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| a Mijikenda sacred grove in East Africa |
The various teachers of precolonial African history I've had the privilege to learn from all emphasize that “public healing” is a useful descriptive to understand how a variety of people in Africa understood the connected realm that Western scholars separate into religion and politics. Public healing in Africa symbolized and symbolizes the collective aspiration for harmony, social reproduction and abundance. Public healing was about healing
the political-social body. One of my mentors calls this dynamic discourse of
public healing “a moral aspiration for community.” And it is very very old.
For instance, if you go back and look at the identity of the earliest dynasty
in Great Lakes history, the progenitor to all the subsequent kingdoms, that
dynasty is not really a dynasty at all, but a coalition of healers, mystics and wisemen called the Cwezi.
Till today, the Cwezi
continue to be venerated, as what some might label as gods, or perhaps more
accurately, ancestors or spirits. In some places in the Great Lakes region, the
place where this veneration happened was a territorial shrine. In 1996, the Ugandan
journalist Geoffrey Kamali described a fleet of seven taxis filled with
people who left Kampala in the middle of the night following an “ancestor guide”, someone who had the
ability to communicate with these spirits. They sought a shrine on a hilltop
outside Kampala, a place with many caves. They brought cash and coffee berries
to give to the
omusambwa of that place, the territorial spirit. During
the fire, some people became possessed by the spirits and the ancestor guide moved
through the fire without being burned. Afterwards she took the people to the
shores of Lake Victoria, where she tattooed their right arms and asked them to
confess their sins to her and swallow several of the coffee berries.
The Great Lakes experience is not unique. Similar kinds of shrines exist at the East African coast. The Giriama are one group among the Mijikenda, a people who have lived near the Swahili coast for many centuries. In the precolonial era, they most often lived in rural areas adjacent to the coastal towns. They had their own forms
of sacred enclosures/shrines in the form of groves of trees, called
kayas. In 1914, the
British, in response to Giriama resistance to British colonial taxation and
labor policies, demolished one of these sacred groves. The main trees and gates were blown up, all the dwellings and trees
inside the kaya burned, and the entrance dynamited and barricaded. This
prompted a rebellion by the Giriama, in which 5000 houses were burnt and 150
men killed. Harming religious-political space touched to the core of Giriama conceptions of the good and the sacred.
Nor where such sacred shrines confined to the continent of Africa. They were also found throughout "Arabia" both before and after the arrival of Islam, and constituted an important part of how people related to the divinity. When we think of the ka'aba, we usually think of a place in Mecca, but a ka'aba could potentially be any sacred place where people would gather to seek intercession. It was a plural religious space, where violence was forbidden. This is not to say that people always respected these boundaries, but there were rules elaborated about coexisting sacred spheres.
For monotheistic visions of divinity, public healing can look a lot like polytheism, paganism or shirk. Where it gets controversial for African and Islamic history is when the Prophet Muhammad is directly implicated in the destruction of such sacred places. Hisham
Ibn al-Kalbi, the famous Kufan scholar, in his book Kitaab-ul-asnam, reports
the following passage:
"When the Apostle of God captured Mecca and the Arabs
embraced Islam, among the delegates who came to pay their homage was Jarir
ibn-'Abdullah. He came to the Apostle and embraced Islam before him. Thereupon
the Apostle addressed him saying, "O Jarir! Wilt thou not rid me of
dhu-al-Khalasah?" Jarir replied, "Yea." So the Apostle
dispatched him to destroy it. He set out until he got to the banu-Abmas of the
Bajilah [tribe] and with them he proceeded to dhu-al-Khalasah. There he was met
by the men… who resisted him and attempted to defend dhu-al-Khalasah. He,
therefore, fought them and killed a hundred men of the Bahilah, its custodians,
and many of the Khath'am; while of the banu-Qubafah ibn-'Amir ibn-Khath'am, he
killed two hundred. Having defeated them and forced them into flight, he
demolished the building which stood over dhu-al-Khalasah and set it on
fire."
This incident is also in
Sahih al-Bukhari :
"During the Jahiliya, there was a house called Dhu-l-Khalasa or
Al-Ka'ba Al-Yamaniya or Al-Ka'ba Ash-Shamiya. The Prophet said to me,
"Won't you relieve me from Dhu-l-Khalasa?" So I set out with
one-hundred-and-fifty riders, and we dismantled it and killed whoever was
present there. Then I came to the Prophet and informed him, and he invoked good
upon us and Al-Ahmas."
Keep in mind here, we are
talking about the destruction of a very similar type of shrine to that of the
Cwezi shrines or the Giriama sacred groves. In fact, Dhu al-Khalasa was simply a carved piece of white quartz, resting in a place called the ka’aba by
the local people who tended it. People used to come to this shrine when faced with
difficult decisions and seek advice. It was sacred to those people, as showed by their determination to defend it.
The above incident raises several uncomfortable questions for the Islamic tradition and, beyond that for all monotheistic traditions. What is the difference
between ancestor veneration and idolatry, and who gets to decide what that difference is? What are the limitations
of the
concept of toleration in dealing with the religious other? How does monotheism construct its other? I wonder if we regard the Prophet Muhammad’s need to destroy other people’s holy objects as a form of necessary evil on the way to monotheism. Were the tribes and the men a form of collateral damage in the march of the progress of the deen?
Forms of ancestor veneration and spirit possession have been a nearly
universal part of all cultures and civilizations. The ancient Egyptians
venerated ancestors, through a panoply of shrines, gods, idols, statues,
figurines. One wonders however, if the ancient Egyptians
worshipped their gods as a community in Mecca under the Prophet, would they have been regarded as rank
idolators? I don't know the answer, but the above incident made me think about the likelihood that their buildings and
shrines would have been burnt down and destroyed under those circumstances.
I would suggest that we need to interrogate the epistemological assumptions at the root of 1) the categorical move to create people whose beliefs place them beyond the sacred law, and thus in natural rebellion 2) the logic that makes it necessary to kill hundreds of men, simply to destroy an idol, and the moral calculus that makes figuring that possible. More is at work here than mere “Arab ethnocentrism” or “Arab racism” versus “African” religion. In fact what is at work is a profound devaluation of other forms of epistemology, cosmology and meaning making about the sacred in Africa.
For Muslims, the Prophet
Muhammad is understandably the moral exemplar of a virtuous life. This is not
an attack on the Prophet. As a human, he was truly great, a man who rose above the times he lived in. As a prophet,
he was no doubt inspired. As a political leader he often dealt with difficult situations
with the greatest sensitivity to human personality. But on the coexistence of
monotheism with what we understand as “polytheism”, paganism, shirk, or iconoclasm, I believe the overwhelming historical evidence doesn’t support the way he linked polytheism to disobedience to the one God.
The great scholar of religion Talal
Asad has done much work denaturalizing the secular, as something that the West
created to help it imagine itself as civilized, and those still stuck in
religious orthodoxy as barbarous. In fact, Asad and his many students have said
and have demonstrated that secularism
created religion, as a category with
which to consign forms of non-rational belief. But Asad and his students have not gone far enough. Just as Euro-Americans have had difficulty recognizing that their
experience of the Enlightenment was particular to their cultural and historical
trajectory and its categories, so the Abrahamic traditions have had incredible
difficulties recognizing the particularity of their own experience of universal
religion. It would be interesting to get Asad's thoughts on how the Abrahamic faiths have created a category of shirk or polytheism, filled it with a host of negative, immoral meanings which do not
correspond to what we actually find in the historical record, and then constructed themselves in distinction to it. This process of meaning making has had profoundly tragic consequences for non-monotheistic
aspirations for moral community and divinity.
I do not think these anecodetes exhaust the possible entailments of
Islam, Muslims or Islamic epistemologies. But they do highlight the degree to
which force, conquest and a deliberate violence, both epistemological and
literal are part of attempts to secure a particular tradition as sacrosanct. How do
we avoid linking the sacred with a concept of governing exclusion? In reforming
society a prophet has to participate in public life, in the affairs and
concerns of the many, rather than in the cultivation of the one. The prophetic
has to combine the ethical with the political. As the philosopher Muhammad
Iqbal describes it, the Prophet returns: ‘to insert himself into the sweep of
time with a view to control the forces of history, and thereby create a fresh
world of ideals.’ To make a "fresh world of ideals" is a political act; the creation of a world is inherently political. But such a world cannot be sustained, if it continues to instantiate such a profound disregard for epistemologies that do not share in the logocentric assumptions of the dominant Abrahamic religions.
Finally, I want to suggest that we not be so quick to justify the Prophet’s actions above as necessary or divinely inspired. By apologizing for them, we create a direct connection to imagining and modeling the type of world we want to create, support and live in. If we as scholars of Islam want to challenge the rhetoric of
ISIS and Salafism, if we want to imagine a world where we create enough room for “other ways
of knowing”, for traditions which challenge the narrow technocratic ways of
knowing of the modern world, and its attendant domination over nature, then we cannot afford to ignore some acts of profound
violence and disrespect of other ways of knowing, at the root of ‘our’
tradition. In reckoning with these acts, I think we will be led into new
definitions of tawhid, in which we are not so quick to think that we know the
difference between tawhid and shirk. Inshallah, that will lead us into a
profound humility and care in our encounter with the religious other.
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