Search Results for: Jeremy Walton

“Lacan Makes Freud Sound Like a Simple Valley Girl”

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Regarding this video clip of NiteBeat’s Barry Nolan interviewing Slavoj Zizek about his new book, “The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity,” Jeremy Walton (Assistant Professor/Faculty Fellow, NYU Religious Studies) writes: This clip poses a number of urgent questions:  Why did Zizek agree to an interview with such a buffoon? Is Zizek familiar with the humor of Dennis Leary?  Finally, and most perplexingly, why is Zizek dressed as though he has just returned from a fly-fishing trip in Montana? Continue Reading →

Making Alevism:Lawfare, Secularism and The Secular

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A response to Markus Dressler’s essay, “Making Religion Through Secularist Legal Discourse: The Case of Turkish Alevism”

On a rather chill afternoon in March of 2005, I sat across from Ali Bey, the president of the Cem Foundation, one of the largest civil society institutions dedicated to Turkey’s Alevi community in all of Istanbul. After calling to the kitchen to request a fresh round of tea, Ali Bey proceeded with his monologue:

Think of two families, one Sunni, one Alevi. The Sunni woman is wearing a headscarf, the man has a long beard, they appear to have just arrived from the village. Then look at the Alevi family: the man is clean-shaven, the woman has fine hair, the children are clean and well-dressed.  Which of these two would you say is modern, secular? The Alevi family, of course.  And yet the (Turkish) state does not recognize us as a legitimate minority. True secularism does not exist here.

These were not unfamiliar or unsurprising sentiments for me to encounter. Throughout two years of research with Alevi NGOs in both Istanbul and Ankara, I frequently spoke with Alevis who drew a direct connection between the ‘modernity’ and ‘secularity’ characteristic of most Alevis and the failures of Turkish secularism, which they typically understand to be fatally skewed in favor of Turkey’s Sunni Muslims. This irony—the ostensible failure of Turkey’s political and legal system of secularism to recognize its most ‘secular’ subjects as a legitimate religious minority—is the crucible and dynamo of much Alevi political mobilization. Continue Reading →

Who’s Afraid of the Free Speech Fundamentalists?: Reflections on the South Park Cartoon Controversy

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Recent days have, alas, been marked by a sense of déjà vu all over again for scholars of contemporary Islam. On April 14th, the American cable network Comedy Central aired the first half of a double episode of the immensely-popular cartoon sitcom “South Park.” The episode specifically parodied Islamic prohibitions on the pictorial representation of the Prophet Muhammad by portraying him in concealment, first within a U-Haul truck and then inside an ursine mascot costume. On the day prior to the episode’s airing, the American website revolutionmuslim.com posted the following comments by one Abu Talhah al-Amrikee:

We have to warn Matt and Trey [Matt Stone and Trey Parker, co-creators of South Park] that what they are doing is stupid and they will probably wind up like Theo Van Gogh for airing this show. This is not a threat, but a warning of the reality of what will likely happen to them.

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In the News: Hip Hop, Hijabs, Hasidic Fashion, and more!

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A round-up of the week’s religion news. Continue Reading →

America's Muslim Anxiety: Lessons from The Third Jihad

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The past week has witnessed an escalating political crisis within the New York Police Department, sparked by the revelation that over a thousand officers viewed an Islamophobic film as part of a training exercise.  The Third Jihad (view trailer here) was produced by the Clarion Fund, a New York-based non-profit that first gained notoriety during the 2008 election season when it mailed thousands of unsolicited DVD copies of an earlier, similar film, Obsession: Radical Islam’s War Against the West (view trailer here), to voters in swing states, presumably in the hope of influencing electoral college votes.  New York City Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly had denied earlier rumors concerning the widespread screening of the Third Jihad; more shockingly, Kelly himself makes a cameo as a talking head in the film, although he claims that he was not apprised that footage of the interview would be used in the film.   In the wake of the report concerning the screening of the film—Tom Robbins of the Village Voice first broke the story on January 19th—Kelly issued an unprecedented public apology; while Mayor Bloomberg rushed to the commissioner’s defense, a variety of groups, including several Muslim organizations, continue to call for Kelly’s resignation.  Meanwhile, the film’s producers have vigorously redoubled their advocacy of The Third Jihad’s message, claiming that it only presents “the facts.”
The NYPD’s Third Jihad controversy presents many questions for those who track the politics of and about Islam in the contemporary United States.  For instance, one wonders what the airing of such a film in a “training”—presumably a context for teaching tactics and strategies in preventing crime—says about the institutional cultures of American police forces more generally. Continue Reading →

Remembering Differently: Coping with 9/11 Fatigue

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by Jeremy F. Walton

9/11 fatigue is a fully comprehensible, affective response to the cadences of nationalism that have accompanied public commemoration of the tenth anniversary of September 11, 2001. But this fatigue should not constitute the alibi for indifference, solipsism, or cynicism.

Several weeks after September 11, 2001, I participated in what was surely a frequent sort of event at the time:  a hastily organized panel of academic experts summoned to reflect upon the radical political upheavals of the recent weeks.  This particular panel occurred at the University of Chicago, where I was then a second-year graduate student in Anthropology; the first speaker was the Haitian anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot, an early mentor of mine.  Rolph, as we affectionately called him, struck a dramatic note:  “A pillar of impenetrable, black smoke in the firmament.  The echo of jet engines above, weapons of war.  On all sides: death.”  He went on to describe the brutal and tragic events of September 11, but not the September 11 that we had gathered to reckon—his own narrative was set in Santiago, on September 11, 1973, the date of the coup d’état that constituted the bloody birth pangs of Augusto Pinochet’s military junta in Chile.  Rolph’s rhetorical and political point was as sharp as his description was vivid:  Already, in a mere two weeks, the meaning and collective memory of “September 11” had come to exclude everything other than the national trauma of the United States. To this day, I continue to wonder how Chileans interpret and experience each anniversary of September 11 (and note that September 11 can now only exist as an anniversary), especially if they happen to find themselves in the United States at the time. Continue Reading →