I guess this is maybe the rhythm this blog will take - inactivity punctuated by a few blog posts at once. Some more recent reading, specifically Tamim Ansary's Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes, a broad history of the Islamic world, framed as a corrective to "world histories" that are really histories of Europe and the United States, in which the rest of the world is assigned roles in the form as "encounters" with Asia, with Africa, with Islam, etc.
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When the ideal future envisioned by postindustrialized, Western democratic society is taken as the endpoint of history, the shape of the narrative leading to the here-and-now features something like the following stages:
1: Birth of civilization (Egypt and Mesopotamia)
2: Classical age (Greece and Rome)
3: The Dark Ages (rise of Christianity)
4: The Rebirth: Renaissance and Reformation
5: The Enlightenment
6: The Revolutions
7: Rise of the Nation-States
8: World Wars I and II
9: The Cold War
10: The Triumph of Democratic Capitalism
But what if we look at the world through Islamic eyes?
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1: Ancient Times: Mesopotamia and Persia
2: Birth of Islam
3: The Khalifate: Quest for Universal Unity
4: Fragmentation: Age of the Sultanates
5: Catastrophe: Crusaders and Mongols
6: Rebirth: The Three-Empires Era
7: Permeation of East by West
8: The Reform Movements
9: Triumph of the Secular Modernists
10: The Islamist Reaction
Literary critic Edward Said has argued that over the centuries, the West has constructed an Orientalist fantasy of the Islamic world, in which a sinister sense of "otherness" is mingled with envious images of decadent opulance. Well, yes, to the extent that Islam has entered the Western imagination [at all], that has more or less been the depiction.
But more intriguing to me is the relative absence of any depictions at all. In Shakespeare's day, for example, preeminent world power was centered in three Islamic empires. Where are all the Muslims in his canon? Missing. If you didn't know Moors were Muslims, you wouldn't learn it from Othello.
Going to college when I did -- I imagine this is true for all humani... humanitists? humanities majors, whatever, of a certain age range -- Said's Orientalism was one of the core texts pretty much everybody read, along with something by Foucault and something on gender. It's interesting that because of that I sort of stopped thinking about Said at all for a number of years -- sort of abandoning him as undergraduate fodder. He's certainly not faultless -- in many ways he's like Elaine Pagels, in that he became associated with a specific niche of valuable scholarship, so that any time you have a conversation that is too near that topic, you have to bring him up, which preserves his relevance and sometimes acts to prevent his replacement.
Anyway, the larger point here is precisely what Ansary says: how much did you hear about Islam (especially outside of the Crusades and the 20th century) in your history classes before college? I would bet very little; like Ansary, I've worked on history textbooks, though I've never been part of the planning process or (as he talks about in the introduction) had my plans to include Islam continually shot down. But it does give me a somewhat wider view of what's commonly covered than I would have if I were only relying on my own idiosyncratic high school experience. (That said, I took all the history electives I could and still don't remember learning much about Islam. I dropped out of the honors program almost immediately in disgust over other matters, but I think the only history class that would have impacted was an American history class.)
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On the Shi'ites and Sunni, their different usages of the word "imam," and their different perceptions of Mohammed's specialness:
Originally, imam was simply the term for a person who led communal prayer. To most Muslims, that's still what the word means today. ... but when Shi'i say "imam," they mean something considerably more elevated. To Shi'i there is always one imam in the world, and there is never more than one. They proceed from the premise that Mohammed had some palpable mystical substance vested in him by Allah, some energy, some light, which they call the baraka of Mohammed. When the Prophet died, that light passed into Ali, at which moment Ali became the first imam...
The mainstream doctrine, as articulated by Abu Bakr and Omar, said that Mohammed was strictly a messenger delivering a set of instructions about how to live. The message was the great and only thing. Beyond delivering the Qur'an, Mohammed's religious significance was only his sunna, the example he set by his way of life, an example others could follow if they wanted to life in God's favor. People who accepted this doctrine eventually came to be known as Sunnis, and they comprise nine-tenths of the Muslim community today.
The Shi'i, by contrast, felt that they couldn't make themselves worthy of heaven simply by their own efforts ... they wanted to believe that direct guidance from God was still coming into the world, through some chosen person who could bathe other believers in a soul-saving grace, some living figure who would keep the world warm and pure. They adopted the term imam for this reassuring figure.
Put aside the Islamic specifics of this dispute for a moment and consider the generalities. These are conflicts we see again and again in the early development of religions. Christianity argued fiercely over the nature of Christ. The shape of those arguments, how they were resolved and why, differ from the early Muslim arguments because of some key social differences -- specifically, Mohammed was a political and military leader who needed an immediate successor one way or the other, while Jesus was a religious leader in a time and place where the normal response to the death of a religious leader was for his disciples to go their separate ways. The Christ arguments take place long, long after the death of Jesus, when those disciples had founded movements of their own in Jesus's name, not all of which agreed on cultural, legal, or theological points, whereas the Mohammed arguments -- though they continue to transpire for generations -- begin immediately.
But in any event, in both cases there are arguments not just about the correct way to continue but, in time, arguments about the nature of the leader: was he important principally as a vessel for his message (which becomes the dominant Muslim view of Mohammed) or is his message inseparable from his own divine character (which becomes the dominant Christian view of Jesus)? These are not uniquely Abrahamic dilemmas. Similar questions are raised about the Buddha Siddhartha Gautama (and for that matter invoked by disagreements over which other figures are buddhas), for instance, and not just within Buddhism. Because Gautama's work began in India, there are Hindu schools of thought that consider him an avatar of Vishnu, even though this is (many Buddhists would say) incompatible with the Buddha's own teachings.
Notice, too, how a disagreement over the nature of Mohammed results in two branches of Islam that are very different in ways that, at first glance, don't seem so easily explained. That is, if you began with descriptions of Shi'ite and Sunni Islam, the explanation "one of them believes Mohammed was given a mystical energy that has been passed on to others, and the other doesn't" would not be immediately obvious.
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On the background to why Iran is Shi'ite today:
The Shi'ite threat metastasized because of an ominous synchronicity that developed in Umayyad times:
The Shi'i were the suppressed religious underdogs of Islam.
The Persians were the suppressed ethnic underdogs of Islam.
The Shi'i chafed against the orthodox religious establishment.
The Persians chafed against the Arab political establishment...
One day, a mysterious man blew into the city of Merv. This distant outpost of the empire lay almost fifteen hundred miles east of Damascus. Here in the wild, wild east, this stranger began to agitate against the Umayyads by promulgating a millennial religious narrative that spoke of an impending apocalyptic showdown between good and evil.
No one knew much about this fellow, not even his real name. He went by the handle Abu Muslim, but that was obviously a pseudonym ... he was a professional revolutionary, dispatched by a secretive group called that Hashimites ... a cross between a cult and a political party, whose core membership probably never exceeded thirty. Its name referred to the Prophet's clan, the Banu Hashim, and its purpose, supposedly, was to put a member of the Prophet's family at the head of the Muslim world.
This was just one of many angry little hard-core bands of antigovernment conspirators active at this time, all preaching some version of the same message: the community had fallen off the track, history had gone off course, the Messenger's mission had been subverted, and toppling the Umayyads and empowering a member of the Prophet's family in their stead would set everything right again. Let me note that this narrative has been reinvented again and again in the Muslim world over the course of history, and some version of it is being recited even today, by revolutionaries who have substituted "the West" for "the Umayyads."
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"If a man commits a grave sin, is he a non-Muslim, or is he a bad Muslim?"
The question might seem like a semantic game, except that in the Muslim world, as a point of law, the religious scholars divided the world between the community and the nonbelievers. One set of rules applied among believers, another set for interactions between believers and nonbelievers. It was important, therefore, to know if any particular person was in the community or outside it.
Some philosophers who took up this question said Muslims who were grave sinners might belong to a third zone, situated between belief and unbelief. The more rigid, mainstream scholars didn't like the idea of a third zone, because it suggested the moral universe wasn't black and white but might have shades of gray.
There is a lot of food for thought in these three paragraphs.
First, while I'm not going to claim that non-Muslims are uniformly treated wonderfully in Muslim theocracies -- or that there are no Islamists who misinterpret their religion as woefully as our crazies misinterpret Christianity -- it is always worth noting how little sense it makes for these Tea Party Zapf dingbats to rail on about "sharia law" being adopted in the United States when the whole premise of Islamic law is that the bulk of it is only applicable to Muslims.
Second, one of the things that the Christian-centric view of history and religion (which, like I keep saying, has been absorbed even by westerners and Americans who aren't practicing Christians) tends to occlude is the idea of religions that can pose questions like this: "if you commit action X, do you cease being a member of the religion?" Mainstream Christianity understands questions like that only with reference to heresy, and even heresy doesn't work the way most people think it does. That is, a Christian is understood to remain a Christian unless they are specifically excommunicated. There is no mainstream Christian framework in which it makes sense to ask if someone ceases to be a Christian because of a thing they've done, unless of course that thing is converting to another religion.
But this is because of Christianity's unique features, not Islam's.
This reminds me that one of the things I've been thinking lately is that one of the worst things that happened to Christianity is when it stopped being a religion of adult conversion -- which is one reason it's flourishing in Africa and Asia now, where it's returned to being one. There are religions that I think are well-suited to being the religion you're raised in, because they provide paths for you to then choose from as an adult -- that's a discussion for another time. But Christianity was not just founded by and for adult converts, it continued to be a religion of adult conversion (not missionaries forcing the religion on natives, but genuine adult conversion) for centuries, and there is a marked difference in the way believers talk about it.
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On the Sufis --
Almost from the start .. some people were asking, "Is this all the revelation comes to in the end -- a set of rules? Because I'm not feeling it. Is there nothing more to Islam?" Instructions from God on high were all very well, but some people longed to experience God as a palpable living presence right now, right down here. What they wanted from the revelations was transformation and transcendence.
A few of these people began to experiment with spiritual exercises that went way beyond the requirements of duty. They read the Qur'an incessantly or spent hours reciting the names of Allah. In Baghdad, for example, there was a man named al-Junayd who habitually performed four hundred units of the Muslim prayer ritual after work every day. ... some of these seekers embraced voluntary poverty, living on bread and water, dispensing with furniture, and wearing simple garments made of rough, uncarded wool, which is called suf in Arabic, for which reason people began to call these people Sufis.
They professed no creed, these Sufis. They were not out to launch another sect. Sure, they opposed worldly ambition and corruption and greed, but so did every Muslim, in theory.
They began to work out techniques for eliminating distractions and cravings not just from prayer but from life. Some spoke of engaging in spiritual warfare against their own meanest tendencies. Harking back to a hadith in which Mohammed distinguished between a "greater" and a "lesser" jihad, they declared that the internal struggle to expunge the ego was the real jihad, the greater jihad.
Although I always want to stress that truth I have brought up in earlier posts -- all religions are not the same -- by the same token it is not a coincidence that any time (within the limits of my knowledge) there is a religion that fits certain criteria (it has to be sufficiently large and broad, such that there is a pressure to adapt the religion to fit the practitioner rather than, in the modern manner, to just fuck off down the street to some other church), people will force it into certain shapes. Specifically, they will always squeeze it until they can get some mysticism out of it. The legalist and mystical practitioners of Catholicism can seem to be members of two entirely different religions, and yet.
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In sum, by the mid-eleventh century, Muslims were hard at work on three great cultural projects, pursued respectively by scholar-theologians, philosopher-scientists, and Sufi mystics: to elaborate Islamic doctrine and law n full; to unravel the patterns and principles of the natural world; and to develop a technique for achieving a personal union with God. Yes, the three groups overlapped somewhat, but overall they pulled in competing directions, and their intellectual disagreements had high and sometimes bloody political and financial stakes.
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More development in Shi'ism:
[In Shi'ism], whenever an imam had more than one son, his death opened up the possibility of disagreement about which of his progeny was truly the next imam. Just such a disagreement over the fifth imam gave birth to a minority sect called the Zaidis (or Fivers). Another disagreement over the seventh imam had spawned the Isma'ilis (or Seveners).
The remaining Shi'i agreed on the imam all the way to the twelfth generation down from Ali, but the twelfth imam disappeared when he was a little boy. Non-Shi'i assume he was murdered. Shi'i, however, believe he never died but went into "occultation," a concept peculiar to Shi'ism: occultation meant he could (can) no longer be seen by ordinary people.
Mainstream Shi'i (or Twelvers) call this twelfth imam the "hidden imam." Shi'ite doctrine holds that the Hidden Imam is and always will be alive, that he is still in direct communication with God and is still guiding the world in some unseen way. The doctrine doesn't say exactly how the Hidden Imam remains hidden. It doesn't say whether he has become invisible, donned a disguise, changed form, gone to ground in some cave, or what... Shi'ite doctrine declares that the twelfth imam will reveal himself at the end of history, sparking the perfection of Allah's community and inaugurating the final Age of Justice, the endpoint sought by all good Muslims. Upon reaching its endpoint, history will end, the dead will be resurrected, and Allah's judgment will sort all who have ever lived into heaven or hell according to their just desserts. Because of this expectation that the Hidden Imam will appear again at the end of days, Shi'i sometimes refer to him as the Mahdi, "the expected one" (a concept that exists in Sunni Islam too, but less vividly).
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Back to Iran:
When the Safavids first came to power they had created a distinctly Persian Islam by making Shi'ism the state religion. This was useful to the state at first, because it promoted a national coherence that made Persia strong for its size. But it alienated Sunnis within the borders, and as the throne weakened, these Sunnis turned rebellious and began to pull away.
Making Shi'ism the official state religion had another downside ... it gave the Shi'i religious scholars a dangerous sense of self-importance, especially the mutjahids, a title that meant "scholars so learned they have a right to make original judgments" (later these worthies were called ayatollahs). These Shi'i ulama began to claim if Persia was really a Shi'i state, kings could rule only with their approval, because only they spoke for the Hidden Imam...
Safavid kings therefore found themselves facing a Hobson's choice. If they sought the approval of the ulama they would be conceding ultimate authority to the ayatollahs; if they asserted their own authority as supreme, they would have to forego the ulama's approval and in that case rule without popular legitimacy ... kings who lack legitimacy need some other source of power to give them authority ... they had nothing to turn to but their armies ... trained and "advised" by European military experts.
In short, Persia ended up with European Christians helping Safavid kings clamp down on Muslim religious scholars who were closely tied to the masses: obviously a formula for trouble.
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By 1700 or so, religious institutions had bureaucratized spirituality in much the same way that the Catholic Church had bureaucratized Christianity in late medieval Europe. The whole system of Muslim law had been worked out so fully that there was no creative work left for any new enthusiast to do. The application of sharia to every dot and detail of personal and social life was a done deal. ... the Sufi orders had been institutionalized, and authorities at every level agreed that "the gates of ijtihad were closed."
"Ijtihad," remember, means "free and independent thinking based on reason." It can't depart from scripture, but it consists of thinking through the implications of scripture creatively. Muslim scholars had once allowed that ijtihad might be exercised on issues not explicitly settled by Qur'an; then by Qur'an and hadith; then by Qur'an, hadith, and the work of previous authoritative scholars ... and so by the eighteenth century, important scholars generally agreed that no unsettled issues existed. Everything had been covered, everything worked out; ordinary people no longer needed to exercise free and independent thought. There was nothing left to do but follow the rules.
Following the rules, however, does not provide the spiritual fulfillment people seek from religion. The bureaucratization of Islam created much the same stultifications and discontents that in Christendom had provoked the Protestant Reformation. And, indeed, by the middle of the eighteenth century, reform movements were beginning to sprout throughout the Muslim worled.
But there was never a Muslim version of Europe's Protestant Reformation ... no doctrine of individualism emerged here, no coupling of religion to nationalism (except in a sense in Iran), no separation of church and state, no conceptual division of the world into secular and religious realms, no sudden development of enlightenment-style liberalism ...
Why not?
Well, for one thing, some of the issues that fueled the Reformation could not arise in Islam. Protestant reformers rebelled against the Church; Islam had no church. ... Protestants said priests could not mediate between man and God; Islam never had a priesthood ... the Protestant reformers insisted on a direct, personal interaction between the individual worshipper and God. The Muslim prayer ritual had always been just that.
European religious reform took shape in a purely European context ... Muslims were in a different boat. Islam had offered its political and military successes as an argument for its doctrines and a proof of its revelations ... then came the Mongol holocaust ... by the end of the eighteenth century, Muslims looked around and saw with dawning horror that they had been conquered: from Bengal to Istanbul, they were subservient to foreigners in every aspect of their lives, in their own cities and towns and neighborhoods and in their very homes.
... One response was to say that what needed changing was not Islam but Muslims. Innovations, alterations, and accretions had corrupted the faith, so that no one was practicing true Islam anymore. What Muslims needed to do was shut out Western influence and restore Islam to its pristine, original form.
Another response was to say that the West was right. Muslims had gotten mired in obsolete religious ideas; they had ceded control of Islam to ignorant clerics who were out of touch with changing times; they needed to modernize their faith along Western lines by clearing out superstition, renouncing magical thinking, and rethinking Islam as an ethical system compatible with science and secular activities.
A third response was to declare Islam the true religion but concede that Muslims had certain things to learn from the West.
That first paragraph is especially interesting, although it's also interesting thinking about the Protestant Reformation and its aftermaths in terms of their specifically European historical contexts. But this idea that bureaucratization -- or especially, of the establishment deciding that the work of formulating a religion has been completed -- leads to reform movements, that's very interesting.
It goes to some basic questions about religion and human nature: what do people look for in religion?
Amateurs do badly with this question when they try to answer for other people, for a very simple reason: not everyone has the same answer. But the same answers tend to come up, over and over again, and that's very important. Paul of Tarsus and Thomas Aquinas were very different figures and undoubtedly were attracted to different things in the religious life. The impulse that leads Sufis and nuns to introduce mystical practices to Islam and Catholicism comes from a different answer than the impulses that lead to legalism or end of the world prophecies.
A sufficient number of them, though, especially among religious professionals of some stripe -- clergy, scholars, what have you -- are going to want to be active and to contribute, and a static religion in which everything has been figured out and all the questions are answered is not as satisfying as it might sound like it should be.
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You can look long and hard through the actual writings of Abdul Wahhab and not find Wahhabism as it is defined today, largely because he didn't write political tracts; he wrote Qur'anic commentary and wrote it strictly in the vocabulary of his doctrine. His single-minded focus on details of Muslim doctrine, law, and practice might strike outsiders as obsessive. His major work, Kitab-al-Tahwid (the Book of Unity), has sixty-six chapters, each of which presents one or more quotes from the Qur'an, unpacks each quote, lists lessons to be learned from the quote, and then explains how this quote relates to Wahhab's core creed.
Wahhab is the founder of what is sometimes misleadingly called "Islamic fundamentalism" -- a "back to basics" movement (which, like the Christian fundamentalists later, was strongly informed by Wahhab's interpretation of the Qur'an rather than just rewinding to the practices and interpretations of an earlier time) in response to his disgust with the wealthy modern westernized Arabs he saw as going through the motions of Muslim devotion. Wahhab's alliance with the House of Saud in the 18th century led to the creation of Saudi Arabia. I didn't highlight much in this section because it was already familiar to me, I guess.
Some Islamic fundamentalists disapprove of the term "Wahhabist," because Wahhab's own claim was that he wasn't proposing an "ism," but only encouraging people to abandon innovations and modern "isms" and to go back to the Qur'an -- that is, Wahhab would claim that there is nothing in "Wahhabism" that is his own thought, it's only about following what the Qur'an says. At the same time, "Islamic fundamentalism" is a problematic term for a number of reasons:
1: It is a back formation introduced later by way of comparison to Christian fundamentalism, which was also formed in response to modernism but which takes its name from "The Fundamentals."
2: Christian fundamentalism insists on several ultra-conservative approaches to Christian scripture which were novel and strange when fundamentalism was introduced, but Wahhab's insistence of Qur'anic literalism is neither novel nor unusual. That is, traditional Islam is already "fundamentalist" for the most part -- it is more explicit than Christian fundamentalism in allowing for interpretation, and it has specific systems and strategies for interpretation and the evaluation of interpretation instead of the hodge-podge that Christian fundamentalism has wound up with, but traditional mainstream Islam has always insisted on the truth of the Qur'an, and so labeling an ultraconservative movement as "Islamic fundamentalism" does not underscore the correct areas of contrast.
This is basically unresolvable, because Islamic fundamentalism is the term the public knows, and for the last few decades and the century to come, the terminology will be dictated more by journalists and speechwriters than by academics.
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And on to the opposite of Wahhabism, so to speak, the beginnings of the modernist reform movements:
Sayyid Ahmad, or Sir Sayyid Ahmad of Aligarh ... began exploring ways to rethink Islam as an ethical system that would stay true to its own traditions and spirit but make it compatible with a secular world dominated by Europeans.
... Ahmad came from a modernist, Western-oriented family, and he knew something about British life. His mother, however, was a devout Muslim of legendary piety, respected for her scholarship. She made the boy go to madrassa, and she equaled his grandfather as an influence on this life, so Sayyid Ahmad grew to manhood with these two dueling currents in his personality: a heartfelt allegiance to his own Muslim community and a high regard for British culture and a longing for the respect of those colonials.
... England had impressed him deeply ... What could he do to elevate his community? ... he decided that the problem lay partly in the way Muslims were interpreting Islam. They were mired in magical thinking, they were clinging to superstition and calling it Islam. Sir Sayyid Ahmed Khan began elaborating a doctrine that offended his contemporaries among the Indian ulama. Religion, he suggested, was a natural field of human inquiry and achievement. It was integral to human life. It evolved with the human community in the natural course of things -- just like art, agriculture, and technology -- growing ever more sophisticated as a man grew more civilized.
Early humans had a limited capacity to explore moral and ethical issues intellectually, Sayyid Ahman speculated. They needed revealed religion to help them overcome their passions and guide them to moral judgments and conduct: rulings from a higher power, delivered by prophets with the charismatic authority to persuade without explanation. But the moral and ethical injunctions of all great, true religions are not fundamentally irrational. They are reasonable, and reason can discover them, once people have developed the intellectual capacity to do so.
That's why Mohammed announced that he was the last of the prophets -- he didn't mean that his rulings about issues in the Mecca and Medina of his day were to be the final word on human conduct throughout the ages. He meant that he had brought the last tools people needed to proceed on the quest for a moral community of their own, without unexplained rulings from God. Islam was the last of the revealed religions because it was the beginning of the age of reason-based religions.
... Ahmad was suggesting implicitly that Muslims disconnect from obsessing about heaven and hell and miraculous interventions by God in history and rethink their faith as an ethical system.
... Ahmad's specific ideas failed to create any widespread movement associated with his name, but modernist intellectuals in other Muslim lands were exploring similar ideas and coming up with similar conclusions. In Iran, a prime minister working for the Qajar Shahs established a school called Dar al-Funun, which offered instruction in all the sciences and in the arts, literature, and philosophies of the West ... similar modernists were active at the heart of the Ottoman Empire.
These, of course, are the strains of Islam that western political discourse would have you believe do not exist.
Tuesday, January 19, 2016
Monday, January 18, 2016
the study of religion
This post is not about stuff regular people really need to know, just getting into some distinctions that are important in my reading and my frame of reference. A lot of what I'm going to say is obvious but it just makes sense to break it all down in one place.
My field, broadly speaking, is religious studies. Religious studies is, in the simplest terms, the secular study of religion, and so is both broader and less charged than theology -- although theology can be studied without believing, can be offered as a discipline by secular institutions, and in some cases is the field of scholars who have no religious affiliation, more commonly it's associated with believers and ministerial training.
This doesn't mean that no one in religious studies has any religious beliefs, only that the academic discipline itself, and ideally any program offered in it, is belief-neutral, just like a political science or economics program.
Because "religious studies," unlike "history" or "psychology," is not part of the core curriculum throughout the land, not every religious studies scholar has a degree in that field. The field is by nature multi-disciplinary and includes history, sociology, anthropology, philosophy, and psychology most obviously, as well as overlapping with pretty much every other multidisciplinary field. Further from the core of the topics that are sort of the heart of "religious studies" you find areas where there are certainly scholars pursuing work that deals with religion -- neurologists, legal scholars, literature scholars -- but who might or might not consider themselves part of "the religious studies field." (Of course, this can also be true of historians whose work happens to focus on the antipopes, or ethnobotanists studying the ritual use of plants.)
In my case, for instance, I came >thisclose< to a double major in English and philosophy but, because the philosophy department was incredibly small (just a couple classes per semester), had to settle for an English degree because the alternative was delaying graduation by a semester or two waiting for another few credits in philosophy classes I hadn't already taken to be offered. In grad school, I did two consecutive Master's programs (at different schools) - history because no religious studies program was offered, and Western European Studies because I was moving on short notice and had missed the application deadline for religious studies.
In both cases I focused primarily on religion and philosophy (and the history and philosophy of science along the way), but my tools and training are as a historian, not as a sociologist or an anthropologist. This isn't unusual, and it fits my areas of interest -- the development of Judaism and the early Christian Church (and the blurry inbetween), the later development of Christian theology, the history of American religion.
Some areas within religious studies -- the history of religion, the anthropology of religion, for instance -- are very deep, with numerous subspecialties, traditions, or competing schools of thought. There are books just on the history of the "quest" for the historical Jesus, for instance, and they're not lightweight books. Some are newer or narrower, like the neuroscience of religion, where there's neither enough data nor enough scholars for a robust field. There are areas that are not explicitly part of religious studies but which certainly inform religious studies, from moral psychology to constitutional law.
Methodologies vary considerably in religious studies, according to the scholar's training and focus. Comparative religion is a term that many people are familiar with, and when I was in college -- this may still be true -- many schools still had comparative religion majors, programs, or degrees instead of religious studies ones. But comparative religion is more limited in scope and methodology than religious studies -- a necessary step along the way, perhaps, but historically very focused on classification. At its worst, the comparative religion as a methodology is tunnel-visioned and focused on the wrong details -- while it is (perhaps) one thing to sort folk tales according to type, doing so with belief systems ignores the fact that people live these belief systems, and change them and are changed by them. You can go on and on about how many different flood myths there are, but what do you do with that if you don't know anything else about the different cultures the flood myths came from? But like I say, it's still an important part of the field's DNA -- knowing that there are all those different flood myths is important. It just isn't enough.
As you can likely tell by this blog and my decision to include both religion and my ongoing reading in the same place, religion and science are not only not at odds for me, they are intertwined. Religion, science, art, love, these are all means we use to grapple with our experience of the world in order to come to better terms with it. Some people abuse religion (whether they're the lawmakers or the lawbound or somewhere in between), some people abuse love. Not everyone grapples well. I am aware of, but not especially intrigued by, the fascination in the 19th century and again in the 21st with finding the "explanation" for religion, the reason for it, the lens in the mind that makes it happen. For me it's all fundamentally part of the human condition, and the human condition is always what interests me most.
Defining religion is much harder than defining religious studies. I'm not even really going to attempt it. There are a few important things, though:
1: It's a mistake to think of religion as "a set of beliefs." Most members of most religions at most points in history would find this definition nonsensical. Religion has almost always, almost everywhere, been defined, talked about, and argued about not in terms of what you believe but what you do.
2: Trying to figure out "what religion is," how to define it, whether X or Y "counts" as religion, and so on, is a whole area of scholarship within religious studies, which is not to say it is an area that has generated solid answers. I'm not new to the internet. I get that you read the above two paragraphs and there's a pretty good chance you thought to yourself that you're pretty sure you know what religion is. Do not trust that confidence.
3: This is even apart from the fact that it is often necessary to talk about doctrinal religion and lay religion separately -- what a religious institution actually teaches or embraces, versus what its members believe. Now, although I rail about the decline of modern religious literacy, I am not just talking about the fact that modern Methodists and modern Presbyterians rarely know anything about their own denominational differences. I'm talking about, for instance, the way that Marian devotion within the western European Christian laity and especially in Italy and the Iberian peninsula trickled upward over many centuries, until eventually the doctrine of immaculate conception -- which says that Jesus's mother Mary was born without sin -- was adopted in the 19th century, an incredibly late date for such a strongly supernatural piece of doctrine.
I am not saying that lay Catholics held a folk belief in immaculate conception that was eventually made into doctrine; that didn't happen. But there were strong Marian strains in folk Catholicism for a number of reasons, and Mary was consistently more important in the day to day worship of everyday Catholics than in the official doctrine of the Catholic Church. Eventually this pressure from below resulted in a change in doctrine, though that single change certainly didn't result in equilibrium.
4: It is considerably easier to define and talk about any given religious institution. It is not super hard to explain what we mean by "Catholicism," or "Judaism," though it is probably a longer conversation than you're imagining. Once we can talk about Catholicism or Judaism, we can start talking about Catholic culture or Jewish culture, and then we can talk about Santeria and Voodoo in the context of Catholic culture without trying to have a much harder and more hesitant conversation about whether Santeria or Voodoo "are religions."
5: The idea that certain beliefs are -- considered on their own, without respect to context -- inherently religious beliefs is a very new one, and while it makes sense to a modern post-Enlightenment laity, it is not an especially useful one. The idea that certain beliefs are inherently supernatural, although it's one I reference myself on a regular basis, is pretty dodgy too, and at best has to be understood as a sort of shorthand, a sort of footnote referencing a long conversation.
6: One reason it's very tricky defining what a religion is, what religious beliefs are, etc., is because there are so many supernatural practices, religious-seeming practices, etc., that are often found among the practices of members of particular religions but which are not found among the teachings of those religions. I'm talking about magic, but I'm not just talking about magic, in part because magic is a complicated area of scholarship and in part because people often misunderstand what you mean by it. On the one hand, you can make the claim, as some believers might do, that various magical practices are condemned by such and such a religion -- that Christians have no business believing in astrology, let's say. On the other hand, what do you make of the reality when such a forbidden, "non-religious" practice is primarily practiced by members of the religion that supposedly forbids it?
(Kabbalah, pre-Madonna -- no, pre-19th century, obviously -- is the obvious example here, because while roundly and regularly condemned by every major Jewish denomination it is also a group of mystical practices that, whatever its outside influences, is also quite clearly Jewish in nature, Jewish in practice. This is different from the divide between doctrinal religion and folk religion because we're talking about religious, mystical, or magical practices rejected not just by institutional authorities but by regular folks. And yet also practiced by regular folks.)
(As you might suspect, defining "magic" is at least as difficult as defining "religion." To me it seems harder -- with a lot of hemming and hawing I could spend a few thousand words explaining what religion means. I would hesitate to even attempt the same with "magic.")
My field, broadly speaking, is religious studies. Religious studies is, in the simplest terms, the secular study of religion, and so is both broader and less charged than theology -- although theology can be studied without believing, can be offered as a discipline by secular institutions, and in some cases is the field of scholars who have no religious affiliation, more commonly it's associated with believers and ministerial training.
This doesn't mean that no one in religious studies has any religious beliefs, only that the academic discipline itself, and ideally any program offered in it, is belief-neutral, just like a political science or economics program.
Because "religious studies," unlike "history" or "psychology," is not part of the core curriculum throughout the land, not every religious studies scholar has a degree in that field. The field is by nature multi-disciplinary and includes history, sociology, anthropology, philosophy, and psychology most obviously, as well as overlapping with pretty much every other multidisciplinary field. Further from the core of the topics that are sort of the heart of "religious studies" you find areas where there are certainly scholars pursuing work that deals with religion -- neurologists, legal scholars, literature scholars -- but who might or might not consider themselves part of "the religious studies field." (Of course, this can also be true of historians whose work happens to focus on the antipopes, or ethnobotanists studying the ritual use of plants.)
In my case, for instance, I came >thisclose< to a double major in English and philosophy but, because the philosophy department was incredibly small (just a couple classes per semester), had to settle for an English degree because the alternative was delaying graduation by a semester or two waiting for another few credits in philosophy classes I hadn't already taken to be offered. In grad school, I did two consecutive Master's programs (at different schools) - history because no religious studies program was offered, and Western European Studies because I was moving on short notice and had missed the application deadline for religious studies.
In both cases I focused primarily on religion and philosophy (and the history and philosophy of science along the way), but my tools and training are as a historian, not as a sociologist or an anthropologist. This isn't unusual, and it fits my areas of interest -- the development of Judaism and the early Christian Church (and the blurry inbetween), the later development of Christian theology, the history of American religion.
Some areas within religious studies -- the history of religion, the anthropology of religion, for instance -- are very deep, with numerous subspecialties, traditions, or competing schools of thought. There are books just on the history of the "quest" for the historical Jesus, for instance, and they're not lightweight books. Some are newer or narrower, like the neuroscience of religion, where there's neither enough data nor enough scholars for a robust field. There are areas that are not explicitly part of religious studies but which certainly inform religious studies, from moral psychology to constitutional law.
Methodologies vary considerably in religious studies, according to the scholar's training and focus. Comparative religion is a term that many people are familiar with, and when I was in college -- this may still be true -- many schools still had comparative religion majors, programs, or degrees instead of religious studies ones. But comparative religion is more limited in scope and methodology than religious studies -- a necessary step along the way, perhaps, but historically very focused on classification. At its worst, the comparative religion as a methodology is tunnel-visioned and focused on the wrong details -- while it is (perhaps) one thing to sort folk tales according to type, doing so with belief systems ignores the fact that people live these belief systems, and change them and are changed by them. You can go on and on about how many different flood myths there are, but what do you do with that if you don't know anything else about the different cultures the flood myths came from? But like I say, it's still an important part of the field's DNA -- knowing that there are all those different flood myths is important. It just isn't enough.
As you can likely tell by this blog and my decision to include both religion and my ongoing reading in the same place, religion and science are not only not at odds for me, they are intertwined. Religion, science, art, love, these are all means we use to grapple with our experience of the world in order to come to better terms with it. Some people abuse religion (whether they're the lawmakers or the lawbound or somewhere in between), some people abuse love. Not everyone grapples well. I am aware of, but not especially intrigued by, the fascination in the 19th century and again in the 21st with finding the "explanation" for religion, the reason for it, the lens in the mind that makes it happen. For me it's all fundamentally part of the human condition, and the human condition is always what interests me most.
Defining religion is much harder than defining religious studies. I'm not even really going to attempt it. There are a few important things, though:
1: It's a mistake to think of religion as "a set of beliefs." Most members of most religions at most points in history would find this definition nonsensical. Religion has almost always, almost everywhere, been defined, talked about, and argued about not in terms of what you believe but what you do.
2: Trying to figure out "what religion is," how to define it, whether X or Y "counts" as religion, and so on, is a whole area of scholarship within religious studies, which is not to say it is an area that has generated solid answers. I'm not new to the internet. I get that you read the above two paragraphs and there's a pretty good chance you thought to yourself that you're pretty sure you know what religion is. Do not trust that confidence.
3: This is even apart from the fact that it is often necessary to talk about doctrinal religion and lay religion separately -- what a religious institution actually teaches or embraces, versus what its members believe. Now, although I rail about the decline of modern religious literacy, I am not just talking about the fact that modern Methodists and modern Presbyterians rarely know anything about their own denominational differences. I'm talking about, for instance, the way that Marian devotion within the western European Christian laity and especially in Italy and the Iberian peninsula trickled upward over many centuries, until eventually the doctrine of immaculate conception -- which says that Jesus's mother Mary was born without sin -- was adopted in the 19th century, an incredibly late date for such a strongly supernatural piece of doctrine.
I am not saying that lay Catholics held a folk belief in immaculate conception that was eventually made into doctrine; that didn't happen. But there were strong Marian strains in folk Catholicism for a number of reasons, and Mary was consistently more important in the day to day worship of everyday Catholics than in the official doctrine of the Catholic Church. Eventually this pressure from below resulted in a change in doctrine, though that single change certainly didn't result in equilibrium.
4: It is considerably easier to define and talk about any given religious institution. It is not super hard to explain what we mean by "Catholicism," or "Judaism," though it is probably a longer conversation than you're imagining. Once we can talk about Catholicism or Judaism, we can start talking about Catholic culture or Jewish culture, and then we can talk about Santeria and Voodoo in the context of Catholic culture without trying to have a much harder and more hesitant conversation about whether Santeria or Voodoo "are religions."
5: The idea that certain beliefs are -- considered on their own, without respect to context -- inherently religious beliefs is a very new one, and while it makes sense to a modern post-Enlightenment laity, it is not an especially useful one. The idea that certain beliefs are inherently supernatural, although it's one I reference myself on a regular basis, is pretty dodgy too, and at best has to be understood as a sort of shorthand, a sort of footnote referencing a long conversation.
6: One reason it's very tricky defining what a religion is, what religious beliefs are, etc., is because there are so many supernatural practices, religious-seeming practices, etc., that are often found among the practices of members of particular religions but which are not found among the teachings of those religions. I'm talking about magic, but I'm not just talking about magic, in part because magic is a complicated area of scholarship and in part because people often misunderstand what you mean by it. On the one hand, you can make the claim, as some believers might do, that various magical practices are condemned by such and such a religion -- that Christians have no business believing in astrology, let's say. On the other hand, what do you make of the reality when such a forbidden, "non-religious" practice is primarily practiced by members of the religion that supposedly forbids it?
(Kabbalah, pre-Madonna -- no, pre-19th century, obviously -- is the obvious example here, because while roundly and regularly condemned by every major Jewish denomination it is also a group of mystical practices that, whatever its outside influences, is also quite clearly Jewish in nature, Jewish in practice. This is different from the divide between doctrinal religion and folk religion because we're talking about religious, mystical, or magical practices rejected not just by institutional authorities but by regular folks. And yet also practiced by regular folks.)
(As you might suspect, defining "magic" is at least as difficult as defining "religion." To me it seems harder -- with a lot of hemming and hawing I could spend a few thousand words explaining what religion means. I would hesitate to even attempt the same with "magic.")
Sunday, December 13, 2015
why I didn't include a love interest in my nanowrimo novel
So I just finished reading a novel that might've been just about perfect if not for the fact that the most prominent female character -- and one of the only female characters to appear throughout the whole book rather than in a scene or two -- is also:
a) one of the least developed characters in the book
b) plot-wise, mainly serves as an objective sounding board for the protagonist (though there are several other better-developed male characters who can and do serve this purpose)
c) repeatedly and primarily described in terms of her breasts
d) in the end, seems to be there to assure us that this man is a heterosexual, by giving him the opportunity to have heterosexual sex over the course of a plot in which sex is totally unnecessary.
This isn't a pulp or noir or detective story where genre tropes are informing this choice. And nothing would justify the first point anyway. It was enough for me to deduct a star in my Goodreads rating -- it doesn't help that there was such a dearth of female characters in general -- and would've been more if Goodreads did half-stars.
It got me thinking about the decision-making processes I had gone through recently in National Novel Writing Month this past November.
The first novel I finished -- after the usual years-since-childhood of starting many novels, getting a few pages or many brainstorming pages into them, and then moving on -- was a historical novel about the life of Jesus, during National Novel Writing Month many years ago. It's a good way to get over the mental hump of novel-writing: the process of constructing a beginning, middle, and end, developing an idea that is significantly longer than that of a short story, getting through the challenges of Act II, and so on. It makes you keep writing. I've written a good number of novels since, published a few, I did what I wanted to do: I learned how to get it done.
I hadn't written one in a while, so since my fiction writing agenda in 2015 was very informed by "going back to the beginning" -- writing stories in the genres where I started 25 years ago, etc -- I thought it would be a good time to do Nanowrimo again, so I did, and I got it done.
My 2015 novel takes place in an alternate 21st century where aquatic aliens landed on Earth in the early 20th century and colonized the deep sea. Due to the differences in living environments, contact since then has been sporadic and difficult, but the course of the 20th century unfolds differently. My protagonist, Shout, begins the story as a member of a church that was founded in 1970, a syncretic religion combining elements of Christianity and Judaism with the religion of the aliens, inspired by surprising coincidences in the aliens' scripture. In the 21st century, that religion falls apart when it'd discovered that the alien colonists consider their scripture a hoax, invented by a separate race of alien overseers and delivered to them sometime in their past. The story is in large part about how Shout deals with the dissolution of a religion he has spent more than half of his life in, and which was the center of his social and cultural world.
I decided Shout should be in his early 40s for two simple reasons: it's roughly my age, which makes it easy to relate, and since this is a new enough religion that most members were converts, it meant he had been a member long enough that the loss would be significant. But this brought up a serious question: should he be in a relationship?
If he's in a relationship with a fellow member of the church, then I'm writing about the effect of this church's dissolution on two people, not one, and of the effect they have on each other if and when they don't respond exactly the same way. That's an interesting story, but less introspective, less Dark Night of the Soul, than the one I had in mind, though I may always change my mind in revision. If he's in a relationship with someone who isn't and has never been a member of the church, the frictions might be even more difficult -- he'd be living with someone who might on some level be relieved that this religious difference was going away, or might expect him to give her religion (or lack thereof) a shot. Again -- interesting story, but didn't feel focused on the material I wanted.
So I established a breakup in the recent past as a result of his girlfriend leaving the church before he's ready to do so. The breakup is recent enough that he's not on the market.
What I didn't want to do was include a love interest that he meets over the course of the story -- a love interest who exists not because that's what the story is about, but because that's the arbitrary way to include a prominent female character, or because it's somehow necessary to establish the heterosexual red-bloodedness of the protagonist even in a story in which sex has no plot relevance.
On the one hand, that's one reason why, less than two weeks later, the love interest in this book I've just read stood out so much. On the other, the only reason I made this decision in the first place is because I was aware of how common that trope is. The interesting roles, the plot-moving roles -- the protagonist, the antagonist, the obstacle in this chapter, the person who needs to be convinced in that chapter, the ally from an unexpected place in this other chapter, the confidante over here, bonding over war stories over there, the mentor -- these roles all get filled by men, and then it feels weird to have a book that's just men (maybe it's a little gay, maybe they'll bump into each other backstage when they're getting dressed), so maybe a female victim is introduced in order to be avenged, or maybe a woman is introduced for men to fight over, or maybe a woman is introduced in order to sleep with. It's enough just to include them, right?
And even when it's not that bad, this "including a love interest just because for some reason a protagonist is supposed to have a love interest" trope has always felt lazy to me. There are so many other ways people fit together.
Just some Sunday morning thoughts.
a) one of the least developed characters in the book
b) plot-wise, mainly serves as an objective sounding board for the protagonist (though there are several other better-developed male characters who can and do serve this purpose)
c) repeatedly and primarily described in terms of her breasts
d) in the end, seems to be there to assure us that this man is a heterosexual, by giving him the opportunity to have heterosexual sex over the course of a plot in which sex is totally unnecessary.
This isn't a pulp or noir or detective story where genre tropes are informing this choice. And nothing would justify the first point anyway. It was enough for me to deduct a star in my Goodreads rating -- it doesn't help that there was such a dearth of female characters in general -- and would've been more if Goodreads did half-stars.
It got me thinking about the decision-making processes I had gone through recently in National Novel Writing Month this past November.
The first novel I finished -- after the usual years-since-childhood of starting many novels, getting a few pages or many brainstorming pages into them, and then moving on -- was a historical novel about the life of Jesus, during National Novel Writing Month many years ago. It's a good way to get over the mental hump of novel-writing: the process of constructing a beginning, middle, and end, developing an idea that is significantly longer than that of a short story, getting through the challenges of Act II, and so on. It makes you keep writing. I've written a good number of novels since, published a few, I did what I wanted to do: I learned how to get it done.
I hadn't written one in a while, so since my fiction writing agenda in 2015 was very informed by "going back to the beginning" -- writing stories in the genres where I started 25 years ago, etc -- I thought it would be a good time to do Nanowrimo again, so I did, and I got it done.
My 2015 novel takes place in an alternate 21st century where aquatic aliens landed on Earth in the early 20th century and colonized the deep sea. Due to the differences in living environments, contact since then has been sporadic and difficult, but the course of the 20th century unfolds differently. My protagonist, Shout, begins the story as a member of a church that was founded in 1970, a syncretic religion combining elements of Christianity and Judaism with the religion of the aliens, inspired by surprising coincidences in the aliens' scripture. In the 21st century, that religion falls apart when it'd discovered that the alien colonists consider their scripture a hoax, invented by a separate race of alien overseers and delivered to them sometime in their past. The story is in large part about how Shout deals with the dissolution of a religion he has spent more than half of his life in, and which was the center of his social and cultural world.
I decided Shout should be in his early 40s for two simple reasons: it's roughly my age, which makes it easy to relate, and since this is a new enough religion that most members were converts, it meant he had been a member long enough that the loss would be significant. But this brought up a serious question: should he be in a relationship?
If he's in a relationship with a fellow member of the church, then I'm writing about the effect of this church's dissolution on two people, not one, and of the effect they have on each other if and when they don't respond exactly the same way. That's an interesting story, but less introspective, less Dark Night of the Soul, than the one I had in mind, though I may always change my mind in revision. If he's in a relationship with someone who isn't and has never been a member of the church, the frictions might be even more difficult -- he'd be living with someone who might on some level be relieved that this religious difference was going away, or might expect him to give her religion (or lack thereof) a shot. Again -- interesting story, but didn't feel focused on the material I wanted.
So I established a breakup in the recent past as a result of his girlfriend leaving the church before he's ready to do so. The breakup is recent enough that he's not on the market.
What I didn't want to do was include a love interest that he meets over the course of the story -- a love interest who exists not because that's what the story is about, but because that's the arbitrary way to include a prominent female character, or because it's somehow necessary to establish the heterosexual red-bloodedness of the protagonist even in a story in which sex has no plot relevance.
On the one hand, that's one reason why, less than two weeks later, the love interest in this book I've just read stood out so much. On the other, the only reason I made this decision in the first place is because I was aware of how common that trope is. The interesting roles, the plot-moving roles -- the protagonist, the antagonist, the obstacle in this chapter, the person who needs to be convinced in that chapter, the ally from an unexpected place in this other chapter, the confidante over here, bonding over war stories over there, the mentor -- these roles all get filled by men, and then it feels weird to have a book that's just men (maybe it's a little gay, maybe they'll bump into each other backstage when they're getting dressed), so maybe a female victim is introduced in order to be avenged, or maybe a woman is introduced for men to fight over, or maybe a woman is introduced in order to sleep with. It's enough just to include them, right?
And even when it's not that bad, this "including a love interest just because for some reason a protagonist is supposed to have a love interest" trope has always felt lazy to me. There are so many other ways people fit together.
Just some Sunday morning thoughts.
Thursday, December 10, 2015
recent reading: theology in the context of world christianity
I think this is the last of these for now, though of course if I don't blog about something else before the next relevant book I finish reading, that will prove wrong.
Theology in the Context of World Christianity:
This is a book for theology students, and Tennent is not only an orthodox Christian -- which I am not, at least in some respects that orthodox Christians would find important -- he is a relatively conservative one, and his skepticism where progressive Christianity is concerned is frequently clear. Nevertheless, that doesn't take anything away from the many valid points he has to make about the growth of Christianity in what this book calls the "Majority World," which you may more familiarly know as the Third World and which in my encyclopedia work is often called the Global South.
I've blogged about this book before, last week. Moving on from there:
"These new Christians believe the Bible [which is to say, incline more toward literalism and authoritarianism], are Christ-centered, and are supernaturalistic ... in contrast to their Western counterparts, they have 'a much greater respect for the authority of scripture' and 'a special interest in supernatural elements of scripture, such as miracles, visions, and healings.' They also believe in the 'continuing power of prophecy.'"
While on the one hand this rise sounds similar to the religious revivalism that punctuated American religious history until culminating in the takeover of American Protestantism by charismatic, Pentecostal, evangelical, and fundamentalist elements, the important context here is that these are "revived" Christians, these are converted Christians, Christians living in cultures much more religiously pluralistic than the United States, Christians who have chosen this flavor of Christianity over other religions, rather than simply over other flavors of Christianity. The religious history of the United States is so incredibly and improbably diverse within the bounds of Judeo-Christianity that it is easy for Americans to lose sight of how different Christian life is when you have, instead, many religions and fewer variations within Christianity.
"Five trends in the theology of Majority World Christians:
"1: These believers accept the authority of Scripture and, by Western standards, hold a theology considered conservative, orthodox, and traditionalist;
"2: Majority World Christians are more likely to be morally and ethically conservative;"
And yet ...
"3: These new, younger churches are more likely to be sensitive to the Christian responsibility to address issues related to poverty and social justice;
"4: These younger churches are experienced at articulating the uniqueness of the gospel in the midst of religious pluralism;
"5: Majority World Christians are more likely to grasp the corporate (not just individualistic) dimensions of the teachings of the New Testament."
"These younger churches are experienced at articulating the gospel in the midst of religious pluralism. Many of the younger churches are springing up within the larger context of the sometimes dominating presence of some non-Christian religion, such as Islam, Hinduism, or Buddhism. ... They often approach the continuities with less defensiveness while, at the same time, are surprisingly frank and candid about the glaring discontinuities that inevitably arise when other religions fail to recognize the true dignity of Jesus Christ."
"Many of these new Christians cannot be easily categorized under any of the traditional and familiar headings of Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, or Protestant. These Christians had no part in the European 'protest,' so it is difficult to call them Protestant. They are not related to the pope or the magisterium in Rome, so it is difficult to call them Roman Catholic. They are not submitted to the authority of any of the Eastern patriarchs, so it is difficult to call them Eastern Orthodox."
To be fair, this is true for many, many Christian movements in the United States from the 19th century onward, with the Latter Day Saints, 7th Day Adventists, Jehovah's Witnesses, Christian Scientists, and aforementioned fundamentalists and evangelical movements as the obvious examples. Nevertheless there is a good point to be made here, it has just been worded poorly: these younger "Majority World" churches are in many cases independent or have only tenuous formal connections to western ecclesiastical organizations.
"The delegates to the Council of Nicea and the Council of Chalcedon were seeking to be faithful to the hundreds of Christological 'pieces' found in the texts of Scriptures. It was their unenviable task to put the whole 'picture' of Christ together for the very first time in such a way as to find a perfect match for every piece. ... The proceedings of these councils did more to declare which pieces were not true pieces of the puzzle and should be discarded, then to provide a final, definitive statement of Christology that would silence all future discussions."
First of all, see what I mean about orthodox Christianities defining themselves by opposition, vis-a-vis what I mentioned in passing in my Qur'an in Conversation post? Second, this is mainly a reminder to myself to expand my reading to include more in-depth reading about the Council of Chalcedon, which lies just outside the time period I have usually focused on.
"Another example is reflected in the insightful question about Chalcedon raised by Millard Erickson: 'How do we integrate and understand a Christology 'from above' with a Christology 'from below'? In other words, the Council of Chalcedon was looking at the Christological puzzle from the upper side, that is, from the divine perspective of God's initiative in becoming a man. They did not deliberate or discuss how the incarnation is understood from the perspective of, for example, fifth-century Persian Christians who, at the time of this council, were being persecuted for their faith in Christ.
"Even these few examples reveal two important insights about Chalcedonian Christology. First, even if we accept, as the sensus communis has, that every single piece Chalcedon placed into the Christological puzzle was a perfect fit and every single piece they rejected was truly worth rejecting, we must still recognize that the puzzle is much bigger than Chalcedon or any other council could fully tackle. Second, as it turns out, the puzzle is more complex than an ordinary one because each piece of the puzzle seems to have two sides: an 'upper side' revealing God's perspective on Christ (eternality, Trinity, Son of God, etc) and an 'under side' revealing the human perspective on Christ (teacher, healer, friend of sinners, etc)."
"African Christology tends to be more holistic in the way it integrates the person and work of Christ. Its view of the person of Christ is constantly informed by what Christ has accomplished in history and what he continues to do in the world. There is a deep concern in African Christology to demonstrate that Christ is no stranger to the practical realities of poverty, illiteracy, ethnic tensions, colonialism, dictatorship, illness, disenfranchisement, and suffering, all of which Pobee and Akinade have aptly called Africa's 'multiheaded hydra.'"
"The second implication of Africans' starting their Christology 'from below' is that its overall approach is more holistic and integrative in explaining how the person and work of Christ apply to the whole of African life. ... The early preaching [by European missionaries] did not, for example, point out that Jesus was Lord of the crops or the one who provided protection during dangerous journeys or who assisted in the safe birth of a new baby. The nineteenth-century missionaries did not generally come from Christian traditions that practiced casting out demons or were accustomed to praying for God to bring in the crops, except perhaps during times of extreme drought. In short, the Jesus Christ who was preached was often a truncated Christ, not measuring up fully to the biblical picture of Jesus's life, work, and ministry."
"The second distinctive feature of African Christology is its conscious awareness of traditional Christological formulations from the West. Unlike Western theologians who often write in isolation from the wider global context, African theologians are keenly aware of the historic Western Christological focus on precise philosophical and metaphysical questions concerning the person of Christ. It is true that some African theologians are critical of the way the councils produced 'metaphysical rather than biblically functional images of Jesus,' or complain that the historic formulations are 'static,' and fail to 'touch the souls' of Africans or relate to the 'concrete lives of people.' But the overall tenor of African Christology is marked by a profound respect for historic Christian confessions.
"In fact, John Pobee encourages emerging African theologians to listen carefully to those who have gone before us so that we 'do not go hopelessly wrong.' He reminds Africans that they are not 'starting from scratch,' but that they must write in the context of the depositum fidei that should inform all African Christology. John Onai-yekan calls the classical formulations 'valid reference points' and argues that every African Christian should 'consider this classical Christology part of the common theological patrimony of the Church, of which we are full-fledged members.'"
Some of this can sound a little paternalistic, like the concern here is to make sure that new Christians don't "accidentally" stray from orthodoxy and wind up with a Christianity that's too far removed from western Christianity, but to be fair, it is true that in two thousand years of Christian history, chances are pretty good that past theologians have addressed -- and disputed -- and countered -- and doubled down on -- just about every question you can think of, and that there is little point in reinventing the wheel without at least consulting everybody else's wheel blueprints first. Even so, after reading a chapter on African Christology by a non-African, I sort of feel obligated to read some African theology by an actual African theologian.
Moving on from Africa:
"... two important branches of Vaishnava Hinduism are the Vadagalais and the Tengalais. The Tengalais teach that salvation comes through a total surrender to the sovereignty of Lord Vishnu and a full and complete trust in his bestowal of unmerited grace. Being saved and surrendering to God is like a young kitten totally dependent on its mother. We have all observed how a mother cat will pick up her kitten with her mouth ... as it hangs helplessly and in complete trust. The Tengalais say that the baby kitten is the perfect picture of grace ... so the devotee must totally surrender to the will of Lord Vishnu.
"In contrast, the Vadagalais teach that salvation depends on some exercise of our human will and our participation with God in his sovereign act of grace. Rather than a kitten, they use the analogy of the baby monkey. A baby monkey must actively cling to its mother as the mother moves around for food or shelter or seeks safety. The baby monkey is, for the Vadagalais, the picture of our participation with God in his sovereign work."
And some points about the Holy Spirit, in a chapter about the rapid growth of Pentecostalism in historically Catholic Latin America:
"This ambiguity [of the Holy Spirit] and neutrality is reflected in the Apostles' Creed (which is probably based on the earlier second-century Roman Creed) and the original Nicene Creed of AD 325, which simply states, 'We believe in the Holy Spirit,' without further commentary. In 381, a second ecumenical council met in Constantinople. The further deliberations on the Holy Spirit led the council to amplify and clarify the faith of the Nicene Creed so that it unequivocally declared the deity of the Holy Spirit. The Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed declares,
"'We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord and Giver of Life, who proceedeth from the Father, who with the Father and the Son together is worshipped and glorified, who spoke by the prophets.'"
"Because the ecumenical discussions about the Holy Spirit were focused primarily on its deity and relationship within the Trinity, there was a serious neglect of a full development of its work. Indeed, William Menzies points out that 'the ancient church from the second century through the ninth century was almost totally preoccupied with questions pertaining to the identity of Jesus Christ, so that what was said of the Holy Spirit was largely an appendage to theology, and was limited largely to ontology, the Being of God within his inter-trinitarian relationships.' That remained largely unchanged during medieval scholarship."
For context, the Holy Spirit is the source of "gifts of the spirit," i.e. speaking in tongues, prophecy, the casting out of demons, "faith healing," and the other distinctive features of Pentecostalism. There is a sense -- and this is me saying this, not Tennent -- in which what happened here is that Trinitarianism was established but the role of the Holy Spirit was so ill-defined (especially in Protestantism, which largely lacks a distinctive vigorous theology of the Trinity but usually preserves the concept of the Trinity) that the Pentecostal movement was able to find this conceptual gap in received Christian thought and wiggle into it, providing Biblical and theological justification for religious activities that are in other respects very foreign to the Christian experience of worship.
"The bhakti movement allows for Hindus to focus their worship on a particular god ... these Jesu bhakta [Jesus-worshiping bhakta] follow an ishta devata theology within Hinduism. The practice of ishta devata allows a person to worship a particular, chosen deity without necessarily denying that other gods exist."
INTERRUPTING BILL SEZ: This is similar, it sounds to me, to the term "monolatry," originally used in reference to classical Greek religious practice but also used in discussions of ancient Jewish religion, specifically the theory that the ancient Jewish religion shifted from the monolatrist worship of El (Yahweh) while acknowledging the existence of gods such as Baal, to a strict monotheism that denies not only the validity of worshiping other gods but the existence of those gods. The textual evidence for this is rampant, and it feeds into an alternate origin story for Israel: because there is no archaeological evidence for an Exodus (and because this lack of evidence is not easy to explain), a popular theory is that Canaan became Israel not through the invasion of Hebrews who had escaped bondage in Egypt, but through internal revolt as Yahwists overthrew non-Yahwists, whether by force or cultural shift.
So that was a total tangent.
"They are, therefore, allowed to focus their worship exclusively on Jesus and yet maintain their cultural and social particularities as Hindus. If asked, they continue to call themselves Hindus. They will not identify themselves as Christian, and many do not attend any church. This unwillingness to identify with the church or with baptism is not due to any shame about following Christ, but to strong cultural associations surrounding the terms ... many Hindus think that to become a Christian means using Western style eating utensils, eating beef, and drinking alcohol ... they do not understand why Christian women no longer wear bangles or participate in popular cultural festivals. In short, even if a Hindu is drawn to Christ, they may find membership in the church or the term Christian repugnant."
There's a longer and more complicated section on people in the Muslim world who, while worshiping Jesus, continue to identify as Muslim, with the note that there is not nearly enough research in this area.
So. Overall a very good overview with lots of things to explore more in the future.
Theology in the Context of World Christianity:
This is a book for theology students, and Tennent is not only an orthodox Christian -- which I am not, at least in some respects that orthodox Christians would find important -- he is a relatively conservative one, and his skepticism where progressive Christianity is concerned is frequently clear. Nevertheless, that doesn't take anything away from the many valid points he has to make about the growth of Christianity in what this book calls the "Majority World," which you may more familiarly know as the Third World and which in my encyclopedia work is often called the Global South.
I've blogged about this book before, last week. Moving on from there:
"These new Christians believe the Bible [which is to say, incline more toward literalism and authoritarianism], are Christ-centered, and are supernaturalistic ... in contrast to their Western counterparts, they have 'a much greater respect for the authority of scripture' and 'a special interest in supernatural elements of scripture, such as miracles, visions, and healings.' They also believe in the 'continuing power of prophecy.'"
While on the one hand this rise sounds similar to the religious revivalism that punctuated American religious history until culminating in the takeover of American Protestantism by charismatic, Pentecostal, evangelical, and fundamentalist elements, the important context here is that these are "revived" Christians, these are converted Christians, Christians living in cultures much more religiously pluralistic than the United States, Christians who have chosen this flavor of Christianity over other religions, rather than simply over other flavors of Christianity. The religious history of the United States is so incredibly and improbably diverse within the bounds of Judeo-Christianity that it is easy for Americans to lose sight of how different Christian life is when you have, instead, many religions and fewer variations within Christianity.
"Five trends in the theology of Majority World Christians:
"1: These believers accept the authority of Scripture and, by Western standards, hold a theology considered conservative, orthodox, and traditionalist;
"2: Majority World Christians are more likely to be morally and ethically conservative;"
And yet ...
"3: These new, younger churches are more likely to be sensitive to the Christian responsibility to address issues related to poverty and social justice;
"4: These younger churches are experienced at articulating the uniqueness of the gospel in the midst of religious pluralism;
"5: Majority World Christians are more likely to grasp the corporate (not just individualistic) dimensions of the teachings of the New Testament."
"These younger churches are experienced at articulating the gospel in the midst of religious pluralism. Many of the younger churches are springing up within the larger context of the sometimes dominating presence of some non-Christian religion, such as Islam, Hinduism, or Buddhism. ... They often approach the continuities with less defensiveness while, at the same time, are surprisingly frank and candid about the glaring discontinuities that inevitably arise when other religions fail to recognize the true dignity of Jesus Christ."
"Many of these new Christians cannot be easily categorized under any of the traditional and familiar headings of Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, or Protestant. These Christians had no part in the European 'protest,' so it is difficult to call them Protestant. They are not related to the pope or the magisterium in Rome, so it is difficult to call them Roman Catholic. They are not submitted to the authority of any of the Eastern patriarchs, so it is difficult to call them Eastern Orthodox."
To be fair, this is true for many, many Christian movements in the United States from the 19th century onward, with the Latter Day Saints, 7th Day Adventists, Jehovah's Witnesses, Christian Scientists, and aforementioned fundamentalists and evangelical movements as the obvious examples. Nevertheless there is a good point to be made here, it has just been worded poorly: these younger "Majority World" churches are in many cases independent or have only tenuous formal connections to western ecclesiastical organizations.
"The delegates to the Council of Nicea and the Council of Chalcedon were seeking to be faithful to the hundreds of Christological 'pieces' found in the texts of Scriptures. It was their unenviable task to put the whole 'picture' of Christ together for the very first time in such a way as to find a perfect match for every piece. ... The proceedings of these councils did more to declare which pieces were not true pieces of the puzzle and should be discarded, then to provide a final, definitive statement of Christology that would silence all future discussions."
First of all, see what I mean about orthodox Christianities defining themselves by opposition, vis-a-vis what I mentioned in passing in my Qur'an in Conversation post? Second, this is mainly a reminder to myself to expand my reading to include more in-depth reading about the Council of Chalcedon, which lies just outside the time period I have usually focused on.
"Another example is reflected in the insightful question about Chalcedon raised by Millard Erickson: 'How do we integrate and understand a Christology 'from above' with a Christology 'from below'? In other words, the Council of Chalcedon was looking at the Christological puzzle from the upper side, that is, from the divine perspective of God's initiative in becoming a man. They did not deliberate or discuss how the incarnation is understood from the perspective of, for example, fifth-century Persian Christians who, at the time of this council, were being persecuted for their faith in Christ.
"Even these few examples reveal two important insights about Chalcedonian Christology. First, even if we accept, as the sensus communis has, that every single piece Chalcedon placed into the Christological puzzle was a perfect fit and every single piece they rejected was truly worth rejecting, we must still recognize that the puzzle is much bigger than Chalcedon or any other council could fully tackle. Second, as it turns out, the puzzle is more complex than an ordinary one because each piece of the puzzle seems to have two sides: an 'upper side' revealing God's perspective on Christ (eternality, Trinity, Son of God, etc) and an 'under side' revealing the human perspective on Christ (teacher, healer, friend of sinners, etc)."
"African Christology tends to be more holistic in the way it integrates the person and work of Christ. Its view of the person of Christ is constantly informed by what Christ has accomplished in history and what he continues to do in the world. There is a deep concern in African Christology to demonstrate that Christ is no stranger to the practical realities of poverty, illiteracy, ethnic tensions, colonialism, dictatorship, illness, disenfranchisement, and suffering, all of which Pobee and Akinade have aptly called Africa's 'multiheaded hydra.'"
"The second implication of Africans' starting their Christology 'from below' is that its overall approach is more holistic and integrative in explaining how the person and work of Christ apply to the whole of African life. ... The early preaching [by European missionaries] did not, for example, point out that Jesus was Lord of the crops or the one who provided protection during dangerous journeys or who assisted in the safe birth of a new baby. The nineteenth-century missionaries did not generally come from Christian traditions that practiced casting out demons or were accustomed to praying for God to bring in the crops, except perhaps during times of extreme drought. In short, the Jesus Christ who was preached was often a truncated Christ, not measuring up fully to the biblical picture of Jesus's life, work, and ministry."
"The second distinctive feature of African Christology is its conscious awareness of traditional Christological formulations from the West. Unlike Western theologians who often write in isolation from the wider global context, African theologians are keenly aware of the historic Western Christological focus on precise philosophical and metaphysical questions concerning the person of Christ. It is true that some African theologians are critical of the way the councils produced 'metaphysical rather than biblically functional images of Jesus,' or complain that the historic formulations are 'static,' and fail to 'touch the souls' of Africans or relate to the 'concrete lives of people.' But the overall tenor of African Christology is marked by a profound respect for historic Christian confessions.
"In fact, John Pobee encourages emerging African theologians to listen carefully to those who have gone before us so that we 'do not go hopelessly wrong.' He reminds Africans that they are not 'starting from scratch,' but that they must write in the context of the depositum fidei that should inform all African Christology. John Onai-yekan calls the classical formulations 'valid reference points' and argues that every African Christian should 'consider this classical Christology part of the common theological patrimony of the Church, of which we are full-fledged members.'"
Some of this can sound a little paternalistic, like the concern here is to make sure that new Christians don't "accidentally" stray from orthodoxy and wind up with a Christianity that's too far removed from western Christianity, but to be fair, it is true that in two thousand years of Christian history, chances are pretty good that past theologians have addressed -- and disputed -- and countered -- and doubled down on -- just about every question you can think of, and that there is little point in reinventing the wheel without at least consulting everybody else's wheel blueprints first. Even so, after reading a chapter on African Christology by a non-African, I sort of feel obligated to read some African theology by an actual African theologian.
Moving on from Africa:
"... two important branches of Vaishnava Hinduism are the Vadagalais and the Tengalais. The Tengalais teach that salvation comes through a total surrender to the sovereignty of Lord Vishnu and a full and complete trust in his bestowal of unmerited grace. Being saved and surrendering to God is like a young kitten totally dependent on its mother. We have all observed how a mother cat will pick up her kitten with her mouth ... as it hangs helplessly and in complete trust. The Tengalais say that the baby kitten is the perfect picture of grace ... so the devotee must totally surrender to the will of Lord Vishnu.
"In contrast, the Vadagalais teach that salvation depends on some exercise of our human will and our participation with God in his sovereign act of grace. Rather than a kitten, they use the analogy of the baby monkey. A baby monkey must actively cling to its mother as the mother moves around for food or shelter or seeks safety. The baby monkey is, for the Vadagalais, the picture of our participation with God in his sovereign work."
And some points about the Holy Spirit, in a chapter about the rapid growth of Pentecostalism in historically Catholic Latin America:
"This ambiguity [of the Holy Spirit] and neutrality is reflected in the Apostles' Creed (which is probably based on the earlier second-century Roman Creed) and the original Nicene Creed of AD 325, which simply states, 'We believe in the Holy Spirit,' without further commentary. In 381, a second ecumenical council met in Constantinople. The further deliberations on the Holy Spirit led the council to amplify and clarify the faith of the Nicene Creed so that it unequivocally declared the deity of the Holy Spirit. The Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed declares,
"'We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord and Giver of Life, who proceedeth from the Father, who with the Father and the Son together is worshipped and glorified, who spoke by the prophets.'"
"Because the ecumenical discussions about the Holy Spirit were focused primarily on its deity and relationship within the Trinity, there was a serious neglect of a full development of its work. Indeed, William Menzies points out that 'the ancient church from the second century through the ninth century was almost totally preoccupied with questions pertaining to the identity of Jesus Christ, so that what was said of the Holy Spirit was largely an appendage to theology, and was limited largely to ontology, the Being of God within his inter-trinitarian relationships.' That remained largely unchanged during medieval scholarship."
For context, the Holy Spirit is the source of "gifts of the spirit," i.e. speaking in tongues, prophecy, the casting out of demons, "faith healing," and the other distinctive features of Pentecostalism. There is a sense -- and this is me saying this, not Tennent -- in which what happened here is that Trinitarianism was established but the role of the Holy Spirit was so ill-defined (especially in Protestantism, which largely lacks a distinctive vigorous theology of the Trinity but usually preserves the concept of the Trinity) that the Pentecostal movement was able to find this conceptual gap in received Christian thought and wiggle into it, providing Biblical and theological justification for religious activities that are in other respects very foreign to the Christian experience of worship.
"The bhakti movement allows for Hindus to focus their worship on a particular god ... these Jesu bhakta [Jesus-worshiping bhakta] follow an ishta devata theology within Hinduism. The practice of ishta devata allows a person to worship a particular, chosen deity without necessarily denying that other gods exist."
INTERRUPTING BILL SEZ: This is similar, it sounds to me, to the term "monolatry," originally used in reference to classical Greek religious practice but also used in discussions of ancient Jewish religion, specifically the theory that the ancient Jewish religion shifted from the monolatrist worship of El (Yahweh) while acknowledging the existence of gods such as Baal, to a strict monotheism that denies not only the validity of worshiping other gods but the existence of those gods. The textual evidence for this is rampant, and it feeds into an alternate origin story for Israel: because there is no archaeological evidence for an Exodus (and because this lack of evidence is not easy to explain), a popular theory is that Canaan became Israel not through the invasion of Hebrews who had escaped bondage in Egypt, but through internal revolt as Yahwists overthrew non-Yahwists, whether by force or cultural shift.
So that was a total tangent.
"They are, therefore, allowed to focus their worship exclusively on Jesus and yet maintain their cultural and social particularities as Hindus. If asked, they continue to call themselves Hindus. They will not identify themselves as Christian, and many do not attend any church. This unwillingness to identify with the church or with baptism is not due to any shame about following Christ, but to strong cultural associations surrounding the terms ... many Hindus think that to become a Christian means using Western style eating utensils, eating beef, and drinking alcohol ... they do not understand why Christian women no longer wear bangles or participate in popular cultural festivals. In short, even if a Hindu is drawn to Christ, they may find membership in the church or the term Christian repugnant."
There's a longer and more complicated section on people in the Muslim world who, while worshiping Jesus, continue to identify as Muslim, with the note that there is not nearly enough research in this area.
So. Overall a very good overview with lots of things to explore more in the future.
recent reading: qur'an in conversation
I'm much earlier in my education on Islam than I am in my education on Christianity or Judaism, which I expect is the norm for religious studies scholars who don't actually specialize in Islam (or in comparative religion) -- at least of my generation. For the younger generation, the ones who started school after 9/11, maybe it's different. On 9/11/2001, both my graduate career and my professional scholar career were already launched -- I was researching a Master's thesis on King David, and I had my first professional nonfiction assignment (the prefatory essay to a Mark Twain collection), which happened to be due 9/12/2001, a deadline that is for obvious reasons easy to remember. Though I remember some colleagues who were interested in the Nation of Islam and Islam in the African-American community, for instance, there was otherwise little discussion of American Islam, which is now receiving considerable attention in the scholarly community (and newspapers, every time some group of shitbirds protests the building or expansion of a mosque) after post-9/11 Islamophobia reinvigorated American Muslims.
But it seems particularly silly to be a religious studies scholar in 2015, nearly 2016, without a decent handle on Islam, and while just by virtue of being able to read a book with grown-up words in it I know more about Islam than the "ban all Muslims" knuckleheads, the prevalence of ignorance is not an excuse to lower standards -- there's no reason to grade on a curve here.
As with my early reading on Christianity or Judaism, my reading on Islam is a little scattershot, and I will eventually have to doubleback and reread things that will make new sense the second time through. (This is not the first book I've read on Islam, to be clear, just the first since starting this blog. My formal education, though, was limited to Medieval Islamic philosophy, so I don't have the same foundations that I do for discussing western religion and philosophy, the ancient Near East, or the development of religion in the US. In my own research prior to the last couple years, my primary interest in Islam has been with regard to its place in one of my ongoing areas of scholarly concern: the way orthodox Christianities [meaning principally the Catholic Church in this case] have defined themselves in terms of opposition to other belief sets, i.e. through the identification of heresies and so on. There are a lot of parallels between the early reception of the Latter Day Saints and that of Islam, by mainline Protestants in the first case and western Christianity in the second: "is this a kind of Christianity we're looking at? it claims to pray to the same God but also possesses a new scripture from that God." The reasons why everything played out differently from that point, and so on, well -- that would be a good subject for a book by someone better versed in both topics.)
Qur'an in Conversation:
This is a collection of essays, loosely sorted by theme, by Muslim scholars on different suras of the Qur'an. Though I wish the project were more global in scope, I understand why only North Americans (specifically Americans and Canadians, I think, but forgive me if I'm forgetting someone) were included. Virtually every page of it contradicts the popular press image of Islam as an ultraconservative and unchanging monolith.
Intellectually I knew that. Even when you insist on "taking the Qur'an [or the Bible] literally," there is always a necessary act of interpretation, because there is no language that is free of ambiguity, and putting centuries between the writer and the reader nearly always increases rather than decreases that ambiguity. The most conservative, most literalist possible version of Islam couldn't be monolithic, without strict centralized control (which would only control what people can say and act on, not what they believe), which simply does not exist. But there is knowing that this is true, and there is reading scholars' essays on the specifics of it.
Most of what I read here, I didn't mark any specific passages from. My takeaway was much more basic, along the nature of "oh okay, this is an example of how a modern feminist Muslim deals with the Qur'an." At my level of education, those basic takeaways are still the most important. The specifics are important for their demythologizing effect. But that's the thing, part of religious literacy, perhaps a large part, is avoiding the caricaturing and broad sketches of faith groups.
For instance, I'm not clear on how many people are aware that only 20% of the Muslim world is Arab. I think maybe a lot of educated people would have guessed that the Muslim world was at least not majority-Arab, given some time to mull it over, based on two things that should be part of the common knowledge canon: the role played here by the Indian subcontinent, and the fact that Christianity is no longer mainly a religion of Palestinian Jews, nor Buddhism mainly a religion of India. Among world religions, in other words, this is one of the models for becoming a world religion.
But one of the things most people seem to know about Islam is its insistence that the Qur'an is read in Arabic, the language in which it was revealed to Mohammad. This is one place where that "only 20%" becomes very important to our discussions of Islam, because the overwhelming majority of Muslims do not read the Qur'an in Arabic, and I have seen many, many people insisting that they do, and insisting on the dominance of a form of literalism or fundamentalism that a) simply is not dominant and b) is functionally impossible given the size of Islam and its many, many internal divisions.
The predominance of translated Qur'ans is important for a number of reasons. Biblical translation is an area the layman knows little enough about as it is -- you have only to glance at the headlines about the recent KJV draft discovery to realize that. But as complex an issue as Biblical translation is, Qur'anic translation is not only more complex, it is far more politicized, and involves state actors.
Anyway, on to some notes.
Emran El-Badawi:
"Within the Arabian sphere in which the Qur'an operates, Jews, Christians, and hanifs -- 'proto-Muslims' -- were competing with one another at times through Arabic oral tradition, at other times through forms of Aramaic writing. When the Qur'an identifies itself as 'clear Arabic language,' it acknowledges its existence in a multilingual context, hence the significance of the 'Arabic Qur'an.' Why would such descriptions have been significant if all members of its audience simply spoke Arabic? It would have been a nonissue. Such descriptions are a statement that THIS Scripture is in Arabic -- a new revelation to be added to Hebrew and Christian Scripture."
"One thing I argue in the first chapter of my book The Qur'an and the Aramaic Gospel Traditions is that there exists some serious sectarian and missionary activity in the environment of the Qur'an. Some Muslims feel uncomfortable when I say that, and fear that I am subjecting the text to a secularizing or even orientalist reading. In such cases I say, 'No, I'm reading the Qur'an and you're reading tafsir, the commentary that came about later on.' The Qur'an discusses the sectarianism of its day explicitly, a small sample of which can be gleaned from such words as shiqaq (division) and ahzab (parties) and when it talks about groups or sides. The Qur'an is adding its voice to a multiplicity of competing theological and legal schools and proposing its own to be the correct one."
I don't know how much I am reading in my Christian scholarship here, but this sounds similar to the role of the Gospels, which did not create Christianity -- even though moderns now treat them as the foundational Christian texts -- but were written by existing Christian communities to compete with, correct, or convert audiences away from other Christian communities which owed their existence to other written and oral sources.
"To push this argument further, some Muslims are hesitant to look at such texts as the Infancy Gospel of Thomas or the Protevangelium of James. Muslim tradition is not based, as it were, on such texts but rather on exegetical, prophetic, and biographical literature -- tafsir, hadith, sirah, and so on -- which flourished about two centuries after the Qur'an. However, in the premodern Muslim scholarship of the ninth to sixteenth century, widely accepted authors like Ibn Qutaybah, Tabari, al-Suyuti, and others were looking at and debating the textual context with which the Qur'an is in dialogue. I say 'in dialogue' because it is talking to the audience of those texts. In the fifteenth century, in his multilvolume Tafsir, al-Biqa'i considers the canonical Gospels to be the injil referred to by the Qur'an. Most Muslims today would not agree with that. And yet this line of thought was afforded some space within Islam in the past."
Jamal Badawi:
Sura 9:5: "Kill the idolaters [mushrikin] wherever you find them, capture them, besiege them, lie in wait for them at every place of ambush."
This is obviously one of the most incendiary lines in the Qur'an, one that both jihadists and Islamophobes will point to. But given that this religion has been around for a long time and that most of its members have not, in fact, called for the death of non-Muslims ... sometimes I can't believe I have to point this out, but in all religions there is, clearly, a long tradition of grappling with the challenging or the problematic, whether that means discounting something as simply wrong because we have moved on from its original historical context (as liberal -- and really, most moderate -- Christians do with the violence, homophobia, and misogyny of the Bible), or looking deeper to see if there might be another less problematic level of meaning.
That struggle is the sort of thing I have seen New Atheist writers dismiss as "cheating," as though somehow religious people have an obligation to live up to a cardboard stereotype. Let's be very clear: grappling with scripture in this way is not a modern preoccupation. It is a major component of the very substance of religious life and religious thought, and in every religious tradition with which I am at all familiar, you will find it dating to its earliest generations.
Badawi begins:
"This is one of the most misunderstood verses of the Qur'an, and so it offers an excellent opportunity for exploring an appropriate methodology of reading the Qur'an. The Qur'an describes itself as a book of guidance ... it tells its readers what to believe and how to behave. Yet there are some verses that can seem, at first glance, to be in tension with or even in contradiction to other parts of the Qur'an. Islamic tradition offers a way to approach these verses and to set them in the context of the larger message of Islam's holy book...
"First of all, in order to evaluate whether or not a given act or argument conforms to the normative teachings of Islam, there must be some criteria for such evaluations. How are these norms to be identified? In the case of Islam, the primary sources are the Qur'an and authentic or sound hadiths, which are reports of the words and actions of the Prophet Muhammad... These primary sources are supplemented by secondary sources of Islam. The generally agreed to sources are consensus of the scholars on a given issue, or ijmaa', and analogical deduction, or qiyaas. Secondary sources are not revelatory, even though they are based on interpretations of revelatory sources.
"... Next, a solid interpretation of the Qur'an must be based on a study of the text in its original Arabic form. Translation results in ambiguity. Furthermore, the Arabic language itself has evolved since the seventh century, and some words have changed in meaning...
"Historical context is another tool, particular what is termed the occasion of revelation of a particular verse. Some verses were revealed to address a particular situation or to settle a particular dispute. A knowledge of this context can help to understand a verse that otherwise might seem to be incoherent with the larger message of the Qur'an."
So there's some simple "how to use the Qur'an" takeaway here:
1: As with the Bible, it is inappropriate to pick a verse and use it in a vacuum -- the meaning of a verse has to be considered against the context of the text as a whole.
2: There are traditions of commentary and interpretation, just as Judaism has the Talmud or Christianity has the Church Fathers and later theologians (and a history of continuing to adopt new doctrine, cf. the Immaculate Conception). No religion is limited to its original text. That is not how people do religion.
Back to Badawi:
"Read in isolation ... it suggests that people who do not accept Islam deserve to die. We cannot say, as some extremists do, that this single verse cancels out all the Qur'anic verses that speak of tolerance and peaceful coexistence. The historical context reveals that the idolatrous Meccans had broken the treaty of Hudaybiyya, which they had made with the Muslims in Medina, and murdered peaceful Muslims. ... The treaty ... stipulated a ten-year truce between the two cities, but not all Meccans abided by the conditions of the treaty. By today's standards that would be considered a war crime. So now the verse is limited to those who had committed that aggression.
"To someone first reading this verse, without understanding its context, it may sound like a general principle, but this verse is limited to those who carried arms and killed innocent people.
"Another important word to notice in this verse is the word mushrikin in Arabic, often translated as 'nonbelievers' or even sometimes as 'infidels.' Some polemical, anti-Islamic writers claim that this refers to Jews and Christians and therefore enjoins a wholesale slaughter of these communities. In fact the Qur'an never uses the word mushrikin as an epithet for Jews or Christians. ... in this verse, the term mushrikin refers only to idolaters, specifically idolatrous Arabs, and of those, only the [treaty-breakers] who committed this atrocious act."
"Another principle for proper interpretation is that 'the few must be interpreted in light of the many.' For example, the Qur'an repeatedly affirms freedom of conscience and rejects compulsion in religion..."
That principle would do homophobic Christians a lot of good, given how little the Bible says about homosexuality -- the New Testament in particular -- and how much it says about judgment and compassion.
"Islamic tradition also includes the concept of nashk, which is often understood as abrogation but is more properly translated as supercession. A verse that was revealed later in time is understood to replace an earlier verse with which it seems to be in tension. In the case of 9:5, some have claimed that since it was revealed later than the earlier verses that promote harmony and peaceful aspirations with Jews and Muslims, 9:5 instituted a new policy of Muslims toward all non-Muslims. This argument does not hold because there are many verses that were revealed during the Medinan period that likewise endorse a relationship of respect and peace with the People of the Book."
And back to me:
Like I said, there was much more that I read here, it's just that a lot of it washed over me without my thinking to mark specific passages. But even these two essays, I think, offer so much food for thought.
But it seems particularly silly to be a religious studies scholar in 2015, nearly 2016, without a decent handle on Islam, and while just by virtue of being able to read a book with grown-up words in it I know more about Islam than the "ban all Muslims" knuckleheads, the prevalence of ignorance is not an excuse to lower standards -- there's no reason to grade on a curve here.
As with my early reading on Christianity or Judaism, my reading on Islam is a little scattershot, and I will eventually have to doubleback and reread things that will make new sense the second time through. (This is not the first book I've read on Islam, to be clear, just the first since starting this blog. My formal education, though, was limited to Medieval Islamic philosophy, so I don't have the same foundations that I do for discussing western religion and philosophy, the ancient Near East, or the development of religion in the US. In my own research prior to the last couple years, my primary interest in Islam has been with regard to its place in one of my ongoing areas of scholarly concern: the way orthodox Christianities [meaning principally the Catholic Church in this case] have defined themselves in terms of opposition to other belief sets, i.e. through the identification of heresies and so on. There are a lot of parallels between the early reception of the Latter Day Saints and that of Islam, by mainline Protestants in the first case and western Christianity in the second: "is this a kind of Christianity we're looking at? it claims to pray to the same God but also possesses a new scripture from that God." The reasons why everything played out differently from that point, and so on, well -- that would be a good subject for a book by someone better versed in both topics.)
Qur'an in Conversation:
This is a collection of essays, loosely sorted by theme, by Muslim scholars on different suras of the Qur'an. Though I wish the project were more global in scope, I understand why only North Americans (specifically Americans and Canadians, I think, but forgive me if I'm forgetting someone) were included. Virtually every page of it contradicts the popular press image of Islam as an ultraconservative and unchanging monolith.
Intellectually I knew that. Even when you insist on "taking the Qur'an [or the Bible] literally," there is always a necessary act of interpretation, because there is no language that is free of ambiguity, and putting centuries between the writer and the reader nearly always increases rather than decreases that ambiguity. The most conservative, most literalist possible version of Islam couldn't be monolithic, without strict centralized control (which would only control what people can say and act on, not what they believe), which simply does not exist. But there is knowing that this is true, and there is reading scholars' essays on the specifics of it.
Most of what I read here, I didn't mark any specific passages from. My takeaway was much more basic, along the nature of "oh okay, this is an example of how a modern feminist Muslim deals with the Qur'an." At my level of education, those basic takeaways are still the most important. The specifics are important for their demythologizing effect. But that's the thing, part of religious literacy, perhaps a large part, is avoiding the caricaturing and broad sketches of faith groups.
For instance, I'm not clear on how many people are aware that only 20% of the Muslim world is Arab. I think maybe a lot of educated people would have guessed that the Muslim world was at least not majority-Arab, given some time to mull it over, based on two things that should be part of the common knowledge canon: the role played here by the Indian subcontinent, and the fact that Christianity is no longer mainly a religion of Palestinian Jews, nor Buddhism mainly a religion of India. Among world religions, in other words, this is one of the models for becoming a world religion.
But one of the things most people seem to know about Islam is its insistence that the Qur'an is read in Arabic, the language in which it was revealed to Mohammad. This is one place where that "only 20%" becomes very important to our discussions of Islam, because the overwhelming majority of Muslims do not read the Qur'an in Arabic, and I have seen many, many people insisting that they do, and insisting on the dominance of a form of literalism or fundamentalism that a) simply is not dominant and b) is functionally impossible given the size of Islam and its many, many internal divisions.
The predominance of translated Qur'ans is important for a number of reasons. Biblical translation is an area the layman knows little enough about as it is -- you have only to glance at the headlines about the recent KJV draft discovery to realize that. But as complex an issue as Biblical translation is, Qur'anic translation is not only more complex, it is far more politicized, and involves state actors.
Anyway, on to some notes.
Emran El-Badawi:
"Within the Arabian sphere in which the Qur'an operates, Jews, Christians, and hanifs -- 'proto-Muslims' -- were competing with one another at times through Arabic oral tradition, at other times through forms of Aramaic writing. When the Qur'an identifies itself as 'clear Arabic language,' it acknowledges its existence in a multilingual context, hence the significance of the 'Arabic Qur'an.' Why would such descriptions have been significant if all members of its audience simply spoke Arabic? It would have been a nonissue. Such descriptions are a statement that THIS Scripture is in Arabic -- a new revelation to be added to Hebrew and Christian Scripture."
"One thing I argue in the first chapter of my book The Qur'an and the Aramaic Gospel Traditions is that there exists some serious sectarian and missionary activity in the environment of the Qur'an. Some Muslims feel uncomfortable when I say that, and fear that I am subjecting the text to a secularizing or even orientalist reading. In such cases I say, 'No, I'm reading the Qur'an and you're reading tafsir, the commentary that came about later on.' The Qur'an discusses the sectarianism of its day explicitly, a small sample of which can be gleaned from such words as shiqaq (division) and ahzab (parties) and when it talks about groups or sides. The Qur'an is adding its voice to a multiplicity of competing theological and legal schools and proposing its own to be the correct one."
I don't know how much I am reading in my Christian scholarship here, but this sounds similar to the role of the Gospels, which did not create Christianity -- even though moderns now treat them as the foundational Christian texts -- but were written by existing Christian communities to compete with, correct, or convert audiences away from other Christian communities which owed their existence to other written and oral sources.
"To push this argument further, some Muslims are hesitant to look at such texts as the Infancy Gospel of Thomas or the Protevangelium of James. Muslim tradition is not based, as it were, on such texts but rather on exegetical, prophetic, and biographical literature -- tafsir, hadith, sirah, and so on -- which flourished about two centuries after the Qur'an. However, in the premodern Muslim scholarship of the ninth to sixteenth century, widely accepted authors like Ibn Qutaybah, Tabari, al-Suyuti, and others were looking at and debating the textual context with which the Qur'an is in dialogue. I say 'in dialogue' because it is talking to the audience of those texts. In the fifteenth century, in his multilvolume Tafsir, al-Biqa'i considers the canonical Gospels to be the injil referred to by the Qur'an. Most Muslims today would not agree with that. And yet this line of thought was afforded some space within Islam in the past."
Jamal Badawi:
Sura 9:5: "Kill the idolaters [mushrikin] wherever you find them, capture them, besiege them, lie in wait for them at every place of ambush."
This is obviously one of the most incendiary lines in the Qur'an, one that both jihadists and Islamophobes will point to. But given that this religion has been around for a long time and that most of its members have not, in fact, called for the death of non-Muslims ... sometimes I can't believe I have to point this out, but in all religions there is, clearly, a long tradition of grappling with the challenging or the problematic, whether that means discounting something as simply wrong because we have moved on from its original historical context (as liberal -- and really, most moderate -- Christians do with the violence, homophobia, and misogyny of the Bible), or looking deeper to see if there might be another less problematic level of meaning.
That struggle is the sort of thing I have seen New Atheist writers dismiss as "cheating," as though somehow religious people have an obligation to live up to a cardboard stereotype. Let's be very clear: grappling with scripture in this way is not a modern preoccupation. It is a major component of the very substance of religious life and religious thought, and in every religious tradition with which I am at all familiar, you will find it dating to its earliest generations.
Badawi begins:
"This is one of the most misunderstood verses of the Qur'an, and so it offers an excellent opportunity for exploring an appropriate methodology of reading the Qur'an. The Qur'an describes itself as a book of guidance ... it tells its readers what to believe and how to behave. Yet there are some verses that can seem, at first glance, to be in tension with or even in contradiction to other parts of the Qur'an. Islamic tradition offers a way to approach these verses and to set them in the context of the larger message of Islam's holy book...
"First of all, in order to evaluate whether or not a given act or argument conforms to the normative teachings of Islam, there must be some criteria for such evaluations. How are these norms to be identified? In the case of Islam, the primary sources are the Qur'an and authentic or sound hadiths, which are reports of the words and actions of the Prophet Muhammad... These primary sources are supplemented by secondary sources of Islam. The generally agreed to sources are consensus of the scholars on a given issue, or ijmaa', and analogical deduction, or qiyaas. Secondary sources are not revelatory, even though they are based on interpretations of revelatory sources.
"... Next, a solid interpretation of the Qur'an must be based on a study of the text in its original Arabic form. Translation results in ambiguity. Furthermore, the Arabic language itself has evolved since the seventh century, and some words have changed in meaning...
"Historical context is another tool, particular what is termed the occasion of revelation of a particular verse. Some verses were revealed to address a particular situation or to settle a particular dispute. A knowledge of this context can help to understand a verse that otherwise might seem to be incoherent with the larger message of the Qur'an."
So there's some simple "how to use the Qur'an" takeaway here:
1: As with the Bible, it is inappropriate to pick a verse and use it in a vacuum -- the meaning of a verse has to be considered against the context of the text as a whole.
2: There are traditions of commentary and interpretation, just as Judaism has the Talmud or Christianity has the Church Fathers and later theologians (and a history of continuing to adopt new doctrine, cf. the Immaculate Conception). No religion is limited to its original text. That is not how people do religion.
Back to Badawi:
"Read in isolation ... it suggests that people who do not accept Islam deserve to die. We cannot say, as some extremists do, that this single verse cancels out all the Qur'anic verses that speak of tolerance and peaceful coexistence. The historical context reveals that the idolatrous Meccans had broken the treaty of Hudaybiyya, which they had made with the Muslims in Medina, and murdered peaceful Muslims. ... The treaty ... stipulated a ten-year truce between the two cities, but not all Meccans abided by the conditions of the treaty. By today's standards that would be considered a war crime. So now the verse is limited to those who had committed that aggression.
"To someone first reading this verse, without understanding its context, it may sound like a general principle, but this verse is limited to those who carried arms and killed innocent people.
"Another important word to notice in this verse is the word mushrikin in Arabic, often translated as 'nonbelievers' or even sometimes as 'infidels.' Some polemical, anti-Islamic writers claim that this refers to Jews and Christians and therefore enjoins a wholesale slaughter of these communities. In fact the Qur'an never uses the word mushrikin as an epithet for Jews or Christians. ... in this verse, the term mushrikin refers only to idolaters, specifically idolatrous Arabs, and of those, only the [treaty-breakers] who committed this atrocious act."
"Another principle for proper interpretation is that 'the few must be interpreted in light of the many.' For example, the Qur'an repeatedly affirms freedom of conscience and rejects compulsion in religion..."
That principle would do homophobic Christians a lot of good, given how little the Bible says about homosexuality -- the New Testament in particular -- and how much it says about judgment and compassion.
"Islamic tradition also includes the concept of nashk, which is often understood as abrogation but is more properly translated as supercession. A verse that was revealed later in time is understood to replace an earlier verse with which it seems to be in tension. In the case of 9:5, some have claimed that since it was revealed later than the earlier verses that promote harmony and peaceful aspirations with Jews and Muslims, 9:5 instituted a new policy of Muslims toward all non-Muslims. This argument does not hold because there are many verses that were revealed during the Medinan period that likewise endorse a relationship of respect and peace with the People of the Book."
And back to me:
Like I said, there was much more that I read here, it's just that a lot of it washed over me without my thinking to mark specific passages. But even these two essays, I think, offer so much food for thought.
Wednesday, December 9, 2015
recent reading: deep structure of biology
Since the primary purpose of this blog is to keep track of what I'm thinking about what I'm reading - some brief thoughts on things I read in the last couple months that I didn't have time to write up longer thoughts about (but which are part of longer rivers of reading which will undoubtedly entail later stops and longer tarries).
This entry ended up longer than anticipated after just the first book, so perhaps I'll do one entry per book, which also lets me post it earlier than I'd otherwise have time for. So.
These are basically my class notes, really, for a class I'm both constructing and attending all by myself, and I don't expect them to have the same value for you; that's just the nature of this blog.
Deep Structure of Biology --
A succinct summary of the phenomenon of convergent evolution:
"Beyond all reasonable doubt -- and here we can draw on embryology, comparative anatomy, histology, molecular biology, phylogeny, and the fossil record -- the common ancestor of the octopus and the blue whale could not possible have possessed a camera-eye. Each group has independently navigated to the same evolutionary solution, and it is one that not only works very well but has arisen at least five more times, in animals as diverse as snails and, more extraordinarily, jellyfish."
Another example, later:
"The cartilaginous fish and the bony fish both solved the physics of swimming back in the Silurian by evolving streamlined, fusiform morphologies. Some 230 million years later, a group of land-dwelling reptiles rediscovered this same morphology in their evolutionary return to the sea. And around 175 million years later, a group of land-dwelling mammals also rediscovered this same morphology in their own evolutionary return to the sea."
(The "return to the sea" here is a reference to the Devonian era, when the first land-dwelling animals evolved from sea-dwelling ancestors; before the Devonian, life was primarily a watery phenomenon. Today's aquatic reptiles and mammals have an evolutionary family tree that came up to land before returning to the sea.)
"The evolution of an ichthyosaur or porpoise morphology is not trivial. It can be correctly described as nothing less than astonishing that a group of land-dwelling tetrapods, complete with four legs and a tail, could devolve their appendages and their tails back into fins like those of a fish. Highly unlikely, if not impossible? Yet it happened twice, convergently in the reptiles and the mammals, two groups of animals that are not closely related. We have to go back in time as far as the Carboniferous to find a common ancestors for the mammals and the reptiles. Nonetheless, the ichthyosaur and the porpoise both have independently reevolved fins.
"Contrary to the dictum that 'biological evolution has no predictable destination,' I predict with absolute confidence that if any large, fast-swimming organisms exist in the oceans of the moon Europa -- far away in the orbit around Jupiter, swimming under the perpetual ice that covers their world -- then they will have streamlined, fusiform bodies; that is, they will look very similar to a porpoise, an ichthyosaur, a swordfish, or a shark."
Gould argued strongly against this kind of conclusion with his famous "rewinding of the tape" analogy:
"Any replay of the tape would lead evolution down a pathway radically different from the road actually taken ... The diversity of possible itineraries does demonstrate that eventual results cannot be predicted at the outset. Each step proceeds for cause, but no finale can be specified at the start, and none would ever occur a second time in the same way, because any pathway proceeds through thousands of improbable stages."
The Gouldian argument is not disproven by convergent evolution -- that is, you do not have to deny that convergent evolution is a fact to support Gould's view of evolution. But I think it's important to remember that he constructed that view in the 1980s, and even for scientists it can often be easier to fit new evidence into an existing model -- especially when nothing is going to come along that actually proves it one way or the other, by the nature of the theory -- than it is to re-weigh the evidence every time the balance changes and decide all over again. It's always politically dangerous to talk about the fallibility of scientists because climate change and vaccination denialists pounce on it to "prove" that science is "lying" or "wrong" about those things, which is ridiculous: here we are talking about a very small subsection of a very small corner of a particular science, and how one school of thought may have differed given thirty years difference in the accumulation of evidence.
The phenomenon of convergent evolution raises many questions about:
a) extraterrestrial life, with reference to the Gouldian argument -- if the conditions necessary for life are or have been present elsewhere in the universe, has life evolved in a recognizably similar way? and especially, once simple life has evolved, is it inevitable (assuming that the necessary resources are available) that multicellular and more complex life will evolve eventually?
b) the evolution of intelligence: nevermind the "not all people are smart in the same way" discussions, which are interesting in of themselves. Are the differences between potentially evolvable intelligences enormous, even enormous enough to be mutually unrecognizable, or will intelligence evolve more or less convergently, the way sharks and swordfish are significantly different from one another but still evolved substantially similar structures of swimming?
On primate and corvid intelligence:
"It is certainly plausible to argue that surviving the trials and tribulations of a complex social world makes intellectual demands on many primates. Individuals need to know who is who, they need to keep track of who did what to whom, where and when, and to use this information to predict the actions and intentions of other individuals in their social network, as well as understanding how these relationships change over time. In short, the need for effective competition and cooperation with conspecifics may have provided the main selective advantage for the evolution of primate intelligence.
"That said, there is no reason to assume that intelligence is restricted to primates or that such abilities have evolved only once. Indeed, we shall argue that there is good reason to believe that complex mental characteristics have evolved several times and that the existence of intelligence in different, distantly related lineages must have arisen as a result of convergent evolution in species facing similar social and physical problems. ... perhaps the most dramatic case for convergent evolution of cognition comes from comparing primitive cognitive abilities with those of crows, given that the common ancestor of mammals and birds lived over 280 million years ago and that not all birds and mammals share the complex mental abilities found in crows and primates."
On social and cultural evolution in the ocean:
"Steele notes that, in the ocean, environmental noise (after removing predictable cyclical variation: diurnal, lunar, annual) is largely 'red' (greatest over large time and space scales), while, on land, it is more 'white' (roughly constant over all scales, up to a century or continent or so). The fundamental contrasts between the two habitats are illustrated by the methods of the scientists who study them: terrestrial landscape ecologists plot habitats using geographical information systems, while their oceanographic counterparts use the partial differential equations of fluid dynamics to describe the marine environment.
"The environment is the stage for evolution's greatest play: organisms evolve to maximize their fitness given the environment. Two general environmental traits known greatly to influence evolution are connectedness and variability. In these respects, and many others, marine and terrestrial systems differ radically. And so, with these different sets, we might expect immense contrasts in both the action of the evolutionary play and its results, whether it occurs on land or in the ocean. And there are. Looking out my north-facing windows onto the land, most of the primary productivity I see is in large, long-lived, slowly reproducing spruce and maple trees. To the south, in the sea, the primary productivity is in microscopic diatoms and dinoflagellates. There are squid on one side, neutrally buoyant and forming large schools in an open three-dimensional habitat, and foxes on the other, negotiating trees and rocks and roads by themselves or in small groups, anchored by gravity. These are very different creatures in very different environments. Terrestrial and oceanic environments provide a tough challenge for convergence. When traits do converge, something remarkable has occurred.
"... as we move up the trophic web, convergences between oceanic and terrestrial animals begin to appear. The eyes of squid and foxes are an example. But at the trophic peaks and at the highest levels of biological organization, then the convergences between oceanic and terrestrial systems become particularly strong and provoking. A diatom and a spruce tree have little in common other than being autotrophs but, as I will try to show, the social structures and cultures of sperm and killer whales have much in common with those of elephants and humans.
"Phylogenetic constraints play a part in this. The diatom and maple are about as distantly related as any two organisms on Earth, whereas elephants, sperm whales, killer whales, and humans are all mammals and share all the constraints and advantages of the mammalian order, including backbones, air-breathing, warm blood, live birth, and lactation. But their common ancestor, perhaps one million years ago ... was small, likely socially and culturally primitive, certainly nothing like today's large and dominant mammals of land and ocean."
Later in same section:
"However, the most comprehensive convergence between marine and terrestrial mammals is between ... the sperm whale and the elephants. Termed 'the Colossal Convergence' by an editor at American Scientist, it features a wide range of traits in which elephants are more similar to sperm whales than they are to other terrestrial mammals and sperm whales are more similar to elephants than other marine mammals. In both species, females live in largely matrilineal social units of about elevan animals within which there is communal care for the young and communal defense against predators. These social units aggregate to form larger social structures, including groups of about twenty animals. Males leave their mothers' social units, segregate from the females, and grow to become much larger than their mothers, In their late twenties, the males return to the habitat of the females to mate, roving between the female units, competing with each other and being selected by the females.
"There are additional nonsocial parallels between sperm whales and elephants. For instance, the species have very similar life histories and are nonterritorial and quite mobile. And both are extreme in other respects. These include body size and brain size: the sperm whale has the larges brain of all species, and the elephant the largest among land animals. Another parallel is in ecological success. Elephants, due to their size, numbers, and feeding methods can restructure habitats while the world's sperm whale population, even though substantially reduced by whaling, currently removes about as much biomass from the oceans as all human marine fisheries combined.
"This convergence between a terrestrial herbivore and a marine teuthivore (the sperm whale principally eats deep-water squid) is striking, especially given the radical contrasts in their habitat and food: quite a puzzle for the evolutionary biologist."
Then the author (Hal Whitehead) goes on to explain his theory, that the convergence begins with the nose, which is interesting but not as interesting, overall, as the Colossal Convergence itself.
Explaining convergence:
"Two prime candidate theories have been proposed:
(1) "One is that convergence is evidence for what might be called the limited scope of biological materials; favored by authors such as Stephen J Gould, this explanation rests largely on the idea that phylogenetic, developmental, and physical constraints restrict the forms that biological systems can take, and, therefore, change tends to be strongly limited to what is developmentally possible. This explanation has been considerably reinforced by the evidence for the deep conservation of regulatory genes across many lineages.
"However, there is also mounting evidence that the genome can be dynamic at this level. These same regulatory genes are capable of producing widely divergent phenotypes at a very fundamental level, and convergence at the very basic level of biological systems, such as the evolution of multicellularity, can occur there through entirely different genetic means.
(2) "An alternative view is that convergence is so common because the adaptive problems faced by organisms in the struggle to survive recur frequently, and so selection tends to favor the same solutions. In this case, it is not the nature of biological materials that is limited but the 'imagination' of the selective forces."
This is the view that would have us predicting the nature of sufficiently large swimming life on Europa, for instance. (Naturally the author points out that both views are probably right in various cases.)
This entry ended up longer than anticipated after just the first book, so perhaps I'll do one entry per book, which also lets me post it earlier than I'd otherwise have time for. So.
These are basically my class notes, really, for a class I'm both constructing and attending all by myself, and I don't expect them to have the same value for you; that's just the nature of this blog.
Deep Structure of Biology --
A succinct summary of the phenomenon of convergent evolution:
"Beyond all reasonable doubt -- and here we can draw on embryology, comparative anatomy, histology, molecular biology, phylogeny, and the fossil record -- the common ancestor of the octopus and the blue whale could not possible have possessed a camera-eye. Each group has independently navigated to the same evolutionary solution, and it is one that not only works very well but has arisen at least five more times, in animals as diverse as snails and, more extraordinarily, jellyfish."
Another example, later:
"The cartilaginous fish and the bony fish both solved the physics of swimming back in the Silurian by evolving streamlined, fusiform morphologies. Some 230 million years later, a group of land-dwelling reptiles rediscovered this same morphology in their evolutionary return to the sea. And around 175 million years later, a group of land-dwelling mammals also rediscovered this same morphology in their own evolutionary return to the sea."
(The "return to the sea" here is a reference to the Devonian era, when the first land-dwelling animals evolved from sea-dwelling ancestors; before the Devonian, life was primarily a watery phenomenon. Today's aquatic reptiles and mammals have an evolutionary family tree that came up to land before returning to the sea.)
"The evolution of an ichthyosaur or porpoise morphology is not trivial. It can be correctly described as nothing less than astonishing that a group of land-dwelling tetrapods, complete with four legs and a tail, could devolve their appendages and their tails back into fins like those of a fish. Highly unlikely, if not impossible? Yet it happened twice, convergently in the reptiles and the mammals, two groups of animals that are not closely related. We have to go back in time as far as the Carboniferous to find a common ancestors for the mammals and the reptiles. Nonetheless, the ichthyosaur and the porpoise both have independently reevolved fins.
"Contrary to the dictum that 'biological evolution has no predictable destination,' I predict with absolute confidence that if any large, fast-swimming organisms exist in the oceans of the moon Europa -- far away in the orbit around Jupiter, swimming under the perpetual ice that covers their world -- then they will have streamlined, fusiform bodies; that is, they will look very similar to a porpoise, an ichthyosaur, a swordfish, or a shark."
Gould argued strongly against this kind of conclusion with his famous "rewinding of the tape" analogy:
"Any replay of the tape would lead evolution down a pathway radically different from the road actually taken ... The diversity of possible itineraries does demonstrate that eventual results cannot be predicted at the outset. Each step proceeds for cause, but no finale can be specified at the start, and none would ever occur a second time in the same way, because any pathway proceeds through thousands of improbable stages."
The Gouldian argument is not disproven by convergent evolution -- that is, you do not have to deny that convergent evolution is a fact to support Gould's view of evolution. But I think it's important to remember that he constructed that view in the 1980s, and even for scientists it can often be easier to fit new evidence into an existing model -- especially when nothing is going to come along that actually proves it one way or the other, by the nature of the theory -- than it is to re-weigh the evidence every time the balance changes and decide all over again. It's always politically dangerous to talk about the fallibility of scientists because climate change and vaccination denialists pounce on it to "prove" that science is "lying" or "wrong" about those things, which is ridiculous: here we are talking about a very small subsection of a very small corner of a particular science, and how one school of thought may have differed given thirty years difference in the accumulation of evidence.
The phenomenon of convergent evolution raises many questions about:
a) extraterrestrial life, with reference to the Gouldian argument -- if the conditions necessary for life are or have been present elsewhere in the universe, has life evolved in a recognizably similar way? and especially, once simple life has evolved, is it inevitable (assuming that the necessary resources are available) that multicellular and more complex life will evolve eventually?
b) the evolution of intelligence: nevermind the "not all people are smart in the same way" discussions, which are interesting in of themselves. Are the differences between potentially evolvable intelligences enormous, even enormous enough to be mutually unrecognizable, or will intelligence evolve more or less convergently, the way sharks and swordfish are significantly different from one another but still evolved substantially similar structures of swimming?
On primate and corvid intelligence:
"It is certainly plausible to argue that surviving the trials and tribulations of a complex social world makes intellectual demands on many primates. Individuals need to know who is who, they need to keep track of who did what to whom, where and when, and to use this information to predict the actions and intentions of other individuals in their social network, as well as understanding how these relationships change over time. In short, the need for effective competition and cooperation with conspecifics may have provided the main selective advantage for the evolution of primate intelligence.
"That said, there is no reason to assume that intelligence is restricted to primates or that such abilities have evolved only once. Indeed, we shall argue that there is good reason to believe that complex mental characteristics have evolved several times and that the existence of intelligence in different, distantly related lineages must have arisen as a result of convergent evolution in species facing similar social and physical problems. ... perhaps the most dramatic case for convergent evolution of cognition comes from comparing primitive cognitive abilities with those of crows, given that the common ancestor of mammals and birds lived over 280 million years ago and that not all birds and mammals share the complex mental abilities found in crows and primates."
On social and cultural evolution in the ocean:
"Steele notes that, in the ocean, environmental noise (after removing predictable cyclical variation: diurnal, lunar, annual) is largely 'red' (greatest over large time and space scales), while, on land, it is more 'white' (roughly constant over all scales, up to a century or continent or so). The fundamental contrasts between the two habitats are illustrated by the methods of the scientists who study them: terrestrial landscape ecologists plot habitats using geographical information systems, while their oceanographic counterparts use the partial differential equations of fluid dynamics to describe the marine environment.
"The environment is the stage for evolution's greatest play: organisms evolve to maximize their fitness given the environment. Two general environmental traits known greatly to influence evolution are connectedness and variability. In these respects, and many others, marine and terrestrial systems differ radically. And so, with these different sets, we might expect immense contrasts in both the action of the evolutionary play and its results, whether it occurs on land or in the ocean. And there are. Looking out my north-facing windows onto the land, most of the primary productivity I see is in large, long-lived, slowly reproducing spruce and maple trees. To the south, in the sea, the primary productivity is in microscopic diatoms and dinoflagellates. There are squid on one side, neutrally buoyant and forming large schools in an open three-dimensional habitat, and foxes on the other, negotiating trees and rocks and roads by themselves or in small groups, anchored by gravity. These are very different creatures in very different environments. Terrestrial and oceanic environments provide a tough challenge for convergence. When traits do converge, something remarkable has occurred.
"... as we move up the trophic web, convergences between oceanic and terrestrial animals begin to appear. The eyes of squid and foxes are an example. But at the trophic peaks and at the highest levels of biological organization, then the convergences between oceanic and terrestrial systems become particularly strong and provoking. A diatom and a spruce tree have little in common other than being autotrophs but, as I will try to show, the social structures and cultures of sperm and killer whales have much in common with those of elephants and humans.
"Phylogenetic constraints play a part in this. The diatom and maple are about as distantly related as any two organisms on Earth, whereas elephants, sperm whales, killer whales, and humans are all mammals and share all the constraints and advantages of the mammalian order, including backbones, air-breathing, warm blood, live birth, and lactation. But their common ancestor, perhaps one million years ago ... was small, likely socially and culturally primitive, certainly nothing like today's large and dominant mammals of land and ocean."
Later in same section:
"However, the most comprehensive convergence between marine and terrestrial mammals is between ... the sperm whale and the elephants. Termed 'the Colossal Convergence' by an editor at American Scientist, it features a wide range of traits in which elephants are more similar to sperm whales than they are to other terrestrial mammals and sperm whales are more similar to elephants than other marine mammals. In both species, females live in largely matrilineal social units of about elevan animals within which there is communal care for the young and communal defense against predators. These social units aggregate to form larger social structures, including groups of about twenty animals. Males leave their mothers' social units, segregate from the females, and grow to become much larger than their mothers, In their late twenties, the males return to the habitat of the females to mate, roving between the female units, competing with each other and being selected by the females.
"There are additional nonsocial parallels between sperm whales and elephants. For instance, the species have very similar life histories and are nonterritorial and quite mobile. And both are extreme in other respects. These include body size and brain size: the sperm whale has the larges brain of all species, and the elephant the largest among land animals. Another parallel is in ecological success. Elephants, due to their size, numbers, and feeding methods can restructure habitats while the world's sperm whale population, even though substantially reduced by whaling, currently removes about as much biomass from the oceans as all human marine fisheries combined.
"This convergence between a terrestrial herbivore and a marine teuthivore (the sperm whale principally eats deep-water squid) is striking, especially given the radical contrasts in their habitat and food: quite a puzzle for the evolutionary biologist."
Then the author (Hal Whitehead) goes on to explain his theory, that the convergence begins with the nose, which is interesting but not as interesting, overall, as the Colossal Convergence itself.
Explaining convergence:
"Two prime candidate theories have been proposed:
(1) "One is that convergence is evidence for what might be called the limited scope of biological materials; favored by authors such as Stephen J Gould, this explanation rests largely on the idea that phylogenetic, developmental, and physical constraints restrict the forms that biological systems can take, and, therefore, change tends to be strongly limited to what is developmentally possible. This explanation has been considerably reinforced by the evidence for the deep conservation of regulatory genes across many lineages.
"However, there is also mounting evidence that the genome can be dynamic at this level. These same regulatory genes are capable of producing widely divergent phenotypes at a very fundamental level, and convergence at the very basic level of biological systems, such as the evolution of multicellularity, can occur there through entirely different genetic means.
(2) "An alternative view is that convergence is so common because the adaptive problems faced by organisms in the struggle to survive recur frequently, and so selection tends to favor the same solutions. In this case, it is not the nature of biological materials that is limited but the 'imagination' of the selective forces."
This is the view that would have us predicting the nature of sufficiently large swimming life on Europa, for instance. (Naturally the author points out that both views are probably right in various cases.)
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