God in the 21st Century – Shakira Hussein

Dr Shakira Hussein, from the National Centre for Excellence in Islamic Studies at the University of Melbourne, addressed The Sydney Institute on Tuesday 23 August 2011 as part of a discussion on God in the twenty-first century. She was joined by Angela Shanahan, a columnist with The Australian , Rabbi Jeffrey Kamins from the Emanuel Synagogue in Sydney, and Robyn Williams, the ABC Radio National presenter of The Science Show & Ockham’s Razor

GOD IN THE 21ST CENTURY

SHAKIRA HUSSEIN

Throughout much of the twentieth century many commentators asked to speculate on the role of God in the next century would probably have predicted that He – and let’s refer to God as He for the moment, although I realise that’s contentious – would be in retreat.

In using the phrase “retreat from God”, I’m not suggesting that anyone had much expectation that society would become dominated by atheism – although it does seem to be much more widespread. I mean that God would be seen as having less and less of a role to play in public life, let alone in international relations. God would be confined to the home and to well defined and limited religious spaces.

The Iranian Revolution presented a major challenge to the expectation that post-colonial societies would follow a Western model of modernisation, undertaken within a secular political framework. But, thanks to the Ayatollah Khomeini, religion became a factor in international relations once more. As the last century moved on, it became an increasingly visible factor in domestic politics in Europe, North America and Australia as well, even as tangible religious practices such as regular church-going became far less widespread and religious affiliation became far more fragmented. Of course, religion and religious conflict were not a new element in Australia or North America, nor European societies. The Catholic/ Protestant divide had been a highly contentious factor in Australian politics and particularly, of course, within the ALP.

The re-entry of God into public discourse was triggered, however, by the arrival of new players on the scene. New and unfamiliar religious communities, whose members did not necessarily stick to the familiar script and the established religious space. Muslim communities have of course been the most headline-grabbing of these new players.

The process of accommodating these new identities through a Christian lens, has been referred to as a process of“competitive piety”- in which religious networks escalated their visible religiosity and then claimed religious entitlements in order not to fall behind other competing communities. Muslims, again, have been the most visible of these competing religious pieties. Partly, because of the visibly different form of dress worn by Muslim women and, increasingly, by Muslim men – such as wearing beards and various forms of visible Islamic dress.

But I would argue that atheists, or a particular form of atheism as well, have also been participants in the process of competitive piety. Heightening their visibility and their claims for a slot in public life, in response to the piety contest by which they feel surrounded. And so, if they are atheists, people are being encouraged to present their participation within public life according to their atheist identity, to self-identify vocally as atheists, to organise events based around atheism and to apply to public funding along with religious communities to fund these events and to enable them to evangelise.

If God seemed to be in retreat during the mid-twentieth century, so too did atheism, not because there were fewer atheists but because it was seen as part of an argument that was obsolete and stuffy. Not many people were sitting around reading Bertrand Russell and thinking that was the way of the future. It was an argument that was seen as not exactly resolved but sidelined because religion in general was also an increasingly a less visible part of public life, and increasingly less important as a battle ground. But we now have vocal arguments from atheists  and the most vocal are Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Neill, Ayaan Hirsi Ali and so on.

God is once again under siege on both empirical and ethical grounds. I should add that I’ve listened to The Science Show since childhood and I don’t think I can remember ever having heard anything said there that I found particularly offensive or upsetting. The various branches of science are said to have filled the empirical space that humans used to explain in terms of God.

This concept of God always reminds me of old primary school text books explaining the function of mythology, for which one can also read religion, in terms of primitive people dressed in animal skins, crouched around the fire and pointing fearfully towards the heavens. Primitive people, these text books explained, cowered in terror at natural phenomena such as thunder and lightning, for which they invented explanations such as feuding spirits, demons and gods in order to calm their fears and to pass away the winter evenings prior to the invention of TV and Blu-ray. These days, however, we have science to provide us with rational evidence-based explanations about the workings of the universe, and reality television to provide us with stories of salacious misbehaviour, unmatched by any deity, even the Norsk ones.

God, according to this view of history, has been superseded by scientific discovery and Channel Nine. I do not see, however, scientific narratives and religious narratives as being in competition. They occupy separate plains. It is perfectly possible to be a believer and also to accept most of the science that we’ve heard explained on The Science Show every week for 36 years.

I realise that science and religion are often presented as competing and that efforts to bring science and religion together somehow have come up with various discourses that are both bad science and bad theology. Creation science would be the most prominent of these. I am speaking here not only as a Muslim but also as somebody who grew up with a Bjelke-Petersen childhood, in which creation science was supposed to be given equal time with evolution. It was offensive, on both religious and scientific grounds.

In another example of competitive piety, Muslims have begun to develop explanations of creation and fossils and whatever, which might be compatible with the Koran and to explain every scientific discovery that ever comes up as being predicted by the Koran, or at least entirely consistent with the Koran. Again, that is dodgy, according to Islam as well as scientifice. I have considered what branches of science might present a challenge to my sense of what God is. I’ve always come back to neurology. I don’t think that there’s a fossil or a distant star or something in astrophysics that is going to challenge my sense of the world and my sense of God, but perhaps neurology might explain the workings of my brain, why I am inclined to feel that there is a sense of something external, a sense of something divine.

In that case, God is definitely a “He” because only a male God would have the sadistic sense of humour to make me think much more deeply about neurology by giving me a neurological disease. I do give serious thought to whether the various lesions that are currently scattered across my brain might be playing havoc with my sense of the boundary between the divine and the physical, given that it also sometimes obscures my ability to tell the difference between hot and cold. If I can’t tell whether the spoon I’ve just put in my mouth is burning hot or freezing cold, then how can I tell whether I’m thinking about God, or whether it’s just some random circuitry gone a little strange.

Neurology has been used to explain away Islam for a very long time. Christopher Hitchens, I think, is the most recent. He explains the divine revelations to the Prophet Muhammad in terms of possible epilepsy. Various descriptions of the Prophet Muhammad’s experience of the divine, can be made to sound like an epileptic fit. But an epileptic fit that produces works – regardless of whether you consider them to have any truth or value – of considerable Arabic literary merit seems to me as unlikely as the idea that Muhammad was listening to the Archangel Gabriel. I do not think that the origins of Islam can be explained by some random neurological circuit malfunction. I do not even think that my own contemplations of the divine can be explained away by my neurology, as random and strange and complicated as that neurology may be.

God is facing far more serious charges than His (or Her) non-existence. God is also held responsible, for the abuses committed in His or Her name. In this critique, my own religious community is held to be particularly culpable. If God exists and, in particular, if God according to Islam exists – which of course he doesn’t, according to atheists – then he should be on trial for crimes against humanity, according to this perspective. I thought long and hard about whether to make this obvious point but it’s a bit hard to go past it on this particular occasion.

Much of the violence between religious doctrines can be seen as being more ethnic than theological. If we think of Partition or to the violence in the Balkans, people were not being asked for their religious opinions before they were slaughtered. They were slaughtered according to their name, according to whether or not they were circumcised, according to their family background, according to their ethnic presentation. Sociologically and politically, these may have been presented as religious conflicts, and I am not saying that religious and doctrinal conflicts don’t exist and that abuses are not committed in the name of religion, but those mass atrocities that dominate our thoughts, I would argue, are by and large more ethnic conflicts. The Jews of Europe were not exterminated on the basis of a theological difference but on the basis of a perceived pseudo-genetic difference.

Muslims of the West are starting to occupy an ethnic rather than religious identity. And people of Muslim background who do not practise their religion, who did not publicly identify as Muslims prior to 9/11 are increasingly doing so because that is still their social and community network. They still have respect for their parental background, they still celebrate Muslim holy days, just as non-practising Christians celebrate Christmas. They are still part of the Muslim religious community in that regard.

So, again, while the Muslim issue in Australia is presented as being a religious issue – and obviously for some people it is – there is clearly more to it than religion. It might be helpful to try and see beyond the theological issues, which of course are real and tangible, and which are as contested among Muslims as they are between Muslims and non-Muslims. Muslims themselves should pay greater attention and be more publicly faithful to the support that we’ve received from many atheists who have participated in the anti-racist movement. Muslims have been the prime targets of racism over the past decade.

The place of contesting racism against Muslims has often been inter-faith dialogue. One of the issues with inter-faith dialogue is that it’s often really about racism rather than religion. Atheists want to participate in that dialogue and there isn’t a spot for them marked, “atheist”. They don’t have a ritual they can present as we sit through the Bahá’í prayers and the Jewish and Christian and Muslim prayers. There’s no brief recitation of Richard Dawkins.

One thing I do find very heartening. Moderate atheists are beginning to speak out, just as moderate Muslims are. They are echoing the language used by moderate Muslims in distancing themselves from their extremists. Just as I would not claim to be a spokesperson for Muslims, even less would I claim to be a spokesperson for moderate atheists, but I’ve had many heartening conversations with moderate atheists. They say things like, “Richard Dawkins is an embarrassment to all of us, he’s such an extremist and he wants people offside.” Really, some atheists talking about Richard Dawkins sound like Muslims talking about Sheik Halali.

I was going to conclude by saying that I hope that moderate Muslims, Christians, Jews and atheists can all find a common ground from which to address common issues of Muslim concerns. But I am a bit sick of the term, “moderate” in describing Muslims. I don’t imagine that Robyn Williams particularly wants to be described as moderate either – although he comes across as one. Phillip Adams, I have to say, is sounding like a moderate atheist.

So, what can we say that’s better than moderate? Should we say, “people who are committed to dialogue”. I would like to echo Robyn Williams’ call for a sense of humour. That is incredibly important. So let’s say atheists, Christians, Jews, Hindus, Bahá’ís, list them all off, who are committed to having conversation and with a decent sense of humour.