The Politics of Islamophobia: Race, Power and Fantasy

Prologue

All this happened, more or less

Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five

As I write Lieutenant Columbo shuffles affably around the small screen, solving a murder in the movie industry in his own inimitable fashion. There is really no need to pay attention for it could be pretty much any one of sixty-nine different episodes which all hinge on similar logical devices in which befuddlement and harmless curiosity conceal what he really knows. The knowing at-stakeness of this kind of inquiry makes me mindful of the formulaic ways in which we tend to tell our tales, heavily reliant upon a set of stock character clichés and a reliable set of assumptions on which to base them. But as we wind towards the predictable climax of one of those and-now-what-I-brought-you-all-here-for moments when all will be revealed, I find myself more concerned with the rules of the game, and with the question of what happens when the conventions through which our tellings are organised are placed into question by the content of our tales.

We all tell our stories using certain vocabularies that are organised through grammars that establish rules to structure our narrations (Laclau 2000: 283). Most of the time this serves us well in putting into words, and integrating into memories, the events that occur as we go through life. But on rare occasions events can rise up on us as though they somehow burst through from beyond language itself, and can seem difficult to organise or express through language. The atrocities that took place on 11 September 2001 were such an example, and the mantra of the time that ‘everything changed’ on 9/11 seems to summarise not only the seismic geopolitical shifts that seemed to be set in train by the atrocities, but also the emergence of new ways of being able to incorporate certain types of unthinkable acts and events into the symbolic, or at least to find new ways of reorganising the old ways in which we tended to tell our tales.

Around 3,000 died in the attacks and it often appears as though in this ugly context, Muslims seemed to provoke particular fears and anxieties, not only about the threat posed by the few, but also questions about how they could be understood and narrated. Were the Islamist extremists, the anti-Semites, the homophobes, the bigoted thugs like Abu Qatada or Omar Bakri, just an aberration, or were they a more general reflection of the ways that Muslims feel about us? The events of 9/11 foregrounded a range of possibilities for narrating Muslims and opened what Norton (2011) has termed ‘the Muslim question’. In the days, months and years that followed, attempts to answer that question, and even to work out what it was asking in the first place, took competing forms. For example, in 2011 the chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee convened hearings to explore Islamic radicalisation in the United States in the context of persistent fears and uncertainties surrounding these minorities within. For example research Kurzman (2012: 2–3) cites three senior figures on the terrorist threat: Robert Mueller, Director of the FBI told Congress that ‘FBI investigations have revealed militant Islamics [sic] in the US. We strongly suspect that several hundred of these extremists are linked to al-Qaeda’; in March 2011 Mueller testified to Congress that ‘we are seeing an increase in the sources of terrorism, a wider array of terrorist targets, and an evolution in terrorist tactics and communication’; and Janet Napolitano, Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, said in a 2011 address that ‘the terrorist threat facing our country has evolved significantly in the last ten years – and continues to evolve – so that, in some ways, the threat facing us is at its most heightened since those attacks’.

But on the other hand, Kurzman’s research discovered that these fears were not borne out in the actual numbers of Muslims indicted on terrorism in the United States, and that although radicalisation exists, ‘[t]he limited scale of Muslim-American terrorism in 2011 runs counter to the fears that many Americans shared in the days and months after 9/11, that domestic Muslim-American terrorism would escalate’ (Kurzman 2012: 8). Despite this, reports suggest that there will be further congressional hearings on home-grown Muslim radicalism (Kim 2012). Similarly, in the face of widespread concerns about the ability of Muslims to integrate into Western democracies, from a survey of 1,033 American Muslims the Pew Research Center (2011) found that Muslims in the United States are far from being radicalised, alienated, or poorly integrated. The study also found that the percentage of American Muslims who believe there is no conflict between being a devout Muslim and modernity was almost to the number of Christian Americans who felt the same way about conflicts between faith and modernity in an earlier survey (Kim 2012: 36). Similarly, the percentage of American Muslims who thought of themselves as Muslim first and American second was only 3 per cent higher than the number of American Christians surveyed earlier who thought of themselves as Christian first (Kim 2012: 34).

It seems that what is at stake in the different positions is not primarily the strength of one set of empirical claims versus another, but rather the very terms on which we can make our claims – that is, the way we can tell our stories. Nor are these workings-through limited to academics, politicians, or security tsars. In a world in which surveys find startling numbers of US citizens who actually believe the conspiracy theories that their President, Barack Obama is a foreigner and, worse, a secret Muslim, these attempts to find a language for the Muslim question are being worked through all kinds of surprising narrations. In some way, we can all be affected or involved in these struggles over language. Nor is there a benign or responsible uniformity in the attempts to find a way to narrate the Muslim question, as became obvious through the emergence of an increasingly visible ‘backlash’ against Muslims across Europe (cf. Allen and Nielson 2002) and the United States (cf. Esposito and Kalin 2011). This backlash is often termed Islamophobia, and it cannot be easily exceptionalised; some even suggest that it has been reproduced on an industrial scale in the media to feed wider patterns of racial hate against Muslims (Steuter and Wills 2008).

No case more clearly illustrates this problem than the attacks launched by Anders Behring Breivik in July 2011. With two related terrorist attacks, the London-born Norwegian launched his war against what he saw as the Islamisation of Europe. Breivik’s first attack was a bombing in Oslo; disguised as a policeman he then made his way to Utoya island, where he beckoned young Norwegians attending a left-wing liberal youth camp to gather round him for safety. Breivik then produced an automatic weapon and began indiscriminately mowing down the youngsters, calmly walking around the island to hunt them down. Sixty-nine were killed. This was not an attack against Muslims, but it was a strike against the left-wing multicultural elites that he claimed were tacitly responsible for the stealth Islamisation of the West, and it was the first strike in what Breivik termed a civil war. Breivik’s background was unremarkable; the son of a diplomat he was well educated and seemingly a model citizen – if one is able to ignore his bizarre claims about his mother having venereal disease, his resentment towards feminists, his hatred of immigrants, Muslims and multiculturalists, and his addiction to computer games. In his teens he had joined the right-wing Progress Party, later claiming to have been attracted by its anti-immigration stance. The attacks he launched at the age of 32 had taken up to a decade of planning and meticulous preparation. That same attention to detail would later resurface during police questioning, when Breivik recounted details of the youths he had hunted down, apparently ensuring his work would be recorded (Heyer and Traufetter 2011). Breivik detailed some of his planning in a diary and rambling manifesto in which he drew attention to the NATO bombing of Serbia, the Rushdie affair, the furore over the Danish cartoons featuring caricatures of Muslims as terrorists and depicting Muhammad with a bomb in his turban, and highlighting Muslim immigration to Norway (Friedlander 2011). Breivik’s case tells us a story about far-right Islamophobia; his conspiracy theories about a threat of Islamisation fuelled by multiculturalism and left-wing elites are rehearsed across the blogosphere and resonate with views held by the organised far right across Europe and the United States, as well as those held by some more mainstream figures (Fekete 2012). Breivik claimed to have links with members of far-right groups across Europe, which in turn caused some far-right groups to distance themselves from his actions. The BBC quoted a Norwegian terrorism expert who was aware of Breivik’s web postings as suggesting that in the context of his online discussions with others in the far right, ‘Breivik did not stand out with a particularly aggressive or violent rhetoric. He was quite mainstream’ (BBC News 2011).

Brevik’s case also highlighted another feature of the contemporary far right; stopping short of describing himself as a member of the extreme right, he declared his politics as ‘Cultural conservatism, or a nationalist/conservative orientation known as the Vienna school of thought. As for the political movement, I would describe it as a national resistance movement, an indigenous-rights movement or even a right-revolutionary movement’ (Friedlander 2011). This finds its echoes across Europe as far-right groups reposition themselves as respectable, describing themselves simply as being culturally conservative, and frequently declaring themselves to be the defenders of indigenous rights. The far right appropriates the progressive language of the mainstream it attacks; in some kind of perverse post-political parody, the political mainstream responds to the threat of the far right by hardening its stance on immigration, appropriating, it seems, from the far right. No wonder in the final hearing before his trial, Breivik demanded a medal (Waterfield 2012). Even more curious; in his manifesto Breivik actually denied his own Islamophobia, claiming that he didn’t actually hate Muslims; he simply loved his country and culture. Denial and Islamophobia? Now there’s a story ...

It is also an important question because, in spite of the hate attacks that take place with increasing frequency, one of the most important ways in which people have sought to deny the existence of Islamophobia is by seeking to reduce it to the banal question of religion. Thus, the argument goes that what is at stake is not the right of minorities to protection against an increasingly prevalent racism, but simply our right to criticise religious beliefs. But I am not sure this will do as a definition for Islamophobia. This logic presupposes a hard distinction between race and religion that might appear superficially compelling but which fails to account for the contingencies of a world in which even religious subjects are racialised, or the interplay between race and religion. This book does not, therefore, engage with questions about any supposed essential opposition between Muslims and secularism, nor with the prospects of post-secularism, nor with questions of religious discrimination. What it deals with is the relationship between Islamophobia and racism. It seems that there is more at stake here, and a more complex picture of displacement and effacement of the political primarily in relation to the apparent impossibility of openly discussing Islamophobia as a primarily racist expression. In part this focus might reflect the fact that I have no academic interest in religion and no personal investment in it, having lost all faith in god and religion at some point over the past decade. More fundamentally than this it reflects the importance of tracing out the emergence of Islamophobia in relation to changing expressions of racial politics, and in recognising that simply to criticise a religion is not necessarily to be Islamophobic.

Telling Tales

Lieutenant Columbo is ambling ever closer to solving the case, and has just observed ‘that maybe a real detective doesn’t belong in the movies’. Perhaps we can take something from this; perhaps real subjects do not always belong in books either. But unlike Columbo I cannot fall back upon some intuitive positivism or pluck out a curiously apodictic conclusion with which to end my tale. I cannot offer any dramatic flashes of logic to illuminate the scene; there is no great revelation of the true order of things; I have no subjects to grill. Instead I ask only that you remain mindful that this is but a story and, as I seek to tell it through discourse theory, ask that you remember this epistemology ‘is not (and should not) be read as another royal road to wisdom. Its usefulness can be judged only as one would judge a piece of literature or cinema. Namely, is the story that it tells compelling?’ (Sayyid and Zac 1998: 256). Truly rich tapestries have been woven around Muslim minorities in the West, from ethnographic accounts to media exposés, and from far-right propaganda to mainstream political demands that the unintegrable finally give up whatever beef they hold towards Western values and, well, just integrate. Sheehi (2011) and numerous others have explored the various modes of constructing contemporary knowledge about Muslims, so recognising that there is precious little to be added to such a fruitful line of inquiry, and an ever-decreasing number of native informants to be fetishised, I am more concerned with finding the loose thread to see how the picture unravels ...

I am really seeking to narrate a story about the stories we tell about Others. Although Islamophobia is a comparatively recent entry to the political lexicon, it has been the object of increasing scholarly interest (cf. Allen 2010; Geaves et al 2004; Gottschalk and Greenberg 2008; Sayyid and Vakil 2011). Despite this increasing coverage, none of it has really sought to systematically situate Islamophobia on a wider field of racial politics. My aim in this book is therefore to offer a conceptual account of Islamophobia as a political expression of racism. All stories must start somewhere, but I want to avoid starting at the beginning with some simple linear account. Instead I want to start by considering how the naming and conception of Islamophobia itself unravels. It is therefore helpful to briefly sketch out the conceptual vocabulary through which I seek to elaborate my account of Islamophobia.

The need for a conceptual engagement with Islamophobia is illustrated by the continued debates surrounding the nature of the phenomenon – is it merely religious discrimination, or more properly related to racism? – and even the utility of the term itself. In the context of war on terror in which acts of Islamist terrorism have come increasingly to the forefront of public and political consciousness, there has been a dramatic increase in the level of public awareness about Muslims (and about Islam, although the latter is not a focus for this book). As the question of exactly who Muslims are has become increasingly prominent, we have witnessed countless media investigations and exposés, interventions by think-tanks, and studies funded by states, frequently under the auspices of counter-terrorism work but also framed by wider concerns about integration. All of this has occurred as a supplement to more traditional forms of academic enquiry, in which questions about Muslims and their relationship to the West have been increasingly posed and investigated. It seems that knowledge about Muslims is not a major problem for us in contemporary times.

If there is no shortage of information about Muslims in the public domain, in shorter supply have been attempts to think through conceptually the terms on which we have come to understand the signifier Muslim. This question is at the heart of this book, since the continued debates over how Islamophobia can most fruitfully be understood – whether as a fabrication, as merely a form of religious discrimination, or as an expression of racism – reflect a series of underlying, but frequently unexamined, questions concerning the terms on which Muslim identities are to be grasped. In political practice the question of what does the signifier Muslim take as its object is reflected in contests over the content of the signified, as Islamists on the one hand promote a particular way of understanding what Muslim means and how it can be mobilised in politics to create a counter-secular subject position, while on the other hand Western states have increasingly attempted to promote an understanding of Muslim that is more compatible with liberal secularism, neoliberal accumulation, and democracy by seeking to foster ‘moderate’ Muslim subject positions. At stake in both academic understanding and in political practice is therefore an underlying question concerning the ways in which the term Muslim is used, and an implicit recognition that this in turn has implications for political practice and for proper understanding of Islamophobia. But such questions are frequently under-explored in the academic literature. Simply to investigate, say, the ways in which the media or states represent Muslims does not necessarily shift us beyond an apodictic understanding of the term; the oft-repeated claim that the media offers a distorted representation of Muslims implies a kernel of truth that can be mined as the ultimate arbiter of correctness or distortion. In other words, the assumption remains that the locus of our attempts to think through Islamophobia lies not in thinking critically through the terms of debate, but rather that it lies in deploying the correct ‘facts’ about Muslims.

In this book I want to shift away from such an emphasis to explore the ways in which the signifier Muslim is deployed, and to consider how the contests which surround it also reflect struggles over the nature of the social, and how they have the effect of instituting particular subject positions that can be occupied, struggled over, renounced, or transformed through political practice. Such an endeavour requires me to shift away from empiricism and to locate myself within conceptual and methodological approaches to the analysis of discourse. In this I want to begin by suggesting that there is no kernel of truth to which any signifier is innately connected. Take, for example, the signifier ‘chair’. If one asks what ‘chair’ means, the response might be that a chair is something with four legs. But so, too, might a grand piano have four legs. Ah, might come the response, ‘but you can sit on a chair’. But one can also sit on horses, which also have four legs. This glib aside is intended to illustrate a fundamental point about the language we use, insofar as our words do not access any innate kernel of truth, but merely direct us to other words. In this, I am not suggesting that there is no reality, as the glib denunciations of post-structuralism so frequently posit. Rather, I want to suggest that there is indeed something called the real that exists beyond the symbolic, but that language gets in the way of our being able to directly access it. Our attempts to insert the real into the symbolic order have the effect of constructing something called reality, which is entirely mediated and constituted by language.

There is no social phenomenon about which we can speak without recourse to language. So, to return to the earlier example, even if we ignore that not every chair has four legs or that not everything that people sit on can be classified as a chair, our arbiter of what might or might not be understood as a chair is not some innate property of chairness, but rather a product of a particular set of conventions, expressed through language, which have provided a particular way of envisaging, understanding, bringing into being, and using, certain artefacts as chairs. This is not a product of some ahistorical essence of chairness, for if it were so, then one would be forced to assume that chairs had existed in some more or less stable form since before the advent of the signifier itself. This book therefore begins from the realisation that there is no way to speak of social phenomenon other than through language, and that there is no language with which to speak of them other than language itself; even empirical claims do not exist outside language and their referents can only be understood and enunciated through language. Richard Rorty has expressed this in a rather more elegant manner by noting that:

Truth cannot be out there – cannot exist independently of the human mind – because sentences cannot so exist, or be out there. The world is out there, but the descriptions of the world are not. Only descriptions of the world can be true or false. The world on its own-unaided by the describing activities of human beings-cannot ... When the notion of ‘descriptions of the world’ is moved from the level of criterion-governed sentences within language games to language games as wholes, games which we do not choose between by reference to criteria, the idea that the world describes which descriptions can no longer be given a clear sense. (Rorty 1989: 5)

As such, this book is located within anti-foundationalist theory, an approach that privileges the analysis of discourse and the concept of the political. The term discourse has been used in many different ways within social sciences research, including socio-linguistics and ethnomethodology. As an analytical approach, it is most explicitly associated with critical discourse analysis, a range of approaches associated with the work of Fairclough (1995) and Van Dijk (2008) among others. Influenced by the work of Foucault, critical discourse analysis tends to treat discourse as something more than merely written or spoken languages, and as a subset of social practices. This book is informed not by discourse analysis, but rather by a strand of post-structuralist political theory known as discourse theory. A set of approaches influenced by the works of Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, Julia Kristeva, and Judith Butler, the emergence of theory as a political analytic was informed in particular by the work of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe (1985). Discourse theory in this sense does not provide a structured methodology for social and political investigation, but rather it provides an ensemble of analytic tools which can be brought to bear on the analysis of meanings and political practices in a contingent and radically contested social terrain.

Discourse theory posits a broader understanding of discourse than does critical discourse analysis, recognising all meaning bearing practices, customs, beliefs, and activities as reflecting a discursive logic. Discourse theory therefore rejects superficial assumptions concerning a distinction between the discursive and the extra discursive, instead concerning itself with the articulation of linguistic and non-linguistic elements in discourse (Barnard-Wills 2012: 66). The starting point for discourse theory is that the meanings of all social phenomena are bestowed through discourse (Carpentier and De Cleen 2007: 267). This does not validate the facile rejections of anti-foundationalism (‘everything is socially constructed’), because discourse theory is not in fact based on the idea that things are constructed through language. Rather, discourse theory recognises that the only ways in