The Muslim Condition: III

I would like to thank Atif Imtiaz, editor of the Bookviews section at DeenPort, for allowing me to reproduce a piece entitled "The Muslim Condition". I have serialised it into several parts and made some minor editions for the sake of presentation. May God reward his efforts. This is the third part of what will be a six part series.

Anti-Muslim opportunism and the pills of humility
The events of September 11 have also opened up a window of opportunity to those who would wish to peddle populist prejudices but would have previously been made to feel uncomfortable while doing so, that is to say that the boundaries of acceptability have widened. This is because the zeitgeist has shifted against the cultural relativist as multiculturalism is on the back-foot. For some strange reason, the terrorist acts have shifted the whole context of the multicultural debate. Since there is no connection between the topic of integration and the terrorists of September 11, this can only be regarded as a form of opportunism by those who have never felt comfortable with human diversity. This opportunism is based upon a particular understanding of how people actually change their mind. This approach believes that shaming people is more effective than argument. In pursuit of this, some sectors in the media and the academic world are engaged in a branding exercise: Islam and violence, Islam and oppression etc. The simple retort is to add up and compare how many people have been killed by the military of the US and 'al Qaida fighters' since September 11. This point of historical contingency can perhaps be highlighted by the French 'l'affaire du foulard' which began in earnest in September 1989 – eight months after the fatwa by Ayatollah Khomeini against Rushdie. A window of opportunism for a climate of prejudice was opened then and the process has repeated itself now in France with its recent outlawing of all ostentatious religious symbols, except that this time the French have suggested that Sikhs should wear hairnets instead of their turbans, it has repeated itself as comedy. As C. S. Lewis says: "There’d be no fun if there were no outsiders..."

Pietersen [1] in his book on the history of cultural representation of African-Americans shows how as the anti-slavery argument became more powerful during the time of William Wilberforce, then representations that increased distanciation became simultaneously more prevalent. That is, as attempts were made to decrease the distance between opposites, a counter-reaction followed in which the difference was exacerbated. This analysis disturbs the projected relation between liberalism and culture because as certain forms of liberalism attempt to extricate themselves from culture, they simultaneously project images of difference that depend upon a cultural history. Sander Gilman's [2] work is also a testimony to this. This point has an economic slant as well in that the progress of the Muslim community in Britain will involve social mobility and hence as the class profile for some sections of the community will change, then representations may become an aspect of the resistance to such change. In view of this, we have to be careful about the hatred we may arouse in others and all of the above perhaps explains the increasingly paranoid and hysterical reaction of some of those who are at present engaged in critiquing Muslim practice. I will return to how we can lessen the tension towards the end of this paper.

However, a blanket condemnation of the media incorporation (or lack thereof) of the Muslim voice is now unwarranted. There have been several inroads made into the national and local media since September 11 by spokespersons and academics that represent a positive step forward. However, national figures and faces remain absent, and the most famous Muslims in Britain are probably Abu Hamza and Omar Bakri Muhammad. This indicates the extent to which the whole process is managed. There seems to be no coincidence that such figures have been promoted within certain sections of the media. This repeated exposure of the exception (as both figures are) as the rule is helping to define the multiculturalism debate (and that probably explains their utility) as the construction of a variety of nodes of difference is contributing towards the establishment of a language that firmly places Muslims outside of the circle: honour killings, forced marriages, Islamic terrorism, suicide bombers, female circumcision [3] – this attempted reification within certain sections of the media needs to be interrogated. But as Parekh suggests in his Rethinking Multiculturalism: "The assimilationist pressure sometimes has the opposite consequences to those intended by its champions" (p. 198). These nodes of difference emerge from a cultural Weltanschauung that objectifies and condemns the acts of others as barbaric whereas privileging the moral life of the self as clean from all these contaminations. But this construction of difference needs to be challenged – at the level of foundations and at the level of rhetoric in relation to moral practice. In terms of foundations, if we take key discourses upon which modernity is assumed such as the privileging of rationality and science, the mechanics of democracy, the possibility of liberal individualism and the toughness of nationalism, then those who are familiar with academic musings over the last half century or more will know that such assumptions can no longer be taken for granted. In fact, they stand as vastly weakened versions of their former selves. Hence, the meaninglessness of their employment in shallow discussions on Islam and modernity. Even Gellner, who can stake a stronger claim to intellectual competence on these issues than most, could only state that the reason why modernity was ‘right’ was because ‘it worked’. The point is that the liberal foundationalist hope for moral absolutism can flounder if challenged.

The rhetoric on moral practice is similarly confusing. It is true that suicide bombers kill, but then so do missiles that are fired from fighter aircraft. What two word appellation do we have for the latter? Similarly, it is also true that some people kill their relatives as a way of preserving their honour, but then so do husbands in British society who found that their wives had been unfaithful – but what two word appellation do we have for their crime? Female circumcision is condemned because the values of a culture are forced upon the female body, so what of breast enlargement, or more generally, plastic surgery as a whole that seeks to pursue accepted notions of beauty? Polygamy is condemned, but pornography is widespread (and even occasionally celebrated) while prostitution is soon to be decriminalised. It is true that there are many Islamic practices that are un-modern, but while we may not be able to persuasively explain every Islamic injunction, we may nevertheless rest assured that those who condemn us most stridently do so from a position that itself is beginning to appear increasingly absurd. 

What is happening is that we are being forced to try to understand each other, but an important part of this is being organised by those who do not wish to see this understanding emerge. Life is complicated, prejudice however requires a certain – only a certain – amount of knowledge. Easy conclusions on important issues can encourage prejudice – but understanding and analysis, this has been difficult to find. For example, in the above examples that reflect a generalised Western critique of 'Muslim practices', some practices such as honour killing and female circumcision (in its extreme form) are universally condemned and forbidden, some such as 'suicide bombing' are disputed and polygamy is permitted. But this moral distinction is not clear in the public conscience, because the force of the rhetoric obfuscates such distinctions. Perhaps an example would help. Geertz examines two Muslim societies in his book Islam Observed. He examines the kinds of individualism that each has:

"Mysticism", "piety", "worship", "belief", "faith", "sacredness", "tradition", "virtue", "spirituality", even "religion" itself all these words we use, as we must, for there are no others by means of which we can talk intelligibly about our subject – thus turn out, when we compare the way in which each our people’s came, on the whole, to develop a characteristic conception of what life was all about, a conception they called Islamic, to mean rather different things in the two cases. On the Indonesian side, inwardness, imperturbability, patience, poise, sensibility, asceticism, elitism, and an almost obsessive self-effacement, the radical dissolution of individuality; on the Moroccan side, activism, fervour, impetuosity, nerve, toughness, moralism, populism and an almost obsessive self-assertion, the radical intensification of individuality [4].

Such deep interpretations may also help in the analysis of gender in Muslim society debate. Those familiar with the variety of Muslim cultural life will know that though the public, outward manifestations may be similar, the actual private relation may be differentiated and involve alternative notions of masculinity and femininity. What is happening is that the transition of 'Western society' from modernity towards a postmodern unravelling is leading to a situation in which multiple moralities are becoming publicly more available, and not all of them have their gaze firmly fixed towards the future.

© S. M. Atif Imtiaz

[Read Part I and Part II, Part IV, Part V and Part VI of this series.]

Notes
[1] Pietersen, J. N. White on Black: of Africa and Blacks in Western Popular Culture.
[2] See for example Gilman’s contribution to the multiculturalism debate in Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?, edited by S. M. Okin.
[3] This criticism of Muslim practice makes no distinction between that practice which is obligated, permitted, disliked or forbidden by Islamic law. It similarly makes no distinction between those practices which are geographically confined to certain cultures and those which are universal Muslim practices (like the obligation to give charity).
[4] Geertz, C. Islam Observed.