This excerpt is the conclusion of the book and considers the provocative question, “have the crusades ended?” By outlining how selective and incomplete ideas of the crusades have functioned in modern geopolitical debates right up until the present moment, I show both the connection and the disjunction between past and present, between the history of the crusades and their modern depiction. Ultimately, I suggest, both past and present urge us to acknowledge the complexity of human relationships and the danger of simplistic “us v. them” ideologies of violence.

***

Conclusion: Have the Crusades Ended?

“‘Crusade’ even in its most apparently benign usage divides the world into black and white […] it effaces the nuance, the grey, in both our modern world and the medieval one it purports to represent.”[1]

Crusading influenced European national identities and European interactions with the rest of the world in the early modern and modern eras. This lasting impression is visible in not only the material cultures of Europe and in a legacy of anti-Jewish and anti-Muslim ideologies and actions, but in European philosophy and history. In eighteenth-century Europe, historians like David Hume and Edward Gibbon disparaged the crusades as the opposite of the rational “Enlightenment” they themselves hoped to promote. This disparagement created an image of the crusades that has persisted to the present, namely, that of barbaric wars fueled by greed and religious fanaticism. From this perspective, these unholy wars serve as the mascot for a murky Middle Ages, a veritable Dark Age. In creating this image of the crusades, eighteenth-century historians pulled on medieval sources selectively, making use of those that supported their perspective and ignoring—or unaware of—counterevidence.

In contrast, nineteenth-century romanticism and nationalism ushered in an era of increased positive attention to the crusades in Europe. Romantic writers like Sir Walter Scott and William Wordsworth simultaneously glorified both the crusades and Salah al-Din, whom they depicted as culturally and morally sophisticated. Historians like Joseph Michaud used the crusades to bolster contemporary national identity and kindle nationalistic fervor. The great edited compilations of crusading primary sources were constructed at the same time as the great edited compilations of “national” primary sources from the Middle Ages, and some imperialists explicitly linked their enterprises to earlier centuries of crusading. For example, L’Institut Religieux et Militaire des Frères Armés du Sahara, a new military order, was briefly created to promote Franco-Catholic interests in Africa, while in England, Sir William Hillary called for a new crusade to seize Acre from the Ottomans and establish a new order-state centered on Jerusalem.

Unsurprisingly, then, in the nineteenth-century the English word “crusade” acquired the broader, romanticized meaning of a righteous pursuit of justice. The romantic nationalists had generated a second image of the crusades that has also persisted to the present. Thus, in European history and memory, the eighteenth-century image of unholy holy wars rubbed shoulders with the nineteenth-century image of honorable, glorious, and self-sacrificing quests to build a better world by using force to smite the evildoer, defend the good, and liberate the oppressed. In creating this nineteenth-century image of the crusades, European historians, like their eighteenth-century predecessors, used medieval sources selectively.

The crusades continued to be invoked as an historical example for imperialist and other national or “Western” military endeavors in the twentieth century. Jonathan Riley-Smith has asserted that it was in the aftermath of World War I that European nations and the United States of America drew back from explicit comparison between modern warfare and the crusades.[2] However, such comparisons actually carried on later into the twentieth century; examples are as readily available as President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s 1948 memoir of World War II, titled Crusade in Europe.[3] Indeed, in the early twenty-first century American politicians on both right and left have continued to discuss “crusading” either to support or criticize American aggression.[4] Meanwhile, as Andrew Elliott has demonstrated, the crusades are heavily invoked and reimagined by white nationalists across mass media platforms.[5]

In Islamicate spheres, the crusades have also been remembered in different ways and used to support different contemporary agendas. Memories of the crusades and of Salah al-Din in particular, as well as “fears of renewed attack,” remained present in Islamic popular and historical literature.[6] These memories were influenced—though not caused—by European cultural trends in the nineteenth century; the romanticized vision of bold yet culturally unsophisticated crusaders encountering a superior and chivalric Salah al-Din was particularly in line with existing trends in Islamic historiography.

The fall of the Ottoman Empire after World War I gave rise to both Arab Nationalism and Pan-Islamism,  which each remembered and reimagined the crusades. Both Arab Nationalists and Pan-Islamists oppose American and European imperialism in its political and cultural dimensions and both movements seek to build a unified state in west Asia. Both also believe that such a state would reflect the history of the region accurately. In other words, from their perspective, such a state would constitute a return to a better model rather than an entirely unprecedented challenge to the imperialist status quo. However, at the risk of overgeneralizing, while Arab Nationalists seek to build a unified Arab nation, Pan-Islamists seek to build a unified Islamic nation, i.e., a theocracy. In the later twentieth century, speaking again in broad terms, Arab Nationalism lost ground to Pan-Islamism.

Both Arab Nationalists and Pan-Islamists have constructed and made use of their own images of the crusades. For mid-twentieth-century thinkers like Sayyid Qutb, the crusades were an ominous history, the victories of Salah al-Din notwithstanding. Western imperialism/intervention in majority Muslim regions—including, after World War II, the existence of the state of Israel—appeared as the latest manifestation of “Crusading Spirit.”[7] Thus the crusades became both an inspirational example from the past and an ongoing and oppressive reality to fight in the present. Political leaders, perhaps most notably Gamal ‘Abd al-Nasir, President of Egypt (1956–70), and Saddam Hussein, President of Iraq (1979–2003), used words, art, and in the case of al-Nasir, film to depict themselves as modern Salah al-Dins. While twenty-first-century militant groups like al Qaeda and IS do not share all the same goals and ideals, they do share anti-crusading rhetoric and imagery. Furthermore, they have effectively used references to crusading in American and European political discourse to bolster their claim that the crusades are indeed ongoing and require armed resistance.[8]

In summary, then, there are a number of modern actors worldwide who maintain that the crusades are ongoing today, even if they disagree on whether that is a reason to rejoice or an injustice to protest. Whether rejoicing or protesting, these modern actors often see the continuation of crusading as a reason to take up arms and commit violence. And strictly speaking, these actors are not completely fabricating the history of the crusades, but rather—not unlike European historians in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—they are seizing upon the evidence they want to see and disregarding the rest.

One might hope that a historian’s perspective would be clearer, but even as a historian, it is difficult to establish a precise date at which the crusades can indeed be said to have ended. If we apply pluralist criteria, it appears that crusading ended in 1645. But the persistence of Hospitaller Malta into the eighteenth century and the nineteenth-century example of L’Institut Religieux et Militaire des Frères Armés du Sahara make it difficult to fix a concrete end date. Faced with this problem, Jonathan Riley-Smith suggested two analytical categories for modern phenomena: “para-crusading” (containing some “authentic elements”) and “pseudo-crusading” (containing no “authentic elements,” just borrowed rhetoric and imagery).[9] According to these categories, L’Institut Religieux et Militaire des Frères Armés du Sahara was paracrusading, while Eisenhower’s choice of book title was pseudocrusading.

This analytical model is quite unwieldy but that very unwieldiness is illuminating. Clearly, even if we conclude that the crusades ended in the mid-seventeenth century, the legacy of crusading continues to unfold. As a result, crusading cannot be decisively locked into the box of the Middle Ages and the key thrown away; neither can modern violence, rhetorical or physical, be neatly detached from the premodern past. We are unavoidably challenged to contend with complex and contested ideas about the past alongside ongoing and horribly real violence in the present.

I hope to have shown in this book that the complicated nature of the crusades—the extreme multivalence of crusading—long predates the modern era’s use of the term and the history. Crusading emerged from a long tradition of Christian violence and warfare, as well as within a dynamic Mediterranean world. Crusading was always viewed differently by different observers and participants, and even in the Middle Ages, its history was often linked to one political agenda or another. Those Latin Christians who supported crusading utilized a wide and variable set of ideas and cultural practices to do so. Those outside the cultural boundaries of Latin Christendom not only viewed the crusades in different ways, but viewed them in ways that shifted over time, as they variously found themselves allies or enemies of crusaders. On all sides, some deliberately presented and may well have fully believed in the crusading enterprise as a categorical civilizational conflict. Yet given the ways in which Latin Christians used crusading to further their own political, economic, and social causes, including against each other, and given the wide range of people who participated in crusading, it is impossible to claim that the crusades actually were categorical civilizational conflicts, or even that all of those involved believed them to be so. It is also impossible to claim that all the targets of crusading violence necessarily interpreted every assault they suffered as religious or cultural violence, as opposed to violence motivated by political or economic concerns. To emphatically quote historian Brian Catlos, “we should not expect the people of the past to be any more coherent, consistent, or comprehensible than those of today.”[10]

When today the crusades are invoked in twenty-first-century geopolitics, they are usually invoked, in the words of Umej Bhatia, as a “poster-child of civilizational conflict.” To depict crusading in this way does draw upon some historical evidence—namely, the evidence that presents the crusades in that way—but simultaneously ignores the evidence for a much more complex and interconnected past. These depictions also draw upon all the images of crusading generated in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. In other words, when we look at how the crusades are used in contemporary geopolitics, we see both the influence of an incomplete interpretation of the medieval past and the influence of modern histories, ideologies, priorities, and practices. Historians can counter the selective interpretation of the past by providing a broader perspective, as this book has sought to do, but that broader perspective will remain full of complexity and ambiguity.

While recognizing that complexity and ambiguity can be frustrating, these characteristics of the history of the crusades may be uniquely valuable. Given the effectiveness of ‘us vs. them’ rhetorics of religious violence in the past and in the present, complexity and ambiguity seem particularly constructive. They encourage us to continue to ask questions, consider alternatives, rethink conclusions, and acknowledge complications. The very desire many clearly feel for crystalline clarity on the question of “the crusades”—at its most extreme, a desire for an ‘us vs. them’ past to support an ‘us vs. them’ present—should urge us to recognize the variety of ways in which history has been and still is mobilized for polemical purposes and to incite violence. I hope that this book leads you, the reader, to do all of these things as you continue to explore the history of crusading for yourself.

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^[1]      Matthew Gabriele, “Debating the ‘Crusade’ in Contemporary America,” The Medieval Journal 6: 1 (2016): 84.

^[2]      Riley-Smith, Crusades, 344.

^[3]      See also, particularly, Rick Atkinson, Crusade: The Untold Story of the Persian Gulf War (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1993).

^[4]      Gabriele, “Debating the ‘Crusade’.”

^[5]      Andrew B. R. Elliott, Medievalism, Politics and Mass Media. Appropriating the Middle Ages in the Twenty-First Century (Woodbridge: D. S. Brewer, 2017). See especially Chapters 4, 6, and 7.

^[6]      Diana Abouali, “Saladin’s Legacy in the Middle East,” Crusades 10 (2011): 175–85, at 180. See also Konrad Hirschler, “The Jerusalem Conquest of 492/1099 in the Medieval Arabic Historiography of the Crusades: From Regional Plurality to Islamic Narrative,” Crusades 13 (2014), 37–76.

^[7]      Qutb, Social Justice in Islam, 269.

^[8]      Elliott, Medievalism, Politics and Mass Media, especially Chapters 5 and 8.

^[9]      Riley-Smith, Crusades, 333–36.

^[10]    Brian A. Catlos, Muslims of Medieval Latin Christendom, c. 1050–1614 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 520.

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Susanna Throop is Associate Professor of History at Ursinus college. She studies the cultural history of Christian religious violence, particularly in the context of the crusades. Her current scholarly projects include a chapter on crusading violence for the forthcoming Cambridge World History of Violence, co-authoring the fourth edition of The Crusades: A History by Jonathan Riley-Smith, and new work on the role of the crucifixion in crusading culture in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. She is General Co-Editor of the book series Christianities Before Modernity.

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Copyright © 2018 Susanna A. Throop / CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

The post The Crusades: An Epitome appeared first on The Revealer.

Americans are having a moment — which I hope will be more than a moment — in which we are taking stories about women’s sexual coercion and abuse more seriously than in generations past. This is an unsettling and important time to be thinking about women’s stories, and the bedrock of any examination, any dismantling of rape culture, must be this: listen to women.[1] Believe women. Their stories matter. We need to hear these stories.

Sharing stories about sexual abuse is not enough, though. These stories are a call to act, to prevent future abuses from happening. But we don’t act on every story of abuse; only certain kinds of stories, about certain kinds of survivors, seem to actually inspire action.

My book, Abusing Religion (Rutgers University Press, forthcoming), looks at stories about abuse in American minority religious groups. These stories share a common thread: they depict the violation of white American women and children at the hands of religious minorities. And they have inspired massive — indeed, staggeringly disproportionate — responses from the American public through law enforcement, media coverage, targeted legislation, and congressional actions.

Abuse is obscenely common, but few stories of abuse incite raids by armored personnel carriers, news broadcasts that reach millions of viewers, decade-long FBI investigations, or congressional hearings. The stories I write about in Abusing Religion motivated all these responses and more. Americans’ horror and fascination with marginal religions often cause us to correlate religious difference with sexual danger. But we need to take all allegations of abuse seriously, not only the ones that confirm our fears about the danger of sexual and religious difference.

This series for The Revealer introduces three stories of abuse in minority religious communities, how they caught the public’s attention, and why they are still haunting the American religious imaginary. The first installment traced links between Mormon fundamentalists, Jon Krakauer’s Under the Banner of Heaven, and the American public’s fascination with polygyny.[2] This piece considers American Muslims, race, and the “Not Without My Daughter problem.”

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Betty Mahmoody’s marriage seemed like a storybook romance: she fell in love with an intense, foreign man (a doctor!) born in Iran but trained in the States, who swept her right off her feet. The sex was great; their marriage was loving; their daughter was beautiful and free-spirited. But the 1979 Iranian revolution disrupted their “normal American lives.” According to Mahmoody, Iran’s political upheaval became “an alien storm…that would shatter my marriage, imprison me…and threaten not only my life, but that of my as yet unborn daughter.”

After the revolution, her husband demanded that they visit his family in Tehran. Dr. Bozorg Sayyed Mahmoody promised his wife they would visit for only two weeks. But once there, he took her passport, beat her, and told her they would never leave. Her appeals to the Swiss embassy proved fruitless; her home country was powerless to help her.[3]  Fearing for her child’s safety and her own life, Betty Mahmoody smuggled her daughter through the icy mountains of northwestern Iran to escape into Turkey and freedom.

 Not Without My Daughter (St. Martin’s Press, 1987) made Mahmoody an international feminist icon, poster girl for women’s liberation from oppressive and notably religious patriarchal abuse. On the surface, this is one woman’s inspiring story of having survived domestic violence against all odds. But the book and its movie adaptation (1991) also fed American biases against Muslims and Islam: portraying her husband, his family, Iranians, and all Muslims as dirty, dangerous, violent, and especially abusive of “their” women.

Stories about Muslims being sexually suspect and abusive toward women are not new to the American religious landscape.[4] At their root, these stories characterize Islam as fundamentally unAmerican and as a threat to women. Published in the aftermath of the Iranian hostage crisis, Not Without My Daughter reinforced convictions that Muslims could never really be Americans, and that contrary to historical evidence Islam had never been, and could never truly be, an American religion. Mahmoody’s work offers us insight into the ways religion and race co-constitute each other in the United States, and conspire to limit “American religion” to white Christianity.

RACE, ISLAM, VIOLENCE, AND AMERICA

We cannot fully understand Americans’ suspicion of and violence toward Muslims if we are not also thinking about race, if we fail to consider American Islam as racialized, if we don’t take into account that, in fact, “Muslim” has always been a racial as well as a religious or religio-racial (to use historian Judith Weisenfeld’s term) identity in the United States.[5]

Religion has played an intimate role in the construction of race throughout American history. In the colonial period, colonizers justified violence toward and exploitation of non-Christians — enslaved or Indigenous precisely because they were not “saved.” Once slave owners began forcing enslaved and Native persons to convert to Christianity, religious difference could no longer justify chattel slavery. This is when we see arguments about the essential, biological superiority of whiteness over all other racial categories emerge — when we see American whiteness created to justify the commodification of Black bodies and the eradication of Native bodies.

Religion in the United States has also always been a racialized category. While the Founding Fathers went some distance to enshrine religious liberty in the Constitution, the operating definition of what qualifies as American religion has always been informed by white Christian sensibilities. Here again, Black Christianity and Native Christianity needed to be essentially inferior to white Christianity to justify land theft, forced relocation, enslavement, and attempted genocide. These white supremacist attitudes continue to inform Americans’ legal and cultural understandings of “religion.” When Americans speak of “religion” as an undifferentiated, unmarked category, “religion” usually signals “what white Christians do.” That is: American religion is a religio-racial category that assumes both whiteness and Christianity.

Islam, of course, is not a race. But as a religion, Islam has been racialized throughout the American experiment as not-white, not (fully) American. Betty Mahmoody’s xenophobic blockbuster reinforced and authorized these longstanding perceptions of Islam as a religion antithetical to America and to whiteness.

To understand why this is, it’s helpful to know a little about the history of American Muslims and Islam in the United States. American Islam is indelibly intertwined with the history of slavery. Islam came to the North American continent with the trans-Atlantic slave trade: the first American Muslims were enslaved people, forcibly taken from their homes in West Africa — a region in which Islam had thrived for centuries — and brought to North America.

The American Muslim population remained relatively small throughout the nineteenth century. Muslims were mostly invoked in Orientalist terms, as anti-Americans, opposed to freedom and civility. Until the mid-twentieth century, Black Muslims were the face of American Islam. The Moorish Science Temple, and later the Nation of Islam, emerged as spaces of remarkable Black religious innovation. Both the Moorish Science Temple and the Nation allowed members to resignify their own Blackness, to locate themselves in histories other than those of oppression and enslavement.

From the eighteenth through the mid-twentieth century, American Islam was coded as Black religion. Immigrants allowed into the country after immigration reform legislation was implemented in 1965 shifted the demographics of the American Muslim population from Black to Brown, as U.S. Muslims were increasingly of South Asian and Middle Eastern decent. In a nation that strongly identifies with white Christianity, American Islam’s connection to Black and Brown-ness, to slavery and immigration, and to a monotheism not centered on Jesus, has led to widespread convictions that Muslims cannot truly be Americans.

THE NOT WITHOUT MY DAUGHTER PROBLEM

During the 1979-1981 Iran hostage crisis, Americans increasingly came to view Muslims as a threat to domestic sovereignty. Not Without My Daughter chronicles the (supposed) dangers and (seemingly) inevitable failures of one Muslim man’s attempts to assimilate to American-ness. Not Without My Daughter narrates at length the inability of Dr. Bozorg Sayyed Mahmoody — or “Moody,” as she calls him throughout the book — to assimilate and his “regression” into both Islam and violence toward women. Mahmoody details her husband’s rapid deterioration from an industrious, virile, and thoroughly Americanized medical doctor into an abusive, impotent lunatic shortly after their family’s arrival in Tehran. Within days, Moody begins threatening both Betty and their daughter.

Mahmoody links her husband’s violence to his nationality and his religion. Throughout her narrative, she attributes the abuse she suffers not merely to her spouse, but to Iran and Islam. She consistently describes Iranian women as meek slaves, portraying all Muslim men, and the Islamic Republic of Iran, as uniquely oppressive of and violent toward women. She identifies her husband’s Moody’s violence toward her, and what she perceives as Iranian men’s disregard for women in general, as inherently Islamic. The racialization of Muslims throughout American history predisposed Betty Mahmoody’s readers to believe that her Muslim husband was essentially foreign, other-than-American – and essentially violent toward women. Not Without My Daughter characterizes Muslim belonging as a religious, but also a racialized threat, revealing the ways anti-Muslim hostility builds on white supremacy.

Were it not for its sustained influence on the ways Americans presume to understand Islam, Not Without My Daughter could be regarded, at best, as one woman’s story of surviving domestic abuse. But in the three year’s between the publication of  Daughter’s and its film release, mainstream Americans were poised to assume Muslims hailed from certain regions and that — following the 1979 Iran hostage crisis and the 1990-91 Gulf War — those regions meant harm to the United States. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer released the Not Without My Daughter film three days before George H. W. Bush’s deadline for Iraqi soldiers to withdraw from Kuwait, presumably to capitalize on Americans’ anti-Arab sentiment. Sally Field portrayed Mahmoody in this poorly reviewed but oft-referenced adaptation, which still regularly airs on the Oprah Winfrey Network, OWN.

Daughter sold 15 million copies internationally and has been translated into 20 languages. Mahmoody also told her story to Barbara Walters, Larry King, Phil Donahue, Sally Jessie Raphael, and Oprah Winfrey – and through them, to millions of American viewers.[6]  The book was selected as a Literary Guild alternate and nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in 1987. Perhaps most strikingly, Mahmoody’s story helped shape US federal law and policy – Mahmoody was the only person to be named in the Senate hearings for a bill which became the International Parental Kidnapping Crime Act. The US State Department appointed Mahmoody as an advisor “on the plight of American women and children held against their will in foreign countries.” Mahmoody’s strongly contested narrative influenced not only millions of readers and film-goers, but also federal law and foreign policy for the world’s largest military state.

That scholars, critics, and former acquaintances have condemned Mahmoody’s narrative as misleading, inaccurate, and racist has done little to stem its lasting influence on Americans’ imaginings of Islam and Iran.[7] Despite its questionable content, Americans frequently cite Not Without My Daughter not merely as a personal memoir of domestic discord, but as an authentic account of contemporary Iranian life. Not Without My Daughter, in its pulp nonfiction and filmic instantiations, enjoyed a near-monopoly on Americans’ imaginings of Iranian culture. Teachers showed the film as a credible example of Muslim beliefs and practices. Comic Maz Jobrani insists that “this movie [Not Without My Daughter] did more to hurt the dating lives of Iranian men in America than the hostage crisis. Many of my friends relinquished any pride they had in their Persian background and just pretended to be Italian.”  Sociologist and media personality Reza Aslan joked that the film “absolutely destroyed” his romantic life and “ruined dating for every male Iranian of [his] generation,” because viewing Daughter led American mothers to fear that all Iranian men were secretly abusive toward women.

Daughter made Iranian/Muslim men monstrous; novelist Porochista Khakpour calls Daughter “a horror movie about Iran,” in which “we [Iranians] were Freddy Krueger.”  In January 1997, the judge presiding over a Michigan child custody suit between a European American mother and an Arab American father allowed the mother’s attorney to screen the film Not Without My Daughter as evidence for the father’s parental unsuitability.[8] The affective resonance of the book and the film for late 20^th century American audiences cannot be overstated: consumers received this narrative as insight into how Iranians — and Muslims —“really were” at home.

Stories like the one Betty Mahmoody told are still shaping American attitudes toward Muslims and Islam. Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran and Ben Affleck’s Argo are two recent examples of this persistent, pernicious genre, both portraying Muslim men as violent, irrational, and hostile.[9]

The sustained popularity of such narratives coincides with intensifying anti-Muslim rhetoric and violence within the United States and an increased American scrutiny of Muslim majority states. For example, the current president of the United States has tried to restrict immigration from Muslim-majority countries three times. Executive Orders 13769 and 13780 both highlight so-called “honor killings” among the justifications for these proposed restrictions. Using “honor killings” to render domestic violence in Muslim families as especially heinous and specifically religious is a standard tactic among anti-Muslim pundits like Pamela Geller.

The Supreme Court recently upheld the president’s third attempt to restrict immigration from Muslim-majority countries. In her dissent, Justice Sotomayor cited a statement the president issued in 2015 “calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.” This statement alleges that Islamic law “authorizes… unthinkable acts that pose great harm to Americans, especially women.”  In light of recent events, Not Without My Daughter foreshadows nearly half a century of xenophobic stories that demonize Muslim men as violent, racialized, religiously fanatic predators. The anti-Muslim hostility evident in the book and film continues to manifest in American policy, which demonizes Muslims and excludes them from national belonging. Such stories lay plain the co-construction of race and religion and reveal the power of white Christian supremacy in the United States.

***

[1] And other survivors of violence, coercion, and assault, of course. I focus on women’s stories not because they are more important than those of other survivors, but because stories about white women and children being abused are most effective at inciting public response.

[2] Polygamy refers to any marriage of multiple partners and is the most common term used by outsiders to describe Mormon fundamentalist plural marriage. But Mormon fundamentalist plural marriages are exclusively polygynist, marriages of one man to multiple women. Mormon fundamentalist doctrine permits — and in some cases encourages — this form of “plural marriage” while proscribing polyandry, the marriage of one woman to multiple men. See Doctrine and Covenants 132: 54-55.

[3] After the revolution and the pursuant hostage crisis, the United States did not maintain diplomatic ties with the Islamic Republic of Iran. Mahmoody approached the Swiss embassy as a neutral third party.

[4] For example: nineteenth-century anti-Mormon activists used orientalist stories about Muslim harems to discredit the nascent Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints for its practice of polygyny.

[5] My understanding of religio-racial identities draws directly from Judith Weisenfeld’s germinal New World A-Coming. Weisenfeld offers religioraciality as space in which history, racial identity, and the relationship of religion to racial collectivity enmesh and inform one another (2016, 13).

[6] OWN still airs and promotes the film.

[7] Roger Ebert called the film “racist and prejudiced.” Sylvia Chan Malik provides a scholarly analysis of the film in her article, “Chadors, Feminists, Terror.” See also my article, “They Do That to Foreign Women” (2016).

[8] It’s worth noting that the family depicted in Not Without My Daughter is Iranian, not Arab, making this lawsuit yet another space in which the racialization of Islam (and the operation of anti-Muslim hostility as racism) is apparent.

[9] Reading Lolita sold more than a million copies and spent two years on the New York Times best-seller list. Argo won three Academy Awards in 2012. Before naming Argo 2012’s Best Picture, First Lady Michelle Obama hailed the film as one that “lift[s] our spirits, broaden[s] our minds, and transport[s] us to places never imagined.”

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Megan Goodwin (PhD UNC 2014)  is a scholar of gender, sexuality, race, and contemporary American minority religions. and the Director of Sacred Writes at Northeastern University, a project committed to amplifying the voices of experts who often go unheard in public discourse. Her current book project, Abusing Religion: Literary Persecution, Sex Scandals, and American Minority Religion (Rutgers University Press, forthcoming), explores the coding of religious difference as sexual danger. Her next project considers the ways contemporary American whiteness is (or feels) threatened by Muslims and Islam. Goodwin is the co-chair of the American Academy of Religion’s New Religious Movements Program Unit and a former co-editor of Religion Compass’s Religions in the Americas section. 

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Published with support from the Henry R. Luce Initiative on Religion in International Affairs.

The post Abusing Religion: Race, Islam, and Not Without My Daughter appeared first on The Revealer.

“Via Dolorosa” by Jon McNaughton

In our winter of authoritarianism, no artist encapsulates the tackiness of evil quite as much as Mormon fabulist painter Jon McNaughton, whose Manichean politics are so concrete you can see the cracks in the pavement. Liberals? Bad! Democrats? Bad, Bad! Barack Obama? Bad, Bad, Bad! Donald Trump? Good! McNaughton’s paintings include Via Dolorosa, which shows a contemporary business man playing the role of Simon of Cyrene (Karl Marx is in the crowd); Angel of Liberty – The Vision of George Washington, which presents a celestial being, as if from Revelation, brandishing a sword and an American flag over a burning capital; and most miraculous, All-American Trump, which depicts its svelte subject in a red jersey and old timey leather football helmet running into the endzone like he’s Knut Rockne.

McNaughton’s most famous painting, 2010’s The Forgotten Man, depicts the White House in an eerie twilight with a gathering of the first 43 presidents, including an argumentative Abraham Lincoln and a grimly constipated Ronald Reagan, behind the dejected titular (white) everyman who looks like he just missed a Gander Mountain sale. Standing apart is a haughty Obama, his foot on the Constitution, with an angry James Madison gesturing as if toilet paper was stuck on the 44^th president’s blucher. Yet few of McNaughton’s stunningly unsubtle images quite capture the myopic hypocrisy of the religious right as fully as his addendum to The Forgotten Man, his 2017 piece entitled You are Not Forgotten.

“The Forgotten Man” by Jon McNaughton

Sad Gander Mountain guy is back, but now he’s no longer sad! He has a partner, a pretty (white) woman who is dressed in a similarly rustic manner, and the panoply of presidents has been replaced with a heroic assemblage of (mostly white) first responders, including cops, soldiers, bikers (?!), and one saluting marine. Gander Mountain guy tends to a fragile flower growing through the cracks of Washington DC, as parched and barren as the Great Salt Lake. Trump, with hand outstretched in benediction, replaces Obama. And underneath Trump’s left foot, in a pose of Marian defiance, is a crushed snake. Thus, like St. Michael draining the swamp of dragons, Trump is made into some flame-haired archangel restoring the promise of the forgotten man – McNaughton’s blasphemous inversion, his fantasy of an American paradise regained.

Where paradises fall, so shall serpents be found. Snakes were omnipresent in early American political discourse, and they’ve remained awkward symbols of American defiance that can’t help but conjure Eden. Eden is the ur-text of the Faustian bargain, first in a long series of deals made with the devil that had unforeseen (yet totally predictable) consequences. By proxy, our national narrative isn’t just one of being a paradise lost, it’s also a Faustian tale that is “identical with the American myth itself,” as Leslie Fiedler argues in 1960 in Love and Death in the American Novel. For Fiedler, myths of progress and liberty have to be read alongside the horror of genocide and slavery; a Faustian bargain where colonists traded the lives of others and consequently lost their own souls.

“You Are Not Forgotten” by Jon McNaughton

Benjamin Franklin’s “JOIN, or DIE!” cartoon printed in a 1754 edition of the Philadelphia Gazette presents the British colonies during the Seven Years War as if they were a dismembered snake, chopped into eight section with a shovel in some sadist’s garden. Each section is labeled with the initials of the colony it represents, excluding Georgia and, in a blow to Boston provincialism, all of New England is reduced into one section, though for their sake they did happen to be the beast’s head. Made in the context of the Albany Congress when politicians like Franklin began to consciously think of these disunited colonies as having a singular identity, it’s a fascinating conceit to see America represented by a creature so often labeled as vermin. Eighteenth century pamphleteers were aware of the prophecies of the fifteenth century Iroquois Deganawidah, which told tale of a white serpent who would steal native land, only to be later defeated by a red serpent. In political pamphlets printed in Mohawk, the American partisans of liberty configured themselves as the red snake coming to liberate the Indians from the British white snake, demonstrating the political convenience in ambiguous prognostications.

Similarly, there is the 1775 “Don’t Tread on Me” banner, designed by the South Carolina general Christopher Gadsden, which features a rattle-snake’s coiled body and hissing forked tongue on a yellow background with the general’s pugilistic motto beneath. An inversion of that ancient image of the dragon being caste out and of Michael with his heel upon the serpent’s head; the Gadsden flag offered its warning not just to the King, but God as well. Writing anonymously in the Pennsylvania Gazette that same year, Franklin says of the rattle-snake that the “weapons with which nature has furnished her, she conceals in the roof of her mouth, so that… she appears to be a most defenseless animal; and even when those weapons are shown and extended for her defense, they appear weak and contemptible; but their wounds however small, are decisive and fatal.” The very vices which are associated with the animal – its deceitfulness and trickery – are turned into virtues of survival.

The Gadsen Flag

Perhaps by their very nature, serpentine symbols are ever winding. Consider a representative ritual from the revival-meeting-political-rallies of candidate Trump, who would often take the opportunity to read the lyrics of the Al Wilson 1968 soul song “The Snake” as a kind of anti-immigration spoken word poetry performance. In the original, which has nothing to do with the message Trump appropriates it for, the narrator sings tale of a kind woman who rescues a half-dead snake freezing by a lake. With campy inflection, Trump reads aloud the snake’s plea: “Take me in tender woman/Take me in for heaven’s sake/Take me in, tender woman.” She nurses the animal to health with “some honey and some milk,” only to finally be bitten by the creature who tells her, “You knew damn well I was a snake before you took me in.” Trump repurposing the lyrics of civil rights activist Oscar Brown as an anti-refugee parable, is not only a particular obscenity, it’s an exquisite irony as well. There’s something Faustian in Trump reciting such lyrics to his supporters — the story of a woman choosing to trust a monster whom she knows is lying to her — because what makes snakes so potent is that the trick is somehow implicit within the very metaphor itself.

Few concepts have quite the disjunct between popular conception and scholarly esteem as the symbol, at least for the past half-century. It’s not that questions of symbolism are verboten per se, but discussions of symbolism hold a bit of fussiness about them, a sense that literature can be cracked like some sort of code. If there is a generalized sense that the word “symbol” has outlived its usefulness, that’s not because the concept itself isn’t helpful. Symbols, after all, are actual things. If the word itself has a bit of the cryptographic about it, that’s not the word’s fault. Any post-structuralist worth their Social Text subscription will tell you that the problem is the popular conception that symbols always mean one thing when they’re actually slippery. Symbols can dart in one direction and then another; they can “mean” something in one context, and its opposite somewhere else. A symbol can be as subtle as a snake.

The Penguin Dictionary of Symbols, compiled by Jean Chevalier and Alain Gheerbrant and published in 1997, helpfully informs readers that the serpent is the “sacred made manifest” for which there is a “continuation of the infinite materialization which is none other than primordial formlessness, the storehouse of latency which underlies the manifest world.” Well, maybe. And yet the difficulty of such myth-speak aside, it’s undeniable that as a symbol and as a trope, the slithering snake has always been with us. Consider the multitude of circumstances in which a serpent is made to mean more than a literal reptile, from its enigmatic scriptural appearance in Eden and the transfiguration of Moses’ staff into the writhing body of a snake, to Medusa’s tangle of serpentine hair or the Staff of Asclepius, with its distinctive depiction of a snake curling up a rod, an alchemical symbol that even in the supposedly secularized West appears on the frosted glass windows of hospitals and stapled white bags containing our prescriptions.

There is the infinitude of the Ouroboros, the serpent swallowing its own tail in an expression of circular self-creation, and there are the multitude of rituals involving snakes, independent cultural practices from Indian snake-charming, to pre-Christian customs such as the Cocullo, Abruzzi snake festival, and the snake-handling of Appalachian Pentecostalism, from those who read Mark 16:18, “They shall take up serpents,” as a challenge of faith. Mythological systems from the Indus River Valley to Oaxaca are as a knot of vipers, with the population of famed serpents increased if we include their close cousins of the dragon. Cornelius Agrippa writes in his 1510 alchemical De occulta philosophia that the “Egyptians and Phoenicians placed this creature above all others and saw its nature as divine because it has a sharper mind and a greater fire than the others.” If primed for their slither, you can see snakes everywhere.

Early alchemical ouroboros illustration with the words ἓν τὸ πᾶν (“The All is One”) from the work of Cleopatra the Alchemist in MS Marciana gr. Z. 299. (10th Century)

So frequent are references to the snake, from the Mesopotamian god Nirah to the python coiled around Britney Spears during her performance of “I’m A Slave 4 U” at the 2001 VMA’s, that I’m tempted to introduce a new critical term – serpentine mundi. The long body of the snake is an axis around which our collective dreams and nightmares turn, what the mystic Jacob Böhme described in his 1682 Theosophische Werke as the “form of a snake: the fire-wheel of essence.” With slither and flick the serpent makes his appearance, from Genesis to the fevered conspiracy theories of David Ickes fretting about secret reptilians among the Trilateral Commission, the Bilderbergers, and the House of Windsor.

Chevaliar and Gheerbrant’s Dictionary explains that the serpent “makes its appearance in the sunlit world like a ghost… which slips through one’s fingers… Swift as lightning, the serpent streaks from the dark mouth of some crevice or cranny to vomit life or death, before returning to invisibility.” Without falling into that fallacy which sees symbols as innate or universal, one must admit that the frequency of the snake across cultures and religions, and the similarity in terms of the role it plays, must have something to do with the reality of the actual reptile itself. Snakes are unsettling; there is a reason why alongside alien insects so many have a fear of them. Creatures that flit about quickly with an uncannyl sidewinding motion, the flick of sibilant tongue and the inhuman slit pupils set in yellow, jaundiced eyes.

Something strange in an animal without limbs; something unsettling about a beast that can squeeze you to death. A being of uncertainty and variability, of inhumanity and venom. The hiss, the rattle – there is a reason why koala bears don’t occupy the same psychic space in the cultural imagination. Jeffrey Burton Russell writes in The Devil: Perceptions of Evil from Antiquity to Early Christianity that the “serpent can heal and help; the serpent can destroy.” Whether depicted as teachers of a liberating wisdom or as confidence men who promise paradise but deliver perdition (and snakes are presented as both), it’s the alterity of serpents that makes them so potent.

Even more so, it’s their liminality as fallen creatures without appendages that makes them a symbol, for, well, the ambiguity of symbols themselves. Symbols slither out and the human mind can barely perceive them before they’re turned into something else, seeming literal one minute and then but a ghostly imagining the next. Always shifting, undulating, sidewinding. Impossible to catch or get a handle on. If I were a more superstitious critic (and I’m not that) I’d note that even the Latin letter which inaugurates the word “symbol” can be traced back through the Greek sigma, the Phoenician Shin through the proto-Sinaitic alphabet and into its original Egyptian hieroglyph, a wavy vertical line which was meant to symbolize a snake. And as with symbols, how we’re to interpret the snake is also always in flux, it being ambiguous as to whether we’re to read the Fall which they tricked humanity into as fortunate or not.

In the West, or in “Judeo-Christianity” (whatever that’s supposed to be), the serpent of Genesis is the most famed of snakes. So common is the Sunday School explanation that Genesis’ cunning asp is actually Satan, that it can be jarring to remember that that wasn’t the intent of the Torah’s authors. Genesis was written by an anonymous author whom 19^th century philologists called the Yahwist and which was composed during Judea’s monarchical period some nine centuries before the Common Era. The first instance of the title “Satan” doesn’t appear until the Book of Job, which was written during the Babylonian Exile  some three centuries after the composition of Genesis. Of course, this doesn’t mean that the serpent isn’t actually Satan, if literalism is the sort of thing you go in for, but in terms of authorial intent the snake must have been something else entirely, similar though their personalities may have been.

T.J. Wright and Gregory Mobley in their study The Birth of Satan: Tracing the Devil’s Biblical Roots note that the “identification of the serpent in Genesis 3 with the Devil… [is] without any foundation in the original story.” Though exegesis later theorized to the identity of that snake, it’s arguably not until Revelation’s composition more than a millennium later — with its language of “the dragon, that ancient serpent, who is called the Devil and Satan” — that the connection is made explicit. As the theological gloss of original sin became imparted onto the serpent, James Kugel notes in How to Read the Bible: A Guide to Scripture, Then and Now that “for the serpent who caused such a calamity, interpreters now concluded that he could not have been just an ordinary snake.” Something, perhaps, mysterious and uncanny in imagining that it was an ordinary snake. A tradition of Felix culpa, a doctrine which holds that the fall was a fortunate one because it necessitated the incarnation of Christ, is hardly unheard of in Western theology. In such understandings, entirely orthodox I should add, the serpent may be acting of his own malignant volition, but only by the allowance of God, and in the furtherance of His aims. More radical interpretations of Eden’s snake are also possible.

“Fall and Expulsion from Garden of Eden” by Michelangelo

Few sects so fully embraced the serpent as those heretical groups from the first few centuries of the Common Era that, whether it’s an accurate umbrella term or not, are grouped together as Gnostics. Scholars have debated the utility of classifying cults from the ancient Mediterranean with exotic names like the Valentinians, the Sethite-Barbeloites, and the Marcionites into one all-encompassing designation, but they all did have commonalities. Namely, that the God of scripture was not the actual Lord, but rather a malevolent demiurge who crafted this world of fallen matter while the supreme deity dwelled somewhere far beyond. Such a ret-conning of the Bible can lend itself to eccentric conclusions, namely that everyone who was bad before can now seem good, once you realize that like Milton’s Lucifer, they’re only rebelling against a usurping and corrupt authority. Suddenly there is room at the inn not just for Christ, but for Cain and Judas as well. And Satan of course.

In some Gnostic traditions the snake thus becomes entirely different from how he’s interpreted in orthodoxy. Occasionally conflated with Christ, the serpent becomes a teacher, a wise master who, after all, encouraged the first couple to eat the fruit of knowledge. Writing about one Gnostic group known as the Ophites, the third-century Christian apologist Pseudo-Tertullian explains that “they extolled the serpent and preferred it to Christ.” Such theology also extended to ritual, as when the Church Father Epiphanus of Salamis wrote in his fifth century Panarion that the Ophites encourage a serpent to roll about on an assortment of bread loafs (seriously), which “they say is the perfect sacrifice.” Afterwards, they “not only break the bread in which the snake has rolled and administer it to those present, but each one kisses the snake on the mouth…. they fall down before it and call this the Eucharist.” Whether or not Epiphanus’ unusual claims are libel or not is impossible to tell, but his recounting seems to betray both anxiety and projection, the sense that Christian mysteries may perhaps seem similarly occult to outsiders (as indeed they did).

The Ophites’ own scriptures do confirm that they regarded the serpent as an “instructor” which was “possessed by the female spiritual principal” and as a “form they themselves had modeled,” while God was the “arrogant ruler.” Such language is found in a third-century apocryphal text with the fantastic name of The Hypostasis of the Archons, found with the cache of Gnostic texts recovered from Egypt in 1945 and known to posterity as the Nag Hamadi Library. Another exegesis on Genesis called On the Origin of the World, also from the third-century and found at Nag Hamadi, is even more unequivocal on the serpent. After enumerating a baroque history of emanations and archons, we finally see the Genesis story as spied through a greasy window, an altered and strange sequence of events whereby the snake is “the wisest of all creatures, who was called Beast.”

Whether the serpent is valorized or condemned, trickery is at the heart of both accounts – the only difference is who is guilty of said chicanery. In orthodoxy, the snake is himself the great trickster, the adversary who convinces our great-grandparents to eat of that poisonous fruit which then condemned all of humanity. If you’re an adherent of the Gnostics who have embraced the snake, then it is that being who claims to be God who is now tricking us, the serpent having simply been a wise teacher who informed humanity of our proper station in creation. But dialectic being the engine for all of history, what of the possibility we’re aware of our own delusions, where we know that we’re being lied to, but that that’s precisely the point? Where the whole system is so decadent and corrupt that we’re all handmaid’s in deception – humanity, serpent, and the Lord – knowing that the whole thing is rigged, but that it’s the performance itself which is sacrament?

Such would have been the ethic of those who followed one of the strangest deities to ever emerge in the ancient Mediterranean, a god named Glycon who was represented by a snake puppet. In the thesis of orthodoxy and the antithesis of Gnosticism, what emerges is a winking and cynical paganism that prostrated itself before an illusion. Drawn from that funky, fermented broth of the late Roman Empire, when faiths as varied as Mithraicism and Christianity vied for hegemony, as the virtues of republican liberty had faded away into the excesses of a decrepit, unequal, spectacle which claimed to be a nation. Glycon was the “revelation” of a Greek pseudo-prophet named Alexander of Abonoteichus, a cult leader who constructed his god from some wire and cloth, a conman who convinced everyone from Greek peasants to perhaps Marcus Aurelius himself that there was merit in his hoax. The rhetorician Lucian was no fan of the cult, claiming that Alexander was a con-artist who “contrived an ingenious ruse.” Lucian writes that Alexander had “long ago prepared and fitted up a serpent’s head of linen, which had something of a human look, was all painted up, and appeared very lifelike,” explicating the mechanism by which Glycon operated its “mouth by means of horsehairs, and a forked black tongue like a snake’s, also controlled by horsehairs.” Such an illusion was “cast for the leading role.”

Late 2nd-century statue of Glycon. (National History and Archeology Museum, Constanţa, Romania)

Lucian writes that Alexander’s “prophetic shrine spread to Italy and invaded the city of Rome, everybody without exception… made haste… particularly with those who had the greatest power and the highest rank.” So popular was the cult in the second century, that references to Glycon spread from Austria to Iraq, and Glycon’s handler “began to devise projects that were greater and greater… warning the cities to be on their guard against plagues and conflagrations and earthquakes; he promised that he would himself afford them infallible aid so that none of these calamities should befall them.” Invented threats from an invented god, but Alexander understood a fundamental tautological axiom of authority – power belongs to he who has convinced others that he has power.

Hard to believe that a cheap puppet could hoodwink so many into believing that it was a god, that so many would fall for such obviously empty promises. We must ask ourselves, could they not see the horsehair moving Glycon’s jaw, could they not detect Alexander’s ventriloquism? That’s the wrong question – of course they knew they were being lied to. Being associate to your own trickery has its own occult power. Alexander understood the significance in fear, hate, and the desire to feel chosen, to feel great. For as popular as Glycon’s cult was, there is little tangible of it which remains, the exception being some coins with his image, a few bronze statuettes, and a remarkable carving of the snake god excavated in 1962 from a Constanta, Romania construction site. Standing about three-feet tall, Glycon is carved from cool, white marble, a coiled python with the face of a man, visage of haughty cruel command, and most striking of all a cascade of hair which Lucian informs us was blonde. This creature, this Copperhead, with his strawberry combover and his adoring crowds of credulous believers. You can almost imagine that serpent hissing out to his adoring followers – “Believe me.”

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Ed Simon is a staff writer at The Millions and the Editor-at-Large of The Marginalia Review of Books, a channel of The Los Angeles Review of Books. He holds a PhD in English from Lehigh University, and is a frequent contributor at several different sites. His collection America and Other Fictions: On Radical Faith and Post-Religion was published by  Zero Books in 2018. He can be followed at his website, on Facebook, or on Twitter @WithEdSimon.

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Published with support from the Henry R. Luce Initiative on Religion in International Affairs.

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