Thinking the Muslim Question by way of Rethinking the Jewish Question: A Critique of Frankfurt School's Secular Analytics of Religion

While Europe's "Jewish question" gained prominence in the nineteenth century and has become a cardinal ordeal for emancipatory thought and praxis, its "Muslim question" started to surface in the early 1980s and gelled in the aftermath of September 11, 2001 attacks. Whereas the former reached an apotheosis in a genocide of European Jewry and a resolute exportation, and confinement, to Palestine, the latter is steadily brewing in Europe, and globally, and has not hitherto received satisfactory answers - nor any "final solutions." And yet, the ''Muslim question'' is an increasingly prominent cipher that signifies the construction and abstraction of Muslims and Muslimness in relation to their standing and integration within the secular Western polities and beyond, as well as the problematization of their political and epistemic statuses within the Western-styled secular public sphere.

Prima facie, this study asks: is it possible to examine the "Muslim question" in Europe through the lens of the older discourse on the "Jewish question," despite the differences in group under consideration, gaps in time, discursive trajectories, and not the least the Holocaust? Building on multidisciplinary scholarship, I contend that, despite these variances, and the changing political contours, there are common and parallel European-framed grounds, tropes, and historico-political affinities between the "Jewish" and the "Arab/Muslim" figures. These, which unfolded over half a millennium (at minimum), make it hardly possible to understand the modern construal of their respective representations unless considered jointly. There are, furthermore, critical insights to be gained from studying the historical discourse surrounding the "Jewish question" to illuminate current discussions about, and analytical paradigms of, the "Muslim question."

To that end, the study interrogates the epistemo-political effects of the racialized genesis and transmission of "religion" in critical Enlightenment thought - as a concept through which "Jewish being" has been apprehended - and the forms of their reception and elaboration in the Frankfurt School tradition more specifically. As a category, religion was uniquely distinguished from emerging and established modern notions of social life, especially starting from the latter part of the eighteenth century and through the intellectual consolidation and political ascent of the Enlightenment. Still, the contours of Enlightenment's notion of religion were essentially derived from early modern Western Christian (mainly Protestant) derivations thereof. The proliferation of "religions" in the secular age endowed the category of "religion" with multiple descriptive and normative attributes, and entrenched its status in juridical and legal edifices, social and political thought, and shaped concomitant discourses of emancipation. Whence, "religion" asserted itself as a world-embracing, secular, sphere of knowledge capacious of grasping various forms of life and traditions based on universalizable analytical precepts sourced from intra-Christian differences.

In attempt to sketch the contours of a counter-model of the prevalent family of Enlightenment understandings of religion that sedimented in the last two centuries, the study revisits Karl Marx's analysis of the "Jewish question" as posed in the 1840s as an index to Enlightenment's problem of emancipation and religion: of the emancipation of, and/or from, religion. To that end, it argues that Marx's analysis suggests, counterintuitively, that the "Jewish question" is fact an ideological artefact of a substantive Christian question, and that "religion" is not an elementary basis for emancipation (and that emancipation is not itself not one but a bifurcated horizon: political and human). In short, rather than perceiving religion as a descriptive category, Marx demands that we understand religion as a mediational, re-descriptive, category, and critique its operations accordingly.

The study subsequently proceeds with problematizing the descriptive validity, normative status, and socio-political valorization of religion in the Frankfurt School's tradition. More specifically, it scrutinizes Frankfurt School's reflexivity vis-à-vis its social (qua secular) imaginary and epistemo-critical apparatus with regards to "religion/religious" figures of thought and objects of analysis. To that end, it shows that early Frankfurt School's approach to the critique of religion is confounded by Weberian conceptual logistics, and thus does not correspond with the Marxian approach previously elucidated. Rather, it relies on Weberian Marxist lens which essentially does not challenge the descriptive normativity of the category of religion. Henceforth, the study contends that the critical apparatus of the early Frankfurt School is bent on reproducing an "emancipatory prejudice" when analyzing the oppression and domination that are associated with "religion/religious" objects. To remedy this deficiency, it argues for the incorporation of theologico-political lens in the systemic level of its critical instrumentarium, as a corollary to the economic-political one, for that would endow the ideologiekritik of "religion" with awareness to systemic forms of domination and social harm steeped in the operation of secular(ist) power.

Having shown the early Frankfurt School's inherent Weberian Marxist secular schematics of religion the study focuses moves to address the post-secular turn that the tradition's most eminent second-generation theorist, Jürgen Habermas, has effected in its agenda and viewpoint. It sets to unpack and bring to light the tacit investments qua assumptions upon which Habermas's purportedly inclusive and pluralist framework relies. In this vein, it critiques his epistemological position on secular reason in three ways, arguing that: (i) there is a distinctive conserving power in Habermas's argument for the wider recognition of religion; (ii) it engages in religious boundary-drawing; and (iii) it amplifies the voices of the so-called Judeo-Christian heritage over others. In doing so, the study clarifies the limits of the emancipatory horizon entailed in Habermas's formulation of the post-secular society and argues that it ends up reinscribing the religious-secular binary.

Lastly, the study dissects Habermas's engagement with the Jewish question in the aftermath of the Holocaust and its ramifications for the German Enlightenment tradition and identity. It contends that Habermas's unmitigated urge to salvage the Enlightenment tradition in its German formulation leads him to singularize the event of "Auschwitz" and its emblematic Jewish victim as the litmus test of any emancipatory social theory worthy of the designation "critical." Habermas's secular redemption of the "philosophical Jew" is met, however, by a lack of critical historical reading of the broader historical torment that brought Auschwitz into being. The study reads Habermas's silence on the history of real Jews, pre- and post-Auschwitz in the context of what he views as a relevant history for redeeming Germany's enlightened soul - German Jews as leading exponents of Enlightenment thought until the Holocaust and the establishment of Jewish sovereignty in Palestine in its aftermath. Habermas's post-Auschwitz Jewish question becomes then the question of enlightened conscientious Germans who want to endow their morality with political legitimacy regardless of the contemporary history of real, sovereign, Jews. This post-national German predicament, I argue, perpetuates Enlightenment's emancipatory prejudice against the Jews - i.e., it reaffirms both the Orientalist framework that denied Jews collective identity and national consciousness in pre-Auschwitz Europe and the approval of the realization of Jewish national self-determination outside of Europe in the post-Auschwitz epoch. Habermas's interlocking of the post-Auschwitz Jewish and German questions leads to the extension of Enlightenment's emancipatory prejudice to Palestinians and, effectively, to the denial qua sacrifice of their existence as a nation. In short, by continuing denying the ongoing impact of the legacy of European Orientalism and racialist enmity vis-à-vis the figures who it once constructed as "Semitic brothers" and affirming an enlarged yet exclusivist civilizationism (Judeo-Christian) stance as the moral backbone of the Enlightenment tradition, Habermas's post-national and post-secular theorizing end up short on delivering the emancipatory thrust needed to cater for the Enlightenment endeavor as an "unfinished project."

Aside from the critically discussing the above thematics, the study has manifold implications. Theoretically, it enhances the analytical capacity of the critical method to analyze the conjoined social reality of religion and the secular(ist) bias of the Frankfurt School (and beyond). Practically, it dialecticizes the pervasive principle of epistemic ruptures and enables a bi-focal look on continuities and dis-continuities between religion and cognate analytical social categories. The political and normative implications of this study bring back the possibility of viewing the Muslim question as historical figuration of a stealthy Christian-European complex that for several centuries centered on the figure of the Jew. In other words, the study "re-Europeanizes" the vantage point from which the critique of the Europe's Muslim question should proceed and reaccommodates what appears as a sprawling global question to its still potent racializing European/Western trajectory.