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| Coexistence in Experiences of Racism https://thesymmetryforum.com/viewtopic.php?f=223&t=513 |
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| Author: | themsforum.org [ Sun, 21 Dec 2025, 2:56 pm ] |
| Post subject: | Coexistence in Experiences of Racism |
Preface on Terminology In this article, the term “historical Jewish cousins” is used in a precise and non-political sense. It refers to the long-standing genealogical, Abrahamic, and civilisational relationships between Jewish and Muslim communities that developed over centuries of coexistence prior to modern nation-states and contemporary geopolitical conflicts. The term does not imply present-day political alignment, uniform belief, or the erasure of difference. Rather, it reflects a historically grounded recognition of kinship, shared ancestry, and sustained social proximity—visible in legal systems, languages, neighbourhoods, and intellectual traditions—through which both communities learned, often through hardship, the consequences of exclusionary ideologies. The usage is intended to situate personal experience within this longer historical continuum and to foreground empathy derived from shared historical memory rather than from contemporary political positions. Historical Kinship, Abrahamic Lineage, and Empathetic Coexistence in Experiences of Racism Academic discussions of racism often prioritise institutional frameworks while under-examining the role of historical memory and inherited relational understanding. Yet for many individuals, encounters with exclusion are mediated through long-standing narratives of kinship, coexistence, and shared vulnerability transmitted across generations. When I first encountered racism in Britain as a Muslim, my response was shaped by an awareness of what I describe as my historical Jewish cousins. This phrase is used deliberately. It refers not to contemporary political alignment, but to a recognition of shared Abrahamic lineage, intertwined genealogies, and centuries of lived proximity between Jewish and Muslim communities. Long before the emergence of modern nation-states or present geopolitical disputes, these communities understood themselves as distinct yet related peoples, bound by ancestry, scripture, and social interdependence. Across much of history, Jews and Muslims lived not merely alongside one another, but within the same civilisational frameworks. In Muslim-ruled Spain (Al-Andalus), Jewish communities participated in Arabic intellectual life, producing scholarship in philosophy, medicine, and law. In North Africa and the Eastern Mediterranean, Jews and Muslims shared languages, commercial networks, and neighbourhoods. Under the Ottoman Empire, Jewish communities—many expelled from Christian Europe—were incorporated into pluralistic legal systems that recognised religious difference while preserving communal autonomy. These societies were not utopian, nor free from hierarchy or tension. However, the dominant historical pattern was continuity rather than eradication. Crucially, both communities developed a shared awareness of what occurs when exclusionary ideologies replace plural social orders. This awareness became embedded in collective memory. It was this historical consciousness that shaped my experience of racism. The reassurance I felt did not stem from expectations of intervention or protection in a literal sense, but from the knowledge that Jewish historical experience—marked by early warning signs of marginalisation—recognises the trajectory of such hostility. When one minority is marked as disposable, others soon follow. This understanding is not ideological; it is historical. Scholarly analyses of far-right movements support this perspective. Such movements rarely maintain a fixed target. In Britain and Europe, Jews were among the earliest objects of organised exclusionary politics; over time, rhetoric adapted to include new groups, often reframed through the language of culture, security, or demographic threat. The emotional resonance of this pattern lies not in fear alone, but in empathetic recognition shaped by long memory. What contemporary discourse often obscures is that Jewish–Muslim solidarity is not a modern invention produced by crisis. It is, rather, a re-emergence of historical normality. For much of history, Jews and Muslims navigated difference without demanding erasure, disagreement without dehumanisation. Their relationship was sustained not by uniformity but by a shared understanding of kinship and mutual risk. From this perspective, empathy is not an abstract moral posture but a historically informed mode of survival. My own experience of racism was rendered bearable by the knowledge that others—formed by centuries of displacement, resilience, and coexistence—understood where such moments can lead if left unchallenged. That understanding transformed isolation into connection and vulnerability into responsibility. In periods of heightened social tension, there is a strong tendency to collapse history into the present, reducing complex relationships to singular narratives of conflict. An academically responsible and empathetic approach resists this compression. It situates contemporary experiences within a longer civilisational arc, one in which kinship, coexistence, and mutual recognition between Jews and Muslims were not anomalies, but enduring social realities. May the present, guided by the enduring memory of shared history, steady its course, restore kinship across time, and cultivate a world where empathy and understanding outlast fear and division. |
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