The Coloniality of Multicultural Entrapment: A Few Comments on Michael Karayanni's A Multicultural Entrapment

Abstract

To date, scholarly debate on state and religion in Israel has been Jewish-oriented, focusing on the major tensions and clashes between the state and the Jewish religion. Palestinian Arab religious matters have been treated as peripheral and as a private matter of religious groups. This gap in the literature reflects the power structure in academic interests concerning the Jewish state and its discriminatory treatment of the Palestinian Arab minority. Michael Karayanni’s book A Multicultural Entrapment: Religion and State among the Palestinian Arabs in Israel1 is a thorough and provocative attempt to unmask the false idea of multicultural accommodation with regard to the religious jurisdiction of Palestinian Arabs. Karayanni provides a rich, comprehensive analysis of multicultural theory, its scope, historical development, limitations, and implementation in the case of the Palestinian minority in Israel. He brings to the forefront the main challenges of multicultural theory by focusing on the judicial religious jurisdiction of the Palestinian Arab minority in personal status laws. He touches upon one of the most important scholarly debates in multicultural theory and dilemmas faced by the minority within a minority group, providing us with a rich and comprehensive account of the challenges created by multicultural accommodation of minority groups, and the application of harmful patriarchal norms to marginal excluded groups (such as women and children).