OFTEN, debates are most revelatory about critical issues that the debaters think they are not debating.
This occurred recently in an exchange in Critical Inquiry, a scholarly journal published by the University of Chicago Press.
The debate revolved around whether the Simon Wiesenthal Center should build a Museum of Tolerance in Jerusalem.
This seemingly innocent project ran into a buzz saw when it was discovered that the land designated for the project contained, in part, what some Palestinians claimed was a Muslim cemetery, and what the Wiesenthal Center claimed was a former, abandoned, “desacralized” Muslim cemetery.
A long court battle in Israel ensued. Israel’s High Court found for the Wiesenthal Center, affirming that Islamic jurists had indeed desacralized this cemetery. (The project is proceeding, albeit on a somewhat reduced scale due to the withdrawal of its original architect, Frank Gehry.)
In Critical Inquiry (spring, 2010), Prof. Saree Makdisi wrote a long attack on the project. The journal published four, much shorter responses to Makdisi.
Then Makdisi wrote a response to the responses.
In his final piece, Makdisi made some remarks that unwittingly raised the question of whether memory plays a role in Islam.
I leave aside the debate over the Museum of Tolerance except to highlight the issue at hand: memory in Islam.
AMONG the arguments that the Wiesenthal Center made before the courts in favor of sustaining the project was that various Islamic jurists had articulated the concept of the desacralization of a Muslim cemetery, and specifically of the one on which the museum will, in part, arise.
Makdisi dismissed these arguments out of hand. Among his reasons:
“ . . . it doesn’t matter what living Muslims say; it doesn’t matter what the actual Muslim community of Jerusalem is demand- ing; it doesn’t matter what families with loved ones buried in Ma’man Allah [the cemetery or ex-cemetery in question] have to say; it doesn’t matter what any Palestinian has to say; the only thing that matters is that the Simon Wiesenthal Center and its Jewish Israeli advisers . . . have unearthed some medieval scrap of paper that they say says that Islamic law says (no matter what actual Islamic jurists have to say about the matter and leaving quite out of the question the whole matter of property rights) that a Muslim cemetery can be desacralized so that its land can be put to other uses . . .”
To Makdisi, what “living Muslims” say trumps Islam’s own sacred legal history, whose arguments, as quoted by the Wiesenthal authors, Makdisi does not address. Nor does Makdisi identify or cite “what actual Islamic jurists have to say.” Apparently, the arguments of Islamic jurists are far less important that what an “actual Muslim community” demands. History and memory seem inferior or irrelevant.
At what point do the preferences of “living Muslims” or an “actual Muslim community” give way to the inevitable decay of the living and the actual? No one lives forever. Makdisi’s logic here would have the next group of living Muslims or an actual Muslim community potentially deny the preferences of those alive now.
And when is “now,” anyway? If living Muslims can trump the arguments of Islamic jurists of a few decades ago, then it would only take a few months to pass after Makdisi’s article was published for a new crop of living Muslims to say that their own preferences for this piece of cemetery (or ex-cemetery) trump Makdisi’s.
What if, by some happenstance, Iran invaded Jerusalem, harmed Israel, and in the process destroyed this cemetery? Makdisi would have no basis to object because he would, no doubt, be supremely pleased by Iran’s anti-Israel triumph.
To give permanent validity to his current objections to the Wiesenthal Center’s use of this cemetery (or ex-cemetery) land, he would have to fix his current objections in some value system besides the potentially evanescent preferences of the current crop of “living Muslims” and of the “actual Muslim community of Jerusalem.”
He would have to assert the axiological superiority of his current preferences. He would have to make them tomorrow’s memory.
Yet, seemingly without a twinge of conscience or a ripple on his sensibility, Makdisi can dismiss arguments of Islamic jurists cited by the Wiesenthal scholars as medieval scrap.
The only other interpretation of his dismissive reference to his own tradition that I can think of is his unwillingness to grant the possibility that a non-Muslim can understand a Muslim jurist, or that a Muslim jurist can work for Israel and retain his integrity.
To argue the former is to remove any possibility of discourse and to render debate in Critical Inquiry, including his own articles therein, pointless.
To argue the latter is to ignore the challenge to the integrity of any jurist, operating under any government or ruler. If an Islamic jurist is hopelessly compromised by working in Israel, as Makdisi argues, this would eliminate the possibility of Islamic jurisprudence almost anywhere in the Middle East, for what of the totalitarian control of Islamic jurisprudence in Iran and Saudi Arabia? What of the preordained rulings in any totalitarian country, which is where most Muslims in the Middle East live?
I would argue that it is only the arguments of the Islamic jurists themselves that need be analyzed — yet Makdisi doesn’t do so because they (allegedly) conflict with the preferences of living Muslims. To Makdisi, these arguments of decades ago — of Islamic memory — are worthless. To him, memory doesn’t count.
IN Judaism, memory is a living, daily, normative, essential part of consciousness and behavior.
To cite only a few of an almost limitless number of examples: remembering the Exodus from Egypt at each Friday night kiddush (not to mention at Passover); remembering the passing of loved one during the kaddish; remembering history, enjoined by Deuteronomy’s “remember the days of yore”; remembering the destruction of the Second Temple on Tisha b’Av; remembering the wandering in the Sinai desert by sitting in sukkot.
No reasoned decision of an authoritative halachic scholar, reaffirmed over time by generations of scholars, would responsibly be dismissed as “medieval scrap” due to the preferences of “living Jews.”
Yet, according to Makdisi, it is not even necessary to examine the arguments of Islamic jurists who ruled that it is permissible to desacralize a cemetery, since (he says) the living disagree. There’s a saying about childraising, “the days go slow, the years go fast.” Makdisi's tyranny of the living in the spring of 2010 will fast give way to next year’s or next decade’s very different political context of this Islamic legal issue: desacralization of cemeteries.
Then where will Makdisi be?
To me, as least, it seems he will be left with no memory, only with the next passing political preference.
I DO not know whether Makdisi’s dismissal of memory in Islam is representative of Islam; it remains destabilizing nonetheless. For if there is no memory, ultimately there is no debate, only force. History — which can even mean yesterday — becomes irrelevant. Context goes up in flames. The only remaining relevancies are the demands of right-this-minute. On that basis, peace regarding any land in Palestine (not just cemeteries) becomes absolutely impossible.
Copyright © 2010 by the Intermountain Jewish News
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