It’s so weird. Before 9/11, I am just a white guy, living a typical white guy’s life. All my friends had names like Monica, Chandler, Joey, and Ross … I go to bed September tenth white, wake up September eleventh, I am an Arab.
Despite the losses of civil liberties, the hate crimes, and the launching of wars causing the deaths of hundreds of thousands in the Middle East and South Asia, there was no mass-movement building among American-Muslim communities to protest against the war on terror, as there had been to some extent in the UK. Instead, most American Muslim organizations favored attempts at behind-the-scenes political lobbying and judicial activism. Even public statements by Muslim organizations against the 2003 Iraq war were wrapped in declarations of loyalty. The Muslim American Society on its Web site on March 27, 2003, stated:
Our opposition to some government policies does not diminish our love for our country and our commitment to its security and prosperity. We strive to serve its best interests by standing out firmly for justice at home and abroad, and calling for meaningful reforms.
For young American Muslims growing up in the period after 9/11, the contradictions were glaring. The excessive loyalty declarations inadvertently revealed how insecure Muslims actually were in America. Youth worker Rachid Elabed explained that before 9/11, young Muslim Americans in Dearborn were reaching the point where they “felt like they’re American.” But that ended with the war on terror.
And they see all this stuff on TV, like the Peter King congressional hearing on Muslim radicalization and the guy who wants to burn the Qur’an. They feel like: What’s up with this? Just because one Muslim does something bad, doesn’t mean all Muslims are bad. They love to be American, they love the freedom, but things like this pull down their self-esteem. Deep down it hurts them, but they don’t show it. They don’t feel like anything’s going to happen if they speak out, so they keep it to themselves.55
Young Muslims outside the largely Arab neighborhood of Dearborn feel such sentiments even more intensely. The dissonance between public patriotism and private anger at what was happening in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Palestine was striking. Many middle-class Muslim professionals continued to genuinely believe in the American Dream; others just felt they had to be careful what they said in public. To many young Muslims, America’s rhetoric of freedom began to ring hollow. At school, those who seemed, from their color, dress, or name, to be Muslim—including Sikhs, Hindus, and Christian Arabs—were often victimized. A 2009 survey revealed that the majority of Sikh school students in the San Francisco Bay Area suffered racial bullying or harassment.56 (The Muslim terrorist is stereotypically depicted in US popular culture with a turban, which is traditionally worn by Sikh men.)
For many young Muslims, the war on terror forced a rethinking of their identities as Americans. Suhail Muzzafar, a Pakistani American who chairs a mosque on Staten Island, New York, remembers:
On 9/11, all the schools in New York were locked down. Afterwards, I went to pick up my eight-year-old daughter. She said: “Dad, our teachers told us someone bombed the World Trade Center. We should go and bomb whoever did this.” She was thinking like a pure American. Like many other American Muslims of her generation, she didn’t know anything about Palestine or Pakistan. However, when American-Muslim children returned to school after 9/11, they suddenly discovered they were being called “terrorists” and “extremists.” Muslims came under suspicion, and their loyalty to America was questioned. In the post-9/11 climate our kids were made to think of themselves only in terms of their Muslim identity. Prior to 9/11 we identified ourselves to each other based on ethnic and national identity—as Italian Americans or Pakistani Americans, for example. After 9/11 we were identified more by our religion, as American Muslims, and this was new to us. The older generations of American Muslims generally did not react to this, but we noticed our children often responded by highlighting their Muslim identity. Young women began to wear hijab and young men wore Muslim caps in public. By their dress code, they were saying, “You think I’m an extremist. OK, I’ll give you extremism.” On the other hand, others went the other way and called themselves “Mo” instead of Mohammed.
As in the UK, one way that young Muslims have tried to reconcile these tensions is by distancing themselves from the specific ethnic heritage of their immigrant parents and identifying with the ummah. But such an identity is not easily expressed publicly—in some quarters, it makes you a potential enemy of the state—so many find online venues to explore who they are. Many, too, search for answers to the question of what being an American Muslim might mean. Tariq Ramadan’s model is, for many, an attractive way of rethinking Islam for life as a Muslim in the West, with its emphasis on individual interpretation, reconciling basic values, and engaging the wider society in struggles for justice.57 In various ways, a new narrative is beginning to emerge among the younger generation, which starts from the premise, I want my parents’ religion but not their culture.58 Figures like Suhaib Webb, imam of the Islamic Society of Boston Cultural Center, and Hamza Yusuf, cofounder of Zaytuna College in Berkeley, California, are at the forefront of this movement to create an American-style Islam that combines Islamic principles with US culture. At the 2007 ISNA annual convention, Yusuf argued not only that Muslim and American values are aligned, but also that American Muslims are the true inheritors of “old-fashioned American values” which have otherwise been lost.59
Looking back in 2011 on ten years of Muslim activism that was mainly focused on reassuring the mainstream, Khalilah Sabra of the Muslim American Society asked:
Did we affect those who have the power to act against the injustices that still seem to have significant traction? I wonder if we did more than just fortify a comfort zone … I cannot help but believe that many Muslims were more apologetic than honest, hoping to avoid the appearance of being more antagonistic than moderate. It’s pretty common to disguise indignation with moderation, because it offers an individual self-protection. Is there no escape from this circular reasoning in which Muslims are urged to prove their loyalty to the nation, and after presenting themselves as loyal, are then accused of concealing their disloyalty?60
CHAPTER 2
The Politics of Anti-Extremism
The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society. The central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself.
—Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Family and Nation
The terror war’s policy makers, scholars, ideologists, and political activists have developed two broad approaches to making sense of “Islamic extremism.” In the first one, Muslim communities are seen as failing to adapt to modernity as a result of their Islamic culture. Islam, they say, fails to separate religion from the state, and to render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s. Because its founder was a statesman as well as a prophet, they hold, Islamic culture is inherently antithetical to a modern, secular containment of its aspiration to impose itself on society. Further, because the teachings of Islam fail to separate it from the political sphere, the atavisms of religious fanaticism are dangerously introduced into the public realm. This approach to analyzing extremism, which emphasizes what adherents regard as inherent features of Islamic culture, I refer to as “culturalism.”
In the second approach, extremism is viewed as a perversion of Islam’s message. Rather than the legacy of a premodern, Oriental religion, extremism is the result of twentieth-century ideologues who transformed Islam’s essentially benign teachings into an antimodern, totalitarian, political ideology. In this view, the classical religious texts themselves are not the basis for terrorism. Instead, ideologues who reinterpreted Islam based on the models of communism and fascism lie at the root of al-Qaeda’s violence. The war on terror is not, then, a clash of civilizations between the West’s modern values and Islam’s fanaticism; the clash is instead between a traditional, apolitical Islam that is compatible with Western values and a totalitarian ap
propriation of Islam’s meaning that has transformed it into a violent political ideology. I refer to this view as “reformism,” both because it seeks to reform what it regards as the counterproductive stereotyping of the early war on terror and because its project is to, in effect, reform Islamic culture itself.
The concept of ideology is central to both the culturalist and reformist accounts. They both find terrorism’s origins in the content of an ideology that is rooted in an alien culture, whether that ideology is thought of as Islam itself or as Islamist extremism. This concept of ideology is ultimately derived from cold war views of totalitarianism, in which theorists assume a direct causal connection between holding a certain ideology and committing acts of political violence. The role of Western states in coproducing the terror war is thereby obscured. Rather than seeing terrorism as the product of an interaction between state and nonstate actors, who together constitute themselves in a relationship of conflict between the West and radical Islam, both culturalists and reformists take the content of an alien ideology as sufficient explanation for the conflict’s existence; they eschew the role of social and political circumstances in shaping how people make sense of the world and then act upon it. In the following chapter I explore the cold war origins of this account of ideology in more detail. But I first consider the different antiextremist strategies that flow from culturalist and reformist ways of thinking.
The Culturalists
The culturalists’ argument can best be illustrated by considering Bernard Lewis’s much-circulated 1990 Atlantic Monthly article, “The Roots of Muslim Rage,” a major source for their analysis.1 Muslims and the West, Lewis says, are in a deeply rooted conflict that is not linked to a set of political issues such as racism, the Israel-Palestine conflict, or Western backing for Middle Eastern autocrats but must be understood as a product of Islamic culture itself and its unique structural problem with modernity. For Lewis it is this fixed content of Islamic culture rather than various political contexts that lies at the root of what he calls “Muslim rage.” “It should by now be clear,” writes Lewis,
that we are facing a mood and a movement far transcending the level of issues and policies and the governments that pursue them. This is no less than a clash of civilizations—the perhaps irrational but surely historical reaction of an ancient rival against our Judeo-Christian heritage, our secular present, and the worldwide expansion of both.2
While Lewis referred to Islamic fundamentalism as the current expression of this deeper problem in Islamic culture—keeping open the possibility of nonfundamentalist Muslims finding their way to a reconciliation with Western modernity—Samuel Huntington went further, popularizing the clash of civilizations notion as a general formula for understanding post–cold war international relations and seeing Islam itself, rather than Islamic fundamentalism, as an underlying problem for the West. “The great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural,” wrote Huntington. “Islam has bloody borders [and a] centuries-old military interaction” with the West that is unlikely to disappear and “could become more virulent.”3 In either form, the clash of civilizations thesis assumes that Muslim politics can be explained simply as the mechanical and repetitive expression of an underlying cultural abstraction called Islam that is preprogrammed for fanaticism, has remained the same over centuries, and whose content can be known through a reading of its religious texts. The more literally one reads those texts, the more forcefully their inherent violence captures the reader: terrorism is simply the product of a literalist reading of classical Islam. This view has been taken up with enthusiasm by the Christian Right and by right-wing Zionists; together they have driven the culturalist agenda to a significant if not dominant position in American political life. For them it conveniently posits Islam as inherently alien to the Western values that they say underlie the alliance between Israel and the US.
As a method of understanding the “Islamic world,” this approach has the advantage of offering a simple, endlessly recyclable formula that does not require attending to what individual Muslims actually say or do. And, much like the Salafis, it takes Islam to have only one possible meaning. This kind of view of Islam reduces a complex social, economic, and political history to an underlying cultural essence that is taken to be the root cause of a wide range of phenomena spread across vastly different historical and geographic contexts.4 In a July 2011 comment, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney offered a variation on this theme: The Israelis have outpaced the Palestinians economically because “culture makes all the difference,” ignoring the decades of military occupation and ethnic cleansing suffered by the Palestinians.5 Culture here plays the same role as race: a hidden force that underlies a whole people’s behavior; a single rule that can be applied everywhere to explain anything that Muslims do. According to the culturalists, Muslims live hermetically sealed within their homogenous culture, their lives entirely determined by it, whereas Westerners exist outside any specific culture in the universal space of modernity. In the West, people make culture; in Islam, culture makes people.
Using the language of culture in this way to define a “Muslim problem” produces the same outcomes that more obviously racial languages had achieved.6 Cultural tropes such as wearing a hijab have come to serve as twenty-first-century racial signifiers, functioning in ways analogous to the more familiar racial markers of “color, hair and bone” that W. E. B. Du Bois identified.7 In the same way that some claim racial inequities are natural, a product of blacks having a lower innate intelligence, the political origins of violence in the Middle East are masked when culturalists invoke the idea of Muslims as culturally prone to violence and rage. As the philosopher Étienne Balibar writes, with these new forms of racism “culture can also function like a nature, and it can in particular function as a way of locking individuals and groups a priori into a genealogy, into a determination that is immutable and intangible in origin.”8 Culturalists introduce an ontological chasm between us and them—their violence is the natural product of their inner culture while ours is the necessary response to their fanaticism. Thus, the imperial violence of the US state and its allies is disavowed and projected onto the enemy other. In doing so, culturalists displace what are essentially political conflicts onto a more comfortable cultural plane. The problem is their culture not our politics. Islam becomes, as Huntington puts it, the “ideal enemy” against which an America fractured by multiple antagonisms can be bound together, a phantomlike image of external danger to mask the cracks within the social body.9 This culturalist view of Islam remains the default position among conservatives, even though it has long been discredited intellectually. In his Orientalism Edward Said demonstrated that the West’s homogenized and reified culturalist view of Islam has its roots in European colonialism.10 In his Covering Islam he showed how these colonial notions continued to influence US news coverage of the Middle East in the 1990s.11 Against the culturalist view that Islam has a special problem distinguishing religion and politics, the writer Eqbal Ahmad pointed out in his 1984 essay, “Islam and Politics,” that religious and political power in Muslim-majority countries have been separate for at least ten centuries. In 945, the Abbasid caliph’s dual role as Islam’s temporal and spiritual leader came to an end. Since then the exercise of state power by temporal governments generally has been accepted. Where insurrections in the name of Islam have occurred against such power, the causes are to be found more in the secular political context than in some eternal Muslim propensity to apply religion to politics.12 Anticolonial uprisings that coalesced around a religious ideology, or the politicization of the Shi’ite clergy in Iran from the late 1960s in opposition to the shah’s regime, demonstrate not an Islamic failure to separate mosque and state but the possibility that Islam, like any religion, can be mobilized for political purposes.13 Like other religions, Islam provides at most a language and a broad moral outlook with which to make sense of political crises. What matters are the specific wa
ys in which people apply an Islamic discursive tradition, one open to wide-ranging interpretation, in particular political settings.
Whatever its intellectual flaws, culturalism has proved useful as ideological ballast for US foreign policies. President George W. Bush’s official statements tended to reject a straightforwardly culturalist analysis in the days after the 9/11 attacks. He told a joint session of Congress that “a fringe form of Islamic extremism that has been rejected by Muslim scholars and the vast majority of Muslim clerics” was responsible, and that these extremists constituted a movement “that perverts the peaceful teachings of Islam”—the problem was not Islam itself but a small number of individuals who had hijacked the religion.14 But the neoconservatives who shaped his foreign policy in the early years of the terror war did have a culturalist analysis of the Muslim problem. It was their analysis that was reflected in Bush’s characterization of the war on terror as a “crusade.”15 Bernard Lewis himself was a key adviser to the administration. And among members of the Christian Right, a key base of Bush’s support, the idea of an apocalyptic crusade against Islam was prevalent. Such views sometimes emerged among military leaders. In 2003, William Boykin, Bush’s deputy undersecretary of defense for intelligence and an evangelical Christian, told a meeting in Oregon that the war on terror is a battle against Satan fought by “the army of God.”16
To the culturalists, the Islamic world was inherently prone to fanaticism and violence. Revolution there could only mean Islamic revolution along the lines of Iran in 1979. Pro-Western democracy could not emerge except by force from outside—the script for the disastrous Iraq war begun in 2003. Neoconservatives presented their Middle East policy as a call for democratic transformation, appearing to break radically with the conventional wisdom of maintaining alliances with autocratic regimes in the name of stability. But behind the apparent differences, neoconservatives and those favoring more conventional policies shared the same culturalist logic: Muslims could not produce an acceptable form of democracy by themselves. Within this logic the only foreign policy options were autocracy or war. The US backing of autocratic regimes—for example, in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Pakistan—was the traditional method of restraining Islamic fanaticism. The neoconservatives proposed a new alternative: war as a way of erasing the substrate of Muslim culture to such an extent that a new value system no longer prone to fanaticism could be erected upon the resulting tabula rasa. For Bernard Lewis, the key intellectual influence on neoconservative thinking about the Middle East, the model for this revolution from above was Atatürk’s violent “modernization” of Turkey in the 1920s and 1930s—an attempt to impose a total cultural transformation on a majority-Muslim country.17 This more radical solution to the Muslim problem defined the early war on terror, and especially the invasion and occupation of Iraq. Neoconservatives fantasized about rebuilding Iraq from scratch in the image of US neoliberalism—a project that in practice implied the destruction of the country’s entire social fabric. The wars of the time were, as British prime minister Tony Blair noted, “not just about changing regimes but changing the values systems governing the nations concerned. The banner was not actually ‘regime change’; it was ‘values change.’ ”18
The Muslims Are Coming! Page 7