Palestinian Steadfastness as a Mission

Abstract

This chapter presents an analysis of an important tendency related to the Palestinian refugee social belonging process, and firmly tied to variations of a Palestinian time conception. This tendency is to symbolically link the definition and experience of Palestinianness in the present through the concept of al-ṣumūd (steadfastness). While elusive in practice, ṣumūd does play an important role in the Palestinian refugee’s process of belonging. With ṣumūd, a concept that evokes Islamic divine attributes, and ṣāmid (plural, ṣamidīn) a derived term that denotes the subject who possesses the qualities of sumūd, the Palestinian conception of time is, for many Palestinian refugees, in large measure inscribed into an Islamic praxis. In this way, this chapter contributes to the broad discussion on religion as an anthropological category, as epitomized by the Clifford Geertz-Talal Asad polemics.¹ By showing how religion and nationalism are not necessarily distinct dimensions of social life, this chapter reinforces Asad’s critique to Geertz’s hermeneutical approach. Moreover, my study shows how the local condition of refugeeness, in this case, further strengthened the interconnection between religious, ethnic, political, and nationalist social drives. In other words, this study shows that the labeling of certain phenomena as simply “religious,” to isolate and study them in relation to other such phenomena, is not always as constructive as analyzing them in relation to a broader social context, which in this case is the local condition of refugeeness.