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Global Currents article

Other Jerusalem Realities: The “City of Prayer” in Palestinian Nationalist Imaginaries


Photo Credit: Michele Benericetti. The wall surrounding the Aida refugee camp in Bethlehem, Palestine, painted with the Al-Aqsa Mosque.

On December 6, 2017, President Donald J. Trump declared that the United States would move its embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. He described the decision, which overturned decades of US policy, as a recognition of the “reality” that the Holy City was the seat of Israel’s national government.

This reality, however, was of a particular sort, picked out to appease important constituencies of Trump’s political base: right-wing US Evangelicals who view Israel through Christian Zionist lenses, for example, and also US Jewish activists and organizations that back the maximalist policies of the present Israeli government. Significantly, too, Trump’s preferred reality resulted from Israel’s annexation and settlement of conquered land and from its discriminatory regime of control. Such actions are a violation of international conventions that proscribe acquisition of territory through war, rule out the expropriation of an occupied population for expansionist purposes, and insist on the legal rights of the occupied.

 

The Global Reaction

Attuned to their exclusion, Palestinians of all backgrounds—and concerned Arabs and Muslims globally—have responded in sharp tones. Palestinian Christians, who comprise a small but significant minority, have reacted strongly against the Trump announcement; but their statements have received little to no coverage in a US media conditioned to reduce Palestinian politics to the Hamas-Fatah rivalry. Arab and Muslim responses have occurred on a far wider, global scale. At this writing, mass demonstrations convulse cities and towns in the West Bank and Gaza Strip as well as in Jordan, Egypt, Tunisia, Iraq, Pakistan, Malaysia, and Indonesia.

Map of the separation wall around Jerusalem, West Bank, and Gaza. Wikimedia Commons. Similar map here.

The response has not been exclusively an Arab or Muslim one. The United Nations General Assembly passed overwhelmingly a resolution denouncing the Trump Administration’s decision. The UN Security Council voted 14 to 1—the United States was the only vote against and its vote served to veto the resolution—to demand reversal of the US decision. Strong criticism, too, has come from individual European governments and from groups in the United States committed to opposing the occupation, upholding international law, and reviving peace negotiations. More than 160 Jewish Studies scholars in the US have signed a letter condemning the US move. With Palestinian Catholic communities in mind, Pope Francis has also issued a statement insisting the international status quo with respect to Jerusalem be maintained and emphasizing the city’s religious importance to Christians, Muslims, and Jews.

Predominantly Palestinian East Jerusalem—cut off by Israeli settlements, sealed behind the “separation wall,” and subject to a stringent police presence—has remained relatively calm, although breaking reports describe violence occurring at the gates to the Haram Al-Sharif platform. Armed groups in Gaza, some of them aligned with Hamas, have launched missiles across the border fence into Israel, leading to the inevitable Israeli retaliation: air bombardments have killed four Gazans.

 

Protest through an Orientalist Lens

In US media, the Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim reaction appears yet again as violent and unreasonable. Once more, young men masked in keffiyeh scarves hurl rocks from behind burning tires; anonymous massed bodies demonstrate in the streets, burning US flags; and militants in military fatigues, green or black scarves tied around their heads with the Islamic shahada emblazoned on them, sling automatic rifles and ammunition belts across their backs.

The images project into a void of knowledge. The interpretive lens that substitutes for informed understanding—a filter that the memory of the September 11, 2001 attacks, the wars that have followed it, and the lurid violence of the Islamic State have reinforced—presumes a simple but intractable dichotomy between a reasonable West, inclusive of a beleaguered Israel, and a threatening Middle East beholden to a barbarous Islam.

The dichotomy bends in instances in which the masked militants are “our militants” fighting for “our values” of freedom and democracy. Examples include the Reagan Administration’s support for Afghani mujahidin in their fight against the Soviet invasion and, recently, US support for anti-regime forces in the Syrian civil war. When these groups turn against US interests, they revert to the category of civilizational threat. And, so, in the case of Israel, the binary bends back to form: the violence of Israel’s occupation—military, settler, and structural—either goes unremarked or presents within this interpretive frame as justifiable self-defense.

The Orientalist bifurcation that casts the non-West as atavistic produces a Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim civilizational exception. Devoid of context, “their” reactions figure as symptoms of a cultural pathology that only resolves once “they” relent and accept what “we” value. And yet, a moment’s reflection reveals “their” reactions to be anything but exceptional; the responses have comprehensible antecedents in the history of the three monotheisms as they have intersected in Jerusalem and in the formation of modern national imaginaries.

 

Jerusalem in Palestinian Nationalist Discourse

Jerusalem figures centrally in Palestinian nationalist discourse, secular and religious. It stands in metonymically for Palestine itself. In Muslim Palestinian homes in Palestine and in diaspora communities abroad, an enlarged, often gold-framed photographic image of the Dome of the Rock rising above the walls of the Old City adorns the main sitting or dining room. Christian Palestinian families might display images of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. These images are present in the most ornate villas and in the humblest of refugee shelters. The images gesture to Jerusalem, to Palestine, and to the nation that seeks to return and recover it.

Photo Credit: Patrick McKay. Al-Aqsa Mosque, Jerusalem.

The force of the images for Palestinians flows from remembered and persisting social and economic ties that intertwine intergenerationally with the city and its institutions. Some of these institutions, like the Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Holy Sepulchre Church, date to late Antiquity and the early centuries of Muslim rule that followed the conquest of Jerusalem in 637 C.E. These religious sites became destinations for local and regional pilgrimage, especially during important moments in the liturgical calendar like Ramadan or the Christian Holy Week. Other institutions, secular ones, like the Khalidi family library, appeared later as part of a cultural efflorescence that saw elite families assume leadership positions in the Ottoman and British Mandate structures.

Economically, the city had long integrated itself with surrounding towns. Villagers would travel to the city’s markets to sell their produce and pray at Al-Aqsa or at the many churches. The War of 1948, which divided the city between Israeli and Jordanian controlled halves, severed or stunted these connections. Jews, too, experienced this cutting, prevented as they were from traveling to the Western Wall, a site of Jewish prayer since the 16th century. After the Six-Day War in 1967, the Israeli government razed the Moroccan Quarter, the harat al-maghariba, to create the large Kotel plaza in front of the wall. The displaced Palestinian residents of the quarter sought shelter in the Shu`fat Refugee Camp along the northern municipal boundary. The forced removal was yet another instance of mass displacement that has so powerfully defined the Palestinian sense of loss and demand for return.[1]

The 1967 War, in which Israel conquered and then annexed the entire city, expanding its boundaries into the West Bank through land confiscations and settlement building, restored Jewish access to the city. This restoration, however, entailed a further cutting off of Palestinians. Since the Second Intifada (uprising) in 2000-2005, Israel has built what it calls a “separation wall” putatively to stem infiltration of armed Palestinians. Effectively, the wall solidifies Israel’s territorial and demographic dominance in the city.

Israel’s annexation and Judaization of Jerusalem, rather than annulling Palestinian attachments, have instead amplified the city’s symbolic importance for Palestinians. The event that ignited the Second Intifada, known commonly as the Al-Aqsa Intifada, was Ariel Sharon’s provocative visit to the Haram al-Sharif in a bid to shore up right-wing settler support for his effort to win the premiership. As Jewish settlements push aggressively into Palestinian areas, as politicians and settlers at times force their way onto to the Haram platform, and as Israel undertakes archeological excavations under the Haram’s walls, Palestinian activists raise the alarm, as they are now in the aftermath of Trump’s declaration, of “Al-Aqsa fi khatar” (Al-Aqsa is in danger!). In response, they take to the streets to demonstrate, enacting the longstanding Intifada practices of burning tires, throwing stones, and chanting slogans.

The centrality of Al-Aqsa and the Haram Al-Sharif to Palestinian national discourse reaches back to the origins of Palestinian nationalism in the first decades of the 20th century. Formed through the intersection of multiple currents—incipient Arab nationalism stemming from the Great Arab Revolt of 1916-1918; late 19th century lay Arab Christian advocacy of nationalism as a counter to the power of church hierarchs within the Ottoman governing system; the emergence of lay Muslim-Christian Associations; reaction against the growing assertiveness of Zionism—the Palestinian national movement increasingly came under the sway of elite families in Jerusalem.

The Husayni family, in particular, gained special prominence through the activism of Muhammad Amin al-Husayni, a strong supporter of the Arab revolt and of the pan-Arabism of Amir Faysal. Appointed Mufti of Jerusalem by the British High Commissioner in 1921, Al-Hajj Amin, as al-Husayni became known, gained the presidency of the Supreme Muslim Council, an institution the British had created to co-opt Palestinian leadership. Al-Husayni transformed the council and the Al-Aqsa Mosque and its institutions into a platform for the global projection of Palestinian national demands. In 1931, in a bid to rally Muslim support for Palestinian statehood, he hosted the first Islamic Congress at Al-Aqsa. The Congress was the culmination of outreach to Muslim leaders and movements worldwide, including the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt but also the Khilafat Movement in India. Both groups rallied to the cause of Palestine, sending delegates to the congress and, in the case of the Muslim Brotherhood later, armed irregulars to fight in Gaza during the War of 1948.[2]

 

Jerusalem in Fatah and Hamas’ Discourse

After the war, in the wake of the forced exodus of 750,000 Palestinians from their villages and towns, the national movement regrouped. Hearkening to a revived pan-Arabism—Arab nationalist leaders like Jamal `Abd al-Nasser and the Ba`athist parties had ascended to power across the Middle East—the founders of the Palestinian National Liberation Movement (Fatah), which eventually took control of the Palestine Liberation Organization in 1968, emphasized the centrality of Palestine to the Arab nationalist cause. The new movement presented itself as a state in exile, inclusive of all the diverse groups comprising Palestinian society. Christians, especially, supported the PLO and its various factions. Individuals like George Habbash, founder of the Marxist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, an important PLO faction, came from Christian families.

Jerusalem remained politically important to this new form of PLO nationalism centering the ethnos. It repeatedly figured, for example, in the demand, “dawla filastiniyya `asimatha al-quds” (a Palestinian state the capital of which is Jerusalem). Yet, the focus rested primarily on the liberation of the land of Palestine.

Fatah’s coat of arms. Wikimedia Commons.

This emphasis manifested symbolically, for example, in Fatah’s coat of arms. The image features a representation in green of the geographical space that the British Mandate once constituted. Within this space—the space of Palestine—Israel took form. Crossed in front of the territory are two automatic rifles, a grenade, forearms cuffed in the Palestinian national colors, and the slogan, al-`asifa (“The Storm”), a reference to Fatah’s armed wing. The message is clear: Fatah commits itself to the armed struggle—the “revolution until victory”—to liberate the usurped homeland.

Fatah’s crest does not include any image or reference to Jerusalem. The national politico-geographical space, not the religious one, is central. That space incorporates the autochthonous Arab Christians and Muslims. In Fatah’s conception of indigeneity, those Jews (Palestinian Jews) who had lived in Palestine before the arrival of the Zionists from Europe were also legitimate members of the Palestinian nation. Given this pluralistic vision, the elision of particular religious symbols in the coat of arms becomes comprehensible. Palestine subsumes Jerusalem and its people in all of their subnational groupings.

During the two decades after the 1967 war, Islamist movements rooted in the Muslim Brotherhood challenged Fatah and the PLO. The viability of this challenge, as journalists and historians have long noted, resulted in part from Israel’s strategy of suppressing PLO-affiliated groups while allowing Muslim Brotherhood activists to organize. Islamists took nimble advantage of the opportunity to create a forceful counter to secular nationalism.

The signal event in this process was the emergence of the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) during the First Intifada in early 1988. Hamas immediately contested leadership of the uprising. During the Oslo Process, it used violence to undermine Fatah’s negotiations with Israel. In 2007, Hamas and Fatah fought a brief, bloody civil war that ended with Fatah’s expulsion from the Gaza Strip. Palestinian political leadership has since remained fractured.

Hamas redefines national belonging in sectarian religious terms. In doing so, it mirrors the political theology of Zionism, which conceives of Eretz Israel as a land belonging to Jews solely.[3] In similar terms, Hamas invokes “Muslim Palestine” and speaks of liberating Al-Aqsa in metonymic reference to Jerusalem. Its discourse resurrects the symbolic and discursive links that Al-Hajj Amin al-Husayni forged between the Palestinian national cause and Islamic movements in the wider Middle East and South Asia. It also resuscitates memories of the guerrilla movement that Shaykh `Izz al-Din al-Qassam led in the Galilee just prior to the outbreak of the Great Peasant Revolt of 1936-1939.[4] Hamas’ armed wing calls itself the `Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigade.

Hamas’ Coat of Arms. Wikimedia Commons.

Hamas’ coat of arms, in sharp contrast with Fatah’s, explicitly invokes Muslim Palestine and Al-Aqsa in its imagery. In the center background is the Dome of the Rock, the most prominent built structure in Jerusalem’s Old City. The image of Palestine as constituted during the period of the British Mandate appears in green above the Dome as if linking the structure to the heavens. The Dome is the unmistakable and irrefutable symbol of Islam’s territorial and religious supersessionary claims to the city: it and Al-Aqsa next to it sit dominantly atop the platform from which the Jewish temple once rose. The Dome, in its magnificence, also rises preeminently above the silver cupola of the Holy Sepulchre Church. The representations of the Palestinian flag that frame the Dome in Hamas’ coat of arms feature the Islamic shahada that “there is no deity but the one God” and that “Muhammad is God’s messenger.” The inclusion of the shahada on the national banner reinforces Islam’s priority: the nation is a Muslim one. Through this choice of imagery—the Dome, the Islamized flag—Hamas excludes Jewish and Christian claims to the city.

Additionally, the crossed swords, which contrast with the modern rifles and grenade images in Fatah’s crest, redefine the meaning and objectives of Islamist politics globally. The swords mirror the sabre that appears in Saudi Arabia’s national flag. In both instances, Saudi and Palestinian, the symbol evokes the Islamic conquests of the 7th Century C.E. The critical difference in the Hamas crest is that the swords cross in front of the Dome. This arrangement renders Jerusalem the centerpoint of Islamist politics. Hamas reinforces this centering in articles 14 and 15 of its 1988 covenant. In those passages, the movement calls Muslims globally to free the Holy Land as the prior condition to returning Islam to its rightful place of power in the world.  “Jihad in the path of God” to free Jerusalem (Palestine) has become, according to Hamas, a fard `ayn—a prescribed individual duty such as the five daily prayers—of Muslims everywhere.

 

Conclusion

This religiously framed call to struggle—in the broader sense of jihad as the effort to resist injustice—has increasingly resonated with Palestinians in Western diaspora communities, where affirmation of Islamic identity has intensified partly in response to spiking anti-Muslim racism. In 2013, for example, the American Muslims for Palestine organization, one of the most prominent groups advocating on behalf of the Palestinian cause in the United States, adopted the Qur’anic verse, “al-ladhi barakna hawlahu”—“the surroundings of which we have blessed,” a reference to Al-Aqsa and to Jerusalem and the Holy Land, generally—as the slogan of their annual conference. The reference implicitly cast activism for Palestine as a sacred struggle on behalf of an inalienable Islamic patrimony that God, through the miraculous journey of his messenger across the night sky to “the farthest mosque,” had bestowed upon his faithful.

The official recognition by the Trump Administration that Jerusalem is Israel’s capital settles nothing. On the contrary, it reinforces the exclusionary logics of the contesting claims to the city. The announcement reinforces this zero-sum game in favor of Israeli-Jewish hegemony. Still, Jerusalem, deeply significant to Muslims, Christians, and Jews, to Israelis and Palestinians, defies the zero-sum. Any attempt to impose the dominance of a single group necessarily entails violent exclusion and suppression and the inevitable resistance they provoke. Recognition of this fact and of the corresponding necessity to live and govern equally with others remains the sine qua non of any peace worthy of the name in the Madinat al-Salah (City of Prayer) and in the wider territorial expanse that Israelis and Palestinians claim as their own.

 

[1] See Tom Abowd, Colonial Jerusalem: The Spatial Construction of Identity and Difference in a City of Myth, 1948-2012  (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2016).

[2] See Muhammad Y. Muslih, The Origins of Palestinian Nationalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988); Rashid Khalidi, Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern Consciousness (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997); Robert Haddad, Syrian Christians in Muslim Society: An Interpretation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970); Omar Khalidi, “Indian Muslims and Palestinian Awqaf,” Jerusalem Quarterly 40 (2009): 52-58; Uri Kupferschmidt, The Supreme Muslim Council: Islam under the British Mandate in Palestine (Leiden: Brill, 1987); and Abd al-Fattah Muhammad El-Awaisi, The Muslim Brothers and the Palestine Question 1928-1947 (London and New York: Tauris Academic Studies, 1998).

[3] Zionism, like Palestinian nationalism, is internally complex. Important movements within Zionism have promoted bi-nationalist and two-state conceptions of Jewish-Arab national coexistence. Other powerful tendencies within Zionism, however, have advocated and actively pushed forward ethno-nationalist ideas that envision exclusive Jewish territorial dominance, especially in Jerusalem. For a trenchant critique of these various ideological orientations as they have manifested within Israeli Jewish peace groups, see Atalia Omer, When Peace Is Not Enough: How the Israeli Peace Camp Thinks about Religion, Nationalism, and Justice (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2013).

[4] Abdallah Schleifer, “Izz al-Din al-Qassam: Preacher and Mujahid,” in Struggle and Survival in the Modern Middle East, edited by Edmund Burke III and David Yaghoubian (Berkeley, Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 2005; Ted Swedenburg, Memories of Revolt. The 1936–1939 Rebellion and the Palestinian National Past (Little Rock, AK: The University of Arkansas Press, 2003).

 

 

 

 

Array
Loren Lybarger
Loren D. Lybarger is an associate professor in the Department of Classics and World Religions at Ohio University, Athens, where he teaches courses on Islam, Sufism, Political Islam, Theories of Religion, Religion and Violence, and American Religions. He is the author of Identity and Religion in Palestine: The Struggle between Secularism and Islamism in the Occupied Territories (Princeton, 2007).
Global Currents article

Evangelicals and Jerusalem


Palm Sunday procession with Palestinian flags
Photo Credit: Scottgunn. Palestinian flags wave at a Palm Sunday procession down the Mount of Olives into the Old City of Jerusalem, 2017.

Essay posted in conjunction with Georgetown’s Berkeley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs.

Are evangelicals the magic ingredient in the recipe that led Trump to claim he would recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital? Yes and no. Vice President Mike Pence unquestionably influenced the discussions in the White House, and Trump certainly felt himself in debt to white evangelicals in the US, but the role of Saudi Arabia’s Mohamed bin Salman in promoting a “peace plan” that betrayed Palestinian hopes for Jerusalem as their capital also had an immediate and forceful impact.

American evangelicals are, after all, divided on how they feel about President Trump, especially when theologically conservative Asian, black, and Latino Protestants are counted.[1] And when the announcement was made in early December, the evangelical community was already in turmoil over the lead-up to the special election featuring Roy Moore in Alabama. Still, the president and vice president clearly thought they had a heartwarming moment prepared for their conservative white base when they put together the Jerusalem photo op, with Pence standing by Trump’s side.

Indeed, evangelical Christians in the US, particularly white evangelicals, have long been a key base of support for Israel. The reasons for that support are many. Often, the assumption is that evangelicals’ views are based on biblical prophecy, and there is no question that, for a significant subset of evangelicals, the belief that Jesus will return to fight in the great battle of Armageddon (Har Megiddo) is key to their political and emotional commitments to the Jewish state.

But there are more prosaic reasons as well, including the powerful role that Holy Land tourism plays in shaping Americans’ perceptions of the region. Ever since Israel took control of all of Jerusalem in the 1967 war, American evangelicals have declared their support for its territorial ambitions by voting with their plane tickets. Within a month of the war’s end, Americans were rushing to join trips that no longer required complicated travel to Jordan. Israeli tour guides quickly ventured into the new territories, working in towns that just recently were controlled by Jordan, heading into tourist sites that had, just weeks before, been hosted by Palestinian guides. In late June of 1967, Israelis “took the wrong roads, wandered mistakenly into strange quarters, and spent part of their time asking directions as they moved through Bethlehem and Jerusalem.”[2] The control of those unfamiliar places would turn out to be quite lucrative, as an avalanche of tourists and dollars began to flow into the region. The number of tourists increased from an average of 269,000 arrivals a year in the 1960s to 772,000 a year in the 1970s.[3] In 2016, there were 2.9 million.

On tours led either by pastors or other well-known religious leaders, American evangelicals and other Christians, have learned to love Israel in the most material of ways—seeing the land, eating the local foods, “walking where Jesus walked”—all while being told that Israel could be counted on to guarantee their access to the religious sites they loved, in Jerusalem and beyond: the Garden Tomb, the stations of the cross, the Mount of the Beatitudes near the Sea of Galilee.[4] It is though these ordinary practices of visiting Israel—and ignoring Palestine—that American Christians have most commonly come to understand themselves as tied to the land, to Israel, to Jerusalem.

There are other motivations as well. Some evangelicals make political arguments about US interests, others simply argue that God has declared his preference for Jerusalem in the Bible. The combination of factors has made love of Israel into a kind of evangelical common sense over the fifty years. It was no surprise, then, when a raft of American evangelicals welcomed President Trump’s announcement that he would recognize Jerusalem. A roll call of conservative leaders lined up: James Dobson of Focus on the Family; Jerry Falwell Jr., president of Liberty University; Robert Jeffress of First Baptist Church of Dallas; Pentecostal pastor Paula White; and prophecy promoter Johan Hagee all touted Trump’s decision as an act of bold and faithful promise-keeping. Even Samuel Rodriguez, president of the national Hispanic Leadership Christian Conference, who had been critical of Trump on immigration issues, said that “the historical record, empirical fact and our faith all confirm that Jerusalem is in fact the capital of the Jewish people.”

And yet, on closer inspection, evangelical opinion was far more divided than all the ring-kissing seemed to imply. When Mark Galli, editor of Christianity Today (CT), opened a podcast discussion of Trump’s decision, he commented that, while he did not feel like he was particularly well educated on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Trump’s announcement made him “uncomfortable.” CT’s Morgan Lee made a similar comment: There were so many evangelicals hailing and praising the move, she said, and many of those evangelicals were the same ones who were saying that evangelicals in the US really needed to “stand up” for Christians in the Middle East. But those Middle Eastern Christians were not particularly happy about this decision. So, she said, “I really wanted to get at what the disconnect was.”

Disconnect indeed. Evangelical Christians in the Middle East were outspoken about their feelings of anger and betrayal at Trump’s announcement, supposedly rendered (in part) to make evangelicals happy. Botrus Mansour, a Baptist leader who is co-chair of the Lausanne Initiative for Reconciliation between Israel and Palestine (a working group of the Lausanne Movement, a global evangelical organization), told CT that the announcement “will increase resentment and possibly spark unnecessary violence, making peace harder to obtain.” In addition, he said, “America will lose any remaining legitimacy it had as a fair broker.”

Photo Credit: Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Trump and Netanyahu during Trump’s May 2017 visit to Israel.

It is far from clear that the United States had any such legitimacy left, but the striking thing was exactly the “disconnect” that CT’s reporting had highlighted. For more than two decades, the persecuted Christians movement among global evangelicals (and some other Christians) had talked about the “suffering church.” As a social movement built on web activism and church-based activities like the International Days of Prayer for the Persecuted Church, that movement had both conservative and liberal implications. On the one hand, the modern focus on Christian persecution emerged from, and profoundly fed into, the anti-Muslim tenor of much of evangelical life, both in and beyond the US. Violence against Christians was a real and persistent problem in many parts of the world, but since the 1990s when evangelicals took up the cause of the International Religious Freedom Act, religious activists had not infrequently misrepresented conflicts that emerged from on-the-ground tensions over land, resources, or power as matters of Muslims’ personal hatred of Christians.[5]

At the same time, the persecuted Christians movement had emerged out of the human rights activism of the 1970s and 1980s, and had pushed Americans and others to pay attention to the difficulties of fellow believers in the global South, bringing issues from human rights violations to hunger to HIV/AIDS to the attention of the broader evangelical community. And it encouraged the American church, in particular, to give more consideration to the racially diverse believers who were well on their way to becoming the global majority of evangelicals. That meant that, when Middle Eastern Christians talked, American evangelicals should, theoretically, listen. And, indeed, a small subset of US and other evangelicals had begun to pay particular attention to what Palestinian Christians were saying about their situation under Israeli governance. A number of those Americans had joined in the bi-annual conference, “Christ at the Checkpoint,” sponsored by Bethlehem Bible College.

This self-awareness about the globalizing of evangelicalism meant that even a moderately conservative journal like Christianity Today responded to Trump’s announcement by asking how a move of the US embassy would affect relationships between American evangelicals and Christians in Middle East. In recent years, CT reported, many evangelicals had decided that “we must become better friends, and work harder for the persecuted church’s flourishing in the land of its birth.” When reporters asked people in those churches what they thought of the policy change, some were blunt. Mitri Raheb, an evangelical Lutheran pastor and author, said that “local Christians [had been] sacrificed on the altar of imperial politics.” The head of the Coptic Church in Egypt announced that he would not be meeting with Vice President Pence during his visit to Israel and Egypt in December. The Christian mayor of Bethlehem also announced he would not meet with Pence. The message was clear, for those who wanted to listen.

The Trump announcement also came at a moment when cracks were showing in the pro-Israel edifice at home. It turns out that younger American evangelicals, much like younger Jews, are tracking differently than their parents. According to recent polls, evangelical millennials have far fewer attachments to Israel. Forty percent of evangelicals aged 18 to 34 say they have no particularly strong views about Israel. When asked whether the founding of Israel was an injustice to Palestinians, 19 percent say yes, and 47 percent are not sure. In fact, when younger evangelicals consider the key issues facing the Middle East, they are more likely to think about Iraq and ISIS than Israel. Compared to previous generations of evangelicals, they are simultaneously more critical of Israel and less interested in it.

President Trump’s embassy announcement seemed to have been designed as yet another attempt to encourage his base, thumb his nose at European allies, and give shape to his foreign policy. He may have succeeded at all of those goals. But if his goal was to curry favor with evangelicals, there is a lesson that he has yet to learn: evangelicals are global, and their politics are changing almost as fast as their demographics.

 

Essay posted in conjunction with Georgetown’s Berkeley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs.

[1] On believers of color, see the discussion “Am I an Evangelical?” featuring a group of Protestants of color, hosted by The Witness, a Black Christian Collective.

[2] NYT, June 24, 1967.

[3] Tourist numbers from Israel in Statistics, 1948-2000 (Jerusalem: Central Bureau of Statistics, 2008).

[4] See Hillary Kaell, Walking Where Jesus Walked: American Christians and Holy Land Pilgrimage. New York: New York University Press, 2014.

[5] Melani McAlister, “The Politics of Persecution,” Middle East Report (Winter 2008), http://www.merip.org/mer/mer249/politics-persecution.

Array
Melani McAlister
Melani McAlister is an associate professor of American studies and international affairs at George Washington University. Her books include Epic Encounters: Culture, Media, and US Interests in the Middle East (2005, o. 2001) and The Kingdom of God Has No Borders: A Global History of American Evangelicals (forthcoming from Oxford University Press in 2018), a study of evangelical internationalism since 1960.
Global Currents article

This City that Isn’t One: Fragments on a Fragmented City


Photo Credit: Dr. Kupietzky, Wikimedia. 2017 Jerusalem jubilee celebration at Givat Hathmoshet

The city that speaks its fragmentation and divide so clearly and loudly cannot be forced into coherence because “cities” do not cohere. Only people do.

The story is well known: On June 27, 1967, the Israeli Government officially annexed the seventy kilometers of land the Israeli army conquered a couple of weeks earlier. East Jerusalem and its 69,000 Palestinian residents were incorporated into the Israeli municipality of Jerusalem.  On July 30, 1980, the Israeli Knesset voted and approved the “Jerusalem Law,” which declared unified Jerusalem the capital of the state of Israel despite critique from the UN. Since then the efforts to declare and celebrate the city’s unification continue, perhaps because a meaningful and valid unification continues to fail.

1. Most modern cities are divided: separating the rich and the poor, concealing racial segregation by relating to the city’s different neighborhoods in terms borrowed from folklore: “colorful,” “authentic,” “unique” etc. Hoods and slums are naturalized as the lower ends of the town, while gated communities or otherwise rich parts, are similarly seen as a natural urban development. Inequality, separatism, classism, and racism are translated into and masked by imaginary urban geographical terminology. This is true for modern, western cities: Paris, London, Los Angeles, Berlin, Toronto, NYC, and many more. But unlike these and other cities, Jerusalem is divided at the core. It is geographically divided into two, with one part (the West) serving as the location for all Israeli government activities since 1948 and the other side (the East) occupied since 1967, but in no way integrated. Access to Jewish holy sites is well maintained for both sides, but this by imposing military sanctions and policing on the majority of the native population (Palestinians). In short, the logic of so called unification is one of increasing maximum mobility rights to Israeli Jews in the occupied Palestinian populated areas while providing minimum resident rights to Palestinians in turn. Jerusalem is a city that emblematizes partition as such. Divided, it divides. And the more it is said to be unified, the more divided it is.  For the unification is not about unity but about militarized colonial control. A city that is colonized and occupied cannot be unified but by force.

2. It is no secret that within the borders of pre-1967 Israel/Palestine the population (of Israeli citizens) is already sharply divided: there are Jewish Israeli citizens (“full citizens”) and there are Palestinian Israeli citizens who, to borrow Homi Bhabha’s language from another colonial context, “are almost the same but not quite” (Bhaba, “Of the Mimicry of Man,” The Location of Culture,  1994: p. 86). In short, pre-1967 Israel is a partitioned nation, whereby the divided populations (Arab Palestinians and Jews) live radically apart. After 1967, with Israel conquering the West Bank, Golan Heights, East Jerusalem and Gaza, the status of partition becomes even more pronounced. If the divide between Jewish and Palestinian Israeli citizens was sharp and decisive in itself, the new geo-political reality created a further and even more dramatic partition between citizens (Israeli) and non-citizens (Palestinians residing in the occupied territories). The one place where all these divisions, partitions, inequalities, and symbolic demarcations come into play all at once is Jerusalem. Here you find, primarily on the West side, Israeli Jewish citizens and in lesser numbers, Palestinian Israeli citizens. While on the East side, (with the exception of about 200,000 Jewish settlers with citizenship, who are there to “Judaize” East Jerusalem), you find mainly Palestinian non-citizens: non-citizens living in the claimed capital of the only democracy in the Middle East. Politically speaking, then, close to a fourth of the residents of Jerusalem are in fact ghosts. They live in a capital (a city in which they are residing as if by mercy) of a nation to which they do not belong (they are non-citizens). While many have lived in East Jerusalem for generations, in 1967 they became non-citizens with temporary residence (since 1967, over 14,000 Palestinians have lost their residency): they are not-quite there.

3. Truthfully speaking, Jerusalem was never unified. Once it was partitioned in 1948 it remained so, despite (or maybe due to) the repeated declaration of its unification. Split in two, with a modern light rail train crossing in the middle, Jerusalem is the mirror through which Israel’s true nature as apartheid state becomes visible to all. The impossibility of this city reminds us that there is no “Jerusalem” but “Jerusalems” and that “Israel” too, acquires its coherence and unity only on the basis of making Palestine and Palestinians forgotten, erased.

4. To speak today of “Jerusalem,” then, is to continue to propel an image of coherence and unity that has never existed. Since 1967, Israel has been celebrating the unification of Jerusalem. But what is celebrated, especially in the last few years, when the unification parties have become so extravagant and visibly excessive, is not unification. What is celebrated with flashy lights, music, flags and fireworks is the militarized presence of Israel all over East Jerusalem: in the gates to the Old City, in the alleys, by the train, by the universities and schools. What is celebrated in other words, is the Occupation. And the celebration of power is itself a sight of power and a vulgar demonstration of dominance displayed all across East Jerusalem. This is not the sight of unity being celebrated. It is a sight of colonial aggression.

  • Photo Credit: Lisa Nessan. A woman walks along the Jerusalem separation wall.

5. The so-called “unified Jerusalem” is primarily a rhetorical manipulation. But it is also an urban experiment in unifying geography while keeping populations apart. Jerusalem, then, cannot be Israel’s capital, even if Trump fancy’s so, because there is no one Jerusalem. The city that speaks its fragmentation and divide so clearly and loudly cannot be forced into coherence because “cities” do not cohere. Only people do.

6. After occupying East Jerusalem in 1967, the Israeli state did the only thing it knows how to do when it comes to Palestinians: it pretended the population didn’t exist or that it would soon somehow miraculously disappear. Instead of fostering real and meaningful unity between residents of East Jerusalem and West Jerusalem, between Israeli Jews and Palestinians, the Israeli state invested in a futile goal: unite land, not people. And when land could not be united because of people, Israel built a wall. In 2002 a mighty and ugly separation wall cut through neighborhoods in East Jerusalem and placed areas and populations previously “in” Jerusalem on the other side of the Wall. People who were residents one day, could no longer enter the city the other. We now have at least three Jerusalems, each in a different position vis-à-vis the Wall.

7. Unified Jerusalem is a myth. The very term masks and covers a politics of extreme divide and inequality. West Jerusalem and East Jerusalem may be connected nowadays by a fast train but the division between citizens and non-citizens, those who enjoy water and other services and those who are cut off from municipal services, cannot be overcome by any such simple means of connectivity.

  • Jerusalem-Bethlehem militarized checkpoint with sign: "Love and Peace."
    Photo Credit: Ted Swedenberg. Jerusalem-Bethlehem militarized checkpoint with sign: “Love and Peace.”

8. Jerusalem today is an ill place. A lab for social hostilities. A city surrounded by walls, divided by walls. Jerusalem, “a holy city” as they say, is the end result of a politics of partition, colonial aggression, and ethno-national separatism. No place on earth could be less suitable to be called “unified,” no place on earth less qualified to be(come) a capital. The matter here is not how holy the city is for Jews, Christian, Muslims or others. These debates, important as they may be, simply mask the fact that, at present, too many of the city’s inhabitants are discriminated against and kept apart in order for the city itself to be celebrated as unified.

9. Last year, during the 49th anniversary of “unified Jerusalem” (yerushaliam ha-meochedet) as it is called in Hebrew, Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu announced: “It has been 49 years since Jerusalem has been released from its shackles. We shall never go back to a reality of a wounded and torn apart city (ir sh’sua’ v’ptzua’)!”

10. This year, in response to Trump’s endorsement of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, Nir Barkat, mayor of Jerusalem had this to say in defense of Jerusalem’s unified status: “I talk to Palestinians living in East Jerusalem and I can tell you, they want to live in unified Jerusalem, they understand what is best for them, they compare themselves to others living anywhere in the middle east and they realize they are much better off with Israel.”

Through such a thick colonial mindset (knowing what is better for the occupied and for the city itself) even a city so brutally divided, and a reality so antagonistic, violent and unjust, can seem “unified.”  It is this blinding power of the colonial enterprise that must be combated for the residents of a city which is not one (and which under current circumstances cannot become one) to be seen and heard equally, across walls and divisions which cannot be cheaply done away with.

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Gil Hochberg
Gil Hochberg is Ransford Professor of Hebrew, Comparative Literature, and Middle East Studies at Columbia University. Her research focuses on the intersections among psychoanalysis, postcolonial theory, nationalism, gender and sexuality. She has published essays on a wide range of issues including: Francophone North African literature, Palestinian literature, Hebrew literature, the modern Levant, Semitism, Israeli and Palestinian Cinema and art. Her first book, In Spite of Partition: Jews, Arabs, and the Limits of Separatist Imagination (Princeton University Press, 2007), examines the complex relationship between the signifiers “Arab” and “Jew” in contemporary Jewish and Arab literatures. Her most recent book, Visual Occupations: Vision and Visibility in a Conflict Zone (Duke University Press, 2015), is a study of the visual politics of the Israeli-Palestinian. She is currently writing a book on art, archives, and the production of knowledge.
Global Currents article

Gold-Plated Jerusalem


Photo Credit: Bon Adrien. Jerusalem Old Town Market, with children playing in the background.

Like many Jews around the world, every morning I engage in a somewhat arcane ritual of placing leather boxes on my forehead and arm containing scriptural verses handwritten carefully by a scribe and, among other things, I pray for the flourishing of Jerusalem. And quite often, along with many Jews, Christians, Muslims, and others, I hope for a peaceful resolution to the conflict of Israel/Palestine, including Jerusalem. Am I praying and hoping for the same thing? Is praying and hoping the same thing? The same Jerusalem?

After the Six-Day War in 1967 Israeli poet Naomi Shemer wrote a song entitled “Jerusalem of Gold” celebrating the beauty of a city that many Israelis and Jews considered “liberated” and “unified.” Songs, like poems, are more often aspirational than a reflection of a messy political reality. “Jerusalem of Gold” became a classic. But what Jerusalem does it represent? Whose Jerusalem does it represent?

From 1948 until 1967 Jerusalem was truly a divided city; the western half part of Israel, the eastern half part of Jordan. The Six-Day War did not unify the city; in some way it re-instated its divided status, putting both halves, still divided, under one sovereign. There are segregated cities and divided cities. Boston in the 1960s and 1970s was largely a segregated city. Jerusalem is a divided one. East and west today have separate bus systems, school systems, separate sanitation collection, even separate mail delivery systems. Western Jerusalem is a Jewish city, eastern Jerusalem a Muslim city; in the west the lingua franca is Hebrew, in the east, Arabic. Those in the west, most of whom are relative newcomers but view the city as the fulfillment of their religious and national aspirations, largely see the city as theirs, those in the east, many of whose families have lived in Jerusalem for generations, see it as theirs. The illusion of a unified city in Shemer’s “Jerusalem of Gold” is just that; an illusion. That is, if we understand the question of unity to be more complex than simply power. In the real world, west Jerusalem is the capital of Israel; east Jerusalem is a city in waiting. Jerusalem the holy city is in exile.

Photo Credit: Bradley Howard. Dividing wall in Jerusalem/Gaza.

From the halls of the Israeli Parliament to the fresh cut lawns of American Jewish summer camps, one hears the refrain that Jerusalem is the capital of “the Jewish people.” This is an interesting assertion. First, as my colleague Liora Halperin noted in a Facebook post, the Jewish people do not have a capital because the Jewish people are not a nation-state. Israel is not the state of the Jewish People, even if you maintain it is a Jewish state, largely because about half of the world’s Jews choose not to live there. Like every nation-state, Israel is state of its citizens. Second, Jerusalem is certainly the holiest site of the Jewish people, the center of its homeland, and the place of its longing. But as Hannah Arendt noted in her 1947 essay “To Save the Jewish Homeland,” a homeland is not a state and, in fact, a state may undermine a homeland. Homelands too are aspirational, states by definition often destroy aspirations. As Franz Rosenzweig suggested, homelands, or holy lands, are places of longing. In states longing too often is buried in the messiness of injustice and inequality. Finally, Jerusalem in the Jewish imagination was not limited to a place, much less a state, but also traditionally functioned as a marker of robust Jewish life in the Diaspora. Thus Vilna was called “The Jerusalem of Lithuania,” and Lublin “The Jerusalem of Poland,” etc. If you look at the “real” Jerusalem, the city behind the theology, which is, as Israeli poet Yehudah Amichai so pointedly put in his poem, “Tourists,” the place where “A man buys fruits and vegetables for his family,” Jerusalem is a divided city where a significant portion of its inhabitants (not of all whom are even citizens) do not even recognize the sovereignty which that capital represents.

What drives the rhetoric of “Jerusalem as the eternal capital of Israel” is the erasure of a divide separating aspirational theology and Realpolitik. In his 1922 Political Theology, Carl Schmitt argued that modern politics is little more than secularized forms of pre-modern theological precepts. Is Jerusalem a proof of his theory, or an exception? I suggest the latter. The sleight of hand in Schmitt’s thinking is the way secularism serves as a veil, a rational frame that conceals non-rational motives driven by claims founded on theological beliefs. In some way, Zionism may confirm such a theory. Even some of the most secular architects of Zionism claimed that Zionism contains elements of messianism, broadly defined, without which it could not sustain its force or popular appeal. But Jerusalem might be different because in the case of Jerusalem, for Jews at least, the secular veil is not even translucent, it is transparent. It hides nothing. And yet it is precisely in this transparency and in the very claim  of Jerusalem’s unification, that the vulnerable underbelly of Jerusalem is exposed; the erasure of any difference between prayer, and hope, between theologically-based aspirations and the workings of modern statecraft. Israel is not a theocracy, but it, and Jerusalem in particular, is too often theologically justified.

This came through quite clearly in Shmuel Rosner’s recent op-ed in the New York Times “Of Course Jerusalem is Israel’s Capital” (December 5, 2017). Rosner begins with a discussion about the Jerusalem Temple destroyed over 2,000 years ago and the conclusion of the Passover Seder “Next Year in Jerusalem” as “proof” of Jerusalem as the capital of modern-day Israel.  What Rosner doesn’t mention is that the rabbinic tradition relegates the rebuilding of the Temple and collective return of the Jews to the messianic age, which Jews believe is still forthcoming. Nor does he mention that the aspiration “Next Year in Jerusalem” is theological rather than political: Jews celebrating Passover and Yom Kippur in Jerusalem also say “Next Year in Jerusalem” (some say “the re-built Jerusalem”).

It is not insignificant that the 1947 U.N. Partition Plan that created the state of Israel and is so often used by pro-Israelis to justify its international status establishes Jerusalem as an “international regime…to be administered by the United Nations Trusteeship Council.” This declaration was made with full knowledge of the complexity of Jerusalem and perhaps recognition of the inability to disentangle it from its theological and aspirational status, at least in the initial stages of statecraft.

Photo Credit: BDNEGIN. Old and New Jerusalem

This nuance seemed lost in President Trump’s declaration of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. But such nuance was understood quite well by the likes of Shmuel Rosner and Prime Minister Netanyahu. For Rosner it fortified the permanent erasure of theology and politics and in doing so made the former a handmaiden to the latter. The danger here is that when there is no distinction between prayer and hope, between an aspirational Jerusalem and a divided city, God becomes no more than a means to human power and religion a Machiavellian church. For Prime Minister Netanyahu the primary victory is the erasure of “east” and “west” thereby “unifying” a city not through collective bargaining but by the political will of a global power. In this sense, Jerusalem is now under the sovereignty of the United States. What the Prime Minister gets in return is a case against a Palestinian State since he knows that the Palestinians would never, and arguably should never, accept a state that does not have (east) Jerusalem as its capital. Shortly before his death, Netanyahu’s father Ben Zion Netanyahu responded to the question as to whether his son favors a Palestinian State. The elder Netanyahu responded  “He supports the kind of conditions they would never in the world accept.” President Trump has arguably just confirmed Ben Zion Netanyahu’s prediction.

But if we move beyond the power politics and return to those morning prayers and afternoon hopes, to Schmitt’s claim about politics and to Jerusalem’s sacred status, we can ask whether using God to rule over others is actually antithetical to praying to God to redeem the world. My point is not to sink into some kind of sentimental piety. Rather it is to suggest that Jerusalem—both aspirational and real—is a great way to enter into the mosh pit of religion and politics, a great counter example to Schmitt that affirms his principle while challenging his assessment of the secular. Jerusalem is theology all the way down, and Trump just affirmed that this is sufficient to undermine the contemporary Palestinian narrative and make a geo-political claim of ownership. In this sense, Trump’s declaration is certainly Schmittean.

But if we want to take theology in another direction then we might suggest the very opposite of what has transpired. One of history’s great purveyors of Jerusalem is, of course, the prophet Isaiah. Isaiah prophesied,

Even them will I bring to My holy mountain, And make them joyful in My house of prayer; Their burnt-offerings and their sacrifices Shall be acceptable upon Mine altar; For My house shall be called A house of prayer for all peoples (Is. 56:7).

Rosner’s inclusion of the Jerusalem Temple only goes half way. If it’s the Temple upon which Jerusalem is based (and that is how Rosner begins his op-ed) then it is not about sovereignty, certainly not only about sovereignty, it is also, perhaps primarily, about inclusivity. This is the prayer. And the hope.

In the 1980s Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, architect of the Jewish Renewal movement penned an “Open Letter to Teddy Kollek,” then mayor of Jerusalem. In his letter he made the case for the internationalization of Jerusalem as an expression of aspiration where prayer and hope could co-exist. For Jerusalem to be truly “unified” it should be “internationalized.” This kind of unification is the submission of human sovereignty to that which lies beyond, or inside, it. Not using theology as a handmaiden of human power but human power as a handmaiden of theology. Where theology could serve a humanizing function, what Martin Buber called “Hebrew Humanism.”

The tragedy in President Trump’s Jerusalem decision is that its ostensible obviousness belies its destructive potential, and not only in regards to violent protest or political fallout. Rather, it undermines the sacrality of Jerusalem for three religions, essentially relegating it only to one. As Isaiah saw it, that exclusivity undermines Jerusalem’s sacredness. As a lover of gold, Trump has inadvertently undermined Shemer’s song and given us a cheaper version: a gold-plated Jerusalem. Shemer saw a vision of the future even though it was still an illusion; Trump abandoned any spiritual vision for the cheaper shininess of the now.

I affirm all Judaism’s religious claims to Jerusalem. And I affirm all Islam’s religious claims to Jerusalem. And Christian claims. And I reject all of them as leverage to the modern secular nation-state called Israel. I can live with my prayer and my hope as having two separate objects. Jerusalem, a city divided, and the Jerusalem that aspires one day to be unified. But I can only tolerate the “unification” of my prayer and my hope if such unification maintains the object of my prayer as an integral part of the object of my hope. The U.N. Partition Plan made “internationalization” an exercise in pragmatism. They likely did not have Isaiah 56 in mind. But I do. And it is my prayer and my hope that moving forward, Isaiah’s words will once again be heard from the City of Peace, not as a triumphalist claim of sovereignty but as a true call for “unification.” Only then can the holy city of Jerusalem truly be a capital of anything.

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Shaul Magid
Shaul Magid teaches Modern Judaism at Harvard Divinity School and is a senior research fellow at the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard. His latest books are Meir Kahane: The Public Life and Political Thought of an American Jewish Radical (Princeton University Press, 2021), and The Necessity of Exile: Essays from a Distance (New York: Ayin Press, 2023). He is an elected member of the American Academy for Jewish Research and the American Society for the Study of Religion.
Field Notes article

The Names of God: Pluralism’s Civic and Theological Frameworks


Photo Credit: Eduardo M. C. A boy rides past election advertising for Jokowi and Ahok in Jakarta in December 2013.

Sources of Authority

In the context of Indonesia, pluralism is actually a deeply and widely shared value. After all, it is an idea that lies at the origin of Indonesian nationalism and nation-building (Indonesia’s national motto is “Unity in Diversity,” Bhinneka Tunggal Ika). So, any meaningful approach and understanding of pluralism in contemporary modern Indonesia, in my view, has to start from the authority or framework of this ethical nationalism. This is not the narrow nationalism wherein the self is defined against the other. Rather the ethical nationalism of Indonesia is marked by inclusivity, pluralism, and hybridity. Authentic or ethical nationalism seems to be a language of pluralism that has the highest degree of normativity and acceptability in Indonesian society, across many religious or ethnic groupings. Indonesian nationalism is in fact a modern construct, but it has come to be rooted in the common experience of many groups within the nation, and over time it has accumulated affective or emotional status among most contemporary Indonesians. It has become crucial ‘social and cultural’ capital for the life of the nation. This affective or emotional aspect of nationalism is extremely important as a unifying force, especially when heated and polarizing debates or contentions occur on many aspects in the life of the nation.

The second source of authority, one that is becoming more crucial yet remains highly sensitive and underdeveloped, is theological reasoning. Indonesians in general are religious and take theology (religious doctrines and the theological foundations of their community) very seriously. For most of them, religious or theological doctrines are not just “communal consensus” that stem from historical contingencies. Rather, they have a much closer connection with a Divine reference (God’s Revelation). In recent years, thanks chiefly to the internet and digital culture, public theological discourses are mushrooming in Indonesia. Lay people debate and discuss theological topics. Even without proper educational credentials in religious matters, such as degrees from traditional Islamic boarding schools (pesantren) or Islamic theological colleges, people are quite forthcoming about their theological opinions. The situation can be chaotic, although some good theology does emerge from these discussions.

Here, I would like to offer some notes on the suitability of the term  “pluralism.” In some circles of Indonesian (mainly Muslim) society, the term “pluralism” (Indonesian: pluralisme) has a rather suspicious connotation. It is perceived to be a suspect Western concept and ideology. Especially in the field of religion, the term “religious pluralism” is at times understood not as a sheer fact of life, but rather a Western ideology of sanctioning the rights of any religion or religious community to exist, with all their claims to truth and legal recognition. Thus, in the minds of some people, it is connected to the idea of religious relativism that gives every religion the right to exist and to claim theological truth. In this regard, the term “religious pluralism” is understood too narrowly as a (Western) position that relativizes theological truths in unacceptable ways (akin to the pluralist position in the theology of religions). However, the situation changes dramatically when the Indonesian word “keragaman” is used. This term has roughly the same meaning (that is, diversity or pluralism), but without the above negative connotation. This is the case because “keragaman” (or, “kebhinekaan”) belongs to the basic concept of Indonesian nationhood (Bhinneka Tunggal Ika), that is, the authority of Indonesian nationalism mentioned above. So, whenever possible, it is better to use this indigenous terminology than the Western one.

 

A Case in Point

Photo Credit: Izzy. Photo of a “Free Ahok” protest, May 9, 2017.

In this regard, the case surrounding Mr Basuki Tjahaya Purnama (Ahok) in the last Jakarta Gubernatorial Election in late 2016 and early 2017 provides some insight and I would like to use it to highlight the need to talk about pluralism by using the framework of ethical nationalism as well as theological reasoning.

Considered unfair and politically motivated by many, the verdict against Mr Basuki (two years in prison) has led to an unprecedented civic movement in support of him. This movement quickly morphed into a larger movement involving diverse religious groupings beyond the narrow Muslim-Christian tension, and in support of the ideal of the nation, that is, unity rooted in pluralism (Indonesian: kebhinekaan). Very interestingly, it has given rise as well to ‘theological reasoning’ among scholars of different religious persuasions. An important line of these theological reflections is the need to develop a theology of love or mercy (based on the idea of God as the Merciful) that takes into account the specificity of the current Indonesian context.

In a way, the naming of God has become a public discourse in Indonesia most recently, particularly in the aftermath of the Jakarta gubernatorial election, as shown by a flurry of articles on the theme in major newspapers, such as Kompas Daily.[1]  The aforementioned civic and peaceful movement is a public expression of the idea of the merciful God and Islam as God’s blessing and grace for the whole universe.  Ahmad Syafi’i Maarif, one of Indonesia’s most respected Muslim scholars and leaders, categorically says:

Based on my limited knowledge of Islam, I have come to the conclusion: the most inclusive framework for Islam is “Islam as rahmatan lil’alamin” (God’s mercy for the whole universe), not only for believers, but for the whole of humanity, even for the universe. So, everything has to be put in this framework. Otherwise, it is deviant.

In particular Maarif speaks against a misguided “Arabism” as well as the theology of death (misguided martyrdom) that lies behind religious violence and fundamentalism. This style of Islam is at odds with the merciful and universal Islam that, among others, can accommodate local realities, including the ideals of Indonesian nationalism. For him, Islam in Indonesia has not been consistently practiced as a universal blessing (or mercy) for non-Muslims as well as for the universe. He contends that this is more of a problem for the Muslim community itself where internal conflicts and divisions are rife. What we see here is the growing awareness among Muslim theologians on the need to understand God as Merciful, and Islam as God’s mercy for all. So, there is an awareness of the theological nature of the problem, namely, the way we name God and the implication of this naming on our life together, beyond the confines of our own religious communities.

The current divisiveness and tensions in Indonesian society have raised serious concerns and doubts for many about the hybridity of its cultural traditions and the open-mindedness of its people. In this regard, a properly theological account of God’s mercy might provide a theological framework that can account for these pluralities and particularities more deeply, something that would appeal to religious believers when it is worked out properly, that is, when they see that this account comes from the authenticity of their religious tradition. In this regard, diverse religious scholars have begun to reflect on the need to give a proper place to the inclusive state ideology of Pancasila within their religious traditions. One can say that in the current religio-political life in Indonesia, the naming of God becomes a public discourse geared toward a theology of inclusivity that can be based on the idea of God as Merciful. There is a growing agreement that a responsible naming of God in the current Indonesian context has to meet this demand of inclusivity. Indonesian nationhood has been hailed as the framework of the common good for all religious communities. Thus, this non-theological category has actually become a category of public and civic theology of inclusivity, including the theology of God as Mercy. A constructive theology done by religious communities together, in ways that are still possible, can push this process further so as to bring fruits that the ever-changing Indonesian society needs. A contextual comparative theology, such as a Muslim-Christian theology of mercy, might have a role in this process.

Photo credit: Anton Muhajir. Pancasila Monument, Indonesia.

Beyond the context of Indonesia, in my view, our time is a crucial moment in history where Christians and Muslims are at a critical juncture of their religious journey, as they are challenged to have a better understanding of who God is. This is a deeply theological moment. The turns of events in the world have challenged Christianity and Islam in their respective understanding of God. Here the understanding of God as Merciful presents itself in both traditions as particularly rich, which can adequately respond to the challenge of our time. Along this line of thinking, Muslim-Christian comparative theological discourse on God as Merciful can bring these communities together in their response to the challenge. As Pope Francis suggests, Christians and Muslims can name their God together, and comparative theology provides a possible avenue for this.

In Indonesia, a number of individual Muslim thinkers, such as Ahmad Syafi’i Maarif, Quraish Shihab, Alwi Shihab, Haidar Bagir[2], and Zuhairi Misrawi, have begun the works of reflecting on the nature of God in terms of love and mercy. A similar enterprise has also been done by major Muslim organizations and institutions. For example, the Nahdlatul Ulama has determined to embark on a long-term mission of restoring the notion of Islam [the Quran and the Prophet Muhammad] as a blessing for the whole universe, an understanding based on the more fundamental notion of God as ar-Rahman ar-Rahim, the Most Gracious and Merciful.

On the Catholic side, any discourse on mercy recently cannot be separated from what Pope Francis has been doing in the past few years, namely, emphasizing the message of God as Mercy that has become the hallmark of his papacy.[3] But his works on mercy are not done in isolation. Mercy has been a central work in Christian theology in general, and a few contemporary Catholic theologians have done work on the theme, among others Walter Kasper, from whom Pope Francis also drew some major inspirations.[4] What Pope Francis has achieved is giving new impetus, a sense of urgency, to this movement of naming God as Mercy beyond the confines of the Church, as he encourages interreligious reflection on God as the Merciful together with Jews and Muslims.

 

Conclusion

In order to work in the context of plural Indonesian society, the theological framework of naming God has to be done in the spirit of collaboration among thinkers and theologians belonging to different religious communities in line with the nationalist framework above. I believe that with these two frameworks and sources of authority (ethical nationalism and theology of God as Merciful), tolerance will be understood as a civic virtue that is also rooted in a proper understanding of who God is, the Merciful One, particularly among Muslims and Christians. Especially in the context of agonistic pluralism, this civic and theological virtue of tolerance will prove to be helpful, but again it needs to be translated into a larger and sustained civil movement.

 

[1] See, for example, Kompas 15 Juni 2017 on the seminar on tolerance and religious pluralism; also Kompas May 17, 2017 that publishes an article by Asep Salahudin on the notion of hubb or mahhabah. He argues that love is the core (seed) of religion, of life, of worship, citing Rumi’s famous verse: Love is an ocean without shores.

[2] Cfr. Haidar Bagir, Islam: The Faith of Love and Happiness (forthcoming, Kube Publishing Limited);  See also his various popular works on Rumi and Ibn Arabi, which are also centered around the idea of love, such as Risalah Cinta dan Kebahagiaan (Bandung: Mizan, 2012); Belajar Hidup dari Rumi: Serpihan-Serpihan Puisi Penerang Jiwa (Jakarta: Noura Books, 2015);  Mereguk Cinta Rumi: Serpihan-Serpihan Puisi Pelembut Jiwa (Jakarta: Noura Books, 2016); Semesta Cinta: Pengantar kepada Pemikiran Ibn ‘Arabi (Mizan, 2015).

[3] Cfr. two most recent works of Pope Francis on mercy, Misericordia Vultus (the Bull of Indiction of the Extraordinary Jubilee of Mercy) and his interview with journalist Andrea Tornielli, The Name of God is Mercy (Bluebird Books for Life, 2016).

[4] See various recent works by Walter Kasper on mercy, such as Mercy: The Essence of the Gospel and the Key to Christian Life (Paulist Press, 2013) and “Mercy – The Name of Our God,” Louvain Studies 39/3 (2015-2016): 205-217.

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Albertus Bagus Laksana
Albertus Bagus Laksana teaches at Sanata Dharma University in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. He received his PhD in comparative theology from Boston College (2011) with a focus on Muslim-Christian encounters. Previously he was educated at the Weston Jesuit School of Theology, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and was a postdoctoral fellow at Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles. His research interests and publications include topics in Muslim-Christian comparative theology and theology of religions, mission studies, theology and culture, and Asian theologies. His most recent publications include the monograph Muslim and Catholic Pilgrimage Practices: Explorations Through Java (Ashgate, 2014) and some chapters in Ritual Participation and Interreligious Dialogue: Boundaries Transgressions and Innovations, in M. Moyaert and J. Geldhof, (Eds.), Bloomsbury, 2015; The Oxford Handbook of Christianity in Asia, in F. Wilfred, (Eds.), Oxford, 2014; The New Comparative Theology: Interreligious Insights from the Next Generation, in F. Clooney (Eds.), Continuum, 2014. He is also the managing editor of BASIS, a cultural journal based in Yogyakarta.
Theorizing Modernities article

‘Not Me, Not That’: Thinking Race and Catholic Modernity


“The political and intellectual history of modernity,” writes historian Robert Orsi, “is also always a religious history.” However, as significant and diverse recent scholarship is now bringing to light, narratives around the political, intellectual, and religious history of modernity often serve not only to illuminate the past, but also to obscure it through the authorization of specific forms of experience and knowledge. 

This symposium, entitled “Decolonizing Narratives, Denaturalizing Modernity,” aims to highlight recent scholarship that complicates received notions around the history of modernity. While focusing on distinct temporal, geographical, and religious contexts, in their shared attempts to uncover histories hidden by the dominant discourses of modernity, the authors featured in this symposium uniformly challenge the naturalization of modernity’s emergence and indicate that the history of modernity has always been (and remains) fundamentally contested. 

Claude McKay (The Crisis Magazine) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Words like “modernity” and “subaltern” can feel one step removed from reality, living out there somewhere in the theoretical ether, as opposed to the empirical here below. In my own work on modern European Catholicism, I have engaged with different subaltern voices throughout the years, but I came late to the topic of race. But once I did, it didn’t just give me a richer, more complex sense of my own field, but also a new perspective on what I teach and why, and where I come from. In other words, subaltern voices are not just about “diversity,” but about approximating a more honest, more rich and enlarged sense of truth and the world, and a more candid reckoning with our own place in it.

For several years, I’ve taught a graduate seminar called “Medieval Modernisms” in the History of Christianity at my Jesuit university. It’s a fairly narrowly focused course, exploring an underworld of Catholic thinkers and activists, mostly writers, artists, theologians, and historians from Europe who charted a unique path through the challenges of modernity in the twentieth-century. From roughly 1920-1960, they were the pioneers who helped lay the foundations for the changes inaugurated at the Second Vatican Council. But they had their sights on issues much broader than just the Church. They worked against the violent logic of xenophobic neo-medievalism that was a prominent part of mainstream Catholic thinking, but they were unusual in that they also resisted the secularizing tendencies of most leftist movements in that period. This network included some fairly well-known scholars, such as the Islamicist Louis Massignon (1883-1962), Dominican theologians like Marie-Dominique Chenu (1895-1990) and Jesuits Henri de Lubac (1896-1991) and his student, Michel de Certeau (1925-1986).

When I prepare the seminar syllabus, I constantly experiment with ways to incorporate minority histories into this movement, while still dealing with key canonical, clerical protagonists, men without whom the story of modernity and Catholicism would be incomprehensible. I don’t always know what I’m doing, and I’ve definitely had some misses, but a few successes too. Archival research, for example, has yielded fabulous discoveries of women who were prominent intellectuals and activists in this circuit, though almost entirely forgotten: Marie-Thérèse d’Alverny (1903-1991), Jeanne Ancelet-Hustache (1901-1990), Mary Kahil (1889-1979), Marie-Madeline Davy (1903-1998), and many more. Including these women has meant that the story shifts from seminaries, parishes, the Vatican, to places such as salons, activist centers, libraries, research institutes, and living rooms to find out where the theological and political action was. Other experiments have included de-centering Catholicism to show how this kind of religious modernism and anti-fascist politics was a sensibility that spanned across religious and intellectual traditions. We’ve been fortunate to host outstanding guest lecturers on twentieth-century secular and Jewish thinkers, such as Mara Benjamin on Franz Rosenzweig and Mara Willard on Hannah Arendt. This semester we’re looking at the life and writings of Muhammad Asad, a writer disillusioned with capitalistic culture in Germany who converted from Judaism to Islam in 1926 (and eventually became father to the anthropologist Talal Asad). When one sticks with the clerical Catholic voices alone, Vatican II (1962-1965) looms too large, and the conversation about religion and modernity becomes more exclusively ecclesial than it was in reality. But from these carefully chosen views from the edges, the story is full of surprises, spinning off into a wider a range of theological and political trajectories, and ultimately giving it a more interesting feel, bringing us closer to its richness and reality.

But, to be honest, it wasn’t until recently that I truly pushed myself to stretch even further and think seriously about race in Medieval Modernisms, the African diaspora in particular. Although I teach on the African diaspora when I do broader undergraduate courses on religion and modernity, for this particular European Catholic network, I sensed that it was not the African-American or broader African experiences as much as neoscholasticism, European authoritarianisms of all kinds, Judaism and even Islam that organized these intellectuals’ lives and work. A long time ago, I literally underlined something Tony Judt said in an interview, quoting Gertrude Stein: “not everything can be about everything.” I felt off the hook.

But like so many Americans, these past two years have changed me. I have come to see that our analysis of modernity and religion, even in a place like Paris, even among Catholic avant-garde intellectuals, will never be complete without race. I’m embarrassed to admit that I arrived here pretty late.

Claude McKay’s “Songs of Jamaica.” From NYPL.

This past year, two terrific sources guided my efforts: Kennetta Hammond Perry and Kira Thurman’s excellent “Black Europe: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” and Leora Auslander’s fabulous website full of incredible syllabi on modern Europe with attention to race, racism, and anti-racists movements from her teaching at the University of Chicago, including several that deal with religion. There are countless ways these materials can and will impact my teaching, but this year I eventually decided, given the particular contours of my class, to focus on Claude McKay (1889-1948), the African-American activist and poet of the Harlem renaissance, a literary star of the first magnitude. McKay was Jamaican born, involved in movements for racial equality in the United States in the 1920s and 1930s, but eventually, like many African-American writers, set sail for Europe. As James Baldwin described it, “Paris, from across the ocean, looked like a refuge from the American madness.” Travelling in Spain and France, McKay joined internationalist, socialist, anti-racist, and anti-colonial activist communities abroad, and at the same time, witnessed a kind of Catholicism there, probably in the peasant piety of Spain, that seemed to him to embody something counter-cultural. According to Madhuri Deshmukh, Catholicism was, in McKay’s mind, the “most explicitly anti-modern of the West’s religions,” revealing the depth of McKay’s final “discontent with modern Western civilization, the slavery, the colonialism, racism, capitalist expansion, technology, and urbanization that were always the underside of its claim to secularism, rationality, enlightenment.” (This is, it should go without saying, McKay’s perception, not a historical fact.) Back in the United States, McKay became a friend of Dorothy Day’s, and the Catholic Worker published some of his poems. McKay made his way to the Friendship House, an interracial apostolate in Chicago, and converted there in the early 1940s.

In our seminar , before we encountered McKay, we had spent weeks thinking about theology, modernity, and politics from the perspective of white European Catholics. We moved through secularism, WWI, the rise of fascism, the Holocaust. Then suddenly Claude McKay’s voice entered the room. The temperature changed. It was still the same conversation, but it shifted entirely. In his 1943 collection of sonnets entitled “The Cycle,” McKay writes:

Lord, let me not be silent while we fight
In Europe Germans, Asia Japanese
For setting up a fascist way of might
While fifteen million Negroes on their knees
Pray for salvation from the Fascist yoke
Of these United States. Remove the beam
(Nearly two thousand years since Jesus spoke)
From your own eyes before the mote you deem
It proper from your neighbor’s to extract!
We bathe our lies in vapors of sweet myrrh,
And close our eyes not to perceive the fact!
But Jesus said: You whited sepulcher,
Pretending to be uncorrupt of sin
While worm-infested, rotten through within!

 

It was a denunciation of the American smug willingness to name, critique, even destroy evil on other shores while being willfully blind to our own. Why were Americans quick to condemn the scapegoating of minorities and authoritarian violence across the ocean and not think about racialized violence and death here? Reading McKay in the context of other subaltern voices—Jewish and female—helped us resist the notion that our empathy depletes as it extends, so it can only be directed at Jewish or black victims but not both, and no more. We read of McKay’s “fifteen million Negroes” alongside the poetry of the Russian Jewish émigré convert Raïssa Maritain, who begged Americans to take seriously what was happening to Jews. One of her poems published also in 1943—the same year as McKay’s—described “4 million Jews—and more —have suffered death without consolation/Those who are left are promised to the slaughter.” McKay expanded our sense of what was happening by seeing our topic from another angle. Who cannot but be moved by both subaltern poets to think harder?

It made me think how I too am part of this story. My own scholarly career has focused entirely on modernity and Catholicism in Europe, and to some degree, probably always will. For an American, there is something deep down more comforting in thinking about xenophobia and slaughter on someone else’s shores, lifting up their heroes, pondering the lessons over there. Of course, this was never a conscious decision but the result of years of cumulative courses, books, papers. Has this all excised me from the history of my country, my past, my entanglements with racialized violence? As I was thinking through all this, I also listened to my colleague Bryan Massingale’s incredible talk on race and social justice in Jesuit schools. Racial justice conversations keep “limping along,” in sad fits and starts, Massingale argues, because the priority has always been white comfort and the protection of white feelings, at the expense of truth. It made me think that the study of Catholic European xenophobia and resistance has been, oddly, a way to stoke comforting feelings. Words from my friend Mary Dunn’s new book on early modern Catholic piety and motherhood suddenly appeared: “Not me. Not that.” These lines are in Dunn’s final, beautiful chapter, drawing on Julia Kristeva’s notion of subject formation as a process that depends on the logic of expelling abjection from the self. Was focusing on European Catholic modernity, violence, and resistance a way to say of America’s terrible shame, not me, not that?

Reading McKay helped me see that the American willingness to condemn–even at great risk to one’s own safety—European fascism while ignoring, or even abetting, racial violence at home is part of my own family history. My grandfather, Henry Moore, was a WWII pilot who flew 50 successful B52 missions over Italy and Romania. After the war, he and my grandmother, Mary Moore, rented an apartment outside of Youngstown, Ohio, and he worked in one of the steel mills. My grandfather eventually worked his way up in a machinery company in Youngstown and eventually Michigan. A working class son of Irish parents, he was also, perhaps unexpectedly, a voracious reader and something of a self-taught intellectual. He loved Milton, the poems of Dickenson, and in some ways, was ahead of his time. He advocated for universal healthcare. When I was a freshman in college, he sent me a typed letter encouraging me to continue in my budding interests in “comparative religion,” not exactly typical Irish working-class advice. I was touched, and saved the letter. But a bizarre amount of his studies was fueled by vile, racist vitriol. Not unconscious bias “of the time,” but active loathing and resentment. I remember when I was a teenager he asked me to take a look at an organized set of handwritten notes and charts he had been compiling in a notebook. I checked it out. He was deep in a research project comparing the efficacy of different postal branches. The working thesis was that a higher percentage of African American postal carriers corresponded to higher rates of late and lost mail. White carriers delivered mail on time.

My grandfather’s life embodied the way that many Irish proved their Americanness by emphasizing their whiteness and joining the Anglo cause of racial violence against blacks. We are not them, they are not us. I thought too of something Raïssa Maritain wrote in her journal as an adult, after learning about the depth of her Jewish heritage–something she had never truly considered (she was a convert to Catholicism): “I have all of that in my blood, all of that’s behind me.” Irish American racism: all of that in my blood...

So it was Claude McKay’s beautiful and tragic poetry that helped me think hard about my own gaze across the Atlantic, to the place where I first went at age 16, to Spain, to escape my high school, where I’ve kept returning, in my thoughts and in my words and in my deeds, and even now, with my own kids usually in tow. Claude McKay brought something more powerful and poignant than words like “modernity,” “subaltern,” or “diversity,” left in the abstract, can suggest. He brought me an enlarged, more capacious sense of truth, of reality, of the world, and also brought me back down to earth, the earth under my own feet. Yes me, yes that.

 

Further reading

Guillaume Aubert, “’The Blood of France’: Race and Purity of Blood in the French Atlantic World,” William & Mary Quarterly, 51 (July 2004), 439-478.

Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize: The Republican Idea of Empire in France and West Africa, 1895-1930 (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1997).

Wayne Cooper. Claude McKay: Rebel Sojourner in the Harlem Renaissance. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1987.

Matthew Cressler, Authentically Black and Truly Catholic: The Rise of Black Nationalism in the Great Migration (NYU, 2017).

Madhuri Deshmukh, “Claude McKay’s Road to Catholicism,” Callaloo 37.1 (2004) 148-168.

Félix F. Germain Decolonizing the Republic: African and Caribbean Migrants in Postwar Paris, 1946-1974 (Michigan State University Press, 2016).

Paul Gilroy. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Harvard University Press, 1993).

T.S. Eliot, “Catholicism and International Order.” Essays, Ancient and Modern. (Harcourt, 1936).

Caroline Ford, Creating the Nation in Provincial France: Religion and Political Identity in Brittany (Princeton University Press, 1993).

Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (Routledge, 2008).

Minkah Makalani, In the Cause of Freedom: Radical Black Internationalism from Harlem to London, 1917-1939  (University of North Carolina Press, 2014).

John T. McGreevey, “Race and the Immigrant Church,” Parish Boundaries: The Catholic Encounter with Race in the Twentieth-Century Urban North (University of Chicago, 1996).

Claude McKay, The Oxford Anthology of African-American Poetry, ed. Rampersad (Oxford, 2006).

Lynn T. Ramey, Black Legacies: Race and the European Middle Ages (University Press of Florida, 2014).

Tyrone Tillery, Claude McKay: A Black Poet’s Struggle for Identity (U of Massachusetts, 1992).

William Shack, Harlem in Montmarte: A Paris Jazz Story between the Great Wars (University of California Press, 2001).

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

Forget Pinkwashing, its Brownwashing Time: Self-Orientalizing on the US Campus


A banner for the Columbia University Students Supporting Israel 2017 "Hebrew Liberation Week: A Celebration of Semitism."
Photo credit: Gil Hochberg. A banner for the Columbia University Students Supporting Israel 2017 “Hebrew Liberation Week: A Celebration of Semitism.”

“The political and intellectual history of modernity,” writes historian Robert Orsi, “is also always a religious history.” However, as significant and diverse recent scholarship is now bringing to light, narratives around the political, intellectual, and religious history of modernity often serve not only to illuminate the past, but also to obscure it through the authorization of specific forms of experience and knowledge. 

This symposium, entitled “Decolonizing Narratives, Denaturalizing Modernity,” aims to highlight recent scholarship that complicates received notions around the history of modernity. While focusing on distinct temporal, geographical, and religious contexts, in their shared attempts to uncover histories hidden by the dominant discourses of modernity, the authors featured in this symposium uniformly challenge the naturalization of modernity’s emergence and indicate that that the history of modernity has always been (and remains) fundamentally contested. 

It is the ninth week for me as a new professor at Columbia University. The move here from UCLA, where I taught for fifteen years, has been full of surprises, and not always of the kind one expects. But nothing prepared me for the sight I encountered recently as I crossed the main plaza of the college on the way to class to teach Edward Said’s Orientalism to a large group of MESAAS (Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies) majors. I was thinking about how best to make them see the political relevance of Orientalism to our present-day reality, and just then, as if by divine intervention, I noticed a flyer: “Hebrew Liberation Week: A Celebration of Semitism.” Curiously I approached the plaza. After all, I was about to teach Said’s discussion of Semitism as an invented 19th century orientalist category and this seemed relevant. I soon faced three tall poles mounted with Israeli flags and was surrounded by about a dozen of young men and women wearing kaffiyehs (a checkered scarf, which has long been a symbol of Palestinian national liberation) that were blue and white (the colors of the Israeli flag). “Things don’t look right,” I noted to myself. But it was only when I noticed the bombastic billboards covering the borders of the plaza that the effect became truly chilling.

Photo credit: Gil Hochberg. SSI 2017 "Hebrew Liberation Week" poster of a person in indigenous headdress with "Judah" written across the chest.
Photo credit: Gil Hochberg. SSI 2017 “Hebrew Liberation Week” poster of a person in Plains Indians-style headdress of a lion with “Judah” written across the chest.

First I saw a large portrait of a Native American wearing a traditional headdress, with the word “Judah” written across it.

Another banner, shown above, presented a group of men in indigenous dress with a bearded man in a tallith (a white prayer shawl worn by Jewish men) placed right in the center among them.

There is, of course, nothing wrong in suggesting an alliance between Jews and Indigenous people, and in the context of Jews living in Europe and elsewhere as “inside outsiders” and as part of internal European colonization (too much has been written about “The Jewish Question” for me to summarize here) it indeed makes sense to compare and point out similarities between the position of Jews as a fragile minority and the position of other oppressed groups, like the indigenous, colonized, enslaved, and more. However, placing such images underneath the Israeli flag makes them, at best, tasteless depictions of a pseudo alliance. Suggesting, as the posters do, that Jews have been driven out of their land (like indigenous people) and have finally returned to Israel–a trajectory that all indigenous people should unite behind–is a crude and cynical manipulation of (Jewish) history and a vulgar fabrication that not only makes no sense, but is also offensive in its use and abuse of indigenous peoples’ histories of oppression.

Photo credit: Gil Hochberg. SSI 2017 "Hebrew Liberation Week" poster of Philippino-Israeli IDF soldiers.
Photo credit: Gil Hochberg. SSI 2017 “Hebrew Liberation Week” poster of Philippino-Israeli IDF soldiers.

Indigenous people are not the only ones exploited in this campaign, run by SSI (Students Supporting Israel). SSI is the new kid on the block of campus hasbara groups (only five years old) but this kid is well funded by the usual suspects. A notable amount of the $319,598 in 2015 contributions SSI reported on tax forms comes, for instance, from the Milstein Family Foundation, which also supports CAMERA, Stand with Us, Hasbara Fellowships, and other right-wing Israel advocates. The mission of SSI, as their webpage indicates, is “to be a clear and confident Pro-Israel voice on college campuses,” and for this mission, they even offer scholarships for students “to visit Israel and come back to campus ready for action!” Nothing on the webpage, however, mentions what SSI’s current campaign at Columbia University makes clear beyond all doubt: that the organization has decided to shamelessly appropriate histories, narratives, political symbols and imagery of indigenous people, Native Americans, Africans, and even Palestinians for the purpose of producing a fictitious, if colorful, narrative of Jewish indigeneity and self-Orientalization. By Self-Orientalism I mean, in this context, a certain instrumentalization of Orientalism and its stereotypes for the purpose of producing a figure of a modern Jew/Israeli who is at the same time ancient, biblical, Semitic, Oriental. This figure is in fact an updated and improved version of the early Zionist invention of the Occidentalized ‘New Jew.’ If the Occidentalized New Jew was said to bring European civilization and progress to the East, this updated version is no longer associating the Israeli Jew with the West and its promise of modernity and progress. On the contrary, the self-Orientalized Jew/Israeli embraces his/her position as the son/daughter of the East. He/she is the native indigenous of the east (Palestine, the biblical Holy-land, Israel) whose temporality expands from the biblical time to the present.

Photo credit: Gil Hochberg. SSI 2017 "Hebrew Liberation Week" poster of Black and Brown IDF soldiers.
Photo credit: Gil Hochberg. SSI 2017 “Hebrew Liberation Week” poster of Ethiopian IDF soldiers.

As a bold background to the blue and white kaffiyehs being sold on location, there were posters covering the plaza, inundated with images of Brown and Black people and proud Israeli soldiers: Asians (children of mainly Filipin@ guest workers who became Israeli citizens and “won” the opportunity to serve in the Israeli army), Ethiopian Jews, Bedouins, and overtly joyful Druze. If yesterday’s message was that the Israeli army is welcoming of gays*, today’s message is that the IDF is a place where Brown, Black, African, and Arab people all feel happy. Together.

In addition to the soldiers, there are images of Arab-Jews (Mizrahim) who must not be forgotten, not again. Images of Yemeni families, perhaps making their way to the Promised Land, are shown on other banners.

Photo credit: Gil Hochberg. SSI 2017 "Hebrew Liberation Week" banner of Yemeni family.
Photo credit: Gil Hochberg. SSI 2017 “Hebrew Liberation Week” banner of Yemeni family.

One must ask: why a “Brown people campaign”? Or: How did all the Israelis (or Jews, the campaign isn’t clear) become so Brown all of a sudden? (I ask as a very fair Polish Jew!) Why does an organization like SSI feel the need to “celebrate Semitism” and parade Ethiopians, Yemenites, and Druze in order to make historical claims of belonging and ownership? And why the sudden need to create the pretense of a coalition with the indigenous people in North America?

The answers are to be found in the logic of political tactic and not in the realm of a real existential identity transformation. In other words, Orientalism–which here functions also as self-Orientalism–is meant to do political work, masking settler colonialism with the language and images of nativism. But what is the political work of self-Orientalizing? What is gained by associating Zionism with the struggles of Native peoples and people of color? Correctly identifying past and present trends of the liberal and the radical left (the focus of indigenous rights, multiculturalism, and siding with the colonized and the oppressed) SSI disdainfully adopts these characteristics in order to unarm leftist critique. Indeed, if Israelis are indigenous people returning to their colonized lands, their political struggle must be considered valid and progressive.

SSI’s Semitic campaign is based on a simple but dangerous manipulation of historical facts. It abuses the historically ambivalent position of the Jew in the West as not-white-not-quite and the Orientalized modern biblical iconography of the Israelites as prototypical Orientals and Semites to create a narrative of a present-day political hallucination, according to which Jews are the colonized natives fighting for their land. If only this fantasy wasn’t so cynical, offensive and well-funded, we might have had a good laugh.

 

*Pinkwashing is a term by the growing global gay movement against the Israeli occupation to denote Israel’s deliberate strategy to conceal the continuing violations of Palestinians’ human rights behind an image of progressive modernity symbolized by Israeli gay culture. See: Sarah Schulmann, “Israel and ‘Pinkwashing’” Opinion, NYT, Nov 22 2011.

Further Readings:

Self Orientalization:
Grace Yan and Carla Almeida Santos, “China Forever: Tourism Discourse and Self-Orientalism” Annals of Tourism Research, Vol. 36, No. 2, (2009): 295–315.

Matthew Jaber Stiffler “Consuming Orientalism: Public Foodways of Arab American Christians” Mashriq & Mahjar 2, no. 2 (2014): 111-138.

Arif Dirlik, “Chinese History and the Question of Orientalism” History and Theory, Vol. 35, No. 4, (1996): pp. 96-118.

Plamen K. Georgiev. Self-Orientalization in South East Europe. Springer, 2012

Cultural Appropriations:
Yonatan Mendel and Ronald Ranta. From the Arab Other to the Israeli Self: Palestinian Culture in the Making of Israeli National Identity. Routledge, 2016

Nicholas Rowe “Dance and Political Credibility: The Appropriation of Dabkeh by Zionism, Pan-Arabism, and Palestinian Nationalism” Middle East Journal Vol. 65, No. 3 (Summer 2011): 363-380

Susan Slyomovics. The Object of Memory: Arab and Jew Narrate the Palestinian Village. University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998.

Array
Gil Hochberg
Gil Hochberg is Ransford Professor of Hebrew, Comparative Literature, and Middle East Studies at Columbia University. Her research focuses on the intersections among psychoanalysis, postcolonial theory, nationalism, gender and sexuality. She has published essays on a wide range of issues including: Francophone North African literature, Palestinian literature, Hebrew literature, the modern Levant, Semitism, Israeli and Palestinian Cinema and art. Her first book, In Spite of Partition: Jews, Arabs, and the Limits of Separatist Imagination (Princeton University Press, 2007), examines the complex relationship between the signifiers “Arab” and “Jew” in contemporary Jewish and Arab literatures. Her most recent book, Visual Occupations: Vision and Visibility in a Conflict Zone (Duke University Press, 2015), is a study of the visual politics of the Israeli-Palestinian. She is currently writing a book on art, archives, and the production of knowledge.
Field Notes article

Religious Coexistence and Conflict: Reflections on Lombok


Photo Credit: Hansel and Regrettal. Pura Lingsar is a temple in Lombok, Indonesia, where both Balinese Hindus and Wektu Telu Muslims hold religious services.

Questioning Pluralism

The current populist ferment in the United States and Europe is, in part, a reaction against religious and ethnic diversity and the cosmopolitan elites who are seen to promote and benefit from it. What about Indonesia? Can pluralism be more than an elite project? To be sure, the archipelago has a long history of religious, linguistic, and cultural diversity. Our interest in pluralism is provoked, in particular, by the threat of ethnic or religious violence. In Indonesia, peaceful coexistence and cooperation have taken many forms. They do not, however, necessarily depend on taking pluralism as such to be a positive value. Appeals to that value by elites are not likely to gain traction on the ground if they are not informed by local knowledge. That means taking seriously ordinary people’s fears, ethical values, and cosmological beliefs.

 

Violence and Identities

Lombok is home to a Bali-Hindu minority, a Sasak Muslim majority who see them as past oppressors, and smaller numbers of Christian newcomers. The study by Mohamad Abdun Nasir for Contending Modernities asks a crucial question: when does violence not happen? This question rests on another: what conditions lead people on the ground to expect that there will be conflict? And when is violence due to religious difference, rather than, say, economic grievances or just plain criminality? As post-Suharto collective violence was confined to a few localities. Most of the country, including some of the most heterogeneous areas, remained peaceful: it is not so-called primordial identities alone that prompt conflict. Specifying which identities are relevant is not necessarily a straightforward matter. For instance, attacks on Chinese Christians might be about ethnicity, religion, or economics. Motives can change and so will the means of preventing violence.

Webb Keane presents at the Contending Modernities 2017 Jakarta Conference.

Indonesians are involved in both an expanded global imaginary and intensified localism simultaneously. State policies and religious reform movements have led to a hardening of religious boundaries that were once more permeable. In Lombok, for instance, accusations of shirk (polytheism) lead Muslims to abandon religious sites they once shared with Hindus. With contested elections, reified identities can become a way to organize blocs of voters, at the expense of more expansive nationalist sympathies. At the same time, when identities are understood in terms of religion, they can spawn transregional identifications. In Lombok, the 2000 riots were prompted by images of violence from Maluku, and some Muslims suspect local Hindus of conspiring with supporters from India.

 

Local Viewpoints

Jeremy Kingsley attributes both Lombok’s 2000 riots and the lack of violence during the gubernatorial election of 2008 to elite strategies. But this tells us nothing about the ordinary people who do or do not carry out the violence. Elites do not always get what they want—their manipulations must resonate with local life if they are to be effective. For instance, in times of stress, by means of pengajian (religious discussion groups) and sermons, Tuan Gurus (local religious leaders) may emphasize silaturrahim (keeping good relations with others). But do exhortations always work? Neighborliness and hostility are both sustained through everyday interactions, on which explicit discourses may have little impact (see Keane 2016). Even the canniest elite initiatives need to speak to ordinary folk if they are to get real uptake.

Among other things, this means taking religion seriously, not just as a political tool. Nasir reports that some Sasak worry that the very presence of Christian churches in a neighborhood will weaken the faith of the young. Given that Sasak are 93 percent of the population, where does this kind of anxiety come from—what makes it plausible? Much violence is a response to rumors—what are those rumors telling us about people’s fears? For example, according to Kari Telle, many Sasak fear Balinese rituals precisely because they consider them to have occult power (2009, 2014, 2016). From this perspective, rituals have real effects, just as amulets and mantras may convey invulnerability to members of a militia, something elites may not take seriously or even know about.

Violence, of course, is not always political or religious in nature. In Lombok, criminality has been rampant, prompting the rise of private militias. John MacDougall reports 25% of adult men belonged to one in 1998. Soon they were being mobilized for other purposes: Kingsley reports all Lombok militias have links to Tuan Gurus, who used them both to attack Ahmadiyah and to keep peace during the 2008 gubernatorial election. Given the threat of violence posed by such groups, Nasir observes that local officials end up ignoring the legal rights of minorities in the name of “peace keeping.” Displays of force, in an atmosphere of rumor, energized by social media, produce the expectation of violence. This is when the question of why violence does not occur becomes relevant.

 

Terms of Coexistence

Photo Credit: Jos Dielis. Detail on the Pura Lingsar Temple in Lombok.

Where does coexistence work? Nasir points to the everyday habits of neighborliness in urban Lombok, which are, however, under pressure from growing residential segregation. He also notes Christian and Hindu participation in Islamic festivals and other public events. But ritual can have contradictory effects. As Clifford Geertz argued long ago, some rituals are ambiguous enough that people who disagree about what it all means can still participate together. At its best, the result could be coexistence—even to the point of denying difference for the sake of a community. On the other hand, he also showed that public rituals may force people to make explicit their conflicting positions that might otherwise be ignored, exacerbating polarization. Nasir explains that one source of growing conflict in Lombok is the Joint Ministerial Decree on Houses of Worship of 2006. While acknowledging the existence of multiple religions when viewed from the encompassing perspective of the nation, the decree implies something quite different at the scale of village, neighborhood, or city where people carry out their daily lives. By spatializing religion, the decree reinforces the boundaries between groups, valorizes religious purification over social intermingling, and puts at a disadvantage those, like Lombok Christians, who have no specific localities to call their own, or others, like Hindus, whose temple affiliations are not necessarily bound to residential units. Although it recognizes plurality, the decree hardly encourages active practices of coexistence.

The language of pluralism may offer little in the way either of aspirational values or concrete habits to those who must find ways to live with one another. Nor does it necessarily provide a viable counterpoint to fear and rumor. During much of the 20th century, Indonesian nationalism trumped local identities, at least as an ideal toward which people could strive. If nationalism is now weakening as a positive value, what other basis for moral community might make coexistence across religious differences possible? It will take more than exhortations to achieve this; it will take change in people’s everyday habits of living together.

Array
Webb Keane
Webb Keane is the George Herbert Mead Collegiate Professor of Anthropology. At the University of Michigan he is affiliated with the Social-Cultural and the Linguistic subfields in the Anthropology Department, as well as the Interdisciplinary Program in Anthropology and History and the Center for Southeast Asian Studies. His writings cover a range of topics in social and cultural theory and the philosophical foundations of social thought and the human sciences, and include the recently published Ethical Life: Its Natural and Social Histories (Princeton University Press, 2015). In particular, he is interested in semiotics and language; material culture; gift exchange, commodities, and money; religion, morality, and ethics; media and public cultures. He is currently working on a project centered on religious piety, language, and media in Indonesian Islam and Euro-American secularism, with a special interest in semiotic transgressions such as blasphemy, obscenity, and defamation.
Theorizing Modernities article

The Role of Heritage and Tradition (Turāth) in the Search for Muslim Identity


Dr. Ebrahim Moosa delivers the keynote at the 2017 “Beyond Coexistence in Plural Societies” conference in Jakarta.

What is the place and role of the Arabo-Islamic heritage, known as the turāth, in contemporary society? Arabic and Islamic thought spilt a lot of ink on this question in the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. Tradition, in short, was viewed as a repository of identity and morality. The challenge for Muslim thinkers and practitioners in this time period was to come to grips with new forms of identity making in which the modern nation state played a significant role. Whether they liked it or not, modernity and the modern world arrived on Muslim doorsteps as an uninvited guest under colonization or as an invited guest of declining Muslim empires, when aspects of modernity were adopted by the Ottoman, Safavid or the Mughul empires.

A French parachute division marches through a street in Algeria in 1957.

Muslim identity became entangled with the identity of insurgent cultures as well as civilizations more powerful than theirs and which eclipsed their own. In other words, the Muslim narrative of morality became more complex with more ruptures, breaks and discontinuity than previously experienced. I am fully aware that in the Islamic past the cultural mixing of styles of thought emanating out of the Arabian desert sometimes conflicted with the subjectivities of say North African, African, Persian, Turkic, Malay and a variety of Asiatic peoples over the centuries. But in the past many societies who newly adopted Islam, in one way or another, became invested as actors and players in the making of the Islamic smorgasbord or the Islamic quilt. In the modern period, many Muslims felt that foreign cultures were dictating the nature of the cultural changes and they had little agency in determining their own fate.

The question was never about Arabo-Islamic or a purely Islamic heritage in isolation from the rest of the world. The debates about heritage, turāth, tradition, and Arab identity, and varieties of hyphenated Islamic identities such as Afro-Islamic, Euro-Islamic, Malay-Islamic, Indo-Islamic, Perso-Islamic were entanglements of cultures, symbol systems, multiple forms of meaning-making and lived-practices. These debates were not only limited to the Arabic-speaking world. People as far as Indonesia, Nigeria, central and southern Africa, North America and Europe have all participated in these debates actively or passively. Why? Because they are all part of ongoing Muslim identity debates, namely what is the good life for Muslims in terms of state-formation, governance, citizenship, education, laws and ethics.

Of course, different constituencies in the Muslim world addressed these issues and challenges on their own terms and with great variance. Those who framed the question as that of heritage, turāth, were often folks who espoused modern education and a modern identity. They used modern moral and ethical languages of inquiry to find solutions. They took the entanglement of cultures and civilizations seriously and saw this as an opportunity to remake Muslim cultures and the elements that constituted Muslim or Islamic civilization. Their archive was a much more diverse account of multiple strands of Islam in the past. Yet, to their traditionalist critics among religious orthodoxies, these modern educated folks tilted too far in the direction of the modern and abandoned essential elements of the past or historical tradition. Their flaw, as the Lebanese writer Yahya Muhammad[1] pointed out, was that they viewed the authority of tradition to be suggestive and indicative (tawjīhī). In the view of the modernists, not everything in the tradition was useable. Only those parts of the tradition that enjoyed the largest consensus and agreement historically made sense in the present. One major flaw of this group of modern educated elites was that they never really paid serious attention to the improvement of the political. In other words, as much as there were debates about questions of morality, gender and law, the question of political modernity in Muslim politics was seriously neglected. Status quo practices and patriarchal politics of the all-knowing rulers, authorities and their intellectual enablers continued. With that state of affairs, political accountability became non-existent as a value.

Another significant sector of Muslim intelligentsia were the religious scholars, ‘ulama, who explored these questions of identity from a different perspective. These were the people in the traditional institutions of learning like the famous Islamic universities in the Arabic speaking world, the pesantren of the Malay world, the madrasas of South Asia, the hawzas of Iran and Iraq or the madrasas of sub-Saharan Africa and central Asia. For them the tradition was constitutive (takwīnī) of Muslim identity, and morality was indispensable to self-making. But in this view, tradition was also an exercise of moral power by the custodians of tradition. The ‘ulama viewed the moral templates of the past to be sufficient and that tradition could be deployed in the present with minor modifications.

Boundaries of the Ottoman Empire in 1801.

Both the modern intellectuals and the traditional ‘ulama did not allow for a healthy mutual exchange. In fact, dialogue between rival perspectives was often non-existent or, when it did occur, took the form of excommunication, anathematizing and deeming the other as either anachronistic peddlers of tradition or lackeys of foreign and alien cultures. Meanwhile, the modern nation-state never facilitated serious and meaningful debate about the nature of Muslim identity. Identity questions were often politicized to create the most useful and compliant citizen who could conform to the will of the state. And these days the major identity project is to create sectarian loyalties and hatreds between Sunni and Shia adherents in different parts of the globe. Without careful nurturing and dedicated attention to the past as well as the present, tradition becomes an instrument of power, and a source of learned ignorance. Unless it is used with integrity and care, tradition becomes a site for pathological manifestations.

So let’s ponder what is at stake in this debate about heritage and tradition. At its core, the debate was about the role of the Islamic past in the making of the new and the present. In short, the question was one of identity and selfhood in late modernity. The question of identity is deeply enmeshed in rubrics as varied as questions of Islamic law, ethics, theology, philosophy, debates on religion in modernity (religious studies), Islamic revival, gender debates, education, environment, bioethics and personhood. Put differently, the question centers around the moral anthropology and the moral theology of what it is to be a human person. Actors such as Muslim revivalists, activists in political Islam, Muslim modernists, traditionalists, feminists and gender activists as well as those exploring the complex debates in human sexuality have all had a say in these matters.

For tradition to play a role in Muslim majority societies that are searching for authentic commitments and strong identities, the very idea of tradition ought to be linked to lived experience. One of the major challenges to sustaining tradition in Muslim societies is to configure precisely how to cultivate intelligible literacies of tradition. Tradition cannot merely be the simple adherence to a past practice without understanding its moral relevance and its place in policymaking and politics today.

 

(This blog was drawn from a keynote address delivered at the Contending Modernities “Beyond Coexistence in Plural Societies” Conference in Jakarta, Indonesia, on July 10th.)

[1] Yaḥyá Muḥammad, Al-Qaṭīʿa Bayna Al-Muthaqqaf Wa Al-Faqīh: Dirāsa Maʿrifīya Tastahdifu Ibrāz Jawānib Al-Qaṭīʿa Bayna Al-Binyatyan Al-ʿaqliyatayn-Almuthaqqaf Wa Al-Faqīh (Muʾassasa al-Intishār al-ʿArabī, 2001).

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

Eternal Enmities: A Jewish Decolonial Re-Evaluation of Western Altruism


Photo courtesy of Kenneth Lu, “SFO #noban Protest–Jan 29, 2017”

“The political and intellectual history of modernity,” writes historian Robert Orsi, “is also always a religious history.” However, as significant and diverse recent scholarship is now bringing to light, narratives around the political, intellectual, and religious history of modernity often serve not only to illuminate the past, but also to obscure it through the authorization of specific forms of experience and knowledge. 

This symposium, entitled “Decolonizing Narratives, Denaturalizing Modernity,” aims to highlight recent scholarship that complicates received notions around the history of modernity. While focusing on distinct temporal, geographical, and religious contexts, in their shared attempts to uncover histories hidden by the dominant discourses of modernity, the authors featured in this symposium uniformly challenge the naturalization of modernity’s emergence and indicate that that the history of modernity has always been (and remains) fundamentally contested. 

The photo of two children of different religious backgrounds protesting side by side inside the Chicago O’Hare airport on a cold January 2017 morning was enthusiastically ‘liked,’ ‘posted,’ and ‘re-tweeted’ thousands of times on social media. The context of this intercultural encounter was not random. The new political juncture had created networks of racialized populations facing immense pressure. The travel ban against Muslims, the ICE raids targeting Latinxs, and the attacks against Asians in public spaces had become normalized as part of a new tragic reality. Even the Jewish Community Centers, institutions largely incorporated into liberal white society, suffered a string of bomb threats. A number of these communities launched struggles that paralleled those of pre-election movements against anti-Black racism (Black Lives Matter) and Native invisibilization (Standing Rock).

In this volatile context, two parents, one Jewish and one Muslim, joined the protest against the travel ban on January 30th at Chicago’s largest airport with their kids, Maryam and Adin. During this protest, the kids, who were riding on their parents’ shoulders, encountered one another and exchanged gazes full of deep solidarity. The picture of two “immemorial enemies,” one wearing a hijab and the other a yarmulke, engaging in a true act of comradeship quickly captivated the imagination of the Facebook/Twitter/Instagram market. A young man from California wrote “Only in America,” while a middle-aged woman from New York pleaded “we should learn from these innocent children.” The picture represented what a large part of the Western liberal population needed to see: that even in the most challenging moments, the U.S. was still symbolized by pure and innocent individuals able to start a life beyond ancestral enmity.

It is not surprising that those practicing a liberal reading rejoiced at the image. They saw in it the true spirit of the American system: the altruistic and progressive incorporation of difference into a national community able to self-correct its past injustices. Furthermore, the “land of the free,” the ultimate consummation of Western ideals, is the ideal space to leave behind ancient hatreds. There may be no better example of this than a re-encounter between Muslim-Arab and Jewish populations that have been (allegedly) murdering each other since Biblical times. This hatred, however, is far from eternal. It is, on the contrary, a very recent fabrication of the same altruistic West that now intends to mediate among the parties, portraying itself as the only neutral ground for reconciliation. The question is, then, whether the perpetrator and beneficiary is the best candidate to solve the problem it created.

Photo Credit: Christopher Rose. The Synagogue of Santa Maria la Blanca in Toledo, Spain, was forcibly converted to a church decades before the expulsion of Jews and Muslims from Spain in the late 1400s.

This is where a Jewish decolonial critique of Western modernity, in conversation with other voices, can offer its two cents. A new world came into existence in 1492 with a process that led to European accumulation of capital and a self-appointed epistemological privilege following the conquest, forced conversion, genocides, and/or enslavement of Jews, Muslims, native peoples, and Africans. Veiling the newly acquired resources that enabled the nascent West to launch industrial and political revolutions, this system started dividing into two groups the populations whose resources were being stolen. On the one hand “people with no religion,” largely representing “Native” and “Black” populations, and on the other, “people with the wrong religion,” generally characterizing Jews and Muslims. This division became a core component of coloniality, or the patterns of domination developed during colonial times that transcend time and space and continue until the present day.

From the fifteenth to the nineteenth century both groups suffered increasing racialization. The “people with no religion” were categorized as people with no history, civilization, or development. The system, then, altruistically offered them the evasive possibility of saving themselves by erasing their past and accepting their alleged cultural or biological inferiority. Even in current political discourses, the intention of helping “inner-cities” escape their underdevelopment attests to how coloniality is very much alive. The “people with the wrong religion” were described as “being stuck” or “having a regressive” history, civilization, or development. Since theirs was an alternative, erroneous system, they were portrayed as threats to civilization. The longevity of this narrative in the U.S. was evident in the Communist Jew represented by the Rosenbergs yesterday and in the banned Muslim today.  

In the nineteenth century, imperialism elevated some minorities above the general Muslim population to dismember one of the last non-Western powers, the Ottoman Empire. In the Jewish case European powers were aided by Jewish continental communities who were eager to prove they could erase their uncivilized past and earn citizenship in their own European context. Importing the history of Western anti-Semitism to narrate the history of Arab Jews, colonial powers justified their conquest, altruistically pretending to “save” not only Christian but also Jewish populations from the “regressive” forces of Islam (and Jewish Arabs from their own “underdevelopment”). While this strategy was premodern, coloniality added a fundamental twist. If before modernity genocides were perpetrated to “altruistically” save Christians (the Crusades), in modernity this narrative was mobilized to rescue others from alleged barbarism: Natives from human sacrifices, Africans from cannibalism, and now Jews. Western altruism seems to have recurring ends.   

Photo Credit: Roy Cheung. “Blue on Blue.” Many Muslims and Jews found refuge in the city of Chefchaouene, Morocco, after fleeing Spain in the late 1400’s.

What this narrative obscured is that Jewish history in Muslim-ruled lands was far from identical to the Jewish experience in Christian Europe. This does not mean there were no problems, but Jews were an integral part of the social fabric of Muslim-Arab/Berber societies and this conviviality was present well beyond the sometimes over-romanticized experience of el-Andalus. For over a millennium Jews lived among Muslim populations within a clear protected legal structure (dhimmi and then zimmet). Several Jewish communities have had a continuous presence in the region, refuting the Christian myth of the “wandering” Jewish existence as a punishment for the rejection of Christianity. Under the auspices of the Ottoman rulers, Jews who escaped Christian persecution (starting but not limited to the fall of Granada in 1492) commonly found refuge among Muslims. By the seventeenth century major cities in the Ottoman Empire had Jewish majorities or a distinctive presence.

It is not a coincidence that even with the gradual erasure of Arab Jewish history, Jews at large were still being accused by Western luminaries of having an “Oriental Spirit,” portrayed as a “Palestinian Race” or looking like “Asiatic Refugees.” Edward Said points out the connection between anti-Semitism and Orientalism, and Ella Shohat explains how the same logic was applied to Arab Jews. Despite the efforts to split Jewish and Arab populations, the connection between them endured. In the late nineteenth century it was a Jew (Yaqub Sanua) who coined the slogan “Egypt for Egyptians;” during the Holocaust, Albanian Muslims quintupled their Jewish populations hiding refugees; and on the eve of the postcolonial struggle in Morocco, Sultan Mohammed V called for an anti-colonial “Jewish-Muslim-Berber” alliance. This bond came to be broken only in 1948 (or during the 1956 Suez Canal crisis) with the ultimate naturalization of Jews as Westerners in Israel, the US, and eventually the rest of the world. The “eternal” enmity, then, was a colonial fabrication built on altruistic discourses that are less than 180 years-old (more realistically, 70 years-old).

A Decolonial Jewish re-evaluation of narratives of eternal enmity can shed light upon the perverse altruism of the Western project. While witnessing Neo-Nazis shouting “Jews will not replace us” in Charlottesville, some may feel nostalgic for liberalism. However, we need to evaluate whether the roots of this discourse are not already contained in the colonial manipulation of racialized populations. Liberal altruism may well be the problem and not the solution. The Jewish-Muslim case is one of many that invite us to unveil what has been hidden, contest what has been naturalized, and move beyond modern/colonial liberal narratives.  

 

Further Reading

Ammiel Alcalay, After Jews and Arabs (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993).

Gil Anidjar, The Jew, The Arab: A History of the Enemy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003).  

Gil Z. Hochberg, “‘Remembering Semitism’ or ‘On The Prospects of Re-Membering the Semites’” Re-Orient: The Journal of Critical Muslim Studies 1.2 (Spring 2016): 192-223.

Ramon Grosfoguel, “The Structure of Knowledge in Westernized Universities: Epistemic Racism/Sexism in the Four Genodies/Epistemicides of the Long 16th Century” Human Architecture 11.1 (2013). http://scholarworks.umb.edu/humanarchitecture/vol11/iss1/8

Walter Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).

Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1995).

Salman Sayyid, Recalling the Caliphate: Decolonisation and the World Order (London: Jurts, 2015).

Ella Shohat, On the Arab-Jew, Palestine and Other Displacements (London: Pluto Press, 2017).

Santiago Slabodsky, Decolonial Judaism: Triumphal Failures of Barbaric Thinking (New York: Palgrave, 2015).

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Santiago Slabodsky
Santiago Slabodsky is the Florence and Robert Kaufman Chair in Jewish Studies at Hofstra University in New York. He is co-director of the journal Decolonial Horizons/Horizontes Decoloniales at the GEMRIP institute in Latin America and convener of the summer program of Liberation Theologies and Decolonial Thought at the Global Dialogue Center in Spain. In the past he was co-chair of the Liberation Theologies unit at AAR, convener of the PhD Program in Religion, Ethics and Society at Claremont School of Theology and associate director of the center for Race, Culture and Social Justice in his current institution. Concurrently to his permanent posts in the US, he has served as visiting professor at institutions in the Netherlands, South Africa, Spain, Costa Rica, Macedonia, and Argentina and has lectured throughout Europe, the Americas, Africa, South East Asia, and the Middle East. His book Decolonial Judaism: Triumphal Failures of Barbaric Thinking received the 2017 Frantz Fanon Outstanding Book Award from the Caribbean Philosophical Association.