First up this month, this utterly infuriating report from The Guardian: Easter Island governor begs British Museum to return Moai: ‘You have our soul’

It was an emotional moment for the indigenous Rapa Nui visitors when they saw the basalt statue, which for them, contains the spirit of their people.

“I believe that my children and their children also deserve the opportunity to touch, see and learn from him,” Rapu said, with tears in his eyes.

“We are just a body. You, the British people, have our soul,” she added.

…

It is the first time that the British Museum, which holds cultural treasures from around the globe, has agreed to hold talks about the statue. But on Tuesday the museum was talking only of a loan, not the return, on the artefact.

“The museum is one of the world’s leading lenders and the trustees will always consider loan requests subject to usual conditions,” a spokeswoman said.

Next this really superb book reviewby Amir Khadem for the Los Angeles Review of Books, A Faux-Muslim Mission

But allegory is a one-trick pony. There is only so much a writer can do by winking rather than pointing. The years of war in Iraq and Afghanistan both eclipsed the literary attention to 9/11 and highlighted the further need to engage with Muslim histories, lives, and beliefs, as now it wasn’t anymore just their world that had ruptured ours. Beginning around 2011, novelists made a sincerer effort to imagine Muslims without trying to find a detour. Amy Waldman’s The Submission, about a Muslim architect whose design wins the contest for the Ground Zero memorial, and Elliot Ackerman’s Dark at the Crossing, about an Arab-American man trying to join the Syrian Civil War, are two representative examples. But none of the Anglophone post-9/11 novels have been as ingeniously involved with the question of conversion to Islam and with the determination to take one’s acquired belief into the realm of violence as John Wray’s new novel, Godsend.

After which, we suggest reading through Ian Johnson‘s comprehensive and helpful summary of The Uighurs and China’s Long History of Trouble with Islam for The New York Review of Books

In recent months, there are signs that the campaign has moved beyond Xinjiang to the Hui Muslims, the descendants of the first Muslims, who are centered in Ningxia province but also live scattered across China. In Ningxia, Islamic domes and signs in Arabic are being pulled down, while the call to prayer has been banned.

It would be tempting to say that all of this is just typical Communist excess, something in the party’s DNA that forces it to turn to repression and violence to solve problems. But the long history of Islam’s persecution points to older, deeper problems in the Chinese worldview. Most worrisome, it is these very traditions that the state is promoting as a way to bolster its legitimacy, instead of building a pluralistic society open to different faiths, beliefs, and convictions.

Meanwhile, back in Los Angeles, Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft has a beautiful reflection On Reading Jonathan Gold  for the Los Angeles Review of Books

To produce an array of culinary microclimates — one way to think about L.A. and food — takes the relative isolation of cultures just as much as intermixing. Diversity doesn’t necessarily mean togetherness. Gold’s dream of commensality begins to seem like an ideal he held out for himself and for his readers, rather than an observation of what was actually happening at street level in Los Angeles. … Just as Gold was the gastronomic beneficiary of post-1965 immigration to the United States, he also benefited from the fact that he came to prominence just as the restaurant took on a new centrality as a form of cultural expression in American life. People started to skip the movie and go directly to dinner, the restaurant experience supplying much of the sense of play and personality that we previously expected from light passing through celluloid. As restaurants rose, so did the trend to level value distinctions between different types of cuisines. Thus we enjoy the high-end taco, or a new restaurant in Koreatown that sells slightly polished versions of the stews already available down the block.

After which, you might also want to read this (even less religion-related, but still worth recommending) record of stories, The Last Curious Man: The enormous life of Anthony Bourdain, according to those who knew him by Drew Magary for GQ .

Martin Schoeller / AUGUST

Reading about Bourdain, sadly, made this recent, very religion-related, piece for Sacred Matters, Suicide: The Last Taboo , by Gary Laderman quite relevant:

The numbers of young people killing themselves is astonishing and points to larger cultural and social problems that we all should be concerned about for America’s future. As a professor who tackles the topic of death in all of its fascinating, revealing dimensions, and loves to entertain and enlighten students, I am stumped and uncertain about this topic and how, or if, I should address it in class. It is clear from my meetings with students that for many—not all—a neutral, intellectually open and honest context for discussing suicide is sorely needed.

In Bourdain’s memory, have a look: Parts Unknown’s perfect day in Jerusalem, photographed by Tanya Habjouqa, who was also the photographer for Amnesty International’s Nakba: Seventy Years of Suffocation report

Seventy years on from their expulsion, the suffering and displacement of Palestinian refugees are ongoing realities. Amnesty International recognizes that the responsibility for this suffering goes beyond that of the host states and is rooted in the Palestinian exodus of 1948 and Israel’s denial of their right to return. However, host states must protect and fulfil the rights of Palestinian refugees within their jurisdiction. These states must repeal or revise all laws and policies that discriminate against Palestinian refugees and immediately take steps to improve conditions in the Palestinian refugee camps and informal “gatherings”.

Now that we’re on the topic of Israel and Palestine, do read Katherine Franke ‘s report from the frontline of The Pro-Israel Push to Purge US Campus Critics  for The New York Review of Books

All of these incidents are part of a larger effort by both the US and Israeli governments and their supporters to undermine the university’s civic role as a crucial forum of democratic engagement. The First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech as well as fundamental principles of academic freedom are violated when governments that profess to be democratic declare certain topics off-limits. The capacity to critically evaluate the way in which state power is exercised—in the US, in Israel, and in other places around the world where human rights are under threat—is vital to responsible citizenship and is central to our mission as educators. The American and Israeli governments alike should stand up for, rather than stand in the way of, open and vibrant academic debate on Israel–Palestine, just as they should for debate about any contentious subject essential to democracy.

There are a multitude of reasons to read all of  Eclipse of the Sun by Elizabeth Schambelan for Artforum, but this part is particularly relevant to our present subject: 

It’s not that anti-Semitism is any worse than any other form of hate. It’s more just the dreamlike surreality of watching the Jewish conspiracy become central to the rhetoric of one of America’s two major parties. To find this old fiction, the Jewish cabal, looming over our political landscape is like the shot in season two of Stranger Things when you first see the giant spider-monster. It’s an important milestone, not just because it’s another huge step toward the GOP no longer pretending not to be a bunch of Nazis, but also because it’s the scaffolding of a truly totalitarian epistemology, one that dispenses altogether with truth-value, but that does offer some kind of coherent theory of the world—perhaps crazy, but unified, the way Melania Trump’s head-to-toe Nazi-archaeologist look was crazy but unified.

Gritty, mascot for the Philadelphia Flyers, Wells Fargo Center, Philadelphia, October 9, 2018. Photo: Len Redkoles/NHLI/Getty Images.

As is, though in a very different register, Reconsidering the Jewish American Princess by Jamie Lauren Keiles for Vox

JAP is rarely used outside the Jewish world — only by goyimin very Jewish cities, and usually playfully so. A second-degree ethnic slur, it is far too acute to be useful in places where people don’t know many actual Jews. On those milk-and-meat main streets, Jews don’t have midlevel designer handbags or custom window treatments; they have horns. There, the top-level pejorative is “Jew.”

Still, to endeavor to write about the JAP feels, in some way, like a risky proposition — a boon to the rising class of anti-Semites and their claims about “globalist Jews” and Jewish money. Why pick now to salt an old wound? But the JAP, as a figure, is a paragon of nuance, as complex as the Jewishness and womanhood she draws from.

At worst, she is the dybbuk of the upwardly mobile, the ever-haunting spirit of the Jewish nouveau riche as it tries to find its place in the American class system. At best, she performs her own kind of Jewish drag, reclaiming the anti-Semitic tropes of yore as a positive ideal of Jewish womanhood. I see her as a queen of multitudinous existence.

And, on the lightest possible note, this very marginally related bit of holiday cheer: He Is Jewish, But Being Santa Is His Calling by Kelly Moffitt and Cameron Jenkins for NPR

Lastly, and even more lightly, two Internet artifacts that made us laugh/groan this month.

And with that, we’re signing off for 2018. Thanks so much for reading with us this past year — it’s been… eventful, and we’re grateful for all that we get to read and everyone who reads with us. 

We’ll see you next year! In the meantime, let’s: 

From the amazing “Gods Taking Selfies” project at Smarter than a Waffle

The post In the News: Lots of bad and a bit of good appeared first on The Revealer.

Ed Simon gestures towards a different approach regarding the idea of America in his essay collection America and Other Fictions: On Radical Faith and Post-Religion. A specialist on early modern trans-Atlantic literature and religion who holds a PhD in English from Lehigh University, Simon’s essays interrogate the idea of America as a religion, asking what we’re to do now that it appears that the American God has failed? Simon draws inspiration from the radical theologians of the previous century who asked what it meant to worship after the “Death of God,” applying their approaches to American civil religion, seeing “America” not as a thing which exists, but as something that has yet to be built. In contrast to Hitchens, Simon doesn’t think that the American Revolution has the same resonance in the 21^st century – which is why he thinks that American Revolution is a pretty good idea.

Simon’s cultural criticism range across legacies of American violence as reflected in the colonial King Philips’ War, to the radical theology of Walt Whitman, the embodied poetics of Catholic relics housed in a Pittsburgh chapel, and the vernacular scripture of Bob Dylan. What unites Simon’s analysis is a concern for those deep cultural etymologies whereby our barely concealed histories still affect us today, asking what emancipatory potential might be hidden within that American civil religion that has so often failed? In the excerpt below he turns his attention to Thomas Paine, most radical of American revolutionaries who perhaps most fully understood the millennial potential of the new Republic. Unlike Hitchens, who wrote his own biography of Paine, Simon doesn’t interpret the figure through the myopic lens of a reductionist secularism that understands Paine as a New-Atheist-in-training. Rather, Simon returns Paine to his radical, dissenting, non-conformist religious roots, imploring his reader to understand that anemic political discourse cannot match the scriptural idiom’s enchanted power to critique injustice.

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The Non-Apotheosis of Thomas Paine

“For there’s no gods/And there’s precious few heroes.”

-Dick Gaughin

 

“The King of England looking westward trembles at the vision.”

– William Blake

Since it became America’s Bohemia, its “Republic of Dreams” as it’s been called, many junkies and drunks have died anonymously in the tenement houses of Greenwich Village, but only one of them was a Founding Father of the United States of America. Before Andy Warhol and Bob Dylan, or Walt Whitman and Mark Twain walked Canal and Houston, there was Thomas Paine. Here the forgotten founder of America died alone of cirrhosis in a lower Manhattan hovel with only six mourners at his funeral. His very body was absconded with and lost in transit to his native England. Regal George Washington lay in a massive mausoleum and a mural of his apotheosis looks out over the Capital (making him not just monarchical but divine); the silver-tongued hypocrite and patron of equality Thomas Jefferson’s tomb is surrounded by the graves of anonymous slaves. But Tom Paine, most pious partisan and prophet of liberty had his body mutilated, spread about, and lost. In myth-haunted America, land of the jeremiad, newest world based on some of the oldest legends, polemicists on both left and right treat our “Founding Fathers” as gods. Tom Paine however didn’t believe in gods, and so he was just a man, sometimes a flawed one, and because of that he deserves our love.

Tom Paine did not have the aristocratic forbearance of Washington or Jefferson; he was an uncouth man, one of the roughs, an American. Born in Norfolk, he had a life-long working class English accent. Rebellion was what he was raised on. It was not ideology; it was inheritance. Unlike Jefferson he needed no Locke and Bacon to convince him of man’s natural state of liberty, and unlike Washington he had no need of a Jefferson to convince him of the same. His home village of Thetford was the site of Boudicca’s royal residence, the raped Celtic queen who avenged her husband’s death by descending on Roman Londinium and burning it to the ground, and it’s that legacy he imbibed in youth. It’s a historical slander of the English to say that they are a people of royal servitude, for Tom Paine demonstrated the deep sense of justice and equality which runs in the veins and sinews of those who belong to the radical English tradition. There is no understanding 1776 without understanding 1649, or 1381. His was not the England of Plantagenet, Tudor, Stuart, Hannover or Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. Tom Paine is of the England that gave us John Ball and Jack Straw, Gerard Winstanley and Abiezer Cope, William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft. “When Adam delved and Eve span,/Who was then the gentleman?” is as if a nursery rhyme to the young Tom Paine, inheritor of radical religious non-conformism and theological dissension.

If Paine was an Englishman by birth, then he was an American by choice. For Paine “The cause of America is in great measure the cause of all mankind.” Washington and Jefferson were wealthy plantation owners, but Paine’s father was a corset-maker. Like his ally Benjamin Franklin, Paine was that most potent of American archetypes, the self-made man. He was the son of a woman’s underwear maker who christened the thirteen colonies with his original name for them: “The United States of America.” His parents were Quakers, followers of the radical tradition of George Fox and John Naylor and William Penn. It was the Quakers who took the Reformation tenant of a priesthood of all believers to its logical conclusion, rejecting even Luther’s biblical “Pope of Paper” in favor of an “inner light.” Because of his Age of Reason he is often thought of as Theodor Roosevelt’s “dirty little atheist” (the 26th president’s estimation of Mr. Paine) but his convictions were forged in the kiln that is the hot and fiery inner light of the Society of Friends.

In England he failed at every task he tried, as a tobacco shop owner and a rope maker, as a town alderman and as a petitioner to Parliament. In 1774 he left his wife and escaped to London (Can one see George walking out on Martha?) where he met the frontier physicist, the sage of Pennsylvania, the raccoon-fur clad guest of Europe’s salons and courts: Benjamin Franklin. The printer wrote Paine a letter of recommendation. Five months later he was an immigrant in that apocalyptic-named Revelation city Philadelphia, sitting on the edge of the western horizon where the sun goes down on the last day of existence, but where Paine saw the sun rising in the west. It was the light marking the arrival of a “New Man,” a Homo Novus, a millennial figure that would take at least a thousand years to truly develop: the American. And while Paine may have failed at his schemes in England, and he would die destitute and alone, forgotten and drunk in New York, it was for an act in that auspicious year of 1776 that he would be forever remembered, a little pamphlet with the humble title of Common Sense.

Paine was a pamphleteer, a journalist, a propagandist. And he was the product of a radical republican tradition that has existed in the shadow of Britain’s royal absurdity for centuries. One could see him as in the tradition of that other revolutionary writer, John Milton. Like Paine, Milton had taken advantage of cheap print more than a century before (during the years of the English civil wars) to advocate for the ancient liberties of the Anglo-Saxon people. But where Milton was an educated man, a polyglot and a polymath, “the Lady of Cambridge,” the author of the greatest epic poem in the English language, and the last of the Renaissance men, Tom Paine was but the son of a corset-maker. Milton’s home was Trinity College; Paine’s was a tavern in London or a bar in Philadelphia. That makes all the difference.

Milton – “Thus did Dion Prusaeus, a stranger and a privat Orator counsell the Rhodians against a former Edict: and I abound with other like examples, which to set heer would be superfluous. But if from the industry of a life wholly dedicated to studious labours, and those naturall endowments haply not the worst for two and fifty degrees of northern latitude, so much must be derogated, as to count me not equall to any of those who had this priviledge, I would obtain to be thought not so inferior, as your selves are superior to the most of them who receiv’d their counsell: and how farre you excell them, be assur’d, Lords and Commons, there can no greater testimony appear, then when your prudent spirit acknowledges and obeyes the voice of reason from what quarter soever it be heard speaking; and renders ye as willing to repeal any Act of your own setting forth, as any set forth by your Predecessors.”

Paine – “These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of men and women,” and “If there must be trouble, let it be in my day, that my child may have peace,” or “Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered,” and maybe most amazingly “We have it within our power to begin the world anew.”

This is not to defame or slander Milton. Areopagetica is one of the most potent defenses of free speech written, in Eikonoklastes and The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates he conceives of an inspiring radicalism, and of course the author of Paradise Lost could turn a phrase. And yet his political pamphlets when read today comes across as stiff and scholarly, as arguments built on an edifice of the knowledge of the great classics. They ooze Latin and Greek. Milton can be stirring, he can be inspiring, he can light a love of liberty, but he can also be ponderous. Milton’s Republic collapsed under Cromwell’s Stalinist impulses; Paine’s remains, shaken and often on the verge of collapse, yet somehow still standing. It would be hard to argue that it was the pure power of direct, simple, and angry rhetoric that stays the life-blood of a nation, but perhaps (or hopefully) some of that working class rage of the dispossessed and ignored which threads its way through Common Sense is somehow to attribute to our survival. Milton was read widely, but he spoke in an educated tongue, a Cambridge man. Paine was a pub man; he spoke not to university dons but to the barkeep, the factory worker, the farmer. He has a rough language but it’s the peoples’ language. He wrote like an American. Paine’s sleight pamphlet sold half a million copies the year it was printed. Less than a year later all thirteen colonies would declare their independence from Great Britain.

Americans were already fighting the British in a revolution, but Paine made it the Revolution. Like all true Revolutionaries he knew that America needed its Year Zero, and he reoriented and redefined what was at stake. No longer was this a small rebellion simply tied to anger over a few taxes here and there, petty grievances about expensive tea and playing cards to raise revenue to pay for a frontier war which in many ways the colonists started themselves. No, now this was about apocalypse, it was about Millennium, it was about making the world anew and redefining what it meant to be a person. In Letters from an American Farmer, written only a few years before by the Frenchman J. Hector St. John DeCrevecoeur, the author asked “What then is the American, this new man?” Paine had an answer; the American was of no particular nationality, and of no particular faith. Rather his was a new creed, a new religion, for now the cause of America is the cause of all mankind.

It’s important to remember that he was no provincial, his nationalism was cosmopolitanism. For Paine “America” was but a synonym for the cause of liberty, wherever she may need to be liberated. It was Paine who coined the phrase that would be the official name of these fifty states, but in many ways there is a distinction between “The United States” and “America.” The former is a nation-state bordered to the north by Canada and to the south by Mexico with the Atlantic on one side and the Pacific on the other and a capital in Washington DC. Like all nations it has its good and bad, its idealists and its corrupt. A country bounded, like all nations, by a border of time and space. But “America” is something different, if “The United States” is written in prose than “America” is written in poetry. Its language is not that of legislation and treaties, rules and laws, but rather of myth and legend. “America” is the commonwealth, Arcadia, Eden. John Locke wrote “In the beginning all the world was America.” It’s synonymous with ancient and hopefully future freedoms. America is not a place, nor has it every really existed, it is merely always in the process of coming into existence. That other destitute and drunk poet-prophet Oscar Wilde would write almost a century after Paine’s death that “A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail.” The United States is on the geographer’s map, but America is on the one composed by the utopian. America is not found in the United States (alone) but she is found in Europe’s revolutionary camps of 1848, in the Paris Commune of 1871, in the abolitionist’s sermon, in the Union soldier’s heart at Gettysburg, at Seneca Falls and while marching in Selma, at the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, in Ho Chi Minh’s Declaration of Independence and in Nelson Mandela’s prison cell and inside Vaclav Havel’s type-writer, at Stonewall and Tiananmen Square. Thomas Paine understood the crucial point that America must never be a mere country, for it is much more; it is an idea, and a potent one. The American is not a citizen of the United States or an inhabitant of the western hemisphere; the American is “the Adam of a New World.”

In 1792 Paine found “America” in the streets of Paris, among the debates of Jacobins and Girondists. As he always maintained his cause was the cause of all mankind and his empire was Liberty’s, so in France he took the banner of revolution up once again. It was the second time in his life he left his native England for radical causes across the sea. Left behind in Britain was the Rights of Man, which answered the objections to the revolution made by Edmund Burke, the comfortable father of contemporary conservatism. Burke may have maintained that the dead deserve a say in the present, but Paine was wise enough to know that the world is for the living, and he answered Burke’s objections point by point. And he not only advocated the cause of revolution, he put his body “upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus to try and stop tyranny” (as Mario Savio put it in 1964). He was elected to the French Assembly, but his opposition to totalitarianism and his embrace of freedom was too consistent. He opposed the execution of the pustule rat-king Louis XVI, and Robespierre used the opportunity to have Paine imprisoned within DeSade’s home, the supposedly liberated prison of Bastille.

But as they say stone walls do not a prison make, nor iron bars a cage, and Paine found an America even within the Bastille. It was here that he wrote The Age of Reason, the book scandalous and heretical enough that the newly holy of Second Great Awakening America would turn their back on the man who baptized their nation, and whose political ethos made their faith even possible. “I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of.” Milton’s rebellious and similarly exiled hero Lucifer taught us that the human mind can make of heaven a hell and of hell a heaven, and for Thomas Paine “My own mind is my own church.” It only saw publication because his fellow American and member of the French Assembly Joel Barlow (who also gave this nation its first epic poem in The Columbiad) smuggled it out of prison. Paine’s stay from execution was ironically perhaps more providential, all that saved him from the guillotine’s blade was an improperly placed sign on his cell door. Thermidor and Robespierre’s downfall awaited and James Monroe was able to secure his release. And this is how Thomas Paine found himself returned to the crooked streets of lower Manhattan, so different from the rational, rectilinear Enlightenment street grid of a few blocks north. But if America was an Arcadia than Et in America Ego.

Washington had his Mount Vernon, and Jefferson his Monticello, but Tom Paine just had 59 Grove Street. He died seemingly abandoned by all, with only Jefferson still supporting him but distancing himself at all costs, as the Federalists loved nothing more than to tout Paine’s associations with the third president, like some eighteenth-century Weatherman. In 1799, when Washington died, Napoleon ordered ten days of mourning. Thousands of Americans felt intense grief at the death of their god, and they built an Egyptian pyramid to entomb him, after he lived through the construction of the capital which bared his name. Ten years later when Tom Paine died like a common drunk most American newspapers merely reprinted the local obituary. There was no ceremony for Tom Paine; the Quakers wouldn’t even allow him to be buried in their ground. Only six people came to mark the passing of the man who named the United States of America, including two nameless black freedmen. On the Mall of that right-angled city of Roman marble there stands an occult obelisk in memory of Washington, and an American Pantheon holds a statue of Jefferson that is nineteen feet tall, but in the District of Columbia there is no memorial to Tom Paine. Washington and Jefferson are gods, but Paine is but a man, and the better for it. If you seek his memorial you must go to those places where people yearn for freedom, and are willing to fight for it. There if you seek his monument you must merely look and listen.

***

Ed Simon is a staff writer at The Millions and the Editor-at-Large of The Marginalia Review of Books, a channel of The Los Angeles Review of Books. He holds a PhD in English from Lehigh University, and is a frequent contributor at several different sites. His collection America and Other Fictions: On Radical Faith and Post-Religion will be released by Zero Books in 2018. He can be followed at his website, on Facebook, or on Twitter @WithEdSimon.

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Published with support from the Henry R. Luce Initiative on Religion in International Affairs.

The post America and Other Fictions: On Radical Faith and Post-Religion appeared first on The Revealer.

The Incredulity of Saint Thomas by Caravaggio

The Gospel of John records two curious and dramatic encounters that followed Jesus’ crucifixion. Nearly all of Jesus’ disciples secretly huddled together a few days after his death when he, miraculously, appeared in their midst. But one of the disciples, Thomas, was absent and couldn’t bring himself to believe what the others reported to him. He leveled the skeptic’s ultimatum: “Unless I see the nail marks in his hands and put my finger where the nails were, and put my hand into his side, I will not believe.”

Wonder of wonders, then, when Jesus appeared to Thomas some days later. One can imagine (with Caravaggio) an incredulous Thomas suspiciously probing Christ’s yonic wounds, while also remembering Thomas’ earlier declaration was more about the touching than the seeing. Thomas’ fingers, rather than his eyes, felt out the path of belief: “My Lord and my God!”

Jesus, in turn, shifted the terms of engagement. “Have you believed because you have seen me?” he asked Thomas, whose fingers were, perhaps, still moist from his inquiry. Then came the kicker: “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet still have come to believe.”

The Gospel of John asks us to be convinced by Thomas’ belief, which is another way of saying that we are asked to make do with words alone. Jesus, at least, wanted Thomas to feel the weight of our disappointment at not being able to touch the wounds of a resurrected body. While it is tempting to put a glowing modernist halo around Thomas’ skepticism — to see in his initial question some ancient version of “pic or it didn’t happen” — would we be any more convinced if we, somehow, had a photograph of the exchange? And to ask that question is to miss the heart of Thomas’ desire, which was to let his fingers feel the truth of what others already believed.

Jonas Bendiksen’s documentary photography project, The Last Testament (Aperture/GOST, 2017), opens with an invitation: imagine yourself as a believer, as someone whose world is ripe with the hope that salvation — some divine rescue — is coming. By making such an invitation, Bendiksen (b. 1977) welcomes those who, like he describes himself, are people “of little faith.” He envisions that those who will behold the images of these Christs have, on the whole, left religious belief behind. For them, such belief is the mere spirit of a European past whose gothic skeletons become barer by the Sunday. He asks, however, if they might like to step into what it used to be like. For back when belief was possible, the world was full of glorious possibilities and promises, like that one day, Christ would return to create a new heaven and a new earth.

The irony that Jesus, before whom, we are told, “every knee will bow in heaven and on earth” was undeniably parochial — quaintly magisterial — infuses The Last Testament. Jesus, of course, lived at a certain moment in history, under Roman imperial rule, speaking a single language, and working, presumably, as a carpenter. What if that Christ returned, but to Zambia, or Japan, or the UK, with all the contingencies that come with living in those particular places at this particular time? What if we could see him and, in seeing him, perhaps believe?

Bendiksen’s project is, in one sense, an accomplished Norwegian-born Magnum photographer’s documentary exploration of seven men who believe themselves to be Christ, returned in the flesh. But to conscribe it merely to documentary photography would be to ignore both the project’s mode of expression, as well as the spirit that infuses the whole of it. Organized into seven chapters, with each “Christ” the subject of his own chapter, one encounters each Christ’s words — and often a good many of them — long before one beholds his image. Printed on gilt-edged scritta paper, the testaments of these Christs are treated to the biblical double column layout of more ancient scriptures. The provocative truth of the project emerges through this creative use of affect. Is this holy? Is it true?

I doubt the texts will prove convincing to many people, even if they take time to read these testaments, which are part screed, part local history, part geo-political critique, and part biblical exegesis. Who, for example, does Bendiksen really expect to trace out David Shayler’s byzantine efforts at demonstrating why he must be regarded as the Lord Jesus Christ under English Common Law? But to dwell on the written words of these Christs is to miss the point of why their words seem to be there in the first place, which is to confirm, one assumes, our bias.

It is hard to imagine someone so exotic to a modern, secular European than a man who is not only deeply committed to his religion, but who has the audacity to argue that he himself is Christ, returned in the flesh. So, we are made to puzzle at a compendium of odd claims. Do these people really believe this stuff? The testaments within The Last Testament exotify even as they create an ethos: they could be something holy. For, what if that first Jesus — an uneducated peasant from the margins of the Roman Empire, some 2,000 years ago — had left a 50-page treatise? To think of such a question, which haunts The Last Testament, is also to remember the fact that we don’t believe in that stuff – at least now, anyway.

When we quickly thumb through the words to find the images do we, then, see belief? If so, that belief seems to separate photographer from subject, for that difference is the occasion for Bendiksen’s photographs. If this is the case, then “belief” reproduces the exotifying gaze that infused so much colonial ethnographic photography whose images displayed the superstitious, baffling, and altogether odd subjects who, metropolitans were told, actually did these things, if they could believe it. And those civilized metropolitans did believe it, and it helped to distinguish modern from superstitious, photographer from photographed.

Bendiksen does not entirely shed this tone, but he seems aware of its history, the burden of this legacy. The Last Testament is less a dismissal of that impulse and more a transmutation of it, for, in being invited to believe, we become implicated in these incarnations. The photographer’s gaze is not so much exotic as envious — an almost nostalgic longing after belief. Wouldn’t it be nice if it were still true that — in the midst of the wars, famines, and destruction of our common home — that someone could save us? It is a desire for that truth that Bendiksen wants to show us. But, as Pilate famously queried, “What is truth?” Can a photograph capture the unreality of the incarnation or the resurrection any better than words?

Bendiksen’s opening image — of “Jesus of Kitwe” — fixes our attention on the eyes of a Zambian Christ who looks up and away, cast in a fierce hope. With a depth of field so shallow that even the tip of his nose starts to blur, we behold his eyes glowing with a haunting vermillion confidence. If we see in it something saintly and ethereal, some evocation of the eternal, the next image jars us into the contingencies of his incarnation: in this case, a worn blue sedan parked in a dirt lot; faded, hand-lettered words “LORD OF LORDS” mark the rear door. And we are immediately struck by the burden of living the paradox of Christ: the eternal contained in time and space.

Subsequent Christs have their own ways of bearing this contradiction. In the next chapter, INRI stands in a hotel room, dressed in a simple white frock, a plump braid of white thorns crowns his head, which is backlit with a heavenly ochre. His fraught countenance turns from the open window, and with hands raised in innocent defensiveness, one feels his bemused discomfort at being exposed to the rainy Brazilian cityscape below.

Then, on a typically overcast British day, David Shayler walks behind a nearly life-sized statue of the crucified Christ outside of a Sainsbury’s convenience store. His hands pressed into his trouser pockets, he stares off to the left of the photo, unable to be bothered to look at the crucifix emplaced in the sidewalk in the center of the frame. One feels the ambivalence of being a Christ in a country that has said quite clearly over the past century that they’ve already given that whole thing a go and have had quite enough of it, cheers. Who, then, could blame this Christ for rebuffing dubious moderns with “You’re not interested in my Twitter feed, I say fuck off then, don’t read it!”?

Jesus Matayoshi isn’t so willing to leave it to others to make the decision. In some sense, Matayoshi exists in severe contrast to the cacophony that surrounds him — the moral laxity of the Japanese urban masses’ global capitalism — but he also cannot help but contribute to the noise. We see Matayoshi standing atop his minivan, straining his voice into a microphone, scolding the ignorant crowds beneath him with a singular condescending finger. Bendiksen frames the moment at an angle such that the only plumb line seems to be Matayoshi’s spine, while the blissfully absorbed cosmopolitans carry on, unconcerned that they could never hope to set themselves straight. We ponder the desperate impossibility of their ever hearing him, even as we don’t bother to listen either.

Apollo Quiboloy feels like an apocalyptic interlude, a Christ so consumed with power that Bendiksen can only focus upon the accoutrements of his televised presence: hands deliberately clasped over a trim gilt-edged Bible, revealing a luxury sports watch; a private jet silhouetted against the blue sky; spraying bullets into a jungle with a machine gun. One wonders whether this is the Jesus who has “come not to bring peace, but a sword.” Or perhaps this is a Christ who wishes he could return to that mountain top and take up the devil’s offer from all those years ago, for he was promised “all the kingdoms of the world,” after all, and it might as well start with the Philippines.

If Bendiksen shows us the artifice of Quiboloy’s authority, the implicit terror of his performance, then in Moses Hlongwane we are endeared by Christ’s improvisations. In an almost-finished house, with mismatched flooring and spliced wires, or in the dark sunglasses and gaudy sequins tacked onto repurposed dress shoes, we see a Christ who cobbles together his divinity. This Christ bursts with a joyous panache into such a dazzling assortment of what’s at hand that it might be easy to overlook the fact that the rhinestone lettering on his cap — “JESUS” — is slightly askew, or that one of the tacks securing the lace lining of his glistening shoes has fallen off.

In the end, however, Bendiksen can’t take too seriously a Jesus who preaches to the Japanese urban masses with a megaphone from the top of a minivan, or a Christ who gets carted around a meticulously tended Brazilian garden every day. But in the quaint Siberian messianic communes founded by Vissarion, he seems to have found something that resonates. Here, his earlier suspicions about the invention of other Christs’ claims begins to soften. Those who follow Vissarion have crafted these communities out of the forest. As they share the food, piled high across long tables, Bendiksen’s fingers seem to touch something, and we wonder if he might blurt out a surprised confession. Until, that is, the final frame captures this Christ on a snowy hillside, benevolently overseeing the adoring crowds below as he makes his way to or from a carved wooden throne, shaded with a scarlet umbrella, and we wonder if we can almost hear the photographer’s sigh as he realizes that he probably wouldn’t fit in after all.

We are shown each of these unique Christs and given the suggestion that they might be holy, even if it is merely a biblical simulacrum. Even if one of them really is holy, we can’t take any of them on their own terms, for, in setting an array of Jesuses before us means that their truth claims have all been relativized. But to focus on that is to miss a crucial point, for what is sacred here is the possibility of having options. Bendiksen seems to say, “Not that it really matters, of course, but which Jesus do you like?” And this is the curse of the modern blessing: how to choose? To read The Last Testament, then, is to imagine a world in which Jesus mattered. It is to feel ourselves pulled into a different, more enchanted, history, even as the photographs make us encounter Christs in the present.

It is to our present that these Christs speak; it is our present that they critique. They hope, by their very presence, that they will cast into relief the partiality and paucity of the existing options, of what is being said and done. The incarnation surely implies some discomfort at the present state of affairs, whatever that present is.

Even as Bendiksen so creatively and provocatively captures these contemporary Christs, I wondered what was occluded by his preoccupation with the present. We get little sense of the particular, local histories into which each of these Christs has been incarnated. What of new religious movements in Russia? What of the history of independent, prophetic, and revolutionary movements in the Zambian Copperbelt from the colonial era? What about the history of Christianity in Japan, or the rapid growth of Pentecostalism in Brazil? There’s some consideration of why these particular individuals believe themselves to be Christ returned, but there is no consideration of the how — which is to say, these Jesuses exist, mostly, without history. Instead, they appear as idiosyncratic global moderns who have, somehow, managed to still inhabit a world of belief. But, if this difference is marked merely by belief, how much of an exception are they? And to whom? Perhaps those of us who are among the disenchanted, are the exotic minority.

If there is a thread throughout the work, maybe it is not so much belief, but disappointment. The world is in need of salvation, and Bendiksen tempts us to recall how nice it felt when we believed that someone would come and set it right. But what if any version of the salvations described in The Last Testament actually came? Do we really long for Jesus Matayoshi’s fierce and swift justice, his weeding out of the sexually impure and the morally corrupt? Would we be willing to live according to the strict communal code of Vissarion’s Siberian villages?

The allure of salvation is surely its clarity, certainty, and hope. But to be saved is to not be in control. To be saved is to have a radically different set of power relations — ones that are determined by another, which means that one of the gifts of salvation is not having to figure it out. It is to forego choice. This figuring it out is the exhausting work of modernity, and we despair as we realize that, for us, salvation is bound up with the choice of working it out for ourselves, which means that we have to get busy making up how we might go about doing it.

While Bendiksen shows us Christs in the making, Christs finding their ways among us, the reader also comes to envy them, for they seem to be carried along by something that ultimately feels less of their own making. They believe that salvation is coming. But for many of us, the implied tragedy of Bendiksen’s project is that it doesn’t matter how many divine pictures we see because we wouldn’t know which photo would have us believe that we look out onto something other than an indifferent universe. And even if we did behold such an image, we might find ourselves doubting it with Kafka: “There’s nothing so deceiving as a photograph.” Perhaps that is why Christ called blessed those of us who couldn’t see him, which leaves us flipping through Bendiksen’s gilt-edged paper with the dry fingers of an unbelieving Thomas, imagining ourselves not being disappointed with the world we’ve made.

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Jason Bruner is an assistant professor of global Christianity in the School of Historical, Philosophical, and Religious Studies at Arizona State University.

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Published with support from the Henry R. Luce Initiative on Religion in International Affairs.

The post “Blessed are those who have not seen”: Image and belief in Jonas Bendiksen’s The Last Testament appeared first on The Revealer.

In one corner of the ring stood Imam Muhammad Asim Hussain, the leader of Al Madina mosque in East London and founder of al-Hikam Institute, which offers religious education and community services in the city of Bradford, England. Though young (born 1990), and far more accessible in style than leaders of an older generation, Hussain is the also benefactor of a traditional Islamic education, having studied under Muhammad Imdad Hussain Pirzada and Qazi Hassan Raza, both renowned Pakistani scholars. Following the majority of Sunni jurists, Imam Hussain held that the celebration of Mawlid was permissible. It was indeed noteworthy that the Imam spent so much time (one video outlining his position surpasses three hours in length) justifying a practice that has been common for centuries, and that is particularly well-established in the Pakistani diaspora community of which he is a part.

Muhammad Asim Hussain

In the other corner stood Imran Ibn Mansur, aka “Dawah Man,” also born in 1990, a former rapper turned Salafi YouTube evangelizer. Based in London, Ibn Mansur maintains a popular YouTube channel and operates an online educational platform called The Knowledge College (formerly, the Muslim Survival Guide)  —  all ostensibly devoted to helping “the average Muslim” become more pious. In particular, Dawah Man appeals to Western Muslims raised in a largely secular milieu, many of whom highlight their lack of any formal Islamic education (and backgrounds involving drinking, violence, and petty crime) before they were “guided” to the truth of their religion. In addition to maintaining a robust online presence, Dawah Man leads a number of public events in cities throughout England, which are then uploaded to his various media platforms. With regard to the Mawlid debate, Dawah Man echoed the Wahhabi position that the holiday is an unlawful innovation, or bida’, and recorded no fewer than nine videos disputing the proofs brought by Imam Hussain.  

The Mawlid debate between Imam Hussain and Dawah Man encapsulates a number of tensions that run through contemporary Sunni Islam. On one hand, it was reminiscent of familiar controversies that have pit the customs of local communities against Wahhabi interpretations, which have spread throughout the world on the heels of a well-funded Saudi educational mission. Whether in Chechnya, Nigeria or Malaysia, in recent decades Wahhabis have emerged to argue that local forms of Islam are syncretic and therefore unlawful. Thus, Islam’s capacity to adapt to and absorb local conditions — undoubtedly one of the key factors that enabled its tremendous spread across the globe — has become its chief liability in the eyes of purists, who do not recognize that Salafi Islam is also a particular formation rather than the neutral carrier of uncorrupted religion.

Yet, and more significantly for our purposes, the video feud highlights a relationship between technology and religious authority, and indeed how changes in the former can serve to transform the latter. An early 20^th Century Dawah Man certainly would not have been able to bypass traditional gatekeepers and speak directly to the masses at the scale enabled by the Internet. There are, of course, many precedents: from the printing presses that produced Martin Luther’s vernacular Bible to the local access channels that nurtured the Moral Majority; there is nothing static about the nature of religious authority. And while we often associate technological innovations with some form of democratization — as individuals gain the ability to access holy texts in an unmediated fashion, to do their own research, and to theoretically reach their own conclusions — this emancipatory narrative does not capture the complexity of these transformations.

Imran Ibn Mansur, AKA “Dawah Man”

Here, the case of Dawah Man is illustrative. In a type of double movement that is characteristic of many self-proclaimed religious guides, Ibn Mansur both attacks the authority of an establishment class and asserts his own — not despite his lack of credentials, but indeed because of it. What we see in such a move is not a true populist transfer of authority to the people at large, but the replacement of one class of authority figures (here, classically trained scholars, the ‘ulema) with another. What is the nature of this transformation, and what assumptions underpin the authority of the Everyday Man? A closer look at Dawah Man’s online presence reveals some possible answers.

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A self-proclaimed “street kid,” Ibn Mansur peppers his video sermons with English slang and Arabic terms in equal measure. As we will see, he never claims the title “imam” and often serves as a conduit for popularizing established Wahhabi positions. Though he is said to have studied at the Saudi-backed Al-Maghib Institute, he has no formal credentials to speak authoritatively about shari’a, though this hardly detracts from his popularity. On the contrary, his Everyman appeal is precisely why some Western Muslims — often lacking in formal religious education and growing up in countries where Islam is not intrinsic to various cultural and social forms — find him inspiring. And indeed, his videos communicate decisively about what Islam demands of the believer, meaning that for all intents and purposes, Dawah Man serves as an online sheikh for his flock of approximately 138,000 YouTube followers.

He often responds to queries from his viewers, and the types of questions he addresses have a decidedly modern bent. Dawah Man will let you know whether you may smoke weed (no), wear makeup (no), or vote in a Western democracy (no). He will advise “sisters” on thorny situations that they may find themselves in, such as what a woman should do if she needs to work in a haram environment. In this way, the structure of Dawah Man’s video channel mimics the question-and-answer format that has been central to Islam since the outset, when believers would bring questions to Prophet regarding everyday life. However, as the historian Richard Bulliet has argued, “what makes the question-and-answer motif distinctive in Islamic religious history is the variability over time of the parties deemed capable of answering questions authoritatively.”[1] While the first generation of Muslims looked to the Prophet’s companions and those in later centuries to sufi sheikhs or jurists, many now look to Dawah Man. He may not be an actual sheikh, but he plays one on YouTube. 

Ibn Mansur exemplifies a populist mode of religiosity that bypasses traditional leaders, many of whom serve as his rhetorical punching bags. In contrast to the staid, scholastic language that has long been synonymous with religious authority, Dawah Man revels in railing against “Hijabi YouTubers” and directing Muslim women (who are interested in this-worldly pleasures) to “twerk to your husband in Paradise.” One video references an elderly man who has sex with a woman outside of marriage: “Old man, what you mean, you lived your whole life, you’re about to die. You’re supposed to be takin’ Viagra to get onto this. But, you out there sleeping with girls. You should be struggling to get it up but you out there sleeping with girls!” The language is casual and the banter affable: just a couple of Salafi bros hanging out teaching you how to avoid the hellfire.

Dawah Man is well-aware that he lacks the traditional credentials to speak authoritatively about Islam, but manages to spin this lack of expertise to his advantage. For instance, in the midst of his video feud with Imam Muhammad Asim Hussain regarding the permissibility of celebrating Mawlid, he shamed his adversary for using the incorrect form of an Arabic verb, and used this slip as an opportunity to speak to their relative qualifications:

“Wallahi it’s shocking that we’re going to take seriously — it’s shocking that even for a second we’re going to consider and take seriously an individual who is explaining to us his understanding of the ayah (verse) which no scholar of tafsir (Qur’anic exegesis) ever brought before… Yet he doesn’t even know the difference between a command verb and a present tense verb. And like I said, he’s an imam (with emphasis). You can pick mistakes out of individuals like myself, but we, we not claiming to be imams. We’re just your average street kids right? But, you’re an imam! You should not be making these mistakes.”[2]

This is but one instance in which Ibn Mansur references — and rhetorically undermines — Imam Hussain’s “expertise” vis-à-vis his own. In another message, he states, “You’re a man who’s an imam. Your people look at you as a scholar. You’re a man who studied the religion. That’s what everyone keeps saying — look, look, look, ‘Da’wah Man, who is he, who did he study under? What’s his senad[3], what’s his chain, who’s he studied under? [pause] imam, so-and-so, he is a man who studied under ‘ulema, studied Arabic, went here, traveled around the world, he’s a learned man, knowledgeable man’ — and you’re making some really basic mistakes.”[4]

If one strategy is to attack the expertise of the scholarly class, another technique is to appeal to the supposedly self-explanatory nature of religious truth. It is in letting the text “speak for itself” that Dawah Man, true to his Salafi proclivities, truly shines. Take for instance his video about the sinfulness of music, “which actually leads to the hellfire,” he argues, echoing a common Wahhabi position. At the outset of the video, he mentions the scholastic hand-wringing that characterizes the question as to whether music is permissible before changing courses entirely:

We always hear about this discussion about music. Is music haram, some will tell you ‘no,’ some will tell you ‘yes,’ if it is haram — then they will tell you what kind of music is haram, this type is permissible, What about instruments, can you use this instrument…what about this, what about that, can you have halal hip-hop, can you have halal music — all this discussion goes on, right? And we’re always quoting, ‘this sheikh said that sheikh said this person said that person said,’ so today, I thought to myself, ‘right, let’s just talk about what the Prophet said’.[5]

Within such a view, the Qur’an has already been understood and interpreted by the Prophet and his companions, and thus there is nothing else to do but act as a pure conduit for their practice. And while it is true that many of the sages of the classical age held that music was prohibited, medieval scholars disputed this view by pointing out numerous discrepancies — for example, that in Sura al-Isra’, the Qur’an mentions that David was given the Psalms — or by arguing that the prohibition was limited to the Prophet’s immediate context because of the historic association between music and idolatry. In practice, many traditions of music have flourished across the expansive geography of Islam, and music is regarded as permissible by a vast assortment of Sunni ‘ulema. Indeed, the prohibition against music is hardly a consensus position even within highly conservative or even fundamentalist contexts (ISIS videos, for instance, almost always include musical accompaniment, and legalizing concerts was among Muhammad bin Salman’s most high-profile reforms in Saudi Arabia).

The denial of any interpretive agency by Dawah Man, like others within the hermeneutic tradition of which he is a part, is integral to their discursive and material power. As I have argued elsewhere, the claim that the text can and should speak for itself is both a relatively novel position and an extremely consequential one when it comes to understanding contemporary Islamic movements. Beyond this though, I would like to suggest that what is most noteworthy about the form of authority that Dawah Man enacts is its faux-populism. On one hand, he attacks traditional elites and their scholastic practices (not to mention the “un-Islamic” customs that they support), speaking as nothing more than your average “street kid.” On the other hand, his entire media operation is clearly designed to carry viewers down an incredibly narrow interpretive path whose boundaries are fixed by Salafi positions. The point is not, then, to introduce young Muslims to the texts, interpretive traditions, or juridical principles that together constitute shari’a as a lived practice, such that they might become proficient enough to reach their own conclusions. The point is rather to convince them, through the use of selective texts, that the Salafi approach is the only permissible option. Thus, rather than dismantling religious authority by empowering individual believers, Dawah Man channels a false populism that is, in fact, authoritarian.

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In closing, it is worth noting some of the threads that link the Dawah Man phenomenon to the world beyond Salafi circles. Chief among them is the ambivalent role of online technologies in advancing individual agency vis-à-vis authoritative voices — be they of the established or “populist” nature. Contrary to libertarian fantasies, the vast amount of information at our fingertips is not an uncontested good that necessarily makes humans more free. Rather, digital life also enables new forms of control by leaders bent on usurping the power of traditional elites, and indeed, reconstituting that power on an increasingly authoritarian basis. That this is all done in the name of everyday people is not ironic — it is an essential part of the appeal. If this all sounds uncomfortably familiar in the days of

#fakenews, alternative facts, and a Tweeter-in-Chief, that is because Dawah Man belongs to a growing global phenomenon of right-wing populists who want to assure you that the world is both quite simple, and yet only they can truly understand it. Best get in line before the hellfire (or George Soros) gets you.

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[1] Richard Bulliet, Islam: The View from the Edge, 183.

[2] Naseeha Sessions, “The Ending of the Mawlid Debate,” available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dT9pmgdEQsE, 12:20.

[3] A senad (plural: isnad) is a technical term used to denote the chain of transmission through which a hadith become known. In this contemporary context, it is used to indicate with whom one studied the religious sciences.

[4] Survival Sessions, Feb. 1, 2016. “You are Either a Liar Or You Are Ignorant!” Available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cbp2mRIL3YM&list=PLD_t6Hg9sq-8OMI53_bNq5P2CKHy3cuvp&index=5, 6:35

[5] Naseeha Sessions, “Music Lovers Become PIGS & MONKEYS.” June 9, 2018. Available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iEj1hrhAYL8, 1:07.

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Suzanne Schneider is Deputy Director and Core Faculty at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research. An interdisciplinary scholar working in the fields of history, religious studies, and political theory. Suzanne is interested in social and political life in the modern Middle East, in particular Jewish and Islamic modernism, religious education and jurisprudence, Palestine/Israel, and histories of violence. She is the author of Mandatory Separation: Religion, Education, and Mass Politics in Palestine (Stanford University Press), and her writing has appeared in The Washington Post, The Forward, Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Revealer: A Review of Religion and Media. She is currently working on a book about religion and violence in the modern age. 

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Published with support from the Henry R. Luce Initiative on Religion in International Affairs.

The post Digital Islam and the New Sheikhs appeared first on The Revealer.