Whenever a conversation of the concept of Islamic state is opened, Saudi Arabia and Iran are immediately raised as examples. Both countries are similarly run as religiously backed states. Yet, they are rather different in terms of type of authority, democratic scale, and historical development. The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia derives its legitimacy from applying Sharia law by a king who has the legitimacy through Bay'ah (the recognition of obedience to the Muslim ruler), while the Islamic Republic of Iran claims its legitimacy via both applying Sharia and an elected authority. It is thus an attempt to understand political philosophy of modern state in the Middle East in a different way than typically found in Western philosophy.
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Part I Part II Conclusion Additional Post Details
Sarah Silverman’s guest who spoke of “the Jewish media” and the “liberal media,” a good example of “invisible washing” issue: https://www.instagram.com/p/BbyaeJfAq_L/ About Jorge Luis Borges: Moreiras, Alberto. "The Villain at the Center: Infrapolitical Borges." CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 4.2 (2002) Introduction
The killing of off-duty soldier Lee Rigby on May 22nd , 2013, in Woolwich, UK, overshadowed completely the NSA scandal that came out around the same time. The revelations by journalist Glenn Greenwald-through thousands of documents leaked by the former security company employee1 Edward Snowden-that massive surveillance operations are being carried out by the NSA in the US and GCHQ in the UK, shows that there is no place to hide,2 to borrow from the title of Greenwald's book. The transnational Islamic political group, Hizb ut-Tahrir (HT) Britain's leader Imran Waheed spoke on this issue a couple of weeks later-at a half-day event organized by HT, which seeks to establish an Islamic State in the Muslim world through ideological (non-violent) struggle, in East London-stating that Prism (the clandestine surveillance program under which the United States National Security Agency [NSA] collects internet communications from at least nine major US internet companies) is not just being used to monitor Muslims, but everyone. I argue that today's monitoring of Muslims goes hand in hand with the notion of the need for Islamic reform (or, put differently, the reformation of Muslims). Muslims across the board have internalized the (Western) logic of the need to reform, and cannot help but do so, given the ways in which (dominant) discourses function, that is, they go into creating people's everyday sense(s) of being, living, and thinking-as a type of self-surveillance, even as many abjure the notion of reform, as the ideas of the need for "reformation" and "enlightenment" constitute the modern Western "unconscious of knowledge:3' I examine Imran Waheed's criticisms of British governmental (media-political) pressures on Muslims to reform, and the "Marrakech Declaration,"4 where "hundreds of Muslim scholars and intellectuals from over 120 countries, along with representatives of Islamic and international organizations, as well as leaders from diverse religious groups and nationalities, gathered in Marrakesh ... to reaffirm the principles of the Charter of Medina:5' I also examine a conversation between the director of the "anti-extremism think tank," The Quilliam Foundation, Maajid Nawaz, and Sam Harris-one of the "Four Horsemen of New Atheism" alongside Richard Dawkins, Daniel Denet, and the late Christopher Hitchens-published as Islam and the Future of Tolerance: A Dialogue,6 in which the question of the need for Islamic reform is front and center. Absolute power, as they say, corrupts absolutely. There is a reason why power corrupts. It deludes us into thinking we are the reference, we are all that we are because of our own doing. We become to a certain degree gods unto ourselves. The most powerful rulers through history, the most powerful rulers contemporary—and few and far between are those who never abused their powers—all of these people assumed at some level that they were and are indomitable, and that they are in some ways God’s gift to his people. And it usually is the case that these figures were and are men.
Every so often, allegations emerge about famous Muslim celebrity-scholars abusing their power—although, in the case of Nouman Ali Khan, the details are still murky (and in some ways the details don’t matter too much if an abuse of power has occurred). When Muslim celebrity-scholars abuse their power they in a very real sense scar the community, and this applies to any religious community of course—whether Christian, Buddhist, Hindu, or New Age. Myanmar is a non-secular Buddhist majority country. The majority of Myanmar peoples are Buddhist, including both ethnic Burmans and non-Burman ethnic minorities. Buddhists make up 89.8 percent of the population, Christians 6.3 percent and Muslims 2.3 percent. In the contemporary climate of Myanmar, Many Buddhists see Islam as a threat to Buddhism; they use Bangladesh, Indonesia and Afghanistan as examples of Islam’s takeover of previously Buddhist majority locations. Myanmar was born out of the ashes of the murder of its integrationist freedom fighter leader General Aung San, the father of Aung San Suu Kyi. He was assassinated on July 19, 1947, a few months before the independence of Burma on January 4, 1948. His legacy of seeking integration and the violence associated with his murder still alludes Myanmar today. These research notes witll set forth the history of Muslims in Mynamar as in attempt to understand the contemporary exclusion of the Rohingya from the modern nation-state of Mynamar and to argue for the continued failure of Myanmar to become a multicultural society of ethnoreligious equality and plurality. This book asks the critical question, how did we get here, to this place of hijab bans and outlawed minarets, secret renditions of enemy combatants, Abu Ghraib, and GTMO? It is not simply a result of September 11, 2001, Madrid 2004, or London 2005, nor a culmination of events of the past decade or the past century. Terrorist attacks, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the increased movement of Muslim immigrants into northern and western Europe, and the visibility of Islam, in general have contributed to a voicing of "the Muslim problem." However, these concerns represent old anxieties that lie within a multiplicity of times and spaces on the pages of manuscripts and canvases of paintings, in works of great drama, poetry, and fiction, within travel diaries and government documents, and on the screens of movie theaters. To find the answer to the question posed here, we must look at numerous fields of cultural production; there, we find a vision of Islam that is both familiar and unsettling. Within it, we must seek what is common. What is common is the Muslim monster. The history of monsters is a subject addressed in several disciplines, among them history, theology, and religious studies. In this study, I will argue that imaginary Muslim ,monsters have determined the construction of the Muslim in Western thought. At times, these constructions have involved fantasies about Jewish and African bodies; ,at other times, they have reacted to anxieties surrounding categories beyond race-in particular, those related to religion, gender, and sexuality. To be clear, I am interested here in raising an awareness of these creatures-demons, giants, cannibals, vampires, zombies, and other monsters-that can help us understand the status of Muslims today as stock characters in the Western imaginary landscape. The character of the homicidal terroristic Muslim stalks the Western social imaginary in print media, television, and film, but he has ancestors. Alterity If, as Talal Asad reminds us (2003:169), Islam is the primary alter of Europe, then “Muslim” is the site of that primary alterity. Alterity is the meeting place of two opposites, not just one. It is where the Other’s signal quality – whether irrationality or backwardness or fundamentalism or religion – gives rise to the very quality of the Other’s Other (that is Europe). The “I” and “us” and “we” of Europe, and of Euro-American provenance, reflects into itself, by means of the Other, qualities – whether rationality or progress or enlightenment or secularism – that are essential to its identity (since the Hegelian master is constituted out of the slave’s recognition, in a dual movement). What I am saying is a re-articulation of the some of the ideas that have gone before us to take account of our present moment in history (as we know, a la Foucault, that every new historical period is configured by specific conditions of possibility that have continuities and discontinuities with the past). Euro-America cannot conceive of its central (imaginary) qualities without its Other. Euro-America (whose Other gives birth to these qualities from its hapless bosom) depends on its very existence – philosophically, ideologically, existentially – on its Other. Euro-America’s very identity is based on acts of Othering. Now, to consider for a moment the history of this binarized approach to the world, it is rooted in the modern approach to knowledge and to the self. The modern self is derived from Descartes’ cogito ergo sum. When Descartes declared “I think, therefore I am,” which followed from his radical skepticism, he declared his own self as the source of all knowledge. This was in contrast to a premodern understanding of the self as being rooted in God as “the ground of Being,” whereby there was a fundamental inseparability of the known, the knower, and knowledge (Nasr 1989:49). Descartes marked the modern break of the object from the subject and the birth of the modern self. According to Heidegger “at the heart of [Western] modernity is the rise of an absolute subjectivity, such that the world appears to man as if it were ‘for’ him […] as picture” (Seth 2007:67) - that is, as an externalization. ![]() Originally published in The Islamic Monthly An Exchange Between Thomas Beale and Hasan Azad Thomas Beale (an e-health expert, platform technologist and e-community builder, who in many ways is representative of an educated liberal voice in the West) and I recently had an exchange that emerged from my piece Racism Runs Through the Arteries and Veins of the United States published February 5 on The Islamic Monthly. Below is our conversation which occurred online, lightly edited for clarity, that I hope gives readers a better idea of how complex this issue is, a debate that explores how racism is never as black and white as is typically assumed. Thomas Beale: Your article conflates quite a few things. One can’t deny the institutionalised racism in the US, but the kind of racism that corresponds to the history of black Americans is quite specific — it’s more like inter-caste racism in India — which is very deeply ingrained. Racism in the US against other people who happen not to be white, I think, is more likely to be of the mindless, casual type one sadly sees everywhere. The latter is inexcusable, but I don’t think it’s ideological/cultural, whereas the former arguably is, because it’s built into the history of the country. I suggest the real basis of anti-Muslim sentiment in the US is the same as here in the UK, France, etc. — it’s mostly fear-of-Islam sentiment, not anti-Muslim personal racism. The problem is that people who have never educated themselves on Muslim culture or Islam don’t have a way to articulate their fears that doesn’t sound in some way racist. And there are plenty of Muslims who don’t understand Islamic and/or Arabic/Persian/Turk/etc. culture (just as there are equally many non-Muslims who similarly have no idea of the Western tradition, Indian culture, pre-communist Chinese culture, etc.), so they tend to be reactive and insulted without understanding: a) what non-Muslims are afraid of, and b) the Western tradition that their critics come from. The parts of the Western tradition that survive today are the ones most educated people want to keep, and they’re not Western, other than historically (similar thinking can be found in other cultures). The main points are: liberty of speech and thought; rule of law; human rights; secular democracy (which is the only way to enable multiple faiths to live side by side in peace). People who do bother to find out about Islam can then start to make sense of and contribute to the kinds of conversations being had by modernising Muslims who accept and champion these basic values, and can articulate real problems (radicalisation etc.). Any non-Muslim who makes this effort can then start to understand the difference between the term “Muslim” as a Muslim in the Western World means it (a specific interior value system, understanding of Islamic faith, etc.) and what the term is implied to mean by the Trumps and others (i.e., “potential terrorist,” “ISIS sympathiser” etc.). Unfortunately fixing this probably requires a great deal of education and self-education and willingness to understand the history of other cultures — unlikely to happen anytime soon… Hasan Azad: Your argument hinges on a couple of assumptions: 1. That there is a radical difference between racism towards blacks in the US and “Racism in the US against other people who happen not to be white.” You argue that the former is “more like inter-caste racism in India — which is very deeply ingrained,” while the latter is “more likely to be of the mindless, casual type one … sees everywhere.” My argument hinges, however, not on whether or not the types of racism can be equated. I don’t actually equate the two, but rather make the point — which is a historico-philosophical one — that European history is ideologically and epistemologically rooted in “Otherness.” And it is a widely accepted thesis within the academy that Islam and Muslims have culturally (or — what historically came to be replaced by “culture” in Europe — religion; see: Terry Eagleton, Culture and the Death of God [2014]) and ideologically — going back to the first Crusades, through the European Enlightenment, and to the present — been constituted the radical “Other” within the (Christian) European imaginaire. 2. That there is a fundamental difference between the “fear-of-Islam sentiment” and “anti-Muslim personal racism.” You stress that the “real basis of anti-Muslim sentiment” in the West is the former — which, you emphasize is not racist, while the latter is. My argument is rooted in some significant studies, not least of which is David Tyrer’s The Politics of Islamophobia (2013). Tyrer, who is Reader in Critical Theory at Liverpool John Moores University, closely analyses (and takes apart) the claim — which is used by almost everyone engaged in discussions regarding their “fear/phobia” of Islam — that Islamophobia is not the same as racism, because Muslims do not constitute a race. He writes: "The attempt to deny the racist nature of Islamophobia is of utility in extending a particular racial politics without risking the accusation of racism, and in doing so it also centres problematic ideas of phenotypal racial difference, not by labeling Muslims as biologically bounded but by contrasting Muslims against other minorities who are held as such. It thus guarantees the continued hold of race as the basis for organising society and distinguishing between subjects, because it holds phenotypal race as the logical arbiter of whether racism can be said to exist. However, it also constructs Muslims as a lack — as lacking raciality." (26) In other words, by denying that Islamophobia is racist, Islamophobes both reconfirm a politics of racism, where society is organized hierarchically by “race” (which, let us remember, is a modern Western construct that was historically, and till now, used to categorize differences among peoples for the purposes of ruling over them by white Europeans, the master race, or, which amounts to the same thing, the race which is un-marked), and they make disparaging comments regarding Muslims and Islam (that they and their religion is/are backwards, that they need to “modernize,” that they are “irrational,” that their religion is “inherently violent,” and so forth). What Tyrer is arguing, therefore, and it is a subtle but extremely important argument, is that Islamophobia is a constituent element of the wider politics of racism, and is not separate from it. As for your claims vis-à-vis the intrinsic nature of modern Western society/tradition as being rooted in and champions of “liberty of speech and thought; rule of law; human rights; secular democracy (which is the only way to enable multiple faiths to live side by side in peace),” I would argue (and there are some major scholars who have been arguing these things for some years now) that these ideas and ideals are part of the “mythology” of the modern Western imaginaire — and mythologies are of course necessary to create cultural/national/ideological cohesion. But, on closer analysis, these ideas and ideals are not only far from being fully realized, they are systematically being eroded, not by the presence/intrusion of the “alien Other” in the heartlands of the West, but by the very secular modern institutions (in particular by the governments) that claim to be their most avid upholders and guardians. So, contrary to you, I would argue that it is not the problem with “the Muslim” who does not know “Western tradition” (I’m afraid that in your construction, you have unwittingly relegated Muslims as “Other” and as different from the wider society in the West), but rather the self-identified — and educated — Westerner who, all too often, is in fact not sufficiently educated in his/her “own” tradition. Thomas Beale: Although there were undoubtedly some individuals, adventurers, kings and statesmen coming from Europe with some “master race” thoughts, I think it’s a somewhat post-modernist preoccupation to try to graft that kind of ideology onto the “Western tradition” as a whole via evidence of colonialism/empire, etc. European ideas of empire were no different than those of the USSR, Ottoman Turks, the early Muslim caliphate, and all other empires back to Rome and beyond: control of resources, people and territory. The tiny number of people running those empires all thought they were superior; the intelligent among them understood that their superiority came from more evolved institutions and politics, not from being racially superior. I haven’t read the Tyrer reference, but suspect I would not be convinced by it, because from the quote you give, it seems to want to create a “racism” where there probably is none (in the ideological sense). There’s a more obvious explanation for Islamophobia: the use of “Muslim” as a self-identifier. Consider that you don’t hear of individuals in the West of any religious persuasion self-identifying as their faith before their ethnicity, region, country, or something cultural (excepting the well-known hard-core fringe like Seventh Day Adventists, some of the evangelicals, and some Mormons). No one in the West feels the need to defend being Catholic or Anglican, or Buddhist — they assume the faith does it itself. When one group of people perceive another group from countries as diverse as Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Iran, Indonesia and also from within Western countries, etc., whose members self-identify as “Muslim” prior to any other category, they start to put them in a category like Christian evangelicals or other kinds of ideologues, and they start worrying about fanaticism. Note: I’m not making truth claims here — simply claims about perceptions. Of course there are many millions of people who are Muslim who don’t go around talking about it. Fanaticism is really not part of any version of the Western tradition since the Enlightenment period, and Westerners don’t react well to anything or anyone they think is oriented that way. Is the so-called Western tradition imperfect? Of course. The modern “democracy” of the US is a joke, and the weak politics in Europe can be criticised in 50 different ways. But the basic fact of secular democracy and human rights-based law being an enabler of a workable civil society in which violations (real racism, hate crimes, slavery, religious violence) can at least be legally pursued if not totally removed, can’t really be contested. All those countries where you can think and speak freely (including freely exercising a faith different from that of the prevailing culture) are some kind of democracy; those where you have to be careful or silent are theocracies or totalitarian dictatorships. That’s the evidence. And that’s with very imperfect governments. Many of the ideals are in fact realised, even if they are being eroded by recent legislation designed to create a security state (without exception created by politicians completely unconscious of the dangers of sliding toward totalitarianism). I think the thesis of “Otherness” applies to Islamic culture rather than “races” of Islamic countries; [the Islamic culture] was historically seen as a different set of basic beliefs than the Western tradition. I don’t think we should have a problem with this — it’s true. Islamic scholars for centuries have thought the same about the West. I’m not saying there is no problem today, what I am suggesting is that it’s far more to do with fear of a radical [violent] ideology than any “race” problem. Hasan Azad: Regarding the notion of the Western “master race,” this is in the epistemological, political, ideational and ethical sense — and all four are intimately intertwined with one another. The very idea of the intrinsic superiority of Western theories of knowledge, of Western politics, of Western ideas and of Western ethics as being off-the-bat superior to other modes of being, thinking and living historically — whether explicitly expressed as such or unconsciously assumed — goes back to colonialism and its theories of knowledge (and rule) vis-à-vis the colonies. This is not a “post-modernist preoccupation,” as you put it, but is an amply demonstrated, studied and commented-upon field of study — broadly speaking called post-colonial studies — that has some very significant names such as Hamid Dabashi, Gayatri Spivak, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Partha Chatterjee, Nicholas Dirks — many of whom teach at Columbia University and have been thinking and writing about these topics for over 30 years. As for your dismissal of David Tyrer as seeming “to want to create a ‘racism’ where there probably is none (in the ideological sense)” — your comment highlights almost exactly what Tyrer is pointing to. Race is not a simple category that we all immediately understand, even if we think we do. Let us remind ourselves, again at the risk of repetition, that “race” is a modern Western construct whose borders constantly shift. So, for example, not too long ago, the Irish and the Italians were considered “black” in the US. Race is part of a very sophisticated politics — a politics of power and coercion — wherein Islam and Muslims are constituted as the “Other.” And this politics of power and coercion — and persuasion — is intimately intertwined in the language of mainstream media, which has been shown to have an Islamophobic agenda (see, for example, Nathan Lean’s The Islamophobia Industry [2012]). So let us all be wary of making truth claims about anything really, but especially something as excessively political (on all sides) as Islam. Regarding your assertion that “the thesis of ‘Otherness’ applies to Islamic culture rather than ‘races’ of Islamic countries; [the Islamic culture] was historically seen as a different set of basic beliefs than the Western tradition,” I would like to quote from Jonathan I. Israel’s magisterial Enlightenment Contested: Philosophy, Modernity, and the Emancipation of Man 1670-1752 (2009). Israel, a professor in the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, writes: "Muslims, from the time of Muhammad in the seventh century onwards … were invariably more tolerant than the Christians. Had Christians ruled the Ottoman Near East instead of the Turks … there would remain today no ‘trace of the Greek Church’ and Islam would have been obliterated whereas, by contrast, [Muslims] fully tolerated Christianity." (618) I fear that there is a lot more work — not unlike the kind of conversation we’re having — that needs to be done, from all sides and quarters of human experience, for the human project to continue forward. ![]() Originally published in The Islamic Monthly by Hasan Azad It appears that my 6-year-old son, Zayn, doesn’t think Muslims are American. When my ex-wife recently talked to him about his being Muslim, he responded: “I’m not Muslim! I’m American!” Zayn, by the way, goes to a school in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where the vast majority of students are Muslim. What does it mean for a precocious 6-year-old to say he isn’t Muslim, that he’s American? What does it mean for a Republican presidential candidate — for candidates — to say that Muslims are not or cannot (really) be American? Of course people have been raising weary — and worried — eyebrows regarding Donald Trump’s comments about the need to create Muslim databases, and his suggestions along the lines of internment camps. What has been less discussed is the manner in which Trump — a billionaire businessman who knows full well the importance of giving his customers what they want — is not inventing these anti-Muslim sentiments. He is, in a very real sense, reflecting the sentiments and aspirations of his droves of supporters. And these same sentiments are being catered to with varying degrees of emphases by other Republican hopefuls. Anti-Muslim rhetoric — and bigotry — wins elections. This is being tried and increasingly successfully tested in Europe. The far right in Britain, France, Denmark, Belgium are winning significant electoral victories in local and national elections. It’s not surprising — or coincidental — that anti-Muslim sentiments are being openly expressed by U.S. presidential hopefuls at the same time that we’re witnessing some of the worst acts of police brutality against Black people since the 1960s. Police shoot and kill blacks almost twice as frequently as any other racial group. … “Black people were about four times as likely to die in custody or while being arrested than whites.” … The militarization of local police has been growing ever since the Pentagon and U.S. Department of Justice decided to give away surplus weaponry from Iraq and Afghanistan. The heaviest weaponry is often used by SWAT teams during drug raids, where … communities of color are targeted for nighttime raids. They face few consequences for making mistakes, such as maiming or killing people and pets and ransacking homes and personal property. These same teams were deployed in Ferguson to confront protesters after [Michael] Brown’s killing in August [of 2014], exacerbating violence instead of quelling it. These are the days of Black Lives Matter. These are the days of Ferguson. These are the days of Trayvon Martin. These are the days of Michael Brown and Eric Garner. These are the days of countless Black men and Black boys, Black women and Black girls who are unnamed and unrecognized as they are dehumanized and brutalized. It’s not a simple quirk of fate that massive structures of institutionalized racism — whether against Blacks or other minorities — are being exposed (it’s come to the fore, for example, that the NYPD sets arrest quotas for minority police officers against their own minority communities). It’s not a simple quirk of fate that all these facts form the backdrop against which anti-Muslim rhetoric is becoming manifest. It’s not a simple quirk of fate because: Racism runs through the veins and arteries of the United States. Racism runs through the veins and arteries of a United States that bears within its collective unconscious the blood of 10 million of Native Americans. Racism runs through the veins and arteries of a United States that was built on the broken backs, in the ravaged wombs, through the blood, toil, sweat and tears of 250 years of slaves and slavery. Racism runs through the veins and arteries of a United States that interred over 100,000 Japanese Americans during WWII, that discriminated against Italians, against the Irish, against the Jews. At the same time, racism is part and parcel of the Western intellectual tradition. And this, I realize, is a somewhat radical statement on my part. Racism — the idea that a certain group of people or peoples is or are inherently different from, and inferior to, the dominant group — was central to the colonizing missions of Europe, of which the United States is heir. The Christian doctrine — let us recall — “Thou shalt not kill” was altered to “Thou shalt not kill a Christian” to justify the “civilizing” missions carried out around the world. Of course Christian missionaries were central to those colonizing missions: whether in Africa, the Middle East, or the so-called New World — as if to say that that part of the world didn’t have a prior existence until European settlers came to those shores. The popular philosophical problem of whether a tree makes a sound when it falls if no one is there to hear it perhaps should be re-formulated to “Does a falling tree make a sound if a European is not there to hear it?”; since, of course, these lands were inhabited and lived in and named, and their trees — on occasion — felled, by “indigenous” people. Which, incidentally, is another problematic term, just as “native,” given the colonial construction of “natives” and the “indigenous” as being different from those of us going over there from Europe. You need only consider the fact that Europeans are not referred to as “indigenous” or “natives” to gain a better sense of the “Othering” that happens through the process of naming and referring to Brown and Black people as “indigenous” and “natives.” Language is always embedded in and re-creates structures of power. Similarly, white Americans are — in everyday conception — constructed as “American,” and not as having immigrant roots — regardless of how many or how few generations may have been living here. Whereas the same is not true for non-white Americans. The idea of where one is really from always gets applied to people of color. For example: I have a fairly recognizable British accent. And yet, the number of times I’m asked by well meaning white Americans where I’m from is telling. (Incidentally, I don’t usually face the same type of questioning from non-white Americans.) Another illustration: When my former wife and I were in Morocco studying Arabic a few years ago, we were traveling with some people from our Arabic program — students who were mostly from the U.S. and a few from the U.K. One student, who was a Brit, and white, was talking to my wife rather excitedly because another male student from Scotland had just joined the program. My wife pointed out: “Hasan’s British.” To which the other student replied, quite innocently: “Not really,” and then immediately realized what she had said because she looked embarrassed. Historic European colonizing missions and civilizing missions have simply been renamed as democratizing missions by the U.S., as it promotes — and has been doing so for many decades — its own brand of rule, which, in effect amounts to rule that meets the needs of U.S. imperialism. In fact, as Noam Chomsky argues in his book Deterring Democracy, the U.S. has very little interest in promoting “democracies” that do not serve its interests. This has been shown time and time again. But all this doesn’t come as much of a surprise. And I claimed earlier that racism is part and parcel of the Western intellectual tradition. It could be contended that all I’ve been describing is part of politics and the logic of nations and, of course, capitalism. It is my argument that the Western intellectual tradition is fundamentally rooted in the idea of “Othering,” of creating difference, of degrees and levels of preference and subjugation. Let’s consider the history of this largely binarized approach to the world — the “Us” vs. “Them” worldview. It is rooted in the modern approach to knowledge and to the self. The modern self is derived in a significant way from the father of modern philosophy, Rene Descartes (1596-1650), and his notion of cogito ergo sum. When Descartes declared “I think, therefore I am,” which followed from his radical skepticism, he declared his own self as the source of all knowledge. This was in complete contrast to a premodern understanding of the self as being rooted in God as “the ground of Being.” In premodern knowledge systems, there was a fundamental inseparability of that which is known, the knower and knowledge. Descartes marked the modern break of the object (that which is observed) from the subject (the person who observes), and the birth of the modern self. According to philosopher Martin Heidegger, “at the heart of [Western] modernity is the rise of an absolute subjectivity, such that the world appears to man as if it were ‘for’ him […] as picture.” When I think about looking out the window of a moving train, for example, and look at the trees passing by, I see a two-dimensional image of a tree, followed by another, and then another. At no point do I experience the three-dimensional “reality” of the tree as such, whose three-dimensionality my mind fills in, as philosopher Matthew B. Crawford points out in his book The World Beyond Your Head. But, we must remember that each age, and the styles of thinking of that age, are defined by certain parameters of thought. When we speak of the world as picture — even if we may not consciously do so — we are immersed in a particular worldview, simply by living. We’re drawing on a view of the world as a movie. How often have you had the experience — I know I certainly have, probably because I’m a bit of a film geek — where you look at a series of events and think “That would make a great scene in a movie”? The premodern view of the world was one where the world existed objectively and separate from our perceiving it, as a thought in the mind of God, as a Theophany, as a reflection upon the veil of Maya. It is a fundamental epistemological need of the West to have an “Other” that is radically different from and separate to it. It is in light of these things that it needs to be understood why Islam and Muslims are being seen as fundamentally “Other” in the West. The “Othering” of Islam and Muslims has been a long process throughout Western history, about which Edward Said famously wrote in his epochal Orientalism. This is not to say that other people and ideologies have not been “Othered,” but it seems that Islam and Muslims constitute the most obstinate of “Others.” Islam — within this particularly Western imaginaire — is emblematic of religion as such — a “religion” that the West is supposed to have overcome. Islam has come to signify all that the West has supposedly consigned to the trash heap of history. At the same time, Islam has come to also serve as the catchall for the deep sense of dis-ease that we all feel with the world, from the far-reaching corruption of corporations and their long-time bedfellows, the politicians. And who is to blame for an environment that is on the verge of complete collapse? Who will be taken to task for the raping and pillaging of a Mother Nature that can no longer bear such burdens? Not us. Anyone but ourselves. So, what does it mean for Republican candidates to say that Muslims are not and cannot (really) be American? It means that Muslims constitute the currently most convenient scapegoat for so many ills of the world — when, if we are truly honest, everyone in the U.S., and in the West in general, has to at the very least accept a degree of responsibility. |
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