Nadim N. Rouhana and Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian — When Politics Are Sacralized: Comparative Perspectives on Religious Claims and Nationalism

195 published claims from this book.

• A diasporic national movement necessarily becomes settler-colonial to achieve territorial sovereignty
• A dominant imperial power can cap sectarian violence while institutionalizing its basis.
• A legitimating myth’s collapse can shift political initiative to marginalized religious movements
• A national movement chose sacred return over material refuge needs.
• A religious-nationalist movement can secularize while retaining religious roots
• A secular majority depends on the religion it claims to resent.
• A senior Israeli minister publicly branded Arab society inherently violent by cultural code.
• A settler-colonial project’s structural logic operates independently of its founders’ motivations.
• An IDF commander publicly framed battle in Gaza as a religious war defending God
• Analyses missing settler colonialism misread why religiosity rises in Israel.
• Attempted reversal of IDF religionization institutionalized it rather than weakening it
• Britain engineered Irish partition on a sectarian headcount basis.
• British imperialism first politicized religious division at home, not in its colonies.
• Categorizing Zionism as settler-colonial fundamentally determines its legitimacy
• Challenges to a sacralized claim increase rather than weaken reliance on the sacred text
• Challenging a sacralized national majority counts as treason against the faith itself
• Colonial religious voter registration manufactured demographic anxiety in Hindus
• De-secularized national movements retain messianic content as their legitimacy basis.
• Declining national fervor can paradoxically empower religious groups inside militaries
• Distinguishes ‘full fusion’ nationalisms from mere religiously-inflected ones by whether religion defines the nationalism
• Elite-promoted political paradigms can fail to displace mass-held frameworks that later return
• Exclusive land control was religiously founded even during Zionism’s secular phase.
• External pressure can move discrimination-entrenched settler states toward democracy
• Fusing religion with nationalism amplifies collective violence and self-sacrifice.
• Geopolitical realpolitik shifted the dominant Palestinian framing from settler-colonial to national-conflict
• Governing dynasties can contractually institutionalize a religious-ideological alliance for internal legitimacy.
• Hamas discourse measurably shifted from religious to nationalist vocabulary by 2012
• Hamas emptied traditional religious concepts and refilled them with revolutionary content
• Hamas nationalized while mainstream Zionism religionized in tandem, opposite directions.
• Hindutva defines Indian citizenship by religion-of-origin within sacred territory
• Hindutva narration casts Muslims as violators of the sacred Hindu body to justify dominance.
• Hindutva’s founding architect praised Nazi racial purity as a model for India
• Hindutva’s real purpose of the Muslim enemy is to alibi internal caste exploitation
• Hindutva’s universal claim must annihilate whatever disrupts its completion
• Iran’s constitution sacralized state power by subordinating even religious ordinances to state interests
• Irish republican nationalism drew on Catholic myths of sacrifice though it was formally creed-blind.
• Israel drew Jerusalem’s post-1967 boundaries to engineer a Jewish demographic majority
• Israel is a political-theological project, not a secular nation-state
• Israel’s putatively secular founding period was suffused with religious justifications at its core.
• Israel’s residency revocation laws ban bereaved Palestinians while welcoming global Jewish newcomers
• Israeli ‘secular’ identity is only definable negatively as not-religious.
• Israeli nationalist parades weaponize sensory dominance to confine Palestinians to invisibility
• Israeli politicians feared Kosovo’s loss to Serbia would set a precedent for Jerusalem
• Israeli religious encroachment rises as a legitimation response to Palestinian resistance.
• Israeli scholarship on religious politics omits settler colonialism as a frame
• Jewish nationalism adopted the Christian West’s secularized image of the ancient Hebrews
• Jewish nationalization realized rather than abandoned Christian millenarian theology
• Jewish settlers destroyed over 50,000 Palestinian olive trees between 2009 and 2014.
• Jewish-Israeli academia has almost entirely avoided the settler-colonial framing of Zionism
• Judaism resists modern Western categories of nation, ethnicity, race, and religion.
• Labeling a settler conflict ‘tribal’ displaces its causes onto the colonized
• Land acquisition was framed as religious ‘redemption’ even in the pre-state secular era.
• Lynch mobs justify murder by merging contemporary Muslims with mythic demons
• Mainstream Israeli scholarship attributes religious-nationalist rise to 1967 contact with holy sites
• Narrated exclusivity hardens over time into constitutive claims of positional superiority.
• National identity becomes nationalist ideology only through emotionally charged crafting against others.
• Nationalism can overtake faith as a worldview while inheriting its exclusivity
• Nationalisms vary in how fully religion defines them rather than merely residue
• Nationalists borrow another movement’s sacred-claims template to justify land conquest
• Nationalists conjure threats to stay politically relevant after their enemy is defeated
• Natives naturally resist settler colonization of their land irrespective of the settlers’ history
• Official Israeli diplomacy deploys biblical covenant claims to justify West Bank settlement.
• Only a subset of states fuse religion into nationalism to legitimize policy.
• Only five percent of Price-Tag attacks result in any suspect arrests.
• Over 650 anti-Muslim attacks followed one shrine’s destruction since 2011
• Pahlavi-era oil revenues grew eightyfold amid rapid uneven prosperity.
• Palestine’s pre-Zionist Jews identified as Arab Jews
• Palestinian consensus resistance has opposed the Israeli settlement project since 1967.
• Palestinian political failure was culturally reframed as a question of failed witnessing.
• Palestinian religious parties nationalized while Zionist national parties religionized
• Palestinian resistance drives the rise of religious nationalism in Israel
• Palestinian scholars pioneered settler-colonial theory in the 1960s
• Palestinians perceived Zionism as settler-colonial displacement from its outset
• Partition institutionalized settler-native religious antagonism into a local ethnocratic jurisdiction.
• Politicians suppress minority turnout and invent threats to mask authoritarianism
• Politics fused with sacred religious claims follow distinctive conflict dynamics
• Pre-1948 Palestinian parties claimed Palestine on nationalist, not religious, grounds.
• Protracted ethnic conflict and domestic liberalization jointly drove military religionization
• Putin justified the Crimea annexation by sacralizing territory as a holy national source
• Radical religious nationalism arises when sovereignty is read in redemptive terms
• Religion and nationalism are fused throughout secular Zionism, not only in religious nationalism.
• Religion and nationalism are modern categories co-created by the secular order, not ancient givens.
• Religion and nationalism fuse when religious symbols represent the nation
• Religion and nationalism mutually constitute identity and resist clean separation
• Religion and secular nationalism sustain violence only when mutually reinforcing, not inherently.
• Religion as political legitimation functions regardless of actors’ actual religiosity
• Religion functioned to invent Zionist land claims but only to mobilize Palestinians.
• Religion fuses with nationalism only when it legitimizes actual state governance
• Religion in settler conflict operates as a differential marker, not as doctrine
• Religious birthright logic embedded in language structures yields formally unequal citizenship.
• Religious claims anchor constitutional inequality and block democratic equality.
• Religious claims can serve legitimacy or resistance functions in nationalism
• Religious disputations resolved nothing but each side claimed victory
• Religious fusion with nationalism matters only when it legitimizes state governance.
• Religious injunctions directly legitimize land expropriation and permanent Jewish-only ownership.
• Religious justification moves ethnic-control mores beyond politics into purity discourse.
• Religious legitimation claims intensify as a project’s true coercive character becomes exposed
• Religious legitimation increases both the exclusivity and violence of ethnic nationalism.
• Religious legitimation of policy is usually studied only as social-sphere activism.
• Religious markers fade when not needed to secure supremacy in a settler context
• Religious nationalism since the 1970s is a desecularizing movement worldwide, not ancient revival
• Religious Zionism’s territorial claims were not a revival of old Jewish settlement ideology
• Religious-nationalist antagonism originated in Western imperial heartlands, not just its colonies.
• Resistance by the colonized reshapes settler society’s internal factions and ideologies
• Running against historical decolonization made Israeli settler-colonialism uniquely visible
• Sacralized dominance frames out-group resistance as savage to sustain moral superiority.
• Sacralized domination gets institutionalized into constitutional and legal ethnic privilege
• Sacralized nationalism licenses violence even within a pacifist religion
• Sacralized nationalist myth suppresses concrete land history and indigenous presence
• Sacralized politics occurs in democracies too, giving constitutions and founders scripture-like status
• Sacralized politics yields a self-sustaining power structure resistant to change
• Sacralized scriptural precedent is invoked to authorize killing enemy civilians in the IDF
• Sacralized territorial claims have become a shared vocabulary among rival post-imperial nations
• Sacralizing religion extends state power across identity, law, and violence
• Sacralizing the political makes conflicts protracted and violence more legitimate.
• Sacred legitimation persisted in land policy even during the allegedly secular founding phase.
• Sacred monuments only mobilize masses through a politically directed agenda
• Saudi rule has rested since 1744 on a clerics-decide, rulers-enforce division of power.
• Saudi rulers exported Wahhabi militancy abroad to deflect criticism at home.
• Savarkar defined Indianness as sacred land of our gods to exclude universal patriots
• Savarkar’s rhetoric manufactured conviction from passion without evidence
• Sectarian identity in pre-war Iraq did not govern family relationships.
• Secular and religious frames obscure persistent messianic assumptions in nationalism.
• Secular ideology itself enables racial exclusion, not the religion it blames.
• Secular Labor Zionism, not religious parties, initiated settlement and annexation
• Secular settler-colonial projects increasingly need religious legitimation to sustain expansion.
• Secular Western political thought drew on the Hebrew Bible
• Secular Zionism deliberately fused itself with religious claims to build legitimacy.
• Secular Zionism internalized Christian anti-Talmudic polemics by splitting Bible from law
• Secular Zionism retained redemptive-messianic content while rejecting the messianic label
• Secular Zionist leaders invoke religious claims to obscure settler colonialism.
• Secularism as a category masks the colonial dimension of settler nationalisms
• Secularism can only arise from within theological discourse, not against it
• Secularism is not a neutral doctrine but a modern construct redefining religion and politics
• Secularism itself functions to exclude Palestinians in Israel
• Secularist bias hid that nationalism and religion fused while remaining distinct
• Secularization in Belfast privatized institutions but not popular religion’s territorial marking.
• Secularization is impossible inside a biblical-grounded settler project.
• Secularization is impossible within Israel while settler-colonial reality stays denied
• Secularization stripped religion of its state-legitimating function in the US and Japan
• Settler attacks in oEJ rose 40 percent against 2018 and 133 percent against 2017.
• Settler mentalities are effects of dominance structures, not fixed identities.
• Settler occupation is inherently ahistorical and thus never complete
• Settler rabbis wrote a 2010 manual authorizing killing non-Jewish infants and children.
• Settler-colonial domination can be dismantled by power-sharing agreements
• Settler-colonial elimination is a permanent structural principle, not a one-time event.
• Settler-colonial incorporation of new territories demands new legitimacy claims
• Settler-colonial states facing unresolved legitimacy needs keep manufacturing legitimation
• Settlers claim self-evident racial markers for differences they admit no outsider can perceive
• Slavic Muslims were redefined as Turkish invaders through religious nationalism
• Societal secularization and denationalization can paradoxically empower religious groups within armies
• State sanctions against religious communities replaced pure education efforts
• States sacralize political claims with religious certainty, increasingly overriding public attention on non-state actors
• Suppression of democratic participation, not secularism itself, galvanized opposition to nationalist rule
• The 1948 massacres aimed at demographic, not physical, elimination.
• The cleric-ruler division of labor is Saudi Arabia’s founding institutional model
• The colonial situation manufactures the colonialist as much as the colonized.
• The external enemy functions as cover for internal caste exploitation
• The Land in Israeli education has no secular history beyond the Bible
• The Persian term for nation originally designated a religious community.
• The phrase ‘state of Israel’ began as a Christian millenarian term in the 1600s
• The political restoration of Jews originated as a Christian millenarian idea
• The religion-secularism divide is a modern Protestant construction
• The same biblical imagery powered both European nationalism and colonial expansion
• The Saudi-sponsored English Qur’an interpolates Wahhabi doctrine while disavowing the connection.
• The secular state’s dependence on Jewish numerical majority is racial at root
• The Serbian-Jerusalem discourse is a product of 1980s Serb nationalism, not ancient tradition
• The Serbian-Jerusalem slogan first circulated under Serbia’s chief Nazi collaborator
• The state of exception legally expresses the settler’s psychic siege mentality.
• Treating both sides’ religious claims as equivalent falsely cross-equates them.
• Vernacular religion, not institutional belief, drives post-conflict sectarian division.
• Violence legitimated by religious claims is a racialized governing technology.
• Wahhabi clerics shifted their target from internal Muslim apostates to Jews and Christians.
• Wahhabi doctrine commands obliterating images and tombs wherever they are found.
• Wahhabi doctrine makes hesitation itself a capital offense stripping apostates of protection.
• Wahhabism legitimizes itself by declaring nearly all other Muslims apostates
• Weak prewar religious affiliations rapidly hardened into lethal communal identities
• Western secularism claims universality while resisting genuine multicultural inclusion
• When conflict ends, violence gives way to memory contestation
• When privilege no longer depends on it, religious identity markers fade.
• Zionism alone sustained biblical justifications because of a real cultural tie to the land
• Zionism fuses religious and national identity so completely they are indistinguishable.
• Zionism made the Bible a national rather than religious text
• Zionism reacted against the older invention of Judaism as religion.
• Zionism required religious myth because it lacked the land and language pillars of nationalism.
• Zionism was never secular but always leaned on biblical narrative.
• Zionism’s negation of exile caused the Palestinian exile and denial of homeland
• Zionism’s self-definition required rejecting parts of Jewish religious history too
• Zionism’s settlement of Palestine structurally required demographic and cultural replacement of natives.
• Zionist memory erased the major sixteenth-century Jewish community of Safed
• Zionist nationalism required denying its own kabbalistic and exile heritage
• Zionist return to the East functioned as identification with the West against Arabs
• Zionist secular nationalism borrowed Protestant theological imagination
• Zionist secularization nationalized messianic myth rather than replacing it
• Zionist secularization reinterprets biblical myth through colonial frames