On January 26, 2024, India celebrated its Republic Day – the day India adopted its current Constitution – with great fanfare, with French President Emmanuel Macron as the guest of honor. “Liberty, Equality and Fraternity’ is the major political ideal for France, though each of these terms has little meaning for Indians in the context of rapidly expanding Hindu majoritarianism.
Only a few days earlier, on January 22, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi inaugurated a massive temple to the God Ram in Ayodhya – at a site called the Babri Masjid that had been disputed for decades between Hindus and Muslims. It was given to the Hindus by India’s Supreme Court, and it was expected to end the long-standing conflict between Hindus and Muslims. This does not seem to be the case. Given that India is a secular country, some feel that the prime minister’s decision to inaugurate it was not at all appropriate. There has been violence in parts of India such as Mumbai. In this context, one wonders what kind of democracy India is becoming. Or is it becoming something else?
Please read this – real reason why all of Modi govt targeting me. @thewire_in on how Modi govt breaking every rule and convention in order to find ways of handing over their future to Adani. India asking what was the quid pro quo? https://t.co/OuqvA6BvqQ via @thewire_in
Long ago, renowned economist John Kenneth Galbraith described India as a functioning democracy. To some, not much has changed, and the same phrase could be used even today. For years, until the rise of Hindu majoritarianism, India was considered a shining example of secular democracy. It was seen as an exception compared to many newly decolonized Third World countries. And even compared to its immediate neighbors like Pakistan or Bangladesh, which shared a common history but whose politics moved in a different direction, contributing to the myth that Third World countries cannot be democratic. What has often been celebrated about India is the way it has ensured the safety and security of its religious minorities – particularly Muslims and Christians. Both have begun to see themselves as victims of Hindu majoritarianism. This is not to say that there were no issues before the rise of Hindu majoritarianism. Yet, India’s electoral democracy was recognized and it was hoped that it would slowly and steadily move towards substantive democracy. Alas, such hopes and assumptions have fallen apart.
India’s Congress party leader Rahul Gandhi speaks at a meeting as he concludes the “Bharat Jodo Yatra” march on January 30, 2023. Photo by Tauseef Mustafa/AFP.
At the heart of this development is the way Muslims, India’s largest religious minority, are treated. They number more than 200 million – more than the populations of Italy and the UK combined. In 2006, a report called the Sachar Report documented their socioeconomic conditions, which were considered worse than India’s Dalits, the former untouchables. Yet the community has produced some of the finest names in art, culture, music, sports and cinema. Khans in Bollywood are the most popular. This contrast is unique. But ever since 2014, the year Modi came to power in Delhi, Muslims have been the target of unprecedented violence in most parts of India. Lynchings, frequent riots and bulldozer justice are the new forms of violence that they face. This has raised global concerns, even as many Muslim countries have paid special tribute to Prime Minister Modi for helping to build their economic partnerships. The fact is that Indian Muslims are increasingly the target of systematic human rights violations. Some even have raised concerns about possible genocide in the future.
At another level, the rise of Hindu authoritarianism has affected various institutions, and the Indian media has become a partner in this process, partly voluntarily for business reasons and partly out of fear of repercussions. Some of the major global news agencies such as the BBC were recently raided by the Indian government for airing a two-part documentary on Narendra Modi’s controversial role in the 2002 Gujarat riots, for which the US denied him a visa. India’s Supreme Court, however, has given Mr. Modi a clean chit on the 2002 riots.
Modi meets with the Christian community in New Delhi on December 25, 2023. Photo by PMIndia
It is widely known that the strength of a democracy is reflected in the way its opposition parties behave or raise their voices in and outside Parliament. There have been also attempts to silence them. Two of their most vocal voices: Rahul Gandhi of the Indian National Congress (INC) and Mohua Moitra of the Trinamul Congress Party (TMC) – a regional party from West Bengal – have been suspended from Parliament. The reason for their suspension is that they have regularly raised their concerns about undue favors being given by the Modi government to Adani, a well-known industrial group. While Rahul Gandhi has managed to return to Parliament after a prolonged battle in the Indian Courts, Mohua Moitra will apparently remain outside the Parliament until the next elections.
On December 24, 2023, Prime Minister Modi hosted a meeting of over 100 Christian leaders from different parts of India. This was seen as an attempt to reach out to Indian Christians. It is worth noting that the Hindu nationalist party, the BJP, is yet to find its feet in various southern states such as Tamil Nadu and Kerala, where Christian communities have a significant presence, and the BJP is working hard to reach out to them. It is also worth recalling that Modi made a similar outreach to Muslims when he started campaigning for India’s prime ministership as Chief Minister of Gujarat. This outreach has not benefited Muslims in any way – instead they have become targets of frequent violence and scapegoating. Worst of all, his government’s decision to exclude Muslims from the Citizenship Act has also raised global concerns. Therefore, the value of such outreach is limited.
What is unfolding at the ground level is what matters. Indian Christians have been targeted by Hindu right-wing political groups for allegedly indulging in forcible conversions of India’s poor – especially India’s tribals – to Christianity. The BJP has promulgated stringent anti-conversion laws in various parts of India to deter Indian Christians from any missionary activities, which is indeed their constitutional right. Indian Christians were promised during the Constituent Assembly debate that they would have full freedom to propagate their own religion in India under the leadership of former Home Minister Sardar Patel. Modi has built the tallest statue of Mr. Patel in Gujarat, but that promise is now forgotten.
As India’s opposition political parties try to come together to take on the BJP in the next general election in 2024, the chances of Narendra Modi’s return are high. It is not good news for India’s religious minorities – such as Muslims and Christians. In India’s modern history, Narendra Modi and Jawaharlal Nehru are the two most ideological prime ministers. While Nehru moved India to the left, Prime Minister Modi has been assiduously trying to move India to the right, and his days are not yet over.
Cover photo: people watch the BBC documentary “India: The Modi Question” about Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s role during deadly 2002 sectarian riots, on January 24, 2023. Photo by Arun Chandrabose/AFP.
According to a 2022 Gallup survey, Afghanistan is the only country in the world where the vast majority of the population, a staggering 92 percent of men and 96 percent of women, say they face hardships that make their lives sheer suffering. In this realm of agony, the Hazaras bear a disproportionate burden of suffering. And for Hazara women, the burden intensifies further.
The Hazara people speak Persian, practice mostly Shiia Islam, and make up about 20 percent of Afghanistan’s population. For most of Afghanistan’s history as a “state,” Hazaras have borne the brunt of being “the other” in the “Afghan nation,” because nationalism in Afghanistan is not an all-encompassing concept that includes all ethnic groups of the geography, but is based on Sunni Islam, Pashtun ethnic identity, and, to some extent, the Pashtu language. For the Hazaras, falling into the category of “the other” came at a high cost: genocide and loss of political autonomy in the 1890s, when Afghanistan was forcibly unified by the British-backed Amir Abdur Rahman, – also known as the “Iron Amir” for his brutality – followed by a century full of massacres and systematic persecution.
In the last two decades, when Afghanistan’s 2004 Constitution at least theoretically guaranteed freedom and equal rights for all citizens, the Hazaras sought education as a last resort. Although Afghanistan’s education system fell far short of global standards, the Hazaras seemed to be thriving; nevertheless, the Taliban and other Islamist extremist groups didn’t like it and continued to target the Hazaras, while the Afghan government failed to ensure the community’s safety. In the past few years, the Hazaras have been attacked everywhere, including educational centers, schools, sports clubs, and even maternity wards. With the return of the Taliban to power in 2021, the Hazaras face further ethnic and religious persecution.
The deteriorating situation of the Hazaras in Afghanistan has raised concerns of widespread abuse. Organizations such as the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) have warned about potential mass atrocities against women and Hazaras and reiterated the need for urgent action. Some experts have described the current situation as “slow genocide,” underscoring the gravity of the ongoing threat.
The Taliban, armed to the teeth with US-supplied military equipment – intended for the collapsed Afghan army, emboldened by their “victory” and undeterred by the international community, have intensified their persecution of the Hazaras. Recently, the Taliban began arbitrarily detainingHazara women and girls in the Hazara enclave of Dasht-e Barchi in western Kabul, and in Ghazni and Daikundi provinces for “not wearing the proper hijab.”
While the prevailing assumption is that the Taliban’s recent arbitrary detentions of Hazara women and girls stem from their extremist interpretation of Islam, particularly application of their draconian “Hijab Decree” of April 25, 2022, much evidence and testimony suggest that these detentions are motivated less by “hijab enforcement” and more by an intention to further marginalize and persecute the Hazaras.
According to Shah Gul Rezaie, a former member of the Afghan parliament, Hazara society, like other peoples of Afghanistan, is religious and people observe hijab by default. There is no one on the street without a hijab, and the Taliban’s arbitrary arrests have nothing to do with hijab or Islam. Images from the detention centers show Taliban “policewomen” detaining fully covered women.
یک منبع از غرب کابل ویدیویی را به افغانستان اینترنشنال فرستاد که لحظه بازداشت دختران جوان در منطقه دشت برچی در آن دیده میشود. در ویدیو دیده میشود که ماموران زن طالبان، یک دختر جوان را داخل موتر خود میکشانند. یک باشنده کابل میگوید این ویدیو را روز جمعه، ششم دلو در غرب کابل ثبت… pic.twitter.com/SlM4KI8c7f
Human rights activist Tamana Rizaei, who has protested against the Taliban’s ban on women from work and education and the killing of Zainab Abdullah – a Hazara woman from west Kabul – by Taliban fighters, says the Taliban’s detention of Hazara women and girls is ethnically and religiously motivated to Reset DOC. Rizaie and the group of women she was protesting with were detained by the Taliban for nearly a month in 2022.
Explaining her position, Rizaei says, “Hazara women and girls, in their own way, resisted the Taliban’s infliction of terror and fear. The Taliban closed schools, but Hazara girls went to educational centers ordered to be segregated by gender. The Taliban said ‘Islamic hijab the way we [Taliban] say’, women and girls resignedly complied, but kept going to classes, with many trying to learn a foreign language and seek an education abroad. Then, when the Taliban realized they couldn’t stop the girls, they began arbitrarily detaining girls, accusing them of not wearing proper hijab. But hijab and Islam are excuses.”
Women’s rights activist Fariza Akbari, who also protested against the Taliban and was detained together with her husband at the same time as Rizaei in 2022, has a similar view of the Taliban’s detention of Hazara women and girls. Akbari says, “It is clear that the recent detentions are related with the girls’ Hazara ethnicity and their Shia faith.”
Akbari says that as her situation worsened during her detention, under interrogation, “I said I had committed no crime and wanted to be released. The Taliban interrogator said ‘You filthy Shiites are protesting against the Islamic Emirate and have to be punished’, in response to which I said I was not a Shiite and had converted to Sunni Islam years ago.” That, Akbari says, “instantly softened their tone”. Disclosing her faith might have softened the Taliban interrogators’ tone, but it did not save Akbari’s baby as she suffered a miscarriage after her release, which she believes happened only because she could not get the necessary the medical care she need while in detention.
Taliban detention was dreadful for Akbari and Rizaei. They were forced to fast during the day, pray at night and were sometimes punished for falling asleep. Rizaei says of the Taliban’s treatment of Hazaras, “The women Taliban are as brutal as the men Taliban.” She adds, “They did not even call us by our names, but by derogatory terms like filthy Hazara infidels.”
Rizaei and Akbari were released after confessing at gunpoint that they had been treated well and that their act of protest was wrong, and their families were forced to sign a guarantee that they would not protest again. They both confirm that the Taliban demanded copies of their families’ property deeds in addition to their IDs. Recent reports, however, indicate that the Taliban are demanding money for the release of women and girls.
Maryam, a student at Herat University, who prefers to be identified only by her first name, says, “The Taliban despise women and girls, and they despise Hazara women the most because, in their eyes, we [Hazara women] are born with four unforgivable sins: being Hazara, being a woman, being Shia, and wanting to get an education.” What she fears most is that “the Taliban may succeed in confining women to their homes by inflicting fear and violence on women and their families.”
A detailed account of the testimonies of three people held by the Taliban suggests that the group uses torture as the most common method of extracting confession, something both Rizaei and Akbari have also experienced.
While for many, arbitrary detention has irreversible psychological consequences, for many others it has cost their very lives, as women and girls who are detained by the Taliban are further stigmatized in society. According to Rina Amiri, the US Special Envoy for Afghan Women, Girls and Human Rights, “Some [of the detained women] who faced overnight imprisonment committed self-harm and suicide out of fear of dishonor.”
Afghans are taking extraordinary risks to speak out against the abusive measures being carried out under the guise of the hijab decree. (1/3)
— U.S. Special Envoy Rina Amiri (@SE_AfghanWGH) February 9, 2024
As for the Hazaras, the community’s rights are further threatened by the Taliban’s religious homogenizing policies that particularly target the religious freedom of Shia Hazaras. In early 2023, the Taliban removed Shia theology – taught at universities in Hazara-dominated provinces like Bamiyan – from the curriculum. Later, they ordered private universities to cleanse their libraries of non-Sunni Islamic texts, including Shia and other religious books.
The Taliban’s minister of higher education denied in a speech that Afghanistan was a country of multiple religions, saying “all [the people] are followers of Hanafi [the main branch of Sunni] Islam.” In a similar move, the Taliban governor of Herat, Noor Ahmad Islam Jar, in his recent book in Arabic, Research on the Māturīdiyyah Doctrine, describes Shiites as “infidels” and long-term “collaborators with the infidels”. All of this, along with the Taliban’s huge investments in Sunni jihadist madrasas will hardly leave any space for religious freedom.
The Hazaras have long faced insecurity. Months before the Taliban regained control of Afghanistan in August 2021, the community faced unprecedented levels of violence. A United Nations report documented 20 violent attacks against them in the first half of 2021 alone.
The Taliban, who committed several massacres of Hazara civilians during their first time in power, began their return to power by killing and displacing Hazaras. When they took over parts of Ghazni province in July 2021, the Taliban killed 9 Hazaras. Months after taking over the entire country, they killed 13 Hazaras, including an teenage girl in Daikundi province. At the same time, the Taliban forcibly displaced Hazara villagers in several villages in Daikundi and later in other villages, including in Ghor, Daikundi, and Urozgan provinces.
Since the return of the Taliban, hundreds of Hazaras have been killed or injured in attacks claimed by ISIS across the country. The Taliban, as the “de facto authorities,” have not faltered in tolerating these attacks and continue to persecute the Hazaras. In the past two years, in cases of disputes between Hazara villagers and the Pashtun Kuchi nomads who move to parts of Hazara regions with their sheep flocks in spring, the Taliban have always sided with the Kuchis, forcing the Hazaras to pay extremely high amounts as arbitrary “compensations.”
According to reports, in 2023, Pashtun residents in the Urozgan-e Khas district of Urozgan province destroyed the property of their Hazara neighbors, cut down their fruit trees, torched their houses, and set fire to their wheat crops. These acts of violence and abuse, according to locals, were carried out in coordination with the Taliban.
Cover photo: Members of the Afghan Hazara community hold placards during a protest against the suicide bombing at a university in Afghanistan on September 30, in Pakistan’s capital of Islamabad on October 8, 2022. Photo by Aamir Qureshi / AFP.
Some may remember that when Vladimir Putin initiated his “special military operation” against Ukraine, one of his earliest supporters was Patriarch Kirill I of the Russian Orthodox Church. What was his perspective? In his first public address following the commencement of what Moscow terms the “special military operation,” he provided a clear answer: he saw it as a “metaphysical war.” In other words, for the Patriarch, it was evident that this conflict represented a battle between Russia defending the fundamental values of its Christian essence, and Western de-Christianization, which sought to spread, through Ukraine, even to this part of Europe, concepts like gay pride, seen as the epitome of evil. The conflict was deemed metaphysical in the sense that it represented a clash between those upholding traditional values and those promoting progressive ideals.
As the anniversary of the Russian military intervention approached on February 20 of this year, attention once again turned to the issue. Shedding light on how and why this was significant, Hilarion, formerly the second-in-command of the Moscow Patriarchate’s international relations and now serving as Metropolitan of Budapest (a city crucial for Russian diplomacy due to its proximity to neighboring communities) as well as the chairman of the Patriarchate’s Theological and Biblical Commission, offered an explanation. In an interview with the Novosti news agency, Hilarion clarified that according to the commission, “the blessing of same-sex couples is in radical contradiction with Christian moral teaching… These new decisions of the Catholic Church contradict fundamental moral norms.”
I wasn’t looking for the Commission’s documents on fundamental moral norms; rather, my focus was on gaining insight into the perspective of Russian theologians and biblical scholars regarding the statement “Fiducia supplicans” issued by the Holy See on December 18, 2023. Hilarion clarified that the document has been presented to Patriarch Kirill for assessment alongside the Holy Synod.
Let’s start with an observation: the core of the Declaration “Fiducia supplicans,” as evident to those who have read it, revolves around the quest to reconcile doctrinal precision with pastoral compassion towards individuals “in their struggles.” It appears to me that this is fundamentally the overarching theme of Francis’ papacy. Each religious leader has an underlying theme: “metaphysical warfare” being one; tending to people in their humanity, even within the clarity of doctrine, being another. This care can also manifest through a blessing, albeit not a liturgical one, bestowed upon two individuals who seek it together. Francis remarked on this: “When a couple spontaneously approaches to request it (the blessing), one does not bless their union but rather the individuals who have jointly made the request.”
Father Lorenzo Prezzi, a keen observer of ecumenical relations between churches and the Christian-Eastern context, initially presented and analyzed these developments on the website of the Dehonian Fathers. He highlighted that the Moscow Patriarchate has long abstained from theological dialogue, opting instead for a strategic dialogue with the Holy See, focusing on shared actions and attitudes. He further pointed out that in his statement to the Novosti agency, Metropolitan Hilarion stated, “There is talk of same-sex couples as individuals in need of the Church’s blessing for healing and edification. Hence, it is permissible to bless the couple collectively rather than each individual separately. The statement emphasizes multiple times, in various ways, the importance of ensuring that such blessings remain spontaneous and distinct from marriage rituals. It provides practical suggestions for differentiating these blessings from marriage ceremonies. While reaffirming the Church’s teaching on marriage as the union between one man and one woman, open to procreation, the document maintains that blessing same-sex couples contradicts Christian moral teaching.”
The commentary from the Catholic priest, an expert in matters concerning dialogue between Catholics and Orthodox, holds merit: “The statement overlooks the repeated assertion of the distinction between same-sex cohabitation and marriage, elevating what is not sacramental to that level and neglecting the possibility of a pastoral approach to complex situations. It implies that every blessing must be ritualistic and liturgical, disregarding the prevalent culture in Russia that condones severe and systematic violence against homosexuals. In the Fundamentals of Social Doctrine, it is stated: ‘The Church holds that those who promote a homosexual lifestyle should not be allowed into teaching, educational, or other roles involving children or youth, nor into leadership positions in the military or re-education institutions’ (Chapter 12, No. 9). The Church has remained silent on defending the dignity of homosexuals against imprisonment, violence, and social exclusion. This echoes the situation in the document regarding the sanctity of human life (published December 27, 2023), where the relentless defense of life was followed by the successful lobbying to defeat a bill aimed at protecting women from domestic violence. Sodomy is portrayed as the gravest and unforgivable sin, serving as the litmus test for an entire civilization.”
Could one perceive the provocative stance of the Russian Orthodox Patriarchate as an attempt to meddle in the “internal affairs” of another Church, endorsing a viewpoint (that of individual blessings but not joint ones) shared by many critics of Francis? The possibility of such interference may exist, yet it remains speculative. However, there is undoubtedly a critical view towards other Churches, though Metropolitan Hilarion refrains from explicitly labeling them as such. He pointed out that Protestants also began with non-liturgical blessings, eventually evolving into something distinct in some of their communities, not recognized as Churches. This cautious criticism extends to sister Churches within the Orthodox family, such as the Greek Orthodox, who were reproached by another prominent member of the Moscow Patriarchate, Yacklimehuk, for failing to oppose the legalization of same-sex marriage by the government in Greece.
Father Lorenzo Prezzi’s assessment suggests that Moscow aims to transition from being criticized for supporting the invasion of Ukraine to positioning itself as the defender of authentic Christian principles. This shift underscores the importance of a new theological perspective, epitomized by the concept of the “metaphysical war” mentioned earlier—an ideological battle between good and evil. This perspective challenges the traditional teachings traced back to St. Augustine, who vehemently opposed Manichaeism. It appears that Hilarion is making a bold messianic assertion: “The Russian Orthodox Church serves as the restraining force—I assert this with full responsibility—that courageously and decisively upholds the unchanging commandments established by God, which form the foundation of human existence.” However, there is silence regarding God’s commandments concerning the case of Navalny, who passed away four days before this interview. Nonetheless, around 400 Russian Orthodox priests, advocating for the return of Navalny’s body to his mother, have addressed this issue.
Cover photo: Head of the Russian Orthodox Church Patriarch Kirill blesses people congregated for mass in Donetsk on May 7, 2011 during his visit to the Ukraine. Photo by Alexander Khudoteply / AFP.
The following appeal has been signed by the leaders of the main religious communities in Haifa, Israel, and released by the Haifa Laboratory for Religious Studies after six intensive meetings that were held at the University of Haifa between December 2023 and February 2024.
We, representatives from the Jewish, Muslim, Christian, and Druze religious communities in Haifa, have convened in recent months under the initiative of the Haifa Laboratory for Religious Studies at the University of Haifa and the Department for Religious Communities at the Ministry of Interior Affairs in order to promote an active leadership that will work together to safeguard a shared civic society and prevent violence.
In this challenging and tense period, we have recognized the great importance of establishing a group of religious leaders from the various faiths, who study each other’s religion and aspire to promote good neighborliness and uphold a dignified way of life in our city.
The dialogue among us, the tolerance, and mutual respect are rooted in the tradition and sacred scriptures of each and every one of us:
“Beloved is man who was created in the image” (Mishnah Avot 3:14). We believe that all human beings are creations of God, as stated in the Bible, “The earth is the Lord’s, and everything in it, the world, and all who live in it” (Psalms 24:1). Even in Islamic scriptures, it is said: “All creatures are the children of God, and the most beloved to Allah is the one who treats God’s children kindly” (Ibn Abi Shaybah).
The various religions emphasize the value of respecting others, prohibiting harm to them, caring for others, responsibility towards your neighbors and relatives, and above all, the sanctity of life.
Trust among group members was built step by step, meeting after meeting, and can serve as a foundation and model for the religious communities we represent in the important process in which we have participated. Our personal security depends on our cooperation, our ability to reduce points of friction, and our ability to inspire respectful dialogue, striving for agreements and good neighborliness.
Haifa, our beloved city, is characterized by diverse groups and communities, and we all desire the prosperity of the city and its residents, out of a deep commitment to the State of Israel and its laws.
We commit to being active partners in promoting good neighborliness, mutual respect, and tolerance, and we call on the public to preserve the unique character of our city, Haifa.
Signed by:
Imam Rashad Abu al-Hijaa – imam of al-Jarina Mosque, Old Haifa
Father William Abu Shkara – priest of the Catholic Church and Head of the Archbishop’s bureau in Haifa
Rabbi Eliyahu Blum – rabbi of Rambam congregation, Newe Shanan
Ms. Rabi’a Bsis – Druze social and political activist
Rabbi Ne’ama Dafni-Keln – rabbi of Or Hadash congregation
Rabbi Ben-Zion Gagula – director of Chabad house, the German Colony
Sheikh Tawfik Halabi – Imam and member of the Druze religious committee, Dalyat al-Karmel
Mr. Muhammad Ijbaria – Mu’adhin (caller for prayer) of the Haj Abdallah Mosque, Halisa
Ms. Christin Khazen – member of the Catholic Church in Haifa
Sheikh Jaber Mansur – Druze Imam, Isfiya
Amir Muhammad Sharif Odeh – Head of the Islamic Ahmadiyya Community, Kababir
Ms. Du’a Odeh – head of the women’s council in the Islamic Ahmadiyya Community, Kababir
Ms. Avital Peleg – Principal of the Amit Ulpana
Father Demetrius Samra – priest of the Greek Orthodox Church in Haifa
Rabbi Shemuel Sasson – head of the Garin Torani (lit. Torah Nucleus), Hadar
Ms. Hiam Tannous – member of the Christian Forum and of the Catholic Church in Haifa
Cover photo by Haifa Laboratory for Religious Studies, all rights are reserved.
The 1992 destruction of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya, upon which Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Ram temple was built, is seen by Hindu nationalists as a “historical retaliation” against India’s so-called “dark ages”. Several right-wing news outlets, such as Republic TV, have celebrated the inauguration of the new temple as a “500-year wait coming to an end.” This “dark” period, which lies 500 years in India’s past, is popularly characterized by the rise of the Mughals, an empire of Muslim rulers from what is now Uzbekistan. According to Hindu nationalists, the Babri Masjid is believed to have been built by the first Mughal emperor, Babur, as a result of the destruction of the “original” Ram temple that once stood on the site. Although there is no concrete historical and archaeological evidence of the destruction of this temple, there have been attempts by archaeologists and historians leaning towards the ideology of Hindutva (Hindu nationalism) to suggest otherwise.
Revisionism in Archeology Thought to Villainize Muslims
One such person is archaeologist Braj Basi Lal, the former Director General of India’s top archaeological institution, the Archeological Survey of India, who in 1990 published an unverified, non-peer-reviewed article claiming evidence of the destruction of the temple under the Babri Masjid site, allegedly by Babur. Lal’s article was published in a journal associated with Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), India’s largest Hindu nationalist organization, whose political wing is the current ruling government, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Lal’s contribution is just one instance of the major push toward historical revisionism that the Hindutva ideology has been creating since its inception. Its weaponization of history has reached its worst form under the current Modi government, where historical revisionism villainizing Muslims has seeped into formal institutions.
School History Textbooks Deleting Mughal History
In April 2023, the National Committee of Educational Research and Training (NCERT), which is responsible for publishing textbooks for all schools in India under the authority of the national level board of education, removed the only chapter devoted to Mughal history in high school education from its curriculum. This omission is a clear attempt to derecognize religious plurality in Indian history at the national level of formal education. There have been several previous attempts by Hindu nationalists to omit religious diversity in Indian history, both in universities and schools.
In 2011, the University of Delhi dropped A.K. Ramanujan’s essay “Three Hundred Ramayanas: Five Examples and Three Thoughts on Translations” from its undergraduate history curriculum. This was in response to a protest by the student wing of the RSS, Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP), against the “blasphemy” of the supposedly monolithic sacred text of the Ramayana being told in multiple forms and interpretations throughout Indian history – the Ram temple, as it stands today, is also believed to be the exact site where Ramayana’s God Rama was born.
Eminent historian Romila Thapar has also been criticized by Hindu nationalists for “anti-Hindu” school education. She was denounced by religious-political organizations Hindu Mahasabha and Arya Samaj for mentioning cattle slaughter and consumption in ancient India in the first set of NCERT history textbooks in the 1960s and 70s. It is not surprising that for proponents of Hindutva, the mention of beef consumption (considered taboo by several Hindus in India, especially upper caste Hindus) in ancient times would jeopardize the perfectly consistent and sacrosanct Hindu past they wish to construct in the current social consciousness.
These examples of advocating historical revision in the past to protect “Hindu histories” show the fragility of Hindu nationalist sentiments. But they are markedly different from the recent deletion of Mughal history from school textbooks altogether. What makes the omission of Mughal history so peculiar is how Hindu nationalists want to treat so-called “Hindu histories” and “Muslim histories”. For Hindutva, the former must be made into a monolithic institution of thought that fits into the narrative of a Hindu nation, and the latter must be completely vilified to push their contemporaries outside their nationalist project. The question then arises about the omission of Mughal history: how does the RSS-BJP intend to villainize the Mughals in order to construct a narrative to “avenge” them in the name of historical justice today, if it omits them altogether from an educational-historical consciousness?
The answer lies in two parts. One, the peculiar mode of historiography essential to Hindutva, and the second, the popular cultural space that the BJP-RSS occupies outside formal education.
A Hindu-centric Narrative Passed off as “Eternal Faith”
Veer Savarkar, now considered the pioneer of the Hindutva ideology, defines the doctrine not in terms of the Hindu religion, but in terms of a collective history. In his seminal book, Essentials of Hindutva, he stresses that “Hindutva is not a word but a history” and dedicates a large part of his monograph to the construction of a Hindu past. He argues that the Hindu nation was founded by the “Prince of Ayodhya” and then mortally threatened by the invasions of Muslimrulers like Mahmud of Ghazni in the 11th century. Savarkar then emphasizes the conflict and loss of a “glorious” Hindu past, and puts forward the idea of a restoration of the “original” Hindu nation.
Within his mode of narrating history, Savarkar repeatedly demonstrates that only Hindu thought is indigenous to the Indian subcontinent, and thus contemporary Hindus should be the sole bearers of its nationalized identity. Thus, Hindutva views not only Muslim invaders but even Indian Muslims in general as foreign elements who have no right to a national identity in the Indian subcontinent. Savarkar willfully ignores the rich history of interactions between Hindus and Muslims, who did not necessarily see each other solely in terms of strict religious identities. To cite one example among many, the history of temple desecration and destruction in India cannot be attributed solely to religious despotism. Both Hindu and Muslim rulers have destroyed religious centers for economic purposes, such as looting, and for political purposes, such as seizing important sites of power. Thus, the practice of temple desecration by rulers and invaders cannot be seen solely as an act of religious despotism. What the Hindutva ideology does is that it short-circuits this history by focusing on “Muslim tyranny” without any reflection on nuance, and solely attributes every act of despotism as religious in order to justify a “return to the past.”
Savarkar made it possible for anyone to turn Indian history into a fantastical, Hindu-centric narrative. Now that the bearers of his legacy – the RSS-BJP – have taken office in the Modi government, India’s socio-historical consciousness is being further annexed by what historians now call “saffronized history” (named after the color of the RSS flag). The educational void left by the erasure of Mughal history is to be filled with Islamophobic saffronized history. The RSS has a large, nationwide network of schools that operate outside the “formal” educational sphere and are tasked with inculcating what historian Tanika Sarkar calls “unending hatred” against Muslims. This, along with the fact that the RSS has no formal membership and is run almost entirely by volunteers in more than 50,000 local branches or shakhas, puts into perspective just how entrenched the Hindutva ideology is. The Hindutva ideologue only finds a louder voice in the age of digital media, where blind adherence to fake news and exaggerated claims has hooked Hindus on the BJP-RSS’s model of hatred and violence. Content creators opened accounts on social medias to spread fake historical conspiracies in the name of uncovering the “forgotten history”. With videos titled “The history you WISH you were taught in school,” it becomes clear that this “forgotten history” is entirely a polarizing mission to create hatred by appropriating the historical source.
The corruption of history by the RSS-BJP idealogue is attributed to the allure of Indian history in generating nationalist sentiments. Its appeal lies in exoticizing and mythicizing the distant past, and then convincing the present subject that this past is owed to them, a natural right. In fact, the term popularly used by Hindu nationalists to describe their faith, Sanatana Dharma, translates as “Eternal Faith,” as if the course of the Hindu faith has been and will always be consistent throughout history. Mass events such as the celebration of the new Ram temple take place in a social space where religion, mythology, history, and politics are all conflated, linked by a narrative of hatred, and ultimately resigned to losing their meaning. In an increasingly triumphant Hindu nation, it is all the more important for future generations to remember the current injustice faced by Muslims in India. This cannot be justified as retaliation for a mutilated and disfigured past but has to be understood through the antics of the rogue forensic who runs the morgue. If this process is delayed, then history — as a discipline, as a record, as an education — will inevitably find itself in the hands of Hindutva.
Cover photo: Tourists are visiting the Red Fort in Old Delhi, India, on December 10, 2023. (Photo by Nasir Kachroo / NurPhoto / NurPhoto via AFP.)
Hamas styled its Oct. 7 massacre as retaliation. Its name, Operation Al Aqsa Flood, refers to the Israel Defense Forces’ April 2023 intrusion into the Al Aqsa mosque compound to tame riots and remove weapons stored there. That Israeli soldiers were present—to protect the Temple Mount, Judaism’s holiest site—is a potent symbol of lost sovereignty that Hamas purports to avenge.
Yet Israel isn’t the source of the conflict. It dates to March 3, 1924, the end of the last major Islamic caliphate, which capped the forcible transfer of Islam’s most sacred sites out of Ottoman hands.
The shift to British-allied control over Mecca, Medina and Al Aqsa fulfilled European empires’ campaign to restore the caliphate to the Arabs by removing it from the Turks in Istanbul. The abrupt end, however, left open the question of who protects Muslims and their holy sites. The subtext of the “Al Aqsa Flood” is that its current Arab guarantors, Jordan and Saudi Arabia, haven’t done so. (The Amman-controlled Waqf is in charge of security for Al Aqsa, while Riyadh oversees Mecca and Medina.)
Hamas’s assault violated Israel’s borders, reflecting its agenda of reverting to pre-European frontiers. Similarly, when ISIS crashed through the Syrian border a decade ago, it did so to restore Al-Sham—an area consisting of historical Palestine, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and parts of Egypt and Turkey—erasing the nation-states it considered to be colonialist slave names.
The missing caliphate has presented an opportunity for Iran, whose 1979 revolution restored religious rule. The mullahs proclaimed their desire to reconquer Jerusalem by holding the first annual “Al Quds day,” the Arabic name for the city, in rejection of the budding peace between Israel and Egypt. The Saudis were similarly threatened when insurgents occupied the Great Mosque of Mecca for two weeks that year.
But Tehran took a back seat to the regional Sunni bloc. When Hamas suicide bombers attacked Israeli civilians in the 2000 Al Aqsa intifada, they weren’t seen to be acting at Iran’s behest. As Sunni regimes have gradually normalized relations with Israel, that dynamic has changed.
The Oct. 25 photograph of Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Hezbollah leaders meeting under the portraits of Iranian ayatollahs is a striking sign of the times. The kinetic activation of Iran’s alliances beyond Hezbollah and the Houthis completes an arc of cross-sectarian influence stretching from Syria to Yemen.
Whether this amounts to Iran’s caliphal moment or a desperate effort against a turning regional tide is unclear. On the one hand, the Saudis are on the verge of becoming the seventh Arab state to recognize Israel. On the other, Iran’s spoiler role in Mideast peace talks reflects geopolitical shifts that eliminated many of its rivals in the past two decades. Iraq lurched from Sunni-led counterweight into Iran’s column, while Afghanistan came under Islamic rule. The US and its allies took care of al Qaeda and ISIS. By empowering proxies to attack the custodians of Islam’s holiest sites, Iran emerges as the military defender of an alternative regional order.
The Gaza war is a reminder that the Europeans left behind an unstable status quo a century ago. Absent a Sunni consensus, Iran is making an indirect power play. Iran’s weakness is also a strength: as non-Arab, Shiite Muslims, Iran’s leaders can’t trace their ancestry to the prophet Muhammad’s qureysh tribe—as can Jordan’s and Morocco’s monarchs, and as ISIS’s Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi claimed. Though around 85 percent of Muslims are Sunni, the demography of global Islam has long favored much larger non-Arab populations.
The dynamic might be resolved with a Vatican City-style solution for Al Aqsa. Those responsible for overseeing the complex would include Saudi Arabia and Jordan but also Muslims from Turkey, Indonesia, Egypt, Morocco, Algeria, Pakistan, Nigeria and Muslim-minority countries. Free from Western government interference, the arrangement would have to retain Jewish rights to visit and pray at the Temple Mount. Israeli soldiers’ presence could be defused by cooperative patrols alongside the soldiers of countries with which the Jewish state has built thick relations.
As for security considerations, the stakes of a nuclear-powered Iran make the extension of a North Atlantic Treaty Organization-style umbrella to Saudi Arabia seem less outlandish. A nuclear deterrent would obviate the need for U.S. military bases, which would present credibility issues for the Saudis and security risks for American troops.
A comprehensive deal would threaten Iran’s interests by sealing Hashemite and Saudi oversight of Al Aqsa and uniting custodianship of Islam’s three holiest sites for the first time since the Ottomans. Tehran and its proxies would still wish to protest—but with broad Islamic involvement, including outreach to Shiite communities, the protection of international law, and Israeli consultation, the project can defang their threats and assert a unified profile where disunity has prevailed.
Cover photo: Palestinian Muslim devotees arrive for the second Friday Noon prayers of the Islamic holy fasting month of Ramadan, near the Dome of the Rock mosque in the compound of the Al-Aqsa mosque in the Old City of Jerusalem, on March 22, 2024. (Photo by Ahmad Gharabli / AFP)
This editorial was originally published on the Wall Street Journal on February 29th 2024.
“Major elements of Islamic Shari’a are human dignity, justice, fairness and freedom: there is no force, no compulsion in the case of faith and religion.” An excerpt from the first part of ResetDOC’s latest video-interview with Mohsen Kadivar, Professor of Islamic Studies at Duke University, on pluralism in Islam.
Text Editing and Production: Nina zu Fürstenberg Interview: Nina zu Fürstenberg Video: Andrea Martella – Salvatore Caruso Video Editing: Andrea Martella
Michael Daniel Driessen, joined by Giancarlo Bosetti, Sihem Djebbi, Claudio Fontana and Paolo Maggiolini, will discuss his most recent publication, “The Global Politics of Interreligious Dialogue: Religious Change, Citizenship, and Solidarity in the Middle East” published by Oxford University Press, which examines the growth of state-sponsored interreligious dialogue initiatives in the Middle East and their use as a policy instrument for engaging with religious communities and ideas. Using a novel theoretical framework and drawing on five years of ethnographic fieldwork, Driessen’s book explores both the history of interreligious dialogue and the evolution of theological approaches to religious pluralism in the traditions of Roman Catholicism and Sunni Islam. It presents four studies of dialogue in the Middle East—the Focolare Community in Algeria, the Adyan Foundation in Lebanon, the King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz International Centre for Interreligious and Intercultural Dialogue (KAICIID) of Saudi Arabia, and the Doha International Center for Interfaith Dialogue (DICID) of Qatar—and highlights key interreligious dialogue declarations produced in the broader Middle East over the last two decades. The event is within the framework of the project “Theologies and Practices of Religious Pluralism“.
Opening remarks: Michael Daniel Driessen (John Cabot University)
Speakers:
–> Giancarlo Bosetti (Reset DOC)
–> Sihem Djebbi (Université Sorbonne Paris Nord and Pontifical Theological Faculty of Southern Italy)
–> Claudio Fontana (Oasis Foundation and Catholic University of Milan)
–> Paolo Maggiolini (Catholic University of Milan)
Cover photo: Pope Francis embraces the Grand Imam of al-Azhar mosque Sheikh Ahmed Al-Tayeb during their meeting at the Papal residence near the Sakhir Royal Palace, in the eponymous Bahraini city on November 4, 2022. (Photo by Marco Bertorello / AFP)
When English settlers came to the “new Zion,” they behaved much like Israeli Zionists today. What’s the lesson? This is the first part of an article originally published on Salon, on March 31st 2024.
“Humankind cannot bear very much reality,” T.S. Eliot wrote in the first of his Four Quartets. Today’s Israel-Hamas war and America’s own increasingly warlike divisions are forcing some of us to bear realities we haven’t borne quite so heavily before. Some of those realities involve attitudes against Jews that Eliot held and that may have become menacing again — as have the recent frantic efforts to censure antisemitism itself, sometimes in ways that risk prompting even worse antisemitism.
But larger eruptions of hatred and mayhem in America’s increasingly divided, uncivil society are driven not by antisemitism or by today’sJews, nor by the riptides of global capital and technology and the desperate migrations and belligerent nationalisms that they accelerate. More than most of us recognize, they’re driven by ancient religious passions that figured deeply in Israel’s and America’s origins. Both nations’ professedly “liberal” and civic-republican cultures are profoundly and perhaps fatally conflicted, in ways that prompt not only news headlines but also biblically resonant upheavals, even when the participants don’t consider themselves religious at all.
Some of these conflicts have generated the Trump phenomenon, but Donald Trump and his media heralds, political acolytes and allies — including most evangelical Christians and many Orthodox Jews — aren’t the progenitors of these conflicts; they’re carriers of a deeper plague. Similarly, the belligerent Jewish nationalists who currently govern the State of Israel are accelerants of a doom-eager Zionism that isn’t new in history and that some of the Bible’s own prophets condemned.
Few of us can bear very much of such realities, whether in America or in Israel. I want to make a few observations about the origins of America’s obsession with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Original image by New York Public Library. Uploaded by Ibolya Horvath, published on 14 January 2021. (Creative Commons)
The 17th-century English Calvinists who colonized lands that they called New England and Virginia, and whose 18th-century legatees participated in founding the American republic, pursued strategies remarkably similar to those of today’s Israeli settlers in the West Bank and today’s military invaders of Gaza, some of whom claim a divine mandate and others a “manifest destiny” to impose one ethno-religious identity at the expense of longtime inhabitants.
In retrospect, American Puritans seem almost to have been “copying” today’s Israeli Zionists, tactic for tactic and pious justification for pious justification. Even more remarkably, Puritans justified what they were doing not by looking ahead 300 years but by looking back more than two millennia, emulating biblical Israelites’ “Hebrew republic” so intensely that they called themselves the “New Israel” and New England their “Zion.” They even put the Hebrew phrase Urim v’tumim, — meaning, approximately, “Light and Truth,” or “Light and Purity,” taken from the breastplate of the high priest in the Jerusalem temple — on the seal of Yale College, founded in 1701.
The “settler-colonial” paradigm (or accusation) touted by today’s American progressives in attacking Israel certainly fits the early American Puritans, who had no ancestral roots or claims on the lands they were settling and seizing. Yet their pivot backward toward ancient Israelites’ divinely promised “Zion” has infected America’s civic-republican culture in ways that still drive Protestants’ and Jews’ obsessions with Israel’s presence in the Middle East.
I experienced that strange convergence as late as the 1950s, growing up in Longmeadow, Massachusetts, an old Puritan town whose public school teachers still passed on echoes and remnants of its origins. I was also learning biblical Hebrew two afternoons a week in a nearby synagogue and, more intensively, in eight years of Jewish summer camp. When I entered Yale in 1965, in the twilight of its own Puritan ethos, I could read the Hebrew-lettered motto on its seal, and I knew that Yale’s president during my years there, Kingman Brewster Jr., himself born in Longmeadow, was a direct descendant of Elder William Brewster, the minister on the Mayflower in 1620.
In June 1967, you could have found me standing in line outside the Jewish Agency in Manhattan, hoping to register as a noncombatant in the Six-Day War. Not yet 21, I needed parental permission, which I didn’t get, so I didn’t go. But two years later, I was in Haifa and the Galilee with a small movement for Arab-Jewish cooperation, holding intense conversations with Palestinian citizens of Israel, as I’ve recounted in The New Jews, an anthology of essays by young American-Jewish activists of that time that I co-edited with the late scholar of Hebrew literature Alan Mintz. My own story only matters here because it showed me some origins of today’s controversy that are overlooked or mishandled by American Christians and Jews who are reckless with historical narratives, mythical or scholarly.
Ever since Jews’ own origin story, in Genesis 12:1, announced that God had told Abraham to “Go from your country [Ur, in Mesopotamia, ed] and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you,” Jews have unsettled, stimulated and exasperated other peoples because they had unsettled and uprooted themselves ever since their own “Abrahamic,” pivotal, “axial” break in human consciousness and conventions, becoming a tribe that negates a lot of what’s usually tribal in pursuing something broader.
A lot of this has been “too much” reality for many people and peoples to bear — Jews as well as non-Jews. The word “Hebrew” —ivry — means “He passed over,” as in crossing borders that are metaphysical and cultural as well as geographical, to pursue universal knowledge and justice across time as well as space. Many Americans and Israelis consider such pursuits essential to the Enlightenment, not to religion. But Abraham’s grandson Jacob, demanding to know the terms of the mission, wrestled with an angel for a whole night until the angel released him at dawn without an answer and renamed him Yisrael, which means, “He contends with God.”
That’s a myth for all of us, believers or not. Ancient Hebrews’ uprooting from Ur and their contentions elsewhere figured centrally in America’s own beginnings as a “nation of immigrants,” a land of clean breaks and fresh starts, and they figure now in our preoccupations with the Gaza war: from the biblical Abraham to Abraham Lincoln and beyond, the Hebraic origins of the American republic still matter, even as the country is becoming more gnostic, agnostic or libertarian, and less Hebraic and covenantal.
So let me make a few more observations about the original Jewish “axial” break from other traditions, and then about how New England Puritans transported that break into what has become our fraught, disintegrating civic-republican culture.
Jewish sublimity and its discontents
In the Genesis myth, Abraham doesn’t only leave Ur; he smashes its idols and even prepares to sacrifice his own son Isaac at the command of a hidden but omnipotent Interlocutor. Equally puzzling, the command is rescinded at the last minute, even as Abraham is preparing to obey it by binding his trusting son and raising his hand to strike the fatal blow. The father’s grief and loneliness are broken by the angel Gabriel, bringing a ram to substitute for Isaac in the offering. But Abraham has other disputes with God (over God’s decision to obliterate the corrupt cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, for example, killing many innocents). And Yisrael contends with God ever after.
These biblical accounts of the human spirit’s estrangements from nature turn the latter’s enticements into signs of human futility: A central prayer in the liturgy of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, originated the claim that “man’s origin is dust, and his destiny is dust,” depicting every individual life “as a fragile potsherd, as the grass that withers, as the flower that fades, as the fleeting shadow, as the passing cloud, as the wind that blows, as the floating dust, and even as a dream that vanishes.”
Such a scourging faith projects the faithful into a vast unknown between humans and their unknowable, sometimes irascible God. Its baring of human self-awareness prompts yearnings like Jacob’s to know God’s will and to identify human pursuits with transformations of a world that isn’t wholly indifferent to their efforts, so long as they keep a covenant that limits and repurposes tribal reliance on blood and soil.
“The Jewish nation is the nation of time, in a sense which cannot be said of any other nation,” the German Protestant theologian Paul Tillich explained in 1938:
It represents the permanent struggle between time and space. … It has a tragic fate when considered as a nation of space like every other nation, but as the nation of time, because it is beyond the circle of life and death, it is beyond tragedy. The people of time … cannot avoid being persecuted, because by their very existence they break the claim of the gods of space, who express themselves in will to power, imperialism, injustice, demonic enthusiasm, and tragic self-destruction. The gods of space, who are strong in every human soul, in every race and nation, are afraid of the Lord of Time, history, and justice, are afraid of his prophets and followers.
Afraid, indeed: “The eternal silence of these infinite spaces terrifies me,” wrote Blaise Pascal, a French contemporary of the Puritans. That Jews have negated much of what’s tribal yet haven’t disappeared as a “tribe” themselves, at least in many other people’s minds, has angered some followers of Judaism’s derivative religions, Christianity and Islam, which claim to have superseded the Jewish faith and to have relieved humankind of having to bear too much reality in this fallen world.
Moses Receives the Law (Picture by Lawrence OP/Flickr)
“How odd of God to choose the Jews,” quipped journalist William Norman Ewer a century ago, capturing the mix of antipathy and admiration they have provoked ever since Judaism prompted its “axial” break in Western consciousness. You don’t need to “believe in” that break, in the religious sense, to notice that Jews have stimulated and exasperated other peoples among whom they’ve sojourned.
Christianity and Islam also acknowledge the Hebraic separation of spirit from nature: “We are all, in all places, strangers and pilgrims, travelers and sojourners,” intoned Robert Cushman, a contemporary of the Elder William Brewster and an organizer of the Pilgrims’ voyage, in a sermon he delivered in 1622. Islam commemorates Abraham’s readiness to sacrifice Isaac in a holiday, the Feast of the Sacrifice, that honors Abraham’s obedience and celebrates Isaac’s release.
But in Judaism’s judgment, these derivative religions fudge the starkness and sublimity of the separation of spirit from nature: In Dark Riddle: Hegel, Nietzsche, and the Jews, Israeli philosopher Yirmiyahu Yovel writes that Christians have depicted God “as a suffering, agonizing man, but thereby… transformed a human need into a theological principle that ends with an illusion” and “a false consolation.” For two millennia, Christians have intoned, “My kingdom is not of this world” and “Baptized in Christ, there is no Jew or Greek,” while sitting on golden thrones over armed states whose national identities are rooted even more deeply in ties of “blood and soil” than Jewish “tribal” identity has ever been.
Yet the Hebrew Bible shows that Hebrews were as terrified of existential uprootedness as Blaise Pascal or any Christian king. Even as Exodus recounts God revealing the terms of his covenantto Moses on the summit of Mount Sinai, the chosen people are busy fabricating and worshiping a Golden Calf at the foot of the mountain. Later they turn to kingly and materialistic protections against their wandering. Zionism appears in several historical periods as an attempt to return to and possess the promised land, the latest attempt provoked partly by an urgent need to escape rising persecution and even extinction.
But returning does not guarantee succeeding. For three millennia, Jews have invoked a “return” to Jerusalem from exile and a deliverance from “the Lord of time, history and justice” poetically and ritually, but not always really. Yet Jews have indeed returned at times to tribal or national service to “gods of space, who express themselves in will to power, imperialism, injustice, demonic enthusiasm, and tragic self-destruction.”
The Bible itself recognizes such ambivalence. In the Book of Samuel, Israelites importune its eponymous judge to “Give us a king to rule over us, like all the other nations.” Although that demand displeases not only Samuel but God, Samuel and the Israelites commit genocidal assaults against neighboring Canaanites, Amalekites and Philistines:
Remember what the Amalekites did to you… [when] they met you on your journey and attacked all who were lagging behind; they had no fear of God. When the Lord your God gives you rest from all the enemies around you in the land he is giving you to possess as an inheritance, you shall blot out the name of Amalek from under heaven. [Deuteronomy 25]
Then Samuel said, ‘Bring me Agag king of the Amalekites.’ Agag came to him cheerfully, for he thought, “Surely the bitterness of death is past.” But Samuel declared: ‘As your sword has made women childless, so your mother will be childless among women.’ And Samuel hacked Agag to pieces before the Lord at Gilgal. [1 Samuel 15]
Eight centuries before Christ, and 28 centuries before the Netanyahu government waged war against Hamas in Gaza, the prophet Amos said, “For the three transgressions of Gaza, Yea, for four, I will not reverse [its punishment]: Because they carried away captive a whole captivity [of Israelites] to deliver them up to Edom. So I will send a fire on the wall of Gaza, and it shall devour the palaces thereof; … and the remnant of the Philistines shall perish, Saith the Lord.”
So the militarized nationalism of today’s Zionists can be understood as another such reversion, reinforced in 2018 by the Knesset’s “Basic Law” declaring that Israel is “the Nation-State of the Jewish People,” and greatly diminishing it as a liberal democracy.
Such contradictory, conflicted uprootings and re-rootings have given Jews their atypical mobility, marginality and occasional magnificence and malfeasance, breeding some tough, defiant spirits, not only in Moses and Jesus but also in Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Albert Einstein and J. Robert Oppenheimer, inventor of the atomic bomb and self-avowed “destroyer of worlds.” The Jew as interloper, living marginally in homogeneous societies but flourishing and sometimes predominating in pluralistic and open ones — agile, entrepreneurial, walking on eggshells and thinking fast – has sometimes seemed most “at home” in media of exchange, whether of information, money, merchandise, music, math, medicine or scientific discovery. Confirmation of their prominence in those realms is presented sociologically and lyrically in anthropologist Yuri Slezkine’s The Jewish Century.
That Jews, unlike Puritans, actually do have ancestors in their “promised land” was confirmed in 1947 by the discovery of scrolls transcribed in Hebrew and buried in caves near the Dead Sea seven centuries before Islam existed and before Arabic was spoken in the region. That complicates the “settler-colonial” paradigm, which applies readily to English Puritans but more ambiguously to Jews. Yet those passages also contain prophetic warnings that Israelites’ territorial claims were contingent on keeping the covenant sealed at Sinai — or, as we might put it now, on transcending narrow tribalism to meet a higher, more universal standard. If they didn’t, God would punish them at the hands of their enemies:
Woe to those who are at ease in Zion, and to those who feel secure on the mountain of Samaria, the notable men of the first of the nations, to whom the house of Israel comes! …. Go down to Gath of the Philistines. Are you better than these kingdoms? Or is their territory greater than your territory, O you who put far away the day of disaster and bring near the seat of violence? Woe to those who lie on beds of ivory and stretch themselves out on their couches, … who drink wine in bowls and anoint themselves with the finest oils, but are not grieved over the ruin of Joseph! [Amos 6]
The reluctant but overwhelmed prophet Isaiah reported that God would punish the Israelite elites’ arrogance by destroying their Zion “until the cities lie ruined and without inhabitant, until the houses are left deserted and the fields ruined and ravaged, until the Lord has sent everyone far away and the land is utterly forsaken.”
How America’s Puritans became the “new Israel”
Puritans tried to Hebraize their Christian quest for personal salvation in Christ by grounding it in covenanted communities of law and collective discipline. But they had to reconcile their attraction to the gods of space and power with the biblical prophetic condemnations of it. Those condemnations were useful enough when Puritans faced defeats at the hands of the enemies they called “Indians,” reminding them that God had sometimes used the Israelites’ enemies to punish the chosen people for their sins. Puritans’ days of “fasting and humiliation” were essentially rituals of atonement, meant to affirm the participants’ righteousness — in the Puritans’ case, their conviction that they had superseded Israel.
It’s remarkable how closely the early American Puritan strategies, including mass murder, anticipated those of today’s Zionist settlers on the West Bank and the IDF in Gaza. In 1637, Puritan soldiers surrounded a major settlement of Connecticut’s Pequot people as Puritan leader John Mason “snatched a torch from a wigwam and set fire to the village, which, owing to the strong wind blowing, was soon ablaze,” according to James Truslow Adams’ 1921 Pulitzer-winning “The Founding of New England”:
“In the early dawn of that May morning, as the New England men stood guard over the flames, five hundred men, women, and children were slowly burned alive.” Ministers of Christ saluted one another “in the Lord Jesus,” some of them profiting directly from selling surviving Pequot boys and girls into slavery.
George Henry Boughton, Pilgrims Going to Church (Wikimedia Commons)
A few decades later, in 1676, future Harvard president Increase Mather urged and then celebrated a genocide of the Narragansett people, declaring, in his chronicle of “The Warr with the Indians in New England”:
The Heathen People amongst whom we live, and whose Land the Lord God of our Fathers hath given to us for a rightfull Possession, have at sundry times been plotting mischievous devices against that part of the English Israel which is seated in these goings down of the Sun…. And we have reason to conclude that salvation is begun [because] there are two or 3,000 Indians who have been either killed, or taken, or submitted themselves to the English…. [T]he Narragansetts are in a manner ruined… who last year were the greatest body of Indians in New England, and the most formidable Enemy which hath appeared against us. But God hath consumed them by the word, & by Famine and by sickness.
Gregory Michna, a historian of that war, writes, “Just as [the biblical] Canaan was wrested from the hands of heathens through sacral violence… the Rev. Joshua Moodey advocated infanticide as a wartime strategy, writing that ‘The Bratts of Babylon may more easily be dasht against the Stones, if we take the Season for it, but if we let them grow up they will become more formidable, and hardly Conquerable.’”
Indigenous people made retaliatory attacks against the English, including an infamous 1704 example in Deerfield, Massachusetts, by the measures of its time nearly as horrifying as last October’s Hamas attack on Israel. The Deerfield attack has figured deeply in my own moral imagination ever since a February morning in 1957, when my fourth-grade class — some of them descendants of the original Puritan settlers — sat on the floor, with the lamps turned off for effect, as Miss Ethel Smith stood before us in the pale, wintry light and told us that on another cold February morning, 250 years earlier, howling, hatchet-wielding “Indians” had slaughtered nearly 20 English settlers of Deerfield, 40 miles upriver from us, and then force-marched nearly a hundred more through the frigid wilderness to captivity in Canada.
The captives included Deerfield minister John Williams and his family. Two of his children were killed in the attack and his wife, Eunice, became weak on the trek north and fell down a ravine, tumbling into a river that swept her away. Williams’ account of that personal and communal calamity, all the more harrowing for its self-sacrificing affirmations of faith amid crucifixion, was published as The Redeemed Captive Returning to Zion soon after he and his son Stephen returned to Massachusetts in a hostage exchange. His account rivaled John Bunyan’s “The Pilgrim’s Progress” as a parable and primer for the Puritans’ holy but dangerous errand into the “howling wilderness,” as the historian John Demos recounts in The Unredeemed Captive; A Family Story of Early America, highlighting Williams’ daughter’s refusal to leave her Native captors to rejoin the English world.
Williams’ son Stephen later became the minister of Longmeadow’s Congregational church, which stands 100 yards from the classroom where Ethel Smith told us about his captivity. The great Puritan theologian Jonathan Edwards visited him there in 1740, and a year later Stephen Williams rode the five miles south from Longmeadow to Enfield, Connecticut, to hear Edwards preach his (in)famous sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” and write an eyewitness account of its listeners’ writhing reactions.
My belief that this matters may be overdetermined by the fact that, 200-plus years later, I bicycled along Williams Street every weekday, passing the church where Edwards had visited Williams, on my way to and from Miss Smith’s classroom.
Miss Smith didn’t tell us that the English had included some rogues, swindlers and mountebanks who drove the expulsions and massacres of Pequots, Pocumptucs, Mohawks, Narragansetts, Wampanoags and Abenakis. Despite their proclaimed good intentions, the settlers’ land hunger generated duplicitous trade and land deals, alongside pious missions to convert indigenous people into “praying Indians.” James Truslow Adams explains that:
As the whites increased in numbers and comparative power, and as their first fears of the savages, and the desire to convert them, gave place to dislike, contempt, spiritual indifference, and self-confidence… it was no longer considered necessary to treat with the Indian as an equal…. [T]he lands of the [Indians] gradually came to be looked upon as reservations upon which their native owners were allowed to live until a convenient opportunity, or the growing needs of the settlers, might bring about a farther advance.
Today’s Israeli settlers on the West Bank might take note and take caution. So might American patriots who have forgotten these and other precedents for our present civic-republican crisis. Even the Rev. Stephen Williams, a redeemed captive who returned from the attack on Deerfield in 1704, wound up owning Black slaves as his house servants in Longmeadow, as recent Harvard graduate Michael Baick recounts in a fascinating senior essay.
How America’s founders invoked biblical Hebrews
In the latter half of the 17th century, Cotton Mather, the son of Increase Mather and a tribune and chronicler of the Massachusetts Bay Puritans, learned Hebrew and studied the Old Testament to confirm that New England “fulfills the type of Israel materially.” Mather wrote that his Puritans, like the Hebrews making the Exodus from Egypt, had fled “slavery,” in their case under the Church of England, to establish communities “for the exercise of the Protestant religion, according to the light of their consciences, in the desarts of America.”
In 1771, the young James Madison, then a future framer and president, stayed on for a year at the College of New Jersey (later known as Princeton), to study Hebrew and Puritan theology.
In 1776, Benjamin Franklin proposed that the great seal of the United States depict “Moses in the Dress of a High Priest standing on the Shore, and Extending his Hand Over the Sea, Thereby Causing the Same to Overwhelm Pharaoh.” (The Continental Congress chose instead the Masonic-inspired seal now on every dollar bill.)
In 1809, John Adams, a descendant of New England Puritans and by then a former president, wrote, “I will insist that the Hebrews have done more to civilize Men than any other Nation. If I were an Atheist and believed in blind eternal Fate, I should still believe that Fate had ordained the Jews to be the most essential Instrument for civilizing the Nations.” Adams employed that “instrument” to advance something like the Hebrews’ covenant, writing in the preamble to the Massachusetts constitution, “The body politic is … a social compact, by which the whole people covenants with each citizen, and each citizen with the whole people, that all shall be governed by certain laws for the common good.”
Note what that entails: a civic-republican society is secured not only by institutional and legal authority but also by “understandings” that cannot merely be legislated. Nor can a civic-republican social compact be rooted ultimately in ties of “blood and soil,” the infamous German shorthand for ethno-racial, quasi-familial bonds that sustain a sense of intimacy among people who share what historian Benedict Anderson called “imagined community.” Rather, a civic-republican society must be based on a covenant, a semi-spiritual agreement among autonomous individuals to hold one another to certain public virtues and norms that neither the liberal state nor “the free market” can nourish or defend. Something additional, or foundational, is required — a civil society that relies not just on the rule of law but on the kind of “social compact” described by Adams.
Covenants require extralegal agreements, or traditions of trust, even among their competing participants, as much as they require laws that are otherwise too easily undercut by their enforcers. Thanks to such extralegal traditions, citizens accused of having broken the covenant are assured of hearings before a group of their peers, where they are informed of the charges against them and enabled to rebut or disprove the charges, if they can. A truly covenanted society cannot punish someone who hasn’t been convicted in such a process. A civic-republican society relies on an overriding sense of trust, even amid substantive disagreements among citizens. Thomas Hooker, the 17th-century “father of Connecticut,” invoked the model of the biblical “Hebrew Republic” in Election Day sermons to the settlers of that church-state, whose separation of religion and public law would come later.
In 1869, the British critic Matthew Arnold observed that Protestant Americans had internalized Hebraism’s scourging demands for “conduct and obedience” and “strictness of conscience”:
To walk staunchly by the best light one has, to be strict and sincere with oneself, not to be of the number… who say and do not, to be in earnest – …. this discipline has been nowhere so effectively taught as in the school of Hebraism…. [T]he intense and convinced energy with which the Hebrew, both of the Old and of the New Testament, threw himself upon his ideal, and which inspired the incomparable definition of the great Christian virtue, Faith — the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen — this energy of faith in its ideal has belonged to Hebraism alone.
“From Maine to Florida and back again, all America Hebraizes,” Arnold wrote, and Hebraic intrepidity and prickly fidelity indeed characterized the training of many American leaders and followers at prep schools like Groton, whose founding rector, Endicott Peabody, was a Puritan descendant. His students included Franklin D. Roosevelt, who continued to correspond with Peabody even after becoming president.
In 1987, historian Shalom Goldman discovered that George W. Bush’s great-uncle five generations removed, the Rev. George Bush, was the first teacher of Hebrew at New York University in 1835 and the author of a book on Islam, “A Life of Mohammed,” which pronounced the prophet an imposter. In 1844, the Rev. Bush wrote “The Valley of the Vision, or The Dry Bones Revived,” interpreting the biblical Book of Ezekiel to prophesy the return of the Jews to Palestine.
I don’t know whether George W. Bush has read his ancestor’s exegesis, but Barack Obama cited Ezekiel in his 2008 speech on race, recalling that at his Trinity Church in Chicago (a branch of the Puritans’ Congregational Church), “Ezekiel’s field of dry bones” was one of the “stories — of survival, and freedom, and hope” — that “became our story, my story; the blood that had spilled was our blood, the tears our tears.”
Obama seemed to want to weave back into America’s civic-republican fabric some tough old threads of Abrahamic, covenantal faith. Now that we’re looking through gaping holes in that fabric, the republic’s fate seems more contingent than ever on its founders’ hope that it could rely on “strictness of conscience” and citizens’ inner beliefs as strongly as on their outward performances and interests.
Much from those origins still animated American civic culture during my childhood but has gone missing during the 70 years since Miss Smith’s pronouncements implanted in an impressionable nine-year-old some of the old Puritan (and Hebraic) discipline. Even John Adams’ civic-republican culture seems to have given way to personalistic strains in evangelical Christianity and in the republic’s Lockean heritage.
It would be wrong for today’s faltering, formerly “mainline” Congregationalists, Presbyterians and other Protestants to displace onto today’s Israel their own discomfort about soulless neoliberalism or reactionary tribalism. If we could reweave older, stronger threads into our civic-republican fabric, we might remember that claims on sacred soil and blood are contingent on upholding principles that can’t be defended, much less inculcated,by armies and wealth alone.
Cover photo: Illustration of the departure of the pilgrim fathers, for America. Dated 1620 (Photo by Ann Ronan Picture Library / Photo12 via AFP.)
In the largest election year in history, with over 2 billion voters already gone or set to go to the polls in 50 countries, nearly 970 million Indians are expected to cast their ballots in what will be the world’s largest democratic exercise. India’s general elections kick off today and will be held in phases through June 1, with results to be announced on June 4. Despite a decade-long erosion of rights and the hollowing out of democratic institutions, most polls predict a victory for Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party for a third consecutive five-year term. What does an India heading to the polls look like in 2024? How has ten years of BJP rule shaped the world’s largest democracy?
An introductory piece by Maria Tavernini looks at how the BJP is attempting to mold the electorate through shady practices. An interview by Giancarlo Bosetti with Jean Drèze underscores India’s significant lack of economic progress compared to its neighbors, while Abhijan Choudhury delves into the complex interplay of caste, class, and regional factors in shaping the electoral landscape. Mujibur Rehman comments on Modi’s efforts to create an “India for Hindus” by eroding the rights of India’s religious minorities. Ashaz Mohammed analyzes a specific case of Muslims marginalization: Indian school history textbooks are erasing Mughal history. Finally, Chandra Mallampalli explores the potential implications of the BJP’s agenda under Modi’s leadership, suggesting that his re-election could herald significant constitutional changes aimed at advancing a Hindu-centric vision for India.
If you wish to contribute further to the discussion, please feel free to write to alessandra.tommasi@resetdoc.org.
