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Periphery: Israel's Search for Middle East Allies

envisaged as a destination for the majority of India’s Muslims or Europe’s Jews” (p. 44). Devji forcefully argues that “Muslim nationalists rejected history, geography and even demography as the foundations of their political life, opting instead for an abstract idea of belonging together” (p. 123). By juxtaposing this with Zionism, he opens himself to unavoidable criticism. Early in the book, Devji observes that “both emerged from situations in which minority populations dispersed across vast subcontinents sought to escape the majorities whose persecution they rightly or wrongly feared” (p. 3) but executed it badly. There is a significant corpus of literature that compares Pakistan with Israel and materials available in the Central Zionist Archives in Jerusalem shed interesting light on the meetings between the Yishuv and Muslim League leaders including Jinnah. Not all comparisons cast the countries in a negative light. In a monograph published in 2000 by Tel Aviv University, this reviewer argued that normalization of relations between Israel and Pakistan would be beneficial to both countries and should not be viewed in terms of the third party interests and calculations. Ideally, the author should have confined himself to writing Pakistan as a Political Idea and that would have made for an interesting treatment. By bringing in Muslim Zion, Faisal Devji exposed his unfamiliarity with Zion itself, its complexities, and his lopsided understanding of the parallels. Muslim Zion is an excellent idea whose scholarly treatment is still awaited.