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Jewish Muslims in The Handsome Jew and Don’t Leave Me Here Alone : Conversion, Identity, and Liminality
Abstract
The present article addresses the complex interplay of boundaries, belonging, and modes of identity and investigates the space between the distinct boundaries of religious identities. It focuses on the Jewish Muslim identity as it defies categorization and plays out in the liminal space of the Jewish Muslims, a space of fluid and blurred contours, haunted by ancestral religion and inherited culture, and obsessed by a crucial need to reconstruct a new sense of self. The article explores these concepts by referring to two narrative works: Ali Al-Muqri’s The Handsome Jew and Ihsan Abdel Quddous’s Don’t Leave Me Here Alone, which extensively elaborate on the relationship between conversion, identity, and liminality. It argues that Jewish Muslims stay within a liminal space due to their inability to forget their past and assimilate into the present, and that a non-binary Jewish Muslim subject lives in a place that borders the Jewish and Muslim spaces but never crosses into either position completely. The study aims to investigate discourses, as presented in the two texts under discussion, that construct boundaries between individuals of different religious affiliations and the motives for such constructions, and it tries to demonstrate the extent to which liminality can be used as an apt metaphor to define the life of Jewish converts to Islam.
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Scholars of interfaith tolerance and conflict in the pre-modern Mediterranean have largely overlooked the history of mixed marriage, that is, the binding union between men and women from different religious communities. Concentrating on pre-modern Iberia but looking as well at wider Mediterranean contexts, the collection of essays gathered here examines mixed marriage in relation to religious conversion and the family.
The article examines Ihsan Abdel Quddous’s literary texts that deal with Egyptian Jewish women to explore how Egyptian Jewesses figure in these texts to disrupt, disturb, or offset prevailing historical and fictional discourses and explore his attitude toward Egyptian Jews in general and Jewish women in particular. Deploying post-colonial feminist theory, the article argues that in Quddous’ works, Jewish women represent a highly-educated and liberal community with fluid, transnational identities that serve to foil exclusionary discourses, and that Quddous increasingly has given Egyptian Jewish women, more than any other Arab writer of the period, a voice and an active role in his works. As a result, he has articulated their hopes, fears, and needs in a period dominated by political and social instability. The article aims at identifying and categorizing major tropes and characteristics pertaining to the portrayal of Jewish women in Ihsan Abdel Quddous’ fiction, and how these portrayals adhere to or play on the universal stereotypes of Jews.
The question of female conversion to Islam in pre-modern times has received insufficient attention in modern scholarship. This is mostly the result of the methodological problem that shrouds it. One can say with high measures of certainty that in contrast to their male counterparts, the treatment of female converts to Islam in early Islamic sources is almost always in relation to a male figure. It is the premise of the present contribution that female choices to embrace the Islamic creed, although restricted by male authority, deserve greater attention. The present discussion explores female agency in moments of conversion to Islam by focusing on the biographies of three female figures from the time of the Prophet. Read in tandem with additional literary sources, it attempts to locate the medieval (i.e. eighth–thirteenth centuries) context of stories that go back to the very early phases of the Umma – the Muslim Community of Believers.
This book is the first in over a decade to attempt a systematic synthesis of the field of conversion studies, encompassing the disciplines of anthropology, sociology, psychology, history, and theology. Gooren analyzes conversion and disaffiliation in a worldwide comparative framework, using data from North America, Europe, and Latin America.
Since the beginning of its history, Islam has encountered other religious communities both in Arabia and in the territories conquered during its expansion. Muslims faced other religions from the position of a ruling power and were therefore able to determine the nature of that relationship in accordance with their world-view and beliefs. Yohanan Friedmann's original and erudite study examines questions of religious tolerance as they appear in the Quran and in the prophetic tradition, and analyses the principle that Islam is exalted above all religions, discussing the ways in which this principle was reflected in various legal pronouncements. The book also considers the various interpretations of the Quranic verse according to which 'No compulsion is there in religion', noting that, despite the apparent meaning of this verse, Islamic law allowed the practice of religious coercion against Manichaeans and Arab idolators, as well as against women and children in certain circumstances.
In early 20th-century Yemen, a sizable Jewish population was subject to sumptuary laws and social restrictions. Jews regularly came into contact with Islamic courts and Muslim jurists, by choice and by necessity, became embroiled in the most intimate details of their Jewish neighbors’ lives. Mark S. Wagner draws on autobiographical writings to study the careers of three Jewish intermediaries who used their knowledge of Islamic law to manipulate the shari‘a for their own benefit and for the good of their community. The result is a fresh perspective on the place of religious minorities in Muslim societies.
Hindu and Christian debates over the meanings, motivations, and modalities of 'conversion' provide the central connecting theme running through this book. It focuses on the reasons offered by both sides to defend or oppose the possibility of these cross-border movements, and shows how these reasons form part of a wider constellation of ideas, concepts, and practices of the Christian and the Hindu worlds. The book draws upon several historical case-studies of Christian missionaries and of Hindus who encountered these missionaries. By analysing some of the complex negotiations, intersections, and conflicts between Hindus and Christians over the question of 'conversion', it demonstrates that these encounters revolve around three main contested themes. Firstly, who can properly 'speak for the convert'? Secondly, how is 'tolerating' the religious other connected to an appraisal of the other's viewpoints which may be held to be incorrect, inadequate, or incomplete? Finally, what is, in fact, the 'true Religion'? The book demonstrates that it is necessary to wrestle with these questions for an adequate understanding of the Hindu and Christian debates over 'conversion.' Questioning what 'conversion' precisely is, and why it has been such a volatile issue on India's political-legal landscape, the book will be a useful contribution to studies of Hinduism, Christianity and Asian Religion and Philosophy.
The way in which people change and represent their spiritual evolution is often determined by recurrent language structures. Through the analysis of ancient and modern stories and their words and images, this book describes the nature of conversion through explorations of the encounter with the religious message, the discomfort of spiritual uncertainty, the loss of personal and social identity, the anxiety of destabilization, the reconstitution of the self and the discovery of a new language of the soul.
This article studies what conversion to Islam meant in legal terms for women and how it affected their marriage, conjugal rights, children, and property rights in two circumstances: one, when conversion was of their own volition, and the other, when it was not their own decision, but that of their husbands or fathers. A cluster offive conversion documents-three for Christian, Jewish, and pagan males, and two for Christian and pagan females—from a notarial manual composed in tenth century Cordoba is used here to place the results of the investigation within the analytical framework of the study of Muslim women's legal status, and beyond, into the emotional and psychosocial environment of women's conversion and its significance as a life event.
The article discusses the phenomenon of Jewish conversion to Islam in Yemen in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, mainly in the tribal-rural areas where the majority of the Jews lived. This phenomenon is explained against the background of political, social, and economic developments: the intervention in Yemen of outside forces; the penetration of the world economy; and the weakening of Jewish institutions. Religious conversion is presented as a familiar and tempting phenomenon in Jewish life. Social considerations are put forward as the main reasons for Islamization, whereas the role of religious conviction is seen as insignificant. The article also deals with the symbolic meanings of the conversion ceremony and with its practical implications—in the convert's community of origin and in his or her new community. This article is based on oral history, on personal interviews with Yemeni Jews now living in Israel, and on written sources such as letters, memoirs, itinerary books, and legal writings on issues resulting from conversion.
As is well known, the long arm of the Arab-Israeli conflict reached far beyond the geographical borders of Palestine. Prior to the creation of the State of Israel in 1948, somewhere between 700,000 and 850,000 Jews lived in inveterate communities spread throughout the Middle East and North Africa. By the end of the century, all the historic Jewish communities of the region (with the partial exceptions of Morocco and Iran) were to meet a single fate—dislocation and dispersal—effectively vanishing with nary a trace left in their countries of origin. These were indigenous communities (in some cases, present in area for millennia) whose unique, syncretic cultures have since been completely expunged as a result of emigration—whether to Israel, where they were subjected to a systematic program of deracination and resocialization, or to the West, where in most places “Jewish” was more or less synonymous with “Ashkenazi” and the concept of Jews from the Arab world was (and remains) little known or understood. The disappearance of the Jewish dialects of spoken Arabic, of written Judeo-Arabic, and, more recently, of the last generation of Jewish writers of literary Arabic, all silently sound the death knell of a certain world—that which S. D. Goitein dubbed the “Jewish-Arab symbiosis,” and that which Ammiel Alcalay sought to recapture in his groundbreaking book After Jews and Arabs.1
This essay is concerned not only with this displaced population and its lost history but principally with the evocation of both subjects through a concept gaining increasing acceptance and purchase in academic discourse, namely, the “Arab Jew.” Numerically, the total population of Middle Eastern and North African Jews prior to 1948 hovers under the million mark, and this is perhaps one of the reasons its historic experience has been so eclipsed by the cataclysmic events that befell European Jewry in the twentieth century. Yet due to its historic location betwixt and between things “Jewish” and things “Arab,” this population’s symbolic importance belies its small numbers. Whichever way you look at it, the not-so-simple fact of Jews who are Arab or Arabs who are Jewish raises all sorts of problems and possibilities ripe for exploration, interpretation, and manipulation—and people are beginning to notice. Paradoxically, even as so much of Arab Jewish language, culture, and historic memory slips away like gossamer threads carried off on the wind of a quickly receding past, the reappropriation—some might even say the commodification—of the “Arab Jew” (now as a largely symbolic figure) accelerates in kind. The renewed interest in the figure of the Arab Jew and in the lost Arab Jewish past is perhaps best evidenced by the multilingual swell of documentary films, memoirs, novels, and even cookbooks-cum-community histories (which I call “culinary nostalgia”) produced by Arab Jews and their descendants (primarily from Iraq and Egypt) in recent years.2 At the same time, as Emily Gottreich points out in her essay, the political capital of the Arab Jew has not gone unrecognized by activists from either right or left.3
The term “Arab Jew” was in fact reclaimed by scholars such Ella Shohat, Sami Shalom Chetrit, and Yehouda Shenhav as part of a political project of intervention into the normative terms of Zionist discourse.4 This project evolved from a history of Mizraḥi activism, which began as a protest movement responding to the discriminatory economic, social, and cultural treatment of “Mizraḥim” (non-European Jews) in Israel.5 Shohat’s pivotal 1988 article “Sephardim in Israel”6 emerged at a moment of symbiotic activity between activism and scholarship, but the past decade or so has witnessed what Moshe Behar calls the “academization of the Mizrahi cause.”7 Although scholarly research on the history of Jews in the Middle East and North Africa has of course been carried out by scholars in Israel, Europe, and North America for several decades, it has been conducted largely in isolation from the Mizraḥi issue and its scholarly outgrowth. These historical researches (many of which are informed by an uncritical reliance upon the “tradition”/”modernity” dichotomy)8 have generally been local both in scope and perspective. They have not connected...
Social movements transform participants' identities. Why they do so is an unresolved puzzle. I argue that for participants, social movements are liminal phenomena characterized by varying degrees of freedom, egalitarianism, communion, and creativity. As such, the transformative power of social movements depends on their degree of liminality. Those that approximate most to the pure type of the liminal offer to the participants high degrees of freedom, egalitarianism, communion, and creativity. They transform identities most powerfully. In the 1960s, China's Red Guards experienced a profoundly liminal movement. As a result, an age-cohort that was coming of age began to recreate itself. The personal transformations of the Red Guards would persistently bear on Chinese politics and society up to the 1989 Chinese student movement.
This study analyzes the constitutional provisions in 44 predominantly Muslim countries addressing the relationship between religion and the state, freedom of religion or belief, and other related human rights as measured against recognized international human rights standards. The geographic diversity of the Muslim world mirrors a central finding of the study, that predominantly Muslim countries encompass a variety of constitutional arrangements - ranging from Islamic republics with Islam as the official state religion, to secular states with strict separation of religion and state. Key findings of the survey include: More than half of the world's Muslim population (estimated at over 1.3 billion) lives in countries that are neither Islamic republics nor that have declared Islam to be the state religion; countries in which Islam is the declared state religion may provide constitutional guarantees of the right to freedom of religion or belief that compare favorably with international legal standards; countries in which Islam is the declared state religion may also maintain constitutional provisions protecting the related rights to freedom of expression, association, and assembly - or the rights of equality and nondiscrimination with regard to, inter alia, religion and gender - that compare favorably with international standards; and a number of constitutions of predominantly Muslim countries incorporate or otherwise reference international human rights instruments. This study is also available in Arabic.
Dissertation (Ph.D.)--University of Michigan.
Remembering Ihsan Abdel Quddous on his centennial birthday
- Marie Mustafa
Marie, Mustafa. (2019). Remembering Ihsan Abdel Quddous on his centennial birthday.
Egypt Today. https://www.egypttoday.com/Article/4/62924/Remembering-Ihsan-Abdel-Quddous-on-his-Centennial-birthday
- Marzouki Nadia
argues that love and marriage usually lead to conversion of one of the lovers. The mixing of the Muslim and Jewish communities led to the emergence of "romantic ties and sometimes even marriages developed" between members of the two communities. Most of those marriages
- Klorman
Klorman (2007) argues that love and marriage usually lead to conversion of one of
the lovers. The mixing of the Muslim and Jewish communities led to the emergence
of "romantic ties and sometimes even marriages developed" between members of the
two communities. Most of those marriages "resulted in the conversion of the Jewish
party, man or woman" (pp. 95-96). Klorman adds, "In Yemen, religious conversion
ran largely in one direction: from Judaism to Islam" (p. 90).
For Muslim men marrying non-Muslims, see Elmali-Karakaya
- Shatzmiller
Shatzmiller
(1996, pp. 240, 242-244). See also Simonsohn (2020). For Muslim men marrying non-Muslims, see Elmali-Karakaya (2021);
Rituals often remind the individual of this belonging, creating an intense sense of togetherness
- According To Mcguire
According to McGuire (2002), "Rituals often remind the individual of this belonging,
creating an intense sense of togetherness" (p. 21). It is through religious commitments
and the practices of these rituals that a solid identity is created among adherents.
Further, conversion is seen as "a sociological and psychological crime against the persecuted Jewish group
- Magnus According To
According to Magnus (2010), "Jews who convert of their own volition are very bad
Jews, but they remain Jews under rabbinic law" (p. 134). The convert is "a Jew, though
he has sinned, remains a Jew" (Magnus, 2010, p. 134). They are "terribly bad Jews"
(Magnus, 2010, p. 134). Conversion is considered as "apostasy…a theological betrayal
of Judaism" (Magnus, 2010, p. 135). Further, conversion is seen as "a sociological
and psychological crime against the persecuted Jewish group, a treasonous going over
to the camp of the oppressor" (Magnus, 2010, p. 135). And converts are "considered
La Tatrukuni Huna Wahdi
- Abdel Quddous
- Ihsan
Abdel Quddous, Ihsan. (2021). La Tatrukuni Huna Wahdi [Don't Leave Me Here Alone].
Ihsan Abdel Quddous: Ma'arik Al-Hub wa Al-Siyasah 1919-1990 (Ihsan Abdel Quddous: The battles of love and politics 1919-1990)
- Abdul Razaq
- Zainab
Abdul Razaq, Zainab. (2020). Ihsan Abdel Quddous: Ma'arik Al-Hub wa Al-Siyasah
1919-1990 (Ihsan Abdel Quddous: The battles of love and politics 1919-1990).
Egyptian-Lebanese Publishing House.
Jewish communities in exotic places
- Homi Bhabha
Bhabha, Homi. (1994). The location of culture. Routledge.
Blady, Ken. (2000). Jewish communities in exotic places. Jason Aronson Inc.
Apostasy from Islam: A historical perspective
- David Cook
Cook, David. (2006). Apostasy from Islam: A historical perspective. Jerusalem Studies in
Arabic and Islam, 31, 248-288.
Longing for community: Church, ummah, or somewhere in between?
- Tim Green
Green, Tim. (2013b). Identity choices at the border zone. In David Greenlee (Ed.), Longing
for community: Church, ummah, or somewhere in between? (pp. 53-66). William
Carey Library.
Literature and disability
- Alice Hall
Hall, Alice. (2016). Literature and disability. Routledge.