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We are pleased to bring you episode 4 of the Revealer podcast: Hasidic Jewish Heretics.

Happy listening!

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The excerpt comes from the book’s first chapter.

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Yisroel was an earnestly pious boy growing up Hasidic in Brooklyn, New York. With his side curls grazing his shoulders, thick plastic glasses, and big black velvet yarmulke, he looked like all the other boys in his yeshiva, where he studied the Torah and its commentaries from early in the morning until late at night. But when he was thirteen, Yisroel began to notice contradictions that troubled him in the religious texts he was studying. He didn’t initially doubt the truth of ultra-Orthodox Judaism, but he had problematic questions—what are called in Yiddish emuna kashes (questions about faith). Only once did he timidly confide in his teacher, a rabbi, who angrily warned him that such questions came from the sin of masturbation. From then on, confused and ashamed, he kept his questions to himself and tried, as he told me, to “push them under the rug.” At eighteen he got married, and he and his wife, Rukhy, whom he barely knew but grew to adore, had five children in quick succession. To support his growing family, Yisroel eventually stopped studying Torah and began, as many Hasidic men do, to work in information technology.

However, in 2003, when he was twenty-nine, his questions began to nag at him again. And this time, thanks to his work with computers, he turned to the internet, secretly searching for and reading forbidden scholarly articles on theology, biblical criticism, and science. He hoped to finally find answers to his questions about faith in these non-Jewish sources, but they only provoked more questions. He decided then, he told me, that he had to “take his questioning all the way.”

Late at night, sitting alone in the kitchen after everyone had gone to bed and the only sound was the humming of the two dishwashers (one for meat and one for dairy), he began reading some of the then-popular heretical ultra-Orthodox blogs, like Hasidic Rebel and Shtreimel. These led him to online forums of the day, where writing under a pseudonym in Yiddish and in English, Yisroel debated with ultra-Orthodox Jewish doubters and even some who had openly left Jewish Orthodoxy altogether to go “OTD,” or “off the derekh” (path). He tried to convince them (and himself ) that they were wrong. All of his searching, he told me, remembering his anguish, “tortured” him, but he could not stop.

Eventually, his questions gave way to doubt in the central premise of ultra-Orthodox Jewish authority: that God revealed the Torah to the Jews at Mount Sinai through Moses. Yisroel was in such agony at this heresy (kfira) that he secretly began to make phone calls to consult rabbis outside of his community who specialized in answering questions of faith. Their arguments failed to convince him. Despite continuing to observe the mitsves, the 613 prohibitions and commandments that had always directed every aspect of his life, he began to doubt their divine truth.

The first time he ever violated one of the commandments was on a Sabbath evening in 2012. His youngest was crying, and he knew that turning on the musical mobile above her crib would calm her down. Observant Jews do not turn electricity on or off during the Sabbath. He stood alone in the dark with his hand on the switch for a long time—yes, no, yes, no, yes, no? And then he switched it on. Each time he broke another commandment, like using his phone on the Sabbath, or skipping daily prayers, or even eventually sneaking non-kosher cold cuts into the pocket of his jacket to nibble on at home, he told me, he felt a sense of “freedom,” finally “in control of his life.”

That was when he became one of a growing number of what most ultra-Orthodox call in English “double life” or “ITC” (in the closet), or what Yiddish-speaking ultra-Orthodox call bahaltena apikorsim (hidden heretics), those who feature in this book: men and women who practiced religiously in public, including at home, but who often violated the commandments in secret because they no longer believed them to be God’s words to his chosen people. Yisroel and others like him kept their double lives secret to protect their families and for fear of being cast out in a world they were ill-prepared to navigate.

In 2014, after Yisroel had developed a growing network of double-life friends on social media and in person, his wife, Rukhy, finally confronted him. She had noticed that in the intimacy of their bedroom, he had stopped “washing negl vasser,” the ritual hand washing upon waking each morning. She asked him if he still prayed. If he kept the Sabbath. Did he still believe? Hiding in their bedroom closet and whispering late at night, so their children would not hear, he told her everything. She was devastated and told me she cried for three days straight. Then, just a few months later, the vaad ha-tsnius (the Committee on Modesty), a group of self-appointed activists and rabbis, contacted Yisroel through his brother-in-law. They somehow knew that he had just bought a book on science from Amazon for his twelve-year-old daughter, which included a section on the theory of evolution, which Hasidic Jews reject.

Yisroel’s world was literally falling apart, and that was when I met him. A mutual contact, Zalman, who had been forced to leave his own ultra-Orthodox community a few years earlier for heresy, introduced us, knowing I was conducting anthropological research with those living double lives and those who tried to help them. Over the next year, Yisroel and I met periodically in a wooden booth in the back of a dark bar on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, amid the safe anonymity of Columbia University students. He still had his long side curls along with a long beard, thick glasses, and a big black velvet yarmulke. However, as a small personal rebellion, he had taken off the high black velvet hat most Hasidic men wear, and instead of the usual Hasidic men’s long black jacket, he always wore a cardigan or a parka.

Yisroel told me his story as it was unfolding. Although he was always anxious about protecting the anonymity of his family, he seemed to need to talk, often asking me about his legal rights, something I knew little about. When we couldn’t meet, we communicated on WhatsApp, the secure phone messaging app that so many ultra-Orthodox Jews used. He told me how he and his wife were trying to figure out how to make their life together work again. He had promised her that he would keep practicing in front of the children. He hoped it was enough.

With her permission, he gave me Rukhy’s number, and I began to talk with her, too, on the phone and on Facebook. Rukhy, who used to rely on her husband for spiritual guidance, told me how his doubt had begun to affect her: how she worried about her own faith glitshing (slipping); how she had begun to reach out to other women in similar situations online; and about her new sense of responsibility for the rukhnius (spirituality) in their home, traditionally the authority of the husband. Yisroel’s secret was hers now too. She could tell no one, not even her mother or her sisters who lived across the street. She told me she was scared, angry, and heart-broken all at once.

The Committee on Modesty wanted Yisroel to sign a contract promising he would stop using any social media, part of the growing effort by the ultra-Orthodox to control the internet and protect the community from what was increasingly called the “crisis of emuna,” or the crisis of faith. This made Yisroel angry, and he brought up his constitutional right to privacy, having only recently learned about the existence of the Constitution at all. He was not rebellious, he insisted. He was simply following his conscience. Then the committee threatened to expel his children from school and to tell Yisroel’s parents unless he and Rukhy agreed to see a religious therapist, someone who worked with a rabbi and then reported back to the committee. Many ultra-Orthodox Jews believe that religious doubt might be symptomatic of an underlying mental illness, perhaps depression, a trauma, or anxiety, something that could be treated and cured. Afraid, Yisroel and Rukhy tried a number of different therapists, religious and secular, but none helped Yisroel regain his faith.

What Yisroel called his “journey” was still unfolding. Would he and his wife stay together, and if they did, would her faith continue to slip? Would the religious authorities and institutions be able to control the decisions Yisroel and his wife made? Would they expel his children, which would have serious repercussions for the entire family’s life, especially when it came time for matchmaking? Where did his responsibilities as a parent lie, especially as his children got older? Was there anyone, a therapist or a rabbi, who could help Yisroel regain his faith, something   he still wished for?

Yisroel’s story was but one of many, the uncharted territory of ultra-Orthodox hidden heretics living double lives where belief and practice were at odds; these were men and (fewer) women, who no longer believed in the literal truth of divine revelation at Mount Sinai. Nevertheless, they felt bound by love and a sense of moral responsibility to stay with their still-religious spouses and children. Keeping secrets from those they were closest to, double lifers upheld the public appearance of adhering to ultra-Orthodoxy, even as they explored forbidden worlds, online and in person, beyond their own.

Those living double lives are part of a broader twenty-first-century generational crisis of authority among the ultra-Orthodox. Despite their robust demographic growth, there have been increasingly loud struggles over competing knowledge and truths. The internet facilitated the formation of a public oppositional voice, one that included anonymous expressions of life-changing doubt and validated radically changing perceptions of oneself in the world. Gender was key to the experience of and possibilities for living double lives, since gender structures authority in both ultra-Orthodox life and its alternative public. Begun in online spaces, but soon crossing over to meetings in person, this alternative public gave a platform to dangerous questions: Who should have the authority for making life choices? What and who defined Orthodox Judaism or self-fulfillment or an ethical life? The pages ahead ask what double lifers’ everyday struggles can tell us about religious doubt and social change in the digital age.

Ayala Fader is a Professor of Anthropology at Fordham University and the author of Mitzvah Girls: Bringing Up the Next Generation of Hasidic Jews in Brooklyn. Her newest book Hidden Heretics: Jewish Doubt in the Digital Age is available now.

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Interested in more on this topic? Check out episode 4 of the Revealer podcast: “Hasidic Jewish Heretics” featuring our fascinating interview with Ayala Fader!

The post Hidden Heretics: Jewish Doubt in the Digital Age appeared first on The Revealer.

Grave Attending is about moods, individual and public, emotional and political, embodied and spiritual; it is about why we feel the way we do and how we can imagine and build new futures in and with these feelings. She combines critical theories of gender, race, affect, and theology with storytelling, personal reflection, and pop culture to weave a unique and effective method. Reading Bray’s book gave me a sense of being both grounded and restless — feelings that, themselves, I realized were deeply productive ways of working through her ideas and into our conversation. I’m grateful to her for engaging with me and with these questions and hope that we will, one day, get to continue this exchange in person.

Kali Handelman: Over the course of the last month, as our collective attention expanded from the experience of lockdown to the worldwide Black Lives Matter uprising, I found myself grateful for the concepts and language you offer in your book. It seems uncannily well-timed, though maybe that’s because we’ve actually been in this mood for a while? I wanted to start by asking you to tell us what led you to the book? What got you into moodiness as a topic of study? 

Karen Bray: Yes, it’s been both heartening and disheartening to hear from many people that the book is resonating with them in this particular moment. Heartening because maybe there are some concepts in the book, some ways of being in the world, that might be of use right now, or at the very least which could help readers feel a little less lonely, isolated, or ashamed of their depression, rage, and anxiety. I think we have been in an unsustainable mood of global anxiety and of both righteous and toxic rage and depression because of the unpaid debts and under-acknowledged material (emotional, spiritual, physical, and financial) legacies of neoliberal capitalism, colonialism, white supremacy, and heteropatriarchy (all of which fortify one another). The world sort of has a choice whether to use such a mood to double down on attachments to old/current forms of power (i.e. the white rage behind “Make America Great Again”) or to cultivate such moods towards liberation and transformation (i.e. “Black Lives Matter”). Both “Make America Great Again” and “Black Lives Matter” are lamentant moods, so it is not that moodiness itself will save us. Rather, what I hope the book points to is how important mood is as an expression, tool, and mode of power, and to whose mood we count as redeemable and whom we leave unredeemed in order to make some moods respectable and others depraved, criminal, out-of-joint, etc.

To turn to your first question, I got into the book at its most basic level because of being moody. I have bipolar 2 disorder and PTSD and my emotional range has always been a bit larger than what seems to count as “normal.” I vibrate with emotion—excessive joy in the joyous moments, oversensitivity to the tragic moments. And as a result I have always felt a little out of joint with the world. A little too emotional, a little too loud, a little too sensitive, a little too combative, a little too fast thinking, a little too talkative, a little too much. I was too much and not enough all at once and all the time. I knew somewhere in my soul that the overflow of emotion also meant good things like being unafraid of others’ traumas, connecting with people quickly, building community, reading a room, being smart about people and ideas, but it also felt like a great burden, like I would never succeed in the right way at the right time at anything. While I was feeling all of that moodiness within, I was being inspired by activists living moods out loud. From 2005 to 2007 I worked for the hotel worker’s union in NYC. There, worker’s rage over working conditions was funneled into strategic movement building. In 2007-2009 I did witness bearing work in Honduras with women who were lamenting feminicide (the state sanctioned killing of women). These women poured their grief into the public square, discomforting passersby, and building solidarity that set the groundwork for a women-led movement against a right wing coup. Lament in the public square was transformative. Moodiness, took on a different meaning for me working with these women. As early as my Master’s thesis I was writing a theology of lament in the face of trauma. That theology morphed for me as my doctoral work progressed and I was introduced to affect and disability theory and then Black studies, which helped me to find language for the need to reframe “negative” emotion and moodiness and see the resistant potential in being out-of-joint. My bipolar moods meant I couldn’t work on capitalist time, which meant I could see and feel a temporality beyond capitalism. But why mood? Because I’m a moody dame, and you write what you need.

KH: And can you tell us what “grave attending” and “grave attention” mean — in the work of the book and to you in the present moment?

KB: Grave attending is the practice of being brought down by the gravity of what is. Grave attending is about paying attention and being accountable to whose identities, what social systems, and which moods had to be denied, belittled, criminalized, pathologized, or defamed to construct white, propertied, male, straight, and able-bodied as the norm and capitalism, productivism, politeness, and docility as social goods. It is about me attending both to what kind of flourishing I might have had if I had not been told my moods were disordered and worthy of shame, and it is about me attending to the ransom of Black life made so that my model white womanhood could count as good. Importantly, it is a practice. It is something we have to keep working at. I do not believe that some brand new thing is coming to save us out of the blue, or that some God will burst in and lift us all up. If we are to salvage this world it will be from possibilities that hegemonic powers wanted to kill off and keep buried, so grave attending is being open to the resurgence of those possibilities.

Right now I think the pandemic and the racial revolution being led by Black Lives Matter and BIPOC youth have demanded we pay grave attention. The pandemic slowed life down for many and sped it up for others. It created bipolar time for us all. Days of total grief and paralyzing fear, other days of hyper anxiety or juggling childcare and work, or for essential workers, non-stop maddening work. Time being out of joint for everyone forced a kind of attention-paying that woke many up to how broken our system is. I don’t think we can separate this moment of awakening to shared vulnerability brought by the pandemic to the (finally some) grave attention more white people are paying to Black death in the wake of the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Amaud Arbery, Tony McDade, Elijah Mcclain, and so many others. The shift in more people filling the streets in protest of these murders, and the growing popularity of defunding the police and of Black Lives Matter, is of course due to massive organizing efforts (primarily by BIPOC) over the last decade, but it is also about a shift in mood, one that took more people, particularly more white people, finally paying greater and graver attention. More people in the last four months have been brought down by the gravity of what actually is–that we do not have functioning healthcare or a functioning government, and that we do live in a white supremacist police state. The question remains for me how we keep such grave attention up and how we best materially support the possibilities being resurfaced, like police abolition. One way my book, along with many others, offers is to not police and professionalize the mood of the protests. This moment could not be a greater example of how supposed “disorder” is necessary for transformation.

KH: Your book is profoundly interdisciplinary and intertextual — combining religious studies, theology, affect theory, queer theory, disability studies/ crip theory,^[1] media studies, and more. I’m particularly interested in the fact that you situate the project as a work of political theology. You write, “At its core, this book attempts to construct a political theology attendant to moody and material life.” I’d love to think with you about what we gain from thinking about these questions — of productivity, of bodies, of race and gender and feeling — within the practices and concepts of political theology, for instance, salvation and redemption?

KB: I am a theologian who does not hold the Christian God, or a transcendent God as primary. Political theology (as a theological discipline that does not need to center a God figure) was central to this project because it insists that theological thinking is happening in the secular sphere and happening in ways that we must grapple with if we are to deal with power, both toxic and liberatory. My frustration with political theology has been that certain Western strains seem to talk a lot about salvation, power, redemption, and economy without dealing with material histories, bodies, and moods. It felt very disembodied and sanitized, even in the leftist versions that should be attendant to the marginalized and processes of marginalization. Theological concepts of redemption and salvation were of particular importance to me, because part of my theological diagnosis of the problems with neoliberalism are the systems of redemption it offers. One must be a profitable investment to be saved under neoliberal capitalism. Such an economy of salvation, it seems to me, leaves far too many of us damned and, perhaps worse, bargaining for our redemption by ransoming others. This is in part why I am so drawn to the concept of Holy Saturday. Both neoliberalism and too often Christian theologies rely on a Friday/Sunday salvation economy, in which once damaged, we need to resurrect quickly to be of worth again. So under neoliberalism we work ourselves to sickness, and then invest in an economy of resilience to be back to work as fast as possible, only to repeat such a damage resurrection cycle and infuse more money back into the system over and over again. Or in another register, if impoverished white people have been crucified for the economy instead of taking the time to feel such a trauma and correctly diagnose for whom they were strung up on the cross, there is a push to sacrifice impoverished Black people and immigrants to resurrect quickly back into worth. Holy Saturday does not rush to Sunday, but rather invites us to sit with the pain of crucifixion and to refuse Sundays built on the ransom of others for our redemption. Such political theological concerns are central to my book.

KH: There is also a theme of haunting that, well, haunts the book. Without being too cute about it, it really does sort of spectrally hover. I wonder if you can say more about how you think about haunting? What does it mean to be haunted? Is being haunted a mood we should be thinking more about? How do haunting and mourning come together — or not?

KB: Haunting returns us to the graves. Again, I do not think we will be saved or really freed from the in-breaking of the new, but rather if there is any chance for liberation and transformation it is from being haunted by the deaths that demand our attention, in particular for me by Black death, and therefore also by what Black life has meant. I want to be haunted by what might have been, a kind of Afrofuturist vision perhaps, if we had not colonized and enslaved. I do not want this out of sympathy, but because my liberation from white supremacy demands it. Our lives are already haunted by such death, and by visions of another way that have been manipulated and commodified and used for ill. Indeed, we are all haunted by such death whether we want it or not. Our country was and continues to be built on violent death. So the question is whether we will let the ghosts in so we can learn from them, or whether we will pretend they are not there. Mourning is a part of being haunted, in that we both have to mourn the dead that we have avoided for so long, but perhaps more importantly in being haunted by the death we have to mourn the innocence we thought our lives contained. We — here being white people — have to get over our need for innocence so that we can do the hard work of liberation from the systems that murder and try to keep the ghosts buried. This is why work like Christina Sharpe’s on Black life lived in the wake of state sanctioned death in In the Wake: On Blackness and Being is so crucial. The haunting is unavoidable if you are forced to live in the wake. It’s up to those of us who have avoided such attendance to show up for the wake-work.

KH: Can we talk a bit more about Neoliberalism? First, how do you define it? Second, can you walk us through how thinking about moods like exhaustion are necessary for critiquing neoliberalism?

KB: I guess I would define neoliberalism as an economic and sociopolitical system that defines all worth by market value or profitability. So it is an extreme form of capitalism, one which spreads its accounting of worth into every realm of life. Under neoliberalism there is no private and public sphere, no work time and off time, because all time is under the framework of its profitability. For one of the best conversations/introductions to neoliberalism I would suggest Wendy Brown’s Undoing the Demos.

 Exhaustion as a mood has little worth in neoliberalism, unless one is desperate to solve exhaustion quickly. By this I mean, if one is exhausted they are not being productive nor profitable for the system, unless they are buying drugs or self-help books or wellness regimes that funnel money back into the system. Neoliberalism does not mind exhaustion in this way because it can exhaust material, in this case human material, which then buys its way out of exhaustion so that it can be exhausted by the work of neoliberalism again. If we embrace exhaustion, and actually let ourselves ask the question “why am I so exhausted?” And “what would real rest mean”? We monkey with the machine that needs us to be desperately trying to get back to our productive and profitable capacities. This is why I am drawn to the work of Robin James on resilience and melancholy. She uses pop music to talk about the impulse to overcome our damage. For instance, she compares Lady Gaga’s music where her “little monsters” grow up to be good citizens overcoming the damage of being outsiders, to Rihanna, whom for James rejects overcoming both in terms of the dynamics of her music and the images in her music video. James is particularly interested in Rihanna’s video for the song “Diamonds” in which the video ends not with an upbeat pop star, but with Rihanna floating in water. Rihanna here is not letting the water drown her, nor is she pretending to not be exhausted by it. She is floating with it, and so attending to it.

KH: In the book you write, “one can speak ethically without speaking morally.” This really jumped out at me and I’d love it if you could expand on the difference, and the necessity of speaking ethically rather than morally in this moment.

KB: I am sure there are philosophers more attuned to strict definitions who will disagree with the following, but in this case I am thinking of morality as a tool of biopower, a set of coded moral principles whose rigidity is used by those in control to mete out punishment and reward. It is another tool of some ransoming others for their redemption. Ethics, on the other hand, at least as I am using it, is a practice, a doing that takes contextual sensitivity. To speak ethically would be to speak with claims to righteousness that are open to challenge, but also which demand action to test out, and not just boundary drawing. For example, the term “family values” and its homophobic and anti-reproductive justice implications uses morality in a biopolitical way to police women and queer bodies. Conversely, people who work in reproductive justice ask questions about the sociopolitical contexts in which individual and collective reproductive choices are made and therefore must be agile in drawing ethical conclusions about right and wrong in various situations.

KH: I really appreciate how you brought your own academic life — graduate school, precarious labor, your teaching and your students — into the book. That’s both generous and brave and I think it was a way of modeling the work you are asking of the reader. I’m interested in why you felt it was important to integrate yourself and your work into the book in this way?

KB: In many ways the style of including personal narrative in the book is a mimicry (I hope in a good, not derogatory way) of the sources I’m most drawn to, in particular Ann Cvetkovich’s Depression: Public Feeling, the work on critical disability by Robert McRuer, and the work on queer temporality found in José Muñoz and Jack Halberstams oevres,^[2] all of which were my early entrée into thinking about mood. These writers use personal experience as part of the tapestry of their scholarly offerings. I also felt that to call for the depathologization of “negative” emotions and for the accounting of the debt to those ransomed for my becoming, I had to share my moods and work through my own shame as part of the sharing. If I want political theology to have more moody and material weight, I need to put my mood and matter into my theology.

KH: You end the book with a chapter that engages with the subjects of white feminism and fragility and Black rage and breath and aspiration. The book ends with this paragraph:

 “If the mode of witness offered by political theology of and for the unredeemed does not seek to save white people—whiteness must take its poison pill. Nor does it request that we be frozen in shame. Knowing white people cannot be innocent, should not lead to more impotence. Nor does such witness portend to see no difference between forms of political and post-secular theology that wish to counter white supremacy and those whose purpose is to fortify it. It asks us to sit with pain, to be humiliated, to be undone by the horror of what white people, my people, have built. Instead of individual or denominational or disciplinary pardon, let us be ungrounded, let us be responsible for the active dismantling of the holds that have sheltered some while violating others for far too long.”

 How are you thinking about that chapter’s topics today? What would you like to see more — or less — of in public discourse?

KB: If I were writing the book now, I would never have written the other chapters without having dealt with the issues raised in the last chapter first. This is an excellent thing. By which I mean Blackness, Black death and Black life, and whiteness, can no longer be one part of a larger project, and the last part, the part that came after. It never should have been able to be that way, but of course it has been that way and continues to be that way for far too many of us. The demand of this moment, the demand of living in the wake of colonialism, and enslavement, and white supremacy, and anti-Blackness, and the genocide of indigenous peoples, and neoliberalism means no white academic should be able to write anything without confronting our whiteness and the whiteness of our disciplines. This is good, this is necessary, this will make our work better. And it means indeed that we must be ungrounded and we must actively dismantle. I think this chapter is relevant right now if mainly in its push to read the works of Black thinkers like Christina Sharpe, Fred Moten, Kelly Brown Douglas, and Ashon Crawley. I hope it is relevant in that fellow white people can embrace my call for us to do the work of dismantling, to embrace the vulnerability it takes to admit we have held onto false innocence for too long, and that we need to let what feels unholdable take hold. I hope this chapter is the most relevant and the most critiqued of the book, so that I can keep being ungrounded from my attachments to my own redemption.

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^[1] I really appreciated this definition of Crip Theory from your book: “Crip theory is a version of disability theory that rejects assimilationist politics and apologetics.”

^[2] José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics and Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity ; J. Jack Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives.

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Kali Handelman is a Contributing Editor for the Revealer. She is also a freelance academic editor and manager of program development and London regional director for the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research.

Karen Bray is an Assistant Professor of Religion, Philosophy, and Social Change, the Director of Interdisciplinary Programs, and the Director of the Honors Program at Wesleyan College in Macon, GA. In addition to authoring Grave Attending: a Political Theology for the Unredeemed, she is the co-editor of Religion, Emotion, Sensation: Affect Theories and Theologies also from Fordham University Press.

The post On Moodiness and Righteous Rage appeared first on The Revealer.

Ramy,

Season Two surpasses the revolutionary zeal of season one by tackling sexual issues long thought to be incompatible with Muslim values: pornography, masturbation, and homosexuality, among other spicy topics. As a scholar of sexuality in the Arab world and its Diaspora, I have spent years studying how people in the West perceive Arab immigrants to have problematic attitudes about gender and sexual tolerance. Ramy seemed perfectly poised to shine a positive light on diverse Muslims perspectives about gender and sexuality. While the show does much to dismantle stereotypes about Muslim sexual conservatism, it also sends an unfortunate message about Muslim acceptance and assimilation in the United States: conform to normative American ideals of sexual liberation and gender inclusivity, or risk lifelong unhappiness and exclusion from American society.

Ramy certainly brings fresh and sensitive eyes to questions that are of actual concern to Diaspora Muslims and Arabs: women’s empowerment, inter-racial relationships, the connection between sexual health and mental health, male privilege lingering even in progressive circles, transgender identity, men’s inability to talk about loneliness, and whether marriage is still a good idea. I am going to set aside discussions of where the show excels, and instead hone in on two important ways the show could have more thoughtfully captured the latest developments in Muslims’ thinking about sex and gender. The first is on the question of homosexuality, and whether Muslims who experience same-gender sexual desire must claim a gay identity. The second is the show’s occasional suggestions that Muslim immigrants have “backward” notions about gender and sexuality that must be reformed. The show’s recommendations for greater sexual and gender inclusivity are tips that all Americans would do well to follow, but their targeted nature raises concerns: Ramy’s call for Muslim sexual reform is being made at a time when, more than ever, young Muslims are pushing back against the portrait of Islamic sexual backwardness, calling it part and parcel of the campaign to demonize Muslims in the “War and Terror,” a campaign that borrows heavily from longstanding colonial and Orientalist tropes about Muslim sexual perversity.

Please be advised, the remainder of this article contains spoilers.

Ramy takes off with clear feminist messages, and its best moments belong to women, especially the masterful Hiam Abbas, playing Ramy’s mother Maysa. At first, she seems to be a one-dimensional FOB (fresh off the boat) immigrant, whose sole purpose is to butcher the English language. Her children mock and correct her when she mistranslates millennial speak and pop culture. But her poetic and sincere mistranslations are not mistakes: she is ultimately a witness to what is weird about America, what is not easily translatable. In an episode titled “They,” Maysa grapples with how to translate and make sense of gender-neutral pronouns when she meets a transgender woman for the first time.

By episode’s end, Maysa learns how to use pronouns correctly, but it is a rocky road: her daughter Dena, who is embarrassed by her backwardness, has to “re-educate” her. The drama starts when her mother, who drives Lyft part-time, stresses over a bad review. Dena helps her mother retrace her steps only to find out that her mom had made a stream of politically incorrect comments about passengers’ appearances. Dena, an at times harsh teacher, imparts valuable lessons in inclusivity to help her mom become culturally competent in liberal 2020 America. Maysa regurgitates what she’s learned in a comical but sincere way, querying Muslim guests in her home about their preferred pronouns.

Maysa’s “reeducation” process was prompted because she repeatedly misgendered her passenger Sophia (who is alternately referred to as “trans” and “non-binary”), asking if she was going to a “costume party.” Her daughter sensitizes her to a culture clash Maysa was oblivious to before this experience: the stereotypical habit of Arab mothers pointing out everything in their children that could use improvement, a practice that can generate offense when applied to strangers, like when Maysa tells her non-binary passenger how to look more “feminine.” Dena makes the offense intelligible for her mother by explaining how her mom’s daily negative comments about her attire ruin what would otherwise be a happy start to each day. “You have no filter, just like Trump” Dena tells her mom, who reacts with a horrified expression, vehemently rejecting the comparison.

During her struggle to understand gender variance, Maysa uses two languages that have ironically not allowed space for gender neutrality. This becomes evident when, seemingly out of nowhere, Maysa starts cursing in French when she gets tongue-tied trying to use “they/them” pronouns. She sardonically over pronounces the silent S in “ils” (plural “they” in French), to show the absurdity and impossibility of translating singular “they” into romance languages. This scene reminded me of a French quote from a textbook I use in my teaching that aims to explain transatlantic differences: “Asking a French person to behave in a gender-neutral way is like asking them not to breathe.” Meanwhile, all nouns, adjectives, and even some conjugations in Arabic are gendered. Very generally, Arab social norms encourage girls to be feminine and boys to be masculine (but we must also acknowledge the many ways Middle Eastern masculinity cultivates faculties of affection, sensitivity, and emotional expression that depart from Western norms, something the show glosses over). These linguistic and cultural heritages play a part in Maysa’s impulse to impose the male-female binary on non-binary people.

However heart-warming Maysa’s “successful” reeducation, there was an element that gave me pause. The “They” episode is set against a parallel intrigue: Maysa is studying intensely for her American citizenship test, and she wants more than anything to secure voting rights so she can vote that “fuckman” (as she calls him) out of office. Her immigration officer tells her to stay out of trouble until the government approves her application, which means she cannot afford any infractions. Her dilemma with her trans passenger starts here, as Lyft received a complaint that suspended Maysa’s driving privileges pending investigation. Though it turns out that Sophia did not make the complaint that landed Maysa in hot water, the episode focuses on her efforts to eliminate any suspicion of transphobia in order to secure her citizenship. In this way, Maysa must pass a test within her citizenship test: she must show herself to have progressive attitudes about gender, especially as a Muslim woman, in order to gain citizenship. The right-wing country where she is seeking to become a citizen actively undermines trans rights, and yet immigrants must prove their understanding of gender inclusivity in order to gain admission. I was additionally surprised the show made no mention of the fact that, in several Muslim-majority countries, trans identity is relatively more socially acceptable than gay identity, as recent cases in Egypt and Iran have shown.

This equation between civic fitness and tolerance of alternative sexualities and identities was not pulled from the ether: countries like Germany and the Netherlands have introduced citizenship “tests” and mandatory educational modules that make an equivalence between European values and sexual tolerance. Anti-discrimination activists seized on these tests, suspecting they were specifically designed to target Muslims so as to limit their immigration prospects because of an assumption that Muslims are more likely to oppose such things as same-sex marriage. More recently, Milo Yiannopoulos took credit for getting President Trump to propose a strict citizenship test, which thankfully never the saw the light of day, filled with questions about “gayfriendliness” that Muslims, it was assumed, would answer “incorrectly.” The irony of right-wing governments co-opting LGBT rights for xenophobic purposes has a name: sexual nationalism. The same politicians demanding that Muslims drop their sexual phobias are sexist themselves. A show as forward-thinking as Ramy should have known that assessing Muslims in this way has a problematic history.

This testing of gayfriendliness continues with the character of Naseem—Ramy’s sleazy bodybuilding uncle with thinning hair who owns a jewelry store. The portrait is poignant in its exploration of male loneliness, but potentially damaging for the message it sends. Naseem, who is deeply invested in his own manliness, frequents gyms and other testosterone-filled locales that foster male bonding. He has a regular gym buddy, a Latino male with a similar build. Weekly, they exchange sexual favors, under cover of steam in the sauna, without ever using the word “gay.” Naseem’s crisis starts when his buddy stops coming to the gym and Naseem must track him down, afraid for his own loneliness.

Naseem, and others like him, belong to a group that sociologists have called “MSMs,” that is, men who have sex with men, but who do not associate with the visible gay public or even identify as gay. A decade ago, there was a media panic, some would say a moral panic, about men of color on the “down low” who would have clandestine sex with men while acknowledging attraction to women in their public personas. Were these men hypocrites? Or sexual outliers who refused to embrace the homo-hetero binary? Unbeknownst to many, this binary has never been universally accepted around the world. It is a product of the late 19^th and early 20^th century period and its enthusiasm for finding and labelling “sexual deviants” in order to reinforce a growing psychological apparatus that aimed not just to categorize sexual preferences, but to create sexual personality “types” based on these preferences where none existed before. Historians of sexuality have explicitly contrasted this Western obsession with classification and sexual disclosure with eastern and Arab cultures that place a greater emphasis on the art of pleasure and eroticism, less invested in naming everything. This historical and cultural divide is the unacknowledged ghost that haunts this episode.

At every moment that Naseem wants to experience pleasure with another man, he faces the pressure to name what he is doing as “gay,” and he refuses to do it. He is unable to recognize himself in younger gay men who dance at hedonistic clubs, even though he makes a sincere but ultimately futile effort to find a solution for his loneliness in those spaces. He is uncomfortable there because his homosexuality is of an entirely different nature: he longs nostalgically for the homosocial environments he left in Cairo, the soldiers’ barracks and devoted male friendships that can sometimes be more loving than a marriage for those involved. He can’t recreate these relationships in the Western spaces designated for gayness. He wants his sexuality to exist within the margins, not outside of them.

Ramy makes it seem that there is an obvious choice for Naseem to make: drop the “façade” of straight-passing masculinity and confess, to himself and his gym buddy, his true sexual identity. The portrayal of Naseem is at first heartbreaking because it shows how lonely life can be for middle-aged immigrants who have not found companionship. If only Naseem would admit to his true nature, he wouldn’t be so sad, the show seems to suggest. Naseem makes a last attempt at gay romance, taking up his gym buddy’s invitation to come over for dinner: it starts well—they watch TV, eat pizza, and share laughs—but ends in violence at the very moment Naseem seems ready to move from loving friendship to gay couplehood. Distraught at his own reaction, Naseem eats his feelings, wolfing down a cake meant for two with the words “deepest sympathies” emblazoned in frosting, while crying on the sidewalk. It is one of the saddest sights I have seen on screen: sad not only because Naseem finds himself isolated and engaging in self-sabotage, but also because he seems to be looking for something he may never find in the United States.

The problem is, the moral of this storyline—that Naseem would be happy if he came out of the closet and embraced a gay identity—overstates the degree to which “out” gay culture is universally embraced, and never once considers how migrants and people of color could put pressure on normative, American definitions of what it is to be gay. What if Naseem were lonely, not because he is a gay man in a straight man’s body, but because he cannot find partners for the homosexual bonding that excites him the most? In Egypt, his sexuality existed comfortably within mainstream society: he was able to seek out same-sex encounters within the frame of ordinary friendships with other men, in a somewhat sex-segregated and homosocial society that enables those kinds of encounters, even if it doesn’t vocally endorse them. In the U.S., he must first admit to being “different,” and confess an “alternative” sexuality when deep down he feels his sexuality is anything but alternative.

Jane Ward, author of Not Gay: Sex between Straight White Men, makes the critical point that, for one to identify as gay, one has to not only practice gay sex, but also be invested in gay culture and public notions of gay love. The straight men she studies—in male orders like fraternities and the Navy—have definitely not signed up for gay identity, even if they repeatedly have sex with other men: as she shows, they are often nostalgic later in life, like Naseem, for a sexuality that evokes memories of sexually charged male bonding from their formative years. It is also the case in Ramy that most of the visible models for “out” homosexuality are white men and seen in public places like nightclubs: all homosexual contact between brown men happens behind closed doors in private.

The message imparted by this episode is dispiriting to those who practice this form of homosexuality and do not recognize themselves in normative, public gay identities. One scene especially stands to harm Muslim viewers who happen to be attracted to the same gender. In it, Naseem reconnects with an old friend, Yassir, who is now married and has “moved on” from the type of fraternal homosexuality he once practiced with Naseem. They share a tender moment catching up on the couch, acknowledging that they are in different places in their lives, and wishing each other happiness for the future. At one point, Yassir says that he had a “choice,” that it could have gone either way, and that he chose to be the way “Allah wants him to be.” There is a moment of hesitation as we see the embers of old passions in Yassir and Naseem’s eyes. Yassir moves toward Naseem, as if to embrace him, but this is a false move: Yassir was merely reaching for the Koran, and suggests that they pray, as if to put an end to this conversation and all its possibilities. Naseem looks at Yassir’s back, his eyes moist, knowing that he lost the friend he loved because his friend finds their love incompatible with a heterosexual way of life.

The desire for sexualized fraternal companionship is not the same thing as homosexual identity, and the conversation between Naseem and Yassir could have ended differently. By having the characters “pray the gay away” with a Koran, while not showing any alternative representations of Muslims who are attracted to the same gender, Ramy suggests that Islam and same-gender desires are fundamentally incompatible.

This is not what I expected from a show that aims to document the creative ways young Muslims in the Diaspora are taking charge of their religious practices. More than ever after the tragic Orlando Pulse nightclub shooting in 2016, Muslim-Americans have been speaking openly about homosexuality and Islam. Homophobia, especially among young Muslims, is slowly disappearing according to Pew research polls (with 52% of U.S. Muslims saying homosexuality should be accepted by society in 2017, up from 27% in 2011). Muslims across the country, at family dinners and in student groups, have been fleshing out the difference between homosexual acts and identities, and figuring out an honest Islamic stance that is not simply an imitation of Western attitudes. This has required investigating the history of sexual diversity in the Middle East—and it is a rich history—without capitulating to the pressures of globalization that aim to impose one form of homosexuality as the sole form: research into the Middle East’s forgotten history of sexual diversity started long before the Pulse shooting, but interest in it grew markedly afterward. There are now numerous researchers who do this work, countless young American Muslims who were at the Orlando vigils, and countless other Muslims who have no problem proclaiming their own queerness and reconciling it with their religion, since queerness is a way of being and not simply a sexual act.

As with Maysa and her exhortation that religious and sexual minorities have to get together to defeat Trump, new coalitions are forming. For all its innovations and attempts at inclusivity, Ramy failed to include queer Muslims, or even allow characters the opportunity to exist as queer and Muslim. What is a Muslim adolescent who is not willing to give up his family and his entire support system in order to come out of the closet supposed to think when the Muslim show that defines his generation tells him that he has to choose one or the other, that he can’t be both Muslim and queer? There are smart ways out of this dilemma that activists and scholars have articulated. Queer Muslims today are forming their own support groups, recommending inclusive mosques, refining their knowledge of the Koran and Hadith, and forming relationships with one another: any one of these trends would be worth exploring in a future episode of the Golden Globe and Peabody award winning Ramy, which has just been renewed for a third season after glowing reviews.

Ramy is still a breath of fresh air, a therapy, a relief, in the way it embodies the voice of a Muslim generation that contests the previous generation’s excessively rigid approach, using sound Islamic reasoning most of the time. Even as Ramy grapples with trans and gay issues, it succeeds in creating poignant portraits. In a show that for the most part rejects the idea that Muslims must embrace every part of the American way of life, some of the more subliminal messages, however, do underscore the point that Muslims must assimilate to Western sexual values. Ramy missed an opportunity to show the myriad ways that Muslims have and could queer mainstream American sexuality.

Do Arabs and Muslims have nothing to teach the West about love and sexuality, only lessons to learn? Though Muslim masculinities are routinely demonized as aggressive and intolerant, they contain possibilities of same-sex affection and emotional range that expand the rigid confines of normative U.S. masculinities. Homo-erotic strands in literature and song subsist in Middle Eastern heritage and were commonly used to mark cultural differences with the West only decades ago. If we fail to acknowledge this queer potential, we persist in the same amnesia of convenience that dictators and their Western allies are only too happy to encourage, as it disconnects the docile population from a complex and potentially subversive past of gender ambiguity and sexual dissidence. Ignoring what queer Muslims are doing in the present denies their agency in the community, silences the important religious questions they raise, and runs the risk of perpetuating the idea that the age of studied reinterpretation remains locked away in the Islamic past.

Mehammed Amadeus Mack is an Associate Professor at Smith College and the author of Sexagon: Muslims, France, and the Sexualization of National Culture (Fordham University Press, 2017).

The post Ramy Season Two: Let’s Talk about Sex, Habibi appeared first on The Revealer.

The vitriol directed at me has been amplified by my pursuit of public-facing intellectual work and my robust social media presence, two things many historians have pursued—and, often, have been encouraged by our mentors to pursue—with vigor over the last decade. My own experiences have resulted in three related sets of experiences as I navigate life as a public intellectual, manage relationships with colleagues, and produce scholarship. First, I am hated by a small but vocal group of Hindu nationalists, primarily based in India but also including a number of Indian Americans. This group attempts to marginalize my voice by subjecting me to a continuous stream of online harassment and threats. Second, as a result of these ad hominem attacks, many of my colleagues associate me with public controversy, and I must now contend with my reputation as a troublemaker. Third, the hate directed at me has changed my scholarship by constricting what I can and cannot say about premodern Indian history and to whom I might speak. In all three arenas, many people treat me poorly because I am a woman, and this gender bias has proved an intractable feature of my scholarly life over the past five years.

My story of being hated, known for being hated, and the pressures of dealing with that hate is unique in certain ways, as all stories must be, but layered sexism is something experienced to varying degrees by most female academics. Gendered hate harms not only the women targeted but the academy as a whole. If historians, religious studies scholars, and other humanities professors are going to share their expertise with the public in the social media age—and I think we should—then we need to talk about the hate that this earns some women and how it echoes through the sexism that continues to pervade the academy.

In addition to gender bias, we also need to talk about race and how many scholars of color are attacked and discriminated against in 2020. Women scholars of color often confront especially hateful opposition, in both the public sphere and academic circles, as they face racial and gender prejudices. I listen to the experiences of women professors of color. I try to put myself in their shoes while simultaneously acknowledging that I can never fully understand their position. I take active steps to contribute to the ongoing project of dismantling racial inequality on systemic and personal levels. I recognize that I need to do better.

For myself, I acknowledge that, no matter how virtuous my intentions, I operate as part of a racist world and benefit from white privilege, even while I face misogyny. This mix of privilege and disprivilege is one of many fraught factors that comprise my own experience of hate, which centers largely on gender. I share some of my experiences here as a way to explore one major problem in academic life, misogyny, with the goal of beginning to change the currently isolating experience of being a hated (female) historian.

Panoply of Hate
I received my first piece of hate mail in the fall of 2015 when I gave an interview about my book, Culture of Encounters: Sanskrit at the Mughal Court, to an English-medium Indian newspaper. This was one of my first attempts to speak to a non-academic audience. Shortly after the interview ran, I awoke to a tweet featuring a 1945 photo of Holocaust victims accompanied by the wish: “I hope another Hitler comes back and finishes off your people.” A web of alarming links bind together Nazism and Hindu nationalism, a political ideology that is separate from the broad-based religious tradition of Hinduism. Nazism served as an inspiration for early Hindu nationalists who saw Hitler’s treatment of the Jews as a useful model for how to treat India’s Muslim population. Even today, many Hindu nationalists remain unrepentant admirers of Adolf Hitler. That tweet in the fall of 2015 proved a harsh introduction to what can happen when women academics share their expertise with the public. A slew of vile tweets, Facebook messages, and emails soon followed, attacking me in gendered, racial, ethnic, and religious terms. At the time, I thought of that first wave of hate mail as an avalanche that could bury me alive. But compared to what I receive these days, I would describe those first messages as a trickle.

I currently receive hate mail, in descending order of frequency, via Twitter, Facebook, email, snail mail, and phone calls. Something comes in most days, and when I come out with new scholarship the hate mail can crescendo to hundreds of messages daily. Other people also receive malicious messages about me. I have had detractors email every colleague in my department to spread slanderous falsehoods. Both my graduate and undergraduate academic advisors have received rancorous notes about me. Groups have led coordinated attempts to pressure my university administration to retaliate against me and have called for my arrest upon arrival in India, where I travel for lectures and research. There is unflattering chatter about me most days on social media as well as appalling messages on WhatsApp, blog posts, and articles on Indian right-wing propaganda websites. At times, the assaults show clear marks of coordinated attacks that use paid troll accounts, bots, and right-wing networks to spread defaming claims on behalf of the BJP, India’s ruling party, and a dense web of Hindu nationalist organization.

I was never trained to address anything approaching the savage animosity that is now directed at me in my daily life. I have written elsewhere about the larger political and social contexts, much of its concerning Hindu nationalism, in which I am subjected to vitriol. Here I reflect on the following questions that have occupied me for the last five years: How should academics deal with extreme levels of hate? What are the repercussions of being infamous for being hated, both in the public sphere and in the academic world? And, how does facing such hostility change one’s pursuit of scholarly knowledge? With few resources to traverse these frightening waters, I have cultivated a host of methods, to varying degrees of success, so I can share my expertise with the public while also dealing with a barrage of hate.

Object of Hatred
In what is the most quintessentially academic way to handle any problem, I analyze the hate I receive. I am targeted with anti-Semitic and anti-Christian messages, Islamophobic attacks, racially charged language, slander, and more. But, in my case, having a female voice seems to overshadow all other features, and so misogynist attacks constitute the most frequent genre of hate mail directed my way. I am regularly called a bitch, whore, prostitute, and presstitute (an Indian English term that combines “press” and “prostitute”). Some people revel in imagining me in sexually compromising positions, usually with Indian emperors who have been dead for centuries (yes, it is weird). Others prefer to belittle my intelligence in gendered language. I am commonly reduced to “woman,” my proper title of Professor or Dr. elided. When I point out the error, it usually has the effect of doubling or tripling the misogynist rhetoric in response.

In making sense of this outpour of female-specific antipathy, I have found helpful Kate Manne’s insight in her book Down Girl that misogyny is not about hating all women but rather a set of attempts to control and punish outspoken women who challenge male dominance. My gender unlocks a range of deeply rooted, anti-woman attacks for those reacting to my audacity to speak-up. Such unrelenting attempts to compel female submission seek to tame me. Simultaneously, they work to dissuade other female academics from acting like me in the future. What woman wants to see vile comments about herself splashed all over social media? What woman wants her parents and children to see that?

Part of the cruelty of misogyny is that it dictates that women ought to feel embarrassed by being singled out for character smears. Writing this article is, among other things, an attempt to push back against this gendered way of feeling misogynist insults. It is the attackers who should feel shame, not the attacked.

Where possible, I use my own experiences to alert others about the dangers women face when we speak publicly. I regularly talk about hate mail in my academic lectures. In 2018, I was one of nine women interviewed in Amnesty India’s Campaign to address Online Violence Against Women. Disproportionate targeting of women is an appalling, well-documented aspect of social media, especially Twitter (here, here, and here). For the record, I have blocked over 4,000 Twitter accounts to date, but that still does not stem the tide of people insulting me with misogynistic language, threatening to rape me (and, occasionally, my daughters), and rooting for or promising to bring about my death. Twitter’s tolerance of misogyny has led to the deserved hashtag #ToxicTwitter and was one catalyst in the late 2019 experimental migration of many Indian Twitter users to Mastodon, a social media platform with a robust moderation system intolerant of hate speech.

There have been few upsides to being bombarded with hateful rhetoric, but one possible silver lining is that being a target of anti-Semitic and anti-Muslim sentiments have, collectively, enabled me to gain deeper empathy for marginalized communities in India and elsewhere. Before 2015, I had never faced anti-Semitism for the basic reason that I am not Jewish. In the last five years I have been repeatedly misidentified as a member of a marginalized community subjected to alarmingly high levels of hate crimes in America, and, in the process, I have been thrown into a role I never expected to play. I am only thought to be Jewish on social media, which is markedly different from the lived experiences of many Jews. But even this highly limited environment in which people draw from the deep well of anti-Semitism in order to attack me in the most vicious possible terms has given me more robust awareness of the struggles many communities constantly face.

My empathy for Muslim communities, both in India’s past and present, has been enhanced by my experiences with Islamophobia. Because I analyze Indo-Muslim history, many see me as fair game for Islamophobic attacks. The rhetoric is appalling, often crossing over into dehumanization. Perhaps the most frequent accusation against me in the Islamophobic department is, simply, that I sympathize with Muslims. My bigoted detractors condemn compassion for any Muslim, but, as Professor Elya Jun Zhang recently wrote in a discussion of teaching premodern China, historical empathy is “one of the most important competencies our discipline can impart” that can serve “to bridge the gap between then and now.” I agree, and so, far beyond sympathy, I actively attempt to relate to Muslim communities, among other groups, in Indian history. I try to educate myself and others about the stomach-churning stream of anti-Muslim hate directed at modern-day Muslims, including Indian Muslims who comprise about 14% of India’s population.

I also extend empathy to the most unlikely candidates in this story: the haters. I view this, too, as an extension of historical empathy that, in this case, serves to diffuse my understandable anger and lends me insight into some key contours of the modern politics of Indian history. Many of my attackers believe that I am twisting their history, stripping away virtuous Hindu achievements and whitewashing demonic Muslim invaders. This perverse storyline of the Indian past (and my treatment thereof) is factually wrong, but many people genuinely believe it.

Two further facets make this modern emotional investment in a mythical, Hindu majoritarian-defined past something with which I can empathize. First, the West has a dark history of deliberately misrepresenting Indian history in order to promote the racist underpinnings of British colonialism. Given this, I can understand why some might be skeptical of a European-descent scholar who advances historical arguments that cut against the popular beliefs of many Indians. Two, few to none of my haters have anything approaching my level of academic training in South Asian history and in multiple premodern Indian languages. Among other things, this means that those who feel I am skewing their history lack the basic skills required to check my work or to formulate compelling counter arguments. The inability to engage on academic grounds is a major reason that political opposition to my scholarship takes the form of hate-filled attacks. Beyond the explanatory value of empathy, it is important to see the larger social inequalities and unequal access to education that, frustratingly, characterize our world.

Infamy Among Colleagues
Most of my colleagues—in the field of South Asian history and in South Asian studies more broadly—are aware that I face hate in the public sphere. When I meet colleagues for the first time, more often than not, they have already heard my name in connection with my reputation in this regard. Sometimes, this leads to good things. I probably receive more invitations to give lectures than I would otherwise. Many graduate students, especially young women, seem to find my experiences useful to reflect upon in the contexts of formulating their own career goals. But there are serious professional risks to my infamy in a male-dominated academic world that operates on personal connections and opinions.

Some of my well-meaning colleagues suggest that I and other targeted women should end the hate by going silent in the public arena. In fact, when I shared a draft of this article with colleagues, one responded by advising me to renounce social media to avoid further unpleasantness. Attacked women could, of course, retreat into the ivory tower by deleting our social media accounts, ceasing to write for popular publications, and only speaking to fellow scholars through paywalled academic articles. Taking these actions would reduce the venom significantly, or at least prevent me and other women from seeing much of it. But if we were to step back from the public sphere, we would do so at enormous cost to both ourselves and to the discipline of history.

Many historians use social media, especially Twitter, to speak to each other and wider audiences. Princeton professor Kevin Kruse, the most famous historian on social media, explained in a 2019 interview why he is active on Twitter: “Historians have a special expertise, a special knowledge about our past. And there are a lot of mistruths being spun about that in both the popular media and on social media. We have a duty to step in and correct those.” Kruse went on to say that he generally limits his fact-checking tweets to his areas of expertise, which is fine, because “there are lots of other historians on Twitter who are doing exactly what I am doing.” Kruse gave this interview at the annual meeting of the American Historian Association, the major U.S.-based professional organization in the discipline, which itself signals the importance of being on Twitter. The AHA regularly publishes Twitter handles in the bylines of articles in Perspectives on History, a monthly magazine sent to all AHA members. At its annual conference, the AHA offers to print four pieces of information on your badge: name, affiliation, pronouns, and Twitter handle. Asking women who face online harassment to walk away from Twitter is tantamount to asking us to forgo what has become, like it or not, an important medium in our discipline.

In the suggestion, no matter how well intentioned, that women ought to step back from social media when they are attacked, sexism is at work. The logic dictates that when a woman acts in a way that discomforts other people, she must change her behavior by going mute. As Kate Manne put it in Down Girl: “Silence is golden for the men who smother and intimidate women into not talking, or have them change their tune to maintain harmony. Silence isolates his victims; and it enables misogyny.” The result of a female retreat from social media would be to cede much public-facing history and its associated professional visibility to men, especially white men, who do not face similar threats and so have no reason to step back.

It is worth emphasizing that, in our society, men cannot be attacked in the same way as women. When you call a woman a slut, it carries a great amount of cultural baggage that evaporates when you apply the same term to a man. When you threaten to throw acid on a woman’s face (a threat I have faced), it is gendered; it is not similar to threaten a man using the same language. Unless we are resigned to declaring popular discussions about history and religion, once again, an old boys’ club, we must confront public hate against women as a problem impacting these disciplines as a whole.

Many of my male colleagues treat misogynist hate as a women’s problem, by which I do not mean a problem that disproportionately impacts women (which is true) but rather a problem about which only women need care (which is false). When I bring up my own tribulations on this score in conversation, some of my male colleagues look embarrassed, stare at their shoes, or squirm. It is as if I have just shared with them that I recently began my period, had a miscarriage, awoke drenched in perimenopausal night sweats, or some other comparable piece of female-specific information about which women whisper amongst ourselves as the need arises but is decidedly unwelcome in mixed company. What is rightly considered a field-wide issue—namely ferocious public pushback against female scholars—is reduced to being impolite talk, fit for women’s ears only.

Other colleagues blame me for inviting hate. They say I am too abrasive, too humorless, too self-righteous, or otherwise unfeminine in descriptions that, more than anything else, signal that many men still claim the right to dictate how a woman ought to speak. Pointing out the gendered, misogynist nature of such attacks risks igniting male resentment and anger. More than a few of my colleagues are willing to go to great lengths to deny the obvious: sexism persists in the academy, and women, especially outspoken ones, pay the price.

When there is a flare-up and I suddenly face an onslaught of public vitriol and hate, most of my colleagues remain silent. Many men and quite a few women fall into this category. Some watch the attacks online (many colleagues follow me on social media), but few publicly say anything about the waves of misogyny, bigotry, and ad hominem insults that crash into me. Perhaps many of my colleagues, men and women, forget that not speaking is also a form of communication. When you mutely watch a woman being relentlessly attacked with hate speech, your silence allows misogyny to do its dirty work of detaching and gagging female voices. I wonder sometimes if my quiet colleagues realize this, or if leaving the loud-mouthed woman out to dry is so deeply ingrained in our society that they do not even see their own complicity in isolating a woman as a means to discipline her into more demure behavior.

When I describe to my colleagues the hate that I face, some express sympathy. They tell me how horrible it is, or how sorry they feel for me. Some colleagues urge me to contact the police about the death threats, a perhaps well-intentioned show of interest in my physical safety that, at the same time, absolves them of any responsibility of further action. What is needed, however, is for scholars to transform their emotions of pity into an attempt to imagine walking in my shoes and, then, to analyze and discuss this horrifying, untenable situation that threatens key humanities disciplines. Humanities scholars are trained to extend empathy to people radically different from themselves (for historians, this is part of historical method), and so it is quite possible for my colleagues of all genders to exert energy imagining what it would be like to face unceasing misogynist vitriol. It is both callous and irresponsible to breezily dismiss blowback as the price that some women must pay. Instead, historians ought to talk, frankly and frequently, about how scholars experience attempts to present history to the public differently based on their gender, and then work to transform our misogynistic world.

Scholarly Risks
Being a target of contempt has changed my scholarship, sometimes in good ways. I find myself well positioned to write about a range of issues beyond premodern Indian history, including censorship, threats to academic freedom, sexism and misogyny, and current Indian politics. I also find that my reputation secures a relatively wide readership, both within and beyond the academy. I have many fans within this broad audience from whom I receive notes of encouragement and thanks. If only it was all so rosy.

Being subjected to ceaseless hate has also constricted aspects of my scholarship, both in public speaking and in print. This is painful for me to admit because this sort of influence—the ability of hate to shut down reasoned academic discourse—is, above all else, what I wish to prevent. To date, I have had one public lecture cancelled (in Hyderabad in 2018) because the organizers felt that a talk on premodern Indian history would be unsafe, for them and me.

Because people threaten me with violence, I am sometimes accompanied by armed security when I give public lectures about Indian history. When I spoke in New York City in April 2018, the hate mail had crossed into death threats and so an armed security officer stood outside of the room while I spoke about a twelfth-century Sanskrit text. In Chennai in January 2019, following an outburst by a visibly upset man regarding my scholarship on a seventeenth-century Indian king, I was again provided with an armed guard outside the lecture hall. The most extensive protection occurred in August of 2018 in Delhi. The venue provided airport-style security with a metal detector to screen those entering the auditorium and had plain clothed policemen scattered throughout the hall, “just in case,” I was told. A few days later there was an unsuccessful assassination attempt on a humanities graduate student in Delhi not far from where I had lectured.

There are practical questions about what risks are acceptable in order to speak about Indian history. Scholars must consider employment stability and the physical safety of themselves and their families. There is also the increasing risk of legal challenges within India, where Hindu nationalists seek to limit the circulation of scholarship. Wendy Doniger is a prime example; she faced a lawsuit for years over her book The Hindus: An Alternative History, which was dropped when her publisher, Penguin, agreed to withdraw the book from the Indian market and pulp all remaining copies. For women especially, the threat of sexual violence is also present. Cynthia Mahmood has written about her experience being gang raped in retaliation for pursuing a controversial subject while conducting research in northern India in 1992.

I remain fuzzy about my own acceptable level of risk, and the limits are bound to be different for everyone. But I wonder if, by virtue of being a public intellectual, I have already ceded the ability to determine what chances I am willing to take. After all, I also exist outside of lecture halls and the classroom, and I am sometimes recognized in public. In 2018, I had a few young women approach me in Delhi and ask for a selfie. At the time, I viewed the incident as contingent on being in India, where I stand out because I am white. But then, in August of 2019, I spent a week hiking with my family in Acadia National Park in Maine. Acadia is so remote that I did not have cell phone service much of the time, but that did not prevent a gentleman from approaching me to ask if I was, indeed, Audrey Truschke. This time, too, it was someone who supported my work. While appreciative, I could not help but wonder: What if it had been a foe?

Sometimes I know that something I plan to say or publish will bring antagonists out of the woodwork. More often than not, I proceed anyway, in pursuit of public-facing history and with a desire to live an ethical life in which I use my platform and privilege to advance values in which I believe, such as human rights and widespread knowledge for all. But, other times, I too cave, and one such instance involves my second book, a biography of the Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb Alamgir who died in 1707. I knew I was stepping into hot water when I decided to write about Aurangzeb, a historical Indian Muslim many love to hate. Aurangzeb serves as a dog whistle for Hindu nationalists who invoke him to rile up anti-Muslim sentiments and violence. I have detailed elsewhere how, acting on legal advice, I lightly censored the Indian edition of Aurangzeb in order to comply with Indian laws that restrict freedom of expression. I also cut all named acknowledgments and the dedication from the Indian edition out of a fear of reprisals and violence.

I chose not to name colleagues or family in the Indian edition of Aurangzeb because I thought that doing so might make those individuals targets of hate. This is a legitimate concern. In 2003 and 2004, vigilantes used the acknowledgements of Professor James Laine’s book Shivaji as a roadmap for people and institutions to attack. They literally blackened the face of one Sanskrit scholar whom Laine thanked in his book. A mob vandalized the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, one of Laine’s archives for the book and one of India’s great manuscript repositories. When I wrote Aurangzeb, I wanted to avoid repeating the targeting of helpful people and institutions that characterized the Laine affair. And, so, I scrubbed any trace of my support networks from the Indian edition of Aurangzeb.

I was never happy to erase my academic and personal contexts from Aurangzeb, but I recently experienced renewed outrage about the circumstances that made this a reasonable decision when I read Professor Emily Callaci’s article “On Acknowledgements.” In the piece, Callaci calls attention to how acknowledgements chronicle the exclusions and hierarchies that keep certain types of people out of the discipline of history. I agree with her arguments. But one line hit me in the gut in a way I do not think she intended: “Writing righteous, comradely acknowledgments is a great thing to do, but it also costs nothing.” I take Callaci at her word that this is true in her field of modern African history and probably in most fields. But acknowledgments are not always risk free for scholars of South Asia. Have I spent so long in a field crisscrossed by odious politics and looming violence that I have forgotten the normalcy enjoyed by my colleagues in adjacent fields, who can write acknowledgements in their books without thinking about who might be assaulted?

Reflecting anew on my decision to omit named acknowledgements and the dedication from the Indian edition of Aurangzeb, I was struck by how the harsh realities of my scholarly-cum-political world render isolation an outcome at multiple junctures. It is not reasonable, healthy, or sustainable to expect women to stand alone as they are bombarded by hate and threats in the course of sharing their expertise with the public.

Can we find a better, more supportive way for female scholars? I think we can, but it requires academics, especially men, to call out misogyny in the public sphere, in academic circles and in themselves. The three are connected since the gendered hate that other women and I face publicly is rooted in the desire to control outspoken women and maintain male dominance, which underlay our society, including academic contexts. Admitting the pervasiveness of anti-woman sentiments—and one’s own complicity in a sexist society—is the first step down the long road of dismantling misogyny, both in public and scholarly circles.

Audrey Truschke is Associate Professor of South Asian History at Rutgers University in Newark, NJ. She tweets at @audreytruschke. (For comments on earlier drafts of this essay, she would like to thank Dick Eaton, Simran Jeet Singh, Ananya Vajpeyi, and Taymiya Zaman.)

The post Hate Male appeared first on The Revealer.

Jehan Numa Palace Hotel in India

The key to personal wealth lies in India’s ancient texts. That is the message in bestselling author Devdutt Pattanaik’s latest book How to Become Rich: 12 Lessons I Learnt from Vedic and Puranic Stories. Amidst advice about sound accounting practices and saving for retirement, the author, a self-styled mythologist, outlines how Hindu concepts can help people accumulate tremendous riches.

Many Hindu gurus have framed financial success as a spiritual endeavor – take Swami Parthasarathy, Dayananda Saraswati, and Dandapani for example. They are part of a growing trend of religious leaders assuring their adherents – many of whom are among India’s high-powered executives and entrepreneurs – that their pursuit of material wealth does not diminish their piety. Instead, these leaders argue that pursuit for wealth is Hindu at its core. Pattanaik is a slightly different kind of guru. He is no saffron-robed ascetic initiated into a Hindu order, but a former healthcare professional who now makes a living as a self-help author. He does not live in an ashram but in a high-rise Mumbai apartment surrounded by books and art. And unlike these other gurus, Pattanaik eschews words like “spirituality” and even “Hinduism.” As a result, his popularity extends far beyond religious circles. Yet it is Hindu texts to which he turns for financial wisdom.

Pattanaik has written dozens of books, hundreds of newspaper columns, given countless interviews, and delivered multiple TED Talks. His work is particularly popular among Indian business professionals, both in India and abroad. From 2008-2013 he was the “Chief Belief Officer” of the Future Group, one of India’s largest retailers. While there, he infused management practices with an Indian ethos drawn from Hindu texts and practices. In 2013, he authored Business Sutra: A Very Indian Approach to Management. In these works, he presents the constitutive components of late capitalism – the free market, reliance on debt, the financialization of the economy, and an ethos of individual responsibility – as timeless, natural, and yes, even sacred.

Pattanaik’s starting point is that Hindu gods and goddesses are wealthy and they want believers to be wealthy too. The goddess Lakshmi is wealth personified. According to Pattanaik, “to become rich is to seek Lakshmi in our lives.” It is therefore good to have material wealth and to seek more of it. The god Vishnu shows us how. Unlike the god Indra who thought he had a monopoly on human devotion and took it for granted, Vishnu bestows lavish blessings upon his devotees who come back again and again, returning far more wealth to him than they had been given. Like Vishnu, Pattanaik writes, we ought to be generous with our wealth and talents, investing each in the economic marketplace by becoming entrepreneurs, knowledge workers, and stockholders. If we do, returns are inevitable.

For Pattanaik, the core of Hinduism is the act of investment in the hope of a return. In the yagna – one of the earliest rituals found in the Vedas – a devotee places an object into a ritual fire that transforms and carries the object to one or more divine beings who provide something in return. In today’s business parlance, Pattanaik says the ritual fire is the marketplace; the object placed into the fire is the investment; and the object received in return is the ROI (return on investment). This is “the basic principle of economics, or artha-shastra,” he writes. If you think you can be free of yagna, think again because all are born into debt – debt to ancestors, the divine, and nature, each of which gives us life and nurtures us. Our need for Lakshmi – money – begins with our first breath. Pattanaik believes the ultimate goal is to re-invest our money in the marketplace in equity or debt funds so that our money makes money with little effort on our part. In that way, we become like Shakambari, goddess of fruits, seeds, and trees who “feeds herself by feeding others.”

While others have quibbled with Pattanaik’s interpretation of Hindu texts, that is not my aim. Instead, I want to understand why this message is so appealing to people in today’s economic climate. Despite appearances, there is more to this than money. Pattanaik’s message promises Hindus that they can achieve success in a neoliberal capitalist system. But perhaps even more importantly, he promises that they need not become Western to do so. In order to make this claim, Pattanaik pushes back against longstanding stereotypes of Hinduism. His is a message of hope wrapped in cultural pride.

Paths to Prosperity in Uncertain Times
Pattanaik is hardly the first person to suggest that the pursuit of wealth is compatible with religion. For the past several decades, prominent Christian leaders have promoted the “prosperity gospel.” As Joel Osteen once put it in an interview with Oprah: God doesn’t want you to be poor. Instead, “Jesus died that we might live an abundant life.” Prosperity gospel pastors preach that God provides the faithful with abundance—homes, cars, health, and luxury goods. Ministers encourage congregants to demonstrate their faith through giving to God (that is, to the church and its leaders). In return, God will reward them. Want proof? Look at the wealthy pastor, his beautiful home, and pictures from his recent vacation on a private island. The minister knows the prosperity gospel is the truth because it’s in the scriptures and it has happened to him (or her). Sowing and reaping – investing and receiving a return – are sacralized.

There are clear parallels between the prosperity gospel and Pattanaik’s message. Both uphold personal wealth as a sacred aim and promise a path to it via scripture. They sanctify conceptions of debt, profit, and investment. They repudiate accusations from within their respective religious folds that what they are doing is plain materialism. Yet beyond that, there are different assumptions underlying the Hindu texts to which Pattanaik refers than those of biblical texts. In the Puranas, there is not one God who wills you to have certain things. Instead, there are many deities whose engagement in the world is characterized by lila – play. There is no devil or evil. There are simply opposing forces – neither of which is wholly good or wholly bad. Actions have consequences and you can learn about those consequences by consuming the gods’ stories. The tone is practical rather than preachy.

Pattanik’s work, then, outlines a more straightforward approach to wealth than the prosperity gospel’s moralizing admonishment to have greater faith. The means to achieving wealth lies not in having faith in a God who wants you to be wealthy. It lies in seeking God herself. There is no devil to stop you from finding her. You stop yourself from finding her by either not asking for her, or by trying to grab and hoard her rather than helping her to circulate in the cycle of free exchange between investor and investee, company and consumer for which she was intended.

The prosperity gospel, according to Duke Divinity School professor Kate Bowler, gives people hope in uncertain times by providing overwhelming optimism that they can overcome every obstacle that comes their way. Pattanaik’s work does this too. The answer to the question “How do I become rich?” is clear. It is all there waiting for you. You just need to see the truth in the Vedas and Puranas and wealth will be accessible. As economic inequality continues to rise in India as it does the world over, this is a powerful promise indeed.

Hindu Capitalism
Pattanaik’s message addresses another profound need that Christian versions of the prosperity gospel do not. He overturns Western stereotypes of Hinduism with roots both deep and wide: that Hinduism is inimical to capitalism and therefore primitive. In the early twentieth century, Max Weber famously blamed Hinduism for capitalism’s late arrival in India, steeped as he saw it in fatalism and other-worldly asceticism. His sentiment echoed British colonialist policies that sought to reform Indian merchants so they might break free from caste and kinship ties and pursue profit for profit’s sake. Even two decades after India’s independence in 1947, Indian economists disparagingly described the nation’s slow economic growth as a “Hindu rate of growth.”

Devdutt Pattanaik

Against such naïve views, Pattanaik provides a model of Hindu scriptures that encourages the acquisition of wealth and a system of capitalist exchange, lauding the accumulation of profit for the purpose of reinvestment. When challenged by Hindus who argue that one ought not be so “money-minded,” he asks: “Why are we driving Lakshmi out of India instead of inviting her lovingly into our lives?” To not seek wealth, he argues, is to ignore what Hindu scriptures actually say. It is in fact to drive the goddess away – a most inauspicious act.

Many others share this sentiment. India’s upper-middle-class Hindus pushed for the government to open India’s economic borders in the 1980s, making trade and travel with the rest of the world more possible and attractive. Upon India’s wholesale adoption of neoliberal economic policies in 1991, India was touted as the next economic superpower. Its citizens are major players in, and benefactors of, this new form of global capitalism. They relish the opportunity to buy iPhones and Gap jeans, and to do their grocery shopping at international supermarket chains. They make up the workforce of IT employees, managers, and CEOs of multinational corporations all over the world. Hindus seem to be very good capitalists indeed.

Neoliberalism and Neocolonialism
The push for greater capitalist wealth has changed Indian society, and not always in positive ways. My friends in the IT industry in Bangalore, Kolkata, and Mumbai speak of the harsh culture of multinational corporations for which they work. Those corporations have a reputation for being rigid, cutthroat, encouraging bragging about one’s achievements (“selling oneself” as it is typically put), not giving any leeway for family situations, and mandating the use of English in all business interactions. They report that a Western set of cultural values is replacing an Indian set, even while many find it difficult to pinpoint what constitutes that set of Indian values. By their account, they live and work in a world that is not their own. And it is a world that threatens to erase their culture and crush their souls.

Yet this is the kind of work that is most lauded among young professionals in India. The top recruiters for Indian MBA students are multinational investment banks and management consultants who offer jobs abroad and in U.S. dollar salaries that can be up to ten times more than other salaries offered to students at the same institutions. Business schools purposefully train incoming students to acquire these jobs, even as some academics within them fully acknowledge and critique the neocolonialism of this situation. Most business schools do not offer instruction in a language other than English, and they promote the notion that working for first-world employers is more prestigious than third-world employers, including Indian ones.

It is this combination of the pressures and constrictions of the neoliberal economy and the postcolonial context that produces the desire to create (or, as it is often framed, “recover”) a Hindu ethos that can inform the way Indians engage in corporate life. Pattanaik’s work does just that. He assures readers that they can be successful not by becoming Western, but by becoming more like themselves – by embracing their Hindu culture.

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 A few years ago, I asked Pattanaik to meet with me so that I could learn more about his Business Sutra, and specifically the yagna model he proposed in it. How to Become Rich had not yet been published, but he was already promoting similar ideas that would appear in that book. He graciously accepted my request and conveyed to me that everything was really quite simple. “Hinduism is based on return on investment. Karma. Every action has a reaction. So all your actions – you are trying to do actions which will give you a good return on investment.” He demurred: Why couldn’t people just see that?

“The problem is that Hindus are embarrassed by Hinduism,” he explained. He spoke of the damaging legacy of India’s colonial history. Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the European colonizers who ruled India saw their own religion – Christianity – as the highest form of religion and equated it with rationality. In so far as other religions differed, they were deemed “irrational.” They deemed Hindu practices superstitious, idolatrous, sexist, and hierarchical. Some Hindus imbibed these critiques, reforming Hinduism so that it took on remarkably Christian features, from embracing monotheism to establishing weekly worship services. As a result, Pattanaik says, Hindus have only been exposed to two forms of Hinduism. One is “mysoginist” and “caste-ist” that “nobody wants to be associated with,” and one is a form of spiritual universalism that Westerners love but that does not reflect what Hinduism really is, in its particularities. The latter, he says, does not connect people to the stories their mothers told them when they were children. There is this disconnect, then, between what is absorbed in culture and what is respected in high society.

Pattanaik resolves this tension by mining these stories for wisdom applicable to peoples’ daily lives. He helps fellow Hindus rejoice in these stories and learn from them rather than being embarrassed by them. The sentiment of our conversation was simple: ‘This is what our scriptures say – invest and expect a return. That’s economy, that’s the natural state of things. Embrace it because it will make you successful in life. Stop being embarrassed because you think religion shouldn’t talk about such things.’

Resistance Repackaged
In an attempt to push back against the neocolonialism that undergirds Indian economics, one might imagine a simultaneous attempt to resist the neoliberal project itself – a project that makes the generation of wealth the highest human aim, and an individual’s ability to contribute to that wealth the source of their value. That is not what we find in How to Become Rich. Instead, Pattanaik writes that there is nothing novel about the kind of uncertainties we face in our work lives today. Risk is eternal. The solution is to engage fully in the marketplace as entrepreneurs, laborers, and consumers, and to employ the tools the marketplace offers to mitigate risk by having home insurance, savings accounts, and wills.

Yet in our conversation, Pattanaik expressed a great deal of concern about the kinds of risks involved in business life today. He said he wants businesspeople to ask themselves: “What does the business do to you as a person? Because the business doesn’t need you. And one day the business will kick you out because it will survive and you will be out of the market. What does it do to you as a person? You spend your entire life 9-5 working weird hours, youth gone, working in these offices with laptops. What does it do to you?” He said he has seen a number of giant business moguls up close and they are “hungry animals.” “They are just hungry, hungry because they’ve been told ‘be hungry, be foolish.’ We have valorized stupidity. Its like you keep running, running in a marathon and like ‘wow’ everybody is cheering you, but… which direction are you going?”

Pattanaik’s warning about the toll late capitalism takes on individual workers did not make it into his book. In How to Become Rich, he doesn’t ask what your work does to you. He doesn’t ask what your wealth does to you. He doesn’t remind you of your insignificance in a system that ultimately does not care about the people that make it work. Why not? Probably because those sentiments don’t sell nearly as well as the promise that anyone with a proper understanding of ancient Hindu texts can be rich. Pattanaik knows his message must be packaged and commoditized if it is to find wide circulation in our neoliberal world. So in this version of the message, Pattanaik uses the Vedas and the Puranas to support this particularly unforgiving form of capitalism, much like the Bible was once used to justify the capitalism that subjugated India and her peoples to the exploitations of European imperialism. This ironic state of affairs reflects the double-bind of the economic power structures we inhabit. The necessity of having to live within those structures incentivizes individuals to try to find success within them rather than thinking beyond them. And whatever ideas one has about them must be made legible within those structures. India’s new business gurus provide paths to success in neoliberal India on its terms.

Deonnie Moodie is an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Oklahoma and a Sacred Writes/Revealer Writing Fellow. She is the author of The Making of a Modern Temple and a Hindu City: Kālīghāṭ and Kolkata (Oxford University Press, 2018). She is currently writing a book about the recent emergence of Hindu ideologies in Indian business schools and corporations.

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This article was made possible in part with support from Sacred Writes, a Henry Luce Foundation-funded project hosted by Northeastern University that promotes public scholarship on religion.

The post A Hindu Guide to Wealth: Finding Success in Neoliberal India appeared first on The Revealer.

Most of the country’s earliest academic institutions were deeply connected to Christian denominations. Harvard was founded in 1636 to educate ministers. The Presbyterian Synod established Princeton with a similar mission to train future clergy. Three Quaker colleges – Haverford (1833), Guilford (1837), and Earlham (1847) – were founded by an Evangelical movement of Friends called the Gurneyite. Clergy at these institutions served as models for ministry and as representative voices for their denomination.

As the religious landscape of United States started to shift, especially by the middle decades of the twentieth century, so did the role of clergy on college campuses. “Campus ministries” or “Offices of Religious Life,” as they came to be called, worked to support the religious needs of students from diverse religious and ethnic backgrounds. Today, some schools recruit and pay religious leaders to assist in the spiritual life of students, and some also receive funding from local and national organizations to employ staff from diverse religious traditions. The once traditional Protestant-oriented campus ministry office has changed at many institutions to include staff who provide outreach to Muslim students, classes in Buddhist meditation, and Hillel International-funded employees who create opportunities for Jewish students. As the way students engage with religion shifts, so are the religious leaders who are faced with the challenge of supporting college students’ religious needs.

Providing care in a crisis
This year, religious leaders who work in higher education faced their biggest challenge yet: supporting students who were no longer on campus. According to a study by Wisdo, college students experienced “an unprecedented spike in depression, anxiety and loneliness” during the first months of the pandemic. It is not difficult to imagine why students had a challenging time. Instead of going on spring break, many students faced the upheaval of moving off campus with limited notice and, in turn, leaving behind the support structures that helped them thrive. Even for students who already lived off campus, this meant no library where they could study, taking classes that were not designed to be online, and having no in-person interaction with their peers. And these stressors occurred amidst the spread of a highly contagious virus. Campus religious leaders had to determine quickly how they were going to support students through grief and anxiety and provide them with a sense of community.

Spirituality is just a click away
When the University of Chicago announced that students would move off campus and courses would take place online, the first thing Jigna Shah, the university’s Assistant Dean of the Rockefeller Chapel and the Director of Spiritual Life, did was review the school’s Spiritual Life website to ensure visibility of online programming and services. During the school year most of their programming took place in the basement of one of the student centers. Now, everything would be equally accessible by the click of a button. Shah and her team changed the categories on their campus page to prioritize resources for students who were experiencing difficulties in the transition to remote learning. Students who wished to speak with a specific campus minister could now go to a Google Calendar on the website to find a Zoom link and the office hours of the campus minister of their choice.

With physical space no longer available, the way students and staff engaged with one another also had to change. Shah and her team recognized the importance of consistency in online programming. Every weekday, students could join a twenty minute still meditation. Shah worked with her colleagues to set up regular Coffee and Chai Chats where students could bring their beverage of choice to a regular virtual check-in with Spiritual Life staff via Zoom. But even with the consistent programming, students still wanted a calm place to study. During the school year, students would hang out in the public area of the Spiritual Life office and do their homework. To continue this service, Shah and her team created a “Virtual Living Room” to give students the feeling of informal, un-programmed space. Students could keep the Zoom window open and feel like they are studying alongside another person, even from their childhood bedroom.

Do you feel comfortable talking where you are?
The sudden transition to online classes caused an increase in anxiety and depression for many students, and with telemedicine laws limiting access some students have to mental health services, the need to support students was greater than ever. Tammy Liddell, Director of Campus Ministry at Seattle University, has a Masters degree in Counseling from Boston College, but she has always been clear about the difference between providing counseling and pastoral care. Typically, Liddell engages one-on-one with students in her office and recognizes the unique role campus ministry plays at universities. “Students start telling us what’s going on in their lives and why they need to talk to someone who isn’t a peer. That’s what we are: a non-peer conversation partner.” The role of a conversation partner often takes the form of helping students with transitional issues like adjusting to roommates, helping with family problems, and talking about relationships. Campus Ministry staff at Seattle University and other institutions work closely with the school’s counseling center to make sure students get the care and accommodations they need.

Being at home provides new challenges to the conversation partner model of pastoral care. Roommate disagreements are a common problem on college campuses, but what happens when your roommates are also your parents? Confidentiality is also non-existent for many who are living in homes with other people. Liddell and her staff start their Zoom calls with “Do you feel comfortable talking where you are? Does it feel private enough to you?” Normalizing the limits of confidentiality helps students decide if they feel safe having personal conversations about their lives.

Reminding students they are loved
Reverend Jamie Lynn Haskins, the Chaplain for Spiritual Life at the University of Richmond, wears several hats on campus, as many college chaplains do. She’s the faculty advisor to the LGBTQ student group and works closely with students who describe themselves as “spiritual but not religious.” With COVID-19 prompting new needs for students, Haskins worked with the other chaplains to ensure students would have the support they need to grow spiritually and succeed academically during the semester. “I have seen students who never walked through my doors reaching out to me about how do I meditate, or I’m thinking about trying yoga, or do you know anything about Buddhism?” For some students, however, the time at home brought up challenges that they thought they had left behind. Haskins’s schedule now consists of multiple mini-meetings to touch base with students. The school’s counseling center continues to be a resource for students who need more mental health care, but for many students the consistency of regularly checking in with a chaplain has provided relief.

When asked what spiritual support for LGBTQ students looks like during the pandemic, Haskins replied, “College is this time of radical discovery. And so you’ve got freshmen who are just dipping their toes into like, ‘Oh, my God, I’m queer. And no one knows, but I’m going to be out here at the University of Richmond because I don’t know anyone.’ And they did that for like seven months. And now they’re just super back in the closet.” She also added, “And you’ve got these seniors who have done four years of just beautiful work–like they’re so out. And they’ve claimed all their spaces and they are there. But now they’re having to go home and not always, but often that work is not supported at home, particularly if it’s fraught…. And so I’ve just tried to be an incredibly loud voice. I mean, I could never overpower a mom who won’t use [correct] pronouns or a dad who won’t believe you’re coming out. But I just try to speak as often and as loudly as I can. I love you. And if you believe in God, God loves you. I promise. I promise. I promise.” Haskins knows she cannot control the circumstances many LGBTQ students face, but providing love and affirmation from a religious figure who validates their identity is something she can do from her computer.

Practicing religion in community
For many students, religion is about community, celebrating holidays together, and feeling a connection with others who share similar interests. When the pandemic threatened to leave student feeling isolated, the staff at Hendricks Chapel at Syracuse University changed how they provide students with a religious community. Friday prayers for Muslim students had been a way for Syracuse students to practice their faith and come together weekly. Amir Duric, the Muslim chaplain at Syracuse University, recognized the immediate need to bring this community online and expand it. Duric started a new program called “Spiritual Sitdowns” for students to discuss current events. He says, “Spiritual Sitdowns bring together not just students, but also recent graduates and people from all over the world. It became one coherent group of recent graduates and students. I wanted to create a safe space where they could share how they feel and what we were able to navigate together.” Originally Duric thought this program would end after the spring semester, but after receiving requests from students he is continuing through the summer and starting to figure out how to keep the group going online and in-person in the fall.

Duric is already starting to consider the logistics of prayer on campus if students return this fall. “How many students would be able to participate in that? Are we going to have to have two or three services that we don’t pass that limit or what is going to be limited? And then usually when we pray, we stand next to each other. But some mosques are resuming prayers now and they now, which was never the case, are praying six feet away from each other while it was always shoulder to shoulder. It’s just the new reality. We have to adjust to it.”

Academic institutions are changing – and so is campus ministry
Religious life on campuses will continue to change, as will higher education. When asked about the way campus ministry will transform after the pandemic, Rev. Brian E. Konkol, the Dean of Hendricks Chapel at Syracuse University replied, “The crisis has compelled us to just move a bit quicker, to catch up and create opportunities. We have students who would have much rather connected online. And we’ve had students taking online classes for years. We all can recognize that this [pandemic] is clearly a terrible situation, but Hendricks Chapel is far more than a beautiful physical structure that we put on postcards. It represents a movement and service to the common good that knows no boundaries.”

Students returning to campus this fall, either online or in-person, will find a different religious life experience than the one they saw one year ago. Every religious leader working in higher education I met shared the same message: there is no going back to the way things were before the pandemic.

Campus ministries have changed remarkably in the past several decades to meet the needs of religiously, culturally, and sexually diverse student populations. The lessons learned in the pandemic have become the blueprint for how to meet the needs of college students in the twenty-first century. The pandemic may have changed our world, but for religious leaders struggling to serve a broader community, these changes may only be the beginning of what is to come. Indeed, these changes may be the only way for institutional religious leaders to stay relevant in this new religious landscape.

Katie Breslin is a writer and seminary student at Earlham School of Religion, where she is studying Quaker Ministry. Previously, she worked in faith-based advocacy at the Friends Committee on National Legislation (FCNL) and Catholics for Choice. You can find her writing at katiebreslin.com and follow her on twitter @katiebreslin.

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In all likelihood, the president’s team chose St. John’s Episcopal Church because almost every sitting president has attended that church. They also surely selected that church because a small fire erupted there during the initial protests over George Floyd’s murder—a convenient focal point for Trump’s outraged calls for “law and order.” However, minutes before the president stood there with the Bible (we’re not sure if it was his), protesters—priests among them—were driven from the area by force. The Episcopal Bishop of Washington, the Right Rev. Mariann Budde, did not share Trump’s anger about the fire. “It’s a building; no one’s life is gone,” she said. “The rebuilding of our country…is more important.”

The subtext of Trump’s Bible photo op is that the protesters demanding racial justice are anti-Christian. At his rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Trump articulated that point when he again referenced the minor fire at St. John’s, implying that protesters and his critics threaten religious freedom. “Joe Biden and the Democrats want to prosecute Americans for going to church,” Trump said, “but not for burning a church.”

But the story that protesters are anti-Christian, or even indifferent to religion, isn’t true. Such a portrayal of the protesters overlooks the fact that many victims of police brutality, like George Floyd, were people of faith.

“Here is the story that is told about religion and racial justice today: The U.S. civil rights movement was led by Black male ministers harnessing the socially transformative power of the Christian tradition,” writes Vincent Lloyd, Associate Professor of Theology and Religious Studies at Villanova University. Whereas the movement for Black lives today is led by Black youths who, the story goes “are largely detached from Christianity.”

“This story is false.”

According to Lloyd, both the Civil Rights Movement and the recent uprisings for racial justice are shaped by religion—just in different ways.

Unlike the Civil Rights Movement, which had Martin Luther King, Jr. a Christian minister and Malcolm X, a Muslim leader, among many others at the helm, Black Lives Matter has a more disparate leadership and participation. And the religious sensibilities of recent protests for racial justice reflect the religious diversity of the country’s inhabitants today, over 25 percent of whom can be described as “nones”—spiritual, but not religiously affiliated. In his research, Lloyd focuses on how Christian concepts of love and justice imbue protests. In Black Lives Matter, Lloyd sees “a concern for the self, the soul, and the community expressed in terms of religious provenance and resonance.” While there isn’t a single religious tradition inspiring the current movements for racial justice, plenty of organizers consider themselves and their work spiritual.

Here, six activists in the New York area describe the role their respective religions played in deciding to protest for racial justice and equality.

Responses have been edited for clarity and length.

Protesting Injustice as Worship: Nicole Najmah Abraham
Najmah Abraham organized a protest march of over one thousand people with Esraa Elzin (see below) and Nazahah Booth, called Muslims Against Police Brutality. The protesters travelled from Bay Ridge, Brooklyn to the Barclays Center, where outside they held Jummah prayers, the prayers Muslims say on Fridays. Non-Muslim allies formed a circle around those praying.

“As Muslims it is commanded of us, by our Creator, to fight against injustice. We can’t look at anything—hunger, poverty, racism—except from the perspective of trying to eradicate. In our own community we’re dealing with anti-Blackness, and some non-Black Muslims have said that this isn’t our problem. So how do we as a community fight this issue? We organized a Black-led, Muslim-led, Women-led, protest. We had a lot of allies that were non-Black Muslims, which was important.

 The protest was a testament to what we understand as Muslims. It shows the balance of how Muslim men and women come together for the sake of their Lord. Everything we do as Muslims we lead with prayer and worship—just being able to protest injustice is a worship. But to stand with other people of faith who observed our Jummah, our Friday prayer, was very beautiful.”

Just and Fair: Esraa Elzin
“Islam has an explicit anti-racist tradition and we noticed a void in the Muslim community not speaking up for justice….The Muslim community of Bay Ridge is often immigrants from Middle-Eastern countries who aren’t understanding/knowledgable on social injustice.

 One of the most famous quotes cited in Islam regarding equality is ‘No Arab has any superiority over a non-Arab, nor does a non-Arab have any superiority over an Arab. Nor does a white man have any superiority over a Black man, or the Black man any superiority over the white man.’

 Racism exists in all religions. The goal is to create a more inclusive and diverse space within religion, seeing more mosques that have Black Imams, seeing more Islamic teachers who are Black.”

Jesus the Revolutionary: Hawk Newsome
Hawk Newsome, based in the Bronx, leads Black Lives Matter New York (BLM NY) with his sister Chivona Newsome. Their parents were Civil Rights activists.

“I think that Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ was a revolutionary. Jesus went around from town to town holding rallies of sorts and preaching the Good Word to the people. What we talk about [in Black Lives Matter] is freeing people, what we talk about is loving people. What we talk about is Christianity. We always pray before movements, before marches, we ask for guidance. We ask that God guides us.

God is on the side of the oppressed. Not only do we try to guide people, but we try to teach them a better way to live, a more loving way to live, and that’s very Christian-like.”

White Catholics Need to Listen: Felix Cepeda
In early June, the New York Police Department ambushed a group of peaceful protesters in Mott Haven in the Bronx. About a hundred protesters were handcuffed, with others reporting that officers beat them with batons. Felix Cepeda was one of the protesters arrested. In late June Cepeda began a vigil outside New York City’s Columbus monument. He sees the statue as a symbol of oppression and is demanding the statue’s removal.

 “Here in the United States, I see how many white Catholics do not try to listen and understand the racism that many of their Black, brown, indigenous and other minority Catholic sisters and brothers experience every day.

 There are regular Catholics in my life and famous Catholics like Sister Thea Bowman, Father Bryan Massingale, Dorothy Day, Oscar Romero, Cesar Chavez that motivate me to see that there will always be a few Catholics that will stand against racial injustice and injustice in general inside the Church and in society. These people in my faith community inspire me to continue to pray, speak, write, think and act against racial injustice in the church and in society.”

How Worship and Social Justice Come Together: Sarah Ngu
Sarah Ngu is executive director of Forefront Brooklyn Church, an interdenominational and progressive Christian Church. She has attended several rallies for racial justice as part of a protest group at her church.

“At Forefront we lay a theological foundation for what it means to be political and a Christian, or Jesus-follower. We’re not partisan, we don’t say who to vote for. But we have weekly action items for parishioners to call legislators, for example, on issues like #DefundThePolice and #CancelRent. After service we have been hosting “brunches” on zoom. Right now there is a meeting space for white allies, and another for people of color, and sometimes a separate call for Black church members to talk about how they’re feeling right now.

 At the heart of why we believe in defunding police and reinvesting funds in social services is our belief in restorative justice. When someone commits a crime, we have to ask why, not just jump to punishment. This stems from our view of the cross—we don’t interpret it as God punishing God’s son for our sins, but rather God demonstrating solidarity with us to rescue us from the works of the devil.

 Our church wasn’t always progressive. We lost members of our congregation when we became LGBT-affirming, and then again when Trump was elected because people came to us and said we were too political. But we want to show how Gospel and social justice come together.”

Tipping the Scales of Justice: Maayan Zik
Maayan Zik is a Black Orthodox Jewish woman and one of the organizers of “Tahalucha for Social Justice,” a protest movement against police brutality led by the Hasidic Chabad-Lubavitch community in the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn. “Together, we are raising the flame of justice and kindling it in hearts and minds,” Zik said in her speech at the protest.

 “Racism is definitely there in my faith community. Every group has work to do. I think a lot of the work to change racist ways within Judaism will be through education. I think some people don’t do it on purpose or out of a particular hate, but have projected learned and ignorant behaviors without fully realizing how painful or seemingly malicious their behavior is. Education is key and an openness to learn.

Within the framework of Judaism, there is a call to action to seek out and help justice prevail, so that played a role in choosing to help create a protest. There’s this idea that an individual can tip the scales in favor of good with the performance of mitzvot [commandments]. That we all have this individual super power is amazing and empowering.”

 “Anyone,” Zik said, “can ‘Ker A Velt’—turn the world over and change it for better.”

 Eloise Blondiau is a journalist and radio producer specializing in religion and culture. Her work can be found on New York Public Radio, Vox, and America magazine.

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Dear Revealer readers,

To my surprise, the modern Orthodox synagogue down the street from my apartment recently announced that it would offer a daily morning minyan, a gathering of at least ten adult Jewish men for public prayer, for the first time since the pandemic hit New York City earlier this year. Alarmingly, reopened religious institutions are responsible for at least 650 new coronavirus infections, if not more. In an attempt to prevent the spread of the virus, the synagogue near my home is limiting the size of the daily minyan and giving priority to people who need to say Kaddish, the Jewish mourner’s prayer. According to Jewish law, the mourner’s prayer can only be said in the presence of ten or more Jewish adults. The ancient rabbis reasoned that a person in grief should never pray alone. The community must support the bereaved, and so the mourner’s prayer can only be uttered in the presence of a quorum. For months, those in mourning had to rely on Zoom to connect with others. But now, as the virus ravages other parts of the country the way it did in New York three months ago, religious institutions like this synagogue are reopening and offering modified approaches to prayer, ritual, and community. Time will tell if praying alongside others can be done safely.

Revealer Editor, Brett Krutzsch

Reopening. A term that instantly raises my anxiety. While I know others find the term exciting, I remain hesitant. We have seen what reopenings have done in Arizona, Florida, Texas and elsewhere where coronavirus cases have spiraled out of control. And although we know more about the transmission of Covid-19 than we did in those frightening early weeks of March and April, we still do not have an effective treatment, vaccine, or strategy to mitigate the disproportionate spread of the virus among people of color. Nor do we know the full extent of what the virus does to the body, why some suffer with symptoms for months, why others have permanent lung and brain damage, and why others have died from heart attacks and strokes. We do, however, know that far too many Americans refuse to wear masks, listen to medical experts, or demand our elected officials find ways to keep the economy running without sacrificing the lives of hundreds of thousands of people. And so the virus continues to spread in bars, at family gatherings, and in religious communities. Perhaps I would feel differently about reopening if I believed we were united in our fight against the virus, if I had witnessed countless business executives offer up billions to support everyone in need, if I believed institutions cared about the racial dynamics of their essential workers, or if the President displayed any empathy about the catastrophic horrors this virus has inflicted under his watch. But that is not the situation in America. And none of those things have been qualifiers for reopening.

Our Summer issue grapples with the present conditions of the pandemic as we face demands for reopening, continued protests for racial justice, and ongoing issues of misogyny, racism, and heterosexism that existed before the pandemic and that will continue after states reopen. The issue begins with Eloise Blondiau’s “Protesting Racism as Religion” where she profiles six activists who describe how religion inspired their commitment to participate in protests for racial equality. Next, in “Worship During a Pandemic,” Katie Breslin describes how college chaplains and religious life staff at several universities have transformed their operations to meet students’ religious needs as the pandemic disrupts higher education.

The Summer issue also features powerful articles about the conditions of our world that have been with us long before the emergence of Covid-19. In “A Hindu Guide to Wealth,” Deonnie Moodie—one of our Sacred Writes/Revealer Writing Fellows—reports on a trend in India where self-styled gurus present Hinduism as compatible with capitalism and as the best path to individual riches. In “Hate Male” Audrey Truschke describes the daily hate she receives as a woman scholar of Indian history and the risks women and people of color face when they share their expertise beyond the academy. Next, in “Ramy Season Two: Let’s Talk about Sex, Habibi,” Mehammed Amadeus Mack reviews the show’s depiction of how American Muslims are confronting queer possibilities in the present day. In “On Moodiness and Righteous Rage,” Contributing Editor Kali Handelman interviews Karen Bray about her book Grave Attending: A Political Theology for the Unredeemed and what it can teach us about the current global protests against white supremacy. And, in an excerpt from Hidden Heretics: Jewish Doubt in the Digital Age, Ayala Fader shares a story of a Hasidic Jewish man who privately rejects his tradition’s teachings while still practicing Hasidic Judaism.

Our Summer issue also features the fourth episode of the Revealer podcast: “Hasidic Jewish Heretics.” Ayala Fader joins us to expand on her book excerpt from this issue, discuss what it means to lead a double life as a Hasidic Jew, and reflect on why Hasidic communities are flourishing in America despite the presence of Hasidic double-lifers. You can listen to this fascinating episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and Google Play.

As summer continues, and as the desire to reopen grows stronger, I hope more of us can accept the reality of the virus. I, too, long to embrace friends and spend time with loved ones in far off places. I also understand why people in mourning would want to connect with others in prayer, ritual, and community. And perhaps there are ways to come together safely—indeed, some activities and gatherings are lower risk than others. But we must continue to re-imagine our lives and institutions, remember that our actions impact the people we encounter, and accept that we share the world with a virus that will continue to bring grief until we radically change so much of how we lived before 2020.

Yours,
Brett Krutzsch, Ph.D.

P.S. We hope you enjoy our Summer issue. We will be back in September with a special issue on religion and fashion!

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