President Donald Trump meets with Faith Leaders from across the country to pray in the Oval Office, Wednesday March 19, 2025. (Official White House Photo by Molly Riley)
One of the most troubling features of Trump-era politics is not simply nationalism, authoritarian style, or contempt for institutions. It is the extent to which large parts of the administration and its surrounding ecosystem have normalised a form of religious absolutism, especially in its Christian Zionist variant, as a legitimate basis for public policy. This is most clearly visible in relation to Israel–Palestine, where biblical claims, apocalyptic imagination, and civilisational rhetoric increasingly bleed into state language, lobbying, and diplomacy.
This is not a story about religion in politics in the broad sense. American politics has always been saturated with religion. Nor is it a story about American Christians as such, many of whom reject Christian Zionism and oppose the sacralisation of war and occupation. It is, rather, a story about a specific ideological formation: the convergence of Trumpism, evangelical power, militarised Christianity, and an unqualified pro-Israel agenda that increasingly treats territorial expansion and permanent domination as morally righteous, even divinely sanctioned.
Consider Pete Hegseth, now serving as U.S. defense secretary. His tattoos include both “Deus Vult” (the medieval crusader slogan meaning “God wills it”) and the Jerusalem Cross, a symbol with a long Christian history that has also been adopted by some far-right groups as an emblem of struggle for “Western civilisation.” Symbolism matters, especially when it aligns with a broader worldview. Hegseth’s public commentary has long deployed crusade-inflected language and cast politics in civilisational terms. In a political environment already inclined to frame conflict as existential and redemptive, such imagery is not merely ornamental. It signals a moral universe in which force can be imagined as a sacred duty.
Then there is Paula White-Cain, Trump’s longtime spiritual adviser, now serving as senior adviser to the White House Faith Office, created in February 2025. White is not a marginal pastor offering private counsel; she is an institutional actor at the centre of the administration’s religious outreach. Her prominence illustrates how charismatic evangelical leadership has been folded directly into executive power. Whatever internal diversity exists within evangelicalism, White’s role provides formal access and symbolic legitimacy to a religious-political bloc that has made unwavering support for Israel central to its moral vocabulary.
That bloc has organisational muscle. Christians United for Israel (CUFI) describes itself as the largest pro-Israel organisation in the United States, with more than 10 million members. It presents its mission in explicitly activist terms: to educate and mobilise Christians “with one voice in defence of Israel and the Jewish people.” CUFI is not merely a constituency group; it is a mass infrastructure for translating prophetic belief into lobbying pressure. When biblical narratives are converted into organised political leverage at this scale, they shape the range of what elected officials can say and do.
The American Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) is different, but no less important. It is a major pro-Israel lobbying organisation that plays a key role in shaping the U.S.–Israel relationship. Its worldview is more conventionally strategic than theological. Yet in practice, the agendas of groups like AIPAC often converge with those of Christian Zionist networks, producing an American political field in which the costs of backing Israeli occupation, settlement expansion, or maximalist territorial claims are drastically reduced. Theology and lobbying are not identical, but they are politically complementary.
The administration’s own institutional architecture reinforces this trend. In February 2025, Trump signed an executive order creating the Task Force to Eradicate Anti-Christian Bias, led by Attorney General Pam Bondi. On paper, the initiative is framed as protecting Christians from discrimination. In practice, such moves risk deepening a politics of Christian grievance and exceptionalism, presenting the state as the guardian of a supposedly besieged majority faith at the very moment when Christian nationalist language is becoming more entrenched in public power.
The rhetoric becomes even clearer in the case of Elise Stefanik. During her January 2025 confirmation hearing for the UN post, Stefanik endorsed the claim that Israel has a “biblical right” to the West Bank. The significance lies not only in the remark itself, but in what it reveals: a willingness to displace international law, diplomacy, and Palestinian political rights with a sacred title deed. Although her nomination was later withdrawn, the statement remains politically telling.
Mike Huckabee, now U.S. ambassador to Israel, has long embodied this same logic. He is widely described as a staunch evangelical supporter of Israel and a longstanding defender of Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank. His politics are not simply “pro-Israel”; they are rooted in a theological reading of land, sovereignty, and history that aligns closely with Christian Zionism. That worldview narrows the space for any policy grounded in equality, international law, or genuine Palestinian self-determination.
This alignment is clearly reinforced by the relationship with Israeli political leadership. While Benjamin Netanyahu has strategically engaged with evangelical audiences and Christian Zionist networks, he is not alone. Extremist figures such as Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir have drawn explicitly on religious justifications in articulating territorial claims and in dehumanising Palestinians. This does not imply a simple ideological overlap with American Christian Zionism, but it highlights a growing convergence in which theological narratives and state interests intersect, mutually reinforcing a political environment where extremist ideologies and military policies acquire both strategic and symbolic legitimacy.
Crucially, this ideological framework does not stop at Israel–Palestine. It extends into broader geopolitical imaginaries, including the war in Iran, where segments of the same evangelical ecosystem interpret conflict through apocalyptic and civilisational lenses. In such narratives, geopolitical confrontation is not merely strategic but part of a larger, divinely ordered struggle. The effect is to further erode the space for diplomacy, recasting war as destiny rather than as a contingent and avoidable political choice.
At the centre of this configuration stands Donald Trump himself. Trump is not a conventional religious actor, nor does he consistently articulate a coherent theological worldview. His relationship to religion has been largely instrumental and politically attuned rather than doctrinal. It is precisely this pragmatism that has enabled a particularly effective alignment with Christian Zionist constituencies. Trump’s approach to Israel has combined strategic calculation with symbolic gestures that carry deep theological resonance for evangelical supporters. Decisions such as the relocation of the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, the recognition of Israeli sovereignty over contested territories, and the consistent avoidance of pressure on settlement expansion have not been framed in explicitly religious terms by Trump himself. However, they have been readily interpreted within a Christian Zionist framework as affirmations of biblical promise and prophetic fulfilment, in line with the “Greater Israel” vision. Trump’s significance lies less in personal belief than in political calculation: he has translated a set of religiously inflected expectations into concrete policy shifts, while maintaining enough ambiguity to keep these commitments legible as both strategic choices and moral imperatives.
Taken together, these figures and institutions reveal a deeper pattern. Christian Zionism is not a decorative feature of Trumpism; it is one of the moral languages through which power justifies itself. It sanctifies hierarchy, recasts occupation as covenant, and turns war into destiny. Its extension beyond Israel–Palestine into wider conflict theatres underscores the risks of allowing theological absolutism to shape statecraft.
Its danger lies precisely in this fusion of transcendence and politics. Once territorial claims are rendered biblical, and military force is wrapped in sacred symbolism, political argument becomes harder, compromise becomes sinful, and domination begins to masquerade as faith. The ritual of “laying on of hands” in the Oval Office on 5 March 2026—during which prominent evangelical figures gathered around Donald Trump, placing their hands on his shoulders and arms while praying over him—epitomises this convergence. It is not merely a display of personal devotion, but a performative enactment of political theology: a moment in which spiritual authority and executive power collapse into one another, reinforcing the idea that political leadership itself is divinely sanctioned and that state action can be endowed with sacred legitimacy.
Antonio De Lauri is a Research Professor and Research Director at the Christian Michelsen Institute. He is the President of the International Humanitarian Studies Association, and the Editor-in-Chief of Public Anthropologist.
Cite as: De Lauri, A. 2025. “The Trump Administration: Theology into Statecraft” Focaalblog March 27. https://www.focaalblog.com/2026/03/27/antonio-de-lauri-the-trump-administration-theology-into-statecraft/
One might intuitively assume that the Syrian Sunni ulama (religious scholars) would valorize periods emblematic of Islam’s bygone grandeur, such as the Umayyad or Ottoman empires. In practice, however, their historical narratives accord greater significance to the era of parliamentary rule spanning the late French Mandate through the early years of independence (1932–1963). This emphasis stems in part from the fact that this period is portrayed by Syrian ulama as a nahda (“renaissance”) of Islamic knowledge. Yet this focus on the parliamentary era is also driven by political considerations. First, against a backdrop of sectarian violence, the ulama have underscored the harmony that purportedly characterized interreligious relations during that period, attributing this in particular to the efforts of religious leaders to foster such concord. Second, during the parliamentary era, the ulama enjoyed an unprecedented degree of autonomy, a circumstance that once again stands in sharp contrast to the present situation.
December 8, 2024: Islamic conquest or liberation?
The new Syrian authorities and their supporters have drawn a parallel between the rebels’ capture of Damascus on 8th of December 2024, on the one hand, and the 7th-century Islamic conquest (fath) of Syria, on the other hand. As early as January 2012, current President Ahmad al-Sharaa signed the first statement of his organisation (then named Jabhat al-Nusra, “the Support Front”) as “the Conqueror (al-fatih) Abu Muhammad al-Julani”. This grandiose title (e.g., the Ottoman Sultan who is commonly referred as “the Conqueror” is Mehmed II, who captured Constantinople from the Byzantine Empire) was far from an obvious fit for a complete unknown whose only achievement, back then, was the establishment of a small underground organisation.
The notion of “Islamic conquest” remained central to al-Sharaa’s organisation until 2015-2016, which saw the successive establishment of the Army of Conquest (jaysh al-fath), a Nusra-dominated rebel alliance, and of the Levant Conquest Front (jabha fath al-sham), a revamped version of Jabhat al-Nusra following the latter’s decision to sever its ties to al-Qaeda. In 2017, however, the organisation renamed itself the Levant Liberation Committee (hay’a tahrir al-sham, hereafter HTS), a means to distance itself from pan-Islamic Jihadi ideology while moving closer (rhetorically at least) to the Syrian revolutionary mainstream.
The 2024 collapse of the Asad regime, which many Syrians perceived as an unexpected miracle, gave new impetus to the use of the term fath by members and supporters of the new regime. In a speech he gave on 29 January 2025 in front of the military commanders who were about to appoint him as president, al-Sharaa himself used the Quranic expression al-fath al-mubin (“the Clear Victory”) to describe the toppling of the former regime.
A few Sunni religious scholars, although supportive of the new regime, expressed polite disagreement as to this use of the term fath. Among them was Dr Imad al-Din al-Rashid, who was appointed as the Dean of the Faculty of Sharia at the University of Damascus in March 2025. In a Friday sermon he gave shortly after the fall of Assad and his own consequent return to Syria, al-Rashid warned that speaking of fath implied that just like early 7th-century Damascus, pre-December 8 Damascus was not a Muslim city. Speaking in a well-off neighbourhood of the capital that had experienced relatively little violence and displacement during the war, he insisted that, on the contrary, those who had remained in the city during the past fourteen years were in fact “steadfast guardians of Islam” (murabitin), provided, of course, they had not actively collaborated with the former regime. It was, therefore, more correct to speak of “liberation” (tahrir) rather than fath.
This viewpoint has officially prevailed: as per a presidential decree issued in October 2025, nationwide celebrations were held on December 8 of that year on the occasion of “Liberation Day” (‘id al-tahrir). The term fath has not disappeared, however,i as it endows the new rulers with greater religious legitimacy than the more “secular” tahrir.
The Umayyads: multi-faceted symbolism
“We are Muslims, not Umayyads”, Mufti of A‛zaz Mahmud al-Jabir (a well-known critique of the new regime) stated in May 2025 in response to increasingly frequent references to the Umayyad dynasty among constituencies loyal to al-Sharaa. In February, for instance, prominent pro-government media figure Musa al-Omar had posted a video of the president riding a horse to a song praising the Umayyads’ “golden lineage” and their name that “sent fears in Persian kings.”ii
For mainstream Sunni religious scholars, the Umayyads are problematic in two respects. First, they were key protagonists in the conflicts occasioned by the succession of Prophet Muhammad, a topic most ulama tend to avoid as they profess love for the Al al-Bayt (family of the Prophet) while acknowledging the legitimacy of the Umayyads on a pragmatic basis, namely, their victory over the descendants of Ali. Second, Umayyad Caliphs are not remembered as particularly pious rulers except for ‘Umar bin ‘Abd al-‘Aziz (r. 717-720), who is, for this very reason, the only member of the dynasty to regularly feature as a role model in mainstream Sunni religious discourse in Syria.
A more distinctly anti-Shia tradition epitomized by Ibn Taymiyya (1263-1328) and currently championed by Salafi scholars (who have remained a minority among Syria’s ulama) has set the Umayyads up as a symbol of exclusionary Sunni identity. A notable example was that of Zahran ‘Allush (1971-2015), a Salafi preacher and founder of the Islam Army (jaysh al-islam). Following the Lebanese Hezbollah’s 2013 military intervention in support of the Asad regime, ‘Allush recorded a speech in the ruins of the Umayyad palace of Qasr al-Hayr al-Sharqi (near Palmyra). Likewise, addressing Shia supporters of the Asad regime, he famously promised that “the Umayyads’ glory will return to Damascus, whether you like it or not!” Twelve years later, TV preacher ‘Adnan al-‘Ar‛ur, who had first made a name of himself in the late 2000s with his anti-Shia programmes, came back to the homeland after a fifty-year long exile in Saudi Arabia. From Damascus’ Umayyad square, he proudly stated: “We have returned to the capital of the Umayyads, the capital of Mu‘awiya” (this is the founder of the dynasty and, as such, a particularly hated figure among the Shia). Likewise, at the Umayyad Mosque, al-‘Ar‛ur reminded his listeners that they were “the descendants of the Umayyads.”
Umayyadism conveys more than anti-Shia and anti-Iranian sentiments, however. Because the Umayyads turned the Arabs into major players on the world stage, and because they had their capital in Damascus, they also constitute a potent symbol of Syrian Arab identity, which is why their memory was also cultivated by the former regime: Hafez el-Assad had his name engraved on the façade of the Umayyad mosques in Damascus. Like its counterpart in Aleppo, the latter was the only historical monuments in Syria whose restoration was directly funded by the Presidency.iii Other characteristics of Umayyad rule can be emphasised to the attention of specific constituencies, such as their pragmatism (as mentioned above, they were often not very devout Muslims) and relatively tolerant treatment of Christians, who remained a majority of the population in the territories of today’s Syria under Umayyad rule.iv
A last, and so far, more subliminal implication of the reference to the Umayyads, is the fact that they were a monarchy. When al-Sharaa visited Jordan in February 2025, for instance, HTS-aligned social media accounts praised the encounter between the Umayyads and the Hashemites.v In the summer of 2025, rumours that al-Sharaa was considering turning himself into a king were debated on the pro-government Syria TV. Whatever the truth to this rumours, this latter aspect of Umayyadism has gained little traction among the country’s Sunni religious scholars: first, because embracing that rhetoric would immediately identify them as unreserved sycophants of the new regime; second, because many of them quietly harbour reservations about al-Sharaa’s ambitions of unchecked personal rule.
The Ottomans: codename for ‘Turkey’
In the 1960s and 1970s, extolling the virtues of the Ottoman Empire was a means for some ulama to voice their critique of Arab nationalism, that is, the main ideological pillar of the Baathist regime. Dr Sa’id Ramadan al-Buti, who in the following decades became one of the Assad family’s most ardent religious supporters, then famously branded nationalism as a virus that European imperialism and Freemasonry had introduced into the Ottoman Empire to destroy it from within.vi Conversely, “Ottomanostalgia’ was encouraged during Bashar’s first decade in power to legitimise Syria’s fast-paced rapprochement with Turkey. In 2009, for instance, head of the al-Fath Islamic Institute Sheikh Husam al-Din Farfur emphasized the two countries’ “half a millennium of common history”. Al-Buti concurred, hailing the newfound friendship between Damascus and Ankara as “the premise of the coming Islamic unity.”vii
Another countervailing shift occurred after 2011 as a result of Turkey’s support for the Syrian opposition and, as of 2016, its direct military intervention in the war. Pro-Assad ulama then revived the Arab nationalist narrative of “Ottoman occupation’. The latter, for instance, was blamed by Minister of Religious Endowments Muhammad ‘Abd al-Sattar al-Sayyid for the establishment of the Grand Muftiship, a “historical error” that the president “corrected” by abolishing that position in 2021.viii
By contrast, and counter-intuitively, references to the Ottoman past became exceedingly rare in the outward discourse of those Sunni ulama who turned against Assad and sought refuge abroad. Most settled in Istanbul, where they established the Syrian Islamic Council in 2014. Although overtly grateful for Turkey’s support, and generally favourable to its policies in Syria, they also tried to preserve some level of autonomy, a trend notably illustrated by the Council’s criticism of Ankara’s tentative rapprochement with the Asad regime in 2022-2023. Back then, just like today, references to the Ottoman past seem to have been avoided because they act as reminders of an unpleasant reality, namely, the fact that Turkey is both an indispensable and overbearing ally.
A (liberal) golden age
The historical period that the Syrian Sunni ulama most enthusiastically evoke in their public discourse is the liberal era stretching from the end of the French Mandate to the early years of independence. Their nostalgia of this period is primarily rooted in reasons that are strictly internal to the country’s Sunni religious scene. It is remembered as an era marked by a “renaissance” (nahda) of religious knowledge, a traditionalist revival that is entirely distinct from the (predominantly modernist) Arab Nahda that has received far greater attention in Western historiography. The Mandate-era renaissance of religious knowledge is credited to Sheikh Badr al-Din al-Hasani (1850-1935) in Damascus and to the Islamic seminary established in 1922 at Aleppo’s Khusrawiyya madrasa. Such narratives of refoundation are key to the legitimacy of the newcomers who came to dominate Syria’s religious scene in the second half of the 20th century, owing to the disappearance of the ancient ulama families, whose sons were now embracing more socially desirable careers as physicians, lawyers, or politicians. Evocations of this episode has remained a staple of Syrian Sunni religious discourse until today, as illustrated by an interview with Sheikh Abu al-Khayr Shukri shortly before his appointment as Minister of Religious Endowments in March 2025.
Syrian ulama also exalt the mid-20th century as the period during which the Syrian people succeeded in foiling France’s attempts at dividing the country along sectarian lines. Speaking at the presidential palace a few weeks after the March 2025 massacres of Alawites in the coastal region, Grand Mufti Usama al-Rifa‛i reminded the audience that his own mother was born, as per her birth certificate, in the short-lived State of Damascus, which the French had established alongside similar statelets like the State of Aleppo, the State of the Alawites, and the State of the Druzes. Yet al-Rifa‛i insisted, Syrians resisted such policies as they “remained a single hand and a single heart”. Religious leaders, the Grand Mufti claims, had played a critical role in the cultivation of inter-religious harmony at the time. In a previous speech, he had told the story of the friendship between prominent Sunni Muslim scholar Bahjat al-Bitar (1894-1976) and Christian Prime Minister Faris al-Khuri (1944-1945 and 1954-1955)—as the latter had once forgotten his hat, he recounted, the former lent him his turban.
Finally, the ulama fondly recall the level of freedom they enjoyed during the liberal era. Generally cordial relations with the political elites of the time translated into official religious institutions that enabled the ulama to manage their own affairs with limited executive oversight. Although they only exerted limited influence over decision-makers, they were at least free to take advantage of the liberal political system to make their voice heard by issuing statements, petitions, and voting instructions. For instance, upon his appointment as Grand Mufti by the Syrian Islamic Council in 2021, al-Rifa‛i recounted how his predecessor Abu al-Yusr ‘Abidin (in office 1952-1963) organised a press campaign against the Minister of Tourism, who had ignored his demand to have a poster showing a half-naked female dancer removed from the facade of a cabaret.
Lastly, between 1946 and the 1963 military coup, the ulama ran their own political organisation, the League of Ulama, which issued voting instructions and even fielded its own candidates, though with limited success. The Syrian Islamic Council that was established in 2014 was, in essence, a reincarnation of the League in a broader form. Yet al-Sharaa ordered its dissolution in June 2025 against the will of al-Rifa‛i and many of his colleagues. Against this backdrop of re-emerging authoritarian governance, Syrian ulama will probably continue to idealize the bygone days of parliamentary rule.
Conclusion
Recent history occupies a more prominent place in the historical imagination of the Syrian Sunni ulama than the distant past. Invocations of the Islamic conquests or the Umayyad Caliphate may be deployed to affirm—or to dispute—the religious legitimacy of the al-Sharaa regime, just as recollections of the Ottoman period evoke Turkey’s tutelage over the new Syrian state. Yet it is the parliamentary era of 1932–1963 that endures as the ulama’s true golden age. Remembered as a time of religious revival, intercommunal coexistence, and institutional autonomy from state control, this liberal interlude functions as both retrospective ideal and political critique. In elevating that moment, the ulama articulate not only a rebuke of authoritarian rule but also an enduring aspiration to transcend political subordination.
Dr Thomas Pierret is Senior Researcher at the Institute for Research and Studies on the Arab and Muslim World (IREMAM), National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), Aix-Marseille Université in Aix-en-Provence, France. He holds a PhD in Political Science from Sciences Po-Paris and the University of Louvain. He was previously Senior Lecturer at the University of Edinburgh, and Postdoctoral Research Associate at Princeton University. His publications include Religion and State in Syria: The Sunni Ulama from Coup to Revolution (Cambridge University Press, 2013), Utopianism in the Middle East and North Africa (Edinburgh University Press, 2025), and the chapter on Syria in the 10th edition of Government and Politics of the Middle East and North Africa (Routledge, forthcoming).
i See for instance this statement by the Ministry of Religious Endowment: Taht al-Majhar, 7 December 2025, https://web.archive.org/web/20260119224406/https://www.almjhar.com/ar-sy/NewsView/2212/296160/اجتماع_موس_ع_في_جامع_سعد_بن_معاذ_يجمع_كبار_علماء_دمشق_ومسؤولي_الدولة_تأكيد_على_دور_المساجد_في_ترسيخ_الأمن_والوعي.aspx.
ii The New Umayyads. Syria in Transition 23, https://web.archive.org/web/20260119230946/https://www.syriaintransition.com/en/home/archive/issue-23/the-new-umayyads.
iii Stéphane Valter. La Construction nationale syrienne. Légitimation de la nature communautaire du pouvoir par le discours historique (CNRS éditions, 2002).
iv Aaron Zelin. Christians in the New Syria: Accepted, but at-risk. The Caravan, December 9, 2025, https://web.archive.org/web/20251210052600/https://www.hoover.org/research/christians-new-syria-accepted-risk.
vi Thomas Pierret. Religion and State in Syria. The Sunni Ulama from Coup to Revolution (Cambridge University Press, 2013): 78.
vii Thomas Pierret. Sunni Islamists: From Syria to the Umma, and Back. In M. Cimino (ed.). Syria: Borders, Boundaries, and the State (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020): 229.
viii Thomas Pierret. Minister vs. Mufti the struggle over ‘moderate Islam’ in wartime Syria (2011–2021), Mediterranean Politics. DOI: 10.1080/13629395.2024.2385780 : 18.
Cite as: Pierret, T. 2025. “The Sunni Ulama: Syria’s Parliamentary Era as a Golden Age” Focaalblog March 24. https://www.focaalblog.com/2026/03/24/thomas-pierret-the-sunni-ulama-syrias-parliamentary-era-as-a-golden-age/
Image 1: Syrian postage stamp commemorating the Yom Kippur War, 1998. Author unknown, copyright expired. Source: Wikimedia commons
This post examines how the new Syrian state seeks to reconstruct public memory through revisions of public-school curricula in a period of profound political and social transformation after December 8, 2024. It unfolds how education, and more specifically official historiography, are employed by the new state as symbolic tools through which the former regime is delegitimized as not authentically Arab. It focuses particularly on how the new state achieves this through a reconfiguration of the portrayal of Israel and of the historical relationship between Israel and Syria. Israel has figured prominently as an enemy character in official rhetoric and legitimization efforts of the Assad regimes. The post discusses how this has changed with the new al-Shara regime and suggests that a realpolitikal emphasis on non-antagonism towards Israel as well as an agenda to downplay the achievements of the previous regime is at the heart of these changes.
Background – revision of schoolbooks
On December 8, 2024, the rule of Bashar al-Assad came to an end after 14 years of uprising and civil war when the Islamist militia Hayat Tahrir al-Sham and its allies marched into Damascus and the former president fled to Moscow. A major priority of the new regime´s reconstruction efforts has been dedicated to education. This has included physical reconstruction as the war has left more than 7000 schools destroyed and more than 2 million children without schooling (Vignal, 2021). It has also entailed revisions of Syrian schoolbooks with a specific focus on differentiating the content from the former regime´s curricula.
In early January 2025, the Syrian ministry of Education of the recently installed caretaker government published 12 pages via its official Facebook page bringing immediate changes to all levels of Syrian schoolbooks (Syrian Ministry of Education, 2025). It also announced that the subject National Education would be cancelled all together and that Religious Educationi would substitute it as a graded course (Mortensen, 2025). The new minister of education Nadhir al-Qaderi explained in an interview in February that the course would be replaced by a new one, and that the ministry was working on “creating a genuine, nationalistic subject that will raise a Syrian people on the basis of citizenship and a real national feeling.” (al-Arabi, 2025). The curricula revisions generated strong criticism. The ministry was accused of transgressing its mandate as an interim caretaker government, and of Islamizing Syrian education and changing its history (al-Jadid, 2025). Al-Qaderi defended the changes saying that it was necessary to erase references to and “wrongful understandings” of the former regime. But the changes went further than just removing the old flag and pictures and quotes of the former president(s). They included deleting pictures of figurines of pre-Islamic Gods from history books (in addition to the word āliha “Gods”), leaving out the theory of evolution from biology and changing nationalistic formulations such as “in defense of the homeland” to the religious wording “in defense of belief” (BBC News عربي, 2025).
A new Minster of Education took office in March 2025, and in October 2025 the revisions were implemented in the new textbooks that were distributed to the schools and uploaded to the ministry´s curricula website. In some cases, the revisions went further than the “emergency changes” announced by the caretaker government in January. However, the minister has insisted that the changes are only “deletions” – most recently in an interview with the state-run Ikhbariyya TV in December 2025 (al-Ikhbariyya, 2025). New paragraphs were added to contemporary Syrian history describing the 2011 revolution, its goals, and major events leading up to the revolution like the Kurdish intifada in 2004 (also known as Qamishli Uprising), the Damascus declaration and the regional context of Arab uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt. Other changes include removals of whole chapters that are not related to the former regime like a paragraph on the Alepine Nineteenth-century thinker and reformer, al-Kawakibi. Yet, the revisions are moderate as they have been based on the 2013-versions of Syrian schoolbooks and thus bypass major revisions by the Assad-regime in 2017 that aimed at promoting a version of Syrian history emphasizing Syria as a land of religious coexistence where Islam was but one of several religious traditions shaping Syrian culture and nationhood (Mortensen, 2026). Also, the 2017 versions have a more thematic and skills-oriented approach, whereas the older versions are classic chronological textbooks.
The revision process has not been very transparent. Whereas the older schoolbooks listed the authors, this is not the case with the revised versions. Furthermore, it is not clear how the emergency revisions from January turned into the revisions that we now see in the books. One thing that is certain is that this should not be seen as the final product but a “work in progress”. Still, it reflects what the new regime deems relevant information and framings of historical periods for a new generation of Syrians. Therefore, it is not surprising that the textbooks that underwent the most substantial revisions were history books. This is a pattern recognizable from other states emerging from political rupture where historiography is mobilized to rework public memory (Wertsch, 2002; Fukuoka, 2023; Lavabre, 2009; Greene, 2013).
The relationship with Israel
A major revision—closely linked to Syria’s position within the international and regional order and, simultaneously, a key component of the former regime’s legitimization strategy (Beetham, 1991) —concerns the reinterpretation of the wars with Israel and Syria’s role in the Arab world under the former regime. The two Assads consistently portrayed Syria as the final bulwark against Israeli hegemony in the Middle East and as a central member of the Iranian-led “resistance axis” (a narrative it maintained until its very last days). For several years the pan-Arab Baath-flag – identical to the Palestinian flag due to their shared origins in the 1916 Arab revolt – was the most common on public buildings until the Syrian flag gradually substituted it as part of an effort to downplay pan-Arab Baathist rhetoric after Bashar took power in 2000. In Syria under Bashar al-Assad – especially after the 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah – pictures of Hasan Nasrallah (then head of Hezbollah) and Iranian leaders became ubiquitous and state sponsored demonstrations against Israel in the streets of Damascus during the wars on Gaza were a common sight. Syria also hosted several Palestinian factions -PFLP, PFLP-DC and Hamas that, however, fell out with the regime in 2012 over its public endorsement of the Syrian revolution (Danin, 2012). The Golan Heights that were occupied by Israel in 1967 and annexed by Israel in 1981 were a daily feature on Syrian state tv. News segments celebrated the steadfastness of the Syrian citizens in the Golan and emphasized that Syria had a rightful and lawful claim to the area. This intensified especially after the Trump administration’s recognition of the annexation in 2019.
A central pillar in this state promoted narrative was the surprise attack on Israel that Syria launched in October 1973 (Tishreen in Arabic) in coordination with Egypt. Although the war ultimately proved a strategic failure, it was carefully embedded in official state ideology through school curricula, commemorative events, a major memorial complex in Damascus, and the naming of hundreds of state institutions, neighborhoods, and even a dam in Northern Syria. In older history textbooks, the war was described as “one of the greatest achievements of the Corrective Movement” (12th grade, 2013).ii To underscore its significance, a national Tishreen Day was celebrated annually from 1973 in schools, in the public squares all over Syria and in state media where a reporter in the street would ask ordinary Syrians about their memories from the war (Syrian Ministry of Interior, 2020). After the 2011 revolution, the commemoration was adapted to the new reality as the Syrian army’s efforts to repress the uprising were presented as retaking lost areas from an enemy that was working in the service of the Zionist enemy.
Under the new al-Shara regime, this national holiday has been abolished by presidential decree along with the Martyrs Day that commemorated the execution of Syrian and Lebanese nationalist activists by the Ottoman governor in 1916 (Souriaalghad, 2025). Also, public institutions such as Tishreen University in Latakia have been renamed (Burhan, 2025), as has the official newspaper, now titled Freedom الحرية)). The official name of the war in state discourse has been changed to the “1973 War” instead of the celebratory “the Tishreen War of Liberation”, a shift that was already announced in the January 2025 revisions that were published on Facebook.
Overall, the description of Israel has not undergone significant changes, but the framing of Syrian-Israeli relations has changed in schoolbooks. A comparison of new and old versions of the history and the social studies curricula reveals that the books’ authors are still exploring what language to appropriate and how to forge a coherent narrative around the historically fraught relationship between Israel and Syria.
In the 12th grade history curriculum, we see that the description of the 1967 Israeli surprise attack on Egypt, Jordan and Syria has been changed from “the Zionist entity with the support of imperialist forces launched a widescale aggression on the Arabic states neighboring occupied Palestine (Syria, Jordan, and Egypt” (12th grade, 2013). This framing emphasized the centrality of Palestine to the conflict and sought to delegitimize the Israeli claim to statehood. In contrast, the revised version adopts a more neutral tone. It states: “Israel started the war against Egypt, Jordan, and Syria on June 6, 1967.” (12th grade, 2025).” The new version also describes the war as the al-Naksa (“the setback”). This term typically signifies the collective trauma of the defeat and contains a critique of the Arab political systems that situates their shortcomings as a partial explanation of the defeat (Bilal, 2017). While the older versions explicitly attributed the war to the inherent expansionist motive of the Zionist ideology – stating that “Zionism adopts aggression as a way to expand” – the new versions only partially retain this explanation. It notes that the attack was in “accordance with [Zionism’s] expansionist and aggressive nature” and thereby preserves only elements of the previous framing.
Regarding the terminology employed to describe the State of Israel, a degree of continuity is evident. Though the neutral “Israel” or “the Israeli Army” are added in the new versions, numerous instances of more ideologically charged language persist, including “the Zionist Entity”, “the Zionist Enemy”, and “the Zionist terrorist Enemy”. The latter in a chapter on children´s rights in 5th-grade social studies where Israel is sidelined with the Assad regime as perpetrators of crimes against children (Social Studies, 5th-grade, 2025, pp.41).
While we see some continuities in how Israel is described, the role of Syria as an actor in this conflict has been subject to significant revision. Most notably, responsibility for Syria’s territorial losses is now attributed to Hafez al-Assad in several books. The revised texts assert that Israel occupied the Golan Heights in collusion with Hafez al-Assad, who, according to the new history books for 12th and 9th grades, declared the territory occupied a day before the actual event occurred. In the 12th grade book this information is added in a yellow information box on the left side of the page. Hence, it is highlighted as particularly relevant information. By contrast, in the 9th grade book the information is part of the main body of text that states that the Syrian Golan was occupied “in collusion with the Syrian Defense Minister at that time (Hafez al-Assad)” (Ministry of Education, 9th grade, 2025, pp. 30). Significantly, this claim has been put forward previously as well. It was made in an Al-Jazeera documentary on the 1967 war broadcast in 2015 (al-Jazeera 2015) and gained widespread currency in opposition circles even though many Syrians would dismiss it as a conspiracy theory.
The same narrative trope – presenting the Assad-regime as secretly collaborating with Israel and undermining the Palestinian cause – is evident in chapters on modern Lebanese history as well. Here, we find the claim that the Sabra and Shatila massacres, perpetrated by the Lebanese Phalange militia, was in fact committed in cooperation with the Syrian regime. It is also mentioned that the former regime intervened in Lebanon and committed massacres against the Palestinian people. Here the 1976 Tel al-Zatar massacre is highlighted without including the Lebanese militia that did the actual killing. Whereas the Syrian forces were without doubt implicated in the siege of and killings at Tel al-Zatar camp this was not the case with Sabra and Shatia, which were besieged by the Israeli army that had launched a full-scale invasion of Lebanon that year (Khalidi, 2021).
This narrative is part of an attempt at presenting the former regime as acting against broader Arab interests through its alliance with Iran against the “brotherly” Iraq (here adopting typical pan-Arab discourse), and through the assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafiq al-Hariri – as well as other Lebanese “nationalists” like Kamal Jumblatt. The Syrian revolution, with its conclusion in the 2024 liberation, is described as restoring “the authentic Arab face of Syria” (12th grade, 2025, pp. 56). One could say that the new material in certain ways competes with the older versions over being more Arab. Cultural Arabism is thus still presented as a normative ideal in the new books.
Geo-political, regional and internal concerns at the heart of revisions of schoolbooks
The most sweeping changes to Syrian schoolbooks concern the war between Syria and Egypt on one side and Israel on the other. The term Tishreen is among those banned and has been systematically removed from textbooks and public discourse. Through my comparative reading of history textbooks, I only found a single use of this term (in a chapter on Russian history, referring to Soviet support for the Tishreen Liberation War) that has somehow escaped the editors´ attention. In the new textbooks, the 1973 war is mentioned only briefly, in connection with Hafez al-Assad’s rise to power in 1970. Here, the war is characterized as a “show war,” with “illusory victories” intended “to legitimize his rule” and “consolidate his power” (9th grade, 2025, pp. 111).
Nevertheless, the texts introduce a degree of ambiguity and, at times, seem internally inconsistent in their attempt at undermining the victory claims of the Assad-regime while criticizing Israeli behavior. For instance, the short paragraph in the 12th-grade book on the war has only been slightly revised from “The Tishreen liberation war in 1973 embodies Arabic Solidarity” (12th -grade, 2013 pp. 56) to “the 1973 war embodies solidarity” (12th grade, 2025, pp. 54). Even though the book argues that the war was a “propaganda war” with the aim of” conferring legitimacy to [Hafez Al-Assad’s] rule” the paragraph also mentions the military contributions of several other Arab states. The regional backing during and after the war is preserved again in an information box on the oil crisis that notes Saudi Arabia’s support for Syria and Egypt, which, according to both versions, “restored the Arab umma’s agency and prestige.” (8th-grade, 2025, pp. 111). The new materials thus seek to balance recognition of Syria’s regional backing as a “frontline state” with the portrayal of Israel as a genuine geostrategic threat while avoiding unnecessary provocation of Israel.
Since December 8, Israel has bombed both military and civilian infrastructure and occupied territory beyond the demilitarized zone established between Syria and Israel in 1974 (Chughtai & Haddad, 2025). A recent example of the consequences of heightened rhetoric occurred in October 2025, when the Ministry of Culture in Aleppo planned an event commemorating October 7, which was subsequently raised in the UN Security Council by the Israeli representative. Similar scrutiny will likely be directed at the new educational materials, as has already been observed regarding Saudi Arabia (Gold & Al Lawati, 2023) and the Palestinian Authority (Moughrabi, 2001) where comparable trends toward normalization of relations with Israel and gradual de-escalation of anti-Israel rhetoric have emerged.
It is too early to predict how the Syrian-Israeli relationship will evolve. Yet, the textbook revisions make one point clear: the al-Shara regime cannot entirely escape the legacy of Syrian-Israeli relations and the historic enmity between the two states. Hence, the revised versions of the history books to some extent retain older framings. Several factors will shape this trajectory, including whether the ongoing rounds of negotiations between Israel and the new leadership in Damascus result in a security agreement or even some degree of normalization. What is certain, however, is that the era of hostile rhetoric against Israel and the instrumentalization of the Palestinian cause as a pillar of regime legitimacy has ended. Ahmad al-Shara can tap into alternative and way more potent claims of revolutionary legitimacy, as well as the promise to bring back the state and the country to its people and bring Syria out of its political and economic isolation.
Kræn Kielsgaard. I am a Phd fellow at the Institute of Cross-cultural and Regional Studies, University of Copenhagen, where I study how Syria´s ongoing nation- and state- building efforts since December 8, 2024, take shape through education reform. I first visited Syria in 2007 and moved to live there between 2009 and 2011 as part of my Arabic studies at the University of Aarhus. I have worked with translation, interpretation and teaching Arabic at the University of Copenhagen before starting my doctoral research in September 2025.
Chughtai, A., & Haddad, M. (2025, December 9). Israel attacked Syria more than 600 times over the past year. Al Jazeera. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/12/9/israel-attacked-syria-more-than-600-times-over-the-past-year
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Gold, H., & Al Lawati, A. (2023, June 19). Saudi Arabia is quietly changing its textbooks. Could that lead to acceptance of Israel? CNN. https://edition.cnn.com/2023/06/19/middleeast/saudi-textbooks-israel-mime-intl/index.html
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i The curriculum is divided into Islamic Education for Muslims and Christian education for Christian.
ii The corrective movement in Baath parlance signifies Hafez al-Assad´s coup in 1970 against his former Baathist companions from the military.
Cite as: Kielsgaard, K. 2025. “Rewriting Syria´s history – the case of Israel in Syrian schoolbooks after December 8, 2024” Focaalblog, March 20. https://www.focaalblog.com/2026/03/20/kraen-kielsgaard-rewriting-syrias-history-the-case-of-israel-in-syrian-schoolbooks-after-december-8-2024/
Image 1: Exú Tranca Rua (left) and Maria Padilha das 7 Encruzilhadas (right) depicted on the walls of the center. Photo by author.
When I started fieldwork in neighborhoods in Rio de Janeiro’s North zone in December 2021, the first thing my Brazilian friends told me was to be very careful. The area where I was based was notorious for its high number of armed robberies and for its proximity to a cluster of favelas. Shortly before my arrival in Brazil, the drug trafficking group that effectively controlled the favelas had expanded its territory by blocking roads and installing armed checkpoints at various street corners across the neighborhoods. The local leader (dono) of the group, who identified as a Pentecostal Christian, was accused of orchestrating disappearances, homicides, and extortions, and of destroying temples dedicated to Afro-Brazilian religious practices.
It was against this backdrop of violent events that I conducted an interview with Catarina, a frequent visitor of a local Umbanda center. Umbanda is an Afro-Brazilian religion that contains influences from Roman Catholicism, West-African religious traditions, indigenous beliefs, and Kardecist spiritism. In Umbanda, spiritual guides provide guidance and support on matters of health, money, love, and wellbeing. Catarina lived with her teenage daughter in a commercial district some 15 minutes away from the center, outside the zone of influence of the drug trafficking gang. As we sat in the patio of the center, shaded by the trees that surrounded the open space in front of the terreiro (indoor place of worship), I asked Catarina whether she hadn’t considered visiting a center located closer to her home in an area that was considered less dangerous. She responded the following:
There is a center close to me, which I visit sometimes, but I am not from that center. And I feel very much at peace here. Inside here, it doesn’t feel like I am in this particular neighborhood. It is as if a microclimate (microclima) was created inside here, with the trees and all that. Even if it takes forever for the sessions to start. If you arrive all worked up, inside here you are able to relax, think about life. And thank God, nothing has ever happened to us here. I think that is our protection (é proteção mesmo). Protection that the center gives, which the spirits (entidades) from here give until we arrive at our house. Because nothing ever happened when we left here. While everything is deserted, everything is black.
I was intrigued by Catarina’s attention to the atmospheric qualities of protection. Like other Umbanda practitioners whom I spoke to, Catarina spoke about the protection offered by the center as a material and embodied reality where the dangers of the street were temporarily kept at bay. This is a material and embodied reality that emerges through a series of ritual practices that involve an interplay between objects, bodies, and spirit entities, amongst other things. I offer two examples to illustrate the interplay between these different materialities inside the center.
Champagne and cigarettes
The largest altar in the Umbanda center was dedicated to a group of spirits known collectively as the spirits of the streets (povo da rua). It was located inside a separate building in the courtyard, closed off with an opaque door. The outside wall depicted a large mural painting of the Exú Tranca Rua, protector of the terreiros, and the pomba-giraMaria Padilha das 7 Encruzilhadas, guardian of love, protection, and courage (Image 1). Both figures play an important role in the center as they are called upon to cleanse the center from negative energies (limpar), to open new ways of thinking and being (abrir caminhos) and to shield practitioners from harm (proteger). Because of their ability to protect, the povo da rua are also referred to as guardian spirits (guardiões).
Different from other kinds of spirits, who emphasize benevolence and humility, the povo da rua embody sensuality as well as force. When they incorporate the bodies of the spirit mediums, they dance, smoke, drink, and flirt. To outsiders, the spirits’ human appetites are sometimes mistaken for sinful behavior and for provoking “bad things” (fazer mal). But for my interlocutors, “exú only does good things” (faz bem).
Inside the altar of the povo, a faint red light revealed a row of thirteen statues, representing particular spirits worshipped in the center. Twice a year, the povo receive an extensive offering (oferenda) from the spirit mediums to request guidance and protection for themselves or on behalf of a friend or a family member.
The offerings that I witnessed followed a specific order and were carried out individually. First, a big plate filled with tropical fruits was brought to the altar. The medium then took a pull of a cigarette to appease thefemale spirits. The remaining packet of cigarettes was placed alongside the plate of fruits on the altar. Next, the medium filled a glass of champagne. After taking a sip of the glass, the glass was also placed in front of the statues. To appease the male spirits, the medium took a pull of a cigar and exhaled in the shape of a circle. He or she then filled a glass of cachaça (white rum), took a sip, and placed it on the altar. In the final step, the spirit medium placed a handful of coins in a clay bowl. One of the coins was used to slowly move it over the body, starting with arms crossed, and then directing the coin over the head, knees, legs, and under one of the feet.
The individual offerings were complemented by the traditional food offering for exús, prepared in the small on-site kitchen: a big bowl of toasted manioc flour prepared in Dendê oil, filled with red chili peppers. Softly burning candles and vases filled with red roses and small white flowers were tucked in between the offerings (Image 2). According to the mediums, each of the items placed on the altar to feed the spirits absorbs the spirits’ capacity to cleanse and protect and contributes to the circulation of positive energy and spiritual force inside the center.
The process of preparing the offerings and placing them inside the altar took several hours. After about two weeks, once the offerings were received and “eaten” by the spirits, they were removed from the altar. The rotten fruits were discarded, and the ones that were still edible were taken back home. The flowers, cigarettes, candles, and manioc flower were dispatched near one of the city’s highway intersections, to serve those who wander through the city.
According to Zezé, one of the mediums who works at the center, the offerings to the spirits were not made in vain. When I spoke to him in an interview, he said the following:
The guardian spirits protect those who have faith. Up until today, inside here nothing bad has ever happened, while in the meantime a lot of bad things have happened outside. We’ve had cases where violence happened outside of the gate, shots were being fired, but not even the bullet shells made it in here. That, to me, is proof that this is a protected place.
Zezé’s words echoed those of Catarina. Despite the dangers that surrounded the center, in the comforting presence of the povo da rua, no bullets would pierce the center’s walls.
Image 2: Offerings for the povo da rua. Photo by author.
The swords of Ogum
Besides offerings to the spirits, mediums also channeled spiritual energy through incorporation sessions (giras). One of the sessions I attended at the center was dedicated to Ogum, an orixá associated with strength, courage, and battle. Inspired by African deities, orixás are at the top of the spiritual hierarchy in Umbanda. The session for Ogum was held in the indoor space adjacent to the courtyard where all the spirit incorporations took place. The entire room was painted light blue. Walls were covered with paintings, photos of mediums and visitors, and small spirit altars. A small sign right behind the door read “negative energies prohibited.”
Just like the other sessions, the session for Ogum started with a short prayer followed by drumming. The repetitive drum rhythm worked to induce a trance-like state amongst the mediums and the visitors. One by one, the spirits announced themselves through the bodies of the mediums, which were slowly moving towards the center of the room, with one leg lagging the other and their index fingers pointed out. Their reception was welcomed by the audience, whose clapping and singing grew louder as more spirits descended onto the room:
Eu tenho sete espadas pra me defender
I have seven swords to defend myself
Eu tenho Ogum em minha companhia
I have Ogum in my company
Eu tenho sete espadas pra me defender
I have seven swords to defend myself
Eu tenho Ogum em minha companhia
I have Ogum in my company
Ogum é meu pai
Ogum is my father
Ogum é meu guia
Ogum is my guide
Ogum é meu pai
Ogum is my father
Na fé de Zambi
In the name of Zambi (the Creator)
E da Virgem Maria
And the Virgin Mary
By the time Ogum finally announced his presence through the body of a medium it was already close to midnight. A spiritual caretaker guided Ogum to a room in the back of the building to prepare his costume. In the meantime, the other spirit mediums took a single leaf each from the sansevieria plant in the front of the room. A few moments later, Ogum re-entered the room with the air of a dignified man, wearing a red cape, a sword, and a knight’s helmet adorned with a red feather. The other mediums held up their leaves in the air and formed an arch (image 3). Carefully, Ogum was led under the arch and made his way to the front of the altar, where he greeted the mediums and the visitors with an embrace.
Towards the end of the session, the mediums handed each of the visitors one of the leaves to take back home and place it in front of their house. The “swords”, I was told, were considered as an extension of the protective power of Ogum cultivated during the session and served to protect the house from negative energies and to attract prosperity (prosperidade).
Image 3: The swords of Ogum. Photo by author.
Reflections
There is no shortage of people seeking protection and guidance in Brazilian cities, which statistics show are among the most violent on earth. Trapped between militias, drug trafficking groups, and the state, urban residents cultivate spaces where they feel safe, comfortable, and cared for. These spaces of security and comfort are rarely secular. They are inhabited by a range of otherworldly entities who are called upon to protect and to heal (see also Amoruso 2025. Willis 2024), including Afro-Brazilian spirits.
I have illustrated how Afro-Brazilian spirits and the mediums who incorporate them engage in affective relationships that contribute to a sacred, intimate space shielded from the dangers of the street. Each of the objects placed within the center takes part in this affective relationship in different ways: not merely in a symbolic manner, but by absorbing and circulating the spirit’s powers to cleanse, heal, and protect. The champagne and cigarettes on the altar dedicated to the guardian spirits become charged with spiritual powers, while the swords of Ogum, represented by the sansevieria leaves, become an extension of the protective power of the orixá.
My analysis moves from an understanding of security as something that is produced on the level of the state towards an understanding of security as something that is lived and felt in everyday interactions (see also Ghertner, McFann & Goldstein 2020: 3). Moreover, like Anderson (2009), I draw attention to the atmospheric quality of security as an affect that emerges between objects, bodies, and spaces. For ethnographers, it is essential to do justice to the ways in which the senses shape our everyday experiences and ontological realities.
Jolien van Veen is a PhD researcher at the department of Cultural Anthropology at Utrecht University. Her PhD is part of the ERC-funded project “Sacralizing Security: Religion, Violence and Authority in Mega-Cities of the Global South”. She has published in City & Society and the European Review of Latin American and Caribbean Studies.
References
Amoruso, Michael. 2025. Moved by the Dead: Haunting and Devotion in São Paulo, Brazil. University of North Carolina Press.
Anderson, Ben. 2009. “Affective Atmospheres”. Emotion, Space and Society 2: 77-81. DOI:10.1016/j.emospa.2009.08.005
Ghertner, D. Asher, Hudson McFann, and Daniel M. Goldstein, 2020. Futureproof: Security Aesthetics and the Management of Life. Duke University Press.
Willis, Laurie Denyer. 2023. Go With God: Political Exhaustion and Evangelical Possibility in Suburban Brazil. University of California Press.
Cite as: Veen, Jolien van 2025. “Atmospheric Security in Rio de Janeiro” Focaalblog December 22. https://www.focaalblog.com/2025/12/22/jolien-van-veen-atmospheric-security-in-rio-de-janeiro/
On 30/10/2022, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (Lula) of the Workers’ Party won an exceptionally close runoff election against the current far-right president of Brazil, Jair Messias Bolsonaro. For volunteers of a community kitchen (Cozinha Solidária) of the leftist Homeless Workers Movement (MTST), Lula’s victory represents an enormous relief and a hope after the long period of anxiety during the election campaign. Nevertheless, his victory does not mean “the end of hell or the entrance into paradise”, as Maria (all names are pseudonyms), one of the volunteers cooking in a Cozinha Solidária noted.
The hell she speaks of means the years of the Bolsonaro government, in which almost 700,000 people in Brazil died of Covid-19, while the president made jokes about patients with respiratory distress. Hell, moreover, means the hunger that the women themselves experience and fight in their volunteer work. In recent years, Brazil has returned to the world hunger map of the United Nations. According to the Brazilian Research Network on Food and Nutritional Sovereignty and Security, circa 30% of Brazilian households are currently food insecure. In addition to the Covid-19 pandemic, suspension of state welfare programs, inflation and price increases have led to this development. The aftermath of this period will not be over when Lula takes office early next year.
Hell and paradise are metaphors that reflect the volunteer’s worldview, which is strongly influenced by the Christian system of belief. The all-female chefs of the Cozinha Solidária where I conduct ethnographic fieldwork since March 2022 regularly frequent Catholic or Evangelical churches. Besides that, the women are also part of the political struggle for housing in demonstrations and occupations of urban land. In their everyday lives, they balance left-wing political militancy and religiosity. They are politicized through the social movement and entrenched in their peripheral community. All the kitchen’s volunteers working there currently are also mothers and most of them work or worked in paid cleaning jobs in addition to their volunteer work.
In this article, I portray the period between the first round of voting on 2/10/2022 and the runoff. How did the cooks negotiate the fear of a second electoral victory by Jair Bolsonaro? A look at the Cozinhas Solidárias sheds light on the positioning of hunger and domestic labor within the election campaign. The perspective of the cooks’ stresses the importance of religiosity to people’s lives and political decisions. After localizing the Cozinhas Solidárias within the Homeless Workers Movement and explaining their emergence and functioning, I consider reflections and concerns about the election, starting from the perspective of the cooks, to arrive at an assessment of the consequences of the election results.
Cozinhas Solidárias of the Homeless Worker’s Movement
The Homeless Workers Movement (MTST) was officially founded in 1997 as the urban counterpart of the rural reform movements of the Landless Workers Movement (MST). The first occupation took place in Campinas, a city close to São Paulo. Nowadays, the MTST is present in 13 Brazilian states, but most occupations are still concentrated in and around the city of São Paulo. The strategy of the movement is to occupy unused land in the periphery of large cities and to obtain expropriation with reference to the legally established duty of fulfilling a social function of the inner-city areas.
Victor Albert traces the history of the movement: In the first decade after its founding, it had little success with the strategies of the Landless Workers Movement. This changed, on the one hand, because of social mobilizations during the housing market crisis and the 2013/2014 World Cup, and on the other hand, primarily through cooperation with the Lula government’s state housing program Minha Casa Minha Vida. The movement was often able to obtain home ownership for the squatters through the State Program and thus acted as an agenda for identifying new building land for the state program.
During Jair Bolsonaro’s administration, which replaced the Minha Casa Minha Vida program with the Casa Verde e Amarelo loan program and classified the MTST as terrorism, their construction projects from the Minha Casa Minha Vida era continued to be completed, such as 216 apartments in São Paulo’s West Zone in March 2021.
Figure 1 Kitchen as part of occupation, Photo: Elena Reichl March 2022
Figure 2 Cozinha Solidária at lunch time, Photo: Elena Reichl October 2022
The idea of Cozinhas Solidárias was already inherent in the community kitchens that are part of every land occupation of the movement. The occupations of new land areas begin with the construction of tents made of tarpaulins and bamboo. In newly emerged occupations, community kitchens are the first shanties to be set up to nurture the squatters and provide a place of political organization and community economy. Each occupation has numerous of these kitchens, which are the heart of the groupings, the small neighborhoods within the barrack settlements. The kitchens inside the squats are primarily for the squatters who run and finance them.
What is new about the Cozinhas Solidárias is that they now address the peripheral neighborhoods outside the occupations. Diverse people from the nearby neighborhoods frequent the cozinhas solidárias, for example schoolchildren, old people, or workers at their lunchbreak. They pick up hot lunches for free that were prepared and distributed by volunteers like the women mentioned in the beginning of this article. The Cozinhas Solidárias acquire their donations in the form of money from large-scale campaigns and as crops by collaborations with, for example, supermarkets and the MST. Cozinha Solidarias’ dependence on food has brought the MST into close contact with its urban counterpart.
The Homeless Workers Movement founded the first Cozinha Solidária in São Paulo in March 2021, during the peak of the Covid-19 Pandemic, under the motto highlighted by MTST coordinator Guilherme Boulos, “we do what the government does not“. The movement now operates 31 of these kitchens throughout Brazil. By expanding to peripheral neighborhoods in general, the movement claimed a direct confrontation of the cutbacks in state welfare programs under the Bolsonaro government.
Hunger was particularly central to Lula’s election campaign, highlighting how his earlier government had helped to remove Brazil from the United Nations world hunger map, on which the country turned back after the election of Bolsonaro in 2018. In fact, it was through Bolsa Família, as Massimiliano Mollona elaborates,that this government from 2003 to 2008 reduced the population rate below the poverty line from 36 percent to 23 percent. Bolsa Família incorporated the preceding Zero Hunger “Fome Zero” program in 2003 and, as Anthony W. Pereira argues, promoted the democratization of citizenship claims through effective, relatively unbureaucratic redistribution. On the other side, Bolsonaro has introduced the social program Auxilio Brasil at the end of 2021, which is modeled on Lula’s Bolsa Familia but without any long-term strategy or monitoring and therefore has beencriticized as an election campaign method.
Before the Runoff Election
A morning a few days after the first round of voting in one of the cozinhas solidárias in the periphery of São Paulo: In addition to preparing rice, beans, chicken, and fried cassava, we talked about Bolsonaro’s visit to the Freemasons. The video is from Bolsonaro’s 2017 election campaign but gained popularity only in October 2022 via its rapid spread on social media. The context mattered little. Bolsonaro had been campaigning for votes among Freemasons and rumors were spread that he might be a member. We chatted about the experiences some of the women had as cleaners for members of the Freemasons whom they accused of performing diabolical rituals. On the subject of religion, we also came to a remark that one of them had overheard during services in their parishes: Their pastor had announced that whoever voted for Lula would go to hell.
Ludmilla was indignant: “The place for priests is in the church. What is this about politics?” “They won’t vote for him [Jair Bolsonaro] because of the Freemasons” Retorted Maria. Ludmilla: “I am afraid that they might do it after all.”
Jair Bolsonaro has many evangelical supporters who, as some of the cooks, consider the Freemasons a diabolical sect and hence expressed their disappointment. On a more general level, religiousness played a key role in the election campaign. Padre Kelmon, who was denied the recognition as a priest by the Catholic Church, ran for president as one of the eleven candidates of the first electoral round. He just received 0.07 % of the valid votes and was called a “folkloric candidate”. For Bolsonaro’s election campaign, his candidacy nevertheless had an important function. He supported Bolsonaro during the first TV Globo debate, to which all candidates were invited. Instead of asking critical questions, he accused Lula of wanting to establish an anti-religious dictatorship in Brazil. Lula, meanwhile, tried to win over conservative church followers through critical statements on abortion and Christian affirmations, as he recently did in a letter to evangelicals.
In the community kitchen, I hear different Christian songs sung by the women every day. “God bless you” is a common phrase used by those receiving the hot lunches, to which the cooks respond with “Amen”. Unlike the students and coordinators of the movement, for whom religion takes a back seat to communist utopias, the cooks and squatters balance left-wing political commitment and the struggle for housing with religious affiliations in their work.
A domestic worker comments on the election
For Lula’s election campaign, starvation, but also ‘gusto’, was a central theme. During this election, Lula’s repeated statement that the people must be able to eat picanha and drink beer again became famous. Ludmilla, a cook at the community kitchen before the runoff election, said she talks to Lula when she sees him on TV. “Lula, stop talking about picanha. When did I eat picanha? Lula, I cleaned the toilet of my patron [where she worked as a maid] during your government.”
Figure 3 Banner that says “First domestic worker in the Legislative Assembly of São Paulo” at the event “Women from the periphery with Lula and Haddad”, in which some cooks of Cozinha Solidária participated, Photo: Elena Maria Reichl, October 2022
Although she supports Lula, she feels unrepresented by his promises of the return of expensive barbecue after the huge price increase during the Bolsonaro regime. Actually, picanha has never been part of her lifeworld. Domestic workers, who are for the first time politically represented in Brazil, gain more political and class-consciousness. In the first round of voting, PSOL candidate, former domestic worker, and occupant of the MTST Ediane Maria, won the post of State Representative in the Legislative Assembly of the State of São Paulo as the first domestic worker to occupy this political position. Like Ludmilla, Ediane Maria had migrated to São Paulo from Brazil’s northeast to work as a domestic worker. Ediane Maria will now represent Ludmilla’s perspective in São Paulo. No easy task in a parliament where the PL, Bolsonaro’s party, won by far the most votes.
Anti PT and “anti-establishment” propaganda
The outcome was close, with Lula winning 50.9% and Bolsonaro 49.1% of the vote. Bolsonaro’s party’s most effective campaign method still seemed to be the “anti-corruption agenda” Flávio Eiró already analyzed after the 2018 election.
Although the court case that led to Lula’s conviction was annulled as illegal in 2021, opposition to Lula’s PT party because of corruption scandals remains widespread. This is despite the fact that Bolsonaro has also been accused of institutionalized corruption, namely the use of public funds in the form of secret budgets to buy approval in Congress.
Bolsonaro still manages to position himself as ‘anti-establishment’ in front of large segments of the population, who spread the slogan “PT never again” and in the aftermath of the election “crimes pay off in Brazil” on the internet. Widespread among his electorate is also a rejection of conventional media and academia. Election forecasts predicting a higher approval rating for Lula than he actually received in the first round of voting confirmed this skepticism. The Tribunal Superior Eleitoral’s decision to cut Bolsonaro’s TV time due to fake news also fuels the debate about media bias. Bolsonaro supporters were already acting violently in some cases, such as federal deputy Carla Zambelli, who a few days before the election chased a black journalist with a firearm under the pretext that he had pushed her.
The End of Hell?
During this interim period between the two votes one clearly sensed the fear that Bolsonaro might not recognize the election results, as he had already spread rumors that the ballot boxes were rigged. On day one after the elections, while Bolsonaro remained without statement about his loss, his supporters blocked roads within the country to protest alleged electoral fraud. Attempts at electoral fraud did indeed occur, but not on the part of PT supporters: The electoral court investigates against the federal police, who blocked roads for hours in the northeast and near indigenous communities, from where most votes for Lula were expected, under the pretext of carrying out road controls.
Even without a coup, Lula’s victory will mean hard work against right-wing fronts in state and federal parliaments, but above all against what is called ‘bolsonarismo’ in society. The cooks of Cozinha Solidária are well aware of this. Nevertheless, there will be relief for their movement when Lula takes office next year. He has already announced his intention to rehabilitate the program Minha Casa, Minha Vida. Fighting hunger was moved again to the center of the political agenda. Currently, discussions are underway within the MTST to make Conzinhas Solidarias a public policy and to hire the cooks on a regular basis until the acute hunger crisis is resolved. This would mean the end of dependence on donations and volunteerism. Lula, who had already visited a Cozinha Solidária this year, nurtured hope for this possibility.
Elena Maria Reichl is a PhD candidate in Social Anthropology of the Johannes Gutenberg-University in Mainz, Germany, and member of the Project „Sorting with Care. Human Categorization in Post-Humanitarian Contact Zones“ that is part of the Collaborative Research Centre 1482 “Studies in Human Categorisation” funded by the German Research Foundation.
Cite as: Reichl, Elena Maria 2022. “End of Hell? Brazil’s Election and a Community Kitchen of the MTST.” Focaalblog 2 November. https://www.focaalblog.com/2022/11/02/elena-maria-reichl-end-of-hell-brazils-election-and-a-community-kitchen-of-the-mtst/
At the end of July, a remarkable event unfolded in three distinct but significant sites in Canada. Pope Francis, the Argentinian current supreme pontiff of the Roman Catholic Church, travelled to Maskwacis, Ste. Anne de Beaupré and Iqaluit on his “penitential pilgrimage” in Turtle Island (the Indigenous name for North America), an historic visit intended to allow for “forgiveness” for the heinous acts at Catholic Residential Schools which for over almost a century (1885-1996) separated thousands of Indigenous children from their families and communities and subjected them to awful physical, emotional, and sexual abuse.
The event earned some attention in the media internationally and in Canada, where it monopolized national and local airwaves and the Internet. The media drummed up popular fascination, in “will he, or won’t he?” fashion, with the potential Apology from the Pope – a possibility planted earlier this year in March when a delegation of members of 32 First Nations, Métis and Inuit communities visited the Vatican and met with the Pope to share their experience in residential schools and express the importance of a formal papal declaration of apology in their homeland. Part of the delegation’s aim was a call for the rescinding of the 1492 Treaty of Tordesillas and its accompanying “Doctrine of Discovery”, which originally endowed early Christian explorers the legal authorization to occupy and extract from a supposed ‘terra nullius’.
We draw attention to the need for anthropologists and other scholars to recognize the importance of what is at stake in this papal event as a culmination of colonial histories and processes that are not merely “religious”. While many may read the papal visit as simply an enactment by an archaic religious institution breathing its last breaths on the global stage, there is much more at work here that touches on the most pressing issues of our day concerning (self-)sovereignty, governance and decolonization, and the powerful hidden theopolitical economy of bodies, blood and soil, and the commons that underlies them. As such, this papal visit and other prominent public Church performances also invoke, implicitly though distinctly, themes familiar to many anthropologists in our thinking and research: debt and guilt, capitalism and care, denizen-ship and vulnerability.
A Pope is never a single story, nor a truly singular individual. Technically, the Pope is the Bishop of Rome, in straight lineal descent from Saint Peter, making him a unique combination of the historical person, the geopolitical configuration of the Church (as sovereign of the Vatican City State), and the liturgical, “God-manifested” investiture of the Pontificate. While many regarded the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965) as marking a pivotal rejuvenation of the Church and a welcome modernizing shift toward reform and social engagement, the two pontificates that followed Vatican II dampened any such hopes. Both Pope (and now Saint) John Paul II (1978-2005) and Pope Benedict XVI (2005-2013) manifested ambiguous stances toward Indigenous people and the deep histories of violence, neglect, and exploitationin the Americas.
John Paul II, personally invested in a post-cold war politics of anti-communism, was a staunch defender of ‘human life’ as a universal value rather than something to be understood as mediated by social and cultural specificities. He travelled to some 120 countries and oversaw an unprecedented surge in the canonization of new saints, including in the Americas. Yet in this continent he also undid years of efforts by more ‘progressive’ Church factions in promoting participatory democracy, land rights advocacy, human and Indigenous rights, and in the fight against poverty and neoliberal policies of international structural adjustment – the broad canvas of programs that theologically and pastorally became known as part of the movement of Liberation Theology. John Paul II’s geopolitical orientation toward Turtle Island could be summed up by his words during a brief visit in 1984 where, in Ste. Anne de Beaupré, he stated, rather elliptically, “We know that Jesus Christ makes possible reconciliation between peoples, with all its requirements of conversion, justice and social love. If we truly believe that God created us in his image, we shall be able to accept one another with our differences and despite our limitations and our sins.” Reconciliation for this pope was thus fundamentally a repairing enabled by the sweeping of vexing “differences” and past evils under the supposedly apolitical carpet of a transcendent universal (European) catholicity.
In contrast to his predecessor, Benedict XVI appeared more interested in the “Arab world” rather than the Americas, which he visited only briefly twice (Brazil in 2007, and Mexico in 2012, en route to Cuba). In travels to Lebanon, Syria, and Germany he worked to encourage, not always successfully, Christian-Muslimdialogue, visibly more at ease as a theologian rather than a pastor surrounded by a crowd. More generally, he had an infamous role in partly covering priestly sexual abuse before becoming Pope, but also, perhaps unknown to many, while Pope, tried to address the abuses committed within and by members of new 19th and 20th century religious Orders (such as the Congregation of the Legionaries of Christ and their founder Marcial Maciel) that had been much in the grace of John Paul II. The “traditionalism”–in both theological orthodoxy and disposition – of this German Pope also served to bolster the “old”, pre-Reformation Orders within the church and affirmed the Christian roots of Europe and its ‘civilization’. Yet when Benedict XVI met a First Nations delegation visiting the Vatican in 2009 (headed by then National Chief of the Assembly of First Nations, Phil Lafontaine), the pontiff expressed a heartfelt shame and sorrow for the suffering of those living with the tragic legacy of Catholic residential schools, and blessed sacred medicine brought by delegation members. However, the Pope’s utterance of remorse took place on Vatican soil, as part of a private visit, not an act of attempted reconciliation on Turtle Island.
When Francis became Pope, however, the world expected something different. As the first Latin American Pope, with a theological and pastoral proximity to the poor and the “peripheries” (though with an unclear association with Argentina’s military regime while Provincial of the Jesuits in Buenos Aires), it was thought he could open the magisterium of the Church to an embracing of the divorced, homosexuality, the ordination of women priests, and the tackling of priestly sexual abuses, while setting in motion a concrete system of reparation. Now, amid the ninth year of his pontificate, an opening on these matters has been only partial.
Nevertheless, Pope Francis has called attention to capitalism’s “culture of waste” and our universal denizen-ship on the earth as “our common home”; in 2015 he met for over three weeks with Indigenous communities in the Amazon toward mobilizing clergy and others for an “Integral Ecology” of “pastoral, cultural, and ecological conversion” in the interests of Indigenous survival. In addition, he has pointed to the aging, “grandfather”–like nature of European societies which he urges must rejuvenate their ancient cultural values by means of new immigrant blood.
These overtures have been appreciated especially by non-Catholics, attracted by their ethically driven politics of inclusion and active collective responsibility in a time of increasing individualist populist politics world-wide. Conservative Catholics, however, have portrayed Francis as a mere pastoral figure rather than one with true theological gravitas, a breaker of traditions rather than an architect of authentic intra-church alliances. Moreover, the ambiguity of this Pope from the Americas is precisely regarding its Indigenous peoples: they are beloved as ‘primordial’ caretakers of the earth and holders of ancestors’ wisdom yet remain trapped in the romanticizing gaze of Francis in his own embodiment of an immigrant European in the New World.
The most striking image in the just-completed Turtle Island papal pilgrimage is the frail, wheel-chaired body of Francis as the agent of avowed penitence. The popular enthrallment with the highly mediatized story of the papal visit, not just in Canada but worldwide, points to a collective desire for a punctual, perlocutionary healing, as if the spoken apology “for deplorable evil” could perform the erasure of the stubborn stain of guilt not just for the Church. In this context, the Pope as the Church’s metonymic leader becomes the proxy for non-indigenous Canadian society at large (the latter, after all, tacitly accepted the colonial assimilationist system that allowed the unspeakable abuses of Indigenous children to take place).
Indeed, at the very start of his visit this unique (as both the first Jesuit and non-European) Pope could be seen solemnly and pensively cradling his chin and mouth in his hand as if hesitant about the words he would soon be expected to utter. Later, in Maskwacis, he was enveloped in a soundscape of sacred chanting and drumming, grinning as he donned an Indigenous ceremonial headdress. The moment displayed a willful audaciousness typical of the Church, justified by the familiar theological principle of Humanitas – a vitalization of ‘cultures’ under a universal umbrella that sees all members of those Cultures as children of God. Yet, the apparent seamlessness of this harmonious scene later became undone by the raw, devastating, impromptu spectacle of a lone woman, Si Pih Ko, powerfully singing, in Cree, her fist raised to the sky, an alternative version of Canada’s national anthem known as “Our Village”, rebuking the papal presence while protesting the death of her brother in prison.
Image 1: Chief Wilton Littlechild and Pope Francis, Maskwacis, Alberta, July 26, 2022 (photo by Guglielmo Mangiapane, Reuters; the authors are grateful for the right to publish the image here)
If, as Carl Schmitt says, all political concepts are secularized theological ones, Pope Francis’s recurring gestures of apology for “cultural destruction” came crashing to a ground of (missed) interpellations and apologies, while he continued to offer his fragile body for a performative Church and State healing of indigenous lives ravaged by the violence of genocide – a word the pontiff spoke only when he was safely on the plane back to Rome.
Thus, the concept of reconciliation by Pope Francis was affectively mobilized through the soil, commons, soundscapes, and bodies as these hinged on the ultimate sacrifice of Christ’s crucifixion and a human/divine suffering that were, in this highly mediatized visit, notably devoid of Marian iconicity. In this framework, the singular yet communal suffering of First Nations, Métis and Inuit peoples becomes part of the ‘universal’ redemptive incarnation and blood of Christ, and, by extension, the healing sovereignty of the Canadian state.
The much-anticipated apology for the methodical cruelty of educational Catholic missions, and the Catholic Church’s role in past and ongoing colonialism, cannot be understood simply through an anthropological lens of battles for and refusal of modern state (self-)sovereignty. This 2022 papal journey through Turtle Island made glaringly evident that a colonial Church infrastructure is deeply engrained in a Christianity of the modern Canadian state, as the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops made clear by orchestrating, albeit not in line with Pope Francis’s will, an estranging Eucharistic Mass performed in Latin (an archaic norm abandoned post-Vatican II) in Edmonton’s Commonwealth stadium on July 26. Throughout this visit we beheld an aging papal body answering Indigenous calls for the dis-entangling of Catholic colonial violence through his encounter with the sacred soundscape, walking the soil (even if in a wheelchair), and in his public acts of listening.
‘True’ reconciliation remains a matter of the return of stolen gifts and livelihoods, requiring a new articulation between economies of suffering and indebtedness. From the perspective of Catholic theology, indebtedness is intrinsic to the tension between guilt and debt, where guilt is the unavoidable condition of being born as human (fallen from Eden), and debt is enjoined by God’s gift of life that cannot ever be fully repaid. The tension of guilt and debt in their eternal production of indebtedness is a “vital” theological hinge and a primary force of a capitalist market that functions as a never-ending fulfillment of drives and desires. Reconciliation then is also a much-needed breaking of precisely this theological hinge
Yet, in a way that was perhaps unperceived by many, this papal visit with and beyond the Indigenous peoples of Turtle Island affords the possibility that “reconciliation” is not only a matter of voicing and representation, sovereignty and its ongoing unravelling, or retribution and (unmade) apologies. It also a political, theological, and cosmological matter of a mystery of incarnation, in its particular bodily forms of fragility—a fragility now more than ever common to all living beings. As potent as this mystery of incarnation may be for healing, it may not be enough.
Valentina Napolitano is Professor of Anthropology and Connaught Scholar at the University of Toronto. Valentina Napolitano’s work weaves together anthropology, political theology, and Critical Catholic Studies. She is currently focusing on a book on mysticism and politics in the 21st century.
Kristin Norget is Associate Professor of Anthropology at McGill University. Her current research interests are concerned with mediatization and contemporary strategies of evangelization of the Roman Catholic Church focused on Mexico and Peru. She has also published on issues of indigeneity and Catholic liberation theology in Mexico.
Cite as: Valentina Napolitano and Kristin Norget. 2022. “Pope Francis, Reconciliation, and the State.” Focaalblog, 12 August. https://www.focaalblog.com/2022/08/12/valentina-napolitano-kristin-norget-pope-francis-reconciliation-and-the-state/
Tiny bodies, the remains of little children entombed without name or mercy, are uncovered in Tuam, a small Irish town in Co. Galway in the west of Ireland, at the site of a former Bon Secours Mother and Baby Home in 2017. The excavation, part of a Mother’s and Baby’s Home commission of inquiry (set up in 2015), precipitated by the tireless research of a local historian Catherine Corless, uncovered an eerie underground structure demarcated into 20 chambers (possibly a sewage tank) containing the children’s remains. The commission stated that ‘multiple remains’ were found, but some estimates run as high as in the region of 800. The home was run by the Catholic Bon Secours order of nuns from 1925 to 1961, one of many on the island of Ireland at that time. Now in Oct 2020, even before the Commission of inquiry publishes their long-delayed report (original deadline Feb 2018 due now Oct 30th, 2020), the Irish State has stated it intends on sealing the Mother and Baby records for 30 years.
In his classic Ecstatic Religion: A Study of Shamanism and Spirit Possession, I. M. Lewis (1971) contends that ritual, belief, and spiritual experience are the three cornerstones of religion, with the third certainly being the most important. Although disputed, this thesis strongly resonates with trends and themes currently taken up by gallerists and exhibition curators. Last year saw the launch of two major exhibitions on the topic of ecstasy: one at the Musée d’ethnographie de Genève (MEG) in Switzerland entitled Afrique: Les religions de l’extase (Africa: The ecstatic religions) and the other one simply called EKSTASE (Ecstasy) at the Kunstmuseum Stuttgart in Germany.
