Seen on campus: “Islam vs. Democracy”

Last Thursday, I received an anti-Islam, anti-Muslim flyer titled “Islam vs. Democracy” at my campus office address. I’d been mailed the same flyer during the Spring semester, as well. At that time, I responded by holding a class session in my REL096: Islam course in which we analyzed and critiqued the two-sided flyer, line by line, in the theoretical terms we’d explored all semester (Orientalism, imperialism, authenticity, categorical definitions) and compared to the definitions for Islam we’d read by scholars (like Ernst, Shepard, and Curtis, to name a select few).

It was a challenging class. Most students were horrified–one actually gasped out loud, another approached me after and apologized, having done nothing wrong, for the existence of such material. Many students expressed genuine feelings of disgust and exceptionalism: UVM is a friendly, liberal place, they said; this shouldn’t have happened here. Some asked questions about the role of open spaces and free speech on a public campus; others asked if free speech rules applied on a campus and to whom; and others still asked about the overlapping issues of free speech and campus safe spaces, accommodations, and UVM’s On Common Ground ideals. We solved none of these problems of a contemporary campus broadly or of our own.

But, in April, near the end of the term, so many of my students–even some who rarely spoke in class–offered real critique of the content of the flyer, citing theorists of religion, scholars of Islam, and critics of both. We read the flyer as a primary source to be interrogated, analyzed, and placed in its multiple contexts (what kind of literature was this? who or what was its audience? what do we do with unsigned writings? where was its information factually wrong? to what avail? & etc.).

That was my response this past spring. I scrapped a class about American Muslims in the earliest part of the 20th century so that we could instead talk about a two-sided flyer found on campus for an hour. We applied what we’d learned about Islam, the study of religion, and reading primary sources critically to a new primary source document–the flyer itself. We had an academic conversation first, but also addressed the affective responses it elicited, which ranged from thinking the flyer a joke unworthy of our time to tears, frustration, and anger.

This time the flyer surfaced, however, students hadn’t yet arrived. I sent out a call on Twitter and my personal Facebook account asking if anyone else had seen these flyers. Two colleagues responded that they had seen them in Williams Hall both recently and back in April. I’d found another set of flyers postered in Bailey-Howe Library, and a student sent a direct message on Twitter to say he’d seen them in the Davis Center, a center of student activity (and food) on campus.

Islam vs Democracy close upI won’t republish here the anti-Islam, anti-Muslim diatribes beyond this (purposefully incomplete) photo. There are lots of responses to Islamophobic content, in the broadest senses; and there are responses to those responses. There are books, journals, blogs. I am not a scholar of Islamophobia, and I am deeply aware of the various risks publishing about it can be. The broadest sense of all this isn’t the point, anyway. It is the peculiarity.

In this context, a broad post I might write about how anti-Islam, anti-Muslim rhetoric actually limits engagement on a campus by using fear is too general. It feels like a general response to a general phenomena on campuses writ large. But this wasn’t a general flyer, out there somewhere. This was a flyer on our campus, right here.

These flyers certainly speak about a vast, faceless, dangerous, and imagined Islam, but because they appear on campus, they are directed at us, the members of the UVM community–Muslim and non-Muslim alike. Moreover, because it has been mailed to me personally (but not to my departmental colleagues), I can assume I am a targeted audience for the message of the flyer, and I might further imagine this is specifically in my capacity as the professor of courses about Islam and Muslims in the Religion Department.

So, my response is this: a lament that students arrive in our classrooms today, August 31, and that my classes won’t begin until tomorrow.

Had these flyers gone up in a week, I’d have a clear sense of what my job is, what my obligations are, in terms of my campus. I’d ask students to talk about it. We’d read it, in the constructed space of a classroom which is purposefully set up for interrogation, investigation, and critique. We’d take its claims seriously, talk about where they came from, and what work they do now; we’d maybe theorize why UVM’s campus–why the library, the student-centered Davis Center, Williams Hall, and my mailbox–were imagined to be good spaces for an anonymous poster and author declare “the truth” about Islam in the form of double-sided, photocopied flyers. We’d talk about the possibilities, responsibilities, and challenges of free speech on campuses. We’d talk about reading about religion beyond classrooms, and the value of the skill sets needed to do so. We’d talk about microaggressions and safety for our classmates, colleagues, and staff who were the subject of the flyer’s message. We might even place this flyer in a conversation about Muslims and racialized religious identity–a conversation we normally get to toward the end of the semester.

My classes begin tomorrow. And my syllabus has already changed.

Rev. J. J. Ransome-Kuti and the History of Yoruba Gospel Music

Last September I announced on the REL@UVM blog that I would post periodic updates about what I was up to while on sabbatical. I then disappeared…into my field notes, stacks of library books, and pages of notes on my new book project. Well, I am back! I am still in the thick of it—ordering books from Interlibrary Loan, searching through indexes to find out which archives might hold relevant sources, and scribbling and typing notes on what I know and what I need to find out. This month I plan to share some of these notes in a series of posts describing my current research and providing some insights into the research process.

A selection of labels from releases by J. J. Ransome-Kuti, from Black Europe endpapers.

A selection of labels from releases by J. J. Ransome-Kuti, from Black Europe endpapers.

The main project I have been working on since September has been a study of commercially recorded and distributed Yoruba gospel music. This topic emerged naturally out of my research on music in Cherubim and Seraphim churches in Lagos, as the church where I based much of that earlier research had a choir that released a number of successful recordings (see my article about these recordings here). My interest in the gospel music industry in southwest Nigeria led me to investigate the history of this genre. When were the first recordings of Yoruba Christian music made? How? Who made up the audience? Do the recordings circulate today?

These questions led me to focus on what I believe are among the earliest—if not the earliest—sound recordings of Yoruba gospel music. In 1922 the Reverend Josaiah Jesse Ransome-Kuti traveled from his home near Abeokuta, Nigeria to London, England to attend the Church Missionary Society Exhibition. While there, he recorded a total of 43 songs which were released on double-sided Zonophone discs by the Gramophone Company.

Rev. J.J. Ransome-Kuti

Reverend J. J. Ransome Kuti

According to most sources, Ransome-Kuti wrote and arranged all of the songs he recorded. The recordings feature Ransome-Kuti singing to piano accompaniment. The majority of the songs are described on record labels as Yoruba “hymns” or “sacred songs.” In addition to these Christian songs he also recorded a funeral lament, and a track described on the label as “Abeokuta National Anthem,” a folk song about the strength of the Egba Yoruba community in which Ransome-Kuti lived.

I first heard these recordings when I visited the British Library in 2010. However, they have since been released by Bear Family Productions on a monumental boxed set called Black Europe that documents the sounds and images of black people in Europe prior to 1927. The set includes 45 discs of music and data, along with two coffee-table books that provide documentation and background information about the recordings. While only 500 copies of the Black Europe set were released, when I asked Lori Holiff, the librarian at UVM’s Bailey-Howe Library, to purchase a copy she readily agreed. In the past three months I have been poring over the recordings and combing through the extensive documentation to help me understand the significance of these recordings for both the history of Yoruba Christian music as well as for the development of the music industry in Nigeria.

I have a lot of questions to ask of these recordings. It is unclear exactly why they were made and how they were used. In a paper concerning the history of the recording industry in West Africa, Paul Vernon suggests that the Ransome-Kuti recordings were likely novelty records made for British audiences. I have a difficult time imagining non-Yoruba speaking listeners to these recordings, nor does this explanation account for the number of songs that Ransome-Kuti recorded. A more promising explanation is found on a promotional sheet reproduced in the Black Europe book, which notes that the recordings were made by Ransome-Kuti “so that the Sacred Songs of his own composition…may be available to all Yoruba speaking people” (Vol. 2, p. 194) This statement opens up the possibility that they were recorded for and distributed to the growing number of elite, educated, and Christian Yoruba families in Lagos and Abeokuta, Nigeria in the 1920s. This group constituted an early market for Western commodities, which may very well have included gramophones. I am looking for additional evidence that supports this interpretation. I still have to follow the strands through the archives and history books to determine to what extent the playback technology was available for consumers in Nigeria in the 1920s and 1930s and whether or not recordings such as those made by Ransome-Kuti were marketed to listeners in Nigeria.

I am also interested in how these recordings were used, and what people thought about them at the time. Did they help to circulate the growing corpus of Christian songs composed by Yoruba musicians to the expanding number of churches in the Yoruba-speaking region of the colony? If so, this represented a transformation in the way Christian practices were circulated between churches. Were the recordings intended to help congregations learn these songs so that they could sing them during church worship? Did they supplement the numerous printed hymnals and other song books in which the songs appear?

I do not have the answer to these questions though I have some ideas about what I will find, as well as some ideas about the implications my findings will have for understanding the development and significance of Yoruba Christian music. In the coming weeks I will tell you more about what I have found out about J.J. Ransome-Kuti and these recordings, how my research questions have developed over time, and what new directions this project will take me towards in the future.

Read Part 2 of this series of posts, “Ransome-Kuti: Between Old and New.”

Primary Sources: Reading President Carter’s talk at the AAR

Every year, over the weekend before Thanksgiving, scholars of religion gather for the annual American Academy of Religion (and concurrent Society of Biblical Literature) meetings. It is usually a zoo: networking, papers, panels, interviews, plenary sessions, reunions, and more for nearly 10,000 scholars, whose expertise varies from Biblical hermeneutics to critical theories to Islam to post-secular ritual and more. Despite a long history, and many important moments in scholarly production, this year marked a true first: a former president of the United States addressed the conference attendees. As a historian who deals, in bulk, with archives and documents, President Jimmy Carter’s talk turned out to be a fascinating, rich, and valuable primary source.

President Carter has a new book out–A Call to Action: Women, Religion, Violence, and Power–and ostensibly, found the AAR/SBL annual meetings a good place to talk about (and sell the results of) his findings. He presented a talk entitled “The Role of Religion in Mediating Conflicts and Imagining Futures: The Cases of Climate Change and Equality for Women.”

As a scholar of Islam, I was suspicious of this talk, to be honest; I wanted to see a former president speak, but I wasn’t sure what, if anything, would come of it. After all, a Sunday school teacher, an active and evangelical Christian, and, yes, former POTUS talking about religion and violence against women (with an addendum of climate change) reeked of a certain paternalism, perhaps even a lurking Orientalist set of assumptions–we Americans know about the appropriate treatment of women; those (Muslim?) foreign folks, in far-flung lands, do not.

photo 1

POTUS Carter, as seen on screen from the crowd.

My suspicions weren’t entirely grounded, it turned out. Carter did espouse a particular set of paternalist and patriarchal assumptions–i.e., he called for the protection of women by men, and called for men to step up to this specific challenge, without citing women or girls who already do this work or whose movements we might look to for models.  And, yes, he opened his talk by discussing violence against women “over there,” by an assumed Muslim population: genital mutilation, the Taliban’s ban on girls attending school, child marriage. But then, bluntly, he addressed this crowd of scholars by saying: “If you think these aren’t our problems, you’re wrong.”

With that and what immediately followed, he proved that I was wrong to have assumed a monolithic dismissal of non-American or non-Western cultural practices or an abundantly rosy view of America or the West. He listed statistics about sexual assaults on university campuses and in the military. He cited women’s unequal pay for equal work. He blasted Atlanta, where his own center is located, as the nation’s largest hub for human trafficking. He lingered on human trafficking, though Carter refused to call it by its “euphemistic label,” and instead called it slavery. And then, President Carter claimed that there are more slaves–more trafficked humans–in today’s America than at the height of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. With oratory aplomb, he let that sit; and then, he continued on to link what he called the degradation of women and girls to issues of race and racism, briefly mentioning the then-unfolding decision in Ferguson.

While Carter did not address climate change or the environment at length in his prepared (though, for the record, extemporaneously delivered) remarks, the Q&A that followed focused on his (religious) sense of environmentalism, highlighting policies he created in office and asking him to reflect on the relationships between violence against women and nature. He suggested that women and girls would be hardest hit by climate change, as they tend to be in most natural or man-made crises.

Women, girls and the environment. But, what about religion, you ask? That’s the most fascinating part of all. President Carter asked for action not on the basis of American superiority, though that was part of it. He asked, in this talk anyway, for action on the basis of reading scripture correctly. His talk was a primary source document: it demonstrated world problems, to be sure, but then asked the audience to solve those problems using appropriately read and meaningfully interpreted theology. It was a lived exercise in progressive evangelism and liberal theology. To use the language of pedagogy, President Carter described problems but prescribed (generally) a solution: rereading scripture and correcting misinterpretation.

To his eye, misinterpretation of holy scriptures–Christian, Jewish, or Islamic, here–was at fault for systems that support violence against women, girls and the environment. Carter was asked if religion might be an obstacle to achieving his stated goals; couldn’t religion and religious texts be used to prop up the systems he critiques? And in reply, he offered classic theological interpretation, saying, “They [opponents] can find some verse in the Bible to support their misinterpretation.”

Of course, he doesn’t see his own interpretations–that women and girls are equal, that the environment is entrusted to humanity by God–as misinterpretation. He sees them as accurate, based upon deep reading, deep commitment, and, as he put it, his sense that he “serves the Prince of peace.”

His talk begs countless questions. What Christianity or textual interpretation does he envision as especially correct–is it just his, is it his community’s, or something else altogether? Does he envision limitations in non-male, non-white, non-Christian settings to an approach that values (Christian) liberal theology? If climate, gender, sex, race, class, and religion are so imbricated–as he suggested at various points–how might his solution(s) address these both various and intersecting sets of issues? How might his suggestion of “reading better” work against his calls for peace, environmentalism, equality, and justice?

It was a scholarly treasure trove, as primary source texts often are, which is why his talk was exciting: as a scholar of religion, I had the opportunity to listen to the former leader of the United States actively offer biblical exegesis in light of current issues, and do so in such a way that critiqued various (American) political administrations, (largely Christian) textual interpretations, and ethical and moral commitments (of political and religious institutions and persons). And reading his talk as a primary source is crucial. By doing so, analyzing what he says in its contexts leaves room to critique issues in his comments like paternalism, heavy-handed prescriptive Christian religion, and privilege of various stripes, while also preserving his talk as an example of a set of discourses.