“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.

In the Sacred Relic Room in Topkapi Palace, a former imperial residence and present-day museum of the Ottoman period in Istanbul, Turkey, visitors will find relics of the Prophet Muhammad. Among them there is a sword and a few strands of the Prophet’s hair. The devotional practices that surround these relics, concerned quite literally with the spirit of God and thus appropriately termed “spiritual,” are not expressly political. Nonetheless, the public veneration of such baraka (spiritual power)-charged relics challenges laicist traditions in Turkey, whether secularist or Islamist (both of which espouse a version of “rational Islam”). These practices remind us that spirituality is not simply a “private” or domesticated form of religion, but rather a form of devotion that always takes place within broader—and, in the modern context, public—fields of debate about the nature of religion.

Despite the relics’ nearly continuous 550-year residence in Topkapi Palace, we can profitably distinguish between the early years and the later years of their exhibitionist career. Having arrived in Istanbul via Ottoman expansion into Egypt and the Hijaz in the early sixteenth century, the possession of these objects informed the force of the sultan’s claims to authority over the entire Muslim community. They were material evidence of what God’s revelation to humanity through Muhammad made possible for believers in this life and in this world. They point to a physical man (illustrated through his hair), Muhammad, who enjoyed incredible success in nurturing, protecting (at times through his sword), and expanding a community in the service of God. The incredible growth of the Ottoman Empire in the space of a century suggests that the sultan may not have been unjustified in seeing a connection.

Today, safely ensconced in a glass case that sits in a state heritage site (itself a relic of the past), the Prophet’s relics reflect the attempted domestication of Islam in the service of a nationalist project to create and maintain the Turkish nation that can be distinguished from the Ottoman period at all costs. Despite being embalmed in a museum, however, these relics continue to function as something more than data in nationalist historiography. However much the Turkish state continues to regulate what it means to be a Muslim, the authorities cannot contain the surplus value of the Prophet’s relics. Thus we find people using a seemingly secular institution for devotional purposes, much like one finds in the Hagia Sofia, another contested state exhibition space in Istanbul.

On my own visit to Topkapi Palace, just after I entered the relic room, a large group of Turkish visitors soon followed—what seemed to be a class outing of some kind. In the midst of the clatter of young kids liberated from the classroom, I felt myself being elbowed aside by a small elderly woman. Clearly, I was not the first. A Frommer’s review of the palace warns visitors: “It’s impossible to rush through the palace, so you should allot at least a half-day and be prepared to encounter a few bottlenecks throughout the enclosed exhibition halls, especially in the Holy Relics Room where the ardent faithful, in their religious fervor, tend to obstruct the display cases.” The momentary displeasure I felt as a tourist gave way to a slight embarrassment as a non-believer: this woman, I presume, actually wanted to be close to the relics because their power was real, no matter how purposefully prosaic the setting.

As a character in Turkey’s nationalist rendering of history, the entombment of the Prophet’s sword is perhaps too obvious a prop to offer much analytic insight. Tamed by the Turkish assembly’s abolishment of the Caliphate in 1924, Islam is no longer a politico-military force with which modern societies must reckon. The Prophet’s hair is another story.

Hair, as in any other matter containing DNA, contains the breath (ruḥ) or spirit of God. Surat al-sajda, verse 9 (Sura 32, or “Prostration”), which details God’s creative capacities, reads: “and then He forms him [human] in accordance what he is meant to be, and breathes into him his spirit: and [thus…] He endows you with hearing, and sight, and feelings as well as minds: yet how seldom are you grateful!” The modern Arabic term for spirituality (and I stress the historical novelty of the term in Arabic) is al-ruḥiya, and derives from the same root as breath (r-waw-ḥ). The phrasing of verse 9 in the original Arabic is instructive: God “inflates” him (human) from His breath [min ruḥihi]. The spirit of God inhabits every nook and cranny of creation, not least every cell of the human body. Spirituality, then, though a novel term, captures a devotional emphasis that focuses attention on the enduring presence of God on earth as manifest in humanity itself.

Much to the chagrin of distinctly modern reformist perspectives across the Muslim community—a category that admits to a range of visions, from secularist to Islamist—practices focusing on the baraka of relics of one kind or another function as an important element of the devotional life of many Muslims. From the last quarter of the nineteenth century, reformists have identified such “irrational” practices as bearing much responsibility for the “backward” state of the Muslim community. Mustafa Kamal Ataturk banned Sufi orders in 1925 for two reasons: One, Sufi orders provided too great a non-state institutional space for the expression of opposition to elements of his modernization project; and two, authority within Sufi orders flowed from the baraka of sheikhs (living and past), which for Ataturk smacked too much of superstition to be welcome in the modern world. It is no coincidence that Ataturk created museums in some of the buildings formerly occupied by Mevlevi orders of dervish fame.

Over time, the Turkish state has softened its stance on Sufism. Orders are now legal but regulated. The Mevelvi whirling dervishes are one of Turkey’s most beloved exports, performing in front of audiences the world over. Nonetheless, the “religious fervor” of the “ardent faithful” in the Sacred Relic Room in Topkapi Palace suggests that, no matter the regulatory regime in place, domesticating the spirit of God lies somewhat outside of state power and authority.

For those who recognize the reality of saints’ intercession with God on humanity’s behalf, the relic room is a shrine, not to the Turkish nation or state, but to God’s presence on earth as manifest in a very special human being. The active devotional life that unfolds in a space meant to perform a break with “pre-modern” kinds of authority raises significant questions about what constitutes public religiosity. The elderly woman who elbowed me out of the way did not do so in order to make a statement about a fundamental relationship between religion and state (an absurd proposition given my memory of the situation). Nonetheless, the presence of spirit-infused relics in a public institution marks a seemingly “politically neutral” devotional practice as necessarily political. In its very effort to domesticate Islam the laicist Turkish state created a new space for (and thus a new kind of) public “spiritual” devotion that challenges common accounts of the meanings of public religiosity in Muslim-majority contexts.