Richard Landes: Muslims who Admire Israel: What Significance?

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There are a tiny number of Arab and Muslim intellectuals who have expressed admiration for Israel. What does this admiration mean? Do we take its numerical percentage as a sign of its significance? Say a hundred pro-Israel Muslims out of 1.4 billion Muslims, so less than.00001% of the total, i.e., less than a fraction of a statistical error?

Or do we take it as the tip of an iceberg of an opinion that cannot express itself in an honor-shame culture where honor has been defined in terms of hating Israel, and therefore every expression of pro-Israel sentiment represents something far more significant, something that, just in order to exist, must fight heavy cross-winds. In other words, it’s the easiest thing to be pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel in the Muslim world; it takes great courage and intellectual integrity to fight that consensus. Just as we should weight Israeli self-criticism differently from Palestinian demonization in our efforts toassess the information we get from the Middle East, so should we weigh pro- and anti-Israel sentiments in the Muslim world.

The case of Salah Choudhury, the Bengladeshi journalist who is now fighting for his life against charges of sedition, treason, blasphemy and espionage, raises yet another dimension. In addition to the peer-pressure of an honor-shame culture – so strong it can drive mothers to kill their daughters – there is also the matter of violent intimidation, whether state-sponsored (as in Choudhury’s case) or supported by a fatwa that operates at the grass-roots level. Just as Islam considers that apostates deserve death, so does this religion exercise enormous threats of and execution of violence against those it considers guilty of betraying the cause.

When one considers the joint threat of social and economic ostracism on the one hand and threat of violence on the other, even the slightest expression of support or admiration for Israel in the Muslim world needs to be factored at, say, 100,000,000 times the significance of an anti-Israel sentiment that is so easy and so (seemingly) cost-free for Muslims to express.

In honor of Choudhury’s struggle – I urge everyone to sign the petition on his behalf – I post here the reflections of another courageous Muslim, exiled Iraqi writer Najem Wali, who followed her intellectual instincts and went to visit Israel.

Richard Landes: Muslims who Admire Israel: What Significance?

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AUTHOR

Richard Landes

Richard Allen Landes is an American historian and author, specializing in Millennialism. He retired from teaching history at Boston University in the Spring of 2015. He currently serves as the Chair of the Council of Scholars at SPME.

His work focuses on the role of religion in shaping and transforming the relationships between elites and commoners in various cultures. He has coined the expression "demotic religiosity," an orientation that prizes 1) equality before the law, 2) dignity of manual labor, 3) access to sacred texts and divinity for all believers, and 4) a prizing of moral integrity over social honor. Trained as a medievalist, his early work focused on the period around 1000 CE, a moment, in his opinion, of both cultural mutation (origins of the modern West), and intense apocalyptic and millennial expectations.

From 1995-2004, he directed the Center for Millennial Studies at Boston University which held annual conferences and published an online journal, Journal of Millennial Studies. This involvement refocused his work on millennialism the world over and in different time periods, and has resulted in the Encyclopedia of Millennialism and Millennial Movements, (Berkshire Reference Works; Routledge, NY, 2000); Heaven on Earth: The Varieties of the Millennial Experience (Oxford U. Press, 2011), and The Paranoid Apocalypse: A Hundred-Year Retrospective on the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (NYU Press, 2011).

His work on the apocalyptic currents that built up during the approach to 2000 has led him to focus on Global Jihad as an apocalyptic millennial movement, whose relationship to the internet may parallel that of Protestantism to printing, and whose active cataclysmic apocalyptic scenario (Destroy the world to save it), makes it potentially one of the most dangerous apocalyptic movements on record.

In addition to his courses on medieval history, he offered courses on

Europe and the Millennium,

Communications Revolutions from Language to Cyberspace

Honor-shame culture Middle Ages, Middle East

The Biblical origins of the Democracy.

In 2011, he is a fellow at the International Consortium on Research in the Humanities at Alexander University, Erlangen, Germany. There he is working on the study with which his medieval work first began, the history of the “sabbatical millennium” with its expectation of the messianic kingdom in the year 6000 from the creation of the world: While God Tarried: Demotic Millennialism from Jesus to the Peace of God, 33-1033.

In 2005 he launched a media-oversight project called The Second Draft in order to look at what the news media calls their “first draft of history.” Since January 2005 he has been blogging at The Augean Stables, a name chosen to describe the current condition of the Mainstream News Media (MSNM) in the West.

As a result of this work on the MSNM, he has come to understand the role of cognitive warfare in the campaign of apocalyptic Jihad against the West in the 21st century, and the abysmal record of the West in defending itself in this critical theater of War. He plans a book addressing these issues tentatively entitled They’re so Smart cause We’re so Stupid: A Medievalist’s Guide to the 21st Century. 

Books

  • Landes, Richard A.; Head, Thomas J. (eds.) (1987). Essays on the Peace of God : the church and the people in eleventh-century France. Waterloo, Ontario: Waterloo University. OCLC18039359.
  • Landes, Richard A.; Paupert, Catherine (trans.) (1991). Naissance d'Apôtre: Les origines de la Vita prolixior de Saint Martial de Limoges au XIe siècle. Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols. 9782503500454.
  • Landes, Richard A.; Head, Thomas J. (eds.) (1992). The Peace of God: social violence and religious response in France around the year 1000. Ithaca, N.Y: Cornell University Press. ISBN 080142741X.
  • Landes, Richard A. (1995). Relics, apocalypse, and the deceits of history: Ademar of Chabannes, 989-1034. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. ISBN 0674755308.
  • Landes, Richard A. (ed.) (2000). Encyclopedia of millennialism and millennial movements. New York: Routledge. ISBN 0415922461.
  • Landes, Richard A.; Van Meter, David C.; Gow, Andrew Sydenham Farrar (2003). The apocalyptic year 1000: religious expectation and social change, 950-1050. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0195111915.
  • Landes, Richard A. (2011). Heaven on Earth: The Varieties of the Millennial Experience. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  • Landes, Richard A.; Katz, Stephen (eds.). The Paranoid Apocalypse: A Hundred Year Retrospective on The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. New York: New York University Press.


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