![]()
1 Making sense of Islamophobia in Muslim societies
Enes Bayraklı, Farid Hafez and Léonard Faytre
Introduction
The vast literature in the emerging field of Islamophobia Studies has been focusing on Islamophobia in what many people refer to as the ‘West’ in a geographic way of understanding. Or at least, Islamophobia was analysed in terms of Western political forces, which represent powers that are located there such as US foreign policy, although its scope reaches countries such as Iraq and Afghanistan. This book is a first attempt to shift the discussion to a different context. It is not meant to redefine Islamophobia as such, but rather to look at how Islamophobia plays a role in a context where Muslims are not the minority in a society, but constitute the majority of a society. Muslims are in the minority status in many ‘Western’ countries, where this goes hand in hand with less economic and political power. Even in countries with a large Muslim population, however, Islamophobia can play a significant role.
In this chapter, we try to disclose the main dynamics that make sense of Islamophobia in predominantly Muslim societies. By ‘Muslim societies’, we refer to societies with a Muslim majority population. First, we suggest framing the notion of the ‘West’ not as a territorial category, but as one of power. With the global hegemony of the United States as the super power on the globe, Islamophobia can be understood as a continuation of an already existing global structure of racialization where ‘culture’ and ‘religion’ have replaced ‘biology’ (Mbembe, 2014, p. 7) The whole world is home to Islamophobia, especially in the form of epistemic racism. The latter, which is seen as one of the most hidden forms of racism, is defined by Ramón Grosfoguel as a tradition in which ‘the “West” is considered to be the only legitimate tradition of thought able to produce knowledge and the only one with access to “universality”, “rationality”, and “truth” ’ (Grosfoguel, 2010, p. 29).
This does not mean, on the other hand, that Islamophobia is expressed in the same form in every context. Obviously, in the political context of a kingdom or an autocratic state, Islamophobia may function differently but, in essence, the phenomenon is connected to the global political context that is very much structured by the post-colonial order and related to contemporary US hegemony in the world. Second, since many of the political elites in Muslim societies have been educated in the centres, some even in the higher learning institutions, of the global North, many among these Westernized elites think along the same patterns as ‘white men’. This is true for formerly colonized countries such as Egypt, Pakistan or Algeria, as well as self-Westernized countries such as Turkey and Iran before the revolution. Therefore, the regulation of Islam in many Muslim countries has become a way of regulating an identity that was regarded as a threat to the Western-like secular nation-state. Third, this reflects a notion of Islamophobia that was suggested by Salman Sayyid in his writings. According to Sayyid, Islamophobia is about making it impossible for a Muslim political identity to exist. For him, the challenge of being Muslim today is that there is no epistemological or political space for its identity (Sayyid, 2014, p. 8). Accordingly, the inclusion of Islam in Western epistemology as a concept would destabilize the colonial order. Sayyid wants to introduce a post-positivist, post-Orientalist and decolonial perspective to create exactly this space. Christian political identity, such as Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Party, may be regarded as part and parcel of our current political order, whereas this is not the case on behalf of Islamic political identities. This aspect is strongly connected to the fourth aspect of Islamophobia, which is self-Orientalization, meaning non-Westerners’ appropriation of a Western understanding of the world. One could here intervene to argue that this framing may support a non-critical support of political Islam. This is not the case since both forms of Islamophobia – conceived as a form of epistemic racism and self-Orientalization – can be found among those actors propagating an ideology of political Islam or Muslim theologians who reproduce Western dominance by attempting to imitate it and hence become nothing more than a reflection of Western patterns of thought.
While epistemic disobedience (Mignolo, 2009) becomes a necessity to relocate the subaltern Muslim subject in the world, this also invited reductive –what some called nativist or fundamentalist (Ali, 2002, p. 126) – perspectives to counter the influence of colonialism and fight it back. We argue that the problem at hand is more complex. Since racism, such as, in our case, anti-Muslim racism, is not about an intentional act but is structural and works unconsciously, it can also be part of Islamist discourses who often mirror the essentialist and reductionist identity politics of their Western counterparts.
World-systems theory, epistemic Islamophobia and secularism
Islamophobia is another form of epistemic racism, since Islam is excluded and denigrated and perceived as antithetic to the modern secular tradition by the dominant West (Grosfoguel, 2010, p. 29). In his reflection on the Formations of the Secular (2003), Talal Asad demonstrates how Muslims in Europe are both present and absent from the secular Europe. Present on one side, because of Muslim immigration to the Old Continent and their subsequent place in the European public life (work, education, media etc.). Absent on the other, because Muslims are perceived as carrying values that contradict those of the European sacrosanct principle, namely the subordination of the divine authority by the worldly power (i.e. secularism). In this regard, ‘Muslims may be in Europe but are not of it’ (Asad, 2003, p. 164). We argue that this observation does not only speak to Muslims in Europe, but to those in many Muslim majority societies as well.
In Local Histories/global Designs (2000), decolonialist author Mignolo helps us understand the roots of epistemic Islamophobia in Muslim societies through his reflection on the notion of coloniality. By drawing on Quijano’s notion of ‘coloniality of power’ (Quijano, 2000) that assumes a hierarchical structure of the whole world between the dominating-made product (from the white Western man) and the dominated-made product (from any non-white Western man) in every social sphere (ontology, epistemology, language, sign, economy, politics, etc.), Mignolo introduces the concept of ‘world views in collision’. In fact, Mignolo profoundly demonstrates how the encounter between European local cultures and non-European worlds at the beginning of the sixteenth century did not only lead to the ‘transition from one culture to another’ (that is Malinowski’s concept of ‘acculturation’) or to the complex interbreeding of cultures (that is Ortiz’s concept of ‘transculturation’) but rather to coloniality of power, which ‘presupposes the colonial difference as its condition of possibility and as the legitimacy for the subalternization of knowledges and the subjugation of people’ (Mignolo, 2000, p. 16).
Mignolo describes this Europeanization of the world as an offensive process that colonizes any sphere of the ‘being’ and that deeply reshapes the colonized’s approach to the world, namely his understanding of ontology (definition of human being and of its relation to the inner and supra-worlds), of psychology (subconsciousness, self-representation), of linguistics (discourse, use of certain concepts), of epistemology (definition of knowledge, divine and secular knowledge), to politics (state, nation, secularism), of economy (capitalism, industry, centre–periphery) etc. At the end of this destructive process, the colonized is not allowed to ‘be’ outside the Europeanized world. Put differently, Mignolo draws an intrinsic link between Europeanism (i.e. Western colonial design of the world), Orientalism (i.e. Western approach to the non-Western world), and self-Orientalism (i.e. the adoption of an Orientalist approach by non-Westerners/ natives/indigenous).
Another decolonial author, Ramón Grosfoguel, argues that Islamophobia takes root in Western imperialism at the global scale, leading to ‘self-valorisation’ of Western epistemological tradition and rising it up to the rank of ‘universality’, ‘neutrality’, ‘rationality’ and ‘philosophy’. This is a global phenomenon. Starting from the fifteenth century (the destruction of Al-Andalus and the conquest of the American continent) onwards, the ‘West’ claimed intellectual superiority over other civilizations following its growing political domination (slavery, colonization, Westernization, etc.). One of the results of this long global process was the creation of the ‘world-system’ we all live in, which is yet again designed and dominated by the Western framework and world-view. For Grosfoguel, we all live in a world-system characterized as the ‘modern colonial Westernized Christian-centric capitalist patriarchal world-system’ (Grosfoguel, 2012).
In this definition, globalization does not only involve ‘international division of labour and a global inter-state system’ but also
as constitutive of the capitalist accumulation at a world-scale, a global racial/ethnic hierarchy (Western versus non-Western peoples), a global patriarchal hierarchy (global gender system and a global sexual system), a global religious hierarchy, a global linguistic hierarchy, a global epistemic hierarchy, etc.
(Grosfoguel, 2006)
This epistemic racism/sexism is the underlying discourse (in the Foucauldian sense) of the world we live in. In this context, the Islamic civilization’s knowledge, values and way of life are automatically dismissed as ‘particularistic’, ‘provincialist’, ‘subjective’, ‘undemocratic’, ‘irrational’ and ‘non-universal’. From this perspective, the Westernized political, cultural, etc. elites in Muslim majority countries can either be regarded as part and parcel or as operating within the epistemological framework of a racial structure. Indeed, post-colonial political elites work within the frame of the nation-state, a system that goes back to the Westphalian concept of sovereignty (seventeenth century). Again, the broad context in which elites are involved represents itself in the European local experience that became hegemonic on a global scale. This intellectual ‘dependency’ or ‘captive mind’ (Alatas, 2005) is particularly obvious for those cultural, political and other elites who were educated outside of their native homelands in Western universities. With this hegemony of knowledge production in the centres of the global North, a non-Muslim perspective on Islam has become the starting point for many Muslim thinkers and policy-makers, as will be later discussed in this chapter.
Centre–periphery relations and the birth of Westernized elites in Muslim societies
In what is often imagined as the ‘Muslim world’ (on the evolution of this term, see Aydin, 2017), the collision of world-views during the modernization and Westernization process (Mignolo, 2012) led to the decreasing role of Islamic normative perspectives in favour of the modern nation-state world-view, with more and less conflicts, resistance, and disturbance according to each country. Hallaq argues that,
beginning in the nineteenth century and at the hands of colonialist Europe, the socio-economic and political system regulated by the Sharīʿa was structurally dismantled, which is to say that the Sharīʿa itself was eviscerated, reduced to providing no more than the raw materials for the legislation of personal status by the modern state. Even in this relatively limited sphere, the Sharīʿa lost its autonomy and social agency in favour of the modern state.
(Hallaq, 2013)
As a result, the establishment of European domination over other ontologies, epistemologies and ways of life (materialized today by globalization) took place in a geographic space where ‘the Islamic normative structure [is used to] serve both as a religion and as a way of life for its adherents’ (Hussain, 1984). This ontological contradiction between Western modernization and Islam is still structuring most of the political conflicts in the region.
How did the anti-Islamic tradition of Westernization manage to prevail in predominantly Muslim societies? The first answer is to point out the role of colonization in the destruction of Islamic normative structures and the shift to the European nation-state model through the establishment of modern administration, military and education by force. Yet Westernization took place in non-colonized countries such as Turkey, Iran and – to a lesser extent – Afghanistan as well. Therefore, besides colonization, one should underline the decisive role played by secularized Muslim elites in the rise of the European modern nation-state model as both a practice (establishment of modern institutions, bureaucracy or schools for example) and an ideology (modernization as civilizational path, discourse and world-view). Dahl defines a ‘ruling elite’ as ‘a group of people who to some degree exercise power or influence over other actors in the system’ (Dahl, 1958) while Hussain adds that, according to elite theory, it is those who concentrate political power and ‘who guide the destiny of their country’ (Hussain, 1984).
The neo-Marxist centre–periphery perspective defines secularized and Westernized Muslim elites as intermediaries between European dominant powers and Muslim dominated peoples. Indeed, in the centre–periphery theory, while
the metropolis expropriates economic surplus from its satellites and appropriates it for its own development, thereby creating the polarization of the capitalist system into metropolitan centre and peripheral satellites, […] the existence of the third category [here Muslim countries’ elites] means precisely that the upper stratum is not faced with the unified opposition of all the others because the middle stratum is both exploited and exploiter.
(Hussain, 1984)
The centre–periphery perspective offers a useful framework to understand economic relations between dominant and dominated countries worldwide. Completed by post-colonial considerations on European imperialism, the centre–periphery perspective draws a general outlook in which predominant Western countries directly or indirectly shape Muslim countries through the complex mediation of secularized and Westernized Muslim upper-class elites. It is possible to categorize the constitution of such elites in history through two main dynamics:
a Colonization: Elites first suffered capitalization of the indigenous economy, as well as Westernization of values through the occupation of their country by a foreign power. Then, they either fought colonial power by reclaiming European Enlightenment values (Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, Senegal) or worked with it to remain at the head of the country (Malaysia, Iraq, Jordan).
b Self-Westernization: Domestic elites got engaged in the capitalization of the economy and Westernization of values without being subjected to any foreign colonization in the long run because they believed it to be in the best interest of their countries and they thought it impossible to resist the advance of Western powers without modernizing and Westernizing their societies (Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan).
Although the process of Westernization in each of these countries from the end of the eighteenth century until today is complex and differs in every case, almost all the secularized elites of these countries engaged in a radical reconsideration of the Islamic tradition/world-view/way of life that they consequently considered to be an obstacle to the establishment of a modern state, the only path to civilization.
The Malaysian sociologist Syed Farid Alatas shows how Westernization (or modernization) constitutes an ideological dynamic of change, an ‘attitude or mentality that subordinates the traditional to the modern’ (Alatas, 2005). Even though Muslim elites may have supported modernization in the last two centuries in order to better protect indigenous regimes (military, administrative and educational modernizations to balance European technological advance in Qajar and Ottoman states), to reclaim independence (resistance movements in Algeria, Senegal, Tunis, Egypt) or for purely pragmatic interests (exploitation of rubber in Malaysia, elites of the brand new states of Kuwait, Iraq, Jordan, etc.), their engagement in reform has never gone without ideological motives, a burden of civilizational rehab put by Muslim elites on their respective societies.
In other terms, the use of European modern state-based instruments to reform political, economic and m...
