The Religious Right and the Talibanization of America

Masood Ashraf Raja

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781137590466
• eBook ISBN: 9781137584908
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: American Government
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This highly original book suggests that the practices of Taliban and the American far right, two very significant and poorly understood groups, share common features. This commonality can be found in the philosophical basis of their ideological beliefs, in their comparative worldviews, and in their political practices.  As Raja argues, the Taliban are much less the product of an irrational fundamentalism, and the radical right in America is much more the result of such a mindset, than Americans recognize.  After providing a detailed explanation of his theoretical concepts and specialized vocabulary, the author develops a discussion of the subject in this brief but penetrating book.  This is a book that should attract a wide readership among both academics and the general public.

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016

Masood Ashraf RajaThe Religious Right and the Talibanization of America10.1057/978-1-137-58490-8_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Masood Ashraf Raja¹ 

(1)

University of North Texas, Denton, Texas, USA

 

End Abstract

The question that would be asked of me, especially by those who will pose the question without having read this book, is this: Are you suggesting that the American conservatives are terrorists like the Taliban? I will not answer that question here, for this book, read in its entirety, is the answer to this and so many other questions. There will be other questions and the display of dramatic outrage that defines a certain segment of American right. My purpose is to speak the truth and to talk about difficult subjects and I have, to the best of my ability, tried to be fair. There are no apologies, though: I am, unapologetically, a progressive and liberal scholar and find no reason to apologize for my political and social leanings. But in fairness to my readers, I must first provide a brief genealogy of my own thought and practices, and, most importantly, my reasons for writing this book.

I came to the USA in 1996 after having served in the Pakistan army as an officer for 10 years. So, the self that I brought to America was a different self as structured and defined by the limitations and possibilities of my own culture and, certainly, also informed by military training and service. I attended a small Baptist university¹ where I encountered the best of American conservatism, especially in terms of a humanistic education. I know, through experience, that not all Christians are fundamentalists just as all Muslims are not terrorists. In fact, I would say that the majority of Christians in America are decent, humane, and caring people. Thus, the Christian right that I invoke in this book, in my view, is a vociferous minority that claims to speak for most American Christians.

I came to a Baptist university in 1996 and chose to study literature simply because it allowed me to explore the possibilities of my personal development in a field of study that I had always been interested in. In the process of my education, I also made a choice to keep my mental horizons open. As a result, over the years, I have retained the best of my own culture—Pakistan—and merged it with the best of my host culture—the USA. The personal identity that comes out of this process, though not perfect, is more tolerant, compassionate, and accepting of differences. That a humanistic education played a crucial role in this experience is undeniable and that America helped me craft this cosmopolitan, compassionate, and tolerant identity is also a fact.

In my years in America, I have also learned that what we become in life is a combination of individual effort and myriads of enabling conditions and that much of what we accomplish depends upon so many things outside of ourselves. Think of it this way: If you are successful in your life, you can look back and exactly trace the roles of your parents, teachers, and mentors in giving you the necessary guidance and care to get to where you are right now. It is, therefore, necessary to acknowledge that for all positive things to happen, certain necessary preconditions must exist and that human will is also defined outside of ourselves, for someone must teach us what it means to be responsible, commiserative, and self-reliant.

In this spirit, then, it pains me to see actions, slogans, and practices in the USA that are coterminous with the destructive practices of groups such as the Taliban and since so much of what I have accomplished has been made possible with the kindness and the compassion of my American friends, I find it imperative to write this book to point out certain dangers to the kind of America I have experienced and the kind of America that must sustain itself not only for my American friends but also for the rest of humanity.

This book, therefore, is written out of love and I have no qualms in accepting that deep down I even love those whose views and actions I disagree with and whose way of life and worldview I will criticize without a single iota of foreboding. Such a critique is essential, necessary, and noble.

Since one part of the book also deals with my native country, I confess that this part is also imbued with a deep and lasting love of my land and its people. I come from the Potohar region of Pakistan and can trace my own ancestry to the same village for at least 600 years. I am, therefore, as Pakistani as one can be and have never felt the need to prove my love and care for my people and my land to anyone.

Living in between, in the interstices² of two cultures, can be a hugely enabling experience, for it gives one a more complex sight and enables one to see questions of culture from more than one perspective. I have, therefore, mobilized in this book the best of this hybrid and composite self to write a narrative that attempts to speak to a varied audience of nation, region, religion, creed, and philosophy. My own views on the subject, of course, inform every aspect of my discussion, and I do not claim to write objectively from a nonideological place, as such a place is usually itself ideologically and discursively conceived.

This book suggests that the American right and Tea Party share a lot in common with the Taliban and that if their political and cultural vision is left unchallenged, they would, in turn, have transformed America into a Talibanized modern nation. Furthermore, I also assert that in comparison to the Taliban the American right happens to be more dangerous and destructive. I know these claims seem overtly shocking, but sometimes one has to state the truth as nakedly as possible. This is one of those times! When we imagine a Christian America, we tend to forget that our imagining is informed by a larger, living secular culture within which this Christian nation would come to be. We somehow believe that all the secular correctives that have shaped modern Christianity would stay intact when America is Christianized. By secular correctives, I mean simply the imperatives from the general secular culture that have forced Christianity to reshape and reinterpret some Biblical views of the world. Imagine if America becomes exclusively Christian without the protections of a secular constitution, without the separation of Church and state. Wouldn’t that give rise to a religious superpower? And if America does become a religious superpower, wouldn’t the world become a more dangerous place?

I use the term Talibanization as a specific signifier of certain precise ideological positions and political praxis. In simple words, a Talibanistic worldview contains some of the following as part of its internal logic and conception:

• Seeing the world as hostile to the adherents of its ideology.
• Seeing all directive actions of government as intrusive and violent.
• Relying on a scriptural understanding of the world.
• Being critical of modern education, especially sciences.
• Believing in traditional roles for women and holding traditional views of gender roles and sexuality.
• Seeing political compromise as a sign of weakness.
• Believing in an extreme form of cultural and individual purity.
• Seeing one’s opponents as morally corrupt, impure, and worthy of sanction.

In my previous work,³ I have argued that the Taliban are a product of high capital and cannot, therefore, be understood as a product of only religion and specificity of their own culture. Similarly, the American right is also a consequential production of high capitalism and it is only by placing them within the general paradigm of market capitalism that one can understand the makeup of their consciousness as well as their political and social practices.

The Taliban and their worldview, violent as it may be, have a better explicatory narrative than that of their American counterparts. In fact, if one were to look at the constitutive elements of both these groups, as I will do later in my discussion, the American right as a modern resistance group, as I stated above, happens to be more dangerous and alarming. They are more dangerous and alarming because they did not emerge as an outcome of 24 years of war within a mountainous and isolated region of Pakistan/Afghanistan. Instead, their mode of life and politics has emerged as an extreme reactionary choice within the most modern and the most diverse nation on the planet. When one places Taliban within the metrics of their region and its conflicts, it is easier to understand the rise of such a group, but the rise of American right within the national space and imaginary of America is, somewhat, more perplexing.

The American ultraright rose in the modern USA, one of the most diverse nation-states in the world. This sudden rise to political prominence makes their emergence the most dangerous phenomenon as it has happened despite the cultural materials available to discourage any such worldviews. Thus, to be ultraconservative in America is a matter of choice against many other more intricate, humane, and liberatory options available within the complex array of American national narratives.

While I provide some insights related to Taliban and the American ultraright, I do not offer any solutions in this book. I do not come with a recipe for defeating the Talibanization of America, though at times I will attempt to hazard an opinion or two. My aim in this brief volume is to perform a comparison between the two groups and to suggest that we are witnessing the Talibanization of a substantial segment of American population and unless we acknowledge this within the vocabularies that most Americans employ to name and categorize their so-called enemies the message will not really drive home.

My hope is that if one were to see these movements for what they are and what they relate to globally, it will enable us (by us I mean all those who see America as a democratic nation without a state religion) to develop more critical insights into our actions and only then will we be able to mobilize a defense against this dangerous Talibanization of America.

I must first clarify some of the concepts employed in this book. As you might have noticed, I have conflated the Christian right and the Tea Party. This is meant just to avoid referring to two groups separately every single time I invoke them. I am, however, aware that within their own group dynamics the American right has a varied gradation of beliefs and positions. Thus, when I refer to the American right, I am generally referring to the ultraright in its various manifestations. For me, people like Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, and James Dobson are examples of ultra-Christians, which means that there are millions of Christian Americans who do not hold views as extreme as these gentlemen. Similarly, I am aware that the Tea Party is not necessarily a centralized hierarchical movement but an array of varied regional groups that come together under a general philosophical and political rubric. So, my discussion should be understood within the constraints and connotations of these two large constituencies of American conservatism.

There is yet another counterargument from my opponents that I must first put to rest before beginning my discussion. It might be said that considering the nature of conflicts involved, there is no plausible ground for comparison between the Taliban and the American Christian right. In other words, it might be argued that since the Taliban are a militaristic, terroristic group, it is unfair to compare them with a usually nonviolent⁴ American constituency. In my opinion this is not a valid argument in various ways.

First, though the nature of violence is different, the American ultraright does rely on epistemic, juridical, and political techniques of violence and the difference is only of immediacy and the degree of violence. While the Taliban rely on physical violence to implement their agenda, the American right relies on acts of epistemic violence to transform the American public sphere. By epistemic violence, I mean all methods of coercion and intimidation used to either force or convince people to see the world in a purely religious way. This could include, for example, production and dissemination of antichoice, antievolution materials to actively supporting causes that enhance an ultra-Christian American public sphere. The type of violence employed is different because of the location of its application: the Taliban apply their mode of violence in an already violent political public sphere and the ultra-Christian right uses its modes of epistemic violence within the political public sphere of a stable and regulated modern state. Besides such violent acts, the aims of both these groups in their own geographical loci are startlingly similar. While one group wants to Islamize its region, the other aspires to Christianize the nation. I also have another argument: just because one group is physically violent and the other is not does not make the pernicious politics and agendas of the other any less reprehensible, for if one compares one’s practices to the most extreme pole of anything, one can always posit one’s methods and philosophy as pleasantly acceptable. Furthermore, though there is an obvious absence of physical violence in the actions and politics of the American right, the rhetorical means employed by it and the ruthless self-justifications offered by them in favor of their cause are rather more violent and dangerous, given, not the least, that these arguments are offered within a nation that has functional civic and political structures. Their aim, however, remains the same as that of the Taliban: to shatter the system, as it exists, and to rewrite the nation according to a religious understanding of the world.

This book has a very simple plan. In Chap. 2, I will provide a broad discussion, with certain specifics where needed, of the underlying philosophy of the Taliban, their goals, and their actions. This chapter also provides a discussion of the philosophical genealogy of the discourses that underwrite Talibanization. Please be patient if the chapter gets too tedious, for I hope to provide a really deep discussion of Taliban as a militant group and of Talibanization as a political phenomenon. In Chap. 3, I will discuss the philosophies, historiography, and cultural discourses that form part of the ideological and discursive framework of the American right. In Chap. 4, I will compare these two groups to suggest and to conclude that on an abstract as well as a practical level these two groups share a lot in common.

I conclude the book in the hope that reading this book would have, at least, encouraged you to think differently about American politics and its impact on the world. If, by some chance, this book helps you see things slightly differently, then it would have served its purpose.

Footnotes

1

Belmont University, Nashville, TN.

 

2

I am relying on a particular explanation of hybridity and interstitial thinking. For details see Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994).

 

3

“Neoliberal Dispositif and the Rise of Fundamentalism: The Case of Pakistan.” Journal of International and Global Studies, Vol. 3 (1) 2011: 21–31.

 

4

I would say that even though the American ultraright is not actively engaged in armed struggle, they do have the potential to be violent and, given their support for guns and militias, the potential for this violence is on the rise.

 

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016

Masood Ashraf RajaThe Religious Right and the Talibanization of America10.1057/978-1-137-58490-8_2

Begin Abstract

2. Taliban and the Spread of Talibanistic Politics in Afghanistan–Pakistan

Masood Ashraf Raja¹

(1)

University of North Texas, Denton, Texas, USA

End Abstract

The term Taliban is a pluralization of the word Talib,¹ which means “student”...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Taliban and the Spread of Talibanistic Politics in Afghanistan–Pakistan
• 3. The American Ultraright: A Genealogy of Basic Beliefs and Practices
• 4. Taliban, the American Right: The World They Will Create
• 5. Conclusion
• Backmatter