Rosenzweig positioned Judaism, Christianity, and Islam on a single politico-theological axis

Evidence

If Judaism knows nothing of war-loving the self and, unmediated, the neighbor, and thus experiencing only political war-Islam knows nothing of love, and thus spreads nothing but holy war. This, then, is Rosenzweig’s political theology. At the theological pole, Judaism experiences only political war. At the political pole, Islam spreads only holy war. And in between lies Christendom, undecidably theologico-political. This is because Islam fails to secure any theological status. In what is much more than the expression of a contingent prejudice, Rosenzweig claims that Islam may be theologically oriented, but knows nothing of religion: “Islam has neither creation nor revelation, although it struts about, full of pomp and dignity with both of them as it found them” (n7/G130). The power of its God is therefore “like that of an Oriental despot” (ibid.). — Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab, 493

Categorization

• DEFINE: The three-way schema — Judaism=theological/political war, Christendom=theologico-political undecidability, Islam=political/holy war — is the structural core of Rosenzweig’s political theology.
• DEEPTHINKING: The triadic structure, with Christendom as undecidably ‘in between’ the two poles, is a genuinely dense and paradigm-shifting schema worth sitting with.
• QUESTION: How does Rosenzweig’s claim that Islam ‘has neither creation nor revelation’ square with actual Islamic theology? This warrants investigation into how Rosenzweig arrived at this.