Queering Paternity in Academia and Art

The book Jinnealogy: Time, Islam, and Ecological Thought in the Medieval Ruins of Delhi engages with important aspects of intercultural relations, both horizontally and vertically. The significant sites of South Asia are visited through ethnographies. Ruins such as Firoz Shah Kotla tell us of “Islam as an ethical inheritance and not a religious identity, the inheritance of a premodern past shared by Muslims and non-Muslims.” Yet inheritance also involves kinship, which is also shaped by religious identity and the more unsavory aspects of humanity, such as slavery.

Photo from "Story at every corner"

https://storyateverycorner.com/feroz-shah-kotla/

Sometimes the textual evidence in the book is a bit scant, which leads to strenuous conclusions, such as the uncritical citation of the work of Dr. Asma Barlas (2002). Barlas claimed that the Qur'an is egalitarian and anti-patriarchal. Dr. Taneja also entertains this notion by quoting the parts where Barlas notes that the Prophet Muhammad was not the father to any men but a daughter. The life of the Prophet happened as such, and some Muslims use the narratives to productively help them understand the text. I also took accepted the genealogy as suitably prescriptive in modern times for many years, until I read David S. Powers' book Muḥammad Is Not the Father of Any of Your Men: The Making of the Last Prophet. In the book, Powers showed that the Muhammad's adopted son, Zayd, was disowned. Zayd's recorded response to Muhammad's renunciation that he is not his son was affirmative: 

"I am Zayd bin Haritha زَيْد ٱبْن حَارِثَة‎," 

Haritha being his birth father's name. 

Readers also learn in Powers' book that Zayd was a former slave. It is interesting that the question of paternity continue to haunt the lives of ex-slaves even to this day. (If Zayd was born during Malcom X's time, perhaps he would have renamed himself as Zayd X.) And perhaps his response to the renunciation would have been different if his circumstances were different. But Zayd still had several progeny from his marriages with many wives. So the patriarchal genealogy continues, despite the fact that Zayd chose to recover his name before enslavement after his adopted father renounced their relationship. If I did not read Powers' book, I would continue to grapple with Barlas' argument and the baffling extent to which patriarchal relations exist throughout the Muslim world. Some men are choosing to use their kunya (Abu Leila, for example) with their daughters' names as a progressive move now. Yet many daughters of the Middle East continue to be identified within their patriline, as a person of a Muslim background noted in her essay for Sumou mag. (Read it here)

Mneera writes: "Last year, I decided to get my maternal lineage tattooed on my right arm—and through that, I will carry with me four generations of strong women who have given life to that tree but whose names, voices, and histories have been brushed away and made invisible. But I see you, now everyone sees you, and you will never be forgotten."

It is also interesting that in South Asia where caste is usually identifiable with one's last name, the practice of using one's father's name as a last name can replace the caste hierarchy of last names with a gendered hierarchy. This is usually done by South Asian Muslims who converted in the past two hundred years. In conclusion, I am slightly disappointed with the sweeping idealizations in this otherwise rich book by Dr. Taneja. If we are to inherit the rich past, it must be done with caution since much of the past is entangled with relations of slavery.

My own biological father practically stopped speaking to me some years ago when I did not feel comfortable calling him by his title on WeChat. A few years later, many Uyghur and Kazakh families started fracturing and disappearing, all the while performing their loyalty to the party on WeChat for self-survival. The little contact people had with their families continued to be hosted on this platform that otherwise censors most forms of minority expression. I was first astonished when I saw Uyghur people continue to use the app when they are overseas, fully aware that their activities are being watched by the genocidal state. Now, perhaps their behaviors makes more sense in the context of American slavery and its afterlife. 

My biological mother, also in a series of startling moves, became employed by a company run by a Chinese man from Inner Mongolia. She practically became a cultural interpreter among the diverse employees, in addition to being the scientist. A white co-worker there asked her what his tattoo meant. It was the Japanese kanji character for Buddha, yet it looked like a Chinese character.

My mom did not know this character and later asked me. After I told her, she told him. He chuckled and said he thought it meant "father." And then in a characteristically American fashion, he said, Buddha is a father symbol of the east, so it is not that far off. If I was there, I would promptly correct him according to Buddhist principles which I have studied for many years. Yet on the other hand, it would be quite embarrassing since he cannot easily undo this etymological mistake on his body. 

Today, during eclipse season, I reminisce how many contemporary Chinese intellectuals claim that such and such Japanese or Korean practice came from China when they are visiting such places. In such a claim of lineage, Chinese intellectual tourists perhaps seek to recover paternity or the comfort of "family" standard. I do not know how many times tour guides faced the decision with asserting their individuality or accommodating such exclamations as benign. The novelist Changrae Lee delves into such uneasy patterns in many of his works that explore kinship and adoption.

I enjoy playing the qanun for disrupting such interactions and assumptions as well. While one could argue that the qanun originated from China, which has a long civilization and an instrumental relative called the guqin, today the social meaning of the music of the guqin largely diverges from the social meaning of the music of the qanun. Furthermore, after the Cultural Revolution, Chinese teachers of those times have been largely challenged by the generation that followed them in violent as well as non-violent forms. (For example: My mother told me that she wrote an essay denouncing one of her female teachers in 2nd grade.) Thus, the Confucian lineage of respecting teachers as father-mother figures has been challenged and negotiated since; just like the way slaves have been groomed to call their owners "Mother" and "Father" in the past and in the present.

BBC News: Maids for Sale

I remember a Saudi artist Abdullah who visited the Maghreb in recent years and surveyed the works of people there. His style focuses on the indigenous flavor of Saudi society, which might appear to some as orientalist since modern machinery is mostly absent from his works. In an interview on Instagram live during quarantine, he appreciated the artists, the galleries, and their creativity. Yet he also expressed that he was unsettled and upset that many people there drank alcohol to his interlocutor, who presumably would share his discomfort. I wondered if this sort of exclamation is parallel to the cultural paternity that Chinese tourists express when they visit Japan and Korea. 

Perhaps Africana Studies and Black studies face a similar issue today. If we are to claim a lineage from Africa while also accommodating the various forms of kinship and expressions of sexualities that exists in America today as well as in the past of Africa, then perhaps Black studies is the answer. But if there is an urge to preserve W. E. B. DuBois as the founding father of such studies, then Africana Studies perhaps is still the way to go.