Can Tradition Provide Answers to the Present? The Crisis of Language in Contemporary Palestine
Since October 2023, Palestinians have produced an unprecedented archive of witness to genocide and destruction. My project begins from a difficulty recurring across that archive, that I traced in earlier work on how mass death is conceptualized in Palestinian texts (Kiadan, 2024): the secular register available for naming catastrophe, rights, trauma, or historical processes has become unable to account for how the scale of destruction touches memory, lineage, land, and the relation between the living and the dead. The intuitive response I observed has been a turn toward turāth (tradition) as an alternative reservoir (Kiadan, 2024). This project complicates that intuition. Following Iqbal and Odabaei’s account of the “in/capacitations of tradition” (2026), I take seriously that turāth is itself wounded and interrupted by colonial violence, which means tradition cannot simply stand in, as it is, to replace modern secular language. The project’s method is to work in the space this double incapacity opens, tying and knotting secular critique together with inherited ethical and theological vocabulary rather than choosing between them, through genealogical engagement with specific Arabic-Islamic ethical concepts that take on new meanings when related to decolonial analysis of contemporary Palestine. One example I worked on is the concept of iḥsān (Kiadan and Mawasi, 2025), a concept that opens up to a new lisān (discourse) when read through a modern decolonial/postcolonial lens.
This project engages intellectually with the work of earlier thinkers who have been confronted with the difficulty and necessity to search for a language adequate to their own political and historical context: Adorno’s warning that invoking sacred language risks producing jargon, sounding profound while evading material conditions (1973); de Certeau’s notion of mystic speech, language that emerges from a humiliated or ruined tradition and continues to speak from the site of its own loss (1992); Mufti’s postcolonial “aura of authenticity,” a consoling wholeness that aestheticizes loss without examining power, and his own alternative, vernacular modernities, a model of engaging modernity through a local idiom without recuperating a lost, uncontaminated past (2000); and Galili Shahar’s reading of Gershom Scholem’s warning about the sacred residue carried within a secularized Hebrew, and others.