Political Rhetoric,Fictional Narrative,and Construction of Arab Muslims in the United States: A Critique of Updike’s Terrorist

Political Rhetoric

Since the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the United States, relations between the United States and the Arab world appears to be in an intensifying cycle of conflicts caused by unsettled issues like terrorism, radicalism, democracy, and human rights. The 9/11 attacks and the subsequent “War on Terror” brought back the old Orientalist discourse toward the Middle East, with its binary division of “us” and “them,” into focus. In the United States, terms like “Islamo–fascism,” “Islamo–fascists,” “Islamic fascism,” and “Islamic fascists” were used for the first time by President George W. Bush in 2005 to describe Islamist terrorism. This particular representation serves, as Amy Kaplan suggests, “a [unitary] fantasy about [American] national identity” (Kaplan, 2004, p. 8), as well as “fantasies of a global monolithic order extending outward from a national centre” (ibid., p. 7). Not surprisingly, then, much of the increased focus on the Arab-Middle East in modern American cultural can be directly linked both to the 9/11 attacks and the subsequent “War on Terror.”

At least two more factors have helped accelerate this focus on the Arab world. First, the urgency in the American academia toward strengthening ties with Israel and undertaking an intensive interrogation of the longstanding diplomatic, military, and cultural relations. Second, but more importantly, the events of “Arab Spring” that accelerated the vitality of American cultural and political attention toward the Arab world.

Another important scenario that developed after the 9/11 is that the war on terrorism not only involves a fight against the terrorists but also dedicates great efforts for observing and keeping an eye on every Muslim, as Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper observed on September 6, 2011: “Islamic terrorism is the greatest threat to Canada’s security” (CBC News, 2011). More than a decade and half after the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington they continue to play a vital catalytic role in the Western perception of the Arabs and Muslims. This view, including American assumptions spanning many fields of cultural studies, assumes that Islam is a threat to the Western way of life. In the prime minister’s speech, this problem is productively complicated by insistent comparisons and differentiations between the Muslim terrorists and their organized opposition to Western ethics and values which are incompatible with radical Islamic life.

Franklin Graham, an American Christian evangelist and missionary who was chosen by George Bush to deliver the prayers at his presidential inauguration, addressed the attendants in November 2001 as follows:

We’re not attacking Islam but Islam has attacked us. The God of Islam is not the same God. He’s not the son of God of the Christian or Judeo-Christian faith. It’s a different God, and I believe it is a very evil and wicked religion... I believe the Qur’an teaches violence. It doesn’t teach peace, it teaches violence. (Ghazali, 2008, p. 21)

The Judeo-Christian and Islamic traditions are brought into collision on regular occasions at both political and cultural levels within the United States and reached its peak after the 9/11 attacks. President George W. Bush justified the war on Iraq and Afghanistan as a holy struggle against evil force: “I was praying for strength to do the Lord’s will … in my case I pray that I be as good a messenger of His will as possible. And then, of course, I pray for personal strength and for forgiveness” (Hamilton, 2004, p. 2).

Bush made it clear that the attacks he launched in Afghanistan and Iraq were divine missions and more colored in moral authority than national interests, a language that convinced a broader audience of its necessity. He tells Nabil Sha’ath, a senior Palestinian politician:

I’m driven with a mission from God. God would tell me, “George, go and fight those terrorists in Afghanistan.” And I did, and then God would tell me, “George, go and end the tyranny in Iraq.” And I did. And now, again, I feel God’s words coming to me, “Go get the Palestinians their state and get the Israelis their security, and get peace in the Middle East.” And by God I’m gonna do it. (Sturcke, 2005)

Theoretical Framework

Addressing the current America–Middle East crisis and its reflection on narrative, Kaplan notices a dramatic shift in contemporary American narrative that loudly champions US military supremacy and reflects the American policy:

This coming-out narrative, associated primarily with neoconservatives, aggressively celebrates the United States as finally revealing its true essence—its manifest destiny—on a global stage. We won the Cold War, so the story goes ... we will maintain global supremacy primarily by military means, by preemptive strikes against any potential rivals, and by a perpetual war against terror, defined primarily as the Muslim world ... This narrative is about time as well as space. It imagines an empire in perpetuity. (Kaplan, 2004, p. 4)

As a violent turn at the very outset of a new century, the event was immediately assimilated into exceptionalist national narratives that were tied up with national security, empowering state security agencies and imperial as well as hegemonic policy. Kaplan argues that the dominant post 9/11 narratives are “very binary oppositions and exceptionalist” and are “erected on that ground, between before and after, between being with us or with the terrorists, between the American way of life and the ‘axis of evil’” (Kaplan, 2003, p. 57).

The impact of this national awareness and its impact on literature have been referred to as a “shift from an aesthetic and pleasant literature to moral, functional, instructional and informative” (Altwaiji, 2011, p. 169). Donald Pease argues for a “symbolic response” in narrative instead of the existing “national metanarratives” a change that shall meet “the nation’s foundational fantasy” of the United States and its people (Pease, 2008, p. 6). According to him, the existing “metanarratives” need reconstitution to be able to account for the aftermath of 9/11.

The post 9/11 broadly accepted division between the good and evil and can be interpreted as “imperial feeling” of the present moment; the everyday “structures of feeling” that undergird what William A. Williams called “empire as a way of life” (Williams, 1980, p. 92). These imperial feelings are the “complex of psychological and political belonging to empire that are often unspoken, sometimes subconscious, but always present” (Maira, 2000, p. 319). This is not surprising for the current mainstreaming of structuring the Arabs and some prominent American writers like Daniel Pipes, make this binarism more vivid: “Muslim countries host the most terrorists and the fewest democracies in the world” (Pipes, 1990, p. 30).

This differentiation rests on a multicultural nationalism as a solid ground and composite body of the nation in relation to other peoples, places, and ways of life. From Arab critics’ point of view, whether the aftermath of 9/11 event is interpreted as signifying a new era in America–Middle East relations or as a continuity, there will not be change in American cultural and political approach toward the Arab countries. As Buthaina Shaaban, advisor of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, notes:

Arabs are aware of the truth, which is that whoever is in the White House will not change U.S. foreign policy. He or she will have no significant impact on Arabs’ rights... The United States, as a modern state, has a global strategy, set interests, and a vision that no one working in the White House’s Oval Office can abandon, whether they be Republican or Democrat, man or woman, black or white, and whatever their personal leanings, political tastes, or ideological affiliation may be. (Maira, 2000, p. 332)

Along with the rising interest in state security in the United States, academia has been one of the many arenas encouraged to invest in the new policy resulting in growing number of books, mainly fiction, that historicize the emergence of Islam from the seventh century onwards and funding studies on “security studies.” Susana Araújo argues that “narrative and fiction have always been fundamental to the construction of national self-images, as justifying means for political and military expansion” of the United States (Araújo, 2009, p. 4). In this sense it may be opportune to draw on contemporary American fiction as a way of seeing through the fictionalization of the Arab identity.

John Updike’s Terrorist (2006) illustrates well the aggressive merge between American political strategy and the social anxiety which unite together to face Arab terrorism. Referring to the general mainstream post-9/11 narrative, Catherine Morley argues that American writers have absorbed the rhetoric and mechanisms of an ideologically construed notion of “homeland,” they “have emphasized in their treatment of the 2001 terrorist attacks in New York” and “each of these writers takes up the political rhetoric of homeland security and examines the effects of constitutionally-sanctioned surveillance and pre-emptive action upon the individual” (Morley, 2009, p. 85).

Undoubtedly Edward Said’s Orientalism has been one of the greatest canonical books that have been published in the twentieth century and inspired thousands of academic papers, reviews, discussions, conferences, either supporting or rejecting the message of that book. In Orientalism, Said elaborates on the political dynamics and the energetic writings through which the West demonstrated its superiority and hegemony over the Orient in which Arabs constitute a major part. Said identifies how the western world “spoke” for and represented the East, while the East was kept silent: “Orientals were rarely seen or looked at; they were seen through, analyzed not as citizens, or even people, but as problems to be solved or confined” (Said, 1978, p. 207), as “silent shadows to be animated by the Orientalist” (ibid., p. 208). Orientalism strenuously challenged the corpus of the Orientalist writings, statements, and views and argued that what was believed to be genuine and reliable source of knowledge on the East has in many ways fabricated texts written to justify and naturalize domination on the East.

Reflection on Updike’s Terrorist

Updike’s novel Terrorist (2006) illustrates the aggressive merge between political strategy and social anxiety from the growing threat of Islamic extremism within the American society. The novel, as a frontal response to 9/11, underlies the American current obsession with national security as well as the worldview and motivations of Islamic fundamentalism. Terrorist is about Ahmad, an Arab-American teenager, and his high Jewish school counselor, Jack Levy. The novel begins with a monologue by Ahmad about the condition of faith in America that expresses how the materialistic and hedonistic society around him in New Jersey threatens his faith in God:

These devils seek to take away my God. All day long, at Central High School, girls sway and sneer and expose their soft bodies and alluring hair. Their bare bellies, adorned with shining navel studs and low-down purple tattoos... Boys strut and saunter along and look dead-eyed, indicating with their edgy killer gestures... The teachers, weak Christians and nonobservant Jews, make a show of teaching virtue and righteous self-restraint ... They are paid to say these things ... They lack true faith; they are not on the Straight Path; they are unclean. ... They are slaves to images, false ones of happiness and affluence. (Updike, 2006, p. 1, emphasis added)

When Terrorist begins, Ahmad converts himself to Islam and his anti-Americanism emerges eventually: “all unbelievers are our enemies. The Prophet said that eventually all unbelievers must be destroyed” (ibid., p. 38). The United States in Ahmad’s mind is a decadent society and Americans are morally impure nation. He quits his classes and joins the mosque where he gets very close to the Yemeni Imam of New Jersey mosque, Shaikh Rashid, who teaches him how to blow up Lincoln Tunnel. Though Levy’s view of America is that it is materialistic and greedy country but his criticism of the country is different from Ahmad’s condemnation which is fuelled by jihadi enthusiasm. Levy too believes himself as a victim of American modern materialism and obsession with consumption and advises Ahmad: “[As] they slide into the fatal morass of the world-its dwindling resources, its disappearing freedoms, its merciless advertisements geared to a preposterous popular culture of eternal music and beer and impossibly thin and fit young females” (ibid., p. 23).

America, in Levy’s opinion, is “paved solid with fat and tar” (ibid., p. 27). Levy informs Terry, Ahmad’s mother, about his observation of Ahmad:

[K]ids like Ahmad need to have something they don’t get from society anymore. Society doesn’t let them be innocent anymore. The crazy Arabs are right-hedonism, nihilism, that’s all we offer. Listen to the lyrics of these rock and rap stars... We don’t know what to do, we don’t have the answers we used to; we just futz along, trying not to think. (ibid., pp. 205–206)

Ahmad, as a new student of the mosque, still has doubts whether exploding the tunnel and killing the innocents will be rewarded by God and asks himself: “Shouldn’t God’s purpose, as enunciated by the Prophet, be to convert the infidels? In any case, shouldn’t He show them mercy, not gloat over their pain?” (ibid., p. 42).

Ahamd’s resolution and rational thoughts are obfuscated by the Imam’s assurance about God’s reward to him: “With this glorious act, you will become my superior. You will leap ahead of me on the golden rolls kept in Heaven” (ibid., p. 154). Ahmad’s regular talk with the mosque’s Imam does not produce a very determined terrorist. Though he receives many assurances about paradise, irresolution and indecisiveness disturb his evil spirit: “What evidence beyond the Prophet’s blazing and divinely inspired words proves that diere is a next? Where would it be hidden? Who would forever stoke Hell’s boilers? What infinite source of energy would maintain opulent Eden? ... What of die second law of thermodynamics?” (ibid., p. 3).

While religion continues providing Ahmad the answers and, it is clear by the novel’s end that fifty-sixth Sura (chapter) in the Quran helped Ahmad abandon his terrorist plan: “The Event,” that “God does not want to destroy: it was He who made the world” (ibid., p. 306). Yet Ahmad’s final thoughts admit defeat. Emerging from the tunnel, Ahmad and Jack find themselves on Eighth Avenue, where Ahmad’s religion dies:

All around them ... the great city crawls with people [hugging to themselves] their reason for living another day, each one of them impaled live upon the pin of consciousness, fixed upon self-advancement and self-preservation. That, and only that. These devils, Ahmad thinks have taken away my God. (ibid., p. 311)

However, even though Ahmad sees America as a threat to his personal faith: “America wants to take away my God” and expresses detestation of American life “because it has no God, it is obsessed with sex and luxury goods.” Yet his perspective is not so much threatening (ibid., pp. 21–22). His inner goodness is still alive but yet shaken by Imam’s teaching: “I of course do not hate all Americans” (ibid., p. 22).

In an interview with Louis Witt, Updike describes Ahmad as “a boy who is trying to be good and trying to make sense of his life in an American environment, which doesn’t make much sense to him. He sees the rather hedonistic, materialistic, pleasure-now side of America, which strikes him” (Omidvar & Richards, 2014, p. 231). Ahmad’s language reflects the identity dilemma of an Arab teenager brought up in a Western environment, neglected by his parents and exposed to radical groups at a very early age. These factors make it difficult for Ahmad to identify himself with American cultural and political contexts; rather, it becomes easy for him to imagine himself as being from somewhere else in the Middle East as a critical or oppositional stance.

However, Imam Rashid thinks of himself as a member of a beleaguered minority confronting a vastly superior power that desires his psychic and spiritual destruction while stealing his wealth and lands in Middle East. He positions himself as a defender of Islam against the unbelieving Americans whom he perceives as:

Cockroaches that slither out from the baseboard and from beneath the sink-do you pity them? The flies that buzz around the food on the table, walking on it with the dirty feet that have just danced on feces and carrion—do you pity them? ... The deaths of insects and worms, their bodies so quickly absorbed by eardi and weeds and road tar. (Updike, 2006, pp. 42–43)

Throughout the novel, Ahmad reiterates his critique of American life as vapid and corrupt because it is godless while faith in the transcendence of Allah leads to disparage the immanent world, a world he sees as ruled by unrestrained sexuality and empty materialism. In his point of view, the words of the Quran invade his body and true spirit entails the destruction of the flesh and the denial of sexual desire. Even though he finds the exposure of women’s bodies generally to be sinful, yet, he enjoys looking at female’s parts: “Their bare bellies, adorned with shining navel studs and low-down purple tattoos, ask, What else is there to see?” (ibid., p. 2).

In characterizing Ahmad, reader appreciates innocence, goodness and immaturity of a boy misled by a religious fanatic. At school, he fantasizes about his female classmates’ bodies while simultaneously imagining their punishment in hell, a means of expressing his sexuality and desire. He envisions the “smooth body” of Joryleen, an African-American girl with whom he timidly flirts as “darker than caramel but paler than chocolate, roasting in that vault of flames and being scorched into blisters” (ibid., p. 9). It becomes clear that Ahmad’s devotion to Islam is, in large part, a means of negotiating the difficulties of adolescence by addressing issues like sexuality and other complexities in different cultures.

However, religion is not simply a means of repressing one’s own sexuality, as is clear when he responds to Joryleen’s assertion:

The way I feel it, the spirit is what comes out of the body, like flowers come out of the earth. Hating your body is like hating yourself, the bones and blood and skin and shit that make you… He thinks of sinking himself into her body and knows from its richness and ease that this is a devil’s thought. “Not hate your body,” he corrects her, “but not be a slave to it either. You have a good heart, Joryleen, but you’re heading straight for Hell, the lazy way you think.” (ibid., p. 40–41)

Updike shows an attitude toward Islam by establishing Christianity as a basis for judgment and as a ground against which he balances what he describes a “static religion” and contrasts it with Christianity and Judaism: “It’s fairly absolutist, as you know, and you’re either in or not” (Omidvar & Richards, 2014, p. 232) and describes the intention behind writing the novel is to “give us models of living human beings who may not agree with us and even be our enemies” (ibid., p. 225).

Following the footsteps of classic Orientalists, Updike refers to Islam with the Orientalist term “Mohammedanism” which may indicates two things: first, this term is a misnomer because it suggests that Muslims worship Mohammad rather than God. When Terry tells Ahmad: “I don’t know how much credit to give your Mohammedanism,” he replies, “[w]e don’t call it Mohammedanism, Mother. That sounds as if we worshipped Mohammad. He never claimed to be God; he was just God’s prophet” (Updike, 2006, p. 137). Second, it is an intentional misrepresentation resulting from having in mind Christianity, drawn from Christ, as the basis for representing Islam. Besides, the term Mohammedanism is a vulgar use, deriving from the Prophet’s name Muhammad. Muslims do not speak of Islam as Mahometanism or Mohammedanism because Mohammad is regarded as the Prophet and not God himself.

Similarly, the mention of Prophet Muhammad in a terrorist context is reductive as the novel draws similarities between the spiritual journey of Prophet Muhammad to Heaven and the terrorist journey of a misled young man whose main purpose is to murder a huge number of civilians. A common feature between the two is that in both journeys God is “closer than the vein in his neck” to both Prophet Muhammad and Ahmad who are both, as Ahmad believes “surely in the Straight Path” (ibid., p. 144). Before he sets out, Ahmad wonders whether he will be flying to heaven after killing Americans:

So where did that body fly to? Perhaps it was snatched up by God and taken straight to Heaven … according to the sacred tradition of the Hadith such things happen: the Messenger, riding the winged white horse Buraq, was guided through the seven heavens by the angel Gabriel to a certain place, where he prayed with Jesus, Moses, and Abraham before returning to Earth, to become the last of the prophets, the ultimate one. (ibid., p. 3)

Terrorist implicitly empathizes that Ahmad’s belief that leads him to loath American life is a part of a larger conflict between Islamic and Judeo-Christian civilizations that has, in fact, been ongoing in various ways and formats over the last thirteen centuries (Huntington, 1993, p. 31).

Updike, however, does not provide an explanation of how and from where people like Ahmad are coming. Rather he seems to be writing from the victims’ point of view providing a sense that if this description represents a terrorist, it also happens to represent all the Muslims including those who reject terrorism: “To Westerners and Americas, ‘Islam’ represents a resurgent atavism, which suggests not only the threat of a return to the Middle ages but the destruction of what is regularly referred to as the democratic order” (Said, 1997, p. 55).

Once again, Updike flirts with a connection between the Quran and violence providing out of context verses and forgetting the role played by Imam Rashid in brainwashing Ahmad’s mind: “Mohammed is Allah’s apostle. Those who follow him are ruthless to the unbelievers but merciful to one another” (Updike, 2006, p. 103). According to Margaret Scanlan, media and political rhetoric in post-9/11 America has significant role in representing Islam as “a religion of violent fanatics” (Scanlan, 2010, p. 267). Hence, a well-noted characteristic in this dominant narrative is that terrorists are wicked, blood-thirsty, barbaric and uncivilized. It does not stop there, however, and as dominant or master narrative reflecting the ongoing political development, narration introduces those who support terrorism or fail to support the United States in its War on Terrorism as part and parcel of international terrorism.

Geography is assumed to have relevance to the representation of characters. Omar Ashmawy Ahmad’s father who is married to a Christian Terry is ended by Omar because she is a “trashy and immoral.” Unlike Levy, Omar is an opportunist Arab Muslim figure who marries Terry during his studies in America and suddenly abandons his wife and son without having them informed. Though Omar is not a dedicated Muslim and never goes to a mosque, he is doomed to be inferior because of his Arab identity. Later, his wife observes the impossibility of a successful marriage to an “exotic” man: “I was young and in love-in love mostly with him being, you know, exotic, third-world put-upon, and my marrying him showing how liberal and liberated I was” (Updike, 2006, p. 48).

Updike creates characters from different ethnic and religious affiliations in order to show how religions and believers differ from each other. In addition to Muslim characters, there are Jewish characters like Jack Levy whose religion “meant nothing to him” and Beth, Levy’s wife and her sister Hemione who are Lutheran, a hearty Christian denomination. Tylenol and Joryleen are African American characters while Terry is of Irish and Catholic descent, is not a devout Christian and tells Levy: “If Ahmad believes in God so much, let God take care of him” (ibid., p. 51). Reader admires the way the Jewish and the Christian characters are represented and the harmonious state and agreement of opinions they hold in the American multicultural society. For example, Levy does not have a problem in marrying a Lutheran woman, Beth, and religion is not a barrier in their life. In this marriage, no one converts. No one discusses theology. No one insults one’s own Gods, or anyone else’s. Interfaith marriages are not the key to world unification under the banner of Judeo-Christian tradition; neither do they have to follow the cataclysmic struggle between good and evil.

Rashid and Levy represent two conflicting forces that try to manipulate Ahmad in two opposite directions. Throughout the novel, Rashid works hard to distance Ahmad from all the people he knows including his own family and confine him to “istishhdd,” suicidal attack, using verses from the Quran to convince him: “In your wives and children you have an enemy. Beware of them. But if you, uh, forgive and pardon and are lenient, God is forgiving and merciful” (ibid., p. 61). He explains to Ahmad that these people “distract you from jihdd, from the struggle to become holy and closer to God… Perfect! What a beautiful tutee you are, Ahmad!” (ibid.). Levy, however, has been knocking himself to get this boy out of the grip of his mosque that leads him to abandon his education. He reveals his own personal history when he refuses to kill civilians in Vietnam to Ahmad: “I was in the Army, you know, though they never sent me to Vietnam. That bothered me. I didn’t want to go, but I wanted to prove myself. You can understand that” (ibid., p. 165).

The story ends when Levy knows about Ahmad’s mission just a few minutes before the bombing and marvelously succeeds in convincing him to stop driving the truck that is planned to blow up the tunnel:

Let’s get this truck back to Jersey. They’ll be happy to see it. And happy to see you, I regret to say. But you committed no crime, I’ll be the first to point out … they’ll probably lift your license, but that’s O.K. delivering furniture wasn’t your future anyway. (ibid., p. 176)

Ahmad and Rashid are not the only two important Arab characters and, of course, narration in Terrorist does not offer a balanced perspective in its portrayal of the complex role played by Charlie Chehab in fighting terrorism. Chehab is a Christian gentle Arab who has been raised in America and looks at America as an “honest and friendly country.” He is perceived by Levy as “a loose cannon” though he is a “CIA asset” (ibid., p. 259), a CIA covert assigned to uncover the terrorist cell that he entices Ahmad into joining. Chehab is, therefore, an important character occupying a fascinating position whose actual role is to fight terrorists and their possible threats to national security.

In the analysis of Terrorist, critics find that the Muslims occupy a very uncomfortable place in the American society and are subject to racially motivated hatred, crimes and violence especially after 9/11. Ahmad’s mother had to change their phone number on regular basis after 9/11. She explains to Levy her experience of anti-Arab racism: “We had to, after Nine-Eleven ... We were getting hate calls. Anti-Muslim. I had the number changed and unlisted, even if it does cost a couple dollars a month more” (Updike, 2006, p. 79). At the graduation ceremony in Ahmad’s high school, Levy thinks that the imam “twangs out a twist of Arabic as if sticking a dagger into the silent audience” (ibid., p. 111) and embodies “a belief system that not many years ago managed the deaths of, among others, hundreds of commuters from northern New Jersey” (ibid., p. 112).

Conclusion

The post-9/11 American fiction accepts myths gushed about the Muslims and their religion, in the wide range of works that they are intolerant toward other faiths. This representation, however, is not a new phenomenon. Since the Middle Ages, Islam–West relationship was one of confrontation and enmity and therefore, Islam was represented in a way that created and intensified xenophobic feelings in the Western psyche. At the outset of the twenty-first century, the 9/11 attacks and the rhetoric of the politicians have brought back the Middle East and the old Orientalist discourse into the focus. The Arab Muslims characters are usually racially represented reflected on their daily life and become subject to prejudices, discrimination and vilification. They feel they are unwanted and insecure even if they frequently prove their loyalty to the United States. Though, the core of the novel is the issue of terrorism, Updike creates characters who have nothing in common with the 9/11 terrorists and most of them are either Christian or Jewish Americans, resulting in narrative failure to bridge the gap separating the “civilized” and the “evil.”