ES3206: Week 3

1
ES3206 Week 3

• Education Islam From Race to Religion, 1

2
Key words to define and understand

• Multiculturalism
• Integrationism
• Islamicism
• Islamophobia

3
Discourses of otherness

• Peach (2005) documents the changing emphasis of
  discourses on
• colour in the 1950s and 60s,
• race in the 60s to 80s,
• ethnicity in the 1990s and,
• religion in the 2000s.

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Discourses of otherness

• Opinions vary over how the new discourses of
  the other operate
• Is racism simply finding a new justification in
  the language of anti-Muslimism?
• Or are discriminatory practices and belief
  transforming the other from a primarily
  racialised character to one shaped by markers of
  religion?
• What is your view?

5
Discourses of otherness

• We will look at three positions on this
  question
• Chris Allen
• Tariq Modood
• Edward Said

6
Islamphobia

• Islamophobia is not a post-9/11 concept insofar
  as it has a history in Orientalism and racism,
• there is general agreement that it is a
  distinctly post-9/11 phenomenon in its current
  form, blurring, conflating and exaggerating and
  confusing terror and political questions with
  understandings of Islam and South Asians.

7
Chris Allens position

• While racism on the basis of markers of race
  obviously continues, a shift is apparent in which
  some of the more traditional and obvious markers
  have been displaced by newer and more prevalent
  ones of a cultural, socio-religious nature.
  (Allen, 2005, p.49)
• Some of the socio-religious symbols of Islam have
  attained prominence recently among non-Muslims
  and their recognition has almost entirely
  negative or detrimental associations.
• post 9/11 reificatory processes have built upon
  pre-existing anti-Muslimism well established
  within Western historical mindsets, to develop a
  new Islamophobic us-them polarity.
• The climate of fear initiated by 9/11 finds an
  exterior threat in the Axis of Evil combined
  with an interior threat, an enemy within, in the
  shape of British (French, German, Danish,
  American) Muslims.

8
Chris Allens position

• As racist groups sought to continue to propagate
  their beliefs in the 1980s within a new
  legislative framework, they were forced to shift
  the loci of hatred to focus on issues of
  cultural and religious difference in order to
  make assertions about the same groups and
  communities as previously, but in ways which did
  not contradict acceptable norms within society
  (e.g., which no longer tolerated strictly
  biological accounts of racial inferiority).
• Building on an existent Orientalist context which
  fixed the character of the archetypal Muslim and
  defined Islamic otherness, far-right groups
  located an opportunity to exploit a definable yet
  unprotected marker Muslim identity.
• Asian Muslims found themselves not only being
  identified on the basis of religion rather than
  race, but also being identified as the prime
  representatives of what had come to be seen as
  Muslim. To their communities were attributed
  markers of cultural and religious difference that
  the shifting focus of new racism had identified.
  (Allen, 2005, p.52)
• The popular media are the main disseminators of
  the images and messages that have codified and
  established the markers of difference which have
  come to define Muslims as the greatest threat to
  our way of life.

9
Chris Allens position

• Less subtle than traditional Orientalist
  knowledge about Islam, contemporary
  characterisations offered by the tabloids, along
  with the BNP and other fascist and nationalist
  groups, deliberately misinterpret and
  misrepresent Quranic texts to reinforce racist
  monolithic accounts of undifferentiated Muslims,
  for instance as universally supporting the
  burning of infidels.
• The ideological separation of whites from
  non-whites is reinforced by stereotyping and
  identification of fixed identities and
  differences.
• Islamophobia operates as a smokescreen for the
  old racist hatreds and hostilities by reinventing
  Asians as Muslims of South Asian descent.
  Among supporters of the BNP and others, the sense
  of the term paki has shifted from one having to
  do principally with dark skin to one having to do
  also with certain stereotyped understandings of
  selective socio-religious practices and customs.
  The biological bases of racism, have in this
  respect become less important than racisms
  imputation of fixed cultural practices, beliefs
  and ideas to racialised groups.

10
Tariq Modoods position

• The question of race is circumscribed by many
  factors other than simply skintone, genes or
  nation of birth.
• Representations and developing senses of identity
  on both sides of any socially constructed binary
  have a role to play.
• Since 9/11, Muslims have been blamed for cultural
  separatism and self-imposed segregation. This has
  lead to a retreat from multiculturalism in
  countries across Europe and a return to
  integrationist policies.
• Certainly, the relation between Muslims and the
  wider British society and British state has to be
  seen in terms of the developing agendas of racial
  equality and multiculturalism. Muslims have
  become central to these agendas even while they
  have contested important aspects, especially the
  primacy of racial identities, narrow definitions
  of racism and equality, and the secular bias of
  the discourse and policies of multiculturalism.
  (Emphases added) (Modood, 2005, p.ix)

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Tariq Modoods position

• There is a relation between growing awareness
  among non-Muslims of a distinctive Muslim
  identity above and beyond the racial categories
  of Asian and black which dominated discussion
  in the 70s-90s, and,
• a growing Muslim consciousness evidenced, for
  example, by the larger number of young women
  choosing to wear the hijab, jilbab or niqab.
• A new ideal of equality has developed which is
  not satisfied with the equality and integration
  of minorities on terms shaped by hegemonic
  groups, but which encourages the rediscovery and
  reassertion of heritages and identities
• This significant shift takes us from an
  understanding of equality in terms of
  individualism and cultural assimilation to a
  politics of recognition to equality as
  encompassing public ethnicity and, by
  extrapolation, to minority religious identities.
  (Modood, 2005, p.ix)

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Tariq Modoods position

• Muslim assertiveness in Britain, though
  triggered by events such as the invasion of Iraq
  is primarily derived not from Islam or
  Islamicism but from contemporary Western ideas
  about equality and multiculturalism. (Modood,
  2005, p.ix)
• If multiculturalism has failed to distinguish
  Muslims from the black population at large,
  this must in part be a result of the identity
  politics of a previous generation which
  consciously sought to build alliances between
  peoples of Asian and African and Caribbean
  heritages in order to forge a strong united
  black identity.
• Even before 9/11 Muslims faced uniquely intense
  levels of discrimination, which were intensified
  greatly afterwards. Is this true?

13
Tariq Modoods position

• The liberal notion of citizenship unemotional
  membership of a society offers insufficient
  grounds for cohering a multiethnic, multicultural
  country.
• Rather a sense of attachment to the polity and a
  belonging to a community of communities is
  required, accompanied by a generalised
  challenging of all racisms including anti-Muslim
  racism.
• Integration and assertiveness are achieved in
  unison through political mobilisation and
  participation, protest and contestation,
  resulting in a two-way process of education and
  incorporation.
• Blackness is now seen less as an oppositional
  stand (to Britishness), but as a way of being
  British (Black British). Being Muslim is going
  through the same transition. For Modood, we must
  rethink Europe so that Muslims are not a Them
  from without, but a part of a plural Us within.
  In Saids terms this would mean a humanistic
  overcoming of Orientalist attitudes towards the
  Orient within.

14
Edward Saids position

• Even though the Orient has been considered
  inferior, it has always been endowed both with
  greater size and with a greater potential for
  power (usually destructive) than the West.
  (Said, 1997, p.4)
• Insofar as Islam has always been seen as
  belonging to the Orient, its particular fate
  within the general structure of Orientalism has
  been to be looked at first of all as if it were a
  monolithic thing, and then with a very special
  hostility and fear. There are of course many
  religious, psychological, and political reasons
  for this, but all of these reasons derive from a
  sense that so far as the West is concerned, Islam
  represents not only a formidable competitor but
  also a latecoming challenge to Christianity.
  (Said, 1997, p.4)

15
Edward Saids position

• Islam became a real political force with great
  speed it was as if a younger more virile
  version of Christianity had appeared in the
  Orient, equipped itself with the learning of the
  ancient Greeks, and set about destroying the
  West.
• Even when the Islamic world began to decline and
  Europe develop, a fear of Islam remained. The
  other great civilizations and faiths of the East
  might be regarded as defeated or as too distant
  to pose too much of a threat. The Islamic world
  remained unbowed adjacent to Europe.
• Beginning with the oil crisis of the early
  1970s, it looked as though Islam might be
  reviving to relive its great triumphs and the
  whole West seemed to shudder. The onset of
  Islamic terrorism in the 1980s and 1990s has
  deepened and intensified this shock. (Said,
  1997, p.5)

16
Edward Saids position

• Labels such as Islam or the West are means
  of giving shape and definition to complex vague
  realities. These labels exist as an integral part
  of cultural history rather than as objective
  classifications. They have two functions
• one of identification, marking a bare minimum
  category
• marking a set of connotations particular to a
  time and cultural space. They might connote
  something unpleasant or agreeable. The use of the
  word Islam has of recent years become a form of
  attack, which provokes ever greater hostility
  between Western and Muslim spokespersons, and
  which conjures a whole range of connotations and
  associations, many of them negative.
• Islam defines a relatively small proportion of
  what actually takes place in the Islamic world,
  which numbers a billion people, and includes
  dozens of countries, societies, traditions,
  languages, and of course an infinite number of
  different experiences. It is simply false to try
  to trace all this back to something called
  Islam, no matter now vociferously polemical
  Orientalists mainly active in the United
  States, Britain and Israel insisted that Islam
  regulates Islamic societies from top to bottom
  This is unacceptable generalisation of the most
  irresponsible sort, and could never be used for
  any other religious, cultural or demographic
  group on earth. (Said, 1997, p.xv-xvi)

17
Edward Saids position

• There is an assumption in the West that this
  region has moved beyond and surpassed the stage
  of Christianity its defining religion.
• However the world of Islam is taken to be mired
  in religion and backwardness, society and
  religion are conflated. Whereas the West is
  modern, Islam is reducible to a small number of
  unchanging characteristics.

18
Edward Saids position

• In the media, the terms Islamic and
  fundamentalism are employed in such a way as to
  deliberately create associations and to ensure
  that many people come to see Islam and
  fundamentalism as the same thing.
• Note the different treatment of Christian and
  Muslim fundamentalism (Said, 1997, pp xvii-xviii
  Rai, 2006, p.60)
• Anti-Muslim racism relies on representations of
  the Muslim as filled with rage at Western
  modernity. Such a position is based on a denial
  of the centuries of cultural interchange between
  Europe and the Muslim world.
• it is not rage at modernity that drives
  Arab-Islamic grievance, but the treatment by
  Israel of Palestinians in their occupied land as
  sub-human in effect a race apart, and more
  generally at colonialist Western adventurism in
  the Middle East.

19
Edward Saids position

• The USA and the Invention of Islam
• At least Islam existed for many Europeans as
  a kind of standing religiocultural challenge And
  however much hostility there was between Europe
  and Islam, there was also direct experience.
  (Said, 1997, pp.12-13)
• As a result of American hegemony in the Middle
  East since WWII, Muslims and Islam have seemed to
  become in Americans lives, and yet be deeply
  alien from them, an Other both without and
  within.
• For America, Islam remains largely a policy
  question.
• The Muslim becomes known only through the part
  s/he plays in a news-media representation. Thus
  the identity of the Muslim Other contains as an
  integral part of its character, newsworthiness,
  and, in particular, associations with terror.

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Edward Saids position

• Classical Orientalism does little to illuminate
  the world revealed by the news, however,
  Orientalist ideas underlie much of the sensation
  and spectacle of contemporary news media.
• The West domesticated those aspects of the
  Islamic world which it considered newsworthy,
  that is, it has constructed a highly selective
  Muslim identity which makes sense only within the
  domestic news agenda of terror and threat.
• In America, very little of the detail or density
  of Arab-Muslim life has entered the consciousness
  even of those whose job it is to report the
  Islamic world
• How much of your knowledge of Islam is actually
  knowledge of news stories? (How does this
  contrast with your knowledge of Christianity?) It
  is worth exploring the sense in which our
  Muslims, or our Islam in Britain too exist
  within us as an effect of newsworthiness.

21
Edward Saids position

• All knowledge about human affairs is historical,
  deriving its importance from what is made of
  facts in the interpretation.
• All interpretations are situational and the
  situation in which they occur had a bearing on
  the interpretation which is affiliative that is,
  it is related to what other interpreters have
  said.

22
Edward Saids position

• Insofar as knowledge of other cultures is
  possible and desirable, it must answer to his two
  conditions
• Uncoercive contact with the culture through
  genuine exchange. The student of culture must
  feel that she is answerable to and in uncoercive
  contact with the culture for the most part, what
  has been said about Islam has very little
  reference to sources other than European and
  North American ones. Knowledge of Islamic people
  has proceeded mostly from dominance,
  confrontation and cultural antipathy. Today
  Islam is defined negatively as that with which
  the West is radically at odds, and this tension
  establishes a framework radically limiting
  knowledge of Islam. (Said, 1997, p.162)
• Self-consciousness about the interpretative
  project itself. In that knowledge of the social
  world is interpretative, it is not only
  intellectual but social and political it takes
  place in a particular time and place, in a
  particular individual for particular ends. No
  interpretation can neglect this situation. It
  should be self-conscious interpretation. This is
  impossible in America because genuine
  interpretation is precluded in favour of
  assertions of power.

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Bibliography

• Allen, C. (2005) From Race to Religion the New
  face of Discrimination, in Abbas, T. (Ed.)
  Muslim Britain Communities Under Pressure,
  London Zed Books
• Modood, T. (2005) Foreword in Abbas, T. (Ed.)
  Muslim Britain Communities Under Pressure,
  London Zed Books
• Peach, C. (2005) Britains Muslim Population an
  Overview in Abbas, T. (Ed.) Muslim Britain
  Communities Under Pressure, London Zed Books
• Rai, M. (2006) 7/7, The London Bombings, Islam
  the Iraq War, LondonPluto Press
• Said, E. (1997) Covering Islam, London Vintage
• You might also find the following online article
  by Tariq Modood a useful and accessible way into
  this topic
• Modood, T.(2005) Remaking multiculturalism after
  7/7 http//www.opendemocracy.net/content/articles
  /PDF/2879.pdf