The Abraham Accords are not simply a series of normalisation agreements between Muslim countries and Israel, motivated by a shared enemy or political dividends writes Olga Kirschbaum-Shirazki. Instead they reflect the arrival on the scene on an official level of an Islam that eschews replacement theology on – and this is critical – traditional grounds. Since Islam is the majority religion in the region, this is nothing short of a template for traditionalist interfaith reconciliation as a pillar of regional peace.
While there are ethnically-based imperial aspects to Arab maximalism among the Arab national movements in the Levant, whether Palestinian, Iraqi, Lebanese, or Syrian-Arab – with their history of mutual influence grounded in a long Arab history of ruling over other Levantine peoples – the religious dimension, of a maximalism grounded in Muslim approaches to other religions, is also critical. This has been laid bare by the openly religious dimensions of Hamas’s platform and attack on 7 October; by Hezbollah’s politics; by Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham’s (HTS) persecution of non-Muslims; and by the growing power of Islamist militias in Iraq, in all cases with the support of one or more of the three most powerful Islamist states in the region – Iran, Turkey, and Qatar. Despite this obvious point, many in the West continue to accept Islamist power in the Levant, hoping for stability through an attenuation of their Islamist politics rather than an alternative Islamic religious and political path.
There will be no lasting peace in the Levant, or the Middle East more broadly, until there is such a shift, achieved through genuine religious reconciliation, from within the religious groups themselves. Because of the numeric and political dominance of Islam in the region, this means, so this article argues, first and foremost an end to Muslim replacement theology, and second a transition to traditionalist interfaith reconciliation among all regional parties, which articulates: cooperation and mutual respect based on concepts within the faith traditions themselves; blunting fundamentalism/authoritarianism; and accommodating believers and non-believers alike.
This process is currently underway with the Abraham Accords, which is why so many dissidents and minority nationalities and religious groups in the region view them as much more than normalisation agreements with Israel, but as regional alternative to the current Islamist-dominated order lead by Iran, Turkey, and Qatar and the militias and political parties they support.
In many strands of traditional Islamic teaching, Islam is not only the final revelation, but the one that corrects the distortions of the Jews and the Christians – and is therefore the only truly legitimate religion. Legitimate religious and political authorities are Muslim. It follows that the parts of the world that have come under Muslim authority should remain under it or, if they have been lost, reconquered. A Jewish state in a land that was once part of the Umma – the territory of Islam – is, therefore, not a legitimate entity. And so, according to many fatwas, Israel is officially a country in the ‘land of war’, as opposed to being a country in ‘the land of treaty’ – a the status of most European countries – or in the ‘land of Islam’ – the status of most Muslim-majority countries – (dar al-harb, dar al-Islam, and dar al-sulb respectively). Indeed, the only other region as consistently named dar al-harb is Kashmir.[1] Similarly, there was significant Muslim opposition to an independent Christian Lebanon and Assyrian state when these were proposed in the post WWI period, as well as to Christian power in the multi-confessional Lebanese state of the postwar period.
Replacement theology does not always mean death and destruction for non-Muslims, but it always means living with Muslim power and authority exercised over them. The status of Jews and Christians as ‘people of the book’ signifies that they can live within the Umma without having to convert, so long as they pay the necessary taxes, are loyal, and know their place. Replacement theology has a long history within Muslim thought and today it finds its most aggressive and uncompromising expression in Islamist movements and states. All non-Muslims in the Middle East have suffered the consequences of this ideology. ISIS, Al Qaida, Al Nusra, and the governments of Iran, Turkey and Qatar are the outgrowth of the Islamist ideology expressed in the works of the Muslim Brotherhood. This latter organisation not only views Islam as the only true religion and legitimate political power, but advocates violence, including against Muslims they consider insufficiently pious, to achieve a universal Caliphate. This Caliphate is to be the ultimate expression of the triumph of Islam.
The Islamist states and movements have taken several approaches to implement their programme of global conquest. These include genocide and murder, as with ISIS against Yezidis and Christians; state oppression of religious minorities and policing of ‘impious’ Muslim citizens, including arbitrary incarceration, torture, and murder; an explicitly genocidal agenda against Israel; global expansion through proxies, as with Iran; and dissimulation, as with Qatar and Turkey, which funds interfaith activities and/or allows for religious minorities, while also funding Islamist expansion globally. This range is also expressed in their approach towards non-Muslim religious holy sites and places of worship, which include converting them into Muslim places of worship, destroying them, forbidding them, or regulating them in a subordinate position.
In recent years, Islamists have manipulated violence and racism towards Muslims to their own ends. The Muslim Brotherhood approach, often used by Qatar – to tar people with ‘Islamophobia’ if they speak out against the very Islamism it supports globally, all in the name of tolerance – has been especially powerful in the West. Indeed, this approach twists urgent concerns for the safety and freedom of Muslim citizens in the West or around the world, to the benefit of Islamists who seek to silence the concerns of moderate Muslims and non-Muslims about Islamism, and to take over Muslim institutions in the West and globally. A most telling example of the Western internalization of this approach was when a Yezidi genocide survivor of ISIS, human rights campaigner, and author Nadia Murad was disinvited from a school presentation in Toronto in fear that her testimony would spark Islamophobia. Thankfully Murad was eventually allowed to speak but only after a public outcry about the decision that led the Toronto District School Board to backtrack with a press release and reinvite her after an examination of her book.
We must not underestimate the breakthrough involved in the Abraham Accords
It is in this context that the importance of the Abraham Accords is underappreciated and misunderstood by many groups in the West. The Abraham Accords are not simply a series of normalisation agreements between Muslim countries and Israel, based on a shared enemy or because of political dividends; they also reflect the arrival on the scene at an official level of an Islam that eschews replacement theology, and does so – this it critical – on traditional grounds. Here is nothing short of a template for traditionalist interfaith reconciliation in the region.
The recognition of Israel and the rejection of Islamism is, for the Abraham Accord Partners, as most clearly articulated by the Emiratis, justified from within their reading of Muslim tradition. The Emiratis view their rejection of Islamism and their approach to Judaism and Israel as emanating from their reading of the traditional texts. And this is not a delusion. Islamic texts, like their Christian counterparts, offer passages and interpretative frameworks that support such a reading. In the Christian context, Vatican II could draw on a minority tradition of the Jews’ ‘enduring covenant’ with God to amend Christianity’s overall approach to the Jews – namely the notion that Jews are accursed and that they killed Christ – and thereby insist that antisemitism is forbidden, and that Christianity’s roots are in Judaism. This created a sea-change for the theoretical foundations of Jewish-Christian relations, effectively ending Catholic replacement theology. In 1993, the Vatican also recognised the State of Israel, thus further repudiating its former stance. Critically, Vatican II also lead to a Christian re-evaluation of other religious traditions as well.
Likewise, in Muslim texts, there are traditions that can be drawn upon to accept the existence of Jews as a people, the state of Israel, and the legitimacy of the Jewish religion. Indeed, the normalisation agreements of the Abraham Accord partners, unlike the peace between Israel and Egypt and Israel and Jordan, have been accompanied by such an articulation by their Muslim leaderships. The Emiratis have also developed this approach to other religions. Emirati sponsorship of Muslim education along these lines would be a revolutionary change in a region where Islamist powers have long sponsored education, media, and political parties especially if Saudi Arabia joins the Abraham Accords and their traditionalist path.
The importance of this development in Abraham Accord signatory countries cannot be overstated. The consolidation of an Abraham Accords-aligned Arab leadership among Palestinian, Syrian, Lebanese, and Iraqi-Arabs whether Sunni or Shia, could bring peace and prosperity hitherto unimagined for the Levant. Indeed, should such an approach to Judaism and Israel – or to Christianity, the Yezidi religion, the Druze religion, and the Alawite religion, which is most accurately designated as traditionalist because its self-understanding is grounded in traditional texts – become mainstream across the Muslim world, it would help to neutralise the religious dimensions of the conflict with Jews as well as with other religious groups, especially hitherto vulnerable communities like Assyrian, Maronite, Coptic, Armenian, and Greek Christians as well as the Yezidis, Alawites, Druze, and a number of smaller communities. These communities have already endured unspeakable violence and are all still currently seriously menaced by Islamic replacement theology, especially in its Islamist form, by the Iranian, Turkish, and Qatari governments and their proxy militias who currently control the region outside of Israel, Rojava, and the Kurdish autonomous region in Iraq (Lebanon may be said to be coming out Iranian control with the weakening of Hezbollah). Moreover, it would give a political home currently unavailable to moderate Sunni and Shiite Palestinians, Syrians, Lebanese, Iraqi-Arabs, and Kurds, in a landscape long dominated by secular Arab nationalist, communist, or Islamist parties. It would also stop their children from being radicalised. It would of course consolidate a counter-vailing block to Turkey, Iran, Qatar, and the Muslim Brotherhood – perhaps even inspiring their citizens to take the traditionalist course as well.
Traditionalism as an alternative to secularism and fundamentalism
In order to appreciate these real-world possibilities of the Abraham Accords, it is critical to understand how the traditionalist religious reconciliation it represents differs from the liberal approach to church and state and from a fundamentalist/authoritarian one. Contrary to the liberal approach, the traditionalist approach accepts the place of religion in the public sphere and politics. At the same time, it addresses conflict – with all its real-world consequences and political implications – head on, unlike many current interfaith initiatives. However, unlike fundamentalism/authoritarianism, traditionalism is not supremacist: it leaves room for others to coexist with full rights and protections. Traditionalism abandons neither the age-old texts and practices nor the realities of the present.
Markers of traditionalism over liberalism/state secularism are: a state church; a state-recognised or funded religion; and mandatory religious instruction in schools, and/or the influence of a religious legal tradition on the legal system without being the sole legal influence. Markers of traditionalism over fundamentalism/authoritarianism are: freedom of worship; legal protections for other religious groups and atheists; and, in a large number of cases, democratic institutions and norms. In concrete terms, Denmark and Malta are traditionalist countries; France is a liberal/secularist one; and Iran is a fundamentalist/authoritarian one.
Indeed traditionalism, in contrast to either fundamentalism or secularism, is a wide tent. For example, take a Christian or an atheist parent in Denmark: in the first instance their child would take the mandatory Christianity classes as lessons in authoritative Scripture and in the second as lessons in a human-authored philosophy. What traditionalism does is to make an equivalence between religion and secular ideologies as respected sources of wisdom and aspects of a society’s cultural patrimony, however a person views their status – human or divine – or their value – wise or misguided. This allows for coexistence between the religious and secular in a way that is impossible in a fundamentalist or secularist society. As a result, traditionalism has the power to dissipate polarisation and the accompanying disrespect for different groups that has occurred in countries where secularism or fundamentalism are the primary alternatives.
Traditionalist interfaith reconciliation the only road to peace and stability
The Traditionalism expressed in the Abraham Accords can accommodate one of the most important features of Middle Eastern politics and culture, whether in Muslim states or Israel: an enduring ambivalence about the West, characterised by both imitation and radical rejection. All religious groups faced the meteoric rise of Western science, secularisation, and political power during the modern period. Many political movements in the region can be understood by looking through the lens of this encounter.
If one takes the Jewish Israeli case, for a majority of Jewish Israelis neither a Jewish theocratic state – the rejection of the West as modelled by some ultra-Orthodox communities – nor a radical Western state – as modelled by ardent secularist communities – is the answer. Israeli activist Ophir Touboul argued in his landmark essay, ‘A Mesorti [traditionalist]-Mizrahi Approach to Travel the Middle Path’, that the Sephardic community, with its more robust traditionalism, offers the only approach for the Jewish believer and non-believer alike, while rejecting neither the outside world nor Judaism.
As the text of the Abraham Accords Declaration articulates this traditionalist approach can be extended to interfaith relations as well, in a region where religion is not going away: ‘We encourage efforts to promote interfaith and intercultural dialogue to advance a culture of peace among the three Abrahamic religions and all humanity.’ It is an approach that also explicitly positions itself against Islamism: ‘We seek to end radicalisation and conflict to provide all children a better future.’ The key feature of this traditionalism is its own subjectivity. Jews, Muslims, Christians, and Druze express their relations to one another from within the language of their faiths. A classic example of this is the ‘covenant between Jethro and the Jewish people’, as expressed by the Druze allied with Israel. The Abraham Accords themselves express the familial bonds and faith commonalities of Muslims and Jews from within their own cultural tradition. Likewise, the choice of the expression a ‘culture of peace,’ rather than of tolerance or of pluralism (the key words among Western liberals) are also signs of an indigenous conceptual landscape.
For Jews, Christians, and other minority religions in the region, traditionalist interfaith reconciliation means balancing self-affirmation and an opposition to Islamism with an openness to Islam as a religion with shared values. In the case of the Jews – the only remaining religious minority in the region with significant political and military power (with the loss of Maronite political and military power since the Lebanese Civil War) – it means taking the approach of organisations like the religious kibbutz movement, Brit Olam ,and Roots to name but a few prominent examples, which advocate both Jewish self-affirmation and mutual respect between Jews and Muslims.
Jewish traditionalist oppose the ideology and actions of contemporary Kahanist-influenced groups and parties which promote Jewish self-affirmation while rejecting Arabs and Muslims on racial and supremacist grounds (a parallel to Lebanese Falangism) and engaging in acts of terror (the reason for the banning and designation of the two official Kahanist parties as terror groups in the 1990s). However, in contrast to secularists, Jewish traditionalists ground their opposition to Kahanism and acts of terror based on Jewish axioms and laws. It should be noted, however, that Jewish traditionalists, like their counterparts among Christians and other national/religious groups, have a variety of positions on territorial solutions for their respective political conflicts, in this case the Israeli-Palestinian Arab conflict, ranging from two states, to confederation, to Palestinian Arab local autonomy, though they share a rejection of the demonisation of Muslims or all members of any religious or ethnic group based on arguments within their own religious texts teaching instead about mutual respect. Likewise, it is important to highlight that Muslim traditionalists also advocate or are open to different territorial solutions vis-à-vis non-Muslim populations in the region, from collective cultural and religious rights, to federalism and autonomy, to independence.
The use of different concepts to describe mutual respect is not merely nomenclature: it represents a different model of coexistence. It posits that groups in the region can cooperate based on indigenous cultural and religious concepts. Many may ask whether traditionalism isn’t just the dawning of liberal concepts in an old garb. Indeed, sometimes this process is retroactive: a new political reality demands a traditional justification. This does not compromise the process: it is the process. Traditionalism is often about seeing how new problems can be understood or even solved with old ideas, including by reinterpreting the latter without abandoning it.
The times are changing, and traditionalism of the kind I have described is on the rise. There are the Abraham Accords states, who not only offer another Muslim path, but have banned Islamist groups domestically. Potentially, there are the various national/religious groups – especially the Kurds, Druze, Maronites; as well as Turkish, Iranian, and Sunni and/or Shia Syrian, Iraqi, Lebanese, and Palestinian-Arab dissidents who are coming out of the failed states or Islamist dictatorships of the region. Muslim replacement theology has shown itself to be so brutal that there is a new generation, especially among non-Muslims, historically moderate Muslims, and secular citizens, for whom it must be defeated.
Now is the time to clearly articulate the traditionalist alternative as a pillar of peace for the region. Western powers can and should support the Abraham Accords for the entire Levant and hope for their extension to the entire Middle East. They can do this first and foremost by recognising unambiguously the difference between Islamist and traditionalist perspectives. Such clarity will help to reorient those on the left and right in the west towards a politics that neither excuses (or even supports) Islamism, nor victimises all Muslims for it.
[1] https://www.tarb.co.il/islamic-law-in-the-lands-of-war/
