Chris Pish and Sue Williams

By Ann Neumann 

Use hospitality one to another without grudging. 1 Peter 4:9 KJV

I have a friend, Chris, who lives in my neighborhood and pours me pints at my local bar. He’s blonde, gregarious, and likely to say the damnedest things. In my close neighborhood in Brooklyn, Chris and his wife, Sue, are fixtures. Everyone knows them, they’re community.

Chris just found out he has a tumor in his brain that’s 37.4 millimeters in diameter. Cancer. Stage four. Melanoma. And growing every day. Chris doesn’t have health insurance. Neither does Sue, who is a self-employed toymaker. Like millions of others, they’ve been priced out by a system that awards health care coverage to the wealthy and the well-employed. The neighborhood is collecting funds, at The Chris Pish Brain Trust, to keep Chris and Sue under roof and out of hunger while they both focus on Chris’s treatments. They’ve just successfully collected enough for a “down payment” to the hospital for his brain surgery. The successful fundraising is a moving example of how a community can come together. But it shouldn’t be necessary. And it’s not enough.

Larger social systems, like disability insurance and Medicaid, should make our local collection efforts obsolete, or at least limit them to meals, visits and whatever errands and support a neighbor can provide. But, across the nation, they don’t. Why? Chris’s case and a close examination of charitable, community-based health care institutions–hospitals–exposes the inadequacy of charity to provide full and equal health care security to all of us.

The Affordable Care Act’s open enrollment and launch have passed, yet more than 40 million Americans are still without health insurance. For those who don’t qualify for free coverage but have been getting by on a wing and a prayer, those who are already sinking in the stagnant economy, Obamacare is still expensive. The fear of squeezing an extra couple hundred dollars out of the monthly budget, for many, outweighs the fear of a broken leg… or the unthinkable, catastrophic illness.

In an op-ed for the New York Times on January 1, the day Obamacare went into effect, Michael Moore highlighted the primary flaw of the program. It’s pro-business. Insurance companies (“By 2017, we will be funneling over $100 billion annually to private insurance companies.”), drug manufacturers (like “Novartis, which charges leukemia patients $90,000 annually for the drug Gleevec,”), and high-paid executives (“like Stephen Hemsley of UnitedHealth Group, who made nearly $102 million in 2009”) are all reaping indecent financial gains from our current health care system. Obamacare will only begin to reform this institutionalized corporate profit. Moore writes:

My friend Donna Smith, who was forced to move into her daughter’s spare room at age 52 because health problems bankrupted her and her husband, Larry, now has cancer again. As she undergoes treatment, at least she won’t be in terror of losing coverage and becoming uninsurable. Under Obamacare, her premium has been cut in half, to $456 per month.

Let’s be honest. How many people can actually pay $456 a month? When they’re sick and unable to work? And why should they when we know, from other countries, that back-breaking debt or bankruptcy don’t have to be the price of good health care. I agree with Moore that Obamacare is the right step toward the most efficient and effective health care system, single-payer. But the larger question of how to move from our current system, rife with run-away pricing, and  inequality, is more nuanced and complicated than Moore acknowledges.

While we’ve learned to expect profit-driven priorities and behavior from corporations, hospitals, the front line of health care provision, the life-saving pillars of our communities, continue to be seen as benevolent and noble institutions. “For many, hospitals still embody the human gift relation, a moral commitment to giving and receiving removed from the purely commercial realm and its cold, bottom-line mentality,” writes Guenter B. Risse in Mending Bodies, Saving Souls: A History of Hospitals. The idea that providing care entitles hospitals to special status comes in part from the origin of the modern hospital.

Both hospital and hospitality (hospitalitas) are derived from the Latin hospes–a host, a guest, a foreigner, a stranger. Hospitality, according to the philosopher Jacques Derrida, “is absolute in that it requires one to give all one has to another without asking any questions, imposing any restrictions, or requiring any compensation” (Mark W. Westmoreland, “Interruptions: Derrida and Hospitality”). For this reason, if we use Derrida to think of hospitality as an ethics and a culture, hospitality can be seen as a statement of social order that denies the self (the host) and welcomes the guest as the new person in charge, the one who decides how to use the home and it’s resources. To give unconditional care to our family and friends is easy; to give to a stranger, no questions asked, no limits placed, is no easy task. Yet this is the greater demand of hospitality. The meaning of hospitality and social obligation are far from static. Over the centuries, their meanings have been shaped by new social orders and beliefs, not the least of which, Christianity.

Homes for the sick existed long before the advent of Christianity but by the time the Roman Empire converted, hospitals were the domain of the Church, a manifestation of its mission to care for those in need. Mark 25:34-40 lays it out plainly:

“Then the King will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.’

Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?’ “The King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’

But the Christian concept of charity altered the original meaning of hospitality by establishing a hierarchy between giver and receiver. Even as Christ, in the ultimate act of charity, offered up himself for sacrifice for our sake, he was elevated as a representative of all humanity. Charity, then, relies on the continuation of a hierarchical relationship. We get something for our sacrifices, our acts of generosity, our extension of kindness. Or as Zizek puts it, charity “allows the capitalistic system to postpone it’s crisis.”*

Charity is a pretense that has allowed capitalism, the monetization of everything, to quietly seep in. It divides the giver from the non-giver and the giver from the receiver.  It looks and sounds like hospitality, but it has a price, whether that be status or rights or, in contemporary America, an impossible, often debilitating fee. “The only hospitality we have ever encountered in the West is conditional,” writes Westmoreland. Charity, or conditional hospitality, makes us feel good but it doesn’t solve the underlying problem of inequality, it only masks it.

One new provision in the Affordable Care Act that unmasks the commodification of charity is the requirement that hospitals report their itemized charitable activities every three years.

This matters. As Elisabeth Rosenthal wrote at The New York Times recently, “many experts argue that most hospitals today do not deserve their tax-exempt status.” Non-profit hospitals–of which there are 2,894, according to the American Hospital Association–are not required to pay federal or state income taxes. Rosenthal reports that such taxes would amount to more than $12 billion a year.

A pending case in Pennsylvania highlights how non-profit hospitals have chosen to spend their cash. The city of Pittsburgh is challenging the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center’s tax-exempt status in court. From Rosenthal’s article:

“Its commitment to charity is dwarfed by its preoccupation with profits,” E.J. Strassburger, the city’s lead lawyer on the case, wrote in a letter to the city solicitor. He said that the hospital failed most, if not all, of Pennsylvania’s criteria for a tax-exempt charity, and that its annual report described it as a “$10 billion global health enterprise,” with excess operating revenue of nearly $1 billion and reserves of more than $3 billion. The institution paid 20 executives more than $1 million annually, he said.

Qualifying for tax-exempt status turns out to be easier than you’d think. Lawyers and researchers are beginning to ask what, exactly, the hospital considers “charity care and community benefit.” The answers are telling.

According to a study published last April by the New England Journal of Medicine (and referenced by Rosenthal in the article cited above), hospitals have been categorizing their charitable works on tax forms since 2009, when the IRS made it mandatory. The study, led by Gary J. Young, analyzed data from 1,800 hospitals and found that their total charitable giving came to a surprisingly small 7.5% (with a range of 1% to 20%). Young and his team also found that the acts hospitals considered charitable weren’t really what many would call giving back.

Sure, providing local immunization programs and contributing to community activities count. But what about “health-professions education” (i.e. paying residents and interns… which, by the way, might explain our escalating doctor shortage, despite an annual hospital subsidy, by Congress via Medicare, of $10.1 billion)? Even “clinical services provided at a financial loss” is questionable when you consider how that financial loss is tabulated. “If a hospital forgives a $3,000 bill for three stitches for a poor patient, how much of that should be counted as charity if the charges are greatly inflated?” asks Rosenthal.

Which brings us back to my friend Chris. What about “unreimbursed costs for means-tested government programs” like Medicare and Medicaid, which pay only a part of the total hospitals would otherwise charge patients or their insurance plans? Yes, charity. For example, to keep the math simple, let’s say that Chris’s hospital sends him a bill for $900,000. Even if Chris and Sue negotiate with the hospital to reduce the bill to $600,000 (which makes one wonder what actual costs for materials and services are), that’s an enormous amount of money to raise. If, after months or years of unsuccessfully trying to collect the total, the hospital could write it off as “charity”–and therefore secure its continued tax-exempt status.

Charity, then, is really a means of continuing our inadequate and entrenched system of health care inequality because it offers care and demands money (and submission to the charade of benevolence) in return. Could the strengthening of Medicare and Medicaid, could the establishment of a single-payer system move our culture toward hospitality that is unconditional? I don’t know. But it would save my friends from the current plight, of scrambling for dollars to live.

In the meanwhile, I know two strangers who need you. You can donate here.

**

Do religious hospitals provide more charity? How about the 645 Catholic hospitals in the US? Do they receive more funding from Catholic sources? In my next column, I’ll discuss a timely new report, jointly produced by the MergerWatch Project and the American Civil Liberties Union, that examines the ways in which Catholic hospitals threaten access to reproductive health care, despite providing no more charity than their secular counterparts. “Miscarriage of Medicine” was released in December. You can read it here.

*Zizek, Slavoj, Living in the End Times (Verso, 2010), page 240: “What this amounts to is nothing less than an elevating of figures such as Soros or Gates into personificatins of the inherent self-negation of the capitalist process itself: their charity work–in the form of immense donations to public welfare–is not just a personal idiosyncrasy. Whether sincere or hypocritical, it is the logical end-point of capitalist circulation, necessary from the strictly economic standpoint, since it allows the capitalistic system to postpone its crisis.”

Ann Neumann is a Visiting Scholar at the Center for Religion and Media at New York University and contributing editor at The Revealer and Guernica magazine. She’s written for Guernica, New York Law School Review, Bookforum (January 2014), Lapham’s Quarterly, Religion & Politics, Killing the Buddha, and The Nation, among others. She’s appeared on NY-1 News, WBAI radio and Voice of America and taught journalism at Drew University. Neumann’s chapter on class and hospice appears in Living with Class: Philosophical Reflections on Identity and Material Culture (Palgrave Macmillan, December 2013), edited by Brian Seitz and Ron Scapp. Neumann is currently writing a book about a good death.

The post Hospitals and the Pretense of Charity appeared first on The Revealer.

Growing up in the nineteen-nineties, it was hard not to come away with a romantic idea of the American teenager — especially the teenagers of two decades before. I was bombarded by constant, gold-tinted recreations of my parents’ youth on television, an endless montage of screaming crowds on the Ed Sullivan show fading into painted Woodstock bodies into raised fists and burning cars. Teenagers, I was told, existed in an important pop-cultural nexus: their taste, and spending power, steered the aesthetics of decades. Their political opinions, to the degree that they existed at all were worthy of consideration.  . To be a teenager, I thought, was to be at the center of things, to be, at least potentially, cool.

It’s embarrassing to admit, but seeing divergent opinions on the matter still gives a kind of brain-freeze. At some fundamental level, I assume that teens have agency, that they know best, and that their generative cultural powers trump any and all arguments for good taste and moderation. Positions to the contrary tend to come off as camp.

Case in point:

Speak Out is a small booklet intended for nebulously “Christian” teens, containing a vernacular rephrasing of the Book of Acts alongside artfully chosen photographs and small reflections on the life of the American adolescent. Its goal, as stated in the introduction, is to “open the door to witnessing for us ordinary people with extra-ordinary Life within.” The interior knowledge of Christ, it argues, is comparable to many “teenage” experiences, such as “getting an ‘A’ in the roughest math course of the semester,” “standing alone on a rocky mountain peak staring at breathtaking beauty” and “hitting a hole-in-one.” However, unlike such minor victories, talking about religious belief is strictly regulated in public and often met with suspicion. “If Christ lives within you, then talking about Him should be as natural as talking about … that very special date you just had,” the text observes. “Yet Speaking Out isn’t natural!”

To address the issue, Speak Out provides the stories of the Apostles’ witnessing, in Acts, as a fit model for emulation. At the same time, in the additional photographic sections, it addresses more practical concerns, and suggests ways in which its readership can apply biblical lessons to their “world of sports, work [and] studies.” The results are often bizarre.

A concern with youth “activism” is noticeable throughout Speak Out!, although the word is unfailingly qualified by the argument that “most [teen activism] is typical games and parties.” This lack of recognition for the political agency of teens seems needlessly patronizing now, especially on the page depicting “obviously … anti-Establishment” girls. However, in the context of Speak Out’s production and intended audience, they make perfect sense.

Speak Out was produced in 1967 by Youth for Christ International, the interdenominational ministry that was largely defined by the style of its first full-time evangelist, Billy Graham. A robust Christian press was a central part of the organization, and the most visible part of that press was a regular magazine, begun in 1945. At first the periodical was known as Youth For Christ, but changes in approach and a reaction to the growing sixties counter-culture prompted a change to the less-declarative title Campus Life in 1965. According to scholar Eileen Luhr, writing in the recent essay collection American Evangelicals and the 1960s [,http://www.amazon.com/American-Evangelicals-Studies-Thought-Culture/dp/0299293645] “the magazine sought to shape a new generation that might exert great influence around the globe through youthful optimism paired with Christian devotion.” Targeting an audience of middle-class, Christian whites, Campus Life aimed to promote engagement with and responsibility for global affairs, with the caveat that all “social change derived from individual conversion.” According to an edition of the Campus Life Forum, a regular feature, in 1971:

“Campus Life asserts that we can reach for genuine heroism in a vast drama of good vs. evil which we are all (whether we know it or not) participating in. We assert that we must go beyond protesting bigotry and hypocrisy, that there is a radical Christian life-style upon which we can build— changing individuals, and therefore society itself.”

Activism was an important term within Campus Life, and the idea of specifically Christian activism generated by Christian witnessing was held up as the publication’s overarching goal. This prompted an adoption, on some level, of the trappings of non-evangelical activism in the nineteen-sixties. Luhr, for instance, cites “a 1966 article titled ‘The Tallest Placard,’” wherein author Gordon Maclean “described a masculine Jesus who supported an activist faith… a ‘real man’ who became the ‘greatest Revolutionary history has ever known!’” In other words, the “activism” which Speak Out dismisses so handily is not suspect because of the age of its participants. Rather, it is not “true” activism, as the editors of Campus Life understand it. If social change can only occur through conversion, the true activists are the readers of Speak Out. It is they who have the power to “[turn] the world upside down.”

Some photo-captions from Speak Out even make a point of allaying readers’ fears at ministering to “anti-establishment” types. In the photo of the protest above, for instance, Campus Life editor Harold Myra, author of Speak Out’s additional text, makes it a point that the student protestor’s “actions indicate a searching for the fulfillment Christ could bring.” In other sections, racial differences and fashion cues are dismissed as barriers to ministry:

This produces the booklet’s most interesting page, which arranges a reflection of Myra’s beside an ambiguous poem from Sonia Wardle and the image of a short-haired, poorly-lit young woman.  “Do we sometimes confuse culture with Christianity?” it asks, from a position somewhere between sympathy and pity. The sympathy may be found in Wardle’s poem, “The Outsider, which embodies the thoughts of its irreligious protagonist so forcefully that it can be read as a credible counter-example to Speak Out’s entire ministerial enterprise. Wardle’s narrator is a “proud unreachable,” and her condition, though anguished, seems to have been assumed with such overpowering force that it earns the reader’s respect as an act of willpower. While it is tempting to assume the sympathetic reading as unintended, Myra’s commentary treads similar water, summarizing the concern that religious conversion might  amount to nothing more than a transformation of style, the creation of a “carbon copy.” This, Myra argues, is missing the point. Fashion, music, cigarettes, hair-dos – these are superficial things. They are also, ironically, icons of what I identify as teenage agency. Speak Out refutes this notion by arguing for the existence of a deeper agency, founded on the same conversion which the larger Campus Life project positions as the cornerstone of social change.

On my first reading, I’ll admit I laughed my way through this material. Speak Out and Youth for Christ International are definitely not “cool” in any kind of identifiable  way. But they aren’t trying to be — and that’s the trick. Speak Out, from the perspective of its authors, actually respects the political and social potential of teenagers far more than the counter-culture, which it sees as lightweight and unproductive. If social change is generated by conversion, inspiring teens to witness is inspiring them directly towards social change. Speak Out actually agrees with my implicit understanding of the “teenager” as existing in a nexus of cultural power — it just doesn’t share my pop-focused understanding of culture. That’s an interesting message, and a nuanced one. I almost missed it entirely.

That said, sixteen-year-old me wouldn’t set foot in a “gigantic pillow fight involving hundreds of Christian teens” if you paid him ten-thousand dollars.

These days I’d do it for free.

The post Speak Out! appeared first on The Revealer.

The grave of Bahauddin Zakariya, surrounded by those of his earliest murids. Photo: Umar Farooq.

By Umar Farooq

The scene that greets the devotee upon entering the final resting place of Shah Jewna leaves little doubt as to what is expected of them in the world outside.

The shrine—an expansive complex of marble buildings that is expanded every year—rises out of a landscape of dusty fields of cotton and fruit orchards pockmarked by brick kilns and dilapidated shops, the most important landmark for miles around. A dirt road leads to the shrine, some 125 miles west of the city of Lahore, in Punjab province.   Hawkers line the road, calling out to the visitor to purchase sweets and flowers to offer Shah Jewna. A three story high arch covered in blue tiles leads to a stairway landing on a clean, white marble courtyard. On one end is a mosque, empty. On another, fifteen cells housing pilgrims that have come to visit the shrine for the traditional nine-day period, sweeping the floors and helping to cook the langar, the free meal offered to impoverished visitors.

The pilgrims seek the intercession of Shah Jewna, hoping the help of an awliyah—or “friend of Allah” –can increase the chances of their prayers being answered.

Shah Jewna, whose grandfather migrated to the region from Bukhara in the 15th century, was a descendant of the Prophet Muhammad.  Shrines like the one devoted to him litter the landscape throughout Pakistan, with the most prominent ones dating from the 11th to 16th centuries.  They house the remains of mystics and ascetics that travelled to the region when Islam was still taking root.  Their followers grew as stories of their miraculous powers spread, and their generosity and charity towards the poor helped convert many local Hindus to Islam.  Shah Jewna, for example, is credited with bringing a boy who had been stabbed in the chest back to life.

Visitors to the Shah Jewna shrine are confronted by a series of banners bearing the image of Makhdoom Syed Faisal Saleh Hayat, the direct descendant of Shah Jewna. The title makhdoom signifies Hayat’s status as a descendant and caretaker of a shrine. “May Allah bestow peace upon Muhammad and on the family of Muhammad,” says one banner in Arabic, recalling part of a rote that every Muslim must recite during five daily prayers. It’s a reminder of the special status given to the Prophet Muhammad’s family, whose descendants in this part of the world carry the title syed.

Another banner asks devotees to vote for Hayat, a remnant from elections held in May this year, when he ran for Parliament for the two districts near the shrine.

One of many signs depicting Faisal Saleh Hayat in his hometown of Shah Jewna. Photo: Umar Farooq.

In Pakistan, the descendants of saints like Shah Jewna have played an important role in politics for centuries. They have historically commanded the devotion of hundreds of thousands of followers who looked to them for guidance in all spheres of life.  Prime Ministers, Presidents, and numerous legislators have been elected into office because of the influence they wield as spiritual guides for millions of Pakistanis.

But things are changing in Pakistan, which is experiencing rising urbanization and an Islamic revival that is gradually moving Muslims away from the Sufi shrines that used to dominate rural life. Increasingly, urbanized Muslims in Pakistan are looking for a direct path to Allah, one that does not involve the intercession of saints.  As a result, the descendants of those saints, or those that control shrines housing those saints, exert less and less influence.

The makhdooms have tried to supplant the decline in religious devotees with patronage, granting government resources to those voters that are loyal to them.  But in areas where people are no longer dependent on the patronage of landowning makhdooms like Hayat, more and more Pakistanis are voting based on the candidate’s record and platform instead of their pedigree.  And voters are less likely to overlook allegations of corruption against a makhdoom.

“I’ve always voted for him [Hayat], for the last 30 years,” says a scrap dealer on the main road of Shah Jewna and a regular visitor to the shrine. “Everyone here votes for him.” Hayat is the sajjada-nashin, the head, of Shah Jewna’s congregation, millions of people that credit the saint for converting their ancestors to Islam. On the death anniversary of Shah Jewna – called his urs, or marriage with Allah—hundreds of thousands will show up to pay their respects at the shrine.

Despite repeatedly switching political parties, Hayat has won the area’s National Assembly seat in almost every electoral contest since 1977. The years he has lost, his cousin Syeda Abida Hussain, also a descendant of Shah Jewna, has won instead. Hayat served as a Federal Minister five times, including as the Minister of Interior under President Pervez Musharraf in 2002, when he was accused of doling out thousands of government jobs to his constituents in return for their votes.

“He hasn’t done anything as noteworthy as the bridge,” says Khanam Ahmed, who makes bricks at a kiln near the shrine. Until 2010, the town of Shah Jewna was connected to the nearby city of Jhang by a single, rickety, century-old bridge that served pedestrians, cars, and trains. Hayat had a new bridge built, and giant billboards have been erected along the road leading into town to make sure no one forgets it. “We have always voted for one of the two families,” says Sarfaraz Amir, another brick maker, referring to Hayat and Hussain’s families. “Both have never done much work. They know they will always get votes.”

Shah Jewna only has basic primary-level schools, which are so far apart many parents simply don’t send their kids. Many homes lack electricity, and no one has access to natural gas for heating or cooking. “We only see him [Hayat] during elections,” says Amir. Like many of the politicians in this part of Pakistan, Hayat lives in Islamabad, and only returns to campaign for elections or partake in the annual urs.

Despite Hayat’s wholesale neglect of his constituency, almost all the residents of the town of Shah Jewna will continue to vote for him or his family. At first glance, it might seem like a simple case of religious devotion, but as Hayat’s record on development shows, many voters choose him because they need him to get even the most basic infrastructure. With no local government, development lies entirely in the hands of provincial and national legislators like Hayat, who receive $200,000 each term to spend on their constituency.

But Hayat lost the 2013 elections. Redistricting just before the elections changed the usual constituency, introducing a new, more urbanized voting block outside Shah Jewna into the electorate and making it possible for a third candidate, unconnected to the shrine, to win by a narrow margin.

The example of the Shah Jewna shrine bears an important lesson for examining the power of Sufi shrines in Pakistan: veneration is not a guarantee of victory. Even makhdooms must supplant power with patronage, because their constituencies are changing, and including those that are no longer willing to blindly hand their spiritual masters their votes.

The shrine of Shah Yusuf Gardezi in Multan. Photo: Umar Farooq.

The city of Multan, in southern Punjab, is called the City of Saints because of the numerous famous shrines it houses. It’s a dusty and ancient abode, with luxurious Land Cruisers carefully making their way through hoards of donkey-drawn carts. When Alexander the Great arrived in Multan in 326 BC, it was already a bustling city, surrounded by massive fortified walls. It was the first major city to come under Muslim rule in South Asia, falling to Arab armies led by Muhammad bin Qasim in 712 AD, and remaining largely under Muslim rule until 1818, when the Sikh Maharaja Ranjit Singh took over Multan and the Punjab.

Between the 12th and 16th centuries, Multan attracted a large numbers of Sufi ascetics whose shrines continue to shape the political landscape of Pakistan.

Beginning with the Mughul Empire in the 16th century and throughout Sikh rule in the 19th century, the makhdooms and pirs of Multan were given tracts of land in exchange for political support. After 1848, the British accelerated this process, handing out huge landholdings in exchange for their support in putting down rebellions over the next few decades.

It was a carefully calculated move on the part of the British, which ended up empowering a handful of makhdoom families that still dominate politics in southern Punjab. “Practically every Muhammadan in the district has his pir … in most cases a Syad, Koreshi, or Khagga,” explains the 1923 Gazetteer of the Multan District, referring to three families that continue to dominate politics in the region today. When a Muslim and Hindu-led rebellion broke out in 1857, the same makhdooms “rendered valuable assistance to Government” and in return “ received suitable rewards.”

Locals still tell tales of the British doling out huge tracts of land to the families. One folk tale explains how the British would simply let a horse run until it collapsed form exhaustion, and hand the entire length it had traversed to the makhdooms. The loyalists were given key administrative jobs, seats in District Councils or made Magistrates, paving the way for their future dominance of politics. In 1900, in an effort to undercut the emerging power of urban capitalists opposed to their rule, the British passed the Punjab Alienation of Land Act, explicitly defining a set of “agricultural tribes” that included Sufi shrine caretakers, and barring others from obtaining land in rural areas. The shrine leadership, which traditionally relied on its religious prestige, now found itself in perpetual ownership of large tracts of farmland.

A man puts fresh garlands on the grave of a makhdoom at the shrine of Bahauddin Zakariya in the Multan fort. Photo: Umar Farooq.

The most important shrines in Multan are situated around the ancient city’s fort.  The tombs of two of Pakistan’s most revered saints, Bahauddin Zakariya (died 1267) and Shah Rukne Alam (died 1335), sit on a hill inside the fort, rising high above the perpetual haze that blankets the city. The beautiful octagonal buildings—topped with domes and massive spires—are usually crowded with thousands of worshipers from all over Pakistan. Traditionally, the pilgrims make their way to the shrines by walking on bare feet, in some cases from hundreds of kilometers away. For many, this is the only pilgrimage they will ever be able to make—the cost of going to Mecca for the Hajj being unimaginably out of reach.

Inside Bahauddin Zakariya’s tomb, scores of mounds covered in a single layer of white plaster mark the final resting places of his earliest, closest followers, his murids. Just outside the building are scores more graves, shrines in the making, to his makhdooms, the unbroken line of descendants that look after his legacy.

Visitors light candles to symbolize their prayers, leaving them on the tombs. Some sprinkle the graves with rose petals, and others tie pieces of string to the building’s window screens. The strings are mannats, reminders of an oath sworn to the saint that must be fulfilled if the visitor’s prayer is answered. When the oath is fulfilled, the visitor will return to the shrine and remove the mannat.

In an open space set apart from the ancient graves, a gazebo houses the graves of the last generations of makhdooms, the father and grandfather of Shah Mehmood Qureshi, the current makhdoom and the area’s representative in Pakistan’s National Assembly—the Qureshis are just one of a number of prominent families connected to shrines in the area. Qureshi, a Cambridge-educated farmer, previously served as the Foreign Minister of Pakistan, and his late father served as the governor of Punjab. He’s also the makhdoom of the nearby shrine of Shah Rukne Alam, the grandson of Bahauddin Zakariya.

Another nearby shrine is under the care of Yusuf Raza Gilani, who served as Pakistan’s Prime Minister between 2008 and 2012.  Prime Minister Gilani is the makhdoom of the shrine of Syed Musa Pak Gilani (died 1592), who links his family to that of Abdul Qadir Gilani, a 12th century mystic that most Sufi orders the world over trace their origin to.

A man prays at the shrine of Bahauddin Zakariya in the Multan fort. Photo: Umar Farooq.

But not every shrine in Multan has played a role in politics.

The shrine of Shah Shamsuddin Sabzwari (died 1276) lies outside the Multan fort, and is in need of extensive repair. Historically, the shrine’s caretakers have refused to take any part in politics, which helps explain the financial straits it is in.

“The makhdooms have lots of influence, wherever people are ignorant, they have followers,” says Makhdoom Syed Zahid Hussain Shamsi, the shrine’s caretaker and a direct descendant of Shah Shamsuddin. Shamsi is a lawyer, and claims the other shrines—particularly that of Syed Musa Pak Gilani—divert funds meant to restore all the city’s shrines.

Yusuf Raza Gilani was removed from the post of Prime Minister in 2012, after refusing to re-open corruption cases against then President Asif Ali Zardari. Last year, Pakistani investigators decided to indict him for a series of corruption cases. During his time as Prime Minister, Gilani diverted more than $200 million to development projects in Multan, building half a dozen flyovers and an expressway, and a new bridge connecting a largely isolated community to the west of the city.

Despite their religious following and attempts at patronage, the Gilanis lost almost every contest they were involved in this year’s elections (Yusuf Raza Gilani himself was disqualified from ever running for office by the Supreme Court.). The loss can partly be attributed to the fact that the family no longer controls enough land to form a single voting block – much of their historical farm land has been divided among children.

But Pakistanis are also adopting higher expectations for their leadership, and the makhdooms are not immune to this.  The party the Gilanis were affiliated with, the Pakistan People’s Party, was handed a resounding defeat nationally because of allegations of corruption against its leadership. Both of Yusuf Raza Gilani’s sons lost, even though they were contesting elections from traditional family seats. His nephew, Pir Ali Baba, was also roundly defeated in the town of Sandhilianwali, in central Punjab, despite having followers there that number in the several hundred thousands.

Whatever edge the Gilanis had because of their lineage was overshadowed by their affiliation with the Pakistan People’s Party and its reputation for corrupt leadership.

Shah Mehmood Qureshi opted to join a new party, the Pakistan Tehrike e Insaaf, which won a sizable victory in this year’s elections based on an aggressively anti-corruption platform.

The shrine of Shah Rukn-e-Alam in Multan’s fort. Photo: Umar Farooq.

Pakistan’s 342-member National Assembly includes six makhdooms, descendants of Sufi saints like Hayat that head large congregations. There are also five pirs, leaders of shrines that are not direct descendants of saints, but who still command hundreds of thousands of followers. Finally, there are 17 syeds who claim descent from the Prophet Muhammad, but may not lead religious congregations.

The defeat of the Gilanis and Syed Faisal Saleh Hayat due to their image as corrupt politicians is an indication of the declining power wielded by Sufi leaders.  But there is another reason behind the diminishing influence of the shrines and their caretakers.

Pakistan is urbanizing rapidly – nearly 40% of people live in cities today, twice the percentage in 1951 – and more and more people are being influenced by Islamic revival movements of the last century that have shunned the veneration of shrines, likening it to the worship of those buried there.

Increasingly cosmopolitan lifestyles have moved Muslims away from shrines.  Individuals that used to look towards a shrine as a spiritual center in their rural lives, may now view Sufism as archaic.

Shaukat Ijaz, a real estate broker from Haripur migrated to Islamabad more than a decade ago looking for work. Initially, he spent much of his spare time at one of the city’s most famous shrines, Golra Sharif, the burial place of Pir Meher Ali Shah, a saint who lived during the 19th century. Ijaz studied the Quran directly under the saint’s grandson , and today the sight of throngs of devotees kissing the grave of his teacher makes him visibly uncomfortable.

A few weeks before last year’s elections, the current sajjada-nashin of Golra Sharif, Pir Jalaluddin, told his followers to support the Pakistan Tehrik e Insaaf party.

After congregational prayers at the shrine on a recent Friday evening, thousands of men and women formed lines that stretch for more than a hundred yards, waiting to meet Pir Jalaluddin and ask for his advice. Guidance will be given in every arena, from how to atone for a sin, to who to marry and where to invest money.

Ijaz maintains his distance from the pir. After spending a few years at the shrine, Ijaz says he joined the Tablighi Jamaat, a revivalist Islamist movement that promotes individual enlightenment over the veneration of saints.  Members of the Tablighi Jamaat form small, autonomous groups that visit communities of Muslims, usually in far flung places, even in other countries, in an effort to revive Islam at the individual level.  The movement advocates self-betterment and introspection, and a religious adherence to obligatory worship like the five daily prayers.  With the Tableeghi Jamaat, Ijaz will go on pilgrimages that might last up to four months, but he will not head for shrines, he will head for mosques, where he will spend his spare time in meditation on his own, or in discussions with fellow travelers.

Like millions of other rapidly urbanizing Pakistanis, Ijaz has circumscribed the role of the shrine in his spiritual life. He regularly visits the shrine, but he does not seek any blessings from the saint’s being. When it comes to voting, he says he would never think of voting according to the pir’s wishes. In fact, in this election, he did not follow the sajjada-nashin’s advice, and voted for a different party altogether.

Along with the anti-corruption stance of voters, reformist attitudes toward Sufism like Ijaz’s could spell the end of shrines in Pakistan’s politics altogether.

Umar Farooq is a freelance journalist whose work has appeared in the Christian Science Monitor, the Wall Street Journal, and the Globe and Mail. He tweets @UmarFarooq_

With support from the Henry R. Luce Initiative on Religion and International Affairs.

The post Diminishing Returns: Sufi Shrines in Pakistan’s Politics appeared first on The Revealer.

Bnagladesh holds elections, January 5, 2014. (Image via AFP)

By Nayma Qayum

On 6^th April 2013, members of an Islamic group by the name of Hefazat-i-Islam organized what they called a “long march” into Dhaka city. They had gathered at various localities across the country on the days preceding the march, and on the sixth, they marched into Dhaka city shouting slogans that called for the death of the blasphemous. By late morning, thousands of Hefazat members had gathered at a city square called Shapla Chottor in Dhaka’s commercial hub, Motijheel.

Photographs and video footage of the procession shows that the group consisted entirely of men. Participants wore the same long and pastel-colored panjabi (long shirt) and a white tupi (cap). Most of them appeared to be young boys. Once the gathering was in place, the group’s leaders began the rally with a recitation from the holy Quran. Their only call at the time was for the death of the “atheist” bloggers, who had staged the Shahbag protest in February and demanded the death penalty for 1971 war criminals. Many of the accused in these trials belonged to the Jama’at-e-Islami (JI), the country’s premier Islamic party. But the Hefazat’s slogans did not just call for the release of Jama’at leaders –they also sought to punish initiators of the Shahbag movement for their alleged blasphemy.

The sheer magnitude of the march surprised many Dhaka-city residents – the number of participants, and their devotion to the cause as they walked for hundreds of miles to reach the city. One news outlet called it the “biggest-ever showdown by any Islamist group in recent times” in Bangladesh.

The march contradicts the neoliberal image of Bangladesh that the international media has projected in recent years. The Bangladesh government has pursued a World Bank-prescribed neoliberal development agenda; the government and non-government actors started to empower rural women through NGO programs and microfinance as far back as the early seventies. The government has started to contain the exploding population growth rate, as fertility rates have declined from almost seven children per woman in 1975 to 2.5 in 2006 according to the World Bank. Almost every single child of primary school-going age was enrolled in school by 2011. It was within this scenario that the war crimes trials and Shahbag movement prompted the entry of a new grassroots Islamic force into the political scene.

In 2012, the Awami League government established a War Crimes Trials in order to try perpetrators of 1971 war crimes, many of whom were now prominent members of the opposition alliance. The Bangladeshi people have waited a long time for a true reckoning on 1971. They have sought justice for the violence inflicted on the East Pakistan by the Pakistani Army and collaborators during the Liberation War from West Pakistan.  Over four decades later, the contested International War Crimes Tribunal (ICT) may not have provided the nation with closure.

The Secular Origin of Bangladesh

When the Indian subcontinent decolonized in 1947, then East-Bengal became part of Pakistan due to the common Islamic majority of the two populations.  For twenty-four years, West Pakistan marginalized its eastern province both economically and politically, prompting a movement for regional autonomy that soon grew into a full-blown call for independence. In 1971, the country became independent from West Pakistan after a bloody civil war and declared secularism as a founding principle, enshrined in its new constitution.

The secular foundation of Bangladesh’s 1972 constitution did not reflect the role that Islam played in society. In fact, over 89% of Bangladesh’s population is Muslim. The country also has the fourth-largest Muslim population in the world, and the number is expected to grow from 14.86 million to 187.5 million by 2030. Rather, Bangladesh’s secular origin is at least partially linked to a desire to detach the new country from the Islamic identity that it shared with West Pakistan. The independence movement was driven by chants such as “Joy Bangla,” as Bangladesh’s founders sought to establish a new state based on ethnic Bengali nationalism instead of the common Islamic identity that bound the two Pakistans. Thus, Bangladesh’s secular foundation may not have been an effort to undermine the role of religion in society, but rather, to separate religion from politics.

In 1971, the Pakistan Army engaged in mass atrocities against Bangladesh’s civilian population. They were aided by their paramilitary wings and local collaborators, many of whom allegedly belonged to the Islamic party, Jama’at-e-Islami, which also opposed the idea of independent Bangladesh. The country’s first Awami League government fell in 1975, when its leader, Sheikh Mujib was killed along with many of his family members inside his own home. The country was governed by a number of military governments amidst severe political unrest and numerous coups. Since the transition to multiparty democracy in 1991, both the Awami League and BNP have practiced dynastic politics and held power in alternate terms.

Both AL and BNP enjoy massive followings based on their historical legacies. During electoral campaigns, AL plays up Sheikh Mujib’s leadership in the liberation war and generally projects a secular, pro-India image (India played a pivotal role in the Liberation War. A new government in exile was based in Calcutta, and the India Army had fought alongside civil combatants and soldiers who had defected from the Pakistan Army. In turn, BNP focuses on the numerous developmental initiatives that its first President, Ziaur Rahman, adopted in the late seventies and early eighties. BNP has also acquired a pro-Islam reputation; President Ziaur Rahman replaced the word secularism in Bangladesh’s constitution with “absolute trust and faith in almighty Allah,” as part of an effort to ally with Islamic countries, such as Saudi Arabia, and seek a position for Bangladesh in the Islamic world.

Recent events have intensified the existing conflict between these two parties. During the ICT trials, BNP stood by its coalition partner Jama’at and demanded fair trials, as well as the trying of alleged collaborators who were part of the ruling party alliance (to date, all charged war criminals belong to the BNP-Jama’at alliance). At the time, a massive protest erupted in Dhaka’s Shahbag Chottor, where citizens gathered to demand the death penalty for Kader Mollah, a JI-leader and charged war criminal whom the tribunal had sentenced to life imprisonment. The AL coopted the Shahbag movement and appeared to stand by its leaders, and a clear divide appeared within Bangladeshi political and intellectual circles, where AL supporters branded the BNP as anti-liberation due to their questioning of the war crimes trials and support for JI leaders, and BNP supporters branded the AL as anti-Islamic.

Religion and Party Preference in Bashabo (2009-2011)

The war crimes trials have intensified the role that Islam plays in the AL-BNP divide. However, Islamic parties have historically played a limited role in mainstream politics. The JI enjoys a small following and has previously formed coalition governments with both AL and BNP. But the party has a limited voter base. At least in urban centers, religion seems to have had little influence on party preference before 2013.

Between 2009 and 2011, I interviewed residents of Bashabo, an area in Dhaka city, regarding their perceptions of various parties and motivations for participation in politics. Bashabo lies on the outskirts of Dhaka city. It falls just east of the rail tracks that border the capital and lies adjacent to the city’s easternmost thana, Demra. The area drew large numbers of migrant workers. Many of the people I spoke with belonged to families where the primary earners held low-paying desk jobs or worked in the informal service sector – in the housing, garments, or urban transportation industries. Slum-dwellers huddled large families together into small, one-room tin huts. Even the better-off families cramped numerous members into small apartments. They shared bedrooms and converted living rooms into sleeping quarters.

Bashabo dwellers’ support for AL-BNP had little to do with religion, or even the parties’ programmatic agendas. Rather, they chose to support parties based on historical legacies and their perception of the parties’ ability to meeting their material needs. Selina was a 27 year-old housewife who had attended college, but given up her career after her wedding.[1] She shared a tiny two-bedroom apartment with her in-laws; her living room was crowded with oversized sofas and small cabinets that overflowed with kitchenware. Selina was raised as an avid BNP supporter. She said that BNP was a good party as the country had progressed under this party; prices of basic necessities (mostly food, such as rice, lentils, sugar, and gas) were also low under BNP governments. However, in reality, prices were not low under either AL or BNP governments, and in fact, surged during the post-BNP period, when an independent caretaker government remained in office for almost three years in order to restore a law and order crisis. Ahmed, a 42 year-old office worker also believed that AL’s performance far exceeded that of BNP. He said, “Prices were less, and people lived peacefully. AL was also the most responsive government.”

Both Selina and Ahmed had grown up supporting their party of choice. In fact, most people I spoke to vote for the political party that their parents had also supported.  Ayesha, a housewife in her forties, has voted in the last four national elections.[2] Although disenchanted with the various existing parties, she is eager to vote. During elections in 2008, she had gone to visit her parents in the northern district of Sylhet. She took an overnight train ride back to Dhaka so that she could vote the next day. Ayesha felt that most democratic governments did not do anything for the people. Their business pretty much halted during the current AL regime due to high levels of extortion by ruling party cadres. But she voted regularly and supported BNP because her father did. Many times during the interview, she said that voting was her responsibility and that she had learnt this from her family.

Neither Selina, nor Ayesha supported BNP for their alliance with the Jama’at-e-Islami. In fact, none of the sixty-five interviewees from the area supported the JI – they supported the AL, BNP, or AL-ally Jatiya Party. For Dhaka-city dwellers, religion and politics were separate. Nor were they supportive of the city-wide strikes (hartals) that plagued urban life. Most of them liked democracy – some supported army interventions when law and order spiraled out of control. But they did not like hartal, protests that involved city or nation-wide shutdown. A young professional who worked in a private firm said that protesting was of little use, as most protests are staged by the political parties in order to force out the opposition. In his eyes, when parties protested in Bangladesh, they almost never made demands on behalf of the people. “People protest because they will get some advantage out of it.” He added, “Money or connections. It is political.”  Like many others, he felt that the Jama’at-e-Islami used religion to amass power, but failed to uphold the true values of Islam.

One man I interviewed was well past his nineties. He was dismayed at the state of politics in Bangladesh and felt that the Jama’at’s religiosity was limited to prayer. “They do not live up to religious morals” he said. “Outside of their fake prayers they do immoral things.”

The new conflict: AL vs. BNP-Jama’at-Shibir

The war crimes trials have now created an unprecedented ideological divide among supporters of the two parties in urban Bangladesh. Over the past months, opposition activists from the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) and its coalition partner, the Jama’at-e-Islami, have clashed with the police and workers of the ruling Awami League (AL). The country is not unfamiliar with such political turmoil nor is such violence exclusive to the BNP-Jama’at alliance. While one party has ruled, its opponent party has frequently used hartals (strikes) as a weapon to delegitimize the ruling party and force them to step down.

On 5^th January, Bangladesh held elections that were far from representative. In many areas, Awami League candidates won uncontested as the opposition boycotted polls and refused to go into elections without a neutral caretaker government. Very few people showed up at the polls; Al Jazeera reports that the media declared between 20 and 30 percent turnout and the election commission claimed official turnout at 40 percent in 139 constituencies.

The ongoing deadlock between the ruling AL and opposition BNP also has its roots in the war crimes trials. The AL has ardently pursued these trials as to live up to its electoral agenda of 2008. But many of the accused war criminals belong to the Jama’at-e-Islami (JI), a prominent Islamic party and a member of the opposition coalition.  The Jama’at-e-Islami and Shibir have embarked on a violent campaign to oppose the verdicts against their leaders.

The BNP opposition initially stood by its coalition partner and contested the trials’ flawed process – witnesses have disappeared midtrial or been coerced into silence and on 12^th December 2013, Abdul Kader Mollah was hanged to death after a law was retroactively amended to retry the accused after an initial verdict granted him a life sentence. After Mollah’s death, violence escalated as activists of Jama’at and its student wing Shibir continued their violent campaign. The earlier verdict of life sentence for Mollah also sparked a mass protest, now popularly known as Shahbag movement, where thousands of Bangladeshis demanded justice for the war crimes and the banning of Islamic parties. Later this year, the Supreme Court removed Jama’at from politics and the election commission prevented them from registering for the election.

The war crimes trials and subsequent Shahbag movement have prompted the emergence of a new kind of politics. Both parties have used these events to create new and perceived ideological divides. Their very stand on the issues has forced them to take sides; those supporting the trials verdicts are now rallying behind the AL but being labelled as anti-Islam by their proponents, and those demanding due process are now rallying behind the BNP and being castigated as anti-liberation. The Awami League General Secretary has said that the BNP has now become the prime anti-liberation party.  Others have called the Awami League anti-Islam and fascist based on its crackdown on opposition activists and guiding philosophy of Bengali nationalism; the 1971 liberation movement was guided by the latter, which stood in opposition to the Islamic identity that bound the two Pakistans.

The Hefazat and a Silent Rural Transformation

It was this very political climate that the Hefazat-e-Islam emerges with its extreme vision of political Islam. The group’s radical demands are surprising and contradict Bangladesh’s successful pursuit of neoliberal growth and human development, and especially, the empowerment of its women through the efforts of various non-governmental organizations (NGOs). The Hefazat not only asked for the punishment of blasphemy with death, but also for educating boys and girls separately and banning the installment of sculptures across the country, among other things.

The Hefazat’s march drew participants from towns and villages across the country. Most of its members did not live in Dhaka; they came from a world that was far removed from the cosmopolitan setting that gave birth to the Shahbag movement. Religious organizations have indeed transformed rural Bangladesh. During a weekend trip to Bangladesh’s north-eastern district of Hobiganj two years ago, a friend snapped a picture of a curious road sign on the drive from Hobiganj town to Lawacchara, a national park in the heart of the district. The sign read, “Ma bonera porda manun,” which translates to “mothers and sisters, cover yourselves.” Local travelers on this route remain unfazed by such billboards. Hobiganj falls within the division of Sylhet, which has the reputation of being fairly conservative. However, the billboard illustrates one of the many ways in which religious organizations have reinforced existing religious norms, and perhaps, instilled new religious practices into rural society.

In Bangladesh, development organizations – for example, donor organizations, national NGOs, and United Nations agencies – and Islamic organizations have developed side-by-side since the late 1970s. It was during this period that Bangladesh’s governments adopted poverty reduction and rural development as crucial components of its development strategy.  Massive aid entered the country through Islamic sources via the petrodollar bonanza, and along with diaspora remittances, funded hospitals, clinics, educational foundations, orphanages, and madrassas or Islamic schools. President Ziaur Rahman strengthened alliances with Western donors. He secured a total of US$ 808.63 million in aid from the Muslim states and established a security relationship with china, but the most significant volume of aid came from the USA and other Western allies, including Japan.

But foreign funded Islamic institutions have won the hearts and minds of many rural Bangladeshis, as they provided essential services to rural Bangladeshis much earlier than NGOs funded by western donors. Geoff Wood reports that these Islamic sources of aid have avoided classic West-favored development sectors such as agriculture, infrastructure, and poverty reduction, and instead focused on health services and madrassa education. As the Western donors have recently turned their attention to the health and education sectors, these areas have become “contested terrain.” As government schools have failed to keep up with Bangladesh’s exponentially growing population, both NGO schools and madrassas have picked up the slack. State-funded madrassas have expanded their focus to accommodate a modern curriculum, but other foreign-funded madrassas focus strictly on Islamic studies.

Much like the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, these organizations have entered rural society and provided much-needed services to an impoverished population. Unlike NGO-services at the time, which focused on longer-term goals of livelihoods and poverty eradication, the services provided by Islamic organizations were immediate. Wood writes that it is certainly not a coincidence that cultural and religious rejection of Bangladesh’s secular founding principles occurred alongside a heightened sense of relative deprivation and that arises from exclusionary growth that is assisted by urbanization, migration, and mobility. Indeed, in Bangladesh, poverty and weak institutions may have contributed to the attractiveness of service-providing religious institutions.

These Islamic organizations are also likely to have filled a vacuum that occurred in the weak institutional context of rural Bangladesh. Rapid growth uprooted older and traditional power structures and provided new actors with opportunities to assume leadership positions. Local religious leaders could have found new spaces to exercise their authority within this rapidly shifting social structure.

As local religious authorities grew in strength, they openly clashed with some of the larger national NGOs, such as BRAC. This conflict was fairly visible during the 1990s, when there was a sudden rise in crimes against women by militant Islamic groups and rural elites, including the local clergy. In 1993, several women were publicly stoned by a local clergy for adultery and one woman was burnt to death. The clergy openly condemned donor-funded and national NGOs, many of which implemented programs for rural women. In 1997, a human rights initiative by the development organization BRAC that involved fixing 700,000 posters throughout Bangladesh met with opposition from religious groups, where attacks included verbal condemnation, tearing down of posters, and organizing demonstrations against BRAC staff.

In the context of this transformation, the radical demands of the Hefazat-e-Islam may not as be as surprising as they first appear in a country that was founded a secular state and has later embraced neoliberal development. Indeed, images suggest that the group consists of young men, mostly madrassa students who attended the rally to condemn those who are desecrating their religion. As the Hefazat marched through the streets of Dhaka in early April, the young men chanted, “Nastik blogger-der fashi chai,” which translates to “We demand that the atheist bloggers be hanged.” (The online blogger network had initiated the Shahbag movement that called for war criminals to be hanged). If we imagine the circumstances through their eyes, the protestors were probably defending their religion as they know it, and their values as endorsed by the institution that educates and feeds them.

Faruk Wasif writes of the morning after the Hefazat march,

In the morning I saw four teenagers on the pavement across the street from Mohammadpur Central College. They wore the usual jobba-tupi, but no footwear. Those, they had lost in Motijheel, and could not buy another pair. Now, the four of them hold hands and walk the streets of an unknown city. They have figured out that this nation’s capital no longer belongs to them….

…They had come to Dhaka just like that, in hundreds of thousands, walking in lines, along with their hujoors. I don’t know how much they despise this city, but they have now certainly realized that those who own Dhaka despise them.

Wasif identifies a previously unnoticed dichotomy between urban and rural Bangladesh that the Hefazat’s march has now brought to the surface.

The intersection of the war crimes trials a growth in grassroots Islamic organizations may have created a turning point for Bangladeshi politics. The conflict that surrounds these trials has provided groups such as the Hefazat to emerge as new and visible actors in the political space. The AL and BNP now remain in a deadlock, but religious parties are no longer playing a role in mainstream politics after the ban on Jama’at. However, an emerging Islamic politics threatens Bangladesh’s secular politics, political stability, and women’s rights and freedoms. These grassroots religious organizations may provide Jama’at with a space for its operations. Jama’at has a history of violence in Bangladesh. The Hefazat’s demands resonate elements of Sharia Law. For example, the demands ask for a stop on the “free-mixing” of men and women. One of their leaders referred to women as tetul (tamarind) and argued that women should stay confined to their homes.

The Hefazat may not play a role in mainstream politics, but its followers are not strangers to the rural population. The young men who marched into Dhaka city are themselves members of rural communities. Should the group emerge as a potent political force, it will pose a challenge to Bangladesh’s secular politics, neoliberal development, and the cosmopolitanism that has grown out of rapid economic growth and urbanization.

Nayma Qayum is a PhD Candidate at the Graduate Center, City University of New York.

The post Bangladesh: Taking Sides appeared first on The Revealer.

“Performing Piety: Singers and Actors in Egypt’s Islamic Revival,” by Karin van Niewkerk (University of Texas Press, 2013)

By Maurice Chammah

Mickey Rooney, Chris Tucker, Kirk Cameron, Bob Dylan, Mr. T. This list of celebrities, which you don’t see very often, represents some of the bigger names who reinvented themselves as born-again Christians. Of the group, only Cameron really left the mainstream entertainment business to star in Christian films like Left Behind and Fireproof. Many others made the transition with less fanfare. Mr. T mostly speaks at small community churches. Chris Tucker has said almost nothing publicly.

But together these celebrities show us something else. They represent a slow and broad turn towards evangelical Christianity that permeated American popular culture throughout the second half of the twentieth century.  Their born-again narrative tapped into a broader cultural movement that by the 2000s had already found a place in American political life, in Jimmy Carter, the Moral Majority, and years later in George W. Bush’s oft-professed faith. Born-again politicians and born-again entertainers create a context for one another, and allow non-famous Americans to see their own decisions to join a church and have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ as part of the mainstream.

That dynamic has been easier to understand since I began exploring it in the context of Egypt, a country that also saw a huge swing towards public religiosity at the same time that Islam found a voice — albeit a constantly repressed one — in the country’s political life. The US had Jimmy Carter, who talked about being born again only to lose an election to Ronald Reagan’s merger of the far right with evangelical Christianity. Egypt had Anwar Sadat, who bolstered his image as a pious Muslim just as he crushed radical Islamists. Carter lost a second term to his co-religionists. Sadat was assassinated by his.

Danish anthropologist Karin van Nieuwkerk, explores these dynamics of religion and public life in her new book, Performing Piety. A study of celebrities who publicly renounced “sinful” lifestyles as dancers, singers, and actresses, the book looks at how they reinvented their public images as beacons of worship, preaching, and charity.

Throughout the 1980’s and 1990’s, Egypt underwent a social transformation in which much of the population turned to Islamic ritual in their daily lives. A small group of anthropologists, Saba Mahmood and Charles Hirschkind among them, have studied in rich detail the Islamic culture that came out of that period—mosque study groups, sermons distributed by cassette and religious television. Van Nieuwkerk’s study of celebrities who “repented” and turned their back on previously “sinful” (if highly lucrative) careers, adds to this literature.

Van Nieuwkerk argues that their self-styled narratives of finding faith are a repository for the imaginations of ordinary Egyptians, who see themselves in these stars. “Since they are famous stars,” she writes, “they themselves feel an urgent need to ‘celebritize’ piety, to hide breaches and imperfections as well as to uphold and carefully monitor their public images as pious exemplary personalities.”

And because the piety of celebrities is so embedded as a phenomenon in the intricacies of Egyptian political and cultural history, van Nieuwkerk must explain that history in long, richly detailed passages. The result is a lucid explanation of the myriad forces that have shaped contemporary Egyptian society.

Van Nieuwkerk is less of a critical theorist than others in her field. There are none of the broad challenges to canonical Western thinking that made Saba Mahmood’s The Politics of Piety a fascinating and ambitious text but wholly unapproachable to non-academics.  This book is deliberately not as grand a statement, but its modest effort to provide context for a little understood historical trend make it actually far more readable to non-specialists. She begins each chapter with the story of an individual star before exploring a broader theme. In the 1980’s, that theme is the repentance and veiling of a number of female actresses and dancers. Their public narratives dovetailed with the broader movement towards piety in Egyptian society.

Then, in the 1990’s, the number of stars reached a “critical mass” that “greatly disturbed the secular field of art.” Secular newspapers, seeing in these conversions evidence of growing radicalism in their society, satirized the stars’ self-presentations, bringing even more attention to them. Since political activism was silenced and the Muslim Brotherhood was banned, popular culture and the press became a place to debate secularism and Islamism. “Gender, art, and Islam, condensed in the symbol of the veiled actresses, proved a perfect way to delineate the opposing ideals of secularists and Islamists,” van Nieuwkerk explains, “in which the religious idiom nevertheless became inescapable, strengthening the Islamization of the public sphere.”

Van Nieuwkerk keeps an eye on how her subjects were perceived by ordinary Egyptians, and she finds an ambiguity that illustrates a tense relationship between secularism and Islam. Apparently, a popular joke in 90’s Egypt went like this: “Who are the second best-paid women in Egypt? Belly dancers, of course, because Saudi tourists throw banknotes of a hundred dollars on their feet while they are dancing. Who are the best-paid women in Egypt? The converted belly dancers, of course, because Saudi sheikhs transfer banknotes of a thousand dollars to their accounts if they stop dancing.” Many secular Egyptians were distrustful of the motivations of the repentant stars, and used humor as a way of expressing their anxiety at the rising influence of Islam in their society, just as their fellow Egyptians happily embraced it.

In the late 1990’s and early 2000’s, a period van Nieuwkerk explores in the final part of the book, there was a trend towards “a relatively open view that encouraged artists to return with pious productions.” New debates arose about whether “art with a purpose,” that is, openly Islamic productions in which women always wore headscarves and were never seen in intimate situations with men, was a refreshing alternative to mainstream, secular television and film, or whether it was tasteless evangelism. She doesn’t answer the big, unanswerable questions, but she asks them. “Should we interpret the new ‘lite’ trend in Islamism as an extension of the Islamist political project by, seemingly, nonpolitical means?” she writes. “Or does it indicate a change of direction away from political activism toward consumerism and individual pursuits?”

Van Nieuwkerk’s study ends in the years before the uprisings that brought down Mubarak and the political turmoil that has lasted until now, but her book offers an important addition to our understanding of the unresolved tensions that will continue to define Egyptian society in the coming years. Mubarak, a celebrity but a profoundly alienating one, kept his foot on the Muslim Brotherhood just as he oversaw a society slowly growing more religious. Once he was gone, that society elected the Brotherhood’s candidate, Mohamed Morsi, but they tossed him out as well. One of his major faults was always said to be a lack of celebrity charisma. He was a bumbling, quiet technocrat who failed to capture the audience’s attention.

Nobody knows what kind of leader could bring Egypt together, but he (a ‘she’ is unlikely) will have to understand both how to be a celebrity and how to negotiate subtly between Islam and secularism. The stars profiled by Van Nieuwkerk in this book are unlikely to become politicians — no actor-presidents like Ronald Reagan have emerged — but they are the clearest examples thus far of such a strange balance of forces. It’s a balance anyone who tries to lead Egypt will have to embody.

Maurice Chammah is a writer and musician in Austin, Texas who studied journalism in Egypt as a Fulbright student, 2011-2012. More about him at http://www.mauricechammah.com. He writes regularly for The Revealer.

With support from the Henry R. Luce Initiative on Religion and International Affairs.

The post Performing Piety appeared first on The Revealer.

By Elizabeth Hewitt

“There’s no pig in any of it,” Murat Guler, the proprietor of a second-floor establishment on Istanbul’s Tarlabsi Boulevard, told me. He had moved a few dildos across his desk when we sat down so we could see each other clearly. A blond mannequin in the corner behind him modeled a faux-leather body suit.

Central Istanbul is chock-a-block with sex shops, if you look for them. They don’t display their wares in windows next to the Gap, but they’re not hidden either. I first started to notice just how many upper story “EROTIK” signs flashed around the bustling Taksim area this fall, after I read a short news piece in an English-language daily about the opening of Turkey’s first online halal sex shop. In a country that officially registers at 99.8 percent Muslim, a Turkish entrepreneur had seen a niche opportunity and launched HelalSexShop.com. Halal, or helal in Turkish, means sanctioned by Islamic law. Curious as to what specifically isn’t halal in an ordinary sex shop, I went with a friend to consult with Istanbul’s erotic shopkeepers.

Guler reports having plenty of Muslim customers—both local Turks and Arabs vacationing from other countries in the Middle East. HelalSexShop.com, he noted dismissively, is just a different way of marketing the same things.

And yet, if it is a gimmick, it’s a good one. Though not the world’s first halal sex shop—El Asira opened in the Netherlands three years ago, and a similar small business operates in Bahrain—it claims to be the first in Turkey, a title that has landed it in newspapers and on blogs and radio shows round the globe. It has been lampooned and lauded by commentators inside and outside of Turkey.

At a time when the so-called “Islamization” of Turkey is a hot topic of debate, the opening of a sex store catering specifically to Muslims is headline-grabbing indeed. But does this new entrepreneurial endeavor indicate anything about how Islam and sex are viewed or practiced in Turkey today?

A few inches of fresh snow coated the capital city when I set out to meet the founder of HelalSexShop.com. Haluk Murat Demirel lives in an apartment complex in Sincan, a suburb at the very end of Ankara’s commuter rail.

The 38-year-old grew up in Sincan and now lives with his wife and two-year-old. He attends prayer at the neighborhood mosque, but doesn’t consider himself a part of its community. He works in electronics.

Normally the business is based in his partner’s apartment nearby, but they had friends in town, so Demirel set up shop in his living room when I came to visit. An array of more than three-dozen tubes, boxes and bottles were displayed on the dining room table when I arrived at his third-floor flat. He talked me through the gels, sprays, and assorted aphrodisiacs, and showed me the plain brown packaging they use for shipping, part of the site’s discretion guarantee.

Demirel came up with the idea in early 2013 after a female friend, a new mother, confided in him that her libido had been absent since she gave birth. Embarrassed to consult a pharmacist, she turned to the Internet to try to find a product to restore her sex drive, but she was overwhelmed by the pornographic images on European and American sites. Five months later, Demirel, with two of his friends on board as business partners, launched their self-built website. Today, a Google search of his name turns up news stories from around the world.

Visitors to HelalSexShop.com are greeted by a modest royal purple backdrop with hot pink font. The interface is simple, devoid of scantily-clad women or other pornographic images. Men access their section of the shop by clicking an outline of a seated man, women by clicking the silhouette of a woman wearing a headscarf.

Gels, lubricants and sprays promise to engorge, excite, and enhance. For 74 Turkish lira (roughly $37) you can purchase one of the site’s most popular products for women: a 35ml tube of Scream Orgasm Cream. For men, the top items are pills and sprays intended to make them last longer. But for the absence of phallic and battery powered products (aside from a vibrating ring), the stock does not appear to be particularly halal-specific. Most of the labels are written in English and the products originate from outside of Turkey. So what makes this all suitable to Islam?

No pork products, of course—not necessarily a high bar to meet. But unlike regular sex shops, Demirel can guarantee that everything sold from HelalSexShop.com is alcohol free.

“We don’t have any products that a Muslim cannot use, like sex dolls, sex toys. Those are forbidden in Islam so we don’t sell them,” Demirel said. “That’s the best a Muslim can get from a sex shop,” he laughed.

In addition to a full range of stock for both sexes, the website offers advice for Islam-approved sex. Complete with Quran passages, the Sex in Islam section spells out what exactly is and isn’t halal in the bedroom. Demirel compiled the blurbs himself from writings of Islamic scholars he found online and in books.

HelalSexShop.com launched in October 2013, at the end of Eid al-Adha, the 5-day Muslim feast of sacrifice holiday. Without much of an advertising campaign, the site received little attention at first. Then it exploded.

By Monday morning, the Turkish press had picked up the story. By Monday afternoon, the international press had too. “We were on the news even in countries I had never heard of before,” Demirel said. Written up by Reuters, discussed on Czech radio. The BBC sent a team to Sincan to interview Demirel. HelalSexShop.com showed up in news clips from Germany, New Zealand, the United States, Sri Lanka, and beyond.

“The reason I guess is the words,” Demirel said. “Halal and sex. Those words were really interesting for a lot of people.”

“The world really got surprised,” Demirel said. “Americans and Europeans were very surprised. Even maybe Arabs and Muslims were very surprised.” Meanwhile, as HelalSexShop.com generated columns and analytical pieces in everything from gossip sites to scholarly journals oceans away, his wife, his friends, and his community in Sincan took it in stride. “People in Turkey did not get surprised much.”

That’s not to say the story went unnoticed in Turkey. Actually, it generated a flood of media commentary, almost entirely from secularists and leftists, Demiral recalled. “They reacted because “the AK Party has become really strong in the country and Muslims have gone too far,” he said, referring to the ruling Truth and Justice Party.

Barin Kayaoglu, a history Ph.D. student at the University of Virginia who wrote about HelalSexShop.com for Al-Monitor, explained the silence from the conservative commentators. “Anything they’d say, write, or report would’ve been taken as more food for comedies by people on social media.”

Secularists ridiculed the idea of a halal erotic store, joking about “blessed” sex toys, while other’s noted it to be an opportunistic capitalist enterprise. The varied response illustrates the huge variety of attitudes towards sex in Turkish society. “Many Turks would still have trouble going to pharmacies and asking for contraception,” Kayaoglu said. Much like the woman who inspired Demirel’s idea for an online halal sex shop.

“It is a trivial, sensational news story,” Belgin Alkatan, a columnist on gender and sex issues for Hurriyet Daily News, told me when I asked her if HelalSexShop.com would change how sex is approached in Turkey. “How can the opening of one shop change a discussion in a country? I don’t think many people know about it.”

In parts of Turkey, sex is an increasingly open topic. Simultaneously, a conservative tide within the country strongly rejects discussion of sex as  taboo. “Even the whole headscarf issue is about sex,” Alkatan said. “Women are bound to cover their hair to not arouse any sexual feelings in men.”

Women’s bodies and choices have ended up as a prime battleground in the country’s political tug of war. Prime Minister Erdogan has told Turks that, “at least three children are necessary in each family,” and advised the country’s expectant mothers against Cesarean births. Women’s clothing choices are routinely the subject of national law: in early October, Turkey’s long-standing ban of the headscarf was significantly relaxed. The following month, parliament lifted a dress code that required women to wear skirts or dresses, rather than pants, into the Assembly.

“This government considers it has a right to intervene in everybody’s life, more so in women’s,” Alkatan said.

Only a few months old, HelalSexShop.com still has a long way to grow. Demirel still works his day job and helps run the site on the side. He’s planning to increase the range of products, and wants to introduce costumes and lingerie.

Along with the international attention HelalSexShop.com generated have been requests for sales to Pakistan, Egypt, and around the world. Demirel is considering trying to launch English and Arabic websites, but in the immediate future he will start selling products on eBay.

“At least in my opinion, Turkey is the most democratic, liberal country among the Muslim countries,” Demirel said, noting that in Egypt and other parts of the Middle East, a sex shop like his wouldn’t be possible. Within Turkey’s range of conservative and secular voices, all piping in with advice on how sex should be addressed, there is the space to open a shop that caters to casual and devout Muslims alike.

“When you look from abroad, Turkey is like a closed community with big beards, like Arabs,” said Demirel. “But as you can see it is like a European country.”

Elizabeth Hewitt is a freelance journalist based in Istanbul, Turkey and Vermont. She has written for regional and national publications, including Christian Science Monitor and Slate, and holds a master’s degree in journalism from New York University. You can read more of her work at emhewitt.com.

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