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Theorizing Modernities article

“Holding on to God’s Rope”: Knotting the Adventure of Trace in Tradition


A Jalalabad man makes a “charpoy,” used commonly as a bed or chair. Photo Credit: Canada in Afghanistan, 2010.

Why are Sufis imagined as apolitical? Why are the theological and the political realms purportedly opposed? Why does Islamic reform provoke deep anxieties of force and violence? Why are madrassas thought to be hotbeds of religious insurgency? SherAli Tareen’s new book Defending Muḥammad in Modernity reveals these questions for what they are: a function of secular translation in which a modern notion of “the political” is wielded against Islam to secure the global secular politics of religion. Islam is, after all, an entity, as Gil Anidjar has argued, which has historically been phobically imagined by the West as the enemy. Indeed, Islam becomes the very ground through which Europe-as-Christian launches itself into Europe-as-political. Here Islam features as a figure of a certain kind of “beyond” of politics in which the political itself is “put under question from a certain outside” (49). Islam emerges, not simply as a theological enemy or even a political enemy, but as an enemy to the very notion of the political itself in the modern world. An exemplary enemy of the capacity to be political as such.

Against the tyranny of such a modern notion of the political, Tareen’s book is a comprehensive interrogation of how various competing imaginaries, in their attempts to cohere the boundaries of Islam, reveal Muslim ethico-moral-political commitments. These 19th century debates between South Asian Barelvī and Deobandī ‘ulamā’ show that questions related to God’s sovereignty, the Prophet’s authority, heretic innovation, food and contamination, prayer gatherings, death-associated rituals, and so on, reveal how ceaseless contestation that aspires to make a tradition cohere “enables a shared form of life” (13). Tareen disrupts discourses that identify Barelvīs with a Sufi tendency in Islam and Deobandīs with a legalistic reform-driven tendency, and instead shows that Sufis were no less interested in reform or the juridical totality of sharīʿa, and that Deobandī scholars were also major Sufi masters. Tareen, thus, labors against the insistence upon translating this “form of life” into religious versus political or mystical versus orthodox. Following Talal Asad, the insistence on these binaries risks instrumentalizing the “ambivalences and gridlocks that exist in our collective” (11)—a reduction in which “the native’s point of view” becomes “merely information to be translated for a purpose entirely foreign to it.” (9)

Against this neat excision of indeterminacy and opaqueness from a form of life, the contestations between these ‘ulamā’ reveal deep investments in the question of what constitutes the ethico-moral-political life of a community. By this Tareen does not simplistically mean that “religion” is “political,” a claim which returns the secular political to us in a redoubled way, using a logic of substitution rather than bringing into question the founding possibility that launches one into the binary. Derrida labels this “the problem of the status of a discourse which borrows from a heritage the resources necessary for the deconstruction of that heritage itself” (282). Rather, grappling with the history of Western political theology, I wish to foreground a question resonant in Tareen’s book: Is Islamic political theology simply Islamic “political theology”?

The Logic of Encounter

To get past the sleight of hand (religion is political), which reinstalls the modern academic as arbitrator and sovereign decider, Tareen suggests another ethics, one of listening to a multivocal tradition: a reading that practices humility and attention in reckoning with an internal otherness. He sets up the book’s challenge as one of an openness to the unknown, echoing a sentiment that Stefania Pandolfo elsewhere has called a “vision of blindness” in which “the mastery of the plot must be surrendered, and exchanged for trust in the guidance of the Other” (15). Indeed tradition, as Tareen notes via Talal Asad, is about a story of encounter not communication. The logic of encounter insists that one give up the fantasy of transparent meaning, and submit to a radical alterity which admits that one has always already been inhabited by the discourse of the Other. Such an ethical orientation to history writing, as Omnia El Shakry has suggested, might even allow a secular discipline to begin “encountering [its] own disappearance” in the process (174).

If not within the binaries of religion/politics, mystic/reformist, belief/knowledge, how then is one to speak intelligibly of the meaningful category of Islam? If the historian should not be a sovereign decider of Islam, taking a god’s eye view between various polemics to decide where orthodoxy lies, it would also be misleading to claim that any exploratory practice a Muslim engages in with the goal of it being Islamic is an Islamic practice. How then to speak of Islam—especially in a time structured by a deathly paranoia against Islam, or as Freud has termed, our “times of war and death”? Why turn to the past?

The Gift in Inheritance and Tradition

Tareen takes his cue from Asad’s genealogical method to interrogate the Islamic discursive tradition, though he does it “through a route different than that of offering another genealogical critique of the secular. Instead [the book] has tried to shift inquiry from secular colonial regimes of ‘religion making’ to critical conjunctures of authoritative native discourses and debates on the boundaries of religion” (380). Exploring these Barelvī-Deobandī debates about the boundaries and limits of Islam allows Tareen to remind us of David Scott’s famous lesson: “Tradition is not merely an inheritance” available for simple recovery (115; Tareen, 382). Indeed, one might add that inheritance is never simple to begin with as Freud has demonstrated for us through an analysis of the inheritance of the unconscious (35). More than an Oedipal drama that would allow a tracing back to origins, an inheritance is collective, a layer upon unconscious layer of the lacuna of the unknown, around which human attempts at meaning circumambulate. All inheritance, then, is of the order of the gift and remains mysterious as to its origins. And a true gift, à la Derrida, is precisely what cannot be recognized as gift (29). A gift, already something forgetful or unconcerned of its origins, outside the logic of economy and exchange, is without expectation or possibility of return. Perhaps it is possible to conceptualize the inheritance of tradition in this mode of a gift. It is a task, and one that requires a different kind of work than mere recovery. To retrain the eye on the unpast of the importance of the polemics that Tareen highlights is vital, especially in a moment of reductionist discourse about good/bad Islam. In fact, the task of the critical historian then is not the recovery of an authentic indigenous debate but to deal with the unpastness of the past, the unsettled question of tradition, and as Walter Benjamin poignantly framed it, “to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger” (255).

“Ramadan Mubarak!” Prayer beads. Photo Credit: Steve Evans, 2010.

Staying with this “adventure of the trace” (292), giving up a search for a decidable finite origin, Tareen’s book instead demonstrates how moral reasoning for both Barelvīs and Deobandīs revolved around the lacuna of the unknowable—the knowledge of al Ghayb, mutually agreed upon to be possessed only by the Divine. The debates, however, centered on identifying the capacity of others, especially God’s beloved, the Prophet, to be gifted knowledge of al Ghayb. These questions had less to do with an uncomplicated inheritance than with the reliability of possible custodians and guides of such an inheritance. The questions that were fiercely argued over were the capacity for gift receiving, the status of the receiver in question, the matter of whether status is linked to receiving or not, the capacity also for gift giving (whether rewards for prayers could be gifted to the dead), and so on. At the heart of these debates were competing imaginaries of what knowledge is and of the hierarchy of such a knowledge—a question that necessitates a distinction between the conceptual use of hierarchies as opposed to binaries.[1] This recognition of hierarchical power in Islam provides an important counter to the simplistic celebration of the purported (though never-possible) egalitarian subject of modern power. Submitted thus to the absolute alterity of the Divine, in this conception of heteronomous ethics, the subject secures agency through submission to the Unknown.[2]

The Gap in Power and Politics

How might this notion of Divine sovereignty be understood alongside the sovereignty of the colonial state as well as the declining sovereignty of 19th century Muslims in the subcontinent? Is the understanding of power within Islam similar or different than what the colonial encounter brought? Tareen argues that Islam’s encounter with colonial secularism is to be understood not through a logic of capture but rather one of haunting: “While haunted by colonial power, the grammar of that hauntology was distinctive and particular” (161). He is careful to note that he is not interested here in a project of recovery of indigenous thought or native agency. But attention to the particularity of the grammar of the Barelvī-Deobandī polemic allows an understanding of sovereignty as these ‘ulamā’ imagined it through the sharīʿa, one that was not overdetermined by the colonial context and tied neither to the idea of a nation-state nor to the idea of a caliphal state. By this Tareen does not mean that Barelvīs or Deobandīs were not interested in “the political” as it manifests in state form. Rather, salient is the fact that the state was just one manifestation of power and politics for these ‘ulamā’. I take the example here of one reformer, Shāh Muḥammad Ismāʿīl, who distinguished between what he called siyāsat-i īmānī (politics of salvation) and siyāsat-i sulṭānī (imperial politics). While salvational politics was concerned with moral cultivation central to community life, the “driving force of imperial politics was the commanding ego-self (nafs-i ammāra)” (107). The more a leader gave in to the ego-self, the more corrupt and distant from salvational politics the political order became. In both conceptions of politics, power was imagined as a continuous struggle between the desiring self and the Divine Other, a continuous internal battle of the nafs (variously translated as soul/ego/psyche) which was to be cultivated toward more ethical frontiers through a moral community life. Further, considerations of both these forms of the political were not unconnected to Muslims’ declining power in the colonial encounter, which haunted the debates about the ethical risk inherent to a desiring subjectivity as well as competing understandings of temporality, corruption, and decline of tradition. Tareen’s analysis shows a reckoning of the political which contended with the temporality of the world, but remained aspirationally open to the temporality of the Elsewhere.

Such a notion of politics reckons with the full extent of ambiguity as a productive force within the sharīʿa, giving rise to multiple heated debates around claims on the normative. Which is not to say Tareen is suggesting we adopt “openness,” “fluidity,” or “complexity” in relation to Islam—all categories vested with liberal aspirations of making Islam compatible to modern secular values of the good. Rather, we can understand that the sharīʿa, for these ‘ulamā’, was framed around a core of an Absolutely Other unknowable Divine, around which disputation and contestation make claims on the normative. As Rajbir Singh Judge too has argued, the goal in sharīʿa is not to close the constitutive “gap” between past authority and present application, “but to wallow in its opening” (180). In the absence of a centralizing authority (such as the Roman Catholic Church) in Islam, no final word could be produced on a locatable orthodoxy. Instead, Islam emerges as a tradition that coheres itself via authoritative discourses that compete to interpret what the normative model of sharīʿa is, organized around an unknowable kernel of al Ghayb, the Unknown, of which only the Divine maintains full knowledge. The subject of this heteronomous law is imagined as engaged in a repetitive struggle, “holding on to God’s rope” (Tareen, 188). And yet, we should not forget that the final word could be produced, and was repeatedly, by the arbitration of British colonial law, which alternatively banned, allowed, or “protected” Deobandī ‘ulamā’ at times, and Barelvī at others. “Defending Muḥammad” as a practice embedded in the Islamic discursive tradition takes on a different force when the defense must be produced in modernity when decision is possible. Tareen thus presents the problem of modern sovereignty as precisely one that wishes to foreclose any indeterminacy and opaqueness inherent to a form of life.

The Impossibility of Arbitration

Masjid sweeper at the Jama Masjid in Ahmedabad’s Old City. Photo Credit: Meena Kadri, 2012.

A fuller examination of similarities and differences in contestation of boundaries of Islam and the boundaries of the modern state, its law, and the ability to enact exception remains to be undertaken. However, to continue questioning down this road, the task of the critical historian must be, as Omnia El Shakry has argued, not of endless historicization but of how one might contemplate one’s own psychic stakes in one’s objects of study and ethically encircle the distance from the radical unknowability of our deathly enjoyments in our catastrophic times.[3] This caution is no less relevant for the ethnographer, for as Jeanne Favret-Saada has famously argued, one cannot be both participant and mere observer at the same time; the only players of a game are those “caught” within it, spoken through and possessed by the full force of language at all times. There is no outside/neutral position from which to arbitrate, mix and match different Deobandī or Barelvī ideas to arrive at a Sufi or reformist Islam—a position that would be deeply trapped in the modern secular notion of choice. Giving up the secular fantasy of neutral “outside-the-game” arbitrating ground necessitates that one lose the role of sovereign decider and contemplate the impossibility of producing a final answer. To understand how 19th century Muslims related to what they did not know, how they imagined reforming the community, experienced anxieties over the loss of public markers of Islam, were possessed by a vivid gastronomic imagination of the threat of contagion living in proximity to unbelief, and negotiated curtailed futures in a moment of colonial onslaught one must ask not whether these actors were interested in politics or simply mired in debates of internal reform (again questions that cannot be unlinked). Rather, we must ask how we might turn the question back to ourselves to ask about the founding mystification that produces this binaristic interrogation that then intensifies in our current moment of a global war on Islam. Even as Tareen’s interlocuters attempt to “defend” Muḥammad in the encounter with modernity, their central challenge to the reader emerges as one of continuously calling into question the settled nature of the terms themselves with which one might translate this form of life.

[1] Distinguishing between the conceptual use of hierarchies as opposed to binaries, Tareen shows that the modern academic’s suspicion of all power has perhaps neglected to fully interrogate the productive force of Foucault’s famous lesson on the cultivation of ethical subjectivities being a function of hierarchical power.

[2] Here, Tareen is building on Saba Mahmood’s renowned work on the false equation of submission to lack of agency. See, Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject. Princeton University Press, 2011.

[3] Omnia El Shakry, “History and Lesser Death,” eds. Ethan Kleinberg, Joan Wallach Scott, and Gary Wilder. “Theses on Theory and History” in History of the Present (2018). See also, Omnia El Shakry, The Arabic Freud: Psychoanalysis and Islam in Modern Egypt. Princeton University Press, 2017.

1 Comment on “Holding on to God’s Rope”: Knotting the Adventure of Trace in Tradition Array
Zunaira Komal
Zunaira Komal is a PhD candidate in Anthropology at University of California, Davis. Her research, supported by the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research and the American Institute of Pakistan Studies, examines military psychiatry’s epistemic engagements with war, Qur’ānic rūḥānī ʿilāj, and armed struggle in (Azad) Kashmir.
Theorizing Modernities article

Prophet Motive


Pakistan Monument, Islamabad. Via Wikimedia Commons.

A masterful study of the polemics over Muḥammad’s status that have been occurring for more than a century in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, SherAli Tareen’s book accomplishes a number of important tasks. It demonstrates the wrongheadedness of framing this debate in terms of a conflict between tradition and modernity, or mystical and clerical forms of Islam. It repudiates accounts that understand the issue either as a meaningless conflict about ritual matters or a purely instrumental battle over power, influence, and resources. And it shows us that this polemical tradition is founded in a genuine argument, whose philosophical and juridical implications are meaningful even for those outside its purview.

What I want to do in this brief blog post is explore one of the implications of this debate, that having to do with what Tareen envisages as the simultaneous appropriation and expulsion of sovereignty by Muslims debating Muḥammad’s status. He describes this paradox in the following way. The coming of colonialism to South Asia not only diminished the power and authority of Muslim rulers, but also allowed religious specialists in these regions unprecedented freedom in the newly secular conditions of European empires. They responded to this freedom by purging Islam of its historical links with monarchy and the entire language of political thought associated with it. Yet this excision was accompanied by new Islamic actors accepting a European notion of sovereignty which, however, they reserved only for God.

Impossible Sovereignty

What does it mean to replace the traditional forms and vocabulary of Muslim politics with a modern category like sovereignty, while at the same time forbidding its use among human beings only so that it can be placed at the very heart of Islam? On the one hand, a sovereignty unavailable to colonized peoples might in this way have been displaced onto God as a kind of compensation. On the other hand, its expulsion from the world of mortals may indicate a deep suspicion of sovereignty and the modern state it represents. Having been stripped of its own political tradition, in other words, new forms of Islamic thought were magnetized by the idea of sovereignty in a way not so very different from anti-colonial nationalism.

Since engaging a politics defined by sovereignty was unavoidable despite their fear of it, Islamic thinkers seem to have instituted it as a kind of taboo that came to define their debates and even the public controversies such debates sometimes gave rise to. The anxiety produced by this taboo finds its site of manifestation in the person of Muḥammad, who is, after all, the most important intermediary between the worlds of God and men. Like the fanciful accounts of medieval Europeans about the Prophet’s coffin magnetically suspended between the floor and ceiling of his tomb in Medina, Muḥammad occupies an impossible position in modern Islamic thought.

Tareen’s book describes the battles over Muḥammad’s difficult positioning between divine sovereignty and mortal sinfulness. And while he is concerned chiefly with the polemics of Barelvī and Deobandī writers, we can add to these the violent criticism levelled at Ahmadi and other Muslims for allegedly denying Muḥammad’s prophetic finality, and even the murderous controversies over “blasphemy” and insults supposedly directed at him. I enclose the term “blasphemy” in scare quotes because, as we shall see, it is used in these debates as a borrowing from Christianity and mostly in European languages. Despite the presence of comparable terms in Islamic history, what is interesting about modern controversies over Muḥammad is that they rarely deploy such theological terms. It is because he occupies such an ambiguous position between the sovereignty of God and that of men, in other words, that Muḥammad serves as a lightning rod for Muslim outrage. By contrast the act of blaspheming God rarely, if ever, becomes the subject of such debate and passion.

Controversies about the Prophet’s status rehearse a political as much as a theological paradox, since the very effort to expel sovereignty from human society while preserving it elsewhere sets the stage for its spectacular return. All three iterations of Pakistan’s constitution, for example, reserve sovereignty for God as a result of a compromise its drafters made with Muslim religious groups led by the Islamist intellectual Mawdūdī. But I would argue that precisely because it was not vested in any institution by these constitutions, sovereignty returned to Pakistani politics in the form of the coup d’état as an exception that served as a counterpart of the miracle in theology. For even in negative form it remains central to modern Islamic thought.

Depoliticized Islam

Like his contemporary, Carl Schmitt, Mawdūdī recognized sovereignty as a theological concept. Unlike Schmitt, however, he wanted to reserve it for God because human beings were incapable of exercizing the absolute power that the modern theory of sovereignty demanded. Rather than offering too much power to human beings, in other words, sovereignty was dangerous because no mortal institution could match up to its truly theological demands. It was their incapacity to exercize such absolute power that led to injustice, whose violence arose in the gap between sovereignty’s theological purity and its all too human reality. By reserving sovereignty for God, then, it could be expelled from human society.

Controversies about the Prophet’s status rehearse a political as much as theological paradox, since the very effort to expel sovereignty from human society while preserving it elsewhere sets the stage for its spectacular return.

Mawdūdī’s interpretation of the dispute between God’s sovereignty and Muḥammad’s humanity took this debate in a new political direction. Drawing from the deep suspicion of modern statehood among many anti-colonial thinkers, for whom the state was inextricably linked with imperialism, he focussed on what we may call social self-governance instead. Like Gandhi, whom he had admired in the early part of his career, Mawdūdī sought to reconceive politics in more or less anarchist terms. Whereas Gandhi did so by fragmenting and distributing sovereignty, however, Mawdūdī sought to expel it altogether by founding a self-governing society on the basis of a pre-given and unchanging Islamic law.

Now the sacred law had itself become autonomous as a result of the collapse of pre-colonial polities, and it was held to define Islam by colonial scholars and administrators who wanted to delegitimize traditional forms of kingly authority. In this sense, law in Islam performed the role that caste did in Hinduism, which is to say as a principle of depoliticization. Both caste and law, however, could be re-politicized in an anarchistic way, as Gandhi and to some degree Mawdūdī tried to do. The latter, for instance, was careful to deprive the state of all power over the sacred law, which had to be interpreted by authorities outside its control.

Defined by the law as a social force meant to restrict the sovereign impulses of both state and citizen, Islam has been deprived of a political vocabulary. The “Islamic state,” which Mawdūdī was a pioneer in theorizing, is meant to be subordinated to a law representing not just the views of individual Muslims but their very reality as a society. In the Leninist theory that both Gandhi and Mawdūdī cited, the state had to be captured for the dictatorship of the proletariat, only to be dissolved into what Lenin called the bureaucratic “administration of objects” once all class enemies were destroyed. Gandhi wanted to begin where Lenin ended, with the withering away of the state, while Mawdūdī wanted law to limit this state from the outside.

But Mawdūdī feared losing control of the society he wanted to triumph over the state and its principle of sovereignty. This led him to construe the law that was meant to represent the social against the political as a conservative and undemocratic force. In effect, he sought to forestall sovereign violence by foreclosing the possibility of new legislation, which was reduced to mere governance as fidelity to a preordained law. In this way, an anarchist vision of politics was eventually turned into a neoliberal one, where the regulation of society is conceived as a marketplace. This market had already come, indeed, to shape controversies about Muḥammad in the depoliticized arena of colonial Islam well before the emergence of neoliberalism in the wake of the Second World War. 

A Market for Hurt Sentiments

The first modern controversies over insults to Muḥammad are likely to have been the Bombay riots of 1851 and 1874. Occurring between Muslims and Parsis rather than Hindus, one involved an unflattering image and the other a prurient account of Muḥammad in Gujarati newspapers published by Parsi proprietors. As would become the case with subsequent protests over alleged insults to the Prophet, these provocations were neither part of any pre-existing and polemical debate between religious groups nor of the Christian missionary activity that also entailed engaging Muslims in theological argument. They were addressed instead to a generic public constituting a market for information and entertainment.

But Mawdūdī feared losing control of the society he wanted to triumph over the state and its principle of sovereignty. This led him to construe the law that was meant to represent the social against the political as a conservative and undemocratic force.

These insults, then, were so offensive in part because they surfaced as news and rumour with no direct address or even purpose, asking neither for the acquiescence nor opposition of Muslims themselves. Because they seemed to lack theological purpose and meaning, it is not surprising that conspiracies were manufactured to explain them. And this meaninglessness was, of course, defined by the anonymous market and its public that had turned Muḥammad into a what we would today call a human-interest story for a profit-making enterprise. Those representing the new capitalist class among Indians, Parsis, and other readers of Bombay’s Gujarati press were targeted for attack by Muslims. The latter did not themselves speak Gujarati and belonged to laboring, artisanal, and service classes, and were also sometimes joined in their rioting and looting by low-caste Hindus.

While in Tareen’s framing these offended Muslims may be said to follow the Barelvī line in refusing Muḥammad’s humanization, what is interesting about their outrage was the fact that it refused theological expression. They appealed, rather, to a protectionist logic that was defined by the market, and called for its freedoms of production and circulation to be restricted. These limitations were understood in terms of forgery and libel, with only the colonial state and non-Muslim critics applying theological categories like blasphemy to the protests. The offended Muslims themselves also deployed the language that went into the making of the Indian Penal Code. This code replaced the Christian sin of blasphemy with the secular one of hurt sentiments from which the religious prejudices of Hindus and Muslims should be protected.

Fascinating about these details is how they have continued to define Muslim offense not only in contemporary India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, but more globally as well, for example, in the Rushdie Affair of 1989. In almost every instance of protest, the theological vocabulary of blasphemy used has explicitly been taken from Christianity and deployed mostly in European languages for non-Muslim audiences. In languages like Urdu the chief terms used are secular ones, including the “hurt sentiments” mentioned in the Indian Penal Code, and other words like “insult” and “impudence.” Theological notions only make an appearance when Muslims think in Christian terms. This was the case during the protests over The Satanic Verses, where Muslims asked for their sanctities to be included within Britain’s blasphemy law, which until then had been reserved for Anglicans alone. The law was eventually abolished in the 1990s to avoid including apparently more excitable non-Christian religions. Subsequently, the Pakistani prime minister Nawaz Sharif tried to drum up support for an international provision against blasphemy modelled on the one in Irish law.

Just as sovereignty had to be expelled from politics to be ensconced at the heart of Islamic theology, in other words, Muslim protests have expelled blasphemy to lodge it in the deepest recesses of Christian theology. Whatever Islamic scholars might say, then, the popular language of Muslim offense in which they increasingly participate possesses little if any theological character. Indeed, its prosaic arguments derive from a market logic that bears no apparent relationship to the violence in which it sometimes results. It is as if such violence takes its meaning from the very absence of a theological vocabulary, and even as its wordless replacement by the ritual practice of sacrifice. But what does all of this mean as far as Tareen’s book is concerned?

On the one hand, a sovereignty reserved for God keeps returning to the world of men in murderous controversies over insults directed against the Prophet. This suggests that modern Islamic thought is incapable either of deploying or renouncing the political principle that defines the state. And on the other hand, the law and theology meant to take the place of sovereignty and its politics in social life keeps disappearing, only to be brought back by these same controversies in the form of a violence that can only give itself the Christian name of blasphemy. The social self-governance in which Islam was supposed to manifest itself has been turned into the struggle to regulate a market whose limits are tested by what can be produced and circulated about Muḥammad.

 

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Faisal Devji
Faisal Devji is Professor of Indian History at the University of Oxford. 
Theorizing Modernities article

Theology and the Ironies of History


Reading SherAli Tareen’s magnificent Defending Muḥammad in Modernity (Winner of the 2020 American Institute of Pakistan Studies Book Prize) one is left contemplating how the ideas of visionary figures can set the complex agenda of future trends and institutions. Take the well-known scholar and political activist Shāh Muḥammad Ismāʿīl (d. 1831), a scion of the influential Walīyullāh family, and a key figure in Tareen’s work. His rigorist theological vision was adopted by some of the founders of the Deoband school, and they outlawed the widely practiced ritual and ceremony of commemorating the Prophet. Paradoxically, the spiritual mentor of the founders of Deoband, Hājī Imdadullāh (d.1899), much to the chagrin of some of his disciples, approved of this ritual, known as the mīlād, as Tareen explains, albeit with some stipulations. Ismāʿīl and Imdādullāh subtly and deliberately re-shaped the discursive practices of Muslims in South Asia, especially those that directly impinged on the relations between institutions, namely, what became known as the Deobandī school and their rivals the Barelvī school of thought. These schools argued over the ritual of mīlād and other doctrinal issues that Tareen discusses in detail. “Once a vision becomes an institution,” the influential German writer Siegfried Kracauer writes, “clouds of dust gather about it, blurring its contours and contents. The history of ideas is a history of misunderstandings” (7).

The jury is still out as to how one should name and frame the nature of these theological shifts which left long shadows on Islam as practiced on the subcontinent. But few doubts arise that their ideas were impacted by the changing political and cultural landscape of colonial India, a phenomenon that multiple participants in this symposium have noted. This harvest of reflections, with each contributor’s unique appreciation, is possibly the best gift to Tareen, who explores, describes, and analyzes the micro-histories of discrete theological debates in colonial India so that his readers can get a sense of what was at stake in these debates in the past and what ramifications they continue to have in the present. Most theological disputes have an afterlife, and some of these intricate and subtle debates about the authority of Islam’s messenger and prophet still percolate in the hearts and minds of the faithful to this very day.

Political Theology

As Tareen himself explains, political theology forms the golden thread in his book. In his contribution, Waris Mazhari acknowledges that religion and politics in Muslim history were intimately connected but he rejects what he labels as the “Western” category of “political theology” as less useful. In my view, the deep roots of “political theology” in Islamic thought can be found in the work of medieval Muslim scholars, which is often unacknowledged in critical scholarship. For instance, Muḥammad Aʿlā al-Tahānawī (died approximately 1707), the outstanding encyclopedist in Mughal India, writes that governance or politics (siyāsa) is “the cultivation of the good in humanity by guiding them to the path of salvation in this life and the next” (1:993–94). The nexus between humans, the world, and attaining God’s salvation is evident in this definition which today enjoys the moniker of political theology. In Tahānawī’s all-inclusive and comprehensive notion of the political, prophets exercise governance over the souls and the bodies of all people. As to the learned, who are fondly remembered in the tradition as “the true heirs of the prophets,” per the premodern prescription their jurisdiction is limited to the nurturing of the souls of the elites. As to the multitude, the discipline and governance of all people in this schema takes place via a regime of regulation by the show of power and of force for the maintenance of order. Even more interesting is that medieval Muslim political philosophy conceptualized the discipline of the self as the “governance of the souls” (siyāsa nafsīya) and the regulation of the realms of subsistence or economics, communal existence, and welfare as the “governance of the corporeal body” (siyāsa badanīya). Disciplining the subjectivities of the people was the task of the scholars, while regulating the public sphere was the task of the political rulers. All of this was part of this Islamic tradition centuries before Michel Foucault made us aware of the technologies of the self.

Most theological disputes have an afterlife, and some of these intricate and subtle debates about the authority of Islam’s messenger and prophet still percolate in the hearts and minds of the faithful to this very day.

Tahānawī explains that two common forms of theological and philosophical politics prevailed among Muslims. One was a politics of justice, also named “a regime of Norms/Sharīʿa” (al-siyāsa al-sharʿīya), which was drawn from the teachings of the prophets, as also articulated by the work of the philosopher Abū Naṣr al-Fārābī (d. 950). The other was a regime regulated by political philosophy and wisdom (al-siyāsa al-madanīya or al-ḥikma al-siyāsīya) where the rule of the monarch, Sulṭān, or other similar kind of ruler prevailed. Politics as a regime of governance is central to order, justice, and the protection of the realm against all enemies. Early Muslim political theorists viewed the regime of law and political philosophy as part of a mutually reinforcing continuum.

A feature of the composite political theology described above has as its desideratum the need to sustain an empire in harmony with early and premodern Islamic predecessors. Key features of these predecessors were hierarchy and a variety of distinctions, for example, between those who are free vs slave, male vs female, and between different forms of political subject positions and professions. In modern times, the heirs to this vocabulary of Muslim political theology often adopt it uncritically without due attention to the conditions of a different time and altered aspirations. In other words, not frequently practiced is a critical engagement with histories and concepts for their more effective use in the present.

Contextual Theology

It appears that someone like Shāh Muḥammad Ismāʿīl, whose thought Tareen’s documents in detail, partially sought a more egalitarian promise in the God of the Qurʾān. While undoubtedly portrayed as a monarch (malik), the God of the Qurʾān is nonetheless also one who does not act in an aristocratic fashion in the same way as earthly monarchs. Shāh Ismāʿīl’s God hears the prayers of the lowly leather-worker as well as the rich landowner without any need for any human intercession and intermediary. Thus, he leveraged the image of God as the fountain of mercy and sovereign authority who is available at the request of all creatures. His desire to reduce the aristocratic elements of political theology to one more in line with the impulse of the pre-imperial Muslim caliphate, which was more egalitarian in its impulses, is unmistakable.

A postage stamp commemorating Aḥmad Razā Khān Barelvī in India. Via Wikimedia Commons.

Alert to the context and the work of Shāh Ismāʿīl, Zunaira Komal provides a reading of Tareen via Sigmund Freud, Walter Benjamin, and Jacques Derrida. For the latter, tradition can also be viewed as an “encounter” and a “gift” even though it might be a mysterious one in its origins. If Tareen’s reading is centered around the contestation over tradition in one sense, then Komal reminds us that the past has multiple echoes as “the unpastness of the past, the unsettled question of tradition.” Drawing on Walter Benjamin, she pushes us to grapple with traditions in such a way that we might “seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger” (128).

We will recall that it was the sect called the Khārijites who seized onto a memory of the nascent (primitive) political impulse at the founding of Islam, roughly three decades after the Prophet died. The Khārijites invoked God’s sovereignty above human claims at a moment when they sensed the danger of internecine conflict. Political legitimacy for the Khārijites was centered on the preservation of divine sovereignty as framed in their clarion call that “only God’s command shall prevail” (lā ḥukm illā lillāh) in all disputes and circumstances. But over time Islamdom’s political theology shifted, grew, and adopted greater complexity as multiple empires rose, evolved, and fragmented. Sunnī juridical theologians paraphrased a Qurʾānic verse that “obedience (dīn) was only due to God” and insisted on the regime of law as a sign of legitimacy of the political order.

Hermeneutical Shifts

Tareen’s nineteenth-century Muslim reformers in South Asia, and those elsewhere in the Muslim world began to rework the regime of norms or laws into their projects of reform, but often neglected rich medieval political philosophy and the lush conceptual vocabularies that were coupled with it. Instead, these reformers energized their discursive tradition and practice by pairing it strictly to scriptural sources—the Qurʾān and the Sunna (prophetic norms drawn from a copious archive of ḥadīth). In the process, the historical memory of the tradition was substituted by a surfeit of confidence and reliance on the norms of scriptural authenticity. With the emphasis on pristine origins, this reformist tradition was bound to clash with existing interpretative frameworks that were embedded in historical experiences that privileged the will of the community and the authority of tradition equally.

Divine sovereignty in this redesigned or reformed tradition was weaponized as a means to alter the hearts, minds, and the worlds of the believers. The stand-off between Fazl-ī Ḥaqq Khayrābādī (d. 1861) and Shāh Ismāʿīl in the nineteenth century, and Aḥmad Razā Khān (d. 1921) and the Deobandīs in the twentieth, are both instances of an internal clash within the Sunni Muslim community. Unfortunately, because of the heat of polemics, no mechanism for discursive reconciliation or brokering was possible.

These scorching debates prevailed in the post-colonial periods, as Sohaira Siddiqui points out in her response. She rightly observes that the “problem space” of the Barelvī-Deobandī polemics also have a contemporary manifestation not only in South Asia but even in regions where these Muslim sub-traditions have traveled.

Like Siddiqui, Faisal Devji also reflects on how Tareen’s argument helps us in addressing issues in different contexts. He notes that in the twentieth century the refurbished concept of divine sovereignty became an instrument of ideological state-formation. Such a notion, he claims, has been institutionalized via constitutions and legislative processes. Pakistan and Egypt are two examples of how the concept of divine sovereignty gets embedded into nation-state political orders. Baptized by revised politico-theological concepts, one observes how the legislatures, courts, politicians, and political activists all deploy God’s sovereignty as a war cry to contest, topple, and challenge governments; restrain or ban speech about religion; and mount campaigns against alleged offenses denoted as blasphemy. By purging vast sections of the archive of historical Muslim political theology, Devji suggests the result is “new Islamic actors accepting a European notion of sovereignty which, however, they reserved only for God.” I agree with Devji as to how European notions of sovereignty are patched on to modern Islamic practices. My readings of the premodern literature suggest that notions of sovereignty were meshed into authoritative discourses and symbolic imaginaries. And sovereign-authority was often fragmented and distributed, and perhaps functioned more like rhizomes—sometimes you saw it and at other times it was concealed.

Jonathan Brown is curious as to why these intra-Muslim theological contestations reached such fury in South Asia. Perhaps a comparative study which looked to the slightly earlier period in West Africa could help illuminate the developments in South Asia. Developments in the Sokoto Caliphate under Osman dan Fodio and his heirs might provide one entry point here. In his essay, Brown notes some of the uncanny resemblances in the theological developments in South Asia in the nineteenth century and Arabia in the eighteenth century, but then himself correctly discounts the comparison because he claims that there were crucial differences between the two contexts. Even if it is hazardous to speculate, I would proffer that Shāh Ismāʿīl and his colleagues were a minority in a diminished Mughal empire, where the anxiety of loss and dissolution of Muslim fortunes weighed heavily on their conscience, a point that Mazhari confirms. This might have led them to assess their situation as dire, and thus in need of an exceptional response at multiple levels. The reaction to some of their proposals too was unusually intense.

Afterlife of Theological Polemics

But as Ammar Khan Nasir points out, even amongst those Deobandīs who were devoted and supportive of the reformist cause of Shāh Ismaʿīl there were reservations and discomfort at the latter’s rhetoric of reform. This is a sentiment voiced by a later Deobandī, Anwar Shāh Kashmīrī (d. 1933), who considered himself a supporter of this reform. Curiously, it seems that the judicious among the Deobandīs were unable to reduce the polemical heat in the twentieth century between themselves and their rivals, the Barelvī sect. This would have required them to both voice critical dissent in some matters that they found objectionable in the writings of the reformers, while nonetheless still support the overall reform project. Perhaps the heat and din of polemical exchanges and vested political interests rendered such potential stillborn. For when the stakes are high even the most constructive critique can be viewed as outright rejection.

Darul Uloom Deoband. Deoband, India. Via Wikimedia Commons.

The larger question Nasir poses is whether or not knowledge of the multitude of Muslim sectarian struggles on the subcontinent which date back to the seventeenth century can be edificatory. Historical awareness, he implies, might help imagine new possibilities in the present. He points out that theologians prescribed theologies that caused rifts and divisions that persist to this day among the Muslims of South Asia. He wonders if South Asian Islam can find a formula whereby different religious identities can coexist in ways that disallow the state to own the monopoly over religion. This remains a relevant question. Countless experiences around the world show that the defenders of God’s sanctity and Muḥammad’s dignity often wrap their own personas in the mantle of infallibility and privilege their opinions and thus raise the stakes. Proclamations of sovereignty quickly unravel into pithy slogans and the theological tinder emitted can turn into a conversation-stopper which makes it difficult to pursue any meaningful discussion on myriads of issues concerning law and theology.

We are grateful to SherAli Tareen for providing us with an opportunity to think through a multitude of questions involving God, humans, and the world in South Asia. He has raised many issues for us to continuously ponder. Since many of the ideas Tareen raised are still alive and kicking among the faithful, so to speak, we can therefore be content that over time there might be different permutations of this debate in uncharted waters. Defending Muḥammad in Modernity can also be framed as “contesting” deeply held theological concepts centered on the Prophet of Islam. Central issues debated in this book and their history show that there are conceptual caesuras or interruptions that have allowed the controversy to go on after it reached its peak. Doctrines of a tradition—and Islam is no exception—continue to undergo adjustment and reframing to ever-changing conditions. Reinterpreting a doctrine might at times lead away from a tradition. History has repeatedly shown that no dogma is immune to innovation and new possibilities.

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Ebrahim Moosa
Ebrahim Moosa is Mirza Family Professor of Islamic Thought and Muslim Societies in Notre Dame’s Keough School of Global Affairs and Department of History. He co-directs Contending Modernities with Atalia Omer and Scott Appleby. Moosa’s interests span both classical and modern Islamic thought with a special focus on Islamic law, history, ethics and theology. He is the author of Ghazali and the Poetics of Imagination, winner of the American Academy of Religion’s Best First Book in the History of Religions (2006), and What is a Madrasa? (2015).
Theorizing Modernities article

Rejoining the Ottoman and South Asian Worlds


Deoband students going to class. Author’s photo.

This book lands like an obelisk at the intersection of several fields. It joins the philological rigor of classical Islamic studies with the theoretical framing of religious studies and the contextual nous of South Asian studies. It will likely be a new point of departure for conversations around Islam in early modern and modern South Asia. And it plants a sturdy post in the region, extending the discursive tent of the Arabo-Ottoman-centric study of Islamic thought to include influential participants long ruefully omitted.

One could reflect on this book in many ways. I would be content merely to list its virtues and accomplishments were more engagement not asked of me. And yet at this I hesitate, well aware of the daunting expertise needed to comment on the universe of the Deobandīu/Barelvī dispute, an imposing knot that draws together equally the long diachronic cords of Islam’s theological dispute over divine sovereignty and the rich threads of cultural and political contestation in British India.

Perhaps one insight I could offer would be a memory of my own befuddlement, born of an Arabo-Ottoman bias. I remember reading the Taqwiyat al-īmān of the Indian-born Shāh Ismāʿīl al-Shahīd (d. 1831), a text that anchors Tareen’s book, almost fifteen years ago. I was very interested in the topic of the 18th-century movements of revival and reform in the Islamic world, often conceived of as Proto-Salafi, and the text clearly fit right in. Shāh Ismāʿīl’s disapproval of conspicuous markers of social hierarchy and his fierce rejection of saintly intercession could have come from the pen of the Najdi Ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb (d. 1792) in Saudi Arabia or the books of Ibn al-Amīr al-Ṣanʿānī (d. 1768) in Yemen. And yet the relatively short text quickly escaped my comprehension. Shāh Ismāʿīl began speaking of intercession of different sorts, deploying the analogy of petitioning a vizier, of a sultan’s love and permission. It made little sense to me. It seemed very foreign.

Intra-Sunni arguments over seemingly obscure points of theology, whether the nature of God’s speech in the ninth century or whether the Prophet is present during prayer in the twentieth, reach such volume and ferocity that historians often assume that they must have been debates over politics or society by other means. A point clearly and convincingly made in Defending Muḥammad is that assuming that theological dispute and—for the lack of a better word—politics are isomorphic does disservice to the weight and intermingling of both. Muslims had been debating whether and how a human being can intercede with God on behalf of another for over a millennium. And Muslim scholars had been wringing their hands at what various types of rulers and states meant for the public manifestation of Islam—and competing for influence among both the masses below them and the ruling elite above—for equally long. What Tareen demonstrates is that understanding Shāh Ismāʿīl’s text, as well as the many rebuttals it prompted, means reading it through the court idiom of the Mughal twilight. But, crucially, this political idiom was synchronous to this theological discourse, not causal (124 ff., 146, 148, 155).

Succumbing to the Atlantic-world habit of assuming a bifurcation of politics and religion is one danger aptly pointed out by Tareen. His book makes it equally clear that one cannot read the landscape of Islamic thought and practice in British India through a lens ground to catch binaries like tradition/reform, law/mysticism, Arab/indigenous, extremist/tolerant, Salafi/Madhhabi-Sufi. Many of these binaries seem better suited to the study of Islam in the modern Ottoman Middle East, though Indira Falk Gesink (2009) and Leor Halevi (2019) among others have revealed the error of over-reliance on such framing.

Perhaps the appeal of the Salafi/Madhhabi-Sufi binary is so appealing in the Ottoman-Middle-East context because ʿulamā’ participants in prominent debates raging there since the early twentieth century have so explicitly acknowledged this divide, if not always by those terms. As Tareen explains, the thunderous Deobandī/Barelvī battle has occurred within one side of that binary: neither Deobandīs nor Barelvīs are “Salafis” by any stretch (despite Barelvī invectives against their allegedly ‘Wahhābī’ foes). Both camps are admitted and recognized devotees to the Ḥanafī school of law and the non-controversial strain of India’s Sufi heritage.

Dar al-Ulum Deoband Rashid Mosque. Author’s photo.

Hence it could be the Ottoman Middle East’s most vehement enemy of Salafism—and a scholar who breathed to defend Abū Ḥanīfa against any and all foes—Muḥammad Zāhid al-Kawtharī (d. 1952), who first widely promoted the Hadith scholarship and theological polemics of Deoband grandees like Khalīl Aḥmad Sahāranpūrī (d. 1927), Anwar Shāh Kashmīrī (d. 1933), and Ashraf ʿAlī Thānvī (d. 1943) in the Arabic-speaking world.[1] This praise was echoed by another bane of Salafism in the Arabophone world, the Moroccan traditionalist polymath ʿAbdallāh bin al-Ṣiddīq al-Ghumārī (d. 1993).[2]  Die-hard opponents of Salafis, al-Kawtharī and al-Ghumārī were delighted by the tremendous accomplishments in Hadith scholarship by these Deobandī giants. And they appreciated their rebuttals of the Aḥmadī movement. In one book, al-Ghumārī notes approvingly of three of Aḥmad Riḍā Khān’s (d. 1921) books on the Prophet’s knowledge of the unseen.[3] But Khān’s writings seem to have had little impact on scholarship in the Arab world, certainly not in comparison to Deobandīs like Anwar Shāh Kashmīrī. Ironically, if asked about the Prophet’s knowledge of the unseen or the mawlid, scholars like al-Kawtharī and al-Ghumārī would no doubt take the Barelvī side. But they could read and appreciate the books of Deobandi scholars in blissful removal from the controversies in South Asia. Even today, ulama in the Arab world remain mostly unaware of—or uninterested in—the Deobandī/Barelvī debate.

Why has a debate that seems so voraciously consuming in South Asia not spread elsewhere, touching as it does on the enduring controversies of divine sovereignty and the Prophet’s relationship to it (large South Asian diaspora communities excepted)? Ironically, the answer might comfort Shāh Ismāʿīl al-Shahīd, the founders of Deoband, and Aḥmad Riḍā Khān alike. Tareen assiduously lays out how all these great scholars sought to preserve what they saw as the religious, communal, and sometimes even political hallmarks (shaʿā’ir) of Islam and Muslim practice. They wanted the Muslim community to survive, vigorous and uncorrupted, though they disagreed on how that vigor should be protected and what the most dangerous forms of corruption were. It may be that the Deobandī/Barelvī debate, which, Tareen reminds us, takes place between two parties who agree on far more than they disagree and compete for adherents in the same population, has remained at such a stunning volume for so long because the universe of South Asian Islam has been nurtured so richly. That one can enter this dispute on the streets of Durban or Leicester, that Cape Town has Barelvī mosques and Deobandī Dār al-ʿUlūms, testifies to the powerful infrastructure of clerisy and learning, and even more to the passions stoked by all these reformers. This is a rowdy but unbroken spirit.

 

 

[1] See Muḥammad Zāhid al-Kawtharī, Maqālāt al-Kawtharī, 68, 271.

[2] ʿAbdallāh b. al-Ṣiddīq al-Ghumārī, Sabīl al-tawfīq fī tarjamat ʿAbdallāh b. al-Ṣiddīq (Cairo: al-Dār al-Bayḍā’, 1990), 59.

[3] Al-Ghumārī, Afḍal maqūl fī manāqib afḍal rasūl (Cairo: Maktabat al-Qāhira, 1425/2005), 70 ff.

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Jonathan Brown
Jonathan Brown is the Alwaleed bin Talal Chair of Islamic Civilization in the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. He received his BA in History from Georgetown University in 2000 and his doctorate in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations from the University of Chicago in 2006. Dr. Brown has studied and conducted research in countries such as Egypt, Syria, Turkey, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, South Africa, India, Indonesia and Iran. His book publications include The Canonization of al-Bukhari and Muslim: The Formation and Function of the Sunni Hadith Canon (Brill, 2007); Hadith: Muhammad’s Legacy in the Medieval and Modern World (Oneworld, 2009; expanded edition 2017); Muhammad: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2011), which was selected for the National Endowment for the Humanities' Bridging Cultures Muslim Journeys Bookshelf; Misquoting Muhammad: The Challenges and Choices of Interpreting the Prophet’s Legacy (Oneworld, 2014), which was named one of the top books on religion in 2014 by the Independent; and Slavery and Islam (Oneworld, 2019). He has published articles in the fields of Hadith, Islamic law, Salafism, Sufism, Arabic lexical theory and Pre-Islamic poetry and is the editor in chief of the Oxford Encyclopedia of Islam and Law. Dr. Brown’s current research interests include Islamic legal reform and a translation of Sahih al-Bukhari. He is also the Director of Research at the Yaqeen Institute.
Global Currents article

Religion, Uyghurs, and the Global War on Terror


Uyghur man in Urumchi carefully prepares watermelon and cantaloupe for iftar, the evening meal of Ramadan. Photo Courtesy of Timothy Grose.

The weaponization of “Islam,” imagined as an inevitable and immutable cause for violence and social disruption, is a recurring global phenomena that is employed by numerous national bodies. For example, in 2020 alone, we saw Muslims in France being deemed unsuitable citizens based on the criteria of French laïcité, and in India there were religious conversion laws that criminalized Muslims in interfaith marriages and the Citizenship Amendment Act that disadvantaged Muslim refugees. This pattern of state-administered harm against Muslims in China can be seen so clearly in the ongoing Uyghur crisis because it is severely protracted and especially monstrous. While the Uyghur crisis doesn’t revolve solely around Islamic identity and practice, the category “religion” provides an organizing framework that the People’s Republic of China (PRC) utilizes to justify its continued oppression of the community. The historical expansion into Uyghur lands through settler colonialism and the continual denial of Uyghur sovereignty by ruling bodies has drastically intensified under General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Xi Jinping through practices of technological surveillance, invasion of private spaces, mass detention, incarceration, and internment. Across these perilous circumstances, the insistence on a clear distinction between religious and secular domains of social life undergirds the CCP’s governance of Uyghur life.

Regulating Religion in China

Since the People’s Republic of China operates as an authoritarian secular state, whose party members are obligated to renounce religious belief, it has established its ability to govern religion. The privilege of religious freedom is set out in the constitution but is limited to religious belief and only offered to recognized groups, including the five official religions of Buddhism, Islam, Catholicism, Protestantism, and Daoism. The discursive construction and legal definition of religion hinges on European Christian understandings of the category, which prioritize faith over and above practice. China’s safeguarding of religion did not include lived social behaviors and proselytization associated with a tradition. In 1982, Article 36 of the Constitution of the PRC established that “[t]he state protects normal religious activities. No one may make use of religion to engage in activities that disrupt public order, impair the health of citizens or interfere with the educational system of the state.” What is deemed “normal” was governed by the state through the Religious Affairs Bureau, also known as the State Administration for Religious Affairs. In 2018, however, this department was absorbed into the United Front Work Department, which reports directly to the Chinese Communist Party. The state has the ability to regulate what it deems appropriate “religion” in matters of worship and practice, professional leadership, and sacred institutions.

While the Uyghur crisis doesn’t revolve solely around Islamic identity and practice, the category “religion” provides an organizing framework that the People’s Republic of China utilizes to justify its continued oppression of the community.

Since Islam is an officially recognized religion, the Chinese state can govern what the tradition looks like in word and practice for Muslims living in the country. The specifics of what counts as official Islam in the PRC were first set and circulated through the China Islamic Association, founded in 1953, which is made up of leadership that is affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party. The vast majority of Uyghurs are Muslims so the state’s ability to regulate Islam directly shapes Uyghur religious life, which the state has increasingly posited as being in opposition to being a Chinese citizen. The state has operationalized “Islam” as a signifier of potential state disruption and treated Muslims with force, dominance, and discipline. But the state’s reliance on a discourse of acceptable and unacceptable religion has played a shifting role in classifying and regulating Uyghur life.

Historically, Muslims across China have had changing relationships with one another. At times, Muslim communities have been in direct conflict with other Muslim groups, or aided in state domination of other Muslim populations. For example, Sino-Muslim communities (i.e. Hui minzu of the PRC) had both internal conflicts based on religious leadership or ritual difference, and have also had tense relationships with Uyghur Muslims. During other moments, Hui and Uyghur Muslim worked and lived together, even in opposition to state control. James Millward’s expansive Eurasian Crossroads: A History of Xinjiang paints the most comprehensive picture of the history of the region. In 1759, during the Qing dynasty’s colonial expansion to the west, the Qianlong Emperor annexed what was dubbed Xinjiang (New Domain or Frontier), the region many Uyghurs call East Turkistan today. The grand swath of land under Qing rule during the 18th through early 20th century was made up of a great deal of ethnic, religious, and linguistic diversity. Qing leaders employed strategies that fostered greater autonomy within local communities across various cultural regions but maintained control by accommodating diversity among their subjects. This “imperial pluralism,” as Millward puts it, was echoed during the 20th century through the minzu system (usually rendered nationality or ethnic group), which designated 56 minzu groups (including the Han majority) who had equal standing as Chinese citizens.

Indigeneity, Separatism, and Settler Colonialism

The minzu question, or the question of how the state relates to its minorities, has been one way scholars have tried to understand contemporary Uyghurs. However, under the PRC’s control there was increased promotion of settler colonialism in East Turkistan, where Han Chinese have been inching closer to being equal in number to the Uyghurs in Xinjiang. While the Uyghur question is often framed as an issue of minority suppression, we should remember that it is also one of indigeneity. Uyghurs, like Mongols and Tibetans, are a majority population tethered to specific geographies that have been encroached upon by outsiders and the community has been socially and politically stifled within their indigenous lands. In 1953, Han settlers stood at 6% of the overall Xinjiang population while Uyghurs made up 75%. The settler colonialism framework helps us render the logics of resistance within a more suitable domain than the minzu paradigm since the Uyghurs were not a minority but were minoritized.

In periods of Uyghur unrest during the second half of the twentieth century, the state commonly used a discourse of “separatism” to describe Uyghur resistance to the government’s policies. However, social turmoil was most often the result of a search for greater Uyghur autonomy within their indigenous lands rather than a plot for secession. The state continued the separatism classification especially within the context of the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the creation of newly formed Central Asian nations. During this period, “religion” was not a generative discourse for advancing state suppression of dissidents and, therefore, was generally ignored in state documents and statements. This strategy was effective until the CCP found a new fertile slogan for drumming up international support for their domestic Uyghur difficulties: the “War on Terror.”

Islam and Terrorism

The attacks on September 11, 2001 catalyzed a series of new policies, governmental departments, and ideological positions in the United States. The logic of the so-called “War on Terror” relied on the circulation of long held representational stereotypes about Islam in US popular media, governmental knowledge production, and colonial encounters with global Muslims communities, as well as the inherited traditions about the “Orient” from European predecessors. The lynchpin of arguments for state anti-Muslim suspicion and conduct was rooted in essentialized interpretations of Islam that suggested an inherent Muslim disposition towards defiance, resistance, and violence.  Talal Asad argues that these types of assumptions about the essential violent features of “religion,” as opposed to the seemingly justifiable logic behind “secular” aggression and force, pivot on the construction of these two categories as separate and unique.

The US policy tendency to equate Muslims with potential terrorist threats was soon wrapped up in international diplomatic exchanges and agreements, incorporating opportunistic governments wishing to control Muslim communities more restrictively through the global “war on terror” and its logic of racialization. The CCP moved the classification of their Uyghur anxieties from a “separatist” to “terrorist” designation that is directly tied to notions of “religious extremism.” This rebranding of China’s domestic tensions was validated when the U.S. government added the Eastern Turkistan Islamic Movement (ETIM) to the U.S. terror list. Sean Roberts new book, The War on the Uyghurs: China’s Internal Campaign against a Muslim Minority, exposes the fallacies behind the CCP’s claim of a local “terrorist threat” while also illustrating the broader historical, political, and social contexts in which the discursive shift in Chinese discourse took place. In October of 2020, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo removed ETIM from the U.S. terror list but the initial international endorsement already set things in motion. The cover of the “War on Terror” allowed the CCP to exercise its suppression of any Uyghur resistance to state policies under the guise of the global battle against “religious extremism.”

Religious Extremism and the Criminalization of Islam

Following the CCP’s label modification we can see how the form of the policies and the shape of their enforcement have changed over time. Over the past decade, many restrictions seem directly related to what would be popularly understood as “religion.” For example, in 2014 we saw the exclusion of traditional Islamic sartorial markers through a local ban on the “five abnormal appearances,” which included women wearing niqab, hijab, or burqa; clothing with crescent moon and stars; and long beards for men. The use of “religious” evidence as means for suspicion ramped up after 2016 with the appointment of the new leadership of Chen Quanguo as Communist Party Secretary for the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. After piloting techniques of social control in Tibet for 5 years, Chen set up the security architecture that we have become so familiar with in the region’s recent history, including surveillance systems with QR codes, eye scans, smartphone access, blocking of external media sources, and re-education programs. The tactics explicitly associated with Islam ramped up shortly after Chen took control and were classified as indicators of “religious extremism.” The signifiers included things like going on pilgrimage to Mecca, traveling to Muslim majority countries (such as Turkey, Egypt, and Indonesia), closing a restaurant during Ramadan, exchanging Islamic greetings, wearing a headscarf, or having a long beard. These types of activities could land you in an internment camp for re-education, according to CCP policy. The working assumption is that strong religious participation meant an inclination to follow extreme forms of Islam, which from the party’s perspective meant that they were predisposed to violent disruption of the state.

Young Uyghur boy sells prayer rugs outside the Yanghang mosque in Urumchi. Photo Courtesy of Timothy Grose.

Another factor here is the structure of state-recognized religions and how “official” religion is able to operate. Fenggang Yang’s model for understanding the regulation of religion in China today organizes traditions into “a red market (officially permitted religions), a black market (officially banned religions), and a gray market (religions with an ambiguous legal/illegal status)” (93). Much of Uyghur religious practice is related to the gray market because while Islam is officially sanctioned, non-institutional practices and holy places are deemed illegal. The state has gone after these holy places recently, closing or destroying mazars (shrines or mausoleums) and razing grave sites, both of which play central roles in Uyghur religious life. Official Islamic sites have also been targeted with mosques being torn down or significantly altered in dramatic ways. These religious markets also reflect the reality of practices concerning religious education, the circulation of Islamic texts or videos, the preaching of religious knowledge, or attending religious gatherings, all of which are seen as illegal behavior that is indicative of extremism. The state views these religious expressions as evidence of cultural backwardness or infectious ideological illness that need to be rectified through re-education. But for many Uyghurs, a rigid distinction between what is deemed “religion” versus “culture” defies their lived experience where common everyday social practices intersect with their local exercise of Islam. How one dresses, eats, greets one another, treats their family members, celebrates life, buries their dead are all shaped by a rich social history that is infused with vernacular customs inspired by Islam. To deny the right to carry out this way of life, as it is rendered “illegal religious extremism” by the state, is to deny Uyghurs of their distinctive heritage.

The Uyghur Crisis between Secularism and Religion

The shift in state policy from a multicultural and ethnically diverse sense of Chinese citizenship (echoing the imperial pluralism of earlier settler colonization) to the assimilationist approaches of Xi’s regime, characterized by Han-centric ethno-nationalism, leaves very little room for Uyghurs. National homogeneity requires cultural capitulation and the surrender of ethnic or religious difference. Or as Rachel Harris has pointed out, the government uses “Uyghur heritage as a cultural resource to develop the tourism industry” through narrowly defined cultural expressions and kitschy spectacles of sound and color. To be Uyghur under the current state vision of what national subjectivity looks like is inherently disruptive. The very presence of Uyghurs serves as a reminder of resistance to state power, which prompts the CCP to develop management strategies that regulate ethnically diverse populations. From the state’s perspective, relinquishing Islam will sever Uyghurs’ ties to “extremist” stimuli and allow them to be productive Chinese citizens. However, this position rests on the assumption that “religious” and “secular” behaviors, traits, and characteristics are neatly divided and do not intersect. This, of course, is a myth. While it is not the only factor that shapes the current Uyghurs crisis, one cannot fully understand this emergency outside of the framework of the study of religion, secularism, and modernity.

The cover of the “War on Terror” allowed the CCP to exercise its suppression of any Uyghur resistance to state policies under the guise of the global battle against “religious extremism.”

As Talal Asad reminds us in his most recent book, Secular Translations, “The terms ‘secularity’ and ‘religion’ belong to what Wittgenstein called language games, games within which consensus and dispute occur as part of ordinary life—games that are always capable of being changed, with or without agreement” (148). We witness this language game in the discursive shifts that have occurred in CCP word play over the past two decades in regards to the Uyghurs. The state has operationalized “religion” as evidence of the potential for social disruption, which it has combatted through the systematic governance and regulation of ordinary Uyghur life. It has changed the rules of the game for how it justifies its own violent and oppressive measures that directly affect Uyghur culture and identity. As outside observers, we should stay attuned to the moves but not get lost in the play because this is a game that Uyghurs cannot afford to lose. As many have noted, the current trajectory of events could best be described as cultural genocide, where Uyghurs have been depopulated and displaced in their homeland, stripped of their language and cultural practices, had their histories and stories erased and banned, their religious observance criminalized, and their families and friends disappeared. We should continue to support efforts to address the Uyghur crisis as a critical humanitarian issue that requires an international coalition standing up for the community.

1 Comment on Religion, Uyghurs, and the Global War on Terror Array
Kristian Petersen
Kristian Petersen is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy & Religious Studies at Old Dominion University. He is the author of Interpreting Islam in China: Pilgrimage, Scripture, and Language in the Han Kitab (Oxford University Press in 2017), editor of Muslims in the Movies: A Global Anthology (ILEX Foundation & Harvard University Press), and New Approaches to Islam in Film (Routledge), and co-editor with Christopher Cantwell of Introductions to Digital Humanities: Research Methods in the Study of Religion (de Gruyter). He also co-hosts the New Books in Islamic Studies podcast on the New Books Network.
Theorizing Modernities article

On the Rhetoric of Jewish Solidarity: A Hebrew-Israelite’s Perspective


This sketch was made to represent the inauguration of the 19th Street Synagogue in New York. The year is 1860. The artist here “appears” to be drawing different shades of faces. The author believes these are the sketch artist’s references to phenotype, not dress or shadows. Image from M. Angel’s Remnant of Israel, originally published in Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper (Sept. 29, 1860). Public Domain. There is a written record of Black women who attended this synagogue.*

I am a Palestinian Hebrew-Israelite (or simply “Israelite” for short).

By the foregoing confession, I do not mean that one identity or the other is ontologically isolated from the other. Nor do I mean that one is embedded in the other, or even that they are qualifications of each other. For I am also a rabbi who works with gender-nonconforming Jewish teens. None of these qualities inform my Israelite identity. They are my Israelite identity. The radicality of this assertion has been the source of much confusion in the media about who Hebrew-Israelites are. And in light of recent years’ focus on Jewish activism, perhaps it is time for some clarifications.

The Paradox of Faux Jewish Solidarity

My Jewish story begins with the Middle Passage as much as it does with my grandparents’ flight from Palestine. Because slavery, sex, trafficking and diaspora are seminal to my existence, al-Nakba, for example, can never for me be a singular 20th century event. It is rather the entire constellation of violent processes that made modern Jewish coloniality, as well as that singular catastrophe, possible. This is why I have for many years been publicly critical of using allegories and analogies to promote cross-communal solidarity. The problem with their use is not only that they can provoke collective traumas while reasserting Jewish metanarratives that demand my community’s phenomenological disappearance. It is also that they often betray a deep-seated desire for us as Jews to construct mirrors of ourselves without a background context through which to assess the self-images we promote. For example, the “BIJOC” label (Black, Indigenous, Jews of color), in both genealogy and referential axis, is not for me an inclusive signification. In fact, in many ways the acronym provokes in me a cultural memory of rape and sexual violence, a common theme when it comes to the history of how identities are superimposed on people from without. My community, on the other hand, is uniquely and unparsimoniously self-referential, hence the term “Hebrew-Israelite”—that is, people of Israel who by nature “transcend.” This description (as opposed to the racist labels “BlackIsraelite” and/or “BlackHebrew Israelite”) is important for understanding the many anticolonial (not decolonial) complexities found in the global South’s Hebrew-related communities. These peoples may include all future descendants of earthlings, for transcendence to us means moving beyond religion, culture, nationality, humankind, and all other significations rooted in coloniality.

The problem of a jim-crow Torah arises when Jewish affirmations of holiness simultaneously embrace particularity and universality by evoking a cultural memory of alliances with “outsiders,” all while ignoring the intracommunal effects of intergenerational trauma within the Jewish community itself.

Without sounding too dismissive, it seems to me that appeals to Jewish relational analogies, even if drawn upon to promote cross-communal interest-convergences, can powerfully reinflict trauma, particularly when such appeals are made without acknowledging some obvious historical contexts that make them problematic. There is a gadflyish paradox in Jewish attempts to mitigate the violent historical effects of Jewish coloniality through a quest for justice-oriented solidarity with BIJOC and/or other peoples of color. Whether in Israel, Palestine, or diaspora, Jewish colonialism was a catastrophe. It led to the proliferation of Jewish races and imposed a legitimation crisis on Jewish activism: How can Jews claim solidarity with people of color while rejecting those who are Jews because they are people of color? What kind of solidarity is this? In the Hebrew-Israelite community’s case, it can be nothing less than a faux solidarity precisely because the catastrophe (or al-Nakba) of human trafficking that attended African American origins are what have provided us with the whiteness and privilege of many Jews that make such Jewish “solidarity” possible.

Hebrew-Israelites and the Lesson of Community-Building

We Israelites learned generations ago that attempts to evade the inevitable cultural integration resulting from modern colonial violence prove themselves to be futile in the end. All communities are, by definition, in the constant process of growing and renegotiating boundaries. But in the case of Hebrew-Israelites, our intra-communal debates over the margins of identity have been used to not only depict us as kooks in popular media, they’ve also been used by Jewish communities themselves, including self-espoused BIJOC groups, to justify the policing of Jewish existential legitimation. It is my position, however, that such policing has consistently ignored the necessary encounter with Others attending our experiences as people who embrace a variety of genealogies as “Israel.” These are not allegories nor analogies nor metaphors “of” Israel, but rather Israel as such. Even when acknowledging the nodes of incommensurability between Jewish self-determination and other liberation movements such as that embraced by Hebrew-Israelites, the process of community-building with Others is inevitably aided and abetted. Al-Nakba occurred as a result of efforts to ignore this process. One such effort was the invention of new speech-acts that segregated Jews who are “in” from those who are “out,” irrespective of whether those victims of segregation understood themselves as such through those speech-acts—especially when the mixtures and creolizations inherent in Jewish coloniality made this segregation untenable. While portraying the segregationist as like an “evil sower” from a New Testament parable, Prophet William S. Crowdy describes this very dilemma in one of his sermons:

Evil sowers are those that invent[ed] separation between one blood, for the scriptures said that the Lord out of one blood created all to dwell upon the face of the earth, but the evil sower says, ‘No, we shall not be together, but we shall have jim-crow cars, jim-crow boat lines, jim-crow railways, jim-crow boarding houses, jim-crow churches, jim-crow barber shops, and jim-crow laws for the Jews to live under’ (175–76).

By focusing on the invention of “separation between one blood,” Crowdy appealed to a shared  human dimension of Jewish existence. Unlike contemporary Jewish solidarity movements, he was not referring to an analogy, metaphor, or allegory to establish and/or reinscribe ties between Black and Jewish communities. For him, such kinds of discursive linkages were insufficient to address what centuries of human trafficking engendered. He was instead pointing out the historical and conceptual problem that racial segregation poses for Jews who wish to live beyond the confines of a jim-crow Torah (or a jim-crow law for Jews).

Eliminating Misunderstandings

The problem of a jim-crow Torah arises when Jewish affirmations of holiness simultaneously embrace particularity and universality by evoking a cultural memory of alliances with “outsiders,” all while ignoring the intracommunal effects of intergenerational trauma within the Jewish community itself. Existential ruptures of this kind always feed off the false ideals of ontologically isolated communities. For example, consider the malignant and exoticist narratives promoted about Hebrew Israelites in the popular media. According to these narratives, Hebrew-Israelites are members of militant cults that embrace a racist kind of heretical, and at times criminal, counter-narrative against normal Jewish traditions (including BIJOC traditions).  But this narrative is largely false, and it is false to such a degree that one is tempted to believe that such an account of my community’s history is built more on spite, suspicion and racism than historical accuracy. When members of early postbellum Hebrew-Israelite communities were asked by outsiders where our religious practices came from, there was one historical explanation that was consistently dismissed over and over again: Jewish slavery and sex trafficking.[1] The memories of such events are alive and well in Hebrew communities across the Americas. Yet those narratives are ignored, and exoticist ones are popularized instead, particularly the long and racist tradition of portraying Black people as violent, corrupt, and prone to criminality. And although this aspect of Jewish culture and religion has been intentionally and conveniently ignored by some preeminent scholars of American Jewish history, Hebrew-Israelite communities continue to bear, in the words of Caroline Randall Williams, “rape colored skin.”

 

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Rabbi Bertram Korn sought to argue that no black Jews existed outside of synagogues after slavery’s abolition. But he fell into dispute with Caribbean rabbis who insisted otherwise. In these letters, multiple authors are clear that biological descent is responsible for the existence of many black and mulatto Hebrews in Central and South America and the Caribbean–even though such people of Jewish descent were estranged from synagogue life. Photo Credit: Author’s photographs used with permission from the Jacob Rader Marcus Center at the American Jewish Archives.

Much like Vodou, Conjure, and Santeria, Hebrew-Israelite practices have been criticized because they are more concerned with the historical effects of racism, colonialism, and anti-Black trauma than they are with doctrinal purity, monotheistic orthodoxy, and especially rabbinic norms of Jewish identity construction. People in my community have often been marginalized (and at times blacklisted) for emphasizing and making too much of these facets of American Jewish history. However, I believe such criticisms are misplaced. Convenient historical fictions quite often infect conversations between victims and beneficiaries of atrocities. The notion that Palestinians “willingly” abandoned their homes during al-Nakba is one such example. The notion that Hebrew-Israelite communities didn’t exist before the 1890’s is another.[2] Our communities are maligned because we are inherently diverse and do not allow class divisions and educational privilege to regulate religious discourse in the form of a single hierarchy. As a result, detractors use the more provocative beliefs of some members of our community to slander the reputation of all. Yet the fact that our community embraces large contingencies of humanity—from rabbinic Jews to Biafran nationalists—should be seen as a strength (and perhaps a lesson) in Jewish struggles to work for social justice. The insights of prophetic justice are assumed to be available to all Israelite persons—to the criminal as well as the law-abiding, the illiterate as well as the scholar, and the poor as well as the financially secure. We already assume that human communities are interdependent and connected in forms of solidarity, whether made explicit or not. And it is for this reason that discourses about Jewish solidarity can be alienating: the social deaths of enslaved Hebrew-Israelites, deaths provoked by the trauma of human trafficking, deaths which engendered global understandings of “Israel,” deaths continually and presently ridiculed for revealing “Israel” to be composed of many cultures and peoples, including those presumed to not be Jewish or Hebrew at all—these very same deaths are reinscribed in theodicean clouds of misunderstanding when a muted history of sexual violence informs the coherence of Jewish solidarity movements signified by acronyms such as BIJOC.

Moving Forward Together

By criticizing the move to establish coalitional politics with a focus on activism, it is not my intention to romanticize Hebrew-Israelites or Palestinians. My experience has been that both groups exhibit their own forms of the very same problems I am outlining here for Jewish solidarity movements. Jewish and Muslim rape cultures existed wherever slavery was found in the colonial period. The violent practice has existed for millenia, and although I believe discussions on how to move forward on questions of justice are important, I also believe that in the desire to demonstrate that Jews are on the right side of history, the (white and non-white) Jewish community’s problems with racism are often ignored. Addressing these problems can sometimes be far more effective at alleviating injustice than creating solidarity movements with Other communities. This is because various “in group” avenues, due to being more immediately relevant to the social tasks at hand, can more powerfully employ Jewish communal resources as such to both confess and work against the wrongness of being rooted in Jewish coloniality. Religious reparations to Hebrew-Israelite communities who have suffered damages from white Jewish racial and sexual assault is only one such avenue. But there are many others, and many of them can remind us that Jewish existence itself is often refracted in ways that make cross-communal solidarity movements unnecessary and at times counter-productive. It is quite possible that the coalition one seeks to promote is the very means by which the oppression you fight becomes resurrected.

Jewish and Muslim rape cultures existed wherever slavery was found in the colonial period. The violent practice has existed for millenia, and although I believe discussions on how to move forward on questions of justice are important, I also believe that in the desire to demonstrate that Jews are on the right side of history, the (white and non-white) Jewish community’s problems with racism are often ignored.

In conclusion, I do not believe that what I am proposing here is difficult. The upshot of my argument has to do with maintaining a basic appreciation, respect, and historical awareness of the people we claim to be allying ourselves with. A profound sense of existential humility is required when one commits oneself to the project of human freedom. All too often, Jews of Color (as well as their white Jewish advocates) lack such humility. Neither Hebrew-Israelites, Palestinians, nor BIJOC are exceptions to this note of caution. For some of us, standing up for the rights of Others and demanding that they be invited to participate in proactive coalitions that fight for social justice are important aspects of our spirituality. For Others, the means by which this happens recycles entrenched forms of marginalization that have violent roots as their genesis. But regardless of who one claims to be, if such a person is oppressed, then trust capital from the beneficiaries of one’s oppression is nearly always earned, not given away willy-nilly. One earns another’s trust by being reliably honest and transparent. Yet no matter how sincere one’s efforts to be in solidarity, silence about one’s role in the Other’s oppression will never reflect that kind of honesty. If Others’ “allies” in the fight for justice cannot transcend a dishonest relationship with the history of such oppression, then those Others will always have reason to avoid that solidarity movement like the plague.

[1] There are many references to this phenomenon in the works of scholars such as Jonathan Schorsch, Saul Friedman, Jose Malcioln, Judah Cohen, as well as early 20th century articles on “Negro Jews” in Harlem from the New York Amsterdam News. To begin the investigation of this issue, please see Bertram Korn letters to Caribbean rabbis and vice versa. Folder 12: “Blacks: Jewish Blacks in the Caribbean,” Box 3, (MS-99) Bertram W. Korn Papers, Rabbis, Major Manuscript Collections, the American Jewish Archives, Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, Cincinnati, Ohio.

[2] As Jacob Dorman has shown, such ideas are still popular, over 100 years after they were first proposed and dismissed. See page 62 of Dorman’s article.

*”It was surprising to me to see some negresses in their synagogue, who prayed with true devotion, but without the exaggerations that are usually characteristic of blacks… I heard that they were formerly slaves of the families in which they still live; when slavery was abolished in New York State, they voluntarily remained with the rulership they had loved, whose faith they also accepted.” Translated via Google translate from Israelitische Volks-Bibliothek. V: Deutsch-Amerikanische Skizzen fur Judische Auswanderer und Nichtauswander  (Leipzig: Oskar Leiner, 1857), 60.

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Rabbi Walter Isaac
Rabbi Walter Isaac, PhD is President of the Afro-Jewish Studies Association, Chair of the Caribbean Philosophical Association’s Committee on Jewish Research, and former Director of Jewish Outreach at the Center for Afro-Jewish Studies. The author of many articles and monographs on Afro-Judaism, he is currently on faculty at Claflin University. He may be reached at: afrojews@gmail.com.
Decoloniality article

They Say “Out of Sight, Out of Mind,” Look, We Are All over Palestine


 

Palestinian flag at Brighton, England Pride celebration. Photo Credit: Flickr User Daniel Hadley.

For the past two years, there has been a shift in the public perception of the Palestinian LGBTQI+ issue. It has gone from being ignored or rarely discussed by regional political and spiritual leaders, to becoming one of the most controversial subjects on the Israeli political agenda.

So, what has changed in Palestinian society regarding  LGBTQI+ persons and will it cause a split in the Joint List (a political coalition which represents the Palestinian citizens of Israel, or 48ers, in the Knesset) in the upcoming national election on the March 23, 2021? It is worth noting that this election will be the fourth election cycle in Israel in two years due to the inability of Prime Minister Netanyahu, immersed in a corruption scandal, to form a steady coalition in the past three cycles.

Before explaining this shift, I need to return to a major event that occurred almost two years ago. On July 26, 2019, a man from Tamrah, a Palestinian city within the 1948 borders, stabbed his 16-year-old brother just outside a queer youth shelter where the brother had been staying. The boy was hospitalized and later discharged. This event sparked a public campaign against homophobia in the Palestinian community, as well as the first Palestinian queer protest in Haifa.

Both the campaign and the protest were organized by Palestinian activists from the AlQaws organization with the support of a few Palestinians NGO’S and public figures, such as MK Aida Toma Suliman from the Joint List political party, and prominent leaders from Palestinian civil society.

What instigated the first protest focusing on and organized by queer Palestinians?  After all, violence against queer Palestinians is ubiquitous, whether it is coming from the Palestinian community itself or from Israeli policies and practices as an occupying force.

The unapologetic visibility of Palestinian LGBTQI+ persons did not happen overnight. The visibility reflected in the protest was achieved by the relentless work of many fellow Palestinian queer activists (mostly from queer organizations Alqaws and Aswat) over two decades. That is what I believe caused the shift that put the LGBTQI+ community in a confrontational position with the rest of the Palestinian community. The aforementioned protest wasn’t a one-time event. It was also held in 2020, and was accompanied by a much more visible campaign which called for more inclusion of queer Palestinians and insisted on their belonging to the broader Palestinian community. Another notable point is that the protest was held in the center of Haifa, a Palestinian city that was occupied by the Israeli forces in 1948.  More than that, the location of the protest is well known as a gathering place for Palestinian political and national protests.

While the protest was held as a response to a homophobic instance of violence, only one member of the Joint List described the event as a protest against this specific form of violence. Instead, they preferred vague generalities. For example, the head of the Joint List condemned violence in Palestinian society without specifying what kind of violence it was. This constituted a clear avoidance of potential political fallouts and the risk of conflict with other members of the Joint List whose silence in the face of homophobia has been deafening.

The controversy didn’t end there. In July 2020 new legislation focusing on a ban against conversion therapy was proposed in the Knesset. Out of the 15 Palestinian members of the Joint list party, 3 voted in favor of the legislation, 4 opposed it, and the remaining MKs abstained. These votes further ignited debate in Palestinian society. Three main positions have emerged as representative of Palestinian approaches to LGBTQI+ rights:

(1) The pro queer position. Those who hold this position state that queer Palestinians have the right to exist and are an integral part of the Palestinian community. This approach involves condemning homophobia directly and explicitly using the term LGBTQI+. This position has been associated mainly with activists and civil society organizations.

(2) The “neutral” position. This position is taken mostly by people who self-identify as secular progressives. They hide in the shadows of the conversation on queerness and do not cause controversy. They would, accordingly, denounce violence in general without calling out homophobia specifically. This vagueness also explains why they do not employ the direct and explicit terminology of LGBTQI+.

(3) The antagonistic position is more violent and blatantly homophobic. This position is characterized by the weaponization of religion to justify homophobic violence. This camp deploys religion, citing relevant verses from scriptures, as a justification for violence. It likewise uses homophobic slurs against the Palestinian LGBTQI+ community, even erasing them by say “there are no gays in the Palestinian community.” One of the most vocal members of the Knesset in the Joint List who is affiliated with the Islamic party said in regard to banning conversion therapy law, “we hope the Joint List will keep its alliances and will consider the Islamic, Christian, and Druze beliefs and values of its members.”

The way we use terminology matters. If in the past the “neutral” rhetoric was perceived as enough, today it is a different story. This so-called neutrality itself constitutes a form of violence. The Palestinian LGBTQI+ community is not static. Indeed, it is elastic and changing. It is not in the same place it used to be in terms of its strength. Rather than parting ways with broader Palestinian society, the enhanced visibility of the LGBTQI+ Palestinian community demands inclusion and needs conversation with religious and spiritual leaders in order to achieve it.

I believe that the LGBTQI+ community in Palestine is at a crossroads. Increased visibility has put the queer community in a confrontational position with the broader Palestinian community and it has also led to increased homophobia. Because of the dominance of the antagonistic camp and its explicit deployment of religion in tandem with the “neutrality” of secular “progressives,” queer Palestinians are alienated from their national and religious modes of belonging to Palestinian society. Therefore, tackling the homophobic deployment of religion that defines the antagonistic camp, in my opinion, is an important site for action. It requires using theological tools that expand interpretations of religious meanings and orients them to the suffering of queer communities. At the same time, bridging religious and national modes of belonging with sexual orientations and rendering them as coextensive rather than oppositional binaries would continue strengthening the Palestinian queer community given their multiple forms of belonging. Now, more than ever, we should build a mediating lexicon that will allow us to have a conversation with spiritual and religious leaders. Creating a shared language and terminology that is accepting of the queer community along with the development of progressive attitudes among spiritual and religious leaders is key for queer Palestinian inclusion.

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Halah Abdelhadi
Halah Abdelhadi is a queer, feminist, and Palestinian activist based in south Tel Aviv. During the last two and a half years, Halah has worked as a researcher at "Gisha," a human rights organization that advocates for the right of movement for Palestinians in the Gaza strip. She has a bachelor's degree in biomedical science from Tel Aviv University.
Theorizing Modernities article

White Supremacists Among Us—Discomfiting but True


Ethiopian Hebrews Series, No. 37. Photograph by Alexander Alland c. 1940. Photo Credit: The Jewish Museum, New York/Art Resource, NY. Used with permission.

The historian Marc Dollinger was recently asked to write a new preface for the 2020 scheduled 4th edition of his book Black Power, Jewish Politics. The racial tumult of spring through summer 2020 led to extraordinary sales of the 3rd edition, as was the case for a variety of books addressing racism in the United States. Controversy over Dollinger’s book arose, however, when he submitted his new preface to the publisher. The editors objected to his use of the word “white supremacy” to refer to the attitudes and social investments of certain communities of Jews who welcomed their designation as white in the U.S. racial hierarchy. Dollinger stood by his position, which resulted in the publisher deciding to publish the 4th edition without his preface and to decline publishing future editions of his book. The copyright for any future editions has been returned to him.

A debate on those events quickly followed. The perspective of several critics in the controversy, which amounts to claiming either that no white Jew can be a white supremacist or that any advantages acquired by Jews who are white are earned, not racially bestowed, smacks of overgeneralization and bad faith. They appeal to a form of intrinsic innocence that ultimately defies their humanity.

Professor Dollinger shared the full rejected preface with me in an email exchange. Having read it, my conclusion is that he doesn’t claim that Jewish people in general are white supremacists. He also doesn’t claim that the Jewish people (as a whole) are white. Beyond the preface, doing so in an exchange with me would be weird since he and I have known each other for more than a decade through meetings of Jews of color at the Institute for Jewish Research in San Francisco. What he is claiming is that many European immigrants to the United States were integrated into U.S. society under conditions of assimilation as whites, and many European Jews were not exceptions from that historical, whitening process. Once a white identity was granted, some went so far as to endorse white supremacist views, including eugenics, segregation, social Darwinism, and anti-miscegenation law. Some also blocked anti-racism struggles through fighting against social remedies such as affirmative action and political movements such as Black Power and Decolonization. Among white Jews, this was and continues to be particularly evident among those who embrace neoconservatism, and one could easily find those who identify themselves as white supremacists by consulting the Southern Poverty Law Center. The presence of neoconservative white Jews in a blatantly racist administration such a President Donald Trump’s speaks for itself.

 The idea that “real Jew” must be white is a feature of unfortunate misrepresentations of Jewish people primarily during the twentieth century, with steam gathered in its support since the late 1960s.

We should bear in mind that, odd and ironic as this may appear, there are nonwhite people who are also white supremacists, and they, too, often embrace neoconservatism, in addition to forms of populism and fascism. Members of those groups, which include black conservatives who endorse white supremacy through regarding themselves as “exceptions” to a generally pathological black people, gained access to institutions of power ranging from being seated on the U.S. Supreme Court to working in Trump’s Cabinet. This overrepresentation in positions of power makes them appear to be representative of a larger proportion of nonwhite people than what reality reveals. For most Jews on the spectrum from centrism to leftism, the reality is that left-wing Jews hardly have a public voice in the representation of Jews in which neoconservatives have acquired the bully pulpit for at least the past four decades. Many—perhaps most—other Jews never abandoned antiracist struggles. As most black and brown peoples do not embrace bigoted celebrations of white supremacy, their outliers should be understood as just that: outliers.

What makes things difficult for Jews who have become known as “white” is that whiteness was not historically part of Jewish identity. The idea that “real Jew” must be white is a feature of unfortunate misrepresentations of Jewish people primarily during the twentieth century, with steam gathered in its support since the late 1960s.

The bad faith issue at work in the controversy over Dollinger’s ascription of “white supremacy” to white Jews who have demonstrated clear investments in whiteness and have endorsed policies that limit opportunities to nonwhite groups is evident in the claims of those who try to argue accusing them of complicity with white supremacy diminishes what such Jews have “earned. It is a coded version of the “qualifications” and “merits” debate. We should ask: If whiteness is irrelevant to the opportunities many white Jews garnered, why don’t they, then, reject whiteness? If it is their Jewishness that made the difference, how can they explain the socioeconomic and structural differences between the lives of nonwhite Jews and theirs? If they reject their Jewishness as the basis of their achievements and appeal instead to their individual grit, how, then, do they explain the inequalities and negative social-economic indicators of black, brown, and Indigenous peoples in the United States without blaming those people for lacking what it takes to ascend in its clearly white-dominated society?

An unfortunate, underlying trend for “having what it takes” is being designated as white. By this I mean that people designated white have greater options available to them than those designated otherwise. Erased in much of this debate is the long history of “whites only” policies that in effect created a social welfare infrastructure for white supremacy. Yes, there are disadvantaged, individual whites, but white structural power has placed white people as a group at a distinct and historically unjust advantage over others. Although there was discrimination against groups ranging from Greeks to Italians to Irish to European Jews, the fact of the matter is that crucial policies concerning resources were made available to whites and barred from nonwhites.

I regard Dollinger’s point as simply this: acknowledge that there are white Jews who embrace white supremacy. They are not representative of Jews, but they are, whether we like it or not, members of what we call the Jewish people.

This is not to say that these white groups are on a level playing field. There is racial hatred of Jews in the United States, and this hatred has terrible health effects on white Jews on a par with blacks across ethnic and religious lines. There are Jews who would prefer to describe this hatred as a “religious” one, but the fact of the matter is that most people who hate Jews know nothing of Judaism or Jewish religion. And more, racism is more sophisticated than a systematic attitude and the rallying of resources on the basis of mere morphology. There are black people who “appear” whiter than many Ashkenazi white Jews. (I added “white” because there are black, Asian, Native American, and Pacific Islander Ashkenazi Jews.) Among black communities, it is admitted that many—though not all—light-skin blacks have more opportunities available to them than do their darker sisters and brothers. There are light-skin forms of antiblack racism going back to exclusionary African American institutions premised on complexion in the nineteenth century. Similarly, as historians of European Jewish history could attest, there were (and in many places still are) Western Jewish forms of anti-Jewish hatred toward Eastern European and non-European Jews. We would be remiss to make these exemplars of degradation and hate the representatives of each group. But we would also be lying to ourselves if we were to deny their existence.

I regard Dollinger’s point as simply this: acknowledge that there are white Jews who embrace white supremacy. They are not representative of Jews, but they are, whether we like it or not, members of what we call the Jewish people. All peoples have members with values they despise. I take Dollinger to be arguing that even if the majority of Jewish people reject white supremacy, we should identify and put on the table our criticisms of those who embrace it—however deluded or pernicious their reasons for doing so are.

Here are some recent conversations for those interested in podcasts and audiovisual recorded panels on antiblack racism and antisemitism:

Rethinking Black-Jewish Relations featuring Marc Dollinger & Lewis R. Gordon, Adventures in Jewish Studies Podcast, Season 2, episode 7, American Jewish Studies Association (2020).

“AJS 2020 Plenary: Why Racism Should Matter for Jewish Studies Scholars,” December 16, 2020.

“Better Than Nothing Episode 6: Lewis Gordon,” Better Than Nothing, host and interviewer Mark Leuchter (October 2020).

“Jews of Colour: Race and Afro-Jewishness.” Pears Institute for the Study of Antisemitism. Birkbeck University of London. London, UK. (June 26, 2018).

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Lewis R. Gordon
Lewis R. Gordon is Professor and Head of the Philosophy Department at UCONN-Storrs, where he is also a member of the Center for Judaic Studies and Contemporary Jewish Life. He is the author of many books, including Freedom, Justice, and Decolonization. He co-edits, with Jane Anna Gordon, the journal Philosophy and Global Affairs. He is Honorary President of the Global Center for Advanced Studies and a former president of the Caribbean Philosophical Association, for which he now serves as its chairperson of awards and global collaborations.
Decoloniality article

Empire and Race in Comparative Religious Ethics


José Clemente Orozco. The Epic of American Civilization: The Coming of Quetzalcoatl (Panel 5). 1932–1934. Fresco. Overall: 125 ½ x 205 in. (318.8 x 520.7 cm). Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth: Commissioned by the Trustees of Dartmouth College. Used with permission.

Comparative Religious Ethics and Decolonial Thought

As a subfield of philosophy of religion, comparative religious ethics is concerned with the study of various peoples’ ethical dispositions and their production of ethical knowledge that might reasonably be called “religious.” At its best, work in the subfield is marked by a commitment to denaturalizing the normative status of Christian and/or European philosophic concepts, vocabularies, and traditions in religious ethics. Sometimes this commitment takes the form of extensive methodological and metaethical reflection. Other times, it appears in the formation of self-consciously provisional categories for comparison. Whatever shape it takes, this commitment might be regarded as stemming from comparativists’ desire to challenge the longstanding cultural imperialisms of philosophy of religion and religious ethics—or what decolonial theorists would call their coloniality—and what the founding editors of the Journal of Religious Ethics in 1973 called “the parochialism and Western bias that tends to characterize the present state of our discipline.” Even though most comparativists have not adopted avowedly radical or anticolonial perspectives, they have generally maintained that neither Christianity nor European philosophy should set the standard for ethical inquiry.

Viewed from this vantage, comparative religious ethics might appear to be one of the subfields of philosophy of religion most readily amenable to a decolonial turn. For more than four decades, many comparativists have aspired to create a field of inquiry that not only includes ethical perspectives and knowledges once marginalized in religious studies but that also is transformed by them. It is a subfield in which many purport to be skeptical of the universality and explanatory power of Christian and European philosophic concepts for analyzing religiously ethical phenomena generally. Yet, for all their awareness of the limits of western traditions and Christian concepts in the production of ethical knowledge, comparativists have not significantly inquired into them as ethical problems in their own right—particularly in view of their historic roles as imperial classificatory technologies both productive and preservative of racial distinctions. Instead, they have been relatively satisfied to assert that the historicity of these concepts as colonial sorting techniques, as a means of propagating differences between peoples that have justified the subjugation of some by others, is rather inconsequential for present analysis, provided, of course, one is sufficiently self-conscious about their use. In other words, despite their recognition of the provincial character of European and Christian moral vocabularies, comparativists have not yet seen fit to delve into the darker side of their historicity—that is, their active involvement with coloniality, and so to embark upon anything that might be called a decolonial turn.

Prompted by the work of Nelson Maldonado-Torres, I’d like to propose one possible set of foci for comparison which might inspire comparative ethicists to begin taking this metacritical turn, or at least incline them to begin thinking with decolonial theorists. What I suggest is that empire and race ought to become central focal points for ethical analysis. Comparativists ought to ask how imperial and racial formations have shaped the settings within which peoples have acted and thought, regarding them not as wholly determinative but as nevertheless integral components of peoples’ ethical lives. Such inquiry might proceed from the decolonial observation that empires, and modern European colonial empires in particular, have generated longstanding racialized and gendered patterns of power and domination that perdure into our purportedly postcolonial present, and that these patterns are some of the most pressing ethical problems of our times. It would then regard as axiomatic the idea that religiously ethical scholarship is incomplete at best, and fundamentally ideological or distortive at worst, when it fails to interrogate the ways imperial and racial formations influence ethical subjectivation and moral discourse.

Empire and Race in History

If empires are provisionally understood as macropolities that rule different peoples differently, and if race is provisionally understood to name a structural relationship for the production and preservation of these differences, then it would appear possible to use these concepts as foci for comparative work in religious ethics without lapsing into theoretical heavy-handedness or presentist anachronism. As concepts, they are sufficiently delimited without also being so content-laden that they predetermine analysis. They are also able, as Geraldine Heng and Sylvester Johnson have recently demonstrated, to provide rich frames for theorizing almost a millennia of race-making, even before the category of race was explicitly fashioned during the colonial period. More importantly, however, the ability to comparatively explore the historic entanglement of religious varieties of ethical discourse with imperial and racial formations may expand our understanding of how these discourses came to be what they are in the present, as well as produce new perspectives on how processes of moral formation unfold. If comparativists were to begin studying how religious persons and communities have negotiated the tensions of empire, then it would seem we may likely come to a better understanding both of the darker side of religious varieties of ethical discourse and of their contestation.

Marcus Garvey during a parade on the opening day of the annual Convention of the Negro Peoples of the World at Lenox Avenue in Harlem, New York City. Garvey helped spark movements from African nationalist independence to American civil rights to self-sufficiency in black commerce  (AP Photo/File). Wikimedia Commons. Public Domain.

Of course, not every empire has governed its subjects in the same way. Neither have they all engaged in explicit processes of racialization or racial formation as scholars now use these terms. Nor, as Sylvia Wynter argues, are the patterns of differentiation and domination that various empires have installed equally pressing ethical problems. One would not want to suggest that ancient Chinese, medieval Islamic, or early modern West African imperialisms were qualitatively the same as, for instance, contemporary Anglo-American settler colonialisms. Here as elsewhere in ethical analysis, then, historical specificity and normative clarity are needed. Defined thusly, however, taking empire and race as broad focal themes for comparison appears promising for enriching our understanding of the role that religious actors, communities, and their ethical discourses have historically played in the organization of political power, the production of ideas about and representations of human difference, and the shaping of the present. In particular, for those conversant with decolonial theory, it represents an opportunity to gain better understanding of the long-term historical processes that underwrote the transformation of the category of religion in the sixteenth century, as well as the explicit conceptualization of race. Indeed, deploying these terms as comparative foci in conversation with decolonial thought has significant potential for transforming inquiry in comparative religious ethics. How? I offer three concluding propositions.

Critical Prospects

First, it would require that ethicists finally confront the ways that imperial and racial formations have in many cases been constitutive components of ethical subjectivity itself. As David Scott reminds us, imperial techniques of rule have often functioned such that race “becomes inserted into subject-constituting social practices, into the formation, that is to say, of certain ‘raced’ subjectivities” (196–97). Not only interested in establishing political relations of insider and outsider, citizen and alien, imperial statecraft and colonial governance have also sought to shape the interior landscapes of the peoples whom they have ruled. They have used, as Ann Laura Stoler notes, various techniques of subjectivation, or what Ian Hacking refers to as “making up people,” as chief strategies of rule. Consider the ways, for example, that imperial nineteenth-century U.S. discourses of citizenship articulated racial distinctions together with the ideals of liberal egalitarianism, thereby generating citizen-subjects whose universality was made possible by their racial particularity. That is, the ways that the abstract equality shared by U.S. citizens was made possible precisely through the exclusion of non-national, racialized persons from citizenship. Addressing such strategies and techniques of rule may therefore require a substantial rethinking of central ethical categories and the role they have played in instantiating the very divisions of humanity that are constitutive of what W. E. B. Du Bois once called “the color line [that] belts the world.” Dominant conceptions of citizenship, humanity, personhood, reason, affect, action, responsibility, and even ethics, for example, are not simply neutral descriptors of ethical life with respect to empire. They are, in fact, some of the many tools imperial polities have used to subjugate and subjectivate peoples around the world.

Second, as Irene Oh, Danube Johnson, and others have observed on this blog, such foci would likely also call into question both the category of religion itself as a longstanding imperial sorting technique for establishing artificial criteria and scales of comparison between peoples, as well as any comparative endeavor which uses religious designations to naturalize racial distinctions. In other words, it would likely cause comparativists to have to further confront the ways that their very tools of analysis, i.e., the category of religion and the comparative method, are glossed with imperial residues. I will not here rehearse the well-known stories of the colonial origins of religion or the complicity of comparison in colonial domination, but suffice it to say that a focus on race and empire would not, therefore, be simply a matter of incorporating these topics as further specializations in comparative ethical analysis. It would also involve subjecting many of our dominant methods and assumptions to critical scrutiny as ethical problems in their own right and, perhaps, abandoning them when necessary.

Dominant conceptions of citizenship, humanity, personhood, reason, affect, action, responsibility, and even ethics, for example, are not simply neutral descriptors of ethical life with respect to empire. They are, in fact, some of the many tools imperial polities have used to subjugate and subjectivate peoples around the world.

On this note, and finally, a focus on empire and race would demonstrate, I believe, that a mere commitment to provincializing the normative status of Christian and European philosophic concepts, vocabularies, and traditions in religious ethics is not be enough to qualify work in the subfield as decolonial, or even decolonial-adjacent. It would demonstrate, in other words, that becoming an active participant in decolonial projects, both scholarly and political, necessitates a further commitment: that of generating new modes of ethical inquiry delinked from the patterns of power and knowlege installed by imperial and racial formations, modes likely emerging from sources and/or practices that many comparativists have not heretofore considered “religious” or “ethical.” If comparative religious ethicists want to live up to our aspirational self-descriptions as transformative public intellectuals, whose work contributes both to ethical understanding and modes of ethical living, then we will need to significantly rework our own analytical conventions and ethical commitments. Foregrounding race and empire in conversation with decolonial thought can provide the metaethical spur to instigate this transformation.

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Nicholas Andersen
Nicholas Andersen is a PhD candidate in the Department of Religious Studies and a 2020-2021 Interdisciplinary Opportunities Fellow at the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America at Brown University. He works primarily in the fields of modern religious thought and ethics, with particular interests in Black religious thought, theories of empire and colonialism, and religion in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century Americas. His dissertation, provisionally entitled "Ethiopia Shall Stretch Forth Her Hands unto God," offers a novel theorization of nineteenth-century Ethiopianism.
Global Currents article

Weaponizing Antisemitism is Bad for Jews, Israel, and Peace


If Not Now protest during President Trump’s appearance at American Israeli Public Affairs Committee, March 21, 2016. Image Credit: Flickr User Miki Jourdan.

The flag of Israel has been spotted in white nationalist displays of violence such as the insurgency of January 6, 2021. The Star of David was there. There were also white men wearing shirts that read “Camp Auschwitz,” “Arbeit macht frei,” and “6MWE” (a neo-Nazi slogan meaning “6 million wasn’t enough”). These are obvious expressions of antisemitism that reveal a strange and explosive interweaving with Zionism, or rather Israelism. Years of Israeli hasbara (or propaganda) and its elective affinities with the Christian Zionism that has permeated white American evangelicals brought us this moment of “love of Israel” that wants to kill Jews. The absurdities are in plain sight. This constitutes the tragic upshot of Israel’s weaponization of antisemitism to muzzle legitimate criticisms of its continuous occupation of Palestinians, now labeled “apartheid” by B’Tselem, an Israeli human rights’ organization. On the global scene the Israeli efforts have been amplified by the IHRA (International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance) which has gained traction globally as a mechanism designed to delegitimize criticism of Israeli policies, diminish the Palestinian struggle for dignity and human and political rights, and enhance militant ethnoreligious nationalism in Israel. Framing itself as an intergovernmental effort to combat antisemitism, the IHRA thus has consolidated a definition of antisemitism to better determine what it looks like in political and social life, with the intention to uproot and criminalize criticisms of Israeli policies. One of the IHRA’s list of examples of antisemitism includes “denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor.” The ramifications of the IHRA’s definition of antisemitism reverberate loudly. To begin with, in so far as the insurgency on Capitol Hill in January 2021 displayed its support of Zionism through use of the flag, this support is not inconsistent with the explicit antisemitism captured in the shirts and other neo-Nazi paraphernalia. White nationalists take from Euro-Zionism’s textbook aspirations for ethnoreligious supremacist political hegemony. There is no room for Jews in “White nationalism” as articulated by the likes of Richard Spencer who has expressed admiration of Zionism’s ethnocracy. The ramifications of the IHRA’s nationalist discourse also reverberate, for example, in the U.S. State Department’s labeling as “antisemitic” the long-established practice of nonviolent actions of Boycott, Divestment, and Sanction (BDS) campaigns. Antisemitism, like other forms of racism and bigotry, should be rejected by appeals to human rights and justice, not through the closure of critical thinking and blind acceptance of official Israeli state policies.

The IHRA’s promotion of its understanding of antisemitism is the latest attempt to instrumentalize antisemitism to control how people are allowed or not allowed to talk about Israel. This account of antisemitism, however, is only possible through the flawed equation of Israel with all Jewish people, forcing all Jews the world over to accept and endorse a military occupation and a country that is increasingly more aligned with the wave of neo-fascism sweeping the world than with international law, democratic values, human rights, pluralism, and racial justice. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu seems to be much more comfortable with the likes of Victor Orbán, whose consolidation of power has thrived on antisemitic tropes (along with homophobic, anti-LGBTQI, and anti-feminist rhetoric), than with the American Jews whose social justice activism I trace in my recent work and who channel Jewish values of solidarity with the marginalized and powerless “because Jews were slaves in Egypt.” For this reason, the Jewish people I engaged in my ethnographic work recite the lesson of the Passover story. For them, the lesson of the Holocaust ought not be the maintenance of an ethno-nationalist ghetto via a massive security and surveillance infrastructure. While the Israeli government renders such young Jewish activists pursuing anti-occupation outlook as a “threat”—as is evident in the elaborate surveillance of campus activism—the same government engaged in pomp and circumstance for antisemitic and Islamophobic white Christian evangelicals when they relocated the American embassy, which was formerly in Tel Aviv, to Jerusalem. This is an expression of the marriage of convenience between Christian Zionists, the U.S. Republican Party, and the right-wing Israeli agenda. This marriage is bad for the prospect of a just peace for Palestinians and Israelis, as well as for Jewish safety. The IHRA, the Israeli government, and its “friends” all tell Jews that they can only be safe as long as they are Zionists. President Trump chillingly told representatives of the American Jewish community on the occasion of Rosh Hashanna 2020, “we love your country,” suggesting they are not Americans. Ironically, one of the IHRA’s examples of antisemitism also includes: “accusing Jewish citizens of being more loyal to Israel, or to the alleged priorities of Jews worldwide, than to the interests of their own nations.”

Jews who resist their equation with the occupation assume as their mantra the ancient Rabbi Hillel’s three interrelated questions: If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am only for myself, what am I? If not now, when? For them the weaponization of the legacy of antisemitism and the memories of the Holocaust, which many of them carry within their own families, is threatening and wrong both because it manipulates such memories and because it makes them less safe in the face of real and accelerating antisemitism in the U.S. and elsewhere. Many young activists increasingly recognize that their safety depends on linking the fight against antisemitism to other social justice struggles. Many Israelis have taken to the streets to protest Netanyahu’s regime and many others such as B’Tselem for years have decried the weaponization of antisemitism. Their critical voices are silenced within the entrenched ideological regime that the IHRA represents as it coalesces with white nationalist and Christian Zionist antisemitism. Most importantly, this regime renders invisible and inaudible the Palestinian struggle for human rights and dignity that is pivotal for a real peace. A real peace is not the “peace” or normalization of Israel’s relations with Bahrain, the Emirates, Morocco, Sudan and other political entities that were in no direct war with Israel. This push for “normalization” (in the form of arm deals and economic incentives orchestrated by the U.S.) in conjunction with the chilling effect of IHRA on free speech is therefore bad for Jews, Israelis, and peace with justice.

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Atalia Omer
 Atalia Omer is Professor of Religion, Conflict, and Peace Studies at the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies and at the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame in the United States. She earned her Ph.D. in Religion, Ethics, and Politics (2008) from the Committee on the Study of Religion at Harvard University. Her research focuses on Israel/Palestine; religion, violence, and peacebuilding; as well as theories and methods in the study of religion. Omer was awarded an Andrew Carnegie Fellowship in 2017, resulting in Decolonizing Religion and Peacebuilding (Oxford University Press, 2023). Among other publications, Omer is the author of When Peace is Not Enough: How the Israeli Peace Camp Thinks about Religion, Nationalism, and Justice (University of Chicago Press, 2015) and Days of Awe: Reimagining Jewishness in Solidarity with Palestinians (University of Chicago Press, 2019). She is also a co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of Religion, Conflict, and Peacebuilding (Oxford University Press, 2015).