Irish Terror Trouble by Richard English

Why do significant terrorist campaigns begin?  How are terrorist campaigns sustained? Why does terrorism end?

Each side in the Irish conflict preferred an outcome which would see the state representing their own national tradition (Irish or British), their own religious orientation (Catholic or Protestant), their own economic interests (broadly, Protestant Ulster had thrived within the industrial, imperial UK framework more strikingly than had the more nationalist remainder of the island), and their own cultural (more Gaelic-influenced for nationalists, more emphatically centered on Britain for the unionists.) There was, therefore a long-rooted problem of contested legitimacy in Ireland, and the resolution of this in the 1920s was messy.  The partitioning of Ireland into north and south left a sizeable minority of Irish nationalists  in the Northern Irish part of the UK, many of them feeling that the state they inhabited was neither legitimate or fair. If the whole of Ireland were to be separated from Britain, then a strong and concentrated north-eastern minority of unionists would themselves be in the wrong state and hostile to it. Thus the politics of nationalism and the problem of unresolved self-determination were long present in the Irish-British relationship and they formed the vital historical context within which to place the eruptions of various terrorisms in Ireland (1969-2005).

The political aims and justifications of terrorism- whether Irish Republican (opposed to UK membership), or pro-UK Ulster loyalist – therefore had deep historical roots. In each case, there was for the practitioners of violence not only an urgent need for such aggressive action, but also a legitimization of it in terms of the nation: even though most co-nationals did not enthuse over your violence, it was still seen as essentially democratic  because it was carried out in pursuit of what were perceived as historically legitimate national rights. The Provisional IRA in the 1970s presented themselves and their violence (they killed 1,045 people during the decade) in precisely these terms, pointing back to the authentic Irish republic which had been declared by the Easter rebel of 1916 and then embodied in the legitimate Irish Republican parliaments created during 1918- 21. According to this view, the IRA was

the direct representative of the 1918 Dail Eireann parliament . . .as such they are the legal and lawful government of the Irish Republic . . . The Irish Republican Army, as the legal representatives of the Irish people, are morally justified in carrying out  a campaign of resistance against foreign occupation forces and domestic collaborators…the moral position of the IRA, its right to engage in warfare is based on: (a) the right to resist foreign aggression; (b) the right to revolt against tyranny and oppression; and (c) the direct lineal succession with the Provisional government of 1916, and the second Dail of 1921.

According to such views, IRA violence was not anti-democratic terrorism but rather democratically justifiable struggle in pursuit of national rights and freedom, against the by day-to day unfairness and Catholic communal disadvantages they experienced under British rule which then prompted the 1960S civil rights movement for reform precipitating inter-communal conflict from which the Troubles subsequently ensued. So too in the 1970s, the IRA claimed that the source of violence lay ‘in the social and economic deprivation suffered by the nationalist’s people in Northern Ireland’: peaceful attempts to deal with the problems had failed, force was ‘the only means of removing the evil of the British presence in Ireland.’

The specific sequence of events which led to the birth of the Provisional IRA points to other key aspects of explanation and understanding. One is the psychological and emotional force behind such violence. As civil rights demonstrators clashed with rival unionist/loyalist protestors and with policed, and inter-communal violence escalated during 1969, there emerged an understandable urge within some Catholic areas towards the provision of a new IRA defense force. But just as the existence, actions and fear of the IRA had helped prompt awful loyalist violence in the 1960S, so too violence from the loyalists and then from tye British army after its 1969 deployment, in turn generated a nationalist desire to strike back. The Provisionals were rarely ever abler to defend their community effectively; they did, however succeed in hitting back: ‘first, I think, it was defense of the ghettos . . . and then to retaliate too. Defense and retaliation were the terms we used to use. With increasing friction between British soldiers and the Catholic working class, searches, arrests, and street and other clashes  led to an increasing desire for revenge. Why join the IRA?  One ex-member reflected: ‘It was because of a process of British repression as clearly distinct from any sort of attachment to republican ideology.’

For some in the movement, ideological inheritance a tradition did mean a considerable amount… Future Brighton bomber Patrick Magee had an IRA grandfather, but he also stressed that his own arrest and beating-up at the hands of British soldiers played its part in leading him to join the IRA; there was, he says, ‘a sense of anger. Real anger. I felt I just couldn’t walk away from this, and I did join up.’  Another man reflected: ‘Probably one of  the deciding factors would have been constant harassment of British troops on the streets. It generally created an atmosphere of violence and the desire to fight back and not accept that type of state.’

In addition to the desire to strike back and exact revenge paramilitary recruits also gained rewards in terms of status, power, prestige, excitement, camaraderie, influence and kudos among one’s peers.

Evidence accumulated that, really, the six-county area (Northern Ireland) was irreformable, that it was impossible to change it by civil means. ‘Irish history is littered with the corpses of Irish politicians who genuinely believed that political processes set up by the English would achieve justice and freedom. The six counties is a politically contrived and manipulated ‘state’ designed specifically to allow the permanent domination of one section of the community over the other. Any reforms which it is forced to accept are only cosmetic and not worth the paper they are written on . . the Republican movement will not settle for anything less than British withdrawal.’ As Gerry Adams said in 1989: ‘The British government does not respond to the force of argument. It only understands the argument of force, this is why armed struggle is a fact of life, and death, in the six counties’

The IRA strategy is very clear. At some point in the future, due to the pressure of the continuing and sustained armed struggle, the will of the British government to remain in this country will be broken. That is the objective of the armed struggle . . .we can state confidently today that there will be no ceasefire and no truces until Britain declares its intent to withdraw and leave our people in peace.

Bombs in British cities and violence against British soldiers was an attempt to coerce the wider public into pressurizing their own government towards giving the IRA what it wanted. It was the well know  Clausewitzean strategy of war: your opponent had to be put in a position which was more oppressive to them than it would be for them to give you what you wanted.

If dispassionate analysis is necessary to explain the complexities which produced serious terrorism [albeit in an abbreviated form here], then what of our second question: How are terrorist campaigns sustained? The Provisional IRA 1969-2005 campaign provides a bloody and durable case study. In the first place, however it is not simply true that “Once you start the business of killing, you just get ‘deeper and deeper, without limits. Although escalating communal violence  played an important role in the emergence of the Provisional IRA as a serious force, the highest rates of annual killing occurred early on, the later conflict characterized by much lower rates of fatal violence. A better explanation for the ‘sustainability’ of the Ulster Troubles was escalating violence on the part of the British government. The Falls Curfew in July 1970 : an extensive search  of Belfast’s Lower Falls district during which many houses were damages, and people killed. Though many weapons were seized, in Gerry Adam’s words, “The Falls Road Curfew made popular opposition to the British Army absolute in Belfast … After that recruitment to the IRA was massive.” Then the British government was induced by Ulster Unionists to introduce internment without trial and in August hundreds of people were  lifted on the basis of weak intelligence and given very harsh treatment. When British soldiers fatally shot fourteen anti-internment marchers on 30 January 1972 in Derry (Bloody Sunday’) the IRA gained more potential recruits than it could easily cope with. Both republican and loyalists played their parts in the escalating hostility but violence against civilians, one-sidedly directed at the Catholic communes played a dramatic part in stimulating the growth of precisely that organization against which their actions had been  directed.

Sustained by inter-communal violence and the heavy-hand of the government, intra-communal violence also played a role in sustaining the terrorist strategy. Within the Republican movement there repeatedly developed feuds and splits between the warring Provisional and Official factions which spawned a hostile offshoot in the form of the Irish National Liberation Army. In these intra-movement battles tit-for-tat vengeance played a part, as did rival conceptions of the best strategy or ideological path and competition between alternative leaders and leaderships. Similar intra-communal struggles were apparent also on the loyalist side.

Although leaders of the IRA initially expected an early success, in  the late 70s  most had settled into the prospect of a long war, Gerry Adams by 1973. As they saw it their war was just, the Irish had rights to national self-determination and to liberation from colonial enslavement: it was destined for success, as suggested by the late twentieth-century decline of the British Empire.  Sustenance  was also provided by cultural-national enthusiasm or socialist millenarianism. Support also came from external actors , such as diasporic sympathizers in the USA and Colonel Gaddafi. Mundane but significant momentum was provided by organizational dynamics themselves: training, meetings, campaigning, fund-raising, commemorations establish the identity, solidarity and comradeship.

But one cannot explain the durability of the Provos brutal campaign without acknowledging that behind it was a serious and recognizably important contest over political legitimacy.


Multiple causation is clearly at work in the generation and sustenance of terrorism, and the same is true when we turn to our third major question: Why does terrorism end?


By 1986 Gerry Adams had acknowledged the reality of a situation of deadlock in which the IRA was able to block the imposition of a British solution but were unable to force the British to withdraw.. By 1990, this military stalemate was being clearly noted by other sharp-eyed republicans. Adams himself had apparently been in indirect dialogue with British politicians during 1986-, a crucial factor. Provisional IRA violence had emphatically political roots and aims and- potentially- resolution; those involved were as normal and rational as other political actors tend to be, and when years of struggle had taught the lesson that violence was bringing, not the anticipated victory, but instead pointless stalemate, then such people looked for alternate ways of achieving political momentum. When those involved in terrorist violence recognized that they had potentially more to gain from non-violent than from violent politics, they eschewed the latter in favor of the former.

The distinctive  1990s engagement with Northern Ireland by the Clinton regime in Washington added impetus towards a fruitful peace process (especially as it reassured Irish republicans that there was someone involved in the initiative who as more powerful than the British and who was, if anything, sympathetic to the nationalist rather than the unionist politics in Ireland.) The harmonious relationship of British and Irish politicians and civil servants within the European Union context facilitated a joint London-Dublin approach to Northern Ireland in ways that offered a framework for negotiations. Again, for those republicans whose struggle had involved a hard-leftist commitment to destroying capitalism, the death of communism closed-off expected revolutionary progress and made compromise seem more sensible. Later on, the impulse to abandon terrorism was strengthened by the atrocity of 9/11 [by which you might infer the author means, success in persuading the British voters to blame their own government for the situation seemed less imaginable.] And, of course, through the course of the long war the British public simply became accustomed to the violence [just as Americans do mass shootings in their own country.

If the British could endure the IRA’s lethal activities of 1971-6 (during which they killed an average of 144 people a year), would increasingly lower level of fatal activity ( never more than 100 people a year between 1977-2001) really be likely to produce a better outcome? Part of this shift lay in the increasing effectiveness of state counter-terrorism, although this should not be over-stated. The IRA remained in a position to achieve huge and damaging bombings in Britain as well as fatal attacks in Ireland. But the latter years of the war were ones during which the Provisional’s ranks were riddled with agents and informers. Accurate intelligence,  was of far greater benefit in the fight against terrorism than the more formal military muscle.

Furthermore, there is considerable evidence to suggest that sharp-eyed republicans came by the early 1990S to acknowledge that their reading of the Ulster unionists had been simplistic and naïve. ‘In a way we made them into non-people. We just said: you can’t move the unionists until you move the Brits. So we didn’t even see them as part of the problem, never mind as being part of the solution.’ Once  the unionists were placed more centrally in view, as an enduring obstacle rather  than just a tool of the British, then more subtle ways of dealing with the problem became possible.

Similarly, it was recognized that prompt British withdrawal from the North would in fact have catastrophic economic consequences for a region that was propped up by British state subvention.  Most decisively of all, perhaps, it became clear  that the main obstacle to achieving Irish unity lay not in London, but rather in the complex range of views in Ireland itself, North and South. With unionist recalcitrance, with obdurate loyalist resistance, and with the southern electorates and governments which were markedly ambivalent about the prospect of unity anyway, the feasibility of the IRA’s traditional goal now seemed questionable.

So in Northern Ireland it was not that a prior peace process addressed the root causes of the conflict and the the terrorism ended, but rather that the key terrorist movement recognized that its violence was not producing what it had expected it to produce, that there might e greater rewards from peaceful politics, and political realities demanded a rethinking of strategy. This sea change decisively allowed for the construction of a peace process that could address some of the root causes of the conflict in ways that allowed for the prospect of sustainable peace in the North of Ireland.

The deal which emerged was one which took lengthy and difficult work both too construct and then to implement.

[Did terrorism work in Northern Ireland? The author thinks not. It did not convince the British to leave. Yet the long campaign of terror eventually led those who conducted it, and those against whom it was conducted, it to pursue a different course. There is no telling what how the situation in Northern Ireland would have developed had there been no terror campaign. The certainty is the that roots of The Troubles could not be simply ‘wished-away’.]

Hannah Arendt "Zur Person" Full Interview (with English subtitles)

The Bergen-Belsen Heap by Mark Celinscak

In 2007, Simone Veil, a French survivor of Bergen-Belsen who later became a renown lawyer and politician, addressed the United Nations in New York during the International Day of Commemoration in the Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust. “I can still see the horrified faces of the soldiers,” she said of the troops who entered thee Bergen-Belsen concentration camp on 15 April 1945, adding solemnly that there were “no cries of joy on our part –only silence and tears.”

According to the nineteenth-century Hasidic Rabbi Menachem Medel  Morgenztern of Kotzk,  there were three ways open to a man who is in sorrow. He who stands on the normal rung weeps, he who stands higher is silent, but he who stands on the topmost rung converts his sorrow into song. For Kotzker Rebbe, the latter is the preferable response; but  Leslie Hardman of the Canadian Chaplain Services  could not remain steadfast, nor could he feel admiration for a higher power. “I could not accept,” he explained, “with perfect faith and equanimity as Aaron did, nor could I sing praises to God.” When face to face with overwhelming misery, he could not transcend the ‘rungs’ of his grief. “Keep a stiff upper lip, Padre” was the universal recommendation but it seemed utterly impossible. In those early days of ‘liberation’ Hardman became ill with dysentery, depressed and openly wept.

Among the Allied forces there were no plans to liberate the camps.  Reports of the crimes and the location of some camps were known by the Allied governments relatively early into the war and reconnaissance missions provided aerial views of Bergen-Belsen in 1942 and again in 1944, the specific functions of the Nazi camps were not well known. Despite basic knowledge of Nazis crimes, Allied governments were not prepared to meet the challenges that they ultimately faced during the spring and summer of 1945. They failed to comprehend the extremely desperate needs of the victims who had  suffered at the hands of the Nazis. And for the small number of government officials who did know the specifics of the crimes, many either could not accept it or refused to act. After securing a cease fire with beleaguered German Army units in the neighborhood, British and Canadian troops simply arrived at the gates of the camp, completely unprepared for what they were about to witness and the measures that would be required to rescue 60,000 people from what many could only describe as an inferno. In the first weeks of Allied occupation 19,000  of the inmates at Bergen-Belsen died.

The coverage in both Britain and Canada of  crimes occurring in Nazi Europe during the war years, while scant, are easily discovered and relatively accurate. There was, however, a chasm between what was “known” and what was “believed.” The fact that some information has been mentioned once or even a hundred times in secret reports or in mass circulation newspapers does not necessarily mean that it has been accepted or understood. Big figures become statistics, and statistics rarely have profound psychological impacts.

From the fall of 1944 to Mach 1945, Canadian coverage of crimes in Europe was almost non-existent. A rare feature was the September 1944 issue of Maclean’s magazine,an American reporter’s article “Mass Murder!" her observations while traveling with the Red Army. “Jews of eastern-Europe,” she wrote, ‘have been slaughtered –destroyed by a plan pursued with German thoroughness – until almost none remain." During the fall of 1944 and early winter of 1945, camps were being liberated by the Red Army. Upon  discovering  Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka,   the Soviets issued no major press releases. The publicity of the liberation of Auschwitz was minimal. Because the reports that did get through were perceived to come from less-than-trusted sources, news of the camps made little impression on the public’s imagination. It would take the liberation of the camps in western Europe by the apparently more reliable American, British and Canadian forces before the horrors were believed and appreciated.

Anticipation is prior imagination and the extent of one’s capacity to imagine a profound event has important bearing upon the way one is able to respond. For Allied troops arriving at Bergen-Belsen, the experience was one of shock and profound disturbance. While warnings were issued to many who entered the camps in the days that followed ,detailed reports, photographs and moving images had not yet been distributed and many found it difficult  to perceive or prepare themselves for such horrors. Indeed, those who arrived three to even seven days after the surrender of the camp, viewed virtually the same conditions of those who, on the afternoon of 15 April, first entered the camp.

Bergen-Belsen was a ‘space of abjection.” Put simply, the ‘abject” is that which is both part of and thoroughly rejected by the self. The writings of theorist and critic Julia Kristeva provide substantial insight on the complex notion of abjection. To operate as a social being, one must expel or do away with elements which the collective order considers contaminated or impure, such as waste, excrement, blood, vomit, bodily fluids, cadavers and the like. ‘Refuse and corpses show me what I permanently thrust aside in order to live. These bodily fluids, this defilement, this shit are what life withstands, hardly and with difficulty, on the part of death.” However, these elements, which we try to cast off, can never be completely disregarded. They linger and remain, haunting us – the subject, the self – in different ways, threatening with the suspension or interruption  of our very being. As the philosopher Giorgio Agamben acknowledges, “Whoever experiences disgust has in some way recognized himself in the object of his loathing and fears being recognized in turn.”

  Kristeva contends that the abject “draws me towards that place where boundaries are erased and meaning collapses.” Thousands of corpses scattered around the camp grounds, inside and outside the decrepit barracks, along with the waste, excrement and filth, disturbed, horrified and sickened military personnel. And yet many were fascinated, drawn to the site of abjection, despite warnings of the horrors. Bergen-Belen became kind of a ‘tourist attraction’ for troops passing through the area.

For many inside the camp and working against the unfolding catastrophe, with limited personnel and scant resources, irony and sarcasm became a way of coping. Comments were often harsh, cruel, untimely, frequently deployed as type of cognitive wall, similar to the zoomorphic language and animal metaphors used in letters home and in memoirs by those who first entered the camp. Sarcasm, irony and dark humor were rhetorical devices used in order to keep a distance, either physically or psychologically from the desperate situation. It helped them to achieve the detachment necessary to complete their assigned tasks such as choosing who should receive immediate medical attention and thus perhaps live while  leaving others  where they lay to face certain death, witnessing the last breaths of orphaned children, or burying thousands of unidentifiable people  in mass graves.

While the crimes in Bergen-Belsen and other concentration camps were being publicized through-out the Western world, a clinical study was taking place at the University of Minnesota under the lead investigator and American scientist Dr Ancey Keys. Beginning in 1944, in what was known as the “Minnesota Starvation Experiment,” Keys and his team scrutinized the physiological and psychological effects of severe and prolonged malnourishment in healthy men. The findings of the project were intended to later guide the Allied powers in their dealings with the victims of famine in Europe and Asia at the end of the Second World War.  Formally published in 1950, the work was instantly regarded as a landmark treatise on the subject. As biochemist Jack Drummond – an advisor to the Ministry of Food and nutrition consultant to the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force and the Allied Control Commissions-acknowledges in the book’s forward, “My admiration was tinted with only one regret, that the investigation had not begun three years earlier.”

It is interesting to observe the overlap in the findings of Dr. Keys study and the candid accounts of Allied medical personnel.  Canadian John F. McCreary served with the RCAF Nutrition Group during the war. In 1944 McCreary and his team were seconded to SHAEF to conduct clinical surveys of children in various concentration camps across northwest Europe. They traveled to Bergen-Belsen in early May 1945 to survey the conditions of the inmates.  Upon his return to Canada, McCreary gave an address at the Empire Club of Canada in Toronto. According to McCreary, the internees could be divided into three main groups: the first cluster included recent arrivals that, because of their brief time in the camps, remained relatively fit. The third and final group involved those too ill to digest any type of food and as a result had the highest death rate. In regards to the second group of inmates, McCreary describes them as those who had deteriorated physically but, with proper diet, could once again regain their bodily strength. However, their mental recovery would take additional time. In McCreary’s point of view, this group

had been so disturbed mentally by so long a period in the camp that their mental return was far from as rapid as their physical return. When we saw the people in the camp some had even lost their ability to see. They had of course no idea what their names were. They had no idea where they came from. They didn’t know how long they had been there. They were simply mute. They were the people whose only noise was a high pitched cry. There we were thousands of these people and they represented the most disturbing sight to be seen in the Belsen concentration camp. It looked for a long time as if there was absolutely no hope of any return to normal for this group.

Complicity in these crimes and attempts at judging the guilty became subjects of some concern in the immediate responses of Allied personnel to the camp and all subsequent narratives of the holocaust.  [In the author’s view] one scholar in particular offers a useful model in which to investigate the context of such judgments. A native of northern Germany, Karl Jaspers was a psychiatrist and philosopher. He wrote his treatise – ‘The Question of German Guilt” (1947)- for a population, of which he was one, who lived through and mostly supported, albeit often submissively, the Nazis regime.

Jaspers had a fourfold schema on the question of guilt: criminal, political, moral and metaphysical. The first, criminal guilt, includes offenses that violate the law, and whose prosecution remains with the Courts [like murder, battery, robbery, kidnapping and extortion]. The second type of guilt, political guilt, involves all citizens of a modern state. The citizens of the state are accountable for the conduct of their governments. Jurisdiction, in this instance, rests with the victorious  powers. Moral guilt encompasses personal responsibility for one’s actions. In this instance, jurisdiction involves one’s own conscience. Morally, an individual can condemn only his or herself and no one else. Finally, the fourth type, metaphysical guilt, involves everyone’s responsibility for the crimes and injustices in the world. This is especially true for offenses of which one has knowledge or that were committed in one’s presence. According to Jaspers, jurisdiction for metaphysical guilt remains with “God alone.” Jaspers did not conclude that he himself was criminally guilty of Nazis crimes.

Allied troops occupying Bergen-Belsen had no question in their mind that what they witnessed was a crime. They differed in their opinions as to how guilt should be assigned. [In my view, it is remarkable how few summary, extra-judicial executions actually occurred, how few people were blamed in a political sense. As ever, the question of moral responsibility and the burdens of wounded conscience were easily displaced as many Germans were able, in post-war conditions, to view themselves as victims. The judgment of God is pending.]

The Folly of Progressive Islam by Michael Mohammad Knight

[ Readers unfamiliar with the subject might want to consider an analogy not just between progressive Muslims and progressive Christians but also the Qur’an as equivalent in some respects to the Constitution, the hadith and tafsir to the narratives and legal precedents surrounding the notion of ‘original intent’, deployed with equal trust and vigor by all positions in the American political polemic.]

For a variety of reasons, many of the great scholars and thinkers who have contributed to the “Progressive Muslim” scene – whether or not they self-identify as ‘”progressive Muslims” – have chosen the Qur’an as the chief terrain on which battles over issues such as gender equality are to be fought.  While the Qur’an is placed at the center of progressive arguments, progressive Muslims often position the hadith corpus and/or its primary advocates as Islam’s greatest obstacle against gender justice. It remains a popular sentiment among progressive Muslims that if we can push away the historically accumulated hadith and tafsir (exegesis/interpretation) that have concealed the Qur’an’s true meaning, finding out way to a new and “direct’ encounter with the text, we will successfully find Islam- defined here entirely within the eternal message of the Qur’an – to be wholly resonant with ideals of modern feminism. Like science-obsessed modernist Muslims who sought to prove that the Qur’an displays miraculously advanced knowledge of natural phenomena, some progressive Muslims would claim that the Qur’an’s original message included a call for gender equality that could only be fully comprehended fourteen centuries later.

The Qur’an-centered nature of progressive Muslim arguments could be situated within the same intellectual trends and historical shifts that made Qur’an-centered Islam so appealing to so many Muslims from the nineteenth century onward. There is also the question of the particular training that progressive Muslim intellectuals bring to their sources. Equipped with Western literary theory and modern hermeneutics, which had first developed through the attempts of Christian scholars to investigate the Bible, progressive Muslim thinkers perhaps find their tool boxes more intuitively applicable to reinterpreting divine scripture than sorting through the unique problems of hadith studies. Meanwhile, for many progressive Muslims, the mere mention of hadiths evokes nightmares of puritanical religiosity, unsophisticated textural literalism, repressive legalism, superstitious  ritualism, sectarian intolerance, and the vaguely defined boogeyman of “Wahhabism, often racialized as ethnocentric “Arab Islam” and caricatured with reference to the beards and clothing choices of its  adherents. Finally, the status of the Qur’an as God’s word means that people can theoretically conceive of it as free from the constraints of earthy patriarchy; while the revelation was delivered through a man, this man does not own  the words as their “author.” In contrast, the hadith corpus remains bound to this earth and is inescapably the work of men who were products of their historical setting, with all the limitations that imposed on them. Again, we must recognize that even when we read narrations attributed to A’isha or any other women of the Salaf, we do not have direct access to her voice, but rather her voice as represented by male-dominated scholarly networks and institutions of knowledge. The hadith corpus can therefore be exposed to varieties of critique from which the Qur’an would be protected.

To get into progressive “Qur’anic hermeneutics” projects, we must first work with a few assumptions: (1) that we have access to the Qur’an in its original and eternal form, its integrity perfectly preserved, absolutely innocent of any human interventions to add or redact content; (2) that the Qur’an can speak in “universals” such as universal justice, universal equality, universal anything; (3) that the Qur’an’s “universal” messages represent broader themes of the text, even if they do not necessarily find harmony with the specific content of every verse; (4) that the relationship of any particular verse to the Qur’an’s universal or thematic truth provides a measure by which we should weigh its value against other verses; (5) because the Qur’an’s universal themes are what really matters, any isolated verse of the Qur’an can be over-ruled by what we have named as the Qur’an’s true heart. By the logic of this approach, if the Qur’an’s universal message calls us to greater justice and mercy, but domestic violence betrays what we recognize as mercy and justice, then domestic violence cannot be possibly endorsed by the Qur’an, no matter what a specific verse appears to be saying.

Maybe the Qur’an’s statements of spiritual equality between women and men should erase verses articulating their inequality, and maybe the Qur’an’s monotheism is betrayed by hierarchal relationships between human beings. I don’t know. This all rests on what you personally assume about the Qur’an’s ultimate purpose and how this text is supposed to work. Maybe the Qur’an’s references to God with male pronouns occur only due to limitations of Arabic grammar, and maybe the divine “he” doesn’t relate to any broader gender logic running through the text. Again, this isn’t simply the self-evident truth of the Qur’an, but a conclusion you might reach with the pre-existing values that you bring to your reading. For the Qur’an to express an obvious opposition to patriarchy, I have to decide this is what want to see. Even if I reject the traditionalists verse-by-verse reading method that progressive Muslims disdain, choosing instead to read “thematically” with an eye for the Qur’an’s broader message, there’s till a reasonable chance that I can find patriarchy fully endorsed by the Qur’an, even as one of the Qur’an’s ‘universal” themes. Contrary to the notion of a god so absolutely transcendent and wholly other that this god could never be contained within human constructions of gender, I can also read the Qur’an as speaking for a he-god who assumes men’s domination of women to be the natural, normative order of the universe. This reading, after all, does not seem to have experienced meaningful challenges prior to the modern interest in gender equality.

Gender-sensitive Qur’an hermeneutics works like a shell game in which shells are pushed around to make us miss where the hetero-sexist pea has been hidden. Ebrahim Moses describes this privileging of our favorite verses to control the meaning of less charming ones as “hermeneutical acrobatics or a hermeneutics of wishful thinking.” Though I personally agree with Amina Wadud’s response to Moosa ( that such disparagement from privileged, self-identified ‘progressive” male scholars provide nothing useful and can only be destructive), this doesn’t make the problem go away. What hermeneutics offers seem to be less a critical method than a critical-sounding means of affirming, “The text says whatever I want it to say.”

I would ask what gives us the eyes to claim our universals, especially when the concepts that we hold as universal, such as gender egalitarianism, lead us to radical breaks from the ways in which the Qur’an has been comprehended for nearly fifteen centuries. Isn’t our interest in the Qur’an’s gender egalitarianism itself the product of historical forces that asked new questions of the text? Don’t we also read from within the bounds of time and place, or have our sophisticated methods methods enable us to step out of the world that gave us those very methods? We defend our universal Qur’anic ethics, while exiling other readers to their particular contexts, through our use of modern (and postmodern) Western literary theories; we forget that these theories themselves, rather than universalize our voices, only locate us within particular intellectual genealogies and our own narrow context. While accusing other thinkers of misreading the Qur’an through the filters of their cultural backgrounds, Western-educated scholars find the Qur’an’s “universal” truth with tools developed by the nineteenth- century European Christians who has sought new understandings of their Bible, or mid-twentieth-century European Marxists and Marist-inspired thinkers who examined the importance of power and context in our constructions of reality.

Like a liberal mirror of Salafism, progressive Muslim hermeneutics confidently tells us which methods of interpretation transcend interpretation and which ones have strayed from the pure origins. Like the Salafiyya, progressives plant their flag on the origins of Islam, present themselves as heirs to the Qur’an’s truest spirit, and condemn various traditional authorities as innovators and corruptors. While calling our attention to the Qur’an’s multiplicity of meanings and the subjectivity of interpretation, progressivists nonetheless tend to make proclamations against those whom they accuse of having read the Qur’an wrong. Even when celebrating the individual reader as the true locus of meaning, these emancipators of texts can be as hegemonic and authoritarian as the most rigid literalists, and their flexing of Western academic training and literary theories can execute power plays just as much as mystical hierarchies do appeals to capitalized “Tradition.”

There’s a political stake here, as the progressivist reform project cannot be neutral in matters of empire. Progressive Muslim hermeneutics happens to hare some overlap with the agendas of forces such as the RAND Corporation., the conservative think-tank that associated close observation of Muslim rituals (such as prayer and fasting) and behavioral codes (such as hijab) with “backwardness and under-development, which in turn are the breeding ground for social and political problems of all sorts.” The RAND Corporation has advocated for Muslims to be restrained in their approach to the Qur’an, namely, to be fed new methods of reading that would disenfranchise traditional institutions and modes of authority, creating a new kind of Muslim. Because the Qur’an says much less in terms of rituals and embodied practices than the hadith corpus, Qur’an only Islam ( particularly when the Qur’an is read with what Sabah Mahood has called ‘secular hermeneutics) can more effectively produce the kind of liberal, rational, autonomous, Protestantized Muslim that RAND Corporations want to see…

Various parties make claims that the Qur’an is inherently liberatory or oppressive or progressive or violent. The lived reality of language says that the Qur’an is inherently nothing but uncontrollable…



Here's the pivot point, after a long historiographical prologue: Malcolm, Sunna, Hadith, Hanbal, al-Afghani, crystallization of the Salif in the 1920S, Cold War, 5 Percenters:

" If I'm a stranger to myself , If I'm a product of unknown ancestors, I can't know my lord. So I stare at the big flowcharts of names and these arrows of influence pointing in all directions, trying to tie my religion together ,seeing not an Islam of eternal consistency but only something frail and vulnerable, subject to whatever causes history to move; and it has me wondering about the options for a fundamentalism that looks like apostasy, in which Islam can only come to me as side effects, instabilities, fragments, random molecules, brokenness and rupture and cross-fertilization forever, nothing staying in place, forever new empires promoting new books."

[Is this sad? Malcolm X was alive- moving through the vortex of history but now he's dead, finished, nothing more to say about himself. He weeps ,like David Bowie, 'everybody knows me now'. The eternal repose. The infinite 'fuck you' to the living.]

 "Why I am a Salafi" by Michael Muhammad Knight

Memento (On Writing) by Theodor Adorno

A first precaution for writers: in every text, every piece, every paragraph to check whether the central motif stands out clearly enough. Anyone wishing to express something is so carried away by it that he ceases to reflect on it. Too close to his intention, ‘in his thoughts’, he forgets to say what he wants.

No improvement is too small or trivial to be worthwhile. Of a hundred alterations each may seem trifling or pedantic by itself; together they can raise the text to a new level.

One should never begrudge deletions. The length of a work is irrelevant, and the fear that not enough is on paper, childish. Nothing should be thought worthy to exist simply because it exists. Has been written down. When several sentences seem like variations on the same idea, they often represent different attempts to grasp something the author has not yet mastered. Then the best formulation should be chosen and developed further. It is part of the technique of writing to be able to discard ideas, even fertile ones, if the construction demands it. Their richness and vigor will benefit other ideas at present repressed. Just as, at table, one ought not to eat the last crumbs, drink the lees. Otherwise, one is suspected of poverty.

The desire to avoid clichés should not, on pain of falling into vulgar coquetry, be confined to single words. The great French prose of they 19^th century was particularly sensitive to such vulgarity. A word is seldom banal on its own: in music too the single note is immune to triteness. The most abominable clichés are combinations of words, such as Karl Kraus skewered for inspection: utterly and completely, for better or worse, implemented and effected. For in them the brackish stream of stale language swills aimlessly, instead of being dammed up, thrown into relief, by the precision of the writer’s expressions. This applies not only to combinations of words, but to the construction of whole forms. If a dialectician, for example, marked the turning-point of his advancing ideas by starting with a ‘But’ at each caesura, the literary scheme would give the lie to the un-schematic intention of his thought.

The thicket is no sacred grove. There is a duty to clarify all difficulties that result merely  from esoteric complacency. Between the desire for a complex style adequate to the depth of its subject matter, there lies no obvious distinction: suspicious probing is always salutary. Precisely the writer most unwilling to make concessions to drab common sense must guard against draping ideas, in themselves banal, in the appurtenances of style. Locke’s platitudes are no justification for Hamann’s obscurities.

Should the finished text, not matter of what length, arouse even the slightest misgivings, these should be taken inordinately seriously, to a degree out of all proportion to their apparent importance. Affective involvement in the text, and vanity, tend to diminish all scruples. What is let pass as a minute of doubt may indicate the objective worthlessness of the whole.

The Echternach dancing procession is not the march of the World Spirit;* limitation and reservation are no way to represent the dialectic. Rather, the dialectic advances by way of extremes, driving thoughts with the utmost consequentiality to the point where they turn back on themselves, instead of qualifying them. The prudence that restrains us from venturing too far ahead in a sentence, is usually only an agent of social control, and so of stupefaction.

Scepticism is called for in the face of the frequently raised objection that a text, a formulation, are ‘too beautiful’. Respect for the matter expressed, or even for suffering, can easily rationalize mere resentment against a writer unable to bear the traces, in the reified form of language, of the degradation inflicted on humanity. The dream of an existence without shame, which the passion for language clings to even though forbidden to depict its content, is to be maliciously strangled. The writer ought not to acknowledge any distinction between the beautiful and adequate expression. He should neither suppose such a distinction in the solicitous mind of the critic, nor tolerate it in his own. If he succeeds in saying entirely what he means, it is beautiful. Beauty of expression for its own sake is not at all ‘too beautiful’, but ornamental, arty-crafty, ugly. But he who, on the pretext of unselfishly serving only the matter in hand, neglects purity of expression, always betrays the matter as well.

Properly written texts are like spiders’ webs: tight, concentric, transparent, well-spun and firm. They draw into themselves all the creatures of the air. Metaphors flitting hastily through them become their nourishing prey. Subject matter comes winging towards them. The soundness of a conception can be judged by whether it causes one quotation to summon another. Where thought has opened up one cell of reality, it should, without violence by the subject, penetrate the next. It proves its relation to the object as soon as other objects crystallize around it. In the light that it casts on its chosen subject, others begin to glow.

In his text, the writer sets up a house. Just as he trundles papers, books, pencils, documents untidily from room to room, he creates the same disorder in his thoughts. They become pieces of furniture that he sinks into, content and irritable. He strokes them affectionately, wears them out, mixes them up, re-arranges, ruins them. For a man who no longer has a homeland, writing becomes a place to live in. In it he inevitably produces, as his family once did, refuse and lumber. But now he lacks a store-room, and it is hard in any case to part from left-overs. So he pushes them along in front of him, in danger finally of filling his pages with them. The demand that one harden oneself against self-pity implies the technical necessity to counter any slackening of intellectual tension with the utmost alertness, and to eliminate anything that has begun to encrust the work or to drift idly, which may at an earlier stage have served, as gossip, to generate the warm atmosphere conducive to growth, but now is left behind, flat and stale. In the end, the writer is not even allowed to live in his writing.

* Echternach is a town in Luxemburg, whose dance procession at Whitsun advances in a movement of three steps forward and two steps backward.

American Political Polemics by Theodor Adorno

Adorno characterizes the polemics of the obscure radio evangelist Martin Luther Thomas as fascist, whose broadcasts and sermons were mounted with the intent of subverting Democracy and institutions of  State authority by means of brutal, sadistic oppression. The book presents and analyzes various types of polemical devices that this preacher and others used during the 1930S to achieve their goals. These devices, however, are not unique to a fascist program, but common to the American politics generally and can be examined as the basis of many a successful campaign, especially for President, though the intents of the candidates may not be fascist at all or, in any case, do not necessarily result in any lasting fascist outcome. Or, at least, one might hope that the Constitution, the carefully crafted balance of Powers and our independent judiciary would ultimately prevent the worst of consequences when one demagogue or the other wins an election.


Adorno defends Enlightenment principles when he contrasts the ideals of  intellectual freedom, the independence of individual judgment, the capacity to absorb abstract arguments, and the pursuit of autonomous logical process against the myth, magic, idolatry and animism- with  their under-currents of paganism, sectarian religious theology and other ‘non-civilized religion of nature’ elements- in popular political discourse.  In Adorno’s view the masses of lower middle class Americans, in the thrall of the modern forces of industrial production, unable to discern the ambiguities, substitutions and inconsistencies of the fascist polemics,  are persuaded by such unreasonable appeals to surrender, through various subliminal processes, their powers in a democratic state in a sort of ‘blind obedience’ to the self-interest of the fascist agitator or beloved leader whose efforts, never-the-less, rarely meet with total or lasting success.

I will proceed with a brief over-view of the polemical devices in question. First,

Political candidates characteristically indulge in loquacious statements about themselves. Their talk is personal. Not only does it refer to the immediate interests of their listeners, but it also encompasses the sphere of privacy of the speaker who thus seems to take the listeners into his confidence and thus bridges the gap  of the abstract detachment involved in any objective discussion of the collective issues in a campaign. He often dwells upon his “also being a human being”. That is to say, in some respects as weak as his prospective adherents, exposing his or her own unrequited emotional responses to the social problems and blaring injustices of past and current affairs.  This helps establish a faux sense of affinity or sympathy between the candidate and his audience.

Politicians often characterize themselves as  a kind of ‘lone wolf’, struggling against mighty and often concealed opposition or inconstancy, not beholding to the establishment racket and thus playing up their own courage and integrity in order to win the confidence of those who feel they are underdogs and alone in their struggles.  They play upon the public distrust of the manipulations by the present power within the systems of communications and party, emphasizing their own uncorrupted loyalties to the public interest.

At the same time, a candidates self-advertisements and egotistical preenings, which often put his or her actual training, erudition or political  experience into the background, are often vague enough to leave room for any kind of fantasy and contradictory conceptions on the part of his listeners. This serves to herd together different types of listeners who are willing to follow him or her blindly, the less exactly they know who she (or he) is and stands for. Generally, the try to project innocence, honesty and unselfishness, together with untiring devotion to the cause.

Rather than presenting themselves overtly as a savior or superior, social agents, most politicians go with the meme of a messenger, an initiator, a ‘drummer’, a representative of something greater than him or herself. This introjects the proper note of humility into the politicians ambitions to power, side-stepping the potential damaging effects of ‘oriental’ patriarchalism or intimations that the candidate might be a despot in the making. Probably the best self-representation a politician can have is that of “a great little man”- he who walked unrecognized in the paths of other folks but who is finally revealed as  one who will‘ baptize’  America with the forces of change.  In America ‘incognito’ is relative, some sort of prior name-recognition in the early phases of a campaign is useful, celebrity can be good as long as it is not too closely associated with failed political enterprises.

The last character self-representation a politician in America likes to project, Adorno suggests, is the ‘good old time device.’ The American cult of novelty is likely to produce a sort of resentment within all those who cannot participate in the latest blessings of technical civilization, whereas even those who do participate in modern technology life appears to become colder and more frantic by the sweep of progress. A politician will often try to compensate for this feeling by emphasizing the old-fashioned and the homely as being genuine, traditional and as having  sort of patina which novelties don’t have. Certain unglamorous values and interests can be glamorized. New products can be spun as having palpable affinities with old ones.

Thsee character representations are probably the most important in any national campaign in America but there are many others which are crucial for success.

One trick is to establish the perception that the campaign is ‘a movement’ that has more general implications in social and cultural relations than can be encompassed by specific legislative proposals, policy debates or bureaucratic reforms, and reduces the needs to discuss the rather more complicated matters of government in a modern industrial society comprised of hundreds of millions of distinct individuals. Thus the voters are seduced into the notion that something really big is going on that has a life of its own, almost as if it were a natural phenomena, a new turning point in the evolution of human society itself.

At the same time other politicians often communicate their messages ‘atomistically with a host of isolated, logically unconnected statements that avoid the impression of any consistent structure of thought. There are a whole range of devices used for this purpose including ‘red-herrings’, bogeymen, scape-goats, slippery slopes, conspiracy theories and the deployment of various other name-calling tactics, including epithetical uses of the term ‘radical’, red-baiting and more or less incoherent appeals to sectarian interests. The resistance of voters to such appeals can be moderated by the use of polls that, through the manipulations and aggregations of the snap judgments of no personal consequence to respondents, “ majority opinion’  can be made to appear supportive of a candidates or parties’ position. Attacks on bureaucratization, the opacity of the system of taxes and its always ‘excessive burden’ as well as fear-mongering external enemies are also popular approaches to winning elected office.  If the ‘forces’ of Enlightenment (as Adorno would have it) happen to present any significant challenge to such representations as serving the public interest then a politician can always claim that customary standards of civility have been broached and that he or she, above all, represent the ideal program for sustaining a ‘safe’ status quo: bi-partisanship, or even non-partisanship, though only a few exceptionally naïve voters will fall for that, so that it is only maintained for brief periods of exceptional crisis.

After they are elected to the Presidency, most candidates rely on the tendency of Americans to think that there is a kind of natural, inherent authority in the office, they are leaders because they hold the formal position of leadership, especially from the members of the Party from which he or she were elected, no matter what they do or say.   When members of the opposite party do not provide any degree of natural deference to the office as embodied in the person of the President, a great hue and cry is raised, as if the core value of American society –fair play- had been grievously violated. One can certainly imagine Adorno responding: “What [god-damned] fair play do you think you are talking about ?”

From the back of the hall one can also imagine John Gray hollering’ What the [fuck] kind of fair play are YOU talking about!”

The Invention of God by Thomas Romer

When we speak of the ‘invention of God’ [monotheism] we should not image that a group of Bedouins  met one day and huddled around an oasis to create a god for themselves, or that some scribes, much later, invented Yahweh out of whole cloth, so to speak, as their tutelary god. Rather this “invention” should be understood progressive construction arising out of a particular tradition. Think of this tradition as a series of sedimentary strata gradually laid down over the course of time, which is then sometimes disrupted by historical events that disturb the orderly sequence of layers, allowing something new and unexpected to emerge. If we try, then, to understand how the discourse about this god developed and how he eventually became “one God”, we can observe a kind of “collective invention,” a process in which the conception was continually revised in the light of particular, changing social and historical contexts.

Neither should we speak of “Jews’ or “Judaism before the end of the Persian era, or even before the Hellenistic period, because it was only towards the end of the fourth century that we find a religious system in place that is at all like what one designates today as “Judaism.” So it is better to avoid using the term “Jew” and “Judaism” for the earlier periods, but instead speak of “Israelite” or “Judean.”

Putting this in an archeological context, the beginnings of the history of Israel in the thirteenth century fall into the time of transition from the Late  Bronze to the Iron Age. In the middle of the second millennium (@1,500 BCE) the Levant was controlled by Egypt. It was organized politically into city-states whose minor kings were vassals of the pharaoh. There also existed some groups with minimal integration, notably the “apiru”, who lived on the margins of the political system, in conflict with one or another of the minor Canaanite kings or chiefs or serving as potential forced laborers for the Egyptians. Egyptian texts also mention “shasu” , nomads, and they sometimes use the term Yhw to characterize them. Scholars have often tried to connect this them – probably a toponym- with the name Yahweh, which was to become the name of the god of Israel.

[ Romer then states the classical explanation of the collapse of late Bronze Age civilization:] The end  of the thirteenth century was marked by upheavals during which the city-states collapsed. New populations, ‘the people of the sea” arriving from the Aegean Sea or from Anatolia, the Philistines as the Bible and we call them, established themselves on the southern coast of Canaan : Gaza, Ashdod, Ashkelon, and Ekron. At the beginning of the first millennium in the whole of the Levant there gradually came into being an exchange economy that replaced the previously existing subsistence economy.

[However, this old hypothesis has recently been challenged, by Eric Cline in “1177BC: The Year Civilization Collapsed”. The Palace cultures of the Mediterranean littoral in the Late Bronze  between whom there were intensive exchanges of luxury goods collapsed on their own weight due to the limited capacities of their agricultural base and the center of power shifted closer to the Fertile Crescent or continental , regions: Hittites, Assyrians ,Babylonians and Persians, nix the  ‘Sea Peoples’.]

[ The period between the collapse of late Bronze Age Civilization through the Assyrian and Babylonian ascendency the peoples of Israel and Judah practiced various and evolving forms of polytheism.]

IN 539 the Persian king Cyrus took the city of Babylon, putting an end to the Babylonian Empire. His religious policy was ‘liberal’ in that he permitted the reconstruction of destroyed temples and allowed populations deported to returned to their respective countries. Cyrus is celebrated as the ‘Messiah” sent by the god of Israel in texts that are appended to the scrolls of the prophet Isaiah, which are often called “Deutero-Isaiah.” The Persians granted the Judean community the same cultural and religious autonomy they accorded other peoples who were integrated into the empire. The Temple of Jerusalem was rebuilt at the end of the sixth or the beginning of the fifth century, and it is under the influence of the Golah, the Judean exiles in Babylon who returned to Judea, that a quasi-theocratic temple-centered organization of political and religious life was put in place. Many of the Judean exiles preferred to remain in Babylon, and various documents found there indicate that these Judeans belonged to the comfortable strata of that city and were fully integrated into its life. Until the arrival of Islam, Babylon was to remain an intellectual center of Judaism, as indicated by the Babylonian Talmud. In the same way the strong Judean presence in Egypt was in no way diminished. Thus Judaism from its very birth was a religion of the diaspora, and was to continue as such during the Hellenistic era around the whole of the Mediterranean basin.

To grasp the complexity of ancient religiosity- that is in the pre-Hellenic era before the conquests of Alexander (356-323 BCE)- we must distinguish three levels of analysis. First of all, at the level of the individual, the family, or the clan, one turned to divine protectors, personal gods, and deified ancestors, and others. There is no need for a sanctuary or temple here: the pater familia takes care of ritual acts. The grouping together of several clans brings forth a new level of religious activity that is practiced at a local level. There are local sanctuaries; these are not generally very important and are often in the open air. It is these local  sanctuaries against which certain biblical texts conduct a fierce polemic, calling them cults “on every hill” and “under every green tree.” Religion on the national level is expressed in a set of cult ceremonies of which the king is a mediator, and it is organized around a national god and other deities who are associated with him in one way or another.

Regarding the third level, one important question is whether, from the early part of the first millennium up until  the end of the eighth, with the ascendency of the Assyrians in Canaan, the official royal cult was the same in Israel and Judah. Some specialists in biblical studies think that the cult of Yhwh in Judah was in effect very different from that of Israel: the Yhwh of Israel was worshipped rather on the model of Baal, that is, as the god of storms and fertility, whereas in the south, he has incorporated the traits of the older sun god who was the tutelary deity of Jerusalem. This picture needs qualification – rather than strict opposition- it is more likely that there were differences in relative emphasis in the culst in the north, different constellations of gods associated with Yhwh. In Judah there seems to have been a conception of Yhwh that combined the traits of a storm god with the attributes of a solar deity. Human sacrifices were offered to Yhwh in times of military crisis. Towards the end of the eighth century he began to assert his superiority over the gods of the underworld.

 Representations of Yhwh in the north (statues, images on seals and so forth) have long been considered simply idolatrous and “deviant’. At first Yhwh was worshiped as a “Baal,’ a storm God, who resembled the god Baal of Ugarit. He was not the only god worshipped in Israel; probably he was subordinated to El. Under the Omrides two ba’alim were in competition with each other: the Phoenician Baal and the Baal Yhwh. Later Yhwh seems to have integrated the attributes of El and also some features of a solar deity. He became ba’al shamen, a “Lord of the Heavens. Up until the fall of Samaria in 722, the cult of Yhwh was not exclusive. At any rate El was often represented as a Bull  and was considered the father of many gods. There is plenty of evidence that the gods in both the north and south were represented in statues, stereotypically,  so it is hard to tell which  gods particular statues or other images represent.

To be the only true god means to have no partners. Thus, Yhwh is traditionally considered to be an “unmarried’ god, and the allusions to goddesses in the Bible, notably to Asherah, have been interpreted as referring to non-Yawhists cults. This is the way the editors of the Bible finally decided to present matters. For historians, however, the situation looks different . . . the goddess Asherah was associated with Yhwh as his patredros (assessor) and also worshipped independently of him, especially by women, in the form of the “Queen of Heaven’. It is only with the beginning of the reign of Josiah (640-609) we will find Yhwh alone without his Asherah, at least in the official cults of Israel and Judah.

No one knows for sure why the Assyrians failed to capture Jerusalem at the end of the eighth century. Whatever the situation was, in  the consciousness of Judeans this quasi-defeat was transformed into a triumphant victor.y These events of 701 are the origin of the symbolic importance of Jerusalem as the city of Yhwh. First of all, it is this intervention of the Assyrians in Judah that in fact caused a centralization of the cult and the administration in Jerusalem, the only city in Judah that the Assyrians did not conquer. The fact that Jerusalem was spared also gives rise to the “theology of the remnant” we find in Isaiah: this theological view asserts that in all the cataclysms of history Yhwh has always protected a “remnant’ in Jerusalem. The events of 701 signify a strengthening of the theology of Zion, the idea that Yhwh will always watch over his sacred mountain. It is this theology of the uniqueness of Jerusalem and the hill of the Temple that will later become the foundation for the centralization of the cult of Yhwh.

The period of reform between the decline of the Assyrian influence in Israel and Judah and conquest by the Babylonians- said to be the work of King Josiah- though not lastingly established- was one of the most important historical moments in the evolution of the cult of Yhwh. From that time on, Yhwh became “one” god (not unique, but singular) and Jerusalem became the only place in which his sacrificial cult could be legitimately practiced :’There is only the Yhwh of Jerusalem, there is no Yhwh of  Samaria, Teman, Bethel and so on’. The can be no other temples other than the Temple of Jerusalem and ‘one’ tribe (the kingdom) of Judah. A history written during the reign of Josiah may be the first version of the life of Moses . Paradoxically, it is the Assyrians, deeply detested as they are by the biblical authors, who furnished a large part of the material needed to construct this literature and who thus contribute to forging the new image of Yhwh.

The reforms of Josiah mark  in a broad sense the beginning of Judaism, because of the theologically central place given Jerusalem in his reforms, the affirmation of the unity of Yhwh, which is recited in Jewish prayers to this day, and finally, the monidolatric idea of the exclusive worship of Yhwh, which can easily mutate into monotheism.

After the death of Josiah in 609, the Babylonians quickly took control of the Levant, although the Egyptians tried to contest them for a short time. By surrendering in a timely fashion the complete destruction of Jerusalem was avoided  in 597 but the Babylonians instituted a policy of large scale deportations,. The king was exiled with the court elite: high officials, clergy, artisans. After a misguided revolt, the Babylonians completely destroyed the Temple, the city and the walls of Jerusalem, several other cities in Judah and organized a second deportation (587 BCE).

The events of 597 and 587/586 must have produced a major crisis in the collective identity of the Judeans, The destruction of Jerusalem and the movements of population were significant, but it is also true that they mainly effected the members of the elite, who were deported, rather than the rural population and the poor who remained in the country. The elites and particularly the royal officials and been cut off from their source of power, the traditional political and ideological pillars of a monarchial state in the ancient Near East had collapsed generally. The king had been deported, the Temple destroyed, and the geographical integrity of Judah was compromised by deportations and voluntary emigration. One way of explaining the situation was the the gods of Babylon were stronger, and had won a victory over the national god Yhwh, who had clearly been defeated. Another possible explanation was that Yhwh had abandoned his people.

Different groups in the Judean aristocracy tried to deal with and overcome the crisis by producing ideologies that endowed the fall of Judah with theological meaning. We can order these attempts according to a model proposed by Armin Steil. Steil, who was influenced by Max Weber, developed his model by analyzing the semantics  of crisis in the context of the French Revolution; however this model is very helpful for understanding the reactions to the fall of Jerusalem that we find in the Hebrew Bible.

 Steil distinguishes three types of attitudes towards a crisis: that of the prophet, that of the priest, and that of the mandarin.  The prophetic attitude consists of declaring the crisis to be the beginning of a new era. The main proponents of this attitude are members of marginal groups, who are nevertheless capable of formulating and communicating their convictions. Conservative representatives of the social structures that are collapsing are more likely to adopt a priestly attitude. For those who take this posture, the way to overcome the crisis is to return to the sacred origins of society, given by God, and to ignore the new reality. The mandarin posture expresses a choice by high officials, who are trying to understand the new situation and accommodate themselves to it in order to preserve their existing privileges. The “mandarins” try to objectify the crisis by giving a historical account of it that explains  the collapse of the old structures.


Instances of all three attitudes are clearly visible in the Hebrew Bible and its interpretations of the destruction of Jerusalem. These reactions were perhaps put down in writing during the period called “the exile” (587-539) but it is more reasonable to think that they date from the Persian period, when socioeconomic conditions had somewhat stabilized.

The mandarin position towards the crisis is the Deuteronomistic school. The sought an explanation for the exile by constructing a history of Yhwh and his people, from the beginning under Moses up to the destruction of Jerusalem. This is the story tells from Deuteronomy to 2 Kings.  They wanted to show that the Babylonians gods had in no way defeated the national god of Judah. The Babylonians were the instruments of Yhwh, the tools of his anger. This idea prepares for the monotheistic statements in the parts of the Deuteronomistic history that was revised and retouched last of all in the Persian period. Yhwh reigns over all nations but has a special relation with Israel.

The most highly developed set on monotheistic speculations in the Hebrew bible is to be found in the second part of the book of Isaiah ( chapters 40-55). It is a collection of anonymous oracles that was revised over and over again during a period of at least two centuries, the kernel of the text being a piece of propaganda celebrating the arrival in Babylon of the Persian King Cyrus the Great. It is inspired by the propaganda of the Persian king which itself was a reworking of the Assyro-Babylonian royal ideology.  Other parts of the texts of Deutero-Isaiah propose a ‘theoretical demonstration” of monotheism, the only place the the Hebrew Bible where such a thing can be found, a theological revolution. It makes serious attempts to compensate for the loss of the feminine ‘assessors’ that accompany the gods  in the polytheistic system and deal with the question of evil, which can no longer be attributed to other malevolent gods or demons  in a monotheism.

The third or priestly reaction to crisis is embodied  in what is traditionally called the ‘priestly document in the Bible, including texts  that today are part of the Pentateuch, that is, sections found in Genesis, Exodus and the first part of Leviticus. These texts were drawn up by a group of priests or persons very close to priestly circles in Babylon or Jerusalem at the beginning of the Persian period. The priestly narrative views all the most significant cultural and ritual institutions as have been given to the Patriarchs and Israel before the political organization of the tribes. This mean there was no need of a country or a king in order to worship Yhwh in the appropriate way.  This uncoupling of the cult of Yhwh from political institutions and from a connection with a particular country prepares the way for the idea of the separation between the domains of religion and politics.

The Hebrew Bible, in the form we have it today, presents itself in all three of its parts as a “monotheistic document,” but the authors and editors of the various texts of which it is composed also retain traces of polytheism – for instance, in Job and numerous psalms, where Yhwh appears surrounded by his heavenly court. Thus, there is at least a partial integration of the polytheistic heritage into the Bible’s monotheistic discourse. The authors of the New Testament and  also the Qur'an  were going to be confronted with the same difficulty, namely how to deal with plurality within the framework set out by the confession of a single, unique god. Biblical monotheism, therefore, is not really a closed philosophical doctrine – it is pluralist, and invites the reader of its texts to reflect on the difficult relation between unity and diversity.

For Judaism God reveals himself primarily through the 613 commandments of the Torah as transmitted to the people through the intermediacy of Moses. Therefore it is primarily the observance of these divine commandments and the search for their true meaning that characterizes Judaism and its God, whose name is not pronounced, but whose interaction with Israel is commemorated through the reading of the Pentateuch. And its is precisely the Pentateuch that had retained the memory traces of a god who at the beginning was completely different from the transcendent, one[-and-only god now professed by the monotheistic religions.