political catholicism and political islam_synopsis

7/30/2019 Political Catholicism and Political Islam_synopsis

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SYNOPSIS

ON

POLITICAL CATHOLICISM AND POLITICAL ISLAM COMPARATIVE

PERSPECTIVE


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ABSTRACT

The works of scholars and Eastern Christian writings claim that Christianity was

introduced to India by Thomas the Apostle, who visited Muziris in Kerala in 52

AD and baptized Kerala's Jewish settlements who are known as Saint Thomas

Christians (also known as Syrian Christians or Nasrani) today. Although the exact

origins of Christianity in India remain unclear, there is a general scholarly

consensus that Christianity was rooted in India by the 3rd century AD, including

some communities who used Syriac liturgically, and it is a possibility that the

religion's existence there extends to as far back as the 1st century.[35] Christianity

in India has different denominations, like Roman Catholicism, Oriental Orthodox

Christianity and Protestantism.

Roman Catholic is a denomination practiced by over 17.3 million people in India

which represents less than 2% of the total population. Most Catholics reside in

South India. Goa is home to Roman Catholics. The state known for its Christian

population. Christianity was introduced to Indians twice. Possibly in the 1st

century by St. Thomas, and by Europeans. Europeans brought Catholicism in the

13th century (Portuguese) and Protestantism in the 18th century (British and

American missionaries). It became popular following European colonization and


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Protestant missionary efforts. The essay draws some comparisons between Old

Catholic and current Muslim politics at three different levels:

(1) at the level of the transnational structures of Catholicism and Islam as world

religions;

(2) at the level of religious political parties and movements in national politics; and

(3) at related issues of immigrant incorporation of Catholics in Anglo-Protestant

societies in the past and of Muslims in secular-Christian Western societies today.


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INTRODUCTION

As religious regimes, both Catholicism and Islam preceded and are likely to outlast

the modern world system of nation-states The very attribute transnational only

makes sense in relation to the Westfalian system of sovereign nation-states that

emerged in early modernity and eventually replaced the system of medieval

Christendom. That system had been centered on the conflictive interdependent

relation between the Roman papacy and the Holy Roman Empire. Of all the world

religions, none had seemed as threatened at its core by the emergence of the

modern world system of sovereign territorial states as the Roman Church. The

dissolution of Western Christendom undermined the role of the papacy as the

spiritual head of a universal Christian monarchy represented by the Holy Roman

Empire. The papacy lost control of the emerging national Catholic churches to

caesaro-papist Catholic monarchs and it itself became territorialized into the Papal

States, reduced to being just another marginal and increasingly irrelevant sovereign

territorial state. One by one, from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, most of

the transnational dimensions of Medieval Catholicism receded or disappeared

altogether. It is not surprising, therefore, that the Catholic Church remained for

centuries adamantly antimodern and developed a negative philosophy of history.


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Mother Teresa issued thousands of disclaimers about any knowledge of politics,

but even a casual look at her career would make one wonder if she "doth protest

too much."

I wish to make it absolutely clear that unlike Christopher Hitchens, I am not

judging Mother Teresa from a leftist sanctimonious angle. According to Hitchens,

Mother Teresa was bad because she did not share his politics. I am afraid I have no

time for such a view, not least because I have no defined politics myself.

On an national level, Mother Teresa's political agenda were narrow -- the "politics"

of human reproductive intervention, and, Catholicism. In India however, she often

involved herself with less subtle and more earthly politics.

On the issues of abortion, contraception and Catholicism, she found her political

allies in a particular spectrum in the political arena, who are most vociferous in the

United States. Indeed, her biggest political allies were also in this country, as were

her most powerful financial backers. Not all her political friends were Catholics,

and some -- like Ronald Reagan -- are sturdy Christians from other denominations.

Without actually giving an overt call to the American people to vote Republican,

she made it very clear -- especially by meeting Republican hopefuls before

elections -- whom she supported. When the Republican presidential nominee Bob

Dole was once challenged by his own party over his anti-abortion credentials, he


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invoked the Teresa card, saying that he had been endorsed by Mother Teresa.

Ironically, it was the 1804 Concordat with Napoleon that served as the blueprint

for the successive concordats with secular states, which allowed the papacy to

regain control of the national hierarchies. In the course of the nineteenth century,

however, as conflicts with the liberal state became endemic throughout Europe and

Latin America, it became increasingly evident that it was easier to safeguard papal

claims in Anglo-Saxon countries that had institutionalized freedom of religion than

in Latin Catholic countries, even when Catholicism was officially established as

the state religion. Indeed, Anglo-Saxon as well as Protestant countries such as

Holland, Germany, or Switzerland, where Catholics constituted large minorities,

became strongholds of modern Romanization and of a new liberal form of Catholic

ultramontanes, distinct from the integrality ultramontanes that was tied to the

restoration of European monarchies.

The year 1870 marks the turning point in the modern process of Catholic

globalization. At the very moment when the Papal States were incorporated into

the new Kingdom of Italy and the papacy was forced to renounce its claims to

territorial sovereignty, the First Vatican Council reaffirmed papal supremacy.

Through the control of the nomination of bishops, the papacy has gained

progressively and for the first time in history control over the national churches.

Significantly, non-Catholic liberal states were the first ones to accept the


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transnational papal claims, while Catholic monarchs tried to preserve the old

caesaro-papist claims of state supremacy. Today, the Peoples Republic of India

may be the only state in the world still claiming supremacy over its national

Catholic Church. Not surprisingly, Catholic nations under non-Catholic rule,

Catholic minorities in Protestant countries, and Catholic immigrant diasporas were

the first ones to lend support to the new papal global claims.

The Muslims of India, over 120 million, constitute about 12 percent of the total

population and are the second largest religious community in the country. They are

about 10 percent of the total Muslim population of the world and are nearly one

third of the total Muslim minority population in the world.[9] India has the largest

concentration of the Muslims outside the member countries of the Organization of

the Islamic Conference (OIC) and the second largest (after Indonesia) in the world.

The Muslim immigrants, mostly Arabs, Turks, Afghans and Mughals, made the

sub-continent their own homeland. Scattered in different cities, towns and villages,

they became indistinguishable from the original inhabitants of India. The Muslim

scholars and religious leaders propagated Islam among the original inhabitants and

a large number of them converted to Islam. The vast majority of the present-day

Indian Muslims are the descendants of these converts. It is therefore not correct to


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say that Indian Muslims are not Indian but outsiders as it is wrong to say that they

are all descendants of the converted Muslims. As far as the question of Indian

origin is concerned, there is no difference between the descendants of the Aryan

invaders (Brahmins, Kshatryas, Vaishyas) and the offsprings of the Muslim

immigrants. In fact, the Muslim community of India, with its major segment

having indigenous Indian origin, is more Indian than the descendants of the Aryan

immigrants who had their origin somewhere in the Central Asia.

The loss of the Papal States rather than leading to the further weakening or even

extinction of the papacy, as was first feared, has led to the reconstitution of the

Vatican as the highly centralized administrative core of a modern transnational

religious regime, this time on a truly Catholic, that is, global-ecumenical basis. The

Vaticans unchallenged control over the process of nomination of bishops through

the papal nuncios has proven to be the single most important factor in papal control

of the transnational Catholic Church. The internationalization of the Vatican Curia

serves as counterpart to the global Romanization of the local Catholic churches.

In addition, the contemporary process of Catholic globalization finds expression

primarily in three new directions: in the ever wider publication of papal encyclicals

dealing not only with matters of Catholic faith, morality, and internal church

discipline, but also with secular global issues affecting all of humanity; in the

increasingly active and vocal role of the papacy in international conflicts and in


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issues dealing with world peace, world order, and world politics; and in the public

visibility of the person of the pope as a symbolic high priest of a new universal

civil religion of humanity and as the first citizen of a global civil society.

As a transnational religious regime, Islam never had the highly centralized,

hierarchic, and priestly-clerical structure of the Catholic Church. Against the often

repeated claim that Islam is religion and state and, therefore, knows no clear

differentiation of religion and politics, even a superficial acquaintance with the

complex history of premodern Muslim societies across three continents and over a

millennium makes abundantly clear that the patterns of relations and, indeed,

differentiation between religious and political institutions and structures are as

diverse as anything one finds in Latin Christendom or, indeed, in any other world

religion. But as a political system, the Muslim Caliphate, in its successive

institutionalizations from the Umayyad Caliphate through the Abbasids, had some

structural similarities with medieval Christendom.

However, when the Ottoman Sultans assumed the title of Caliphs in the

sixteenth century, in the dynamic context of Mediterranean and Central East

European geopolitics and in confrontation with the emerging post-Reformation

European system of states, the Caliphate was transformed in a modern absolutist

caesaro-papist direction. Although what could be called positivist secular

legislation under the Ottomans was named qnn (after ecclesiastical canon law),


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in fact, canon law in Islam means exactly the opposite of Catholic canon law. The

two functions of Sultanate and Caliphate were separately invested in the same

Ottoman ruler, but, as positive legislators, the Ottomans functioned only as Sultans

and, as pointed out by Fazlur Rahman, the qnn-law was a product of the

Sultanate, not the Caliphate.4

The European colonial expansion into the abode of Islam and the posterior

globalization of the European system of nation-states undermined the viability of

all premodern forms of Muslim polities. The political world of Islam disintegrated

throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Like European

Christendom before, Islam also became fragmented and territorialized into nation-

states. The dissolution of the Caliphate following the collapse of the Ottoman

Empire found little resistance throughout the Muslim world, particularly in

predominantly Muslim countries. With the emergence of various forms of secular

nationalism after World War II, it seemed as if the nation were becoming also for

Muslim peoples the primary imagined community, replacing the old transnational

imagined community of the ummah. It is increasingly evident, however, that in the

last decades, Islam is being reconstituted as a transnational religious regime and as

a global imagined community. The proliferation of transnational Muslim networks

of all kinds, transnational migration and the emergence of Muslim diasporas

throughout the world, the massive global proportions of the pilgrimage to Mecca,


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the establishment of global Islamic mass media, the expressions of global

solidarity with the Palestinian people and other Muslim causes-all can be viewed

as manifestations of the contemporary globalization of Islam.6

But unlike the modern reconstitution of the papacy as the core of a de-

territorialized transnational Catholic religious regime, the dissolution of the

Caliphate has created a void and a still unresolved crisis in the political imaginery

of Islam as a transnational religious regime. Three alternative models of

organization of Islam and of the global ummah are competing on the world stage

among Muslim actors.

The predominant model and the one more in accordance with the world system of

states is that of an international system of Muslim states in geopolitical

competition with other state blocs and with Western hegemony. To a certain

extent, this has been the aim of the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC)

since its founding in 1972. Virtually all states with majority Muslim populations

now belong to the Conference. No other world religion has such an interstate

organization. Yet, the OIC has proven an extremely ineffective and noncohesive

organization.


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LITRATURE REVIEW

the Catholic Church is an institution of singular importance in the coastal villages

of Kanyakumari, there is no single way of understanding its role. It is a key

element of the identity of the villagers, the basis of their faith, and an intimate part

of their everyday lives and struggles. As Kalpana Ram (1992) has argued, it also

functions as a quasi-state in the villages. From the time of the Churchs entry

here five centuries ago, every state of the day, including that of postcolonial India,

has accommodated it, allowed it to take on administrative and judicial functions,

and to represent the villagers. The size and prominence of the church in every

village, especially when contrasted to the cramped housing of the villagers,

illustrates its centrality as a structure of authority. The Church also operates at

multiple scales beyond the local: not only as part of a powerful international

institution, but at the national scale, as representing a small minority. Catholic faith

and identity are deeply rooted and thoroughly indigenised; nevertheless, as an

international institution, the Church must constantly struggle between introducing

new ideas and directives from the World Church (for instance, around theological


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purity and liturgical practice), and the need to inculturate2 and remain

indigenous, especially in the context of Hindu nationalism. Nor is the relationship

between the local Church and its community entirely harmonious, with its

authority being constantly called into question, and many of its own activities

being about restoring or trying to maintain legitimacy. Charting the course this

struggle has taken over the centuries between the secular and the spiritual, the

international and the national, the institutional and the popularis necessary to a

complex understanding of the Churchs present role.

Much of the task of mediation between the different levels outlined above is

carried out by individual clergymen, many of whom come from the fishing

villages. Drawing on Gramscis schema (1971: 5-14), this article examines their

role as agents of transformation, both as organic intellectuals representing their

class, and as traditional intellectuals who articulate the ideology of the Church and

state. Attending closely to the background and role of the clergy helps us to

compare and counterpose their involvement in politics with similarly placed

individuals in Hindu right organisations, most of whom are drawn from the upper

castes (Jaffrelot 1996, Saberwal & Hasan 2006), and for whom the intertwining of

religion and politics is a way of keeping other castes and religions down.

Church-related associations play another key linking role between the Church and

state. Over the years, for reasons having to do locally with needing to maintain


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legitimacy with its followers, nationally with matching secular movements aimed

at social reform, and internationally with movements of contestation and reform,

the Catholic Church has introduced a variety of associational forms in the villages.

These range from pious associations and youth groups, to the Basic Christian

Communities (BCCs) and Parish Councils. They have become spaces from within

which the Church struggles to maintain its relevance, and from which parishioners

seek to make claims upon the Church and state, while simultaneously asserting

their autonomy from them. But they are also spaces within which villagers seek to

reform the hierarchies of village life itself, such as the exclusion of women from

political authority. Religiosity here is mediated by an awareness of wider Indian

tropes of democracy and development, and villagers ability to negotiate between

the Church and other patrons such as political parties in order to further their

secular interests. Fishers rarely act only as Catholics, but also as members of

backward castes, regional and linguistic identities, fisher people, and women.

Equally importantly, the associations are spaces where members learn the routines

and technologies of modern governance, such as rules of order for the conduct of

meetings, minutes and accounts, village censuses, and membership cards.

The second model is one of diverse nonstate transnational Muslim groups, the

kilafist, striving to reconstitute the Caliphate, or a global Muslim polity,

incorporating all the historical territories of Dar el Islam, of which the radical


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jihdis willing to use spectacular terror across state borders are the most prominent,

or at least they have attained the greatest global prominence. In terms of numbers,

those may be relatively small and rather isolated and loosely organized cells, but

through their willingness to openly challenge the hegemony of the Western

powers, particularly that of the United States, and through the skillful use of

Muslim rhetoric and symbols, they have captured the imagination and the

sympathy of many disaffected Muslims throughout the world, particularly in the

diasporas of radical Islam.9 Although a highly destructive force able to disrupt the

international order, such terrorist groups present no real threat to Western

hegemony or to the established Muslim states, no more so than did their modern

global precursors, the anarchist terrorist groups of the end of the nineteenth century

or the left communist factions of the 1960s. On the contrary, by provoking the

military response of the only global superpower, they have contributed to the

strengthening of global U.S. hegemony. International multilateral intelligence and

policing would probably prove more effective against such transnational terror

groups than a global war on terror that is unable to discriminate against various

forms of radical Islam.

There are some similarities between transnational jihdism today and Catholic

ultramontanism in the nineteenth century. Both were parallel responses of

transnational religious groups to the threats of the modern system of nation-states


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and the political opportunities of globalization. But Catholic ultramontanism only

turned politically violent in conjunction with integralist tendencies aiming to

restore Catholic authoritarian monarchism against the liberal state, particularly

against republicanism, as in the case of the Carlist wars in Spain or

counterrevolutionary Catholic monarchism in France.10 The Cristero Rebellion in

laic post-revolutionary Mexico had a similar character.11 In Spain, those Catholic

political movements also assumed explicitly the identity of Christian crusades and

in its final stage, in the global political context of the underground radical

movements of the 1960s, they even assumed the name of Guerrilleros de Cristo

Rey.

In the 1930s, however, the surviving currents of Catholic ant liberal and ant

modernist integralism fed the various movements of Catholic Fascism and

authoritarian corporatism throughout Latin Europe and Latin America, searching

for a Catholic Third Way between bourgeois liberal democracy and godless

Bolshevik communism.


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RESEARCH METHODOLOGY

India is a multicultural and pluralistic religious society, but Christians have been

largely absent from political life. Menezes took the plunge when he joined the BJP.

Atal Bihari Vajpayee, the present prime minister of India and the most influential

leader in the BJP party, appointed Menezes to the national executive committee.

When confronting immigrants in their midst, Europeans rarely reflect upon the fact

that, throughout the modern era, European societies have been the primary

immigrant-sending region in the world. In the last decades, however, the migration

flows have reversed and many Western European societies have become, instead,

centers of global immigration. But European societies still have difficulty viewing

themselves as permanent immigrant societies or viewing the native second

generation as nationals, irrespective of their legal status. They prefer to maintain

the illusion that immigration is a temporary phenomenon, that those are guest

workers who can be sent home or refused entry whenever it is convenient. But

unless it is willing to turn itself into fortress Europe, with heavily policed

external borders, and thus belie the self image of cosmopolitan modernity it would


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like to have, the EU is unlikely to be able to stop completely the constant global

flow of refugees and of legal and illegal immigration. Under contemporary

conditions of globalization, fortress Europe would be economically,

geopolitically, and culturally self-defeating. It would turn Europe into a parochial,

ethnocentric, and peripheral peninsula of Asia, the position it had before the rise of

European hegemony in early modernity.

It was only later on that the national perspective was frowned upon by a political

leadership which was out to seek Muslim support for the national movement as a

short-cut to a quick and peaceful transfer of power. The Muslim support failed to

materialise. Instead, Islamic imperialism became parasitic on the national

movement, and continued to fatten till it succeeded in partitioning the country. But

in the process, the national perspective on Indian history stood subverted in all its

essentials. We are now paying the price in the from of renewed aggression from

Islamic imperialism, and the growing fissiparous tendencies within the national

fold.

The national perspective had become diluted when some scribes, patronised by an

opportunist or self-alienated political leadership, had started parading Siraj-ud-

Dawla, Hyder Ali, Tipu Sultan and Bahadur Shah, the last Mughal, as Indian


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patriots, and pillorying Mir Jafar and Omichand as traitors. It had become distorted

when the Mughal empire had begun to be depicted as a native political system in

which its victims, the Hindus, were harangued to take as much pride as they had

done earlier in the Maurya, the Andhra, and the Gupta empires. And it had suffered

a total perversion when the Mamluks, the Khaljis, the Tughlaqs, the Sayyads, the

Lodis and the Bahmanis were transformed into indigenous dynasties on par with

the Maukharis, the Rashtrakutas, the Chalukyas, the Chandellas, the Chauhans, and

so on. In the process, the bulkwarks of national resistance like Mewar and

Vijayanagar were reduced to puny Hindu principalities on par with provinces ruled

by Muslim governors, and indomitable freedom fighters like Rana Pratap and

Shivaji were cut down to the size of local chieftains on par with Muslim rebels

who frequently ran foul of their imperialist overlords at Delhi or Agra.


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OBJECTIVE OF THE STUDY

Clash of Civilizations or Parallel Aggiornamentos? Transnational Structures of Catholicism and Islam as Worldly Religious

Regimes

Define Political Catholicism and Political Islam in Comparative Perspective.


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CONCLUSION

All the world religions, none had seemed as threatened at its core by the emergence

of the modern world system of sovereign territorial states as the Roman Church.

The dissolution of Western Christendom undermined the role of the papacy as the

spiritual head of a universal Christian monarchy represented by the Holy Roman

Empire. The papacy lost control of the emerging national Catholic churches to

caesaro-papist Catholic monarchs and it itself became territorialized into the Papal

States, reduced to being just another marginal and increasingly irrelevant sovereign

territorial state. One by one, from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, most of

the transnational dimensions of Medieval Catholicism receded or disappeared

altogether.

Anti-immigrant xenophobic nativism, the conservative defense of Christian culture

and civilization, secularist antireligious prejudices, liberal-feminist critiques of

Muslim patriarchal fundamentalism, and the fear of Islamist terrorist networks are

being fused indiscriminately throughout Europe into a uniform anti-Muslim

discourse which practically precludes the kind of mutual accommodation between


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immigrant groups and host societies that is necessary for successful immigrant

incorporation.

REFERENCES

http://www.voiceofdharma.org/books/hhrmi/ch1.htm http://www.loompanics.com/Articles/PoliticalIslam.html Brock, P. (2005) IndigenousPeoples and Religious Change, Brill Academic Publishers Budick, S. & Iser, W. (1996) The Translatability of Cultures, Stanford University Press Clogg, R. (2004) A Millet within a Millet: The Karalides, inI Kathimas Anatoli:

Studies in Ottoman Greek History, Istanbul: The Isis Press

Draper, J. (2006) Africa in Sawyer J. (ed.) The Blackwell Companion to the Bible andCulture, Blackwell Publishing

Fuze, M.M. (1922) Abantu Abamnyama Lapa Bavela Ngakona, Pietermaritzburg:University of Natal Press

Grey, J. (2009) The Importance of Vernacular Bible Translations by Martin Luther, JohnWycliffe, and Erasmus in the Reformation, [online] available from:

http://janegrey.hubpages.com/hub/The-Role-of-Bible-Translations-in-the-Reformation

[accessed 10/11/11]
http://www.voiceofdharma.org/books/hhrmi/ch1.htmhttp://www.voiceofdharma.org/books/hhrmi/ch1.htmhttp://www.loompanics.com/Articles/PoliticalIslam.htmlhttp://www.loompanics.com/Articles/PoliticalIslam.htmlhttp://www.loompanics.com/Articles/PoliticalIslam.htmlhttp://www.voiceofdharma.org/books/hhrmi/ch1.htm


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