الإسلام والغرب: نحو عالم أفضل

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Jews and Arabs @ @

destroyed. Contemporaneous with Tocqueville’s visits in Algeria, Jesuit missionaries were deploying the same means of distributing knowledge, the same divisive understanding, aimed to create “pure Christian spaces” in Mount Lebanon (Makdisi, Culture , 91). They expressed “revulsion at the intermingling of Muslim and Christian, at the Christian’s practice of adopting Muslim names, and at their habitual invocation of the prophet Muhammad.”

We are sorry, these Jesuits wrote, that there was a sort of coexistence [fusion] between the Christians and the Muslims of Sayda. They visited each other frequently, which resulted in intimate relations between them and which introduced, bit by bit, a community of ideas and habits all of which was a the expense of the Christians. These latter joined in the important Muslim feasts, and the Muslims [in turn] joined in the Christian feasts; this kind of activity passed for good manners, sociability, while in truth it resulted in nothing more than the weakening of religious sentiments. (quoted in Makdisi, Culture, 92)

The “danger” of coexistence, ta‘ayush , was to be prevented not only by separating between communities, but by dividing them from themselves, from their own habits and practices, by fostering a different division of reality. The modern separation of spheres described by Max Weber found its origins and terrain of application in particular technologies of governing, embodied technologies that divided populations of course, but that also divided colonial labor: the missionary is not the diplomat, the governor is not a general. They do not serve the same function. In the colonies, this complex political, religious, military and economic apparatus, this novel technology, divided Druze from Maronite, Arab from Berber, Hindu from Muslim, and Hutu from Tutsi (Mamdani, When Victims ). It marks a rupture and a beginning, a very modern beginning of communalism, of sectarianism. In Mount Lebanon, it marks “the birth of a new culture that singled out religious affiliation as the defining public and political characteristic of a modern subject and citizen” (Makdisi, Culture , 174). In India, it puts into place the essential (even if not inevitable) premises of

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