Political Islam and the Media

Of course, such slovenly, perhaps, irresponsible, views are not universal among Western experts on Islam, several among whom are, regrettably, only self-styled experts. Many have rejected the underlying assumption, including John Esposito. In an issue of Foreign Affairs, the question of whether Islam poses a threat to the West is debated by Leon Hadar (who argues effectively that there is no real threat) and Judith Miller (who maintains that there is) . However, far more important than the arguments and evidence mobilized in this debate — which are constantly replicated in Western publications and the media — is the fact that, regardless of the position taken by individuals in the debate, the questions that underlie it remain urgent: “Is the Islamic revival really dangerous? If so, what exactly does it threaten?”

Those for whom the answer to the first question is in the affirmative refer mainly to “Western interests” and, sometimes, to “modern values,” and assume an easy connection between the two. Thus, the Western media are more alarmed about violent and authoritarian tendencies that appear to be generated by “Islam” than by those attributable to other religions. In fact, one can discern a vicious circle in which the more the media focus on incidents and developments that can be assigned to “Islam,” the more disproportionate that alarm becomes.

But there is another interesting selectivity: Western media are far more interested in threats to cartoonists and literary writers than in the cruelties perpetrated against other human beings. In India, for example, studies show that, from 1948 to 2005, there have been about thirty-six thousand riots perpetrated by extremist Hindus against Muslims alone (i.e. leaving aside riots against the so-called Untouchables, Christians and other minorities). These horrendous events have never been given the extensive coverage they deserve, nor vehemently condemned; nor has extreme Hinduism been vilified by the Western media or the liberal intelligentsia. By contrast, the Muslims’ death threats against, and declaration of a reward for, killing the cartoonist who drew the cartoon of the Prophet Mohammad (pbuh) have been well-publicized.

Lives of unequal value
Even before 9/11, the London bombings of July 7, 2005 (“7/7”), and the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, worldwide publicity was given to the death threats made by Muslim extremists against British novelist Salman Rushdie and Bangladeshi novelist Nasreen Taslima. It is worthwhile to reflect why far less interest is taken by the Western media in the number of casualties caused in Afghanistan and Iraq by the invasion of the US-led Coalition forces, or in the killing of Kashmiri militants by Indian security forces. Is it because the Western liberal intelligentsia and public intellectuals regard the lives of literary figures (or other famous individuals) to be more valuable than those of other mere mortals? Or is it, as some claim, because, in threatening these figures, principles are involved that affect the fundamental constitution of modern liberal society? In other words, is this unevenness of moral concern due to the perception that, in attacking authors, Muslim extremists are attacking Freedom of Speech, and in seeking to murder critics of religion, they are trying to kill the liberties on which modern society itself is built? But if this is admitted to be an adequate explanation for the West’s unequal emotional responses to different types of human outrage, one is led to the following disquieting thought: some of our secular liberals are more easily moved by what they see as an affront to transcendent sacred principles (like the religious militants) than by actual instances of gross cruelty to particular human beings. The ‘principles’ are, so it appears, highly emotive symbols of the personal identity of the liberal literary intelligentsia.

This becomes more evident when we examine the remarkable lack of interest, in the media and among most public intellectuals in Europe and North America, in the cases of persons held indefinitely, without trial, in British and American prisons. The following letter written by a group of Algerian “Islamists” in a British prison was published in The Guardian of April 26, 2006:

We are being held as political hostages.

We are Algerian men who have now been locked up in prison in this country for as long as five years. We know that we face torture in our country of origin, but some of us have come to the decision that a quick death is preferable to the slow death we feel we are enduring. We have tried to tell the media and, in particular, we have tried to tell the Islam channel in this country, but had the phone box closed down so we could no longer phone the presenter of the programme. We know that the population at large in this country, including Muslims, knows nothing of what has happened to us. We write to ask that you help us break the silence. We are all on hunger strike and have been so now for a week.

The forgotten Long Lartin hostages
Long Lartin Prison, Evesham, Worc.

There are numerous other cases of Muslim detainees of different national origins held under terror laws in similar predicaments.

Now, one might suppose that the media and public intellectuals in Western countries concerned about defending modern secular liberties would create a public outcry, even if it is not quite as passionate as it was in the Rushdie case. For not only is this simply a case of gross abuse of human rights, it is also a case where fundamental modern liberties are directly attacked by a government. Yet, this case (and several others, for example, in Belmarsh Prison in Britain) is not considered a cause for concern by the media in t
he West, or pursued by those who have access to its media, in its human specificity. This is because, related as it is to “Islamists,” it cannot be construed as an attack on the sacred symbols defining the collective identity of a media and literary intelligentsia that regards itself as the guardian of the secular, modern state.

Here, one may mention a paradox which, in the main, holds only partially and in diluted form in the post-9/11 and 7/7 eras: The same Western press that contributes to the representation of an aggressive and intolerant Islam comes forward to defend victimized individuals.

Religious and secular violence and oppression
From the time that demonstrations against the cartoons began in Britain in the first week of February, British newspaper headlines in the mainstream ‘quality press’ included “Freedom v faith: the firestorm,” “Flames of Islamic fury spread to Beirut,” “Muslims outraged by new cartoons of prophet in hell,” “Danish apology fails to quell Muslim anger,” and “How [Muslim] clerics spread hatred over cartoon,” etc. The underlying assumption of the headlines and the opinions conveyed were that “religion” in general and Islam in particular is the major threat to the principles of tolerance and democracy. However, this basic premise, which was adopted apparently en-masse in the Western liberal discourse and by the public intellectuals that articulate issues and inform the public in such matters, is in fact highly questionable. Although Islam (or religion, in general) is often considered to be integral to present-day violence and disruption, it can hardly be denied that great acts of human cruelty and destruction in the twentieth century have been carried out by secular governments (Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia, Pol Pot’s Cambodia, etc.), not by religious ones. In the US, which considers itself a model of liberal-democratic government and of the constitutional separation of Church and state, we have witnessed, until very recently, the intolerance of McCarthyism, anti-Semitism, and legal apartheid between whites and blacks; today, we have the pervasive miseries of entrenched racism and massive poverty. Post-9/11 intolerance towards US citizens of Muslim and Arab background as well as the suspension of human rights of prisoners in the Guantanamo Bay Camp bear testimony to the abuse and grotesque manipulation of human rights and individual freedom. On this evidence, one can challenge the easy secularist connection between intolerance and religion.

Indeed, one may suggest that there is more to be feared from some of the trends generated by secular democracy: the existence of a single global power possessing massive quantities of weapons of mass destruction; the sovereignty of the nation-state; the flooding of non-European countries with weapons manufactured and sold by the West; worldwide pollution and degradation of the natural environment; the development and application of sophisticated technologies of social control; a global economy of unbounded consumption whose movements are poorly understood, etc. Thus, in identifying “religion” as the real threat to tolerance and sanity, one allows oneself an easy escape from the enormous problems that confront the modern world.

While religion in general is often thought of as a major danger, it is Islam that is frequently represented as a uniquely intractable instance of active religion in the modern world, which “fuses religion and politics,” and gives rise to the familiar pathology. In the modern world, the proper place for religion is believed by many to be restricted to the private sphere. The perception of Islam as a “religious civilization” is a construct not only of the media but also of intellectual discourse. It is a discourse in which the rich and diverse history of Muslim societies, which spans three continents and one-and-a half millennia, is reduced to the essentialist principles of a distinctive “religious civilization.”

Such essentialist characterizations of the so-called Islamic civilization are sometimes carried out sympathetically, but mainly, especially since 9/11, with hostile intent. In either case, they prompt people to explain the many authoritarian or violent trends in Muslim countries in terms of an essential Islam. There are several objections to such an explanatory procedure, but one can confine oneself here to the most obvious case from the subcontinent: No liberal scholars or the media today would suggest that the powerful authoritarian campaign throughout India for Hindutva expresses the essence of Hinduism ; yet, Western writers continue to identify an essential “authoritarianism” in Muslim societies and to attribute it to Islam’s monotheistic beliefs and identity of religion and politics.

Historical precedents and contemporary discourse on Islam
The Western intellectual discourse on the “Islamic civilization” goes back at least to the first half of the nineteenth century, and continues in contemporary times through scholars such as von Grunebaum, Gibb, Watt, Lewis, Crone and Cook, Geertz and Gellner, and many others. Although this discourse is not invariably hostile, it does make it possible to represent the contemporary Islamic revival as reaction of a civilizational essence against the challenge of modernity. However, one can contend that the very idea of “civilization,” in itself a nineteenth century invention, is not helpful for thinking constructively about the cultural and political problems of our time. On the other hand, “tradition,” often falsely opposed to “modernity” and “reason” since the Enlightenment, is a far more promising concept. This needs to be discussed.

Islam and its tradition of tolerance
Islam is a major tradition in countries where Muslims live. It is not the only tradition, of course, but it is one that still constitutes a significant part of the lives of Muslims. Because Muslim societies are in a crisis, the Islamic tradition is in crisis too. It has to be defended, argued through and reconstructed if it is to be viable. This refers not simply to intellectual tradition, to philosophy, theology, history, etc., which (so we are continually told by critics of Islam) are in a state of decay, but also to the ways of living that are articulated, in diverse conditions, by the Islamic tradition. But we should not take it for granted that, in order to be viable, the Islamic tradition needs to be remade in the image of liberal Protestant Christianity.

People are now increasingly conscious of living in a single interdependent world. However, Muslim societies are not new to absorbing elements from other civilizations. In the past, ideas and material culture from the Hellenic, Persian, Chinese, African and Indian societies were synthesised and incorporated into Muslim societies as long these were compatible with and did not contradict Muslim tradition. Contrary to the frequent allegations made today about “Islamic intolerance,” Muslim empires in the past were more tolerant of diversity of religions and cultures than Europe. Western scholars who concede this history sometimes insist that non-Muslims lived under Muslim rule as “second class citizens.” But this understanding
is entirely anachronistic because no one in those hierarchical empires was a “citizen,” and the majority of Muslim subjects cannot in any meaningful sense be regarded as part of “the ruling class.” Besides, Muslim rulers often employed Christians, Jews and Hindus in positions of power and trust, who therefore had authority over Muslims. In saying this, the intention is not to imply that Muslim rule and populations were never bigoted and never persecuted non-Muslims. The social and moral assumptions around which such empires and kingdoms were constructed are, of course, no longer viable, but they did embody certain principles of tolerance that were absent not only in Latin Christendom but in post-Enlightenment European states too. They did not require everyone —whether Muslim or not — to live according to a single set of “self-evident truths.” Such arrogant and intolerant insistence has in fact reached its apex in secular modernity and ‘liberal’ democracy.

Reflections on contemporary Muslim ‘extremism’ and its objectives
It needs to be emphasised that the systematic extremism so characteristic of many Islamic political movements in recent times is a product, not of the mainstream historical tradition of Islam, but of modern politics and the modern state that the West itself has produced. Many academic commentators have pointed to the modern ideologies and organizations of contemporary Islamists. Such analyses are nearly always conducted to demonstrate the speciousness of the claim to authority made by these movements. By asserting that there is a sharp split between “traditional Islam” and “modern development,” these analysts imply that authentic Islamic tradition cannot become genuinely modern.

The commentators are mistaken in making this sharp opposition. More importantly, they rarely go on to ask themselves what their conclusion indicates about modern historiography and the modernizing state. They fail to note that it is the unprecedented ambition of the latter — its project of transforming the totality of society and subjectivity in the direction of continuous productive progress — that creates a space for correspondingly ambitious Islamist politics. Islamic history had no such space; that space, with its coercive and totalitarian potentialities, belongs entirely to Western modernity.
In fact, there was no such thing as a state in the modern sense in Islamic history, or for that matter, in pre-modern European history. (By a “state in the modern sense” is meant a state that stands as a sovereign structure apart from both the governors and the governed, which it is the government’s duty to maintain, and which articulates, through the territory it controlled, the entirety of society.) Like Western orientalists, Muslims who call for the establishment of an Islamic state take for granted that the rise of Islam in the seventh century saw the establishment of a theocratic state in Arabia, in which religion and politics were indissolubly fused together. These Islamists and orientalists see later Muslim history as a falling away from that model — a process in which a separation occurred between religious and political institutions. For Islamists, this separation constitutes the betrayal of a sacred ideal that Muslims are required as believers to restore. For orientalists, the lingering connection between politics and religion in Islam defines a schizophrenic compromise that has always prevented a progressive reform of Islam.

Some contemporary Muslim (and non-Muslim) scholars are beginning to ask whether it is right to represent Islamic history in these terms at all. Such representation, it may be argued, is the product of a nineteenth-century European historiography in which the modern categories of religion and state are used anachronistically. Moreover, the pathology of the fusion between religion and politics in the West (often with violence and intolerance) is imputed into Islam with its quite different historiography and consequence of toleration.

This is a complex historical and theological theme that cannot be discussed presently, but the important point is that one may question the Western understanding of the meaning of a theocratic state. The original Islamic theocratic state, which is the real cause of contemporary Islamist ambitions, ought not to be understood in the Western — nineteenth century European — sense that developed under the evolutionary theories of religion. It should be understood in its own terms and in light of its own history. But, even if we were to accept the suggestion that “a religious state” is not essential to the tradition of Islam, this need not undermine the validity of any kind of politicized Islam, which, far from receding as Kepel suggests, is expanding.

Causes of Islamic revival
One can contend that it is entirely misplaced to represent all forms of Islamic revival merely as accidental growths caused by the combination of deteriorating economic conditions and Western ideologies. People respond to contemporary conditions; they are not passively determined by them. Their traditions and interpretations of history, and therefore their formulation of the problems they face, are part of these conditions. They should not be seen simply as reacting to Western ideas and conditions created by the West.

It is often wrongly stated by Westerners that Muslims are allergic to self-criticism. Such statements confuse dictatorial rulers with the people they rule. When analyzing the violence, collective and individual, which we witness in Euro-American countries, perceptive analysts point to the conclusion that something is structurally wrong with their political systems as well as with their economies. That conclusion is certainly widespread among most Muslims about their own countries. In any society whose inhabitants are undergoing and acknowledge a wide-ranging social crisis, intense and passionate conflict over principles of renewal are almost inevitable. Thus, militancy finds its place, as European history surely attests. In this respect, those who insist on secularism as the solution to all our political ills are no different from the Westerners who criticise the militants who speak in the name of Islam, or, for that matter, in the name of any other living religious tradition. One may hope that another kind of history-for-the-present may emerge in Muslim countries, overlapping with that of other societies, and connected to them by a multiplicity of relationships, in a fashion quite unlike the one envisaged by Huntington. In fact, Rached Ghannouchi, a respected contemporary Islamist scholar/ politician, proposes various possibilities and modalities for Islamist politics. He writes (2007: 273) [sic]:

Can any Muslim community afford to hesitate in participating in the establishment of a secular democratic system if it is unable to establish an Islamic democratic one? The answer is no. It is the religious duty of the Muslims, as individuals
and communities, to contribute to the efforts to establish such a system. In this way, Muslims would seek the establishment of the government of rationale due to their inability to establish the government of Shari’ah’… And (2007: 278):

[I]slamic circles [ought] to adopt power-sharing…even in a secular style government…as a means for achieving mutual goals such as national solidarity, respect for human rights, civil liberties, cultural, social and economic development…[t]he root of the problem in the Muslim world lies in the hegemony of despotism. Our main task now is to combat despotism in favour of a genuine and true transition to democracy.

For many Islamists this does not mean that differences between Muslims and non-Muslim politics should be synthesised into a lowest common denominator to which all can happily subscribe. Nor does it mean that the Muslim political identity should become so mobile that, as some postmodernists would have it, no one can be continuously one kind of moral being belonging to a distinctive community. What it does mean is that Islamists should be prepared to engage productively with members of others, challenging and enriching themselves through these encounters and, if need be, “choosing the best from the West” as long this does not contradict Muslim tradition. However, as history shows, it is the West with its overwhelming power that does not want to engage with Islam, or only wishes to ‘engage’ with it on its own terms. It is this one-way traffic, political, cultural, economic and ethical, that Islamic militants are disputing, for which they are construed as intolerant, as compared to the West with its tolerance for difference and plurality.

On tolerance of difference and modernity
This goes beyond tolerance of difference and pluralism, because very often “to tolerate” differences either means indifference, or simply implies not taking them seriously. This certainly has been the attitude behind the religious toleration bequeathed to the modern secular state by the European Enlightenment. But it is no longer adequate to regard religion simply as a type of private belief. In a political world where everyone is said to have the right to construct him or herself, religion is now also a base for publicly contested identities. As such, it is at the very centre of democratic politics, from which only the most determined anti-democratic power can keep it out. The problem is whether we can break away from the fundamentalist vision of a single authentic, that is to say, a Euro-American modernity (as envisaged in the New World Order), and help to construct multiple modernities? It will be interesting to see how many Westerners will actually be drawn to this option despite the strong sense that most of them still have of their cultural power (and triumph) in relation, not only to Muslim societies, but also to other societies in the Third World.

Conclusion
This paper has attempted to provide a descriptive analysis of some of the main issues that were implicit or explicit in the cartoon controversy in 2006. One of the most contentious issues touched upon was the reasons attributed to the rise of political Islam. The paper concludes on this theme with the hope that it will encourage further research in this area.

The rise of political Islam in contemporary history and Islamism’s preoccupation with state power is the result, not of socioeconomic or cultural deprivation only, but of the secular modernizing Muslim states’ enforced claim to constitute legitimate social identities and spaces. Given that the modern/modernizing nation-state seeks to regulate all aspects of life, even the most intimate, such as birth and death, no one, religious or otherwise, can avoid encountering its ambitious powers. It is not only that the state intervenes directly in society for purposes of reform; it is that all social and economic activity requires the consent of the law, and therefore of the nation-state. The way social, economic and cultural spaces are defined, ordered and regulated makes them all equally political. So the attempt by Muslim activists to ameliorate social conditions, for example, through establishment of clinics or schools in underserviced areas, must seriously risk provoking the charge of political illegitimacy and being classified as ‘Islamist.’ The call by Islamist movements to reform the social structures through the authority of popular majorities in the national parliaments will be opposed by governments in the Muslim countries and in the West as anti-democratic. Such cases of religion entering into the political arena are often intolerable to secularists, primarily because of the motives imputed to their opponents rather than anything the latter have actually done. The motives signal the potential entry of religion into space either already occupied by the secular or left empty through negligence.

No Islamic movement that aspires to more than mere belief or inconsequential talk in public can remain indifferent to state power in a secular world. The Islamic resurgence is located in a secular world and the circumstances that comprise it. These circumstances oblige Islamist movements to emerge publicly as a political discourse, to assume state power, and to challenge the deeply entrenched power of secularism and nationalist discourse, both indigenous and in the West.

References

Ahmad, I. 1987. The Concept of an Islamic State. London

All Parties Hurriyat Conference. n.d. Report: A Summary of Indian Atrocities in the Occupied Kashmir, from January 1989 to April 2004. Raj Bagh,: Srinagar.

Amnesty International. 2004. Amnesty International Report 2004: Human Rights Violations in India. London.

2006. Amnesty International Report 2006: United Kingdom—Human Rights: a broken promise. London.

Apaiah, A. 2003. Hindutva: Ideology and Politics. New Delhi: Deep.

Eickelman, D. F., and Anderson, J. W., (eds). 1999. New Media in the Muslim World. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Esposito, J. 1992. The Islamic Threat: Myth or Reality. New York: Oxford University Press.

Gerber, H. 1999. Islamic Law and Culture, 1600-1800. Leiden: Brill.

Ghannouchi, R. (2007)’The participation of Islamists in a non-Islamic Government’ in Donahue, J. and Esposito, J(Eds). Islam in Transition: Muslim Perspectives, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2nd Edition.

Hadar, L. (1993) ‘’What Green Peril?’’ Foreign Affairs, Vol.72 (No.2)

Halbertal, M. and A. Margalit. 1992. Idolatry. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Hallaq, W. 2001. Authority, Continuity and Change in Islamic Law. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Huntington, S. 1993. “The Clash of Civilizations.” Foreign Affairs. Vol. 72 (No. 3).

Human Rights Watch. 1993. In Palestine: A License to Kill: Israeli Undercover Operations Against “Wanted” and Masked Palestinians. New York: Human Rights Watch Publications.

International Crisis Group. March 15, 2005. Pakistan: Political Impact of the Earthquake. (Policy Briefing No. 46.) Islamabad/Brussels.

Jaffrelot, C. 2001. “The Rise of Hinduism.” In Shastri, A., and J. Wilson (eds.). The Post Colonial States of South Asia. Richmond: Curzon.

Kepel, G. 1993. The Revenge of God: The Resurgence of Islam, Christianity and Judaism in the Modern World. Cambridge: Polity.

Kepel, G. 2002. Jihad: the trail of political Islam. London: I. B. Tauris

Lewis, B. 1988. The Political Language of Islam. Chicago: Chicago University Press.

2002. What Went Wrong? Western Impact and Middle Eastern Impact, London: Phoenix.

Mehta, P. 2004. Hindu Nationalism in Indian Politics. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.