The Version Of History Presented By Islamophobes Is Banal
By Faisal Devji
27 Mar 2020
The mass
incarceration of Uighurs in China. Rohingya terrorised and driven out of Burma.
Indians hacked to pieces and burnt alive in Delhi. Germans of Turkish origin
shot dead by a far-right activist in Hanau. All recent events that tell us how
disconnected populations have been brought together as global targets for
anti-Muslim activism. Like the militant Muslims who inspire and enrage them,
these activists invoke lengthy histories of conflict spanning the world, the
narrative of one being used to justify that of the other in a paradoxical
partnership.
In fact,
anti-Muslim feeling was sporadic and lacked a global dimension until recently.
Despite having been classified by colonial governments in religious terms, the
immigrants who came to European countries after independence neither asserted
their religious identities nor experienced discrimination based on it. In the
United Kingdom, Hindu, Muslim and Sikh migrants from India, Pakistan or
Bangladesh rarely defined themselves by religion in public life, and were seen
by government as well as anti-immigrant movements in racial or national terms.
When and
why did religious identities come to define public debate and social conflict
in so many parts of the world? The answer has to do with the larger processes
of globalisation – economic, cultural and political – within which such
identities have been transformed since the 1990s. That decade saw a worldwide
surge of religious “fundamentalism”, of which Islam has emerged as the most
prominent example. And the story of how this happened begins with the cold war.
For Europe,
North America and Australia, the chief destinations for those leaving Asia and
Africa starting in the 1950s, Islam did not become a political issue until the
cold war ended. Islam impinged upon the west in events such as the Iranian
revolution of 1979, but it was the mobilisation 10 years later against Salman
Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses that established its global credentials.
Starting in the UK, the protests over Rushdie’s novel moved on to India,
Pakistan and thence to the rest of the world.
A protest against Islamophobia in Paris, November 2019: ‘Islamophobia has not supplanted its racist predecessors, but energised them.’ Photograph: Christophe Petit-Tesson/EPA
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Mobilising
Muslims without ideological or institutional connections, the protests spread
through television but were made possible by the new global arena brought to
light with the cold war’s end. Emerging from the Soviet Union’s collapse, this
was an arena defined by global communications and supply chains tethered to the
uninterrupted march of capitalism. No longer divided into rival hemispheres by
the two superpowers and their allies, the global arena had been emptied of its
political character, and so was free to be occupied by cultural and
civilisational disputes.
But Muslim
movements became globalised in this arena out of weakness not strength, because
they were unable to prevail against the post-colonial dictatorships of Asia and
Africa. This was acknowledged by al-Qaida’s repudiation of the “near” for the
“far” enemy: its decision to attack the western countries enabling Middle
Eastern regimes such as Saudi Arabia. But Islam’s globalisation only signals
its fragmentation, as exemplified by such militant outfits, whose members lack
a common origin and are disconnected from traditional religious authorities.
The Rushdie
affair also laid the groundwork for an anti-Muslim rather than simply an
anti-Asian, anti-Arab, anti-Turkish or anti-immigrant response in Europe.
Starting with accusations of extra-territorial loyalties, and followed by
charges of fanaticism, terrorism and even desire for world conquest,
anti-Muslim feeling came to be defined in historical terms as a “clash of
civilisations”. But Muslims were not the first group to be elevated into a
global target of this kind, having been preceded in this role by Africans and
Jewish people.
While
anti-black discrimination possesses a varied past in many cultures, it was
globalised as part of the history of capitalism, with people of African origin
understood as labour reduced to its ultimate form, part animal and part
machine. If Africans represented the dehumanisation of labour for Europeans,
the anxious recognition of which had to be disavowed by its racialisation, Jews
came to represent another kind of racialised anxiety, about the dismantling of
cultural and other boundaries as part of capitalism’s global reach.
The
previously theological status of Jews as “Christ killers” in medieval Europe or
treacherous subjects in the Muslim Middle East was subordinated to that of the
“capitalist bloodsucker” in modern antisemitism, a phenomenon that is no longer
confined to any religion or geography. The portrayal of Jewish people as a
conspiratorial minority working behind the scenes to deceive and master the
world depends upon the trope of invisibility, just as the demographic threat
posed by a black population rested on its hyper-visibility.
The term
Islamophobia was coined during the 1990s, referring neither to labour, as with
anti-black racism, nor capital, as with antisemitism, but a global arena
without a politics of its own. Islamophobia has not supplanted its racist
predecessors, but energised them in a context where nation states seem unable
to display political mastery against non-state forces, whether environmental,
economic or civilisational.
The global
arena remains politically imponderable: the human race that has emerged as its
true subject, in an age of terrorist panic, pandemic and climate change, has no
way either of representing or debating itself institutionally. But this arena
can be familiarised by taking the European past as a universal model, and
dehumanising newly global enemies such as Islam with a historical genealogy
that links the Arab conquest of Spain to Islamic State. Islam is thus conceived
as a totalitarian ideology, or the kind of religious fanaticism that western
civilisation has not seen since the wars of religion. Even Americans repudiate
their exceptionalism when it comes to Islamophobia, linking 9/11 to a history
stretching from the Crusades to the Ottoman siege of Vienna.
But the
version of history presented by Islamophobes is banal, lauding the Reformation
or Enlightenment and proposing not some radical new vision of society, but
familiar liberal virtues such as free speech and gender equality. These
virtues, they argue, can be defended only by the exclusion, expulsion and even
extermination of Muslims. Increasingly associated with violence in the west,
however, Islamophobia’s brutality is most readily seen in Asia, a continent
awaiting its recognition as capitalism’s new home.
Here anti-Muslim
violence emerges from the globalisation of older conflicts. In India, domestic
narratives about Hindus and Muslims as brothers who betray each other but can
always reconcile are being replaced by new stories about alien and permanent
enemies. This may not alter the violence deployed against Muslims, but it
buries even the myth of coexistence in some imagined future. As its own
influence wanes, in other words, Europe offers the global arena a history with
which to imagine a politics for the future.
Original Headline: From Xinjiang to Germany:
how did Islamophobia become a global phenomenon?
Source: The Guardian, UK
URL: https://newageislam.com/muslims-islamophobia/the-version-history-presented-islamophobes/d/124533
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