The second panel kicks off with Phillip Muñoz, whose talk concerns the limits of state power with respect to religion as a historical matter in the text of state constitutions. Phillip’s key point is that there are some features of religious freedom that are categorically outside state power. There are some interests that the state can never pursue. Sherbert and RFRA are mechanisms through which the government can control religion. Phillip focuses on state constitutions because these documents show that the founders had a natural rights view of religious freedom and the unalienability of certain rights, over which the government has no jurisdiction. These rights were categorical limits on government power. But the rights have natural limits–to wit, the natural rights of others.
Brett Scharffs spoke next. Brett offered an interesting account of the different types of restrictions on religious freedom across the world. 39% of the world’s countries have high or very high government restrictions, and these include countries with high populations. Countries on the Asian continent have particularly high representation. There are also statistics for social hostility with respect to religion, which seem to correlate with countries with a high percentage dominant religious group. Catholic majority countries tend to score low as to both measures. His conclusions: religion is a limitation on religious freedom. Second, it is important therefore to look for justifications for religious freedom within those traditions.
Anna Su spoke last. Her presentation was historical whose points were that the US approach was an important, at first, contrast and then, later, a model for the Catholic Church. She also noted that John Courtney Murray’s contributions were prefigured by the Americanist controversy in the 19th century. Religious freedom may be less threatened in secular countries like the US, but that does not mean that religious freedom is less fragile in secular countries than in those with religious bases.
I’m here with Mark at the Notre Dame conference and thought I would live blog some of the panels today.
The first panel deals with the First Amendment proper. After a wonderful introduction by Judge Sullivan, Tom Berg spoke first. His primary theme concerned the role of religious organizations in the broader society, particularly those organizations that span the public and private realms. Critics of exemptions say that once a religious organization enters the public realm (by hiring employees who may not share the faith), no exemptions are permissible. Tom’s focus is on what he calls “partly acculturated” organizations–organizations that are deeply involved in providing social services and in performing civic functions but that do not share all of the culture’s norms. He argued that such organizations should receive exemptions both for religious equality reasons and for reasons of the social capital contributed by such groups. As to the latter, the point is not simply about the benefits to society but about the core reasons for protecting religious freedom at all.
Rick Garnett spoke next. He focused on an under appreciated feature of Dignitatis Humanae, the idea that government has a role in creating, proactively, the conditions necessary for the full exercise of religious freedom. As to the second, is this consistent with American constitutionalism? There is at least some tension. But Rick argued that the American account of religious freedom need not be neutral if neutrality demands that the state not regard religion “as a good thing.” That is, there is an important space between establishment and the state’s proper, secular, care for religion. That understanding is reflected in DH. Care, as Rick understands it, might include the building and maintaining of infrastructural spaces within which religious institutions can thrive.
Paul Horwitz spoke third. His theme was a liberal argument for accommodation as to illiberal groups. He began by surveying the usual accommodationist and anti-accommodationist claims. His own view he described as a liberal pluralist perspective. Accommodation is valuable because the state is obliged to act as if there may be important and valuable ideas inaccessible to liberalism. But it is also valuable because not accommodating illiberal groups will ostracize them entirely from society, isolated entirely. This would be a loss for them and for the liberal society. Accommodation “keeps those groups in and not out.”
Chris Lund spoke last. His talk concerned exemptions as well. He argued that without exemptions, many religions could not survive in the modern age. He addressed the claim that certain sorts of exemptions violate the Establishment Clause, those that impose third party harms. There has to be some principle of third party harms and cost, but the difficult questions concern which sorts of harms count. And they are quite difficult. His current factors include: (1) severity of the harm, the problem of course being describing what this means. (2) likelihood of the harm, which is perhaps a bit easier to understand. (3) the religious interest in obtaining the exemption. (4) the existence of other secular exemptions. All of this will require balancing, something the Court is not especially willing to do.
Over the last two centuries the Muslim world has undergone dramatic transformations, impacting the Islamic tradition and throwing into question our understanding of tradition. The notion of tradition as an unmoving edifice is contradicted by the very process of its transmission, and the complex role human beings play in creating and sustaining traditions is evident in the indigenous mechanisms of change within the Islamic tradition.
Politics of the Islamic Tradition locates the work of Egyptian cleric Muhammad al-Ghazali within the context of this dynamic Islamic tradition, with special focus on his political thought. Al-Ghazali inherited a vast and diverse heritage which he managed to reinterpret in a changing world. An innovative exploration of the change and continuity present within Muslim discourses, this book brings together disparate threads of the Islamic tradition, religious exegesis, the contemporary Arab Middle East, the Islamic state and idea of renewal in al-Ghazali’s thought. As well as being one of the first complete treatments of al-Ghazali’s works, this book provides an original critical approach to tradition and its capability for innovation and change, countering the dichotomy between tradition and modernity that typically informs most scholarly studies on contemporary Islam.
Offering highly original insights into Islamic thought and engaging with critical notions of tradition, this book is essential reading for students and scholars of Islamic Politics and History.
In January, the Harvard University Press will release “Why Muslim Integration Fails in Christian-Heritage Societies,” by Claire L. Adida (University of California, San Diego), David D. Laitin (Stanford University), and Marie-Anne Valfort (Paris School of Economics and Université Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne). The publisher’s description follows:
Amid mounting fears of violent Islamic extremism, many Europeans ask whether Muslim immigrants can integrate into historically Christian countries. In a groundbreaking ethnographic investigation of France’s Muslim migrant population, Why Muslim Integration Fails in Christian-Heritage Societies explores this complex question. The authors conclude that both Muslim and non-Muslim French must share responsibility for the slow progress of Muslim integration.
Claire Adida, David Laitin, and Marie-Anne Valfort found that in France, Muslims are widely perceived as threatening, based in large part on cultural differences between Muslim and rooted French that feed both rational and irrational Islamophobia. Relying on a unique methodology to isolate the religious component of discrimination, the authors identify a discriminatory equilibrium in which both Muslim immigrants and native French act negatively toward one another in a self-perpetuating, vicious circle.
Disentangling the rational and irrational threads of Islamophobia is essential if Europe hopes to repair a social fabric that has frayed around the issue of Muslim immigration. Muslim immigrants must address their own responsibility for the failures of integration, and Europeans must acknowledge the anti-Islam sentiments at the root of their antagonism. The authors outline public policy solutions aimed at promoting religious diversity in fair-minded host societies.
The opening scene of The Suppliants is set in the holy ground of the sanctuary of the goddess Demeter in Eleusis. The Eleusinian Demeter was a grain goddess, whose Great Mysteries were celebrated annually in September, when the autumn rains were expected to renew the life of the earth. At the climax of the mysteries, a reaped ear of wheat was revealed. Grain was stored in underground rooms in the sanctuary. By placing the play at this site, Euripides is invoking the idea of civilization, which the Greeks associated with the practice of agriculture. Thus, in the description of the shield of Achilles in Book XVIII of The Iliad, the cultivation of wheat is tied to prosperity and the rise of kingship: “at a furrow’s end the king stood pleas’d at heart,/Said no word, but his scepter show’d. And from him, much apart,/His harvest-bailiffs underneath an oak a feast prepar’d” (ll. 506-08). According to Athenian legend, the demi-god Triptolemus, to whom a temple at Eleusis was dedicated, was a favorite (perhaps even the son) of Demeter and is depicted in her company in many Athenian vase paintings. Triptolemus, whose name seems to mean “thrice-ploughed” or “thrice-sown” and who presided over the sowing of grain and the milling of wheat, was credited with inventing the plough and spreading the cultivation of agriculture. Hence he was thought to have originated civilization, which resulted from his discoveries. Sophocles wrote a lost play called Triptolemus. See Susan B. Matheson, The Mission of Triptolemus and the Politics of Athens(1994).
There are many echoes of these legends in The Suppliants. One critic goes so
Demeter, Triptolemus, Persephone
far as to suggest seeing the entire play “as a kind of fertility ritual ensuring Athenian and Argive prosperity.” See D.J. Conacher, Euripidean Drama: Myth, Theme and Structure (1967). The Athenian king Theseus praises “whatever immortal power” it was whose wisdom “[g]ave us earth’s fruit for food and, lest supply should fail/Sends rain to nourish growing plants, and fertilize/The womb of earth.” (Here and hereafter, I use Philip Vellacott’s Penguin Classics translation of the play). And in the speech that opens the play, Aethra, Theseus’ mother, tells us that she has come to Demeter’s shrine at Eleusis “to make sacrifice,/For a good harvest, at this holy shrine, where first/Bristled above the soil the fruitful ears of [wheat].” Aethra is there, apparently, to officiate as Athens’ Queen Mother at the feast of the Eleusinian Proerosia, when the first fruits are gathered. The founding hero of the festival was Triptolemus; it commemorates the beginnings of agriculture. See Noel Robertson, New Light on Demeter’s Mysteries: The Festival Proerosia (1996). Note that Aethra claims that Athens is the place where grain “first” appeared.
Furthermore, the sanctuary at Eleusis was emblematic of Athenian prestige and glory. The Eleusinian Mysteries “were for a thousand years one of the crowning glories of Athens, the pride of her statesmen, poets, and orators, a focal point of piety which though intimately civic was at the same time panhellenic.” Francis R. Walton, Athens, Eleusis, and the Homeric Hymn to Demeter(1952). Many of Athens’ greatest leaders, including Pericles, were associated with renovations of the sanctuary. The accusation against the Athenian politician and general Alcibiades, that he and his friends had profaned the Eleusinian rites, charged him with an extremely serious offense, fed into suspicions that he intended to overthrow the democracy, and prompted him to demand that he be put to death if tried and found guilty. See Thucydides, Peloponnesian War, Book V, cc. 28-29. The fourth century Athenian orator Isocrates, in celebrating Athens’ contributions to the world, significantly put first two gifts of Demeter, “the greatest [gifts] in the world—the fruits of the earth, which have enabled us to rise above the life of the beasts, and the holy rite [i.e., the Eleusinian mysteries (RJD)] which inspires in those who partake of it sweeter hopes regarding both the end of life and all eternity.” Panegyricus, IV, 28.
Eleusis and panhellenism
Although Eleusis was located on Athenian territory and although the rites celebrated there were used to serve Athens’ self-presentation, the sacred precincts had a panhellenic as well as a specifically Athenian significance. Athens claimed “to be connected to all of Greece through the panhellenic and beneficial institutions” at Eleusis. Barbara Goff, Aithra at Eleusis(1995).
Athens attempted to be at once exclusionary and engaged in relation to the rest of Greece. After a law of Pericles adopted in 451, Athens excluded from citizenship all those who were not born of Athenian parents on both sides. But Athens was happy to open the city to foreigners, and non-Athenians (like the Argive women in the play) were free to worship at Eleusis. Indeed, the shrine at Eleusis, along with those at Dodona, Delos and Samothrace, was one of the four great “common shrines” of Greece, with unrestricted access to all. And sometime in the 420s (i.e., around the time The Suppliants was written), Athens issued the so-called Aparkhai decree, which ordered the city’s allies, and invited other Greek states, to send offerings of corn and barley annually to Eleusis. Athens seems to have been promoting Eleusis as a common religious center for the whole of Greece. See Ian Rutherford, State Pilgrims and Sacred Observers in Ancient Greece (2013).
Eleusis and the legends associated with the site thus functioned as a kind of bridge to other Greek cities. In Xenophon’s Hellenika (Book VI, c. 3.4-6), the Athenian envoy Kallias reminds the Spartans that “the first foreigners to whom Triptolemus, our ancestor, revealed the secret rites of Demeter and Kore were Herakles, your founder, and the Diskouroi, your citizens; and he first gave the seeds of the fruit of Demeter to the Peloponnese” (The Landmark Xenophon’s Hellenika, Robert B. Strassler (ed.), John Marincola (trans.)). Through Eleusis and its cult, Athens claimed to be the source and provider of benefits, both material and spiritual, to the whole of the Greek world. It sought to be (as we might say) the supplier of international public goods for the other Greek cities (and hence entitled to a hegemonic role in their affairs). Panhellenic values will loom large in the play: Athens goes to war against Thebes for the sake of upholding panhellenic law and custom.
The rites of supplication
By situating the beginning of the play at a sacred site, Euripides has also underscored the social and religious significance of the actions of the Argive King and women in “supplicating” Athens. “Supplication” (“hiketeia”) was an important and distinctive social practice in ancient Greece. It was highly ritualized and was enacted through stylized symbolic gestures, such as kneeling and clasping or touching the beard, chin, hands or knees of the person to whom the supplication is made. The two main forms of supplication were a face-to-face encounter between a human being and a god (or another human), and an appeal through contact with the altar or sacred precincts of a god. See John Gould, Hiketeia(1973). Supplication of the first kind is illustrated by King Priam’s visit to the camp of Achilles in Book XXIV of The Iliad, ll. 414 et seq., when – following the instructions given by the god Hermes — he kisses Achilles’ hand and beseeches him to release to him the body of his son Hector. The action of The Suppliants, which takes place at a shrine, illustrates the second form, although it includes significant elements of the first. (For example, the Argive women cling to the knees of Theseus, clasp his hand and touch his beard.) Theseus himself describes the Argive women and their king as “formal suppliants.”
Suppliants were under the special protection of Zeus. In Aeschylus’ Suppliant Women (l. 1, l. 438), Zeus is said to “guard suppliants.” In Sophocles’ Ajax, the archer Teucer, fearing for the life of the son of his brother Ajax after Ajax’s death, bids him to assume the posture of a suppliant next to his father’s body and places a curse on any evil-doer who may seek to harm the lad. In Book IX of the Odyssey (ll. 303-05), Odysseus appeals to Polyphemus to bear in mind that he is a suppliant, guarded by Zeus of the Strangers, who will punish disregard of his rights. “[A]ll suppliants were placed under Zeus’ protection, and those who harmed a suppliant or violated the established rules were liable to divine sanctions.” Nonetheless, whether to yield to a suppliant’s pleas was in the discretion of the more powerful person to whom the appeal was made. Angeliki Tzanetou, City of Suppliants: Tragedy and the Athenian Empire (2012).
As suppliants at the Eleusian sanctuary, the Argive women and king occupy a liminal position between the gods and men: they stand at the border where humanity encounters the divine, and so demonstrate the “extra-territoriality of the sacred” (Gould). Moreover, they are powerless, but their very powerlessness invests them with the mystery and aura of the supernatural. (The blind, aged, ruined, destitute Oedipus, also portrayed as a suppliant in Sophocles Oedipus at Colonus, exerts the same kind of power when seeking refuge from Thebes at the village of Colonus, near Athens.) Their speech, gestures and posture demonstrate their shameful vulnerability; but they also pose an implicit threat to the more powerful, because it would be shameful not to pity those who are so wretched, especially when the supplication is enacted in a public space. “The suppliant is by definition weak and defenceless; yet he carries within him the threatening power of what is ‘beyond’” (Gould). Moreover, the Argive women are foreigners, strangers to Athens; and yet they assert some claim to its protection, as if they were members of the city’s community. Supplication, in short, was “a ritual one of whose functions is to bring an aberrant human being within the norms of the social order and to mitigate or resolve the crises which result when the community or its representative agent is confronted with what is ‘outside’” (Gould).
Just as the unburied sons are “outsiders” at Thebes, lying on its soil but given no place in its social order, so the suppliant women are “outsiders” at Athens. But Euripides will show that Athens, unlike Thebes, has the humaneness and the courage to take the outsiders “in.” As Sophocles’ Oedipus will say of Athens, it must show itself to be “that rock of reverence all men say it is,/the only city on earth to save the ruined stranger,/the only one to protect him, give him shelter.” Oedipus at Colonus, ll. 277-79 (Robert Fagles trans.).
Note, though, the counterpoint later in the play (after Athens’ victory at Thebes). Although the Argive mothers get their sons’ bodies back, they will still lament their deaths and, strikingly, they will still remain “outsiders.” Just as their unburied sons occupied a liminal place between the living and the dead, so too will their bereaved mothers:
Now in childless misery
I tread the lonely road to old age;
Numbered neither with the dead nor with the living
I inhabit the world of the outcast.
The Argive mothers
War is unfamiliar to most of us. But we should not mistake the depths of the Argive mothers’ agony. In our own time, we need only consider the anguish of the Argentine “Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo.” Beginning in 1977, a group of mothers marched every Thursday around the central square of Buenos Aires, demanding that the government inform them of the fates of their children, who had “disappeared” by the tens of thousands in the political violence of the 1970s and early 1980s against left-wing activists. Until they discovered what had happened to their children, the mothers’ grief could not be assuaged: they marched for over thirty-five years.
For reasons that I cannot claim to fathom, it is a balm to such suffering to learn the fate of a child who has gone missing in war, and still more to be able to hold that child’s remains, visit that child’s grave, or at least know the place and circumstances of his or her death. In his moving and powerful account of how Britain and her Empire dealt with the burial of their dead soldiers after the First World War, David Crane writes of the yearning that thousands of parents across the Empire felt to identify or to visit the sites where their sons had died or been buried:
In 1931, an Australian mother was found sobbing at the grave on Gallipoli of a son who she had thought among the missing. ‘If only I could see your grave, I would die happy,’ another Australian, the mother of Jack Fothergill, killed on the first day of the Gallipoli landings in 1915, wrote . . . eight years later.
Empires of the Dead (2013).
While reflection on experiences that are, like these, nearer in culture and time to us may help us understand the Argive mothers’ sorrow, it seems that we would still have not touched the full depth of their agony. Greek epic and tragedy seem to have had a unique pathos and poignancy on this matter. In her Mothers in Mourning (1998 (French ed. 1990)), the French classicist Nicole Loraux calls attention to the fact that in Greek literature, the sight of a son’s corpse is presented as the cause of a peculiarly intense, as it were physical, anguish for his mother, activating in her what Loraux calls a “body-memory.” “Suddenly present with a heart-rending accuracy, the grief and the memory of the intimacy of these bodies produce excessive pain for the body-memory of mothers. Euripidean tragedy has much to say about this sensual intensity that expresses itself only on a background of loss.” Here in The Suppliants, the Argive women plead for the recovery of their sons’ bodies so that they can once more hold and touch them: “Out of the depth of pain I cry to your [Aethra’s] son/To give my dead into my arms,/ That I may embrace and mourn the body that I bore.” And later: “Give me my son;/ Let my arms hold him fast;/ Let my embrace rest and enfold him.”
Loraux connects this longing with the scene in Book XXII of The Iliad in which Hector’s mother Hecuba implores him not to fight Achilles: she knows, not only that Achilles will kill her son, but also that he will take his body, and so deprive her of the comfort that she has often imagined that she would eventually have in holding his body in the mourning ritual. Hecuba tells Hector (in Loraux’s translation) (ll. 86-7):
If he kills you, I shall no longer be able to weep
Over your bier, dear child, whom I myself begat.
Loraux comments: “As if mourning necessarily were part of a mother’s fate from the very beginning, Hecuba has so much anticipated the vision, both dreaded and strangely comforting, of Hector’s prothesis [the part of the Greek death ritual in which the body is laid out and ritually cleansed (RJD)] that the mother panics . . . foreseeing the loss of her son and of his dead body [my italics (RJD)], as well as of the comfort brought on by ritual. . . . Hecuba thus evokes . . . the ritual that has been imagined so often and will not take place.” The bond between the mother’s body and her son’s, ruptured by his death, must be reknitted in the funeral ritual by her holding and mourning over his body, or her grief and loss are redoubled.
And this, Euripides shows us, will become the final, exquisite agony of the Argive mothers. For Theseus, despite eventually recovering their sons’ bodies and bringing them back to Athens, will deny them the one last chance to hold them; and Adrastus will concur. Between them, the two kings, guardians of the civil order, will set limits to the grieving of the women:
ADRASTUS: Is it wrong for a mother’s hand to touch her son?
THESEUS: They are disfigured; the sight would be too great a shock. . . [W]hy inflict distress on these women?
ADRASTUS [To the CHORUS]: Wait patiently. Theseus is right.
The civic ideology of ancient Athens had little patience with women’s mourning. In Sophocles’ Ajax (ll. 579-80), the hero says to his concubine Tecmessa, “make no laments before the house. God, what a weepy thing is woman” (Richard Jebb trans.). Even Pericles’ funeral oration pays little concern to women: Pericles remarks near the end (Book Two, c. 45) that a woman’s part is simply not to be talked about. But Euripides’ play lets the Argive mothers speak, if not mourn.
question our understanding of tradition. The notion of tradition as an unmoving edifice is contradicted by the very process of its transmission, and the complex role human beings play in creating and sustaining traditions is evident in the indigenous mechanisms of change within the Islamic tradition.
countries. In a groundbreaking ethnographic investigation of France’s Muslim migrant population, Why Muslim Integration Fails in Christian-Heritage Societies explores this complex question. The authors conclude that both Muslim and non-Muslim French must share responsibility for the slow progress of Muslim integration.
