The Abrahamic Ideology: Patrilineal Kinship and the Politics of Peacemaking in the Contemporary Middle East

Abstract

This article examines the geopolitical landscape organised by the Abraham Accords, signed in 2020 between Israel, the UAE and Bahrain under US sponsorship, by exploring their namesake’s status as the common ancestor of Jews/Israelis and Muslims/Arabs through his sons Isaac and Ishmael. I begin by presenting the background and significance of the Accords, and show how despite its US-Christian origins, their nomenclature was enthusiastically received by Israeli and Emirati signatories thanks to its appeal to genealogy. Utilising anthropological theory, I then trace the legend of Abraham and his progeny from Genesis, through ancient and medieval debates between monotheists, arriving finally at the modern discourse of patrilineal cousinage and ‘Abrahamism’ as semi-official ideology. Other Abrahamisms may be possible, but in the form embedded in the Accords, I argue that this ideology promotes not sustainable peace but patriarchy, territorial homogeneity and violent marginalisation of those deemed ‘not to belong’ to the family.

L’idéologie abrahamique : La parenté patrilinéaire et la politique de pacification dans le Moyen-Orient contemporain

‘We encourage efforts to promote interfaith and intercultural dialogue to advance a culture of peace among the three Abrahamic religions and all humanity’.

- Abraham Accords Declaration of leaders of the US, UAE, Israel and Bahrain, 15 September 2020

‘Recognizing that the Arab and Jewish peoples are descendants of a common ancestor, Abraham, and inspired, in that spirit, to foster in the Middle East a reality in which Muslims, Jews, Christians and peoples of all faiths, denominations, beliefs and nationalities live in, and are committed to, a spirit of coexistence, mutual understanding and mutual respect [. . .]’

- UAE-Israel Peace Treaty, 15 September 2020 (emphasis in original)

On an autumn day in 2020, the leaders of the United States of America, the United Arab Emirates, the State of Israel and the Kingdom of Bahrain sat behind a table on the White House lawn and signed a historic document: the Abraham Accords. Both more and less than a peace agreement, the Accords brought into the open an alliance which had been growing in strength for some time, combining the most pro-Western and anti-Iranian forces in the Middle East into a coherent, public-facing bloc. Many analyses of the event and its consequences have since appeared, but they devote little attention to the legitimating gesture encapsulated in the naming of the agreements after the Patriarch Abraham, linked to his status as both a figurehead of three monotheistic religions and a common ancestor of the two religious-cum-national groupings which the Accords supposedly reconcile: Jews/Israelis and Muslims/Arabs. While ‘the Abrahamic ideology’ is far from the most important frame through which Middle Easterners understand their affairs, nor one limited to the region, this article argues that taking it seriously can help to make sense of the contradictory geopolitical landscape organised by the Accords. Tracing the myth of the patriarch and his descendants from the Hebrew Bible to the present day, I argue on the basis of anthropological theory that this reference to Abraham’s genealogy draws modern Middle Easterners into a dialogical ‘community of disagreement’ over his legacy and the mutual responsibilities of patrilineal cousins, even while legitimising a patriarchal organisation of the ‘family’ and casting those who supposedly do not belong thereto into marginality.

Opposed to both naïve views of Abrahamic patronage as ineluctably leading to sustainable regional peace and to cynical dismissals of the agreement’s nomenclature as mere embellishment, my argument is that this instance of ‘Abrahamism’ is best understood as continuous with theories of affiliation and affinity that have enjoyed currency in the region for centuries. In line with the turn towards inspection of the interrelation between religion and race as categories of national differentiation in critical international relations scholarship, I seek to examine how the ‘genealogical imagination’ also makes it possible to link nation-states to one another in terms that are at once religious and racial. ¹ However, I argue, the elements of the Abrahamic ideology activated by the Accords – including its essentialising concept of the nation as family, glorification of military might and exploitative attitude towards non-men and non-kin – are not conducive to a lasting and just peace in the region. In its currently dominant guise, Abrahamism serves the interests of the (declining) global hegemon as well as those of (rising) regional elites, at the expense of all those who are deemed ‘not to belong’ – a flexible category which may include indigenous Palestinians, Asian migrant workers and European Jews. But this is not to deny the possibility of alternative interpretations, including valorisations of the legend’s subaltern characters, such as the despised Hagar.

The article begins by presenting the background and significance of the Abraham Accords, followed by a brief discussion of the Christian milieu from which the name probably emerged. This nomenclature, I show, was eagerly picked up by Israeli and Emirati signatories primarily due the legibility of the Abrahamic frame to those whom it interpellates as patrilineal kin. After discussing the anthropological approach to this genealogical imagination known as ‘segmentation’, I summarise the legend of the Patriarch Abraham, his wife Sarah, her slave Hagar and their sons Ishmael and Isaac as it appears in the Book of Genesis. (I use the English forms of the names of Biblical figures, even when discussing their appearances in Jewish and Islamic texts, to underscore the fact that the Anglophone discursive sphere in which this text appears is in no way immune to their mythic pull.) I then trace intensely dialogical discussions of the kinship of the descendants of Isaac and Ishmael in Jewish, Islamic and Christian texts, arriving finally at the modern era’s ‘cousinage’ discourse and the culmination of Abrahamism as a semi-official ideology of the new alliance, before briefly considering the possibility of other Abrahamisms and summarising the meaning of this one.

A Bellicose Peace

The Abraham Accords, widely regarded as the crowning foreign-policy success of Donald Trump’s presidency, augured the normalisation of relations between Israel on one hand and the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan on the other. These were not Israel’s first treaties with Arab states; neighbours Egypt and Jordan had normalised relations in 1979 and 1994, respectively. Neither did the accords signal any sudden transformation in Israel’s relations with the UAE, which had been strong for years, or with Morocco, which have been informal but warm for decades; indeed, its ties with Saudi Arabia are known to be good despite the latter’s refusal to join the agreement. ² The rapprochement is one result of the region’s violent re-arrangement over the past two decades, with conflicts in Iraq, Syria, Libya and Yemen leading to the emergence of loose regional blocs. Iran’s alliance with the Assad regime, Hizballah, and the Yemeni Houthi insurgency has been countered by the emergence of an axis dominated by Israel and wealthy petro-states Saudi Arabia and the UAE. More populous but far poorer, Egypt, Jordan, Sudan and Morocco are minor partners in the axis, as is the Palestinian Authority in the occupied West Bank. ³ In the face of what appears to its leaders as a long-term American tendency to withdraw from Middle Eastern engagements, this so-called ‘moderate’ axis has demonstrated willingness to break with the West on issues such as the Russian war on Ukraine. ⁴

The convergence can be traced as far back as 2006, when Hizballah’s effective resistance to Israel’s attack on Lebanon began ringing alarm bells regarding the organisation’s rising strength among Gulf elites. ⁵ Following the war, the Saudi regime backtracked on its sponsorship of the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative, which demanded full Israeli withdrawal from the Occupied Palestinian Territories in exchange for normalised relations. Leading Saudi figures, including crown prince Muhammad Bin Salman, began making remarks critical of the Palestinians and sympathetic to Israel even before the bloody aftermath of the revolts of 2011, when Syria, Libya and Yemen sank into civil wars and military dictatorship was reinstalled in Egypt. ⁶ As forces backed by Iran gained strength in many of these theatres, Barack Obama’s US administration was shifting, in the wake of the disastrous Iraq War, towards a laissez-faire Middle East policy. ⁷ Increasingly worried about Iran’s nuclear aspirations and dissatisfied with its 2015 agreement with the superpowers, lobbyists for Gulf powers found themselves in the same corner with the Israel lobby on Capitol Hill. Trump’s election helped to solidify the alliance: fulfilment of his campaign promise to cancel the Iran deal gave the Israeli and Gulf lobbies an important victory, while the anti-interventionist pull of his Middle East policy and the hasty retreat of US forces from Syria convinced the quiet allies of the need to augment their military capabilities. Dismissive of Palestinian aspirations and staunchly supportive of Israel, Trump’s administration also moved its embassy to Jerusalem in the face of uproar across the Arab world. Finally, the administration, and Trump’s emissary Jared Kushner in particular, sought a foreign policy ‘win’ which would cast Trump as a ‘populist peacemaker’ in the run-up to the 2020 election. ⁸

Seeking a way to convince Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to back down from the West Bank annexation plans which he had announced under the pressure of Israel’s ascendant extreme right, and desirous of Israeli agreement to their purchase of American weapons systems, that summer Emirati diplomats signalled to the United States that they would be willing to sign a treaty in return for Israel’s abandonment of the annexation plan. Himself facing election and in need of ‘wins’, Netanyahu quickly agreed to the deal, which seemed to clinch his longstanding argument that peace with Arab states could be achieved without concessions to the Palestinians. Though chary of joining the framework, Saudi Arabia authorised the agreement; Bahrain jumped on board, and the principals went to Washington. Months after, Morocco and Sudan followed suit, each receiving an American bonus: recognition of its claim over the Western Sahara for the former, removal from the State Department’s ‘supporters of terrorism’ list for the latter. ⁹

Following the accords, tourist traffic and investment flows between Israel and the UAE have boomed. ¹⁰ Palestine/Israel’s Mediterranean coast has re-emerged as an important node in the transportation of Gulf fossil fuels to European markets: plans have been laid for a re-opening of the Eilat-Ashkelon Pipeline to transport Emirate natural gas from the Red Sea to the Mediterranean, and though the Israeli environmental movement has managed to foil these plans for now, Europe’s search for alternatives to Russian oil may drive a reversal of policy in the near future. ¹¹ Finally, normalisation has augmented the repressive capabilities of the alliance’s components, as Israel’s wealthy Gulf allies eagerly acquire advanced American weaponry to intimidate external enemies and Israeli surveillance technology to crack down on the internal dissent fostered by their unpopular foreign policies. ¹²

Tightening relations between the Gulf monarchies and Israel are bringing to the fore similarities between these countries which had previously escaped the notice of observers. Much wealthier than the global average and thus heavily invested in the perpetuation of global inequalities, Israel and the Gulf states are also similarly dependent on the labour of migrants from outside the region, who are legally bonded to their employers and have no pathway to citizenship. ¹³ Israel, like the UAE, is constitutionally theocratic – recognising the binding status of religious law, especially in the domestic sphere, with brutal repercussions for women – while simultaneously styling itself opposed to religious fanaticism. ¹⁴ Abraham, as we shall see, is exceptionally well suited to embody these contradictory commonalities.

From Western Abrahamism to Middle Eastern Dialogues

Credit for the name ‘Abraham Accords’ goes to Miguel Correa, a two-star US general and National Security Council member who took part in the negotiations. ¹⁵ Symptomatically conflating language, religion and nationality, the general explained his thinking to an interviewer as follows: ‘All three of the religions have a different name [for Abraham]. It’s translated in their religion. And we immediately make this people-to-people and religious [. . .] rather than just a political agreement’. ¹⁶ Correa’s notion that the figure of Abraham can bring monotheists together in harmony, though familiar at this point, is in fact of historically recent vintage. One of its primary sources is the Vatican II council of the early 1960s, which mobilised the allegorical father of monotheism in the struggle against ‘neo-pagan materialism’ under the influence of theologian Louis Massignon, who sought to bring Christians and Muslims, in particular, closer together. ¹⁷ But US Christian support for the Accords does not derive solely from this allegorical reading; the dispensationalist theology prevalent among white Evangelical Christians, who count among Trump’s staunchest supporters, promotes a literal geopolitical reading of the Old Testament and a genealogical legitimation of the Jewish right to the ‘Land of Israel’ nearly identical to the kind endorsed by religious Zionists. ¹⁸ Christian leaders close to the Trump White House were ecstatic about the Accords, with influential Evangelical pastor John Hagee declaring ‘the sons of Abraham [. . .] coming together for the first time in thousands of years’ under its aegis to be ‘nothing short of a literal miracle’. ¹⁹

Though the allegorical interpretation of Abraham’s paternity counts Christians among his descendants and the literal one does not, both entail a certain distance from the Abrahamic genealogy – either, in the first case, because Christianity is perceived to have transcended such fleshly concerns, or in the second, because Christians are deemed external thereto. As such, Western Abrahamism is contiguous with ‘Semitism’, a scholarly label for the longstanding Orientalist discourse that casts both Jews and Muslims/Arabs as similarly religious, literal-minded, tribalistic and so on. ²⁰ Taking its cue from an earlier part of the genealogical narrative in Genesis, the ‘generations of Noah’ which begin with his sons Shem, Ham and Japheth (Gen. 10:1), Semitism is of course heavily implicated in the overt racialist discourses which climaxed with Nazism – perhaps one reason for its swift decline in the interwar period, and its replacement with the ‘softer’ alternative of Abrahamism thereafter. ²¹

In the light of such ‘othering’, which seeks to position the Christian/Western as at once innocent of responsibility for the Middle East’s bloody messes and uniquely placed to resolve them, it is tempting to dismiss any political use of Abraham and his generations as an Orientalist imposition. But such a dismissal may itself reflect an assumption of greater distance between ‘East’ and ‘West’ than is in fact the case. As the rest of this article will attempt to demonstrate, while the patriarch is no consensus figure, he and his descendants have been an object of intense political dialogue between Jews, Christians and Muslims ever since his legend was put to parchment. I use ‘dialogue’ here in the sense pioneered by Mikhail Bakhtin, to signify a discourse ‘revealed in all its distinctiveness only when it is brought into relationship with other languages, entering with them into one single heteroglot unity of societal becoming’. ²²

A clue to the resonance of this dialogical frame, and to its relative autonomy from Western Abrahamism, appears in the text of the Israel-UAE peace treaty. Here, but not in the Abraham Accords Declaration co-signed by the United States (see texts above), Abraham appears as the ‘common ancestor’ of the ‘Arab and Jewish peoples’, language inserted into the text by Israeli negotiator Tal Becker and received warmly by his Emirati colleagues. ²³ The appearance of such apparently archaic language of common descent in this diplomatic document cannot, then, be squarely laid at the door of the Americans. Given its subsequent uptake by the autochthonous Emiratis as well as the settler-colonial Israelis, we can rule out the outside imposition of a primitivising discourse as a sufficient motive; how, then, can this ‘scandal of continuity’ be explained? ²⁴ What does it mean to present the normalisation of relations between Israel and Arab states as the resolution of an ancient rivalry between cousins? What kind of society does this presentation imagine and exhort the Middle East to be, and whose interests does it serve?

A Segmentary Ideology

For many decades, anthropologists have grappled with the question of the relation between segmentary patrilineal kinship as a model of social organisation, which appears frequently in Middle Eastern societies, and realities which never seem to accord with this model. Segmentation, a conceptual structure ‘informed by balanced or complementary opposition’ between self-contained groups, ²⁵ does not always express itself in terms of patrilineal kinship: indeed, it may be a fruitful lens for examining other appearances of inverse identification with the other in Arab/ and Palestinian/Israeli contexts, which scholars have discussed in such terms as ‘mirroring’ and ‘severance’. ²⁶ However, discussions of segmentation in Middle Eastern contexts usually centre on patrilineal kinship structures, whose ontological status and power to condition are contested. Stereotypically, such lineages are headed by men, and both power and property flow through the male line, such that one man’s responsibility towards another is a function of patrilineal distance. The strongest link, and potentially the fiercest competition for the father’s favour and legacy, connects a man to his brothers. Conversely, with the important exception of the duty of hospitality, nothing is owed to the unrelated stranger. According to the stereotype, segmentary patrilineal societies are martial in orientation, hostile to the state and often engaged in nomadic husbandry.

In an influential critique, Lila Abu-Lughod has argued that presenting Middle Eastern societies as patrilineally segmented is not only fallacious, but also convenient for outsiders motivated to imagine them as primitive, violent, macho et cetera, whether in order to legitimise their subjugation as ‘terrorists’, as a projection of reactionary desires for lost masculinity, or both. ²⁷ However, insofar as the distinction can be made, there are forces interested in projecting the idea that Middle Eastern societies are patrilineally segmented, once were, should be, or all of the above within these societies as well as outside. ²⁸ In particular, the idea of the tribal, genealogically pure nomad as the origo of sedentary, agricultural, ‘mixed’ society goes back at least as far as the work of the medieval Arab scholar Ibn Khaldun, who cannot be construed as a shill for Western imperialism. ²⁹ As we shall see, the Abraham myth is an even earlier instance of a Middle Eastern society imagining patrilineal-segmentary origins for itself. For centuries, this myth has been a tool of structural nostalgia, an image of an ‘unspoiled and irrecoverable past [which] legitimises deeds of the moment by investing them with the moral authority of eternal truth’. ³⁰ Structural nostalgia invents hoary precedents to further contemporary political ends by repurposing layers of ideology with which its interpellants are already intimate.

The genealogical model set forth in the Abraham legend, I propose, is one such layer, and its power to model proper familial and political behaviour peaks with the most structurally ambiguous relation in its conceptual toolbox: cousinage. As opposed to the humanist idiom of universal relatedness through an undifferentiated siblinghood, writes Naor Ben-Yehoyada, segmentary cousinage ‘permits varying degrees and kinds of difference, familiarity, misunderstanding, and structural distance’. ³¹ Patrilineal kinship also entails differences between types of cousins, and in Ben-Yehoyada’s analysis, Sicilian and Tunisian fishermen see themselves as members of patrilines linked through repeated intermarriage: cross-cousins. But the Abrahamic schema presents Arabs and Jews as descending from two branches of the same patriline, making them patrilineal (parallel) cousins – a different sort of relation which entails similarity, proximity and unity against outsiders. Relations with such cousins confer the advantage of preserving the patriarch’s heritage through endogamous marriage, while also entailing the possibility of intense rivalry over that heritage.

In the case at hand, the genealogical blueprint is the Abraham legend of the Hebrew Bible, with its many historical variations and contestations. Before we consider this legend and these contestations, it is crucial to stress that Abraham – a paragon of unquestioning faith in God – can also be read as opposed to patrilineal-segmentary logic. We have already noted that Christianity offers a universalistic allegorical interpretation of the family drama in addition to a genealogical one, but as we shall see, the same is true of the other two traditions under consideration. Islam affirms a genealogical link to Abraham while also associating him with a rejection of descent’s religious significance. Even in Judaism, in which the bloodline is doctrinally fundamental, genealogy’s significance was historically downplayed in legal practice, though it has regained narrative and affective power in Zionist theology. However, given the intrinsically polemical nature of the Abrahamic dialogue, in the Middle East even those holding anti-segmentary stances are often pulled into debating whether Jews and Arabs are cousins in Abraham, and if so, what precisely that relation signifies.

The Abraham Cycle in the Hebrew Bible

Contemporary scholarship traces the composition of the ‘stories of the patriarchs’ which form chapters 12–50 of the Book of Genesis to the end of the Babylonian Exile, in the fourth century BC, as diasporic elites began to return to Palestine. ³² In this cycle, God several times promises to Abraham, who also hails from Mesopotamia, that his progeny shall inherit the Land of Canaan. The Abraham cycle is tied into a genealogical structure which occupies much of Genesis, including lists of ‘generations’ that purport to account for the ancestry of all coeval humanity, the descendants of Noah whose languages were confounded following the sin of the Tower of Babel (Gen. 11:1-9).

The segmentary logic of complementary opposition is worked to dramatic effect in the stories of the patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Two of the three are polygamous: Abraham has a wife and two concubines, Jacob two wives and two concubines. All marry within the patriline: Sarah is (perhaps) Abraham’s half-sister; Rebecca, Bethuel’s daughter, is Isaac’s patrilineal cousin once removed; and Leah and Rachel are the daughters of Rebecca’s brother Laban, Jacob’s cross-cousins (see Figure 1). ³³ In each of the three iterations, brothers struggle for the father’s blessing and patrimony, and in each case the elder, the heir presumptive, ends up losing out to a younger: Ishmael to Isaac, Esau to Jacob, and (in the third generation, where things get more complicated) Reuben, Simeon and Levi to Judah and Joseph. Isaac, Jacob and Joseph are all sons of a favoured but barren wife who conceives miraculously, and each secures his patrimony through a combination of maternal intrigue and divine intervention. However, the dispossessed older brothers – characterised as fierce and unruly in opposition to the youngers’ combination of obedience and cunning – all also receive a consolation legacy of sorts. Within the segmentary logic of the stories, the younger sons’ repeated victories represent a rejection of the rule of primogeniture as well as an affirmation of women’s agency, exercised through their sons and by virtue of their intimacy with God.

Figure 1.

The genealogy of Abraham, as related in Jewish, Christian and Islamic sources. Only personages mentioned in mentioned in the article are represented. Descent is shown from the mother if she appears on the chart, and from the father otherwise.

With this structure in mind, we can approach the Abraham portion of the patriarchal cycle (Gen. 11–25). As we have seen, the figure who emerges from the Hebrew Bible to inflect Judaism, Christianity and Islam is not only the ancestor of the Jews and Arabs but also a progenitor of the monotheistic faith. While Adam and Noah precede him as figures with a direct relationship to God, Abraham is the first to explicitly reject idolatry. Unlike these two predecessors, he is not a father of all humankind but of a particular segment thereof, ‘the children of Abraham’, which includes not only the descendants of Israel (his grandson Jacob), but also those of his son Ishmael, his grandson Esau and others. Abraham embodies a complex relationship between common descent, matrimonial affiliation and shared faith as principles of social cohesion. ³⁴ That said, the following summary will concentrate on the story’s genealogical aspects.

Commanded by God to leave their hometown of Ur, Abraham and Sarah wander between the promised land of Canaan and neighbouring countries. Though God has promised to make him a ‘father of many nations’, Abraham remains childless until the barren Sarah suggests that he sire a child by her Egyptian slave Hagar. After Sarah turns to persecuting the pregnant Hagar, she escapes into the desert, where a messenger of God informs her that her son Ishmael will be ‘a wild ass of a man’ and instructs her to return. Thirteen years later, Sarah miraculously gives birth to Isaac, and when the adolescent Ishmael offends her somehow at the child’s weaning feast, Sarah demands that mother and son be sent away once more, a demand affirmed by God over the objections of Abraham, who loves Ishmael. The two are banished, but again an angel appears to Hagar, creating a well to save her and the child from dying of thirst. Ishmael stays in the desert and becomes an archer; later his mother finds him an Egyptian wife, and his male descendants are listed. After Abraham accedes to God’s demand to offer Isaac up in sacrifice, the boy is reprieved, and God blesses the father and his progeny one last time. ³⁵ Later, Abraham has additional children by Qeturah, a slave concubine, who receive ‘gifts’ but no inheritance. When he dies, his sons Isaac and Ishmael together bury him at the cave of Machpelah in Hebron.

The Abrahamic Genealogy in the Monotheistic Dialogue

Having presented the Urtext of the Abrahamic genealogy in the Hebrew Bible, I now trace the narrative’s evolution from late antiquity to the cusp of the modern era through a contentious dialogue which involves Jews, Christians and Muslims, and may in fact have played a role in constituting these religious groups as we know them today. I do not claim that the topic has been paramount to these traditions throughout: while some of the texts under discussion are canonical, others are rather arcane and only gain in significance retrospectively. Rather than theological exegesis, the point of the exercise is to demonstrate the continuity of the ‘community of disagreement’ ³⁶ which enables the myth to play its contemporary political role.

The segmentary cosmology presented in Genesis continued to play a role in late-ancient Judaism, though as the borders of the known world expanded, the identification of Biblical peoples with contemporary nations became more allegorical. The mountain kingdom of Edom, associated with Isaac’s son Esau, was first linked with the Roman Empire, and later with Christendom. ³⁷ Ishmael would come to be identified with Islam, but here the chain of association is more direct. As Jan Retsö argues, the ‘Ishmaelites’ of the Hebrew Bible can be identified with the ‘Arabs’ also mentioned therein and in other ancient documents. ³⁸ Who exactly these Arabs were is another question; clearly, in the ancient world the term signified something very different than it does today. But a passage from the Palestinian Talmud (Ta‘anit 4:5), composed no later than the early 6th century CE, demonstrates that some Jews of the time saw Arabs as cousins – perfidious ones, who could not be trusted to uphold their duties. The Talmudic text is an exegesis of the prophet Isaiah’s ‘Proclamation Against Arabia’ (Isa. 21:13-17):

In the forest in Arabia you will lodge, o you traveling companies of Dedanites. O inhabitants of the land of Tema, bring water to him who is thirsty; with their bread they met him who fled. For they fled from the swords, from the drawn sword, from the bent bow, and from the distress of war. For thus the Lord has said to me: ‘Within a year [. . .] all the glory of Kedar will fail; and the remainder of the number of archers, the mighty men of the people of Kedar, will be diminished; for the Lord God of Israel has spoken it’.

Dedan, Tema and Kedar, which appear here as peoples, are all identified in Genesis as descendants of Ishmael; all are also attested as placenames in ancient northwest Arabia. ³⁹ While the Biblical text does not specify the Arabians’ transgression, the Talmud explains that they denied succour to the refugees, their Judean kinsmen. The word ‘Dedanites’, dedanim, is reinterpreted as the homonymous dodanim, ‘cousins’:

Rabbi Joḥanan said, 80,000 young [Judean] priests (broke through) Nebuchadnezzar’s armies and went to the Ishmaelites. They said to them, give us to drink for we are thirsty. [The Ishmaelites] brought before them salted fish and inflated waterskins. They said to them, eat and then you can drink. When one [. . .] opened the waterskin and put it into his mouth, the wind came out and suffocated him. [. . .] the ‘companies of Dedanites’ (orhot dedanim), that is the way the cousins act (orahhon divnei dodaya ‘avdin). When Ishmael was thirsty, did [God] not ‘bring water to him who is thirsty’? God opened [Hagar’s] eyes and she saw a water cistern. ⁴⁰

At this remove, it is difficult to explain the text’s ambivalence towards the people(s) identified by this swirl of ethnonyms. Following exegetical literature of the period, Carol Bakhos argues that Ishmael and Esau are allegorical figures of heresy, while the ‘correct’ line of descent, from Abraham to Isaac to Jacob, represents the transmission of orthodox theology. ⁴¹ However, in the Talmud Arabs are represented as sharing rituals such as circumcision with Jews and possessing real powers as healers. ⁴² Their liminality is not merely theological but also socio-economic: in Retsö’s reconstruction, they are camel herders and warriors who reside between the desert and the sown, possessors of a mystical language, Arabic, which their neighbours – including the Jews – recognise as efficacious. ⁴³

As this image suggests, when Islam emerged a few centuries later, it was from a cosmopolitan milieu in which Jewish, Christian and other traditions were in sustained contact. ⁴⁴ Thus, when ‘Arabs’ re-emerge in the historical record as the name of the Islamic ruling stratum under the Umayyad dynasty, it is with a re-shuffled genealogy which serves ‘the establishment of Ishmael and his progeny among the Arab people’. ⁴⁵ The Qur’an locates Ishmael’s desert residence in Mecca, where his father comes to visit him, bringing treasure and joining him in building the Ka‘aba. ⁴⁶ But if the Jewish Abraham is already a symbol of religious rectitude as well as a genealogical point of origin, the Islamic Abraham – though an ancestor of the Arabs, including the Prophet Muhammad – explicitly rejects genealogical squabbling between his descendants. In Surat al-Baqarah (Qur’an 2:135-136), when confronted with Jewish and Christian claims to primacy, Muhammad is instructed to appeal to ‘the faith of Abraham, the upright – who was not a polytheist’ and implicitly neither a Jew nor a Christian. Among the adherents of his faith are listed Ishmael, Isaac and the latter’s descendants, together with Moses, Jesus and other prophets. ‘We make no distinction between any of them’, ends the verse, ‘and to Allah we all submit’.

Jewish commentators rapidly took up Ishmael’s identification with Islam, which fit well in the genealogical cosmology that had already slotted Christendom in as Esau. The exegetical Pirkei de-Rabbi Eliezer, written in Palestine in the eighth or nineth century, reveals an intensely dialogical relationship between Muslim and Jewish versions of the Abrahamic legend. Astonishingly, this tract takes up the story of Abraham’s visits to Ishmael – otherwise known to us only from Muslim sources – and even identifies the latter’s wives as ‘Ayisha and Fatima, namesakes of the Prophet Muhammad’s wife and daughter respectively. The wives participate in a parable about hospitality: Abraham comes to visit twice incognito, but while ‘Ayisha turns him away and is subsequently repudiated, Fatima fulfils her duty as hostess and receives praise. ⁴⁷ Gordon Newby suggests that this volley in the ‘battle for possession of the biographies of Abraham and his descendants’ may have been launched as part of a bid by the Jewish ‘Issawiyah sect for alliance with the proto-Shi‘ite ghulāt movement, which pledged allegiance to Muhammad’s descendants through Fatima and her husband ‘Ali. ⁴⁸

The Abrahamic genealogy was evidently important to early Christianity as well, with two of the synoptic gospels exhaustively documenting Jesus’ descent from the patriarch. ⁴⁹ But in his supersessionist bid to distance Christianity from Judaism and appeal to prospective converts with no genealogical claim, the Apostle Paul instituted the allegorical interpretation of the family drama to which we have already alluded. In his Epistle to the Galatians (4:21-31), Paul identifies Judaism, born ‘on Mount Sinai in Arabia’, with the slave Hagar who gave birth ‘according to the flesh’, and the church with Sarah, whose son was ‘born as the result of a divine promise’. But allegory is no guarantee of otherworldliness: the Christian interpretation of the Abraham legend was put to geopolitical use during the First Crusade, when the Latin warriors who slaughtered Jerusalem’s Jewish and Muslim inhabitants took up as their rallying cry Sarah’s injunction to ‘cast out the slave and her child’. ⁵⁰

Dangerous Cousins: Patrilineal Logic and Israeli–Arab Relations

Today, Arabs and Israeli Jews commonly call each other ‘cousins’. The Hebrew term is bnei dodim, while its Arabic equivalent is awlad ‘amm (or ibna ‘amm, or ibna ‘umumah), referring specifically to patrilineal cousins. While in some cases this terminology reflects an unambiguous affirmation of the relationship, in Hebrew it more commonly functions as a sort of euphemistic pejorative, since the word ‘aravim (‘Arabs’) itself carries a derogatory charge. ⁵¹ A famous dictionary of Israeli slang defines bnei dodim as a ‘secret term for Arabs, [used] in their presence’, giving the following two usage examples: ‘he is one of our cousins, but you can trust him one hundred percent’, and ‘everyone on the bus is one of us, except two cousins in the back row’. ⁵² Reciprocally, at least among Palestinians, the term is sometimes used in a sarcastically honorific way, something like the term khawajāt, ‘foreign dignitaries’, which is also used to refer to Jews. ⁵³ Welad al-‘Amm, a dialectal rendering, is the title of a 2009 Egyptian spy drama whose heroine discovers that her husband is a secret Jew and a Mossad agent. ⁵⁴

The Jewish identification of Arabs (or Ishmaelites, or Muslims) as cousins, which we have traced back to late antiquity, is picked up by rabbinic authorities from medieval Spain to 18th-century Germany. ⁵⁵ I have not been able to find analogous references in pre-modern Arab sources, but when the discourse of cousinage arises in the print media of the Middle East in the late 19th century, the context is one of intense and often antagonistic dialogue. Participants in this dialogue made use of rhetorical moves made possible by the segmentary frame, including both denial and affirmation of cousinage, as well as juxtaposition with brotherhood and accusations of betrayal of kinship duties. Examples can be found as early as 1887, but a turning point in this dialogue are the 1918–19 negotiations between Chaim Weizmann, head of the World Zionist Organisation and later Israel’s first President, and the Hashemite King Faisal of Iraq, who was strongly aligned with Western imperialism, opposed to ‘Islamist extremism’ (at the time represented by the Wahhabi House of Saud) and eager to ‘make a deal’ with the Zionists. ⁵⁶

Faisal and Weizmann’s diplomatic vision sounds like a blueprint for the Abraham Accords: ‘non-Palestinian, pan-Arab leader(s) would benefit from Jewish development capital, technical assistance, and international political lobbying [. . .] in exchange, Zionists would benefit from Arab recognition of some form of Jewish national existence in Palestine [. . .] and from pressure on the Palestinian leadership to moderate its hostility to Zionism’. ⁵⁷ Faisal’s arguments in favour of alliance with the Zionists leant heavily on the language of genealogy. He often referred to Jews as brothers of the Arabs, citing their shared history ‘from Bagdad to Yemen and Cordova’ and their common racial heritage – both of which he juxtaposed to the more distant relation between these two ‘Semitic’ groups and Europeans, as did some Zionists of Middle Eastern origin in the same period. ⁵⁸ Faisal also repeatedly referred to the Jews as cousins, but – demonstrating the flexibility of segmentary logic – he at least twice offered to upgrade this relationship to a fraternal one. ⁵⁹

This sort of talk was anathema to Arab nationalists opposed to Faisal’s plans. In a good example of the era’s densely dialogical citation practices, the ‘In the Arabic Press’ section of the Hebrew daily Do’ar Ha-Yom quoted Palestinian journalist Hosni Abdulhadi’s polemic against Faisal, whose roots were in the Arabian Hijaz, as follows:

You say ‘we do not aspire to drive the Jews out of Palestine’. Who are your partners, sir, who permit you to say we do not aspire, do you mean that the Palestinian movement is a false one? Because we do want to drive them out, by any peaceful means. You say: The Jews are our cousins. I say: They may be brothers or cousins to the people of Hijaz, but they are enemies to the Palestinians and the Syrians. ⁶⁰

Faisal may have reciprocated this denial of kinship between Arabians and Palestinians; according to Weizmann, the king was ‘contemptuous of the Palestinian Arabs whom he doesn’t even regard as Arabs’. ⁶¹ This rejection of the Palestinians as relevant kin due to their supposedly faulty genealogy was shared by the Zionist Weizmann, who called Faisal ‘the first real Arab nationalist I have met’, as well as by ‘British government Middle East specialists, and many Western European Orientalists, [who] commonly judged that much of the Palestinian population was [. . .] “of the most mixed race”’. ⁶² Here too there is continuity: even in the 1990s, some Jordanian Bedouin denied Palestinians a place in the local ‘community of disagreement’ due to their supposed lack of proper genealogy. ⁶³

Arab nationalist discourse, for its part, continues to prominently feature the rejection of cousinage with Jews, sometimes in similar terms. In the face of Zionist colonisation, which has taken on a particularly brutal character in the West Bank city of Hebron, site of Abraham’s tomb, Palestinians have gradually withdrawn their recognition of Jewish claims to the patriarch’s legacy and moved towards understanding him an ‘Arab [who] immigrated to an Arab country’, denying any genealogical continuity between ancient and modern Jews, who have ‘mixed with other peoples[.]’. ⁶⁴ This denial of cousinage based on an appeal to racial pseudoscience, which characterises Jews as a ‘mixed race’, is carried to extremes in an article in the Egyptian magazine Al-‘Usour al-Jadidah titled ‘Are Jews and Arabs Cousins?’ which answers the question in the negative – by reference to the proto-fascist anthropologist Gustave Le Bon. ⁶⁵

The re-polarisation of attitudes towards Israel in the Arab world around the turn of the millennium found expression in the Arab press in this genealogical-racialist mode. ‘We and Our Jewish Cousins’, in the Saudi Arabian Al-Riyadh in 2004, begins with an anecdote: ‘I have a “smart-aleck” friend who, every time he hears of the crimes of the Jews against the Palestinians, says “Oh well, cousins and relatives. . .”’. ⁶⁶ Citing a genetic study, the author concedes that Sephardic Jews are descended from Abraham, and admits his concern that ‘a study like this may be taken by the Jews as an excuse and pretext for claiming their right to the region’. Nevertheless, he remarks, the study ‘nullifies the claim of European Jews – the most numerous and influential – to return to Palestine and the entire Middle East’. A decade later, a writer for the Qatari Al-Jazeera uses similar data to answer the question in the negative. Relying on the same outdated anthropology and the popular notion that Ashkenazi Jews are descended from the Slavic Khazars, the author concedes Abrahamic ancestry to only a ‘small percentage of the Jews of the Arab countries’ and concludes that ‘any claims of blood relationship between the Arabs and the Jews must be dropped’. ⁶⁷

Denial of the genealogical connection to Arabs is not a discursive avenue open to religious Zionists, who sanctify the continuity between biblical Israel and modern Jewry as well as the scriptural canon which identifies Arabs/Muslims as the progeny of Ishmael. ⁶⁸ As we have seen, the Jewish tradition is strongly ambivalent about the meaning of this relationship. Religious Jewish thinkers interested in promoting reconciliation with Arabs, from the 16th-century mystic Hayim Vital to the radical Mandate Era writer Rabbi Binyamin and the contemporary liberal academic Marc Gopin, have found inspiration in this tradition. ⁶⁹ But there is also no lack of precedent available for those who wish to cast the Ishmaelite branch of the family as violent, idolatrous and anxious to claim an inheritance of which it feels cheated. These elements were picked up by the infamous Meir Kahane, leader of Zionism’s extreme-right fringe and a ‘symbol of the love of Israel’ in the eyes of Israel’s current Minister of National Security, Itamar Ben-Gvir. ⁷⁰ Kahane writes:

the Ishmaelites see Israel as thieves and robbers, they are thirsty for Jewish blood and will never abandon their aspiration to destroy the people and its land. Hence, they should be treated in the manner of the Seven Nations, ⁷¹ and anyone who falters in this duty out of foolish mercy will be acting cruelly towards merciful sons of merciful men [i.e. Jews]. Moreover, these are Ishmaelites, who have been notorious since their creation through Ishmael, the father of their nation. ⁷²

In a responsa on ‘war with the Arabs’, a rabbinic leader of a slightly less radical strain of religious Zionism forbids harassment of individual Arabs but concurs with Kahane on the Ishmaelites’ essential character: ‘they are wild men [. . .] and hence they want to conquer the whole world, us included’. ⁷³

This use of narrative material is, technically speaking, beside the point. Insofar as these rabbis’ interpretation of Jewish law (halakha) is concerned, genealogical differentiation between Gentiles based on their genealogical proximity to the Jews is irrelevant: after all, even the Amalekites condemned to annihilation by the Bible descend from a grandson of Esau. In this sense, Judaism as practiced as a state religion in Israel today rejects segmentary logic. But that logic’s staying power is nevertheless apparent in the following online responsa, in which the respondent (who disclaims that he is ‘not a rabbi’) argues that there is no special obligation towards Arabs by emphasising the difference between cousinage and brotherhood:

[Q:] It is true that Isaac and Ishmael were brothers. . . and had the descendants Isaac =Jews and Ishmael =Arabs. . . Right? . . . So what does it mean that even though the Jews and the Arabs kill each other and there is great hatred but according to the Torah we are brothers? [sic]

[A:] First I would like to point out that the People of Israel descended from our Father Jacob and Ishmael was Jacob’s uncle. So it is more correct to call the relation between us and the Ishmaelites/Arabs ‘cousins’ and not brothers. [. . .] the fact that the Arabs and the Jews descend from one father does not entail any special obligation on our part towards them or vice versa. We are commanded to honour them as with any human who is created in the image of G-d, but this does not negate our natural right to defend ourselves in case of attack. [. . .] One of the exegeses ⁷⁴ emphasises the fact that although the Ishmaelites are our cousins, this does not mean that they will act with compassion towards us. ⁷⁵

This distancing move has become increasingly important in the ideology of the far-right settlers who now form a central pillar of Israel’s ruling coalition. Israel Ariel, a spiritual leader of Ben-Gvir’s ‘Jewish Power’ party, interprets a text which proclaims Abraham ‘secondary to Sarah in prophecy’ in light of the matriarch’s steadfast protection of her son’s birthright, which he contrasts with her husband’s affection towards Ishmael. While it would be sacrilegious to accuse Abraham of the same ‘foolish mercy’ towards the enemy of which Kahane accuses Israeli liberals, glorification of Sarah’s zealotry implicitly serves the same purpose.

With this contrast in mind it might be argued that Abraham represents the virtues of liberality and compassion, and that in this sense his patronage of the Accords might be considered appropriate. But this would be to misunderstand what the religious-Zionist milieu regards as the point of the story: ‘the distancing of Ishmael for his correction’. ⁷⁶ Arabs, like other non-Jews, may live in the Land of Israel only if they waive any claim to sovereignty and accept an inferior status which Kahane, citing Maimonides, characterises as comprising the payment of special taxes (mas) and slavery (‘avdut). ⁷⁷ Against liberal common sense but in tune with much proletarian common sense, ⁷⁸ the head of the Shiru La-Melekh yeshiva in the illegal settlement of Havat Gil‘ad clarifies that menial wage-labour ‘in cleaning, sanitation, table service and so on’, when combined with inferior political status, qualifies as slavery. He then likens non-Arab migrant workers to the children of Abraham’s concubine Qeturah, who received gifts but no inheritance.

Unlike Ishmael who belongs to sanctity (shayakh la-qedusha), but whose boasting, evil deeds, and desire to inherit the land made it necessary to send him away and deny his status, the sons of the concubines were not sent away because they did something wrong. They simply do not belong. [. . .] Abraham has no qualms about sending them away and feels no sorrow over it. [. . .] Isaac and Ishmael belong to sanctity, and they bury our Father Abraham in the Cave of Machpelah. The other sons [. . .] do not come there. They do not belong. ⁷⁹

In this version of patrilineal-segmentary logic, anxiety about Ishmael’s claim to Abraham’s inheritance – analogous to secular Zionists’ anxiety over the Palestinians’ juridical rights and ‘sweat equity’ in the land ⁸⁰ – makes it necessary to enact ethnic cleansing. While admitting that Jews and Arabs are cousins, this logic leads to the conclusion that they can only live in peace if each stay in (or leave for) their place: Jews in Israel and Arabs in ‘Arabia’. Migrants from outside the region can be tolerated only because, and only insofar as, they make no political claims and accept their inferior status. With this racist-cum-genocidal logic – which in no way contradicts the spirit of the Abraham Accords – it is no surprise that the settlers have taken up the Crusader battle cry, ‘cast out the slave and her child’. ⁸¹

Conclusion: Other Abrahamisms?

On 16 February 2023, Deputy Prime Minister of the UAE Saif bin Zayed Al Nahyan and the country’s Minister of Tolerance and Coexistence, Sheikh Nahyan bin Mubarak Al Nahyan, officially inaugurated the Abrahamic Family House, ‘a new centre for learning, dialogue, and the practice of faith’ in Abu Dhabi. Ephraim Mirvis, Chief Rabbi of the United Kingdom, Cardinal Miguel Ángel Ayuso Guixot, President of the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue, and Professor Mohammed Al Mahrasawi, former President of Al-Azhar University, were all present for the inauguration. Designed by Ghanaian-British architect David Adjaye, the Abrahamic Family House comprises three cubic buildings of equal size consecrated for liturgical use by Christians, Jews and Muslims. Visitors are ‘invited to participate in religious services, guided tours, celebrations, and opportunities to explore faith’ and take advantage of daily guided tours which point out ‘features of the design pertinent to the practices and traditions of each faith’. ⁸²

The whitewashed cubes of the Abrahamic Family Centre, erected no doubt by the hard labour of disenfranchised migrants, are a monument to the ideology which encourages us to imagine Jews and Muslims (or Israelis and Arabs, and other conflations ad nauseam) as antagonistic branches of an ancient, patriarchal family which can be reconciled through the benevolent intervention of the ambiguously related Western/Christian other. This idiom, as we have seen, is powerful precisely because of its intensely dialogical nature, which enables conversations within and across confessional lines in the present as well as with texts and traditions of the past. Though it has a long and continuing history of serving Western imperialism, this ideology also has deep roots in the region and plenty of ‘authentic’ local partisans. But dialogue does not in itself promise harmony or peace: on the contrary, framing antagonism in a language common to the antagonists may only serve to reify difference, perpetuate conflict and intensify exclusion. The allure of this genealogical imagination lies in its simplification of reality and in its exploitative marginalisation – whether implicit or explicit – of everyone who ‘does not belong’ to the family.

To say this is not to preclude creative appropriations and subversions of the Abrahamic legend: like other effective mythical narratives, this one too contains productive oppositions, pitting universality against common descent, primogeniture against divine grace and cunning against brute force. Despite the male domination which it takes for granted, in this narrative it is often women, and sometimes the most abject of women, who communicate most directly with the divine. It is certainly possible that movements upholding the rights of women, migrants and the poor will take up the cause of the marginal and abused characters of this story. The most prominent candidate is Hagar, whose name is cognate with the Semitic root for ‘migration’ and whose presence in the narrative may point far back in time, to a vanished cult of movement and mixing whose adherents might have been the first ‘Arabs’. ⁸³ As for the figure of the patriarch himself, transmitted through these ramifying traditions, it too is sufficiently complex and contradictory to make ‘other Abrahams’ possible. Among these we might count the lover of both Ishmael and Isaac found in the Qur’an and in the writings of Jewish progressives; the attractive but abstract patron saint of hospitality imagined by Levinas and Derrida; or, most attractive to me personally, the Abraham envisioned by Kafka – a poor old man who does not lack in faith, but is too humble and afraid of ridicule to believe himself chosen. ⁸⁴

In a region now plagued with violence towards women, rapaciousness towards the poor, and murderous hostility towards those seeking asylum and livelihood – especially if they are dark-skinned and deemed ‘not to belong’ to the family – it may be worthwhile, even necessary, to hold out for other Abrahamisms (or Hagarisms). But as instantiated in the most prominent public document to bear the patriarch’s name, the Abrahamic ideology plays a regressive role. In the imaginary which accompanies the geopolitics of the Abraham Accords, the conception of Jews and Arabs as patrilineal kin invites an essentialising nationalism that equates peoplehood with territorial homogeneity (‘distancing for correction’). This ideology presents the healing of one rift, ostensibly internal to the family, as necessitating the escalation of antagonism towards those whose kinship is suspect – whether these be migrants from outside the region, Ashkenazi Jews or, paradoxically enough, indigenous people like the Palestinians. In the face of mythmaking and obfuscation which often rely on genetic pseudoscience, scholars might emphasise the growing evidence that the Middle East has always been a crossroads, a meeting-place of muhājirūn and hosts, a cauldron of diversity in which any claim to pure descent deserves to be taken with a dose of respectful irony. ⁸⁵ And against the abhorrent cry to ‘cast out the slave and her child’, which has returned like a nightmare from the darkest eras in the region’s history, it behoves Middle Easterners to construct an inclusive regional politics, one committed to the demand that no one be cast violently into the desert, ever again.