Islam,violence and the ‘four dogmas of Orientalism’

Us versus them

The first of Said’s dogmas is, in many ways, the master distinction between East and West. As Mather shows, it ‘identifies two basic properties of Orientalism, namely the Orient’s incommensurable difference from, and inferiority to, the Occident’. ⁶ It is considerably extended in Said’s later work, Culture & Imperialism, in which it is broken down into five constituent foundations – geographical distinction, ethnographic inferiority, developmental intervention, nominalist historiography and counter-creative authority. Of the great many markers of divergence that these epistemic endeavours have constructed, the public role of religion is, Said makes clear, amongst the most profound. ‘Unlike normal (“our”) societies, Islam and Middle Eastern societies are [not] . . . able to separate (as “we” do) politics from culture.’ ⁷ This point is greatly developed in Said’s follow-up to Orientalism. Entitled Covering Islam, it focuses on the West’s axiomatic premise that ‘Islam is totalistic and makes no separation between church and state or between religion and everyday life’. It ‘seems to engulf all aspects of the diverse Muslim world, reducing them all to a special malevolent and unthinking essence’, Said concludes. The result, he continues, is that ‘instead of analysis and understanding . . . there can be for the most part only the crudest form of us-versus-them’. ⁸

Western scholarship’s self-characterisation of ‘absolute and systemic difference’ here rests on its supposed relegation of inherently dangerous public religiosity to the private sphere. Re-energised by the presumption that the attacks on Washington and New York in 2001 were motivated by what Charles Selengut called a kind of ‘sacred fury’, innumerable studies have proceeded from the premise that a profoundly held faith ‘encourages and promotes war and violent confrontation’. ⁹ In Charles Kimball’s view, since truth is derived from unimpugnable sources, ‘ordinary’ systems of logic and judgement ‘simply do not apply’, rendering a faith’s adherents vulnerable to a sense of absolutism that can then lead to zealotry, blind obedience and ‘holy’ violence. ¹⁰ Conflict is thus not seen as ultimately ‘about economics, political power, or even territory’, but, as Selengut continues, ‘it is about conflicting sacred visions, prophetic pronouncements, and eschatological expectations’. ¹¹ ‘Especially savage and relentless’, Mark Juergensmeyer tells us, its belligerents are said to see violence ‘not merely as part of a worldly political battle but as a part of a scenario of divine conflict’ ¹² and consequently, Bruce Hoffman concludes, ‘often disregard the political, moral, or practical constraints that may affect other[s]’. ¹³

The apparent prevalence of political violence within Muslim-majority countries, coupled with the impact of the mass-casualty attacks that Muslims have undertaken in the West, have contributed to the view that Islam is an especially dangerous example of organised religion’s inherent truculence. Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins, for instance, respectively hold the view that its ‘civilizational problem of jihad’ represents ‘the greatest force for evil in the world today’. ¹⁴ For Christopher Hitchens, Islam is ‘the most toxic form religion takes’ ¹⁵ while Glenn Beck, whose radio shows have attracted more than six million listeners, explains the violence of the Islamic State with the simple moniker, It IS about Islam. ¹⁶ Far from the preserve of the political Right alone, this perspective has become the dominant discourse on faith and violence as national studies have repeatedly reported that portrayals of Islam as ‘dangerous, backward or irrational’ frequently constitute more than a quarter of all press coverage of Muslims. ¹⁷ The starting point here is that Islam (1) uniquely intermingles with politics, (2) has a broad unity of thought and action and (3) has an intrinsic antipathy to Western ‘values’. ¹⁸ Amritha Venkatraman, for instance, begins her study of the ‘religious basis for Islamic terrorism’ with the assumption that ‘in the Islamic world the Quran itself determines political, economic, and social perceptions . . . violence in Islamic nations almost always has an essential religious rather than political bias’. ¹⁹ Muslims’ ‘drive for global conquest, a never-ending jihad, and the subjugation of infidels’ are all regarded by commentators such as Brigitte Gabriel as ‘core Islamic theological and legal traditions’. ²⁰ ‘Not some fringe element but . . . a logical outgrowth of mainstream Islam’ (Solomon), ²¹ the conclusion is that Muslims’ sense of ‘sacred privilege’ (Selengut) ²² renders them ‘uniquely susceptible’ (Pipes) ²³ – in contrast to the West’s apparently secular liberal (and therefore neutral) values – to ‘divine conflict’ (Juergensmeyer) ²⁴ and its tendency to ‘generate a far more open-ended category of “enemies” for attack’ (Hoffman). ²⁵

This view assumes that there is a ‘direct, causal relationship between ideology and its content, on the one hand, and the practices of actors who espouse this ideology, on the other, thus creating a direct relationship between ideology and violence’. That is, ideology is provided less as one explanatory factor than ‘“a cause sui generis” of Muslim violence’. ²⁶ ‘Ultimately derived from cold war views of totalitarianism, in which theorists assume[d] a direct causal connection between holding a certain ideology and committing acts of political violence’, ‘the complexity of the socio-economic, political and historical circumstances as well as behavioural factors that act as a catalyst for people to enact their ideologies, are completely overlooked’. ²⁷ Rather than a propensity of the religious in general, or Muslims in particular, violence may, Charles Tilly suggests, be more fruitfully regarded as a contingent tactic ‘support[ing] demands for recognition, redress, autonomy, or transfers of power’ while also ‘engaging simultaneously or successively in other more routine varieties of political claim making’. ‘Terror is [therefore] not the outflow of a uniform mentality, but’, ²⁸ he continues elsewhere, ‘a strategy employed by a wide array of actors whose motives, means, and organization vary greatly’. ²⁹ This approach is both more consistent in the sense that it does not distinguish between perpetrators (it does not arbitrarily focus only on sub-national groups as per most other definitions) and, as Kundnani concludes, more wholistic as it includes ‘the violence that states themselves use to influence behaviour for their political, religious or ideological causes’. ³⁰

As such, it is very difficult to demarcate the sacred from the profane. A key element of this dogma is to leave any such distinction blurred. Devoid of any clear definitional criteria, the term ‘religious’ is, instead, arbitrarily positioned before a wide range of human (and especially Muslim) behaviour without any kind of proper rationale for insertion. As William Cavanaugh notes, ‘placing God at the centre of a belief system excludes Buddhism, Confucianism and Daoism and substituting a deity with a more generic concept like “transcendence” renders nationalism and Marxism impossible to exclude’. Moreover, focusing on the role of the sacred, he continues, would oblige the analyst to ‘include the worship of the worldly – wealth, the nation-state, political party and so on – in ways not very different from “secular” ideologies’. ³¹ The term ‘religion’ is, as Jonathan Z. Smith noted many years ago, thus simply ‘created for the scholar’s analytic purposes by his imaginative acts of comparison and generalization’. ³² This lack of specificity serves the rhetorical function of substantiating an otherwise unsustainable divide between ‘“good religion” [that] is private, nonviolent, and subject to reason . . . [and] “bad religion” [that] is public, violent, and irrational’. ³³ In Cavanaugh’s words, ‘the attempt to say that there is a transhistorical and transcultural concept of religion that is separable from secular phenomena is itself part of a particular configuration of power, that of the modern, liberal nation-state as it developed in the West’. ³⁴ If it can neither be adequately defined, nor fully disentangled from the secular state-building processes which established its meaning and continue to determine its use, then it ‘can never be regarded as a single identifiable phenomenon that causes violent behavior’. ³⁵ Those ‘who believe it is God’s will to engage in jihad are [therefore] no less “religious” than those who kill for something called a “nation”’. ³⁶ By labelling the former as such, Jeroen Gunning concludes, ‘we risk seeing any increase in violence as simply a product of religion’s presumed absolutism, divisiveness, and irrationality . . . (just as we risk missing how the response of “secular” states to such groups can be just as irrational, divisive, and absolutist – and similarly framed as “sacred”)’. ³⁷

Such an arbitrary distinction deflects attention from the instrumental role that Christian discourses play in the West’s use of violence. ‘A nation with the soul of a Church’ as G. K. Chesterton put it, approaching half the citizenry of the United States regularly identify as ‘born-again’ or ‘evangelical’ Christians. ³⁸ This includes former President Bush. Claiming that ‘God told me to strike at Al Qaida’, ³⁹ he deployed ‘an abundance of biblical references . . . to help [in] “sanctifying”’ his policies. ⁴⁰ Senior figures in his administration spoke of having ‘no king but Jesus’ (John Ashcroft) and serving in the ‘army of God’ (William Boykin), ⁴¹ while then President Obama began Operation Neptune’s Spear in 2011 by wishing his forces ‘Godspeed’ and was later presented with an American flag bearing these same words. ⁴² Overall, then, the United States’ political narratives have long been ‘imbued with a distinct form of Calvinism’ ⁴³ that has served to bolster ‘the certainty of an American special destiny . . . [as] a messianic saviour to implement a transfiguration of the world’ in ways not so very different from claims of legitimacy issued by many non-state armed actors from the Middle East. ⁴⁴

Numerous studies have also indicated a positive relationship between the articulation of a strong Christian faith and recruitment patterns within all branches of the United States military. Burdette et al., for instance, find this to be true of a large cross-section of male college students; both for those they classify as ‘highly religious evangelical’ and ‘moderately religious nonevangelical’, with the ‘nonreligious consistently exhibit[ing] lower odds of enlistment’ overall. The result is that 65 per cent of service personnel identify as either ‘general’ (35 per cent), ‘catholic’ (18 per cent) or ‘evangelical’ (13 per cent) Christians. ⁴⁵ Large and powerful religious organisations such as Campus Crusade for Christ’s Valor mission and the Officers’ Christian Fellowship aim to ensure that officer cadets are trained to be ‘government paid missionaries’. The latter is reported to have more than 15,000 members present on over 180 military bases worldwide where, in Lieutenant General Bruce Fister’s words, it promotes the idea that the ‘war on terror’ represents ‘a spiritual battle of the highest magnitude’. ⁴⁶

Combat units serving overseas have also reiterated such a view. An army commander in Samara commemorated Easter by painting the words ‘Jesus killed Muhammad’ on one of his unit’s vehicles before leaving on patrol, stating that ‘each time I go into combat I get closer to God’, ⁴⁷ while Lieutenant Colonel Gary Hensley implored troops based at Bagram to ‘hunt people for Jesus’. ⁴⁸ Perhaps inspired by Congressman Robin Hayes’ insistence that ‘stability in Iraq ultimately depends on spreading the message of Jesus Christ’, Christian murals were painted on walls surrounding forward-operating base Warhorse in Diyala, crosses appeared on gun barrels (beneath the biblical references long-inscribed on standard-issue Trijicon sights) and a US infantry battalion based in Hawijah took part in a 2008 Discovery Channel documentary entitled God’s Soldier. ⁴⁹ The unit’s chaplain (one of almost 3,000 employed within all branches of the United States military, 70 per cent of whom identify as coming from an evangelical background) is heard praying that his forces would be given ‘the ability to exterminate the enemy and to accomplish the task that they’ve been sent forth by God and country to do’. ⁵⁰ Within a year of the invasion of Iraq, a network of forty chaplains had apparently overseen the distribution of between 100,000 and 500,000 Arabic language bibles – arguing that the distribution of gifts is not covered by Central Command’s General Order Number One forbidding proselytisation. ⁵¹

Modernity versus atavism

Said’s second dogma of Orientalism holds that conclusions drawn from ancient traditions, ‘classic’ texts or ‘sacred’ ideas are, as Mohammad Samiei writes, ‘always preferable to direct evidence drawn from modern Oriental realities’. ⁵² Found ‘in these beginnings’, Aziz al-Azmeh explains, are ‘the fount, origin and explanation of . . . Islamic history, institutions, societies and thought . . . [all] eventually to be reducible to the irreducible essence of Islam’. ⁵³ With all other ‘complex forces removed’, Noah Raffoul Bassil continues, ‘interpretations of Islamic texts become the key variable to unlocking knowledge about the Orient’ and its gradual decline from an imaginary golden age. ⁵⁴ In Said’s words, they serve to exclude ‘those who would otherwise disrupt the seamless patterns spun out of studies . . . [that] anachronistically use texts like the Koran to read into every facet of contemporary’ life. ‘Islam – or a seventh-century ideal of it – is’, he continues, ‘assumed to possess the unity that eludes the more recent and important influences of colonialism, imperialism, and even ordinary politics.’ ⁵⁵ As Mahmood Mamdani observes, ‘except for a founding prophetic moment and some monuments, Muslims are simply born into a culture, and are said to live it like a destiny’. ⁵⁶ Charles Selengut, for instance, maintains that ‘the scriptures, traditions, and communal life of religion all come together to make sense of and justify religious violence’. ⁵⁷ This is said to be especially true of Islam which, writes M. Zuhdi Jasser, ‘has scriptural elements and jurisprudential precedents that serve as the intellectual fodder for . . . the theocratic motivations of the violent Islamists’. ⁵⁸ Indeed, so potent is this association that, by the end of September 2001, translations of the Qur’an had risen to the top of bestseller lists as the Western public searched for an exegetic basis for the attacks on New York and Washington. ⁵⁹

This dogma thus provides a ‘protocol for reducing the history of the present to the nature of the invariant essence’, as Aziz al-Azmeh puts it. ⁶⁰ ‘The decline of the once great Islamic civilization’, Valentine Moghadam writes, ‘and the contradictions of modernity and modernization [have] imparted a legacy of shame and humiliation’, thereby instilling within Muslims an antediluvian antipathy to contemporary Western values. ⁶¹ Accordingly, Muslims do not make culture, culture makes Muslims. Political violence is thus not a contingent response to the present, but merely a ‘modern evolution of something that was always in Islam’. ⁶² The job of the Orientalist is, as the third dogma below illustrates, simply to find it. As Noah Raffoul Bassil concludes, such a premise involves ‘dismissing and overlooking the empirical and material experience’ in favour of ‘the universalisation of one determinant (Islamic) culture’. ⁶³ Ayaan Hirsi Ali, for example, introduces her bestselling book Heretic with the opinion that ‘Islamic violence is rooted not in social, economic, or political conditions – or even in theological error – but rather in the foundational texts of Islam itself’, ⁶⁴ while Evans and Johnston set out the view that ‘the Islamic State adheres to and embodies the teachings of Muhammad and Islam at its core’. ⁶⁵ What Graeme Wood calls its ‘medieval religious nature’ and its desire to ‘go back in time to the days of the earliest Muslims’ have been repeatedly cited as the principal reasons for its violence. ⁶⁶

Comprehensively overlooked here is the distinction between faith and identity. Being ‘religious’ can mean either an interest in (as well as some knowledge of) scripture, worship and so on, a fraternally experienced social connection to others or both. Joining or supporting a militant Muslim organisation therefore does ‘not necessarily refer to an increased adherence to the Islamic code – the practical commitments of prayer or piety – but, instead, [may] refer . . . to group solidarity and belonging’. ⁶⁷ These may be wholly independent of one another. Those rooted in, and profoundly observant of, Islamic exegeses may have no interest in social action of any kind, while activists, politicians, community leaders and so on may make few efforts to apply the scriptural basis of their faith to their personal lives. Rather than being driven by abstruse interpretations (or ‘abstractions’ as Said puts it) of classical texts only rendered knowable through the teleology of Western scholarship (as per the third dogma discussed below), political violence may thus be better understood as part of a rational effort to ‘consciously and deliberately locate the self in the world . . . [or] in contrast to others’. ⁶⁸ In this sense, the individual is subsumed within a collective identity that is, itself, being constantly recreated and redeployed as a motivational force. Instead of representing an extreme or atavistic version of Islam, Muslim militancy may actually reflect ‘a weakening of [the] effective, spontaneous power of religion . . . The more [the spiritual relevance of] its substance recedes, the more salient religion becomes as a group identity.’ ⁶⁹

This emphasis on what John Turner called ‘the depersonalization of self-perception’ offers an explanation of why Muslims militants have regularly been found to be neither particularly knowledgeable about, nor especially observant of, the scriptural basics of Islam. ⁷⁰ Those thought to be responsible for the attacks on New York and Washington in 2001 spent their final days gambling and partying, while the group wanted in connection with the 2004 Madrid railway bombing were reported to have ‘a liking for football, fashion, drinking and Spanish girlfriends’. ⁷¹ Ramzi Yousef and Khalid Sheikh Muhammad, were – Philippine police uncovered – regular visitors to nightclubs and bars during their time in Manila in 1994 and a ‘fairly extensive’ quantity of pornography is said to have been recovered from Osama Bin Laden’s compound following his assassination in 2011. ⁷² Recently recovered documents submitted to the Islamic State by 4,030 foreign recruits revealed that 70 per cent of applicants defined themselves as having just a ‘basic’ knowledge of the sharia (the lowest level available for selection) suggesting that most joined ‘for political reasons or for adventure, not because they had a solid grasp of and wanted to follow a coherent religious ideology’. ⁷³ As a report from MI5 puts it, ‘far from being religious zealots, a large number of those involved in terrorism do not practise their faith regularly. Many lack religious literacy and could . . . be regarded as religious novices’. ⁷⁴ Successive studies of recruitment, radicalisation and grooming have drawn similar conclusions – noting a ‘lack of theological knowledge or critical engagement with theological debates and traditions’ and concluding that ‘religion is not the primary motivator despite the use of religious language and slogans’. ⁷⁵

Muslim suspects and defendants also very often fail to cite any particular version of Islam as their foremost motivation. Robert Pape’s seminal study of suicide bombing, for instance, finds ‘little connection between suicide terrorism and Islamic fundamentalism’. Rather than religious objectives, ‘nearly all suicide terrorist attacks’, he concludes, maintain the more prosaic aim of forcing the ‘withdraw[al] [of] military forces from territory that the terrorists consider to be their homeland’. ⁷⁶ Similarly worldly intentions have been found in the plans to attack Herald Square in 2004, Times Square in 2010 and a military office in Seattle in 2011. Despite being widely reported as the result of ‘jihadi’ ideologies, interviews with the suspects revealed that ‘what seems primarily to have driven them to contemplate violence is not an increasing religiosity but, instead, an increasing desire to protect the religion and its attendant way of life against what they saw as a systematic attack upon it abroad’. ⁷⁷ This suggests that even those ‘groups which claim to be, and are described as, primarily religious [actually] derive both their legitimacy and political efficacy from other sources, mainly from playing a defined political role and fulfilling a socio-political need’. ⁷⁸

Subject versus object

Said’s third dogma proceeds from the premise that the East cannot understand itself. It is not a subject to be consulted as part of a shared system of knowledge (co)production, but merely a passive object of Western attention to be discovered, catalogued and exhibited. The Oriental is, Said observes, ‘given as fixed, stable, in need of investigation, and in need even of knowledge about himself. No dialectic is either desired or allowed.’ ⁷⁹ ‘The Orient is thus constructed as a silent Other, an object that is incapable of defining or representing itself, and that is therefore in need of Western subjectivity.’ ⁸⁰ Lacking autonomous agency, Muslims’ role therein is ‘either as silent shadows to be animated by the Orientalist, brought into reality by him, or as a kind of cultural and intellectual proletariat useful for the Orientalist’s grander interpretative activity’. ⁸¹ Such a process of erasure obviously involves considerable omission, as well as taxonomical classification. Comprehensively ignored is the ‘empirically polysemic nature of Muslims in their historical traditions, ethnic cultures, legal and theological interpretations and forms of religiosity’. ⁸² Complexity and heterodoxy is generally set aside in favour of ‘notions of essential homogeneity, transhistorical continuity and closure . . . [which, as per Said’s first dogma] leads to the confinement of political forms . . . to those in keeping with a putative Islamic essence’ that has ‘little (if any) capacity to define itself, and so which must be defined through the Western scholarship’. ⁸³

Since the turn of the millennium, though, these ‘scientific’ processes of demarcation have served less to establish uniformity (as per Said’s original conceptualisation) and more to substantiating what Robert Wuthnow calls ‘a more specific variant or even a perversion of Islam’. ⁸⁴ The challenge of ‘retaining the support of moderate Muslim states’ meant ‘disproving Huntington’, as Arthur Schlesinger put it. ⁸⁵ Capacious commentaries on the generic bellicosity of the Islamic ‘bloc’ have thus been gradually revealed to be neither discriminating enough to identify potential allies, nor a viable basis for the kind of ‘Islamic Kulturkampf’ needed to ensure the West’s long-term hegemony. ⁸⁶ Arguing that ‘the current struggle against Islamist terrorism is much less a clash of civilizations than an ideological struggle within Islam’, President Obama’s policy advisors called for a more pragmatic emphasis on partnership to replace the hard-faced cultural supremacism of the Bush doctrine. ⁸⁷ Conscious of the obvious non-sequitur in allocating ‘manpower, money, and military aid for the purpose of bringing change to an unchangeable region . . . or dividing an undividable people . . . [they thus] demanded a rhetoric with more flexible tropes than [classical] Orientalism had to offer’. ⁸⁸

So, the Orient thus remains incapable of defining itself, but is not to be presented as eternal and uniform. ‘Rather than a singular enemy, the Islamic world’, Kundnani writes, is now ‘a cultural terrain within which Western states need to intervene to reshape identities . . . and save it from itself.’ ⁸⁹ Objectifying Muslims is no longer simply a process of otherisation, but a strategic means of engaging ‘in the internal struggle within Islam’, thereby separating the irredeemable from the salvageable. ⁹⁰ As the RAND Corporation put it, ‘the struggle underway throughout much of the Muslim world is essentially a war of ideas’ – a battle that has refined Orientalism’s master binarism of ‘us’ versus ‘them’ into ‘them’ versus ‘them’. On the one side, its authors continue, are ‘liberal Muslims’ broadly ‘analogous to the European Christian Democrats’ and ‘moderate traditionalists and Sufis’ (who have, apparently, long been ‘natural allies of the West’). ⁹¹ Seen as having greater legitimacy than less overtly pious networks, organisations drawn from the latter category (such as the UK’s Sufi Muslim Council and the Naqshbandi Islamic Supreme Council of America) have enjoyed many years of considerable state patronage. ⁹²

On the other side are the ‘extremists’. Despite being controversially stripped of confessional monikers by the Obama administration (an effort later reversed by President Trump), these are, in keeping with Said’s other dogmas, ubiquitously seen as motivated by a particular version of Islam. Scientifically constructed as a metaphoric matryoshka doll (see, for instance, Will McCants’ diagrammatic use of concentric circles), Muslims contain Islamists (previously named ‘fundamentalists’), Islamists contain Salafis (interchangeably known as Wahabis) and Salafis contain jihadis. ⁹³ As Ed Husain makes clear, ‘Al Qaeda, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, Boko Haram, the Shabab and others are all violent Sunni Salafi groupings’ ⁹⁴ while Admiral Michael Rogers described Operation Inherent Resolve’s efforts at ‘ideological de-legitimisation’ as tackling the ‘false narrative that the Arab future inevitably belongs to a radical Salafist brand of Sunni fundamentalism’. ⁹⁵ Underlying Said’s observation that the most ‘powerful difference posited by the Orientalist as against the Oriental is that the former writes about, whereas the latter is written about’, the binary separation of good and bad Islam has few connections to Muslims’ lived experience. ⁹⁶ Many relate to the faith through the notion of struggle/jihad and see ‘“the teachings of the righteous salaf” as an important source of authority’. ⁹⁷ Far from a civilisational challenge to the West, those who choose to identify as ‘Salafis’ are generally focused on ‘disentangling the belief system from cultural identity and recasting the religion into a universal code of norms . . . free from the challenges of culture itself’. ⁹⁸ They thus tend to see social cleavages as principally ‘between believers and non-believers within so-called cultures’ and therefore typically reject the primordial social ties that have traditionally made up the social basis for armed struggle. ⁹⁹ It is no surprise, then, that many studies focused on Muslim attitudes to violence have found ‘self-described Salafis’ to be ‘among the most hostile to radical Islamic movements’. ¹⁰⁰

In fact, jihad as armed resistance has, for the most part, been ‘characteristic of charismatic, mystical and heretical movements, often messianic in nature, located at the peripheries of Islamic power and authority’ and far from the cautious legalism of Salafism. ¹⁰¹ Hassan al-Banna (whose work has been described as ‘a starting point for contemporary Islamic fundamentalism’), for instance, was inspired by the Persian Naqshbandi master, Muhammad al-Ghazali (Lav), ¹⁰² while Sayyid Qutb, despite being ‘generally considered to be the spiritual father of al-Qaeda’ (Hansen and Kainz), ¹⁰³ ‘displayed a Sufi-like disposition’ during his time within the Brotherhood (Calvert). ¹⁰⁴ Heterodox Qadiri Gilani and Naqshbandi Mojaddedi networks have also long taken an active role in resisting foreign encroachments into Afghanistan. Muhammad Omar, the Taliban’s founder, for instance, was educated by Sufi pirs, grew up wearing taw (tiny extracts of the Qur’an), was said to have been motivated by an apparition, appeared in a cloak which he claimed had been owned by the prophet and regularly attended prayers at the shrines of local ‘saints’ – all of which would be unacceptable to the majority of self-identifying Salafis. ¹⁰⁵ Studies of Osama bin Laden’s broadcasts have also revealed how often he ‘invokes Sufi or mystical practices relating to dreams, visions and divine intercession, all supposedly frowned upon by the Wahhabi branch of Sunni Islam he is meant to follow’. ¹⁰⁶ Frequently photographed in similarly ‘un-Salafi’ jewellery, he also uncritically recounted the recital of fatiha at the funerals of martyrs and spoke of how they might ‘intercede with God for the salvation of their families’ – both practices ‘generally frowned upon by anti-Sufi groups’. ¹⁰⁷

The fight against the invasion of Iraq has similarly included insurgent groups drawn from the country’s three million or so followers of Sufi orders. The most effective of these has been the Jaysh Rijal al-Tariq al-Naqshbandi (JRTN). Rooted in the spiritual and mystical teaching of the medieval Persian Khawaja, its forces fought in Fallujah in 2004 where the overall defence of the city was jointly coordinated by another Sufi sheikh (from the more minor order, the al-Nabhania), Abdullah al-Janabi. ¹⁰⁸ Smaller units led by Qadiri sheikhs, such as the Katibat al-Sheikh Abd al-Qadir al-Jilanin Al-Jihadia, emerged in Mosul and Kirkuk. Many eventually aligned themselves with the JRTN which became a key ‘driver for the ongoing resilience, or even revival, of Sunni militancy’ following the partial withdrawal of United States forces in 2010. ¹⁰⁹ Contrary to those that argue that Sufism’s ‘“peaceful” counter position to the violence of the radicals’ offers a means of Western engagement with Islam, ‘the multiplicity of Sufi insurgent groups [in Iraq and] their dedication to expelling outside occupiers . . . ma[de] it impossible to employ any “soft strategies” to fight extremism, because the Sufis themselves ha[d] embraced resistance to the American political aims’. ¹¹⁰

Humanity versus barbarity

‘The fourth dogma concerns the Westerner’s need to respond to the Oriental as someone to fear and control.’ ¹¹¹ ‘Lamentably underhumanized, antidemocratic, [and] backward’, Said observes, their ‘civilization, religion, and manners [a]re so low, barbaric, and antithetical as to merit reconquest’. ‘Foreclos[ing] the possibility that any advance over [such] tyranny and barbarism could or did occur outside the West’, he continues, Orientalism’s focus on ‘the modern “Arab mind,” with its alleged propensity to violence, . . . [reiterates] the historical determinism developed in colonial perspectives.’ ¹¹² As Noam Chomsky puts it, ‘it is an absolute requirement for the Western system of ideology that a vast gulf be established between the civilized West, with its traditional commitment to human dignity, liberty, and self-determination, and the barbaric brutality of those who . . . fail to appreciate the depth of this historic commitment’. ¹¹³ This kind of moral taxonomy therefore tends to be particularly powerfully invoked when ‘bad’ Muslims threaten the progressive intervention of the West – after all, in the case of the Islamic State, it ‘became impossible to ignore not when it conducted mass executions, on camera, of hundreds of Iraqi and Syrian fighters, but when it beheaded western hostages’. ¹¹⁴ The violence of the other is, as Mat Coleman observed right at the start of the ‘war on terror’, thus ‘rendered distinct to an apparently defensible statist mode of warring, despite the fact that both state geopolitics and “terrorism” concern the use of violence for political purposes’. ¹¹⁵

As such, official narratives often tend to rest on what Bromley, Shupe and Ventimiglia call the ‘atrocity tale’. This aims to define the use of violence in terms of ethics, rather than politics by portraying an ‘event (real or imaginary) in such a way as to (a) evoke moral outrage by specifying and detailing the value violations (b) authorize, implicitly or explicitly, punitive sanctions, and (c) mobilize control efforts against the alleged perpetrators’. ¹¹⁶ In other words, alternative ‘attempts at scientific discourse are continually hybridized by the moral discourse of the public sphere, in which terrorism is conceived as a problem of evil and pathology’. ¹¹⁷ As William Cavanaugh explains, ‘their violence – being tainted by religion – is uncontrolled, absolutist, fanatical, irrational, and divisive. Our violence – being secular – is controlled, modest, rational, beneficial, peace making, and sometimes regrettably necessary to contain their violence.’ ¹¹⁸ The utility of this is clear. As President Obama argues, ‘there can be no reasoning, no negotiation, with this brand of evil . . . the only language understood by killers like this is the language of force’. ¹¹⁹ ‘Evil [i]s something to hunt down and purge, not to understand – something to deny, not transcend.’ ¹²⁰ Once, as Mamdani points out, ‘the struggle against political enemies is defined as a struggle against evil . . . there can be no compromise. Evil cannot be converted; it must be eliminated.’ Since, he continues, ‘the righteousness of self goes alongside the demonization of the other as evil’, ‘our’ violence is a legitimate response to what Benjamin Barber identifies as a religiously mandated attempt to denude the ‘secular, scientific, rational and commercial civilization created by the Enlightenment’. Military action is thus not only ‘rational’, but also both ‘necessary to historical progress’ and normatively better (measured in ways that suit contemporary foreign policy imperatives). ¹²¹

A key problem here is that ‘they’ are simply not especially violent. Within the top ten countries suffering the highest murder rates worldwide, Muslims make up an average of less than 1 per cent of the population. Conversely, out of the ten countries with the lowest rates, Muslims constitute an average of around 44 per cent, leading Michael Steven Fish to conclude his large-scale statistical study with the observation that ‘homicide is markedly rarer in Muslim societies than non-Muslim societies’ (2.4 versus 7.5 per 100,000 people). He also finds no greater incidence of ‘mass political violence’ in Muslim countries worldwide and, while he calculates that ‘Islamists [have been] responsible for more than sixty per cent of high-casualty terrorist bombings’, he notes that nearly three-quarters of these ‘occurred in just seven countries’ – suggesting that local dynamics, rather than the tenets of a global religion, may be instrumental. ¹²² Iraq is a case in point. Before the invasion of March 2003, it had a homicide rate of around 5.8 per 100,000 people but, since then, its violence levels have been so high as to oblige Fish to exclude it from his dataset altogether (307 high casualty attacks out of a global total of 535 between 1994 to 2008). ¹²³

Even in the world-leading conflagration that was occupied Iraq, however, the principal loss of life was not at the hands of Muslim insurgents, but Western states. During the first eighteen months of its administration alone, the Coalition Provisional Authority’s forces killed, according to an epidemiological cluster survey published in The Lancet, at least 100,000 people, half of whom were women and children. ¹²⁴ Further research funded by the United States Army Medical Research and Materiel Command found that 28 per cent of marines and 14 per cent of soldiers who had returned from duty in Iraq admitted ‘being responsible for the death of a non-combatant’. ¹²⁵ Indeed, periodic calculations carried out by the Iraqi government regularly concluded that Coalition forces were killing more than double the number of non-combatants than the insurgents, leading the United Nations Commissioner for Human Rights, Louise Arbour, to call for an investigation into the Coalition’s ‘deliberate targeting of civilians’. ¹²⁶ Reports of US soldiers tying bodies to their vehicles as ‘trophies’ and photos of mutilated corpses uploaded to nowthatsfuckedup.com (a website with around 45,000 military personnel users that allows registrants to exchange pornography for graphic combat images), combined with the 1,800 images of maltreatment from Abu Ghraib, revealed highly ritualised forms of violence not so very different from the spectacles of humiliation and desecration sought by other belligerents. Overall, there appears to be a widespread failure to live up to the narrative of morally superior Western values, thereby fatally undermining a binary distinction between ‘our’ and ‘their’ violence. ¹²⁷

In fact, while President Obama claimed that ‘even in a region that has known so much bloodshed . . . these terrorists are unique in their brutality’, the patterns of violence selected by Islamic State forces have, in reality, neither been unique nor even exceptional. ¹²⁸ In Syria, the United Nations attributes the death of 76,657 people to government forces between 2011 and 2022 and 16,944 to the Islamic State between 2014 and 2018 – an annual average of around 7,000 versus a bit over 4,000. ¹²⁹ Similarly in Iraq during fighting in Fallujah between 2012 and 2016, Iraq Body Count recorded the deaths of 1,627 civilians at the hands of government forces – a figure not vastly different from the approximately 1,200 residents it estimates to have been killed by the Islamic State during the latter half of that period. Across the country as a whole in 2014, it believes that the latter was responsible for the deaths of around 7,300 civilians, with another 1,900 fatalities caused by Operation Inherent Resolve airstrikes and a further 10,000 killed by unknown assailants. While a substantial proportion of this latter figure is likely to be a result of the Islamic State’s expansion and governance, it is also probable that, as the UN concludes, it includes numerous ‘unlawful killings and abductions perpetrated by [Western-trained and funded] pro-Government forces’. ¹³⁰ Of course, these figures are very unlikely to be accurate and all studies premise their data with the likelihood of severe underestimation, but the conclusion remains that the Islamic State’s actions are difficult to see as a pathological deviation from the kinds of conduct of which other forces, including Coalition troops and their associates, have regularly been guilty. Given that such methods ‘have been used by a variety of insurgent (and also incumbent) actors in civil wars across time and space’ (so, as Stathis Kalyvas notes, any ‘easy cultural interpretations should be challenged’), it is thus difficult to accept a binary distinction between ‘their’ excessive and barbaric violence and ‘our’ proportionate and measured response. ¹³¹

Conclusion

This paper has sought to reveal how the four key dogmas of Orientalism identified by Said can cast light on the ways in which the relationship between Islam and violence is constructed. Following his primary aim in exposing the binary contours of Orientalism, each undergirds an interlinked sense of difference between East and West. ‘The common thread, indeed the structuring principle, of these varied terms is’, Mather notes, ‘the assignment of positive and negative values, which is meant to highlight the hegemonic quality of Orientalism, as a political discourse that seeks to justify its will to dominate others.’ ¹³² More than an axiological process, though, each is also built on conceptual and empirical foundations that can be evaluated and challenged. In other words, while Said may have convincingly demonstrated the ways in which Islam has been turned into the ‘very epitome of an outsider against which the whole of European civilization from the Middle Ages on was founded’, it is also necessary to uncover and confront the particular ‘scientific’ bases upon which each dyad has been (re)produced. ¹³³ Nowhere is the West’s search for distinction from, and therefore hegemony over, the East more profoundly experienced than in the consideration and depiction of violence.

Dogma One is a case in point. Even though, as Terry Eagleton notes, ‘there are no rational grounds for judging between cultures . . . because my judgement is bound to be made from within my own culture, not from some disinterested point outside it’, the West is presented as normatively better, measured in ways that maintain older narratives of collective superiority without deploying older and ‘crude[r] notions of biological inferiority’. ¹³⁴ ‘Ours are not Western values’, Prime Minister Blair stated, but ‘the universal values of the human spirit.’ As Said explains, ‘efforts to bring the Orient closer to Europe’, and overcome any resultant resistance, aim to ‘subdue and reduce its strangeness and, in the case of Islam, its hostility’. ¹³⁵ Overlooking the obvious problem that ‘what counts as religious or secular in any given context is a function of different configurations of power . . . [and] the political conditions under which the very category of religion is constructed’, Muslims’ inability to separate what belongs to Caesar from what belongs to God becomes the master explanation of such enmity. ¹³⁶ At the heart of this Orientalist dogma, then, is, as Salman Sayyid notes, to contrast the ‘abnormality and extremism’ of Muslims’ cultural recidivism ‘with the moderation and reasonableness of western hegemony’, thereby not only concretising the inferiority of the East, but also ‘establishing and reinforcing the identity of the West’ – even though, of course, it too instrumentalises comparative narratives to organise and justify its own violence. ¹³⁷ ‘The result is an invidiously ideological portrait of “us” and “them”.’ ¹³⁸

As Said’s second dogma reveals, the precise role that Islam stubbornly continues to play for Muslims is not driven by contemporary materiality, but by ethereal abstractions hidden within an intricate and convoluted canon of classical manuscripts decipherable only to the academy. By undertaking a ‘thorough study of the classical texts . . . [and then] an application of those texts to the modem Orient’, its social phenomena in general, and its violence in particular, become explicable Said points out. Whereas the social identities of the West have been arrived at through a fraternal and rational engagement with the modern material world, those in the East are a result of an atavistic desire to return to a time before Western cultural hegemony. As such, the resistance, and especially the violence, of Muslims is a result of a scriptural interpretation, not a contingent response to current events. The facts that those who claim such a connection often lack personal piety and generally have little relevant knowledge does not imperil the veracity of what Said calls the ‘old Orientalist truism that Islam is about texts, not about people’. ¹³⁹

The third dogma furthers this point by identifying and problematising a particular version of Islam. The resultant bifurcation of Muslims into good and bad is a form of objectification more refined than the monolithic uniformity implied by Said. In this way, the ‘act of power by which images of them were in a sense created by the Western observer’ that Said sets out in Orientalism and elsewhere, has become more effectively applied, thereby further reinforcing the rhetorical role of Muslim identity ‘as peoples and societies to be ruled and dominated’. ¹⁴⁰ ‘By giving something the status of scientific truth’ through a more discerning typology, the West not only ‘tries to justify its hegemony over the East’, but also attempts to ‘mak[e] it unchallengeable.’ ¹⁴¹ Said’s more basic premise remains though: ‘for the latter, passivity is the presumed role; for the former, the power to observe, study, and so forth’. ¹⁴² Packaged by policymakers, such as RAND, as unified by ‘innovative thinking about Islam’, the key marker of a Muslim to be trusted is, in reality, not a shared cultural understanding of the faith, but a political response. ¹⁴³ ‘The most important factor differentiating varieties of Islamic activism’ within these taxonomies is therefore ‘not so much the relative militancy or moderation with which they express their convictions, but rather the nature of the convictions they hold.’ ¹⁴⁴ As Mamdani concludes, the moderate-to-jihadi spectrum is not made up of ‘adjectives describing the attitude of Muslims to Islam. They [a]re actually adjectives describing the attitudes of Muslims to the West.’ ¹⁴⁵ Put another way, ‘to be classed as moderate, Muslims . . . have to publicly condemn using violence to achieve political ends – except when their own governments do so’. ¹⁴⁶ The choice of ally therefore ‘usually boils down to distinguishing between those with whom Western governments feel they can “do business” (the moderates) and those with whom they cannot or will not . . . [and thus] must accordingly be confronted’. ¹⁴⁷ Although ‘masked as blandishments to harmony’, such processes of classification are, as Said concludes, actually ‘instruments of conquest’. ¹⁴⁸

The fourth dogma concerns representations of the West’s response to these ‘bad’ Muslims. Such ‘cool, relatively detached instruments of scientific, quasi-objective representation’ are deployed, Said argues, so that ‘Islam is made more clear, the true nature of its threat appears . . . [and] an implicit course of action against it is proposed’. ¹⁴⁹ Crucial here is to de-politicise by moralising. ‘Faced with political violence that arises in a modern context but will not fit the story of progress’, Mamdani observes, Western narratives have ‘tended to take refuge in theology.’ ¹⁵⁰ After all, it is, as William Cavanaugh makes clear, ‘no secret who the primary “they” are today. We in the West are said to be threatened by a Muslim culture whose primary point of difference with ours is its stubborn refusal to tame religious passions in the public sphere.’ This ‘then allows for the violence built into the state responses to “terrorism” to be normalised – celebrated, even – as the “normal” use of force’. ¹⁵¹ As Cavanaugh continues, ‘those who have not yet learned to disassociate religion from the use of force are threats to the peace of the world and must be dealt with as such’. ¹⁵² Rather than a nationalist (or separatist) insurgency aimed at establishing independent institutions of statehood, then, Iraqi resistance is, for example, merely the latest evidence indicative of what is generally seen as ‘a realm characterised by inherent violence’. ¹⁵³ As Said wrote of similar discourses on Palestine, ‘because Arabs are, first of all, as one in their bent for bloody vengeance, second, psychologically incapable of peace, and third, congenitally tied to a concept of justice that means the opposite of that, they are not to be trusted and must be fought interminably’. ¹⁵⁴ Of course, ‘left unacknowledged (and yet strongly present in juxtaposition) in such depictions is the binary opposite of such notions: the modern, rational, free, normal Western subject, a figure which is normalized and naturalized in contemporary discourse’. ¹⁵⁵ The result, then as now, is an over-arching dissection; that ‘the historical cultures of humanity can be divided into two main groups, the one assumed to be universalistic and progressive, the other supposed irremediably particularistic and primitive’. ¹⁵⁶