religious history Archives

A Texas Historian’s Perspective on Mexican State Anticlericalism

Housed in a miscellaneous folder in the Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection is an assortment of thirteen broadsides, letters, newspapers, and drafts of two articles by prominent Texas historian Herbert Gambrell (1898-1982). Gambrell had a long and prestigious academic career studying Texas history as a fixture at Southern Methodist University. These documents all originate from a summer research trip to Mexico City, where, in 1925, Gambrell studied the creation of a new, factional, schismatic Mexican Church, the Apostolic Mexican Catholic Church (known by its Spanish acronym, ICAM), in order to better understand the causes and impacts of the budding movement. These papers give us a particularly interesting view into Mexican cultural life in the 1920s through the lens of Church relations and offer understanding of state-sponsored anticlericalism during this period.

Black and white photograph of leaders of the 1910 Mexican Revolution after the First Battle of Ciudad Juarez (SMU Central University Library via Flickr). — Leaders of the 1910 Mexican Revolution after the First Battle of Ciudad Juarez (SMU Central University Library via Flickr).

In February 1925, one hundred men took over the Catholic Church of La Soledad in Mexico City, removed the head priest of the church, and announced that they were converting it into the Apostolic Mexican Catholic Church (ICAM). An ex-clergyman by the name of Joaquín Pérez then entered and announced he was the “Patriarch” of this new Church. Breaking off from the Roman Catholic Church, the ICAM pledged allegiance to the Mexican state instead of recognizing the Papacy in Rome as the spiritual head of the church. Picking and choosing which Catholic dogmas, or fundamental tenants of the faith, to keep, this new church allowed priests to marry, offered mass in Spanish, instead of Latin, left biblical interpretation to the individual, and did not require members to pay tithes, or financial contributions to the church. ICAM took root in several hundred communities in the southern and central states of Mexico and, in some places, lasted until the 1940.

This incident occurred in the context of renewed anticlericalism and persecution in Mexico and it contributed to the start of the Cristero Rebellion, when from 1926 to 1929, Catholic peasants took up arms against the state in order to restore the place of the Roman Catholic Church in Mexico. The Mexican president, Plutarco Elias Calles (1924-1928), a Protestant and fervent anti-clerical, blessed this schismatic Mexican Church and allowed it to function freely during his presidency. Its creation represented one challenge of many during this time to the position of the Roman Catholic in Mexico.

Photograph of the front facade of the Church of La Soledad in Mexico City, Mexico — Church of La Soledad, Mexico City (via Wikimedia Commons).

Herbert Gambrell arrived in Mexico City only six months after the birth of this schismatic church. The drafts of his articles come from interviews with the head of the ICAM, Joaquín Pérez, and Mexican Secretary of the Chamber and Government, López Sierra. Also included in this folder are newspaper clippings relating to the ICAM, a reprint of the ICAM’s main ideology, called Bases fundamentals, a personal letter, and a short letter from López Sierra asking him to share the findings from his articles.

Trying to contextualize the creation of the new church, Gambrell starts out by commenting that this is not the first effort to lead Mexicans away from the Catholic Church in Rome, but this is one of the most successful examples. The ICAM arose from a long nationalistic tradition in Mexico, as the church’s slogan, “Mexico for Mexicans,” suggests. Nevertheless, the church remained controversial in Mexico. Gambrell notes that there were pamphlets plastered all around the city reading “Viva el papa!” (Long live the Pope) alongside those proclaiming “Muera el papa! Viva Mexico,” (Death to the Pope, Long Live Mexico) suggesting the controversy remained unresolved.

Gambrell’s observations about the creation of the ICAM emphasize the disjointed implementation of certain segments of the Mexican Constitution. After the Mexican Revolution of 1910, the Constitution of 1917 was written with a liberal, secularist, political view: various articles limited the power of the Catholic Church within Mexico in an effort to strengthen the government. Because Article 130 of the Constitution required the nationalization of all church property, Gambrell remarked that the ICAM ran into obstacles because their private Churches were not publicly owned “templos.” Another 1917 article required foreign-born priests to be removed from their positions in the Catholic Church, many of whom were replaced by Mexicans. The ICAM’s nationalist message was less powerful now that the Catholic Church was less “foreign.”

Black and white photograph of Mexican president, Plutarco Elias Calles standing with members of the Apostolic Mexican Catholic Church — President Calles stands center, with a mustache (via Wikimedia Commons).

The budding evangelical church was not without faults, according to Gambrell. He comments on one of the major faults of the movement, namely the absence of proper leadership. The ICAM was also more political than spiritual: “It is semi-political in its makeup . . . a religious movement which does not come from a deep spiritual ideal can succeed more or less apparently, but does not triumph in a definite way.” Gambrell concluded that the success of the new church would only show itself with time.

Gambrell’s insights provide a particularly fascinating perspective as he, himself, came from an evangelical family, growing up with a Baptist pastor. His opinions were formed through the lens of his own experiences as the son of a Baptist pastor. Gambrell believes that ICAM marked an important step towards what he considered real progress and celebrates that “Rome’s grip has been weakened, seriously weakened, by the movement, nor will she ever be able to regain what she has lost.” With documents written in both English and Spanish, this collection is an accessible resource for interrogating state anticlericalism and the 1917 Mexican constitution.

Sources:

Herbert Gambrell Papers, “The New Catholic Church of Mexico,” Benson Latin American Collection, (all quotes come from this collection of documents).
David C. Bailey, Viva Cristo Rey, The Cristero Rebellion and the Church-State Conflict in
Mexico, (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1974)

Giordano Bruno and the Spirit that Moves the Earth

By Alberto A. Martinez

Before Galileo did anything in astronomy, the Italian philosopher Giordano Bruno argued that the Earth moves around the Sun. Bruno believed that the Earth is a living being, with a soul. These were unusual beliefs for a Christian.

In 1592, Bruno was captured by the Inquisition in Venice and imprisoned. The next year he was transferred to the Inquisition’s prison in Rome. After seven and a half years of interrogations, he was finally condemned to what was widely feared as the worst kind of punishment: he was gagged, taken to a public place, tied to a post, and burned alive. Historians are quick to point out that Bruno was not killed for his belief in the Earth’s motion, but for heretical religious beliefs.

Engraving of Giordano Bruno from ca. 1830 (via Wikimedia Commons)

For years I investigated this story and what I found really surprised me. It turns out that Giordano Bruno’s belief in the moving Earth was directly connected to some of his beliefs that were heretical. To Catholics, heresies were willful departures from Catholic dogma. Heresies were the worst kinds of crimes, even worse than murder. Heresies were crimes against God.

Bruno’s final condemnation by the Inquisition exists only in a partial copy, prepared for the Governor of Rome. Unfortunately, it omits the list of accusations against Bruno, that is, his alleged heresies. But there is some good evidence of what they were.

On February 8, 1600, the Roman Inquisition condemned Bruno at the palace of the supreme Inquisitor, Cardinal Ludovico Madruzzi. On that day, one of the witnesses present was a young German humanist, Gaspar Schoppe, a guest living at Cardinal Madruzzi’s palace. Days later, Schoppe also witnessed Bruno’s execution at a public marketplace, an open intersection of city streets in Rome known as the Campo de’ Fiori: the “Field of Flowers.”

The statue of Giordano Bruno at the Campo de’ Fiori, in Rome. The plaque reads: “9 JUNE 1889. TO BRUNO. THE CENTURY PREDICTED BY HIM. HERE WHERE THE FIRE BURNED” (via author).

The day Bruno was burned, Schoppe wrote a detailed letter to a friend explaining what had just happened. Schoppe complained that ordinary people in Rome were saying that a Lutheran was burned. But Schoppe explained that that was not true at all. Bruno wasn’t a Lutheran, but something far worse—a “monster.”

Schoppe wrote: “Perhaps I too would believe the vulgar rumors that Bruno was burned for Lutheranism, but I was present at the Holy Office of the Inquisition when the sentence against him was pronounced, & so I know what heresy he professed.”

Excerpt of Gaspar Schoppe’s letter from February 1600, published in 1621, stating Bruno’s “horrendous” beliefs and teachings (see below for source).

Schoppe listed twelve of Bruno’s absurdly horrible claims, his “teachings” (quibus horrenda prorsus absurdissima docet). I’ll quote just two of them, the first and fifth:
(1) “Worlds are innumerable,”…
(5) “the Holy Spirit is nothing other than the soul of the world,”…

Schoppe commented: “perhaps you might add: the Lutherans neither teach nor believe such things, and therefore should be treated otherwise. I agree with you, & therefore, precisely no Lutherans do we [Catholics] burn.”

This means that if the Lutherans held these teachings or beliefs, docere neque credere, they would be burned. It also means that Bruno was burned for these teachings and beliefs.

A portrait of Gaspar Schoppe by Peter Paul Rubens, 1606 (via Wikimedia Commons).

The two accusations above recur throughout Bruno’s trial, from its beginning to the end. It turns out that both were directly connected to Bruno’s conviction that the Earth moves. And most importantly, surprisingly, I found that these beliefs were heresies.

First, Bruno had said in nine books that many worlds exist: not just the Earth, but the Moon, the planets and the stars: “innumerably many worlds.” Apparently he didn’t know it was a heresy to claim that “innumerably many worlds exist.” This belief had been denounced as a heresy by many authorities including Saint Philaster, Saint Jerome, Saint Augustine, and Pope Gregory XIII.

Catholics were horrified by this idea, because if many worlds exist then Jesus Christ would have to be born and crucified in each of those worlds to offer salvation to the beings in such worlds.

Second, Bruno said that the Earth has a soul. In twelve of his books he repeatedly asserted that the world has a soul, the Earth has a soul, or the universe has a spirit. According to Bruno, the Earth was alive, like an animal. Just as our bodies are made from matter, from bits of the Earth, so too he said that our individual souls come from soul of the Earth.

Yet this belief that heavenly bodies are animated had been declared heretical by the Fifth Ecumenical Council in the year 553. Similarly, in 1277, Bishop Etienne Tempier in Paris had condemned as a heresy the belief that the heavenly bodies are animated, like animals. This was viewed as a belief of ancient pagans, not Christians.

When Bruno was interrogated by Inquisitors, he said that the Holy Spirit is the soul of the world. Apparently he didn’t know that in 1141 the Council of Sens had condemned as heretical the claim that “the Holy Spirit is the soul of the world.”

Relief depicting the trial of Giordano Bruno, from the base of the Ferrari statue in Campo de’ Fiori (via Wikimedia Commons).

Books on heresies echoed this statement. For example, in 1590, Tiberio Deciani published a Criminal Treatise on All Heresies, in Venice, including the heresy that the Holy Spirit is the soul of the world. Yet Bruno said that to the Inquisitors in Venice when he was interrogated in 1592. And Bruno repeated it to the Roman Inquisitors; he “relapsed” into this heresy. Anyone who relapsed into a heresy, after being instructed to abandon it, was a proven to be an obstinate heretic.

So these heresies about many worlds and about the universal soul were linked to Bruno’s conviction that the Earth moves. It moves because it’s a heavenly body. It moves because it has a soul.

Still, is there any direct evidence that the Inquisitors were aware, concerned, or annoyed, specifically, by Bruno’s claim, in three books, that the Earth moves around the Sun?

Yes. By 1597, theologians working for the Roman Inquisition had extracted ten propositions from Bruno’s books. The propositions were censured and Bruno had to recant. Two were about the “world soul” or “universal spirit.” One was about the planets being animated. One was about the existence of many worlds. And yes—Bruno’s fifth censured proposition was: “About the Earth’s motion.”

A line engraving of Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543) . Copernicus is holding a model of his heliocentric theory (via Wikimedia Commons).

This all means that Bruno’s belief in a moving Earth was part of the heretical worldview that he advocated both in his books and in his trial. His ideas about many worlds and about the soul of the world convinced him that Copernicus was right: the Earth moves. Those same ideas about worlds and souls led Bruno to his death.

Sixteen years later, in 1616, when Galileo first got in trouble with the Inquisition in Rome, four of the same Inquisitors and Consultors from Bruno’s trial also met with Galileo. One of them was now the head of the Inquisition. Another one was now the head of the Index of Forbidden Books. And another was now the Pope.

But Galileo was more cautious than Bruno.

Illustration depicting Galileo Galilei at his trial by the Inquisition in Rome in 1633 (via Wikimedia Commons).

Galileo denied that the Moon was another world, even though he discovered—he saw with a telescope—that the Moon has mountains and valleys. Bruno had actually predicted that, whereas Copernicus had not. Galileo didn’t say that “innumerably many worlds exist,” though he proudly wrote that he had discovered “innumerably many stars.” Bruno, not Copernicus, had predicted that too. Galileo discovered moons around Jupiter. And again, Bruno had predicted that some planets have moons, like the Earth, while Copernicus had not.

Galileo did not tell the Inquisitors about any soul or universal spirit that moves the Earth either. But in two private letters, in 1615, he guardedly admitted that he believed that the Sun can be described as the soul of the world and that it transmits a spirit throughout the universe, a spirit that gives life and movement to all things. Even the Earth?

After meeting with the Inquisitors in Rome, Galileo never again wrote about the universal spirit that vivifies and moves all things. We don’t even know if the Inquisitors knew that, in private, secretly, quietly, Galileo too entertained such ideas.

Bruno was not killed for his belief in the Earth’s motion. But this belief was directly linked to key heresies that led to his execution.

The trial of Bruno was in the background of Galileo’s troubles with the Inquisition. Galileo lived in the haunting shadow of the burning man.

Photo Source: Gaspar Schoppe to Konrad Ritterhausen, 17 February 1600, printed in Gaspari Scioppii, “Epistola, in qua sententiam de Lutheranis tanquam haereticis atram Romae fieri asserit & probat,” in Machiavellizatio (Zaragosa: Didacus Ibarra, 1621), pp. 30-35.

Also by Alberto Martinez on Not Even Past:

Alberto Martínez on Darwin’s Finches & Other Science Myths.

Was Einstein Really Religious?

Dividing by Nothing.

More of Alberto Martinez’s works and writings can be found here.

The Rise of Liberal Religion, by Matthew Hedstrom (2013)

By Christopher Babits

In this history of popular religion and spirituality, Matthew Hedstrom argues that books and book culture were integral for the rise of liberal religion in the twentieth century. After World War I, a modernizing book business and an emerging religious liberalism expanded the spiritual horizons of many middle-class Americans. The new spiritual forms of twentieth-century liberalism incorporated psychology, mysticism, and (to a lesser extent) positive thinking in their works. Hedstrom, like sociologist Christian Smith, believes that liberal religion achieved a stunning cultural victory after World War II.

Two key developments led to the rise of liberal religion: the embrace of the marketplace and the creation of middlebrow reading culture. In the 1920s, liberal Protestants turned to the marketplace, but on their own terms. They wanted people to read right. Middlebrow reading required that one read earnestly, intensely, and with purpose. Many liberal Protestants thought that this manner of reading would improve people. Middlebrow reading norms also required individual autonomy and expertise. Religious and cultural leaders carefully shepherded readers by offering comfortable — but limited — freedom to act as guided consumers. In other words, religious leaders still hoped to shape the purchases that laymen and laywomen made and the book industry complied.

The First World War destroyed the faith Americans had in simple notions of progress. In response to this crisis, liberal Protestant leaders, executives of the American publishing industry, and other cultural figures collaborated on a series of new initiatives to promote the buying and reading of religious books. These initiatives included the Religious Book Week, the Religious Book Club, and the Religious Books Round Table of the American Library Association. Major publishing houses, like Harper’s and Macmillan, established religious departments for the first time.

Religious Book Week Poster from 1925. Via Library of Congress.

In the interwar years, religious reading became a national concern as the United States faced the threat of fascism. Religious groups like the Council on Books in Wartime and the Religious Book Week campaign of the National Conference of Christians and Jews (NCCJ) promoted reading. Hedstrom shows the widespread appeal of the Council’s slogan, “Books as Weapons in the War of Ideas.” The Second World War, for these groups, was not only an ideological battle, it was also a spiritual struggle for the soul.

US Government Poster from 1942. Via Library of Congress.

Harry Emerson Fosdick. Via Wikipedia.

After the war, Americans continued to turn to books for spiritual guidance. And the increasing belief that the United States was a Judeo-Christian nation formed the foundation of what Hedstrom calls “spiritual cosmopolitanism.” Letters to Rabbi Joshua Loth Liebman and Harry Emerson Fosdick, two of the most popular post-World War II authors of liberal religion, display Americans’ newfound eagerness to read religious and spiritual works from authors of other faiths. These letters also provide keen insight into who was reading spiritual books and why and how they were reading them. Many Americans were religious, even if they were not attending church on Sundays. Readers of middlebrow religious culture were trying to grapple with religious questions about the Second World War, morality, and spirituality. Fosdick and Liebman helped them find answers.

The Rise of Liberal Religion is revisionist history in the best possible sense. By emphasizing “lived religion,” or the spaces where religion is practiced and faith is formed, Hedstrom shows that the numerical decline of mainline Protestant churches and churchgoers matters less than previous historians insisted. In addition, Hedstrom challenges the master narrative that conservative Christianity dominated the post-World War II religious landscape. Despite this, readers might find a few shortcomings. First, Hedstrom makes too many sweeping declarations about liberal religion after the 1950s. For example, he points to Americans’ incorporation of yoga as a form of spiritual cosmopolitanism, but it is not clear that liberal religion in the U.S. made a conscious effort to incorporate yoga into its practice. More important, Hedstrom provides little evidence about the lived religious experiences of women, African Americans, and Native Americans. He asserts that middlebrow reading provided women agency, but the evidence from women themselves is somewhat thin. By emphasizing the vitality of liberal religious experience, Hedstrom has set a new agenda for the cultural history of U.S. religion, but that cultural history will have to incorporate more of the population of the faithful for it to have a real impact.

Matthew Hedstrom, The Rise of Liberal Religion: Book Culture and American Spirituality in the Twentieth Century (Oxford University Press, 2013)

You may also like these reviews by Christopher Babits:

Encountering America: Humanistic Psychology, Sixties Culture, and the Shaping of the Modern Self, by Jessica Grogan (2012)

Age of Fracture, by Daniel T. Rodgers (2011)

And Robert Abzug’s discussion of William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience.

Religion and the Decline of Magic, by Keith Thomas (1971)

By Mark Sheaves

Political and religious discord, disease, famine, fire, and death afflicted the lives of the English population between 1500 and 1700. While alcohol and tobacco provided an escape, Keith Thomas argues that astrology, magic, and religion offered all levels of society a way to make sense of human misfortune. These competing systems of belief shared the ethical assumption that difficulty struck those who deserved it, and thus operated as systems of social control during this period. Religion and the Decline of Magic provides a detailed account of how and why people practiced an eclectic systems of belief in early modern England. The transition from Catholicism to Protestantism, which stripped Christianity of its magical power to provide believers protection from misfortune, he argues, explains the boom in magical beliefs in the early sixteenth century. Yet the widespread use of non-religious magic before the Reformation tempers this conclusion. This balanced study offers explanations and arguments while also acknowledging their weaknesses.

The question of why magic declined but religion endured underpins the book. Thomas points to a fundamental difference in function between religion and magic: religion offered an explanation of human existence while magical practices commonly addressed specific temporary problems. The popularity of the holistic system of astrology, however, which seemed to do both, provides a counterpoint to this distinction. He also demonstrates the malleability of religion. Thomas shows that Christianity shed magical elements, such as a belief in the ability of idols to intervene in human affairs, while developing new theologies that kept up with contemporary intellectual thought and technology. The author also notes the importance of scientific and philosophical revolutions resulting in a widespread belief in natural rather than supernatural laws, which Christian theology successfully integrated with the rise, for example, of natural theology. Technological advances, such as improvements in agriculture, firefighting, and complex mechanisms of banking and insurance, also improved life expectancy and reduced misfortunes. Thomas appears most convinced by the idea that over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries English people developed a belief in their own capacity to help themselves thus rendering the everyday power of magic redundant. He largely relates this self-help philosophy to Protestant theology. However, this diligent scholar demands further research before reaching definite conclusions.

Depiction of the Devil giving magic puppets to witches, from Agnes Sampson trial, 1591. Image via Wikimedia Commons.

While some of the arguments rest on premises now refuted, such as the idea that elite individuals drive changes in our conception of ourselves, the depth of detail and its clear engaging prose makes this book a must for anyone interested in the history of belief in early modern England. The idea that religion maintained importance in English society into the eighteenth century, despite increased emphasis on scientific and rational understandings of the world, significantly challenged previous explanations of the incompatibility between religion and science at the time of publication. This radical conclusion represents the key legacy of this excellent classic work of history.

Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, (Scribner, 1971)

Interested in Sixteenth-century England? You may also like these reviews:

Christopher Heaney reviews Poetics of Piracy: Emulating Spain in English Literature, by Barbara Fuchs (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013)

Michelle Brock on The Voices of Morebath: Reformation and Rebellion in an English Village, by Eamon Duffy (Yale University Press, 2001)

Indrani Chatterjee on Monasteries and Memory in Northeast India

European monasteries were segregated by sex – for men or women only – and the inhabitants were expected to be celibate. In South Asia, where many different religious traditions grew up side by side in the same terrain since the earliest times, monasticism neither insisted on absolute celibacy for men, nor did it exclude women. Many monastic men moved from site to site collecting food and exchanging information. Those who were not ordained as monks but were simply followers or tenants on lands that belonged to a monastery, took herds out on seasonal cycles, traded in goods, and transported goods on behalf of their monastic teachers. Women held these monastic centers together and were central to their everyday lives. They cultivated the land, provided the food and maintenance services, and often, their sons or brothers joined the order or served it in some military or diplomatic task. The functions these little monastic communities carried out make it possible to call them “governments.”

These monastic governments were connected to each other across vast territorial expanses in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries – before the borders of the modern state of independent India, Pakistan, Bangladesh were carved out. From the mountains of Nepal to the Manipuri Valley to West Bengal, monasteries of diverse religions – Buddhists, Saiva and Vaisnava Hindus, Sufi Muslims, Bonpo Tantriks – shared many political, economic, military, and gender practices. Communities formed around a central leader, who was considered both a teacher and a “friend.” Initiates who wanted to join a monastic community agreed to submit to that teacher’s legal, moral, and disciplinary leadership. They would provide personnel for religious practices for artisanal production and military protection. The monasteries were also centers of economic activity. All students paid the monastery, in cash gifts or in labor. Sometimes local authorities transferred to the monastic teacher such secular powers as collecting taxes or punishing criminals. Wealthy women were active as patrons of monasteries up and down the economic hierarchy. They both offered gifts of gold, valuable manuscripts, lamps, and herds, and they worked in the monastery’s fields. Marriages were central to establishing lines of alliance and power. In many of these communities, multiple spouses – polyandry as well as polygamy – strengthened political and economic power. Long-distance relationships between monastic communities were nourished by the mobility of ordained men and laymen who moved about as soldiers, pastoralists, itinerant merchants and peddlers, and diplomats working on behalf of particular disciples and patrons.

These connections among monasteries were dramatically reconstituted after 1765, when the English East India Company established its control over the subcontinent. After the 1830s, most lands of monastic governments located in the hills east of the Ganges Delta were taken over by European-funded tea plantations. Officers who worked for a soon-to-be-defunct English East India Company also used some of these lands to settle groups favorable to colonial control – gifting lands to Christian missionaries, settling some Vaishnava lineages in the Manipuri valley and ousting others. So they did not entirely dissolve the monasteries but made them give up their privileges.

By the 1850s, a harsh regime of work arrived to make tea plantations here a profitable enterprise for European planters. Large numbers of women and female children were brought from parts of central India to pick tea and work in these plantations. In 1869-70, some older monastic lineages pooled resources to liberate the predominantly female laboring population from the brutality of some of these plantations. The British-led military fraternity responded with an ideological war followed by a military war. The administrative aftermath was to isolate the entire belt of tea-planting lands from the monastic order. After 1871, when the Buddhist monks and Vaisnava-Saiva teachers were prohibited from working on or holding lands in the tea-planting regions, Christian missionaries took over.

This extension of colonial control radically dispossessed the monastic daughters and widows of the rights to landed property and authority that they had previously enjoyed. Yet this dispossession, along with the similarities of monastic communities among diverse religions, has gone unnoticed by modern historians of India. The intervening century has created other investments in the land, and none of the present investors wants the past owners and cultivators remembered. And of course, Christian missionizing has also authorized the erasure of the past because it is designated as “barbarian.”

Professional historians of India (and Bangladesh after it was founded in 1971), even when they were not trained in missionary-funded schools and colleges during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, looked upon the complex history of the terrain through lenses similar to the colonial authorities. Pre-colonial societies were “feudal” and colonial rule was equated with modernity and industrialized progress. These historians were extremely faithful to the spirit and letter of the colonial records. Their interpretation of the records echoed the colonial officials’ descriptions of once-resistant monastic subjects and adherents as “tribals” at best, and “savages” at worst.

After the 1970s, a younger group of historians expressed greater sympathy for the anti-state resistance movements they found in the same records. Better known as the Subaltern Studies scholars, these historians were, however, hampered by their lack of training in the multiple languages and literary traditions essential for uncovering the story of the multiple dispossessions practiced in the region that came to be called Northeast India. The result was therefore the same: postcolonial historians too failed to see through existing categories of “forest” or “tribal” rebels. If I had to sum it up, I would say that the cultural and financial successes of tea-drinking since the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have ensured a collective and permanent failure of memory among postcolonial historians. That amnesiac disregard of the past is especially dense around the various women who supported monastic governments in the past.

So when post-colonial, independent, democratically elected Indian governments allow their own military or paramilitary officers to evade judicial process after they rape and torture women from these eastern communities, they betray the extent to which such governments continue the practice of the dispossession of women and the erasure of women’s important roles in the history of the region and of the links that joined the people living in Northeast India as “friends.” Historians can refuse to be complicit in this dispossession by telling their stories

Indrani Chatterjee, Forgotten Friends: Monks, Marriages, and Memory in Northeast India

Brian Levack on Possession and Exorcism

By Brian Levack

Ever since the beginning of Christianity, the belief has existed that demons can enter the bodies of human beings and take control of their physical movements and mental faculties. Those people who reportedly have experienced such possessions, known as demoniacs, have displayed a wide variety of symptoms, including convulsions, rigidity of the limbs, and vomiting extraneous substances such as pins, nails, or stones. A few demoniacs were reported to have levitated. The possessed also reportedly conversed in languages of which they had no previous knowledge, spoke in deep voices that were different from their normal voices, displayed contempt for sacred objects, uttered blasphemies, went into trances, and foresaw the future. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the period of the Reformation, there was an “epidemic” of such possessions. Some of them were group possessions in which many people in small communities, such as convents and orphanages, displayed the same symptoms.

The challenge for historians is to make sense of this bizarre, pathological behavior. For most people living at the time, the afflictions experienced by demoniacs made perfect sense, since they believed that the Devil or one of his demonic subordinates had the power to enter people’s bodies against their will. Others, however, including many who believed in the existence of the Devil, posed alternative rational, natural explanations why these demoniacs acted the way they did. The most common “rational” explanation of what was “really happening” to the possessed was that they were either physically or mentally ill: either epileptics or victims of hysteria. In the view of most modern psychiatrists, demoniacs were simply experiencing some sort of disorder, such as dissociative identity disorder, commonly known as multiple personality syndrome. Another rational explanation was that demoniacs were faking their possessions so that they could engage in anti-social or anti-religious behavior without being prosecuted for a criminal or religious offense. They were able to do so because demoniacs were not legally or morally responsible for anything done or said while possessed, since the Devil was believed to have forced them to speak or act.

The only human being who could be held responsible for causing a possession was a witch who commanded the Devil to enter the body of another person. Many of the cases of witchcraft in the Reformation era began when demoniacs accused a person of causing their possession by means of witchcraft.

Medical and other rational explanations of possession can contribute to an explanation of some possession cases, but they cannot account for all the symptoms displayed by demoniacs, especially those that reflected the religious views of the possessed. The key to understanding this phenomenon is to recognize that all demoniacs, either consciously or unconsciously, were following scripts that were encoded in their religious cultures. They were, in a sense, performers in a sacred drama. Demoniacs learned their scripts from observing other demoniacs or by reading the many published narratives of other possessions or by hearing sermons that related the details of famous possessions. Some of them acquired knowledge of possession scripts from their exorcists, who suggested things they might say or do while in the state of possession. Nuns in convents often imitated the symptoms of those who had already exhibited some of the signs of possession. In the most famous case of possession in seventeenth-century Europe, the nuns in a convent at Loudun in France, after witnessing the convulsions and sexual gestures of the Mother Superior, Jeanne des Anges, began to act in a similar manner. This group possession resulted in a mass exorcism, and it led to the execution of a parish priest, Urbain Grandier, in 1634 for having caused their possession by means of witchcraft.

The scripts followed by Catholic and Protestant demoniacs and by the exorcists who tried to dispossess them were different. Catholic demoniacs, for example, were repulsed by the sacraments, especially the Eucharist, which is the most distinctive feature of Catholic sacramental culture. Protestant demoniacs on the other hand often reacted violently to hearing or even seeing a copy of the Bible, which was the foundation of Protestant faith. Catholic exorcists appealed to the Virgin Mary and other saints to help them expel the invasive demons, whereas Protestants, who emphasized the sovereignty of God to whom individuals prayed directly, left that task to God alone. Catholic demoniacs, especially young Catholic women, tended to display unconventional or prohibited sexual behavior during their possessions, whereas Protestants, who did not believe in a hierarchy of moral offenses, exhibited a wide range of sinful activities, including disobedience and playing cards. In more general terms, Catholics emphasized the innocence of demoniacs, whereas Protestants stressed their sinfulness. This helps explain why there were far more Catholic than Protestant demoniacs, since admitting one’s guilt might lead to the assumption that they were predestined to eternal damnation.

The incidence of demonic possession declined notably in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but in the late twentieth century the number of reported cases increased dramatically. Celebrity exorcists in Italy, Poland, and Latin America have been in large part responsible for this increase. The demoniacs who have flocked to these exorcists have not, however, displayed many of the classic symptoms of possession. They have not, for example vomited pins or blasphemed. In most cases they were plagued by medical or psychological problems and have sought the assistance of exorcists who promised to cure them. The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries remain “The Golden Age” of demonic possession.

State of Virginity: Gender, Religion, and Politics in an Early Modern Catholic State by Ulrike Strasser (2004)

by Julia M. Gossard

Munich’s central square, Marienplatz, is best known today for its magnificent Rathaus-Glockenspiel that delights tourists and townspeople alike with its melodies. But until the nineteenth century, the square’s main attraction was a golden pillar adorned with the Virgin Mary known as the Mariensäule. Still standing today, the Mariensäule is a reminder of the religious reformations Bavaria endured as well as the Bavarian state’s early attempts at centralization and modernization in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Erected in 1638 by order of Elector Maximilian I of Bavaria to thank the Virgin for protecting the city from an attack by Protestant Swedes during the Thirty Years War, the Mariensäule not only represented Maximilian’s fervor for Catholicism, but, as Ulrike Strasser writes, also represents his use of “virginity as a master metaphor to elaborate ideas about good governance and a functioning society.” Usually used to imply innocence, purity, and occasionally frailty, images of virgins and virginity were among Maximilian’s strongest metaphorical tools. State of Virginity explores how Maxilimilian employed female virginity to increase patriarchal power and limit female agency and facilitate Bavaria’s centralization.

Drawing on a wide variety of archival documents including Bavarian laws, civil court records, ecclesiastical court documents, and select convents’ records, Strasser investigates the ways in which marriage, family organization, and female religious life changed as a result of the new emphasis placed on virginity as the female moral and political ideal. Strasser explains that judicial records are useful to her study because they show how individuals explained their own behavior, emotions, and identities under the eye of powerful institutions. These records permit her to observe the state or the church at work, and to see how people reacted to mandates from above.

Starting with an examination of Bavarian marriage, Strasser notes that people explained their attitudes toward marriage and sexuality in the context of competing religious and secular judicial discourses. The Catholic Church wished to have all couples marry, regardless of social status, in order to affirm their respect for the sacrament in marriage and avoid licentious behavior. The state, on the other hand, took a rather paradoxical approach to marriage with its establishment of Munich’s marriage bureau. Of the utmost importance to the marriage bureau was a bride’s virginal status. If a woman was not a virgin, the union was unlikely to be approved by the marriage bureau. The state saw this virginal prerequisite to marriage as a way to prevent poor people from procreating outside of marriage, and reduce sexually licentious unions. However, in addition to virginal status, the marriage bureau also scrutinized the financial stability of couples. On top remaining chaste, the prospective spouses also had to prove they were capable of providing for a family. For the poor couples, this was often difficult to achieve. Therefore, the creation of the bureau resulted in marriage becoming a type of social status reserved for the upper echelons of society.

By making the prerequisites of marriage so strict, Bavarian authorities required women to “uphold the boundaries of a new social and sexual order” that made virginity a moral obligation, among both upper and lower classes. When wealthy women remained chaste, their families’ economic interests and possible alliances with other wealthy families remained intact, benefitting both the families and the state, which relied on these families for money and support. When women from the lower sorts remained chaste, the state believed the number of illegitimate children and single mothers would greatly decrease. This would also further strengthen the patriarchal household that the Catholic state viewed as being essential to an orderly and stable society. Although virginity became the female moral and political ideal, as Strasser argues, that was often difficult for women of the lower sorts to achieve. With marriage being denied to poor couples, these couples entered into nonmarital sexual relationships that were not sanctioned by the state. Strasser hints that the “perpetual state of virginity” that the state advocated for women who were denied marriage by the bureau, was simply an unrealistic goal. One of the only institutions that guaranteed a perpetual state of virginity for women was a convent. However, just like marriage, in the seventeenth-century, Bavarian cloisters turned away poorer women and increasingly became depositories for elite, unmarried women. Though groups of unmarried, uncloistered virgins, like the English Ladies, were established, they too consisted of “honorable women,” meaning those from the upper-middling classes or the elite. Although poor women may have remained chaste, the Bavarian state began to view unmarried and uncloistered poor women, regardless of their individual virginal status, as a “social and sexual threat” to the Bavarian state.

With marriage, family, and the convent all becoming elite institutions, what happened to the unmarried, poor, virginal woman? Are we to believe that she merely succumbed to “the sins” of the lower sorts and entered into profligate relationships? Strasser suggests, without much evidence, that the new marriage regulations and convent restrictions may have strengthened the state’s control over noble society but actually led to more relationships outside of marriage among the lower classes. Despite this lack of evidence, State of Virginity is an innovative piece of scholarship. Other studies have focused solely on the impact that this new “virginity” had on women’s experiences, but while Strasser does include the effects on women, her most poignant arguments explain how the state’s regulation of virginity brought about changes in societal structure, specifically the centralization of the Bavarian state. State of Virginity successfully repositions the role of the female sexualized body as a factor in the strengthening of Bavarian patriarchy and the process of state building under Maximilian I.

Photo Credits:

Maximilian I, Elector of Bavaria, with his wife Elisabeth Renée of Lorraine, 1610 (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

Hand colored illustrated of Maximilian I at the age of 11 (Image courtesy of Penn Provenance Project)

Munich’s Rathaus-Glockenspiel (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

Performing Piety: Making Space Sacred with the Virgin of Guadalupe by Elaine A. Peña (2011)

by Cristina Metz

A Google image search for “Our Lady of Guadalupe” returns millions of images. This Catholic icon appears on paintings, coffee mugs, tattoos, and more. Her image is an international symbol for Catholics and non-religious alike. For Mexicans in particular, la Virgen (as she is known to them) is more than a religious symbol; she is a national symbol. In Performing Piety: Making Space Sacred with the Virgin of Guadalupe, anthropologist Elaine A. Peña explores the intersection of religious practice and national identity through the embodied practices of Marian devotees at three shrines: Tepeyac, Mexico City, Mexico; Des Plaines, Illinois; and Rogers Park, Chicago, Illinois.

The story of la Virgen begins in December 1531, when she appeared to Juan Diego, an indigenous peasant, as he walked along a hill in Mexico City called Tepeyac. This apparition story culminates in the Virgin imprinting her image onto Juan Diego’s tilma, a cloth garment. The site of her apparition became an important shrine in the newly-colonized city. Holy places like this one served an instrumental purpose for the Spanish spiritual conquest. Colonial officials reinforced the legitimacy of the shrine by incorporating it into the actual infrastructure of the city so that by 1748, the path leading to the shrine had become a major entryway into the city. The site’s importance as a holy place has grown tremendously since the colonial period. Together with the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe, which houses Juan Diego’s tilma, Tepeyac is today one element of a much larger holy space known as La Villa. This Marian shrine attracts millions of visitors from around the world each year.

One important group of annual visitors are women pilgrims, peregrinas. There are four official, all-women’s pilgrimages to la Villa that set out from Mexican states, such as Michoacán and Morelia, usually in the days leading up to December 12, the holy feast day of la Virgen. The peregrinas walk from their hometown for days, braving heavy traffic, weather, muscle cramps, fatigue, sleep deprivation, and other hardships. Women perform this “devotional labor” for a variety of reasons. Some walk out of a sense of tradition, others are holding up their part of a bargain they made with la Virgen, and still others do so as a reprieve from family and other day-to-day obligations.Once they arrive at the Basilica at Tepeyac, the women attend an early-morning mass then take a ride on a conveyor belt that will transport them to the sixteenth-century image of the Virgin. Peña describes the moment of passing in front of Juan Diego’s tilma as a profound one for which words do not suffice. Peña joined two of these groups on their ritual of devotion to la Virgen. Her active participation, which Peña calls “co-performative witnessing,” helped her realize that while the Virgin of Guadalupe brought people together to a specific location, it was their embodied practices—prayer, song, dance, shrine maintenance—that imbued these sites with holiness.

Devotees of the Virgin who migrated to the United States have created new sacred spaces. In 1987, Joaquín Martínez, a Mexican national living in Des Plaines, Illinois, received a statue of the Virgin from his family in San Luis Potosí. He began soliciting the help of architects and collecting donations to build a shrine for the statue. After nearly two decades, Martínez and the Guadalupan community in Des Plaines inaugurated what came to be known as the Second Tepeyac, a replica of the Tepeyac outdoor sanctuary in Mexico City. High-ranking clergy from Mexico City’s Basilica also assisted the 2001 inauguration. Though it imitates the original, Second Tepeyac has become a multipurpose site. It is a devotional destination for the local area and community organizers hold citizenship workshops there for an increasingly diverse congregation. As Peña sees it, this site is “a sacred space and an inclusive international political haven.”

While Second Tepeyac has achieved a degree of local and transnational legitimacy, a Guadalupan shrine in Rogers Park, a neighborhood in Chicago’s far north side, has not. The area’s early settlers were European immigrants. Today, the population of Rogers Park is divided equally among white, Black, and Latino residents. Demographic changes have caused tensions, especially among longtime white residents and their new Mexican neighbors. These came to a head in 2003 over a contested Guadalupan shrine.

In July 2001, the Virgin appeared to a woman, originally from Guanajuato, while she waited at a bus stop. The woman and area residents built a shrine around the tree where the Virgin’s image appeared and they venerated her by singing traditional songs, such as “Las apariciones Guadalupanas,” which narrates the Virgin’s apparition at Tepeyac. This and other songs are also the ones that female pilgrims in Mexico sing on their pilgrimages. The neighborhood Catholic church kept its distance from the shrine and its keepers because it has strict guidelines in determining whether or not to sanction an apparition. This one did not meet those requirements.

The Rogers Park shrine also encountered resistance from other area residents, city officials, and law enforcement. Devotional practices like prayer meetings and special celebrations at and around the shrine raised the ire of neighborhoods who associated the shrine with immigrants, especially from Mexico, and saw it as an encroachment on what used to be their exclusive space. Police officials also responded negatively. When devotees sought out police protection for their holy site after vandals had destroyed it, they received an offer they could not take. Police officials claimed that the shrine attracted gang activity. They also viewed shrine devotees as potential informants. Through her own participation in meetings with the police and in conversations with community members, Peña observed how police reaction to the shrine only helped to accentuate immigrant fears and distrust of city and law enforcement officials. By November 2003, the Rogers Park shrine had been dismantled. Candles, pictures, letters and other relics that people had left for the Virgin were haphazardly stuffed into city garbage cans.

This study of performing devotion and creating sacred spaces is valuable for many reasons. It offers an insider view of modern-day women’s pilgrimages that exposes the contradictions between a centuries-old practice and modernity. Peña’s study also details the ways beliefs and practices travel, how they stay the same, and how they change. Finally, it also helps us understand the many ways that newly-arrived migrants begin building community in their new home and how they become politically empowered through community-based self-help projects.

Photo Credits:

A 16th century rendering of the Virgin of Guadalupe (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

A devotional doll of the Virgin at the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico City (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

You may also like:

Janine Jones’ review of Devoted to Death: Santa Meurte, the Skeleton Saint

Kristie Flannery’s review of 2012 and the End of the World: The Western Roots of the Maya Apocalypse

Was Einstein Really Religious?

When he was a boy, yes. He lovingly studied the Bible, sensed no contradiction between Catholicism and Judaism, stopped eating pork, wrote little songs to God, and sang them as he walked home from school. But at the age of twelve, by reading science books, he abruptly abandoned all of his religious beliefs. He kept a “holy curiosity” for the mysteries and wonders of nature.

It is well-known that decades later, he made witty statements about God: that He does not play dice and that God is crafty but not malicious. Einstein famously wrote: “Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.” And the year he died, in 1955, a student quoted him as having once said “I want to know how God created this world. I’m not interested in this or that phenomenon, in the spectrum of this or that element. I want to know his thoughts, the rest are details.”

Young Albert Einstein circa 1890. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Yet Einstein’s statements on God were notoriously ambiguous. Therefore, many Jews, Christians, atheists, and others have embraced Einstein as one of their own—by picking his most appealing quotations. Atheists such as Richard Dawkins are glad that sometimes Einstein clarified that by “God” he actually meant to say “nature.” Yet sometimes he remarked “I am not an atheist.” Other times Einstein said that he believed in the God of Spinoza. In the 1670s, the Dutch philosopher expressed great reverence for the lawful harmony of nature, arguing that God has no personality, consciousness, emotions, or will. In 1929 Einstein praised Spinoza’s outlook as a “deep feeling in a superior mind that reveals itself in the world of experience.” Yet at the same time he expressed doubts as to whether he could fairly describe himself as a pantheist like Spinoza.

In his #1 New York Times bestselling biography of Einstein, Walter Isaacson argues that Einstein did not use the word God as just another name for nature. Isaacson insists that Einstein was not secretly an atheist but instead, that Einstein believed in an impersonal Creator who does not meddle in our daily lives. Likewise, many other writers also think that since Einstein did not believe in a personal God, a fatherly Creator who cares about us, and not being an atheist, that therefore he believed in an impersonal God.

In 1936, Einstein wrote a letter to a little girl, in which he explained: “Everyone seriously engaged in science becomes convinced that the laws of nature manifest a spirit which is vastly superior to man, and before which we, with our modest strength, must humbly bow.” This certainly sounds religious, but what did he mean by “a spirit”? Einstein’s replies to inquisitive strangers, children, reporters, or close friends sometimes were markedly different. In some cases, he used colloquial expressions that he preferred to rephrase in more exacting contexts. He voiced regrets that many of his casual expressions later became subject to public dissection.

In contrast to the famous quotations that portray the old Einstein as a religious man, it is less well known that he privately described himself as agnostic. In 1869, “Darwin’s bulldog,” Thomas Henry Huxley coined the word “Agnostic” as an attitude of temporary reasoned ignorance, to not pretend to know conclusions that have yet to be demonstrated scientifically. Twenty years later, Huxley commented: “I invented the word ‘Agnostic’ to denote people who, like myself, confess themselves to be hopelessly ignorant concerning a variety of maters, about which metaphysicians and theologians, both orthodox and heterodox, dogmatise with the utmost confidence…” Popularly, agnosticism became known simply as the position of admitting that one does not know whether God exists.

Albert Einstein 1921 by F Schmutzer.
Source: Wikimedia Commons.

In 1949 Einstein wrote a letter to a curious sailor in the US Navy, explaining that “You may call me agnostic.” In 1950 he replied to another correspondent: “My position concerning God is that of an agnostic. I am convinced that vivid consciousness of the primary importance of moral principles for the betterment and ennoblement of life does not need the idea of a law-giver, especially a law-giver who works on the basis of reward and punishment.” Then in 1952, in a letter to a philosopher, Einstein frankly expressed his unsweetened opinions: “The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honorable but still primitive legends aplenty. No interpretation, no matter how subtle, can change this (for me).” Einstein added that the Jewish people were no better that any other groups of people: “I can ascertain nothing Chosen about them.” He said that all religions are “primitive superstitions.”

He wrote such stark comments in private letters, in contradistinction to his published pronouncements about God and religion. So, was Einstein really religious? Or was he politically correct in public? In 1930, at the age of fifty-one, an article was published in which he described himself as “deeply religious.” But by then he was a world-wide celebrity. He knew that every word he said might be analyzed and interpreted. Over the years, he explained that he was religious only inasmuch as he felt a deep sense of wonder and reverence for the laws and mysteries of nature.

But what do we usually mean when we say that someone is religious? Most of the beliefs and practices that we distinctively associate with religious people were absent in Einstein. He denied the existence of a God that cares for humans, he argued that there is nothing divine about morality, he did not believe in any holy Scriptures, he had no faith in religious teachings, he rejected the authority of all churches and temples, he belonged to no congregation, he denied the existence of souls, life after death, divine rewards or punishments. He denied the existence of miracles that suspend the laws of nature. He rejected all mysticism, he did not believe in free will, he did not believe in any prophets or saviors. He denied that there is any goal in life or in the order of the universe, he practiced no religious rituals, and he did not pray.

Having rejected most aspects of religion, the young Einstein had some options: either say that he was not a religious person, or instead, find an alternative way to define religiosity. He chose the latter path. In science, Einstein had great success by redefining traditional concepts: he redefined concepts of time, energy, mass, gravity, and more. So he tried to do the same thing with religion. In 1950, he explained to his close friend from youth, Maurice Solovine: “I have found no better expression than ‘religious’ for confidence in the rational nature of reality as it is accessible to human reason.”

Instead of accepting Scriptures, rituals, or traditions, Einstein focused on the wonders of nature. By redefining religion to include at its core the emotions and attitudes that Einstein did cultivate, then and only then could Einstein describe himself as a deeply religious man. For example, he called himself deeply religious, but he did not pray. Therefore, in his new definitions, not praying became an act of a deeply religious man, one who fully trusts the laws of nature. He once wrote to Leo Szilard: “as long as you pray to God and ask him for some benefit, you are not a religious man.”

Summing up, good old Einstein was agnostic, I don’t think that he was very religious. Forgive me for making an unscientific analogy. Suppose someone tells us that he really loves pizza, but then he says that he prefers no sauce, dislikes dough, is allergic to cheese, and believes that anyone who asks for toppings does not really like pizza. Then we ask: but how can you say that you really love pizza? He answers: “because I have a deep appreciation for its essence.”

The Letter

In 2008, the letter from Einstein on the subject of religion stunned the public and was sold at auction for a staggering £207,000 ($404,000) instead of the £6000-8000 estimated by Bloomsbury Auctions.

Einstein-Gutkind_1954_p2 — Einstein’s letter.
Source: Albert Einstein to philosopher Eric B. Gutkind, 3.1.1954, Einstein Archives, item 33-33.

Alberto Martínez translates part of the letter here:

The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honorable but still primitive legends aplenty. No interpretation, no matter how subtle, can change this (for me). Such refined interpretations are naturally highly varied and have almost nothing to do with the original text. For me the unmodified Jewish religion, like all other religions, is an incarnation of primitive superstitions. And the Jewish people to whom I gladly belong and with whose mindset I have a deep affinity, have no different quality for me than other people. As far as my experience goes, they are also no better at anything than other human groups, though at least a lack of power keeps them from the worst excesses. Thus I can ascertain nothing “Chosen” about them.

Overall, I find it painful that you claim a privileged position and seek to defend it with two walls of pride: an outer one as a man, and an inner one as a Jew. As a man you claim a certain exemption from otherwise valid causality; as a Jew, a privilege for monotheism. But a limited causality is no longer causality, as our wonderful Spinoza had first said in the strongest terms. And the animistic interpretations of natural religions are also through monopolization not invalid. With such walls we fall essentially into self-deception, but they do not help us in our search for a higher morality. On the contrary.

Now, though I have in all honesty expressed our different beliefs, I still have the certainty that we largely agree on important matters, e.g. in our assessment of human conduct. What separates us, in Freud’s terms, are intellectual “supports” and “rationalizations.” I therefore believe that we would understand each other well if we were to talk about concrete things.

With friendly thanks and best wishes,

your

A. Einstein.

A History of Islam in America: From the New World to the New World Order by Kambiz GhaneaBassiri (2010)

by Reem Elghonimi

In the last decade, the history of Muslims in America has come into its own and A History of Islam in America provides one of the most comprehensive and even-handed treatments of the subject. Many previous studies breezily pit “Islam” against the “West.” Sidestepping the assumption that the two categories are essentially different, GhaneaBassiri studies the actual lived tradition of Muslims in America instead of second-guessing their compatibility.

America has been home to Muslims for a long time. Compelling stories come to the fore. Some Muslims arrived in the New World before slavery, like the adventurous sixteenth-century Moroccan cowboy and healer, Estevanico. Enslaved African Muslims sometimes resorted to private worship and remained active in their local communities. The story of Selim, an Algerian captive who petitioned for his freedom, is fascinating. Understanding his constraints, Selim converted to Christianity and, as a result, received economic and political benefits. He finally earned enough money to return to Algeria as a free man. Once there, he reverted to Islam.

Much past research about Islam in the West has focused on perceptions. For instance, Timothy Marr’s The Cultural Roots of American Islamicism and Susan Nance’s How the Arabian Nights Inspired the American Dream: 1790-1935 study only non-Muslim Americans’ representation of Islam. But images of Muslims in literature and political propaganda are not the only sources at our disposal. The historical records of Muslim individuals and institutions show that in the past four hundred years, Islam and America have interacted and the relationship between the two has defined each. Islamic America, like the rest of American society, is not one uniform set of communities, practices or symbols, but it has nonetheless existed in different forms continuously on this side of the Atlantic.

American political, legal, and civic institutions have provided many ethnic and religious groups, not only Muslims, with opportunities for participation mixed with doses of exclusion. GhaneaBassiri tells us of Muslims who collaborated and challenged these norms through organizations of their own. In the period between the two world wars, Islamic community building took root in mosques and benevolent societies like the Moorish Science Temple and the Nation of Islam. Islam allowed black Muslims new tools for rethinking race, religion, and progress in the aftermath of World War II when optimism about human accomplishment waned. Civil Rights legislation offered opportunities for immigrant Muslims by declaring loudly that discrimination based on race would not be tolerated. A positive, if accidental, symptom of immigration reform was the realization that the Muslim community also struggled for self-reliance.

In the wake of the 1979 Iranian Revolution and the popular American use of the term “Islamic terrorism” in place of “Arab terrorism,” Muslims in the United States continued to participate in activism. Optimistic that their adopted land gave them substantial socio-economic and political advantages, Muslims also realized that prejudice, like anything else, fades through interaction. Today, the juggernaut terms “Islamic terrorism and fundamentalism” are the focus of U.S. foreign policy rather than Cold War enemies. But at the same time, GhaneaBassiri believes that American Muslim objectives continue to show increased diversity. With a multiplicity of institutions, Muslim groups and organizations have ties to non-Muslim institutions and individuals. These relationships, bonds and experiences testify to a larger and more varied experience than merely cultural conflict. This book drives home the point that America’s historical encounter with Islam has not been a clash. But, as the author explains, we can only get our arms around it when we look at how Muslims actually lived on American soil.

Photo credits:

Marion S. Trikosko, “President Jimmy Carter greets Mohammad Ali at a White House dinner celebrating the signing of the Panama Canal Treaty, Washington, D.C., 7 September, 1977”

Library of Congress

Kamal al-Din, People Marching before the Iranian Revolution

Author’s own via Wikimedia Commons

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