There is a tacit understanding that no self-respecting postmodernist would want to align herself (at least in public) with a category such as the spiritual, which appears so fixed, so unchanging, so redolent of tradition. Many, I suspect, have been forced into a spiritual closet. Ultimately, then, I argue that a transnational feminism needs these pedagogies of the Sacred … because it remains the case that the majority of people in the world—that is, the majority of women in the world—cannot make sense of themselves without it. (Alexander Reference Alexander2005, 30)
I am part of that majority of women who cannot make sense of themselves without spirituality. I am also a feminist researcher and an academic. This has put me in an uncomfortable position for reasons I hope to explore in this piece. Thinking along with authors such as M. Jacqui Alexander (quoted above) has guided my questioning of the knowledge, philosophies, and methods we often take for granted in feminist scholarship and in Western academia at large. This sense of unease was wildly exasperated by Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza. Witnessing such extreme levels of injustice and violence exposed just how inadequate our current theoretical tools are in making sense of how so many can survive, persevere, and care for each other in otherwise impossible circumstances.
This journey of questioning began with an exploration of academic research on women in the Middle East, a category that applies to my own positionality as well as my area of expertise. In this literature, spiritual women appear in the ethnographies of authors such as Janice Boddy (Reference Boddy1989), Lila Abu-Lughod (Reference Abu-Lughod1986), or Saba Mahmood (Reference Mahmood2011). They are studied as part of situated Muslim communities, either in a village, a tribe, or a particular urban movement, respectively. As a reader of these texts, I felt alienated from them even as I was learning about the different groups they covered. I realized this was because the intended audience was people who exist within academia but who do not have a personal spiritual or cultural understanding of practices carried out by Muslim women. These texts were best suited for community outsiders to gain a better understanding of women’s agency, ambivalence, and negotiation of various social and religious traditions. While this form of scholarship was important for speaking back to the Western view of Muslim and Middle Eastern women as oppressed and/or brainwashed, it does little for audiences who already have a nuanced or experiential understanding of these contexts. That means that I must dislocate myself from any epistemologies that I have developed outside of Western academia in order to read these texts as they are intended. These different epistemologies are what Alexander calls “pedagogies of the sacred,” spiritual and religious teachings that are almost always located elsewhere in the literature, both geographically and in the global ordering of thought. Contrary to what champions of academic diversity may believe, this is not simply an issue of differences in culture and worldviews, there is a hierarchy of frameworks—one that goes uninterrogated in many ways.
As a result, I have had to develop a dual epistemological position that allows me to access (though not fully embody) the subjectivity of the individual Westernized researcher of these communities AND the subjectivity of the researched, who are part of a wider group with similar characteristics and beliefs to myself. Where I stand in relation to the spiritual effectively determines where I stand in the research relationship, either as a knower or somebody to be known, never both. In literature on women in the Middle East, I have observed that believers and spiritual people are the ones who are studied, ideally by non-believers (though we can’t know for sure) and those who use methods deemed proper by Western higher education institutions. Some of the methods I am referring to here include empirical research and observation, the reading and recording of practices, and finally referencing and citing other works that pertain to this line of research. This research relationship creates an epistemological separation between knower and known, one that marks their respective subjectivities in ways that render them ontologically opposed. I hope to show through the examples of spiritual, metaphysical, or religious knowledge that any fixed epistemological method for understanding the self and what it means to be a subject creates not only a different lifeworld and accompanying perspective, but an entirely different ontology. Thus rendering any modes of care practiced by spiritual people illegible or untranslatable to Western hegemonic thought. Additionally, any theorizing that attempts to void these practices of their spiritual elements ends up replicating the same epistemological violence committed on these communities since the beginning of European colonization.
1. Internal incoherence
The spiritual and religious resurfaced into my own life as a source of comfort during times of distress. The first time was in the aftermath of a mental breakdown that was aggravated by the stress and living conditions of the 2020 pandemic. In this instance it came to me as a form of self-care, an individual pursuit of knowledges and rituals to help me soothe a nervous system that was not properly responding to counseling and psychotherapy. The second time was sparked by the ongoing decimation of Palestine, Lebanon, and Sudan. Again, the more mainstreamed forms of self-care could not hold enough “space” for the grief and cognitive dissonance of living in and working with the same institutions legitimizing and enacting annihilation on populations from my part of the world.
It is a well-known cliché about people turning to God and spirituality in times of crisis but my faith boomerang largely came as a result of the gendered and embodied experiences of growing up with nationalized religion and then moving to a “secular” West (I use inverted commas thanks to the work of Talal Asad (Reference Asad1993, Reference Asad2003, Reference Asad2009, Reference Asad2018) and Fatima El-Tayeb (Reference El-Tayeb2011) who have powerfully theorized on the false construction of a secular Europe). Like a lot of feminists growing up in Arabic-speaking, Muslim-majority countries, my introduction to religion and spirituality was a form of social enforcement. Not because our societies have higher tendencies toward regulation and disciplining, which exist everywhere in different guises, but because we were taught that this was its principal function. We understood that there was a correct way to see the world and a correct way to be in the world. This world involved a God and a set of practices that could bring us closer to God. While there were times this messaging was instilled using scare tactics and adult authority over children, I was also lovingly introduced to the sense of wonder around a process of creation beyond our understanding. That as much as science had taught us, it still did not know everything; and that whatever science had discovered was in fact God’s creation. Crucially, I also saw forms of piety that brought about an inner peace, a sense of reassurance and acceptance of all that fate had to offer. It represented a beautiful surrender to a future we could not see and an eternity that we hoped to build in the present.
But like many people who grew up feeling different from the social mores around them, I could only see the oppressive nature of this framework. I was also made to believe, through Western cultural hegemony and the rise of the popularity of atheism in the 2000s thanks to Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and their ilk, that pious people were intellectually lazy, conformist, or even brainwashed. I had been influenced by the ideas around individual liberties and that all knowledge must be arrived at through individual learning of the Western canon of science, philosophy, literature, and art. I had been convinced of the superiority of this idea and its secular methodology. Talal Asad summarizes brilliantly how this functions on both the national and individual level by stating that “secularism” (in its context of European liberal democracy) isn’t just about the abstract principles of equality and freedom but also “a range of sensibilities—ways of feeling, thinking, talking—that make opposites only by excluding affinities and overlaps. Perhaps the single most important sensibility is the conviction that one has a direct access to the ‘truth’” (Asad Reference Asad2018, 2, emphasis original). In that sense, state secularism and personal atheism become intertwined as they pertain to hegemonic European thought. This comprehensive system of thought came to represent the “truth” in my mind.
I had conveniently forgotten about the principle of ijtihad or the intellectual inquiry and labor required to arrive at proper faith and knowledge in general. I had not been taught about the centuries of Islamic philosophy that went far beyond the scope of jurisprudence and shariʿa, and into the realm of truth, nature, and human existence. Because I did not know all of this, I rebelled against my cosmology. Even when I began my more academic bend towards gender, race, and coloniality, it was in the form of a critique of the social categories, systems of inequality, and their relationship to power networks. I understood the relationship between knowledge and power but accepted the inescapability of a wider knowledge system that produced these meta reflections on the system it was functioning within. But there were early signs of discomfort, one that was hard to name and which I often blamed on my lack of theoretical mastery. So total was my conviction that I had landed on the correct epistemology that I did not question how epistemicide was so central to its conception and what that meant for my very being, how that shifted and obscured my inner cosmologies; what it had e/affectively killed inside me.
The moments of rupture and crisis I was experiencing on a personal and communal level however, had exposed the fault lines. None of the usual methods of self-care were helping. No amount of new knowledge or changes in habits or finding the right surroundings helped. So I decided it was time to explore what I had been avoiding for over 30 years, the knowledges and wisdoms (for the difference between both see Collins Reference Collins1990, 257) of much older non-Western societies. I started with Buddhism and Daoism because those were the most socially acceptable in the Western context. I was very pleased to find that these were philosophies that conceptualized reality differently and as a result had a different view on the meaning of our existence. I discovered that I did not need a band-aid on my wound, I needed a transplant, a transfusion, a complete overhaul of the shaky foundations of a building I had built so high in the hopes of achieving something like peace of mind through cognitive pursuits and rational thought. How delusional.
Still, I needed the comfort of seeing myself reflected in academe to create a sense of internal coherence. Like bell hooks, I came to theory because I was in pain (Reference hooks1991), but not finding my cosmologies compounded the pain by confirming that I did not belong there. Whenever I did find them, it was never from the position of theoretical knowledge production. In fact, it was often parochialized in area studies, theology, and ethnographies of an over there. These philosophies were not citable like the works of the postmodernists and poststructuralists. Despite this, there have been infuriating repetitions, discoveries that had already been uncovered in different places, languages, and methods centuries earlier. Though it seems I am not alone in this frustration as Eve Tuck also expresses it in her essay “Breaking up with Deleuze,” where she asks “how do I attribute Deleuze’s notions of rhizomatic interconnectedness, a notion at the very center of his philosophies, when for hundreds and thousands of years, interconnectedness has been the mainstay in many Indigenous frameworks, both tribal and diasporic” (Reference Tuck2010, 646)? This interconnectedness also has strong echoes in African epistemology which is characterized as an “ontologised knowledge” that relates to an interdependent whole, impacted by interactions between the material and immaterial, and is realised through social epistemology (Ikhane and Ukpokolo Reference Ikhane and Ukpokolo2023, 29). This description is not intended to flatten the philosophies of the continent, but finds the common guiding principles of an epistemological approach that “does not have a dichotomy between the subject and the object in the knowing process” (Ikhane and Ukpokolo Reference Ikhane and Ukpokolo2023, 6), the very tension I had experienced in my dual position as the researcher and the researched. Instead, this epistemology proposes a “universe-of-harmony” worldview where all things are connected (Ikhane and Ukpokolo Reference Ikhane and Ukpokolo2023, 19).
2. Epistemic loops and locating liberation
How then is a concept such as going beyond the binary, popular among many Western theorists in the twentieth century, not just another way of describing non-dualism, the principle of oneness that exists in Buddhism, Sufism, and most African epistemologies as cited above? How could there be a book that does a comparative analysis of Jacques Derrida and Ibn ʿArabi as philosophers who lived centuries apart (see Almond Reference Almond2004; Derrida was born in 1930 and Ibn ʿArabi was born in 1160)? Almond argues that, although they do not arrive at the same idea, both see “something fatally flawed in the arrogant confidence of the system—a presumptuous taking-for-granted of the analysability of God/writing” (Almond Reference Almond2004, 28). God is replaced in the philosophical canon by writing, nature, or the human subject, but remains a specter that haunts modern European thinking. In disallowing God’s existence as a potentiality, European philosophy dooms itself to repeating the questions, eternally frustrated and circular in its logics. But still, it is implied that there might be some liberation for us in this tradition, that we could not possibly find revolution in Islamic philosophers or the stories from Eve Tuck’s grandmother. However, Ian Almond argues that “it is not exaggeration to say that a certain emancipatory spirit underlies both their projects” (Reference Almond2004, 10). If that is so, how much time would have been saved if Derrida had read Ibn ʿArabi? Why are we posing the same questions centuries apart, thinking that we have discovered the true source of our confusion for the first time? Maybe it is time we considered that our liberation lives somewhere beyond the European philosophical canon, and maybe as the adage claims—we can’t heal in the same places we got sick.
But when I say Western philosophy is inadequate, I must use the language and methods of Western philosophy to theoretically “prove” or argue that exact point. That means I have to suppress my inclination to study using different frameworks and methods. And while I understand that the poststructuralists and postmodernists offer critiques of modern thought and its modes of categorization/domination—they still belong on a continuum that builds on and responds to itself, making it seem wider in scope. You can’t understand Derrida and Deleuze without Kant and Hegel. It’s self-referential on a longer temporal scale and this allows for Western philosophy to self-critique enough as a measure of protection against its own destruction. Even the critical knowledge from within is complicit. Eve Tuck points out that Deleuze and Guattari’s theorizing is “wholly situated within democratic capitalism, even at the same time that they are working to confront and expose the fallacies of this system” (Tuck Reference Tuck2010, 640). They have not successfully overcome that which they are critiquing, nor have they provided a wholly new system of thinking. Otherwise, we would have all been theoretically liberated from the limitations of Western thought by now or at least been open to the serious use of different epistemologies for academic theorizing.
That leaves me no choice but to study this canon, then go off and study my own so I can be accepted as a viable academic that not only critiques and builds on existing literature but also proffers a propositional alternative. In other words, my work is doubled, like most of us who were not incubated in this system. Have we not asked enough of people who have experienced epistemicide? We take away spiritual comfort and communal knowledge and make people work twice as hard to prove that what we know can compete against the dominant streams of knowledge. I am supposed to be grateful however, because there are indigenous studies and decolonial methodologies and African epistemologies. The epistemological and academic equivalent of diversity and inclusion work, letting just enough of these different ideas and thinkers in to present a veneer of ideological or philosophical diversity.
Ultimately, I am not looking to rewrite the truth or expand the number of seats at the table. I want to scream for an epistemology of the unknown. I loathe to call the unknown a productive space, but it is where we learn the limits of humans’ cognitive ability. I do not claim that Western philosophy believes to know everything, but it believes that it can know everything on a long enough timeline and with enough progress. Consider how that changes a person’s ontology—the belief that everything is knowable, you just don’t know it yet. It is the birthplace of entitlement and domination. As a result, there has been so much theorizing about the connection between knowledge and power (Foucault Reference Foucault1972 and Reference Foucault and Gordon1980 being the most popular), but not enough to undo it. That would require a belief in multiple ontologies, not just multiple epistemologies, which is a tall order for hegemonic systems that prefer to violently homogenize ideas around subjectivity with an occasional “diversification” in order to maintain their power.
But maybe it doesn’t matter that you understand it in this way, systematically and on the level of global domination. What if I told you that this is simply what I need to survive? To feel whole and make sense of the world around me. That it counts as self-care, to know and believe that other cosmologies, worldviews, and epistemologies reside inside of us, even those of us who work with academic theory. I do not want to study religion and spirituality; I want to make them my method and my central mode of theorizing.
3. God in our mouths
As the violence and destruction escalated in Palestine and Lebanon, only a little bit of faith in the religions we had previously rejected brought us any trace of comfort. We watched videos and heard accounts of people suffering and dying with nothing but God in their mouth. They created life by expanding its meaning to go beyond our individual existence. They found safety only in the knowledge that no mortal pain can shake a human out of their sense of justice. That no matter how many people die, there is always something worth fighting for. We didn’t understand how strong they could be in the face of all this cruelty, until we remembered—those of us who had left—we remembered that we were once cradled in the same warmth of an interconnectedness that goes beyond the rational mind.
When our erratic, overstimulated, anxious brains can no longer parse out the personal from the theoretical to the political and the spiritual, we turn to ʿelm el gheib, or the science/study of the unknown; powerful in its magnitude because what we don’t know far exceeds what we do know. We need to hold on to a plan we cannot see, a future that does not exist; precisely because in the current conjuncture, there is no future for this world. Unfortunately, what we do know is that nothing we’re doing is preventing the violence or providing us with the care we need in the face of these unstoppable forces of death, death itself being the greatest of all unknowns and our singular certainty in life. My self-care is an incantation “oh God, oh God, oh God.” It is a reminder of my good fortunes “thank God, thank God, thank God.” It is the knowledge that I as an individual cannot exist in a state of separation. We say aʿudh b’Allah men kelmet ana or God deliver us from the word “I” not for religious denouncement but for its social understanding that inter-subjective humility is necessary. I would like to distance myself from this “I” that knows so little but thinks so much, of itself and about a world it cannot completely comprehend. Because what is a collective if it’s made up of individuals who only know how to say “I”?
4. Care beyond the self, care beyond theory
Can I still call it self-care if it aims to transcend the self? “As Derrida might say: the secret of the self is that there is no self” (Almond Reference Almond2004, 103). Yet we reinscribe it every day in how we do theory and understand issues such as self-care by fixating on the subject and whether it exists. Whereas cultivation of the self can take on a different meaning and porosity if we consider different spiritual lifeworlds. During the Ottoman Empire for example the production of a moral subject, “far from being an externally imposed system of ‘training the subject,’ was designed to operate internally” (Hallaq Reference Hallaq2018, 75, emphasis original); just like the pious women in Saba Mahmood’s ethnography who construct their subjectivities through strengthening their faith (Reference Mahmood2011, 31). In Mahmood’s engagement with Judith Butler’s theorization on agency, Mahmood also pushes back on the poststructuralist understanding of what it means to be a subject because it is inadequate to the task of analyzing the lives of people who are reproducing themselves through a religious framework. It is a subjectivity that is “a product of the historically contingent discursive traditions in which they are located” (Mahmood Reference Mahmood2011, 32), that is, quite far (both in distance and thinking) from the theoretical positions of poststructuralists writing in the West. In fact, this differently contextualized subjectivity produces what Wael Hallaq calls “a different concept of human” (Reference Hallaq2018, 83). It is a different epistemology that can produce a different kind of human ontology. The presence of this variation can help us to push against the limitations of hegemonic thought.
If you only read modern European philosophy, you would almost believe that only poststructuralist thought had the capacity to be fluid. But what could possibly defy categorization more than the spiritual and the unknown? It should be our teacher, a constant reminder that a lot of what is worth knowing is unspeakable, unwritable, and untranslatable. It is as incoherent as we are as subjects—a world that is a reflection of ourselves. It is “the re-affirmation of something vital, inconstant and elusive which defeats all our attempts to talk about it” (Almond Reference Almond2004, 10). This of course does not belittle the real and material impact of all things socially constructed, but what are we beyond these categories? What are we risking losing? “When the immeasurable isn’t recognized or valued, it tends to slip from view. Out of sight, it ceases to claim our minds and attention. We forget how to see it” (Carini Reference Carini2001, 175). We lose ourselves when we lose our ability to engage with the immeasurable. Only a coming out of the spiritual closet, or at least a playful engagement with the unknowable, will allow us to think of ourselves as beings in a universe of meaning outside the social constructions that are defining our worlds. But when I do that, will I still find a home in the feminist academe?
Postmodernists and poststructuralists will posit that they are not like the rest, but Patricia Hill Collins points out that “every idea has an owner and that the owner’s identity matters” (Reference Collins1990, 265). Not looking to other places, other epistemologies, and cosmologies to make sense of the world around them and critique the toxicity of modern European knowledge systems was a choice. Postmodernist thinkers chose to do their own theorizing rather than learn from the people Western thought had hurt the most. These choices are what shape the kind of knowledge I can produce today within the context of academic research, and it also determines what is considered theoretical truth. In theory, postmodernism and poststructuralism seem inescapable. They have covered all critiques and possibilities, addressed every concern and questioned every category and framework to the point where active resistance to the dominance of Western philosophy seems unnecessary. This effectively allows the whole hegemonic knowledge system to continue by expressing its contradictions and producing a resistance to it from within. And I refuse to accept the postmodernist truth (or the deconstruction of it) as the final word because my/our call for truth can only come from outside the house. Only when I am in relationship with the untheorizable can I contain the multitudes that do not vie for coherence and the contradictions that do not seek stability in form, and potentially even create a world, as the Zapatistas say, where many worlds are possible.
Lina Ashour is a feminist writer, speaker, and community organizer. Her research explores the politics of knowledge production and the urban/rural divide as it pertains to gender, class, and other forms of social inequality.
Open access
