Resources by Eren Tasar

On November 8, 2016, I watched Ana Navarro telling ABC News that “there is a White America and there is a Brown and Black America, Chinese America, Muslim America.” Muslims, of course, are white, brown, black, Chinese, and many other things as well, so from a historical standpoint it is surely curious, if nothing else, to see how adherents of a major world religion have been squeezed into the “non-White” umbrella of the American racial classification scheme. Navarro’s comments got me thinking about my own research on Islam in the Soviet Union and the question of how large, cosmopolitan, majority non-Muslim societies have resolved the problem of finding a “niche” for Islam. I see many parallels between the political context of Islam in America today and discussions that took place in the colonial empires in the late-19th and early-20thcenturies. America is not an empire. Yet, like the British, French, and Russian empires, the U.S. is cosmopolitan, multiethnic, multifaith, and hosts a growing and prominent Muslim minority. The British, French, and Russian empires have a legacy of incorporating and dealing with Muslims that our society should be aware of. This legacy should be especially important to anyone teaching or talking about, the history of the modern Islamic world, anywhere. On the one hand, the elites of these empires, like many members of the American elite today, were firmly convinced of the inherent fanaticism and insularity of Islam, though they disagreed vehemently on whether such fanaticism stemmed from Islamic dogma (whatever that might be), or the historical and cultural circumstances of Muslim societies. The fact that these elites were Christian, secular, or some combination of the two, obviously colored their views about Islam, but so did the reality that their geopolitical interests placed them in an adversarial relationship with large swathes of the Islamic world. On the other hand, there was a vital and compelling need to extend Muslims some sense of belonging in the polity. Across the 19th century, the British, French, and Russians all sought to institutionalize Islam through the patronage of religious scholars, foundations, and shrines, and through various attempts to codify or otherwise make sense of Islamic law. With the right kind of interference, it was hoped, Islam could be civilized into a form that would make it worthy of inclusion and protection in the imperial framework. Why does this legacy matter in today’s college classroom? It is only a small overstatement to say that the current liberal/conservative impasse about Islam is a reiteration of an old colonial debate. Take, for example, the comments of Newt Gingrich who stated that “sharia is incompatible with Western civilization. Modern Muslims who have given up sharia—glad to have them as citizens.” It is perhaps fitting that Gingrich has a Ph.D. in history—though I realize I’m giving him too much credit here—because these two sentences are a crude restatement of the old colonial accommodation with Islam: join the imperial polity, but for God’s sake, practice the kind of Islam that you can show up to the Club with! In my classes on 20th-century history, which focus heavily on Muslim countries such as Afghanistan and Iran, we do not regularly discuss American politics or current events. We do, however, talk a lot about colonialism, and I try to make my students see the past through prisms that are relevant to their own lives. As it turns out, this has been relatively easy when it comes to the relationship between Islam and the state.

In the quest for understanding the dynamics of Muslim societies, understanding Islam is not always the key. This was the theme of my last post on Islam and Decolonization. I would like to offer more thoughts on a related topic: racism, or at least racial and ethnic prejudice, in the Muslim societies of West and Central Asia that I focus on in modern history classes I teach. (To be clear, I most often focus on Afghanistan, Egypt, Iran, Turkey, and Soviet Central Asia.) My purpose is to demonstrate that Muslim societies are in several respects not so very different from our own. I’m sure I’m not alone in finding that some of the students, especially undergraduates, arrive in the classroom with a spoon-fed narrative about Islam that is disturbingly unitary: Islam, which is a tangible thing, has certain characteristics wherever it has spread, including shari’a (also a tangible thing), oppression of women, rejection of modernity (another thing!), and, probably, violence. This uniformity is so resolute that it sometimes even elicits admiration. Whatever differences exist across the Muslim world are not as important as these commonalities. Talking about ethnic conflict, and the very real ethnic hatreds, prejudice, and stereotyping that I have encountered in every Muslim society I’ve lived in or visited, is a valuable endeavor in its own right as a tool of historical inquiry, and also a helpful way to complicate the unitary Islam narrative. The problem is the vast majority of my students understand ethnic conflict through one prism, “racism,” which cannot be avoided in the classroom. To say the least, “racism” is a loaded term, one that, for many students at my university, carries all kinds of historical baggage with little direct relevance for the societies I deal with in class. To eschew the term entirely, however, would represent a missed pedagogical opportunity. It is true that ethnic conflict in many Muslim countries lacks the characteristics of racism in North Carolina. However, many of my students have no other frame of reference for understanding a different society (aside from the framework of unitary Islam). My goal is to help students relate to the countries whose history we are studying in terms that are understandable and familiar. An example: one topic that comes up frequently in my classes is the relationship between Turks and Kurds in post-Ottoman Turkey. After students have done the assigned readings, my starting point is to ask: what is a Turk, what is a Kurd, and why is there tension today between these groups? In a dynamic session, several themes begin to emerge in discussion: language, region, culture, rural/urban origin, religion, and class. After exploring these themes in detail, it is possible to talk about the role of ethnic nationalism, the Turkish state’s language and education policies, and the social impact of rural-urban migration. The fact that region and class attract the lion’s share of attention in our discussions is meaningful. These are two themes that all of my students understand. My approach resembles that of my hero Miss Marple, who tackled every new case by framing it in terms of the characters living in her home village. It can be risky to ask students to learn about different societies through the frames they are most familiar with. But I almost always find that, if nothing else, students come out of my classes disabused of the fantasy of unitary Islam. In an insightful recent post, Sufia Uddin wrote about the implications of the “racing” of Islam in media and politics. I am interested in the possibilities and pitfalls of talking about race, and racism, among Muslims in the Islamic world. Where does our understanding of racism apply, and where does it not? How can American frames of reference be harnessed for students’ benefit, without reducing the complexity of other societies in their eyes? I welcome your suggestions and ideas.

Eren Tasar Assistant Professor University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill As a trend in twentieth-century world history, decolonization is a major topic in any class dealing with modern Muslim societies. This mundane fact comes as a surprise to some of my students, however, for reasons that I can illustrate.

Eren Tasar Assistant Professor University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill I remember how dumbfounded I was the first time a student told me he had grown up believing Catholics were not Christian. He had never, moreover, heard of the Orthodox Church, the only form of Christianity recognized by most