Terrorism
Inc.: Violence And
Counter-violence (of the Letter)-Part II
By Mustapha Marrouchi
20 June, 2007
Countercurrents.org
Read
Part I
To
turn from the argument I have been making in section one to the speech
given by Pope Benedict XVI, the bile secreted by Martin Amis, and the
diatribe led by Ayaan Hirsi Ali is to be sharply reminded of the point
at issue: From what vantage point could the West label Islam as inferior,
backward, and vengeful? The answer to the question posed here may be
found in the turning point which came as early as the eight century.1
Then as now, the search for a foreign devil has come to rest on Islam,
a religion whose physical proximity and unstilled challenge to the West
seem as diabolical and violent now as they did then. The result is a
transformed view of the social whole, which Benedict XVI, an enlightened
theologian, at least that is what we thought until recently, made worse
by a perverse and reductive speech he gave at the University of Regensburg
in September 2006. Beginning with a question raised by a fourteenth-century
Byzantine emperor to a Persian guest at his winter barracks near Ankara:
“Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new and there you
will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread
by the sword the faith he preached,” the speech could best be
described as a scholarly refutation of the so-called Kantian fallacy–Kant’s
distinction between rational understanding and apprehension of the sublime.2
The problem for those of us who read the text in its entirety is that
the Pope chose not to dispute the emperor’s statement, but to
overlook it voluntarily. For someone who enjoys discussing philosophical
matters with the likes of Jürgen Habermas, a pope who claims to
be an intellectual and a teacher; in fine, un bel esprit, to allow the
emperor to speak with a “startling brusqueness,” but not
to say where he disagreed, nor, for that matter, acknowledge that Christianity
had contributed its share of inhumanity to the world: from the Spanish
Inquisition to the Slave trade, from the Holocaust to dropping atomic
bombs on innocent civilians, is reductive to say the least. The fact
that he did not refute the emperor’s thesis is meant, and indeed
intended, to denigrate and degrade a great religion. For him, the question
of Islam seems to belong where Dante had left it–in the “schismatics”
corner of the Eighth Circle, with Mohammed eternally disemboweled or,
in the words of the medieval poet, “rent from the chin to where
one breaketh wind.”3 In this sense, Benedict XVI may be compared
to St. John of Damascus, the eighth-century saint and last Father of
the Church, who considered Islam to be a Christian heresy.4 After all,
he went so far as to refuse to allow Muslims to pray at a church that
was once a mosque in Córdoba–a decision that can be, at
best, thought of as naive and messianic and, at worst, theologically
irresponsible and indifferent. But such a decision should come as no
surprise to us in that those who know Benedict XVI call his severity
“shyness” when it is, in fact, what I would call “passive-aggressive”
toward the Other: not only Islam is a disorder but also Judaism, Protestantism,
homosexuality, divorce, remarriage–anything that postdates and
rejects the divinity of God is heretical. It is also his belief that
Christian faith is demonstrably “rational” and therefore
superior to the Muslim one.5
This stand is all the more
clear in his conversation with Habermas about reason, religion, and
the “dialectics of secularization.” Habermas has always
maintained that secular morality–morality negotiated in and by
civil society–can, and should, provide humanity with a governing
ethos. Ratzinger, in the course of their exchange, maintained that the
“rational or ethical or religious formula that would embrace the
whole world and unite all persons does not exist; or, at least, it is
unattainable at the present moment.”6 By that definition, almost
any discussion that does not include a shared definition of the rational,
the ethical, or the religious becomes impossible. And it precludes any
attempt at theological dialogue with Islam. A faulty thesis to say the
least in that “theology, being in language, is part of culture”–which
is to say that, if “culture” is open to debate, so is Godship.7
Here, Ratzinger is blinded by his own brand of Eurocentrism: for him,
Europe is Christianity tout court. That more than fifteen million Muslims
live inside its belly is irrelevant. His idea that there is nothing
of him in the Other and nothing of the Other in him smacks of ignorance
and a narrow view of the very idea of culture, let alone Christianity.
There is not just the Greek Logos in Christianity. There has been violence,
irrationality, and literalism. Benedict XVI has never thought that perhaps
what Islam is this century–a beleaguered religion as witness the
dissemination of the Danish paper Jyllands-Posten with its twelve cartoon
drawings of the Prophet as a terrorist, the production of an “Idomeneo”
with a scene in which the severed heads of Jesus, Mohammed, Buddha,
and Poseidon were set on chairs at the Deutsche Oper; and therefore
a religion on the defensive as shown in the resistance movement in Iraq–was
his beloved Christianity for centuries: a purchase on truth, a contempt
for the moral accommodation of the secular (we still remember the philosopher
and scientist Giordano Bruno who was arrested in 1592 in Venice, and
after a seven-year trial was burned at the stake in Rome), a strong
imperative to censure, convert, and multiply; and a belief that Heaven,
and possibly Mother Earth, belong exclusively to Catholicism.8
This is the point at which
we reach the most persistent thesis of all, namely, what Martin Amis
calls “The Age of Horrorism”: an essay haunted by Freud’s
death wish, that better mousetrap of which any self-respecting intellectual
owes it to himself to invent a theory (Freud’s own version having
satisfied nobody). But we also owe it to ourselves to deconstruct everything
that is paradoxical (or perverse) in Amis’s version of violence
(of the letter); for here terrorism has nothing to do with death at
all. Its horror lies in its embodiment as life itself (or martyrdom),
sheer life, indeed, as immortality, and as a curse from which only death
mercifully relieves us–all the operatic overtones of The Flying
Dutchman are of importance here, all the mythic connotations of the
undead, those condemned to live forever in the wilderness are relevant
insofar as they add fuel to the fire of hatred and division between
Islam and Christianity. For Amis, the death drive is what lives inside
us by virtue of our existence as living organisms, a fate that has little
enough to do with our biographical destinies or even our existential
experience: the Thanatos lives through us (“in us what is more
than us”); it is our species-being; and this is why it is preferable
(following the later Lacan) to call it a drive rather than a desire
(to kill the Other who resides in us), and to distinguish the impossible
jouissance it dangles before us from the humdrum desires and velleities
we constantly invent and then either satisfy or substitute.9 As for
jouissance, it is perhaps the central or at least most powerful category
in Amis’s line of argument, a phenomenon capable of projecting
a new theory of violence (of the letter) as much as a new way of looking
at individual subjectivity. But to grasp the implications of the argument
Amis makes in the essay it is best to see jouissance as a relational
concept rather than some isolated “ultimately determining instance”
or named force. In fact, it is the concept of the envy of jouissance
that accounts for collective violence, racism, nationalism, terrorism,
and the like, as much as for the singularities of individual investments,
choices, and obsessions: it offers a new way of building in the whole
dimension of the innocent Other, who, in most cases, is reduced to rubble.10
Indeed, the critique of
horrorism by the darling of postmodernity, the prototypical figure of
the last post, is here shown to be responsive to Islamic history in
ways only too accessible to ideological critique: in its post-9/11attempt
to assimilate the West and the postmodern, Enlightenment and rationality,
honesty and integrity. Amis even makes Westernism itself (and its stylistic
embodiment) into something profoundly English and American. His unmasking
of this ideology of freedom reflects a historical situation in which
late capitalism or globalization seems to allow one to find a position
outside the older national discourse; and in which the now rich tradition
of ideological analysis itself serves as a kind of theoretical accumulation
for some newer heightened or reflexive consciousness of the way in which
history and class struggle intersect. He cannot, of course, be outside
those intersections any more than we can; but his essay testifies to
the way in which a discourse on the specificity of Islam as a “total
system” belongs to his own culture and theoretical preoccupations,
and not to some exotic margin or linguistic footnote. For this take
on Islam, he relies on an old maxim, the “paradigm shift,”
coined sometime ago by Thomas Kuhn, whose exemplars are meant to guide
research scientists in their work, for although, unlike rules, they
are specific in content, they are general in import.11 Amis, on the
other hand, goes on to tell us about what he calls
The stout self-sufficiency
or, if you prefer, the extreme incuriosity of Islamic culture [which]
has been much remarked. Present-day Spain translates as many books into
Spanish, annually, as the Arab world has translated into Arabic in the
past 1,100 years. And the late-medieval powers barely noticed the existence
of the West until it started losing battles to it. The tradition of
intellectual autarky was so robust that Islam remained indifferent even
to readily available and obviously useful innovations, including, incredibly,
the wheel. The wheel, as we know, makes things easier to roll.12
He quotes his guru, Bernard
Lewis, as saying the wheel “also makes things easier to steal”
(i.e. the Muslim is a thief). This is as good as it gets because with
the rest of the essay, we reach the theoretical heart of Amis’s
historicist investigation into Islam and Islamism. The latter is a category
in which he seems to have had a lifelong interest, having invented a
character named Ayed, “a diminutive Islamist terrorist who plies
his trade in Waziristan, the rugged northern borderland where Osama
bin Laden is still rumored to lurk.”13 In many ways, Ayed reminds
us of another fictitious terrorist, namely, Ahmad Ashmawy Mulloy, spawned
by John Updike in his novel, Terrorist. Mulloy is a young man with no
friends, no siblings, an absent father and a mother he barely sees.
Unlike Ayed, however, he is someone who is curious, and has done his
research diligently, rather than someone for whom it is the bedrock
of his most deeply held beliefs.14 Ayed, on the other hand, is clearly
enough himself (literally) one of those rabid Islamists modeled on Sayyid
Qutb, the godfather of al-Ikhwan, (The Muslim Brotherhood). Amis calls
him “my diminutive terrorist,” who “is not a virgin
(or Joseph, as Christians say).”15 For Amis, Ayed has no Western
equivalent and this take gives him carte blanche to argue for the existence
of precisely that East/West gap on which various culturalisms thrive.
Indeed, we can ourselves only convey it negatively: thus, it is not
nothingness, but it is not something either, except that it stems from
the Islamic world.
Even so, can the notion
of rationality which has everywhere in the West begun to supplant the
old Aristotelian conceptions of substance be of any use here? Not for
Amis, apparently, for whom rationality scarcely conveys the negative
or destructive components of cluster bombs dropped from above on innocent
civilians, who are the Goebbels of Bush’s regime; a regime associated
with rubble even though by now the latter have become the negation of
the negation: calling scenes of ruins to mind has itself faded, the
very act becoming a sort of ruin in itself. In this way, Westernism
and/or Islamism designates a primordial unity of time and space which
we can only mystically approximate. Amis himself fears for the safety
of his daughter: “. . . a slight little blond with big brown eyes
and a quavery voice” while he preaches at the “Palestinian
mother . . . to cease to marvel at the unhinging rigor of Israeli oppression,
and to start to marvel at the power of an entrenched and emulous ideology,
and a cult of death.”16 Never mind the use of DIME (Dense Inert
Metal Explosive) and micro-shrapnel made of highly enriched carbon,
tungsten, aluminum, and copper that the Israeli army uses on a daily
basis to kill and maim innocent civilians whose only mistake is to claim
a watán (homeland) so that they can live in peace and dignity.
For Amis, there is no immorality in such acts. Never mind too six decades
of Israeli occupation and humiliation, never mind the sheer abuse of
International law, never mind the arrogance and anti-humanism of the
Israeli government, never mind the concentration camp that is Gaza.
What matters to him is to further typecast the Arab and Islam while
quoting his other guru, the brilliant but bigoted V.S. Naipaul, who
keeps ranting about Islam as the end of civilization as “we”
in the West know it.17 Islam is anti-human, anti-democratic, anti-Semitic,
anti-rational.
The category Enlightenment
à la Amis then echoes an archaic or sacred concept, that of the
niwa, to borrow a concept from Japanese mythology, or empty bounded
space which awaits the visitation of the gods: a profoundly ambiguous
place which can either mean Entzauberung–the death or disappearance
of the divine or of meaning itself–or the promise of its reappearance
(a promise never invalidated by its turning out to be a broken one).
In this way, the ma: another Japanese concept, which means the space
in between things that exist next to each other, say, Islam and the
West; then comes to mean an interstice between beliefs or chasm; would
not so much fall into the range of contemporary appeals to the mythic
nor betray an filiation with some Heideggerian or etymological return
to primordial social experience. Rather, it could also account as one
of those moments in which the groping for new concepts and new categories
of a historically original experience of spatiality in late capitalism,
in globalization and postmodernity, intersects with a form from the
past and recognizes in it a possible response to its own new needs and
urgencies. The new category must still be marked with Otherness, since
we do not really have it yet concretely; it remains part of a utopian
language of which we glimpse only the external face of its articulation
and expressiveness. But that Otherness (the Palestinian mother whose
son blows up himself out of desperation because he has been “incarcerated”
by a ruthless occupier since birth, must continue to live under occupation
as if it were her destiny) is no longer national, cultural, racial or
ethnic; for in globalization Islam no longer exists in the old national
or cultural way. It is an ideology and therefore worldly. This reality,
Amis, fails to understand, and until he does, his quasi-culturalism
is bound to remain one of the short-sighted philosophical issues in
the age of postmodern modernity: its debate with universalism cannot
be completely subsumed under the polemics that continue to swirl around
the human rights agenda that turns currently on the question of freedom
of expression in a West eager to celebrate its failures at the rendez-vous
of the “unknown knowns,”: things we do not know that we
know, which is precisely the Freudian unconscious, the “knowledge
which doesn’t know itself” as Lacan perceptively put it.18
But even those juridical issues, which involve physical existence and
suffering, imperceptibly find themselves diverted into the questions
of religion and freedom, which are by no means so immediate or so existential.
Meanwhile, the character
of the oppositions at war here changes dramatically as one moves from
one level or context to another: the natural law universalism of Habermas,
which can embody an Enlightenment stance against superstition and tyranny,
suddenly looks rather different when it is realized that it is the US,
a wealthy commercial and non-national society without any indigenous
culture of its own, except the native one or what remains of it, which
seeks to embody the new global values and institutions (such as the
constitution and “democracy”) with universal human nature
on a world scale. At this point, people who feel that culturalism remains
an alibi for exoticizing and marginalizing Islamic cultures and societies
as such might be tempted to recommend a healthy dose of it as therapy
for what is either hypocritical or brutally cynical, if not simply blind
and self-absorbed, in American thinking about the great outside world
beyond those apparently dismally protected by US borders. At which stage,
Amis declares:
In July 2005 I flew from
Montevideo to New York–and from winter to summer–with my
six-year-old daughter and her eight-year-old sister. I drank a beer
as I stood in the check-in queue, a practice not frowned on at Carrasco
(though it would certainly raise eyebrows at, say, the dedicated Hajj
terminal in Tehran’s Mehrabad); then we proceeded to Security.
Now I know some six-year-old girls can look pretty suspicious; but my
youngest daughter isn’t like that. . . . Nevertheless, I stood
for half an hour at the counter while the official methodically and
solemnly searched her carry-on rucksack–staring shrewdly at each
story-tape and crayon, palpating the length of all four limbs of her
fluffy duck.
There ought to be a better
word than boredom for the trance of inanition that wove its way through
me. I wanted to say something like, “Even Islamists have not yet
started to blow up their own families on airplanes. So please desist
until they do. Oh, yeah: and stick to people who look like they’re
from the Middle East.”19 [Emphasis added]
This is the view of someone
who calls himself a humanist in luck; a humanist for whom racial profiling
is fine as long as you do not include “me” because “I
am a free-born, blued-eyed, Englishman.” Whether Amis asked himself
the question how can the Absolute be relative and how can it be historicized
is irrelevant insofar as it does not even exist for him. After all,
cultural relativism, or typecasting for that matter, is always a little
easier to profess and to defend, particularly in our current anti-Enlightenment,
multi-cultural, and post-national situation, in which it seems to let
the various cultures simply “be in their being,” as Heidegger
liked to say.20 But this is to reckon without that “giant sucking
sound” with which all these authentic cultures are in the process
of disappearing into the global standardization of late capitalism,
of commercialization, commodification, and consumerism–the three
“c”s, as Fredric Jameson aptly named them, of that Disneyfication
which is the hallmark of the new world system. This, however, is when
the polemics and the oppositions on which they are based suddenly vanish,
since this new global standardization has no opposite number any longer:
the days and nights of the struggle between Westernizers and the Traditionalists
are long gone, no one believes in Modernism or its high culture any
longer, all the formerly authentic sub-group cultures have become postmodern
simulacra, even when they kill people. At this point, the idea of religion
is resuscitated, to Nietzsche’s disappointment I am sure; yet
only Islam remains a possible example of it, even though 80 per cent
of the American population claim to be believers (unfortunately for
this claim, they are also consumers). Indeed, one suspects that even
the prestige of Islam, now taken to be the embodiment of religion as
such, is based on some fundamental misunderstanding about “belief,”
a category of Otherness always projected onto other people.
To return to Amis is to
be reminded of his fictionalized regurgitation of the horror, blood,
defacement, and defilement that infect the language he uses to describe
the “war” on Islamist terrorism–a subject that has
lately got the better of him in that he seems, publicly at least, to
have been thinking about little else. “They’re also gaining
on us demographically at a huge rate,” he said in an interview.
“A quarter of humanity now and by 2025 they’ll be a third.
Italy’s down to 1.1 child per woman. We’re just going to
be outnumbered.” Amis does not take his usual care to predicate
his pronouns here–who are “they” and who are “we”?–but
the message is clear: something must be done. He goes on:
There’s a definite
urge–don’t you have it?–to say, “The Muslim
Community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order.”
What sort of suffering? Not letting them travel. Deportation–further
down the road. Curtailing of freedoms. Strip-searching people who look
like they’re from the Middle East or from Pakistan. . . . Discriminatory
stuff, until it hurts the whole community and they start getting tough
with their children. They hate us for letting our children have sex
and take drugs–well, they’ve got to stop their children
killing people. It’s a huge dereliction on their part. I suppose
they justify it on the grounds that they have suffered from state terrorism
in the past, but I don’t think that’s wholly irrational.
It’s their own past they’re pissed off about; their great
decline. It’s also masculinity, isn’t it?21
This alarming tirade–“strip-searching,”
“discriminatory stuff”– descends into confusion in
its latter part, in addressing the Islamists’ concerns: “I
suppose they justify it,” Amis says, “but I don’t
think that’s wholly irrational.” As Daniel Soar has brilliantly
argued, the conjunction here ought to be an “and,” unless
the Times has otherwise mistranscribed Amis’s speech–“irrational”
for “rational”–in which case what he is saying is
that “they” have suffered and “they” accordingly
inflict suffering on others, but that he does not think that this response
of theirs is wholly rational. Rational, though, is partly what terrorism
is: in the sense that it doles out a small measure of the same medicine
the great powers trade in.22 No wonder that the people who brought us
the disaster in Iraq are so fond of it. Amis, who never thought that
Hammas might be less popular if Palestinians were less miserable, must
have been delusional.
Having decided that “terrorism”
was too meager a term to encompass the world post-9/11, he vents more
anger: “All religions, unsurprisingly, have their terrorists,”
he observes, “Christian, Jewish, Hindu, even Buddhist. But we
are not hearing from those religions. We are hearing from Islam.”
That, with its weighty pause, is a nicely macho bit of pulpit proselytizing,
but elsewhere in “The Age of Horrorism” he is less sure
of his footing. “It’s time,” he declares, “to
stop asking, too ‘rationally,’ why terrorism happens: ‘We
are not dealing in reasons because we are not dealing in reason.”
But then he contradicts himself: there is in fact one “rational
response,” which, he says, is an “unvarying factory siren
of unanimous disgust.”23 What that siren has to do with free-thinking
anti-fascism is not clear. Amis thinks he believes in reason, in the
soft liberal universalist sense: be good to women, hold free elections,
drink plenty of booze. But he is consistently unreasonable toward Islam.
That words fail him here–when carefully attended-to words were
once his most reliable friends–is evidence of the strength of
his feeling. This has never happened to him before. Something has changed.
Amis came to Islamofascism late. When the Iraq war began, in March 2003,
he was writing in the Guardian about the causes of the current crisis,
from a realist perspective. The US, he said, was targeting Saddam because
he had no WMD, or not many: “The Pentagon must be more or less
convinced that Saddam’s WMD are under a certain critical number.
Otherwise it couldn’t attack him.”24 He wrote, too, of the
causes of anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism in the Islamic world: a “longstanding
but increasingly dynamic loathing” in the Middle East of the single
remaining superpower is “exacerbated by America’s relationship
with Israel–a relationship that many in the West, this writer
included, find unnatural.”25 Also unnatural, he felt, was the
influence of the Israel lobby on the Bush administration, whose born-again
contingent welcomed the lobby’s message. The Guardian essay–with
its measured emphasis on cause and effect and the realities of state
power–was a form Amis soon abandoned. It may not be a coincidence
that he wrote it at a time when he and his friend Christopher Hitchens
were not speaking, or so the papers said: Hitchens objected to a chapter
in Koba the Dread that accused him of collusion with Stalinist crimes.
Perhaps, with the Hitch away, Amis’s mind was momentarily open
to other influences. But their differences were apparently soon mended,
and he began to think about how–fictionally–he could write
his way into Islamism, properly understood.26
For Amis, “Islam is
a total system, and like all such it is eerily amenable to satire. But
with Islamism, with total malignancy, with total terror and total boredom,
irony, even militant irony (which is what satire is), merely shrivels
and dies.”27 Satire as militant irony is a formulation that was
invented by Northrop Frye, another systematizing preacher; and Frye’s
Anatomy of Criticism is a model that Amis has always tried to emulate.
The collected grotesques that animate all his novels–from the
scabrous adolescent narrator of The Rachel Papers to the leeches and
locusts of House of Meetings–belong in Frye’s fourth and
final mythic category, “winter,” which stipulates monsters
for the apocalypse. But, here as elsewhere, Amis misreads Frye: satire
is “militant” not because it is irony with cannons blazing
but because it is a distinct genre with its own characteristics and
distinguishable moral norms.28 If Amis now finds satire inconceivable
it is because he has left all norms behind. His take on irony “shrivels
and dies”: small wonder, since he has forgotten that irony depends
on a certain distance, without which it can only collapse. Even so,
Amis has always been interested in anatomizing hatred–the Jew-hating
of Time’s Arrow, the class detesting of London Fields, the self-loathing
of Money–but in trying to address Islamofascism his resources
fail him. He hates so much that he cannot begin to see what it is that
the haters hate. He used to have a means of rebutting a vicious argument:
a single rhetorical flourish, and the deed was done. In his memoir,
Experience, he says in passing of someone that he “has succumbed
to the miserably trite belief system of schizophrenia. And it is a system,
a wretched little rhombus: Jews, spies, aliens, electricity. . . .”29
That dismissive ellipsis is one way of dealing with anti-Semitism: as
just another form of madness. One benefit of the Amisian lightly ironizing
put-down was to deny a hatred the sustenance it gains from being taken
seriously. But recently Amis has lost his lightness, has become deadly
serious. It is possible to watch the transition in action. In Experience,
he tells an anecdote about a visit to Jerusalem: “Once, in the
Arab Quarter, I had a mild altercation with one of the gatekeepers of
the Holy Mosque, and I saw in his eyes the assertion that he could do
anything to me, to my wife, to my children, to my mother, and that this
would only validate his rectitude. Humankind, or I myself, cannot bear
very much religion.”30 He might be reading too much in the eyes
of the gatekeeper but at least he does it amusingly. That emphatic “anything”
is another ellipsis: Amis does not care to imagine the tortures his
gatekeeper might inflict because that would be to give his thinking
more weight than he can presently bear. In “The Age of Horrorism,”
though, he revisits the same scene:
I will never forget the look
on the gatekeeper’s face, at the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem,
when I suggested, perhaps rather airily, that he skip some calendric
prohibition and let me in anyway. His expression, previously cordial
and cold, became a mask; and the mask was saying that killing me, my
wife and my children was something for which he now had warrant. I knew
then that the phrase “deeply religious” was a grave abuse
of that adverb. Something isn’t deep just because it’s all
that is there; it is more like a varnish on a vacuum. Millennial Islamism
is an ideology superimposed upon a religion–illusion upon illusion.
It is not merely violent in tendency. Violence is all that is there.31
Amis’s mother has disappeared
from the list of intended targets–mentions of mothers can be comic–and
the threat has become specific: this is killing we are talking about.
In Experience Amis imparted nothing about the gatekeeper, or why he
might think the way he does (if he does); now he is denying the possibility
of there being any reason at all for the gatekeeper’s hatred:
his “mask” is an effect without a cause. Amis’s “varnish
on a vacuum” is a way of sealing an absence of explanation, wrapping
it up, so to speak. Once it has been so packaged–a handy, pocket-seized,
neatly labeled black hole–he can make it his subject, or make
it his message. The trouble is that without taking cause and effect
into account, a novelist cannot write a novel; or, can he?32
It is not just the continuity
in wording: with his veneer of English sophistication and perfect readiness
never to doubt what he is saying, Amis has become an appropriate participant
in the post-September “violence of the letter,” reshaping
his crude simplifications in essays and books as well as television
shows. It has never occurred to him that his jowly presence as a man
of letters is contrary to what the rest of the world thinks, that the
subject/object of his verbal aggression constitutes precisely that gap
or inner distance which he theorizes in his narrative, and which features
the innocent civilians (including himself) whom the US government loves
to defend. Amis also falls short of noting how the US administration
perpetuates violence, a characteristic behavior of its interventionism
in the world: Philippines, Vietnam, Korea, Chile, Cyprus, Grenada, Panama,
Iran, Lebanon, Somalia, Libya, Cuba, the Philippines, Haiti, Afghanistan,
Iraq, the list goes on, or how it increases daily in viciousness as
the spurious excuse of “fighting terrorism” serves to legitimize
every case of torture, murder, censorship, deportation, illegal detention,
collective punishment, closure of schools and universities.33 The point
to be made is that such episodes are almost completely swept off the
record by the righteous enthusiasm for deploring African, Arab, Muslim
“terrorism.” In this eagerness a supporting role is played
by the accredited experts on the Muslim world. Note here how, unlike
those scholars of Latin America and Asia whose naivete leads them to
express solidarity with the peoples they study, the guild of Africa
seems to have produced only the likes of the utterly ninth-rate Ayaan
Hirsi Ali, Abdelwahab Meddeb, and Malek Chebel, each of whom contributes
a slice of mendacity to the smorgasbord of daily life.34 Far from offering
insights about their area of specialization (which provides them with
a living) that might promote understanding, sympathy or compassion,
these guns-for-hire assure us that Islam is indeed a sick patient waiting
to be examined by European and American doctors in the ward. So untoward
and humanly unacceptable is this position that Christopher Hitchens
refused to recognize it in his review of The Caged Virgin–a memoir
of sorts by Ayaan Hirsi Ali, former member of Al-Ikhwan, a victim whose
body bears the trace of a milah (excision) performed by the female triangle
back home in Somalia; a woman who says she subscribes to Western values
and is devoted to defending her chosen cause, namely, that Islam is
a backward religion; a religion of violence and psychosis. Her narrative
lends her an air of authority not enjoyed by non-African polemicists
like Daniel Pipes and Martin Kramer.
Still, Hirsi Ali is no gadfly.
She has, in fact, taken shape and achieved distinctness as the exemplary
female figure from the Third World masquerading as Mademoiselle Je Sais
Tout in a morally bankrupt constituency; someone who can be relied on
always to tell the truth about Islam, its people, and its ideas. In
this, she draws inspiration from her maître à penser, the
ethnocentric John Stuart Mill, whose thesis about the “lesser
people” consigned the periphery from which she comes from to a
purgatory, in which, in different concentric circles, it has been waiting
or “developing” ever since. The note is perfectly struck
in the brilliantly constructed Provincialising Europe by Dipesh Chakrabarty,
who writes: “Historicism--and even the modern, European idea of
history--one might say, came to non-European peoples in the 19th century
as somebody's way of saying 'not yet' to somebody else” (2004:
56). To illustrate what he means, Chakrabarty turns to Mill’s
On Liberty and On Representative Government–“both of which,”
he says, “proclaimed self-rule as the highest form of government
and yet argued against giving Indians or Africans self-rule.”
He then goes on to add:
According to Mill, Indians
or Africans were not yet civilized enough to rule themselves. Some historical
time of development and civilization (colonial rule and education, to
be precise) had to elapse before they could be considered prepared for
such a task. Mill’s historicist argument thus consigned Indians,
Africans and other “rude” nations to an imaginary waiting-room
of history (Ibid., 79).
Hirsi Ali would render tremendous
service to herself were she to read Mill critically instead of blindly
quoting from his “On the Subjection of Women.”35 After all,
Mill did not have her or any other woman and/or man for that matter
from the so-called Third World in mind when he wrote his essay, which
was meant solely for European men, given the rate of literacy at the
time. The same goes for her other intellectual guide, namely, Voltaire
whose Textes sur l’Orient, La Princesse de Baylone, and Le Phanatisme
ou Mahomet le prophète degrade Muslims and their prophet in a
fixed and inflexible way. Her other favorite source is David Pryce-Jones,
senior editor of the National Review, an influential publication in
US conservative parlance.36 What Hirsi Ali fails to note is that the
belief that the malleable is always preferable to the immovable is a
postmodern cliché. There is a good deal about human history which
ought not to alter (educating our children, for example), and quite
a lot of change which is deeply undesirable. Change and permanence are
not related to each other as enlightenment to fanaticism. In any case,
all genuine enlightenments respect tradition. They respect among other
things the tradition of resistance to typecasting, rather than the tradition
of promoting it the way Hirsi Ali, who says she has become a “Westerner,”
does, forgetting that history did not all begin with modern-day liberal
pluralism. One would like to ask her where were Mill and Voltaire during
slavery–a time when her people were treated worse than chattels.
Blinded by her own ignorance, she continues to be victimized, except
that this time the invagination is double: she is after all free of
any romantic moonshine about the moral claims of the primitive, and
she does this with the full knowledge in her of “Western”
condescension toward a besieged religion. (Consider the treatment of
Islam in Europe alone and the case will be clear enough).37
There is very little pleasure
and only a very little affection recorded in Infidel. Its funny moments
are at the expanse of Muslims who are “wogs” as seen by
Hirsi Ali’s Western readers, potential fanatics and terrorists,
who cannot spell, be coherent, sound right to a worldly-wise, somewhat
jaded judge from the West. “In a community of over 1.2 billion
faithful,” she pontificates, “knowledge, progress and prosperity
are not primary aspirations”; “The cultural expressions
of the majority of Muslims are still at the pre-modern stage of development”;
“Human curiosity in Muslims has been curtailed.”38 The pity
of it is that the memoir is already considered a summa, or better still,
a comprehensive treatise on Islam. Never mind the suffering and mutilation
of so many Muslims across the globe, never mind too the disfiguration
of their religion. For now, Ali is busy lining her pockets with gold
following the publication of her rudimentary and reductive objet (petit
o). The irony is that no one would write a similar kind of book about
Christianity or Judaism. Islam, on the other hand, is fair game, even
though the expert may not know much about the subject as is the case
with Hirsi Ali, whose quasi-luminous narrative, a blend of Naipaulian
clichés about Muslim pathologies and a misreading of al-Qur’an,
is saturated with self-hatred and hostility toward Muslims wherever
they are. On this score, she invites comparison with Fouad Ajami, another
immigré intellectual who achieved extraordinary prominence as
a champion of scorn.39 Like Ajami, she has a suave television demeanor,
a gravitas-lending accent, an instinctive solicitude for the imperatives
of power, and a cool disdain for the weak and vulnerable. And just as
Ajami cozied up to Bernard Lewis who went so far as to recommend him
for the prestigious MacArthur “genius” scholarship which
he got in 1982 even though he was and remains a mediocre scholar, so
has Hirsi Ali attached herself to such powerful patrons as Christopher
Hitchens, Stephen Schwartz, and William Kristol. The timing of her arrival
in the US which is “at war” could not be more perfect in
that she, another trusted voice, is needed to shoulder the task of typecasting
the Other who happens to be the Arab this time, although it could be
the Chinese tomorrow.
Ali was born in Somalia
into a poor Muslim family, and left for Canada to marry a man she had
never met, let alone loved. Upon arriving in Europe, she changed her
course of action: she disavowed her past by conning the Dutch Government
into accepting that she was a genuine refugee, which it did with open
arms. Talk about what Jacques Derrida shrewdly called “Step of
Hospitality/No Hospitality,” by which he meant hospitality as
a question of what arrives at the borders, in the initial surprise of
contact with an Other, a stranger, a foreigner. It is no exaggeration
to say that in lying to her host, Hirsi Ali made a mockery of the act
of hospitality, of the contours of proximity, that unbearable orb of
intimacy that Derrida speaks about with flair in Of Hospitality.40 While
in Holland, she went to school, earned a degree in political science,
did social work among immigrant Muslim women, and entered politics.
She even ran for a seat in Parliament, got elected, and opposed any
Dutch appeasement of radical Islam. Her crusade against Islam led her
from one influential circle to another until she met the fair Theo van
Gogh with whom she collaborated on Submission: Part One, a short TV
film featuring women who described their abuse by Muslim men while revealing
Qur’anic verses written on their bodies. As a result, van Gogh
was murdered by Mohammed Bouyeri, a young fanatic who acted out of religious
conviction. He left a letter stabbed to the chest of his victim, promising
that Hirsi Ali would be next. It was at this time that her neighbors,
who feared for their lives, wanted her evicted. Chose promise, chose
due! In the Spring of 2006, the Dutch immigration minister, Rita Verdonk,
she considered an ally, revoked her Dutch citizenship, after a Dutch
television report had revealed that she had cheated on her original
application for asylum in the Netherlands in 1992. Faced with the fact,
Hirsi Ali, by now a casualty of history, made her exit: she abandoned
Europe for the right-wing conservative think-tank, the American Enterprise
Institute, where she was received with fanfare by Mullahs David Frum
and Richard Perle among other neocons. In one sense, we may be permitted
to feel disgust at her character. In another, we are revolted and nauseated
by her crude typecasting of all Muslims and most liberals. There is
a third sense in which our doubts about the neocon/theocon company she
keeps and the misgivings about a geopolitics of religious profiling–of
borders closed except to mandarins, cheaters, and virgins like herself,
are confirmed. Nor are we persuaded that Western secular ideas of tolerance,
forgiveness, and respect are as jellyfish as her quick but simplistic
mind imagines them to be. It takes quite a spin to see an effect of
negativity on Islam and Muslims. From dismay at specific Islamic regimes
and cultural practices (such as honor killings, excision, submission),
Hirsi Ali graduated to a general disdain for al-Qur’an: “It
spreads a culture that is brutal,” she writes, “bigoted,
fixated on controlling women” and the Prophet whom Maxime Rodinson
says was a combination of Charlemagne and Jesus Christ, “[b]y
adhering to His rules of what is permitted and what is forbidden, Muslims
suppressed the freedom to think for ourselves and to act as we chose.
We froze the moral outlook of billions of people into the mind-set of
the Arab desert in the seventh century.”41 Ali may be right in
her latter claim, but one wishes she could consolidate her argument
with some measure of scientific evidence; for whereas Rodinson understood
what Islam means, Ali tells us (irrelevantly) that she is filled with
loathing and aversion to it and that she is a victim of a terrorist
conspiracy. For her, Mohammed is the begetter of an anti-Jewish religion,
one laced with violence and paranoia. She does not directly quote one
Muslim source on the Prophet; just imagine a book published in the US
on Jesus or Moses that makes no use of a single Christian or Judaic
authority.
Anyone can curse Islam and
many have done so. Think of al-Ghazali, al-Maari, Taha Hussein, al-Massadi,
Naguib Mahfouz, Fatima Mernissi, Nawal el-Saadaoui, Salman Rushdie,
Fawzia Afzal-Khan, Siham Bensedrine, Taslima Nasrin, Assia Djebar, to
name but a few of the better known scholars who challenged its orthodoxy.
But to do it crudely and without insight smacks of sheer ignorance.
We may put this another way by saying that in disfiguring a great religion
the way Hirsi Ali has can lead to only one conclusion: she has abused
the very concepts of Humanism and Enlightenment she is said to have
espoused, and in doing so, she stands for what V.S. Naipaul, a mind
so fine yet so distorted when it comes to Islam, aptly called “a
half-made individual” whose sad desire and perversion to suppress
her origins has led her to deliberately repudiate her tur’ath
(heritage) and declare her capacity for denial. It has also driven her
to embrace prevailing Western values and pour scorn on all those with
whom she does not wish to be identified, people of Muslim faith. Even
so, there is something eerie about reading The Caged Virgin, a devil
theory of Islam, in that each sentence in the narrative shows a naive
identification with a belligerent West as witness the war in Iraq, the
genocide in Palestine where people are reduced to live in cages and
ghettos, the slaughter in Afghanistan, the brutality sans pareil in
Guantánamo. On this view, Hirsi Ali is the example par excellence
of what Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak termed the native informant: a mouthpiece
for extreme conservative and nationalist views in America–hers
is a position usually associated with the overtly wicked genies of Orientalism:
Bernard Lewis, Fouad Ajami, Martin Kramer, among several others. She
has no room or sympathy for so many of the marginalized peoples of Islam–particularly
those with whom she shares a background–and uses her perceived
membership in both the worlds of the privileged and the underprivileged
as authorization for her distorted views. Her prose is especially loathsome
because of her cruel and cynical descriptions of Mohammed, an orphan
who came from a poor family, a man who stood for tolerance and justice;
in fine, a begetter of an extraordinary text. For unlike Christianity
or Judaism, Islam is the product of al-Qur’an, a unique event
in time and space: the literal descent into worldliness of a narrative,
as well as its language and form, are to be viewed as stable and complete.42
Hirsi Ali blames underdeveloped
Muslim women for their backwardness rather than inquiring into the historical
roots of the problems that led to the predicament they find themselves
in today. “She seems far interested in indicting Islam than helping
damaged women (like herself),” Maria Golia perceptively writes,
whose horror stories she
conveniently trots out whenever she needs to bludgeon home a broadsided
point. Convinced that Muslims are incapable of the self-criticism required
to root out gender discrimination and other injustices, she overlooks
longstanding calls for political and social reform, and the fact that
Muslim women today are at the forefront of campaigns for fresh interpretations
of Islamic jurisprudence. She is at her most pretentious when appointing
herself spokesperson for Muslim women “unable to speak for themselves,”
while ignoring the extensive scholarship, field studies and literature
produced by them.43
True, insofar as Western
readers who think of Hirsi Ali as a “Westerner,” which she
is not, frequently mistake her attitudes for an objective viewpoint.
Those she attacks in print are powerless and cannot fight back–this
may be the reason why many of us born in the same faith who lead a secular
life find her Olympian disdain quite repulsive. One can, of course,
read Islam and/or al-Qur’an against the grain. Many have done
so including myself. But one cannot go so far as to offend so many of
the earth’s people by degrading their sensibilities in the name
of freedom of speech. After all, many Muslims have only Islam to lean
on, and that is plenty for them. It would be interesting to see how
the so-called Enlightened West reacts if Hirsi Ali were to denounce
Israel for its inhumane treatment of Palestinians or criticize its lobby
the way John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt did in their brilliant essay,
“The Israel Lobby,” 44 or oppose US genocidal foreign policy
in Iraq and Afghanistan, or speak against the brutal treatment of prisoners
in Guantánamo. If this sounds too extreme, I need only remind
her of the recent vilification Jimmy Carter, who did more than anyone
else to bring peace to the Middle East, was subjected to following the
publication of his book, Israel, Peace Not Apartheid, which is a plea
for coming to a solution that will permit both Israelis and Palestinians
to live side by side in peace with and respect for each other. He was
not only disfigured and dehumanized but also accused of being a pathological
liar and a cheat, a deranged demagogue and schitzophrenic, even if his
book is a real tour de force in the ocean of shabby screeds about peace
out there. The irony is that if you speak against Israel you are either
labeled anti-Semitic or mentally retarded. And if you speak about justice
for Palestine, well, you may as well fuck off and die!
Hirsi Ali has propagated
Islamophobic views for years, and sought historical and political justification
for doing so. Her premise, which she writes repeatedly, is: “By
our [note the misappropriation of the possessive pronoun] Western standards,
Mohammed is a perverse man. A tyrant. If you don’t do as he says,
you will end up in hell. That reminds me of those megalomaniac rulers,
bin Laden, Khomeini, Saddam . . . You are shocked to hear me say these
things . . . you forget where I am from. I used to be a Muslim; I know
what I’m talking about.”45 To say that we are “shocked”
by her “political and linguistic evil” is to be reminded
of Rousseau’s Emile’s toy, which seems to favor rather the
exploitation than the enlightenment of mankind. It is in this sense
that her writing and/or saying allies itself with falsehood: Islam represents
hysteria, tyranny, and a keen sense of revenge. The problem with this
thesis is that it mistakes Islam for the interpretation of Islam. Women
are no more equal in Christian and/or Jewish theology and history, and
yet the equality Western women currently have has developed out of a
Christian cultural past Hirsi Ali seems to ignore. In this sense, Christianity
and Judaism have not changed, but the interpretation of both has. Whether
Islam will follow the same trajectory remains to be seen, but if it
does not, it will not be because of what is wrong with Islam but because
of what its interpreters will say and do. For now, at least, some of
her readers may take her as the authoritative voice on Islam when in
fact she is a hatemonger parading in iron pants. Indeed, she is no different
from Osama bin Laden, a cross between a medieval theologian and twenty-first
century CEO, in that her attempt to outline the horrors Muslim women
are often subjected to is corrupt and self-serving. Hers is another
visible bullet aimed at Muslims at a time when they are seen with suspicion
at every turn. Her pseudo-scholarship is symptomatic of the whole deformation
of mind and language induced by the question of “terrorism.”
She is so ideologically infected with the antinomian view that, on the
one hand, no respectable scholar can pronounce racist things and, on
the other, one can say anything about Islam. That a debauched neocon
such as the pathologically monolingual Christopher Hitchens, who describes
her as an “arresting and hypnotizing beauty,”46 should come
to her defense is hardly a surprise in that he himself has of late become
an expert on Iraq and Islam following a few trips to that wounded country.
“I, for one, do not speak or read Arabic,” he confessed,
“and have made only five, relatively short, visits to Iraq. But
I am willing to bet that I know more about Mesopotamia than Saddam Hussein
ever knew about England, France, or the US.”47 A pretentious attitude
that reminds us of Edgar Allan Poe who wrote: “A little learning
is a dangerous thing.” His rallying to her putrid cause is by
now reckless with the confidence inspired by having Slate and Vanity
Fair more or less at his disposal. Moreover, Hitchens has a tendency
to serve up one falsehood or half-truth after another: Islam, he tells
us, is a political religion, a unique thing. Whereas, he intones, Jesus
sacrificed himself on the cross and Moses died before he entered the
Promised Land, Mohammed (a clever fellow) founded a state and governed
it.48 Those three millennial facts alone are supposed to have determined
the whole of Christian, Jewish, and Muslim history and culture ever
since. Never mind that Jewish and Christian leaders have–to this
day–founded and governed states, or that Jews and Christians (quite
ignoring the charity of Christ or the misfortunes of Moses) fought battles
in the name of Christianity and Judaism that were as bloody as anyone
else’s. What matters, Hitchens says, is that at the present time
there is the “reassertion of this association of politics and
Islam,” what he calls “Islamofascism,” as if it is
not clear that the US is perhaps the most perfect coincidence of religion
and politics in the contemporary world, or that George Bush and Pat
Robinson time and again connect religion and politics. No, not at all;
it is only Muslims, unregenerate combiners, like their founder, of politics
and religion, who are guilty of this atavism. It can make you quite
angry to read such nonsense.
Perhaps Hitchens’s
most consistent failing as a C-grade scholar of Islam is that he only
makes connections and offers analyses of matters that suit his thesis
about the militant, hateful quality of Islamism. I have little quarrel
with the general view that the Muslim world is in a dreadful state,
and have said so repeatedly for the past decade. But he barely registers
the existence of a determined anti-Muslim US policy. He plays fast and
loose with fact too. Take the bombing of the pharmaceutical factory
in Khartoum (Sudan) in August 1998. “Self-defense.” That
is the principle invoked by the US to justify attacking “terrorist
training camps.” In an international system in which states are
challenging the law of the jungle, the State Department needed a legal
cover for the raids which violated the sovereignty of several states
in the Horn of Africa. So it invoked Article 51 of the United Nations
Charter. But the article only provides for the use of “self-defense”
in the case of an “armed attack . . . until the Security Council
has taken measures necessary to maintain international peace and security.”49
Did the US really defend itself from “an armed attack” while
waiting for the Security Council to take the “necessary measures”?
It seems not. Indeed, a number of American officials have pointed out
that the raids marked a turning point in Washington’s strategy:
the US no longer feels constrained to seek an international consensus
or the backing of the UN. As one official remarked: “We’re
in the deterrence business . . . [and it] is not based on legal niceties
or delay.”50 Forget international law. Forget human decency. Forget
neighborly love. After all, the sheriff never asks permission to shoot
a bandit–or does he?
These warlike policies are
based on crude analogies and the politics of fear. One such analogy
is the deliberate usage of the lie that is “Islamofascism”
(itself a new term of art, an emotional rather than analytic term, intended
to get us to think less and fear more), a concept intended by President
Bush and his neo-conservative entourage to imply that a wide range of
organizations (Al-Ikhwan, Hammas, Hizbullah, Al Qaeda) are the successors
of Nazism and communism. This is a canard in that
Italian fascism, German Nazism
and other European fascist movements of the 1920s and ‘30s were
nationalist and secular, closely allied with international capital and
aimed at creating powerful, up-to-date, all-encompassing states. Some
of the trappings might have been anti-modernist–Mussolini looked
back to ancient Rome, the Nazis were fascinated by Nordic mythology
and other Wagnerian folderol–but the basic thrust was modern,
bureaucratic and rational. You wouldn’t find a fascist leader
consulting the Bible to figure out how to organize the banking system
or the penal code or the women’s fashion industry. Even its anti-Semitism
was “scientific”: the problem was the Jews’ genetic
inferiority and otherness, which countless biologists, anthropologists
and medical researchers were called upon to prove–not that the
Jews killed Christ and refused to accept the true faith. Call me pedantic,
but if only to remind us that the worst barbarities of the modern era
were committed by the most modern people, I think it is worth preserving
“fascism” as a term with specific historical content.51
Pollitt’s point is
that the usage of the concept by neocons and war-mongers to describe
a broad swath of Muslim “bad” guys is deliberate; in fact,
it is a ploy meant to promote the idea of preventive wars and justify
naked aggression. It presents the bewildering politics of the Muslim
world as a simple matter of “us” versus “them,”
with war as the only answer, as with Hitler. The term also rescues the
neocons from harsh verdicts on the invasion of Iraq “cakewalk
. . . roses . . . sweetmeats” by reframing that ongoing debacle
as a minor chapter in a much larger story of evil madmen who want to
fly the green flag of Islam over the capitals of the West.52
The use of such a crass
term as “Islamofascism” could be ignored if the words had
not been uttered publicly by the President himself in a press conference
in August 2006, and repeated in statements by other US officials, to
imply that Islamism equals Nazism.53 Renaming the “war on terror”
as the “war on Islamic fascism” is meant to place Islamist
movements among the totalitarian enterprises of the twentieth century.
It was no innocent play on words, but rather a calculated and cold-blooded
formula designed to legitimize state terrorism. Stephen Schwartz claimed
the credit for the neologism “Islamofascism” in William
Kristol’s Washington-based political magazine The Weekly Standard;
he also contributes to the controversial FrontPage Magazine website
run by David Horowitz.54 But Schwartz first used the term only in 2001,
and it was actually coined by the historian Malise Ruthven, who writes:
Nevertheless there is what
might be called a political problem affecting the Muslim world. In contrast
to the heirs of some other non-Western traditions, including Hinduism,
Shintoism and Buddhism, Islamic societies seem to have found it particularly
hard to institutionalize divergences political: authoritarian government,
not to say Islamo-fascism, is the rule rather than the exception from
Morocco to Pakistan.55
The delusional, and once
left-leaning, journalist Christopher Hitchens has done much to popularize
the expression in the US. (Hitchens, along with Kanan Makkya, Fouad
Ajami, and Martin Amis, supported the invasion of Iraq). The inclusion
of the term in an official Bush speech was probably due to the influence
of the crudely Darwinian Bernard Lewis, a White House adviser motivated
by hostility to Islam, a man whose thesis on cultures can only be measured
in their appallingly simplified terms (my culture is stronger–i.e.,
has better trains, guns, symphony orchestras–than yours). No wonder
that Schwartz is his disciple. In any case, none of the Islamist movements
that Bush lumped together under the formula meet the criteria for fascism
as traditionally defined by such experts as Hannah Arendt, Renzo de
Felice, Stanley Payne, and Robert Paxton. Not that religion is incompatible
with fascism. Although Payne asserts that fascism requires for its development
the “space created by secularization,” Paxton and others
make it clear that this applies only to Europe.56 There can indeed be
Islamic fascism, just as there can be Christian, Hindu or Jewish fascism.
The movements accused by
the Bush administration are not in that category. Islamism must be seen
as a contemporary phenomenon, both new and distant. It is true that
Islamist movements exhibit certain traditional features of fascism:
a paramilitary dimension, a feeling of humiliation, and a cult of the
charismatic leader (although to a relative degree, and scarcely comparable
with the cults of the Führer or the Duce). But all the other fundamental
ingredients of fascism–the expansionist nationalism, corporatism,
bureaucracy, and the veneration of the body–are generally lacking
in Islamism. In addition, Islamist movements are often transnational
and far removed from the integral nationalism characteristic of European
fascism of the 1930s. Fascism was by nature imperialist and expansionist.
Although Al Qaeda cells operate in many countries and some Islamist
movements do dream of re-conquering Andalusia and restoring the Caliphate,
organizations such as Hammas and Huzbullah, however disreputable their
religious ideology and armed operations (especially attacks on civilians),
are struggling against territorial occupation by a ruthless occupier,
namely, Israel, who is girding itself to celebrate its 59th Independence
Day at the expense of six decades of occupation of Palestine. The religious
absolutism by the Taliban regime in Afghanistan made it more like medieval
obscurantist theocracies than the fascist regimes that emerged in industrialized
countries after World War I. The corporatist dimension inherent in fascism,
its almost total merger of state, industrial enterprises, and professional
bodies, is lacking in the Islamic context. The close relationship between
the Islamist regime that wanted to establish an Islamist state in Algeria
and the bazaar merchants is not comparable. Islamists are not usually
supported by a national military-industrial complex as fascism was.
The existence of a “partisan
state” is a necessary condition for the exercise of fascist power,
but these Islamist groups are most often non-state organizations marginal
to, or persecuted by, the authorities of the countries in which they
are based. They may be movements ideologically structured by religion,
but ideology often plays only a secondary part in them, whereas Raymond
Aron stresses its extreme role in totalitarian systems, based on what
he called the “primacy of ideology.”57 Islamist movements
make an instrument of religion and try to use it as an ideology, but
they do not intend to create a “new man,” as was the case
in fascist Europe. They propound archaic religious and social precepts
rather than an overall coherent ideology. The popular success of these
movements is often due to factors unconnected with ideology. The Hammas
vote is often a vote against Fatah corruption, not a reflection of the
Palestinians’s belief in Hammas’s religious ideology. Many
people support Hizbullah in Lebanon without supporting its Islamist
ideology. Intellectuals give credence to such movements despite rather
than because of their ideology. But fascism and Nazism seduced many
intellectuals, including some of the most distinguished minds of their
time: Martin Heidegger was a flagrant example. Al Qaeda can boast only
occasional support of this kind, and its crude discourse is more like
that of sects than of European totalitarian regimes. Moreover, fascism
and Nazism were mass movements based on the politicization and consent
of the masses. And although the context of economic crisis and widespread
humiliation is particularly propitious in most Muslim countries, Islamist
organizations run up against civil societies that cherish their freedoms.
The numbers supporting Islamist movements in The Maghreb are not much
greater than those supporting the far right in Europe. Al Qaeda appeals
only to a narrow fringe of Muslim society–something neither President
Bush nor Hitchens and Co. seem to realize, let alone understand. Those
like Bernard Lewis who speak of “Islamofascism” have in
common the desire for preventive military action in the name of the
war on terror. Over the years he has popularized the idea that Arabs
are backward people who must be disciplined and at times punished because
they do not understand the language of diplomacy. He would do well to
read Hannah Arendt, who wrote: “all hopes to the contrary notwithstanding,
it seems as though the one argument the Arabs are incapable of understanding
is force.”58 Lumping together dozens of disparate movements, often
in conflict with each other and pursuing widely varying aims, is a way
to spread the myth of a world Muslim conspiracy, conceal secular geo-political
issues, and avoid reference to the root causes of the misery that gave
birth to these movements, especially military occupation but also territorial
conflicts. Only just solutions to these problems can put an end to the
breeding ground for Islamist terrorism. Instead, public opinion in the
West is being prepared for new wars by cheap, Churchillian posturing;
all those opposed to absurd and counter-productive confrontations are
accused of Munich-style capitulation. In lieu of being accepted as lucid,
they are described as “naive and even gullible,” the modern
equivalents of Edouard Daladier and Neville Chamberlain, who signed
the 1938 agreements with Hitler. We should perhaps remember Paul Valéry
who intoned long ago that “nothing is worse than the so-called
lessons of history–when history is misunderstood and misinterpreted.”59
I doubt that Lewis, Hitchens, and Bush’s other “useful idiots”
will learn something from Valéry; after all, they are busy keeping
their heads safely below the parapet.
Notes
1. Karen Armstrong, Islam: A Short History (New York: The Modern Library,
2000): chap. 2 in particular; Holy War: The Crusades and their Impact
on Today’s World (London: Anchor, 2001): 34-112.
2. Jane Kramer, “The
Pope and Islam,” The New Yorker 2 April 2007: 58-67; Immanuel
Kant, “Critique of all Theology Based upon Speculative Principles
of Reason,” Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Meiklejohn (London:
Everyman, 1993): 427 . I owe a great deal to Kramer in the making of
some of the ideas I develop in this section.
3. Dante, The Inferno, 34.
4. St. John of Damascus,
Exposition of the Orthodox Faith, Vol. IX, trans. Rev. S.D.F. Salmond
(Aberdeen, 1898): 45-8.
5. An excellent rebuttal
of the Pope’s view of Islam is to be found in Abdelwahab Meddeb,
Christian Jambet, Jean Bollack, La conférence de Ratisbonne:
Enjeux et controverses (Paris: Bayard Culture, 2007). See also Régis
Debray, Les communions humanines (Paris: Fayard, 2005); Serge Lafitte,
La Bible et le Coran (Paris: Plon, 2006). Meddeb shows that the Greek
and Christian heritages are also found in Islam and that the symbiosis
violence/faith is located in both the Greek logos and Christianity as
well as Islam.
6. Joseph Ratzinger and Jurgen
Habermas, The Dialectics of Secularization: On Reason and Religion (Collins:
Ignatius Press, 2007): 67 and chap. 2 in particular.
7. Talal Asad, Formations
of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 2003): 67.
8. In the end, the only thing
Benedict XVI seems to admire about Islam is its insistent presence at
the center of most Muslims’ lives.
9. Jacques Lacan, Séminaire
– T16 d’un autre à l’autre (Paris: Seuil, 2006):
122.
10. Slavoj iek,
Le sujet qui fâche (Paris: Flammarion, 2007): 45-6; Fredric Jameson,
“Perfected by the Tea Masters,” LRB 5 April 2007: 21-3.
I have relied on Jameson’s brilliant essay to make my point here.
11. Thomas S. Kuhn, Les structures
des révolutions scientifiques (Paris: Flammarion, 1983): 89-90.
12. Martin Amis, “The
Age of Horrorism,” The Observer (September 2006): 3.
13. Ibid., 4.
14. John Updike, Terrorist
(New York: Hamish Hamilton, 2006): 34.
15. Amis, “The Age
of Horrorism,” 4.
16. Ibid., 5.
17. V.S. Naipaul, “Our
Universal Civilization,” in The Writer and the World (New York:
Knopf, 2002): 503-19.
18. Lacan, Séminaire,
45.
19. Amis, “The Age
of Horrorism,” 7.
20. Martin Heidegger, Essais
et conférences (Paris: Gallimard, 1999): 45.
21. See Ginny Dougary, “The
Voice of Experience,” Times on Line 9 September 2006: 4-5.
22. Daniel Soar, “Bile,
Blood, Bilge, Mulch,” LRB 4 January 2007: 14. I am indebted to
Soar for the formulation of some of the ideas I explore in this section.
23. Quoted in Dougary, “The
Voice of Experience,” 4.
24. Ibid., 5.
25. Ibid., 6.
26. I owe this insight to
Daniel Soar.
27. Ibid., 7.
28. Northrop Frye, The Anatomy
of Criticism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957): 234-45.
29. Martin Amis, Experience:
A Memoir (New York: Knopf, 2001): 67.
30. Ibid., 156.
31. Amis, “The Age
of Horrorism,” Part Two, 12.
32. Soar, “Bile, Blood,
Bilge, Mulch,” 15.
33. Michael Byers, Custom,
Power and the Power of Rules: International Relations and Customary
International Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999): 34-40.
34. To cite one example,
Abdelwahab Meddeb, La maladie de l’Islam (Paris: Points, 2005).
The essay is an apology for the state in which Islam is viewed in the
West. That it is “sick” and badly in need of care is jejune,
to say the least.
35. John Stuart Mill, On
the Subjection of Women (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1970).
36. See Maria Golia, “Variants
of Abuse,” TLS 17 February 2007: 4. See also Andrew Anthony, “Taking
the Fight to Islam,” The Guardian 4 February 2007: 4-5.
37. Timothy Garton Ash, “Islam
in Europe,” The New York Review of Books 5 October 2006: 9-12.
38. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, The
Caged Virgin: An Emancipation Proclamation for Women and Islam (New
York: Free Press, 2006):
39. See Adam Shatz’s
brilliant essay, “The Native Informant,” The Nation 10 April
2003: 14-20.
40. Jacques Derrida and Anne
Dufourmantelle, Of Hospitality, trans. Rachel Bowlby (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2000): 13.
41. Hirsi Ali, The Caged
Virgin, 34.
42. Edward Said, The World,
the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge: Mass.: Harvard University Press,
1983): 36.
43. Golia, “Variants
of Abuse,” 5.
44. For more on the subject,
see John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, “The Israel Lobby,”
LRB 23 March 2006: 3-16. The publication of the essay brought a slew
of critique that forced the London Review of Books to organize a public
debate that was chaired by Anne-Marie Slaughter. The panelists were
Shlomo Ben-Ami, Martin Indyk, Tony Judt, Rashid Khalidi, and John Mearsheimer.
45. Hirsi Ali, The Caged
Virgin, 73.
46. Christopher Hitchens,
“The Caged Virgin: Holland’s Shameful Treatment of Ayaan
Hirsi Ali,” Slate 8 May 2006: 13.
47. Christopher Hitchens,
“A Liberating Experience,” Vanity Fair (October 2003): 128.
48. Christopher Hitchens,
God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (New York: Hachette,
2007):
49. Byers, War Law, 56.
50. Quoted in Byers, War
Law, 122.
51. Katha Pollitt, “Wrong
War, Wrong Word,” The Nation 24 August 2006: 13.
52. Ibid., 14.
53. Jihad Incorporated: A
Guide to Militant Islam in the US, ed. Steven Emerson (New York: Prometheus,
2006): v.
54. Stephen Schawrtz, “What
Is Islamofascism?” TCS Daily 17 August 2006: 2-3.
55. See Katha Pollitt, “Wrong
War, Wrong Word,” The Nation 24 August 2006: 5-7; Malise Ruthven,
“Islamofascism ,” The Independent 8 September 1990: 6.
56. Robert Paxton, The Anatomy
of Fascism (New York: Knopf, 2005): chap. 1 in particular.
57. Raymond Aron, Penser
la liberté, penser la démocratie (Paris: Gallimard, 2005):
34.
58. Bernard Lewis, What Went
Wrong? The Clash between Islam and Modernity in the Middle East (New
York: HarperCollins, 2003): 56.
59. Paul Valéry, Cahier,
1943 – T 3 (Bordeaux: Fata Morgana, 2006): 56.
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