Seyla Benhabib - Dignity in Adversity

PREFACE

Around September 18, 2001, almost a decade ago, I crossed Whitney Avenue in New Haven, Connecticut, with my 14-year-old daughter, traveling from our house to a Red Cross center to give blood for the victims and rescuers of the Twin World Towers 90 miles away. As I gave my name, Seyla Benhabib, to the nurse in attendance, she froze for a moment: Ben-Habib wasnt Habib an Arabic name? Who was this lady with a foreign accent, she seemed to be thinking, coming in to give blood?

My daughter, who noted the nurses hesitation, immediately understood that I was being assessed as an Arab or a Muslim, and she squeezed my hand in solidarity. I could not help feeling, that early evening in Connecticut, that my gesture of solidarity with the victims of 9/11 and the fire-fighters and policemen of New York City was not wanted and, as it turned out, not needed: students of Yale University and other schools had already rushed to the Red Cross banks across New Haven, and actually, the blood banks were well stocked.

Nevertheless, something in me ached. The moral of this story is not about discrimination against Middle Easterners, Muslims, or Arab Americans, real though it is. Rather, it is about the complexity and multiplicity of identities to which my name testifies, but which bureaucratic administration shorthands in an increasingly securitized world political environment reduced to unequivocal signals of danger during the so-called war on terror. The lady at the Red Cross station could not have known that I was a Sephardic Jew born in Istanbul, whose earliest known ancestor was called Jacob Ibn-Habib, from the city of Zamora in Spain, and whose descendants were Rabbis and prominent members of a Jewish community first in Spain and then in Salonica and Galipoli. According to some historical records, when my ancestors tried but failed to persuade Christian authorities to permit the Jews to stay in Spain, they, like thousands in that period, left to seek refuge in the Ottoman Empire.

Islam for them was not a religion of war and jihad but a religion of tolerance that respected the Jews and granted them the right of hospitality, in Kants sense, and not only because they were people of the book, namely, the Torah, which Islam, along with the New Testament, acknowledged as being holy. Certainly, the history of the Jews of the Ottoman Empire has its experiences of discrimination, prejudice, oppression, and exclusion. Yet when I read about laffair du foulard the scarf affair that erupted in France when French authorities banned Muslim girls from attending public schools with their heads covered, and about the turban or basrt meselesi in Turkey, I think of my own grandmothers and aunts. They covered and uncovered their hair in much the same way as their Muslim neighbors did. I also think of Orthodox Jewish women who wear wigs in public places in Brooklyn, Queens, Jerusalem, as well as Paris and London. And I ask, a Turkish-Jew? A Jewish Turk? A Sephardic Jew growing up in a Muslim-majority country? A child of Ataturks Republic? What does it all mean?

The eruption of political Islam into world politics after September 11, 2001, has thrust these aspects of my biography, which I had considered of private import only, into theoretical and political debates concerning the dialectic of Enlightenment and the Jewish experience, international law and the Holocaust, Islam in contemporary Europe, and the meaning of contemporary cosmopolitanism.

The essays collected in this volume, which were written in the period from 2006 to 2010, document this trajectory. They continue the projects of discourse ethics and communicative rationality and freedom, which I have outlined in various works since the early 1990s, by extending them into the terrain of legal cosmopolitanism and recent world political events.

At the center of much contemporary political discourse is the concept of human rights: their justification; their scope; the relationship of philosophical accounts of rights to international declarations and to international human rights law, and their diversity across constitutions and legal traditions.

The following chapters discuss the philosophy and politics of human rights by offering a systematic account of their place within the project of discourse ethics and communicative rationality. They also examine rights against the background of changing conceptions of citizenship in Europe, in particular, as a consequence of Muslim migration, and they look at contentious debates since September 11, 2001, some of which dismiss demands for human rights as hypocritical justifications for humanitarian interventions, at best, and neo-imperialist ventures of global capitalism, at worst. But considerations of rights cannot be entertained independently of transformations of state sovereignty. Today, the tensions between the changing status of state sovereignty in international law and the normative ideal of a democratically self-governing people are the source of much acrimony. For some, international law undermines democratic sovereignty; for others and I count myself among them it enhances it. My aim in this book is to explore this complex landscape and to situate human rights discourse within a vision of democratic iterative politics.

NOTES AND REFERENCES

See Esther Benbassa and Aron Rodrigue, Sephardi Jewry: A History of the Judeo-Spanish Community, 14th20th Centuries (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000).