by Aneeq Ejaz
On Monday April 17, 2023, the Department of Religious Studies organized a one-day conference titled “The Ethics of Idolatry: Sun and Cosmos Worship in Judaism and Islam”. The conference was convened by two Religious studies professors, Azfar Moin and Jonathan Schofer, and co-sponsored by the Schusterman Center for Jewish Studies and the Institute for the Study of Antiquity and Christian Origins.
Centered around the theme of idolatry in the Jewish and Islamic traditions, the conference sought to explore how the tension around idolatry—its rejection and its celebration—functioned as a dynamic force propelling the two traditions at key historical junctures.
The keynote address was delivered by Moshe Halbertal, Professor of Jewish Thought and Philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In his address, Halbertal explored the nature of divinity and deification and framed these concepts by formulating the following question: at what moment does directly addressing or worshipping a creature in the divine hierarchy (for example, angels) turns that creature into a rival or false god.
Halbertal also examined Carl Schmitt’s theory of political theology and noted the absence of the problem of idolatry in Schmitt’s framework. Schmitt had critiqued liberalism because it lacked what he considered the ultimate commitment—the commitment to kill or die for something. Schmitt, Halbertal noted, took the existence of commitment or worship in an ideology to be praiseworthy but did not ask if all such commitments were in pursuit of the good; in other words, he failed to take into account the question of idolatry—the question of false commitment or false worship.
In the first session of the conference titled “Architecture and Image”, Ebba Koch of the University of Vienna explored the influences of planetary movements and stations on the court administration of Mughal Emperor Humayun. She noted that Humayun’s court conducted its business on particular days determined by planetary movements, and the emperor matched the color of his dress to the color of the planet for that day. Koch also analyzed the architectural presence of jharokha darshan (“window of veneration”) in several Mughal palaces where emperor Akbar, Humayun’s son, would make a public appearance often at sunrise, with a view to pass on the light and blessings received from the sun onto his people.
Continuing with the theme of architecture, Professor Steven Fine of the Yeshiva University analyzed the ubiquitous presence of zodiac signs and images in synagogues despite the Biblical prohibition against images in Exodus 20:4. Fine noted that the Exodus verses command Jews not to make images and bow before them, but what if visitors were not bowing before them in the synagogue? Pursuing this question, Fine argued that zodiacs in synagogues did not function as idols to be worshipped—rather they existed as artwork integrated into the structure of synagogue buildings as images on the floor or the walls; he equated them to modern-day linoleum. Fine also argued that the specific style of synagogue decorations reflected the dominant culture—Roman Empire, Islam, Medieval Christian Europe, etc.—that surrounded a given Jewish population.
In the session titled “Medieval Poetics, Politics, and Cosmology”, Prof. Eitan Fishbane of the Jewish Theological Seminary explored the aesthetics and metaphysical discourses of the Zohar, the foundational text in Jewish mystical thought known as Kabbalah. Fishbane argued that the Zohar contains lyric depiction of divinity as the “ontology of light” which can be observed in the Hebrew Bible’s story of creation or autogenesis. In this depiction of the divine unfolding, Fishbane notes, the primary symbol is the sun and around this primary symbol is constructed an entire symbolic universe in which Moses receives revelation from the “lens that shines” and the oral Torah serves as the moon that receives light from its sun, the written Torah.
Jonathan Brack, from the Ben Gurion University in Israel, examined the works of Rashid al-Din (d. 1318), an Ilkhanid vizier and a Jewish convert to Islam. Brack demonstrated how Rashid al-Din argued for the compatibility of Islam and Mongol kingship by creating an equivalence between the Chinggisid totalizing vision of universal rule and Islam’s totalizing vision of a universal cult. Brack also examined how, after their conversion to Islam, Mongol practices of ancestor worship turned into shrine-centered kingship. Furthermore, Brack demonstrated that this project of creating Islam-Mongol compatibility entailed acclimating Mongol patterns of immanentism to the transcendentalist imagery of Islam.
In the next session, titled “Subtleties in Late Antiquity”, Sarit Kattan Gribetz of Fordham University explored the concept of bein hashemashot (“between the suns”, or twilight)—the time period between the six days of creation and the Sabbath—as it appears in the rabbinic sources of Late Antiquity. Gribetz argued that bein hashemashot in these sources is imagined as a period of increased doubt as well as increased divinity. This notion of the twilight, the precise nature and moment of which is only known to God, allowed the rabbinic sources to explore notions of doubt and uncertainty as they related to matters in the real world and in the legal realm, for example, the question of when does the Sabbath begin in terms of its precise time.
In a paper exploring the Mughal ideas and practices of sun veneration, co-authors Jos Gommans (Professor at Leiden University) and Said Reza Huseini (Research Fellow at the University of Cambridge) located the roots of such practices in Hellenic Neoplatonism. Gommans and Huseini argued that, although Neoplatonism is not a category often used in Indian or Islamic historiography, it is this more philosophical category that does explain Mughal Emperor Akbar’s sun worship. In Neoplatonism, they argued, the sun functions as a window or mirror between the One and the Material World. Hence sun worship entails worshipping God through the sun. Akbar’s Neoplatonic advisers reframed sun worship as part of a perennial and universal tradition that was capable of incorporating other religious traditions including Islam. Gommans and Huseini further noted that Akbar’s sun worship bears striking resemblances to that other well-known Neoplatonic philosopher-king, Julian the Apostate, ruling the Roman Empire some 12 centuries earlier, which serves as more evidence for the deep Hellenistic origins of Akbar’s sun project.
In the final session of the conference, Laura Lieber of Duke University explored in her paper, “Prayer and Palinopsia: Heavenly Echoes in Early Jewish Hymnody”, the experience of illumination in the synagogues of Late Antiquity. Following the anthropological insight that “the luminous is the hallmark of the numinous,” Lieber examined how lamps in synagogues had simultaneous practical and symbolic functions, like shielding the Torah from darkness or the eternal flame signifying the eternal presence of God. Lieber also argued that decorative materials in the Israelite temple, like the garments and robes of the priests, had borrowed some of the luminousness of the divine. After the temple was destroyed, this material engagement with the luminous moved to the realm of the imagination in Rabbinic Judaism.
Blake Pye from the University of Texas at Austin presented his research on the religious policy of sixteenth-century Mughal Emperor Akbar and the debates concerning the veneration of the heavenly bodies that ensued after he adopted the sun as a key element of Mughal imperial rituals. Pye examined these debates in the context of the rise of Neoplatonic influences in Islam that allowed for veneration of the heavens over and against the Qur’anic ban on such practices. The Neoplatonists argued that they were expanding their horizons by pursuing tahqiq (“realization of the Truth”)—a concept developed by Andalusian Muslim scholar-mystic Ibn Arabi (d. 1240)—and derided their scripture-minded rivals as merely stuck in the mindless imitation of tradition or taqlid.
In delivering the final presentation of the conference, Matthew Melvin-Koushki of the University of South Carolina proposed a new category of “occult rationality” to study discourses and practices that are dismissed by both historians of science and the historians of religion. Noting the ubiquitous presence of occult practices in the Perso-Mongol imperial world, he argued that practices like alchemy and astrology had a type of “scientific” merit—they were prevalent in society precisely because they provided a way to democratize power and bypass the strictures of revealed religion. Melvin-Koushki questioned the Eurocentric grand narrative of enlightenment and suggested that occult rationality in post-Mongol Islam provided an alternative route of political emancipation and religious free-thinking.
Aneeq Ejaz is a doctoral student in the department of Religious Studies.
