Gaza and Muslim Political Theology: Three Meditations on Justice, Extermination, and the Humanitarian Order

In the second installment of the Political Thought Talks hosted by the İSAR Research Center, we present Ebrahim Moosa’s lecture titled "Gaza and Muslim Political Theology: Three Meditations on Justice, Extermination, and the Humanitarian Order."

In this talk, Moosa treats Gaza not as a completed event, but as a catastrophe that exposes the moral, legal, and political failures of the modern order. He diagnoses these failures through the lens of Muslim political theology, demonstrating how the international humanitarian regime—formed in the aftermath of World War II—manages suffering while systematically deferring accountability and redress. According to Moosa, this process transforms justice from a field of actual responsibility into a mere spectacle. Drawing on his earlier critiques of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission and Robert Meister’s work After Evil, Moosa argues that this deferral is structural rather than incidental.

Moosa further explores the figure of the Muselmann—the "Muslim-Jew"—found in Nazi camp literature. He posits that this figure reveals how Islam has been coded within Europe’s theological memory as a diminished or devalued form of humanity. This naming serves as a politico-theological operation that renders certain lives expendable, thereby paving the way for exterminatory imaginaries directed at Palestinians and other Muslim communities. The expansion of this logic, which Moosa terms "Gazafication," points toward the normalization of infrastructural destruction and mass civilian vulnerability across the Middle East.

In response, Moosa proposes a Muslim political theology grounded in a prophetic understanding of justice, Qur’anic moral language, and classical traditions of governance. Central to this approach are accountability, restitution, and resistance against unjust authority. Ultimately, the lecture argues that Gaza must be understood primarily as a theological problem rather than a purely political one.

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