A Fundamental Fear

Eurocentrism and the Emergence of Islamism

S. Sayyid

• Publisher: Zed Books
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781783601912
• eBook ISBN: 9781783601936
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Political History & Theory
• Index: Social Sciences

The fear and anxiety aroused by Islamism is not a myth, nor is it simply a consequence of terrorism or fundamentalism. Writing in 1997, before 9/11 and before the austerity that has bred a new generation of far right groups across Europe and the US, S. Sayyid warned of a spectre haunting Western civilization. This groundbreaking book, banned by the Malaysian government, is both an analysis of the conditions that have made 'Islamic fundamentalism' possible and a provocative account of the ways in which Muslim identities have come to play an increasingly political role throughout the world. This is a pioneering, provocative and intricately crafted study, which shows the challenge of Islamism is not only geopolitical or even cultural but also epistemological.

1. Framin’ fundamentalism

‘Islamic fundamentalism’ has emerged as a way of representing and analysing a series of events involving Muslim communities. Accounts of ‘Islamic fundamentalism’ often begin by listing a number of incidents in the Muslim world which show the growing importance of Islam. For example, John Esposito lists the politics of Sudan, Malaysia, post-revolutionary Iran, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Egypt and Libya as all demonstrating an Islamic revival.¹ P. J. Vatikiotis sees ‘Islamic resurgence’ as a way of conceptualizing the Iranian revolution, ‘tribal’ resistance to the Soviet invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, and the establishment of the Zia regime in Pakistan.² Michael Fischer cites the replacement of the Pahlavi state with the Islamic Republic, the millenarian revolt in Kano (northern Nigeria), the attempted assassination of the Pope, the activities of the Muslim Brethren in Egypt, the assassination of Sadat, and the seizure of the Grand Mosque by anti-Saudi dissidents as being manifestations of Islamic fundamentalism.³ One could go on extending the list of events which are presented as the empirical referents of Islamic fundamentalism: the civil war in Algeria, HAMAS’s activities against Israeli occupation, the Rushdie affair … and so on.⁴

What then is ‘Islamic fundamentalism’? One way of answering this question is to conceptualize it as a strand within a broader phenomenon, a movement which includes political projects represented by organizations such as Gush Emunim in Israel, Shiv Sena in India, or the Christian Coalition in the United States. In this approach, fundamentalism is not specific to Muslims; they are just one example of something that is a general feature of our contemporary world. However, although resurgent Islam may be only one form of fundamentalism, it is the form which is most often cited as an example of it. Fundamentalism itself is made flesh by drawing upon examples of ‘Islamic fundamentalism’.⁵ Veiled (Muslim) women and bearded (Muslim) men, book burners and suicide bombers have emerged as fundamentalist icons enjoying recurrent Hollywood canonization (see, for example, Not Without My Daughter and True Lies). Consequently, although representing only one aspect of a global fundamentalism, Islamic fundamentalism has become a metaphor for fundamentalism in general. This would suggest that fundamentalism and Islamic fundamentalism are closely related. To understand Islamic fundamentalism we need a theory of fundamentalism – we need to conceptualize fundamentalism, not just as journalistic slogan, but as an analytical category.

Theorizing fundamentalism

Gita Sahgal and Nira Yuval-Davis⁶ are among a number of writers who think it is possible to use fundamentalism as an analytical category.⁷ In their opinion, fundamentalism has three main features: it is a project to control women’s bodies; it is a political practice which rejects pluralism; and it is a movement that purposefully conflates religion and politics as a means of furthering its aims.⁸ Sahgal and Yuval-Davis would have little hesitation in arguing that groups such as Lubavitch Hassids, Hizbollah and the VHP have enough in common to be classed together as fundamentalists. To sustain fundamentalism as an analytical construct, it is necessary to theorize the common features of the various fundamentalist projects, and at the same time to be able to draw distinctions between these and other types of political projects. The three characteristics that Sahgal and Yuval-Davis consider to be constitutive of fundamentalism must, therefore, be common to all forms of fundamentalism and should not be found in other types of political projects.

Problems of governmentality Sahgal and Yuval-Davis consider fundamentalism to be, in many ways, a reaction to the advances of feminism. They argue that fundamentalists see the role of women as having a wider symbolic value, reflecting the morality of their society. This allows them to assert that there is an underlying similarity between, for example, the anti-abortion activities of the Christian Coalition in the United States and the insistence on veiling in many Muslim communities. Despite the many differences between these two groups, they are united by their desire to control women’s bodies. According to Sahgal and Yuval-Davis, fundamentalism of all types aims to exercise control over women’s bodies.⁹ This argument has great resonance; the subordination of women and/or their confinement to ‘traditional’ spheres is considered one of the hallmarks of the various fundamentalist movements. Popular conceptions of Islamic fundamentalism all trade on the figure of the veiled, passive and subjugated Muslim woman. But can fundamentalism be usefully defined in this way? Would all political movements which aim to control women be considered fundamentalist by Sahgal and Yuval-Davis? For example, Mustafa Kemal and Reza Khan both considered the role of women to be of central political importance. For them, the role of women had symbolic significance because it signalled the position of their societies upon the ladder of progress, and both introduced measures which exercised control over women’s bodies. They demanded that women should not be veiled (on occasion, enforcing their demands by physical force). This would lead us to question whether political projects that prevent women from veiling could be considered fundamentalist.

It could be argued that imposing the end of the veil is not the same, in principle, as enforcing the wearing of the veil. The former is ‘liberating’ and, therefore, is not an exercise in control but its abandonment; the latter, conversely, is restrictive and, as such, can be considered an exercise in control. In other words, control is only exercised when it is a restriction. But why should the enforced removal of the veil be considered liberating and the enforcement of the veil be considered restrictive? It is only by assuming there is a ‘natural’ female subjectivity (what Elizabeth Spelman calls an ‘essential woman’) that it is possible uncritically to equate veiling with a restriction (in other words, the ‘essential woman’ is unveiled and therefore veiling is a violation of that ‘natural’ subjectivity).

The consequence of assuming that there is an ‘essential’ woman is that other women who do not match the ideals of this essential figure are considered ‘inessential’.¹⁰ The essential woman has characteristics which are culled from particular historical/cultural formations: she speaks a particular language, eats particular foods, consumes particular products, dresses in particular ways, and so on. Her ‘essential’ status, however, has the effect of transforming her particularities into universals; her particular way of being becomes everywoman’s way of being. The effect of this is that women who do not share the essential woman’s particularities become lesser women. As Spelman has so persuasively argued, feminists who fail to address the heterogeneity of women end up underwriting cultural and racial hierarchies.¹¹ Clearly, Sahgal and Yuval-Davis reproduce versions of feminism which endorse the homogeneity of the female subject.¹² The consequence of such endorsements is erasure.

With regard to the question of the veil, Leila Ahmad’s work has shown that the reason for thinking that the veil was more repressive than, for example, Victorian corsets had more to do with the way the veil was used as a marker of particular cultural formation.¹³ When white women of the nineteenth century saw veiled women, they understood it to be a sign of cultural backwardness and female subordination.¹⁴ They did not make the same assumptions about their own clothes, which for them did not signify female subordination – because they did not signify cultural backwardness. Cultural backwardness – that is a culture not modelled upon a European template – manifested itself in female subordination. By focusing attention on the veil, the critics of the veil have often neglected far more serious issues.¹⁵

Unless one assumes that there is an ‘essential’ woman, one has to accept that control over women is being exercised regardless of whether they are being compelled to veil or unveil. In other words, control is a matter of maintaining and producing subjects. If fundamentalism is to be characterized by the desire to exercise control over women, there should be no difference made between modern Turkey, which prohibits the wearing of the veil in certain situations (or even modern France where Muslim schoolgirls were prevented from wearing headscarves at school), and Saudi Arabia, which prevents women from unveiling in public. It is unlikely that Sahgal and Yuval-Davis would see in the French authorities’ resistance to Muslim schoolgirls wearing headscarves a manifestation of fundamentalism.

Fundamentalism cannot be defined in terms of exercising control over women. Exercising control over bodies is the function of governmentality itself.¹⁶ Sahgal and Yuval-Davis seem to have a rather vague notion of governmentality which grants credence to the suggestion that attempts to exercise control over women is a feature peculiar to fundamentalism. It is not only in Muslim societies that control of women’s bodies has been considered a matter of political significance, nor is it solely a function of particular types of political movements: it can be found in regimes as diverse as those of the Nazis, communists, fascists and the most liberal of the North Atlantic plutocracies. Controlling bodies is what governments attempt to do. For example, legislation which very directly seeks to control women, such as legislation governing abortion, is determined in Britain by votes in the House of Commons – a body overwhelmingly made up of male MPs. Nevertheless, it is unlikely that Sahgal and Yuval-Davis would include the mainstream British political parties in their taxonomy of fundamentalism.

Governance involves the control of all bodies – male and female. This does not mean governance is gender blind or that the control which is exercised impacts equally upon men and women, but it cannot be seriously argued that only fundamentalists wish to exercise control over women. The difficulty with Sahgal and Yuval-Davis’s approach is that, by assuming ‘woman is woman only’,¹⁷ they ignore the massive disciplinary techniques of the contemporary state, and only by this act of neglect can they suggest that a common denominator of fundamentalism is the exercise of control over women. In their eagerness to make corporeal the phantasmagoria of fundamentalism, Sahgal and Yuval-Davis are willing to forget the patriarchy that underlies the disciplinary codes of all existing societies.

Styles of polit...

Table of contents

• Cover
• critique influence change
• Praise for A Fundamental Fear
• About the Author
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword by Hamid Dabashi
• Preface to the critique influence change edition
• Acknowledgements
• Preface to the second edition
• Prologue: The return of the repressed
• 1 Framin’ fundamentalism
• 2 Thinking Islamism, (re-)thinking Islamism
• 3 Kemalism and the politicization of Islam
• 4 Islam, modernity and the West
• 5 Islamism and the limits of the invisible empire
• Epilogue: Islamism/eurocentrism
• Bibliography
• Index