Dear Engineer,
Prospective Application: Mizrahi Conversion to Islam as Post-Hosophobic Civilizational Therapy
Applied prospectively to a hypothetical future in which significant numbers of Mizrahi Jews convert to Islam, the framework of raceless antiracism as civilizational therapy acquires both heightened complexity and sharper diagnostic power. In this context, the Pakistani analogy does not function as a model to be copied, but as a conceptual lens through which an unprecedented transformation of identity, memory, and political fear can be interpreted without collapsing into either triumphalism or paranoia.
At stake here is not conversion as a private theological event, but conversion as a civilizational stress test—one that exposes the limits of racialized, genealogical, and securitized conceptions of selfhood on all sides.
1. Mizrahi Identity as Latent Palimpsest Rather Than Boundary Marker
Mizrahi identity already occupies an unstable position within modern racial taxonomies. Neither fully assimilable into Ashkenazi European whiteness nor reducible to Arab alterity, Mizrahi Jews historically inhabited Islamic civilizations as integrated yet differentiated minorities—linguistically Arabic, culturally Near Eastern, religiously Jewish. Their displacement into the modern Israeli project forced a retroactive racialization of this hybridity, reframing it as marginal, suspect, or incomplete.
Future Mizrahi conversion to Islam would therefore not represent a leap across a civilizational chasm, but a reactivation of a suppressed historical continuity. Conversion would surface what modern nationalist epistemologies worked hard to erase: that religious identity in the Middle East was once orthogonal to race, and that Jewish–Muslim difference operated primarily as a juridical–theological distinction, not a civilizational abyss.
In this sense, the Mizrahi convert embodies a temporal palimpsest—not a traitor crossing sides, but a layered subject in whom multiple civilizational inscriptions become simultaneously legible.
2. Raceless Antiracism Against Genealogical Panic
Within both Jewish and Muslim imaginaries, such conversions would likely trigger intense hosophobic reactions.
From a Jewish-nationalist perspective, the convert risks being framed as the ultimate internal enemy: proof that Jewishness is defeasible, porous, and not biologically guaranteed. From a Muslim perspective, particularly one shaped by postcolonial trauma and securitization, the convert risks being read through the lens of infiltration, espionage, or instrumental faith.
Here, raceless antiracism performs its critical intervention by disabling genealogy as a guarantor of authenticity. The convert cannot be stabilized as racially alien, because Mizrahi phenotypes already collapse the visual grammar of Jewish-versus-Muslim distinction. Nor can the convert be dismissed as civilizationally external, because their cultural memory is already endogenous to the Islamic world.
What is exposed is the fiction of bounded civilizational selves. The anxiety does not arise because the convert is alien, but because they reveal that the boundary itself was always contingent, politically enforced, and historically recent.
3. Therapeutic Effects on Hosophobia: Conversion Without Betrayal
Hosophobia feeds on the terror that the Other is already inside. Mizrahi conversion to Islam intensifies this fear because it collapses external and internal difference into a single figure. The convert is not a foreign invader but a familial echo.
The therapeutic reframe offered by the Pakistani logic is decisive here:
there was never a pure interior to be compromised.
For the Mizrahi convert, Islam is not the discovery of an alien self but the recomposition of an already composite identity. For the receiving Muslim civilization, the convert is not a Trojan horse but a reminder that Islam historically functioned as a civilizational attractor, not a racial enclosure.
Hosophobia dissolves when impurity is no longer interpreted as loss. The convert’s hybridity ceases to be a scandal and becomes ontological evidence: identity has always been assembled, never sealed.
4. From Agonistics to Assemblage in a Post-Zionist/Post-Islamist Horizon
Politically, such conversions would be explosive if interpreted agonistically—Jew versus Muslim, loyalty versus betrayal, faith versus blood. Interpreted through an assemblage lens, however, they signal a possible exit from zero-sum civilizational logic.
The Mizrahi Muslim does not negate Jewish history nor validate Islamist supremacy. Instead, they instantiate a third position that neither side can easily metabolize without revising its foundational myths. Like the Pakistani condition, this position is unstable, contested, and uncomfortable—but precisely for that reason, philosophically generative.
Civilization here begins to resemble not a fortress or even a battlefield, but a polyphonic composition—closer to qawwali than to anthem—where incompatible inheritances coexist without being synthetically resolved.
5. Limits, Risks, and Non-Romanticism
This scenario must not be romanticized. Converts would likely face intense suspicion, social isolation, and instrumentalization. States would securitize them. Movements would attempt to weaponize them symbolically. Pathologies would proliferate.
Yet, as with the Pakistani analogy, the therapeutic value is not pragmatic but ontological. It demonstrates that civilizational identities can survive the collapse of racial and genealogical certainties. It shows that Hosophobia is not an eternal psychological law, but a symptom of particular historical arrangements.
Concluding Synthesis: Conversion as Civilizational Mirror
In this future scenario, Mizrahi conversion to Islam functions as a mirror event. It reflects back to Jews, Muslims, and the modern nation-state the uncomfortable truth that identity was never pure, never singular, and never secure.
To the xenophobe, it says: the foreigner was always your cousin.
To the hosophobe, it says: the enemy you fear is the proof that the self was plural all along.
As civilizational therapy, this does not promise harmony. It promises something more austere and more durable: the end of innocence regarding purity, and the beginning of an ethics capable of inhabiting composite being without panic.
A spiritual Ishmaelite 