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PDF FormatThis element enables a Jew to transfer in his imagination—virtually—essential and basic elements of his national identity, like territory, language, and even a framework of natural national solidarity, from the active and living nationality to the religious life and its ceremonies, and to preserve them for thousands of years as if they were real and actual.
The physical territory of the land of Israel was preserved as a symbol or metaphor of the holy land in prayer or in religious ceremonies. The national language became a holy language and acted not as a living and practical language but as a rabbinical one or one reserved for prayer. The institutions of self-determination, sovereignty and the military became symbols and metaphors that the Jew was able to alter and knead in different spiritual commentaries (but not as a fact active in reality) as he wished and as he needed.11
The Jew’s particular ability to live physically in one nation while belonging to another in the abstract—one whose members had no common territory or governmental institutions—allowed him to integrate into a foreign cultural and political environment, true, but it also provoked powerful antagonism. The elastic nature of Jewish identity, says Yehoshua, is the root of anti-Semitism:
The fact that a Jew recognizes certain clear, virtual fundamentals makes his identity flexible, fluid, lacking clear boundaries, and difficult to identify; enables virtual activity equivalent to that of a non-Jew to accrue to it, for better or worse, which can be associated with this identity more easily than with other identities defined and delineated by territory, a language, and the traditional elements that create identity. This association is usually achieved according to the needs of the one associating, in fantasies, fears, or various desires on the basis of which the superstructure of religious arguments and contentions is erected.12
According to Yehoshua, the Jewish nation is a unique phenomenon; a combination of nationality and religion that exists intact in the Jewish imagination even when Jews are living dispersed, landless, and without self-determination on the terrain of other nations.13 But is this really a phenomenon that has no counterpart? An examination of the development of Islam from its beginnings until our own time reveals that it is not.
What the prophet Muhammad established in 622 following the hijra from Mecca to Medina was not only a religion, but also a nation: The Nation of Islam, orummah (the word for nation in Arabic and Hebrew is identical). Muhammad demanded that his followers accept not only the Sacred Book, its fundamentals of faith, and its binding laws, but also allegiance to a sociopolitical group obedient to the authority of a single ruler and prepared to take up arms when necessary. Thus the fundamental principle of Islam was the idea of religion and state as an indissoluble unit.
The nation Muhammad founded was exceptional in that it was not a function of social status, ethnicity, or territorial location. The only condition a man must fulfill to become a Muslim is his willingness to convert to Islam. Sovereignty over the Islamic nation is granted not to a king or to the collective that comprises the Islamic nation, but to Allah alone. The principle—absurd to Western ears—that a man can belong completely, politically as well as religiously, to the Islamic nation, even if he does not live under Muslim rule, derives from this essential concept.
In its early years, the Islamic nation was a tangible entity. It numbered several hundred of Muhammad’s followers, each of whom knew their leader and each other as flesh-and-blood human beings. But within a few decades, the nation’s conquests had become so extensive that, out of necessity, it became an imagined nation. The Muslim in Syria, the Muslim in Egypt, and the Muslim in Spain, while all belonging to the same political-religious community, could verify this belonging only through the abstract belief that the sacred text they read, the laws they obeyed, and the wars they were embarking on were held in common by Muslims they had never seen and would never see.
A mere three hundred years after the establishment of Islam, the physical Muslim nation that had become an imagined Muslim nation split into a myriad of sub-kingdoms, which differed from each other not only in their leadership, but also in their theological outlooks and legal systems. But while the Muslim domain was splitting up into separate, occasionally mutually hostile entities, the idea of the Islamic nation as a united religious-political community retained its vitality. The competing Muslim kingdoms did not see themselves as autonomous units, each with a manifest ethnic and territorial identity, but rather as faithful representatives of the supra-ethnic and supra-territorial Islamic nation. The last of these kingdoms, the Ottoman Empire, was not “Turkish” in the sense in which Westerners commonly and mistakenly refer to it. It characterized itself as the embodiment of the Islamic nation, and as it grew weaker, it came to rely more and more on that concept.
The breakup of the Ottoman Empire after World War I led to a change in the way the Islamic nation was perceived and imagined. From the ashes of the empire rose territorial nation states in which Islam played a secondary role. At the beginning of the twentieth century, therefore, for the first time since its establishment, the Islamic nation lacked any territorial entity that could claim to represent it. Islam lost not only its unity, but also the competing political entities that purported to embody that unity.
Muslim clerics could not tolerate such a state of affairs; it violated the fundamental Islamic principle that the Islamic nation is one unified religious and political framework. Reaction to the Muslim political reality that followed World War I was almost instantaneous, and, at its most forceful, it was a fundamental negation of the existing order. For clerics and radical intellectuals like the Pakistani Abu al-Ala al-Maududi and the Egyptian Sayyid Qutb, the entire concept of the new territorial nation states was jahili, or non-Islamic, and therefore wholly illegitimate.14 They demanded a restoration of the unity of the Muslim nation and the return of Islam to its rightful place as the supreme regulatory structure of all aspects of life, including politics. Because even more moderate clerics were bound by this fundamental principle, the regimes in Muslim nation states were compelled to pay lip service to it—whether by bankrolling institutions that theoretically embodied the unity of believers, employing rhetoric that boasted of the existence of the Islamic nation, or providing fiscal and political support to Islamic religious organizations throughout the Muslim and Western world.15 Nonetheless, in the absence of any real political power or military capability, the Islamic nation remains a purely imagined entity; it exists only in fatwas, in homiletics, and in pan-Islamic conferences. As such, it is an idea, the perfect image of a mythical past, separate from the circumstances of the present and its practical dictates.
The situation of the Islamic nation is thus analogous in several important respects to the situation of the Jewish nation following the Babylonian exile. That is, it is a nation that exists on a purely imagined level; but even as an imagined nation it contains a set of beliefs, symbols, and yearnings that retain enormous power over its members’ allegiances and identity.
As fate would have it, the period during which the Islamic nation became a purely imagined nation, devoid of any tangible political dimension, also witnessed the mass immigration of millions of Muslims to the West. Ironically, living conditions in the Western world made the concept of an imagined Islamic nation far easier to accept. Whereas the dictatorships that hold sway over many parts of the Islamic world suppress their more radical clerics and restrict their ability to speak in the name of the Islamic nation, the open and liberal environment of Western societies allows considerable freedom of thought and expression. The Muslim immigrant in London, Paris, Amsterdam, or Berlin can therefore present himself as and behave like an active member of an imagined Islamic nation without fear of the violent and often murderous reprisal facing his counterparts living in dictatorial nation states.
There are reasons to doubt the extent to which Europeans who fear Islamic immigrants and their possible intentions are aware of these dynamics. However, even the most complex issues of identity and allegiance can sometimes be perceived instinctively and unconsciously. The European senses that the Islamic identity is unlike that of other minorities living in his midst, and therefore he fears it.
