الإسلام والغرب: نحو عالم أفضل

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Jews and Arabs @ @

Jews and Arabs Undissociable in the theological and political imagination of Western Christendom as well as in the rich history of their social and cultural contacts, Jews and Arabs continue to function as paradigmatic markers of distance and antagonism rather than of proximity and affinity. This is increasingly the case in France, the United States and, of course, Israel/Palestine. But beyond a geographical logic that seem to maintain an East/West division, the antagonism between Jews and Arabs operates, like the colonial technologies I was describing, on a number of levels and dimensions: historical (Holocaust versus colonialism), sociological (negotiating sexual difference, anti-Semitism versus islamophobia), political (the hegemonic of liberal, secular democracies and the so-called “war on terror”) and religious (the “judeo-christian tradition”). What I have argued elsewhere is that these dimensions partake of two histories that have been kept separated for strategic reasons, two histories that come under the headings of “Islam and the West” and “Europe and the Jews.” I conclude, therefore, with the claim that these two histories are, in fact, one: the singular management of Jew and Arab in Western Christendom through its transformations (Roman Catholicism, Reformation, Secularism). I argue, in other words, for the articulation of a Semitic perspective. Let me begin by quoting again from the description by Jesuits of the coexistence, ta‘ayush or convivencia that existed between Christians and Muslims on Mount Lebanon.

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.

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