brill.nl/mjcc MEJCC Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication 5 (2012) 101–115 © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2012 DOI 10.1163/187398612X641860 On the Connection between Islamic Sacred Texts and Muslims’ Political Conduct: The Israeli Dominant Elites’ Conception Issam Aburaya a and Hisham Abu-Raiya b a) Seton Hall University, USA Email: issam.aburaya08@gmail.com b) Tel-Aviv University, Israel Email: Aburaiya@gmail.com Abstract This essay provides an empirically grounded and theoretically informed examination of Israeli elites’ discourse on Islam, in general, and its conceptualization of the relationship between Islamic sacred texts and the political conduct of Muslims, in particular. It argues that the Israeli elites’ discourse, for the most part, is not only unhistorical and lacking in a sociological basis, but, most importantly, emphasizes Islamic religious texts while reducing their Muslim readers into uniquely choiceless beings. This conceptualization, we contend, leads to unnecessary and unjustifiable theoretical inconsistencies concerning the broader topic of the relationship between human agency and religious texts. We conclude by suggesting that the above mentioned Israeli discourse teaches us less about what Islam and Muslims ‘really are’ than it does about the Israeli self-idealized image as members of a secular western society and the desires and anxieties this image expresses and represses. Keywords Islam, Israeli elites, representation, Muslims, political conduct ‘It is perhaps a measure of the potency of the imaginary Islam as it is conceived in mediatic representation and according to the spontaneous philosophy of “experts”, academics included’, complains Aziz Al-Azmeh: that this elementary contention needs to be defended at a time like ours. We can surely assume that among the permanent acquisitions of the social and human sciences is the realization that ideological and other forms of collective representation are unthinkable without internal change and structural bearing. And it is a fact that this acquisition is almost invariably put to use in the study of contemporary ideologies, mass movements and other phenomena of European histories and realities. But it is not generally put to use regarding