Hiba and Maissun look at me with dismay. We are sitting in a shawarma restaurant in the center of Copenhagen planning a trip to Palestine. I have contacted my colleague's research assistant in the West Bank who has offered to give us a guided tour of Birzeit University, as well as to introduce us to the nightlife of Ramallah (the administrative capital of the West Bank). I am trying to present the offer as neutrally as possible. However, straightaway Hiba starts to question me: “What does she [the research assistant] mean by nightlife? Does she mean a bar? Will there be alcohol? Will there be dancing?” Maissun jumps straight to the predictable conclusion: “A guided tour of the university sounds nice, but maybe we should just skip the evening part.” Looking at the two young women in their mid-twenties, and their quick rejection of a night out, I cannot help but think of their parents—reminiscing about their youth in refugee camps on the outskirts of Beirut in the 1970s and 1980s they certainly did not sound as if they would have missed an opportunity to have a night out, not to mention going dancing. Maissun's father had told me that the other youngsters used to call him Michael Jackson because he was so good at imitating Jackson's moonwalk, and even owned an exact replica of the short red and black jacket Jackson wore in one of his videos.
Hiba and Maissun's reaction did not take me by surprise. At that time in my fieldwork I was used to being around a liberal generation of parents, and the more conservative generation of their children. Whereas Hiba's parents in their youth in Lebanon drank whisky and met each other at a political meeting of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP), a Palestinian Marxist-Leninist organization,Footnote 1 Hiba has taken up the practices of praying and attending a mosque. However, although the young generation distance themselves from their parents’ past, I believe that what may appear as an opposition between them deserves closer analysis.
Based on sixteen months of fieldwork between 2005 and 2008, this article explores generational changes and continuities among Palestinian families in Denmark. The empirical question that it seeks to explain is why the young generation along with many from the parental generation are turning away from secular ideologies and towards Islam. Analytically, I suggest that what, from the perspective of social actors, may appear as change, also reflects structural continuities when scrutinized more closely. Even though the families have moved from Beirut to Copenhagen and from a secular ideology to Islam, on a structural level they have remained in the same position.
Ethnographically the article can be read as an extension of Rosemary Sayigh's acclaimed book, Palestinians: From Peasants to Revolutionaries.Footnote 2 The book is based on oral histories she collected among Palestinians in refugee camps in Lebanon between 1975 and 1978.Footnote 3 An apt title for a similar project carried out between 2005 and 2008 among Palestinians in housing projects in Denmark is Palestinians: From Revolutionaries to Muslims. Just as Sayigh's book shows how Palestinians became revolutionaries in Lebanon, this article attempts to show that Muslims are not only people whom migration brings to Denmark, but also people migrants become once in Denmark. Whereas the days of the revolution (ayām al-thawra) in the refugee camps created a fertile environment for becoming a fidāᵓī (fighter), the beginning of the new millennium in Denmark seems to have created an equally fertile environment for becoming a Muslim.
Analytically, the article contributes to the growing body of literature inspired by Karl Mannheim's essay on historical generations.Footnote 4 Mannheim suggests that generations crystallize around the distinctive historical experiences of a particular age cohort. Taking this conceptualization of generations as its point of departure, this article argues through the cases of two Palestinian families that the 1970s in Lebanon and the beginning of the new millennium in Denmark were moments where the becoming of, respectively, revolutionaries and Muslims rose to their highest degree of intensity in my interlocutors’ lives. In the last part of the article, I extend Mannheim's argument. I suggest that in order to explain the movement from Marxist to Muslim among my Palestinian interlocutors we can rely on neither genealogy nor historical context alone, but need to pay equal attention to structural continuities across generations. I have therefore coined the term “liminal becoming” to denote how the specific figures of the revolutionary and the Muslim discussed here arise from the structural liminal position of being “betwixt and between” the national order of things.Footnote 5
Palestinians in Denmark simultaneously serve as an exemplary and as an extraordinary case.Footnote 6 Since the 1970s, the Islamic revival has swept through not only the Middle East but also through the many Muslim diasporas worldwide.Footnote 7 The Palestinians offer an excellent example of this broad movement from leftist to Islamist positions, and my analysis on how changes in global and national politics are enacted within the intimate sphere of Palestinian families may therefore reverberate with other research on Muslim families. Simultaneously, I suggest that the Palestinians in Denmark provide an extraordinary case of these global changes due to the prolonged liminality of their position. Liisa Malkki uses the term “liminal” to designate the structural position of refugees who are caught on the threshold (the limen) between nation-states, at once no longer and not yet classified, and whose bare presence thus challenges the national order as such.Footnote 8 Palestinians are not only refugees but also stateless, and the Palestinians in Lebanon and Denmark continuously so since, unlike in other Middle Eastern and European countries, they were denied citizenship.Footnote 9 My interlocutors have therefore never experienced being a legitimate part of a nation-state but have always moved within the space of the other, forced to seize emerging opportunities to change their predicament.Footnote 10 And I propose that it is this structural liminality that explains why my interlocutors have seized the current zeitgeist with such vigor, exploiting the potential of their time the most: without a space of their own they are structurally inclined to seize the moment.Footnote 11
Along the same line of thought, I use the concept of becoming to emphasize that the figures of the revolutionary and the Muslim are not only products of history but simultaneously subjects of change that transform the very history of which they are a part.Footnote 12 In the conclusion I suggest that we think of the movement from revolutionaries to Muslims not only in terms of changes but also in terms of continuities—as liminal becomings that are repeated with a difference across historical generations.Footnote 13
HISTORICAL GENERATIONS AND STRUCTURAL LOCATIONS
The majority of Palestinians are refugees or internally displaced people as a result of the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 and the ensuing Arab–Israeli wars.Footnote 14 The greatest numbers live in the Middle East though one also finds large Palestinian communities in places such as the Unites States, Latin America, and Europe.Footnote 15 In Denmark, Palestinians constitute one of the largest groups of refugees.Footnote 16 The majority have followed the same route from villages in Palestine, to camps in Lebanon, to housing projects in Denmark. They arrived in Denmark as a result of the Lebanese Civil War of 1975–90 and were received as freedom fighters by the Danish left wing. As part of a protest against Palestinians being returned to Lebanon, a group of Palestinians and Danish left-wing activists arranged a “church asylum” for a large group of Palestinian refugees and invited them to stay in a church in Copenhagen. The spectacular event, which lasted five months, attracted intense media coverage, and in 1992, quite extraordinarily, the Danish Parliament passed a special law known as “the Palestinian law” (Palæstinenserloven) granting permanent residence to all Palestinians from Lebanon who had lived in Denmark for more than twelve months.Footnote 17 Hiba and Maissun's fathers were among the Palestinians who were embraced by the Danish left wing and who happily partook in a range of solidarity activities at the time. The question is why the children of the fidāᵓīn and many of the fidāᵓīn themselves have turned their backs on secular ideologies and have instead embraced Islam.
Two interrelated strands of studies focusing on Arab migrants explain the turn towards Islam in terms of, respectively, the development in global and national politicsFootnote 18 and the emergence of a transnational Muslim community.Footnote 19 While I lean on this literature to explain the Islamic revival, neither strand addresses the specific continuities I found across generations. The scholarly literature on diaspora and generations is diverse and far ranging.Footnote 20 Within the literature on second-generation Muslim migrants in Denmark there is a tendency to focus on intergenerational relations between parents and children.Footnote 21 For instance, Garbi Schmidt and Karen-Lise Johansen stress how the young generation present their interpretation of Islam as a kind of classical Islam based on the Qurʾan in contrast to their parents’ traditions from their homeland.Footnote 22 However, even though the young generation's move toward Islam could be interpreted as a move away from the secular political ideologies of the parents, I argue that in many ways it is not, and that we should be careful not to reduce generations to genealogical relations. The studies on Palestinian diasporas operate with several concepts of generations. For example, Diana Allan distinguishes between different generations of refugees based on the different events that led to displacement,Footnote 23 whereas Victoria Mason analyzes Palestinian exilic generations based on how many generations they have been in exile.Footnote 24 Here, I want to take a slightly different direction. In order to acknowledge both the historical particularities of a distinct generation and the structural similarities across generations, I turn toward Mannheim.
Mannheim suggests that a generation is characterized by its structural “location” within the continuous historical processes that limit its members to a specific range of potential experiences and predispose them to a certain characteristic mode of thought and type of historically relevant action.Footnote 25 He describes how members of the same age group will show certain similarities merely because their crucial first experiences, or “fresh contact,” put them in contact with the same things. According to him, generations are both social positions and the social processes of becoming within a specific historical context of potentialities.Footnote 26
Recently, a growing number of anthropologists have been inspired by Mannheim and have used his ideas to bring to the fore the historical circumstances of a particular cohort.Footnote 27 However, less attention has been paid to the structural feature of Mannheim's concept of generation. As Kecskemeti writes, Mannheim is not concerned simply with how particular historical circumstances or zeitgeists affect the emergence of new historical generations, but with how specific structural locations predispose individuals to experience specific historical events in a similar way.Footnote 28 In the last part of this article I highlight the structural locations that crosscut different historical generations and influence how individuals experience and act upon the respective problems of their time.
The movement from revolutionary to Muslim was quite prevalent in my fieldwork, during which I interviewed over eighty Palestinians and conducted participant observations among nine families living in different housing projects in Denmark. Below I introduce Hiba and Layal and their families, whom I have known for three years, and then situate their cases within their respective historical generations.Footnote 29 Following Mannheim, I emphasize the formative years of the youth of Hiba and Layal and their parents respectively, in other words the years in which they had “fresh contact” with their cultural heritage within the prevailing “spirit of the age.”Footnote 30 I have chosen these specific cases because although Hiba and Layal are part of the same historical generation, they explore its possibilities in different ways, creating different trajectories for themselves and their families.
TO HOLD ONE’S GROUND: THE STORY OF HIBA
Hiba is rather cool with her baggy jeans, tight blouses, and unorthodox education as a machine engineer. She grew up in a housing project where most of the tenants were ethnic minorities such as Palestinians, Somalis, or Iraqis. However, when she started her university studies, she suddenly found herself surrounded by ethnic Danes. Our first interview revolved around her being Palestinian. As I turned the tape recorder off, she confided to me that recently she had begun to pray. We were sitting in the living room while her father and brother were next door, and I asked her why she was whispering. “Because my father doesn't know,” she replied. At that time her answer left me in the dark. The majority of Palestinians are Sunni Muslims and Hiba's family is no exception. So why did she prefer that her father not know?
Over the next couple of months I witnessed Hiba's growing interest in what I would term “becoming a Muslim.” She would check out the different Muslim congregations in Copenhagen, discussing the pros and cons of different imams with her friends and me. Finally she decided on attending Friday prayer at Abu Laban’s, a mosque named after its imam.Footnote 31 Hiba, her friend Sara, who has a Moroccan background, and I met half an hour before the prayer was supposed to begin. Sara was wearing a black headscarf as always, and had brought one along for Hiba, who refused to wear it before we were inside the mosque. As soon as Abu Laban's lecture finished, we left the mosque quickly, avoiding the groups of young people who were chatting in the courtyard. Hiba said she did not want to face the other young Muslims, who would congratulate her and be happy on her behalf. Hiba's mother was picking her up at the railway station. As soon as Hiba caught a glimpse of the car, she loosened her hair and hid the headscarf, explaining to me that her mother thought she had been working out in the local fitness center.
The next time I interviewed Hiba, I asked her why she had begun to pray. She explained to me that at the university she was always confronted with her assumed Muslim background. Her classmates would ask her whether she was a Muslim, and if she confirmed this they would ask her all kinds of questions. Why did she not wear a scarf? What was Ramadan all about? What did she think of 9/11? Not knowing how to answer, Hiba started to search for knowledge about Islam in order to defend herself, as she put it. She was also very upset by the debate over headscarves at that time. In France a law had just been passed that made it illegal to wear headscarves in public schools,Footnote 32 and Hiba declared that if they also made it illegal in Denmark, she would start to wear a headscarf while in school and take it off as soon as she left the building. I asked her why, and she said with a proud smile, “We Palestinians are stubborn.” When I asked her how she would frame the sentence in Arabic, Hiba translated the Danish term stædige (stubborn) into Arabic as ṣumūd, which is usually associated with the Intifada in the Occupied Palestinian Territories and represents “steadfastness,” “staying put,” or “resistance.”Footnote 33
A few weeks later, Jyllands-Posten, the largest Danish daily newspaper, printed the twelve cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad. Hiba was very upset and decided to write a letter to Jyllands-Posten to set things straight. She wrote that she was 150 percent in favor of freedom of speech, but not if it was used to harass other people. She did not demand an apology but rather respect for herself, her Prophet, and her religion. A journalist from the Danish national radio program P1 reacted to her letter and invited her and the editor of the culture section in Jyllands-Posten, Flemming Rose, to a live debate the following Friday. While Hiba was in the studio, approximately 3,000 Muslims were demonstrating against the cartoons. The majority of the Palestinians I knew took part in the demonstration and Hiba joined us at the central square (Rådhuspladsen) in Copenhagen. Later on, when I listened to the radio program, Hiba was presented by the journalist as “a young Muslim without a headscarf.” Instead of presenting her as something she was (a university student) or referring to something she actually wore (baggy jeans), she was defined by what she did not wear. But Hiba was pleased with the debate, “even though I did not make Flemming Rose change his mind,” she said smilingly.
In the preceding section I have described Hiba's journey toward becoming a Muslim, from her first initiative regarding praying to her representing Muslims on a Danish national radio program. Still we are left with the question of why, at least initially, Hiba preferred her parents not to know that she had begun to pray and attend a mosque. A clue might be found in the last piece of data I will present here. A year after the events described above, a group of seven girls—five with a Palestinian background, one with a Turkish background, and me—were celebrating Hiba's sister's birthday. One of the girls had recently married an Iraqi man and we discussed whether nationality really mattered. They all agreed that the most important thing was that the potential husband should be a Muslim. Then the subject turned to their parents and they all laughed at the fact that most of their parents had been active in the same left-wing party (DFLP) in Lebanon. One of the girls told me: “They brainwashed people. In the refugee camps they would have these long, long meetings where they would only discuss Palestine. People stopped praying and fasting for many years. It was not until they came to Denmark that they became religious.” Hiba then corrected her: “They did not brainwash people. But the Palestinians were so desperate that if somebody turned up and said, ‘We will help you free Palestine,’ they followed him. In this sense the Palestinians have always been easy to manipulate.”
I am not sure if Ahmad, Hiba's father, would approve of the above interpretation of his youth. Ahmad grew up during the heyday of the revolution in Shatila, a refugee camp on the outskirts of Beirut. From a young age he happened to be a natural with a Kalashnikov and when he was fifteen he earned himself a position in the military wing of the DFLP. He met Hiba's mother at a DFLP political meeting and they soon got married and had two girls. Most of the time, though, Ahmad was not at home, but was fighting in the south of Lebanon and participating in military operations against Israel. However, when the War of the CampsFootnote 34 broke out, and the fighting against the Amal militia spilled over into clashes between different Palestinian factions, he decided to leave Lebanon with his family. Once in Denmark he applied for political asylum, and the family was assigned an apartment in a housing project. Since then Ahmad has tried to start up a range of different small-scale businesses, from a bakery to a jewellery shop. They have all failed. As he puts it, his Marxist way of thinking makes it very difficult for him to take money from people, and today the family makes a living from delivering newspapers.
In a sense, Ahmad is distinct from my other interlocutors among the parental generation. Like Hiba he is very steadfast and refuses to abandon the secular left-wing convictions of his youth. The majority of my interlocutors within the parental generation, though, have turned toward Islam and faced the new “spirit of the age” along with their children. Layal and her father offer such a case.
“EDUCATION IS LIKE A WEAPON IN YOUR HAND”: THE STORY OF LAYAL
Layal came to Denmark from Lebanon when she was seven years old. She grew up with the Palestinian proverb “an education is like a weapon in your hand.” Her father explained to me that the proverb meant that you should be able to secure yourself, both in terms of defending Palestine but also in terms of providing for yourself and your family. He said, “My parents lived off their land, we have to live off our minds.” While Layal grew up surrounded by books and encyclopaedias within the field of natural science, religion was less prevalent. Layal knew that her family was Muslim, but she did not have a religious upbringing, and her mother did not wear a headscarf. Layal did well in school and after high school she fell in love, got married, and had her first child. Everything seemed to be going smoothly except for the fact that Layal did not feel happy. She did not know which field of study to pursue and, as she framed it, felt “emptiness” in her life. As she enrolled and dropped out of different lines of study she started to read about Christianity, Judaism, and Islam.
One night she overheard her Moroccan parents-in-law badmouthing the Islamic preacher Amr Khaled's TV show. They criticized his open discussion of sex and the fact that both girls and boys were present in the studio. In contrast to her parents-in-law, both things made perfect sense to Layal and she began watching the show. The first time she watched the program Amr Khaled addressed the emptiness one might feel in life and underlined that there was no contradiction between education and Islam. Inspired by Amr Khaled, Layal started to wear a headscarf and, with scientific thoroughness, set out to find the mosque in Copenhagen that suited her best. She started out at a mosque that turned out to belong to the organization Hizb al-Tahrir.Footnote 35 Within a few hours Layal decided she did not like it. According to her, the imam did not refer to the sayings of the Prophet, but only to Hizb al-Tahrir. Moreover, the imam stated that since it was impossible for Muslims to acquire jobs in Denmark, he approved of illegal work. Layal moved on to another mosque belonging to al-Ahbash, who combines Sunni and Shiʿi theology with Sufism.Footnote 36 During her second visit, however, the imam badmouthed Abu Laban, the imam of the largest Muslim congregation in Copenhagen, and played a recording of a speech made by Abu Laban in which he advocated that one should not read just the Qurᵓan but also the Bible. Layal declared that she agreed with Abu Laban and questioned whether it was legal to have recorded the speech without Abu Laban's consent. The incident made her visit the mosque headed by Abu Laban himself, and during the years I have known her this is the mosque with which she has stuck. Layal has also begun to study medicine and while her life is back on track her decision to wear a headscarf has introduced unforeseen obstacles.
Until she began wearing a headscarf Layal had been classified by those in her surroundings as “Danish” due to her blue eyes, brown hair, and light skin color. Perceived as likable and promising, she never had any problems obtaining jobs. However, according to Layal, all this changed when she decided to wear a headscarf. At job interviews employers explicitly stated that the headscarf was a problem. Finally, she got a position at Amnesty International in one of their face-to-face campaigns and started her first day at work in a small town square.Footnote 37 In her portfolio were three campaigns, one condemning torture, one condemning violence against women, and one advocating freedom of speech. However, often when Layal approached people they would start discussing her rather than the campaigns. One man even yelled at her, asking how she was supposed to teach him anything about discrimination and freedom when she herself was obviously oppressed. The man was quite big and Layal felt intimidated and unprepared for this kind of attack. Later Layal approached an elderly woman, who told her: “You should return to your homeland and try to improve things down there before you start criticizing us.” Layal told me that she managed to sign up some people, but only by humiliating herself. Over and over again, she had to explain that she was not oppressed, that her husband did not beat her up, and that Denmark was her homeland. Layal was exhausted and when one of her colleagues, who also wore a headscarf, was spat at, she decided to resign.
Layal told me this story over several conversations. Later, when I sat in the sparsely furnished living room of Layal's father Adham, he smiled when I brought up the topic of headscarves. “Listen,” he said, “my daughters decide on their own. I just want them to make their decisions on a solid foundation.” Still smiling, Adham continued: “In Lebanon religion was only for old people, the ones who were afraid of dying and who wanted to ensure that they went to paradise. In Lebanon it was Beatles, Rolling Stones, and girls in miniskirts.”
Anja: Did the Palestinian girls wear miniskirts as well?
Adham: The whole world did in those days. I remember I had sisters who had girlfriends. When they came over for visits their skirts were so short that they revealed their panties when they sat down. They couldn't move. The only scarves present in my parents’ home were neckerchiefs, which the girls used to cover their legs when they sat down. We had some neckerchiefs in the home of my parents, but never enough for everybody [he laughs].
Adham was one of the few of my interlocutors who had managed to complete a university degree before he fled to Denmark. After he finished his education he enrolled in Fatah and got a job in Beirut in the Palestinian Red Crescent Society established by the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO). While Adham focused mainly on his civil career, the Lebanese Civil War caught up with him. Due to his political engagement with Fatah he was imprisoned and tortured twice, first by the Lebanese army and later by the Amal militia. After he was released the second time he fled to Denmark with his wife and two daughters.
In Denmark he had difficulties finding a job and ended up applying for a PhD in biology. Adham got the PhD grant and obtained the degree; however he still had problems finding a job. His wife, who was also unemployed, started complaining about their lack of money and encouraged him to find a position in one of the local greengrocers, where several of her friends’ husbands had found work. Adham told me that he simply could not work there. Maybe others, without education, could create a decent life by working in a greengrocer every day, but not him. By the time I got to know Adham both of his daughters had married and left home and his wife had divorced him. He spent most of the time on his black fake leather sofa drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes. On a shelf next to his many diplomas, an open Qurᵓan was on display and from time to time he joined the Friday prayers in the nearby mosque headed by Imam Abu Laban.
POLITICAL PLATFORMS AND SOCIAL STIGMAS
When we left Hiba and Layal they were each standing at different public squares in Denmark. Hiba was amongst 3,000 other Muslims protesting the public denigration of the Prophet, while Layal had turned herself into a public monument of denigration in a suburb of Copenhagen, exposing herself to anger and offensive remarks from random passersby. The two cases illustrate that Palestinian nationalism in Lebanon and Islam in contemporary Denmark at once serve as political platforms and as social stigmas. The cases furthermore highlight that “revolutionary” and “Muslim” are not simply what you are, but rather what you can become within a specific sociopolitical climate and national context. As such the two cases provide an example of not only historical generations but also segmented assimilation, in the sense that the families are simultaneously excluded and incorporated according to how difference is measured nationally at a given time.Footnote 38 In Lebanon the parental generation had no option but to turn to the PLO for protection and a livelihood. In Denmark, Hiba and Layal both felt excluded and turned to Islam in order to face the challenges in their everyday lives. Despite their very different lives, it is significant that whether they were searching for political platforms to promote the Palestinian cause and minority rights or for peace of mind, Islam became the option, and for Hiba and Layal, an option that was realized with a successful outcome, despite its attached stigma.
Before I discuss the continuities across generations, I will therefore situate the generations within their respective historical and national contexts in order to outline the families’ different fields of possibilities during the 1970s and early 1980s in Lebanon, and at the beginning of the new millennium in Denmark.
THE GENERATION OF THE REVOLUTION
The parents of both Hiba and Layal grew up in refugee camps in Lebanon during the days of the revolution from 1969 to 1982. Sayigh describes the lives of Palestinians in Lebanon from 1948 until the revolution as intolerable in every respect. Palestinians were refused civil, social, and economic rights, and the refugee camps were controlled by the Lebanese police and army. Besides living in poverty and being prevented from taking up jobs and building proper houses, Palestinians were harassed or imprisoned if they expressed any kind of Palestinian identity or organized politically.Footnote 39 Oscillating between the present and the past, Adham described it as follows:
The Palestinians in Lebanon have no rights. A dog has a better life than a Palestinian in Lebanon. If you visited a refugee camp in Lebanon you would be shocked. How do people live? Like rats. I cannot describe it. We had torture. At that time [before the revolution] if I had a visitor, I had to phone the Lebanese Army to tell them that you are here. If I don't call, I would be in trouble. When the revolution came we could breathe because all the powers that had put pressure on us were gone. But we still didn't have rights, and there were still many problems.
The Arab–Israeli war in 1967, in which Israel occupied the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, created momentum that paved the way for the change the Palestinians in the camps had so desperately awaited.Footnote 40 Sayigh quotes a Palestinian schoolgirl as saying “I was waiting for anyone to make a revolution, and, thank God, it came, and I can share in it.”Footnote 41 After the humiliating defeat of 1967, popular support for the incipient Palestinian Resistance Movement (PRM) and its military operations inside Israel grew among the Arab populations, and the Arab regimes could no longer afford not to support it.Footnote 42 In Lebanon the prewar ban on guerrilla operations was lifted and the PRM groups were allowed to openly recruit and train.Footnote 43 In 1969 a number of popular uprisings succeeded in liberating the refugee camps in Lebanon and paved the way for the Cairo Agreement, which handed over control of the camps from the Lebanese government to the PLO.Footnote 44 Sayigh writes that al-thawra (the revolution) went far beyond the situation of the moment—it also shed new light on former uprisings in Palestine and pointed toward a path into the future.Footnote 45 Just as the peasant (al-falāḥ) was a symbol of the Palestinian village and of the “Great Revolt” (al-thawra al-kubrā) from 1936 to 1939 against British colonial rule,Footnote 46 the fighter (al-fidāᵓī) became a symbol of the refugee camps as specific sites of resistance during the days of the revolution.
The parents of Hiba and Layal became part of the historical generation that is known among Palestinians as jīl al-thawra (generation of the revolution).Footnote 47 During their youth in the 1970s and 1980s the camps were militarily controlled and politically organized by the PLO.Footnote 48 Whereas the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) was responsible for institutions such as primary schools and medical clinics, the PLO financed hospitals, factories, and infrastructure such as wells and sewerage systems.Footnote 49 One of Adham's friends tried to explain the role of the PLO in the camps in Lebanon by comparing it to the municipality (kommune in Danish) within the Danish welfare state. “The PLO was like the kommune,” he said. Besides providing the economic and political infrastructure of the camps (as the kommune provides the infrastructure of the Danish cities and housing projects), the PLO supplied the refugees with weapons and protected them from recurring attacks by Israeli and Lebanese forces. Spatially the camps were divided into neighbourhoods belonging to the main resistance groups such as the Palestinian National Liberation Movement (Fatah), the Palestinian Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), and the DFLP,Footnote 50 which also appointed the members of the local popular committees established to take care of the day-to-day affairs within the camps.Footnote 51
During the days of the revolution the Palestinian–Israeli conflict was in many ways a microcosm of the Cold War.Footnote 52 The PLO relied on the former Soviet Union and the Middle Eastern bloc for political, economic, and military support,Footnote 53 while the United States supported the State of Israel. Ideologically the PLO was preoccupied with secular ideologies, and several of the political organizations within the PLO, such as the DFLP in which Hiba's father was a military member, were inspired by left-wing ideologies. The left-wing landscape in which the generation of Hiba and Layal's parents grew up is also evident in the fact that several of my interlocutors received scholarships to study in the former Soviet Union, while others went on “scout camps” with the youth organization of the PLO to East Berlin, and yet others received military training in Egypt and Cuba. It was within this zeitgeist and national context that Hiba's father became a fighter (fidāᵓī) and Layal's father joined Fatah.
THE GENERATION OF THE “BATTLE OF CULTURE”
Compared to the days of the revolution in Lebanon, the climate that the families of Hiba and Layal navigate in Denmark today is different in many ways. This is not only because they have moved from refugee camps in Lebanon to housing projects in Denmark, but also because changes in global and national politics have influenced their specific historical potentials.Footnote 54 During the 1990s a major shift in religious practices and identification took place among Arab communities across the globe. The “Islamic revival” is most often explained by scholars as the outcome of the failure of secular political movements.Footnote 55 Among Palestinians the political failure of the PLO and the peace process paved the way for Islamist organizations, which since the beginning of the new millennium have gained footing among Palestinians both in refugee camps in LebanonFootnote 56 as well as in the Occupied Palestinian Territories,Footnote 57 where the Islamic party Hamas won the Palestinian parliamentary elections in January 2006. Among Palestinians in Denmark this development has been reinforced by developments in national Danish politics.
Whereas immigrants in Denmark were becoming marked as “Muslims” already during the 1990s, the new discourse on Muslims peaked near the beginning of the new millennium.Footnote 58 Two months after 9/11 a right-wing government came to power in Denmark and for the first time in a century the right-of-center parties constituted a majority. The newly elected government was supported by the Danish People's Party, which is known primarily for agitating for a strict policy against immigrants and refugees.Footnote 59 It started out by declaring war on two fronts. First, it decided to play an active role in the War on Terror, militarily by supporting the US-led coalition in Afghanistan (since 2002) and in Iraq (since 2003), and legally by passing a series of laws on terror that have resulted in several high-profile trials including two against Danish Palestinians. Second, it started what it called a “battle of values” (værdikamp) or a “battle of culture” (kulturkamp). After the parliament had passed several laws that restricted immigrants’ access to Denmark and the Danish welfare state,Footnote 60 the conservative minister of culture launched the second phase of the Battle of Culture. He publicly declared that “the new frontier in the battle of culture” was “immigrants from Muslim countries who refuse to acknowledge Danish culture and European norms.” Furthermore, he stated that it was unacceptable that “in the midst of our country a parallel society is developing in which minorities are practicing their medieval norms and undemocratic mindsets.”Footnote 61 I quote these excerpts because they clearly illustrate that immigrants in Denmark during my fieldwork were no longer simply addressed in terms of how the Danish state could reduce their numbers, but had also become the target of ideological warfare in which they were perceived as embodying a specific mindset that was incompatible with Danish values and norms.Footnote 62 Furthermore, the war against Islamic terrorists in the Middle East and the battle of culture targeting Muslim immigrants in Denmark were often conflated in the public debate, creating a “migration-security nexus” in which local Muslims were perceived as security threats.Footnote 63 A good example of this is the way the 2005 protests by Danish Muslims against the printing of the cartoons mentioned above were labeled as acts of treachery by the Danish People's Party.Footnote 64
The War on Terror and the battle of culture has influenced, not surprisingly, the relations between native Danes and immigrants.Footnote 65 Today, in public places in Denmark such as schools, workplaces, or simply on the streets, Palestinians are no longer approached as immigrants and asked where they are from; instead people assume, based on skin color, name, or dialect, that they are Muslims. The cases of Hiba and Layal convey this approach. Hiba was introduced as “a Muslim without a scarf” on the Danish radio program, and Layal, while advocating for women's rights in her work with Amnesty International, was approached by random ethnic Danes as a repressed Muslim woman unaware of her own rights.
Simultaneously, at the beginning of the new millennium transnational Islamic movements gained strength,Footnote 66 and the cases of Hiba and Layal illustrate that today, within the circle of their Muslim friends and neighbours in the housing projects, Palestinians do not inspire each other to attend study groups on the writings of Lenin and Marx. Instead they study the website IslamOnline, watch Arab satellite programs by Islamic preachers such as Amr Khaled and Yusuf al-Qaradawi, and take up veiling. That the parental generation has also reoriented itself toward Islam, including Layal's father who has started visiting a mosque, illustrates that there is no one-to-one correspondence between genealogical generations and historical generations. Rather, during a lifetime, the same person will be in contact with several historical periods dominated by different spirits of the time,Footnote 67 and, all in all, one can say that the Palestinian field of possibilities has changed from one dominated by secular discourse to one dominated by religious discourse.Footnote 68
In the following section I extend Mannheim to emphasize the continuities across the historical generations as they manifest themselves among my interlocutors.
SIMILARITIES ACROSS HISTORICAL GENERATIONS
Spending time with Palestinians from Hiba and Layal's generation as well as that of their parents, I was often struck by the similarities in their interpretations of Islam and of secular political ideologies respectively. Even though the young generation counterpose their Islamic perceptions with their parents’ secular ideologies, it was difficult not to notice the similarities between the two worldviews. Both generations use their respective convictions to criticize the relations between the West and the Arab world. Whereas the older generation would criticize the former colonization of the Middle East and the involvement of the United States in Middle Eastern affairs, the young generation would criticize the War on Terror, especially the United States’ and Denmark's part in it. Likewise, both generations would counter the ego-centered and materialistic outlook of the capitalistic West with left-wing ideology and Islam. They would both underline how ethnic Danes were unhappy and stressed in a society with a high divorce rate, whereas both left-wing ideology and Islam advocate solidarity and community rather than the empty pursuit of money. Finally, both generations would promote their identity as part of a global community, challenging the narrow concept of the nation-state. Rather than simply identifying with other Palestinians, they would advocate that one should make common cause with other exploited people,Footnote 69 their comrades, or, as in the case of Hiba and Layal, their Muslim sisters and brothers.
The resonances across generations also owe to the fact that although my interlocutors would present the different ideologies and practices as worlds apart, there is a great deal of continuity between Arab nationalist secular thinking and many manifestations of Islam. As Lara Deeb and Saba Mahmood have shown, recent interpretations of Islam, in common with leftist secular Arab ideologies, not only offer a critique of US hegemony in the Middle East and capitalism,Footnote 70 but are themselves entangled with liberal secular thinking on issues such as gender relations, time, and causality.Footnote 71 Likewise, if somehow in reverse, Nels Johnson has examined how Islamic symbols and ideas are interwoven in Palestinian nationalism and has analyzed the continuities between the sacrificial figure of the martyr (shahīd) and the fighter (fidāᵓī), on the one hand, and the religious struggle (jihād) and the secular revolution (thawra), on the other hand.Footnote 72 More specifically, he shows how both the Great Revolt in Palestine and the revolution in Lebanon were inextricably intertwined with Islamic notions of jihād.Footnote 73 Following Johnson, not only is it significant that the two generations interpret different discourses, that is, secular ideologies and Islam, in fairly similar ways, but it is also interesting how the two generations seized and fueled the respective contemporary conflicts.
Writing about the days of the revolution in Lebanon, Sayigh explains that experiencing the humiliation of being refugees with no rights, combined with the absence of progress toward liberation, created a revolutionary readiness among Palestinians in the refugee camps, which required only a spark to set it off.Footnote 74 She cites a teacher who said, “we would have joined the Devil's party if it had put Palestine among its aims.”Footnote 75 The quotation reminds me of a statement of one of my interlocutors about the Hamas victory in the 2006 parliamentary elections: “Listen, most people [that is, Palestinians] will vote for Hamas, not because we are pro-Hamas, but because we are against Fatah.”Footnote 76 According to him and others, Fatah was guilty not only of being corrupt and having sidetracked the refugee problem, but first and foremost of not having made any political progress since they embarked on the so-called “peace process.”
What my interlocutor (in 2006) has in common with the teacher (in 1976) in Sayigh's book is the same as what Hiba and Layal have in common with their fathers in their youth: they are all searching for a way to radically change their current predicament. Whereas secular political parties in Lebanon provided their parents with jobs, weapons, and a political platform (and a spouse in the case of Hiba's parents), Islam today offers Hiba both a way to “defend herself” in relation to her classmates’ intimidating questions, and a political platform in relation to the cartoons in Jyllands-Posten and to the question of Palestine; for Layal Islam is a way to handle some of the existential questions with which she grapples. The cases of Hiba and Layal highlight that the spectrum of social becoming is limited. Hiba cannot escape being identified as a minority and Layal cannot escape her feelings. However, by appropriating the dominant discourse of their time Hiba becomes a Muslim activist rather than merely a part of a stigmatized minority, and Layal becomes an observant Muslim instead of a confused young woman.
In order to understand the changes across generations, and why some practices seem more potent than others within certain contexts, we have to return to the structural approach of Mannheim. I do not believe we should accept Hiba and her friends’ inverted Marxism when they consider the leftist ideology of their parents to be a consequence of false consciousness (i.e., brainwashing), which implies that the resurrection of Islam is a return to a more authentic Palestinian identity. Neither can we explain the changes across generations with reference to the families’ movement from Lebanon to Denmark. Then we would not be able to explain the rise of Islamic organizations among Palestinians in Lebanon and in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Instead I suggest that the changes of practices and ideologies among Palestinians are related to the emergence of a new “historical generation.”
According to Mannheim, each new generation makes “fresh contact” with their cultural heritage on the basis of the generation's specific historical location.Footnote 77 Following Marx, Mannheim relates the location of people within history to the concept of class.Footnote 78 As suggested at the start of this article, when working with refugees it is pertinent to refer to another political structure, namely what Malkki has termed “the national order of things.”Footnote 79 According to Malkki, the nation can be perceived as a transnational categorical order that classifies people into national kinds.Footnote 80 Building on Mary Douglas and Victor Turner, she writes that without a specific place in this order, refugees become “matter out of place,” liminal personae, left to live in the interstices between human and political statuses.Footnote 81 Inspired by Malkki, I suggest that the Palestinians, as stateless refugees, take up a liminal position within the national order of things, being on the one hand structurally invisible and on the other hand politically marked and perceived as a threat to the nation-state, in Lebanon as well as Denmark.Footnote 82
Although Palestinians in Lebanon and Denmark are not, of course, the only liminal personae, they do provide an extraordinary case. In Lebanon the Palestinians were contained outside of the national order when they were categorized as “foreigners” and incarcerated in refugee camps; they were made at once structurally invisible and politically hypervisible. In Denmark the Palestinians were neither granted citizenship nor recognized as Palestinians, since Palestine as a nation-state does not exist; rather, they were registered according to their birthplace (in this case Lebanon). Furthermore, people are not registered as “Danish” in the official Danish statistics until at least one parent is born in Denmark and is a Danish citizen, independent of their own birthplace and citizenship. Statistically, Palestinians are therefore invisible as a group in Denmark, which has severe consequences in a welfare state where policies, programs, and research are often based on statistics and target specific groups. Simultaneously, the Palestinians are politically marked in the Danish public media, which tends to emphasize people's ethnic backgrounds and has often singled out Palestinians as troublemakers and criminals, and lately as terrorists.Footnote 83
According to Mannheim, one's structural location within a specific historical generation not only delimits one's potential experiences but also predisposes that person to a certain type of historically relevant action. Inspired by Malkki and Michel de Certeau, I therefore suggest that my interlocutors, out of category within the national order of things in Lebanon as well as Denmark, did not have the luxury of a proper place from which to strategize and plan ahead; instead they were dependent on time, waiting for events that could be turned into opportunities.Footnote 84 Whereas the movement from left-wing ideologies to Islam is not, of course, delimited to Palestinians, as extraordinary liminal personas they were particularly eager to seize the potentialities afforded by contemporary political events.
In Lebanon, the Palestinians exploited the Arab defeat in the Arab–Israeli war in 1967 to create nothing less than a revolution that not only gave them control over the refugee camps, but also meant that they established themselves as a political factor that could not be overlooked by the Lebanese nation-state. In Denmark, Palestinians took the lead in and forcefully fueled protests against the cartoons of the Prophet, using the battle of culture promoted by the Danish government as leverage to create the “Cartoon Controversy” that established them not simply as a local minority but as part of a global majority, which Denmark as a nation-state could not afford to ignore. More specifically, it was the Palestinian imam Abu Laban, head of the largest Muslim and Palestinian congregation in Denmark, who organized the first protest (the largest Muslim demonstration in the history of Denmark) against the cartoons, making sure that it was transmitted by Al Jazeera and Al Arabia television, online, and print news networks. It was also Abu Laban who was part of the leadership of a Danish-Muslim delegation that toured the Middle East and mobilized Muslim organizations (including the Organization of Islamic Cooperation) and communities against the cartoons. Furthermore, it was a Palestinian woman who served as a spokesperson for eleven Muslim organizations that filed a complaint with the Danish police about the cartoons, just as Palestinians used the controversy to establish and promote several Muslim organizations in Denmark.Footnote 85 Finally, Danish Palestinians in general figured prominently in Arabic and Danish public media commenting on the cartoons, exemplified by Hiba's interventions in national Danish media.Footnote 86 All in all, by appropriating the Arab–Israeli war of 1967 to create a revolution in Lebanon and the battle of culture to create a cartoon controversy in Denmark, Palestinians not only managed to establish themselves as political subjects within the two nation-states, but also to change the respective nations and history itself.
REVOLUTIONARIES AND MUSLIMS: SUBJECTS OF CHANGE
In this article I have shown not only how different becomings of Palestinians take on heterogeneous forms according to the contemporary historical contexts that they are offered, but also how they transform the very history of which they are part. By extending Mannheim's structural approach and linking it with Malkki's concept of refugees as a liminal category within the national order, I have argued that although the families have moved and the times have changed, the structural location of Palestinians has stayed the same. The transformation from revolutionary to Muslim therefore does not reflect simply a temporal chronology measured by generations, but rather liminal becomings within specific historical generations. This, of course, also implies that the notion of “liminal becomings” is not delimited to becoming revolutionary or Muslim, but can result in multiple becomings depending on the current historical potentials.
During my fieldwork it was not only the young generation of Palestinians who turned toward Islam; their parents did so as well. The majority of my interlocutors no longer adhered to Fatah or the left-wing Palestinian parties but preferred Hamas, and whereas the secular Palestinian organizations had problems attracting members, the mosques had become meeting places where people exchanged gossip, met potential spouses, and were offered political platforms through participation in demonstrations. Within a single household both kaffiyeh (the characteristic chequered scarf that is associated with the Palestinian peasant and revolutionary) and headscarves, Marx and God, embroideries that outline the territory of Palestine and pictures of the Dome of the Rock were present and resonated with each other, thereby challenging any simple chronological conceptualization of change.
Having moved all the way from Lebanon to Denmark, and from secular ideologies to Islam, obviously some things have changed in the lives of my interlocutors. However, at another level things have stayed the same. The Palestinians themselves comment on the continuities rather than the changes. When they do not refer to the housing projects they inhabit as “ghettos,” they nickname them mukhayyamāt, meaning (refugee) camps. When they narrate their life stories, they describe their lives as one nakba (catastrophe) after the other,Footnote 87 starting with their families being expelled from Palestine, moving to the wars in Lebanon, and ending with their daily problems in creating a dignified life in Denmark.Footnote 88 I believe there is more to these conceptualizations than merely the effort to create coherence where there is none. The Palestinians use the terms mukhayyam and nakba as cynical comments on the fact that although they have left their land, houses, and family members behind, many things remain unaltered. In Lebanon the Palestinians were prohibited from owning land and thus faced difficulties moving out of the refugee camps; in Denmark many Palestinians cannot afford to buy their own apartment or house and thus are often unable to leave the housing projects. In Lebanon the Palestinians were categorized as “foreigners” who were not entitled to work;Footnote 89 in Denmark Hiba's parents make a living by delivering newspapers. Without any higher education they have no chance of obtaining better jobs. Both of Layal's parents are unemployed and live off the Danish welfare state, despite Adham's many degrees. Highlighting the continuities in their lives, the Palestinians challenge the transnational paradigm with its emphasis on mobility and change.Footnote 90 Rather than celebrating the movement from one nation to another, the Palestinians are illuminating the national order itself that confines them to a liminal position.
Within the literature on Palestinians, Palestinian identity is sometimes described as particularly revolutionary.Footnote 91 Rather than perceive this as a psychological or cultural trait, I contend that it makes more sense to regard it as an effect of being relegated to an extraordinarily prolonged liminal position in a nationally ordered world. By way of conclusion, I suggest that the becoming of fidāᵓīn during the revolution in Lebanon and the becoming of Muslims during the battle of culture in Denmark neither are related by causality, nor can they be perceived as oppositions. What connects the actualization of Palestinians across historical generations is how—from a structurally liminal position, always within the space controlled by an Other (British colonial rule, the Lebanese and Danish nation-states)—they attempt to change their predicament, overturn their liminal position, and challenge the national order. It is this structure-based “revolutionary readiness,”Footnote 92 this drive towards transformation, that relates the peasant (falāḥ) during the Great Revolt under British colonial rule, the revolutionary (fidāᵓī) during the days of the revolution in Lebanon, and the Muslim during the battle of culture in Denmark.
