The Muslims Are Coming!
Page 14
In his 2007 book The Fallout, for example, Observer journalist Andrew Anthony writes in such a vein.51 In his liberal version of the clash of civilizations, the battle lines are clear: on the one side, the Western Enlightenment and, on the other, what he calls the “Endarkenment” of the Islamic world. The Arab world, says Anthony, suffers from a “lack of intellectual curiosity [and] self-willed ignorance.”52 Its cultural failure to produce rational, independent thinking implies Western liberals must not shy away from imposing their universal values. British culture has, he says, “over the centuries,” tended toward valuing “certain rights, liberties, responsibilities, protections and opportunities,” while “many traditional cultures in the Third World” value “petty corruption, sexism, homophobia, tribalism and patriarchal authoritarianism.” He only finds it necessary to cite two examples: a case of voting fraud among some South Asians living in Birmingham, England, and rigged exams in an Indian university.53 But mounting an empirical argument is not the point. Nor is he concerned to explore how, for example, homophobia in traditional cultures might be fought against. What matters is the performance of an identity, the desire for a liberal army to raise the flag of the West so that conservatives no longer monopolize the war on terror’s political energies.
A similar picture emerges in Martin Amis’s The Second Plane, a collection of writings on 9/11 and the war on terror. In a section on “the dependent mind” of “the Muslim male,” Amis writes: “No doubt the impulse towards rational inquiry is by now very weak in the rank and file of the Muslim male.”54 And he sees the “Muslim problem” as ultimately rooted in a cultural frustration of sexuality. Thus, he speculates that the anti-Western anger in the Islamist writings of Sayyid Qutb stems from his lack of success in attracting women during his stay in the US in the 1950s. He imagines that suicide bombings and the practice of torture in Arab police cells are the product of sexual frustration or male impotence. The pathological hatred and violence of the enemy in the war on terror is thus presented as the product of a culture that unhealthily represses or misdirects male sexual desire, a culture that is implicitly contrasted to a post-1960s Western culture of sexual freedom. The covering of women’s bodies through various kinds of head scarves is, then, the ultimate rejection of Western sexual “openness.”
Amis also worries about the potency of Muslim reproduction. He endorses Mark Steyn’s book America Alone, which argues that within a few decades, Europe will succumb to a demographic takeover by Muslims with higher rates of reproduction. Noting, “not a single West European country is procreating at the ‘replacement rate’ of 2.1 births per woman,” Amis adds:
A depopulated and simplified Europe might be tenable in a world without enmity and predation. And that is not our world. The birth rate is 6.76 in Somalia, 6.69 in Afghanistan and 6.58 in Yemen.
For Amis, Europe’s valuing of women’s autonomy in sexual reproduction hampers the continent in its “demographic war” against immigrants from Muslim countries, because women choose to have fewer children.55 Behind the anxiety about Muslim sexual repression and the fear of Muslim fecundity lies the question of cultural differences: what makes Muslims a threat is, for Amis, ultimately their rejection of European gender and sexual relations. Amis says: “Geopolitics may not be my natural subject but masculinity is,” implying that in explaining Muslim political violence, geopolitics is of less relevance than a culture that perverts masculinity.56 Thus, Amis stitches together a number of liberal and conservative themes, all of which lead to conventional anxieties about the infiltration of alien cultures. But precisely because this framework differs from familiar patterns of racialization associated with skin color, it can associate itself with the defense of a liberal way of life and appear postracial. In 2006, Amis told an interviewer:
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.57
What is striking here is the way that some reformists—liberals and former leftists of the 1968 generation who were shaped by their earlier experiences of campaigning on issues of gender, sexuality, religious authority, and censorship—turned the values they once fought for into icons of Western identity. What was once a call to fight for freedom in Western societies degenerated into a call to defend a liberal way of life from foreign enemies.58 Though the slogan of Enlightenment values was repeatedly invoked, the (universal) Enlightenment principle of rejecting all authority that stands in the way of freely reasoning equal individuals was, strictly speaking, incompatible with the reformist war on terror: its aim was not to encourage autonomous thought but to reshape identity according to a state agenda. On the other hand, the (particular) Western historical experience of enlightened individuals freeing themselves from the religious authority of the church was more amenable to being presented by reformists as a model for Muslims to follow. In seeking to resolve this tension between the universal and the particular, reformists collapsed the distinction between liberalism as a set of universal principles associated with the Enlightenment (that could be the basis for critiques of social institutions) and liberalism as what Edmund Burke called an “inheritance”—the shared customs and habits thought necessary to sustain a specific way of life. Liberalism became a form of identity politics.59
In Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville wrote that the citizens of the liberal US, “each of them, living apart, is as a stranger to the fate of all the rest.”60 It was this void in liberal social philosophy—its inability to generate common bonds—that historically led to liberalism borrowing from the Left and adopting ideas of social equality and welfare rights in order to embed itself in a collective culture. But the war on terror offered a different glue to hold society together: liberal values—held up as the cultural basis for Western identity and the universal standard of civilization—were taken to imply an identitarian politics of national security rather than an egalitarian politics of social security. Nowhere was this more powerfully manifested than in the image of the liberal intellectual who claimed to stand above identity politics on the hallowed ground of conscience, from where, in the name of universal values, he raged against the West’s enemies. A liberal ideological positioning beyond identity made possible the knitting together of Western identity itself.
In its campaign to transform Islamic identity, liberalism itself underwent a transformation: it became an ideology of total war that led its advocates into what Italian theorist Domenico Losurdo calls “a tragic performative contradiction.”61 War on terror liberals reproduced the weaknesses of the conceptual scaffolding they inherited from the cold war. They located the problem of radical political challenges to Western society in alien ideologies that by their very nature were bound to produce violence. In so doing, they disavowed the structural violence on which liberal society itself depended: the ways in which racialized “others” live in a “state of exception” in which liberal norms are permanently suspended—paradoxically, in the name of defending the liberal way of life.62 Fighting an extremist enemy constructed as Huntington’s “ideal enemy”—both “ideologically hostile” and “racially and culturally different”—required that liberalism become an identity politics, a call to recharge the batteries of belonging, to take a stand defending a way of life—militarily, intellectually, and culturally—while still claiming the mantle of a universal civilization.63
CHAPTER 4
The Myth of Radicalization
Religion had nothing to do with this. We watched films. We were shown videos with images of the war in Iraq. We were told we must do something big. That’s why we met.
—Hussein Omar, interviewed after participating in a plot to bomb the London Underground on July 21,
2005
How a government makes sense of political violence directed against it usually tells us at least as much about the nature of that government as it does about the nature of its violent opponents. After Ulrike Meinhof, of West Germany’s Red Army Faction, was found hanged in her prison cell in 1976, officials secretly removed her brain in the hope that neuropathologists might discover why she gave up her successful career as a journalist to cofound the far Left armed group. To state officials it seemed more natural that the source of her violence was located in brain deformities than in the political conflicts of postwar Germany. Likewise, Mau Mau rebels captured in the 1950s by the British army in colonial Kenya were examined by the psychiatrist J. C. Carothers, who claimed to find “hard scientific evidence” demonstrating that the uprising was “not political but psycho-pathological,” a conclusion which conveniently validated the need for continuing colonial government.1
In the aftermath of 9/11, public discussion of the causes of terrorism was largely curtailed, on the assumption that there could be no explanatory account of terrorism beyond the evil mind-set of the perpetrators. Culturalists, whose analysis tended to prevail, saw terrorists as motivated by a fanaticism that was inherent to Islam and did not require much in the way of further analysis. Those wanting to cover such simple formulae in the veneer of scholarship turned to the founding father of terrorism studies, Walter Laqueur, whose “new terrorism” thesis distinguished between older, political forms of terrorism inspired by nationalism, communism, or fascism and the new “Islamic fundamentalist violence” that he saw as “rooted in fanaticism.”2 By 2004, however, this account of terrorism was showing its limitations. No longer believing that killing and capturing could by themselves bring success, governments began looking for a new discourse that could better guide their counterterrorism efforts. The taboo on discussing the causes of terrorism now had to be broken. The concept of radicalization emerged as a vehicle for policy makers to explore the process by which a terrorist is made and to provide an analytical grounding for preventive strategies that went beyond the use of state violence.
Peter Neumann, director of the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation at Kings College, London, is one of the founders of the new radicalization discourse; he is also a scholar with access to policy makers in Westminster and Washington. In 2008 he wrote about the value of the concept of radicalization:
Following the attacks against the United States on 11 September 2001 … it suddenly became very difficult to talk about the “roots of terrorism,” which some commentators claimed was an effort to excuse and justify the killing of innocent civilians. Even so, it seemed obvious [then] that some discussion about the underlying factors that had given rise to this seemingly new phenomenon was urgent and necessary, and so experts and officials started referring to the idea of “radicalisation” whenever they wanted to talk about “what goes on before the bomb goes off.” In the highly charged atmosphere following the September 11 attacks, it was through the notion of radicalisation that a discussion about the political, economic, social and psychological forces that underpin terrorism and political violence became possible again.3
In the context of the evolving war on terror, this new discussion of radicalization could present itself as the wiser, more liberal alternative to the simple accounts of terrorism offered immediately after 9/11. It acknowledged that terrorism was a problem that could be investigated, analyzed, and subjected to policy solutions beyond the use of physical force. In actuality, however, the radicalization discourse was, from the beginning, circumscribed to the demands of counterterrorism policy makers rather than an attempt to objectively study how terrorism comes into being. Rather than provide a location for the scholarly understanding of the causes of terrorism—what Kant called the “public use of reason,” aimed at the general enlightenment of society—the radicalization discourse limited itself to the “private use of reason” (serving the needs of a “particular civil post or office”), constraining the intellectual process to the needs of government security establishments.4
As such, the concept of radicalization inherited at birth a number of built-in, limiting assumptions. Those perpetrating terrorist violence are drawn from a larger pool of extremists who share an ideology that inspires their actions; entry into this wider pool of extremists can be predicted by individual or group psychological or theological factors; and knowledge of these factors could enable governments to develop policies that reduce the risk of terrorism. The study of radicalization, ostensibly a reflection on the causes of terrorism, is thus in practice limited to a much narrower question: why do some individual Muslims support an extremist interpretation of Islam that leads to violence? This question, of course, takes terrorist violence to be a product of how Islam is interpreted and so renders irrelevant consideration of terrorism not carried out by Muslims. An a priori distinction is drawn between the new terrorism, seen as originating in Islamist theology, and the old terrorism of nationalist or Leftist political violence, for which the question of radicalization is rarely posed. Answers to the question of what drives this process are to exclude ascribing any causative role to the actions of Western governments or their allies in other parts of the world; instead, individual psychological or theological journeys, largely removed from social and political circumstances, are claimed to be the root cause of the radicalization process. While some accounts acknowledge politics as a component—using euphemistic phrases such as “grievances against real or perceived injustices”—this is only done in the face of overwhelming empirical evidence, before they quickly move on to the more comfortable ground of psychology or theology. While terrorist violence is not seen as having political causes, nonviolent political activity by Muslim groups that are thought to share an ideology with terrorists is seen as another manifestation of the same radicalization process, with roots in individual theological and/or psychological journeys; it is thereby depoliticized and seen as complicit with religiously inspired terrorism. As historian Mark Sedgwick argues in one of the few critical reflections on the radicalization discourse:
The concept of radicalisation emphasizes the individual and, to some extent, the ideology and the group, and significantly de-emphasizes the wider circumstances—the “root causes” that it became so difficult to talk about after 9/11, and that are still often not brought into analyses. So long as the circumstances that produce Islamist radicals’ declared grievances are not taken into account, it is inevitable that the Islamist radical will often appear as a “rebel without a cause.”5
In pursuing this path, radicalization analysts supply what policy makers demand. Following the murder of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh in Amsterdam in 2004 and the 7/7 attacks on the London transport system in 2005, the issue of homegrown terrorism, involving citizens of European countries carrying out violence domestically, came to prominence. Government officials, first in the Netherlands and later elsewhere, began to devise counterradicalization policies they hoped would preempt such violence. Their assumption was that knowledge of the indicators of individual or group radicalization would allow for the construction of an early warning system to detect theological violence. Authorities came to believe they could monitor and profile Muslim citizens for these signs of radicalization and then intervene to prevent the drift to extremism. Rather than providing governments with a full analysis of the causes of homegrown terrorism, think tanks and terrorism studies departments—which had been established in universities after 9/11 to attract new government funding for national security research—began to model the process by which an individual was thought to become a supporter of the extremist ideologies assumed to lie behind terrorist violence. After all, addressing the wider political context of terrorism was a nonstarter with government officials, for whom the basic parameters of foreign policy in the Middle East and South Asia were written in stone.
For those establishing themselves as purveyors of this knowledge, the period from 2004 onward was a time of ne
w opportunities, new funding, and new audiences, first in Europe and then in the US, especially following the election in 2008 of a president who wanted a new way of talking about counterterrorism and who was confronted, a year and a half into his term, with the attempted car bombing of Times Square by an American Muslim. Disraeli once remarked, at the high point of British colonial expansion, “The East is a career.” Edward Said used the phrase as the epigraph to his Orientalism. Today counterradicalization is a career, as young scholars enter the mini-industry of national security think tanks, terrorism studies departments, law enforcement counterterrorism units, and intelligence services to work on modeling radicalization. Of course, scholars of political violence should want societies to make use of their work in order to reduce such violence. But true scholarship also involves a duty to question the underlying assumptions that define the discipline, particularly when those assumptions reflect the priorities of governments that are themselves parties to the conflict under investigation.