A coal mine in Meghalaya State. Courtesey of Flickr User Environmental Change and Security Program. CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
Colonizing Kashmir is a remarkable book that changes the way we understand not only the post-colonial experience of Kashmir, but histories of development, occupation, and counter-insurgency that extend to many other regional histories of South Asia marked by the violence of state-building after 1947. It is a book that brings Kashmir and Kashmiris to the forefront of the historiography of post-colonial development by exploring the emergence of this governing technology in relation to themes of sovereign violence, the politics of secularism, corruption, and militarization. At one level, the “colonizing” of Kanjwal’s title alerts us to the types of governing continuities between the post-colonial Indian state under Jawaharlal Nehru, Bakshi Ghulam Mohammad, and the Indian National Congress, and their British imperial predecessors. At another, the book also opens new considerations of democracy and its subversion, international law and institutions, and the redefinition of religious and regional identities in the wake of partition. How to parse these continuities and differences requires, as Kanjwal shows, moving away from official narratives of either the Indian or Pakistani states. It forces us instead, as I will try to draw out here, to engage the problem of post-colonial sovereignty as an active and ongoing project, and one that can be traced from the experiences of communities living under varied projects of state building and state separatism.
Sovereign border-making is the lifeblood of states, extending not only through the fungibility of geopolitical markers on maps and re-forged in contexts of war, but also through biopolitical boundaries of citizenship identification and other routinized forms of exceptional bureaucratic work. In this way, Kanjwal’s book joins one of the insights provided by a recent ethnography of the other side of what was once the India-Pakistan border, Sahana Ghosh’s A Thousand Tiny Cuts. Ghosh’s study examines the Bangladesh-India borderland in the present, putting forward a notion of the border and its surveillance regime as an infrastructure for incompletely attempting to sever the intimate and material connections that routinely transcend geopolitical boundaries. Kanjwal’s book shows us that this incompleteness is also part of the Kashmiri story. Not only is this a book that narrativizes paths-not-taken in the recognition of Kashmir as a contested state entity in post-colonial South Asia. But it also self-consciously probes for new possibilities to think Kashmiri politics and history in the present. As she writes: “This book calls for the creation of a historiography of states that do not exist, that have not been allowed to exist, and peoples who have been denied self-determination and the right to exercise their sovereignty” (20).
I read Kanjwal’s book with my own research area in mind, namely India’s central and eastern mining belt. As the center of the nation’s extractive economy and an energy landscape subject to the forms of rentier-capitalism that underly the Indian political-corporate nexus, this region has also often been a hot zone of separatist political formations and counter-sovereign political projects. Most famously, perhaps, such conflicts rose to international significance in the 2000s with the acceleration of a Maoist insurgency and state-directed counter-insurgencythat targeted mineral-rich Adivasi landscapes. Exploding at a moment in which the erstwhile leading political party, the Indian National Congress, sought to broadcast the liberal and humane achievements of its developmental strategy, these events served as an awful reminder of how violence gets distributed when resource-intensive economic growth is on the agenda.
My work primarily interrogates how the long-term production of mining frontiers fits into these political and social fissures, both shaping and exacerbating forms of regional identity, and also creating networks of patronage and power that have oftentimes blocked or subverted popular political movements led by Adivasi communities, peasant organizations, and trade unions. Adivasis, also referred to as Scheduled Tribes, have often been the central targets of the dispossessive projects of both colonial and post-colonial regimes, living across the forest uplands that became transformed by mining investments going back to the early nineteenth century. Because my research engages questions of mining—and specifically coal, the most important and ubiquitous energy source in the subcontinent—I have often been led back to the ways in which contestations over property and land ownership have defined the politics of this region, to say little here about the ecological effects of long-term mineral production in generating dispossession and struggle in their own right. The history of property here, as elsewhere, has further necessitated research into the various types of sovereign power leveled by both the colonial and post-colonial state to claim (and oftentimes not to claim) prerogatives of ownership over the subterranean earth.
Tracing a conflictual history of sovereignty and property since the nineteenth century, my research has tended to emphasize what Lauren Berlant identified as the aporetic quality of sovereignty, rather than its absolutist or strictly delineated forms (Arpitha Kodiveri and I have also tried to write about this notion of sovereignty.). I believe this notion is connected to Kanjwal’s intellectual project as well. In this figuration, sovereignty is not a settled discursive form—the kind of transparent law-making dichotomy of state and exception we see in authors like Carl Schmitt or Giorgio Agamben—but is itself an active practice often made through both the utterances of the law, and its everyday and routine silences. An aporia is a logical disjunction, a moment where coherence cannot form—and it is in those spaces where relations of power are instantiated and sustained, often violently, on-the-ground.
I examine these practices specifically through the question of land law, and the sovereign right asserted by the post-colonial state to the subterranean resources of the Indian underground. Where does this right come from? How does it relate to topographical claims to land and nature that remain vested at the site of civil contract or commercial law? The central contradiction I am concerned with is how extractive claims to the subterranean have historically come to dominate Adivasi claims to topographical land, while at the same time the post-colonial Indian state has insisted on a facetious equality of rights between surface and subsurface right holders.
As it turns out, the state’s assertion over subterranean resources is not simply grounded in the exceptional logic of eminent domain, but is itself part of a genealogy of terrestrial law-making determined by the particular historical entitlements afforded to coal zamindars in the nineteenth century, which denied Santhal and other Adivasi groups claims to three-dimensional property. The very invocation of three-dimensional property in South Asia came to be associated with the assertions of zamindars against Adivasi and Dalit communities that they identified as their tenants, thus embedding a history of agrarian class formation and struggle within the legal form of the mining lease.
It was, as many Adivasi leaders in the 1940s and 1950s pointed out, the failure of land reform by the post-colonial state that rendered the Indian sovereign, with its assertion of supremacy over the underground, into what they called a “coal zamindar” masquerading as a state.
One of the sources I have been focused on recently that touches on these themes is a diary and photo album made in 1948 by the interim governor of the Central Provinces Ravishankar Shukla.[1] Shukla took a tour of prospective coal mining areas in what today are the largest coal mines in Chhattisgarh after they were ceded to the Indian Union following the break-up of the Central Indian Princely States.
Shukla spent part of his time photographing future coalfields to explain how fossil fuel extraction was ultimately a form of social life that Binjhwar and Gond Adivasis required to modernize and become Indian citizens. Railways, roads, investment, markets, and towns would accompany the arrival of new minefields. As he wrote in a letter attached to these photographs,
I have always opposed the British attitude towards primitive people. There can be no question of keeping such people forever in a condition of primitiveness, and to rhapsodize about customs and behavior that are relics of barbarism….We should not lead these children of nature on the road to progress, nor drive them up it with blows.
Shukla’s account here is, of course, quite legible to anyone familiar with debates about the “tribal question” in the late 1940s. Yet, curiously, Shukla suggests that the goal of Adivasi modernization through coal mining was not for them to become workers in the mines. Nor, however, could they be entirely disconnected from them, as they lived on the land that would be required by the state for opening up new extractive zones. What would be their function? He instead imagined their “primitive genius” subsisting enclosed within, but ultimately separated from, the mainstreams of Indian economic life, likely living somewhere near to the minefields and benefitting from a generalized influx of commerce and society. His prognostications for their future are ultimately vague, even though his state-sponsored project entails the immediate ecological destruction of the villages and farmlands that define their social life.
It is here where one can see the aporetic qualities of a sovereign violence at work. It is a discourse that fancifully imagines social integration while seeking to enact the most brutal forms of displacement and dispossession that undermine those conditions of possibility. Shukla’s dream-like account of the coal wealth of the region—which he identifies in his diary as a “paradise”—bears a strong resemblance to the political world revealed by Colonizing Kashmir. It is often what is left unsaid that opens the door for private conversations between “men of consequence,” backroom dealing, and the blunt enactment of discretionary power. It is also such silence and innuendo that sows seeds of doubt when individuals or communities experiencing state violence raise the alarm or seek redress. How can one ascribe culpability to a state? Where are the documents to prove intent? Kanjwal’s book takes us beyond such questions. It is a history that seeks to imagine a social world outside the varied bonds and discourses of states.
[1] This account is forthcoming in: Matthew Shutzer, “Capital, Earth, and Image: Photography in India’s Mining Landscapes,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, Special Issue: Materializing Land (Summer 2025).
Matthew Shutzer is Assistant Professor of Environmental History at the University of California, Berkeley. He is currently completing a book on fossil fuels, land, and development in colonial and post-colonial India. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in outlets such as Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, Osiris, The Radical History Review, Past and Present, Comparative Studies in Society and History, and the Borderlines blog.
Leh city community information center, Ladakh in India-Administered Jammu and Kashmir. CC BY-SA 2.0.
As the title suggests, Hafsa Kanjwal’s overarching argument in Colonizing Kashmir: State-Building Under Indian Occupation is that Indian rule over Kashmir represents a case of colonial occupation. She characterizes the policies and practices of the Bakshi Ghulam Mohammad government (1953–1963) as part of a state-building project premised on a colonial mode of control. In doing so, Kanjwal is simultaneously challenging our understanding of Kashmir’s relation to India as well as rethinking the category of colonialism. Her argument is framed by two interconnected paradoxes. One concerns the configuration of the Indian state as a colonial power, as is apparent in its actions in Kashmir, which during the very same period is emerging as a postcolonial nation-state. She thus argues that colonialism sits at the very foundation of the Indian state and is not an exception to its otherwise democratic order of rule. The second paradox relates to the Bakshi regime’s deployment of a new mode of colonial control in Kashmir, which Kanjwal characterizes as the “politics of life.” Rather than domination through repression and violence, the politics of life is directed towards the care and administration of life.
Kanjwal characterizes this politics of life as a state-building project aimed at materially and emotionally integrating Kashmir into India. In the rest of this contribution, I explore the context and contours of Bakshi’s politics of life as a mode of colonial governmentality. In doing so, I am not only interested in illuminating Kanjwal’s approach to the governance of Kashmir, but also critically evaluating the possibilities and limitations of thinking with the politics of life as a mode of colonialism. Understanding the politics of life as a colonial governmentality directs attention to the desires, interests, and motivations that the Bakshi regime sought to produce in Kashmiri subjects and inquires about the conditions of life that were targeted by this politics. How did the regime envisage the impact of these population level interventions on processes of Kashmiri subject formation? How effective were they in transforming Kashmiri subjects? How do they compare with other modes of colonial governmentality that are based on extraction, racialization, denial of sovereignty or genocidal violence?
The Politics of Life and State-Building
At the time of India’s establishment as an independent nation in 1947, Kashmir was part of a princely state under the deeply unpopular rule of the Dogras. Despite comprising a sizable majority of the state’s population, Muslims were highly disenfranchised and even subjected to ethnic cleansing in the Jammu region by the Dogra army. While the Dogra ruler formally acceded the state to India, his decision was contested by Pakistan and rejected by large swathes of Kashmir’s population. India and Pakistan fought their first war over the Kashmir state which resulted in the bifurcation of its territory between the two countries with a UN ceasefire line dividing the region. Sheikh Abdullah was installed as the first prime minister of Indian-controlled Jammu and Kashmir, which was given a special autonomous status within the union through Article 370 of the Indian constitution. It was allowed to have its own constitution, laws, flag, prime minister, and control over internal matters, while the Indian government’s mandate over the state was limited to communications, defense, and foreign affairs. Sheikh Abdullah’s regime (1947–1953) was concerned with preserving this autonomy but was subjected to increasing interference by the Indian government. It was finally brought down through a coup which led to Bakshi Ghulam Mohammed being installed as the new prime minister.
Understanding the politics of life as a colonial governmentality directs attention to the desires, interests, and motivations that the Bakshi regime sought to produce in Kashmiri subjects and inquires about the conditions of life that were targeted by this politics.
Eschewing the policies of his predecessor, Bakshi set about integrating Kashmir into India by launching a series of state-building projects. Framed by Kanjwal as the politics of life, this state-building was conducted through a “biopolitical mode of governmentality” which “entailed foregrounding the day-to-day concerns of employment, food, education, and provision of basic services” while suppressing “questions of self-determination and Kashmir’s political future” (9). Kanjwal views these attempts to shift Kashmiri sentiments towards integration with India (by offering them a better life) as premised on essentialist assumptions about Kashmiris as primordial beings who are motivated by a hearty meal rather than any complex desire for freedom. In Kanjwal’s formulation, the politics of life comprises a series of policies and projects in the realms of economic development, tourism, media representation, education, food security, and culture. These interventions were designed, on the one hand, to open up Kashmir to India and Indians by making it available for trade, tourism, and filming cinema. On the other, they sought to make Kashmir economically and emotionally dependent on India. They did this by having the central government fund education and subsidize food. The regime also attempted to represent Kashmir in a positive light to multiple audiences—Kashmiris, Indians, as well as on the global stage—by producing propaganda material and curating visits by tourists, filmmakers, journalists, and foreign dignitaries. Besides cultivating emotional and material attachments to India, these state policies also sought to improve the material conditions of life in Kashmir, especially for Muslims, by offering them opportunities for economic mobility.
Molding a Kashmiri Subjectivity
One of the key objectives of the politics of life was to shape Kashmiri subjectivities in a particular secular mode by presenting Kashmiri history and culture as secular or Hindu. Kanjwal sees this as an attempt by the Bakshi regime to underplay the state’s links with Islam and the Muslim world and forge the region’s historical links with India. Yet even as the regime sought to contain communalism, religious difference was fundamental to its own dealing with Kashmiri society. Rather than religious neutrality, Muslim and other religious identities and communities were critical to the way in which the state saw, organized and managed Kashmiri society, further exacerbating its polarization. Such contradictions are also reflected in the new Kashmiri subject’s relation to India. While on the one hand, the regime sought to emotionally integrate Kashmiris into India, on the other their representation of Kashmiris as a soft, easy-going and simple people who just desired a good meal highlighted their difference from modern India. Such characterizations also reflect that the politics of life was not just premised on creating a new Kashmiri subject but tactically sought to build upon and redirect the existing desires of Kashmiris towards a greater acceptance of India. Since the question of erasure/assimilation is central to Kanjwal’s understanding of the politics of life as a colonial governmentality, it is important to highlight these contradictions in the state’s policies. It suggests that the Bakshi regime’s political project was defined by the need to forge a distinctive Kashmiri identity while simultaneously creating emotional and cultural linkages with India. The defining ambition of the politics of life is therefore not to strike some balance between these cultural formations but to promote affinities between them such that the Kashmiri identity and “India” pull in the same direction. The result, according to Kanjwal, is a process of selective erasure, which ultimately results in the crafting of a “fragmented Kashmiri ‘self,’ one for whom the cultural terrain remains deeply contested and suspect” (233). This model of cultural appropriation points to some key differences between colonial governmentality in Kashmir and Orientalist approaches to the colonization of culture whose exploration can be fruitful for establishing the distinctiveness of this particular mode of colonialism.
Kanjwal demonstrates that as a leader, Bakshi cultivated a paternalistic political style in which he loomed large as an authoritative figure. He also fashioned himself as a modernizing reformer who delivered infrastructure and economic opportunities to Kashmir, especially to its neglected Muslim population. Even though he lacked legitimacy, Kashmiris, and even Muslims beyond the state, looked up to him as someone who could solve their problems. He was bestowed with several titles including that of the “architect of Kashmir,” which reflected the widespread recognition of his authority. Yet Bakshi’s politics of life ultimately failed in its goal of emotionally assimilating Kashmiri Muslims to India. As Kanjwal relates, alongside the politics of life, Bakshi’s government relied extensively on “surveillance, violence, and repression, to contain political dissent against its rule” (236). When the Bakshi regime came to an end in 1963, it was followed by mass protests against the theft of Prophet Muhammad’s hair from its shrine which “paved the way for a mass movement for self-determination against the Indian state, underscoring the tenuous nature of Bakshi’s state-building project during the prior decade” (13). The question that arises then concerns this failure of Bakshi’s politics of life. Why was it that despite significant material improvements for Kashmiri Muslims and their widespread recognition of Bakshi’s authority and his policies, they ultimately rejected the Kashmiri state and refused to diminish their demands for self-determination?
The Bakshi regime’s political project was defined by the need to forge a distinctive Kashmiri identity while simultaneously creating emotional and cultural linkages with India.
This is a lingering question that is not entirely addressed by Kanjwal. It also speaks to the methodological choice of focusing on how power shapes subjectivities. While this approach offers important insights into techniques for shaping subjectivities, the ways in which the subject themselves respond to them is not as clear. For example, consider Kanjwal’s descriptions of the ways in which the Kashmiris engaged with Ghulam Bakshi. She argues that while they rejected his legitimacy to rule over Kashmir, nonetheless, they recognized his authority and even demanded that he use it to improve their lives by providing them with better education and health facilities, etc. What is missing though is an account of how the regime’s policies lead to such dual attitudes towards it. An examination of how these policies were debated, made sense of, acted upon, and even appropriated for their ends by the Kashmiri people can open avenues for understanding the limitations of the Bakshi colonial project as well as offer insights into how it was actively resisted or channeled into unplanned directions.
Questioning the Politics of Life
While Kanjwal does a remarkable job of marshaling a diverse array of archives and interviews to paint a wide ranging and detailed picture of the Bakshi regime’s governance, her use of the “politics of life’” does raise certain questions. How does the plethora of policies and projects that Kanjwal describes coalesce around the category of “politics of life”? Clearly, her use of this category is meant to emphasize the difference between Bakshi’s political era and the violent repression unleashed on Kashmir by the Indian state from the 1980s onwards. In fact, she contrasts this militarized mode of control as “necropolitics” or the “politics of bare life” (273). Yet the question of how state propaganda that seeks to sell an image of a peaceful, beautiful, and secular Kashmir to the international media shares its rationality with state policies of subsidizing food to increase and improve the diet of Kashmiris remains unanswered. While the latter is a clear-cut example of biopower, that is, the power to bring new forms of life into being and calibrate the productivity of subjects by targeting the conditions in which life is lived, it is much more complicated to think of state propaganda for foreign audiences as a politics of life.
Kanjwal’s interest in deploying the framework of politics of life is not so much in establishing the internal coherence of a political rationality but to delineate a modality of control, which she sees as one of many that repeat across Kashmir’s colonial history. However, as I see it, her claim that Bakshi’s regime is colonial is not just premised on the fact that it lacked legitimacy and denied Kashmiris the right to self-determination but also because its policies and strategies sought to create a new Kashmiri subject that is economically, culturally and emotionally assimilated into India. I find her choice of “politics of life” rather than the broader category of “hegemony” to be quite telling in terms of the specificity she wants to bring to her analysis of colonial modalities of control. However, my one quibble with an otherwise meticulously researched and written book is that further developing and sharpening her framework of politics of life would have gone some way to strengthening her argument.
Amen Jaffer is Associate Professor of Sociology at the Lahore University of Management Sciences. His research is located at the intersection of religion and urban studies with a particular focus on sociality, community, and infrastructure in neighborhoods, markets and Islamic institutions. His forthcoming monograph, The Social Life of Islam: Sufi Shrines in Urban Pakistan(Cambridge University Press), examines the coming together of Islam and the city in Pakistan’s Sufi shrines. He is the co-editor of State and Subject Formation in South Asia (Oxford University Press, 2022). His ongoing research projects include an analysis of urban citizenship in low-income neighborhoods of Lahore which explores poor residents' engagements with the infrastructures of their neighborhoods as practices of forging political communities. The other project investigates the social organization of the waste and recycling economy in Lahore by focusing on Afghani scrapyards and settlements of low-caste nomadic communities.
Ahasuerus and Haman at the Feast of Esther. By Rembrandt, 1660. Oil on canvas. Public Domain.
Two Preambles
The immediate aftermath of October 7, 2023 was one of shock and deep humiliation for Jews worldwide. The sovereignty of the Zionist project should have made October 7 impossible. But it didn’t. Reactions to the war exhibited a rawness that was as understandable in its intensity as it was troubling in its presentation. And the military reaction to that massacre has been horrifying to watch. I begin with two preambles.
First, in February 2025, a liberal Zionist rabbi gave a moving sermon about the fears, anxieties, and the insecurity of this moment. He talked about the need for Jews to retain a commitment to a moral standard even, or precisely, in these moments. Hamas, the rabbi said, was “an enemy whose depravity and evil knows no bounds.” A few minutes later he described the plan, recently approved by the Israeli Knesset, to transfer two million Palestinians out of Gaza as “an abomination” and a deep moral error. He described Israelis as good people who sometimes do bad things.
There is nothing unusual about these comments and, in fact, calling transfer “an abomination” was to my mind quite a courageous thing to say from the pulpit these days. But the juxtaposition of “evil people” and “good people who do bad things” is worth considering, not because I necessarily think it was misplaced, but because it raises a series of issues that need further examination.
Second, in a recent interview on Peter Beinart’s Substack, “Beinart’s Notebook,” Palestinian Israeli law professor and cultural critic Raeif Zreik responded to using the language of “evil” regarding what the IDF has done in Gaza or what Hamas did on October 7 (depending on which side of the conflict you stand). He said that “evil” was not a useful analytical category to describe either group. Evil, he suggested, is acting with no context, no justification, no reason other than the act itself. In both instances, the actions may be evil, but the perpetrators were not acting without reason. Each had a reason, legitimate or not, to perform those inexcusable evil actions. This is not to justify the actions, but quite the opposite, it is to try to understand their causes.
Purim and Violence in the Jewish Tradition
It is no coincidence that both of these comments took place as the Jews entered the month of Adar and began to think about Purim. The prelude to Purim is the public reading of Torah verses describing Amalek and the Jewish obligation to obliterate Amalek (that is, to commit what today we would call genocide). Who exactly Amalek was, scripture never quite tells us. In the Jewish tradition, Amalek represents the quintessence of evil, “with no bounds.” In fact, Amalek is viewed as the exemplar of evil worse than other nations who attacked Israel, i.e., the Moabites, Ammonites, or the seven nations indigenous to the land of Canaan. Those biblical peoples were legitimate enemies who acted in some cases as a response to the Israelite claim that God gave them the land that would come to constitute the biblical Kingdom of Israel. In fact the first comment by Rashi on Genesis 1:1 asks the question: Why did the Torah have to begin with the story of creation? He then cites a midrash that states, “because the nations will claim you are thieves when you come into the land and thus Genesis begins with creation to show them that I, God, created everything and I can give it to whomever I want.” Setting aside the problems that comment creates when it is used as a political tool, there was never a biblical mandate to destroy those peoples (although there were mandates to expel them, what today we would call “ethnic cleansing”). This was because, I surmise, those peoples had a reason to attack the Israelites as nations attack other nations: they felt threatened, they were defending their land. Therefore, they may have committed evil actions, war crimes of the time etc., but they were not deemed “evil” in themselves. Only Amalek was deemed “evil” in essence, and thus meriting the mandate of genocide. As Zreik noted when talking about evil, there was no context, no justification, no reason other than the act itself that made Amalek evil.
The rabbinic sages seemed acutely aware of this genocidal mandate and muted it by claiming that the genealogy of Amalek had been lost. For this reason, obligatory genocide was interpreted out of the Jewish tradition. But was it? As Elliot Horowitz shows in his book Reckless Rites, which explores the history of Purim violence in the Jewish tradition, Amalek has continued to be used, to this day, to describe Israel’s enemies. Horowitz cites a 2004 essay by Jeffrey Goldberg in The New Yorker: “The Palestinians are Amalek,” Goldberg was told by Benzi Lieberman, chairman of the Council of Settlements. “We will destroy them,” Lieberman continued. “We won’t kill them all. But we will destroy their ability to think as a nation. We will destroy Palestinian nationalism.” And Moshe Feiglin, a leading Likud activist, told Goldberg: “The Arabs engage in typical Amalek behavior. I can’t prove this genetically, but this is the behavior of Amalek.”
During the Jewish holiday of Purim, a Jewish settler overlooks the streets of Hebron. The only Palestinian city settled from within by the Jewish colonizers, Hebron sits as a hotbed of occupation, violence from the settlers, and oppression of the Palestinian residents. Via Flickr User flo razowsky. CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.
The rabbis suggest that the villain in the Book of Esther, Haman, was descended from Amalek. Horowitz shows how even today Palestinians who live under the auspices of a Jewish state are called by some Amalekites.
Goldberg then turned to a young acquaintance seated next to him, Ayelet, a pregnant (married) teenager who wore a long skirt and carried a semiautomatic M-16 and asked her whether she thought Amalek was alive today. ‘Of course,’ she replied, and pointed toward one of the Arab villages in the distance. (Horowitz, Reckless Rites, 3–4)
Of course, after the massacre on October 7, Hamas were likened to Amalekites by Israeli government officials, rabbinical leaders, even the Prime Minister. As Amalekites they were “pure evil” and the mandate of genocide would apply to them. And here, those who make that claim get caught in their own trap. If you deem Hamas to be Amalek, there is a biblical mandate to commit a genocide against them. At the same time, however those same people invoking Amalek are claiming that Israel is not committing genocide against Gazans. Of course, extending Hamas to Gazans more generally requires an additional step, albeit one that is becoming increasingly common, for example in President Herzog’s early claim that “there are no innocents in Gaza.”
Essentializing Hamas as Evil
Before bringing Kant and his notion of “radical evil” into the conversation, I want to parse one more distinction that could be used to justify genocide in this circumstance. I mentioned previously the trope that “Hamas are evil, and Israelis are good people who sometimes do bad things (in this case “ethnic cleansing” is an “abomination” committed by Israel). There seems to be a categorical distinction here between how the two peoples are being defined. One group’s ethics is defined by what they do, while another’s is defined by who they are deep down. Israeli Jews are essentially good, who can do evil, that is, they can fall into moral error. Hamas, however, form an “evil that knows no bounds” and thus what they do is not a willed choice, not a moral error, but an expression of their essence. More generally, this describes how many (though certainly not all) Israelis view themselves and Hamas: as two different species of humanity. One who can choose good or evil, and one who can’t. Can this be distinction be reasonably sustained?
In terms of people being capable of evil, we needn’t look further than Genesis 8 where we learn that, in response to the flood, the LORD smelled the pleasing aroma, the LORD said in his heart, “I will never again curse the ground because of human beings, for the intention of the human heart is evil from their youth (Gen 8:21). The Jewish tradition has done much with this verse, mostly to say that humans are not evil by nature but are capable of evil. That is, given free will they can, and often will, choose evil, but that is not part of their essence. Saying Hamas is evil—certainly their eliminationist ideology can be evil but that is saying something different—is making a different and, in my view, more problematic, claim. By saying Hamas is evil, one is saying that their evil actions (and their actions certainly were evil on October 7) are not a choice, say, between good and evil, they are not “evil thoughts” that became a reality through choice, they are not a product of reason, however skewered, but rather part of their essence: it is who they are. This can easily bring one to compare Hamas to Amalek. But I think this is a serious error.
By saying Hamas is evil, one is saying that their evil actions (and their actions certainly were evil on October 7) are not a choice, say, between good and evil . . . but rather part of their essence: it is who they are.
We must recall that which separates Amalek from, say, the Canaanites. This is that, as the Bible tells it, the Amalekites had no reason to attack Israel in the desert. They had no claim to land that was being challenged nor that they were being threatened. In short, they had no justification for choosing to attack the Israelites. The Canaanites, however, had a reason to go to war with the Israelites. In fact, God tells the Israelites the indigenous population will go to war with them. The Israelites enter their land and claim that God granted them this land even though the Canaanites were indigenous to it. In that sense, if we want to anachronistically compare any ancient people to Hamas, it would be to the Canaanites and not Amalek. But I have never heard that comparison.
Kant, Radical Evil, and Moral Choice
And here we come to Immanuel Kant and his notion of evil and radical evil. Kant’s religion is a religion of reason, which for him requires human freedom. He rejects the Lutheran and Calvinist understanding of “original sin” as an erasure of human freedom, suggesting that we are trapped in an irredeemable state of sin/immorality only redeemable by Christ. Recounting Kant’s rejection of original sin, Emil Fackenheim in his essay “Kant and Radical Evil” describes it this way: “original sin is a state in which I am obligated to a law which I am nonetheless unable to obey…[Kant] categorically denies the possibility of a situation in which there is a moral obligation without a corresponding moral freedom” (69). For Kant, if original sin defined as such, is true, then humans are not free, and thus not human. Human freedom, or moral freedom, is at the center of his understanding of the human and of evil.
For Kant, evil actions are the result of a “weak will” (choosing to ignore moral obligation) or “no will” (choosing to act solely on desire). Relevant to our concerns, there is another category Kant introduces. It is what he calls “radical evil.” Radical evil for Kant is acting by already perverting the principles in one’s character such that one chooses to curtail the freedom to choose the good. One example might be taken by an ideology to the extent that violence in the name of that ideology is viewed as “good.” Ideology can demand, at times, the curtailing of a moral will. Yet, as humans, we must retain that freedom, albeit it is now muted (by perverted desires, ideologies, etc.). Does radical evil erase one’s ability to choose good? Kant would say “no,” that is impossible, but the shift from choosing evil to choosing good cannot come about incrementally but only through a “revolution.” Kant writes, “A man [can] reverse…by a single unchangeable decision that highest ground of maxims whereby he was an evil man.” ( 43). How this can occur, Kant does not tell us, but he maintains that it can occur, in fact it must be possible for it to occur in order for the human to be human. To be chained to desires or instincts would be to lack the capacity for reason that is essential to human nature for Kant. And if specific humans are not human, but “animals,” then they are not capable of evil, radical or otherwise. This is because animals do not have the capacity of reason which makes a moral choice possible. Thus, they are not able to be “evil” or “good.” On Kant’s reading, animals act according to their nature. This may be one interpretation of the legal claim of insanity, but here insanity would be a perversion or malfunction of one’s humanity. Amalek becomes the biblical exception that proves that rule. Amalekites were not insane. And yet on Kant’s terms they were not “radically evil” either. They were something else, some kind of amalgam of human and not-human. To my knowledge Kant never discusses them.
In the end, Kant leaves us with three categories: those who can choose evil but choose good (a strong moral will), those who have the ability to choose evil and choose evil (a weak moral will), and those whose perversion of principles reaches a point that it minimizes freedom (radical evil). Each remain free agents, each can choose otherwise—even if one may require a “revolution,”—and thus each remains human.
How can all this speak to our moment? Likening Hamas to Amalek is self-serving. It is as if saying, “we are good people who can act badly, but they are simply evil.” Perhaps we can say, rather, that Palestinian resistance is as Revisionist Zionist Zeev Jabotinsky claims in his essay “The Iron Wall”, “natural” and even justifiable. Kant would say that it is a willed choice that comes from a place of moral freedom (self-determination) even as, in this case, it manifests as evil (the murder of civilians). It may be for Kant an example of a “weak will,” that is choosing against morality (the sanctity of life) that results in evil (the death of innocent people).
Likening Hamas to Amalek is self-serving. It is as if saying, ‘we are good people who can act badly, but they are simply evil.’
One can even say, I think, that while Palestinian resistance more generally is a willed act between good and evil (as Jabotinsky acknowledged), Hamas has morphed that state into one of “radical evil” whereby, as Fackenheim again surmises, “any empirical evil act already presupposes a perversion of principles in man’s intelligible character” (67). This coheres with Kant’s notion that man has freedom to choose evil. But one does that as a human being and that freedom can also be a tool to reverse that choice. It may, as Kant suggests, take a “revolution” and not merely “reform.” But it is precisely because that decision is possible that the comparison to Amalek and the biblical mandate to commit genocide against them, does not—cannot—apply. Amalek, as Kant might interpret it, has for whatever reason (we are not told) erased its freedom and thus is irredeemable. But it also may be the imagined enemy that has not, and cannot, truly exist. The closest we may have come is Nazism which, in its baseless, almost insane, hatred of Jews comes nearest in resembling the biblical story. But any comparison between Hamas and Nazism is, to my mind, unsustainable.
As a brief coda to this brief exploration, one can understand psychologically why some might deploy Amalek as a description of Hamas. By setting up the enemy as “pure evil” one also sets up the self as innocent (as the Israelites were in the desert when Amalek attacked). But of course, as Jabotinsky makes quite clear in “The Iron Wall,” Zionism as colonialism (a term he uses) is not wholly innocent (separating whether in this case it is justified). And once you erase innocence, the Amalek claim falls apart.
Ideologies, in this case Hamas, are one justificatory way that choosing evil as a moral error can become “radical evil.” But ideologies are human constructions and human choices, and can be transformed, or lose support among the masses. One can see Hamas as performing evil actions, even reaching the bar of “radical evil” on October 7, yet withhold essentializing them as Amalek. When we do this we can better see a way beyond this morass, in part by recognizing that while Israelis may be “good people who sometimes choose bad things” Israelis are not innocent here like the Jews in Shushan or the Israelites in the desert when Amalek attacked them. That is, in some way, one of the consequences of sovereignty. Sovereignty includes responsibility and agency that can sometimes result in moral error. Amalek may be the counter example, and not the embodiment, of where we find ourselves today.
At the Gate of Jamia Masjid Mosque in Srinagar, India-administered Jammu and Kashmir. Photo Credit: Caéshmir, via Pexels. CC.
Hafsa Kanjwal’s book Colonizing Kashmir is an important addition to Critical KashmirStudies. Broadly, the book analyzes how modern forms of colonialism take place within “post-colonial” nation states and perfect control over people, their land, and resources. It is especially timely when part of divided Kashmir (also called Jammu and Kashmir, J&K, or just Kashmir) is reeling from yet another phase of ever tightening control by India. Kanjwal’s laser-sharp analysis focuses on the 1950s, a notorious time in Kashmir known as the Bakshi Daur (era). During this time, the Indian government weaponized institutions of state-building—such as autonomous governance, territorial sovereignty, elections, infrastructure, development, media, culture, religion, and even feminism—to camouflage its military occupation. This essay keeps critical interventions made by Colonizing Kashmir central and reflects on their impacts on political resistance and gendered activism, which are pivots of my own research.
Since the late 1940s India’s colonial power has distorted and exploited the identity and agency of Kashmiris. Kanjwal illustrates how from the get-go the Indian government put into place a clientelist structure to govern the region and steadily criminalized the Indigenous Kashmiri movement for independence and self-determination. Kanjwal shows how state building and its dissolution were equal processes, especially pivoting on tensions between different communities living together. In 2019, the Indian state came full circle: it went from propping up Kashmir’s political system via clientelism to militarily dismantling the quasi-autonomous state and dividing the region into two. Unprecedently, Kashmir was demoted from a state to a union territory to be ruled directly from New Delhi. Even after more than 70 years, India has had to employ military tactics to remove regional autonomy to further tighten its control over and occupation of Kashmiris. Most Kashmiris distrust Indian policies, with the brutal removal of autonomy being likened to BJP stabbing Kashmiris from the front as opposed to previously being stabbed in the back.
When India and Pakistan became two nations in 1947, Kashmiris were reeling under economic slavery and religious persecution. The region had been under centuries of foreign occupations, the latest being the Dogras, a clan of Hindu warlords. The Dogras had purchased the region of Kashmir along with its people from the British in exchange for their loyalty in regional wars. The Dogra despot fled to India in the face of Kashmiri rebellion in 1947. A clientelist structure would soon emerge from the emergency administration left in charge of Sheikh Abdullah at end of Dogra rule. The state apparatuses that were allowed to flourish were enmeshed in Indian militarism and clientelism and fueled by rank corruption, nepotism, and horse-trading. Policies preyed on the economic desperation and rampant illiteracy of the Kashmiri publics who were emerging from the despotic rule of Dogras. Electoral politics—which the United Nations initially objected to because the region was under dispute—were closely controlled by India. India weaponized electoral politics to create the perception of a legitimate democratic system and solidify its governance. Kanjwal brings together analysis around this period aptly contextualizing the succeeding events which ultimately led to the demise of autonomy.
Client Politics in Action
Kanjwal’s analysis shows how Bakshi Gulam Mohammad’s regime became a prototype for India in governing Kashmir through a mix of military occupation and clientelism. In 1953 Bakshi was installed as the Prime Minister of Kashmir. At that time, under special article 370, Kashmir was a semi-autonomous region that had its own constitution and flag. The previous administrator, Shiekh Mohamad Abdullah, an iconic leader of Kashmiri nationalism, was ousted in a coup. Bakshi, even though Abdullah’s close aide, lost no time in turning against his colleague and friend. Bakshi’s unconditional kowtowing to India earned him the moniker of the “biggest traitor” of the Kashmiris. Abdullah was later framed in a conspiracy case against India for seeking independence of Kashmir. He was imprisoned and exiled on and off for two decades before coming to heel after agreeing to abide by limits on his political actions put in place by India.
Kanjwal’s analysis shows how Bakshi Gulam Mohammad’s regime became a prototype for India in governing Kashmir through a mix of military occupation and clientelism.
Previously in the 1930s and 1940s Abdullah was lionized as “sher” (lion) and “bab” (father) for his revolutionary leadership against despotic Dogra rule. Kanjwal reiterates that Abdullah did “withstand” Indian government’s attempts to erode Kashmir’s autonomy. However, in time he felt the full force of India strongarming him, and ran into disfavor. He was deposed and jailed in 1951 and replaced by an infinitely more plaint Bakshi, whose regime is central to Kanjwal’s analysis. In the 1950s and 1960s India quickly exhausted its earliest cache of local Kashmiri client-politicians. In 1975 Abdullah was returned to power after signing an agreement that effectively ended his political aim of forming a plebiscite in Kashmir to shape its future. It had taken about two decades to fully defang the lion of Kashmir. Kashmiris often hold Abdullah responsible for colluding with India for an autonomous status, which is seen as a death knell for their sovereignty and self-determination. The anger against Abdullah is so deep that his grave has 24/7 police protection. Similarly, Bakshi is not forgiven for his compliant status with India and his era continues to be steeped in shame and dishonor. Bakshi’s own disenchantment for the kind of politics he peddled is manifest in his advising of his heirs to stay away from it.
Eroding Autonomy, Erasing Identity
In 1947, the Kashmiri negotiators, whether rank “opportunists” or “naïve,” saw the autonomy agreement or Article 370 as an ironclad safeguard for self-rule and territorial sovereignty. However, India deployed it as a trojan horse. The moment Article 370 came into effect India used it to pass laws that eroded Kashmir’s autonomous structure. Executive orders, statutes, direct coups, incarceration, detentions, exile, clientelism, and election rigging became a norm for engineering a compliant constituency for India and steadily criminalizing the movement for self-determination. Shiekh Abdullah, who had been pivotal in supporting the agreement, became its first iconic victim.
The Indian state fetishizes Kashmiris and undermines their political and cultural autonomy by controlling the narrative of Kashmir’s history and politics. Resonating with my own work on Kashmiri gendered subjectivity, Kanjwal reveals how Kashmiri men are often depicted through a lens of suspicion and violence as militant and hypermasculine figures. This depiction helps justify militarization and surveillance. Kashmiris are also stereotyped as servile in the romanticized and commodified depiction of Kashmir as a “paradise on earth” that subsists on the scraps of Indian tourism. The exotification of Kashmiri women either as victims or as resilient figures of beauty also plays into the broader colonial and patriarchal projects. As my ethnographic research shows, even the defenders of human rights who mobilize against the Indian military’s abuses, such as the Association of Parents of the Disappeared Persons, are not immune to such brazen appropriation. The reduction of Kashmiris into simplistic tropes reinforces a colonizer-colonized dynamic, one which has enabled the Indian state to justify its control over the region. Indian policies are systematically altering Kashmiris distinctive identity and Islamic-majority character. Within the Hindutva ideology Kashmir is being reframed as a sacred Hindu land. Kashmiri indigeneity is being reframed via legal changes, demographic reengineering, cultural erasure, epistemic domination, and economic restructuring, with a focus on the pre-Islamic past and the demonization of Islam and Muslims. The weaponization of religion and indigeneity reinforce broader settler colonial logics of elimination, replacement, and domination over the distinctiveness of Kashmiri identity. As Kanjwal also illustrates, these processes did not start with the BJP government, but have been in the making for a long time. These processes aim to make Kashmir and Kashmiris compliant within the broader Indian nationalist project, which is also euphemistically called “integration.”
The Indian Politics of Handling Kashmir
Pivotal in the Indian policy of handling Kashmiris has been creating conditions which whittle down the local leaders into mere collaborators. Kashmiris often say that India ensures that no tall graves remain in Kashmir, meaning leaders who would be revered in perpetuity. Such policies of breaking-in Kashmiri leaders and the fragmentation of the political terrain to ultimately cause collective disempowerment continue to remain entrenched in Kashmir’s politics. Leaders like Abdullah and Bakshi are exemplars of this political decimation. They went from being forebearers of Kashmiri nationalism—ones who bargained for self-rule and did not readily accede to India—to becoming compliant clients. When British rule was ending, for regions like Kashmir there was no way of achieving some amount of sovereignty without acceding to larger nation states. This nascent neocolonial system, ridden with imperial Eurocentric hubris, was imposed by the fleeing British colonists. It planted the seeds of many tragic disputes among newly liberated peoples, Kashmiris being one of them. Kanjwal has discussed this in detail throughout the book and pertinently analyzes the Indian military occupation within the settler colonial frame as it has been unfolding since 1947.
The Bakshi regime, as Kanjwal notes, preyed upon the economic desperation of the formerly enslaved Kashmiris in what is now the Indian-administered side of divided Kashmir. The military, judicial, electoral, and bureaucratic structures are rigged to generate continued clientelism. Kashmiris who resist this mode of operation are imprisoned, exiled, isolated, or killed. All administrations installed since 1947 have become increasingly authoritarian in dealing with dissent and resistance to Indian rule. Over the years the institutionalization of policies to manufacture Indian loyalists has deepened nepotism and corruption. Bakshi, as Kanjwal illustrates, would often say that if someone did not get rich under his regime, they never would, propagating the idea that Kashmir could only prosper with India. Bakshi began what Kanjwal conceptualizes as developmentalism, a process where economic development is deployed to achieve political legitimacy. Over the long term, this policy would create a chronic dependency on India. Hallmarks of modernity, especially infrastructure, literacy, and development—which Kashmiris badly need—were used to manufacture compliance. Women’s empowerment emerged as state feminism which was weaponized within these policies to create a gendered constituency. Women were thus reigned in by the opening economic and educational opportunities but thwarted of any meaningful or radical political engagement. The tradeoff of gendered empowerment was to remain uncritical of the state and apathetic to politics.
Hallmarks of modernity, especially infrastructure, literacy, and development—which Kashmiris badly need—were used to manufacture compliance.
Kanjwal argues for a critical understanding of the Bakshi era which has been overlooked in scholarly analysis because it is often characterized as being “the first in series of governments through which the Indian state attempted to erode Kashmirs’ autonomy” (30). Kashmiris derogatorily called local supporters of Bakshi “Goggeh” for their collaboration with India and repression of their own people. For example, an uncle in my extended family joined Bakshi’s party mainly for economic opportunities. He was able to secure admissions to professional colleges for his son and daughter. Such was the level of ostracization for Bakshi’s camp that this uncle had trouble finding a match for either of his well-educated children. They were also disinvited from family functions. Such treatment was also reserved for members of Indian parties, such as the India National Congress, who first made an open foray into local Kashmiri politics in the 1960s. Even today, pro-India outfits in Kashmir, both old and new, are popping up every day, and they are seen as proxies for India. Currently, Kashmiri disdain is foremost reserved for the Hindu supremacist Bharatiya Janata Party. In the recent parliamentary election, Kashmiris, who often boycott polls, voted to keep the BJP and their proxies from gaining seats in the region. India continues to patronize pro-India politics in the region and the leaders of resistance political groups, armed and unarmed, are either killed, jailed, or exiled.
Since 2019, Kashmir has increasingly been facing cultural, religious, and political erasure. Autonomous and territorial sovereignty have been militarily removed and Indian settler colonial policies are fully underway. The Indian government says that the removal of Kashmir’s autonomy is for development, but as I have written elsewhere it should be seen as embedded in a structure of neocolonialism, described by Kanjwal as Third World Imperialism (22) based on fundamentalist Hindu ethnonationalism or Hindutva, and fueled by neoliberalism. Against this backdrop even Muslims living in India are cast as invaders and foreigners. Kashmiris are doubly marked as the Other: first as Muslims and second as seekers of self-determination. Kashmiris are facing the loss of territorial sovereignty, policies of dispossession, ecocide, and rampant exploitation of resources, resulting in neocolonial maldevelopment and settler influx. Kanjwal’s book is a timely arrival that complements Critical Kashmir Studies scholarship that teaches us that such policies in Kashmir are not new and that the “Kashmir issue” is not an intractable conflict but instead has been made intractable by Indian colonial politics over the last 70+ years. Kanjwal pushes against the “territorial and historical conceptions of India, whereby all other political visions and aspirations become mere aberration” (26). This book is a testament to the face that Kashmiri political aspirations for sovereignty are not an aberration yet continue to face tremendous violence at the hands of the Indian nation state.
Hafsa Kanjwal’s Colonizing Kashmir: State-Building under Indian Occupation challenges our assumptions both about who counts as a colonizer and what the practice of colonization entails. Many histories of colonization in the Indian subcontinent exclusively focus on the British as colonizers and the Indigenous peoples as the colonized. This is of course necessary, as the colonization of Kashmir by India cannot be understood apart from this history. Hafsa Kanjwal asks, however: What happens when the postcolonial state itself becomes an agent of colonization and not merely one of its victims?
Through extensive archival research on the early years following the partition between India and Pakistan, Kanjwal shows how the nascent Indian government, led by the supposedly tolerant and pluralistic India National Congress, replicated colonial forms of governance in the region of Jammu and Kashmir, a land whose people have their own unique blend of religious, cultural, and political practices. It did so primarily through what Kanjwal, drawing on Neve Gordon, calls “the politics of life.” Through such politics, the “Indian government and Kashmir’s client regimes propagated development, empowerment, and progress to secure the well-being of Kashmir’s population to normalize the occupation for multiple audiences” (9). To focus on such a politics is not to discount the brutal oppression that has come to Kashmiris at various points when they have sought to secure their own self-determination. It is rather to draw our attention to the various, and often less visible, ways in which power is wielded to maintain control over occupied peoples. In examining the rule of Sheikh Abdullah and Bakshi Ghulam Mohammad during the time following the 1948 partition that created the independent states of Pakistan and Indian, Kanjwal demonstrates how power operates in ways that cruder models of domination would otherwise exclude, including via the circulation of media, educational reform, economic aid, and more.
The three contributions to this symposium reflect on different features of “the politics of life” that is central to Kanjwal’s book. Ather Zia draws on her own research to go deeper on the gendered politics of Kashmiri identity. As Zia notes, Kashmiri men are often stereotyped as hypermasculine and militant, while women are depicted as exotic figures of beauty. These stereotypes strip Kashmiris of their humanity and justify the continued Indian occupation. Even feminism, she argues, has been coopted by the Indian government to further cement its domination in the region.
Amen Jaffer, meanwhile, examines the shaping of Kashmiri subjectivity under occupation. In focusing on modes of governing Kashmiris through a politics of life, Jaffer worries that Kanjwal leaves out the agency of Kashmiris who had to balance their desire for self-determination with simple survival. Such an account, he contends, would enrich Kanjwal’s investigation
Matthew Schutzer, finally, draws on his own research among Adivasi, or “schedule tribes,” in India to show how the Indian state, as in Kashmir, developed stereotypes around marginalized communities in order to justify their dispossession. Schutzer suggests that this dispossession reveals the concrete ways that sovereignty operates within the social sphere, which notably extends beyond the “exceptionalist” political theological framework of Carl Schmitt and Giorgio Agamben.
When leaders of powerful countries brazenly proclaim that the dispossession of land by those decimated by war will result in their being “thrilled”, we see how the fantasies of empire continue to wreak havoc on the marginalized. Kanjwal shows how claims and actions among current and former colonial powers, while now nearing absurdity, have not been only the purview of right-wing populists, but often their “liberal” political opponents as well. In doing so, she reminds us of the way structures of governmentality often reach across internal partisan lines when it comes to maintain the boundaries of the state.
Joshua S. Lupo is the Assistant Director of the Contending Modernities research initiative. In this role, he serves as the editor and writer for the Contending Modernities Blog and the classroom coordinator for the Madrasa Discourses program. He has published articles and reviews in Sophia, Soundings, Critical Muslim, Reading Religion, and Religious Studies Review. With CM Co-Director Atalia Omer, he is the co-editor of Broken Solidarities: Feminism, Race, and Transnationalism (Notre Dame Press, 2022) and Religion, Populism, and Modernity: Confronting White Christian Nationalism and Racism (Notre Dame Press, 2023). His current book project is titled After Essentialism: A Critical Phenomenology for the Study of Religion.
Hundreds of migrants wait in front of US-Mexico border wall on December 21, 2022. Image licensed by MT Dávila from Shutterstock.
What are the boundaries of Christian love? And how should our answer to this question influence policy on immigration and other critical issues at this moment in the US and beyond? In a Fox News interview with J.D. Vance, the Vice President of the United States, offered the following take on Christian love in relation to President Trump’s immigration policies:
As an American leader, but also as an American citizen, your compassion belongs first to your fellow citizens. That doesn’t mean you hate people from the outside of your own borders, but there’s this old-school [concept]—and I think it’s a very Christian concept by the way—that you love your family, and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens in your own country, and then, after that, you can focus and prioritize the rest of the world. (January 30, 2025)
In discussing these policies, J.D. Vance brought up the Augustinian and Thomistic principle of the order of love—ordo amoris—whereby a Christian’s call to love is organized into ever expanding circles or spheres of contact and care beginning with those closest to us by accident of family, geographic region, or nationality. Vance’s presentation of this concept implied that Christian love is a bounded category, limited in its reach, as in a pie that only has so many slices to go around. According to Vance, Christians in the U.S. should understand that our love must first extend to care for U.S. citizens, and then, if anything is left over, to extend to those who are either living beyond our borders or living within them though not as citizens. Trump’s orders for mass detention and deportation of persons in the country illegally are presumably designed to target only those with criminal records and criminal charges that pose a threat to U.S. citizens (though we now know these policies are impacting a much broader population of immigrants).
Vance’s words drew a slew of commentary that broke down the concept of the ordo amoris from a myriad of perspectives. Some excellent analyses include Tisha Rajendra, who took to Bluesky to do a thorough rundown of Vance’s confused and inaccurate reading of the concept in light of Aquinas’s much broader understanding of love and justice, one that calls for priorities shaped by the dire humanitarian need of persons to whom we may not be related by birth or nationality. Also relevant is Matthew Shadle’s extensive commentary on his blog, Window Light. In “Getting Love Right: J.D. Vance and the Ordo Amoris,” Shadle thoroughly reviews a spectrum of clarifying responses from ethicists and theologians, and provides context on the issue of migrant justice in Catholic social teaching. In America Magazine, Terence Sweeney reminded us that the ordering of love has its origin in St. Augustine, stating that, “What Mr. Vance gets wrong is that the point of Christian teaching is to expand, even transform, our order of loves. If our explanations of Christianity do not ‘build up this double love of God and neighbor,’ as Augustine writes in On Christian Doctrine, then we have failed to understand Christianity.” And Stephen Pope, an Aquinas scholar, explained that in Aquinas the order of love is a framework that is grounded in God’s love for all creation. For Pope, “No true Catholic ethic relegates mass numbers of distant suffering neighbors to the outer periphery of our moral concern. The fact that we cannot love every neighbor ‘in the same way and to the same degree,’ as Mr. Reno rightly notes, does not justify loving only our own people and ignoring the rest of humanity.… Such a love, in Christian terms, is anything but properly ordered.”
Christian love is not a concentric expansion of interests that little by little extend to other persons and groups. In other words: the human person is not a mere individual, relatively expansive, with some philanthropic feelings! The human person is a subject with dignity who, through the constitutive relationship with all, especially with the poorest, can gradually mature in his identity and vocation. The True ordo amoris that must be promoted is that which we discover by meditating constantly on the parable of the ‘Good Samaritan’ (cf. Lk 10:25-37), that is, by meditating on the love that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception.
In the letter the pontiff places migration front and center as a preeminent issue of the current moment: “The journey from slavery to freedom that the People of Israel traveled, [] invites us to look at the reality of our time, so clearly marked by the phenomenon of migration, as a decisive moment in history to reaffirm not only our faith in a God who is always close, incarnate, migrant, and refugee, but also the infinite and transcendent dignity of every human person” (1). In this letter the Pope goes so far as to declare that protection of human dignity, including the dignity of migrant persons, “surpasses and sustains every other juridical consideration that can be made to regulate life in society” (3). Summarizing much of Catholic social teaching on the rights of migrants and refugees, Francis reminds the church in the United States specifically to do no further harm to already vulnerable persons who “have left their own land for reasons of extreme poverty, insecurity, exploitation, persecution or serious deterioration of the environment…” (4)
Lamenting the lack of compassion and dignity at the borders, Pope Francis’s 2020 encyclical Fratelli Tutti offers an ordering of political love that lifts up the gift of encountering the other, the migrant, and other persons on the move.
Indeed, while Catholic social teaching has historically affirmed the right of nations to sustain and defend their borders, the right of persons to migrate holds a special priority, as evidenced by the lengthy history of support for migrants and refugees in Catholic teaching. Moved by the waves of refugees after the 1914 earthquake in Sicily, Pope Pius X declared the World Day of Migrants and Refugees to be celebrated yearly on the last Sunday in September. Since then, Catholic social teaching has honored the plight of migrants throughout its documentary heritage. Pope John XXIII’s Pacem in Terris (1965), for example, affirms the right of people to freedom of movement within their own country and to emigrate to other countries when the conditions make such moves necessary. In 2003 the U.S. and Mexican bishops, in their joint statement Strangers no Longer: Together on the Journey of Hope, stated that, “While recognizing the right of the sovereign state to control its borders [] this right is not absolute…” (30) Citing the 1952 document Exsul Familia: On the Spiritual Care of Migrants, the U.S. and Mexican bishops reiterate that the sovereignty of the state “cannot be exaggerated to the point that access to this land is, for inadequate of unjustified reasons, denied to needy and decent people from other nations.” (a portion of the document that in turn refers to a 1948 message from Pius XII to the American Bishops)
Lamenting the lack of compassion and dignity at the borders, Pope Francis’s 2020 encyclical Fratelli Tuttioffers an ordering of political love that lifts up the gift of encountering the other, the migrant, and other persons on the move as important contributions of cultural and economic talent to the receiving country. In Fratelli Tutti, Francis observes that there continue to be people “who appear to feel encouraged or at least permitted by their faith to support varieties of narrow and violent nationalism, xenophobia and contempt, and even the mistreatment of those who are different” (86).
The Framing of Migration Narratives
Indeed, what the current Trump administration labels as “an invasion“—a term that frames migrant flows as a form of aggression against the United States, justifying the use of military force mainly at the Southern border with Mexico—is part of a longer-standing, historical trend in the movement of people. In her 2016 chapter “The Making of Migrations,” sociologist Saskia Sassen carefully details the various forces driving global migration patterns. Migration flows, she demonstrates, follow cross-border relationships established by various mechanisms, primarily colonial, economic, and military. Sassen describes the significant impact on migration flows of U.S. foreign policy and economic activity from the 1950s–80s thusly: “This central military, political, and economic role contributed both to the creation of conditions that mobilized people into migrations, whether local or international, and to the formation of links with the United States that subsequently were to serve as unintended bridges for international migration.” (13) Migration streams do not represent an invasion. More often than not they follow extractivist and interventionist policies that connect geographies across international borders. An immediately recent example of this phenomenon is the flow of Haitian and Afghan asylum seekers and refugees into the U.S., flows that directly develop from the U.S.’s military activity in these countries, especially the war on terror after September 11, 2001. Rather than speaking about immigrants as bands of aggressors in a cross-border feud, language about migration patterns ought to acknowledge the heavy footprint left behind by the extractivist imperial, colonial, and military presence of the United States across the globe. As Pope Francis suggests in Fratelli Tutti, our governmental policies and processes must exhibit some sense of memory, “Nowadays, it is easy to be tempted to turn the page, to say that all these things happened long ago and we should look to the future. For God’s sake, no! We can never move forward without remembering the past; we do not progress without an honest and unclouded memory” (249).
“Angels Unawares” by Canadian sculptor Timothy Paul Schmalz was installed on Piazza San Pietro in Vatican City in 2019. It is based on Hebrews 13:2: “Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for thereby some have entertained angels unawares.” Image via Flickr user David Stanley. CC BY 2.0.
The language of “invasion,” an expedient and dangerous term, is not unique in its demonization of foreign, specifically Brown and Black persons. The detention and deportation industrial complex serves the U.S.’s historical urge to control and contain Black and Brown persons. Architectures of hate construct holding spaces for humans considered criminal by virtue of their skin color or citizenship status. The prison and detention industrial complex has ensured that one in three black men born before 2001, and one in five born since, will experience incarceration of some kind in their lifetime. The captivity of black and brown persons in the U.S. is part of an egregious economic network in which private companies charge billions of dollars yearly to the U.S. government for holding Black and Brown persons who often perform free labor. This network generates even more revenue by fleecing prisoners, detainees, and their families in their attempt to meet basic human needs, for example to maintain hygiene by obtaining toiletries and communicate with the outside world on the phone. Due to Trump’s mass deportation policy, the U.S. is now in the business of also establishing private detention facilities in places such as Panama and Costa Rica, as well as utilizing detention facilities in Guantánamo. To the already inhumane treatment of migrants that includes family separation, a beyond sluggish immigration court system, the processing of minors without representation, we now add deportation to third countries and indefinite detention therein. Imprisoning people in this way adds to the inhumanity because it puts many deportees not from these regions in foreign locations with no knowledge about their prospects or their final destination, amounting to another form of human trafficking. Of significant concern is the trafficking of deportees to El Salvador to be housed in the country’s recently built mega-prison. The Salvadoran prison system is already under severe scrutiny for safety violations, lack of due process, and placing minors in harm’s way. It is not fit for housing deportees.
Aquinas on Christian Love – “It’s complicated”
No reading of Christian love can ever make it acceptable to deport persons with full dignity and worth to be detained in mega-prisons in El Salvador or private detention encampments in Panama, or in a base in Guatánamo. Aquinas scholar Frederick Bauerschmidt and attorney Maureen Sweeney state that for Aquinas the dire need of a stranger can in fact make a moral claim on us that surpasses our responsibility to those closest to us. “The ordo amoris does not mean that proximity always trumps urgent need,” they declare. “Rather, prudent people must be allowed to make judgments in complex situations” (ST, II-II, Q.31, a.3, ad.1). Vance misses the mark on the order of Christian love in Aquinas on two fronts. First, how we negotiate our care of others in urgent need, in complex situations, and with limited resources is very much a matter of prudence, that is, we are meant to evaluate facts about the conditions of need and our capacity for compassionate responses against various categories and responsibilities. Catholic social teaching has sought to infuse prudence into considerations of the care of migrants by prioritizing the principle of human dignity above the rights of borders in its 130-year tradition. At the heart of this tradition is the overwhelming prioritization given to the welfare of migrants and the stranger in the Bible. Second, Aquinas’s treatment of virtues such as justice, prudence, and love in the Summa sits between Aquinas’s exposition on the nature of God and Creation on one end, and his exposition on the Incarnation and the Sacraments as signs of God’s unbounded, expansive, and redeeming love, on the other. The measure of Christian love is not a set of boundaries around specific kinds of people, but, rather, the gift of God’s crossing all boundaries through the Incarnation.
Contrary to being a formula for how to clinically calculate what we owe others most connected to us, Aquinas’s ordo amoris is an invitation to prudently discern how to imitate God’s love in a fractured and hurting world. As Shadle suggests, for Pope Francis, “our concern for migrants and refugees is a manifestation of the preferential option for the poor and vulnerable.” This, too, requires careful consideration of the concrete needs of vulnerable persons in our midst, all equally endowed with dignity and infinite worth. Prudence in this case ought to energize our political imagination, challenging it to consider the costs—financial, but also moral and spiritual—of militarizing borders, detentions, and deportations, against the costs of investing in the gift of the newcomer, in housing initiatives, in fast-track asylum processes, and other ways of extending political love to migrants, as Francis suggests we do in Fratelli Tutti. The ordo amoris does not free us from the moral claims that deported migrants stranded in a hotel-turned-detention center in Panama, for example, make on us via the grounds of Christian love. In fact, it binds us to them. No weaponization of Christian love for a political agenda can free us from this responsibility. In Christian love there is, in fact, as St. Augustine had declared, “no one in the whole human family to whom we do not owe love…” Unbounded.
MT Dávila is a Roman Catholic laywoman. She is Associate Professor of Religious and Theological Studies at Merrimack College. Along with Agnes Brazal, she is co-editor of the volume Living With(out) Borders: Catholic Theological Ethics and the Migrations of Peoples (Orbis Books, 2016). Her research and publications focus on racial and migrant justice, political theology, liberation theology and ethics, Catholic social teaching, and ethics of the use of force.
Image from 2008 protest at celebrations of 60th anniversary of Isarel’s founding. Via Flickr User Hossam el-Hamalawy. CC BY 2.0.
The Heritage Foundation provoked widespread outrage with the publication of their Project 2025, a policy agenda that targets immigrants and trans people, attacks abortion access, proposes to erode voting rights, censors curricula, and prohibits protest and free speech. Less public attention has been given, however, to the Heritage Foundation’s additional document titled “Project Esther.” The document outlines a strategy for dismantling the Palestine solidarity movement in the United States by deploying false claims of antisemitism and terrorism against the movement. It lays out a sweeping program of surveillance, propaganda, deportation, and criminalization. We can only imagine that after deploying these right-wing tactics on defenders of Palestinian liberation, they will target other movements of social justice with similar campaigns of violence, and the Trump administration appears to be manifesting this extremist vision now.
Project Esther appropriates the story of Queen Esther, the Jewish heroine who saved the Jewish people from extermination; Jews commemorate her story during the spring holiday of Purim. While the Heritage Foundation calls Project Esther their “National Strategy to Combat Antisemitism,” their program does precisely the opposite. Rather than protecting Jews from antisemitism, Project Esther deploys antisemitic conspiracy theories mixed with the false claim of “defending” Jews as a smokescreen to attack the Palestinian liberation movement. While this movement is diverse, we know these attacks will be used to disproportionately target Palestinian, Muslim, and Arab people, non-citizens first among them, as well as organizations representing them. Project Esther aims at nothing less than the full-scale dismantling of the Palestine solidarity movement as a crucial ingredient of the racist anti-immigrant policies unleashed simultaneously, and it invokes the defense of the Jewish people as rhetorical human shields in order to do so.
In that, the Heritage Foundation is not alone. Rather, the appropriation of Esther is the next chapter of a genocidal vision that has historically manipulated this Biblical text in an effort to tie Christian Nationalists to Jewish Zionists.
Jewish settlers in the occupied West Bank have long exploited Purim to escalate violence against their Palestinian neighbors, from Baruch Goldstein’s 1994 Ibrahimi mosque massacre up to the Huwara pogrom in 2023. Jewish terrorists have reactivated exterminationist interpretations of the Book of Esther in an effort to provide religious justifications for their genocidal ideologies. It would thus be too simplistic to say “This is not Judaism.” Whether in Palestine or the United States, the far right projects fanatical religious interpretations of Esther onto Palestinians and their allies, and translates them into political projects of ethnic cleansing, expulsions, political repression, and terror in real-time. Project Esther uncovers the international entanglements and global proportions of how fascistic forces use what they call “antisemitism” for the advancement of their own antisemitic agendas.
Rather than protecting Jews from antisemitism, Project Esther deploys antisemitic conspiracy theories mixed with the false claim of ‘defending’ Jews as a smokescreen to attack the Palestinian liberation movement.
Christian Nationalists also have a long history of appropriating the figure of Esther as an ideal of womanhood, a woman who both engages in political action while remaining, in their interpretations, subservient to male authority around her. Diana Hagee—wife of notorious antisemite and founder of Christians United for Israel, Pastor John Hagee—taught teenagers to view Esther as a “bride of Christ who prepared her body and soul for total submission.” More recently, the phrase “for such a time as this,” drawn (and from Jewish perspective, decontextualized) from Esther 4:14, has become a shibboleth for Christian Nationalist calls for “spiritual warfare,” including calls to violence. Much like the report itself, the invocation of Esther in the report’s title seeks to smuggle in far-right Christian Nationalism under the guise of Jewish safety.
Resisting these apocalyptic misuses of Judaism for settler violence, anti-Zionist Jews in the United States have joined Palestinian-led coalitions to spend the past 16 months organizing our communities to recognize and resist a genocide unfolding before our eyes. Throughout this time, powerful constituencies have repeated the bald lie that this genocide in Gaza was an operation enacted to ensure Jewish safety. From Benjamin Netanyahu, Bezalel Smotrich, and Itamar Ben-Gvir to US entities, including institutions claiming to represent American Jews and university administrations, we have heard “Jewish safety” invoked in the service of committing genocide, while those speaking against genocide have been slandered as antisemites. As writer, attorney, and analyst Dylan Saba has pointed out, the Heritage Foundation’s Project Esther simply promises the increased use of defamation, criminalization, and deportation to dismantle the Palestine solidarity movement.
As Jews, we denounce Project Esther’s manipulation of our community’s experiences of oppression and our cultural identity for a racist, anti-Palestinian project that seeks to shore up the US-Israel alliance. We write now to reclaim our heritage and biblical traditions from Christian nationalists who invoke Jewish protection only to advance a White supremacist, misogynist, imperial, and anti-LGBTQIA+ agenda that further endangers Jewish peoples in the U.S. and abroad. In disingenuously speaking for Jews, the Heritage Foundation attempts to deny Jewish agency, and to install Christian Nationalists as the proper arbiters of the Jewish past and our Jewish present. The Heritage Foundation undermines Jewish voices by acting as if Jews cannot advocate for ourselves or that we speak with a single voice. It wrongly positions itself as the authority on Jewish identity, safety, and vulnerability. Moreover, it claims Jews must be separated from others for our protection, when this isolation actually serves their own agenda. While they explicitly state that they seek Jewish partners to assist in achieving their political goals of repressing dissent and mandating allegiance to Zionism and US patriotism, no collaboration with Jewish people or Jewish institutions can hide the basic White nationalism, Christian fundamentalism, and antisemitism that are the well-known provenance of the Heritage Foundation.
Against Project Esther’s efforts to marginalize and silence anti-Zionists, we insist on our presence and our voices. We insist that Jewish people in our diversity and heterogeneity, not Christian Nationalists, determine Jewish belonging and interpret how our histories of displacement, threat, and violence inflect our lived experiences and principles in this moment. And we insist that the Heritage Foundation and other far-right groups (including those self-identified as Jewish) represent the real threat to Jewish liberation and human rights writ large. Ours is a liberatory struggle that takes shape in combination and in concert with overlapping movements against White supremacy, settler colonialism, and fascism.
We begin this statement, collectively written by the Academic Council of Jewish Voice for Peace, with our objection to the Heritage Foundation—a Christian Nationalist organization—deciding what is best for the Jewish people and what constitutes antisemitism, especially when the definition they offer equates anti-Zionism with antisemitism. We note with alarm that the Heritage Foundation’s proposal manifests, for example, in Donald Trump’s executive order 13899, signed on January 30, 2025, with the Orwellian title “Additional Measures to Combat Antisemitism.” This executive order is already being used to criminalize not only protests in solidarity with Palestine, but even simple displays of Palestinian culture, like a flag or a keffiyeh. The Department of Justice’s sweeping “investigations” into alleged antisemitism on college campuses and the aggressive efforts to deport Mahmoud Khalil in retaliation for his political activism demonstrate how Project Esther’s blueprint for suppression is already being implemented through governmental mechanisms of surveillance and punishment. This is the eliminationist agenda of Project Esther at work, one that invokes “Jewish safety” in an effort to banish the very existence of Palestinians and Palestinian culture from the public sphere.
Our analysis exposes the Heritage Foundation’s deceptive claim to “combat” antisemitism, while emphasizing the antisemitism inherent in Christian Zionism: Project Esther repeats and fortifies antisemitic tropes which are simply transferred from Jews to the Palestine solidarity movement. The very notion of a “Hamas Support Network,” a term the authors of the document have contrived to vilify us, redeploys an antisemitic conspiracy theory whereby a hidden cabal is purported to secretly control political opposition and social justice movements; it is also a falsehood, presuming as it does that all struggles for the Palestinian people are lined up behind Hamas. Their rhetoric refuses to honor the complexity of the movement for Palestinian freedom and constitutes a slur against all those who are exercising constitutional rights of freedom, affiliation, and expression. Ominously, Project Esther proposes the criminalization and deportation of protestors, abridging rights and principles fundamental to the Constitution. It also recommends the targeting and possible firing of faculty who express viewpoints in support of Palestine. This constitutes an attack on institutions of learning, particularly higher education. Project Esther proposes a surveillance and repression of curricula, media, and non-profit organizations for any mention of “Hamas support”—its code for support for Palestinian liberation.
In disingenuously speaking for Jews, the Heritage Foundation attempts to deny Jewish agency, and to install Christian Nationalists as the proper arbiters of the Jewish past and our Jewish present.
State repression has been directed against Palestinian people and their political allies for some time. But Project Esther differs from the uneven patchwork of campus crackdowns, deportations, and visa denials in decades past. The legal architecture proposed by Project Esther would be partially executed under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) against protesters in the Palestine solidarity movement. This act was created in 1970 to combat organized crime and convict mafia bosses. It has been used historically against leftist groups, and was used recently to bring false money laundering charges against “Stop Cop City” protesters in Atlanta, Georgia. Further, in November 2024, the US House of Representatives passed the “Stop Terror-Financing and Tax Penalties on American Hostages Act,” also known as the “Non-Profit Killer Bill,” which promises to revoke the tax-exempt status of any organization that provides “material support” to terrorism. While the bill did not become law in the 118th Congress (2023–25), we expect that it and similar bills seeking to criminalize the Palestine solidarity movement will return under the current Congress. If all support for Palestine is now branded as support for Hamas, and Hamas is considered a terrorist organization, then it follows that any and all support for Palestine could be prosecuted under this proposed implementation.
The charge of “support” for Palestine remains overbroad and vaguely defined. We have already seen the grave consequences of this logic play out across institutions of higher education. Students are being disciplined for holding silent study-ins in their campus libraries. Professors are being banned from their own classrooms and having their syllabi interrogated by administrators because of their participation in nonviolent protests. Some have even been fired for sharing the words of Palestinian poets on their personal social media pages. Minor infractions like unauthorized postering or protests are being met with expulsion and even felony charges. And schools are being investigated for allowing students to wear keffiyeh and Palestinian flags on their graduation regalia. Should Project Esther’s vision come to pass, any educational support, demonstrations, or even expressions of Palestinian identity could be construed as support for “terrorism” and punishable.
We conclude this post by noting that Project Esther misunderstands the history of Esther, whose legacy we reclaim for the living Jewish tradition of anti-Zionism. We join in a rich tradition of Jews who interpret the story as a feminist tale from which we can glean ethical precepts: rejecting demonization, opposing genocide, and standing for principles of equality among peoples.
Project Esther: A Christian Nationalist Project
Project Esther purports to be a document about ensuring Jewish safety. Despite this, few Jews were consulted in the drafting of this document. The project’s co-chairs—Pastor Mario Bramnick and Luke Moon—are self-identified Christian Nationalists whose support for Israel stems from their belief that Jewish presence in the Holy Land will precipitate the End Times. Historically, this merger of philosemitism (the professed love or admiration for Jews) and antisemitism has undermined Jewish belonging in America, as our exile to Israel is viewed as necessary for the Second Coming of Christ.
While Bramnick and Moon included participants from a handful of smaller, far-right Jewish organizations in Project Esther, they excluded larger Jewish organizations—even those on the right with strong ideological overlap with the Heritage Foundation. This exclusion is evident in both the document’s language and policy recommendations, which reflect a broad Christian Nationalist framing rather than concerns emerging from American Jewish communities.
We note with particular alarm how the embrace of Project Esther and broader claims of supporting Israel are actively being used to shield Trump’s appointment of multiple White supremacists, Christian Nationalists, and avowed antisemites in the highest offices of the land. To give just a few examples: Darren Beattie, a frequent speaker at White supremacist events, has been nominated as undersecretary of state; Trump’s FBI Director, Kash Patel, has repeatedly appeared on Holocaust denier podcasts; Trump’s Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, is on record declaring “We want our nation to be a Christian nation”; Trump has appointed Sebastian Gorka, who has been linked with Hungarian Nazi organizations, as senior director for counterterrorism; and Elon Musk infamously gave the Nazi salute twice while standing in front of the Seal of the President of the United States during Trump’s inauguration. Project Esther provides cover for these White supremacists and Christian Nationalists to advance their own antisemitic and Islamophobic agendas.
Project Esther and the Architecture of Repression
The Project Esther document begins with the accusation that the entire pro-Palestine movement is composed of direct supporters of Hamas and are therefore terrorists and should be treated as such. As they write: “The virulently anti-Israel, anti-Zionist, and anti-American groups comprising the so-called pro-Palestinian movement […] are part of a highly organized, global Hamas Support Network (HSN) and therefore effectively a terrorist support network.” The document declares this mission from the outset: “to dismantle the infrastructure that sustains the HSN and associated movements’ antisemitic violence inside the United States of America within 12 to 24 months.” Their goal is specifically to dismantle movement infrastructure on this accelerated timeline. In order to do this, the Heritage Foundation proposes assembling a broad coalition of actors and organizations across government, civil society, and academia to enact this campaign of political repression in every sector of American society. They intend to “exploit fissures” and “generate strategic dilemmas” so that pro-Palestine activists “feel extreme discomfort” and “capitulate to our pressure campaign.” They intend to pursue lawfare and political repression through “the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA); the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO); and counterterrorism, hate speech, and immigration laws.”
Gaza Solidarity Sukkah organized by Jewish Voice for Peace. Courtesy of Jewish Voice for Peace.
They declare that “an effective strategy and campaign focused on the HSN will level a decisive blow against both antisemitism and anti-Americanism.” While the report never defines anti-Americanism (and antisemitism is simply defined as any and all criticism of Israel or support for Palestinian survival), the implication throughout the document is clear that any strand of left-wing thought, any organizing against oppression or exploitation is, in true McCarthyite fashion, anti-American. Their intent is not only to limit pro-Palestine activism, but to use attacks on Palestine solidarity to also strike out at fields such as Critical Theory, Ethnic Studies, and Gender and Women’s Studies, university initiatives including but not limited to DEI, and movements like migrant justice and Black Lives Matter, all alleged to be elements of this “anti-American ideology.” The slippage between focusing on the Palestine movement and general “anti-Americanism” is one of the many indications in this document that the repression formula they develop here will eventually find its way to targeting all movements for social justice.
They articulate a set of 11 “desired end states” (ES), each more harrowing than the last. We highlight just a few here: Their number one priority (ES1) takes aim at the U.S. education system, specifically at universities. Coming on the heels of several years of attacks on so-called “Critical Race Theory,” the Heritage Foundation sees academia as a primary target. ES3 attempts to block “access to U.S. open society”; elsewhere in the document, the following rights are described as characteristics of US open society: the freedom of assembly, first amendment rights of political affiliation, the right to free movement, and an open press. By attempting to block access to these fundamental political rights, the Heritage Foundation is specifically laying out a blueprint for complete political repression. They also hope that pro-Palestine organizations will lose access to the US economy (ES4) and to any form of political representation (ES5), no matter how paltry. They then call for the US Executive Branch to adopt a strategy to pursue “legal and criminal prosecutions” (ES6) with the goal of activists’ communications being disrupted (ES7) and therefore being “unable to conduct or sustain demonstrations and protests” (ES8).
The document lays out 19 “desired effects” (DEs). The first five all concern universities: “purging” pro-Palestinian “propaganda” from curricula (DE1), getting all anti-Zionist faculty and staff “removed or fired” (DE2), removing all access of pro-Palestinian organizations to all campuses (DE3), removing access of “foreign” members of these organizations from campuses (DE4), and limiting the donations to schools from organizations with ties to Palestine (DE5). Off campus the desired outcomes include collecting and presenting evidence of the Palestine movement’s “criminal activity” (DE9), being kicked off of all social media (DE10), the loss of any means of public communication (DE11), as well as the loss of internal communications (DE12). They foresee that this will result in the inability of the movement to coordinate actions (DE13), that permits for demonstrations will be denied (DE14), and hence that people will not join them (DE15). We have already seen these aspirations shape the current administration’s thinking, with Executive Order 13899 threatening everything, from the withholding of funds to universities that tolerate pro-Palestine activism, to threats of criminal prosecution against the movement, to efforts to deport non-citizens who engage in dissent.
The document lays out 28 necessary conditions (NCs) to achieve these outcomes: discrediting Palestinian liberation both off-campus (NC1) and on-campus (NC2); requiring that all curricula provide a “both sides” approach (NC3); undermining the credibility of pro-Palestine faculty and staff (NC4) so their employment is terminated (NC5); declaring all Palestine organizing in violation of campus principles (NC6) leading to such organizations loss of campus affiliations (NC7); finding foreign students and faculty in violation of their visas (NC8 and 9) leading them to either leave the US (NC10) or get deported (NC11); and targeting their ability to use social media (NC 20, 21, 22). Their goal is to undermine trust among the organizations in the movement (NC23), and this is a crucial piece of the strategy.
Even before Trump’s inauguration, too many universities have already adopted this agenda, firing faculty for extramural speech, interfering in their syllabi, and banning organizations like Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace. These are fundamental violations of academic freedom and basic Constitutional Rights. We call on universities to recognize the threat posed by Project Esther and Project 2025 and take concrete action.
Not In Our Name
The equation of Zionism and Judaism is always a heinous act of political erasure of the complexity and history of Judaism and of diverse Jewish perspectives on Zionism and Israel, but it is especially egregious coming from the Heritage Foundation, a notoriously Christian Zionist organization. The Heritage Foundation is attempting to give itself the authority to determine who is authentically Jewish and who—by embracing the Jewish traditions of tzedek (justice), tikkun olam (repairing the world), and social activism in supporting freedom and justice in Palestine, has “abandoned” their ties to Judaism. As Jewish anti-Zionists, we reject this narrow definition of Jewish people, and instead claim our place in the struggle for “a world where many worlds fit.” We believe that Jewish liberation must be a struggle waged alongside all racialized and colonized people across the globe, especially Palestinians. Constructing Israel as “the only safe place for Jews” suggests that other governments do not have an obligation to all their citizens to protect against discrimination–Jews among them. As critical scholars of Zionism have long surmised, the Zionist drive for the “ingathering of the exiles,” materialized in the Law of Return, is a strategy both for the colonization of Palestine and for Jewish assimilation into the global colonial order. The Heritage Foundation’s Project Esther directly subscribes to this vision.
In speaking back against this narrative, we cast our lot with Queen Esther—a woman who lived amongst other peoples, not apart from them, who stood for essential principles of cohabitation and equality.
We object to the Heritage Foundation’s production of this document and its effective adoption and implementation as state practice under the Trump regime. Likewise, we oppose any Jewish institutions that support this blatantly antisemitic form of Zionism. Despite its pretense to “combat antisemitism,” Project Esther never addresses antisemitism, nor the fundamental White supremacist ideologies upon which antisemitism rests. Instead, it weaponizes the notion of Jewish oppression—defined through a conflation of antisemitism and anti-Zionism—to promote a conspiracy theory about the grassroots Palestine solidarity movement. The Heritage Foundation claims that the “ideology and actions” of Jewish Voice for Peace, Students for Justice in Palestine, and American Muslims for Palestine—progressive grassroots organizations that oppose apartheid and genocide—“directly challenge and attempt to undermine the American values that are fundamental to our way of life, our nation’s success, and our future.” In characterizing our movement against colonial violence as a “terrorist” movement, the Heritage Foundation proposes to upend reality. It is the US-Israeli alliance, not grassroots human rights organizations advocating for an end to Israeli genocide, that are producing mass death in Gaza and across Palestine.
In the midst of the ongoing Israeli genocide in Gaza, which many have named the “first livestreamed genocide in human history,” the Israeli state claims to act on behalf of all Jews. From afar we witness daily acts of ethnic cleansing, as the Israeli army has killed dozens and even hundreds of Palestinian adults and children each day for more than a year. The Israeli state produces conditions of deprivation and misery so profound as to comprise a textbook example of the “destruction of a society” that Jewish scholar Raphael Lemkin coined the term genocide to name. Let us state what should appear obvious: this mass violence does not counter antisemitism at all; indeed it reanimates long-standing anti-Jewish sentiment and inspires new forms of antisemitic prejudice. Hiding behind the lie of “saving” Jews, Israeli violence continues and makes anew a history of settler genocide. Genocide does not and cannot make anyone safer. We are all made more unsafe in a world where the wholesale destruction of a people is rationalized. As Jews in particular, we denounce the attempt to commit genocide in the name of our safety. As Jews, we declare, “Not in our name!”
JVP Grand Central Station action. October 27, 2023. Courtesy of Jewish Voice for Peace.
In the wake of October 7th, 2023, a renewed “War on Terror” began, with the US-Israeli alliance galvanized for further efforts to control land and resources, starting with the most intense bombing campaign of the 21st century. This mass destruction relies on a cultural strategy of White supremacy, which uses a Christian notion of antisemitism to justify the fight against it and so to run cover for US-Israeli exceptionalism. Project Esther is a right-wing offensive meant to squelch people power and democratic speech rights in order to usher in ever-more authoritarian state power in which the state perpetually renews its weaponry. Despite its purported aim of addressing antisemitism, Project Esther instead reinforces harmful antisemitic ideologies while repackaging them in contemporary language. To understand this dynamic, it’s important to examine the historical context of antisemitism and how Project Esther perpetuates these patterns.
Project Esther’s methodology eerily mirrors the conspiracy theories it claims to combat. It constructs a narrative about a supposed network of Jewish funders orchestrating anti-Zionist organizations, baselessly linking these groups to Palestinian militant operations. This framework not only attempts to delegitimize criticism of Israeli policies but also dangerously resurrects antisemitic tropes about hidden Jewish influence, especially fiscal, and global conspiracy.
The term “antisemitism” emerged in late 19th-century Europe to describe the views of German nationalist thinkers who portrayed Jews as an alien presence fundamentally incompatible with European society. Rather than addressing the profound societal changes of the era—including the breakup of empires, the rise of nation-states, the decline of religious authorities, mass migration, and the impact of industrial capitalism—antisemitic ideologues scapegoated Jewish communities for these upheavals.
This narrative built upon centuries-old stereotypes of Jews as subversive forces within European Christian society. The widespread circulation of fraudulent documents like The Protocols of the Elders of Zion in the 1920s further promoted the false notion of a global Jewish conspiracy. These works portrayed Jews as an inassimilable threat to western civilization, encompassing supposed racial, economic, and cultural dangers.
Where the infamous late nineteenth-century “Protocols” fabricated an elaborate Jewish global conspiracy, Project Esther invents the equally fictional “Hamas Support Network” (HSN), already mentioned above. The document describes this purported network using language that echoes classical antisemitic stereotypes, speaking of “vast networks of activists and funders” pursuing “insidious” goals to undermine democracy and capitalism. Just as the “Protocols” depicted Jews as dedicated to the wholesale destruction of western civilization, Christianity, and capitalism, Project Esther portrays the equally fictional “HSN” as an existential threat to American values and way of life.
The document’s portrayal of the “HSN” as having penetrated and subverted major American institutions mirrors one of the most pernicious aspects of the “Protocols—the notion of hidden Jewish infiltration of society’s power centers. Where the “Protocols” claimed Jewish agents had secretly gained control of banking, media, and government to advance a global conspiracy, Project Esther similarly depicts “HSN” operatives as having covertly embedded themselves throughout Congress, universities, civil society organizations, and news outlets to promote an anti-Israel/anti-American agenda. This parallel extends beyond mere structure into rhetoric; both texts employ images of “infiltration,” “penetration,” and “subversion” to suggest that these supposed networks have compromised vital institutions from within. Just as the “Protocols” portrayed Jews as masters of deception who could appear outwardly respectable while secretly undermining society, Project Esther characterizes “HSN” members as skilled manipulators who have gained influential positions while concealing their true aims. This recycling of classic antisemitic tropes about shadowy infiltrators corrupting societal institutions is particularly troubling given how such conspiracy theories have historically been used to justify persecution against Jews. This structural similarity in conspiracy theorizing demonstrates how antisemitic frameworks can be repurposed, targeting non-Jewish “others” while maintaining their essential characteristics.
Project Esther continues this tradition of marginalization while presenting itself as a solution to antisemitism. Instead of addressing antisemitism as one form of bigotry among many, it promotes the same exceptional treatment of Jewish communities that characterized historical antisemitism. The project advocates for Jewish separation from broader society, now reframed as relocation to Israel, while defending Israel’s status as an ethno-nationalist state. This reveals the convergence and intersection of White Christian Nationalism and Christian Zionism, a movement that predated Jewish Zionism and has many more adherents. For example, Christians United for Israel (CUFI) has over 11 million members, a population greater than the entire Jewish population in the United States.
The project advances what could be termed a “double ethnic cleansing” agenda. First, it seeks to convince Jews that they are fundamentally unsafe in America, creating an atmosphere of fear designed to encourage their emigration to Israel. Second, it envisions an Israel without its indigenous Palestinian population, promoting a colonialist narrative that denies Palestinian rights and humanity. Both of these maneuvers attempt to incite Jewish people to fear, priming Jewish people to become subjects of militarized state-nationalism both in Israel and the US. Importantly, all of this once again assumes that all Jews have a historical link with European antisemitism. This homogenizing understanding of Jewishness discounts Sephardic, Mizrahi, Ethiopian,and Russian Jewish people, as well as their cultures and histories.
Instead of addressing antisemitism as one form of bigotry among many, Project Esther promotes the same exceptional treatment of Jewish communities that characterized historical antisemitism.
At its core, Project Esther represents continuity of a historic, strategic alliance between Christian Nationalists and Zionists who manipulate antisemitism for ideological purposes. By portraying diaspora Jews as perpetually endangered, these groups pressure Jewish communities to embrace an ethno-nationalist agenda that presents Israel as the only viable haven for Jewish survival. This narrative deliberately ignores the interconnected nature of various forms of oppression, including racism and Islamophobia, instead treating Jewish identity in isolation. It fails to see that no one form of racism can be fully overcome without overcoming all racisms. Indeed, Project Esther activates and thrives on Islamophobia and anti-Arab and anti-Muslim racism.
Equally troubling is the document’s homogenization of Jewish identity and experience. As Arab-Jewish scholars such as Ella Shohat have argued, the rich histories of non-European Jews have been elided through a Eurocentric framing that routes all forms of Jewish identity through European antisemitism. In this project “Zionist historiography” comes to “consist… of a morbidly selective ‘tracing the dots’ from pogrom to pogrom as evidence of relentless hostility toward Jews in the Arab world, reminiscent of that encountered in Europe” (6). Such erasures are deeply ahistorical; they also silence criticisms of the Israeli state’s racism and eugenic projects against its non-European Jewish subjects (See also Sahar Mandour and The Palestinian Feminist Collective). This Eurocentric homogenization of “the Jew” functions as a lynchpin of Israeli settler colonialism because, as Moshé Machover elucidates, this move consolidates a central feature of political Zionism: “that the totality of Jews the world over is a single national collectivity—a people (ethnos).” Put simply, without this homogenization, the grammar of the ethno-nationalist state would fall apart.
By presenting Jews as a monolithic entity with uniform interests and perspectives, Project Esther systematically denies the diversity of Jewish thought and practice—especially regarding Zionism and Palestine—and instead weaponizes concerns for Jewish safety in order to further its ideological agenda. This silences rich histories of Jewish resistance to Zionism, as well as histories of interwoven lives of Jews, including Mizrahi and Arab Jews, and their Muslim and Arab neighbors in the region, creating the mythology of an “eternal” Arab/Jewish conflict upon which Israeli aggression rests. This approach attempts to silence Jewish voices that dissent from its narrative, to gatekeep only that identity which serves specific political goals rather than the broader Jewish communities’ interests in living in a world dedicated to equality. This erasure not only marginalizes Jews who resist its narrow vision but also perpetuates a false dichotomy between Jewish identity and criticism of Zionist policies.
Perhaps most alarmingly, Project Esther’s emphasis on fabricated threats actively distracts us from real antisemitic violence and discrimination, which comes not from the movement for Palestinian freedom but from the very right-wing Christian Nationalist groups that are the driving force behind the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025. It was Christian Nationalists and White supremacists who, after all, marched on the University of Virginia campus on August 11th, 2017 chanting “blood and soil” and “Jews will not replace us” before killing Heather Heyer in a car attack, beating Black bystanders, and directing a mob to burn down the town’s only synagogue in downtown Charlottesville the next day. This deflection instrumentalizes concerns over Jewish safety by failing to address the true sources of antisemitism in contemporary society while redirecting attention away from actual threats facing Jewish communities. In 2017, as so often in US history, the threat of antisemitism converged with White supremacist nationalism, naming Jewish as well as Black and Brown communities as threats to the White nation.
Project Esther’s approach to interfaith relations is similarly problematic. While claiming to promote Jewish-Christian alliance, it actually reinforces traditional Christian supersessionist narratives that have historically contributed to antisemitism, and still do. A crucial example is the Evangelical Christian vision that holds an eschatological interpretation of the Bible and sees the Jewish colonization of Palestine as a stepping stone to expedite the second coming of Christ. Organizations such as CUFI are supported by openly homophobic, racist, and antisemitic political characters such as John Hagee, Nikki Haley, Ron DeSantis, and Mike Pence. Not surprisingly, the same people are also known for their anti-Arab and anti-Muslim racism. This dynamic reveals how the document’s supposed advocacy for Jewish interests is subordinated to broader ideological goals that actually works against Jewish and other communities’ interests and safety.
Ultimately, Project Esther exemplifies how antisemitic frameworks can persist and even thrive within ostensibly philosemitic or philo-Zionist discourse. Rather than genuinely combating antisemitism, it redirects and reconfigures antisemitic elements to serve right wing, ethno-nationalist, anti-democratic political ends. This underscores the urgent need for authentic approaches to addressing antisemitism—approaches that reject both the instrumentalization of Jewish identity and the perpetuation of exclusionary narratives.
The New Red Scare
Project Esther is not just an elevation of rhetoric nor an expressive document; it is a blueprint for a new Red Scare. We must remember that the Second Red Scare, sometimes inaccurately referred to as “McCarthyism” as it preceded and lived on far after the notorious Senator from Wisconsin, was, as historian Ellen Schrecker phrased it, “the most widespread and longest wave of political repression in U.S. history” (x). The Second Red Scare ramped up in earnest in the late 1940s and continued apace until the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) was politically and legally challenged by the New Left in the 1960s. In the decade plus of its existence, the Red Scare affected a vast cultural change in the U.S., turning socialism from perhaps a radical and subversive political position to one considered treasonous and dangerous. Through legal means much like the RICO Act and today’s “Non-Profit Killer Bill,” left wing labor unions, community organizations, academic organizations, anti-racist coalitions, and of course, communist organizations, were either disbanded or driven underground, with many thousands of their members serving jail time and/or deportation, to say nothing of the tens of thousands who lost their jobs and faced public harassment and violence. A vibrant, active, multi-tendency working class left was irrevocably shattered, leaving, as Joel Kovel put it, a “black hole” at the center of the American Century.
The legal architecture of the Second Red Scare consisted primarily of three laws: the Internal Security Act, the Alien Registration or Smith Act, and the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, or McCarran-Walter Act. These acts each linked speech and protest to criminal conspiracy. The Internal Security Act forced communist-aligned organizations to register and then, once registered, made it a felony to support a “dictatorship” in the U.S. The second and third laws similarly criminalized belief, allowing for the jailing and deportation of those who “advocated” the “overthrow of the United States government by force and violence.” In practice this meant that supporting communism, or even advocating for the reading of Marx, could land someone in jail or disband an organization for giving—as we would say now—“material support” for the overthrow of bourgeois rule. Needless to say, such persecutions were heavily racialized, with African American and Jewish leftists suffering the most.
Project Esther is not just an elevation of rhetoric nor an expressive document; it is a blueprint for a new Red Scare.
Project Esther makes similar rhetorical and legal moves. Stating that the “HSN” is “supported by activists and funders dedicated to destroying capitalism and democracy” and has the “support and training of America’s overseas enemies,” Project Esther threatens Jewish Voice for Peace and Students of Justice in Palestine with legal disbanding, defunding, and even criminalization of individuals and organizations engaged in dissent. That there is no evidence for such claims does not matter, nor did it matter that in the 20th century, the Communist Party, the Jewish People’s Fraternal Order, the Civil Rights Congress, the American Committee for the Protection of the Foreign Born, the Council on African Affairs, and countless other organizations were not plotting to overthrow the United States—they were all either banned or harassed into near or total collapse. As historian Rachel Ida-Buff phrased it, “The Palestine solidarity movement is the new Communist Party: the shadowy and ubiquitous internal enemy that justifies the broad and brutal repression of past and current McCarthyisms.”
This may not be remembered now, but the Left resisted the policies, such as it could, during the Second Red Scare. Noncompliance was a conscious strategy on the part of HUAC defendants. As noted socialist Albert Einstein wrote in 1953, “non cooperation” with HUAC was “revolutionary,” and the defendant should be “prepared for jail and economic ruin. . . . for the sacrifice of his personal welfare in the interest of the cultural welfare of the country.” If defendants complied with HUAC, Einstein followed, then they “deserve nothing better than the slavery which is intended for them.” Such resistance did not save many of the defendants, but left the spark for the New Left a generation later. Many of the members of both Students for a Democratic Society and the Black Panther Party, among an array of organizations of their era, made “anti-anti-communism” a central element in their resistance to the Cold War order. We must remember the actions of our Left forebears in resistance to such oppression, and stand in solidarity with other activists who likewise may be targeted.
Reclaiming Esther against Project Esther
For the past 400 years and more, European Christian men have produced an antisemitic, racist, and sexist image of Jewish women, known as the figure of the “Jewess” in modern literature. The paradigmatic Jewish heroines of the Torah have provided Christian-dominated European and US culture with their “stereotyped sex-object par excellence,” as Jewish feminist literary scholar Livia E. Bitton argues. Versions of Queen Esther, who won her place at the king’s side through triumph at a beauty contest that was refused by his previous wife, Vashti, have featured prominently in such antisemitic discourse. But, like so many women who survive the conflagrations of patriarchy, Esther’s knowledge and power grew over time, and she became a political and spiritual leader—and a fighter for collective Jewish survival—because of, and not in spite of, her skilled navigation of gendered and sexualized institutions.
Pietro Paolini, The Intercession of Esther with King Ahasuerus and Haman. Public Domain. Via Wikimedia Commons.
Alongside generations of Jewish feminists, we now lovingly reclaim the figure of the beguiling Jewish seductress, whose powers of beauty and sexuality contribute to her assumption of power. We know that we are not in Esther’s moment of potential annihilation of Jewish people, as the Heritage Foundation, like Netanyahu’s cabinet, and so many contemporary forces would have us believe. Such fear-mongering is quintessential to racist statecraft, and has embedded itself into the current war on terror logic that hinges on philosemitic lies about the “protection” of Jews, among others. Against this propaganda, we offer a different recognition. We know that many Jewish people are now faced with a different threat: the threat of alienation from Jewish community and belonging. We oppose traditional institutions that purport to speak for Jewish communities, but manipulate religious texts and principles to advance genocidal statecraft and colonial conquest. We refuse this corruption of our cultural and spiritual heritage, which makes our own institutions and sometimes even our own communities unrecognizable to us as Jews.
The Heritage Foundation has no entitlement to represent the protection or salvation of Jewish people, or any people. As we have demonstrated here, their attempt to vilify and shame anti-Zionists merely exposes the antisemitism at the heart of their nationalist will to dominance. Against this Christian Zionist attempt to hijack our own struggle against our experiences of prejudice and oppression so that they can secure state power, we proclaim: the Heritage Foundation has no Project Esther. Instead, we represent the living legacy of Esther. As Jewish anti-Zionists, we will fight for the survival of a different image and a different historical role for the Jewish people. Neither colonizers nor props for state violence and repression, we are proud, anti-Zionist Jews engaged in collective struggle for justice, peace, and the survival of a plural and interdependent humanity.
The opinions expressed in this post are solely those of the individual authors and do not represent the official opinions of the Contending Modernities research initiative, the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, the Keough School of Global Affairs, the University of Notre Dame, or their faculty and staff.
Ottoman miniature of Mukhayriq agreeing to fight with Muhammad. From Siyar-i nabī, by Mustafa Darir (ca. 1594–95). New York Public Library Digital Collections. CCO 1.0.
Islamic tradition portrays jinn as mysterious shapeshifters who can morph into different forms, usually invisible to the human eye. Constantly in motion, they are elusive, evading human capture. Like the mysterious jinn, knowledge possesses an uncanny ability to transform into something new and unexpected. As time passes and I look back at my study of Muslim difference, it takes on a new shape, barely recognizable from the form it first took when it entered my view two decades ago. More than an inert object of study, Muslim difference reminds me of its own agency, its capacity to evade definition despite my futile attempts to set limits and boundaries upon it. The brilliant contributions to this book symposium remind me that once any piece of scholarship enters the world it is transformed by those who read, engage, critique, and refashion it in new contexts—discursive, social, and historical. The responses take us on a thrilling tour across the heterotopic spaces of the madrasa, Sufi lodge, hospital, and clinic, revealing the varieties of Muslim difference, past and present.
Between Muslims
Although The Muslim Difference draws attention to the fragile line distinguishing Muslims from non-Muslims, all respondents, to some degree, reflect on the lines dividing Muslims from other Muslims. Martin Nguyen asks, “What can we say about the differences that divide our Muslim communities or those that divide our own selves?” Concerning the physical, psychic, and spiritual landscape of ‘afiya, Ashwak Hauter explores “how different traditions of Islam are expressed and negotiated between my interlocutors.” Anna Bigelow considers how adepts in the medieval Suhrawardi Sufi community grow spiritually through their social encounters with one another. Haroon Sidat reflects on how his postgraduate training in the secular academy transforms his relationship to the Muslim scholars and students at the British Deobandi madrasa in which he first studied Islam traditionally.
The respondents’ turn toward inter-Muslim difference is not as strange as it may first seem. In my book, I advocate for conceiving of Muslim difference not as a binary opposition to non-Muslims but as a continuum that also cuts across heterogeneous groups of Muslims—Sunnis and Shiʿis, men and women, Arabs and non-Arabs, free persons and slaves, young and old, human and jinn. By framing Muslim interreligious relations within a wider field of social and political associations beyond religious identity, we come to see that Muslims are not cut from the same cloth—that Muslim identity is relational and intersectional. All the responses, through their unique interpretive lenses, highlight the diversity and heterogeneity of Muslim lifeworlds.
The Gog and Magog Outside and Inside Us
The Qur’an (18:94) describes the monstrous figures of Gog and Magog as “spreaders of corruption on earth (mufsidun fi’l-ard).” They are so disruptive and dangerous that a mysterious hero, dubbed as Dhu’l-Qarnayn, “The Two-horned One,” builds a wall to divide Gog and Magog from humankind. But the Qur’an warns that this wall will one day fall. In the End Times, Gog and Magog will finally break through the wall and overwhelm their helpless victims, like water breaking through a dam and engulfing all who come in its way (Qur’an 21:96). The Bible likewise speaks of Gog and Magog in apocalyptic terms. Although it makes no mention of a wall, Revelations 20:7–10 warns that Gog and Magog will wreak havoc in the End Days, joining Satan in a final battle against humankind.
Drawing on a seventh-century apocalyptic composed in Syriac, Apocalypse of Pseudo-Methodius, both Muslim and Christian exegetes came to identify the figure who built the wall as Alexander the Great. Medieval mapmakers, Christian and Muslim, portrayed the foreign land where Gog and Magog resided as an actual physical place; it was a land of unbelief, danger and chaos, a place to be feared. Blurring the line between fantasy and reality, Christians and Muslims across time and place imagined a host of dangerous Others as monstrous embodiments of Gog and Magog: Christians saw Gog and Magog as Romans, Goths, Scythians, Sarmatians, Huns, and Mongols; Muslims saw them as Turks, Vikings, Portuguese, and the Dutch. As harbingers of danger and disorder, Gog and Magog helped materialize the boundary between self and other.
But Gog and Magog not only represent our deepest fears of the monsters that reside outside us; they also represent the monsters that reside inside us. Both Hauter and Nguyen provoke us to confront the alterity not merely outside us but within us. Nguyen asks, “What is disclosed when we seek to understand the fine line of difference within us all? What separates that which makes us human from that which makes us otherwise?” Nguyen explores these existential questions through a profound theological meditation on the “darker side of difference” that revisits human history’s first murder: the Biblical/Qur’anic story of Cain and Abel, which bears witness to the unleashing of Cain’s monstrous inhumanity. In Nguyen’s psychospiritual reading, “Cain represents an inner impulse focused solely upon the self—a self (nafs), the Qur’an warns elsewhere, that commands to evil” (Qur’an 12:53). Cain, in other words, lets loose the monster within, resulting in “violence-unto-death, the inhuman.” Abel, by contrast, retains his humanity. This polarity between human and inhuman, avers Nguyen, resides within us all. As I argue in my book, we are all difference-makers, drawing lines between who we are and who we are not. But we cannot allow these differences to transmutate into subjugation, violence, terror—lest we become monsters ourselves.
Hauter likewise exposes the alterity within. She turns away from the dark side, however, toward the potential light within. Drawing on her fieldwork on individual and collective ‘afiya in hospitals and clinics, she sees a believer’s focus on the nafs not as innately nefarious, but as potentially generative. The nafs, “self/soul,” is not static, but dynamic, oscillating. “The unknowability and oscillation of the soul imbues individuals with a radical otherness or alterity.” Far from being an exercise in monstrous self-absorption, Hauter sees “vitality and potentiality” in a person’s daily repertoire of ordinary practices that disclose how the self relates to the soul. “In the gap between self and soul and self and other,” she argues, “there is a field of possible exchange, recognition, and innovation.” In this way, difference, whether small or great, is not exclusively a pathway to subjugation of the other.
We are all difference-makers, drawing lines between who we are and who we are not. But we cannot allow these differences to transmutate into subjugation, violence, terror—lest we become monsters ourselves.
Both Hauter and Nguyen make compelling arguments. Both suggest, in different ways, that difference need not deteriorate into domination. How people attend to their nafs, and subjugate it to themselves, determines whether difference in its myriad forms will become a means to subjugate others. Those whose nafs overwhelms and consumes them, as it did Cain, may seek to dominate others. But those who vigilantly watch over and overwhelm the nafs until it is broken, as the Sunni theologian Ghazali urged, have no need to claim victory over others—for they have triumphed over themselves (Qur’an 23:1).
Technologies of Self-Cultivation
While Nguyen and Hauter draw attention to the possibilities and consequences of cultivating particular kinds of subjectivities, Bigelow and Sidat illustrate the essential but oft-neglected role of imitation in that process. Indeed, my book can be read as an extended commentary on the Prophet’s pithy but potent dictum, “Whoever imitates a people becomes one of them.” Whether read by Muslim thinkers as an admonition or encouraging homily, the hadith advances a universal truth about human becoming and belonging: people become who they are based on whom they emulate—and whom they don’t.
Anna Bigelow’s nostalgic, empathetic, and insightful reflection on the spiritual and social dynamics of emulation in the Suhrawardi Sufi community reminds us that people can learn from imperfection; people learn from their mistakes—and from the mistakes of others. Sufi adepts learn how to be better Sufis through their encounters with boorish Sufi novices who lack self-discipline and social etiquette (adab). They learn hownot to be. When Sufi adepts shun emulating the uncouth behaviors they witness in others, they not only distinguish themselves from them, they also spiritually grow The unexpected self-cultivation Sufi adepts gain from these social encounters transforms these boorish neophytes whom they look down upon into their teachers worthy of reverence and love. After all, these novices help them progress on the spiritual path and realize the fullness of their human potential. In this sense, all social encounters are teaching moments that lead to the Sufi adept’s spiritual transformation.
Between Academia and Alimiyya
Sidat also underscores the power of imitation to shape Muslim being, becoming, and belonging. He wonders if his liminal position in the barzakh between academia and alimiyya can become a productive space that bridges different epistemes and builds new ones. Alimiyya refers to the curriculum of the traditional madrasa that produces ulama (sing. alim), religious scholars who become custodians of the Islamic discursive tradition. This is not purely an intellectual role. They are expected to live what they learn, embodying what they know in their everyday conduct. As a result, they become spiritual exemplars, communal leaders who inspire ordinary believers to become better. Sidat refers to this socio-spiritual role of the Muslim religious scholar as imitatio imam (imitation of the imam). These scholars model Prophetic behavior, Sidat tells us, by being imitators of the malakut, the angelic or imaginal realm that cannot be apprehended by the physical eye. Imitation thus becomes a chain linking ordinary believers to scholars and scholars to angels across the realms of the visible (mulk) and invisible (malakut). Imitation, in other words, leads to collective solidarity across the cosmos.
Muslims, Mimesis, Modernity
In response to the encounter with colonial modernity, Muslim thinkers across the Muslim world—South and Southeast Asia, North and West Africa, the Levant, Arabia, and Europe—composed Islamic treatises warning ordinary believers against becoming Muslim mimics estranged from their tradition and themselves. While neither uniform nor universal in content, the global spread of these discourses during the 18th–20thcenturies speaks to the collective trauma experienced by Muslims under colonial rule.
Imitation thus becomes a chain linking ordinary believers to scholars and scholars to angels across the realms of the visible (mulk) and invisible (malakut). Imitation, in other words, leads to collective solidarity across the cosmos.
Many of these treatises were borne of violent political upheaval, from the Spanish-Moroccan War and civil strife in Nigeria to the British colonization of India and the creation of a secular republic in Turkey. Iskilipli Aṭĭf Hoca (d. 1926), was executed by the newly formed Turkish Republic for composing a treatise forbidding European style hats on the pretext that it undermined a state law banning the tarbush. In this new social imaginary, to reject a European way of life was to reject civilization itself.
Although built on a premodern Islamic discursive tradition, the shape of these modern Islamic discourses against imitation were different; they displayed Muslim anxieties over aping the west in everything from wearing brimmed hats and bowties to celebrating Valentine’s Day and Christmas. The Prophet’s mantra against imitation transformed into a slogan of anti-colonial and anti-western resistance. In fact, Muslim adoration of all things European became so pervasive that Iranian intellectual, Jalal Al-e Ahmad (d. 1969), dubbed it a plague, gharbzadegi, translated variously from Persian as Westoxification or Occidentosis.
Nevertheless, it was, and is, an Islamic discourse that assumed a religiously plural public space where Muslim encounters with Christians, Jews, Hindus, Zoroastrians, and others were possible. It is propelled by the conviction that social encounters with Others are potentially transformative, that mimesis, conscious and unconscious, is normal but dangerous.
So what does the present and future of Muslim mimesis look like? Well, one thing is for certain: it won’t look the same everywhere. In the epilogue of my book, I offer a preliminary sketch of how to reread the Prophet’s dictum on imitation beyond confessional lines—as an exhortation to emulate what is best in others regardless of belief and to be mindful of the divine breath that inheres in all humans. To be clear, this reading is an attempt to expand the contours of Muslim difference, not to erase it. Whether or not my audience finds my rereading of tradition persuasive, I hope that the genealogy of Muslim difference presented in my book will help scholars and laypeople think more clearly and critically about a politically loaded, misunderstood, and poorly theorized subject.
The shape and style of Muslim difference continues to matter. Today, it is common to hear peacemakers and politicians make anodyne public appeals to “overcome our differences.” That is, they portray difference as an obstacle to solidarity—that conflict, even violence, is the inevitable outcome of difference. But if we listen to Muslim thinkers across time and place, as I urge readers of my book to do, we learn that being different can be a very good thing. Today, a call to Muslim difference is not a call to reject modernity or to reject the west. It is not a call to despise the Other. It is, I believe, a call for Muslims to shape and style their own modernity, a modernity that is almost the same but not quite.
Youshaa Patel’s scholarship explores how Islam has shaped—and been shaped—by Muslim interfaith encounters in the Middle East and beyond. He is author of The Muslim Difference: Defining the Line between Believers and Unbelievers from Early Islam to the Present(Yale University Press, 2022), which was named a finalist for two American Academy of Religion book awards: “Best First Book in the History of Religions” and “Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion, Textual Studies.” His work has been supported by grants from Mellon, Fulbright, and the American Institute of Yemeni Studies, and includes extended research stays in India, Qatar, Yemen, Jordan, and Syria. Most recently, Professor Patel was the Abdul Aziz Al-Mutawa visiting fellow at the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies, an independent center of the University of Oxford.
Youshaa Patel’s book, The Muslim Difference, explores the Islamic discourse on reprehensible imitation (tashabbuh) that seeks to distinguish Muslims from others in the public space. In this piece, I want to use his insights to think about the positive valence of imitation, the moral meanings it expresses, and how it facilitated my own research at a madrasa in Britain.
Transcending Life-Worlds
Often the rhetoric filling our airwaves is about scapegoating anyone who is different, whether they are Muslim or otherwise. This rhetoric is divisive and guided by an Othering logic. This is not new. When 9/11 happened, I was a student at a madrasa in Great Britain. Buried in books, I was completing a six-year intensive classical curriculum and had very little time for anything in the outside world. Yet I recall how Muslims were portrayed as the Other, vilified and demonized. I was raised under the long shadow of America’s War on Terror that followed 9/11. It was this darkness that inspired me to undertake the first-ever ethnographic study of the modern madrasa, a dar al-uloom in Britain. Scholars had written about how madrasa students were among those Muslims who were most vilified in the western mainstream media and about the lifeworld of Muslim religious scholars (ulama) in the context of South Asia. But I wanted to speak to this misunderstanding of madrasas and Islam in a different context that broadens our understanding of the roles of madrasas in the Muslim community. The Madrasas are at the heart of serving and responding to the needs of the Muslim communities in Britain.
There were challenges to conducting this research. It would be wrong to assume that just because I graduated from a madrasa, I would be welcomed back with open arms to undertake research. I was worried that I would be perceived as a foreign “virus.” Viruses carry genetic information that invades healthy cells, or hosts. Having entered the secular academy to pursue Islamic Studies, would those in the madrasas think that I had become a virus that could infect my hosts with foreign ways of thinking and being? A madrasa graduate-turned-academic, Ebrahim Moosa highlights the general mistrust of the academy and antipathy towards modern secular education, which leads to graduates being stigmatized and marginalized. Although my identity as an academic at a secular liberal university had the potential to “Other” me as an invading virus, it is important to note that viruses also play an important role in breaking and restructuring cells in more productive ways. In Sufi thought, the term barzakh can denote a place between Paradise and Hell, whereas, in the Arabic lexicon, it is defined as a “barrier” between two things. My positionality as ‘alim and academic is like being between two worlds. Could my liminal position give birth to new ways of engaging in epistemic inquiry and sociality?
I want to answer this question by reflecting on how my role as an imam—that is, as a prayer and community leader at a mosque—at the time of my research, and my imitation of other imams and the ethical and social meanings it radiates, granted me access to my research subjects. This experience speaks to the broader question of living with Muslim difference under conditions of modernity, and this is where Patel’s book is also particularly insightful. Second, given my positionality, I want to place academic writing on Islam in conversation with traditional Islamic scholarship, which is part of a larger project on which I am currently working. This attempt speaks to the need to bring together different epistemes in order to produce fruitful harmony.
Imitatio Imam
Many of the senior teachers at the dar al-uloom were also imams at mosques. In a sense, I was imitating them in the way I approached my work. Imitation is a powerful social technology of becoming and belonging, which has received attention in recent academic scholarship on Islam. Patel’s pioneering book on imitation in premodern Muslim intellectual thought is based on the politically charged hadith: “Whoever imitates a people becomes one of them.” This hadith forms part of a tradition that has often been used to “other” non-Muslims. Recently, SherAli Tareen has explored a similar theme to show how the discourse on imitation has shaped Hindu-Muslim friendship under colonial modernity. The key Arabic term for imitation, tashabbuh, usually carries a negative valence. Yet, as Patel demonstrates, imitation can also be productive. For example, the hadith above can be deployed by Muslims to “expand the social boundaries of their spiritual communities,” (144) and it is this positive valence of imitation on which I want to reflect.
Across Islamic history, some Muslim scholars have drawn attention to the positive, transformative potential of imitation. In precolonial India, the polymath theologian, philosopher, and religious scholar Shah Wali Allah (d.1762) articulated the inner meanings of the Divine law when he wrote that fasting is “like imitating the angelic realm” (ka-tashabbuh bi al-malakut). Before him, Ibn ‘Arabi (d.1240) envisioned fasting as a way to imitate God’s self-sufficiency. For such thinkers, external acts express ethical meanings. This synthesis of ritual and law, ethics and mysticism, is embodied by many of my teachers, who are both Sufi masters and jurists (fuqaha). For them, the imam is the embodiment of the highest ethical virtues, something that classical Islamic legal manuals also emphasize. Shah Wali Allah argues that the imam is the preeminent object of ethical imitation for his congregationYet this congregational prayer led by the imam also symbolizes the transcendence of difference, with social inclusion where “hermaphrodites,” for example, are given a space to pray. As a scholar of Islamic law, reading Patel’s work alerted me to how this ritual act, though an individual obligation to God, emphasizes both a horizontal form of inclusion and an ethical philosophy. The opposite of this is both harmful and inauthentic to the Islamic tradition. As he states:
It is incumbent upon Muslims to acknowledge the moral damage that exclusivist religious discourses may inflict upon others in order to apply the Prophet’s universal ethical teaching: “Do not harm nor reciprocate harm” (219).
Alongside being an “imitatio imam,” I maintained a sociality of companionship (suhba) with my teachers. No human is an island. The tradition in which I was trained requires one to fully embody Prophetic guidance by imitating others in order to intuit wisdom. Just like pages are bound to books to produce a coherent narrative, bodies, placed together, generate wisdom and moderation. What our project on researching imams in Britain demonstrated, and what madrasas expect their graduates to embody is a selfless service (khidma) to society. This is important, Cyrus Zargar notes, “since a virtue-based society will be led and populated by those who have also perfected their own characters” (9). Imams ought to be the most visible embodiment of this vision. It was this imitation of fellow imams and the ethical meaning it embodied, I argue, that inscribed itself on my identity while researching a madrasa. I think my experience at the dar al-uloom speaks to a broader conversation about how the Sharia, as a socially based moral system of values, can play a productive role in engaging and living with the other in modernity where morality is an afterthought. The Sharia, on the other hand, is infused with moral and spiritual concerns.
A Morally Infused Theocentric Worldview
Mosque in Msheireb, Doha. Image via Flickr User Omar Chatriwala. CC BY-NC-ND 2.
As Wael B. Hallaq reminds us, even the so-called “ritualistic” parts of faith are deeply imbued with a synthesis of morality, law, theology, mysticism, and philosophy but also an anthropological foray into Muslim subjectivity all of which engenders a paradigm that is intellectual, social-communal, and psychological. The Prophet, we are told, deftly combined all of this with what I would term an imitative art form. For example, Shah Wali Allah shows that the wedding sermon (khutba) in pre-Islamic society was a mechanism for blameworthy ostentation and showboating. Yet, it served a positive function. It publicly announced the coming together of two people, and thus crucially served as a beneficial civilizational purpose (maslaha). The Prophet thus imitated this practice while coloring it with a theological-moral hue by emphasizing an awareness of God (the supreme Other) over and above oneself. In doing so, he kept “the original [act] while changing its [negative] attribute.” Following this example, we can note that the spiritual and legal tradition of Islam provides a reservoir to replenish ways of living wherein Muslim political theology is no longer the de facto state of affairs. Crucially, Patel recognizes the need for the humanistic impulse of Islam in a context of virulent discrimination:
This principle is particularly relevant today amid the alarming spread of Islamophobia across the globe, which has normalised anti-Muslim discrimination. Instead of reciprocating harm, Muslims must struggle to “respond in a better way [ahsan]” by exhibiting self-restraint and refusing to categorically demonize the Other. The outcome of treating the religious Other with dignity, equality, and humanity, promises Q 41:34, is that “your bitter enemy will become like an old friend (219).
The emphasis on ethical living—that is, everyone living as “imams” in a socio-moral sense—transcends the destructive distrust pervading society. For Abu Hamid al-Ghazali (d.1111) love is a unique characteristic of a sentient being. One cause of this love is a beautiful character: someone who possesses moral traits of knowledge and intellect, chastity, bravery, piety, and generosity, among others. This is because there is something in our very nature, freed from the calls of the ego, that is innately attracted to inner beauty. It is to this beauty which transcends otherness that is key:
… the spiritual objective of subjugating the self to God prevails over the social objective of subjugating others to the self…. The spiritually undisciplined self (nafs) obsessed with power seeks to be above others, but the spiritually disciplined self shuns self-aggrandizement, fearing abasement before God. By denying the impulse of the self to rise above the religious Other, the flattening of religious hierarchy onto a plane of social equality acts as a form of spiritual discipline (ta’dib) that cultivates a virtuous self (nafs) (223)
Transcending the Self
In Sufism, one seeks to erase the facile border between self and other. The mystic Jalaluddin Rumi (d.1273) writes that duality can only be erased through self-annihilation, exemplified in the statement by the martyred mystic Mansur al-Hallaj (d.922): “I am the Real” (Ana al-haqq). He paid the ultimate price in his search to remove ontological difference. For Rumi, Hallaj’s friendship with God reached an apogee, where duality—between him and God —ceased. For, as the mystics tell us, it is pretentious to say “He is God” due to the “stench of duality.” The third person “he” only emerges when there is an “I.” Once erased, sameness turns enmity into amity. Another cause for love is benevolence (ihsan). Friendship is the outcome of serving and caring for others, something that madrasas seek in producing carers of others. I would say that it is this very “social suhba” of living with others ethically while being theologically rooted that paves the way for a productive imagining of Muslim difference with others today. Muslims in the West, like others, can maintain and hold on to their theological claims, while beautifying their social presence with and among others. Patel’s work has helped me think outside of the “insider-outsider” dichotomy of research access, and how imitation, infused with ethical meanings, can open up doors not only to madrasa but others in our often fractured and increasingly pluralistic world.
Haroon Sidat is a Research Associate at the Centre for the Study of Islam in the UK at Cardiff University and a Trustee at the Cambridge Muslim College. He specializes in the study of Islam in Britain and the intersection of sociology and Islamic Law. He is the author of Competing Spaces of Religious Belonging: Deobandi Debates on Interest/Usury as a Case Study and has worked on the largest study ofBritish imams. He is currently working on the Legacies of Learning: from Turath to Transformationproject that explores the lives and works of Islamic scholars, with a focus on their biographies, socio-political context, and institutional connections, as well as their intellectual work to answer questions that are pertinent to civilizational flourishing today.
Reflections in Alhambra. Image via Flickr User Inge Knoff. CC BY-NC 2.0.
Difference is everywhere. It is always at work. We make difference as much as we encounter it. We practice it, perform it, and embody it in how we choose to live in the world. The ethical dilemma, of course, is what do we make of these differences?
Youshaa Patel’s The Muslim Difference
In the The Muslim Difference: Defining the Line between Believers and Unbelievers from Early Islam to the Present, Youshaa Patel adroitly directs our attention to the many differences in ritual performance, cultural practice, and sartorial preferences that have emerged as Muslims have sought to define themselves against the religious Other. Over the course of eight chapters, Patel traces the currents and counter-currents that Muslims across the centuries have, in various ways, attempted to understand, define, and embody what it means to be “Muslim.” He does so by guiding us through how different religious and cultural distinctions—from funeral prayers to European-brimmed hats—have figured in this ever-shifting identity discourse. As Patel observes, these carefully studied windows into the past reveal that “change is built into the architecture of Islamic tradition” (220).
Moreover, in our times when discussions of identity are increasingly fraught, I believe Patel’s turn to supposedly “minor” differences to be especially salient. What might we learn, then, if we move beyond the lens of the religious Other? How might Patel’s vector of analysis inform our understanding of other varieties of othering? What can we say about the differences that divide our Muslim communities or those that divide our own selves? Put another way, what can difference disclose for us theologically and ethically?
Patel answers some of these pressing questions in a notable transition from the analytical to the ethical in the epilogue. He presents a constructive vision of how contemporary Muslims, in all of their heterogeneity, might engage with other social divisions and structures of oppression. He has us imagine how we might “heal and repair” and even expand “the circle of belonging” that emerges from “the darker side of difference: conflict” (228). It is on this last point that I take inspiration for myown work on religion, race, and systemic evil. Beyond the religious Other, how might we use difference to understand othering more broadly experienced and conceived?
The Darker Side of Difference
The discernment of difference, I argue, is an innate trait that human beings share with other biological entities. We make sense of the world through this divinely endowed ability to distinguish and categorize similarities and differences. The Qur’an repeatedly attests to this intrinsic sensibility for difference: Humankind was but one community, then they differed (Q. 10:19), But they have fragmented their affair among themselves (Q. 21:93), truly you are of differing claims (Q. 51:8), joined with the continual refrain that wherein they differed (Q. 10:19) that wherein they used to differ (Q. 10:93, Q. 32:35, Q. 45:17), that wherein you used to differ (Q. 22:69). Our sense of safety and danger, and hence our ability to survive and thrive, depends upon it. Yet, in our case of human beings—as servants of God—how does difference figure into the larger spectrum of our activity, a spectrum that encompasses acts of personal transgression (individual evil) to socially instantiated forms of oppression (systemic evil)? To understand these degrees of wickedness, I would have us return to that “darker side of difference.” This same divinely endowed sense of discernment also has the potential to end in divisiveness and death. Our ability to differentiate can easily be arrogated into a sense of subjugating supremacy. This is especially evident, for instance, in the hierarchical differentiations born out of the modern concept of race first formulated by European colonizers, scientists, and writers and then continued and further developed by many others.
More fundamentally, the Qur’anic story of Satan attests to the possibility of this social human impulse. When the figure Iblīs, who would become Satan, is presented with the creation of the first human being by God and then commanded to prostrate before him, we are told that Iblīs waxed arrogant (Q. 2:34, Q. 38:74), claiming his existential superiority over the human being (and by extension, us): I am better than him. You created me from fire, but him You have created from clay (Q. 7:12, Q. 38:76). In effect, we are being cautioned against succumbing to a similar sense of superiority based on difference.
When a notion of supremacy prevails within the human self, a rippling disfiguration occurs. The personal seeps into the social. We transpose differences in identification into hierarchies, which are then taken to structure society itself. It marks a tragic human pattern. Seeking to order the world, a group envisions itself as categorically superior to others in a gross misapplication of difference. The ancient Greeks set themselves against all others who they named barbarians (barbaros), a pejorative reference to their inability to speak “clearly.” Likewise in Late Antiquity, the Arabs named all non-Arabic speakers ʿajamī, a pejorative based on the incomprehensibility of their speech. For some, sentiments such as this transformed into an idea of Arab preeminence as demonstrated by the range of positions taken in works of jurisprudence (fiqh) or more literary apologetics like Ibn Qutayba’s The Excellence of the Arabs. It is to such particular sets of differences—phenotypical, socio-cultural, ideological, linguistic, religious—that we often attribute hierarchical lines of division. Ethno-centrism, nationalism, colonialism, and racism among other hierarchical orientations are born from and fed by this social predilection to differentiate with prejudice. The theological utility of difference is hardly restricted to religious identity. In fact, as Patel rightly states, “it is not necessary to construct the non-Muslim as a foil to forge the ideal Muslim” (222–23). We should turn our ethical gaze introspectively in order to more keenly apprehend what it means to be human from the horizon of Islam. In other words, what is disclosed when we seek to understand the fine line of difference within us all? What separates that which makes us human from that which makes us otherwise?
The Difference Between Cain and Abel
Consider the Qur’anic story of the two sons of Adam (Q. 5:27-32), which the Muslim commentarial tradition identifies as Cain (Qābīl) and Abel (Hābīl), the first generation to follow the initial creation of humankind. In the account, each brother offers a sacrifice to God. For one, Abel, the sacrifice is accepted, while for the other, Cain, it is rejected. After this rejection, he declares his commitment to slaying his brother. Recite to them, with truth, the account of the two sons of Adam. When they each made a sacrifice, it was accepted from one of them, but it was not accepted from the other, who said, “Surely I will kill you.” [The other] said, “God only accepts from the reverent” (Q. 5:27). On one level, it is a tale of fratricide that explains how murder first entered the world. On another, it is a bitter disclosure about human nature. While the biblical account of Cain and Abel makes much about what each brother offered in sacrifice (Genesis 4:1–18), the Qur’an is altogether unconcerned with that difference. What it emphasizes instead is the manner in which each brother presents himself. Cain proclaims a commitment to deadly violence—Surely I will kill you (la-aqtulannaka)—using the socially differentiating language of “I” and “you.” Abel, meanwhile, responds with words aimed at restoring the primacy of the Divine—God only accepts…(innamā yataqabbalu Allāhu)—obviating entirely the distinction between “I” and “you.”
Ethno-centrism, nationalism, colonialism, and racism among other hierarchical orientations are born from and fed by this social predilection to differentiate with prejudice.
For the Iranian revolutionary thinker Ali Shariati, this Qur’anic narrative was significant for what it revealed about human potential: “Cain is not inherently evil. His essence is the same as that of Abel, and nobody is inherently evil, for the essence of everyone is the same as the essence of Adam” (107). Cain might have acted otherwise. Instead the brothers represent something more fundamental within ourselves. Cain represents an inner impulse focused solely upon the self—a self (nafs), the Qur’an warns elsewhere, that commands to evil (Q. 12:53). In contrast, Abel represents an impulse that takes God as its center instead. Each brother embodies a different way of being human: one of violence-unto-death, the inhuman, and another of devotional reverence (taqwā), the human. Through this story of the first generation to follow, revelation is calling us to recognize that we each bear within ourselves the capacity for the human and the inhuman.
Discerning Differences Today
What does this mean for Muslims today living in a world wracked by war, suffering, and interlocking forms of structural oppression? It concerns how a person of faith ought to understand and confront the injustices of the world. It concerns the ethics of faithful response. All too often, as Viet Thanh Nguyen describes in his ethics of recognition, we are quick to identify the inhumanity of others, while remaining blind to our own inhumanity:
Identifying with the human and denying one’s inhumanity, and the inhumanity of one’s own, is the ultimate kind of identity politics. It circulates through nationalism, capitalism, and racism, as well as through the humanities. Reminding ourselves that being human also means being inhuman is important simply because it is so easy to forget our inhumanity or to displace it onto other humans. (72)[1]
The failure to recognize the fullness of who we are, the human and inhuman, renders us susceptible to re-inscribing division and violence ourselves. The path of social complicity in oppression is the path of least resistance. It takes very little to cross into the inhuman. A similar sentiment underlies Paulo Freire’s warning in Pedagogy of the Oppressed, “the oppressed must not, in seeking to regain their humanity… become in turn the oppressors of the oppressors, but rather restorers of the humanity of both” (44). To be human is to recognize that we might one day do the same as the oppressor, the colonizer, the occupier, and the dehumanizer. To be human is to recognize that we might, at any turn, descend into the fallenness of Cain.
Indeed, Patel invites us in his epilogue to consider the United States as “an imagined community,” given the polarizing divisions wracking the nation (228). I feel compelled, however, to think more broadly, even if more abstractly, on the scale of humankind. Our history testifies to how easy that descent of Cain is: a continual history of complicity in war and colonialism, slavery and subjugation, displacement and exploitation, and apartheid and genocide. The challenge lies in maintaining the fine line between our humanity and inhumanity. Indeed, we would be mistaken to conceive of humanity and inhumanity as diametric opposites or inversions of each other. Rather, they are, like Cain and Abel, brothers to one another separated by only “minor” differences. They are deceptively alike. Inhumanity does not lack in love, conviction, or a sense of justice. Like our humanity, our inhumanity has its share of intimacy and empathy, relationality and community, creativity and artistry, even faith and righteousness. But our inhumanity holds each of these differently—more selectively and narrowly—in contortions and distortions of how they ought to be. Inhumanity loves its own dearly, but only its own. It draws its arms tightly around its beloved community in disregard of others. Its dreams extend to sustain a select few. Its imagination is exercised for its own exclusive ends. It believes in itself so deeply that it will even fight and die for itself. It is precisely in this proximity of our inhumanity to our humanity that we are most challenged and tested. God calls us to recognize our potential for inhumanity—our capacity to be Cain—because it is nothing more than the subtle disfigurement of our humanity, a difference of but a little. It is to this “Muslim difference” that I believe greater work in theological ethics is called to disentangle. How ought that fine line between them be understood and maintained? How exactly ought our humanity be made to subsume and circumscribe the darker side of difference? How can we work instead to restore and sustain the humanity of all?
[1] With respect to identity politics, I follow Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò’s critical engagement in Elite Capture. Identity politics may have begun as a concept for “fostering solidarity and collaboration” by those in positions of subjugating power, a sentiment with which Viet Nguyen’s comments are aligned.
Dr. Martin Nguyen, Professor of Religious Studies at Fairfield University, is an Islamic studies scholar and Muslim theologian. His work revolves around Islamic ethics, theology, spirituality, Qur’anic studies, and the intersection of race and religion. He is currently writing on global mass displacement and modern structural racism from an Muslim theological vantage. Among his books is Modern Muslim Theology: Engaging God and the World with Faith and Imagination (2019) and An American Muslim Guide to the Art and Life of Preaching (2023), which he edited and revised with the late Imam Sohaib Sultan at Princeton. More about Prof. Nguyen’s work can be found at https://drmartinnguyen.com
Hafsa Kanjwal’s 
