Zensur durch Andeutung: Vorläufiger Bericht aus der Sache Ghassan Hage gegen die Max-Planck-Gesellschaft

Wer erwartet hatte, ein deutsches Arbeitsgericht wäre kein Ort für Gerichtsaal-Dramen, wurde am vergangenen Dienstag eines Besseren belehrt. Fast fünf Stunden lang tagte das Arbeitsgericht Halle am 10.12.2024 zu der Klage, die Ghassan Hage gegen die Max-Planck-Gesellschaft wegen seiner seiner fristlosen, hilfsweisen ordentlichen Kündigung im Februar 2024. Die Entscheidung ist nicht in seinem Sinne. Das Gericht gab ihm nur formal recht, inhaltlich aber nicht. Das Folgende sind meine Notizen der Urteilsverkündung, die nicht im Wortlaut identisch mit dem Urteil sind. Der genaue Wortlaut der Urteilsbegründung wird später schriftlich bekannt gegeben.

„- Das Arbeitsverhältnis wurde nicht durch eine außerordentliche, sondern durch eine ordentliche Kündigung, ausgesprochen am 7.2.2024 und mit Wirkung zum 31.3.2024, beendet.
- Der Kläger und die Beklagte teilen sich die Kosten 50:50.
- Der Kläger (also Ghassan Hage) hat durch seine am 7.10. und 16.11.2023 veröffentlichten Posts erheblich gegen seine Pflichten verstoßen, so erheblich, dass eine Abmahnung nichts gebracht hätte: dies aufgrund mangelnden Mitgefühls in seinem Post am 7.10. und weil er in seinem Post vom 16.11. Israel als ‚Projekt‘ bezeichnet und somit die völkerrechtlich verfasste Existenz Israels bestreitet. Die Kammer ist nicht überzeugt, dass der Beklagten (also die Max-Planck-Gesellschaft) diese Entscheidung aus heiterem Himmel traf. Deshalb war aus formalen Erwägungen die fristlose Kündigung unwirksam. Wir (also das Gericht) haben bewusst nicht über Antisemitismus gesprochen. Die verfasste Staatlichkeit Israels ist hinreichend und das sollte dem Kläger bekannt sein.”

Die Pressestelle des Arbeitsgerichts veröffentlichte dazu die folgende Mitteilung am Tag nach dem Urteil:

„Der Direktor des Arbeitsgerichts Halle kam mit seiner Kammer zu dem Ergebnis, dass die außerordentliche Kündigung aus formalen Gründen wegen Nichteinhaltung der Ausschlussfrist des § 626 BGB unwirksam ist, jedoch die hilfsweise ausgesprochene ordentliche Kündigung das Arbeitsverhältnis mit Ablauf des 31. März 2024 beendet hat.
In der sich an die Kammerverhandlung anschließenden Urteilsverkündung hat der Direktor des Arbeitsgerichts Halle betont, dass der Kläger insbesondere mit seinen Posts vom 7. Oktober 2023 und vom 16. November 2023 und damit, dass er die verfasste Staatlichkeit Israels in Zweifel ziehe, seine gegenüber dem Max-Planck-Institut bestehenden arbeitsvertraglichen Pflichten so massiv verletzt, dass die ordentliche Kündigung keiner vorherigen Abmahnung bedürfe.”

https://lag.sachsen-anhalt.de/fileadmin/tsa_rssinclude/landesarbeitsgericht_11_12_2024_pressemitteilung_lag-arbeitsgericht-halle-ordentliche-kuendigung-der-max-planck-gesellschaft-beendet-befristetes-arbeitsverhaeltnis-mit-ghassan-hage.pdf

Vorher war eine beinahe erfolgte gütliche Einigung gescheitert. Die Parteien hatten sich nach langen Verhandlungen auf einen Text geeinigt, in dem Hage erklärt, dass seine öffentlich geäußerten Ansichten mit den Interessen der Max-Planck-Gesellschaft inkompatibel sind, und die MPG klarstellt, dass der letzte Absatz ihrer Presseerklärung vom 7. Februar sich nicht auf Ghassan Hage bezieht, sondern eine generelle Aussage darstellt. Zudem sollte Hages Antrittsvorlesung wieder online gestellt werden. Der Anwalt der MPG legte diesen Entwurf dem Vorstand der MPG vor, der diese Klarstellung ablehnte. Der Richter hat dennoch mehrmals und erneut auf eine Einigung gedrängt, in der beide Parteien erklären, dass sie keine Meinungsverschiedenheiten haben, aber dies hat Hage nicht akzeptiert, weil der durch die Kündigung und die damit verbundenen Vorwürfe entstandene Reputationsschaden damit nicht beigelegt sei.

Im Anschluss an die Verhandlung fragte ich Hage um eine Stellungnahme. Er nahm folgendermaßen Stellung:

„I am disappointed, but a part of me is not disappointed.”

Ich fragte ihm, welcher Teil von ihm nicht enttäuscht ist. Er antwortete:

„There was a strange comfort in hitting a brick wall at the court. It’s a bit like you realise that what you are facing is a natural disaster, not a social disaster. It has at least some element of a natural disaster. Like, the unthinkingness of what I heard was, wow!”

https://www.facebook.com/samuli.schielke/posts/pfbid02ZBL61pnHrUHDp477pTcphyJaE2MQQMgRA51dArscWpT1P188CvVtZFrdaZnSWdYHl

Ich einem Facebookpost an demselben Abend kündigte ich einen Bericht mit mehr Details. Hier ist er. Eine längere Reportage mit Blick auf die Hintergründe und Folgen der Affäre wird hoffentlich im kommenden Jahr im zenith Magazin erscheinen.

Was bisher geschah

Die Welt am Sonntag hatte Ghassan Hage in einem Bericht vom 4. Februar 2024 mit geschickt zusammengestellten Passagen aus verschiedenen Beiträgen in sozialen Medien porträtiert. Die WaS warf ihm „menschenverachtenden Zynismus“ vor und sprach von einem „Antisemitismus-Skandal“. Der Text zielte darauf, eine ablehnende Gefühlsreaktion der Lesenden auf Hage hervorzurufen, und ließ verstehen, dass er ein unbelehrbarer Antisemit sei. Doch stand nirgends im Text explizit, Hage sei Antisemit oder seine Äußerungen antisemitisch. Diese Auslassung ist wichtig, wie wir bald sehen.

Der Vorwurf wurde von vielen deutschen Medien übernommen, während Hage international eher Unterstützung bekam, darunter auch von Kollegen in Israel. Nach einer Prüfung der Beiträge kam ich zu dem Schluss, dass der Vorwurf des Antisemitismus gegen Hage nachweislich falsch ist. Wohl ist Hage ein entschiedener Gegner Israels und wütend über dessen extreme Methoden der Kriegsführung im laufenden Krieg in Gaza. Er hat auch um die israelischen Opfer des 7. Oktober 2023 getrauert, aber seine Sympathien sind entschieden auf der palästinensischen Seite. Er findet Widerstand gegen Israel grundsätzlich legitim, hat aber extreme Gewalt gegen Zivilisten nicht befürwortet. Wohl befürwortet er eine Einstaatenlösung, in der Juden, Muslime, Christen, Drusen und andere in einem demokratischen Staat mit gleichen Rechten leben. Man kann ihm Idealismus vorwerfen, Antisemitismus aber nicht. Ganz sicher aber sind seine Standpunkte in der Frage über Opposition oder Unterstützung gegenüber Israel mit denen der Max-Planck-Gesellschaft unvereinbar. Die MPG hat entschieden Solidarität für Israel und Trauer für die getöteten Israelis gezeigt. Sie hat keine Solidarität für Palästina und Palästinenser gezeigt. In einer Stellungnahme am 11. Oktober 2023 hat die MPG zwar von „unsäglichem Leid unter der palästinensischen Zivilbevölkerung“ gesprochen, aber dieses Leid ausschließlich der mörderischen Initiative der Hamas zugeschrieben; als ob die Regierung Israels keine Wahl gehabt hätte über den Einsatz der extrem mörderischen Mittel, die sie in ihrem Vergeltungskrieg seitdem einsetzt. Zuletzt hat die MPG Anfang Dezember 2024 ihre institutionelle Präsenz in Israel ausgebaut und ein Büro in West-Jerusalem eröffnet. Dass Hage und die Max-Planck-Gesellschaft sich darüber einig werden, ist nicht zu erwarten.

Beurlaubt von seiner Professur in Sydney war Hage an das Max-Planck-Institut für Ethnologie in Halle als Gastprofessor auf einer vollen Stelle in 2023 gekommen. Die Stelle wurde anschließend als eine halbe Stelle bis 31.12.2024 verlängert mit der Einstufung 15/6 nach Tarifvertrag des öffentlichen Dienstes, und mit einem Bruttomonatsgehalt von 3572 Euro – ein Schnäppchenpreis für einen weltberühmten Forscher. Am 7.2.2024 erhielt er eine fristlose, hilfsweise ordentliche Kündigung. („Hilfsweise ordentlich“ bedeutet, dass falls die fristlose Kündigung widerrufen wird, stattdessen eine ordentliche Kündigung zum nächsten gesetzlich erlaubten Termin erfolgt, in diesem Fall zum 31.3.2024.) Dagegen ging er vor Gericht.

Vorwurf durch Andeutung

Die Max-Planck-Gesellschaft veröffentlichte zur Kündigung Hages am 7.2.2024 die folgende Stellungnahme:

„Der in der Fachcommunity bekannte und angesehene libanesisch-australische Wissenschaftler Ghassan Hage war seit April 2023 am Max-Planck-Institut für ethnologische Forschung tätig. Unter den von ihm in jüngerer Zeit über soziale Medien verbreiteten Ansichten sind viele mit den Grundwerten der Max-Planck-Gesellschaft unvereinbar. Die Max-Planck-Gesellschaft hat sich daher im Einvernehmen mit dem Institut von ihm getrennt.

Die vom Grundgesetz der Bundesrepublik Deutschland seit 75 Jahren garantierten Freiheitsrechte sind für die Max-Planck-Gesellschaft ein unschätzbar hohes Gut. Sie gehen mit großer Verantwortung einher. Forschende missbrauchen Freiheitsrechte, wenn sie mit öffentlich verbreiteten Verlautbarungen die Glaubwürdigkeit von Wissenschaft untergraben und damit das Ansehen und Vertrauen in die sie tragenden Institutionen beschädigen. Das Grundrecht auf Meinungsfreiheit findet seine Grenze in den wechselseitigen Pflichten zur Rücksichtnahme sowie Loyalität im Arbeitsverhältnis.

Rassismus, Islamophobie, Antisemitismus, Diskriminierung, Hass und Hetze haben in der Max-Planck-Gesellschaft keinen Platz.”

https://www.mpg.de/21510533/stellungnahme-ghassan-hage 

Der erste Absatz ist fett gedruckt, danach folgt ein grüner Balken, und die zwei weiteren Absätze sind in kleinerer Schriftgröße formatiert. Dadurch entsteht eine visuelle und semantische Mehrdeutigkeit. Ist der letzte Absatz ein Vorwurf, Hage habe sich des Rassismus, Antisemitismus, der Islamophobie, Diskriminierung, des Hasses und der Hetze schuldig gemacht? Welche seiner Ansichten sind mit welchen Grundwerten der Max-Planck-Gesellschaft unvereinbar? Dank der mehrdeutigen Formulierung sowie der Trennung der Absätze konnte der Anwalt der MPG während der Verhandlung verneinen, seine Mandantin hätte Hage durch einen falschen Antisemitismus-Vorwurf geschadet. Die breite Öffentlichkeit hat das aber klar und deutlich als Antisemitismus-Vorwurf verstanden. Darauf hat Hage auch während der Verhandlung verwiesen. Er argumentierte, dass es ihm vor allem darum gehe, den ihm zugefügten Reputationsschaden zu beseitigen:

„Wie ich bereits erwähnte, habe ich einen Vortrag an der Universität Mainz gehalten. Die Leute, die mich eingeladen haben wurden belästigt und befragt: ‚Wie könnt ihr einen Antisemiten einladen?‘ [...] Der Vorwurf, ich sei ein Antisemit, betrifft mich täglich. Mein Ruf unter Kollegen ist gut, aber was in der breiten Öffentlichkeit geschieht, ist von den Medien beeinflusst und eine andere Sache.“

Genauso ist es auch gegangen. Die MPG hatte Hage in ihrer Pressemitteilung vom 7.2. nicht direkt Antisemitismus vorgeworfen. Aber doch verweigerte der Vorstand der Gesellschaft eine vom eigenen Anwalt verhandelte gütliche Einigung, in der die MPG klarstellen würde, dass sie ihm keinen Antisemitismus vorwirft. Ein expliziter Vorwurf kann als falsch bewiesen werden. Durch den enormen Reputationsschaden hätte eine Unterlassungs- oder Verleumdungsklage Aussicht auf Erfolg. Wohl deswegen haben sich sowohl die Welt am Sonntag also auch die Max-Planck-Gesellschaft davor gehütet, den Vorwurf explizit zu machen. Aber durch die Verweigerung der Klarstellung durch die MPG blieb der Vorwurf bestehen – allerdings unangreifbar, weil implizit. Das Hallenser Nachrichtenportal Du bist Halle hat die implizite Andeutung aber klar und deutlich interpretiert. Es berichtete am Tag nach der Urteilsverkündung: „Arbeitsgericht Halle: Rauswurf eines Wissenschaftlers beim Max-Planck-Institut wegen Antisemitischer Äußerungen und HAMAS-Sympathien bestätigt.”

In einer Stellungnahme am Tag des Urteils hielt sich die MPG zurück, das eine oder andere zu behaupten, sondern stellte nur fest:

„Im Februar 2024 hatte sich das Max-Planck-Institut für ethnologische Forschung in Halle im Einvernehmen mit der Leitung der Max-Planck-Gesellschaft von dem libanesisch-australischen Gastwissenschaftler Ghassan Hage getrennt. Hintergrund waren von Hage in den Sozialen Medien verbreitete Ansichten zur Terrorattacke der Hamas vom 7. Oktober 2023, die mit den Grundwerten der Max-Planck-Gesellschaft unvereinbar waren. Ghassan Hage hatte gegen seine Kündigung vor dem Arbeitsgericht in Halle geklagt. In seiner heutigen Sitzung hat das Arbeitsgericht die Klage abgewiesen und damit die Position der Max-Planck-Gesellschaft bestätigt.“

https://www.mpg.de/21510533/stellungnahme-ghassan-hage

Die Leiterin der Abteilung Kommunikation der MPG verweigerte weitere Erläuterungen, als ich am 12.12. in einer Email um ein Interview anfragte: „Wir sehen mit dem Urteil unsere Position, die wir am 7. Februar veröffentlicht haben, bestätigt. Mehr gibt es aus unserer Sicht dazu auch nicht mehr zu sagen.“ Ich hatte die folgende Frage stellen wollen:

“In der Pressemitteilung und am Dienstag vor dem Gericht hat die MPG es sorgfältig vermieden, Hage explizit Antisemitismus vorzuwerfen. Das spiegelte auch das Urteil wieder. Dennoch hat die MPG eine Einigung abgelehnt, in der sie feststellen würde, dass sie ihm nicht Antisemitismus vorwirft. Warum?”

In Ermangelung einer Antwort von der MPG versuche ich eine Erklärung.

Tendenzträger, Projekt, moralisches Empfinden

Es ist nichts Neues, dass Wissenschaftler Ansichten vertreten, die ihre Institutionen nicht mittragen wollen. Dasselbe Max-Planck-Institut für ethnologische Forschung in Halle, von dem Hage entlassen wurde, hat in seinen Reihen auch Chris Hann, einen prominenten Versteher der Politik von Vladimir Putin und Kritiker der Westorientierung der Ukraine. Manche seiner Argumente in seinen Publikationen (https://www.berghahnjournals.com/view/journals/focaal/2024/98/fcl980110.xml
https://ukraine2022.ios-regensburg.de/poland01/) lesen sich als eine verschleierte Aberkennung der Legitimität der Ukraine als Nationalstaat - dabei sagt Hann es nicht selbst, sondern lässt geschickt andere zu Wort kommen, die es sagen. Seine Ansichten sind in der Fachwelt bekannt und umstritten. Trotzdem führt die Homepage des MPI in Halle ihn als aktiven Emeritusdirektor – und das ist auch richtig so. Die Wissenschaft lebt von Dissens und Kritik, darunter auch fragwürdige und problematische Ansichten. Ohne die Auseinandersetzung mit ihnen sind unsere Analysen und Entscheidungen blind, eine bloße Widerspiegelung unserer eigenen Tendenzen.

Und genau darum ging es im Grunde vor dem Arbeitsgericht Halle: welche Art von Dissens und Differenz ist Wissenschaftlern erlaubt, und inwiefern sind sie als „Tendenzträger“ verpflichtet, die offizielle Linie ihrer Institution mitzutragen? Zum Beispiel sind Priester einer Kirche Tendenzträger eines Glaubens und sollten sich nicht öffentlich anti-religiös äußern. Das Wort Tendenzträger wurde vom vorsitzenden Richter in der mündlichen Urteilsverkündung zwar nicht erwähnt. Aber während der Verhandlung verwies er darauf, dass das Landesarbeitsgericht Berlin im April 2024 (Aktenzeichen 5 Sa 894/23) die fristlose Kündigung eines Mitarbeiters der Deutschen Welle wegen dessen antisemitischen und antiisraelischen Äußerungen auf sozialen Medien bestätigt und eine Revision nicht zugelassen hatte. Jener Mitarbeiter hatte unter anderem geschrieben, eine vermeintliche jüdische Lobby hätte die deutsche Politik unter ihrer Kontrolle. Er hat sich also wirklich antisemitisch geäußert. Dies hat Hage nicht getan. Entscheidend war hier aber nicht der Tatbestand, sondern die Begründung des Berliner Landesarbeitsgerichts, wonach

„der Redakteur als sogenannter Tendenzträger verpflichtet war, sowohl bei seiner Arbeitsleistung als auch im außerbetrieblichen Bereich nicht gegen die Tendenz, das heißt die grundsätzlichen Zielsetzungen, der Deutschen Welle zu verstoßen.“

https://www.berlin.de/gerichte/arbeitsgericht/presse/pressemitteilungen/2024/pressemitteilung.1455787.php

Aus dem umfangreichen Beweismaterial konzentrierte sich der vorsitzende Richter in seinem Urteil auf zwei Posts, die die MPG dem Betriebsrat vorgelegt hatte (Rücksprache mit dem Betriebsrat ist eine rechtliche Bedingung für eine fristlose Kündigung). Der erste Post ist ein Gedicht, veröffentlicht am Nachmittag des 7.10.2023 – also zu einem Zeitpunkt, als noch nicht bekannt war, wie brutal der Angriff und wie hoch die Anzahl Getöteten war. Zu jenem Zeitpunkt waren viele Beobachter noch unter dem Eindruck, es handele sich um eine eher militärische als terroristische Aktion. In dem Gedicht zeigt sich Hage beeindruckt über die Fähigkeit der Palästinenser, Widerstand zu leisten. Der Text ist eine Romantisierung eines bewaffneten Kampfes gegenüber Israels Kriegsführung, aber eine Verherrlichung oder Rechtfertigung der extremen Gewalt durch die Hamas und ihre Verbündeten ist dort nicht zu finden. Zum Zweiten nahm der vorsitzende Richter Bezug auf ein Essay vom 16.11.2023, wo der Ausdruck, „zionistisches ethno-nationalistisches Projekt“ vorkommt. Der Richter wies darauf hin, dass Hage in seinen Äußerungen das ganze Gebiet Palästinas als besetzt bezeichnet hat. Zentral in seiner Begründung war aber das Wort „Projekt“. Israel als Projekt zu beschreiben sei eine Verneinung der völkerrechtlich verfassten Existenz Israels, weil ein Projekt etwas Unbeständiges und Vorübergehendes bedeute.

Das Wort „Projekt“ kommt in jenem Essay nur in einem Satz vor, und zwar in diesem:

„Es gibt natürlich jene unter uns, die trotz unserer Gegnerschaft zum zionistischen ethno-nationalistischen Projekt und aus dem Komfort unserer gesellschaftlichen und geografischen Lagen, und wegen unserer vielfältigen Bindingen, in der Lage waren, für die Opfer der Morde der Hamas zu trauern.“

Hage leugnet in dieser Passage also keineswegs die staatliche Existenz Israels, identifiziert sich aber wohl als Gegner des politischen Projekts des Zionismus. Zudem drück er explizit Trauer für die israelischen Opfer des 7. Oktober aus. Der vorsitzende Richter hatte Hage mangelndes Mitgefühl attestiert. Hier aber steht Mitgefühl schwarz auf weiß. Dies wurde im Urteil nicht in Erwägung gezogen.

Der vorsitzende Richter verzichtete in seinem Urteil ausdrücklich darauf, die Frage zu erörtern, ob diese Aussagen antisemitisch seien oder nicht. Während der Verhandlung wurde aber viel über Antisemitismus gesprochen. Der Anwalt der MPG hatte mit Verweis auf ein Urteil des Bundesverfassungsgerichts darauf bestanden, dass Äußerungen in den sozialen Medien durch ihre Wirkung auf das Publikum auch dann antisemitisch sein könnten, wenn Hage, der mit einer Jüdin verheiratet ist, selbst kein Antisemit ist. Hages Anwalt hatte wiederum darauf bestanden, zu prüfen, ob überhaupt antisemitische Inhalte vorlagen, und das unter Berücksichtigung der Begleitumstände, wie die Antisemitismusdefinition der IHRA als auch die der Jerusalemer Erklärung vorsehen.

Hätte die MPG Hage explizit wegen Antisemitismus entlassen, hätte sein Anwalt nachweisen können, dass der Vorwurf nicht wahr ist. Aber indem sie den Vorwurf weder ausdrücklich erhob noch zurückzog, gab die MPG dem Gericht die Möglichkeit, andere Gründe für das Urteil zu finden.

Mein Eindruck war, dass der vorsitzende Richter sich bei seinem Urteil auf sein eigenes moralisches und politisches Empfinden stützte. Während der Verhandlung sagte er, er wolle keine Dresden- und Nazivergleiche hören (damit verwies er auf eine Erwähnung Dresdens in den von der WaS gesammelten Zitaten von Hage), und dass wenn man über einen anerkannten Staat sage, dass er eine Besatzung und ein Projekt sei, die Beklagte (also die MPG) das nicht hinnehmen könne. Der Tonfall und die Wortwahl machten deutlich, dass es dem Richter nicht darum ging, dass die Ansichten von Hage und MPG inkompatibel waren – das stand nicht zur Debatte. Vielmehr schien er davon überzeugt, dass Hage moralisch und politisch im Unrecht sei.

Was das Urteil für die Wissenschaft in Deutschland bedeutet

Dass das Wort „Projekt“ zum entscheidenden Grund des Urteils erhoben wurde, ist bemerkenswert. Schließlich ist das Wort Projekt nicht allgemein negativ besetzt, und auch entschiedene Anhänger Israels haben Israel als ein Projekt beschrieben. Ein politisches Projekt ist nicht dadurch charakterisiert, dass es vorübergehend ist, sondern dass es unabgeschlossen, in Bewegung ist. Das Wort Projekt trifft gut auf Israels Staatlichkeit zu, denn der Staat Israel wurde zuerst als eine Idee ausgesprochen und erst später als Gebiet erobert; und sein Gebiet ist durch unabgeschlossene Grenzen charakterisiert, die sich durch Kriege und Siedlungspolitik, Expansionen und Rückzuge immer wieder ändern. Am Ende ist aber die Wahl des Richters, dieses Wort anzusprechen, nicht entscheidend. Er hätte auch eine andere Begründung finden können, und die Stellungnahme der MPG am Tag des Urteils führt nur das Gedicht vom 7.10.2023 als Begründung für ihren Standpunkt an. Entscheidend für die Wirkung des Urteils auf die Wissenschaft in Deutschland sind drei Punkte.

- Die Mehrdeutigkeit des Vorwurfs ermöglichte der MPG, Hage Antisemitismus zu unterstellen, aber die Unterstellung nicht als Behauptung beweisen zu müssen.
- Der vorsitzende Richter stützte sich auf sein moralisches und politisches Empfinden und sah Hages Standpunkt als inhaltlich falsch an, auch wenn die Kündigung selbst formell inkorrekt war.
- Durch die Mehrdeutigkeit des Vorwurfs und die Rolle des moralischen Empfindens beim Urteil blieb die entscheidende Frage darüber ungeklärt, gegen welche Prinzipien und Vorgaben der MPG Hages Pflichtverletzung sich richtete. Entsprechend vage und ungeklärt bleibt, inwieweit wissenschaftliche Institutionen ihren Mitarbeitern politische Standpunkte verbieten und vorgeben dürfen.

Sollte diese Interpretation gängige Praxis werden, müssen in der Wissenschaft Tätige in Deutschland künftig erwarten, dass ihre Institutionen ihnen politische Standpunkte vorschreiben und verbieten. Doch ist dies der weniger schwerwiegende Teil des Urteils. Denn jene Erwartung der erzwungenen politischen Linientreue haben viele meiner Kolleginnen und Kollegen in Deutschland schon jetzt. Schwerer wiegt die Art und Weise, wie der Vorwurf des Antisemitismus im Laufe der Affäre immer wieder in den Vordergrund rückte, nicht offen ausgesprochen wurde – aber auch nicht zurückgenommen wurde.

Überhaupt wurde vieles nicht offen ausgesprochen, und das zeigte sich auch in einem Unwillen unter Mitarbeitenden des Max-Planck-Instituts in Halle, gegenüber der Öffentlichkeit zu sprechen. Meine ersten Versuche, dort Interviewpartner zu finden, waren erfolglos. Menschen fanden es problematisch, sich auch nur anonym zu äußern, denn ihre Wortwahl und Argumente würden sie trotzdem erkennbar machen. Aber wovor genau hatten sie Angst? Auch das war unklar. Ein Kollege aus dem Institut hat mir schließlich in einem informellen Gespräch seine Erfahrung mitgeteilt.

Er sagte, dem Bericht der WaS und der Entlassung Hages sei eine große Unsicherheit unter Mitarbeitenden des MPI in Halle gefolgt. Die in der WaS zitierten Fragmenten aus seinen Posts wurden unterschiedlich wahrgenommen. Internationale Mitarbeiter empfanden sie oft als weniger problematisch. Deutsche Kollegen äußerten unterschiedliche Ansichten. Sie konnten leichter verstehen als ihre internationalen Kollegen, warum die Aussagen in der deutschen Öffentlichkeit auf Ablehnung stießen. Dennoch sei so gut wie die ganze Belegschaft des Instituts gegen die Entlassung von Hage gewesen, und bestürzt über die plötzliche und intransparente Entscheidung. Seitdem herrsche unter den Kollegen Sorge und Unsicherheit. Werden jetzt soziale Medien der Mitarbeiter überprüft? Was ist erlaubt und was nicht? Die Leitung des Instituts habe versucht, die Mitarbeiter zu beruhigen. Dennoch sei es ihnen nicht gelungen, das Gefühl der Unsicherheit zu beseitigen. In einem Townhall-Treffen mit den Mitarbeitern, wo die vorher veröffentlichte Stellungnahme vom 7.2.2024 diskutiert wurde, habe der Präsident der MPG Patrick Cramer es vermieden, Hage Antisemitismus vorzuwerfen. Auf die Stellungnahme Bezug nehmend habe er gesagt, beim letzten Paragraph handele es sich um einen allgemeinen Standpunkt der MPG. Eine Klarstellung sei gefordert worden, aber der Präsident habe dafür keinen Anlass gesehen.

Das Bild, das ich im Gespräch mit ihm bekam, deckt sich mit dem allgemeinen Eindruck aus informellen Gesprächen mit Kollegen: durch heftige, aber unklare und intransparente Entscheidungen entsteht ein bedrücktes, unangenehmes Schweigen. Eine außerordentliche Kündigung ist umstritten und riskant, schafft oft mehr Konflikte als Lösungen. Viel einfacher ist es, Verträge nicht zu verlängern und Unterstützung für Förderanträge zu entziehen. Eine solche Zensur durch Andeutung ist viel mächtiger als offizielle rote Linien, an denen man sich entweder arrangieren, oder gegen die man vorgehen kann, wenn man bereit ist, die Konsequenzen in Kauf zu nehmen.

Nachwort, mit Stellungnahme vom Autor

Auch ich habe mich eine Zeit lang als Teil eines bedrückten Schweigens empfunden. Als der Krieg begann, hielt ich mich lange bedeckt, weil ich sowohl die massenmörderische Kriegstreiberei in Deutschland auf Seiten Israels ablehnte, als auch die Rechtfertigung eines Massakers im Namen von Widerstand und Dekolonisierung. Hier und da empfand ich die Unmöglichkeit eines Gesprächs, das über einen genervten Austausch von unvereinbaren Behauptungen hinausgehen würde. Etwas Ähnliches muss Hage empfunden haben, als er nachdem Urteil vom „seltsamen Komfort“ sprach, „auf eine Backsteinmauer vor Gericht zu stoßen.“ Er beschrieb es als „unthinkingness“ der Gegenseite, was sich vielleicht mit „Entschiedenheit, nicht zu denken“ übersetzen lässt. Dabei hatte sich der vorsitzende Richter eindeutig Gedanken gemacht. Aber seine Gedanken und die Gedanken von Hage konnten sich nicht begegnen. Eine feste Mauer von Unverständnis trennte sie voneinander, beide an und in sich stimmig und vollständig.

Die Wissenschaft bietet der Menschheit eine kritische Vielstimmigkeit, die besseres Denken und bessere Handlungen ermöglicht. Diese kritische Vielstimmigkeit ist während dieses Krieges zu einem gefährlichen Ausmaß durch eine Backsteinmauer des laut vorgetragenen Unverständnisses und durch eine bedrückte Stille der Zensur durch Andeutung ersetzt. Ich habe meine Deckung verlassen und begleite den Fall Ghassan Hage gegen die Max-Planck-Gesellschaft aus zwei Gründen: erstens weil diese bedrückte Stille mich und meine Kolleginnen und Kollegen mehr bedroht als das offene Unverständnis; und zweitens, weil Hage und ich die Überzeugung teilen, dass es in diesem seit Jahrzehnten dauernden Krieg andere Möglichkeiten geben sollte, als die Unterwerfung oder Vernichtung einer Seite durch die andere. (Zurzeit hat Israel die Mittel und zunehmend auch den Willen, die palästinensische Seite nicht nur zu unterwerfen sondern auch in Teilen oder ganz zu vernichten. Auf der palästinensischen Seite mangelt es ebenfalls nicht am Willen zur Vernichtung der Gegenseite, aber wohl an Mitteln. In einer anderen weltpolitischen Konstellation in der Zukunft können die Mittel anders verteilt sein. Mit dem Atomwaffenarsenal, das Israel als eine Waffe der letzten Instanz besitzt, kann die Zerstörung dann weit über die Region Palästina-Israel hinausgehen.) Ich habe weniger Glauben als Ghassan Hage an idealistische Ziele und Revolutionen. Wo er eine demokratische Einstaatenlösung für realistisch hält, denke ich, dass ein möglicher Verhandlungsfrieden nur schlecht und ungerecht sein kann, aber immerhin besser wäre als mehr Krieg. Solche unterschiedlichen Ansichten sind wichtig. Sie verdienen Förderung und nicht Entlassung.

Peace as a Local Exception

I. 22nd century, another planet

In an unfinished science fiction novel by Arkadi and Boris Strugatski, the hero of an earlier novel travels to an empire that in a previous novel occupied the role of absolute evil. Submarines of that empire spread destruction, torture and murder in the coastal areas of neighbouring countries. In the unfinished novel, the hero Maxim Kammerer discovers that the inhumanely brutal submarine crews constitute only the outer layer of the empire. Travelling further inwards, he first encounters a middle layer of ordinary people who are neither very good nor very bad, and finally arrives at the centre of the empire inhabited by utterly ethical, peaceful and sophisticated people. When the hero confronts them with moral incompatibility of the different layers, they react with polite condescension: ‘How come, would the world be differently organised where you come from?’ When Kammerer describes the utopian communist society from which he comes from, and which essentially is the same as theirs only without the surrounding layer of brutality and violence, they reply: ‘Such a world can only be imagined. I’m afraid, my friend, that you live in a world that somebody has imagined.’ (Boris Strugatski cited by Erik Simon 2010: “Eine Zukunft mit zwei Enden. In: Arkadi and Boris Strugatzki, Werkausgabe vol 1., ed. by Sascha Mamczak and Erik Simon, pp. 893-95. München: Heyne)

The idea of peace as something that is inevitably surrounded by war and violence is common in our linguistic, cultural, and religious heritage, as well as our political present. The pax romana implied that where the Roman Empire is there is peace; war is in the outside. The Islamic legal pair of dar al-salam (realm of peace) vs. dar al-harb (realm of war) was developed at a time when the early Muslim empires where at the peak of their might and able to provide peace and thriving to their subjects. It associates peace with Muslim rule, and war with the rest of the world. The landlord of my small holiday plot in East Germany recently reminded me that I’m contractually obliged to ‘pacify’ my plot. Or that’s what I first thought he meant, until I understood the correct meaning. The German verb einfrieden, literally ‘to generate peace within’, means to fence in a plot of land. It indicates that peace is the quality of a local or territorial sanctuary, an exception from a dangerous and violent outside - or to use a term coined by Michel Foucault, a heterotopia.

 

II. 2023, Kuwait and Germany

Mid-October last year, I was in Kuwait to meet Egyptian workers for a book I want to write. The new war in Palestine that had begun a week earlier was visible on the television sets of cafés, and on billboards with the koufiya pattern and the line ‘We’re with you’. The contrast of the news on television against the peaceful and orderly routine of life in Kuwait was striking. Waiting for the departure of my flight back to Germany, I wrote into my diary:

 ‘In the taxi to the airport, I looked at the houses and wondered about the normality of peace and the invisibility of histories and layers of violence. In this country, [there is] the small and unspectacular violence of exploitation and ethnic hierarchies, and glossing over the past violence of the 1990 war - but on standards of international politics, this is a peaceful place. They are not being bombed by anybody, and not bombing anybody.’

Later in Berlin, with the war continuing and getting worse, I was haunted again by the contrast of the news and the unchanged normality of my surroundings. On 20 December, after a joyful Christmas party of the institute where I work, I wrote into my diary:

‘I have flashes during my daily life of a parallel reality, or maybe the future. I board the S-Bahn full of people busy with their phones, and I see the train stuck on its tracks, blown up and burned, bodies scattered inside and outside, mine among them. I dance with my colleagues at the office Christmas party, and I see our lecture hall and offices filled beyond limits by refugees searching any shelter, the toilets in a terrible state after the water has been cut, the trees in the garden cut for cooking and heating. I enter a supermarket to choose my favourite cereals from a ridiculously vast selection, and I see a crowd of hungry and irritable people lining for bread at the door, very close to losing their tempers and looting the shop. I encounter young men joking in a bar, and I see them in dirty uniforms descending from buses for a holiday from the front, an expression of excited incomprehension on their faces after they have learned their first practical lesson in murder and rape. I sit on the sofa of our small but beautiful home and I wonder which rooms would be safe from shrapnel and sniper fire, and I realise it would be only the kitchen and bathroom (in World War Two, a bomb destroyed the house next door and damaged badly the rooms that now are our bedroom and living room). I walk down the streets of our beautiful and well-tended neighbourhood, and I see houses shot into pieces, some burned, others collapsed and surrounded by people frantically seeking for survivors in the rubble. I even see entire neighbourhoods and their inhabitants wiped out by a nuclear blast.’

The peacefulness of Germany, like that of Kuwait, is surrounded and underlined by violence in other places and times. Yet only at moments when my attention to that violence is great, does it enter my everyday consciousness at such a degree as to disturb me. In Kuwait, most active violence is small in the sense that it considers only few people at a time: domestic and sexual violence, denial of wages and freedom of movement, and humiliating working conditions experienced especially by the majority of non-nationals working in the country, and also by Kuwaiti people denied of citizenship. In Germany, it is more difficult to exploit and mistreat workers at home and in factories, which is why much of the economic violence on which our peace and wealth relies is outsourced to other countries, just as is the violence of our borders.

Kuwait’s solidarity with Palestinians is largely non-combatant. As a country that depends on a foreign power (the USA) for its defence, Kuwait is not in a position to join other wars even if it wanted to. Germany is involved in wars abroad more directly. It is providing ammunition and weapons to Ukraine but abstains from sending soldiers. The latter would bring some of the war home, which would be much less popular than letting Ukrainians do the fighting and the dying. Germany has been widely in the news for its arms exports to Israel, and yet its contribution towards arming Israel is of a different kind than widely assumed. While Germany does also sell ammunition to Israel, its main and more long-standing contribution consists of submarines, a strategic weapon likely to play a major role in a future regional war but not useful in the current one. (For details on this, see endnote at the end of this essay).

Last but least, peace in both places is preceded by a past trauma of violent defeat and destruction. In Kuwait, the 1990 Iraqi occupation has left an unhealed scar. Those who can afford it, I was told, prefer to invest their money abroad rather than at home. They expect that any neighbouring country could, if they want, come and occupy Kuwait again. In Germany, the Second World War has left a double trauma of a devastating defeat, and of the guilt of having started the war along with committing at least two genocides (against Jewish and Romani people). This double trauma structures political consciousness until today. It is also tangible in the peaceful urban present. The beautiful park with a playground in front of our apartment is the result of a British or American bomb destroying the house next to ours during the war.

The playground in front of our home, temporarily closed during the first Covid-19 lockdown, March 2020.

War on television, Kuwait, October 2023. My friend in the picture asked me to clarify that he was watching the news on a screen on the opposite wall, not turning his back to them. He says: 'There is a difference between living with wars, and beginning to not care about them.'

The peace that prevails in Kuwait and Germany is constituted in part by a violent past of war and destruction, a violent underbelly of exploitation, and a violent regional context of direct or indirect participation in wars elsewhere. What does this say about peace? Is our peace a fake one? What if hidden or extraterritorialised violence is a common constituent of peace?

III. 1999, Palestine and Israel

The State of Israel is one of the places where the constructive tension between peace within and war without is most dramatic and extreme today. This has to do with the special circumstances of its establishment: a colony of settlers who came to Palestine escaping persecution and genocide elsewhere in order to live in peace as owners of their own country. To accomplish this aim, they forcibly dispossessed people whose own country it had been until then. Israel, promised to be a space of peace and safety, was thus established by means of war and conquest against the resistance of the long-standing inhabitants of the land. Importantly, this was done in a time of decolonisation, when doing so was no longer as politically tolerated as it had been before. Due to the new post-World War II international context, and due to the fierce resistance of Palestinians and neighbouring Arab countries, the military victories of the Zionist movement have not resulted in the secure and unchallenged dominance that other, older settler colonies today enjoy. Without settler colonialism, Turkey would not be Turkish, North Africa would not be inhabited by Arabs, and Americans would not speak Spanish, Portuguese, or English. The Zionist movement has not accomplished such degree of success, but it was successful enough to create an enclave Zion as it were, a state within the borders of which peace has been the norm. This was accomplished by locating war outside, in the lives of the Palestinians who had to give way to the Jewish national project. 

I experienced this personally on the two visits I paid to Palestine and Israel as a student in 1997 and 1999. Historically, it was an exceptionally peaceful time (approximately from the end of the First Intifada in 1994 until the beginning of the Second Intifada in 2000). On my second and last visit in 1999, the possibility of a two-state solution still seemed within reach, and Israeli and Palestinian people I met expressed cautious optimism. And yet even then, the contrasts were striking and troubling. After visiting a friend in Ramallah, I spent two days in Tel Aviv waiting for my Egyptian visa. The city presented itself to me as a low-cost backpacker idyll by the sea. It was easy to forget other realities. As soon as I received my visa, I decided to continue to Gaza City, only to discover that there was no public transportation. People were not expected to travel that way. By combination of hitch-hiking and a Palestinian minibus service from the last Israeli town, I reached Erez Crossing, a maze of fenced corridors where one was at the same time visible and constrained in a frightening way. Already in 1999, Gaza was surrounded by a border fence unlike the metropolitan area of Jerusalem, where the border was intentionally kept as vague as possible to enable the gradual expansion of Israeli settlements in the West bank (the separation wall was built later, its completion concluding the defeat of the Second Intifada). Six years later, at the end of the Second Intifada, the evacuation of Israeli settlements from the Gaza strip completed this process of enclosure and enabled the blockade of Gaza, turning it conclusively from an ambiguous site of potential expansion into an outside space of warfare. In Gaza City as I encountered it in 1999, Israel was constantly present: in ships guarding the coast, in the currency, in consumer goods, as a place where people worked, through visas they needed to do so, in colloquial expressions borrowed from Hebrew. Gaza, on the contrary, was absent from Tel Aviv in 1999.

A newlywed couple gets photographed in the old harbour of Yafa, south of Tel Aviv in June 1999. The city of Tel Aviv was established in 1909 north of the old Palestinian town of Yafa. Today, Yafa is part of the metropolitan area and municipality of Tel Aviv.

Abu Hasira beach in Gaza City, June 1999. The men running the cafeteria offered me free accommodation for a night because I couldn't afford hotel rates.

 

My stay was short. The people I met were open and generous, and there would have been a lot to learn. But I simply could not afford the high prices of the few hotels in Gaza, catering as they did to journalists and international aid workers whose budgets were bigger than mine. I continued my journey to Egypt. My last memory of Palestine and Israel is that of a nervous young Israeli soldier at Rafah Crossing who leaped to restrain my arms when I tried to pull out my passport from a hidden pocket inside my trousers. Apparently, he was trained to anticipate an assault from anybody and at any time.

I had no desire to return. Although Egypt was poorer, more disorderly, and dirtier than the West Bank and Gaza (the latter surprised me by being a more well-ordered city than I had expected), I experienced life in Egypt as more normal and less absurd. I did not know it then, but this was the turning point in my life that would make me an anthropologist writing about Egypt. Perhaps it also indicated my future path as an anthropologist, more interested in everyday life than in violent confrontations and activist stances.

Looking back at Rafah crossing on the Egyptian side, June 1999.

Fast forward to a time of open war, in 2023. The 7 October attacks by Hamas and allied militias across the 1948 line of control caused a shock in Israel and the West. Part of this shock was due to the extreme death toll (with nearly 1200, it was the highest in such a short time since the Sabra and Shatila massacre in 1982). Another part was due to the unequal hierarchy of care where western audiences tend to care more for murdered Israelis and less for murdered Palestinians. But there was also a third part to the shock. The attack violated a hierarchy imposed by Israel that determined where there can be war and where there is peace. The construction of a fence around Gaza in the 1990’s and the withdrawal from the settlements in 2005 had done two kinds of work: it fenced out Gaza as a site of war; and it fenced in Israel as a site of peace, as in the German verb einfrieden. Crossing that literal fence, Hamas and other militants brought war to places that were supposed to be well-protected sanctuaries of peace for their inhabitants. The kind of violence employed by the militants was appropriate to that purpose. It was personal and close-range, aimed to cause the greatest pain possible, seeking and killing people in their homes, raping many (yes it really happened), and broadcasting much of the events live on the internet. This kind of violence says: Look, there is no peace here for you. This spectacular violation of the border between places reserved for peace and others exposed for war amplified the horror, and by so doing, it also amplified the willingness to support horrible countermeasures.

The Israeli war of retaliation against Gaza appears to have among its aims to reestablish the hierarchy of places exposed for war and places reserved for peace. This is evident in the shocking discrepancy between Israeli and Palestinian losses: By 19 February 2024, 29,092 Palestinians have been confirmed killed according to the Ministry of Health in Gaza (the number does not differentiate civilians and combatants). Israel claims to have killed over 10,000 Palestinian militants, and reports that 236 Israeli soldiers have been killed in action during the invasion. 236 is an extremely low number after months of urban warfare, which is usually close-range and bound to cost many lives on both sides. By losing as few of its soldiers as possible, the government of Israel keeps death in war at a distance from Israeli society while at the same time mobilising for a massive military operation. The only way to do so in urban warfare is to mindlessly bomb entire blocks, even neighbourhoods to the ground and shoot everybody at sight (even if they are holding a white cloth to surrender) in order to avoid the risky confrontation of man to man. It means to bring exceedingly much more death to everybody on the other side, combatant or not. A report by The Guardian cites an Israeli soldier returning from the front: ‘We take some fire and identify a target. For an hour we unload everything we’ve got, our own weapons, tanks, anything we can get. Then we advance and find dead terrorists.’

Contrary to the violence by Palestinian militants on 7 October that was intended to hurt in a personal and close-range manner, the violence of the Israeli retaliation is decidedly impersonal and distanced. It uses long-distance massive firepower, and treats people that come into its way as mere material to be liquidated or pacified, undressed less for the sake of personal revenge through rape, and more for the sake of impersonal processing and potential disposal. This kind of violence says: There is nothing to see here, look away while we restore order. It is the kind of violence that seeks to reconstitute the logic of peace within and war without by maintaining a deadly distance between the two.

Such violent constitution of spaces of war and others of peace is not unique to Israel. It also structures Arab solidarity for Palestinians. Palestinians are frequently venerated as martyrs but often unwelcome as neighbours and colleagues. This, too, is a violent fence of peace. It allows people to live in relative peace and at the same time support the cause of Palestine without having to bear the responsibility nor to experience the devastating consequences of yet another disastrous battle in a never-ending war of liberation.

 

IV. 2024, here

In my recent research work I have thought much about the work towards a normal life that may not be a normative one, and the many things we need to be silent about, ignore, or evade in order to accomplish the visible and tangible means of a good life (Bromber et al. 2023). The current war in Gaza has made me connect these thoughts with the issues of war and peace. I am a person who prefers even a bad peace over an extended righteous war. This is partly due to my character as a person who favours compromises over confrontation. For another part, it is due to my own political views that began with Leninist communism and moved away from it. Last but not least, it is also due to the recent history of my native country Finland, which survived World War II as an independent country thanks to a combination of a righteous war (against a Soviet invasion), the evillest allies available (Nazi Germany), and a bad peace that was nevertheless better than the available alternative of no peace. Motivations aside, there are good objective reasons for my preference for peace. Even a bad peace allows for living and thriving in a way a prolonged just war does not. However, as a proponent of peace, I also realise that it is necessary to look more closely into what goes into its making, especially into those constituents of peace that don’t look good in broad daylight and that contradict the idea that peace entails justice and harmony.

Among Michel Foucault’s most brilliant ideas was that of the heterotopia: a place that is defined by being different from ordinary places. His examples include prisons, boarding schools, hospitals, boarding and insane asylums. Other scholars inspired by Foucault’s intervention have kept finding more and more heterotopias, from battlefields to downtown weekend strolls. I, too, have participated in the inflationary use of the term to describe all kinds of spaces that are significant by being different. But with so many places turning out to be heterotopias, what if it is the ordinary, unremarkable sites that are different? What if we consider war and violence not the exception to an ordinary state of peace? Following this thought, the patches of ordinary peaceful living like those that I encountered on my travels in 1999 and 2023 could be considered exceptions, heterotopic islands demarcated and constituted by various forms of violence. Their peacefulness is thus more like that of the empire described in the Strugatski brothers’ unfinished novel, brutal and evil on its fringes and its invisible underbelly, peaceful and friendly at its visible centre.

It is evident that heterotopic peace is incomplete and unsatisfactory. It does and should cause moral trouble and torment. That better kinds of peace would be preferable is obvious. But the more important question is: what kinds of peace would be attainable?

A pragmatic modesty of ambition is evident in the pre-modern origins of terms like einfrieden and dar al-salam: peace is a local accomplishment, an exception from the general state of the world. Anthropologists today don’t like such conclusions, because many of us are committed to the idea of a radical critique, a search to overcome the normal assumptions of our societies and states. But why exactly should our critique be radical? As a former radical myself, I have seen ample evidence about radical movements, when victorious, turning their violence of resistance into a violence of domination, and building archipelagoes of prison camps in which the violent margins spread out even further than they might otherwise. And when radical movements fall short of their aims, the picture is often not better. Those who today rally the slogan ‘No justice, no peace’ rarely seem to realise that their demand has in fact been fulfilled. There is no justice and there is no peace. Rather than a radical critique seeking to overcome the present for the sake of a revolutionary transformation, I would pursue a pragmatic critique grounded in a sense of responsibility and an attention for consequences.

When the hosts of Maxim Kammerer in the Strugatski brothers’ unfinished novel claim that the communist utopia from which Kammerer arrives can only exist as a work of imagination, this is a humble admission by the authors that the political hopes of their youth could not be realised. The Soviet Union they participated in building turned out to look much more like the evil empire Kammerer travels to than the 22nd century utopia they sketched in their earlier novels. We, too, face this discrepancy between our radical utopias and the constituents of our everyday peace.

In a way, we are all Israel. Not only we the western people who feel more for Israeli lives because we consider them ‘us’. I also mean us pro-Palestinian anti-Zionists. I mean you who is reading this. You are Israel, too, insofar as the peace in which you live is enabled by boundaries of violence that are beyond your everyday experience. The degree of violence may be less extreme, but it is just as constitutive. I doubt whether it is possible to completely remove violence from our patches of peace. But it is possible and necessary to make the violence less extreme, and the patches more encompassing.

Berlin, 21 February 2024. Passage on German military support for Israel updated in April and May 2024. Text and photos by Samuli Schielke. Big thanks to Asmaa Essakouti who read the two drafts of this essay and gave very helpful suggestions for improvement.

ENDNOTE:

The issue of German arms sales to Israel has been in the news, with Germany featuring as the second largest source of Israel's arms imports. According to the same statistics collected every year by Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), German arms exports to Israel jumped from tens of millions to hundreds of millions in 2023. Germany rose to the second biggest arms exporter to Israel in 2023, with export licenses worth 326 millions euro, equalling 1.3 per cent of Israel's 25 billion euro military spending in 2023. 

Information about arms exports is to a degree publicly available in Germany, so I have tried tounderstand what exactly has been sold. The leftist nationalist party of Sahra Wagenknecht made a parliamentary inquiry on how much weapons were sold to Israel in 2023. The answer by the government specifies "weapons of war" as a separate category: 20 million euros, mostly anti-tank grenades and rifle munition: https://www.zdf.de/nachrichten/politik/ausland/waffenlieferungen-deutschland-israel-100.html  

That is a lot less than the other figure of 326 million that's also been published by the German government, referred to by SIPRI, and then cited by others as indicating Germany's important role in arming Israel. Where does the difference come from? According to press reports about the reply of the federal government to the parliamentary inquiry, the figures don't include Drakon, a new submarine of the Dolphin class that was approved the same or previous year. However, the export license for Drakon does not figure in the 2022 exports either (but half of 2022 exports were submarine related). In fact the last time submarines featured in German arms export licenses to Israel was in 2014 and 2015. The official answer of the federal government to the parliamentary inquiry does include the export list category A0009, warships - but the answer does not give details of what was approved and for how much. So basically, we do not know what exactly Germany licensed for export in 2023 beyond 20 millions for actual ammunition. However, statistics on long-term German arms sales since 2002 show warships and especially submarines as the leading item, amounting to half of the total financial value of Germany's military exports to Israel over the past 22 years. Whenever a submarine is approved of or sold, exports of a single year peak from tens to hundreds of millions. The unit price was 500-700 million USD when the first German submarine was delivered to Israel 13 years ago: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolphin-class_submarine

Germany's role in arming the current massacre in Gaza thus appears to be less major than widely assumed. However, Germany plays a substantial role in something potentially far more terrible and destructive. The submarine is a strategic weapon that can carry nuclear weapons. The nuclear warheads that will be carried by just one submarine can cause destruction that would make the current war look like a brawl among friends. And a big part of the price of the submarine under construction as well as the previous ones delivered by Germany to Israel in the past two decades has been subsidised by the German federal government. This is strategic military aid that can be extremely consequential if the current war escalates into a bigger one.

On Exiles and Alternatives: An Afterword

by Samuli Schielke and Mukhtar Saad Shehata

 

On 5 July, our new book Shared Margins: An Ethnography with Writers in Alexandria will be published open access. While waiting, you now read our afterword to the book. Here it is! And starting From 5 July, you can read the whole book here: https://www.degruyter.com/document/isbn/9783110726305/html.

This book’s meandering ethnographic exploration of Alexandrian writers and literary scenes ended with a reflection about the common ground of romantic subjectivity that is shared by two poets who may seem to have little in common. However, the romantic common ground of authorship that is so widespread in Alexandria today is not only about subjective expression; it also equally involves the talent and skill to communicate, to have an effect. In a literary and social world where plurality more often than not does not imply pluralism, what may such communication entail, and what might its effect be? In this afterword we reflect on that question through an engagement with two recent theoretical inspirations, combined with our own trajectories after the end of our fieldwork.

In September 2017, we both left Alexandria to take different directions. Mukhtar, who had lived permanently in Alexandria since 2004, migrated to Brazil as a graduate student after separating from his wife. Samuli, who had been moving back and forth between Berlin and Alexandria since 2010, settled permanently in Berlin to stay close to his wife who was sick. Samuli returned to Alexandria on two visits in autumn 2019, and Mukhtar moved back from Brazil to his native village in spring 2020. Owing to the Covid-19 pandemic and other developments out of our control, we were not able to meet. In consequence, instead of spending long evenings debating in Mukhtar’s living room as we had done during our fieldwork, we became involved in long online chats about the book manuscript between 2018 and 2020. And as our lives and careers took a turn away from Alexandria, our networks and ideas became more affected by Egyptian and Arab exiles in Europe and the Americas.

We were part of a trend. Egypt was experiencing a major emigration of highly skilled people with intellectual and artistic interests. This emigration was related to an increasingly widespread sense among them of life in Egypt being too repressive, the opportunities too limited for them to stay. But as people moved abroad, their anxieties and traumas travelled with them. A part of the sense of exile that we encountered among people from this class is a painful sense of privilege mixed with disconnection: a sense of confusion that results from enjoying a pleasant gathering of like-minded spirits abroad while knowing that back at home, tens of thousands are in prisons, often with fabricated charges or no charges at all, and that the life of ordinary citizens is cheap. It involves knowing that staying away from politics is not a safeguard either. While we were writing this in summer 2020, a moralist media and legal campaign in Egypt against young female influencers on the social media platform TikTok resulted in two-year prison sentences and public shaming for a number of women for ‘offending Egyptian family values’. Even intentionally banal commercial entertainment is not a safe haven in post-2013 Egypt. As soon as one gains a significant audience, be it for politics or for product placement, one becomes a potential target. From the vantage point of an exile, one can be concerned, angry, and frustrated about such and other developments – but also safe. The price of that safety is disconnection. And yet for many, it is not only a price, but also an accomplishment.

Berlin became a particularly hip spot for what Samuli only half in jest calls the bohemian Arab exile (al-manfa al-bohimi). People in that scene regularly mastered a cosmopolitan habitus and connectedness that were rather rare in Alexandria. They were involved in sophisticated academic and activist debates, and many were highly politicised. They attended parties that aligned with Berlin’s reputation at the time as the capital of Europe’s hip nightlife. At a party (not a hip and extravagant one, though, just a gathering at home of a kind that is held in Alexandria as well) hosted by a young Egyptian scholar in Berlin in 2019, Samuli became involved in a discussion about literature with someone who had moved from Egypt to Berlin, and who argued that he had stopped reading Arabic literature because he found God guarding and limiting the authors’ scope of imagination, which he didn’t like. This confused Samuli. He recognised the idea of a religious framework of the imagination from his encounters with conservative scenes, but he had not previously thought – as his conversation partner did – that writings of the cosmopolitan avant-garde shared that framework, if in more implicit ways. Samuli was at the time reading scholarship that described contemporary Egyptian literature as essentially secular, while the person he met at the party described it as not secular enough to be interesting for him.

Of course, this conversation tells us more about the kind of parties Samuli attends in Berlin than it tells us about Arabic literature. But then we have argued throughout this book that the kind of parties people attend is an important part of literature.

In an influential and much-discussed essay published in January 2019, the political scientist Amro Ali (who moved back to Alexandria from Australia after completing his PhD, and who has been a frequent visitor in Berlin) proposes that the Arab community in Berlin must claim a voice and a mandate as the provider of new narratives and alternatives that can benefit the city and the Arab world alike. Amro Ali is highly inspired by the thriving liberal-leftist Arabic speaking intelligentsia that has gathered in Berlin, making use of its political freedom and plurality, networks, and affordable rents it offers (affordable when compared with Beirut or London, not compared with Alexandria). At the same time, he is troubled by the tendency of Arab intellectual circles towards seclusion and self-sufficiency that results in good ideas and productions being ‘hurled into a void’ (Ali 2019: 6) and lost in ‘a black hole’ (p. 13). In his view, Arab intellectuals in Berlin have potential for much more: ‘Berlin will need to be actively thought of and treated as one critical hub and safe space to reconstruct alternative narratives and futures’ (p. 12). To do so, Amro Ali calls the cosmopolitan intelligentsia of Arab origin in Berlin to act as organic intellectuals who speak with, to, and perhaps also for a wider society – a conscience of the nation of Berlin, as it were, not so unlike the self-understanding of twentieth-century Egyptian nationalist modernism (see Chapter 2):

The intellectual exile body will need to forge an intimate relation with café staff, barbers and other occupations critically positioned within common social spaces. The ‘antiquated’ flyer will hold more weight than a Facebook post as the mere act of handing it to someone restores an invaluable human transaction that makes bonding and togetherness more realisable than what social media can offer.

It would be a delusion of utter proportions to think the mosque and church have no place in this endeavour. Any project to live out one’s secular fantasies is doomed. There needs to be a move beyond the spaces of smoke-blowing chatter over Foucault versus Deleuze and the echo chamber it entails. This is not a matter of merely tolerating faith because it is deeply rooted in the Arab community. Rather, it implies coming to terms with the constructive role faith can play in an increasingly alienating environment and, therefore, that it needs to be better framed and understood rather than overlooked by intellectual currents.

[…]

The Arab author is simply one manifestation of the same political spectrum that produced that barber. The author just happens to be one of the most visible, most political, most clearly articulated expression of Arab grievances. Yet the author should not forget that he or she developed, consciously or not, from the same background and reservoir as the rest of society and the upheavals of the Arab Spring. This is where they draw their strength and legitimacy from; and this society has a very large reservoir of pain, unhappiness, confusion, and uncertainty. But when the intellectuals and activists not only recognize the futility of separation from that background, but also return to and engage with it, not as shewerma-buying customers but as citizens-in-exile in an ever-expanding conversation with moral obligations, the securing of a steadfast future is aided. (Ali 2019: 13–15)

The forward-looking narrative that Arab Berlin can offer according to Amro Ali’s vision, is to keep alive, cultivate, and spread the pluralist, loving, and democratic potentials that were released but defeated in the uprisings of 2011. The Arab intellectuals gathered in Berlin can, according to Amro Ali, help Arab societies gradually recover from the violent authoritarian powers that rule it, and they can also help Germany heal itself from its own rising wave of right-wing nationalism.

The problem of self-referentiality and a lack of outreach that Amro Ali identifies, is also something that Mukhtar recognises among his own literary networks, especially those that hail from his native village. The literary circles and milieus that we analysed in Chapter 2 have a tendency to generate small and solid echo-chambers or what Mukhtar in a recent essay (Shehata 2020) calls ‘cultural pockets’. Those pockets often give their participants a sense of accomplishment and skill, with the consequence that writers who move out of such pockets into wider networks are for the first time exposed to a harsher kind of critique that is about questioning and not about praise and recognition – with the result that they resentfully withdraw to their safe spaces of mutual recognition again. In contrast to the highly educated bourgeois-cosmopolitan scene in Berlin that Amro Ali writes about, Mukhtar’s concern is with rural and provincial intellectuals and writers who, socialised in supportive pockets with their closed sets of values and standards, move to Alexandria or Cairo where they experience the challenge of plurality and critique as a personal threat and offence – a regrettable waste of talent and opportunity. While Amro Ali and Mukhtar look at different social classes, they share a concern about what they see as effective self-marginalisation of writers and intellectuals that prevents them from being heard by a larger audience, and from developing their own voice and ideas in a way that could be useful or inspiring for others.

And yet, from what Samuli knows from his time among some of the bohemian-bourgeois Arab exiles, most of them have little connection with mainstream Berlin – be it ethnically German, Arab, or other. They are not in Berlin because of Berlin, but because it is a safe haven, a hub for the like-minded who might not be able to live and debate as they can, if not in Berlin. For some people, such as Samuli’s conversation partner about literature at the party, Berlin provides a rare chance to finally live out a secular fantasy – so why the hurry to give up that hard-fought fantasy? The author and the barber may have a refreshing conversation about concerns they share, but both of them are also likely to hold some very divisive stances that could put a quick end to the conversation. If the barber is skilled in his profession, he will know how to entertain a good conversation with his customer without raising issues that would hurt. It is easy as long as the two don’t know each other too well. The Arab intellectual community in Berlin, as far as Samuli has encountered it, thrives on a peripheral contact with the many mainstream societies (Arab and others) of the city, and yet it could not survive in full exposure to them. Such exposure would drain people’s energies and resources, because they would be constantly busy explaining, legitimising, and adapting themselves. It would be the end of Berlin as a safe space.

We have long debated among ourselves whether such self-marginalisation by writers and intellectuals is a problem or a productive condition. Mukhtar tends to see it more as a problem, Samuli more as a productive condition. We agree on the description of the condition, however – a description that is provided in the eight ethnographic chapters of this book. Alternative visions and ways of life or unusual, strange ideas, values, and tastes cannot survive in full exposure to the societal mainstream. Even fairly conventional and conservative ideas thrive on a degree of outsider position, some luxury of time and space apart that allows authors to play with and develop them (Chapter 1). Turning them into literary text means, by definition, to give them a safe space that is marked as outside the ordinary (as we described in Chapter 3). That space is nevertheless not hermetic; on the contrary, it invites an audience to engage with it. The audience must be willing to engage with those strange ideas on their own terms, however, otherwise the authors may either remain unheard (as in Chapter 4) or face grave consequences (as in Chapter 7).

If we look at those special places and times as accomplishments in their own right, a different image emerges, one where the sense of shortcoming involved in ‘marginal’ is replaced by the sense of improvement involved in ‘alternative’. Seen that way, literary and intellectual engagements are not about acting as the conscience of a nation, as it were, but about crafting imaginary and material lives on a small but effective scale.

This idea echoes an emerging interest in Egypt, especially among liberal-bourgeois intellectual, literary, artist, and activist circles, towards alternative lives and lifestyles. From that direction also comes the other theoretical inspiration we engage with in this afterword. In December 2019, after a break of five years, a long-awaited new issue of the influential non-periodical journal Amkenah (according to its subtitle ‘concerned with the poetics of places’), edited in Alexandria by Alaa Khaled and Salwa Rashad (2019a), was released. The theme of the new issue was ‘alternative lives’.

Combining photo essays, literary texts, travel writing, theoretical essays, and interviews, the issue presents a map of alternative communities and social projects, long-distance travels, pilgrimages and mountain hikes, bohemian and artistic careers in Egypt and abroad. On the pages of this volume at least, a privileged and recurring location of such alternative lives in Egypt is in the desert, where some try their hand at alternative ecological farming and tourism, others go mountaineering, and yet others undertake a pilgrimage to the remote Sufi shrine of Sidi Abu al-Hasan al-Shadhili in the far south-east of Egypt. Cities and rural communities in the Nile valley also feature in the volume, but articles about them are fewer in number and more pragmatic in tone, less carried by a sense of fascination.

In Alaa Khaled’s and Salwa Rashad’s (2019b) literary and photographic travel journal of the southern Red Sea region that opens the volume, Alaa Khaled meditates on the openness, non-binary relation to time and existence he sees embodied in nomad lives of the Ababda and Bishariya ethnic groups. The desert and nomadic lives become a site to imagine a life beyond the binaries that divide society from nature, centres from peripheries, past from present – a more authentic, immediate way of being that, according to Alaa Khaled, can provide an alternative to city life and its political and societal conflicts. It is alternative not as opposed to something, but as a parallel, other reality that is constructive (as ideally expressed in farming and community projects) rather than antagonistic in nature, echoing the theme of heterotopic spaces that we develop in Chapters 3 and 5 of this book. In the introduction to the volume, he develops the same idea in more conceptual terms:

Maybe ‘hope’ was in the past put into the service of impossible ‘utopias’, which want to be released upon earth; thus in the past, the alternative was exemplary, and carried within itself the seed of its own transience, for it was searching for a paradise on earth. Perhaps now, ‘the alternative’ has liberated itself from this utopia, and has become free and planless about its paths and choices, lacking a centre that would guide its choices, running as it does after a ‘hope’ wherever it may find or feel it. Perhaps the old and new projects and experiences collected in this issue are one part of a map of this ‘errant hope’ and its journeys.

[…]

The alternative in this elusive age we live in, is not the marginal, and does not carry the ambition to smash the centre or to take its place. […] The alternative neither contradicts nor resists; instead, it encompasses in order to live and persist. (Khaled 2019: 7)

The turn to search for alternative lives and places is linked with an interesting historical shift in the spiritual self-positioning of a section of the urban intelligentsia. It is no coincidence that the shrine of the medieval mystic Abu al-Hasan al-Shadhili plays such an important role in the emerging landscape of alternative travel in Egypt – alongside the more pleasure oriented beach resorts in Dahab and Nuweiba. The spiritual radiance of the Sufi shrine is enhanced by its exotic location in a remote mountain range inhabited by nomadic people from an ethnic minority. The widespread appreciation of twenty-first-century intellectuals for the non-binary, non-rationalist ecstasy of Islamic mysticism stands in a contrast to intellectuals of past generations, who more often saw in the same Sufi shrines a source of backwardness and error. The sociologist Sayyid Uways (1998), who with remarkable perceptiveness studied the letters sent or brought in the 1960s to the grave of the legal scholar Imam Muhammad ibn Idris al-Shafiʿi (d. 820), also insisted that the visitors were ultimately mistaken and misguided in their hope to reach the Imam al-Shafiʿi through their letters. Many among the current cosmopolitan intelligentsia, in contrast, actively embrace mysticism – some from the distance of uncommitted fascination and exploration, others by actually joining the mystical path in the guidance of a spiritual leader.

Also in more worldly terms, writers and intellectuals from the same alternative-bourgeois milieu appear less likely than their predecessors to try and act as a conscience of any nation, and more likely to search and create something valuable among a circle that is willing to share in the attempt. In a conceptual essay included in the same issue of Amkenah, the anthropologist Amal Idris-Haroun (2019) points at the paradox of that move: the circle is also the shape of power in capitalism based on circulation, and as much we may seek to overcome the oppressive power of the global economy, our alternative lives, too, take the shape of chosen circles that exclude what does not fit into them.

Alternative lifestyles tend to be romantic by default – not necessarily in the sense of romantic subjectivity, but in the sense that they are driven by a longing for something more immediate and humane than capitalist production-consumption processes, governmental power, and urban anonymity. However, the paradox is that such longing becomes possible only with the material and energy resources provided by precisely those processes. It is not the point of view of the few remaining nomads of Egypt; it is the point of view of highly educated city-dwellers with cosmopolitan connections who have the means to desire something they miss in their urban lifeworlds and see (or hope to see) realised in nomadic lives. That vision renders invisible the history of internal colonisation of desert regions by the Egyptian state – especially the Sinai, and more recently, the disputed border territory of Shalatin and Halayeb in the southern Red Sea region – which has made those regions now increasingly accessible for urbanites searching for alternative lives.

Amro Ali’s proposal to make Berlin the hub of a new narrative and mission embodied by organic intellectuals, and the visions of alternative lives and lifestyles collected by Alaa Khaled and Salwa Rashad on the pages of Amkenah, may at first seem to be as far apart as their respective metonymic locations: the cosmopolitan urbanity of Berlin and the mountainous desert of the Red Sea region. And yet pilgrimage to Sidi Abu al-Hasan and ecological farms and vacations in South Sinai are in a sense not so unlike Kreuzberg, the heart of left-wing multiculturalism in Berlin. The realities and possibilities they represent are all marked by their being different from a wider mainstream, however defined. They are bound to specific times, places, and groups of people that are in various ways extra-ordinary. While Amro Ali struggles with their resulting insular tendency and hopes to overcome it, Alaa Khaled and the authors of the new issue of Amkenah rather embrace it. This productive tension has an important recent history: the 25 January revolution, which failed in changing the regime, but succeeded in creating temporary revolutionary heterotopias that live on as political myths – and by so doing has also made islands of alternative lifestyle more attractive. At the same time, such alternative islands are also among the few possible paths left: ten years after the uprising, they remain possible and to some degree safe because they don’t challenge dominant relations of power, while attempts at wide-scale societal or political mobilisation will now very likely result in exile, imprisonment, or death.

No matter whether authors have the explicit aim to offer critical questioning or concrete utopias (as in Chapter 5), literature as a social space is much more prone to generate heterotopias, that is, special spaces out of the ordinary, than it is to communicate with the society widely. Very few literary texts accomplish the latter feat. And yet this is not to say that heterotopias would be ineffective, lost, wasted in a black hole. What if we instead think of the lives and writings that are produced in rural literary pockets, in the various circles and scenes in Alexandria we studied, and in the bohemian-bourgeois exiles in Berlin as an accomplishment? They would be a dubious accomplishment for sure, one that comes at the price of various layers of exclusion and seclusion. But they are an accomplishment all the same, a landscape of alternative lives that are effective not because they may or may not heal Egypt, the Arab world, or Germany, but simply because people who entertained them have indeed generated real alternative lives for themselves – even if only partially, only at specific times at marked spaces, and with many frustrations.

No matter what its intentions may be, one of the things literary writing most reliably produces are alternative lives – although those lives generally are much more precarious, partial, and short term than those described on the pages of Amkenah. The parallel worlds of reading, writing, and socialising (Chapters 1, 2, and 3), the political affects cultivated in revolutionary poetry (Chapter 4), the competing myths of the city (Chapter 5), the moods generated and the claims marked by wall-writing (Chapter 6), and the search to embrace or overcome the condition of an uncertain world (Chapters 7 and 8) – all these are effective realities that have emerged from literary explorations. At the same time, these realities repeatedly, almost systematically, fall short of what those who entertained them would have expected – fame and recognition not gained, an independent life not accomplished, a reform of society not completed, a regime not overthrown, claims to public space made but not kept, ways of living in a city lost to construction projects, new ways of thinking not appreciated by conservative audiences, old ways of thinking not recognised by avant-garde critics, and the path towards certainty lost in haze.

The problem of alternative lives is not simply the question of their realisation or non-realisation. The striving to live one – be it in fictional texts, in the safe spaces of literary meetings, or in full exposure and confrontation with the social mainstream – in itself effectively produces an alternative life. The problem is that many are disappointed because they expected that other life to be happy, or long-lasting, or world-changing, or in other ways up to their ambitions – while in reality it simply is what it is: other. In that capacity of otherness, it can in turn also ‘seep into’ (to follow the wording of Andrew Brandel 2016: 177) ordinary life, and become its ambiguous companion or accomplice.

Thinking of imaginary explorations and their practical pursuits as an effective if elusive and transient reality that simply is what it is also means that those explorations and pursuits are under no circumstances innocent (just as it would be mistaken to assume that they generally involve resistance against hegemonic powers). They are possible through available material and cultural resources, means of privilege and mobility, circles and pockets of mutual encouragement. There is no exemplary innocence nor universal inspiratory power, because every expression is enabled by strings of complicity. Attempts to accomplish such an impossible feat are worthy of attention, however, because they may result in something else, something less exemplary and less far-reaching and yet not meaningless nor insignificant. An ambitious attempt to change the world by speaking truth to power leaves a dent, as it were, in the world, while truth may not win. A pilgrimage to Sidi Abu al-Hasan al-Shadhili may leave the pilgrim’s prayer unanswered, and yet it does something to the pilgrim and, with luck, may leave a trace in the readers of the travel account.

We, too, know the pull of the south-eastern desert. In February 2017, we undertook a journey – a pilgrimage, a literary exploration, a tourist trip, something of those in combination – to the shrine of Sidi Abu al-Hasan (Shehata 2019). After a hazardous car ride in the night, we arrived at the site, which we found almost empty because it was a working day and not the pilgrimage season. The next morning, we gathered at the shrine. Each of us had come with urgent worries at the back of our minds, but sitting in the realm of the sheikh, we found that we had no questions to ask. If the journey had seemed to have a purpose before we undertook it, once we arrived, we found that it was its own purpose and outcome.

The homeward journey begins after a pilgrimage to Sidi Abu al-Hasan al-Shadhili, Humaythara, February 2017. Photo by Samuli Schielke.

 

References:

Ali, Amro. 2019. ‘On the Need to Shape the Arab Exile Body in Berlin’. Dis:Orient, 23 January. https://www.disorient.de/blog/need-shape-arab-exile-body-berlin.

Brandel, Andrew O. 2016. City of Letters: The Making of Literary Life in Berlin. PhD thesis: Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD.

Khaled, Alaa. 2019. علاء خالد: "افتتاحية". أمكنة، العدد 12، ص 6ـ8.

Khaled, Alaa, and Salwa Rashad (eds). 2019a. علاء خالد وسلوى رشاد (تحرير): أمكنة، العدد 12: حيوات بديلة.

Khaled, Alaa, and Salwa Rashad. 2019b. علاء خالد وسلوى رشاد: "رحلة إلى الحنوب". أمكنة، العدد 12:، ص 9ـ59.

Idris-Haroun, Amal. 2019. أمل إدريس هارون. "الحياة البديلة: محاولة متقطعة بتطبع المفهوم". أمكنة، العدد 12، ص 69ـ79.

Shehata, Mukhtar Saad. 2019. مختار سعد شحاتة: "حميثرة". في كتاب من وحي الرحلة، إعداد ياسين أحمد سعيد ومجموعة إلى أبعد مدى. طنطا: فنتازيون للنشر والتوزيع.

Uways, Sayyid. 1998 [1965]. سيد عويس: "من ملامح المجتمع المصري المعاصر: ظاهرة إرسال رسائل إلى ضريح الإمام الشافعي". في كتاب الأعمال الكاملة للدكتور سيد عويس، المجلد 1، ص 9ـ316. القاهرة: مركز المحروسة.