Welcome everybody and good afternoon. I am especially delighted to welcome our speaker today. Professor, Professor, Voice of the Deaf. I think there is very little need to introduce Professor Energy, but we just mentioned well, he's currently a reader, a reader write in South Asian history and fellow it's in Antony's previously held positions at New York University.
So new school in New York Yale University University of Chicago where you where he had the he got is a huge reform he is the author most recently of Muslims in Pakistan is a Political Idea, which is published by the Harvard University Press. And the title of his talk today is Jewish Presidents and Muslim Nationalism. Professor, thank you so much. Thank you very much, Yakov. It's a pleasure to be here.
Forgive me for the skimpy ness of my notes, but I find it filled with more interesting not to read out a paper. I might be incorrect. You can tell me later. So what interests me in writing this book, Muslim Zion, is how to tell the story of nationalism differently. And the historiography of nationalism tends to be dominated by themes of either triumph. You know, nationalism comes and everyone somehow succumbs to it almost without question.
It becomes the natural political form of the 20th century of modularity. And this, of course, is the work of people like Benedict Anderson, where the nation form is seen as a kind of modular form that people can imitate and repeat in many different parts of the world or of derivation.
And this, of course, is the work of part, the strategy to which I refer, where, you know, his question is whether the postcolonial nation state, especially in Asia and Africa, can be seen as a more or less perfect derivative of some European original. But what interests me is not the story of teleological triumph, but rather that of reluctance and self-criticism in the history of nationalism.
How can we think about nations that are actually premised upon the critique of nationalism itself, that are therefore critical in some sense, that do not naturalise it? And I think many postcolonial forms of national identity in Asia and Africa, in Latin America are of this kind in greater a greater or lesser degree that they that they the those who are called nationalists are already fully aware of the perils and pitfalls of nationalism as a political form.
It's not simply that they want to just get what Europeans already have, apparently, and that, you know, unlike the sort of romantic form that nationalism often takes on the European continent, many of these national movements, the kind that I'm interested in, actually entirely unromantic, are prosaic, are almost instrumental. They don't necessarily have a great ideal or romance built into them.
Sometimes they emerge almost out of a sense of necessity or or of out of a history in which no other option has remained available. So nationalism might not even be the first choice of many of these movements. Now, that is not to say that once this nation states are created, you don't have ideals, romances and all the rest of them built into them. But I'm interested in exploring history, which is not always and already about those categories.
Even today you see such forms of nationalism. They're not simply historical survivals. One can look at different forms of national, new national movements in the EU, for instance, which are curious because they tend not to gesture towards the older virtues of nationalism, whether it is Scotland or Catalonia. Both presume the existence of the European Union for their existence, for their own existence.
Both appear to be national forms that lack sovereignty or that resigned sovereignty to a kind of federal whole, you know, that share currency. So that lack many of the perquisites of classical national movements. And they are not necessarily terribly romantic either, right? With the Kurds today. Also, you might see this sort of thing happening. So if you look at the work of Abdullah Öcalan, it's very interesting because it's premised upon the critique of nationalism.
It's entirely anti nationalist. And he, of course, was a great reader of of all people, Benedict Anderson, who himself was a critic of nationalism. So here you have a Kurdish national movement which emerges out of the critique of nationalism, which doesn't want to constitute a nation state of any classical or romantic vintage.
So these uncertain, self-critical forms of nation building, I want to argue, are not only true of the past, but are in a way ever more true of our own present and future, that it's that history that might be the more illuminating and important history in terms of the future of nationalism than the old story of triumphant modular or derivative nationalism that the historiography tells us. Right. And in many ways, Zionism is part of this self-critical, uncertain, doubtful history.
Now, in in my book, I wasn't because I'm not qualified to really write about Zionism per se. But it was important for me because it was important for many of the figures I was writing about.
In particular, those Muslims in British India who like Jews in Europe, who were constituted as a minority at a certain point, and of course the figure of the minority only becomes possible in a if not in a nation state, then in a kind of proto nationalist imagination, when numbers of this kind matter and numbers of this kind matter, when, as it were, elections, democracy and and procedures such as these which belong generally to nation states, matter.
Otherwise, majorities of minorities are of no particular consequence in an aristocratic state. After all, a minority is a good thing to be because that minority rules. But in a nation state, a minority is not necessarily a good thing to be. Right. So the history of nationalism and the category of the minority as well as the majority are intertwined.
I think one with the other. And the minority only becomes a political reality and a problem once you have a majority, a national majority, and therefore once you have a national imagination and whether it is Jews in Europe and indeed in other parts of the world include the Middle East or in this case, in the case I was working on Muslims in India, you have a sort of shared language to some degree and something of a shared imagination, which becomes clear when you realise, as I did,
that many of the people who came to be called Muslim nationalists were drawing explicitly upon European Jewry, its culture and the thought of early Zionism in particular. So let me proceed to talk about British India and then I'll come back to say something about the links with European Jewry and with Zionism in particular. So what happens in India is two national movements emerge, at least two big ones anyway.
One Indian nationalism. But also in a way, Hindu nationalism is tied to historical continuities and geographical unities. Right. So this idea that there is a continuity of history from ancient times into the present that makes the nation what it is and that the territory of the nation is already given. The history belongs to the territory, the people belong to the territory. The two are almost coeval and that's what gets to make the nation state in the other.
And in what comes to be Pakistani nationalism. Neither of these two things is given that there is no historical continuity and there is no geographical unity either, because the only way in which Pakistan can be conceived of as a separate nation state is by denying those unities and those continuities by acknowledging them. A muslim nationalist could only be drawn back to the history of India. Right, and to some form of Indian nationalism.
So they are quite distinctive ideologically and conceptually, even though they are often dealt with, as, you know, Tweedledum and Tweedledee, forms of national movement. You know, there is the Indian one and the Pakistani one or the Hindu one of the Muslim one. They are not. In many ways, Muslim nationalism, what comes to be called Pakistani nationalism, unlike Indian or Hindu nationalism, draws from a tradition that is not European and not romantic.
But that is, if you will, a new world and enlightenment in its character. And I say this because Pakistan is conceived like a new world country as something completely new, right? As a new kind of settlement, something that has never existed before, that it has a history, of course, in terms of the history of Islam. But the history of Pakistan in the history of Islam are not coeval. Pakistan is a new entity. It's not a romantic one.
There are no great paeans of, you know, nationalist prose or poetry which talk about the lengthy gestation or survival of this new nation. It doesn't exist. And you can see this indeed by its name as well as its territory. So the name Pakistan is like USA or USSR, an acronym, you know, P stands for Punjab, A for of Ghana, K for Kashmir, the s for sind and tarn for Baluchistan. Missing is Bengal, which became one half of Pakistan.
East Pakistan. What is today? Bangladesh. It's a name that has no history. It's a completely new name. It doesn't gesture towards the past at all. There's nothing like it. Its territory came to be a curious amalgam because, of course, you may recall Pakistan was created in two wings. West Pakistan. What is today? Pakistan. And then a thousand miles away, east Pakistan.
Now, Bangladesh also very unlikely for a nation state which is usually conceived of at least a European form of nation state as something that has territorial and sort of integrity. Right here, you don't have that. In fact, the only models I can think of of this kind of dispersed form of national territory are new world forms. The United States is like that. It has Alaska separated from it by all of Canada.
It has, you know, Puerto Rico and Hawaii, etc. Of course, colonial powers, all colonial powers still have overseas territories, but they tend to be conceived of only in terms of their primary territory. In in Europe, in Western Europe, the short lived United Arab Republic was like this, bringing together Egypt and Syria right in Nasser's day.
But there are very few such examples. So you have a kind of imperial example, a new world example, sorry, like the United States, but also a kind of imperial example because of these these colonial powers, some of which still retain overseas territories. And of course, the imperial states themselves were often scattered across the globe.
And in some ways, therefore, I think Pakistan looks backwards to imperialism on the one hand, but also to new world models and to internationalist models for its. Status, right? And it does so not simply out of necessity, but because, as I said, it's built upon a fundamental critique of the nation, of the nation state itself.
So that like many groups that had come to be defined as minorities but sought to make themselves into majorities or national majorities, Indian Muslim nationalists were highly dubious about majority defined nation states because they thought that they themselves had been or were the potential victims of one such majoritarian nation, India. And they looked to other populations, such as the Jews in Europe, but also, interestingly, Protestants in Ireland and Germans at the Sudetenland as models.
And all these models are incompatible with each other in many ways, obviously. But they came together for Muslim nationalists when they are trying to think of themselves in an international context. And the other ways in which this international or imperial world is thought about as a way of as a site of escape from the nation state, in a way. All right. So just as I describe Catalonia and Scotland.
But there are others as well that seek to construct nation states of a certain kind, but only within the context of a federal or international order, because they are themselves critical of the old fashioned ideal of the nation state. So to Muslims, nationalism sought to locate itself, you know, either in some version of the Muslim world itself modelled on the British Empire.
You know, there's a new book on the category of the Muslim World by Jeremy Leyden, which makes this argument he doesn't make it as clearly as I would have liked him to. But because I think the idea of the Muslim world actually takes the British Empire in particular as its model. It's not any pre-modern empire because pre-modern Muslim empires tended to be contiguous territorially. They spread, but they were not dispersed all over the globe in the way that the Muslim world is.
It's not an imperial idea. It's not from the Ottomans or the Abbasids or anything like that. But also the League of Nations, also the idea of a communist international. So there are many models which are actively referred to by these figures who who theorise and and make Muslim nationalism into a reality. And of course, they're critical about the Nation-State, precisely because they have been constructed within national imaginaries as a minority and therefore have become a problem.
So in Europe, of course, this problem is or. QUESTION These are the two terms used. It's dominated by European Jewry, right? So there's a Jewish question or a Jewish problem. Both these terms question. The problem are also used for minorities in other parts of the world, on the Jewish, European, Jewish example.
And Amir Mufti at UCLA has written an entire book called Enlightenment in the Colony on how it was that these categories, as they come to be developed in Western Europe or with European Jews at their centre, get transferred to other parts of the world and in particular to India and re-used there. Now, of course, Zionism, unlike Muslim nationalism, relies upon an old name, Israel. All right. And relies upon a long history to legitimise itself.
On the other hand, I think if I'm correct, it's still in many of its variant forms, is very critical indeed of the European nation state within which it finds itself. All right. So here you have the creation of a new nation of a new nation state eventually. That is also critical about the national form. And, you know, I, I, I wonder if it's correct to say that.
Well, I don't if it's correct, but I think that it's a it's too easy a flip to make an argument that Zionism simply gets to recapitulate what European nation states do in Palestine, that it's simply a kind of easy imitation or even more, that it's a kind of new world settler colony unproblematic.
I think the huge debates and discussions and moments of self-criticism, indeed structural self-criticism in their criticism of the idea of the nation state, which makes it like Muslim nationalism and other forms of nation making in the post-colonial world quite different from any European original. Now, the way in which in South Asia this could, the way in which this criticism manifests itself is very interesting.
And it's not only among Muslims. So Gandhi early in his career is very interested in thinking about the British Empire as. A new kind of global political form, which would redeem the British and British history in the East entirely if it were to be democratised and he thought what you would have. In a way, it's the earliest, one of the earliest and most virile, if I can use that word. Ideas of what came to be the Commonwealth. The Commonwealth is a pale reflection in comparison.
So he thought that if you democratise the British Empire. Well, first of all, of course, India would take central centre stage because of its population. But secondly, what this would mean is that there could be no majority or a minority in such a political entity because it was too vast and diverse to be conceptualise in terms of majorities and minorities that you would get rid of the problem of majority of the minorities altogether in this global configuration.
His Muslim compatriots also tended to think along these lines, though for different reasons. They were not interested in the same kinds of, you know, anti statist and non-violent political forms as Gandhi was, but nevertheless, they share a language. So, for instance, the Aga Khan, who was the first president of the All-india Muslim League, was equally interested in this way of transforming the empire.
And he also was one, one of the earliest Muslim nationalist figures to actually draw up on Zionism as a more explicitly as a model. So he had gone on behalf of, I think, the Baron, Edmond de Rothschild, who was his friend to the Sultan in Constantinople, to plead the cause of the of Herzl, basically of the early Zionists, and to ask the Sultan to set aside Palestine for Jewish immigration. Here was the president of the All-india Muslim League. All right. Meeting the sultan.
And his argument, it's very interesting because, of course, he knew and not just in London, but also in India, a number of early Zionists. He sympathised with them. He, after all, was himself part of a minority in India. He thought that Palestine set aside for Jewish migration would be simply another version of the the migration of Circassians into the Ottoman Empire and their supplement in Transjordan.
He uses that example. He recommends to the Sultan, who was not so interested in the end, but also is also interested after the First World War in setting aside German East Africa for Indian settlement. So it's not you know, it's a it's a how should I put it, a generalised logic. It's not a specific logic. It's not about Muslims or Jews. It's a it's a way of thinking about the political future. Right.
And in all these ways, he's trading both on sort of imperial forms of political accommodation by the Ottoman or British, but also internationalist ones. He ends up after the First World War as India's representative for the League of Nations and eventually arises in the 1930s to become president of the League of Nations. So here is a man who belongs both in the old empire, but also in the new international order simultaneously. Right. Not accidentally. He's thinking along these lines.
He can have a conversation with Gandhi about them, about this way of thinking. And Gandhi has his own way of considering the empire. Right. And of course, Theodor Herzl and the early scientists also thought along these lines, you know, how would you actually produce a Jewish homeland, etc., in the Ottoman Empire?
Or as our entire Aaron would argue, as late as the 1940s, you know, a British imperial state within which Jews could have a national home and like the Indian Muslims had argued much earlier or Gandhi had argued much earlier. Get rid of the categories, minority and majority altogether. Right. So it's this is these are not just ideas coming from European Jewry and going to the east, but they return as well in some fashion.
The invocation of European Jewry then begins here with the problem or question posed by new minorities, especially after the First World War, with the creation of all these new nation states in Europe, but also, as I mentioned, with the Germans of Sudeten land, the Irish Protestants, etc. Right. Whereas Indian nationalism refers to the non-citizen Germans and to the Irish godless. Right. So they take different sides on each of these conflicts.
By the time you get to the 1940s, and indeed even from the late 1930s, Zionism comes to you know, comes to produce actual political categories for the Muslim League. Right. So the idea of a national home on the one hand and then later on how this is replaced by the of a national state.
All right. Both somewhat undefined and a famous Indian political thinker and political figure, Dr. Ambedkar, who ends up being one of the chief architect of the Indian Constitution, is the one who points this out in the middle 1940s. How it is, how curious it is that Muslim nationalism, eventually Pakistani nationalism ends up using Zionist categories for itself almost deliberately. All right. Now, both.
For many of these Muslim nationalists, both Jewish internationalism and Jewish nationalism or Zionism, serve as models of different kinds. They are very interested in Jewish internationalism because they conceive of themselves as being part of an international community, the Muslim world, and they don't want to hive off Pakistan what comes to be Pakistan as a nation state simply among other nation states. You know, it's part of some larger entity, which is international.
But of course, they're also afraid of what happens to non-national forms of identification. Whereas these internationalist and imperial models were the imperial model was very popular before the First World War, after the first word goes out of fashion for clear, obvious reasons. Between the first and the Second World Wars, the internationalist model seems to hold sway.
Equally understandable because of the League of Nations. But with the Second World War, it now seems that neither of those two are available. Right. That's. And Pakistan becomes a kind of reality. Perhaps that's also when Israel becomes a certain kind of political reality for exactly the same reason. So what I want to do is read just to give you a flavour of this way of thinking of this comparison.
Read some sections of a very famous epic poem by the poet, the Indian poet, now considered the spiritual founder of Pakistan, Muhammad Iqbal. Hugely consequential all over the Muslim world, actually wrote in Persian and Urdu and was a philosopher as much as a poet and crucial to Pakistani nationalism. And here is this is quite early from 1918. So the end towards the end of the First World War from a work called Ramsay. Basically the mysteries of selflessness. Where he's writing about.
You know, the European Jews and the idea of Jewish internationalism. And for Yakov sake, I can read it a bit out in Persian. Do I have time, please? Yeah. And. And then the translation. It brought us all to Israel. Dear God. Mossad. Who's got it? Who? Nagar, Sathya, John and Nazario Nagar. Who? Get on set us down. And I call you Sanjay. Suddenly, though, you see my Aigoo Pandya guys doing Q and good ish.
PRASHAD Y'all got a mouthful. Haroon Ahmad as nearby optician ish MATHEWS Like in that scene is done Dada What happens is I'm Cajun jammy as Hampshire cast juice bar head off the guy and Mahmood in the spot So take warning He's addressing his Muslim audience Take warning from the Israeli to case consider well there are variable fate now what now called regard the obduracy, the hardness of their spare and tenuous soul sluggishly flows the blood within their veins,
their furrowed brow so smitten on the stones of porticos 100 though heaven's grip hath Preston squeezed their grape the memory of Moses and Aron liberty. Yet, and though their ardent song had lost its flame still palpitating the breath within their breast for when the fabric of their nationhood was rent asunder, they still they laboured on to keep the high road of their forefathers. Right. So this is this it's a warning. It's a gesture of admiration.
Right. And there's another I'll skip the Persian on this. Take heed once again, enlightened Muslim by the tragic fate of Moses, people who, when they gave up their focus from their grasp, the thread was snapped that bound their congregation each to each. That nation nurtured up upon the breast of God's apostles, and aware of the part, was privy to the secrets of the whole. Suddenly smitten by the hand of time, poured out its lifeblood in slow agony.
The tendrils of its vine are withered now, nor even any willow weeping grows more from its soil. Exile has robbed its tongue of common speech, dead the lamenting moth. My poor dust trembles at its history. There's more of the thing.
So you know, what's interesting, of course, is on the one hand, this idea of the tenacity, you know, the unity of a dispersed group, on the other hand, the fear that actually that the the the ties that make for that unity internationally outside the nation state will have snapped, you know, and that there's nothing left, there's no common language, you know, the muck circles around the flame, which is a stereotypical kind of poetic trope in Persian, in Urdu, etc.
Now, it's nothing less than extraordinary that a writer in Persian and Urdu, you know, penned such fairly lengthy descriptions of the fate of the European Jews. And he can only do so because as an Indian Muslim who identifies with it and offers this example to his readers. Right. And this, of course, is not at all in contradiction with the fact that such people would have been anti-Zionist. All right. They can take example.
They can model themselves on Zionism and they can take an example, an admiring example, make an example of Jews, and they can still be anti-Zionist. And so one has to rethink one's idea of intimacy and enmity. Yeah. So let me come to the end here just to suggest, to ask what happens then when these two nation states, in this case, Pakistan and Israel, come into being one immediately after the other and one with a precedent of the other? Because, as you know, Pakistan is created in 1947.
And when Israel comes into existence at the United Nations in 1948, the creation of Pakistan is taken as a as a legal precedent for that of Israel. Because of Pakistan. You also have the creation of a nation state on the basis of a religious slash ethnic identity. It was therefore ironic, but not surprising that the anti-Israel charge of the United Nations was led by the Pakistani ambassador there, Chaudhry.
Also Muhammad Zafar Larsen, who himself was from a much smaller minority called Ahmadis, who were eventually ostracised by the Pakistani state that he himself represented. So you can get minorities all the way down. In other words, you know, there's no none that is actually given as a singularity. The problem, in a way, one of the problems is whether and this you can see in the early work.
Leo Strauss, for instance, where he asks, you know, is Judaism to lose its character as a philosophy, as a theology, as a religion, if you will, and simply become the dark matter of nationhood? Is it simply to be what is given to the nation state? It could be anything. It could be language, it could be race, it could be. But it just happens to be Judaism, which is reduced to those things. Or will Judaism actually take over the nation state? The same question is asked of Pakistan.
And there have been similar ways of dealing with that question or that problem. So the those two old terms. But should the problem come back to these postcolonial states and in the new fashion, will Islam simply be what is given the dark matter that makes Pakistani nationalism or a majority form of nationalism, which can also include Hindus, Zoroastrians, Christians, Jews, others? Or will it actually end up being ideologies?
Can a theological or let's say, a religious identity survive unscathed within the nation state of which it is meant to form a constituent part? Or will it be willy nilly pressed into the service of the state and defined only by the state? And Iqbal had that worry. Even in that latter quotation I read from him. Right. So without a nation state, the Jews are dispersed.
But with it, what's going to happen? All right. The same question he has about Muslim nationalism, because Iqbal is also a critic of the nation state. He doesn't like nation states, but you opt for one as well. Nevertheless, right in this negative way.
So, you know, in both countries, then the religious element, if you will, comes to dominate the nation state, though perhaps in a perverse way, because it's difficult to identify it either purely theologically or religiously, if you want to use that term or philosophically, you know, and it dominated in a simultaneously national way, but also still internationally, that continues to be there.
In a way. It's the tail end of that international or an imperial way of conceiving, of belonging, of political belonging that had been fashionable in the period before the First World War, and to some degree even in the period between the wars with Pakistan. Of course, this idea of innocence, of pain, Islamism or the Muslim world with Zionism, it is the idea of, if you will, a Jewish world, though that's not a common term, but certainly of the diaspora, the Jewish diaspora.
Right. And in both cases, of course, the the notional boundaries of the nation state, the belonging, the geographical belonging of that is supposed to characterise nation states is detracted from by the fact that Jews anywhere can come and become Israeli citizens. They don't have to passport, they can belong to any language group, etc., and come and be citizens from somewhere else.
Similarly, at least notionally, Muslims from all over the subcontinent can come and become Pakistani citizens, even if they're not from the area that constitutes a Pakistan. So even when they are made into nation states, that old world of the international and the imperial survives in some attenuated fashion to disrupt, even in their modern, even in their most nationalistic forms, the very idea and structure of the nation state by which.
We open for question comments. As Professor Schneider and I begin by asking you a question from the last point you made about the similarity between the creation of Pakistan in 1947. You've been some articles written comparing the partition of India to the partition of Palestine, which happened in the same year when the U.N. passed the partition resolution in 1947. But the comparisons that I've come across were from the perspective of the British Empire.
Mm hmm. Well, the most obvious parallel is that when British imperialism came to a dead end in a country. The game wasn't worth the candle. The solution was to cut and run and partition the country. This is what they did in India. This is what they did in Palestine. And Palestine was unique in the history of the British Empire in that there was no orderly transfer of power to a new authority.
The British just cut and run. But this is irrelevant to you because you're interested in the notion of nationalism. And can you elaborate on that? On the similarity between the creation of Pakistan and the creation of of Israel, from your perspective? Yeah, I mean, I think you're right, of course. And Ireland is the answer to the original sin of partition. But that became the legal model for both Palestine and Pakistan.
And, of course, partitions have occurred since then. You know, in the Balkans and, you know, after the Bosnian war in Sudan and, you know, you know, in a way, they are in their modern way, in in their modern form. They are a result of British imperial policy.
And so they are many more places than we normally take into account, including very recent cases that I think should be brought into that history, even if it's not only the British were doing it this time, it's been made into a kind of part of international law like blockades, which are also a very nice British naval invention. You know, sanctions and blockades. And these come out of British imperial history and have not become part of international law.
Right. So the the British element of those things needs to be stated. And partitions, of course, are one of these elements. I mean, you're right, of course, that there is no transition of transfer of power, as it was known, and there was cut and run, it seems. It seems there was an India to some degree as well, because even though there was a formal transfer of power, British troops were withdrawn or disbanded.
Very few plans were made to actually deal with what ended up being a kind of overwhelming mass of refugees and very brutal violence. So say about ten or 12 million people moved in the partition of India and, you know, probably about 3 million killed. So these are sizeable numbers, you know, and you can count them as being as a part of the Second World War itself.
This happened in 1947. Right. So it's if we extend the dating of the war, you can bring those people in there as well, because it's also part of the history of the war and the new role Britain was meant to play in the post-war, in the post-war world. But what might be interesting is to note how the Indian Muslim nationalists actually dealt with the partition of Palestine.
It's fascinating. They had been involved from quite early days with it, you know, in a kind of pro-Palestinian sense, obviously pro-Arab way, but in a fashion that displays what I was describing a that, if you will, the inert ambiguity of the of Muslim nationalism itself.
So even during the Palestine conflict in the 1935 or you know, you have a strong presence of and you will know more about this than I do clearly of Indians there as long as the British Empire, as long as the British continue to hold India, Indian Muslims and Indians generally have a disproportionate voice in Middle Eastern politics, because, of course, the Indian army was used in the Middle East and Africa.
The British were worried about uprisings in India and the moment as if Pakistan became independent. India. Pakistan became independent. The the power of India and of Indian Muslims in particular was smashed in international can.
The international order, which is an extraordinary thing where independence results in weakness rather than strength in this country, not at least, but the the Indian Muslims who were who partook and they partook of the Palestinian of the Palestine Conference and in the supposed negotiations over the future of Palestine, in many different capacities, on the one hand, working with the British very closely in a point at the Afghan itself was sort of,
you know, by the Viceroy or the, you know, and on the other hand, you know, emerging out of mass movements in India. But when they are speaking to the Arabs, it's a fascinating story they tell. So if you read someone like Chopra Chronicles a man who was an important member of the Muslim League who has actually written his account of the Indian negotiators, they tell the Palestinians to accept a single state in Palestine.
And the Palestinians say to them, But you want partition, you want the partition of India. Why are you asking us to have a single state with Jews and Arabs? And they say to him, they say the Indian Muslims say to their Palestinian interlocutors, but you don't understand. We in India in the position of the Jews, you in Palestine and the position of the Hindus, you know, you will be a majority.
And once you get to a nation state, you can in a purely democratic way, stop Jewish migration or, you know, form formulate the citizenship laws of Israel or whatever Palestine, whatever the countries to be called in such a way as to maintain your majority.
As long as you have a majority, you are fine. And indeed to have a Jewish population in Palestine is a good thing for Palestine and a good thing for, you know, to figure out so that capable of actually moving beyond themselves, rising outside their own identities, to actually take the position as they explicitly was like the Jews of India. We understand exactly what that means. And, you know, you are the Hindus, you the Muslims, the Christians are the Hindus.
So they're using Indian categories to actually think about Palestine, you know, Middle Eastern realities in a way that you can just switch. It's like a game of musical chairs. You can literally put yourself in the identity of someone else.
So there is a deliberate way in which they are comparing the partitions, but not in the fashion that you would imagine that even at that moment when they are strongly anti-Zionist, they actually are capable of of thinking intimately with Zionism because they know exactly what it is since they are model themselves on it for many years. This is really interesting. Can you can you say something more specific about in what sense was the creation of Pakistan precedent for the creation of Israel?
I think it was it was it was mentioned that you it was brought up at the U.N. as a kind of because it had only it had only been created not so long ago out of a partition, after all. So both the partition is of Palestine is justified because of that of India. That has happened and also because it was the making of a religio national state for a minority. Is justified in Palestine is justified because of what happened in India.
I don't think it's it's you know, it's part of the debate and the discussion and it's basically torn in the face of the Pakistani ambassador. So it's overtaken, as you know, basically, again, it's another example of the strange intimacy and of enmity. You know, it's like, okay, you don't want to you don't want Israel, but you have Pakistan on the same principle.
How can you possibly deny Israel? Right. So both the Pakistanis or the Muslim nationalists and the international community fully seems to realise. The intimacies that exist between Zionism and Muslim nationalism. The Arab representatives don't, and they are not so keen on Pakistan. They're actually more keen on India, you know, which they see as the true model of the offer of a nation, of a post-colonial nation state.
So in that way and in others, Pakistan, it gets to be really a you know, it stands, as it were, in a tangential relationship with the Arab world and the world of Islam, even though it is at this point the biggest Muslim country in the world, the most populous Muslim country in the world, and militarily, one of the more powerful ones and the one championing Palestinian rights. And yet it can only do so from a position that is, if you will, Zionist was the question.
Well, thank you very much, both of you personally. And when you mentioned the religious appeal, the trans Islamic or trans Muslim religious appeal, do you understand from the ideologues point of view is is this primarily a religious or is it cultural in some sense, or is it a combination of both?
And the reason I ask, because although Zionism as a putative basis in the Bible and religion or Judaism in early Zionism, certainly that that's a minority faction of a struggle to start, but it quickly becomes a minority. And what really becomes strong is, is the cultural, the kind of secular cultural faction, because most Jews, certainly in Europe, are secular Jews. And the religious appeal really wouldn't ring strong on their ears.
So we've got to hand it to other people who for the big cultural Zionist and then of course, political Zionism. So even even though it's in the picture and the thing is and it actually practically speaking, it's not is as big as it seem. I'm wondering if there's a parallel or a big difference in your case?
No, there's a striking parallel because in a way, Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan, he's the kind of archetypical secular figure, not religious, not practising, in any case, from a heretical Shia, heretical by majority-Muslim standards, heretical Shiite sect. You know, he's not even a majority in terms of this is another example of a minority school.
You can split any minority into more minorities, any majority to minorities, never known to practice religion, you know, publicly drinking alcohol, you know, eating ham sandwiches and sausages.
But this is not a there's no element of practice almost at all, even though retrospectively now, of course, in Pakistan, you have to say that Jinnah was, in fact a practising Muslim and his official portraits are all in, you know, as it were, Eastern, if you will, because it's not Muslim, but Indian dress is. In fact, he wore Savile Row suits most of his life. And for him, just like with Ben-Gurion and others, the problem is precisely this What do you do with religion?
He might himself be perfectly secular. So what you make of this thing, this Islam, that gives these people a national identity. And what he tries to do is, as it was spiritualised it completely so that it becomes nothing more than a set of inspirations or ideals. It can be reduced simply to that. So reduce to. But when you reduce things to that level, they become entirely generic. There's no specificity left in them.
So, for instance, to say, oh, you know, Brotherhood, Muslim Brotherhood, that's well, you know, other people have brotherhood as well. Right? Equal egalitarianism. But that's not unique to Muslims if indeed it is even specific, even if it didn't need even characterises them, you know, all of these kinds of entirely anodyne and generic things. So he's unable to really do you can only sacrifice the specificity of both Judaism or Islam by reducing them to these sorts of things.
So in the end, you have to bring back, even if in a purely symbolic way, you know, whether it is elements of architecture or are a menorah or whatever, you know, things that become national symbols, right? A star or in this case, a crescent in a star, you know, apparently deprived of any serious religious significance, but always there, you know, always available for appropriation by others who might be more religious, as is true now both in Israel and Pakistan.
So I think that's, you know, it's a problem that vexes them, as I said, both someone like Ben-Gurion and Jinnah from very early days. And they are afraid. That you will have a kind of more intensely religious development occurring. And this is something Leo Strauss had actually mentioned in his early works. You know, it was it continued to be a problem, a new kind of problem in a way that it wasn't for other kinds of nation states.
But what China does is even more curious, because he for him, there's he's so worried about this in a way, and he's so critical of the idea of the nation state that the Pakistani nation state has no quandt almost no contact at all. You know, as I said, they have to reject the language of history. He doesn't like history at all.
He just condemns, you know, even the Mughal Empire and all the great Muslim empires of the past and India as a threat, you would have thought that he'd gesture towards this great, great and glorious past. He doesn't. He compared the Mughal Empire to the British Empire with it. You know, when empires is not the same as another, he's not interested in the great and glorious history of Islam. He for him, Muslim nationalism is a completely negative thing, you know, in a way.
So it's there. And I wonder if you can also say this in some sense of a figure like Ben-Gurion. Right? So what Jinnah is interested in is, is this problem India by the 1940s is now this is now exists in such a way that its political language is determined by terms like minority and majority. But once you are a minority in majority, the minority is naturally it might ask for protection. And in the days of the League of Nations, people were satisfied with protections.
Once the Second World War breaks out, they all realise, like the European Jews did, that there was nothing to protect them. You know, that the League of Nations protections didn't work and so they give up their faith bitterly, very bitterly in this international order, this idea of them.
This is when the goal for the nation state, but in a completely negative fashion, in fear and trembling, not because of this great delight in in acquiring such a property which they had been criticising for decades in the form of India or in the form of European nation states. Because remember, for India, the nation state was also problematic in general, because they understood the colonial state as being in excretions of the European nation state.
They thought that European liberalism and European nationalism were fundamentally complicit in it, implicated in imperialism that you couldn't separate. Nehru tried to separate the two England's. He called them the liberal England of Democracy and Parliament. And then there is the evil England of colonialism. And Gandhi said, No, no, it's one and the same England one depends on the other.
And so there's a general colonial distaste with European nation states and with the idea of the nation state to begin with, quite apart from Muslim or Hindu. Then with the Muslims, there's even more of a criticism because of their minority character. All right. And that also their fear, if they actually were to achieve a nation state of losing the connection that bound them to other Muslims in a kind of non statist community,
again, the Jewish example becomes crucial, right? The loss of language and all of these things that Iqbal describes. So for Jinnah, what he does is to say, okay, there are no majority of the minorities. Muslims are not a minority because they are so large. There were about 70 million at that time, larger, as he puts it, than any European population outside Russia. You know, how can you call a population of that size a minority plus to have regional majorities?
Hindus are not a majority because they're divided by caste and language and region, just like Muslims are. So what do you do? You have to fight to get rid of these languages altogether.
So he's tried to get rid of the language initially by thinking of an internationalist or an imperial political form, and then eventually by the late thirties into the early forties by saying, okay, we'll go for the nation state, even though we hold our noses when we go for it and will do it in the following manner. There is no majority. There's no majority or minority. There's only one two nations, the so-called two nation theory, Hindus and Muslims.
But for him, these are entirely negative forms. He doesn't actually believe that there is a Hindu nature or a muslim nation. He simply wants to replace the categories of majority and minority as legal terms by two nations, to create equality, to create parity so that there's parity in negotiation, so that despite the difference in numbers, Muslims and Hindus have to speak as equals because they are not part of a single nation.
And by the time he gets Pakistan, there is no content to this Muslim nationalism. So it's become a it's a huge problem and it's an that, if you will, a vacuum that Islam gets remade, you know, is what is it to be a Pakistani? Because they are meant to be Hindu Pakistanis and Muslim Pakistanis. Right. And Sikh Pakistan. And all Muslims. Should it be an Islamic state? It wasn't initially. It becomes an Islamic republic compared with the first Islamic republic later on in 50 years or so.
I think the second is Iran. So there's a you know, the question, it starts off with the question of what is the nation? And even by the time Pakistan is achieved, the question is simply a more intense, both in a more intense way. And it's to, as it were, break this or answer this question that religion becomes crucial.
Yes. And do you think when everybody's writing about Zionism, a lot of these things, you know, in terms of contemporary history, condition of European Jewry, etc., but also about sacred history and. So it's a great if you choose this idea of, yes, if something had gone wrong and most this was a lot of it. And in that state, if that's true, then that says scientists and this kind of stuff. In end, it's an accidental loss of the ideal model.
That's interesting. Yes, of course. I mean, already in that first poem I read out, Moses and Aron are mentioned. Right. And Moses is crucial. You know, it's interesting. He says crucial for for very obvious reasons, because of the, you know, the promised land, the leading of God's people into the promised land and the making of the law. All right. So he's crucial to any thinking about the nation state for it, but also Khamenei in different ways.
Moses is hugely important for Khomeini in the Iranian revolution, whether it's the pharaoh, the shy pharaoh. Right. And and community, of course, is Moses. And then there's the Red Sea moment. And all of these things are they're edible as well. Right. So certainly Moses and Arendt to some degree, but not interestingly, Jesus, which is really fascinating here. I'm trying to think whether he obviously does have a kind of grasp of the history of monotheism and therefore, you know, ancient Judaism.
He doesn't write that much about it. He's more interested in Zoroastrianism because of the Persian interests and all the rest. And he's trying to argue that Persia, in fact, his his first his doctoral thesis called the Development of Metaphysics in Persia, which is in Munich, is fascinating because what he does there is he basically inserts Islam into a narrative that begins with Zoroastrianism, that begins in Zoroaster and ends up borne out by them. Right.
And it's made part of a single genealogy. And one reason why he's doing that is because he wants to remove Islam from a kind of Greek centred historical narrative where Islam only takes its meaning because it somehow transmits Greek philosophy to the West, or somehow therefore is derivative in the sense he thinks that Persia is much more important.
And so he's willing to, as it will make Islam into clearly the, the, the main element, but still neither the beginning nor the end of Persian metaphysics. The end is behind them. But he loves by them, strangely, you might think. So the hesitant monotheistic elements get set aside there, and they are put aside along with, you know, Christianity and Judaism. But I've set aside along with Greece because they've been too influenced by it.
I mean, it's in a way, it's a kind of a reverse version of what Strauss does by bringing in my model is al-farabi to break the completely Greco centric cloister of European political thought. Right. He breaks it by introducing these to my more specifically, but also far behind introduces them into European political thought. And Iqbal, you know, deals with the Greek in this manner by because of where he is and who is in India, by bringing in Zorra, Iran, Zoroaster and all that.
But where he really thinks about Judaism and in comparison with Islam is in the early modern period. So he's fascinated by Spinoza and he supports the Jews of Amsterdam against Spinoza. He thinks Spinoza is of course of is a great philosopher. But he argues that the Jews of Amsterdam, which he follows, you know, will and will do to, you know, that story of philosophy, a situated that there were as a kind of vulnerable minority in Amsterdam.
They had no choice. They could not tolerate to Spinoza that despite him being a great philosopher, they had to close ranks against Spinoza because Spinoza would destroy the Jewish community. And he recommends that as a model for, if you will, Muslim conservatism in India, that though he might not agree with that conservatism. What is true of the Jews and Spinoza is also true of Muslims.
I think he's interesting because he takes not ancient Judaism, but if you will, diasporic Judaism as his model. But that is also makes perfect sense given who he is and given Muslims in India. So you don't have that apart from prophets like Abraham and Moses and what, you know, seem. Muslim prophets. It doesn't really deal with monotheism.
And it's ancient history. So. I want to ask you, I guess moving to the contemporary period thought about the afterlife, because I think what you've presented today very clearly could upset a lot of contemporary debates or disrupt a lot of contemporary debates. And I'm just wondering how you've negotiated that as a scholar, how your work maybe has been instrumentalized by a variety of forces, how you kind of contend with that?
Well, it's not it's somewhat surprisingly, it's not resulted in much anguish for me. I mean, yes, in Pakistan, there has been some upset. You know, and I'm occasionally called anti Pakistani, but I'm not a Pakistani anyway. So and never have been so. So then I might be described as an Indian nationalist because I am of Indian origin and all the rest. But what's interesting is that there it plays out as an Indo-Pakistani fight.
It's not about anything else. The comparison with Israel, of course it's not. How should I put it? It's it's not one that runs throughout the book.
It's there, obviously. But because there are others also and I describe some of them, you know, Ireland, etc., I found the term Zion interesting, not simply for political reasons, but because it has meaning beyond Zionism, which is why earlier in the book I brought in Liberia, you know, and the making of a new, you know, a state for a poor of a minority, displaced people, population returning, etc., 100 years before Pakistan in this world.
Right. And you don't normally get discussions of Liberia in the history of Zionism, but I think you might do it. And also there are ways in which because with Liberia and with movements in South Africa and elsewhere, you have explicit invocations of the children of Israel and the wanderings and the promised land and all of this kind of stuff. So they are part of the history of Zion, if not Zionism anyway, and that there's a prior Christian history of Zion before Zionism begins.
Right, obviously. But so apart from that, it's very difficult to deny, you know, the comparison even in Pakistani textbooks to this day in school, you will have sentences like, you know, in the middle of the 20th century to ideological notoriety. Those ideological states were created. Israel and Pakistan, they state clearly.
Right. I quote here in the preface. Zia ul Haq, the military dictator who was president of Pakistan, saying, you know, Pakistan and Israel are two states, the only two states in the world that are much more like each other. And if you get rid of Judaism from Israel, it'll collapse. If you get rid of Islam from Pakistan, if you collapse whatever is meant by those terms. So this is a popular culture. Everyone knows it in Pakistan.
It cannot really be denied. I've just worked it out in terms of political thought, so people might be queasy with that in Israel. I mean, I gave a paper based on this book at Hebrew University a couple of years ago, which when it was five, you know, so it was very interesting for me. And, you know, it makes me think that I'd like to know more about, you know, obviously I read a lot of secondary work on Zionism when I was writing this book.
But, you know, I'm certainly not expert enough to be able to pronounce on it myself, but I find the of fascinating. Now I take the prerogative and, uh, take the question. Um, you mentioned that both national movements arise from, uh, a critique of the European nation state mindset of minorities and minorities. And I guess they both arise from the Jewish problem and different variations of it in a sense.
Um, but if you fast forward, especially the Israeli case, it's clear that the nationalist statist mindset has taken over so much so that the Judaism itself is redefined along these lines to the degree to which is where it is uh, obsessively busy with the arithmetic of yeah, call it ethnics race, whatever, uh, viewing each on Jewish that is dependent upon preserving the Jewish majority. I think it goes back to what you referred to in Leo Strauss's work at the point we are now.
It seems that the relationship he was hoping for that the idea is overcome, the politics is reversed, the politics overcome, the ideas to the degree to which the Judaism is really is redefined in a sense in Israel it has been nationalised in the sense that it is read through this line.
Has the same happened in Pakistan to some degree because especially after the Pakistani civil war in 1991 that resulted in the creation of Bangladesh, you know, it became clear that Islam was not something that kept these two things together, both Muslim populations, but they could not survive in a single political unit. So and in a way that made Islam much more italicised and located in Pakistan, of course, that doesn't mean that they are not pan-Islamic.
There's a huge debate on whether it's militant or not movements that are. But those movements, what I find fascinating is that it's the people who are defined as religious, who have taken on the most crucial categories of the early secular nationalists. You know, so for instance, this the the anti nationalism itself, which is not, you know, it's not it's it's not the olamide was not the clerics who were propounding theories that were against nationalism.
They didn't have that much problem with it. It was, you know, people like Iqbal and, you know, people like Jinnah and others who were Iqbal was arguably a vision, at least gave the impression of being a practising Muslim, though he had running fights with religious leaders and authorities. So neither of these people nor anyone else in the Muslim League really was an acceptable figure for the deeply devout and the religious establishment.
Much of the religious establishment sided with the Indian National Congress and went with India, not with Pakistan, because precisely because the leader of the Muslim League was seen as being too secular and, you know, likely to betray Islam. And they were used to Islam as being a part of a state of some sort, whether dynastic or colonial. And why not national? You know, there was not a huge problem because India Nationals was not about eliminating religion from public life.
But now in Pakistan, in what you would call the religious right, what in Israel is what you would call the religious right has taken on these very anti nationalist teams from various secular, if you will, rivals among the early Muslim nationalists and are also interested in propagating a religion or Islam as national culture, you know, so that the very arena which Jinnah had, for instance, had left vacant.
He didn't give a definition of what it meant to be Pakistani. What was the national culture of this? It had to be made post facto. These guys think they know it, and precisely because it doesn't exist, it must be Islam that becomes not so. There is an identification of both national culture and Islam, but also Islam as a form of as a critique of nationalism, of a European kind.
So both of them coexist uneasily. So they are very pro Pakistan, but at the same time, they don't want to sacrifice the kind of larger Muslim world, which is not the same thing as the international order, obviously. And you find this in particular with Islamism. Indeed, with Islamism, you have this very curious situation in which Abul al-Mahdi, the most important of them, the founder of the Jamaat e Islami Party, you know, is interested in or was long dead and died in Buffalo.
Believe it or not, but they had gone for medical treatment after inveighing against America for decades. But he he was deeply suspicious, not only of the form of the nation state. He was deeply suspicious of sovereignty of Britain about this, because he thought that that was a form of tyranny and was a full fledged military.
The European idea of sovereignty as propounded by thinkers, as diverse as Schauble, than Thomas Hobbes, whom he cites, by the way, is so absolute and so laden with power as to be impossible for a human being to wield. It is impossible, as we know. So in his view, sovereignty, whether belonging to a dictatorship or a monarchy or a nation separate, particularly a nation state, is a theological category.
But in earlier days, he thought there was because sovereignty could only belong to God, ordinary rulers could never be sovereign. It's only with the secular nation state that sovereignty becomes possible. And therefore the secularists are in fact the ones who are most truly theological, because they try to they take God's place. And of course, you have this critique in Israel as well. Right. And so what do you do?
You need to somehow by saying that sovereignty only belongs to God, which is a kind of Islamist mantra, shibboleth and a cliche in a way. You try to you expel it altogether, and you have to conceive of society and society running itself, managing itself. This is not accidental. You know, modesty comes out of a situation in which he had been in his early days, a great fan and biographer of Gandhi's, for instance.
So this is a situation which, like Gandhi, was also deeply suspicious of sovereignty. And Gandhi, too, drawing upon both anarchist and Bolshevist narratives. By Bolshevist, I mean the very end of Lenin's theory. The buitrago of the state. Right. How can you conceive of a society that manages itself without sovereignty that in Gandhi in terms of would be self running villages and all the rest are known by the right?
In Modi's terms, you would have the mechanism of a state in a way, but its authorities would be religious authorities outside the state who would basically control not the levers of power, but because they were outside it, but prevent the state from assuming the sovereign absolutist form. In both cases you have it's an anti political vision in so many ways, you know.
So that's what he does is he takes the deep suspicion of nationalism and he turns it in this direction precisely by doing what the secularists never did. They all wanted sovereignty. He wanted to get rid of sovereignty. And so the Pakistani constitution reserved sovereignty for God. You know, and of course, it's very difficult to imagine to actually have that in practice. And what happens in practice is precisely because it's not vested institutionally.
It comes back to haunt the state from many different directions. You know, so I often tend to think of the military coup as being in a way it's a classic Schmitt Ian version of sovereignty because it's a temporary, supposedly temporary suspension of the law. And the military coup gets to be it. It works like a miracle in a way. You know, it suspends natural law. And and that's the way in which sovereignty manifests itself in in Pakistan, precisely because it's not situated anywhere.
The president has doesn't have it. The prime minister doesn't have it and parliament doesn't have it. So it's difficult to keep it away. But the ideal was a social of what? Social self-management, the sovereignty to God and bound to. Yes, yeah. Yes. Last question, maybe. And I was also thinking about what actually quite. Talk about the issue of Muslim nationalism built on a fundamental critique of the European team.
And you also mentioned about the Zionism being that when everyone was kind of nodding and I was thinking maybe perhaps I'm thinking about this. Or maybe it's your skin colour. The biggest critic I could see Zionists having against the European nation state is that they were rejected by it. Hmm. Not that it. Not with the actual concept of it. And so even if we think about how Zionism does it, really.
anti-Semitism. It just kind of internalises it and then tries to fit the image of its own creation of self fiction. Then it doesn't seem to me as that same critique perhaps, or maybe on that of that kind of, you know, kind of really getting down to the side of championship. How do you see that Zionism as kind of this fundamental critique similar to Muslims? Yeah, you know, as I said, it's not something I'm particularly expert in, but 2 to 2 things.
One is that almost as it would by default or maybe speaking in a structural manner, if there is already a critique, as there was of nationalism, as the problem which makes which makes the minority question, then there's already a realisation that, you know, not all is about me and one might want to be part of the nation while at the same time realising that it, it, it has reinvented and made a new kind of made a group that might have been once
considered purely theologically or religiously into a new kind of problem, minority problem, in which numbers are crucial. What you were mentioning and that this there seems to be full realisation of from Herzl onwards the fact that you might also then want a nation state of your own if you want it to be integrated into the old one in a way, is neither here nor there. I mean, I find fascinating Herzl's novel.
What's it called? Yes. You know, where you actually have these two, you know, you have a new world, as it were, version, and you have an old world and, you know, you move from one to end. He seems to be rehearsing that problem. You know, can you belong? Is it possible to have a nation state or do you, Robinson Crusoe, like start to gain in some different fashion?
Similarly, the way in which he tries to insert a Jewish homeland into the Ottoman Empire, eventually that moves to think about the Jewish homeland within a British with an Arab does with a British empire or commonwealth. These are all ways of which of thinking that recognise the problem that the nation state poses for minorities, what they've been defined as minorities. So I think there is a critique. It may not be expressed in the same way or as fulsomely.
Now what I'm mufti does is that I think he he I don't think he I don't think it's a very productive way of doing it. He then talks about various Jewish and indeed Muslim intellectuals who abandoned this abandoned idea, Zionism on the one hand, or Jewish or Muslim nationalism on the other, and become these pariah figures. And he's relied on Arabs. The word pariah, of course, is interesting as it comes from India, right?
So pariah goes from India to Europe to describe Jews and ghetto goes from Europe to India to to describe both castes, generally low caste groups. So there's a nice or not so nice exchange of derogatory terms here. So I'm a move to basically says these are the great heroic figures, the pariah figures. Right. Who have removed themselves. I don't think it's who wants to be a self-conscious pariah, you know.
And how is that a political possibility worth anything, instead of which you can understand why people, for whatever reasons, go for either Muslim nationalism or Zionism, because it's a real political project of which something can be made. You can't really make very much of the pride of purely individual status. So I think the you know, there is by default or structurally the critique is there, though it might be voiced quite differently.
So for instance, with the Muslim nationalist, there is an explicit disavowal of nationalism. We take model for instance, links to, you know, I didn't do it at the time, but, you know, he he links to capitalism in the form of private property that the nation state is simply private property writ large and guarantees private property. And it makes all going back to ideals, you know. Strauss It really turns all ideals into interests, interest being defined by property of certain kinds.
So your or your religious identity can also be an interest. You're conceived of it as you conceive of your body as your property, which is what gets rights. Rights attributed to you. Right. And this, he thinks is a is is a hideous defamation of religion. Right. But when it becomes property and rights and interests and all the standard language politics, then all ideas disappear and all of.
Of his leftist instrumentality, which is violent by definition. So the preservation of religious ideals is not there because, you know, simply because they exist, but because he thinks that it's not a historical thing, that we must protect what has existed before, but it's a future orientation because he's interested in, as we saw, both of Judaism, but also with Islam in how religion conceived of in a non instrumental non interested way as a let's say an ideal
or principle with specificity can actually stand as a bulwark against purely instrumentalized form of politics, which is violent out of necessity, a right in which anything can be remade into something else. And that is what he doesn't want. That's what he thinks nationalism brings in. So it's a philosophical critique of nationalism. It's not simply, Oh, we are a minority, so it won't do us any good.
And, you know, people like Strauss, arguably, if you will, on the right has it and I read it also in our own way, has it on the as it were left. So it's it's there. You might not say it's part of mainstream Zionism, but then neither is that part of mainstream Muslim nationalism, though many of the key figures of it are very conscious of it.
If I may just make a short commentary, I think one of the ways to understand this is to to the rhetorical, dangerous move of separating the Zionist Europe from the Jewish Europeans. The European Jew, I think by definition does challenge European nationalism, political Zionism, specifically inside the way that it does. Yeah, it does only complain about not being included and then wanting to do it.
I think this reason this has been a great lesson in the in the problematics, to say the least, of adopting a European discourse and conceptualisations to speak of non-European cases and then the realities that grew out of them, which are much stronger than any idea in any, you know, any matter of linguistic linguists. I have to thank the the speaker. Thank you all. I think, Professor, for this lovely discussion.