The Muslims Are Coming!

by Arun Kundnani

  I worry very much, from the Jewish point of view, [at] the presence, and increased stature, and affluence, and enfranchisement of American Muslims, because they are so much led by an Islamist leadership that this will present true dangers to American Jews.11

  Pipes’s understanding of this Islamist leadership is conveyed in a later comment:

  If Ayatollah Khomeini and Osama bin Laden represent Islamism 1.0, the prime minister of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdogan and the French intellectual Tariq Ramadan represent Islamism 2.0. The former are more deadly, but the latter will likely do greater long-term damage.12

  The “damage” of an “Islamism 2.0” represented by figures like Ramadan is presumably that the US foreign policy of one-sided support of Israel will be increasingly challenged. No one knows the exact number of American Muslims in the US, but it is likely to approach the size of the American Jewish population—around six million—over the next decade, and the number of young, American-born Muslims is set to increase significantly in the coming years.13 For all its rhetoric, the real fear that lies behind US Islamophobia is not the Muslim fanatic but the possibility that this new generation of American Muslims might express itself politically.

  Tahrir Square

  If conservatives after 9/11 viewed political Islamic organizations as united in a worldwide conspiracy to overthrow Western civilization, liberals have tended to distinguish between moderate and extremist organizations on the basis of whether such organizations accommodate themselves to perceived Western interests and values. The debate between conservatives and liberals thus revolved around the question of whether political Islam can be incorporated into the liberal capitalist order or whether the former is necessarily an extremist threat to the latter. The stale public debate that has recurred through the war on terror, on whether Islam is culturally compatible with democracy, has usually been a proxy for consideration of this essentially political question. What both sides in the debate neglected to properly consider were the social and political injustices that create the fertile ground in which extremism grows.

  The US response to Arab peoples themselves rising up in mass movements for dignity and equality is illustrative of these limitations. Conflict in the Middle East has been seen by conservatives as rooted in a cultural failure of Islam to adapt itself to modernity rather than as a political aspiration to freedom from Western-backed regimes. The assumption has been that Muslims could not generate their own democracy. The eruption of a transformative movement in Egypt in 2011 finally demonstrated in practice that this culturalist assumption does not hold. Popular sovereignty, not God’s sovereignty, was the basis of the Tahrir Square protests; Muslims and Christians marched together. The slogans were demands for rights, dignity, and social justice. All of this confounds the clash of civilizations thesis, which holds that “Islam has bloody borders.”14 Equally, it undermined Obama’s dialogue of civilizations approach, which sought to address the people of the Middle East as a culturally distinct Muslim world rather than as populations whose demands are political. It is no surprise that Obama’s response to the fall of his erstwhile ally Hosni Mubarak was muddled. The events of 2011 drastically undermined the administration’s strategy of restabilizing US Middle East policy through strengthened multilateral alliances with governments in Muslim-majority countries and using soft power public diplomacy to recognize moderate Islam as a legitimate cultural and religious identity. It turned out that US recognition of Islam was not the shortcut to winning hearts and minds that planners had anticipated. The people of the Middle East were more concerned with the US foreign policy of supporting oppressive regimes than its views on cultural questions about Islam and the West. And the strategic alliance with the Egyptian security services, which the Obama administration relied on in its war on terror, placed it on the wrong side of the barricades in 2011. Administration officials thus worried that the Egyptian revolution was “very chaotic” and would struggle to “find an equilibrium.” What was needed was an “orderly transition” in which limited reforms could be made while maintaining US interests.15 The administration’s hope was for a managed process that would leave Egypt’s strategic alliance with the US unaltered. The State Department stepped up talks with the Muslim Brotherhood, the leading organized political force among the opposition to Mubarak, in an attempt to achieve this. To the shari’a conspiracy theorists this was further evidence of the infiltration by Muslim Brotherhood supporters of the Obama administration. But the reality was that the Egyptian revolution had made the Brotherhood a potential power broker that the US government chose to engage with to secure its interests.

  By the beginning of 2012, Obama liberals such as the journalist Fareed Zakaria—always a reliable bellwether of administration thinking—were no longer treating the Brotherhood as an extremist threat but seeing it as a potential stabilizing force that could, on the model of Prime Minister Erdogan in Turkey, partner with the military, continue neoliberal economic policies, avoid excessive anti-Western populism, and leave in place Mubarak’s security arrangements with Israel and the US.16 After Brotherhood leader Mohamed Morsi was elected president of Egypt, Time magazine featured him on its cover and described his seven years at universities in California, where he became a fan of the Trojans, the University of Southern California’s football team, and acquired the nickname “Mo.”17 This assimilation of Morsi into American culture signaled that US establishment media were now able to conceive of the possibility of a Muslim Brotherhood government acting as a shock absorber for the Egyptian revolution’s more radical impulses and bringing stability to the most populous Arab nation. The formula was an implicit pact between the Brotherhood leadership and the military, in which the generals would be able to maintain their hold on the deep state and continue profiting from their business interests while the Brotherhood pursued its cultural agenda. This, of course, left unaddressed the processes of social and economic marginalization that had driven Egypt’s revolutionary protests in the first place. Liberal media in the US were correct to belatedly adopt a measure of nuance in their accounts of political Islam. But they were unable to grasp that the real problem was the Brotherhood’s inability to offer an alternative economic model to the neoliberalism that produced Egypt’s vast inequalities. The predominantly cultural formulae of Islamic movements are a poor basis upon which to resolve the political and economic challenges faced by postcolonial societies. Political Islam has historically reconciled itself to Western capitalism, despite its rhetorical opposition. Political scientist Fawaz Gerges has described the Muslim Brotherhood as “new capitalists,” supportive of the interests of the business class and eager to reassure Western powers of its commitment to free-market principles: “The architect of the Brotherhood’s economic policy, the millionaire businessman Khairat al-Shater, has silenced voices within the organisation that call for a more egalitarian, socialist approach.”18 Indeed, political Islam is usually content to play a role shoring up capitalist social relations, offering itself as an efficient cultural glue to resolve the antagonisms such relations generate, a process in which women and minorities are likely to pay the heaviest price. Despite continuing mass mobilizations on the streets, the more radical desire for economic, political, and social transformation that Tahrir Square represented was ignored by the Morsi government. Such a transformation, in which the people of the Middle East might begin to free themselves from the vested interests of pro-Western business and military classes, was the US’s real fear of radicalization and the basis for its improvised response to the events of 2011. Indeed, once it became clear in 2013 that the Brotherhood would be unable to prevent such a radicalization in Egypt, despite its attempts to present itself as aligned with Western interests, the Egyptian military returned to power by appearing as the embodiment of the people’s unmet demands; and the US government gave its blessing to what amounted to a military coup, with Secretary of State John Kerry describing the military intervention as “restoring democracy.”19 As Egyptian-American journ
alist Sharif Abdel Kouddous put it:

  In securing the military’s fiefdom, the Brotherhood was left to its own devices to manage civilian politics. Yet the generals needed political stability in order to enjoy their economic empire, and the June 30, [2013], uprising threatened a complete state collapse, prompting them to intercede to protect their core interests.20

  When the military began its brutal crackdown on dissent—killing hundreds of unarmed protesters—it knew it did so with the support of the US government. A token and temporary reduction in US aid to the Egyptian military did not alter their underlying strategic partnership. And with the generals once again monopolizing power, the US media’s brief flirtation with Morsi ended. In the New York Times, David Brooks defended the military’s power grab on the culturalist grounds that Egypt lacks “the basic mental ingredients” for democracy, while conservative magazines such as Commentary and National Review cheered on the violent suppression of opposition.21

  Defending Dissent

  This book has argued that the radicalization discourse of the current phase of the war on terror conceives of Western Muslims as locked in an ideological battle between, on the one hand, a moderate Islam that is seemingly apolitical but implicitly supportive of Western governments, and, on the other, an inherently violent extremist Islam. How is “extremism” defined in this discourse? At times the term has a theological meaning, referring, for example, to Salafi or conservative religious beliefs; it is also sometimes given an identitarian meaning, referring to the idea of a global Islamic identity that emphasizes one’s affiliations with other Muslims around the world over one’s national citizenship; on occasion it assumes a more explicitly political meaning, referring to radical opposition to Western governments. As a proportion of young Muslims in the West seem to fall under these various definitions of extremism, and extremist ideology is assumed to be a precursor to terrorist violence, the perception has grown that large numbers of young Muslims are on the verge of becoming al-Qaeda terrorists. Political and cultural disaffection is then misread as terrorist radicalization. With these assumptions in place, policies have been devised that would not make sense if the actual, negligible extent of al-Qaeda activism among Western Muslims was properly acknowledged.

  Having conceived of radicalization in this way, tackling it implies the mass surveillance of the religious and political lives of Muslim populations. In the US, thousands of informants in Muslim communities have been recruited to this end. In the UK, nonpolice public service providers are drawn into the process of gathering intelligence on those suspected of radicalism. In both countries the state has criminalized expressions of Islamist ideology. Sting operations in the US have been deployed against those thought to be traveling on a radicalization journey. The grim legacies of COINTELPRO-style countersubversion policing have been revived. The UK state’s Channel project uses a different approach, one in which young people are subjected to soft interventions designed to shift them away from extremist ideology while every aspect of their lives is scrutinized by police counterterrorist units. These have a less harmful impact on the lives of those targeted compared to US-style sting operations. But the Channel project nevertheless raises the question of whether it is appropriate to target young people on the basis of ideological expressions the government believes to be problematic, and then trying to manipulate them into adopting more acceptable opinions, all the while gathering detailed information about their private lives.

  Some in the US have tried to import Britain’s Channel project, seeing it as a liberal alternative to the FBI’s sting operations. For example, Mohamed Elibiary, a Muslim activist from the northern suburbs of Dallas, has conducted his own Channel-style soft interventions in partnership with the FBI since 2008. Elibiary personally engages in counseling and mentoring young people to divert them from their extremist opinions while briefing the FBI on his progress. Such initiatives are rare, because in order to share information on the young person involved, high levels of trust are needed between the FBI and the activist carrying out the intervention.22 And yet, the closer the relationship, the more the activist is, in practice, a state agent whose efforts to shift a young person’s political or religious opinions begin to resemble state intrusion into personal ideology. The UK, meanwhile, is beginning to import the FBI’s sting techniques and apply them to countering radicalization. In an unprecedented case that came to trial in Manchester in 2011, Munir Farooqi was convicted of preparing for acts of terrorism, inciting murder, and disseminating terrorist publications. Two undercover police officers had befriended Farooqi, pretended to convert to Islam, and spent a year repeatedly raising questions of jihad and the war in Afghanistan.23 At the time of writing, Farooqi is appealing his conviction.

  The close coordination between US and UK counterterrorism officials is illustrated by another development. The British government now has a policy of revoking the citizenship of suspected Islamist extremists while they are outside the UK in order to pave the way for US actions against them. Two British nationals who were stripped of their UK citizenship were subsequently killed in US drone strikes in Somalia.24 Another British national, Somali-born Mahdi Hashi, is currently imprisoned in New York. Before 2012, he was a youth worker in Camden, London, where he had been pressured by MI5 officers to become an informant. He refused but was threatened with harassment. His citizenship was withdrawn while he was visiting Somalia in 2012, making it impossible for him to return to the UK. He was then imprisoned at a secret site in neighboring Djibouti, where he was threatened with torture and questioned by CIA and FBI officers. Because his British citizenship had been revoked by the Home Office, he was not entitled to consular assistance, and UK ministers could wash their hands of him. Only months later did his family track him down in a New York detention center, where he had been rendered to face charges of providing material support to al-Shabaab.25

  Everyday life for communities under state surveillance programs increasingly resembles the patterns described in classic accounts of totalitarianism. There is the same sense of not knowing whom to trust, of choosing one’s words with special care when discussing politics, and of the arbitrariness and unpredictability of state power. The thousands of American Muslims on the US government’s no-fly list, for example, have no idea why their names are on it. Is it because they share a name with a suspected terrorist? Is it because someone with a grudge has phoned the government with false information? There is no way of knowing. No one can be sure whether the telephone call to relatives in Iran is wiretapped, whether Facebook posts are read by officials, or whether the new face in the mosque congregation is an informant. They have heard the stories, so they are careful—just in case.

  Totalitarian rule thrives on its subjects’ ignorance of the extent to which the surveillance system is monitoring their lives. The possibility, rather than the fact, of surveillance is enough to generate fear, anxiety, and informal pressures to conform, to downplay dissenting opinions, to declare one’s absolute loyalty. Thus an enforced culture of self-censorship emerges in communities that used to express their political opinions freely. Linda Sarsour, an Arab-American community activist from Brooklyn, New York, notes:

  We’re Arabs, we talk about politics all the time. Politics is all we do! Every coffee shop, it’s either al-Jazeera or a soccer game on TV. This new idea that we must be suspicious of those who speak about politics—something’s wrong.26

  Humor is often the way people cope with this subtle psychological terror. The jokes American Muslims tell about state surveillance will be eerily familiar to those who lived under the East German Stasi; they are a way of acknowledging the same anxiety. Occasions on which political issues might be tentatively discussed by Muslim Americans usually begin with a humorous reference to the wiretapped phone or the presence of an informant.27 Such humor is also an acknowledgment that the surveillance regime has been normalized in their everyday lives. Sunaina Marr Maira, a New England community activist, has written of how she and her colleag
ues began to develop

  strategies to manage the unspoken anxiety about the intrusion of state powers into everyday life, by self-consciously drawing attention to this constant possibility of surveillance. We made jokes about FBI videotaping and wiretapping, dressing for the camera, and possible informants in our midst … Our humor, I think, was a way to grapple with the unknown and ever-present reach of state powers.28

  After repeated FBI interrogations over a six-month period in 2002, in which he was asked about every aspect of his life, Hasan M. Elahi, an artist and scholar at the University of Maryland, began to produce a Web site that automatically documented every flight he took, every place he visited, every financial transaction, and every meal he ate—a darkly humorous parody of the national-security state’s obsession with quotidian detail. “There are 46,000 images on my site,” he writes. “I trust that the FBI has seen all of them.”29

  The East German Stasi is estimated to have had one intelligence analyst for every 166 citizens. Adding regular informants brings the number to one spy for every 66 citizens.30 The FBI reportedly has at present 10,000 intelligence analysts and agents working on counterterrorism and 15,000 paid informants.31 Exactly how many of them are focused on Muslims in the United States is unknown; there is little transparency in this area. But given the emphasis the FBI has placed on preventing Muslim terrorism, it is reasonable to estimate that at least two-thirds are assigned to spy on Muslims. Taking the usual estimate of the Muslim population in the United States of 2.35 million, this would mean that the FBI has a spy for every ninety-four Muslims in the United States—before the resources of the National Security Agency, regional intelligence fusion centers, and the counterterrorism resources of local police departments, such as the NYPD, are added. This suggests that Muslims in the United States are likely to be exposed to levels of state surveillance similar to that which the East German population faced.