Against All Odds: How to Re-Inscribe Islam Into European History
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
Manfred Sing Against All Odds: How to Re-Inscribe Islam into European History Abstract: The central place that Muslims and Islam are accorded in the European media and public debates today contrasts with their near-complete absence in parts of European historiography until recently. While right-wing demagogues campaign against refugees, Muslims and the supposed Islamization of Europe, their argument that Islam does not belong to Europe is, at least partially, supported by the rather patchy awareness of a continuous and multi-facetted Islamic history in European societies and, horrible dictu, even in some history departments. Recent research challenges this neglect, tries to overcome the “Othering” of Islam, and demands a new conceptualization of European history that leaves behind the Europe/Islam binary. As the construction of a European identity and a European space is based on “Othering” – a definition of what is not European –, the conscious and visible integration of Muslims into European history poses a systematic challenge to nar- ratives of Europeanization. The article draws attention to the difficulties that spring from this challenge and discusses new approaches in scholarship that try to over- come them. Reflecting on the status of Muslims as a minority in Europe, the anthropologist Talal Asad once coined the paradoxical phrase: “Muslims are clearly present in secular Europe and yet in an important sense absent from it.”1 This simultane- ous presence and absence of Muslims in the West has found a recent expression in the popular rediscovery of thirteenth-century Sufi master Jalaluddin Rumi. In times of hate speech and fake news, seekers of love and truth have made him a best-selling author in the USA.2 The “Rumi renaissance”3 has even seized showbiz celebrities like singer Madonna, actress Tilda Swinton, or Coldplay’s Chris Martin (“It kind of changed my life”).4 The new veneration for the Persian poet (d. 1273), who is “typically referred to as a mystic, a saint, a Sufi, an enlightened man,”5 has been substantially sparked by the new English translations by the American 1 Talal Asad: Formations of the Secular. Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Stanford 2003, 159. 2 Jane Ciabattari: Why is Rumi the best-selling author in the US?, in: BBC culture (21 Oct. 2014). URL: http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20140414-americas-best-selling-poet (6 Jan. 2017). 3 Ibid. 4 Rozina Ali: The Erasure of Islam from the Poetry of Rumi, in: The New Yorker (5 Jan. 2017). URL: http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-erasure-of-islam-from-the-poetry-of-rumi (6 Jan. 2017). 5 Ibid. DOI 10.1515/9783110532241-008, © 2017 Manfred Sing, published by De Gruyter. Die Online Ausgabe steht unter einer Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND Lizenz. 130 Manfred Sing poet Coleman Barks (b. 1937). Rather than retranslating the original poems, Barks transformed the stiff language of earlier academic translations – e. g. by British Orientalist Reynold Nicholson (d. 1945) – into free verse in a contemporary idiom; Barks’s delving into Rumi has yielded 22 volumes since 1976. Curiously, however, Rumi’s lifelong engagement with the Koran and his permanent re-working of Islamic material remain mostly invisible in this smooth English style, whereas references to Jesus, Joseph and the Bible are retained. Nonetheless, as one scholar put it, “the universality that many revere in Rumi today comes from his Muslim context.”6 While Barks believes that people may read Rumi “with a strong impulse that wants to dissolve religious boundaries (…) and end sectarian violence,”7 the religious as well as the Islamic context are often lost in his translations. Instead, Rumi’s teachings stand as “timeless wisdoms (…) suitable to satisfy the spiritual need of the many who do not identify with the traditional religions but are in search of personal development.”8 For example, a half-sentence on the houris, the virgins promised in Paradise, (“Whoever asks you about the Houris”) is rendered as “If anyone asks you how the perfect satisfaction of all our sexual wanting will look.”9 One verse reads “Out beyond ideas of rightdoing and wrong- doing, there is a field / I will meet you there,”10 while the original refers to imān (belief, faith) and kufr (unbelief), implying that there is a meeting-point beyond belief and unbelief. Omid Safi, professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic studies at Duke Univer- sity, points out that already in the nineteenth century, translators and theologians separated mysticism from its Islamic roots, thus arguing that people like Rumi were mystics not because, but in spite of Islam. Safi therefore calls extracting the spiritual from its religious context a form of “spiritual colonialism.”11 Today, as a permanent spotlight is directed at Muslims and Islam in the media, the Western reception of Rumi similarly neglects his Islamic references and contexts as well as his heterodox beliefs. The universality of his message works against its Islamicity, thus obscuring the idea that Islam “can be like that, too.”12 Talal Asad’s phrase quoted at the beginning, which may help to understand such paradoxes, dates back to 2003. At that time, the study of Muslims in Europe and the West was developing 6 Ibid. 7 Ciabattari, Why is Rumi. 8 Francesco Alfonso Leccese: Islam, Sufism, and the postmodern in the religious melting pot, in: Roberto Tottoli (ed.): Routledge Handbook of Islam in the West. London 2015, 441–454, here 451. 9 Ali, The Erasure. 10 Ibid. 11 Ibid. 12 Ibid. Against All Odds: How to Re-Inscribe Islam into European History 131 “in the atmosphere of a gold rush,”13 as a new and fast-growing field of research. Since then, the output in the field has further multiplied,14 new scholarly platforms have been established,15 and fundamental essays collected in an anthology16 as well as in new handbooks – e. g. the Cambridge Companion to American Islam (2013), the Oxford Handbook of American Islam (2014), the Oxford Handbook of European Islam (2015), and the Routledge Handbook of Islam in the West (2014). While these efforts certainly add to our knowledge about the many facets of Muslim life outside Muslim societies and empires, there can be no doubt that these publications generally show a certain bias. A significant amount deals with popular issues like the headscarf debates, questions of security, deviant behavior, and cultural conflict, so that one is inclined to conclude that “the governance of Islam is the fastest growing focus of research on Islam in Europe,”17 for which the overwhelming majority of research grants seems to have been awarded after 2001.18 In opposition to what has been termed the “domestication” or the “securitization” of Islam,19 its alter ego, the study of “Islamophobia,”20 is also gaining ground. However, it is also fair to note that many researchers in the field are well aware of these biases and take issue with them.21 Even in 2003, the sociologist Levent 13 Levent Tezcan: Das Islamische in den Studien zu Muslimen in Deutschland, in: Zeitschrift für Soziologie 32, 3 (2003), 237–261. 14 If one looks up, for example, the combinations from the world field “Islam” and “Muslim” with “Europe” on Google’s Ngram Viewer (which does not consitute scientific research because the basis of Google’s data is not transparent), one finds a seven- to ten-fold increase since the 1980s. 15 See for example the Journal of Muslims in Europe, established in 2012, the Yearbook of Muslims in Europe, established in 2009, or the online resources Euro-Islam.info, and Islamopediaonline. org, founded in 2007, both coordinated by Jocelyne Cesari. 16 David Westerlund and Ingvar Svanberg (eds.): Islam in the West, 4 volumes, London 2011. 17 Thijl Sunier (2012): Beyond the Domestication of Islam in Europe: A Reflection on Past and Future Research on Islam in European Societies, in: Journal of Muslims in Europe 1 (2012), 189– 208, here 191. 18 Jorgen S. Nielsen: Book reviews, in: Journal of Muslims in Europe 1 (2001), 217; Maurits S. Berger: A Brief History of Islam. Thirteen Centuries of Creed, Conflict and Coexistence. Leiden 2014, 235. 19 Sunier, Beyond the Domestication, 191. Jocelyn Cesari: The Securitisation of Islam in Europe, in: Research Paper No. 5 (2009). URL: http://aei.pitt.edu/10763/1/1826.pdf (06 Feb. 2017); Farid Hafez: Disciplining the “Muslim Subject”: The Role of Security Agencies in Establishing Islamic Theology within the State’s Academia, in: Islamophobia Studies Journal 2, 2 (2014), 43–57. 20 See the Islamophobia Studies Journal at Berkeley, founded in 2012, and the Islamophobia Studies Yearbook at the University of Salzburg, founded in 2010. 21 Birgitte Johannsen and Riem Spielhaus: Counting Deviance: Revisiting a Decade’s Production of Surveys among Muslims in Western Europe, in: Journal of Muslims in Europe 1 (2012), 81–112; Jocelyn Cesari: Introduction, in: idem (ed.): The Oxford Handbook of European Islam. Oxford 2015, 1–20, here 3–5. 132 Manfred Sing Tezcan wondered what was specifically Islamic about many studies of Muslims in Germany.22 In 2012, Thijl Sunier, a cultural anthropologist and professor of “Islam in European societies” at the University of Amsterdam, complained that “whereas Islam has become the common denominator for a wide range of phenomena, atti- tudes, and developments,”23 the narrowing down of research foci “has caused a serious academic neglect,” especially when it comes to everyday life, religious practices, and the production of religious knowledge among Muslims. Yet again, with these limitations in mind and looking back on three decades of research on Muslims in Europe, it is certainly not wrong also to identify “an increase in research and a thematic diversification in academic literature.”24 What makes the phrase of a simultaneous presence and absence of Islam in Europe pertinent is, however, not so much the quantitative aspect of biased research foci, but the underlying difficulty of integrating Islam into European history, of treating Islam as an integral part of European self-understanding and identity construction.