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

79 published claims from this book.

• A manufactured external enemy masks and justifies internal caste inequality
• A military defeat’s myth-debunking enabled the religious settlement project to go mainstream
• A settler-colonial regime whose founding narrative is sacred cannot secularize without renouncing that narrative
• A state channels domestic religious zeal outward to protect its own rule.
• Absentee Property Law of 1950 legally barred expelled Palestinians from reclaiming property
• An English Qur’an translation inflated mentions of Jews and Christians to manufacture animus
• Claiming the greatest-victim status grants moral absolution for present violence
• Claims of sacred land ownership secure one group’s dominance over others
• Debate over secularism strengthens, rather than divides, ethnic boundaries
• Evangelical Christian messianic doctrine directly shapes US foreign policy on Israel
• Even the most religious Palestinian factions used religion for mobilization, not land claims
• External pressure can invite colonialists to exit the settler mentality they inhabit
• External superpower endorsement of sacral claims intensifies settler-state repression
• Hindutva’s apparent religious liberalism hides a weaponized pantheon
• Hindutva’s fascist ideological debt is the exception to its anti-Western stance
• Historical foreign interventions forged an Iranian victimhood that shapes distrust
• Identity’s political meaning derives from domination structures, not attachments themselves
• Invented sacred territorial traditions serve elites while ruining the nation
• ISIS middle-school curricula treated Wahhabism’s central text as their most heavily weighted subject.
• Israel’s religious-secular binary functions as a self-purifying rhetoric that masks racial exclusion
• It is the secularization of messianism, not messianism itself, that makes it dangerous
• Jewish religious symbols were harnessed because no modern common Jewish culture existed
• Jewishness was transposed from a nation’s religion into a national religion
• National identity requires crafted enemies to become activist ideology
• Nationalism is an ideology while national identity is a shared cultural base
• Nationalists borrow others’ sacralized land narratives as strategic templates
• Native resistance caused Israel’s turn to overt religious legitimation
• Needing mass mobilization against a fellow-Muslim foe made revolutionary Iran embrace nationalism
• Partition’s ethnic supremacy aim collapses into apartheid as territory and population cannot be separated.
• Peace settlements can increase rather than reduce physical segregation barriers
• Political denationalization can paradoxically strengthen religionization inside the military
• Protestant reinterpreted biblical concepts seeded modern nationalism
• Rational or moral correction from inside cannot touch Zionism’s founding religious claim
• Religion functions as the enabling power behind a preferential legal system
• Religion stayed marginal in mainstream Palestinian nationalism for four decades
• Religion’s resurgence reflects political instrumentalization, not personal piety
• Religious claims adopted for instrumental legitimacy can come to genuinely saturate the adopting movement.
• Religious claims serve different functions depending on political position
• Religious framing obscures settler colonialism and blocks secularization in Zionism
• Religious sacralization of politics produces tyranny no differently than secular ideology
• Religious war rhetoric loses force and gives way to nationalism
• Removing a named external threat intensifies rather than softens dominant-group nationalism.
• Sacralized claims to territory are framed as non-negotiable across all authority
• Sacralized national identity emerges amid state collapse crises to rally mobilization
• Sacralized political discourse becomes constitutive regardless of professed sincerity
• Sacralized politics racializes others to make their rights violatable
• Sacralized religious claims regulate whom states treat as entitled
• Sacralized territorial rhetoric travels across unrelated national conflicts
• Sacralizing territory lets political claims override demographic and geographic facts
• Saudi and Qatari states fund unofficial fatwa platforms that dominate global online influence.
• Saudi wealth transformed Wahhabism into a global ideology under the guise of Salafism
• Sectarian discrimination vertically integrated Protestant workers under Unionist elites.
• Secular political movements can weaponize religious claims they do not believe.
• Secular Zionism’s biblical narrative itself drives the apocalyptic impulse to rebuild the Temple
• Secularism as neutral ground cannot host a public sphere because it is itself theological
• Selfhood and national unity are forged through conflict with a common foe
• Settler attacks on Palestinians rose sharply by 2019
• Settler identity depends constitutively on the colonized it wishes to erase.
• Settler-colonial solidarity persists only through materially maintained structures, not primordial identity
• Suppressing messianism produced a secular national theology that erased the land’s non-Jewish history
• Symbolic and physical violence reinforce each other as sovereign marking
• Systematic minority discrimination inevitably undermines the impartiality of the rule of law
• Territorial sovereignty over a diaspora required settler colonization.
• The anti-apartheid campaign’s secondary effect persuaded insiders the regime was untenable
• The binding sacred-land slogan gets revised and redeployed as contexts and wars change
• The Israeli-Palestinian conflict’s religious framing is recent rather than primordial
• The Kosovo-as-holy-land discourse is a modern nationalist invention, not ancient tradition
• The myth of two-millennia-old ethnic enmity is fabricated
• The permanently retained state of exception expresses settlers’ felt siege even when dominant.
• The religion-secular boundary is a construct serving Western state power
• The religious core is inseparable from Zionism but separable from Israeli Jewish nationalism
• Threatened group unity is maintained through a manufactured image of internal subversion
• Top-down secular nationalism failed in Iran because religion saturated daily life
• Wahhabi tawhid doctrine requires public repudiation of others as an initiation rite
• With the Tamil enemy removed, nationalists manufactured a Muslim threat to sustain group solidarity
• Zionism countered the earlier invention of Judaism as a religion
• Zionism is settler-colonial nationalism, not national liberation.
• Zionism’s professed secularism carried hidden messianic theology
• Zionist and Palestinian uses of religion differ fundamentally in function and centrality