Speaker 1:	Of course I have to begin my thanking Jasmina. Let me just tell you a little bit of a story. She asked me to participate with some feminists in Europe working in degree programs and gender studies. One group called Edges, and also to teach a master class at her university, a central European university. The only thing is she wasn't going to be there. I went to Utrecht to the meetings, and I went to a central European university and taught the master classes just last week. Jasmina was not there, but believe me, she was there because everybody invoked her. Everybody said, "Jasmina would say, Jasmina would help us do this, Jasmina, Jasmina."
	"If only Jasmina were here, we would do X, Y, and Z." I had quite a sense of the enormous presence of this invisible person, and of course coming to this conference, we see it all in action. As a visiting fellow instead of just working on her own research, what does she do but give us all an extraordinarily stimulating, so could we have just a round? My husband wanted to know last night, "Why did you talk to?" I said, "This person said, and this person said, and this person, and I had this conversation and that conversation." He knew that I was having a wonderful time. I thank you all for the stimulations that you brought to my own thinking. I hope a little bit that this very much work-in-progress connects to what you're doing.
	Let me also mention that it's a little bit shocking to me. This year is my 50th reunion year for Swathmore College. I graduated in 1965 with a major in classics and in English, and I can't come to the reunion, so you guys are my reunion. When I walk around campus, it's a little bit disorienting. Final initial thing I wanted to say is that we've had a little bit of discussion about the relationship of theory to practice in connection with translated. I wanted to say that some of the theoretical ideas that I represent today, I have learned from the novelists. When I read the theory, I'm often unhappy for some of the same reasons that Michael mentioned a certain kind of setness or dogmatism in some of the theory.
	The novelists teach me to think about theory, which I think is very important for us to do, as Elenora was suggesting in her paper. The novelists teach me to think with more flexibility, and I hope nuance about complex theoretical issues, political issues that we care about. Finally, I see this paper as resting very much especially on the paper that Elenora and Vita gave on transnational literature, and Michael Kendell's very interesting sense of translation from the ground up. I thank you for your work here. Some preliminary reflections. The focus of this conference, Transnational Literature and Translation, affirms the centrality of language for efforts to move beyond the national paradigm for literary studies.
	Language in both its translatability and its untranslatability to invoke Emily Actor's important work in The Translation Zone, and also her more recent Against World Literature. The discipline of comparative literature and the more amorphous field of world literature have both opened up the horizons of literary studies of refusing the straight jacket of national borders, and by basing their explorations on cosmopolitan ideals going back to classical Greek notions of the cosmopolis, and Enlightenment reinventions by Kant, Goethe, Marx, and Engels, among others. The universalizing gestures built into early notions of the cosmopolitan potentially sidestep the issue of literary language.
	That is, reading in the original language versus reading in translation. Translation itself has been a flashpoint of conflict in literary studies. As the famous debate between Franco Moretti and Gayatri Spivak embodied. That is Moretti's advocacy of what he calls distant reading through translation, versus Gayatri Spivak's advocacy of close reading based in the original language, and for her especially those less commonly taught original languages. Actor's somewhat ambiguous stand against world literature in her most recent book translates into a critique of two easy assumptions of translation.
	A forgetting, she calls, that a translation can never fully capture the nuances of the original language. In my view, Actor's move in this book, for all its complexity, is regressive. It takes us backwards. What I have found most exciting in the translation studies of the past 15 years or so has been the move away from the privileging of the original language, and notion of the source text as pure, and the target text as diluted or impure. Rather, as Lawrence Venuti's readers in translation studies have taught me, the gap between languages is a creative space in between.
	On the high fence, so to speak, to invoke Azade Seyhan's wonderful Writing Outside the Nation, which by the way I teach every year, the introduction. Beautiful. It is a space for intercultural encounter, for the crossing over, even for productive transgressions of limiting notions of purity. This is the space that Elenora yesterday called where the dynamic interpreter, or the agency of the translator as part of a dialogic process is so important in both transnational literature and in processes of translation. Here I'd like to suggest that in thinking about translation, whether it's linguistic or cultural, that we have on the one hand a sense of incommensurability, that there's never an equivalence between languages, but also the translation is a space of the commensurable, of the bringing together.
	In a book come co-edited with Rita Felsky on comparison, this is what I have argued about comparison itself, that it's the tension between the incommensurable and the commensurable that is an exciting space of encounter. So, too, translation, I think. For me, the new approaches to translation from one language to another invites the fraught, difficult, but potentially enriching process of a more broadly understood cultural translation. For sure, questions of power, colonialism, and resistance interweave through language issues, but nonetheless, however utopian, cultural translation is one component, perhaps the key component, of cosmopolitanism.
	Thinking about cultural translation as a site of transnational literary encounters between incommensurables, between differences in turn helps us rethink cosmopolitanism. Rather than posit the cosmopolitanism as a homogenous same, cosmopolitanism can be and is being reconstituted as a pluralist site of differences that acknowledge the existence of the right to the existence of the other and others. By way of example today, I will focus on the particular case of religion and secularism as sites where heterogeneous cosmopolitanism based in cultural translation is at times possible, and is in fact imagined in the narratives of two Muslim women writers. The Syrian American Mohja Kahf, and the Turkish writer Elif Shafak.
	First, cosmopolitanism, religion, and secularism. Fire and ice. Religion and cosmopolitanism. Are they incompatible? Do they each destroy the other? Fire melts ice, water puts out fire. Does religion melt away the capacity for cosmopolitan identification? Does cosmopolitanism cool the passions of religious belief or practice? Although the meanings of the term cosmopolitanism are what Bruce Robbins calls situated and particular in space and time, at its heart, cosmopolitanism suggests identifies that encompass difference, identifies that reach beyond the limitation of one's home polis, or city state. Allan, I'm sorry, the first paper this morning was discussing.
	Identifies that reach beyond the limitation of one's home polis, city-state, nation, or community, however broadly defined. As complex and varied as the human phenomenon of religion has been, religion involves in some basic way a communal identification that typically combines elements of shared belief systems, cultural practices, and forms of institutionalization. In heightened forms, religious communalism functions on sharply binary systems of us, them, the saved versus the damned, the chosen versus the unchosen, the enlightened versus the unenlightened, the pure versus the impure, the believers versus apostates or heretics or infidels. Cosmopolitanism appears to reject such binaries in proposing a world view, an identification beyond dualistic systems of insiders and outsiders.
	Instead, cosmopolitanism as a concept in the modern world system seems rooted in a tolerance that embraces diversities and holds out the kind of utopian hope for perpetual peace that Kant theorized in his 1795 essay, Perpetual Peace, a Philosophical Sketch. Given recent world events, I should not need to remind anyone that history is replete with instances, periods, and eras of religious violence where identification with one religion, or one sect of one religion, or one interpretation of one religious sect serves ideologically to justify murder and mayhem. Witness the religious violence in the past year, the slaughter of Charlie Hebdo cartoonists, and people in the kosher supermarket in Paris.
	The massive demonstrations and incident of violence against Muslims in conjunction with the Pegida movement in Germany. Europeans against the Islamization of Europe, the Buddhist killing whole villages of Muslims in Myanmar. The Sunnis of the Islamic Caliphate killing whole other villages of Shia, or Christians, or even other Sunnis. The Alawites and Sunnis in Syria killing over 200,000 people. The Jews and Muslims at war again in Israel and Palestine. The Boko Haram massacring yet other whole villages of Christians and kidnapping girls for forced conversion and marriage in Nigeria. Witness the battles this year in the Ukraine, interwoven, inseparable from allegiances to the orthodox Christian patriarchs in Moscow or Kiev.
	With a historical eye, remember the slaughter of millions during India's partition and ensuing flare-ups. Hindus, Sikhs, and Muslims killing and raping neighbors and strangers alike, depending on religion. Witness the long history of violence against Jews and Muslims in the name of Christian, going back at least to the crusades, and up through the religious civil wars, the Holocaust, Northern Ireland, and so forth. It would be naïve to claim that religion is the sole cause of such violence. Economic, geopolitical, territorial, ethnic, racial, caste, gender, and sexual politics all contribute. It would be equally naïve to ignore the role religions plays ideologically, phenomenologically, and institutionally to motivate, justify, and enable such violence among its perpetrators and victims.
	No religion has been exempt from such mobilizations of violence against others in the name of religion, whatever the complex or causes. On such a geohistorical landscape of continuously erupting violences, are religion and cosmopolitanism inevitably at odds with each other? Although many religions promote themselves as peace-loving and offer hope of eternal peace, religion in its actual historical manifestations has often been at odds with the tolerance of difference and peace that cosmopolitanism appears to promote. As a concept, however, cosmopolitanism has not been immune from binarisms, even from forms of violence that binaries often underpin.
	Current debates about cosmopolitanism often distinguish between the old cosmopolitanism from above, standing for an imperial and illusory dream of global homogeneity produced during the European Enlightenment, and serving to justify its ideological universalism versus the so-called new cosmopolitanism representing a cosmopolitanism from below, produced in current times by the new globalization and enforced transnationalism of neoliberalism and the intensified migrations of heterogeneous refugees, exiles, and diasporas. The one involves categorical and material violence of imperial powers against the less powerful. The other suggests the violences from which migrants often suffer in homelands, host lands, or in transit.
	Still others enter the debate by positing more continuity between old and new cosmopolitanisms regarding both the trans-local and the situated as interwoven into the old and the new. What interests me today is the relevance of religion and secularism to these cosmopolitanism debates. I suggest that religion bring sharply into focus the way in which the old cosmopolitanism has been associated with European modernity, and thus with secularism, and especially with what's known as the quote "secularization narrative," unquote. This narrative, discredited among many scholars today, but still widely believed, holds that Europe's modernization is synonymous with the rise of secularism in the West.
	This story, which I have elsewhere argued is an ideological narrative rationalizing Western imperialism and exceptionalism, sees the development of modernity beginning in Renaissance humanism and moving to the rise of capitalism and the nation-state formations in the 17th century, the Enlightenment of the 18th century, the scientific and industrial revolutions of the 19th century, and the technological advances and catastrophes of the 20th century. Accompanying and enabling Western modernity is the increasing secularization of the West, particularly with the spread of scientific knowledge and epistemology. That's how the story goes. The secularization narrative.
	This story embeds within it a transnational binary of the West versus the rest. The West is kinetic, increasingly modern, secular, cosmopolitanism, progressive, developed, while the rest is static, still pre-modern, religious, sectarian, traditional, tribal, backward, developing. Let's set aside for a moment the complexity of these binaries, as they are various applied to Africa, south Asia, east Asia, west Asia, and South America. They certainly take different shape in reference to, say, Afghanistan versus Brazil, Nigeria, or South Korea, for example. Moreover, the West itself is a highly indeterminate and inconsistent category, ostensibly geographic, but variously economic, political, cultural, racial, or religious by turns.
	The point I want to emphasize here is that the linear secularization narrative is central to conventional notions of modernity as a Western invention spreading belatedly elsewhere. This ideological narrative is also wildly out of touch with the past, and still ongoing power and significance of religion in the so-called West, and of secularism in many other regions of the world outside the West. In place of the secularization narrative, I suggest that we look for ways in which the religious and the secular engage dialectically with each other throughout world history, and in all societies, not just in the contemporary period, not just as a symptom of modernity, but rather as a facet of how elements of power and culture conflict and conjoin in the different spheres of the social order, from the economic, political, and military, to the phenomenological, symbolic, and spiritual.
	I suggest that no time or place has been exempt from this tug of war, this dialectical dance of engagement between some forms of religion and some aspects of the secular. Such a trans-historical and global approach to religion and secularism requires a rethinking of the categories themselves. For the purposes of this paper today, I suggest we recognize that all religions encompass the interaction of three component parts, however differently these parts find expression. The first part, some sort of theology or belief system positing some sort of divinity, spiritual world, or spirituality that may or may not be embedded in sacred texts.
	Second part, cultural practices that may include rituals, symbolic representations, or faith. Third, institutional formations that might include everything from buildings, to hierarchies of religious education and authority, to enmeshment in the political, economic, and civic institutions of society. Secularism I suggest takes various shapes in theological, cultural, and institutional domains depending on the scale of reference and on the arena of manifestations, whether it be governmental, as in the concept of separate of church and state, or mosque and state, or the civil realms, civil society, or the cultural, the family, or the individual.
	Much of the confusion and controversy about secularism I believe comes from slippage between scales of reference. Assertations of the United States as a secular society might reference the first amendment to our constitution, the concept of disestablishmentarianism, or separation of church and state in the realm of law. It might also allude to the cultural promiscuities of American mass media, or it might allude to the decline of religious affiliations among young people. Such assertions do not take into account the flourishing of religious institutions and practices of all world religions within the US. A society can aim for a secular state at the same time that it identifies itself as predominantly a Christian or Muslim nation, as the entangled history of religion and secularism throughout the US, Europe, the Middle East, and south Asia demonstrate.
	I resist the collapse of secularism with modernity, and do not accept the premise of the secularization narrative that secularism first appears in the West during the rise of European modernity. Rather, the secular as a domain and impulse interacting with the religious has taken on different forms throughout world history. This global and historical approach to rethinking the interplay of religion and secularism opens up new ways of thinking about cosmopolitanism. One's not based in the opposition of old elite cosmopolitanism versus new subaltern cosmopolitanism. In particular, it allows us to see cosmopolitanism as a potential that resists the sectarianism that can take either religious or secular form.
	Let me repeat that. It allows us to see cosmopolitanism as a potential that resists sectarianism of all kinds, whether it's religious sectarianism or secular sectarianism. As I use the concept, cosmopolitanism is a kind of anti-sectarianism, not the secular opposite of religion. From this perspective, cosmopolitanism can find expression in either religious or secular domains, as well as in the interaction between them. This is what the novelists have taught me. Novels produce theory, not the other way around. As such, cosmopolitanism can be fully situated, rooted in its time and place, and at the same time as it encompasses the capacity to see beyond its specific location and loyalties.
	Cosmopolitanism in this sense posits and continual epistemological traveling back and forth between local and global, between self and other. These are forms of translation. Such cosmopolitanism does not preclude national, religious, ethnic, gender, or other kinds of situated and local identities. Rather it refuses absolutist sectarian identifications, the mindset of, "My country is always right, my race or gender is superior to all others, and my religion is the one true religion, my god the only god, my sacred text the only sacred text, my salvation the only salvation, my truth the only truth, and so forth." Cosmopolitanism is based in the capacity to encompass or at least acknowledge multiple points of view, multiple ways of experiencing the world, of seeking truth.
	Translation is the binary opposite of fundamentalism. In reference to the interplay of religion and secularism, cosmopolitanism as I am using the term is not the assertion that acceptance of Jesus as the only path is the only path to salvation. Cosmopolitanism is not the self-named caliphate, the Islamic State, where only those who accept one particular sect of Sunni Islam deserve to live, and all else are infidels who deserve to die. In this regard, cosmopolitanism requires the acceptance of different religions as legitimate forms of human expression and organization. I realize that the word tolerance is heavily weighted with its own histories, some of which are paternalistic, and even colonialist.
	In relation to religion/secularism, cosmopolitan implies for me a form of respectful tolerance of beliefs and practices other than one's own. Cosmopolitanism in this sense is not the opposite of religion, nor is it the equivalence of secularism. Rather, cosmopolitanism incorporates a spectrum reviews towards religion and secularism, but challenges fundamentally all those views which promote themselves as the single and only and pure truth. In this sense, cosmopolitanism is the opposite of any sectarianism, whether religion or secular. Cosmopolitanism requires, in short, a form of culture translation, an ability to cross over, even imaginatively from one cultural framework to another.
	Migration, particularly diasporic migration, intensifies this process of cultural translation that I define as central to non-sectarian forms of cosmopolitan religion and secularism. Migration of peoples, the mobility of human bodies through space, enforces a process of cultural translation requiring forms of adaptation and accommodation to difference. Language as spoken, written, or translated is often a flashpoint of the tension between the pressure to assimilate and the efforts for cultural retention. The post-World War II migrations, especially those of people coming from colonized or formerly colonized societies into Europe and North America exhibit the push-pull factors that motivate migrations, as well as the tension and acculturation processes between assimilation and cultural retention, between host land hostilities and longings for homelands, between the hope for new beginnings and the sense of loss for past homes.
	Feminist anthropologist Avtar Brah posits the concept of what she calls diaspora space, by which she means the sites of interaction between natives and migrates that change the cultural communities of both, this interaction produces not only rich multiculturalisms, but also resistant and often violent nativist movements. Diaspora space is the space of cultural translation, one structured by systems of power, one fraught with the binaries of pure and impure, and one enabling the creative potentials of transgration like translation itself. How, then, do religion and secularism function in these trans-cultural interactions? Diaspora space, I suggest, often sets in motion a binary conflict between cosmopolitanism versus sectarian manifestations of both religion and secularism.
	You can use that to read the Charlie Hebdo situation. No doubt global and local inequities of political, economic, territorial, cultural, and psychological formations underlie the conflicts of diaspora space. Religion and secularism often function as the flashpoint of conflict. Think for example of the Danish cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed defended in the name of free speech even though the newspaper, that newspaper had previously censored cartoons satirizing Jesus. The cartoon sparked resistance among Danish Muslims, as well as widespread condemnation and violence in parts of the Muslim world as the West's secular denigration of Islam. Think also of the pig soup movement among nativist movements in Europe, or the banning of head scarves in the schools in France, or the battle against the building of the Mosque in Tennessee, or the campaign in New York City against a Muslim community center run by an ecumenical imam near the site of the stricken World Trade Center buildings.
	Beyond the instance of anti-Muslim activism and violence in the West, however, lies the larger principle that is fully global, and not confined exclusively to Europe and North America. Namely, the conflation of nationalist, racial, and ethnic identities with the discourses of sectarian religion or dogmatic secularism. A cosmopolitanism diasporic space, in contrast, is one in which differing communities and individuals, both migrants and native, can express and practice religious or secular beliefs without fear, undue violence, or debilitating inequities. Now let me turn to the novels. The Muslim Cosmopolitanism, Mohja Kahf's the Girl with the Tangerine Scarf, and Elif Shafak's the Bastard of Istanbul. I turn to these two women Muslim writers whose migration narratives work through the binary of tolerance cosmopolitanism and intolerant sectarianism.
	Both refuse the conventional binaries of religion, secularism, tradition, modernity, and East, West. Mohja Kahf's the Girl with the Tangerine Scarf and Elif Shafak's the Bastard of Istanbul both published in 2006 envision a cosmopolitanism that incorporates religion and the secular. Mohja Kahf was born in Syria and migrated to Indiana as a child, where her parents were involved in the Islamic [foreign 00:30:31] movement to bring Muslims back to a purer form of higher observant Islam in the context of considerable heartland American hostility and prejudice. Mohja Kahf has a PhD in English literature. She teachers at the University of Arkansas, and wrights as a scholar, a poet, and a blogger. Her volume of poems, Emails from Scheherazad, and her autobiographical novel, the Girl with the Tangerine Scarf, focus on hyphenated identities and cultural translation in the context of a strongly religious and non-sectarian identity.
	With the advent of the Arab Spring and Syria's devastating civil war, Kahf has contributed heavily to the blogosphere and other forms of activism. Elif Shafak is arguably Turkey's best known and most controversial woman writer, and like may writers and journalists in Turkey, she faced charges of violating penal code 301, which prohibits quote "denigrating Turkishness," unquote with the publication of the Bastard of Istanbul. The author of some eight novels, some written in English, some in Turkish, Shafak came of age among a secular intellectual culture of Istanbul, received her PhD in Turkey in political theory with a dissertation on Sufism, that is a mystical branch of Islam, and received an MA in gender and women's studies at the University of Michigan, taught at the University of Arizona, and currently lives in writes in Istanbul.
	On the surface, Kahf and Shafak appear to be at different ends of the spectrum between religion and secularism. Kahf is an openly observant Muslim, choosing at times to wear a head scarf, where Shafak, in spite of her extensive interest in Sufism, does not support President Erdogan, the AK Peter Justice and Development Party, and a push toward a more Islamic theocratic state. A closer look at the Girl with the Tangerine Scarf and the Bastard of Istanbul reveals a shared cosmopolitanism that resists intolerant religion on the one hand, and dogmatic secularism on the other. Religion, particularly in its intimate, even mystical forms for both these writers becomes a pathway to a vision of cosmopolitanism in both novels, one that is inseparable from past diasporic histories and newer migrations.
	First, the Girl with the Tangerine Scarf. Kahf's novel is a migration Bildungsroman that features Khadra, a girl born in Syria who migrates at a young age with her family to Indiana, America's heartland, where resistance to strangers, especially Muslim foreigners, is strong, even violent at times, as the murder of Khadra's cousin attests. Khadra's parents are key figures in a tight-knit Dawah community. Fundamentalist Muslims proselytizing to other Muslims to bring them back to a purer form of Islam based in strict observance and isolation, especially isolation from non-Muslims. Khadra's growing up begins within this tight-knit community, moves to her sense of entrapment within its confines, then journeys through exposure to a panoply of different religious and secular practices, and ends with her forging of a religious identity whose cosmopolitanism contrasts sharply with her origins in the Dawah community.
	Complicating this linear movement, however, are circular narratives of return that underlie the novel. The novel opens and closes in present time, when the adult Khadra returns to Indiana as a photojournalist to document the Dawah community she had fled long ago as part of her growing up and out of the fundamentalism enclave of her beginnings. This circular structure embeds another story of return, a return from Indiana to Damascus, to the family home where she was born. This return features scenes of personal and spiritual awakening that usher her into a different, more cosmopolitanism form of Islam, a kind with an ancient past in Syria that informs her adult life as an artist and practicing Muslim in the United States.
	That is, she finds a more cosmopolitanism tolerant Islam in Damascus, not in the West. Counterintuitively, both returns, to Indiana and to Damascus, result in her becoming American, shedding her status as marked outsider, and embodying an identity she forges out of old worlds and new. Breaking the conventional migration narratives of assimilation into a quote "free" America, the narrative locates the heart of a spiritual cosmopolitanism in Damascus, a way of being symbolized by the tangerine scarf that Khadra brings back to the United States as the basis of her freedom. Laying the groundwork for Khadra's awakening in Damascus are her experiments with various forms of political Islam in college, and a marriage that had pleased the Dawah community, but ended in disastrous failure.
	She feels unmoored. She enters free fall, and she detaches herself from the surety of her mother's fundamentalist pronouncements on the laws and practices of real Islam based in purity. Quite, "All that smug knowledge, Khadra thinks, Islam is this, Islam is that. Maybe she believes some of it, maybe she didn't, but it needed to be cleared out so she could find out for herself this time. Not as a given. Not ladled on a plate, and she had to eat it just because it was there." Unquote. The desire to find out for herself about Islam takes her back to Damascus, where Khadra finds a different kind of mother figure in her great aunt Tita, a non-fundamentalist Muslim who had fled her home in Hypha during the Palestinian catastrophe of 1948, known as the Nakba.
	She introduces Khadra to a centuries-old Islam that is interwoven with Judaism, Christianity, and even secularism. Khadra's awakening begins in a disorienting visit to an ancient Damascus synagogue with Aunt Tita, a visit that opens her up to the influence of an elderly Syrian poet who mysteriously and repeatedly appears to her on a semi-magical hillside overlooking Damascus. Khadra is not sure whether he is real or imagined, although she later learns from her aunt that he was a poet famous in the 1960s for his modernist experimentation. In one of their meetings, Khadra's head scarf suddenly slips off, and she feels the sun on her hair for the first time since girlhood.
	Quote, "Here was an exposure, she thinks. Her soul, an unmarked sheet, shadowing into distinct shapes under the fluids, fresh film, herself, developing," unquote. Paralleling her developing self to film, she realizes quote, "How veiling and unveiling are part of the same process, the same cycle, how both are necessary, how both light are dark are connected moments in the development of the soul in its darkroom," unquote. Now she understands what the poet mean when he said, "Your woman body is loved by God, good and pure, veiled or not veiled." The tangerine scarf she makes and shares with her aunt symbolizes this new freedom to veil or unveil as she chooses. The scarf is colored a hybridic blend of red and yellow, also signifies a relation to Islam based not on fundamentalist laws, but on her own mystically oriented relationship to God.
	Inspired by a different cosmopolitan Islam she meets in Syrian, Khadra is now able to return to the States feeling herself to be quote, "An American, not an outsider." She attends photography school, engages openly with practicing agnostic, atheist, and lesbian Muslims, forms a close bond with a Jew emerging from an orthodox background, and then returns home to Indiana as a photojournalist. This time, her mother's admonition that she is impure, that she has fallen away from the true Islam, does not threaten her. Quote, "All paths lead to God, she thinks, as she agrees to helper her brother explain to their parents his decision to marry a practicing Christian." Brother and sister agree that their children will quote, "Never have the pure, sheltered, one religious experience our parents tried to give us," unquote.
	For Khadra, the Koran remains an inspiration. Quote, "I love the Koran and the forms and rhythms of salam. I keep coming back to it, she tells her friend Taiba. Taiba asks her, 'But you think someone else can pray another way and find a path to God?' 'Absolutely,' Khadra answers." Khadra now embraces a cosmopolitanism that encompasses both religions and secularism. Now the Bastard of Istanbul. Where Kahf's novel promotes a cosmopolitan Islam through the Bildung of a single protagonist, Shafak's novel centers on the lives of two multi-generational families, one Muslim in Turkish, mostly based in Istanbul, and one Christian, an Armenian originally from Turkey, and now diasporically based in the United States.
	The novel deals fundamentally with the Armenian genocide in 1915, which displaces 1.5 million Armenians with one half to one million of them dying by execution, ethnic cleansing, and forced marches under orders during the waning days of the Ottoman Empire. Functioning allegorically for the nation of Turkey, the two families diverge not only in religious and ethnic identities, but also in their relationship to historical and cultural memory. The modern Turkish family, citizens of the Republic of Turkey, that Kemal Ataturk founded as a secular state in a Muslim nation represents the will to forget the past, while the diasporic Armenian family represents the will to remember, particular to remember Armenian victimization and exile at the hand of the Turks.
	Each family in turn includes members who are differently places on the spectrum from secular to religious. Also, each family harbors secrets of traumatic violence, with ongoing effects in the present. Secrets that must be told to break the pattern of victimization, destructive forgetting, and obsessive remember. As the novel's denouement reveals the two families are in fact related by blood, like the Muslim and Christian populations of Turkey itself. In its advocacy of familial and historical memory, the novel expresses hope for reconciliation and a belief that Turkey's more multi-religious past under the Ottomans might inspire a cosmopolitan future that ensures both religious and secular freedoms of mind, spirit, and body.
	The novel's pomegranate broach purchased from a Jewish antique dealer by the patriarch of the Armenia family murdered in 1915, but not mysteriously an heirloom in the Turkish family. The pomegranate then functions as the novel's main symbol of cosmopolitanism. The broach not only proves the connection and crimes hidden in the two families, but also blends the pomegranate's multi-religious past in centuries-old Jewish, Christian, and Islamic popular traditions. The novel opens in Istanbul, 19 years before the main events narrated in the rest of the novel. The scene immediately breaks down the polarity of secularism and religion. Salia, the youngest daughter of the Turkish family and a self-identified agnostic, runs through the torrential downpour of the city streets in her short skirt, broken spike heels, nose ring, and frizzy raven-black hair, an exuberant spectacle of immodest bodily display.
	She ends up in a doctor's office, waits with splayed legs for an abortion when suddenly she hears what she finds to be the hateful cacophony of electronic calls to prayer chiming from mosque to mosque. Without knowing how or why in the fog of anesthesia, she apologizes three times to Allah, stops the abortion, and saves the child to come. Her daughter, Isah, one of the novel's two main protagonists. Salia's 19 years old and single. She tells no one who the father of the child is. The secret buried in her body is one of the pasts that must be remembered. 19 years later, we meet Salia amidst her family of women, each one of which represents a particular form of Turkishness.
	Salia herself, the agnostic whose immodest display of her body embodies the Islamic concept of fitna, the capacity of women's bodies to produce chaos if not modestly covered. Benu, the fully observant religious sister. Sevria, the Kamala sister, a dogmatic nationalist and secularist. Farida, the neurotic sister. Dolcum, the mother who loves only her faraway son, and the grandmother Petima, whose dementia metaphorizes the families and by extension Turkey's refusal to remember the past. The story of the entwined Turkish and Armenian families centers of the two young women, Armenuj and Isah, who are cousins, but don't know it until the novel's denouement.
	Their search, one insistent, the other resistant, into the history of the family and the nation as family provides the overarching structure of the novel. Isah does not know who her father is, and in response she says she has no past and wants no past. She adopts a radically nihilist philosophy expressed through her circle of bohemian friends, the artists and alienated intellectuals of the secular elite who congregate at Café Kundara. These militant secularists are hilariously satirized, caught between East and West, cut off from the past, and facing an uncertain future.
	Their blindness signals the insight that Isah comes to learn through her relationship with Armenuj and the agency of her mother's religious sister, Auntie Benu. Armenuj, in contrast to Isah, can't get enough of her past, and travels to Istanbul to locate more of her family history. She is the daughter of Rose, a white woman from Kentucky, who married and then divorced the Armenian Barsam, born of the American-born son of Armenian refugees in the Armenian family. Despite her Armenian in-laws, who considered her forever an outsider, Rose marries Mustafa, a Turkish student in Tucson, Arizona. Armenuj, however, develops a full-blown Armenian identity expressed nightly online in a chat group called Café Constantinople, whose members include Greeks and Armenians whose families had been forced to leave Istanbul as a modern Turkish state was formed.
	Their identifies are based on shared victimhood and outrage for the injustices of the past not yet acknowledged by Turkey. Armenuj's decision to make a secret trip to Istanbul to learn more of her family history sets the plot in motion. It just so happens in the first of many coincidences in this intricately plotted novel that her stepfather Mustafa is the only son of the Turkish family. [inaudible 00:46:39], his brother, who left Istanbul abruptly for Arizona and cut himself off from his family in Istanbul 19 years ago. Auntie Benu, the religious sister, is the aging of memory and the moral center of the novel. She acts against national and familial amnesia to expose the crimes hidden within the family and the nation as family.
	Her religious beliefs and practices are inseparable from this agency on behalf of memory. In religious terms, she is the most observant character in the novel, practicing all levels of Islam from the official to the mystical and the popular. Particularly, those ancient practices that Islam absorbed into its multi-level traditions. She frequently cites the Koran. She prays five times a day. She wears the head scarf. Despairing of the unobservant in the household, but she is also a seer, reading fortunes in coffee cups and cards, worrying about the evil eye, and conjuring the past in a silver bowl filled with consecrated water from Mecca.
	As part of popular Islam, two jinns sit on her shoulders to do her bidding, Ms. Sweet, who encourages her to cover over the crimes of the past, and Mr. Bitter, who insists that she expose, and even more dreadfully, act upon them. The jinns function narratively as both magical realist elements and as real presences that embody the conflict in Turkey between remembering the past and forgetting it. Mr. Bitter represents the ethical drive of conscious, compelling Auntie Benu to face the significance of her possession of the pomegranate broach she inherited from her dead father, the broach that she accidentally learns belonged to Armenuj's great-grandmother, great-grandfather, the famous Armenia writer.
	With Mr. Bitter at her side, Auntie Benu fearfully resorts to the silver bowl, where the stories of the past lurk inside the consecrated water. The past is recreated before her and our very eyes in all its many and entangled secrets and crimes, the state's murder of Armenuj's great-grandfather in 1915, the diaspora of the family's few survivors, relocating to San Francisco. Auntie Benu's Muslim grandfather, who found the Armenian girl Shushan in an orphanage and married her. The son Shushan then abandoned to rejoin her Armenia brothers in San Francisco, eventually becoming Armenuj's grandmother. The embitterment of Shushan's abandoned Muslim son, who passes his bitterness on to his son Mustafa.
	Then the crime that hid behind the novel's opening chapter, Mustafa's rape of his sister Isalia, who as fitna represented temptation he could not resist. Execution, massacre, abandonment, rape, secrets. These are the crimes hidden in the histories of the state and the families. As the novel's religious figure, Auntie Benu not only sees and indirectly tells the truth, but she also confronts the ethical responsibilities that historical memory brings. To act on these recovered memories of national and familial crime, Auntie Benu believes she must disobey Allah and condemn herself to hell by offering Mustafa the chance to choose death in the form of a poison dish of his favorite dessert, asura.
	In silence, understanding what she has done, Mustafa eats the dessert and dies. His death frees Salia from the rape, which frees her to tell Isah who her father is, and thus give her a past. This honesty with her daughter frees Salia to have a different kind of future with her Armenian lover. Together as the novel closes and it's partially utopian gesture, they signify the conjoining of Muslim and Armenian Christian cultures, and union based on love as a symbol of hope for the multi-religious nation. As Aram explains about his decision to remain in Istanbul quote, "This city is my city. My family's history in this city goes back at least 500 years. Armenian Istanbulites belong to Istanbul, just like the Turkish, Kurdish, Greek, and Jewish Istanbulites do."
	"We have first managed and badly failed to live together. We cannot fail again," unquote. In conjuring the crimes of the past, Auntie Benu, the religious character, functions as a surrogate for the writer telling stories that are still dangerous to tell in contemporary Turkey. Significantly, Auntie Benu's silver bowl begins to produce its stories at the end of a chapter that opens with the narrator's uncanny celestial gaze that sweeps over the city of Istanbul at dawn watching the lights sporadically quote, "Flickering as if coding a cryptic message to God," unquote.
	The mystical eye of the narrator no doubt reflecting Shafak's extensive research into Sufism blends first with the city's many calls to early morning prayer, and then into Auntie Benu's stories in the consecrated water of the silver bowl. Signaled by the mystical celestial eye that gazes over the city, the Bastard of Istanbul embodies a cosmopolitan hope that defies Islamic theocracy on the hand, and [inaudible 00:52:15] nationalist secularism based on the expulsion of non-Muslims on the other. Symbolized by the many ruby red seeds of the gold pomegranate broach, the novel's cosmopolitanism embraces the possibility of both religious and secular ways of being.
	In conclusion, the two novels locate their utopian hope for a cosmopolitanism future in the recovery of an Islam, and by implication for religion more generally that is not fundamentalist, not law-bound, not intolerant of other religions and peoples, not intolerant of agnostics or atheists. In this regard, the novels address a debate within Islam about its past and future, as well as an appeal to others to recognize Islam's diversities, including it's cosmopolitan tolerant aspects. To the extent that the novels engage with issues of the nation and the state, Shafak more directly than Kahf, both novels promote the idea of a secular state as a necessary foundation for the free flourishing of either religious or secular beliefs and practices.
	A secular state they suggest creates the conditions in which both different religious and secular practices can coexist. At the scale or level of the individual, the family, or the community, religion becomes dangerous, they suggest, when it takes dictatorial forms that promote it as the only correct way to believe and practice a religion. As migration narratives, both novels refuse the binaries of secular, modern, progressive America versus religious, traditional, backward, Middle East. A progressive cosmopolitanism lies within Islam's past, one located for Shafak in Ottoman Istanbul, and for Kahf in ancient Damascus. For them both, it lies as well within a mystical religious practice centered in the personal, not in the rulings or pronouncement of clerics, not institutionalized religion, not in the powers of a theocratic state.
	Additionally, both novels promote a cosmopolitan concept of diaspora space, to invoke Avtar Brah. For Shafak, the return of the Armenian family to Istanbul signifies an acknowledgement of their shared past, both in love and violence. For Kahf, interweaving of the Turkish and Armenian families evident in their shared ... Whoops, that sentence got lost. To return to the general questions with which I began, these novels illustrate how cosmopolitanism is not inherently secular or anti-religious. Just as cosmopolitanism can be rooted and situated in a particular time and place, cosmopolitanism can be rooted and situated in a particular religion. Moreover, religion can be compatible with secularism if we rethink what we mean by secularism.
	We have to abandon the secularization narrative that equates the secular with the modern, and secularism with the West. This is an ideological narrative that obscures the ongoing importance of religion in the West, and the longstanding existence of secularism outside the West. The secular, in short, needs to be re-theorized in scalar terms that recognize the different arenas of secularism from the state and the law, to civil society and culture, to communal and family groupings, to individual belief and practice. Religion and secularism, in short, are not binary opposites, but enmeshed, entangled phenomena that exist in different levels of society.
	For religion to be compatible with cosmopolitanism and secularism, however, it cannot be dogmatic, fundamentalist, absolutist, and exclusivist. I mean by this, religion cannot enforce the idea, whether by state law, cultural ethos, or violent force, that its truths are the only truths, its practices the only practices, and its way the only way. The binaries of believer versus unbeliever, infidel, apostate, or heretic underlie forms of religion that are not compatible with cosmopolitanism. In all the world's religions, such binaries underlie violence perpetrated in the name of religion no matter how many other factors inform the conflict. Violence in the family, violence among communities, violence among nations.
	To be cosmopolitanism, religion needs to respect multiple ways of belief and practice. Similarly, a secularism that is dogmatic, fundamentalist, absolutist, and exclusivist, why by state law, cultural ethos, or violent force is also not compatible with cosmopolitanism. Cosmopolitanism as I have theorized it is based in an epistemology capable of traveling back and forth between multiple pathways to truth. That's that process of translation. Of circulation among many perspectives without privileging one over another. This view is utopian, I am quite aware. When I see the effects of sectarian power around the world today in which religious discourse plays a central role, I see dogmatism, especially the kind that engenders violence at all levels of society.
	From the girls kidnapped to become wives of jihadists abroad to the women denied contraception in the United States, both in the name of the one true religion. Embedded in human history, as in the novels I discussed today, is also the record of cosmopolitan hope. Such a cosmopolitan hope, one I have learned to theorize by reading the novels of many Muslim women writers, not just these two, is also one that assumes the possibility of cultural translation. Not a cultural translation that involves a complete superposition of one culture with another. Not one that presumes full understanding. Not one blind to the inequities of all kinds. Shafak's pomegranate broad, should we remember, is full of seeds that are ruby red, the color of blood.
	Blood accompanies birth. It also comes with violent death. We should not be naïve about the conflicts that intercultural encounter and cultural translation can arouse, especially when the entangled phenomenon of religion and secularism are at stake. The kind of cosmopolitan hope that Mohja Kahf and Elif Shafak narrate should remind us that cultural translation is worth striving for. The transnational literatures of which both the Girl with the Tangerine Scarf and the Bastard of Istanbul are a part, even though I point out both were initially written in English, at times narrate the very processes of cultural translation that they themselves embody. Thank you.