Abstract
September 11, 2001, has come to be referred to as ‘the day the world changed forever’, but what this commonplace headline routinely neglects to mention is that the changes wrought on some worlds are barely if ever recognized. Deepa Kumar’s Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire departs from personal experience of what a ‘changed world’ feels like, and from a subsequent commitment to contest this blinkered recognition of change and injustice in the newest world order. Recalling her shock on 9/11 at the jeers of a colleague, and the request for an apology from a clerk in a grocery store, she writes: ‘The only thing I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt at that moment was that my response, when it did come out of my mouth, would not reveal that I was neither Muslim nor Arab’ (p1). In this immediate response, the Indian-American Kumar grasped precisely how, as Junaid Rana (2007: 159) details, ‘anti-immigrant racism and Islamophobia incorporate the Muslim into the US racial formation in several social and cultural groups to become a singular threat: the Muslim’. Her book is a relentless and powerful response to this process of racialization, and its ideological function in a resolutely imperial present.
For a book explicitly aimed at charting and opposing anti-Muslim racism, its emphasis on the idea of ‘Islamophobia’ initially appears reductive. Kumar deals briskly with the debates about the resonances and implications of the term, recognizing its limits while basing her choice on its relative ubiquity. Arguably, this is not sufficient to overcome the critique that not only does the term combine a misleading focus on religion (Islam, rather than the racialized category of ‘Muslim’) with a reductive sense of pathological fear (‘phobia’), but that it positions ‘Islamophobia’ on a plane of psychic aversion that does not admit of questions of class, power, racial structure and geopolitical conflict – in short, the empire under discussion.
Of course, Kumar is well aware of these arguments, and her strategic choice to bracket them is key to understanding the argumentative drive of the book. In her study of the French ‘headscarf debate’ of 2003–2004, Joan Wallach Scott (2007) points out that the concomitant reduction and inflation of everything to questions of immutable ‘culture’, and the evacuation of complexity, history and politics from public debate, is a cumulative effect of political discourse. This discourse is a product of concerted, elite labour, as ‘creating the reality one wants requires strong argument and the discrediting, if not silencing, of alternative points of view’ (2007: 7). Kumar’s book is shaped by the need to confront and undermine precisely these forms of hegemonic narrative, both by providing a corrective to deliberate ellipses and sustained misrepresentations, and by providing a detailed study of the intellectual and political labour involved in their cultivation and dissemination.
The book does this in three main sections. The first section, ‘history and context’, features two chapters that examine the historical production of a racializing yet ambivalent repertoire of images of Islam. In charting key shifts in perception generated within a matrix of regional alliances, imperial diplomacy, overlapping markets, colonial knowledge production and romantic projection, the book moves swiftly through more than a thousand years of history. There are inevitable risks in such compressed summaries, however their function here is clearly pedagogical, emphasizing the intertwined histories that reveal the motivated flaws in breathless accounts of ‘a transhistoric “clash of civilizations” between a united Christian West and a Muslim East’ (p24). The chapter on ‘colonialism and orientalism’ is particularly good at tracing the Eurocentric genealogy of the ‘Muslim mind’, a mind automated by Islam and thus rendered comprehensible ‘by recourse to religious texts and the mentalities they supposedly created’ (p31). This essentialism endures – and explains, as Slavoj Žižek repeatedly noted, the record sales of the Koran in the USA after 9/11 – and is put to work, as Kumar argues in her identification of ‘persistent Orientalist myths’, in reducing the political and the social to culturalist factoids.
These recited truths of a trans-historic, trans-regional Muslim rage against modernity are equally prevalent in the executive summaries of think tank reports and in the cut and paste fury of talking points in a comment thread, and as the section contends, dominated the ‘national political conversation’ as ‘both liberals and conservatives accepted the logic of these myths and propagated them in the years after 2001’ (p59). Kumar’s pointed undermining of myths that sunder the better to dominate is important as, for all the intellectual scorn they have attracted, ‘clash’ narratives continue to thrive. For example, the iconographic importance of the ‘Gates of Vienna’ – a reference to the failed Ottoman siege of Vienna in 1683 – to the networked ranks of bloggers and activists positioning themselves as contemporary crusaders in an old and venerable war illustrates how such histories are cultivated primarily as legitimating narratives for contemporary racisms. Their authors and adherents are not open to a corrective historiography, no matter how detailed; what Kumar provides is a robust primer for confronting their closed systems in the putative openness of ‘political conversation’.
Section two, ‘Political Islam and US policy’, continues with this approach, mapping the messy experiments in cultivating Islamist movements as ‘anti-communist’ bulwarks throughout the Cold War period. Here, Kumar writes explicitly against what Derek Gregory (2004: 33), in his study of the geopolitics of the ‘war on terror’, terms the ‘arts of memory … in the colonial present’. If the political project of the post 9/11 period demanded an ontology captured in the simpering, Manichean question ‘why do they hate us?’, revealing its imperial continuities and breaks requires an insistence on the tangled involvement of the United States’ various agencies with insurgent groups, Islamist organizations and social movements appropriated, but never fully controlled, by geopolitical calculus.
The remaining chapters in this section move past the logics of regional hegemony to examine the historically specific emergence of political Islam and Islamic fundamentalism. Given the implacable thicket of stereotypes that passes for coverage of ‘the Islamic world’, Kumar’s conclusion here bears repeating, for ‘in contrast to the caricature of Islamists as a medieval-minded clergy railing against the modern world, political Islam is the product of specific historic conditions’ (p110). Here, Kumar’s mode of address is fully trained on a readership of ‘progressives and the left’, or, more precisely, on heading off the frequent and generalized accusation that ‘the left’ has embraced a costly cultural relativism at the expense of a universalist commitment to emancipation by supporting Islamist groups. Kumar is correct that this is frequently a gleeful caricature, as the question for ‘anti-imperialists’ is the terms on which they can offer contingent and critical support to Islamist groups.
The final section, ‘Islamophobia and domestic politics’, provides an indispensable guide to the network of ideologues, institutions, agencies of the security apparatus and think tanks that have, inter alia, peddled a risible science of ‘radicalization’ and engineered a thoroughgoing assault not only on civil liberties protections and instruments, but on the values and suppositions that have informed them. Echoing the insight that the political right has always – and particularly on the cultivation of racism – taken the idea and practice of hegemony very seriously, Kumar’s final chapters trace the ideological labour invested in education, journalism, ‘objective’ research and cultural production that have contributed to a ‘green scare’ that has, in the transition from the Bush to the Obama era, shifted but hardly dissipated. The clanging rhetoric of ‘with us or against us’ may have been shelved for an emphasis on common values and shared struggles, but with drones in the sky replacing boots on the ground, Kumar reminds us that the idea that ordinary people in the Middle East and elsewhere might get to make decisions about their societies remains as exotic to the authors of imperial adventures as the images they generate to embroider them.