The Muslims Are Coming!

by Arun Kundnani

  The collapse of East Germany communist system and the opening of the Stasi’s files gave regular citizens the uncanny experience of discovering their names in state intelligence documents and finding out who among their circles of friends was an informant. The 2011 leaking of some NYPD intelligence files has already begun giving individual Muslims the same disturbing experience. Numerous businesses, cafés, restaurants, and mosques in New York became aware that the NYPD considers them hot spots and deploys informants to monitor them. And the recent outing of a small number of NYPD informants has meant that some have found out that relationships they thought of as genuine friendships were actually covert attempts to gather intelligence. Asad Dandia, a nineteen-year-old student at City University of New York, has spoken of becoming aware that a friend was an informant.

  I met him through the Muslim Student Association’s Facebook connections. He had told me he wanted to become a better person and to strengthen his faith. So I took him in, introduced him to all of my friends, got him involved in our extracurricular activities. I would wake him up for prayer every morning. He even slept over at my house … When I was texted the news [that he was an informant], the shock caused me to drop my phone. It took me twenty-four hours to get myself together.32

  Another student at City University, Jawad Rasul, saw his name listed when a file on Muslim students became public in 2012, and that was when he discovered a friend of his was an informant. “You always hear about the NYPD spying on this group or that group, but having your name come up, it just brings everything home.”33

  Our current models of totalitarianism, largely derived from the cold war, are poorly equipped to make sense of these practices. Whether derived from fiction or historical studies, they usually picture a narrow, ideologically driven elite controlling the mass of the population. Such a state of affairs is normally assumed to be incompatible with a formal democratic process and a liberal economy. But the experience of the war on terror suggests that, if the same tools of totalitarian rule are applied only to racialized groups rather than the population as a whole, the trappings of democracy can be maintained for the majority. (Numerous other examples—such as China—have long demonstrated the compatibility of a liberalized economy with state authoritarianism.) The key to such a seemingly inconsistent “democratic totalitarianism” is a racialized discourse of fear that constructs Muslims as a cultural threat to the liberal order. It is the race principle that enables the separation of Muslims from the usual liberal norms of rights and citizenship. And it is on the basis of race thinking that Muslim dissent is read only as the intrusion of alien, illiberal cultural values into the public sphere and rarely as an attempt to use the political process to hold states accountable to their own liberal standards. From this perspective, the totalitarianism of the war on terror intersects with other racialized regimes, such as the war on drugs and the militarized policing of immigration, in which similar patterns of discriminatory surveillance, brutality, and incarceration are central.34

  So long as the unspoken assumption that these measures will only be directed at racialized subjects—Muslims, African Americans, undesired immigrants, asylum seekers—remains valid, then the consent of the majority can be secured. And if this racialized totalitarianism begins to overreach and step on the freedoms of others—through, for example, overbearing screening at airports or by trying to introduce universal identity cards—such excesses can be quickly corrected while preserving the essential structure of the system. Moreover, since a transformative politics is more likely to emerge from racialized sections of society, the special measures the state reserves for these populations prove useful tools for maintaining the status quo. The analysis of totalitarianism today therefore requires a critical understanding of the centrality of race—but in a more radical way than managed by Hannah Arendt, who ultimately saw it as merely one of various possible precursors.

  But as even the Stasi eventually discovered, no system of surveillance can ever produce total knowledge. Indeed, the greater the amount of information collected, the harder it is to interpret its meaning. The relevant information in the majority of recent US terrorist attacks was somewhere in the government’s systems, but its significance was lost amid a morass of useless data. More significantly, what is obscured by the demands for ever greater surveillance and information processing is that security is best established through relationships of trust and political empowerment. A society that has blocked a section of its population from shaping a process of political transformation is one that has hollowed out its democracy until what’s left is an empty, technocratic consensus in which real politics is disavowed. When radical political contestation is suffocated, the processes by which societies reinvent themselves and resolve their social tensions are neutered, and in the absence of a genuinely emancipatory alternative, the only possible outlet for the impulses generated by social and economic marginalization is the fake radicalism of armored identity politics, conspiracy theories, and apocalyptic fantasies.

  Ending the War on Terror

  Among the youth workers participating in the British government’s program to tackle extremism, the more independently minded have realized that the real problem is the absence of any alternative to the managerial politics of mainstream liberalism. The young people they work with have not been radicalized by Anwar al-Awlaki or Nick Griffin. Their accounts of the world are more likely to involve conspiracy theories about Tupac or the Illuminati. Among those from Muslim backgrounds, there is no knowledge or interest in the content of Islamic ideology, only a pulp millenarianism and what one youth worker refers to as a “pseudo-Islamism” that reduces Islam to “a set of clichés.” He adds that they share with young people supportive of the far Right a “totally uncritical way of looking at the world” that is apolitical, conspiratorial, and narrowly identitarian. The underlying principle of this worldview, reflecting the wider culturalist prejudices of our age, is that all societal problems are to be blamed on the fixed culture of the “other.” Such attitudes are common and can, of course, connect with racist violence of various kinds, though youth workers say the risk of it leading to terrorism is negligible. To tackle it requires understanding its roots in the current context of depoliticization. Javaad Alipoor, a youth worker in Bradford who deals with issues of extremism among young people from a variety of backgrounds, points out:

  It is not a political way of thinking. When daily political discourse is completely shorn of any emotion and it’s just a tedious administrative question of Ed Miliband versus David Cameron, then, of course, this repressed emotional core politics is going to come out in these crazy ways. I think there’s a wider problem, which is, there’s no politics. As radical as young people’s worldviews are supposed to seem, in their racism, or their crazy religious millenarianism, in reality they are all built on the understanding that nothing about the fundamental socioeconomic constellation can actually change, that no one ever talks about class, no one ever talks about capitalism, no one ever talks about working-class access to the world and the good things in life. The problem is that we don’t have any politics. And so people’s revulsion at the existing state of things manifests itself in all these crazy ways.35

  In contrast to this political analysis, official thinking on extremism assumes that flawed structures of identity are the problem. A void is imagined to exist among white, working-class young people where a positive sense of national identity ought to be; a lack of identification with Britishness is supposed to be equally destructive of the proper integration of young Muslims. The absence of an appropriate sense of identity creates an opening for an extremist mind-set to fill the void. Part of the blame lies in excessive multiculturalism, which supposedly encourages the value of different cultures while not endorsing the majority identity. The answer, accordingly, is to revive national belonging by defining it in terms of the shared liberal values from which both Muslims and the white, working class are currently seen as alienated. On this view, the libe
ral state positions itself as a neutral mediator between the various forms of extremism that confront it, and sees its role as developing forms of identity politics that can draw marginal populations into accepting its values. In the latest iteration of this thinking, far Right extremism and Islamist extremism are seen as mutually reinforcing threats to the liberal order; extremism in one community provokes support for extremism in an opposing group, in a spiral of demonization—a process of “cumulative radicalization.”36 The response, liberals argue, should be a generic antiextremism that treats all forms of it as rooted in the same psychology of blocked identity formation that creates an opening for ideological mind-sets (a view that renders irrelevant the twentieth-century tradition of Left antifascism, which treated extremism as a political problem of class societies). Among the groups adopting this depoliticized model of extremism is the think tank Google Ideas, which has developed counterradicalization programs in which former radicals speak of their struggles to construct a positive sense of identity.

  The limitation of this approach is that the liberal state is absolved of its role in creating an environment in which identitarian political violence occurs. Liberalism’s promise (latterly in the form of multiculturalism) is that it provides the best means of enabling the coexistence of different ways of life within a single polity. But liberalism always had a different meaning too: not just a way of “reconciling many ways of life” but a way of life itself into which lesser peoples needed to be civilized.37 The more the war on terror has emphasized this view of liberalism, in which it becomes a transcendent identity politics of its own rather than a space where various identities come together, the less liberalism has been able to play the role of neutral mediator. Instead it appears to its interlocutors as a one-sided demand that they simply substitute one form of identity politics for another, giving up their current ethnic, racial, or religious affiliations in favor of a “progressive nationalism.”38 This is unlikely to be very appealing to would-be extremists, who are characterized by their rejection of the liberal political game and a belief in the complete bankruptcy of the mainstream. But while the extremist is positioned as an outsider, as a force alien and disruptive of liberal democratic capitalism, he is in fact a symptom of the very system he despises. The al-Qaeda wannabe is no more than the mirror image of the official discourse of the war on terror, simply inverting the terms in the culturalist clash of civilizations rhetoric. Equally, the far Right activist gets the idea that he is at war with Islamic extremism from the very governments he rejects as hopelessly co-opted by an empty cosmopolitanism. This suggests that, in the end, liberals will be unable to solve their problems with extremism unless they can construct forms of political identification that reach beyond questions of cultural identity and speak to the wider context of neocolonialism, social and economic inequality, and the collapse of working-class representation.

  For these reasons, programs that emphasize intense scrutiny of, and limitations on, radical opinion and religious behavior in the name of tackling radicalization are counterproductive. In the case of the Boston bombings, for example, the real missed opportunity to intervene before the attack was not some piece of intelligence that might have been picked up had the government been given greater surveillance powers. Rather, it came three months earlier, when bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev stood up during a Friday prayer service at his mosque—the Islamic Society of Boston, in Cambridge—to angrily protest the imam’s sermon. The imam had been celebrating the life of Martin Luther King Jr., which Tsarnaev thought was selling out. According to one report, Tsarnaev was then kicked out of the prayer service for his outburst.39 Since 9/11, mosque leaders have been under pressure to eject anyone expressing radical views rather than to engage with them and seek to challenge their religious interpretations, address their political frustrations, or meet their emotional needs. That policy has been forced on mosques by the wider climate of excessive surveillance. It has made mosque leaders wary of even having conversations with those perceived to be radicals for fear of attracting official attention. They fear that every mosque has a government informant listening for radical talk. Unsurprisingly, this means most people are reluctant to engage with young people expressing radical views.

  The Tsarnaev brothers were said to be angry about US foreign policy in Afghanistan and Iraq, possibly drawing parallels with their own experiences as refugees from Russia’s brutal wars of counterinsurgency in the Caucasus. But because discussions of foreign policy have been off-limits in mosques since 9/11, they were unlikely to have had their anger acknowledged, engaged, challenged, or channeled into nonviolent political activism. The heavy surveillance of Muslims has meant there is no room for mosques to engage with someone like Tamerlan Tsarnaev, listen to him, challenge those of his ideas that might be violent, or offer him emotional support. Instead, Muslims have felt pressured to demonstrate their loyalty to America by steering clear of dissident conversations on foreign policy. Flawed models of the radicalization process have assumed that the best way to stop terrorist violence is to prevent radical ideas from circulating. Attempting to reconstruct the motivation for the bombings is fraught with difficulty; there can be little certainty in such matters. But pathological outcomes are more likely when space for the free exchange of feelings and opinions is squeezed.

  No one could have predicted from Tsarnaev’s outburst that a few months later he would be suspected of carrying out an act of mass murder on the streets of Boston. And we do not know what would have made a difference in the end. But a community able to express itself openly, without fear, whether in the mosque or elsewhere, should be a key element in efforts to prevent terrorism. What is needed is less state surveillance and enforced conformity and more critical thinking and political empowerment. The role of communities in countering terrorism is not to institute self-censorship but to confidently construct political spaces where young people can politicize their disaffection into visions of how the world might be better organized, so that radical alternatives to terrorist vanguardism can emerge. Radicalization—in the true political sense of the word—is the solution, not the problem. Genuine emancipatory movements eschew the tactic of terrorism, because they locate themselves among the people; violence has only a defensive role in such movements.40 Terrorism is not the product of radical politics but a symptom of political impotence. “The very fact of individual acts of terror,” wrote Leon Trotsky, “is an infallible token of the political backwardness of a country and the feebleness of the progressive forces there.”41

  Anyone who seeks to extinguish the lives of civilians in acts of terrorism deserves universal contempt. But to condemn terrorism without hypocrisy today requires also a questioning of the normalized violence of the war on terror. The question of terrorist violence carried out by extremist or ideological nonstate actors is inseparable from the wider background of state violence that is defined as normal, necessary, and rational. They feed each other in a savage cycle of war and murder. Martin Luther King Jr. well understood how individual violence at home is intricately linked to state violence abroad—although this part of his message is downplayed in official celebrations of his life. Speaking in 1967, he told an audience at Riverside Church in New York:

  As I have walked among the desperate, rejected, and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they asked, and rightly so, “What about Vietnam?” They asked if our own nation wasn’t using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own government.

  His efforts at what might now be called “preventing violent extremism” among young American
s depended on first opposing the violence of US foreign policy, a point that remains as valid today in the era of the terror war’s global battlefield. Equally relevant today is King’s understanding that “the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism” are interwoven in societies that place “profit motives and property rights” above human beings.42 It is time once again to heed King’s message of peace by ending the war on terror, and unraveling the racisms and totalitarianisms it fostered.

  Notes

  INTRODUCTION

  1 Phone interview with Omar Regan, July 18, 2012.

  2 Criminal Complaint, USA v. Luqman Ameen Abdullah et al., United States District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan, October 27, 2009, 2.

  3 Ibid., 3.

  4 Interview with Imam Abdullah Bey el-Amin, Detroit, March 31, 2011.