Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire

20 years after 9/11

Deepa Kumar

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781788737227
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Sozialgeschichte

In this incisive account, leading scholar of Islamophobia Deepa Kumar traces the history of anti-Muslim racism from the early modern era to the "War on Terror." Importantly, Kumar contends that Islamophobia is best understood as racism rather than as religious intolerance. An innovative analysis of anti-Muslim racism and empire, Islamophobia argues that empire creates the conditions for anti-Muslim racism, which in turn sustains empire.This book, now updated to include the end of the Trump's presidency, offers a clear and succinct explanation of how Islamophobia functions in the United States both as a set of coercive policies and as a body of ideas that take various forms: liberal, conservative, and rightwing. The matrix of anti-Muslim racism charts how various institutions-the media, think tanks, the foreign policy establishment, the university, the national security apparatus, and the legal sphere-produce and circulate this particular form of bigotry. Anti-Muslim racism not only has horrific consequences for people in Muslim-majority countries who become the targets of an endless War on Terror, but for Muslims and those who "look Muslim" in the West as well.

1

Empire, Race, Orientalism:
The Case of Spain, Britain, and France

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When the film Sex and the City 2, set in Abu Dhabi, was released in 2010, several reviewers rightly panned it for its racist stereotypes of Arabs and Muslims. It was as if the producers of the film had gone back to the 1920s, revived the Ali Baba film template, added a few iPhones and five-star hotels as a nod to the modernity of Abu Dhabi, and left everything else more or less intact. How do we understand this view of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) as a region that does not change—a place where, despite high technology and consumer luxuries, the people remain static and essentially “Muslim”? This view of Islam emerges from a body of work known as Orientalism that came into being in the context of European colonization, which reached its peak in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The late eighteenth century witnessed tumultuous changes. It was an era of revolution—the Industrial Revolution in Britain, the American and French revolutions, and the Haitian Revolution. These revolutions brought forth notions of human equality, secularism, anti-slavery, and democracy and ushered in a process where capitalism would shape global relations. While Spain had held sway during the era of mercantile imperialism, Britain would assume dominance in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, building a vast empire that spanned the globe. In this context, the once powerful Ottoman Empire would experience a decline relative to Europe. Other Muslim states seemed equally unable to prevent the onslaught. France invaded and occupied Algeria in 1830, and in 1881–83 seized Tunisia as well. In 1882 Britain colonized Egypt, and in 1898 it took over Sudan. Imperialism in this era, however, didn’t always take the form of direct colonization; indirect control was exercised through financial power. Between 1854 and 1879, the Ottomans borrowed heavily both to finance the modernization of its army and to fund various reforms designed to make it more competitive with Europe. However, the terms of borrowing were unfavorable and it resulted in the establishment of European economic control over Ottoman finances. A similar process was at work in Egypt and Tunisia.¹ After World War I, the Ottoman Empire finally collapsed.

There was nothing inevitable about this. Historian Albert Hourani notes that from the eighth to the eighteenth centuries, powerful Muslim empires stretched across the globe “from the Atlantic to the Pacific, with Arabic as its lingua franca, the most universal language which had ever existed.”² Up until 1500 or so, Western Europe with its various feudal kingdoms was a marginal player on the world stage relative to other great powers (such as the Ottomans, Chinese, and Indians). In Before European Hegemony, sociologist Janet Abu-Lughod demonstrated that their “relatively primitive development” in the medieval era meant that Europeans were economically backward relative to Middle Eastern and Far Eastern systems of production and exchange.³ They overcame their backwardness in the context of the rise of mercantile imperialism and capitalism. Abu-Lughod argues that these factors explain European hegemony from the sixteenth century on; it is not the case that “only the institutions and culture of the West could have succeeded” [emphasis in original].⁴ Yet, this is precisely what Orientalism, as a body of thought and a practical means of colonial domination, set out to establish. Building on late eighteenth and early nineteenth century European conceptions of history, Orientalists divided human societies into civilizations that have a core set of values that drive their progress (or lack thereof). The people who inhabit these civilizations were said to have a cultural “essence” that explains who they are across time. Essentialism of this sort is one of the pillars of race making.

This chapter begins with European ascendance in the early modern era. It situates the rise of Spain in a period dominated by mercantile imperialism. I argue that this was the context for the development of nascent or protoracist notions about Muslims. Next, I turn to the rise of Britain and the transition to capitalist imperialism. I place British Orientalism, a body of instrumental knowledge, within the political economy of empire. Both Britain and France were central to the development of Orientalism, which was not simply an ideology but a practical method of colonial domination. Drawing on various scholars who have written critical appraisals of institutional Orientalism, I lay out its key characteristics in order to unpack the notion of Homo islamicus, or Muslims as a subspecies of the genus Homo. Moreover, Orientalism had strong gendered dimensions, and the era also saw the development of colonial feminism, that is, feminism being weaponized to serve empire. The focus in this chapter is on Spanish, British, and French imperialism. Each of these powers had its own unique types of imperialism that informed different projects of racialization.

My key argument is that notions of race and of Muslims as inferior beings could come to the fore in a context where European nations were in a position to actually challenge and eventually dominate once-powerful Muslim empires. While Muslims occupied a liminal position between inferior and superior in imperial Spain in the early modern era, this would give way to outright inferiority in the nineteenth century. Thus, while protoracism existed before the nineteenth century, it is capitalist imperialism that sets the terrain on which Enlightenment notions of race were deployed. I argue that two conditions were needed for the production of Muslims as a race: colonial domination and “free” liberal societies.

The Early Modern Era

The period from the late Middle Ages to the post-Enlightenment era is a transitional one characterized by elements from both ages. Known as the early modern era, it runs roughly from 1500 to 1800 CE.⁵ The period marked the arrival of several European imperial powers on the global stage and rivalry among them for domination over world trade. Mercantilism characterized the era’s economic logic. The mercantilist system was based on a drive to establish lucrative trade and to ensure profits through a monopoly enforced by arms and military might. The profit generated through such trade was based on buying cheap and selling dear, where the centers of production and exchange were separated.⁶ Portugal and Spain led the way and were followed by Holland, England, and France.

These empires were of a different kind than Rome, which was a tributary empire.⁷ Historian Frederick Weaver characterizes the new European empires as mercantile empires because “monarchs were active partners with merchants” within a system of global trade and overseas expansion.⁸ Merchants relied on trade privileges and protections offered by rulers to establish monopolies in specific trades. This was achieved through military means, which inevitably led to inter-European conflicts.⁹ The Ottomans were a tributary empire with a primarily land-based system of trade; in contrast, the European intercontinental empires were mainly seaborne.¹⁰

In addition to profound economic and political changes, the early modern era also saw a shift in intellectual life. The Renaissance, a cultural movement that began in Italy in the fifteenth century and spread to the rest of Europe by the sixteenth, brought new ways of thinking. The sixteenth century saw the emergence of some of the first studies of Europe’s Near East to adopt a more open-minded and disinterested tone. The study of Arabic in France, England, and the Netherlands and the scholarship from academics in these countries cast Islam and the Prophet in a more sympathetic light compared to what existed during the Crusades.¹¹

Significantly, by the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries attitudes toward religion began to change. While Christianity was the key framework from which to make sense of the world in medieval Europe, now religion, Hourani explains, “came to mean any system of beliefs and practices constructed by human beings.”¹² When thought of in this way, all religions were seen as worthy of rational study and analysis as human-made systems of thought. Further, Hourani notes that among the educated classes “travel, commerce, and literature brought some awareness of the phenomenon, majestic and puzzling, of Islamic civilization.” The eighteenth-century English author Samuel Johnson noted: “There are two objects of curiosity—the Christian world, and the Mahometan world. All the rest may be considered barbarous.”¹³ The Mughal Empire, which ruled much of South Asia from the sixteenth to the mid-nineteenth century, was respected even if much was not known about it. Moreover, the Protestant Reformation of the early sixteenth century, which challenged the authority of the papacy and of Catholic doctrine, translated into an attitude toward Islam where it came to be seen as yet another schism, albeit a dangerous one. Thus, even while Martin Luther, who led the Protestant Reformation, had negative things to say about Islam, he viewed the Vatican as the greater enemy. For Luther, only after the defeat of Catholicism could Islam be beaten.¹⁴

Nabil Matar, who has written extensively on the relationship between Britain, Western Europe, and the Islamic Mediterranean, argues that English attitudes toward the Ottomans, whether as ally or enemy, always constructed the Muslim as equal. The Ottoman state was viewed as on par with England if not superior to it and other European states.¹⁵ Orientalism based on a notion of a superior Europe and an inferior Orient had not yet emerged, not least because it made no sense given the grandeur and advances of Muslim empires both in the Near East and South Asia. If anything, the Muslim empires had superior accomplishments in comparison to their Western European counterparts both in this period and during the Middle Ages more generally, and many Muslim authors wrote of Europe’s backwardness.¹⁶ Matar shows that English travelers to the Mediterranean remarked that the Turks knew little of the Britons, and what they knew they found lacking.

This early modern view of the Ottomans reflected the fact that England was not in a position to challenge the Turks. Matar argues that the construction of Muslims in this period drew not from the actual encounter with Muslims but with the Native Americans. Whereas Britain had succeeded in dominating Native Americans, they were unable to do the same with Muslims. Thus, they “borrowed constructions of alterity and demonization from their encounter with the American Indians” and applied them to Muslims.¹⁷ It was not, as Matar notes,

England but the Ottoman Empire of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that was pushing into Europe, conquering Rhodes and Crete, attacking the Spanish, French, Dutch, English, and Scottish trading fleets … and enslaving thousands of men and women, many of whom converted to Islam.¹⁸

The attitude of Britons toward the Turks was one of “fear, anxiety, and awe.”¹⁹ Further, the idea of colonization was not applied to the Ottomans. Thus, Queen Elizabeth “cooperated commercially and diplomatically with both the Turks of the Ottoman Empire and the Moors of the Kingdom of Morocco, and never entertained or articulated—and nor did her subjects—projects for colonizing them.”²⁰ In the seventeenth century, the British either embraced Ottoman civilization or vilified it. All along, however, there was a sense that the Turks were not outsiders. Certainly, they were not “outside the diplomatic scope of alliance and peace treaty, individual friendship and amicable correspondence—and even marriage.”²¹

However, this was not the case in Spain and Portugal, the key mercantile empires of the early modern era. Whereas England was in no position to go up against the Ottomans, Spain and Portugal were able to rise as imperial powers of some standing by turning to the high seas. It is in this context that we see the rise of protoracism. For perhaps the first time in human history, bodily notions of difference, which were understood to be passed on from one generation to the next, made an entrance. The purity of one’s blood or the color of one’s skin meant that conversion to Christianity no longer guaranteed acceptance. Religion, however, was still the source of such protoracism. In this sense, it was not full-blown racism but a stage in the development of irredeemable otherness and inherent inferiority. Historian David Brion Davis argues that while we can find examples of xenophobia and prejudice that go all the way back to classical Greek society, “there is no evidence in antiquity or even in medieval and Renaissance Europe of the kind of fully developed racist society” that we witness in the post-Enlightenment period.²² However, as a transitional period between the Middle Ages and modernity, the early modern era gave rise of transitional forms of racism that contained elements of the medieval othering and anticipated post-Enlightenment racism.

Protoracism in Spain

Spain and Portugal emerged as the first European empires to establish sea-borne trade, bypassing the land trade dominated by the Ottomans. Portugal started to trade extensively in African slaves and Spain followed suit. Spain also reached the New World and expanded its colonial acquisitions. Barely a few months after the capture of Granada, Isabella and Ferdinand had sponsored Columbus’s voyage. The discovery and conquest of new regions, the trade in African slaves, and the difficulty of consolidating a united Spanish empire (which included various rival kingdoms) created the conditions for the rise of various forms of racism. In what follows, I focus on the racialization of Jews and Muslims, because similar mechanisms were used in both cases.

In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, while Muslims and Jews occupied second-class status under Christian rule, they were nonetheless accepted as a part of Spanish society, and the Church tolerated their presence.²³ Conversion to Christianity was a means by which they could escape persecution; Christian universalism sought to include all non- Christians into its fold. This changed in the late fourteenth century when a wave of anti-Jewish pogroms swept through the kingdoms of Castile and Aragon.²⁴ Jews were given a choice between conversion or death and a large proportion of Sephardic Jews chose to convert. Faced with a similar choice or expulsion in 1492, many Jews again chose the path of conversion. However, this was no longer enough to protect them from discrimination.

The Spanish Empire was built on a Catholic Christian identity, which served as an ideological means to overcome regional differences. In 1483 Isabella and Ferdinand established the Inquisition under their control, with Rome’s permission.²⁵ While the Catholic monarchs were undoubtedly devout Catholics, religious zeal alone does not explain their actions. Rather, as historian J. H. Elliot argues, the “establishment...