Good afternoon and welcome. I'm honoured and extremely pleased to present to you our speaker today, Dr. Khalid Fulani, Dr. Ferrante's associate professor of anthropology at Tel Aviv University. His research interests include, among many others, social theory, modernity, language and literature, secularism, Palestine and the history of anthropology.
In addition to many articles in top most journals before, Professor Ferrante has also published a book, a book long ethnography titled Silencing the Sea Secular Rhythms in Palestinian Poetry 2012, in which Stanford University Press and his next book, Inshallah Redeeming Anthropology, A Theological Critique of Modern Science, is forthcoming this year with Oxford University Press.
Yes. And the title of his talk today is Putting Israel on the Couch, A Palestinian challenged from within the Leviathan. Thank you. Thank you. I appreciate your invitation to come. It's a privilege and it's an honour. And thank you all for coming today, this afternoon. I'm very pleased to be here with you. Do you hear me? Okay? Can you hear me? Okay, good. May I ask just the door to be closed? It helps me with that. Maybe. Okay. I think there are a few disclaimers.
We have 40 minutes. Okay. A few disclaimers that I feel I owe you my audience for you to better understand where I'm coming from. I think I have seven of them. So I feel first I hope to explicate to you the terms of the title, the title of my talk and putting Israel on the couch. A Palestinian challenge from within the Leviathan. A In some sense, I feel my my task today and in this inquiry generally is to take you with me to the basement.
Under the basement, as it were, to the basement concealed under the basement. I'm trying to go to put it differently. I'm trying to go two flights down into the unconscious of our modern political imagination. And that might make a the ways I you I use certain terms a bit tricky. So you may write to ask why Israel, why couch, why Leviathan and in what sense Palestinian. So let me just spend a few minutes to explain to you something about that.
Why Israel? So I should make that clear from the outset. I happen to be a Palestinian citizen of Israel. I'm born and raised in Haifa. I teach at Tel Aviv University. I was the accused. But Israel, let me make that clear, is doesn't in itself, per se, interest me in this inquiry, because it it in this paper, it's in a vehicle, not the terminus of my writing. It's not the final destination of my writing. I go through it.
Israel That is to arrive at my explicit and primary object of thinking here, which is sovereignty. But why the couch? The couch on the assumption, clearly this is a play on the psychoanalytic term that that indeed sovereignty. My my primary concept for today is the enforcement of political imagination. Hence the couch. It's the unconscious, as political theology tells us these days of political thinking.
So be curious to visit at a what happens when we go down to the grammar of our modern political imagination? It's the soul. In other words, a sovereignty, I take it, to be not alone, to be the soul of our politics. Hence the catch Leviathan. Simply, if we're going to talk about sovereignty, how could we not revisit such a canonical, constitutive and founding text like Hobbes's Leviathan?
Okay. And in what sense? Palestinian simply in the sense of being a sovereign, sovereign, less a subject, especially after after the nationality law. If you know what I'm talking about, we're the only self recognised. Legitimate self-determination is the prerogative of a Jewish citizen of Israel. So what happens to us sovereign less Palestinians? And so it's an interesting exercise to think about sovereignty from the condition of being sovereign, less how to look at it from the outside in.
In broad terms, this is what I'm trying to do to think outside sovereignty about sovereignty. That's what's only one disclaimer. I'll go to the next. I'm also an anthropologist, so this is a new field for me, really. And I am very eager to hear your comments and critical comments, of course, and questions, especially as in some sense this is only preface to something that's going to engage me for the next few years. But I'm running as an anthropologist, however, not for anthropologists.
This is an intervention in political. This is a political essay. So it's a new terrain, new field for me. Although one could argue what I'm conducting eventually, or essentially I should say what I'm conducting is a quintessentially anthropological exercise. How so? In the sense that we anthropologists think of our discipline as one that is charged with familiarising the and sometimes, by the way, that's how people talk about philosophy. So I'm trying to familiarise the art.
And so you may ask, but what is the art here? And the art in my case would be the concept coming from the Muslim tradition. And that's the concept of Khalifah, that they're the bizarre, scary things that we don't want to touch. But in what sense do I come with a term Khalifa to this conversation today? Of course, I'm not thinking simply of the name of a political office in Muslim political history.
It's not what interests me, what instrument is in some sense how the Koran itself invokes this term a Khalifa as as in a transient. Transient, I'm sorry. Transient inheritor and builder of the earth, as entrusted by the divine. If you'd like, I can refer you back to the second chapter in the Koran. Chapter two, where God describes the Koran, describes God as anointing on Earth. Khalifa If and by the way, anecdotally and if not graphically.
KHALIFA In Palestinian society or Arab society in general could mean could that could be the last name of a Jewish family, of a Christian family or a muslim family. There's nothing essentially Islamic about this term. Each and every one of us could be relevant and explain that more later. I just need you to at the moment, remember, this is not the name of a political office. So rather than abandon this, I call it the Earth preserving concept to Earth corruptors.
Given the age of doubt and Islamophobia, I wish to recover an excess of chronic access to this term. Khalifa For the purpose of what? The purpose of interrogating the paradigm of modern sovereignty. So it's not that this is a paper about reinstituting the Khalifa as a political institution, but rather exploring the usefulness of this notion of Khalifa as an ethical political disposition for building and preserving the Earth.
I'm arguing in a century accessing the Koranic sense of the term before institutional sediments have accrued to this concept. And again, to reiterate, I'm doing this from a Palestinian standpoint.
And what this means, just to be clear, is a sovereign less subject of a nationalist Jewish sovereignty, meaning Israel, from within the belly of the of the Leviathan, and with the sense of there is in me at least a curiosity to interrogate the costs and specifically the ethical costs of the safety, the ethical costs of the safety once it's entrusted to the sea monster that we otherwise know since Hobbs as the Leviathan.
And in interrogating the costs, the ethical costs of delivering food and seeking cultural resources, as it were, outside the master's own house outside the Leviathan, whereby perhaps in my case, the Muslim tradition could offer perhaps some emancipatory resources for all inhabitants of Palestine. Israel would be they Jews, Muslims, Christians, or none of the above. And finally, this will be the end of my disclaimer today. When you hear me today, use the word sovereign.
Please keep in mind that I use it to mean both the individual, but also the collective, the collective sovereign, but also the individual itself. Okay, maybe I should tell you about a something that has inspired this talk and the paper on which it's based. And that's, as I said, that Koranic reference to human beings as such human qua, human as Khalifa. That each one of us is, in a sense, Khalifa, by mere being humans on this earth.
It's a timeless. To put it in a philosophical term, Hanifa is everyone's status here and this is a crucial point. This has been a crucial point for launching my my writing a because I'm trying to assist to measure to what extent the concept of Khalifa A partakes in an ethics participates articulates an ethics that is fundamentally at odds with our modern political imagination. Insofar that it's an imagination that is beholden to the paradigm of sovereignty.
The final objective, if you would like. The goal of this intervention is to explore directions for invigorating what I call a decolonised Palestinian political imagination. I'm trying to basically look at the malaise of Palestinian political imagination. Why? Why state? What kind of state? And maybe there's something better than a state for us to fight for as the Palestinian people. And should should sovereignty continue to be the regnant concept governing our political imagination?
The strategy for me to to to stir the water there with with our political imagination is to follow an immediate objective. So if let's say that the the first objective is to to question the limits of Palestinian imagination. My more immediate objective, my meaning, my strategy to get to that goal is to dethrone the concept of sovereignty.
And please put it into this word I'm saying the throne, not dismiss the throne, the concept of sovereignty, by which I mean, if you ask me, what does that mean to the throne? I mean contesting the sovereignty of sovereignty concept. Why should it have such a hold in our political imagination? Why should it be so constitute of our political grammar and perhaps allow for another concept to be in the table? So you see, I'm not saying let's ditch, let's throw away sovereignty.
Maybe there'll be good arguments at some point in the future wise we should keep thinking about sovereignty when we dig into our political, political imagination. But I'm saying it ought not to be the only concept or that the primal concept governing our political imagination, perhaps the telos that we otherwise not itself, could be such other rival concept. What is my tactic for reaching these goals?
My tactic, as you may have guessed already, is to return to Hobbes's Leviathan, what he called the soul of politics. Hence, again, the couch. We're going to the soul of politics, and specifically to use a reference from Walter Benjamin. Let us drill into the paradigm of sovereignty. Let's do some conceptual drilling here. And when I say drilling, I have in mind a principle within the paradigm.
So let's say the paradigm is this. Let's say, for example, just to illustrate visually, the paradigm is a square. That's the paradigm of sovereignty. Within that square, there is a circle. The circle is the principle of sovereignty. Excuse me? The authority, the principle of indivisibility within the paradigm. There is a principle and that principle is indivisibility. Actually, it's been called not just a principle within the paradigm.
It's the defining characteristic of sovereignty. It's the foundation of political thought. I say that by relying on genealogies of sovereignty. This is Bartlett Berthelsen. John Berthelsen. Let me give you then I owe you at this point with without any further delay, a schematic presentation of my overall argument. Okay. So far, this has been just paving the road to what the argument is in its current structure. And I think I've identified four components.
I'm allowing that constitutive to the principle of sovereignty is a categorical denial of the possibility of self oppression. In other words, this principle of indivisibility is constituted by denying that humans can bring themselves. Wronging oneself in Arabic is not as voluminous a reference that I'll talk about more later at this foundation of denial of wronging oneself as a possibility.
A binds the sovereignty paradigm to an impoverishment and more specifically, an ethical impoverishment, and more precisely, an impoverishment of our ethics or fragility. And therefore, I argue, it should not be alone on the table. It must contend with rival concepts, a concept like paradigm that does not recognise that we can wrong ourselves as humans should not be the only conference, the concept on the table.
This political imagination, therefore, ought to host rival conceptions of governance, the governance of oneself, but also of society, contending with the paradigm of sovereignty. But don't partake and don't participate in. In the danger to the ethics of fragility. And from within the Muslim tradition of formulating the human telos. I suggest the inheritor or the vice chairman or the successor. In one word, the Khalifa could offer such a rival contending concept.
With the help of such notion, it becomes possible to chart new questions for Palestinian political imagination or any political imagination. Does it have to be Palestinian at some point? You may argue with me and say there's nothing essentially Palestinian about your thing, and I'm happy to discuss that with you. But the point is to a forge, a political imagination that's not beholden to the logic of sovereignty and specifically ethical impoverishment.
And by keeping access how? By keeping access to an ethics of fragility, offering thus a rival aspirations for personal and collective flourishing. I've just finished describing to you schematically the four components of my argument. I'll get a chance to summarise it also at the end of this talk. But why sovereignty? Okay, let me elaborate if you want to.
In other words, I'm sharing with the question if you want to contest, if you want to explore new directions in political imagination, why go to sovereignty? Consider sovereignty as political theology teaches us, is the thought of liberalism. And it actually we find resources in political theology for putting the state as an instance of sovereignty on the couch. Let's remember, the state wasn't always hasn't always been the embodiment of sovereignty.
It may be a quintessential, historically quintessential embodiment of sovereignty, but this state remains an instance, sincere instantiation of our sovereignty, it looks like. The idea here is to go to the soul of the political, namely sovereignty. And again, Israel is but an instance of sovereignty. In fact, 300 years separate, 4 to 8, the founding of Israel and the Peace of Westphalia. Right. Exactly. 300 years. Exactly three centuries.
Separate the we we the the Piece of Westphalia and the founding of Israel. But it remains an instance it meaning Israel. It remains an instance of modern sovereignty. But I want to go to the unconscious that enables something like Israel, that is sovereignty concept. In fact, you could say the unconscious of states being states, modern nation states, that Israel is only one of them.
But I also if I joined political theology by paying attention to the concept of sovereignty, I also partway with it I part ways with political theology because political theology, for all the insightful things we learn from it, it strikes me as a sharing something with liberalism in that in that it retains, along with liberalism, a royal place for sovereignty. In other words, political theology does not question the sovereignty of sovereignty. Yet that's exactly what I'm pushing towards.
And that's where my intervention in some sense becomes ethical in that I want to connect to an ethical horizon that difference. But doesn't dismiss sovereignty. I I'm trying to connect to an ethics of fragility which allows us to, as we reinvigorate our political imagination, to think also about finitude, about revelation as necessary for human flourishing.
This ethics of fragility A is all the more relevant for a reinvigorating political imagination, given the transient, the transience I'm sorry, given the transience or the finitude of states as states. Hence my focus on the pivot, which is sovereignty and not transient instances, meaning the state. I'm basically trying to focus on the norm, the founding norm, meaning sovereignty, and not on its particular embodiment in specific forms.
Hence the state. You may wonder why are you approaching the state as something transient, as a as a transient form? Allow me to bring you two testimonies. I have several, but for this talk, maybe two will suffice. One of them come from Hobbes himself. From within the Leviathan. We get to understand how states come and go there. They are not everlasting. Something we know all too well in the Middle East, but not only but also Arabic language, attest to the fact that states are transient.
For those of you who may be sufficiently familiar with Arabic, the word for state in Arabic is Dola. Dola. Do you know what else Dola means in Arabic? It means, for example, rotation. Rotation. So even Halloumi talks about the dollar. It's that which means which rotates. In fact, in Bedouin folklore, the coffee part is called Dola because it goes around. It's not like the Latin star state coming from Stacey's right. So when we so Arabic language gives us one indication of how states don't last.
They come and go, but so does the the founder of Fears of the State. Let's go to the Mortal Gun, the acronym moronic paradoxical term The More than God, the Divine that dies and hops himself. You can read it for yourself. Stipulates when do states die? I don't want to read it all for you now, but he's basically saying once the state, as a state begins to mess with people's past, they have basically signed their defence. Okay, take a minute to read it out because when it does. Okay.
I put down for one of the most effectual seeds of the death of any state that the conquerors require. Not only is submission of men's actions to them for the future, but also and approbation of their of all their actions past. When there is this curse, a Commonwealth in the world whose beginnings can in conscience be justified. 1651. Okay. That's for later. To return to sovereignty, therefore, is to return, as I said, to the grammar of our political, modern imagination.
The grammar also because Rousseau himself continuing the tradition of hopes in the social contract, talks about the following that the principle of political life develops. It dwells in the sovereign authority. Thus, sovereignty becomes for us. For anyone curious to question the limits of political imagination becomes its eye to open to a few questions about freedom, death, community, and even revelation. Yes, revelation.
I know it sounds counterintuitive, but I hopefully will get a chance to tell you why. Revelation. So you see. In other words, the concept of sign is in sight. If you can't resourceful sight from which to open basic questions of what makes up our politics of questions of freedom, question of death, questions of commuting, and so on and so forth. Having acknowledged the centrality of the sovereignty paradigm right, I hope I conveyed that to you.
How central to our political imagination, the sovereignty concept and and within it also the indivisible indivisibility principle. Let's see what happens when Hobbes and Rousseau together formulate modern sovereignty, the sort of politics as they form formulated according to a divine paradigm of modern ruling. Meaning, if you're not sovereign, you're not legitimate, right? They're allies. And in a sociable and defining principle within the paradigm known as the indivisibility principle.
But what happens is that this indivisibility principle within the paradigm of sovereignty demands oneness again, following the logic of transferring divine theological concepts into secular political concepts. Just like God is one. So this, the earthly sovereign is one meaning he or she is sovereign must also be one, must also be indivisible. So I'm remember I said, I'm drilling. I want us to go further and further into into the atom of the paradigm.
But what that means to be one and to be indivisible is that the sovereign is self-sufficient and autonomous. The be that the king, the law, the ruler or the people or the individual. And thus all the way from Jean Beaudin, who wrote before Hobbs all the way to Isaiah Berlin. Indivisibility principle has been a discernible from and to divine eyes, along with the sovereign deferred on meaning and insistent a continuous insistence on the oneness of the sovereign.
It's the sovereign, self-sufficiency and autonomy for man be unto himself becomes demonised, the conscience becomes demonised. And this has been the the the regnant ways of thinking about both the governing of states and the governing of human souls. But political theology is less concerned with the indivisibility principle, as you may know, and more concerned with, especially after agamben, with exception.
But let's pay attention to how how theologically rooted and prominent this notion of indivisibility. We can find it, I want to argue, but with like your hope with that maybe in the discussion that at the foundation of this principle of indivisibility is perhaps some some Lutheran thinking. Look, there were three in the sense of Martin Luther. So let's go back to Luther and see how he left his own imprint on modern states, including the Jewish modern state.
Let's see Luther at work. My source for that and maybe you have someone better to suggest is Jean Elstein Beth Goldstein, where she cites him as someone who has divine conscience and his rebellion against papal authority, where he describes his in his state of being and with his conscience as utterly free in conscience and innermost being, innermost being meaning where freedom is, where conscience is. He experiences freedom in conscience.
Maybe this is not clear entirely what's happening by conscience, but I hope in just a few minutes to be able to connect you. Why I'm why am I getting to Luther and to conscience?
But for me to do that, I have to close my terms of engagement now with political theology for all the dark spots I'm trying to see, for all the dark spots that political theology has helped us understand about the working of a liberal governance and liberal democracies, how they conceal violence, how they conceal the exception and the sacred under their secular guise. There seems a tenacious I want to argue critically with political theology.
There seems to be a tenacious blindspot. And that spot is, as I said, the sovereignty of sovereignty concept. And. The attention I want to draw to is here the attention to the danger it poses to the ethics, not the flexibility or applicability of the paradigm of sovereignty. In other words, what interests me to take this a bit empirically. What? Not to debate whether should there be one state to state? Three states. They have state. But rather, what is the state anyway?
Is it worth having? What kind of danger? Ethical danger it poses. So if political theology shares with liberalism, its enabling hold of sovereignty over our political imagination. My attempt in this project is to ask, after a century long disillusion dissolving, I should see actually dissolving of the Arab and Muslim governance since 1916. You know why 1916, right? The Sykes-Picot after a century of dissolving what we now call Middle East.
My interest is not how to share the apple, how Jews and Arabs can, you know, have a state or how each part could have a state. But again. And that. You know, should we have an apple of our own? But rather. But is it an apple that we should taste from? Hence my need for a molecular inquiry. Molecular, conceptually speaking, molecular meaning. I go into the paradigm of sovereignty.
I zoom in on the principle of indivisibility in the paradigm and then look closely at conscience and specifically the demand for oneness. Drilling into the principle of indivisibility and the kind of ethics it either fosters or frustrates in the world today, the principle of indivisibility stands as one of the logical properties of sovereignty. Meaning it's a it's something that individual. Excuse me.
It's something that sovereignty demands that it that it contains this property of indivisibility, in fact. But this in terms of this principle, is the condition of possibility for sovereignty. Just as God was, is one and thus indivisible. So to our modern sovereign and so articulate this oneness and then which has been endorsed with us all the way to the 21st century, as indispensable for sovereignty. But who is the sovereign?
According to Hobbs, the sovereign is the one who carries the person that is the Commonwealth. And here we get to hear him. How he talks about the indivisibility and is by definition is indivisible, for it is the unity of the representative, he tells us. Not the unity of that represented. That makes makes the person one. And I'm getting closer to my crucial point of intervention now that we understand that the sovereign is one, the sovereign is indivisible.
What's this indivisibility about? In formulating their the indivisibility principle in the way they did Hubbs and Rousseau together make and this is a crucial point of the intervention make justice and injustice as valid only within the contract. Right outside the Leviathan, there is unnecessary death. Violence. There were all against all. There and only there. We cannot talk about injustice and justice because those two categories are only relevant to society, not in nature and not in solitude.
You may ask one Why does Hubbs deny the fact that injustice and justice are relevant outside society, outside the country? And this is the crucial point because he, he and Rousseau together argue that is actually impossible. Two wrongs yourself. You cannot strong yourself. Injustice towards oneself is impossible. One oneness of the sovereign, the sovereignty that the king, the people or single person precludes injustice towards oneself because the sovereign is one and one cannot harm oneself.
Let this actually read them both articulating this denial. And the definition of injustice is no other than the not performance of governance. Right. So you see injustice, class injustice are relevant only to contracts. If the meaning justice and injustice were faculties, they might be in a man that we're alone in the world, as well as his senses and passions. The meaning justice and justice are qualities that they relate to men in society, not in solitude.
Further, with jobs, we hear whatsoever is sovereign death. It can be no injury to any of his subjects, nor he, nor ought to be by any of them accused of injustice, because to do injury to oneself is impossible. Just these words that I underlined is what launched in some sense my inquiry in writing this piece. To do injury to oneself is impossible. Because I'm curious.
Excuse me? Because it's here that I begin to raise the question what ethical capabilities are emaciated with this denial, with the sovereignty regime that demands the denial of self oppression? Now, let's contrast this. Oh, no, I have to show you this also before I contrast with the notion of wronging oneself in, the Hobson's men shall judge what is lawful and unlawful, not by the law itself, but by their own conscience. That is to say, by their own private judgement. Now we understand.
Maybe better. What about Luther on conscience? Because in some sense, if we want to do a genealogy of this denial, one has to go back to Luther and Russell continues. Hobbs, as Hobbs continued Luther by saying Conscience never deceives us. You see how they absolve conscience from everything. Conscience can never go to court. Conscience never deceives us because laws are acts of. The general will no longer ask if the law can be unjust because no one is unjust to himself.
You see how strikingly similar Hobbes and Rousseau. No one is unjust to himself. And because no one is unjust to himself.
Almost to the word. But then the question arises for us what kind of ethical accounts we can generate of our failures or fortitude as ethical subjects if we fail to recognise the possibility of self-harm, of wronging oneself as a possibility, if we absolve conscience from any tribunal, if sovereignty to move forward, if sovereignty is no longer the Archimedes point of our politics,
meaning if we look at sovereignty completely from the outside, if costs to our sovereignty bound ethics are interrogated, we could find two forms of enslavement that we maybe should recognise and interrogate a relationship to our death and to our relationship to reason. This is a place where we could see two flights of consciousness down under the instances or symptoms. That is the modern state, in this case Israel.
What the crushing of ethics, of fragility due to sovereignty, principle of India's indivisibility, what what such aggression could entail. Let me focus just a little bit on. The first casualty, our relationship to death. Our mortality. Our sometimes philosopher calls the ethics of finitude usurped by the mortal God. Mortal God. The state's right, as it scolded. The state is so deeply anxious. Controls are spoken from political theology.
It's so deeply anxious of its own death that it makes the subjects of the state or the citizens enslaved insofar that they don't recognise and don't authentically attend to their own essence, which is their own mortality. To bring an empirical example to what, in discussing conceptually, think of Israel's obsession with Iran. Iran. Iran. Iran. In the meantime, car accidents, drugs and labour fatalities as as primary cause of death in the country.
So if the sovereigns cannot wrong themselves, how can individuals see that they're wrong themselves? How could they wrong themselves? Let's think of what I argue always with my 13 year old son. How many hours do you need to spend on Fortnite? The game every day. I'm trying to convince him that he's wrong himself. I'm a successful. I can't be sure, but this is who I am. One what I'm trying to mobilise wrong in oneself argument against my son's obsession with Fortnite game.
But. But this is just, you know, personal example. But how tenable is this vision of reality really, in the reality in which individuals are are seen as incapable of wronging themselves when we basically absolve a our conscience from examination? And why why should we examine conscience in the first place because of this absolving? Let me go to the second casualty, and that's the place of revelation.
Our relationship to revelation. If you look directly at the insecurity of the states, if we look at it, if we look if you look directly at the insecurity of the states governing paradigm, meaning specifically the insecurity or instability of the sovereignty concept, how itself as a concept sovereignty is open to definition of change, meaning it's malleable, it's theme, and it's not essential about politics.
One thing we learned from Parkinson in his genealogy of sovereignty, it's not essentially or inherently a political concept. Actually, it's an ethical as well as an epistemic concept, meaning it has to do with how we organise our knowledge. That could mean that the loss of a sense of frailty, the loss of our access to ethics or fragility, will make us lose a sense of the fragility of reason.
How so? In that threesome retains its sovereignty over revelation and keeps the true meaning, reason and revelation as separate and not only separate reason and revelation remain estranged from each other. This is, I'm trying to say, the epistemic and cost or casualty of crossing our ethics of fragility, because we take reason to be everything.
So in other words, the task of questioning modern political imagination may turn out to be the task of interrogating not only the claims of the state to reason, which is, you know, what political theologians do, oh, how the state pretends that it's a normal, sane state, but it's really crazy state. Well, you've seen that exercise in many places and think the task is even further than that.
The task is not only to clean the question claims of state to reason, but also reasons clean to sovereignty. We turned the table around and question what the reason is. We questioned the tyranny of reason, and perhaps that too could emerge as a second form of enslavement. And the irony is here to bring an empirical example from the two flights down into consciousness.
The irony is that we have a nationalist, secular Jewish state participating in the western secular dimension, a of an alienation of religion in the world. Let me summarise the argument, even though I feel I skipped this slide. Yes, I skipped this line. You heard me talk a lot about wronging oneself. I've been informed and think that by a couple of verses in the Koran and the concept would be voluminous or doing injustice to oneself.
This happens in multiple places in the Koran. I just chose to hear, for example, in chapter two, Saurashtra McCarroll, Moses. I think this is full citation. And Moses said to his people, All my people, indeed, you are wronging yourselves by worshipping the calf. Okay. This is just a fragment of a story of an encounter between Moses and his rights in China. And then there's another story, the parable of the parable of the cave sura, 18, sort of telegraph.
Okay. And this is a reference to a man who was endowed with a lot of wealth. And he mistook himself and his property to be eternal, lasting forever without an end. And that is considered in the Koran, thinking yourself immortal to be a form of wronging yourself. The luminous. And he entered his garden being unjust to his soul. The only Malinowski saying, I don't think this will ever perish this meaning his wealth. So towards ending.
Let me say the following. We have a code here. Could Western political imagination accept and admit migrant notions outside the regimes of sovereignty in which sovereignty concept is itself dethroned and is allowed to contend with other concepts? And the Muslim tradition belief as a human, ethical disposition or orientation towards flourishing on the Earth doesn't deny frailty,
including the frailty that has its wrong ourselves. Could it offer such resources in the search for what I call humility? Resources we are wanting to steer and invigorate and and and work against the malaise within Palestinian political imagination. We might look into Muslim experiences of governance, including Ottoman experiments, as in Tunisia, towards a decolonised, wise and durable governance in what is Israel Palestine today.
And for conclusion from conclusion of just read you the following a Palestinian political imagination concerned with human flourishing beyond sovereignty paradigm, but including the including the flourishing of toleration in the homeland, should critically attend to the land's cultural patrimony. I'm talking about Palestine, Israel and the rich cultural patrimony of the land.
This patrimony ineluctably includes but is not limited to a kind of governance of self and a governance of politics that had paradigmatic living in the longest on the record in the homeland history,
namely the theories of Khalifa. But the imagination, political imagination, so attentive one that doesn't, in other words, succumb to secular isms, discursive wars and discursive checkpoints could scour this unduly locked chest box that is the Khalifa for humility resources that are necessary for reformulations of our modern moralities, such reformulation benefiting from what the world. Hallock, in his book, called The Impossible State, has called the retrieval of Islamic research.
Excuse me, the retrieval of Islamic moral resources could aim at the proper binding, a proper thinking of the relationship, how we think better in our imagination of the relationship between reason and revelation, where reason is not tiring, how we think better, the relationship between fact and value, how we think the relation between our ethics and our politics. And of course, how do we face the questions of unity and plurality in politics?
Opening that just box rather than running away from it appears to be the urgent task of any imagination that does not want to surrender into the leviathans Halloween of toleration. I'm assuming here that one of the most urgent tasks of Palestinian imagination is how do we honour that the the the plurality of Palestine, be it among humans themselves or be it between humans and the habitat, the natural habitat that they vicariously inherit and inhabit in Palestine no less than elsewhere.
Thank you very much.