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Tag: jeremy walton
Muslim Attitudes
Comment by NYU assistant professor/faculty fellow Jeremy Walton on yesterday’s New York Times article, “Koran burning in NATO Error Incites Afghans,” (February 21, 1:39 pm):
These comments are, on the whole, atrocious and disturbing, for two reasons. First, there seems to be absolutely no interest or concern on the part of most NYTimes readers to comprehend Muslim attitudes toward the Qur’an. As a professor of Islamic Studies, I begin every class on the Qur’an by emphasizing that it should not be understood as a mere ‘book’–it is both more and less. Less because Muslims don’t read the Qur’an cover-to-cover like a novel; more because it is, along with the exemplary conduct of the Prophet Muhammad, the authoritative source of wisdom about the universe and humanity’s place within it for Muslims. Qur’anic passages suffuse Muslim life and worship. The performance of salat, the five daily prayers, is an embodiment of the Qur’an, and Qur’anic verses saturate daily speech and life in most Muslim contexts. Muslims who cannot fully comprehend the linguistic meaning of the text due to illiteracy in Arabic respect the Qur’an no less because of this fact. Is it any surprise that some devout Afghani Muslims take umbrage to the disrespectful actions of their military occupiers? Of course, dismissal of religious attitudes is a secular privilege that we all share, but this brings me to my second objection to the bulk of the comments here: Even if you choose to denigrate the actions of some Afghani Muslims, do not make the vicious mistake of all prejudice and bigotry, the substitution of the actions of a few (the protesters) for the whole.
Be Mine
By Jeremy Walton
On February 14th, 1989, the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini sent what surely must have been one of the blackest Valentine’s greetings of all time to novelist Salman Rushdie. Invoking somewhat dubious legal and theological authority—as a Twelver Shi’a, Khomeini could hardly claim to speak for all of the world’s Muslims—he called for Rushdie’s death on the charge of blasphemy, based on certain passages of the novel The Satanic Verses. The politics of Khomeini’s so-called fatwa are intricate, and deserve to be understood beyond the typically Islamophobic responses voiced by many Western defenders of Rushdie. This question of politics aside, however, Khomenei’s Valentine to Rushdie provokes me to ask: Which one of us has not felt a certain chill, the risk of annihilation in our beloved, upon receiving or giving a Valentine? Freud, for one, would appreciate Khomenei’s gesture—perhaps the most authentically libidinal expression of love is the desire to expunge, and to be expunged in, the object of one’s affection. In any event, I call to mind Khomenei’s Valentine each year even as I scrawl greetings on mass produced cards and distribute chalky sugar hearts proclaiming, somewhat sadistically, “Be Mine.” Perhaps we would be wise to meditate on the relationship between “Be Mine” and “Be Dead” a bit more cogently, even as we rush to purchase chocolates and red roses (with thorns!) for our sweethearts today.
Jeremy F. Walton is an assistant professor/ faculty fellow in New York University’s Religious Studies Program. Continue Reading →
America's Muslim Anxiety: Lessons from The Third Jihad
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 →
Making Alevism:Lawfare, Secularism and The Secular
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 →
Remembering Differently: Coping with 9/11 Fatigue
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 →
Reactions to the Death of Osama bin Laden
On this day after the announcement that Osama bin Laden was killed by U.S. Navy Seals, we collect reactions from religion scholars and journalists, including Jeremy Walton, Noah Jaffe Silverman and Brigitte Sion.
Late last night, on a return flight from the Society for the Anthropology of Religion biannual meetings, I was stirred from my sleep by an announcement from the cockpit: “Some uplifting political news—we’ve just learned that Osama bin Laden has been killed. It’s a great day to be an American.” Continue Reading →
Acknowledging the Lives of Religious Texts
Jeremy Walton moderated a panel sponsored by NYU’s Institute for the Production of Knowledge last week. The event inaugurated a new series by Princeton University Press, “The Lives of Great Religious Books,” and gathered Martin E. Marty (Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers from Prison), Donald Lopez (The Tibetan Book of the Dead: A Biography), and Vanessa Ochs (currently working on a “biography” of the Passover Haggadah for the series) for a discussion of these and other foundational texts — a discussion that also shed light on the series’ approach to the discipline of religious studies and its conception of “texts.” Walton writes in his summary of the event, at The Immanent Frame:
For many years, Religious Studies was defined as a hermeneutical discipline based upon great texts, but the typical disciplinary approach was to treat the texts as hermetic, self-contained wholes upon which the scholar expounds and expands. With this series, however, we are witnessing a new willingness on the part of scholars in Religious Studies to approach the dynamic relationship between theological treatises and their social environments, between texts and contexts, as it were.
Disguising Islamophobia
This photo was taken yesterday by Jeremy Walton, assistant professor at NYU’s Religious Studies Program, in downtown Manhattan where various groups gathered to protest a proposed community center or to march in support of it. Continue Reading →