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Beyond the West: Nationalism, Religious Literacy, and the War in Ukraine


Orthodox priests saying offices during the Euromaidan protests, Jan 21, 2014. Image via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 3.0

Western interpretations on the war in Ukraine commonly ignore the importance of both nationalism and religion, even though such elements are arguably essential for understanding the sources of democratic resistance in Ukraine, the motivations behind Russian aggression, and the complex futures that confront the Ukrainian and Russian peoples. The following post critiques one example of western liberal reportage and offers an alternative reading that takes nationalism and religion seriously in the interpretive process.         

The War in Ukraine: Beyond Western Framing

In the weeks leading up to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, a campaign begun in 2014 and escalated with criminal brutality on February 24, 2022, many in the west began thinking about the political and social makeup of the Ukrainian nation for the first time. For millions, the New York Times’ flagship podcast The Daily became a place to hear expert analysis and reportage on the war in Ukraine interwoven with explanations of history and place in ways that are brief, digestible, and accessible. For instance, the episode of February 15—‘How Ukrainians View This Perilous Moment’—arranged a suite of powerful personal stories told from the capital Kyiv and several regional contexts into a narrative challenging President Putin’s assumptions about Ukrainian submission to the looming Russian takeover. How insightful such a report proved to be: since the 2022 invasion, the refrain Slava Ukraini (“Glory to Ukraine”) has evoked images of defiance in the face of tyranny, national sacrifice in the struggle against oppression, and of hope and despair on the outer edges of catastrophe.

The magnitude of western solidarity with Ukraine, both its military and humanitarian expressions, can arguably be explained by both the moral gravity and existential proximity of the conflict. These factors are embodied in how civilians have become collateral victims and strategic targets of Russian aggression. Of equal significance, I suggest, is the translatability of the Ukrainian resistance into the idioms of western liberalism. In particular, the discursive superstructure of “democracy versus autocracy” situates the war in Ukraine in a Manichean world that pits the struggle for freedom against the demagogic intentions of a tyrant. The name of Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, has become universally associated with democratic liberty, much as the names of others before him in different times and contexts. Such inspiring dynamics of solidarity-making are clearly welcome, especially as a sustained humanitarian response by the west toward millions of Ukrainian refugees will no doubt be required. 

Yet we are also provoked to ask what may be lost in translating the Ukrainian resistance through the discursive filter of “democracy versus autocracy,” and why this might impact the nature of our solidarity as well as long-term prospects for peace. How might the fight be reimagined beyond westernism and western interests? And how might this reimagining thicken our understanding of democracy and the resources that inform it? I return my thoughts to The Daily, the globally popular investigative podcast that also offers a portal into the liberal worldview, and arguably the best version of it. As its millions of followers would attest, The Daily is nothing if not highly scripted, tightly produced around dramatic pauses, metered interjections, the juxtaposition of serious content with tip-toe curiosity sound bites, evocative theme music, and the communication of mature and insightful analysis in tension with a kind of “explainer baby talk” where the listener is simultaneously informed and infantilized. The movement between these experiences, I suggest, mirrors liberalism itself, notably its nimble capacity to simplify collective phenomena for individual consumption via a reductively thin rendering of social space. In this context, what is left out of a story becomes as important as what is put in.  

The Heavenly Hundred: Religion, the Sacred, and National Belonging

Street Memorial to the Heavenly Hundred Victims, 2018. Image via Flickr user Adam Jones (CC BY 2.0)

The initial encounter in the podcast episode on February 15, 2022 illustrates this dynamic. The report first visits a memorial site in Kyiv dedicated to the 100-plus people who are remembered as the Heavenly Hundred. They were killed in a popular uprising, known as both the Maidan Revolution and the Revolution of Dignity, that began in late-2013 against the Russian controlled government of Ukraine. Describing the site as “this black steel and granite monument with these kind of spectral faces taken from real life photos of individuals,” the Daily report accurately depicts the memorial as dedicated to a tipping-point event in the modern history of the Ukrainian nation, whose victims are lauded as heroes for the principles of democracy, human rights and freedoms. The podcast narrative twice emphasises the fallen as “individuals” who, collectively, “through the force of numbers, through the force of their own will,” overthrew the regime of President Viktor Yanukovych. Adding to the narrative is an encounter with “two elderly women there in headscarves, cleaning up the site.” As a final comment, the reporter conveys an explanation from one of the women about her actions. He says: “Every time one of the individuals who died during the uprising in 2014 has a birthday, she hangs their photos on a little holder here and rings a bell.”

End of scene.

The underlying emphasis of this brief account is one of civic defiance, of spontaneous ritualized choices by individual citizens, also depicted later in the report as “college students and history professors” joining volunteer brigades to fight the Russian incursion into Eastern Ukraine. Few would doubt the inspiration of such citizen courage, but as an educative process about the dynamics of resistance in Ukraine—of helping listeners to enter into a social and political space very different from their own; to understand, as the episode’s title suggests, “how Ukrainians view this perilous moment”—the Daily’s account at the memorial of the Heavenly Hundred is deficient in important ways. Such a criticism might seem unfair given the need to produce a fast-moving podcast, were it not that the missing elements in the story are also absent from all Daily reportage to date (again: what is left out is as instructive as what is put in). The elements to which I refer are those of religion and nationalism as formative resources of communal and institutional resistance to Russian aggression. Not coincidentally, I suggest, dynamics such as these also disrupt the ideological scripts of western liberalism. 

The Daily scene at the memorial of the Heavenly Hundred begins near what the reporter describes as a “small wooden chapel.” Such a detail provokes us to interrogate the religious aspects of the site, whether they are a central or ancillary dimension, and whether they are an original or a later addition to the lived practices of remembrance that occur there. In an essay titled “Commemoration and the New Frontiers of War in Ukraine,” Catherine Wanner offers an incisive answer:

A popular outpouring of grief over the deaths of protesters in February 2014 resulted in individuals creating vernacular memorial shrines, sometimes in the form of graves, to honor those killed … From the beginning, a prominent religious idiom was incorporated into commemorations, as it was in the protests themselves. Candles, icons, and prayer beads, which evoke the veneration of saints, are among the other objects with clear religious meaning that are placed near the shrines (334, italics added).

In 2014 I was invited to write about the place of religion in the Maidan Revolution, and was immediately confronted by how to interpret powerful images of Orthodox priests placing themselves at the deadly center of the protests, actions that added a more traditionally sacral dimension to the events that preceded the vernacular rituals of the post-revolution memorials. Functioning as a corrective to my initial interpretation that religion was indeed ancillary to the struggles for economic and democratic autonomy—and that these priests had less agency, for instance, than in the earlier anti-Communist struggles in Poland—Wanner attributes religion with both a primary and ongoing role in revolutionary sentiment. For instance, 

It has become a tradition for volunteers, soldiers, and others actively engaged in the war effort to come to the Maidan to light a candle near the portraits as a form of ‘blessing’ before they head to the front. In 2017 the exterior wall of St. Michael’s Monastery in downtown Kyiv, where the protesters notably took refuge during the Maidan protests, became the site of a ‘Wall of Remembrance for those Fallen for Ukraine.’ The notable presence of clergy during the protests gave way to a rapid expansion of the number of military chaplains who accompanied soldiers to the east (Wanner 334).

The Australian Stefan Romaniw, the first vice president of the Ukrainian World Congress and a participant in the Revolution of Dignity, recalls the coexistence of ecclesiastical leadership alongside grassroots activism at work in Maidan:  

I recall the street rallies—many hundreds of thousands of people started at Taras Shevchenko National University and marched to Maidan. I remember Patriarch Lubomyr Husar [Patriarch of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church] in an open vehicle speaking to the crowd … Over the course of the revolution, politicians took to the stage, but slowly realized this was a civil revolution—a people’s movement. Civil society took charge.  

For scholars seeking to reinstate religious actors, interests, and practices within the political landscape, the reframing of the Revolution of Dignity through the lens of both vernacular and formal religious expressions would constitute an important finding. Such a reframing, to be sure, represents an advance in applying religious literacy to the Ukrainian struggle because we perceive something thicker and more culturally embedded in the modes of Ukrainian dissent. Specifically, many participants in both the 2014 revolution and the anti-Russian resistance today are buoyed by a sacredness beyond the temporal order just as much as they are motivated to uphold democratic sovereignty within it—and much less by the autonomous citizen-self as the sole occupant and hero of thinner liberal narratives. 

Yet the fusion of religion and national resistance could also be a legitimate cause for concern when applying perspectives more aligned with critical disciplines, such as the contribution of Diane Moore, which require religious literacy to include “an analysis of power and powerlessness” and ask, “Which perspectives are politically and socially prominent and why?” (384). Whatever roles history professors might have played, we do know for certain that the Maidan revolution was comprised of a variety of actors with a variety of interests, “from the liberal intelligentsia to hardcore nationalists.” The specter of a religious nationalism with strong affinities toward national chauvinism, therefore, creates interpretive dilemmas for understanding how some Ukrainians do indeed view this perilous moment. As Wanner observes, 

Religious institutions have tremendous political valence because of their ability to create and morally legitimate new cultural boundaries and the often unsavory emotions that lead to delineations of ‘us’ and ‘them.’ … Many supporters of the Maidan validate religiosity as a fundamental component of Ukrainian nationality (334). 

So we must ask, “nationality for whom”? Might religio-nationalist resolve not only galvanize resistance but also unlock historic legacies of social hostility toward religious minorities in Ukraine, including an increasing number holding to no religion? Critical approaches face a dilemma here: the recognition that religion has always been involved in the world of power has caused many to erase it as the mere epiphenomena of hegemonic structural interests, an inverted form of the modern liberal containment of religion as the mere expression of individualized ethics. In a departure from both approaches, and in solidarity with a scholarly tradition that wants to ask critical questions in-and-through religious beliefs, practices, and belongings, in what follows I suggest the legacies of religion in the war in Ukraine offer frameworks for understanding the broader constitutive forces of nationhood beyond western assumptions and a political hermeneutic guided by the frame of autocracy-democracy.

Religion in the Russian State and the Ukrainian Nation

It is important to briefly declare some of my assumptions and show how they apply to the context of the war. I understand the state to be a bureaucratic entity, and as a researcher more aligned to ethno-symbolic theories of nationalism, I part ways with modernist scholars of both a cosmopolitan and critical persuasion who assume that it is the state that creates the nation.1 While acknowledging the salient insights of a modernist like Siniša Malešević that states can powerfully mobilize nationalist sentiment via institutions, ideology, and networks of micro-solidarity, I also hold Benedict Anderson’s popular modernist idea of the nation as an “imagined community” to be far too anemic. To echo the writings of Anthony Smith, nations are not only imagined, they are willed, felt, remembered, and repurposed, and the deep cultural reservoirs from which such actions are often drawn predate the modern state and in some instances give rise to it. 

While states differ in polity and efficiency (for instance, often less totalized and more random [or aleatory] in their actions toward the vulnerable), the long held axiom of critical theory that states “see” a certain way remains important. In classical terms, the state is more of a Parmenidean entity—defined by unity, where all movement ultimately must serve the One. The state can assert religion as an archetype, as a “first form” indispensable to the reinforcement of a patriotic standard (or canon) and the upholding of sovereignty. The principal example of religion as archetype in the context of the war in Ukraine is the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) and its relationship with the Russian state. In an important essay, Shakhanova and Kratochvíl examine the “patriotic turn” of the ROC via the discursive movements of nomination (naming key actors and concepts), predication (assigning value to actors and actions against a patriotic standard), and argumentation (the construction of a persuasive narrative), leading to the creation of key rhetorical topoi that are employed in the discourses of Russian education and politics. In education, the “topos of indispensability whereby (the Church as the only one who can protect Russia from moral decadence)” develops into a “topos of superiority (Orthodox patriotism is superior to all other kinds).” In politics, the “topos of moral supremacy (the Church’s moral tutelage of the state)” develops into the “topos of power struggle (Orthodox Christians have to be influential in politics)” (120). Religion as archetype is also seen in the authors’ appeal to a 2014 study by M. D. Suslov on the creation of the idea of “Holy Rus.” Here, the archetypal first form is violently imposed upon a geopolitical space, as forecast in President Putin’s now infamous essay of July 12, 2021, “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians.”

In contrast to the state, while different nations can be understood against common sets of ideals and concepts, the processes of their formation are both varied and dynamic. Thus, the nation is more of a Heraclitan entity—defined by movement and the possibility that the flows of history will yield new iterations at once recognizable and reconfigured. If the state can assert religion as a singular archetype, the nation can enable religion more as an ideal-type, that is, as a resource that can support multiple political forms. In the context of the war in Ukraine, religious traditions, practices, and interests have an ambivalent quality and can thus contribute to civil and political cultures of both inclusion and exclusion. Regarding inclusion, that President Zelensky is Jewish in a context shaped by histories not only of social hostility toward Jews but also their elimination as a people, becomes a powerful embodiment of democratic pluralism and the role that religious diversity plays to strengthen Ukrainian nationhood. The same can be said of the public unity in support of the Ukrainian resistance by Muslim, Jewish, and Christian leaders on March 21, 2022 in the ancient port city of Odesa. 

Religion as archetype has been stridently challenged within the majority religious tradition of Christian Orthodoxy in the region. One such example can be found in the ideational texture of the recent statement, A Declaration on The “Russian World” (Russkii Mir) Teaching, by an international network of Orthodox scholars, clergy and lay people against the Russian ideology. First, the primary appeal is to interpretive practices of the Orthodox faith, notably the ethics that stem from situated readings of sacred text. Second, the affirmation of human equality (i.e. beyond confessional and partisan boundaries) is framed as a prophetic challenge to “all forms of government that deify the state.” Third, that a turning away (a metanoia) from the current conflict is also seen as a turning toward “the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.” The sentiments of the Declaration were also echoed in the Statement of Solidarity against Christian Nationalism signed by an international coalition of scholars instigated by a conference at the Blavatnik School of Government at Oxford University. The Tablet reports a detail from the conference that is relevant to the notion of religion as ideal-type:

At a public lecture during the conference, Archimandrite Cyril Hovorun encouraged Orthodox theologians to “weaken symphonia with the state, and strengthen symphonia with civil society.” The Ukrainian priest and academic used the metaphor of “symphonia” or musical unison to describe Orthodoxy’s relationship with the polity.

Religion understood as a set of both distinct yet malleable communal practices and a metaphor for civic unity encapsulates well the potential of religions as ideal-types in the service of the common good, the challenge to hegemonic injustice, and the building of nations.

Of course, symphonia also possesses an ambivalent quality. As William Schweiker has recently noted, in the case of the alliance between Putin and the ROC symphonia has led to belligerence over civility, thereby highlighting the importance of situating symphonia within the ideal-type of the nation rather than the archetype of a religio-state. Such a rejection would also restore transnational Orthodox unity. Notably, in a recent interview Fr. Cyril Hovorun appeals to Orthodox tradition for support of this idea:   

To restore such a unity, in my opinion, the Orthodox churches must condemn the ideology of the Russian world. Such a condemnation would be an update of the famous condemnation of “phyletism” (nationalism applied to ecclesiastical affairs) at the Council of Constantinople in 1872.

Latent within Hovorun’s appeal for a symphonia with civil society is a traditional rejection of the archetype of the religio-state in favor of a preferential option for the plural nation.

“Glory to Ukraine”: Religion and the Sacred Nation    

In the case of Russia’s war on Ukraine, we are arguably presented with a geopolitical adaptation of R. Scott Appleby’s prismatic and enduring concept of the “ambivalence of the sacred”: on the one side, “Holy Russia” founded on the archetype of a singular religio-political ontology; on the other, the Ukrainian nation in a resistance struggle understood by its citizens to be contextually and metaphorically “sacred.” The national exaltation of the Heavenly Hundred memorializes the Revolution of Dignity by infusing this sacredness throughout institutional and popular forms of Ukrainian resistance: the advocacy of traditional hierarchs—religious and civic—on behalf of an oppressed and endangered nation; and the accountability of those same hierarchs to the standards of sacred justice believed in traditional and vernacular ways by a citizen community. For the Ukrainian nation, therefore, the bifurcated discourse of “autocracy vs democracy” does not do justice to all that is at play in the circumstances of this terrible moment, nor to the multilayered and situated meanings of the refrain “Glory to Ukraine.” 

The dynamics of religion and nationalism are inextricably entangled in the scenarios that will unfold in the coming months and years, not only for Ukrainians but also for Russians. To not acknowledge those dynamics presents a serious deficiency in our understanding and our solidarity. When an elderly woman, whose history is intimately bound up in the story of both peoples, rings a bell at a grave of the fallen, it is unlikely that she intends to channel the powers of western liberal individualism to her cause; it is instead more reasonable to assume that she is releasing a sound that reverberates through spaces that are as primordial as they are modern, linked to communities of both the present and the past, and ritualized in the hope that the sustaining presences of a sacred social order will one day give rise to a renewed and better life for her people. 

Slava Ukraini.

____


1  For example, I have employed ethno-symbolic theory to argue that the constitutive dimensions of nationalism can be employed to counter the forces of national populism. See John A. Rees, “Religion, populism, and the dynamics of nationalism,” Religion, State and Society, 49, no. 3 (2021): 195–210. For a recent use of Anthony D. Smith’s ethno-symbolic approach in the study of religion and nationalism, see Gurharpal Singh and Giorgio Shani, Sikh Nationalism: From a Dominant Minority to an Ethno-Religious Diaspora (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2021).

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John Rees
John A. Rees, PhD. is Professor of Politics and International Relations at The University of Notre Dame Australia, where he co-convenes the Religion and Global Ethics program at the Institute for Ethics and Society. Dr. Rees was the 2022 Milward L. Simpson Visiting Fulbright Professor at the University of Wyoming (January-May). This article is based on a public talk cohosted by the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies and the Nanovic Institute for European Studies, delivered at the University of Notre Dame on April 28, 2022.
Theorizing Modernities article

Modernity, Coloniality, and Interiority in Kindred Spirits


Image of various archival materials discussed by Moore in Kindred Spirits. Image courtesy of the author with permission.

Thank you so much to my three generous colleagues, Kathleen Holscher, Niloofar Haeri, and Scott Appleby for their smart and thoughtful readings of my work, and to Atalia Omer and Joshua Lupo for creating this space for a conversation about Kindred Spirits. It is an honor to see how the book has stretched to speak to scholars working in fields adjacent to my own, and engaging with them is a welcome chance to think more explicitly about shared themes in our field—modernity, colonialism, and spirituality—that may have been undertheorized in the book.  All of the thinkers have asked me to be a bit more explicit in my conceptual thinking. I’ll take this as an opportunity to deepen and clarify, and this is a most generous and welcome gift.

To begin with Scott Appleby’s essay, I must say that while reading it, I was seized with sudden flashbacks to my earliest semester teaching undergraduates fourteen years ago, when I would painstakingly try and define modernity for my students. I used Gustsavo Benievides’s Critical Terms essay, and would re-trace, whiteboard marker in my trembling hand, the various meanings of the Latin term modernus, and how it changed over time. More than a decade later now, I am in total agreement with Appleby that those debates seem to have fizzled out; I now rarely engage discussions about what we mean when we say “modernity.” Nonetheless I do appreciate Appleby’s point that I sometimes evoke the term more confusingly than maybe I should, sometimes descriptively, other times with a critical edge.

Grateful for the chance to clarify, I would say that my research relied on scholars of race and transatlantic modernity like Paul Gilroy to make an empirical point about the world that formed the protagonists of Kindred Spirits. Like those Gilroy writes about, some of the writers, poets, and activists in my book also experienced forced exile, fled violence, and lived rootless, vulnerable lives. This form of existence made friendship such an important anchor. This rootlessless also was something that writers like Claude McKay and Gabriela Mistral evoked in the art that give their works a wide, eclectic appeal and reach. This is a descriptive way of thinking about modernity: the global circuits carved from the violence of modernity—enslavement, wars, genocide—and the internationalist, eclectic art that came out of those same circuits. But the critical edge Appleby points to evokes the idea of the modern differently. One example here is where I suggest that male friendship offers an alternative to the dominant modes of male subjectivity that the modern world has on offer (think of the controlled, tough, independent “bottled up version of masculinity”).  I do think that modernity is a swirl of cultures, fantasies, hopes, and imaginations, but in the west, despite this empirical mix, there are dominate cultural ideals that define what it means to be modern. I would say that one of these is that men should be emotionally restrained, untethered, and unencumbered. This suspicion of male intimacy was also central to colonial ideologies. Fantasies of male intimacy and sexuality in colonial countries were recoded as sexual sin, in need of Christian intervention and restraint. Or, as Marie Griffith and others have shown, these fantasies became the grounds of elaborate romanticization of sexual freedoms unburdened by western religious constraints. In either case, the Christian west was seen to be the space where men lived lives of independence and restraint when it came to intimacy. Though living in Europe and the United States and Christian, the men I describe in Kindred Spirits lived lives in radical disjunction to that dominant norm. And much of the ideas for this alternative did come from medieval monks (whose affective lives were more “uncorked,” to use Appleby’s words). Marie Magdeleine Davy wrote on the elaborate love expressed among Cistercian monks and Brian Patrick Maguire has written beautifully on medieval male friendship. These were models of alternative ways to embody masculinity taken up by people like Jacques Maritain and Louis Massignon. The affective, even queer way Maritain and Massignon carried themselves is “modern” in a sense because modernity creates space for the perpetuation of hegemonic norms as well as their subversion. I hope this clarifies the point I was trying to make in the book.

I will add here that when Appleby writes that I exhibited a “reluctance to stand back from the reporting of  . . . richly detailed research” in some places, I felt he was peering into my soul a bit! The archival sources I used were so vast, so personal, so difficult to excavate, and the authors themselves were so prolific that it sometimes overwhelmed me. I feared I would never get out from under the sources. It is refreshing to now truly step back and bring these larger conceptual points into focus.

I do, however, depart from the conclusion that the “collective agency” of the men and women in my book “did not amount to much,” especially compared to “champions of the ressourcement such as Henri de Lubac and Marie-Dominique Chenu” and those like “Jacques Maritain….who interacted consistently with the Vatican.” I would emphasize here that the world I describe in Kindred Spirits includes Maritain and de Lubac, but by centering those more on the margins (like Davy, Massignon, McKay, Mistral) I move away from centers of Catholic power. White male priests like de Lubac or those White men loved by priests like Maritain were always invited into the halls of power. They looked like that power, and places like the Vatican and Notre Dame recognized them, applauded them, and welcomed them. Black writers like Claude McKay or the Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral were illegible to the people in those places and operated in another sphere. As artists, McKay and Mistral worked at the level of imagination untethered to the levers of power in the 20th century. It is thus much harder to track what impact artists had on the cultural imagination than those invited to Geneva or Rome. But I would be reluctant to say they had no impact: McKay offered up in his poetry a completely new vision of what Black resistance could look like, and he is still read today.  Mistral won the Nobel Prize for literature. Louis Massignon completely transformed the study of Islam for Catholics and inspired many of the Dominicans who remain prominent and influential scholars of Islam today. But this is a different kind of power. One of their impacts was in dispersing Catholic spirituality to places beyond the reach of the Vatican.

And I am so grateful to Katie Holscher who raises the important issue of coloniality and friendship, especially in U.S. contexts. I had a long section on the language of friendship in relationship to colonialism, associations exactly like those Holscher describes as the “Friends of the Indians” that “worked to dispossess Native peoples.” But this ended up being too far afield from the figures in my book. Still, I don’t want to let the figures in the book off the hook too easily. I especially related to Holscher’s evocations of Catholic confraternities that prayed for the living and the dead, a mix of spiritual and social bonds, in the language of love. Despite the softness of the language and the depth of the mysticism and the fact that it was Catholicism in a secular-Protestant country like the United States, the Catholic mystical imagination in communities like Friends of the Indian still worked to further colonial dynamics. She is exactly right on this point. Although the figures in my book tended to be critical of state power, there is a range in their approaches to this issue. Early in his career, for instance, Louis Massignon’s efforts at friendship with Muslims entailed a mix of prayer and pressure for conversion and we can see the colonial dynamics at work in the way Holscher describes. The most tragic figure in my book is that of the young Muslim scholar Muhammad abd Jalil, who converted to Islam under Massignon’s friendship and care, and was more or less disowned by his parents. Jalil spent time in a mental institution and had a very difficult life. Massignon’s ideas evolved over time, but the issue of friendship as a language that can soften the sound of colonialism is part of the story indeed. As I was writing, I had to remind myself that friendship is much like any other basic human endeavor: eating, walking, play, childbirth, swimming, loving, talking, fighting – something so basic and universal that it can be invested with an almost infinite range of meanings. But a story of the spirituality and politics of Catholic friendship with ties to Paris is one that should never exclude the ways in which this world has been entangled with colonialism. I appreciate this point and could have done more to stretch this. I imagine the possibility of a rich and needed volume on friendship in modern religion, where one would see friendship’s range across geographic, linguistic, and cultural contexts. When taken together, we could see what theoretical insights we could glean from a wide ranging set of data that reveals different stories friendship, spirituality, colonialism, and decolonialism in the modern world. This is so important with words like friendship, words that are warm, spiritual, and seemingly harmless. It is important to not simply show that there is always hegemony lurking there, but to open it up, explore it empirically, and be able to stretch our understanding of this important mode of human experience.

Shifting more from the political realm of structures and back into the inner domain, in terms of academic specialty, the scholarship of Niloofar Haeri, an anthropologist of Islam, is furthest from my own.  It means a great deal that she connected to Kindred Spirits, and her own scholarship on friendship, kinship, prayer, and poetry has been an important influence on my thinking. Her essay here reminds me why. The language she uses keeps us tethered to the spiritual and the interior, even if it is always, in her hands, entangled with the external realms of language, culture, and embodiment. But nonetheless it has its own kind of integrity. She describes my work on friendship in this way: “There were beloved saints and some contemporaries whose being seemed to emanate a certain blessedness (very similar to the concept of those who are seen to have baraka in Muslim communities). That members of this group saw sacredness as not limited to the divine and to saints and prophets is one of the most interesting discussions in the book.” Reading Haeri I am forced to confront my own habits. For example, I often emphasize the political nature of experiments and efforts of the friendship networks I describe. But for them, it was how friends embodied some part of the supernatural that was most fundamental. The beautiful phrase “to emanate a certain blessedness” (baraka) inspires in me a desire to learn more about the idea in Muslim communities.

Thank you again so much to Katie, Scott, and Niloofar for these incredibly helpful readings that pushed me at last to stand back and clarify my conceptual thinking.  I find myself now looking to future projects as a chance to be more explicit in my analysis of how experiments in Catholic spirituality worked to advance or undermine the French colonial project – I was too subtle on that point and need to tackle it more directly. I am also reminded too of the need for further elaboration of second, rather distinctive impulse to consider the experiential aspects of religion, the piety and devotion that requires a somewhat different set of analytic tools. In future projects I hope to go further with both of those rather distinct set of questions, both of which I find fascinating and can tackle more explicitly head on. Thank you again to my generous readers and colleagues.

 

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Brenna Moore
Brenna Moore is Professor of Theology at Fordham University. She works in the area of modern Christianity, with a focus on Catholic intellectual and cultural history in Europe. Dr. Moore’s teaching and research centers on mysticism and religious experience, gender, a movement in theology known as “ressourcement,” (“turn to the sources”) that paved the way for Vatican II, and the place of religious difference in modern Christian thought. She is most recently the author of Kindred Spirits: Friendship and Resistance at the Edges of Modern Catholicism (University of Chicago Press, 2021). This project explores a remarkable network of Catholic historians, theologians, poets, and activists who pushed against both the far-right surge in interwar Europe and the secularizing tendencies of the leftist movements active in the early to mid-twentieth century.
Theorizing Modernities article

Modern Mystic Activist Scholars Resist Fascism, Colonialism, and Definitional Pigeonholing: A Comment on Brenna Moore’s Kindred Spirits


St. Patrick’s Cathedral on 5th Ave in New York, NY. Photo Credit: Flickr User a.has. CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

Brenna Moore’s rich and rewarding analysis of the far-flung network of “spiritual friends” who anticipated and helped shape the ressourcement—the movement for Christian renewal that emerged in the 1920s and 1930s among French Catholic theologians, historians and exegetes—is a painstakingly researched work of historical recovery and interpretation. With the exception of the French mystic, philosopher, and political activist Simone Weil and the neo-Thomist exponent of Christian humanism Jacques Maritain, the protagonists of Kindred Spirits—the distinguished Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral, the accomplished scholar of Medieval Christian mysticism Marie-Magdeleine Davy, the writer and catalyst of the Harlem Renaissance Claude McKay, the pioneering and yet inimitable Islamicist Louis Massignon—stand outside the circle of influential Catholic thinkers familiar to most American religious historians, not to mention students of modern Catholicism.

Yet the singular preoccupation of these institutional outsiders—their conceptualization and attempted enactment of the holy community as an inclusive, borderless spiritual fellowship of love—anticipated the retrieval of the Biblical model of the Church as a “mystical body” (endorsed in Pope Pius XII’s encyclical of 1943, Mystici Corporis Christi). In turn, their critique of “religious power” foreshadowed Catholicism’s decisive confrontation with secular modernity, which led to the Church’s accommodation of religious pluralism and to the abandonment of the long-held dream of establishing Roman Catholic states across the globe—these sea changes were ratified by the Second Vatican Council (1962–’65).

While Moore gestures toward a shared legacy of the “kindred spirits,” her focus is elsewhere. Accentuating her protagonists’ rejection of “the inherited ties of family, tradition and nation” in favor of a medieval and antimodern mode of belonging, Moore takes aim at the male clerics who narrowed Catholic theology in such a way as to authorize and reinforce their own institutional power (and who, until recently, dominated the historiography as well). The individuals profiled by Moore gravitated to the margins of this ecclesial arrangement. By situating her protagonists’ public careers and published works as well as their private and inner lives (as disclosed by their correspondences, diaries, memoirs, and fragments) in the context of their shared affinities, disagreements, and sometimes tenuous relationships with one another, Moore makes accessible their attempt at creating nouvelles familles spirituelles, a radically countercultural spiritual network. Strikingly, they deemed this “alternate mode of belonging” an appropriate response to the descent of European civilization into the darkness of racism and the chaos of war.

The book raises three meta-questions, each of which is telegraphed by its tantalizing subtitle: “Friendship and Resistance at the Edges of Modern Catholicism.” Moore’s way of dealing with these questions advances Contending Modernities’ exploration of how “identity” is constructed, contested, policed, and transformed under the shifting conditions of what we loosely refer to as “modernity.” While Moore focuses on religion, and Catholicism in particular, the story she tells of these boundary-dwelling thinkers underscores the necessity to resist facile reliance on gender, race, and nation as stable categories by which to understand the fluidity of the modern period and modern identities.

Grappling with Multiple Modernities

First, what do we mean by “modern”? Ah, modernity! Of the writing of essays, theses, tomes, blogs, and doggerel plumbing the depths—or the shallows, I begin to suspect—of our deployments of “the modern,” there seems no end. Alas: the more I read, the less I understand, and so I cling desperately to ready-at-hand conventions, whereby “modernity” signifies the condition of being modern, whatever that is, and “modernism” the distilled essence of the modern, raised or reduced to an aesthetic, a hermeneutical strategy, a political project, and/or a theological/philosophical cudgel. This formulation, of course, is completely inadequate.

Moore does little to clarify but much to complicate and perhaps (intentionally?) to confuse the question. In some passages the modern seems to refer to a historically specifiable period, and to events therein which helped to define that period as modern. Channeling scholars of African diasporic practices, for example, Moore ties the global circulation of ideas “in modernity” to “. . . the slave trade, the global history of the notion of race, and the making of transnational Black cultures all as key to the formation of the modern world” (234). Elsewhere modernity, the condition of being modern, is identified with certain (regrettable and recognizably American) cultural, social, and individual characteristics, such as “. . . the modern ideology of isolation that prioritizes the self-made man or woman, a bottled-up version of masculinity, and a world where we are better left alone, with our border sealed and gates locked, left to find pleasure in our own private family lives” (253). This connotative strategy becomes less useful when it takes on its own polemical and ideological shadings (e.g., “a bottled-up version of masculinity”) or when it specifies traits that do not seem distinctive to the modern period. (It is not clear, for example, how the medieval monks’ version of masculinity was, by comparison, uncorked.)

Portrait photograph of Claude McKay, 1920. Unknown artist. Public Domain. Via Wikimedia Commons.

By contrast, relatively little attention is given to definitions and aspects of modernity pinned to the hubris of “modernization theory,” à la Weber and Parsons, which at the time correlated modernity with “development” driven by superior technical and scientific skill possessed by the “enlightened” West. Yet, this virulent intellectual strain reinforced the subjugation of supposedly benighted “pre-scientific” Black and Brown peoples, against which McKay, Mistral, Massignon, and other of the book’s protagonists railed. Their shared “resistance” against European imperial ambition, reductive materialism, the valorization of technocracy, and racialist theories underlying colonialism put them on the edges of modernity, in one accepted use of the term, and on the edges of modern Catholicism in its (soon to be contested) religious nationalist mode. And yet, their embrace of religious pluralism and celebration of Muslim, Hindu, Jewish, and indigenous artists, writers, poets, and scholars; rejection of the confessional state; and search for a middle way between the excesses of both capitalism and Soviet-era Marxism—these stances, too, were “modern,” and they prefigured Catholicism’s imminent theological and social transformations.  Not least, our heroes “on the edges” did benefit from at least one dimension of “techno-scientific modernity,” namely, the enhanced travel and communication among exiled peoples scattered across the globe, a convenience which enabled the spiritual friends to advance “various modes of internationalist belonging.” (The idealization of medieval mysticism notwithstanding, none of them were sedentary monks.)

Moore’s reluctance to stand back from the reporting of her richly detailed research and her quasi-biographical method in order to probe and clarify the ideological options present in the modern world and available to her protagonists—a tangle of ideas and values, some of which resonated with and shaped their political and aesthetic sensibilities—leads to some confusing (which is not to say inaccurate) claims. Opposed to Nazism and European colonialism alike, her protagonists, we are told, were “anti-modernists but not fascists.” The implication is that anti-modernism is compatible with and might even lead to fascism. Depending on how one defines modernism and anti-modernism, that implication may be correct. On the other hand, if one hews to the (plausible) dictum that fascism is a quintessentially modern evil, the consequence of a sterile, inhumane rationality empowered by the destructive prowess of the modern war-making state, then anti-modernism of a sort would seem not to buttress fascism but rather to discredit its pernicious assumptions. (The conflation of theological, philosophical, and political expressions of modernism adds to the confusion.) In any case, Moore tends to invoke terms like “anti-modernism” without much attention to their divergent meanings.

Thankfully, Moore attempts no recondite terminological treatises on “the modern” and, to be fair, she engages the admittedly squishy zeitgeist throughout the narrative. Still, her subjects had a complicated and sometimes confusing relationship to modernity and to modernism. To take another example, much is made of the anti-family bias of the Maritains, Mistral, Davy, Weil, and (the married father) Massignon, and Moore seems to associate their preference for spiritual rather than carnal relationships with a form of neo-medievalism. One unexamined assumption supporting this reading is a presumed radical discontinuity between medieval and modern gender roles, with an implicit idealization of the former. Moore’s admirable honesty about the failures of her protagonists to live up to the ideals they articulated—she notes that Mistral, McKay and Weil, for example, could be frustratingly aloof, self-absorbed, and isolationist for long stretches—raises the question of whether they really preferred any kind of “friendship” or “bond of love” sufficiently thick to endure the passage of time and the distance of place. Given the fragility of the friendships over time, can we really conclude that they “offer a striking alternative to many of the ideas that prevail in our own time” (253)?

Examined in its disparate manifestations across decades and centuries, Modernity—the condition as well as the term—eludes the precision of a good definition and upsets expectations.

In short: Were these inescapably modern figures also counter-modernists, anti-modernists, neo-medievalists, all of the above? Or were they merely “on the edges”?

Examined in its disparate manifestations across decades and centuries, Modernity—the condition as well as the term—eludes the precision of a good definition and upsets expectations: modern people are practiced in the selective retrieval and recombination of scattered bits of identity and ideas originally embedded in a specific time and place. For this reason, we need not be surprised to find modern would-be monks inhabiting metropolises and universities, theologates and factories. Nor should we be surprised that celibate marriages like that of the Maritains existed alongside traditional sexual practices and gender roles. All of these kinds of options, and more, can be said to be “modern,” but of course that is insufficient if we are to understand the variation and continual contestation that marks the era. Just when we label something “modern,” we find ample alternative practices, lifestyles, and ideas which can also be said to constitute the modern world.  Oh, the irony of it all!

The Political Implications of Spiritual Friendship

How are we to understand the relationship between political activism and spiritual friendship? Is “resistance” the residue of mystical experience or its very essence? How does holiness or perceived holiness shape power relations? Does “religious power” reverse or otherwise upend the experience and expectations of mundane political power?

Moore plants various clues to assist in solving such perennial puzzles. Describing the “spiritual power” of Massignon’s influence on Davy, she remarks that “. . .there has never been a time when intimacy between friends was possible in a context immune frow power and politics” (141). This is perhaps a cynical view, depending on whether “context” refers to interpersonal dynamics or rather to impersonal cultural currents. Moore seems to suggest that these two contexts are inseparable, given that the “. . . warmth of spiritually powerful friendship is no safe haven from other kinds of power, no magic circle protected from race, gender, and religious difference, but intimacy and friendship have their own specific religious power within these broader societal forces” (141). The sacred “is made real through the personal spheres of intimacy that happen always within, and alongside, the more diffuse networks of discursive and nondiscursive power” (142). One wishes for guidance as to what constitutes “religious power.”

Drawing of Simone Weil. Via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.

Is love, even interpersonal love, incapable of transcending power politics? Perhaps—especially if Davy and other of the book’s “heroes,” as Moore calls them, attempted to channel their intensely personal and mystical love for one another into “the more diffuse networks of discursive and nondiscursive power” by which bureaucratic systems are reformed and the suffering masses liberated (142). In that case, love is reduced from care for the individual person to generalized concern for the abstract masses, and the movements for reform and houses of solidarity come and go, vulnerable to the shifting social trends and political currents of the day. And, indeed, this was the fate of many of the activist organizations and movements founded or embraced by the kindred spirits.

The “concrete mysticism” (my phrase) of Simone Weil, for example, was a self-conscious attempt to place the radical attentiveness of person-centered mystical love at the heart of social action. Active in the 1930s in workers’ rights campaigns in Europe, Weil taught high school and subsequently worked in a Renault auto factory and then on a farm in Marseilles—all to avoid the abstractions of philosophy (even of “personalism”) and to experience poverty and quotidian suffering on the margins of society firsthand. Weil “placed her hope in the individual who cultivated the art of radical attention to those easiest to ignore,” Moore concludes (160). That Weil was at best a casual participant in the internationalist mode of belonging suggests that friendships kept alive by correspondences across time and space might help to inspire attentiveness to the person but cannot replace it. It is encouraging, then, when we learn in these pages of the heroes’ concrete commitments to the local poor, the student, the worker.

Which Modern Catholicism?

What, then, is “modern” about Modern Catholicism? Complicity with fascism or support of Christian Democracy? (Davy and others had doubts about both.) The Church presented as a divine and inerrant institution governed by the Magisterium and canon laws created by White European priests? Or, a mystical body incorporating all spiritual communicants of whatever religious or secular background? (The spiritual friends were inclined to give priority to the latter.)

The thesis of Catholic Modern, James Chappell’s masterful account of mid-twentieth century transformations in the Catholic countries of France, Germany, and Austria, is that the tragic encounter and debilitating alliance with totalitarianism led to the Church’s “turn to modernism.” Far from telling a singular, happy story of Church modernization, he writes, historians are tracking the emergence and historical agency of different forms of Catholic modernism, by which he means the ways people strive ‘’to make themselves secure in a constantly changing world.’” “If secular modernity is a state-sanctioned condition of religious freedom,” Chappel writes, “religious modernism can be understood as a set of tactics that religious communities use to conceptualize, mobilize within, and shape that modern settlement” (5).  Another irony of modern religion is that the “privatization” of religion once touted as constitutive of the modern settlement led not to the withdrawal of religions and religious actors from the public square and their depoliticization, but rather, as Chappell puts it, a movement toward “new forms of public intervention that can be legitimated in the name of that sacred private sphere” (5).

Can the loose network of spiritual friends pursuing their separate if interrelated vocations in different regions of the globe and corners of the world of ideas be called “pioneers” or merely fellow travelers on the road to a Catholic modernity?

Where did our heroes stand in this decades-spanning struggle to give birth to a new mode of Catholic presence in the modern world? Reading Moore’s authoritative account of their attitudes toward and engagement with the ideas and agents of this ecclesial, political, economic, and social evolution (e.g., champions of the ressourcement such as Henri de Lubac and Marie-Dominique Chenu, influential Catholic economists such as Theodor Brauer, etc.) one finds it impossible to generalize or to place the spiritual friends as a collective in a particular camp. Despite some shared political and intellectual convictions, their collective agency did not amount to much, and at times they seemed indifferent to, or openly skeptical of the Catholic modernization agenda as it emerged. Among them, Jacques Maritan was the one (the only one?) who interacted consistently with the Vatican, with major theorists of the modern state, and with influential European or American Catholics. Weil, we are told, dismissed the campaign for human rights, which became central to the new Catholic “modernist” identity. And if Europe was the epicenter of the emergent Catholic modernism, Davy, Mistral, Massignon, and McKay operated on the racial, regional, and cultural “margins” in provocative but also constructive ways.

Can the loose network of spiritual friends pursuing their separate if interrelated vocations in different regions of the globe and corners of the world of ideas be called “pioneers” or merely fellow travelers on the road to a Catholic modernity? Kindred Spirits waffles on this question and hesitates to provide an integrating motif or orientation that would situate Massignon and Mistral, the Maritains and Davy, and the others within a stable conceptual framework. In the final analysis, however, this resistance is perhaps the most eloquent statement Moore makes about “modernity” as well as “Catholic modernity.” For how can her subjects, or any of us, be said to operate on the edges of something whose boundaries are so permeable, ill-defined, and constantly shifting?

 

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Scott Appleby
Scott Appleby (Ph.D. University of Chicago, 1985) is the Marilyn Keough Dean of Notre Dame’s Keough School of Global Affairs. Appleby, a professor of history at Notre Dame, is a scholar of global religion who has been a member of Notre Dame’s faculty since 1994. He graduated from Notre Dame in 1978 and received master’s and Ph.D. degrees in history from the University of Chicago. From 2000-2014, he served as the Regan Director of the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies. Appleby co-directs, with Ebrahim Moosa and Atalia Omer, Contending Modernities, a major multi-year project to examine the interaction among Catholic, Muslim, and secular forces in the modern world.
Theorizing Modernities article

Catholic Friendship, Porosity, and the “Coloniality of Being”


Catholic theologian Louis Massignon circa 1956. Image via Wikimedia Commons. CC-BY-SA 3.0

Brenna Moore’s wonderful book Kindred Spirits: Friendship and Resistance at the Edges of Modern Catholicism invites us to consider the ontology of Catholic friendships. While reading it, I found myself returning to one question: How do Catholic friendships exist amid the conditions of knowing, living, and relating that organize, and emanate from, modern nation-states? Here I’ll pose this question about the United States in a way that pays attention to the United States’ colonial underpinnings.

In Kindred Spirits, Moore recovers the spiritual friendship of Louis Massignon and Mary Kahil as it caught fire in 1934 on the day they rode by train together to a Franciscan chapel in Damietta, Egypt, and professed a shared vow to live their lives for Muslims (94). For the next three decades, Massignon and Kahil were radically altered by the porosity between them: their selves opening and mingling across distances, traversing boundaries of family, sexual mores, and the nation-state. This porosity collapsed, by extension, what Charles Taylor calls the “immanent frame,” that secular order that renders political and social life as bounded human affairs. Their friendship dissolved the modern conditions that permit a person to distinguish themself as an isolable actor, apart from God. “Massignon’s increasing belief that God was present in the intimacy of their bond had a way of letting this love [between he and Kahil] off its leash,” Moore writes, “as they experienced a madder and deeper passion” (96).

The friendship between Massignon and Kahil, and other early-to-mid twentieth-century spiritual friendships that Moore carefully narrates in Kindred Spirits, were, as the author suggests, glimmers of holy light tended among Catholic intellectuals, artists, and activists who recognized their specialness amid a gathering darkness. This specialness was marked by the accumulating clouds of fascism on one side, and the assumptions of godlessness orienting liberal and leftist political thought on the other. These “extraordinary friendships” conjured worlds apart from predominant strains of nationalism and liberalism and accompanying formations of race and empire, even as they sometimes fell short of their ideals and replicated those systems. These friendships also nurtured activism, “sustain[ing] a spiritual and sensual undercurrent out of which political action seemed to flow” (12).

In their brilliance, the “special friendships” Moore recounts in Kindred Spirits also cast light backward and reveal hidden dimensions of the secular modern they exceeded and defied. Though Moore’s own focus remains upon the “wide, wild, and weird field of desire” that sustained these friendships (18), her book provides us a vantage point for approaching, in ways that de-normalize and critique, secular friendships from the same period. The text invites us to attend to the rootedness of secular friendships in time and place, the epistemological and political conditions they’ve relied upon, and their effects in the world (including perhaps their inability to change it). Relatedly, Kindred Spirits invites us to look for other varieties of modern Catholic friendship, and to ask questions about their ontologies and their political effects.

In their brilliance, the “special friendships” Moore recounts in Kindred Spirits also cast light backward and reveal hidden dimensions of the secular modern they exceeded and defied.

To think about ontologies of friendship, Sylvia Wynter’s account of the coloniality of being is useful. Wynter identifies a “de-godding” process—specific to Europe during the age of its imperial expansion—which produced a new mode of being human. This human no longer bent toward the heavens to know who he was, Wynter tells us, but instead turned inward to realize his humanness through the exercise of Reason, the allegiance to the modern nation-state as the apotheosis of Reason, and the differentiation (dehumanization) of racial others. Though culturally specific, this transformed ontology of humanness came to be “overrepresented” as universal and as part and parcel of empire. Reading Moore alongside Wynter, we might now ask: What instances of Catholic friendship persisted (and persist) amid modern projects of empire? What forms of Catholic relationship have conformed to this ontological shift, i.e. to the genre of humanness that has sustained these empires? And which, if any, have exceeded it?

In my research and teaching, I tend to approach the United States as a political formation that is at once modern and settler colonial. I am interested in the US nation-state as an entity that has expended enormous energy, across the centuries, to manage selves, and relationships among them, in ways that ensure deference to its sovereignty, and buy-in to the liberalism that is the medium for its manifestation. I try always to keep in mind how all this has worked to dispossess Native peoples. As a historian of Catholicism, I am interested in Catholic modes of being—and, now reading Moore, in Catholic friendships—that happened in relation to this settler colonial matrix. Reading Kindred Spirits helps me to ask new questions about porosity in these relationships, and specifically about how porosity—if and when it persists amid the modern settler colony—positions Catholic friendships in relation to the sovereignty of the U.S. nation-state.

I will not draw final conclusions here, but I will share a two-part example for consideration. While there is always some risk in drawing sharp contrasts between “Protestant things” and “Catholic things,” here it might prove useful. During the late nineteenth century, a group of prominent US Protestants extended friendship as a mode of relating to Native peoples. As Moore notes in Kindred Spirits, “Catholics were [..] not the only ones drawing from the language and practice of friendship to engage the political world.” Though when their Protestant counterparts did it, they often (if not always) did so with more optimism about liberalism and modernity (14–15). True to this form, to be a “Friend of the Indians”—in the nineteenth century US Protestant sense—was to commit to a relationship that would achieve for Native peoples what their White “friends” already enjoyed: full inclusion in the US political project. The work of assimilation that Friends of the Indians supported was, of course, intended to achieve this purpose. During this period, Protestants involved in crafting US Indian policy also included the federal government as a party in these “friendly” relations. Native children “should be taught to look upon [..] the United States government as their friend,” explained US Commissioner of Indian Affairs Thomas Morgan in 1889 (223). The Friends of the Indians represent, I’d argue, a secular deployment of friendship: an imagined (if not actualized) relationship of care, extending between people who are themselves commonly oriented (again, in the imaginations of those friends) not toward God but toward the benevolent blessing of the liberal nation-state.

Father Marquette preaching to Native peoples (circa 1675) in a stereotypical painting of Catholic colonialism. Image via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

During the same period of US history, settler Catholics also imagined friendship in relation to Native peoples. Sometimes, though, those friendships encompassed supernatural forms. In 1876, Catholic journalist James McMaster used his newspaper to launch a “Confraternity for Reparation to the Indians.” In Catholic worlds, confraternities are groups of lay people joined in common work of charity, piety, or both. Within the Confraternity for Reparation, US Catholic devout would form “bands” comprised of fifteen individuals, with each band collectively producing fifteen daily Hail Mary prayers, as well as forty-five cents (three cents per member), “for the poor Indians and their friends.” The plight of Native peoples, McMaster wrote, “is one that ought to alarm us all.” “We Catholics [..] ought to lay these things to heart; for we are part of the American people, and when their punishment comes, we, assuredly, shall not escape our full share.”[1]

Within the Confraternity for Reparation, friendships extended not only between devout Catholics and Native people they prayed for but—just as importantly—between the Catholic living and the Catholic dead. The dead “can be made partakers of the benefits of this Confraternity, by having living friends contribute [on their behalf],” McMaster explained.[2] The inclusion of departed friends, and building of a work of charity with them, was compelling and real for living Catholics who participated. One eight-year-old from Pennsylvania promised to provide prayers and alms for “ten living and five deceased.” “We [..] promise, ‘honor bright, to say fifteen Hail Marys daily, from our little brother’s box, who died one month ago today,” wrote a pair of siblings from San Francisco.[3] In this way, family ties—and friendships too—were nurtured, and boundaries between life and death dissolved. This all happened as Catholics committed to the work of funding Indian missions, which saved souls in line with theology and doctrine, but also enacted the US colonial dynamic of dispossession.

The Friends of the Indians represent, I’d argue, a secular deployment of friendship: an imagined (if not actualized) relationship of care, extending between people who are themselves commonly oriented (again, in the imaginations of those friends) not toward God but toward the benevolent blessing of the liberal nation-state.

How can we reconcile the porosity that permeated confraternities—the Catholic sensibility of selves reliant upon one another in the work of salvation, and of relationships of love, manifest in collective acts of charity, that ignored boundaries between natural and supernatural—with the modern colonial system they sustained through their devotional work?  Do episodes like this represent transitional moments in a history of US Catholicism that is a story of both secularization and settlement? Or are they evidence of a more complicated—and perhaps less evenly modern—US colonial reality? These are some of the important questions Kindred Spirits raises for me in its attention to spiritual friendships that not only survived but flourished in a modern and secular age.

[1] “The Prefecture Apostolate of Indian Country,” New York Freeman’s Journal and Catholic Register 37, no. 30 (October 10, 1876).

[2] “Union of Prayer and Alms,” New York Freeman’s Journal and Catholic Register 37, no. 32 (October 21, 1876).

[3] “Prayers and Alms in Reparation to the Poor Indians,” New York Freeman’s Journal and Catholic Register 37, no. 36 (November 11, 1876); untitled, New York Freeman’s Journal and Catholic Register 37, no. 38 (December 2, 1976).

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Kathleen Holscher
Kathleen Holscher is Associate Professor of religious studies and American studies, and holds the endowed chair in Roman Catholic studies, at the University of New Mexico. She is the author of Religious Lessons: Catholic Sisters and the Captive Schools Crisis in New Mexico (Oxford University Press, 2012). Her current research focuses on clerical sex abuse amid the history of US Catholic missions to Native peoples. She has written on that topic for Religion Dispatches, The Revealer, The Tablet, and the National Catholic Reporter, as well as for the edited volume Religion and US Empire: Critical New Histories (eds. Tisa Wenger and Sylvester Johnson, forthcoming Spring 2022 with New York University Press)
Theorizing Modernities article

What Does It Mean to Be Religious?


Women in prayer (oil on canvas). Image via Flickr User vanessa.p. CC BY-ND-2.0

A few years ago, I created a new course for an upper-level undergraduate seminar called “What Does it Mean to be Religious?” I wanted the title to be a question to call attention to the fact that so many of us, especially those who don’t think of ourselves as “religious,” take it for granted that we just know the answer, if we ever truly ponder the matter. Most of the time, the question hardly comes up and one regularly runs into trite and cliched shorthand depictions of “religious people” in the media who are held to be responsible for all kinds of things including, singularly, for wars.

In the context of post-revolutionary Iran where the state lays claim both to the spiritual and political realms and uses all media and other means to define Islam, the question of what it might mean to be religious came up insistently and powerfully during my fieldwork—conducted between 2008 and 2016—for my book Say What Your Longing Heart Desires: Women, Prayer, and Poetry in Iran (see CM’s symposium on the book here). In this period, I was spending much of my time with a group of women, some of whom were in friendship and kinship networks. I was following them to their social gatherings, poetry-reading nights, and their Qur’an and poetry classes.  Listening to their conversations about divinity, prayer, religious obligations, the ups and downs of their relationships with God and so on, I was reminded of the work of a number of scholars—such as Robert Orsi, Ann Taves, and Talal Asad—who have argued with great insight for the necessity of re-thinking of religion and its relationship to modernity. This is also what Brenna Moore does in her recent book. Kindred Spirits: Friendship and Resistance at the Edges of Modern Catholicism offers a great opportunity for returning to basic questions about how religion can be inhabited and enacted in ways that are far from “traditional” and/or “pre-modern.”

Moore’s biographies of a group of writers, poets, activists, and scholars makes the reader understand how personal and public lives and in particular friendships were lived in the context of Catholicism—a Catholicism beyond the Vatican and the Pope but still there and insisted upon by these individuals. She calls their way of living Catholicism an “alternative modernity.” I interpreted this description as stating that this form of Catholicism was an alternative to Protestant modernity, or the kind of modernity that is unquestioningly equated with Protestantism as the epitome of a modern religion. I then wondered about how members of the group that Moore discusses were viewed by their Protestant contemporaries and whether they had Protestants in their friendship networks. But I also thought perhaps what is being argued is that given the crucial role that friendship played in how members of this group enacted Catholicism, friendship is an alternative modernity to historically more established categories with which modernity is defined.

Moore’s meticulous archival research amply illustrates Robert Orsi’s insight that “human beings are always accompanied, and any account of a single human life must include these others that accompany that life, for better and for worse” (65). Given Moore’s biographies, it becomes hard to imagine their religiosity as apart from or even weakly linked to their friendships. And in the network of these passionate friends, there were both those who had passed away as well as those who were living—there were beloved saints and some contemporaries whose being seemed to emanate a certain blessedness (very similar to the concept of those who are seen to have baraka in Muslim communities). That members of this group saw sacredness as not limited to the divine and to saints and prophets is one of the most interesting discussions in the book. Among the various correctives that Moore’s book provides is to the widely held idea that doctrine plays a primary role in attracting individuals to religion. As an acquaintance of mine put it recently, this is how those “happy atheists” think.

Among the various correctives that Moore’s book provides is to the widely held idea that doctrine plays a primary role in attracting individuals to religion.

The stereotype is that religious individuals either get indoctrinated since childhood and then as a result lose all their critical faculties in the face of doctrine, or they learn about their (or some) religion’s foundational ideas and become devoted followers once and for all. But each of the individuals Moore discusses—including poets, authors, and scholars—engaged with Catholicism in a way that related its theology to what was going on in their own social and political contexts. Gabriela Mistral who “(re)turns” to Catholicism in her adulthood states, “Our form of Christianity has divorced itself from the social questions, indeed has even disdained it. . . . Catholicism must regain what, either by neglect or selfishness, she has lost, and this will be possible if Catholics show that they are capable of the very essence of her teaching. The hunger for justice awakened in the people cannot be satisfied by a few meager concessions. . . . If we are to be whole-hearted Christians, we will go to the people. Our religion must not restrict itself to mere worship” (41, emphasis added). Although Moore’s study is of a group of Catholics in the early decades of the twentieth century, there are a number of interesting similarities with what I found in my research in Tehran. The idea that religion cannot simply be limited to the mere performance of worship as Mistral put it, is one of them. The group of Shi’a Iranian women that I discuss in my book spent much of their time re-thinking the obligatory ritual prayer, namaz, its experience and its aims, posing questions such as whether prayer that does not prevent harsh judgements of others and lacks love has any worth. They asked, in effect, “Should we keep on praying if we do not become more generous toward the world?”

Returning to my course on what it means to be religious, I find Moore’s book as perfect reading material. In its ethnographic history, it offers many insights into the diverse ways in which members of this group understood religiosity. Besides the scholarly and academic interest of Moore’s book, it can go a long way in creating understanding for those who have turned resolutely against religion. In her book When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God, Tanya Luhrmann explains the purpose of writing her book by saying, “I wrote this book because I think I can explain to non-believers how people come to experience God as real. This is an important story because the rift between believers and non-believers has grown so wide that it can be difficult for one side to respect the other” (xv). Brenna Moore’s fascinating narratives are compelling reading material in helping to lessen this kind of rift. By locating the importance of friendship, its spirituality, the ways in which it propels the creativity of those who were a part of such networks, she illuminates how individuals became and remained “Catholic” without losing their abilities to think critically or alleviate injustices in their societies. Kindred Spirits treats the reader to one of the most persuasive portrayals of how individuals’ religiosity is both public and private and is sustained over difficult periods of their lives and over a lifetime.

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Niloofar Haeri
Niloofar Haeri is professor of Anthropology at Johns Hopkins University and Chair of the Program in Islamic Studies. She is a Guggenheim fellow and a former fellow of the Stanford Humanities Center (2015-2016). Her first book was on language and gender in Egypt, and her second one Sacred Language, Ordinary People: Dilemmas of Culture and Politics in Egypt (2003 published in Arabic in 2011) followed the implications of attempts since the 19th century to “modernize” Classical Arabic—a language primarily associated with the Qur’an; and argued that whereas we are the owners of our vernaculars, we can only be custodians of sacred languages. She is the editor of a Special Section of Hau: The Journal of Ethnographic Theory (2017) where the Protestant notion of sincerity is put in conversation with other religious traditions. Her most recent book is Say What Your Longing Heart Desires: Women, Prayer, and Poetry in Iran (Stanford 2021), which won the Middle East Studies Association’s Fatema Mernissi Book Award and the American Academy of Religion’s Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion: Constructive-Reflective Studies.
Theorizing Modernities article

Introduction to Symposium on Kindred Spirits


Modernity, it would seem, makes little room for friendship. Its economic logic, which often goes by the moniker neoliberalism, seeks to isolate us as individuals from the wider communal contexts in which we live. The Protestant reformation, as some scholars have contended, played no small part in ushering in modernity’s mechanistic and individualistic ethos and the economic system that accompanied it. The result of this process has been to reduce human beings down to their component parts so that we might be more active consumers and more disciplined workers. In the early part of the twentieth century, this reduction birthed totalitarian and liberal modes of governance alike.

It is this story of modernity and its logics that the figures examined in Brenna Moore’s Kindred Spirits: Friendship and Resistance at the Edges of Modernity seek to push back against. Whether in the close circle of friends formed between Gabriela Mistral and Jacques and Raïssa Maritain, or in the spiritual connection formed between Marie-Magdeleine Davy and Simone Weil, these charismatic and avant garde figures drew on Catholic theologies and cultures that stood against the totalitarian worldview that had come to shape many nations in Europe. Without ignoring the role that Catholicism played historically in the colonization of the world and in promoting fascist politics, Moore shows how these thinkers developed an alternative Catholic modernity to the modern world order. With regard to the latter, Claude McKay, another figure that Moore examines, analyzes the links between racism, Protestantism, secularism, and colonialism in the US. In Catholicism, he saw a spiritual alternative to the dry, Protestant, and racist culture of the U.S. While perhaps naive in his embrace of Catholicism as anti-racist and anti-colonial, his critique nonetheless opened up space for being-with-others that pushed back against the dominant trends of his day. McKay, and the other names mentioned above, are only some of those that appear in Moore’s deeply researched and profound book.

The interlocutors invited to participate in this symposium—Niloofar Haeri, Kathleen Holscher, and Scott Appleby—all bring to bear different disciplinary, tradition-based, and geographical expertise on Moore’s book. The result is a symposium that resembles the form of the book itself. By bringing Moore’s insights to their work, these contributors open up space for thought that break through the modern boundaries of nation, discipline, and thought.

In her response, Niloofar Haeri weaves in her own ethnographic research on women’s prayer in Tehran, Iran, with reflections on the contributions Moore’s book makes to our understanding of religion and modernity. She notes that one of the many lessons of Moore’s book is that doctrine is rarely what attracts people to a religion. Rather, it is more often how a religion speaks to the political and social moment in which people find themselves that brings them to it.

Kathleen Holscher, meanwhile, brings Moore’s account of friendship into her own work on the role of friendship in relations between Catholics and Native peoples in the context of the US settler colonial project. By looking at two examples, one from a Protestant religious organization and one from a Catholic organization, she draws out the differing dynamics of friendships in the traditions as they were practiced at the time—the Protestant idea of friendship in service of the nation-state and the Catholic idea in service of more supernatural ends. While Catholics recognized their responsibility towards the plight of the Native peoples—and ultimately a kind of friendship with them that extended beyond the state—Holscher argues that they nonetheless participated in settler colonial practices that deprived Native peoples of their land and religious practices. Holscher asks us to consider, then, the challenging, and sometimes contradictory, dynamics of friendship among these communities, and others.

Scott Appleby, finally, closely analyzes three key questions that are already marked in the title of the book: (1) What do we mean by modernity? (2) What is the relationship between friendship and political activism? (3) What is modern about modern Catholicism? Appleby contends that there is some terminological instability throughout the text, but that this terminological instability perhaps reflects the shifting grounds of the tradition itself as it has found its way into modernity.

In her response, Moore responds to each of these interlocutors, reflecting in particular on the conceptualization of modernity in Appleby’s essay, the intertwining of her subjects with colonial dynamics in Holscher’s response, and the integrity of the inner spiritual experiences of those she writes about in Haeri’s post. She also looks forward to how the contributors’ responses will impact her future work.

As Appleby notes in his essay, Moore’s book “advances Contending Modernities’ exploration of how ‘identity’ is constructed, contested, policed, and transformed under the shifting conditions of what we loosely refer to as ‘modernity.’” Here, I would add that the contributors, in each of their responses, also further that end by engaging Moore’s insights and taking them beyond the borders of the book and into their own research projects.

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Joshua S. Lupo
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.
Decoloniality article

The Myth of the Secular Revolutionary: On Fanon’s Religion


Poster for a presentation titled “Who was Frantz Fanon.” London, May 2017. Via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.

Religion remains an underattended area in contemporary study of Frantz Fanon. This is likely due to the misunderstanding informed by the normative secularist epistemic framework that dictates conversations in humanities and social sciences. The prevailing misunderstanding or bias that pits religion against decoloniality often fails to recognize the ideological (that is, colonial) baggage of the secular and its episteme. The rather simplistic, yet widely held view on Fanon’s relationship with religion, overlooks the numerous nuanced references to religion that he makes. In short, Fanon’s relationship with religion is far more complex and complicated. He constantly appeals to religion even as he deliberately turns away from it. The various streams of decolonial struggles he sets his feet in—be that a political movement or an intellectual tradition—are already entangled in a dynamic and complex interaction with religion. Both his critique of the pernicious presence of religion in social-political life and his gesture to repurpose it (as a vessel to resignify Blackness) remain understudied in contemporary Fanonian scholarship.

Beyond the Western-Secularist Framework

Fanon’s work reveals an ambiguous view of religion overall. He seems mostly critical of the role religion plays within the colonial order and often expresses strong repugnance against indigenous religions, identifying them with myth, superstition, and magic. At the same time, Fanon acknowledges religion’s place in culture as a vital ingredient that fosters national identity. As Federico Settler observes, Fanon “recognized the significance of the sacred in cohering social collectivities and in the recovery of the black self” (5). In “Daily Life in the Douars,” Fanon offers a comprehensive report on the general socio-cultural constitution of the Muslim community bound by a unifying religious identity. Here he gives one of his most sympathetic accounts of religion, sketching out the constructive function that religion plays by providing the foundation for community, security, and order (379–81). The ambivalent understanding of religion that fluctuates between two contrasting views reflects perhaps his own ongoing personal anxiety about the subject, an anxiety that often overwhelms the man who inhabits the crossroad of conflicting desires. This is a man who is constantly negotiating the negative colonial affects of denial, refusal, shame, and the desire to restore to wholeness a self split between the two radically contrasting worlds. He was at times critical of the problematic association of native religions with irrationality made by western critics even as he simultaneously reproduced the same questionable associations himself. We can see this in his different treatments of institutional religions (such as Catholicism and Islam) and indigenous religions. The latter is often an object of shame and abhorrence for Fanon. Fanon’s treatment of Islam was different from Christianity as Islam played a significant role in the Algerian revolution. He acknowledged Islam’s contribution to revolution despite his lack of a deep understanding of Islam and the full extent of its connection to the revolution. His limited understanding of the intricate interaction between religion and culture, particularly of Islam, partly overshadows his views. He did not fully understand the degree to which the tradition of anticolonial struggle in modern history of Algeria was deeply Islamic in nature. Fanon praised the self-organization of Algerian peasants in their involvement in the anti-colonial resistance but failed to understand that the origin of these movements was Islam. Fouzi Slisli unpacks the numerous cultural and historical references that Fanon makes to Algeria without acknowledging their connection to Islam.[1] Slisli wonders, “Was he ignorant of this Islamic tradition or did he choose to ignore it?” (97). Whatever the case may be, Fanon’s harsh stance towards Christianity and African (and Afro-diasporic) indigenous religions did not extend to Islam. Still his otherwise ambivalent attitude towards religion also informed his characterization of some Islamic practices. For example, he refers to the mystical Islamic worship of holy men in Algeria as maraboutism and lists it among the list of “old superstitions,” alongside witchcraft and djinn (Arabic spirits). 

Fanon’s critique of the pernicious presence of religion in social-political life and his gesture to repurpose it (as a vessel to resignify Blackness) remain understudied in contemporary Fanonian scholarship.

Such a view of religion is not surprising when considering Fanon’s professionalization in western medical practice. A great part of Fanon’s deep immersion in the worldview of North African Muslims came through his clinical observation and study as a psychiatrist. During his time at the Blida-Joinville psychiatric hospital in Algeria, he treated a large group of Muslim patients. There he observed that many of his clinical tools (which came from western science) did not work efficiently on his Muslim male patients. The main reason for this discrepancy was cultural difference. The local population adhered to a completely different worldview informed by religion, which made the seamless application of western methods difficult. A dismaying aspect for him as a clinical practitioner was how often the patients’ religion-based worldview conflicted with the scientific method of the psychiatric approach. The traditional worldview grounded in religion did not help with the procedures as there was a widespread tendency among locals to attribute mental illness to a spiritual problem. Yet Fanon does not let go of his ambivalent position towards religion. Even in his characterization of Islam as rather primitive and traditional, he would not set a strict binary of values that stigmatized Islam in its entirety while uplifting the secular worldview. Discussing the traditional tribal structure of the local Muslim society, Fanon describes the transformation of land ownership implemented by the French. The process of land (wealth) redistribution aggravated the economic condition of the poor. Prior to the privatization of property, there were poor people, but not proletarians. ⁠ What Fanon implies is that even when certain western innovations reflect advanced (and potentially beneficial) technology, not all such customs and implementations signify a true sense of progress.

Fanon’s views were influenced by western-secularist categories that informed modern science and academic conversations. He insinuates the link between the secular and the colonial ideology of the west, yet he often employed the dominant secularist definition of religion.[2] It is far from difficult to identify the same oversight we find in Fanon across numerous examples in contemporary conversations in critical theory. Many interlocutors in contemporary decolonial theory are critical of the secularist discourse, yet they often overlook the secularist categories that reduce religion to a narrow notion. The compound interaction between religion and power is eclipsed by the reductive concept of religion in their works. For instance, the critical study of the formation of race and (de)coloniality in the Americas is often overshadowed by the erasure of religion, an important constitutive element of (de)coloniality. The secularist epistemic framework at play here consigns knowledge and knowledge production to particular forms and locations. Like the normative ideal of the human (Man), this unmarked normative epistemic framework universalizes a particular mode of knowing as the sole arbiter of knowledge. Forms of knowing that emerge from non-western locales are measured and classified according to these normative principles. These unmarked principles are in fact heavily marked with a western-secularist inflection (rooted in Euro-Christian history), and they underlie the study of religion, particularly of non-western religions. In his latest article on Fanon, Nelson Maldonado-Torres makes an important point on the reception of Fanon’s writings by the contemporary academy. A frequent oversight when approaching Fanon’s work, Maldonado-Torres observes, is to interpret it as a traditional academic text by taking his statements at face value, thus disregarding the complex layers of the clinical and revolutionary context from which he was writing. Religion, be it a conceptual apparatus or a constitutive element of the social fabric, occupies a substantial place in the formation of anticolonial struggles and thoughts of which Fanon was a part. Reading Fanon and religion with these complexities in mind lends an interesting twist and insight: Fanon’s critique of religion (political theology) ends up being a critique of the secular, even when he is not naming it as such. His turn to secularist language as an alternative to religion seems to suggest, in turn, an alternative notion of the sacred. The disavowal of colonial religion need not disclaim the diverse forms of religion-making that take place in and through various forms of decolonial movement and imagination. The sacred molds the spirit and movement of decolonial resistance in the colony. But unlike the institutionalized forms (and understandings) of religion, the diverse registers of the sacred usually take murky shapes. And at times, they are presented as antitheses to the sacred, that is, as a disavowal of the dominant notion of the sacred (and of religion more broadly). Yet even in negation, they are not renounced. Fanon’s critique of religion winds up being a powerful critique of the secular. Contrarily, Fanon seeks refuge in the secular in order to resignify the human but he ends up repurposing religion along the way.

Many interlocutors in contemporary decolonial theory are critical of the secularist discourse, yet they often overlook the secularist categories that reduce religion to a narrow notion. The compound interaction between religion and power is eclipsed by the reductive concept of religion in their works

It is not possible to fully unpack and elaborate on the claim I made above in this limited space. I have elsewhere articulated these ideas partially and I develop them further in my forthcoming book, The Coloniality of the Secular.[3] In what follows, I briefly point to a couple of sites (among others) in Fanon’s work that offer possible directions for advancing meaningful conversations on Fanon’s anticolonial critique and the problem of religion.

Two Possible Readings

(1) Fanon offers an insightful phenomenological analysis of the political by tracing how political life is constituted by the violent sanction of normative universals and the distribution of regulative identities in the colony. A paramount insight Fanon offers here concerns religion’s place as the metaphysical foundation of the political. Fanon continuously insinuates that colonial governance cannot be administered by coercion alone. Its fundamental mechanism requires metaphysics: a theological worldview that makes the colonized accept the colonial structure as the only possible reality. A Manichean worldview of good and evil that requires “a reference to divine right… to justify [the] difference” (Fanon, 1963, 5). This is a theology that legitimates the Manichean dualism dictating colonial reality and its values. It is a theodicean order in which the White/colonizer embodies the Good and the Black/colonized represents absolute evil (50). In other words, Fanon attributes the primary characteristics of colonial violence to theology. As Michael Lackey observes, instead of suggesting that theology benefits from colonization, “Fanon argues colonization is at the service of theology, that theology is the parent and original.” Political life is a theological problem as well as a colonial problem. Fanon brings to light the ways in which the category of secular humanism often overshadows the theology (the colonial theology of Whiteness) that constitutes European humanism and its concomitant colonial vision. The secular dilutes the theological edifice of both modernity and coloniality, thus fostering a notion of modernity that distinguishes itself from normative (dogmatic) values, sectarian positions, and power. The violence of its theology and the theology of its violence are obscured by the nominal framework of the secular. The secular hinges the two ends of modernity/coloniality. Fanon’s piercing analysis of colonial modernity implies, in a way, a nuanced critique of the theological edifice that sustains the necropolitical (Mbembe) management of the colonial world.

Plaque on Frantz Fanon Street in Paris, France. Via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.

(2) Much attention has been paid in Fanonian scholarship to the effects of the damage that dehumanization and violence enact on racialized beings, socio-politically and otherwise. Some of these voices also suggest that we pay close attention to the generative ideas that Fanon evokes. They find important constructive ideas in Fanon’s visions such as care, love (Nelson Maldonado-Torres, Houria Bouteldja), fugitivity (Fred Moten), poetics (Sylvia Wynter, Achille Mbembe), and rehumanization (Lewis Gordon), among many others. The bleak outlook we glimpse in Fanon’s penetrating diagnosis does not signal a retreat to resignation, that is, political pessimism. Fanon’s writings and commitment to political struggle consistently demonstrate that the essence of being a human lies in the possibility and capacity of praxis born out of love and solidarity. Building on these insights, we can bring our attention to the sites in Fanon that often go unnoticed, that is, some of the generative ideas that he gestures to in his poetics. Despite his complicated relationship with religion, there are numerous moments in which his appeal to generative concepts and alterity seems to beckon at a certain sense of the sacred, however alternative or unnamed it may be. Joseph Winters has recently suggested that we read the concluding prayers in Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks as a repurposing of Blackness as sacred, “a sacred gone astray” (258). In the face of suffocating colonial-racial violence, Fanon tenaciously refuses to renounce the possibility of an otherwise. Against the common (mis)perceptions, we can read religion as a reservoir of such possibility for Fanon. His lengthy, pessimistic account concludes with a religious rhetoric that signals hope in which he recreates Blackness as the embodied signifier of the sacred. Put differently, what takes place in Fanon’s phenomenological reflection on his racialized body is a reconstruction of the sacred. The secular humanist’s staunch rejection of western religion and metaphysics unfolds, paradoxically, alongside the unnamed figure or moment that evokes a certain sense of the sacred, a sacred presented as an antithesis to the sacred.

Fanon’s critique of religion winds up being a powerful critique of the secular. Contrarily, Fanon seeks refuge in the secular in order to resignify the human but he ends up repurposing religion along the way.

On the one hand, a closer look at the phenomenological method that Fanon employs opens up the possibility of building on the connection between his repurposing of Blackness and religion. Fanon relies on many of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s concepts—many of whose ideas were formed in conversation with Catholic theology—in his phenomenological reading of Blackness. On the other hand, we can situate Fanonian poetics within the twentieth century Caribbean tradition of anticolonial poetics. In many ways, Fanon’s poetics are a direct response and a reaction to Aime Cesaire’s anticolonial poetics, which are heavily infused with theological concepts and symbols. In this sense, Fanonian poetics inherit the theological themes and imagery that Cesaire’s poetics inaugurated. It is the Jamaican philosopher and theorist Sylvia Wynter who develops a full-fledged account of political theology by honing the questions and problems that are dormant in Cesaire and Fanon. Poetics disrupts the normative narrative. They seek to (re)create the world by reconceptualizing symbols and meanings. The decolonial refusal in Fanon signals a moment of decolonial poetics. By reconceptualizing theological symbols ingrained in secular registers, Fanon gestures at the possibility of a decolonial otherwise.

What happens when we read religion as a key fabric of social reality that constitutes both the colonial reality and the intellectual traditions that shaped Fanon’s vision, regardless of how much he was aware of it? What are the insights and perspectives we might gain when we view religion as a segue into decolonial resistance for Fanon? Coloniality censors sacrality, as Talal Asad and Peter Van der Veer have shown. That the secular has consistently provided an efficient platform for the articulation of coloniality raises important questions about the relation between decoloniality and the boundaries that segregate the sacred. When the sacred is isolated from the fabric of social relations, it obscures the enduring power of religion that is carved deep in the fabric of political life. It makes us lose sight of the symbolic power that sustains the colonial order which functions as a theological commandment (111).

[1] Much of the anticolonial rebellion in 19th century Algeria was led by Islamic groups and leaders. As Fouzi Slisli points out, the spontaneity of rural-Algerians’ self-organization that Fanon praises was shaped significantly by this historical tradition (Islamic anti-colonial struggle).

[2] While Fanon does not name the link between colonialism and the secular as such, he constantly insinuates that colonialism is founded on a religious (Christian) worldview and metaphysics, one that operates according to a theological mechanism or logic. In other words, Fanon challenges the myth of secular-modernity by calling out the theological logic operative in colonialism (and colonial modernity). See Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth; An Yountae, “On Violence and Redemption: Fanon and Colonial Theodicy.”

[3] “Decolonizing the Cosmo-polis: Cosmopolitanism as a Rehumanizing Project” in Decolonial Christianities: Latinx and Latin American Perspectives; “On Violence and Redemption: Fanon and Colonial Theodicy,” in Beyond Man: Race, Coloniality, and Philosophy of Religion; The Coloniality of the Secular: Race, Religion, and Poetics of World Making (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, forthcoming).

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An Yountae
An Yountae is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at California State University, Northridge. He specializes in Religions of the Americas with a particular focus on Latin American/Caribbean religion and philosophy. He is the author of The Decolonial Abyss (Fordham University Press, 2016) as well as the co-editor with Eleanor Craig of Beyond Man: Race, Coloniality, and Philosophy of Religion (Duke University Press, 2021). His new book, The Coloniality of the Secular: Race, Religion, and Poetics of World Making is forthcoming from Duke University Press (2023).
Global Currents article

Israeli Apartheid and Its Apologists


Beit Hanina, East Jerusalem, June 8, 2020. The Jerusalem Municipality offers Palestinian residents of Jerusalem two options: to demolish their own homes or wait for the municipality’s heavy machinery to do it. The latter will force them to pay huge fines. Photo: ‘Amer ‘Aruri, B’Tselem. CC BY-SA 4.0.

Dr. Deborah Lipstadt testified on February 8, 2022 before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in her confirmation hearing for the role of Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism. In response to a question from Senator Marco Rubio, she criticized Amnesty International’s latest report on Israel, the most recent among similar evidenced-based reports by human rights organizations, including Human Rights Watch and the Israeli B’Tselem, which apply the international legal category of apartheid to describe ongoing Israeli violence against Palestinians since 1948. Amnesty’s report on apartheid in Israel is thorough and well-documented. Still, Lipstadt retorted that it is “unhistorical,” “delegitimizes” Israel, and is somehow threatening for Jewish students on US campuses. This portends a worrying and accelerating trend for an important role in the US State Department, carrying on the Trump Administration’s legacy of attacking human rights organizations and conflating legitimate criticism of Israel with antisemitism.

Dr. Lipstadt is not alone in her harsh condemnation of the Amnesty report, entitled “Israel’s Apartheid Against Palestinians: A Cruel System of Domination and a Crime Against Humanity,” which was published on February 1, 2022. It prompted immediate reactions from the Israeli government and its aligned American Jewish organizations that seek to control a narrative that persistently erases Palestinian experiences, human rights, and political aspirations. Instead of engaging with the evidence presented in the report, they accused Amnesty of antisemitism and of singling out and seeking to destroy Israel. Never mind that Amnesty is a respected human rights organization that has reported extensively on violations of international human rights and humanitarian laws around the world. Amnesty has, for instance, described Myanmar’s system of rule as apartheid in 2017, without anyone understanding this as rooted in anti-Buddhist prejudice. Amnesty is also reporting now on the severe violations of international law in Russia’s war in Ukraine since February 24, 2022, and no one has suggested that Amnesty is biased against Russians. What is singled out in the case of Israel, therefore, is criticism of Israeli policies: those defending such policies distort legitimate criticism of a state and present it, only in the case of Israel, as an attack against a people.

I have been engaged in research and teaching about the Holocaust, genocide, state violence, Jewish history, and antisemitism for over fifteen years in Israel and in the US. I have also written about the weaponization of the discourse of antisemitism, used often to silence and attack those who speak about Israeli state violence, especially Palestinians. It is a crude and cruel distortion: abusing the historical struggle of a vulnerable people, Jews, under attack by powerful states to blur the attack of a state, Israel, against a vulnerable people, Palestinians.

Knee-jerk allegations of antisemitism are meant to marginalize engagement with this reality, as presented in the report. There is indeed much to discuss: the report is the product of four years of research, based also on the work of Palestinian, Israeli, and international human rights organizations, and on a large body of scholarship. It clearly shows that, according to international human rights and humanitarian law, Israel has created and maintains a system of apartheid, consisting of segregation, discrimination, persecution, and violence against Palestinians in all the areas under its control and military occupation. The report therefore calls for dismantling the apartheid system, not the state; for those responsible for apartheid to be held accountable; and for the victims and survivors to receive justice—all according to international law. The report is a critique not of a people, but of a state, though it does not prescribe what the political future of the state should look like following the dismantling of the apartheid system.

Jews who care deeply about Israel have, in fact, described it as an apartheid state, including leading Israeli organizations and politicians, among them former prime ministers.

Those attacking the report present themselves as representatives of all Jews, but Jews hardly agree on anything, including Israel. It is, furthermore, precisely the association of Jews everywhere with Israel that puts them in danger, as it confirms in the eyes of antisemites that Jews do not really belong where they live. This unfortunate meeting point of antisemites and apologists for Israeli state violence stems from a shared segregationist view of the world, which brings us back to the report: the reality of the system of Israeli apartheid.

Israel has etched this reality into the landscape of the occupied Palestinian territories and deepened its colonization through walls, fences, other barriers, and roads intended only for Jews or only for Palestinians. The apartheid system in Israel is less visible but, as the report argues convincingly, runs deep. For instance, since 1948, Israel has built 700 new localities for Jews, but none for Palestinians. Zero. Some Palestinians seek to break through this overtly discriminatory reality. One such case happened in 2018, in the northern Israeli town of Kfar Vradim, where the sale of land for new construction was canceled after Palestinians had purchased more than half of the plots. The head of the local council, Sivan Yehieli, explained this decision with apartheid logic: he is “trusted with preserving the Zionist-Jewish-secular character of Kfar Vradim” and maintaining “demographic balances.” If Palestinians in Israel are denied movement on such racist grounds, they are also denied the right to live on their land, as in the case of Palestinian Bedouins in the Negev/Naqab in southern Israel who have faced, since the 1970s, a systemic attack by the state to displace them. To date, Israeli courts have rejected all Palestinian Bedouins’ land claim cases and denied their ancestral land rights.

Those attacking the report present themselves as representatives of all Jews, but Jews hardly agree on anything, including Israel. It is, furthermore, precisely the association of Jews everywhere with Israel that puts them in danger, as it confirms in the eyes of antisemites that Jews do not really belong where they live.

Just as the Israeli apartheid system denies Palestinians’ past, it also seeks to deny their future through an assault against Palestinian children. Palestinian scholar Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian has recently termed this Israeli state violence “unchilding,” which includes imprisonment, causing serious injuries, inflicting psychological trauma, and killing. The numbers are staggering: Israeli authorities have killed more than 2,000 Palestinian children since 2000 and detained around 500-700 Palestinian children every year since 2008.

On the day before Dr. Lipstadt’s hearing, February 7, 2022, the Israeli Parliament approved in first reading the proposed Citizenship Law, which denies Palestinians married to Israeli citizens permanent residency in Israel and thus bans Palestinians from the occupied Palestinian territories and Gaza from living in Israel with their Palestinian partners. Israel’s Minister of Health, Nitzan Horowitz, whose party (Meretz) opposes the proposed law, described it as “racist and discriminatory, and there is no place for it in a democratic state.” This failed to prevent the final approval of the law on March 10, 2022. Israeli Interior Minister Ayelet Shaked sees the Citizenship Law as an “important result for the security of the state and its fortification as a Jewish state,” expressing the apartheid rationale that, furthermore, casts Palestinians collectively as a security threat.

Israel’s Citizenship Law is thus another example, along with many others discussed in Amnesty’s report, that demonstrates Israel’s “purpose of establishing and maintaining domination by one racial group of persons over any other racial group of persons and systematically oppressing them,” as the crime against humanity of apartheid is defined in international law. Rather than protecting Jews, then, Lipstadt’s position helps secure a segregationist political ideology authorizing state violence. Many scholars of mass violence and Jewish history, however, teach their students to stand not with violent states, but with their victims. This also applies in the case of the Israeli apartheid system, for everyone living between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea deserves equality, security, and freedom.

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Raz Segal
Dr. Raz Segal is Associate Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies and Endowed Professor in the Study of Modern Genocide at Stockton University. Dr. Segal has held a Harry Frank Guggenheim Fellowship, a Fulbright Fellowship, and was recently a Senior Fellow at the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies (March-July 2023). His publications include >Genocide in the Carpathians: War, Social Breakdown, and Mass Violence, 1914-1945 (2016); Days of Ruin: The Jews of Munkács during the Holocaust (2013); and he was guest editor of the Hebrew-language special issue onGenocide: Mass Violence and Cultural Erasure of Zmanim: A Historical Quarterly (2018). In addition to scholarly publications, Dr. Segal has published op-eds, book reviews, and larger articles on genocide, state violence, and memory politics in Hebrew, English, and German in The Guardian , LA Times, The Nation, Jewish Currents, Haaretz, +972 Magazine, and Berliner Zeitung , and he has appeared on Democracy Now! and ABC News.
Theorizing Modernities article

Palestinian Protest: The Palestinian Question and the Global Israeli South (Part 2)


Ethiopian protestors at a rally in Tel Aviv (2015). Public Domain. Via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 2.0
The summer of 2021 marked the 50th anniversary of the Mizrahi Black Panther movement. Those months in the aftermath of the May events followed a remarkable decade during which Mizrahim succeeded in amplifying their struggle in the Israeli mainstream, even if only for its representatives, and as a kind of lip service and bon ton. Despite this progress, the anger and the pain remained: If previously it was the Mizrahi protesters who were “not nice” (the way they were referred to by American-born Prime Minister Golda Meir), today it is Ethiopians. Like the ultra-Orthodox, the Ethiopians burned tires and blocked roads. However, in frightening similarity to recent events, they also burned and overturned cars, thus becoming the enemies of  Israelis that usually perceived the community as unthreatening and docile. The most chilling moment was revealed in a video which captured several Ethiopians at the Kiryat Ata junction chanting cries in Palestinian Arabic from the First Intifada: “Allah akbar”; “Free Palestine!”; “idbah al yahud”; “With blood and spirit we will redeem Palestine”; “Everybody hates you, 5 billion people hate you”; “Only money and greed interest you!” And finally – “You brought us so that we would fight for you, what do you think, that we are like the Moroccan chakh’chakhim (thugs). We are not!”

In this video, the Ethiopians identify with the Muslim population, thereby branding the “Jews” (certainly the new Jews of Zionism and of the luxury towers in Tel Aviv) as a symbol of the Global North. On the one hand, they removed themselves from the imagined collective that tolerates them only when they are “nice,” and at the same time they identified themselves—albeit forming a more radical critique vis-à-vis vis the state—with the Moroccan chakh’chakhim, illustrating their familiarity with the Israeli history of the 1981 election campaign. The demonstrators identified with a critical post- or even anti-Zionist view that rejected the myth of “return to a forgotten homeland” as its purpose was to bolster the Jewish population in the struggle against native Muslim Palestinians. The Ethiopian protesters recalled the Mizrahi struggle of the 1970s rather than trends of Mizrahi domestication into the new Israeli middle class in more recent decades. In their very name, the Israeli Black Panthers defined themselves as part of a globalized solidarity movement (Meir was terrified of any analogy being drawn between them and the American Panthers). They further underscored their global interconnectedness in how they appealed to other Blacks throughout the world, including Palestinians. The Ethiopian video reveals how potentially close the alliance is between suppressed identities in Israel. It creates an almost uncanny effect (in the Freudian sense) in which the warm and the familiar (the Ethiopian) is juxtaposed with the alien and most threatening of all (Palestinian resistance, including Hamas). Recalling this truly remarkable video of 2019 during the May 2021 crisis, I realized that someone was trying to remove it from the web, as I was only able to track it down again in an article by Salmach Salima published in “Siḥa Mekomit” web magazine (the Hebrew version of +972 magazine) in July 2019. There, Salima offers a ground-breaking criticism of the Palestinian struggle’s failure to forge alliances with other suppressed identities:

I nevertheless wish to help the suppressed populations in the society that I aspire to live in. And for me, as the weakest link in this chain of suppression—national, racial, and gender—I have a part to play in the liberation of others, even if these ‘others’ were exploited, willingly or unwillingly, and coerced into suppressing me and my people. This is the strongest position I can take at the moment as a Palestinian.

In the second part of this two-part post, I examine the ongoing ways in which Ashkenazi hegemony is perpetuated in Israel/Palestine and the necessity for the Left to recognize protests against that hegemony as legitimate. Salima’s words above indicate the kind of solidarity between marginalized groups that is necessary in the current moment.

Palestinians, Mizrahim, and…the Israeli (Ashkenazi) Left

The Palestinian struggle is also captive to the equation of “Jews-Arabs.” Recently, Palestinian intellectuals Haneen Maikey and Lana Tatour criticized Israeli human rights organizations for, in effect, preventing the Palestinians from telling their own story. They mocked B’Tselem’s definition of Israel as an apartheid state several decades after it had been so classified in Palestinian historiography. A similar discussion took place recently after editor-in-chief of Haaretz, Aluf Benn, expressed support for the narrative of the Nakba, 73 years after it happened. Maikey and Tatour had no compunction in claiming that “the Ashkenazi-Israeli human rights sector suffers from a problem of supremacy.” During the May crisis, all the organizations who have high visibility in times of Intifada, when the fabric of “co-existing” is jeopardized, speak about symmetry between Arabic and Hebrew and between Jews and Arabs. Not one of them alluded to Jewish-Israeli-Ashkenazi responsibility.

The fact that many people have a keen interest in maintaining the status quo cannot be overstated. In an article which appeared in Haaretz 25 years ago under the heading “The Bond of Silence,” sociologist Yehuda Shenhav-Shahrabani highlighted the Ashkenazi non-recognition of the oppression of Mizrahim. This same silence is passed down through generations and is bound up with Ashkenazi attitudes toward the Palestinian issue. While admitting the injustices done to Mizrahim threatens Ashkenazi hegemony, acknowledging those endured by the Palestinians does not. Furthermore, turning a blind eye to Mizrahim—or in other words, trying to avoid linking the colonialism within Israel with the colonialism in the occupied territories—was always a precondition for the existence of the “Left” (even before the 1967 expansion and occupation beyond the “Green Line”).

At issue here is the European secularization process that was enabled by the negation of religion (the Jewish, the Black, the non-European). Indeed, as Mahmood Mamdani wrote recently, “Zionism is both a product of the oppression of Jews under European modernity and a zealous enactment of European modernity under colonial conditions” (250). The brand of Zionism that Israel markets in North America and in Europe is only the enactment of European modernity. It should therefore come as no surprise that all the liberal media in Israel, as well as the English edition of Haaretz, continue to foster this separation, the significance of which is no less than the denial of the Mizrahi cause, which is what stands behind the false “religious” division between all “Jews” and “Arabs.” The crucial point is that Zionism’s colonization of the Jew himself, a notion at the core of early Zionist discourse, is now enabled by its focus on the distinction between “Jews” and “Arabs,” a binary which makes (Ashkenazi) Jews seem modern and secular. Nonetheless, when the focus turns to Mizrahi Jews, (Ashkenazi) Jews are reminded of their own “non-Europeaness,” and thus their failure to fully assimilate to White European identity.
While admitting the injustices done to Mizrahim threatens Ashkenazi hegemony, acknowledging those endured by the Palestinians does not. Furthermore, turning a blind eye to Mizrahim—or in other words, trying to avoid linking the colonialism within Israel with the colonialism in the occupied territories—was always a precondition for the existence of the “Left” (even before the 1967 expansion and occupation beyond the “Green Line”).

Because Mizrahim are unequivocally Jewish, unaffected by the complex political-theological discourse surrounding immigration from Ethiopia and the former Soviet Union, they serve as a painful reminder that Jews (including those of European descent) are themselves not European. Mizrahim remind Ashkenazim of their own Mizrahiness and that their assimilation into Whiteness and a modernist civilizational discourse came at a price, not just of losing their oriental heritage but in fact of losing their own Jewishness as a socio-political mark. It is interesting to note that since the defeat of the crime families—Alperon, Abergil, but also Rosenstein—the state has “nurtured” the crime scene in Arab towns. The much-discussed documentary series “Jerusalem District” (the Israeli broadcast channel, 2019) follows the capitol’s police force and their interactions with the city’s Palestinian population (like in the case of Sheikh Jarrah). The Jerusalem police often confront drug-related and other socio-economic crimes, those which are not connected to citizens’ ethnic or national identities. Because Mizrahi is not a category recognized by the State of Israel (unlike Ultra-Orthodox, Arabs [recognized as bnei mi’utim, minorities, and not as Palestinians], or Ethiopians), as a people they are often difficult to trace. However, in “Jerusalem District” the policemen’s surnames are so clearly Mizrahi that they border almost on the stereotypical: Obadia, Hazan, Gueta, Ohayon, Amsalem, etc. If the occupier is visualized as a fearless Ashkenazi from the Palmach and afterwards the Israeli Air Force, then policing in Israel is a Mizrahi performance: what was once the Minister of Police and then the Minister of the Public Security is now a job reserved for Mizrahim, starting with the first Minister of Police Bechor Sheetrit (the only indigenous Palestinian-Jew who signed the Declaration of Independence), and going on to Moshe Shahal and then Shlomo Ben-Ami. The picture that emerges is quite damning: the more blatantly evident it is, the greater its invisibility to us. Only this mesmerizing mixture of presence and absence—the entire domain of “internal security” is kept for Mizrahim who only police the Arab population—enables the perpetuation of this project of Jewish-Ashkenazi supremacy (and recall: the Oslo Accords granted Palestinians the right to police themselves; what is the PLO if not a police force?). In Israel, the victims become the executioners, and in this process the Israeli ethos is emptied of all hope for real political protest. It is also clear from this why Mizrahim themselves will go to any lengths to deny this.

In 1996, Amira Hass published her monumental book on Gaza, Drinking the Sea at Gaza, which in my opinion is one of the most important works of Israeli prose. Even during the era of the peace accords and the consolidation of the separation regime, Hass, in her role as a collector of testimonies, understood the legitimate and popular origin of the Hamas movement and recognized it as a multi-faceted and human entity which has both moderate and less moderate streams. The phrase “my friend the Hamas activist” appears many times in the book. The Muslim Brothers, who helped found Hamas, are a popular movement in the Muslim arena. They are “popular” both in the sense of their wide reach and also in their connection to the people, that is, in their stand against the colonial elites and their emissaries from the early twentieth century. In many ways, the Brothers are reminiscent of the consolidation of the steadfast “Jewish bloc” in the Knesset during Netanyahu’s last governments (this bloc, based on the “Likud” party and the two Ultra-Orthodox parties, also presents itself as fighting the elites, which are often perceived to be under Western influence). This movement is conservative in the same way that Germany, for example, has been ruled for many years by a conservative Christian-Democratic-Union movement. Hamas was established in 1987 as a direct result of an earlier period of Israeli violence. In 1948, Israel was responsible for both ethnic cleansing in the south of the country and the bombing of new refugee areas, one which included the hospital in Majdal, now Ashkelon, where many future leaders of Hamas originated.

In an interview following the last war, Tareq Baconi explained that there was no consensus within Hamas regarding the use of violence. During “The March of Return” protests of 2018, for instance, it was apparent that non-violent protest attracts much less attention from the international community and from Israel itself, for which only the firing of rockets represents an act of war. The continuing siege is not perceived as violence that demands a response, and the “right to self-defense” is reserved for Israel alone. Hamas’ use of violence has a long history in the anti-colonial struggle: suffice it to recall the famous scene in Gillo Pontecorvo’s film The Battle of Algiers (1966), in which the native Algerians plant bombs in the fashionable handbags of the ladies of Algiers who innocently place them in the heart of the city’s Parisian cafes. And here, in the same classic book about Gaza, back in the 1990s when the hopes for peace were mixed with the distress surrounding segregation and closures, A’s testimony teaches us something about alienation and closeness in the colonial oppression of the global age: 

There is no longer light you know, when I reach the Palestinian front [the checkpoint – OBY], the closest to the Israeli side where they thoroughly check all the documents, sometimes there is some Bedouin black as night posted there, who comes from Egypt or Yemen, so black that I cannot see him in the dark, and he does not know one word of Hebrew and he takes my work permit, shines his torch on it, holds it upside down because he has never seen a Hebrew letter, and he has to decide whether the permit is fake or not. Afterwards we advance with the car and reach the Israeli checkpoint, and we meet there an Israeli soldier, a new immigrant from Ethiopia, black as night and I do not recognize him in the dark, and he looks at the permit and reads it for half an hour, very slowly because he does not yet read Hebrew very well, reads and glances at me and again reads and looks at the photo and again looks at me, and I feel as if I’m the biggest criminal in the world who is about to be caught.

A certain guilt accompanies this blindness towards one another (“I don’t recognize him in the dark”) which is the lot of all subalterns who live under this regime, especially during times of violence. The Left remains indifferent to the state-sanctioned violence practiced by Israel as a matter of course against the large majority of its inhabitants who are not part of the European settlement project in the Middle East. The word “settlement” here is the same as “colonization,” which is used until this day in French, and was previously not differentiated from “settlement” in both German and English. For this “sane majority” (which is not a majority), many of whom are left-wing liberals, Hamas is an extremist movement and not one that raises the flag of protest against a siege that has lasted in various forms since the late 1980s and against many decades of racism and varying degrees of ethnic cleansing.

Hamas shooting missiles can be compared to a child in a refugee camp who throws stones, an expression of rage with which I, as a Queer Mizrahi, and thus as a victim of Israel’s degrading and humiliating system, can identify. A Left that just quells the flames is not Left, but hegemony; a true Left protests injustice. Perhaps a change will signal its coming when the Left will be able to declare, unequivocally: “Palestinian protest is just.”

The author wishes to thank Dr. Sigal Nagar-Ron of Sapir Academic College.

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Omri Ben Yehuda
Dr. Hannah (Omri) Ben Yehuda is a scholar of comparative literature in Tel Aviv University. This essay is based on her academic paper “The Flight of a Mother: Rape and National Coercion in David Grossman’s To the End of the Land”, Shofar 42:3, 2024, 155–180.
Theorizing Modernities article

Abolishing the Jewish-Arab Divide (Part 1)


Protest in Tahrir Square (2011). Photo by Flickr User Hossam el-Hamalaway. CC BY-SA 2.0

Jews, Arabs, and… Ashkenzim

One of the most viral videos to emanate from the last Gaza war and the violence within Israel in May 2021 was of Amit Segal, Israel’s most popular political commentator. On May 13, Segal appeared on a prime-time news broadcast on Keshet 12. For several minutes, Segal, acquainted with the Right, laid out his grievances against the media for their symmetrical coverage of the Jewish-Arab violence when, in his opinion, the Jewish side was most often the victim. Close to four minutes into Segal’s monologue, which he subsequently posted on his popular Facebook page, a kind of dialogue began with his interlocutor, one of Israel’s star journalists, the non-partisan (i.e. in today’s Israeli media the Center-Left) Ilana Dayan. Dayan presented the discursive symmetry in Jewish-Arab relations, wherein the “other” is no more than a reflection of the “I” or “we” and its desires (“they are our doctors,” “I have an Arabic teacher,” “we live together”). At the 17:12 mark, Segal—for whom this “other” is an opponent and as such enjoys a modicum of independence from the “I” (always a Jewish “I”)—blurted out a word that was out of place in the context and was probably an unintentional slip of the tongue. When Dayan argued, “We must address the lynching in Bat Yam (where Jews are perpetrators) because we have a role to play here,” Segal asked, “Who is ‘we’? Who is ‘us’? Journalists? the Ashkenazi Jews?” Dayan replied “We the Jews.” Segal branded this “we” as an imaginary and narcissistic collective oblivious to internal pluralities of the Jewish communities in Israel. The Ashkenazim, at the height of the battle and on prime time TV, triggered those sitting around the “tribal bonfire” in the midst of the May 2021 escalation. They suddenly spoke about the “ethnic demon” (ha-shed ha-‘adati), always a Mizrahi demon. Segal made it clear, briefly, that the “we” that bears responsibility and which Dayan presumed so easily is not simply Jewish but unequivocally Ashkenazi. It was a moment, however fleeting, of admitting responsibility for the implications of Ashkenazi hegemony which has targeted Palestinians and Mizrahi differently but in interconnected ways.

Amit Segal (left) and Ilana Dayan (right). CC BY-SA 3.0

This was not the only time during the conversation that Segal took issue with Keshet’s official line, which it has held since its establishment in the 1990s—the prime-days of Israeli neo-liberalism—as the first commercial channel in the country. Unlike his liberal peers, Segal’s overall point of view amalgamates “the Arabs from Gaza and East Jerusalem with the rioters in Lod” (at 18:04), thereby eliminating any distinction between them. In his opinion, they all “do not want us here.” Although, naturally, this extreme point of view is incompatible with the position of any liberal media outlet, Keshet 12 has made every effort to accommodate it. Indeed, Segal subscribes to the pre-state Zionist ethos of victimhood in which the “Arabs” are perceived as an entity hostile to “Jews” (then in a minority)—an entity which was dismantled and fragmented by the liberal Left after the Oslo accords (around the same time as establishment of the commercial channel). Also in the 1990s, acclaimed Haaretz journalist Amira Hass (1996) showed that the Oslo Accords formed a division between “Israeli Arabs” (or Palestinian Israelis) and “Palestinians.” This acknowledgment came, of course, without recognizing the terrible split that the Zionist project has imposed on Palestinians since its very beginnings. This split ruptured ties between Palestinians of 1948 (who possess a blue identity card), Palestinian residents of occupied East Jerusalem, Palestinians in the West Bank, Palestinians in Gaza, Palestinians in the refugee camps in Lebanon, Syria and Jordan, and of course Palestinians in the diaspora around the world. Segal’s words thus carry great subversive potential because he regards the region of historic Palestine/Eretz Yisrael as a single entity. In the first part of this two part post, I will therefore grapple here with the way the liberal Left—for which Dayan serves a prominent example—normally frames Arab-Jewish relations in the region; namely, in a way that erases both the legitimacy of violence by subalterns and the entire Mizrahi question. While the Palestinian question, or case, is somewhat recognized outside the very provincial scope of the Israeli Left, the Mizrahi case has gained currency only recently and among a handful of Palestinian activists who insist on uttering, like Segal, a known harbinger of the Right, the word “Ashkenzim.”

Gaza as an Israeli Space

Much has been said about the suitcases filled with dollars that were transferred from Qatar to Hamas with the approval of former Prime Minister Netanyahu, but no mention has been made of the currency —the Israeli lira and the shekel—used by Gazans to buy vegetables or pay for services, at least since its occupation in 1967. With the changeover to the new banknotes in Israel in 2013, I wrote in Haaretz about the feeling of alienation that a Jewish immigrant from Tunis must feel, never mind a native-born Palestinian, when waiting at the bank where images of statesmen and poets such as Moshe Sharet, Natan Alterman, and Shaul Tchernichowsky gaze out at her from plasma screens. Imagine how the residents of the most bombed buildings of the Gaza War of 2014 (Operation Protective Edge), for example, must feel when, while fleeing for their lives, they hang on to these notes as a kind of security. Of course, Gaza is part of Israel in many other respects, some civil (like area dialing codes and electricity infrastructure) and some under the umbrella known in Israel as “foreign and security affairs.” The latter has been under the control of the Israeli army since the establishment of the Palestinian Authority and certainly since Israel’s disengagement from Gaza in 2005 and the rise of Hamas a decade and a half ago. This reality is in complete contrast to the picture painted in times of war by Keshet 12 and all other mainstream Israeli media outlets. They talk of “Israel under fire” by an external agent with which Israel shares only a border. For this reason, it is legitimate for Israelis to claim that against such incoming fire, Israel, like “every country has the right to defend itself and its citizens.”

However, if Israel has sovereignty in Gaza over all matters relating to foreign affairs and security, is it really under fire from an external force when Hamas fires rockets on its citizens? What protection is being referred to if residents of Gaza, including members of Hamas, and residents of East Jerusalem, resort to violence against citizens of the same sovereign entity? Why do the media, and also a large part of Israeli academia, firmly refuse to refer to Palestinian violence, both internal and external, as a “protest”? As “Palestinian protest”? This protest is linked to the Mizrahi struggle in Israel, the Wadi Salib protest in the fifties, the current protest on the Asi Strem in the Kibbutz of Nir David, the social justice protests of 2011, the recurrent protests of persons with disabilities (who get minimal aid from the government), the Balfour demonstrations during the coronavirus pandemic against Netanyahu’s legal affairs, right-wing protests especially against the disengagement plan from Gaza in 2005, and the Ethiopian protests over the years. The protests of Palestinians with Israeli citizenship in October 2000, which many people called to mind last May, are defined as “events,” in line with pre-state Zionist historiography that defines the Palestinian uprisings against the colonial apparatus (Turkish, British, and particularly Jewish) as events (1921, 1929, and now 2021 as well). 

The “Palestinian cause/question” (al qadiyyah) and the “Jewish question” are both expressions of European modernity, whether in the form of their currency of nationalism or genocidal practices, neither of which are acknowledged in Israel.

In Arabic, just as in the context of the Arab Spring, these events are described via the language of revolts/uprisings. In Hebrew, the words meora’ot (events) and meḥaah (protest) are reserved for Jews, while pra’ot (revolts) or meora’ot (events) relate to the Jewish-Arab conflict. Mainstream historiography in Hebrew also uses the word “Palestina,” which was imported from German and Yiddish in order to foster the illusion that Palestina existed only before 1948, while Palestine is something which relates to theory alone. Another striking example of how the Israeli Center Left imagines the country’s reality can be seen in Avi Nesher’s spectacular film Portrait of Victory (Israel, 2021) that depicts the battle over Kibbutz Nitzanim in 1948. Because the narrator is Egyptian, half of the film is in Arabic with Hebrew subtitles, and while Palestinians and Egyptians refer to Nitzanim as a settlement (mustautanah), the translation refers to the foreign word “kolonia” (colony) and not to the Hebrew word hitnaḥalut (settlement). The latter is reserved only for the settlements beyond the green line, thus continuing the false legitimacy of the pre state colonization of the country by dubbing it with a foreign, and hence neutral, word. The “Palestinian cause/question” (al qadiyyah) and the “Jewish question” are both expressions of European modernity, whether in the form of its currency of nationalism or genocidal practices, neither of which are acknowledged in Israel.

This leaves the Israeli Orientalists mainly with Arabs who want to integrate into society or those, like members of the Joint List party, who are “troublemakers” or “terrorists.” It is convenient for Israelis to think that Israeli Arabs are not really interested in “Palestinians,” those on the other side of the “walls” whose protection gave its name to the May assault. The current Israeli discourse refers to “rounds” (sevavim) of violent skirmishes between the Israeli government and Hamas. The last major round was Operation Protective Edge in 2014, during which 70 Israelis—almost all of them soldiers, a terrible loss that is hardly ever mentioned in Israeli media—and more than 2000 Gazans lost their lives. And although Operation Protective Edge hovers in the background together with the endless rounds that prove that the process is at a standstill, there were several unprecedented factors during the 2021 round, most notably Hamas’ response to the events inside Israel and the responsibility it took for the fate of East Jerusalemites that resonated as well in an internal Israeli intifada.

The Protest of the Global South

When the May events began, we—that is, the Israeli media and academics—reignited a dialogue about Hamas itself and about Gaza, consolidating Protective Edge of 2014 as the central point of reference. But then the rebellion broke out within Israel, an uprising (intifada) in Jaffa, Lod, in Jerusalem and the North, as well as other places, which reminded some commentators of the October 2000 protests that ended with the death of 13 Palestinians with Israeli citizenship. I suggest that the rebellion of 2021 and the imaginary “coexistence” that was projected by Israeli liberals, should not be separated from Israel’s war against Hamas. In my historiography of the events last May, there are two points of reference far more pertinent than Operation Protective Edge. First is the Intifada of the Individuals from 2015–2016, which broke out in the aftermath of Protective Edge, and was an assemblage of suicide missions during which Palestinians attacked security personnel with scissors or other ridiculous weapons with the sole purpose of bringing about their own death. Second are the Ethiopian protests in 2019 following the murder of Solomon Tekah. These protests, and not Protective Edge, uncover the seething venom that exists in all areas of the Greater Eretz Yisrael/Palestine, a venom of pain mixed with justified anger rather than the brittle “fragility” of coexistence.  They teach us that, unlike what was formulated by Dayan and Keshet 12, the issue is not Jews against Arabs, but rather Israeli-Ashkenazi Jews against the Global South, which in Israel is represented by non-Europeans: Palestinians, Mizrahim, Ethiopians, and migrant laborers (almost all from the Global South).

In a state of emergency, every Mizrahi has to internalize (what Dayan nonchalantly parroted) that she is nothing more than a “Jew,” an imaginative signifier that also represents the adjectives “Israeli,” “liberal,” a “champion of progress.” In one stroke, Mizrahi identity is totally erased: the non-European Israeli Jew is no longer “Black” (whether ultra-Orthodox or Ethiopian), or as liberals in Israel tend to condemn Mizrahim today, a “Bibist” (a follower of Bibi Netanyahu). She has to suspend the knowledge that there is only one Mizrahi party leader in the Knesset, Aryeh Deri (who recently had to resign the Knesset and rule the party from the outside as part of a plea deal related to minor misdemeanours), that Israel has never had a Mizrahi prime minister, and that the new administration (that was inaugurated a month after the May crisis) is almost entirely Ashkenazi. In times of escalation, the Mizrahi will have Dayan and her colleagues to remind them that in the equation of Jews and Arabs, they are definitely not part of the latter. In the Israeli discourse, both in Hebrew and Arabic, Jews and Arabs are dubbed as two migzarim (sectors), each entirely homogeneous and distinct from one another. Thus, whenever the discourse becomes demographic, people repeat a fact that has become an axiom, namely that 20 percent Palestinians are also citizens. But that is a biased perspective that upholds the liberal discourse of a Jewish majority and an oriental minority. A different perspective, one which emphasizes those who inhabit the thoroughly oriental vicinity in the imagined Jewish nation state, will either address those who live between the sea and the Jordan River (thus capturing Mizrahim and Palestinians together as descendants of those who are indigenous to the Middle East) or will focus on those who are Jewish according to the Jewish Law and not to the State’s Law of Return. In the latter case, Mizrahim will also be the majority among the Jews, while the category “Jews” as a non-oriental signifier (with the help of such Jews as those who immigrated from Russia, who adhere to the Law of Return but not necessarily to the Jewish Halakha) will be abolished and instead undergird this signifier—“Jews”—with its lost oriental undertones. Remarkably, just recently this de facto approach to understanding Jews as non-Orientals became official with the census’ abolition of the generalized term “Jews and Others,” a designation which encompassed “those who are undefined” (meaning descended from the USSR) as well as “non-Arab Christians” for either “ukhlusia yehudit murḥevet (expanded Jewish population)” or “Jews and their family members” (the words of Prof. Danny Pfeffermann, director of the census). For my argument, it is sufficient to pay attention to the “non-Arab Christians” label, which evinces the politization of the non-Oriental.

In part 2 of this series, I argue that a more emboldened left-wing movement is required if Ashkenazi hegemony is to be addressed and overcome in Israel/Palestine. This overcoming will require that Ashkenazi Jews relinquish their attachment to European white indentity formations and re-engage their “oriental” identity in solidarity with Mizrahi and other marginalized Jews.

The author wishes to thank Dr. Sigal Nagar-Ron of Sapir Academic College.

Leave a Comment on Abolishing the Jewish-Arab Divide (Part 1) Array
Omri Ben Yehuda
Dr. Hannah (Omri) Ben Yehuda is a scholar of comparative literature in Tel Aviv University. This essay is based on her academic paper “The Flight of a Mother: Rape and National Coercion in David Grossman’s To the End of the Land”, Shofar 42:3, 2024, 155–180.