The Muslims Are Coming!
Page 8
But the ways of thinking advanced by Lewis and Huntington did not restrict themselves to questions of international relations, their original topic. Precisely because they relied on an essentialist notion of Islamic culture, it was easy for their methodology to be used in the analysis of Muslims living in the West. The application of the culturalist thesis to a substantially different context was made possible by the underlying assumption that Muslims are everywhere the same. Protests against Danish cartoons in European cities, urban unrest in French banlieues, or young Muslims volunteering to leave the West to fight foreign occupations in the Middle East, Africa, or Asia—all these different actions are not made sense of by culturalists in terms of the specific social and political histories involved but explained away as symptoms of an inevitable, underlying conflict between Islam’s regressive cultural identity and Western values.19 Thus, a culturalist writer like Weekly Standard senior editor Christopher Caldwell can dismiss the social and political factors that motivated the rioters in France in 2005 and instead declare Islam the cause: “Even if they did not believe in Islam, they believed in Team Islam.”20
In both Britain and the US, anti-Muslim culturalists were able to appropriate and rework culturalist arguments that had long been central to popular forms of racism. In the US, the 1965 Moynihan report had claimed that higher rates of unemployment among African Americans ultimately derived from a culture of weak families rather than from structural racism. Conservatives would resuscitate this theme in the ensuing decades, as they sought to roll back the gains of the civil rights movement, culminating in today’s racially coded attacks on welfare dependency.21 In Britain, beginning in the late 1960s, African Caribbeans and South Asians were regarded by conservatives as bearers of alien cultures that disrupted the homogeneity supposedly essential to the national political order.22 As Margaret Thatcher put it in 1978, a year before she was elected prime minister, there was a worry that unless nonwhite immigration was halted, Britain “might be rather swamped by people with a different culture.”23 Such themes continued into the 1990s and beyond, but their force was gradually diminished by pressure from antiracist movements. In response, conservatives shifted their attention to Muslims, against whom their culturalist arguments enjoyed greater success.
For example, the British journalist Anthony Browne had, in 2002 and 2003, written a series of articles on Third World immigration that recycled the same language of cultural fear that Thatcher had earlier mobilized. In The Times (London), he wrote:
Britain is losing Britain [as] an unprecedented and sustained wave of immigration [is] utterly transforming the society in which we live against the wishes of the majority of the population, damaging quality of life and social cohesion … In the past five years, while the white population grew by 1 per cent, the Bangladeshi community grew by 30 per cent, the black African population by 37 per cent and the Pakistani community by 13 per cent.
What he called “little Third World colonies” had appeared in Britain.24 (Contrary to the impression given by these numbers, Britain’s population remains 88 percent white.)25 In the same year, Browne wrote in The Spectator magazine that immigration “especially from the Third World [is] letting in too many germs.”26 Following the July 2005 terrorist attacks on London’s transport system, Browne abandoned Third World immigration as his target and directed his aim at Islam. Excessive multicultural tolerance, he claimed, had led to the creation of “Muslim ghettoes.” That tolerance now needed to be abandoned so that arranged marriages could be banned, imams who support the Muslim Brotherhood deported, and a French-style ban on wearing head scarves in schools considered. The Pakistani and Bangladeshi women whom he earlier saw as helping form “Third World colonies” now needed to be rescued from the ghetto extremism of their male coreligionists.27 With the war on terror, racisms directed generally at people of color in Britain honed in on the figure of the Muslim as a convenient symbol of threatening cultural difference.
Similarly, New York–based lawyer David Yerushalmi, whose group, the Society of Americans for National Existence, received about $1.1 million in donations from 2007 to 2009, spearheads a campaign to identify shari’a as the greatest threat to US security.28 But his targeting of American Muslims is the thin end of a larger racial wedge. In a 2006 essay published in a little-read bulletin of the far Right, he wrote that most “of the fundamental differences between the races are genetic.” He asked why “people find it so difficult to confront the facts that some races perform better in sports, some better in mathematical problem-solving, some better in language, some better in Western societies and some better in tribal ones?” And he called on the US to reject the political correctness that prevents asking why “the founding fathers did not give women or black slaves the right to vote.”29 His campaign to focus popular anxieties on Muslim culture—symbolized by shari’a—is an attempt to rework racial ideology in an age when more obviously racist rhetoric had become publicly unacceptable but white America’s fears of its diminishing demographic weight remained. In both the UK and the US, existing forms of racism did not disappear after 9/11, but the racial terrain underwent a transformation, as new alliances and new enemies were constituted.30
Domestically, culturalism is strongly bound up with discriminatory immigration and policing practices that construct Muslims as a “suspect community.”31 For culturalists, Muslim extremists are a threat to Western civilization, and the state can legitimately use wide-ranging emergency powers to counter them. But other Muslims, who do not adopt a literalist interpretation of Islam, must also be regarded with suspicion. Douglas Murray, the associate director of the Henry Jackson Society, a UK-based neoconservative think tank, has said: “Conditions for Muslims in Europe must be made harder across the board: Europe must look like a less attractive proposition.”32
In the months after 9/11, the US Justice Department detained thousands of Muslim, South Asian, and Middle Eastern men, through various initiatives. Many were deported, others held for months without charge; all had their lives turned upside down and their reputations destroyed.33 The only basis for such a policy was a general suspicion directed at those thought to be Muslim; only one or two convictions on terrorism charges resulted from the roundup.34 One of those detained, Mohammed Rafiq Butt, died of a heart attack after being taken to a New Jersey jail. He had come to New York from Pakistan to work as a waiter in Jackson Heights, Queens, but after 9/11 some of his neighbors had called the police, saying they thought he looked suspicious. As a result, he joined other foreign nationals who were held without charge. The FBI passed him on to the Immigration and Naturalization Service, which detained him for overstaying his visa.35
Similarly, the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System, introduced in 2002, required men aged sixteen to sixty-four who were present in the US or planning to enter on nonimmigrant visas, and who were from twenty-three majority-Muslim countries, or from Eritrea or North Korea, to be interviewed under oath, fingerprinted, and photographed by a federal official. The Department of Homeland Security stated that these nationalities were singled out because they were a “risk to national security.” More than 200,000 Arab and Muslim men underwent this “special registration,” all of whom were cleared of terrorism. Nevertheless, 13,424 of them who were present in the US were placed in removal proceedings, and faced deportation.36 According to one estimate, as of 2004, at least 100,000 Arabs and Muslims living in the United States had personally experienced one of the various post-9/11 state security measures, including, arbitrary arrests, secret and indefinite detentions, prolonged detention as “material witnesses,” closed hearings, the production of secret evidence, government eavesdropping on attorney-client conversations; FBI home and work visits; wiretapping; seizures of property, removals for technical visa violations, and mandatory special registration.37 All of these measures embodied the notion that Islam was, by its very nature, a threat. They thus, as scholar Moustafa Bayoumi put it, “created a race out of a religion” by assuming
that, by virtue of an inner, fixed cultural essence, Muslims were potentially violent.38
Women wearing head scarves were especially at risk of harassment and discrimination. After 9/11, the hijab was taken to signify that its wearer was “sympathetic to the enemy, presumptively disloyal, and forever foreign.”39 Women faced discrimination in employment and violence on the streets, often involving attempts to pull off their head scarves.40 A post-9/11 study of young, college-educated Arab-American Muslim women in Chicago, some of whom wore hijabs, found that all of those interviewed had been the victims of physical or verbal abuse, or knew someone close to them who had been.41
For culturalists there is only one political act that Muslim fellow citizens can perform without suspicion: rejection of their own Muslim identity. On this view, liberation for Muslims consists in leaving their culture behind rather than autonomously changing it from within. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali-born former Dutch parliamentarian recruited by the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute, serves as an icon for this form of politics. She describes herself as a “combatant in the clash of civilizations.”42 “Violence is inherent in Islam,” she says. “It’s a destructive, nihilistic cult of death … The battle against terrorism will ultimately be lost unless we realise that it’s not just with extremist elements within Islam, but the ideology of Islam itself.”43 After the Boston bombings and Woolwich murder in 2013, she reiterated once more the basic culturalist argument: the violence simply reflected “the problem with Islam” that Muslim leaders had repeatedly refused to address.44
The Reformists
By 2006, the war on terror was in crisis. Despite Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s comment that the violence in Iraq was merely the “birth pangs” of the new Middle East, the war on terror had clearly failed to establish the hoped-for transformation of values.45 With France and Germany’s opposition to the Iraq war, the Atlantic alliance had fractured. Images of human rights abuses in Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo discredited the talk after 9/11 of spreading democracy around the world. In Madrid, Amsterdam, and London, for the first time, “homegrown” Muslim terrorists were carrying out acts of violence against fellow citizens.
Waiting in the wings to respond to this crisis were a number of reformists who, since the inception of the terror war, had been arguing for a rethinking of its basic assumptions. In the first four years of the war, their influence had been modest. But as failures mounted, they took center stage, and a second view of Muslim extremism became prominent. The reformists made three main points. First, they rejected the view that Islamic culture was inherently oppositional to Western interests. What mattered, they said, was not Islamic culture itself, but the politicization of Islamic culture among an extremist minority. Whereas culturalists saw Islam as having an inherent tendency to generate extremism, the reformists argued that extremism was a product not of Islam but of its perversion. In this view, what distinguished extremist Muslims from moderate Muslims was their misinterpretation of Islam as bearing a political message. Against the culturalists, who argued that Islam is inherently reluctant to separate itself from the political sphere, the reformists viewed the majority of Muslims as practicing their religion apolitically in ways that presented no threat to the West. But, they said, a minority remained who distorted Islam’s essentially benign message and turned it into an anti-Western political ideology. The reformists usually used the word “Islamism” to label this political distortion of Islam; sometimes the term “Salafism” was preferred.
Culturalists had sought to illustrate Islam’s dangers by borrowing the imagery of totalitarianism. Bernard Lewis regarded Islam and communism as having affinities: both were totalitarian doctrines with “complete and final answers to all questions on heaven and earth” in contrast to “the eternal questioning of Western man.”46 For Lewis, Islam’s totalitarian tendency was an outgrowth of its core religious beliefs. The reformists countered that Islam only became totalitarian when its core beliefs were distorted into a political ideology. They argued that such Islamist extremism was best understood as a Muslim version of the totalitarianisms—communism and fascism—that had taken hold in twentieth-century Europe. Both culturalists and reformists made use of the term “Islamo-fascism” to refer to the totalitarian content of the ideology they saw as the cause of terrorism. To culturalists “Islamo-fascism” referred to Islam’s inherent tendency to fanaticism; to reformists it named a political misreading of Islam not to be confused with Islam as a mainstream religion. The term’s ability to straddle both modes of analysis made it useful in political campaigning. President Bush used the ambiguous term in his 2005 speech to the National Endowment for Democracy, and in 2007, the Islamophobic activist David Horowitz launched a series of protests on college campuses under the banner of Islamo-fascism Awareness Week.47
Liberal writer Paul Berman has produced the most sophisticated statement of the reformist position. His best-selling Terror and Liberalism contends that there is a single template underlying all totalitarian ideologies: the myth of “a people of God, whose peaceful and wholesome life had been undermined … [by] the subversive dwellers in Babylon.” Restoration of the reign of God, of “a society cleansed of its pollutants and abominations” that would be governed by a great Leader, would only be achieved by “the war of Armageddon—the all-exterminating bloodbath.”48 In the European “counter-Enlightenment” the elements of this originally religious “ur-myth” were given secular form. For the communists the proletariat were the people of God; for the Nazis it was the Aryan race. Detecting the same template in the texts of the influential Egyptian radical Sayyid Qutb, Berman concluded that Islamist totalitarianism is “the Muslim variation on the European idea.”49 Similarly, the journalist Peter Beinart, in his book The Good Fight, argued for fighting the war on terror in the tradition of cold war liberalism. The enemy, in this view, was “a new totalitarian movement that lacks state power but harnesses the power of globalization instead.”50 Inspired by Qutb, Salafism, though a social movement rather than a state, has a “totalitarian character.”51 In Britain, the Observer columnist Nick Cohen and former Hizb ut-Tahrir activist Ed Husain made essentially the same argument in best-selling books.52 For the reformists the clash was not between civilizations but between extremists and moderates within Islamic civilization itself—an internal struggle over Islamic identity. Rather than a battle between the Judeo-Christian West and Islam, there was an extremist version of Islam on one side and a pro-Western, moderate Islam on the other.
The second part of the reformists’ argument was the claim that ideology—which they took to mean any set of ideas radically rejecting the existing system—was bound to lead to violence as a direct result of its illiberal ideological content. For Berman, if we pay close enough attention to the content of Islamist texts, we can see that the ideology they embody is, like Nazism, “bound to end in a cult of death.”53 The third point the reformists made flowed from the first two. Because the battle was between competing definitions of Islamic identity, the war on terror was as much a cultural war as a military one. Berman called for a new “mental war” against “Islamism” that is “partly military but ultimately intellectual, a war of ideas, fought around the world.”54 Rather than a singular enemy, the Islamic world was a cultural terrain within which Western states needed to intervene to reshape identities in an antiextremist mold. They believed the right kind of antitotalitarian politics could change Islamic culture and save it from itself. In this global campaign “shock and awe” had to be complemented by attempts to win over the hearts and minds of Muslims around the world.
If the key reference point for the reformists was the cold war concept of totalitarianism, they found that the word itself, with its connotation of state repression, was unsuited for general use in the war on terror—after all, the new enemy was clearly characterized by its lack of attachment to any state. The term “extremism” came instead to serve as the anchor for the war on terror. Extremism is a term peculiarly amenable
to naturalizing the status quo. Since at least the French Revolution, politicians have used the accusation of extremism to denounce enemies on their flanks, and to present themselves as occupying a moderate center. But used in this way, the concept is somewhat arbitrary. The German liberal Heinrich Bernhard Oppenheim asked in 1850, “Would the middle not lie elsewhere if only the extremes were moved?” On the principle that truth is always to be found in the middle ground, political movements would be “right to increase their ‘demands’ to the utmost extreme in order to gain a bit more of the centre for themselves.”55 In British political discourse, the term “extremism” was first used at the beginning of the twentieth century. Police reports produced by the colonial administration in India categorized anticolonial militants who favored full independence as “extremists,” while those, such as the Indian National Congress, whose demands were limited to administrative reform, were dubbed “moderates.” English-language newspapers in India used the terminology before it spread to the British press.56