A religion sociologist discovers that his criticism of the Church is based on lies. Shutterstock

My undergraduate sociological training reinforced my atheism. My sociological lectures and sociological canons all decried and denounced the irrationality of human religion.

I dutifully read Marx’s Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right and dismissed religion as an opiate delusion. I understood from Max Weber that religion was pure ideology, and made an oath not to get fooled again. I agreed with Peter Berger that religions were superstitions “beyond the pale” of respectable discussions.

At one point, I’d even have gone go so far as to call myself a devotee of evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, who sees religion as — among other more negative things — a crime against childhood.

Like a lot of my sociological colleagues, I heaped derision on the faithful. However, one day I decided to put aside my sociological roots and take a closer look myself.
 

Religion is the problem

As a researcher who looks at religions, I dug around and I was surprised by what I found.

I looked at the Western Tarot and found it was created as a propaganda tool.

Hand-drawn, grungy, textured Tarot cards depicting the concept of Death and Judgement. Shutterstock

I discovered the remarkable story of Bartolomé de Las Casas, a brutal colonizer who one day saw the light and decided to fight for the slaves instead of immolating them.

I read the research of psychology professor Abraham Harold Maslow, who said everyone has a mystical experience. I examined the origins of global beliefs and found that although our beliefs are different, they seem to originate from the same place.

After this research, I wondered why the sociological “founders” had mostly ignored these mystical experiences. I decided to pick up the Bible and read; I was surprised by what I learned.
 

Jesus was a revolutionary leader

I expected to find either a passive shepherd who had died for our sins or a shady street corner dealer waiting for the next addict.

What I found instead was a modest, egalitarian but charismatic and revolutionary leader. The text I read showed that he was a leader who thought of women as equals, didn’t like commercial activity, didn’t think the rich could be authentic and absolutely hated the wealthy local elites.

He told his students to be cautious of elites because “they are corrupt” and lead people astray.

He said “they do not practise what they preach” and called them wicked, blind, self-indulgent, hypocrite fools; pretty on the outside but rotten and unclean deep within.

After reading the Gospels, it seemed to me that in the story, Jesus was a charismatic and popular revolutionary who had angered local elites and was assassinated as a result.
 

The big lie

The elites were afraid that should the people crown this new leader king, as they seemed ready to do, they would lose their control of power.

To head off the threat, the top male elites, the “chief priests and the Pharisees”), convened their version of the Supreme Court (the Sanhedrin) and plotted an untimely death for Jesus.

Vatican City is a symbol of the Catholic Church’s enormous wealth. (Shutterstock)

To accomplish their goal, the elites told a lie, what I call the “Caiaphas Lie,” to turn the people against him. Once the lie spread as truth, Jesus went into hiding but was arrested by local elites who threatened Roman leaders into a public shaming and brutal execution.

To my sociologically trained eye, the assassination was a clear attempt to suppress teachings that awakened the public to elite corruption. It was designed to put the public back to sleep.

Unfortunately for the elites, their first suppression attempt didn’t work. The assassination turned Jesus into a martyr, as he himself knew it would.

After his death, the word spread fast, with thousands and thousands of Jews and gentiles being converted at once.

We see the conversion of Roman centurions, traditional priests, foreign state officials and top-level elites (e.g., Saul’s Conversion in Acts 9). There is conversion “through the whole region” — Iconium, Lystra, Derbe, Syria, Philippi,Thessalonica, Berea, Athens, Corinth and Ephesus.
Christ’s martyrdom created a steamroller that spread throughout the whole world. It enraged local elites and lead to pogroms (Acts 8: 1-4), mass deportation and pervasive persecution.
 

Early Christians were socialists

Why put so much effort into assassination and suppression? The answer is that Jesus wasn’t just an anti-authoritarian, he was a socialist revolutionary leader. He told wealthy folks to redistribute their wealth and his followers did the same.

Jesus and the early Christians were about equality and freedom from the “yoke of slavery.” They dismissed political, ethnic and gender hierarchies and said we should all help the weak, not destroy them.

In 2 Corinthians 8: 13-15, the apostle Paul admonishes the Corinthians and tells them to “strive for equality” by redistributing their wealth. In a passage prescient of Karl Marx’s famous quote: “From each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs,” Paul reminds the Corinthians to share. “The one who gathered much did not have too much, and the one who gathered little did not have too little.”

All of the above was rooted in Christ and his followers’ dismissal of authoritarian spirituality in favour of a radical “we are all God” cosmology. Jesus claimed to be God but “so are you,” he said (John 10:24,Corinthians 6:19 Colossians 3:11).

In other words: Don’t listen to authority. Don’t listen to tradition. Don’t follow their rules. Give your possessions away. Help the weak. Live in peace with all people. Redistribute wealth. I am God. You are God. We are God.

Why were my expectations so out of line with the actual story told in the Bible?
 

The Church is a rich male collective

The Catholic priests I listened to as a child didn’t talk about Jesus the revolutionary; they told me the same “big lie” the elites in the Bible told. They made me recite that same lie every Sunday. By the time I was 10, the Catholic Church had burned the lie deep into my mind.
If you believe the Church is a continuation of Christ’s teachings, this is confusing.

However, once you learn the Catholic Church is a collection of elite patriarchs brought into formal power by edicts and actions of the Roman Emperors Constantine and Theodosius, it begins to become clear. When you realize the Church is one of the richest and most powerful male collectives in the world, it comes into clear focus.
 

Mike Sosteric, Associate Professor, Sociology, Athabasca University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Mozambique’s military responded swiftly following deadly attacks by Islamist gunmen on three police stations recently. Reuters/Juda Ngwenya

They told local people they would not hurt them, that their fight was with the state and the police. They explained that they rejected state health and education and refused to pay taxes. The local population calls these men “Al-Shabaabs”.
Mozambique’s government’s response was swift. It fought back with forces from other districts and special forces from the provincial capital. The battle lasted several hours and left 16 dead, including two policemen and a community leader.
The attack came as a shock to a country already grappling with major economic and political problems. The incident is the first confirmed Islamist armed attack in Mozambique.

Information is still sparse and confused. But for now, we can say with some degree of certainty that what happened on 5 October 2017 was not a Somali Al-Shabaab attack nor an externally driven international Jihadi plot. Nor was it a state conspiracy as some had suggested.

Rather, the attack appears to have been carried out by a group of local young Muslims who formed a sect in 2014 in Mocimboa da Praia which is known as “Al-Shabaab”. The group controls two mosques in the town and have told their followers to stop sending their children to secular institutions such as state schools and hospitals. It wants Sharia law applied in their area.

The fact that this first Islamist attack was carried out by Mozambicans makes the event no less shocking, particularly in a country proud of its sound and relaxed inter-religious relations. Until we get more information on the group and what triggered it to attack the state, it’s worth setting the incident within a historical context.
 

Islam in Mozambique

Islam has a very old presence in Mozambique, particularly on the coast and in the Northern parts of the country. Various Sultanates and Sheikdom existed before Portugal occupied the territory in the late 19th Century .

The Portuguese colonialists openly and officially favoured Catholicism, at a time repressing Islam and other religions. But Islam gained converts and nonetheless grew. By the time of independence in 1975 Muslims officially accounted for 13% of the population. The 1997 census gave the figure of 17.8%. Both figures are contested by Muslims who believe them to be higher.

After independence the Liberation Front of Mozambique (Frelimo) adopted Marxist-Leninism. It attacked all faiths, but Islam was particularly affected. It was a faith most state leaders didn’t understand. This was evident in incidents such as President Samora Machel keeping his shoes when he walked into the main mosque in the country. Another example was the government insisting on pigsties being built in Muslim areas in the name of “development”. Memories such as these are still raw and were raised yet again after the Mocimboa da Praia attack.

After Frelimo abandoned Marxism-Leninism and shifted to multiparty democracy, the party began courting all religions to gain electoral support. But tensions still arose from time to time. One involved the government taking steps to officially recognise Islamic holidays. This sparked a crisis in parliament in 1996 and the Frelimo governing party backtracked, adopting a more secular approach from then on.

The incident served to remind Muslims that they still felt marginalised.

Islam is overwhelmingly Sufi in Mozambique, with a majority of Muslims belonging to different Turuq (brotherhoods). Sufism represents the more mystical side of Islam – opposed by scripturalist Muslims, such as the Wahhabi, who accuse them of deviating from the Koran.

The return of African graduates from Saudi Arabia in the 1970s gave political clout to the reformist and scripturalist movements in Mozambique. They gained control of some mosques and, in collaboration with the Portuguese, expanded their presence.

Today the main national organisation is the reformist Islamic Council which was created after independence by Wahhabi elements and grew in the 1980s and 1990s in partnership with the authorities.

Splinter organisations appeared in the late 1990s and 2000s, particularly in Northern Mozambique. As reformism gained firmer ground in the north, tensions and conflict increased. Controversies emerged in relation to sufi practices, alcohol, education and dress code. There was, however, never any violence against the state.
 

Powder keg

Although no international terror group has been linked to Mocimba da Praia, the incident is very serious. Cabo Delgado is a Muslim-majority province where discoveries of giant oil and gas reserves have brought international conglomerates and their private security, making the area a potential powder-keg.

On top of this, the area is desperately poor. Northern areas of Mozambique have gained little from the economic boom of the 2000s. Mocimboa da Praia is a case in point: little development has been seen even as expectations exploded following the discovery of massive gas and oil reserves in the province. Billions of dollars have been invested in offshore drilling, with little benefit to local communities.

The government must devise a careful and well-thought response to this new Islamist threat. Downplaying the affair as “banditry” and dealing only with the sect when it’s clear that there are broader religious and social dynamics at play risks seeing the problem reemerge elsewhere.

In turn, going for an all-out repression to eradicate the “Islamist threat” could radicalise other Muslims and root the problem deeper and more widely – think only of Boko Haram in West Africa in 2009.

So far state officials have been careful and moderate in their statements. But practice on the ground needs to follow the same line and some changes in social and religious policy will need to follow.
 

Eric Morier-Genoud, Lecturer in African history, Queen’s University Belfast

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

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Although he weaves these two elements of his identity together in many ways, during Ramadan the borderline between them becomes palpable. For the 3,500 to 5,000 Puerto Rican Muslims like Juan, the holy month of fasting brings to the surface the tensions they feel in their daily life as minorities – Muslims among their Puerto Rican family and Puerto Ricans in the Muslim community.

So, who are the Puerto Rican Muslims and what are their struggles?

Since 2015, my broader research on Islam in Latin America and the Caribbean has taken me back and forth between Puerto Rico and cities in the U.S. where Puerto Rican Muslims live in large numbers (New York, New Jersey, Florida, Chicago, Atlanta, Houston and Philadelphia) in an effort to better understand the Puerto Rican Muslim story.

What I have found in my research is a deep history and a rich narrative that expands the understanding of what it means to be Muslim, and Puerto Rican, today.
 

The history of Muslims in Puerto Rico

Muslims first came to the island as part of the transatlantic colonial exchange between Spain and Portugal and the “New World.” There is evidence that the first Muslims arrived with the explorers in the 16th century. Many “Moriscos,” or Iberian Muslims, came to the Caribbean bypassing Spanish laws that prohibited them from coming to the Americas and serving as merchants, slaves and explorers.

Slaves from West Africa also came. Though these Muslim slave communities did not thrive, or even survive, Islam established itself in significant ways across the American hemisphere. It became the region’s “second monotheistic religion” – a result of the religious imagination and inventive ritualistic adaptation of Muslim slaves, former slaves and maroons – Africans who escaped slavery and founded independent settlements. These Muslims left their mark and contributed to the culture and history of the continents.

These slave communities, however, faded due to conversion to Catholicism or adoption of Afro-American religious practices. Today’s Muslim communities largely comprise recent immigrants from Jordan, Palestine, Lebanon, Egypt and Syria; some are descendants of late 19th- and 20th-century immigrants. Ethnically speaking, nearly two-thirds of Puerto Rico’s Muslim population is made up of Palestinian immigrants living in places like Caguas and San Juan who came fleeing political turmoil or to pursue business interests abroad.
 

Recent conversions

In recent years some Puerto Ricans have been reverting to the religion of their ancestors: Islam. How they wrestle with their identity as both Muslim and Puerto Rican is a key focus of my research.

Straddled between a predominately Arab Muslim population on the one hand and their avowedly Puerto Rican families, neighbors and coworkers who imagine Islam as something foreign to, rather than part of, Puerto Rico, converts struggle to marry the two identities they now claim. They are in search of a Boricua “Islamidad” – a unique Puerto Rican Muslim identity that resists complete assimilation to Arab cultural norms even as it reimagines and expands what it means to be Puerto Rican and a Muslim.
 

In each of Puerto Rico’s nine mosques, researchers have found an increasing number of recent local converts. There is no accurate measure, but anecdotal evidence suggests rising numbers.

One of them is Juan, whom I first met at an Eid al-Fitr – the festival of breaking the Ramadan fast – celebration at the San Juan Convention Center in 2015. The 40-something man of Dominican descent and Puerto Rican heritage said,
 

“I came to Islam by asking questions: about the ills of society, the difficulties of life.”
 

Juan found that Catholicism, the religion adopted by his ancestors when they converted, was too confusing, the doctrine of “tawhid” in Islam – the oneness of God – simpler than what he believed to be the complex theology of the Trinity. Furthermore, he felt that Islam called for a higher morality and sense of self-discipline. And so, he “reverted” – that is, returned to the faith of his birth and the heritage of his Iberian forebears in al-Andalus, in what is modern-day Spain.

But Juan, like many other converts, is also searching for a sense of authenticity in his new community. While Juan finds that his Muslim brothers and sisters appreciate him, he still feels marginalized because of his cultural background. He finds ways to express his “Boricua” (a term for resident Puerto Ricans, derived from the island’s indigenous name Borinquen) pride and his Muslim identity by sporting a “taqiyah” (a short, rounded skull cap) decorated with the Puerto Rican flag.

Another Puerto Rican convert from Aguadilla, Abu Livia, lives in this tension as well. He told me during an interview, “too often we hear people say you have to wear certain clothes, speak a certain language, look like an Arab, talk like an Arab, behave like an Arab.”

Not just Juan and Abu Livia, as I found in my research, but many other Puerto Rican Muslims are looking toward Andalusia, or Moorish Spain, to define who they are in a Puerto Rican society that claims a mixed background of indigenous, African and European influences.
 

Combining traditions

As such, Puerto Rican Muslims are finding ways of expressing their Muslim faith through symbols of Puerto Rican culture, whether it be their flag, their family traditions or their food.

Walking toward his home at the end of a long day of work, Juan looks forward to a quiet “iftar” – a meal to break the daily fast – with his family. It’s hot; beads of sweat have gathered like the faithful for prayer on his forehead; his legs are almost to the point of dragging up the small hill to his home; and the difficulties of Ramadan in a Caribbean climate weigh upon him. Even so, he smiles and gives praise to Allah.

As the sun sets and Juan prepares a light Puerto Rican meal of tostones – twice-fried plantains – his sincerity toward both his culture and his faith cannot be challenged.
 

“If anyone questions my religion,” said Juan, “they cannot question my ‘taqwa,’ my intention and fear of God.”

 

Ken Chitwood, Ph.D. Candidate, Religion in the Americas, Global Islam, University of Florida

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

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Two worlds? Minaret in Brick Lane, East London. Andy Sedg/Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND

Governments in Britain have tended to treat Muslim citizens much like colonial administrations treated their subjects. Intermediaries – tribal leaders or religious figures – are found to establish communication between the empire and its people.

One positive thing about a recent ICM poll of British muslims is that it offers an alternative. The survey, carried out for a Channel 4 documentary, was never going to be able to reflect the complexity of British Muslim life accurately, but it does signal a shift by engaging directly with Muslim citizens.

How poll data is used is one way to test how colonialism’s legacy might linger on. The Daily Mail chose for its headline the quote: “Muslims are not like us and we should just accept that they will not integrate …” while Sky News highlighted that: “Half of British Muslims want homosexuality banned.”

Few media outlets rushed to use the headline that “86% of Muslims feel strong affiliation with UK, higher than the national average", although this too is one of the findings from the survey. It is an “us and them” framework that fails to spark debate about who “we” might be and why “they”, with all their differences, might need greater integration with us, as the report has suggested.

We don’t have space here to discuss how the category Muslim may be broken up across class, regional or ethnic background. Nor will we get into comparisons with others: whether, for instance, British Catholics, or for that matter, members of the Conservative Party, might have similar sentiments towards homosexuality.

Same stop. Same destination? Kamyar Adl/Flickr, CC BY

I want to focus on a more pervasive but implicit idea that allows the obsessive focus on difference. It is what Trevor Philips, the former head of the Equality and Human Rights Commission and presenter of the documentary, has called everyone else’s “centre of gravity”. A key aspect of that is the concept of secularism, which many take to mean the separation of church and state.

State of affairs

There is an underlying assumption that Islam as a religion is uncomfortable with secularism and that Muslims require “integration” to be able to live in secular states. This assumption finds forceful evidence in the desire expressed by 23% of the Muslims polled for some form of sharia law in UK. Critics who claim that Islamic thought and practice is uncomfortable with secularism may be right, but we need to pause and consider first what they mean by secularism. Is it the same thing that many Muslims might be uncomfortable with?

The most common assumption about secularism is that it is a separation of state and religion. This assumes a universal definition of religion as a specific set of ideas and practices that we can separate from other aspects of life. This definition is, of course, a product of a particular social historical context and not one that is universally true.

Part of life. The Koran. Mohammed J/Flickr, CC BY-ND

Colonialism was integral not just to exporting ideas about what constitutes a religion to other parts of the world, but on imposing that vision of religion on societies that did not demarcate the spiritual from the economic, the moral from the political.

Britain, a deeply Christian society right up to the early 1960s and where empire and Christianity were tied closely together in a “civilising mission”, imposed its definitions on its Asian and African colonies, actively reshaping religious practices. It is not widely discussed that the rigid codification of sharia, as well as Hindu practices, was a process started by colonial administration in India in the late 18th century.

In fact, the notion of religion as a compartmentalised aspect of human existence does not mean much for those who think of Islam, not as a set of specific practices or laws, but as a way of life, or “deen”, which has long been wrongly translated as “religion”.

More critically, the definition of secularism as a separation of church and state obscures a key reality. Historically, secularism has actually entailed the increasing control and management of religious thought and practice by the state. It is not a separation, but a relationship in which the state has increasing control.

In his nuanced analysis of secularism and its development within the European context, cultural theorist Talal Asad showed how this led not just to opening up of church property for market circulation, but also to a new closeness. Perhaps it is easiest if we think of secularism as an inversion of a previous relationship in the European context where the Roman Catholic church had extensive control over the state.

Saudi atheism

Within what we call the “Western” experience of secularism are many differences: the American constitution attempts to protect religious practice from heavy state intervention, leading to a highly religious citizenry. The French state has generally carried out very aggressive management of religious practice.

National Front posters in France highlight tension. EPA/CHRISTOPHE PETIT TESSON

Secularism as state management of religion is precisely the aspect that the vast majority of Muslims find alien. On the other hand, Islamists – by definition those who want to take over the state to transform society through their interpretation of Islam – find it an appealing prospect.

Unlike the Catholic church, which forms the bedrock of many European attitudes towards religion, Islamic practice has been fairly decentralised over the last 1,400 years. Sharia has been, for the most part, a set of guidelines rather than a set of laws, enforced not by the state but self-imposed through believers deciding to follow the scholarly opinions of particular muftis.

This self-imposition has allowed Islamic thought and practice much more entrenchment in social and political life. That Islam is not reliant on state imposition is precisely what makes it much more accessible to believers than the structured hierarchy of European churches.

Where states such as in Saudi Arabia have pursued state imposition, the level of disaffection with religious practice is very high. In recent decades, atheism has seen significant growth in the kingdom. So many have declared their atheism that the government last year passed a law against it.

Secularism, apparently a cornerstone of British values, is then something quite different from what mainstream understanding would suggest, as is the relationship of Muslims with it. Insisting on integration, without any questioning of dominant assumptions and beliefs, values and ideas, carries strong echoes of colonialism. How and why the UK’s “centre of gravity” came to be defined through its opposition to Muslims needs to be opened up if this report is to be an exercise in bringing us all together.

(This article was first published on The Conversation.)
 

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