“This is not really a mosque, it is a community center”

The “Park 51 controversy”—erupting over the construction of a mosque/community center in the vicinity of “Ground Zero” in New York—highlighted an irresolvable contradiction at the heart of the American project: the very diversity and pluralism that forms the identity of the liberal state also threatens the stability of that identity. The liberal state strives to secure the promise of freedom and autonomy for all its citizens. This promise, perhaps, lies at the root of the relatively recent embrace of spirituality as marker of one’s own freedom and autonomy. This embrace, moreover, is accompanied by the perceived threats of pluralism and difference, the latest being the physical attacks against Muslims and Sikhs mistaken for Muslims in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, or the spectacle of Islamophobia that captivated public discourse during the Park 51 saga. Each of these moments reflected a crisis in which the fictitious harmony of liberal pluralism was exposed, precipitating all manner of reminders to United States citizens about the virtue of tolerance.

The appeal for tolerating minority ‘others’ is integral to certain registers of spirituality—a language that secures the secular promise of respect and equality for all citizens.

Tolerance serves as the soothing balm that promises relief from both the threat to liberal freedoms and the threat of impending violence. Such promises, however, are never fulfilled.

If anything, such promises work to exacerbate the initial contradictions. A politics of tolerance that demands respect and understanding for the threatened minority ‘others’ accomplishes little more than further inscribing the distinctions of majority/minority, citizen/alien, identity/difference and so forth. Such a dynamic of tolerance was at work during the Park 51 debate, if one may call it that. Rather than offering another critique of the outright racist characterizations of Islam and Muslims that populated various media during this episode, I want to instead think about a statement that was frequently aired by both Muslim and non-Muslim supporters of this project: “This is not really a mosque, it is a community center.”

It may well have been a community center. But what must demand our attention is the kind of politics that authorizes and sustains the desire to replace, substitute, and moderate the specter of a ‘mosque’ as a community center. The plea to remind hostile citizens that what they think is a mosque is not really a mosque but something else participates, perhaps unwittingly, in a politics that strives to humanize, moderate, and civilize—shall we say spiritualize—religion so as to make it more palatable to modern sensibilities. This kind of critique demands its object to separate from itself, to differ from itself while keeping its name; a community center that is also a mosque. This secular demand for the name to retain itself while also differing from itself resonates with the categorical use of spirituality and illuminates a central contradiction.

The affirmative denial “I am not religious but I am spiritual” that has achieved ubiquitous purchase in recent years crystallizes this logic of difference. The spiritual here refers to something ineffable that is not really religion but that owes its recognition precisely in relation to religion. Spirituality takes the form of secularized religion unencumbered from institutional, doctrinal, and ritual demands. The rebirth of religion as spirituality is made possible by the power of the secular imaginary within which religion represents something out there, always available for critique, moderation, and humanization. It is precisely such a secular notion of the spiritual that sustains the liberal demand for religious moderation, a demand that is made most frequently on Islam and Muslims today. For a crude yet illuminating example of this demand, consider the language of a petition advanced this year by the group “Concerned American Citizens” entitled “separating Islamic Law, Shariah, from the spiritual side of Islam.” The first few sentences of this petition read as follows: “It is time to expose the moderate Muslim. Will the Moderate Muslim be willing to eliminate egregious seventh century Islamic Law “Shariah” from the spiritual side of Islam? It is also time to take a role call on this subject and hold all moderate Muslims accountable. If these moderates wish to practice only the spiritual side of Islam and desire to assimilate into the American culture, reform is mandatory, let it begin!!!”1 Leaving aside the theatrical provocations of these statements, they capture quite well the liberal equation of spirituality and moderation. In this view, the labor of moderation requires the embrace of spirituality as the only authentic, tolerable, and respectable expression of religion. Moreover, to moderate religion is to separate its “spiritual side” from the non-spiritual. This exercise of separation stands authorized through the secular assumption that religion is a category of life readily available to be separated, moderated, purified, and humanized.

A concept like ‘moderate Islam,’ that became centrally visible during the Park 51 debate, also owes its life to such a secular politics of spirituality that assumes the universal availability of religion. The defenders of the project rushed to remind skeptic opponents that their fears were misplaced. This was only a benign community center and not a mosque. Moreover, its spiritual leader, Feisal Rauf, was a ‘moderate Muslim’ who followed the peaceful brand of ‘Sufi Islam’ and who was not to be confused with the variety of Muslims prone to violence and intolerance. These were the kinds of apologist reminders that populated public discourse during this episode.

What these protagonists of moderate Islam have not sufficiently thought about is the racist colonial history that sustains the category of ‘moderate Islam’. The process of moderating Islam intimately depends on the modern colonial inheritance of religion as an object of critique that is readily available to be moderated, rationalized, and purified. Such an inheritance becomes possible through a sovereign decision on what counts as religion worthy of toleration. The moment of tolerating religion also represents the moment of defining the limits of religion. For religion to demand toleration and respect, it must first be baptized in the holy water of moderation. Moreover, the conceit of moderate religion is animated by the same desire that seeks to separate the spiritual from the religious. Life, according to this logic, is readily available for division, definition, and translation such that the proper domains of the ‘spiritual’ and the ‘religious’, the ‘moderate’ and ‘extreme’ might be established.

Armed with the sovereign authority to choose the limits of life, one can now choose to be spiritual but not religious, embrace moderation over extremism. But the promise of this choice remains unfulfilled. It remains deferred to an unspecified future. This is so because any sovereign attempt to moderate religion, or to separate it from spirituality, can never resolve the irresolvable contradiction of seeking to retain the name while also deferring it from itself, of wanting to have religion that is not really religion.

The reminder “this is not really a mosque but a community center” is also detained in this contradictory logic of difference. This statement labors to moderate, pacify, and substitute the apparently threatening specter of a mosque by gifting it a new metaphorical life as a community center. However, this gift can never be gifted; it will always be suspended and deferred. The exhortation to correct the misrecognition of a community center as a mosque strives to repudiate the prejudice and ignorance of those who refuse to make that correction. But ironically, the desire to ensure that a community center is not mistaken for a mosque perpetuates the very politics of secular critique that takes religion, indeed life, as something out there, as something readily available, to be moderated and rendered less extreme. Far from combating the racist assumptions that underlie various stripes of Islamophobia, this seemingly pacifying gesture further confirms those assumptions. Ultimately, this kind of politics, ensconced in the secular inheritance of religion as a substitutable object of critique, can achieve nothing new. It can only perpetuate the irresolvable contradiction of a liberal logic of tolerance that seeks to moderate religion through the language of spirituality.

Some medieval Christian mystics expressed their experiences in language that confounds modern readers. Writers such as John of the Cross, Teresa of Avila, and Hildegard of Bingen reported their sense of the emptying of self and embrace of nothingness. Many others have written similarly about their experiences.

The French theoretician Roland Barthes once framed the problem in remarking on a difference between Japan and the West. For Zen writers in Japan, the point was to fashion an “emptiness of language,” and in this emptiness, “Zen, in the exemption from all meaning, writes gardens, gestures, houses, flower arrangements, faces, violence.” Barthes juxtaposed to such an “empire of signs” the Occidental empire “of meaning.” In the West, said Barthes, we are preoccupied with meaning. In the Barthesian turn of phrase, the West “moistens everything with meaning, like an authoritarian religion which imposes baptism on entire peoples.” The dense cultural mass of Christianity, pulling everything into orbit around it, requires the dutiful embrace of metaphysics as the practice of meaning-making. Christian semiosis is a distinctive enterprise geared to patterning language in response to questions of meaning. If the West might be said to privilege meaning, then in Zen Japan, things are different, a matter of signs, of linguistic emptiness, where semiotic systems labor in service to aesthetics, or other cultural authorities. The Christian angle is the pathway to a specific realization of salvation. In Japan, thinking can be less important than nothingness, and signs more important than meaning.

Christian-inflected scholarship about religion, which is most scholarship in the West, preoccupies itself with questions of meaning in religion and hesitates when forced to confront reports of nothingness. Academic investigators of religious experiences tend to steer their interpretations away from testimonies of self-negation and the elusiveness of meaning into waters more accommodating to somethingness and to discovery of meaningfulness susceptible to linguistic coding. Even if that somethingness is gender, or body, or food, or institutional politics, those themes enable analysis that is complicit with the liberal insistence upon the doxic superstructures of actors’ experiences. In other words, such interpretation is largely oriented to the recognition and admiration of the process of meaning-making that is presumed to direct the spiritual experiences of persons.

As an artifact of Christian enunciations of orthodoxy—in the technical sense, the privileging of “right language”—such interpretation takes shape as a species of doxography. A critical approach to the study of religious experience requires a determination to escape the gravity of Christian domain assumptions about the manner in which religious life grows by degrees from a seed of meaning planted by epiphany. Instead, scholars can consider how generative emotional crises that are referenced as spiritual by persons can be meaningless moments, biological-cultural events characterized more by their emotional intensity and a sense of negative identity than by sudden awareness of, and near-simultaneous linguistic framing of, a kernel of meaning. From such a genesis, the subsequent development of a religious persona can occur as a series of further definitions by negation, as actors undertake to separate themselves from certain emotions, ideas, groups, spaces, times, and bodies. Religion as a byproduct of such an exercise presents as the ongoing collective implementation of a program of exclusion. It blindly coalesces as the impossible pursuit of closure with the meaningless moment through unending systematic extrapolation and expansion of that moment.

I run in Nike Free, divinely inspired running shoes. In them I am, I am able to be, spiritual.

Nike (Νικη) names an ancient Greek goddess or spirit, a divine courier who delivers Zeus victoriously via his chariot. She is a winged intermediary, moving and transporting through the air between here and there, between mortal and divine. The daughter of a titan and a river, she is a force of nature, a numinous being, a kind of angel, who bears deep bonds to Athena, goddess of wisdom. In Nike, wisdom is related to movement, transit, and to air.

Nike moves unencumbered—which is to say, freely. In many ways, then, Nike Free is redundant, particularly when Free suggests not, or not only, an enlightened free agent who is “free to” but a bareness that is “free from” unnecessary embellishment. In running shoes, such freedom often translates into a modern fetishization of technology, of progress (new = better) and excess (more = better). Nike Free running shoes, however, resist this fetish, opting for a different equation: new = less, and that less = better. These shoes promise freedom by using technology to strip away as much encumbering technics as possible. Introduced in 2005, Nike Free got back to basics and hence to the elements, coming two steps away from being barefoot (thanks to their extremely thin and flexible sole). Running in them, unlike running in almost any other kind of running shoes, my feet feel the ground’s contours, its textures and striae.

Running in them, I become more bodily, more aware of my bodily movements, since I can feel those kinetic effects in my feet as they contact a solid surface and then lift themselves into air: contact, release, contact, release; earth, air, earth, air. Unlike nearly all other running shoes, Nike Free do not overcushion and overcorrect. They do not permit bad technique or incorrect form. Instead, they insist on corporeal sensitivity, reconnecting my bodily parts to one another by reminding me of action-reaction relations. They silently suggest kinesthetic corrections, modifications in motion. They, like other spiritual exercises, are praxial rather than simply practical: they are transformative, perhaps even transfiguring.

Running in them, I am my most bodily, hyperaware of my bending knees and elbows, of my foot stride and impact, of the angles of my head and chest, of my heart and lungs as they invigoratingly move air, resuscitating—almost resurrecting—my sense of my corporeality. Running in them, I move and move through air. Thus I am, in a seeming paradox, simultaneously my most spiritual and my most bodily, most spiritual because most bodily. This seeming paradox exposes itself as illusory as I re-member spirit: a matter of breath, of air. Spirit—as ruach, as psuchē or pneuma, as anima or spiritus—names breath, wind, air with movement. It is elemental, sensible, mobile, dynamic, animating, vital and vitalizing. It is divine, as Nike’s domain or as ruach elohim (a Hebrew name of god), as well as human, even fundamentally so in tripartite anthropologies, including Stoic and Pauline, that conceive of humanity as body, soul, and spirit. Spirit, as a matter of breath—as the (literal or figurative, biological or religious) breath of life—is humanly necessary, and that necessity ties spirituality to corporeality, bound together by air. My body cannot live for long without air, without respiring.

Running makes me acutely aware of that need; it makes me intensely sensitive to my breathing—that is, my relationship with air. Running is all about breath, air, spirit, since it involves respiration, perspiration, and, for me, inspiration. When I run, and my body is continually in motion, moving and moving me from here to there like Nike in transit, I am most receptive to inspiration, to thoughts and perceptions that I take in like air. I am, body and soul (however those words signify), my most porous, and I do my best thinking and my best contemplating while running. I, like my stripped-down shoes, feel less encumbered, more flexible, most free. Respiration and inspiration meld as body and spirit mingle.

I breathe in air rhythmically, and with it comes…well, that depends. Sometimes while running I work through intellectual puzzles. Sometimes I ponder personal predicaments. Occasionally I stumble upon wisdom (recalling Nike’s relation to Athena). Sometimes I experience an airy stream of conscious perception. Sometimes I am simply free, free from distracting concerns or laborious thoughts or conscious monologue—free, that is, from a certain reflexive self, in an experiential zone (sometimes dubbed simply “the zone”) to which many spiritual or religious praxes aspire. Running can inspire or even be what others label meditation, moksha, prayer, contemplation, communion, ecstasy, enlightenment.

My Nike Free are akin to an athletic sajjāda or tallith or prayer beads (whether japamala or rosary or otherwise): they become the medium, the apparatus, the tool or supplement, that enable my running, which engenders what I experience as and am calling spirituality. If I am spiritual, I am so while running, sensitively breathing in the world.