Discussions concerning LGBTIQ+ rights in African countries are about bodies and not abstract or theoretical issues. They are about bodies who have been described via the languages of colonialism and the colorized. Such bodies have been the battleground where colonial processes have worked themselves out, and, as such, LGBTIQ+ bodies have been sites of both colonial production and knowledge and of struggle against colonialism. Religious leaders, at various times, have acted as supporters of LGBTIQ+ struggles for recognition as well as opponents. Religious leaders who have supported LGBTIQ+ persons have aimed to make visible LGBTIQ+ bodies and promoted public policies in keeping with that aim. Religious leaders, however, also sometimes hold stigmatizing attitudes towards the bodies of marginalized populations, and the resultant public policies they have promoted have reflected these biases. In this post, I focus on the way that LGBTIQ+ bodies have been made invisible by scriptural misreading, fallacious historical narratives, and heteronormative assumptions about reproduction and fruitfulness.
Scriptural Misreading
Adrian van Klinken’s Kenyan, Christian, Queer: Religion, LGBT Activism, and Arts of Resistance in Africabrings into sharp focus the bodily realities of the LGBTIQ+ community, a community which continues to struggle to find a space to breathe in a broader political landscape in which LGBTIQ+ persons are marginalized for who they are. Discussions about LGBTIQ+ people are complex, especially when raised by those who still question whether they even exist, and whether, if they do exist, their identity is one that should be recognized by the state. With more visibility of LGBTIQ+ persons through lobbying and advocacy, the religious and cultural reasons used to discriminate against the community have been brought into relief, thus forcing opponents of LGBTIQ+ recognition to rethink their assumptions. Attending a forum that was meant to challenge and critique the LGBTIQ+ community, I heard one opponent say, “We know that you exist but do not bring to the public what you do in the dark because we [meaning the heteronormative community] do not discuss our affairs in public either.” This claim was loaded and could be interpreted in a variety of ways. My interpretation was that its aim was to reduce the LGBTIQ+ question to a matter of private sex and sexuality, rather than looking at it as a part of a wider set of issues, including human rights. Unfortunately, it is often those across Africa who claim to be Christian who provide theological rationalizations that dehumanize LGBTIQ+ people. In doing so, they justify homophobic practices through demeaning language, and increase the violence meted out against LGBTIQ+ persons.
Several reasons have been proffered by Christian actors to refute the right of the LGBTIQ+ community to exist and have their human dignity respected. Two reasons one often hears are that (1) the practice of homosexuality is un-African, and that (2) it goes against the biblical teachings of the Christian tradition. In my earlier writings I argued against the first point by showing that homosexuality was a phenomenon found universally throughout human societies, and that therefore it was not specific to any one nation or region. Concerning the second point, I noted that one needs to read biblical texts within their historical context to better understand their meaning. When one does this, I claim, the argument that homosexuality goes against biblical teachings falls apart.[1]
History and Narrative
It is with this background that I read van Klinken’s book, which either revisits or confirms some of the issues that I have dealt with before concerning arguments opposing LGBTIQ+ rights. The book is wonderful to read because of the way it brings to light the ways in which LGBTIQ+ as individuals and communities navigate the harsh contexts in which they find themselves. The narratives that LGBTIQ+ persons relay to van Klinken serve as data points that can then be used to show the folly of those who think LGBTIQ+ persons do not exist or are not worthy of receiving recognition. To use the words of Sarojini Nader, “stories are data with soul.” In another way the book deconstructs the historical trajectories on the subject of homosexuality in Africa. The book deconstructs the myth that homosexuality is un-African, and in doing so complements the work of other scholars, such as Sylvia Tamale, who have shown that there were a range of sexual practices that were acceptable in precolonial Africa.
I have seen the importance of making visible queer bodies in my own teaching as well. Once, while I was teaching an online class at St. Paul’s University (Limuru, Kenya) on gender and sexuality there were several speakers who joined the class who were members of the LGBTIQ+ community. When one of the speakers introduced himself as a gay man, the students asked him to turn on his camera so that they could see him. Seeing his body was believing and a new data point was revealed that once again showed that the story of homosexuality being un-African was and is false.
Challenging Heteronormativity in the Church
Raised fist with “Queer254” bracelet. The rainbow bracelets with the text 254Queer are made by a local Kenyan LGBT group and combines Kenya’s country-code +254 with the word Queer. Photo courtesy of Adriaan van Klinken.
While many religious communities struggle to be inclusive of the LGBTIQ+ community, the work of the Cosmopolitan Affirming Church (CAC) that van Klinken discusses in chapter 4 challenges those who hold power in the church to allow LGBTIQ+ persons to engage with the Divine. The affirming church does not discriminate but provides a space for people to worship in community. The ethics of this church are based on their interpretation of the life and teaching of Jesus Christ as recorded in the Gospels. Attending the church, I was amazed at their spirit of inclusivity and acceptance by people who have experienced exclusion and marginalization by those who profess a faith based on the acceptance of Jesus Christ. In making space for LGBTIQ+ persons to worship they made room for their bodies.
The prioritization of bodies over theories also raises the question of hierarchy in same-sex relations. It forces us to ask how the roles are divided between partners and who plays what role. While this is often asked about the roles of partners in the LGBTIQ+ community specifically, it also raises wider societal questions about the structure of all relationships. More specifically it raises the question of power and how it is manifested between people and in wider society. Relationships in a society are always structured in a hierarchical manner, at the intersection of gender, race, class, religious identity, and/or age. One’s place in these power dynamics determines one’s likelihood of receiving recognition and status in society. What same-sex relationships force communities of faith to think about is how to form relationships of mutuality not determined by the strict roles constructed by dominant social and cultural norms. Same-sex relationships, at least ideally, envision a power sharing model that promotes life-affirming relationships.
Another concern often expressed by opponents to same-sex relationships is about the importance of reproduction in relation with the birth of children for population. In forums with religious leaders the challenge to LGBTIQ+ concerns the Biblical command in Genesis 1:28 to “be fruitful and multiply.” This is echoed by the broader community. This challenge is based on the assumption that every person has to produce children and that there is only one way to have children. As Mercy Oduyoye, a childless woman in a West African space, asks: “Where in the Bible are the children of Miriam, Deborah and Esther? Where are the offspring of Mary, Martha, John and James, Priscilla and Aquila.”[2] While producing children is important, not everyone has the capacity to produce children in the way to which society is accustomed. As such, those who are unable or choose not to father or birth children for a variety of reasons have other ways of raising the next generation. This includes playing other roles, including caring for the many children that are in need. Linking fruitfulness solely to giving birth to children misses the mark because it is only one among the many things that human beings are commanded in the Genesis story to do. More deeply, it does violence to those who are unable or decide not to have children. Further, in the story of the church we have groups made up of individuals who have not given birth to children but have been fruitful in a myriad of ways, including by acting in just and merciful ways. There are those in the society who in caring for the earth engage with the world. There are also those who look out for the many who are denied justice in society. The call for inclusivity and giving others a voice is among the many forms of fruitfulness. Van Klinken’s book itself represents a fruitful engagement with the world as it brings to light the narratives of the marginalized.
Conclusion
I began by stating that bodies are a site of struggle for LGBTIQ+ persons. To conclude this piece, I acknowledge the ways in which the author deals with his positionality while still nonetheless retaining the privilege of being able to do research while those whom he studies cannot. Due to colonialism, classism, and patriarchy, LGBTIQ+ persons have suffered exclusion and marginalization at different levels in society. Their experiences are often reduced to anecdotes and treated as irrelevant. This book is one of the ways in which the bodies of LGBTIQ+ persons are acknowledged and their knowledge production is brought to the center. This knowledge, however, is still brought to the center by an outsider. The community itself cannot make itself fully visible since the context is not yet one in which it is safe for them to do so.
[1]“Kenyan Reflections” in Other Voices, Other Worlds. The Global Church Speaks Out on Homosexuality, ed. Terry Brown (London: Darton Longman & Todd, 2006).
[2] Mercy Amba Oduyoye, “A Coming Home to Myself, The Childless Woman in the West Africa Space,” in Liberating Eschatology: Essays in Honour of Letty Russell, ed. Margaret Farley and Serene Jones (Louisville: John Knox Westminster Press, 1999), 115.
Esther Mombo is a Professor of Theology at St. Paul’s University in Limuru, Kenya. Her research interests span the fields of Church History, Theology & Gender, Sexuality in Church, and Society. She is a founder member of the Tamar Campaign in Kenya, a mechanism that seeks to acknowledge the existence of Gender Based Violence in the society and empower and facilitate churches to address this concern. She is a member of the Circle of Concerned African Women Theologians and coordinator of the Eastern Africa region. She is a graduate of St. Paul’s University, the University of Dublin, and the University of Edinburgh. In 2007 she was awarded an honorary doctorate by Virginia Theological Seminary for her work in bringing to the fore issues of gender disparity and gender justice in church and society.
Praying hands with “Queer254” bracelet. The rainbow bracelets with the text 254Queer are made by a local Kenyan LGBT group and combines Kenya’s country-code +254 with the word Queer. Photo courtesy of Adriaan van Klinken.
For a culture supposedly unforthcoming in matters of sex, Africans have been doing a lot of talking about sex lately. In hindsight, the dam of this discursive freedom was burst open by the HIV/AIDS pandemic as, beginning in the late 1980s, public health concern over the spread of the HIV virus quickly instigated broader moral and political questioning around intimacy, privacy, sexuality, affect, gender relations, and identity. The ascendant techno-media effectively dashed any lingering hopes of a return to the presumed reticence of old. If anything, the new media dispensation, the sensations always overlaid with the dangers, has enabled vigorous debates and risqué explorations. The old apprehension may have been about getting the genie back in the bottle. The fear nowadays is that the bottle itself may have been smashed beyond recognition.
Unease over homosexuality is one aspect of this general sexual effervescence. The prickliness that has been its central feature is linked to larger disputations and struggles over meaning, personhood, love, and, last but not least, family. The saying “Everything in life is about sex, with the exception of sex, which is about politics” is widely attributed to Oscar Wilde. Whether or not we agree that everything in life is, at bottom, about sex, the conclusion that sex is about politics seems safe enough, though how we understand politics here is key. When Africans contend over “good” (not to be mistaken for exhilarating) and “bad” (not to be mistaken for depressing) sex, they are, we might reasonably infer, sparring over moral questions with direct implications for community, the supposed health and preservation of the latter being the ultimate purpose of politics. With that in mind, we should not be surprised at the passion that questions around homosexuality elicit. Nor, given the historical centrality of religion to social life across the continent, should we be puzzled that homosexuality—as a matter of fact, sex, period—is constantly shadowed by references to sin, evil damnation, and salvation.
Kenyan, Christian, Queer is not the first book to plunge into this vortex. The study of sex, identity, and spirituality has expanded radically in recent years. Nevertheless, as a queer European scholar who is a Christian to boot, Professor Adriaan van Klinken seems uniquely poised to delve into this area of study. He has written in the past with sensitivity, sympathy, generosity, and amazing frankness about the travails of masculinity, the politics and aesthetics of sexual citizenship, and the emerging field of queer theology in Africa. The same admirable traits and tendencies are on display throughout this book. Never less than sensitive to the advantages and privileges that may redound to him on account of his pigmentation and citizenship, he acts and writes in the hope that they may be discounted by his sexual and religious identity, if not by his fervent affection for the African continent.
Van Klinken’s overriding project is to articulate “a counternarrative to the well-known narrative of ‘African homophobia,’” the need for such a project being necessitated by the perception that, contra the evident advance in other parts of the world—especially in the western democracies where the success of LGBT claims for equal humanity is such that any apparent dissent is likely to be met with instant sanction—Africa stubbornly clings to heterosexuality as the sexual ideal. The reality, suffice to say, is more complicated. In the first place, the picture of an African continent totally out of sync with the rest of the world is less than accurate, especially when you consider that the struggle for acceptance is far from complete even in those countries where one can point to considerable gains. In the United States, particularly among religious conservatives, there is lingering disquiet, if not about homosexuality per se, about how far (too far is the fear) the push for the recognition of rights of minoritized groups might be go in reframing American ethos and culture. Accordingly, American evangelical outreach against homosexuality in Africa, which has exploited a cultural concern with the family, is partly born out of frustration with grounds ceded to the onslaught of secular forces back home.
On that basis, some have deduced that the conservative wing of American Christianity is the engine of African homophobia. This is only partly true. Homophobia in Africa is, as is to be expected, propelled by a wide range of local and external cultural, social, and political forces. As a matter of fact, it is precisely this interplay of internal and external impulses that places African homophobia within the stream of human experience. Nor is the complementary claim, nowsurprisinglypopular in some quarters, that Africa was an Eden of sexual tolerance before contact with European colonizers, backed up by anything more than wishful thinking and Afrocentric fantasy (that, and a sliver of dubious data). For all sorts of reasons, same-sex relationships have been largely frowned upon across human society, and Africa is no exception. Imputing that African disgust at homosexuality is a function of colonial reeducation is nonsense.
Homophobia in Africa is, as is to be expected, propelled by a wide range of local and external cultural, social, and political forces. As a matter of fact, it is precisely this interplay of internal and external impulses that places African homophobia within the stream of human experience.
Van Klinken knows this, and, while not denying the travails of living as a homosexual in Africa, or, more specifically, the role of religion in the generation and sustenance of hostility towards homosexuality, nonetheless prefers to be led by the shafts of light flashing insistently against the gloomy backdrop. He is more interested, he says, “in the other side of this coin: in how lgbt activism in Africa also uses and relies on religious language and symbols” (6; my emphasis.) He does this through a set of Kenyan case studies. These include a close reading of selected literary, film, and social media texts of the late gay activist, Binyavanga Wainaina; an analysis of a music video, “Same Love,” released by the Kenyan hip-hop group Art Attack; an analysis of the sexual, cultural, and religious dimensions of Stories of Our Lives, an anthology compiled by the Kenyan art collective, The Nest; and finally an ethnography of Cosmopolitan Affirming Church, a Nairobi-based LGBT-affirming church community established in 2013. Through these examples, van Klinken hopes to muster enough troops to repel the idea that Africa is uniformly homophobic, and that, contrary to appearances, things are far from static. He writes: “My interest is in the ways in which notions of African culture, identity, and history are invoked, deployed, and negotiated…while acknowledging the complex and multiple ways in which Africa is part of a globalized world—culturally, politically, and religiously. This interest allows me to explore queer African imaginations and their relation to globalized discourses of lgbt activism and queer politics” (17).
Very well, although some might cavil, and not without merit, at the practicality of achieving all this from the standpoint of a single African country, and on the basis of four randomly selected examples. It is one criticism that van Klinken appears to have anticipated, judging by the assiduousness with which he protects his flanks. He makes clear that all he is trying to do is explore how the four cases, though originating in Kenya, help “speak to broader lgbt realities on the African continent and contribute to African queer politics more generally” and “respond to social and political homophobia in different parts of the continent in various ways, presenting a range of lgbt activist strategies and opening up alternative queer imaginations” (17). If only for this, for anyone seeking some emotional uplift about the condition of queer Africa, this is the book to read. It is a brilliant analysis of ordinary and not so ordinary gay people cocking a snook at the Man in his various guises, having fun despite the all too real strictures on gay life, pursuing pleasure, building a community, all the while remaining resolutely Kenyan, Christian, and queer all at once.
Given what I just said, it might seem a strange charge to bring against a book of which one is otherwise enamored, but I happen to find van Klinken’s optimism somewhat jarring. Perhaps this is because, being Nigerian, and being fully aware of the Nigerian situation with respect to homophobia, hope does not come easily to me. Recently, as I have collected data for a planned monograph on sexuality and the struggle for belonging in Nigeria, I have been struck by the sheer number of LGBT Nigerians who have fled the country because of persecution, whether manifested as physical violence by the police, or violent rhetoric by religious leaders and the media. Knowing this dampens my mood, and returns me to the question of how much can be read into the four case studies in question. Is there something to be said about such cases standing out precisely due to their rarity, and is there, hence, a danger of reading too much into what they symbolize? What, really, are the chances of delegitimizing and upstaging Pentecostal demonology around homosexuality, never mind substituting it with an alternative notion of Christian love considering the former’s popularity and the cultural hostility which, all told, endures? Is Kenya more profitably compared with South Africa, where members of the LGBT community can at least take some pride in the continent’s most generous legal protections? To what extent is the Nigerian situation suggestive of important regional variations in patterns of political homophobia, sexual citizenship, and sexual mores?
Rainbow flag being hung at the Cosmopolitan Affirming Church, discussed in chapter 4 of van Klinken’s book.
The reader feels fortunate that, in examining the four case studies, van Klinken unwittingly takes us into the pulsating heart of Kenyan civil society. We are introduced to a wealth of interlocutors inside church communities, inside various civic associations, in night clubs, on screen, and across the pages of diverse literary and artistic texts. However, we are never afforded more than a faint glimpse of the secular principalities, powers, and “the rulers of the darkness of this world” that we know they are at war against (Ephesians 6:12). I am referring to the Kenyan state of course. For a work that, rightly, focuses on the “political significance” of various artistic expressions and arts of resistance, one wishes that the state were more than a spectral presence, although one also recognizes in the oversight traces of a perceptual shift dating back to the inception of scholarly interest in civil society in the late 1980s.
Those quibbles aside, what van Klinken has given us is much more than a book about homosexuality in Africa. It is an astounding ero-ethnography in which the author grapples with the question of the research field as a site of desire and vulnerability. He does this across the four Interludes which punctuate the book, setting up and exfoliating themes of a rather personal nature, and seeing in his own distress a physical metaphor for the bodily vulnerability and contingency that is the basis of human solidarity.
What van Klinken has given us is much more than a book about homosexuality in Africa. It is an astounding ero-ethnography in which the author grapples with the question of the research field as a site of desire and vulnerability.
It is not unlikely that some of the personal disclosures in the book will raise some hackles. No matter. What is important is that we understand, first, van Klinken’s struggles with what he calls “the management of more subtle manifestations of erotic subjectivity and of the fluid boundaries between embodied relationality, friendship, intimacy, and sex” (96); and second, that in electing to disclose his relationships and HIV status—and doing so with the kind of raw poignancy one rarely encounters in scholarly work—van Klinken is acting in loyalty to the very principle we all claim to cherish as scholars: academic honesty and integrity.
It remains to be seen whether future ethnographies will pick up the gauntlet he has so fearlessly and admirably thrown down.
Ebenezer Obadare is Douglas Dillon Senior Fellow for Africa Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), Washington, D.C.; a fellow at the University of South Africa’s Institute of Theology, and contributing editor of Current History. Author and editor of numerous books on religion and politics and state and civil society in Africa, Obadare’s most recent work is Pastoral Power, Clerical State: Pentecostalism, Gender and Sexuality in Nigeria (Notre Dame Press, 2022). He is editor of Journal of Modern African Studies, published by Cambridge University Press.
Adriaan van Klinken’s Kenyan, Christian, Queer: Religion, LGBT Activism, and Arts of Resistance in Africa is a boundary-breaking study of queer life in Kenya. In four chapters and four interludes, van Klinken documents the activism of various queer religious actors in Kenya today. The first chapter analyzes the literary figure Binyavanga Wainaina’s critique of colonial Christianity, the second provides a close reading and theological hermeneutics of the 2016 “Same Love” music video by Kenyan hip-hop group Art Attack, the third examines the Story of Our Lives anthology released by a Kenyan art collective, and the fourth provides an ethnographic account of the queer-affirming Cosmopolitan Affirming Church (CAC), which was founded in 2013 in Nairobi.
While not denying the realities of religiously inspired homophobia in Africa, these case studies challenge the notion that homophobia has led to the disappearance of queer religious life in Africa. Simultaneously, by showing that queer agency in Kenya is expressed in explicitly religious ways, van Klinken also makes the case that liberation need not entail breaking free from religion and into a more secular society, as many queer theorists in the west have claimed. Especially in the last chapter, van Klinken shows the way members of the CAC are reimaging Christianity in ways that challenge the homophobic status quo in Kenyan Christianity. They do this not for pragmatic reasons, on his account, but because their Christian identity is inextricably bound up with their queer identity. To relegate either to the sidelines would be to discount a part of themselves.
Van Klinken’s study is theoretically and methodologically boundary-breaking in at least two interlinked ways: (1) in its crossing of the disciplinary boundaries of anthropology, theology, and religious studies; and (2) in its open acknowledgment that the boundaries between scholar, friend, advocate, and lover are often more malleable than is acknowledged in scholarly works. Breaking these latter boundaries, van Klinken expertly shows, comes with the territory of being an ethnographer who is not sitting at a desk reading about queer religious activists in Kenyan, but is in fact talking with them, learning from them, and getting to know them. The breaking of disciplinary boundaries is linked with this on-the-ground work. For in working with people on the ground, van Klinken shows that the boundaries between theology, religious studies, and ethnography fail to hold. Indeed, these boundaries are the fictions of academic institutions that, while sometimes useful, can quickly become limiting when taken to be rigid boundaries one cannot cross in the field. Van Klinken’s disciplinary boundary breaking here is no doubt also linked to his own identity as a gay man invested in promoting a more just world for queer people in Kenya and beyond. Here again, when working with people on-the-ground, and witnessing their struggles, hopes, and dreams, the boundaries between theologian and disinterested religious studies scholar fail to hold. The result of this boundary breaking is a refreshing analysis that is as erudite as it is honest in its aims.
The contributors to this symposium take van Klinken’s work as jumping off point for further reflections on queer studies, religious studies, Christian theology, and comparison. Ebenezer Obadare reflects on the optimism of van Klinken’s conclusions about a more capacious account of Christianity. He brings his own subjectivity to bear on these conclusions by drawing on his experience of living and working in Nigeria. Sa’ed Atshan engages with van Klinken by comparing and contrasting van Klinken’s work with his own work among queer Palestinian Christians and George Paul Meiu’s study of male sex workers in northern Kenya. Through this comparison he shows that scholars have much to gain from de-centering the western white gaze and instead providing a platform for those outside the west to speak for themselves. Ludovic Lado reflects on the challenges of doing work on homosexuality in Africa and the potential for imaging “queer arts of resistance” amongst African Catholics. Mujahid Osman argues for the importance of challenging assumptions about religion in queer theory, and indeed suggests that religion offers a potential emancipatory site for queer people. Finally, Esther Mombo engages with van Klinken’s theology, drawing on her own work to suggest the faultiness of many of the arguments deployed against same-sex relationships in Kenya, and the continued importance of theorizing the body in any account of queer life.
These reflections, like van Klinken’s book, break boundaries between various disciplines. In doing so, they open up new spaces for imagining the emancipatory possibilities that come with attending to queer religious life in Kenya and beyond. By tracing the faultiness of secular opposition to religion in queer studies, and other forms of humanistic inquiry, they remind us again that the secularization thesis that prophesized the end of religion is indeed one that proves untenable. Further, van Klinken’s book and these essays remind us that such a thesis risks not only misunderstanding religion, but the foreclosing of its liberatory horizons.
Joshua S. Lupo is the Assistant Director of the Contending Modernities research initiative. In this role, he serves as the editor and writer for the Contending Modernities Blog and the classroom coordinator for the Madrasa Discourses program. He has published articles and reviews in Sophia, Soundings, Critical Muslim, Reading Religion, and Religious Studies Review. With CM Co-Director Atalia Omer, he is the co-editor of Broken Solidarities: Feminism, Race, and Transnationalism (Notre Dame Press, 2022) and Religion, Populism, and Modernity: Confronting White Christian Nationalism and Racism (Notre Dame Press, 2023). His current book project is titled After Essentialism: A Critical Phenomenology for the Study of Religion.
Exterior of Nadwatul Ulama (Nadwa), which Allama Shibli Nomani helped establish in 1898. Via Wikimedia Commons. Public Domain.
Recently, the intellectual and social detachment of madrasa education has been maligned within countries in South Asia. In Europe and the U.S., post-9/11 narratives have constructed madrasas as breeding grounds for religious extremism. In response to these concerns, many South Asian governments have developed strategies for improving madrasa education so that it will be better integrated within secular and democratic societies. While there are no doubt problems with these narratives, they should nonetheless prompt us to reconsider what educational reforms might look like. To do so, we must begin by turning back to the colonial era.
The emergence of colonial powers spawned a plethora of new discourses in theology, religion, modernism, east-west contact, and so on among Muslim cultures throughout the world, and in South Asia in particular. Starting in the nineteenth century, British colonialism began to pose challenges to Muslim society’s pre-established educational institutions. This resulted in the separation of these institutions into two groups: traditionalists and modernists.
Although the primary goal of these two groups was to “reform” the Muslim community, the former sought just “conventional” reform within the religion only, while the latter sought “transformational” reform with a global view in mind. Because both, however, relied on conventional techniques, a period of isolation from socio-political and cultural concerns developed, and this trend continues today.
Such pressures upon Muslim intellectuals are thus not new. They were also clearly present almost a century ago during the time of Shibli Nomani (1857–1914), a prolific writer, scholar, historian, poet, traveller, and educational reformist from the Indian subcontinent. Shibli taught Persian and Arabic languages at the Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College (now, Aligarh Muslim University) in Aligarh and travelled widely. Amongst his many other contributions to Muslim intellectual life, he was an educational reformer. As an intellectual who was attuned to the changes in education during his time, he was quite conscious of the attempt by the British colonialists to stagnate the social and scientific development of madrasas. One way this was done was by splitting education into the religious sciences and the secular sciences. The ulama largely agreed to this, and promoted the former as Uloom e Din (the sciences of religion) and demoted the later one as Uloom e Duniya (the temporal/worldly sciences). This practice continues today.
This article explores Shibli’s ideas, philosophy, and initiatives to aid in the modernization of madrasa education.
Significance of Shibli’s efforts
Shibli grew up during a turbulent phase in the Islamic world in general, and the Indian Subcontinent in particular. The Ottoman Caliphate was in decline and finally defeated by a Western alliance in the first half of the twentieth century. Indian Muslims witnessed hitherto unseen hostilities from the British following the 1857 Sepoy Mutiny. During these times of upheaval, Shibli’s writings were like a lighthouse to Islamic world.
Shibli was well aware of the drawbacks of the research methodology of the traditionalist ulama and scholars of Muslim society during his time. He also understood the developing scientific and conceptual challenges that Newtonian laws and the Darwinian theory of evolution raised. Having understood the intellectual currents of his time, Shibli was committed to improving the method of reading and interpreting Islamic sources in order to enhance their credibility in the modern world. He embarked on a program to revive the dead spirit and enthusiasm of the Islamic world by reconceptualizing madrasa education according to the socio-political needs of the modern world. His aim was to create a new generation of dynamic scholars who were in tune with modern secular sciences, philosophy, etc. This, he believed, would help contribute to the spread of Islam in the modern world.
Shibili’s project was primarily focussed on the reinvigoration and modernization of the madrasa education. This essay will primarily focus on the reforms of the madrasa system at the Nadwatul Ulama (Nadwa), which Shibli helped establish in 1898.
Efforts at the Nadwa and their Contemporary Significance
The madrasa has been a central institution in the Muslim society since the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Its graduates have played a significant role in social, cultural, religious, and educational life of the urban, rural, and even tribal areas where Muslims lived. For this reason, Shibli paid special attention to madrasa educational reform, which he thought required educating students in the modern theories of knowledge along with critical approaches to the Qur’an and Hadith.
Shibli spent 14 years of his life in traditionalist seminaries among scholars and clerics, followed by almost 16 years of teaching at Aligarh Muslim University (AMU). Here he improved his critical thinking and analytical skills. It was also here where he met Professor Thomas Walker Arnold, a famous Orientalist who was also poet and politician and Allama Iqbal’s teacher. Shibli taught him Arabic in exchange for Arnold teaching him French, and it was Arnold’s company that brought Shibli into contact with Orientalist literature. Shibli observed that western scholars had done a great deal to expand our understanding of oriental literature in comparison to Islamic scholars, who had done little. As a result, he concentrated on creating a framework for reviving Muslims engagement with various forms of knowledge and for reconciling traditional wisdom with modern knowledge. In pursuit of this end, he began the popular journal Risala al-Nadwa.[1] Shibli describes the early achievements of Risala al-Nadwa in the following words:
Al Nadwa’s greatest advantage is that it introduced a revolutionary change in the minds of the revered ulama. Inevitably, they were forced to read these articles no matter how much pain they went through in pouring an eye on its content. This journal opens up the doors of many modern discourses, it explores the range of latest methods in Islamic studies, and it introduces ulama to the variety of manners of language and expression. Those who liked it started writing for the journal, and its opponents began to follow it as well.[2]
But publication of a journal to restore the shaky educational and economic situation of Indian Muslims was not enough. This was because imperial politics since the mutiny in 1857 had led Muslims to lose legislative sovereignty in politics, culture, and industry. During Shibli’s time, this political power was still not restored and the conservative methods of the ulama were unable to respond to the challenges of western modernity. The Aligarh movement headed by Islamic modernist Sir Syed Ahmad Khan emerged as a result of a number of reformist movements that were attempting to address this issue. The movement was entirely influenced by western society, politics, expertise, and science, and was opposed by a major pro-traditionalist movement called the Deoband movement (which then ran the largest Islamic seminary in Southern Asia). The pro-Deoband agitators doubted the credibility and legitimacy of western science and technology.
The central idea of Shibli’s educational reform was bridging the gap between the education that a madrasa like Deoband and a modern institution like Aligarh University imparted. But the traditionalist clerics and scholars virulently opposed that idea on a large scale. As he expresses in following words:
Today, the entire Muslim community has split into two groups: the traditionalist scholars think that they are engaged in celestial affairs so they gain nothing in the materialistic world; that’s why they concentrate solely in religion. On the other hand, the modern literates assume that they have acquired a modern education and therefore cannot grow in the religion at all. In the meantime, both of them are not adherents of the Sirat-e Mustaqeem (The straight path) that has been expounded by Islam.[3]
Somehow, Nadwatul Ulama—the renowned Islamic Seminary of South Asia and first Islamic Seminary to teach orthodox science along with modern methodology and academic courses—turned Shibli’s dream into reality and filled the vacuum between Muslim traditionalism and modernism. Shibli as a founding member of the Nadwatul Ulama prepared its educational model and curricula.[4] He writes, “Dar al-Uloom‘s primary aim is to create such religious scholars or clerics who are capable of maintaining the values of Arabic and religious studies and encouraging people to study modern education.” Then Shibli cited a couplet of great Iranian poet Sheikh Saadi:
Dar Kafi Jam-e Shariyat Dar Kafi Sandan-e Ishq Har Hawasnaki Nadand Jam-o Sindan Bakhtan[5]
In one hand, the cup of Shariya, in another the anvil of love
Everyone, does not know how to stake a cup against an anvil
Nadwa attempted to reorganize the traditional South Asian Islamic Seminary curriculum. The old curriculum did an adequate job of training students in the study of logic and theory, but was not adequate in its training of students to critically appraise Qur’anic exegesis and Hadith literature. So Nadwa put more emphasis on learning analytical and critical skills to analyze the canonical Islamic texts (i.e. the Qur’an and Hadith) rather than formal logic and philosophy. Conventionally, Arabic literature had been taught only for understanding large Arabic treatises, but Nadwa changed this practice and taught Arabic with the aim of creating a scholar who could also lead the Arabic-speaking world.
An image of Shibli Nomani. Via Wikimedia Commons. Public Domain.
Nadwa also concentrated on improving students’ religious and ethical values so that they could lead the following generations in a multi-cultural and multi-ethnic community. When Shibli joined Nadwatul Ulama as its president and one of its founders in 1905, he was aware of the madrasas that were built and created during Muslim rule in South Asia, and we can consider him the last glimmer of that previous glory. Shibli had a keen eye on all the contemporary academic institutions and their curricula, ranging from western universities, including Oxford and Cambridge, to Dar al-Ulum[6] (now it is a faculty of Cairo University called Faculty of Dar al-Ulum) and Aligarh Muslim University. He studied their syllabi and compared them with the curricula of the madrasas. Then he proposed an advanced curriculum for Dar al-Uloom Nadwatul Ulama which could equip madrasas with training in modern languages like English and Hindi. He also sought to counter the phobia of the subcontinent’s Muslim society regarding English-language education.
Shibli Nomani faced extreme criticism in the Muslim community over his modernization efforts. He wanted to create a new enlightened and civilized society that could thrive among the Indian subcontinent’s pluralistic and multi-ethnic community. This, he believed, was impossible with an obsolete system of traditional religious education. He desired the reformation of conventional Islamic education and the establishment of a sustainable pluralistic society with equal involvement of both men and women. Ultimately, he persuaded women to leave their homes and to study the same way as men:
Women should obtain as much education as men, I have to disagree with the concept of dividing the academic curriculum on the basis of gender. In my opinion men and women should receive the same syllabus. I stand firmly for women’s rights and today. The practice of women working at home as maids should be stopped. At the same time I strongly support the system of the veil.[7]
Shibli was skilled as an educator, historian, biographer, lawyer, scholar, philosopher, and cleric. However, his major form of expression was through poetry. His poetry preserves the glorious history of the Muslim world, the lamentation over its humiliation, and a consideration of the bitter fate of contemporary Muslims. In addressing socio-political issues and awakening to modern education and social reformation, Shibli is equal to Altaf Hussain Hali and Allama Iqbal. He raised his voice against intellectual stagnation, backwardness, and the disadvantages of the outdated Arabic syllabus and promoted modern science, philosophy, and technical skills as an essential part of the education system. His Subh-e Ummid, which takes the form of a Mathnawi (a particular genre of Urdu poetry), clarifies these points:
Ghaflat ne Dobo diya tha Hamko Taqleed ne Kho diya tha Hamko
Negligence has drowned us
The imitation has vanished us
Daulat se haath Dho chuke the Ham Ilm-o Hunar bhi Kho Chuke the[8]
Not only did we lose the wealth,
But all the knowledge and skill
Then in the following couplets he sees an opportunity at Aligarh Muslim University:
Alqissa yeh bat ki thi TasleemYani ke Uloom No ki Taleem Yani ke Uloom No ki Taleem
Finally, the matter was settled on the curriculum of modern sciences
Sikhein who Matalib no Aiin Europe main jo ho rahe hain Talqeen
We need to learn those new concepts that are inculcated in Europe today.
Kepler ki who Noqta Aafrini Newton ke Masail e Yaqini[9]
We need to look at Kepler’s creativity and the accuracy of Newton’s questions.
Shibli expressed the same views in his Persian poetry as well:
Uloom o Btazeh ra ba Shar’e o Hikmat ba ham Amezim Ilaahi, ba Riyaz o Tabi’e Ashnaa Bashad[10]
We must blend modern science with poetry and wisdom.
Oh, my God, one must be conscious of mathematics and nature
Unfortunately, the contemporary ulama virulently opposed his reformist initiatives. Those who preferred to cling to the conventional structure did not tolerate any changes in the status-quo. Neither were they prepared to deal with the socio-political problems of that time or care for the community’s future. They even compelled Shibli to resign from the headship of Nadwatul Ulama.[11]
But others who were deeply concerned with the future of Muslim society became Allama Shibli’s companions. One such person was Maulana Abul Kalam Azad. He met Shibli in 1905 in Mumbai, and Shibli took him to Nadwa, where Maulana Azad held scholastic and scientific discussions with Shibli. Here he also met Maulana Hamid Uddin, a leading expert on Qur’anic exegesis. Historian Sulaiman Nadvi argues that Azad’s meeting with Shibli had a big impact on Maulana Azad’s life, and led him to start his journal, Al Hilal.[12]
In 1913, Shibli resigned from Nadwatul Ulama and then travelled to Mumbai, Hyderabad, and Azamgarh. In Azamgarh, he laid the foundation stone of the last part of his dream, a library known as Dar al-Musannefin (The House of Writers). He demonstrated his immense vision in a report that he drafted for Delhi Session in March 1910. Shibli writes:
As colleges, madrasas and universities play a key role in a community’s development; a large library is also a critical necessity in a society. If we wish to keep alive the Muslim’s religious, scientific and intellectual heritage, then a large library should be constructed which has a vast collection of books from both scientific and scholastic streams. This library should be built in the name of the whole community. Then everyone, particularly writers, researchers, and authors from all over the subcontinent could freely access it.[13]
In his life full of ups and downs, Shibli successfully achieved his goals. He initiated reforms that equipped Islamic society to face the social, political, religious, and economic challenges of his times.
Shibli acknowledged the limitations of the conventional Islamic system. But he also tried to protect Muslim civilization from the unexpected onslaughts of contemporary western culture by strongly supporting certain practices, such as the veiling of Muslim women, as noted earlier. He sought a middle solution to reconcile conventionalism and modernity. On the one hand, the traditional structure had done little to change the cultural and social plight of Muslims. On the other hand, modern Muslim public leaders of the era were unable to fully understand modernity or contribute to Muslim society.
In this context, Shibli selected a community of preachers and speakers who had direct access to a large number of Muslims on the subcontinent. He educated them with modern education and expertise to train a modern generation from Nadwa and Darul Musannefin.
Shibli’s attempt to modernize madrasa education provided a durable impetus for social and educational reform within religious society, the impact of which is felt even today. Around a century ago, the seeds he planted still bear fruit. Amongst them is educational reformist Professor Ebrahim Moosa, who has resurrected Shibli Nomani’s buried dream of equipping educators and students in madrasas with modern science and philosophy. Madrasa Discourse’s curriculum is the forum for reconceptualizing studies in the madrasa in our time.
[1] Syed Sulaiman Nadvi, Hayat-e-Shibli (Azamgarh: Dar ul Musannefin, 1993), 441.
[3] Akhtarul Wasey and Farhat Ahsas, Shibli Nomani (New Delhi: Al-Blagh Publication 2009), 10–11. Own translation.
[4] See “Dar al-Uloom Nadwa Ki Ek Aur Khususiyat,” in Maqalat e Shibli, Volume 8, ed. Masood Ali Nadvi (Azamgarh, Matba e Maarif 1937), 142. Own translation.
[10] Shibli Nomani, “Nazm Muslim University Musalmano ki Khwab e Tabeer,” Kulliyat e Shibli, 90. Own translation.
[11] Aal Ahmad Suror, Tanqeed Kiya Hai (Aligarh: Maktaba e Jamiya, 1972), 81. See also Ahmad Zafar Siddiqui, Shibli Muaserin ki Nazar Main (Lucknow: Uttar Pradesh Urdu Academy, 2005), 201.
[12] Syed Sulaiman Nadvi, Hayat-e-Shibli (Azamgarh, Dar ul Musannefin 1993), 444.
Dr. Syed Hasan Sardar earned his Ph.D. from the Center of Persian and Central Asian Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. His research interests include Medieval Islamic Intellectual History with a focus on the philosophical and scientific developments in Muslim society, Qur’anic exegesis, Islamic Astronomy during medieval period, and influence of Arabic and Persian languages on Indian society and culture. He has published articles and reviews on Islamic astronomy, the role of the Persian language in the development of the Islamic intellectual tradition in India, and the contribution of Shiite Ulama in the promotion of Muslim Intellectual thought in India.
Arch of Constantine, Rome, Italy. Photo Credit: Flickr User Carole Raddato. CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.
1. “Oh, What a Tangled Web We Weave”
“The Last Europeans”: a tantalizing and enigmatic title for an exhibition! The subject is brought into sharper focus by the subtitle, “Jewish perspectives on the crises of an idea,” along with the description on the Jewish Museum Hohenems’ website: “75 years after the end of World War II, Europe is threatened by a relapse into nationalist and xenophobic ideologies.” This is the selfsame crisis to which Romano Prodi alluded in a keynote address which, as President of the European Commission, he gave in February 2004 at a seminar in Brussels. “The European idea,” said Prodi, “was based on the firm determination to make sure the Europe of the future would be different—a Europe of peace, tolerance and respect for human rights.” Different from what? Different from the Europe of the past, the old Europe of war and atrocity. “The horror of the Shoah and the terrible loss of life caused by the Second World War,” Prodi explained, “deeply marked Europe’s founding fathers …” (That is to say, the founders of the new Europe that he represents.) “The Europe of today,” said Prodi towards the end of his Brussels speech, “is not the Europe of the 1930s and 1940s.” He added: “We must never forget what happened then, because remembering the past is a way of ensuring that such terrible events never recur.” So, if “the European idea” is in crisis, it is because Europe is in danger of not remembering its terrible past—and forgetting that it has rejected it.
But remembering can also be problematic; a lot turns on how we remember. In his keynote address in Brussels, Prodi recalled that “the first thing I did after my investiture as President of the European Commission was to visit Auschwitz.” Not for one moment would I criticize this; quite the contrary. But if there is a crisis of Europe today, it is due in part to the way in which Europe—new Europe, Prodi’s Europe—remembers Auschwitz and, more generally, remembers the Jewish Question. Moreover, Europe’s Jewish Question leads, via Zionism, to the question of Palestine and Israel: this is one of the threads in the tangled web we weave.
The crisis of Europe into which Jews are woven is simultaneously a crisis in Judaism: this is the wager of my argument. But I should warn you that the argument presented here is a work in progress. My thoughts on the subject are somewhat raw and not yet fully organized. A remark of Rabbi Tarfon’s from the Mishnah comes to mind: “You are not obliged to complete the task, but neither are you free to give it up” (490). It takes more than one lecture to disentangle the web in which all of us—including Jews and Palestinians—are caught.
2. Europe and the Jewish Question
I am writing these words from my home in Hackney. Given that my focus is on Europe’s Jewish Question, Hackney is not an inappropriate place to be. Having been kicked out of England by King Edward I in 1290, Jews had to wait until 1656 before Oliver Cromwell let them back in. Within 20 years, a certain Isaac Alvares, a Sephardi Jew, bought a house in Homerton, which today is part of Hackney.[1] Hackney also includes the district of Stamford Hill, which has the largest population of Haredi (Ultra-Orthodox) Jews in Europe. Strolling on the local streets and in Clissold Park, you discover that Yiddish is not a dead language. What is more, my mother was born in Hackney and my father probably too. (When we were growing up, my parents spoke Yiddish to each other—but only when they didn’t want the children to understand what they were saying!) The school they went to (Newington Green) is up the road from where Reva and I live. My life is here. In short, if I can call any place on this planet heim (home), it is, precisely, here.
But Benjamin Netanyahu, the former Prime Minister of Israel, begs to differ. He thinks I am under a misapprehension. He said as much in January 2015, following the deadly attacks that took place in Paris at the offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and, two days later, at the Jewish supermarket Hyper Kasher (Super Kosher). Speaking on television from his office in Jerusalem, Netanyahu cordially extended an invitation to his Jewish audience: “To all the Jews of France, all the Jews of Europe, I would like to say that Israel is not just the place in whose direction you pray, the State of Israel is your home.” Home: that is to say, the place where, as Jews, we belong. He warmed to his theme. “All Jews who want to immigrate to Israel,” he said expansively, “will be welcomed here warmly and with open arms.” (This, of course, depends on whether they meet the criteria used by Israel for determining who is a Jew; but let’s put that to one side.) A few days later, having got back from attending the funeral in Paris for the four French Jews murdered at the supermarket, he expanded on his offer, making it clear that it was more than a mere offer. He did concede that “Jews have the right to live in many countries,” but went on to say: “But I believe that they know deep in their hearts that they have only one country, the State of Israel, the historic homeland that will accept them with open arms, like beloved children.” “Today, more than ever,” he continued, “Israel is our true home.” “Our” meaning Jews in general; for example, me. “True” implying that any other place that a Jewish person might call “home” is not really home; for example, Hackney. His cordial invitation to “all the Jews of Europe” is more like a directive than an invitation. He is saying, in effect: “Pack your bags and take the next El Al flight to Ben Gurion Airport” (which I, by the way, remember as Lod Airport; that shows my age!). On this view of the Jewish future, Hackney and Hohenems, Paris and Vienna, and every other place on the map of Europe, are but staging posts on the road to Jerusalem. If Netanyahu had his way, we European Jews would end up being the last Jewish Europeans. Coming home to Israel, we would be the last Jews to bid Europe adieu.
Haredi man walks in Stamford Hill, Hackney, N16. Photo Credit: Flickr User Dario. CC BY-SA 2.0.
But would we leave Europe behind? What is Europe? Zygmunt Baumann, at a session in the first of the Vienna Conversations (hosted by the Bruno Kreisky Forum), defined Europe as the “north-western peninsula of the Asiatic continent.” That is a pretty nifty definition of where Europe is located on the globe. By this definition, the strip of land on the eastern shores of the Mediterranean that used to be called Palestine and which today is called Israel is not part of Europe. But there is another way of defining Europe, which has led important figures in the Zionist movement to a different conclusion. Their concept of Europe is not about geography but about culture or civilization. This is a huge subject and I am at a loss as to where to start. Needing help, I turn, of course, to that classic Jewish source: Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “The Sound of Music.”
“The Sound of Music,” to be frank, is not one of my favorite musicals. But the song “Do Re Mi,” irritating as it is, asserts a useful maxim. In the opening line, Maria (played by Julie Andrews in the 1965 film version) intones: “Let’s start at the very beginning/A very good place to start.” Applying Maria”s maxim, I shall start with Theodor Herzl”s Der Judenstaat (“The State of the Jews” or, as it is usually translated, “The Jewish State”), published in 1897. There were earlier Jewish writers who anticipated Herzl, but it is not unreasonable to treat his pamphlet as “the very beginning” of political Zionism. Now, everyone is familiar with the title. But the subtitle, “An Attempt at a Modern Solution of the Jewish Question,” tends to be overlooked. Yet it is the key that unlocks the whole text. It tells us that the text provides an answer to a question that it asks: the so-called Jewish Question. It is my contention that in asking this question, Herzl legitimized it, and in legitimizing it he went wrong from the very beginning. For the purposes of thinking about the Jewish political future, it was a very bad place to start. A better way to start would have been to question the Question; to query the process that led to Jews being constituted, collectively, as a question or problem. But Herzl took the Jewish Question at face value; and one writer after another, Jewish as well as non-Jewish, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries fell into this trap. We are, I believe, still ensnared by the Jewish Question—a point to which I shall return later.
If Netanyahu had his way, we European Jews would end up being the last Jewish Europeans. Coming home to Israel, we would be the last Jews to bid Europe adieu.
Despite its name, the Jewish Question was not a Jewish question as such; it was a European question, whose subject was the Jews. Herzl, a child of the Austro-Hungarian empire, wrote about it precisely as a European. Moreover, he saw the world through late-nineteenth-century European eyes. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the section “Palestine or Argentina,” where he weighs the pros and cons of each of these two locations as alternative sites for his Judenstaat. It is clear which he prefers: Palestine, and he muses, “We should there form a portion of the rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism.” (He continues: “We should as a neutral State remain in contact with all Europe, which should have to guarantee our existence” [96]. With hindsight, this seems remarkably portentous.) To the ears of European chauvinists, his rousing words would have been the sound of music.
To put it another way, Herzl wove Europe into the very fabric of “the Jewish state.” And one Zionist thinker after another, on the left as well as the right of the movement, reproduced this pattern of thinking. Here are a few examples. Max Nordau was even more strident than Herzl, his associate. “We will endeavour to do in the Near East what the English did in India,” he averred, speaking at an early Zionist Congress. “It is our intention to come to Palestine as the representatives of culture and to take the moral borders of Europe to the Euphrates River” (150). (He said nothing about the immoral borders of Europe.) Or consider the testimony of David Ben-Gurion, leader of the democratic socialist political party Mapai, the first Prime Minister of Israel (and the man after whom Lod Airport was renamed). Writing to George Antonius, the Arab nationalist, he clarified what the intentions of the Zionist movement were. He said: “We want to return to the East only in the geographic sense, for our objective is to create here a European culture ….” When Shlomo Ben-Ami, the former Israeli foreign minister, quotes this remark in his book Scars of War, Wounds of Peace, he comments: “Ben-Gurion was expressing the core essence of Zionism, not merely a personal view” (19). That is to say, the “core essence of Zionism” places the “Jewish state” on the map of Europe—a cultural, not geographical, map. This “core essence” was encapsulated by Ehud Barak, a former Labour Prime Minister of Israel, in his trademark orientalist image of the State of Israel as “a villa in the jungle.” On the opposite political wing, a prominent Likud politician has made the same point, but more prosaically: “We are a part of the European culture. Europe ends in Israel. East of Israel, there is no more Europe.” The speaker was Benjamin Netanyahu, four years ago, at a meeting in Budapest of Eastern European leaders.
Despite its name, the Jewish Question was not a Jewish question as such; it was a European question, whose subject was the Jews.
So, it is not Herzl alone who weaves the thread of Europe into the very fabric of “the Jewish state.” It is a staple of Zionism as a political ideology, from the very beginning to the present day. This is why Israel belongs on the agenda of an exhibition called “The Last Europeans,” especially one that is mounted by a Jewish museum. Israel, in its own eyes, or in the eyes of its founding political ideology, is the last outpost of Europe. This makes its citizens the last (or at least the latest) Europeans—although some of its citizens, such as Mizrahi Jews from north Africa or Iraq, need to be “Europeanized,” while others are altogether excluded from the tent: the Palestinians. For there is one other thread with a place name that is woven into the fabric of “the Jewish state” and which is no less part of the “core essence” of Zionism: Zion. The intertwining of these two threads (Europe and Zion) is what led to the passage in 2018 of the Basic Law defining Israel as “the nation-state of the Jewish people,” a definition of Israel that leaves out about one-fifth of the Israeli population: those who are not Jewish. Thus, through Zionism, the Palestinians are caught up in Europe’s Jewish Question. It is tempting to say that, in Israel, the Jews have become Europeans and the Palestinians have become Jews. I shall resist the temptation—just. Nevertheless, the Palestinian predicament in “the Jewish state,” the “modern solution to the Jewish Question,” shows just how tangled is the web we weave.
3. In the Footsteps of Moses?
Zionism is a new idea. But “Zion” is, of course, an old word. It is a term of art in the Hebrew Scriptures, where, originating as the name of a hill (Mount Zion), it is used as a synecdoche or synonym for the city of Jerusalem and ultimately for the whole of eretz Yisroel (the land of Israel). In Philosophical Investigations, Ludwig Wittgenstein remarks: “Uttering a word is like striking a note on the keyboard of the imagination” (4). The name “Zionism” is a case in point. It does more than denote an idea or an ideology. It resonates in hearts and minds. It evokes an entire cultural heritage that goes by the name of “Judaism.” Moreover, it invokes this heritage: it hitches its wagon to the story of the Israelites told in the Tanakh (the core text of Judaism) beginning in the Torah (the core text of the Tanakh) with the exodus from Egypt and the trek across the wilderness to the land of Canaan. Zionism, which originally and predominantly has understood itself to be secular, tends to treat this story as a Jewish national epic, a mixture of history and myth. It positions itself as the latest episode in this epic story—as if the likes of Herzl, Nordau, Ben Gurion, Barak, and Netanyahu were following in the footsteps of Moses. None of this might be spelt out in Zionist texts, but it is how the word, across the religious-secular divide, plays on the keyboard of the Jewish imagination, especially for Jews since 1945, living in the aftermath of a Nazi genocide that almost wiped them—us—out.
Moses parting the Red Sea. Photo Credit: Flickr User Bjørn Bulthius. CC BY-SA 2.0.
“Zionism as following in the footsteps of Moses”: it is a potent image. I would like to put it to the test by conducting a thought experiment based on the set of quotes from Herzl et al. discussed above. It is the summer of 1395 BCE. Moses, Hebrew prince of Egypt, is sitting in his royal chamber in Pharaoh”s palace, a large goblet of dark red Nile wine within easy reach, reed brush in hand, and a strip of bare papyrus laid out on the desk in front of him. In the manner of Herzl, he is composing a political pamphlet about the future of the Children of Israel. He proposes that the oppressed Israelites should leave Egypt and form a state of their own, free from the servitude that for centuries they have endured. As I peer through the mists of time, I seem to be able to make out the title of Moses’ pamphlet. Translated into modern English, it is: The Israelite State: An Attempt at an Ancient Solution of the Israelite Question. It includes a section “Canaan or Assyria,” where he weighs the pros and cons of each of these two locations as alternative sites for the Promised Land. We can imagine that he prefers Canaan. But can we imagine Moses writing (in the idiom of Herzl): “We should there form a portion of the rampart of Egypt against Asia”? I think not. Or this (in the idiom of Nordau): “It is our intention to come to Canaan as the representatives of culture and to take the moral borders of Egypt to the Euphrates River”? Or saying (like Ben Gurion) that in Canaan “our objective is to create an Egyptian culture”? Finally, are we able to contemplate Moses telling the Children of Israel (à la Netanyahu): “We are a part of the Egyptian culture. Egypt ends in Canaan. East of Canaan, there is no more Egypt”? The mind boggles.
For Moses, liberation from oppression in Egypt did not mean carrying Egyptian culture on the shoulders of the Israelites through the wilderness and replanting it in Canaan. The story of the exodus from Egypt is about a radical rupture from a dominant culture—not a project of importing that culture into another territory. The parting of the Red Sea signified a clean break with Egypt: it meant leaving Egypt behind, not just physically but culturally. (The Book of Exodus dramatizes this idea by stipulating that only the Hebrews, not the Egyptians, have safe passage through the channel.) Furthermore, for 40 years the people wander around in the wilderness. Why? They had basically one job to do, whether they did it simply by dying or by any other means: lose their Egyptianness. In short, Herzl was no Moses. The spirit of Zionism could hardly be more antithetical to the spirit of the biblical Exodus, the story that lies at the heart of the identity of am Yisroel, the Jewish people.
In Philosophical Investigations, Ludwig Wittgenstein remarks: ‘Uttering a word is like striking a note on the keyboard of the imagination.’ The name ‘Zionism’ is a case in point. It does more than denote an idea or an ideology. It resonates in hearts and minds. It evokes an entire cultural heritage that goes by the name of ‘Judaism.’
I said earlier that the Jewish Question was not a Jewish question as such; it was a European question about the Jews. Zionism was conceived as an answer to this European question; and the answer, a political ideology configured along ethno-national lines, is as European as the question. But, over time, especially since the creation of the State of Israel in 1948, Zionism has come to be understood as an answer to a Jewish Jewish Question: the question “Who or what is am Yisroel, the Jewish people ?” Or “What does being Jewish mean?” Or “What is Judaism?” Britain’s current Chief Rabbi, Ephraim Mirvis, calls Zionism “one of the axioms of Jewish belief.” In an op-ed for The Telegraph, he wrote: “One can no more separate it [Zionism] from Judaism than separate the City of London from Great Britain.” “Open a Jewish daily prayer book [siddur] used in any part of the world,” he wrote, “and Zionism will leap out at you.” It is as if Zionism lies in wait on the page, ready to spring out and grab a reader by the throat. It is a startling image, one that could keep sensitive Jewish children awake at night, or at least persuade them never to open a siddur! But Rabbi Mirvis is not unrepresentative of mainstream Jewish thought on both sides of the religious-secular divide. Judaism today, in much of the Jewish world, has recentred itself on Zionism.
4. “The Nationalization of Judaism”
Let me illustrate the point with a domestic anecdote. When my partner Reva and I got married, I visited the Beth Din, the court of the Chief Rabbi, to deal with some paperwork. As I entered the building, my eye was caught by a framed poster on the wall that included a list of the six core “values” of the United Synagogue, the largest organization of Orthodox synagogues in the UK. Five items on the list were values that would have been familiar (in some shape or form) to Jews anywhere and at any time in history: “spiritual growth and practice,” “lifelong Jewish learning,” and so on. But the sixth stood out as something new: “the centrality of Israel in Jewish life”—as if this were on the same level as the other five values. Moreover, the United Synagogue evidently saw no tension between this item and the first on the list: “the welcoming of every Jew” into the synagogal community—as if necessarily every Jew puts the State of Israel at the center of Jewish life.
At the same time, the State of Israel itself has appropriated Judaism—or at least the Jewish people—to Zionism. So, for example, Netanyahu visited France a few years ago, in an official capacity, to take part in a ceremony commemorating the roundup of Jews by the police in Vichy in 1942. He presented himself as speaking “on behalf of the State of Israel, on behalf of the Jewish people,” thus conflating the two. (The conflation of the Jewish people and the State of Israel is the minimum definition of Zionism as a political ideology.) This conflation is, essentially, the meaning of the nation-state law, to which I referred earlier. Yaacov Yadgar, Professor of Israel Studies at the University of Oxford, sums this up as “the nationalization of Judaism.” His meticulous analysis exposes how this “nationalization” has created, in his phrase, “Israel’s Jewish identity crisis” (the title of his book published last year). But, as we have seen, the crisis caused by the interweaving of Zion and Europe is not Israel’s alone. It is also a crisis of Judaism. “Oh, what a tangled web we weave.”
5. Unasking the Jewish Question
The web we weave is even more tangled than this. For, if the thread of Europe is woven into the fabric of “the Jewish state,” the thread of Judaism (or the Jews) is woven into the idea of Europe—and has been from the very beginning. To get our bearings, I shall do the opposite of what Maria’s maxim advises: I shall start at the very end—in the present—and look back down the centuries. I shall paint with the broadest possible brushstrokes, not with the careful craftsmanship that a good historian would bring to the task. But I am no historian. I am trying to see the wood for the trees. I expect we all are. Inevitably, this means not seeing most of the trees; or seeing only enough of them to enable us to infer the contours of the wood, its overall shape. I am trying to get the hang of the larger picture, so we can see ourselves within it. And, seeing ourselves, plan our future. If we can get the so-called Jewish Question into focus, if we can understand what it is that has driven this Question in the past and what the Question itself is driving in the present, then we might be in a position to alter the course of history as it turns from past into future. Unless we intervene, this process happens automatically. Our future is the writing on the wall, and it is written by history. If we want to alter the text of the future, then we have to decipher the writing. If we want to unsnare ourselves from the Jewish Question, it is not enough to refrain from asking it, we have to unravel it and then repudiate it: we have to unask it. Ultimately, this is a collective and political project.
Panificio del Ghetto. Pitigliano, Tuscany. Photo Credit: Flickr User Eric Huybrechts. CC BY-ND 2.0.
Beginning at the end, let’s home in on a portion of the landmark speech that Romano Prodi gave in 2004. His subject is “the Jews of Europe.” He refers to them as “the first, the oldest Europeans” and as “Europe’s archetypal minority.” Everyone, he suggests, should emulate the Jews. “We, the new Europeans, are just starting to learn the complex art of living with multiple allegiances,” he says, whereas the Jews “have been forced to master this art since antiquity.” He is unstinting with his praise for the Jews: despite being persecuted, “they have made an immense contribution to European culture,” not only as individuals “but also as a community.” Thus, the Jews, collectively, are twice over a model. “The values that have guided them through the centuries,” says Prodi, “have provided a reference for us.” (Note that the entire passage is structured by the grammar of “us” and “them.”) Given the centuries of denigration and vilification, there is something wondrous about this testimonial to “the Jews of Europe.” But it is also somehow unsettling; it certainly makes me, as a European Jew, uncomfortable. Once again, Jews as a group, are being singled out. Where we Jews were once negated, now we are affirmed, lifted out of Europe’s gutter and placed on a pedestal. Setting out to right a wrong, Prodi reproduces the very essence of that wrong: setting us Jews apart as a group with a set of traits that we possess collectively by virtue of being Jewish and which make us larger than life. This is another variation on the theme of Jewish otherness.
If we want to unsnare ourselves from the Jewish Question, it is not enough to refrain from asking it, we have to unravel it and then repudiate it: we have to unask it. Ultimately, this is a collective and political project.
The phrase “the Jewish Question” became current in the nineteenth century, along with equivalent phrases that refer to other groups; for example, the Armenian Question, the Macedonian Question, the Irish Question, the Belgian Question, the Polish Question, and so on. All such questions, including the Jewish one, tend to be lumped together under the broad heading of “the National (or Nationalities) Question.” But this is misleading. The Jews were not simply another case of a European nation whose future on the political map of modern Europe was the subject of a question. On the contrary, whether the Jews collectively are a nation in the modern (European) sense was moot: it was an integral part of the Question. And, while this also applied to certain other groups, the case of the Jews was radically different. Their collective status was seen as problematic by Europe for a thousand years or more before the political formations that were the subject of the National Question in the nineteenth century came into being.
6. The Jewish Question is a European Question
I noted earlier that the Jewish Question is a European question about Jews. But, although ostensibly about Jews, ultimately it is about Europe: it is about Europe via the question of the Jews. It always has been, ever since antiquity and the days of the original European Union (as it were), the one whose capital city was Rome. The very beginning of this story is the conversion to Christianity of Flavius Valerius Constantinus, otherwise known as Constantine the Great, emperor of Rome. Constantine converted on his deathbed, and his conversion was perhaps his most significant legacy for Europe—and for the Jews. From this point on, Europe (by any other name) uses the Jews to define itself. The question, which we might rename “the European Question,” was this: What is Europe? Answer: not Jewish. Down the centuries, as Europe’s idea of itself changed, there were variations on the theme of this answer. Prodi’s answer is the opposite: What is Europe? Jewish. Different answers, same question.
In short, the Jewish Question existed as an issue for Europe avant la lettre. Seen as being in Europe but not of Europe, the Jews were the original “internal Other,” the alien Them to the European Us. First, in antiquity, Judaism was the foil against which Europe defined itself as Christian. Later, in the eighteenth century, the Jews were (as Adam Sutcliffe puts it in his book Judaism and the Enlightenment) “the Enlightenment’s primary unassimilable Other” (254). Esther Romeyn explains: “For the Enlightenment, with its investment in universalism and civilization, the Jew was a symbol of particularism, a backward-looking, pre-modern tribal culture of outmoded customs and religious tutelage” (92). Then, in the following century, the symbol flipped: “For a nationalism based on roots, the distinctiveness of cultures, and allegiance to a shared past, the Jew was an uprooted nomad or a suspect ‘cosmopolitan’ aligned with ‘abstract reason rather than roots and tradition’” (92). That is to say, Europe saw itself as a patchwork quilt of ethnic nationalities and the question arose: “How do the Jews fit in? Do they fit in? If they do not, what is to be done with them or with their Jewishness?” This was the Jewish Question in the nineteenth century. The National Question was about ethnic difference and how Europe should deal with it. The Jewish Question was about the alien within —so deep within as to be internal to Europe’s idea of itself.[2] The title of the latest book by Adam Sutcliffe, What Are Jews For?, is apropos. We Jews have played the role in Europe of being the reference point for “the idea of Europe” in any given period, as if this is what we are for. We still play that role. Prodi and Project Europe have changed the answer, but not the Question.
7. A Double Whammy for the Palestinians
Inevitably, if subliminally, there is a knock-on effect experienced by the Palestinians: they tend to be cast as the negative to the Jewish positive. I ran into this in a rather vivid way in my encounters with the radical left faction known as the Antideutsch. The first time was when I came to Berlin to give a talk on antisemitism and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. A man in the audience stood up after I had finished speaking and, addressing me, said: “To me, everything you have said is antisemitic.” I was gobsmacked. I wasn’t sure whether to laugh or to be offended. The only way I knew how to answer him was to try to get him to see how weird the situation was. On the one hand, there was me: Jewish by any reckoning, with relatives who had perished in the Shoah. On the other hand, there was him: a White non-Jewish German denouncing me in Berlin as antisemitic! “I will dine out on this story for years,” I told him. And I have done so. My second brush with the Antideutsch came when The Jewish Museum Berlin invited me to give a public lecture on antisemitism to mark the 75th anniversary of Kristallnacht (Pogromnacht). A certain campaigner against antisemitism—again White, German, non-Jewish, left-wing—launched an international campaign to get me disinvited. He compiled a 25-page dossier in which 17 handpicked, high-profile people took turns to say how reprehensible I am. What brought this about? The sole trigger in both anecdotes was my critique of Zionism as an idea and criticism of Israel as a state. That’s it, full-stop.
We Jews have played the role in Europe of being the reference point for ‘the idea of Europe’ in any given period, as if this is what we are for. We still play that role. Prodi and Project Europe have changed the answer, but not the Question.
What does this signify? To begin with, the Antideutsch are more Deutsch than they think. I am thinking when I say this of developments like the Bundestag passing legislation in May 2019 criminalizing boycotts directed at Israel. But it is not Germany alone. It seems to me that there is a wider tendency in Europe—new Europe—to ringfence Israel and Zionism, protecting them from criticism that goes at all deep, as if this were the way to reckon with Europe’s Nazi past; as if this were the lesson to learn from Auschwitz; as if this were how to obey the imperative “Never forget!” But actually it is just another way of failing to treat Jews collectively as normal human beings, with dire ramifications for others. In the old Europe, Jews paid the ultimate price for the Jewish Question with the Shoah. As the Shoah led to the Nakba, the cost was transferred to the Palestinians. Now the Palestinians are paying the price again. They pay twice over: once for Jews being the stigmatized Other of Europe and a second time for Jews being the valorized Other of Europe.[3] First they pay the price for the antisemitic exclusion of Jews in Europe. Then they pay for their anti-antisemitic inclusion. Heads they lose, tails they lose. It is a double whammy, where both whammies are the consequence of Europe’s immersion in its own Question. “Oh, what a tangled web we weave.”
8. To Be Continued
How do we disentangle this web? How do we overwrite the writing on the wall? How do we unask the Jewish Question? How should I end this essay? This time, Do Re Mi is no help: Maria has no maxim about a very good place to end. I shall simply have to stop in mid-air.
Notes
[1] He bought it in the name of his children Deborah and Abraham. See here and here.
[2] It is significant that the Question was essentially about European Jewry, which was (and is) predominantly Ashkenazi. The status and treatment of Mizrachi Jews—mainly Jews from southern Asia and northern Africa—was an appendix to the Jewish Question, just as it was for Zionism; and for the same reason: both the Question and Zionism are quintessentially European phenomena. (Events in the Jewish world after the creation of the State of Israel in 1948, plus the current demographics of the state, have affected the character of Zionism, but do not contradict the assertion that Zionism was planted and nurtured in European soil.)
[3] Compare: “The rejection of anti-Semitism and the political integration of Jews into the Western world did not lead to a dissolution of their alterity but, paradoxically, to its valorization” (Enzo Traverso, The End of Jewish Modernity, 56).
Brian Klug is Hon. Fellow in Social Philosophy at Campion Hall, University of Oxford; Hon. Fellow of the Parkes Institute for the Study of Jewish/non-Jewish Relations, University of Southampton; and Fellow of the College of Arts & Sciences, St Xavier University, Chicago. He is an Associate Editor of Patterns of Prejudice and a member of the Boards for “Negotiating Jewish Identity: Jewish Life in 21st Century Norway” (The Norwegian Center for Holocaust and Minority Studies), Islamophobia Studies Yearbook, and ReOrient: The Journal of Critical Muslim Studies. His books include A Time to Speak Out: Independent Jewish Voices on Israel, Zionism and Jewish Identity(2008, co-editor); Offence: the Jewish Case (2009); Being Jewish and Doing Justice: Bringing Argument to Life (2011); and Words of Fire: Selected Essays of Ahad Ha’am (2015, editor). He took part in The Vienna Conversations (Bruno Kreisky Forum) and was one of the drafters of the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism (2021).
“Tabligh Booth” at the West Coast Jalsa Salana, the Ahmadiyya’s annual meeting taking place in Chino, CA on December 20-21, 2019. In this booth, missionaries would share printed resources and answer visitors’ questions about the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community. Photo courtesy of the author.
“Today it is the distinction of an Ahmadi that he strives for piety with humility and meekness and does not hesitate to lay down his life for it. They are the people who have been promised mercy and blessings from their Lord. No matter what people say to us, we know that Allah is with us and we are witnessing His blessings being showered upon us on account of our sabr.” This passage is from a letter written to the head of the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community’s Pakistani congregation. The Ahmadiyya originated in India during the British colonial period in the 1880s. The community self-identifies as Muslim, but this identity claim has been challenged by many South Asian and global Muslim leaders since its inception. In Pakistan, in particular, Ahmadis are legally designated as non-Muslims and are subjected to draconian blasphemy laws. The passage from the letter above, describing how Ahmadis ought to persevere through hardship, encapsulates how this community opposes its persecution and marginalization.
Sabr is often translated into English as “patience.” However, as Saba Mahmood notes in her discussion the practice of sabr among women in Egypt’s piety movements in Politics of Piety: “sabr communicates a sense not quite captured by [patience]: one of perseverance, endurance of hardship without complaint, and steadfastness” (171, fn. 15). Sabr is an active form of embodied agency, and in this piece, I present: (1) the role of sabr in the Ahmadiyya ethical program, and (2) how Ahmadiyya’s externalized practices of sabr seek a type of transformation not included in Mahmood’s theorization of agency. Her approach misses important opportunities to interrogate how religious actors—especially those who are minoritized and excluded from public religious discourses—may express their agency in “oppositional” ways that hold religious and secular forms of agency as mutually constitutive. I argue that the Ahmadiyya practice of sabr is at the core of an “oppositional” intentionality not captured by “resistance” or “conformity.”
Despite global persecution and marginalization, the Ahmadiyya has grown in size and global influence through its practices of tabligh [missionary and humanitarian work] and “jihad by the pen” [versus “jihad by the sword”]. Unlike other marginalized Muslims groups, such as the Druze, who do not engage in proselytization, the Ahmadis commit themselves to spreading the “True Islam” through preaching and the written word. Unlike the Baha’i, who splintered from their Muslim origins, the Ahmadis claim themselves as not only part of Islam, but as practitioners of the “True Islam.” Ahmadis participate in discourses that construct and negotiate an Islamic ontology—who is and is not a Muslim—in which the community opposes how “Other Muslims” cast Ahmadis as apostates, and elevates its own interpretation of Islam.
“Preaching with love” is the Ahmadiyya embodiment of sabr. The community’s “Ask an Imam” sessions are live-streamed on social media (available on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter) several times a week, and missionaries will answer questions asked by audience members about Ahmadiyya interpretations of Islam. Sometimes, the missionary will dedicate the beginning segment to a message based on frequently asked questions by the audience or general teachings. On June 29, 2021, the missionary dedicated the first ten minutes to the message of “Preaching with Love and Not Hate.” This was in response to hostility that missionaries face when preaching as Ahmadis, especially online. Throughout the segment, this missionary encouraged Ahmadis to “respond in an academic and an appropriate [manner], even in a strong [approach], but never crossing the limits or behaving in a way that is similar to the way the other party is behaving…when we preach, we should preach with love and with concern…”
The inclination to look for moments of resistance is widespread in modern and postmodern discourses on agency, spanning from liberal discourses, rooted in Rawlsian understandings of the autonomous and rational self, to postmodern discourses, from Michel Foucault to Judith Butler’s theorization of agency through subject formation.
The core of Ahmadiyya intentionality, their practice of sabr, exemplifies the tension between “resistance” and “conformity.” The Ahmadiyya embodiment of sabr has an internalized form, which is more akin to a “conformist” conceptualization of agency, in which the individual is persevering through her circumstances. While internalized sabr is an active form of agency, this is distinct from externalized sabr, in which one perseveres through hardship while also seeking a transformation of circumstances. In the “Ask an Imam” session mentioned above, for example, the internalized form of sabr (when practicing tabligh) is to not behave in a way that mirrors the other party’s hostility, while the externalized form of sabr is to continue preaching with love despite hardship. This externalized form in particular, I argue, takes on “oppositional” forms that are also not recognizable within secular and liberal notions of “resistance.” Because of the emphasis on the practice of sabr, the Ahmadiyya’s continued commitment to spreading “True Islam” rests somewhere between resistance and conformity.
It may be tempting for scholars trained in secular approaches to religious ethics to treat Ahmadiyya agency as a form of resistance. Saba Mahmood argues that liberal feminist assumptions about agency often lead scholars to “look for expressions and moments of resistance that may suggest a challenge to male domination” (8, emphasis my own). The inclination to look for moments of resistance is widespread in modern and postmodern discourses on agency, spanning from liberal discourses, rooted in Rawlsian understandings of the autonomous and rational self, to postmodern discourses, from Michel Foucault to Judith Butler’s theorization of agency through subject formation. Furthermore, agency that seeks transformation has often been referred to as “resistance,” especially among decolonial scholars, while postcolonial approaches to resistance are explicitly premised on secularized assumptions about opposition, in which minoritized actors seek to disrupt the power held by superordinate and repressive structures or actors. However, these secularized understandings of “resistance” misrepresent why the Ahmadiyya claim to worship God as Muslims. As an allegedly apostate group, the Ahmadiyya religious ethic evokes a relationship with Allah that “Other Muslims” might claim this community does not possess. When the Ahmadiyya evokes its relationship to Allah, especially in claiming itself as the “True Islam,” the community is engaging in a form of “opposition” through sabr.
“Love for All, Hatred for None” is the official slogan of the Ahmadiyya Muslim community. Here it is featured as a bumper sticker. Photo Credit: Duncan C, via Flickr. CC BY-NC 2.0.
The Ahmadiyya practice of sabr cannot be explained through resistance when taking the community’s ethical intentionality into account. Scholars can observe that yes, the community is using a form of “oppositional” language to communicate its self-proclaimed identity as the “True Islam,” but adherents do not interpret this as resistance. The transformation that the Ahmadiyya seek in this world is not to resist mainstream Muslims who delegitimize the Ahmadiyya Muslim identity or liberal colonial powers; instead, it is a divinely-ordained purpose in this life. It is a purpose in which an Ahmadi “preach[es] with love and with concern…” and “strives for piety with humility and meekness and does not hesitate to lay down his life for it.” It is a duty to God that requires the practice of sabr. Reducing this enactment of agency and sabr to resistance or conformity misses the ethical intentionality that holds both as mutually constitutive.
In her account of piety and embodied agency, Mahmood does not include externalized processes of transformation for the women participating in Egypt’s piety movements. Her account of sabr focused on the dichotomous responses by two Egyptian women—one who identifies as “secular Muslim” and another who participates in the piety movements—to the patriarchal pressures put onto single women in Egypt. While the former focused on the “practice of self-esteem” to survive such oppressive social conditions, the latter emphasized sabr. Mahmood cautions her readers from casting sabr as passive. She argues against secular and liberal sensibilities of agency that might see in this virtue a reluctance to actively engage with the situation in which one finds herself. In fact, sabr entails an “individual responsibility that is bounded by both an eschatological structure and a social one” (173). The individual responsibility to persevere and endure is bounded by a duty to God, which will come with eternal blessings, and an acknowledgment that each individual is responsible for her own actions—God is just and everyone will be responsible for their own deeds.
Mahmood’s conceptualization of embodied agency is unable to account for the moments of transformation that religious actors seek in this world, while being committed to a higher eschatological goal. Her conceptualization reinforces binaries of ‘resistance’ or ‘conformity.’
As she is concluding her discussion of sabr as a form of embodied agency, Mahmood argues that “[n]either [woman], for a variety of reasons, could pursue the project of reforming the oppressive situation they were forced to inhabit” (174). Such sociopolitical conditions yielded a form of “conformist” agency—one that is active in nature and has the goal of survival rather than transformation. While she uncovers the “grammar of concepts” within the communities’ own discourses, Mahmood’s commitment to this “positive conception of ethics” narrows the possibilities of ethical action for religious actors, including, possibly, her own interlocutors.
In trying to preserve “a purist interpretation” of conformist religious discourse, as Atalia Omer has argued, Mahmood misses opportunities to consider how religious actors are participating in and shaping modern discourses. Mahmood claims that “[n]either [woman]…could pursue the project of reforming the oppressive situation they were forced to inhabit” (174)—is this necessarily true? Can we think of the women participating in the piety movements as transforming the liberal, colonial, and secular structures within the modern nation-state through sabr? The piety movements exemplified externalized forms of sabr, by advocating to preserve particular values allegedly contradictory to the modern nation-state. The women were participating in and transforming discourses on Islam and modernity through their preservation of piety and acts of sabr. While Mahmood has made substantial contributions to accounts of religious agency in her work, I find that it just falls short due to her own resistance against liberal feminist scholars who “look for expressions and moments of resistance that may suggest a challenge to male domination.” Mahmood’s conceptualization of embodied agency is unable to account for the moments of transformation that religious actors seek in this world, while being committed to a higher eschatological goal. Her conceptualization reinforces binaries of “resistance” or “conformity.” The Ahmadiyya’s ethical program embodies sabr in both the internalized form that Mahmood conceptualizes, but also an externalized one that seeks an “oppositional” transformation.
The claim that the Ahmadiyya embodies the “True Islam,” and that this message must be spread globally, encapsulates what I argue is an “oppositional” form of agency—one that is beyond the binary framework of “resistance” or “conformity.” The recasting of mainstream forms of Muslim identity, or Islamic ontology, is not represented through secular forms of “resistance” when considering the religious ethics undergirding the opposition itself. A duty to God, which calls for Ahmadis to continue advocating for the “True Islam” through “jihad by the pen” and sabr, is the source of Ahmadiyya religious ethics and ethical intentionality. And this practice of sabr is, like Mahmood noted, an active state of perseverance. This practice of sabr is also, unlike Mahmood’s conceptualization, an externalized embodiment to transform this world by continuing to spread the “True Islam.” Therefore, the “oppositional” agency of the Ahmadiyya is more complex than the previous theories of agency—from both Mahmood and those whom she critiques—are able to account for because it simultaneously holds together the ephemeral and temporary nature of this life, while also emphasizing the importance of transforming it. And this work continues for the Ahmadiyya, regardless of worldly consequences. As one Ahmadi leader said to me: we’ve become “oblivious to the fact that someone is trying to harm us…[because] they can only do so much…[the] worst they can do is harm you and send you to Paradise earlier than you would have wanted to go yourself” (interview, March 2021).
Misbah Hyder is a Ph.D. Candidate in Political Science, specializing in International Relations and Interpretive Methodology, at the University of California, Irvine. She is also a Luce Graduate Fellow for The Critical Investigations into Humanitarianism in Africa Blog, www.cihablog.com. She studies how persecuted religious minorities respond to their marginalization from state and religious institutions through their religious practice. Her dissertation, The Pen is Mightier than the Sword: How the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community Enacts Peacebuilding, focuses on how the global engagement of a marginalized Muslim minority necessitates a re-evaluation of theories on agency for religious actors.
Selection from “The Old Middle East” by Dotan Moreno. Image courtesy of the artist.
Preface/Context
A nearly decade-long Vienna seminar gave birth to The Arab and Jewish Questions: Geographies of Engagement in Palestine and Beyond.Initiators and conveners of the seminar were the Secretary General of the Bruno Kreisky Forum for International Dialogue, Gertraud Auer Borea d’Olmo, and Bashir Bashir. As I mentioned at the book’s launching event (which led to the present CM symposium), my hope was that Gertraud and Bashir could find the time one day to detail in full the methodology behind the seminar and its political and thematic trajectories. For my purposes here it suffices to highlight that at the seminar’s inception two separate study groups were at work: one gathered Palestinian and non-Palestinian Arabs who discussed “Arab Engagement with the Jewish Question,” while the other brought together Israeli and non-Israeli Jews to discuss “Jewish Engagement with the Arab Question.” Due to the complexities surrounding Palestine/Israel, it took nearly three years before a joint gathering of all could be held.
The invitation to join the “Jewish group” was extended to me in 2013; my contribution to the group grew out of my work in two domains: (1) the modern sociopolitics and thought of Jews in the Ottoman/Arab Middle East, and (2) the comparative study of nationalism, Marxism, and binationalism. Since seminar participants could only include one chapter each in the book, my contribution in the former domain remained unpublished. It was delivered—to members of the “Jewish group” alone—on Friday, April 19, 2013 and is published here for the first time as a contribution to this symposium. This 2013 essay—and its 2021 afterthoughts—include thematic linkages to two of the book’s chapters: Ella Shohat’s “On Orientalist Genealogies: The Split Arab/Jew Figure Revisited” (89–121) and Hakem Al-Rustom’s “Returning to the Question of Europe: From the Standpoint of the Defeated” (122–47).
Were There–and Can There Be–Arab Jews? [April 2013]
This essay addresses two inter-dependent themes. The first is the collective sociopolitical existence of roughly 750,000 Jews who were an integral part of the post-Ottoman/Arab Middle East. This number reflects their presence in the region prior to their en masse dispersal in the 1950s, when two thirds went to Israel and the rest relocated to other places around the globe. The second theme is the possible relevance of this historical trajectory—part and parcel of what is after all modern Arab history—to the future of Palestine/Israel, and the Arab Middle East at large, in the twenty first century. I open with terminological clarification on what I define as “the Arab Question” in relation to this intervention.
Two “Arab Questions”
What is known as “The Arab Question” in Palestine/Israel studies is understood chiefly as the pre-1914 Zionist realization that the territory comprising Ottoman Palestine/Eretz-Yisrael was not “a land without people,” as some European Zionists have wishfully hoped; the territory was instead the home of an indigenous Arab society, numbering at the time half a million individuals. Understood as such, “The Arab Question” was then transformed terminologically (and otherwise) into the “Palestinian question” and—later still—to “The Question of Palestine” (as popularized by Edward Said’s 1979 book The Question of Palestine).[1]
In the context of these remarks I wish to assign a different meaning to the phrase “The Arab Question.” It will be understood here as a question concerning the following conundrum: how to materialize socio-politically an inclusive Arab identity capable of incorporating into itself members of different religious groups, sects, ethnicities, language groups (etc.) who live inside the territory that comprises the Arab Middle East (Palestine/Israel included). Understood as such, this is a considerably broader “Arab Question” than the one commonly discussed in Palestine/Israel studies. My view is that “The Arab Question” framed as such remains relevant to present and future relationships between Palestinians and Israelis.
It is in this context that it is most productive to pose my guiding question here, namely, were there—and can there be—Arab Jews? The simple answer is a resolute “yes, there were Arab Jews and yes there can be Arab Jews” (in the future that is). Yet a more detailed and critical discussion strikes me as necessary.
Trailblazers
The original and daring work of such activist authors as AbrahamSerfati, Ilan Halevi, Abbas Shiblak, and Ella Habiba Shohat rendered the signifier “Arab Jews” meaningful and productive for scholarly analysis. As such, their work enabled the modern critical study of these communities and/or identities. Following these trailblazers, in 1997 (amidst my PhD studies) I too anchored the collective signifier “Arab Jews” via a three-fold justification:
“Arab” is a linguistic and cultural marker rather than a racial or religious one.
Pre-1950s Jews within the Ottoman and Arab Middle East have participated fully in the production and consumption of Arab culture.
Distinctions in the Middle East were commonly drawn internally between “Jews,” “Muslims,” “Christians,” etc., rather than between “Jews” and “Arabs.”
Sixteen years later, I suggest that while this conceptualization is internally consistent and coherent, it still remains weak and insufficiently convincing. This is because the above three-fold justification unwittingly smokescreens what in my present reading is the single most important realm in the constitution of the post-1914 modern Arab identity, namely, the political realm. Put differently, the still most dominant conception behind “Arab Jews” does not acknowledge as lucidly as needed the absolute primacy of the politicalrealm over the cultural, religious, intellectual, lingual and/or ideological realms vis-à-vis modern Arab identity generally and, even more particularly, in relation to the formation and consolidation of modern Arab nationalism since 1917.
The political realm must therefore be tightly woven into every historical and contemporary reflection on Arab Jews considerably more assertively than it has been during the preceding two decades. By saying political I do not have in mind such mundane issues as “party politics.” What I instead have in mind is the broadest substantive meaning of the political, that is, the collective, mass-based undertaking by members of local, national, or regional social groups to put in place a functioning institutional setting capable of facilitating their individual and collective well-being, whether political, economic, or cultural.
In this context, in 1946, the one-year-old League of Arab States stipulated that an Arab is a person whose language is Arabic, who lives in an Arabic speaking country, and who is in sympathy with the aspirations of the Arabic-speaking peoples. “Aspirations” here have chiefly meant political aspirations linked to the Arab struggle against foreign domination (previously Ottoman, and later colonial-European) to achieve some political form and societal configuration of Arab self-determination and self-rule.
The still most dominant conception behind ‘Arab Jews’ does not acknowledge as lucidly as needed the absolute primacy of the politicalrealm over the cultural, religious, intellectual, lingual and/or ideological realms vis-à-vis modern Arab identity generally and, even more particularly, in relation to the formation and consolidation of modern Arab nationalism since 1917.
Scholars agree that there never was a singular political conception of the aspirations of the Arabic speaking peoples (irrespective of whether that was for better or worse). As I explained in 2005, across the Arab Middle East—certainly in the pre-1950s era when indigenous (non-European/non-white) Jews were still present—there have always been vigorously competing (sub-national) variants of anti-colonial nationalism at play. Those included, among others, a religiously informed one (think of the Muslim Brotherhood), a liberal one (such as that advanced by the Egyptian Wafd), a communist one, and a pan-Arab one (such as that of the Iraqi Istiqlāl).
If one generally accepts my proposition that the political dimension (or realm) is indeed very central to the constitution of modern Arab identity (including in Palestine), then the best and methodologically most logical step to undertake in order to examine the collective signifier “Arab Jews” meaningfully and non-trivially is this: turn the scholarly spotlight on politicized Jews across the Arab Middle East. Politicized Jews across the region have been affiliated disproportionally with liberal or Marxist sub-national currents. (Note: it is unnecessary to discuss here the minority of politicized Zionists among the Arabized-Jews since they have certainly prioritized Jewishness over Arabness and thus seldom view themselves as “Arab Jews”). Back now to those non/anti-Zionist liberal or Marxist Jews.
While Arab liberalism and Marxism in the pre-1950s era were both anti-colonial, the former placed its emphasis on (1) institutionalization of as strict a separation as possible between the Mosque/Synagogue and state, and (2) a political conception of equal citizenship. The latter meant that Iraq, Egypt, Morocco, etc. would constitute themselves as democratic states of their citizens, members of minority communities included. Liberal Jews in the Arab Middle East did not advocate for Jewish collective rights as a minority group, nor for cultural autonomy (or for that matter any other type of autonomy), nor institutionalization of consociational arrangements, nor did they view themselves as a national minority. Instead, the aim of politically active liberal Jews across the Arab Middle East was a political and civic one, and stood in some contradistinction to a religious or cultural one. Their aim was the constitution of an inclusive civic-democratic state of citizens.
Marxist Jews adhered to the host of modern liberal tenets I just listed, yet additionally emphasized (1) the dynamics and importance of class analysis; (2) the necessity of socialization, land redistribution, and equality within as classless of a society as possible; and (3) the conception of internationalism as one within which anti-colonial nationalism should be situated.
All of the above boils down to this: even politicized liberal and Marxist Jews in the Arab Middle East did not emphasize cultural nationalism, nor did they particularly care for it. They seldom placed the cultural elements of nationalism—be they informed by religion and/or by supra-state lingual and cultural “Arabness”—before the greyer and more mundane pressing political, economic, and institutional factors commonly understood to be pre-requisites for the constitution of functioning—essentially modern/secular—democracies irrespective of geographical area (see also Joel Beinin on this matter). Pre-1950s liberal/Marxist Jews considered the respective Iraqi, Egyptian, Moroccan, etc. civic-democratic national project daunting and complex enough even without the additional Arab (or pan-Arab) cultural, lingual, and supra-state layer. Iraqi-Jews thus tended to self-identify more as Iraqi rather than Arab, Egyptian Jews more as Egyptian rather than Arab (this also prevailed in the other Arab states).
All of this yields my core proposition: reintroducing the political realm more vigorously—while concurrently relaxing somewhat the focus on such realms as culture and language that scholars tend to place at the very fore in dominant conceptions of “Arab Jews” (and/or “Jewish Arabs’)—makes it more complex to speak meaningfully of these signifiers.
“Who is an Arab” [Non-Jew]?
Perhaps we ought to ponder the question, “Who is an Arab?” In many respects this entire intervention on Arab Jews here is a miniscule segment of its mammoth and more foundational conundrum “Who is an Arab?”
The single most elastic and socially inclusive answer to this question is this: an Arab is simply anyone who speaks (or, for our purposes, perhaps spoke) Arabic as his/her native language; a related conception is that pre-1950s Middle Eastern Jews were Arab in all but the dominant religion. My impression is that these twin conceptions reflect the wishful and ideational thinking of secular Arab nationalists more than the empirical Arab reality on the twentieth-century socio-political ground itself. This is all the more so when one essentially does not have in mind here the post-1952 Nasserist era, a period in which important Jewish communities were no longer present in the Arab world (including in Iraq, Yemen, Algeria, and Egypt).
There were, and remain, members of social groups in the Arab Middle East who spoke Arabic as their native language, yet contest their labeling as “Arab.” This is for a variety of reasons. In Lebanon, some Arabic-speaking Christians identify more as Phoenicians; in Egypt some Copts likewise avoid the signifier Arab; the Arab identity of Druze in Israel is a site of an intense communal wrestling. Iraq, the quintessential Arab country, has always been home to social communities— such as the Assyrians, Turcomans, and Chaldeans—whose native tongue is Arabic, yet who do not necessarily consider themselves Arab. And what sense should scholars make of groups/communities whose native language is Arabic because their ancestral ones have been snuffed out? These may include the Arabic-speaking Amazigh/Berber across North Africa or the Copts in Egypt. Similarly, what sense should scholars make of Kurds who have been gathering in public squares in Iraq or Syria declaring in their native Arabic, “We Are Not Arabs”? Iraq’s quintessential Arab party, the Baa’th, considered Kurds as Arab so long as they themselves refrained from speaking about the question (including in their native Arabic).
I have no pretense of having answers to these puzzles. This lack of an answer, however, has no significant bearing on the argument I attempt to make here: if the quest for “who is an Arab” is found elusive enough, the quest for “who is an Arab Jew” is even more so. The complexities with the signifier “Arab-Jew” springs more from the “Arab side” of the equation and a less from the “Jewish side” (this proposition will require an explanation that far exceeds this essay; please consult my other work on the matter here). For now, it suffices to underscore that the 1936 phrasing by the (obviously Iraqi) Jewish intellectual Ezra Haddād (1900–1972), “we are Arabs before we are Jews,” is invoked in the twenty-first century (Rejwan, 2004, Levy, 2005, 2008; Snir, 2005, 2008)) somewhat nostalgically and sorrily to lament what was back in 1936 a sociopolitical path that ultimately was not taken. Hopeful as Haddād’s words were—and remain—they are best appreciated in the poetic/symbolic realm more than in the muddier matrix of the region’s post-1917 ethno-national politics (involving colonialism, Arab nationalism, and Euro-Zionism).
If the quest for “who is an Arab” is found elusive enough, the quest for “who is an Arab Jew” is even more so.
Even in the case of pre-1952 Iraq—the single easiest and friendliest case in which to employ “Arab-Jews”—it was primarily a minority of introspective members of the (Baghdadi) Jewish intellectual middle-class who defined themselves firstly as “Arab.” This included twenty-first-century luminaries such as Shimon Ballas, Samir Naqqash, Sami Michael, Nissim Rejwan, and Sasson Somekh. These intellectuals undoubtedly deserve the (disproportional) scholarly, literary, and cinematic attention that they have received in Israel/Palestine and globally.
Materialist, evidence-based scholars, however, cannot afford the luxury of ignoring the fact that such (Iraqi) Jews were, and alas remain, an exception to the rule across the Arab Middle East and North Africa. Constructing conceptual and ideational bypass roads around the majority of Jews in the Arab world who did not really self-define as Arab [Jews]—while concurrently focusing on (the above mentioned) few over the majority—is scholarly unjustified, and normatively unproductive, vis-à-vis efforts to induce positive dynamics into the Israel/Palestine matrix. In fact, such misrepresentations—coupled with a didactic tone lecturing Mizrahi Jews that they do not understand that they are “really” Arab—nearly always produce the opposite effects to those otherwise intended. That is, they antagonize “ordinary” Mizrahim outside academia and alienate everything “Arab” even more: Israel’s Mizrahim, irrespective of their class position, tend to detect such maneuvers easily and are on the whole hostile to them. This brings me to the very act of defining—or labeling or signifying—human beings.
A work that echoes some of the Mizrahi condition in the twenty first century. Courtesy of Dotan Moreno.
Self-Defined vs. Other-Defined
An awareness of the differences between self-defined and other-defined procedures of signifying human collectivities is critical in the context of any “Jewish engagement with the Arab question” (both narrowly and broadly defined). Prevailing self-identifications among members of any worldwide group ought to be taken into account very seriously by scholars who seek to observe these groups as candidly, impartially, and respectfully as possible. Here, the signifier “Arab-Jews” springs more from an other-defined procedure of labeling than from a self-defined one.
As a collective signifier, “Arab-Jews” is super-imposed somewhat paternalistically on a social group that the majority of its members either feel uncomfortable with, or do not subscribe to (in both historical and contemporary terms). Whether or not this self-identifying tendency among Jews across the Arab world (Israel/Palestine included) is a consequence of ignorance, “false consciousness,” collective amnesia, Zionist manipulation—or of being “colonial compradors”—may well be in-themselves interesting questions to explore. Yet, such questions remain irrelevant in relation to the theme I highlight here, that is, the importance of scholars having the utmost respect for the prevailing self-identification and self-determination within the groups they observe and study. So don’t call 1948 Palestinians in Israel “Israeli Arab”; don’t call Moroccan Amazigh “Arab”; and be more hesitant and sensible when considering lecturing to working class Mizrahi Jews that they are Arab [Jews]. Socio-politics across the post-Ottoman Middle East are simply more complex.
Lastly, the conception “Arab Jews” reflects the identity of Jews in the Arab Middle East ambiguously since it has been nourished disproportionately by an Iraqi-centric outlook. North-African Jews during the first half of the twentieth century were not as “Arab” as were Jews in Iraq. Notwithstanding that Iraqi Jews comprised 14% of all Jews across the Arab Middle East, their experiences have persistently received disproportional attention compared to those of other Jewish communities in the Arab world.
As a collective signifier, ‘Arab-Jews’ is super-imposed somewhat paternalistically on a social group that the majority of its members either feel uncomfortable with, or do not subscribe to (in both historical and contemporary terms).
It is therefore a conceptual imperative to introduce collective signifiers that (1) can be reasonably applicable to as many of the 750,000 Jews who have lived across the whole Arab Middle East, and that (2) can capture comprehensively as many of their multi-lingual, cultural, social, and/or political experiences. I explained in detail elsewhere why the collective signifier “Arabized-Jews” is in my understanding a more capable and explanatory one than both “Arab-Jews” and “Jewish Arabs.” Because of this, it can help form a “bridge” between diverse minority Jews across ten states in the Arab Maghrib and Mashriq, as well as to unite them for the purposes of scholarly analysis, terminological clarity, and for other purposes as well. Such historical and conceptual enquiries and debates continue to maintain important relevance not only for contemporary Palestinian/Israeli affairs but also for broader Arab affairs and dynamics regionally, including in the complex Arab societies and states of Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen.
Afterthoughts, August 2021: Were There—and Can There Be—Palestinian Jews?
Eight years after delivering this lecture in Vienna I can attest more emphatically that the twenty-first century has witnessed a great expansion of studies and discussions on Arab Jews. Yet The Arab and Jewish Questions: Geographies of Engagement in Palestine and Beyond does stand out. For starters, no collection integrated into itself as thoroughly, critically, and comprehensively the probing of non-European Jews and their experiences. I’m similarly unaware of any work whose editors afforded non-Ashkenazi/non-European Mizrahi scholars 45% of the total contributors’ space. Lastly, the book’s eight launching events during 2021—in Europe, the US, and Palestine/Israel—have been characterized by critical public debates of the highest quality on the question of Arab Jews.
This uplift notwithstanding, the discussion of Arab Jews has disappointingly remained imprisoned within the suffocating walls of academia. To date, the signifier “Arab Jews” has failed to migrate and spread into the broader, more crucial, domains of popular politics and civil society. This, alas, means that the hegemonically entrenched dichotomy separating “Arab” and “Jew”—which has been consolidated since the late 1930s as a consequence of dynamics running across Jewish and Arab national formations—has not fractured tangibly.
By way of illustration, recall that the PLO’s 1964 National Covenant stipulated that “Jews of Palestinian origin [and their descendants, such as myself] are considered Palestinians if they are willing to live peacefully and loyally in Palestine.” Following the Covenant’s 1968 revision this modified article read “the Jews who had normally resided in Palestine until the beginning of the Zionist invasion [1917] will be considered Palestinians.” This inclusion notwithstanding, my three decades of scholarship and (non-Zionist) activism confirm that only a handful of Palestinians have considered me a Palestinian even after explaining that I (1) categorically self-define (also) as Palestinian, and (2) am in full sympathy with the democratic aspirations of the Palestinian people.(It has incidentally been a waste of time to attempt and communicate such Mizrahi matters to many pro-Palestinian Whites across Euro-America.)
Let me attempt a second illustration of the meagre materiality of “Arab Jews” and “Palestinian Jews.” The year 2020–21 not only witnessed expanding discussion on Arab Jews but also a Herculean struggle against the International Holocaust Remembrance Allliance’s (IHRA) definition of antisemitism. (I took part in this effort here and here for example). The most profound contribution to the global anti-IHRA struggle was a lengthy statement that “Palestinian and Arab academics, journalists and intellectuals” published in Arabic, Hebrew, and English (in The Guardian). Among other important claims, they contended:
Through ‘examples’ that it provides, the IHRA definition conflates Judaism with Zionism in assuming that all Jews are Zionists, and that the state of Israel in its current reality embodies the self-determination of all Jews. We profoundly disagree with this.
While doubtlessly a sensible proposition, as far as I was able to ascertain not a single (Arab or non-Arab) Jew can be found among the statement’s 122 prominent signatories (who reside worldwide). This de-facto omission or exclusion oddly encompasses (non-Israeli) Arab Jews who have been for decades public anti-Zionists (such as Magda Haroun, Sion Assidon, Robert Assaraf, Salim Nassib, etc.). Moreover, I did try—but failed—to find North African or Asian Jews who were approached to endorse this truly crucial statement. It is difficult to fathom why an invitation to add their names to the statement was not extended to such (non/anti-Zionist) Jews as the Israeli Black Panther Reuben Abergel; Professors Ella Shohat, Ammiel Alcalay, Avi Shlaim, Sami Shalom Chetrit, Zvi Ben Dor Benite, Gil Anidjar, Yehuda Shenhav, Smadar Lavie, Yigal S Nizri, or Almog Behar; artists Meir Gal, Rafram Chaddad, or Eliahou Eric Bokobza; filmmakers Osnat Trabelsi and Eyal Sagui Bizawe; author Massoud Hayoun, and many more like them (please do explore the twelve hyperlinks). Would inclusion of North African/Asian/Arab Jews as signatories “dilute” somehow the statement’s Palestinian and Arab “integrity,” “credentials,” or “purity”? Could such inclusion “harm” or “diminish” in some way the uncompromising anti-IHRA message it aimed to convey (to global public opinion mind you)?
Artist Description: In Armpit, the geographical maps of Israel and the Palestinian occupied territories were painted with black ink on my body. The piece concretizes the psychosexual relations between the State and its citizens, the internalization of the state’s memory and priorities over personal history. It illustrates how the State infiltrates, hides and ultimately brands itself using its citizens’ bodies. The second image is of the United States. Image Courtesy of Mizrahi artist, Meir Gal.
I have no answers to such questions, yet I am still of the view that the statement’s anti-IHRA credentials are wanting—possibly even self-defeating—precisely due to the wholesale non-inclusion of (Arab) Jewish signatories. This inevitably plays into the hands of pro-IHRA adversaries and significantly bolsters their dichotomous and separatist case and worldview. Be that as it may, the anti-IHRA statement seems to exemplify paradigmatically that the signifier Arab Jews is plainly absent in the minds of many, and not taken seriously in the slightest. This is a testament to the entrenched logic of European colonialism and modernity that separated “the Jew” and “the Arab” and that underpins the impossibility of the political intelligibility and viability of the “Arab Jew.” After five decades of the (modern) employment of Arab Jews, the signifier appears to remain hollow, discursive, rhetorical, and unwelcome—while also hardly gaining any political purchase. While one would expect this to be the case among Christian and non-Christian Zionists, it bizarrely seems equally so among enough anti-Zionist Palestinian and Arab academics, journalists, and intellectuals.
For the time being, therefore, a Jew cannot really be an Arab or Palestinian in a manner that is non-theoretical or substantive sociopolitically. The Palestinian/Arab anti-colonial/Zionist struggle may well be in some need of broader inclusion and democratic refinement. The pre-1992 approach of the South African National Congress (ANC) seems worth studying.
Behar, Moshe. “What’s in a Name? Socio-terminological Formations and the Case for Arabized Jews.” Social Identities 15, no. 6 (2009): 747–771.
Behar, Moshe. “Mizrahim, Abstracted: Action, Reflection and the Academization of the Mizrahi Cause.” Journal of Palestine Studies 37, no. 2 (2008): 89–100.
Behar, Moshe. “Palestine, Arabized-Jews and the Elusive Consequences of Jewish and Arab National formations.” Nationalism and Ethnic Politics 13, no. 4 (2007): 581–612.
Behar, Moshe. “Do Comparative and Regional Studies of Nationalism Intersect?” International Journal of Middle East Studies 37, no. 4 (2005): 587–612.
Behar, Moshe. “Is the Mizrahi Question Relevant to the Future of the Entire Middle East?” News from Within 13, no. 1(1997): 68–85.
Beinin, Joel. “Jews as Native Iraqis: An Introduction.” Foreword to Nissim Rejwan’s The Last Jews in Baghdad, xi-xxii. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004.
Halevi, Ilan. A History of the Jews: Ancient and Modern. London: Zed Books, 1986 (1981).
Levy, Lital., “‘From Baghdad to Bialik with Love’: A Reappropriation of Modern Hebrew poetry, 1933.”Comparative Literature Studies 42, no. 3 (2005): 125–54.
Levy, Lital. “Historicizing the Concept of Arab Jews in the Mashriq.” Jewish Quarterly Review 98, no. 4 (2008): 452–469.
Palestine Liberation Organization. “The Right of Arab-Jews to Return.” PLO Information Bulletin 1, no. 2 (1975): 8.
Rejwan, Nissim. The Last Jews in Baghdad: Remembering a Lost Homeland. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004.
Serfati, Abraham. Lutte anti-sioniste et Révolution Arabe – Essai sur le judaïsme marocain et le sionisme [Anti-Zionist Struggle and Arab Revolution: Essay on Morrocan Judaism and Zionism]. Éditions Quatre-Vents, 1977.
Serfati, Abraham. Écrits de prison sur la Palestine [Prison Writings on Palestine]. Éditions Arcantère, 1992.
Shiblak, Abbas. The Lure of Zion. London: Saqi, 1986.
Shohat, Ella. “Sephardim in Israel: Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Jewish Victims.” Social Text 19/20 (1988): 1–35.
Shohat, Ella. “Dislocated Identities: Reflections of an Arab-Jew.” Movement Research Performance Journal 5 (1992): 8.
Shohat, Ella. “The Invention of the Mizrahim.” Journal of Palestine Studies 29/1 (1999): 5–20.
Shohat, Ella. “Rupture and Return: Zionist Discourse and the Study of Arab Jews.” Social Text 21/2 (2003): 52–53.
Snir, Reuven. ‘“Mosaic Arabs’ between Total and Conditioned Arabization: The Participation of Jews in Arabic Press and Journalism in Muslim Societies during the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries.” Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs 27, no. 2 (2007): 261–95.
Snir, Reuven. “‘We Are Arabs Before We Are Jews’: The Emergence and Demise of Arab-Jewish Culture in Modern Times.” Electronic Journal of Oriental Studies VIII (2005): 1–47.
Tamari, Salim. “Ishaq al-Shami and the Predicament of the Arab Jew in Palestine.” The Jerusalem Quarterly 21 (2004): 46–60.
“Entangled.” Photo Credit: Phil Shirley. Via Flickr. CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.
Entanglement is an ambivalent concept. While it implies an intimate and hopeful prospect, i.e. that of being deeply interconnected, it also suggests an element of unavoidability, of being wrapped up into each other’s existences in an inescapable manner. It articulates both a profound relationality but also an impossibility to choose. It is both bonding and restricting, connecting and entrapping. Furthermore, when the notion of entanglement is addressed, its opposite— disentanglement—also emerges as a promising telos. Unwrapping the knot in order to see clearly is what we do as scholars.
The scholarly effort done in The Arab and Jewish Questions: Geographies of Engagement in Palestine and Beyondis, however, a different one. Rather than untangle, it aims to re-entangle; and this re-entangling is both analytical and political. It is political as it aims to not only undo the separation between different questions (e.g. the “Muslim question” in Europe and the “Palestinian question”), but also the separation between identities. This appears centrally across the different contributions in the volume that attend to the construction of the Jew and Palestinian Arab, and which strive towards a critical unmaking of this Jewish-Arab duality.
Re-posing these questions through the lens of entanglement also shows family-resemblances with that other important concept which has gained prominence in the recent years, intersectional solidarity. In both cases, there is an effort at analyzing, understanding, and interconnecting that which appears as separate in order to create broader alliances between distinct movements. Yet, while the notion of intersectional solidarity assumes a coalition across “social group differences,” the lens of entanglement articulates a view that takes these different causes as variations of the same question. The Palestinian question, the Jewish question, and the Muslim question, hence, are addressed as iterations of the same, European question, as Gil Anidjar famously argued. Against the idea of bounded identities and distinct struggles, the notion of entanglement underscores interconnections and co-dependency. Adopting a methodology of entanglement thus entails a critical deconstruction of these acts of separation and opposition (the Jew vs. the Muslim vs. the Palestinian) but it also implies and presupposes that those possible alternatives or responses cannot be reached in isolation, but are necessarily intertwined. What would, then, these entangled answers look like? And (how) does it take us away from an imaginary of solidarity that assumes a coalition between socially differentiated groups?
While the notion of intersectional solidarity assumes a coalition across ‘social group differences,’ the lens of entanglement articulates a view that takes these different causes as variations of the same question.
The possibility to imagine these co-dependencies becomes important when the Palestinian question is discussed together with the Muslim and the Jewish question in Europe. As has been described by Brian Klug in his excellent contribution: the construction of the New Europe equally signaled a shift towards a philosemitic, supposedly pro-Israel, and anti-Muslim Europe. Islamophobia became the point of embrace that enabled the fostering of alliances, which have only grown stronger in the recent two decades, since both parties have been understood to fight a common enemy: (Muslim) terrorism. This embrace became even more acute in the recent escalation in Israel/Palestine, which saw an unprecedented uprising among Palestinians across the territories of ‘48 and ’67 around the expulsion of the residents of Sheikh Jarrah, and a violent attack of worshippers during Qadr night in the Al-Aqsa Mosque as well as the resuming of deadly airstrikes in Gaza in response to the firing of missile rockets by Hamas. During this violent escalation, at least 256 Palestinians and 13 Israeli were killed, and 94 commercial and residential buildings were destroyed in Gaza.
Despite this renewed demonstration of ostentatious and deadly asymmetry, the president of the European Commission reiterated her unconditional support of Israel, addressing the rocket attacks by Hamas but remaining conspicuously silent about the immense weaponry on the Israeli side. A lethal embrace among a shared common enemy prevailed: the radical, extremist, Muslim Other.
Very concerned by the situation in Israel and Gaza. I condemn indiscriminate attacks by Hamas and Israel. Civilians on all sides must be protected. Violence must end now.
This lethal embrace does not, however, restrict itself to the geographies of Palestine and Israel, but equally informs the suspicion thrown at “solidarity movements” (as they are called) with Palestine. To discredit the pro-Palestinian demonstration in Brussels in May, various media relayed information about antisemitic chants among the demonstrators. This information could circulate easily since most demonstrators were identified as North African or Middle Eastern, with many veiled women amongst the supporters. Such attempts are neither new, nor unique to the Brussels context, but signal an older, and already documented trend of disentangling the question of antisemitism from Europe, and re-entangling it with the Arab and Muslim question (and more broadly with the anti-colonial question).
While the notion of solidarity assumes a separation in the struggles, and a tactical alliance and support, the vocabulary of entanglement forces us to reckon with the interdependency of these different struggles.
What would it then, mean, to replace the language of “solidarity” with Palestine, with that of entanglement with Palestine? How can it help us rethink these different questions? While the notion of solidarity assumes a separation in the struggles, and a tactical alliance and support, the vocabulary of entanglement forces us to reckon with the interdependency of these different struggles. Hence, it forces us to account for the postcolonial continuations of Europe as an imperial project, both in its domestic construction of subaltern others (i.e., Muslims, migrants, and Blacks), but also in its international ramifications through its European corollaries (Europe and/as Israel, and vice-versa, vs. the Arab). Thinking through entanglements invites us, also, to think the question of Islamophobia as an extension of a European imperial project, of which Palestine is an incumbent part. It forces us to consider, infrastructurally, the making of the European and Israeli security states, and how they are interconnected. But it also pushes us to understand how Islamophobia operates as a global imaginary in the construction of an internal enemy, and of the Islamization of the Palestinian as “other.” Thinking through entanglement forces us, finally, to abandon the premise that the Muslim question can be “solved” through the Europeanization of Muslims (the so-called “European Islam”, and the disentanglement from an African or Asian heritage), or to assume that the Muslim question is unrelated to the concerns of a secularized elite in the Muslim world. With their book, Bashir Bashir and Leila Farsakh have opened the door for an important conversation and given us a hopeful vocabulary to think with.
The Arab and Jewish Questions: Geographies of Engagement in Palestine and Beyond interrogates the opposition between the “Arab” and the “Jew” in order to challenge dominant understandings of political identities, nationalism, and citizenship rights. It is a result of a series of workshops organized by the Bruno Kreisky Forum for International Dialogue in Vienna that brought a wide range of scholars together who put the Arab and Jewish questions in conversation with one another (rather than treating them as two distinct concerns, as is often the case). This book revisits European modernity by exploring contemporary Arab engagement with “the Jewish question,” which was created by and in Europe, by delving into how Arabs have dealt with the question of Jewish political rights in light of European antisemitism and Zionism. It gives as much attention to Jewish engagement with the “Arab question,” as European colonialism called it, by shedding new light on how Zionist and non-Zionist Jewish voices have dealt with the political rights of Palestinians in historic Palestine. The book’s originality lies in subverting our understanding of these two questions by exposing how they are inextricably intertwined, not only by their histories, but also by their contemporary concern with questioning modernity as well as articulating the meaning of political equality today. The various chapters included in this volume allow us to better understand how European modernity enabled, as much as constrained, geographies of entanglement in Palestine and beyond, as well as offer us new analytical and political perspectives that transcend the confines of ethnic nationalism and the exclusionary understanding of equality.
The motivation for this juxtaposition between the Arab and Jewish aspiration for political equality and freedom arises from three deeply interconnected and important developments that have taken place over the past two decades. First, the Oslo peace process has failed to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The ongoing colonization of Palestine created irreversible realities that cast serious doubts on the feasibility of partition and the “two-state solution” that this accord offered as the way forward. Zionist colonization has also deepened the intertwinement between Israeli and Palestinian lives, making the equality of Palestinian and Jewish rights in Palestine/Israel central. This issue is still far from resolved. Second, the Arab uprisings that erupted in a number of Middle Eastern countries in 2011 signaled the demise of grand assimilationist ideologies like Arabism, Ba’athism, and Islamism. These uprisings expressed people’s rejection of their authoritarian regimes and the state-sanctioned definition of the collective “we.” They brought to the fore the diverse ethnic and cultural realities that nationalist ideologies sought to repress, as well as a clear demand for democracy and a state that was accountable to all its citizens. Third, Islam and Muslims have become the new internal signifiers of otherness, particularly in the west. This change has posed serious challenges to existing conceptions of democracy in the West. The rise of Eurocentric and Islamophobic notions of citizenship are intimately connected to the globalization of the neoliberal political economy today. They are equally tied to the suppressed memories of Europe’s colonial “past.” These notions reflect an intimate conceptual and historical link between Judeophobia and Islamophobia in Europe, one that continues to impact the Middle East, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict more specifically, in more ways than one.
The Arab and Jewish Questions exposes the intersections between the legacy of European colonialism, the failure to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict, and the persistent demand for equal citizenship rights in the Arab world and the west. It shows that the question of Palestine/Israel, the Arab/Muslim question, and the Jewish question are not only entangled, but also belong to the same history. The first part of the book focuses on the historical connection between the Arab and Jewish questions, shedding new light on how they are tied to Europe. The three chapters in this section unpack the link between antisemitism and Islamophobia, showing how it is intrinsically tied to Europe’s refusal to confront its colonial legacies and address its racial prejudices today. It is a product of Europe’s fundamental failure to deal with any non-Christian “other” and of its attempt to transport this failure outside its borders.
The rise of Eurocentric and Islamophobic notions of citizenship are intimately connected to the globalization of the neoliberal political economy today. They are equally tied to the suppressed memories of Europe’s colonial ‘past.’
The second part of the book explores the political connections between the Arab and Jewish questions by highlighting their concerns with notions of political rights and equality. The four chapters in this section go beyond the binary division between the “Jews” and the “Arab” by discussing the figure of the Arab-Jew, which the chapters of Ella Shohat and Hakem Rustom engage more deeply. They each expose the ways in which Zionism and Arab nationalism negated the Arab dimension of Jewishness and repressed the Jewish dimension of Arab identity as a result of their respective ethnic, and intrinsically chauvinistic, definition of the nation-state. The chapter by Yuval Evri and Hillel Cohen challenges the uniform narrative that the Israeli historical establishment has tried to propagate about Jewish political uniformity by exposing how early Zionist and non-Zionist Jewish voices dealt with Palestinian political rights, affirming their congruency with Jewish political rights.
The third, and last, part of the book puts the Arab and Jewish questions into conversation with one another in order to start imagining a viable political alternative to the present stubborn reality that is marked by the ongoing Palestinian Nakba, continuous Israeli aggressions, and failed peace negotiations. The three chapters in this section stress the need to go beyond partition as a paradigm for resolving political problems. In this regard, in her chapter, Jacqueline Rose invites us to engage in the important and difficult task of undertaking a deep introspective approach to one’s nationalist discourse in order to transcend entrapments of victimhood that hamper any liberatory politics. The chapters from Behar and Masarwi explain the dialectic of national identities and unpack some of the challenges that face bi-nationalism or any alternative one-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. These include finding the means to protect both the individual and collective political rights of Palestinians and Israelis, and to rethink nationalism in more inclusive terms. Such rethinking is ever more pressing today, as the Middle East seeks to create new political entities that protect the rights of others—be it Jews, Kurds, Yazidis, or Copts—as equal citizens rather than as protected minorities, and calls on the state to create new structures that guarantee inclusivity, accountability, and equality for all.
Leila Farsakh is Associate Professor and Chair of the Political Science Department at the University of Massachusetts Boston. She is the author ofPalestinian Labor Migration to Israel: Labour, Land and Occupation, (London: Routledge, second edition, 2012) and of Rethinking Statehood in Palestine: Self-Determination and Decolonization beyond Partition (University of California Press, 2021). She has also published on questions related to the political economy of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, alternatives to partition, and international migration in a wide range of academic journals, including the Middle East Journal, the European Journal of Development Research, Ethnopolitics,Journal of Palestine Studies, the International Feminist Journal of Politics, and Le Monde Diplomatique. In 2001, she won the Peace and Justice Award from the Cambridge Peace Commission in Cambridge, Massachusetts and since 2008 has been a senior research fellow at Birzeit University in the West Bank.
The Arab and Jewish Questions: Geographies of Engagement in Palestine and Beyond draws links amongst otherwise segregated histories, struggles, and possibilities. It argues that three seemingly unrelated questions—”the question of Palestine,” “the Jewish question,” and “the Muslim question”—are conceptually and historically linked, and that their entanglement continues to fuel tensions in the Middle East, Europe, and the USA.
The book is part of a wider research project that is motivated by the search for a new moral and political grammar for Israel/Palestine. This grammar is urgent if we are to move beyond the logics of partition, racial segregation, and settler-colonialism to achieve decolonization and historical reconciliation. The research project has three major components. The first component questions the paradigm of partition that has dominated international diplomacy around Israel/Palestine. The second examines links between the two foundational pasts of the Israeli and Palestinian narratives, namely the Holocaust and the Nakba. The third and final component casts a wider net and examines the entangled histories of the Arab, Muslim, and Jewish questions. To date, the project has resulted in three main publications: Rethinking the Politics of Israel/Palestine: Partition and its Alternatives, The Holocaust and the Nakba: A New Grammar of Trauma and History, and now The Arab and Jewish Questions.
These three books are in close conversation with each other by interrogating two main features confounding political modernity. The first is the nation-state’s drive for homogeneity and the second is settler-colonialism’s drive for eliminating the natives and streamlining settlers’ racialized normativity. These features have channeled European/western efforts to (re)draw lines of enmity along racialized hierarchies of identities and instituted dynamic strategies of ruling and exterminating others. Problematizing the workings of these features, therefore, is critical for understanding the ubiquitous intersections of European nationalism and imperialism, Zionism, and Arab nationalism and their contemporary guises and vehicles of reproduction.
In the last two decades, the discourse of Islamophobia has been indispensable to the articulation and reproduction of modernity’s political fixes and has also masked the intimate ways that it is bound to western antisemitism and Orientalism. The resurgence of the discourse of antisemitism testifies to this twisted logic. Instead of attending to this phenomenon as a reminder of the troubling endurance of the Jewish question and its underlying political generators in the west, the discourse of countering antisemitism is (ab)used to shoulder blame on “Islam” and stigmatize and racialize abstract “Muslims.” Being Muslims and Arabs, Palestinians are asked to pay the antisemitic bill of an allegedly a philosemitic west: the victims of the victims are the perpetrators! Once more western modernity’s ordeal then centers around the “Jewish question,” “the Muslim question,” and “the question of Palestine.”
‘The question of Palestine,’ ‘the Jewish question,’ and ‘the Muslim question’ are conceptually and historically linked, and their entanglement continues to fuel tensions in the Middle East, Europe, and the USA.
In the following, I introduce each one of the three components of research and the way they grapple with the enduring effects of modernity’s political fixes. Then, I elaborate on the link between the three research components and prescribe egalitarian binationalism as a principle which cuts against the grain of modernity’s hegemonic logic in Palestine/Israel. Put differently, I contend that in Palestine/Israel’s case, egalitarian binationalism is a guiding ethical principle for a form of politics that can unsettle the reigning chauvinist and racialist tendencies of the nation-state model and the settler-colonial mindset.
Terms of the Debate
(1) Alternatives to Partition. There are increasing challenges to the long-held idea that the creation of two separate nation-states will resolve the conflict between Zionism and Palestinian nationalism. In response, many have proposed integrative solutions to the traditional two-state paradigm. Integrative solutions refer to inclusive and egalitarian political visions and institutional arrangements for all the citizens and residents of Palestine/Israel. In Rethinking the Politics of Israel/Palestine, I, with my coauthors, map out and critically assess the strengths and weaknesses of these integrative solutions to Palestine/Israel. The book was the product of a research group that worked closely for several years at the Bruno Kreisky Forum for International Dialogue in Vienna. In my contributions there, I argued that Palestinian nationalism is undergoing a process of redefinition whereby the whole of Mandate Palestine is viewed as a single political unit of analysis and the Palestinian “we” and struggle for freedom encompasses all Palestinians.
(2) The Holocaust and the Nakba. In several articles co-authored with Amos Goldberg, I developed a theoretical framework for shared and inclusive deliberations on the memories of the Holocaust and the Nakba. While these two foundational tragedies are often discussed separately and in abstraction from the constitutive historical global contexts of nationalism and colonialism, we explored the historical, political, and cultural intersections between them. Without blurring the fundamental differences between the two, we examined how and why the Holocaust and the Nakba were embedded in cultural imaginations, colonial and asymmetrical realties, and how articulating these links can pave the way for a new political and moral grammar. This new grammar, we claimed, enables a joint Palestinian-Israeli dwelling and supports historical reconciliation in Israel/Palestine. Our co-written articles were published in the Journal of Genocide Research and in two volumes that we co-edited. The first was entitled The Holocaust and the Nakba: Memory, National Identity and Jewish-Arab Partnership (2015, in Hebrew) and the second is a major collection of essays published by Columbia University Press as The Holocaust and the Nakba: A New Grammar of Trauma and History (2018).
(3) The Arab and Jewish Questions. In Rethinking the Politics of Israel/Palestine and The Holocaust and the Nakba: A New Grammar of Trauma and History, I argued that a better understanding of the question of Palestine/Israel requires revisiting “the Jewish question” and the ways Europe’s colonial history and nationalism created the question of Palestine and its intersections with the pressing historical and contemporary issues in Europe, the Middle East, and elsewhere in the world. As a result, I launched a third research project at the Bruno Kreisky Forum under the title “Jewish Engagements with the Arab Question and Arab Engagements with the Jewish Question.” The project was premised on the claim that over the past two decades Middle Eastern and European politics have been impacted by three critical developments that call into question dominant understandings of nationalism, citizenship, and decolonization.
First, “the question of Palestine” remains unanswered. The aggressive and ongoing colonization of Palestine has created irreversible realities that cast serious doubts on the feasibility of partition and the “two-state solution.” At the same time, Palestine’s colonization deepened the entanglements between Israeli and Palestinian lives, rendering inseparable the question of present and future rights of Palestinians and Israelis. Second, the Arab uprisings that erupted in a number of Middle Eastern and North African countries in 2011 signaled the demise of grand assimilationist ideologies like Arabism, Ba’athism, and Islamism, thereby calling into question the overarching “we” that cements the citizenry together. Third, Islam and Muslims have become the new internal signifiers of otherness, particularly in the west, which poses serious challenges to existing conceptions of citizenship and democracy there. The rise of chauvinist and Islamophobic notions of citizenship reflect, among other things, an intimate conceptual and historical link between Judeophobia and Islamophobia in Europe.
Nakba Day demonstration in Ramallah. Heinrich Böll Foundation. CC By 2.0.
Many scholars have studied the causes underlying these developments. No study, however, has explored the intersections between the rise of Islamophobia in the west, the failure to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict, and the political meanings of the Arab uprisings. Neither have many scholars examined how these developments are tied to three seemingly unrelated questions, namely the question of Israel/Palestine, the Arab-Muslim question, and the Jewish question. Starting in 2012, we held a series of international workshops to critically examine these intertwined topics. One of the outcomes of these workshops is the previously mentioned volume The Arab and Jewish Questions. This book argues that these questions are not only entangled, but also belong to the same history—one that continues to foment tensions in the Middle East, Europe, and the U.S. By shedding new light on the intricate relationships among Orientalism, antisemitism, Islamophobia, colonialism, and the impasse in Israel/Palestine, the book reveals the inseparability of Palestinian and Israeli struggles for self-determination and eventually for political equality.
These three research projects do not only interrogate how nationalism and settler colonialism shaped Europe and the Middle East, they also pave the way for identifying egalitarian binationalism as an ethical frame for decolonization, historical reconciliation, and the dismantling of Jewish Israeli supremacy in Israel/Palestine.
Egalitarian Binationalism
Egalitarian binationalism is a principle that recognizes and promotes the existence of two national groups with equal rights to self-determination. Egalitarian binationalism represents a bold departure from what has dominated the literature on Israel/Palestine. For decades, scholars have proposed various frames to conceptualize Israeli politics and citizenship regimes, like Jewish and democratic (e.g., Ruth Gavison; Alexander Yakobson and Amnon Rubinstein), ethnic democracy (e.g., Sammy Smooha), ethnocracy (e.g., As’ad Ghanem and Oren Yiftachael), multiculturalism (e.g.,Yehouda Shenhav and Yossi Yona), indigeneity (e.g., Amal Jamal), and egalitarian Zionism (e.g., Chaim Gans). Despite their differences and disagreements, these frames share two problematic assumptions. First, they presuppose a relationship of majority (Israeli Jewish) and minority (Palestinian) in Israel. Second, they operate within the logic of partition under which the State of Israel is confined within the boundaries of 1967. Egalitarian binationalism disputes both of these assumptions and insists on viewing the entire land between the Mediterranean Sea and Jordan River as one political unit of analysis belonging to a larger region, the Eastern Mediterranean. Furthermore, it views the aspired relationships between the Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs as premised on national parity rather than on majority/minority relationships. Stated differently, egalitarian binationalism recognizes the right to national self-determination of both national groups while insisting that this right ought to not be realized in the form of an exclusive ethnic state.
Recently, it has also become common to use settler colonialism as a desirable interpretive frame to engage with Israel/Palestine and go beyond partition and peacemaking discourse. According to this “colonial turn,” settler colonialism is the core dynamic that shapes the conflict and not peacemaking of nominal symmetry. While settler colonialism draws attention to several overlooked issues (power asymmetry, the centrality of land, and political elimination), egalitarian binationalism argues that it fails to capture the national dimension of Israeli Jewish identity and remains underdetermined regarding what would be the ultimate outcome of decolonization. The overwhelming majority of one-state advocates are suspicious of a prescriptive bi-national paradigm that would afford the two national groups equal collective rights, primarily because its recognition of Israeli-Jewish national self-determination is seen as entrenching, rather than decolonizing, colonial relations of power. I argue that an egalitarian binationalism in fact offers rich resources for a decolonizing project in Israel/Palestine that seeks to establish a polity based on the principles of justice and equality, coming to terms with historical injustices, and imagining alternative pasts, presents, and futures based on Palestinian-Israeli relationships. In this way, egalitarian binationalism is better equipped to address the persistent and underlying issues of the conflict and its colonial realities. The national entry within the frame of binationalism is very critical for Palestinians because of its emancipatory potential. Articulating the Palestinian struggle in national terms has a liberating power given the centrality of denial, negation, and misrecognition that informed the development of Palestinian nationalism, whether from Zionism, Arab regimes, or western powers. Therefore, it is the language of national identity and not post-national identity (in its liberal variant or in others) that grants Palestinians confirmation and recognition of their peoplehood. Thus, the binational frame that takes seriously the existing realities of intertwinements secures the recognition of this constitutive dimension of Palestinian identity.
Egalitarian binationalism recognizes the right to national self-determination of both national groups while insisting that this right ought to not be realized in the form of an exclusive ethnic state.
The national entry within the proposed egalitarian binationalism reasonably addresses two main historical arguments, though contested and controversial, in support of Jewish nationalism too. Based on the traumatic and long history of antisemitism and Jewish persecution, the first argument maintains that Jews need a shelter run by Jews and with Jewish veto power. The egalitarian binationalism that I propose here affords ample protection and representation for Jews. The second prevailing argument is that Jews are entitled to national self-determination, like other nations, preferably, in the Holy Land where they have religious and historical attachments. In light of intertwined realities and theological attachments to the entire land of Israel/Palestine, the proposed egalitarian binationalism insists that these aspirations for self-determination and normalization are better met by binational arrangements than by the two-state or one (liberal)-state solutions.
Unlike other fashionable theoretical frames that are “imported” (liberalism, multiculturalism, indigeneity etc.) to explain realities or envision futures in Israel/Palestine, the egalitarian binationalism that I propose is based on and inspired by the concrete and existing realities in Israel/Palestine where the life and future of Jews and Palestinians are intertwined. It starts from the local conditions in order to conceptualize the solution for Israel/Palestine and then moves to global claims and comparisons.
Bashir Bashir is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology, Political Science, and Communication at the Open University of Israel and a senior research fellow at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute. His primary research interests are nationalism and citizenship studies, liberalism, democratic theory, decolonization and the politics of reconciliation. Among other numerous publications, he is the co-editor of The Holocaust and Nakba: A New Grammar of Trauma and History(Columbia University Press, 2018); and The Arab and Jewish Questions: Geographies of Engagement in Palestine and Beyond(Columbia University Press, 2020). His writings have appeared in English, Hebrew, Arabic, Italian, and German.
Adriaan van Klinken’s 
The Arab and Jewish Questions: Geographies of Engagement in Palestine and Beyond
