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The state of Israel as a “Jewish” supremacist and belligerent settler-colonial regime embodies the tragic genocidal logic of modernity/coloniality. It tells the story of the destruction of Jewish lives in Europe and SWANA, the Palestinian ongoing Nakba, and the destruction of Jewish-Muslim and Jewish-Arab worlds.  In addition to (and constitutive of) a shift from Islamicate to orientalist geopolitics and euro-centricity, the abolition of the caliphate happened at a moment that signalled and anticipated these multiple destructions. To what extent does reconstituting Muslim political subjectivities through decolonial registers need to wrestle with the loss and potentiality of Jewish-Muslim worlds? To what extent does such interrogation need to reclaim and reimagine these worlds from the rubble? To what extent has the pervasive disruption of Judeo-Muslim interwovenness demobilised Muslim decolonial potentialities?

The abolition of the caliphate came amid an antecedent colonial division and sectoralization of previously interlaced communities that embodied what Ussama Makdisi analyses in terms of a broad “ecumenical frame” in the SWANA region. Saba Mahmood further helps us understand why the key engine of violence that appears to be raging along “religious” lines in SWANA is, in effect, the constellation of secular, liberal, and colonial discursive regimes. As Ella Habiba Shohat and Santiago Slabodsky argue, albeit mobilising different scholarly conversations, the extraction of “the Jew” from “the Muslim” and “the Arab” became one of Europe’s technologies to maintain epistemic supremacy and geopolitical hegemony. Hence, disrupting this bifurcation may be pivotal for decolonial Muslimness. One of the urgent questions to reckon with, therefore, is how the transformative materiality of euro-Zionism as an expression of the consolidation of “Judeo-Christian” secularity and civilisational orientalist ideological formations has segregated the reimagining of decolonial Muslimness as an intra-Muslim discussion over and against the Eurocentric epistemic scaffolding and geopolitical formations.

Certainly, anticolonial and decolonial interventions seek to reimagine the Islamicate outside the matrix of modernity/coloniality. However, has the ubiquity and rhetorical infrastructures of Jewish and Christian Zionist discursivity and the political realities enacted by Israel blocked the possibility of a robust decolonial imagination of future Muslim political subjectivities? To what degree can retrieving Jewishness and Jewish-Muslim histories enact decolonial potentialities for reconfiguring Muslim subjectivities? How has Israel, as an embodiment of the colonization of Jewish consciousness by Christian imagination about the Jews (as Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin writes), influenced Muslim decolonial thought?  Put differently, to what extent has the geopolitical and discursive hegemony of Christian and Jewish Zionisms and the political realities created by Israel delimited the decolonial horizons of Muslimness after the abolition of the caliphate? 

This line of questions leads me to ask further questions. What is the role of counter-archiving of Judeo-Muslim worlds in reshaping alternative decolonial horizons of Muslimness and Muslim political subjectivities? Substantial literature by critical Mizrahi thinkers, such as the aforementioned Shohat, but also others, including Smadar Lavie, Ariella Aïsha Azulai, Moshe Behar and Tzvi Ben-Dor Benite, and Yehuda Shenhav, among others, interrogates and laments how the Jews lost their Muslimness and Arabness as another necessary casualty of Europe’s colonisation of SWANA, the entrenchment of a “Judeo-Christian” civilisational discourse, and the consolidation of Zionism and later Israelism as a geopolitical settler-colonial reality.

For critical Mizrahi thinkers, the discursive act of reclaiming the Judeo-Arab and Judeo-Muslim through archiving against the grain or engaging in what Shohat calls a “diasporic reading” amounts to decolonial interventions and disruptions of modernity/coloniality upon its multiple narratives of dislocation. Such decolonial interventions mean reconfiguring regional understandings not determined by the ethnoreligious-centric logic of Israel, understood within a broader critique of European Christian modernity and its manufacturing of “Judeo-Christian” epistemologies. To this extent, decolonial interventions in Muslim and Jewish political subjectivities may be integral and complementary to one another.  

Rather than romanticising the caliphate, I reconnect to what its abolition in March 1924 marked and what other potentialities existed in its rubbles but were shattered due to a century of European-imperial designs that butchered the SWANA region along with Zionist settler colonialism which has, from its inception, relied on its imperial European patrons and Christian Zionist ideological and material backing. The geopolitical realities, underwritten by an ever-adaptable discursive violence that posits “Muslims” or “Arabs” and “Jews” as enemies and enfolds “the Jews” into European whiteness and “Judeo-Christian” civilisational posturing, resulted in diminishing the decolonial imaginative horizon. The foundational question relates to whether Muslim decoloniality must also be critical Mizrahi to disrupt “Judeo-Christian” white colonial civilisational epistemologies and illuminate transformative political horizons.