Fred Halliday. Ethnic and Racial Studies. Volume 22, Issue 5, 1999.
An anxiety of our times: ‘Islam’ versus the ‘West’
No subject in contemporary public discussion has attracted more confused discussion than that of relations between ‘Islam’ and the West. Whether it be the discussion of relations between Muslim states and non- Muslim countries, or that of the relations between non-Muslims and Muslims within Western countries, the tendency has on both sides been, with some exceptions, towards alarmism and simplification. Alarmism has concerned the ‘threat’ which, from one side, ‘Islam’ poses to the non-Muslim world, and on the other, which ‘the West’ poses to Muslims. Non-Muslim simplification involves many obvious issues: terrorism—as if most Muslims are terrorists or most terrorists are Muslims; the degree of aggressiveness found in the Muslim world and the responsibility of Muslims for this; the willingness of Muslims to allow for diversity, debate, respect for human rights. It is not only the sensationalist media, but also writers with an eye to current anxieties of the reading public, such as V. S. Naipaul and Samuel Huntington, who reinforce such misrepresentation. Muslim simplification is itself two-sided: on the one hand, a stereotyping of the ‘West’; on the other, the assertion of a unitary identity for all Muslims, and of a unitary interpretation of text and culture.
The core simplification involves these very terms themselves: ‘the West’ is not a valid aggregation of the modern world and lends itself far too easily to monist, conspiratorial presentations of political and social interaction. But nor is the term ‘Islam’ a valid shorthand for summarizing how a billion Muslims, divided into over fifty states, and into myriad ethnicities and social groups, relate to the contemporary world, to each other or to the non-Muslim world. To get away from such simplifications is, however, virtually impossible, since both those opposed to ‘Islam’ and those invoking it adhere to such labels. Moreover, as much of this literature shows, those who are most intent on critiquing standard Western prejudices about the Muslim world themselves fall back on another set of simplifications. Instead of fearing or hating anti-Muslim stereotypes, we are now invited to respect, understand, study ‘Islam’.
Islamophobia, Eurocentrism, stereotyping
The literature under review here ranges across several aspects of this question. The Runnymede and Wilton Park reports identify misinterpretations, above all in the West, of the Muslim world and advocate a more tolerant, informed, relation to the Muslim world. They reflect an approach derived, on the one hand, from race relations and, on the other, from inter-faith dialogue. They both set current frictions in the context of the long historical relations between Muslims and the Christian world, both identify the role of the media in reinforcing stereotypes, both advocate greater discussion between communities. Most significantly, perhaps, they accept the term ‘Islam’ as a denomination of the primary identity of those who are Muslims; they avoid discussion of the diversities within Muslim societies, on ethnic grounds or on the interpretation of the Muslim tradition and on its application to the contemporary world.
The volume by Bobby Sayyid, a sociologist writing in a Nietzschean- Foucauldian vein, strikes a less emollient note. He seeks to provide a critical ‘conceptual narrative’ of how the Western world has come to identify an Islamic threat. The category ‘fundamentalism’ he sees not primarily in terms of the social or political factors that occasion it within specific Muslim societies, but rather as a Eurocentric response by the West as its hitherto undisputed domination of the Muslim world is challenged. Eurocentrism, the bane of so much analysis of the region, is, he argues, not so much a product of a historical Western hegemony, as a response to the threat which the decentring of the West now poses to that hegemony: it is a sign of decline, not of enduring power.
Islamism is, in this context, something to be welcomed, the return of the repressed, a rejection by Muslims of Western domination. Sayyid excoriates those in the Muslim world—be they liberal modernizers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, or the Kemalists of the twentieth—who have tried to learn from the West and so modernize their societies. He also denies the argument that Islamism contains another variant of radical Western discourse, seeing this as another form of hegemonic denial: those who have argued this—Aziz al-Azmeh, Sami Zubaida, myself—come in for spirited attack. Islamism is a discursive construct that rejects the West, a form of modernity that is non-Western.
In contrast to these three works, which treat ‘Islam’, for the purposes of their argument at least, as a unitary object, and Muslims as a single community, the other three works stress the diversity of Muslim societies, and of non-Muslim responses to them. The two works edited by Kai Hafez, a scholar at the Orient Institute in Hamburg, examine the different interactions of Muslims with the West. Der Islam und der Westen covers political thought, the status of women, terrorism and economics, together with the foreign policies of specific Muslim countries: Iran, Algeria, Turkey, Bosnia, the Palestinians, Central Asia and Pakistan. Islam and the West in the Mass Media provides a subtle, and disaggregated, account of the coverage of the Muslim world, relating it to different strategic priorities (for example, the enormous disproportion in regional coverage), to the distortions contained with the media of Muslim world, and to the broader changes of globalization. It includes an informative chapter by Elizabeth Poole, on British press coverage of Muslims.
The study of Turkey by Hugh and Nicole Pope is a study of an actually existing Muslim society. Turkey exemplifies many of the general issues in this debate, illustrating as it does the tensions of modernity, not least those between a secular state and an Islamist opposition, and between the Turkish state and the, equally Muslim but politically secular, Kurdish opposition. Their assessment of the contemporary Turkish scene has drawn strong attack from those who associate them with a trend known as ‘the second republic’: by this is meant those who wish to lessen the hostility of the state to Kurdish and Islamist opposition, by, for example, permitting the wearing of the headscarf in universities, and granting an element of autonomy to the Kurdish regions.
To read a concrete study is a breath of fresh air: here ‘Islam’ ceases to be a monist abstraction and becomes something specific and diverse—belief, history, culture, literature, symbol, political and economic force. Thus, in marked contrast to Iran, the Turkish Islamists try to invoke the monarchical, Ottoman past in their favour. On the other hand, the Alevi Shi’ite minority is staunchly secular—for fear of the Sunni Islamist majority. The Kurdish parties have shunned Islamism—the PKK is as secular as you can be—yet many Kurds vote for the Islamists. As elsewhere, all is not as it appears: in Turkey of the 1980s, as in Algeria, Pakistan, Egypt and the Israeli-occupied Palestinian lands, the state indulged in promoting Islamist as a means of isolating the left, only to find its client had slipped the leash. Turkey matters not only because it is the symbol of the secular-religious conflict in the Muslim world but also because it shows how, in a variety of ways, other forms of interest and identity interact with religion. The analysis of Nicole and Hugh Pope, like that in the two volumes edited by Hafez, enables us to get away from the stereotypes, of confrontation and piety, that too often afflict this subject.
Modernism and variety
To identify conflicts between Muslims and non-Muslims is, however, not sufficient to explain such tensions or to identify how to resolve them. It is here that some of the conciliatory coverage, exemplified in the Runny-mede and Wilton Park reports, may be open to question. Too often political and humanist good intentions seem to have got the better of sociological analysis. In the first place, there is the question of historical context. It is tempting, but misleading, to link contemporary hostility to Muslims to the long history of conflict between ‘Islam’ and the West. Bobby Sayyid does this –‘the return of the repressed’ –without evidence. Even more so is it mistaken, as so many commentators seem to think they are clever by doing, to ascribe contemporary hostility to ‘Islam’, to the end of the Cold War. This presupposes something, for which there is little evidence, that modern society, ‘the West’, needs an enemy. One has to apply to this prejudice and, indeed, to the study of prejudice in general, the same sociological critique that is applied to other ideologies: the perennialists will argue that such ideologies are permanent, be they Islamophobia or anti-Semitism. But a modernist reading is also possible and more plausible.
The past provides a reserve of reference and symbol for the present, it does not explain it. The Ottoman siege of Vienna in 1683 or the crusades do not explain current politics, they are used by them. A modernist interpretation, with regard to this prejudice as with regard to others, also offers more hope, the possibility of change: if far from its being embedded in the collective psyche or national character of Western society, negative attitudes to Muslims are more contingent, then it is more likely something can be done. Here the analysis in the Runnymede Report of the media runs the risk of overstating its case: for if in the national British press there is still much that is distorting, this is less so in the local and regional press. Coverage of Muslims in, say, Birmingham, or Cardiff has changed over the years, in response to education and political protest: the situation is not as fixed as it might appear, and for modernist reasons.
To this historicization can be added the pertinence of national differences, and on both sides. On the European side, as the Hafez volumes bring out, there are significant differences of emphasis, prejudice, engagement depending on the colonial histories, the geographical location, the composition of the immigrant community. The issues of conflict within Western societies vary: Rushdie in the UK, the headscarf in France, Turkish-Kurdish rivalry in Germany, anti-Arab racism in the USA. Equally, the relation of different Muslim societies to the Western world is distinct: secular nationalism and Communism have provided as much resistance as has Islamism. Alliance and cooperation have been as prevalent as conflict: the Kaiser sought to lead Muslims in World War I, the Soviet Union backed jihad and national liberation from the 1920s to the 1970s, the CIA funded the Afghan mujahidin in the 1980s.
To the diversities of history can be added that of identity. All those who are Muslims certainly consider Islam as part of their identity. They respect the five injunctions of Islam, they practise the rituals of life in an Islamic way, they celebrate Muslim festivals, they call their children by Muslim names. Equally importantly, and central to this issue, they experience a degree of common identity with Muslims who are oppressed elsewhere—be this in Palestine, Bosnia, or Kashmir. Yet these commonalities of faith, practice and solidarity are not the whole story. Islam may, in some contexts, be the prime form of political and social identity, but it is never the sole form and is often not the primary one: within Muslim societies divisions of ethnicity matter as much and often more than a shared religious identity; this is equally so in emigration. There is no lack of difference between genders and classes, between those with power and wealth and those without. No one can understand the politics of, say, Turkey, Pakistan or Indonesia on the basis of Islam alone. Despite rhetoric, Islam explains little of what happens in these societies.
The claim of a shared Muslim identity is therefore a distortion if this is meant to imply the primacy of such an identity. It is equally distortion if it implies a common, or given, interpretation of that tradition. Perhaps the great disservice which invocations of ‘Islam’, of community and of tradition, indeed of the whole communitarian and identity rhetoric of today does, is to distort the degree to which what is presented as ‘Islam’, or any other religion, is itself diverse and changing. The claim of fundamentalisms, indeed of all, be they religious or nationalist élites, who claim to be interpreters of the perennial, is that they are representatives of a given: therein lies authority. But such is never the case. This is what is well explained in the essays in Der Islam und der Westen, and which is the core of the modernist account of Islamism and Islamic thought. Bobby Sayyid vigorously rejects a monist interpretation of Islam, but he offers no specific, researched, analysis of what Muslim thinkers have said or of their concepts. Indeed, his very rejection of reformers such as al-Afghani and Abduh would seem to imply the aspiration for a similar essentialist and unchanging view of Islam.
What this implies for the study of Muslim societies, and for the study of Muslims in western Europe, is an analysis of ‘Islam’, much less general and less absolute than has often been the case, and as is claimed by representatives, often patriarchal, sectarian and self-appointed, of Muslim societies. On the one hand, what is presented as ‘Islam’ may well be one, but by no means the only possible interpretation. Aziz al-Azmeh has shown well, for example, in Islam and Modernities how the apparently given symbol of Islamism, shariah law, is itself a modern creation and liable to many, contingent, interpretations: there is no one shariah which Islamists can invoke. The Taliban interpretation of the place of women in society, or of the ban on images of the human figure, reflect one, but very much a minority, view. Similarly views by fundamentalists about the impropriety of Muslim women in the West training to be doctors or engineers are one, also very much a minority, variant.
The mistake of those opposed to anti-Muslim prejudice has been to accept, as the one true Muslim answer, particular, and often conservative, versions of that tradition. Even more so, the identification of Muslims with supporters of terrorism or fundamentalist groups is a distortion: a work like that of the otherwise judicious Gilles Kepel, Allah in the West, misrepresents the Muslims of the UK, France and the USA as if they are in large measure adherents of the Bradford Council of Mosques or of the Black Muslims. In a more extreme vein, Sheikh Omar Bakri Mohammad of al-Mohajirun was to claim in January 1999, during the controversy over British subjects being arrested in Yemen, that in every mosque in Britain and the Middle East young men were receiving military training. Allah is in the West, but in different forms.
Most challenging from an analytic point of view is the analysis of the intersection of identities. It is easy to visit a Muslim country or study an immigrant community, and present all in terms of religion. But this is to miss the other identities—of work, location, ethnicity –and, not least, the ways in which different Muslims relate to each other. No one with the slightest acquaintance with the inner life of the Arabs in Britain, or the Pakistani and Bengali communities, will know there is as much difference as commonality. The repeated feuds over sites of worship—common to Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, Jews—testify to the intrusion of other, secular, factors and to different interpretations of the tradition. The analytic challenge is to identify how the tradition and religion are shaped, how the modern is presented as the traditional, and how other factors of ethnicity, class and sect play a role.
There may therefore be occasions on which ‘Islam’ is the main or sole identity, not least when people are attacked on that basis: but such occasions are rare. ‘Islam’ tells us only one part of how these peoples live and see the world: and that ‘Islam’ may vary greatly. To take the most divisive international issue of the 1990s: if there can be an Islamic solidarity with Saddam Hussein, there can also be one with countries that Iraq has attacked, Iran and Kuwait, just as there is a strong Islamic opposition by Iraqis to Saddam’s regime.
Islamophobia or anti-Muslimism
Such historicization and disaggregation is relevant to the issue of what to term prejudice against Muslims. That there is such a thing as denoted by the term ‘Islamophobia’ is undoubtedly true. Recent examples in the British press are not hard to find. Elsewhere we can see similar trends: in Denmark the People’s Party has made such hostility central to its programme; in 1998 Hollywood produced an alarmist film, The Siege, focusing on Islamic terrorism, in marked contrast, be it said, to its indulgent treatment of Irish republicanism. Nor is this specific to the Christian or Jewish world: perhaps the most striking instance of hostility to Muslims today is to be found in India. The BJP ran for re-election in 1997 on three anti-Muslim issues: rebuilding the Temple at Ayodhya, removing separate legal codes for Muslims, and ending the special status of Kashmir. Other BJP policies—renaming Bombay after a Hindu goddess, rewriting history books—follow a similar logic.
The positing of a continuous, historic, past of confrontation may not only be historically inaccurate but may ascribe cause to religion, an eternal factor, where other, more contingent and contemporary causes, may be at work. It also misses the point about what it is that is being attacked: ‘Islam’ as a religion was the enemy in the past: in the crusades or the reconquista. It is not the enemy now: Islam is not threatening to win large segments of western European society to its faith, as Communism did, nor is the polemic, in press, media or political statement, against the Islamic faith. There are no books coming out questioning the claims of Muhammad or the Koran. The attack now is against not Islam as a faith but Muslims as a people, the latter grouping together all, especially immigrants, who might be covered by the term. Equally, the ‘Islamophobic’ attack is against states which may be among the most secular in the world, as Saddam Hussein’s is. If we take the study as one of negative stereotyping, of what in German is called the Feindbild, the enemy image, then the enemy is not a faith or a culture, but a people. Hence the more accurate term is not ‘Islamophobia’ but ‘anti-Muslimism’.
Use of the term ‘Islamophobia’ may also convey two other, misleading associations. One is that the term reproduces the distortion, already discussed, that there is one Islam: that there is something out there against which the phobia can be directed. This serves not only to obscure diversity, but also to play into the hands of those, within the Muslim com- munities, who wish to reply to this attack by offering their own selective interpretation of the tradition, be this on women, rights of free speech, the right to renounce religion or anything else. ‘Islamophobia’ indulges conformism and authority within Muslim communities: one cannot avoid the sense, in regard to work such as the Runnymede Report, that the race relations world has yielded, for reasons of political convenience, on this term.
Use of the term ‘Islamophobia’ also challenges the possibility of dialogue based on universal principles. It suggests, as the Runnymede and Wilton Park reports do, that the solution lies in greater dialogue, bridge-building, respect for the other community: but this inevitably runs the risk of denying the right, or possibility, of criticisms of the practices of those with whom one is having the dialogue. Not only those who, on universal human rights grounds, object to elements in Islamic or other traditions and current rhetoric, but also those who challenge conservative readings from within, can more easily be classed as Islamophobes. The advocacy of a dialogue, one that presupposes given, homogeneous, communities places the emphasis on understanding the ‘other’, rather than on engaging with the ways in which communities, national and religious, violate universal rights. The danger in these reports is that they are defined, if not monopolized, by representatives of religious bodies, and of community organizations, who apply to them the conventions of inter-faith dialogue: the churches have a role, in educating their own people about the faith, but also about the everyday lives and political grievances, of other faiths, Muslims included. This cannot and should not be at the expense of a critical examination of how these religions treat their members.
‘Islamophobia’ may also have confusing practical results. The grievances voiced by Muslims in any society may relate directly to religious matters: of school curriculum, dress, diet, observance of ceremonial days. But much of what is presented as the Islamic critique of the West has little or nothing to do with religion: it is secular, often nationalist, protest and none the less valid for that. Support for Palestine, denunciations of Western hegemony in the oil market, solidarity with Iraq, opposition to Soviet involvement in Afghanistan, denunciations of cultural imperialism, protests at double standards on human rights—these are all part of the ‘Muslim’ indictment of the West, but are not necessarily religious in content, or specific to the Muslim world. The Chinese denunciation of Western human rights interference, on the ground that it violates sovereignty, is the same as the Iranian. It has little to do with belief, and a lot to do with political power in the contemporary world. Similarly, within Western society, issues of immigration, housing, employment, racial prejudice, anti-immigrant violence are not specifically religious: the British term ‘Paki’ can, in a racist attack by white youth, as easily denote a Hindu, a Sikh or a Christian from Tamil Nadu as a Muslim.
Nor should the international implications of all this be overlooked, not least because they so directly affect the level of dialogue within Western societies: the violation of human rights, in the name of religion or secular power, is found in many Muslim as in non-Muslim societies. The analysis within the West of attitudes to Islam, and of renderings of Islamic tradition, cannot be divorced from what is going on within Muslim societies themselves: here horrendous violations of human rights are being committed, against Muslims, in the name of religion. The fight against fundamentalism is not, as Bobby Sayyid presents it, between the West and the Muslim world, but within the Muslim world itself: the briefest acquaintance with the recent history of Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Egypt or Algeria would bear this out. Those who protest the loudest about such violations are inhabitants of these countries, that is to say, Muslims themselves. Their protests are framed in universal terms, and demand a universal response. This is as true for political prisoners, trade unionists, journalists, women, as it is for representatives of ethnic groups within Muslim countries who are denied recognition and group rights. There are, as in any discussion of human rights, difficult issues here—relating to accuracy of information, approach, impartiality. But to deny their right to make these protests, on the grounds that there can only be one Muslim voice, or that their invocation of universal principles violates tradition, is a paradoxical conclusion for those who begin by protesting at non- Muslim discrimination against Muslims. ‘Islamophobia’, like its predecessor ‘imperialism’, can too easily be used to silence critics of national states and élites.
A return to universalism
Underlying much of this discussion and the related policy debates is the question how far we are able to apply universal categories, of analysis and ethics, to different religious and political communities. Current fashion has it that this is no longer possible, or desirable: Huntington on the right, and Bobby Sayyid on the left would, in their own ways, agree. So, too, would Islamists and their anti-Muslim opponents in the West. Yet it may be that all is not quite so relative as it appears. In the first place, much of the political language of protest and difference is itself part of a universal vocabulary: this is as true for the universal invocation of rights, as it is for the universal and very modern principles of sovereignty and national independence. Contrary to Bobby Sayyid, I would sustain the modernist argument that much of Khomeini’s rhetoric, like that of Islamists elsewhere, is derived from a modern and Western set of populist and revolutionary vocabulary. For all that the Islamists reject aspects of the modern world, they are grappling with similar problems and use similar instruments, of which the modern state, and the resources of the modern economy, are central. One of the most striking, and original, assertions of this universalism has come from the President of Iran, Mohammad Khatami: he argues from a shared reason and a shared cultural and intellectual interaction for the possibility of common values.
Nowhere is this modern context more important than in regard to the fissure that, perhaps more than any other, separates most Muslims from their non-Muslim fellow-citizens, as it does Muslim states from the West, namely the inequality of rich and poor in the contemporary world. Islamism is a form of protest—political and discursive—against external domination, just as Islamist movements within these societies are protests against social and political power that excludes them from power. It is important, however, and a point post-modernist friends of resistance too easily forget, to note that the Islamists are far from being the first to contest the inequalities of modernity: nationalism on the one hand, and socialist, populist and communist movements on the other, have long contested Western hegemony. The twentieth century has been one of relentless denial of Western hegemony, long before Khomeini and the FIS appeared on the scene.
The problems are, however, not only whether such a challenge can succeed, but also whether, in posing such a challenge, other violations of rights may not occur. Power relations, and distortions of truth and history, occur within protest movements as much as in relations between these movements and their oppressors. Hence the false salvation offered by those who, out of well-intentioned ecumenism, or partisan engagement, seek to remove the possibilities of critical dialogue with regard to those who invoke religious discourse. The alternative to the clash of civilizations need not be the mutual indulgence of communities.