The Muslims Are Coming!

by Arun Kundnani

  In ways that would later be repeated with the war on terror, cold war liberalism masked the fact that the most promising opportunities for emancipatory politics emerged in spaces outside the war’s own terms of reference—in movements that sought to transcend the Moscow-Washington axis rather than take a position along it. Throughout the cold war, radical political movements found themselves on the wrong side of antitotalitarianism’s vaunted liberal tolerance. The McCarthyite blacklists are well known, but the anticommunism of the early cold war was also hugely destructive to the early US civil rights movement, pressuring its leaders to detach the issues of desegregation and voting rights from the wider context of struggles for social equality in the US and the fight against colonialism internationally. Those who were unwilling to make this accommodation were marginalized. In 1948, W. E. B. Du Bois was sacked from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People when his attempt to petition the United Nations for the human rights of African Americans clashed with the anti-Soviet propaganda of the US government (the strategy would have to wait until the early 1960s, when Malcolm X advocated the same approach).27 The same anticommunist lens refracted Third World nationalist movements, making them appear communist pawns on the cold war chessboard rather than struggles for national self-determination.28 A measure of liberal tolerance at home went hand in hand with brutal repression of Third World movements for national independence, whether in the form of CIA-orchestrated bloody coups in, for example, Iran (1953), Iraq (1963), and Indonesia (1965), or as full-scale military violence—as in Vietnam. The antitotalitarian discourse obscured the ways in which the domestic successes of liberal America were dependent on an illiberal foreign policy of using state terror to secure the international arteries of US-led capitalism.

  Governments which joined the US-led fight against communism—such as the military regime in South Korea, General Pinochet in Chile, or the fascist governments of Spain and Portugal—were supported, irrespective of whether their own governing practices resembled the totalitarianism of Moscow. In these cases, the label “totalitarian” was not applied—they were merely “authoritarian”, and therefore not to be thought of as cold war enemies. In Italy, where a strong working-class movement was by the late 1960s transcending the Communist Party as its chosen form of organization, the state, with NATO backing, manipulated emergency antiterrorism powers to undermine the Left, while secretly fostering its own right-wing terror cells to destabilize democracy. Presenting itself as a neutral mediator between opposti estremismi (opposing extremisms) of Left and Right, the state was able to camouflage its own hand in the violent suppression of working-class radicalism. In the name of a “sacrosanct defence against the terrorist monster,” wrote left-wing radical Gianfranco Sanguinetti, the state “can exact from all its subjects a further portion of their tiny freedom, which will reinforce police control over the entire population.” In this “strategy of tension,” all other political questions were forgotten in the face of the “holy mission” of securing public order against totalitarian extremists.29

  Ideology and Violence

  Like the cold war theorists of totalitarianism, who ignored the specifics of political context and assumed violence to be the direct product of unrestrained ideology, both culturalists and reformists in the war on terror ignore the fact that terrorism is a mode of political action. Whether a movement makes the leap into using a particular form of violence or not cannot be reduced to the question of its ideological content. It is necessary instead to examine how states and social movements have mutually constituted themselves as combatants in a global conflict between the West and radical Islam. A key part of such an analysis is to ask under what conditions each has chosen to adopt tactics of violence and in response to what political circumstances they find themselves in, paying close attention to the relationship between their legitimizing frameworks. It is the interaction between these state and nonstate actors that produces a context in which violence becomes seen as a valid tactic.30 This relational aspect requires us to investigate the ways in which Western states themselves became radicalized—as much as Islamist political movements—both becoming more willing to use violence in a wider range of contexts. Only by analyzing the interactions between the parties in the conflict, and how each interprets the other’s actions, is it possible to explain why, for example, the number of incidents of terrorist violence increased in Britain following the launch of the Iraq war.31 Similarly, while it is convenient for Israel’s army of publicists to claim that Hamas is immutably violent because of its Islamist ideology, and therefore needs to be met by force rather than dialogue, the truth is that Hamas’s political violence can only be explained in the context of the decades-long Israeli military occupation, to which it is a flawed response. That religious arguments are used by Hamas to legitimize its ceasefires as much as they are used to legitimize its violence suggests that religious ideology does not provide an adequate explanation of its behavior.32

  Related to the question of ideology is the issue of how culturalists and reformists relate to the texts they think provide the source of ideological violence. For culturalists, the classical Islamic texts themselves are the problem: the Qur’an, and the sunna—descriptions of the Prophet Muhammad’s life given by his companions. Culturalists compile lists of verses from these texts, which are taken to indicate an Islamic prescription to terrorism. Of course, it is possible to quote an equal number of verses that contradict or contextualize what might seem at first to be injunctions to violence. But whether the use of violence is legitimate in Islamic terms in any particular context is not something that can be straightforwardly deduced from the classical sources. The standard Islamophobic argument is that, as Melanie Phillips put it after the Woolwich murder in 2013, terrorism “arises from an interpretation of Islam which takes the words of the Koran literally as a command to kill unbelievers in a jihad, or holy war, in order to impose strict Islamic tenets on the rest of the world.”33 But there is no Islamic doctrine of “kill the unbelievers,” as anti-Islam propagandists often maintain. Islam, like other religions, provides a broad moral framework for thinking about questions of violence; the real question is how Muslims apply this framework to particular situations. Disagreements over these questions reflect different analyses of particular political contexts rather than disagreements over theology. The classical Islamic precepts are themselves too broad and too open to different interpretations to be a cause of violence in themselves. Nor is there a centralized authority, like the Vatican, that can lay down an official interpretation of Islam. Culturalists have to abandon all scholarly rules of exegesis in order to present Islamic doctrine as causing violence, exclude all contextual factors, and embark on a crude reification of the texts. As the anthropologist Talal Asad has argued, religions are not reducible to a single essence which can be read from founding texts. Islamic doctrine has always interacted in complex ways with social practices rather than laid down a total blueprint for every aspect of life.34

  At first it might appear that the reformists avoid these problems, because they at least admit Islam is usually interpreted in moderate forms. Yet their thinking about the practical effects of texts also tends to be reductive. In order to make their argument that extremist ideology directly inspires violence, they are also forced to simplify the relationship between ideas and actions. The question of how different actors find different meanings in Islamist texts in different contexts, and mobilize them for different purposes, gets lost. The problem can be illustrated by thinking of earlier debates on the political meanings of Islam. During the cold war, scholars debated whether Islam would tend to support communism or capitalism. Many, such as Bernard Lewis, believed that Islam had an inherent affinity with communism, due to their shared totalitarian tendencies—a precursor to the similarly unconvincing arguments made today. But others found equal evidence suggesting compatibility between Islam and capitalism. After all, the religion had emerged in a merchant culture.

  S
ome went further still and thought they could detect a process of reform taking place in which innovators within Islam were pushing the religion toward a modern form of private belief based on individual conscience. For US development scholars focused on the Middle East, such as the political scientist Leonard Binder, this was thought a necessary step in the emergence of a procapitalist middle class in Muslim countries. Ironically, the innovator who was given as an example of such a trend was Sayyid Qutb, who, Binder thought, introduced an “element of individualism” that could be the basis for an Islamic liberalism.35 Binder was picking up on the idea in Qutb’s book Milestones that Islamic political identity is based on the individual actively choosing to join the community of believers rather than on accepting inherited tribal, ethnic, or national filiations. For Qutb, the Islamic society is based “on the association of belief alone, instead of the low associations based on race and color, language and country, regional and national interests.”36 Emphasizing the individual freed by conscience from the authority of the nation-state makes possible a model of Islamic society that is libertarian, “an anarchy of true believers” in which there is no need of earthly laws.37 Qutb wrote:

  Islam is a declaration of the freedom of man from servitude to other men … Thus it strives from the beginning to abolish all those systems and governments which are based on the rule of man over men and the servitude of one human being to another. When Islam releases people from this political pressure and presents to them its spiritual message, appealing to their reason, it gives them complete freedom to accept or not to accept its beliefs … Whatever system is to be established in the world ought to be on the authority of God, deriving its laws from Him alone. Then every individual is free, under the protection of this universal system, to adopt any belief he wishes to adopt.38

  In the context of the cold war, when socialist rather than religious radicalism was the greater fear, such passages were, for Binder, enough to present Qutb as embracing modern ideas of individual emancipation from traditional authority, and of religious subjectivity as an individual and intuitive experience that does not require the methods of the traditional clerics. Writing in 1988, Binder went so far as to suggest that “the political significance of Qutb’s work may not be as violently revolutionary as it now appears,” and its idea of individual freedom could even provide the “social preconditions for the emergence of a liberal bourgeois state.”39 Yet twenty years later the very same passages were cited in the war on terror as evidence of Islamism’s totalitarianism, and the authors of the 9/11 Commission report regarded Milestones as the inspiration for al-Qaeda.40 What this points to is that the practical effects of even hard-line Islamist texts are shaped by the political context within which they are read rather than just the unfolding of a violent dynamic inherent to the texts themselves. Qutb himself stated that his advocacy of violence against the Egyptian state was not an ideological principle but a product of political circumstances. On the eve of his execution, he wrote: “If we had known that arrest is merely an arrest, which ends up with a fair trial and legal penalties … nobody would have thought of retaliation by force against aggression.”41

  Because of the influence of the idea of a direct causal connection between ideology and terrorism, possession of books such as Qutb’s Milestones is in danger of being criminalized in Britain. In December 2011, Ahmed Faraz was convicted in Birmingham of possessing and distributing “extremist” books, including Milestones, and sentenced to three years in prison (his conviction was quashed by the Court of Appeal after a year of imprisonment).42 Much of the trial discussion consisted of attempts to interpret the meaning of Milestones. In his sentencing, the judge described the book as Manichean, separatist, and excessively violent, and claimed it misinterpreted the teachings of the Qur’an in order to justify a skewed position on Islam.43 Not only was the state arrogating to itself the right to decide that certain books were too dangerous for its citizens, but in order to do so, the judge had to become a de facto theologian who could distinguish between Qutb’s false interpretation of Islam and an officially endorsed moderate Islam. This reformist war on terror had become one in which governments tell believers what their religion really means, and back that up with the power to criminalize alternatives. This ultimately involves a restriction on the freedom of believers to explore their own textual tradition and interpret its meaning for themselves—ironically mirroring the approach of fundamentalists whom such policies ostensibly aim to marginalize. Government attempts to establish an official interpretation of Islam as a benign monolith are as flawed as campaigns to present Islam as a monolithic threat.

  Desperately Seeking Moderate Muslims

  In practice, the classifying of Muslims into extremist and moderate is highly unstable. The boundary between the two is constantly shifting, putting moderate Muslims in the precarious position of continually being scrutinized for evidence that they really have distanced themselves from Islamist ideology. The act of distinguishing a moderate from an extremist is not a matter of applying objective criteria (such as whether or not one has advocated political violence against fellow citizens) but a complex hermeneutic of suspicion, in which cultural, religious, and political signifiers are parsed for signs of allegiance. Ed Husain, in his The Islamist, for instance, used an array of adjectives to distinguish between “true Islam” (which is “spiritual,” “moderate,” “Sufi,” and “traditional”) and a distorted form of Islam as “ideology” (which is “extremist,” “activist,” “Salafi,” “literalist,” “anti-Western,” and “political”).44 But these two sets of terms do not fall neatly into line: spiritual Islam need not be traditional; political Islam need not be literalist; one can be a Sufi who is anti-Western. Cultural attitudes, religious beliefs, and political allegiances are independent of each other. But reformists tended to assume that Muslims’ cultural and religious attitudes could serve as indicators of their political allegiances and potential for violence.

  In 2007, Paul Berman wrote a twenty-eight-thousand-word essay for the New Republic dedicated to establishing whether the Swiss philosopher Tariq Ramadan was a moderate or extremist. Ramadan had been denied entry to the US on national security grounds but was also a fellow of St. Antony’s College, Oxford, a professor at Erasmus University Rotterdam, and had served on a British government task force on combating extremism. In his writings, he opposes literalism in the interpretation of Islam and argues for the use of “reason in the treatment of the Texts in order to deal with the new challenges of their age and the social, economic, and political evolution of societies.” He says that through such a process Islam could be found to share the core values of Western societies. But he also opposes Western foreign policies and locates himself within the tradition of political Islam and its organizational networks.45 Berman worked his way through what he regarded as Ramadan’s “double discourse” to see if behind the mask of moderation lurked a closet extremist, and concluded that he was indeed an extremist, not really because of anything he said or did, but because he failed to completely distance himself from an Islamist intellectual tradition, which “can only serve to confer legitimacy on the revolutionary Islamist idea, which is willy-nilly bound, in turn, to elevate ever so slightly terrorism’s prestige.”46

  David Goodhart, then editor of the liberal British magazine Prospect and another significant war on terror reformist, also scrutinized Ramadan. For a while Goodhart held him to be a positive example of a Muslim leader who appropriately called for Muslims to adopt Western values. But the admiration came to an end when Ramadan tried to talk publicly about the root causes of terrorism, writing in the Guardian that “a link exists between terrorism and foreign policy.”47 With this betrayal, Goodhart denounced Ramadan as “grievance-seeking” and “responsibility-avoiding.” In an “open letter” to Ramadan, Goodhart announced the parting of ways like a lover betrayed: “You, I thought, were different. You were modern, confident, educated, in favour of Muslim integration against religious and ethnic balk
anisation … I was wrong about you.”48 Ramadan, it seemed, was just like all the rest of them: he talked a nice talk, but deep down, he was not really one of us. Expressing a different view of the origins of terrorism turned him from a moderate Muslim into an extremist Muslim. For Observer columnist Nick Cohen, the anti-Iraq war movement in Britain had been purged of moderate Muslims by an extremist leadership.49 What was it that made someone like Salma Yaqoob, the most high-profile Muslim leader of the antiwar movement, an Islamist, which for Cohen implies being “sexist, homophobic, racist”?50 Was it that she wears a hijab? Or just that she is a Muslim who disagrees with US-UK foreign policy?

  What is most disconcerting to the reformists is Western Muslims who identify with the victims of Western state violence in other parts of the world. To be classed as moderate Muslims must forget what they know about Palestine, Iraq, and Afghanistan and instead align themselves with the fantasies of the war on terror; they are expected to constrain their religion to the private sphere but also to speak out publicly against extremists’ misinterpretations of Islam; they are supposed to see themselves as liberal individuals but also declare an allegiance to the national collective; they are meant to put their capacity for reason above blind faith but not let it lead to criticisms of the West; and they have to publicly condemn using violence to achieve political ends—except when their own governments do so. No wonder moderate Muslims are said to be hard to find.

  Identity Liberalism

  Like their cold war forebears, war on terror liberals have been haunted by the thought that the individual freedom they celebrate hampers their ability to generate the collective identities necessary to mobilize their cause. Compared to culturalists, with their rousing rhetoric of defending Western civilization against Islamic fanaticism, reformists were left with apparently mediocre slogans of liberal values, pluralism, and tolerance. Would this be enough to wage a cultural war against a full-blooded ideology such as political Islam, which claimed to march in the name of God? On the one hand, reformists aspired to a politics drained of such popular enthusiasms; on the other, they felt compelled to mimic the grand ideological claims of their extremist enemies, finding their own language of life-and-death struggle. To do so they were forced to borrow from a culturalist ideological basket and adopt the idea that the West faced a fundamental cultural threat. But they also redefined what Western identity meant: whereas the culturalist version of the war on terror was presented as ultimately a campaign to defend a Judeo-Christian identity, the reformist version held it to be a battle to defend the liberal values they thought defined the post-1960s West.