Writing History, Constructing Religion

James G. Crossley, Christian Karner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780815399155
• eBook ISBN: 9781351142748
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Writing History, Constructing Religion presents a much-needed interdisciplinary exploration of the significance of debates among historians, scholars of religion and cultural theorists over the 'nature' of history to the study of religion. The distinguished authors discuss issues related to definitions of history, postmodernism, critical theory, and the impact on the study and analysis of religious traditions; exploring the application of writing 'history from below', discussions of 'truth' and 'objectivity' as opposed to power and ideology, crises of representation, and the place of theory in the 'historicized' study of religion(s). Addressing conceptual debates in a wide range of historical and empirical contexts, the authors critically engage with issues including religious nationalism, Nazism, Islam and the West, secularism, religion in post-Communist Russia, ethnicity and post modernity. This book constitutes a significant step towards the self-reflexive and interdisciplinary study of religions in history.

Part I
Introduction

Chapter 1
Writing History, Constructing Religion

James G. Crossley and Christian Karner

A wide variety of religions, cultures and languages have something akin to the conventional English use of the word ‘history’ in the dual senses of a description of past events or an all encompassing term for the whole collection of these events (Breisach, 1987, pp. 371, 372–383). Stories, epics, genealogies and biographies of important figures from the past are not difficult to find in religious traditions. History is obviously not something that can easily be ignored in the study of religion.

In Islam, Judaism and Christianity there are grand overviews of history from Creation through to the end times. In these monotheistic faiths, calendars are set according to key events in the sacred past so that such events can be continually remembered. Some of the famous religious traditions originating from Asia are often — albeit problematically — thought to ideally extol an ahistorical attitude, an otherworldly emphasis on the changeless, and a cyclical conception of time. However, it would be a one sided and simplistic account, which stressed only such aspects of these religious traditions and neglected their concern for events of the past. Critically commenting on significant attempts, not least by western scholars, to provide a theology of Sikhism, Beryl Dhanjal points out the following:

Writers say that God is one, omnipotent, infinite, eternal, absolute, immense, omnipresent, spirit and light etc., which is not untrue, but nor is it distinctive … Much writing concentrates more on history than theology. A recent booklet from the Sikh Missionary Society contains thirty-four pages of ‘history’ and two and a half on actual belief. This is not an uncommon situation.

(Dhanjal, 1994, p. 174)

For all the well-known traditions of asceticism, meditation and search for nirvana in Buddhist traditions, a figure in human history is found throughout this diverse movement, namely Buddha. Moreover, not only are there a wide range of biographies across different Buddhist traditions but there are also Buddhist historians of the Buddhist past, such as the monk Bu-ston (1290–1364), author of Chos-’byun (History of Buddhism), a history of Buddhism up to the fourteenth century CE. Hinduism is widely associated with a long tradition of epic literature, stories of kings and genealogies. Lest it be thought that Hinduism — itself a highly problematic term that imposes an artificial unity on a highly heterogeneous range of beliefs, practices and identities — is exclusively concerned with things transcendent, Christian Karner’s second chapter in this volume shows that periodization and an authorized version of the past can be of crucial importance and a matter of no small controversy in the here and now for present day Hindu nationalism in India.

The telling of history in the construction of a ‘religious’ past frequently has an explicitly moral element. The prophets revered in the Islamic tradition (right up to Muhammad) came to correct misguided teaching and establish true faith. In the narratives of the Hebrew Bible, Israel and Israelites are often judged by their behaviour: behave well and prosper or behave badly and face exile (cf. Clines, 1979). This retributive history was also to become important in early Christianity (Trompf, 2000). As such moral views of history show, writing history and constructing religion are often closely interwoven social practices that are anything but a detached chronicling of bygone events of the sacred past. The writing of history and the constructing of religion are, of course, tied up with power and hence with the social construction of insiders and outsiders, of friends and foes. The ‘official history’ of the Bible can be read from different perspectives and has obvious modern day political implications, particularly in the context of the Israel–Palestine conflict (Whitelam, 1996). For example: how would a Palestinian read the Exodus and Conquest stories of the Bible, a part of ‘official’ Jewish and Christian history? The long-standing controversy over the mosque built on what has been claimed to be Ram’s birthplace in Ayodhya, India (see Karner’s second chapter in this volume), was no more a quibble over aesthetics than Stalin’s removal of Trotsky from photographs of Lenin was reducible to the ‘disagreeable’ state of his moustache. In these cases the protagonists are actively engaged in reconstructions of how the past ‘really was’ in order to justify beliefs in the present and ideas concerning the future.

An implication of all this is that history cannot so easily be separated from popular understandings of that most slippery of terms ‘myth’.¹ It would be simplistic to describe myths as solely concerned with questions of origin, taboo, authority, life and death taking place in the distant past, not least because ‘history’ can serve similar functions. Perhaps the distinction is unnecessary, perhaps myth and history can — on the level of political logic and purpose — be closely related and, at times, indistinguishable (cf. Lévi-Strauss, 1978; Kunin, 1995; and Kunin in this volume)? The phenomenon of postmodernism has brought questions of ideology sharply into focus and raises all sorts of questions, many of them uncomfortable. Adopting a working definition of ideology as language and behavioural practices that serve either the reproduction or the subversion of existing power structures (Augoustinos, 1998), a range of highly pertinent questions emerges: are the official histories of a given religion narratives of power that marginalize or exclude alternative versions and subversive voices? Who controls what we are told about the past? Are the writing of history and the construction of religion so immersed in ideology that nothing of the past can be known to the historian of a given religion? Should anyone even care? How might we critically engage with (academic) theories of religions and their histories as well as with the very concepts they utilize in an all-too-often non-reflexive manner?

This book is an attempt to address questions such as these and others related to them. The two introductory chapters raise general issues surrounding the academic study of history and religion. In Chapter 2, Defining History, James Crossley provides an introductory discussion of recent and still current debates raging over the nature of history (for example, narratives, theory, ‘history from below’, objectivity and neutrality) with some consideration of the impact these debates may have on the study of religion. In Chapter 3, Postmodernism and the Study of Religions, Christian Karner provides an introduction to the varied themes and concepts associated with postmodernism (for example, discourse and ideology, power, knowledge and identity) and how they can be mapped onto the study of religions.

Subsequent chapters provide specific and detailed analyses of historical, ethnographic, textual and theoretical examples of history being written and religion(s) being constructed. While all chapters reflect their author’s own interests and areas of expertise, the inevitable exclusion of countless other — equally pertinent — (empirical/ historical/textual) examples and contexts is counter-weighed by a systematic attempt running throughout the entire volume to address the above-mentioned range of epistemological and methodological, theoretical and conceptual challenges.

In Chapter 4, On Religion: Speeches to its Cultural Despisers, Philip Goodchild observes that the idea of ‘religion’ representing cross-cultural cultural forms is limited to a certain Western (and peculiarly modern) metaphysical concept of truth. Goodchild argues that the study of religion should include a cultural hermeneutic, a careful interpretation of given traditions of thought and activity and their alternative conceptualizations of truth and value. This chapter presents a thought-provoking way of critically interrogating the history and semantic/ideological content of ‘religion’ and ‘culture’ as key-concepts in modern Western consciousness, the ideological assumptions and motivations of those writing about and/or ‘against’ religion, and the political implications as well as ethical possibilities of trying to understand ‘it’.

In Chapter 5, Postmodernism Before and After: The Fate of Secularization, Alan Aldridge analyzes the postmodernist rejection of meta-narratives of history with especial focus on the secularization thesis and one of its major exponents, the sociologist of religion Bryan Wilson. Aldridge argues that although Wilson’s work may seem to be a monolithic piece of modernist social science and a prime target for postmodernist critique, critical engagement with Wilson shows that he is much more subtle and nuanced. While critical of postmodernist analysis, Aldridge does not reject it outright as a sceptical but sympathetic reading can illuminate certain aspects social life that may otherwise be overlooked. Aldridge’s chapter makes two particularly significant contributions to this volume: first, he presents an insight into a range of religious phenomena and identities in our contemporary, Western, consumer-oriented and arguably postmodern society; second, he critically examines the construction of theoretical paradigms and the classification of religious phenomena therein; as a result, Aldridge is able to interrogate the problematic, though often taken-for-granted division between modernism and postmodernism.

In Chapter 6, The Crisis of Representation in Islamic Studies, Hugh Goddard analyzes the problems involved in the wide variety of contemporary voices claiming to speak for Islam, be they Muslim or non-Muslim, non-violent or violent, illiberal or liberal, interactive or non-interactive. Goddard discusses how these differing views can colour approaches to understanding Islamic history, including the distortion of basic factual information for not-so-hidden political agendas and the dangers of a violent Islamophobia that can and does arise from this. Goddard concludes that the representation of Islam and Islamic history is of crucial importance for community relations both at local and global levels.

In Chapter 7, Living Yesterday in Today and Tomorrow: Meskhetian Turks in Southern Russia, Kathryn Tomlinson provides a discussion of the ways in which a group of people among whom she has conducted anthropological fieldwork construct their identities, variously drawing — in the post-Communist era — on the labels ‘Turkish’, ‘Soviet’ and ‘Muslim’. It is argued that the Meskhetian Turks’ approach to the past is of an ontological (mythic) as opposed to an epistemological/theoretical kind, emphasizing a practical (or practiced/lived) engagement with the past rather than a detailed concern for historical accuracy or a preoccupation with origins. Tomlinson suggests that if powerful outsiders frame their discussion of the past, present and future of the Meskhetian Turks in terms of a conventional epistemological approach to history, this will result not only in a distortion of the Meskhetian Turks’ relation to their past and hence in a lack of meaningful cross-cultural communication, but could have further detrimental consequences to an already marginalized group of people.

In Chapter 8, Who’s Afraid of Jesus Christ? Some Comments on Attempts to Write a Life of Jesus, Maurice Casey discusses how powerful social groups can determine the outcome of critical historical scholarship and even distort factual information with particular reference to the writing about the historical Jesus in the context of Nazi Germany and Christian communities both ancient and modern. Casey then proceeds to argue that through careful attention to primary sources it is possible to establish verifiable facts about Jesus even if the narrative in which such facts are placed are human constructs.

In Chapter 9, History From the Margins: The Death of John the Baptist, James Crossley examines the beheading of John the Baptist in the context of Jewish rewriting of history and a nod in the direction of certain anthropological approaches to history. It is suggested that the people responsible for this story were a minority group facing the very real possibility of persecution and that this affected their rewriting of history. Crossley also looks at how this group’s writing of history interacted with political and social attitudes, particularly the construction of gender.

In Chapter 10, If Isaac Could Speak …: Redefining Sacrifice, Maria Varsam presents a critical feminist-literary approach to a well-known narrative of sacrifice. Looking for the voice of the marginalized, overlooked and silenced sacrificial victim, Varsam engages with the politics of sacrifice and hence with the ideological implications of a key-concept in the study of religious rituals.

In Chapter 11, Ideological ‘Destructuring’ in Myth, History and Memory, Seth Kunin discusses the relationship between myth and history through a re-examination of a set of questions, first addressed by Claude Lévi-Strauss, concerning the effects of geographical diffusion/historical transformation on myths (including their eventual ‘death’). Based on his continuing and critical engagement with structuralist theory, Kunin presents a detailed analysis of the Hebrew Book of Judges and a discussion of the Crypto-Jews of New Mexico. This chapter thus establishes a meaningful dialogue between two frequently contrasted schools of intellectual thought: a structuralist preoccupation with the cultural logic underlying key-categories and their inter-relations that define a particular social/historical context is thus integrated with a post-structuralist concern with questions of power and ideology. The death of myths, Kunin argues, is the result of their being appropriated by ideologically motivated social actors for political purposes.

In Chapter 12, Writing Hindutva History, Constructing Nationalist Religion, Christian Karner applies some of the approaches associated with postmodernism to the study contemporary Hindu nationalism. This includes: a discussion of the discursive construction of a particular type of Hindu identity; an analysis of historiography in Hindu nationalism as an example of the ideological nature of the practice of writing and using history, focusing on the above-mentioned Ayodhya controversy; the remembrance of violence and the ethical implications concerning how this is done; and understandings of ‘religion’ in Hindu nationalism and how this relates to debates about ‘identity’. Karner ends with an endorsement of ‘affirmative postmodern politics’ to provide a challenge to the essentialist and static constructions of identity and history associated with Hindu nationalism.

In keeping with the academic spirit of our times, this volume aims to be both interdisciplinary and self-reflexive. It brings historians, sociologists and anthropologists of religion into dial...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• Part I Introduction
• Part II Writing History, Constructing Religion
• Index