Religion is a Choice

The units of History are the people who make it. This holds true for the people faced with the racialized discourse of colonialism. In Frantz Fanon's Algeria Unveiled and Khaldoun Samman's discussion of Fanon's viewpoint, Healing Injured Identities: Frantz Fanon and the Transcendence of Colonialist Binaries, the argument is made persuasively that those "who find themselves on the wrong side of colonial binaries and international divisions of labor"[1], particularly those whose religion is dismissed for the progress of secularism, are cruelly influenced to revere and aspire to the ideals of those who hold power over them.

Fanon and Samman's point is ultimately correct but incomplete. The subaltern people do not just sit passively at the onslaught of insults nor do they react to insults out of a base desire for confrontation. Alev Çinar's Modernity, Islam, and Secularism in Turkey and Carolyn Moxley Rouse's Engaged Surrender provide evidence of the central motives of subaltern people in opposing colonizers, secularist reformers, and racist attitudes in the United States. Subaltern people are motivated by the desire for political change through religious devotion as well as the desire to find stability in an unfair situation through the embracing of religious ideals and by surrendering to the discussion and customs of organized religion.

But before I discuss this engaged religious activity, let me first speak to the timeless ideas of Fanon and Samman's application of and commentary on these ideas.

Fanon approaches the idea of the colonizer reducing the colonized by discussing the colonizers' attempt to end the practice of Muslim women covering their faces with veils as symbolic of the colonizers' attempt to unveil Algeria and bring it into the liberal, secular tradition.[2] Colonialists thought that banning the veil in Algeria, Fanon argues, was the most "effective means of destructuring Algerian culture."[3] Fanon implies that before the colonizers, religion was a background presence in Algeria. He again uses the veil as a symbol for this. Fanon says that before the colonizers the veil "was an undifferentiated element in a homogenous whole" but with colonial opposition it "acquires a taboo character."[4] The more the colonizer takes on a role of a liberator of the Algerian women from the misogynistic custom of veiling, the more the Algerians "weave a whole universe of resistances"[5] and make the issue of the veil more important than it originally was. Fanon implies that while the veil was used before the colonizers as a minor religious ritual, under the colonizers its significance is transformed into an act of protest and the religious value shrinks from view.

A preeminent secularist thinker, Peter Berger, argued that the processes for dissemination of religion become vehicles for the spread of secular thought and that secularization is a process that progresses steadily over time.[6] Even if one was to concede to Berger that a society will become more secular if left alone, it is clear that colonialism is a violent disruption of any such process. Rapid attempts to change the religion of a society are counterweighted by new religious sentiments. Fanon says that the Algerian woman's "fatalism" and unchanging appearance are representative of the "violence of the occupier and [of] his inhumanity."[7] She remains stoic and silent, Fanon argues, to show that she will not conform to the occupier's expectations.

Samman says "subaltern people are expected to look up to ideals of "those who are on top of the world...in the most humiliating and degrading manner."[8] Colonizers create an orientalist outlook on the world where Europeans are the most evolved and societies that differ from the European ideal are asked to reform into a European model. The crux of the problem with orientalism is that "a large sector of the world is asked to transform its self in order to emulate its more powerful other."[9]

Attempts to secularize are insulting to the Muslims who are on the receiving end, Fanon and Samman argue. By telling a culture that it needs to become secular, a European society restructures classes and societies in terms of race and religion with themselves at the top. By saying that secularism is something that other societies should progress towards, European colonizers created a rhetoric of humanity in varied states of evolution "where the African-Algerian-Arab is positioned as an animal needing to be tamed and disciplined by its master."[10]

This harmful thought process that non-Europeans are backwards and civilizationally lagging was created by colonizers but gained some traction among the colonized. The "modernizing" of Turkey started in the early twentieth century and the recent Americanization of Mecca[11] are both prime examples of this. Samman quotes Amin Maalouf as asking, "How can their personalities fail to be damaged? That they are living in a world which belongs to others and obey rules made by others, a world where they are orphans, strangers, intruders or pariahs."[12] For these cultures and religions, the striving for betterment via Westernization is not an achievable goal. To accept the rules of the colonizers is to accept rules that are crafted so that the winner is always the same and to ever chase an unattainable acceptance by the colonizers.

Not only are Muslims and "southern cultures and religions"[13] held to standards that are not compatible with their histories and norms, but often they are held more strictly to standards. Western powers "get a free pass on their own destructive behavior" and destroy "subsistence economies, ecosystems and political structures" without any "denunciation" of "the West" for "such injustices."[14] Any sort of aggression from a region of the Others is considered indicative of an uncivilized nature. Samman passionately cuts to the heart of the basic inequality of expectations with a comparison. Modernizers like Thomas Friedman, he says, "are quick to ask good Muslims to discipline bad Muslims, while rarely asking good Jews and Christians to restrain their own rogue and insidious regimes."[15]

While Samman's binary approach to global conflict works well on the macro level, on the micro level it is a simplistic way of defining participants' motivations for their actions. In reality the subaltern people, who have been insulted in this manner that lowers their self-worth in comparison to an imposed standard of cultural correctness, pursue their religious goals primarily in order to find their own peace, their own happiness, and their own satisfaction with the state of their society. The political reactionary aspect of continuing their faith and culture is only secondary and the result of the choice to pursue religious goals. Çinar demonstrates this by discussing the Islamist movement in Turkey in reaction to the secular nature of Kemalism. Turkish Islamists of the 1990s have attempted to alter the religious bent of the country not just in opposition of the "injured identities" and wrongs of the colonizers but because they want an Islamic nation for its own sake. Similarly, in the United States African American women convert to Sunni Islam because the benefits of Islam outweigh the disadvantages of isolating themselves from mainstream American society and the economic and social advantages associated with it.

Çinar's thesis, that Islamic modernity can differ from European modernity without being lesser to European modernity, emphasizes the existence of this middle road between the compliance to European ideals exhibited during colonialism and the single-issue ideology of anti-Europeans or anti-secularism. Today's Turkish Islamists do not just rebel against secularists but challenge "the secularist basis of official national identity by reconstituting an Islamic-cultural basis."[16]

Islamism can be a constructive force in a society, not merely a counter-discourse to European secularism. The Islamist Refah Party of Turkey is a "social movement that works toward the center of the political spectrum."[17] Çinar uses the Adalet ve Kalkinma Party (AK Party) in Turkey as an example of this combination of secular style political ideas and religious and cultural devotion to Islam. The AK Party seeks "membership in the European Union" and embraces "economic and political liberalism" while maintaining "conservative social values" and personal religious commitment ("The wives of a majority of AK Party parliamentarians and cabinet members are wearing the Islamic headscarf and attire"). [18]

Fanon says that women, "in imposing such a restriction on [themselves], in choosing a form of existence limited in scope," engage in a form of "combat" against "the occupier."[19] But the choice to don religious garments, like the choice to stay in the home, is a choice often made for other reasons than selfless political resistance. Fadime ªahine, the "Veiled Marilyn" who talked about a sexual affair on Turkish television while refusing to take off her religious headscarf, "said she was wearing the headscarf not for anyone else, but for Allah, and that she would not take it off because 'it does not have any weight, [it is not a burden],' and it is a part of her."[20] Rouse quotes an African-American Muslim woman as saying, "when you [dress] for the pleasure of Allah you can put on what you need to put on."[21] Religious garments are often only incidentally rebellious and primarily focused on actual religious conviction.

The choice to follow the tenets of Islam and sever ties to the benefits of Western approbation is more significant than the choice to wear religious clothing. Understanding the choice to embrace or convert to Islam in a world often hostile to Muslims is central to understanding why religious nationalism and political religious devotion is more than a reaction to secularism and colonialism.

With this in mind, it is important to remember that choosing to be an observant Muslim, like choosing to be a political secularist, is a choice and can be affected by surroundings. While one man might look around and perceive religious extremism detached from reality and choose to be a political secularist, another person may perceive a meritocratic society that doesn't provide universal equality and choose to find a community of equality in Islam. While these choices may be influenced by different types of culture, they are primarily a choice and not a reaction against a situation.

In this vein, Rouse offers guesses as to the advantages that Sunni Islam poses to African-American women. "For them the rewards include the possibility of a more just community and society, more successful interpersonal relationships including marriage, and, most importantly, the knowledge that one is living according to the will of Allah."[22] Rouse also discusses the way that African-American women can find a textual basis from Islamic scholars that reinforces their understanding of the inequality they observe on a daily basis. The women have the ability to "isolate from the sunnah or from the tafsir of Islamic scholars interpretations that makes sense given their particular social reality."[23]

This "strategic essentialism" lends a dignity to the women who follow Islam that the pursuit of Western ideals cannot provide. The concept of Allah as the ultimate authority robs the "small sector of the world population"[24] that achieves success through the Western meritocracy of their moral superiority. One African-American Muslim women explained, "If you're only submitting to Allah, you really can't be a slave to anybody else."[25]

By essentializing strategically, individuals with similar experiences can increase the pull of Islam by creating communities of religious learning. Portraying the West as aggressive provides an explanation for oppressive U.S. racism.[26] Tendencies among African-American women to consider the genders equal can also be supported by Islamic texts. While in Christianity, Eve was created from Adam's rib and ate the food of sin, in Islam women are not created in sin and were created equal with men.[27]

Rouse's and Çinar's examples of religious action without ulterior motives are important to keep in mind. While religious nationalism was important in fighting colonialism, the simple truth is that religion is always a religion and that people will always choose to participate in a religion for personal reasons deeper than political protest.

[1] Samman, Khaldoun. Healing Injured Identities: Frantz Fanon and the Transcendence of Colonialist Binaries. p. 1

[2] "Every veil that fell...was a negative expression of the fact that Algeria was beginning to deny herself and was accepting the rape of the colonizer. - Fanon, Frantz. A Dying Colonialism. New York, New York. Grove Weldenfeld. ©1965. p. 42

[3] Ibid, p. 39

[4] Ibid, p. 47

[5] Ibid, p. 47

[6] Berger, Peter L. The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion. New York 1990 ©1967. pp. 105-125

[7] Fanon, op. cit., p. 66

[8] Samman, op. cit., p. 1

[9] Ibid, p. 4

[10] Samman, op. cit., pp. 1-2.

[11] Ibid, p. 5

[12] Ibid, p. 5

[13] Ibid, p. 4

[14] Ibid, p. 5

[15] Samman, op. cit., p. 5.

[16] Çinar, Alev. Modernity, Islam, and Secularism in Turkey. Regents of the University of Minnesota. Minneapolis. ©2005. p. 172

[17] Ibid, p. 172

[18] Ibid, p. 177

[19] Fanon, op. cit., p. 66

[20] Çinar, op. cit., p. 98

[21] Rouse, Carolyn Moxley. Engaged Surrender. University of California Press. Berkeley and Los Angeles, California. ©2004 p. 62

[22] Ibid, p. 9

[23] Rouse, op. cit., p. 80.

[24] Samman, op. cit, p. 1

[25] Rouse, op. cit., p. 93

[26] Ibid.

[27] Ibid, pp.40-41.