The Muslim Speaks

Khurram Hussain

• Editorial: Zed Books
• Año: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781786999719
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Teologia e religione
• Categoría: Fondamentalismo e sette religiose

The Muslim Speaks reimagines Islam as a strategy for investigating the modern condition. Rather than imagining it as an issue external to a discrete West, Khurram Hussain constructs Islam as internal to the elaboration and expansion of the West. In doing so he reveals three discursive traps – that of 'freedom', 'reason' and 'culture' – that inhibit the availability of Islam as a feasible, critical interlocutor in Western deliberations about moral, intellectual and political concerns. Through close examination of this inhibition, Hussain posits that while Islamophobia is clearly a moral wrong, 'depoliticization' more accurately describes the problems associated with the lived experience of Muslims in the West and elsewhere. Weaving together his conclusions in the hope of a common world, Khurram Hussain boldy and quite radically deems that what Islam needs is not depoliticization, but infact repoliticization.

1

The Slanted Abyss

In this chapter, I focus on rhetoric about Muslims in the time immediately following the events of September 2001, and in the years since, as indicative of certain basic ideological patterns in Western treatments of Islam. These patterns eschew proper political analysis of events and focus instead on essentialized readings of Islam as both explanation and prescription for what ails the Muslim world. From President George W. Bush’s famous “Why do they hate us?” speech, to the widespread derision of Muslim critics such as Tariq Ramadan among the learned classes in the West, to the intellectual drift of ostensibly progressive intellectuals toward an identarian politics that rejects Islam as critique as a matter of basic principle, this chapter clarifies what the either/or of Islam actually sounds like in the contemporary discursive practices of the West.

***

In an obvious sign of ‘peak Islam’ in the public imagination, academic libraries in the West now flow over with books about fundamentalist and jihadist Islam or liberal and modernist Muslims. Talking heads on cable news television indulge in endless debates about whether Islam is a religion of peace or of violence. Harrowing tales of ex-Muslims absconding the astringent constraints of religion rub shoulders on real and virtual bookshelves with ‘moderate’ Muslim calls for reform of their faith. A pervasive fear of Muslims competes in the public square with concerns about Islamophobia and its enervating effects on modern bodies politic. Disagreements about the nature and meaning of wearing the hijab turn on whether it is a free expression of faith or an indelible sign of cultural inferiority. Countless texts pairing Islam with the West, democracy, human rights, feminism or secularism, and so on, argue either affinity between the two or a lack thereof. And of course, intellectuals and activists of all stripes incessantly deliberate the potential for a reformation in the Muslim world or the dangers of radicalization in it. Bickering over the essence and future of Islam is the tic-tac-toe of debates. And the ink spilt on such discussions would fill a proverbial ocean.

I have no interest in feeding into what is already this deluge of talk fixated on the eithers and ors of Islam’s compatibility with the West or with this or that version of what counts as modernity. Or, for that matter, in tedious enumerations and analyses of ‘Islamophobia’ or ‘reform’. In this chapter, I will argue instead that the ostensible back and forth of these so-called debates often functions as a discursive straitjacket that ensnares Muslims into futile, dead-end conversations about ‘Islam’ and ‘the West’. This chronic reliance on ever-evolving tropes of Western vintage to evaluate and explain Islam forecloses any possibility of critical novelty from Muslims and sieves these discussions into the restrictive either/or of Islam’s familiarity or difference with the West. In the discursive regime of this kind of talk, then, Muslims can be friends or foes but not critics. Here, a professed and sincere love of Muslims can serve to inhibit complex elaborations of Muslim subjectivity just as effectively as overt Islamophobia. And Muslims can render themselves irrelevant to critical participation in the affairs of this world just as proficiently as non-Muslims often do.

I focus on the West not because Muslims play no role in their futility (they obviously do), but because Western discourses set the stage for anything that follows. This is what it means to live in a world that European imperial expansion has created but which all of humanity now calls home. This creation is, of course, an ongoing process. The world is imagined and made anew in countless debates and happenings every day, through iconic events such as 9/11 but also the writing of books, the making of films and the movement of peoples. To argue that this world is the common context of our shared humanity, that it is in fact now one world with one future, may come across as an old-fashioned modernist cliché, a quaint idea whose time has come and gone. We live in what Pankaj Mishra calls an ‘age of anger’, of alternative modernities, multiculturalism and postcolonial angst on the left and Western exceptionalism and triumphalism, of resurgent religion and nationalism on the right. But the idea that this world is meaningfully divided between the West and the rest is a dangerous diversion. And although a liberatory politics of difference is a necessary corrective to the failed universalisms of the past, it offers no ultimate reckoning with the thoroughly globalized nature of the present moment. Even as far back as 1968, Hannah Arendt had already intuited that:

For the first time in history, all peoples on earth have a common present … Every country has become the almost immediate neighbor of every other country, and every man feels the shock of events which take place at the other end of the globe.¹

But this collapsing proximity generates what Arendt calls “negative solidarity” when “individuals with very different pasts find themselves herded by capitalism and technology into a common present … [with] grossly unequal distributions of wealth and power.”² This is what Frantz Fanon meant when he called this “a compartmentalized world … inhabited by different species.”³ Power in this new reality properly refers not just to military might or economic advantage, but that most ancient of human privileges, the power to name. To set the terms of the debate, so to say, to posit the truth of things. The immediacy of the global present is interpolated with vast discrepancies in the practice of this privilege. And if the neo-liberal world order and the ‘War on Terror’ are any indications, the West jealously and often violently protects its turf, this hard-won privilege.

It is in this sense that the modern world sometimes begins to resemble a kind of global household, and on the classical model where women, children and slaves properly belong in the oikia, the private realm of necessity, and only the despotikon is freed from necessity, by the labor of his wards, to debate the good life with free and equal men in the polis. This capacity to discuss the common good, the past, present and future of a common communal life in the open agora, is the essence of politics itself for Aristotle, and its practice is the very actualization of our humanity. Or as Arendt put it rather more evocatively:

The world is not human just because it is made by human beings … [rather] we humanize what is going on in the world and in ourselves only by speaking of it, and in the course of speaking of it we learn to be human.⁴

Locked in the prison of particularity, of essence and difference, of being spoken about and looked into, not at, the Muslim can only really ever be an object of politics in this common world, never a subject. And this rationing of discourse about the world not only dehumanizes the one being rationed out, but depoliticizes the world itself, and in so doing dehumanizes it. The Muslim Question, then, is ultimately and always has been a political question, which is to say a question about the humanity of others. But it is also in this sense always already a question about what kind of world we imagine this world to be and what manner of futures we make available for it in speaking it continuously into existence.

It is for this reason that the discursive asymmetries that generate this world of Muslim children and slaves never offer a durable panacea for the ongoing problem of Islam and the West. In this discursive regime, any exposition of Islam’s critical edge must be surrendered to the so-called Islamists who definitively reject the West while ‘moderate’ Muslims all but cower in apologia, bidding validation for their liberal and progressive credentials. But if the last twenty or so years are any indication, these pious comforts continue to make us ever-more somnolent as the complexities of the world we inhabit overwhelm our senses and blind our half-open eyes. Writing in the mid oughts some years after 9/11 and well into the proverbial War on Terror, Mahmood Mamdani argued that when “President [George W.] Bush moved to distinguish between ‘good Muslims’ and ‘bad Muslims’ … [his] presumption that there are such categories mask[ed] a refusal to address our own failure to make a political analysis of our time.”⁵ These refusals of history and failures to understand our present political moment mean that there is little acknowledgment of the need for a politics that conforms to neither enmity nor acquiescence. And as ISIS, al-Shabab and Boko Haram take hold in the very hearts of Muslim lands and radicalized Westerners threaten to turn their own homelands into shooting galleries, perhaps it is time to admit that our regnant paradigms have done little to win hearts and minds and our political calculations regarding the future of the Muslim world have been deficient and inadequate. That a humble curiosity about modern Muslims, bereft of affirmation or rejection, seeking political engagement, not observation, evaluation and judgment, may well be the proper order of the day.

But though it does sometimes appear here and there in current debates on Islam in the West, such humble curiosity is desperately rare. Instead, every Tom, Dick and Harry feels qualified to actively theologize Islam’s true essence and to opine definitively on its real meaning. Muslims are not entirely absent from these kinds of discussion, but they tend to play along to get along. Or they confirm the infernal character of their religion in the minds of many in the West by blowing this or that thing up here and elsewhere. And all the while, negative solidarity gains more momentum. Most Muslims are mere spectators to these discussions when they are not being targeted on account of them. Their depoliticized selves are extras in the stories being told and histories being written about them by others.

***

Of course, some may be tempted to retort that bringing down the tallest buildings in the metropole (to say nothing of hitting the nerve center of the imperial military) were acts of tremendous political agency. Insofar as Muslims planned and executed these attacks, they clearly demonstrated their willingness and capacity to act against the West in furtherance of their own ends. They continue to pursue these ends even today, despite the trillions that Western governments have now spent in the ongoing, never-ending struggle against Muslim insurgencies, and the billions they continue to spend on ‘hearts and minds’. These Muslims may be the villains of history but their renewed influence on the affairs of the modern world is not contestable. They are once again actors on the world stage. How else to explain the clear signs of their impact everywhere one looks. Islamist partisans are resurgent in Muslim lands. Veiled women confidently stroll the streets of European capitals. Young men strap bombs to their chests and their limbs and gladly embrace their own death in return for visiting it upon countless others. Strident mullahs openly preach violent jihad against the West to ever-expanding audiences. Insurgencies are ubiquitous, spattering the blood of their victims across the globe in crescent arcs of destruction from Southeast Asia to Europe to the homeland itself. In eighteen short years, al-Qaeda has metastasized into Boko Haram, al-Shabab and countless other outfits operating with near impunity. There was for a time even a so-called Islamic State in the Levant, stubbornly persistent against staggering odds, that even in its absence still remains a “shining city on the hill” for jihadists everywhere. And closer to home, the West is embroiled in endless debates concerning moral and political principles that, until recently, were considered irrefutable foundations of modern civilized life. There is even talk of negotiating with the Taliban so that an unwinnable war can be brought to a face-saving end that, in the end, will end nothing. If agency is the capacity to create change, then surely these Muslims have had a greater impact on the world in the last twenty years than anyone could have anticipated not so long ago. In what sense, then, is this axiomatic of the futility of Islam, and not its renewed agency?

One obvious response to this question has been to deploy a kindly euphemism that is popular among the so-called enlightened political classes here and elsewhere. This is the notion that true Islam is a religion of peace. It has been hijacked by a small group of extremists, wolves in sheep’s clothing, who fiendishly dress their depraved ideological ends in the fabric of Islam. They are at best misguided and ignorant, oblivious to the true nature of the religion they ostensibly profess. Or worse, they willfully twist Islam in service of their own destructive agenda. The most telling iteration of this paradigm is George W. Bush’s speech to a joint session of the United States Congress on September 20, 2001, in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. Widely regarded even by his detractors as a high point of his presidency, this speech set out to explain to the American people who had attacked them, and why. Bush asserted that “[these] terrorists practice a fringe form of Islamic extremism that has been rejected by Muslim scholars and the vast majority of Muslim clerics; a fringe movement that perverts the peaceful teachings of Islam.” Bush then addressed the Muslim world directly in a display of deep empathy and remarkable statesmanship (rare during the rest of his presidency):

We respect your faith. It’s practiced freely by many millions of Americans and by millions more in countries that America counts as friends. Its teachings are good and peaceful, and those who commit evil in the name of Allah blaspheme the name of Allah. The terrorists are traitors to their own faith, trying, in effect, to hijack Islam itself. The enemy of America is not our many Muslim friends. It is not our many Arab friends. Our enemy is a radical network of terrorists and every government that supports them.⁶

With the precision of a surgeon, Bush theologically amputates al-Qaeda from the healthy body of Islam and then defines this body as the very antithesis of what al-Qaeda represents. When the story is told this way, Muslims appear as much the victims of al-Qaeda as those Americans targeted on 9/11. Like a diseased limb that could ravage an entire organism if left unchecked, the fringe extremism of al-Qaeda and its ilk infects the Islamic body politic. Re-envisaged in this manner, the attacks of 9/11 are properly understood not as signs of Muslim agency, but of futility, not of healthful vigor, but a sick body.

Like all effective euphemisms, this one too rests on a partial sort of truth. Al-Qaeda’s brand of Islam is clearly detached from any mainstream understanding of the religion. Inasmuch as the short-lived Taliban...