The Jew, the Arab: A History of the Enemy
... However, their argument surpasses labeling Israel as an apartheid state, falsely depicted as a democracy, and extends to challenging the classification of Jews as a persecuted minority in the Western world. For instance, A. Anidjar argues that "Jews in Western societies are no longer an endangered minority; the Muslims are" (Anidjar 2003). ...
... Despite these historical differences, scholars like Wendy Brown and Gil Anidjar propose that Islam and Judaism share a common history of exclusion, assimilation, and subjection to state policies of exemption during periods of political crises and threats. Despite Islam often being depicted as an external adversary and Jews seen as a theological internal enemy, both groups, over time, were portrayed as polarized enemies of each other and as common foes of Europe (Anidjar 2003). ...
This article argues that from the end of the 19thcentury, the debate about anti-Semitism became a marker for a wider dispute focusing on the meaning of national identity. Integrating the Jews into the polity was part, and even a justification, of the Enlightenment political project and of the democratic state. However, while the Jewish question was fundamental for politics and philosophy in the Enlightenment, in our time, as the Enlightenment fades, the Muslim question takes its place. This article argues that the goal of integrating Muslims into the Western democratic polity under a culturally blind, egalitarian and secular type of non-discrimination has proven to be unsuccessful. Moreover, rather than pitting racist nationalists against liberal democrats, it has triggered a “civic confrontation” in liberal political thought, between liberal multiculturalists and supporters of religious freedom who understand, on the one hand, and secular democratic integrationists, on the other.
... Dabashi 2013: 136. 41 De Vries 1999.42 Anidjar 2003Anidjar , 2008 ...
... Anidjar 2003: 140. 63 Dabashi 2013.64 Dabashi 2013: 120.65 Ahmed 2016: 32ff.; Ahmad 2017, chaps. ...
... This is not to suggest that the entanglement of race and religion has yet to be voiced, interrogated, or conceptualized as such (cf. Anidjar 2003Anidjar , 2008Kalmar 2009;Meer 2013aMeer , 2013bMeer and Moodod 2010;Said 1978Said , 1985. Nevertheless, we believe that strands and gestures of postcolonial thinking have been isolating the inquiry of race and religion, underscoring the history and violence of one at the expense of the other. ...
... Edward Said in Orientalism (1978) and more specifically in Orientalism reconsidered (1985) already hinted at the relation between anti-Semitism and Islamophobia through the figure of the Semite. Following Said, Ivan Kalmar (2009) has also investigated the complex and »long history of the joint construction of Jew and Muslim« in Europe, that is to say, the history of Semitism and anti-Semitism (see also Massad 2015;Anidjar 2003Anidjar , 2008. Building upon these critiques, our aim is to investigate the many cases where the historiography has obliterated the moments where the categories of race and religion, as well as their effects, have operated conjointly. ...
... When applied to Israel, the topos is often conveyed through claims that its government or citizens feel untouchable and above the law, especially in comparison with other governments, countries or nations. It is common for such accusations to imply the existence of double standards and juxtapose Jews with other groups, for example Black people (as mentioned earlier) or Muslims, and Israel with other states, typically Palestine (Anidjar 2003) or-in the context of the invasion of Ukraine in 2022-with Russia. ...
The two contradictory elements of antisemitic narratives portray Jews as inferior and lesser on the one hand, and influential or powerful on the other. The stereotype of Jewish privilege highlights the latter aspect: it fosters the idea that Jews, Israelis or the State of Israel enjoy a certain amount of advantage over others, and that they benefit from a more favourable or more lenient treatment. What is more, they are supposedly convinced of their own superiority, and as a result expect to be granted a special status or protection, or are indignant if this is not the case.
... Understanding religious heritage in terms of an assumed homogeneity of historic nations erases the violence involved in securing and protecting the hegemonic position of Christianity (Anidjar 2003;Nirenberg 2013). It also sustains the idea that we can speak of one unified majority culture, which obscures the history of cultural mixing as well as tensions within Christianity and between Christianity and secularity. ...
... Anti-Muslim racism and Islamophobia as governmentality I understand contemporary Islamophobia as a form of anti-Muslim racism that is embedded in European colonial histories and Orientalism, in which the concepts of race and religion are intertwined (e.g. Anidjar 2003). Scholar of religious studies Anya Topolski refers to the race-religion constellation to show how processes of racialization have been entangled with views of the religious Other since the sixteenth century (Topolski 2018). ...
... Muslim as the political enemy and the Jew as the theological-racial enemy. (Anidjar 2003). For a collection of Rosenzweig's texts on Islam alongside a critical introduction, see (Rosenzweig 2003). ...
The present study will focus on core parallels and nodes of theopolitical exchange between the two most politically and theologically consequential jurist “theosophers” of the twentieth century, the Religious Zionist founding father, the Jewish Rav Avraham Yitzchak Hacohen Kook (1865–1935), and the Shia Islamic Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini (1900–1989). Unquestioned masters of the tradition of both medieval philosophy and mysticism, as well as the theosophies of the early-modern and modern eras, both Kook and Khomeini attempted to embed the rhetoric of theosophy within revolutionary notions of both clerical religious authority and the necessity of their respective nomoi to assume political form. The study will also correlate contemporary Shia reformist theosophies undergirded with anti-theocratic exoteric postures with pre-WW2 German-Jewish “existence philosophies” as represented by Franz Rosenzweig, noting a common appreciation for what the study will term “theopolitical risk”. It argues that the retrieval of medieval Judeo-Islamic political philosophy for the successful negotiation of reason and revelation in modernity against both theocratic juridical extremism and the iron cages of positivistic-realist secularism must be rethought in light of the theopolitics coursing through Iran and Israel, two states at the geographic periphery though fully within the horizons of the Modern West.
... This paints a picture of Europe's origin story independent from any interaction with Islam. Yet, as religion scholar Gil Anidjar (2003) argues, the idea and identity of Europe have actually emerged out of a conscious Christian political-theological project to define Europe in contrast to Islam and Judaism. In this process of self-narration through distinction, Jews became imagined as the theological and therefore interior enemy of Christian Europe. ...
In 2008, the Dutch Party for the Animals submitted a proposal to ban religious slaughter without prior stunning. The proposal was widely supported in the Lower House but finally rejected in the Upper House in 2012, mainly on the grounds of religious freedom. Academia was keen to study the polemic, but no research has attempted to study the controversy through a lens of racialization. This is remarkable, given the well-documented increase in Islamophobia and the political use of racism since (at least) the turn of the millennium in The Netherlands (and the geopolitical “West” at large). In this article, I demonstrate that a racializing dynamic is actually part and parcel of the Dutch controversy. I apply a reflexive thematic analysis to study archival material from the Dutch Parliamentarian debate and show that the dispute foremost references Islamic slaughter. Appeals to civilization, accusations of barbarism, dystopian warnings against Islamization, and invocations of Judeo-Christianity are discursive elements that feature in the debate and have racializing ramifications for Muslims. By unmasking this racializing dynamic, I offer a means to empirically explore the ways in which taxonomies of religion and race intersect with and through the politicization of animal ethics. When considering religious slaughter it is essential, I ultimately maintain, to observe the violence caused by socially constructed racial and species differences. Only if we hold both in serious regard do we have a chance to begin to imagine ourselves in relation to others differently and move towards more just futures—for humans and non-humans alike.
... Between the foundation of the German nation state in 1871 and World War I Kulturnation legitimized imperial colonialism and cemented visions of a superior culture carried by an educated bourgeoisie whose self-conception was built against a Jewish, Muslim and non-white "other" (Anidjar, 2003;El-Tayeb, 2001;Keskinkılıç, 2019). Closely linked to the emergence of a global bourgeoisie in the context of a Europe-dominated colonial globalization , notions of superior cultural nationhood were also shaped by discourses of colonial racism, anti-Semitism (El-Tayeb, 2011;Nduka-Agwu and Hornscheidt, 2014) and illiberalism (Dejung, 2019: 269). ...
Scholarly and public debates generally envision the far right as a populist, irrational and anti- intellectual movement. Driven by economically left-behind voters it is seen as diametrically opposed to rational and educated, bourgeois liberal democracies. In Germany, this is echoed in the vision of a liberal-democratic cultural nationhood or Kulturnation¸ a country of poets and thinkers, that is imagined as a bulwark against the far right. Yet, envisioning themselves as Querdenker – original thinkers – a growing number of German intellectuals, once celebrated as representatives of Kulturnation, have recently embraced the populist far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) and the PEGIDA movement. Why and how do well-off educated bourgeois intellectuals and institutions formerly seen as exemplifying Kulturnation embrace far-right populism? Why and how is the populist far right appealing to academics, artists, writers and their educated bourgeois audiences? To explore these questions this thesis analyses ethnographic data gathered among Dresden’s intellectual and educated bourgeois milieu between 2016 and 2018. Employing Jacques Rancière’s concept of the “politics of aesthetics” and symbolic boundary theory it argues that Dresden’s intellectuals use the aesthetics of Kulturnation not to counter, but to reproduce, substantiate and legitimize far-right populism and racism. As producers and interpreters of shared cultural symbols, local writers, artists and academics draw on the racist heritage implicit in Kulturnation’s politics of aesthetics to ideationally articulate and spatially prefigure an explicit white identity that resonates with educated bourgeois and far-right populist audiences. As a concept of nationhood that is perceived as post-racist, Kulturnation helps to design a shared white identity while veiling its biological underpinnings. The findings demonstrate that the far right is not a “populist other” that is essentially distinct from rational post-racist visions of national identity. Rather, Dresden’s intellectuals make visible unmarked racial and irrational dimensions in liberal-democratic discourses on national identity.
... European history has been dominated by Christianity and characterized by the violent oppression of non-Christian minorities, especially Jews and Muslims (Anidjar, 2003;Jansen and Meer, 2020;Nirenberg, 2013). European nation-states have historically formed around religious homogeneity and exclusion (Renton and Gidley, 2017). ...
Scholarship on religious inequality in Europe has focused mainly on the position of religious minorities, primarily Jews and Muslims. Investigations into Islamophobia, antisemitism, and other forms of discrimination and oppression, however, are merely one side of the coin. This article draws attention to Christian privilege as a different, but related phenomenon. It understands ‘privilege’ to be part of the study of hegemony, as the asymmetrical counterpart of structural oppression. The article situates Christian privilege within secular Christian hegemony in Western Europe and explores its relation to racial and religious exclusion. It identifies three different types of Christian privilege and outlines a framework for normatively evaluating them.
... Thereby, religion is increasingly being transformed into an ethnicity since ethnicity -contrary to religion -cannot be changed by an act of conversion (Anidjar, 2003). ...
In this project, I sought to understand how Palestinian claim-making in the West Bank is possible within the context of continuing Israeli occupation and repression by the Palestinian political leadership. I explored the questions of what channels non-state actors use to advance their claims, what opportunities they have for making these claims, and what challenges they face. This exploration covers the time period from the Oslo Accords in the mid-1990s to the so-called Great March of Return in 2018. I demonstrated that Palestinians used different modes and strategies of resistance in the past century, as the area of what today is Israel/Palestine has historically been a target for foreign penetration. Yet, the Oslo agreements between the Israeli government and the Palestinian leadership have ended Palestinians’ decentralized and pluralist social governance, reinforced Israeli rule in the Palestinian territories, promoted continuing dispossession and segregation of Palestinians, and further restricted their rights and their claim-making opportunities until this day. Therefore, today, Palestinian society in the West Bank is characterized by fragmentation, geographical and societal segregation, and double repression by Israeli occupation and Palestinian Authority (PA) policies. What is more, Palestinian claim-making is legally curtailed due to the establishment of different geographical entities in which Palestinians are subjugated to different forms of Israeli rule and regulations. I argue that the concepts of civil society and acts of citizenship, which are often used to describe non-state actors’ rights-seeking activities, fall short on understanding and describing Palestinian claim-making in the West Bank comprehensively. By determining their boundaries, the concept of acts of subjecthood evolved as a novel theoretical approach within the research process and as a means of claim-making within repressive contexts where claim makers’ rights are curtailed and opportunities for rights-seeking activities are few. Thereby, this study applies a new theoretical framework to the conflict in Israel/Palestine and contributes to a better understanding of rights-seeking activities within the West Bank. Further, I argue that Palestinian acts of subjecthood against hostile Israeli rule in the West Bank are embedded within the comprehensive structure of settler colonialism. As a form of colonialism that aims at replacing an indigenous population, Israeli settler colonialism in the West Bank manifests itself in restrictions of Palestinian movement, settlement constructions, home demolitions, violence, and detentions. By using grounded theory and inductive reasoning as methodological approaches, I was able to make generalizations about the state of Palestinian claim-making. These generalizations are based on the analysis of secondary materials and data collected via face-to-face and video interviews with non-state actors in Israel/Palestine. The conducted research shows that there is not a single measure or a standalone condition that hinders Palestinian claim-making, but a complex and comprehensive structure that, on the one hand, shrinks Palestinian living space by occupation and destruction and, on the other hand, diminishes Palestinian civic space by limiting the fundamental rights to organize and build social movements to change the status Palestinians live in. Although the concrete, tangible outcomes of Palestinian acts of subjecthood are marginal, they contribute to strengthening and perpetuating Palestinian’s long history of resistance against Israeli oppression. With a lack of adherence to international law, the neglect of UN resolutions by the Israeli government, the continuous defeats of rights organizations in Israeli courts, and the repression of institutions based in the West Bank by PA and occupation policies, Palestinian acts of subjecthood cannot overturn current power structures. Nevertheless, the ongoing persistence of non-state actors claiming rights, as well as the pop-up of new initiatives and youth movements are all essential for strengthening Palestinians’ resilience and documenting current injustices. Therefore, they can build the pillars for social change in the future. Das Ziel der vorliegenden Dissertation war es zu untersuchen, wie palästinensisches claim-making, also die Artikulation von Forderungen bzw. die Geltendmachung von bestimmten Rechten, vor dem Hintergrund der anhaltenden israelischen Besatzung und Repressalien durch die palästinensische politische Führung im Westjordanland durchgesetzt werden kann. Dabei soll der Frage nachgegangen werden, welche Kanäle nichtstaatliche Akteure nutzen, um ihre Ansprüche geltend zu machen, welche Möglichkeiten sich ihnen dafür bieten und vor welchen Herausforderungen sie stehen. Der Untersuchungszeitraum erstreckt sich dabei vom Osloer Friedensprozess Mitte der 1990er Jahre bis hin zum sogenannten Great March of Return im Jahr 2018. Die im Gebiet des heutigen Israel/Palästina lebenden PalästinenserInnen bedienten sich in Zeiten ausländischer Einflussnahme, z.B. während der britischen Besatzung im vergangenen Jahrhundert, verschiedenster Widerstandsformen und -strategien. Jedoch haben die Osloer Abkommen zwischen der israelischen Regierung und der palästinensischen Führung die dezentrale und partizipative Mobilisierung der palästinensischen Gesellschaft erschwert, die andauernde Enteignung von PalästinenserInnen begünstigt und ihre Rechte bis zum heutigen Tag weiter eingeschränkt. Die heutige palästinensische Gesellschaft im Westjordanland ist daher durch Zersplitterung, geografische und gesellschaftliche Segregation und doppelte Un-terdrückung durch die israelische Besatzung sowie die Palästinensische Autonomiebehörde gekennzeichnet. Zudem führt die Etablierung verschiedener geografischer Entitäten, in denen PalästinenserInnen unterschiedlichen Formen israelischer Herrschaft, Regularien und Ein-griffsrechten unterworfen sind, dazu, dass palästinensisches claim-making auch formalrecht-lich eingeschränkt ist. Um die Aktivitäten nichtstaatlicher Akteure in diesem Kontext beschreiben zu können, wer-den häufig das Konzept der Zivilgesellschaft oder das der acts of citizenship herangezogen. In der vorliegenden Arbeit wird jedoch argumentiert, dass diese Konzepte nur bedingt auf den Status Quo im Westjordanland anwendbar sind und palästinensisches claim-making nicht hinreichend verstehen und beschreiben können. Im Laufe des Forschungsprozesses hat sich daher das Konzept der acts of subjecthood als neuer theoretischer Ansatz herausgebildet, der claim-making in repressiven Kontexten beschreibt, in denen nichtstaatliche Akteure nur geringen Handlungsspielraum haben, ihre Forderungen durchsetzen zu können. Durch diese „Theorie-Brille“ ermöglicht meine Forschung einen neuartigen Blick auf den israelisch-palästinensischen Konflikt und trägt auf diese Weise zu einem besseren Verständnis von claim-making-Aktivitäten im Westjordanland bei. Darüber hinaus bettet die vorliegende Ar-beit acts of subjecthood in den größeren Kontext des Siedlungskolonialismus ein. Dieser beschreibt eine Form des Kolonialismus, die darauf abzielt, eine einheimische Bevölkerung durch die der Kolonialmacht zu ersetzen. Im Westjordanland manifestiert sich der israelische Siedlungskolonialismus in der Einschränkung der Bewegungsfreiheit von PalästinenserIn-nen, dem Bau von Siedlungen, der Zerstörung von Häusern, Gewalt und Inhaftierungen. Die Verwendung der Grounded Theory und des induktiven Denkens als methodische Ansätze ermöglichte es, verallgemeinerbare Aussagen zum Zustand palästinensischen claim-makings treffen zu können. Diese Verallgemeinerungen beruhen auf der Analyse von Sekundärquellen und Daten, die im Rahmen von Interviews mit VertreterInnen nichtstaatlicher Organisationen in Israel/Palästina erhoben wurden. Die durchgeführte Analyse macht deutlich, dass nicht eine einzelne Maßnahme oder Bedingung palästinensisches claim-making behindert, sondern eine komplexe, vielschichtige und zielgerichtet implementierte Struktur. Diese verringert einerseits den Lebensraum von PalästinenserInnen durch Besatzung und Zerstörung und schränkt andererseits den zivilen Raum ein, indem sie ihnen grundlegende Rechte und fundamentale Freiheiten verwehrt. Obwohl die konkreten Auswirkungen palästinensischer acts of subjecthood marginal sind, tragen sie dazu bei, den Widerstand gegen politische Unterdrückung zu stärken und fortzusetzen. Angesichts der Verletzung von Völkerrecht und der Missachtung zahlreicher UN-Resolutionen durch die israelische Regierung, der Niederlagen von Menschenrechtsorganisationen vor israelischen Gerichten, der Unterdrückung von Institutionen im Westjordanland durch die Palästinensische Autonomiebehörde und die Besatzungspolitik können acts of subjecthood die derzeitigen Machtstrukturen nicht aufbrechen. Dennoch sind die anhaltende Beharrlichkeit nichtstaatlicher Akteure, Forderungen zu artikulieren und Rechte einzufordern und die Gründung neuer Initiativen und Organisationen essenziell für die Stärkung gesellschaftlicher Resilienz sowie die Dokumentation von Ungerechtigkeiten und Rechtsverletzungen. Diese Akteure legen so den Grundstein für einen möglichen gesellschaftspolitischen Wandel in der Zukunft.
... 6 Framing the current questioning of Muslims as the "Muslim Question", several scholars have illustrated the complex operations by which Islam and Muslims have appeared as questions -as questionable. Instead of attempting to answer the "Muslim Question", these scholars have explored the possibility and significant effects of this very questioning (seeAnidjar 2003;2004;Amir-Moazami 2016;Farris 2014;Mufti 2007;Norton 2013;Sayyid 2009;Selby and Beaman 2016). The aim, however, was not to juxtapose or even collapse the "Muslim Question" with the effects or outcomes of other famous or infamous questions. ...
... The merit these scholarly approaches both hold is that they highlight the challenges, tensions, and contradictions involved in governing oneself as a Muslim ethical subject and also unpack how these challenges and contradictions are embedded in the larger apparatus of the liberal-secular state, entangled with issues of securitisation and linked to questions of integration (Cesari 2010(Cesari , 2013DeHanas 2016;Müller 2019;Scott 2007). All of these elements also contribute to constructing Islam and Muslims as non-European others (Amir-Moazami 2016;Anidjar 2003;Sayyid 2009). ...
In recent years, scholarship on Islam in Europe has highlighted the many attempts to govern Muslims and Islam. Concerned with discussions about secularism, security, integration, or national sentiments more generally, Muslims and Islam have become a target of governmental power. However, the effects of such governmental discourses, practices, or strategies are rarely analysed. In filling this lacuna, we turn to the scholarship on Muslim ethical self-making and specifically ask how configurations of a liberal-secular paradigm govern Muslim subjects in Europe. Focusing upon the nexus of governmentality and the (re-)making of an ethical self, we make visible the ways Islamic ethical and moral commitments are contested, negotiated, or even restructured through the liberal-secular powers of the modern state, its institutions, and its agents in different European contexts.
This paper examines the evolving stance of young Jewish Millennials and Generation Z toward Zionism and the Israel-Palestine conflict. Historically, Zionism has been widely embraced within Jewish communities as a movement crucial to Jewish identity and security. However, recent years have seen an increasing number of younger Jewish individuals in Israel and the diaspora question, and even oppose, traditional Zionist ideologies. This shift is fueled by growing discomfort with Israel's policies in Palestinian territories, which many young Jews view as inconsistent with values of social justice, equality, and human rights. Through a mixed-methods approach that includes a review of mainstream and social media content, this study analyzes the factors behind this generational shift, highlighting the role of historical context, educational influences, and increased access to Palestinian perspectives. Prominent voices from within the Jewish community, including intellectuals and activists, reveal a disillusionment with Zionism and a growing alignment with anti-Zionist movements. The paper also explores how these changes are impacting Jewish identity, community dynamics, and global perspectives on the Israel-Palestine conflict. By focusing on the generational divide, this study sheds light on a transformative moment in Jewish engagement with Israel, underscoring increased solidarity with Palestinian rights among young Jews and a rising demand for Palestinian sovereignty.
This study contributes to contemporary discussions about the entanglement, cross-fertilization, and co-implicatedness of religion and empire by adding a voice from the still underexamined field of Jewish thought. It claims that the European imperial project is inherent to the vision of Judaism, Jewish-Christian relations, and global redemption offered in Franz Rosenzweig’s The Star of Redemption, and that its proper conceptual background is the fin de siècle Protestant discourse offering justifications for empire by wedding territorial expansion, mission, and messianism. By examining the appropriate passages from The Star in light of his early wartime geopolitical writings, it demonstrates that Christian proselytization is essential to Rosenzweig’s vision of redemption and that his contribution to the religious discourse justifying empire resides in his conceptualization of the Jews, subtracted from history and politics, as not targets of mission but as prefiguring the empire-like, borderless, and redeemed existence toward which the Christians, always on “the way,” strive. It concludes by calling for an 'imperial turn' in the study of modern Jewish thought.
This article analyses the image of the Arab ‘uncertain body’ by introducing two theoretical tools:
first, the practice of sojourner passing: that is, an abrupt and temporary event limited in space
and time in order to gain access to sexual, financial or militarised goals; second, the uncertainty
of the Muslim male body. In the Israeli context, the fear of the Arab ‘uncertain body’ manifests
itself in two main ways: (1) the fear of Arab sojourner passers who threaten sites of nationhood;
and (2) Arabs who try to assimilate are blamed for passing as civilised, disguising their true
monstrous nature. The Israel–Palestine context is unique in that it offers intriguing insights into
passing in a non-western society, where the ethnic differences are blurred and hence anxiety is
more pronounced.
1999 Gölcük depremi akabinde depremlerin öngörüsü ve kentsel dönüşüm gibi risk azaltma faaliyetleri kentsel siyaseti şekillendirmeye başladı ve 2011 yılında Van depremi sonrasında Kentsel Dönüşüm ya da Afet Yasası olarak anılan 6306 sayılı, riskli alanlarda kentsel dönüşümü ve bina bazlı yenilemeyi düzenleyen yasa çıkarıldı. Bu yasa istisnai maddeleri nedeniyle çok eleştirildi ve yasa koyucular tarafından yaşam hakkına referansla savunuldu. Eleştiriler ise yaşam hakkının sadece araçsallaştırıldığı üzerine odaklandı ve ne yaşam hakkının ne de onun referansı olan yaşamın tarihselliğini sorunsallaştırdı. Gölcük Depreminden günümüze ortaya çıkan bir dizi mevzuat ve kamusal söylemin analizinden elde edilen verileri, biyopolitika kuramlarının eleştirel okuması ışığında tartışarak yaşam ve devlet arasında kurulan biyopolitik ilişkinin tarihselliğine ve son dönemdeki dönüşümününe odaklanacağım. Bugün, halihazırda yaşam ve devlet arasında kurulmuş daha önceki biyopolitik ilişkilere, yeni bir biyopolitik ilişkinin eklendiğinden bahsetmek mümkündür. Makalenin ilk kısmı biyoihtimam diye adlandırabileceğimiz bu biyopolitikada, belli pratikler, duygular ve üretilen bilgi ile afetlere karşı kırılganlığı üzerinden tanımlanmasıyla yeni bir yaşam hakikatinin üretildiğine, yani kırılgan yaşamın tarihselliğine odaklanmaktadır. İkinci kısmı ise biyoihtimamın, afet hazırlığı bağlamında materyal olarak da bazı yaşamlara ihtimam gösterirken bazı yaşamları kırılganlaştırdığına, yani ihtimamın eşitsiz dağılımına ve şiddet üretme potansiyeline dikkat çekmektedir. Bu afetlere karşı daha eşit ve kapsayıcı ihtimam pratikleri geliştirmemize temel hazırlayacaktır.
In Sa’adat Hasan Manto’s short story “Toba Tek Singh”, readers are introduced to Sikh inmate Bishan Singh living in an asylum in pre-Partition India. ¹ The disfigured, swollen, babbling body of Bishan Singh is redolent of Giorgio Agamben’s representation of the “ Muselmann”, the abject camp prisoners of Auschwitz, in his Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive. Drawing on Agamben’s insights, this article reads the figure of Bishan Singh as the Agambenian “ Muselmann” and Partition witness, caught in the space of the camp under the guise of an asylum for the mentally ill. This article also traces this space or holding centre for the mentally ill as a site of production of an ab-humanity marked not so much by a lack of speech, but by its provocative disorder. The figure of Bishan Singh as “ Muselmann” emerges as marked out by his garbled, traumatized language that signals both his ab-humanity and his exposure to the violence that attends the making of the human subject. This study argues that Bishan Singh’s wounded body and speech constitute traces of the unsayable, and that what is perceptible emerges from what is not.
In the early twentieth century, economic and religious antagonism between Sinhalese and Moors in Ceylon escalated into widespread, deadly violence. In the immediate aftermath of the 1915 pogrom, which involved the targeting of Moors and their property, the Sinhalese nationalist Anagarika Dharmapala observed that ‘Muhammadans’ had accumulated wealth through ‘Shylockian methods’. Even prior to Dharmapala’s claim, Moors were repeatedly depicted as the ‘Jews of Ceylon’ by both influential Sinhalese actors and colonial state actors. As Ceylon did not have a local Jewish population, this article investigates the use of a rhetorical device that was familiar within the broader networks of empire to ‘other’ a non-Jewish mercantile minority. The article accordingly enquires into how and why antisemitic epithets came to be used in prejudicial speech against Moors. It also explores propaganda portraying Moors in terms of ‘hostile’ Jewish stereotypes and the way in which such stereotypes were deployed in Sinhalese interactions with Moors. By tracing the connections between antisemitism and anti-capitalism, this article aims to contribute to a broader discourse on the positions of Semitic groups in British imperial ideology.
This paper proposes that we consider the erasure of Kashmiri Muslim men from Indian feminist solidarity discourse. This is a question both of disappearance and of nonbeing. Gender, far from being a self-evident ontological fact, obfuscates; a process explored through the Fanonian notion of “the colonizer’s invitation to identity” and the psychoanalytic concept of the impossibility of sexual difference. A certain grammar of gender—deployed by both the Indian state and the secular liberal-left—covers over the fundamental antagonism of Islam heightened by the occupation. Carceral consensus among seemingly opposed political forces produces Islam as an intensely masculinized threat, against which the precarious Indian project needs to be protected. The Kashmiri militant, always rendered male, simply does not “fit” progressive imaginaries and makes neat solidarities tense, which are themselves emblematic of the colonizer’s terrified consciousness. That this Indian grammar loses coherence when confronted with militant Kashmiri women also reveals how, far from being coherent, gender is a grammar mediated and disarticulated in its relation to Islam. This Indian grammar, this covering over of the drama of nonbeing, justifies the disappearance of the Kashmiri man—rendered excessive and in excess, everywhere and nowhere.
While some of the founders of American cultural anthropology and British social anthropology were part of the transregional Jewish and non-Jewish German speaking community, Jewish anthropology, and anthropology by or on Jews in German-speaking countries, was seriously impacted by the Shoah. Some sources in the area of historical anthropology engage with Jews, who were anthropologists, and who were murdered or who fled, others focus on the appropriation of Jewish cultural heritage and zoom in on discourses about Jews. Living Jews are oftentimes covered in dissertations, after which the nascent ethnologist/anthropologist vanishes from academia, or leaves the country: research on living Jews seems an unsustainable career move. This paper is a first attempt to sketch out the developments of Jewish anthropology – in the broadest sense – in Germany post-1945. It will pay due attention to structures, societal, social, and academic; the place of anthropology within these structures; and Jews, as an ethno-religious group being researched by anthropologists (and other ethnographers); and the anthropologists/ethnographers who research them. By paying close attention to the anthropologists and ethnographers themselves, it is possible to “map the margins” (Crenshaw 1991) of anthropological and ethnographic work in an emotionalized, ideologized, and politicized field, a field that is indicative of post-genocidal intergroup relations in situ.
Long read in relation to public health and gender/sexual mores, Katherine Mayo's Mother India (1927) has rarely been viewed from an animal studies perspective. This article proposes that the animal, tethered to the woman question and to the figure of the Muslim, is integral to the book's imperialist apologetics. Investigations of physical cruelty to women and to animals build Mayo's case against Hindu nationalists' bid for self-rule. Highlighting cruelty alongside the question of dietary choice, Mayo interrogates the self-representation of the Hindu vegetarian as nonviolent, rewriting him instead as rapacious carnivore in every sense but the literal. Mobilized in different contexts and modes, the abused animal becomes part of Mayo's arsenal of shaming rhetoric, as does the figure of the “internationalist” Muslim who is imagined as bulwark against the Hindu vegetarian and as dysgenic threat and “world-menace.” Mother India's political-theological engagement with “the Muslim” as the iconoclastic meat eater pits him against the unfit, diabetic Hindu in a fantasy of carnivory and carnage that enacts a wished-for solution to the problem of defending empire.
Jaspreet Singh's Helium, a novel concerning 1984's anti-Sikh pogroms, seeks to archive the impunity on which sovereignty is based. This basis remains indelible. Impunity's unconscionability contaminates conscience as we know it and as it allows us to know. The cruelty that imbues impunity impacts all social formations and compromises our ethics and politics in practice and in theory as we practice it. At stake in reading sovereign impunity, then, is its very readability. It may be unreadable or readable as unreadable. Fathoming how we are marked by what we resist, Singh writes about the (un)readable in the archive of 1984.
This article explores an important feature of anti-Palestinian racism (APR) that is salient in the North American and European academic landscape: the expulsion of the Palestinian critique of Zionism and Israel from rational and even anti-racist discourse. This expulsion takes place through the toxification of the Palestinian other whereby Palestinian epistemology is to be mistrusted and shunned because it is allegedly rooted in an antisemitic disposition. This amounts to a racialization of the Palestinian critique in the name of anti-racism, which can be seen in recent definitions of antisemitism, the debate over the boycott of Israeli academic institutions and harassment campaigns against Palestinian scholars. I argue that we must name this expulsion as a form of racialization that is part and parcel of colonial modernity. The article concludes that without a centralization of the Palestinian critique, decolonial and anti-racist efforts will not live up to their professed ideals.
‘Overlooked but Not Forgotten’ is the first work to examine the ‘Jewish Exemption Claim’. In doing so, this article asks two questions. One, is the Jewish Exemption Claim true: did the Islamic Republic exempt Iranian Jews from the ‘war fronts’ of the Iran-Iraq War (‘the War)’ from 1980 to 1986? Two, because a clear, definitive answer may be lacking, is there evidence that Jewish Iranians participated in the War at the war fronts as opposed to the home fronts? In addition to examining the original source of the Claim, ‘Overlooked but Not Forgotten’ analyzes the available empirical data. It also analyzes the digital archives of the Society of Tehran Jews, a civic organization that historically has played a role in Jewish Tehranis’ socio-cultural lives. The article also produces oral histories from Tehrani Jews who lived in Iran during the War. Ultimately, ‘Overlooked but Not Forgotten’ unsettles the Jewish Exemption Claim, helps undo exclusionist representations of how Jewish pasts are archived, narrated, and commemorated, and provides a foundation from which to further pursue research on the Claim.
Atalia Omer advocates a turn to “intersectional peacebuilding”. She offers a schematic account of the academic field, arguing that the subfields of ‘religion and violence’, and ‘religion, conflict, and peacebuilding’ have thus far failed to critically integrate questions of peace and justice. The overarching complex of ‘Religion, Violence, and Peacebuilding’ (RVP) has tended to focus on acute and direct forms of violence, while overlooking indirect forms. Structural, symbolic, cultural, epistemic, and discursive violence must be grappled with in theory and practice. What's more, the edges of RVP are growing, allowing room for epistemologies from the margins. RVP must be decolonized and deorientalized and must expand via integrative and intersectional analysis which takes account of multiple bondages. Such analysis should be sensitive to the manifold interrelations of religion and violence, and work toward the constructive aims of peacebuilding.
Slimane Benaïssa is a Franco-Algerian playwright and novelist of Ibadi Muslim and Chaoui Amazigh (Berber) heritage. In his play Prophètes sans dieu (1998), written and staged in France during the 1990s conflict in Algeria, Benaïssa provides a platform for an imaginary dialogue between an actor playing Moses, an actor playing Jesus, and the author who refuses to represent the prophet Mohammed, out of reverence for sacred texts and respect for (fellow) Muslims. In this way, Benaïssa attempts to straddle the sacrilegious and the sublime through a philosophical, quasi-theological debate interrogating the potential of the Abrahamic connection to both unify and divide. Through an analysis of counterfactual mise-en-scène, role play, and word play, this article reveals that, behind the apparent humor in Benaïssa’s play, there is a sharp indictment of the instrumentalization of religion, an openness to (self-)questioning, and a sensibility to doubt. The playwright challenges assumptions and invites interfaith dialogue, while remaining wary of organized religion and advocating an inclusive laïcité. Moreover, Benaïssa poses a double critique of French colonization and theocratic dictatorship, arguing that with independence must come freedom of conscience alongside freedom of speech. In this way, the stage becomes a site of inter-doubt dialogue, questioning the limits of representation, faith, and freedom.
Buildings of the burial complex of Suleiman the Magnificent were excavated between 2015–2019 in Szigetvár. This paper investigates why, despite the traditional anti-Muslim sentiments in the local community, the FIDESZ-KDNP failed to turn the Suleiman story into local political success after the 2015 migration crisis, during a period of extensive anti-Muslim campaigning. This analyses focuses on the opportunities, challenges and concerns of the creation of a Muslim pilgrimage site and cultural tourism attraction based on the death place of the Ottoman emperor. The Muslim rule in the early modern period has left deep memorial traces on Hungary. Despite the superficial similarities, opinions about Muslims in Szigetvár are more complex than in the wider Hungarian public and are influenced by acts of reconciliation and economic considerations. Results of a deep empirical research are presented on local identity and Muslim related sentiments in this paper.
By reconstructing the conceptual logic underlying the figure of ‘the just’ found in Meister Eckhart’s sermons, this essay transforms the parameters of what counts as political theology for the medieval period. By giving voice to an uncreated freedom of those who are equal to nothing, Eckhart’s mystic discourse poses an unmarked challenge to the political theologies of sovereignty and subjection. Against the interlinked ruses of individuation, subjection, and salvation, his mystic speech of de-interpellation asserts that justice is lived only in the now, without deferral or justification. By enacting a reading practice of abandon – abandoning not only rigid distributions of textual genre, but also the primacy accorded to the subject and the proper – this essay makes visible an example of the unbearable truth for the political that may be retrieved from mystical texts – a scandal for the orders of legitimation and interpellative subjection around which the logic of the political ceaselessly revolves.
This article explores the role Arab music has played in forming Mizrahi identity in contemporary Israeli cinema, focusing on the films “The Ballad of the Weeping Spring”, “Testimony” and “Three Mothers”, which second and third generation Mizrahi filmmakers born to Jewish immigrants from Arab and Muslim countries made in Israel. Using Arab music, these films display the vast array of historical and imaginary relations between the Jew and the Arab, West and East, Israel and the Middle East. Memory of the Arab-Jewish past is a place that cannot be revisited, even if one can travel to the geographical territory that appears to be a place of ‘origin.’ As members of the second and third generations born in Israel, these Mizrahi filmmakers cannot reclaim the Arab-Jewish past of which they never really were a part, and so they try to trace musical routes that will take them to places, histories and encounters with people they have not known before. The grounded certainty of their Mizrahi roots is replaced in the films by the contingencies of the routes that the music enabled.
The dissertation, “Theocracy in Judaism and Shia Islam: Studies in Legal Theology” concerns the conceptual underpinnings of modern theocratic thought in both traditions. It also examines attempts by modern thinkers in both traditions to theologically problematize and unwind those monopolistic theocratic-epistemic syntheses that meld mysticism, law, philosophy and politics by engaging with pre-modern sources with an explicit openness to responding to the contemporary imperative of autonomy. It explores the ideas of thinkers in the Jewish tradition such as Judah Halevi, Rav Kook, Leo Strauss, Franz Rosenzweig and Menachem Lorberbaum, along with figures inspired by the Shia tradition that include Ayatollah Khomeini, Ahmad Narāqī, Mohammed Shabestari, Reza Hajatpour and Fazlur Rahman. The dissertation utilizes the core Shia theological concept of “guardianship” (wilāya) as a philosophical window for comparatively examining the theocratic idea in both Judaism and Shia Islam given the philologically demonstrated fashion with which the canonical medieval Jewish thinker Judah Halevi intimately and creatively appropriates the concept via the figure of the walī (the “guardian”) for his legal theology in his magnum opus, the Kuzari. It pays particular attention to the status of “the Esoteric” in the establishment of theocratic epistemic monopoly under the banner of guardianship.
This article explores how Christian theology has historically contributed to the modern ideology of Islamophobia. After arguing that contemporary popular and political Islamophobia has its sources in replacement theology, theological supersessionism, anti-Judaism, antisemitism, Christian-Islamic polemics, Orientalism, and modern racism, it seeks to reorient Catholic theology by undoing and unsaying this discursive and political harm. Constructively, the relatively novel genealogy of Islamophobia this article tentatively traces is based on three discursive moves: linking (1) replacement theology/supersessionism with medieval anti-Islamic theology, (2) the latter to Orientalism, and (3) the previous two to Islamophobia. These three discursive moves are possible because they were and remain sustained by supremacist theologies begotten by replacement theology/supersessionism. The article draws from theories of ideology and social imaginaries to recognize that the words, symbols, narratives, and metaphors that constituted a Christian theology of Islam since the seventh-century emergence of the Islamic tradition cannot be subverted merely by forgetting or ignoring them; they cannot be unlearned merely by learning “positive views” of the Islamic religious traditions (from Muslims, scholars, or both); they cannot be undone through a religion-blind, apolitical theology of religions that rejects nothing that is true and holy in religions; finally, they cannot be dismantled even by a Catholic theology of Islam that cherishes specific beliefs and practices in common with Muslims. It concludes by beginning to construct a Catholic theology of interreligious praxis intended to dismantle and disrupt Islamophobia today. This praxis-oriented theology is grounded in a Christian conception of restorative justice and the Catholic sacrament of reconciliation. At the core of this proposal is the assertion that theologies of the past remain the politics of the present. If Catholic theology has shaped the sociopolitical ideology and structure of Islamophobia today, then an anti-Islamophobic Catholic theology must be political; otherwise, it will remain ineffective in undoing the political harm it has produced.
This article discusses critical issues surrounding the Jewish-Muslim encounter, framed as an evaluation of the approach and conclusions of two recent publications by Aaron W. Hughes: Shared Identities: Medieval and Modern Imaginings of Judeo-Islam (2017) and Muslim and Jew (2019). Hughes’s works present a critique of the established historiography on Jewish-Muslim relations and exchanges, examining such subjects as the Jews of late antique Arabia, the Jewish matrix of the Quran and formative Islam, and the Judeo-Islamic synthesis of subsequent centuries. I interrogate Hughes’s use of sources, treatment of previous scholarship, and privileging of the specific lens of the “religionist” in approaching the historical evidence. Both of the works under consideration here exhibit numerous problems of conception and argumentation that undermine their value for broadening current horizons of research or refining prevailing pedagogies. Ultimately, although they provoke numerous important questions and deftly expose the conceptual and ideological underpinnings of older scholarship, the books fail to offer a constructive path forward for specialists or stimulate a meaningful paradigm shift in the field.
This essay explores repressed hostility and punitive fantasies in the discourse of international health, using Katherine Mayo’s Mother India (1927). Multiple tendencies in interwar thinking converge in Mayo’s book, making it a veritable archive of major, minor and emergent forces, including those shaping the phenomenon of ‘international health’ post-Versailles. Mother India provides a unique opportunity to explore how progressive principles of international public health tend to obscure a ‘minor’ and forgettable yet disturbing truth: the discourse on life and health can ‘safely’ harbour an alternative politics and poetics of enmity. Spotlighting the way international health interventions, centrally shaped by USA, operated across multiple levels of governance, the essay locates the significant detail of Mayo’s representation of India as ‘world-menace’. Propelled by the logic of enmity, her shaming portrait of a dysgenic Hindu India justifying emergency international intervention resonates with a strand of interwar conservatism given theoretical expression in the writings of Mayo’s contemporary, Carl Schmitt. Schmitt’s animosity towards political liberalism helps identify Mother India ’s vision of imperial sovereignty as a curious antiliberal, American iteration of the logic of enmity in extra-European space and in the ‘humane’ domain of health. Biologising the discourse of juridical-political maturity at a time when Indian nationalism’s organised challenge to Empire could not be gainsaid, Mother India urges a re-imagination of the political field as a battlefield where ‘the enemy’, construed as a problem of health, will kill. Building a case for continued imperial domination in the name of global health and immunity, the book’s humiliating representation of colonial bodily habits, habitations and contagions aimed to undermine liberal imperialism, internationalism and Indian nationalism, all increasingly vocal after World War I.
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