Islam and the West… for a better world @
There is no question that this kind of coexistence is predicated on vastly different understandings of political rule and legal regime, social relations and collective identity, a distinct distribution of resources as well as a different way of negotiating violence and conflict. For better or for worse, it is the kind of coexistence that has been brought to an end with modernity. In the specific case of the Jews, the transformation entailed a reflected division, a logic of separation that was meant to increase the political and conceptual distance between Jews and Arabs, Jews and Muslims. Well- known examples are, of course the Crémieux Decree of 1870, but equally important, and no doubt more massive in terms of numbers affected, are the activities of the French based network of schools of the Alliance Israélite Universelle. As one of the teachers of the Alliance wrote in 1930 Damascus, “France has achieved the moral conquest of the Jews in the East” (quoted in Rodrigue, Images , 269). Working in a way that is uncannily similar to the missionaries of Mount Lebanon, the Alliance furthered the goals of the French civilizing mission and participated in making the Jews into aliens to their native environment. But what is essential to remember is that the attention lavished by the different empires on newly constructed “minorities” (the Maronites, the Kabyles, the Jews) was part of a new management of populations, a larger restructuring of rule and knowledge, a extensive redefinition, a separation of, politics and religion, race and ethnicity, and so forth. The culmination of these technologies and their staying power can be seen in two more sites. First, in the lack of attention directed at Edward Said’s assertion that the history of Orientalism, the history of Islamophobia, is “the history of a strange, secret sharer of Western anti-Semitism” (Said, Orientalism , 27), an assertion that, grounded in the sound knowledge of a still invisible history, sought to alert us anew to Aimé Césaire’s insight into the relations that link colonialism and the Holocaust. Second, and obviously related, is the lack of attention directed at the history of the category of “Semites” and particularly at the way in which it functioned and was
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