Reading the Abrahamic Faiths: Rethinking Religion and Literature 9781472509505, 9781350013582, 9781472509246

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Reading the Abrahamic Faiths

Also available from Bloomsbury Religion, Literature and the Imagination, edited by Mark Knight Writing Muslim Identity, Geoffrey Nash Sufism in Western Literature, Art and Thought, Ziad Elmarsafy Jewish Feeling, Richa Dwor John Cage and Buddhist Ecopoetics, Peter Jaeger Encountering Buddhism in 20th Century British and American Literature, edited by Lawrence Normand and Alison Winch England’s Secular Scripture, Jo Carruthers The New Atheist Novel, Arthur Bradley

Reading the Abrahamic Faiths Rethinking Religion and Literature

Edited by Emma Mason With assistance from Nazry Bahrawi

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

LON DON • OX F O R D • N E W YO R K • N E W D E L H I • SY DN EY

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA

www.bloomsbury.com Bloomsbury and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2015 Paperback edition first published 2016 © Emma Mason and Contributors, 2015 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. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. British Library Cataloguing-­in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: HB: 978-1-4725-0950-5 PB: 978-1-3500-0374-3 ePDF: 978-1-4725-0924-6 ePub: 978-1-4725-0993-2 Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk Printed and bound in Great Britain

Contents Contributors Acknowledgements

vii xii

Part One  Religion and Literature

1

Rethinking Religion and Literature  Emma Mason

3

2

The Hagaramic and the Abrahamic; or Abraham the Non-European  Yvonne Sherwood

17

Abrahamic Faiths and Dialogical Transcendence  Prasenjit Duara

47

3

Part Two  Judaism

4

Judaism: Introduction  Cynthia Scheinberg

63

5

Jewish Writers and Nationalist Theology at the Fin-­de-Siécle  Neta Stahl

75

6

Acts of Hearing in the Book of Esther  Jo Carruthers

87

7

‘Every Human Being is a Cause’: Three Re-Writings of Abraham, Isaac and Ishmael  Tom Sperlinger

101

Part Three  Christianity

8

Christianity: Introduction  Joshua King

117

9

The Black Messiah, or Christianity and Masculinity in Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s The River Between  Adriaan van Klinken

131

10 ‘Tongue Far from Heart’: Disguises, Lies and Casuistry in Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure  Máté Vince

143

11 Joy, Doubt and Wonder: Contemporary Readings of the Annunciation  Arina Cirstea

157

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Contents

Part Four  Islam

12 Islam: Introduction  Ziauddin Sardar

171

13 The Man from Beni Mora  Aamer Hussein

183

14 On Naguib Mahfouz’s Late Style: Remembering Art, Remembering the Self  Ziad Elmarsafy

193

15 Sufism and Pain: Poetic Procrastination of Unity in Classical Persian Verse Narratives  Maryam Farahani

205

Part Five  Postsecularism

16 Postsecularism: Introduction  Anthony Paul Smith

221

17 The Categories of Secular Time  Daniel Whistler

237

18 Not my Bible’s Keeper: Saramago’s Cain Translates Postsecular Dissent  Nazry Bahrawi

255

19 The Postsecular and the Postcolonial  Manav Ratti

267

20 Afterword  Susan Bassnett

281

Index

293

Contributors Nazry Bahrawi is a faculty member at the Singapore University of Technology and Design, set up in collaboration with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; and a research fellow at the Middle East Institute, National University of Singapore. His publications include ‘Fictionalising the utopian impulse in post-­secular Islam: An East-West odyssey’ (Literature and Theology, 25.3, 2011) and ‘Hope of a hopeless world: Eco-­teleology in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood’ (Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism, 17.3, 2013). He is also a contributor editor of Critical Muslim (Hurst Publisher), a UK-based quarterly magazine of ideas and issues in contemporary Muslim societies. Susan Bassnett is Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Warwick. Widely published in the field of comparative literature, she is a Fellow of the Institute of Linguists, the Royal Society of Literature and of the Academia Europaea. Recognized for her journalism, translations and poetry, she has served as judge of a number of major literary prizes, including the Times/Stephen Spender Poetry in Translation Prize, the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and the IMPAC Dublin prize. Jo Carruthers is Lecturer in the Department of English and Creative Writing at the University of Lancaster. She is the author of England’s Secular Scripture: Islamophobia and the Protestant Aesthetic (Continuum, 2011), Esther Through the Centuries (Wiley-Blackwell, 2007) and has recently co-­edited Literature and the Bible: A Reader (Routledge, 2013). Arina Cirstea is a tutor in English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick. Her research interests focus on the area of Anglophone literature and religion: her doctoral project explored the relationship between space, gender and spiritual identity in twentieth-­century British women’s urban writing. Publications include: ‘Feminism and faith: Exploring Christian spaces in the writing of Sara Maitland and Michèle Roberts’ (E-rea: Revue d’Études Anglophones, 8.2, 2011); and ‘Postcolonial encounters in Mircea Eliade’s Maitreyi and Maitreyi Devi’s Na Hanyate’ (Theory in Action, 6.4, 2013).

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Prasenjit Duara is the Raffles Professor of Humanities and Director, Asia Research Institute at the National University of Singapore and Professor Emeritus at the University of Chicago. He is author of Culture, Power and the State: Rural North China, 1900–1942 (Stanford University Press, 1988), Rescuing History from the Nation (University of Chicago Press, 1995) and Sovereignty and Authenticity: Manchukuo and the East Asian Modern (Rowman, 2003). He is editor of Decolonization: Now and Then (Routledge, 2004) and co-­editor of A Companion to Global Historical Thought (John Wiley, 2014). His new book, The Crisis of Global Modernity: Asian Traditions and a Sustainable Future, is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press. Ziad Elmarsafy is Reader in the Department of English and Related Literature at the University of York. He is the author of The Enlightenment Qur’an: The Politics of Translation and the Construction of Islam (Oneworld, 2009), Sufism in the Contemporary Arabic Novel (Edinburgh University Press, 2012) and the co-­editor with Anna Bernard and David Attwell of Debating Orientalism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). Maryam Farahani is Lecturer in English and Comparative Literature at the Centre for Lifelong Learning, University of Liverpool. An associate researcher in the School of Arts, she also co-­directs the Embodiments Research Group, specializing in aesthetics, kinaesthetics, multimodality, Orientalism and phenomenology in linguistic and historical contexts. Her publications include ‘Hemans hosting the poetic absolution in anguish with delight’ (Mapping Forgiveness, Inter-Disciplinary Press, 2012). More recently she has completed a higher education course (MA Ed), investigating the history and application of cultural and cross-­cultural modalities in HE literary practice. Aamer Hussein is a Professorial Fellow at the University of Southampton and a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of English Studies, London. He was born in Karachi in 1955, moved to England in 1970 and is a graduate of SOAS, University of London. He is author of five collections of short stories, including Insomnia (2007) and The Swan’s Wife (2013); and two novels, Another Gulmohar Tree (2009) and The Cloud Messenger (2011). He also writes fiction in Urdu, and essays about Urdu literature. Joshua King, Associate Professor of English at Baylor University, has published numerous articles on Romantic and Victorian poetry, religion and print culture

Contributors

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in journals such as Victorian Poetry, Victorian Literature and Culture and The Wordsworth Circle. His book, Imagined Spiritual Communities in Britain’s Age of Print, will be published by Ohio State University Press in 2015. He was recently appointed the Margarett Root Brown Chair of Robert Browning and Victorian Studies at Baylor. Adriaan van Klinken is Lecturer in African Christianity in the School of Philosophy, Religion and History of Science at the University of Leeds. His research focuses on issues of gender and sexuality in contemporary Christianity in Africa. He is the author of Transforming Masculinities in African Christianity: Gender Controversies in Times of AIDS (Ashgate, 2013) and currently works on religion and controversies about homosexuality in Africa. Emma Mason is Professor of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick. She is author of Women Poets of the Nineteenth Century (Northcote, 2006) and The Cambridge Introduction to Wordsworth (Cambridge University Press, 2010); co-­editor of The Oxford Handbook to the Reception History of the Bible (Oxford University Press, 2011) and The Blackwell Companion to the Bible in English Literature (Blackwell, 2009); and the editor of Elizabeth Jennings: The Collected Poems (Carcanet, 2012). With Mark Knight, she edits Bloomsbury’s series New Directions in Religion and Literature. Manav Ratti is Assistant Professor of English at Salisbury University in Maryland. He received his PhD. in English from Oxford University. He is the author of The Postsecular Imagination: Postcolonialism, Religion, and Literature (Routledge, 2013), which he presented at the Ottawa International Writers Festival in October 2013. In 2009, he was the Visiting Fulbright Scholar in the Department of English at New York University; and in 2014 he was a Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Study and Centre for English Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University. Ziauddin Sardar, writer and cultural critic, is Director of the Centre for Postnormal Policy and Futures Studies, East West University, Chicago. He is the author of more than fifty books, including Desperately Seeking Paradise (2004), Reading the Qurʾan (2011) and Muhammad: All That Matters (2012). Cynthia Scheinberg is Professor of English at Mills College in Oakland, California. She is the author of Women’s Poetry and Religion in Victorian England: Jewish Identity and Christian Culture (Cambridge, 2002); and her articles and

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essays have appeared in ELH, Victorian Studies, Victorian Poetry, The Cambridge Companion to Victorian Poetry and various anthologies. She has been awarded grants and scholarships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and the Harvard Divinity School, as well as various Mills College awards for teaching. Yvonne Sherwood is Professor of Biblical Cultures and Politics at the University of Kent. Her admittedly obsessive work on the Abrahamic includes three essays in her book Biblical Blaspheming (Cambridge, 2012); ‘Textual carcasses and Isaac’s scar’ (Sanctified Aggression, Continuum, 2004); ‘And Sarah died’ (Derrida’s Bible, Palgrave Macmillan, 2004); ‘When Johannes de Silentio sounds like Johanna de Silentio’ (Bodies in Question, Ashgate, 2005); ‘Abraham in London, Marburg/Istanbul and Israel’ (Biblical Interpretation, 16, 2008); ‘Iconoclash and Akedah’ (Representing the Irreparable: The Shoah, the Bible and the Art of Samuel Bak, Syracuse University Press, 2008); and ‘The God of Abraham and exceptional states’ (Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 76, 2008). Anthony Paul Smith is Assistant Professor in the Department of Religion at La Salle University, Philadelphia. He is the author of A Non-Philosophical Theory of Nature: Ecologies of Thought (Palgrave, 2013) and co-­editor of After the Postsecular and the Postmodern: New Essays in Continental Philosophy of Religion (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010) and Laruelle and Non-Philosophy (Edinburgh University Press, 2012). Tom Sperlinger is Reader in English Literature at the University of Bristol and was a Visiting Professor at Al Quds University in 2013. He has published on George Eliot, Doris Lessing and various aspects of adult education. His first book, Romeo and Juliet in Palestine: Teaching under Occupation, is forthcoming from Zero Books. Neta Stahl is an Assistant Professor of Modern Hebrew Literature at the German and Romance Languages and Literatures and the Jewish Studies Program at Johns Hopkins University. Stahl’s Hebrew book Tzelem Yehudi on the representation of Jesus in twentieth-­century Hebrew Literature was published in 2008; and an expanded English edition – Other and Brother: the Figure of Jesus in the Twentieth Century Jewish Literary Landscape – was published by Oxford University Press in 2012. Stahl is also editor of Jesus among the Jews: Representations and Thoughts (Routledge, 2012).

Contributors

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Máté Vince is a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies, University of Warwick. He works on the intellectual history of the Renaissance, with a particular interest in the changing concepts of ambiguity. He has edited and prefaced a collection of Hungarian translations of post-­ structuralist Shakespearean criticism; and published articles on Jesuitical Equivocation in Henry Garnet and Shakespeare, on the anniversary play Kazamaták (Dungeons) and the Memories of the 1956 Revolution in Hungary. He is currently working on a Leverhulme funded project, Isaac Casaubon’s correspondence. Daniel Whistler is Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Liverpool. He is the author of Schelling’s Theory of Symbolic Language: Forming the System of Identity (Oxford University Press, 2013) and The Right to Wear Religious Symbols (with Daniel J. Hill; Palgrave, 2013). He is also co-­editor of After the Postsecular and the Postmodern: New Essays in Continental Philosophy of Religion (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010); and Moral Powers, Fragile Beliefs: Essays in Moral and Religious Philosophy (Continuum, 2011).

Acknowledgements This collection arose from a conference on ‘Religious Identities in Literature’ at the University of Warwick in June 2011, one of the inaugural events of Warwick’s research group CoRAL (Comparative Religions and Literatures). The idea for the conference arose from discussion at the Theology Reading Group, begun by Sophie Rudland, Nazry Bahrawi and Arina Cirstea during their doctoral studies, and based in the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies. I am grateful to the volume’s many supporters, not least fellow members of CoRAL at Warwick; and David Avital and Mark Richardson at Bloomsbury. Foremost thanks, however, go to Jeremy Holtom, one of the only teachers I know who converses on religion entirely free of ego and with a warmth and spirit matched by few. Since we met as undergraduates at Cardiff University in the early 90s, I have been inspired by his commitment to world religious studies and its teaching, and dedicate this volume to him. Emma Mason, University of Warwick, 2014

Part One

Religion and Literature

1

Rethinking Religion and Literature Emma Mason

University of Warwick

Holy forgiveness! mercy! charity! faith! Holy! Ours! bodies! suffering! magnanimity! Holy the supernatural extra brilliant intelligent kindness of the soul! Allen Ginsberg A spectre is haunting the Western world – the spectre of religion. All over the country we hear that after an extended absence, it has now returned and is among the people of the modern world, and that one would do well to reckon seriously with its renewed presence. Peter Sloterdijk I begin with the poet Allen Ginsberg (2006, p.  8, l. 127) and cultural theorist Peter Sloterdijk (2013, p. 1) because both effectively resist a sacralizing of the literary to think religion instead as a way of imagining an experiential and political reading practice. For both, religion is serious and urgent: it should not be fetishized as aesthetics or escapist scenarios of wonder; nor dismissed as naïve simplicity or sinister ideology. Religion is frequently assumed to be the latter in western secularist academia, demystified by Marx, Nietzsche and Freud, and often understood through a history of organized religion as a repressive and dictatorial structure of national and colonial power. Compelling examples to the contrary abound. Mike Davis’s work on slum life, for example, reveals that the impact of Pentecostalism in Third World urban economies has served as much to reinvent a context for political action (‘organizing self-­help networks for poor women’, ‘providing recovery from alcoholism and addiction’ and ‘insulating children from the temptations of the street’) as it has to enforce ideological governance (Davis, 2004, p. 33; 2006, pp. 192, 195). Likewise, Richard Kearney’s Guestbook Project has attempted to rethink religion’s potential for hospitable

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Religion and Literature

reconciliation between divided communities (Kosovo, Derry/Londonderry, Jerusalem, Bangalore, Dokdo and the Mexican-American border) by inviting young members of opposing neighbourhoods to ‘witness and work through their ongoing histories of hospitality and hostility’ in and through conversation (Kearney, 2008). While they write from diverse viewpoints, Davis and Kearney, as well as Ginsberg and Sloterdijk, are all willing to explore the meanings that arise from the specifics of religious practice in context, favouring a hermeneutics of trust rather than of suspicion (Ricœur, 1970) that defends a reading of the local and particular alongside the global and different. The wider field of ‘religion and literature’ has not always enabled such trust, alienating readers of all faiths and none by elevating religion as either a privileged way into the literary, or as a bubble within which to magically access ‘truth’. I do not think that religion, practiced or textual, helps us to read ‘better’, and find the characterization of ‘bad’ readers as secular, manic consumers of ideological meaning, and ‘good’ readers as faithful lingering attenders of soul-­improving divine books profoundly unhelpful (see Lewis, 1961; Griffiths, 1999). Nor do I believe in conservative models of faith in ‘literature’ or the ‘value of the humanities’, both of which inevitably lead to the veneration of certain texts and discourses over others. My premise here is that in reading sacred texts and engaging with the history of religious thought we are reminded of the importance of emotionally connecting with all beings and texts beyond their aesthetic, historical or economic value. This is not a new argument and echoes the Marxist politics of liberation theology that religion can sharpen our capacity for care and compassion and in doing so, allow for a direct intervention in a world scarred by mass poverty, human inequality and ecological collapse. Other disciplines do this too, of course, but I privilege religion as that which is uniquely willing to license an experience of something unthought – the hopeful unknown – that serves ‘the lowly and despised of the world’ (1 Corinthians, 1.28) over those invested in ambition, exceptionalism and acquisition. I follow Kearney in his argument that because we know ‘virtually nothing about God’, religion frees us into a moment of ‘not-­knowing’ that allows for a ‘radical openness to the strange’ (Kearney, 2010, 5). For Kearney this is ‘anatheism’, a creative not-­knowing of God that opens a space to imagine the impossible, from the birth of Isaac to the St Andrews Agreement (2006) in Northern Ireland. Religions like the Abrahamic faiths this volume focuses on enable an imagining of the impossible and unknown by offering the reader an affective and non-­hierarchizing mode of approach to people and their worlds. This affective way into thinking rejects a search for textual ‘merit’ (aesthetic, intellectual, economic, soul-­saving or moral)

Rethinking Religion and Literature

5

to encourage a care-­full relationship with and reading of all things that goes beyond justifications for such care. In their poetic, philosophical and social writing, both Ginsberg and Sloterdijk operate this kind of affective thinking, attentively reading and reinterpreting western and eastern religions to call for an embrace of the disenfranchised. Ginsberg’s promotion of mantra chanting to ‘discover the guru in our own hearts’ (2000, p. 130) and Sloterdijk’s call for a ‘non-­religious interpretation’ of ‘the realm of the transcendent or holy’ (Sloterdijk, 2009, p. 4), for example, both focus on the reader as a figure who is emotionally ‘changed’, not by religious literature, but by religious reading. Ginsberg’s poetics of peaceful revolution, for example, hailed in part from his reading (and visions) of William Blake, sparked a personal engagement with Judaism, Islam, Christianity, Buddhism and the Hare Krishnas that contextualize both Howl (1955–6) and the 1967 ‘Gathering of the Tribes for a Human Be-In’ (based on the Kumbh Mela Hindu pilgrimage of faith) he helped lead. Sloterdijk also accesses religion’s capacity to enable an intimate reading mode in both his sociological and ‘literary’ works (he describes his current trilogy, Sphären, as a series of novels; Kirsch, 2013), but does so in order to forcefully critique religion and dogma. Despite the nuance of Ginsberg and Sloterdijk’s religious reading, its potential for a radical approach to the world remains unsettling for many critics. Undeterred by the affective turn, the efficacy of care and attention as the basis of reading holds little weight with a literary critical field won over by empirical models of analysis. I intentionally write ‘field’ here to differentiate ‘real’ readers from the ‘discipline’ of literary criticism: human beings are abundantly careful and respectful with texts, and yet broader theorizations of what we do tends to underplay this element of discernment. Franco Moretti’s ‘distant reading’ (2013) is a pertinent example, a methodology that proposes the use of computational modelling and quantitative analysis to aggregate data on vast numbers of literary ‘works’ that are explicitly not read. Moretti cannot help but draw on religious language in his critique of close reading, a mode that, ‘in all of its incarnations’, he writes, becomes a ‘theological exercise’, a ‘very solemn treatment of very few texts taken very seriously’ (Moretti, 2000, p.  57). The essays in this volume do take a few examples of Abrahamic literature seriously, not to exclude other examples or other religions, but to express a care for the nuances of the texts that contributors have read. Moretti’s parody of the theological as solemn and earnest blocks attention to the particulars of any given text, of the nuances of its cultural, religious and ethical meanings and ultimately of the ‘serious’ reflection and emotional investment readers might have in it and redirect back into society as sociability and kindness.

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Despite my focus on care and kindness, I do not assume any carefree connection between religion and positive feelings about texts. Rather I uphold a mode of reading in which we might give a little more than we get and in doing so imagine a thinking, rather than criticism of, the interconnectedness of religious ideas, commitments and imaginings through a spectrum of literary forms. The response readers have to all texts, and especially those that relate to religion, is simply not adequately expressed in an abstract, empirical or judgemental criticism. Split from the literary to free float in philosophy, for example, religion can become little more than wordplay, as several of the ‘return of religion’ theories attest; and as ammunition in the arena of politics, religion can be twisted beyond recognition as it was in Sarah Palin’s grotesque declaration that, if she were ‘in charge’, the Muslim world ‘would know that waterboarding is how we baptize terrorists’ (Palin, 2014). Palin’s speech, greeted with ecstatic applause by the National Rifle Association at a 2014 rally in Indiana, not only demeans the Christian sacrament of baptism as an image of forced conversion via torture, but it also incites a terrifying Christo-­fascism based on a weak and cruel thinking of Abrahamic religion. Equally aggressive is the ‘new atheism’, repeatedly contemptuous of Christianity and increasingly dismissive of Islam; Richard Dawkins’s tweet ‘All the world’s Muslims have fewer Nobel prizes than Trinity College, Cambridge’ is a notorious example (Meikle, 2013). Dawkins and Palin’s deliberate distancing strategies from any subtlety in reading Islam or Christianity is endlessly echoed in the media, leading to tangible instances of ignorance, intolerance and violence. By contrast, religious reading might provide direct forays into the promotion of care for all texts, humans and non-­humans, the planet and the cosmos. In short, I argue that a thinking of religion enables a compassionate reading of texts to access hopeful unknowns. This has three implications in the context of this volume. First, it authorizes a religious reading that offers an inclusive and politicized alternative to the interdiscipline of religion and literature in its exclusive and inward-­facing form; second, that such thinking and reading does not have to equate to religious texts, but rather provides the basis for the interpretation of all texts through a care for the known and unknown; and third, that it spurs an approach distinct from other modes of care and wonder in that its consistent aim, materialized through the particularities of Abrahamic and Dharmic religions, is to aid the poor and powerless (‘science’, for example, which also lays claim to the imagining of the unknown, can, but does not always, direct its gains at the poor). The thinkings of religion that comprise this volume are grouped into four sections, Judaism, Christianity, Islam and Postsecularism,

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which seek to open up these religions (and ask if Postsecularism should be included as such) to a readership interested in writers who creatively negotiate a world in which people believe with and beyond dogma. The rest of this chapter reflects on the idea of religious thinking and reading in the context of both the on-­going ‘religion and literature’ debate; and also in relation to the disputable categories of ‘inter-­faith dialogue’ and ‘world religion’ (which, as is apparent in Tony Blair’s dream of a global religious democracy, blend up particularities into an inter-­faith soup). Against Blair’s inter-­faith soup, one that privileges uniform democracy over the affective specificities of religion, I posit Ginsberg’s ‘animal soup’, a phrase he employs at the end of the first part of Howl to introduce a religious discussion of forgiveness, friendship and love. I conclude with a brief note on Charles Taylor’s attempt to redirect the study of religion and literature back into politics, and suggest that his particular resort to public virtue ends up re-­moralizing religion. I find a closer affinity with Sloterdijk, Georg Simmel and Giorgio Agamben, whose commentaries on spiritual practice and ‘forms of life’ have helped me to conceptualize and argue for a religious reading of the world through care.

‘Religion and literature’ Critics who seek to pursue a religious idea in a literary text or assess the literary aesthetic of a religious idea now find themselves in a thriving community served by journals, companions, readers and monograph series (see, for example, Branch, 2012–; Mason and Knight, 2010–; and Monta, 2008–). The field has sparked a renaissance in historical work detailing the contexts in which specific moments of belief are represented; a profusion of critical and philosophical reflections on the nature of the religious and the spiritual; and animated political contestations over the relationship between the secular and the religious, including the term ‘postsecularism’ (controversially apathetic towards many major religions). Whereas the religious was once relegated to the status of esotericism or irrelevance in literary studies, one would be hard pushed to find any period or methodology that does not now recognize its importance, even if such recognition is sometimes negative or critical. At the same time, the ‘return of religion’ within critical theory and philosophy has prompted many critics to once again become suspicious of religion, in particular in relation to transcendence and immanence. Those who work on religion and literature have sought to nuance this dualism through specificity, turning in particular to the

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monotheistic Abrahamic faiths, connected as they are in their focus on a main sacred text: the Hebrew Bible, the Christian Bible and the Qur’an. ‘World religion’, as Tomoko Masuzawa (2005) argues, tends to be avoided by scholars aware of its invention by Europeans eager to find a category for the social and cultural practices of peoples across the world. Research into the relationships between Abrahamic and Dharmic faiths nevertheless promises to garner ways of thinking, listening and reading that surpass modes of interpretation locked within one tradition or text. For example, literary discussions of ‘revelation’ tend to be considered within the framework of a monolithic male God that produces a very particular kind of ‘experience’ that changes significantly when read beyond western monotheism. As Cleo McNelly Kearns argues, in Hinduism, ‘we find not only a more multifarious and in many ways less anxious concept of revelation and the incursion of the divine into the human world than in the west’, as many ‘Indic artists work relatively free of the anxiety of influence that troubles the western “maker” ’ (Kearns, 2009, p.  65). While comparativism itself might be accused of being a western paradigm, literary critics will have to engage with non-Christian faiths as the canon expands beyond the West, not only into literature, but also into music, dance, rites and festivals. The diversity of the chapters in this volume point towards the importance of such a task, revealing as they do that the religious interests of certain writers or texts are at once ubiquitous and indisputable, but also easy to side-­step as ostensibly esoteric or abstruse. They offer examples of a religious reading practice receptive to questions of belief, consciousness, emotion and love; what Susan Felch calls ‘registers of religious consciousness’ that include the Abrahamic, Dharmic and Taoic, as much as Māori and Aboriginal spiritualities, as well as mythical cosmology and UFO religions (Felch, 2009, p.  101). The literary, with its embrace of the imagination, the senses, the aesthetic and the experiential, enables the study of religious consciousness where other (empirical) routes in threaten to lock it inside a scholarly environment that favours solutions and objective goals over the joy of asking questions without any answers. This is not to say that the literary makes the religious fictional, but rather that it facilitates multiple ways of believing that might underpin a religious reading practice.

Animal soup versus inter-faith soup An example of how the literary enables multiple ways of believing through a hopeful not-­knowing is Ginsberg’s Howl. At the end of Part I, Ginsberg addresses

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Carl Solomon, the friend to whom the poem is dedicated after the two met while institutionalized in the Columbia Presbyterian Psychiatric Hospital in 1949–50. Exhaling through his ‘Hebraic-Melvillean bardic breath’ (2000, p. 229), Ginsberg sighs ‘ah, Carl, while you are not safe I am not safe, and now you’re really in the total animal soup of time’ (Ginsberg, 2006, p. 6, l. 72). While the animal soup is a brothy time of beast-­like impulse and turbulence, it also offers an alternative to linear, capitalist time, which moves forward with such pace and speed that particularity, repose and meditation become impossible. As Ginsberg’s medical records show, his hospitalization, while in no way a positive experience, did initiate what would become Ginsberg’s enduring interrogation of his ego in both his poetry and spiritual life (Timberg, 2007). The animal soup’s rhythm of ‘variable measure’, for example, opens up a non-­egoic mindfulness alive with the presence of God, Solomon setting ‘the noun and dash of consciousness together jumping with sensation of Pater Omnipotens Aeterne Deus’ (Ginsberg, 2006, p. 6, l. 73–4). As angels and madmen ‘beat in Time, unknown’ to the syncopated blues rhythm of the passage, the ‘ghostly clothes of jazz’ blow ‘the suffering of America’s naked mind for love into an eli eli lamma lamma sabacthani saxophone cry’ (Ginsberg, 2006, p. 6, l. 77), repeating the ‘why’ of Matthew’s ‘My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?’ (Matthew, 27.45–6). For Ginsberg, this accentuated ‘why’ is a direct challenge to the devastating conservatism and atomic violence of 1950s America, controlled by a government in which reverence and care were wholly absent. Howl itself was put on trial for translating the biblical ‘why’ into social and political terms: in 1957, by the American Civil Liberties Union; and also in 1987 by the American ‘Moral Majority’ movement (Morgan and Peters, 2006, p. 221). To the censorious reader, Ginsberg’s animal soup is vapid; the transcript of Howl’s trial is littered with the prosecution’s accusatory demands that the poem’s witnesses make it ‘mean’ (Ginsberg, 2006, p. 139). For the reader who approaches the poem with care, however, the animal soup allows the material – Carl, city streets, saxophones, radios – to sit alongside the intangible – angels, syntax, ‘goldhorn’ shadows, cries, rhythm – without either blending them up or dissecting them into separate and distinct entities. Ginsberg’s religious vision is inclusive, but never consolidating or condescending. In complete contrast to Ginsberg’s animal soup sits the inter-­faith soup. Where the animal soup holds difference buoyant without judgement, the inter-­ faith soup seeks to measure the comparable ‘value’ of religions and assess them in social and political terms. The 2007–13 Arts and Humanities Research Council/ Economic and Social Research Council (AHRC/ESRC) Religion and Society Research Programme and 2012–15 Westminster Faith Debates series, for

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example, ‘reads’ religion through its empirical implications for gay marriage, global unity, the family, the Arab Spring, parish life and the future of the Church of England. As Tony Blair declared in one of the project’s debates, ‘Religion in Public Life’ (Blair et al., 2012), religion enables the success of charity, welfare and human rights, but only in relation to ‘religion friendly democracy and democracy friendly religion’ (Blair et al., 2012). For Blair, ‘inter-­faith dialogue’ leads to a co-­ operative and democratic politics that effectively counters bigotry, extremism, prejudice and intolerance by bringing together people of faith and none in a ‘common space’ organized ‘through the proper processes of the law, parliament and the courts’. In reference to the Middle East, Blair argues that religion should only be ‘safeguarded and allowed to play its part’ if believers ‘understand that there is in the end something essentially pluralistic about the concept of democracy’ that is ‘supreme in the ultimate decision-­making’ (Blair et al., 2012). The problems inherent to inter-­faith discussion are illuminated as much by Blair’s overbearing conviction that western democracy should eclipse religious nuance, as by David Cameron’s Etonian promotion of Christian values as a counter to the UK’s moral collapse (Cameron, 2014). Both embody a logic that annuls Felch’s ‘registers of religious consciousness’ and overshadow suggestions like those of Rowan Williams that, in a post-Christian country like the UK, we would do well to embark on a shared work on all sacred texts (Ross, 2014; Blair et al., 2012). Charles Taylor also explores the significance of reading practices in relation to the religious in A Secular Age (Taylor, 2007), where a late eighteenth-­century Romantic sensibility and authenticity replaced metaphysical beliefs with ‘an original vision of the cosmos’ that provoked unique subjective feeling (Taylor, 2007, p. 353). For Taylor, it is this focus on personal emotion through reading that created the secular itself, a worldview that emerges, not from a decline in religion, but in a human belief in individual expression. This new self, no longer ‘porous and vulnerable to a world of spirits and powers’, was disciplined, buffered and confident, a ‘reformed’ believer who aspired, not to atheism, but to the highest levels of religious devotion and practice. Now able to fulfil the roles once reserved for magi and priests, these disciplined individuals sought to control their world, especially outcast elements like the poor, the sick and the different not easily tidied up into an ordered social imaginary. As a result, individualism becomes defined through economic prosperity, an open public sphere and the practices of self-­rule. Such rational (male, adult, Protestant) confidence in the empirical and observable simply overlooks (rather than dismisses) the illusory (Taylor, 2007, pp. 159, 176, 294). As belief diversified into newer disciplines like

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psychology and neurobiology that promise to ‘explain’ our being, religion is ‘delinked’ from society and transferred to ‘spirituality’ (Taylor, 2007, p.  419). Individuals are freed from church and state alike to live in a ‘spiritual super-­nova, a kind of galloping pluralism on the spiritual plane’ in which we are granted a sense of ‘invulnerability’ consolidated by a ‘sense of self-­possession’ and ‘secure inner mental realm’ (Taylor, 2007, pp. 300–1, 419). Taylor’s narrative of secularism also identifies a flipside to this spiritual super-­ nova: that ‘wide sense of malaise’ at a ‘flat, empty’ world that offers little compensation for ‘the meaning lost with transcendence’ (Taylor, 2007, p.  302). Beyond ‘melancholy’ and perhaps depression too, Taylor’s malaise casts ‘doubt on the ontic grounding of meaning’ itself, so that any possible solution to meaninglessness is immediately dismissed (Taylor, 2007, p.  303). In this light, pluralism simply creates a multiplicity of faiths to deny, and ‘our actions, goals, achievements’ feel as if they are without ‘weight, gravity, thickness, substance’ (Taylor, 2007, p. 307). Religion is consequently reinvented through pilgrimages to other countries where non-Abrahamic faiths are central, or through ‘mystical aspects’ of the Abrahamic faiths, such as Taizé or meditation. For Taylor, like the Radical Orthodoxy thinkers with whom he sympathizes, the way out of this bind is to embrace a Burkean politics of public virtue, understood within a renewed post-Enlightenment Christian framework. While I question Taylor’s turn to public virtue (I prefer an LSD-free version of Ginsberg’s ‘public solitude’; Ginsberg, 2000, p. 125), I do go along with his sense that a ‘new poetic language can serve to find a way back to the God of Abraham’ (Taylor, 2007, p. 757). This does not have to imply a way back to the God of the Radical Orthodoxy, but rather a way back to a language of God as the ‘experiential reality’ of our being (Taylor, 2007, p. 757), the unknown ‘om’ of the logos. A religious reading practice helps us to contemplate this language in an acknowledgement of our contradictory emotional responses to it in relation to the lived reality we each occupy. It is through the practice of reading of God’s word, rather than God’s word itself, that a hospitable and interrogative thinking of religion might move us out of meta-­ theories and interdisciplines like religion and literature or secularism.

Spiritual practice The populist western turn from the Abrahamic to the Dharmic has contributed to a widespread overlooking of the centrality of meditative spiritual reading practices within Judaism, Christianity and Islam. For Sloterdijk, for example,

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western spiritual practices remain a point of access into both individual happiness and a wider commitment to human rights and welfare. While for Sloterdijk religions do not and have never existed, only ‘misunderstood spiritual regimens’ (Sloterdijk, 2013, p.  3), his work provides a very current reading of religion through the discourse of physical fitness. His hero, Homo immunologicus, is a Nietzschean ‘human in training’, dependent on repeated and habitual practices that cultivate his cosmic ability to face an existence made up of anxiety and planetary crisis. While modernity collectivizes practice, either into labour or disastrous regimens of control, Sloterdijk calls on the individual to change his or her own life as part of an organized co-­immunism: ‘the good habits of shared survival in daily exercises’ (Sloterdijk, 2013, p. 452). This ‘co-­immunism’ derives from Sloterdijk’s reading of monotheism. For Sloterdijk, the God of early Christianity offered believers an immunizing sphere in which to live, one where they could be intimate with and protected by all kinds of holiness. In the late Middle Ages, however, the Church discarded the intimate God for a distant deity, neutralizing the ‘immunity’ believers once had and reconfiguring God as a disconcerting, even sinister, ‘outside’. In You Must Change Your Life, Sloterdijk rethinks various attempts to recreate God as an immunizing power – from Olympism to Scientology – all regimens in which humans develop ‘psycho-­ immunological practices’ (‘anthropotechnics’) in ‘the form of imaginary anticipations and mental armour’ that buffer them against fate (Sloterdijk, 2013, p. 9). While Sloterdijk’s reading of religious history is deliberately defiant, the reading practice that emerges from his theory is caring and communal. This is especially apparent when he suggests that practicing religiosity is like practicing music, an act that connects one to a collective performance as often as a personal regimen (Sloterdijk, 2013, p. 361). Here Sloterdijk has in mind Max Weber’s self-­ accusation that he was unmusical in regard to religion, although he does not cite the comparable ‘musicality’ of Georg Simmel, who, because willing to ‘believe’, was able to attune himself into the ‘particular spiritual quality’ of religion as a ‘form of life’ and ‘state of being’ (Simmel, 1997, p. 10). Simmel is helpful because he rejects the notion that religion might be just another psychological (or pathological) inner state, and recognizes religiosity as an affective relationship that includes ‘the subject in a higher order – an order which, at the same time, is felt to be something inward and personal’ (Simmel, 1997, p. 104). Modernity’s crime is not the undermining of dogma, but its characterization of ‘the object of transcendent faith’ as ‘illusory’ and disenchanted: ‘paralyzed’ by a ‘yearning’ for something no longer available, the subject turns to religion as ‘being’ implemented

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by ‘prayer, magic, and rite’ (Simmel, 1997, p.  9). Religion transforms into, ‘not simply an added accompaniment’, but ‘the original source of all the harmonies and disharmonies of life’, a rhythm for being (Simmel, 1997, p. 15).

Forms of life Simmel’s musical reading of religion as an attuned being, a ‘form of life’, coheres with Giorgio Agamben’s use of the same phrase in The Highest Poverty (2013), an inquiry into the early religious monastic orders and heretical sects that emerged as people sought to escape imperial rule and Roman law (Agamben, 2013, p. 91). In a reading of Francis of Assisi, Agamben argues that monastic law transformed, rather than ruled, life for those within religious communities: prayer, song and ritual produced their ‘form of life’ as one modelled on Christ’s own radical rejection of the social order that ultimately crucified him. By the Middle Ages, monasteries had become hierarchized and folded back into the Church, a shift that served to blur monastic rule with legal codes. The Franciscan ‘form-of-life’ – a phrase coined by the overseer of the female Franciscan order, Clare of Assisi, and which denoted a way of living in the world, but not of it – lost its meaning as the law forced the communities to ‘own’ what they used, damning them to bureaucracy through property law. Agamben does not directly envision a ‘new monasticism’ that would provide an alternative form of life to unsustainable capitalist excess; but the implications for radical movements, from Occupy to city missionaries, are there, not least because of Francis’s emphasis on equality between all beings and all things. Monasticism is more radical still because of its refusal of oppositionalism: ‘what was in question in the movements was not the rule, but the life, not the ability to profess this or that article of faith, but the ability to live in a certain way, to practice joyfully and openly a certain form of life’ (Agamben, 2013, p. 93). Such ‘bare life’ describes the physical life apart from the ‘qualified’ or politically identified one, that which remains after we withdraw those other meanings we usually think grant us ‘value’ or help us to think the ‘good life’. Divested of human rights, ego or ethical significance, Agamben’s bare life is exempt from sovereign rule because it exchanges the law for profanity, critiquing religion’s reinvention as political power (Agamben, 1995, p. 54). Profaning and blaspheming, are, as Blake illuminates in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790), skills in which Jesus was particularly adept, breaking all ten of the commandments and embodying ‘virtue’ and ‘impulse’, not ‘rules’ (Blake, 2005, p. 58). For Agamben too,

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people need to command themselves by way of duty and responsibility beyond the law to enable a mode of action that critiques the state’s manipulation of the sacred exemplified by the perversity of Dawkins’s tweets and Palin’s speech. Like Ginsberg and Blake, Agamben invests in poetry as an ‘atheological’ way of revealing a form of living beyond metaphysical, theological and political subjectivity, one that frees society from divine and secular structures to unveil the void at the centre of power to allow for new and creative ways of being (see Dickinson and Kotsko, 2013). These creative ways of being that the literary allows encourages us to develop a spiritual and ecological awareness and discerning reading mode in which we become ‘perceptually open’, not only to humans but also to what Jane Bennett calls ‘nonhuman vitality’ (Bennett, 2010, pp. 14, 19). The thinking of religion proposed here is akin to what Bennett calls ‘sensory, linguistic and imaginative attention’ and it is significant that she concludes her discussion of ‘vibrant matter’ with a ‘Nicene Creed for would-­be vital materialists’, in which a series of statements about the maker of ‘things seen and unseen’, the ‘pluriverse’, the ‘vitality of nonhuman bodies’ and ‘encounters with lively matter’ are each prefaced with the phrase – ‘I believe’ (Bennett, 2010, p. 122). The care and belief on which the ecological movement is dependent to counter ‘oil, coal, and petro chemical interests’ that ‘have flooded the airwaves with climate science denialism’ corresponds with the ‘recognition of human participation in a shared’ immateriality, as well as materiality (Buell, 2014). Reading religion and religious reading alike promise to inspire Ginsberg’s ‘supernatural extra brilliant intelligent kindness of the soul!’ (2006, p.  8, l. 127), opening to us seemingly impossible forms of language and life that promise joy through hopeful unknowns. Thanks to Jonathan Roberts, Rhian Williams, Eileen John, Peter Larkin, Peter Blegvad and Jeremy Holtom.

References Agamben, G. (1995). Homer Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. (trans.) Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford: Stanford University Press. —— (2013). The Highest Poverty: Monastic Rules and Form-­of-Life. (trans.) Adam Kotsko. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Bennett, J. (2010). Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham: Duke University Press.

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Blair, T., Clarke, C., Moore, C., Williams, R. and Woodhead, L. (2012). ‘Religion in Public Life’. Westminster Faith Debates. http://faithdebates.org.uk/debates/2012-debates/ religion-­and-­public-­life/religion-­public-­tony-­blair-­rowan-­williams/ Blake, W. (2005). Selected Poems. G. E. Bentley (ed.). London: Penguin. Branch, L. (ed.) (2012– ). Literature, Religion and Postsecular Studies. Ohio: Ohio State University Press. https://ohiostatepress.org/index.htm?/books/series%20pages/lrps. htm Buell, J. (2014). ‘Giving voice to climate silence’. The Contemporary Condition. 9 April. http://contemporarycondition.blogspot.co.uk/2014/04/giving-­voice-­to-­climate-­ silence.html Cameron, D. (2014). ‘My faith in the Church of England’. Church Times. 16 April, http:// www.churchtimes.co.uk/articles/2014/17-april/comment/opinion/my-­faith-­in-­the-­ church-­of-­england Davis, M. (2004). ‘Planet of Slums: Urban Involution and the Informal Proletariat’. New Left Review. 26. pp. 5–34. —— (2006). Planet of the Slums. London and New York: Verso. Dickinson, C. and Kotsko, A. (2013). ‘On Agamben’s politics and theology’. Critical Legal Thinking. 24 September. http://criticallegalthinking.com/2013/09/24/agambens-­ politics-­theology/ Felch, S. (2009). ‘Cautionary tales and Crisscrossing Paths’. Religion and Literature. 41(2). 98–104. Ginsberg, A. (2000). Deliberate Prose: Selected Essays 1952–1995. Bill Morgan (ed.). New York: Perennial. —— (2006; 1955–6). Howl: 50th Anniversary Edition. Barry Miles (ed.). New York: HarperPerennial Modern Classics. Griffiths, P. J. (1999). Religious Reading: The Place of Reading in the Practice of Religion. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kearney, R. (2008). The Guestbook Project. https://www2.bc.edu/richard-­kearney/ guestbook.html#mission Kearns, C. M. (2009). ‘Religion, Literature, and Theology: Potentials and Problems’. Religion and Literature. 41(2). 62–7. Kirsch, A. (2013). ‘Against Cynicism’. 19 July. http://www.newrepublic.com/ article/113387/peter-­sloterdijks-­philosophy-­gives-­reasons-­living Lewis, C. S. (1961). An Experiment in Criticism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mason, E. and Knight, M. (eds) (2010– ). New Directions in Religion and Literature. London and New York: Bloomsbury. Masuzawa, T. (2005). The Invention of World Religions: Or, How European Universalism was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Meikle, J. (2013). ‘Richard Dawkins criticised for Twitter comment about Muslims’. Guardian. 8 August. Monta, S. (ed.) (2008–). Religion and Literature. University of Notre Dame.

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Moretti, F. (2000). ‘Conjectures on World Literature’. New Left Review. 1. 54–68. —— (2013). Distant Reading. London: Verso. Morgan, B. and Peters, N. J. (2006). Howl on Trial: The Battle for Free Expression. San Francisco: City Lights Books. Palin, S. (2014). National Rifle Association ‘Stand and Fight Rally’. 27 April. http://www. youtube.com/watch?v=lVlQTYDFTTo Ricoeur, P. (1970). Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation. New Haven: Yale University Press. Ross, T. (2014). ‘Former archbishop of Canterbury: We are a post-Christian nation’. The Telegraph. 26 April. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/religion/10790495/Former-­ archbishop-­of-Canterbury-We-­are-­a-­post-Christian-­nation.html Simmel, G. (1997). Essays on Religion. New Haven: Yale University Press. Sloterdijk, P. (2009). God’s Zeal: The Battle of the Three Monotheisms. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. —— (2013). You Must Change Your Life. (trans.) Wieland Hoban. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Taylor, C. (2007). A Secular Age. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Timberg, S. (2007). ‘Before Howl the hospital’. Los Angeles Times. 7 January. http:// articles.latimes.com/2007/jan/07/entertainment/ca-­ginsberg7

2

The Hagaramic and the Abrahamic; or Abraham the Non-European Yvonne Sherwood University of Kent

In excavating the archaeology of Jewish identity, Freud insisted that it did not begin with itself, but, rather, with other identities (Egyptian and Arabian). Edward Said, 2003, p. 44 There is no self-­relation, no relation to oneself, no identification with oneself, without culture, but a culture of oneself as a culture of the other, a culture of the double genitives and the difference to oneself. The grammar of the double genitive also signals that a culture never has a single origin. Monogenealogy would always be a mystification in the history of culture. Jacques Derrida, 1992, pp. 10–11

Genealogy I: From the ‘Judeo-Christian’ to the ‘Abrahamic’ Who or what is ‘the Abrahamic’? What does it mean? What does it want? The suffix ‘ic’, meaning ‘relating to, characterized by’, turns the proper name Abraham into a condition, period or quasi-­scientific concept, like epizootic, Neolithic or Mithraic. Like a religious equivalent of Mithraic or Neolithic, it implies the earliest strata of time: the most ancient foundational deposits of (that modern category) ‘religion’, presided over by the ancient patriarch, with a long white beard. But the Abrahamic is also a modern scholarly invention, used to subdivide religion into the ‘monotheistic’ a.k.a. ‘Abrahamic’ a.k.a ‘Near Eastern’ as opposed to, say, the Far (or Further) Eastern or Asian or Indian religions. The categories create a common essence, ‘religion’, and also control the number of qualifying world religions.

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In recent years the Abrahamic has strayed beyond textbooks on religion to become a commonplace on the political stage. In a piece of paternalistic political-­ e(a)se, pronounced in the wake of 9/11, Tony Blair affirmed that ‘Jews, Christians and Muslims are all children of Abraham’ and ‘This is the moment to bring the faiths closer together in the understanding of our common value and heritage’ (Blair, 2001, pp. 4–5). In his post-­political career, Blair has spearheaded the ‘Faith and Globalization’ initiative, jointly sponsored by the Divinity School and the School of Management at Yale University. The alliance of Divinity and Management is appropriate, since the objective is to manage divinities and to encourage good religion, allied with freedom and the free market economy – a task in which the fraternal ‘Abrahamic’ is expected to play a lead role. In the Bible, Abraham begat Isaac who begat Jacob. In the history of public concepts, ‘ethical monotheism’ begat the ‘Judeo-Christian’, which then (latterly) begat the ‘Abrahamic’. In our conceptual genealogies, the Abrahamic is not the grandfather but the last born son. ‘Ethical monotheism’ was a concept patented in the nineteenth century in order to control the essence of true religion, and to make the ancient text proleptically modern. Scripturally grounded in the (best bits of) the Hebrew prophets and filleted bits of gospels, ethical monotheism emphasizes rationality, ethics, the neat relation between the one God and the single ethical subject, conscience, good citizenship, social justice, ‘values’ in a general but always positive sense. The oneness of ethical monotheism also provided a template for religion that can be (gently) plural, while remaining manageably, essentially one. The successor, or companion, to ethical monotheism was the ‘Judeo-Christian’: a term that evokes the most ancient of origins, but is in fact of recent vintage; in fact barely antique, at little more than a hundred years old (Hartmann et  al., 2005, pp.  207–34; Silk, 1984, pp.  65–85). The hyphenated alliance, the JudeoChristian, first minted in the late nineteenth century, became popular in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, in the contexts of World War II/the Shoah and the Cold War. As a riposte to the Nazi pejorative judenchristlich (in which ‘the Jewish’ is marked as a contaminant which threatens and sullies Christianity), the term Judeo-Christian affirmed Judaism as ‘one of the three “fighting faiths” of democracy’ (Protestantism and Catholicism were the other two [Hartmann et  al., 2005, p.  210]). The moderate plurality of Protestant-Catholic-Jewish pointed to a ‘common faith’ called democracy, the ‘religion of religions’, as Will Herberg put in his famous treatment of the sociology of American religion, Protestant-Catholic-Jew (Herberg, 1955). As a politico-­religious term, the Judeo-Christian affirms what de Tocqueville described, in the 1840s, as an American (‘Western’) alliance between ‘the spirit of

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religion and the spirit of liberty’, which in a unique American Western miracle ‘rule the same territory’, ‘intertwined’ (de Tocqueville, 2004, p. 341). The ‘JudeoChristian’ named a form of democracy that was not secular in the sense of atheistic (no atheistic constitution would dare to call itself ‘Judeo-Christian’) but that was ‘secular’ in the sense that it could show evidence of accommodating religious plurality. Hospitality to the ‘Judeo’ shows a clear distinction between ‘church’ and ‘state’. First popularized in the context of growing anti-­semitic persecution, the Judeo-Christian stood as a marker of repentance or, more defensively, an assertion of the nature of true Christianity, which was always tolerant, and tolerant towards that particular outside that is inside: the Jew. In the wake of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) and campaigns for civil rights and the resulting ‘identity crises’ (a term first coined in 1954), secular democracies came under increasing pressure to publicly perform hospitality to the (ethnic, religious and sexual) other, while also managing and regulating difference through conceptual and actual border control. The rise of ‘identity’, understood as a ‘persisting entity’, or the ‘quality or condition of being the same as something else’ led to new ways of thinking about religious representation and which kinds of religious identities could be represented. Public religious identities had to be ancient (persistent) and communal (big enough to be counted and to count). These imperatives contributed to the rise of the new amalgam, the Judeo-Christian, followed by the Abrahamic. Under the pressure of ‘identity’, religious groupings are getting ever more ancient, ever larger (more compelling), and ever more vague. The ‘Judeo-Christian’ implies an openness combined with essence and conformity. The same work could not be done by the terms, say, Secular-Christian or Hindu-Christian,or Muslim-Christian.In the Judeo-Christian,multiculturalism is gestured to – and managed. Arguably the term implies an evolutionary if not supersessionist narrative (the ‘Judeo’ comes first but its telos is the Christian) and makes Judaism into a ‘religion’ on Protestant lines.1 By taking a group whose differences are masked by proximity to the Christian (for example, sharing roughly the same Bible and the same fundamental commandments), the Judeo-Christian implies a structure of welcome dependent on embracing the fundamental values of the welcoming group. Grammatically, to hyphenate is to ‘divide or connect’, and the hyphenated Judeo-Christian has served to divide and connect: to open out into a moderate and contained pluralism, and, through that vaguely religious and vaguely hospitable gesture, to define itself against various enemies: fascist, communist, or lesser forms of religion that do not qualify for the same status as the

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Judeo-Christian because they are less hospitable, less democratic or less precious repositories of ‘value’. In the 1950s Dwight Eisenhower (who added the phrase ‘Under God’ to the Pledge of Allegiance) invoked the ‘Judeo-Christian concept’ of ‘all men created equal’ against the threefold public enemy: ‘Communism, Korea and corruption’.2 The emphasis was less on the hyphen between the two conjoined religious groups and more on the boundary between the ‘core values’ of the Judeo-Christian and the purer arid secularity to the east. The vague Judeo-Christian clearly models secularism-­lite (the right negotiation between church and state) in contrast to pure (negative) secularity, but its content is rarely, and barely, religious. In the conceptual culture wars, the ‘Judeo-Christian’ has proved hospitably plastic and vague. In 1958, the economist Elgin Groseclose proclaimed that ideas ‘drawn from Judeo-Christian Scriptures . . . have made possible the economic strength and industrial power of this country’ (see Heinsohn, 1962, p. 256). The Republican senator Barry Goldwater (senator 1953–65, and the Republican nominee for the 1964 presidential election) declared that ‘the communist projection of man as a producing, consuming animal to be used and discarded was antithetical to all the JudeoChristian understandings which are the foundations upon which the Republic stands’ (Goldwater,1979). The more it came to stand for core values, the more the Judeo-Christian had to avoid the kind of precision that would provoke disagreement (cf. Silk, 1984, pp. 67–8). It had to gesture to moderate ‘diversity’, as an alternative to division. The Judeo-Christian conjured the illusion of cultural solidity and foundation, while functioning as an empty space capable of accommodating a whole range of goods including industrialism, capitalism, humanism, democracy, equality: a filing cabinet of ‘values’ collectively standing for ‘value’ in a conveniently blurred (economic and moral) sense. The main function of this inflection of the ‘Judeo-Christian’ was to hold the line (even though the nature of the line was unclear) and guard against alien regimes and foreign concepts threatening to collapse in on us, in a domino effect. And then along came Abraham. These days the ‘Judeo-Christian’ seems outdated, in contrast to the far more contemporary name of old Abraham. It’s very eighties (like shoulder-­pads); very ‘Christian right’. ‘Judeo-Christian’ makes us think Reagan’s Year of the Bible in 1983 or Pat Buchanan’s exhortation not to dump our ‘Judeo-Christian values’ on some landfill called ‘multiculturalism’ made in 1984 (cited in St Louis Post, 1991, p. 3C) – or an inappropriate relationship to Zionism that allies itself with the ‘Judeo’ at the expense of the ‘Arab’. In the twenty-­first century, the ‘Judeo-Christian’ has become an emblem of polemic, defiance and immoveable values that can be mobilized against a range of foes

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from gay marriage to Islam. The Blairish voice of liberalism is now much more likely to use the relatively new public term, the ‘Abrahamic’. Abraham and the Abrahamic stand in hospitable contrast to the logic of contrast: the clash of civilizations which sets the Judeo-Christian against Islam. Whereas once the perceived task of Christendom was to hold back the ‘Turks’ (or ‘Moors’, ‘Saracens’, ‘Mohammedans’, ‘Muslims’, ‘Agarenes’ or ‘Ishmaelites’)3 bearing down on Europe’s gates, now the model is that of opening of the gates – provided that those who seek to enter meet the requisite entrance criteria. We think in terms of reaching out to Islam. As Denis Guénoun observes, Europe figures itself facing Islam. It gives itself a face, a figure, by way of Islam – even though, indeed because, ‘Islam is not extraneous to our history. Or it is so in a singular fashion: from the inside’ (like the Jew) (Guénoun, 2000, pp. 62, 267). The Abrahamic fraternity to which the brother-­religions are called is Abrahamic: not Ibrahamic or as Jacques Derrida provocatively puts it ‘Abra-Ibrahamic’. The Abrahamic is a Western term and a political one. It retains a sense of Christianity having a privileged relation to the particular juridical and political order that constitutes ‘the West’. According to a pervasive and incredibly resilient cultural mythology (impervious to counter-­factuals), Protestant-Biblical-Christianity was, uniquely, the only religion that allowed the West to produce the unique emancipatory alliance between the spirit of religion and the spirit of liberty. De Tocqueville cites Nathaniel Morton, the first historian of the settlement of the Plymouth Colony, who in 1669 proclaimed that we ‘the seed of Abraham his servant, and the children of Jacob his chosen’ inherit from the miraculously modern Christian tradition fundamental concepts such as ‘the intervention of the people in public affairs, the free voting of taxes, the responsibility of the agents of power, personal liberty’ as well as the prohibition against any ‘principle or divine prince’ that goes against the covenant ‘between God and man, in the moral law’ and the ‘politic covenants and constitutions, among men themselves [. . .]’ (Morton cited in de Tocqueville, 2004, p. 36). No matter that this Abraham is very different to other political Abrahams on the table in the seventeenth century, including Sir Robert Filmer’s Abraham as World Emperor or divine right monarch (de Tocqueville, 1884, pp. 11–73). Morton’s Abraham represents what I have discussed elsewhere as the victory of the Liberal Bible: the idea that the true Christian Bible (as opposed to the Qur’an and, until recently, the Jewish Bible) has always sought to devolve power.4 The awareness that the Bible could also provide many other political models (and many other Abrahams) has for a long time been held at bay by a pervasive mythology of facing the Qur’an – which we know (sight unseen)

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is full of both ‘principles’ and ‘divine princes’ that seek to transcend moral laws and ‘politic covenants and constitutions, among men’. The ‘Abrahamic’ proclaims that Jews, Muslims and other good religionists are free to join the religio-­ political-judicial alliance of equality and freedom – while remembering that fundamental values such as free elections and personal liberty have a particular Christian pedigree and genealogy. (This claim becomes more acceptable, the more Christianity does not simply name itself as itself but sees itself as opening out into the Judeo-Christian and the Abrahamic, even as it will never let go of its own particular paternity suit on democracy and specifically ‘modern’ or ‘Western’ values such as freedom and rights.) Strangely, the Judeo-Christian and the Abrahamic stand both for historical specificities – and transcendent, foundational values, which birth and ground us, not just ‘religiously’, but politically, morally, at the level of transcendent good. As Gil Anidjar puts it, the ‘Abrahamic phrase’, or ‘formula’ moves between the empirical and the transcendental. The term evokes specific histories and biographies of Abraham, a proper name, and particular (and different) religious identities, connected to idiosyncratic stories of how Abraham was converted to Judaism, Christianity and Islam. But even as it is tied to specific historical identities, the ‘Abrahamic’ evokes that which is beyond and above and before identity and history. (The Abrahamic is the perfect term for this, as it implies that which exceeds specific histories and proper names.) The grandiose term ‘the Abrahamic’ implies the Ur-­time, the time before time, the condition of a certain religion, of a certain politics, and ‘what constitutes our history and what produced transcendentality itself ’ (Derrida, 1998, p. 23; cited Anidjar, 2003, p. 41). Abraham is an irenic and iconic figure of hospitality. He famously welcomes the three figures at the oaks of Mamre, who have been taken as god, the trinity or simply fellow human beings, brothers, believers (Genesis 18.1–15). The old name is domestic, recognizable – and a little manageably, modestly foreign. It implies friendship with brothers in places such as Palestine, Iraq, Egypt, without doing anything other than imply that all these regimes, citizens, are equally, vaguely religious, and without giving any clue as to what talk of the Abrahamic might mean in the context of Israel-Palestine, Revolution and Counterrevolution in Egypt, or the Arab Spring. We can talk pie-­eyed about the ‘Abrahamic’ while the real work goes on at the level of economy, oil prices, or complex discourses on strategy in the idioms of Industrial Relations (IR). Perhaps this is the point of the Abrahamic. It is a nice phrase, but something from the old archives of the religious, the retired, emeritus past of the Bible and relatedly, fraternally, but also deeply controversially for Euro-America, the Qur’an. The Abrahamic bespeaks

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good intentions, without content. It is strangely empty, even vacuous: a perfect meeting place because nothing essential takes place there. The appeal of Abraham is that he is the Ur-­man, the UrPunkt and the Treffpunkt – but not central. In a place before the centre, he is not Christ, Moses, Torah, Muhammad or the Qur’an. Thus Abraham is everything and nothing. He is the no-­religion’s land that is every-­religion’s land (or at least the three ‘Abrahamic’ religion’s land). Islam, Judaism and Christianity can gather as brothers under one father under the capacious tent of Abraham, and do so all the more easily because this father is not at the centre of any the three ‘religions’ he seems to found. The name of Abraham holds out the promise of a dim and distant background, a desert, which has not yet been built on, without any green lines, ‘security fences’ or ‘apartheid walls’.5 He is the place where we can all get together before the difference starts. As the inaugurator of a generalized and universalizable monotheism, he is pre-Mosaic, before the law, before all the specifics of the law and shari’a or halakah. He represents the beginning that can be understood as the beginning of everyone and everything. Dressing up his new gentile friends as children of Abraham, Paul strategically turned Abraham into a figure of the promise, in general, and belief, in general: Abraham the ur-­believer, content unspecific (Romans 4; Galatians 3). Expanding on this Pauline tradition, the Abrahamic offers a welcome to all comers, provided that they leave all controversial differences, all adiaphora, at the door. To put this another way, membership in the fraternity of the Abrahamic comes through sacrifice. Abraham/Ibrahim is famous, above all, for the sacrifice, or more accurately near-­sacrifice of his son (Genesis 22; Sura 39). Nowadays the bland Abrahamic is associated with a call to sacrifice in a different sense. To enter into the political covenant of the Abrahamic, a religion must offer up all fanaticisms, literalisms, secrets: all those aspects of the old religious archive, or contemporary religious practice, that do not meet the standards required for public representation and a public face. But the invocation of the placid peace-­loving Abrahamic awkwardly co-­exists with attempts within Europe and America to provoke religious elements perceived to be fanatic, nominalist or recalcitrant in relation to distinctly Western (‘Judeo-Christian’?) values. The virulently anti-Islamic Innocence of Muslims uploaded onto YouTube; the infamous Mohammad cartoons published by Jyllands-Posten; and numerous public performances of the intolerability of ‘the veil’ are all designed to provoke and make a public display of retrograde Muslims and Islamicists who no longer qualify for membership in the liberal Abrahamic because they have proved themselves ‘enemies’, or those unable to meet the membership criteria of

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‘brother-­friend’. The call to the Abrahamic co-­exists with a recognition and fear of an uncomfortable surplus of religion that refuses to acquiesce to the goals of the Abrahamic and what it seeks to manage and represent. And Abraham has also, confusingly, become the public emblem of this surplus of atavism or ‘religious violence’. At around the same time that he was publicly revived as a concept, the Abrahamic, Abraham was also resurrected as a public emblem of religious violence in at least two senses. As the Abrahamic, the monotheistic, he embodied the widespread criticism (at least within the scholarly community) that monotheism provokes violence through the insistence on the one: a violent gathering into the one. And as renegade knife-­ wielding individual, he became the ultimate wide-­eyed believer; the one who is so confident about what he hears direct from God or the Absolute that he is prepared to kill. This public conviction of Abraham, which dates back to Immanuel Kant and the deists, has been revived, in popular form, in the wake of 9/11. The two remaining textual traces of the hijackers, the manual for the slaughter (dhabaha) and Muhammad Atta’s last will and testament, both referred to precedent of Ibrahim.6 Since 9/11, we have witnessed a proliferation of treatments of religious violence, with Rembrandt and Caravaggio’s paintings of Abraham’s sacrifice on the front cover, from Terry Eagleton’s Sweet Violence (2002) to Troels Nørager’s Taking Leave of Abraham (2008), to Bruce Chilton’s Abraham’s Curse (2008). The hijackers’ manual makes polemic of the contrast between the United States’ sophisticated ‘equipment . . . and technology’ and the hijackers’ toolkit of ‘bag’, ‘cloth’, ‘knife’, ‘tools’ and ‘weapon’. The book covers make a reverse morality tale from the tension between the old patriarch in long flowing robes (represented in oil paintings of the seventeenth century) and the contemporary world, which Abraham (or the wrong kind of Abraham) threatens. With his knife poised above poor Isaac’s prone body, old Abraham has become the standard figure of subjective religious or hyper religious violence: the old kind of religion that is atavistic, insurgent, resurgent and that gives not a damn for ‘rights’. These well-­meaning treatises on religious violence often seek to call true religion back to the placid Abrahamic and to refuse the example of aberrant, knife wielding Abraham. But Abraham provides a clue to the anxieties of modern democracies, as he stands for both the placid invitation – and the recalcitrant element that refuses to sit down at the table of the ‘Abrahamic’ and put down the bomb or sacrificial knife. Without promoting the bland, peaceable Abrahamic as the true essence of religion, I want to question the way in which Abraham has become the ultimate

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emblem of religious violence. I’m sceptical about the automatic assumption that monotheistic religions and deities are more violent than their polytheistic counterparts. I’m wary of the assumption of postmodernism – and ethics-­lite – that there is safety in numbers; that our real enemy is The One. I think we could be letting ourselves off too easily when we scapegoat ‘religious violence’ and use Abraham as the ultimate emblem of religious violence. As Slavoj Žižek points out, we like to focus on the religious fanatic – the aberrant individual – because apparations of subjective and religious violence deflect attention from collective violence perpetrated by ‘secular’ states (Žižek, 2008). By invoking religious images, we call on the logic of the secular that separates ‘church’ and ‘state’– and potentially protect the state.

Genealogy II: Genesis as heterogenesis Abraham, Av-­ram, Av-­raham, Mighty Father and Father of multitudes, is the father of multitude senses. He stands as the beginning of everything – but also names a very careful and strategic genealogy of concepts. The modern development from ethical monotheism to the Judeo-Christian to the Abrahamic functions like the lineage Abraham–Isaac–Jacob. It keeps the primal idea of religion in a particular family and a particular territory of ideas. The book of Genesis agonizes over the question of kinship because kinship is the key to property and inheritance. Once you know who is who, then you know who gets what. This logic is reciprocal: you construct the family to determine who gets what (cf. Schwartz, 1997, p.  102). Similarly, the development from the ethical monotheistic through the Judeo-Christian to the Abrahamic represents a way of keeping the property and paternity of religion in a particular space. These modern mechanisms for controlling and defining what gets to count as legitimate religion are far slicker that the non-­systematic book of Genesis. The book of Genesis is overtly troubled over where to draw the line between inside and outside. Convoluted genealogies and tortured soap-­opera plots of ‘the family’ push further than we expect into both exogamy and incest: patriarchs mix with ‘foreigners’ and marry their sisters. Different narratives experiment with strange permutations of the ‘family’ which refuse to conform to modern models of the nuclear family and nation that we naively (or hopefully) retroject onto the biblical text. As Christian narratives will later pose different models of what kind of son God has (begotten or adopted),7 so Genesis sets up narratives to muse over questions such as:

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Is Sarah Abraham’s sister or wife? Is cohabiting with a daughter-­in-­law, as Judah does, incest? How foreign is the Ishmaelite, the half-­brother of Isaac and son of Abraham? How foreign is the Moabite, son of Lot, nephew of Abraham? How foreign is the Arab from the Jew, both sons of Abraham? (Schwartz, 1997, pp. 83–4)8

Human sonship proves just as controversial as Christology, and different models are explored not as doctrine but in ‘messy and contradictory’ narrative texts (Schwartz, 1997, p. 84). When H. Richard Niebuhr writes ‘to be a self is to have a God, to have a God is to have a history . . . and to have one God is to have one history’ (Niebuhr, 1967, p.  59), he is certainly not thinking of the biblical book of thwarted, tortured Genesis, with its repeated stories of filial struggle, division and dispossession. In ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’, Foucault discusses how the traditional quest for the origin is shaped by the desire to extract the ‘exact essence of things’ and ‘carefully protected identities’, freed from ‘accident and succession’ (Foucault, 1977, p. 142). To this, he contrasts his own (also Nietzschean) practice of genealogy. Genealogy is ‘concerned with dispersed events of heterogenesis . . . invasions, struggles, plundering disguises, ploys’. It exposes ‘the secret that [things] have no essence, or that their essence was fabricated in a piecemeal fashion from alien forms’ (Foucault, 1977, pp.  139, 142). Genesis reads like a work of heterogenesis or genealogy in the Foucauldian sense. The essence is bound to ‘alien forms’ – and very overtly, on the surface of the text. The story of the genesis of Israel absolutely insists on the fact that it did not begin with itself but with others. Israel, in Genesis, is both a land and a body, an eponymous ancestor. It is, by implication, that land that God shows Abraham – still ill-­defined and blurred and not easy to possess (a long way from the modern nation state). (As Edward Soja comments, we naively project onto ancient- and non-Western societies modern notions of rigidly and geometrically defined territorial property, epitomized by the nation-­state [Soja, 1971, pp. 9–11].) But it is also the body of an ancestor, Jacob, the first one to receive the name ‘Israel’, linked to the revealing improvised etymology ‘the one who strives’ (Genesis 32.28). Jacob/Israel is Abraham’s grandson. He is also, in an almost comically complex genesis, the second-­born twin wrestling in utero with his brother Esau, eponymous father of the Edomites (Genesis 25.19–26). The birth of the ‘nation’ is staged as a physical literalization of the etymology of nation (from nascere/ natio: birth/lineage). The impossible being together of these two brothers is literalized as physical unbearability (cf. Benslama, 1998, p. 134). The mother cries

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out in pain, seeks to terminate her life (at least in Syriac; the Hebrew is incomprehensible) and God tells her ‘Two nations are in your womb/And two peoples born of you shall be divided . . . the elder shall serve the younger’ (Genesis 25.19). But God speaks doubly, like the Delphic oracle. In Hebrew, objects and subjects are interchangeable, particularly in poetry, and the divine gloss can be read as ‘the elder will serve the younger’ and/or the ‘elder the younger will serve’ (Friedman, 2001, p. 88). The story of the birth of Israel is not focused. It is still potentially rotating between two versions and two sons. Provocatively Israelites and Edomites are placed together in the same womb. The co-­habitation, split origin, presses the question ‘On what grounds does one “nation” come to be distinguished from another?’ The story of division is told, appropriately, twice – and in ways that absolutely divide our sympathies. The first (Genesis 25.29–34) is told in a way that invites us to side with ‘our’ ancestor, clever Jacob, as he cunningly inverts the laws of primogeniture. But the second version of the usurpation story (Genesis 27) turns against ‘our’ ancestor and invites us to side with a not yet quite distinguished ‘them’. The tricked father (blind Isaac, Abraham’s son) cries out ‘with an exceedingly great and bitter cry’ and condemns Jacob’s ‘deceit’ (Genesis 27.343–5) and Esau weeps ‘Have you only one blessing, father? Bless me also, my father!’ (Genesis 27.38). Like Abimelech of Gerar, he is allowed to complain about having been set up as collateral damage in the in-­story of the adventures of the Abrahamic (Genesis 20.9–10).9 Asking why Isaac has only one blessing, Esau seems to anticipate contemporary writers who attack monotheistic violence. Like Regina Schwartz, Esau seems to wonder out loud why monotheism imagines god and blessing, like land resources, as scarce. But if the biblical and ‘monotheistic’ asks these questions, in its own corpus, then the monotheistic, or at least the biblical monotheistic, is not as complacent and secure as modern theoretical work suggests. What does it mean that the book of Genesis is traumatized at its own origin and to ask these questions of itself? Admittedly, it is not a simple thing for mere humans to think or approach a pure origin as essence, purity, virginity and sole possession. But Genesis does not just flounder on the difficulty: it insists on the point; goes to the opposite extreme. As I’ve argued in more detail elsewhere (Sherwood, 2012b, pp. 311–28), Genesis counter-­productively refuses the consolation of origin as self-­authenticating, self-­consolidating fantasy space. Perversely committed to a ritualistically-­repeated template of an origin divided between firstborn and secondborn, the book of Genesis habitually presents the eponymous ancestor of Israel as haunted by a shadow side, a twin, an other brother who was there before him or a surrogate family lurking just outside the tent. But why complicate one’s

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own story by keeping myriad ‘thems’ (and the laborious narrative of their expulsion) in? And why allow expelled brothers, like Esau, eponymous father of the Edomites to lament their usurpation and articulate our guilt in ‘our’ text? Whence this strange kamikaze desire to present ‘our’ ancestor as the one who had to wrest the blessing from the firstborn or push the other family into the desert to make enough room for us – and why keep this act of dispossession on record? To put it crudely, if you want to write a people out, you can do it quite easily through a simple act of texticide: a form of elimination that is relatively painless. This would all be part of a normal day’s work for Hebrew narrative. Hebrew narrative is famously terse. It is always deselecting detail – not just detail that we would consider superfluous, but detail that we would have preferred to have kept in. Goddesses, daughters, mothers and details are regularly elided. It’s as if there is a surfeit of y chromosomes. Jacob has twelve sons but only one daughter (Dinah), whose function is to be raped and provoke wars of distinction between men (Genesis 34). One of Jacob’s sons is Judah: the eponymous ancestor of the southern kingdom, who surely qualifies for the most tortuous genealogy in Genesis (Genesis 38). He marries a Canaanite (as if to say, overtly, ‘Israelite is mixed with Canaanite’); then has sex with his daughter-­in-law when she is disguised as a prostitute, leading to another twin pregnancy and another tortuous struggle in utero. One of Judah’s twins is called ‘Brightness’ because he was the first to put his hand out of the womb and the extremely skilful midwife put a crimson thread on his hand to mark the right of primogeniture. The other is called ‘Breach’ (Perez) because he overtook his brother down the birth canal and unexpectedly emerged first. ‘The family’ is put through plot-­lines that outflank the wildest imaginings of the scriptwriters of EastEnders or Hollyoaks. The question ‘Who or what is the line of Judah?’ is answered perversely (maybe even half-­smilingly) with the genealogy: ‘The descendants of Judah, formerly married to a Canaanite, then to Tamar, his daughter-in-law, with whom he had sex when she was disguised as a prostitute, leading to the birth of warring twins.’

Perverse (Egyptian) origins; ungrounded origins (not from the ground) Abraham is not made from the earth of Canaan as Adam is made from the soil. The Abrahamic family is emphatically not aborigine or indigenous or autochthonous (from autokhthôn: born from the earth [Khthôn] itself [autos]).

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The comforts of autochthony are spelt out by the Athenian rhetorician Isocrates (436–338 BCE): We did not become dwellers in this land by expelling others, nor by finding it uninhabited, nor by coming together as a motley horde of many races. We are a lineage so noble and pure that we have for all time continued in possession of the very land which gave us birth, since we are autochthonous, and can address our polis by the very names which apply to our nearest kin; for we alone of the Greeks have the right to call it at once fatherland, nurse and mother. (Isocrates, 1928, p. 24)

Autochthonous origins provide legitimacy and security. They naturalize boundaries and the Greek claim on the land. As geographer Stuart Elden puts it: The land is seen to belong to the people by right, by birth. There was no need for conquest and forced movement of previous inhabitants. Playing a role similar to that social contract theory would many years later, the origins of a polis could be assumed to be peaceful. The consequence of this is the existing regime is the original and only one. (Elden, 2013, p. 26)

Abraham is entirely outside the comfort of the autochthonous and the solid ground for nation it provides. He does not come from Canaan: he is a divinely-­ called immigrant, from ‘Ur’ in Babylon, modern-­day Iraq. Many scholars believe that the myth figure Abraham, Mighty Father, is a retrojected origin, designed to accompany the people (or at least the elites, the writers) who left the land during the Babylonian conquest in the late sixth century BCE, and who constructed a narrative of ‘exile’ and ‘return’ as part of a power struggle to reclaim the land and institutions from the people who stayed there all along. Abraham, the one we think of as ‘The Original and the One’ is far from the original one. He is always a long way from the myth of the founding father who was born first and alone in the land. Instead of standing on the solid ground of autochthony he ventures out on the limb of ‘promise’. In the mathematically simple time before Moses, before the laws of Sinai, Abraham is given just two promises (land and descendants) and performs just two rites (circumcision and sacrifice, both of which are tied to making covenants and families and securing who is inside the true line). Both divine promises – land and descendants – are traumatized from the start. Indeed they are troubled by the time before the start. Hearing the voice of an alien god in Iraq, Abraham (Ibrahim?) is commanded to ‘Go from your

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country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you’ in order to be made into a ‘great nation’ (Genesis 12.1–2). Abraham is to occupy an unknown land, sight unseen, as colonizer, pioneer. Abraham goes, together with the ambiguous figure of Lot, who seems to be both Abraham’s nephew and Abraham’s brother (Genesis 12.5; 14.14). Lot is the first example of a pattern that will be repeated. He is Abraham’s ally, close kin – and the one from whom he must separate, because the land is not big enough for both of them; and the father of the Moabites and the Ammonites, non-Israelite tribes (Genesis 13.8–13; 14; 19). When he separates from Lot, Abraham says ‘Is not the whole land before you?’ (Genesis 13.9), as if the two of them were looking at an empty plain, or desert. But Chapter  12 suggests that perhaps they have to separate because the land is already so over-­populated. Just six verses after the initial command to possess the land, the narrator adds the disclaimer (lest there be any confusion) ‘The Canaanites were then in the land’ (Genesis 12.6) These amorphous Canaanites then break down into myriad swarm of ‘Kenites, Kenizzites, Kadmonites, Hittites, Perizites, Amorites, Canaanites, Girgashites, Jebusites’, not to mention the ‘Rephaim’ or giants (Genesis 15.19–21); and God adds the additional caveats that there shall be at least a four hundred year delay on the realization of the promise and that ‘your offspring shall be aliens in a land that is not there, and shall be slaves’ (Genesis 15.13). The fact that the land is not just not empty, but crowded, is mentioned in the Hebrew Bible no fewer than twenty-­seven times. The descendants of Abraham add to the over-­crowding problem. Promised to be as numerous as sand on the seashore or stars in the sky, these descendants splatter, disseminate, far and wide. The modern notion of the father of three religions or sons (Judaism, Christianity and Islam) looks like a hilarious oversimplification or a modern fairytale: one father, and just three, neat sons. The biblical descendants of Abraham spiral out of the control of identity and nation – even paternity. The biblical mighty father’s fatherhood is mighty. He is the father of the Israelites (the sons of Isaac and Jacob); the Ishmaelites (the sons of Ishmael); and the Edomites (the sons of Esau/Edom) – not to mention Zimran, Jokshan, Medan, Midian, Ishbak and Shuah (Abraham’s sons with Keturah), and the unnamed sons by his concubines to whom he (guiltily?) gives gifts before they depart (Genesis 25.1–6). Whereas the promise of sons is over-­fulfilled, in all directions, the promise of the land is constantly deferred. Abraham, from elsewhere, is always going to elsewheres that are not yet clearly defined. If we were to attempt to follow Franco Moretti’s example and draw an atlas of Genesis, it would be the absolute opposite of Jane Austen’s England, centred around the home counties, and the comfort of the home as a domestic space. Canaan is open at the edges, with no green lines

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or ‘separation barriers’ or ‘apartheid walls’ or border controls. This land is not secure and refuses to be possessed. Twelve chapters into the story of Abraham, the patriarch has only managed to secure a grave-­sized piece of Canaan in which to bury his wife, by bartering with the Hittites, one of the myriad sub-­divisions of the peoples already in, and clearly in possession of, the land (Genesis 23). No sooner is he in the promised land than he and his wife Sarah are forced out by famine down to Egypt where they live as resident aliens (Genesis 12.10). The verb gur, to ‘reside as an alien’ is the same verb that makes the name of Hagar: Ishmael’s mother and Sarah’s Egyptian slave. In this, the first of three ‘ancestress in danger’ stories (as scholars bashfully call it), Sarah and Abraham flee to Egypt. In the second, in Genesis 20 (where Abraham cheats Abimelech and is castigated by Abimelech) they move in the same direction but stop in the Negev, between Kadesh and Shur (Genesis 20.1) on the way to Egypt (though Israel and Egypt hardly exist as if they were modern nation states). Shur and Kadesh are also associated with the story of Hagar the Egyptian (Genesis 16.7, 14) – as is Beersheba (Genesis 21.14) over which Abimelech and Abraham struggle for possession in a story that ends with a reiteration of Abraham’s status as one who ‘resides as an alien’ for ‘many days’ (Genesis 21.22–34). Fearful for his life, lest the Egyptians kill him to capture Sarah’s beauty, Abraham passes his wife off as his sister. Passing off one’s wife as sister is a very interesting phenomenon – particularly because in the second version of the story in Genesis 20 Abraham declares ‘Besides she is indeed my sister, the daughter of my father but not the daughter of my mother’ (Genesis 20.12). The assertion may have been inserted due to a revisionist’s profound discomfort with a lying patriarch. If Sarah is Abraham’s half-­sister, then this is only a half-­lie. But the attempt to alleviate the lie only results in worse problems for ‘the family’. Endogamy encroaches on incest. Somewhere in the space between incest and exogamy, the family, Goldilocks-­like, must find the space that is ‘just right’ (Schwartz, 1997, p.  83). But which are the legitimate ways of keeping family in the family? Can one sleep with a daughter-­in-law or marry a sister? Numerous questions cluster around the Abrahamic family line. How foreign is the Ishmaelite, the half-­brother of Isaac and son of Abraham or the Edomites, Israel’s twin? Are the sons of your brother, your nephew, your slave ‘in’ the nation/tribe? In cultures that need to maximize the in-­group, servants born in one’s own house or those that are ‘bought with one’s own money’ can inherit (Genesis 15.3; 17.23) and the circumcised alien (or ger) becomes part of the family through circumcision (cf. Ex. 12.48–9). The law of hospitality is the law of self-­expansion. Genesis is unsure about whether to maximize or minimalize the family line.

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Genesis 12.10–20, the rawest, least improved version of the ‘Ancestress in Danger’ story, overtly performs the anxiety that Sarah’s children may be halfEgyptian. Sarah is taken into Pharoah’s house – and Abraham is given sheep, oxen, donkeys, camels and male and female slaves in return (return for what?). Though the wife-­as-sister trick is revealed when God sends a plague on Pharoah’s house, the story is clearly anxious about the purity of the Abrahamic line. Recall that Abraham’s great grandson Judah is married to a Canaanite, and Israel’s brother, Edom, is his twin. The anxiety goes all the way back to the beginning. The Abrahamic family constantly performs its dependency on Egypt: Egypt is the automatic refuge in famine, and there is frequent famine. As J. D. Ray observes, ‘The Old Testament is full of the shadows cast by Pharoah’s sun’. As a constant intertext, a place of enmity, danger, nurture and refuge, it is a site of ‘admiration, distrust, envy and emulation, often at the same time’ (Ray, 1998, p. 17). It seems that would-­be ‘Israelites’ come from Iraq and spend a lot of time in Egypt. Abrahamic begins as Iraqi and his children may be more than a little bit Egyptian. This anxiety, already awkwardly performed in the Ancestress in Danger story, becomes even more pronounced in the story of Hagar, the Egyptian slave (Genesis 16 and 21.1–21).

Resident aliens: The Hagaramic The Abrahamic – that overtly masculine, paternal-­fraternal concept – has a female foreign shadow or prototype. We could say that the Abrahamic is preceded by the Hagaramic – facilitator of the Abrahamic family; thorn in the side of the Abrahamic family; there to raise the question of the foreigner and the slave. Her name is Hagar, Ha-Ger, ‘The Resident Alien’. She is at home in a book where all the characters are not characters, but emblems: Av-­raham ‘Father of Multitudes’; Esau/Edom (‘Red’ and ‘Hairy’); Jacob (‘He Deceives’); Isaac (‘He Laughs’). In Genesis all the characters, slave and master alike, are subordinated to function, as narrative ‘slaves’. In the story of Hagar, the threat to the Abrahamic that has been played out as an anxiety of paternity (Genesis 12) is replayed as an anxiety of maternity. The key women in Genesis are always barren. The barrenness is schematic, predictable. Just as there are no y chromosomes and hardly any women, so all the main, most beloved wives, are always waiting for divine IVF. Female barrenness is a way of stealing the mysterious power of birth away from woman – and, in the case of Abraham, transferring productive fecundity to human sacrifice, or almost-­sacrifice, as a scene played out gods, sons and

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fathers. Only in the near-­miss human sacrifice in Genesis 22 do we secure the Abrahamic line, and know which son is the ‘real’ one: divinely-­favoured, sacrificially (re)made. But Abraham, Mighty-Father, has immense difficulty in becoming-Father, just as he experiences massive impotence in securing the promised land. No son, no fatherhood.10 (There are always many Abrahams, other Abrahams,11 and Genesis already has lots. One Abraham cannot get a son. Another Abraham has too many sons, spiralling out of control.) But Sarah is barren and past the age of conception – even as she is also (as another narrative requires her to be), young and desirable, much to the hilarity of Enlightenment critics. (The body of the woman obligingly takes on the shapes that the story demands, even when narrative needs conflict and a grotesque-­impossible body results.) When the three visitors at Mamre announce that Sarah is going to become pregnant, Sarah, listening in on this male annunciation scene, laughs at both the prospect of a son and her own ‘pleasure’ (Genesis 18.11–12). In one register the promise is comedy, a real giggle – even as in another it is also a ‘wonder’ and proof that nothing is impossible for god (18.14). The two come together. The divine is absurd.12 Three chapters and at least one sojourn in Egypt later, Abraham tells God ‘You have given me no offspring, for I continue childless and the heir to my house is Eliezer of Damascus’ – a slave from elsewhere born into his house who has been circumcised into the family (Genesis 15.2–3; 17.23). Then ten years and five chapters in to the Abrahamic saga, Abraham and Sarah improvise. ‘You see that the Lord has prevented me from bearing children; go into my slave girl; it may be that I shall obtain children from her’ (literally be built up from her) says Sarah (Genesis 16.2). Hagar is passed to Abraham and she conceives – but then Sarah ‘deals harshly’ with her and Hagar ‘flees’, only to be met by an angel who gives her Abrahamic promises and instructs her to return. In the second Hagar narrative (Genesis 21), set just after the birth and circumcision of baby Isaac, Hagar (now with her son Ishmael) is sent away for a second and final time because Sarah feels threatened when she sees Ishmael yitzhaqing: that is, ‘playing, laughing’ but also ‘yitzhaqing’ or ‘Isaac-­ing’, mimicking Isaac, being Isaac, looking for all the world like an Isaac-­twin. Even though it is ‘very distressing to him’ on ‘account of his son’, Abraham acquiesces to Sarah’s command: ‘Cast out this slave woman and her son; for the son of this slave woman shall not inherit along with my son Isaac’ (Genesis 21.10). Kinship is the key to property and inheritance. Proximity determines who is who and who gets what. In Galatians 4.21–31, Paul takes Sarah’s words and turns them into the authoritative words of scripture: ‘But what does scripture

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(ἡ γραφή) say? ‘Drive out the slave and her child; for the child of the slave will not share the inheritance with the child of the free woman’ (Gal. 4.31). Rarely is the voice of a woman transformed into the voice of authority: ‘it is written’. Voices of women, like the voices of the devil, are there to be questioned. Sarah is clearly jealous, and her command is registered as distressing to Abraham, hence contentious. But for Paul it becomes the very voice of God – a voice that sacralizes the Ishmaelization of the Jewish Christians in Jerusalem. Later tradition will not be so nuanced. Applying Paul’s polemic to the battle between the Jews and the Christians, the two nations or traditions fighting within the same womb, the same archive, they will use this passage to demonize the fleshy, slavish ‘Jews’. In Galatians 3.13–16, Paul reads the collective noun ‘seed’ (zera; spermatos) in Genesis 13.16 and 17.8 as a deliberate, emphatic, singular, and claims that this explicitly refers to Christ, the only. The Abrahamic promise is being universalized, paradoxically, by being channelled through a single point, Christ – the single entrance point that welcomes all (Gal. 3.13–16). The narrow gate and the wide gate are one and the same. As with the hospitality of liberal democracy (with its specific debts to Christianity), one enters through a point of explicitly Christian origin and thereby enters universality and freedom, available to all. In Galatians 4, the invitation is fleshed out by contrasting the son of the slave woman and the son of the free woman; the children of the promise and the children of the flesh. ‘Now you, my brothers (ἀδελφοί)’ says Paul ‘are children of the promise’; children of Sarah (4.28). To be friend or brother is to be a child of the promise. Hagar in contrast is the Arabic-Jewish, strangely geographically splattered, displaced. ‘Now Hagar is Mount Sinai in Arabia [alternative reading: ‘For Sinai is a mountain in Arabia’] and corresponds to the present Jerusalem, for she is in slavery with her children’ (Gal. 4.25). The polemic and geography are running wild. Jerusalem is airlifted to, and conflated with, Arabia, in the east – making a distinct place for a Pauline Christianity that seems, already (prophetically?) to be headed out of Jerusalem, towards Rome and the ‘West’. As a fitting prototype for the crazy geography of Paul’s Arabic-Jerusalem, the Ishmael of Genesis is half-Abrahamic and half-Egyptian, half ‘Arab’ and half ‘Jew’ (though the terms are anachronistic for the book of Genesis). The second time he exits, he goes off in the direction of Egypt with his mother, and takes an Egyptian wife. And this time he leaves for good – at least as an eponymous hero rather than a tribe. Whereas Esau returns to traumatize Jacob, Ishmael only returns as the Ishmaelites in the Joseph saga at the end of Genesis (37.1–50.26). Like his forefathers, Joseph is dragged down to Egypt (this time by civil war between the eponymous tribes of Israel). He is taken to Egypt by

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the Ishmaelites, who are also traders. The Joseph saga then deliberately trades ‘identities’ between Israel, Egypt and the God of Israel and Pharoah. Joseph is, or becomes, Egyptian to the extent that (without censure) he practises divination, marries an Egyptian woman, becomes the son-­in-law of an Egyptian priest and takes an Egyptian theophoric name. It is tempting to read the Ishmael-Isaac, Hagar-Sarah narrative in Genesis through the filter of Galatians and all the Christian-Platonic freight of spirit versus flesh. But Hagar and Ishmael are far more than a natural, earthy foil to the supernatural child conceived by post-­menopausal Sarah who, like other Old Testament women, already foreshadows the fantastic supra-­sexual conception of Mary, later to be promoted to the Virgin Mary. ‘Now the Lord visited [not as the English translation decorously has it ‘dealt with’] Sarah as he had said and the Lord did for Sarah as he had promised. Sarah conceived . . .’ (Genesis 21.1). Granted, Ishmael is described as a ‘wild-­ass’ of a man; has features in common with neandertalish, red hairy Esau; and is described as the quintessential enemy living at odds with kinship itself (Genesis 16.12). It is not surprising that Esau finds a natural home in marriage with Ishmael’s daughters (Genesis 28.9), since Esau and Ishmael are both very close to the ground. But Genesis is not yet Platonic, not yet Christian. Ishmael and Hagar do not serve as figures of the carnal, in contrast to the child of the mountaintop, miracle and stars. Paul’s ‘Cast out’ is far more authoritative and emphatic than the ‘Cast out’ of Genesis. In Genesis, Hagar and Ishmael’s expulsion is remembered, twice, and reported at length. Why (as in the case of Esau) rehearse this narrative of guilt? Why not carry out a more emphatic expulsion and cast them out of the archive altogether? Why not make them ‘flee’ further – off the edge of the page? Like Esau, Hagar is the secret (guilt) of the home that is hidden in plain sight. Readers are encouraged to empathize with her; to feel the torment of our origin and our interests. Just as Esau is allowed to scream out and accuse us, so the Egyptian slave’s flight/expulsion from the oppressive house of Israel is told as an uncanny reverse Exodus: a narrative that has already been foreshadowed in Genesis 15.13 where God warns that Abraham’s offspring will be ‘slaves’ in a land that is not theirs.13 The verbs ‘to cast out’, ‘to build’, ‘to flee’ and ‘to deal harshly’, used liberally in Genesis 16 and 21, are all staple verbs from the book of Exodus. In the book of Exodus, the identities of ‘Israelite’ and ‘Egyptian’, God and Pharaoh, are strangely mixed. Genesis 16 and 21 provide a neater counter-Exodus, where the traditional roles of victim and victimized (hero and anti-­hero) are reversed. Oppressed in the Israelite house of bondage, the slave both flees of her own volition and is forced out (just like the Israelites in the Exodus; cf. Exod. 12.33).

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She leaves the house of Abraham and ends up at Shur, on the borders of Egypt (Genesis 16.7). She departs carrying bread on her shoulders (Genesis 21.14; Exod. 12.34) and enters the ‘wilderness’ (Genesis 16.7; 21.14). She finds water in the desert and is found by a messenger/angel of God, when she is about to die. In the Islamic splinter story of Hagar’s expulsion, the site where Hagar found water becomes the foundation of the holy city of Mecca. Through Ismail she becomes an ancestress of the Prophet. Her name, pronounced in Arabic with a soft g, Hajar, is one of the centres of the Hajj, and her quest for water is remembered in the rituals of the Hajj. Ishamel is mentioned in the Qur’an twenty-­seven times – exactly, by coincidence, the same number of times that the Hebrew Bible refers to the others crowding in the land. Hagar survives in memory, ritual and the hadith – but not in the Qur’an. The Bible, to its own destruction, is more expansive on Hagar than the Qur’an. The biblical Hagaramic functions as a surrogate Abrahamic. Her surrogacy is biological, domestic and textual. A surrogate is someone who can ‘take the place of another, especially as a successor’ and ‘replace’.14 According to the Babylonian Law Code of Hammurabi, a barren wife should offer her servant or concubine, as surrogate. Genesis reflects the same principle. Standing in for Rachel’s body – almost becoming, or merging with, Rachel’s body – the slave Bilhah is described as giving birth on Rachel’s knees (Genesis 30.3). Hagar stands in for the body of Sarah that she may be ‘built up’ by her. Hagar provides boy bricks for the Abrahamic house. The biological blurs into the domestic. She also builds their house, not her own, in her function as slave (cf. Williams, 2004, p. 60). Biological and domestic surrogacy is already deeply problematic. The slave is not simply subservient to the master-­story. The origin does not and cannot happen without the essential supplement, or surrogate. How strange to have a story in which the origin cannot take place without Ha-­ger, the resident alien. We see the mistress needing, supplicating, requesting surrogate life from the body of the slave. God seems unable to give without assistance. ‘Surely it would have been possible for the absolute god of monotheism [of all beings] to offer the gift of a single origin, within a united family – in short, the perfect gift?’ asks Fethi Benslama (2009, p. 80). What do we make of the fact that the God of monotheism, the One, the Abrahamic god no less, seems least able to give this gift? Hagar’s biological and domestic surrogacy already undermines the house she ostensibly serves. But in her active textual surrogacy she is even more destructive. Hagaramic stories that mirror the Abrahamic detract from the uniqueness, primacy and oneness of the Abrahamic name. The level of textual surrogacy is

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shocking and deliberate. Hagar’s stories duplicate and anticipate the Abrahamic to an uncanny extent. Hagar’s story performs the fear of the uncanny, the surrogate, and her ability to ‘take our place’, to be our ‘successor’ (‘Cast out the slave woman . . . for the son of this slave woman shall not inherit along with my son’) and ‘replace’. The strange co-­habitation of the Hagaramic and the Abrahamic performs the mixing of the heimlich and the unheimlich: the proximate and the alien. There is something uncanny about a body and a story so close to us that it impinges on our place. Hagar and Ishmael are positioned at both extremes of the spectrum of the familiar and the foreign, just like Esau and Jacob, who are simultaneously twins and enemies, sharing the same womb and heading up different tribes. It is as if the narrator wanted to experiment with absolute enmity and absolute proximity concentrated in a single figure. Ha-­ger is not ‘the foreigner’ (the nokri) but the ‘resident alien’, the alien living with us, in our house. She is a resident alien in a Canaan which is not yet anything like a dreamt of ‘Israel’ or a ‘Judah’ – still being full of Canaanites, with which we merge and intermarry, and from whom we find it difficult to distinguish ourselves. According to the laws of kinship and tribes in the book of Genesis, she and her offspring can be absorbed into the family of Abraham. Her intimacy with the Abrahamic is as close as could possibly be conceived. Abraham ‘goes into Hagar’ (Genesis 16.4) and Sarah and Abraham’s son comes out from between her legs. As Ishmael yitzhaks or ‘mimics Isaac’, the story of Hagar mimics crucial (unique) elements of the Abrahamic story – sometimes as echo, sometimes as prolepsis. Abraham is a resident alien just like Hagar, following in the footsteps of Hagar – or maybe Hagar follows his (Genesis 12.10; 20.1). Hagar rarely appears without being marked as ‘Hagar the Egyptian’ – and yet her story is doggedly and perversely Abrahamic. Exceptionally for a woman, and especially an Egyptian woman, Hagar steals the thunder from the Abrahamic and the patriarchal prerogative in general. She is the first to bear a son and the first to receive a divine visitation, two full chapters before Abraham welcomes the three divine guests at Mamre (Genesis 16.7). Even more strangely, she becomes a quasi-­patriarch, receiving a direct repetition of the Abrahamic promise ‘I will so greatly multiply your offspring that they cannot be counted for multitude’ (Genesis 16.10; cf. 15.5) uttered just a chapter previously, for all the world as if it were going to be unique. Ishmael is to be the father of a great nation, a parallel and doubled multitude. His name (‘God Hears/God Understands’) is more pious and more closely related to God (El) than Isaac’s name which simply means ‘He laughs’. The Hagaramic promise of myriad descendants seems to be fulfilled in

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the strange biblical record of the only tribe whose name is etymologically related to a woman: the ‘Hagarites’ and the ‘Hagarenes’ (1 Chronicles 5.10, 19, 20; Psalms 83/82.7; 1 Chron. 27.31). The Hagaramic is not simply a phantom dreamt up by a twenty-­first century feminist and critic of identity politics: it seems to be anticipated in these strange Hagarites and Hagarenes. It is as if Hagar takes over a domestic narrative that never gets to be properly domesticated and insular because the Egyptian slave always already does things that only the patriarchs get to do – and first. Acting out all the patriarchal prerogatives, she names her own progeny and she names God, and then she puts a signpost in the landscape – just like the patriarchs – naming a well as a sign of her encounter with the god who hears (Genesis 16.3, 16.14; cf. Genesis 22.14). Undertaking a task performed by patriarchs and their servants, Hagar finds an (Egyptian) wife for her son. The sensational Hollywood pinnacle of the story of the Abrahamic, the sacrifice of Isaac (Genesis 22), is preceded by a far less famous prototype, one chapter earlier. Sensationally, the sacrifice of Isaac tells of the Abrahamic’s virtual self-­destruction: Isaac and the whole future of Abraham under the knife. But the Abrahamic risks itself and threatens to destroy its own uniqueness far more effectively, if less sensationally, by having Genesis 22 pre-­ empted by Genesis 21: the story of Hagar’s expulsion and the last-­minute retrieval of Ishmael from the brink of death. Dead set on textual twinning or textual surrogacy, the first sacrifice tenaciously follows (or rather precedes) the second in myriad points of detail, from ‘getting up early’, to the intervening angel and the son snatched from death. Genesis 22 begins ‘After these things’, as if deliberately releasing memories that will subvert the story that follows, then has God command Abraham: ‘Take your son, your only son, the one you love . . . Isaac.’ A fifth-­century midrash Genesis Rabbah (ca. 400–450 CE) imagines Abraham’s puzzled requests for clarification: God: Take your son Abraham: I have two sons God: Your only one Abraham: This one is the only son to his mother and this one is the only son to his mother God: The one you love Abraham: I love them both God: Isaac (Genesis Rabbah 55.7; cf. B. Sanhedrin 89b)

God forgets; insists on a more standard story. But Abraham does not forget.

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Who or what is ‘the Hagaramic’? What does it mean? What does it want? My Hagaramic wants to upset the bland placidity of the common term the ‘Abrahamic’, and the notions of diversity, identity and representation that it, well, represents. It wants to show how the resources of the old archive subvert bland appropriations because, as Freud noted back in the infamous passage in Moses and Monotheism, the archive is shaped by (at least) two opposing tendencies: acts of repression and distortion that are ‘not unlike a murder’; and indulgent piety preserving everything to excess (Freud, 1939, p. 70). These two counter-­tendencies are perfectly embodied in God’s desire to eliminate (murder?) Ishmael and make ‘an only’, colliding with the laboriously preserved countermemory of Genesis 16 and 21. To borrow Jan Assmann’s comments on the storage system of writing in general, the archive of the biblical exceeds utility and preserves ‘the age-­old’ (the first before the first?), the ‘noninstrumentalisable’ and ‘disowned’ (Assmann, 2006, pp. 27, 114). Hagar and Ishmael are the perfect figures of the retention of the age-­ old (the first before the first) and the remembered disowned. In the 1930s and 1940s – before the rise of ‘identity’, in the days when the Judeo-Christian encompassed more subversive social-­political objectives than acting as a cipher for core values, or cultural essences – exiled German/Austrian intellectuals such as Sigmund Freud and Erich Auerbach produced traumatized ‘readings’ of biblical figures that intruded, boldly and provocatively, onto a fragmented and fissured Europe. From Istanbul in 1942, Auerbach boldly proposed Genesis and the Abrahamic as core texts for ruined European cultures on the grounds that they were so sacrificial, so ‘backgrounded’, so tormented; and because they mystified the origin and, in particular, the origin of war. Auerbach saw clearly how ‘the perpetually smouldering jealousy and the connection between the domestic and the spiritual, between the paternal blessing and the divine blessing, lead to daily life being permeated with the stuff of conflict, often with poison’. The origin fissured, for unexpressed reasons; the domestic was tortured with schwere heimische Kämpfe, ‘struggles, fighting at home’ (Auerbach, 1991, pp. 22, 81; Auerbach, 1946, pp. 29, 82). In Moses and Monotheism, written between 1939 and 1941 between Vienna and London, Freud turned ethical monotheism into a lesson taught by Moses the Egyptian. Monotheism was ‘genetically’ Egyptian, but ‘historically’ Jewish: it was taught by a ‘great stranger’ but preserved by the Jews (or rather ‘Semitic neo-Egyptians’) (Freud, 1939, p. 54). Freud seemingly had no idea that the Exodus already scrambles EgyptianIsraelite identity, or that it performs these Egyptian anxieties even more overtly around the Abrahamic – in the anxious ancestress in Egypt story, or the long narratives of Hagar the Egyptian surrogate. As he busied himself turning his

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‘people’ into a secondary origin – a repetition – Freud was apparently oblivious to the fact that Genesis had led the way in such radical acts of taking away. In his 2002 lectures Freud and the non-European – published with a cover image of Europe as blurred Rorschach ink blot – Edward Said celebrated Freud as the ‘overturner and re-­mapper of accepted or settled geographies and genealogies’. ‘In excavating the archaeology of Jewish identity, Freud insisted that it did not begin with itself, but, rather, with other identities (Egyptian and Arabian)’. From the time before ‘identity’, Freud teaches us that ‘identity cannot be thought or worked through itself alone; it cannot constitute or even imagine itself without that radical originary break or flaw which will not be repressed’ (Said, 2003, pp. 27, 44, 53–4). And so does Hagar and the Hagaramic. She may be too female, too peripheral to the Christian, to pack the kinds of punches wielded, at different times, by provocative politico-­philosophical reworkings of Abraham, Moses, Paul.15 Then again, it may prove to be to her advantage that she is female and also Egyptian, wandering in the no-­man’s or no-­woman’s land between the Bible and the Qur’an. The Hagaramic is capable not just of reiterating the now well-­known general lesson that ‘monogenealogy’ is always a ‘mystification in the history of culture’ (Derrida, 1992, pp. 10–11). She is also capable of making the same kinds of provocative gestures that Derrida attempts when he writes ‘Hear O Ishmael’ or deploys the term ‘Abra-Ibrahamic’ (Ibra-Abrahamic) – but she is able to make them from within the biblical archive itself. Perhaps by way of restitution for her expulsion, she is also capable of forcing (or calling) the Abrahamic outside Euro-America to places like Iran and Iraq – from whence, we recall, the Abrahamic first came. As I explore in more detail elsewhere, since the late nineteenth century, the stories of Hagar and Ishmael have found a home among the unhomed, the immigrants, exiles, slaves – all those guest workers, sex workers and surrogates outside the privileged genealogies of Euro-America (Sherwood, 2014a). But some of the most challenging apparitions of the ghost of Hagar have come out of Iran and Iraq, and their tortured imbrications with ‘the West’. In the 1950s, at the same time that the Judeo-Christian was being mobilized as a concept in the context of the Cold War, British and American intelligence agencies orchestrated a coup against the democratically elected government of Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh leading to the US-backed reign of Mohammad-Rezā Shāh Pahlavi from 1953 – and the Iranian Revolution of 1979, in which a revived Hagar played a major part. The highly influential mystical-­political revolutionary work, Hajj, by Ali Shariati, mixed potent ideas from Fanon and Sartre with the symbolism of Hagar and the Hajj:

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From among all humanity: a woman From among all women: a slave And from among all slaves: a black maid. The weakest and most humiliated one of his creatures was given a place at His side and a room in His house . . . So now, there are two, Allah and Hajar under the ceiling of the house . . . (Shariati, 1992, p. 24)

Hagar has recently become the title figure of a collection of poems by Amal AlJubouri who was born in Iraq, moved to Germany in 1997 during the embargo, then returned to Iraq after the Ba’ath Party’s fall in 2003 and lived there during the war. In Hagar Before the Occupation. Hagar After the Occupation (Al-Jubouri, 2011), the Hagar of the title stands for restless movement, pacing between differently unliveable alternatives. (Was it better when Hagar and Ishmael lived with Abraham, Sarah and later Isaac; or was it better when they were sent away?) In ‘Hagar After the Occupation’ Al-Jubouri writes: There is no one but Hagar Before her, the Occupation Behind her, the Occupation And freedom? A bastard child An orphan Without a name.

At this point we can only begin to glimpse some of the non-European, nonAmerican Abrahamics to which the Hagaramic might take us. For now, it is perhaps enough that she pushes us beyond the blandification of the Abrahamic, and the diversity, equality and freedom that it claims to name.

Notes   1 For the threatened Protestantization and Christianization of the ‘Judeo-Christian’ and the elision of Jewish secularism, see for example Weiss-Rosmarin, 1943; Levitt, 2007, pp. 807–32.   2 ‘Communism, Korea, Corruption’ was Eisenhower’s oft-­repeated designation of the political enemy.   3 For ‘the Arab’ as ‘archival depository of multifarious terms’, see Anidjar, 2003, p. 33.   4 For the Liberal Bible, and Abraham and the Liberal Bible, see Sherwood, 2008, pp. 312–43 and Sherwood, 2012a, pp. 303–4.

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  5 I am of course invoking the various partitions in the modern state of Israel – home territory of the Abrahamic – most recently the wall that Palestinians refer to as the ‘racial segregation wall’ but that Israelis refer to as the ‘separation fence’ or ‘anti-­terrorist fence’.   6 The Manual proclaims ‘If God grants (manna) any one of you a slaughter, a dhabaha, you should perform it as an offering on behalf of your father and mother . . .’ Though used in colloquial street Arabic, the verb dhabaha (used of the terrorists’ justified ‘slaughter’ of resisting passengers) arguably also refers back to Ibrahim’s near-­ sacrifice of the one popularly known in Islam as the dhabih allah, the ‘intended sacrifice of God’. In his will, Muhammad Atta exhorts his family to ‘do what Ibrahim (a prophet) told his son to do, to die as a good Muslim’. See further Sherwood, 2012a, pp. 303–32; Makiya and Mneimneh, 2002, pp. 18–21.   7 For a brilliant exploration of Jesus’s adoption see Peppard, 2011.   8 The ‘Arab’ and the ‘Jew’ are both anachronistic for Genesis.   9 As a victim of the second wife-­sister trick, Abimelech confronts Abraham: ‘What have you done to us? How have I sinned against you that you have brought such great guilt on me and my kingdom? You have done things to me that ought not to be done’ (Genesis 20.9). 10 Cf. Fethi Benslama’s provocative treatment of Hagar and paternity in ‘La répudiation originaire’. 11 Think of the multiple Abrahams of Kierkegaard or Kafka, or Derrida, 2008, pp. 311–38. 12 On Sarah’s laughter, Sarah’s death, and the relation between the two, see Sherwood, 2004, pp. 261–92. 13 For a now classic reading of Genesis 21 as reverse Exodus, see Trible, 1984, pp. 9–35. 14 The definition of surrogacy is taken from the Free Online Dictionary (http://www. thefreedictionary.com). 15 For Abraham’s weakness as a philosophical and cultural trope, compared to Paul, see Sherwood, 2014b, pp. 26–38.

References Al-Jubouri, A. (2011). Hagar Before the Occupation. Hagar After the Occupation. (trans.) R.G. Howell and H. Qaisi. Farmington, ME: Alice James Books/University of Maine. Anidjar, G. (2003). The Jew, the Arab: A History of the Enemy. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Assmann, J. (2006). Religion and Cultural Memory. (trans.) Rodney Livingstone. Cultural Memory in the Present series. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Auerbach, E. (1946). Mimesis: Dargestellte Wirklichkeit in der Abendländischen Literatur. Bern: A. Francke.

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—— (1991). Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953. Benslama, F. (1998). ‘La répudiation originaire’. In Idiomes, Nationalités, Déconstructions Rencontre de Rabat avec Jacques Derrida (Cahiers INTERSIGNES 13). Casablanca: Les éditions Toukbal. —— (2009). Psychoanalysis and the Challenge of Islam. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Blair, T. (2001). ‘Speech at the Labour party conference, Brighton’. Guardian. 3 October. pp. 4–5. Chilton, B. (2008). Abraham’s Curse: The Roots Of Violence In Judaism, Christianity and Islam. New York: Doubleday. Derrida, J. (1992). The Other Heading: Reflections on Today’s Europe. (trans.) A. Brault and M.B. Naas. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. —— (1998). Of Grammatology. (trans.) Gayatri Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. —— (2004). ‘Abraham the other’. In H. De Vries (ed.) Religion: Beyond a Concept. New York: Fordham University Press. De Tocqueville, A. (2004). Democracy in America. New York: Library Classics of the United States/Penguin Putnam. Eagleton, T. (2002). Sweet Violence: The Idea of the Tragic. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Elden, S. (2013). The Birth of Territory. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Filmer, R. (1884). Patriarcha, or the Natural Power of Kings (1680), in John Locke, Two Treatises on Civil Government, preceded by Sir Robert Filmer’s Patriarcha. London and New York: George Routledge and Sons. pp. 11–73. Foucault, M. (1977). ‘Nietzsche, genealogy, history’, in M. Foucault, Language, Counter-­ memory, Practice. D.F. Bouchard (ed.); (trans.) Sherry Simon. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. pp. 139–64. Freud, S. (1939). Moses and Monotheism. London: Hogarth Press. Friedman, R. E. (2001). Commentary on the Torah. San Francisco: Harper San Francisco. Goldwater, B. M. (1979). With No Apologies: the Personal and Political Memoirs of United States Senator Barry M. Goldwater. New York: William Marrow and Co. Guénoun, D. (2000). Hypothèses sur l’Europe: Un Essai de Philosophie. Belfort: Circe. Hartmann, D., Z. Xuefang and W. Wischtadt (2005). ‘One (multicultural) nation under God? Changing uses and meanings of the term “Judeo-Christian” in the American media’. Journal of Media and Religion. 4. 207–34. Heinsohn, A. G., Jr. (ed.) (1962). Anthology of Conservative Writing in the United States, 1932–1960. Washington: Regnery Publishing, Inc. Herberg, W. (1955). Protestant-Catholic-Jew: An Essay in American Religious Sociology. New York: Doubleday.

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Isocrates (1928). ‘Panegyricus’. In Isocrates, Greek-English edition. 3 volumes. (trans.) George Norlin. London: William Heinemann. vol. 1. p. 24. Levitt, L. (2007). ‘Impossible assimilations, American liberalism and Jewish difference: revisiting Jewish secularism’. American Quarterly. 59. pp. 807–32. Makiya, K. and Mneimneh, H. (2002). ‘Manual for a “raid”’. New York Review of Books. 17 January. pp. 18–21. Niebuhr, H. R. (1967). The Meaning of Revelation. New York: Macmillan. Nørager, T. (2008). Taking Leave of Abraham: An Essay on Religion and Democracy. Aarhus: Aarhus University Press. Peppard, M. (2011). The Son of God in The Roman World: Divine Sonship in its Social and Political Context. New York: Oxford University Press. Ray, J. D. (1998). ‘Egyptian wisdom literature’, in J. Day, R.P. Gordon and H.G.M. Williamson (eds), Wisdom in Ancient Israel. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. pp. 17–28. Said, E. (2003). Freud and The Non-European. London: Verso. Schwartz, R. (1997). The Curse of Cain: The Violent Legacy of Monotheism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Shariati, A. (1992). Hajj: Reflections on its Rituals. (trans.) Laleh Bakhtiar. Alberquerque: Abjad. Sherwood, Y. (2004). ‘And Sarah died’. In Y. Sherwood (ed.) Derrida’s Bible: Reading a Page of Scripture with a Little Help From Derrida. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 261–92. —— (2008). ‘The God of Abraham and exceptional states, or the early modern rise of the whig/liberal Bible’. Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 76. 312–43. —— (2012a). Biblical blaspheming: Trials of the Sacred for a Secular Age. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —— (2012b). ‘The perverse commitment to overcrowding and doubling in Genesis: implications for ethics and politics’, in P. Joyce and C. Dell (eds) A Festschrift in Honour of John Barton. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 311–28. —— (2014a). ‘Hagar and Ishmael: The reception of expulsion’. Interpretation. Forthcoming. —— (2014b). ‘Spectres of Abraham’. In A. Bielik-Robson and A. Lipszyc (eds) Judaism in Contemporary Thought: Traces and Influence. London: Routledge. pp. 26–38. Silk, M. (1984). ‘Notes on the Judeo-Christian tradition in America’. American Quarterly. 65–85. Soja, E. W. (1971). The Political Organization of Space. Resource Paper No. 8. Washington DC: Association of American Geographers. St Louis Post (1991). ‘Editorial’. St Louis Post, 13 December. p. 3C. Trible, P. (1984). Texts of Terror: Literary-Feminist Readings of Biblical Narratives. Philadelphia: Fortress Press.

The Hagaramic and the Abrahamic; or Abraham the Non-European Weiss-Rosmarin, T. (1943). Judaism and Christianity: The Differences. New York: The Jewish Book Club. Williams, D. S. (2004). Sisters in The Wilderness: The Challenge of Womanist God-Talk. New York: Orbis. Žižek, S. (2008). Violence: Six Sideways Reflections. London: Profile Books.

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3

Abrahamic Faiths and Dialogical Transcendence Prasenjit Duara

National University of Singapore

As a historian without expert knowledge in either literature or religion, my goal is to trace how the Abrahamic faiths may be seen in the wider context of historical sociology. Specifically I want us to be able to think how their effects on self-­ formation and cultural expression may be differentiated from the nonAbrahamic religious traditions of Asia. The idea of transcendence in the Abrahamic traditions remains distinct from most other religious traditions. I am not, however, making a culturally essentialist argument. While there are doxic and doctrinal differences between Abrahamic and non-Abrahamic traditions, such as Confucianism, Daoism, Buddhism and Hinduism, there are also many similarities in the full range of ideas and practices among these faiths and considerable difference within each religion. When and how certain doxic characteristics – such as a radically transcendent God, the ‘chosen people’, communities of faith, ‘historia sacra’, et al. – become salient is a matter of investigation of historical sociology. While Max Weber and Karl Jaspers proposed the beginnings of such an investigation, we need to inquire more closely when and how these cosmological orientations or dispositions may have an impact on social, intercultural and nature-­human relationships. The similarities and connections among Eurasian religions are often the effect of circulatory historical influences that have linked the region since the advent of agriculture and cities. In some ways, the doxic elements also function to contain or excise the disruptive effects of circulations on existing social patterns, although they are contained or subordinated in different ways. I distinguish between two expressions of transcendence – the radical and the dialogical – which may be seen as tendencies within different faiths.

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Simply put, Abrahamic faiths have a stronger tradition of radical transcendence than non-Abrahamic ones expressed variously at different historical times. However, it is not until the European religious wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when a particular expression of Christian transcendence becomes identified with a political form I call ‘confessional nationalism’, that these ideas become historically determinative. Over time, confessional nationalism in Europe does transmute, at least partially, into secular nationalism. By the end of the nineteenth century, however, different versions of confessional nationalism spread like wildfire across the world as elites and cultural entrepreneurs sought to restructure their older more capacious and universalist religions into confessional moulds capable of achieving nationalist mobilization in a competitive capitalist world. At the same time, it is the more marginalized and deinstitutionalized ‘spirituality’ of the modern West and the ‘alliances’ emerging and merging with the popular and syncretic religious traditions of the developing world to which we need to attend. These movements have come to house expressions of transcendence that are not strictly religious – as, for instance, in many environmental movements – and possess the possibilities to overcome the persistent consumerism and nationalism that is degrading our world.

Theories of transcendence Academic theories of transcendence have been most developed by a tradition of historical sociology known as the theory of Axial Age civilizations. I draw upon this school of thought but also take their ideas as a significant point of departure for my own conception. For the moment, it is sufficient to mention that their ideas are derived from the insights of Karl Jaspers and were developed most famously by Shmuel M. Eisenstadt, Benjamin Schwartz and Robert N. Bellah. The Axial Age refers to the sixth century BCE when revolutionary developments in society, philosophy and religion occurred across the Eurasian axis of China, India, the Middle East and Greece. Philosophers, prophets and what we would today call religious thinkers pursued the quest for human meaning and effected world-­transforming changes by appealing to transcendent sources beyond the known world and magical explanations (Eisenstadt, 1986). There are several ways in which transcendence is understood and deployed even by Axial Age theorists. At the most basic level, it refers to transcending the here and now of the world. This going beyond typically embeds a critique of

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existing conditions and posits a non-­worldly power and vision to morally authorize an alternative to the existing arrangements and structure of power. In other words, transcendence is first of all a source of non-­worldly moral authority that can speak back to power. Moreover, this transcendence does not simply imply a temporal transcendence from the present but its messengers or prophets also often claim a universal applicability. Third, reflexivity, rational knowledge and a synoptic view of the world are seen by many to be a product of the Axial Age. The philosopher Jürgen Habermas makes the most far-­reaching claims for this breakthrough: The Axial Age, captured by the First Commandment, is emancipation from the chain of kinship and arbitrariness from mythic powers. Axial Age religions broke open the chasm between deep and surface structure, between essence and appearance, which first conferred the freedom of reflection and power to distance oneself from the giddy multiplicity of immediacy. For these concepts of the absolute or the unconditioned inaugurate the distinction between logical and empirical relations, validity and genesis, truth and health, guilt and causality, law and violence, and so forth. (Habermas, 2001, p. 160)

Habermas may be rather rashly identifying the unconditioned with the absolute since transcendence as a concept does not necessarily involve the idea of gods or God. Axial philosophies such as Confucianism kept the realm of gods quite separate from worldly changes, although an impersonal moral order of Heaven was certainly relevant to it. The Buddha was still more sceptical and denied any form of transcendent Being, even though the ultimate truth and morality could be achieved from closeness to the state of pure nothingness or Nirvana. A certain measure or type of transcendence is often necessary as a foundation of ideals and values, but the radical transcendence of the Abrahamic religions of an absolute and omnipotent God – or what Alfred N. Whitehead calls an all-­ powerful imperial ruler or an unmoved mover (Whitehead, 1978, p. 342) – is by no means the only expression of transcendence. The concept of transcendence that I deploy does not refer to an ontological status in itself and although it is subjective, it is better thought of as occupying a meta-­epistemic locus. In other words, it is a mode of knowing that is structured by historical and social conditions. George Simmel viewed religion like art, as something that bridges the gap between the subjective and the objective. To be sure, I distinguish between transcendent and immanent expressions of religion, but my use of transcendence fits Simmel’s description of religion as the

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objectification of human yearning – a metaphysical dimension of humans – by means of human interaction. Note that Simmel insists this dimension has little to do with whether or not it is out there, but rather is an aspect of human subjectivity. Simmel asks whether this metaphysical yearning ‘once fulfilled by the idea of transcendence, and now . . . paralyzed by the withdrawal of the content of faith and as if cut off from the path to its own life’ (Simmel, 1997, p. 9) can survive in a secular age? Can its lofty meaning be found in the depths of life itself? I try to show that in a transfigured way, this yearning can and needs to survive, although there are severe challenges. Indeed, Simmel suggests this survival is part of what it means to be human – at least for humans who are ‘religiously musical’, the phrase that Weber used to describe Simmel himself. As Simmel claims: ‘Just as an erotic person is always erotic in nature, so too is a religious person always religious, whether or not he believes in God’ (Simmel, 1997, p. 5). Historically a less radical, ‘dialogical transcendence’ has pervaded most Asian societies. Dialogical transcendence is distinguished from more radical expressions of transcendence by its capacity for co-­existence of different levels and expressions of truth. Moreover, the dialogic is to be distinguished from the Hegelian idea of the dialectic where one of the two terms negates and supersedes the other. This co-­existence took place in debate and disputation, through mutual disregard, and more often by covert circulatory practices of absorption or unacknowledged ‘borrowings’ and encompassment. Disciplinary practices of self-­cultivation and self-­formation that sought to link the self, and/or the community or locality, to the transcendent ideals did not typically or historically eliminate other groups or immanent expressions of religion based on doctrine, although there were certainly historical cases in which it did occur.

Transcendence: Radical and dialogical Jan Assmann, Arnaldo Momigliano and others have shown that the contestation between monotheism and polytheism dominated the religions of antiquity in the Mediterranean and the Middle East region until the Christianization of the Roman Empire in the fourth century CE. What Assmann calls ‘revolutionary monotheism’ and distinguishes from polytheism and ‘evolutionary monotheism’ (where ‘all gods are one’) had appeared with the theologization of history or historia sacra in the Judeo-Christian tradition. This historical vision challenged the polytheistic idea of the world suffused with divinity into one that is merely

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the creation of a single God in whom Truth resides. Time in this world since the fall of Adam and Eve from grace through the culmination of the prophets and until the Second Coming or Judgment Day is a period of waiting and preparation. Events in this temporality gain significance only in relation to salvation. History in the Abrahamic traditions is thus the stage for the unfolding of a divine message revealed by the prophecies of the messiah or prophet and recorded in sacred text. The community of the chosen or the believers are expected to lead a life of faith and godly conduct in the expectation of salvation in the kingdom of heaven whether in later generations or in the afterlife (Assman, 2004, pp.  17–31; Momigliano, 1987, p. 152). Tracking the centuries-­long literature since Edward Gibbon on the origins of Christian intolerance and violence towards pagans and others in Late Antiquity, Guy Stroumsa provides further background for the emergence of monotheism. The region occupied by the myriad communities across the Byzantine and the Sassanian empires in Late Antiquity generated a new axial development, a novel conception of religion based not only on the religions of the Book and monotheism, but the interiorization and personalization of faith, and the shift from civic religion to communitarian religious identity. After the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE, Judaism became the laboratory and the model for several of these ideas, such as the sacrality of the Book, revelation and historia sacra for these communities. Among them were many confessional communities who claimed their prophetic revelation or story of the Truth – modelled on the same historia sacra – to be authoritative. While they may have done so largely to distinguish themselves from each other, their contestations led to a highly competitive and often intolerant environment (Stroumsa, 2005, p. 104, cf. 95–107). The Biblical tradition of salvation history (historia sacra) laid out certain common features among the major religious traditions of this area: the acceptance of a body of material as sacred scripture; a doctrine of prophecy strongly influenced by the Mosaic pattern; and a sacred language. History then is ‘kerygmatic’: it is the proclamation of a message of divine significance. There are of course several other distinctive features among the Abrahamic faiths. At the same time, the similarities among the monotheistic religions and their claim of a common religious ancestry made the quest for a distinct identity all the more urgent (Wansbrough, 1978, pp. 40, 98–9; Al Makin, 2010, Ch. 1; Adams, 1997, pp. 75–90). As we know from similar environments of religious competitiveness in different periods and different parts of the world (such as South or East Asia), competition based on the belief of Truth did not necessarily lead to large scale

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elimination of the Other, in and of itself. Indeed, Stroumsa argues that, despite providing many of the fundamental characteristics of the new religiosity of Late Antiquity, Jewish exclusivism and insistence on the boundaries of collective identity remained within the framework of the civic religion and was indifferent to the Other. It was only when the collectivity of believers in a single universal Truth fired with an imperative to proselytize came to control state power that there developed a systematic ‘intolerance for those who refused to accept the message of love’ (Stroumsa, 2005, p.  104, cf. 95–107). Indeed, Christians in fourth-­century Rome believed that the reduction of diversity was the best preparation for the coming of the Saviour; they built their interpretation of the Roman empire as the providential instrument for the Church. Thus, a significant characteristic of the later Abrahamic societies, Christianity and Islam, is the proselytizing injunction that takes them ‘beyond the community paradigms of the first axial breakthrough associated with Jewish and Greek models’ (Salvatore, 2007, p.  100). Once Christianity became identified with political power in the Roman Empire in the fourth century, the polytheistic civic religion model of the early empire gave way to community churches of the chosen who were defined by shared belief. Good and evil become associated with obedience or disobedience to a single God and the divine law. The attainment of salvation was not only based on prescribed duties, rituals and other orthodox practices; in this new model, faith and piety of those who were converted or baptized was more important than ritual practice. It was imperative to win over those who lived among false gods to live a life and a social bond based on a fellowship of faith (Stroumsa, 2005; Salvatore, 2007, pp. 100–1). At the same time, it is equally clear that there are significant differences between the three Abrahamic faiths. As mentioned, Judaism has no conception of proselytism among those not in the fold or of notions of the heathen or kafir. The sinfulness of people and the dire need for salvation in Christianity that can be met only by the human incarnation of God suffering the agony of crucifixion has no counterpart in the Muslim view of the world. Moreover, while Christianity demonstrated, particularly early on, some ambivalence towards the political sphere, in Islam, the political foundation for the umma of believers was important from the start (Adams, 1997, p. 89; Stroumsa, 2005, p. 107). Whereas on the one hand, the radical transcendence of these faiths predisposes them towards communitarian distinctiveness and often towards intolerance, they also generated vast movements and efforts to bridge the chasm with the non-­believers whether by policies or activities from above or movements from below. Many Islamic and Christian courts, for instance, the court of the Moghul

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emperor Akbar or Roger II of Sicily in the twelfth century, fostered debate and dialogue among the different faiths. Within Sunni thought, for instance, the Andalusian debates about free will and God which later fed into the European Enlightenment, revealed a capaciousness among some of its most radical thinkers such as the mystic Ibn ‘Arabi who was able to dismantle the transcendence-­immanence dichotomy (Bahrawi, 2013). Just as important were the movements outlined by Armando Salvatore that developed periodically among Christian monastic movements – such as the Franciscans – and Sufi mystic brotherhoods which sought to extend the social bond in the public sphere through traditions of inter-­faith understandings (Salvatore, 2007). Finally, there are also several different religious groupings in non-Abrahamic societies that are monotheistic or had ideas of radical transcendence, but few ever came to dominate the society or region (Sikhism may have been the closest in recent centuries). The later Abrahamic religions were dynamic transcendent faiths that expanded through various modes of proselytism including persuasion, trade, politics and violence. Analytically, there were two factors behind the expansionism: theology and political circumstances. Both were necessary but neither was sufficient by itself. The theological imperative to expand the community of believers and dispel non-­belief was possible and did occur through trade and missionizing, but it was most efficiently achieved through state violence – or its threat – against non-­believers, most dramatically during the Crusades. This violence occurred particularly when the non-­theological ambitions of rulers could also be satisfied. Comparing the situation with Buddhist conversions which were rarely accompanied by state violence, Steve Collins (2003) makes the following observation. He argues for two types of salvation: (i) where everyone can and should undertake the path; and (ii) where everyone is permitted to undertake the path (if individually capable), but no one is required to do it. The first corresponds to Christianity and Islam and the second to Buddhism, especially Theravada Buddhism. Indeed, we can argue that not only in Buddhism, but in most versions of Hinduism, Daoism and Confucianism – whether or not their sub-­sects engage in conversion or bring others into the fold – the path of salvation is open to all (although often very unequally, especially in Hinduism where it may take well over a million lifetimes). But it is not required of everyone to follow the path strictly and indeed only the virtuosos may in fact achieve the dao, sagehood, moksha or nirvana (Collins, 2003, p. 34). The relationship between missionizing and state expansion or plunder could of course become mutually reinforcing, as it often did in the late first and second

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millennium. But there were also important reasons of state, particularly in empires, to restrain that lethal combination. Yet that combination resurfaced during the wars of religion between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Europe and doctrinal differences became salient once again. These differences became important for a mode of community-­formation that I have called ‘confessional nationalism’ which in turn was usable for the competitive pursuit of global resources. Although the confessional state had generally secularized by the late nineteenth century, the spread of confessional religions accompanying imperialism beyond the European states led to the appropriation of the model of confessional nationalism in the rest of the world by the twentieth.

Transcendence and circulation While it is easy to over-­generalize about the non-Abrahamic traditions, there are several points of convergence in the major traditions of Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism and Daoism as well as significant differences between them and the non-Abrahamic religions regarding transcendence, belief and faith. In these traditions, the conceptions of transcendence are often not radically separated from the immanent. Transcendence, however, remains extremely important to them and as a historical concept, but needs to be salvaged from the Abrahamic framework. Transcendence furnishes them with autonomous moral authority and a reflexive and universal ethical conception. In the religions of both the Sinosphere and Indosphere, Truth was not bound to a single doctrine or revelation, but by a set of assumptions and questions. The Yijing, the Daodejing, the Analects, the various Buddhist sutras, the Vedas and the Upanishads do not so much specify true propositions, but rather work as foundational texts that shape and govern discourse and debate. To be sure, as the parties to debate and schools of interpretation carry forward the tradition, these traditions themselves change (Mohanty, 1991, pp. 52–3). But, in the hermeneutic mode suggested by Gadamer, as the interpreter reaches back to the text they also renew the links to the textual tradition, creating an interpretive, interactive bridge between present and past, the subjective and the objective, circulation and reification. At the same time, Max Weber noted, ‘Asiatic religions (on the other hand), knew practically nothing of dogma as an instrumentality of differentiation’ (Weber, 1978, p. 461). According to him, even the great schism of the Second Buddhist Council over the ten points involved ‘mere’ questions of monastic

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regulations. In India, theological and philosophical debate was contained within the schools of thought who were permitted wide latitude by orthodoxy. In China, where Weber regarded Confucianism to be dominated by bureaucratic rationality, its ‘ethic completely rejected all ties to metaphysical dogma, if only for the reason that magic and belief in spirits had to remain untouched in the interest of maintaining the cult of the ancestors . . .’ (Weber, 1978, p. 462). On the other hand, in the Abrahamic traditions, doctrine as constitutive of membership became more and more important. ‘For Islam (Zoroastrians), Jews and particularly, Christians, dogmatic distinctions, both practical and theoretical, became more comprehensive as priests, congregational teachers, and even the community became bearers of the religion’ (Weber, 1978, p. 462). In these dialogical traditions, transcendence and immanence are not separated, whether in theory or practice. The Ultimate is both immanent and transcendent because it courses formlessly through the cosmic process. The following represent some of the common characteristics of dialogical transcendence. The two or more levels of truth are seen not as exclusive of each other but negotiatory. There is a frequent acknowledgement that there are different modes of accessing different levels of transcendent power often for different goals, such as wish fulfilment, protection, salvation or oneness. The more immanent goals embedded in mundane exchanges involve partial expressions of the truth at best, but are tolerated. These different levels often do not correspond to different levels of the social or religious hierarchy and people from the lower orders or margins of society frequently contest the claims of the theological and political establishment. These contestations are not necessarily conflictual, but prophets or rebels from the lower social orders periodically arise to challenge the betrayals of the self-­appointed custodians of ‘higher truths’. Second, the relationship is frequently one of encompassment. Encompassing is an act of power as the higher subordinates the lower. There are different modes of subordination: thus Brahmins encompass by a very strong principle of hierarchy to the point of dehumanization of lower castes. In the Chinese case, Confucian elites periodically deny the rights of alternative ‘heterodox’ traditions and practices to exist, an attitude that carries over (or traffics) into modern attitudes against ‘superstition.’ However, most of the time, large segments of the Confucian literati themselves engaged in many of these ‘heterodox’ practices, thereby compartmentalizing them in relation to orthodoxy. By and large, there is a stronger tradition of tolerance of different religions and practices and inclusion of nature and creatures.

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Third, access to the higher level of transcendence is more often than not achieved by practices of cultivation and discipline. Historically, it has tended to be adepts and the virtuosi who undertake the strict disciplinary regimens of bodily and ethical activity required to cultivate spiritual power and/or to access the power and moral authority of the transcendent. Indeed, the practitioner frequently engages in a procedure that Foucault once described, in a different context, as the ‘games of truth,’ the process of ‘subjectivation’ or self-­formation whereby the individual converts his or her experience into Truth. In my view, the wider recognition of acquisition of the higher Truth results in what Weber called charisma. Finally, immanence and circulation are, of course, analytically distinct categories in my study, but we can also see that dialogical transcendence is more capacious in its actual tolerance of circulatory histories, however misrecognized they may be. Thus, the significance of this dialectic emerges not only from a metaphysical perspective but from a sociological one as well. The capacity of traditions of dialogical transcendence to negotiate their relations with more radical expressions of transcendence has everything to do with the social and political framework, including the nature of the state that dominated these societies. Let me briefly cite the case of India from about 1000 CE to 1700 CE, a period in which much of India saw Muslims dominate polities, especially in the north of the subcontinent. While the invasions from Central and West Asia were accompanied by much slaughter, plunder and destruction in the name of Islam, social life took on the form of the co-­existence of communities under imperial rule or even developed new syncretic forms. This is particularly evident in the cultural and literary sphere. One of the most influential writings of Hinduism in this period, the Ramcaritamanas (1574 CE) of the saint Tulsidas was created in the language of the Avadh region of North India. Although it is today among the most revered texts for the contemporary, exclusionary Hindutva movement, as a literary work the Ramcaritamanas was a product of reciprocal influence between Hindus and Muslims. It belongs to the literary genre developed by Indian Sufi poets who transformed older Indian narratives into mystical romances in the Avadhi language. Thomas de Bruijin seeks to show that this kind of interchange – for instance, of a Sufi genre utilized by a Bhakti poet or, conversely, the inter-­text of the Ramayana within a Sufi narrative – reveals not necessarily a syncretism but a polyphony ‘defined by the dialogic nature of the traditions involved’ (de Bruijin, 2005, p. 40). These kinds of early-modern works developed in dialogue and did not represent fixed religious texts or precepts. However with the communalization

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and ethnicization of these works in the colonial public sphere – considerably aided by the rapid circulation of print media – in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, they were increasingly thought of as fixed emblems of fixed religious communities (Green, 2008). Perhaps the most remarkable figure of religious synthesis in South Asia was the poet-­saint, Kabir (1440–1518). Born into a Muslim weaver family in Benares, Kabir remained a working householder through much of his life; he is regarded to this day as one of the greatest poet-­saints of the Bhakti tradition. His poetry, which was first translated by Rabindranath Tagore into English in 1915, is widely dispersed in popular, classical and devotional music and his followers number close to ten million around the world. Early twentieth-­century discoverers of Kabir celebrated the pluralism and syncretism they found him to represent in the Indic tradition. Evelyn Underhill, who wrote the introduction to Tagore’s translations of 1915, observed, Kabir ‘seems by turns Vedantist and Vaishnavite, Pantheist and Transcendentalist, Brahmin and Sufi’. Hindu reformers often identified him with the ‘qualified monism’ of Ramanujan, but as the scholarship of Charlotte Vaudeville (1993) has shown, Kabir is not easily fitted into the received categories of Bhakti devotionalism; and nor was he a simple syncretist. He is profoundly irreverent towards both Islamic and Hindu beliefs, doctrines and clerics. Hindu and Turk (Muslim) have but one Master What is the Mulla doing? And what Shaykh? (Vaudeville, 1993, p. 83)

His contempt for the hypocritical scholars and superstitious religious elites of Benares is profound: I am the beast and you are the Shepherd who leads me from birth to birth, But you have never been able to make me cross the Ocean of Existence: how then are you my master? You are a Brahman, and I am only a weaver from Banaras: Understand my own wisdom: You go begging among kings and princes, and I think only of God! (Vaudeville and Partin, 1964, p. 192)

According to Vaudeville, Kabir draws from a long, perhaps even pre-Buddhist tradition of non-­conformism and protest in South Asia. She argues that a form of late Buddhism, mingled with Advaitin ideas and concepts of tantric Yoga and magic, had profoundly penetrated the lower layers of Hindu society and many

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Sufi groups in North India. The kind of yoga practised by these groups was more method than devotion or even religion. Its ideal of truth and quest for a superior Reality or state of non-­duality was not to be discovered, but ‘realized’ through bodily, breathing and sexual practices (Vaudeville, 1963, pp.  96–8; Vaudeville and Partin, 1964, pp. 194–5). Kabir came to be known as a nirguna (formless) Bhakti practitioner who combined Sufi ideas of the tariqa or path to God which is a path of inevitable suffering and ultimate inaccessibility of his Beloved. ‘Kabīr’s conception of divine love seems to be an original synthesis of the traditions of Yoga and of Sufism, the former exalting man’s effort, the latter making of the yearnings, of the torments suffered by the exiled soul in its mortal condition, the necessary condition for every spiritual ascension. For Kabīr, Bhakti is no longer the “easy path”, but the precipitous path where the lover of God risks his life’ (Vaudeville and Partin, 1964, p. 199). The life and poems of Kabir represent not only an ideational and practical synthesis but a dense point of convergence involving circulation and transcendence, practice and poetry, discipline and passion, abstraction and love. His poetry succeeds in rendering the most unfathomable, formless expression of God (both Sufi and Advaita) with a tender familiarity. He upholds the transcendent source of authority as intimate without, in the words of Underhill, entailing the ‘unrestricted cult of the Divine Personality’ or the ‘soul destroying conclusion of monism’ (Underhill, 1915). This kind of condominium in the cultural and social sphere was enabled by state policies of many of the early Mughal rulers (1526–1857) especially from the mid-­sixteenth to the mid-­seventeenth centuries under the ecumenical rule of Akbar, Jahangir and Shah Jehan (and prince Dara Shikoh who commissioned the translation of the Upanishads and other Sanskrit texts) (Minkowski, 2011, p.  218). These rulers rejected the influence of the Naqshbandiyas who had accompanied their forebears from Central Asia and who represented a relatively intolerant Sufi view, in favour of the more homegrown Sufis of the Chishti sect. Recovering the now forgotten though vastly influential work of the seventeenth-­ century Chishti Sufi ‘Abd al-Rahman Chishti and that Sufi tradition, Muzaffar Alam reveals how Chishti rejected the conservative Naqshbandi emphasis on a narrowly construed jurisprudence and offered an alternative vision of tolerance (sulh-­i-kul or ‘peace with all’ policy of Akbar) in the Mughal imperium under these emperors. Thinkers like Chishti must have been strengthened in their conviction of ecumenical or imperial Islam not only through the works of famed poet-­scholars of the earlier period such as the Persians, Rūmi and Hafīz, but also

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contemporaries such as the Egyptian scholar al-Sharani who, writing in the Ottoman empire, went so far as to even imply the fundamental unity not only of different sects, but of different religions (Alam, 2011, p. 145). The turn in Mughal imperial policy towards exchange and co-­existence has historically been blamed on the emperor Aurangzeb who ruled from 1658 until his death in 1707. He was a pious Muslim who partially abandoned Akbar’s policies, enforced strict Islamic morals, imposed heavy taxes on Hindu pilgrims and ordered the destruction of Hindu temples and schools. From one perspective, the kind of regime imposed by Aurangzeb may be seen as the replacement of dominance by the dialogical to that by strict transcendence. What we still need to understand is how and why this form becomes so important in South Asia, apparently coinciding with the time that confessional nationalism was establishing itself in Europe. What are the circulatory forces at work that make it difficult for religions to be inclusive and accommodative in the mode of Kabir? If confessionalism and exclusivism is the fundamental model of truth that dominates the modern world – whether through the nation, religion or science – we may need to reach into the recesses of religious memories to surface the dialogical conceptions of truth. This essay draws its materials from my book The Crisis of Global Modernity: Asian Traditions and a Sustainable Future, Cambridge University Press, 2014.

References Adams, C. (1997). ‘Reflections on the work of John Wansbrough’. Method and Theory in the Study of Religion. 9 (1). 75–90. Alam, M. (2011). ‘The Debate Within: a Sufi Critique of Religious Law, Tasawwuf and Politics in Mughal India’. South Asian History and Culture. 2 (2). 138–59. Al Makin (2010). Representing the Enemy: Musaylima in Muslim Literature. Frankfurt am Main, New York: Peter Lang. Assman, J. (2004). ‘Monotheism and polytheism’, in Johnston, S.I. (ed.) Religions of the Ancient World: A Guide. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. pp. 17–31. Bahrawi, N. (2013). ‘The Andalusi secular’. In Z. Sardar and R. Y. Kassab (eds) Critical Muslim. 6: Reclaiming Al-Andalus. London: Hurst. pp. 47–56. Collins, S. (2003). Nirvana and other Buddhist Felicities: Utopias of the Pali Imaginaire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. De Bruijin, T (2005). ‘Many roads lead to Lanka: the intercultural semantics of Rama’s quest’. Contemporary South Asia. 14 (1). 39–53.

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Eisenstadt, S. M. (ed.) (1986). The Origins and Diversity of Axial Age Civilizations. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Green, N. (2008). ‘From Breathing to Writing: Meditation in the Colonial Public Sphere’. Modern Asian Studies. 42. 283–315. Habermas, J. (2001). Time of Transitions. (trans.) Ciaran Cronin and Max Pensky (eds). Cambridge: Polity Press, 2006. Minkowski, C. (2011). ‘Advaita Vedānta in Early Modern History’. South Asian History and Culture. 2(2). 205–31. Mohanty, J. N. (1991). ‘Some thoughts on Daya Krishna’s “Three Myths”’, in Daya Krishna (ed.) Indian Philosophy: A Counter-Perspective. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. pp. 68–80. Momigliano, A. (1987). On Pagans, Jews, and Christians. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Salvatore, A. (2007). The Public Sphere: Liberal Modernity, Catholicism, Islam. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Simmel, G. (1997). Essays on Religion. (trans.) Horst Jürgen Helle in collaboration with Ludwig Nieder (eds). New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Stroumsa, G.G. (2005). The End of Sacrifice: Religious Transformations in Late Antiquity. (trans.) Susan Emanuel. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009. Underhill, E. (1915). ‘Introduction’, in R. Tagore (trans.) Songs of Kabir. http://sacred-­ texts.com/hin/sok/sok001.htm Vaudeville, C. (1993). A Weaver named Kabir: Selected Verses with a Detailed Biographical and Historical Introduction. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Vaudeville, C. and H. B. Partin (1964). ‘Kabir and Interior Religion’. History of Religions, 3(1–2). 191–201. Wansbrough, J. (1978). The Sectarian Milieu: Contest and Composition of Islamic Salvation History. New York: Prometheus Books, 2006. Weber, M. (1978). Economy and Society. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich (eds). Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Whitehead, A. N. (1927–8). Process and Reality: corrected edition. David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne (eds). New York: The Free Press, 1978.

Part Two

Judaism

4

Judaism: Introduction Cynthia Scheinberg Mills College

. . . it is not enough to make the Jew respected, but to have JUDAISM rightly reverenced: and to do this, there must be a JEWISH LITERATURE, or the Jewish people will not advance one step. Grace Aguilar (1846, p. 265) Searching for a goat or for a child has always been The beginning of a new religion in these mountains. Yehuda Amichai (1986, p. 138) The fields of religion and literature have never been separate in Jewish tradition; just as Jews are often termed the ‘people of the book’, Judaism’s religious and cultural histories present an almost endless array of relationships between literary and religious modes. The passages above, one from the nineteenth-­century AngloJewish writer, Grace Aguilar, and one from the twentieth-­century Israeli poet, Yehuda Amichai, help chart the wide spectrum of the ways ‘the literary’ and the Judaic have intersected in different historical moments up to today.1 Grace Aguilar writes from the Jewish Diaspora in England at a moment when Jewish identity in England, and indeed much of Europe, was in flux; enlightenment (Haskalah) influences were changing the traditional modes of Jewish practice throughout the region, and, as traditional modes of Jewish religious and cultural life changed, Jewish writers such as Aguilar were concerned about the maintenance of positive Jewish identity and support for Judaism. For Aguilar, a ‘Jewish Literature’ could speak to Jews about their own faith as well as present that faith in a positive light to Christians who were, in Aguilar’s day, involved in a myriad of debates about whether Jews could be full and integrated citizens of the Anglican State. For Aguilar, a Jewish literature written in English was an imperative for Jewish ‘advance[ment]’ in Diaspora, and the goal of such a literature would be to ‘rever[e]’

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Judaism and Jewish history, as well as help consolidate an Anglo-Jewish identity. Judaism and literature thus intersect, in this version, in their mutual reinforcement of Judaism, Jewish identity and Jewish values. Close to 140 years later, Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai might be seen as offering a different literary take on Aguilar’s concept of ‘JUDAISM rightly reverenced’. Writing poetry after the 1948 establishment of the state of Israel, Amichai is no longer located in one of the diasporic cultures that had marked Jewish life for close to 2,000 years. In this poem, as in so much of his writing, the question of religious Judaism becomes more of a question than a value to be ‘revered’; on the contrary, Amichai often challenged the religious texts, values and adherence to a religious Jewish past in favour of posing new questions for the Jewish present. Amichai’s poem describes an Arab goatherd and Jewish father both searching for their proverbial ‘kids’ on two Jerusalem hills, both fearful that each might ‘get caught in the wheels/Of the “Had Gadya” machine’ (Amichai, 1986, p.  138), a reference to the traditional Passover song about how a kid (goat) is eaten, and then multiple acts of violence/consumption follow in which each subsequent thing that eats is then eaten. After describing their shared searches, albeit on opposing hills, Amichai writes, ‘Afterward we found them among the bushes,/ And our voices came back inside us/ Laughing and crying’. Echoing aspects of the Akeidah (the near sacrifice of Isaac in Genesis), the Dhabih (the near sacrifice of Ishmael in the Qur’an), and perhaps even the search for the child Jesus in Bethlehem in the Gospel of Luke, this poem self consciously situates itself in the 3,000-year history that encompasses multiple Jewish/Arab/Christian encounters in ‘these mountains’, a history that encompasses the development of both Christianity and Islam as well. Focusing on their shared landscape, and a set of shared religious scriptural images of seekers, sons, sacrifices, goats, feared violence and moments of resolution, Amichai ruptures common assumptions about Judaism, Zionism, and Jewish and Arab identities in Israel/Palestine, while also highlighting how this particular land has generated multiple faith traditions – and by inference, suggests they might still generate more. Here, Jewish literature becomes not a site for revering or consolidating Jewish identity, faith, culture or nation building, but perhaps rupturing many of those terms simultaneously. I begin with these texts to intimate the breadth of variations of what it can mean to engage Jewishly with literature, to link Judaism and literature, or even to consider what the term ‘Jewish literature’ might mean. Perhaps all that these two starting texts share is the fundamental claim that Judaism is and has been deeply engaged with literary matter, and that literary practices – secular and religious – matter to Judaism. Indeed, we need only start in the beginning, as it were, in

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Genesis 1.3, when we read ‘God said: “Let there be light”: and there was light. God saw that the light was good.’ This opening of the Jewish scriptures highlights how the art of language and the language of art define God’s own creative acts in the Jewish tradition. The very world emerges from the utterance of God’s words, a creation that is then crowned with what might be the first critical/aesthetic evaluation in the Abrahamic tradition: ‘it was good’. Of course, there are endless numbers of Jewish Biblical texts that reference the artistry and creative power of language as well as an emphasis on textual and literary engagement as an essential ingredient for understanding, accessing and interacting with Judaism, God and Jewish religious history. Indeed, along with our scriptural tradition embodied by the written Tanakh (Jewish canonical scriptures), any considerations of the intersections between Judaism and the literary must include our oral religious tradition and its emphasis on the practice of dialogic literary interpretation as a core religious value. Interpretation of text – as a site for finding answers, creating dialogue and having explicit disagreement – marks the Jewish literary tradition from its Talmudic inception in the first through sixth centuries CE, and that textual give and take remained central in the development of Judaism’s ancient and more contemporary literary manifestations. Indeed, the Talmud could be called a text of literary criticism, albeit one that exists within a very clear religious framework. Structured with repeated literary and narrative patterns of naming, writing, interpreting, telling and re-­telling, the Talmud is another Jewish reminder of how stories, allegories and revisions are all aspects of Judaism’s religious practice of ‘learning Torah’, an activity that has been understood as a central religious practice of Judaism since the fall of the second Temple. With these contexts of scriptural, written and oral Torah in mind, we can assert that Judaism was created, persisted and persists through acts of literary creation and interpretation. Further, any overview of the intersections between Judaism, literature and religion must include not just a consideration of content or thematic based analyses on what Jewish texts say or mean, but should also include an understanding of how central the literary has been for the practices of liturgy, learning and interpretation that have marked Judaism throughout its history. Understanding that the literary intersects with Jewishness and Judaism at this level of practice helps articulate one of the central defining features of Judaism: its emphasis on actively doing things (mitzvoth) as an essential theological definition of being Jewish, a characteristic of the religion that some might argue supersedes a more individualized and internal notion of belief that marks Christianity in religious importance.

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But what we see once we attempt to define Judaism and Jewishness in relationship to the literary is that any single definition of this relationship becomes inadequate. Even the terms become muddled: are we talking only about Judaism, the religion? Or does the intersection between literature and ‘the Judaic’ also include Jewishness, which has been understood variably throughout history as an ethnic identity, a cultural identity, a racial identity, various national identities (Jewish-American, Anglo-Jewish, Russian-Jewish) as well as having regional distinctions (Ashkenazi, Sephardic)? The religion/literary intersection becomes more complex for those who look at Judaism from outside a Jewish perspective, as Jewishness is also a textual identity that has been claimed by other Abrahamic religions as well; at what point does a text retain its Jewish identity in relation to the subsequent Christian and Muslim interpretations of that same text? And of course, the varied interpretations of this religious/ textual history have exploded in more recent times as a way to justify various claims to land, home, politics and nationality in the emergence of the state of Israel and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, marking a newer term in the spectrum of Jewish sub-­categories I listed above, namely, ‘Zionist’. To say that it is fraught to stake a claim in this range of choices on how to categorize, understand and name that which is Jewish is, of course, an understatement, just as naming what words in our traditions count as literature, religion, culture is also complex. In short, the challenge posed to me in this essay – to articulate what the intersections between Judaism and the literary have been and or might become – is a task that could take a multiplicity of approaches and versions depending on which understanding of ‘Jewish’ one chooses to emphasize. At the heart of the problem is the issue that being Jewish always exceeds a simple religious identity, for, as discussed earlier, it also defines ethnic, sometimes racial, cultural, and in the twentieth century, avowedly secular forms of identity. Complications emerge also in defining Judaism itself, because of the ways subsequent Abrahamic religions interpret, read and create new narratives that encompass Judaism, narratives that have impacted Jewish practice, identity and history, but remain outside the boundaries of a self-­identified Jewish history. And of course, once we manage the impossible task of defining how we want to talk about the Judaic or Jewishness, the question of what counts as ‘the literary’, let alone Jewish literature, remains yet another problem. Rather than work further to define something that could encompass an enormous variety and range of topics, practices and theories related both to Judaism and literature, I propose to examine the three essays included in this

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section as examples of this range, and to use them as starting points for a set of ideas about salient issues and challenges in the world of Jewish literature, and Judaism and literature. Through their deeply different methodologies and approaches, these essays collectively do a better job than I could in suggesting what the world of ‘Judaism and literature’ means today; read together, they point to the specific challenges and contradictions that mark our interdisciplinary practice as well. Jo Carruthers’s essay, ‘Acts of Hearing in the Book of Esther’, offers new ways to look at a Jewish biblical text, the Book of Esther. By framing her reading in a larger examination of the figure of hearing in Jewish contexts (as opposed to the Christian/Protestant figure of hearing Carruthers describes as a point of contrast), Carruthers lets us ‘hear’ the Book of Esther in new ways. By linking her reading not only to issues within the text, but also to the way this Meghilla is used within Jewish ritual on the holiday of Purim, Carruthers achieves what few academic critics of Biblical texts manage: to highlight the practice (the mitzvoth) of hearing this book as a religious commandment in relation to her interpretation. In so doing, Carruthers extends the practice of literary interpretation of the Bible beyond its roots in the faulty concept of ‘the Judeo-Christian tradition’, and instead lands squarely in a critical mode that highlights and indeed connects specific Jewish significance, meanings and practices as method for literary/ religious analysis. In addition, Carruthers’s essay is unique in this volume by its focus on a Biblical text that emphasizes its diasporic context. As one of the few books of the Bible that makes no explicit reference to Israel, the Temple or the land of Israel (or God, for that matter), Esther is a biblical reminder of the centrality of our Diasporic experiences and history in Judaism, Jewish identity, history and culture, reminding us just how much of Jewish history depended upon a figurative rather than literal relationship to the land of Israel. Carruthers thus offers this volume a method and engagement with a mode of reading that focuses traditional Jewish scriptural text and practice while nevertheless applying a wonderfully new, rich and interdisciplinary set of lenses. Including this essay in this volume reminds us that traditional Jewish practice and its diasporic contexts still have a central place in the study of Judaism and literature. I make this point explicitly, because much recent work in Judaism and literature outside the specific world of religious Jewish studies often emphasizes topics related to the state of Israel and the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, and thus we see a trend in the field toward those ‘newer’ areas, with perhaps less interest in literary explorations related to traditional Jewish practice and Diasporic history.

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In writing this, I am aware of being potentially controversial, as for some Jews, the state of Israel has everything to do with a larger idea of Jewish identity, and thus is a necessary emphasis in any conceptualization of Jewish literature; from this perspective, one could argue there can be no Jewish literature or religion in the twenty-­first century without an inclusion of Israel. For others, however, the state of Israel is only one element in a larger vision of what it means to define Jewishness; to speak in this voice, one might argue that a focus on Israel is only one of many possible visions of Jewish literature today. And for many, but of course not all non-Jews, ‘Israel’ has become a metonym for everything Jewish, a development that threatens to dangerously collapse, elide and erase the complexities and historical realities of Jewish identity and history. Of course, no overview of the field of Judaism and literature should ignore the powerful influence of two linked events that have shaped Jewish identity and likewise has profoundly influenced Jewish literary practices in the twentieth century: namely, the Shoah (Holocaust) and the creation of the state of Israel. Prior to the twentieth century, Jews were most often situated and represented in their minority status in various diaspora settings. Variously persecuted and protected, harboured and expelled in Christian and Muslim countries where they lived for roughly 1,800 years, Jews awoke into an eighteenth- and nineteenth-­century world where new freedoms and the removal of civil disabilities in some nations was countered by the rise of anti-Semitism and pogroms in Germany and Eastern Europe, culminating in the Third Reich’s fantasies about ‘Jewish world power’ and subsequent extermination of six million Jews during the Second World War. It was the Shoah that solidified one set of lived experiences and images of the Jewish people as victims of an unbelievable atrocity in the modern world; yet on the heels of those visions of total victimization, the creation of the state of Israel created a new set of images for Jews as fighters, builders and national citizens, so that, by the end of the twentieth century, Jews moved from being the symbol of oppression and persecution to a people sometimes accused by others of being ‘Zionist oppressors’.2 Thus, despite that fact that anti-Semitism and anti-Judaism still exist and increase in powerful forms throughout the world, the discourses and actions surrounding both the Shoah and the emergence of the state of Israel have had a profound effect on how the world represents Jews and how Jews represent themselves.3 From these events, it has become possible to talk about ‘Holocaust literature’ and ‘Israeli literature’ as subsets of the Jewish literary. Holocaust literature, and the field of Holocaust studies, is rooted in the event we call the Shoah, though it has also come to define a larger body of work that takes on other non-Jewish ‘holocaust’ events in history. As a literature, there is primary

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emphasis on memory, in marking through literature a set of atrocities and lived experiences that often serve to fuel Jewish cultural and religious survival, as well as education for a non-Jewish world. Israeli literature is as diverse as the Jewish literatures that precede it, and of course can also include Arab Israeli writers who live within Israel; some might also include in this category the Palestinian writers who live in occupied territories. Yet it is important to note in the context of this essay that the literature of Israel, usually written in Modern Hebrew, and often translated into diasporic languages where world Jewry exists, does not necessarily connect to issues of religion. And, while it could be argued Israeli literature has now become synonymous with Jewish literature, I would suggest that Israeli literature often carries with it a necessary consciousness of the complex geo-­political relationship of Israel and Palestinian territories, adding a new dimension to the literary themes that resonate in pre-­state literature, and may or may not be an element in other Jewish literatures at other moments of history or in other world regions. Indeed, the issue of the state of Israel has crucial implications for Judaism as a religious practice, but as the influential orthodox Rabbi Joseph Soleveitchik has suggested, ‘Eretz Israel is important, but not the central nerve. The central nervous system [of Judaism] is still Torah’ (in Holzer, 2009).Though of course not representing a universal vision of ‘the Judaic’ in the contemporary Jewish world, with this powerful statement, Soleveitchik reminds us that, although the secular and political world often associates the state of Israel with Judaism, for many Jews in and outside of Israel, the contemporary state remains only a part of a larger Jewish religious life. Thus, I would argue that, while the inclusion of discourses about Israel and Palestine will continue to be an important element in the intersections of Jewish religious and literary studies today, we also need to be mindful not to shrink the parameters of this field through the false assumption that Israel studies encompasses Jewish studies. Indeed, that linkage threatens to erase the multiplicity of narratives of relationship that Jews have had with Arabs, Muslims and Christians at different historical moments, both in the Middle East and in so many other parts of the world; when the terms Jewish and Israeli become equated, Brooklyn, Hungary and Ethiopia (to name only a few) often disappear from the larger view of what Jewish and Jewish history might mean today. Likewise the focus on Muslim–Jewish relations that tends to structure discourses on Israel, Palestine and Jewish identity often erase the other religious identities (Christian, Druse and other Eastern religions) that also intersect in a variety of ways with Jewish history, diverse Jewish communities and the landscape and

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culture of Israel as well. The focus on Israel in current version of Jewish studies in religion and literature also tends to have a retroactive implication, reading all of Judaism and Jewish history in the historical context of today’s geo-­political conflicts. Given these concerns, I was heartened to note that, while the other two essays in this volume by Neta Stahl and Tom Sperlinger do mirror concerns more related to these latter emphases on Israel, Zionism (and to a lesser degree in the Sperlinger essay, the Shoah), they do so in ways that usefully complicate and expand the Jewish/literary conversation rather than shrink it. Stahl’s essay, ‘Jewish Writers and National Theology at the Fin de Siècle’, illustrates how deeply Zionist thinking sought to transform (or reorganize) certain elements and values of traditional Judaism as part of a larger Zionist vision even prior to the actual creation of the state of Israel. Indeed, this essay makes clear how fin de siècle Zionist writers ruptured any easy equation between a traditional religious Jewish identity and a burgeoning sense of non-­observant Jewish national identity, as well as severing the ‘problem of the Jews’ from ‘the problem of Judaism’. What is striking in this analysis is how these fin de siècle writers are not totally rejecting God, but rather ‘depict[ing] the aged Judaism of the present as a threat to the ideal God’. Stahl demonstrates how early Zionist writers sought to harness the trope of (if not belief in) the divine toward a more ‘universalist’ vision, and also sought to break from old understandings of God while nevertheless retaining a new vision of God that still has import for the new nation building of their day. Yet other writers Stahl discusses are drawn to the aesthetic culture of Europe, which we must assume, though Stahl does not highlight this, is probably part of a Christian aesthetic. Whereas Stahl points out how the images of the divine in Berdyczewski’s work ‘transfor[m] Hasidic pantheism into the world of contemporary Judaism’ it also seems likely that these more universalized and naturalistic images of God also owe something to the influence of European (Christian) Romantics who likewise sought to locate a universal pantheistic god in nature. Overall, this essay helps detangle the very many strands of Jewish thought on the role of the divine in fin de siècle Zionist writers, and shows how these strands were wound and twisted in a variety of ways to suit the expanding Jewish notions of religion and nation that are essential to any understanding of the emergence of the national state of Israel. Tom Sperlinger’s essay, ‘“Every Human Being is a Cause”: Three Re-­writings of the Story of Abraham’, poses perhaps the most radically new vision of a ‘Jewish’ engagement with religion and literature, as his essay takes up only one text that might be called Jewish per se. However, this essay is deeply relevant to this

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volume with its focus on new approaches and innovative linkage of twentieth-­ century texts, all of which respond to the First World War. The essay is organized around a comparative and multicultural methodology that examines what Sperlinger calls three different ‘re-­writings’ on what is perhaps the central ‘Abrahamic’ text in Jewish, Muslim and Christian traditions: the texts of the Akeidah (the near sacrifice or ‘binding’ of Isaac in Genesis) or the Dhabih (the near sacrifice of Ishmael in the Qur’an), and the influential Christian typological interpretation of this Old Testament text which is read as pre-­figuring the actual ‘sacrifice’ of Jesus Christ. Sperlinger groups together three texts: the poem ‘The Parable of the Old Man and the Young’ by Wilfred Owen, a First World War veteran who identified as Christian; the novel Mr Mani by the twentieth-­century Jewish/Israeli writer, A. B. Yehoshua, and a short story ‘Returning to Haifa’ by Palestinian author Ghassan Kanafani. Sperlinger groups these texts together because of their shared references to the scriptural texts of the Akeidah/Dhabih, as each text he chooses explores a symbolic or literal act of violence against a child by a father. What is striking in all these texts is how they inform Sperlinger’s reading of the transformation of the essential non-­murder in Genesis to scenes of actual violence in the later texts. Indeed, while the narratives in Genesis 22 and Qur’an 37 are about both Isaac’s and Ishmael’s potential but never enacted sacrifices, both concluding with God saving young boys from death, the more contemporary renditions that Sperlinger calls to our attention offer no such redemptive moment. This turn to interpret the scriptural ‘savings’ of the Torah and Qur’an as acts of violence has always fascinated me, prompting me to wonder why is it that our contemporary moment so often reads as ‘violent’ that which was designed in its original religious contexts as a narrative that counters violence. One answer could be that when Isaac’s ‘not’ sacrifice is read as a violent sacrificial murder, it reflects the profound influence of western Christian interpretations on this text, for it is the Christian typological readings of the binding of Isaac that interpret that event as foreshadowing Jesus’s crucifixion. Thus, the narrative and religious significance of the moment in which God ostensibly intervenes to save a child, a narrative scholars have suggested emerged out of a cultural context in which child sacrifice was not an unusual practice, is often underplayed in later readings that often merge from Christian contexts because of the cultural dominance of the sacrifice of Jesus by God the Father. However, Sperlinger helps us see that there are subtle nuances and echoes of the Akeidah/Dhabih in his chosen texts rather than direct references, and he links these narratives through the notion that the writers seek ‘to make a scene of violence, in

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which the young and innocent suffer, recognizable as a human situation, without making it explicable’. Considering this work in the context of contemporary engagements in religion and literature, we could argue that any specific religious perspective has essentially dropped out of the literary texts under consideration. Rather, Sperlinger’s method takes the Biblical and Qur’anic allusions and echoes as part of a shared cultural legacy for all three writers, understanding the scriptural reference as ‘a contentious touchstone, a representative story, which might also be the site of conflicting interpretations, including if the reader and writer are of different faiths’. In this kind of approach, the question of something specifically religiously Jewish or Judaic becomes less important than the tracing of a textual trope from scripture in secular literary responses and contexts. By examining a scriptural allusion in a variety of secular texts, Sperlinger’s method gestures towards a relatively new field in the larger world of religion and literature termed secular studies (and more recently, postsecular studies). This work often responds to or references the seminal book, A Secular Age (2007) by Charles Taylor, which highlights the historical phenomenon or secularity in specifically Western and Christian societies. Taylor’s work suggests the intricacies and enormous influence this shift in human consciousness had on both history and contemporary notions of what it means to be ‘secular’. And yet, the twentieth- and twenty-­first century resurgence of fundamentalist and mainstream religious belief and practice has also instigated the idea of ‘post-secular’, the idea that religious belief now has re-­emerged as a powerful influence and cultural power in twenty-­first century societies insisting on a new set of relationships with so-­called secular society (Habermas, 2008). From a Jewish and Judaic studies perspective, I would argue that secular studies in their current manifestation in the academy are profoundly unresponsive to the Judaic and Jewish contexts. In part, this is because ‘secularity’ is generally understood in relation to models of Christian identity, where ‘belief ’ is understood and theorized as the main marker of religious identity. Because, as I have mentioned above, Jewish religious identity is not only reckoned in terms of belief, but also in terms of practice, it makes sense that the current formulation of secularity is not fully responsive to contexts of Jewishness. Further, because Jewishness, as opposed to Judaism, includes other forms of identity such as ethnicity and culture, Jewish secularity looks profoundly different than other Christian based versions, most likely because Jews continue to identify as Jews long after the issue of belief is dissolved. Thus, in the Jewish world, a distinctly Jewish version of secularity has emerged, which makes claims for a specifically Jewish identity that is staunchly secular and culturally based.

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This notion of being Jewish without religion is on the rise. Whereas in the 2000–2001 National Jewish Population Survey ‘93% of Jews in that study were Jews by religion and 7% were Jews of no religion’, in the 2013 Pew Research survey, ‘78% of Jews are Jews by religion, and fully 22% are Jews of no religion (including 6% who are atheist, 4% who are agnostic and 12% whose religion is “nothing in particular”)’ (Pew Research, 2013, p. 32). What might this statistic mean for the study of Jewishness and Judaism within the world of religion and literature moving forward? How will a perception that we have a ‘Jewishness of no religion’ affect the field of religion and literature? Here, I think the answer lies in work like that of Stahl and Sperlinger: the former, which seeks to demonstrate the underlying reworking of a distinctly Jewish religious rhetoric for the purposes of articulating a new national, and ultimately secular Jewish identity; the latter, which helps us see how religious texts remain central to the consciousness of a multiplicity of writers – secular and religious – from different backgrounds and religious identifications. As we look to the future of studies in Jewish religion and literature, trends in both religion and literature would suggest that we should not predict a return to a scholarship or literature envisioned by Aguilar’s phrase ‘Judaism rightly reverenced’. But the kind of scholarship we hope might articulate that bridge between the new and the old ‘religions’ that Amichai gestures towards is a scholarship that chooses to embrace the complexity of Jewishness, and particularly the Judaic in the twenty-­first century. To create such a scholarship, it will be instructive to recall how the ‘people of the Book’ have lived and written throughout a 3,000-year history that spans many Diasporic and ‘holy land’ cultures even as we examine more recent Jewish literary and religious professions and pronouncements. The essays that follow offer us fruitful steps in those directions.

Notes 1 In this essay, I use the term ‘Judaic’ to refer to aspects of Jewishness that are specifically religious or theological in nature, as opposed to a broader category of ‘Jewishness’ that encompasses other forms of identity beyond the religious. Likewise, I will distinguish the linked but different terms ‘anti-Judaic’ and ‘anti-Semitic’, the former referring to specific antipathy toward the Jewish religious beliefs, texts and practices, as opposed to the latter term, referring to antipathy towards Jewish people.

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2 For more on the way the emergence of the state of Israel changed visions of Jewish men in particular, see Daniel Boyarin, Unheroic Conduct: The Rise of Heterosexuality and the Invention of the Jewish Man (1997). 3 For more in the recent increases in anti-Semitic violence worldwide, see the report ‘Jews in Europe report a surge in anti-Semitism’ in the New York Times (Higgins, 2013).

References Aguilar, G. (1846; 1884). The Jewish Faith: its Spiritual Consolation, Moral Guidance and Immortal Hope. Philadelphia: 1227 Walnut Street. Amichai, Y. (1986; 1996). The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai. (trans.) C. Bloch and S. Mitchell. Berkeley: University of California Press. Boyarin, D. (1997). Unheroic Conduct: the Rise of Heterosexuality and the Invention of the Jewish Man. Berkeley: University of California Press. Habermas, J. (2008). ‘Notes on a post-­secular society’. New Perspectives Quarterly. 25.4: 17–29. http://www.digitalnpq.org/archive/2008_fall/04_habermas.html Higgins, A. (2013). ‘Jews in Europe report a surge in anti-Semitism’. The New York Times [blog], 8 November. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/09/world/europe/ jews-­in-europe-­report-a-­surge-in-­anti-semitism.html?_r=0 Holzer, D. (2009). The Rav Thinking Aloud: Transcripts of Personal Conversations with Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik. Rabbu Aryeh Holzer (ed.). Israel: HolzerSeforim. Pew Research Center (2013). ‘A Portrait of Jewish Americans’. Pew Research Religion and Public Life Project [blog], 1 October. http://www.pewforum.org/2013/10/01/ jewish-­american-beliefs-­attitudes-culture-­survey/ Taylor, C. (2007). A Secular Age. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

5

Jewish Writers and Nationalist Theology at the Fin-­de-Siécle Neta Stahl

Johns Hopkins University

National pantheism The twentieth century brought significant changes for many Jews. Some of these were dramatic, even apocalyptic, while others were more gradual shifts in ways of life and worldviews. As traditional lifestyles eroded, Jews began to develop a new understanding of the divine and its place in their lives. Jews had traditionally thought of themselves as ‘the chosen people’; this was a crucial part of the covenant between them and their God. As I am about to show, many modern Jewish writers and thinkers at the turn of the century chose to renew this covenant in light of the new and apparently secular ideology of nationalism. I argue that they viewed God as a necessary asset for the development of the emerging movement of nationalism and for the Zionist enterprise. Yet, in order to make God an integral part of Jewish nationalism, it was crucial that this ‘revival’ of the old covenant should also release God from his traditional image.1 We can see this very clearly in the comments of Ahad Ha’am (the pen name of Asher Hirsch Ginsberg, 1856–1927), who was known as the forefather of ‘spiritual’ or ‘cultural’ Zionism. When asked about his understanding of the relationship between non-­observant national Jews and the Jewish people, he replied with the following question: ‘Who respects nature more, the monotheist or the pantheist?’ His answer was that it is the pantheist: The monotheist sees nature only as the messenger of God, which God uses for his service, and which is created by God for his own use. However, the pantheist does not distinguish between God and the world, and the spirit of

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God seems to him like the deepest element of reality, which is not above nature, but rather is nature itself.2 (Ahad Ha’am, 1965, p. 291) (emphasis mine)

Ahad Ha’am applied a similar idea in the opposition he articulated between the ‘free-­thinking’ and the religious Jew: The free-­thinking Jew,3 the one who still loves his nation, including its literature and all of its spiritual possessions, can be considered a national pantheist. He sees the creative power of the nation from the inside, while the religious Jew sees everything as imposed [on the people] by an external power. (Ahad Ha’am, 1965) (emphases mine)

According to Ahad Ha’am, the non-­religious national Jew has better justification for speaking in the name of the ‘spiritual assets’ of the people, since the national spirit is the creator of these assets, and ‘they [the spiritual assets and the nation] become one’ (Ahad Ha’am, 1965). Unlike the religious Jew, he is a free man, and he knows the inner power of his soul. Therefore, when he looks back at the glorious, creative Jewish past, he is confident in its future as well. He creates his own spiritual assets in the nation’s image, because he and the nation are one. The nation is the internal power by which these assets are born, develop, and live (Ahad Ha’am, 1965). This use of the notion of pantheism needs further investigation. In a move characteristic of Zionist thinking and writing at the turn of the century, Ahad Ha’am associates nationalism with pantheism in order to elevate the intellectual and spiritual status of the non-­religious Jew, and to present him as superior to the observant Jew. By contrasting pantheism with traditional monotheism, he associates the nation with certain divine qualities. In this new way of thinking about one’s religious identity vis-à-vis one’s national identity, the nation is endowed with the allure of God. In this sense, Ahad Ha’am’s words not only served rhetorical purposes, but also provided new imagery for the national discourse, imagery that associated the nationalist enterprise with the divine. In his article ‘The Man in His Tent’ (Adam be-­ohalo), he addresses questions of Jewish identity by discussing a famous line from Y. L. Gordon’s (1830–92) poem, ‘Awake, My People’: ‘Be a human being in the world and a Jew in your tent (home).’ Be a human being in the world became the slogan for the Haskalah (the Jewish Enlightenment movement), but Ahad Ha’am accuses the Haskalah thinkers, and especially the writers of Hebrew literature, of concentrating only

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on one side of the dichotomy – that of the ‘man’ – while neglecting ‘the Jew in his tent’ (Ahad Ha’am, 1965, p. 50). For these writers, according to Ahad Ha’am, the ‘man’ (ha-­adam) could not in fact be a ‘Jew’, but rather a Russian, a Pole, a German, or the like (Ahad Ha’am, 1965). Describing modern Jews as ‘men of the world’, he pointed out what he called a ‘disharmony between spirit and form’ (Ahad Ha’am, 1965). It is this disharmony, he suggested, that was triggering Jewish nationalist poets to encourage Jews to be Jews not only in their tents but also in the world. But by ‘pulling the Jew out of his tent’ they left him no time to think of the meaning of his humanity as well as his Jewishness. These poets, then, ‘forced the nation to stop halfway, and to look at the polished mirror in which it could see its strange and disgusting figure’ (Ahad Ha’am, 1965). Ahad Ha’am sees a different solution; what he finds missing in the tent is what he calls ‘the man’. He conceives of ‘the man’ as someone who, unlike the traditional Jew, does not focus on each and every minor Halachic detail (kutzo shel Yod). Instead, he argues that modern Judaism should rise above small quarrels over such specific details of Jewish law and begin a thorough attempt to ‘revive the Hebrew heart’ by finding in it a vital aspiration to unify the nation, to revive it, and to develop it according to general human values (Ahad Ha’am, 1965, p. 53). This search for national identity, as we learn from his writings, should be based on the Jewish past and tradition, yet it should be markedly different, rejecting what he saw as Judaism’s useless and tasteless obsession with the religious law. Surprisingly, though, Ahad Ha’am did not associate this law with God. In fact, he viewed God as a necessity for the revival of the Jewish nation and for the Zionist enterprise. But in order to make sure that God would be considered an integral part of Jewish nationalism, it was crucial to extricate him from traditional Judaism and place him in the world of the nationalist, non-­observant Jew. One of Ahad Ha’am’s most notable self-­declared followers was Hayim Nahman Bialik (1873–1934), who was considered at the turn of the century to be ‘the poet of the reviving nation’, and later became known as ‘Israel’s national poet’. Bialik described Ahad Ha’am as a ‘man who placed the notion of redemption at the heart (of his preaching) . . . simply because he could not imagine an appropriate (Jewish) existence in the diaspora that was not in God’s image’ (1926). He summarized Ahad Ha’am’s main contribution to contemporary Judaism in the following manner: Our entire national heritage, which might be seen as poor and slim, was transferred from the limited realm of religion to the possession of nationalism, and by this, to the possession of humanity. [. . .] Many educated

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people saw our past as a pile of nonsense, and some of them said that Judaism as a whole was nothing but piles of rubbish spread all over, which Maimonides later collected into one big pile of garbage. However, he, Ahad Ha’am, made this pile into a commemorative site [gal-­ed], the ‘founding stone’ [even ha-­ shtiya].4 He is the one that planted in us the recognition that these are the [textual] sources that suckled and absorbed the nectar of all generations, all lives, which we need in order to work for the rising of the whole nation. (Bialik, 1926)

Bialik’s imagery here suggests a sentiment similar to Ahad Ha’am’s. He presents Ahad Ha’am as a latter-­day prophet, ‘He was then, when he came to us, thirty-­three years old’, he says, emphasizing Ahad Ha’am’s age, and perhaps alluding to Jesus’ age at the time of the crucifixion (Bialik, 1926), who brought with him a transformative message that inspired young Hebrew writers. This message, according to Bialik, revives those Jewish assets that the Haskalah destroyed. However, the subtext of Bialik’s imagery is much more radical; the transformative message is a message not so much of renewal but of sealing and, in a sense, of burial. What Bialik praises in Ahad Ha’am’s vision is the idea of making what he calls ‘the Jewish religious heritage’ into a memorial, a commemorative site, and then working on it to make it into the nation’s possession. In other words, the religious heritage should first be relegated to the past; only thus can it be part of the renewed nation. Bialik argued that the new Jewish lives would be honourable only if they were to live in God’s image. This God, however, belongs to a past that Bialik denounced as irrelevant to the Jewish nationalism of the present day. Indeed, in his poems from the 1890s, he depicts a divinity that is imprisoned in the decay of traditional Judaism. In his celebrated 1894 poem, ‘On the Threshold of the Old Study Hall’ (Al saf beyt ha-­midrash ha-­yashan), the old Torah study hall functions as a metaphor for traditional Judaism, and it is depicted as a rotten, sooty place. The Holy Ark, the holiest site within the study hall, is ‘rolled (mitpalesh) in the ashes’ (Bialik, 1933 [1894], 21) in mourning,5 and the ‘worn-­out Torah scrolls are rotten in the barrel’ (Bialik, 1933, p. 21). The speaker of the poem returns to his old study hall after a long and agonizing inner battle, and declares: Indeed, I lost to my enemy; he introduced me as an empty vessel, But I saved my God, and my God saved me. (Bialik, 1933, p. 22)

Amidst a declining Judaism that had lost its battle with the Enlightenment, and speaking from the ruins of its textual heritage, the speaker is comforted by the fact that he has managed to save his God. This is a God that needs to be saved; he

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needs the help of the enlightened poet to be pulled out of the ruins of the old study hall, out of the ruins of traditional Judaism. It is only after this evacuation that God regains his power: And in my healing of the ruined temple of God I will spread its sheets and open the window, And the light will push back the darkness of its spread shadow, And in the rising of the cloud the honor of God will come down; And all flesh will see, from young to old, That the grass withereth, the flower fadeth – forever God. (Bialik, 1933, p. 24)

The speaker in the poem brings the light – perhaps the light of the Enlightenment – into the darkness of the study hall and saves the lost honour of the Jewish God. Bialik presents this act of reviving the Jewish God as a public act, executed by an individual, perhaps the poet himself, but in the name of an entire generation. This public redemption of the Jewish God draws its legitimacy from its audience, which is not specifically Jewish, but rather humanity itself (‘all flesh’). The rescue of God from the ruined world of traditional Judaism, from this decaying and neglected place, is depicted as a reformative act that includes a verification of God’s universality (Shoham, 1994, p. 295). The study hall is left in neglect, but the speaker offers comfort, echoing God’s words of comfort as voiced by the prophet Isaiah. Bialik’s decision to end the poem with a direct quotation from Isaiah 40 is not accidental. He alludes to the famous promise of redemption in order to present the rescue of God as a metaphor for the rescue and renewal of the people. The exiled God is now free, and he will soon be redeemed, like the Jewish people.

Releasing God from his phylacteries Only five years after the publication of Bialik’s ‘On the Threshold of the Old Study Hall’, another poem appeared and was recognized as a faithful reflection of the spirit of the time. Shaul Tchernichovsky’s (1875–1943) ‘In front of the Statue of Apollo’ (1899) symbolically illustrated the tension between the Judaism of the past and the Jews of the present (whom Tchernichovsky refers to as ‘Hebrews’). Like Bialik, Tchernichovsky personified the Jewish God, but instead of trying to rescue this God from the past, he rejects him in favour of a different god, the god of the Greeks.

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The speaker of the poem stands in front of the statue of Apollo and, looking at this young, strong and attractive deity, laments the old, weak Jewish God, whom he describes as captured by traditional Judaism, bound ‘with the strips of Tefilin’ (Tchernichovsky, 1899, pp. 72–4). The Tefilin (phylacteries) here represent the Jewish law, which is depicted as the binding force that suppresses God and turns him into a helpless divinity. Like Bialik, Tchernichovsky describes the ancient Jewish God in a nostalgic tone, but adds that ‘the nation has aged, [and] its God aged with her’. He turns instead to the young and appealing god of a culture that was held by traditional Jews to be an imminent threat and idolatrous abomination (Shavit, 1992). Tchernichovsky describes his encounter with the Apollo statue, which took place when he was a young student at the University of Heidelberg, as a moment of epiphany. It triggered in his mind a comparison between the handsome young god of poetry, music and harmony, and the no-­longer attractive Jewish God.6 Thus, the Greek god symbolized for him not only youth and renewal but also the aesthetic values of the West. This approach of embracing Western culture and aesthetics as a means of promoting Jewish national revival is perhaps most associated with the essayist and prose writer, Micha Josef Berdyczewski (1865–1921). Berdyczewski is usually seen as one of the most vocal opponents of Ahad Ha’am’s and Bialik’s doctrine. He argued that the revival of the nation would require a complete transformation and therefore a real and meaningful break from the Jewish past, and he thought that European culture should be an integral part of the new Hebrew culture. Indeed, unlike Ahad Ha’am, Berdyczewski called for a complete revaluation of the Jewish heritage. This demand was accompanied by a call to adopt a pantheistic God, one that is not very different from the God of Hassidic Judaism, which Berdyczewski studied: Indeed, in a time when we fight for the sake of the creation of something new, which fits our current lives and wishes . . . we feel that we must ruin the worlds that preceded us and take off those [things] which burden us, as they demand that we worship them with our body and soul, while we need a new spirit, the spirit of God. [A God] to whom we will talk mouth to mouth. God lives in our spirit and [he is the] symbol of our world. (Berdyczewski, 2004 [1901), 6:259)

This is similar, in a sense, to Ahad Ha’am’s call to stop concentrating on the specifics of the Jewish law and start looking beyond the daily religious routine. However, Berdyczewski’s pantheism was not nationalistic like Ahad Ha’am’s;

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instead, it was more genuinely religious as it was a version of pantheism which may have been inspired by Hassidic pantheism, modified for the world of contemporary Judaism.7 Berdyczewski argued that God is present in nature and in our world in general, but that he cannot be seen, since the Jewish Halachic and textual heritage obscures his presence. While Ahad Ha’am used pantheism as a rhetorical device in order to illustrate his views about Jewish nationalism, Berdyczewski used it to discuss his own authentic view of God’s omnipresence: You are the witnesses for the soul of the world, the (many) parts of God above, which are spread all around, in every living creature in heaven and earth and all their host. (Berdyczewski, 2004 [1899], 6:274)

Interestingly, Berdyczewski managed to incorporate both his harsh critique of traditional Judaism and his more philosophical view of pantheism into his fiction, by making a clear distinction between the revealed and the natural God. The ‘God of revelation’ is the God of Mount Sinai, who is embodied in the set of commandments that form the basis of Jewish law. The God that Berdyczewski longs for, however, is the ‘natural God’, who can be found only when one is detached from Jewish law and civilization as a whole. In his non-­literary essays, Berdyczewski argued that the act of worshipping God prevents man from being connected with nature and therefore actually keeps him away from the divine.8 He demonstrated this view in his fiction by constructing a strong tension between these two Gods. A sophisticated representation of this tension can be found, for example, in his late short novel, In the Secret of Thunder (Berdyczewski, 1920–1).9 Here, Berdyczewski deals with the role of the God of revelation in the lives of those who believe in him, and questions the power of this God by opposing him to the natural God. The novel tells the story of Red Shlomo (Shlomo ha-­adom), the wealthiest man of a certain Jewish town, who is also its master, even its Lord. Indeed, Red Shlomo is depicted not only as financially powerful, but as a kind of king (at times with clear allusions to King David) or, more strikingly, a God. As the narrator describes him (using the second person, which might also reflect the way Red Shlomo sees himself [Arpaly, 2009, p. 99]): ‘And you are the son of the gods and you have the power, the might and the majesty, the honor and glory’ (Berdyczewski, 1982, p.  10). This description echoes the description of God in Chronicles: ‘Thine, O Lord is the greatness, and the power, and the glory, and the victory, and the majesty’ (1 Chronicles 29.11). These words come right

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after an observation that the God of the Israelites is feared by the gods of the nations, and the allusion may thus seem ironic in retrospect, as Red Shlomo is depicted in the story as embodying the powers of the idols and as competing with the Jewish God. A few sentences later, he is described as ‘omnipotent, the one who owns the keys to the various sections of the world; he gives it at will, he takes it at will’ (Arpaly, 2009). This description indeed associates Red Shlomo’s godly powers with his wealth, by alluding to the famous liturgical poem recited during Yom ha-Kippurim. However, it does not serve as a critique but rather as another metonymy for what Red Shlomo possesses and what the ‘God of the Siddur’ – as he is called in the story – lacks. Indeed, Gershon Shaked has suggested that the novel should be read not as a social critique but as a romance, in which Red Shlomo, in his hubris and uncontrolled lust, functions as a psychological archetype (Shaked, 1973, p. 209). I would suggest, however, that Red Shlomo is more than a psychological archetype: he is rather the archetype of a non-Jewish deity. His nickname, ‘The Red’ (Ha-­adom) alludes to the figure of Esau – a red-­haired and well-­built man who became a symbol of Paganism and later of Christian Rome, and this makes it hard to ignore his foreignness. In many senses, we can see in Red Shlomo the opposite of the exilic Jew: he has a strong body, he refuses to wrap himself in a prayer shawl when he prays, and he owns a dog (something that ‘is not typical for Jews’ [Berdyczewski, 1982, p. 6] as the narrator notes). These features, together with his great power, create the impression of a man-God, someone who refuses to obey the Jewish God. Indeed, Red Shlomo’s actions, as Shaked has shown, are motived by a clear sense of rebellion against Jewish customs and beliefs; he does not question God but actually opposes him, and thus seems like a divinity in his own right. He is a Godly man,10 but also the ultimate sinner, and in his sins he provocatively revolts against the Jewish God, thus becoming stronger and more powerful than his weak and helpless creator.11 Again, these characteristics of Red Shlomo’s should not be seen as reflecting negatively on him, or even showing him in a parodic light, but rather as expressing something approaching admiration for him (Shaked, 1973, p. 211).12 The world of this novel is imbued with polytheistic animism, controlled by the masters of the wind, water and fire, as the narrator mentions right before describing yet another tragic and violent death. The tension between the God of the revelation and the God of nature becomes in this mature story a violent struggle in which the God of revelation clearly loses. This God brings neither salvation nor consolation to his believers, and he is depicted in Berdyczewski’s novel as incompetent.

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God in the field In his poem ‘In the Field (Ba-­sadeh)’,13 Bialik announces: ‘I will go out to the field and hear my Lord’s words from the standing grains’ (Bialik, 1933, p. 25). In just one line, as Ariel Hirschfeld notes, the poet transports the Jewish God into the realm of nature (2011, p. 79). The God that had been closed in by the walls of the Torah study hall becomes omnipresent, and the poet can now experience him by departing from the closed world of Judaism (Hirschfeld, 2011, p.  82). The romantic Zionist notion of the redemptive unification between man and nature is associated here with a religious epiphany. At the end of the poem, the speaker connects these fields with the fields where his ‘brothers’, the Zionist pioneers, are now working. This analogy establishes the connection between the Zionist pioneers’ toil of the land and the revival of the ancient God. By alluding to the Zionist pioneers, the poet finishes redeeming the Hebrew God from his old exilic prison, a symbolic task which he started in his ‘On the Threshold of the Old Study Hall’. Like Ahad Ha’am, the celebrated ‘national poet’ offered a description of the new national identity in religious terminology. As we can see, Hebrew writers at the turn of the century were eager to distinguish between the Jewish and the Hebrew God. The first was depicted as a frozen, ageing deity, and the second as a powerful ancient divinity that should be rescued from decayed Judaism. Surprisingly, while these writers declared their break from traditional Judaism, they struggled to portray God as a divinity that was still present and that still had an important role in the life of the nation. Perhaps not surprisingly, in the Hebrew poetry of the 1920s and 1930s, God would fill the fields of the Land of Israel, not only as part of nature, but as one of the pioneers themselves. This development as well as the long story of Jewish nationalism and the divine deserves a separate and broader discussion.

Notes   1 For a more detailed discussion of this huge topic, see the first chapter ‘Fin-­de-Siécle Jewish Writers on the God of Nature’ of my book manuscript God at the End of Days: Perceptions of the Divine in Twentieth Century Modern Hebrew Literature (forthcoming).   2 Unless otherwise indicated, all translations from Hebrew to English are mine.   3 Ha-Yehudi ha-­hofshi be-­de’otav, which literally translates as ‘the Jew who is free in his opinions’.

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  4 According to the Jewish tradition, the ‘founding stone’ is a large rock that was placed in the location of the Ark in the temple. See: Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Yoma, 5b.   5 This is an allusion to Jeremiah 6:26, where the prophet calls upon the people of Israel to prepare and mourn in light of the coming destruction: ‘O my people, put on sackcloth and roll in ashes; mourn with bitter wailing as for an only son, for suddenly the destroyer will come upon us’ (King James).   6 On the specific circumstances in which the poem was composed, see Shavit, Z. and Shavit, Y., 2009, 7 August.   7 For more about Hassidism in Berdyczewski’s fiction, see Werses, 2002; on Berdyczewski’s collection of Hassidic tales, see Hever, 2013.   8 See for example in his essay ‘About Nature’ (Berdyczewski, 2004, pp. 27–9).   9 The name of the story ‘Be-­seter ra’am’ is borrowed from Psalms 81:7. Abramovitsh’s 1886 novel carries the same name. 10 I discuss this term and its use in modern Hebrew literature in Stahl, ‘Theomorphism’. 11 In this, he might actually be meant to recall not King David but his son King Shlomo, who is depicted in the Bible as a king who turned to worshipping idols as he grew old: ‘He followed Ashtoreth the goddess of the Sidonians, and Molek the detestable god of the Ammonites. So Solomon did evil in the eyes of the Lord; he did not follow the Lord completely, as David his father had done’ (1 Kings 11:5, 6). 12 It is not clear whether Shaked attributes the hubris to Red Shlomo or to Berdyczewski himself. 13 The poem appears in The Writings of Hayim Nahman Bialik (as well as in other editions) right after his ‘On the Threshold of the Old Study Hall’, and was supposedly composed in the same year (1894), or a few years later.

References Arpaly, B. (2009). The Order of Rebels. Jerusalem: Karmel. Berdyczewski, M. J. (1920–1). ‘Be-­seter Ra’am’ (In Secret Thunder). Hatequfah, 9. 7–40. —— (1982; 1920). Three Short Novels. Tel Aviv: Tarmil. —— (2004). Collected Works. Avner Holtzman (ed.) Tel Aviv: Hakibtz Ha-­meu’chad. Bialik, H.M. (1926). ‘An Address for Ahad Ha’am Seventieth Brithday’. http://benyehuda. org/bialik/dvarim_shebeal_peh77.html —— (1933). The Writings of Hayim Nahman Bialik (Special edition for the poet’s 50th birthday). Tel Aviv: Ahdut. Ginsberg, A. H. [Ahad Ha’am] (1965). The Writings of Ahad Ha’am. Tel Aviv: Devir. Hever, H. (2013). ‘The Politics of Sefer Hasidism, With the Power of God: Theology and Politics in Modern Hebrew Literature (Jerusalem: Van Leer Institute), 18–39. Hirschfeld, A. (2011). The Tuned Harp. Tel Aviv: Am Oved.

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Shaked, G. (1973). ‘Observations on bester ra’am’, in N. Govrin (ed.) A Selection of Critical Essays on M.Y. Berdyczewski. Tel Aviv: Am Oved. Shavit, Y. (1992). Judaism through Hellenism and the Emergence of the Hellenistic Modern Jew (Ha-Yehadut be-­ree ha-Yavanyut ve-Hofa’at ha-Yehudi ha-Helenisty ha-­moderni). Tel Aviv: Mossad Bialik. Shavit, Z. and Shavit, Y. (2009). ‘Tchernichovsky in front of the Statue of Apollo’, 7 August, Ha’aretz. Tarbut ve-­sifrut. Shoham, R. (1994). ‘Ha-­mesaper ha-­bilti ne’eman be-­ore’ach nata lalun’. In H. Barzel and H. Weiss, Hikrey Agnon (Agnon Studies). Ramat Gan: Bar Ilan University Press. Stahl, N. (forthcoming). ‘Theomorphism and Modern Hebrew Literature’s Search for the Divine: Brenner and Shlonsky as a case study’. Jewish Studies Quarterly. Tchernichovsky, S. (1955; 1899). ‘In front of the statue of Apollo’, in Poems. Jerusalem and Tel Aviv: Schocken. Werses, S. (2002). Hassidism in the World of Berdyczewski. Jerusalem: Molad.

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Acts of Hearing in the Book of Esther Jo Carruthers

Lancaster University

This chapter argues for attentiveness to the subject of hearing in the Book of Esther, crucial to which is a delineation of what hearing means within Judaic and Protestant religious contexts and how these different frameworks provide contrasting readings of the Esther story. The focus on hearing, although applied directly to the Book of Esther, reveals widely-­applicable religious inflections of what are often regarded as self-­evidently physiological experiences. As this chapter seeks to demonstrate, Judaism contains ritual models of hearing in which it is conceptualized as an act of affiliation and implicated in a wider conceptual network of community and ritual. It is a model at odds with Protestant constructions of hearing that seem to be dominant in Anglo-American contexts, in which hearing is associated with revelation in the Word, a correlation that follows a rationalist agenda in privileging cognitive assent. Attention to hearing as acts of affiliation in the Book of Esther reveals the ways in which the political activities of women and Jews in the diaspora are not only important to the Esther story – something already noted in scholarship on Esther (see Crawford, 1989) – but attenuates precisely the ways in which these two groups can and do act politically. The everyday acts of affiliated groups of people, namely women and Jews, become prominent in the story above the dramatic, singular and spectacular acts of individual women and Jews – of Esther and Mordecai, for example. Esther becomes less a story about the overturning of one catastrophic event by one heroic figure and instead – as the popularity of the festival of Purim itself testifies – about the power of everyday affiliations and networks, and the importance of hearing to this connectivity. I will turn first to those assumptions about hearing that seem intuitive in the Anglo-American contexts in which academic writing on Esther has been dominant. In everyday terms ‘I hear you’ means ‘I understand’, or more tentatively, ‘I am taking into account what you have said’. The Oxford English Dictionary’s

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(OED’s) historical repository of usages of the verb ‘to hear’ includes repeated references to biblical examples in which hearing signifies assent or cognitive understanding. That the Bible features so strongly in the formative period of the term ‘hearing’ itself testifies to the Protestant context of early modern England and our present indebtedness to a history saturated with those biblical texts important within Protestantism. The OED cites, for example, the Wycliffite Bible of 1582 and Luke 1.13, ‘Thi preier is herd’ as well as John Keble’s use in his Christian Year in 1827 of ‘The prayer is heard’ (II. lxxxvii, p.  140) expressing a significance for hearing of a divine acceptance, if not assent. While the verb ‘listen’ has a narrower physiological focus – the registering of sound, whether speech, music or noise (see OED) – the verb ‘hear’ has more profound connotations of comprehension. Although a thorough outline of Protestant constructions of the meaning of ‘hearing’ is impossible here, the following examples are suggestive for revealing an underlying logic of hearing at work within Protestantism. A definition of belief is outlined by Paul in the letter to the Romans in which hearing is noted as essential for the propagation of belief in Jesus: ‘How then shall they call on him in whom they have not believed? and how shall they believe in him of whom they have not heard? and how shall they hear without a preacher?’ (KJV Romans 10.14). Such belief is outlined in an earlier verse in the same chapter as being identifiable through internal assent and verbal confession: ‘For with the heart man believeth unto righteousness; and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation’ (10.10). These verses are taken up within Protestant tradition in ways that articulate the association of hearing and cognitive assent that I am proposing. Matthew Henry, a prominent evangelical commentator, whose writings remained influential in Protestant circles from the eighteenth and into the twenty-­first century, glosses this verse by saying: ‘we must give up, to God, our souls and our bodies – our souls in believing with the heart, and our bodies in confessing with the mouth’ (Henry, 1960, p. 577). Here, believing ‘with the heart’ and speaking ‘with the mouth’ encompass the actions required from the Christian for salvation as Henry draws on theologies of ‘Justification by faith’ (Henry, 1960, p.  577). Although Henry writes of devotion through the body in seemingly literal terms in its distinction to the soul, physical action is limited to speech, the locus of human intelligence and his assertion remains internal and cognitive. Such verses became mainstays of the doctrines of salvation by grace through faith that prevailed at the Reformation, demonstration of the legacy of the rationalist turn in Christianity that accompanied a rejection of salvation by works. Despite there being plenty of textual emphasis upon action in the New Testament (for example,

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Jesus’ assertion that ‘My mother and my brethren are these which hear the word of God and do it’ [Luke 8.21]), human activity is downplayed and faith becomes a matter of assent in the mind and expressed through the assumed transparent medium of speech. The ensuing construction of the sonic through a rationalist frame is evident in Paradise Lost in Milton’s depiction of God’s act of creation – the very beginning of earthly materiality – in which the divine realm is signified by ‘harmonious sound’ (Milton, 1662, VII, l. 206), and it is speech that embodies concord and through which God turns a world of chaos into a world of order. Many examples would serve to illustrate the relation between hearing and Protestant rationalism and its consequential expulsion of the body and its senses, but the following example reveals the specificities of attitudes to the sonic that demonstrates the conflation of a right kind of hearing with cerebral understanding and of the wrong kind with a sonic form of sensuality distanced from cognitive engagement. Writing in 1870, Edward Hine writes in his role as a leader of the marginal, and yet strangely influential, group of British Israelites (who identified the English nation as a lost tribe of Israel who had superseded the Jews as God’s chosen people, a people set apart from all other nations and under the special favour of God).1 Although a radical subgroup of Protestantism, British-Israelites had an influence in and beyond evangelical circles in the late nineteenth century, compatible as their ideas were with Imperial formulations of Britain’s superiority. Hine’s words here reflect, but in usefully explicit ways, the opposition frequently set up between the rational and the sensuous (and even the sensual) in the late nineteenth century. Hine describes ‘Ritualists’, a term often synonymous with Anglo-Catholics, as inveigled in the senses in sensualist terms but with a specific focus on sound: while they do their utmost to destroy the rich power of a holy, devotional service, by intonation, by uncertain nasal sounds, childish, petty, and absurd ceremonials, perverting solemn praise to a brilliant Oratorio, in which the flock can take no part, or reading the Scriptures in an unknown tongue, that they should not be understood. (Hine, 1870–1, p. 45)2

Here, Hine identifies: objectionable sounds such as the ‘nasal’, sound’s instability as he identifies intonation as a destructive force, and finally the danger of unintelligent sound in his denouncing of other languages as objectionable because they mar understanding, his privileged term. Whilst there is rejection of the auditorially unpleasant, the ‘brilliant Oratorio’ is also resisted, partly because the ‘flock’ cannot intelligently participate in it – the implication is that they are

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too ignorant and that its brilliance diverts worship away from God: its primarily sensory power aligns it with the transcendent, it seems, in dangerous ways. Such opposition to Catholic sensuousness and ritual was commonplace until the end of the nineteenth century and it included a set of assumptions that set sound in negative opposition to the rational ‘content’ of oral communication. In short, the Protestant model of hearing privileges comprehension. As such, the use of such a model to interpret moments of hearing in the Book of Esther necessarily privileges them as acts of comprehension. What would be highlighted in such a reading is moments of recognition or understanding, as they indeed are overwhelmingly in Christian and Jewish commentaries: of Esther’s realization of the threat to the Jews, the King’s acceptance of Esther’s accusation of Haman and his recognition of Esther’s worth and Haman as his enemy. In hearing his chronicles, the King understands that Mordecai had saved his life and remained unrewarded and realizes Mordecai’s worth. What becomes important in these readings is the internal shift in the King himself that comes to recognize and reward Esther and Mordecai. To move to Judaic models of hearing involves a move away from the mind as the primary telos for the sense of hearing. Attention to Judaic practice reveals that hearing cannot be conceptualized as a purely cognitive act. With daily ritual centring on the liturgical repetition of the shema, hearing infuses Judaic practice in very specific ways as a bodily and practical activity. This liturgy, referred to by the prayer’s opening injunction, ‘Hear!’, is one that repeats the invocation from God found in Deuteronomy 6.5, ‘Hear, O Israel’, the repetition of which signifies a positioning of the participant as a responder to a divine call to action. Repeated twice daily, the shema involves repetition of verses from Deuteronomy 6.5–9, 11.13–21 and Numbers 15.37–41, beginning with: ‘Hear O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is one’. As this opening makes clear, it acts as an affirmation of belief in God, but the following verses also identify precise actions this belief encourages and needs: those reciting the shema are hearing the command in Deuteronomy to ‘teach these words to your children’: talk about them when you are at home and when you are away, when you lie down and when you rise. Bind them on your hand, fix them as an emblem on your forehead, and write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates. (JPS, Deuteronomy 6.6–9)

The commandments related in Deuteronomy’s previous chapters, command­ ments the people of Israel are told to ‘observe . . . diligently’, are to be recited and

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remembered not simply through speech but through a speech embodied in the movements and landscapes of everyday life. The command to internalize God’s words – ‘lay up these My words in your heart and in your soul’– are entwined with physical activity that implicitly enables that interiorization: talking whilst sitting, walking, lying down and rising embed the words within the individual – physical actions that are repeated in Deuteronomy 11, the second section of the tripartite shema. Reciting and remembering are activities as much as they are verbal or cognitive. The final set of verses, Numbers 15.37–41 refers to the prayer shawls and their blue fringes that are used as memory aids to convert the movement of the eyes to divine purpose: so that when you see it [the blue fringes], you will remember all the commandments of the Lord and do them, and not follow the lust of your own heart and your own eyes. So you shall remember and do all my commandments, and you shall be holy to your God. (JPS, Numbers 15.39–40)

In Jewish tradition, then, recounting of the shema is not just an assent of an internally felt belief, but is the acting out of a commitment, through the repetition of words of faith (‘the Lord is our God’) and words that demand a remembrance and, through that remembrance, obedience. By extension, it becomes difficult to conceive of ‘the Jewish faith’ as a set of doctrines or ideas. Instead, the shema invokes a community that is committed – through action and recital – to remembering God and observing His commands. Midrash on Deuteronomy expands on the term shema to indicate the word’s link to obedience: ‘Hear (Shema) O Israel’ (Deut. 6.4). Why did [Moses] use the word shema? The Rabbis said: To what may this be compared? – to a king who betrothed a lady with two precious gems. She lost one of them. Said the king to her: You lost one of them, now take good care of the other. So did the Holy One betroth Israel [with two gems] – ‘We will do (naaseh) and we will obey’ (nishma; literally ‘and we will hear’) (Exod. 24.7). They lost one [gem, the naaseh, ‘we will do’] when they made the Golden Calf. Hence, Moses said to them: Now take good care to observe the nishma [‘we will obey’ or ‘hear’]. Thus: Hear (Shema) O Israel. (Deuteronomy Rabbah 3.11, with editorial additions in Lamm, 1998, p. 9)

To hear means to obey and it positions the participant in a ritual community committed to obedience.

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Hearing, remembering and action are, then, all inextricably linked to commitment and community; a nexus explicated by Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi in his book, Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory. Here, Yerushalmi notes that Jewish history is told in the form of a remembrance that is both an invocation of past action and a provocation to action. If hearing is configured as ritual response in the shema, then hearing becomes the ritual medium for Jewish memory and community identity. As Harold Bloom states in his introduction to Yerushalmi’s book, the latter’s ‘central formulation’ (xvi) is that ‘the collective memory is transmitted more actively through ritual than through chronicle’ (Yerushalmi, 1996, p. xvii citing p.  15). Bloom explains Yerushalmi’s thesis: ‘in Hebrew to remember is also to act’; ‘God’s acts and Israel’s responses matter, and nothing else’ (p. xvi). To retell stories of Israel’s past, as the history books of Scripture do, is not merely to relate a history that is to be noted and assented to in terms of cognitive recognition or approval or thankfulness (for example). Instead, the hearing of stories makes the hearer complicit in obligations to remember and observe. The ritual emphasis in Judaism not only reflects a more embodied conception of faith, but also blurs the line between faith born of assent and faith born of inheritance: the internalization of faith is not an individual moment of conversion but is dependent upon and entangled within the continued ritual activity of the community as a whole. A single sensory phenomenon, such as hearing, is revealed to exist within a matrix of body, mind and belief and is a shared community occurrence and not merely a singular, monadic experience. To bring hearing into a central focus for reading the Book of Esther makes sense in a Jewish context because it is through hearing that the Jewish community experiences the story in the synagogue at the hugely popular festival of Purim. Hearing is privileged through the ritual of the ‘smiting of Haman’ that takes place during the reading aloud of the story in which the name ‘Haman’ is obliterated from hearing by shouting and banging. Yet hearing has been neglected with attention paid primarily to the story’s numerous and prominent writings. For those not familiar with the story: it is set in the ancient Persian Empire, the site of the first long-­distance postal system.3 The Empire’s king, Ahasuerus, deposes his queen, Vashti, for disobedience, her act resulting in the story’s first edict that commands Empire-­wide female obedience. To replace Vashti, the king chooses Esther from amongst a gathering of virgins. The king’s first-­in-command, Haman, punishes one Jew, Mordecai (Esther’s uncle), by orchestrating the sending out of an edict ordering the destruction of the Empire’s Jews. The king is not aware that Esther is Jewish and therefore is ignorant of the threat to her. Haman’s fall, and Mordecai’s elevation, is wrought through the king’s belated

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rewarding of Mordecai when he hears of Mordecai’s foiling of an assassination attempt through having his chronicles read aloud. This reversal pre-­empts the securing of the empire’s Jews through Esther’s petition to the King that results in a second edict that authorizes Jewish self-­defence and secures their safety, turning their ‘grief and mourning’ to ‘festive joy’ (JPS, Esther 9.22). In a rare focus upon hearing, Leslie C. Allen and Timothy S. Laniak assert in their short, yet richly perceptive, commentary on Esther: ‘Hearing is important in Esther, especially when it is related to what is written’, going on to cite the instances of hearing (choosing examples that all stem from the Hebrew root shm’ from which shema stems): Mordecai’s ‘reputation’ refers to what people heard about him [. . .] Since what Vashti had done was heard, it was predicted that social chaos would ensue (1:18). Once the first edict was heard, there would be no respect (1:20). Because Mordecai did not listen to the other officials’ insistence that he obey the king’s commands (3:4), he put his own life and the lives of the Jews at great risk. Now, as Mordecai’s power is consolidated in Susa, everyone in the empire hears about it. (Allen and Laniak, 2003: §11)

With a sacred written text and revered scribal traditions, Protestant Christianity and Judaism incline towards a veneration of writing and consequently it is not surprising that both traditions have commentaries that offer rich readings of Esther as a book about writing.4 Yet, hearing plays a crucial role at Purim, a role that is suggestive for its importance for the story itself. Congregants fulfil their festive obligations specifically by hearing the story of Esther read out to them in the synagogue service. The command extends, unusually, to both women and children, making this an occasion on which the full community is required to perform the mitzvah (command) to hear. As such, simply through attending the synagogue the individual obeys precisely through hearing. Because of the emphasis upon the participation of men, women and children, hearing and obedience are both communal and community building. The cantor (reader) draws attention to the readerly nature of the story as the scroll itself is unrolled and refolded so that it more closely resembles a letter, invoking the letter mentioned in Chapter 9.20 that Mordecai sends out to establish the days of Purim. In this act of reading, the cantor becomes what Ika Willis has written about in terms of the servant-­orator in ancient Roman culture, a human techne of the spoken word, what the Roman scholar Varro defined as an ‘instrumentum vocale’ (a technological apparatus

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possessed of voice), becoming a human amplification, or an embodied recording or transmission device (Willis, 2006, p. 70).5 As Willis goes on to explain, it is ‘as if voice, far from figuring self-­presence and interiority as it does in the logocentric tradition, were instead a non-­interpretive, non-­spontaneous, automatic, implementation of a program’ (Willis, 2006, p. 71). To think of the cantor as an instrumentum vocale, as a speaker (a term Willis uses ‘for the technological connotations’, Willis, 2006, p. 71), presents the human voice as an unproblematic vehicle for the transferral of meaning and positions it as an element within a network of communication – as a human instrument, a human connecter. The emphasis then is drawn to the network, or community, rather than the individual who is demonstrated to be a slave to the transmission of information. The relation between hearing and community that the cantor-­as-instrumentum vocale represents pre-­empts figures within the Esther story itself that function in similar ways: namely the eunuch Hatakh and the reader of the court chronicles. As the discussion below hopes to demonstrate, it is the prevalence of humans acting precisely as ‘human techne of the spoken word’ that reveals the importance of networks to the political activity of women and Jews in the story. Also important to note is that at Purim ‘hearing’ is closely allied with obedience through the previously mentioned tradition of the smiting of Haman. When the sound-­object ‘Haman’ is obliterated from hearing through shouting and making noise it is in fulfilment of the command given to King Saul to ‘utterly destroy’ the Amalekites in 1 Samuel 15.3 (Haman is an ‘Agagite’ in 3.1, traditionally understood to link him to King Agag of the Amalekites). This obedience privileges the group over the individual as the congregants succeed even where King Saul failed. The community is revealed as primary and ordinary people assume a disruptive and effective power beyond that achieved even by rulers. The site of hearing as holding potential for subversive political power is a theme I will enlarge on in the following discussion. As Jon Levenson points out, the story of Esther does not rely on quoted speech as much as other biblical books (Levenson, 1997, p. 1). Yet, as Levenson also acknowledges, speech and hearing function in ways that are peculiar enough to draw attention to themselves. The first act of hearing is that discussed in the court following Queen Vashti’s disobedience. The king’s advisors fear that Vashti’s act of defiance will be disseminated to all of the empire’s women and they send out a royal edict to counter the feared insubordination, ordering female submission and male authority. Putting aside the ridiculousness of the advisers’ overreaction, their response does assume, and fear, an efficient communication network of individuals – of the passing on of story from person to person – that

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seems to rival the official lines of communication, the empire-­wide postal system that the court uses to legislate against the female uprising. Instead of a postal system, the women are seen to be part of a network of women that works orally. This network corresponds to the oral poetic culture of ancient Rome that was figured by the early Latin poet, Ennius, as a vocal medium and poetically rendered as ‘living through the mouths of men (per oram virum)’ (see Willis, 2006, p. 70). Instead of living through the ‘mouths of men’, in the Empire’s female network dissent lives through the ‘mouths of women’, an identification that accentuates female group identity and suggests the potential power of such a community-­as-network. But these women aren’t only mouths or apparatus, although they function as such in the dissemination of information, they are also agents. The network that enables communication is also imaged by the king’s advisers as a group capable of individual, and familial, acts of insurrection: the advisors’ primary fear is wifely disobedience. The women are therefore both mouths and agents: what is figured is a network of connectors, each part of which may be activated at any time. The next time the postal system is activated in the story is to spread the message of Haman’s deathly edict, the vastness of the undertaking reflected in the clunky linguistic style of the narrative that tells of dates, scribal activity, couriers, satraps, governors, officials, translation, official seals and the necessity of public display (see, for example, JPS, Esther 3.12–14). Alongside this tumult of effort, the narrative moves to the more personal setting of Esther and her Uncle Mordecai’s conversation – in which Mordecai compels Esther to appeal in person to the king. Although a heartfelt and dramatic dialogue, it takes place across a physical distance and through the messenger of Hatakh, one of the court eunuchs. As Mordecai cannot enter the palace in the mourning clothes he has chosen to wear in response to the deathly edict, he depends upon the liminal figure of the eunuch, Hatakh, who moves not only between the palace and the city, but also into the personal space of the queen. As such the persuasive words that Esther and Mordecai speak to each other, that form one of the climaxes of the plot and that have been often quoted for their dramatic effect (‘if I perish, I perish’), are not spoken directly, person to person, but are related in painful convolution through a third party. The movement of Hatakh between Mordecai at the palace gate and Esther in her quarters is set forth in the narrative of the book in detail: Esther ‘sent him to Mordecai’ . . . ‘Mordecai told him’ . . . ‘Hatach came and delivered Mordecai’s message to Esther, Esther told Hathach to take back to Mordecai the following reply’ . . . ‘When Mordecai was told what Esther had said, Mordecai had this message delivered to Esther’ (JPS, Esther 4.8–15). It

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would have been easy for the narration to elide Hatakh’s movements but the narrative communicates the frustration and complications of using an intermediary over seven long verses that give only a few lines of actual dialogue. Hatakh’s role as the slave instrumentum vocale is made apparent and Esther and Mordecai as (albeit a very small) network draws attention to the network of Jews in the Empire – a network that Esther will engage in her request that the Jews of the Empire should fast (JPS, Esther 4.16). As well as the ‘mouths of women’ we also have the ‘mouths of Jews’ and a network for dissemination that, like the network of women, holds subversive potential. Although the network is communicative and therefore can do little to directly impede the edicts ordering their deaths, as a network their power of communication (as the narrative makes clear) extends through every member and therefore into the palace itself because of the inclusion of Esther. Esther is revealed, through a focus on the ‘mouths of Jews’ as not just an individual acting, but as one, albeit important, endpoint of the ‘mouths of Jews’ and, like the Empire’s women, she acts as both connecter and agent. The final acts of hearing to be considered are those of the king: his hearing of the court’s chronicles (and through them of Mordecai’s unrewarded loyalty), his hearing of Haman who asks him to slaughter the Empire’s Jews; and his hearing of Esther, who asks for her people’s safety. The king learns of Mordecai’s loyalty through hearing his chronicles read aloud to him one night when he cannot sleep. The king’s access to important imperial information through the servant-­orator who reads his chronicles reveals the prominence of the medium of the voice in official, court, contexts. But this context, in contrast to the two examples above, is only a closed network of recorded information in which the king’s words are transmitted in a loop: from the king via a scribe to a written text, then to a servant-­orator and back to the king again. It is a limited and bureaucratic inscription of information that is far removed from the communal, personalized, observances of memorial at Purim or that is enacted in the recitation of the shema. It is restricted in its scope because the network is physically limited to the court and thereby restricted in its effect beyond the court. Whereas the ‘mouths of women’ and ‘mouths of Jews’ seem to spread across cities and empires, with fingers reaching into every corner, the scribal and vocal culture at court is limited to within its walls. The reading of the chronicles also reminds us of the performance at the heart of court activity and that true influence in the court is not scripted but vocal. This becomes clear when Haman obtains the seal that authorizes the deathly edict against the Jews through verbal persuasion. The deal to kill the Jews is

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metaphorically sealed through conversation as the king and Haman sit down to drink together: ‘The king and Haman sat down to a feast, but the city of Shushan was dumbfounded.’ (JPS, Esther 3.15) That Haman and the king’s speech is set against the city’s speechlessness amplifies the people’s powerlessness as much as it expresses their shock. What attention to acts of hearing in the Book of Esther reveals is a formulation of political power as dependent, at least partly, on verbal activity and on the ability to hear. The dependence of the powerful on the speech of those around them makes them vulnerable to manipulation and the Book of Esther has been taken frequently as a warning for rulers against evil counsellors. As the apocryphal Additions to the Book of Esther write, the ruler must beware the ‘persuasiveness of friends’ who ‘beguil[e] the good faith of their rulers by malicious equivocation’ (cited in Moore, 1977, p. 232).6 The king’s subsequent act of listening to Esther saves the Jewish population but it also redeems him and restores him to the position of a good ruler precisely because it demonstrates his discernment. This vindication of the king is enforced if we consider Esther as the figure of the parrhesiastes, the speaker of truth in the face of opposition. The parrhesiastes is a figure that Michel Foucault traces back to Greek culture, with Plato acting as an exemplum, in whom he identifies a figure who takes great personal risk in challenging someone to whom they are subordinate, a figure he sees as leading to the ‘ “critical” tradition of the West’ (Foucault, 2009, p. 9). My interest here is not on Esther as truth teller as such, but instead on the king as the person who can recognize the parrhesiastes, an act of recognition that serves to validate his authority through an act of discrimination. The king’s acts of listening to Haman and then to Esther appear to be happenstance and individuated occurrences, but the king is entangled with those he chooses to hear – the evil counsellor or the virtuous parrhesiastes – and as such the act of hearing becomes, again, about affiliation, and is not straightforwardly singular or interiorized. The king connects himself to Haman in hearing him; he then connects himself to Esther – and to her as the interface to the network of Jews – when he listens to her. It is notable, to choose a notorious figure as example, that Hitler (in a speech in which he references Purim) called King Ahasuerus a Jew in an allegorical attempt to denounce the ruler, President Roosevelt and his apparent Jewish interests (see Carruthers, 2011). Listening attaches you to a network and implicates your self-­identification with those you listen to. As this chapter has sought to demonstrate, hearing is not simply a physiological phenomenon but is culturally and religiously constructed and inflected. If hearing is assumed to be conflated with understanding, then Esther is a book about the success and failure of Esther and Mordecai as individuals trying to

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make themselves heard and of the success or failure of the king to hear and understand the political situation in his kingdom. It is hard not to read the story as primarily about the king in which Mordecai and Esther are lucky or providentially aided as they work to persuade him to reject Haman and save the Jews. However if, as the shema suggests, hearing is a matter of affiliation, then it is the networks of Esther that come to prominence: the women and Jews of the empire are revealed as powerful precisely through the efficient networks they are a part of. As such power within the empire is no longer the privilege of the king only but it is shown to be interpersonal and intranational, distributed amongst communities. It is no longer the individual that acts as heroine or hero of the story but, notably for the diaspora communities to whom the story of Esther has been so important historically, the heroic is situated in the ‘mouths of women’ and the ‘mouths of Jews’ who disseminate strategies and information through networks that track across, and reach into the very heart of, the empire.

Notes 1 Hines (1825–91) was the founder of ‘The British-Israel Identity Corporation’ (1878) and Colin Kidd describes it as ‘multi-­denominational’ and argues that its followers were counted in the millions and it is ‘almost impossible to gauge its influence among more passive sympathisers throughout the Protestant world’ (Hines, 2006, p. 209). 2 Hine’s booklet sold 30,000 copies between October 1870 and July 1871 according to its sequel, Flashes of Light (1872) and a copy is in Prime Minister Gladstone’s Library in Hawarden, Wales, containing marginalia demonstrating not only that the Prime Minister read the book carefully, but also identifying phrases that he underlined. 3 The invention of a postal system is dated to the ancient Persian Empire in which a relay system of horses produced an efficient communication network. Herodotus’s description of the Persian postal service – ‘neither snow nor rain nor heat nor dark of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds’ is inscribed on the Farley Post Office building in New York City. 4 Esther is known primarily by its status as writing in the Jewish tradition as the megillah or scroll. It is also writing that condemns the empire’s Jews to destruction and the written record of Mordecai’s thwarting of an assassination attempt that leads to the reprieve of the Jewish population. For Protestant Christians, the focus on writing has led to frequent interpretation of the translation of edicts for the empire’s diverse population as a prompt to biblical translation. See Carruthers, 2007and 2009.

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5 Varro distinguishes between three forms of instrument or tool precisely by attending to their relation to vocality: the slave, instrumentum vocale, the inanimate tool, instrumentum mutum, and the labouring animal, the instrumentum semivocale, see Willis, 2006, p. 81 fn.10. 6 See the section on ‘Evil Counsellors’ in Carruthers, Esther Through the Centuries, pp. 151–5.

References All references to the Bible are from the King James Version (KJV) or the Jewish Publication Society (JPS) version and indicated in parenthesis. Allen, L. C. and Laniak, T. S. (2003). Ezra, Nehemiah, Esther. MA: Hendrickson. Carruthers, J. (2007). Esther Through the Centuries. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. —— (2009). ‘Writing, interpretation and the Book of Esther: A detour via Browning and Derrida’, in Yearbook of English Studies. 39(2). 58–71. —— (2011). ‘Esther and Hitler: A Second Triumphant Purim’, in M. Lieb, E. Mason, J. Roberts (eds), The Oxford Handbook of the Reception History of the Bible. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Crawford, S. W. (1989). ‘Esther: A Feminine Model for Jewish Diaspora’. In Gender and Difference in Ancient Israel. P. Day (ed.). Philadelphia: Fortress Press. Foucault, M. (2009). Fearless Speech. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e). Hine, E. (1870–1). The English Nation Identified with the Lost House of Israel by TwentySeven Identifications, dedicated to the (so-­called) British people, by their kinsman, Edward Hine. London: G. J. Stevenson. Kidd, C. (2006). The Forging of Races: Race and Scripture in the Protestant Atlantic World 1600–2000. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lamm, N. (1998). The Shema: Spirituality and Law in Judasism as Exemplified in the Shema, the most important passage in the Torah. Philadelphia and Jerusalem: The Jewish Publication Society. Levenson, J. (1997). Esther: A Commentary. Louisville and London: Westminster John Knox Press. Matthew Henry’s Commentary on the Whole Bible in one Volume (1960). Leslie F. (ed.) Church, London: Marshall Pickering. Milton, J. ([1662] 2007). Paradise Lost. Alastair Fowler (ed.) Longman Annotated English Poets, rev. 2nd edn. London: Pearson Education Ltd. Moore, C. A. (1977). Daniel, Esther and Jeremiah: The Additions. Garden City NY: Doubleday. Willis, I. (2006). ‘Come Here, Aeneus, I Want You’. Parallax. 12(4). 69–82. Yerushalmi, Y. H. ([1982] 1996). Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory. Foreword by Harold Bloom. Seattle and London: University of Washington Press.

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‘Every Human Being is a Cause’: Three Re-Writings of Abraham, Isaac and Ishmael Tom Sperlinger

University of Bristol

Interpretations of Genesis 22 often depend on whether Abraham’s actions are seen as greater than we can comprehend or worse than we wish to contemplate. To Kierkegaard, for example, ‘there is nothing I can learn from [Abraham] but astonishment’ (Kierkegaard, 2012, p. 29), while to A.B. Yehoshua, whose work is considered in this chapter, this is ‘a horrible myth from all points of view’ (Sperlinger, 2011, p.  52). Yvonne Sherwood has interrogated the relevance of Genesis 22, in its different variations, to ‘the violent rupture that we know, by shorthand, as “9/11”’ (Sherwood, 2004, p. 822). Sherwood suggests that there is a risk, in interpreting 9/11, that violence may be ‘expelled to a putative outside’, as if it exists only ‘either outside religion or outside progressive secularism’ (Sherwood, 2004, p.  822). In either case, it may also be placed outside of a spectrum of recognizable human behaviour. In On Violence, Hannah Arendt writes: It is no doubt possible to create conditions under which men are dehumanized – such as concentration camps, torture, famine – but this does not mean that they become animal-­like; and under such conditions, not rage and violence, but their conspicuous absence is the clearest sign of dehumanization. (Arendt, 1970, p. 63)

Abraham’s behaviour too can seem outside the spectrum of the ‘human’. He is called upon to violate what might be considered a basic tenet of humanity, by sacrificing his son. However, what disturbs many readers is not only God’s instruction, but also Abraham’s response and his ‘conspicuous absence’ of resistance. Similar debates are inherent in the term ‘humanity’ itself, which is also defined through a set of putative ‘outsides’. Raymond Williams notes: ‘There is [. . .] from

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lC15, a use of humanity in distinction from divinity. This rested on the medieval substitution of a contrast between limited humanity and absolute divinity for the older classical contrast between humanity and that which was less than human, whether animal or (significantly) barbaric’ (Williams, 1988, p. 149; italics in the original). A barbarian was historically someone outside the established norms of civilization, speaking another language, or without ‘culture’ in an accepted sense. When the word ‘dehumanize’ appears in the nineteenth century it thus describes, in part, the work of exclusion that the word ‘humanity’ has always performed. To ‘humanize’ Abraham might not mean to secularize the story, therefore, or to alter his actions; the story itself might challenge a reader/writer’s assumptions about what actions or individuals are included in the definition of humanity. This chapter compares three literary works influenced by the story of Abraham, Isaac and Ishmael, which emerge respectively out of a Christian, Jewish and Islamic context: Wilfred Owen’s poem ‘The Parable of the Old Man and the Young’, Yehoshua’s novel Mr Mani, and Ghassan Kanafani’s novel Returning to Haifa. In each case, the writer seeks to comprehend a contemporary scene of violence for which, as with 9/11, there is a shorthand name. For Owen, the event is the Great War; for Yehoshua, it is the first intifada, the Palestinian uprising of 1987–91; and for Kanafani it is the nakba, or what Ilan Pappe has more recently referred to as the ‘ethnic cleansing of Palestine’ in, and beyond, 1948 (Pappe, 2006, pp. 1–9). Kierkegaard writes of Abraham: ‘Faith . . . is not an aesthetic emotion but something far higher, precisely because it has resignation as its presupposition; it is not an immediate instinct of the heart, but it is the paradox of life and existence’ (Kierkegaard, 2012, p. 40). Such faith is absent (or elusive) in all three of these re-­workings of Abraham’s story. Yet each of the three Abraham figures has motives that remain obscure. The old man in Owen’s poem and Avraham Mani in Yehoshua’s novel go through with the murder of their respective sons, and their motives are not fully explained. Similarly, although the reader of Returning to Haifa may understand why Said chooses to support his son in fighting for a political cause, this too is a paradox. It is an act of apparent hopefulness for the future, which nonetheless has resignation at its heart. The act of interpreting the story of Abraham may in itself provoke conflict. Sherwood is critical of a ‘particularly bland response to 9/11 by Tony Blair’, which sought to generalize about the three Abrahamic faiths. ‘This is the moment to bring the faiths closer together’, Blair suggested. Sherwood posits instead that ‘these narratives [of Genesis 22 and Sura 37] stage conflicts or cuts of identity along the lines of Isaac/Ismael/Jesus’ (Sherwood, 2004, p.  825). Sherwood’s

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present moment thus has a different urgency to Blair’s: ‘Now, more than ever, it seems crucial to emphasize the struggle between universality and particularity that takes place within all three “Abrahamic” religions’ (Sherwood, 2004, p. 832). In her emphasis on the struggle between the universal and particular, Sherwood illuminates the tension there is between each Abrahamic faith’s need to be the only true religion and its need to distinguish itself from other faiths with a claim to the same narrative roots. The story of Abraham and Isaac offers each writer considered here a means through which to contemplate the suffering of innocent young people, within a narrative framework that is itself a site of disputed claims. The works by Yehoshua and Kanafani also raise particular questions, since interpretations of Abraham and Isaac must now contend with an Israeli state and thus with the Palestinian cause, which complicate the issue of narration. Can an Israeli writer speak for ‘all Jews’? Can a Palestinian writer ‘speak’?1 Kanafani’s novel is doubly relevant because, as Elias Khoury notes, it is one of the few instances in which an Israeli ‘is represented in the Palestinian story’ and this character, Miriam, a survivor of the Nazi holocaust, ‘embodies [. . .] the Jewish tragedy’ (Khoury, 2012, p. 5). Jewish history is thus interpreted by a Palestinian writer, which prompts questions for Jewish theology as well. In these works, a contemporary conflict over the disputed land of Israel/Palestine, which includes the apparent site of the near-­sacrifice of Isaac, is an explicit part of the story. For both writers, the story of Abraham thus serves to dramatize a different struggle between universality and particularity: a desire for an exclusive claim to the land and a need to distinguish that claim from a competing one. A question raised in examining all three of these works is how literary texts specifically construct notions of human identity. Abraham’s story is ‘universal’ and particular in a further way. It is a shared narrative, within three faiths, and it is the story of two people, a father and son. The story can thus serve as a reminder, at a time of mass violence, of the suffering of individuals (and vice versa). The struggle between the particular and universal is enacted at the level of character in a literary work, which may be literal and metaphorical simultaneously, depicting individuals who are also signs. The characters are thus endowed with human attributes and are also ‘dehumanized’, if they stand for a larger argument or idea. This means that it is possible in such works to examine questions about the status or meaning of one human being, at a time when many innocent people are dying. Rage is one response to such a situation, as Arendt notes, and it is evident in all three works, and in Owen’s poem most overtly. In drawing on the story of Abraham and his son/s, all three of these writers seek to make a scene of

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violence, in which the young and innocent suffer, recognizable as a human situation, without making it explicable. These works all thus resist the work of dehumanization, because violence and rage are not expelled to a putative place ‘outside the text’.2 Wilfred Owen’s poem ‘The Parable of the Old Man and the Young’ is, for the most part, a faithful re-­telling of the story of Abraham and Isaac from Genesis 22. Only in line 8 is a detail added that provides a clue to a different setting: ‘Then Abram bound the youth with belts and straps, / and builded parapets and trenches there’. Even the archaic past participle ‘builded’ here implies a congruity with the biblical narrative, so that ‘parapet’ sounds oddly modern and out of place. It is a single word, ‘trenches’, that establishes a particular context, and it is suggestive of how firmly the trenches are embedded in the European popular imagination, as a symbol of the Great War, that this one word may suffice. The poem concludes with an angel speaking to Abraham: Behold, A ram, caught in a thicket by its horns; Offer the Ram of Pride instead of him. But the old man would not so, but slew his son, And half the seed of Europe, one by one. (Owen, 2007, l.10–16)

Owen’s poem relies on a sudden disjunction between the expected narrative and the rhyming couplet at the close. The poem seems to remain faithful to the biblical story up to line 14, with a second instruction from God contradicting the first and relieving Abraham of the responsibility to kill his son. Yet the penultimate line dramatically reverses our expectations of the story. No reason for Abraham’s stubbornness is given; it is stated only that he ‘would not so’ and ‘slew his son’. Owen’s poem thus retains the aspect of this story that often most troubles modern readers of it – Abraham’s sublime faithfulness to God, in his willingness to sacrifice Isaac – and yet adds to it an act of extraordinary disobedience. In this version, it is as though God’s original invocation awakened a murderous impulse in Abraham, that no further divine instruction can restrain. The penultimate line, however, is also a preparation for the greater barbarity enacted at the close. The rhyme (son/one) makes the final line seem like an inevitable consequence of the penultimate one, as if the death of ‘half the seed of Europe’ follows logically from the death of Isaac. In mathematical terms, the numbers given in these final lines are small: ‘half ’ and ‘one’. Yet half of the ‘seed of Europe’ is a massive, almost incomprehensible number, since it implies not

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only half of the young people of Europe but also their potential for further growth. Similarly, the phrase ‘one by one’ attempts to insert a different scale into the deaths of so many individuals, which might be forgotten amid the mass killing unleashed in technological warfare. Owen’s poem recovers a sense that each death is as horrifying and inexplicable as Isaac’s near-­death at his father’s hand. Kierkegaard comments on how Abraham’s act might be viewed in other circumstances: Is it because Abraham had a prescriptive right to be a great man, so that what he did is great, and when another man does the same it is a sin, a heinous sin? [. . .] The ethical expression of what Abraham did is, that he would murder Isaac; the religious expression is, that he would sacrifice Isaac; but precisely in this contradiction consists the dread which can well make a man sleepless, and yet Abraham is not what he is without this dread. (Kierkegaard, 2012, p. 22)

In this translation of Kierkegaard, the verb ‘would’ is used to express a future intention in a past action. ‘What Abraham did’ was not to murder/sacrifice Isaac, but to intend to do it. It is his anticipation of the act that produces ‘dread’, and Kierkegaard notes that the journey Abraham and Isaac undertook ‘lasted three days and a good part of the fourth’ (Kierkegaard, 2012, p. 45). In Owen’s poem, the act of sacrifice is refused. In this version, as in the original story, Abraham is offered an alternative means of performing the sacrifice, by killing a ram. But Owen’s Abraham chooses to murder his son. The description of Abraham as ‘the old man’ in the penultimate line also seems to distance Owen’s poem from its original context. At this moment, in Kierkegaard’s terms, Owen’s Abraham ceases to be Abraham. It is at this point that that distance is asserted between the biblical figure and the contemporary old man, who is a representative of the politicians and generals of Europe. The poem thus becomes one in which the reader must confront brutality and incompetence as human actions, which are corruptions of God’s original instruction, however obscure or perplexing that also remains. Owen’s poem relies on the reader’s surprise at the death of Isaac in the couplet. Yet the idea that Abraham might go through with the murder/sacrifice is consonant with a long tradition of commentary on, and creative response to, the story. Sherwood, for example, traced various Jewish commentaries in the first and second centuries, in which Abraham at least draws blood from his son. Bruce Chilton associates similar readings with how interpreters utilized the

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story to respond to contemporary events, including ‘violent external forces [such as] the Roman demolition of the Temple’ and ‘a theology designed to enable the [Jewish] community to survive in desperate circumstances’ (Chilton, 2006, pp. 63–4). The story became representative of endurance when one’s faith was under threat, and Isaac assumed new importance as a symbol of martyrdom. The switch in emphasis, from father to son, also opened up new possibilities, including that Isaac might be consciously sacrificing himself or that he might be resurrected (Chilton, 2006, pp. 65–7). In A.B. Yehoshua’s Mr Mani, the story of Abraham is likewise re-­written so that the death of an Isaac figure is achieved. Yehoshua has said that the ‘myth of the sacrifice of Isaac’ is the ‘basic myth’ in most of his work, one that was given ‘full expression’ in this novel (Horn, 1997, pp.  31–2). Mr Mani tells the story of five generations of one family, backwards in time. The novel is structured around five conversations, in each of which the reader hears only one of the speakers. In the final conversation, this speaker is Avraham Mani. He confesses to his old mentor, Rabbi Haddaya, who has been silenced by a stroke, that he had a role in the murder of his son, Yosef Mani, whose throat was cut at the Dome of the Rock. Yosef has what his father refers to as an ‘idée fixe’. He is preoccupied by the notion that the Muslims living in Jerusalem are ‘Jews who [do] not know yet they [are] Jews’, whose ancestors may have converted and in whom he must re-­awaken a sense of their original faith (Yehoshua, 2007, p. 342; italics in the original). This is an account Yehoshua has given of the novel’s relationship to the original story: The story of the binding of Isaac [. . .] is a horrible myth, from all points of view. The Jews believe this myth that you can bring the knife very near to the heart but still in the last moment you will be safe. The Jews push themselves into situations where the knife is very near but believe that in the last moment they will be rescued. I wanted to destroy this myth by doing it. So in the last chapter of Mani, Avraham has to eliminate his son Yosef, in the same place in which there was the binding of Isaac according to the tradition. I believed – of course in naïveté – that by taking the potential threat of it into reality, we can finish with the myth. (Sperlinger, 2011, p. 52)

Yehoshua wishes to free the story of the dread that Kierkegaard saw as essential to it, by seeing the dreadful consequences acted out. Yet Yehoshua’s Avraham Mani hesitates retrospectively, in defining the nature of the act he has performed

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in killing his son. He says that his is ‘the story of a murderer . . . a manslaughterer, a shohet-­uvodek’ (Yehoshua, 2007, p.  360). A ‘shohet-­uvodek’, in Hebrew, is a ritual-­slaughterer, who performs a sacrifice, and so what is at stake in these shifting definitions is not only the legal status of the act (as either murder or manslaughter) but also its religious significance. Such linguistic uncertainties are evident at the climax of the novel, as Avraham Mani narrates how Yosef was chased ‘from the golden dome to the silver dome’: And I, my master and teacher, was outside the gate [. . .] so that I might go to him, to the far pole of his terror and sorrow, whether as his slaughterer or whether as the slaughter’s inspector, and release him from his earthly bonds, because I was certain that he had already deposited his seed. [. . .] Wait! I want to come too, Rabbi Shabbetai Hananiah . . . Why don’t you answer me? . . . For the love of God, answer me . . . ’Twould take but a nod . . . ’Tis not as if I need words to understand . . . In truth . . . Is it self-­murder, then? Yes? . . . No? . . . (Yehoshua, 2007, pp. 362–3)

The death of Yosef is described as a ‘slaughter’, with implications of brutality, but also with echoes of the death of an animal. However, this act is a murder, in Kierkegaard’s terms, although it remains slightly unclear what role Avraham himself performed (‘slaughterer’ or ‘inspector’). In Owen’s poem, God seems remote and the ‘old man’ can (frighteningly) ignore Him. In Yehoshua’s novel, the religious figure of the rabbi is present but he is unable to speak. Rabbi Haddaya, at this moment, is not only mute: he has died during the course of Avraham’s confession. He is a figure to whom the desperate Avraham can appeal despairingly and in vain. Without divine instruction (or forgiveness), Avraham is left to contemplate his own act despairingly and to consider suicide. One of the functions of the novel’s structure is that the reader is able to see the consequences of Avraham’s actions in subsequent generations. Yehoshua explains: We are very much preoccupied with our parents; we know something about our grandparents and something is transferred from them. But then if you go to the father of our grandfather and the grandfather of our grandfather, they are in darkness – if they are not special people that you have documents

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about, they are totally unknown. So I wanted to give to the reader the possibility to do the work of the unconscious that is transferred from generation to generation – because only the reader can know that Mr. Mani from the first conversation is bound or obsessed by the desire to commit suicide because of the fifth generation, the fifth conversation. (Sperlinger, 2011, p. 52)

The implication is that each individual is ‘bound or obsessed’ by desires whose origins he/she cannot know, hidden as they are in the lives of his/her forbearers. Thus the Mr Mani of the first conversation (set in 1982) contemplates suicide in part because of the actions of Avraham Mani in the fifth conversation (in 1848). But, by implication, one may also be ‘bound or obsessed’ by ‘the work of the unconscious that is transferred from generation to generation’ much earlier on. In Yehoshua’s reading, the story of Abraham and Isaac similarly ‘obsesses’ or, in an instructive pun, ‘binds’ the Jewish people. His desire to ‘destroy’ the myth is thus associated with an attempt (‘in naïveté’) to free the Jewish people from a psychological and historical legacy derived from it. Yehoshua’s reading of the myth is explicitly secular. Mr Mani attempts a work of psychoanalysis on the Jewish people, by acting out an earlier threatened trauma. This re-­writing is made possible by a particular understanding of both ancient and contemporary history. In Yehoshua’s interpretation, Abraham ‘puts on a kind of a play’ for Isaac ‘in order to link him in a very existential way, in his soul, to this God’, whom Abraham has invented. The story is therefore about a father trying to ensure the obedience of his son, in continuing his life’s work. If Abraham and Isaac are seen as historical figures, their behaviour can help to explain ‘the whole story of the Jewish people’. Yehoshua suggests, for example, that during the Nazi Holocaust, the Jews were too passive and that security could have been (and has subsequently been) provided for them in Israel. ‘The problem is [. . .] that from time to time the knife penetrates. The Jewish people puts itself into a dangerous situation – for example, the Holocaust – and afterwards, at the last moment, says, “But God is going to save me”’ (Horn 1997, pp. 31–2). Adam Katz has written: ‘The implication is clear: the akedah is a Diasporic myth, and for Yehoshua a symptom of the “neurotic” condition of exile. Its continuance in present day Israel therefore interferes with the normalization of the Jewish people and the development of a broader “Israeli” (rather than Diasporic “Jewish”) identity’ (Katz, 2002). However, if Yehoshua is able to ‘free’ the Jewish people from the story of Abraham by performing the murder, it raises a question about the alternative legacy he is creating.

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The fifth conversation was written at the time of a particular outbreak of violence: The fifth conversation was written during the bitter days of the intifada in 1991 and 1992; this was my way to cope with the intifada [. . .] They are becoming our Jews, in an ironic way, they are becoming our Jews [. . .] all of it comes from my identification with their suffering, especially in the first years of the intifada, when so many children were killed. (Horn, 1997, p. 139)

Yehoshua utilizes the story, as in the Midrash commentaries noted by Chilton, in response to ‘violent forces’ in the present. Perhaps he too sees the act of re-­ interpretation as a way to ‘enable to the community to survive in desperate circumstances’ (Chilton, 2006, pp. 63–4). Yehoshua creates a tentative link between Palestinian suffering and what Mark H. Ellis calls a tradition of Jewish ‘solidarity with the oppressed’; each group has been placed outside ‘humanity’. Ellis suggests that the plight of the Palestinians raises a question for Jewish theology: ‘Can Jews see themselves and their history in a new light without hearing and taking seriously the history and the struggle of the Palestinian people?’ (Ellis, 1990, p. 46). Yehoshua’s novel utilizes the story of Abraham to try and empathize with such suffering. But the novel does not ‘hear’ a Palestinian voice; this is another way in which it offers only one side of a conversation. Other versions of history are absent in Mr Mani, in the form of both the Christian or Muslim story of Abraham and in a different version of events since 1948. If the Palestinians are ‘our Jews’, this is another version of Yosef Mani’s theory: it attempts to make a Jewish story universal and does not fully acknowledge the Palestinians’ particularity and difference.3 In his stories and novels, the Palestinian writer Ghassan Kanafani frequently depicts children at the centre of events in Palestinian history. ‘Paper from Ramleh’, for instance, is narrated by a nine-­year-old boy, who describes the expulsion of his village in 1948. Similarly, the novel Returning to Haifa is the story of a missing child. Said and Safiyya, who are expelled from Haifa in 1948, lose their baby boy in the process. In 1967, they return to the city, not knowing if this son is dead, and find him living in what had been their house. He has been adopted by Miriam, a pained and childless survivor of the Nazi Holocaust. The son, now named Dov, is thus a Jew who did not know for a long time that he was a Palestinian, in a reversal of Yosef Mani’s formulation. However, Dov rejects his Arab parents and vows to continue fighting for the Israeli army. Said, in his reply, links Dov, in an offhand way, with Ishmael, another eldest son whose status is ambiguous:

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Maybe your first battle will be with a fida’i named Khalid. Khalid is my son. I beg you to notice that I did not say he’s your brother. As you said, man is a cause. Last week Khalid joined the fidayeen. Do you know why we named him Khalid and not Khaldun? Because we always thought we’d find you, even if it took twenty years. But it didn’t happen. We didn’t find you, and I don’t believe we will find you. [. . .] Let your name be Khaldun or Dov or Ishmael or anything else . . . what changes? [. . .] Isn’t a human being made up of what’s injected into him hour after hour, day after day, year after year? If I regret anything, it’s that I believed the opposite for twenty years! (Kanafani, 2000, pp. 182–3)

Sherwood writes, about the start of Genesis 22: ‘The opening gambit of the biblical narrative, “Take your son, your only son, whom you love/your favoured one,” seems to make of Ishmael a missing person and raises the question whether Ishmael is, like so many missing persons, dead or, at the very least, dead in effect’ (Sherwood, 2004, p. 6). In other versions of the story, it is Ishmael rather than Isaac whom Abraham nearly sacrifices. Khaldun shares with Ishmael not only his status as a missing person, who is dead in effect, but also his disputed status as eldest son and sibling: ‘Khalid is my son. I beg you to notice that I did not say he’s your brother’. Said suggests that Khaldun/Dov’s name does not ‘change’ anything, because he recognizes that his son is now made up of what has been ‘injected into him’ in the intervening twenty years. The phrasing is ambiguous, with echoes of either a drug or poison. It is also self-­reflexive: Said is accepting that he has not lived in exile from his life for twenty years, but that exile has become his life. Returning to Haifa dramatizes a test of Said’s political convictions and aims to engage the reader in a debate provoked by his trials. Barbara Harlow has noted that Returning to Haifa was written at ‘a moment of intense self-­criticism’ among Palestinians, after the 1967 war ‘had inflicted a massive defeat [. . .] on the very ideals of pan-Arabism on which the Palestinian aspirations for a victorious return to their homeland had largely been based’ (Harlow, 1986, p.  172). It is in this context that the story seems both to contemplate an armed response to the Israeli occupation and hold out the possibility of a democratic solution to the conflict. A ‘fida’i’ is a fighter who is willing to sacrifice his life for a particular cause. It is only in this conversation that Said approves of Khalid joining the resistance; previously he had refused to let him fight. At the end of the visit, Said says to Miriam: There’s absolutely nothing more to say [. . .] Do you know something, madame? It seems to me every Palestinian is going to pay a price. I know many who have paid with their sons. I know now that I, too, paid with a son,

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in a strange way, but I paid him as a price . . . That was my first installment, and it’s something that will be hard to explain. (Kanafani, 2000, p. 187)

The scale is suddenly enlarged beyond the individual: ‘I know many who have paid with their sons’. Returning to Haifa shares with Owen’s poem a (suppressed) rage at the loss of so many young men, but this loss is ongoing: ‘That was my first installment.’ Much of the critical debate about this novel centres on Dov’s phrase, ‘man is a cause’, which is repeated by Said. It is given in the original Arabic text as ‘‫ ;’اإلنسان هو قضية‬a more literal rendering might be ‘every human being is a cause’.4 Dov appears to be quoting this phrase, although he claims not to remember the source (Kanafani, 2000, p. 181). Some readers have speculated that it may be taken from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay ‘Self-Reliance’: ‘Every true man is a cause, a country, and an age; requires infinite spaces and numbers and time fully to accomplish his design’ (Emerson, 2000, pp. 139–40).5 There is self-­assertion in both uses of the phrase in the novel: Dov states that he will remain faithful to the life he has created, rather than to the loyalties his birth might imply; Said realizes his separateness from his son, in spite of the narrative they might once have shared. Yet if ‘every [hu]man’ is a cause, the phrase implies a struggle between a need for such particularity and the fact that this is a universal demand, for ‘every’ person. The competing demands for an exclusive claim to the land of Palestine/ Israel, for example, cannot be reconciled because each involves the denial of other claims. There is no such thing as infinite space in this context. Harlow suggests that this ‘controversial critique [is] directed toward the Palestinian resistance movement itself ’, and that Kanafani implicitly rejects ‘the so-­called “two-­state solution” ’ and insists that a democratic secular state ‘must be developed and implemented by a progressive and democratic revolutionary movement’ (Harlow, 1986, p. 175). Kanafani’s novel thus argues, like Emerson’s essay, against conformity to existing ideas and for a true form of democracy, in which difference is permissible, in which every human being is a cause. The dialogue between a particular man and a larger group is enacted through the form of the novel, in which characters take on symbolic functions. Khoury suggests Palestinians lost four ‘main aspects of their lives’ in 1948: ‘their land [. . .] their cities [. . .] their Palestinian name [and] their story or their ability to tell their story’ (Khoury, 2012, pp. 9–11). Khaldun/Dov symbolizes the loss of land and its re-­naming. The story is about Haifa, one of the lost cities. The loss of the Palestinian story and of a capacity to narrate it is also evident. For example, in

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their distress, Said and Saffiya ‘were silent all the way’ back to Ramallah. Only in the final line is this silence broken, when Said remarks: ‘I pray that Khalid will have gone – while we were away!’ (Khoury, 2012, pp. 187–8). If the characters are read figuratively, their situation highlights that the Palestinians collectively also cannot speak. The faint echoes of Abraham and Ishmael in Returning to Haifa work not only to dramatize its religious tensions, but also to accentuate the dread that Said feels at the thought of losing his son/s: ‘Only now did he feel tired, that he had lived his life in vain’ (Khoury, 2012, p.  182). Ian Campbell has claimed that the ‘argumentative rhetoric’ in Returning to Haifa is ‘undermined by the story’ and that, in failing to bear witness to and articulate their past, Said and Saffiya are doomed to repeat it, and thus to lose another child (Campbell, 2001, p. 72). Yet the novel itself bears witness. It contains Said’s desire for Khalid to join the armed struggle, but it also offers an alternative response. By narrating what has happened to Said, Kanafani recovers the story of the Palestinian people, in the period from 1948 to 1967, and reclaims their right to ‘speak’ it. The novel is thus an act of resistance against those forces that have placed the Palestinians outside the larger cause of humanity.

Notes 1 Spivak notes, in ‘Can the subaltern speak?’: ‘The clearest available example of such epistemic violence is the remotely orchestrated, far-­flung, and heterogeneous project to constitute the colonial subject as Other’ (Spivak, 1988, pp. 280–1). 2 Bennett and Royle note: ‘This much quoted and much misunderstood slogan is, in fact, a misleading translation of the French sentence “Il n’y a pas de hors-­texte”, which is perhaps better rendered as “There is no outside-­text”. [Derrida’s] point is not that there is no such thing as a “real world” but that there is no access to the real world of, for example, [a] poem, except through the language of the poem’ (Bennett and Royle, 2004, p. 30). 3 Yitzhak Laor writes: ‘[Yehoshua] does not join the fascistic calls by politicians on the right to expel the Arabs from Israel, but he is troubled by the fact that the Arabs in Israel regard themselves as belonging to the Palestinian people [. . .] The wish that there should not be Arabs among us or that they should become a part of us (“Israelization”) is an element of Yehoshua’s great fear of ethnic heterogeneity’ (Laor, 2009, pp. 135–6). 4 I am grateful to Younes Samman for suggesting this different translation and to Mohammad Abu Hilwa for useful conversations about it and other aspects of

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Kanafani’s work. Muhammad Siddiq considers whether Dov and Said would have spoken in Arabic, Hebrew or English: ‘How unlikely it is that Dov said this [phrase] in English is clear from the ambiguity of the English translation of “qadiyya,” which can be rendered as “cause”, “problem” or “case”, among other possibilities’ (Siddiq, 1984, p. 62). A further variation is suggested by Barbara Harlow, who translates the phrase as ‘it’s man who is the issue’, explaining: ‘My own translation of the word [qadiya] as “issue” is intended to suggest the problematic inherent in the political and ideological debate as well as in Kanafani’s novel’ (Harlow, 1986, pp. 19, 23). 5 See, for example: http://theaterjblogs.wordpress.com/2011/01/15/students-­respondto-­the-novella-­returning-to-­haifa-in-­advance-of-­opening/

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Sherwood, Y. (2004). ‘Binding-Unbinding: Divided responses of Judaism, Christianity and Islam to the “Sacrifice” of Abraham’s Beloved Son’. Journal of the American Academy of Religion. 72(4). 821–61. Siddiq, M. (1984). Man is a Cause: Political Consciousness and the Fiction of Ghassan Kanafani. Seattle and London: University of Washington Press. Sperlinger, T. (2011). ‘A conversation with A.B. Yehoshua’. The Reader, 42. 47–54. Spivak, G. (1988). ‘Can the subaltern speak?’ In Nelson, C. and Grossberg, L. (eds), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Basingstoke: Macmillan. pp. 271–313. Williams, R. (1988). Keywords. London: Fontana. Yehoshua, A. (2007). Mr Mani. (trans. from Hebrew) Hillel Halkin. London: Halban.

Part Three

Christianity

8

Christianity: Introduction Joshua King

Baylor University

Rather than attempting, in so small a space, to summarize the field of Christianity and literature, in this introduction I highlight promising shared tendencies in the essays that follow. I speculate about the significance of these tendencies for future scholarship on religion and literature by drawing from recent revisionary work on the categories of ‘the religious’, ‘the secular’ and ‘world religions’, and by providing a case study from my own field of nineteenth-­century British literature and religion. Although their subjects are diverse, in their essays van Klinken, Vince and Cirstea collectively indicate two profitable paths for new study of religion and literature. First, they suggest that, rather than accepting ‘religious’ and ‘secular’ as fixed and obvious divisions of experience and social life, literary scholars should remember that the meanings of these categories shift in different texts and contexts. Cirstea, for example, shows how in Daughter of Jerusalem (1978) the British Christian feminist novelist Sara Maitland, without ruling out the transcendental, uses the Virgin Mary’s assent to God’s will in the Annunciation to authorize a feminist identity that can celebrate the ability to conceive while breaking free of patriarchy. Maitland thereby challenges and embraces ‘religious’ Catholic and ‘secular’ feminist doctrines of the 1970s, creating an imaginative and ideological space that does not tidily fit into either perspective. Similarly, van Klinken argues that in The River Between (1965) Kenyan novelist Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o creates a black Messiah figure as part of a critical religious interpretation of the socio-­political situation in colonial Kenya. This defies the simplistic opposition between religion and secular politics often assumed in scholarship on Ngũgĩ, and suggests Ngũgĩ’s early effort to imagine reconciliatory paths between indigenous traditions, Christianity and modernity. Second, these authors indicate that pushing into new frontiers in the study of religion and literature does not mean abandoning close reading for broad

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themes. Rather, attempts to rethink the study of religion and literature might make their greatest contributions through fine-­grained attention to the details and literary structures of texts. In his essay, Vince models close reading that is sharpened by historical scholarship and careful attention to religious issues. He uncovers the ways in which the climactic trial scene of Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure dramatizes ethical quandaries encountered by sixteenth-­century Catholics and Protestants in their disputes over principles of sincere speech, obedience to God and submission to temporal authority. This commitment to contextually-­informed close reading, and to self-­aware examination of the ways ‘religious’ and ‘secular’ spheres are distinguished, has been important to my own work on nineteenth-­century British literature and religion. Until relatively recently, scholarship in this field has been overtly or tacitly guided by the assumption that modern ‘secular’ values and social organizations are what is left behind by ‘religion’s’ inevitable long-­term decline. The categories of ‘religious’ and ‘secular’ vital to such secularization narratives have been re-­examined in the last two decades by social scientists, intellectual historians and sociologists. This new scholarship has suggested (i) that the secular, rather than some obvious ‘reality’ left behind by the retreat of religion, is in fact a Western construction dependent on cosmological and institutional distinctions unique to Latin Christendom (Taylor, 2011, pp. 33–4); (ii) that there is no universal way of dividing religious and secular spheres in Western nations, much less in the non-Western world (Casanova, 2011, p. 61); and (iii) that the secular and religious are mutually constituted categories whose significance depends on when and where they are used (Asad, 2003, pp. 17, 25). In my view, such wide-­ranging work on the religious and the secular still needs to be filled out by analysis of the ways these categories are worked out over time in the fine details of literary texts. This seems especially necessary for the global approach to religion and literature promoted by Abrahamic Faiths. I think of my own contribution to that comparative project along lines similar to those suggested by Charles Taylor, author of the most important recent work on the genealogy of Western secularism, A Secular Age (2007). While admitting the need for close study of non-Western secularity and religion, Taylor is equally aware of his limited capacity, as a scholar of Western intellectual and political history, to offer that discussion. He proposes, however, that ‘a more fine-­grained account of the Western trajectory’ might advance comparative analysis by depriving the Western situation of any claim to universality, and by establishing clearer points of contrast with other civilizational histories (Taylor, 2011, pp.  36–7). As Taylor suggests, the call to revitalize comparative study of

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religion and literature should not be interpreted as initiating a struggle for survival between ‘up-­to-date’ global approaches and scholarship that remains rooted in single national and religious contexts. Rather, it should encourage specialists in diverse fields of literature and religion to see their work as complementary. In the rest of this introduction, I provide a case study for how specialized literary scholarship might learn from recent revisionary work on the secular and the religious, and thereby contribute to comparative study of religion and literature. I select two poems by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, In Memoriam (1850) and ‘Akbar’s Dream’ (1892), examining the ways the categories of ‘religious’ and ‘secular’ are negotiated through the poems. I choose In Memoriam to show how even canonical Western works can remain important to new scholarship on religion and literature. ‘Akbar’s Dream’ suggests the degree to which the comparative category of ‘religion’ is historically entangled in efforts to extend the power of Western imperial states – a point worth recalling in today’s scholarly and global environment. Key to my discussion of In Memoriam are those passages that privilege an interior realm of ‘faith’ in tension with a sense of ‘secular’ time and space closed to transcendence. In Memoriam, with two instances of ‘secular’, might use that term more than any of Tennyson’s other poems (Baker, 1965, p. 613). This is significant, since so much of In Memoriam is devoted to testing, doubting, defining and defending a viable space for faith in modern Britain. In Memoriam develops the significance of the secular in dialectical tension with the territory of faith. As is well known, the poem is an elegy for Tennyson’s friend Arthur Henry Hallam, begun after Hallam’s death in 1833 and published in 1850. The elegy’s individual poems, which eventually totalled 133, are united by multiple calendars in an imagined three-­year sequence, whether anniversaries of Hallam’s death and birth, the return of Christmas Eve or the arrival of the New Year. As the events, motifs and words within these cycles repeat in new contexts, they invite reinterpretation. This is true of the term ‘secular’, which first appears in section  41, where the speaker fears that he will always be a lifetime behind Hallam’s intense ‘spirit’, which in this life ‘ever’ rose ‘from high to higher’: . . . oft when sundown skirts the moor An inner trouble I behold, A spectral doubt which makes me cold, That I shall be thy mate no more,

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Tho’ following with an upward mind The wonders that have come to thee, Thro’ all the secular to-­be, But evermore a life behind. (Tennyson, 1982, section 41, l. 17–24; emphasis mine; all further quotations from this edition)

In notes included in the 1907–8 collected works, Tennyson paraphrases ‘the secular to-­be’ as ‘aeons of the future’, and the phrase probably alludes ‘to the saecula into which the Cumaean Sibyl divided time’ (Tennyson, 1982, p. 206). In alluding to saeculum, the Latin root of the word ‘secular’, Tennyson recalls its preChristian and Christian history. Inherited by the Romans from the Etruscans, saeculum was eventually standardized to mean a ‘century’, reflecting the longest normal human life, and a succession of saecula marked stages in the history of cities and civilizations (Calhoun et  al., 2011, p.  8). Secular time was thereby associated by early Christians with affairs of worldly existence as opposed to eternal life, and increasingly connected to anxiety over entanglement in fallen, sensual affairs that might distract one from the task of preparing for eternity (Calhoun et  al., 2011, pp.  12–13). This contrast between the secular and the eternal informed the medieval Western Christian division between ‘secular’ and ‘religious’ orders, and sacred and profane spaces. As Taylor has argued, this distinction in turn paved the way for a gradual reversal of emphasis after the seventeenth century, according to which ‘the “lower”, immanent or secular, order is all that there is’, with the ‘first unambiguous assertion of the self-­sufficiency of the secular’ coming in ‘the radical phases of the French Revolution’ (Calhoun et al., 2011, pp. 33–4). Taylor portrays rising insistence on the self-­sufficiency of the secular order as the formation of an ‘immanent frame’, a sense of the world as working of itself and impersonally ordered without reference to a transcendent realm. This immanent frame is not inevitably closed to transcendence, but an increasing number of Westerners have inhabited it as if it were (Taylor, 2007, pp. 539–93). Tennyson’s ‘secular to-­be’ invokes Taylor’s ‘immanent frame’. It carries the feeling of time stretching infinitely into the future without necessary connection to transcendent eternity. In section 41, Tennyson imbues this sense of time with a transcendent quality by pairing the ‘upward’ movement of the speaker’s ‘mind’ with ‘evermore’. Joined to ‘secular to-­be’, however, ‘evermore’ also recalls the countless eons discussed in Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology (1830–33), which informs Tennyson’s description a few sections earlier of ‘streams that swift

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or slow / Draw down Aeonian hills, and sow / The dust of continents to be’ (Tennyson, 1982, section 35, l. 10–12). The speaker imagines postmortem mental ascension, but into an eternity without much vertical thrust, and without the threatening abysses that terrified his ancestors and still haunted most of his contemporaries. He claims to recall Dante’s Inferno without anxiety: ‘my nature rarely . . . / . . . shudders at the gulfs beneath, / The howlings from forgotten fields’ (Tennyson, 1982, section 41, l. 13, 15–16). This surmise of quasi-­transcendent progress into unending secular time offers relief (Hallam might be preserved and exalted after death) and provokes dread (Hallam might be forever a lifetime ahead). Tennyson’s stanza form, which continually multiplies and divides quatrains, enacts on a small scale the endlessly extended separation feared by the speaker. This analogy is highlighted by the enjambment between the stanzas I have quoted, which prompts readers to notice the division of time and white space they traverse as the speaker’s doubt is held in suspension: ‘[I fear] I shall be thy mate no more, /enjambment / Tho’ following with an upward mind’. Readers might further become aware of moving forward in the poem only by moving backward and downward, from line to line, from stanza to stanza. For the speaker, onward and upward through endless saecula would also be downward and backward with respect to Hallam – a paradox repeated by the reader’s navigation of the printed page in secular space and time. In the first stanza I have quoted, the speaker’s ‘inner trouble’ – his anxiety about unrelieved separation from Hallam – is correlated with decline of the light and temperature in the evening, as stressed by the homophones, ‘when sundown skirts the moor’ I fear ‘I shall be thy mate no more’ (Tennyson, 1982, section 41, l. 17–20). This fear is therefore contained within this-­worldly parameters. This both reaffirms the immanent frame and casts doubt on doubt: perhaps the speaker’s misgivings derive their force from a change of atmosphere. This is nicely caught in the simultaneously haunting and hallucinatory sense of the speaker’s ‘spectral doubt’, a phrase which suggests that the doubt is not only otherworldly but also a perceptual trick, whereby the speaker confuses his ‘inner trouble’ with his environment, so that he seems to ‘behold’ his fears of separation from Hallam enacted by the ‘sundown’ that leaves the moor ‘cold’ (Tennyson, 1982, section 41, l. 17–20). The speaker encounters a fear of separation that risks hardening into a doctrine about the afterlife as terrible as the Hell that he claims no longer horrifies him. Yet the lines transfer this fear to the territory of uncertain feeling – it might be ‘merely’ physical and psychological. The transfer only works because the distinction between ‘inner’ and outer ‘cold’, between interior human meaning and a world of material causality, is kept in play, and crossed by a

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‘spectral’ feeling that reaffirms the boundary. Tennyson’s speaker inhabits not only the immanent frame, but also the modern ‘buffered self ’ described by Taylor as fitted to this frame, a selfhood in which meaning and purpose arise within the individual mind, which is strongly ‘buffered’ – barricaded, and so potentially disengaged – from everything in the ‘outside’ world, understood to operate by ‘merely’ physical cause-­and-effect (Taylor, 2007, pp. 35–42). Later, in section 76 of Tennyson’s poem, ‘secular’ indicates the ‘abyss’ of time into which all things physically sink and decay, nakedly exposing the fear of non-­ transcendent continuance that the term carried in section 41: Take wings of foresight; lighten thro’ The secular abyss to come, And lo, thy deepest lays are dumb Before the mouldering of the yew; . . . . . . Ere these have clothed their branchy bowers With fifty Mays, thy songs are vain; And what are they when these remain The ruin’d shells of hollow towers? (Tennyson, 1982, section 76, l. 5ff)

The fecundity of ever-­evolving ‘life’ anticipated and feared in the earlier lyric (Tennyson, 1982, section 41, l. 24) sheds any sense of ascension. In section 41, the speaker wished to ‘wing my will with might / To leap the grades of life and light, / And flash at once, my friend, to thee’ (Tennyson, 1982, section 41, l. 9–12). Here he does ‘Take wing’ (Tennyson, 1982, section 76, l. 1), but only to flip on its side the earlier ambition to approach a vaguely transcendent ‘light’, as his thoughts horizontally ‘lighten thro’ / The secular abyss’, witnessing the entropy and depletion implied in unending secular time. The ‘branchy bowers’ humble the speaker’s poetic aspirations. His ‘vain’ songs despondently recall the leafy ‘vein’ by which they are outlasted: the yew and ‘oak’ (Tennyson, 1982, section 76, l. 13) will display their greenery undiminished long after the speaker’s poems are forgotten. Yet the poet’s song in turn undermines the trees’ supremacy with carefully pitched rhymes, as the chiming of ‘vain’ with ‘remain’ affirms that such leafy endurance is in the end also vain, sustaining the growth of ‘branchy bowers’ only so that time can eventually suck them dry, leaving them ‘ruin’d shells of hollow towers’. Drained of spiritual progression, the saecula continue endlessly, leaving a trail of wasted limbs, both of the trees and of the unreclaimable dead around whom their ‘roots are wrapt’ (Tennyson, 1982, section 2, l. 4). This is the dark side of the periodic emphasis of In Memoriam on secular time as a

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‘homogenous empty time’, in which ‘the meaning of its important dates, like the anniversaries of Hallam’s birth and death, are contingent rather than motivated by theology or cosmology’ (Rowlinson, 2013: 46). I trace these changing senses of the secular to suggest their unexpected service in securing one modern Western space for the elegy’s persistent affirmation of ‘faith’ (Tennyson, 1982, Introductory Stanzas, l. 21; section 31, l. 9). As others have observed (Tomko, 2004, p. 115), in disenchanting secular time and space, Tennyson actually works to save a place for faith – ‘in my spirit’ (Tennyson, 1982, section 123, l. 9). This safe haven corresponds to the ‘buffered self ’ described by Taylor, and within this walled-off self a convicting feeling that ‘Love is and was my Lord and King’ can be preserved (Tennyson, 1982, section 126, l. 1). In this way, the incremental reinforcement of a ‘secular’ immanent frame defines and enables the inner ‘religious’ experience of doubt and affirmation that Tennyson’s poem struggles to make articulate. By this I mean that the ‘Godless deep’ of the secular abyss (Tennyson, 1982, section 124, l. 12) actually provides the alienated environment in which the speaker can cultivate one modern Western way of experiencing belief. He learns to ‘hear’ beneath the vain roar of secular time’s ‘storm’ the ‘deeper voice’ (Tennyson, 1982, section 127, l. 3–4) that recalls, and reforms, Christ’s voice in the gospel story (Mark, 4:35–41; all references to the King James Bible), and proclaims with Julian of Norwich that ‘all is well’ (section 127, l. 20), in this case both for humanity’s secular ‘social’ flourishing and for its ultimate spiritual destiny (Tennyson, 1982, section 127, l. 5). Only after tuning his lexicon and verse to register what seems ‘A contradiction on the tongue’ (Tennyson, 1982, section 125, l. 4) – a lament over the Godless deep alongside praise of hope and love – can the speaker ‘hear at times a sentinel / Who moves about from place to place, / And whispers to the worlds of space, / In the deep night, that all is well’ (Tennyson, 1982, section 126, l. 9–12). Denuded of unique sacred ‘place[s]’ and left a ‘space’ in which even ‘worlds’ seem small, secular infinity exerts the pressure of vast, silent darkness. It forces the speaker, with heightened attention, into the soul’s spiritually resonant chamber. More than an exteriorly motivated and confirmed Providence, the speaker trusts in a ‘dream’ fitfully preserved ‘in my spirit’ (Tennyson, 1982, section 123, l. 9–10). This empowers him to ‘mingle all the world with’ memories of Hallam (Tennyson, 1982, section 129, l. 12), and to feel that in continuing to love Hallam he participates in the progressive inclusion of all things in love, even ‘God and Nature’, which previously seemed ‘at strife’ (Tennyson, 1982, section 55, l. 54): ‘Tho’ mixed with God and Nature thou, / I seem to love thee more and more’ (Tennyson, 1982, section 130, l. 11–12).

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The speaker of In Memoriam undergoes, then, painful instruction in one method of adapting faith to the immanent frame. He drains ‘secular’ time and space of transcendent meaning, identifies his spirit as the sensitive refuge for faith, and then reanimates the secular world with the divine love his spirit has learned to feel. Through this art of supposition, the speaker is able to re-­envision the ‘Godless’ secular ‘deep’ (Tennyson, 1982, section 124, l. 12), with its ‘vast eddies in the flood / Of onward time’ (Tennyson, 1982, section 128, l. 5–6), as an artwork in process: ‘I see in part / That all, as in some piece of art, / Is toil cöoperant to an end’ (Tennyson, 1982, section 128, l. 22–24). This reworks St. Paul’s contrast between present knowledge of God and intimacy with God in the new creation: ‘now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known’ (1 Corinthians, 13:12). By likening unfulfilled eschatological hope to the act of reading an artwork for signs of its maker’s synthesizing labour, Tennyson invites readers to imagine In Memoriam as a work in progress, and to find in their movement through the multi-­part poem an analogy for perceiving the apparently aimless events of secular time as parts in a work of redemption. This way of thinking is a ‘toil cöoperant’, one in which author and reader negotiate the ‘chang[ing] bearing of a word’ (Tennyson, 1982, section 128, l. 16), the shifting and mutually defining senses of ‘secular’ and ‘faith’. Tennyson reinforces the immanent frame and yet creatively retains sometimes uncertain openings to transcendence, offering a loose and theologically oriented analogy to what Cirstea, in her essay, discovers in Salmon Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses (1988). She shows how Rushdie’s reworking of Annunciation scenes in the Qur’an and New Testament undermines secular scepticism, even as it tentatively opens the door to spiritual experience, or at least to the exploration of new epistemological possibilities. Tennyson later claimed that In Memoriam’s vision of ‘the Christ that is to be’ (Tennyson, 1982, section 106, l. 32), or the Christian civilization of the future, was expressed in his late poem ‘Akbar’s Dream’ (1892) (Tennyson, 1897, vol. i, p. 326). The poem is a dramatic monologue framed by a narrator, in which the sixteenth-­century Moghul emperor Akbar recounts to his chief minister, Abul Fazl, his struggle to create a religiously tolerant empire in northern and central India. This poem relates to another subject raised by (especially) van Klinken, Vince and Cirstea: the category of ‘religion’ applied in a comparative context, and therefore the concept, only explicitly formulated at the turn of the last century, of ‘world religions’ (Masuzawa, 2005, pp.  12–13). This view of ‘religion’ is an invention of Western modernity (Casanova, 2011, p.  62), and it is tied to the needs of European imperial states as they governed diverse overseas populations that outnumbered the Christian populations of their metropoles: in the 1880s, a

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Russian observer could describe Britain as ‘ “in reality . . . a Mohamedan empire” ruled by a “Christian minority” ’ (cited in Brown, 2008, p. 302). In fact, the idea of ‘religions’, or distinct ways of binding people together by rituals and beliefs, has long been recognized by states aiming to comprehend a plurality of cultures, whether in the case of imperial Rome, or in the case of the Mughal empire that forms the subject of Tennyson’s 1892 ‘Akbar’s Dream’ (Calhoun, 2012, p. 349). From this perspective, ‘religion’ seems less a neutral analytical category than a potential instrument of political and cultural control. In fact, Tennyson’s ‘Akbar’s Dream’ was inspired by turn-­of-the-­century comparative religion and philology that eventually produced the concept of ‘world religions’, and that participated in ‘the colonial discourse of Orientalism’, in which the West was portrayed as the modern administrator and appreciator of the East and its – decidedly past – great religions and cultures (Masuzawa, 2005, pp.  20–1). Tennyson wrote ‘Akbar’s Dream’ under the influence of works by Orientalist philologist and comparative theologian Max Müller, and at the direct instigation of Benjamin Jowett, the renowned Oxford theologian and classicist, who sent Orientalist books to Tennyson. One such book was Blochmann’s translation (1872–77) of the Ain-­iAkbari by Akbar’s advisor and chronicler Abu Fazl (Blair, 2012, pp. 191–2). Jowett urged Tennyson to write a poem on the theme that ‘All religions are one’ (Tennyson, 1897, vol. ii, p. 372). This context might explain Tennyson’s epigraph for ‘Akbar’s Dream’, an inscription by Abul Fazl quoted in Blochmann’s Ain-­i-Akbari: An inscription by Abul Fazl for a Temple in Kashmir (Blochmann xxxii) O God in every temple I see people that see thee, and in every language I hear spoken, people praise thee. Polytheism and Islám feel after thee. Each religion says, ‘Thou art one, without equal’. If it be a mosque people murmur the holy prayer, and if it be a Christian Church, people ring the bell from love to Thee. [. . .] Thy elect have no dealings with either heresy or orthodoxy; for neither of them stands behind the screen of thy truth. Heresy to the heretic, and religion to the orthodox, But the dust of the rose-­petal belongs to the heart of the perfume seller. (Tennyson, 1987, vol. iii, p. 236; emphasis mine; all further quotations from this edition)

With this epigraph, Tennyson positions his poem as a contribution to a prophetic interfaith dialogue initiated by officials in northern India’s (past) great imperial

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civilization. Appropriately, the term ‘religion’ only appears in ‘Akbar’s Dream’ through this epigraph, as if Tennyson, aided by Blochmann’s translation, were simply excavating the project this term contains to announce an opportunity for the modern West to complete what the ancient East began. Somewhat surprisingly, given the frequency with which scholars have analysed ‘religion’ in Tennyson’s poems, this epigraph from ‘Akbar’s Dream’ appears to contain the only instances of the term in Tennyson’s poetic corpus (Baker, 1965, p. 573). He invokes the term when upholding the capacity of an imperial state to mould the practices of various world ‘religions’, as well as the capacity of secular poetry to enter ‘behind’ the ‘screen[s]’ of ‘truth’ represented by local temples and rituals, in order that the primal intuition of God hidden inside might be given cosmopolitan expression in non-­dogmatic verse. In the poem Akbar describes his efforts to establish an imperial religion that embraces the best in all creeds, and then closes his monologue by recounting a dream in which he foresees the failure of his project, but glimpses its completion by tolerant Christian Britain: From out the sunset [i.e., the West] poured an alien race, Who fitted stone to stone [of my ideal ecumenical temple] again, and Truth, Peace, Love and Justice came and dwelt therein, Nor in the field were seen or heard Fires of Súttee, nor wail of baby-­wife, Or Indian widow; and in sleep I said “All praise to Alla by whatever hands My mission be accomplished!” (Tennyson, 1987, l. 182–9)

Citing the practice of Súttee, or Sati, a widow’s throwing of herself on her husband’s funeral pyre, which the British – like Akbar – would ban in 1829, Akbar prophetically welcomes ‘whatever hands’ will be required to uphold the rule of ‘Love and Justice’ over the ‘furious formalisms’ of Hindu and Muslim dogmatists (Tennyson, 1987, l. 55). Throughout the poem, Tennyson has Akbar portray as subhuman all those (other than himself) who make public and exclusive claims for their doctrines: Muslim ‘Ulama’ are ‘like wild brutes new-­ caged – the narrower / The cage, the more their fury’ (Tennyson, 1987, l. 45–9), and ‘intolerant priests’ are ‘cobras ever setting up their hoods’ who must be ‘beat[en]’ (Tennyson, 1987, l. 156–8). The standards of toleration in this imperial community resemble those Talal Asad finds at work in many secularist understandings of the modern nation state – ‘religion has the option of either

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confining itself to private belief and worship or of engaging in public talk that makes no demands on life’ (Asad, 2003, p. 199). If Akbar’s regime – and Tennyson’s imperial Britain – promotes a ‘free Hall’ of discussion, a public sphere ‘where each philosophy / And mood of faith may hold its own’ (Tennyson, 1987, 1. 53–4), this will include reforming or keeping quiet all who think their faith is more than a ‘mood’, as they ‘clamour “I am the Perfect Way, / All else is to perdition” ’ (Tennyson, 1987, 1. 33–4). In having Akbar allude to Christ’s claim of primary access to God (John, 14:6), Tennyson singles out not only Muslims and Hindus who make doctrinal demands on public life, but also contemporary British fundamentalists, such as evangelical proselytizers at home and abroad. At home, Tennyson’s poem suggests, shame is the best policy for enforcing a British public sphere that excludes strident religion. Tennyson’s imagery of cobra-­priests and clamouring sects indicates that this poem is one dose of the mocking medicine. In British India, as in Akbar’s India, more forceful measures might regrettably be required from ‘the hand that rules, / With politic care, with utter gentleness’ as it ‘Mould[s]’ forms of faith ‘for all . . . people’ (Tennyson, 1987, l. 120–2). Akbar has ‘won’ his ability to ‘do the right / Through all the vast dominion’ by ‘a sword, / That only conquers men to conquer peace’ (Tennyson, 1897, l. 13–16). This effort to enforce the limits of religion is related to Tennyson’s presentation of his verse as a universal language. Tennyson suggests that British poetry, especially his own, might enable the British imperial public to discern amidst the many chants and praises of diverse faiths ‘but one music, harmonizing “Pray” ’ (Tennyson, 1987, 1. 144). Just after Akbar concludes his prophecy of Christian Britain arriving to fulfill his hope of a religiously tolerant empire, he overhears subjects singing an interfaith ‘hymn’ that he – really, of course, Tennyson – composed, which declares that a ‘myriad’ of ‘laureates’ from every clime sing to ‘Him the Timeless’ (Tennyson, 1987, 1. 199, 201). Akbar’s state-­sponsored hymn serves as a thinly veiled analogy to the way Victoria’s laureate sees his widely-­ circulating poetry contributing to the unity of the British Empire. The dream that gripped Tennyson’s Akbar might still guide imaginations, or at least knee-­jerk reactions, in many sectors of Western intellectual and political life. Although reformatted in more pluralistic terms, the basic assumption of ‘Akbar’s Dream’ – that ‘religion’ gathers into a huge analysable field, which is best viewed from a Western perspective, all the world’s local expressions of a universal human phenomenon – is perpetuated in classes on ‘world religions’ offered at North American and British universities (Masuzawa, 2005, pp. 2–13, 19–20). The groups targeted for ridicule by Tennyson – fundamentalist, publicly assertive

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Muslims and evangelicals – remain sources of anxiety for Western policy makers and political analysts committed to liberal toleration under a secular state. The distinction underlying Tennyson’s toleration-­by-mockery – the line between ‘fanatical’ and ‘rational’ religious practice – is still often treated as self-­evident in Western media and cultural commentary. Quietly endorsed by the vision of ‘Akbar’s Dream’ is the idea that Western secular military force must sometimes be used to promote religious toleration and freedom of speech in other countries. This notion thrives in metaphors and images still circulating in the media and in official political debate. Perhaps never before has the boundary between ‘the secular’ and ‘the religious’, carefully built and traversed by canonical authors such as Tennyson, been so hotly debated and (literally) fought over around the globe. Any scholarship on ‘world’ literature and religion must take this contemporary fact seriously. As I hope my meditations on Tennyson suggest, in trying to grasp the genealogy and potency of ‘the secular’ and ‘the religious’, scholars might find especially helpful the dusty titles that at first thought would not seem candidates for a revisionary reading list in comparative religion and literature.

References Asad, T. (2003). Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Baker, A. E. (1965; 1914). A Concordance to the Poetical and Dramatic Works of Alfred, Lord Tennyson. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd. Blair, K. (2012). Form and Faith in Victorian Poetry and Religion. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Brown, S. J. (2008). Providence and Empire: Religion, Politics and Society in the United Kingdom, 1815–1914. Harlow, UK: Pearson Longman. Calhoun, C. (2012). ‘Time, world, and secularism’. In The Post-Secular in Question: Religion in Contemporary Society. New York: New York University Press. 335–64. Calhoun, C., Juergensmeyer, M. and VanAntwerpen, J. (2011). ‘Introduction’ in Calhoun, C., Juergensmeyer, M. and VanAntwerpen, J. (eds), Rethinking Secularism. New York: Oxford University Press. 3–30. Casanova, J. (2011). ‘The Secular, Secularizations, Secularisms’. In Calhoun, C., Juergensmeyer, M. and VanAntwerpen, J. (eds), Rethinking Secularism. New York: Oxford University Press. 54–74. The Holy Bible (1972). King James Version. Nashville: Thomas Nelson. Maitland, S. (1995). Daughter of Jerusalem, 1978. New York: Henry Holt. Masuzawa, T. (2005). The Invention of World Religions: Or, How European Universalism was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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Rowlinson, M. (2013). ‘History, Materiality and Type in Tennyson’s In Memoriam’, in Valerie Purton (ed.) Darwin, Tennyson and their Readers. London: Anthem Press. pp. 35–48. Taylor, C. (2007). A Secular Age. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. —— (2011). ‘Western Secularity’, in Calhoun, C., Juergensmeyer, M. and VanAntwerpen, J. (eds.) Rethinking Secularism. New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 31–53. Tennyson, A. (1982). In Memoriam. Susan Shatto and Marion Shaw (eds). Oxford: Clarendon Press. —— (1987). The Poems of Tennyson. Christopher Ricks (ed.). 2nd edn. 3 vols. Berkeley: University of California Press. Tennyson, H. (1897). Alfred Lord Tennyson: A Memoir by his Son. 2 vols. New York: The Macmillan Co. Tomko, M. (2004). ‘Varieties of geological experience: Religion, body, and spirit in Tennyson’s In Memoriam and Lyell’s Principles of Geology’. Victorian Poetry 42.2. 113–33.

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The Black Messiah, or Christianity and Masculinity in Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s The River Between Adriaan van Klinken University of Leeds

Salvation shall come from the hills. From the blood that flows in me, I say from the same tree, a son shall rise. And his duty shall be to lead and save the people. (Ngũgĩ, 1965, p. 20) In the emerging study of religion and literature, so far there has been little engagement with non-Western literary texts, especially not with African texts. This corpus tends to be left to postcolonial studies, and indeed scholars in this field have extensively studied African and other non-Western bodies of literature. However, scholars in postcolonial studies tend to have a secular bias and demonstrate little interest in the religious aspects of literary writings. This is surprising since religion is a recurring theme in the vast and diverse body of postcolonial literature. Writing about African literature, F. Hale points out that: The relationship between missionary Christianity and traditional African cultures was a prominent theme in post-­colonial literature during and for many years after the era of decolonisation. (. . . ) At least as early as the 1950s, and seen perhaps most vividly in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, African littérateurs began to use fiction as a forum in which to challenge the tribulations resulting from the impact of European cultures on their own. (Hale, 2007, p. 47)

Addressing the above mentioned gaps – the lack of attention to African and other non-Western texts in the study of religion and literature, and the lack of attention to religion in the study of postcolonial literature – Adogame, in his introduction to a special issue of Studies in World Christianity on religion in

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African literary writings, points out that scholars ‘should begin to pay more attention to how and to what extent religion is embedded within African literary cultures; ways in which African literary scholars and their works are informed and illuminated – in their ideas and preoccupations, by religious traditions, imagery, ideas and concerns; and how they engage with and reshape traditional and non-­traditional discourses and repertoires’ (Adogame 2010, pp. 3–4). Taking this call as an impetus, in this essay I focus on the Kenyan author Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o who, together with the late Chinua Achebe from Nigeria, is one of Africa’s most well-­known creative writers with a worldwide readership. My choice of Ngũgĩ is not just informed by the fact that he received his degree in English literature from the university where I am currently lecturing and where his work now is an important subject of study (Nichols, 2010). More relevant to me as a student of African Christianity (rather than African literature as such) is the role of religion, in particular of Christianity, in Ngũgĩ’s writings and, related to that, also in his biography. As Nicholas Kamau-Goro (2011, p. 68) captures succinctly: ‘A product of the mission school, Ngũgĩ started his literary career as a Christian but later developed into a radical critic of Christianity. Despite this, Christian idioms and allegories remained prominent features of his aesthetic praxis. Of all African writers Ngũgĩ has perhaps most consistently used the Bible as a frame of aesthetic reference.’ Especially his early novels, written in the period that Ngũgĩ identified as a Christian, which also was the period of the decolonization of Kenya, are examples of the type of postcolonial African literature referred to by Hale, in which the relationship between missionary Christianity and traditional African cultures, but also between Christianity, liberation and anti-­colonial nationalism, are central themes. In this short essay there is no room to explore these themes in Ngũgĩ’s life and work in-­depth, for which I refer to other publications (Anonby, 1999; Kamau-Goro, 2010, 2011; Siundu and Wegesa, 2010). Building upon this body of scholarship, I seek to make an original contribution by intersecting the themes of Christianity and masculinity in Ngũgĩ’s first novel, The River Between, focusing my reading on the figure of the Black Messiah. In my reading I interrogate the argument made by Kamau-Goro that Ngũgĩ represents a ‘secular reconfiguration of Christianity’. It is not clear what exactly is meant by ‘secular’ in this context, but usually the word is opposed to ‘religious’. In that case, the suggestion is that Ngũgĩ’s interpretation and appropriation of the Messiah-­figure in the context of colonial Kenya is secular because it is social and political as contrasted to religious. This suggestion is problematic, not only because in African cultures generally there is no clear distinction between

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religious and public or political spheres (Ellis and Ter Haar, 2004), but also because it overlooks the possibility that Ngũgĩ’s deployment of the Messiah-­ figure in fact offers a particular religious interpretation of, and commentary on, the socio-­political situation in colonial Kenya. Further, I will take issue with an essay by Andrew Hammond on representations of masculinity in Ngũgĩ’s work. Hammond (2011, p. 116) takes no pains to understand the messianic dimension of the novel’s main character, Waiyaki, simply referring to it as ‘arrogance’ and ‘fantasy’. Hence he fails to acknowledge the crucial difference between Waiyaki and other male figures in the novel. Though this essay is too short to offer a full exploration of Christianity and masculinity in the novel, at least I hope to explore the meaning and significance of messianic masculinity as embodied by Ngũgĩ’s protagonist.

The River Between The River Between is Ngũgĩ’s first written (but second published) novel, published in 1965, less than two years after Kenya’s independence. It was originally written in 1961 for a competition in African literature, when Ngũgĩ was studying at Makere University in Uganda. Kamau-Goro dates the setting of the novel in the 1930s, ‘a period when the Gĩkũyũ people were being intensely evangelised by European missions’ (KamauGoro, 2010, p.  13). In addition to the missionaries’ general disavowal of local African cultures and their polarizing missionary strategies, in Gĩkũyũ land a particular conflict had emerged over the issue of female circumcision. This becomes a central theme in the novel – a focus that is clearly biographically informed, as becomes clear from Ngũgĩ’s childhood memoir. Here he points out that The River Between was an attempt to understand the ‘great historic divide’ (Ngũgĩ, 2011, p. 114) – about circumcision, but fundamentally about issues of cultural and national identity that had begun before he was born and that dramatically shaped his childhood and youth experiences, and indeed his own identity. The river alluded to in the novel’s title is called Honia, which means ‘cure’ or ‘bring-­back-to-­life’ (Ngũgĩ, 1965, p. 1). It flows through the so-­called ‘valley of life’ that is sided by two ridges, Kameno and Makuyu. Directly at the beginning of the novel, with a few simple, evocative sentences Ngũgĩ sketches what Trevor James (2001, p. 228) has called ‘a spiritual landscape’ in which the river is the source of life uniting the two ridges. However, at the same time the river also

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divides the two ridges. Looking at them from the valley, they antagonistically face each other ‘like two rivals ready to come to blows in a life and death struggle for the leadership of this isolated region’ (Ngũgĩ, 1965, p.  1). Only from a God’s eye point of view can the ridges be seen as united (Ngũgĩ, 1965, p. 16). This paradox of unity and division, evoked by the image of the river, is deployed by Ngũgĩ to narrate the story of the two Gĩkũyũ communities on both sides of the valley and their different responses to colonialism and missionary Christianity. On one side is Makuyu, where Reverend Livingstone of Siriana Mission had made various converts. One of them, Joshua, becomes their leader. He zealously preaches against ‘the old ways’ and teaches the Christians to follow the white man and to obey the colonial government. On the other side is Kameno, the traditionalist village where people, under the leadership of Kabonyi, a regressed Christian, become more and more hardened in their rejection of ‘the new faith’ and do not want to be contaminated by the ways of the white man. Thus, the river dividing the two ridges ‘signifies two contesting ideological positions, prefiguring two political theories of responding to colonial subjugation’ (Kamau-Goro, 2011, p. 72). What makes the novel so extraordinary is that this narrative of cultural conflict and polarization as a result of the arrival of missionary Christianity and colonialism is framed in a much older narrative of rivalry between the two ridges for which Ngũgĩ invokes the sacred Gĩkũyũ myth of origins and an ancient Gĩkũyũ prophecy. According to the origin myth, Murungu, the Gĩkũyũ God, told Gĩkũyũ and Mumbi, the original parents of the Gĩkũyũ people: ‘This land I give to you, O man and woman. It is yours to rule and till, you and your posterity’ (Ngũgĩ, 1965, p. 2). The age-­old conflict between Makuyu and Makeno concerns the question on what side of the river Gĩkũyũ and Mumbi stood when Murungu showed them the land, and related to that, which of the two villages can claim spiritual superiority and leadership. By deploying the Gĩkũyũ myth, with its sacred claim on the land, at the beginning of a novel that deals with the loom of colonialism, Ngũgĩ sets up an almost ontological contestation between Gĩkũyũ religious mythology and the Christian colonizing ideology. Adding to this, he evokes the prophecy of one of the great historical Gĩkũyũ prophets, Mugo, who in precolonial times already had prophesied the coming of the white man: ‘There shall come a people with clothes like butterflies’ (Ngũgĩ, 1965, p.  2). Mugo the seer, as historian John Lonsdale (1995, p.  241) points out, advocated a restrained response, warning his people neither to resist nor to welcome the strangers, but to learn from them, out of his conviction that if the Gĩkũyũ ‘renewed themselves and learned the secret of the invaders’ power the latter

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would in the end depart.’ As we will see later, this advice becomes the adagium of Waiyaki, the protagonist of The River Between.

The Black Messiah In addition to foreseeing the arrival of the white man, later in the novel the reader learns that Mugu, before he died, had also whispered an ancient Gĩkũyũ prophecy filled with messianic hope: ‘Salvation shall come from the hills. From the blood that flows in me, I say from the same tree, a son shall rise. And his duty shall be to lead and save the people’ (Ngũgĩ, 1965, p. 20). As Kamau-Goro (2010, p. 12) points out, these prophecies are ‘clad in a multi-­voiced idiom. The Christian nuanced idiom of “salvation” notwithstanding, Mugo’s language reflects the metaphoric richness of Gĩkũyũ egalitarian culture now threatened by foreign influences (clothes like butterflies) as well as the language of Gĩkũyũ traditional kinship and lineage ties (from the same blood).’ The importance of lineage ties is underlined in the novel when Chege, a respected elder in Kameno of whom the people believe that he is a seer, one day takes his only son, Waiyaki, to the sacred place on top of ‘the hill of God’ to tell him that he actually is Mugo’s offspring, the last in the line. Narrating Mugo’s death-­bed prophecy about salvation coming from the hills, Chege instructs his son, in line with Mugo’s advice mentioned above: I am old, my time is gone. Remember that you are the last in this line. Arise. Heed the prophecy. Go to the Mission place. Learn all the wisdom and all the secrets of the white man. But do not follow his vices. Be true to your people and the ancient rites . . . And keep on remembering, salvation shall come from the hills. A man must rise and save the people in their hour of need. (Ngũgĩ, 1965, pp. 20–1)

Thus, at this sacred place, standing under the tree of Murungu, from where they could survey the land and see the ridges laying in peace, Waiyaki learns about the secret messianic prophecy of a saviour coming from the hills and is told that he is the last in the line of those who might fulfil it. It is here that a sense of messianic masculinity is instilled in him. As the narrator describes, in the days after the event Waiyaki ‘felt a heaviness making him a man. In body, he was still a boy’ (Ngũgĩ, 1965, p. 21). It is significant that, in the story line, his father took him to the hill directly after Waiyaki has gone through the second-­birth ritual which, as a rite de passage,

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prepares him for his final initiation into manhood through the ritual of circumcision. At this occasion, the women had shouted, ‘Old Waiyaki is born. Born again to carry on the ancient fire’ (Ngũgĩ, 1965, p.  12). Afterwards, his mother had dipped him into the water of the Honia river, ‘and he came out clean’. Only after this ceremony which, in the words of James (2001, p. 235), ‘echoes the Christian sacrament of baptism, including the ideas of being made anew to fulfil a spiritual vocation’, Waiyaki’s messianic mission can begin. It seems that one must be completely insensitive to the religious imaginary and mythology deployed by Ngũgĩ to ignore the significance of prophecy, initiation and vocation, and to interpret Waiyaki’s so-­called ‘messianic fantasy’ as a form of masculine arrogance (Hammond, 2011, p. 116). The River Between was originally entitled The Black Messiah. Even though Ngũgĩ changed the title, it is clear that the novel has a strong messianic motive, and that Waiyaki in subtle ways is modelled after the biblical figure of Christ (Anonby, 1999). The above-­mentioned ceremony of second birth resembles the story about Jesus’ baptism in the river Jordan after which he took up his messianic mission. Mugo’s prophecy of salvation coming from the hills echoes Old Testament messianic prophecies that Christians believe to refer to Jesus Christ. Indeed, both prophetic traditions are made part of the contestation between Gĩkũyũ mythology and Christianity, such as when Joshua, the zealous convert, meditates on Isaiah’s prophecy of a virgin bearing a son whose name shall be Immanuel: ‘Isaiah, the white man’s seer, had prophesied of Jesus. He had told of the coming of a messiah. Had Mugo wa Kibiro, the Gĩkũyũ seer, ever foretold of such a saviour? No. Isaiah was great. He had told of Jesus, the saviour of the world’ (Ngũgĩ, 1965, p.  29). Likewise, when Waiyaki later in the novel attends Joshua’s church where the congregation sings a hymn about ‘the good news of Christ our Saviour’, he steals out with a disturbed heart because, ‘As the hymn reached his ears, he again felt that insatiable longing for something beyond him, something that would contain the whole of himself ’ (Ngũgĩ, 1965, p. 87). The dramatic end of the novel, where Waiyaki and his vision are tragically rejected by his people, is narrated in a way that resembles Jesus’ passion narrative, with Waiyaki’s childhood companion, Kamau, paralleling Judas’ betrayal of Jesus; his friend Kinuthia echoing Peter’s denial of Jesus; and with Kabonyi who presides over the assembly acting as a counterpart (though less neutral) of Pilate (Anonby, 1999, pp. 244–5). Ngũgĩ’s appropriation of the biblical language of salvation, and indeed of the typical Judeo-Christian term ‘messiah’, in order to depict his non-Christian Gĩkũyũ protagonist, is of course significant and can be seen as subversive.

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Kamau-Goro (2010, p.  13) interprets it as a ‘secular reconfiguration of Christianity’: The reification of the Christian notion of messianism in the person of a black man highlights the ‘black’ aspect of Ngũgĩ’s ideological consciousness which reflects his awareness of the black person’s disadvantaged position in the postcolonial world. It is satirical of the conventional association of the saviour with whiteness and thus highly subversive of the discourses of Christianity and colonialist historiography in relation to the black persons’ identity in the world. (Kamau-Goro, 2010, p. 15)

Indeed, it is obvious that Ngũgĩ’s notion of a black Messiah reflects an ideology of black consciousness and opposes European missionary Christianity with its intricate links to colonialism. However, I am not sure whether this necessarily implies a secular reconfiguration of Christianity. The international black consciousness movement, after all, has always had a strong religious underpinning. In the United States, Henry McNeal Turner (1834–1915), bishop of the African Methodist Episcopalian Church, already in 1898 famously claimed that God was black, and Baptist minister and theologian Howard Thurman (1900–81) in his 1949 book Jesus and the Disinherited associated Jesus with the black people. In 1963, the black leader Malcolm X, himself a Muslim, stridently asserted that ‘Christ wasn’t white. Christ was a black’ – a claim that later became central in black theology (cf. Douglas, 1994). Thus, the black religious movement has a tradition of thinking about Christ in social and political terms, and in the same line Ngũgĩ’s deployment of the Messiah-­figure can well be a critical religious interpretation of, and commentary on, the socio-­political situation in colonial Kenya, and missionary Christianity in particular. After all, via South Africa, American black religious movements had also gained influence in colonial Kenya, such as through the African Orthodox Church in the region where Ngũgĩ grew up (Ngũgĩ, 2011, p.  113). In his memoirs, Ngũgĩ narrates that, being exposed to paintings of a black Christ at Alliance High School in 1956, he was quite sympathetic to the views that ‘Jesus was not born in white Europe’ and that God had ‘revealed Himself in the different colours of different cultures’ (Ngũgĩ, 2012, p.  92). Against this background I suggest that Ngũgĩ’s image of the Black Messiah does not so much represent a secular reconfiguration, but a critical appropriation of Christianity, showing that religious culture, and indeed Christianity, ‘may constitute a site of resistance to colonialism’ (James, 2001, p. 231). It is fascinating to see how Ngũgĩ creatively plays with the theme

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of the Black Messiah, combining Gĩkũyũ religious traditions with biblical themes and the Judeo-Christian messianic tradition in his depiction of Waiyaki. At the same time, this line is not developed far enough to allow for a detailed Christological reading of Waiyaki – he may be modelled after Christ but does not really become an image of Christ in a meaningful theological way. The messianic figure of Waiyaki does represent, however, a religious critique of black peoples’ disadvantaged position in the colonial dispensation and in missionary Christianity.

Messianic masculinity I already referred earlier to the subtle way in which Ngũgĩ associates Waiyaki’s messianic role to the theme of masculinity. A further gender-­specific reading of The River Between reveals that Ngũgĩ in fact sets up a competition between the main male characters in the novel concerning messianic masculinity. Apart from Waiyaki there is, on the one hand, Joshua, the fanatical Christian convert whose originally Hebrew name means ‘God is salvation’ and thus challenges Mugo’s prophecy that ‘salvation shall come from the hills’. He is depicted as a typical Christian patriarch: ‘Joshua was such a staunch man of God and such a firm believer in the Old Testament, that he would never refrain from punishing a sin, even if this meant beating his wife’ (Ngũgĩ, 1965, p.  31). When one of his daughters, Muthoni, against his will decides to indulge herself in the ceremony of circumcision, she ceases to exist for him, and when she dies as a result of the complications, he does not show any emotion on his face. His uncompromising persona leads him to also lose his other daughter, Nyambura, who follows her heart and falls in love with Waiyaki, ‘her black Messiah, sent from heaven after Muthoni’s death to come and rescue her from disintegration’ (Ngũgĩ, 1965, p.  134). Joshua’s name with its reference to the messianic motif is thus rather ironic, since the only salvation he can think of is concerned with the soul, ‘making him fanatically cling to whatever promised security’ and alienating him from his people and from the ‘life-­giving traditions of the tribe’ (Ngũgĩ, 1965, p. 141). Opposite to Joshua is Waiyaki who does have sympathy for the Christian faith, but exactly for those teachings not embodied by Joshua: the elements of love and sacrifice, which correspond with his own temperament (Ngũgĩ, 1965, p. 100). For Waiyaki, these teachings are the essence of Christianity and need to be reconciled to the traditions of the people in order to become ‘a living experience, a source of life and vitality’ (Ngũgĩ, 1965, p. 141).

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On the other hand there is Kabonyi, the only one who, according to Chege, might also know about the prophecy and who indeed throughout the novel is competing with Waiyaki because he considers himself, or otherwise his son Kamau, to be ‘the saviour for whom the people waited’ (Ngũgĩ, 1965, p.  144). Initially a Christian convert like Joshua but later the zealous leader of the Kiama, which was founded to preserve the purity of the tribe against the white man, Kabonyi seeks to undermine Waiyaki’s popularity and authority among the people, among others by publicly addressing him as ‘young man’ (while other elders called him ‘the Teacher’, p. 81) – using age as a basis to subordinate his opponent’s masculinity. The conflict between Waiyaki and Kabonyi, in the words of Kamau-Goro (2010, p. 14), ‘revolves around the identity of the saviour foretold in the ancient prophecy’ but ‘more fundamentally, there’s a conflict over the interpretation of the prophecy and the strategies to face the colonial threat’ (Kamau-Goro, 2010, p. 14). Kabonyi’s messianic agenda is a conservative one: it is concerned with the social, cultural and political preservation of the tribe and its customs, leading to a radical rejection of everything associated with ‘the white man’, including their fellow tribe members, Joshua and his followers. Opposite to this, Waiyaki’s major concern is the unity of the tribe, which in his opinion can only been reached through education – following Mugo’s advice to learn the secrets of the white man – and which, he believes, in the end will lead to political freedom. Waiyaki is the ‘synergetic leader who appropriates elements of tradition and colonial modernity to espouse an ideology of passive, long-­term resistance to colonialism’ (Kamau-Goro, 2010, p. 16). Joshua and Kabonyi represent the two ideological poles in their different responses to missionary Christianity and colonialism. However, they are united in their hate of Waiyaki who is a threat to them precisely because he seeks to negotiate and synthesize their positions. In terms of masculinity, both Joshua and Kabonyi, as Hammond (2011, p. 116) observes, ‘share a belief in the aggressive, autocratic regulation of family and community’. The suggestion in the novel, then, is that the effects of colonialism on male identity in twentieth century Kenya is generally negative because typically patriarchal aspects of masculinity were reinforced both among the Christian converts and the traditionalists. Hammond points out that, compared to his contenders, ‘Waiyaki appears to represent a more sympathetic style of leadership. The emphasis that he places on education leads to an advocacy of non-­violent methods of political resistance, and his ambitions to overcome local divisions through the promotion of tribal unity stands against the masculinist creeds of competition and self-­aggrandisement’ (Hammond 2011, p.  116). By

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simultaneously criticizing Waiyaki for his ‘messianic fantasy’, Hammond however fails to acknowledge how Waiyaki’s more sympathetic character and the level of responsibility he demonstrates in fact are shaped by the sense of messianic masculinity instilled in him from an early age. Indeed, Waiyaki does not turn out to be the strong leader who is able to realize his vision of education, unity and freedom. The opposing forces are too strong. Because of his love for the uncircumcised daughter of Joshua, Nyambura, and his refusal to publicly deny her, Waiyaki’s own people leave his fate in the hands of Kabonyi’s Kiama. Waiyaki’s defeat at the end of the novel, then, is not because of ‘moral indecision’ (Hammond), and also not only because he ‘has internalized the ethos of Western individualism’ and therefore ‘finds it difficult to subordinate his individual will to the demands of a communal polity that has its own ancient rules of belonging’ (Kamau-Goro, 2011, p.  74), though the latter certainly may play a role. For Waiyaki, his love for Nyambura – who does not meet the criteria of the tribe – is not just a private affair but is an integral part of his battle for unity (Ngũgĩ, 1965, p.  143). Their mutual love demonstrates that it is possible to transcend the division between Christians and traditionalists, so denying Nyambura would imply giving up the vision of unity of the tribe. Refusing to deny her, Waiyaki knows that he risks his life but he cannot but be true to his messianic mission.

Conclusion In a fascinating way Ngũgĩ in The River Between merges Gĩkũyũ indigenous religious traditions with Christian idioms and imageries to develop the idea of the Black Messiah in the context of colonialism, missionary Christianity and emerging nationalism. This presents an intriguing example of the creative appropriation of Christianity in African literature. The novel reflects Ngũgĩ’s criticism of a type of Christianity that is irrelevant to the daily concerns and social, cultural and political challenges faced by its adherents, but it also reveals his hope that an alternative, contextually meaningful configuration of the Christian faith is possible. Brendan Nicholls (2010, p.  46) raises the question why the ‘ostensibly revolutionary potential’ of a hybrid character such as Waiyaki, who is clearly privileged in the text, is negated in the novel. His answer relates the figure of Waiyaki to Ngũgĩ himself, specifically ‘his contradictory position within the educated élite in post-Independence Kenya’ (Nicholls, 2010), which is an interesting suggestion. However, I would like to question the idea that the

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political potential of Waiyaki is necessarily negated because of his ostensible defeat. Keeping in mind the similarities between Waiyaki and Jesus Christ, we are reminded that the death of a Messiah actually can have life-­giving potential and can bring about salvation. Ngũgĩ does not explicitly hint at this possibility, yet the closing sentences about the river Honia flowing between the ridges, down through the valley of life, ‘reaching into the heart of the people of Makuyu and Kameno’, emphasize the uniting rather than dividing function of the river. The implicit suggestion, then, is that the sacrifice of Waiyaki and Nyambura somehow has a purpose and that their reconciliatory path between tradition, Christianity and modernity in the longer term might reunite the ridges.

References Adogame, A. (2010). ‘Editorial: Religion in African literary writings’. Studies in World Christianity. 16(1). 1–5. Anonby, J. (1999). ‘Images of Christ in East African literature: The Novels of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’. In S. E. Porter, M. A. Hayes, D. Tombs (eds), Images of Christ: Ancient and Modern. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press. pp. 239–58. Douglas, K. B. (1994). The Black Christ. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis. Ellis, S. and Ter Haar, G. (2004). Worlds of Power: Religious Thought and Political Practice in Africa. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hale, F. (2007). ‘The Critique of Gĩkũyũ Religion and Culture in S. N. Ngũbiah’s A Curse from God’. Acta Theologica. 1. Hammond, A. (2011). ‘Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o and the Crisis of Kenyan Masculinity’. In Lahoucine Ouzgane (ed.) Men in African Film and Fiction. Suffolk: James Currey. 113–26. James, T. (2001). ‘Theology of Landscape and Ngũgĩ wa Thiongo’s The River Between’. In Jamie S. Scott and Paul Simpson-Housley (eds), Mapping the Sacred: Religion, Geography and Postcolonial Literatures. 227–40. Kamau-Goro, N. (2010). ‘African Culture and the Language of Nationalist Imagination: The Reconfiguration of Christianity in Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s The River Between and Weep Not Child’. Studies in World Christianity. 16(1). 6–26. —— (2011). ‘Rejection or Reappropriation? Christian Allegory and the Critique of Postcolonial Public Culture in the Early Novels of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’. In Harri Englund (ed.) Christianity and Public Culture in Africa. Athens: Ohio University Press. pp. 67–85. Lonsdale, J. (1995). ‘The Prayers of Waiyaki: Political Uses of the Kikuyu Past’. In David M. Anderson and Douglas H. Johnson (eds), Revealing Prophets: Prophecy in Eastern African History. London: James Currey. pp. 240–91.

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Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (1965). The River Between (African Writers Series). Oxford: Heineman. —— (2011). Dreams in a Time of War: A Childhood Memoir. London: Vintage. —— (2012). In the House of the Interpreter: A Memoir. London: Harvill Secker. Nicholls, B. (2010). Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Gender, and the Ethics of Postcolonial Reading. Farnham: Ashgate. Siundu, G. and Wegesa, B. (2010). ‘Christianity in Early Kenyan Novels: Ngũgĩ Wa Thiong’o’s Weep Not, Child and The River Between’. The Journal of Language, Technology & Entrepreneurship in Africa. 2(1). 292–310.

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‘Tongue Far from Heart’: Disguises, Lies and Casuistry in Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure Máté Vince

University of Warwick

Measure for Measure may seem to be an almost too obvious choice in a volume about the intersections of religion and literature. The play features, as one of the main characters, a would-­be nun, Isabella, for whom her vow of chastity is a more important duty than saving her brother’s life; a good-­hearted friar; and another (fake) friar, the Duke in disguise, whose machinations both create and ultimately resolve the conflicts of the play. The inhuman nuptial laws that Angelo decides to enforce in the absence of the Duke are religious in nature; the validity of de praesenti marriages (marriages sanctified without the presence of a priest, based merely on the mutual vows of the partners) was much-­contested issue in contemporary theology – the Council of Trent banned the practice, while it was still considered valid in England. Angelo and Isabella, discussing the relative ‘measure’ of the sin committed when saving someone’s life by giving up one’s own virtue (Measure for Measure, 2.4.50–124; see Gless, 1979, p. 120), employ widely known casuistical principles to establish the priorities between two divine laws that appear to be in conflict. I will not follow these paths to put forward a discussion of the morality or the religious inclination of certain characters (or indeed Shakespeare himself), neither will I argue that the play disseminates or condemns particular religious doctrines. Instead, I would like to point at some of the less obvious theological issues that I believe are nevertheless closely relevant to a reading of Shakespeare’s play. I will suggest that Measure for Measure explores not only (the corruption of) sexual ethics, but equally importantly, the ethics of communication as well. When Isabella and Mariana are questioned by hostile judges, they are forced to find verbal tricks to keep their secrets (to save themselves from prosecution) without lying about them (which would be a mortal sin). Anyone who knew unjust examination could sympathize with such a dilemma. In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth

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centuries, a series of Protestant treatises presented certain Catholic teachings as justifying and propagating the idea that Catholic subjects, if they find it more convenient, have the right to deceive the Protestant authorities; therefore, as Protestants often argued, all Catholics represent a potential threat to the security of the state. Catholics, on the contrary, maintained that the forms of deception they teach are all based on biblical examples, and that certain ways of concealing knowledge are justified as a means of self-­defence under what they perceived to be unjust persecution. These controversies raise questions about the extent to which a person can conceal his/her knowledge without falling into the sin of lying. The play testifies to concerns that were very much alive in contemporary English society, concerns about understanding and misunderstanding; about being deceived by words and identities, about lies and disguises. By focusing on the climactic trial scene of Measure for Measure, I hope to give an example of the way in which historical scholarship, a focus on religious issues, and the close-­reading of a literary text can inform one another (Knight and Mason, 2009, p. 135); and to suggest that in fact exorcizing any of the three would result in losing something crucial.

I At the beginning of Act  5, all the characters (except for the Duke Vincentio) believe that the Duke had left Vienna and made Angelo his deputy. They think they know that Angelo had Claudio executed for fornication, despite the fact that Claudio and Julietta regarded their de praesenti marriage valid and therefore its consummation lawful. Moreover, he did so even though he had promised Claudio’s sister, Isabella, to spare Claudio if she agrees to ‘lay down the treasures of [her] body’ to him (Measure for Measure, 2.4.96), which she did. Isabella and Mariana (whom Angelo had previously wedded in yet another de praesenti marriage, and abandoned) think that a certain Friar Lodowick advised them to perform a typical comedic bed trick on Angelo, substituting Mariana for Isabella. Their aim with this is to make Angelo believe he got ‘the gift of [Isabella’s] chaste body’ (Measure for Measure, 5.1.98), while saving Isabella from breaking her vow of chastity, and allowing Mariana to consummate her marriage with Angelo. Only the Duke and the audience of the play know that Friar Lodowick was the Duke in disguise, and that Claudio was never executed. Thus, when the Duke puts away Friar Lodowick’s disguise and pretends to return to Vienna as the ignorant Duke Vincentio (a new disguise), the stage is set for a public testing of all the characters’ words and intentions.

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What makes the trial scene extremely complex is the fact that all its participants (Duke Vincentio, Angelo, Isabella, Mariana, even Lucio) have secrets, and that each character’s success or downfall seems to depend on whether they can find a way to expose others’ secrets without revealing their own. To Isabella and Mariana it seems safer and more advantageous not to disclose their knowledge straight away, but somehow make Angelo confess what he (wrongly) believes to have done. Because of the bed trick, of course, Angelo’s knowledge is mistaken, and it is vital for their success for it to remain so. Not only is this expedient for them, but also necessary for their self-­defence, because their fears seem to be proven when the Duke pretends to disbelieve them. They have to accuse Angelo of deeds that they know he has not committed, but that he thinks he did (and was ready to) commit, and they have to do so without explicitly false accusations to preserve their integrity. In order not to lie, they use phrases that over the course of the scene turn out to mean something else than how they are primarily understood. Is it justifiable to mislead the judges this way for what Isabella and Mariana believe to be a bigger good? Does not such deceitful verbal trickery constitute a lie? In whose understanding are truth and falsehood anchored in the eyes of the Judge: the speaker’s or the hearer’s?

II The end of Elizabeth’s and the beginning of James’s reign (especially after the Gunpowder Plot) saw the emergence of an awareness of certain principles that Catholic theologians devised for those who wished to stick to their old faith despite the measures that the Protestant authorities put into action. Catholics, a persecuted religious minority in Early Modern England, had to be prepared to face situations where obedience to the worldly and to the divine authority came into conflict. Priests, whose presence was a requirement for baptisms and funerals, weddings and Sunday Masses, were forbidden to enter the country, and when they did, they had to hide in Catholic households, often disguised as ordinary servants. Authorities occasionally conducted what to these households seemed unjust searches for priests, and questioned the inhabitants. They had the hopeless choice between revealing the whereabouts of their pursued priests, thus, by becoming instrumental to their death, committing a mortal sin; and lying to keep the priests safe, thus committing a mortal sin again (Holmes, 1982). Casuistical handbooks, used in the training of priests on the continent but also distributed in manuscript copies within England, offered solutions for such

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dilemmas (see Holmes, 1981; Abbot, 1598). These handbooks contained hypothetical cases in which divine and human laws or two divine laws seemed to be in conflict, with advice on the right course of action. A number of these cases of conscience related to questions of how to live under Protestant rule, and gave advice on ways to avoid revealing sensitive information (see Rose, 1975; Sommerville, 1988; Zagorin, 1990). Can a priest conceal his true identity by wearing a disguise or is it a lie? Can Catholics keep their secrets by giving replies that only appear to satisfy the question? Can they, when stopped in the street and asked where they are going, reply they are going for dinner, when their main purpose is to attend secret Mass (in a house where they will also have dinner)? As Catholic theologians in the late sixteenth century argue, in cases when the questioner has no right to know the information s/he is seeking, it is justifiable to give a response that will mislead him/her. The Catholic justification for misleading the authorities was first set out comprehensively by Martín de Azpilcueta, better known as Doctor Navarrus, who emphasized the responsibility of the hearer in the process of communication. In his Commentarius in Caput ‘Humanae Aures . . .’ (the application of a passage in Gratian’s Decretum to a debated case of de praesenti marriage) he argued that a man who allegedly promised to marry a woman, may be justified in claiming that the marriage is void if he made his promise with the concealed qualification that he does not in fact intend to marry her. In order to emphasize the difference between human and Divine understanding, the passage makes a crucial distinction between ‘inward meaning’ and ‘outward words’: The ears of men judge our words as they sound outwardly, but the judgement of God hears them as they are uttered from within. Certainly he is one that knows who explains from the words of another his will and intention; for he ought not consider the words but rather the will and intention, because the intention should not serve the words, but the words the intention. Therefore, if the divine judgment hears our outward words as they are brought forth inwardly, it is not the intention that should serve the words, but the words should serve the intention: then is it clear that God does not receive the oath as the one to whom it is spoken, but as the one who speaks understands it, because to the recipient our words sound not as they are brought forth inwardly but outwardly. (Gratianus, 1995 II.XXII.V.xi)

In this passage Gratian establishes the superiority of the inner meaning – the one that, according to him, God seeks. Navarrus uses Gratian’s argument to show how the speaker of an oath can trick those who unjustly compel them to expose

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something they are not bound (or sometimes not even allowed) to tell. The means, Navarrus suggests, is to consciously use utterances with multiple meanings. The desired consequence is that the inward meaning escapes the audience who will only be aware of the outward meaning and the hearer conceives the speech differently from the speaker (and God). Protestant treatises argued that this is simply lying in disguise, and not even Catholic theologians all agreed with Navarrus’s interpretation of the passage: Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda had argued that Gratian’s passage refers to cases in which the judge unjustly and intentionally misinterprets the speaker’s words (by focusing on the words and not the intention), and that in such cases God takes them in the speaker’s (‘inward’) meaning (Sepúlveda, 1538). Theologians who believed that deception, whether by using ambiguous phrases, disguises, or other ways in which something seemingly simple and familiar conceals a more complex, less obvious meaning, relied on Navarrus’s distinction between the inward intention that God examines and the outward expression that is available to the hearer (Huntley, 1966; Malloch and Huntley, 1966). Why this is not a lie perhaps needs some explanation. According to the commonly accepted definition of Augustine, modified by Thomas Aquinas, to lie is to utter something that the speaker knows not to be true with the intention to deceive the hearer. If the speaker says something that is true in a certain sense, even if s/he knows that that is not the sense in which the hearer will perceive it, it is not a lie according to sixteenth century casuists. The consequence of such speeches, deceit, is not entirely the speaker’s fault, because s/he simply allows the other to be deceived (see, for example, Persons, 1607, sig. Vv3v–Vv4r). Augustine’s definition relies on a linguistic model that stipulates a correspondence between the ‘heart’ and the ‘tongue’ that is mutually exclusive in both ways. If several intentions can result in the same utterance then this model cannot be applied anymore, and Augustine’s definition cannot account for deceptive statements that, depending on whose understanding is regarded as the point of reference, are true and false simultaneously. In these cases, according to Catholic treatises, God understands the words not as they are spoken but as they are formulated within the speaker’s mind (Malloch, 1978; Mullaney, 1980). The debate that made this teaching, the doctrine of mental reservation, famous, later infamous, and ultimately completely discredited, is inextricable from the political and historical situation of the late sixteenth century, and especially so after the Gunpowder Plot, in which the conspirators were accused of actively using this technique to keep their plot concealed (for sources, see Milward, 1978). However, the debate is only partly about the threat that closet Catholics, disguised priests or conspirators meant to the state. Casuistry, as a branch of practical

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theology, is concerned with applying biblical principles to everyday problems of conscience. In their arguments, theologians inevitably sought the interpretation of certain biblical passages that posed difficulty by seemingly recording cases in which supposedly impeccable Old and New Testament figures deceived their hearers; cases in which, when only their words are taken without reference to what is or might be in their minds, they seem to be lying. For example, the case of the priest who seemingly denies his priesthood is analogous with Jesus’ reply to his disciples when they ask him about the Last Judgement: ‘De die autem illo vel hora nemo scit, neque angeli in caelo, neque Filius, nisi Pater’ (Mark 13.32). Given his omniscience, this would appear to be a lie. According to the Catholic interpretation, Jesus here mentally reserves a qualification: nobody knows the time of the Last Judgement, not even the Son [as he is the son of man]. Another method to conceal the truth can be applied when ‘vnto one question may be geven many aunsweres’ of which ‘we may yeelde one and conceale the other’ (Garnet, 1851, p. 49). A justification of this method comes from the story of Samuel whom God sent to Bethlehem to anoint David (1 Samuel 16.1–5; Malloch, 1981). If Saul, the reigning king, had found out his purpose, he would have killed Samuel, therefore God advised Samuel to bring a goat and, when asked about the reason for entering the city, to reply that he came to sacrifice to God. Along these lines, it is possible to utter the secondary cause of one’s actions (which is an appropriate response according to the words of the question), while remaining silent about the primary one (and so not satisfying the intention of the question); which would justify a Catholic, when asked if he is going to a certain house to listen to Mass, in saying that he is going there for dinner. Samuel did not lie, but gave an answer that is true according to the secondary intention of the questioner (to know what he was going to do in the city), but false according to the primary intention (to find out whether he is a threat to Saul), or at least conceals the reply to it (Garnet, 1851, pp. 49–50). Whether we consider the biblical or the historical examples, the common concern is that of misunderstanding, the consequences of misunderstanding, and especially whose responsibility it is when misunderstanding occurs. Navarrus, by emphasizing the role of the hearer, argues that the speaker does not commit a sin as long as the ‘inner meaning’ is true; and since it is the responsibility of the hearer to attempt to seek the intention rather than the superficial meaning, misunderstanding is the fault of the hearer, even if the speaker intentionally formulates his outward message in an ambiguous way. Although Catholics and Protestants judge responsibilities differently, they agree that the separation of ‘inward’ and ‘outward’ meaning results in the hearer’s incapability to grasp the

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speaker’s meaning unless s/he can somehow gain direct access to the speaker’s intentions. However, as the trial scene in Measure for Measure dramatizes, such penetration into the hearer’s mind is exactly against which strategies such as ambiguous speech are devised and employed.

III The distinction between inward and outward meaning is, I think, crucial to our understanding and appreciation of the moral issues that the trial scene is concerned with. In the first part of the scene, when Isabella’s judge, the Duke, does not seem to believe her accusations of Angelo, she reminds the Duke to look into the heart of the matters, instead of relying on preconceptions: Make not impossible That which but seems unlike. ’Tis not impossible But one the wicked’st caitiff on the ground May seem as shy, as grave, as just, as absolute, As Angelo. Even so may Angelo, In all his dressings, caracts, titles, forms, Be an arch-­villain. (Measure for Measure, 5.1.52–8)

‘Dressing’ is a key concept here: it brings into mind not only Angelo’s metaphorical disguise, but also the Duke’s actual one. The success of means of deception like ambiguous statements or disguises depends on their appropriateness: they only work when they are devised with a knowledge of the preconceptions that their intended audience is likely to have (cf. Miles, 1976; Barker, 1992; Ewbank, 1984). They will be successful when they are tailored to the understanding of their audience, and consequently the audience are likely to believe them without even thinking of the need to ask further questions. Isabella explicitly warns against accepting what seems ordinary and true without investigating into possible hidden truths: O gracious Duke, Harp not on that, nor do not banish reason For inequality, but let your reason serve To make the truth appear where it seems hid, And hide the false seems true. (Measure for Measure, 5.1.64–8)

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The danger that lies in hasty judgements like the one that the Duke seems to be making is that a seeming truth, which in fact is only there to veil the actual truth, is accepted. Challenging Angelo’s seeming impeccability, Isabella also uses statements that require the theatre audience’s insight into her heart not to be considered false. If we understand Isabella’s accusation of Angelo literally (the way the stage audience does, except for the Duke), her speech seems to be full of lies. But if we accept the distinction between literal and intended meaning, and the superiority of the latter, our reading, as a result, will allow the contemplation of a more complex moral issue. Isab.

Most strange, but yet most truly will I speak. That Angelo’s forsworn, is it not strange? That Angelo’s a murderer, is’t not strange? That Angelo is an adulterous thief, An hypocrite, a virgin-­violator, Is it not strange and strange? (Measure for Measure, 5.1.38–43)

While Angelo could be said to have broken his oath as an officer and to be a hypocrite, he did not murder anybody, because he was authorized by the Duke to enforce the law. The other two charges are even more dubious. Isabella knows that in fact Angelo did not violate a virgin to commit adultery (instead unwittingly fulfilled his de praesenti marriage vow to Mariana by consummating their marriage), but as far as Angelo’s knowledge and intention are concerned, he did commit the crimes he is charged with. Conversely, it could be said that Isabella is lying as regards the words of her speech, but telling the truth as regards her intentions. Just like in Catholic treatises, there is a sense in which Angelo is guilty: he intended (and to his knowledge committed) what he is accused of. When the Duke pretends not to give credit to Isabella’s ‘most bitter and strange’ accusations, it is Mariana’s turn to demonstrate, in a highly dramatic sequence of equivocations, how misunderstanding is the direct consequence of the judge’s obstinate insistence on literal meanings. Mariana’s ambiguities call the attention to the importance of weighing every word, of being attentive to possible hidden meanings even when a more obvious interpretation offers itself. It is Mariana whose language comes closest to other, more significant Shakespearean characters who have to dissimulate (or even disguise) throughout most of their plays, but try to do so without plainly lying. In these cases part of the dramatic effect comes from the audience’s God-­like meta-­knowledge through which they see these ambiguous linguistic manipulations not so much as lies but

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as masterfully crafted evasions that help certain characters deceive others. The ingenuity of such replies is that they are true in one sense (the sense in which their speaker understands them), and false in another (the more obvious sense in which other characters take them), while the audience perceives them as ambiguous between the two. Mariana’s linguistic manipulations reveal different ways in which ambiguous utterances can be (mis)conceived. This puts into question the reliability of the linguistic model that posits the relation between intention and utterance as a necessary correspondence. Her responses demonstrate that – since certain utterances can represent several intentions – the responsibility for understanding or misunderstanding a speech is shared between hearer and speaker. The replies she gives to the Duke’s and Angelo’s interrogation rely on the ambiguity of words. Mari. Pardon, my lord, I will not show my face Until my husband bid me. Duke. What, are you married? Mari. No, my lord. Duke Are you a maid? Mari. No, my lord. Duke. A widow, then? Mari. Neither, my lord. Duke. Why, you are nothing, then: neither maid, widow, nor wife? Lucio. My lord, she may be a punk, for many of them are neither maid, widow, nor wife. (. . .) Mari I have known my husband, yet my husband Knows not that ever he knew me. Lucio. He was drunk then, my lord, it can be no better. (. . .) Duke.  Mari. Ang. Mari.

This is no witness for Lord Angelo. Now I come to’t, my lord. She that accuses him of fornication In self-­same manner doth accuse my husband, And charges him, my lord, with such a time, When I’ll depose I had him in mine arms With all the effect of love. Charges she mo than me? Not that I know.

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No? You say your husband. Why, just, my lord, and that is Angelo, Who thinks he knows that he ne’er knew my body, But knows, he thinks, that he knows Isabel’s. This is a strange abuse. Let’s see thy face. My husband bids me, now I will unmask. (Measure for Measure, 5.1.169–205)

Mariana plays on the lexical ambiguity of ‘know’ (be acquainted with/have intercourse with). While the audience perceives her intended meaning, they are also aware of the ambiguity in the utterance. She uses words in such an unexpected sense that her speeches seem self-­contradictory, which provokes the stage audience to ask further questions to clarify her meaning. Lucio’s interjections at the same time ensure that the mistaken (but more obvious) interpretation is also expressed on the stage. For someone with his extent of knowledge of the circumstances these are indeed the most likely explanations. Mariana’s replies are ambiguous in a way that they call attention to their own ambiguity: her aim is the opposite of the examined Catholic’s: not to conceal her intended meaning, but to provoke the stage audience into realizing it behind the literal sense of the words. The case of ‘know’ is particularly interesting, because, as soon as Mariana unveils herself, it turns out that Angelo indeed knows her in both senses of the word. Lucio’s interjections emphasize the ambiguity in her words by giving a mistaken interpretation in the first two cases, and, in the third, grasping one sense but missing the other. Mariana’s remarkable linguistic ability resembles the intriguing properties of the language of a number of major Shakespearean characters who do their best to deceive others (like Macbeth) or maintain their disguise (like Viola/Cesario) without uttering a plain lie. They act out the conflicts of a conscience torn between the prohibition on lying and the instinct of self-­preservation. The trial scene in Act 5 is an extremely intricate texture, in which the audience has to take several conflicting interpretations of the same speeches into account simultaneously. The Duke is the only figure on the stage who has the knowledge to understand all other characters’ speeches in their complexity, in the same way as the audience perceives them, but – as part of his disguise – he pretends to be just as ignorant as the others on the stage. Disguise is a visual equivalent of ambiguity in producing two meanings simultaneously: one intended for the other characters, and another for the speaker and the audience of the play. The Duke’s disguise (as any disguise) hides the exceptional beneath the familiar; the fact that his disguise is not penetrated by anyone suggests the potential danger in not being

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able to (or not even trying to) find the ‘primary’ meaning. Most of what the Duke says during the scene (as during the play) is a lie, which nonetheless never occurs to the other characters. The fact that the Duke is ready to speak plain lies whenever he feels he needs them may be part of the reason why many critics feel uneasy about his character, and why even contemporary audiences may have felt the same way. Even though minor characters and villains often lie on stage, for a character in whom some extent of moral integrity would be expected, plain lying is unusual, especially when a minor character in the same play, Mariana, has the linguistic ability to manipulate language without lying.

IV Augustine’s definition of a lie reassured the hearer that if s/he is misled by the information s/he receives then the information is intentionally distorted by the speaker, and the speaker will be punished for his/her sinfulness. When the speaker deliberately employs some form of ambiguity, his/her intention (in the heart) is to convey a message that will be misunderstood. The breach is not between what the speaker thinks and says, as the traditional dichotomy of the heart and the tongue suggests, to which Lucio seems to refer when he says he ‘would not, . . . tongue far from heart’, jest with Isabella (Measure for Measure, 1.4.30–3). It is rather between what the speaker knows to be true and what the hearer will believe to be true on hearing what the speaker says. These equivocal replies come in situations in which both telling the truth and lying would be disadvantageous (or even dangerous) for the speaker: situations in which the choice seems to be between two immoral alternatives. The play acts out the anxiety about (and fascination with) the fact that ambiguity disrupts the logical chain that was supposed to exist between the speaker’s thought, the speech and the ensuing gain of knowledge of the hearer. The play’s interest in deception is also indicative of a deeper concern with the limits of what is allowed for human beings; how to navigate between divine and human laws; how to choose when two divine laws seem to be in conflict; how to save ourselves from (unjust) destruction without bringing the destruction on our own head by lying or giving false testimony in an attempt to save ourselves from a more immediate threat. The theological discussions of such cases of conscience are abstract, and their examples are often simplified to such an extent that it is hard to fully appreciate the difficulty of the choices that people had to make based on their beliefs –

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especially for a reader in the twenty-­first century, who no longer shares some of those beliefs, or indeed is a non-­believer. Trial reports rarely give details, or approach the cases from the point of view of the prosecuted, and when they do, they represent such attempts as entirely cynical. There is a similar tendency in scholarship, too. What reading Shakespeare’s play together with these theological debates might achieve is to give flesh – tangibility – to the issues through the complexity of the situations. Plays often dramatize cases in which even ‘good’ characters (characters with whom the audience’s sympathy lies) are forced to use similar techniques, which can help us understand the difficulty of the ethical choices that members of a persecuted minority (or indeed any person who is facing what is in his/her opinion unjust persecution) had to make. Many of Isabella’s and Mariana’s statements during the trial are either lies, or self-­contradictory, if we consider their words only. However, the audience – as opposed to the other characters – is aware of all that has passed before, which gives them an insight into the conscience of these characters. This knowledge of the circumstances allows the audience to realize that their seemingly unambiguous statements in fact have a further sense, one that the others on the stage cannot guess because of their lack of such knowledge. Isabella and Mariana mislead their immediate audiences, but this is partly the responsibility of their examiners, since when they encounter something that does not seem to fit their preconceived notion of the case, instead of examining the possibility that they may be overlooking certain circumstances, they simply choose to disregard as false what the women seem to say. Their stubbornness in believing what appears to be the truth (in the Duke’s case, this is pretended, in Angelo’s, it proceeds from personal interest) is emphasized over and over again, and the fallibility of human judgement is addressed explicitly when Isabella believes that the truth about Angelo will only turn out at the time when all truths are revealed: ‘And is this all? / Then, O you blessèd ministers above, / Keep me in patience, and with ripened time / Unfold the evil which is here wrapped up / In countenance!’ (Measure for Measure, 5.1.115–19.) Whether we accept the Catholics’ argument (that it is not a lie to respond to the question ‘Are you a priest’ with ‘I am not’, reserving mentally ‘so that I am bound to tell you’), or the Protestants’ (that the utterance itself is a false statement, intended to mislead the hearer and therefore it is a lie), the example itself seems both abstract and childish. But the versatility with which ambiguity can be employed to conceal (potentially dangerous) meanings that are intended only to God becomes obvious once we approach these issues by applying our historical

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and theological knowledge to the carefully crafted language of Shakespearean characters.

References Abbot, G. (1598). Quaestiones sex Totidem Praelectionibus, in Schola Theologica, Oxoniae. Oxford: Joseph Barnes. Barker, S. (1992). ‘Personating persons: rethinking Shakespearean disguises’. Shakespeare Quarterly. 43(3). 303–16. Ewbank, I. (1984). ‘Shakespeare’s liars’. Proceedings of the British Academy. 69. 141–3. Garnet, H. (1851). A Treatise of Equivocation (ed.) David Jardine. London: n.pub. Gless, D. J. (1979). ‘Measure for Measure’, the Law and the Convent. Princeton, Guildford: Princeton University Press. Gratianus (1995). Emil Friedberg and Aemilius Ludwig Richter (eds). Decreti Secunda Pars, Causa XXII. Quaestio V. caput xi. Apud Deum verba nostra non ex ore, sed ex corde procedunt. In Corpus iuris canonici. Pars 1, Decretum magistri Gratiani. Graz: Akademische Druck- u. Verlagsanstalt. Holmes, P. J. (ed.) (1981). Elizabethan casuistry. Catholic Record Society Publications, Records series vol. 67. London: Catholic Record Society. Holmes, P. (1982). Resistance and Compromise. The Political Thought of the Elizabethan Catholics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Huntley, F. L. (1966). ‘Macbeth and the Background of Jesuitical Equivocation’. Proceedings of the Modern Language Association. LXXIX.4. pp. 390–400. Knight, M. and Mason, E. (2009). ‘Saving Literary Criticism’. In M. Knight and L. Lee (eds), Religion, Literature and the Imagination. London: Continuum. pp. 150–61. Malloch, A. E. (1978). ‘Equivocation: a circuit of reasons’, in Patricia Bruckmann (ed.) Familiar colloquy: essays presented to A. E. Barker. Ottawa: Oberon Press. pp. 132–43. ——(1981). ‘Father Henry Garnet’s Treatise of Equivocation’. Recusant History. 15(6). 387–95. Malloch, A. E. and Huntley, F. L. (1966). ‘Some Notes on Equivocation.’ Proceedings of the Modern Language Association. 81(1). 145–6. Miles, R. (1976). The Problem of ‘Measure for Measure’: a Historical Investigation. London: Vision Press. Milward, P. (1978). Religious Controversies of the Jacobean Age: A Survey of Printed Sources. London: Scolar Press. Mullaney, S. (1980). ‘Lying like truth: riddle, representation and treason in Renaissance England’. English Literary History. 47(1). 32–47. Persons, R. (1607). A Treatise Tending to Mitigation. http://eebo.chadwyck.com/ Rose, E. (1975). Cases of Conscience: Alternatives Open to Recusants and Puritans under Elizabeth I and James I. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Sepúlveda, J. G. de (1538). De ratione dicendi testimonium. Valladolid. Shakespeare, W. (1991). Measure for Measure. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sommerville, J. P. (1988). ‘The “new art of lying”: Equivocation, Mental Reservation and Casuistry’, in Edmund Leites (ed.) Conscience and Casuistry in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. pp. 159–84. Zagorin, P. (1990). Ways of Lying: Dissimulation, Persecution, and Conformity in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press.

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Joy, Doubt and Wonder: Contemporary Readings of the Annunciation Arina Cirstea

University of Warwick

Contemporary scholarship (Pelikan, 1996; Cunneen, 1996; Rubin, 2009) has argued that the literature of the past two millennia includes numerous attempts to engage with the elusive figure of the Virgin Mary, and the body of texts currently available suggests that the twentieth century makes no exception. At the turn of the past century, theologian George Tavard wrote that ‘the contemporary development of close relations between the Christian world and the Islamic world’ (Tavard, 1996, p. 32) would benefit from a greater awareness of the role the Virgin Mary (in Arabic Maryam, Mother of Jesus) performs not only in the New Testament and the Christian tradition, but also in the Qur’an and the Islamic tradition. In proposing a comparative reading of fundamental religious texts as a way to enhance cultural dialogue in global society, Tavard anticipates some of the strategies that define the currently emerging interdisciplinary field of world literature and religion. A number of other voices within Christian theology, particularly in the West, have previously recognized the necessity of multicultural dialogue; one of the most notable consequences was the development of the ecumenical movement in the early twentieth century. Aiming to reconcile the issues that have divided the different Christian denominations in the course of history, the movement has been described as ‘one of the most important religious events of the twentieth century’ (Pelikan, 1996, p. 5). The concept of Abrahamic faith that is central to this volume has further widened participation to this dialogue, inviting a re-­examination of the common texts, and indeed the common principles, of three world religions – Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Like Prophet Abraham/Ibrahim, the Virgin Mary/Maryam may be argued to be firmly rooted in all of these religious traditions. By focusing on the contemporary reception of a set of narratives in the New Testament and the Qur’an commonly

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referred to as the Annunciation, this essay will address only in passing issues related to the Judaic heritage that preceded these texts. However, by borrowing insights from both the fields of world literature and literature and religion, it aims to take Tavard’s point one step further and argue that, in contemporary texts, the figure of the Virgin Mary is used not only to mediate an understanding between Christianity and Islam but also between religious and secular experience. The Annunciation (‘Announcement’, Luke 1.26–39) is one of the most lengthy passages in the New Testament engaging with the person of the Virgin Mary, and describes the announcement by the Archangel Gabriel that she would conceive and give birth to Jesus, the Son of God. While proposing a different interpretation of the identity and role of the baby to be born, the Qur’an (19.16–21) presents the Annunciation narrative in strikingly similar details as, if at more length than, the New Testament. This essay however seeks to explore what appears to be an even more pressing question, namely what does the Annunciation mean/what can it mean in contemporary reading? And, following from that, to what extent can this narrative of an encounter between the human and the divine still influence contemporary thinking about matters central to human life, such as conception and pregnancy? In exploring these questions, I will focus on two novels published in the second half of the twentieth century, but written with different agendas in mind, and in response to different religious and cultural traditions. The first is the debut novel of Christian feminist writer Sara Maitland, Daughter of Jerusalem, heralded at its publication in 1978 as the first fully-­fledged British feminist novel (Maitland, 2009, p. 10). The second is the (in)famous postmodernist pastiche of Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses (1988), which brought its author a fatwa by an Iranian tribunal for denigrating Islamic faith, leading to a chain of assassinations, bombings and book-­burnings throughout the world. The comparative reading of the Annunciation in these texts, each controversial in its own context, provides a fresh perspective on the range of meanings that the figure of the Virgin Mary has been invested with in twentieth century (largely secular) world literature. It can hardly escape a reader’s attention that despite its clear feminist allegiance Daughter of Jerusalem reviews critically the principles of second-­wave feminism of the 1970s. These principles were firmly rooted in Betty Friedan’s view that women must dismantle the patriarchal ‘feminine mystique’ by adopting social roles that require ‘initiative, leadership and responsibility’ (Friedan, 2013, p. 335). By contrast, the Biblical Annunciation of the Virgin Mary that Maitland weaves into the plot of her book seemed to promote a model of chaste and submissive

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femininity. Maitland’s character Liz is painfully conscious of the incongruity, while Maitland herself has been one of the first authors to raise awareness about the challenges of engaging with religion and spirituality from within Women’s Liberation Movement (Garcia and Maitland, 1983). Through its references to the New Testament and Marian rituals and prayers, Daughter of Jerusalem displays elements of what Crowe (2007, pp. 23–7) defines as a twentieth-century Catholic novel (Maitland converted to Catholicism in 1993); however it is my view that such a reading obscures the complexity of Maitland’s enterprise. Conversely, it is possible to argue that at this stage in her development as a writer, Maitland’s allegiance to feminism prevails over her other interests, which would explain the apparent paradox of having a text with religious implications hailed as a pioneering feminist novel. Notwithstanding, I would suggest that the true merits of Maitland’s novel come from her effort to rethink the links between religion, literature and experience, from a perspective that can be best described as a form of avant-­la-lettre postsecularism. She achieves this by treading the thin line between faith and scepticism in relation to both the Catholic and the feminist doctrine of the 1970s. On the one hand, Maitland critiques the second-­wave insistence on a unifying female experience by advancing the idea that the experience of the Virgin Mary at the Annunciation, with its mixture of mystery, joy and doubt, can provide an alternative view of conception that contemporary women are missing out on. On the other hand, the novel appears to consolidate a holistic outlook on femininity by suggesting that the Virgin’s Song of Praise (the Magnificat) should be regarded by every woman as a glorification of their ability to bear physical but also spiritual offspring. In both these cases, Maitland attempts to read the Magnificat anachronistically as a feminist text and propose it as the primordial authorization of women’s power throughout time. The novel sets out to explore a range of support systems available to an independent, professional, twentieth-­century woman in her desire to conceive, and finds all equally inadequate. In her ardent pursuit of motherhood, feminist Liz feels ‘cut off ’ from her female friends’ experience, ‘all engaged in avoiding or enduring children’(Maitland, 1995, p.  40). She feels alienated from the maledominated discourse of fertility science as represented by her consultant Dr Marshall, whom she perceives in the course of treatment to turn from ‘scientist’ into ‘moralist’ as he uses his expertise and power over her body to pass moral judgements on her life choices (Maitland, 1995, p. 92). The ritual ‘magic’ of the Black Madonna and fertility prayers is also rejected (Maitland, 1995, p. 91); feminist Liz agonizes over the difficulties of reconciling a traditional Catholic

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approach to conception and pregnancy with the secular and materialist worldview that the Women’s Liberation Movement regards as the key to women’s emancipation. It is nonetheless significant that the first positive experience that rekindles Liz’s confidence in her ability to conceive is triggered by the celebration of Nativity. Maitland engages with the Annunciation early in the novel, however she seems to acknowledge that her message needs time to sink in with both her character and a (potentially) similarly minded feminist readership. Liz regains her confidence by embracing the central idea in Maitland’s reading of the Annunciation, namely that ‘assent becomes the moment of conception’ (Maitland, 1995, p.  34). For Maitland, assent does not undermine freedom, but renders possible the identification of the Virgin Mary with ‘a womanhood so vital and empowered that it could break free of biology and submission’ to male dominance (Maitland, 1995, p. 34), thus consolidating a truly emancipated female identity. A similar interpretation of the Annunciation, it may be argued, is achieved by Rushdie, yet with different means. By displacing the focus of attention from his character Ayesha’s role as potential mother to her mission as a spiritual leader, Rushdie highlights how assent and faith can become instrumental in the development of a model of independent and authoritative femininity. Admittedly this approach may have been determined by the fact that Rushdie does not model Ayesha exclusively on the figure of the Virgin Mary, but also on other central women in Islam, including her namesake A’isha, the wife of the Prophet and narrator of sacred teachings (Schleifer, 2008, p. 150). In a study on Islamic Mariology, Schleifer additionally comments that in Islam the Virgin Mary’s role as mother is ‘de-­emphasized’ (Schleifer, 2008, p. 53), and focus is placed on the attributes of her exceptional femininity. Maitland’s point that at Annunciation the Virgin Mary’s assent leads to physical conception is firmly rooted in the Christian exegesis of the New Testament. This assent, whose essence is captured in the Virgin’s words ‘Behold, I am the servant of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word’ (Luke, 1.38), has been described as central in establishing her place within all denominations of the Christian faith (Pelikan, 1996, p. 20). Pelikan suggests that, while Abraham has been described as ‘the father of all them that believe’ (Romans 4.11 cited in Pelikan 1996, p. 20), through her life-­changing and life-­creating assent the Virgin can be seen as ‘the mother of all them that believe’ (Pelikan, 1996, p.  20). Extrapolating, it may be pointed out that just like Abraham/Ibrahim’s act of faith, the Annunciation is placed at the crossroads between the three Abrahamic faiths, as it not only provides common ground between Christianity and Islam, but also

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through the Virgin’s traditionally acknowledged background as a devout Jew incorporates the essential principles of Hebrew faith. Maitland’s is not a secular feminist Mariology that applies the interpretive tools of cultural materialism to the text of the New Testament (see Schaberg, 2005). Even in the most radical productions at this early stage in her career (and more prominently so in her recent work), Maitland adopts a perspective that does not rule out the transcendental. The novelty of her intervention in the Annunciation consists in the re-­interpretation of assent as a step towards power and freedom rather than the straightforward ‘obedience’ that it has been traditionally associated with (Pelikan, 1996, p.  20). The idea of conscious acceptance of divine will as a source of individual freedom is not extraneous to Christian doctrine; one of its most popular expressions comes from the words of Jesus in the New Testament: ‘If you abide in my word, you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free’ (John 8. 31–2). Maitland’s reading extends this principle to the context of the Annunciation, and adapts its significance for the benefit of the feminist reader. Maitland draws support for this interpretation from further engagement with the Virgin’s presence in the New Testament, in particular the Visitation of her cousin Elizabeth. Elizabeth is the first person to confirm the divine message of the Annunciation through her greeting: ‘Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb!’ (Luke 1.42). The Virgin’s response is known as the Magnificat (Luke 1.46–55), and provides her own interpretation of the recent events as a triumph of ‘those of humble estate’ over ‘the proud’ and ‘the mighty’ of the world. In both Christian and Islamic exegesis, humility is presented as one of many exceptional qualities possessed by the Virgin Mary (Pelikan, 1996; Schleifer, 2008). Rewriting the life of the Virgin from a twentieth-­century perspective, Maitland and Rushdie are aware that in well-­knit communities, being exceptional takes on negative connotations. Both Maitland’s Liz and Rushdie’s Ayesha live on the margin of their respective societies, Liz cherishing the illusion that she belongs to a community of likeminded women, Ayesha taking pride in her isolation. Maitland suggests that the Virgin’s Song of Praise celebrates precisely the triumph of those women who are ‘too much not exactly like everyone else’ (1995, p. 55), heralding a ‘new order’ in which the very habits, beliefs and rules that regulated community life will be seriously shaken. Maitland’s main argument seems to be that contemporary women like Liz could only benefit from acknowledging their own difference, and embracing the rich meanings – the joy, the wonder, the self-­doubt – that biblical texts like the

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Annunciation associate with womanhood. More tentatively, she seems to hint that, through her courageous act of assent, the Virgin Mary could also provide a model of femininity that is missing from the feminist discourse of her generation. As Pelikan points out, the Marian presence in the New Testament is ‘tantalizingly brief ’ (1996, p.  8); while regrettable, this scarcity has enabled the Virgin to become ‘relevant to men and women’ (1996, p.  21) in many times and places. Maitland’s novel attempts in the first instance to extend this relevance to the new generation of British feminist readers, but at the same time to provide access to a feminist interpretation of Christian texts to more traditional Christian readers. This has placed the novel’s reception at the intersection between conflicting religious and secular ideologies, one of the many common points that it shares with Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses. The Satanic Verses has been discussed at length from the perspective of the interaction between literature and religion, with a focus on a series of disruptive oppositions such as faith/irreverence, blasphemy/freedom of speech, magic realism/historical inaccuracy, cosmopolitanism/regionalism (Kuortti, 2007; Warnes, 2009; Spencer, 2011; Mondal, 2013). Bhabha famously summed up the chain of controversies sparked by the novel’s publication as a ‘war’ between two equally rigid ideologies, the ‘cultural imperatives of the Western liberalism’, and the ‘fundamentalist interpretations of Islam’ (Appignanesi and Maitland, 1990, p.  112). Rallying in defence of Rushdie, postcolonial scholarship of the 1990s generally agreed that, as Said pointed out, The Satanic Verses is ‘a great novel’ and ‘a great challenge’ to the ‘settled habits’ of not only ‘religious orthodoxies but national and cultural as well’ (Said, 1994, p. 260). More recently however, writing from the viewpoint of Islamic studies, scholars such as Mondal have questioned the novel’s ability to keep an equal distance from all ideological certainties, and pointed the extent of its reliance on the values of Western secular liberalism. This ideological position is denounced as ‘self-­transgression’, as betrayal of the novelist’s self-­confessed allegiance to the postmodernist doctrine of epistemological scepticism (Mondal, 2013, p. 433). I would argue that, while to a certain extent justified by the cultural climate of the fatwa, any representation of Rushdie’s novel as a heroic cultural intervention ends up disregarding one of the key aspects of the novel, its tremendous self-­ irony. Spencer notes that ‘largely as a result of its distinctively self-­critical form [. . .], The Satanic Verses is a means of unmasking the contestability of texts and of the voices that they dramatise’ (Spencer, 2011, p. 142). A point that has been frequently overlooked is that the novel not only directs its irony towards the textual authorities of tradition, but also towards its own authority as modern

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critical discourse, and through a number of strategies such as inflated theatricality and tongue-­in-cheek use of language and character signals its unwillingness to take anything in earnest, including its own critical arguments. From this perspective, The Satanic Verses is best described not as ‘a great novel’, but rather as a failed novel: a text celebrating the failure of the great Western novel. This ingredient of Rushdie’s narrative technique equally undermines Mondal’s argument. This essay will argue that through an engagement with the Annunciation in the Ayesha episode, The Satanic Verses undermines their own secular scepticism, and, however tentatively, opens up towards the exploration of new epistemological possibilities. From its highly theatrical beginning, evoking a music hall version of the fall of Satan from the heavens, The Satanic Verses dwells on almost every known convention and genre in the repository of Western art, mixing them up in a carnivalesque manner. This ironic use of intertextuality is typical of the genre identified as postmodern pastiche, and has often been used as a justification for Rushdie’s affiliation with postmodernism. Postmodern theorist Fredric Jameson has noted that, unlike parody, which transforms its material with satirical intentions, the postmodern pastiche is pure imitation of ‘dead styles’, leading to an almost complete undermining of subjectivity/authorial voice (Jameson, 1993, p. 17). While the applicability of Jameson’s definition is limited by the unequivocal critical intention of The Satanic Verses, it may still be useful as a standpoint from which to question the novel’s ability to support its own ideological premises. Contrary to Spencer’s interpretation of The Satanic Verses as an urge to ‘refuse to choose’ (Spencer, 2011), I would argue that the novel highlights how an enforced identity is stifling, but at the same time how not choosing – or not being able to choose – from a multitude of options can be equally detrimental. In the Ayesha section of the novel, participation in a religious pilgrimage is arguably presented as an act of individual choice, while the concerted efforts to dissuade the pilgrims from completing their journey expose the hollowness of social conventions and secular reasoning. In particular, doubter Mirza Saeed’s inability to either fully join or abandon the pilgrim convoy may be seen to reflect negatively upon the ambivalent position of a secular spectator to religious experience; he is always on the outside, looking in, unable to fully grasp the situation at any time, and watching the strength of his own secular convictions gradually wear out. There is little doubt that, amalgamating the multifarious demands of his role as a postcolonial migrant, postmodern scholar and popular author, Rushdie’s

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identity as a writer is a product of Western academic and publishing practices, including the secular liberalism that has regulated these practices over the past decades. The novelty of Rushdie’s intervention in these practices, however, comes precisely from his ability to facilitate an encounter between the Western and Eastern worldviews that does not fully embrace either. I would argue that Mondal’s inability to see the novel’s gesture towards self-­critique derives from a misinterpretation of the question of ‘good faith’ that has become central in Rushdie’s defensive response to the negative reception of the novel in the Islamic world. Through the appropriation of words like ‘good’ and ‘faith’ in the title of this defence (Rushdie, 1990), Rushdie seems to aim at placating his critics; however I would argue that his use of religious vocabulary is at least ironic, and that there is virtually no common ground between his understanding of ‘faith’ as an individualistic, malleable postmodern concept and the epistemological concept of faith that underlies the Muslim religious experience. At any rate, the association of definite qualifiers such as ‘good’ or ‘faithful’ with an ambivalent text like The Satanic Verses is at best a paradox, and, as Mondal’s analysis proves, further widens rather than bridging the gap between secular and religious interpretations. The conflict between faith and doubt has in fact been acknowledged as one of the key themes of the novel (Warnes, 2009, p. 105). In a highly intuitive essay, Warnes reads The Satanic Verses in the context of magic realism, one of the most successful trends in contemporary world literature, noting that while the Latin American tradition of magic realism often invests faith with a positive value, Rushdie represents ‘the irreverent strand of the mode’ (Warnes, 2009, p. 97). He further contends that even Rushdie’s texts include the occasional glimpse at the other-­worldly reality, and in The Satanic Verses such a glimpse is represented by the Ayesha episode. Frequently overlooked in critical analyses, this episode calls for a reading from the perspective of literature and religion due to the atypical way in which it frames a religious narrative. Rushdie’s work has frequently been related to the postcolonial metropolis; however here he deals with a rural space that can be linked both to the rural trend in Indian writing and the influence of Latin American magic realism, in particular Garcia Marquez’s ‘village world-­view’ (Rushdie cited in Warnes, 2009, p.  103). While the whole episode is remotely projected as one of the troubled dreams of main character Gibreel Farishta, the extra-­worldly experience of peasant girl Ayesha is unequivocally presented as an act of beauty, with the fairytale image of the swarms of butterflies covering the girl’s naked body like a ‘dress of the most delicate material in the universe’

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(Rushdie, 1998, p.  225) that is most unusual for Rushdie’s style. I agree with Warnes that ‘Rushdie’s butterflies can be read as an objective correlative of the states of faith induced in and by Ayesha’ (Warnes, 2009, p. 103), leaving the door open for an ambiguous interpretation of faith instead of the satirical one with which Rushdie has accustomed his readers. It is also possible to suggest that the village – both as a symbol of rural India and a trope in Latin American writing – is something of a mystery for Rushdie, which makes it a more likely space for staging a genuine experience of faith, or at least one that cannot be readily dismissed. Another intriguing aspect of the Ayesha narrative comes from its rich and varied levels of intertextuality. The religious text that has most often been invoked in connection with The Satanic Verses is the Qur’an, but few commentators have highlighted the links between this episode and the Virgin Mary’s Annunciation in the New Testament. Like the Virgin, Ayesha is visited by an other-­worldly messenger while alone, after ‘she withdrew from her people’ (Qur’an, 19:16). The scene is narrated twice, first from the selective perspective of the omniscient narrator and then from the subjective one of puzzled ‘dreamer’ Gibreel Farishta, who laments over the recollection of the episode, unable to understand either his role or Ayesha’s interpretation of it: ‘Damn me if I know from where that girl was getting her information/inspiration. Not from this quarter, that’s sure’ (Rushdie, 1998, p. 226). Both in the Bible and the Qur’an, the first reaction of the Virgin Mary at the news conveyed by God’s messenger is doubt: ‘How can I have a son when no mortal hath touched me?’ (Qur’an, 19:21). Rushdie takes Maitland’s Christian feminist interpretation of the Annunciation one step further, by radically reversing the power balances; the element of doubt and self-­doubt is transferred onto Gibreel, while rustic Ayesha behaves in a self-­assured, almost authoritative manner. This leaves Gibreel an uncomprehending spectator to her joy: ‘She was still nodding, with a rapt expression on her face, receiving a message from somewhere that she called Gibreel’ (Rushdie, 1998, p. 226). His farcical confusion gives some credibility to the hint that Ayesha may have received her ‘inspiration’ from other ‘quarters’. The framing of the Ayesha narrative within Gibreel’s dream has previously been seen as a strategy to undermine the transcendental significance of the episode (Warnes, 2009, p. 103); Gibreel’s confused lamentations seem to confirm this view. However, it is not without significance that Gibreel himself is not the most reliable of narrators, either as a delusional Bollywood star or a modern type of spiritual leader, unable to justify or indeed recognize his own teachings.

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At best, Gibreel may be seen as yet another ironic representation of the secular reader of sacred text, resolutely cut off from all sources of faith, but unable to convincingly sustain irreverence either. Ayesha’s own perspective is not presented, further limiting the possibility of a stable interpretation. Rushdie’s choice here may have been influenced by the traditional presentation of the episode, which similarly excludes the view of the Virgin Mary. Another important absence is the confirmation that Ayesha will bear a son, which distances the event from the key purpose of the Annunciation. Within these limitations, the sharp contrast between Gibreel’s farcical mystification and the physical manifestations of Ayesha’s experience, her ‘white’ hair, ‘luminous’ skin and magnificent lepidopteral trail, supports an interpretation of the episode in terms of what Warnes calls ‘an example of faith-­based magical realism’ (Warnes, 2009, p. 103). In the wake of this mysterious occurrence in the woods, Ayesha conceives a new version of herself as a confident and charismatic spiritual leader. Her immediate reaction is to address the village headman in words that evoke the Magnificat, a text that is only present in the New Testament: ‘Greatness has come among us’, she declares, adding the motto that will subsequently guide her and her followers: ‘Everything will be required of us, and everything will be given us also’ (Rushdie, 1998, p. 225). Like Maitland before him, through this allusion to the Magnificat Rushdie may be implying that the central outcome of the Annunciation is not so much physical as psychological transformation. As she uses her newly gained charisma to lead the people of her village on a journey of penitence, Ayesha becomes associated through a number of textual hints with Moses (in Arabic Musa), acknowledged as an authoritative foundational figure in both the Old Testament and the Qur’an. The pilgrimage is met with hostility by both secular and religious authorities, and culminates in a rather ambiguous plunge into the waters of the Arabian Sea. Like Ayesha’s encounter with Gibreel, the meaning of this episode is suspended between the transcendental and the mundane, with different witnesses describing it as apotheosis or collective suicide. It is significant however that one of the key witnesses, resolute doubter Mirza Saeed, subsequently reconsiders his secular interpretation of the event, possibly prompted by the proximity of his own death. Through the high level of ambiguity permeating the Ayesha narrative, Rushdie, however tentatively, explores the possibilities of a spiritual level of existence liberated from postmodernist self-­doubt and the constraints of authority. Even if the novel remains uncertain as to the lot of Ayesha and her followers, her story is a narrative of conception that – like the original Annunciation – might be read as a challenge to both comfortable notions of

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materialism and of religious experience. While acknowledging the spiritual connotation of the episode, Warnes warns that Rushdie is merely ‘toying with’ (Warnes, 2009, p. 104) the possibilities of a faith-­based narrative, and the satirical scepticism permeating the rest of the novel as well as Rushdie’s other writings makes this a point hard to contest. Like Maitland’s Daughter of Jerusalem, Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses propose a twentieth-­century reading of the Annunciation that is imbued with a range of Western and non-Western discursive and narrative traditions, both secular and religious. This diversity turns these texts into sites of conflict between secular and non-­secular worldviews, which makes them particularly suitable for an analysis from the perspective of literature and religion. Though approaching the theme from radically different perspectives, these novels suggest that the sacred text of the Annunciation continues to engage the contemporary imagination, and still has the potential to be a source of existential questions or indeed answers for readers of contemporary world literature.

References Appignanesi, L. and Maitland, S. (eds) (1990). The Rushdie File. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press. Bhabha, H. (1990). ‘Homi Bhabha’. In L. Appignanesi and S. Maitland (eds), The Rushdie File. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press. pp. 112–14. Crowe, M. (2007). Aiming at Heaven, Getting the Earth. The English Catholic Novel Today. Plymouth: Lexington. Cunneen, S. (1996). In Search of Mary. The Woman and the Symbol. New York: Ballantine. Friedan, B. (2013). The Feminine Mystique, 1963. New York: Norton. Garcia, J. and Maitland, S. (1983). ‘Introduction’. In J. Garcia and S. Maitland (eds), Walking on the Water. Women Talk About Spirituality. London: Virago. pp. 1–6. Holy Bible (2001). English Standard Version, Crossway. BibleGateway.com Jameson, F. (1993). Postmodernism or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. London and New York: Verso. Kuortti, J. (2007). ‘The Satanic Verses: “To be born again, first you have to die” ’. In A. Gurnah (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to Salman Rushdie. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, pp. 125–38. Maitland, S. (1995). Daughter of Jerusalem, 1978. New York: Henry Holt. —— (2009). A Book of Silence, 2008. London: Granta. Mondal, A. A. (2013). ‘ “Representing the very ethic he battled”: Secularism, Islam(ism) and Self-­transgression in The Satanic Verses’. Textual Practice. 27(3). 419–37.

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Pelikan, J. (1996). Mary Through the Centuries. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. The Qu’ran (1946). (trans.) Abdulah Yusuf Ali. HolyBooks.com. Rubin, M. (2009). The Mother of God. A History of the Virgin Mary. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Rushdie, S. (1990). ‘In Good Faith’. In Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981–1991. London: Granta. pp. 393–414. —— (2006). The Satanic Verses. 1988, London: Vintage. Said, E. W. (1994). ‘Against the Orthodoxies’, in A. Abdallah (ed.) For Rushdie: Essays by Arab and Muslim Writers in Defence of Free Speech. New York: George Braziller. 260–302. Schaberg, J. (2005). ‘Feminist Interpretations of the Infancy Narrative of Matthew’, in A.-J. Levine with M. Mayo Robbins (eds), A Feminist Companion to Mariology. London and New York: Continuum. 1537. Schleifer, A. (2008). Mary the Blessed Virgin of Islam. 3rd edn. Louisville, KY: Fons Vitae. Spencer, R. (2011). Cosmopolitan Criticism and Postcolonial Literature. Houndsmills and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Tavard, G. (1996). The Thousand Faces of the Virgin Mary. Collegeville, MI: The Liturgical Press. Warnes, C. (2009). Magic Realism and the Postcolonial Novel: Between Faith and Irreverence. Houndsmills and New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Part Four

Islam

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Islam: Introduction Ziauddin Sardar

East West University, Chicago

He is a genius, amoral hacker. He provides anonymous online technical support to all variety of people in the Muslim world: revolutionaries, bloggers, censors, spies, even pornographers. Anyone from Pakistan to Palestine who can pay can have their identities and locations hidden from prying eyes, or from regimes eager to silence dissident and depraved voices. He is not into politics or ideology; he justifies his profession by chants of freedom of information. He lives and works from a dilapidated duplex in the workers’ district of ‘the City’, an authoritarian enclave with ‘one of the most sophisticated digital policing systems in the world, but no proper mail service’,  ‘princes in silver-­plated cars’ but ‘districts with no running water’. But his anonymous world of hackers is not without its enemies, the arch one being ‘the Hand of God’, a brilliant state censor and spy master, who watches his every move and is determined to catch him. G. Willow Wilson’s Alif the Unseen is a dazzlingly imaginative novel. But how do we classify its genre? Is it, as Pauls Toutonghi asks in a New York Times review, ‘literary fiction? A fantasy novel? A dystopian techno-­thriller? An exemplar of Islamic mysticism, with ties to the work of the Sufi poets?’ (Toutonghi, 2012). Can we describe it as an ‘Islamic novel’, a new and original addition to Islamic literature? What is ‘Islamic literature’ anyway? Or to put it another way: what is the relationship between Islam and literature? Alif ’s megacity, located ‘at a crossroads between the earthly world and the Empty Quarter, the domain of ghouls and effrit who can take the shapes of beasts’, is an amalgam of a number of Muslim cities. It has elements of Cairo and Lahore, sprawling in all directions, with street vendors competing for your attention at every corner. It could be Jeddah or Riyadh, adjacent to the famous Empty Quarter, with its princes and secret police, rabid fundamentalists and alienated landscapes. Alif himself is a mixture of Arab and Indian lineage, involved in a doomed love affair with a princess, and blind to hijab-­covered

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pious Dina, his keenly observant neighbour. But it is not just the setting of Alif the Unseen that is distinctly a product of Islamic culture. Wilson playfully combines a number of elements of classical Islamic literature with contemporary concerns of Muslim societies. The narrative takes off when the princess passes an ancient manuscript to Alif. Alf Yeom, or Thousand Days, is an Arabian Nights equivalent of Jinn literature, dictated by an enslaved Jinni to a Persian mystic in ancient times. But, unlike Arabian Nights, it is said to contain a secret: the formula for making a quantum supercomputer. Not surprisingly, the spy master ‘Hand of God’ wants to get his hands on the manuscript. When Alif creates a programme that can identify a user by any text they type, and his location is betrayed, he is forced to go on the run. He is captured and tortured, but eventually escapes with the help of a renegade prince. His quest to discover the mysteries of Alf Yeom leads him to the Unseen world of the Jinn where computers crash and Wifi is widely available. En route, he acquires a number of companions: Sheikh Biblal, an elderly liberal Imam; NewQuarter, the renegade prince with a social conscience; a young American woman known simply as ‘the convert’; an assorted variety of Jinns; and the totally devoted Dina. Questions of faith and issues of Muslim societies pop up frequently within the fast-­paced and witty narrative. The Sheikh, as one would expect, makes frequent references to the Qur’an, which he sees as a book of metaphors: ‘knowledge existing in several states simultaneously and without contradiction’ (Wilson, 2012). It can thus be interpreted in numerous ways; each interpretation as valid as the other: ‘they say that each word in the Qur’an has seven thousand layers of meaning, each of which, though some might seem contrary or simply unfathomable to us, exist equally at all times without cosmological contradiction’ (Wilson, 2012). Like Alif himself, Sheikh Bilal too has been tortured by the ‘unclean and uncivilised’ state. ‘Shall I tell you what I discovered’, he asks Alif. ‘I am not the dirt on my hands or the hygiene of my private parts. If I were these things, I would not have been at liberty to pray . . . But I did pray, because I am not these things . . . I am not even myself. I am a string of bones speaking the word God’ (Wilson, 2012). The main protagonists, Alif and Dina, behave impeccably according to orthodox Islamic principles. Sex comes after and not before marriage: ‘he would not touch her until she permitted him, until he had spoken to her father and made it all right’ (Wilson, 2012). None of the main characters in the book drink. ‘When they put something in front of me’, says the renegade prince NewQuarter, ‘I panic’ (Wilson, 2012). The main characters constantly raise questions of identity and what it means to be a Muslim in a globalized, complex world.

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Alif the Unseen is perhaps the most consciously written ‘Islamic novel’ of recent times. That is to say, it determinedly sets within and presents its narrative from the perspective of Islam. Wilson, a committed, hijab-­clad convert to Islam, is also the creator of Kamala Khan, a 16-year-­old superhero of Pakistani background. Kamala is the first Muslim superhero in the Marvel pantheon, which includes Thor, Iron Man and Captain America. Once again, Wilson portrays Kamala as a distinctively Muslim teenager; she frets about her faith and identity as much as Batman broods about his manic depression. In her memoir, The Butterfly Mosque, Wilson argues that in Islam ‘the things that are most precious, most perfect and most holy are always hidden: the Kaaba, the faces of prophets and angels, a woman’s body, Heaven’ (Wilson, 2010, p. 137). So Wilson’s fiction, and much of Islamic literature, seeks to explore the hidden self of Islam. But it does more: as Ziad Elmarsafy argues in his contribution on Naguib Mahfouz, it also aims ‘to trace the memory of self and art’. It would thus be wrong to read self-­conscious Islamic fiction, or indeed Islamic literature in general, as something that is focused firmly on dogma and personal beliefs of Muslims. If that were indeed the case, then it would hardly classify as ‘literature’, let alone ‘great literature’. The literature that is produced from within an Islamic perspective may or may not address what Maryam Farahani calls ‘Muslim’s yearning for religious passion’ but it certainly represents Muslims as human and humane characters struggling simultaneously with their historic memory and the complexities of a contemporary world. As such, it needs to be read simply as literature; and examined on its own terms, rather than, as Farahani notes, seen ‘through the lens of Orientalism and postcolonial studies’. But the problem is not simply how literature from the Islamic perspective is read by western scholars. The representation of Islam and Muslim in western literature, where all too frequently Muslims are portrayed as nasty, brutish folks with hardly any redeeming features, is equally problematic. And it is not a post9/11 phenomenon either. Rather, it has a long and noble lineage going back to such hardy perennials of Western literature as Flaubert, Voltaire and Camus (Sardar, 1999). For contemporary neo-­con writers like Amis, McEwan and Naipaul, Muslims by definition are inhuman creatures; their only function is to be painted with all the colours of darkness (Sardar, 2006). Indeed, it can be argued that the ‘western novel’ would not have evolved and developed the way it has, if Muslims did not exist in Western consciousness as prototypes of everything that is unsavoury and evil about the world. The category ‘Islamic literature’ presents us with another serious problem: it is assumed that Islamic literature is basically Arabic literature. There are historic

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reasons for this. The late Franz Rosenthal, a noted scholar of Arabic literature, argued that the definition of ‘Islamic literature’ can be traced back to the Fihirst, the comprehensive catalogue of books compiled by the tenth century bibliophile and bookseller Ibn al-Nadim. Top of al-Nadim’s list are the Qur’an and Qur’anic sciences, as Rosenthal argues, it should be (Rosenthal, 1974). But the Qur’an is not just a revealed book; it is also a literary text of incomparable importance; it is the basic source for grammatical and lexicographical information and the standard for theories of literary criticism. So as far as al-Nadim was concerned, knowledge of Qur’anic Arabic was a prerequisite for any literary endeavour. But even that was not enough: you also had to know the works of grammarians and lexicographers, who come immediately after the Qur’an in al-Nadim’s classification. We then move to history and historians who provide a context for the evolution and development of both religion and Arabic language. Only then we arrive at poetry; and prose comes way after philosophy and natural sciences. However, al-Nadim was not the only one to connect Islamic literature to Arabic. Classifications of knowledge produced in the ninth century by al-Kindi and al-Farabi also presented Islamic literature as something that could only be produced in the Arabic language. Even Ibn Khaldun, a harsh critic of Arab historians, saw Islamic literature as subservient to Arabic. ‘The skilful and artistic handling of language, as the first requirement of all creative literary activity’, notes Rosenthal, ‘tended to reinforce the pre-­eminence of Arabic among the languages spoken by Muslim people’ (Rosenthal, 1974, p.  322). Thus, in the Muslim world itself Arabic literature became synonymous with Islamic literature at the expense of literature produced from an Islamic perspective in numerous other languages. The emergence of the ‘adab movement in classical Islam further strengthened this tendency. ‘Adab, literally the etiquette of being a human, is associated with the rise of liberal humanism in Islam. ‘Adab monographs and anthologies offered the best of poetry and prose, belles-­lettres and narratives, ethical theory and topology, as a guide to human behaviour and understanding the self. The ‘adab movement also developed a sophisticated system of teaching law, literature and humanism that involved not just institutions such as the university, with faculties of law, theology, medicine and philosophy, but also an elaborate mode of instruction including work-­study courses, curriculum for teaching grammar, rhetoric, poetry, literature, history, medicine and moral philosophy, and a mechanism for the formation of a humanist culture that produces men of letters such as academic associations, literary circles, clubs and coteries. When Europe adopted this system in its totality, including the textbooks, the European humanists felt that they could match the classical Arabic only by another classical

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language, Latin, a language not quite their own. They thus reproduced the same errors that are associated with Islamic humanism: the horror of barbarism and solecism. As George Makdisi, who has spent a lifetime studying how Islam humanized Europe, shows so painstakingly, there was hardly any aspect of Islamic humanism, good or bad, which Europe did not copy: from slogans to a sense of uniformity in dress codes and general conduct; from emphasis on eloquence and display of literary prowess to the cult of classical language; from the works on government administration as part of moral philosophy to the history of cities, the novella, practical and speculative grammar to historical and textual criticism (Makdisi, 1990). All the literary endeavours of the Muslim world were thus seen, in the East as well as the West, to be produced solely in the Arabic language. Yet, even during the classical period, a great deal of Islamic literature was produced in languages other than Arabic. As Farahani notes, ‘from the eleventh to thirteenth century, the art of versification in Persia flourished with a magnificent rise in the production of lyric poetry and ghazal, bearing Sufi and mystical content while praising God with allegorical paradigms of story-­telling’. Indeed, a great deal of Sufi literature, a major component of Islamic literature, has been produced in Persian, Turkish, Urdu, Panjabi, Bengali and Pashto. In Urdu, the mystical poetry of Bulleh Shah, Varis Shah, Shah Abdul Latif – their stories of Hir, Sassi and Sohni and Saiful Muluk – are as powerful as anything written by great Sufis in Arabic (Shackle, 2013). The ghazal, which consists of rhyming couplets and a refrain, received a boost in the Moghul courts and the Sultanates of south India. Moreover, Arabic was not the dominate language of the Muslim world for a considerable period of history – it was Ottoman Turkish. The problem of equating Arabic literature with all Islamic literature is well illustrated by Roger Allen’s An Introduction to Arabic Literature. Arabic, notes Allen, is a ‘diglossic’ language; native-­speakers use different registers of language according to local and regional conditions and situations (Allen, 2000, p.  12). Thus, most Arabs do not speak Arabic but a colloquial dialect – and these vary considerably from region to region; and local literature is often produced in a local dialect. For example, the official language of Morocco is Arabic, but, writes Robin Yassin-Kassab: up to 45% of Moroccans speak a Berber (more properly, Amazigh) language: Tashelhit in the south, Tamazight in the Centre, Tamarif in the north. Almost all of the remaining 55% (except perhaps for the speakers of Arabic’s Hassaniya dialect, found in small southern and eastern settlements) are of

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partly Amazigh ancestry. Morocco’s most widely spoken language is Durija, Moroccan Arabic, which, by its music, vocabulary and grammatical peculiarities, is Arabic mapped onto an Amazigh base. It has a distinctive rhythm in which a phrase sounds like a shrug; its vowels are either elided (so Kareem becomes Krim) or lengthened (so Mohsin becomes Mohseen). There is a case to be made that Classical Arabic (or its Modern Standard version) is an elite language in Morocco, one that preserves elite power, that it’s even perhaps in some way a little ‘foreign’ – but Durija is as Moroccan as couscous. (Yassin-Kassab, 2014)

And these dialects are not a new phenomenon; they emerged, as Allen states, right at the formative period of Islam and Islamic literature. If associating Islamic literature with Arabic is problematic for the classical period, it is even more so in today’s globalized world. Literature from an Islamic perspective comes from all over the world: apart from the Arab world, the Maghreb, Senegal, Mauritania, Somalia and Chad, suggests Allen, it incorporates ‘Iran, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Malaysia, Afghanistan, and Indonesia as well as Tadzhikistan, India, the Philippines, China, France, Britain and the United States’ (Allen, 2000, p. 12). It is produced in a plethora of languages, including the most Islamic of all modern languages – English! Given that Islamic literature is global literature, it should not surprise us to note that it does not exist in isolation. There is, of course, the influence of the classics of the past as well as the echoes of Islamic history; but also cross-­ pollination from western writers and thinkers. In his analysis of Mahfouz’s Children of the Alley (1996) and The Harafish (1995), Elmarsafy detects the influence of Henri Bergson as well as a reworking of the works on the theory of dreams by al-Kindī and al-Farabī, the neoplatonic corpus of Ikhwān al-S. afā (Brethren of Purity), and Rūmi. Bergson also influenced Muhammad Iqbal, the great poet and philosopher of the subcontinent. Both Iqbal and Mahfouz were influenced by Sufism; both seeking an ‘aesthetic link with beauty and creation’ and the ‘eternally renewed aim’ of freedom, equality and justice. Much of what Elmarsafy says about Mahfouz’s work, ‘the persistence of memory’, ‘the virtual coexistence of past and the present’, and the ‘process by which the past becomes contemporaneous with the present that it once was’, is equally true of Iqbal’s poetry – as well as many great Muslim writers, past and present. Indeed, it would be difficult to find a contemporary Muslim writer of note who is not influenced by Rūmi, as well as Hafiz and Attar, the three Persian Sufi poets discussed by Farahani. While all Sufi poets have their own individual styles

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and expressions, they employ, as Farahani shows, analogous rhetorical devices and, sometimes, the same metaphors, giving them their own particular twists. The overall point is that Sufi poetry – not just in Persian vernacular but also in Urdu, Panjabi, Pashto, Bhasa Indonesia, Turkish and other languages – expresses ‘realities of one being’,   ‘manifesting diverse specifications of one universal reality’ as Farahani notes; and as Shackle argues ‘this mystical perception of the unity of all things in the divine is not a merely intellectual one. It is a dynamic process which is pursued through love, the source of both man’s greatest delights and his most acute emotional suffering’ (Shackle, 2013, p. 35). However, ‘universal reality’ is not the sole prerogative of Sufi poetry. It plays an equally important part in much of contemporary fiction from Islamic perspective. The fiction of Aamer Hussein, a modern master of Muslim short stories, provides a good illustration. Memory, autobiography, illusions to Sufi thought, references to classical Muslim philosophers, and raw emotion all merge in Hussein’s short stories that appear to have been written with indelible ink. Hussein’s character struggle with doubt, memory (‘every word I write here is as true as memory can make it’, says one of his characters [Hussein, 2012b, p. 48]), their Muslim identity and beliefs (‘As a Muslim I know I have the God-­given right to protest against unjust rulers’, declares another, a journalist [Hussein, 2012b, p.  147]), their emotions of joy and pain, against the background of recognizable cities caught between tradition and modernity. But memory in Hussein’s fiction is not just the memory of Islamic history, it is also the memory of Urdu culture. His fiction often pays a tribute to Urdu novels and poetry; and celebrated Urdu writers and poets often make a cameo appearance. For example, in The Cloud Messenger (Hussein, 2012a), which takes its title from a Sanskrit poem by Kalidasa, the narrator of the novel has a passion for Urdu, Persian and English; his mother, a singer, haunts his childhood memories by singing the ghazals of celebrated Urdu poets Ghalib and Faiz. Hussein’s stories have a lyrical quality and distinct flavour of Arabian Nights, and many are set in Pakistani cities, such as Karachi and Lahore, as, for example, in his collection, Turquoise. But his characters, like Hussein himself, move between different worlds and often find themselves in Britain, India, Uganda or Bangladesh. The protagonist of The Cloud Messenger is a nomad, born in Karachi but brought up in London, constantly looking for new places to seek love and appreciation of language and art. Hussein is also fascinated by film; and allusions to films sometime crop up in his fiction. The title of a short story in Turquoise is taken from the Chinese phrase for the silver screen: ‘Electric Shadows’. In The Cloud Messenger, the evocation of the protagonist’s childhood is as detailed as a vibrant photograph. In the episodic

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‘The Man from Beni Mora’, the short story presented here, film plays a dominant role: we cut from an invented Pakistani drama serial called Ghazali to the thoughts and deeds of an academic researching the celebrated eleventh century Muslim theologian and philosopher al-Ghazali. But there are many al-Ghazalis here: from the past, the present, and possibly from the future. Not least the Ghazali (1969) of Fatima Mubeen’s novel, which provided the inspiration for the story, and which deals, like Hussein’s story, with a conflict between faith and doubt, embodied respectively by the male and the female protagonist. The story has all the hallmarks of Hussein’s fiction, and the best of Islamic literature: a Muslim aesthetic reminiscent of great Sufi literature, exploration of memory and identity, nods towards Muslim thinkers, engagement with modernity, an amalgam where, to use Elmarsafy’s words in relation to Mahfouz,  ‘art is produced and reproduced in a socially just context’. That in essence is the function of Islamic literature; and it makes Muslim literary enterprise, of past and the present, distinctively global in nature. To read Islamic literature as though it was concerned solely with the imaginative and emotional content of Islam is insipid, unjust and insulting. But historicizing it to the point where all religious emotional content is drained is equally erroneous. What literature from an Islamic perspective sets out to do is to present believing Muslims who do their utmost to live by their faith and tradition. Not everyone sees faith as an ossified, overbearing cross that crushes its followers and transforms them into proverbial, all-­too-familiar, ‘fanatics’ and ‘fundamentalists’. Many Muslims embrace Islam to become fully human, to free themselves from the oppression of their own egos and the crushing burden of uncontrollable desires, to make sense of their historic memory, and to struggle with their complex identity in a rapidly changing world. It is these Muslims who populate Islamic literature and poetry. Hussein’s fiction, the novels of Mahfouz and the great mystical poetry of the Sufis highlight the universal yearning of believers. G. Willow Wilson’s unequivocal Islamic novel Alif the Unseen illustrates this equally well; as does the work of Leila Aboulela, the consciously Muslim Sudanese writer who writes explicit Islamic fiction. In Aboulela’s novels, such as The Translator, Minaret and Lyrics Alley, Islam functions as glue that makes sense of the identities and lives of her character. In The Translator, for example, (Aboulela, 1999) we see both Islam and the larger world from the eyes of Sammar, a young Sudanese widow, living in Aberdeen. She pines for her lost husband and her estranged son who has joined his grandparents in Khartoum. The cold, the snow, the unfriendly Scots – all conspire

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to remind her of home, the poor but happy extended family she left behind. Even the gurgling central heating pipes resonate like the azan – the call to prayer. Sammar is schooled in survival tactics by the cocky Yasmin, a young Pakistani woman who works as a secretary in the Middle Eastern Studies department of a local university. Sammar joins the department as a translator and meets Rae Isles, a lecturer in Middle Eastern politics. In essence, The Translator is a love story. Sammar and Rai fall in love, but there is a ‘but’. Sammar would like the affair to proceed within the boundaries of Islam; that is, she wants Rae to convert to Islam and marry her. Rae, twice divorced and a self-­declared atheist, abhors the whole idea. When Sammar suggests that they cannot go further unless Rai converts, he throws her out of his office. Dejected, Sammar returns to Khartoum. The love story is worked out within a narrative of manners that presents Muslim norms and values, mores and etiquette, as a living, breathing reality. The novel catches fire when the scene shifts to Khartoum. Sammar’s extended family, with countless uncles and aunts, and screaming children everywhere, is an enduring creation with recognizable characters that exist in almost every extended Muslim family. Oppressive heat and poverty are made bearable because Sammar’s family ask so little of life. Happiness is equated not with material goods but with a web of relationships. Even though, hardly unexpectedly, not all the relationships are happy ones! In many ways, Sammar is a feminist – although most Western feminists will have difficulty in recognizing her as one. She is independent, demands high standards, and wants to shape her own destiny on her own terms. Whereas present day Muslim culture, and her own family, discourage widows from remarrying, Sammar insists that in Islam, particularly when we consider the example of the Prophet Muhammad, it should be, and is, only natural for a widow to remarry. While totally traditional, Sammar wants to transform tradition from within to move forward. Her humility is another name for strength. Rae too is a strong character but his strength comes from his position within Western culture in general and the university in particular. His name itself is a comment on Western society: in Arabic, Rae means opinion, and Rae Isles suggests that people in the fair Isles of Britain are a touch too opinionated. Aboulela tries to present Rae not as an Orientalist (who are ‘mostly nasty’) but as an expert in Middle-East politics. In any case, he knows little Arabic, has poor knowledge of the sources of Islam, and knows even less how it is lived. Yet he is an ‘expert’ who represents Islam and Muslims in the media, negotiates with terrorists and advises governments. There is also an interesting hermeneutic

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layer to Rae. He is the good side of the West. But even at its best, and most learned, Aboulela seems to suggest, the West has little or no awareness or knowledge of other cultures. What is presented as objective knowledge is in fact little more than opinion framed in a scholarly garb. This culturally constructed objectivity is used by the West to frame and represent other cultures. Needless to say, Sammar’s principles finally have an effect on Rae. He realizes the surface nature of his expertise; and comes to terms with the fact that he is not above those who he seeks to represent. Being alienated with one religion, he realizes, is not the same thing as being estranged from all religions. Prayers can be accepted, and miracles can happen, even if people around you don’t see them as such. He discovers his own route to Islam before returning to the object of his love. The Translator is like a delicate, intricately woven silk fabric that provides enchanting insights on how Muslims feel and think. Aboulela shows the rich possibilities of living in the West with different, non-­western, ways of knowing and thinking. Like the characters in Hussein’s and Wilson’s fiction, Aboulela’s heroines inhabit a multicultural landscape, endlessly seeking to integrate East with the West – or vice versa! But Islamic literature is not of the East or the West; even more now, than in the past, when such distinctions have all but evaporated in a globalized, interconnected world. Its essence is global and its message is universal. As Wilson’s Egyptian lover tells her in The Butterfly Mosque, ‘the bridge you want to cross doesn’t exist’ (Wilson, 2010, p. 69).

References Aboulela, L. (1999). The Translator. Edinburgh: Polygon. Allen, R. (2000). An Introduction to Arabic Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hussein, A. (2012a). The Cloud Messenger. London: Telegram. —— (2012b). Turquoise. London: Saqi Books. Mahfouz, N. (1996; 1959). Children of the Alley. New York: Knopf Doubleday. —— (1995; 1977). The Harafish. New York: Knopf Doubleday. Makdisi, G. (1990). The Rise of Humanism in Classical Islam and the Christian West. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Mubeen, F. (2004). Ghazaali. Lahore: Sang-­e-meel. Rosenthal, F. (1974). ‘Literature’, in J. Schacht and C.E. Bosworth (eds), The Legacy of Islam. Oxford: The Clarendon Press.

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Sardar, Z. (1999). Orientalism. Buckingham: Open University Press. —— (2006). ‘Welcome to Planet Britcon’. New Statesman 11 December. Shackle, C. (2013). ‘Sacred love, lyrical death’. In Z. Sardar and Robin Yassin-Kassab (eds) Critical Muslim 05. London: Hurst, pp. 31–48. Toutonghi, P. (2012). ‘App for the Ancients’. New York Times. 10 August, http://www. nytimes.com/2012/08/12/books/review/alif-­the-unseen-­by-g-­willow-wilson. html?_r=0 Wilson, G. W. (2010). The Butterfly Mosque. London: Atlantic Books. —— (2012). Alif the Unseen. London: Corvus Books. Yassin-Kassab, R. (2014). ‘Dusklands’. In Z. Sardar and R. Yassin-Kassab (eds) Critical Muslim 09. London: Hurst, pp. 1–28.

13

The Man from Beni Mora Aamer Hussein

University of Southampton

Desert, white sand rippling, reddish sky. A figure, on a white horse, head wrapped in a scarf and covered in a hat, wearing a random assortment of Western clothes: boots, jodhpurs, a short jacket. As it comes closer, we see it’s probably a very young man or a boy. Then, from the distance. A number of horses, ridden by men in long robes. The first figure pulls out a gun and shoots. There’s a round of gunfire, one of the horsemen falls, and the first figure’s horse is wounded. Then, another figure approaches, also in a robe, and shoots in the air; the sound of his shots might sound a code, as the other riders disperse. We see him: he’s tall, beardless, frowning. He gets off his horse, goes to the first figure who’s lying in the sand, unconscious, wounded perhaps. He takes a flask from his hip, splashes water on the recumbent boy’s face, then lifts the boy’s head and shoulders in his arms. We see the boy’s features; not a boy after all, but a pretty young woman in her twenties, with narrow long eyes and an upturned nose. – Ruby? He’s shaking her. She wakes up, in a big white bed, switches the lamp on. – What time is it? she asks. – 6. You should be going soon. You seemed restless in your sleep. You called out my name. – I dreamed we were in Beni Mora again. They were chasing me. And then you came . . .

We follow her to her car, as she drives through city streets, to a hospital we recognize on the edges of Belgravia. As the titles come up on screen, she enters the hospital. We follow her to her office, see her name on the door: Dr Rubina Hasan.

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Umair recognizes the actress, Alina Murad: she’s also credited as the producer. She’s known for her versatility, plays traditional roles as well as transgressive parts. She’s said to have been a belly dancer somewhere in the Gulf before she came to acting. The serial is titled GHAZALI. – Professor Umair Omar? – Yes. – The London Library. We’re holding two of the books you asked for. Margaret Smith’s biography of Algazzaly, and the Montgomery Watt study. – I’ll be there to pick them up this afternoon by 5. – Late hours today. We’re open till 7. 30.

Episode 3 The interior of a tent. She’s sitting up in bed, reading. He comes in. Tall, broad shoulders, slight stoop; in his mid-­to-late thirties, perhaps. He has reddish hair and hazel eyes. – Why are you keeping me here? Why did you kidnap me? When are we going back to Beni Mora? – You’re not well enough yet. And I didn’t kidnap you. I rescued you. What were you doing riding in the wilderness alone after sunset? – That’s hardly your business. Can I have another book? I’ve finished the one you brought me. – She hands it to him. We see the pale yellow cover, the bold red letters of its title: The Rise and Fall of Islamic Thought, by Ahmed Naseem Ghazali. – He sits down on a chair near the entrance of the tent. – I have the book he wrote about travelling with the Touareg, he says. It was his doctoral dissertation. – He’s an excellent writer. Travelogues, philosophy, history. . . . – He’s not bad. Tends to superficiality. – I wouldn’t say you were the best judge. But when are you getting me out of here? – The doctor says you’re still in shock. I’m going to Beni Mora today, when I come back in three days I’ll take you there.

Why Beni Mora? Umair thinks. Is it even a real place? He does a search on his mobile and remembers where he’s seen it before: in that old orientalist chestnut, The Garden of Allah, starring Marlene Dietrich. He remembers it was taken from a novel. What are they doing here, the producer, the scriptwriter, reproducing an

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orientalist chestnut? But the titles say the book is ‘inspired by the novel of the same name’, but he’s never heard of an Urdu novel called Ghazali, nor of the writer, a woman. He turns to his book, but leaves the television on. There’s a long scene he’s aware of, with the young woman leaving her bed, stealing a horse, riding across the desert. He wonders if they really went to North Africa, or whether they shot the film in Sindh or Balochistan. The exteriors are impressive, he thinks; the whites and reds, the sky, sand and date palms of the opening have given way now to rock, scrub, barren pathways. The silent scene ends in a hill town that looks authentic: white buildings, winding lanes. Digital technology, he thinks. To recreate the past. Must be set in the fifties.

Episode 4 Now she’s in a hotel ballroom, in evening dress. She’s with a girl who looks European. The people around her are speaking French. – We’re going to meet Dr Ghazali, Ruby. The hotel manager said he was here and asked if we would join him for dinner. I said we’d be delighted if instead he’d join us. – I don’t know if it’s a good idea to meet a writer you’ve read; he’s probably very old and a bore. – Oh, I hear he’s a fascinating man. The French authorities don’t like him. He spreads subversion among the natives, rebellion . . . He approaches, in a dinner jacket, joins them at their table. The man we know from the desert. – Oh, Miss Warburton. I know Miss Hasan. We’ve met. I rescued her from the desert bandits on the outskirts of Beni Mora. He sneers. – Dr Rubina Hasan. She’s a surgeon, the European girl says. I told her not to ride alone but she’s a headstrong girl. – I didn’t know who he was, though. Why didn’t you tell me? – Oh, I didn’t want to spoil your pleasure in reading . . .

The period atmosphere of the film is effective because it’s created impressionistically. You, the viewer, are in the past, which could be the 40s or the 50s, even has touches of the 60s; but it’s also timeless. Umair recognizes the actor. Babur Awan. One of the best known in Karachi. Earlier he was confused by the dyed hair, the greenish lenses. – Why did you run away? Ghazali asks. – You were keeping me against my will . . . I knew I could get back alone to Beni Mora.

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– You didn’t. You were being followed by my men. It wasn’t safe for you to ride alone.

Umair has noticed now that they deliver their lines in a mannered way that moves from the naturalistic mode of television drama to something measured, almost staccato, that seems more like declamation or chanting. He thinks the lines have been written in blank verse, to scan. – Do you spend much time in England, Dr Ghazali? – I have a house there in Surrey. That’s where I’m planning to write my book about Beni Mora. My grandfather left it to me. My mother was English.

Umair wakes up on the sofa; he’s been trying to write the first chapter of his memoir, which is meant to be recollection of a happy youth; he was reading a rather turgid translation of The Alchemy of Happiness online. The serial’s on again, he remembers. It’s on every night of the week, from 2 a.m. to 3 a.m., often too late for him to watch, but he’s become addicted. He wonders why the hero has been named after Ghazali; we know he’s a polymath, but nothing else seems to link him to a theologian and a mystic. Let’s see, he thinks, and switches on to see:

Episode 7 In the recap that flashes on the screen, we see Rubina and Ghazali in Western wedding dress outside a building that announces its function with a big sign that announces THE ISLAMIC CENTRE. Then they’re in an English country garden, in winter clothes; in the backdrop there’s a big house, the kind of mansion that heritage TV and Bollywood delight in. The grounds are covered with snow and the lake is icy. Ghazali is talking: – I first went there when I was very young. I studied Arabic in Oxford. I set up schools and taught children to read. One day someone asked me to lead a congregation in prayer because they think all educated men are religious scholars and though I’d learned it all as a boy I found to my shame I’d forgotten. It was then that I first became close to my maker whom I’d always taken for granted and began to pray as often as I could, sometimes more than five times a day. I came back and did my doctorate in Islamic Studies, travelled to Cairo . . . – Yes, I loved Beni Mora, Rubina is saying. You know my father sent me here to England when I was very young, barely fourteen, and I haven’t been back

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to Lahore since. I have memories of home but Beni Mora was nothing like what I remember, I had never seen the desert before, but yet some part of me felt as if I had come to a place that I knew, where I may even once have belonged. I loved the simplicity of the people and even more I loved the boundlessness of sand and sky. Sometimes in those absences I felt I was alone in the presence of something greater than I was, though I don’t believe in anything but absence . . . – Do you know they say reason never leads you to faith? Your heart does. It comes like a light that enters you. Look around you, Rubina: look at these gardens that are frozen over, the leaves gone from the trees, the birds flown South . . . they’ll be back, and then they’ll be gone again. Can this happen without an order in our world, and someone who creates that order so that nothing varies, even change is changeless . . . You know they say that God is the greatest artist? The world is beautiful, Rubina, and that beauty comes from Him.

Ghazali’s monologue continues, lyrical, hypnotic. Umair feels he’s heard the words before, and thinks, at first, that they might be paraphrased from the Qur’an. He reflects on the beauty of Urdu, of its sounds which like its letters reach his eyes, reach something in his inner ear that the other languages he knows don’t reach. Indian syntax, Persian images, Arabic alphabet, terms he doesn’t always understand. He remembers how a teacher once told him that Persian was tactile and descriptive but Arabic excelled in abstract contextual terms. If Persian praises God’s beauty (jamal), he thinks, then Arabic evoked His jalal (splendour). The thought of beauty reminds him of Ghazali’s namesake and he wonders whether these words are borrowed from the original Ghazali’s. (‘Ghazali’, Margaret Smith wrote, ‘thinks of plants and flowers not only as things of beauty and a source of keen delight to every lover of nature, but also as displaying the wisdom and loving kindness of God, Who has given the fruit its rind so that it may be protected from the birds.’) And as Ghazali’s onscreen namesake intones his enconium, the seasons around him change: leaves appear on the trees, and pear blossoms. We are in an English spring garden. Swans on the pale surface of the still lake. The foliage of summer. Then leaves fall around, red, olive and burnt gold. Colours explode on film like fireworks, nearly artificial, but recognizably those of the world around us. Once again Umair suspects the use digital technology. Ghazali and Rubina walk through these changing landscapes of a virtual world, their clothes changing with the seasons. They’re holding hands, laughing. Umair thinks that the changes indicate the passing of time in the film, but he’s wrong: the changing seasons were Ghazali’s fantasy, and suddenly we’re back to winter, to Rubina’s point of view.

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– That’s the way of nature, Rubina says. I’m a doctor, I believe in my work and in saving lives and serving my kind that way, that’s my only mission; I don’t believe in faith, or in a Creator. My father was an unbeliever and he brought me up that way. I’m amazed that an intellectual like you can believe in a first cause. I think it’s just accidental collisions and a fusion of particles. You know what my dream is? To go back to the country I left behind and set up a hospital there. I’m going to do that, Ghazali, very soon . . . – And us? What about us? – Won’t you come back with me? Can’t you help? As you went to Beni Mora?

Umair wants to keep on watching, but his mind is sleepily wandering. It’s unusual to see a woman speaking of atheism so directly in a commercial play. He’s noticed that Pakistani drama serials often seem to be about religion. He’s seen one in which a rich boy discovers religion to come close to the poor teacher’s daughter he loves, but loses her anyway to close conflict and death. He’s seen one in which a Hindu refugee is drawn to Islam by the simple faith of her benefactor. He’s seen one in which two headscarved women, visiting from the States, have to fight the prejudices of their chic Karachi hostesses who neither fast nor pray. Most often, the religious win, but they aren’t what you’d call fundamentalists. You also see bigots, both men and women, in these plays, and they’re comic when they aren’t downright evil. There’s a battle on going and it’s difficult to draw the lines between the devout and the bigoted, male and female. The atheists, of course, are in their own enclosed world. But what’s unusual is to find the heroine playing the part of devil’s advocate, without villainy or parody, just in normal, if slightly scathing, tones. Alisha’s slightly scandalous reputation makes her even more convincing in her portrayal. Is that why Alina chose to produce the film? To give an atheist a voice? When his attention returns to the play, Ghazali and Rubina in their night clothes are fighting wordlessly in their bedroom: he isn’t sure whether he’s switched the sound off, but he’s too lazy to reach for the control which is lying on the floor. He looks at the subtitles instead. – You said you wouldn’t go back to work for six weeks. We’ve been married a fortnight. What about our plans to go back to Beni Mora? – You knew who I was when you married me. You knew you were marrying a doctor.

Ghazali flings some clothes into a suitcase, walks to the hall where he pulls on an overcoat which he retrieves from a coat-­rack, puts on shoes and walks out into the night. We see him walk off into the night. Then we see a vintage car driving through foggy streets. It draws up at the Savoy Hotel. Ghazali descends.

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Umair had thought there’d be an accident. That Rubina would rush to wounded Ghazali’s bedside and there’d be a reconciliation.

Episode 9 A montage of still and moving images, in colour and in sepia. Ghazali, in Beni Mora, teaching children. Rubina, giving birth. (That’s a long, silent scene.) Ghazali in the jungle, on safari. (He has a gun, but remember the story is set in pre-­conservation times, when even a good man’s allowed to hunt; or maybe he’s culling.) Rubina in Karachi, building a hospital in a village. Ghazali, in Zulu territories, teaching adults, writing English letters on a blackboard. Documentary footage in black and white (is it genuine?) of a hospital being inaugurated by a ribbon-­cutting dignitary in a long coat and a tall woolly hat. Rubina, with her son, walking by the sea, playing ball. Ghazali, writing. A series of books on travel, history and time. Their phantom covers flash on the screen and we wonder at his rate of production. Ghazali ’s voice over the virtual images of book covers. Oddly enough, in English. – Dearest love – you may wonder that I still call you that, but the pain you caused me made me understand that there’s more to life than beauty, and I’m back to doing what I do best. I feel you found your way to what you believed in. I hear you are a dedicated doctor and your hospital is thriving. You achieved what I never could; I’m just a scribe, and do what little I can, but that’s the road I know, travelling, teaching and writing about what I see and the history of the places I visit. Then I travel on. Each one of us on the path we found that suited us best, you with your science and me with my wandering search. I’m back in Beni Mora. I don’t know how long I’ll stay. I want to go to Andalusia next; it’s so long since I wrote my book about it. But I’m tired and a little ill and for now Beni Mora is where I’ll rest.

Rubina, on a balcony overlooking the sea in Karachi’s Clifton, feeding pigeons. She sits down, takes the letter from a silver tray, reads it; she’s about to tear it up, then changes her mind. Umair goes away for two weeks, in Italy, Scotland and Yorkshire. He’s been thinking about the serial; he ordered the book the film derived from, but when it arrived

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from Pakistan he saw they’d sent the wrong book, and anyway the scriptwriters in Pakistan tend to adapt quite freely from the novels they dramatize so they’ll have changed it all, particularly the sequence of events. But he wants to know what happens to Rubina, to Ghazali, though he knows that like life the endings of Pakistani serials can be inconclusive, even abrupt. It’s not showing late at night any more, and he can’t trace a change of time on the Sky menu. But he knows that the last one he saw can’t have been the final episode. Then one night he decides to try on YouTube. Nothing. He finds two episodes on a TV website, both of which say ‘final’, but he doesn’t know whether that means the serial has ended, or just that the episode on line is the last one shown. He downloads the first one.

Final episode 1 – Headache, Headache.

The child was wailing all night. He’s in a hospital bed now, in a private room. Meningitis. He might not survive. Help. He’s all I have. – Only prayer will help, the nurses say.

Delirium. She’s sitting beside the boy’s bed. His breathing is ragged. Ghazali has sent her his latest book. Prayer in Islam: Selected Translations. Almost as a reflex action, she brought it with her. She opens it. – You win, Ghazali. I’m asking for help. You could say I’m praying. For my son who is also yours.

She hears his echoing voice as she reads: God is the light of the skies and of the earth. The semblance of His light is that of a niche in which is a lamp, the lamp within a glass, the glass is a glittering star as it were, lit with the oil of a blessed tree, the olive, neither of the east nor of the west, whose oil appears to light up

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even though fire touches it not – light upon light God guides to His light whom he will. – I don’t know who You are, she says, or if You or Your light exist, but tonight I’m prepared to pray to You to save my child.

She covers her head with her shawl and repeats the words that might bring back the light.

Final episode 2 You are in Beni Mora, where you almost always seem to find yourself after dark. The sand, dotted with distant date-­palms, stretches away from you, towards the horizon, seeming to slip away, from under your feet. You’re calling. You know your child was sleeping safely beside you when you last opened your eyes. But now he isn’t there. You’re barefoot and the sand burns the soles of your feet. You’re calling, in the dark. Then, in the distance, the man in white. You know you’ve been there before, in your dreams, but you can’t wake yourself up this time. The child is beside the man, holding his hand. Who are you, she calls, do I know your name, tell me your name . . . He stretches out his hand to you. – Ghazali?

You wake up. The child’s breathing is even now. You go to the window: you can see the faint first shimmer of light on the sea and you know the night is almost over.

14

On Naguib Mahfouz’s Late Style: Remembering Art, Remembering the Self Ziad Elmarsafy

University of York

The year 2014 marks the twentieth-­anniversary of the attempt on Naguib Mahfouz’s life. The would-­be assassin was a young Islamist who, despite never having read Mahfouz’s work, was convinced that the eighty-­three-year-­old novelist was the epitome of evil. The putative cause behind the attack was the novel that Mahfouz published in serial form in 1959, Awlād H.āratinā (Children of Our Alley or Children of Gebelawi) in which Mahfouz recast the Abrahamic version of the history of humanity in contemporary Egypt, with the parts of God and the prophets assumed by various human characters: Adam by Adham, Moses by Gabal, Jesus by Rifā῾a and so on. The novel belongs to the long string of novels critical of Egypt’s failure to produce a just society that Mahfouz published in the 1950s and 1960s. Although his aim in Children of Our Alley was to provide ‘an allegorical lamentation of the failure of mankind to achieve social justice and to harness the potential of science in the service of mankind’ (ElEnany, 2007, p. 29), the novel was, perhaps inevitably, seen in some quarters as a blasphemous attack on religion. Consequently its publication in book form was banned in Egypt, though it was published in book form in Lebanon. The Swedish Academy praised the novel as an account of ‘man’s everlasting search for spiritual values’ (Nobel Prize in Literature, 1988) when it awarded Mahfouz the 1988 Nobel Prize in Literature, but its positive view was not necessarily shared elsewhere. Even after his death, Mahfouz continues to be associated in certain quarters with blasphemy and immorality despite (or perhaps, because of) his status as the Arab world’s foremost novelist: one self-­styled Salafi politician, ῾Abd al-Mun῾im al-Shah. h. āt, accused Mahfouz of promoting prostitution and atheism, in a televised interview in December 2011, nine days before the centennial anniversary of the novelist’s birth (Yasin and Dabash, 2011). When Children of Our Alley was finally published in book form in Egypt in 2006, the

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publisher made a point of inserting two articles defending Mahfouz by the writer Ah. mad Kamāl Abū al-Magd as a means of warding off potential criticism and violence (Mahfouz, 2006, pp. 582–90). It is as if the memory of Naguib Mahfouz was doomed to be fought over in perpetuity by the two opposing viewpoints: he is either a great novelist or a vile blasphemer.1 Even the Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature, awarded annually since 1996 by the American University in Cairo Press for the best work of Arabic literature, has generated a comparable, though not identical, set of conflicts and oppositions that can be mapped onto the structure of Children of Our Alley (Mehrez, 2008, pp. 41–56). The point of this brief history is not only to remind readers of certain biographical facts, it is also to introduce the themes on which this paper will focus – namely, memory and persistence. I am not concerned with defending Mahfouz against the charge of blasphemy here; for there is nothing blasphemous in his work except for those who want to find it offensive at any price. My aim, rather, is to trace the memory of the self and art in Mahfouz’s œuvre, dealing in particular with their operation in Children of Our Alley and the works that Mahfouz produced during the last decade of his life – Mahfouz continued to write despite the damage done to his writing arm in the 1994 attack, publishing five more titles before his death. Although the narratives produced during this period are short, they demonstrate quite clearly Mahfouz’s rigorous pursuit of, and many returns to, the themes that he took up in Children of Our Alley. One further biographical detail that will help establish the conceptual framework surrounding this novel is Mahfouz’s interest in philosophy generally, which he studied at Cairo University, and the work of Henri Bergson in particular (El-Enany, 2007, pp.  16–17).2 Echoes of Bergson’s ideas about time, memory, duration and morality can be found almost everywhere in Mahfouz’s work. Bergson’s ideas about the coexistence of the past with the present, and the duration that is constituted by a past that is constantly prolonging itself into the present (Bergson, 1963, p. 1315), shape the two poles of the Mahfouzian aesthetic, from the dynastic sagas such as The Cairo Trilogy to the shorter narratives of his later years. The persistence of memory – what Deleuze called the ‘virtual coexistence’ of past and present in Bergson’s philosophy, and process by which the past becomes contemporaneous with the present that it once was – operates as a key component of the construction of the recognizable self (Bergson, 1963, pp. 295–6, 1315; Deleuze, 1966, p. 54; Ricœur, 2004, pp. 202–3). Bergson’s reversal of past and present, whereby the past is always acting as a sine qua non of a present in continuous dissolution, and whereby perception and memory are formed simultaneously, is reflected in the solid reality that Mahfouz ascribes to

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the physical being of the past toward which events and characters refer incessantly, the most striking example of which is probably Gabalawi’s mansion (Bergson, 1963, pp. 912–14). The continuous anamnēsis operative in novels like Children of Our Alley and The Harafish bears witness to this constant self-­ remembrance in relation to a past that provides an ontological foundation for temporality, thereby underlining the Platonic and Neoplatonic dimension of both Bergson and Mahfouz (Deleuze, 1966, p. 55; Hancock, 2002). It is impossible to ascertain whether Mahfouz’s ideas about anamnēsis are derived from Bergson alone, or whether he also found inspiration in the long history of thinking about the subject from Plato to Plotinus and beyond, including its reworking by alKindī and al-Farabī in their work on the theory of dreams and the neoplatonic corpus of Ikhwān al-S. afā (Brethren of Purity).3 What is beyond doubt, however, is his attraction to the idea of the return to origin, which is itself linked to the moment and locus of creation. The primacy of art in Mahfouz’s scheme clearly pleads for a neoplatonic conception of the aesthetic link with beauty and creation. Mahfouz’s interest in Sufism – another lifetime preoccupation – adds further weight to the importance of this topos (El-Enany, 2007, p. 16; Elmarsafy, 2012, pp. 23–51). Throughout Mahfouz’s œuvre, we find moments of return to the creative self, conveying the idea that the remembered self is always the self of the artist. Mahfouz’s interest in these matters was not limited to their aesthetic and spiritual import; they also had to serve as a basis for the realization of what he called the people’s ‘eternally renewed aim’ of freedom and justice (al-h.ilm al qadīm al-­mutajaddid ilā al-­abadd: h.ilm al-h.urriya wa-­l-῾adl) (Mahfouz, 1996, p. 196). Children of Our Alley begins in Gabalawi’s heavenly palace, a clear stand-­in for heaven. The memory of the Qur’anic narrative is present from the outset: the expulsion of Iblīs (Mahfouz’s Idrīs; cf. Qur’an 2:34; Qur’an 7:11–18) sets the tone for a novel that constantly remembers the stories of creation and the prophets as set out in the Qur’an. This is not, however, the only set of beginnings and memories in play. In addition to assuming the task of Gabalawi’s manager (a clear allusion to the role of Adam as God’s khalīfa or vice-­regent on earth; cf. Qur’an 2:30), Adham spends his spare time playing the reed flute (nāy) in the garden, delighting in his ability to imitate the sounds of the birds that surround him (‘mā abda῾ al-­muh.ākāh’) (Mahfouz, 2006, p. 19). Adham also gazes at the sky at such moments; a gaze that will change into one directed at Gabalawi’s mansion by later generations. Two further aspects of this primal scene attract our attention. First, the reed flute recalls the opening lines of Rūmi’s Mathnawī, where the reed laments its separation from the reed-­bed and expresses its desire to return to its

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origin (Lewis, 2000, pp. 362–4). Second, the scene is one of aesthetic creation and performance. The subsequent moments of reminiscence that fill this novel, in which the image of Adham playing the nāy becomes commonplace, are a return to the moment of creation both artistic and Qur’anic.4 The founding moment of identity is the one where art is produced and reproduced in a socially just context. The memory of the first generation of Gabalawis itself becomes a body of lore that is repeated in the novel by itinerant singers playing the fiddle (rabāba). It is similarly significant that the reminiscences and references to memory peak during the third part of the novel, which is devoted to Qāsim, whose story is based on that of Muhammad. Mahfouz thus alludes to the importance of memory in the Qur’an, as well as the status of Muhammad as a mudhakkir, as one sent to remind humanity of God’s presence and the stories of his predecessors (Sells, 2013; cf. Qur’an 88:21–2). This practice reaches the point of paraphrasing the Qur’an at times, as in Qāsim’s pronouncements on the inherently egalitarian message legacy of Gabalawi that might be read as a translation of Qur’an 49:13: ‘Gabalawi, who is grandfather to all of us, lives here. There is no distinction in the relation to him between one alley [h.ayy] or another, or one person or another, or man and woman.’ (Mahfouz, 2012, p. 464.) Elsewhere, Mahfouz cites his own text, turning it into an oral history, the recitation of which confirms the identity of the Gabalawis even as it drives the plot forward. In other words, the heaven to which successive generations of humanity try to return is the one that enables the production of art along with social justice. The novel’s framing narrative conflates these two functions: the anonymous scribe of the alley, acting as its conscience and memory, records its events and secret history, not for his own well-­being but for the sake of his community (Mahfouz, 2006, pp. 9–10; Mehrez, 2008, pp. 42–3). Going by the strict order of textual presentation – the sjužet rather than the fabula in formalist terms – what is there in the beginning is not the void but the artist and his memory. Given the identification between the anonymous scribe and Mahfouz himself, the novel makes a very strong case for the primacy of art, rather than, as is often claimed, science. It is certainly true that the latter dominates the final part of the novel in the person of Arafa, but his failures under the oppressive, violent conditions of the alley bespeak not only a critique of violence but also, and perhaps more significantly, a proclamation of the lasting value of art. One of the strongest illustrations of this doctrine, and another instance of the neoplatonic basis of Mahfouz’s aesthetics, comes in the opening of the last part of the novel, just before Arafa makes his entrance, where the memory of the alley and the musical memory of the rabāba go hand in hand: ‘it is not impossible that what happened yesterday may happen tomorrow, and that the dreams of the

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rabāba might be come true and that the darkness might disappear from our lives’ (Mahfouz, 2012, p. 468, emphasis mine; cf. Plotinus V.8.1). The controversial memory of Children of Our Alley was seemingly overtaken by Mahfouz’s rich literary output, but key elements remain: the memory of art and the self, the opposition between the common people’s thirst for justice and the violence of the futuwwas (thugs) who lord it over them, and the strong commitment to the bond between the aesthetic and the social. Mahfouz’s vigorous defence of Children of Our Alley in his later life, his insistence on the fact that it is a novel first and foremost, and that those who had it banned are incapable of reading fiction, indicates the fundamental character of its modes and structures, as well as their ongoing relevance to his literary production (Abd al-Ghanī, 1994, pp. 211–12). Many of Mahfouz’s readers have claimed that his later novels mark a departure from these concerns. In a by now famous review essay of The Harafish, his fellow Nobel laureate J.M. Coetzee describes a Mahfouz somehow recoiling from modernity and towards tradition in the 1970s and 1980s, returning to oral storytelling and ‘Arabic prose fiction’s classical and folk antecedents, distancing it from the conventions of Western realism it had earlier embraced’ (Coetzee, 2001, p. 235). This assessment is debatable, not least in view of Mahfouz’s long standing interest in Sufism and the life of Egypt’s alleys, both of which frame The Harafish. What is remarkable about this novel is less the change in Mahfouz’s aesthetic than the persistence with which he pursues it, and his incessant returns to the h.āra (alley) for the rest of his career. It is as if Mahfouz were saying, to readers and assailants alike, that there is no getting around the unfolding exchange between art and the quest for social justice as they play out in the h.āra. In doing so, Mahfouz was quietly defying the trends of the late 1990s in both Arabic and global fiction: gone are the intimate mode of writing that foregrounded the internal conflicts and feelings of various writers, the occasional resurgence of absurd, surreal or magical realist themes, the deep irony and hegemonic cynicism that marked literature at the end of the twentieth century. Instead what we do find are narratives, mostly shortened by the novelist’s advancing age and difficulty in using his writing arm after the 1994 attack, that re-­enact the return to the origin, the recollected self and the memory of art that we see in Children of Our Alley.5 In doing so Mahfouz tends towards what Edward Said, following Adorno, calls late style: persisting, surviving ‘beyond what is acceptable and normal,’ adhering to the principles of an aesthetic despite the ‘irreconcilabilities, negations and immobilities’ that it brings (Mahfouz, 2006, p. 13). Thus, whereas Children of our Alley ends with the promise of a forthcoming revolution under the leadership of h.anash, and The Harafish ends with the

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reappearance of   ‘Ashūr al-Nāgī, the founder of the Harafish clan, no reconciliation or comforting returns are found in the late Mahfouz. Instead, what we do find are short narratives that end on what can only be described as consternation, coupled with a re-­enactment of the double imperatives of anamnēsis and lack of resolution. The proliferation of such moments across the works that Mahfouz published in this period bear witness to his determination neither to be cowed either by putatively religious actors nor seduced by a desire to end his career with writing that bespeaks an all-­encompassing ripeness. Instead, Mahfouz continues to investigate his palaces of memory. It is no accident, for instance, that the first fragment of As.dā’ al-Sīra al-Dhātiyya (Echoes of an Autobiography, 1995) narrates a chance encounter with an old friend and concludes that being forgotten is the same as non-­existence (al-῾adam) (Mahfouz, 1995, p. 13). Nor is it by chance that the first story of The Final Decision is a stream-­of-consciousness account of early childhood memories and that the last phrase of the collection is ‘the memories have not left me (lam tufāriqunī al-­dhikrayāt)’ (Mahfouz, 1996, p. 167). Although Rasheed El-Enany does not include the stories collected in The Final Decision and Echo of Forgetting from the ‘aphoristic or parabolic narratives’ of Mahfouz’s other late texts (Mahfouz, 2007, pp.  146–51), the resistance to interpretation displayed by most of the writing of this late period suggests that perhaps they are all part of a single project: to insist on the writer’s amazement before the enigma of existence, and his wonder before the creative act, understood as something that always involves an inmixing of otherness and yielding control over the process of composition.6 This synthesis of recollection and creation is foregrounded in ῾Al-S. u῾ūd ilā alQamar’ (‘The Ascent to the Moon’), a story in Echo of Forgetting where the narrator pays an architect to knock down and then rebuild his childhood home on the exact spot where it once stood. His instructions are explicit: ‘I want the old house rebuilt without the slightest change, wiping out time in doing so [h.ādhifan al-­zaman min al-­wujūd]’, adding that his desire is to build ‘a resting house in the popular style [istirāh.a sha῾biyya lubnātihā al-­dhikrayāt wa-­l ah.lām]’ (Mahfouz, 1999, p.  31). Once the house is built, the narrator enters and is gradually transported to the world of his childhood: he sees furniture, hears voices, re-­lives a practical joke, but always as it were seeing double, notices what is absent (the warmth of the oven, the stairs on the roof) as well as what is present. By the last paragraph, the transportation into the past is complete as the narrator re-­lives an evening from his childhood: I shouted to my companion, ‘Look!’ and pointed to the colour of the evening descending on the neighbourhood behind the domes and minarets. The full

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moon ascended magnificently behind the old houses as I watched eagerly. At that point I was raised on a shoulder and the kind voice whispered to me, ‘Take it if you can.’ I stretched out my hand with all my love and hope [muntahā al-h.ubb wa-­l-amal] to the shining full moon. (Mahfouz, 1999, p. 33)

In addition to the triumph of mnemonic over real time in this story (El-Enany, 2007, p. 147), what we see through the relived memories is the aforementioned equation between the remembered self and the artistic self. The return to childhood and the creative moment also foregrounds the equation between art and anamnēsis. It is especially significant that the narrator remembers a moment where the imagination plays an important part in the narrative. It is not enough that the narrator runs through the corridors and on the rooftop of the old house; the climax of the story comes when he re-­lives the moment where the creative imagination abolishes the distance between earth and moon, and the voice of the other tells him that he might even seize the moon. The story both shows and tells the complex relationship between art and creation. In the context of the Mahfouz canon, ‘The Ascent to the Moon’ recalls the enigmatic, opening chapter of H. ikāyāt H. āratinā (Tales of Our Alley/Fountain and Tomb, 1975) where a childhood vision of an enigmatic (and possibly divine) figure of a man with a white beard is narrated, and where the narrator proclaims, ‘Thus I created a legend and thus I destroyed it’ (Mahfouz, 1975, p.  5). The mystery of that particular story is never resolved, and the narrator returns to it in later life (in the final tale of the collection) only to reconfirm his perplexity before his unintelligible experience. In other words, the ‘echo’ in the title of the collection that contains ‘The Ascent to the Moon’ is itself the echo of previous key moments in the Mahfouz canon. The fact that Mahfouz would choose to designate these two instances as ones that confirm his outlook, using the first person to narrate both, is symptomatic of a desire not only to be remembered – which is, after all, the case with all writers – but to be remembered as the literary master of remembrance and the mise-­en-abyme of the creative artist remembering himself. Other narratives in Echo of Forgetting foreground the idea of persistence and the survival of traits and attributes beyond what might be expected or deemed reasonable. In the story that gives the collection its title, ῾Anbar, a futuwwa who has terrorized his neighbourhood for most of his adult life, changes suddenly and becomes a meek, pious and humble man. The wife of one of his former gang members offers an explanation: ‘It is the demon of forgetting. Once it touches someone he forgets himself and his people’ (Mahfouz 1999, p.  14). The

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incredulous inhabitants of the h.āra rejoice in the return of peace and calm, those formerly exiled by ῾Anbar’s wrath return to their homes, while the gang members pray that their leader may one day remember himself and lead them back to a position of power even as they lower their expectations and become pious like him. The Imam and the Shaykh of the neighbourhood approve of these developments, adding that ‘Nothing like this has been seen since the days of the Prophet (zaman al-­salaf al-s. ālih.)’ (Mahfouz, 1999, p. 16). Finally, one day, ῾Anbar does return to his senses, and remembers who he is. At the call for the noon prayer, he is seen with his gang, all of whom are armed with bludgeons, heading towards the zāwiya (prayer hall). All expect trouble, seeing in this a return to the bad old days of ῾Anbar’s violent domination of the neighbourhood. Instead, he stops in front of the zāwiya, hits the ground with his bludgeon, and shouts ‘Allāhu akbar!’ followed by his gang members, thereby demonstrating that the conversion to piety was real, and that the phenomena of the ‘days of the Prophet’ continue to the present day. ῾Anbar’s changes of personality and eventual self-­recollection show the determined, remembered self overcoming the ‘demon of forgetting.’ The tale might also be read as an ideal final chapter to Children of Our Alley, in which the futuwwas forget the oppressive dimension of their violent means, and use their force in the service of social justice. Elsewhere in the collection we see characters who go on being themselves, who abide by their decisions regardless of the consequences: a woman who has sworn never to marry a futuwwa succeeds in doing so, a feud between two families continues despite the fact that nobody can remember what the reasons for the original feud were, a woman decides to beg in order to help her widowed daughter and grandchildren despite the damage that her activity brings to their social standing. It is as if the preoccupation with death and nostalgia in the late Mahfouz had given way to a fascination with survival and endurance as both themes and aesthetic categories. The survival in question is not simply that of the writer or his characters, but is reduced to its most elementary form: a repeated activity, insistence on a controversial decision, profound changes of personality that hang over superficial behaviour patterns, and so on. Mahfouz’s late style might thus be seen as a carefully designed method of undoing the false oppositions between the rival legacies that face his readers. Instead, he takes pains to demonstrate very clearly that he is not only a novelist preoccupied by time, memory and the ways in which they shape people and states, but also – and perhaps more significantly – that his reflection on these issues spans his career from start to finish. The controversies surrounding Children of Our Alley and the putative return to folk traditions after the mid-

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1970s miss the mark. If Mahfouz tells stories that are recognizably Abrahamic, or if the episodic novels and parabolic narratives of the later years return to the world of the futuwwas and the h.āras, it is because we are dealing with a large body of work that actively works through the relationship between memory and art, and applies that working-­through to itself as well. The late Mahfouz is therefore not only about the memory of the self and the memory of art – which would amount to little more than an Arabic variation on Proust – it is about being about that equation, and how it opens up more avenues of inquiry than dead ends of fossilized belief. A note on transliteration: I have followed the IJMES system for all names and titles except in those instances where a more popular transliteration exists. Hence Naguib Mahfouz rather than Najīb Mah.fūz. .

Notes 1 The strange and rather perplexed fascination of Egypt’s Islamists with Mahfouz goes all the way back to the novelist’s acquaintance with Sayyid Qutb, a future leader of the Muslim Brotherhood who argued in favour of violence as a legitimate means of social and political change, during their youth. Qutb was an early, and favourable, reviewer of Mahfouz’s work, while Mahfouz repeatedly proclaimed his antipathy towards the Muslim Brotherhood (El-Enany, 2007, p. 28). 2 In his interviews Mahfouz speaks of his interest in philosophy in terms that approach the esoteric: he considered it a field through which he might learn the ‘secret of existence’ [sirr al-­wujūd], a term that reflects his neoplatonic views of art (Al-Ghitany, 2004, p. 142). 3 The genealogy of anamnēsis and its appropriation in Islamic philosophy is beyond the scope of this essay, but see the Meno 80d, Phaedo 72e, Phaedrus 249c, Plotinus I.6.2 and IV.8.4 (Robin, 1941, pp. 337–48; Daiber, 2012). Ian Netton emphasizes the Ikhwān’s rejection of anamnēsis as a method of learning, while stressing the importance of neoplatonism on their thinking nonetheless (Netton, 2002, pp. 17–18, 32–46). The return of the language of dreams and visions in the work of the late Mahfouz (as in Ah.lām Fatrat al-Naqāha [Dreams of Convalescence, 2004, 2006]) indicates the ongoing importance of this particular philosophical strand, which links anamnēsis to creation on the one hand and dreams and visions on the other, in his thinking. 4 See, for instance, Mahfouz, 2006, pp. 235, 305, 336, 358–9 and passim. Such scenes also serve as a further illustration of Bergson’s equivalence between memory and perception: the act of remembering revives the moment of perception (Bergson, 1963, p. 914).

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5 The return to the themes of Children of Our Alley could be said to have started in earnest with Qalb al-Layl (Heart of the Night, 1975) where we find a compact version of the narrative of the expulsion from paradise, represented here again by a fortified ‘big house’. 6 I have explored this theme in my study, Sufism in the Contemporary Arabic Novel (Elmarsafy, 2012) through Mahfouz’s use of the language and ideas of Sufism. A thoughtful description of the literary creation as the creation of the other is found in Attridge, 2004, pp. 17–36.

References Abd al-Ghanī, M. (1994). Naguib Mahfouz min Al-Thawra ilā al-Tas.awwuf. Cairo: al-Hay᾽a al-Mis. riyya al-῾Āmma li-­l-Kitāb. Al-Ghitany, G. (2004). Al-Majālis al-Mah.fūz.iyya. Cairo: Dār al-Shurūq. Attridge, D. (2004). The Singularity of Literature. London and New York: Routledge. Bergson, H. (1963). Œuvres. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Coetzee, J. (2001; 2002). Stranger Shores: Essays 1986–1999. London: Vintage. Daiber, H. (2012). ‘Ru᾽yā’. In P. Bearman, Th. Bianquis, C. E. Bosworth, E. van Donzel and W. P. Heinrichs (eds), Encyclopaedia of Islam, second edition, Brill Online. http:// referenceworks.brillonline.com/entries/encyclopaedia-­of-islam-2/ruya-COM_0945. Deleuze, G. (1966; 2008). Le Bergsonisme. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. El-Enany, R. (2007). Naguib Mahfouz: Egypt’s Nobel Laureate. London: Haus Publishing. Elmarsafy, Z. (2012). Sufism in the Contemporary Arabic Novel. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Hancock, C. L. (2002). ‘The Influence of Plotinus on Bergson’s Critique of Empirical Science’, in R. B. Harris (ed.) Neoplatonism and Contemporary Thought; Part 1. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. pp. 139–62. Lewis, F. (2000). Rūmi, Past and Present, East and West. The Life, Teachings and Poetry of Jalâl al-Din Rūmi. Oxford: Oneworld. Mahfouz, N. (1975). H. ikāyāt H.āratina. Cairo: Maktabat Mis. r. —— (1995). As.dā᾽ al-Sīra al-Dhātiyya. Cairo: Maktabat Mis. r. —— (1996). Al-Qarār al-Akhīr. Cairo: Maktabat Mis. r. —— (1999; 2006). S. adā al-Nisyān. Cairo: Dār al-Shurūq. —— (2004). The Dreams. (trans.) Raymond Stock. Cairo and New York: The American University in Cairo Press. —— (2006). Dreams of Departure. (trans.) Raymond Stock. Cairo and New York: The American University in Cairo Press. —— (2006; 2012). Awlād H.āratinā. Cairo: Dār Al-Shurūq. Mehrez, S. (2008). Egypt’s Culture Wars: Politics and Practice. London and New York: Routledge.

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Netton, I. (2002). Muslim Neoplatonists: An Introduction to the Thought of the Brethren of Purity (Ikhwān Al-S.afā). London and New York: Routledge Curzon. The Nobel Prize in Literature (1988). http://www.nobelprize.org Plato (1920–1985). Œuvres complètes. Paris: Les Belles Lettres. Plotinus (1966–1988). Enneads. (trans.) A. H. Armstrong. Loeb Classical Library, vols 440–5, 468. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. The Qur’an. (2008). A New Translation by Tarif Khalidi. (trans.) T. Khalidi. London: Penguin. Ricœur, P. (2004; 2009). Parcours de la reconnaissance. Paris: Gallimard. Robin, L. (1941; 1967). La Pensée hellénique des origines à Epicure. 2nd edn. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Said, E. W. (2006). On Late Style: Music and Literature against the Grain. London: Bloomsbury. Sells, M. A. (2013). ‘Memory’. In J. D. McAuliffe (ed.) Encyclopaedia of the Quran. Brill Online, http://referenceworks.brillonline.com/entries/encyclopaedia-­of-the-­quran/ memory-SIM_00276 Yasin, M. and Dabash, H. (2011). ‘Al-Shah.h.āt Yas. if Adab Naguib Mahfouz bi-­l-“da῾āra” . . . wa Udabā᾽: Tas. rīh.atihi “῾awda li-­l-takhalluf ” ’, 2 December. Al-Misry Al-Youm. http://www.almasryalyoum.com/node/531026

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Sufism and Pain: Poetic Procrastination of Unity in Classical Persian Verse Narratives Maryam Farahani

University of Liverpool

Though my heart bleeds with pain of parting, Pain I endure for you is more joy than pain. Each night I ponder and I say: ‘O God If such is parting from her, how will union be?’ Rudaki O lovers, lovers, this day you and we are fallen into a whirlpool, who knows how to swim? Rūmi

Introduction Despite its geographic, ethnic, linguistic and cultural varieties, Sufi literature has principally been read by Western scholars through the lens of Orientalism and postcolonial studies (Alhaq, 2009, pp.  387–96). Focusing on rudimentary principles of Sufi theory and practice, critics have proposed contradictory notions about this type of Islamic literature, especially regarding the poetical expression of human affects. Some observe a major inconsistency in quality and quantity of Islamic mystical poetry, suggesting that ‘it seems as if the Muslim mystics, particularly in the Persian-­speaking area, did not give much thought to the problem of how to express their experiences and feelings in poetical form’ (Schimmel, 1997, p. 111). Yet it is emphasized that ‘their output in poetry is much larger than that of most non-­mystical writers’ (Schimmel, 1997). By contrast, others view the intensity of emotionality and ‘religious experience based on emotion rather than logic’ as basic factors in this religious phenomenon called

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Sufism (Fatemi et al., 1978, p. 166). Moreover, nostalgia, negativity and painfulness inherent in certain body-­mind relations, expressed in Sufi literature, have so far been read as symbolic entities of ‘mystical separation’ between God and Man. Notwithstanding content-­based similarities in meanings and metaphors for the basic Sufi conception of ‘unified separation’, which is ‘Unity of Being’ (Wahdat Al-Wujüd), particular misconceptions of the painful ‘mystical separation’ are further elaborated to pinpoint a non-­liturgical characteristic within Sufi poetry. In so concluding, some Western scholars observe little or no veneration or adoration aesthetics in Sufi poetry, contrary to the developments they observe in hymnody within Christianity and Judaism (Lewis, 2001, p. 26). This is a neglected area in the study of Abrahamic faiths and literature. I contend that in hypothesizing Sufi poetry as non-­liturgical, these scholars presume want of therapeutic features in Sufi versification as a problem, against the depth and wealth of healing qualities in Christian and Judaic texts (Schermer, 2003, pp. 181–91). It is understood that ‘early Christian liturgy embraces the Book of Psalms as messianic’, so ‘we see the idea of “joy” as an eschatological conclusion’ in Christian doctrinal literature (Kimball, 2010, p. 225). I argue that a fairly elementary study of classical Persian verse narratives proves to refute such elaborations. From the eleventh to the thirteenth century, the art of versification in Persia flourished with a magnificent rise in the production of lyric poetry and ghazal writing, bearing Sufi and mystical content while praising God with allegorical paradigms of story-­telling. During this period, Persian poets particularly attended to metre and simplicity of language in addition to expressing emotional and adoration contents through romance narratives, which purposefully remedy the Muslim’s yearning for religious passion and lyrical worship. According to William Chittick, it may well be that in their encounter with Persian Sufi poets such as Rūmi, the ‘Western reader faces a number of obstacles’, including ‘draw-­backs of translation in general’, ‘constant references to Islamic teachings’, and understanding each poet’s versification based on comprehending his schooling system (Chittick, 1983, p. 9). To this list, I add outright differences between liturgical stylistics not only of ‘Muslim vs. other Abrahamic faiths’, but also ‘Eastern vs. Western spiritual performance’, be it through music, dance or versification. Stylistic and aesthetic divergences, in my view, are among the greatest obstacles a contemporary Western non-Muslim reader may face in comprehending Sufi poetry. For other readers, unfamiliar with literary and religious relations but acquainted with a historical background of terms, on the other hand, another obstacle remains; mainly, the problem arising from the combination of poetry

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and religion. It is specifically noteworthy that among early Muslims the word ‘poet’ was taken in its ‘pre-Islamic meaning of somebody endowed with a special spiritual power, possessed by a jinn or shaitān whose supernatural insinuations made the poet almost synonymous with “soothsayer” and “magician”, hence a sought-­after arbitrary in tribal feuds’ (Schimmel, 1997, p. 104). This problem brought forth much debate among early classic Sufi scholars who observed, instead of rhyming, the teachings of sincerity (ikhlās) and divinely presented law by Muhammad – not a poet himself – as two major paths to ‘Unity of Being’ for ‘there is no reality but the Reality’ (Lings, 1999, p. 64). Nonetheless, Sufi poetry continued to circulate in different eras and areas, in so far as its textual tendency to create, debate and heal ‘painfulness’ inspired volumes of versification in Arabic, Turkish, Persian, Pashto, Urdu, Panjabi and Sindhi over centuries. Khwaja Mir Dard of Delhi (1721–85), whose name ‘Dard’ in Persian vernacular means ‘pain’, composed an Urdu dīwān, Nāla-­yi Dard (Lamentation of Pain) and consequently another volume entitled, Ah-­i Sard (The Cold Sigh), where he directly engages with the concept of pain in Sufi poetry. His work and that of other Sufi poets is far greater than can be examined in this limited space, and indeed they require separate volumes of comparative essays. I, thereby, retain attention for the great Persian Master of Sufi poetry in this chapter. I read Rūmi (1207–73) as the central figure in conjunction with similarities in Attār (1145–1221) and Hafīz (1320–88). Deliberating Rūmi’s ocean of pain and joy in poetry, its technical specifications, and doctrinal comparisons with Christianity, I discuss his view of motion and fluidity of water in Persian allegorical configurations of pain along the path (tariqa) of Unity.

Knowledge, consciousness and pain in content Critics have argued that ‘Christianity, as everyone knows, is pre-­eminently the religion of love. Islam, for its part (and not only Sufism but also the general religion), comprises all three modes: “Fear,” “Love” and “Knowledge”’ (Michon and Gaetani, 2006, p.  119). In 1993, Maria Jaoudi published her comparisons between outstanding and similar figures in these two Abrahamic faiths, such as St Francis and Rūmi, Rabia and Teresa of Avila, among others, conferring shared dominions of love and knowledge in relevant literature of both faiths. But neither of these studies explores the position of pain in the content of Rūmi’s work. On the other hand, in his renowned study of the Qur᾽anic Sufism, Mir Valiuddin clarified that ‘the locus of pain is consciousness, if pain is found in

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consciousness, how could pain be denied’ (Valiuddin, 1959, p. 129). After almost half a century, Süleyman Derin’s exhaustive exploration (2008) of Ibn Arabi’s doctrine directed scholars to revisit the Sufi conception of consciousness from the perspective of joy within love (be it conscious or unconscious) rather than pain felt in consciousness – akin to the Christian conception of growth-­pain towards a new state of consciousness through the dark night of the soul (López Baralt, 2000, p. 91). Abrahamov asserts that ‘Salh al-Tustarî (d. 283/896) expresses this kind of contentment by the maxim “the beating of a lover does not hurt” (d. arb al-h. abîb lâ yûjiu)’ (Abrahamov, 2003, pp.  81–2). Derin suggests that, according to Ibn Arabi, ‘man needs to be consciously aware of the relationship between the Creator and the creation’ (Derin, 2008, p.  172). This relationship which forms the Sufi understanding of divine love is itself a problematic association for painful conflict in the immediate recognition of consciousness. How can one consciously love secular, obscene and crude objects, and yet console in divine love without feeling ashamed or sinful? Derin explains that Ibn Arabi has solved this problem. He notes: As divine love is interconnected with creation, and it is evident there exists among mankind a body of language used to describe love towards his fellow creatures, it raises the issue of whether the language of profane love can be utilized to explain the experiences of divine love. Ibn Arabi resolved this conflict by accepting that it can. In Ibn Arabi’s writings, the language of divine love is mixed with the language of profane love, since the profane objects of love are in reality divine. (Derin, 2008)

This is an example of divergence in the locus of pain between Ibn Arabi’s teaching and that of some Persian mystic poets. For example, Abū H. āmid al-Ghazālī (1058–1111) is stringently of the opinion that only God deserves love, but Ibn Arabi suggests (although with a deterrent mode) that all creatures in love with profane objects are already in love with the divine. Therefore in Ibn Arabi’s view, the creation is already unified and immersed in the Creator, despite being manifested in profane modes, and as a result human consciousness as the locus of pain may also be viewed as the locus of earthly and divine love; all being aspects of one reality (Wahdat al-Wujüd). Rūmi, by contrast, places pain under his system of classifying knowledge. He makes a division of knowledge into two categories: general and partial. His Sufi poetry of pain is based on this principle categorization, by which he identifies partial knowledge instead of consciousness as the locus of pain. One of the best

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examples in book IV of his Mathnawī, which comprises circa 26,000 couplets, is where he puts forward the pain of limited knowledge within the second story, ‘The Building of the “Most Remote Temple” at Jerusalem’: Ah! better for him had he never learnt swimming! Then he would have based his hopes on Noah’s ark. Would he had been ignorant of craft as a babe! Then like a babe he would have clung to his mother. Would he had been less full of borrowed knowledge! Then he would have accepted inspired knowledge from his father. When, with inspiration at hand, you seek book-­learning, Your heart, as if inspired, loads you with reproach. Traditional knowledge, when inspiration is available, Is like making ablutions with sand when water is near. Make yourself ignorant, be submissive, and then You will obtain release from your ignorance. For this cause, O son, the Prince of men declared, ‘The majority of those in Paradise are the foolish.’ (Mathnawī, Book IV, Story II, ll. 55–68, pp. 278–9)

Rūmi’s technical inference in didacticism and allegorical perspective bears similarities to the School of Ishrāq, the poetic strategies applied by Shaykh Shihāb al-Dīn Suhrawardī (1155–91). However, his view of knowledge is different from Suhrawardī, as the latter trusts in and communicates ‘practical wisdom’ through self-­imposed pain such as fasting for long periods and learning by means of education. In the preceding stanza by Rūmi, ignorance and illiteracy are considered far more valuable than partial, borrowed and limited knowledge. Rūmi’s metaphorical language about water and sand, mother and baby, and Noah’s Ark designates an allegorical paradigm that indirectly cautions about the pain resulting from a conflict between opposing forces of two types of knowledge. This didactic strategy is correspondingly applied to admonish the quickening of desire (inspiration) to obtain ‘Unity of Being’ in a physical sense (joyful eschatological conclusion in God’s Paradise) or from an intellectual perspective (by learning traditional knowledge). The main point here is that for Rūmi, lengthening the process of learning, comprehension and experiencing Unity, is essential in the path of Unity. Similar to Ibn Arabi, Rūmi takes advantage of concealed meanings in words, following the Sufi tradition of spiritual hermeneutics (ta’wīl), by relying on the language of symbolism and symbolic exegesis to direct the imagination from exterior (z.āhir) meanings to interior

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(bāt.in) correlations. However, contrary to Ibn Arabi’s justification of instant unification of love, both divine and profane, Rūmi discerns a prolonged path to Unity, be it through gradual learning by the foolish and ignorant (see Barks, 2003). Extreme pain, then, is inescapable, if the swimmer intends to cross the ocean in one go. Crossing the ocean is better performed by the diver, who has a general knowledge of moving across abysmal layers in the ocean. This allegorical scene of the ocean has a corollary in all of Rūmi’s versification, putting opposites forward in order to draw upon three concepts in connection with consciousness: ‘speech and rhetoric’, ‘autumn-­less garden’ (paradise) and the ‘Universal Man’ (al-­insān al-­kāmil). Rūmi speaks of the same allegory in different books of Mathnawī, for example in ‘Human wisdom, the manifestation of divine’ he declares, ‘yea, the Reason of man is a boundless ocean / O son that ocean requires, as it were, a diver’ (Rūmi, 2001, p. 20). Just as the ocean proves to be an extensive physical length for the swimmer, with potential elements of painfulness upon any attempt to cross it, knowledge and wisdom take a profound place in Sufi teachings, for which waiting to learn about interior meanings is advised. Rūmi clearly suggests this narrative of placing the creatures in a waiting mode which I term as ‘the poetic procrastination of Unity’, instructing the readers to ‘strive, then, to be old in wisdom and in faith / that like Universal Reason, you may see within’ (Mathnawī, Book IV, Story IV, ll. 37–8, p. 290). Rūmi’s verse narratives of pain in Mathnawī are a poetic reflection of Attār’s teaching in Asrār Nāma (Book of Secrets). In fact, Attār had predicted Rūmi’s ability of composing lyrics with a certain content focusing on subjects such as love and pain. This prediction is mentioned in Attār’s meeting with Rūmi’s father, while the Rūmi family was passing through Nishapour to reach Konya. However, some scholars believe that the encounter between Attār and Rūmi is more of a poetical and philosophical nature than actual face-­to-face meeting (Can, 2005). Nevertheless, Attār’s influence on Rūmi’s poetry is of great significance, especially regarding the conceptualizations of pain in their Sufi verse narratives.

The comparative case of love, pain and spiritual joy As explained, Rūmi’s poetic arrangement of Sufi doctrine is based on the concept of learning in waiting. His poetical ideology aims to instruct a gradual process in the path of Unity, rather than encouraging hasty and instant understanding of the ‘Unity of Being’. For him, a profound joy lies at the heart of waiting, in conflict with the pain resulting from sudden connection and attachment in human

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consciousness or through partial wisdom and knowledge. Relatively, in his study of the Gospel of Mark, James Cutsinger argues: Suffering in the spiritual or metaphysical heart is an interior pain or sorrow that is grounded in the searing consciousness of direct perception of the divine presence. It is not a worldly sorrow or depression, which is a negative state that leads to despair and psychological paralysis. Quite the contrary, it is a ‘joy-­making mourning’ that produces great strength, energy, and inspiration in the soul. (Cutsinger, 2002, p. 87)

Mourning in Rūmi’s poetical procrastination of Unity has little space for spiritual manoeuvre, for he draws upon divine adoration integral to suffering. Subsequently he introduces three major descriptions of pain: first, pain of human verbal attachment and interaction (romance painfulness); second, pain of imitation; finally, compassion and wisdom forming a unified playground for joyful pain. Almost in all cases, Rūmi configures the Unity of passion, pain and purification through the symbolic use of water in the allegorical scene of ocean, sea and shipyards, and so on, to indicate the inferiority of tearfulness in magnitude (mourning) compared with the superiority of fortitude and patience in the path of Unity. In so doing, he clarifies not only the temporal but also the intellectual length of understanding the divine (reaching the autumn-­less garden by travelling through the waters of love and knowledge). As Rūmi puts it, ‘and when I drew near to the shore of the sea / The day was drawing to a close’ (Mathnawī, Book III, Story XII, ll. 57–8, p. 204). This is where the joy of unconsciousness and patience culminates in the symbolic use of paradise as the unifying position. Mahdi Tourage argues that ‘Mathnawī does not follow a linear progression in the style of a theosophical epistle, rather it is like an ocean that invites the reader to leap in at any point and be carried away by wave after wave of analogy and symbolism’ (Tourage, 2007, p. 26). He expands on Rūmi’s symbolic use of ocean, quoting the poet himself that ‘reading from Mathnawī is like using a measuring cup for the ocean (II: 3622)’, and as Mathnawī unfolds ‘the poet moves from passage to passage, pointing to the inner meaning of common or Qur᾽ānic concepts, everyday events and ordinary things [. . .]’ (Tourage, 2007, pp. 26–7). This is the great appeal of Rūmi’s texts for readers in all eras and areas, despite difficulties in translation and philosophy. Perhaps it also remarks Rūmi’s poetical strategy to put forth the required fluidity and flexibility in reading and learning, so that readers may gradually fall in love with his text. Rūmi announces his focus on emotional states, ‘I am the heart-­stealer and I take the heart; for the pearl of

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the heart was born of my ocean’ (l. 13) (cited in Yarshater, 2009, p. 63). Elsewhere, he subdues any form of self-­conceit, reproaching the tendency to instant Unity by claiming a great number of competitors in the path of Unity: ‘You will not find fish, my soul, like the sea of the ocean; in the sea of God’s ocean there are many fish’ (l. 2) (Yarshater, 2009, p.  130). Ultimately, consciousness in Rūmi’s poetical procrastination of Unity is the place of excitement and apprehensive joy, rather than total pain or mourning. He notes, ‘The sea of consciousness from which all minds derive’ (l. 8) (Yarshater, 2009, p. 362) and yet ‘I have got out of my own control, I have fallen into unconsciousness; in my utter unconsciousness how joyful I am with myself!’ (l. 1) (Yarshater, 2009, p. 218). It is noteworthy that Hafīz’s personal character and his poetical manifestions of humanity in distress bear similar resemblance to this type of apprehension and pain, while encountering metaphors of ocean. Historical facts demonstrate that Hafīz also had a certain anxiety about crossing the sea or travelling through the ocean (see Bang, 2003). It is said that Shah Akbar of India had invited Hafīz there, ‘but Hafīz had been frightened by the sight of the ship and the ocean and had decided to forego the voyage. As he had written on that occasion: “the dark night, the terror of the massive waterspout / how can the fowl of the ocean comprehend my feelings?” ’ (Green, 1983, p. 60). This confession is significantly instrumental in understanding Hafīz’s symbolic use of ‘ocean’, which remains far less in number than his application of the term ‘garden’. One interpretation may be that Hafīz observed the joy in the path (tariqa) only through his focus on peaceful eschatological conclusion in union with the Creator and at the very end of the path. Besides, he applies far less repetition circles compared with Rūmi’s ample application of radīf, as if he enjoys drawing away from any attempt that brings about unconsciousness. I contend that this persistence of consciousness and anxiety about content corresponds with his rhetorical devices and poetical form. Unlike Attār and Rūmi, he is a master of ghazal instead of ghasīda or mathnawī, both of which present more poetic lines than ghazal. That is why I see Hafīz’s lyricism more akin to love than pain (see Lewisohn, 2010). The aesthetic qualities in his lyrics are evidently of higher merit than his asceticism. He notes, ‘I have launched rivers of tears from my eyes / in hopes a beauty will sit by my side / fetch my ship; my cup of wine; I grieve for my lover’s absence / each corner of my eyes and ocean the fruit of my eyes’ (cited in Ordoubadian, 2006, p. 109). He continues to mention love as the only desired emotion, noting ‘No care have I but wine and my beloved’ (Ordoubadian, 2006). For Rūmi, ‘Love is nothing but felicity and loving kindness; it is nothing but gladness and right guidance’ (l. 1) (cited in Yarshater, 2009, p.  87). If in pain,

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‘Advice from anyone is never to profit lovers; love is not that kind of torrent that anyone can dam up’ (l. 1) (Yarshater, 2009, p. 93). Here, we recognize patience and endurance, of which Rūmi is obviously fond, recalling Saint Paul’s teaching that ‘Love is patient [. . .] it does not insist on its own way [. . .]’ (1 Corinthians 13:4–6). Unlike Christian mystics of the Middle Ages, who believed that the path to reaching God is through suffering in love, Persian Sufi poets advised the opposite; the visual and verbal configuration of suffering demonstrated in the art forms of the period negotiate the same understanding (Saxon, 2012, p. 142). Suffering, in Persian mystical verse narratives, is a pathway to fortitude, endurance and patience. Examples of this kind are the narratives of Leilī Majnūn, Khosro Shīrīn, Yūsefo Zuleikha, among others. Pain is reasonable as long as it generates some form of patience in the path of Unity. In its own right, and in the classic Persian poetical doctrine, pain is not to be taken as the unifying factor between heaven and hell. What is desirable, instead, is ‘disinterested love’. This Sufi conception of pain was first coined by Rabia Bint al-Adawiyyah al-Basriyyah (717–801), also known as St Rabia of Basra, who ‘viewed marriage as a hindrance and a distraction from the path’, in addition to suggesting that marriage has to be considered ‘to be slavery to the spouse’, instilling pain in another human being; thereby stopping them from progress in the path of Unity (Derin, 2008, p. 78). Rabia exemplifies a similar notion to the Aristotelian view of ‘compassion’ as a type of suffering, ‘excited by the sight of evil, deadly or painful, which befalls one who does not deserve it, an evil which one might expect to come upon oneself or one of one’s friends, and when it seems near. For it is evident that one who is likely to feel pity must be such as to think that he, or one of his friends, is liable to suffer some evil’. Rūmi follows suit. His idea of disinterested love appears at the heart of his Diwān-­e Shams, wherein he sings praise and adoration to his beloved friend Shams, until he realizes that physical attachment is a source of pain and indeed a hindrance in the path of Unity; thus, an earthly love becomes the allegory of divine love in lyrical lengthening.

Procrastination of unity in poetical form In Rūmi’s didactic and romantic verse narratives of Mathnawī, poetical form and content are in direct correspondence, although he aspires more to meaning than form, stating that the outward world passes away and what ultimately matters is meaning alone. But to what extent Rūmi rectifies meaning, is reliant on his own

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psychological and spiritual state of consciousness and ecstasy. Adam Potkay reflects on this very fact, explaining the process of absorption in Unity as follows: As Rūmi, the thirteenth-­century Sufi poet, wrote, the term for ‘absorption’ in God ‘is applied to one who has no conscious existence or initiative or movement . . . If he is still struggling in the water, or if he cries out, “Oh, I am drowning”, he is not said to be in the state of absorption’. (Potkay, 2007, p. 204)

Rūmi blends opposites in all forms and contents throughout his poetic practice, including paradigms of outward/inward and visible/invisible incongruity in the ultimate absorption. For the structural specifications of Persian Sufi poetry, especially that of Rūmi, an extensive volume was published in 1994, wherein scholars discussed Rūmi’s application of poetical and rhetorical devices as ‘structural elements of Unity’ (Banani et al., 1994, pp. 44–58). What, however, is overlooked in this and similar volumes, lending itself to further investigation, is the structural locus and interplay of pain/joy in Rūmi’s poetical form – not to be absorbed in the content. In his Book II of Mathnawī, Rūmi clarifies that a certain place for painfulness is our tendency to imitate one another, instead of exploring form and meaning for ourselves. He notes that differences are abundant between the imitator and the thinker, and expressions ‘derive their own value from the state of mind from which they proceed’ (Rūmi, trans. Whinfield, 2001, p. 96). His own innovative strategy that differentiates him from other Sufi poets is the application of ‘radīf ’. Johann Bürgel describes ‘the radīf  ’ to consist ‘of one or more words, sometimes even a whole phrase that follows after the rhyme in every line of a poem, without any alteration. Rūmi was obviously very fond of this formal device and was master of it as well’ (Bürgel, 1994, p.  48). Bürgel goes on to complement his argument of Rūmī’s ‘structural elements of Unity’ by adding several rhetorical devices to radīf, among which Rūmi’s application of vocatives (e.g. Saghiā) and specific verbal forms (e.g. ‘May it be so’) are noteworthy. It seems to me that Bürgel’s attempt to communicate Rūmi’s fascination with radīf, has somehow blinded him to the fact that these repetitions and recurrences of nouns, verbs, adjectives and certain phrases function to delay absorption in Unity, for the mere purpose of reducing pain of instant attachment and instant knowledge while being conscious. In my view, Rūmi’s radīf application generates a sense of repetitive ritual, to induce in the reader the much desired unconsciousness and consequently ignorance which is a prevalent structural and content-­based doctrine in Persian Sufi poetry. It is a strategy to induce unconsciousness very similar to the dance of Sufi dervishes, known as the Samā,

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going round in repetitive circles. ‘Samā is a highly developed practice that assists the Sufi adept in progressing the stages of the Sufi path (tariqa) to enlightenment and Knowledge of God’ (Mir, 2010, p.  106). These performativity models and poetic circles of repetition propose a lengthening pattern in the overall paradigm of ‘Unity of Being’ without motion in utter silence, by prompting fortitude and rhythm in physical and intellectual practices of Sufism. The chief reason being that, except for good words or ‘to celebrate God’s goodness rather than to struggle with life’s ambiguities’ (Lobel, 2007, p. 133), Rūmi advises against utterance of any kind and redirects the reader to the concept of ‘silence’ throughout his poetic career. This is according to ‘the old saying about the complete silence of him who has reached God’. Schimmel observes that this type of silence was applied ‘by many of them not so much to the poetical expressions of their experiences, but rather to the so-­called shathiyāt, theopatic expressions which some of the great Sufis had uttered in the state of ecstasy, proclaiming their union with God in open words’ (Schimmel, 1997, p. 111). Such utterances as ‘I am the Absolute Truth’ (Ernst, 1985, pp. 44–5) caused a great deal of physical and emotional pain to those observing the speaker of such utterances in torment, such as the story of Hallāj’s ‘iconoclastic and defiant ecstasy’ (Dabashi, 1999, p. 113). Rūmi’s poetical devices, especially radīf, generate a sense of avoidance, so that one abstains from uttering such unrefined phrases; thereby reducing pain of instant proclamation of Unity and absorption in God. Hafīz and Attār employ analogous rhetorical devices, even though their poetic expression of exchanging love between lovers remains, to some extent, different in debating gender specification, personification and poetic form. Each of these Sufi poets employs ocean to signify fear, love or knowledge, the latter remaining a great focus in Rūmi’s verse narratives. Each present a different face of pain through form and content, yet all remain coherent. One may resolve to conclude that these three masters of Sufi poetry in the Persian vernacular are realities of one being after all, manifesting diverse specifications of one universal reality. In the words of Rūmi, ‘Immersion in the glory of the Lord of glory! / Immersion wherefrom was no extrication / as it were identification with the very ocean! / Partial Reason is as naught to Universal Reason’ (Rūmi, 2001, p. 53).

References Abrahamov, B. (2003). Divine Love in Islamic Mysticism: The Teachings of Al-Ghazâlî and Al-Dabbâgh. London: Routledge Curzon Sufi Series.

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Alhaq, S. (2009). ‘Sufi Tradition and the Postcolonial Condition: a Report on Knowledge’. Pakistan Journal of Social Sciences. 29(2). 387–96. Banani, A., R. Hovanissian and G. Sabagh (eds) (1994). Poetry And Mysticism in Islam: The Heritage Of Rūmi. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bang, A. K. (2003). Sufis and Scholars of the Sea: Family Networks in East Africa, 1860–1925. Indian Ocean Series. London: Routledge Curzon. Barks, C. (trans.) (2003). Rūmi: the Book of Love: Poems of Ecstasy and Longing. New York: HarperCollins Publishers. Bürgel, J. C. (1994). ‘“Speech is a ship and meaning the sea”: Some Formal Aspects in the Ghazal Poetry of Rūmi’. In Banani, A., R. Hovanissian and G. Sabagh (eds), Poetry and Mysticism in Islam: The Heritage of Rūmi. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Can, S. (2005). Fundamentals of Rūmi’s Thought: A Mevlevi Sufi Perspective. Istanbul: The Light, Inc. Chittick, W. C. (1983). The Sufi Path of Love: The Spiritual Teachings of Rūmi. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Cutsinger, J. S. (2002). Paths to the Heart: Sufism and the Christian East. Bloomington: World Wisdom. Dabashi, H. (1999). Truth and Narrative: The Untimely Thoughts of ‘Ayn Al-Qudat Al-Hamadhani. Surrey: Curzon. Derin, S. (2008). Love in Sufism: from Rabia to Ibn al-Farid. Istanbul: Insan Publications. Elahi Ghomshei, H. (2010). ‘The principles of the religion of love in classical Persian poetry’, in Lewisohn, L. (ed.) Hafīz and Religion of Love. London: I. B. Tauris. pp. 77–106. Ernst, C. W. (1985). Words of Ecstasy in Sufism, SUNY Series in Islam. Albany: State University of New York Press. Fatemi, N. S., S. Fatemi and F. S. Fatemi (1978). Love, Beauty and Harmony in Sufism. New York: A.S. Barnes & Co. Inc. Green, J. (1983). ‘The Patriot’. The Rackham Journal of the Arts and Humanities. II(4). pp. 43–68. Jaoudi, M. (1993). Christian and Islamic Spirituality: Sharing a Journey. New Jersey: Paulist Press. Kimball V. M. (2010). Liturgical Illuminations: Discovering Received Tradition in the Eastern Orthros of Feasts of the Theotokos. Bloomington: Authorhouse. Lewis, B. (ed.) (2001). Music of a Distant Drum: Classical Arabic, Persian, Turkish, and Hebrew Poems. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Lewisohn, L. (ed.) (2010). Hafīz and Religion of Love in Classical Persian Poetry. London: I. B. Tauris. Lings, M. (1999). What is Sufism?, Cambridge: The Islamic Text Society. Lobel, D. (2007). A Sufi-Jewish Dialogue: Philosophy and Mysticism in Bahya Ibn Paquda’s Duties of the Heart, Jewish Culture and Contexts Series. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

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López Baralt, L. (2000). The Sufi Trobar Clus and Spanish Mysticism: A Shared Symbolism. Lahore: Iqbal Academy Pakistan. Michon, J. L. and R. Gaetani (eds) (2006). Sufism: Love and Wisdom. Bloomington: World Wisdom. Mir, F. (2010). The Social Space of Language: Vernacular Culture in British Colonial Punjab. Berkeley: University of California Press. Nūrbakhsh, J. (1978). In the Tavern of Ruin: Seven Essays on Sufīsm. London and New York: Khaniqahi-Nimatullahi Publications. Ordoubadian, R. (trans.) (2006). The Poems of Hafiz. Maryland: IBEX Publishers. Potkay, A. (2007). The Story of Joy: From the Bible to Late Romanticism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ritter, H. (ed.) (2003). The Ocean of the Soul: Men, the World, and God in the Stories of Farīd al-Dīn ῾At.t.ār. Leiden: Koninklijke Brill. Rūmi (2001). Masnavi I Ma᾽navi, Book I. (trans.) E. H. Whinfield. Iowa: Omphaloskepsis. Saxon, E. (2012). ‘Art and the Eucharist: Early Christian to ca. 800’. In Ian C. Levy, Gary Macy and Kristen Van Ausdall (eds), A Companion to the Eucharistic in the Middle Ages. Leiden: Koninklijke Brill. Schermer, V. L. (2003). Spirit and Psyche: A New Paradigm for Psychology, Psychoanalysis, And Psychotherapy. London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers. Schimmel, A. (1997). Pain and Grace: A Study of Two Mystical Writers of EighteenthCentury Muslim India. Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers. —— (1975). Mystical Dimensions of Islam. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Tourage, M. (2007). Rūmi and the Hermeneutics of Eroticism. Leiden: Koninklijke Brill. Valiuddin, M. (1959). The Quranic Sufism. Delhi: Shri Jainendra Press. Yarshater, E. (ed.) (2009). Mystical Poems of Rūmi. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Zavosh, H. (trans.) (2003). Rūmi and Friends. Lincoln: iUniverse.

Part Five

Postsecularism

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Postsecularism: Introduction Anthony Paul Smith La Salle University

Introduction Looking before the complexity of a single historical moment, only the most reductive can fail to see the difficulty in giving a name to that moment. And yet, in the common creation narrative (and the various permutations arriving out of that common story of Jewish, Christian and Islamic monotheism) naming has always been the task given to man (and here I intend the gendered meaning of this term and not uncritically); but is there not a reversibility between the act of naming (a crystallization of the rational powers of the human that places men and women over other creatures) and the foolishness implied in thinking the ability to name, to develop a concept, to make a classification and distinction, sets the human over the rest of creation? After all, once, intelligent human beings thought that one such concept and classification that emerged from an American and European context was a normative demand that bore down upon the whole globe through the process of history. These human beings believed that there was direct-­access to rationality, that time was homogenous across the heterogeneous nations, and that this homogenous time allowed for no mediation between persons and the rational community. The belief in these concepts, classifications and distinctions, perhaps like all beliefs, played themselves out in the public realm as the exercise of violence deemed legitimate. This violence has taken many forms historically that stretch from the earliest defences of colonialism on principles of spreading Enlightenment to those who lived in darkness to, today, the enclosing in a torturous darkness those determined by the State to be terrorists outside the law.1 Beliefs matter. Whether it is the beliefs of the demonized Islamist or the valorized liberal secularist, these beliefs matter in that they bear on matter: beliefs may be inscribed in the flesh, one’s own but also, forcefully, into the flesh

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of the other.2 But what does this discourse – with its references to belief and matter, to violence said to be legitimate or illegitimate, to the reversibility of reason and foolishness – have to do with the postsecular? What does this the postsecular name? Is it a concept? A distinction? A classification of a historical sequence? Or is it perhaps something else not captured by these names? Perhaps it names the heterogeneous space and time of the lived reality of the social and, if so, does it name anything at all? The first thing that is apparent in the term ‘postsecularism’ is its dependence on something other than itself, namely ‘the secular’. So in order to understand the postsecular we are led from the get-­go to the question of the secular. This dependence may first appear as a weakness of postsecularism, but that would be to move too quickly from the description of the postsecular to an assumed value. This dependence upon the secular may actually be seen from a different perspective and one that opens up to the power of the postsecular. Namely, the postsecular first names the relativizing of the secular. An important consequence of the postsecular’s dependence on the secular is that the secular is cast immediately as a kind of power, something upon which others draw, and so something that may also be depleted, something with limits that may be delineated. The postsecular is parasitic upon the secular, something critics of postsecular theory may at times bring attention to, but the very fact that anything may act parasitically upon the secular reveals it to be something akin to a body and not the generalized horizon for thought and action it presents itself as. So in attempting to address the question – ‘what is the postsecular?’ – we see that it is necessary to talk about the secular; and that the very act of naming the secular is part of the identity of the postsecular. Talal Asad is perhaps the most influential theorist who has turned his theoretical gaze upon the secular in this postsecular way. So it is to his discussion of the secular that we will first turn. We will then turn to a discussion of the eventual character of the postsecular before concluding with a short discussion of the kinds of subjects that may exist under the postsecular event.

Secularism: You want it to be one way; but it’s the other way In his path-breaking work Formations of the Secular, Asad breaks up the phenomenon into ‘the secular’, which he defines as an epistemological concept, and ‘secularism’, which he defines as the political project growing out of the secular. Indeed, he describes the relation between the two in a linear way: ‘It is a

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major premise of this study that “the secular” is conceptually prior to the political doctrine of “secularism”, that over time a variety of concepts, practices, and sensibilities have come together to form “the secular”’ (Asad, 2003, p.  16). It should be noted that Asad’s understanding of ‘the conceptual’ is very different from philosophies infected by the Hegelian virus that unconsciously sees a progressive continuity between concepts and concrete forms; namely, the conceptual is already a site of practices and powers. We may even read this separation of epistemological concept from political project as a simple heuristic device, as they are never fully separated in Asad’s discussion, to which even a cursory reading of the organization of the book attests. There we find that his consideration of an anthropology of secularism is located in the section titled ‘Secular’ and not the following one titled ‘Secularism’. However, we will return to this vision of the conjugated secular (here naming the conjugative relationship of Asad’s epistemological concept and political project) when we look at the relationship between the concept of the postsecular and the concrete form or political projects that gave rise to it, for that relationship is reversed with regard to the postsecular and understanding that reversal and thus the character of the postsecular may be aided by some other conceptual tools we will bring in. But, turning back to the secular, Asad’s analysis in Formations of the Secular, especially in the central essay ‘What Might an Anthropology of Secularism Look Like?’, is prefigured in an important essay that appears in his earlier collection Genealogies of Religion (1993). Here, in the essay entitled ‘Ethnography, Literature, and Politics: Some Readings and Uses of Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses’, Asad examines the relation between literature and politics as that relation played out in the publication of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses and the controversy it caused amongst Muslims who were offended by the text and non-Muslim Westerners who were offended at the fatwa issued against Rushdie by the Ayatollah Khomeini. The facts of the controversy are well known and the contradictions of the various parties involved almost too banal to mention; namely, that many Muslims who expressed anger at the text likely had not read it and many non-Muslim Westerners (whom I will refer to as secularists), angry at the reaction, are unable to tell the difference between a fatwa issued by a Shi’a leader from the various unrelated death threats also directed at Rushdie. Nor did any side, as presented by the media and intellectuals, attempt to put the other into some kind of context. Secularists did not seek to compare the anger in the Muslim world with displays of anger from other groups, including themselves. After all, empty death threats are not, unfortunately, uncommon in the world. But, again, an analysis of a complex situation can become muddled very easily

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when it focuses upon these sorts of common hypocrisies. Asad’s analysis cuts through this to focus on the very question of what counts as reading: Many commentators have insisted that most protesting Muslims have not read the book. Clearly, most of them have not. However, as pastiche The Satanic Verses draws on a wide variety of literary texts, reproduces words and phrases from half a dozen languages, and alludes to as many national and religious settings. In what sense, precisely, can Western readers be said to have read the book? One might legitimately respond that reading need not conform to an a priori set of norms and knowledges in order to qualify as reading. At any rate, most people who have used it to commend or oppose particular political positions in Britain have not read it in any conventional literary sense, either. But, then, the way this text has fed into very different kinds of politics is itself, I would argue, part of the reading. The Satanic Verses is without doubt a deliberately provocative rhetorical performance in an already charged political field; that context has inevitably become part of the political struggle. (Asad, 1993, p. 282)

Here he rightly points out that the question of reading is not being asked in the midst of the debate. In a certain sense, the question of reading is assumed by the secularists in a homologous way to the same fundamentalism they are criticizing: ‘Oddly enough, the “fundamentalist” position – according to which the text is self-­sufficient for arriving at its meaning – is being taken here not by religious fanatics but by liberal [i.e. secular] critics. For example, the novelist Penelope Lively refers to a recent essay of Rushdie’s: “I think, sadly, it points up the basic confrontation: here is a novelist trying to explain his purpose to fundamentalists who cannot, or will not, understand what fiction is or does” ’ (Asad, 1993, p. 283). The confluence of reading and politics occasioned by Rushdie’s Satanic Verses is, of course, not limited to this one case study. We may even hazard the thesis that reading is almost always political in the sense that it is located within and conditioned by political practices. One may think of the very ability to publish and the various laws that police what may be published and what may not. With this thesis we may also hazard the corollary thesis that reading takes place within an epistemological frame. This frame is epistemological in the sense implied by Asad, who works from a Foucauldian understanding of how our reading is mediated and how we think and decide on what we know happens. Similarly, Daniel Whistler’s essay, ‘The Categories of Secular Time’, shows how the secular can be reimagined through critique; in doing so, his reading resists a kind of imperial version of the postsecular found in the work of certain Christian

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theologians such as Graham Ward.3 This conception of the secular is one that manifests fractured forms of time instead of supposedly neutral and empty or eschatological as in religious categories of time. This is a very different presentation of secular literature than that present in Lively, as quoted earlier, where she assumes that she knows what fiction is and what fiction does. That knowing is mediated for her through the epistemological framework of the standard conception of the secular, rather than through an experience of reading itself (if such a thing is even possible). Asad says as much writing, not about reading, but about citizenship: When [Charles] Taylor says, that the modern state has to make citizenship the primary principle of identity, he refers to the way it must transcend the different identities built on class, gender, and religion, replacing conflicting perspectives by unifying experience. In an important sense, this transcendent meditation is secularism. Secularism is not simply the intellectual answer to a question about enduring social peace and toleration. It is an enactment by which a political medium (representation of citizenship) redefines and transcends particular and differentiating practices of the self that are articulated through class, gender, and religion. (Asad, 2003, p. 5)

While Asad is not here making a claim about reading, we can extend this analysis of the conjugated secular (again, naming the conjugation of the epistemological concept and the political project) to the realm of reading and the domain of literature more generally. It might immediately be stated that the experience of reading is not always one of a firm articulation of the self, that reading and literature generally may decentre the self, may even cause a cracking up of the self: in other words, the act of reading may be dangerous for those who believe their own selfhood to be consistent and unitary. Such a claim has validity, but where does that validity come from if not from an assumed secular horizon for that reading? This vision of the act of reading as a kind of disenchantment of the self mirrors the vision of the secular as a tragic recognition of the homogeneity of time.4 Stated in more concrete terms, the secular is often presented in terms of a ‘subtraction narrative’, as Charles Taylor calls this narrative, or one that Paul de Man and Walter Benjamin present as following the logic of tragedy. Nazry Bahrawi’s essay, ‘Not my Bible’s Keeper: Saramago’s Cain Translates Postsecular Dissent’, shows how postsecular literature resists or marks its dissent from this subtraction narrative through the process of translation, re-­inscribing ‘religious’ texts in ways that are recognizably religious from the perspective of the divisions

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prescribed by secularism and its substraction. One form this subtraction narrative takes is to assume a kind of pure nature outside the realm of belief, a nature that is the domain of pure facts, the pure ‘that’s how it is’ of the ‘natural’.5 If we wanted a secular myth of this nature we can pull to mind the figure of the seemingly unstoppable criminal. What comes to mind may be scenes in Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men with Anton Chigurh (played by Javier Bardem in the film) flipping coins to see what will happen to his victims, to which we will return; or perhaps a particularly poignant scene with Marlo Stanfield (played by Jaime Hector) from the fourth season of The Wire who, after losing a poker game, goes to a local grocery store and brazenly steals a lollipop in full view of the security guard. The security guard recognizes Stanfield as the leader of a drug gang and presumably knows of his particularly brutal reputation. The conversation that takes place as the security guard confronts Stanfield is remembered by viewers for being particularly chilling: Security Guard: The fuck? You think I dream of coming to work up in this shit on a Sunday morning? Tell all my friends what a good job I got? I’m working to support a family, man. [Marlo looks away] Security Guard: Pretend I ain’t talking to you. Pretend like I ain’t even on this earth. I know what you are. Now, I ain’t stepping to, but I am a man. And you just clip that shit and act like you don’t even know I’m there. Marlo Stanfield: I don’t. [unwraps a stolen lollipop, throws wrapper on the ground] Security Guard: I’m here. [Marlo moves closer to him] Security Guard: Look, I told you I ain’t stepping to. I ain’t disrespecting you, son. Marlo Stanfield: You want it to be one way. Security Guard: What? Marlo Stanfield: You want it to be one way. Security Guard: Man, I don’t want it to be – Marlo Stanfield: You want it to be one way. Security Guard: [losing temper] Man, stop – [pulls himself together] Security Guard: Stop saying that. Marlo Stanfield: But it’s the other way.

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Later in the episode Stanfield’s enforcers murder the security guard on Stanfield’s orders for talking back to him. Here nature, in the guise of the unstoppable criminal, shows no regard for the social order. There is no regard for the symbol of authority, the security guard, a kind of ersatz-­police officer lacking any real authority, but a kind of low-­level avatar for the meaningfulness of order. The security guard knows that the theft is beyond petty, it barely deserves mentioning, and we also know as viewers that there is a certain disingenuousness to Stanfield’s claim to not see the security guard as this very act of theft was occasioned by the diminishing of his power during the poker game (we will return to this in our discussion of the postsecular), but still it is hard not to believe when faced with the coldness of Stanfield’s declaration, ‘You want it to be one way [. . .] But it’s the other way.’ The process of secularization is often presented as the diminishing of the effect of a fantasy, a fantasy that one may transcend the assumed meaninglessness of nature, a fantasy that is seen by many secularists as constitutive of religion itself. But, the secularist tells us, it’s the other way – how tragic. But, is it the other way?

From the postsecular event to postsecular subjects As we move into a more focused discussion of the postsecular beyond its status as parasitic upon the secular, let’s return to our myth of the unstoppable criminal as persona for the homologous nature that stands outside of belief, outside tradition, and which the secular constructs. Instead of a deeper discussion of that myth, though, let’s consider the counter-­myth already carried in some narratives of the unstoppable criminal. There is, as we already mentioned, the fact that as viewers we can see that Stanfield does in fact see the security guard and that is shown in his not simply ignoring him but having him killed. But if that counter-­myth is too passive, we can instead look to the counter-­myth in McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men (adapted for film by the Coen Brothers in a remarkably faithful way). The novel’s unstoppable criminal, Chigurh, stands for the randomness of nature as, throughout the story, he menaces his victims by flipping a coin to decide if he is going to kill them. In so doing, McCarthy is quite clearly making a connection between the randomness of Chigurh and the randomness of nature: a nature that, in its secular guise, just is regardless of human belief or human meaning. After Llewellyn Moss, the closest thing to a protagonist in the novel, is killed (though not ultimately by Chigurh), his wife (Carla Jean) is tracked down by Chigurh who is fulfilling a promise: if Llewellyn turned over money found at the site of a botched drug deal to Chigurh, Chigurh

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would kill only him. If he did not turn over the money, Chigurh would still kill Llewellyn but he would also kill Carla Jean. The scene that plays out as Carla Jean enters her mother’s house after her mother’s funeral to find Chigurh waiting for her, presents to us a personification of the postsecular counter-­myth. For Chigurh sits before Carla Jean, who begins by protesting that she doesn’t have the money. Chigurh explains that this is not about the money and that her husband could have saved her. She protests that he does not have to do this. Chigurh finds this funny: ‘People always say the same thing.’ ‘What do they say?’, she asks. ‘They say, “You don’t have to do this”. ’ He then says the best he can do is to flip a coin. This is one of the scenes where the film differs somewhat significantly from the novel; where the novel presents a perhaps more realistic portrait of a woman who is fearful facing her death, in the film Carla Jean is more resolute in her refusal. While in both the novel and the film she protests that the coin is, in reality, just him, it is only in the novel that at the end of the day she does call it (incorrectly) and is killed. In the film this is the truncated discussion: Carla Jean: I knowed you was crazy when I saw you settin there. I knowed exactly what was in store for me. Chigurh: Call it. Carla Jean: No. I ain’t gonna call it [More insistent] Chigurh: Call it. Carla Jean: The coin don’t have no say. It’s just you. Chigurh: I got here the same way the coin did.

In the same way that Chigurh’s violence is disavowed through recourse to the coin flip, so too does conjugated secularism disavow its own violence as it was enacted during the period of European imperialism. The postsecular event names the refusal of the colonized to allow the colonizers to hide behind this myth any longer. As with Carla Jean, such a refusal was often still met with death but the postsecular event was the global refusal of secularism’s naturalization, its self-­presentation as simply serving what just is. However, even Chigurh’s seeming valorization of the pure homogeneity of chance – a kind of pure secular – by proclaiming that he came to be just as the coin did carries with it its own doing. In the same way that the coin was contingent, so is the violence of the strong over the weak that is so seemingly unstoppable, so too is the naturalized violence of the colonizer over the colonized contingent and able to be overcome.6 I am referring to the colonizer/colonized relationship because we may understand postsecularism, not as a historical epoch, but rather as the name for

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an event which may allow for different subjects to exist in the light of their relationship or reaction to that event. Here I am drawing on the philosophy of Alain Badiou whose idea of ‘the event’ may be useful as a heuristic device to think through the relationship between the secular and the postsecular. The reason we may need a different theoretical framework for understanding this relationship is because the two are heterogeneous to one another. Even in their names we see that difference: secularism names a political project, it names something coherent and a kind of established power in the world, while the postsecular names an opening, it is an antagonism towards that power. Without going into Badiou’s theory of the event in detail, it may be faithfully summed up in this way: the way that a situation names what seems ‘to just be the case’ is radically broken open by an event that changes the very being or constitution of the situation. In other words, while there is room for change within what may ‘just be the case’, any changes that occur are anticipated and conditioned by the situation. An event changes those very conditions, it occurs outside of the anticipation of that system, and allows for new novel situations to arise. What we are terming the postsecular event shows the reversal of postsecularism with regards to the secular. Whereas, as Asad argues, the secular is an epistemological concept that undergirds the political project, with regard to the postsecular event it is the rejection of a political project that has lead theorists to attempt to think up a new epistemological framework.7 By naming this an event, we are able to unite a great multiplicity of events from the resistance in Algeria and Vietnam to French colonial rule, or in Iran the resistance to a more indirect colonialism, to the resistance in Europe as non-Europeans from former colonies were encouraged to immigrate to provide cheap labour for Europe but whose non-European identities would be seen also as a threat (Asad, 1993, pp. 253–6). The response or reaction to this multitudinous postsecular event may be seen as a process of subject formation, again following Badiou in relation to events but calling back to theorists like Asad and those such as Foucault and MacIntyre who influenced him, as well as figures in contemporary race, gender and queer studies such as Judith Butler and Fred Moten, among many others. Thus when considering the postsecular event, we have to consider the way secularism as an epistemological framework and a political system was challenged as a naturalizing process, as we have done, but also turn to the subjects formed or deformed by this event. What does postsecularism mean beyond the challenge it poses to secularism? What matters about the postsecular event, perhaps as with all events, is that new ways of relating to the world are formed by the event. If the postsecular event is related to the relation or non-­relation of

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traditions, their translatability or untranslatability, as many of its theorists claim, then it is also a call to the creation of something beyond translation. In other words, if the secular is always attempting to defer itself through translations of society into nature and of nature into society, the postsecular is the refusal echoing Carla Jean’s refusal: ‘The coin ain’t have no say. It’s just you.’ Manav Ratti captures this well, writing: ‘The postsecular is the sign of not just the limits of translation [. . .] but of also of untranslatability itself. [. . .] The postsecular is the sign of a call for a new form of interpretation, one which does not recode prior interpretative systems, and one which does not attempt a convergence of systems where it knows there can be none’ (Ratti, 2013, p. 136).8 Whatever the particularities of these new forms of interpretation or new subject formations may be, Badiou’s subject typology may be generic enough to be useful in thinking through some of the generalities of these forms (while of course recognizing the danger, always present, in simply choosing to speak at all). In his recent Logics of Worlds: Being and Event II, Badiou develops a theory of the three various subject ‘destinations’ (what we might more idiomatically refer to as ‘identities’) he thinks possible in relation to the event. The first is the faithful subject who attends to the reality of the event and the way the event has broken open, whatever situation once reigned. This faithful subject, Badiou claims, organizes the production of the event as the present; the faithful subject is a ‘resurrection (of a truth)’ (Badiou, 2009, p. 62). The paradigmatic case of the faithful subject is St Paul, to whom Badiou (2003) has devoted an entire book despite his underlying antipathy towards religion, and we can see in his portrayal an example of someone holding faithful to an event and creating anew the very ways in which interpretation is possible. However, not all subject formations take such a productive approach to the event (we must, especially when speaking of the postsecular, avoid speaking in terms of ‘positivity’ or ‘negativity’, for what faithfulness requires in the light of the postsecular event may be a kind of pessimism or negativity as scholars of black religion have argued) (Jones, 1998; Pinn, 2003). There are two other subject formations that ultimately take unproductive stances with regard to the event. These subject formations are named by Badiou as reactive and obscure. The figure of one who reacts is common in political discourse and Badiou is largely drawing upon that familiar trope. The reactive subject denies the event and seeks to remove it and its effects from history (Badiou, 2009, p. 62). Thus, a perfect example of a reactionary type with regard to the postsecular event would be the current crop of thinkers dubbing themselves ‘The New Atheists’. These figures deny the existence of this event and speak as if it didn’t happen, as if the old ways

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of translating still made sense and will indeed force (in both intellectual and political meanings of the term) that sense, even where it does not fit. The third type (the ‘obscure subject’) is perhaps indicative of the regnant stance in Christian theology and Continental philosophy of religion. Here the event is occulted or passed into what Badiou calls the ‘full body’ where the real body of the event is now hidden. What Badiou means by this is that the obscure subject neither affirms the event nor denies it. Instead the obscure subject is split between a simple return to the past (reaction) and the deployment of the new conditions produced by the event (affirmation). While we would need to interrogate Badiou for his own obscurity in his deployment of ‘political Islamism’ as a paradigmatic example of the obscure subject, we may still see a certain generic element in that the obscure subject always looks to plunge the event back within the fullness of some ‘Tradition or Law’ built off ‘the invocation of a full or pure transcendent Body, an ahistorical or anti-­evental body (City, God, Race . . .) from which follows that the trace [of the event] will be denied [. . .] and as a consequence, the real body, the divided body, will also be suppressed’ (Badiou, 2009, pp. 59–60). Perhaps the clearest example of the obscure orientation to the postsecular event is the attempt by some Christian theologians to claim the event as a way for an explicitly Christian political settlement to emerge as the dominant and dominating settlement. Consider John Milbank’s summary of the secular in his Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason: Once, there was no ‘secular’. And the secular was not latent, waiting to fill more space with the steam of the ‘purely human’, when the pressure of the sacred was relaxed. Instead there was the single community of Christendom, with its dual aspects of sacerdotium and regnum. The saeculum, in the medieval era, was not a space, a domain, but a time – the interval between fall and eschaton where coercive justice, private property and impaired natural reason must make shift to cope with the unredeemed effects of sinful humanity. (Milbank, 2006, p. 9)9

Christian postsecular theologians have turned the opening sentence into an incantation imbued with the power to repeal any secularist critiques of Christian thought or practice. But, taken in itself, ‘Once there was no “secular” ’, it would appear to say very little at all. After all, we could also say, ‘once there was no Christianity’. The fact that a theoretical and social system has an origin in time tells us very little about the value of that system, since all earthly things have a

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beginning in time. And while secularism may present itself as normative in a way that is false, as we will see other theorists have argued, Christianity too has presented itself as normative in a similar way and for many theologians continues to do so. For Milbank, while the secular ushers in some kind of new domain, there was once the single community of Christendom with its spiritual rule (sacerdotium) and its political or mundane rule (regnum); a fullness that only exists in the murky projections of the obscure subject. What would a ‘faithful subject’ to the postsecular event look like? It would require looking at the ‘real, divided body’ of the new situation, which Manav Ratti does here in his essay ‘The Postsecular and the Postcolonial’. Ratti’s question, ‘What does postsecularism mean within and for a postcolonial context’ moves the postsecular far from its Christian theological capture, for it concerns a new situation, one of a generalized diaspora where a people may now be dispersed in their own nation. Daniel Colucciello Barber’s work On Diaspora: Christianity, Religion, and Secularity is perhaps the best example of a theoretical unfolding of the postsecular that provides attention to this division most clearly manifest in the post-­colony and, more importantly, thinks that divide as changing the very practice of theoretical work itself. Barber’s text brilliantly provides an analysis of the postsecular event which avoids the easy reversion to a new mythology of transcendence (the ‘obscure subject’ of Milbank and those working in similar ways) but which rethinks the category of immanence in a way that avoids some vision of a world that ‘simply is’, existing as a realm of brute facts that one must submit to: Secularism [. . .] is not necessarily immanence, for immanence does not require that we choose between the signification of religion and the affirmation of the world. In fact, secularism is poorly understood as an immediate affirmation of the world, for it is, more basically, an injunction: to affirm the world, one must be against religious signification, since the true image of the world is one in which religious signification has been devalorized, or at least ‘resituated’. (Barber, 2011, p. 103)

What Barber has done here is take on the challenge figures like Asad have put forward, but in so doing he thinks through the possibility of something common or, in his specific terminology, ‘significant’, that resists being confused as a universal or a term of transcendence (what Badiou has called the full body). He thinks through the way in which immanence, the very realm that the secular claims to derive its authority and against which most religious thinkers imagine

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themselves to be pitched antagonistically, and thinks that very immanence as diasporic and as the creation of fictions (he calls this ‘fabulation’). In one of the most important passages of his book, Barber writes of the relationship between immanence as common or significant and the production of ever proliferating fictive significations for reality: Immanence [. . .] calls for a direct affirmation of the world, an affirmation that proceeds [. . .] by a double affirmation – an affirmation, that is, both of the world as such, or the namelessness of immanence, and the signification that immanence necessarily produces. [. . .] Nonetheless, to affirm the proper namelessness of immanence is not to have found the true, nameless name of reality; it is instead to realize that one necessarily produces fictive names [inclusive of religious and secular naming] for a reality that, as surplus, is fecund with regard to signification. (Barber, 2011, p. 104)

Barber provides an example of a diasporic subject where fidelity to the postsecular event requires an ever more serious and playful re-­engagement; a fabulation that is melancholic and joyful at once. The postsecular requires another effort of thought from us and Barber dismantles the very idea that the conjugated secular is the end of thought. Indeed, he destroys the idea that there is any end to thought except in that very thinking or ‘fictive signifying’. It is this immanent act, which Barber explores and puts into practice, that literature has the potential to resurrect as the truth of the postsecular event.

Notes 1 See Asad, 2007, for a look at the contemporary effect of this, and for a wider historical survey, compare Cavanaugh, 2009. 2 See Goodchild, 2002, for a critical theory of belief and matter (which is flesh in its personal form) and for a more particular reading of pain and belief, see as well Asad, 1993, 2003. 3 For more on the different forms that postsecular theory may take, see Whistler and Smith, 2010. 4 This vision of the secular as a homogenous time transcendent to subjects and unifying those subjects despite their differences is a common self-­understanding of the secular; when considering the question of what an anthropology of secularism would look like in regards to temporality, Asad turns to two different literary analyses of tragedy: one by Paul de Man (‘The Rhetoric of Temporality’) and another by Walter Benjamin (The

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Origin of German Tragic Drama). See Asad, Formations, 2003, pp. 62–6. This short section is nonetheless a remarkably dense reading of these two texts and I cannot possibly do justice to it in a short summary. However, readers so interested should consult Basit Kareem Iqbal, “Chronopolitics of Allegory in Talal Asad’s Anthropology of Secularism” (MA Thesis submitted to the University of Toronto, 2011). The introduction is available online: https://www.academia.edu/ 1507991/MA_Thesis_Introduction This is termed the sékommça by the French philosophers Christian Jambet and Guy Lardreau. See Smith, 2013, for a fuller postsecular account of the sékommça in relation to Christian, Muslim and secular conceptions of nature and thought. See Andrews, 2010, for a philosophical overview of contingency and its relationship to postsecular political projects. For a useful overview of how this postsecular event played out in the Islamic world, see Dabashi, 2008. Ratti’s text is one of the most wide-­ranging studies of postsecularism with particular attention to the field of literature. On the concepts of translation and untranslatability, see Mandair, 2009, and Mahmood, 2011. For a less theological and less polemical, but nonetheless similar account, see the popular work of Taylor, 2007.

References Andrews, A. (2010). ‘Sovereign Autoimmunity: Hägglund, Bataille and the secular’. A. P. Smith and D. Whistler (eds) After the Postmodern and the Postsecular: New Essays in Continental Philosophy of Religion. Newcastle-­upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. pp. 257–79. Asad, T. (1993). Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins Press. pp. 83–124. —— (2003). Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Badiou, A. (2003). St. Paul: The Foundations of Universalism. (trans.) Ray Brassier. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ——(2009). Logics of Worlds: Being and Event II. (trans.) Alberto Toscano. London: Continuum. Barber, D.C. (2011). On Diaspora: Christianity, Religion, and Secularity. Eugene: Cascade. Cavanaugh, W. (2009). The Myth of Religious Violence: Secular Ideology and the Roots of Modern Conflict. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dabashi, H. (2008). Islamic Liberation Theology: Resisting the Empire. London: Routledge. Goodchild, P. (2002). Capitalism and Religion: The Price of Piety. London: Routledge.

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Iqbal, B. K. (2011). ‘Chronopolitics of allegory in Talal Asad’s anthropology of secularism’. MA Thesis, University of Toronto. Jones, W. R. (1998). Is God a White Racist: A Preamble to Black Theology. Boston: Beacon Press. Mahmood, S. (2011). Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Mandair, A. S. (2009). Religion and the Spectre of the West: Sikhism, India, Postcoloniality, and the Politics of Translation. New York: Columbia University Press. Milbank, J. (2006). Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason. 2nd edn. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Pinn, A. B. (2003). Terror and Triumph: The Nature of Black Religion. Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress. Ratti, M. (2013). The Postsecular Imagination: Postcolonialism, Religion, and Literature. London and New York: Routledge. Smith, A. P. (2013). A Non-Philosophical Theory of Nature: Ecologies of Thought. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Taylor, C. (2007). A Secular Age. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Whistler, D. and Smith, A. P. (eds) (2010). After the Postmodern and the Postsecular: New Essays in Continental Philosophy of Religion. Newcastle-­upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

17

The Categories of Secular Time Daniel Whistler

University of Liverpool

Why literature can never be entirely religious In a series of essays published in 2009 and 2010, Graham Ward has argued that ‘literature can never be entirely secular’ or, more strongly still, that ‘literature resists secularity’ (Ward, 2009, pp. 21–7; 2010, pp. 73–88). According to Ward, essential properties of literary production and reception are shared by religious traditions. He points to a number of such properties. First and most prosaically, ‘the Western imaginary has been shaped profoundly in the past by its Judeo-Christian institutions and shaped equally by the gradual secularization of, or secular replacements for, those institutions’ (Ward, 2009, p.  25): the language, imagery and rhetoric we use can never fully escape its theological past. Second, both reading and writing are forms of ‘poetic faith’ or ‘entrustment’ that engages one affectively and also transformatively ‘as proto-­ evangelium performances’ (Ward, 2009, p.  26). Third, and this is the most pertinent piece of evidence for what follows, according to Ward, narrative operates through fundamentally religious categories – that is, by means of teleological ‘horizons of anticipation and expectation, fear and hope’ (Ward, 2009, p. 23). He writes: It is important to recognize how literature is always and inevitably caught up with notions of thaumaturgy, revelatory disclosure, providence and eschatology – however much these notions are secularized into ‘aesthetic epiphanies’, ‘the omniscient narrator’, and the ‘sense of an ending’. (Ward, 2009, p. 23)

As we know from all secularization narratives: secular existence (and so secular literature) never escapes its religious inheritance. It is doomed to repeat religion

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ad infinitum, imprisoned within a cage of theological categories. Hence, Ward sums up his overall argument as follows: Literature will always resist such a secularising process, resist the erasure of religion, because intrinsic to its nature, even when handling the most mundane (and ‘secular’ in the older understanding of the term) matters, it points towards a horizon of transcendence. (Ward, 2010, p. 74)

In what follows, I want to begin to think about what it might mean for literature to be framed by categories that are not religious in nature; how, that is, one might envisage an escape from the religious, however partial. I take three examples to argue that the modes of temporality they perform are constituted by categories that are indifferent to religion – categories that are indeed to be understood in line with the secular’s break from the religious. This is of course not to oppose Ward’s thesis, for literature can obviously both never be entirely religious and never be entirely secular at the same time, without contradiction or incoherence; nevertheless, it is to dispute his emphasis on the need to frame literary time eschatologically. Some literature works differently; indeed, I will argue that Friedrich Hölderlin’s last poems, Michel Tournier’s Friday and Orhan Pamuk’s narrators resist the temporalization of narrative as such, at least on any ordinary conception of time. Nevertheless, the very idea of a conception of the secular that is independent of the religious is often seen as problematic, and this is indeed an issue that bubbles away beneath the surface of Ward’s articles. There are two ways of framing this critique of a distinctive secular: either by defining the secular as a redeployment, or perversion, of religious categories, or by defining it as a mere negation of them. On both counts, according to these critics, to speak of a secular characteristic that does not depend in some way on a prior positing of the religious cannot be countenanced, and so my project in this essay would collapse. Hence, on the first account, any secular space within modernity is merely a perversion or inadequate repetition of the structure of religious traditions, that is, Christianity; so on this view, there is nothing substantially distinctive – and certainly nothing innovative – about the categories that frame secular productions (Milbank, 2006). On the second account, the secular is merely that which fails (or succeeds) in ‘no longer being religious’; to define the secular, then, is to define it merely as a space that negates eschatology, revelation or an embedded sense of self (Taylor, 2007). The two accounts are of course not mutually exclusive: both tend to portray the genesis of the secular as a negative process – a loss of something, whether a feeling for the transcendent,

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understandings of non-­materialist values, a sense of non-­homogenous temporality, or community. Secularity constitutes a ‘Fall’ from religion. Moreover, it is important to note that the above critiques of the autonomy of the secular are usually ‘negative’ in two senses that it is important to distinguish: first, the secular is defined by its lack of religious characteristics; second, this lack is articulated pejoratively or critically. The former is a negative description, the latter is a negative evaluation – and it is with the former that I am concerned in this essay. That is, my task is to provide a preliminary account of secular time in categories that do not merely negate or deviate from the categories of prior religious traditions. My task is to give a positive description that leaves questions of evaluation, whether positive or negative, unanswered. I am not, therefore, interested in the salvation of the secular: a distasteful task considering the oppression, conceptual and real, to which secularism has historically given rise; nevertheless, neither do I wish to throw the baby out with the bathwater: there are moments in becoming-­secular that are worthy of detailed description, at the very least. In what follows, this positive description of the secular is framed around the problematic of a secular time. The saeculum of in-­between times as mediated through the work of Tournier, Hölderlin and Pamuk gives rise to the question: is such an in-­between always reducible to the religious? Ward’s challenge, earlier, is presented primarily in terms of the temporality of narrative – the idea that literary time is always a variant of religious times, that literary time is always eschatological; my aim in what follows is to dispute this by considering two variants of secular time as they are constructed in the works of Tournier, Hölderlin and Pamuk: the human secular of Pamuk’s novel Snow and the inhuman secular found most clearly in Hölderlin’s last poetry. I argue that the categories that generate these forms of secular time are irreducibly areligious.

The inhuman secular: Tournier and Hölderlin Tournier’s Friday and Hölderlin’s last poems resist divine time and they also both resist human time. In their place, they attempt to perform a purely literary time that is indifferent to both gods and man. It is to this extent that they must be read as manifestations of secular time. In other words, they shift towards a time of the inhuman and in-­divine moment, self-­contained and self-­affirming. They enact, therefore, the possibility of a time without transition, a time not governed by the interplay of presence and absence, a time independent of difference.

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Tournier’s Friday describes the passage of Robinson Crusoe from empty body-­without-organs wedded to the earth, through unstable periods of oscillation between cultivated reterritorialization and deterritorializing lines of flight, to the point where – under the unconscious tutelage of Friday – he becomes an aerial, solar surface through which intensities pass and momentarily express themselves. On the threshold of this final transformation, Robinson reflects: What has most changed in my life is the passing of time, its speed and even its direction. Formerly every day, hour and minute leaned in a sense toward the day, hour and minute that was to follow, and all were drawn into the pattern of the moment, whose transience created a kind of vacuum. So time passed rapidly and usefully, the more quickly because it was usefully employed, leaving behind an accumulation of achievement and wastage which was my history. Perhaps the sweep of time of which I was a part, after winding through millennia, would have ‘coiled’ and returned to its beginning. But the circularity of time remained the secret of the gods, and my own short life was no more than a segment, a straight line between two points aimed absurdly toward infinity . . . Yet there are portents which offer us keys to eternity. There is the calendar, wherein the seasons eternally complete their cycle on a human scale, and even the modest circle of the hours. For me the cycle has now shrunk until it is merged in the moment. The circular movement has become so swift that it cannot be distinguished from immobility. And it is as though, in consequence, my days had rearranged themselves. No longer do they jostle on each other’s heels. Each stands separate and upright, proudly affirming its own worth. And since they are no longer to be distinguished as the stages of a plan in process of execution, they so resemble each other as to be superimposed in my memory, so that I seem to be ceaselessly reliving the same day. (Tournier, 1969, pp. 203–4)

Robinson here identifies three structures of temporality: first, a human form of linear time in which moment follows on moment in a ‘straight line’ that recurs ad infinitum; second, a divine time which is circular, the end coiling back to the beginning and recommencing; third, a post-­human time of the moment, in which circular time compresses itself to the limit of the infinitely small, so that it seems almost immobile: each one of these moments becomes self-­contained and self-­affirming (ab-­solute). It is worth noting the relation between divine and post-­human time: the former consists in cycles that exceed all possible

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human experience; the latter shrinks these cycles into the very atoms of experience. One might even speak of the latter as a secularization of divine time to the extent that it repeats the cycle immanently. Moreover, Friday also describes a fourth time which Robinson momentarily forgets (although he returns to it a paragraph later), this is ‘escap[e] into timelessness’ or ‘eternity’: the forgetting of time associated in the novel with the pigs of the swamp (ancestors of Nietzsche’s forgetful cows) (Tournier, 1969, p. 204). This timelessness is of course not only the preserve of semi-­conscious beasts, but also a deity who exists outside of time. The divine has two times: everlasting cycles and atemporal stasis. Robinson goes on to critique the neuroses associated with human time ticking on and on without end; he also rejects the longing for eternity as illusory. Rather, at this late stage in the novel Robinson finds himself wholeheartedly affirming the post-­human time of the moment. He describes the new form of comportment that has come over him as he experiences this ‘revolutionary’ (Tournier, 1969, p. 205) temporal structure: [The island and Friday] call for my attention, a watchful and marvelling vigilance, for it seems to me – nay, I know it – that at every moment I am seeing them for the first time, and that nothing will ever dull their magical freshness. (Tournier, 1969, p. 205)

A similar form of revolutionary naivety emerges out of a reading of Hölderlin’s last poems. While his ‘late’ poems – ambitious hymns and elegies marked by their complexity, disjointedness and their technically fiendish verse forms – are most often celebrated, it is those that come after 1806 that form my subject matter here. 1806 marks a break in Hölderlin’s poetic production: he abandoned the mythic content and eschatological temporality characteristic of his pre-1806 work to produce in his forty-­seven final poems something very different.1 Something similar to Tournier’s description of a time of the self-­contained moment informs the temporal structure of Hölderlin’s last poems. Bertaux’s comments can serve as a guiding motif: ‘The fifty or so poems which remain of [Hölderlin’s] productions from the era of the tower are of a style and tone totally different from the high style of the preceding phase: infinitely simple and sparse, almost naïve and intemporal’ (Bertaux, 1953, p.  331). He goes on to expand on this notion of intemporality: ‘What is at issue is another temporal dimension than that of human agitation, the historical dimension of dates;

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[Hölderlin] rediscovers the cyclic time of agrarian civilisations’ (Bertaux, 1953, p. 331). Earlier comments also shed light on the notion: [During this phase, Hölderlin] shuts up . . . he integrates himself into the landscape, while his body is reduced to the earth. It lives the rhythm of the seasons. Duration is abolished. Around him exist solely the elements, the breath of air, light and water . . . Around him, life is renewed. (Bertaux, 1953, p. 324)

Bertaux’s identification of the intemporal closely maps Tournier’s description of a post-­human time. There is the same refusal to think time as passing away, a refusal to think it in terms of a series of linear presents: ‘Duration is abolished’. This is a time of perpetual beginning, but simultaneously a time of perpetual perfection. Every new moment stands alone, complete and radically new. Böschenstein calls this a ‘despotism of the present’ in Hölderlin’s last poetry (Böschenstein, 1966, p. 39); Miles similarly writes that the poems are ‘lived out in the naked present, free from all tensions in time’ (Miles, 1971, p. 115); and Ryan also provides a helpful gloss: [Noteworthy are] the monotony of form and theme, the lack of a sense of historical time, the almost exclusive use of present tense, the tensionlessness [in these poems] . . . It is above all in the total absence of historical consciousness that this transformation [from the hymns to the last poems] is most apparent. The same poet who once attempted to contain in his words a sweeping vision of the plan of history . . . [now] reflects the condition of ataraxia, a nearly complete acceptance of, and contentment with, the dispensation of things as the poet observes them. (Ryan, 1988, pp. 345–6)

Hölderlin’s experience of time is that of the intemporal. Intemporality has no progress or decline, but merely successive and repeated moments of consummation. Each consummation may well be qualitatively different (for example, the four seasons are all complete in incomparable ways), but each is, on its own terms, equally consummate. An example will shed further light on intemporality: Der Frühling Wenn aus der Tiefe kommt der Frühling in das Leben, Es wundert sich der Mensch, und neue Worte streben Aus Geistigkeit, die Freude kehrt wieder Und festlich machen sich Gesang und Lieder.

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Das Leben findet sich aus Harmonie der Zeiten, Daß immerdar den Sinn Natur und Geist geleiten, Und die Vollkommenheit ist Eines in dem Geiste, So findet vieles sich, und aus Natur das Meiste. (Hölderlin, 2004, p. 207)2

Only the present indicative tense is here used: whereas Hölderlin’s earlier hymns and elegies had drawn on a Schillerian eschatology in which the present is constituted both by its nostalgia for a classical arcadia and also expectation of the end-­times to come, this is completely absent after 1806. The present exists on its own terms, independent of comparisons to happy origins or destinies. It is described for its own sake. What takes place is an absolutization of the present. Fenves’s ‘Measure for Measure: Hölderlin and the Place of Philosophy’ reads into the hymns prior to 1806 precisely this epiphanic structure. Fenves focuses on a line from Der Rhein, ‘Nur hat ein jeder sein Maas’ (l. 203; ‘Only each has its measure’), contrasting it with (what he sees as) the self-­defeating plea of Brot und Wein that measure is ‘allen gemein’ (l. 45; ‘common to all’). By means of this idea of each alone having its measure that is not common to anything else, Fenves develops a version of the incomparability of the affirmative moment found in Hölderlin’s last poems: ‘Only each one’ has its own criteria, which means that the criteria for something being what it is cannot be found in anything but the thing itself . . . The only place to seek the measure of each one is in ‘onliness’ itself: in aloneness, in singularity. (Fenves, 1993, pp. 375–6)

Just like the post-­human time of the last poems, singularity of measure gives rise to an autarchy of the moment. Each is perfect on its own terms. Moreover, Fenves links this new experience of poetic time to the singularity of the poem itself: each poem is an affirmative, self-­contained moment; each poem not only represents but performs its own completeness. The time of Hölderlin’s last poems should be named poetic time itself (Philipsen, 1992, p.  72). And, as such, it is poetic time that needs to be distinguished from the human time of linearity and the divine time of cycles. Or, as Fenves concludes his piece, ‘the other measure, the non-­human one, is a measure of language’s contraction from the human-­ divine interplay’ (Fenves, 1993, p. 380). The time of language is neither the time of men nor the time of the gods; it is an inhuman saeculum.

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The human secular: Pamuk The stakes of Pamuk’s Snow are clearly presented in a central passage from the novel: Here, perhaps, we have arrived at the heart of our story. How much can we ever know about the love and pain in another’s heart? How much can we hope to understand those who have suffered deep anguish, greater deprivation and more crushing disappointments than we ourselves have known? . . . So it is when Orhan the novelist peers into the dark corners of his poet friend’s difficult and painful life: how much can he really see? (Pamuk, 2004, p. 266)

The anxiety eating away at the narrator here emanates from the possibility of represention, the difficulty involved in putting individual lives on display in their singularity – ‘to recreate the world of single human beings’ (Pamuk, 2012, p. 56). It is in this vein Pamuk has styled himself as a spokesman for the Other (Ertürk, 2010, p. 646), a mediator through which any voiceless individual might speak. And what is more, Pamuk’s imperative to represent all voices forms, as we shall see, the basis of his commitment to secularity: he remains explicitly indifferent to the religious positioning of a subject, thereby allowing all voices to speak equally and without discrimination. Pamuk’s secularism is born from an adherence to equal representation. Discourse on Turkey often oscillates between two extremes: a violent Kemalist laicism (or ‘Westernization’) enforced by the army and state apparatus on the one hand and upsurges of ‘Eastern’ Islamic unrest on the other. Kemalist secularism is paradigmatic of the violent, identity-­erasing secular attacked in the name of postsecularity by Asad, Mahmood and others, whereas Islamic resistance occasionally finds itself – and particularly during the early ’90s when Pamuk’s Snow is set – constructed in terms of the Western fantasy of fundamentalism. It is in this cultural landscape that Pamuk’s novels are to be situated through a complex operation involving at least five moves:

1. First and foremost, Pamuk identifies himself as a secularist: ‘I am a secularist, but a liberal secularist’ (cited in Ahmet, 2013, p. 246), and all that follows, I want to contend, must be understood as some form of manifestation of this commitment to the secular plane. 2. Nevertheless, Pamuk is most celebrated (and denigrated) for his sustained, ongoing criticism of the Kemalist laicism that forms the official ideology of

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the Turkish state. In Snow, the narrator is remorseless in his attacks on the Kemalist characters (Sunay Zaim and Z Demirkol) who confuse life with its ideological representation.3 These characters refuse to give the Other a voice: ‘Those who seek to meddle with the republic, with freedom, with enlightenment will see their hands crushed’ (Pamuk, 2004, p. 158). Hence, the narrator, Orhan, speaks of the ‘merciless violence visited upon [the people of Kars] in the name of republicanism’, and the ‘terror’ this gives rise to (Pamuk, 2004, p. 416). As Santesso points out, Pamuk transforms Kemalist laicism into a form of fundamentalist violence, indistinguishable in effect from its religious variants (Santesso, 2012, pp. 127–8). 3. Furthermore, Pamuk is equally committed to the destruction of the East/ West binary that informs so much of this discourse on Turkey, as well as the reception of his own novels. He explicitly frames the aims of Snow in these terms: as the novel proceeds, all binaries are deconstructed so as to give way to a tangled web of complex subject-­positions and mutual dependencies (Neuman, 2011, p. 153). Indeed, as Pamuk has put it more generally, ‘I want to destroy the clichés cultivated by both sides. This is what I perceive as the task of a political novel’ (Pamuk, 2005). And what results from this destruction is a form of anarchy, or at least mixture: ‘Culture is mix’ (Pamuk, 2006). 4. Part of the way in which Pamuk goes about achieving this project consists in an avowed sensitivity to all forms of Islamic subjectivity, allowing them space to speak in his fiction. Ka, Snow’s protagonist, ‘shed[s] tears for the Islamists’ (Pamuk, 2004, p. 210). Hence, Snow’s Turkish reception in particular has been marked by nothing more than shock at how an avowed secularist like Pamuk could represent the voices of ‘political Islam’ so sympathetically.4 5. Finally, Pamuk asserts that the above can only be achieved through cultivating a kind of cosmopolitan homelessness. The novelist must despecify herself from particular traditions and communities, whether religious or secular. Pamuk writes, ‘The novelist is a person who doesn’t belong to a community, who doesn’t share the basic instincts of a community, and who is thinking and judging with a different culture than the one he is experiencing’ (Pamuk, 2008, p. 371). Much of what follows will be focused on the possibility and legitimacy of such a form of fictional life. It is no surprise then that, as a result of this complex series of operations, Snow – Pamuk’s self-­avowed political novel – has been received in diverse, even

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contradictory ways. It has been adduced as evidence of Pamuk’s turn to political Islam and repudiation of secularity tout court (Daglier, 2012, pp.  148–50), as an attempt to sketch out a new form of religious cosmopolitanism (Neuman, 2011, p.  143), or as a covert repetition of liberal-­secular narratives (Ahmet, 2013, pp. 252–3). Pamuk’s representation of Islamic subjects has likewise been seen as successful, a secular caricature or a self-­conscious failure flagging up the impossibility of all representations of the Other (Ahmet, 2013; Ertürk, 2010). Throughout the novel, both the protagonist, Ka, and his narrator (and doppelganger), Orhan, are set up as figures of the secular. They both indiscriminately collect voices and worldviews from across the spectrum of characters, whether secularist thugs, Islamic fundamentalists in hiding,‘headscarf girls’ or Kurdish nationalists. And, what is more, Ka (and implicitly the narrator too) attempts to endorse them all equally. Ka exclaims, ‘Everyone I’ve interviewed since coming here, everyone I’ve talked to. I agree with them all’ (Pamuk, 2004, p. 131). Ka, like Pamuk himself, is resolutely committed to the ideal of polyphony, the active inclusion of all voices in a ‘textual bazaar’ (Ali and Hagood, 2012, p. 505) or carnival. This is flagged up not only by the reference to Bakhtin in the text of the novel itself (Pamuk, 2004, p.  141), but also in the epigram from Dostoevsky (Pamuk, 2004, p. vii). And the ‘heteroglossic spree’ underlying Pamuk’s novelistic practice has been discussed repeatedly in the literature (Ali and Hagood, 2012, p. 505–13; Ahmet, 2013, p. 345; Santesso, 2012, p. 127). Pamuk himself speaks of this component of Snow as follows: My book has many voices, I do not comment on them individually. Dostoevsky was the master of this form of writing. Many of my characters hold ideas which run counter to my own. The challenge is to also make the voices representing opinions I find repugnant sound convincing. (Pamuk, 2005)

That is, Ka collects characters and lets them speak, ‘gather[ing] the perspectives of a wide array of people’ (Coury, 2009, p. 342). He acts as a mediator, or secular plane on which their identities are discursively constructed. Indeed, towards the end of the novel, Ka is explicitly characterized as such, ‘I am an impartial mediator’ (Pamuk, 2004, p.  331). And, of course, this gives rise to trenchant criticism of such mediation within the novel itself, closely mirroring popular critiques of secularism as covertly Westernizing and imperial.5 Ka and the narrator perform secularity in Snow, but it is not the strong Kemalist secularism of the Turkish state. Theirs is not a laicism that refuses to

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hear or represent the voices of the religious; rather, Ka actively seeks out minority religious subject-­positions to give them a chance to speak. On the other hand, the Kemalist secularism of Sunay Zaim and Z Demirkol is remorselessly savaged throughout, as we have seen. Pamuk, therefore, does seem to glimpse here some form of beneficent secularity that fleshes out his own stated commitment to non-Kemalist secularism – and yet, as I will go on to argue in the conclusion, it is a secularity that necessarily fails: a tragic secular. Before considering this, however, it is necessary to elaborate on two of the categories by which such a soft or human secularity is developed: active indifferentiation and spatialization. Secularity operates by indifferentiating religions; that is, the secular should be distinguished from mere tolerance insofar as the latter consists in a passive letting-­be of religious particulars, whereas the former actively indifferentiates them. Thus in Snow, the human secularity of Ka and Orhan is achieved only by means of keeping religion at a distance (‘I kept religion out of my life’ [Pamuk, 2004, p. 98]), by refusing natural curiosity and interest (‘Ka refrained from asking questions, as he would for the rest of his stay in Kars whenever anyone mentioned the rise of political Islam or the headscarf question’ [p. 22]), and by cultivating ‘selfish indifference’ (p. 131). This refusal to identify with one particular tradition more than any other – actively indifferentiating between them – may well be artificial, but it is, according to Pamuk, the very form of life necessary to write: ‘Writing is sort of a philosophy of . . . identifying with everyone with equal intensity and honesty’ (cited in Ali and Hagood, 2012, p. 516). The notion of active indifferentiation thus contributes to a positive description of the secular, and one key site for its theoretical elaboration is Georges Bataille’s Manet. For Bataille, Manet’s painting can be defined by means of this concept of active indifference: Stripped to its essentials, Manet’s sober elegance almost immediately struck a note of utter integrity by virtue not simply of its indifference to the subject, but of the active self-­assurance with which it expressed that indifference. Manet’s was supreme indifference, effortless and stinging . . . His sobriety was the more complete and efficacious in moving from a passive to an active state. This active, resolute sobriety was the source of Manet’s supreme elegance. (Bataille, 1983, p. 73)

Bataille picks on Manet’s Execution of Maximillian as an example of such indifferentiation: it refuses to empathize or to take sides, or even to engender

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affects in the spectator. The representation of murder is achieved as an affectless still life: Manet deliberately rendered the condemned man’s death with the same indifference as if he had chosen a fish or a flower for his subject . . . On the face of it, death, coldly, methodically dealt out by a firing-­squad, precludes an indifferent treatment; such a subject is nothing if not charged with meaning for each one of us. But Manet approached it with an almost callous indifference that the spectator, surprisingly enough, shares to the full. (Bataille, 1983, pp. 46–8)

Orhan’s depiction of the violence that follows the Kemalist coup in Snow (Pamuk, 2004, pp. 161–3) works in a similar fashion, practising a ‘glassy coolness’ (Bataille, 1983, p.  22) in the face of atrocity. The narrator (like the painter) refuses to endorse any one particular tradition, instead remaining ‘detached from any collective enterprise or prescribed system (even from individualism)’ (Bataille, 1983, p.  60). The narrator despecifies, to invoke the early Hallward (2001, pp. 248–9). The second category by which Pamuk’s human secular is constructed proceeds to the heart of the question of secular time. Becoming-­secular and novel writing – the two are synonymous for Pamuk – both consist in the museumification of reality, or more precisely still, in the conversion of time into space. In Snow, the novel becomes a museum of religions, and in the process religious worldviews and traditions are ‘flattened out’, losing their diachronic dimension, their eschatological promise and their historical situatedness. The novel places religious subject-­positions synchronically next to each other in an encyclopaedic panorama or Wunderkammer.6 As Pamuk has himself put it, ‘I will build a museum, and its catalogue will be a novel’ (Pamuk, 2012, p.  21). And what emerges is, in Xing’s words, ‘a new way of writing: writing as archival collecting or even encyclopedia writing’ (Xing, 2013, p. 203). We have already encountered the collecting impulse that underlies Snow; what requires adding is the extent to which such collecting is necessarily a form of spatialization within the novel as well. Throughout Snow, Ka mimics the narrator in transforming the array of voices he gathers into a series of aesthetic objects – in Ka’s case, poems. These poems are precisely and obsessively mapped onto a two-­dimensional diagram of a snowflake (hence, the novel’s title) (Pamuk, 2004, pp.  382–3; passim). Ka ‘interpret[s], classif[ies] and organise[s]’ (Pamuk, 2004, p. 128) voices across space, transforming traditions into vectors, and thereby performing secularity as an archive. This is first and

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foremost a practice of ‘transforming time into space’, as Pamuk writes elsewhere (2009, p. 524). Indeed, the transition ‘from narrative to description’ (Çiçekoglu, 2003, p. 14), and the spatialization consequent upon it, is a recurrent characteristic of Pamuk’s fiction as a whole. Most obviously, this is true of the Museum of Innocence which was conceived, planned and implemented in parallel to the construction of a physical museum in Istanbul. As Pamuk notes, the concept of the novel which arises out of such a project is ‘different from . . . Western novels . . . a sort of encyclopaedic dictionary’ (Pamuk, 2012, p. 15). Here ‘dialectics’ come to ‘a standstill’, according to Xing (2013, p. 209), owing to the evacuation of temporal succession in the name of sheer co-­presence. For Pamuk, in the museum, ‘The whole world and the present are left behind. We are in a different atmosphere, a different time; we are almost wrapped in a radically different aura of almost being outside of time’ (cited in Allmer, 2009, p. 169) – a claim that must remind us of the intemporality of Tournier and Hölderlin. Similarly, Pamuk’s My Name is Red has caused critical anxiety precisely because of its refusal of time for the sake of collecting the widest array of character-­voices synchronically. Göknar thus speaks of its ‘flat two-­dimensionality’ (Pamuk, 2012, p. 316) and Updike of ‘the brilliant stasis of the depictions themselves [which] seem to go nearly nowhere’ (Updike, 2001). Here too Pamuk’s human secular is premised on the erasure of time in the name of space.

The tragic secular At the beginning of this essay I posed Graham Ward’s challenge to literary studies: literature resists secularity. In particular, I focused on Ward’s contention that literary narrative necessarily relies on the temporal categories of religious eschatology. All three writers considered in this essay (Tournier, Hölderlin and Pamuk) belie such a claim. They construct forms of literary temporality that are resolutely non-­eschatological; that is, they construct secular times. Hölderlin, for instance, breaks radically with his own earlier eschatological conception of poetic time – with the act of writing suspended between the non-­longer and the not-­yet – by embodying in his final poems a form of self-­sufficient intemporality in which reality is fulfilled at each moment. Similarly, Pamuk resists narrative time as such through a thoroughgoing museumification of traditions and religious voices. In all three cases, it is a matter of a formation of the secular that neither repeats nor perverts pre-­established religious forms, but which creatively generates its own sui generis categorial space.

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Nevertheless, there are obvious problems here, and they revolve for the most part around the issue of representation. Thus, for Hölderlin’s last poetry one could insist with Constantine, ‘The world is not like that, and such harmony is only possible in poetry not engaging with it’ (Constantine, 1998, p. 312). Likewise, Pamuk puts into question his entire construction of the secular in Snow by asking: how accurately does it portray the voices it claims to represent? That is, Pamuk goes on to parody the insensitivity and blindness consequent on a thoroughgoing practice of indifferentiation. During the revolutionary atrocities depicted in the novel, Ka ‘slept for exactly ten hours and twenty minutes without stirring once’ (Pamuk, 2004, p. 172) and ‘awoke relaxed and refreshed’ (p. 175). Moreover, when other characters attempt to relay these atrocities to him, Ka responds, ‘I was very happy yesterday, you know. For the first time in years I was writing poems . . . I can’t bear to hear these stories right now’ (Pamuk, 2004, p. 179). Indeed, this is later formed into a more general aesthetic philosophy: Many years earlier, Ka had explained to me that when a good poet was confronted with difficult facts that he knew to be true but that were inimical to poetry, he had no choice but to flee to the margins. It was, he said, this very retreat that allowed him to hear the hidden music that was the source of all art. (Pamuk, 2004, p. 232)

Such an aestheticization of reality and refusal to bear witness to violence is obviously inadequate in the face of fundamentalism (whether secular or religious), but it is seemingly a natural implication of the ‘glassy coolness’ and ‘callous’ apathy that active indifference cultivates. This is, moreover, a critique that goes right to the heart of the narrator’s practice, not just Ka’s. Snow concludes with one of the characters, Faizal, contesting his own representation within the pages of Snow itself. The novel collects voices, but what if in so doing it falsifies them? What if the human secular does not represent the Other, but ultimately effaces her? Such are the stakes of Faizal’s intervention: I can tell from your face that you want to tell the people who read your novels how poor we are, and how different we are from them. I don’t want you to put me into a novel like that . . . Because you don’t even know me, that’s why! (Pamuk, 2004, p. 419)

He continues:

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If you write a book set in Kars and put me in it, I’d like to tell your readers not to believe anything you say about me, anything you say about any of us. No one could understand us from so far away. (Pamuk, 2004, p. 435)

In other words, even Pamuk’s human secular ends up repeating the mistakes of Kemalist laicism: imposing identities from a surreptitiously privileged Western vantage point, failing to allow the Other to speak. Snow, then, ultimately dramatizes ‘the impossibility of the unmediated political representation’ (Ertürk, 2010, p. 636), and so the ineluctable failure of the weak form of secularity Pamuk remains committed to. Snow is a tragedy in which representation plays nemesis to the secular as protagonist. And yet the failure of Pamuk’s secular is premised on his continuing adherence to the category of representation. For Pamuk, the secular must but cannot represent the Other of particular traditions. In other words, Pamuk’s secular is – as we have seen at length – a resolutely human secular. This leaves open, however, the possibility of an arepresentational secular, one indifferent to its own indifference – an inhuman secular as provisionally sketched in Tournier and Hölderlin. This is a form of secularity that does not fall with the failure of representation; it is a form which may in the end resist tragedy.

Notes 1 For a full contrast between the phases of Hölderlin’s thought, as well as a more detailed justification of my reading of the last poems, see Whistler, 2009. 2 The excerpt translates as: ‘When springtime from the depth returns to life, / Men are amazed, and from their minds aspire / New words, and happiness once more is rife, / And festive music rings from house to choir. / Life finds itself in seasonal harmonies, / That ever Nature, Spirit might attend our thought, / And one within our minds perfection is; / So, most of all from Nature, much to itself is brought.’ Hölderlin, 2004, p. 787. 3 The confusion of Kemalist revolution with its theatrical performance is a recurrent trope. See Pamuk, 2004, pp. 309, 341, 415 and passim. 4 See Pamuk’s comments on the ‘fury’ of his ‘secular readers’ in ‘The Turkish Trauma’ (2005). 5 Hence, characters respond to Ka: ‘You are not a mediator, you’re cooperating with the tyrants’ Pamuk, 2004, p. 322; ‘Mediators . . . they’re just smart alecs who think they can stick their noses into your private business on the pretext of being “impartial” ’ Pamuk, 2004, p. 326.

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6 For Pamuk on novels as encyclopedias and Wunderkammern, see Pamuk, 2012, p. 254.

References Ahmet, A. (2013). ‘The Hegemony of the Liberal-Secular Master Narrative in Orhan Pamuk’s Snow’. Journal of European Studies. 43. 244–57. Ali, B. and Hagood, C. (2012). ‘Heteroglossic Sprees and Muderous Viewpoints in Orhan Pamuk’s My Name is Red’. Texas Studies in Literature and Language. 54(4). 505–29. Allmer, A. (2009). ‘Orhan Pamuk’s Museum of Innocence: On architecture, narrative and the art of collecting’. Architectural Research Quarterly. 13(2). 163–72. Bataille, G. (1983). Manet. (trans.) Austyn Wainhouse and James Emmons. New York: Skira. Bertaux, P. (1953). Hölderlin, ou le Temps d’un Poète. Paris: Gallimard. Böschenstein, B. (1966). ‘Hölderlins späteste Gedichte’. Hölderlin Jahrbuch. (14). 35–56. Çiçekoglu, F. (2003). ‘A pedagogy of two ways of seeing: A confrontation of “Word and Image” in My Name is Red’. Journal of Aesthetic Education. 37(3). 1–20. Constantine, D. (1998). Hölderlin. Oxford: Clarendon. Coury, D. N. (2009). ‘ “Torn country”: Turkey and the West in Orhan Pamuk’s Snow’. Critique. 50(4). pp. 340–9. Daglier, Ü. (2012). ‘Orhan Pamuk on the Turkish Modernization Project: Is it a farewell to the West?’. Humanitas. 25(1). 146–67. Ertürk, N. (2010). ‘Those outside the scene: Snow in the World Republic of Letters’. New Literary History. 41(3). 633–51. Fenves, P. (1993). ‘Measure for Measure: Hölderlin and the place of philosophy’. Philosophy Today. 37(4). 369–82. Göknar, E. (2012). ‘Secular blasphemies: Orhan Pamuk and the Turkish novel’. Novel. 45(2). 301–26. Hallward, P. (2001). Absolutely Postcolonial: Writing between the Singular and the Specific. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Hölderlin, F. (2004). Poems and Fragments. 4th edn. (trans.) M. Hamburger. London: Anvil. Milbank, J. (2006). Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason. 2nd edn. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Miles, D. H. (1971). ‘The past as future: Pfad and Bahn as images of temporal conflict in Hölderlin’. Germanic Review. 46(2). 95–118. Neuman, J. (2011). ‘Religious cosmopolitanism? Orhan Pamuk, the headscarf debate, and the problem with pluralism’. The Minnesota Review. 77. 143–61. Pamuk, O. (2004). Snow. (trans.) M. Freely. London: Faber and Faber, 2004. —— (2005). ‘The Turkish Trauma: An Interview.’ Sign and Sight. 18 April http://www. signandsight.com/features/115.html

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—— (2006). ‘Telephone interview with Nobelprize.org.’ 12 October. http://www. nobelprize.org/mediaplayer/index.php?id=68 —— (2008). Other Colours. (trans.) M. Freely. New York: Vintage. —— (2009). The Museum of Innocence. (trans.) M. Freely. London: Faber and Faber. —— (2012). The Innocence of Objects: The Museum of Innocence, Istanbul. (trans.) E. Oklap. New York: Abrams. Philipsen, B. (1992). Die List der Einfalt: Nachlese zu Hölderlins spätesten Dichtung. München: Wilhelm Fink Verlag. Ryan, T. (1988). Hölderlin’s Silence. New York: Peter Lang. Santesso, E. M. (2012). ‘Silence, Secularism and Fundamentalism in Snow’, in M. Afridi and D. M. Buyze (eds) Global Perspectives on Orhan Pamuk: Existentialism and Politics. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 125–39. Taylor, C. (2007). A Secular Age. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Tournier, M. (1969). Friday. (trans.) N. Denny. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Updike, J. (2001). ‘Murder in Miniature.’ The New Yorker, 3 September. http://www. newyorker.com/archive/2001/09/03/010903crbo_books1 Ward, G. (2009). ‘Why Literature Can Never be Entirely Secular’. Religion and Literature. 41(2). 21–7. —— (2010). ‘How Literature Resists Secularity’, Literature and Theology. 24(1). 73–88. Whistler, D. (2009). ‘Hölderlin’s Atheisms’. Literature and Theology. 23(4). 401–20. Xing, Y. (2013). ‘The novel as museum: Curating memory in Orhan Pamuk’s The Museum of Innocence’. Critique. 54(2). 198–210.

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Not my Bible’s Keeper: Saramago’s Cain Translates Postsecular Dissent Nazry Bahrawi

Singapore University of Technology and Design Middle East Institute, National University of Singapore

If the quintessential Cain of the Book of Genesis embodies the darker side of humanity, José Saramago’s Cain is better figured as the archetypal rebel-­hero. As in the Old Testament, the titular character of Saramago’s final novel (2009) may be condemned to roam the earth till the end of days for killing his brother Abel, but this is not entirely a cursed existence. Cain’s raffish charm secures him trysts with the sultry Lilith and Noah’s daughters-­in-law. In Saramago’s hands, a pariah becomes a rake – the envy, not shame, of ordinary men. This transformation may however seem trifle in light of another aspect of the new and improved Cain. In the realm of ethics, Saramago converts the world’s first murderer into a virtuous being. It was Cain, not an angel as depicted in the Bible, who saves Isaac from being slaughtered by his father Abraham. This was not his only act of kindness. Throughout the novel, the upright Cain makes a series of moral interventions that urge its readers to rethink holy narratives. To this end, Saramago’s interpretation, or ‘translation’, of a hitherto marginal biblical character can be seen as a gesture of postsecular dissent. Saramago’s Cain is postsecular in the way it contradicts ‘the secularization thesis’. Popular for most of the twentieth and early twenty-­first centuries, the secularization thesis argues by way of empirical evidence that religion has become less important in industrialized societies. For instance, the sociologist Steve Bruce in his book Religion in the Modern World compares contemporary data with the 1851 British census to highlight that fewer people are attending churches, becoming clergies and professing affiliation to a church in the United Kingdom (Bruce, 1996, p. 30). While Saramago’s text can be taken as blasphemous for its unflattering depiction of God, I argue that Cain, in fact, dissents against the secularization

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thesis in suggesting that the world is not quite disenchanted. Contrary to the secularization thesis, the novel celebrates enchantment expressed through the liberating power of narratives. With Cain, the ability to tell creative stories becomes the antidote to religious dogma, which fossilizes imagination. Such a reading stems from an understanding of translation writ large. Here, translation must be seen as an active process of meaning-­making that arises from comprehending, reviewing and adapting established texts and norms. In this essay, I make this case by narrativizing my own arguments on Cain. My first section ‘Cain redux’ assesses the existing discourses about the ‘translation turn’ in cultural studies before exploring its applicability to the field of literature and theology. Arguing that ‘cultural translation’ is an apt frame for understanding Saramago’s retelling of biblical narratives in Cain, the next section ‘Cain rising’ will then expound in greater detail the ways in which the novel can be considered an act of postsecular dissent by delving into the nascent but contemporary scholarship about the postsecular. Acknowledging that Cain is a labour of creative fiction, I will also explore in this section the narrative strategies employed by Saramago in Cain that can possibly define postsecular dissent as a literary undertaking. Finally in ‘Cain’s Uprising’, I argue that the phenomenon of writers translating scriptures can be seen as the future of Abrahamic postsecularity with references to other literary efforts that deal with Abrahamic religious history.

Cain redux How can Saramago’s Cain be seen as a translation? Answering this question necessitates taking a detour into translation studies. In their seminal work Constructing Cultures, translation theorists Susan Bassnett and André Lefevere make the following astute observation: ‘Rewriters and translators are the people who really construct cultures on the basic level in our day and age’ (Bassnett and Lefevere, 1998, p. 10). While it was expressed eleven years before the coming of Cain, this prescient statement aptly captures the spirit of Saramago’s novel. In his literary retelling, the blind author grants a hitherto marginal biblical figure the gift of critical gaze. By making Cain the cynical protagonist, Saramago envisions an alternative history of early Christianity. True to the words of Bassnett and Lefevere, Saramago is in the serious business of constructing culture. At this juncture, some history is needed. According to Edwin Gentzler in his preface to Constructing Cultures, Bassnett and Lefevere were the first to express the ‘cultural turn’ in the field of translation studies as not just an investigation of

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linguistic change but as a study of ‘a verbal text within the network of literary and extra-­literary signs in both the source and target cultures’ (Bassnett and Lefevere, 1998, p. xi). Thus, critics of literary translation can no longer accept textual changes on their own merit, but must now link such deviations to extratextual factors. As Bassnett puts it in an essay in the same book, such critics now need ‘to consider broader issues of context, history and conventions’ (Bassnett and Lefevere, 1998, p. 123). Two lines of inquiry raised by this ‘cultural turn’ in translation studies are relevant to my analysis of Cain. The first denotes the spectrum of ways in which a translated text could be received in the target culture, and the second concerns the strategies employed by a translator to adapt the text from a source culture to a target culture. This essay addresses both in its next section. Some modifications to the terms ‘source culture’ and ‘target culture’ must also be articulated. In the case of Cain, these terms assume new meaning. Conventional scholarship on translation is based on the premise that texts travel from one distinct culture to another. By this criterion, Cain is a text reproduced in more or less the same culture, though by ‘sameness’ I do not mean geographic commonality as much as religious sensibility. That is to say, Cain would make most sense for someone who is familiar with normative Christian doctrines. This echoes the following observation made by Lawrence Venuti in his book The Translator’s Invisibility: Every step in the translation process – from the selection of foreign texts to the implementation of translation strategies to the editing, reviewing and reading of translations – is mediated by the diverse cultural values that circulate in the target language, always in some hierarchical order. (Venuti, 1995, p. 308)

For Bassnett, the above quote from Venuti calls for translation analysts to consider ‘the relationship between the individual texts and the wider cultural system within which those texts are produced and read’ (Bassnett, 1998, p. 137). Indeed, the multiple inversions of aspects of the Book of Genesis in Saramago’s Cain would be lost to a reader who is not familiar with Christian doctrines. Yet familiarity does not equate to belief. As a case in point, Saramago himself was a self-­professed atheist with an adept knowledge of the Bible. In adapting the frames of ‘source culture’ and ‘target culture’ to my reading of Cain, a distinction can still be made between the two. While the Old Testament and Saramago’s Cain address a largely Christian-­centric audience, they are also speaking to two groups with differing socio-­cultural milieus. It is logical to assume that the lasting impact of paradigm-­shifting events like the Enlightenment,

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the Renaissance, the industrial revolution, the two World Wars, as well as genocides like the Holocaust, on Saramago’s modern readers (Cain’s target culture) have given them enough impetus to be concerned about ‘modern’ issues like parliamentary democracy, religious doubt, human rights and agency. These are probably not the concerns shared by the early Christians (source culture). The source and target cultures in this analysis are divided by time more than geography. Couched as a work of cultural translation this way, Saramago’s Cain conforms to Bassnett’s call for cultural critics to embrace what she calls the ‘translation turn’ in cultural studies (or in our case, literature and theology as a field of study which falls under that latter rubric) so as to coincide with the aforementioned ‘cultural turn’ in translation study. For the paradigm of ‘translation turn’ to work in our inquiry, this essay will need to subscribe to the premise that literature and theology is more than just a research focus, but an emerging and viable discipline with bearing on cultural studies. After all, since the release of pioneering works such as Northrop Frye’s The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (1982) and Harold Bloom’s The Book of J (1990), there has been a plethora of other works dealing with the links between literature and theology. Consider, for instance, specialist journals like Literature and Theology (Oxford UP) and Journal of Religion and Literature (University of Notre Dame) as well as edited volumes such as The Blackwell Companion to the Bible in English Literature (2009) and The Blackwell Companion to the Bible and Culture (2006). Then there are institutions, such as the International Society of Religion, Culture and Society which organizes a biennial international conference along themes of religion and culture from an interdisciplinary perspective. Common to all these enterprises is the assumption that scholarly investigations of literature and theology must also take into account extratexual factors as is required of any inquiry of cultural criticism. If so, then Saramago’s cultural translation of the Old Testament as Cain can also be seen as an exercise of Biblical hermeneutics, one which reads this ‘Book of books’ from the postsecular lens.

Cain rising At first glance, Cain appears to spew heresy. Its portrayal of an aloof, spiteful God alone may be enough to qualify it as a New Atheist novel. In an essay, Arthur Bradley articulates the New Atheist novel as an emerging literary genre in which New Atheists take ‘the novel, and literature more generally, as a privileged

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instance of their idea of a natural, secular experience of beauty, wonder, and transcendence’ (Bradley, 2009, p. 21). Yet to categorize Cain this way is simplistic if one considers reviews of Saramago’s final novel as intimating to something less polemical and much more nuanced. Writing in the Los Angeles Review of Books, literary critic William Flesch has this to say about Cain: ‘Atheist though he was, Saramago’s narratives are intent on believing in god’s existence, the better to blame him for our condition, for the behaviour of the world’s cains and joshuas [sic] and Herods and Salazars’ (Flesch, 2012, par. 5). Another reviewer, Daniel Hahn, reaches a similar conclusion when he writes in The Independent: Saramago is a first-­person narrator who keeps himself just out the corner of your eye. He’s often funny, and thought-­provoking, and delightfully mischievous savouring the details of his own defiance. Every little bard, every little twist is absolutely deliberate. Translator Margaret Jull Costa carefully holds the thread of his winding sentences, which snake across pages and pages, running right through the direct speech, one sentence register, one moment Biblical-­stately, the next earthly and idiomatic. The lord is glorious, magnificent, almighty, eternal, splendid, and also just a son of a bitch. (Hahn, 2011, par. 6)

For Hahn and Flesch, the novel’s vehemence towards God belies belief. God may be petty, but he exists. God may be difficult, but he is omnipotent. It is this contradictory nature of God as tyrant but also a caring creator that allows him to perform the following act of kindness even as he expels Adam and Eve from Eden: That said, the lord plucked out of the air a couple of animal skins to cover the nakedness of adam and eve, who exchanged knowing winks, for they had known they were naked from the very first day and had made the most of it too. (Saramago, 2011, p. 10)

This excerpt can be read from two perspectives. On the one hand, God could be hiding the ‘nakedness of adam and eve’ as a way of imposing a moral code. In this interpretation, the ‘knowing winks’ between Adam and Eve can be seen as an acknowledgement of mischief between the pair who saw themselves as having gotten away with doing something wrong. On the other hand, God could also be doing this out of concern. Here, the animal hides are meant to protect the pair’s vulnerable human parts from the harsh conditions of Earth. In this second interpretation, the ‘knowing winks’ between the two only enhance their ignorance

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of God’s omniscience. If God knows that the pair has broken his rule in Eden, he must surely know that they had also consummated their pairing in Eden. Other instances of God’s little acts of kindness abound in the novel, suggesting the latter to be a more plausible interpretation of the aforementioned excerpt. God may be aloof, but he is aware. With Cain then, hating God is comparable to hating a former lover who has hurt you deeply, but remains an undeniable part of your history. God is that former lover. This grudging acknowledgement of Godliness makes the text postsecular. It gestures to the nascent definition of the postsecular as the idea that the human penchant for magic and wonderment encapsulated through religion – or, what some would call ‘faith’ – has not actually gone away. This was a point I made in a previous essay Fictionalising the Utopian Impulse as Post-­ secular Islam, in which I argue that, rather than seeing the postsecular as ‘a reaction against the secular compulsion to privatise religion’ (Bahrawi, 2011, p. 330), it is better conceptualized as a condition that deconstructs the reason and faith dichotomy assumed by the New Atheists ‘through a process of hybridisation’ (Bahrawi, 2011, p. 331). Thus, the novel’s chastisement of normative Christianity appears to be more nuanced – Cain protests against religious dogma, but it also dissents against the secularization thesis. As postsecular dissent, Saramago’s Cain assumes a literary guise that works primarily through the presence of an omniscient narrator who clarifies what could be could be considered ‘gaps’ in the Book of Genesis. In the first chapter, the narrator describes her narrative of Cain as one written ‘with all the meticulousness of a historian’ (Saramago, 2011, p. 5). Among her many bold clarifications is the implicit proposition that Cain was the lovechild of Eve and the cherubim angel Azael, who was tasked by God to guard the gates of Eden in the days following Adam and Eve’s expulsion. After Eve pleads with him, Azael decides to help the stranded couple instead, raising suspicions in Adam as to the nature of his wife’s relationship with Azael. The birth of Cain infers the cuckolding of Adam: When cain is born, all the neighbours will be surprised by the pale rosy complexion with which he comes into the world, as if he were the son of an angel, or an archangel, or even, perish the thought, the son of one of the cherubim. (Saramago, 2011, p. 20)

Here, the omniscient narrator’s delight in suggesting the affair is clearly captured through her sarcasm (‘perish the thought’). This was not the only example of the omniscient narrator attempting to plug a certain historical gap within

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Christianity. In another instance, the narrator informs readers that God had indeed given belly buttons to the pair, even though this was not mentioned in the Book of Genesis. The passage in Cain reads: He [God] had gone there with the intention of correcting a slight flaw, which, he had finally realised, seriously marred his creations, and that flaw, can you believe it, was the lack of a navel [. . .]. Quickly, in case they should wake up, god reached out and very lightly pressed adam’s belly with the tip of his forefinger, making a rapid circular movement, and there was the navel. The same procedure, carried out on eve, produced similar results, with the one important difference that her navel was much better as regards design, shape and the delicacy of its folds. (Saramago, 2011, pp. 6–7)

The mystery of Adam and Eve’s navels has occupied Christians over centuries. Yet the narrator’s sarcastic tone here makes the entire debate sound ludicrous. Read between the lines, the text seems to be saying that such a preoccupation is a wasteful venture, and that the faithful should really focus on something graver. If we factor in Saramago’s Marxist beliefs, it would not be a stretch to speculate that the writer would have taken more kindly to Christian debates about the rich-­poor gap that has expressed itself as liberation theology, or about the narrative of Job in which the seemingly powerless rises against the powerful as an allegory of the proletariat revolution prophesized by Karl Marx. Indeed, the narrator channels Job’s uprising through the protagonist Cain. This is captured in the text when God confronts Cain over the murder of the latter’s brother: Where is your brother, he asked, and cain responded with another question. Am I my brother’s keeper, You killed him, Yes, I did but you are the one who is really to blame [. . .] Just as you had the freedom to stop me killing abel, which was perfectly within your capabilities, all you had to do, just for a moment, was to abandon that pride in your infallibility that you share with all the other gods . . . (Saramago, 2011, pp. 23–4)

Yet again, the novel offers an alternative perspective to normative Christianity, clarifying another ‘gap’ in the Bible – this being, how Cain accepted his punishment. Instead of a dependent Cain who proclaims in Genesis 4:13 that ‘My punishment is greater than I can bear’, Saramago’s Cain cuts a defiant figure whose critique of a hubristic God is viable enough to prod a rethink. Seen this way, Cain becomes a hyperbolic version of Job. Cain becomes Job unbound.

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Some mention of form is important here. Saramago’s Cain is also postsecular in the way it draws attention to the allure of narratives as a way of enchanting the world. Here, the novel is at once a parody and pastiche of the Bible. It satirizes the Bible by way of the narrator’s sarcasm and Saramago’s unconventional casting. Yet it also pays homage to the good book by appropriating biblical characters and events, as well as by upholding the notion of Abrahamic omniscience, though Saramago transfers this power over from God to the narrator in his novel. Cain’s embrace of scripture – both satirical and otherwise – suggests certain veneration for the process of story-­telling.

Cain’s uprising From the twentieth century on, the mark of Cain began to appear more frequently throughout the literary world. By this, I mean that the phenomenon of writers translating scripture into fiction has become pronounced, most prevalently among those who deal with Christianity. It is apt to demonstrate its expanse by beginning with Saramago himself. Cain was the writer’s second attempt at re-­ writing the Bible, with his first being The Gospel According to Jesus Christ published in Portuguese in 1991 and translated into English some three years later. The book recounts an alternative history of Jesus, who was forced into prophethood but decided to end his life by crucifixion in the hope of destabilizing God’s plan to convert the world. Its irreverent content was met with censure from the Catholic Church, as well as the Portuguese government. Later, Norman Mailer also published a novel of Jesus’ life, which the critic James Wood argues is less blasphemous because it misses the chance of knocking ‘Jesus off his throne’ (Wood, 1997, p. 34). It is important to reiterate here that Saramago’s Cain, while earning the ire of Catholics, is postsecular in the way it upholds the wonders of narrative as a way of enchanting the world. Yet Cain and Jesus are not the only biblical figures to get translated literarily. Also popular is Noah, who has received a similar treatment from Jeanette Winterson in her novel Boating for Beginners (1985) and Julian Barnes in his short story ‘The Stowaway’ (1989). Both stories offer a critical take on Noah, with Winterson depicting him as a capitalist and Barnes outlining his eugenics elitism. Meanwhile, destabilizing the literary retelling of biblical male-­centric protagonist is the Irish writer Colm Tóibín, who fictionalizes the narrative of Mary in The Testament of Mary, shortlisted for the 2013 Man Booker Prize, with the mother of Jesus doubting her son’s divine stature. For Terry R. Wright, literary retellings

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of The Book of Genesis can be traced even earlier. He cites Mark Twain’s The Diaries of Adam and Eve based on serialized short stories of Eve and Adam published between 1905 and 1906. According to Wright, Twain’s stories – while gentle on rewriting Genesis – postulate an alternative view of the Fall in which ‘Eve is shown to have more initiative than Adam [. . .] and more intellectual curiosity’ (Wright, 2007, p. 40). Such literary translations must be differentiated from retellings that touch on the Bible tangentially, or as allegory. Among these would be John Steinbeck’s East of Eden (1952) and the novels of Toni Morrison. With the former, Wright argues that Steinbeck’s novel is not exactly anti-­tradition as much as it ‘follows the midrashic tradition [. . .] in providing both a commentary upon Genesis 4 and a supplementary narrative based on it’ (Wright, 2007, p. 51). In engaging with the biblical story of Cain, albeit indirectly as background, Steinbeck’s novel mirrors Cain’s appeal to the postsecular. With Morrison, meanwhile, critic Katherine Clay Bassard has argued in her book Tranforming Scriptures that ‘the Song of Songs is possibly the biblical urtext for much of Morrison’s novelistic and discursive project, since elements of its poetics appear in much of her work’ (Bassard, 2010, p.  101). Here again the breaking down of the reason/faith dichotomy takes centre-­stage. But literary translations of scriptures are not confined to Christian narratives. The mark of Saramago’s Cain can also be seen in Judaism and Islam, albeit in smaller dosages. With the former, the most renown is arguably The Book of J (1990), which features witty English translations of aspects of the Old Testament from Hebrew by David Rosenberg accompanied by essays by Harold Bloom. If theologians have long maintained that J, credited for having written the first five books of the Hebrew Bible, was in truth a group of anonymous authors, Bloom counter-­argues that J was a single person – a brilliant poetess living in the court of Solomon more than 3,000 years ago. To a certain extent, Jenny Diski’s novel Only Human (2000) can also be considered a retelling of Judaic history. The novel narrates an alternative account of the Akedah, or the narrative of Isaac’s binding and foiled sacrifice, as arising out of a complex love triangle between Abraham, Sarah and God. In Diski’s account, Isaac was not saved by an angel as normative doctrine purports but by God Himself who stopped the slaughter from taking place at the last minute. Thinking that God cowered from committing to a serious relationship by backtracking on His command, Abraham becomes resentful of the former. Wright’s observation is relevant here: ‘This God, of course, is not that of Jewish or any other orthodoxy. He is a creature of Diski’s own imagining developed in response of the biblical

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text as she reads it, highlighting some of its absurdities and contradictions’ (Wright, 2007, p. 107). In terms of fictions dealing with Islamic narratives, literary retellings of the Qur’an are most famously spearheaded by the Nobel Prize winning author Naguib Mahfouz in his Arabic book Awlad Haritna (1959), which was translated into English as Children of Gebelawi (1981). The book re-­reads the stories of the Islamic prophets by setting it in an Egyptian hara (alley) ruled by the authoritarian overlord Gebelawi, personifying God. The novel injects themes of class-­consciousness and social justice into the development of Islam, and outlines the death of Gebelawi at the hands of ‘Arafah, personifying Science, thereby proposing the latter as the heir to religion (El-Enany, 1988, pp. 25–6). So controversial was this novel that an Islamic conservative stabbed Mahfouz in 1994 for blaspheming Islam – an attack that he fortunately survived, but one that had left him half-­paralysed. Yet Mahfouz’s novel is probably the most extensive Islam-­themed fiction that engages directly with Qur’anic narratives. Another modern text that comes close is Salman Rushdie’s controversial novel The Satanic Verses (1988). The novel re-­envisions a modern version of Muhammad and Jibril as the characters Mahound and Gibreel to challenge the pervasiveness of rationality in the modern world. As Erickson describes it: ‘Rushdie’s discourse introduces contrariety and contradiction, challenging the logical, scholastic contention that a thing cannot be and not not be [sic] at the same time’ (Erickson, 1998, p. 139). While there are other Islam-­ themed fictions that deal with aspects of religious narrative, these two are the ones that deal directly with the Qur’an. As with Cain, the self-­reflexive nature of these novels must not be taken as an attack against ‘faith’ in the manner of New Atheists like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens. While Awlad Haritna and The Satanic Verses are critical of Islam’s normative narratives, both books also outline the pervasive allure of the unknown expressed through the propensity for imagination. Mahfouz’s novel may see ‘Arafa killing off Gebelawi, but the denizens of his alley still desire for an overlord following his death. With Rushdie’s novel, the chastisement of logic can also be seen as a rejection of hyper-­rationalism, perhaps even of scientism, that fuel the ontology of the secular. Both purport postsecular dissent. While brief, this survey of modern and contemporary fiction suggests that Saramago’s Cain is not alone in translating postsecular dissent. There are others across literatures of the Abrahamic faiths that do the same. One can therefore speak of a Cain’s uprising in the making. As a fledgling but discernible trend, novels of postsecular dissent gesture towards Prasenjit Duara’s breakthrough

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notion of dialogic transcendence in the way multiple levels of truth are contained within each other. Within Chapter  3 in this book, Duara writes: ‘These contestations are not necessarily conflictual, but prophets or rebels from the lower social orders periodically arise to challenge the betrayals of the self-­ appointed custodians of “higher truths” ’ (p. 55). In carving out an alternative history of a biblical story which reverses and chastises but does not dismiss the sacred, Saramago’s Cain does exactly that, and so too its literary brethren.

References Bahrawi, N. (2011). ‘Fictionalising the Utopian Impulse as Postsecular Islam: an East-West odyssey’. Literature and Theology. 25(3). 329–46. Bassard, K. C. (2010). Transforming Scriptures: African American Women Writers and the Bible. Georgia: University of Georgia Press. Bassnett, S. (1998). ‘The Translation Turn in Cultural Studies’, in S. Bassnett and A. Lefevere (eds) Constructing Cultures: Essays On Literary Translation. Clevedon, England: Multilingual Matters. Bradley, A. (2009). ‘The New Atheist Novel: Literature, Religion, and Terror in Amis and McEwan’. The Yearbook of English Studies. 39(1/2). 20–38. Bruce, S. (1996). Religion in the Modern World: From Cathedrals to Cults. Oxford: Oxford University Press. El-Enany, R. (1988). ‘Religion in the Novels of Naguib Mahfouz’. British Society for Middle Eastern Studies. 15(1/2). 21–27. Erickson, J. (1998). Islam and Postcolonial Narrative. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Flesch, W. (2012). ‘The Evil of Banality’. The Los Angeles Review of Books. 30 June. Available at: http://lareviewofbooks.org/review/the-­evil-of-­banality Gentzler, E. (1998). ‘Foreword’, in S. Bassnet and A. Lefevere (eds), Constructing Cultures: Essays On Literary Translation. Clevedon, England: Multilingual Matters. Hahn, D. (2011). ‘Cain, by José Saramago, trans. Margaret Jull Costa’. The Independent. 19 August 2011, http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-­entertainment/books/reviews/ cain-­by-jos-­saramago-trans-­margaret-jull-­costa-2339964.html Saramago, J. (2011). Cain. (trans.) M. J. Costa. London: Harvill Secker, 2009. Venuti, L. (1995). The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation. London and New York: Routledge. Wood, J. (1997). ‘He is finished’. The New Republic. 12 May. 30–5. Wright, T. R. (2007). The Genesis of Fiction: Modern novelists as Biblical interpreters. Hampshire and Burlington: Ashgate.

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The Postsecular and the Postcolonial Manav Ratti

Salisbury University

What does postsecularism mean within and for a postcolonial context, and specifically within India? The posting of the secular occurs in numerous ways, in numerous contexts, as indeed there are differing and different secularisms. Within a western Christian context, we might consider the work of Jürgen Habermas, for whom postsecularism can attain temporal dimensions, signalling the changes and challenges faced by a secularized nation like Germany as increasingly visible, diverse religious communities emerge within its borders (Habermas, 2008). More widely, postsecularism can signify that secularized societies must now acknowledge the public resurgence of religion, so that to post the secular can also mean, especially within postcolonial, multicultural and diasporic contexts, to question what is considered to be ‘within’ the ‘communities’ of nation, implicating questions of ethnicity and culture. In the Indian context, secularism as a postcolonial state policy has had to do enormous work over and across a religiously and ethnically diverse nation, one in which the state assumes (or sees itself assuming) a principled distance from all religious communities. The idea and ideals of state secularism have deep resonances in India, becoming virtually synonymous with nationalism. Embedded in the idea of nationalism in India are the notions of liberalism and democracy, as well as the recognition and protection of individual and group rights. Democracy in this context carries the weight of not discriminating against particular groups, while also recognizing the rights of individuals. Despite the almost intuitive value of secularism as a nation-­building state policy – even termed Nehruvian secularism for independent India’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s commitment to a religiously-­neutral state – secularism in India has faced several crises. Not least among these crises is

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continuing violence, such as the massacre of Sikhs in 1984, the destruction of the Babri mosque in 1992 and the massacre of Muslims in Gujarat in 2002 in retaliation against a mob of Muslims burning a train containing Hindu pilgrims. Among other examples, 1985 saw an elderly Muslim woman, Shah Bano, successfully petition the Supreme Court for alimony. Conservative Muslim leaders argued that the state should not interfere in personal divorce laws established by and for religious communities. Prime Minister Rajeev Gandhi reversed the Supreme Court decision, a move perceived as not only placating Muslim voters but also neglecting women’s rights. In 1989, the Mandal Commission recommended a significant increase in quotas in governmental jobs and educational institutions for members of scheduled castes and tribes, a decision that remains controversial in India, criticized by upper-­caste Hindus. Also in 1989, armed conflict began in Kashmir, India’s only Muslim-­majority state, with insurgents seeking independence for Kashmir. Where the Indian state could have used diplomacy, its response in the 1990s was brutal, converting Kashmir into a conflict zone under the pretence of ‘protecting’ secular nationalism. For Indian writers, postsecularism can mark the exploration of alternatives to the crises of Indian state secularism while still holding onto the ideals of that secularism, which include equality, democracy, and fair and just legal representation and rights across religious, ethnic and minority communities. Postsecularism can also mark for these writers a creative search for (re)enchantment, of suffusing daily life with an ethics and vitality that can capture the generative intensities of religious faith and practice, without the violence to which religious ideologies have been vulnerable in colonial and postcolonial contexts. The postcolonialism of the postsecular is thus marked by the edge of the political, which includes memories of colonial violence, tragedies of postcolonial violence, the necessary ideals and protections of a democratic secular nation-­state and the compulsions of everyday ethical values. A question that can emerge for writers is: how can we have something that is secularly of this world (in this world, immanent to it, as secular knowledge) while at the same time retaining some of the ethical, affective dimensions historically (and ideologically) associated with religious thought and practice – faith, awe, wonder, transcendence? It is some of these ‘secular’ and ‘religious’ qualities that I believe can be captured through moments in literary representation we can understand as postsecular. Such literature is not simply the product of political, ethnic and religious turmoil, but engages with that turmoil in fictional form, or is historically informed by it, dealing with real human problems through

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an imaginative space of possibility. Fiction here becomes an experimental space, one where writers do not simply represent the dilemmas of history and the actual, but structure them. In the sections that follow, I pursue some of the multiple dimensions of secularism in India and correlating questions of religion and democracy, exploring the multiple faces of secularism, democracy and religion that can parallel the multiplicity of representations in literary form.

Secularism and India: Nation, democracy, religion Among the challenges for postcolonial India has been the inclusiveness and recognition of all citizens, a respect for their individuality and rights and worldviews, and their fair inclusion in the procedures and policies of the state. In democratically recognizing the diversity of the nation, such as religious, caste, ethnic and linguistic diversity, the state is seen to be just. How can a state policy of secularism mediate between democracy and religion? That democracy must apply to a specific space, the territory of the nation-­state, is clear. But the workings of democracy are never perfect, which signals how crucial time is to democracy, the historically evolving character of democracy. In his concept of the temporal dimension of democracy, Derrida imagines a democracy ‘to come’, one that is built on the promise of ‘an authentic democracy which is never embodied in what we call democracy’: The idea of a promise is inscribed in the idea of a democracy: equality, freedom, freedom of speech, freedom of the press – all these things are inscribed as promises within democracy. Democracy is a promise. That is why it is a more historical concept of the political – it’s the only concept of a regime or a political organization in which history, that is the endless process of improvement and perfectibility, is inscribed in the concept. (Derrida, 1997)

It is interesting to consider Derrida’s time of democracy alongside Benedict Anderson’s idea of nation’s relation to time: ‘the idea of a sociological organism moving calendrically through homogenous, empty time is a precise analogue of the idea of the nation which also is conceived as a solid community moving steadily down (or up) history’ (Anderson, 1991, p.  26). In the service of the postcolonial nation, secularism as a state policy mediates between (at least) two different times, the time of democracy and the time of religion. State secularism is also implicated in its own historical process, and constitutional amendments

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are only aspects of this working historicism. The ideas and narratives of ‘religion’ can provide solid frameworks for understanding the past, present and the future. Religion’s strong influence on the present is demonstrated by violence: the violence of religious ethnocentrism, fanaticism, fundamentalism. The ‘democracies’ – deconstructive, tentative, exploratory – that emerge within postsecular moments and conditions consist of equality, justice and respect for the singularity of the other. I offer the following concept: secularism as interface. Secularism can exist at the interface, both political and ethical, between democracy and religion. The OED defines ‘interface’ as ‘a surface lying between two portions of matter or space, and forming their common boundary.’ It continues: ‘a means or place of interaction between two systems, organizations’; ‘a meeting-­point or common ground between two parties, systems, or disciplines.’ The etymology of ‘face’ stems ultimately from the Latin verb facere: to make or to do, with greater emphasis on ‘to do.’ ‘Inter’ is from the Old High German untar: ‘between’ or ‘among.’ I am aware that to impute these western etymological forms onto an Indian context is problematic, not only for reasons of linguistic translation but, perhaps more problematically, cultural translation. But if secularism, particularly in its elite manifestation as a cosmopolitan form, aspires to circulate across languages and ethnicities, then it might be interesting to invoke a sort of Saidian cross-­cultural framework and see how ‘the x in the y’ and ‘the y in the x’ might produce an imaginative possibility stretching across cultures, religions and ethnicities. On one face of the postcolonial secular lies the religious. In the case of India, however, secularism is not simply the ‘other’ of religion. Rather, part of what constitutes the distinctiveness of Indian secularism is that, instead of separating religion and state, it asserts that the state should have a principled distance from and equal respect for all religions. On the other face of the postcolonial secular lies democracy. It is here where the question – urgent, critical, unironical – of minorities becomes particularly significant. Through democratic state policies, secularism becomes a guarantor of minority rights, the protection of such minority rights being crucial for developing a cohesive nation, especially in the aftermath of colonialism when anti-­colonial secular nationalism was a driving force in the assertion of a pan-Indian identity, one which aspired to rise above religious, ethnic, and linguistic differences, an exaggeration of which differences was fuelled by colonial divide-­and-rule ideologies and practices. Like the two-­faced Janus of Greek mythology resting on the threshold and boundary of gates, looking both ahead and backwards in both time and space

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(‘January’ as the first month of the western calendar; ‘janitor’ as the guardian of gates), Indian secularism – as a kind of postcolonial Janus – exists at the threshold and boundary of democracy and religion, intimately informed by both. The future time of democracy becomes the eternal promise of secularism, the yet-­tocome. Secularism must apply to the entire nation, stretching to its every corner: hence both the potential of its promise and the pitfall of its unrepresentativeness. As Sumit Sarkar has argued: ‘Indian nationalism had to seek a fundamentally territorial focus, attempting to unite everyone living in the territory of British-­ dominated India, irrespective of religious or other differences’ (Sarkar, 1996, p.  273). ‘Territory’ can also be read metaphorically, so that the ‘territories’ of individual language communities and ethnic communities must also be accommodated by secularism. This stretch of secularism across heterogeneous communities constitutes secularism’s cosmopolitanism. Through its doctrines and its tenets, religion can provide for its believers a code of ethics, so that present actions are aligned with future consequences, with those consequences conceived variously as, for example, rewards, punishments, blessings, curses and karmic fruitions. How could an historical secularism, thoroughly enmeshed in this world, ever face such a potentially awe-­inspiring lifeworld? It is here where intellectuals such as Ashis Nandy and T. N. Madan have criticized Indian state secularism for its ethical weakness, arguing that communities in India have always already had their own ‘home-­grown’ versions of tolerance, and that the state, through the voice of secularism, should not dictate to people and communities how to obtain peace and tolerance among each other. State-­sponsored secularism, they argue, cannot animate and enchant everyday life the way that elements of religious traditions can (Nandy, 1998; Madan, 1998). What happens when individuals of different religious communities might be in disagreement, even conflict, with one another? Can a religion always guarantee protection, in the here and now, for its members? In this context, some of the ideals of state secularism become especially important, even urgent: equal rights for all, non-­discriminatory state protection for all. Secularism as interface is thus suspended in a kind of timespace, contiguous between religion and democracy, suffused with different conceptions of time and space. The liveliness of the debates on the promises and pitfalls of secularism reflects the power of the ethical inspirations of religion and that of the hope-­filled promises of democracy. But the faces of religion in India and South Asia are numerous, as of course they are in many nation-­state contexts, so that it might be useful to imagine multiple

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interfaces of secularism, negotiating a multiplicity of identities. A postcolonial Janus can thus become translated by writers into a postcolonial, multiple-­headed secularism moving beyond the received oppositions of secular/religious, past/ future and democracy/secularism. The challenges for both democracy and secularism are ones of radical re-­conceptualization, compelling the state to develop new ways of perceiving and recognizing the diverse peoples and communities constituting the nation. This is where literature can make a valuable contribution to a range of areas, such as religion, secularism, politics, democracy, theory and history. Through the constitutively flexible, ambiguous and polyvocal space of literary and creative representation, writers can imagine possibilities that both structure the historical and the political, and attempt to gesture toward new combinations and imaginations, animated by a sort of ‘postsecular faith’. Writers can also explicitly thematize such an imaginative process, such as Rushdie in The Satanic Verses, where he meditates on the nature of religious belief while also capturing some of the ‘magical’ qualities of that belief (see Ratti, 2013, pp. 141–73).

Secularism and postsecularism As signs of the multiple faces and reaches of secularism in India, a number of studies have approached the promises and crises of Indian secularism from various angles, including its literary representations. Debjani Ganguly’s Caste, Colonialism, and Counter-Modernity: Notes on a Postcolonial Hermeneutics of Caste (2005) and Arvind Pal Mandair’s Religion and the Spectre of the West: Sikhism, India, Postcoloniality, and the Politics of Translation (2009) examine the space of the postsecular from the perspective of caste and Sikhism, respectively. Ganguly explores the multifaceted insertion of caste into everyday life in South Asia, and argues for a postsecular view of caste ‘against conceptual and perceptual configurations of modernity that conceal the manifestation of transcendence, or, to put it simply, that leave God out’ (Ganguly, 2005, p.  159). Sociological understandings of caste limit it to the concepts of ‘national-­political,’ ‘revolutionary,’ or ‘modernization,’ and thus do not capture the singularity and phenomenological fullness of ‘dalit ways of belonging’ (Ganguly, 2005: 175). For Ganguly, ‘postsecular’ becomes useful to mark the presence of ‘faith’ in dalit everyday being. My notion of the postsecular resembles Ganguly’s insights in that I see it as a marker of ‘faith’, while also preserving the aspirational elements of political secularism, through ‘secular’ forms of ‘faith’ that paradoxically secularize the religious.

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Mandair views postsecularism through a lens similar to Habermas, as the question faced by secular societies having to confront the increasing presence of religious communities within their borders. For Mandair, this postsecularism becomes a reinforcement of a Christian and western narrative of secularism, one which assumes its postsecular is universal, translating other religions into its fold (assuming that they are translatable into a universal). Ananda Abeysekara’s focus in The Politics of Postsecular Religion: Mourning Secular Futures (2008) is Sri Lanka, and he proposes a shift from Talal Asad’s Foucauldian genealogies of secularism to a Derridean aporetic reading of secularism and democracy. Abeysekara problematizes the very nature of the postsecular, by taking for granted that ‘there cannot be such a thing as the postsecular because the secular cannot be reconstructed’ (Abeysekara, 2008, p. 10). This leads him to ask, ‘what option(s) might be available if we began to think that there is no possibility of having secularism after secularism, democracy after democracy, Christianity after Christianity? What if we never have the possibility of reconstructing and improving the name?’ (Abeysekara, 2008, p. 10). To which I would add: what if there are possibilities of reconstructing and improving one’s life? Writers deal with survival, of living on, of affirming life – postcolonialism being but one of the historical conditions informing this survival – and they do so through the intimate, interwoven route of the secular and the religious. I agree with Abeysekara’s caution about the postsecular. The writerly gesture toward the postsecular is an always already hesitant, momentary, fragile, risky process of affirmational search that is aware of its own tenuousness and precariousness, not least because of the threat of colonial, postcolonial and neocolonial violence. Amardeep Singh’s Literary Secularism: Religion and Modernity in Twentieth Century Fiction (2006), Neelam Srivastava’s Secularism in the Postcolonial Indian Novel (2007), and Priya Kumar’s Limiting Secularism: The Ethics of Coexistence in Indian Literature and Film (2008) have each investigated the representation of secularism within fiction. Singh examines the notion of ‘literary secularism’ by exploring how literature can reflect, be an agent of and even problematize forces of secularization within societies. He argues that ‘the history of literary secularism has led not to an ending (literature as comprehensively secularized) but to an extremely heterogeneous present free from telos’ (Singh, 2006, p. 24; italics in the original). Postcolonial postsecularism can constitute part of the heterogeneous present, crucially free from telos, but containing a form of ‘faith’. This faith can gesture toward epistemic changes whose trajectories are unknown, but which are trajectories nonetheless, thus requiring a risk into the unknown. In Limiting Secularism, Kumar demonstrates how literature and film can offer valuable ways

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of imagining how diverse religious groups can peacefully coexist in the Indian subcontinent, beyond the policies of the state. Srivastava concludes her study by arguing that writers such as Amitav Ghosh, Rohinton Mistry, Salman Rushdie, Vikram Seth, Shashi Tharoor, for all their diverse literary structurings of the secular, whether radical or rationalist, in the end at least affirm some idea of the secular, a ‘practical secularism’. This concept echoes, for Srivastava, Spivak’s notion of strategic essentialism, a temporary assemblage that can achieve, for example, a specific political aim. As examples from literature, writers such as Allan Sealy, Shauna Singh Baldwin and Mahasweta Devi represent and/or write from the ‘minority’ position in India: Anglo-Indians, Sikhs and tribals respectively. These writers pursue the challenge of representing minority identity without necessarily being anti-­ nationalist. Sealy in his novel The Everest Hotel and Baldwin in What the Body Remembers secularize Christianity and Sikhism respectively (see Ratti, 2013, pp. 69–85, 119–39). By ‘secularize,’ I mean that they preserve the ethical elements of these religions, but then translate them into thoroughly worldly (‘secular’), contingent contexts and situations, ones that emerge from the real challenges and struggles of women’s experiences, or, in the case of Allan Sealy, the minority identity of Anglo-Christians. These writers neither abandon secularism nor sentimentalize religion. They evoke religious icons and imagery, and try to write ‘through’ them, perhaps even aware of the ‘impossible possibility’ of such a task, but nonetheless undertaking the act of writing. It is this at least double-­layered quality that constitutes the richness of their postsecular literary manoeuvres. The at least doubly-­constituted lifeworlds of secularism and religion can allow for the emergence of paradox, risk and belief, all gesturing toward the unknown. For writers, this entails at least the risk of pursuing such a postsecular possibility, a risk of unknown consequences, whether positive or negative, of confronting, naming and challenging tragic histories and ongoing violence, such as the violence undertaken in the name of nation, colonialism and religion.

Secularism, Christianity and Islam Postsecularism, with these inflections of postcolonialism, can therefore challenge the distinction between ‘religion’ and the ‘secular,’ and in so doing offer a new conception of the secular. In this section, I examine debates on secularism’s intersections with Christianity and Islam by way of continuing the preceding sections’ focus on challenges to secularism. I focus here on contexts outside of

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India, thus highlighting further dimensions, both productive and problematic, of secularism and its posts. According to Gil Anidjar,‘Like that unmarked race, which, in the related discourse of racism, became invisible or white, Christianity invented the distinction between religious and secular and thus made religion. It made religion the problem – rather than itself. And it made it into an object of criticism that needed to be no less than transcended’ (italics in the original; Anidjar, 2006, p. 62). In his argument that the secular and the religious are products within a specific historical western Christian context, and that that invention is masked and made invisible, Anidjar exposes the ideology (masking itself as invisible) that produces the secular/religious distinction. He offers a theoretical route out of the problem of having to ‘defend’ or ‘explain’ or ‘transcend’ religion: in its secularized form, Christianity invented . . . Judaism and Islam . . .  as religions and, more precisely, as being at once the least and the most religious of religions. And of races. Subsequently, it cleared the Jews of theological and religious wrongdoings (heaping upon them, in its more elaborate versions, the new anathema of racial inferiority) and made Islam the paradigmatic religion, the religion of fanaticism. In doing so, Orientalism – that is to say, secularism – became one of the essential means by which Christianity failed to criticize itself, the means by which Christianity forgot and forgave itself. (Anidjar, 2006, p. 63)

In other words, Orientalism is secularism, and secularism is Orientalism. Anidjar’s views are provocative insofar as one accepts the hegemony of the secular, which is in a sense the hegemony of Christianity. This hegemony makes the secular/religious distinction appear natural, normal and everyday, when in fact it can emerge from vested interests, often linked with imperial, colonial and neocolonial agendas. At the same time that Christianity makes Islam the paradigmatic religion, it makes its secularism not just the paradigmatic secularism, but the source of secularism. It is this hegemony of western secularism that constructs the non-­west as non-­secular, and therefore as religious – and now, post-9/11, ‘Islam’ must bear the burden of being ‘religion’. The above distinction of west/secular and non-­west/non-­secular also then appears to be mutually exclusive, reinforcing beliefs of the type that the non-­west cannot be secular, or that religion cannot have so-­called ‘western’ secular qualities such as liberalism, rationality and freedom. As an example from a non-Indian context, it is these beliefs about the mutual exclusivity of religion and rationality/freedom that have been

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challenged by the work of Saba Mahmood. In her book Politics of Piety, Mahmood explores the normativity of the religious/secular distinction by focusing on the women’s mosque movement that forms part of the Islamic Revival in Cairo. This movement has consisted of women meeting regularly in mosques in order to study the Qur’an and other teachings of Islam. These women have wished to restore a space for the study and pursuit of Islamic piety, as both knowledge and as ethics for daily conduct, within a modern national context that they feel has become secularized or westernized. The words these women have used to describe the modern national context include ‘secularization’ (‘almana or ‘almāniyya) and ‘westernization’ (tagharrub) (Mahmood, 2005, p. 4). Among the questions for Mahmood is why these women would appear to support a tradition that has historically marginalized and subordinated them. Mahmood argues that the supposed irrationality of these women’s choices only appears irrational through a framework of the liberalist assumptions that all peoples wish for freedom, and that they will challenge the status quo rather than uphold it. How could an Islamic movement, particularly a conservative one, be deliberately followed by women as a source of agency, strength and self-­ affirmation? Let me frame a response to this question in terms familiar to liberalism: a religiously conservative movement can give some women a sense of freedom, the freedom to determine themselves so as to restore piety in themselves and in their daily lives. This restoration of piety constitutes these women’s flourishing. This flourishing is a sign of freedom, the freedom for these women to live their lives as they wish, ‘even if ’ (the quotes signal liberalism) the choices they make to pursue piety must occur within a religious-­cultural tradition that has demonstrated the capacity to oppress women. But that is the liberal framework, expressed in the English language, a framework with its own embedded notions of what is normal, valuable and desirable. ‘Saba Mahmood’ is now part of the cluster of names gesturing toward possibilities of freedom, agency, rationality and effective self-­ determination that emerge within non-liberal contexts. That Mahmood’s work focuses on women, Islam and Egypt (the ‘Third World’) heightens the ‘difference’ and provocation her work poses to a western liberal and secular feminist tradition, especially after 9/11. As R. Radhakrishnan has argued, ‘“the secular” as a western norm is made to operate naturally and therefore namelessly’ (Radhakrishnan, 1993, p. 754). In light of what I have presented above about Mahmood’s work, consider the following argument by Stathis Gourgouris:

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If indeed secularization takes at one point a normative track (whereby the law of God becomes automatically reconfigured to Law as such – Law as God, one might say) and therefore secularism emerges as a new metaphysics, the response is surely not to subscribe to an allegedly liberational space of “native-­religious” sentiment suppressed by colonial or imperial power but, rather, to unpeel the layers of normativity from secularist assumptions and reconceptualize the domain of the secular. (Gourgouris, 2008, p. 440)

When Gourgouris argues for examining the normativity that has possibly solidified what is ‘secularism,’ it is here that I believe his and Mahmood’s work, although both very different in their arguments, can find an interesting parallel. If normalized secular assumptions about what is ‘religion’ (irrational? illiberal?) make the piety of Egyptian women’s conservative turn to Islam so unusual, then Mahmood has unpeeled the layers of those normalized assumptions. What I suspect Mahmood too senses is that secularism has become a metaphysics whereby its Law is not only God, but a metaphysics that commits violences from which it is free, transcendent and excepted, acting as its own judge and jury. In Jose Casanova’s words, ‘as a result of [the] particular historical process of secularization, “the secular” has become the dominant category that serves to structure and delimit, legally, philosophically, scientifically, and politically, the nature and the boundaries of “religion” ’ (Casanova, 2011, p. 72). To which I would add: the secular also determines and delimits nationally, ethnically, culturally and racially, no matter how constructed or overlapping or imagined each of the above communities might be. It is here where law is powerful. Within its jurisdiction, the law must verifiably be the law, consistently, equally and to all peoples, its repetition and reproducibility giving to law its sense of objectivity, rigour and fairness. If ideally no one is above the law, then that clarity and lack of ambiguity of applicability must also be ideally embodied by the law: the law must be clear and unambiguous. In his quotation above, Gourgouris’s argument about law as God is one that he makes only parenthetically, but it is fascinating. The law of God reincarnates so as to become the law, or law as god. Within the secular construct that is the nation-­state, postcolonial literature can examine how the nation, with its self-­affirming and self-­perpetuating logic (the nation is its own law), becomes a secular God. How can writers respond to and challenge the religion of nation? *   *   *

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That violence can be justified in the name of religion is no surprise, throughout the world, throughout history. But nation also produces its violence, as in Mark Juergensmeyer’s argument that ‘the Frankenstein of religion created in the Enlightenment imagination has risen up to claim the Enlightenment’s proudest achievement, the nation-­state’ (Juergensmeyer, 2011, p.  199). Juergensmeyer’s metaphor is instructive. Ideologies in the name of the nation-­state and its secular humanism have unleashed untold violence throughout the modern world. Saba Mahmood has described how, when she would share with others her ongoing research, she would be met with responses about the oppressiveness of Islam, prompting her to reflect: ‘That an analysis of secular-­humanist projects does not elicit a parallel demand for a denunciation of the crimes committed in their name, the unprecedented violence of the last century notwithstanding, is evidence of the faith that secular-­humanism continues to command among intellectuals’ (Mahmood, 2001, p.  225). With such ‘faith’ continuing to be so strong and even invisible (the religious lexicon is interesting, and it shows the power of religious categories, used here to make an argument no less about secularism), the risk of postsecularism can lie in making visible such invisibility, as indeed postcolonial studies has made visible ideologies and hegemonies, such as those of colonialism and nation. In the context of India, the tasks and ideals of state secularism remain strong. With writers who have inherited the legacies of colonialism, and continue to live through postcolonial policies and their attendant achievements, crises and violence, postsecularism can designate that experimental gesture toward the paradoxes of a non-­secular secularism or a non-­religious religion. In this process, writers can draw upon the full richness of literary creativity to re-­imagine Abrahamic faiths, such as Christianity and Islam, in highly individual searches toward ethical values to guide everyday secular life, under the edge of politics and the postcolonial.

References Abeysekara, A. (2008). The Politics of Postsecular Religion: Mourning Secular Futures. New York: Columbia University Press. Anderson, B. (1991). Imagined Communities. London and New York: Verso. Anidjar, G. (2006). ‘Secularism’. Critical Inquiry. 33. 52–77. Casanova, J. (2011). ‘The Secular, Secularizations, Secularisms’, in Craig Calhoun, Mark Juergensmeyer and Jonathan Van Antwerpen (eds) Rethinking Secularism. New York: Oxford University Press.

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Derrida, J. (1997). ‘Politics and Friendship: A Discussion with Jacques Derrida’. Centre for Modern French Thought. University of Sussex. http://www.livingphilosophy.org/ Derrida-­politics-friendship.htm Ganguly, D. (2005). Caste, Colonialism, and Counter-Modernity: Notes on a Postcolonial Hermeneutics of Caste. London and New York: Routledge. Gourgouris, S. (2008). ‘Detranscendentalizing the secular’. Public Culture. 20(3). 437–45. Habermas, J. (2008). ‘Notes on a Post-­secular Society’. New Perspectives Quarterly. 25(4) 17–29. Available at: http://www.digitalnpq.org/archive/2008_fall/04_habermas.html Juergensmeyer, M. (2011). ‘Rethinking the Secular and Religious Aspects of Violence’. In Craig Calhoun, Mark Juergensmeyer, and Jonathan Van Antwerpen (eds), Rethinking Secularism. New York: Oxford University Press. Kumar, P. (2008). Limiting Secularism: The Ethics of Coexistence in Indian Literature and Film. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Madan, T. N. (1998). ‘Secularism in its Place’, in Rajeev Bhargava (ed.) Secularism and its Critics. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Mahmood, S. (2001). ‘Feminist Theory, Embodiment, and the Docile Agent: Some Reflections on the Egyptian Islamic Revival’. Cultural Anthropology. 16(2). 202–36. —— (2005). Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Mandair, A. (2009). Religion and the Spectre of the West: Sikhism, India, Postcoloniality, and the Politics of Translation. New York: Columbia University Press. Nandy, A. (1998). ‘The Politics of Secularism and the Recovery of Religious Tolerance’, in Rajeev Bhargava (ed.) Secularism and its Critics. New Delhi. Oxford University Press. Radhakrishnan, R. (1993). ‘Postcoloniality and the boundaries of identity’. Callaloo. 16(4). 750–71. Ratti, M. (2013). The Postsecular Imagination: Postcolonialism, Religion, and Literature. London and New York: Routledge. Sarkar, S. (1996). ‘Indian nationalism and the politics of Hindutva’, in David Ludden (ed.) Making India Hindu: Religion, Community and the Politics of Democracy in India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Singh, A. (2006). Literary Secularism: Religion and Modernity in Twentieth Century Fiction. Newcastle-­upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Press. Srivastava, N. (2008). Secularism in the Postcolonial Indian Novel: National and Cosmopolitan Narratives in English. London and New York: Routledge.

20

Afterword Susan Bassnett

University of Warwick

Threaded throughout the history of religions, whether monotheistic or pantheistic, is a profound concern with language. Entire libraries are filled with the vast literature commenting on those religions that have a body of sacred texts, though there is also a global accumulation of myths from pre-­literate or shamanistic religions. Simplifying unashamedly, we can say that what draws textual exegesis and story-­telling together within a religious context is that common concern with language. So we might single out as random examples of linguistic emphasis the centuries of debate in the Judeo-Christian world concerning the naming of God, or, in Native-American religions the many myths about shape-­changing, where humans, gods and animals are able to understand one another’s languages. In Norse mythology, the principal god of the Aesir, Odin,was said to have had two ravens, Huggin (Thought) and Munnin (Memory), which he sent out to fly over battlefields to bring him news in their language of the deaths of heroes who might then be welcomed into Valhalla. One of Odin’s divine abilities was the capacity to speak with birds, a power which medieval legend also attributed to St Francis of Assisi. One of the best-­known stories of the Old Testament is about language. In the book of Genesis, just after an account of the Flood and the following chapter which gives a list of the generations descended from Noah, comes the story of the tower of Babel, which begins with the statement: ‘And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech’ (Genesis 11.1). The eight verses that recount the story tell how the builders were constructing a tower ‘whose top may reach up to heaven’, but when God saw what they were doing, He became angry and said: ‘Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do; and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do’ (Genesis 11.6). Consequently, the building of the tower was abandoned, the builders were scattered ‘upon the face of all the earth’ and condemned forever

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not to understand one another’s speech: ‘therefore is the name of it called Babel’ (Genesis 11.9). The tower of Babel has provided a rich source of material, not only for commentators but also for artists, and the representation by Pieter Brueghel the Elder is probably the best known, with its detailed depiction of a building under construction that has been abandoned, leaving the machinery of the builders derelict. The building of the tower of Babel is a powerful story and a very mysterious one, raising more questions than it purports to answer. In his essay, ‘Des Tours de Babel’, Jacques Derrida wrestles with some of the often-­posed questions and adds some of his own: in what language was the tower of Babel constructed and then torn down? Do we know what we mean when we use the word ‘Babel’ today? What is God punishing the builders of the tower for? Having a common language? Trying to build up to heaven and so perhaps challenge God’s authority? Or can it be that God was jealous of a human endeavour? Derrida cites Voltaire, who drew attention to the double meaning of Babel, for although in Genesis the name signifies confusion, Ba also could mean Father and Bel could mean God, hence Babel signified the city of God, the holy city. Derrida builds on Voltaire’s point, and argues that what Voltaire was saying is that Babel signifies a double confusion: the confusion of languages that was decreed by God, and also the confusion of the builders whose work was broken off, while at the same time Babel also means the name of God the father: ‘The city would bear the name of God the father and of the father of the city that is called confusion’ (Derrida, 2007, p. 192). Derrida deals with the question of why God wanted to punish the builders, arguing that they were scattered across the face of the earth: for having wanted thus to make a name for themselves , too give themselves the name, to construct for and by themselves their own name, to gather themselves there (‘so that we no longer be scattered’), as in the unity of a place which is at once a tongue and a tower, the one as well as the other, the one as the other. (Derrida, 2007, p. 195)

‘Des Tours de Babel’ is an essay that functions on several levels, but its primary theoretical point is that there is no pure meaning behind language, and human beings are destined to struggle with the necessary and at the same time, impossible obligation of translation, between and within all languages. The story of the tower of Babel is an allegory of the impossibility of perfect communication and perfect understanding between human beings. As Derrida puts it, God has subjected mankind to the law and the duty of translation, so that at the very moment when we say the word ‘Babel’, we sense the impossibility of deciding

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‘whether this name belongs, properly and simply, to one tongue’ (Derrida, p. 199). What is significant is that in order to formulate this theory of translation, Derrida (born into a Sephardic Jewish family in French colonial Algeria) should have turned to the ancient story of Babel, and invited us to think again about what we imagine it might mean. The tower of Babel, in his interpretation, represents linguistic multiplicity and the impossibility of any perfect communication, since the very act of translation implies an incompleteness, for what is said in one language can never be said in the same way in another. In St Paul’s epistle to the Hebrews, chapter 11, there is a powerful, enigmatic opening statement about faith: ‘Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen’. Paul goes on to provide illustrations of acts of faith by individuals such as Noah, Abraham, Sara and Moses, before moving to chastise his contemporaries who are without faith. But faith remains ineffable, the evidence for its existence based on the invisible. Similarly, translation involves an act of faith, a leap into the void, as it were, based on the hope that meaning can both be captured and reproduced. The difference is that, while faith can sustain martyrs in their agony, translators are doomed to perpetual disappointment. Nevertheless, translation is fundamental to human communication. Today, as millions of people move around the planet, some driven by necessity, others by choice, plurilingualism is the norm for more people than at any point in history. As people move, they take with them their languages and their cultures, encountering other languages and other cultures on their journeying. But the story of Babel, of linguistic and cultural confusion, is particularly apposite in the twenty-­first century, this age of mass movement of millions and of unprecedented mass electronic communication systems. For despite the apparent possibilities of greater communication between peoples, this century seems set to continue, and perhaps even outdo, the record for mass atrocities set by the twentieth century, the age of two World Wars, the death camps of Europe and Cambodia, genocidal policies on every inhabited continent, cruelties on a titanic scale in the name of ideology, patriotism or religion. We have begun badly, with the global ‘war against terror’, with a new vocabulary of polarization, as words such as jihad or Islamophobia enter daily currency. Yet it is also the case that great socio-­political shifts are reflected epistemologically, and the writing of a book such as this is surely an example of a more positive trend. In his chapter ‘Abrahamic and Dialogical Transcendence’, Prasenjit Duara suggests that, although different religions may have stronger or weaker traditions of radical transcendence, we need today to pay attention to what he calls the more marginalized and de-­institutionalized ‘spiritualism’ of the modern West and the alliances that are emerging with popular and syncretic

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religious traditions of the developing world. Although he argues that some such movements (for example, environmental movements) are not religious in the strict sense of the term, they ‘possess the possibilities to overcome the persistent consumerism and nationalism that is degrading our world’. What Duara is calling for here is for greater understanding of ‘religion’ and ‘faith’, which can only come about through a form of translation, and this same message runs through the essays collected here, culminating in the discussion of postsecularism in the final chapters. Hopefully, it is indeed the case, as Manav Ratti points out, that there is a public resurgence of religion, which also involves questioning what it means to be ‘within’ the communities of nation, a question that also involves questions of ethnicity, gender and, in its broadest sense, culture. In April 2014, the British Prime Minister David Cameron declared that Britain was a Christian country, a statement immediately challenged by, among others, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams. In an online poll of 2,000 British adults interviewed by ICM Research over a two-­day period in April, 14 per cent declared themselves to be practising Christians, 5 per cent practising another faith, 38 per cent non-­practising Christians, 2 per cent as don’t knows and 41 per cent as non-­religious. In response to the question as to whether they considered Britain to be a Christian country, 56 per cent answered in the affirmative, 30 per cent said it was a non-­religious society and 14 per cent were unsure. There were interesting gender variations with 60 per cent of men and only 53 per cent of women agreeing that Britain was a Christian country, while 73 per cent of participants over 65 also agreed. Polls such as this can only tell us that British society is in a state of flux, and that the assumptions of one generation do not hold the same substance for another. Moreover, the terms of the debate were flawed from the outset: what exactly is meant by ‘a Christian country’? Rowan Williams uses the terminology of post-Christian, but only insofar as numbers who actively attend church services can be used as an indicator, for as Daniel Whistler points out in Chapter  17 ‘The Categories of Secular Time’, the Western imaginary has been shaped by its Judeo-Christian institutions (though, of course, we should not forget the importance of the Hellenic also). Writing an introduction to Ecclesiastes in a collection of twelve books from the Bible published by Canongate in 1998, Doris Lessing, an avowed atheist who acknowledged that she had never even read the text, stresses its significance as a cultural artefact: Once, and not so long ago, everybody in Britain and for that matter everyone in the Christian world, was subjected to that obligation, going to church,

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where every Sunday was heard the thundering magnificence of this prose, and so, ever after, they would have been able to identify the origin of phrases and sayings which are as much a part of our language as Shakespeare. These days if someone hears, ‘There is a time to be born and a time to die . . .’, they probably do think it is Shakespeare, since the Bible these days is the experience of so few. Ecclesiastes? Who’s he? But an innocent, even an ignorant, reader may discover a good deal by simple observation. (Lessing, 1998, p. vii)

Lessing sees the heritage of the Bible through language. She writes about how her father was forced to attend church three times on a Sunday and was bored to death, but later recognized that the power of the language and its rhythms had instilled in him a love of literature. The incantatory effect of the language moves her as a reader and inspires her as a writer. So indeed there are two diametrically opposed answers to the question as to whether Britain is a Christian country: on the basis of numbers who practice their religion the answer would be no, but on the basis of how Christianity has not only shaped British cultural practice and had a direct impact on language, the answer would be yes. We are back, via a different route, to the confusion of Babel. The poet Anne Cluysenaar, who has edited the poetry of the seventeenth-­ century Welsh mystic, Henry Vaughan, recently wrote a short reflective piece entitled ‘Is it possible to write a religious poem in the early twenty-­first century?’ (2004). She begins by explaining what she means by a religious poem. She sees it as an evocation in words of those experiences ‘which have led human cultures to evolve religious systems’. In considering this question, she goes back to pre-­ literate cultures, to prehistoric culture and cave art: I suppose I am suggesting that it must have been possible even in prehistory to experience sacred awe and to communicate it through actions, made objects, words – even before words came to be written. If a ‘religious’ poem is understood to be a poem which embodies or seeks after such experience then it would surely be inaccurate to claim that, in any century whatever, a religious poem cannot be written – much less the twenty-­first century, when the intricate wonders of the universe have come to be understood more deeply than ever before. (Cluysenaar, 2004)

Cluysenaar here makes no binary opposition between religion and science, which has been such a mainstay of the secularist argument. For her, on the contrary, scientific discoveries enhance the sense of sacred awe. Religious

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systems in her view arise as a means of exploring what she calls ‘the implications of numinous experience’, but they can never embody absolute truth. Referring to her own bilingual condition (French and English), she notes that poets who are not born into the language they use in their mature writing are all too aware of the extent to which language conditions what can or cannot be said: I have often felt on the pulses the truth of Edward Sapir’s contention that ‘Languages . . . are invisible garments that drape themselves about our spirit and give a predetermined form to all its symbolic expression’. (Cluysenaar, 2004)

That predetermined form is culturally and historically determined, as each linguistic system is unique. What translation exposes is the gulf between what can be expressed in different languages. Ezra Pound identified three elements in poetry: melopoeia, the musical property of words that affects meaning, phanopoeia, or use of images and logopoeia , the most difficult of all to define but which involves the presence of different layers of meaning. His view was that only imagery was translatable, and then only occasionally, where there is a shared imagistic experience, but the musical properties of each language are unique to that language and multiple layers of meaning are similarly untransferrable (Pound, 1971). But Cluysenaar does not only remind us of the uniqueness of individual languages, she also points out that our deepest experiences ‘have always been known to lie beyond words’. The task of the poet trying to write religious poetry is therefore doubly difficult: to the physical constraints of language which, through its available structures and vocabulary imposes limits on any writer, is added the impossibility of communicating one individual’s mystical or transcendent experience to someone else. Henry Vaughan attempted to convey just such a mystical experience in his extraordinary poem, ‘The World’ which opens with a vision: I saw Eternity the other night Like a great Ring of pure and endless light,    All calm, as it was bright, And round beneath it, Time in hours, days, years    Driv’n by the spheres Like a vast shadow mov’d, In which the world    and all her train were hurl’d; (Vaughan, 2004, p. 113)

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The enduring strength of this poem is its imagery, as striking in an age of interstellar travel as in the seventeenth century, when it was written in an environment racked with religious bigotry that would lead to years of civil war. It is, of course, a translation in the broadest usage of that term, since eternity and time cannot be seen in any material sense, only envisioned. And Pound would have argued that the logopoeia of this poem is impossible to grasp, particularly if readers are unfamiliar with the belief system and its iconography upon which Vaughan drew for his inspiration. Similar issues are discussed by Maryam Farahani in her chapter on Sufism and pain, in which she offers a new reading of Persian Sufi poets. Farahani highlights the problems of reading interculturally and intertemporally, a line of discussion that runs through many of the chapters in this book. For the question of writing religious poetry, or indeed any text with any religious dimension, actual, symbolic or implicit is intimately connected to the reading of such texts. The structure of this book, with its four sections focused on Islam, Judaism, Christianity and Postsecularism is underpinned by parallel investigations into both writing and reading. So Ziad Elmarsafy reminds us of the accusations of blasphemy levelled within the Islamic world at the Egyptian Nobel Laureate Naguib Mahfouz, Ziauddin Sardar poses the question of what the relationship between Islam and literature might be for today’s readers, Jo Carruthers offers an alternative reading of the book of Esther, Máté Vince considers Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure in its religious historical context, while Arina Cirstea looks at contemporary readings of the Annunciation. These, and the other chapters, all, in different ways, take up questions involving loss and gain in the act of reading and deal, therefore, with different aspects of the translation of religious meaning. One of the best known sentences in the Bible is the opening of John’s Gospel: ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God’ (1.1). This powerful statement equates language with God, taking us back via a different route to the tower of Babel and to God’s imposition of plurilingualism as part of the human condition. It also reminds us of the divine power of language. The history of the Abrahamic religions is filled with examples of the terrifying power of language: heresies and blasphemy, articulated through language, have led to countless brutal deaths and persecutions. To take just two examples, one recent, one more ancient, we might think of the killing of Hitoshi Igarashi, the Japanese translator of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, in 1991, or the decision to disinter and burn the bones of John Wycliffe, translator of the Bible, in 1415, thirty-­one years after his death from natural causes. In 1415, the year in which Wycliffe was declared posthumously to be a heretic, the Bohemian

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reformer and translator, Jan Hus was burned at the stake. A contemporary liberal viewpoint would see such acts as deriving from a refusal to acknowledge that the Word is with God, in the arrogant and erroneous belief that God’s representatives on earth, members of the clergy, are permitted assume His power. For the perpetrators of those atrocious acts, the victims were all guilty of having profaned God through language. Steven Engler, Canadian scholar of religion, suggests that too little attention has been paid to translation in religious studies. He views this as the legacy of what he calls the simplistic idea that all religions are the same at heart, and asks a series of difficult questions, first of which is how ‘a transcendent, ineffable, symbolically pregnant sacred comes to be translated into the variety of human phenomena called religions?’ (Engler, 2004, pp. 118–19). He then goes on to ask what is the basis for assuming that religious concepts can be translated transparently across cultures, given the differences between cultures and languages. Engler is concerned about notions of translation that assume sameness between linguistic and cultural systems, when all the evidence points in the opposite direction. What translation exposes, as Derrida so clearly shows, is the vast difference between those systems, hence the need for translators and readers of translations to be aware of facile assumptions about equivalence and the need also to recognize that all translations – whether interlingual or intralingual – are imperfect and incomplete. For any translation, however well-­received by the second language readers, must inevitably change the original text. Form and content necessarily are transformed into something similar but different. Let us take just one example to illustrate this point. The South African poet, Roy Campbell, is a controversial figure, in that he sided openly with Franco’s forces during the Spanish Civil War, was volubly anti-Marxist and quarrelled publicly with literary colleagues, most of whom leaned towards the left during the 1930s and 1940s. His political views have led to him being less widely read than some of his work deserves, (though some of his poetry is very bad) but his greatest achievement by far is his translation of the poetry of the sixteenth-­century Spanish mystic, St John of the Cross, for which he was awarded the Foyle Prize in 1952. St John’s poetry is unique, in that he uses language sparingly yet the poems expand outwards in a centrifugal force, propelling the reader at speed into unexpected dimensions. This technique can be seen in ‘De la communication de las tres Personas’ (‘Of the communion of the three Persons’). Here are the first two verses of that poem: En aquel amor inmenso Que de los dos procedía,

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Palabras de gran regalo El Padre al Hijo decía. De tan profundo deleite, Que nadie las entendía; Sólo el Hijo lo gozaba, Que es a quien pertenía. (St John, 1960, p. 68)

Even a reader with no knowledge of Spanish can see at a glance that in these two verses of four short lines the poet is using very few words and there is a strong and simple rhyme scheme (lines 2 and 4). Faced with the impossibility of reproducing that terseness in English, Campbell uses a completely different linguistic register, opting for a language closer to that of Henry Vaughan, and a rhyme scheme that is far heavier than the Spanish, with each verse having a double rhyming pattern: Out of the love immense and bright That from the two had this begun, Words of ineffable delight The Father spoke unto the Son. Words of so infinite a rapture Their drift by none could be explained: Only the Son their sense could capture That only to Himself pertained. (Campbell, 1960, p. 69)

This poem involves several dimensions of translation: the poet is writing about a mystical experience that has arisen from his adoration of the unknowable words spoken by God that only His Son can comprehend. The Father has spoken ‘palabras de gran regalo’, which Campbell renders as ‘words of ineffable delight’, and he then repeats ‘Words’ at the start of the second verse, a repetition that is not present in the Spanish. He also elaborates the simple line ‘Que nadie las entendia’ (literally: ‘which nobody understood’), transforming it into ‘Their drift by none could be explained’. What Campbell does is both to intellectualize the Spanish, and to move it into a linguistic register that draws upon English sacred writing, while at the same time endeavouring to bring across to English-­language readers the subject matter of the poem, which is the impossibility of language to express one individual’s attempt to put into words his own mystical communion with the divine. The conundrum for St John of the Cross was how to put into

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words that which is beyond words, while the conundrum for Roy Campbell was how to render a poem about the inexplicable into another language for readers living in another time and another culture. The deceptive simplicity of the Spanish masks the complexity of the poet’s subject matter. The translator opts for a simple rhyme scheme, but uses a higher register of the English language that derives from the established tradition in English of sacred texts. It is a compromise that works. As Octavio Paz reminds us, the tasks of the poet and of the translator are parallel, though different, for the one fixes linguistic signs into the immutable form of the poem, while the other frees those signs and re-­creates them elsewhere. Both activities, according to Paz require equal creativity (Paz, 1972, pp. 152–62). But both are also, as Derrida reminds us, imperfect, because just as a translator can never recreate the original in another language, neither can a poet express in the language at his/her disposal that which is beyond words. Studying translation can be extremely useful in enabling a rethinking of how we read (and write) religious texts today, for the starting point is acknowledgement of the pointlessness of entrenched doctrinal positions, whether secular or religious. The history of the translation of sacred texts across cultures highlights the continually shifting ground – doctrinal and aesthetic – of language transfer. Steven Engler’s point noted earlier about the need to bring translation back into the study of religious and literary studies is an important one, for thinking about translation compels us to think about language, which takes us back to the Tower of Babel. Let us turn finally, to Derrida again, for a concluding, ironic comment: ‘No theorization, inasmuch as it is produced in a language, will be able to dominate the Babelian performance’ (Derrida, 2007, p. 200).

References Campbell, R. (trans.) (1960). St John of the Cross Poems. London. Penguin. Cluysenaar, A. (2004). ‘Is a Religious Poem Possible in the Early Twenty-First Century?’, in David Hart (ed.) Is a Religious Poem Possible in the Early Twenty-First Century? Birmingham: Flarestack. Derrida, J. (2007). ‘Des tours de Babel’. Psyche: Inventions of the Other Volume 1. (trans.) J. Graham. Stanford: Stanford University Press. 191–225. Engler, S. (2004). ‘Consider Translation: a Round Table Discussion’. Religious Studies Review. 30(2–3). 106–19.

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Lessing, D. (1998). ‘Introduction’. Ecclesiastes, or the Preacher. Edinburgh: Canongate Books. Paz, O. (1972). ‘Translation, Literature and Letters’. (trans.) I. del Corral, in R. Schulte and J. Biguenet (eds) Theories of Translation: An Anthology of Essays from Dryden to Derrida. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 152–62. Pound, E. (1971; 1929). How to Read. New York: Haskell House. St John of the Cross (1960). St John of the Cross: Poems. (trans.) R. Campbell. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Vaughan, H. (2004). ‘The World’, in A. Cluysenaar (ed.) Henry Vaughan: Selected Poems. London: SPCK.

Index Aboulela, Leila 178–80 Abraham 22–5, 28–32, 102–3 and Isaac 4, 24, 27, 32–5, 64, 71, 102, 104, 160, 255, 263 and Sarah 31–41 abrahamic 13ff Adorno, Theodor W. 197 Agamben, Giorgio 13–14 Aguilar, Grace 63, 73 al-Nadmi, Ibn 174 Amichai, Yehuda 63 Anderson, Benedict 269 annunciation, the 158–67 Arabian Nights 172, 177 Arendt, Hannah 101 Asad, Talal 126, 222–5, 229, 232, 244 Attār 176, 207, 215 Auerbach, Erich 39 Augustine 147, 153

Dante, Alighieri 121 Daoism 47 Davis, Mike 3 Deleuze, Gilles 194 Derrida, Jacques 21, 40, 269, 282–3, 288, 290 Diski, Jenny 263

Babel, Tower of 282, 287 Badiou, Alain 229, 230 Barnes, Julian 262 Bataille, Georges 247 Benjamin, Walter 225 Bennett, Jane 14 Berdyczewski, Micha Josef 80 Bergson, Henri 194 Biakik, Hayim Nahman 77–9, 83 Blair, Tony 10, 18 Blake, William 5 blasphemy 13, 262, 287 Bloom, Harold 258 Buddhism 5, 47, 49, 53–4 Butler, Judith 229

Gadamer, Hans-Georg 54 Genesis, Book of 25–8, 71, 101, 110, 255, 261, 263, 281 ghazal 175, 206 Gĩkũyũ religion 134–6 Ginsberg, Allen 5, 9 Gourgouris, Stathis 277

Campbell, Roy 288 capitalism 9, 20, 48 Casanova, Pascale 118, 277 Cluysenaar, Anne 285–6 Coetzee, J. M. 197 Confucianism 47, 49, 55

Ennius 95 Esther, Book of 67, 88–98 Faith and Globalization initiative 18 Foucault, Michel 26, 97, 224, 229 Franciscanism 13–14, 53, 281 Freud, Sigmund 3, 39, Friedan, Betty 158, Frye, Northrop 258 fundamentalism 245, 270, 283

Ha’am, Ahad (Asher Hirsch Ginsberg) 75–8 Habermas, Jürgen 49, 72, 267 Hafīz 58, 176, 207, 212, 215 Hagaramic 32–41 Hinduism 8, 19, 48, 53, 56, 268 Hölderlin, Friedrich 238, 241–3, 250 Hus, Jan 288 Igarashi, Hitoshi 287 Jewish identity 73 Job, Book of 261 Judeo-Christian 18–22

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Kabir 57 ‘Kamala Khan’ (Ms. Marvel) 173 Kanafani, Ghassan 102, 109–12 Kearney, Richard 3–5 anatheism 4 Keble, John 88 Kierkegaard, Søren 101, 102, 105

Pound, Ezra 286 Proust, Marcel 201 Purim 67, 92–4

Lessing, Doris 284–5 liberation theology 4 Lyell, Charles 120

religion and literature 4, 66, 128, 131, 143, 171 Ricœur, Paul 4, 194 Rūmi 58, 176, 195, 206–7, 208–15 Rushdie, Salmon 124, 161–7, 223, 264, 272

Mahfouz, Naguib (Najīb Mahfūz) 173, 176, 193–201, 264 Mahmood, Saba 244, 276, 278 Mailer, Norman 262 Maitland, Sara 117, 158–67 Malcolm X 137 Man, Paul de 225 mariology Christian 157–9 feminist 161 Islamic 160 Marx, Karl 3, 261 McCarthy, Cormac 227–8 and Coen Brothers 228 mental reservation, doctrine of 147 and the Last Judgement 148 messianism 136, 138–41 Milbank, John 231–2, 238 Milton, John 89 Mir Dard, Khwaja 207 modernity 12, 117, 124, 141, 197 Moretti, Franco 5, 30 Morrison, Toni 263 Moten, Fred 229 Mubeen, Fatima 178 Native-American religions 281 new atheism 6, 230, 258–60, 264 9/11 24, 101, 275 norse mythology 281 Owen, Wilfred 71, 102, 104–6 Pamuk, Orhan 238, 244–51 Paul, St. 124, 230, 283 Paz, Octavio 290 post-secularism 7, 159, 221–33, 267, 272

Qur’an 8, 21–3, 36, 40, 71, 124, 158, 195–6, 264, 276 and Arabic 174

Said, Edward 40, 197, 270 Saramago, José 225, 255–65 secular(ism) 4, 7, 11, 14, 19, 25, 48, 50, 54, 64, 66, 72, 101, 108, 117–19, 132, 158, 222, 247, 255–6, 268, 274 Shakespeare, William 118, 143–54 Shariati, Ali 40 shema 90–1 Shoah 18, 68, 103, 258 Sikhism 53, 268, 274 Simmel Georg, 12, 49–50 Sloterdijk, Peter 5, 12–13 spiritualism 7, 11, 48, 133 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty 274 Steinbeck, John 263 Sufism 53, 56, 175, 195, 197, 205–15, and Samā dervish 214–15 Suhrawardī, Shaykh Shihāb al-Dīn 209 Tanakh 65, 71, 78 Taylor, Charles 10–11, 72, 118–19, 120, 225, 238 Tchernichovsky, Shaul 79–80 Tennyson, Alfred 119–27, Thiong’o, Ngũgĩ wa 117, 131–41 Tocqueville, Alexis de 18–19 Tóibín, Colm 262, Tournier, Michel 238, 240–1 translation studies 256–7 Twain, Mark 263 UFO religions 8 Underhill, Evelyn 57, 58

Index Vaughan, Henry 285–7, 289 Wahdat Al-Wujüd 206, 207, 209–10, 215 Ward, Graham 225, 237 Weber, Max 54, 56 westernization 276 Westminster Faith Debates 9–10, Whitehead, Alfred North 49 Williams, Rowan 10, 284 Wilson, G. Willow 171–3

Winterson, Jeanette 262 The Wire 226–7 ‘world religion’ 8, 117, 124 Wycliffe, John 287 Yale Divinity School 18 Yehoshua, A. B. 71, 101, 106–9 Zionism 66, 70, 75 Žižek, Slavoj 25

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