Scapegoating in Tafsir Al-Jalalayn & Shahrastani

Both the late 15th century Tafsir Al-Jalalayn and the earlier 12th century exegesis by Shahrastani of the verse in al-Fatiha:

Ghayr al-maghdubi 'alayhim wa lal'-dallin

reference various sources which claim that those against whom is wrath implies
the Jews and those who have gone astray implies the Christians. Without correcting these limited interpretations with Shahrastani's esoteric commentary which claims that those against whom is wrath implies those who oppose the ones who know and guide such as the Prophets and the Saints, while those who go astray implies the adversaries of those who have received instruction and the believers, it is useful to examine the more restricted interpretations from a psychological perspective. Why would these two groups have been identified specifically by the commentators when the verses do not specifically mention these groups. The answer is best articulated by Ann Belford Ulanov, Professor of Psychiatry and Religion at Union Theological Seminary in New York in her book entitled

"Religion and the Spiritual in Carl Jung:"

"What then is scapegoating, psychologically? This mechanism is well known to us. It forms a distinct chain of reactions that leads from personal repression to social oppression. Its defined sequence begins when we repress contents we dislike and dread. We disown them. We keep consciousness from such contents, and we eject such contents from consciousness. Our ego recoils from connection to contents we feel are destructive to our ego position and from the disordered chaos from which such contents spring. We refuse consciousness to the annihilating forces we call evil. We either throw such contents out of consciousness into unconsciousness, or we leave them blocked in unconsciousness, refusing them admittance to our awareness. Such refusal brings relief to our egos; we get rid of, we think, disturbing contents.

But such contents do not go away. They go unconscious. They remain in us as live bits of being, as volatile forces now out of reach of our ego and its restraining, civilizing effects. These contents regress and achieve still more powerful form, as a hungry dog we lock in a closet becomes a savage beast bent on killing to satisfy its hunger. A repressed content is like a tiny alligator we bring back from a Florida vacation that becomes increasingly inconvenient as it keeps on growing. We flush it down the toilet into our sewers. There it not only continues to grow, but now, out of sight and out of reach, it joins all the other alligators flushed away by the neighbors. What we repress accumulates more life to itself, growing stronger, bigger, contaminating whatever else is in the unconscious. pressure builds up that demands release into conscious life. Such contents burst out finally in projections onto others - usually those different from us, alien, because of physical appearance or sex or background, or distant from us because deem them inferior or superior to us. All that our egos judge unacceptable hurls itself in projection onto our alien or distant neighbors. We identify our neighbors with that bit of ourselves we put onto and into them. Thus we inaugurate a relationship of projective identification with our neighbors. We feel we must control them because we carry a feared bit of ourselves, and we fear them because we cannot control them. They carry the package of unconscious contents we dread in ourselves. Rather we want to see ourselves as identified with the values and ideals we hold most precious. We contrast our good to our alien neighbors' bad. We draw a boundary around the good with which our egos identify, outlawing the bad with which we identify our neighbors.

We can understand that the initial function of such repression and projection is to differentiate good from bad, to become conscious of what we hold as good and to bind our group into a community, distinguished from other groups. Such initial differentiation and group consciousness might be all right, even furthering consciousness, if it did not go further, but it always does. For the repressed material, the howling dogs and snapping alligators, press to get out, press for contact. What begins as differentiation only too soon leads to a wide gap between our conscious ego identification with the good and our projective identification of our alien neighbor with the bad.

The line is drawn, from repression to regression and contamination of unconscious contents to projection and projective identification onto our alien neighbor, to attitudes of prejudice from which grow acts of oppression, persecution, and finally, scapegoating. Like one or the other of the original scapegoats, the alien neighbor is seen as the carrier of sins we must get rid of to keep intact our commitment to the good. In the ironies of opposing consciousness and unconsciousness, we can indulge, even act out in frenzy, all the badness we disown in the name of defending the good. The disease attacks those who attack the disease. In the name of our ideal we attack, violate, persecute, and kill those on whom we have projected our badness." (1999, pp. 44-45).

~ Excerpted from "Religion and the Spiritual in Carl Jung" by Ann Belford Ulanov

Sura 1:7 in the Islamic Republic of Iran

Reading Azar Nafisi's book "Reading Lolita in Tehran," I was disturbed to find that the superiority/inferiority complex of the guardians of the revolution representing the Shia faith in Iran extends to its Armenian population, at least as late as the late 1980s:

"Another urgent meeting was set up, for late afternoon in a favorite coffee shop. It was a tiny place, a bar in its pre-revolution days, now reincarnated as a cafe. It belonged to an Armenian, and forever shall I see on the glass door next to the name of the restaurant, which was in small letters, the compulsory sign in large black letters: RELIGIOUS MINORITY. All restaurants run by non-Muslims had to carry this sign on their doors so that good Muslims, who considered all non-Muslims dirty and did not eat from the same dishes, were forewarned." (2004, p. 180).

~ Excerpted from "Reading Lolita in Tehran" by Professor Azar Nafisi of John Hopkins University.

The Feminine in Islam - Arkoun

Mohammed Arkoun's book "The Unthought in Contemporary Islamic Thought" challenges Muslims to think about many aspects of our faith. His comment on the feminine is poignant:

"Women represent a particularly disadvantaged social body; it is they who have to suffer the oppression of regimes that instrumentalize religion to compensate for their own lack of political legitimacy; the resistance of the popular mentality to any questioning of the status of women as fixed by God Himself in the Qur'an; and the weight of beliefs and customs they have themselves internalized through the rearing process handed down by their mothers and grandmothers in the lineage of an ancient feminine memory. I was able to verify all these mechanisms recently in a broad debate taking place in Morocco around the 'Plan for the integration of women in the development process' launched by the present government (April 2000). The fault line dividing society on the plan is not easy to trace; the simplistic terminology of opposition between progressives and conservatives, left and right, modernists and traditionalists, secular and religious, etc., is unsatisfactory. The use of these trivial, obsolete categorizations in political sociology is both an unavoidable ideological necessity and a backward conceptualisation damaging to proper critical thought: in politics, one has to be effective manipulating the social imagination with words and slogans that elicit immediate adhesion or rejection, while this manipulation avoids the intellectual need to introduce a more relevant emancipating critical discourse." (2002, pp. 22-23).

~ Excerpted from "The Unthought in Contemporary Islamic Thought" by Mohammed Arkoun, the renowned scholar of Islam in France of Algerian descent.

Religious sanction for female circumcision in Islam?

As part of my doctoral research on the place of the feminine in the psychology of Islam, I was shocked to find a religious sanction for female circumcision in "Women and the Fatimids in the World of Islam:"


"The fact that, on the imams' authority, Fatimid Law defined sex as the 'meeting of two circumcised parts', where by 'two circumcised' the early imams meant the penis and vulva, makes us infer that, by Fatimid law, women were expected to be circumcised. On the matter of female circumcision, al-Qadi al-Nu'man thus reported a tradition ascribed to 'Ali b. Abi Talib:

'O women, when you circumcise your daughters, leave part (of the labia or clitoris). For this will be chaster for their character, and it will make them more beloved by their husbands.' Finally, not unlike Islamic law in general, Fatimid Law permitted love play with a ritually impure or menstruating woman, provided that she wore an undergarment below the navel down to the knee.'" (2006, p. 222).

~ Excerpted from "Women and the Fatimids in the World of Islam" by Delia Cortese (Senior Lecturer in Religious Studies at Middlesex University, London) and Simonetta Calderini (Senior Lecturer in Islamic Studies at Roehampton University, London).

The First Ayatollah!

Since Iran is consistently in the news, I thought it would be useful to understand a little about the origins of the Ayatollahs. Heinz Halm, from the University of Tubingen, provides a sound historical background to the development of "Shia Islam - From Religion to Revolution:"

"His true name was al-Hasan ibn Yusuf ibn Ali ibn al-Mutahhar, though even many Shi'ites do not know him by this name. He is known to all Shi'ites by his honorific epithet al-Allama al-Hilli - "the most learned one of al-Hilla." He was also the first scholar to bear the title Ayatullah (sign of God). At that time it was merely an honorary name; only later was it introduced to denote a certain status within a hierarchy.

The Allama was born in 1250, shortly before the Mongol invasion. He studied in al-Hilla under his father and uncle and later went to Tabriz in Azerbaijan to the court of the Mongol Khan...Oljeitu. He even succeeded in winning the trust of the khan and converting him to shi'ism....Oljeitu had the names of the twelve imams embossed onto the coins, but this remained an isolated episode; succeeding Mongol rulers of Iran converted back to Sunnism. The Allama died in 1325 and was buried near the grave of the eighth imam in Mashad, where he is honored today as a saint.

The most significant theoretical accomplishment of Allama al-Hilli was the development of the principle of ijtihad legal ruling based on rational considerations. The foundation of the rule of mullahs in present day Iran lies in this principle.

The starting point of all theoretical considerations is how to answer questions of a religious, juridical nature if they are not definitively clarified by the Quranic revelation or a saying of an imam (a modern example discussed below is that of birth control). We recall that in Shi'ism, only fourteen persons are considered infallible: the Prophet Muhammad, his daughter Fatima and the twelve imams. Thirteen of them are dead; one is hidden and thus inaccessible. All other people are subject to error. No one can claim infallibility. What procedure must be taken if a problem cannot be solved by referring to the transmitted statements - which are limited? This is where human reason comes in: God gave human beings reason to be used to discover His will. If no answer is offered by tradition (naql) then one must gain help from the intellect (aql). A solution so reached, however, like all human decisions, is fallible and therefore subject to revision any time.

This rational effort to solve problems is expressed through the Arabic word ijtihad, a verbal noun denoting "making of an effort." The word is related to the familiar term jihad (effort, action), used to denote the struggle for the attainment of God's purpose on earth. The participle of ijtihad is mujtahid, translating approximately as "the effort-making one." This is a central term; the influence of present-day ayatolllahs lies in the fact that they are mujtahids." (1999, pp. 102-103).

~ Excerpted from "Shi'a Islam: From Religion to Revolution" By Heinz Halm.

The Feminine in Islam

In response to Fethi Benslama's questions about what happened to impede gender parity in Islam, here is an excerpt from Leila Ahmed's book "Women and Gender in Islam:

"'Umar's reign (634-44) is regarded as the period in which many of the major institutions of Islam originated, for 'Umar promulgated a series of religious, civil and penal ordinances, including stoning as punishment for adultery. He was harsh toward women in both private and public life: he was ill-tempered with his wives and physically assaulted them, and he sought to confine women to their homes and to prevent their attending prayers at the mosques. Unsuccessful in this last attempt, he instituted segregated prayers, appointing a separate Imam for each sex. He chose a male imam for the women, another departure from precedent, for it is known that Muhammad appointed a woman, Umm Waraka, to act as imam for her entire household, which included, so far as can be ascertained, men as well as women (Ibn Sa'd, 8:335). Moreover, after Muhammad's death 'Aisha and Umm Salama acted as imams for other women (Ibn Sa'd, 8:335-56). Contrary to Muhammad's practice, 'Umar also prohibited Muhammad's wives from going on pilgrimage ( a restriction lifted in the last year of his reign). This prohibition must have provoked the discontent of the Mothers of the Believers, although "history" has not recorded any opposition on the part of Muhammad's widows to 'Umar's attempt to prevent women from attending prayers at the mosques (Ibn Sa'd, 8:150). The consistent silence on such issues now speaks eloquently." (1992, pp. 60-61).


~Excerpted from "Women and Gender in Islam" by Leila Ahmed, PhD. She was professor of women's studies and Near Eastern studies at the U of Massachusetts, Amherst and is currently on the faculty at the Harvard Divinity School.

The Feminine at the birthplace of Islam

Fethi Benslama's book "Psychoanalysis and the Challenge of Islam" does due diligence to the role of Woman in Islam. Benslama is a psychoanalyst who, although a secular thinker, identifies himself as a person of Muslim culture who rejects ready-made explanations of Islamic fundamentalism. Benslama teaches at the University of Paris VII and is the editor of the psychoanalytic journal Intersignes. Can we really have any doubt from this analysis of Khadija's role in the confirmation of the Prophetic vision that she was a full partner in birthing Allah's final revelation? The book is translated from the French by Robert Bononno:

"The Nights' Word

The first test of truth for Islam took place on a woman's lap. Although this statement seems unthinkable today within the Islamic order of discourse, there was a time when there was nothing shocking about it, for the scene of demonstration was transmitted and repeated by several generations of chroniclers, a chain that can be followed back to the seventh century. No doubt this is one of the symptoms of the torment I referred to earlier, which made origin unavailable in a fictional mode. Research efforts in the humanities on Islam and "Islamic thought," as we have been accustomed to calling it for some time, have contributed more than a little to making the fiction of origin inaccessible. In conventional research such scenes of demonstration are considered to belong on the scrap heap of history and are "barely good enough for literature." According to this research, we should look for reason in the machinery of concepts, in the major theological constructs; that is where the system's gold is hidden, its pure originary truth.

From the Angel's Greeting to Disrepute

Nonetheless, isn't the scene of the first, or initial, faith an important representation of a form of reason that refuses to hide its metaphysical side and accepts its power to affect us by presenting us with a scene of sharing and healing? Here, the founder, the man of the word of law, hallucinating, terrorized, repeatedly visited by an invisible being, wonders if he is possessed by a demon. Like someone comforting a child who suffers pain, a woman holds him on her lap to prove to him that the angel is an angel and to free him of his fear of madness. The scene clearly reveals that the representation of the origin of the Law in Islam needed the body of a woman to remove any doubt concerning man's reason and to help the angel place him on the path of the word. It is in this sense that we understand the angel's greeting to Khadija.

But what happened between this moment, when the woman mediates between man and the angel - in other words, when she assumes a posture of mediation between two mediators - and the moment when she becomes an auxiliary of the demon "whose wiles are great"; between the moment when she, through her unveiling, verifies the truth of the vision and the moment she must be veiled to protect the faithful from the sight of her charms; between the moment when she appears to possess a knowledge that predates the prophetic knowledge of the founder and the time when she will become the woman who "lacks reason and religion" (hadith); between the moment when she frees the Prophet from the suspicion of possession and the moment when she becomes the troubling creature who must be possessed, appropriated, and monitored, and whose submission will be stringently organized; in short, between the angel's greeting and woman's disrepute in Islam? It is with this question in mind that we must scrutinize the future of women in Islam. This is necessary if we are to have any chance of understanding what transpired over a brief period of time (roughly twenty years) that determined women's destiny until today, perpetuating a position that can only be described as extreme. This excess, its origin and its many justifications, indeed the entire network of humiliating attitudes and assertions concerning women, must be analyzed without indulgence, with the greatest precision, for the mechanisms of alienation are far more complex than they appear.

This scene seems to accredit the notion that there was a time when woman was the witness of truth, in the twofold sense that she acknowledged what took place and was the proof and the test of the truth of vision. Then there was another time when woman became deceitful, a trap and a ruse, an artifice (this is the meaning of the word kayd in Koran 12:28) that had to be masked, unmasked and controlled."
2009, pp. 143-145)

~ Excerpted from "Psychoanalysis and the Challenge of Islam" by Fathi Benslama