Racism for the mainstream

The vilification of Islam, particularly in the West, has developed into something of a pseudo-intellectual industry.

My first piece for Online Opinion has just been posted here.

First, define democracy

Lost in the contrived debate over whether Islam is compatible with democracy is a far more important set of questions: what does democracy mean to different societies - not just Westerners or Muslims, but to the Chinese, Tibetans and so on?

Does it matter that no Western government offered material support to the people of Pakistan as they sought to depose their dictator over the past several years?

Should we recall that it was Western countries that overthrew the democratically elected government of Iran in the 1950s?

The debate also avoids any appraisal of the malaise in Western democracies. One only has to look at the frivolity of the US presidential race, where candidates are criticised for their lack of tenpin bowling skills, to appreciate that something is wrong. In our own country democracy has often been reduced to a shallow exhibition of personalities.

Rather than insist that Muslims prove their worth in Western eyes, it would be more productive if we in the West took a good look at our own democracies.

Mustafa Qadri, Sydney

(Published in the Sydney Morning Herald on 18 April 2008)

'The West' and 'The Other'

The respected international relations theorist and former United States Department of State employee Samuel Huntington explains the significance of the West as agent of civilisation:

“The West has, in short, become a mature society entering into what future generations, in the recurring pattern of civilizations, will look back to as a “golden age,” a period of peace resulting in... “the absence of any competing units within the area of the civilization itself, and from the remoteness or even absence of struggles with other societies outside.””[1]

Leaving aside the accuracy of Huntington’s statement, implicit in it is an assumption that the “absence of struggle” is a product of the intrinsic nature of “the West” and its “commitment to democratic and pluralistic politics”[2] which other societies have at present proven incapable of fully realizing. For Huntington this incapacity is not explained by a failure of tactics or strategy on the part of other “civilizations”. Rather, other civilisations seek hegemony on terms that are either totally or generally antithetical to democracy and pluralistic politics. The West therefore is the exception to an otherwise still chaotic world, a world in which acts of genocide are perpetrated. But where the West is concerned it is an exception that proves the rule, the rule being that international peace and order cannot be realized unless the centre of civilisation, the West, takes a leading role. While Huntington goes further to lament the inevitable demise of the West as the hegemonic world civilisation,[3] he does not view as inevitable that future hegemons will reproduce the West’s “golden age” because they have not hitherto demonstrated the necessary capacity for lasting stability along democratic and pluralistic lines. Implicit in this is a belief that, matters of politics apart, the West retains a moral responsibility to remain hegemonic so that it may continue to be the paramount expression of human civilization.

In strikingly similar terms, Mahmood Mamdani relates a dominant expression of the distinction between civilised West and uncivilised others:

“…the world we live in is divided in two: between those modern and those pre-modern. It is said that those modern make their culture; they have a reflexive attitude to it; they can separate the good from the bad, build on the good and correct the bad; their culture develops historically; and the story of that historical development is what we call progress. The pre-modern peoples, in contrast, are said to be born into a culture; they are said to have a tendency to internalize their culture rather than have a critical attitude to it. Rather than make their culture historically, they seem condemned to live it uncritically, and content to pass it on from one generation to another. Pre-modern peoples are said to wear culture as a badge, or to suffer from it, like a twitch, even a fever.”[4]

Mamdani here is speaking of the manner in which two key American public intellectuals understood the cultural boundaries of the current United States War on Terror. But his assessment also resonates with the historical colonial distinctions between civilised and uncivilised, the West and the Other, modern and pre-modern.

The distinction between those with the capacity to civilise and those who require civilising is significant for a number of reasons. For our purposes there are two in particular that warrant further consideration. Firstly, it reminds us of the moral dimension of colonialism. If colonialism represents a power relationship, then it is a relationship where the colonial power believes it has the moral authority to intervene in the affairs of the peoples they wish to subordinate. Secondly, as contemporary literary theorists like Edward Said have shown, representations that reproduce a relationship of subordination endure even after formal representations of decolonisation have been obtained.[5] The international law of genocide is no exception in either of these respects.

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Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, London: Simon & Schuster (2002), at p. 302.

Ibid.

Ibid, at p 91.

Hobhouse Memorial Lecture, London School of Economics, London, 8 March 2007. Text of speech available at: http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/LSEPublicLecturesAndEvents/pdf/20070308_HobhouseMemorial.pdf. Accessed 18 May 2007.

Edward Said, Orientalism London: Penguin Books, 2003, at pp. 284-328 generally and pp. 295-297 specifically.

This is an excerpt from a paper I delivered at the International Law and Society Conference in Berlin, Germany 28 July 2007. If you would like a copy of the paper please leave your email address in the comment box.

Identity and resistance

For the foreseeable future (which is far from forever), my core intellectual interest will be ideology, identity and resistance. What are the features of identity that persuade people to resist those that are 'different' to them? What role does ideology play? These questions might seem quite abstract, but in fact they are very concrete.

The most obvious example is nationality. Nationality represents a relationship of association between an individual and a state. It means, for example, that you can travel to and from a certain territory relatively unmolested (with numerous exceptions which I won't go into for now). But there are problems with the concept of nationality because it tends to discriminate in an arbitrary way. Some of the most dedicated, good people get locked up as illegal immigrants while others are offered citizenship or residency simply because they have a lot of money or have the right skin colour. Whether people indigent to the country of nationality are particularly nationalistic is often quite uncertain. Most Pakistanis, for example, are either Pahtan, or Sindi, Balochi, Punjabi or from a region like Karachi or Lahore first. And they are Pakistani second. Even then our patriotism tends to most manifest itself only when we play cricket.

Resistance is another key feature of identity. To resist, by definition, you need to identify whom you are resisting and whom you are fighting on behalf. My particular interest in this inevitably stems from recent geopolitical events. I'm simply not convinced that there's a clash of civilisations, or, even, that there is a Western world fighting a Muslim world. But I want to empirically investigate this.

I find it concerning that there is now a lot of research on 'what Muslims think'. Inherent in this project is the assumption that religious identity, for Muslims at least, is the pre-eminent marker of identity. Therefore, it is the likely source of resistance to outside interference, real or perceived. But what about cultural affinities, nationality, 'race', and gender? And what about the elephant in the room; what about socioeconomics? That is, what about class distinctions?

Another problem with the clash of civilisations model is the way it marginalises most of the world's populations. Not only does it marginalise Muslims, it marginalises most others as either too benign or intellectually undeveloped to merit attention. Hence, the concern with India or China, for example, is not that their peoples will out think the West, but will instead out produce it.

All of these things are lost in the emphasis on religion.