Liturgy in Postcolonial Perspectives: Only One is Holy

Postcolonialism and Religions The Postcolonialism and Religions series by its very name bridges the secular with the sacred through hybrid, interstitial, and contrapuntal inquiries. The series features the scholarship of indigenous scholars working at the intersections of postcolonial theories, theologies, and religions. The editors welcome authors around the world in an effort to move beyond and interrogate a historical North American and Eurocentric postcolonial studies disciplinary dominance. The series seeks to foster subaltern voices especially from Africa, Asia, Central and South America, and the liquid continent. J. Jayakiran Sebastian is Presbyter of the Church of South India. He is Dean of the Seminary and H. George Anderson, Professor of Mission and Cultures at the Lutheran Theological Seminary at Philadelphia. He has served as Professor and Chairperson of the Department of Theology and Ethics at the United Theological College in Bangalore. Joseph F. Duggan is Presbyter in the Episcopal Church and Episcopal Church Foundation Academic Fellow. He is the founder of Postcolonial Networks and the Journal of Postcolonial Networks. Decolonizing the Body of Christ: Theology and Theory after Empire? Edited by David Joy and Joseph Duggan A Postcolonial African American Re-reading of Colossians: Identity, Reception, and Interpretation under the Gaze of Empire Annie Tinsley Christian-Muslim Relations in the Anglican and Lutheran Communions: Historical Encounters and Contemporary Projects Edited by David D. Grafton, Joseph Duggan and Jason Craige Harris Caste, Gender and Christianity in Colonial India: Telugu Women in Mission James Elisha Taneti Indigenous Australia and the Unfinished Business of Theology: Cross-Cultural Engagement Edited by Jione Havea Historic Engagements with Occidental Cultures, Religions, Powers: Perceptions from Europe and Asia Edited by Anne R. Richards and Iraj Omidvar Islamic Reform and Colonial Discourse on Modernity in India: Socio-Political and Religious Thought of Vakkom Moulavi Jose Abraham Colonial Contexts and Postcolonial Theologies: Storyweaving in the Asia-Pacific Edited by Mark G. Brett and Jione Havea

Liturgy in Postcolonial Perspectives: Only One Is Holy Edited by Cláudio Carvalhaes Postcolonial Discipleship of Embodiment: An Asian and Asian American Feminist Reading of the Gospel of Mark Jin Young Choi A Postcolonial Woman’s Encounter with Moses and Miriam Angeline M.G. Song

Liturgy in Post colonial Perspectives Only One Is Holy Edited by Cláudio Carvalhaes

LITURGY IN POSTCOLONIAL PERSPECTIVES Copyright © Cláudio Carvalhaes, 2015. The cover image is part of the work “Aesthetics of Abandonment, 2012–2014,” and it was photographed in the states of São Paulo and Maranhão, Brazil. All rights reserved. First published in 2015 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress. A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Knowledge Works (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: June 2015 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 ISBN 978-1-349-70362-3 ISBN 978-1-137-50827-0 (eBook) Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2015 978-1-137-51635-0 DOI 10.1007/978-1-137-50827-0

To Jaci C. Maraschin, a postcolonial Latin American/Brazilian liturgical theologian avant la lettre

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Contents Acknowledgments xi Liturgy and Postcolonialism: An Introduction 1 Cláudio Carvalhaes Part I Muslim and Jewish Perspectives 1 Returning to the One: Postcolonial Muslim Liturgy 23 Sophia Rose Arjana 2 Toward a Genuine Congregation: The Form of the Muslim Friday Prayer, Revisited 33 Shadaab Rahemtulla 3 After the Holocaust and Israel: On Liturgy and the Postcolonial (Jewish) Prophetic in the New Diaspora 45 Marc H. Ellis Part II African and African American Perspectives 4 The Ethical Implications of Migration on Liturgy: An African Postcolonial Perspective 71 Beatrice Okyere-Manu 5 “Do This in Remembrance of Me”: An African Feminist Contestation of the Embodied Sacred Liturgical Space in the Celebration of Eucharist 83 Lilian Cheelo Siwila 6 Liturgy and Justice in Postcolonial Zimbabwe: Holy People, Holy Places, Holy Things in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Zimbabwe 95 Herbert Moyo 7 Navigating in Different Seas: Christianity and African Brazilian Religion 107 Miriam Rosa

viii Contents Part III Latin American Perspectives 8 De-Evangelization of the Knees: Epistemology, Osteoporosis, and Affliction 119 Nancy Cardoso Pereira 9 ¡Ponte a nuestro lado! Be on our side! The Challenge of the Central American Liberation Theology Masses 125 Ann Hidalgo 10 Choosing a Heritage: Some Urban South American Mennonites Reread, Reinvent, and Honor the Tradition 135 Marisa Strizzi 11 Liturgy with Your Feet: The Romaria da Terra Pilgrimage in Paraná, Brazil: Reappropriating Liturgical Rites in the Quest for Life Spaces and Their Liberation 149 Júlio Cézar Adam Part IV Oceanian, Asian, and Asian American Perspectives 12 A New Zealand Prayer Book = He Karakia Mihinare o Aotearoa: A Study in Postcolonial Liturgy 165 Storm Swain 13 Liturgical Time and Tehching Hsieh 177 Gerald C. Liu 14 A Postcolonial Reading of Liturgy in India during the Colonial/Postcolonial Period as a Mode of Resistance 189 C. I. David Joy 15 Baptism as Crossing beyond Belonging? 201 HyeRan Kim-Cragg Part V European, European American, Native American, and United States Perspectives 16 A Flagging Peace? 215 Siobhán Garrigan 17 Holy Crumbs, Table Habits, and (Dis)placing Conversations—Beyond “Only One Is Holy” 223 Michael N. Jagessar

Contents ix 18 Puzzling over Postcolonial Liturgical Heteroglossia: In Search of Liturgical Decoloniality and Dialogic Orthodoxy 241 Kristine Suna-Koro 19 When Seminaries Get Stuck 255 Stephen Burns 20 The Cherokee Stomp Dance: A Case Study of Postcolonial Native American Contextualization 267 Corky Alexander 21 Postcolonial Whiteness: Being-With in Worship 277 Sharon R. Fennema Bibliography 289 List of Contributors 309 Index 313

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Acknowledgments This project took a long time to come to its fruition and I must say a word of gratitude to some people. During the planning/writing of this book, I was the associate professor of Worship and Liturgy at Lutheran Theological Seminary at Philadelphia, and I received all the support needed to work on this project. I am very grateful to this great institution and my wonderful colleagues and students. Also, from the editors of Postcolonialism and Religions Series, Jayakiran Sebastian and Joseph Duggan, I received nothing less than steady support and ongoing encouragement. I am grateful. Tiago Chiavegatti helped me format the first versions of the book. I am grateful. Also, Alexis Nelson from Palgrave Macmillan gave me fantastic editorial help through the process. I am grateful. Katy Scrogin offered her sharp theological mind, incredible editing skills, and so much time and patience to help me edit the final manuscript and I am so grateful! Emily Everett and Walter O. Schlupp translated three chapters. I am grateful. My friends Santiago Slabodsky and Paul Galbreath helped me with suggestions and corrections for the introduction. I am very grateful. McCormick Theological Seminary in Chicago offered me time to finish this work in my year of work. I am grateful. And to the amazing host of authors who worked so hard to contribute to this book, I am deeply grateful! They made this book a wonderful project!

Liturgy and Post colonialism : An Introduction Cláudio Carvalhaes Introduction This book is a reading of the liturgical field with postcolonial and decolonial lenses. Both assume a critical view of and acknowledge the complexities involved in entanglements with and against colonialism in the search for autonomous ways of being and living. While both postcolonialism and decolonialism have important theoretical differences,1 and some authors will like to use one term over the other, in this book the two terms are used interchangeably, and so will be assumed to be synonymous throughout the book. They are modes of analysis in which social, cultural, religious, gendered, sexual, and economic ways of living are assessed critically by those who have been victimized by patterns of structural domination, and have been dismissed from the historical processes of life creation: namely, the poor, the disenfranchised, the subaltern, the wretched of the earth, and the colonized. Postcolonial thinking follows Audre Lorde, who said, “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house,”2 and goes to the master’s house with different tools in order to dismantle structures of oppression that lie under past and present discourses and practices of control. The colonizer/colonized are always involved in decolonial thinking in many and yet unimaginable ways. The colonial presence in many places has defined maps, people, sovereignties, culture, notions of public and private, state, religion, imagery, ways of thinking, believing, and so on. At the heart of it, the bodies, the conscious and unconscious lives of people, have been forced, manipulated, and controlled to act, obey, and adjust to certain forms of power in specific places. Linda Tuhiwai Smith describes the presence of colonialism within the history of indigenous people: “The talk about the colonial past is embedded in our political discourse, our humor, poetry, music, storytelling and other common sense ways of passing on both a narrative of history and an attitude about history.”3 This presence has meant the negation of people’s own creations, autonomous ways of living, and sovereignties.

2 Cláudio Carvalhaes In this book, authors dissect how colonizers have exploited notions of worship and liturgical practices, and how those on the receiving end of these notions have responded to such forms of exploitation, in a variety of ways. The volume expands the field of postcolonialism by engaging liturgy/liturgical studies/liturgical theology and creating what I am calling here “postcolonial liturgical theologies” (PLTs). PLTs are ways in which praxis, theories, and theologies of religious groups are engaged in order to challenge those times when the imperial, colonizing power dynamics of domination use religious ideologies/reifications as instruments of an agenda of conquering and dismissal, undermining autonomies and destruction of people’s lives, wisdom, and sovereignties. Additionally, and fundamentally, any work that wants to deal with PLTs must engage interreligious perspectives. The life, theologies, and rituals of non-Christian religions and peoples must trouble the theological exclusivity of the givenness of God in Christ. While this book wrestles mostly with Christianity, we have tried to avoid reducing everyone else’s past to a single history of Christian discussions. Our lives and futures are all tied together, and none of us is liberated until all, of all traditions, have been liberated. For that matter, when we use and create PLTs, we must engage deeply with the many ways in which each people fosters its own liberation. As Vine Deloria says, “If we are then to talk seriously about the necessity of liberation, we are talking about the destruction of the whole complex of Western theories of knowledge and the construction of a new and more comprehensive synthesis of human knowledge and experience.”4 And in order to do that, we must juxtapose our daily struggles, practices, theories, traditions, and imagination. As Andrea Smith says, “The theological imagination then becomes central to envisioning the world we would actually want to live in. At the 2005 World Liberation Theology Forum held in Porto Alegre, Brazil, indigenous peoples from Bolivia stated they know another world is possible because they see that world whenever they do their ceremonies.”5 Our ceremonies, liturgies, and rituals must carry the seeds for this possible world. I am forever grateful to all of the contributors scattered around the globe, who, in this volume, probe several aspects of the liturgical field. Each writer freely chose what she or he thought was the most important thing to wrestle with in this project from a postcolonial/decolonial perspective. The very plurality of the methodologies and approaches used here might be the best witness to postcolonial theory. Christian thinkers have written most of the essays in this book, but we also have one Jewish and two Muslim voices. That ratio is still certainly imbalanced, but is, perhaps, a good beginning. Also, it was a difficult task to organize the authors into chapters and the division used here is unsuccessful. In spite of dividing them into regions/contexts, some authors talk about different things and contexts, making the chapters somewhat incoherent. It is important

Liturgy and Postcolonialism 3 to point out that these essays discuss how liturgies/rituals function and have functioned in specific colonial contexts rather than giving present in-depth descriptions and analyses of specific rituals or liturgies. Liturgical Uniformity and Multiplicities For this introduction, I will depart from a specifically Christian perspective, hoping to offer some connections and disagreements with other traditions. Michael N. Jagessar and Stephen Burns were the first to write about postcolonial perspectives of Christian worship. They reflected: From a postcolonial perspective, there is much to critique in the study of liturgy and the celebration of Christian worship . . . The crucial point for us relates to the challenge of handling and negotiating the weight that tradition carries in the construction of what passes as acceptable worship or worship that is affirmed in liturgical theology.6 The word “liturgy” comes from the Greek leitourgia, or “the work of the people,” and was first related to how people used to organize their lives within the city, including by means of its festivals and civic duties. Nowadays, liturgies are used by various religions to organize their worship and their rituals to honor God, Gods, and/or the divine. Liturgies and liturgical theologies help organize religions with a plethora of actions, vocabularies, and a specific grammar that define forms of reasoning and bodily movements, shaping faith or religious life with flowing, movable, and plural senses of identity. Liturgies/rituals not only organize the religious life within sacred spaces or sanctuaries, but also interpret the life of the individual and the group in the world and consequently interpret the world itself. Liturgies are powerful actions that tell us what and how to think, what (not) to do, how and what (not) to relate to, what to avoid, and so on. Liturgical religious movements shape bodies, minds, spirits, politics, economies, and nation-states. From the beginning, Christian churches used liturgies to organize their world and its relationship with Earth and the cosmos, and to define who believers were while attempting to understand what and who God is in Jesus Christ in relation to all of these questions. In many religions, liturgies/rites are filled with language, gestures, reasoning, expectations, forms of participation, and meanings that in some and many ways, shape contexts, the particular, and the universe. The multiplicity of liturgical/ritual forms, gestures, theologies, prayers, and practices enacted everywhere around the globe is endless, as endless as the human imagination, and provides a fantastic source for the ongoing construction of our identities and worldviews. The spread of religions beyond local contexts has expanded forms of faith and ways of living,

4 Cláudio Carvalhaes transforming religious, cultural, and social practices while being deeply affected by it all as well. Due to the multiplicity and intrinsic plurality of Christianity since its very beginning, churches have tried to find ways to create norms, forms, prescriptions, and formulas of agreement to attest to the authority of its rites and, for that matter, its authenticity and distinct marks and its theological, liturgical, and social practices. Those complex formulas attempted to shape how the Christian faith should be spiritually/ethically lived, performed, believed, imposed, bounded, and shared. Liturgies, imagined and created by various Christian churches, are privileged places where religious/social processes of organization happen. Nothing less than life and death, under specific categories and understandings of the holy/divine, are at stake in religious liturgical actions. Consequently, at every liturgical/ritual gathering, a whole sense of what it means to be human is enacted. At its heart, liturgical/ritual dynamics are deeply related to power, either maintaining or opposing powers already in place. Whoever holds religious power defines, allows, authorizes, and demands the proper practices/behaviors of the faith—a flight from the first liturgical sense of the work of the people to the work of specialists done on behalf of the people. Hierarchical structures of power have in many cases alienated the people’s participation in liturgy and worship, and have walled them off into a state of being no more than receivers of the holy things. However, while religious institutions define themselves by the ways they define their sacred stri(u)ctures of power, access, and practices, people also engage official rituals and define the holy according to their needs. People follow liturgies as prescribed, but they also do whatever they want with them. From high to low masses and worship services, people add and delete language, mix the official with nonauthorized sources, blending religious symbols and actions, imagining and sometimes redoing people, rituals and language completely in multiple possibilities of conscious and unconscious engagements with God/the divine and one another. While empires and colonization processes tried to fix rituals as a way of controlling senses, understandings, and bodies, colonized people have always intervened in these processes, creating, rebelling, challenging, undoing, and redoing, from the margins and assumed places of powerlessness, forms of reaffirmation of life and resistance with old and new theological understandings of God. In this way, postcolonial readings in liturgical and ritual processes unveil how people who could not afford the power to hold holy things intervened in official systems, redoing their own forms of meaning, life, and survival.7 From these places, usually at the margins of systems, local people are traditioning8 other forms of theological-liturgical life, engaging what they have received with their own knowledge, senses, rationality, and perceptions, recreating a world where the sacred and what matters in life are

Liturgy and Postcolonialism 5 perceived differently. These knowledges, which Michel Foucault called the “insurrection of subjugated knowledges,”9 have always existed and have, in many ways, been perceived as a threat to the establishment of the proper forms of religion, including Christianity. According to Foucault, these knowledges are “historical contents that have been buried and disguised in a functional coherence or formal systematization . . . naive knowledges, located low down on the hierarchy, beneath the required levels of cognition and scientificity.”10 It is from these often hidden, forbidden, made negative and shameful treasures that this book arises, bringing forth a fantastic array of knowledge, visions, perceptions, paradoxes, engagements, challenges, and practices from people who love and wrestle with their liturgical practices and the work of the people in their own religious traditions. PLTs work at the borders, within a critical border thinking/pensamiento fronterizo/Nepantla/third space, challenging the Eurocentric sense of the (liturgical) world.11 In this thinking, displacement, fractures, transitions, reverse thinking, interruptions, interventions, a different map of honor, power and colonial territoriality, crossing classes, identities, desires, bodies and sexualities, languages, and so on are some of the markers of this hermeneutics, and offer a new way of looking at liturgical traditions and resources. Faithfulness thus might mean something different than what we are used to. Faithfulness to whom, or to whose God? The Liturgical Turn What I call the liturgical turn within liturgical thinking has to do first with the “Liturgical Reform”12 that happened along with the twentiethcentury ecumenical movement. Within Protestantism, the World Council of Churches, with its assemblies and documents such as BEM: Baptism, Eucharist and Ministry13 and Lima Liturgy, 14 helped foster the renewal of the Church. Within the Roman Catholic Church, we see liturgical reform taking shape after Vatican II, and also before that, with the 1963 document Sacrosanctum Concilium15 calling the church to liturgical renewal. In these documents, languages and practices started to evidence new thinking and movements within Christian churches. The Liturgical Reform was a form of aggiornamento, that is, updating the church with new developments and changes around the world. Liturgical reform also affected/took place within the Pentecostal movement. Beyond the realm of historically Protestant Churches and the Roman Catholic Church, Pentecostal and, later, New Pentecostal Churches have profoundly affected liturgical/theological ways of worshipping God. The Pentecostal movement provoked a different kind of rationality, a more bodily feeling of connectivity with God and the world, new ways of being liturgically fully stretched before God, arguing against a Protestant rationalistic approach and opening space for

6 Cláudio Carvalhaes human emotions. Pentecostal Christians gained a somewhat immediate relation to God who manifested Godself in their own bodies with a different imprimatur of authenticity. Other churches operating under the shadow of larger ecclesial institutions, such as the Quakers, Waldensians, Mennonites, Unitarians, Baptists, Evangelicals, and Black churches in the United States, were also part of the liturgical renewal, as were religious movements such as the popular religiosity of Roman Catholic believers who invented popular uses of liturgy for their own sake and daily needs.16 With mainline churches losing their place in the consumerist culture of the United States, new formats of church are appearing, and prosperity gospel churches/liturgies are growing everywhere. Moreover, it is the churches of immigrants and the undocumented that are fundamentally renewing our liturgies yet again, but with very little attention from major churches. The liturgical turn is back: uncontrolled, messy, informed by unthinkable sources, and nowadays deeply marked by the effects of the economic neoliberal system in full force. Consequently, a whole array of studies around contextualization and inculturation prompted new forms of thinking, wrestling with indigenous practices that were not accepted before. New forms of liturgical theologies, practices, and behaviors were negotiated under the umbrella of cultural differences.17 Not only Roman Catholics but also Protestants engaged in this new frame of thinking, especially because of the growing presence of Christianity from the South, its oddness, lack of proper subservience, and the growing difficulties of colonizing churches and holding (to) the strictures of former ways of liturgizing/ritualizing/understanding/living the faith. Liberation theologies were/are challenging our established liturgical theologies in many ways as well. In addition to these changes, recent approaches to New Testament scholarship have provoked those within the liturgical field to update their theological conclusions, and have evidenced a plurality of novel perspectives that have expanded the field in different directions.18 Diversities and multiplicities of early Christian liturgies, prayers, understandings of leadership, theologies, and practices implicated in the mixture of the lex orandi (law of prayer) and lex credendi (law of belief), have expanded the possibilities of thinking and practicing faith, sometimes debunking myths of former New Testament and liturgical theological scholarship that wanted to hold on to strict forms of liturgy that had shaped the entirety of Christianity. One example of this type of scholarship is represented by Gregory Dix and his poetic and theologically spellbinding The Shape of Liturgy. 19 While still a classic and a main resource for much of the liturgical renewal movement, this book can no longer hold its basic premise that there is/was a uniform shape of liturgy that can be traced back to this once imagined monolithic thing called the early Christian church or Christian liturgy, in the singular. New sources of scholarship have broken

Liturgy and Postcolonialism 7 ground for new liturgical theologies that are now coming from many places around the globe other than Europe or the United States. Liturgical theologians from the Southern hemisphere, along with some from Europe and the United States, are bringing new vocabularies and bibliographical sources into discussion. They are radically changing a field that often relied on European/US thinking, and that used cases from the world South only as illustrations to enhance what really mattered in their (northern) liturgical theological argument and to maintain the structures of patriarchal power/thinking. Another aspect of the liturgical turn is the challenging of the very understanding of the liturgical episteme, or the construction of thinking, that we could define as Apollo over Dionysus. It was the Latin American, Anglican, liturgical theologian Jaci C. Maraschin who called our attention to this division.20 For him, our liturgical thinking was marked by a strong Apollonian structure, organized around order, harmony, and reason. Influenced by Nietzsche, Maraschin challenged us to trust the Spirit of God and let our thinking lean more toward Dionysus, the god of wine who represented joy, ecstasy, and pleasure, enabling us to perceive the lightness and the beauty of God that heavy, ordered thinking would never allow us to think, much less to experience. Maraschin was proposing a shift to the body without losing reason, opening liturgies to engage and love God through the desires, limits, joys, pains, and pleasures of the body in a more deeply incarnated way. Queer theologies are a result of this movement toward Dyonisus, confusing Plato’s black-and white-horses. To use another western philosophical structure, the whole of liturgical thinking is grounded in Descartes’s maxim, “I think therefore I exist,” and does not allow, for instance, Spinoza’s work on the emotions to be trusted. Life is matter and the result of proper thinking that organizes life within certain strictures that were very suspicious of emotions and body movements. This way of thinking entailed the vanishing of other peoples (any people) whose religious practices and emotions did not match the emotionless process of proper (Christian) thinking. In this way, the incorporation of peoples, such as the Jewish Marranos in Europe or the Africans brought to the Americas, and the ethnic cleansing of the Natives by white-colonized America, were examples of a normal flow of “engagement” with those who did not correspond to the proper human ways of feeling/thinking and, consequently, of living the Christian faith. Nonetheless, the Portuguese researcher Antonio Damazio follows Spinoza in order to debunk Descartes’s maxim, resulting in the declaration, “I feel therefore I am.”21 As Walter Mignolo says, “A re-orientation has come about, a change from Being to Doing, a transformation of the classic philosophical questions.”22 Don Saliers, Ernesto Cardoso, Jaci C. Maraschin, and many others have helped us perceive life in an expansive

8 Cláudio Carvalhaes way in the field of liturgy.23 Even before Damazio, Saliers, Cardoso, and Maraschin, Brazilian writer Oswald de Andrade gave us a new, key means of thinking about life: “Happiness is the proof of life.”24 A whole reorientation for the lex credendi, lex orandi. The liturgical turn is thus the extension of liturgical reform, still within what Gordon Lathrop calls “critical classicism,” which has to do with “the willing reception of traditional patterns and archaic symbols . . . ” and “is marked by the willing elaboration of a contemporary critique of received traditions.”25 We must not underestimate the power of liturgical renewal and must continue to accept the challenge of its work and possibilities. The liturgical turn does so by carrying forth traditioning, challenging its work and possibilities. The liturgical turn continues with the traditioning, challenging interpretations, questioning not only liturgical thinking and church practices, but also its many orders, symbols, forms of liturgical creation, understandings of bodies and sexualities, vocabularies, uses of the Bible, liturgical resources, forms of access to holy things, relations to economics and other fields, and so on. Once given and taken for granted, the universal tent of proper liturgical thinking—that tried to fix liturgical practices and thinking and keep everything intact under the name of proper tradition—must now locate itself in very particular and contextual ways and ask if the proper is still important, possible, or even necessary. The creation of liturgical thinking now not only demands that the liturgical theologian locate her/himself in a specific context within a specific culture and local wisdom, but also names the whole array of sources of his/her own formation, biography, and production of knowledge, and responds to the realities of a local people. Breaking with the illusion of a linear, patriarchal way of liturgical thinking held by the centers of power and regurgitated everywhere else, PLTs aim to search and use subjugated knowledges, practices, vocabularies, and sources of the people at a certain place, which might lead us all to unforeseen liturgical/theological possibilities. Within these subjugated knowledges, Mignolo calls our attention to the construction of knowledge and knowing. He calls for an “epistemological disobedience”26 that invites other forms of imagination, knowledge and knowing. In this process, we must be careful about how knowledge is constructed: Geo-politics of knowledge goes hand in hand with geo-politics of knowing. Who and when, why and where is knowledge generated (rather than produced, like cars or cell phones)? Asking these questions means to shift the attention from the enunciated to the enunciation. And by so doing, turning Descartes’ dictum inside out: rather than assuming that thinking comes before being, one assumes instead that it is a racially marked body in a geo-historical marked space that feels the urge or get the call to speak, to articulate, in whatever semiotic system, the urge that makes of living organisms “human” beings.27

Liturgy and Postcolonialism 9 The formation and development of knowledge and knowing in our liturgies reveal how we want to hold life. Thus, at the liturgical turn’s core, there is more than just reform; there is the very living of life! Because life is not just what we think, but fundamentally how we think. As Mignolo says: “The maintenance of life is an expression of knowledge, a manifestation of adequate behavior in the domain of existence.”28 Thus, to maintain the life of those who are not part of the current exclusionary economic system and this self-enclosed European form of knowledge, we must reinvent knowledge itself so that we can exist. That means reclaiming knowledges, creating and exploring other forms of knowing—which means thinking and being church in many forms, including unexpected connections, checking power dynamics, bodily movements, unimagined juxtapositions of old and new symbols, emotions, unforeseen relations, and ecclesiastical power shifts as “necessary steps for imagining and building democratic, just, and non-imperial/colonial societies.”29 New appropriations, expansive juxtapositions, challenging hegemonies, reassessing sources and historical interpretations, checking and redrawing old maps, and naming patriarchal, racist, heterosexual thinking and social class structures, are now at the cusp of the liturgical turn. It is a new turn indeed, honoring what is liberative anywhere and dismantling systems of oppression, arrogance, domination, and exclusivism. Any postcolonial act is a work of love for the past, a work of sustenance for the present, lurking hopes for survival in the future; an ongoing critical, careful, and reckless action that works within and beyond the binary framework of liturgical thinking, trying to escape the exclusive western forms of understanding life and living the faith. Disseminating Identity and Difference Identity and appropriation, authenticity, mimicry, and mimesis are always at play in liturgical thinking/practices. The colonial discourse creates an identity that swallows difference and turns the multiplicity of the sacred into cultural uniformity and monotony. The question of identity, so present in Christian ecclesial traditions, may be an attempt to reify the imperial demand for sameness and a return to the colonial positivist discourse as proper order and progress. The very question of authenticity placed to colonized people is a form of continuous appropriation into the identity/ identical forms of liturgical thinking and action and its ambivalent forms of power. The quest for identity also reifies symbols and structures of power in a form of essentialism, a kind of metaphysical place that comes “before” the thinking of identity.30 The attempt to find norms and patterns of liturgical practices and thinking named before was part of the identity project that hoped to identify ecumenical ground around which Christian churches could gather. While

10 Cláudio Carvalhaes this search for unity is fundamental for our struggles, this project has forgotten that first, the search for unity is always a search for someone’s identities; and second, the very birth and consequent spread of Christianity have always been marked by differences, syncretism, endless changes, and ongoing, uneven reorganization of its many selves throughout history. The stri(u)ctures of the liturgical field have always been at play in religious traditions, trying to foster one embracing discourse that establishes boundaries for practices, languages, and thinking through particular patterns of worship. This identity-shaped theology/liturgy has been a powerful tool within the missionary movement as well. Each denomination wanted to plant its particular flag in the newly “discovered” colonies, and ended up mirroring what already existed in the country/ies from which it came. For example, the many missionary movements in colonized countries created several denominational church buildings competing with one another on the same street, a situation no different from the one found in many streets throughout the United States. The same/different theology/liturgy identity discourse of denominational self-righteousness in this evangelizing-formative Christian project fostered a necessary selfdistinction, and consequently, a distrust of other theologies and liturgies. Distinction as self-enclosed identity was as central a project as the message itself. Christ alone never went alone! From a Latin American perspective, the colonization project used all of its instruments to engage the newly discovered worlds within the gospel of Jesus to erase differences, turning the other into the same/different of the missionary/church/culture/colonizer. Everything that looked different and couldn’t be recognized had to be destroyed. This project was liturgical, too. Liturgies were powerful weapons in this conquering/civilizing project. So much so that thinking and living, reasoning and behaving, were to be organized around certain religious practices. Teaching savages to properly worship has been an ongoing form of civilization. Only those who worshipped in civilized thinking/acting manners were considered human, a practice which required embracing a new identity, both of the gospel and of the missionary/colonizer. No wonder that during the era of slavery in the United States, black people, second-rate humans, were placed at the mezzanines whenever they were allowed to enter white people’s churches. Thus, religious colonialism, religious faith vis-à-vis Empire, was seen as a means of human development, the process by which a culture would gain technical tools and develop a proper sense of humanity. As R. S. Sugirtharajah says, even Reinhold Niebuhr saw colonialism as “an inevitable stage in the development of civilizations.”31 Grace alone never went alone! Within colonizing processes, the liturgical space was central to the life of a community. At the center of every city in Latin America, there is a

Liturgy and Postcolonialism 11 chapel, a church, or a cathedral, which is, or was, the center of life. The boundaries of the new world were drawn in liturgical practicing/thinking, establishing a spatial center from which life was organized. Moreover, the establishment of a center defined a periphery, where those noncompliant with the proper religious life and practices were segregated. Notions of essentials and adiaphoras also mark this center-periphery organization in theological and liturgical studies, throwing into the corners those who neither displayed the proper marks of the church, exhibited proper theological thinking, nor followed the proper liturgical rubrics. There is a list of things and people considered essential, fundamental to faith/power/ holy things to occur. Our liturgical clothes are adamant reminders of that fact. Even the logic of ordaining converted indigenous priests/pastors, the ones who were friendly to the empire, was a tool to hold onto the center while claiming the periphery.32 Nonetheless, colonized people never received any colonial process without resistance. There has always been a dialectical movement between conquering and reactions (to that conquering) through large and small movements of fissures. Alfredo Bosi says: The conquering Cross of the Crescent will be planted in the land of Brazil– wood and will subjugate the Tupis, but on behalf of the same cross, there will be calls for the freedom of natives and mercy for blacks. The cult celebrated in the Jesuit missions of Seven Peoples will also be prayed by the colonizers, anointed by their chaplains, who will slay them without mercy.33 The migration/dissemination of liturgies across the globe has found ways to intercept, refuse, diffuse, amplify, and dilute the interstices of the liturgical empire, forming new ways of being Christians within identities not always easily discerned.34 Even today, when liturgical systems of thinking/ practicing try to hold to tight formulas, or ascribe a single cultural liturgical order, since every liturgical order is indeed cultural, these systems come up against the variety of human creation, turning any attempt to hold on to one liturgical order increasingly more difficult. The “leakiness of imperial boundaries,”35 as Gandhi Leela reminds us, has been there from the outset. That means that liturgical systems have always been porous, ambivalent, and paradoxical, even when totalizing powers have wanted to avoid or mask that fact However, with time, these leaking boundaries have become more evident as indigenous people have started to create, confirm, expand, and un/define their known limits beyond the proper and the acceptable. Again, identity has been a fundamental aspect of this process. The very structures of the Empire had to deal with the many identities of the conquered people, and that movement was never a one-way street. The us

12 Cláudio Carvalhaes and them developed by the imperial system tried to establish the limitations of contact and the maintenance of power. Edward Said says: Throughout the exchange between Europeans and their “others” that began systematically half a millennium ago, the one idea that has scarcely varied is that there is an “us” and “them,” each quite settled, clear, unassailably self-evident. As I discuss in Orientalism, the division goes back to Greek thought about barbarians, but whoever originated this kind of “identity” thought, by the nineteenth century, it had become the hallmark of imperialist cultures as well as those cultures trying to resist the encroachments of Europe.36 Liturgical theologies often work from this same logic of identity thought, favoring the practices of some groups over others, differentiating liturgical and non-liturgical churches, high and low churches, ranking proper and improper ways of worshipping God. The dissemination of sameness through differentiation37 was done with the use of heavy notions of values and hierarchical definitions, ascribing honor and dignity to those who become the same, while never really letting the colonized become the same. While Christian denominations continue to claim clear identity as a way of maintaining their own place in the world, the identity project entailed a double movement of structuring reality in social classes and annihilating difference. In the midst of fears and complex systems, churches try to draw borders of protection that end up isolating themselves in entrenched mighty liturgical and theological fortresses, ending possibilities of mutual exchange, learning, and connectivity. Moreover, the identity-based colonial-imperialprocess of the missionary work also spilled over into notions of nationalisms and hatred. Consequently, borders and walls, such as the wall of shame that the United States built to separate itself from Mexico and the whole of Latin America, and the wall of injustice raised by Israel against Palestine, does not seem that wrong or problematic. They mirror the distinctions kept in worship spaces. Instead of searching for the illusion of clear-cut identities, liturgies should engage sameness/difference as a movable, flowing process of ongoing formation of identities that does not fear that which does not look like its own image. Liturgies, as privileged spaces for social entanglement, are marked by the condition of hosting the foreigner, the stranger, the parasite. By openly and creatively engaging sameness and differences in different contexts for different liberating purposes, ritual religious spaces must engage the parasite, that of the other as a fundamental part of itself, as a way to foster diversity and keep complexity in our human social fabric. By learning to engage, navigate, think, and practice faith in various and multiple ways, we assume that we live in this web of connectivity, as we continue to work with binary structures in order to dismantle them.

Liturgy and Postcolonialism 13 Thus postcolonialism will work within binary systems, finding within their porous spaces unknown forms of life, other forms of thinking, other possibilities of the holy and its sacred gestures, different praxes, indigenous resources, resistance processes, and people’s self–affirmation. The movements between colonialism and postcolonialism are ample and asymmetrical. The specific processes occurring in India, for instance, while very contextual and particular, are noticeable elsewhere. Chad M. Bauman researches the Dalit converts in North Central India and says, “Those who became Christian drew upon the symbols of both colonizer and colonized, and refashioned them into a coherent, meaningful, and effective collective identity that enabled them to change the world, or at least their experience of it.”38 Life and death are always at stake! The dialectic movements within colonization and postcolonial acts are so complex that they must be carefully analyzed and engaged. The dissemination of liturgies has created worlds, established societal structures, invented and deleted forms of lives, uncovered and shattered a myriad of identities, and has destroyed, reshaped, and developed ways of understanding and behaving within traditions. Only One Is Holy Gordon Lathrop reminds us of the Eastern liturgy singing “One Is Holy” as the response to “holy things to holy people.”39 That phrase, as Lathrop points out, contrasts with our condition—none of us is holy. Also, it emphasizes the fact that the Christian liturgy is meant to bring us to God, knowing that no liturgy is good enough for the task it is charged with in any historical time. Thenceforth we move now from a postcolonial perspective, engaging the possibility of the Oneness of God in our midst. Often, Christian theology has emphasized this idea of oneness as an ecumenical trademark, a fundamental aspect of Christian unity. However, this perceived notion of oneness is problematic, since a notion of divine Oneness is always (only) someone’s theological notion of what/who the One is about. A theology of oneness often relies on an ecclesiastical construction based on a lived tradition that carries theological, liturgical, and historical specificities. Within such a theology, the specificities of the oneness of God, which are (also) the specificities of the holy, cannot but be expressed within the specificities of this particular construction, itself the creation of a specific group. This sense of oneness turns away the polidoxy of God’s oneness and excludes theological diversity and the multiplicities of the body of Christ. The result is that the Holy is owned by traditions, identities, since it is trapped into a theological understanding of the oneness that keeps reflecting a game of mirrors. The handling of the holy one is also at stake. What sense of the holy? Who has access to this form of the holy? Who can hold the holy things?

14 Cláudio Carvalhaes In Christian liturgies, the ex operere operato structure looms large around ritual practices, and its theological stricture is dependent on the inner efficacy of a sacramental order that, if done properly, will make the presence of God present and authenticate its power: a goes to b that goes to c that will necessarily and inescapably go to d. Thus, while the theological hope is that the community is actually processing this movement together, only some special people can pronounce the formula for its efficacy. The hierarchical structures of churches have often become more a structure of power than structures of service, or structures of power vested in structures of service. Signs of authority and propriety in accessing and handling holy things are deeply marked in exclusionary notions of the holy and of the oneness.40 In this sense, the oneness of God privileges those who define the liturgical orders and books–a group all too often consisting of a white, male, heterosexual presider, and the whole patriarchal system grounded in social high class. We need to dismantle liturgical constructs that keep exclusive notions of the oneness of God and God’s holiness that mirror the domination of lower class societies. Feminist, Queer, liberation theologians, and many others have criticized the historical making of these liturgical theologies and its notions of access and validity of theologies and liturgies that do not entail the plurality of God and God’s holiness.41 Another issue regarding the singing of “Only One Is Holy” is interreligious dialogue. As mentioned before, PLTs must engage interreligious perspectives. From the multiplicities of religions and religious understandings and practices, how are Christians to deal with the sense of the holy? How do Christians who say “only one is holy” engage in dialogue with other religions that consider everything and/or everybody holy? Also, how are Christians to deal with Jesus as the only holy one? Interreligious dialogue does not intend to preclude anyone from boldly affirming what one believes, and Christians must be able to say, “Jesus is the only holy one!” However, Jesus’s oneness and holiness must be engaged in the correlations, differentiations, and possibilities of the many encounters of the holy one Jesus with others’ religions and other people’s oneness and holiness. Does this engagement take away the holiness of Jesus? Surely not! But it challenges Christians to review their own senses of oneness and holiness. That is because often, others define the oneness/holiness of Jesus as something other than divine and Godly, and consequently, as something mistaken, not enlightened yet or enough, if not utterly and radically wrong, something deeply suspicious, if even human. In this proposition, only God (my God, the God I own) can make others (those who are not as holy as I am) holy. In this sense, God’s oneness is marked by the same sameness-difference identity structures we mentioned above. In this way, the use of “Only one is holy” has been part of a larger colonial process that has supported dominance to rule over people’s sovereignties, has excluded voices (feminist, queer, and minorities), and dismissed

Liturgy and Postcolonialism 15 the challenges of interreligious conversations and a larger sense of mutuality. The holiness of Jesus must be placed in relation with Jewish, Hindu, Buddhist, Muslim, Yorubá, and other religious perspectives that engage the holy and the one in different/same ways. The pluriform embodiment of the holy manifested in a variety of ways offers us a much needed and enriching vision of the world and a deep respect for the plural One! At the heart of the oneness of God is the cotidiano, the daily life of the people. It is, perhaps, one of the key questions for the liturgical world, one held in deep respect by Alfredo Bosi: The nodal question is how each group situation read and interpreted Scripture, the angle of its practice, the universalizing discourses of religion. Symbols, rituals, narratives of creation, fall and salvation, and what makes these discourses not be able to recover, when moving towards an ideal totality, the day-to-day life that is cut by the economic division and oppressed by the hierarchies of power? From cultum, the supine cervical mode of being, also derives another participle: future, culturus, what will be worked, what one wants to cultivate.42 The postcolonial/decolonial project is indeed the ongoing critique of any form of power and the cultivation of a respectful and enriching mutuality within the complex daily life of the people where the holy one manifests itself in plural ways. Hence, this book attempts to impede imperial tendencies of exclusivism and impulses of self-enclosed oneness in the modes of operation of liturgical and theological thinking that also defines people’s thinking. Going to the periphery of the world where the poor live, we learn how people understand the one and the many, the holy and the unholy, as well as how they organize their lives and their sacred spaces. Constructing forms of collective work and shared power and the cultivation of a respectful and enriching mutuality always threatened by death. Our cultus will be a non-hierarchical, equal class shared land given to all, where everybody has access to the basic sources of life and where the lives of the poor will be honored and understood as holy. Postcolonial Liturgical Theologies The maintenance of poder dynamics persists while dominant discourses set themselves up by muting what they deny, dismissing what is in between or not clearly recognized. These structures’ undersides are constituted by the adversaries of the proper, which often go by the names of the exception, the barbarous, or the unreasonable. While binary modes of thinking need to announce and cherish what is in opposition to themselves in order to tame that which can destroy their own structures, these modes (of thinking) use notions of the exception, the improper, the trickster, the coyote, alterity, and so on, to preserve the hierarchical scheme of identity

16 Cláudio Carvalhaes value. For example, when the trickster appears, the laughter provoked by him/her serves to sustain the functioning of its opposite, that is, the necessary seriousness of thought. When the coyote roams around, it reminds us to keep the doors locked. In postcolonial thinking, these terms and others, such as mestizage, hybridity, mimicry, opacity, and interstitiality, already carried inside of the colonial project, are now developed and expanded in order to find other ways of envisaging, practicing, and expanding our thought about life’s meaning. Imagination is desperately needed! Within epistemological processes that carry half-theological truths of the empire, we are entangled in liturgical gestures that teach us how to live anywhere in order to maintain systems of oppression, even when not intentionally preserved. Under these schemes, the denial of the other, the deep silence over the battle of social classes, the practical dismissal of the poor, and the destruction of the variety and multiplicities of life, are often detached from the concerns of our liturgical practices. This book makes use of many different voices, emphases, and methodologies. In any colonized voice, the dominator is present. My colonizer looms large and is present in every word I write, any song I sing, every corner I turn. For instance, I must emphasize to myself repeatedly that indigenous communities are alive, creating and resisting, and I must be careful to learn and respect their ways of living within their own commitments and struggles. Due to a thick history of racism, I must repeat to myself and to my communities time and again that black lives matter! Because five hundred years of colonizing voices in me continue to try to turn these communities into the other of myself, placing them in the shameful shadows of society, delegating them to the past, deleting their beauty, struggles and capacities. My very fear of speaking up is also a product of colonizing voices that keep threatening me. My feet on the ground, with the poor and the disenfranchised, are what keep decolonizing myself. In the Americas, identities are intrinsically related to that which was received over the course of five hundred years. Thus, confusion, uncertainties, unsettlement, displacement, and feeling lost or trapped, are always part of theological/liturgical thinking/practicing. To discern what voice we are using, whose commitments we are taking on, who we are serving, is our endless task. I am an impostor, a trickster, a coyote, one who pretends to know and to feel. A Brazilian boy from the poor areas of Sao Paulo living in the United States, not always conscious, not always knowing the difference between truth and illusion, on what side of the border I am, with whom I should side, what liturgical practice to teach, to differentiate properly what is right or wrong, what is proper and what is really improper: this is my life and the life of the theologian/liturgist/ artist in me. I am a product of the empire and its rigorous critique, an instrument of the empire’s forces of exclusion, and, at the same time, its

Liturgy and Postcolonialism 17 strongest opponent. To undo the colonizer in me is an impossible task, but one that I will never give up. Only one is holy, no one is holy, everyone is holy! What are the liturgical/theological ways in which we say: only one is holy? What are the mirrors, dissensions, necessities, and impossibilities of this affirmation? Who can get to say “only one is holy?” With whom am I saying only one is holy? To what extent does this singing bring liberation to the outcast and defy this economic system of deep exclusion? These are things for us to consider. Conclusion Tudo junto e misturado, Brazilians say: “Everything together and mixed up.” Perhaps, if we are all together and mixed, we can shout only one is holy and learn that the Christian faith consists of solidarity, of living together in communities of affection and interreligious empowerment, trying to figure out, together, through ours and somebody else’s liturgies, what being human is all about. This book is an invitation to the table/altar: come and let us weep together over the death and disasters of the world and the exclusion, pain, and hardships of our poor people; come and feast together on this table of promises, alterities, wisdom, and possibilities for a new world order; come and let us share our worship books, our religious traditions, and see what comes out of that. Bring your bodies and voices and minds, challenge us, teach us to feel, think, and dance with you. Come and wrestle with these authors and their proposals. Clearly, the fields of postcolonialism/decolonialism and liturgies are much more complex than the way I describe them here. But this new field of postcolonial liturgical theologies is a beginning in this new liturgical turn that I hope will continue and take different shapes and forms. The chapters of this book indeed show a little of the complexities of all that is at stake in this postcolonial liturgical theological endeavor, the ins and outs and withins of imperial/colonial religious senses, reasons, and practices. The hope is that this book will serve as another source for others to venture into new and old thinking, from which they may gain the courage and passion clearly demonstrated in the essays of these wonderful writers. Notes 1. In very broad and short strokes, one can say that postcolonialism emerges from experiences in the Middle East and Asia, is a critique to Orientalism and has been deeply influenced by Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak and Homi Bhabha. Decolonialism, on the other hand, arises from experiences in Latin America and the Caribbean, is a critique against Occidentalism and its leading figures have been Anibal Quijano, Enrique Dussel, and Walter Mignolo.

18 Cláudio Carvalhaes 2. Audre Lorde, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House,” Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Berkeley: Crossing, 2007), 110–114. 3. Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (London: Zed Books, 2012), 20. 4. Vine Deloria Jr., For This Land: Writings on Religion in America (New York: Routledge, 1999), 100. 5. Andrea Smith, “Dismantling the Master’s House with the Master’s Tools,” in Hope Abundant: Third World and Indigenous Women’s Theology, ed. Kwok Pui–lan (New York: Orbis, 2010), 82. 6. Michael N. Jagessar and Stephen Burns, Christian Worship: Postcolonial Perspectives (Oakville, CT: Equinox, 2011), 5. 7. If we think there is only silence in oppressive movements, we must start to hear the noise that exists in any form of community. If we look at the ways in which Africans responded to the white Christianity imposed throughout the Americas we have a vast array of movements of resistance that went from protecting their own religious beliefs and practices to entirely reshaping Christianity for their own needs. 8. For the notion of traditioning, see Orlando Espin, Idol and Grace: On Traditioning and Subversive Hope (New York: Orbis Books, 2014). 9. Michel Foucault, “Two Lectures,” in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977, ed. Colin Gordon (Brighton: Harvester, 1980), 81. 10. Ibid, 81–82. 11. For a border hermeneutics perspective, there are many authors from the South of the globe but I will mention here only sources from Mexico and Latin America: Glorai Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Spinsters/Aunt Lute, 1987); Alfredo Bosi, Dialética da Colonização (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1992); Enrique Dussel, Filosofía de Liberación (México: Edicol, 1977); Walter Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs: Essays on the Coloniality of Power, Subaltern Knowledges and Border Thinking (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000); Aníbal Quijano, “Colonialidad y Modernidad/Racionalidad,” Perú Indígena 29 (1991): 11–21; José David Saldívar, Border Matters (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). For border theory in relation to the sacrement of the eucharist, see my book: Eucharist and Globalization: Redrawing the Borders of Eucharistic Hospitality (Eugene: Pickwick, 2013). 12. The Societas Liturgica in its 2013 meeting in Wurzburg, Germany, celebrated and studied the many ways the Liturgical Reform happened in the twentieth Century; http://bit.ly/postcol_i-12. 13. World Council of Churches, Baptism, Eucharist, and Ministry (Geneva: WCC, 1982). 14. Ibid. 15. Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy, Sacrosanctum Concilium, solemnly promulgated by His Holiness Pope Paul VI on December 4, 1963, bit.ly/ postcol_i-13. 16. See Congregation for Divine Worship and Discipline of the Sacraments, Directory on Popular Piety and the Liturgy: Principles and Guidelines (Vatican City: Libereria Editrice Vaticana, 2002) and Mark R. Francis, Local Worship,

Liturgy and Postcolonialism 19 Global Church, Popular Religion and Liturgy (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2010). 17. Among many others, I mention Lutheran World Federation, Nairobi Statement on Worship and Culture (Geneva: Lutheran World Federation, 1996), and Anscar Chupungco, Inculturation of Worship: Forty Years of Progress and Tradition, bit.ly/postcol_i-17. 18. For instance, see E. Kathleen Corley, Private Women, Public Meals (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1993); Luise Schottroff, Hal Taussig, and Dennis E. Smith, From Symposium to Eucharist the Banquet in the Early Christian World (Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg Fortress, 2003); Paul F. Bradshaw and Maxwell E. Johnson., eds. Between Memory and Hope: Readings on the Liturgical Year (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2000). 19. Dom Gregory Dix, The Shape of the Liturgy (New York: Continuum, 1945.) 20. Maraschin, Da Leveza e da Beleza: Liturgia na pós-modernidade. (On Lightness and Beauty: Liturgy in Post-Modernity) (São Paulo: Aste, 2010). 21. Antonio Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness (New York: Mariner Books, 2000). 22. Walter Mignolo, “Decolonizing Western Epistemology,” in Decolonizing Epistemologies: Latina/o Theology and Postmodernity, ed. Ada Maria AsasiDias and Eduardo Mendieta (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012), 20. 23. Don Saliers, Worship Come to Its Senses (Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1996). The late Ernesto Barros Cardoso was a musician, songwriter, liturgist, and liturgical theologian who created artistic and innovative liturgies filled with freedom, liturgies that impacted a whole generation of Christians in Brazil. While Cardoso never published any books or articles, he created the Liturgical Network (Rede de Liturgia) of the Latin American Council of Churches that still exists, and is very active up to this day. Jaci C. Maraschin has several articles in English and several books and chapters in Portuguese; for example, Jaci C. Maraschin and Frederico Pieper Pires, “The Lord’s Song in the Brazilian Land,” Studies in World Christianity 12.2 (2006): 83–100. 24. Oswald de Andrade, “O manifesto antropófago,” in Vanguarda européia e modernismo brasileiro: Apresentacão e crítica dos principais manifestos vanguardistas, ed. Gilberto Mendonça Teles, 3rd ed. (Petrópolis: Vozes; Brasília: INL, 1976). 25. Gordon W. Lathrop, Holy Things: A Liturgical Theology (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1998), 4–5. 26. Mignolo, Desobediencia epistémica: Retórica de la modernidad, lógica de la colonialidad y gramática de la descolonialidad (Buenos Aires: Editora Del Signo, 2010). 27. Walter Mignolo, “Epistemic Disobedience, Independent Thought and Decolonial Freedom,” Theory, Culture & Society 26.7–8 (2009): 2. 28. Ibid. 29. Ibid., 1. 30. Sameness and difference are central to postcolonial thinking, from very different perspectives (there are, for instance, British/Middle Eastern/Asian or Hispanic/French/Algerian/South American perspectives). 31. Sugirtharajah, “Complacencies and Cul–de–sacs: Christian Theologies and Colonialism,” in Postcolonial Theologies: Divinity and Empire, ed. Catherine Keller, Michael Nausner, and Mayra Rivera (St. Louis: Chalice, 2004), 25.

20 Cláudio Carvalhaes 32. For the relation between religion and the notion of difference/alterity: Mark C. Taylor, Altarity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). 33. Alfredo Bosi, Dialética da Colonização (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1992), 15. 34. See Teresa Berger, Liturgy In Migration: From the Upper Room to Cyberspace (Collegeville, MN: Pueblo Books, 2012) 35. Leela Gandhi, Affective Communities: Anticolonial Thought, Fin–de–Siècle Radicalism, and the Politics of Friendship (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 3. 36. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), xxv. 37. Sameness and difference worked in different ways in different places. For instance, colonial discourse wanted to establish sameness and eradicate difference in the Americas, while in Asian contexts, colonial thought tried to establish difference and deny sameness between colonizer and colonized. 38. Chad M. Bauman, Christian Identity and Dalit Religion in Hindu India, 1868–1947 (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2008), 244. 39. Lathrop, Holy Things, 132–138. 40. This private sense of the holy has social results as well. The acceptance of the use of holy things by some people also allows them to own private pieces of land, even if it entails the exclusion of many from the land. PTL must deal with the economic aspects related to liturgies as well. See Cláudio Carvalhaes, “Worship—Loving Madly,” Liturgy, Special Issue: Liturgy, Culture and Race 29.3 (May 2014). 41. Some suggestions include: Janet R. Walton, Feminist Liturgy. A Matter of Justice (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2000); Marjorie Procter-Smith, In Her Own Rite. Constructing Feminist Liturgical Tradition (Akron: OSL, 2002); Marjorie Procter-Smith and Janet R. Walton, eds., Women at Worship. Interpretations of North American Diversity (Louisville, KY: Westminster/ John Knox Press, 1993); Kathleen E. Corley, Private Women, Public Meals (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1993); Teresa Berger, Gender Differences and the Making of Liturgical History (Surrey: Ashgate, 2011); Angela M. Yarber, The Gendered Pulpit (Cleveland, TN: Parson’s Porch Books, 2013); Siobhán Garrigan, Real Peace Process: Worship, Politics and the End of Sectarianism (Sheffield: Equinox, 2010); Siobhán Garrigan, Beyond Ritual: Sacramental Theology after Habermas (Burlington: Ashgate, 2004); Susan A. Ross, Extravagant Affections: A Feminist Sacramental Theology (New York: Continuum, 1998); Gail Ramshaw, God beyond Gender: Feminist Christian God-Language. (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1995); Estelle Jelinek, The Tradition of women’s Autobiography: From Antiquity to the Present (Boston, MA: Twayne, 1986). Diann L. Neu, Women’s Rites: Feminist Liturgies for Life’s Journeys. Women’s Alliance for Theology, Ethics and Ritual (Cleveland, OH: Pilgrim Press, 2003). 42. Bosi, Dialética da Colonização, 16.

Part I Muslim and Jewish Perspectives

1 Returning t o the One: Postcolonial Muslim Liturgy Sophia Rose Arjana Introduction The “post” in postcolonial signifies a hope more than a reality. It is, in the words of Anne McClintock, a move that is “prematurely celebratory.”1 For example, the term “postcolonial” is often used to describe the southern regions of the Americas, despite the fact that the United States has invaded Latin America more than one hundred times over the last hundred years.2 Anyone living in Gaza, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and other places occupied or invaded by military forces would contest the notion that colonialism is a relic of the past. So, why use “postcolonial” at all? The organization of history in terms of precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial is emblematic of the power that the West’s myth of progress has on our imagination. It is a modern vision of history imbedded in the Enlightenment notion of evolution and progress.3 This notion of human advancement is frequently employed in discourse surrounding Muslims, framing them as premodern and medieval or progressive, liberal, and modern. Muslims who don’t agree with neoliberal US policies are characterized as stuck in time—individuals literally suspended and incapable of moving. Muslims who identify with the imperialist aims of the United States and other world powers include some of the liberals and progressives who unequivocally make a distinction between themselves and their coreligionists, stating “I am not like them. I am advanced. I am modern.” For the most part, these statements have no malicious intention, but such words alienate Muslims—placing them in a different time than “moderns” occupy. Even in serious academic engagements, intellectuals have a tendency to rely on antiquated ideas of a progressive West and developmentally arrested East. In a 1991 interview the late Polish philosopher Leszek Kolakowski described Islam as being in “slumber,” asleep at the wheel.4

24 Sophia Rose Arjana According to this view, to be a good Muslim one has to change because Islam is fundamentally broken.5 The consequences of this position are quite serious—it assigns fault not to the articulation of Islam but to the very foundations of the tradition. For Muslims who believe in the holiness of the Qur’an and the sanctity of the Sunna (the Prophet’s actions and words), this is untenable. So-called traditionalists may be among the most “liberal” Muslims. Under the Orientalist rubric established for Islam, Muslims who cling to “traditionalism” are premodern (sometimes called “medieval”), while “progressive” Muslims are seen as choosing modernity. However, even this is a false dichotomy. Modernity is a condition, not a choice.6 None of us is free to choose another way because, in the words of Talal Asad, the crushing authoritarianism associated with its systems (liberalism, secularism, and so forth) extinguishes all other possibilities.7 As indicated above, the myth of progress shapes the conversation surrounding Islamic “reform” including the debates surrounding liturgy.8 In this volume of reflections on postcolonial liturgy, Christianity is the larger focus. In this chapter, I am interested in proposing three central questions surrounding Islam and postcolonial liturgy. First, what exactly is a postcolonial Muslim? This question can be answered by turning to a general description of postcolonialism, supplementing it with the theological concerns that are distinct to Muslims. Second, how do we describe the commitments that postcolonial Muslims are engaged in? Is this a reformation or a renaissance? Much of the discourse is focused on the idea of reform, a concept that suggests something has to be amended or changed. As I have argued, this puts Muslims in a very difficult position. Last, what is the vision of the postcolonial, conscious Islam that is expressed in this shift? Here, special attention is placed on commitments related to gender and sexuality due to the powerful shifts taking place in North American Muslim communities surrounding the participation of women and gender-queers in liturgy, specifically in congregational leadership. I will argue that the growing visibility of these voices is found not in the modern project of textual criticism but in theological commitments formulated in the earliest years of Islam, expressed both in the revelations set forth in the Holy Qur’an and in the spirit of the Prophet. Postcolonial, US-American, and Muslim “Postcolonial” is a contested term. For the purposes of this piece, the characteristics outlined by Michael Jagessar and Stephen Burns are a good starting point. These include the “affirmation of the equal dignity of human beings,” “exposure of imperial dynamics at play in culture and politics, unreflective everyday practices as well as carefully and intentionally

Returning to the One 25 constructed policies,” and “celebration of subaltern wisdom, creativity and resistance to dominant supposed ‘norms.’”9 To get us to a definition of the postcolonial Muslim, I propose the following definition of Muslim: One who believes in the unity of creation (tawhid) through the one God (Allah), believes in the message of the Muhammad (PBUH) and other prophets (nabiyyun/anbiya), and self-identifies as a Muslim, regardless of any objections posed by his or her coreligionists. A postcolonial Muslim, then, is an individual who is mindful of the colonial past and realistic about the imperialist present. The immediate future is bleak, but Inshallah (God willing), humankind will heed the messages in the words of the line of prophets beginning with Adam and ending with Muhammad. Muslims often speak of the poor and abandoned members of society, particularly widows and orphans. The latter hold a special status in Islamic law, due in some part to the Prophet’s experience as an orphan. “Throughout the hardships of his life, Muhammad of course remained under the protection of the One, his Rabb, his Educator.”10 His experience as an orphan, although difficult, was marked with God’s mercy and compassion, qualities all Muslims are encouraged to practice. Living as a postcolonial North American Muslim entails a type of resignation about the world in which we live, a world marked by crimes at home and abroad, what Cornel West describes—in the US context—as an imperial, moral, and spiritual catastrophe, seen in the “hellish conditions” the poor live under and the runaway militarism observed abroad.11 This resignation does not, however, entail passivity. The postcolonial Muslim has no delusions about living in a postcolonial, post-racial, or post-military-industrial-establishment state—an awareness that is both theological and political. At the same time, the postcolonial Muslim exercises criticism in an effort to “rethink, transform, relocate, or reclaim” what has been perverted.12 Regardless of their sectarian leanings, Muslims from across the spectrum—intellectuals, journalists, artists, clerics, and others—use a language that is postcolonial, often solely focused on social justice.13 Omid Safi, a religious scholar who teaches at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has written extensively about state violence, white supremacy, and social justice, problems situated in American empire and capitalism. In Safi’s articulation of Islam, the example of the Prophet must be regained and committed to anew. “For me, Muhammad represents the completion of the possibilities available to us as human beings, not because he is superhuman, but precisely because he embodies the meaning of what it means to be fully human.”14 The Prophet is, after all, the best of us. In Qur’an 9:128, he is described as ra’uf and rahim—kind and merciful—two of the asmah al-husna (99 names of God).15 It is only through the conscious practice of his example that we can be holy.

26 Sophia Rose Arjana Postcolonial Islam: Reform, Reversion, and Renaissance Islamic liturgical rituals are embedded with all sorts of interesting power dynamics involving race, ethnicity, age, gender, and sexuality. The discourse surrounding “progressive” Islam reflects a number of the complications that concern the framing of these Muslim voices, including the exclusion of “traditional” voices. The premodern (“bad”) Muslim is a popular character in the West’s treasure chest of tropes about Islam. He (and more rarely, she) is commonly featured in the discourse surrounding an “Islamic reformation,” an idea reflective of the West’s own religious genealogy, which is focused on the idea of progress. The postReformation view of religion as evolutionary has been a popular approach in both the academic study of religion as well as in colonial programs related to these intellectual pursuits.16 It is such an integral part of the Western consciousness that it is difficult to imagine an alternative, a point Dubuisson argues here: “Since this notion is intrinsically linked to all the philosophies, complementary or competing, that have been invented in the West, the West cannot, at the risk of its own disintegration, do without it, because these global conceptions would then decompose into scattered or juxtaposed fragments.”17 The political implications of this view are often expressed in the worship of secularism, which is readily presented as a solution to the world’s ills, especially those identified with religion. The anthropology of secularism informs the conversation surrounding Islamic liturgical reform. Secular normativity, as established in Europe and North America, forms the foundation for academic discussions related to the reshaping of Islam, which, as a newer religion, needs to be pushed ahead—by neoliberal policies and friendly Muslims—so that it is in line with the rest of modernity.18 Islamic liturgy, like most subjects related to Islam, is presented as premodern, backward, and in dire need of reform. The myth of progress constructs Islam as a modification of the Jewish and Christian traditions—the final installment of a three-part program that seeks to complete the messages voiced by earlier prophets such as Abraham (Ibrahim) and Jesus (Isa). It is true that the Qur’an voices a critique of its Abrahamic relatives, but the critique is directed toward communities seen as straying from tawhid—the Oneness of God and all existence.19 Islam’s critiques of its religious ancestors are primarily situated in the breaking of the covenant and human alienation from tawhid. The Qur’an does not charge Judaism or Christianity with crimes, and although it describes Jewish and Christian communities as those that have disobeyed God, this is a distinct and crucial theological point. It is quite a different thing to say that Jews have broken the covenant, or, for that matter, that Christians have, for in the Qur’an the same critique is

Returning to the One 27 made of all human communities. A central message of the Qur’an is that humans have strayed and must return, which is one reason Allah appears in the seventh century to a merchant named Muhammad to broadcast this message to both the unconscious Jews and Christians and the ignorant Arabs. It is seen in the very first command the angel Jibril (Gabriel) gave to Prophet Muhammad, “Iqra! (Recite!).” Urgency lies in this very first revelation—to recite, broadcast, and help people return to the One. Hence, Islam does not need to move forward, as expected in evolutionary terms, but rather backward, returning to its foundational teachings. For Muslims, loving God is an ethical act that requires following the Sunna. Loving the Prophet is one of the most important ways that Muslims demonstrate their faith: After all, you cannot say to someone, “I love you,” and then go about business as usual. There are procedures and protocols that need to be observed. You must show dedication and devotion if you want to achieve union with your beloved. What, then, is the proper way to show dedication when dealing with God? The Koran puts it this way: Say [O Muhammad!]: “If you love God, follow me, and God will love you” (3:31). Therefore, the procedures and protocols in love for God are rooted in following the Prophet.20 Postcolonial Islamic Liturgy Islamic liturgy—the sacraments and rules associated with rituals—is complicated by the numerous differences that exist between sects. Sunni Muslims, for example, often practice a degree of gender segregation in congregational prayers, as seen in the architecture of mosques that divide women and men. Shi’a more commonly pray together, with the men in front (after salat, the men and women sit separately). Both fashions of structuring space teach the body to be obedient to male hierarchy. In recent years, North American Muslims have questioned these types of orderings, arguing that if Muslims are to rely on the example of the early community, they need to do so accurately. The mosque in Medina was the courtyard of the Prophet’s house, a space with no walls or barriers separating men and women.21 ‘Umar constructed barriers during his rule, something that was condemned by several scholars.22 Such changes represent a move away from the tawhidic principle cited by Wadud and others constitutive of Islam. One perspective that emerges from the so-called traditional view of the early community as modeled along male exclusivity takes different positions on the question of gender and sexuality as models of liturgical rules. This position claims that following the Prophet’s example entails a kind of seventh-century sensibility about gender. Some of the most popular Muslim figures in the United States and Canada follow this model,

28 Sophia Rose Arjana encouraging their students and followers to mind the example of the Prophet, his wives, and companions in a manner that keeps men in a pronounced and superior position of power. Some white American converts display an “idealized Islamic identity” that is expressed in their mastery of Arabic, use of the Qur’an and hadith, and other “pious formulas” that validate their authority.23 One expression of their piety may be a strict adherence to social norms that exclude many believing Muslims. For the past 20 years, Amina Wadud has challenged the current state of Islamic liturgy, which reflects a particularly male-centric reading of the Qur’an and Sunna. Her academic works include a close exegetical reading of the Qur’an’s most controversial verses involving females; she takes male scholars to task for misrepresenting the status of females in the Qur’an.24 In her words, “a female person was intended to be primordially, cosmologically, eschatologically, spiritually, and morally a full human being, equal to all who accepted Allah as Lord, Muhammad as prophet, and Islam as din.”25 Anything contrary to that is human-created and violates the dignity of females as expressed in the Qur’an. In 1995, Wadud led a mixed prayer service in New York City.26 This act was seen by some Muslims as an effect of Western feminism, but from Wadud’s perspective it is situated in actuality formulated along the tawhidic principle, which Wadud explains here: “Activation of the tawhidic principle as a matter of personal practice and in the definitions, establishment, and sustenance of a just social order—the primary responsibility of being human—is the means for practicing a more egalitarian, humanistic, and pluralist Islam today.”27 How one interprets/approaches the question of women-led prayer is dependent on the religious authority being consulted. Ahmed Elawa and Laury Silvers take up the question by looking at the different opinions Muslim scholars have given over the centuries regarding the issue. Within Sunni Islam, on which their article is focused, there is no consensus among scholars.28 The Iranian government has permitted female-led prayers for female congregations, but to date has not altered this to include a mixedgender congregation. North American Muslims who identify as queer, gay, lesbian, transgender, bisexual, or transsexual are finding more places where they can experience acceptance and find community. In one instance, El-Farouk Khaki, a gay Muslim human rights attorney, cofounded the Toronto Unity Mosque (El-Tawhid Juma Circle) in Toronto with religious scholar Laury Silvers. This community is committed to the values of equality and justice on a profound level. The status of homosexual Muslims is a complicated question that has radically altered in recent centuries. For much of Islamic history, samegender desire has been readily acknowledged and the associated sex acts treated in the context of power relations. “Islamic law condemned

Returning to the One 29 homosexual practice, not homoerotic sentiment. Mutual attraction between males was unanimously viewed to be perfectly natural and normal. Islamic civilization being essentially phallocentric, the role of the perpetrator in the sexual act is considered dominant and superior.”29 The Qur’an is vague on the question of sexuality, with only a few references to the act of sodomy in relation to Sodom.30 Hadith have more to say on the subject but, like so many traditions from the Sunna, they are often contradictory. In one case in which the Prophet was asked if an effeminate (mukhanath)31 should be put to death, Muhammad replied, “I have been forbidden to kill those who pray.”32 This tradition suggests that the Prophet not only had an awareness of mukhannathun (effeminates), but he was also charged with executing mercy and compassion in their treatment. Although no hadith exists on the exact question of queer-led prayer, there is ample evidence that mukhannathun were tolerated in the first centuries of Islam, if not celebrated. Tuways is the most famous such individual—as an effeminate (who was married, by the way) celebrated for his singing.33 Musical entertainment is obviously very different than prayer and other sacred acts, but these traditions suggest that effeminates (who may or may not have desired other men) were accepted as part of the community. According to many Islamic traditions, a believing Muslim can act as imam—a tradition that has included females as well; so why not a believing Muslim man who desires men, or a believing Muslim woman who desires other women? Scholars and activists such as Wadud, Silvers, and Khaki have been careful to locate their actions in Islamic sources, pointing to the verse, hadith, or fatwa (legal opinion) that offers support to such stewardship of a religious congregation. While their critics have raised the specter of fitna (rebellion) against these individuals, it is important to remember that Islam, a religion with no central authority and a large number of sects, has no unified set of rules and behavior. While some Muslims express a reliance on hadith, other Muslims may put more emphasis in the Qur’an, explaining as Wadud has that the word of Allah has authority over the Sunna. Gender and queer-inclusive Islamic liturgy is a religious articulation situated in foundational texts and a postcolonial ethic. For some Muslims, alienation from Allah and violation of tawhid is located, not in Islamic feminists or gay Muslims, but in those who seek to separate and exile them from the ummah (the Muslim community). As the Prophet (PBUH) reminds us, “Allah will not be merciful to those who are not merciful to humankind.”34 For those who exclude their coreligionists from the community on the basis of the Prophet’s example, the rejoinder is found in his noble character (makarim al-aklaq) and in the many examples he left for the generations of Muslims that follow.35

30 Sophia Rose Arjana Notes 1. Anne McClintock, “The Angel of Progress: Pitfalls of the Term ‘PostColonialism,’” Social Text 31/32: Third World and Post-Colonial Issues (1992): 87. 2. Ibid., 89. 3. Ibid., 85. 4. Leszek Kolakowski, “Slumbering Islam,” New Perspectives Quarterly 19.1 (2002): 93. 5. Some critics of Islam contend that Muslims cannot change, because Islam affects their moral foundations so radically they always resort to evil. See my forthcoming chapter, “Turning Turk: Anxieties Surrounding Bodily Difference in Orientalist Discourse,” in Orientalism: A Eurocentric Vision of the “Other,” International Peace Studies Center (Spring 2014). 6. David Scott, Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 19. 7. Talal Asad, “Conscripts of Western Civilization,” in Dialectical Anthropology: Essays in Honor of Stanley Diamond, vol. 1, ed. Christine Gailey (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1992), 333, quoted in Scott, 8. 8. The foundational study of this binary in contemporary political discourse is Mahmood Mamdani, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, The Cold War, and the Roots of Terror (New York: Pantheon Books, 2004). 9. Michael N. Jagessar and Stephen Burns, Christian Worship: Postcolonial Perspectives (Oakville, CT: Equinox, 2011), 11. 10. Tariq Ramadan, In the Footsteps of the Prophet: Lessons from the Life of Muhammad (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 16. Rabb refers to Allah and is often translated as Master or Sustainer. 11. Cornel West, “Dr. King Weeps from His Grave,” New York Times, August 25, 2011. I include Canada in this definition of North American Muslims, because the Toronto Unity Mosque is featured in this article. 12. Gyan Prakash, “Who’s Afraid of Postcoloniality?” Social Text 49: The Yale Strike Dossier (1996): 201. 13. Eschatologically, matters become complicated by sectarianism. For instance, Shi’as view the coming of the Mahdi (the appointed one) in a different way from Sunnis, who place less emphasis on this figure clearly identified as the Twelfth Imam in Shi’a texts, but less clearly delineated in the Sunni tradition. Shi’a theology emphasizes suffering and redemption, while Sunni theology is less focused on these themes. This difference influences political attitudes in very obvious ways, even while social justice concerns lie at the heart of Islam. 14. Omid Safi, Memories of Muhammad: Why the Prophet Matters (New York: HarperOne, 2009), 36. 15. Reza Shah-Kazemi, The Spirit of Tolerance in Islam (New York: I. B. Tauris, 2012), 111. Asma al-Husna is often translated as “the most beautiful names.” 16. See Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1978). 17. Daniel Dubuisson, The Western Construction of Religion: Myths, Knowledge, and Ideology, trans. William Sayers (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), 94.

Returning to the One 31 18. Saba Mahmood, “Secularism, Hermeneutics, and Empire: The Politics of Islamic Reformation,” Public Culture 18.2 (2006): 328–329. 19. For Amina Wadud, the relationship of tawhid (the “unicity” of God) with khalifah (agency) constitutes the ethical understanding of human worth. Amina Wadud, Inside the Gender Jihad: Women’s Reform in Islam (Oxford: Oneworld, 2007), 15. 20. William C. Chittick, In Search of the Lost Heart: Explorations in Islamic Thought, ed. Mohammed Rustom, Atif Khalil, and Kazuyo Murata (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2012), 321. 21. Nevin Reda, “Women in the Mosque: Historical Perspectives on Segregation,” American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 21.2 (2004): 81–82. 22. Ibid., 86. 23. Mahdi Tourage, “Performing Belief and Reviving Islam,” Performing Islam 1.2 (2012): 211. 24. Wadud’s position is that the Qur’an is inerrant and supreme, in contrast to the ambiguous and often contradictory ways in which the Sunna describes females. The Qur’an is quite clear on the equal status of man and woman. See Amina Wadud, Qur’an and Woman: Rereading the Text from a Woman’s Perspective (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), xvii. 25. Ibid., ix–x. 26. Juliane Hammer, “Performing Gender Justice: The 2005 Woman-Led Prayer in New York,” Contemporary Islam 4 (2010): 92. 27. Wadud, Inside the Gender Jihad, 15. 28. Ahmed Elewa and Laury Silvers, “‘I Am One of the People’: A Survey and Analysis of Legal Arguments on Woman-Led Prayer in Islam,” Journal of Law and Religion 26.1 (2010–11): 163–164. 29. Sabine Schmidtke, “Homoeroticism and Homosexuality in Islam: A Review Article.” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London 62.2 (1999): 260. 30. For a discussion of the treatment of lesbianism in Islam, see Sahar Amer, “Medieval Arab Lesbians and Lesbian-like Women,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 18 (2009): 215–236. 31. The word “effeminate” is used here to describe the Arabic term, but these individuals were not necessarily gay. Therefore, it might be more proper to use the word “queer” to describe this category. 32. Everett K. Rowson, “The Effeminates of Early Medina,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 111.4 (1991): 674. 33. Ibid., 678. 34. Bukhari 473. Bikhari’s sahih collection of hadith are widely accepted by Sunni Muslims. 35. Shah-Kazemi, The Spirit of Tolerance in Islam, 111.

2 Toward a Genuine Congregation: The Form of the Muslim Friday Prayer, Revisited Shadaab Rahemtulla Introduction In recent years, Muslim progressives have called for a gender-egalitarian approach to the Friday prayer. These efforts have focused on women’s leadership of this ritual, the most well-known example being Amina Wadud’s leading of the prayer on March 18, 2005, in New York City.1 In this chapter, I will argue that in order to attain a truly gender-egalitarian approach to the Friday prayer, women’s leadership is necessary but, in and of itself, insufficient. That is, women’s ritual leadership is a crucial step toward—rather than the summation of—a systematic rethinking of the prayer in the light of justice. The first part of this essay will lay the groundwork for my argument by unpacking what I call the “heart” of feminist critique, which is a critique not only of sexism but of all forms of gendered hierarchy and exclusion. I will then interrogate two problematic aspects of the prayer: namely, (1) the visual symbolism of the pulpit and the staff, which is often (though not always) held by the preacher; and (2) the marked absence of an analytic, participatory role for the congregation. In order to create a more inclusive space for the congregation within the service, I will propose an alternative, praxis-based model. This chapter sets the stage for discussion by providing a basic overview of the prayer and presenting a Qur’anic justification for how I, as a believing Muslim, am able to make such an argument in the first place. Background The Friday prayer (salat al-jum’a) is a central communal ritual in Islam. While Friday may seem like the Islamic equivalent of the Sabbath, it is

34 Shadaab Rahemtulla important to appreciate that, for Muslims, Friday is not a holy day of rest.2 The reason is theological. The Judeo-Christian idea that God, after creating the Heavens and the Earth in six days, rested on the seventh day (Gen. 2:1–3) is simply unthinkable in Islam, since God is viewed as being all-powerful and thus beyond fatigue, a distinctly human quality. The prayer is preceded by a two-part sermon (khutba), which commences with various liturgical formulae—most notably, praising God, professing one’s faith, and invoking blessings upon Prophet Muhammad—and concludes with a supplication for the community.3 The prayer itself comprises two cycles of standing, bowing, and prostrating. Because the Friday prayer takes the place of the daily noon prayer (salat al-zuhr) that requires four cycles of standing, bowing, and prostrating, the two-part sermon is seen as substituting for the first two cycles of the noon prayer.4 The sermon is thus a fundamental component of the Friday prayer. Indeed, without it the prayer is nullified, since half of the prayer has effectively been missed. Although there is a clear religious dimension to the sermon— impassioned exhortation (wa’z) to live a pious life being a key element emphasized by medieval Islamic scholars5—the sermon also has a practical, worldly dimension. The preacher routinely discusses various social and political issues affecting the community. It is for this reason that the sociologist Mazen Hashem has described the sermon as “a religiously driven civic discourse rather than a pure religious sermon as it is customarily referred to.”6 New Liturgical Horizons: The Possibilities of Qur’anic Silence So how can I, Islamically speaking, justify this reformist project? That is, what textual license do I have to challenge the prayer as it is practiced today? First, I should state my own biases with regard to Islamic texts. For me, the Qur’an is the sole, binding source of Islam, for it is this text and this text alone that is viewed by all Muslims as the actual Word of God. This is not to say that I sweepingly reject other Islamic texts, which are human-made, but that I am not bound by them when constructing normative statements about religion. The pressing question for me, then, is what does the Qur’an itself have to say about the Friday prayer? Remarkably, there are only two verses in the entire text that refer explicitly to this ritual: Q. 62:9 and 10. The verses read: O you who have faith! When the call is made for prayer on Friday, hurry toward the remembrance of Allah, and leave all business. That is better for you, should you know. (9) And when the prayer is finished disperse through the land and seek Allah’s grace, and remember Allah greatly so that you may be felicitous. (10)7

Toward a Genuine Congregation 35 This passage clearly states the importance of attending the prayer, and the fact that it calls on the believers to leave (and then return to) their activities presumes that they are in fact laboring on this day, as opposed to resting. But what is most interesting for me is what the text does not say, that is, the silences of the passage. Essentially, we are given two visual snapshots of the prayer: a “beginning,” with people leaving their trade to attend the prayer, and an “end,” in which, having finished the prayer, they are dispersing throughout the land. Significantly, there is no description of the prayer itself, of how it is performed. There is no “middle.” To be sure, this rather oblique treatment of the ritual is consistent with the Qur’an’s discourse on daily ritual prayer in general. Unlike the Islamic legal tradition’s detailed prescriptions of ritual prayers—such as “their types, conditions of fulfillment, times, modes, and what nullifies them”8—the Qur’an refers simply to bowing, prostrating, and reciting a part of the text while standing.9 Just as significantly, the term khutbat al-jum’a (“the sermon of Friday”) and even the word khutba (“sermon”), understood as referring to the prayer, are curiously absent in the text.10 And it is the Qur’an’s silence on the form and content of the Friday prayer, I argue, that offers a scriptural license to explore new modes of approaching this ritual that comply with contemporary understandings of justice, equality, and community. Indeed, it is crucial to appreciate the historicity of the Friday prayer: that it is not a pristine, timeless object that fell from the sky, but rather a practice that has been shaped profoundly by the societal context in which Islam emerged. Consider, for instance, the act of the preacher sitting between the first and second parts of the sermon, both of which are delivered standing. This was a custom of the pre-Islamic Arabian judge,11 and was thus appropriated by the nascent Muslim community. The ubiquitous phrase amma ba’d (literally: “and after that”), which is used in the Friday sermon as a linguistic separator between the opening liturgical formulae and the substantive content of the sermon, is another telling case in point. Quss b. Sa’ida (d. circa 600)—a great poet, orator, and judge of preIslamic Arabia—is considered to be the first person to use this phrase,12 and therefore it, too, was appropriated, entering into the vocabulary of the new faith. Perhaps the most compelling testament to the contextuality of the Friday prayer, however, is the very name for Friday in Arabic: yawm al-jum’a (literally: “the Day of Gathering”). While the vast majority of Muslims presume the “gathering” here as referring to the congregational prayer, the term actually has its roots in the religious milieu of seventhcentury Medina, which had a sizable Jewish population. On this day, the Jews purchased supplies for the Sabbath, and it is precisely because Friday became a major market-day that it was chosen for the ritual, since “everybody was present, and it was, thus, a natural occasion for bringing people together for the purpose of prayer and admonition.”13 In accenting the historicity of the prayer, my purpose is not to suggest that this aspect

36 Shadaab Rahemtulla itself is a problem. On the contrary, such influence is inescapable: religions never emerge in a contextual vacuum but are inextricably molded by their formative environments. There is a problem, however, when we do not acknowledge this historical process and, as a result, treat religious practices—in the case of this chapter, rituals—as sacrosanct. The Heart of Feminism Before presenting two critiques of the Friday prayer, I will elaborate on what exactly my grievances are with a reformist project that focuses solely on female ritual leadership. While this is a significant development that I support, it alone cannot lead to a truly gender-egalitarian practice of the prayer because this ritual is itself hierarchal. An isolated call for female leadership, then, merely places women at the helm of a religious structure that is exclusionary—created for specific groups of men at the expense of other people, men and women alike—without challenging that structure. In other words, I do not believe that the prayer elevates men as a totality, as a gendered category. Fundamental inequalities exist between men, and this fact is rarely taken into account in reformist discussions of the prayer. Take the following statement by Wadud, referring to women’s leadership: “As an explicit articulation for female inclusiveness, I challenge the long-standing historical precedent of male exclusivity in this role.”14 This statement is accurate but imprecise. It is accurate because men have indeed monopolized ritual leadership to the exclusion of women. It is imprecise because it treats men as a monolithic, and thus equally privileged, group. That is, it presumes that all men, or at least most men, can take on leadership roles in Islamic ritual simply by virtue of being men. But religious authority among men (just as among women) is determined by a welter of factors, including social standing, kinship, sectarian affiliation, sexuality, ethnicity, language, and, of course, education. By “education,” I do not just mean a traditional Islamic education versus a secular one—the former clearly wielding more power in mosque contexts than the latter—for even the type of secular education a lay preacher has, and the “worth” that that education carries in an unjust and classist society, determines that preacher’s authority over society. The words of a physician, professor, or engineer are not the same as those of a mechanic, plumber, or “unskilled” laborer. My own experiences as a Shi’a male are an illustrative example of the power differentials that exist between Muslim men in liturgical contexts. During my undergraduate years, I was actively involved in the local Muslim Students’ Association (MSA), which, paralleling the global Muslim community, comprised a Sunni majority and a Shi’a minority. While the organization was open to Shi’a participation, and often spoke of the importance of Muslim unity, there was one unspoken rule: only Sunni males could lead prayer. Here I am referring to communal prayers

Toward a Genuine Congregation 37 in general, which include the Friday prayer. This was the case even when the rare occasions arose in which there were numerically more Shi’as in the room than Sunnis. I vividly recall one instance when there were a dozen or so Shi’as and only a couple of Sunnis sitting together, and yet when the time for prayer arrived one of the Sunni brothers, without a moment’s hesitation, stepped forward to lead the prayer. I often protested this unjust practice and, on a few occasions, pushed my way forward to lead the prayer, much to the consternation of the organization. Each time that I would turn around after leading the prayer, however, I would see the Sunnis behind me—men and women—repeating the prayer individually. How could their own prayers be valid, after all, sitting behind a deviant Shi’a? It was during this difficult period that I came to know intimately the sense of being less, of being almost Muslim but not quite. Furthermore, this formative experience of exclusion forced me to draw the links between sectarian and gender injustice in Islamic ritual, eventually leading me to support woman-led prayer. It is because of the complexity of male-male relations that we need to appreciate what I call the “heart” of feminist critique when rethinking the Friday prayer. Feminism is often seen as focusing on sexist oppression, or women’s discrimination in a world of male privilege. Indeed, the struggle against patriarchy, which can be described as a “system of male dominance by which men as a group acquire and maintain power over women,”15 is a defining feature of feminist scholarship. But feminism has also drawn our attention to the significance of gender as a category of thought. Specifically, it has shown how gender is a socially constructed phenomenon that implicates, in fact constitutes, both women and men. For just as one acquires femininity and becomes a woman so, too, does one acquire masculinity and become a man.16 Gender is everywhere. In other words, (unequal) relations between men are as inextricably gendered as relations between men and women. And if gender is all-encompassing, then the underlying purpose—the heart—of feminism cannot be limited to confronting sexism but must necessarily extend to addressing all forms of hierarchy and exclusion as manifestations of gender injustice. This is the broader vision of feminism and what gives it its acutely egalitarian character, seeking to locate, challenge, and restructure unequal relations of power as a whole. The Visual Imagery of the Pulpit and Staff This brings us to my first critique of the Friday prayer: namely, the problematic symbolism of the pulpit (minbar). Introduced during the Umayyad Empire (661–750),17 the first dynastic state in Muslim history, the pulpit has become a signature trademark of the mosque. Located at the head of the mosque, it is an independent structure—sometimes it is built into the interior wall of the mosque—roughly three and a half to

38 Shadaab Rahemtulla four meters high, with a stairway leading up to the platform.18 The purpose of the pulpit is not merely pragmatic, that is, being seen and heard in a large gathering. It is also about projecting the preacher’s religious authority. In fact, I would argue that it is principally about authority. Naima Chikhaoui and Fatima Casewit describe (notice my verb usage: they are not criticizing, since they do not think religious hierarchy is a problem) the visual symbolism of the pulpit as follows: The elevation often expressed by a ladder or stairway is one of the most ancient designs of ascension. This design is always linked to the symbolism of verticality, a sign of purity and height. The raised minbar is therefore a symbol of the spiritual “verticality” and of metaphorical completion. A sacred and elevated piece of furniture, it permits one to take on this verticality for oneself towards “height,” leading to light.19 The authors go on to claim that the “preacher, a man [sic] of great faith, raises his voice carrying the word of God, the Infinitely Just and Almighty. He lives a moment of unity with the divine word . . . ”20 A fleeting period transpires, therefore, in which the mounted preacher shares in God’s authority, as divine power becomes vested, indeed personified, in the preacher’s body. This type of liturgical culture, centered on the verticality of the pulpit, clearly violates the core Islamic tenet of monotheism (tawhid). For, according to the Qur’an, God is beyond the limits of human language and imagination (Q. 6:103)21 and thus cannot be represented, in any way, anthropomorphically. I should point out that I am not the first to critique the pulpit. In his manual on how to prepare Friday sermons, the Iraqi-American Wael Alkhairo advises against using the pulpit in smaller gatherings, observing that “communication is most intimate and effective when the khatib [preacher] is standing close to the audience.”22 But Alkhairo’s critique is essentially practical, not ethical. His objective is to ensure the most effective delivery of the ritual sermon. My contention with the pulpit is that it elevates—not just physically, but epistemologically—an utterly fallible human over his (invariably his) fellow humans, imbuing him and his equally fallible perspectives with an aura of sacred authority that is beyond questioning. The staff, often (though not always) held in the preacher’s hands, is another problematic dimension of the Friday prayer. Unlike the pulpit, the staff has a longer history dating back to pre-Islamic times, originally being a sign of the Arabian judge.23 Thus, along with sitting in the middle of the two-part sermon and saying amma ba’d, the staff was adopted by Islamic liturgical practice. What makes the staff problematic, however, is not this pre-Islamic heritage—again, the appropriation of existing cultural conventions is part and parcel of the emergence of any religion—but rather the fact that the staff is a powerful image in the Qur’an associated with the prophets and, therefore, prophetic authority. Moses is a compelling case

Toward a Genuine Congregation 39 in point. The Qur’an relates three miracles that this great prophet, by God’s permission, performed with his staff (’asa): first, transforming it into a snake in front of Pharaoh’s magicians (Q. 7:107; 20:17–21; 26:32; 26:45; 27:10; 28:31); second, splitting the sea, thereby creating an escape route for the fleeing Israelites (26:63); and, finally, striking a rock, at which point 12 springs gushed forth, one for each Israelite tribe (2:60; 7:160). Another vivid Qur’anic image is associated with Solomon’s uneventful death, though a different Arabic word is used here for staff (minsa’a). Q. 34:14 refers to an aged Solomon dying while leaning on his staff. The jinn, unaware of their master’s death, continue to labor away, and it is only after a worm eats through Solomon’s staff and his body collapses that the jinn realize that the prophet has passed. The staff, then, is deeply enmeshed in the rich prophetic imagery of the Qur’an, and Muhammad was known to use one frequently. As a result, when a preacher clasps the staff, he links himself aesthetically with the prophetic legacy and, in so doing, taps into that legacy’s vast authority. As the historian Linda Jones argues: When the medieval khatib [preacher] ascended the pulpit, stood leaning on the wooden rod or sword, and faced the audience to deliver his sermon, he likewise reproduced or “re-presented” the charismatic authority of the Prophet Muhammad.24 Essentially, my grievance with the staff is that it is symbolically incompatible with a post-prophetic age, which for Muslims began with the death of Muhammad—“the Seal of the Prophets” (khatam al-nabiyyin, Q. 33:40)—in 632. The person now addressing the congregation (irrespective of what that person may think) is not a representative of the prophets, but, just like the rest of the congregation, a follower of the prophets. Similar to the pulpit, the staff serves to consolidate religious hierarchy, which runs counter to cultivating a pluralistic liturgical culture that is egalitarian and inclusive. Whither the (Critical) Congregation? It is on the issue of inclusivity that we arrive at my second critique of the Friday prayer: the striking absence of an analytic, participatory role for the congregation, which is invariably reduced to an “audience.” In the countless sermons that I have sat through since my childhood, the preacher usually treats the congregants as empty, ignorant vessels into which enlightened guidance is poured. This liturgical approach is similar to what the Brazilian educational theorist Paulo Freire calls a “banking concept”: Education thus becomes an act of depositing, in which students are the depositories and the teacher is the depositor . . . In the banking concept of

40 Shadaab Rahemtulla education, knowledge is a gift bestowed by those who consider themselves knowledgeable upon those whom they consider to know nothing.25 Centrally, the problem here relates to the issue of subject. The preacher standing before the assembly becomes the actor while the assembly, in turn, assumes the role of object, being acted upon by that individual. To be sure, throughout Muslim history, congregants have exercised agency in different ways. They would often respond vocally to the preacher’s call to fear God, reciting various formulae asking God for reward, forgiveness, and saving them from the punishment of Hell.26 Gifted orators like the late Egyptian preacher Abd al-Hamid Kishk (d. 1996) have masterfully turned this emotive dialogue with the congregation into an art form, such as by beseeching them to repeat his own invocations verbatim.27 The anthropologist Charles Hirschkind has shown the importance of taking these vocalizations seriously, understanding this particular mode of listening as “performance,”28 rather than an outcome of the manipulative skills of the orator. But while the congregation is not necessarily passive, it is crucial to acknowledge that their participatory role (in the mosques where they do have one) remains devotional in character. There is a space to participate, but participation in this context requires using a specific type of language. My interest, then, lies in carving out an analytical space for the congregation, fostering critical reflection in a communal setting. Contemporary Muslim attempts to introduce a more intellectual role for the congregants, moreover, have been markedly modest in scope, failing to offer a structural critique of the ritual’s form. For example, Hashem—the sociologist whom we met at the beginning of the chapter—has recommended “evaluative feedback mechanisms,” including an online “nasiha [advice]-to-the-khatib system,”29 whereby attendees can post comments on the quality of the sermon, choice of subject, style of the preacher’s delivery, and so forth. They could also make suggestions for future sermon topics, which can be compiled into an electronic database for preachers to consult.30 Alkhairo provides a survey form that can be distributed after the prayer, allowing congregants to rank, from an ascending scale of 1 to 5, “the choice of topic,” “relevance of the khutbah,” “the contents,” “the speaker and his preparation,” “the length of the khutbah,” and “the benefit obtained,” followed by a comments section.31 He even advises that preachers, in their sermons, review “important” books related to Islam, and that these books be made available after the prayers, either through purchase or library loan.32 While certainly being practical suggestions, none of them brings the attendees into the Friday service as a group, as a category, as an engaged congregation. The assembly’s analytical role remains restricted to individual and isolated actions, channeled through a paternalizing discourse of feedback. It is telling that Alkhairo devotes only one page to his chapter on the congregation—titled “The Responsibility of the Audience”—in