#did i mention that all of this is through my christian lense and a muslim could have a different perception and be just as valid

[not-so-superheroine]

Jesus is my older brother, not my dad.

other christians don't seem to feel the same?

am i missing something where he insists on such a thing except perhaps with actual little children?

[elizabethan-memes]

Can you elaborate on Erusamus and the reformation please, or at least point me toward sources? Politics make more sense than philosophy to me, so I see the reformation through the lense of Henry VIII, or the Duke of Prussia who dissolved the teutonic order, or France siding with the protestants during the 30 Years War because Protestants > Hapsburgs

So sorry to take so long!

If you needed this answer for academic reasons, given that summer term is pretty much done I’m probably too late to help, but I hate to leave an ask unanswered.

HELLA LONG ESSAY BENEATH THE CUT SORRY I WROTE SELF-INDULGENTLY WITHOUT EDITING SO THERE IS WAY MORE EXPLANATION THAN YOU PROBABLY NEED

Certainly religion has been politicised, you need look no further than all the medieval kings having squabbles with the pope. Medieval kings were not as devastated by the prospect of excommunication as you’d expect they’d be in a super-devout world, it was kinda more of a nuisance (like, idk, the pope blocking you on tumblr)  than the “I’m damned forever! NOOOOOOO!” thing you’d expect. I’m not saying excommunication wasn’t a big deal, but certainly for Elizabeth I she was less bothered than the pope excommunicating her than the fact that he absolved her Catholic subjects of allegiance to her and promised paradise to her assassin (essentially declaring open season on her).

I think, however, in our secular world we forget that religion was important for its own sake. Historians since Gibbon have kind of looked down on religion as its own force, seeing it as more a catalyst for economic change (Weber) or a tool of the powerful. If all history is the history of class struggle, then religion becomes a weapon in class warfare rather than its own force with its own momentum. For example, historians have puzzled over conversion narratives, and why Protestantism became popular among artisans in particular. Protestantism can’t compete with Catholicism in terms of aesthetics or community rituals, it’s a much more interior kind of spirituality, and it involves complex theological ideas like predestination that can sound rather drastic, so why did certain people find it appealing?

(although OTOH transubstantiation is a more complex theological concept than the Protestant idea of “the bread and wine is just bread and wine, it’s a commemoration of the Last Supper not a re-enactment, it aint that deep fam”).

I’ve just finished an old but interesting article by Terrence M. Reynolds in Concordia Theological Quarterly vol. 41 no. 4 pp.18-35 “Was Erasmus responsible for Luther?” Erasmus in his lifetime was accused of being a closet Protestant, or “laying the egg that Luther hatched”. Erasmus replied to this by saying he might have laid the egg, but Luther hatched a different bird entirely. Erasmus did look rather proto Protestant because he was very interested in reforming the Church. He wanted more people to read the Bible, he had a rather idyllic dream of “ploughmen singing psalms as they ploughed their fields”. He criticised indulgences, the commercialisation of relics and pilgrimages and the fact that the Papacy was a political faction getting involved in wars. He was worried that the rituals of Catholicism meant that people were more mechanical in their religion than spiritual: they were memorising the words, doing the actions, paying the Church, blindly believing anything a poorly educated priest regurgitated to them. They were confessing their sins, doing their penances like chores and then going right back to their sins. They were connecting with the visuals, but not understanding and spiritually connecting with the spirit of Jesus’ message and his ideals of peace and love and charity and connecting with God. Erasmus translated the NT but being a Renaissance humanist, he went ad fontes (‘to the source’) and used Greek manuscripts, printing the Greek side by side with the Latin so that readers could compare and see the translation choices he made. His NT had a lot of self-admitted errors in it, but it was very popular with Prots as well as Caths. Caths like Thomas More were cool with him doing it, but it was also admired by Prots like Thomases and Cromwell and Cranmer and Tyndale himself. When coming across Greek words like presbyteros, Erasmus actually chose to leave it as a Greek word with its own meaning than use a Latin word that didn’t *quite* fit the meaning of the original.

However, he did disagree with Protestants on fundamental issues, especially the question of free will. For Luther, the essence was sole fide: salvation through faith alone. He took this from Paul’s letter to the Romans, where it says that through faith alone are we justified. Ie, humans are so fallen (because of the whole Eve, apple, original sin debacle) and so flawed and tainted by sin, and God is so perfect, that we ourselves will never be good enough. All the good works in the world will never reach God’s level of perfection and therefore we all deserve Hell, but we won’t go to hell because God and Jesus will save us from the Hell we so rightly deserve, by grace and by having faith in Jesus’ sacrifice, who will alone redeem us.  The opposite end of the free will/sola fide spectrum is something called Pelagianism, named after the guy who believed it, Pelagius, who lived centuries and centuries before the Ref, it’s the belief that humans can earn their salvation by themselves, by good works. Both Caths and Prots considered Pelagius a heretic. Caths like Erasmus believed in a half-way house: God reaches out his hand to save you through Jesus’ example and sacrifice, giving you grace, and you receive his grace, which makes you want to be a good person and do good works (good works being things like confession of sins, penances, the eucharist, charity, fasting, pilgrimages) and then doing the good works means you get more grace and you are finally saved, or at least you will go to purgatory after death AND THEN be saved and go to heaven, rather than going straight to Hell, which is what happens if you reject Jesus and do no good works and never repent your sins. If you don’t receive his grace and do good works, you won’t make the grade for ultimate salvation.

(This is why it’s important to look at the Ref as a theological as well as a political movement because if you only look at the political debates, Erasmus looks more Protestant than he actually was.)

There are several debates happening in the Reformation: the role of the priest (which is easily politicised) free will vs predestination, transubstantiation or no transubstantiation (is or isn’t the bread and wine transformed into the body and blood of Jesus by God acting through the priest serving communion) and the role of scripture. A key doctrine of Protestantism is sola scriptura. Basically: if it’s in the Bible, it’s the rules. If it’s not in the Bible, it’s not in the rules. No pope in the bible? No pope! No rosaries in the bible? No using rosaries! (prayer beads)

However, both Caths and Prots considered scripture v.v. important. Still, given that the Bible contains internal contradictions (being a collection of different books written in different languages at different times by different people) there was a hierarchy of authority when it came to scripture. As a general rule of thumb, both put the New T above the Old T in terms of authority. (This is partly why Jews and Muslims have customs like circumcision and no-eating-pig-derived-meats that Christians don’t have, even though the order of ‘birth’ as it were goes Judaism-Christianity-Islam. All 3 Abrahammic faiths use the OT, but only Christians use the NT.)

1.       The words of Jesus. Jesus said you gotta do it, you gotta do it. Jesus said monogamy, you gotta do monogamy. Jesus said no divorce, you gotta do no divorcing (annulment =/= divorce). Jesus said no moneylending with interest (usury), you gotta do no moneylending with interest (which is partly why European Jews did a lot of the banking. Unfortunately, disputes over money+religious hatred is a volatile combination, resulting in accusations of conspiracy and sedition, leading to hate-fuelled violence and oppression.) The trouble with the words of Jesus is that you can debate or retranslate what Jesus meant, especially  easily as Jesus often spoke in parables and with metaphors. When Jesus said “this is my body…this is my blood” at the Last Supper, is that or is that not support for transubstantiation? When Jesus called Peter the rock on which he would build the church, was that or was that not support for the apostolic succession that means Popes are the successor to St Peter, with Peter being first Pope? When the gospel writers said Jesus ‘did more things and said more things than are contained in this book’, does that or does that not invalidate the idea of sola scriptura?

2.       The other New Testament writers, especially St. Paul and the Relevation of St John the Divine. (Divine meaning like seer, divination, not a god or divinity). These are particularly relevant when it comes to discussing the role of priests and priesthood, only-male ordination, and whether women can preach and teach religion.

3.       The Old Testament, especially Genesis.

4.       The apocryphal or deuterocanonical works. These books are considered holy, but there’s question marks about their validity, so they’re not as authoritative as the testaments. I include this because the deuterocanonical book 2 Maccabees was used as scriptural justification for the Catholic doctrine of purgatory, but 2 Maccabees is the closest scipture really gets to mentioning any kind of purgatory. Protestants did not consider 2 Maccabees to be strong enough evidence to validate purgatory.

5.       The Church Fathers, eg. Origen, Augustine of Hippo. Arguably their authority often comes above apocryphal scripture. It’s from the Church Fathers that the concept of the Trinity (one god in 3 equal persons, God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit) is developed because it’s not actually spelled out explicitly in the NT. Early modern Catholics and Protestants both adhered to the Trinity and considered Arianism’s interpretation of the NT (no trinity, God the Father is superior to Jesus as God the Son) to be heresy. Church Fathers were important to both Catholics and Protestants: Catholics because Catholics did not see scripture as the sole source of religious truth, so additions made by holy people are okay so long as they don’t *contradict* scripture, and so long as they are stamped with the church council seal of approval, Protestants because they believed that the recent medieval theologians and the papacy had corrupted and altered the original purity of Christianity. If they could show that Church Fathers from late antiquity like Augustine agreed with them, that therefore proved their point about Christianity being corrupted from its holy early days.

Eamon Duffy’s book Stripping of the Altars is useful because it questions the assumptions that the Reformation and Break with Rome was inevitable, or that the Roman Catholic Church was a corrupt relic of the past that had to be swept aside for Progress, or that most people even wanted the Ref in England to happen. Good history essays need to discuss different historians’ opinions and Duffy can be relied upon to have a different opinion than Protestant historians. Diarmaid MacCulloch’s works are good at explaining theological concepts, he is a big authority on church history and he’s won a whole bunch of prizes. He was actually ordained a deacon in the Church of England in the 1980s but stopped being a minister because he was angry with the institution for not tolerating the fact he had a boyfriend. The ODNB is a good source to access through your university if you want to read a quick biography on a particular theologian or philosopher, but it only covers British individuals. Except Erasmus, who has a page on ODNB despite being not British because he’s just that awesome and because his influence on English scholarship and culture was colossal. Peter Marshall also v good, esp on conversion. Euan Cameron wrote a mahoosive book called the European Reformation.“More versus Tyndale: a study of controversial technique” by Rainer Pineas is good for the key differences in translation of essential concepts between catholic and protestant thinkers. The Sixteenth Century Journal is a good source of essays as well.

[wellesleyunderground]

#FollowFriday: The Badass Women of Identity Politics

The Women of Identity Politics: Ikhlas Saleem ‘11 and Makkah Ali ‘10

In case you haven’t heard, Identity Politics, the brainchild of Ikhlas Saleem ‘11 and Makkah Ali '10, is a podcast on race, gender, and Muslims in America—and it’s just what the doctor ordered.

May Sifuentes ‘09, a Wellesley Underground editor, had the chance to talk to this #blackgirlmagic duo about their podcast and why you should tune in. Read their interview below, and better yet, share it with the world.

You can find them on Facebook, Twitter, and online. You can also subscribe to their podcast on iTunes, Soundcloud, Acast, and Stitcher. E-mail them with questions and ideas at identitypoliticspodcast@gmail.com.

May: Thank you so much for meeting with us! I was listening this morning, I’m so excited that you started this project. I want to hear more about Identity Politics—what the series is, how did you start it, why did you start it, and also, what does it mean to have a podcast that is named very similarly to, perhaps, one of the most controversial terms of the last election?

Ikhlas: Back in 2010 I started my blog Haya wa Iman, which literally translates to ‘Modesty and Faith’. I was inspired after going to a conference with Makkah called ‘Pearls of the Quran’ in DC and one of the speakers talked about the notion of modesty and faith. Typically you see Muslim women in the media and it’s always about what they are wearing, when we talk about and care about so much more than that. I wanted to spin that into a spiritual reflection of what it means to be Muslim in America today.

For a year and a half I blogged on that topic and had been talking about starting a podcast because I wanted to reach more people. I wanted to be able to share more stories and experiences from within the Muslim community. My husband put a date on the calendar for January 7, 2016 and said “this is the day you are going to release your first episode.” It actually happened on January 9, but that was the push I needed. After the first few episodes, I asked Makkah to join as a co-host and the rest was history.

Makkah: To add on to that origin story, Ikhlas went to Harvard Divinity School and got her Master’s in Theological Studies. I remember visiting her in Boston years ago and talking about how there weren’t adequate discussions happening publicly about life at the intersections of different topics. You can study and discuss classical Islamic texts or you can discuss contemporary gender studies or you can focus on critical race theory. We were frustrated that it was hard to find folks looking at these topics from multiple lenses, even though we live our lives that way. I don’t wake up one day and live just as a woman with all of my experiences happening purely from a woman’s lense, and then wake up the next day as a black person or a Muslim and experience life from those perspectives, one at a time. 

Even outside of academia, we were seeing people speak about “Muslim issues” with flat portrayals of our community that didn’t reflect our rich diversity. Muslims are not a monolith. So having a Muslim expert on the news or a Muslim character on a TV show isn’t enough unless there’s an explicit recognition that the way they understand and experience their Muslimness is also influenced by their race, nationality, gender, language, and so much more. We are more complicated than any one checkbox that we are told to check. These conversations are ones we are having with our friends. It’s like a Tower Dining Hall brunch conversation, brought to your headphones. I’m super grateful that Ikhlas launched this platform and feel very fortunate to be part of it.

May: So what are those conversations that you are having with your friends, your communities, and with your families that you want to infuse all over Identity Politics as a podcast?

Makkah: For example, both of us are the daughters of converts to Islam. For Ikhlas’ first episode, she interviewed her mom; in a later episode about Muslims in love, I interviewed my parents about their love story. Ikhlas and I always talk about how when we were in our early 20s, we don’t think we would have been down for a major life change like choosing a new religion. This is also a conversation I have with my friends who are children of immigrants, whose parents moved to new countries when they were our age. We like learning about what motivated those choices and how different identities influenced the way they experienced these changes—whether it was coming from another country to America as a woman, or converting to Islam from Christianity as a Black American.

We also did an episode about race with some of our white friends. I talk to my white friends all the time about feminism, spirituality, and race. But more often than not, you just see people of color talking about race and white people listening. While it’s important to let people of color narrate their own lives, I also recognize that if we exclude white people from conversations about race, they will continue to just sit in their privilege and never have to assess their own problematic cultural baggage in the ways that POC are often called to do.

We aren’t just two black women talking about race to other black people. We talk to descendents of slaves and African immigrants and Asian Americans and Arab Americans and white Americans because we know that being Muslim is not a single race, practice, or culture. Being Muslim is a spiritual and religious identification and American Muslims are the most diverse Muslim community in the world. We talk to American Muslims of all backgrounds about real issues to give a fuller, deeper, broader picture of what it really means to be Muslim in this country.

May: I think that all of us Wellesley Women who are not white are having similar conversations. As an immigrant to this country, as a Latina, I’ve been trying to see how to get Wellesley Women who may be activists and allies and white to take action—what is the next level for folks that we went to school with and that are our friends? In the era of Trump, it is now very important for them to step it up. For you, what are some of the most interesting outcomes from the many conversations you’ve had with your friends and what do you want to happen with those allies?

Ikhlas: This is something that I thought about early on when starting the podcast. Of course I had a target audience, and we still do, where our primary audience is black Muslim women. But we also try to make the podcast accessible to any group.

One of the earliest pieces of feedback I received was from a white woman who wasn’t Muslim. She listened to the podcast and she said “I had to stop listening because I felt that this was a conversation that I shouldn’t be hearing, that I shouldn’t be a part of.” I thought that was such interesting feedback and I understood where she was coming from. We should be talking about these things within every community—how are we navigating race, how are we navigating gender, how is that influencing how we relate to each other? Even if you aren’t Muslim, you aren’t black, you aren’t South Asian, you aren’t Arab, these conversations translate into our lives in America, into our world. Where do we draw from when we are thinking about “how am I going to treat this black person walking into the store?” Where are those things coming from, and how can we work to improve that?

Our audience has widened over time. We do have a lot of Wellesley Women that are white and love our podcast and listen to every episode. It’s meaningful because they are sharing these episodes with their networks and we are just getting a greater understanding of who we are and how we relate to each other.

May: In this particular space, you are filing a void. You are sharing some stories that are not being shared. So as young women, as Americans, what does it mean to be young, black, and Muslim in the United States to you? Life pre-November is very different that it is now and what it’s going to be. You have so much to share with us.

Makkah: What does it mean to be young, black, and Muslim in America? It is to be on constant alert. I don’t have the luxury of not paying attention to what is happening around me in the world, whether it’s through conversations about race, about police brutality, about sexual assault, about student loan debt, about terrorism. I have to know a lot more about what’s happening because it’s so closely tied to who I am. It’s a burden but also a blessing because, again, this podcast is about understanding that we live our lives as full, complex beings, not just as one thing. So I feel like my experience right now is a complete manifestation of that complexity, of really understanding that the world is grappling with a lot of complicated topics right now and that each thing is not happening in a vacuum. What is happening with Islamophobia in this country is tied to what has happened with black movements in the past, it’s tied to feminism, white supremacy, immigration, it’s tied to many things that I know about from different contexts. It’s been very interesting, particularly being black and Muslim, talking to Muslims who are not black. We’ve found that many of aren’t as familiar with the history of surveillance of black communities in this country, for example. Or even the history of the surveillance of Black Muslims in this country. So the surveillance of their Muslim communities came as kind of a surprise.

I think it’s been a real privilege and blessing, in some ways, to be able to pull from different contexts and different historical backgrounds and talk to people who may be at different cultural intersections about how their understanding compares to ours. Ikhlas, does that make sense?

Ikhlas: That totally makes sense! I’m still thinking about how earlier, May you mentioned that life is very different post-November. And if you listened to our Life After the Election episode you kind of know that I’m a little pessimistic about politics, so life for me kind of still feels the same under Trump. I feel like a lot of my life—being young, black, and Muslim—you are pretty much ignored and not seen as legitimate outside of black American Muslim circles. So, just having those encounters where you constantly have to -- and I don’t do this anymore-- but where you have to prove that you belong, prove that your identity as a black person matters, and you have to constantly remind other Muslims that black lives matter and this should be a concern for the Muslim community. I think we are improving upon that as a “Muslim community,” which is exciting.

I’m excited because black people and people of color in general—I’m seeing the height of our creativity right now. Digital platforms have allowed our voices to be heard, our work to be heard. Whenever I go on Facebook and I see that a friend has this new art piece out, it’s very exciting. People of color are still living under terrible conditions, but we have this young force that is pushing back on that and forcing everyone to take steps towards improving conditions for everyone. To even have you asking us about this podcast is exciting because I really did think that only a small circle of people would be attracted to this.

May: It’s kind of incredible, isn’t it, how even just the three of us seem to be so different. We have different lived experiences. But as you are talking and as you are sharing your own experiences I am remembering feeling those feelings-- in different circumstances, of course-- but feeling them nonetheless. And it’s kind of incredible how we’ve walked different paths but at the same time we do have shared experiences, shared feelings. It’s awesome. Thank you for being here and sharing.

What’s the final pitch for those folks reading the interview—Why should people listen to Identity Politics? What should they expect in the next few months?

Ikhlas: Wow, you really come with the big questions, eh? I think a big thing about Identity Politics is just learning to value human life and, this is a big statement, how to learn to take people for who they are, you know? Recognizing and embracing all of their identities—as a Muslim person, as a black person, as a woman—and factoring in all of these things when we are learning how to be in relationships with one another. I think that’s one of the big things, when people listen to Identity Politics I would hope that they would listen and not just listen for the laughs, but that they take these learnings and implement them in their daily lives so we can be in better relationships with one another. This is my lofty goal for the podcast: that we learn to value one another and treat people with the respect and dignity that they deserve.

Makkah: You know, we got kind of lucky with the name “Identity Politics.” We decided on this name last summer and then it became a huge media catchphrase. So props to us, I guess, for having the foresight and understanding that this was going to be an important concept!

On a serious note, with the name Identity Politics, we are intentionally referencing this idea that who we are— our social groups, our racial, cultural groups— who we are can influence our politics and our decisions. And that’s a controversial concept and people are now trying to figure out whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing. But we chose this name because although we know that one’s identity can influence their behavior, we also know that people have multiple identities. So the question then becomes, how are we negotiating which parts of our identities influence which decisions?

Through this podcast we just want to bring people of different backgrounds together to discuss which parts of who they are, on any given day, are impacting their perspectives on various topics and their lives as Muslims in America. There are many other awesome podcasts hosted by Muslims, but there are none dedicated to covering the intersections between Muslims and the many other communities that we are part of in this country. That’s what we’re adding to this space — we want to unpack what it actually means to be Muslim to different people in America.

Ikhlas and I want to break through this two-dimensional portrayal of Muslims as model minorities that you should respect because we’re your veterans and engineers and doctors. No! We are also your cab drivers, your security guards, we run your gas stations, we’re incarcerated, we succeed, we fail, and we do everything in between. We are human and that is why you should respect our humanity. But if people don’t know who we are and what we care about, they definitely aren’t going to know how to “stand with” us. Hopefully listeners are deepening that understanding so that we can build stronger alliances across our differences.

May: Wow, mic drop. I feel like I have so many questions. I’d love to invite you back in a few months to chat, especially about feminism, womanism, and about this constructed notion of womanhood. It would be awesome to talk to you about it.

Do you have anything final you’d like to say, any final comments before we close up the interview?

Ikhlas: We’re always open to new ideas and suggestions. We are currently in a growing phase, figuring out what the issues are, and sometimes we miss things. As intersectional as we are, there are still things we don’t know about. So we encourage you to listen to the podcast, and to e-mail us, Tweet us, Facebook us, so that we can learn from you and so we can grow.

Makkah: If you are interested in better understanding the diversity of Muslims in America, whether you are part of the Muslim community or not, then this is the podcast for you. If you are interested in smart but accessible conversations about race, about gender, about religion, and about how this very distinct marginalized community in the United States is grappling with some of those issues—that maybe your community is grappling with in a different way—then this is the podcast for you. I think, in these trying times, we really do need to build more solidarity, more empathy, and more knowledge about different communities. And there are great lessons to be learned across different groups.

So listen today! And don’t forget to review us on iTunes to make it easier for others to find us.