Difference, Martin Nguyen recently wrote, is everywhere.
“It is always at work. We make difference as much as we encounter it. We practice it, perform it, and embody it in how we choose to live in the world,” Nguyen wrote in “The Difference Within Us: Our Humanity and Inhumanity,” published February in Notre Dame University’s Contending Modernities. “The ethical dilemma, of course, is what do we make of these differences?”
Nguyen is professor of Islamic Studies at Fairfield University, a Jesuit college in Connecticut. His work revolves around Muslim theology, ethics, spirituality, Qur’anic studies and the intersection of race and religion. Currently, he’s writing on Islamic responses to global mass displacement and modern structural racism, and he joins the Interfaith Lecture Series for the Week Two theme of “Sin and Redemption: Practices and Possibilities for Reconciliation” at 2 p.m. today in the Hall of Philosophy.
Nguyen is the author of Modern Muslim Theology: Engaging God and the World with Faith and Imagination, which presents a contemporary theology rooted in the religious imagination while engaging with voices from the Islamic tradition like Al-Ghazali and Malcolm X. He also edited and revised, with the late Imam Sohaib Sultan, An American Muslim Guide to the Art and Life of Preaching.
The son of Vietnamese refugees, Nguyen studied history and religion at the University of Virginia and obtained his Masters of Theological Studies at Harvard Divinity School. His Ph.D. is from Harvard University’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies. Alongside his publications, he has facilitated several scholarly initiatives, including the “Constructive Muslim Thought and Engaged Scholarship” seminar at the American Academy of Religion and the “Islamic Moral Theology in Conversation with the Future” project supported by the John Templeton Foundation.
In “The Difference Within Us,” Nguyen wrote that discerning difference is “an innate trait that human beings share with other biological entities. We make sense of the world through this divinely endowed ability to distinguish and categorize similarities and
differences.”
The Qur’an “repeatedly attests to this intrinsic sensibility for difference,” he wrote, and humanity’s survival depends on this sensibility — such as when it comes to perceiving the difference between safety and danger.
“Yet, in our case of human beings — as servants of God — how does difference figure into the larger spectrum of our activity, a spectrum that encompasses acts of personal transgression (individual evil) to socially instantiated forms of oppression (systemic evil)?” Nguyen wrote.
The same “divinely endowed sense of discernment” also has a dark side: Divisiveness, death, and “a sense of subjugating supremacy.”
“This is especially evident, for instance, in the hierarchical differentiations born out of the modern concept of race first formulated by European colonizers, scientists, and writers and then continued and further developed by many others,” he wrote.
What does this mean for contemporary Muslims, “living in a world wracked by war, suffering, and interlocking forms of structural oppression?,” Nguyen asked.
It is important to remember, Nguyen wrote, that “being human also means being inhuman … simply because it is so easy to forget our inhumanity or to displace it onto other humans. … The failure to recognize the fullness of who we are, the human and inhuman, renders us susceptible to re-inscribing division and violence ourselves. The path of social complicity in oppression is the path of least resistance. It takes very little to cross into the inhuman.”
This dichotomy of human and inhuman is clearly seen in the Qur’anic story of Qabil and Habil — Cain and Abel.
“God calls us to recognize our potential for inhumanity — our capacity to be Cain — because it is nothing more than the subtle disfigurement of our humanity, a difference of but a little,” Nguyen wrote. “It is to this ‘Muslim difference’ that I believe greater work in theological ethics is called to disentangle. How ought that fine line between them be understood and maintained? How exactly ought our humanity be made to subsume and circumscribe the darker side of difference? How can we work instead to restore and sustain the humanity of all?”
