Religion, Modernity, and the Global Afterlives of Colonialism

RELIGION, MODERNITY, AND THE GLOBAL AFTERLIVES OF COLONIALISM

CONTENDING MODERNITIES

Series editors: Ebrahim Moosa, Atalia Omer, and Scott Appleby

As a collaboration between the Contending Modernities initiative and the University of Notre Dame Press, the Contending Modernities series seeks, through publications engaging multiple disciplines, to generate new knowledge and greater understanding of the ways in which religious traditions and secular actors encounter and engage each other in the modern world. Books in this series may include monographs, co-authored volumes, and tightly themed edited collections.

The series will include works that frame such encounters through the lens of modernity. The range of themes treated in the series might include war, peace, human rights, nationalism, refugees and migrants, development practice, pluralism, religious literacy, political theology, ethics, multiand intercultural dynamics, sexual politics, gender justice, and postcolonial and decolonial studies.

RELIGION, MODERNITY,

AND THE GLOBAL AFTERLIVES

OF COLONIALISM

Edited by

ATALIA OMER

AND

JOSHUA LUPO

University of Notre Dame Press

Notre Dame, Indiana

University of Notre Dame Press

Notre Dame, Indiana 46556

undpress.nd.edu

Copyright © 2024 by the University of Notre Dame

All Rights Reserved

Published in the United States of America

Library of Congress Control Number: 2024941045

ISBN: 978-0-268-20847-9 (Hardback)

ISBN: 978-0-268-20848-6 (Paperback)

ISBN: 978-0-268-20850-9 (WebPDF)

ISBN: 978-0-268-20849-3 (Epub3)

This e-Book was converted from the original source file by a third-party vendor. Readers who notice any formatting, textual, or readability issues are encouraged to contact the publisher at [email protected]

CONTENTS

Introduction: Religion and the Legacies of Colonial Violence

BY ATALIA OMER AND JOSHUA LUPO

Origin Story

The New Cannot Be Born . . . Yet

The Old Did Not Go Anywhere, Nor Is It Dying

Reaching for the Post-Abyssal

Tensions

Notes

PART I. Religion, Politics, and Colonial Afterlives, or the Old Is Not Dying

1. Seeing the Old in the New: The Coloniality of the Liberal–Populist Marriage

BY SANTIAGO SLABODSKY

Abstract

Chapter start

Ending European Hierarchical Hermeticism

Coloniality, Religion, and the Liberal-Genocidal Marriage

Antisemitism/Philosemitism and Islamophobia

Opening Challenges

Notes

2. Deradicalization as a Fetish: The Threat of Da’wa and the Regulation of the Real

BY NADIA FADIL

Abstract

Chapter start

Deradicalization, Political Power, and the Fetish

From Da’wa to Jihad: The Problem of Radical Islam

The Elusive Nature of Da’wa

Conclusion

Notes

3. Afrofuturism, Islamofuturism, and Post-Western Modernity

BY S. SAYYID

Abstract

Chapter start

World Gone Wrong

Modern Times

Time out of Mind

Love and Theft

Notes

4. The Neoliberal Rationality of Secularism

BY LUCA MAVELLI AND EDMUND FRETTINGHAM

Abstract

Chapter start

Introduction

Understanding Secularisms: From National to Societal Differentiation

The Modern Neoliberalization of Secularism

The Postmodern Neoliberalization of Secularism

Conclusion

Notes

PART II. Challenging Colonial Paradigms: Nationalisms and Humanitarianism at the Edges of Modernity

5. Modernist Epistemological Webs: The Complex Legacies of Missionizing and Humanitarianism for Decolonizing Religion in Africa

BY CECELIA LYNCH

Abstract

Chapter start

Note on Positionality

Religion as a Modern, Contested Category: Implications for Decoloniality

What Was/Is Colonial Religion?

Cosmological and Onto-Epistemological Contestations

Knowledge Suppression and Knowledge Commodification

Responses and Conclusions

Notes

6. Linking Identity and Solidarity: A Reflection from the Periphery

BY SLAVICA JAKELIĆ

Abstract

Chapter start

Identity and Solidarity Bifurcated

Identity versus Solidarity as Ethnic versus Civic Nationalisms

Identity versus Solidarity as Identitarian versus Belief-Centered Religions

Overcoming Analytic Bifurcation: Linking the Ethics of Identity and the Ethics of Solidarity as an Alternative to Abyssal Thinking

Particular Attachments and Bonds of Solidarity: The Dual Periphery as a Bridge

Particular and Capacious: The Case of Fr. Tvrtko Barun and the Jesuit Relief Service in South-East Europe

Conclusion as an Opening: Toward a More Relational Ethics of Identity and Solidarity

Notes

7. The Fires This Time

BY GIL ANIDJAR

Abstract

Chapter start

Notes

List of Contributors

Index

INTRODUCTION

Religion and the Legacies of Colonial Violence

ATALIA OMER AND JOSHUA LUPO

ORIGIN STORY

Religion, Modernity, and the Global Afterlives of Colonialism emerged from a series of conversations hosted by Contending Modernities (CM), a global research initiative based at the University of Notre Dame’s Keough School of Global Affairs. Since 2010, CM has orchestrated empirical research and convened scholars from around the globe to focus on questions of science and the human person; reconfigured patterns of authority, community, and identity in sub-Saharan Africa and Indonesia; and practices of intercommunal organizing and new forms of cosmopolitanism and pluralistic exchange in the Global North. In June 2017, CM convened a Theory Working Group that has sought, together with CM’s blog, to curate work on various theoretical issues in religious studies. This group aimed to build upon and push beyond the empirical research of previous years so that CM might intervene in and expand upon central questions and conversations that have shaped the academic study of religion and modernity. The current volume joins two earlier publications emerging from our conversation.

Religion and Broken Solidarities illuminated how national boundaries limit the horizons of solidarity, and Religion, Populism, and Modernity examined the intersections of race, Christianity, and nationalism during the populist moment of the 2010s and 2020s. The current volume examines the afterlife of coloniality in various locations around the world by focusing on global practices of nationalism, humanitarianism, neoliberalism, and deradicalization. As a whole, the volume also seeks to bring to light practices and imaginaries that exceed the colonial gaze and decenter a totalizing western and Christocentric storyline. Our approach is simultaneously genealogical and emancipatory. Through this approach, we move beyond the more cynical visions of critique, which often deconstruct hegemonic structures without pointing to possibilities that might follow them, and which have dominated religious studies, and the wider humanities, in recent years.

THE NEW CANNOT BE BORN … YET

Famously, the Italian theorist Antonio Gramsci wrote that the old is dying but the new cannot be born.¹ He was referring to the decay of the hegemony structuring his historical context and to the fact that this dying was not yet accompanied by the birth of a new horizon. This profound observation has animated emancipatory politics on the Left that have focused on racial capitalism, colonialism, and the matrices of domination and global structural violence. The contributors to this volume capture a similar set of foci in our reexamination of the relations between religion, colonialism, and modernity. We do so by analyzing the historical roots and the ongoing legacies of these phenomena. Through this examination, it is revealed that the dying of the old does not necessarily mark the beginning of an alternative future, as S. Sayyid reminds us in his contribution (chapter 3).

Sayyid and Gil Anidjar (chapter 7) write responses to the contributions herein that reflect on the ongoing challenge of imagining alternatives to the dominant neocolonial hegemony. Sayyid illuminates why a futuristic imagination of the world otherwise, emancipated from European modernity/coloniality, is too often either beholden to a romantic ahistorical authentic precolonial imaginary, or is a replication of western modernity, as we see in Dubai’s skyscrapers—as if modernity was merely an architecture rather than an episteme and set of political projects. Either way, Christian European modernity still anchors the discussion, and thus a true decolonial horizon—which requires epistemological and political alternatives—remains unrealized.

Anidjar, in his synthetic response to the contributors, likewise reflects on the (im)possibility of escaping from the all-consuming fire of Christian European modernity. He extrapolates this from an engagement with Luca Mavelli and Edmund Frettingham’s contribution (chapter 4), which examines an internally colonizing neoliberal rationality/secularism. Anidjar navigates between the false/fictional and true/foundational (annihilating) fires with which the other contributors grapple. Occasionally, he finds them less than allconsuming and thus potentially generative of something new, as in Gramsci’s assertion. This something new ostensibly needs to deploy a grammar different from the modern/colonial, but, as Sayyid and Anidjar suggest, a place of exteriority from the ongoing logic of modernity remains elusive.

Religion, Modernity, and the Global Afterlives of Colonialism centers a decolonial sensibility with regard to how religion intersects with neo-liberalism, humanitarianism, nationalism, and the ethics of political solidarity. We collectively ask (albeit through different scholarly conversations) the following questions: Where are there openings for alternative, less totalizing, and more just futures? Are such new births even possible to imagine without decolonizing the imagination itself? And how might that look? Indeed, this volume asks what it means to decolonize the study of religion.

Part I, Religion, Politics, and Colonial Afterlives, or the Old Is Not Dying, deploys decolonial and genealogical epistemological interventions to expose the onto-theopolitical underpinnings (despite their self-representation as secular security) of deradicalization policies in Europe (as a part of a global reach of the War on Terror) and to challenge the retreat to White liberal innocence in the face of reignited fascism in Euro-America in the early decades of the twenty-first century. A decolonial prism and genealogical approach are indispensable for such demystification, and the contributions by Santiago Slabodsky (chapter 1), Nadia Fadil (chapter 2), S. Sayyid (chapter 3), and Luca Mavelli and Edmund Frettingham (chapter 4) employ them.

This critical turn in the scholarship on religion connects the poststructuralist genealogical demystifying of religion and the secular as all-inclusive and universal categories with the critique of modernity/coloniality. Accordingly, the very presence of national boundaries—a feature solidified in the post–World War I and World War II secular liberal order—is a manifestation of ongoing coloniality and thus engaging with them as the site for emancipation risks erasing a still lurking colonial presence. The secular nation-state might appear enlightened and neutral on the surface, but a critical lens of the kind foregrounded by the authors in part I exposes its underside. We refer to this critical approach as genealogical or archaeological. This method seeks to unearth the obscured features of various historical epochs.

Notably, religion is exposed via this archaeological approach as integral to the colonial grammar, as are secularist discourses that appear good on the surface. Such discourses—which might include democracy and economic development—are certainly not inherently bad. However, in their historical and ideological manifestations, they have often been genocidal, dehumanizing, and exploitative. Occasionally, critics seek to identify/rescue the tradition that anteceded the colonial/modern violence as the ground for an alternative horizon.² The problem, beyond the fact that such a precolonial space does not exist, is that such approaches rely on a closed account of religious traditions that reflects the colonial ossification of the cultural/religious. Such sedimented definitions of religion have been used by colonial powers to map, comprehend, and control colonized peoples, and are the hallmarks of modernity. If one wants to advocate for an emancipatory vision of religious traditions, as Slabodsky reminds us, they cannot do so through this naïve and fictional return to religion; indeed, this is not a return at all because religion is a classificatory category integral to colonial/modern structures.

According to the archaeological line of critique taken by the authors in part I, to the degree to which the analysis of religion and politics is subsumed within and naturalizes the boundaries of modern nations (which in turn conceals the violence their drawing and redrawing has entailed), the study of religion and politics remains colonized, both methodologically and epistemologically, and can only generate limited and nationalist accounts of religion and politics. However, in part II, Challenging Colonial Paradigms: Nationalisms and Humanitarianism at the Edges of Modernity, Cecelia Lynch (chapter 5) and Slavica Jakelić (chapter 6) point to cracks in a totalizing critique. These two contributions consider interventions from the scholarship on coloniality in their reflections on the ethics of political solidarity and humanitarianism in Africa and the Balkans.

THE OLD DID NOT GO ANYWHERE, NOR IS IT DYING

A decolonial approach requires a long historical reach that begins earlier than conventional historical accounts of the category of religion. It requires reaching back to the Christian European colonial expansions that occurred alongside, and entangled with, modernist ideology, racial capitalism, and a scrutiny of what Slabodsky analyzes herein as the genocidal underpinning of liberalism.³ The concept of coloniality captures modernity and colonialism as mutually constitutive and as enduring in their effects on the social, political, and economic realities under which people live around the world.⁴ The contributors define liberalism in a variety of ways, but we consider it most generally to constitute a set of values that prioritize individual rights and the privatization of religion, which are enshrined in a worldview and set of political, social, and economic institutions meant to reinforce those values.⁵

Coloniality came to the fore as a concept meant to capture the afterlife of colonial rule in the postcolonial present. The effects of colonialism are felt beyond military and political domination. Therefore, it is a mistake to think that the problems introduced by colonialism came to an end with the conclusion of the formal colonial era (which is certainly ongoing in various places around the world). The colonial, in other words, goes beyond forms of power over human populations. It is also discursive and epistemic; it operates through bioand necropolitics, controlling all aspects of life and death.⁶ This means that an analysis of colonized people’s interpretation of the world and of their conditions of marginality and dehumanization requires a conception of power as engrained beyond physical domination. To decolonize, therefore, has come to mean the reclaiming of land along with cultural practices, epistemologies, and ways of knowing that decenter western European and Christian-centric universalizing epistemes.⁷ As critics have pointed out, in spite of their desire to create universal values, these epistemes remain parochial in their outlook.

Coloniality dates to 1492. This is much earlier than where the comparative study of religion begins its own conventional examination of the colonial legacy of the category of religion (the European wars of religion are one starting point in this chronology of modern religion, and the study of philology in the nineteenth century is another). Such works trace the Euro-Christian provinciality of religion as a definition deployed to map a world ripe for domination.

Scholarship that grapples with the study of religion’s colonial legacy typically focuses on the deployment of the anthropological category of religion in the taxonomy of empire. The power to define, on these accounts, constitutes the power to control and contain.⁸ The containment of religion has been carried out by colonial actors packaging it as a form of belief that adheres to a certain set of principles or dogmas. This has allowed them to identify and privilege key religious actors in their effort to further domesticate and fragment communities. European philosophy, theology, and political thought define, as cultural anthropologist Talal Asad has elucidated, the constitutive categories of the secular and religious and universalize them. This is a process of epistemic violence against which other theorists and practitioners try to resuscitate tradition from the claws of modernity as a supposed antidote to our current ills.⁹ This binary framing, as Omer has argued elsewhere, reflects antimodernists’ modernism.¹⁰

Still, these are important interventions. They introduce critical levels of disciplinary self-reflexivity. What they miss, however, is that an intersectional and decolonial analysis of religion needs to go back to 1492 and the onset of the Eurocentric Christian colonial project.¹¹ Recent interventions in the study of religion have drawn on insights from scholarship focused on the coloniality of power.¹² The CM blog, for example, hosted a sustained series of conversations by multiple scholars working in various subfields within the academic study of religion, including comparative religious ethics, Continental philosophy of religion, and theory and method in the study of religion. Collectively, they began to meaningfully connect modernity/coloniality scholarship to the academic study of religion and deepen the discussion around what precisely is meant by decolonizing the study of religion.¹³

Religion qua Christianity, as Slabodsky charts in his contribution, had been a mechanism entangled with the exploitative doctrine of discovery, the consolidation of which coincided with the Inquisition and an emerging discourse about blood purity and identity.¹⁴ Certainly, race, even before race became a social/biological category, was already an instrument of nation-making during the Spanish Inquisition. The latter, it is important to note, coincided with Spain’s colonial expansion. During this time, it deployed a racialization logic to justify dispossession and elimination through conversion and other forms of death, including cultural and epistemic forms. Religion as a racialized category, then, was deployed to identify those with the correct religion (Christians), incorrect or false religion (Muslims and Jews, or the two others of Europe), and those deemed to have no religion and thus to be less than human and targets for colonial control, conversion, and liquidation.¹⁵

Slabodsky, therefore, takes a long historical view in order to approach the contemporary configuration of religion and empire as expressed through the institution of the modern nation-state. The state confines the analysis of religion and politics to a comparative (hermetically closed) methodology rather than a relational one. The latter most clearly illuminates the links between evolutionism, or the discourse of false inclusion, and dualism, or forced exclusion. Evolutionism, which Slabodsky also interprets through a discourse of modern altruism, refers to Europe’s inclusion of others via a discourse of progress. Such progress can appear in the form of accepting Christianity or in conforming to Europeans’ understandings of democracy and development. By dualism as forced exclusion, Slabodsky refers to the impossibility of erasing otherness. Accordingly, he states, non-European populations, no matter how much they try to achieve the goal forced upon them, always remain suspect of not being Christian/civilized/developed/democratic enough and end their lives as ‘terrorists,’ exhausted laborers, or as ‘collateral victims’ in the advancement of the only truth. The altruism of modern liberation, then, is premised from a very early stage on a genocidal program.

Slabodsky’s account of coloniality exposes the convergences and cross-fertilization between inclusive liberal values and genocidal legacies that live on in the contemporary manifestations of right-wing racist populist nationalisms of the kinds we examined in Religion, Populism, and Modernity. In light of this claim, the likes of Bolsonaro, Modi, Meloni, and Trump in the world must be analyzed through the lens of coloniality. This requires—and here, Slabodsky’s intervention is decidedly different from Jakelić’s contribution—one to resist a hermetic comparative lens in favor of a global decolonial outlook that can discern the matrices of coloniality and their afterlives. Since its inception, Slabodsky writes, coloniality has woven an intimate relation between (what we today refer to as) ‘right-wing’ genocidal practices and seemingly altruistic liberal discourses of inclusion, and so an analysis of the contemporary cruelty of political regimes must unsettle the persistent navel-gazing approach to history within which Europe is the only actor. Framing coloniality as an ongoing epistemic but also a political, sociocultural, and economic phenomenon helps Slabodsky clarify the need to unsettle methodological nationalism and show how the comparative approach is itself implicated in colonial afterlives.

Triangulating the critical study of religion with scholarship on coloniality and its genealogy, therefore, clarifies religion’s complicity with empire and colonialism. It also shows how contemporary political theory and its intellectual inheritance dictate the present role assigned to religion in the public sphere (a contested space defined by the power of exclusion/inclusion). Religion, therefore, as a generic normative category often denotes Christianity and its history of complicity with empire and the nation as a secular and political space likewise defined by western Christian modernity. This backdrop delineates the correct boundaries of religion, what counts as one, and how it might relate to the thresholds of inclusion/exclusion into the discourse of citizenship.

Religion’s complicity with the hegemonic epistemic modern/colonial constellation has manifested differently in various historical epochs. This includes an earlier emphasis on either the death or conversion of natives, and attempts to create a colonial taxonomy where subjects could be categorized and controlled across empires and colonies. This was done with the aim of dehumanizing people’s sense of worth so as to exploit their labor, enslave them, occupy and displace them, and finally eliminate them. A genocidal logic, the decolonial outlook that Slabodsky conveys in his contribution, is not incidental nor is it a perversion, but rather it is central to modernity as a project that relies on racializing religion in nation-state making. Likewise, and in the contemporary moment, Fadil’s analysis examines the dualistic logic of exclusion in technologies deployed to maintain the secular, liberal dimensions of the metropolitan centers of (former) empires. She specifically focuses on the regulation of political subjects’ Muslimness in Belgium. What Sayyid points out as a foundational paradox between the pretenses of liberalism and the politics and violence of empire and (neo)colonial configurations, Fadil shows through a scrutiny of deradicalization policies in Europe, a vector in the global War on Terror. She reveals the fragility of the modern political liberal order and its dependency upon singling out Muslimness as marked religion and ideology. The old therefore did not die, it just changed its technologies and shapes.

Fadil’s contribution also operates in an expository and demystifying mode, seeking to reveal the ontological and politico-theological dimensions of so-called deradicalization policies designed to prevent the manifestations of religious extremism, where the religious is a marked category denoting the other of Europe, in this case the Muslim. Fadil illustrates how Muslims in Europe are represented as a subterranean threat to the political and social body and how pathological/medical metaphors such as cancer are deployed to rationalize invasive containment and eradication policies. Slabodsky’s analysis amplifies Fadil’s archaeology of deradicalization policies in Europe and the broader motif concerning the undying character of colonial formations and their reconfiguration. As in Slabodsky’s piece, in Fadil’s we find that inclusion within the liberal order’s body politic requires a form of assimilation akin to annihilation. Sayyid thinks together with Slabodsky and Fadil about what their respective critiques of overt and covert Christian modernity/coloniality—as inscribed into necropolitical (and politically liberal)—violence means in relation to the broader conversation about decolonial horizons and what they might look like relative to concepts such as multiple and contending modernities.

If Slabodsky, Fadil, and Sayyid bring to the fore the political and social ramifications of colonial afterlives, Mavelli and Frettingham turn our attention to the economic sphere, bringing to light the religious anatomy of the hegemonic discourse of neoliberal capitalism. Their analysis is archaeological, seeking to excavate the metaphysical foundations of neoliberal theory and secularism. To this effect, they analyze the work of the founding fathers and architects of neoliberalism: Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek. They pay special attention to how these thinkers interpreted the place and role of generic religion (qua Christianity) in society. Mavelli and Frettingham subsequently argue that neoliberal secularism takes the market as a natural secular reality that constitutes the space from which religion is to be assessed for its function and use. This examination demystifies secularism and shows it to be an ideology that polices religion and promotes capitalism. Similarly, neoliberal practices assume spiritual and religious connotations and meanings. For example, philanthropy becomes a form of religious piety and, echoing Calvinist traditions, wealth signifies divine chosenness, a variation of which is the prosperity gospel. The latter has taken hold and buttressed exploitative neoliberal policies. It has entrenched marginality in already marginalized and exploited regions in the Global South and marginalized and underserved communities in the Global North.

In their analysis of the metaphysical and theological anatomy of neoliberalism, Mavelli and Frettingham underscore the importance of studies in secularism for understanding and theorizing religion and modernity, and especially religion and colonial afterlives. Indeed, according to scholars versed in decolonial thought, neoliberalism is a contemporary manifestation of a colonial framework that morphed over the centuries from an initial Christian cosmological licensing of discovery, plunder, exploitation, dispossession, slavery, and elimination to a discourse of progress, civilizational mission, democracy, and neoliberal development.¹⁶ Understanding the neoliberal not only as a locus for colonial afterlives but also as the contemporary register of the same old colonial framework (or the colonial undying) requires the kind of careful analysis Mavelli and Frettingham extend to the metaphysical and Christian theological underpinnings of the secular as it features in the thought of neoliberal ideologues. They bring into the conversation mountains of research in the anthropology and colonial history of religion: Secularisms are colonial epistemic regimes that construct ‘the religious’ as a universal, transcultural, and transhistorical dimension, thus concealing their contingent westerncentric historical situatedness. Accordingly, their focus is on secularisms as colonial epistemic regimes … that have been themselves colonized by neoliberal rationalities. They challenge the conceptual limits that the nation-state framework imposes on the analysis of secularism. Hence, instead of asking questions about French or Indian secularisms, they interrogate and distinguish what they call political, economic, scientific, and even religious secularisms. They demonstrate the artificiality of national boundaries in their scrutiny of the secular challenges and disrupt the methodological nationalism still haunting the analysis of religion and modernity, an analysis that also involves a scrutiny of secular traditions. Slabodsky also supports this point when he critiques the hermetic approach to religion and nationalism for its conceptual blind spots. Indeed, such hermeticism supports the continued haunting of the nation-state by colonial afterlives.

Mavelli and Frettingham posit religion as a generic category that denotes religion in general. This generic religion is of course the topic of countless critical works in the academic study of religion and adjacent fields.¹⁷ In reality, the generic and comparative anthropological category of religion is not actually generic but specifically located in the theological,