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Women, Religion and Civilisational Dialogue: The New Heretical Imperative
Durre S. Ahmed
Religion remains a fundamental aspect of civilisation. Women are central actors on the spiritual scene though they have often been marginalised by organised creeds. The challenging and creative factor of heresy may play a vital role in the evolution of faith.
Introduction
A recent issue of World Affairs was devoted to the search of a new paradigm for a sustainable human order. Almost all the contributors to this thought-provoking subject stressed the necessity of integrating spirituality into the new paradigm. Basing this paper on the perspectives put forward by Kapur et al, I am attempting to explore the problems and prospects related to the spiritual dimension, particularly in the framework of women and religion.
I deliberately use the word 'religion' in order to draw attention to its strident ascendance in regional and global discourse. Similar to globalisation, whether one likes it or not, the issue of religion is here to stay. It should be kept in mind that in the impending 'clash of civilisations', religions have been specifically named and it is best to confront this realistically, rather than opt for the comparatively nondescript, 'spiritual'. The fact is, in many parts of the world, the specifics of one's spirituality are being called into question; this is certainly happening in the case of Islam.
But the most important reason for using the word 'religion', for me, is psychological. The spiritual impulse needs a language for its fullest articulation and to this extent all religions are languages of the 'self/soul'. They are based on a recognition of the human need for form and name. In order to sustain effectively and to be effectively sustained, spirituality has to be embodied and traditional religions provide the grammar, syntax and structure: Names, narratives, rituals, and different practices, provide a psychological container whereby the sustaining sap of faith/spirituality can find form, expression, and purposeful direction. In the absence of these, spirituality tends to dissipate. What in the West has been called its 'compassion fatigue', is actually a spiritual fatigue. Perhaps because of the dominance of Cartesianism, in many ways, its spirituality remains a theoretical ideal rather than an embodied one.
Today a global revival of religion has made it a key factor in the analysis of numerous issues including questions of identity, culture, nationalism, human rights, ethnicity and globalisation. The anti-abortionist religious rights group has steadily increased its power base in the US and the present dominance of neo-conservatives in that country points to the darker aspects of the Judaeo-Christian mindset. Similarly, the rise of Hindu nationalism, the Taliban and their variants in the Muslim world, or the bloodshed in the Balkans, all indicate that the Freudian 'illusion' and the Marxist 'opiate' notwithstanding, across the board it seems that humans remain 'incurably' religious. While there is a tendency to associate this revival primarily to fundamentalism, in actual fact there are numerous religious movements at work, having wide-ranging agendas which are not committed to violence.
Beyond Modernity and Fanaticism: An Emerging Zeitgeist
For a civilisational dialogue to take place in the context of religion, there is a need to move beyond the usual platitudes for tolerance and peace. Whether between Islam and the Judaeo-Christian West, or between Hindus and Muslims in South Asia, uptil now this is basically a political ploy and eventually, a self-renewing, self-perpetuating 'dialogue' between the deaf. Among other reasons, this so-called dialogue, can be linked to a feature of modernity which, whether secular or religious, encourages a philosophical either/or, adversarial psychology.
The old paradigm, which is actually still dominant, relies exclusively on a scientific rationalism, in which, in the North and South, it had become the norm for the intellectual to deride religion on the assumption that 'those who believe cannot think and those who think cannot believe'. In post-Enlightenment terms religion came to be seen as 'philosophy's shadow', a sort of counterfeit compared to the perceived superiority of rationalist thought. Looking back at the last century, it is clear that what Sartre called the 'God-shaped hole in human consciousness' and the attempt to fill it with existentialism/humanism/rationalism has not succeeded. Between 1914 and 1945, seventy million people died violent deaths in Europe and the Soviet Union. As Karen Armstrong notes in The Battle For God (Knopf, New York) the sheer scale of the Nazi genocide, the Gulag, Hiroshima and Nagasaki reveals them as by-products of modernity, which is ultimately nihilistic and self-destructive. Fanaticism has its roots deep in the human psyche and frequently has nothing to do with religion. The fact is that people are as ready to kill in God's name as they are without it. This is an on-going condition, witness Somalia, the Okhlahoma bombing, Rwanda, the slaughter of innocent school children in Britain and most recently 9/11. In short, modernity breeds its own types of fanaticism, liberal/secular and religious.
Huntington's hypothesis is in many ways a mirror image of the religious fundamentalists worldview. Both have static and rigidly defined notions of the religious-cultural matrix. Both see the world in terms of 'us' and 'them'. Both reflect a brutal predisposition to violence, a fascination with violent technologies and a paranoid psychology. From the feminist perspective, given their extremism, both are ultimately anti-nature, anti-women.
If religion is being given attention today it has as much to do with it becoming the nuisance it is currently, as with a remission in its long eclipse by twentieth century global intellectual establishments. Both these dynamics are linked to the modernist paradigm. It has only been towards the end of the last century that the stranglehold of this position began being questioned, a major factor being the 'New Age' movement in the North which has attracted vast numbers of women in search of spiritual alternatives to the Judaeo-Christian mainstream. In short, whether seen as the 'revenge of the sacred', or as a qualitative shift in the twentieth century to twenty-first century consciousness, religion is becoming a force demanding our attention. Whereas presently the focus remains overwhelmingly on its negative and extreme forms, its growing presence in academic and intellectual discourse is considerable:
"It is no longer a prerogative of narrow circles of Parisian intellectuals, 'New Age' scholars or feminist goddess-worshippers to theorise new religious insights. By contrast, spirituality and mysticism seem to impose themselves with increasing power on the post-Marxist agenda of secular Western intellectuals".
Similarly, in the South, the search for a new paradigm, indicates that what we are witnessing is an emergent zeitgeist which roughly means the 'spirit of the age', or the times. The term zeitgeist encompasses much more than the power politics of the moment and refers to a consciousness that is pervasive on a less visible level but socially large-scale. For example, an awareness about the environment, including notions of 'sustainability' are part of today's zeitgeist, as is the entire spirituality and religious spectrum.
The same can be said regarding the whole issue of women and their changing status in today's world. While still an ongoing process, it is nevertheless radically different from a hundred years ago. In many ways, Kapur's model for a sustainable order encapsulates the emergent zeitgeist, and to which, I would add the role of women. Even in contexts where women remain disempowered because of poverty, custom and politics, the issues around them remain prominent and there is today the ubiquitous presence of a 'women's perspective' or 'voice' in contemporary affairs. In short, both women and religion form significant elements of this zeitgeist, and when located within the new paradigm, are part of a rising constellation on the horizons of human consciousness and knowledge.
Beyond the dialogue of the deaf between different types of fundamentalisms, what concerns us here is the potentially wide-range of women's responses to religion. For women, there is an unstoppable momentum towards revisioning this most primordial and enduring of human concerns, since it is they who bear the brunt of what is frequently a brutal vision of religion. All religious mainstreams, or the 'officially' approved religious establishments, discriminate at some level against women. So powerful is the grip of these establishments today, that it requires a great deal of patience and courage to retain any form of religiosity and not to simply throw out the baby with the (by now) considerably dirty bathwater. What the new paradigm implies is a revisioning and re-claiming of religion from those who have hijacked it for political, economic and social gains. Today, this requires courage, and not just physically so. Intellectual courage is equally required for a creative re-engagement with religion, whereby faith and different types of secular and sacred knowledge can reinforce each other.
Particularly in the South and more so in the Muslim countries, this revisioning can be a risky business since sooner or later, the religious establishments will label such dissent as 'heresy'. This is dangerous territory, but one which must be traversed if new paradigms are to be strengthened, and where wornout ways of thinking and being have to be outgrown if genuine dialogue is to take place.
The New Heretical Imperative
The term 'heretical imperative' was first used by the sociologist Peter Berger in The Heretical Imperative (Doubleday, New York, 1979) in his analysis of modernity and its impact on Western Christianity. Writing more than 20 years ago, Berger argued that the dynamics of modernity were such that the only viable option for the individual vis-a-vis religion was the 'inductive option'. That is, having been released from the world of 'fate' into a vortex of choice and freedom, the modern individual must turn to his/her own experience rather than solely rely on faith and religious authority. In many ways a prescient author, Berger, however, did not anticipate the fury of resurgent religious fundamentalism and most significantly, he completely ignored the core issues around women and religion.
Heretics see themselves firmly as part of a religious tradition but are not considered so by the mainstream. As with the word 'religion' a great deal of the original meaning of 'heresy' has been obscured by the political and intellectual accretions of Christianity. It is forgotten that Christianity itself began as a 'heresy'. In its original pre-Christian usage the Greek word haeresis meant, 'to take for oneself', 'to choose', 'the middle voice'. As such, heresy as a 'position' has always been around in any overly institutionalised domain with established power hierarchies. The seemingly rational world of science has had its heretics—frequent harbingers of revolutionary change.
One of the main problems with fundamentalism is the tendency towards an exceedingly narrow vision which is not only intolerant of different views/interpretations within a religion but also of other religions. Studies of 'heretical' men and women suggest that their approach to religion is generally more inclusive and in which boundaries with other religions/sects are blurred and crossed. To the extent that heretics do not draw rigid lines within and between religions, heretical consciousness can be considered hybrid, multi-levelled, ambiguous, refusing to adhere to some singular, pristine ideal of dogma. In its subversion of dogma, heresy indeed 'weakens' what are frequently ossified strains in a tradition. But in its embrace of diversity it not only doubly reinforces itself, but revives—even if through controversy—the traditions of which it partakes.
In the West especially, it is interesting to note that the image of the heretic in the collective imagination is vividly connected with women such as Joan of Arc and the witches of various periods. Male or female, religious or intellectual/academic, it is important to remember that heretics are historically the cross-cultural pollinators of disciplines and civilisations. This cross-cultural pollination is linked (in religion) to the malevolent dynamics of persecution leading to migration and cross-cultural contact, or to something more serendipitous and benign such as textual (mis)translations; or simply to situations of defending religious diversity. From this historical perspective, heresy can then be seen as a longstanding but largely hidden dialogue within and between civilisations.
By virtue of hybridity, heretical consciousness is frequently creative consciousness. This will become evident if instead of falling into the bottomless pit of theological hairsplitting by asking what heresy is, we ask instead, what it does? As Wilson's observations in Scandal: Essays in Islamic Heresy (New York, Autonomedia, 1988) on the art and culture of the Indian subcontinent and of other areas and periods suggest, heresies played a major role in the emergence of a high degree of aesthetics, tolerance and creativity. Frequently the means of transfer of ideas and art forms from one culture to another, heresies have been subversive yet creative modes of communication between civilisations:
"Since the Mughal period, Sufism and Vaishnavite Bhakhti Yoga have influenced each other in Northern India. Islamic and Hindu art and spirituality produced a civilisation of tolerance, creativity and beauty. The colonial period almost destroyed this world. . ."
Similarly, medieval Europe absorbed a great deal of Islamic/Greek/Oriental culture from Spain and other parts of the world through scholars of 'dubious orthodoxy', such as Raimundo Lull, Roger Bacon, the Alchemists, Kabalists and Neoplatonists like Pico, Bruno and the Fideli d'Amore. Likewise, for example, whether deliberate or fortuitous, a mistranslation of Plotinus' Enneads became known in Arabic and Persian as 'Aristotle's Theology'. Absorbed into numerous Sufi discourses, Greek philosophy in Islam came to be seen in a much more neo-platonic light than in the West. Certainly, I have grown up believing that Plato and Aristotle were prophets.
Heresy, then, is a position of rebellion against external centralised authority, chosen consciously and representing 'the middle voice', which, like freedom, is only possible when there is a consciousness of options, of more than one 'voice'. At the most basic level, one can argue that dynamic dissent is integral to the religious impulse and is exemplified in prophetology. Most prophets did not so much 'invent' new religions as strongly disagree with certain elements of an existing one. Christ was seen as a Jewish heretic, and Islam, in turn, a heretical Christianity. At a more general level, as evident in the history of all religions, heresy is a continuous and radical 'tradition', a permanent revolution expressed frequently in mystical and non-dogmatic language.
Finally, through ideas and art forms inspired by a heretical-hybrid religiosity, heresy has the potential to not only inspire collective consciousness but also to heal the wounds inflicted by mainstream religion. As Jung said, "religion is a defence against a religious experience". Those of us from South Asia are familiar with the poetry of many of the great poets, male and female, whose religious experiences were expressed in verse and have been absorbed into a consciousness that embraces both the masses and elites. In spite of the intervening centuries, this genre of poetry continues to remain a powerful social and spiritually inspirational force. Almost without exception, poets such as Kabir, Bulleh Shah, Mira, and numerous others, spoke out against political and religious tyranny, and the ultimate unity of religions and humanity. My personal favourite is the fourteenth century Kashmiri woman-mystic-poet, Lalla, who was renowned for walking around naked and who was not ashamed about her state since, according to her, 'there were no real men in Kashmir'.
Gender and Religion
Lalla's scandalous statement hints at the relationship between heresy, mysticism and gender, and I would like to draw some deeper connections. The earliest paradigm for both psychology and religion was mythology indicating that gender diversity was crucial to conceptions of the divine. Connected self reflexively, humanity and the gods were both a spectrum of masculine and feminine attributes. As I will discuss, the feminine dimension has by now been overshadowed in both divinity and humanity.
Life is both male and female. In Jungian psychology and many mysticisms, 'masculine' and 'feminine', like the terms 'yin' and 'yang' are primarily psycho-symbolic concepts. They represent broad attitudes, a given psychological style towards life, events, situations. For example, masculinity may refer to a certain type of reasoning/rationality, one that is linear and works analytically by breaking down ideas and separating them into various components. 'Feminine' may refer to a different intellectual attitude, one that is receptive, contemplative, synthesising. It is metaphorical rather than literal, poetic and more inner oriented rather than externally focused exclusively on quantifiable facts. Both are essential for health and human functioning.
'Psychology' means a logos-of-the-soul (psyche) and in Greek mythology 'psyche' (soul) was a mortal woman of great beauty. For the psychologist Carl Jung, the human psyche is as varied as the mythic pantheon in its diversity of ideas, emotions, impulses. In the West, over the past 2000 years, this inner and outer diversity has been narrowed to the extent that today it reflects overwhelmingly masculine 'heroic' qualities. For example, in the Judaeo-Christian tradition the creative-compassionate aspect of sophia (wisdom) has been marginalised by the purely 'masculine' Yahweh. The eclipse of Mary in the movement from Catholicism to Protestant Christianity further distanced this dimension.
Similarly, Jung considered the modern notion of the 'ego', our sense of self, as predominantly constructed around male adolescent ideals of will power and a narrow idea of what constitutes 'reason'. The history of psychology shows that our construction of 'normalcy' has occurred at the expense of suppressing the inherent diversity of the psyche, including its feminine, more emotional and ambiguous aspects. When they surface, they are frequently seen as undesirable and 'pathological'. It was no coincidence then, that the first two diseases to be 'discovered' were schizophrenia (diversity) and hysteria, the latter still seen as primarily a female affliction. Jung's statement, 'the gods have become diseases' implies that psychopathology is a modern name for heresy. Again, the focus is women: across the world, women tend to be given more psychiatric pills than men according to Muriel Nellis in The Female Fix. Psychologically and spiritually, women are not so much simply different, but either mad or bad. In sum, both religion and psychology have come to be dominated by overarchingly masculine ideals. Within this framework, many feminists have argued that modernity as a whole can be seen as a masculinist project in its excessive valorisation of an instrumentalist rationality and the tendency towards violence and control (as of nature). Similarly, today, the logos of the soul (psychology) is being reduced to a science of the brain.
Mysticism and the Feminine
Immensely varied, mysticism remains the great spiritual current running under almost all major religions. As a style of religious expression, it can be considered 'feminine' in its attitude of surrender, essentially quietist, contemplative, waiting for the blessing, 'an expression of femininity as expressed through the feminine side of all human beings'. As Walter J Ong puts it, in Fighting for Life: Contest, Sexuality and Consciousness, 'In relation to God ... we are all, men and women alike, basically feminine. Macho insights reveal nothing of God'. Today, this inner, psychological dimension of the spiritual has been overpowered, ignored and overshadowed by modern consciousness and which has led to an overall impoverishment of many religions. What is valued is the outer, material, concrete, the codification of text, commentaries etc which, like nature, are claimed, owned and 'mastered' mostly by males. Accordingly, the inner dimension, of reflection, experience and emotions and one's unique subjectivity, is denied, marginalised–hereticised.
The notion of the feminine is both an aspect of divinity as well as a psychological experience. All religions, particularly in mysticism, incorporate this dimension in which human consciousness must put itself into a receptive state in order to experience the divine. The 'feminine face of God' and the feminisation of the psyche in religion is evident across numerous cultures. In the Shamanistic traditions the shaman performs a symbolic change of sex, living as a wife to a man. The integration of the feminine through ritual is found in tribes in Siberia, Patagonia and among Asiatic Eskimos. Hercules, the great exemplar man of men, after completing his twelve labours served Queen Omphale, becoming a servant to a woman. Similarly, in Hindu iconography, the female aspect or sakti is worshipped along with the male. The centrality of the feminine is especially significant in Tantra. The Buddha's feminine characteristics are obvious: heavy, silent, full-bellied, soft-breasted receptivity. Huge ears reflect the attitude of 'taking in' and the lotus posture represents compassion, a 'soft' feminine virtue. The Sabbath in Jewish tradition is feminine, welcomed on Friday evening as a Queen, the Sekinah. And in Christianity there is the central figure of Mary, representing a passive mood to God's intention. In Islam, the most often repeated attribute/Name of God in the Quran is Al-Rahman, the Gracious and Compassionate One. The etymological roots of 'Rahman' are directly related to the 'womb' and can be understood, as in Judaism and Christianity, as the creative aspect of divinity.
If the (hu)man experience of the divine is 'feminine', insofar as it requires a psychological attitude of receptivity, this 'feminisation' of consciousness becomes the opposite of the heroic, masculine outlook, which overvalues mastery, control and action. Religious fundamentalism, then, can be considered a hyper-masculine and extremely lopsided response to religion, one which valorises action to the point of violence and which is, naturally, anti-feminine in its psychology and, by implication, anti-woman. Its conception of both our spirituality as well as of the divine is unbalanced, one dimensional, phallic and steeped in machismo.
The 'feminine' then, is essentially a constellation of a different consciousness. Today, it is all around us, part of the new zeitgeist. Its archetypal presence is evident in feminism and the empowerment of women, in women's scholarship, in the increasing sense of unity with the planet, in ecological awareness of the interconnectedness of life, in 'alternative' medicine and the widespread urge to reconnect with the body and emotions, in the broad popularity of the Gaia hypothesis, in scientific ideas about chaos, dissipative structures and holism. The list could go on and on. The main point is that it is not an image, but a consciousness and it is this consciousness which must be reclaimed within the religious traditions. Given that its hallmark is synthesis and interconnectedness, it is similar to heretical hybridity, perceiving as it does, that which unites rather divides us. Whereas our successes make us distinct and set us apart, we are united especially in our flaws and failures. Orienting oneself in an interconnectedness that is rooted in a recognition of our imperfections, is to remain grounded in humility. It is thus a more salutary attitude from which to dialogue with each other. Rather than endlessly recycle fossilised theological/political debates, the heretical-feminine perspective offers this way.
Back to the Future
Between the current debates of an advancing monolithic global culture versus the clash of civilisations, somewhere is the heretic's 'middle voice', which is where, I think, most of us would locate ourselves. This location in a third choice entails a dual move, simultaneously forward and backward. Backward in terms of reconnecting with one's specific religious roots but with certain provisos in the context of hybridity and its quid pro quo: I do not think it is possible, at least for the majority here, to reconnect with their spirituality and religion simply on the basis of faith. To do so is to frequently fall into the blinding hold of fundamentalism. Similarly, any return to religion must be accompanied by a consciousness that is both a gift and curse of modernity and globalisation. This gift/curse is the knowledge of diversity including vast amounts of information about one's own and all other traditions. It has been said that 'ignorance is bliss'. Unfortunately, one's existential situation simply does not permit that a re-engagement with religion remain restricted to the bliss factor. Knowledge is a painful burden and has to do with degree and depth rather than impulsive action which eventually seeks a position (of one upsmanship). Christ, one must remember, carried his own cross. To the extent possible, this heavy burden, of knowing more about each other and oneself, must be carried in attempting to critically re-engage with especially one's own tradition, which is the logical place to begin. Then one must move to learning from each other instead of just about each other.
As Karen Armstrong points out "Western civilisation has changed the world. Nothing—including religion—can ever be the same again". Thus, what is required is a radical revisioning of each tradition. As a 'tradition' such radicalism has always existed in every religion in the form of heresies and the mysticisms. The word 'respect' implies, to look at again, and we need to reclaim and re-examine these heretical currents in our own and other traditions.
One should remember that above all, religion has to do with death. This is something that we will all experience but know nothing about. There are no experts on this matter. Ultimately it is a uniquely individual affair. This should give one the courage to explore and understand religion for oneself, without blindly deferring to established authorities. Given that it is women who suffer the most at the hands of religion, the new heretical imperative must come from religious perspectives that set women and men free from a spiritual slavery that binds, suffocates and isolates people by erecting walls in the name of sects, security, and religious dogma.
Whereas in the past the idea of heresy was largely limited to definition/ accusation/punishment within theology, today in countries such as India and (particularly) Pakistan, heresy is on the way to becoming a norm. As competing brands of religious fanaticism bid for greater political power and redefine religion along increasingly rigid, exclusivist and bigoted lines, conceptions of heresy/blasphemy/apostasy are converging steadily to encompass men and women from all levels of civil society. In the process many are being forced to study and re-examine religion. Ordinary people belonging to different Islamic and non-Islamic communities are persecuted, but it does not end there, since by now, the international demonising of Islam and Muslims must also be taken into account. Beyond religion, worldwide, innumerable individuals must confront other types of heretical imperatives as they struggle to transcend the dangerous simplifications inherent in the statement: 'you are either with us or against us'.
But even as the scope of what constitutes heresy expands, past restrictions are less applicable: in spite of persecution, violence, ethnic and religious profiling, there are no longer the old constraints (other than fear) to conduct these conversations in whispers. Today, the crucial difference between women (and men) heretics of the past has to do with communication. "Information", as Bateson said, "is a difference which makes a difference". Once a hidden mode of discourse between a small number of participants, limited further by contingencies of time and space, heretical dialogue, religious/political/intellectual, can become—thanks to communications technologies—a polylogue among different groups, cultures and religions.