Identity vs. Affinity
Ali Eteraz recently wrote a piece for Comment Is Free about the insufficiency of identity politics. It raised an interesting question for me: Is affinity the same as identity? A long-running argument in The Conversation about modern Islam revolves around this subject; whether Islam, and by extension religion in general, is really the primary way people are or should be organized and identified. Could ethnicity be more important? Could class? Could language and geography? What is the ordinal factor of human identity? How much does a black Muslim from Ghana really have in common with a white convert from Chicago?
I think we’re running up against a barrier that is essentially emotional: the way we want to identify ourselves is often different from the way we can identify ourselves. I think a lot of Muslims would like to believe that loving God and speaking to Him in Arabic matters more than the baggage you inherit by being born into a certain class and culture and having a certain color skin. They’d like to believe that ascribing to the Five Pillars is enough overcome those other factors; that if the black Muslim from Ghana and the white convert from Chicago were to get married, it would be enough to prevent their union from becoming a complete walking disaster. And to be fair, it would probably help. But anyone who has been in a culturally mixed marriage knows that no amount of spiritual affinity blunts the guilt and bewilderment of knowing you can hurt the person you love simply with your history. That is a fact, oh evangelical optimists, and a mystery of inherited human pain.
Is religion--or the lack thereof--the primary organizational factor of identity? No--I don’t think anything you can choose and unchoose could possibly be. I think I’ve said this before in a comment thread somewhere: I could choose to be a Unitarian Universalist tomorrow, but I couldn’t choose to be Chinese. Ultimately, and this is not meant to sound cynical, it’s the things you can’t escape that make the deepest impression on who you are. The indulgent reigning philosophy would have us believe that what we choose is more important that what is chosen for us, and while it sounds nice, and I’d certainly like it to be true, I just don’t think it is.
Religion, then, is less a factor of identity than of affinity; of preference. Unlike identity, which limits choice (I can’t choose to have been born in another place, to have learned another first language, to have inherited a different color of eyes or skin or hair), affinity requires choice. Though someone could be forced to practice a religion, there is no earthly way to force him to believe in what the rituals of that religion represent. He chooses to believe or not as he sees fit--emotional state, personality and experience (deeply individual, changeable variables) all come into play. Though we struggle with the place of religion in identity, I think this difference is something we as a culture have unconsciously realized: on all manner of forms (voluntary, in the US), you are asked for your ethnic identity, but your religious affiliation.
There are two exceptions to the identity-vs-affinity construct that I want to point out before someone points them out for me: first, the significance of religion in countries where religion is enforced, and second, the phenomenon of special-interest groups in the west which identify themselves as “culturally” religious, resulting rather ironically in an identical problem. In Egypt, in Iran, in Pakistan, in Saudi Arabia, if the state labels your parents as “Muslim”, the state will consider you a Muslim no matter what you believe or how vocally you believe it. If a woman labeled ‘Muslim’ by the state decides she no longer wishes to believe in or practice Islam, and wants to marry a Christian man, she is legally unable to do so: by law she can neither convert nor marry a man of a different religion. She is and will be Muslim whether she likes it or not. Since she does not have a choice, isn’t Islam by default a factor of her identity, not of her personal affinity? Certainly. However, I ask: is this Islam a religion? From where I’m sitting, it looks much more like a tribal identity enforced by an autocratic regime that needs to label its citizens in order to keep them segregated and oppressed. On to the second scenario. The progressive Muslim movement was replete with pundits who were self-described ’cultural Muslims‘; ie were born into Muslim families or Muslim cultures but were themselves atheists or agnostics. Since this phenomenon is explicitly linked to birth culture, cultural Islam (modeled closely on Secular Judaism) is absolutely a factor of identity rather than affinity. But like the previous example, it can’t be called religion, if religion is “a set of beliefs concerning the cause, nature, and purpose of the universe, esp. when considered as the creation of a superhuman agency or agencies, usually involving devotional and ritual observances, and often containing a moral code governing the conduct of human affairs.” (Dictionary.com)
What I mean to say with all of this is not that religion is less important than we thought, but that affinity--groups created by choice rather than circumstance--is more important than we give it credit for. Political affinity shapes minds and agendas and elections; religious affinity creates poetry, brotherhood, violence. Rather than continuing our obsession with the perfect box, the identity that spans culture and preference and belief in one tidy leap (impossible), we should be asking why people from different backgrounds are continually drawn, by choice, to the same ideas.