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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 Žižek, 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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