RELIGIONS AND NATIONS Three essays examine the vexed relations of religions and nations in the modern era, when the people becomes an electorate and the nation becomes foundational for the state. Religions, once so powerful in forming communities and underwriting the authority of states, have different, more troubled histories within nation-states. (See also, “The State and religion,” the subject of a pair of articles by Joseph R. Strayer and Rushton Coulborn in the very first issue of CSSH, 1:1 [1958], 38–57.)

In 1940, Muhammad ‘Ali Jinnah, the leader of the Muslim League, first suggested that the Muslims of India were not simply a religious community but a nation. But it was only after the triumph of the Muslim League in winning the overwhelming majority of Muslim seats in the 1946 Indian provincial elections, particularly in the two largest Muslim-majority provinces, Bengal and Punjab, that Jinnah could argue convincingly to others that he, and the Muslim League, represented the voice of that nation. In critical ways, the elections of 1946 thus laid the foundations for the emergence of Pakistan. For a good discussion of the 1946 elections in the Punjab, see I. A. Talbot, “The 1946 Punjab Elections,” Modern Asian Studies, 14:1 (1980), 65–91. A state predicated on the existence of a Muslim nation, Pakistan occupies a position of unusual importance in the history of the Muslim world and of colonial nationalism, for it represents the first post-colonial nation created on the basis of a self-consciously Muslim nationalist program.

Edward Said's Orientalism has received both praise and criticism. Among the criticisms leveled is the charge that Said's neglect of German scholarship misses an important part of Orientalism in the West. Robert Irwin, for example, notes that German Biblical scholarship was critically influential as a “motivating force for the study of Islam” and that the “German form-critical techniques” developed to study the Old Testament influence on the way “Western scholars interpret[ed] the Koran and the early Islamic community.” Bernard Lewis claims that Said's neglect of German scholarship calls into question his entire project and likens it to writing a history of European music without a discussion of the German contribution. See Robert Erwin, “Writing about Islam and the Arabs,” Ideology and Consciousness, 9 (1981–82), 108–9; Bernard Lewis, Islam and the West (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 108. More generally, critics have noted that the presence of an influential Orientalist scholarship in Germany, as well as the absence of any significant Germany colonies in the Orient, calls into question Said's claim that there is a confluence between scholarship and political power in Orientalist discourse. Neither critics nor supporters, on the other hand, have given much attention to Said's claim that there is a similarity between Orientalism and anti-Semitism. Said states this in his introduction, where he notes that in “addition and by an almost inescapable logic, I have found myself writing the history of a strange secret sharer of Western anti-Semitism. That anti-Semitism, and as I have discussed it in its Islamic branch Orientalism resemble each other is a historical, cultural, and political truth that needs only be mentioned to an Arab Palestinian for its irony to be perfectly understood” (1978:27–28). Elsewhere, Said has faulted critics of his work on Orientalism for seeing “in the critique of Orientalism an opportunity for them to defend Zionism . . . and launch attacks on Palestinian nationalism,” instead of giving attention to the similarity “between Islamophobia and anti-Semitism” (1985:9).

In imperial Germany, Catholics and Jews were two religious minorities in the midst of an intolerant majority society. Although there were considerable differences in size (Catholics were about 35 percent of the German population and Jews about 1 percent), their positions as minorities vis-è-vis the Protestant majority had clear similarities. While they were officially free to integrate themselves into the Protestant society surrounding them, they were nevertheless targets of religious persecution and of social and cultural discrimination. They were perceived by wide sectors of the German society as “a state within a state,” “a knife in the nation's back,” and as a group of “betrayers” of the German national policy. Even Germans who did not use such expressions, considered these minorities “marginal groups” inasmuch as their religious principles or their cultural heritages seemed outdated and unimportant and thus easily cast off in the name of assimilation.

The following anecdote was related to me during my field work in Syria a few days after the event allegedly took place:

One day a high-ranking officer visiting the regiment ordered the soldiers to recount their dreams of the night before. A soldier stepped forward and announced: “I saw the image of the leader in the sky, and we mounted ladders of fire to kiss it.” A second soldier followed suit: “I saw the leader holding the sun in his hands, and he squeezed it, crushing it until it crumbled. Darkness blanketed the face of the earth. And then his face illuminated the sky, spreading light and warmth in all directions.” Soldier followed soldier, each extolling the leader's greatness. When M's turn came, he stepped forward, saluted the visiting officer, and said: “I saw that my mother is a prostitute in your bedroom.” The beating and discharge followed. Commenting retrospectively on his act, M explained that he had “meant that his country is a whore.”M's story was told to me by a close friend of M's, one of my most reliable sources for information about Syrian politics, during the course of what would become two and one-half years of field research in Syria. In 1985, while studying Arabic, I lived with a Lebanese family in Abu Rummaneh, an affluent neighborhood of Damascus. In 1988–89, under the auspices of an IIE-Fulbright grant, I lived in the women's dormitories at the University of Damascus, in the Palestinian refugee camps, and in a rented apartment in Salahiyya, a middle-class neighborhood near the center of town. In 1992, I rented an apartment on the border of the middle-class, conservative neighborhood of Muhajirin during a year-long stay supported by a Fulbright-Hays doctoral dissertation fellowship. And in 1996, funded by a grant from Wesleyan University, I returned for the summer and lived in the Institut Français d'Études Arabes de Damas. During the course of my research, I conducted open-ended interviews with over 100 people from diverse generational, religious, sectarian, and class backgrounds. Interview subjects included prominent government officials, leaders and rank-and-file members of the “popular” organizations, peasants, sports coaches, school teachers, principals, entrepreneurs, artists, poets, film directors, economists, historians, and political dissidents.

In this essay I hope to come closer to an understanding of how Mau Mau insurgents created a world in the Aberdares forest composed of individuals and groups who contested the means for which positive social value could be attained.Mau Mau is the name given by whites to the Central Kenyan insurgency that became openly violent in 1952. Most Mau Mau violence was centered in and around the Aberdares Forest, which separated the European “White Highlands” from the African Reserves. Though not entirely a Kikuyu movement, most forest fighters were Kikuyu, and Mau Mau has often been referred to as a “Kikuyu civil war” because so much of the violence was directed at African (mostly Kikuyu) elites and because many Kikuyu (such as chiefs, elites, and Homeguards recruited by the colonial government to fight Mau Mau insurgents) took an active role in denouncing or quelling it. As John Lonsdale (1992) and Bruce Berman (1991) have shown, Mau Mau framed and informed debates about morally appropriate lifeways among a people who were never a cohesive “tribe” and who experienced radically different living and working conditions under colonialism. The world they created was replete with power, and this power was congealed in certain objects and the ability to use them. Many of these objects were literally stolen from the institutions which made up the colonial regime (schools and offices, for example). They circulated within and among groups of insurgents (itungati) in the forest and in some way represented and embodied the enchanted power of the colonial state apparatus.Most authors translate itungati as “freedom fighter” or “guerilla.” Lonsdale (1992) has indicated that the term literally means “rear guard” and probably refers to the self-conception of the original Mau Mau leadership as the rear guard, vis è vis literate nationalists like Jomo Kenyatta, in the struggle for independence. Yet the circulation of these objects into new social space (Mau Mau camps), whose constitution they contributed to, both changed the meaning of these objects and clarified and accelerated divisions within the movement.

Disembedded capitals are urban sites founded de novo and designed to supplant existing patterns of authority and administration. While a controversial topic in New World archaeology, there is ample evidence from ancient Western Asia and Egypt to demonstrate that disembedded capitals were a well-understood and frequently used option in developed state systems. Ethnohistoric examples from Egypt and Mesopotamia are presented to show the common organizational, ideological, and ecological features of disembedded capitals, and their varying historical and imperial contexts. Disembedded capitals were typically founded by new elites, either usurpers or reformers, as part of innovations designed to simultaneously undercut competing factions and create new pattterns of allegiance and authority. But while intended to break away from existing power relationships, in order to function disembedded capitals were necessarily reembedded back into those structures, In an evolutionary sense disembedded capitals were short-lived phenomena which tended to create long-term societal problems.

Liisa Malkki's extraordinarily powerful book joins the study of violence and the body with history and nationalism through detailed ethnographic work and a strong grasp of theory. If there is a weakness in the book, it is perhaps that it is burdened with too many themes, since it is also about displacement, marginality and invisibility; about narratives of the self and the conditions of narrative making; and, not least, about the politics of ethnic violence in Burundi from 1972 until the present.