Workshop Others Within and Without: Muslims, Jews and European Identity
Last Updated on Friday, 30 April 2010 15:56
This was a one-day workshop that explored the mutual and intersecting analyses of both Arab/Muslim and Jew as framed in a relational presence to each other and to Europe. It was held in SOAS on Saturday 14th March 2009.
A report of the day's events written by Madeline Clements:
A range of speakers and delegates, academic and professional, and from diverse fields, gathered at SOAS on Saturday 14th March to participate in the one-day workshop Others Within and Without: Muslims, Jews and European Identity. The aim of the day was to explore the mutual and intersecting analyses of the Arab/Muslim and Jew as framed in relation to each other, and to Europe. Organised by Peter Morey and Amina Yaqin as part of the AHRC-funded project, Framing Muslims: Representation in Culture and Society Post 9/11, which fosters research into the cultural, social and legal structures which 'frame' contemporary debates about Muslims in the west, the discussions which ensued were to prove (in the words of SOAS’s Annabelle Sreberney) both fascinating and necessary.
In her welcoming remarks, Sreberney briefly outlined the parameters of the Framing Muslims project in exploring the way Muslim subjects are positioned and represented or ‘spoken for’ in contemporary multicultural society. Focusing on the considerations of the day, she acknowledged the workshop’s indebtedness to the Gil Anidjar’s book The Jew, the Arab, which analyses how Europe has defined itself historically through the production of two ‘others’ – the Jew ‘within’, and the Arab ‘without’. She went on to highlight the pressing need, at a time of rising European anti-Semitism and Islamopobia, heightened anxiety regarding religious extremism, and increased violence against Gaza, to interrogate the processes of stereotyping deployed by the media and civil society to ‘frame’ Jews as well as Muslims, and to examine how, ironically, modes of historic and contemporary ‘othering’ may unite Jew and Muslims, even as they compete on a world stage for who is most persecuted, vilifying and stereotyping one another as they do so.
The first session, intended to present an overview of the ‘othering’ of the Arab/Muslim and Jew, heard contributions from Toronto University’s Ivan Kalmar on ‘Muslims with Jews: Orientalist Structures, Restructures, and Destructures’, and Goldsmiths’ historian Sarah Lambert, who spoke on ‘Aberrant decoding? Muslims and Jews in the visual and textual polemic of the crusades.’ Kalmar’s talk drew on ideas from Said’s Orientalism to trace the ‘joint imaginative construction’ of Muslims and Jews through 700 years of historical restructuring and ‘destructuring’ of the Orients, culminating in the invention post-1948 of a ‘Judaeo-Christian’ tradition of alleged commonality between Jews and Christians, constructed in opposition to negative versions of Islam. He suggested that though we are far from a reciprocal recognition of seeing the self in the ‘other’, and the other in ’other’ in the self today, the realisation of a commonality between contemporary misrecognitions of Muslim and Jew may provide a starting point for dialogue. Lambert then suggested that the two ‘othernesses’ of Muslim and Jew, located in a fantastical Orient, were deeply intertwined in the construction of medieval Europe, highlighted medieval Christianity’s inability to relate its self to the Orient, and described its attempts simultaneously to appropriate aspects of Judaism and Islam position them as deviant or satanic in origin. Her explorations of medieval Europe’s attempts at the time of the crusades to control and contain a Jewish minority ring-fenced as ‘the other within’, and who – perhaps as a result of ‘aberrant decoding’ – increasingly proved targets for violent attacks, proved particularly stimulating.
In the second session, focused on current anti-Arab/Muslim and anti-Jewish racisms and the media, Adi Kuntsman of Manchester University reported her current research in ‘Framing war, figuring otherness, diasporising hatred: anti-Semitism and Islamophobia on the Russian-language Internet’. Rather than a site for the border-transcending resistance of dominant representations, she described the blogosphere as a discursive space saturated with surprising and disturbing Orientalist, Islamophobic and anti-Semitic language and imagery, in which racial, national and religious boundaries were reinforced and violent interactions encouraged as much as they are challenged. In ‘Critical Solidarity: regarding the overlapping of anti-Arab and anti-Jewish racisms in the Guardian and the Independent newspapers’, SOAS PhD student Hagai van der Horst likewise offered a richly illustrated account of recent research, demonstrating how the identities of ‘Jew’ and ‘Arab’ are produced in relation to one another in the British press.
In the afternoon session, ‘framing the Arab/Muslim and Jew in context’, Jerusalem-based lawyer and politician, Ziad AbuZayyad, offered a candid and personal insight into ‘The impact of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict on the Islamic-Jewish relations’. Of particular relevance were his comments regarding the need, at a time of ‘political Islam’, to identify and deal similarly with ‘political Judaism’ (drawing a parallel rather than a distinction between the nationalist policies of Israel and Iran); his highlighting of the importance of distinguishing in debates between articulations of anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic sentiment, and between Arab and Muslim; and his stressing of the responsibility incumbent upon the media to modify the polarised images of ‘enemy’ Jew and Muslim ‘others’ it projects respectively into Palestinian and Israeli homes. SOAS’s Tudor Parfitt went on to offer an explication of ‘The linkage of Jews and Muslims in European thought’, describing how, in Early Modern history, the figure of a Biblical, Hebrew-speaking Jew became the template of a ‘known other’, acting for the ‘unknown other’ of the Arabic-speaking Muslim or ‘Moor’; and how both provided a ‘prism of otherness’ through which the peoples of newly discovered worlds beyond the Mediterranean were viewed.
In the final session on localised Arab/Islamic-Jewish identities, Fiyaz Mughal from the organisation Faith Matters drew on professional experiences of working to promote inter-faith dialogue for his paper, ‘Looking back to look forward: Framing identities through crises within Europe; Bosnia and the Holocaust’. He described commonalities between the narratives of Jewish and Muslim survivors of genocide and their ensuing crises of self-identification, and drew attention to the systematic processes of ‘framing’ used to ‘badge’ communities from different faith elements as ‘other’, isolated within and then extracted from mainstream society. In his concluding remarks he returned the discussion to the concerns of the day, emphasising the vital need to look to the impact of similarly alienating practices in the context of Europe post 9/11.
Full Listing of Contributors and their paper titles:
Ziad AbuZayyad, The impact of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict on the Islamic-Jewish relations
Ivan Kalmar, Muslims with Jews: Orientalist Structures, Restructures, and Destructures
Adi Kuntsman, Framing war, figuring otherness, diasporising hatred: anti-Semitism and Islamophobia on the Russian-language Internet
Sarah Lambert, Aberrant decoding? Muslims and Jews in the visual and textual polemic of the crusades
Fiyaz Mughal, Looking back to look forward: Framing identities through crises within Europe; Bosnia and the Holocaust
Tudor Parfitt, The linkage of Jews and Muslims in European thought
Annabelle Sreberny, Opening remarks and chair of panel discussions
Hagai van der Horst, Critical Solidarity: Regarding the overlapping of anti-Arab and anti-Jewish racisms in the Guardian and the Independent newspapers
Nira Yuval-Davis, Racialized discourses on Arabs and Jews in British and French Press
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