On being cosmopolitan and religious: a commentary

Heba Elsayed’s idea of ‘divine cosmopolitanism’ is, regardless of the presentism in which it is contextualised, ¹ a fine one. I have pursued a similar, yet perhaps less sophisticated idea in a book – Cultural Encounters in the Arab World: on Media the Modern and the Everyday (2010) – in which I unpacked ‘modernness’ as a category that is alternative to ‘modern’, and which comes with predetermined, and perhaps fixed, ideas of being that have their origins in the enlightenment and the ideas of its philosophers. I have hitherto thought of ‘modernness’ as a self-reflexive, phenomenological category in which being modern did not conform to any fixed ontology – it was the self-reflexive process and not any fixed idea of being modern in the world that defined this kind of being that we call modern. My focus groups participants, like Elsayed’s, felt they were both ‘cosmopolitan’ (I used the term ‘modern’ instead) and religious.

Elsayed’s piece has a dual intellectual telos. There is, on the one hand, a conscious and systematic attempt to reclaim, perhaps democratise the category ‘cosmopolitanism’, bringing it down from the towers of the flaneurs and the intelligentsia to the gritty everydayness of popular culture and the masses themselves. On the other hand, Elsayed exposes a modernist interpretation of cosmopolitanism, on this occasion reclaiming it from a fixed, materialist and West-centric interpretation of modernity, opening it to those ‘others’ for whom religion, faith and God are still sacrosanct. The qualitative material emerging from Elsayed’s focus groups proves that identities, especially those in the Islamic world, are more fluid and intricate than some would have us believe. Elsayed’s piece is also timely because it speaks to the recent globalised events which pop up chronometrically on our TV screens, press, computers and I-pads, just like a J.G. Ballard dystopia, ISIS is coming, the apocalypse is nigh. Elsayed’s essay speaks more meaningfully to the Charlie Hebdo disaster than any news or journalistic outlet – her participants, all women, divine cosmopolitanists, would, I am sure, have been outraged by the murder of the French cartoonists, but I can also add with some certainty because they are ‘divine cosmopolitanists’, that they would also have been equally hurt by depictions of their sacred prophet and divine religion in the Hebdo magazine. This is what the Western intelligentsia cannot get its head around: that for some, freedom, democracy, the worldliness of the world, religion, God, prophets and biblical texts are all sacred.

The Muslim’s cosmopolitan imagination is, as Elsayed observes, hybrid: it is a double cosmopolitanism – an inward and outward cosmopolitanism – materialist in its desires for the other and ontologically inward looking, finding solace and self-assuredness in the very idea of the sacred as a transcendental category. It is this dual sacredness that the West and its media cannot fathom – this hybridised form of cosmopolitanism, where the sacred and the profane are constitutive of a kind of ‘modernness’ in which God, the prophet and globalised forms of neoliberal popular cultures are meaningfully sacred. ‘Divine cosmopolitan imagination’, for Elsayed’s participants,

is comprised of multiple identity layers that shift continuously and smoothly between mediated and non-mediated spheres of influence, allowing them to remain loyal to, and observant of, the moral boundaries of their faith, while reaping the benefits of an open and transnational media network.

Elsayed’s notion of ‘hybrid cosmopolitanism’ offers a plausible crystallisation of Bruno Latour’s main thesis in We have never been modern. The focus in this short, yet seminal, work is not on disenchantment or the dialectics of enlightenment, but on the throwing into doubt of the very premise of the ‘modern’ as an historical category (Latour, 1993). This is based on a controversial, yet rather convincing, line of thinking, since the modern’s constitution is based, fundamentally, on constitutional and discursive double separations between human/nonhuman, society/nature, God/state, and also since these separations have never been clear-cut or total. We cannot therefore affirm that we have ever been fully modern or, for that matter, much different from the pre-moderns. However, rather than claiming that we have never been modern, I prefer to argue, with Heba Elsayed and her participants, that the modern/modernity/cosmopolitanism is a narrative category/a discursive formation, and that in not living up to the kind of purification or ontological distinction that Latour exposes, we do not stop being modern or, to be more relevant here, ‘cosmopolitan’. We simply become cosmopolitan in different ways. We can be materialist and divine cosmopolitanists. At the heart of Elsayed’s piece is an attempt to acknowledge modernity’s ontological hybridities, and their proliferation, and to deal with them as constitutive parts of the whole, rather than as contradictory and oppositional components.

To me, the kind of divine cosmopolitanism that is described by Elsayed, however, also reads at times like a ‘good for neo-liberalism Islam’. To be cosmopolitan in the world is surely more complicated than merely being exposed to the worldliness of the world – or by travelling mentally in it. At the heart of cosmopolitanism is an ethical philosophy of otherness – a kind of radical exteriority that transcends nation and territory. Reading through the focus groups material, one feels that the category ‘cosmopolitan’ is at times imposed from above – a kind of Cartesian inner logic, a res cogitans emanating, in the first instance, from the ethnographer and perhaps from her own experience. What the participants are saying is very interesting, but are they, in the first instance, describing or referring to cosmopolitanism? Furthermore, for someone who is keen to reclaim ‘cosmopolitanism’ from the élite and their high cultures, I am surprised by the generalisations made in this essay apropos religiosity and class. Elsayed interviewed both lower middle class and working class groups. However, most of the analysis engages mainly with the lower middle class groups and no more than two pages of the whole essay are dedicated to analysing material that emerged from the working class group. Was it necessary for the coherence of the main argument on ‘divine cosmopolitanism’ to study both the lower middle class and working class groups? Weren’t the lower middle class groups more suited to the divine cosmopolitanism thesis? In fact, doesn’t engagement with the ‘uneducated’ working classes expose the very premise of the divine cosmopolitanism thesis as being a uniquely middle class phenomenon? Is it also not true that the generalised depiction of the working classes as being of an ‘inferior’ religious type (since they lack middle class habitus) an élitist position par excellence? The ‘cosmopolitan imagination’, as described by the author in this work, presupposes a type of habitus, a cultural and religious capital that is only available to the middle classes. Elsayed’s engaging and timely work leaves many questions unanswered, but it certainly invites us in to think even deeper about the complexity of modernity and the intricate and fluid nature of its hybrid identities.