since i'm moving into a realm which could potentially be viewed as part of Islamic theology, i'm going to keep this post brief. there is a sense in which thinking about the mobilization of religious language is something which i am qualified to talk about, but i like to have some idea of that religious basis to apply my expertise.
what the heck am i talking about? Ramadan, of course.
as i mentioned in the first blog post about the title of the blog, one reason why i found the title appropriate was the circulation of comments at the beginning of Ramadan directed at the al-assad regime (see for instance, turkish president abdullah gül's comments). gül's comments here suggest that there is something more atrocious about military action and slaughter of civilians if it is done during the holy month. these kinds of comments have continued.
in the case of syria, after breaking the fast and the sunset maghrib prayer, the critical mass of people together has been an important rallying point for protestors of the assad regime- and subsequently a time of the harshest repression. so while there is some objective reason to a heightened focus on violence in syria during Ramadan, using it as the basis for a call to peace and civility does not seem to me to directly follow.
indeed, what made me decide to write a little bit about this rhetoric of Ramadan non-violence were the unrelated comments of turkey's prime minister erdoğan after a recent attack on turkish soldiers by the pkk (kurdistan workers' party, recognized by most countries as a terrorist group- here is the wikipedia page). erdoğan has explicitly said that severe retaliation and military operations in response to these attacks will take place after Ramadan. "wait until Ramadan ends" he is quoted as saying. of course, in between starting this post and finishing it, erdoğan did in fact not wait until Ramadan ended to retaliate, just like assad blithely ignored the calls for restraint during the holy month.
so why use the rhetoric? there is the obvious answer that we should take these statements at face value: Ramadan is the holy month of the first revelations of the Quran, a time meant for focusing on God,introspection, family and, yes, 'community.' as the month of revelation, it is seen as generally a holy month, and thus violence of any kind would deserve special condemnation during the period.
okay, fine. but if we think back to my post about the military and the reliance on reasons of turkish secularism for intervention, we can ask the same question: what special force or gravity comes from an invocation of a religious condemnation of violence? this question of the binding nature of religious authority is a central one to the work of some of my professors (in particular hussein agrama) and one with which i am seriously grappling. hussein's paper on the fatwa courts in egypt succinctly and powerfully expresses many of his thoughts on the question of 'religious authority' (ethics, tradition, authority: towards and anthropology of the fatwa, american ethnologist volume 37, issue 1). he presents a question towards the end of the article (13), which gives a sense of how these two very different cases (the fatwa and the use of Ramadan as a rhetorical tool against violence) of 'religious authority' may be related: "It is the problem not of freedom but of authority, of how selves are maintained and advanced within the traditions to which they bear a sense of obligation, or, put alternately, how a tradition is inherited by its adherents." while not an answer to the question of the authority of the appeal to end violence during Ramadan, it does begin to suggest why such an appeal might work.
otherwise, why not simply condemn killing of civilians? rights discourse is a powerful contemporary vocabulary. why not employ it? and again, i can't do too much more than pose these questions. in addition to a sense of responsibility and authority which is supposed to come from religion (and the more nuanced discussion of 'religion' and 'authority' discussed above), i would venture an additional idea. in particular with the case the condemnations of assad's violence by turkish politicians, we can see what (linguistic) anthropologists have called variously 'footing' or 'figuration' (okay, goffman was a sociologist). that is to say, syria, already under sanctions by the us before the violent suppression, is not too keen on 'western intervention.' by using shared religious language, the turkish officials use a different vocabulary, set of assumptions, etc. which positions them differently from, say, other members of nato. 'look,' the use of the Ramadan rhetoric says, 'as your friendly and Muslim neighbors, we, not nato, the us, the un etc. are telling you that this is unacceptable.' of course, assad replied with arguments about sovereignty based on international law, which is a whole other story (and, given some of the things i've been reading, a possible blog topic).
beyond this, i'd love to hear some ideas about this. it really is mostly a question for me: why, in the face of horrendous attacks on civilians, does Ramadan have anything to do with it? what additional force or authority is being claimed by making these statements? what sorts of alignments does this rhetoric create? i suppose i could have spent more time on the question of authority, but i feel guilty that i haven't written a paper for the class on which authority was a central topic.
about that paper...
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