Abu Shariati of the blog recently had the chance to travel to Cuba for an exciting workshop on transformative education. The following are some of his thoughts on the expressions of religion embodied in social change:
Imagine a world without the need to incessantly recycle a plethora of hackneyed, overdone discursive binaries and clichés that dumb down intelligent discussion rather than enhance it. It was the author’s unique honor to experience such a world – or something closely approximating it – on my recent trip to that embargoed, but incredibly vibrant and revolutionary, island of Cuba. My amateurish reflections, however, are not merely of Cuban society, but of Latin America in general. It was a gathering of theologians and religious intellectuals, thinkers, and activists from across the world, but with the Latin American flavor of religion writ large on it.
While the attendees may be characterized as the more progressive sections of ‘the Church,’ there was clearly an entirely novel paradigm of ‘doing religion’ that would seem alien to liberals in Pakistan. What was so remarkable is that the discourse we were exposed to would translate into a standard progressive narrative in Pakistan and most parts of the Muslim world – the latter not only being not religious, but at times anti-religion. YET, the Latin American progressives and revolutionaries have not thrown the baby out with the bathwater.What was striking in my conversations and deeper reading of this part of the world, is that those that heavily invoked religion are usually the ones who are most zealously on the side of progressive social change.
The largest churches in the country that were hosting some spectacular events of solidarity and support for issues like socio-economic and gender justice, as well as resistance to forms of neo-colonialism in the region. The expressions of religion were prophetic in all ways, not only speaking truth to power, but concretely challenging it. The Cuban and Latin American experience reminds us – though of course I’m not sure if we need this reminding in the Muslim world! – that religion continues to play a significant role in many if not most societies of the world. If there is a meaningful solution to violent extremism, this is it. The sooner we learn that in Pakistan, the better.
