Jewish Italian writer Primo Levi (1919–1987) in his later years. Photo Via Wikimedia Commons.
To us, we Jews who live safe in our warm houses, consider:
On October 7, 2023, when unspeakable acts of brutality were carried out in southern Israel, our political differences, for the most part, melted away and we reacted with horror and shock. We mourned the victims, wept with the bereaved, and shuddered at the thought of the terror and dread felt by those who were taken captive. We were filled with outrage against the perpetrators. What sort of people would we be if we had not reacted this way? If we had muttered “it’s so tragic” or “how awful,” and left it at that?
But that is how many of us, if not most, respond to the unspeakable suffering and loss experienced by the people of Gaza at the hands of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). We read that over 90% of the population has been forcibly displaced from their homes, with nowhere to go. We see images of total devastation on a gigantic scale. We hear reports of masses of people with little or no food or water; of horrendous injuries and countless deaths caused by relentless Israeli bombardment. And what do we do? We shake our heads solemnly, uttering phrases like “yes, it’s dreadful,” and then quickly move on. The right of Israel to defend itself is blithely invoked. One way or the other, we do not look the victims in the eye.
“You who live safe / in your warm houses, / You who find, returning in the evening, / Hot food and friendly faces: / Consider if this is a man / Who works in the mud/ Who does not know peace / Who fights for a scrap of bread …” “Consider if this is a woman, / Without hair and without name / With no more strength to remember, / Her eyes empty and her womb cold / Like a frog in winter.” These lines are from “Shema” (“Hear”), the poem Primo Levi wrote shortly after being liberated from Auschwitz.
Consider: Levi’s lines tell us that the abject beings he describes are human individuals. He tells us nothing more about them. Nothing about their identity or where they come from. He speaks only of what they have been reduced to in the camps: something less than what they are: a woman and a man. It’s as if there is nothing more we need to know. As if this were the essence of what he wants us to hear.
What he wants us to hear is timeless. So, reflecting on the wasteland called Gaza: Consider if this is a child, who sits amid the ruins of his home, who is inconsolable with grief at the death of his parents, who fights for a scrap of bread. Consider if this is a mother, robbed of her slain daughters and sons, with no more strength to bear her unborn baby, her face wracked with pain and loss.
“Meditate that this came about,” Levi writes in “Shema,” after his harrowing description of the man and the woman stripped of their humanity. “I commend these words to you. / Carve them in your hearts/ At home, in the street, / Going to bed, rising …” Perhaps you notice that these lines inflect the text of the biblical Shema, the summons “Hear, O Israel!,” after which his poem is named. If, confronted with the hell unleashed on the people of Gaza in our name, we could do as Levi says, and carve his words in our hearts, then we would not efface the humanity of the children, women, and men of Gaza. Then our hearts would be broken. We would not rush to justify what Israel is doing, day after day after day, to this people. We might instead exclaim: “Hear, O Israel!”
Brian Klug is Hon. Fellow in Social Philosophy at Campion Hall, University of Oxford; Hon. Fellow of the Parkes Institute for the Study of Jewish/non-Jewish Relations, University of Southampton; and Fellow of the College of Arts & Sciences, St Xavier University, Chicago. He is an Associate Editor of Patterns of Prejudice and a member of the Boards for “Negotiating Jewish Identity: Jewish Life in 21st Century Norway” (The Norwegian Center for Holocaust and Minority Studies), Islamophobia Studies Yearbook, and ReOrient: The Journal of Critical Muslim Studies. His books include A Time to Speak Out: Independent Jewish Voices on Israel, Zionism and Jewish Identity(2008, co-editor); Offence: the Jewish Case (2009); Being Jewish and Doing Justice: Bringing Argument to Life (2011); and Words of Fire: Selected Essays of Ahad Ha’am (2015, editor). He took part in The Vienna Conversations (Bruno Kreisky Forum) and was one of the drafters of the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism (2021).
Palestinians inspect the damage following an Israeli airstrike on the El-Remal aera in Gaza City on October 9, 2023. Israel continued to battle Hamas fighters on October 10 and massed tens of thousands of troops and heavy armour around the Gaza Strip after vowing a massive blow over the Palestinian militants’ surprise attack. Photo by Naaman Omar, apaimages, via Wikimedia Commons.
“Political language … is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.” George Orwell wrote these words, which come at the end of his essay “Politics and the English Language,” in 1946. He could be writing them from the grave today and thinking of ways in which language is being used in the context of the so-called “Israel-Gaza war.” “In our time,” Orwell says, “political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible.” He is not alluding to falsehoods or fallacies, but to words and phrases that keep us from the facts, or from the effect the facts would otherwise have on us. His essay is about “debased language”: language that defends the indefensible by preventing us from thinking.
Day after day, as Israel has laid waste to Gaza, unspeakable atrocities have been spoken about in language that robs them of their horror. Israel’s relentless devastation of Gaza, the destruction of 40% of homes in the strip (at the time of writing), as well as hospitals and infrastructure, the blockade on fuel and electricity and other vital services, the killing, the maiming, the terrorizing, the aerial bombardment that has wiped out entire families, the mass displacement of 1.9 million people (at the time of writing), all this is indescribable.
Sometimes it is better to be lost for words. Perhaps we should remember this more often. Perhaps we should hold our tongue until we find words that approximate to reality—the brutal human reality of suffering, grief, loss, and despair. This means suppressing the impulse to appropriate the facts for our agendas, or resisting the urge to smother those facts with words that cushion their impact, euphemisms that soften their blow. Sometimes we should just stand open-mouthed, without a political analysis falling fully formed from our lips. There are times when we need to stop talking in order to start thinking—thinking politically. Now is such a time.
Sometimes it is better to be lost for words. . . . Perhaps we should hold our tongue until we find words that approximate to reality—the brutal human reality of suffering, grief, loss and despair.
Orwell writes in his essay: “As soon as certain topics are raised, the concrete melts into the abstract and no one seems able to think of turns of speech that are not hackneyed …” Phrases do not have to be around for long in order to become hackneyed. A turn of speech can turn into a cliché almost overnight, provided there is a sufficient incentive. People will latch onto it with alacrity if it helps to conceal an inconvenient truth or to take cover from the implications of their own unbearable position. Take, for example, “humanitarian pause,” a phrase that has become a commonplace in the last couple of months. There has, so far, been one temporary ceasefire, which was towards the end of November 2023. But Israel could not be clearer about its intentions: to continue to lay waste to Gaza. And that is just what they have done, blasting whole neighborhoods to smithereens. Yet there are calls for more “humanitarian pauses.” How reassuring the word “humanitarian” is! But whom does it console: the people of Gaza or the people who utter the phrase? Sara Roy asks: “What does a pause mean in the middle of such carnage? Does it mean feeding people so they can survive to be killed the next day? How is that humanitarian? How is that humane?” But critiquing a mindless mantra or a hackneyed turn of speech is a thankless task. The repetition of the phrase “humanitarian pause” is like a lullaby, and the debate around it is a form of sleep-talking.
Sleep-talking can also take the form of stringing together stock items of vocabulary, “ready-made phrases,” as Orwell calls them, letting them “construct your sentences for you – even think your thoughts for you.” Or, to put it differently, they make the act of thinking passive. They do this according to a kind of algorithm, dictated by a political ideology or program. “It is at this point,” Orwell observes, “that the special connexion between politics and the debasement of language becomes clear.” What could be more debased than a jargon that turns barbarism into justice, atrocity into progress, so as to get the facts to fit a preconceived frame? Consider this set of facts about the actions of Hamas or its allies during its incursion into southern Israel on October 7, 2023: around 1,200 people killed in “more than 20 different locations”; in kibbutz Be’eri alone, “at least 100 people slaughtered … dragged from their homes and murdered”; women “raped before they were shot”; over 200 people abducted as hostages, “including infants, children, and elderly people.” Here is how these horrific facts were reflected in the banner headline of a “progressive” newspaper two days later: “Rejoice as Palestinian resistance humiliates racist Israel.” In this headline, the horrific is turned into the heroic at a stroke. By a kind of verbal alchemy, civilian victims of the crimes committed on October 7th become mere tokens of a state: personifications of Israel, not persons in their own right. It is the Israeli state (“racist Israel”) that was raped, not individual women; the state that was murdered and abducted, not infants or children or the elderly. Similarly, an eminent Israeli historian, but coming to the defense of Israel, declared : “On 7 October Israel [itself] was raped …” You could say this is hyperbole, but it amounts to theft: stealing the ordeal of rape from the women who experienced it and transferring it to a theoretical entity, the state. To recall Orwell’s words: “the concrete melts into the abstract.” In the banner headline that I have quoted, the flesh-and-blood victims of horrendous acts are erased by a phrase “racist Israel.” Even Israel is not the ultimate villain or target, as the subhead, via a dubious historical comparison, explains: “Like the Tet Offensive in Vietnam in 1968, the Palestinians’ surprise attack has humbled imperialism.” Jargon (“imperialism”) has the last word.
The repetition of the phrase “humanitarian pause” is like a lullaby, and the debate around it is a form of sleep-talking.
Moreover, in these two sentences (the headline and the subhead), Hamas’s onslaught is referred to as “Palestinian resistance,” regardless of whether or not this is how Palestinians themselves see it. The synonymy is assumed. But this is a matter for Palestinians themselves to debate and to decide, not something for a person or group in faraway Britain to decree. In this scheme of things, however, Palestinians do not count in their own right, any more than Israelis do. They count only as representatives of (to quote another phrase from the article) “the oppressed.” It is quite an achievement to write an article about the strife between Palestinians and Israelis in which Israelis and Palestinians come into the picture only as stand-ins for “oppressor” and “oppressed.” This article—and there are many others like it—is a helpful demonstration of how “the debasement of language” degrades political thinking. For thinking is not political unless it is grounded, and it is not grounded when, to quote Orwell again, “the concrete melts into the abstract.”
In the passage in which Orwell talks about “the defence of the indefensible,” he immediately illustrates the point with a scenario that is uncannily recognizable. “Defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside … the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification.” Substitute “Israel’s right to defend itself” for “pacification” (and maybe “tents” for “huts”), and the picture corresponds to the here and now. Perhaps he really is writing from the grave.
True, President Joe Biden, Prime Minister Rushi Sunak, and other world leaders who assert Israel’s right to defend itself, add that Israel should act within international humanitarian law (or “the laws of war”). But add is the operative word. The emphasis falls repeatedly on the former, giving the clear impression that the right of the state has priority over the human rights of the Palestinian population of Gaza: “Israel has the right, but…” The “but” is an echo of the refrain, “We stand with Israel,” which Biden and Sunak and other world leaders have declared from the start. (Or, as Sunak said, shaking hands with Netanyahu in Jerusalem, “We want you to win.”) The sound of the refrain, like background noise, never fades, even if we are not aware of hearing it. This too is how speech can confuse and mislead. Language is an instrument. And Biden, Sunak, and the others, are like a collective Nero, fiddling while Gaza burns.
What language can prevent, language can promote: thinking politically. This requires using words that bridge the gap between the concrete and the abstract, without either flinching from the facts or appropriating them for the sake of a cherished theory or agenda. Only thus can we broach the most political of questions, not least for Palestinians and Israelis: how to share the common spaces we inhabit, so as to advance the common good. This, apart from the diagnoses of linguistic malpractices, is what I take from Orwell’s essay—a prophetic blast from the past, which speaks powerfully to us in the present abysmal moment.
Brian Klug is Hon. Fellow in Social Philosophy at Campion Hall, University of Oxford; Hon. Fellow of the Parkes Institute for the Study of Jewish/non-Jewish Relations, University of Southampton; and Fellow of the College of Arts & Sciences, St Xavier University, Chicago. He is an Associate Editor of Patterns of Prejudice and a member of the Boards for “Negotiating Jewish Identity: Jewish Life in 21st Century Norway” (The Norwegian Center for Holocaust and Minority Studies), Islamophobia Studies Yearbook, and ReOrient: The Journal of Critical Muslim Studies. His books include A Time to Speak Out: Independent Jewish Voices on Israel, Zionism and Jewish Identity(2008, co-editor); Offence: the Jewish Case (2009); Being Jewish and Doing Justice: Bringing Argument to Life (2011); and Words of Fire: Selected Essays of Ahad Ha’am (2015, editor). He took part in The Vienna Conversations (Bruno Kreisky Forum) and was one of the drafters of the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism (2021).
Image credit: Megan, Flickr.com, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 DEED
Bibles are particularly charged objects, both in terms of the feelings they arouse and in their capacities to act and be acted upon. Bibles are held up in the hands of priests and rabbis. They are paraded, kissed, gently carried, or heavily highlighted. Bibles evoke feelings of anger at the way they have been used to oppress; nostalgia for different times; indifference as they gather dust on shelves. They are concrete artifacts, whether we are talking about the specific canons of faith communities, the manuscripts studied by scholars, or the versions marketed for teenagers and soldiers.
Though most readily thought of as the possession of faith communities, Bibles are potent objects in the political arena. Bits of biblical text feature on placards, in speeches and debates. In book form, Bibles are pounded, sworn on, or brandished before a crowd. The image of Donald Trump holding up a Bible in front of St. John’s Episcopal Church in Washington D.C. in June 2020, after law enforcement officers forcefully targeted peaceful protesters in Lafayette Square, quickly went viral. Other forms of political Bible-use are more humorous and subversive, like the Tory-Jesus memes circulating on social media.
The politics and potency of Bibles has long been recognized in the formation of modern nation-states. In the wake of the Protestant Reformation, versions of scripture in vernacular languages became important for understandings of peoplehood through the prism of national culture and identity. National Bibles continue to be hailed as foundations for the nation-state. Around the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible in the UK in 2011, then Conservative prime minister David Cameron pontificated that this Bible is a key source for the modern British nation, its language and politics.
Political uses of Bibles work because they are thick with association. In The Cultural Politics of Emotion, Sara Ahmed discusses the way texts generate effects. Texts, particularly classics and canonical texts, are stuck to histories of association. Yet the way these associations orbit a text and make it thick with what Ahmed calls “affective value” is often concealed. Ahmed talks about the effects of repetition, but also of the concealment of the work of this repetition. Associations become thick from the ideas and histories that are stuck to Bibles and particular biblical texts. But the ways that Bibles and bits of Bible are perceived and handled are also a matter, as Karen Bray and Stephen Moore have contended, of how they feel.
Recently, as I have shown elsewhere, the British far-right movement Britain First has made use of biblical verses as forms of greeting on social media. On December 27, 2021, for instance, Philippians 4:13 was shared on their official Telegram account: “I can do all things through Christ, who strengthens me,” followed by the message: “HAVE A GREAT DAY FELLOW CHRISTIAN PATRIOTS…” The image the text is set against is a blue sky with the indication of a cloud. A few days later, December 29, Psalm 139:23, “Search me, God, and know my heart. Try me, and know my thoughts,” was shared over a dark background with leaves in the top corners of the image. Multiple other biblical verses are shared by Britain First in this style and format.
Led by the former British National Party councillor Paul Golding, Britain First emerged in 2011 with distinctly nationalist, authoritarian, nativist, ethnocentric, and xenophobic tendencies. They claim to defend the “indigenous” British people by opposing immigration. Like other contemporary manifestations of the Far Right, Britain First repeatedly speaks of Islam as a threatening enemy, calling for “Islamification” to be resisted. Acting in part like a political party and in part more like a street-level protest movement, Golding has been charged on several occasions for publishing hateful material and for threatening and abusive behavior. While Britain First might not be deemed particularly successful, they have capitalized on the use of social media and have built up significant audiences online.
The sharing of biblical texts seems to have been instigated by Paul Golding on October 16, 2020, when he shared an image of a Bible on their official Telegram channel, and commented: “Just purchased myself a brand-new Bible. At a minimum, I’d suggest to other Christians to read at least one Proverb per day. Nourishment for the soul!”
In some ways the Bible posts of Britain First are not surprising. Britain First has written openly about Christianity in the ideology section of the official webpage (the webpage has since been revised). It describes Britain as a “solidly Christian nation,” and state that “[o]ur political and legal system was born out of the framework of laws and morals contained in the Holy Bible.” It further states:
Britain First is committed to preserving our British cultural heritage, traditions, customs and values. We oppose the increasing colonisation of our homeland through uncontrolled, mass immigration. Britain First is committed to maintaining and strengthening Christianity as the foundation of our society and culture.
The Bible-posts by Britain First can be understood as part of the history of using Christian scripture to perform national identity. I argue that the kind of Bible that features in the social media posts of Britain First is supposed to feel good, not necessarily as textual content but as a source of national sentiment that feeds on national and cultural pride in an anti-Islamic Christian “us.” Despite appearing negligent and benign, then, the Bible-use of Britain First is evidence of the potency of scripture in the political arena, particularly as an affective archive tied to the nation.
It is imperative to understand these daily Bible-posts within broader European far-right tendencies to invoke religion to emphasize essential differences in order to mask the racist division of people into native insiders and foreign outsiders. What contemporary far-right groups across Europe share is an anti-Muslim stance, frequently propped up by a defense of Christian identity and culture. Golding’s allegedly brand-new Bible was a King James version. In the history of creating national—often state-sponsored and state-sanctioned—Bibles in the vernacular, these Bibles can be seen as majoritarian artifacts made accessible for the people of a nation. National Bibles can be treasured books by a majority of the population without that requiring that they necessarily be exclusive or exclusionary. But national Bibles can function, as Marianne Kartzow Bjelland and Karin Neutel have argued, to defend and protect a majoritarian “we” in the face of a changing religious landscape that either implicitly or explicitly excludes minorities from the “we” in the public sphere. Expressing the need to protect the Christian nation and peppering their social media with daily Bible-posts can be a way for Britain First of fostering the “we” that are imagined as native to Britain.
Britain First is not peculiar in this way. In fact, beyond the nation-state, the Bible has long been celebrated as a foundation for “western civilization”. As Jonathan Sheehan has so persuasively shown, the Enlightenment period in Europe produced a dominant conception of the Bible as an icon of cultural heritage in the West. Sheehan suggests that the near-universal admittance of the cultural relevance of the Bible today—from academics to jurists, from the devout to doubters—is a sign of the prevalence of this Enlightenment legacy. Scholarshave demonstrated how the idea of the Bible as a foundation for western culture has fuelled the belief that the Bible is inherently more democratic than the Qur’an, thus becoming a mode of articulating cultural superiority.
The style and format of the Bible-posts are not insignificant. Britain First presents a bite-size Bible as easily shareable content on social media, made up of short verses against an innocuously pretty image. These posts fit into recent social media trends when it comes to “feel-good” content. Peter Phillips has characterized this shift from propositional content to the therapeutic, to fit the therapeutically inclined ethos of social media. Scholars have discussed the exponential growth of “bite-size” content on social media. Much of this bite-size content is centred on positive thinking in the shape of inspirational quotes and memes, aphorisms, or motivational mottos that are superimposed on an aesthetically pleasing image. Tom de Bruin comments on the way biblical verses and bits of text are frequently superimposed on images and shared online; this does not necessarily reflect a preoccupation with religion or theology, but are signs of the “continuing value of the Bible as cultural object” (145). “The addition of images primes the audience to receive the text in a certain way” and this impacts the particular affective impact of the bite-size Bible (149).
We might understand the clouds, mountains, and leafy backgrounds to the biblical verses shared by Britain First as a way of packaging the Bible as a benign product. Considering the way right-wing populist and far-right movements (including Britain First) continuously present Islam as threatening, the Qur’an as dangerous, and Muslims as criminals and terrorists, the Bible becomes a point of pride and source of positivity for the Christian nations that purportedly need defending. The benign Bible imagery is problematic in that it masks violent biblical content and racist deployments of the Bible. It adds to a cultural amnesia of the biblical archive as anything but edifice and source of slogans for nations and civilizations. The sharper edges of critique and calls for justice that are part of historical and contemporary Bible-use should not be forgotten. Focusing on the enslaved Egyptian figure of Hagar, Nyasha Junior, for instance, has demonstrated how Black Hagar has been imagined by African-Americans, feminists, and womanists to counter perceptions of a White Bible. Yvonne Sherwood has disrupted bland references of the “Abrahamic” that serve to bolster the biblical foundations of the western world by speaking instead of the “Hagaramic”. As Sherwood puts it, in the context of “the ever more militant policing of European and American borders and identities, the Hagaramic evokes all the sans-papiers, Gastarbeiters, and ‘immigrant’ (?) religions, suing for citizenship and status” (466).
For a group such as Britain First, sharing innocuous Bible-posts can be a way of posing as culturally respectable, while simultaneously linking followers to more extreme content. Scholars have studied the way Britain First used its Facebook page in this way to include Islamophobic content side by side with posts about the British royal family, or photos of cats and castles. The sharing of biblical verses on social media, then, should be seen as part of the attempt to hold up Islam as other in relation to a Christian English nation. In the case of Britain First, the packaging of the Bible as feel-good mottos and benign daily greetings on aesthetically pleasing backgrounds stands in stark contrast with a persistent fear-mongering about a threatening and violent Islam. The potency of the Bible in the political arena is capitalized on to affectively stir up pride in a Christian nation while simultaneously stirring up hatred and fear of what is excluded from this Christian nation. As such, this Bible-use continues the pernicious clash of cultures discourse that has become so pervasive in Europe. These are not the only capacities Bibles have to affect and be affected, though. Bibles, biblical figures and stories have been used also to engender solidarity, disrupt borders, prompt compassion, and reimagine justice in ways that are anything but benign or innocuous.
Hannah M. Strømmen is a biblical scholar working at Lund University in Sweden. Her scholarly passions are focused on uses and interpretations of the Bible in philosophy, literature and politics. Currently a Wallenberg Academy Fellow, she leads the “Scripture and Secularism” project, which is a reception history inquiry into the way biblical texts are interpreted as sources for the secular and the way biblical texts continue to circulate in so-called secular spaces. Her first book was Biblical Animality after Jacques Derrida (SBL Press, 2018), which examined how distinctions between gods, humans, and animals are constructed in and by way of the biblical archive. Over the last years she has been working on the Bible and the European far right. Her latest monograph, co-written with Ulrich Schmiedel, is The Claim to Christianity: Responding to the Far Right(SCM Press, 2020).
“Bombing Kids Is Not Self Defense” by Becker1999, Flickr.com, CC BY 2.0 DEED.
In the following statement, over 55 scholars of the Holocaust, genocide, and mass violence deplore the atrocity crimes against civilians committed by Hamas and Islamic Jihad on 7 October and by Israeli forces since then. The starvation, mass killing, and forced displacement of Palestinian civilians in Gaza is ongoing, raising the question of genocide, especially in view of the intentions expressed by Israeli leaders. Israeli President Isaac Herzog used particularly loaded language in an interview on MSNBC just a few days ago, on 5 December: “This war is a war that is not only between Israel and Hamas. It’s a war that is intended, really, truly, to save western civilization. … We are attacked by [a] Jihadist network, an empire of evil. … and this empire wants to conquer the entire Middle East, and if it weren’t for us, Europe would be next, and the United States follows.” Herzog builds on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s association of Israel’s attack on Gaza with the Biblical evil of Amalek, but he places it on a modern scale as the last stand against global apocalypse and the demise of “western civilization.” Both Herzog and Netanyahu are secular Jews. Their use of religious language and symbolism in this case reflects a dangerous intersection in the case of Israel of the exclusionary modern nation state with a settler colonial project in a place infused with multiple religious histories and meanings. The scholars who have signed the statement are signaling their alarm about the mass violence underway in Gaza and the inflammatory language that threatens to escalate it further. They call for urgent action to stop Israel’s attack on Gaza and to work towards a future that will guarantee the equality, freedom, dignity, and security of all the people who live between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.
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Statement of Scholars in Holocaust and Genocide Studies on Mass Violence in Israel and Palestine since 7 October
December 9, 2023
We, scholars of the Holocaust, genocide, and mass violence, feel compelled to warn of the danger of genocide in Israel’s attack on Gaza. We also note that, should the Israeli attack continue and escalate, Palestinians under Israeli military occupation in the West Bank and East Jerusalem and Palestinian citizens of Israel face grave danger as well.
We are deeply saddened and concerned by the mass murder of over 1,200 Israelis and migrant workers by Hamas, the Islamic Jihad, and others on 7 October, with more than 830 civilians among them. We also note the evidence of gender-based and sexual violence during the attack, the wounding of thousands of Israelis, the destruction of Israeli kibbutzim and towns, and the abduction of more than 240 hostages into the Gaza Strip. These acts constitute war crimes and crimes against humanity. We recognize that violence in Israel and Palestine did not begin on 7 October. If we are to try to understand the mass murder of 7 October, we should place it within the context of Israeli settler colonialism, Israeli military occupation violence against Palestinians since 1967, the sixteen-year siege on the Gaza Strip since 2007, and the rise to power in Israel in the last year of a government made up of politicians who speak proudly about Jewish supremacy and exclusionary nationalism. Explaining is not justifying, and this context in no way excuses the targeting of Israeli civilians and migrant workers by Palestinians on 7 October.
We are also deeply saddened and concerned by the Israeli attack on Gaza in response to the Hamas attack. Israel’s assault has caused death and destruction on an unprecedented level, according to a New York Times article on 26 November. In two months, the Israeli assault has killed more than 16,000 Palestinians (with thousands more buried under the rubble)—nearly half of them children and youth, with a Palestinian child killed every ten minutes on average before the ceasefire—and wounded over 40,000. Considering that the total population of Gaza stands at 2.3 million people, the killing rate so far is about 0.7 percent in less than two months. The killing rate of civilians in Russia’s bombing and invasion of Ukraine in the areas most affected by the violence are probably similar—but over a longer period of time. A number of experts have therefore described Israel’s attack on Gaza as the most intense and deadliest of its kind since World War II, but while Russia’s attack on Ukraine has, for very good reason, prompted western leaders to support the people under attack, the same western leaders now support the violence of the Israeli state rather than the Palestinians under attack.
Israel has also forcibly displaced more than 1.8 million Palestinians within the Gaza Strip, while destroying almost half of all buildings and leaving the northern part of the Strip an “uninhabitable moonscape.” Indeed, the Israeli army has dropped more than 25,000 tons of explosives on Gaza since 7 October, which is equivalent to two Hiroshima bombs, and according to Human Rights Watch, deployed white phosphorous bombs. It has systematically targeted hospitals, schools, universities, mosques, churches, bakeries, and agricultural fields. The state has also killed many essential professionals, including more than 220 healthcare workers, over 100 UN personnel, and dozens of journalists. The forced displacement has, furthermore, created in the southern part of the Strip severe overcrowding, with the risk of outbreak of infectious diseases, exacerbated by shortages of food, clean water, fuel, and medical supplies, due to Israel’s “total siege” measures since 7 October.
The unprecedented level of destruction and killing points to large-scale war crimes in Israel’s attack on Gaza. There is also evidence of a “widespread or systematic attack directed against any civilian population, with knowledge of the attack” that the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court defines as a crime against humanity. Moreover, dozens of statements of Israeli leaders, ministers in the war cabinet, and senior army officers since 7 October—that is, people with command authority—suggest an “intent to destroy” Palestinians “as such,” in the language of the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. The statements include depictions of all Palestinians in Gaza as responsible for the Hamas attack on 7 October and therefore legitimate military targets, as expressed by Israeli President Herzog on 13 October and by Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu when he invoked, on 29 October, the Biblical story of the total destruction of Amalek by the Israelites, just as Israel began its ground invasion. Casting an entire civilian population as enemies marks the history of modern genocide, with the Armenian genocide (1915-1918) and the Rwanda genocide (1994) as well-known examples. The statements also include dehumanizing language, such as Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant’s reference to “human animals” when he proclaimed “total siege” on Gaza on 9 October. The slippage between seeing Hamas as “human animals” to seeing all Palestinians in Gaza in this way is evident in what Israeli Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories Maj. Gen. Ghassan Alian promised to people in Gaza the next day: “Hamas has turned into ISIS, and the residents of Gaza, instead of being appalled, are celebrating. … Human animals must be treated as such. There will be no electricity and no water [in Gaza], there will only be destruction. You wanted hell, you will get hell.”
These expressions of intent need to be understood also in relation to the widespread incitement to genocide in Israeli media since 7 October. Israeli journalist David Mizrachi Wertheim, for instance, wrote on social media on 7 October that “If all the captives are not returned immediately, then turn the [Gaza] Strip into a slaughterhouse. If a hair falls from their head – execute security prisoners. Violate all norms on the way to victory.” He also added, “we are facing human animals.” Four days later, another Israeli journalist, Roy Sharon, commented on social media “that if, in order to finally eliminate the military capabilities of Hamas, including Sinwar and Deif, we need a million bodies, then let there be a million bodies.” Annihilatory language now also appears in public spaces, such as banners on bridges in Tel Aviv that call “to annihilate Gaza” and explain that “the picture of triumph is 0 people in Gaza.” There are dozens of examples of incitement in Israeli media, which recalls the incitement to genocide in Rwanda as genocide was unfolding there in 1994.
This incitement points to the grave danger that Palestinians everywhere under Israeli rule now face. Israeli army and settler violence in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, which has intensified markedly from the beginning of 2023, has entered a new stage of brutality after 7 October. Sixteen Palestinian communities—over a thousand people—have been forcibly displaced in their entirety, continuing the policy of “ethnic cleansing” in Area C that comprises 60 percent of the West Bank. Israeli soldiers and settlers have furthermore killed more than 220 Palestinians in the West Bank since 7 October, while arresting thousands. The violence against Palestinians also includes acts of torture.
Palestinian citizens of Israel—almost 2 million people—are also facing a state assault against them, with hundreds of arrests since 7 October for any expression of identification with Palestinians in Gaza. There is widespread intimidation and silencing of Palestinian students, faculty, and staff in Israeli universities, and the Israeli Police Commissioner Kobi Shabtai threatened to expel to Gaza Israeli Palestinians identifying with Palestinians in Gaza. These alarming developments and measures build on a view of Palestinian citizens of Israel as potential enemies that stretches back to the military rule imposed on the 156,000 Palestinians who survived the Nakba and remained within the territory that became Israel in 1948. This iteration of military rule lasted until 1966, but the image of Israeli Palestinians as a threat has persisted. In May 2021, as many Israeli Palestinians came out to protest an attack on Palestinians in East Jerusalem and another attack on Gaza, the Israeli police responded with massive repression and violence, arresting hundreds. The situation deteriorated quickly, as Jewish and Palestinian citizens clashed across Israel—in some places, as in Haifa, with Jewish citizens attacking Palestinian citizens on the streets and breaking into houses of Palestinian citizens. And now, Itamar Ben-Gvir, the far-right settler who serves as Israeli minister of national security, has put Israeli Palestinians in even more danger by the distribution of thousands of weapons to Israeli civilians who have formed hundreds of self-defense units after 7 October.
The escalating violence against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and the exclusion and violence against Palestinian citizens of Israel are particularly worrying in the context of calls in Israel after 7 October for a “second Nakba.” The reference is to the massacres and “ethnic cleansing” of more than 750,000 Palestinians and the destruction of hundreds of villages and towns by Israeli forces in the 1948 war, when Israel was established. The language that member of the Israeli Knesset (parliament) Ariel Kallner from the ruling Likud party used in a social media post on 7 October is instructive: “Nakba to the enemy now. … Now, only one goal: Nakba! Nakba that will overshadow the Nakba of 1948. Nakba in Gaza and Nakba to whoever dares to join [them].” We know that genocide is a process, and we recognize that the stage is thus set for violence more severe than the Nakba and not spatially limited to Gaza.
Thus, the time for concerted action to prevent genocide is now. We call on governments to uphold their legal obligations under the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide to intervene and prevent genocide (Article 1) by (1) implementing an arms embargo on Israel; (2) working to end Israel’s military assault on Gaza; (3) pressuring the Israeli government to stop immediately the intensifying army and settler violence against Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, which constitute clear violations of international law; (4) demanding the continued release of all hostages held in Gaza and all Palestinians imprisoned unlawfully in Israel, without charges or trial; (5) calling on the International Criminal Court to investigate and issue arrest warrants against all perpetrators of mass violence on 7 October and since then, both Palestinians and Israelis; and (6) initiating a political process in Israel and Palestine based on a truthful reckoning with Israeli mass violence against Palestinians since the 1948 Nakba and a future that will guarantee the equality, freedom, dignity, and security of all the people who live between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.
We also call on businesses and labor unions to ensure that they do not aid and abet Israeli mass violence, but rather follow the example of workers in Belgium transport unions who refused in late October to handle flights that ship arms to Israel.
Finally, we call on scholars, programs, centers, and institutes in Holocaust and Genocide Studies to take a clear stance against Israeli mass violence and join us in efforts to stop it and prevent its further escalation.
Mohamed Adhikari, University of Cape Town
Taner Akçam, Director, Armenian Genocide Research Program, The Promise Armenian Institute, UCLA
Ayhan Aktar, Professor of Sociology (Retired), Istanbul Bilgi University
Yassin Al Haj Saleh, Syrian Writer, Berlin
Sebouh David Aslanian, Professor of History and Richard Hovannisian Endowed Chair in Modern Armenian History, UCLA
Karyn Ball, Professor of English and Film Studies, University of Alberta, Edmonton
Haim Bresheeth-Žabner, Professorial Research Associate, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London
Cathie Carmichael, Professor Emerita, School of History, University of East Anglia
Daniele Conversi, Professor, Department of Contemporary History, University of the Basque Country
Catherine Coquio, Professeure de littérature comparée à Université Paris Cité, France
John Cox, Associate Professor of History and Global Studies and Director of the Center for Holocaust, Genocide, and Human Rights Studies, University of North Carolina, Charlotte
Martin Crook, Senior Lecturer in Sociology, University of the West of England
Ann Curthoys, Honorary Professor, School of Humanities, The University of Sydney
Sarah K. Danielsson, Professor of History, Queensborough, CUNY
John Docker, Sydney, Australia
John Duncan, affiliated with the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London
Didier Fassin, Professor at the Collège de France and the Institute for Advanced Study
Joanne Smith Finley, Reader in Chinese Studies, Newcastle University, UK
Shannon Fyfe, Assistant Professor of Philosophy, George Mason University; Faculty Fellow, Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy
William Gallois, Professor of the Islamic Mediterranean, University of Exeter
Fatma Muge Gocek, Professor of Sociology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
Svenja Goltermann, Professor of Modern History, University of Zurich
Andrei Gómez-Suarez, Senior Research Fellow, Centre of Religion, Reconciliation and Peace, University of Winchester
Penny Green, Professor of Law and Globalisation and Director of the International State Crime Initiative, Queen Mary University of London
John-Paul Himka, Professor Emeritus, University of Alberta
Marianne Hirschberg, Professor, Faculty of Human Sciences, University of Kassel, Germany
Anna Holian, Associate Professor, School of Historical, Philosophical & Religious Studies, Arizona State University
Rachel Ibreck, Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Relations, Department of Politics and International Relations, Goldsmiths, University of London
Adam Jones, Professor, Political Science, University of British Columbia Okanagan
Rachel Killean, Senior Lecturer, University of Sydney Law School
Brian Klug, Hon. Fellow in Social Philosophy, Campion Hall, University of Oxford, and Hon. Fellow, Parkes Institute for the Study of Jewish/non-Jewish Relations, University of Southampton
Mill Lake, Associate Professor, International Relations Department, London School of Economics
Mark Levene, Emeritus Fellow, University of Southampton
Yosefa Loshitzky, Professorial Research Associate, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London
Thomas MacManus, Senior Lecturer in State Crime, School of Law, Queen Mary University of London
Zachariah Mampilly, Professor, Baruch College and the Graduate Center, CUNY
Benjamin Meiches, Associate Professor of Security Studies and Conflict Resolution, University of Washington-Tacoma
Dirk Moses, Professor of International Relations, City College of New York, CUNY
Eva Nanopoulos, Senior Lecturer in Law, Queen Mary University of London
Jeffrey Ostler, Professor of History Emeritus, University of Oregon
Thomas Earl Porter, Professor of History, North Carolina A&T State University, Greensboro, NC
Michael Rothberg, Professor of English, Comparative Literature, and Holocaust Studies, UCLA
Colin Samson, Professor of Sociology, University of Essex
Victoria Sanford, Lehman Professor of Excellence, Lehman College and the Graduate Center, CUNY
Raz Segal, Associate Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies and Endowed Professor in the Study of Modern Genocide, Stockton University
Elyse Semerdjian, Robert Aram and Marianne Kaloosdian and Stephen and Marian Mugar Chair of Armenian Genocide Studies, Clark University
Martin Shaw, University of Sussex/Institut Barcelona d’Estudis Internacionals
Damien Short, Co-Director of the Human Rights Consortium and Professor of Human Rights and Environmental Justice at the School of Advanced Study, University of London
Ronald Grigor Suny, William H. Sewell, Jr. Distinguished University Professor Emeritus of History and Emeritus Professor of Political Science, University of Michigan
Adam Sutcliffe, Professor of European History, King’s College London
Barry Trachtenberg, Rubin Presidential Chair of Jewish History, Wake Forest University
Enzo Traverso, Professor in the Humanities, Cornell University
Jeremy Varon, Professor of History, The New School, New York
Ernesto Verdeja, Associate Professor of Peace Studies and Global Politics, University of Notre Dame
Johanna Ray Vollhardt, Associate Professor of Psychology, Clark University
Pauline Wakeham, Associate Professor, Department of English, Western University (Canada)
Keith David Watenpaugh, Professor and Director, Human Rights Studies, University of California, Davis
Louise Wise, Lecturer in International Security, University of Sussex
Andrew Woolford, Professor of Sociology and Criminology, University of Manitoba
Ran Zwigenberg, Associate Professor of Asian Studies, History, and Jewish Studies, Pennsylvania State University
Dr. Raz Segal is Associate Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies and Endowed Professor in the Study of Modern Genocide at Stockton University. Dr. Segal has held a Harry Frank Guggenheim Fellowship, a Fulbright Fellowship, and was recently a Senior Fellow at the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies (March-July 2023). His publications include >Genocide in the Carpathians: War, Social Breakdown, and Mass Violence, 1914-1945 (2016); Days of Ruin: The Jews of Munkács during the Holocaust (2013); and he was guest editor of the Hebrew-language special issue onGenocide: Mass Violence and Cultural Erasure of Zmanim: A Historical Quarterly (2018). In addition to scholarly publications, Dr. Segal has published op-eds, book reviews, and larger articles on genocide, state violence, and memory politics in Hebrew, English, and German in The Guardian , LA Times, The Nation, Jewish Currents, Haaretz, +972 Magazine, and Berliner Zeitung , and he has appeared on Democracy Now! and ABC News.
A shrine with a golden dome. A falcon-saint in red. An anthropologist missing home (NK is Neukölln, Berlin). Once a digital postcard from the field, now a companion image. Early on in my research in Sehwan, Pakistan’s most renowned site of multi-faith pilgrimage, I had befriended M. Amin, a photographer-for-hire at the shrine of Lal Shahbaz Qalandar (henceforth Lal). Our shared practice of photographing in the saint’s durbar, albeit for very different purposes, had led to a jolly routine. Every now and then, for a small fee, Amin would photograph me, then place me in templates popular with pilgrims. Poses, backgrounds, motifs were sometimes of his choice, sometimes on my request, but they were always the result of shared visions. One could also, as I did on this one occasion, include a prop. Possibilities weren’t endless but the digital format afforded malleability. At hand was a small selection of the shrine’s facades over time, and to keep one digital company, a stock of characters—politicians, celebrities, saintly figures.
To re/turn to the image with affect is to consider how the image belatedly affects, relationally informs, makes demands for other knowings. The shrine with the golden dome is a state-run shrine, Shi’i-ascendant in the contemporary, Shivaite in history; the Islamic saint in flight is a shariah-troubling mystic; the homesick anthropologist is doing fieldwork at home. There is also that which provides compositional arrest: the ever-present blue in the image, or what for purposes of this discussion I wish to call out as the affective in-between of the saintly, the stately, and the personal. To see the Pakistani state as a saturating presence at shrines, ordinary as the sky yet back/grounding relations in scenes as saintly, jovial, or arbitrary as this, is to take seriously the state’s affective postures, its felt but less-obvious operations—a line of thinking adjacent to what I term in chapter one of Queer Companions: Religion, Public Intimacy, and Saintly Affects as “infrastructures of the imaginal.” Companionship is that lens through which we can appreciate how objects correlate in situations of co-presence, are altered through adjacency, but also how affect is indispensable to what’s going on in scenes of attachment and scenarios of intimacy. Saint, shrine, state, anthropologist when read in companionable terms reaffirm Chris Ingraham’s observation that affects are “not merely personal, … not merely other. They are in-between.”
Ali in the Elevator
Figuring out the logistics of my fieldwork in Sehwan required at least occasionally that I work my way through state bureaucracy, in this case, the Offices of the Sindh Secretariat in Karachi. One afternoon in June 2012, as I walked into the building’s elevator, the man operating the lift was quick to greet me. Ya-Ali madad, he said, literally, “O Ali, help.” Though revered by all Muslims, Ali, the son-in-law of the Prophet Muhammad counts as the primary imam of Shi‘a Muslims and only fourth of the Rightly Guided Caliphs for Sunnis. And while devotion to Ali can surpass sectarian divisions, summoning Ali as a way of daily greeting is neither ordinary nor expected when it comes to interactions among strangers in Pakistan. Mawla-Ali madad, I responded in no time as was customarily appropriate in this situation. The big smile on the man’s face was proof that things had gone smoothly. I had mastered the response in Sehwan where this form of greeting replaces the otherwise customary salam. Formerly Shivaite and home to 125,000 shrines as per local legend, Sehwan is a densely sacred place. As I note in Queer Companions, it is that location where Shi‘i events, histories, and figures are neither exceptional nor minor, rather deftly interwoven into the warp and weft of the place’s most ordinary rhythms. It is also what makes Sehwan an unstraight location in an Islamic republic of (predominantly) Sunni persuasion. By this I mean that Sehwan’s plural orientations, its fractured heritage and compound sense of the divine do not sit straight with pure, exclusive, or official conceptualizations of Islam in Pakistan. Also, that only in the queer affective weave of the sacred are we able to sense and feel the place’s other histories despite counter measures of governance.
To re/turn to the image with affect is to consider how the image belatedly affects, relationally informs, makes demands for other knowings.
But this was Karachi, not Sehwan. “Looking at your wrist, and your face,” said the man, “I knew at once that you were a mo’min” (a believer). A fundamental belief among the Shi‘a is that Ali is wali, the rightful inheritor of divine wisdom who holds the wilayat (religious and spiritual authority, guardianship) of the Prophet. It is precisely what makes a Shi‘a, mo’min, that is, the one with perfected belief, and superior to the Muslim who merely surrenders to Islam. If my spoken allegiance to Ali had worked wonders, the red thread on my wrist from the shrine of Sehwan was no quiet matter either. In fact, Lal and Ali were companion figures, related by blood, entwined in memory and synonymously invoked by many in Sehwan. A call to Lal was a summoning of Ali. Just as I was beginning to appreciate how a red line on my wrist, thin as thread, was potent enough to tie me to places, histories, and publics beyond the elevator—that it could summon saintly figures, whether called or only inferred—the man inquired further, “So, what is your name?’” Any name but Omar, I thought in the moment, a reference so characteristically Sunni in Pakistan that its reckless disclosure risked fracturing the companionable moment. Struggling to un-name or rename myself, rather clumsily, in haste, and without an ounce of originality, “… Ali,” I exclaimed. More smiles were exchanged as Ali walked out of the elevator.
W/Ali in the World
Wilayat—what counted as shared allegiance to Ali in the elevator—is also that concept of spiritual and territorial authority that makes a wali, an Islamic saint, more than just the sanctified dead in the world. Invoked by Shi‘a and Sufi Muslims in distinct ways, wilayat names a particular confluence of saintly dominion and spatial authority, which “encapsulates the range of complex ideas defining the charismatic power of a saint,” writes Pnina Werbner, “not only over transcendental spaces of mystical knowledge but as sovereign of the terrestrial spaces into which his sacred region exists” (27). The authority and influence ascribed to Islamic saints bear the potential thus to encroach on powers of the state. In fact, as the more-than-living, saints are known to act in and on the world, sometimes as judges who arbitrate conflicts and pronounce verdicts at shrines across South Asia, fittingly called durbars, that is, royal courts or courts of law. Their meddling roles and reputations are part of the reason why shrines can run parallel to projects of the nation-state, or are deemed too close to it when targeted by anti-state actors, or why saints are a worry to the political. Such factors inform the Pakistani state’s motivations to govern saints as well as their shrines.
As part of a modernizing project initiated in the late 1950s, numerous sites of religious significance, especially saints’ shrines, including the one at Sehwan, were eventually nationalized and turned into public endowments. Shrines across Pakistan have since been administered under the Department of Auqaf, a subsidiary of the Ministry of Religious Affairs. Scholars have pointed to the secularizing impulse of such a project but also its political and financial gains. In displacing the authority and curbing the influence of traditional custodians and former caretakers of such sites, the newly-formed state was aspiring to expand its political writ while also gaining access to such shrines’ manifold revenues, material as well as symbolic. Shrines under the state were turned into sites of revenue and cultural tourism, places that offer healing on the cusp of the stately and saintly. More prominent ones were turned into political venues where the state’s vision of Islam could be effectively staged. Administrative measures have also led to inadvertent outcomes, as Alix Philippon has shown. It is under state control that women and transgender individuals have found advanced, if not equal, access to religious ritual, saintly charisma, and spiritual careers—marked by the dual care of the saint and the state, shrines are uniquely positioned at the cusp of the public and the intimate. So long as state control of shrines is accomplished by displacing genealogical claims to saints’ bodies and their heritage, governing saints includes enabling new or other public routes of accessing the saintly. As I have shown elsewhere, state infrastructures have propelled once regional shrines like the one at Sehwan into sites of national prominence and pilgrimage. As visions that are co-authored across the saintly and the stately, projects of national becoming are mediated by religious affect. Multiple publics, however disparate or divergent, are thrown together in national scenes, frames, and routes of attachment through devotion to saints of the state.
Shrines under the state were turned into sites of revenue and cultural tourism, places that offer healing on the cusp of the stately and saintly. More prominent ones were turned into political venues where the state’s vision of Islam could be effectively staged.
More curiously though, even when intent at disciplining the nation’s unruly histories and figures, the state invariably ends up promoting their devotional value and affective appeal. How might we then read the governing tactics and administrative presence of the Pakistani state at saints’ shrines as it spills into affective genres that can be traced only through felt registers? Or, when what pulls people to the saint is also wound up in affective postures and desires of the state? How do we make sense of the common assertion that the state and the saint only act in tandem? Thus, when I argue that affective intimacies with enshrined holy figures, beings, and places can foster unstraight and more-than-inherited ways of being in the world, a key insight of my book, I also point to state infrastructures that make such futures available, if not always attainable. It is only through a cross-reading of affect and governance, reading companionably across pursuits of the saint and projects of the state, that we are able to appreciate the broadly felt means and sometimes disguised desires of the Pakistani state to govern saints as well as to govern with them. The affective in-between is where we feel and thereby know that the Pakistani state is present in scenes of religious intimacy. Here, it haunts images, reverberates through devotional song, and sometimes assumes saintly avatars in dreamworlds, or comes to matter in the odd elevator too. This, to the benefit of my broader argument on public intimacy, reaffirms the idea that as individuals come close to the saintly in Pakistan, they also invariably draw nearer to the state.
One is Known by the Company One Keeps
From my first visit to the pilgrimage town in 2009 to my last in 2018, I have come across reactions to my name that ranged from utter disgust to a preference to not speak to me, from creative ways of addressing me to advice on getting my name changed. In its simplest sense, it evokes a strong dislike for ‘Umar, the second of the Rightly Guided Caliphs for Sunni Muslims and one of the key historical figures blamed by the Shi‘a of Sehwan for his alleged hostility towards the ahl-e-bayt or the family of the Prophet. One of the shrine’s custodians always referred to me as Kasmani to avoid my first name; in one setting, people purposefully kept calling me Aamir, chosen for its similarity with Omar as they later told me. To one fakir, I was Mithall, Sindhi for “the sweet one;” and on a local’s mobile phone, I was saved as Omar-Ali Sehwani. If I wasn’t Ali of the elevator, I was no longer just Omar either. I had been renamed more than once and, more importantly, the place had started to stick to my person—whether as thread on my body or Sehwani in my name. The point is, intimacy alters us; companionship also inflects the ways in which we come to be known and become knowable to the world. With red on my wrist, to the man in the elevator, I simply did not look like an Omar. It is as though like my fakir interlocutors, in coming close to Sehwan, with saintly companions, certain pasts were being forsaken. Other futures were being afforded in intimacy’s bloom.
Omar Kasmani is researcher and guest-lecturer in social and cultural anthropology at Freie Universität, Berlin. His research practice is situated across the study of contemporary Islamic life-worlds, queer and affect theory and queries critical notions of intimacy and post-migrant be/longing. He is the author of Queer Companions: Religion, Public Intimacy and Saintly Affects in Pakistan (Duke University Press, 2022). His current book project turns to autotheory and brings personal memoir to bear on an affective geography of Berlin.
All Saved Church of Christ. One of the 15 Congolese “Églises de Réveil” in the neighborhood of Katwe. These churches are usually built in cheap and perishable materials. October 2015. Photo courtesy of Alessandro Gusman.
God has a plan for you; never forget this truth: God has a plan for you. Even if you are a refugee and you can’t see where your future will be, God has a plan for you; even if you are suffering here in Kampala, God has a plan for you; even if you have been here in Uganda for 5 years, or for 10 years, don’t forget, God has a plan for you. This is not something you can know in advance, you just have to put faith on him, because he has a plan for you.
This excerpt from a sermon delivered by a Pentecostal pastor echoes a commonly heard theme one hears in the many Congolese Pentecostal churches around Kampala, the capital city of Uganda: never lose faith in God and his plan, mysterious to humans, but clear in his mind. According to this narrative, the suffering of today and of the past should be interpreted as part of a divine plan that is beyond humans’ comprehension; there is nothing one can do but trust in God, knowing that sooner or later this plan will be accomplished. This theme projects into the future a resolution to the current suffering one faces, maintaining expectations beyond the situation experienced in the present. Briefly, it creates a hope for the future in a situation of extreme existential and legal uncertainty, as is the case for the majority of the more than forty thousand Congolese refugees currently living in Kampala (out of almost half a million who live in Uganda as a whole). They arrived in Uganda in different periods of time through the last three decades, fleeing the conflicts and protracted violence in the Kivu region (Eastern Congo). Many of them live in the settlements in the West and South-West of Uganda. Yet, an increasing number choose to leave the settlements and move to urban centers, where they aim to find better opportunities in terms of education, work, and physical safety.
The reference to trust in a divine plan is identified as a coping strategy by refugees, who listed it as the main mediator of the significant stress that they face in light of their economic and social insecurity and isolation. In conducting my own research in Kampala, I have seen it also operate as a tool to counter the chaotic experience of refugee life, the sense of anxiety and despair generated by the protracted refugee status, and the difficult living conditions of urban refugees. Becoming part of a congregation is also seen as part of this divine plan, as is meeting people in church who provide financial support, help rebuild social networks, and aid refugees in confronting the many other challenges that they face. In short, talking about God’s plan helps Congolese refugees find an order in life, and to project onto a different dimension, that of the divine, their expectations, which are often unachievable in the present.
Another narrative of hope frequently adopted in the Congolese churches in Kampala is that of the biblical story of the people of Israel. The long transit through Uganda (many Congolese have now lived in the country for ten or more years) is symbolically likened to the crossing of the Sinai desert narrated in the book of Exodus, with the prospect of reaching—albeit after a long period of suffering—the promised land, identified as the place of resettlement. Hence, on the one hand these refugees experience the anguish that results from living in a prolonged suspension from living a full life. On the other hand, there is hope, which in Christian theology is the expectation that something that is already there (in this case, a solution to the present condition) will be fulfilled, not that something which may not be real or possible will come to pass. This religious affect of hope seems to be particularly active in the case of the refugees I worked with, because it stands in contrast to the realization that the three “durable solutions” (repatriation, local integration, resettlement) proposed by secular international bodies are ineffective; as I will emphasize below, it is against this ineffectiveness of secular narratives that the Congolese refugees in Kampala have developed the idea of being exposed to a fourth solution, that of a “silent death” in the refuge. In this context, religious institutions maintain an important alternative welfare function too, providing shelter and material aid, as well as spiritual support and opportunities to socialize and share painful experiences in DRC Congo and Uganda itself. Moreover, Christian narratives of suffering and redemption help Congolese refugees in Kampala to make their present experience of suffering, marginality, and displacement more understandable and therefore also somewhat more tolerable. Religious language is crucial in the way Congolese refugees describe their life in Kampala and make sense of it. In light of the fact that states of insecurity and fear mark their everyday reality, they translate these realities into a different affective realm, one in which faith in God and in his plans provides room for narratives of hope.
Église Gloire de Dieu. Congolese congregations in Kampala include 50 to 200 members. They regularly meet on Sunday and on 2–3 other days in the week for prayer and worship. May 2022. Photo Courtesey of Alessandro Gusman.
However, as the time living in refuge becomes more and more protracted, this hope begins to give way to disillusionment, especially among the older generations of refugees and those who have been in Uganda for many years. I started conducting research with the Congolese in Kampala in 2013. At that time, resettlement was an extremely popular discourse and a concrete hope for the future for many. This is because a return to Congo was (and continues to be) an unrealistic (and often unwanted) prospect. In the case of Congolese refugees, Congo is often conceived with a nostalgic feeling of a “lost home,” a place to which it is not possible to return. Thus, the idea of Congo as a “nation” to be supported and to which to return one day is not widespread among Congolese in Kampala, nor it is “exile nationalism”; the only well-known case of nationalism in the Congolese diaspora is the one of “Les Combattants”, a network of intellectuals who live in Europe and North-America and who are critical towards the Congolese state. However, most of my interlocutors in Uganda didn’t even know about this group, or had just heard about it but considered it something far from their experience.
The link to Congo is thus mainly an affective one, most of them declare they are “proudly Congolese”; yet, they do not plan, and do not want, to return. In this situation, resettlement is seen as the only possible way out of the refugee condition. My interlocutors were confident that with God’s help they would soon be travelling to the US, Canada, or another of the UN Refugee agency resettlement destinations. They were in Uganda, waiting for the plan God had for them to be realized, and were hearing in sermons that they should wait patiently for their turn to come. No one could know when, but their long transit would eventually come to an end. Almost ten years later, most of those same people who had expressed hope of building a life elsewhere are still stuck in Kampala. In this situation, maintaining a hope in the future becomes increasingly difficult, and many now express feelings of disillusionment and despair. During my most recent periods in Kampala, in June 2022 and in September 2023, it was not uncommon for me to be told, “I no longer know what my future will be,” “I am beginning to feel that I will be trapped here forever,” or “I no longer have any hope of travelling, I no longer have any plans for the future”; for planning implies having a hope in the future, which for many of the Congolese refugees in Kampala is fading away.
In light of the fact that states of insecurity and fear mark their everyday reality, they translate these realities into a different affective realm, one in which faith in God and in his plans provides room for narratives of hope.
Given the extended length of time that they have lived as refugees, the ability for religious narratives to aid refugees in maintaining positive expectations for the future is also fading. If “hope” in God’s plan is still present in the way Congolese pastors frame their preaching during Sunday sermons, outside of churches refugees seem to turn more and more to a different language, one in which the reference to hope leaves room to make political accusations towards the institutions that they believe are responsible for their condition, as these institutions do not provide real “solutions” to the condition of refugee. In the experience of many of the Congolese refugees, return, local integration, and resettlement are all unrealistic options, and they often remark the distance between international policies that remain on paper, and their everyday feeling of being stuck in Uganda. With the concept of “mort silencieuse” (“silent death”), they describe the extreme consequences of a “protracted refuge” when it appears to have rather become a permanent one. When this condition lasts indefinitely and does not allow a way out to be glimpsed, the prevalent feeling is of no longer being able to “hope for” a solution to the present situation, but of being left to die silently in the country that was imagined as a place of transit and from which one can no longer leave. Congolese refugees have thus started calling this condition of despair and disillusionment a “fourth durable solution,” an expression they use as an allegation against the Ugandan government and international bodies, which they consider co-responsible for the prolonged condition of limbo they are experiencing as refugees. Despite the hospitality offered to them, the Ugandan government is reluctant to allow a form of de jure integration by granting citizenship to those refugees who have been in the country for a long period of time. In addition to this, return to the DRC is made impossible by the protracted conflicts in the eastern regions, and resettlement numbers are increasingly low due to the unwillingness of those countries that have been historically more open to receive refugees (mainly North American, Central and Northern European countries, and Australia) to continue to act as resettlement countries. For these reasons, the common condition for Congolese refugees in Uganda is that of a prolonged lack of citizenship rights and recognition of their claims. In the face of this institutional violence, religious narratives are not emphasized, yet they are complemented by a political claim that becomes stronger and that should not be reduced to a passive acknowledgement of an ineluctable fate, but rather recognized as a renewed plea for a possibility to build a future.
Alessandro Gusman (Ph.D. in Social Anthropology) is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Turin, Italy. His research focuses on the presence of Pentecostalism in Uganda, on Congolese churches in Kampala, and on ageing and end-of-life care in the Italian context. He is the Director of the Italian Ethnological Mission in Equatorial Africa, and of the research center CPS-Africa, which organizes the Summer School TOAfrica. He is the author of the books Pentecostistes en Ouganda. Sida, moralité et conflit générationnel(2018) and Antropologia dell’olfatto (2004), and coeditor of Strings Attached: AIDS and the Rise of Transnational Connections in Africa(2014, with Nadine Beckmann and Catrine Shroff) and Urban Africa(2017, with Cecilia Pennacini).
Zenit ET – Black – v1 camera. Via Wikimedia Commons.
I hate to admit it, but I think about White people damn near all the time. I’m constantly concerned about what they do, about how their words and actions affect me. I wish this weren’t the case. But I cannot help it.
It is not simply the “conservatives” who occupy my mind, though. All that “anti-woke” foolishness is just that—foolishness. It is idiocy. It is violent. And it has brutal effects. But it’s not just them. It is also the liberals. They irritate me, too. For their hypocrisy is apparent. Everywhere.
Or maybe it isn’t hypocrisy. Maybe DEI™ is just the latest iteration of an old philosophy. We have been here before. The “Great Chain of Being” called us here. It structured this world. In fact, it structured the very notion of world. (And if you know Hegel, you know a notion is always more than a notion.) According to this chain, we are all branches from the same Adamic tree. The chain was hierarchical, but it wasn’t exclusive—not in an absolute sense. As Zakiyyah Jackson and Sylvia Wynter remind us, it wasn’t that Africans-turned-negroes were left out. The “negro” might have been an invention, but even it had its place in the great schema (or scheme?) of philosophical and theological anthropology. They were—we are—included. Still.
I therefore live according to their rules. Those rules govern my life. They shape my perception. They form my horizons. They dominate my attention.
And, sadly, they control my thoughts.
And that is the violence. I know we are here to talk about “White nationalism.” This term allegedly conjures up image of tiki torches and white hoods; it is meant to invoke fights over statues and “Moms for Liberty.” But if you look deeper, you recognize: White liberals are White nationalists, too. As they reach for reform at every turn, as they embrace a crass pragmatism disguised as “being realistic,” they name themselves as invested in the same project as their conservative counterparts. To miss this is to be foolish.
To speak of White nationalism, then, is to recognize White supremacy as a common project. A common project of whiteness. Which is to say, a common project of antiblack violence, of antiblackness. We are made to conclude that the source of this violence is found in the mass shootings and the book bans. We are supposed to conclude that the “southern” states are off their rocker, that they are the site and source of our national ills.
White liberals are White nationalists, too. As they reach for reform at every turn, as they embrace a crass pragmatism disguised as “being realistic,” they name themselves as invested in the same project as their conservative counterparts.
But this is not the case. The source of White nationalist violence is not found in the physical and legislative brutality enacted in public spaces and proclaimed in state and federal legislatures. The violence is not simply in the people themselves. It is also in the institutions and structures that are built upon and sourced from that common antiblack white supremacist project. This project might be socially constructed, but it is not a fiction. It is real. It structures our social reality. To borrow from Wynter again, if we only think of the actors, if we only think of White supremacy in terms of those who say and do disgusting things, then mistake the map for the territory; for the real source of theviolence is in its capacity to dominate our attention and occupy our headspace. Whiteness, White supremacy, White nationalism—call it whatever you like—shapes the horizon of what we can and should see. White people are beneficiaries of these horizons and this shaping. Arguing about monuments, getting riled up about White people enacting insurrectionist violence—hell, even getting caught up in Donald Trump’s latest legal fiascos—all of this is meant to distract, to turn our attention toward them and away from ourselves.
Steve Biko once said that “the greatest weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.” I agree. But I must admit: my mind still needs work. Because they dominate my attention. Long ago, a philosopher—well, his translators—used the term “they” to discuss normative (read: White) actions, presumptions, and perspectives. A “normal” person does what they do. One sees as they see; one attends to what they attend to.
This philosopher said he was doing mere description. He claimed he was simply articulating the state of affairs. And maybe he was. I can’t call it. But I know that this philosopher was a White supremacist. Which means that his “description” wasn’t neutral. It was steeped in power relations. The “normal,” the they, isn’t neutral. There is power attached to normality. We call it normativity. And normativity structures what should be attended to and what shouldn’t. When they dominate my perceptions, it isn’t innocuous. In fact, as Frantz Fanon once claimed, they are the ones who tell me that I am nothing more than an “object among other objects,” that whatever I see (or want to see) is structured by what they see (89).
When I speak of they, then, I am speaking of the various structures and embodiments of White supremacist anti-Black normativity. For, even when I might not want them to, they structure my perception and determine what I have come to understand as knowledge. What I see, what I am made to see, is dominated by them.
Call me weak. Call me foolish. But I cannot help it. Not unless I focus. Not unless I turn my attention away from them, away from what they do. I cannot do my work so long as I am focused on them. For as long as I am preoccupied with them, I am not engaged with us.
To turn our attention away: that is the move. I believe that the radicality of Black study is not simply found in its philosophical criticisms of White supremacist anti-Blackness—though there is something to be said for this, to be sure—but instead is sourced from a different kind of attention. And this different attention would entail a different kind of experience—a different structure of experience.Phenomenology wouldn’t hold here; as Derrida once told us, phenomenology is, always, a phenomenology of light. Phenomenological experience is about what can be brought to the light—to the White light of epistemological transparency.
The radicality of Black study is not simply found in its philosophical criticisms of White supremacist anti-Blackness, but instead is sourced from a different kind of attention.
Visibility, then, is a tool of Whiteness and White supremacy. As Lewis Gordon once put it, Whiteness determines what appears—what is deemed a “licit” or “illicit” appearance. And as I’ll show later, Sara Ahmed makes it clear that a phenomenology of Whiteness is about who and what fits and how—which is to say, who and what is rendered visible, and for what reasons.
But I come from the dark. And because I come from the dark, my appearance, my presence, my visibility—even my own perceptions—are rendered subject to the phenomenology of White experience that dominates this world. I am not always invisible, but my appearance is illicit. And that illicit appearance renders my perceptions invalid. Hence, my focus on them.
And yet, I still come from darkness. My birthright is the darkness of night, the depths of the sea. And there is something about the darkness that opens possibilities. There is something powerful about darkness, something generative. And that’s what I want to think with. How might we think with the dark? How might we engage in a paraphenomenology of darkness, a description of what cannot be seen?
Here’s what I have to offer.
***
For some time now, I have been mesmerized by a passage from Toni Morrison’s Beloved. It comes in Beloved’s chapter, where she begins to speak. In speaking, she leaves grammar and punctuation behind. Perhaps she leaves it behind because she is trying to leave her body behind.
we cannot make sweat or morning water so the men without skin bring us theirs one time they bring us sweet rocks to suck we are all trying to leave our bodies behind the man on my face has done it it is hard to make yourself die forever you sleep short and then return
Even if you have not read Beloved, the only context you need for this passage is that Beloved is in the hold. She is in Middle Passage. And being in Middle Passage takes away the sense, the meaning of this passage. This passage in and from the Middle Passage doesn’t make sense. In philosophical terms, it does not give itself. It is not given. It is not an object of perception, of meaning; it leaves the question of significance behind. Understanding is impossible here. All we have are fleeting observations, called and culled from the violence of being too close, of being in such frottage that even the very capacity to move is stunted: “someone is thrashing,” Beloved tells us, “but there is no room to do it in.” Fuck a body schema—the body is a trap.
First paraphenomenological insight: the Black body is not a site of freedom.
There is more. Read the passage again. And now, pay attention to the “men without skin.” These figures are not beautiful. Their morning water, their piss, is not a gift. These men are ugly—physically and ethically. But pay close attention to Beloved’s method. She is describing the conditions of her experience, the structure of a lifeworld to which she does not have access. She is engaging in paraphenomenology here, and what we see, what we are enabled to see, is nothing less than the ghastly grotesqueness of White aesthetics. Whiteness is not beautiful. It is hideous. It has no skin. It is burned by the sun and changes color in the breeze. What is given in the light of whiteness is nothing more than the blinding luminescence of violence.
Second paraphenomenological insight: White aesthetics are not to be embraced, let alone attended to.
There is one last paraphenomenological insight that I think we need to underscore: Blackness is to be loved. Though I didn’t record the whole speech here, there is a moment when Beloved says the following:
if I had the teeth of the man who died on my face I would bite the circle around her neck bite it away I know she does not like it now there is room to crouch and to watch the crouching others
In “Blackness and Nothingness (Mysticism in the Flesh),” Fred Moten calls our attention to the possibility that the hold was a “language lab,” a space where care and love were possible in the midst of degradation. I no longer hold a rosy idea of this picture. But I do think there is something to be said for Beloved’s desire, for the way that she holds care for the woman who has her face. Blackness is to be loved. Blackness is beloved. Why? Because, at some point, there will be “room to crouch.” There will be room. Room will be made. Not because we want it, but because they will make it. Blackness is to be loved. Blackness is beloved. That is the last paraphenomenological insight. For now, anyway.
***
You might be wondering what that detour into Beloved has to do with the idea of White nationalism. And I’ll be honest with you: it has nothing to do with it. Nothing at all. What this brief literary and paraphenomenological detour exposes is the sheer terror of Whiteness, the utter violence of White nationalism. How? Because it exposes how White nationalism seeks to dominate our attention.If phenomenology is about anything, it is about where and how we pay attention. It is about what constitutes “experience.” But, as Sara Ahmed intimates, the very terms under which “experience” is constituted is always White. Always steeped in philosophical and theological logics that posit transcendence and light as good things. But in that light, we are blinded. In that light, we are made to pay attention to the heinousness of White people—a heinousness with which we are already too familiar, a heinousness about which we do not need to be constantly reminded.
This is not to say that there is no place for criticisms of White supremacy. In fact, a turning away from White aesthetics is itself a critique of their logics, their actions. And their history. In fact, a paraphenomenology of darkness allows us to see the brutality of history, the violence not simply of statues, but of the fight over statues. It allows us to the see the disgusting condescension of White liberals who, as Steve Biko reminded us, seek to tell us how and what to think. It allows us to see how this condescension is enacted in the name of goodness. Liberal condescension is their morning water; DEI™ is nothing less than the institutionalization of White people pissing on us and telling us it’s gold.
At the beginning of this essay, I spoke of them. I consistently put it into italics because I wanted to underscore who and what they are. They aren’t (simply) individuals. They are the institutionalization of White normativity, the enactment and enforcement of a brutal social ontology that determines who and what we should attend to. They therefore names both the agents of White normativity and the normativity of Whiteness itself; they names the ways that normativity seeps into our everyday lives, structuring our perceptions, calling our attention toward Whiteness (and white people) and away from ourselves. They are White, and Whiteness is them. The “are” and the “is” in the previous sentence are meant to convey the reality of the they—a social reality, to be sure, but a reality nonetheless. And because it is a reality (though perhaps not the only one) DEI™ is yet another ontological tool they use to reinforce their continued dominance and normativity, to determine who is or isn’t eligible for resources, benefits, and healthy life options.
Liberal condescension is their morning water; DEI™ is nothing less than the institutionalization of White people pissing on us and telling us it’s gold.
Which means that DEI™ is also a nationalist project. It serves the project of U.S. imperial interests here and abroad. It functions to justify a nation steeped in White interests and White perspectives. We must not forget that anti-Black chattel slavery operated along the lines of a doctrine of inclusion; Black people were included—just not as beneficiaries of the country they were tasked with building. Even if they weren’t equitable, slave plantations were both diverse and inclusive; they were pictures of White people and Black people being in the same place.
And what of equity? Equity is structured by them. So to speak of equity in this country is to always measure oneself “against the tape of a world that looks on with amused contempt and pity.” DEI™ is a White nationalist project, steeped in their interests and marked by their desires. In fact, it has been the nationalist project since we hit these shores.
But Beloved is not concerned about their morning water. She has turned away.
Biko Mandela Gray is an Associate Professor of Religion at Syracuse University. He writes, teaches, and thinks about the relationship between blackness, ethics, philosophy, and religion—with a particular emphasis on questions of subjectivity. His first monograph, Black Life Matter (Duke, 2022) sits with four lives as a mode of philosophical eulogy and criticism of religious and philosophical logics of subject-formation. He's also co-author (with Ryan Johnson) of Phenomenology of Black Spirit (Edinburgh, 2022) and co-editor (with Stephen Finley and Lori Martin) of The Religion of White Rage (Edinburgh, 2020). He is currently working on a monograph that explores Sojourner Truth's life as a way of thinking about black ethics.
“Triumph of the Cross.” The Copts newsletter cover. January 1990. Photo courtesey of Candace Lukasik.
One evening before a Bible study, I met with Father (Abouna) James, a Coptic priest in a rural area of middle New Jersey. We sat in what appeared to be the old office of a two-story home, used temporarily as the liturgical space. Abouna James was quite active on Facebook and had recently shared articles on then President Trump’s comments that Haiti and African nations (including Egypt) were “shithole” countries. Looking through the comments on the shared article, I noticed that many Copts voiced their support for Trump’s perspective. I asked the priest why many Copts in diaspora expressed such views on Egypt, despite their Egyptian origins and transnational kin relations. “They support those comments,” he explained, “because when they support them, they are essentially saying ‘shithole’ refers to Islam, not to them.”
While translating “colonial trauma” as well as collective memory of sectarian violence in Egypt, the work of religious differentiation done by some Copts, like those in these comments, gestures toward what I have discussed elsewhere as the ordinary affects of U.S. empire—as a power structure of assimilation to mold sensibilities, relationships, and practices and avoid the gaze of racialized and civilizational suspicion. Both communal and scaled transtemporal affects can be held in tension. These ordinary affects of empire unfold in how Copts have adapted to and have been shaped by visions of Islamic geographies that have kept them in an affective paradox of racial-religious un/belonging. In thinking with the longue durée of geographic and religious difference under colonization, Coptic Christians have more recently integrated into the shifting gaze of racecraft in the United States. The racialization of Coptic Christians in American society can be thought of as pieced together in the ordinary and extraordinary course of everyday doing—mediated through discursive forces of terrorist threat and suspicion of the Middle Eastern other, racial infrastructures of securitization (through profiling programs), as well as the cultural logics that proliferate after the event. The dominance of racial difference—a difference that makes one recognized as a dangerous other—lies in the dense set of prior representations and practices on which they build in U.S. empire—the undocumented, the immigrant, the Jew, Black—the histories of these threats to American freedom and democratic stability interweave with one another. Coptic Christians integrate into the shifting gaze of racecraft in the United States in the way their visibility—as martyrs—is veiled by their positionality as non-White migrants from the Middle East—a politicized place and geography racialized as Muslim and therefore incommensurable with western and specifically American values.
“The Descendent of Islam Princes”
While Coptic immigration from Egypt to the United States began in earnest in the 1970s after the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, Egyptian Coptic Olympic diver and Hollywood socialite, Farid Simaika was already in the center of a battle of racial belonging in 1935. At the time, he was engaged to Betty J. Wilson, University of California, Los Angeles co-ed and daughter of William G. Wilson, steel manufacturer from Youngstown, Ohio. When Simaika and Wilson filed an intention to wed notice, the marriage license bureau initially refused to grant them a marriage license because of doubt as to whether Simaika was “an Egyptian or a Caucasian.” The determination of Simaika’s Whiteness was front page news of the Hollywood elite. In pre-Perez v. Sharp (1948) California, existing laws prevented the intermarriage between Whites and “those of another race.” After consulting ethnologists, the county counsel’s office in Los Angeles ruled on April 26, 1935 that “an Egyptian is of the Caucasian race” and that “Egyptians were of the Hamitic and Semitic branch of the Caucasian race,” thereby removing the racial barrier to their marriage.
Coptic Egyptian Olympic Diver Farid Simaika prepares for a swim. Wikimedia Commons.
In her May 1935 article, journalist Adelaide Fielding rhetorically questioned the appeal of Simaika—“Was he [Simaika] not the descendant of Islam princes?” This question is certainly a prime example of Orientalism, (of the amalgamation of different Middle Eastern communities into the figure of “Islam”). Yet, it also connects national imaginaries of racial imperialism to their very real colonial contexts during this time period—when American Christian missionaries and travel writers were plentiful in Egypt and transnationally circulated tropes on Islam and Muslims.
Amid contesting visions of Middle Eastern Christianity and its distance and proximity to Islam at the time, Copts and others had to varyingly contend with European colonial knowledge production on their racial composition and religious kinship with western Christendom. Egyptologists of the late 19th and early 20th century argued that Egyptian Copts were the “descendants of the Pharaohs” and most importantly, that they were “racially pure.” A continual theme was that of the “racial” link between the Copts and the Ancient Egyptians, which sought to distance Copts from their Egyptian Muslims co-religionists. This complex structure of proximity and difference is linked to how Coptic-Egyptians were racialized in the early 20th century United States, and layers of racialization continue to frame the ambiguous character of transnational Coptic life today as well.
While such citizenship strategies in appeals to Whiteness (like that of Simaika) are plentiful in the early 20th century United States out of legal necessity, the affective conviction of difference among Middle Eastern Christian diasporas like the Copts draws from collective memory of sectarian violence in Egypt and upends those contexts translated through a new imperial key. The allure of Trump among the Coptic diaspora in the United States did not start and end with him but exemplifies a long history of paradoxical dissimilarity from and similitude within the global geography of Islam that has bound Christians in/from the Middle East to strategies of distinction as a means of assimilation into Whiteness.
Affective Geographies of Islamic Persecution
Over the past several decades, these colonial binds have been reconfigured into a new kind of American persecution politics that has translated earlier conceptualizations on Islam within it and bound the Coptic diaspora into conservative political orientations. During the Cold War, evangelical narratives of persecution were centered on the suffering of Christians under communism, especially in the Soviet Union. As the Cold War ended, this global vision began to break down. American evangelical persecution politics of the late 20th century fed into diasporic activism and advocacy among Coptic (or Egyptian) Christians in the United States, and reshaped transnational Coptic identity in the process. In this transnational translation, Coptic injury from Egyptian sectarian contexts also lent itself to burgeoning fields of anti-Muslim public discourse.
The affective conviction of difference among Middle Eastern Christian diasporas like the Copts draws from collective memory of sectarian violence in Egypt and upends those contexts translated through a new imperial key.
Along with translating Coptic plight through western vocabularies of legitimacy, Coptic diaspora activists curated an economy of Christian kinship in line with the changing field of the Persecuted Church and evidenced through dissemination of The Copts newsletter (founded by Coptic diaspora activists in the early 1970s). While maintaining Arabic content for the Coptic diaspora that focused more specifically on local contexts in Egypt and their transnational interpretation, the English content of the newsletter evidenced an emerging diasporic Coptic imaginary of persecution politics. In this imaginary, Egypt’s Christians felt the same experiences as other geopolitically important Christian communities, in such places as Sudan and Pakistan, that were also the focus of U.S. foreign policy and evangelical lobbying efforts.
The Copts newsletter cover, June 1987. Comparing Muslim Fundamentalists and Nazis. Photo courtesy of Candace Lukasik.
In an anonymous editorial from 1992 entitled “Wolves in Sheep’s Clothing,” a Coptic editor of the newsletter explicitly details how civilizational language operates on a global Islamic geography and through its political affects. Writing about the differences between Islam in the Middle East and how Muslim activists in the west politically organize around it, the editorial reads, “They brag about being Americans, and have the American flag cover the background of their program set. This is the same flag Muslims burn in their daily rituals in Iran, calling America ‘The great Satan.’” In other newsletters throughout the 1990s, the juxtaposition between Islam and America became even greater. In two editorials from 1995 and 1996, a writer by the name of “Victor Mordechai” even describes the Qur’an as an “Islamic Mein Kampf.”
While clearly the work of The Copts in the 1980s and throughout the 1990s was shaped by several emerging discourses on Islam focused on fundamentalism and terrorism, the curation of a Coptic perspective on minority discrimination was directly shaped by experiences from the homeland. Although the dangerous consequences of diasporic Coptic rhetoric on Islam and Muslims should not be overlooked, Coptic immigrants to the United States also channeled their experiences in Egypt of pervasive discrimination and violence into networks of American empire-building, embracing global Islamic geographies of threat and advancing strategies to combat it, placing them into political tension.
Right-wing attention to Coptic conditions in Egypt has historically placed diaspora communities in a contradiction-laden position. On the one hand, drawing attention to the Coptic plight inevitably sets them apart from the broader concerns of the Arab American (or Middle Eastern) communities that are split along religious lines (mainly Muslim and Christian). This attention enhances the fractures that are internal to the body politic that seeks redress for the forms of discrimination and racialization in diaspora, and specifically anti-Muslim/anti-Arab racism pervasive in U.S. society. On the other hand, Coptic calls for American protection or advocacy sets up an unstable synergy between the security this affords and the insecurity it engenders. It places Copts in a contested relationship to other racialized Arab American communities—combatting anti-Arab/anti-Muslim racism—as well as to Coptic kin in the homeland who vehemently disagree with their political tactics from the diaspora. Coptic dependence on such organizations that emphasize religious (and particularly Christian) difference and the evils of Islamic governance and Muslim-majority rule amplify Coptic difference for imperial ends. This is a necessary feature of making Coptic discrimination legible in diaspora in terms of international law and U.S. imperial interests. Over the past several decades, how diasporic Copts have relayed their demands to the U.S. government for equal rights in Egypt became increasingly shaped by new vocabularies and enemies, and securitized discourses on Islam that connected with the initiatives and strategies of U.S. empire and evangelical internationalism. Yet, the pain of the persecuted is curated for Western Christian consumption and ultimately political utility with uneven e/affects—that pain does not produce a homogenous group of bodies who are evenly together in their pain.
Candace Lukasik an Assistant Professor of Religion and Anthropology at Mississippi State University, whose research focuses on the intersections of religion, race, migration, and empire. Her first book manuscript, entitled Martyrs and Migrants: Coptic Christians and the Persecution Politics of U.S. Empire, ethnographically examines how American conservative politicization of Middle Eastern Christians has shaped collective memory, patterns of transnational migration, and inter-communal solidarities.
Angel & National Flag of Belgium, Martyrs’ Square – Place des Martyrs – Martelaarsplaats, Brussels, Belgium. Via Flickr User Dr Les Sachs. CC BY 2.0 DEED.
In the wake of the rise of figures such as Victor Orbán, Narendra Modi, Jair Bolsonaro, and Donald Trump, studies of religious nationalism, especially in its more populist registers, are on the rise. Part of the motive for these studies is to better understand why scholars, pundits, pollsters, journalists, and others failed to capture the level of dissatisfaction that has driven some voters in recent years to turn to politicians and causes that are in rhetoric and in practice promoting xenophobia, homophobia, misogyny, and racism. More deeply, scholars are grappling with the resurgence of forces that previous generations of political thinkers believed could be constrained by liberal principles.
Religious nationalism—and more broadly national identity construed in religious terms—has often served as an embodiment of exclusionary ideals. In the US context of White Christian nationalism, for example, the removal of the boundaries between church and State are being supported by public officials who also support ending gay marriage, restricting immigration, and censoring critical discussions of race. Others are calling for “common good constitutionalism” that supports a natural law reading of the constitution and would impose heteronormative laws on all citizens. There are many ways one might approach the examination of this resurgence of religious nationalism, including discursive analysis, ethnographic study, and through the use of critical theory.
This blog series builds upon and extends beyond these studies by focusing on the relationship between religion, the nation-state, and affect/emotion broadly construed. Its contributors draw on the resources of affect theory and studies of emotion to better understand the shifting politics of the nation-state in modernity and challenges to its politics. Such an intervention is necessary for understanding the complex ways in which people become attached to particular understandings of the nation (with its ethnic, racial, and linguistic constructions), and the role of religion in either supporting or hindering that attachment. These essays engage the state not at the high levels of political theory but in the felt realities of people living within it. Notably, the contributors here also extend the conversation beyond the Euro- and US-centric analysis by which it is typically constrained. This provides a unique perspective on our current political and social moment. The contributions not only provide a critical genealogical account of the role of affect—that is, the feelings, moods, and/or emotions that shape our individual and collective lives—in the construction of political loyalties and disloyalties, but also help us imagine ways of breaking through them to begin to imagine new affective alternatives.
Beginning in the US, Biko Mandela Gray examines the White nationalism that undergirds the seemingly neutral liberalism in the US. Casting White supremacy as a wider phenomenon than that of “tiki torches and white hoods,” for Gray, requires that we understand the way that White supremacy shapes our political and social horizons in a more deeply entrenched manner than the phrase “White nationalism” signifies. Philosophy, and more specifically phenomenology, has perpetuated a kind of Whiteness through its supposedly color-blind descriptions of how we experience the world. It is only by developing a paraphenomenology that challenges the dominance of this way of mapping the world that alternatives can begin to be imagined. Gray’s piece ends with a reflection on the way that White supremacy, even when it claims to be invested in diversity, equity, and inclusion, shapes policy not only in the US but abroad as well. Affects, as Gray makes clear, spill over borders even as they also reinforce them.
This is a theme also taken up in Candace Lukasik’s contribution to this series. Lukasik investigates how Coptic Christians who have immigrated to the US translate their experiences of marginalization in Egypt in their new home. In the US, Copts enter into a complex relationship with the racial politics of the US, at times distancing themselves from Muslim Egyptians in an attempt to evade the orientalist gaze of White supremacy. This assimilation into Whiteness has left Copts in an ambiguous position. Of particular note here is how the affect of injury and martyrdom function in some Coptic communities at times to bind them to dominant White evangelical discourse that contributes to White nationalism. Dependence on such discourse, in the end, interpolates Copts into the colonialist discourse on religion that is one of the sources of their marginalization.
Alessandro Gusman is also interested in how migration shapes the affects expressed by religious communities in relation to the nation. His work focuses on the lives of Congolese refugees who are living in Kampala, Uganda. Unlike Copts who have moved to the US, these refugees are unable to integrate into a new society and thus are forced to rely on the more ephemeral affect of trust in God’s plan rather than martyrdom to sustain them in their new home. Gusman describes how this hope that is expressed by Pentecostal pastors on Sunday mornings, sometimes drawing on the story of Exodus, offers a narrative to explain both the current situation of the Congolese, as well as the possibility that their lives might at some point change for the better. It is “God’s plan” that they must trust, not the secular institutions that claim to be acting on their behalf. In recent years, Gusman suggests, it has grown more difficult to sustain this hope and stronger political demands among the Congolese on Uganda and the international community have increased. A feeling of “stuckness” drives this political movement and leads it to imagine a future that lies beyond the current impasse.
If scripture can serve as an outpost of hope for marginalized communities, it can also serve to buttress the standing of the powerful. Hannah Strømmen, in her piece, outlines how the British far-right movement Britain First uses the Bible as a tool to assert a nativist White Christian identity over and against immigrants and Muslims. Its members frequently quote Bible verses in memes alongside expressions of nationalist sentiment in order to perform their British identity. The framing of these posts with seemingly benign imagery like blue skies and clouds, Strømmen contends, only hides the more dangerous message behind them. She ends her piece by suggesting that, despite Britain First’s claims otherwise, the Bible also contains stories of liberation from oppression and siding with the marginalized that are worth reclaiming.
The final contribution to this series focuses more specifically on the way the nation state produces particular affects in order to manage its citizenry. Omar Kasmani examines the way that the management of shrines was taken over by the Pakistani state as a way to establish its custodianship of proper Islam and to reap the financial benefits that would come from donations made at the shrines. In disrupting traditional custodianship rules for the shrines the state has opened them up to queer and trans people as sites where they too can come close to saints. By taking ownership of the shrines, then, new modes of religious intimacy are created across gender, sect, and sexuality.
Together, these essays demonstrate the power of affect to shore up nation state power, to disrupt it, and/or to contest it. One lesson they make clear is that it is not by repressing affect that liberatory aims of marginalized groups will be achieved, as the dream of the Enlightenment and liberal political theory have claimed. Rather, achieving these ends requires harnessing its unwieldy power, a power we ignore at our own peril.
Joshua S. Lupo is the Assistant Director of the Contending Modernities research initiative. In this role, he serves as the editor and writer for the Contending Modernities Blog and the classroom coordinator for the Madrasa Discourses program. He has published articles and reviews in Sophia, Soundings, Critical Muslim, Reading Religion, and Religious Studies Review. With CM Co-Director Atalia Omer, he is the co-editor of Broken Solidarities: Feminism, Race, and Transnationalism (Notre Dame Press, 2022) and Religion, Populism, and Modernity: Confronting White Christian Nationalism and Racism (Notre Dame Press, 2023). His current book project is titled After Essentialism: A Critical Phenomenology for the Study of Religion.
Exterior of Assemblies of God church in Port Harcourt, Nigeria. Image via Wikimedia Commons.
Before my substantive remarks, I should like to put on record my profound gratitude to my distinguished colleagues for their gracious acceptance of the invitation to respond to my work. I am genuinely and utterly grateful. Whatever I may think about their dispositions and disagreements, I am flattered and humbled that they have deemed my work worthy of their investment. If there is a fate worse than being criticized, it is being ignored.
For the sake of convenience, I will categorize those criticisms into three groups. The first concerns my basic argument on the historicity and meaning of the emergence and influence of clerical authority in Nigeria, the second my perspective on secularity, and the third my ostensible treatment of spirituality and liberalism as antithetical.
The Meaning of Clerical Authority
When it comes to clerical authority, my critics express reservations regarding my theory of causation (Premawardhana); whether I have “inflated the clerical authority’s ascendancy” while at the same time lessening the power of the intelligentsia (Afolayan, Van Klinken, Premawardhana); my apparent neglect of the nascent resistance to clerical authority, especially in the realm of literary criticism (Van Klinken); and lastly, my apparent insensitivity to the seeming fragility of clerical authority (Adelakun).
Are Pentecostal pastors in Nigeria really on the rise due to the decline of the intelligentsia or have these contrasting phenomena unfolded concurrently with no direct causal link? I continue to see the preponderance of the argument tilting in favor of my original intuition that the devitalization and degradation of the intelligentsia, located primarily but not exclusively within the university system, prepared the ground for the emergence of the pastorate. In other words, the evacuation of the intelligentsia created a vacuum that, I contend, the pastorate, boasting in addition the ballast of spiritual authority, was all too happy to step into. This transition from an authority based broadly on reason to one based on revelation is, I argue, one of the most consequential developments in postcolonial Nigerian history, and insofar as one finds both my account and interpretation of it more or less plausible, it is difficult to “inflate the ascendancy” of the Pentecostal pastor. Even if we can quibble on the meaning of the degradation of the Man of Letters (the term I use, though with some caution, throughout the book to refer to the intelligentsia) or the relative solidity of the clerical regime that I postulate as its aftermath, what cannot be doubted is the effect of the crisis and collapse of the Marxist ideology in the late 1980s and early 1990s on the Nigerian intelligentsia’s ideological identity and amour propre. That it has yet to recover from this calamity and, more to the point, that Pentecostalism filled the space formerly occupied by Marxism in the Nigerian university system, if not in the imagination of the intelligentsia, is precisely my core argument.
This transition from an authority based broadly on reason to one based on revelation is one of the most consequential developments in postcolonial Nigerian history.
If that is the case, not only can the decline of the Man of Letters not be overdetermined, in fact, the focus on the rise of the contemporary Nigerian Pentecostal pastor would seem totally warranted, if not justified. Whether or not one acknowledges it, the social ubiquity of the Pentecostal pastor is a plain fact. Not only is he, i.e., the pastor, the presiding spirit (pun intended) in what I refer to as an aristocracy of wonderment, such is the vividness of his stamp—on politics, procreation, and social relations more broadly—that one would be remiss in one’s duty as a student of religion and politics not to consider him. I do not dispute that the pastor is, all told, just one element in a “constellation of divines”; nevertheless, his emergent power as a multipurpose cultural broker is such that he has to be taken on his own terms.
Nor am I oblivious to the fact that his “reign” is contested, which is what my analysis of those “useless women” who put up a fight, albeit unsuccessfully, is meant to signal. (In the book, I use the coinage “useless women” to describe women who, refusing to lie down as expected, challenged the masculine authority of various pastors.) On the contrary, while I take this “resistance” for granted and in fact applaud it, I admit to being dubious about its efficacy, at least in the short term. The current order is likely to continue for as long as the sociological conditions that simultaneously froze the development of the university system (and the attendant intellectual culture) and authorized the emergence of what I have termed rule by prodigy are operative. It is not so much a matter of “writing the intelligentsia off” as admitting its relative diminishment.
Nigeria as Secular State
A second criticism concerns my perspective on secularity (Lauterbach, Afolayan), specifically my assumption that Nigeria is a secular state. I admit the academic value of acknowledging the contestations around the term. However, such are the terms of religio-political engagement in Nigeria that normatively, I don’t see how I could have entertained a different point of departure. It is difficult to think of the Nigerian state as anything other than secular. As a matter of fact, contention over the terms of its taken for granted secularity has long been the defining element in Christian-Muslim political struggles, meaning that insofar as either side is content to have the balance shifted in its favor, it is because it perceives it to be otherwise in a notionally secular arrangement. Paradoxically, in their sworn desire to overturn it, rogue actors like Boko Haram are reminders of Nigeria’s secularity. In saying that Nigeria is a secular state, one is not disputing that religious actors and sentiments continue to exercise an outsize influence; on the contrary, one is acknowledging that, in principle, the Nigerian state is bound to an agnosticism which forbids either having a state religion or the privileging of the interests of one religious community over others. That the state frequently strays from this principle does nothing to nullify its secular status.
Liberalism and Spirituality
Finally, I have been challenged (Lauterbach) on my ostensible postulation of liberal democracy and spirituality as essentially antithetical. While I concede that the interplay between the two is neither unidimensional nor teleological, and while liberal democracies of course can and do draw sustenance from spiritual resources, what I am anxious to highlight is the danger of civic manipulation under certain conditions by actors invoking spiritual license or authority. By muddying the waters of rational deliberation, something that we have seen in too many cases, such actors provide a justification for rule by prodigy, a state of affairs that is harmful to the growth of liberal democracy.
Although I have doubled down on my core claims, there is no intention to wave off the earnest corrections and nudges of my colleagues. If anything, not only have I accepted much of their critique as just and taken it on board, they have alerted me to considerations that, in the fog of writing, one is always liable to overlook. None of us, it seems, is spared the fate of seeing through a glass darkly.
Ebenezer Obadare is Douglas Dillon Senior Fellow for Africa Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), Washington, D.C.; a fellow at the University of South Africa’s Institute of Theology, and contributing editor of Current History. Author and editor of numerous books on religion and politics and state and civil society in Africa, Obadare’s most recent work is Pastoral Power, Clerical State: Pentecostalism, Gender and Sexuality in Nigeria (Notre Dame Press, 2022). He is editor of Journal of Modern African Studies, published by Cambridge University Press.
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