International Religion

April 25, 2007

In an essay a student cited a description of the experience of the hajj:

I went to Hajj when I was 17. Didn't really understand
what it means. I was very uncomfortable because it was
very crowded and very hot. The truly awesome thing is
all these people of different countries, ages,
backgrounds were there thinking of God and how to
please Him. Hajj is like being born again, having all
your sins wiped out.

The "awesome thing" about the experience was the tremendous crowd and diverse backgrounds of the people on the hajj. This is a traditional Muslim claim about the hajj: it is a place where the diversity of the ummah is immediately apparent. It is as close as one can get to the gathering of believers at the resurrection.

That standard Muslim interpretation is followed, however, by language that sounds Christian: "Hajj is like being born again, having all your sins wiped out." The idea that completion of the hajj will bring about forgiveness of sins is present in the hadith.. but the close association here with being "born again" swerves this sentiment toward a more typically Christian frame of experience. This would be easy to understand if the source for this quotation had been a western Muslim convert.. or even just someone who had grown up in close proximity to Christian culture. But no.. the source is a Saudi citizen.

One element of globalization that does not get studied enough is the migration of concepts into different language systems. It is often noted that local languages are threatened by globalization.. but even languages that maintain their viability are infiltrated by outside concepts. This came home to me often while living in Cairo and reading Arabic newspapers. One day I came across the phrase: "George Bush gave Ariel Sharon the green light.." As Arabic gained the technical terms to talk about weapons of mass destruction, United Nations resolutions, American electoral politics, and modern economic discourse, it was fundamentally changed. The language has become a conduit for a globalized discourse.

Religious concepts are liable to a similar pattern of movement. Central ideas from one stream of religious thought can easily be translated into another religious tradition.. and find a new home there. This kind of concept migration can happen in any direction.. various religions contributing their distinctive concepts to our common stock of ways to interpret experience. The upshot of this process will be that religious traditions become more and more carriers of a single globalized religious discourse. They may maintain a disctinctive name and identity (like languages).. but the contents of these religions will come to look increasingly like the contents of other religions (again, like languages).

I should add that I find this kind of homogenization of traditions depressing.. and this is a major reason that I find studying ancient religious traditions so much more interesting than modern ones. Not that any tradition has ever been hermetically sealed off from all others.. but the traditions I study have been highly successful at interpreting human experience on their own terms. One of our principal goals here at Old Roads is to preserve some of the diversity of human experience of the world.. and to roll back a little the cognitive homogenization that would make us all see the world through the same mental frame.