There is no God, but he promised us the land.
This chapter examines the epistemological politics of religion as illustrated through a study of the partition of British India and Mandate Palestine and the emergence of the Pakistani and Israeli states. It argues that the concept of ‘religion’ and the capacious concepts of ‘Muslim’ and ‘Jewish’ both gave shape to and were shaped by the various claims for independence, resistance to colonial governance, struggle for minority representation, and other forms of recognition.Footnote 1 It shows that we can gain a better understanding of the costs of recognizing religion in International Relations (IR) by tracing the manifold ways in which the concept of religion has become recognizable locally, nationally, and globally. After a brief historical introduction, I engage the question of numbers and demography (through the analysis of the census and immigration), the topic of political representation, and the work of two border commissions at the centre of the partition processes – the Royal Palestine ‘Peel’ Commission and the Radcliffe Commission of Punjab and Bengal.
In examining how ‘religion’ came to be a part of a transnational vocabulary describing minorities, borders, or conflicts, I focus on the ways in which the term and its cognates were used by colonial, local, international, and postcolonial actors, as well as how it became part of new struggles for authority, power, and order. I ask what this use depended on in order to make sense in particular contexts, and how this use shaped the meaning and the work ‘religion’ could do in terms of legitimating certain actors, authorizing certain political orders and hierarchies, and enabling access to power and position.Footnote 2 Interested in these dynamics, I also look closer at the shift in meaning instantiated by these forms of use and illustrate the details and consequences of such shifts.
It is not the question here whether or not the ‘Jews’ of Palestine or the ‘Muslims’ of India were a religious group or if the minorities, nations, or states formed around them were defined by ‘religion’.Footnote 3 Extensive scholarship has studied the historical formation that has framed Judaism as religion (or not) and Islam as a separate category from politics.Footnote 4 Instead, I build on the critical standpoint underlying these studies and ask what it meant to categorize certain aspects of colonial, local, global, administrative, legal, political, cultural, and social life as Jewish or Muslim. What did this mean and how was it done? What were the consequences? I want to know how subjects that would come to claim political representation on a global stage took shape in the first place, as well as how those subjectivities shifted. The Eastern European Zionists were a very different part of this process than were the Mizrahim or the Orthodox Haredim, for example.Footnote 5 Similarly, the leader of the All-India Muslims League Muhammad Ali Jinnah’s disregard for the Indian Muslims’ religious practices did not hinder him from claiming a nation and state in their name. In this chapter, I single out a few instances of these constitutive processes and look at numbers, questions of representation, and the making of international borders.
It is important to note here that none of these processes were creative in the sense of inventing subjectivities, territorial demarcations, or political categories. As we will see throughout the chapter, these processes were embedded in a context in which such manifestations made sense. The only questions are, then, how were they recognizable and to whom? Why them and not others? And most importantly, what followed?
Race and Religion: Colonial Politics of Knowledge
Over the past five centuries, imperial domination has shaped modern global relations, deeply influencing the development of political orders and legal frameworks that governed both domestic and international affairs. By the peak of European imperialism, a rigid international hierarchy had become entrenched, often justified by appeals to racial differences. Although notions of difference had existed in earlier international orders, during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, these distinctions were increasingly framed in racial terms. What W. E. B. Du Bois called the global ‘color line’ emerged from intersecting political and ideological forces in the nineteenth century, including the legacies of enslavement in the Americas, imperial exploitation in Africa, and what Adom Getachew refers to as a ‘growing racial identification among Europeans and their settler counterparts’ – the latter increasingly blurring the lines of differentiation.Footnote 6 By the end of the nineteenth century, the racialized concept of difference had led to a more conflicted view of empire as a civilizing mission.Footnote 7 While liberal advocates of empire saw imperial rule as a temporary tool for advancing progress, growing scepticism about whether such progress was achievable – due to the perceived intransigence of the colonized peoples – led to a more cautious and conservative approach to empire that focused on maintaining order and conserving native societies.Footnote 8 Another key factor driving the transition from direct to indirect rule by colonial powers was the challenge to the legitimacy of colonial authority, particularly due to its racialized nature and its violation of acclaimed universal principles of equality.Footnote 9 To justify colonial rule, local intermediaries and traditional authorities became crucial in the implementation of indirect rule.Footnote 10
As Mahmood Mamdani argues, it was under the system of ‘indirect rule’ in colonial governance that the categorization and management of difference became central to the functioning of empire. Colonialism, in this context, institutionalized divisions based on race and religion, embedding them both in societal structures and in official policies.Footnote 11 This form of indirect colonial rule – through tools like historiography, lawmaking, and census-taking – politicized these acknowledged differences, transforming them into legally recognized boundaries. Adherence to these boundaries, in turn, became tied to the distribution of security and economic benefits. Mamdani captures this process with the phrase ‘define and rule’.Footnote 12 As Yael Berda suggests, the unravelling of the myth of universality revealed that racial hierarchy was not only a political belief but an organizing principle for administrative actions.Footnote 13 In the hybrid structure of indirect rule, race and religion emerged as key categories, offering an alternative to a universalist order. These categories were thus deeply intertwined with the mechanisms of imperial governance. In this chapter and Chapter 5, I examine how the concepts of religion and race appear, at times, interchangeable and at other times function as distinct concepts of governance and knowledge. In Chapter 5, I argue that this conceptual ambiguity was not merely a product of political interest or administrative needs but was also shaped by the deeper and often contradictory assumptions held by individual actors regarding the global political order.
Pakistan and Israel as States: The British Withdrawal from India and Palestine
On 3 June 1947, the British government issued a statement announcing the ‘intention of transferring power in British India to Indian hands’.Footnote 14 The Second World War had left the British heavily indebted, dependent not only on their colonies but on the declaredly anti-imperialist United States.Footnote 15 The recent war had seen the international order crumble, leaving the League of Nations with its Mandate system and Woodrow Wilson’s limited but broadly disseminated idea of self-determination to merge into a new order. The United Nations (UN) struggled to take up the mantle and emerged as an independent organization during the beginning of what would come to be known as a Cold War.Footnote 16
In this context, the newly elected British Labour government established two commissions to ‘demarcate the [new state] boundaries … on the basis of ascertaining the contiguous majority areas of Muslims and non-Muslims’.Footnote 17 Independence in India was to come at midnight on 14 August 1947, allowing for about ten weeks’ preparation. The British lawyer Cyril Radcliffe left for India on 7 July to head one of the commissions tasked with demarcating the boundary between the emergent states. It was his first visit to the subcontinent. Six weeks later, the results of the commission, known as the Radcliffe line, became an international border separating the Indian Union and Pakistan. It also divided the north-western region of Punjab, bordering Afghanistan, and the north-eastern region of Bengal, bordering Burma, into respective Indian and Pakistani territories. The Radcliffe Award demarcated ‘Muslim Pakistan’ from its ‘non-Muslim’ Indian neighbour in the terms used in the official brief. Subsequently, fourteen and a half million people crossed the border after partition. Of these, between 500,000 and two million died in the warlike conditions that followed.Footnote 18
Earlier that year, on 14 February, the British cabinet had decided to return their Mandate and hand over the ‘Palestine Question’ to the UN. On 18 February, the British foreign secretary Ernest Bevin had spoken to the House of Commons about Palestine: ‘We are unable to accept the scheme put forward either by the Arabs or by the Jews, or to impose ourselves a solution of our own’.Footnote 19 Responding, the UN General Assembly met in special session in New York and established a Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP) to re-examine the options for a Palestine future. The committee toured the country during the summer of 1947 and presented their report on 1 September, later that year. There was unanimity in UNSCOP about the need to terminate the Mandate and a majority in favour of partition into two states. A minority proposal, however, was also presented that would give Palestine independence as a ‘federal state’ with locally governed, separate Arab and Jewish autonomous areas. It would leave Palestine a unitary state under ‘Arab domination’.Footnote 20
During the following two months, three specially appointed subcommittees of UNSCOP developed the terms of the different recommendations. At the end of November, UNSCOP’s recommendations were brought before the UN General Assembly at Lake Success in New York, where the vote was held on 29 November. Two-thirds of the votes were necessary for ratification. In the end, thirty-three states voted yes, thirteen no, and ten abstained. Partition had passed but not very comfortably.Footnote 21 The rejections had consisted of Arab states, Cuba, and India. Resolution 181 (II) thereby terminated the British Mandate for Palestine and established two states, one Jewish, the other Arab, bound in an economic ‘union’. The British pullout was to be completed ‘no later than 1 August 1948’.
With the UN resolution passed, massive demonstration erupted in cities across the Middle East and North Africa. Within the following hours, the region experienced an eruption of violence, turning into civil war.Footnote 22 The desire for a zero-sum conflict during the UN resolution negotiations transformed into a full-scale war, drawing in the neighbouring countries of Transjordan, Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq. The culmination was the exodus of between 600,000 and 760,000 Palestinian Arabs, the refusal of Israel to allow them to return, and the unwillingness, combined with inability of the neighbouring states apart from Transjordan, to resettle them.Footnote 23 On 14 May 1948, Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, proclaimed the establishment of ‘the Jewish State’ in Palestine.Footnote 24 While the Israeli state was de facto recognized by the United States within eleven minutes of the Mandate’s end, Britain took more than eight months. Iraq, Lebanon, Pakistan, Syria, and about twenty-five other states still do not recognize the State of Israel.Footnote 25 On the last day of the British Mandate – 14 May – with the conditions on the ground radically changed, UNSCOP was formally dissolved. In the span of a year, in processes that had been accompanied by large-scale violence, both Pakistan and Israel had emerged as new states that were shortly thereafter granted membership in the UN.Footnote 26
Numbers: Census, Enumeration, and Immigration
British India
The population upon whose behalf the ‘Muslim National Home’ of Pakistan was claimed had been a part of the British Indian Empire for centuries. Prior to that, it had experienced three centuries of Mughal rule. Nevertheless, British Indian Muslims were a heterogeneous group, estimated to comprise approximately 100 million at the time of partition.Footnote 27 The fact that the British administration categorized a population who spoke different languages, belonged to different social strata, and carried out different cultural rites and rituals under a singular label spoke more to the forms of imperial knowledge than the day-to-day experiences of its population.Footnote 28
The census was one of the most influential ways in which this heterogeneity was represented to and by the British as a single whole, making the ‘Muslims’ politically salient and intelligible in the rule of the late British Empire. The Registrar General and Census Commissioner conducted a census in British India every ten years beginning at the end of the nineteenth century. It was intended to serve as a basis for knowledge about Indian local society, mapping the population and land according to language, caste, religion, professions, and so on. Initially initiated in order to assist revenue and tax collection in the north-east region of Bengal during the late eighteenth century, the census developed to capture almost every aspect of British Indian life in numbers.Footnote 29 In his foundational study of the Indian census, Bernard Cohn shows how the original concern with counting the characteristics of the Indian population, ‘which may have started as the intellectual concerns of a few British officials or the administrative necessity of knowing the “natives”’ had become an object to be used in political, social, and cultural battles’.Footnote 30 The Indian census shaped a new sense of categorized identity that in turn created ‘the conditions for new strategies of mobility, status politics, and electoral struggle in India’.Footnote 31
Through the census, the Indian Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, and Christians became quantifiable as ‘communal’ entities.Footnote 32 The census’s enumeration of the Indian population into communities further functioned as a point of reference for the colonial state when it introduced representative political institutions. This was most clearly reflected at the provincial level in 1909 with the decision to introduce separate electorates for Muslims and as the British extended provincial self-government through the Government of India Acts in 1919 and 1935. Through these ‘marked’ electorates, Muslim representation was thought to increase in the system of elective local government.Footnote 33 Once these census categories became a point of reference for the British government, however, religious demographical numbers became directly linked to political representation, power, and patronage. While the introduction of separate electorates for Muslims, Sikhs, and others in British India in the first decades of the twentieth century were meant to ‘protect either community from being deprived of political representation in areas where it was a minority’,Footnote 34 those who were supposed to benefit from these protections were also ‘transformed by virtue of their subjection to the calculus of state and geopolitical power’.Footnote 35
The recognition of religious minorities had empowered and provided them with local political power, but it had also conditioned that very influence to those identifiable as ‘Muslims’, ‘Sikhs’, or the other categories provided for by the census. This categorization encouraged new forms of practices by putting different weights and values on existing conceptions of group identity, bodily distinctions, and self-representation.Footnote 36 While this does not imply that British Indian Muslims were ‘invented’ by imperial arithmetic logics and administrative practices – the Mughal rule had long before consolidated power on the subcontinent around a Sunni Hanafi legal tradition – this formation of an integrated religious, cultural, and political Muslim body brought together what Arjun Appadurai calls an ‘exoticizing vision of orientalism with the familiarizing discourse of statistics’.Footnote 37
In a more general sense, the recognition of the national minority, which had gained an international institutional form after the First World War, had empowered these minorities, but the process of minoritization had also made them governable.Footnote 38 Therefore, while governing instruments such as the census and forms of political representation such as the separate electorates partook in the constitution and the empowerment of the religiously marked minorities, they had simultaneously made them vulnerable to the government practices and categories of the colonial state.Footnote 39 The protection of the minority would not only make it more vulnerable; it would also push its members to amplify their difference in regard to the national majority in order to make them legible to a national and international discourse of minority rights.Footnote 40 The double face of recognition had both enabled and subjected those seeking empowerment through it.
The enumerative power of the census’s categorization was probably the most influential example of the effect that colonial administration and bureaucracy had on consolidating the Muslim political constituency and stabilizing the demarcation between Muslim and non-Muslim. As categories, the ‘Muslims’ and the ‘Hindus’ lent stability to the British experience of heterogeneous Indian social, political, and cultural life. This reduction of complexity was, indeed, a mechanism for organizing and perpetuating state power, as has been argued many times before.Footnote 41 However, while this process of individualizing, categorizing, and disciplining corporeal bodies functioned as an instrument of domination, it also created the conditions for the idea of the representation of Indian selves – in the form of self-rule – as nationalism became a mass movement.Footnote 42 The enumerative power of the census had indeed elevated the entity or identity of ‘the Muslims’ and made them recognizable and intelligible as a coherent and identifiable subject able to claim both the nation and the state. Although the close connection between the census and political representation and power left this connection highly charged, it remained relatively unchallenged until the very end of the British rule.Footnote 43 As so, at the time of independence, the census featured as the single most important point of reference for separating the new Pakistani state from the Indian Union.Footnote 44
Mandate Palestine
The counting and categorization of the population was a different issue in Mandate Palestine. Prior to the British Mandate, the Ottoman Empire kept detailed registers (daftar-I mufassal) providing comprehensive statistics on economic activity and population, including counting household heads and indicating their religion. During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, there were two main sources of Ottoman population data on Palestine: the Salname (yearbook) and population register (nüfus) for the years 1871, 1880, 1905, 1912, and 1915. While they remained incomplete, their main object was not necessarily to provide exact information to the Turkish centre but rather to obtain the names of persons liable for military service or upon whom they could impose new taxes.Footnote 45
The British subsequently conducted censuses in Palestine in 1922, 1936, and 1946, but rather than being connected to questions of political representation and the governing of minorities, the numbers in Palestine came to be intimately connected to the question of immigration. Specifically, the censuses were concerned with the number of Jewish immigrants to Palestine under the auspices of the British Mandate.Footnote 46 In September 1922, after the First World War, the League of Nations allotted the Mandate over Palestine and Iraq to the United Kingdom. The Mandate stipulated that Palestinians should receive ‘administrative advice and assistance by a Mandatory until such time as they are able to stand alone’.Footnote 47 While fulfilling this role, the British were to facilitate the establishment of a ‘Jewish National Home’ through immigration.Footnote 48 The Mandate thereby affirmed the Balfour Declaration given by the British government to the head of the British Zionist Federation, Lord Lionel Walter Rothschild, five years earlier in 1917. The double obligation by the British to develop a ‘Jewish Home’ and protect the ‘civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine’ left the Mandate and the Declaration at the centre of the conflict regarding the right to establish a Jewish State and facilitate European immigration to Palestine.Footnote 49
In contrast to the Palestinian census, which would come to note Arab Palestinians as ‘Muslims, Christians, Druze, and Others’, the Balfour Declaration, as well as the Mandate itself, spoke of Jews and non-Jews only.Footnote 50 The Palestinian Arab population was mentioned only as ‘non-Jewish communities’ and not explicitly by name. Jews were also alone in being labelled ‘national’ in addition to being a religious community in Palestine. No other community was ‘national’ or named. Instead, they were subsumed under the category of the ‘other inhabitants of Palestine’, or ‘non-Jews’.Footnote 51 One of the few suggestions of Arab community occurred in Article 22 of the Mandate, which mentioned Arabic next to English and Hebrew as the future official languages of Palestine.Footnote 52
Demographic politics also structured the Zionist conceptualizations of and policies towards the Arab minority in the proposed Jewish state. As Nimrod Lin shows, prior to 1937 and the first official plan for Palestine partition, the official policy of the Zionist Organization regarding the future of Palestine was ‘mutual non-domination’ – the idea that Jews should not dominate Arabs, and vice versa. ‘This slogan, which permeated Labor Zionist thought since at least 1917, excluded, by definition, any scenario in which an Arab minority would be ruled by a Jewish majority, and thus no serious planning for the place of an Arab minority in a Jewish State had been conducted by the Zionist leadership until July 1937.’Footnote 53 The tacit agreement to establish a Jewish state at the 1937 Zionist Congress, however, signalled the end of mutual non-domination as an official Zionist policy, abandoning the principle of parity between Jews and Arabs in Palestine’s self-governing institutions. It meant that the Zionist leadership accepted that ‘Jews should, and could, rule over Arabs’.Footnote 54 The issue of mass transfer of Arabs out of the Jewish state now became a central part of Zionist political discourse as a measure that would consolidate the Jewish character of the state.Footnote 55 I return to the role of transfer of population in Chapter 5, but what remains important here is how ideas about minority governance and parity – the understanding that Jewish and Arab communities are equal in terms of the kind of entity – both worked to constitute and affirm the difference between them.
From the side of the British, the mandate to facilitate Jewish immigration to Palestine in order to establish a ‘Jewish National Home’ remained, on the one hand, a pledge to help Jews immigrate to Palestine. However, it also sedimented the association between Jews as immigrants.Footnote 56 The growth of the Jewish population of Palestine from approximately 56,000 to 650,000 during the thirty years of British rule not only laid the groundwork for the creation of a durable Jewish society – or a ‘Jewish National Home’ – but confirmed the initial fears of the Palestinian population regarding the expansive aims of the Zionist movement. It made immigration a ‘matter of life and death’ for the Arab population and connected the notion of immigration with the Jewish community.Footnote 57
Indeed, the question of immigration became increasingly contentious throughout the Mandate. While the initial argumentation of the British officials tended to measure immigrant numbers according to the economic ability of the Palestinian society to absorb them, the immigration question soon became a brick in British wartime negotiation. As the British increasingly came to see the war in Europe as unavoidable, they promised the Arab states to limit Jewish immigration to Palestine in return for their support against the Germans. As the war proceeded, the British continued to use the number of Jewish immigrants as leverage to regulate its influence in the region, emphasizing the difference between the Jewish immigrants and the non-Jewish indigenous population.Footnote 58
Representation: Made and Unmade
British India
Another source to look to when trying to understand the establishment and stabilization of knowledge regarding religious difference in British India was political representation. The party of the All-India Muslim League and its leader, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, hold a special position in this context.Footnote 59 Changes in the forms of representative government throughout the early twentieth century expanded the possibilities for participation by the British Indian population at large. However, with the emerging prospects of parliamentary democracy came the fear of majority rule by those who did not see themselves as belonging to it.Footnote 60 It is against this backdrop we can read Jinnah proclaiming the British Indian Muslims as a nation rather than a minority. According to Jinnah, the Muslims were both too large in numbers and too distinct in a constitutional fashion due to the reforms granting them a separate electoral body to be reduced to a national minority.
The real struggle in which the Muslim League and Jinnah took part, then, was not only the struggle for a territorial homeland for India’s Muslims but rather one to establish a unified ‘Muslim community’ in India despite its cultural, linguistic, demographic, religious, and political differences.Footnote 61 It was a struggle between regional and national politics,Footnote 62 between the multiplicity of particular local meanings attributed to these religious markers and in light of the need for a unified Muslim front on the national stage.Footnote 63 However, rather than being a power struggle between different levels of government for the authority to define and delimit a future state, the struggles between the local, national, and internationalist visions of a ‘Muslim Homeland’ forced the political elite of the Muslims League, including Jinnah, to outline a detailed case to convince domestic supporters as well as an international audience of its feasibility.Footnote 64
Early on, Jinnah had rejected appeals to the religious specificity of the ‘Indian Muslims’. Attempts to frame Muslims as a religious minority, as had previously been done by Gandhi and the Indian National Congress, would, he argued, ‘confine [the Indian Muslims] to the demographically and constitutionally powerless, degraded, and impossible position’ of a minority only ‘tolerated’ under a Hindu Raj.Footnote 65 The Muslim League was, however, not only prevented by its leaders’ opinions on the matter from making much use of Islam as the set of religious beliefs and practices of a minority population. Notably, they were also prevented from doing so by the opposition of a broad range of Muslim clerics.Footnote 66 Many of these leaders and clerics rejected the quest for Pakistan and supported the acclaimed secular, if Hindu-dominated, Indian National Congress. To opt for Pakistan, then, was to ‘give up India as part of the Muslim world’ and lose the possibility to regain influence within the subcontinent.Footnote 67
As partition grew closer, the Muslim League had sidelined other Muslim representatives, and according to Ayesha Jalal, Jinnah gained the position as the League’s – and its constituents’ – ‘sole spokesperson’.Footnote 68 Jinnah had rejected the relegation of India’s Muslims to the status of a religious minority – which would have been able to provide the unifying power needed to bridge the heterogeneity of particularities of Indian Muslim life – and Muslim clerics had refused to give their support to a ‘Muslim Homeland’. According to Jinnah, the Muslims were a nation. However, national projects had previously been consolidated through language and natural borders of mountains, rivers, or oceans. They were reinforced by historiography, religious rituals, and so on. The Indian Muslims, however, were heterogeneous in every respect.
[They had] such elements of tradition or religiosity working rather to divide them more, by region, language, sect, and class. Islam as an agglomeration of prejudice, practice, and superstition, held together by juridical categories like separate electorates and personal law on the one hand, and external boundaries of caste … on the other, had to be translated into a national unity of another kind.Footnote 69
Whatever this consolidating power would be – international geopolitics,Footnote 70 pragmatic minority politics,Footnote 71 internationalist forms of Muslim nationalism,Footnote 72 anti-colonial sentiments,Footnote 73 or ideas of Islamic utopias such as those championed by the Deobandi ulamaFootnote 74 – it was clear by the mid 1940s that it would be voiced through the representational authority of Jinnah and the Muslim League, and it was not religion in any institutional sense.Footnote 75
In the elections of February 1946, the League’s victory vindicated its claim to speak for Muslim India. However, the recognition of Muslim unity did not come without costs. As Talbot and Singh have argued, the ‘consolidation of political allegiances around religious community both reflected and contributed to the communal polarisation’.Footnote 76 Again, we see how the meaning and use of ‘religion’ and its ‘Muslim’ cognate is structured by both the representational political system and the need for recognizable political subjects and structures the ways in which arguments on behalf of this particular subject can be made.
Mandate Palestine
In Palestine, the situation of political representation was different. While the highest-ranking political authority of the country was vested in the High Commissioner, who represented the United Kingdom, and while no Palestinian parliament or cabinet could claim popular representation, the Mandate had foreseen a representative body for its Jewish population. Designed to ‘advis[e] and cooperat[e] with the Administration of Palestine in such economic, social and other matters as may affect the establishment of the Jewish National Home and the interests of the Jewish population in Palestine’,Footnote 77 the Jewish Agency represented the Palestinian Jews, Zionist and non-Zionist alike.Footnote 78 It also centralized different Jewish land acquisition and settlement projects. There was, however, no equivalent body for the ‘non-Jewish’ population.Footnote 79
Throughout the decades of Mandate rule, demands for representational government and the halting of land sales lay at the root of reoccurring conflicts, riots, and protests, which were always dealt with in tandem with the question of Jewish immigration. This was also the case during the Arab Revolt in April 1936. What started as dispersed acts of violence throughout Palestine became countrywide riots and ended in six-month-long strikes.Footnote 80 The already significant gap between ‘Jews’ and their ‘non-Jewish’ counterparts grew deeper with each act of violence. The semi-official status accorded to the Jewish Agency by the British and the League of Nations through the Mandate conferred international legitimacy upon the Zionist movement and guaranteed it access to international arenas in London, New York, and Geneva. The demarcation between ‘Jew’ and ‘non-Jew’ – seldom questioned in general – was therefore internationally recognized and institutionally practiced, as the Jewish Agency claimed representation not only for Palestine’s Zionists but for all Jews both inside and outside Palestine with regard to the Jewish state.
In contrast, the Palestinians were not granted the same national recognition or institutional framework. The wording of the Mandate for Palestine mentioned the ‘civil and religious rights of the existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine’ but remained silent on their political or national rights.Footnote 81 During the 1930s, the region’s surrounding countries underwent processes of decolonialization. In Iraq, the Mandate was replaced by self-government, and in Egypt, the terms of the British protectorate were amended in Egypt’s favour. As the rest of the Class A mandate countries moved towards independence, Palestine alone was ‘governed by a regime that did not grant representation to the majority of the population’.Footnote 82 Further, the representational situation was complicated by the fact that the Mandate itself contained the recognition of the Zionist project of building a ‘National Home’ in Palestine. Any claim to political representation within the framework of the Mandate would have implicitly accepted its terms, and thereby the right to establish a Jewish National Home.
In 1923, a British proposal was put forward for an Arab Agency to be appointed by the High Commissioner. Rather than being elected, as was the case with the Jewish Agency, it was ‘a pale reflection of the Jewish [representative body], without sanction in the Mandate, and without international standing’.Footnote 83 In this vacuum, Palestinian Arab politics were increasingly dominated by a religious leadership that had been authorized and subsidized by the British. After taking control over the Palestine territories, the latter created the entirely new post of the ‘Grand Mufti of Palestine’ (al-mufti al-akbar). They were also designated the ‘Mufti of Jerusalem and the Palestine region’ (mufti al-Quds wal-diyar al-filistiniyya), as well as head of the new ‘Supreme Muslim Council’, an advisory body on ‘Muslim’ courts, schools, and charities. The existing system was thus ‘completely restructured by the British, who effectively placed the mufti above all other religious officials in Palestine’.Footnote 84 The British appointed Hajj Amin al-Husayni to this newly created position of unprecedented power. ‘Among all the other leaders of national movements in Arab countries during this period (and among Palestinian leaders), the mufti was alone in being a leading religious figure, whose base of power was a “traditional” religious institution, albeit a newly invented one.’Footnote 85
After the 1936 revolt, the British exiled most Arab leaders in 1937. Others fled, and some never returned to the country, most notably Hajj Amin al-Husayni himself. At this point, the British took control of the Supreme Muslim Council, appointed British officials to supervise it, and deprived the Mufti of its revenues.Footnote 86 As the Second World War approached, the rift between the Jewish Agency and the Mufti grew wider, finally coming to a head with the claim of independence for the Jewish state at the 1942 Biltmore Conference in New York.Footnote 87 The Mufti subsequently left for Germany, supporting the National Socialist German and Fascist Italian war efforts.Footnote 88 Notably, the Biltmore resolution demanded unrestricted Jewish immigration to Palestine, the establishment of Palestine as a commonwealth, and the creation of a Jewish army. The position drove more moderate and non-Zionist members from the Jewish Agency, which would continue to lead the cause for Palestine partition and the independence of the Jewish state at the UN deliberation in the autumn of 1947.
Borders and the ‘Transfer of Population’
British India
After the war, the newly elected Labour government witnessed the British being driven out of the Indian subcontinent. Despite long deliberations between the Muslim League, the Indian National Congress, and the British, the three parties were unable to find a path to independence involving a unified India. On 3 June 1947, therefore, His Majesty’s Government announced the transfer of power to and the partition of British India. It was at this point that Radcliffe and both his Punjabi and Bengali commissions were instructed to ‘demarcate the boundaries of the two parts of [the Provinces] on the basis of ascertaining contiguous majority areas of Muslims and non-Muslims’.Footnote 89 The instructions continued, ‘for the purpose of determining the population of district, the 1941 census figures will be taken as authoritative. [The commissions] will also be instructed to take into [consideration] other factors.’Footnote 90 Apart from the census, the primary source of information upon which Radcliffe relied in drawing his lines were the colonial maps. No information was gathered through the commissions’ own surveys or by consulting the local administration, police, revenue officers, or bureaucrats in the border districts.Footnote 91
The official maps used by Radcliffe had been commissioned for two principal reasons. The first was colonial administration and logistics, such as tax collection, transportation, roads, and railways. The second main function of the maps had been military, especially in the north-east, where the advancement of the Japanese forces in 1942 had highlighted the need for precise cartographical knowledge.Footnote 92 The mark of colonial administration and military imperatives on the maps available for Radcliffe’s border mission became clear in the ‘other factors’ considered besides the census: that is, lines of communication, roads, railways, canals, and military bases. Of less interest were questions of trade patterns and kinship and the cultural and religious significance of cities and regions.Footnote 93 In the Punjabi commission, notably, these ‘other factors’ were insisted upon by the Indian National Congress and the Sikh representatives, the latter pushing for recognition of the importance of religious and cultural heritage in areas where they could never claim numerical majority.Footnote 94 However, in the end, the ‘other factors’ that trumped the cards of the census were just the rivers, canals, railroads, roads, and military bases visible on Radcliffe’s maps.
As discussed, the enumerative power of the census had shaped and strengthened the perception of clearly demarcated and distinguishable religious communities without communal or individual overlap. The colonial maps, heavily dependent upon administrative and military knowledge, superimposed these reified religious communities onto visible territory. The census and the map came together in the cartographic representation of a ‘religio-national’ composition, thereby ‘naturalizing a territorialized politics of … national self-determination’.Footnote 95 The maps enacted ‘immanent national units’ while the census ‘populates those entities’, ‘fill[ing] in politically the formal topography of the map’.Footnote 96 The census together with the colonial and wartime maps upon which Radcliffe’s international border relied territorialized ‘religion’ and ‘religious difference’ by separating the ‘non-Muslims’ from the ‘Muslims’, and they contributed to making these categories salient and recognizable to the international political order that the future states would become a part of.
The border-drawing by Indian and British officials was, however, but one out of myriad instances where ‘Muslims’ were demarcated from ‘non-Muslims’. Differing from the Punjabi border in the north-west, for example, the Bengali border between India and eastern Pakistan was intended to be kept porous.Footnote 97 Still, two factors worked to seal it: ‘The first was the drive to stop smuggling. The second factor was the difficulty of impressing the official policy of openness upon border police and militia.’Footnote 98 As the Muslim National Guard had become obsolete, unemployed young men were plentiful in the swelling border communities. The Bengali government began to issue calls for Muslim youth to build up a 150,000-strong non-official Muslim military organization called Ansar Bahini.Footnote 99 This militia seemed to have been behind a trend starting a few years after partition in which Muslims from border villages in West Bengal moved to Pakistan after burning down their own houses. This made it impossible for the Hindu population to inhabit these homes, but it also left the Muslims who quit India with nothing to return to. The ‘presence of armed border militia did much to re-kindle communal hostilities along the border’.Footnote 100 If this is correct, it would seem that they played an important part in strengthening the border and making it more impregnable.
In contrast to the Bengali border, there was an official agreement in the Punjab to complete the ‘transfer of populations’ on the basis of religious community, which was the only one of its kind in India. The figure of ‘the refugee’ in this region was marked by a sense of religious belonging. However, it was not simply the task of fixing citizenship onto religious differences, since not all Muslims could become Pakistanis, and some Muslims wanted to remain in or return to their homes in India.Footnote 101 Border-making, Vazira Zamindar writes, was not a simple geographic project but one that ran through households and the inner worlds of family ties. As such, the control of movements of people and property by national institutions – such as that of the Custodian of Evacuee Property – helped shape the ‘Muslim’ community alongside the defining imprint of citizenship.Footnote 102 As Zamindar shows, ‘The very ways in which one came to be marked as Muslim were transformed by the process of this long Partition, of dividing, categorizing, and regulating people, places, and institutions for bounding two distinct nations, and they accrued new meanings, for alongside citizens there emerged the “undefined”, the “stateless”, and a landscape of divided families.’Footnote 103 Zamindar demonstrates that the quantification of refugees on either side of the official border categorized the ‘displaced people’ as ‘Muslims’ or ‘non-Muslims’ and suggests how the category of those leaving (the ‘evacuees’) was translated into the number of individuals of the category that could be housed in their abandoned property, the so-called evacuee property.Footnote 104 ‘Thus’, Zamindar writes, ‘it is ironic that the very formulation of evacuee property laws as a cornerstone of rehabilitation programs of both states ended up fixing these two sets of refugees in an oppositional relationship’.Footnote 105 As we will see in Chapter 5, the Pakistani regulations of refugee settlement and evacuee property were copied into the migration policy of the new Israeli state.
There were other ways in which the control of the population’s movement closed the seal on what was ‘Muslim’ and sedimented its difference from the ‘non-Muslim’. For example, this included identifying the need to monitor family ties of Muslim Indian civil servants in Pakistan. Non-Muslims were not surveilled in the same manner. There were also programmes to repatriate Muslim, Hindu, and Sikh women abducted in the Punjabi region to their respective ‘nation’, partly against their own will.Footnote 106 A further factor in consolidating the difference between ‘Muslim’ and ‘non-Muslim’ was fear and violence. The wide-ranging violence accompanying the process of Indian partition did not simply separate, disrupt, and destroy but, according to Gyanendra Pandey, was part and parcel of creating the actors and communities that emerged from this process. Violence and unity, in this sense, constitute each other. ‘Violence happened – and can only happen – at the boundaries of community’, writes Pandey. ‘It marks those boundaries. It is the denial of any violence “in our midst”, the attribution of harmony within and the consignment of violence to the outside, that established “community”.’Footnote 107 The violence in 1946 and 1947, as well as the slaughter that took place in the days of partition and independence, was in this sense also constitutive of a process consolidating the ‘Muslims’, making them even more distinguished and distinguishable from those who were not.
Mandate Palestine
Contrasted with the hasty creation of the new South Asian borders, plans had been available for Palestine for more than a decade before the UN recommended partition in November 1947. Partition ideas for Palestine had been circulating throughout the period of the British Mandate, but the escalation of violence in 1929 catalysed British officials to begin in earnest to further develop their ideas. Until the mid 1930s, these ideas – which mainly took the form of proposals for cantonization – remained vague and abstract.Footnote 108 The Arab uprisings of 1936 concretized these early ideas but did so in the form of full partition. ‘After several months of unrest’, writes Penny Sinanoglou, ‘it became clear to many British administrators that anything other than a “clean cut” would continue to complicate the definition and practical governance of a national entity’.Footnote 109 The ‘clean cut’ would become the official British position a year later, through the Report of the Royal Commission, better known as the Peel Commission after its chairman, Lord William Peel.Footnote 110 The report not only confirmed the Mandate’s distinction between Palestine’s two essentially different ‘Jewish’ and ‘non-Jewish’ peoples but also territorialized them.Footnote 111 In its unanimous report, the commission recommended that Palestine be partitioned into an Arab state (to be joined with Transjordan), a Jewish state, and a new British Mandate area, which would cover the ‘Holy Cities’ of Jerusalem: Bethlehem and Nazareth, with a corridor to Jaffa. Despite the fact that it left many questions open – such as the precise lines of partition and the manner in which it was to be implemented – the Peel report was the first public proposal of partition put forward by British official representatives.
Violent rebellion and general strikes forged the context for the commission in 1936. Although the ‘Arab uprising’ was not the first in Mandate Palestine, it had definitely been the most violent in its history to date. The Peel Commission was given the task of reporting on the causes of the uprising and proposing methods for rectifying Arab and Jewish grievances.Footnote 112 Running to nearly 400 pages in its attempt to outline and analyse the complexities of the Palestinian situation, the Peel Commission’s report was the work of six appointed members,Footnote 113 who had spent the previous eleven months listening to the oral testimony of British officials and Jewish and Arab Palestinians (though the latter boycotted the commission until a week before its departure). They had read letters, memoranda, and petitions, and they toured Palestine and parts of neighbouring Transjordan.Footnote 114 The report also reflected the commission’s experience of a specific Palestinian ‘reality’: that, to a great extent, it was already parted into two separated communities. The salience of their experiencing this de facto partition on the ground was expressed in the commission’s detailed analysis of separate Arab and Jewish economies, school systems, lifestyles, residential areas, and even health facilities.Footnote 115 In short, the thirty-year transitional Mandate period had clearly enabled an established ‘Jewish’ society and economy in Palestine.Footnote 116
Starting its narrative from the biblical days of Abraham, the report traced the history of the problem in Palestine, examining the economic, social, and political life under the Mandate. While it did offer suggestions for managing problems within the terms of the Mandate text itself, the report’s central recommendation, and that which is important for our analysis, fell outside the bounds of the Mandate altogether. It saw the Mandate as unworkable as long as Jews and Arabs could not be brought together in a single representative legislature.Footnote 117 The situation in Palestine had reached a ‘deadlock’, it suggested, continuing, ‘if the existing Mandate continued, there was little hope of lasting peace in Palestine’.Footnote 118 In order to lead the reader to this conclusion, according to Sinanoglou ‘the report had to make the case that the conflict was indeed driven by a clash of two distinct and irreconcilable national communities rather than by ethnic hatreds, economic competition or domination, anger over immigration, or poor government’.Footnote 119 The function of the extensive historical part of the report, which went 2,000 years back into Jewish history, was mainly to make the historicist argument of the deep historical, spiritual, and now ideologically national Jewish connection to the land of Palestine, presenting the Jews as fundamentally different from the non-Jewish population.Footnote 120
In the end, the more than 400-pages-long report reaffirmed the Zionist narrative of a Jewish historical connection to the land of Palestine, the idea of the Jewish people ‘return[ing] to their historic homeland’, and the fundamental difference of the Jews from their non-Jewish neighbours.Footnote 121 In this sense, the report stated that the ‘culture of Arab Palestine … born as it is of Asia, it had little kinship with that of the National Home, which, though it is linked with ancient Jewish tradition, is predominantly a culture of the West. Nowhere, indeed, is the gulf between the races more obvious.’Footnote 122 The commission had taken the situation they found on the ground – that of separate education systems, economies, and language – as evidence reflecting the narrative of the separate nature of the two peoples of Palestine.
On 2 April 1937, the Daily Herald broke the story of the commission’s plan for dividing Palestine, which was officially endorsed by the British government when the commission’s report was published on 7 July 1937. The partition line more or less followed the existing Jewish and Arab settlement pattern. The proposed Jewish state was estimated to contain some 225,000 Arabs, who were to be transferred based on an exchange that occurred between Turkey and Greece during the 1920s.Footnote 123 It would come with ‘just compensation’ for those moved, but for those who objected, the transfer would be implemented by the British by means of compulsion ‘in the last resort’. While the Arab Higher Committee rejected the plan in July 1937, ‘Jewish’ opinion was reported to have remained divided.Footnote 124 Though initially rejected, the Peel report resurfaced ten years later in UN negotiations on Israeli independence and the partition of Palestine in the autumn of 1947. Nearly a decade after the Peel report’s release, the UN recommended the partition of Palestine ‘using the Peel proposals and maps as a blueprint’.Footnote 125 In February 1947, when the British decided to leave Palestine and hand over the question of its future to the UN, they did not expect the UN to achieve a binding resolution, which required a two-thirds majority, mainly due to previous Soviet opposition to Zionist policies. However, contrary to British and Arab expectations, both Eastern and Western blocs supported the draft resolution.Footnote 126
The UN decision to partition intensified the waves of violence that had engulfed Palestinian society during the final years of the British Mandate. A month before Israel declared itself independent, the Arab states surrounding the future state countered the first attempt at a large-scale Jewish offensive. Initially, according to Shapira, ‘The Arab Legion’s goal had been to take control of areas designated as part of the Arab state and as far as possible avoid clashing with the Jews’.Footnote 127 However, each ‘wave of violence brought with it further distancing and segregation of these national communities, each into its own territory’.Footnote 128 On 14 May 1948, David Ben-Gurion declared the independence of the Israeli state, and within the following months, the Jewish State of Israel was recognized by a majority of the world’s existing states. Yet the war of 1948 continued, ending with the expulsion of between 600,000 and 760,000 Palestinian Arabs: ‘Given the destruction of all the Jewish settlements on the Arab side, and the Arab evacuation from the Jewish side’, Shapira writes, ‘a new reality materialized: two ethnically homogeneous states, a mainly Jewish one and a purely Arab one.’Footnote 129 The conclusion was that the State of Israel could not allow the Arabs to return to their homes.
Conclusion
In the chapter, I asked what it meant to categorize certain aspects of social, political, and administrative life as ‘Jewish’ or ‘Muslim’ in the decades leading up to the partition of British India and the Palestine Mandate and the subsequent establishment of Pakistan and Israel. I traced a number of constitutive processes of the ‘Muslim’ and ‘Jewish’ subjects tied into the state-building projects of Pakistan and Israel following the Second World War and the demise of the British Empire. I did so in order to find out how the conceptual apparatus of religion was used to describe minorities, border, and conflict, and how it was put into use when it came to negotiating claims for independence and visions of statehood. How did it structure the analysis of conflict and the expectation of how those conflicts would develop? How did it feature in the struggle over authority, legitimacy, and political order?
In British India, the politics of the census was part of the process of moulding the heterogeneous group of British Indian Muslims into a homogeneous, politically representative entity. In Palestine, the Mandate reaffirmed the Balfour Declaration’s distinction between ‘Jews’ and ‘non-Jews’ and tied the image of the ‘Jew’ intimately to that of the immigrant. The question of political representation highlighted the efforts of Jinnah and the Muslim League to claim and gain representational power over British Indian Muslims, which continued to deepen the distinction between ‘Muslims’ and ‘non-Muslims’ as fundamental, national, and civilizational – and as existing prior to history and politics. Colonial, national, and local government inscribed and shaped the knowledge about ‘Hindu’, ‘Sikh’, and ‘Muslim’ identities in India, recognizing their salience by accounting for them in political electoral representation. Meanwhile, in Palestine, the international recognition of the authority of the Jewish Agency affirmed the alleged difference between the ‘Jews’ and ‘the non-Jews’ as a fundamental difference of two ‘peoples’. This distinction tied the ‘Jews’ to what had previously been claimed as Palestinian territory.
The boundary-drawing and subsequent transfer of population illustrated the terms given to and used by the boundary commissions in British India to separate the future Pakistani ‘Muslim Homeland’ from its ‘non-Muslim’ neighbour. It showed how the knowledge represented in the census and colonial maps was authorized and how their conflicting and ambiguous backgrounds were erased. The creation of an international border between these constructed but nonetheless embodied communities further sharpened the edges of the blurry categories that otherwise claim them. Further, local border control, family surveillance, and refugee administration stabilized the officially sanctioned separations. Through national and local channels and through myriad on-the-ground processes, the meaning and scope of the ideas of a ‘Muslim’ identity and a ‘Muslim Homeland’ were transformed.
The boundary-drawing of partition – both the official, clean, rational, and ‘representative’ version and the unofficial, messy, long, and partly arbitrary one – represented the parting of ways of two ‘religious communities’, inscribing them and the states formed around them into the international system, irrespective of their historical formation. In Palestine, the work of the Peel Commission authorized the claims of the Balfour Declaration and the Mandate regarding the separate nature of the ‘Jews’ from the ‘non-Jews’ and territorialized these differences. Ten years later, this differentiation made its way into the UN’s deliberations on Israeli independence and materialized internationally through the partition of Palestine.
Through this detailed – and yet still inevitably simplified – account of the politics of religion in British India and Mandate Palestine, we see how the vocabulary of ‘religion’ defines the categories of the census but also changes as the shifting constituency of the British Indian Muslims claim political and legal representation.Footnote 130 It both confined those it represented to a recognizable version of ‘Muslim’ while at the same time allowing for mobilization in the name of that very ‘Muslin’ subject. The border commissions delineated the international borders along the lines of religious difference, unifying villages visible on wartime maps according to particular notions of the nation state, but they also enabled new forms of solidarity taking shape across previously separate class divisions.
The two faces of recognition do not describe two sides of a historiographical coin, the either-or of reading of the past, the bad coming with the good, and vice versa. Rather, the two faces of recognition highlight the fact that the enabling aspect – international agency, national representational power – also comes with costs, such as the abduction of women married into the wrong families, demographic politics punishing those remaining unrecognizable or impossible to identify, and more. Thus, mine is not simply an argument about the violence in the aftermath of nationalization processes of state-building missions. It is also not just about the need to pay more attention to the brutal realities and epistemic violence of colonizing and decolonizing projects. It is about the conditions of possibility inherent in recognition, the fact that we cannot get away from the duality of subject and subjectivization, of becoming able to act and the dependency on the epistemic structures that enable this agency in the first place.
The study of religion’s global epistemological politics allows us a way in to understanding both the process of becoming international subjects and the dynamics of the order within which these subjects are realized. In Chapter 5, I will continue my study of the global politics of religion by looking at not only the ways in which it took shape within and among emerging states but how it circulated between them. By looking at the entangled histories of South Asia and the Middle East, we will see how the meaning of and knowledge about ‘religion’ is mirrored, changed, and at times emptied through the decades before and after Pakistani and Israeli independence.
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