The problem with liberalism: what me and Obama have in common

When Malcolm X was 13 years old, he was sent to a detention home after getting expelled from school for bad behaviour. At that time, he had already been separated from his seven siblings while his mother was institutionalised, sent to the State Mental Hospital at Kalamazoo. Her health had steadily declined since Malcolm’s father was brutally killed by white supremacists five years earlier.

Malcolm Little, as he was then known, got on surprisingly well at the detention home. The white couple who ran it, Mr and Mrs Swerlin, liked Malcolm and treated him decently. They treated him well—but not quite as equals, he realised. He wasn’t about to change how they saw ‘niggers’.

“I remember one day when Mr Swerlin, nice as he was, came in from Lansing, where he had been through the Negro section, and said to Mrs Swerlin right in front of me, ‘I just can’t see how those niggers can be so happy and be so poor.’ He talked about how they lived in shacks, but had those big, shining cars out front.

“And Mrs Swerlin said, me standing right there, ‘Niggers are just that way…’ That scene always stayed with me.

“It was the same with the other white people, most of them local politicians, when they would come visiting the Swerlins. One of their favourite parlour topics was ‘niggers’. One of them was a close friend of the Swerlins. He would ask about me when he came, and they would call me in, and he would look me up and down, his expression approving, like he was examining a fine colt, or a pedigreed pup. I knew they must have told him how I acted and how I worked.”

Malcolm X was a ‘mascot’. The token ‘nigger’ of his class. He was liked and accepted by this white family because he behaved himself, he conformed. He set a shining example of what a young black boy in a racist America should be: non-aggressive, obedient, grateful. It was to his credit that he didn’t exhibit the delinquent qualities attributed to ‘niggers’ in general.

“What I am trying to say is that it just never dawned upon them that I could understand, that I wasn’t a pet, but a human being. They didn’t give me credit for having the same sensitivity, intellect, and understanding that they would have been ready and willing to recognize in a white boy in my position. But it has historically been the case with white people, in their regard for black people, that even though we might be with them, we weren’t considered of them. Even though they appeared to have opened the door, it was still closed. Thus they never did really see me.

“This is the sort of kindly condescension which I try to clarify today, to these integration-hungry Negroes, about their ‘liberal’ white friends, these so-called ‘good white people’ – most of them anyway. I don’t care how nice one is to you; the thing you must always remember is that almost never does he really see you as he sees himself, as he sees his own kind.”

Among his detractors, Malcolm X came to be seen as brilliant but reckless, even dangerous. Mainstream white America couldn’t forgive him for failing to denounce violence. They pointed to less threatening civil rights activists like Martin Luther King, and asked why he couldn’t be like them. But what Malcolm X does—that more compromising figures don’t do—is turn the critical lens on liberal America.

He pours scorn both on white liberals and on black Americans’ efforts to ingratiate themselves with them. Black pride, as he saw it, could not exist as long as black Americans were trying to advance themselves within a system that wasn’t made for them; one that was in fact created out of their exploitation. Malcolm X was important because he demanded something more than just “crumbs from the white man’s table.”

Even Barack Obama himself recognises it! In Dreams from my father, he singles out Malcolm X from all the other classic authors on the black condition, saying, “His repeated acts of self-creation spoke to me; the blunt poetry of his words, his unadorned insistence on respect, promised a new and uncompromising order, martial in its discipline, forged through sheer force of will.”

Obama surprised me. I know he’s awesome and everything, but he’s a politician, and politicians are never to be trusted. So yes, I was surprised to read the following passage in his book that not only speaks to the continuing problem of racism in America, but also spoke to other racisms in other places and times:

“I had begun to see a new map of the world, one that was frightening in its simplicity, suffocating in its implications. We were always playing on the white man’s court, Ray had told me, by the white man’s rules. If the principle, or the coach, or a teacher, or Kurt, wanted to spit in your face, he could, because he had power and you didn’t. If he decided not to, if he treated you like a man or came to your defense, it was because he knew that the words you spoke, the clothes you wore, the books you read, your ambitions and desires, were already his. Whatever he decided to do, it was his decision to make, not yours, and because of that fundamental power he held over you, because it preceded and would outlast his individual motives and inclinations, and distinction between good and bad whites held negligible meaning. In fact, you couldn’t even be sure that that everything you had assumed to be an expression of your black, unfettered self—the humor, the song, the behind-the-back pass—had been freely chosen by you. At best, these things were a refuge; at worst, a trap. Following this maddening logic, the only thing you could choose as your own was withdrawal into a smaller and smaller coil of rage, until being black meant only the knowledge of your own powerlessness, of your own defeat. And the final irony: Should you refuse this defeat and lash out at your captors, they would have a name for that, too, a name that could cage you just as good. Paranoid. Militant. Violent. Nigger.”

His words are strikingly reminiscent of Frantz Fanon’s articulation of what it means to be a racialised subject. For Fanon, born in the French colony of Martinique, the shock of reaching Europe and realising that ‘Liberté, égalité, fraternité’ didn’t apply to black people triggered an understanding of race and racism that remains incredibly influential.

It was not the crude racism of the day that so concerned Fanon. It was the promise of humanity, cruelly denied. It was being “overdetermined from without… fixed” by the inescapable blackness of his skin. Like Obama, Fanon discovers that his choices—rebellion, submission, anger, pride—are choices that have already been made for him, they have been presupposed. “And so,” he says, “it is not I who make a meaning for myself, but it is the meaning that was already there, pre-existing, waiting for me.”

This problem now confronts Europe’s Muslims. Observers will have noted a dramatic difference in tone between the first ‘Islam vs. the West’ crisis (the publication of Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses and subsequent fatwa issued against him by Ayatollah Khomeini) and the second (9/11). During the former, the Western media was full of overtly Islamophobic and frankly ignorant commentary denouncing Islam as backward and barbaric.

By contrast, in the days after 9/11, the leaders of the Western world bent over backwards to stress, in public speeches anyway, the essentially peaceful nature of the Muslim religion. They promoted a clear distinction between the peaceful Muslim majority worldwide and the excesses of a fanatical minority. Amongst Western populations there appeared to be a similar trend, with sales of the Qur’an and books on Islam soaring as people sought to inform themselves about the peaceful and tolerant ‘true’ Islam.

Now, I’m a peaceful Muslim, no doubt about it. But something began to happen as more and more people bought into this idea of a ‘true’ Islam corrupted by violent fanatics, something which I found alarming and uncomfortable. A binary took hold, and permeated the public consciousness, taking on the status of a self-evident truth. It was the difference between a Good Muslim and a Bad Muslim. The set of oppositions looks roughly like this:

secular --------------------- religious
liberal ---------------------- illiberal
democracy ----------------- authoritarianism
freedom -------------------- control
decency --------------------- corruption
education ------------------- indoctrination
progress --------------------- stasis/regression
universalist ----------------- parochial
Westernised/integrated --- traditional
religion as faith/culture --- religion as political
peace ------------------------- jihad
clean-shaven ---------------- bearded
rational ---------------------- irrational

Crucially, it’s not the far right who are responsible for this latest manifestation of racism. The BNP think all Muslims are terrorists; by now, everyone knows these guys are loopy. No, it’s precisely the liberal desire to see the best in Islam, the “disgustingly patronizing liberal respect for the Other’s spiritual depth” coming from “people eager to give Islam a chance, to get a feel for it, to experience it from the inside, and thus to redeem it,” as Žižek puts it, that is so dangerous.

Because what it says to Muslims—what it says to me—is that you can be a Muslim, no problem, but you’ve got to be our kind of Muslim. As a Muslim, the invitation to take up my fully human status is extended to me with conditions attached. Do I condemn violence? Check. Do I tolerate other faiths? Check. Do I believe in equality? Check. In other words, to be a Good Muslim I must be a liberal subject first and a Muslim second. Islam is reduced to a lifestyle choice.

And so I lament, with Fanon, that “it is not I who make a meaning for myself, but it is the meaning that was already there, pre-existing, waiting for me.” And like Obama, I know that to refuse my defeat, my powerlessness to define my own identity, desires and ambitions, is only to invite those alternative pre-defined identities. Militant. Violent. Extremist. Terrorist.

God and the Government

Last week the Malaysian Minister of Islamic Affairs warned the Malaysian Bar Council against conducting an online poll to determine whether lawyers and members of the public agree with the government’s ban preventing non-Muslim publications from using the word ‘Allah’.

The warning follows a dispute in January this year, when the Interior Ministry prohibited the Catholic Herald newspaper from printing its Malay language edition after it was found to contravene a 2007 ban on using the word ‘Allah’ to refer to the Christian god.

It later softened its position, allowing the word to be used as long as it is explicitly stated that the material is not for intended for Muslims. To prevent hapless Muslims becoming confused and accidentally converting to a different faith, the Herald was compelled to print ‘For Christianity’ on its cover.

It is worrying that the Malaysian government does not appear to be aware that the Arabic word ‘Allah’ predates Islam, that it is the only available translation for ‘god’ in the Malay language, and that the god worshipped by Christians is, in fact, the same god that Muslims worship.

More worrying, however, are the government’s continued efforts to politicise religion. In Malaysia’s highly racialised political system, religion was bound to get caught up in the whole thing to a certain extent, particularly given that ‘the Malay race’ is defined as unequivocally Muslim.

But recent years have seen a creeping conservatism gaining strength throughout Malaysia. When my mum was growing up in the sixties and seventies, hardly anyone wore the tudung (headscarf). Now it is commonplace, even among teenagers and twenty-somethings.

On a more sinister note, anger directed at the state of Israel is translating into a weird anti-Semitism expressed mainly by people who have never knowingly encountered a Jewish person in their lives. My own uncle, who almost certainly falls into that category, spent a good three or four days trying to get me to read that infamous forgery The Protocols of Zion. Malays routinely equate “Jew” and “Israeli”—an unsurprising conflation given that Malay Malaysians’ national identity is bound to static notions of race and religion, but one that makes me wince nonetheless.

In addition to this shift among the Muslim population, which may well be attributable to global political developments like the war on terror and the belief that Muslims are increasingly targets of victimisation, particularly in the Middle East, there appears to be a growing willingness by the Malaysian authorities to assert Muslim supremacy in the country and take an intolerant approach to the rights of non-Muslims.

In 2007 we heard about the Malaysian woman born to Muslim parents but raised as a Hindu, who asked to be officially registered as a Hindu. As a result she was detained for months in an ‘Islamic Rehabilitation Centre’, where she was forced to pray as a Muslim, wear a tudung and eat beef. In 2005, a Hindu Malaysian was buried in a Muslim cemetery under Muslim burial rites after a Sharia court ruled that he had converted to Islam just before his death, against the evidence of his friends and family. And now we have the government stipulating what non-Muslims are allowed to call the god they worship.

What's next?

Free Speech and freedom to abuse

Poor old Free Speech is on the ropes again, it would seem.


A couple of months ago Italian comedian Sabina Guzzanti made some hilarious quips about Italian premier Silvio Berlusconi, his equal opportunities minister (and former topless model) Mara Carfagna, and finally the Pope. Despite getting away with mocking the two politicians – Carfagna threatened to sue, but didn’t dare carry out the threat – the Pope has proved a little more prickly.

Before a large rally in Rome, she joked that in twenty years time teachers in Italy would be selected by the Vatican, before saying “but then, within twenty years the Pope will be where he ought to be — in Hell, tormented by great big poofter devils, and very active ones, not passive ones.”

This month she was almost charged with ‘contempt of the Pope’. Prosecutors wanted to invoke a 79-year old law originally introduced through a treaty between the papacy and fascist dictator Mussolini.

Dismissing the validity of the charge, Guzzanti said, “I believe that in a democracy there is no right not to be offended. I think that anyone ought to be free to say whatever he or she likes at any moment.

“If someone says things that are offensive, gratuitous and stupid, one has to assume that there will be others to demonstrate that what you said was offensive, gratuitous and stupid.”

There are two points I think we can draw from this story. Firstly, the way that the Free-Speech-In-Europe debate is usually framed, as a conflict between European civilisational values and Muslims, is flawed and – dare I say it? – more than a little racist. This Italian example demonstrates that stifling debate and criticism is a trait of certain aspects of Christian culture as well.

It is also a feature of secular democracies. Berlusconi’s own historically inaccurate assertion that Western civilisation is “superior” to Islamic cultures by virtue of its tolerant and democratic ethos is pretty laughable considering that he basically controls the country’s television broadcasting and silences critics by trying to sue them.

Secondly, the preposterousness of the attempt to prosecute a comedian for ridiculing the Pope can unfortunately lead to a rather overzealous reassertion of the right to free speech. Even Guzzanti falls into the trap: when asked by a journalist whether there should be any limitations on free speech in the context of Holocaust denial or the infamous Danish cartoons, she simply falls back on the free speech mantra.

This can be dangerous because it obscures the difference between poking fun at authority – religious or otherwise – and poking fun at minority communities. In Britain, we have the right to mock the Prime Minister, the Queen, or the Archbishop of Canterbury. We also have the right to mock Muslims, black people, or children with disabilities. So why does former feel ok, whilst the latter feels somehow wrong?

To take part in satirising, criticising and ridiculing someone else, you have to acknowledge that it makes a difference who you are, who the subject of your criticism is, and your respective roles in society. Directing your scorn at a person who has intentionally placed him or herself in the public eye, or who is a figure of authority and should therefore be held accountable to the people, is fine. Directing it at a member of a minority group – such as Muslims in Denmark or Jews in Europe – is less acceptable because these subjects are often already marginalised or discriminated against in some way by the state.

Guzzanti assumes that in a democracy, stupid and offensive comments are permissable because there will always be others there to counter them. This gives society a little too much credit in my opinion. When a well-known British author like Martin Amis makes racist remarks about British Muslims, there are plenty who will stand up and decry his comments. However, they may be less prominent voices, and are easily drowned out by stronger and louder popular discourses reinforcing the flawed association between violence, intolerance and Islam. These spokespeople present themselves as responding to a threat – but in reality they are little more than bullies.

In theory, there should be no limits on Free Speech. In practice, however, the way we use it reveals a great deal about our own positions in society, and how we relate to those we subject to ridicule.

The Indisputable Non-Genius of Richard Dawkins

Last night I caught a few nuggets of Richard Dawkins on Channel 4, waxing lyrical about The Genius of Charles Darwin. Dawkins, most well known for his books The God Delusion and The Selfish Gene, was intent on proving to us that kindness, charity and altruism should not be accepted for what they are; no, they have to be explained in terms of evolutionary theory. In other words, we're not nice to each other just because we're nice. We're nice because it confers upon us some evolutionary advantage. We are, as Dawkins so movingly put it, "survival machines".

I'm too weary of Dawkins to even begin deconstructing his loopy logic. What really struck me, more than his argument itself, was the obsessive manner in which he would try to put his beliefs across. He appears to be driven by a desire to prove that everything, all human and social phenomena, can be explained with recourse to evolutionary theory and genetics. That's fair enough, Dawkins. But other people have their own beliefs - just as valid as yours - about the foundations of human existence. By going around like some crazed televangelist, propelled by missionary zeal, you're really no better than the religious fanatic you so despise. Neither of you are able to accept that there are a million different belief systems, each as meaningful as the next. Neither of you can let go of your unshakeable faith in the singularity of your own Truth.

There was one part of the programme where Dawkins speaks to a woman working in a homeless shelter, dishing out hot soup while she explains that it's just the thing they need after a night out in the cold. He asks her where this charitable disposition comes from, and you can see his brain fizzing as he tries to comprehend it. This scene lent further support to my sneaking suspicion that Richard Dawkins is just not a particularly kind or empathetic individual, and last night's show may be better understood as his rather embarrassing attempt to grapple with the fact other people are, in fact, nice.

As for me, I'm quite happy to accept that altruism and compassion exist in our society, for whatever reason. The obsessive attempt to rationalise such behaviour probably tells us more about Dawkins' character than it demonstrates anything useful about our social existence.

Students, be vigilant!!! …There are fundamentalists among us, and they are dangerous…

by Pia Muzaffar Dawson

this article was first published in The Pulse in 2007

Has anyone else noticed a creeping consensus taking root in our university? A certain sceptical chill in the air? Now, I know that there have been recent reports about campus staff at higher education institutions all over Britain being encouraged by the government to spy on Muslim and ‘Asian-looking’ (!!) students, but I’m advocating that we redirect our suspicions elsewhere. Muslims are too easy to spot; what’s more, they’ll readily admit their faith. No, what I’m talking about is a silent, far more sinister force that has steadily been gaining more and more adherents – but unlike many other cults they wear no visible indicators of their faith, and if you quiz them, chances are they’ll deny they believe anything at all. This stealthy self-denial has proved one of their most effective weapons against detection, and thus against contestation. Yet press them a little more, and you’ll reveal a wellspring of cultural supremacism and badly articulated racism. Yes indeed: these are the secular fundamentalists, and their propaganda is slowly seeping into our institutions, our media and our minds.

Right, what does that mean? Precisely this: despite what is currently propagated by our leaders, our media, our parents, our lecturers (both ‘rightwing’ and ‘liberal’ alike), the greatest cause of hatred and intolerance in fact derives from the secularist myth, and not from any dodgy interpretation of the Bible or Qur’an.

No, hang on, I must have got that wrong. Surely we’re living in an age of increasing threat from “Islamic fundamentalism”? Isn’t there a “clash of civilisations”? That’s right; our secular, modern existence is being jeopardised by people with outdated beliefs trying to drag us back into the Dark Ages! Women are attempting to cover up – god forbid! – their beautiful, liberated bodies. Irrational beliefs and redundant traditions just refuse to go away! What’s wrong with these people?? Don’t they know that we discarded the “God-delusion” decades ago? Aren’t they aware that we’re living in newer, better times, where you can live your life free from the oppressive dogmas of organised religions based on rigid interpretations of ancient texts??

Bollocks, I say. Contemporary Britain remains under the powerful spell of a centuries-old faith: the twin beliefs of rationalism and secularism. Contrary to popular opinion, we are not born atheists with a natural ability to rationally deduce the non-existence of God (or gods) from the assembled evidence until some silly superstitions come along to deceive and flummox us with their threats of eternal pain and promises of everlasting glory. No, we are born into a time and a place, and if that place is Britain and that time is now, the belief system that happens to pervade our social existence is the secularist myth. This myth is based on the notion that we no longer need to turn to religion to explain the fantastic complexity of the natural world; science privileges us with access to the Truth, and Truth need not be mediated by the priest, imam or rabbi. Neither do we need religion to provide us with hope of a better life, since life is better than ever before. We have fridges, for heavens sake!! We can fly to Spain for 99p! Religion has also ceased to be of spiritual use, since we can now fulfil our innermost desires to discern life’s meaning in a multitude of other ways. So we are not, in fact, living in a post-myth, post-religion, post-belief age at all; we have simply replaced the old myth with a new one. We’ve swapped faith in God for faith in ourselves, or in humankind, or music, poetry, surfing – whatever you want really. You get to decide.

Ok, all fine so far, so we’ve moved on from God, so we now believe in other things – where exactly is the harm in that? …This is where the ‘fundamental’ part of secular fundamentalism comes in. Because there’s nothing wrong with being an atheist, nor with believing in the division of church and state, nor with deriving your ethical values from experience and love rather than the Ten Commandments. I myself am a thoroughly secularised Muslim atheist; I see no contradiction there at all. The dodgy bit is when people start asserting that atheism and secular values are somehow… well, a bit more advanced than the old-fashioned religious ones. Though you may not always hear this view expressed in quite those terms, it is nevertheless implicit in more aspects of our daily lives than I, for one, am comfortable with.

For example: part of the myth of rational secularism involves the assertion that being secular is qualitatively different to being religious – that the denial of God permits a certain objectivity, a scientific impartiality not attainable for those who profess to believe in the invisible and unknowable. Hence our mainstream schools and universities are secular institutions, and religious affiliations are treated as special interests. Here at Sussex, as with many if not most other British universities, you can study International Relations, Cultural Studies, Sociology, Media, Politics, Anthropology, Philosophy, all the Sciences – but you can’t study religion. This systematic and institutionalised bias in favour of the secularist myth inculcates the identification of civilised modernity with secularism, reinforcing the linear conception of progressive human history with ‘us’ at the top, and believers a few rungs further down. This is a subtle kind of racism, of cultural arrogance, since it basically adheres to the view that our belief system is superior to all others, placing us in a unique position to observe and comment on everyone else.

In the media as well as in the university, the distinction between ‘liberal’ and ‘rightwing’ is utterly meaningless with regard to the elevation of secularism to a higher moral plane. Even the Independent, which is hardly seen as a bastion of xenophobia and inter-cultural suspicion, recently published an interview with some “smart, articulate, beautifully dressed… brilliant, thoughtful… modern” Muslim women who, according to the writer, are far more representative of the wider “moderate, rational” Muslim community ignored by much of the media. These women all balked at the idea of wearing the veil, comparing it with “attracting attention in the wrong way, like a child." One woman said she finds it “bizarre that a woman who is educated or has a PhD finds it normal to be covered." OH MY GOD!! This article, though superficially a coherent and well-intentioned appeal to non-Muslims to recognise the happy face of Islam we don’t hear about too often, is in fact an appeal to our most basic prejudices – it’s saying: “Yes, there are a lot of basically backward traditions still in force in our society, but if you give these poor Muslims a decent education and teach them how to be rational like us, you’ll soon rid them of their silly attention-seeking habits. Look at these women here! You can’t even tell they’re Muslims, they’re so civilised and articulate!” But here’s a fun fact: you can wear a veil and be an intelligent, modern woman; the two things are not mutually exclusive as this writer would have us believe.

And this subtle prejudice is not only propagated in the media and promoted by the very structures of our education system; the secular fundamentalists are actively recruiting devotees on our very campus too. Just last year our university hosted a debate about the relative merits of religion and secularism at which the journalist Polly Toynbee (winner of the Islamic Human Rights Commission’s "Most Islamophobic media personality" award, 2004) propounded various provocative opinions which refused to engage in a meaningful debate with the other speaker, the Anglican Priest and Quaker Chaplain Paul Oestreicher, and basically amounted to a reinforcement of the mistaken belief that religion’s rightful place is in the past and secularism is synonymous with modernity and civilisation. (The fact that the whole debate took place in the Meeting House, which is both the university chaplaincy and the only place on campus providing the valuable service of coffee and tea for less than 50p – if that’s not contributing to our social wellbeing, I don’t know what is! – was probably lost on Toynbee) Once again, this view can only be described as cultural supremacism. If a fundamentalist is someone who cannot see or comprehend the alternative perspective, and expects to be able to subject all others to their own specific ideology, then ideologues like Toynbee are precisely that: the fundamentalist equivalents to the religious extremists they so despise.

Anyway, try not to get too alarmed by the frenzy of fear over ‘religious extremism’; instead be wary of the other fundamentalists in our midst. Secular superiority is a belief system like any other, and where an ideology claims objectivity there is all the more reason to treat it with suspicion.

Education/Islamophobia

by Pia Muzaffar

this article was first published in The Badger 28/01/08, volume 18 issue 3

Many Muslims in Britain increasingly consider us an Islamophobic society – and our universities are by no means an exception.

Sussex Anthropology lecturer Filippo Osella was the first of three invited speakers to talk on Islamophobia to a crowded lecture theatre last week here at Sussex. Unlike recent outbursts demanding, as Martin Amis controversially did, that it is the Muslim community itself that needs to “get its house in order”, Osella redirected attention towards non-Muslim Britain.

He argued that although the current wave of Islamophobia is clearly unique in many ways, there is nevertheless a continuity in the way that the West has historically defined itself in opposition to its Islamic antithesis. Western civilisation projects onto a monolithic ‘Islam’ everything that it is not. Presently, this means that any form of political Islam is demonised as total anathema to secular society.

In this way, Osella pointed out, it is the secularists who get to define ‘proper’ spirituality. They define who is a ‘good Muslim’ (tolerant, apolitical, non-interfering), and who is a ‘bad Muslim’ (fundamentalist, traditional, political).

And this has crept into our educational institutions. It was only in 2006 that it was revealed that lecturers in Britain have been encouraged to spy on Muslim students. According to Osella, they are also being encouraged to run courses espousing a more ‘moderate’ Islam – ‘moderate’ being defined by the liberal establishment.

Academics have also been asked to conduct research on radicalism in specific Muslim communities which would involve supplying actual names and places to intelligence gathering agencies. And at Sussex, there was even talk of introducing an International Security programme. Though he was assured that such a study programme was in no way Islamophobic, upon enquiring as to what it might entail, Osella was told that a combination “with Middle Eastern Studies and Arabic” might be one possibility.

Such proposals are particularly resonant this week, after the Higher Education Minister Bill Rammell was reported on Tuesday as saying that there exists a “serious” threat of extremism on university campuses, with the younger generation being particularly “vulnerable” to radicalisation.

These claims have been tempered, however, by student groups and unions. A Federation of Student Islamic Societies (FOSIS) spokesman pointed out that “no evidence” exists to suggests that students should become targets of suspicion. NUS President Gemma Tumelty, and the General Secretary of the University and College Union, Sally Hunt, both expressed concern that this government guidance could foster an atmosphere of mistrust between teaching staff and students.

One BSMS student present at the discussion on Islamophobia described how he, along with other Muslim students, had been singled out and warned against taking home any of the routinely used chemicals which could be used to manufacture explosives. He explained that they had been required to fill out reports detailing their use of such chemicals, and that their course coordinator had been visited and interviewed by two Special Branch intelligence officers.

Another student in attendance alleged that Sussex is one of the universities to have recently signed up to a government pilot scheme allowing certain students – particularly members of the Islamic Students Society – to be monitored for suspicious activities.

The second speaker, Assed Baig from the NUS Black Students Campaign, believed that such tactics would prove counterproductive. Turning the glare of the spotlight onto the Muslim community, he said, would not encourage integration. Instead it would create a feeling of victimisation. Drawing on the ‘good’ Muslim/ ‘bad’ Muslim polarisation, he also argued that the distinction currently rests on whether an individual agrees with the government line. “If I disagree with foreign policy, does that make me an extremist?”

This sense of victimisation was the subject elaborated upon by the third speaker, Seyfeddin Kara from the Islamic Human Rights Commission. He presented a recent study conducted by the IHRC on Muslim perceptions of media reporting in Britain. In addition to the fact that a significant majority of respondents believed much media to be Islamophobic or racist, the study also revealed that the more educated the respondent, the greater their perception of anti-Islamic discrimination.

This paralled Osella’s suggestion that the more sinister form of Islamophobia does not come from the typical ‘lay’ racism associated with tabloid hate-mongering, but rather from the liberal establishment. In these ‘higher’ circles, including academia, a consensus has appeared which unites both Left and Right in its assumptions about the conflict between Islam and modern, secular society.

It is undeniably paradoxical that institutions of higher learning, founded upon ideals of freedom of thought and expression, may be entering into suspect contracts with the government that would curtail these freedoms.

Can secularisation be universal?

this essay was written in March 2007 for Social Change and Development, a Development Studies course at Sussex University

I

The Resurrection of Religiosity

It is a trite but commonplace observation that we are witnessing a resurgence in religion and religious fundamentalism; that the secularist progression envisaged by linear models of social development has not come to fruition. This essay seeks both to contest the notion that secularisation can be seen as a universal or absolute process and, further, to problematise certain critical approaches which understand ‘religion’ as a site of autonomy and resistance against these totalising discourses. Thus I first briefly outline the historically specific processes by which ‘secularism’ as a definitive social condition can be said to have arisen, in order to contextualise universalising claims. I then go on to argue that even certain ‘postmodern’ approaches can fail to move beyond Eurocentric assumptions about individual rights, social criticism and dissent, and the nature of ‘religion’ and its relationship to ‘society’; that in fact such analyses retain the telos implicit in liberal or Enlightenment conceptions of human development and social change.

II

Historical specificity and religious decline in the West

European secularisation has long been understood as the crystallisation of multiple material processes and ideological transformations taking place in the specific context of post-Reformation Western Europe. For Weber (1930), an important transformation in the conception of the individual/society relationship could be located in ascetic Protestantism’s rejection of the passion and ritual associated with Catholicism, and its construction of the individual as one who enjoys a personal and somewhat contractual relationship with God unmediated by church or clergy. And, as Marx recognised (1974, vol. I:83), this created conditions particularly conducive for the emergence of market capitalism, characterised by rational, formally free and equal individuals engaging in contractual relations without the socially binding obligations of feudalism. Turner, though differentiating between different strands of ‘individualism’ – namely, the “pessimistic” Calvinist kind and the more optimistic, rationalist kind characteristic of Enlightenment thought and early political economy – identifies in both a “critical and dissenting character… the dissent of Protestants from Catholicism and the dissent of the bourgeoisie from feudal relations of property” (1991:161;171). This liberal notion of public criticism as a right of the free individual relies, furthermore, on a particular conception of the state as a rational-legal sovereign sphere detached from the destabilising consequences of religious difference and conflict in the civil sphere, in which rational criticism in the form of belief and opinion can occur (Asad 1993:202-7).

The specificity of this experience is well illustrated by one example in which ‘secularisation’ and all it connotes is patently inappropriate in understanding the relationship between religion, society and the individual. In contemporary Saudi Arabia (commonly characterised as a highly traditionalist or fundamentalist society) there exists a well-established form of social criticism which is substantially different from the Kantian understanding of public dissent as an individual right and, significantly, as something essentially oppositional (Asad 1993:212-5). In the Saudi context, ‘civil society’ is not a neutral, value-free sphere but innately Islamic, and government is legitimate (shar‘iyya), but its legitimacy is bound up with certain implications of the concept of ash-shari‘a – specifically, with a notion of duty and “divinely sanctioned law-and-morality” (1993:212). The Muslim is not sovereign, but “an individual inhabiting the moral space shared by all who are bound together by God (the umma)” (1993:219): thus social criticism is better characterised as advice (nasiha), and is not so much a ‘right’ as a duty, one which is institutionalised and inherent in the government’s very existence.

Clearly, then, it was a unique configuration of factors including (though not limited to) the development of Enlightenment ideals, political liberalism and state rationalisation, and the advance of modern market capitalism, which together produced the particular conditions under which economy, politics and religion were separated into the pristine spheres we understand as constituting the secular society. ‘Religion’ took on its peculiarly modern definition as something private, characterised ultimately by belief, and the public domain of civil society became a neutral space, an overriding framework of secular, rational objectivity. “[M]edieval religion was a great cloak… Once it became an individual affair, it lost its all-embracing capacity and became one among other apparently equal considerations” (Dumont 1971:32). Furthermore, this separation of religion from politics made it possible to construct the former as a “transhistorical and transcultural phenomenon” (Asad 1993:28). This concept of ‘Natural Religion’, which could be clearly differentiated from the emerging knowledge structure of natural science (and thus be acceptable to it), permitted religion to be defined as consisting of a set of beliefs, ethics and practices and therefore something essentially comparable and common to all societies (1993:40-1) – a reductionist “lowest common denominator” (Sykes 1975:195) understanding of religion. Thus, despite the enormous flaws in a universalist conception of the secularisation process, religion itself was constructed as a monolithic category regardless of context (1). This then permits ethnocentric and reductionist explanations of contemporary social processes which define religiosity against what it is not – as nonmodern, non-Western, nonliberal, nonrational – and therefore the result of having ‘failed’ to implement conditions conducive to secularisation (2). Such ‘explanations’ demonstrate the “Europeans’ ability again and again to insinuate themselves into the preexisting political, religious, even psychic structures of the natives and to turn those structures to their advantage…” (Greenblatt 1980:227).

III

History making and historical time [a critique of the critique]

Within less mainstream discourses, of course, the notion that secularisation/ modernisation is universal or replicable is presently very unfashionable. Critical approaches emphasise the totalising force of Western, rationalist knowledge; of cultural imperialism, bound up with material domination and the globalising “modern juggernaut” (Sahlins 1988:4). It is claimed that the “postmodern condition” in which the world now finds itself, characterised by “widespread, destabilising change” (Haynes 1997:715;725), and its disillusionment with grand narratives like secularisation and myths of universal progress, is causing a resurgence of religion as a ‘local’ strategy of contestation, a rational reaction against ‘modernity’ and ‘Westernisation’. Postmodernism – and particularly postcolonialism – “encourages the rejection of centres and systems, engenders the growth of local identity, makes available information and thus teaches people to demand their rights… fosters ideas of freedom and eclecticism, [and] challenges the state” (Ahmed 1992:129). I want to argue, however, that these concerns, though well-intentioned, are ultimately misplaced. It is possible to expose in them a latent telos centred around assumptions about the relationship between society, religion and the individual, and about agency, progression, and the creation of history: assumptions which remain rooted in a highly ethnocentric and peculiarly universalising narrative of human development and social change.

A Nietzschean concept of genealogy (Foucault 1987), considering how truths are constructed and solidified through a gradual, dynamic process of inclusion and exclusion – producing ‘histories’ – is instructive here, since notions of secularisation and progress are rooted in specific understandings of history and historical time. “[H]ow, by way of what practices, are structures of history produced, differentiated, reified and transformed?” (Ashley 1987:409) Advocating ‘local’ discourses and ‘local’ autonomy merely reinforces the idea that Europe or the West constitutes the site where universal history is produced, and other (local) sites can either permit themselves to be incorporated – reproducing this discourse – or seek to ‘make their own histories’. The vacuity of this relativism belies a more subtle process by which one conception of history is translated onto another site: it is the very concept of history as progress which must be interrogated. Jahn (2000) locates a formative moment in the Europeans’ encounter with the Amerindians, whose utter Otherness presented Christian theology with a problem: how to reconcile the essential humanity of all men with the “state of nature” with which they were now confronted? This was solved, Jahn argues, by the creation of a progressivist hierarchy of human societies in which some were more advanced than others – a “dual modality of historical time… events as at once contemporaneous and noncontemporaneous” (Koselleck 1988:249). Furthermore, in the 18th century, Christian linear salvational teleology came together with secular rational prediction to produce the peculiarly modern concept of progress (Koselleck 1988:17); and the Calvinist emphasis on “good works” contributed to the idea that man makes his own history (Weber 1930:xiii).

This thread, though just as historically and culturally specific as the secularisation thesis, can be seen to run right through subalternist or poststructuralist efforts which couple ‘agency’ and ‘subjectivity’ in the essentialist-liberal-humanist tradition (O’Hanlon 1988), implying that agency – to act effectively in the world, to act purposively and autonomously, to ‘make one’s own history’ – necessitates a consciousness of the ‘self’ contra knowledge structures and systems (Asad 1993:15-6). Agency cannot produce stasis; history making is emancipatory, active, self-consciously dynamic. Religion is therefore a strategy by which to make one’s own history which, even if historical and contextualized (unlike characterisations discussed above), remains rooted in these particularist notions of history making and historical time. There is no space here for an alternative conception of history making. In Islam, however, the perfect moral/social/political foundation already exists; it has already been revealed. So this peculiar notion that humanity progresses, that man makes his own history, that men move further and further from the binds of material and cultural domination, “accelerating forward into an open future” (Asad 1993:18), that man owns himself, that he as an individual possesses certain rights – none of this can be meaningful to the Muslim whose self-consciousness is one not of self-ownership, nor one constituted by an individualistic opposition to the social structures in which she is embedded, but rather a consciousness of her status as ‘slave’ to God, as “indissolubly bound to God” (Asad 1993:221): the Muslim strives not to progress according to some external, lineal, rationalised model of development; but rather to engage in the continuing process of self-realisation. “Man is a ‘choice’, a struggle, a constant becoming. He is an infinite migration, a migration within himself, from clay to God; he is a migrant within his own soul” (Shariati 1979:93).

In summary, there is a clearly a need to relativise understandings of religion in different societies if we are to avoid ahistorical claims about the universality of secularisation and the singularity of ‘modernity’. However, many ostensibly critical – or ‘postmodern’ –approaches remain mired in thoroughly ‘modern’ conceptualisations of historical time, and therefore fail to divest themselves of the progressivist frameworks of a lingering Eurocentric heritage.

(1) For example: Marx famously understood religion as false consciousness or ideology and, similarly, for Geertz religion is a means by which rational beings can account for and give meaning to “irrationalities” such as “ignorance, pain and injustice” (1973:108). This ahistorical and functionalist view even prevails in contemporary accounts: Haynes (1997:713) asserts that “secularisation, involving social differentiation, societalisation and rationalisation, occurs except when religion finds or retains work to do other than relating people to the supernatural”. See also Keddie (1998).

(2) Note the disdain with which one writer refers to a characteristically ‘irrational’ and reactionary Islamicism: ‘Everything from the inflow of ever-larger quantities of Western consumer goods to changes in feminine dress and behaviour, often resented by traditionalist men, to Western films and TV is seen as part of a veritable plot to undermine local ways and products and to make of third world men and women consumers of the least useful and most degrading of Western imports and customs…’ (Keddie 1982:276; emphasis added)

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