Islam in Liberalism - Syndicate
09/02/2017, 11)17
Islam in Liberalism
By Joseph Massad
5.23.16 | Daniel Steinmetz Jenkins
Symposium Introduction
Joseph Massad’s latest book suggests that liberalism—far from
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being a neutral doctrine—depends on the preservation of what its
rejects for its own definition. We err, says Massad, professor of
modern Arab politics and intellectual history at Columbia
University, by raising the question: why is liberalism absent in
Islam? Inquiries of this sort too hastily assume that there is a
monolithic entity called “Islam” that exists apart from liberalism.
He redefines the terms of the debate in asserting that Islam is at
the very heart of liberalism and Europe. “It was there” he argues,
“at the moment of the birth of liberalism and the birth of Europe.”
Far
from
designating
a
clear-cut
religious
or
cultural
phenomenon, “Islam” is rather that which must be repressed in
order for the West to present itself as liberal and progressive.
Islam is thus constituted at the very moment when liberalism
constitutes itself.
Inspired by the theoretical contributions of Edward Said, Islam in
Liberalism demonstrates “how the anxieties about what this
Europe constituted and constitutes—despotism, intolerance,
misogyny, homophobia—were projected onto Islam,” and affirms
that “only through this projection could Europe emerge as
democratic, tolerant, philogynist, and homophilic, in short Islamfree.” What we call “Islam” is the Other that liberalism defines
itself against and through; thus, this “Islam” can only exist in
liberalism.
Liberalism on this reading is ultimately a stealth form of
Christianity that has been repackaged as “secular” and
“enlightened”. The demand for Islam to embrace “secularism” or
“liberalism” is really nothing more than the continuation of
Western Christendom’s attempt to convert the world into its
likeness. And much like with the Crusades of old, the so-called
despotic Muslims who refuse secularism or a liberalized version of
Islam will be forced to convert by any means necessary. Said
differently,
liberalism’s
universalizing
values
insist
upon
producing an Islam in its own image.
In this symposium five leading scholars both challenge and deepen
the major claims of Islam in Liberalism. The political theorist
Murad Idris attempts to enrich Massad’s argument about
liberalism’s “hidden theology” by showing the linguistic
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commonalities that early twentieth-century liberal Protestants
and contemporary secular liberals share in their mutual attempt to
rescue and reform Islam.
The social theorist Sara Farris examines Massad’s explanations for
why Islam became increasingly associated “with unequal gender
relations and violent practices against women” after 9/11. She
argues that neoliberals took advantage of a ripe political moment
by instrumentalizing the themes of gender equality for reasons of
mere capital gain.
Leticia Sabay, a Professor in Gender and Contemporary Culture at
the LSE, examines Massad’s critique of liberal “rights discourse”
which seeks to save women, gays, lesbians and queers from “other
cultures”. Although she acknowledges that there are good reasons
for seeing universal rights as a forum of transnational
imperialism, Sabsay ponders if there is a way around Massad’s
totalizing critique so as to not disregard the potentiality of the
concept.
The scholar of Islam, Salman Sayyid, raises questions about what
the notion of liberalism signifies for Massad, where Muslim
agency is to be found in his argument, and whether the book’s
approach to the relationship between Islam and liberalism is
effective. Finally, the critical theorist Alberto Toscano deepens the
ideological and ethno-political implications of Massad’s notion of
Islam being the necessary other of liberalism.
Massad provides robust responses to each of his interlocutors
helping clarify and strengthen the various arguments of Islam in
Liberalism.
The Author
Joseph Massad is professor of modern Arab politics and
intellectual history in the Department of Middle Eastern,
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South Asian, and African Studies at Columbia University. He
has written many books, including Desiring Arabs, also
published by the University of Chicago Press.
Panelists
Sara R. Farris
S. Sayyid
Murad Idris
Leticia Sabsay
Alberto Toscano
SYMPOSIUM INTRODUCTION
Sara R. Farris
Response
Daniel Steinmetz
Jenkins
The Cold War of Women and Islam
COMMENTARIES
JOSEPH MASSAD’S NEW BOOK Islam in Liberalism is a welcome
and timely intervention into one of the most pressing questions of
Sara R. Farris
our times: why does Islam occupy such a central inimical place
within Western politics and ideology? Massad answers this
question with a straightforward thesis: “Islam” as such does not
exist. What has come to be called “Islam” as a supposedly
The Cold War of Women and
Islam
Reply by Joseph Massad
homogenous cultural entity in reality has been fabricated by
Western liberalism as its symbolic Other. In other words, Islam is
the alter ego of the Euro-American liberal order and “identity,”
represented as fundamentally different precisely in order to
transform it into a symbolic place onto which Western liberalism
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S. Sayyid
Reflections on De-Colonial
Counter-Writing
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Counter-Writing
can project its antinomies and failures.
Reply by Joseph Massad
This thesis becomes particularly clear and convincing in the
second and lengthiest chapter of the book, which is entitled
“Women in/and ‘Islam’: The Rescue Mission of Western Liberal
Feminism.” Alone constituting almost one third of the whole
book, here Massad explores how Western liberalism in general
and Western liberal feminism in particular have successfully
Murad Idris
Liberalism, Islam,
Missionaries
depicted sexism and violence against women almost as the
exclusive domain of Islam as the Other. Massad presents this main
Reply by Joseph Massad
line of argument through a remarkable mode of conjunctural
analysis. For this reason, in this review, I want to concentrate on
this long chapter, highlighting what I consider to be its most
Leticia Sabsay
insightful arguments but also offering a critique of those instances
in which I believe Massad could have developed his important
claims further.
Islam in Liberalism
Reply by Joseph Massad
To begin with, Massad asks how and why has Islam been
increasingly associated with unequal gender relations and violent
practices against women—a kind of mantra that has become
Alberto Toscano
particularly widespread after 9/11 and the beginning of the “war
on terror.” Instead of providing a clear-cut and thus simplistic
argument, he proposes to analyze this phenomenon as the result
of a complex social, economic, political, historical conjuncture in
Liberalism Terminable and
Interminable
Reply by Joseph Massad
which well-orchestrated semantic manipulations, imperialist
gambits and victories (Western liberalism over “actually existing
socialism”) as well as co-optations of liberal feminist concerns are
all amalgamated (wittingly and unwittingly) to produce a
powerful representation: that of Islam as an undemocratic entity
in which Muslims are victims to be rescued. As in the rest of the
book, in the chapter “Women in/and Islam” Massad takes us
through a detailed genealogical reconstruction that shows how
old ideas and well-ingrained stereotypes about Muslim women’s
lives have been re-mobilized in new political landscapes. As he
rightly reminds us, the Western idea that Muslim women are
slaves in a world of male (Muslim) masters is in fact not a novel
one. From Montesquieu’s Persian Letters to Mary Wollstonecraft’s
A Vindication of the Rights of Women, up to Susan Moller Okin’s “Is
Multiculturalism Bad for Women?” the European and American
liberal (and feminist) intelligentsia’s encounter with Islam and the
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East has been one marked by trenchant comments on the inferior
status of women. In both Britain and the United States, the
discourse on Muslim and non-white/non-Western women’s
hardships and lack of rights, Massad maintains, stemmed directly
from entanglements between the white women’s movement and
the Christian missionary movement. As Massad puts it: “The
status of Oriental women would be the reference against which
white women would and could measure their advanced status in
Christian society, further entrenching the already existing
understanding of the liberatory basis of Western Christian society
as opposed to the repressive basis of Oriental societies” (116–17).
Interestingly, in this context Massad also informs us of the rather
less-known fact that the West’s previous alter ego during the Cold
War (i.e., the Soviet Union) also upheld the idea that Muslim and
“Oriental” women occupied a lesser status in the hierarchy of
gender orders. In a speech from 1924, Trotsky predicted that
women in the East had a greater role to play as compared to the
situation in Europe because they were “incomparably more
fettered, crushed and befuddled by prejudices than is the Eastern
man” (quoted in Massad, 120). The Soviet Department for Work
among Women (Zhenotdel) initiated liberation campaigns for
Muslim women in Central Asia, while the Second International
Conference of Communist Women in 1921 welcomed those
Central Asian women who took off their veil as a sign of their
improved consciousness.
As Massad notes, “Soviet Socialism’s understanding of the
Woman Question, unlike its position on other forms of justice,
seemed to meet liberal feminism when it came to Muslim women”
(120). The Eastern Woman Question thus, he argues, was always
an instance and project of the more general Eastern and Western
question.
Such an instance, however, according to Massad, has acquired
particular salience since the late 1980s and the establishment of
the neoliberal new world order. Massad’s central and important
thesis is that the victory of the West and neoliberal capitalism
over Soviet Socialism has produced a series of intertwined
consequences: on the one hand, human rights as non-economic
but purely individual rights have increasingly been used by
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Western actors (including NGOs) to impose their agenda and
values in the Global South. As Massad puts it, “the discourse (and
organized campaigns) of human rights has more of a symptomatic
relationship to neoliberal global capitalism: it broaches moments
of critique; it attempts to inoculate against neoliberalism’s worst
excesses; sometimes it pretends to offer something almost like a
counter-public, yet it continues to operate insistently outside the
economic sphere, the most important of neoliberalism’s theaters
of operations” (133).
On the other hand, Massad seemingly suggests that Islam has
replaced the Soviet Union as the global enemy and the cry against
women’s oppression has replaced that old cry against lack of
freedom in the USSR. In order to articulate these points, Massad
carefully reconstructs the genealogy of the insertion of women’s
rights against violence as human rights by looking at the place the
issue occupies in some key UN-sponsored events: the World
Congresses on Women that took place between 1975 and 1995,
the Convention on the Elimination on all forms of Discrimination
Against Women (CEDAW) adopted by the UN General Assembly
in 1979 and the UNDP report on Arab Human Development
(AHDR) from 2006. In the early 1990s, Massad maintains, the
issue of violence against women as a human rights violation
becomes established as a top UN priority. Gendered violence is in
fact treated as that allegedly universal female lingua franca which
should allow women from different nationalities, cultures and
classes to work on a common agenda. Yet, as Massad well
identifies, it became evident from the outset how gendered
violence was treated as a “cultural problem” in the Global South
and an “individual” problem in the Global North, as well as how
the conflict between culture and human rights was one upheld
only in the case of the former, but not in the case of the latter. As
he argues, “The general approach then, as now, remains for states
to reconcile ‘conflicts’ between rights and ‘culture,’ eliding the fact
that the conflict was principally between a new Euro-American
and European ‘culture’ that the state must bestow rights
domestically and the role it demanded of the United Nations that
it impose this recently invented US ‘culture’ internationally” (128).
After 9/11 and the United States’ resort to women’s rights as
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human rights in the bombing of Afghanistan, the
instrumentalisation of issues of gender equality in anti-Islam
campaigns in particular became embarrassingly evident, but
nonetheless not less dangerous. Indeed, while confirming antiracist feminists, various leftists and anti-war activists in their
arguments and convictions about the hypocrisy of Western
liberals, the resort to women’s rights to justify imperialist wars
was perceived by Western populations at large as some kind of
legitimate endeavor (at least judging from regular polls conducted
in EU countries in which large samples of people associate Islam
with the oppression of women). Many feminists have denounced
such an instrumentalisation and harshly criticized Western liberal
feminists’ “missionary” vocations when it comes to Muslim
women as relics of imperialist feminism during colonialism. And
yet, Massad finds that some feminists (among whom he lists Lila
Abu-Lughod) have nonetheless tried to present Western liberal
feminists’ mistakes as well-intentioned; that is, as fundamentally
motivated by the good aim of helping suffering Muslim women.
Here Massad’s counterarguments become particularly convincing.
Rebuking the attempts to present Western liberal feminist
missionary tendencies as “well-meaning concerns,” he asks: why
do we regard Western liberal feminists who want to rescue
Muslim women as “well-meaning,” but we do not ask why
Muslim women do not try to rescue Western women from their
own patriarchal orders? Is it because Muslim women are not
capable of solidarity? Or rather, is this asymmetry embedded in
the uneven power relations and paternalistic/imperialist ideology
that informs missionary approaches, wittingly or unwittingly?
“Questions of ‘well-meaning concerns’ and pleas for anticulturalist vigilance turn out to be nothing short of misnomers at
best and liberal imperialist dissimulations at worst” (176).
Finally, Massad believes the study of gender and Islam by Western
analysts is necessarily corrupted from the outset by three main
pitfalls: “culturalism,” “comparatism” and “assimilationism.”
Culturalism is the general approach informing studies and
analyses on unequal gender relations amongst Muslim
populations, which attributes such inequalities to inherently
misogynist features within Muslims’ “culture” (whereby culture
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and religion seem to coincide, at least when it comes to discussing
Islam).
Comparatism is what Massad calls “the transgeographism of
Western values . . . a process by which the West, or a fantastic
version of it, is taken as a comparative reference point and the rest
of the world is studied to identify how it converges with or
diverges from it” (207).
Assimilationism, finally, is the process by means of which Islamic
cultures (or non-Western cultures in general insofar as they are
seen as diverging from Western culture) are urged to dissolve and
absorb Western values. Assimilationism presupposes both
culturalism and comparatism insofar as assimilation only becomes
a viable proposal from the moment in which Western analysts
decry Islamic culture as comparatively inferior and unworthy.
So how can we engage in an analysis of gender and Islam that does
not fall into these traps? For Massad,
there are no tricks as to how to study “gender” in the Muslim
world. If analysts attend to the social and economic factors, to the
geographic and historical factors and actors, to culture as a
dynamic entity that produces and is produced by social, economic,
historic and geographic factors and actors, analysts, whether Asian
or African or European or American, will be able to begin to
understand and analyse social phenomena based on terms and
methods that the local situation on hand itself determines, rather
than script them a priori with research agendas that are connected
to imperial policies, namely developmentalism and orientalist
methodologies of culturalism, comparatism and assimilationism.
(211–12)
Overall, Massad convincingly shows the liberal kernel within the
pseudo-philogynist shell that has informed discussions on gender
and Islam in Western circles in the nineteenth as well as the late
twentieth century up to the present. That is, Western analysts’
claim to be the bearers of universal values such as gender equality,
and their individualistic/culturalist approach to the study of
women’s conditions under Islam, are fundamentally liberal
propositions, but have nonetheless been successfully presented as
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politically neutral perspectives. Importantly, as noted above,
Massad treats the integration of women’s rights into the human
rights agenda in the context of the war on the terror as
symptomatic of the relationship that the human rights discourse
more generally has with neoliberalism, whereby the former
criticizes the latter for its negative consequences on people’s lives
while failing to engage it on the economic terrain, which is “the
most important of neoliberalism’s theaters of operations” (133).
Albeit pointing to the contradiction in clear ways, it is here
perhaps that Massad’s analysis should have been deepened. In
other words, it would have been extremely important to explicate
at greater length precisely of what the lack of economic
engagement with neoliberalism by human rights’ organizations is
a symptom. More specifically, it would have been important to
address the following difficult questions: do human rights
institutional stakeholders address violence against women under
Islam as a “cultural” problem, while simultaneously failing to
address the forms of violence confronted by these same women
that have been brought about by poverty and economically
motivated wars, because these stakeholders unconsciously share a
form of Orientalist feminism? Or do they instead avoid the
economic realm because human rights per se pertain only to the
“higher” realms of politics and culture? Is the economic realm thus
“excluded” from human rights’ agendas precisely because it
constitutes the very basis of those “higher” realms of politics and
culture, to put it in Marx’s terms? In other words, is the discourse
of human rights, and consequently, of women’s rights in the East
and under Islam, a plea for political equality that only serves to
divert attention from economic and social inequalities? Massad
touches upon these questions, but does not answer them fully.
Elsewhere, I have struggled myself with these issues and argued
that much of the instrumentalisation of themes of gender equality
by neoliberals and nationalist right-wing parties in Europe in
anti-Islam/anti-immigration campaigns—or what I call
“femonationalism”
1
—should be seen through political
economic lenses. That is, I suggest that one of the reasons why
these non-emancipatory forces offer to rescue Muslim and nonWestern immigrant women in receiving contexts like Western
Europe is linked to the key role these women play in the socially
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reproductive sector (cleaning, housekeeping, child and elderly
care). Similarly, Hester Eisenstein in her path-breaking book
Feminism Seduced attempts to decipher the exploitation of feminist
themes by neoliberals and conservatives in their crusades against
Muslims and migrants in terms of their capitalist interests:
“Feminist-inspired gender ideology is used to enforce the idea of
Western cultural superiority, and thus to facilitate the penetration
of multinational corporations into the preindustrial areas of the
world.”
2
Eisenstein thus understands the deployment of
mainstream feminism—in the sense of an individualist/liberal
ideology—as a “solvent of traditional cultures.” That is, neoliberals
brandish feminist ideas in the Global South in order to destabilize
previous gender orders, create possessive individualist subjects
and thus make the penetration of capitalist production and
consumption patterns easier to establish.
3
A political economic lens thus, I believe, is crucial to make full
sense of the reasons why neoliberal capitalism as an economic as
well as political hegemonic project exploits women’s rights in
anti-Islam campaigns. Unlike a number of works that have
focused upon these issues from mostly politicist perspectives,
Massad’s book has the undoubted merit of pointing to the
economic realm as the missing link in the chain of events
explaining the sudden “treacherous sympathy,” to borrow Leila
Ahmed’s words, that Westerners have shown towards Muslim
women after 9/11.
4
As Massad rightly acknowledges, the
absence of economic considerations from human rights’
discourses symbolically bears witness to the crucial role the
economy plays in these neo-imperialist rescuing narratives.
5.23.16 | Joseph Massad
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Reply
Response to Sara Farris
I cannot but fully agree with Sara Farris’ astute reading of my
book and of her understanding of the general relationship of
neoliberalism and the human rights industry to the question of
“women in Islam,” and to the absence of the analysis of political
economy in their advocacy and analysis. We are clearly in
agreement on seeing the absence of the economic in these debates
and analyses as central.
I make it clear in the book (something I also made clear in my
previous book Desiring Arabs in the context of post-1967 Arab
intellectual debates) that the failure to take political economy
seriously in relation to debates about “women in Islam” and the
attendant privileging of the idea of cultural determinants can be
historicized in terms of the end of the cold war era. Once the
USSR was eliminated, the global public sphere becomes
dominated by the ideas of West European and US Human Rights
and other “development” NGOs, in addition to the expansion of
the purview of the World Bank and the International Monetary
Fund to encompass all of Eastern Europe and the disintegrated
Soviet republics (not to mention post-Apartheid South Africa and
the post-Oslo yet-still-occupied Palestinian territories). It is then
that the liberal language of rights achieves something like global
hegemony and questions of political economy recede, almost
disappear, in the framing of the problem of “women in Islam.”
Farris asks, “Is the economic realm thus ‘excluded’ from human
rights’ agendas precisely because it constitutes the very basis of
those ‘higher’ realms of politics and culture, to put it in Marx’s
terms? In other words, is the discourse of human rights, and
consequently, of women’s rights in the East and under Islam, a
plea for political equality that only serves to divert attention from
economic and social inequalities?” My answer is a resounding yes
to both questions. While Orientalism is the organizing
epistemology and ontology of human rights work at the level of
the representation of Muslim women, the overall strategic goals
of human rights work are set by imperial capital (in its neoliberal
form) which not only funds and plans the agendas of NGOs but
underwrites the very production of imperial culture and policy as
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a “culture of human rights,” either as alibi or as imagined check on
the worst excesses of neo/imperial capital. That what is taken to
be human rights is the liberal agenda of Western European
governments and that of the United States and is adopted by
organizations like Amnesty International and Human Rights
Watch, which originate as partisans in Cold War-era ideological
battles, is hardly a coincidence. Such a human rights agenda
refused to grant any legitimacy to what the Soviets considered
“human rights” not only by the Western human rights industry,
but even by many of their academic, yet liberal, critics in the
Western academy. Of course “Economic and Social rights”
remained on the agenda of resistant academics and activists whose
voices, however, were not influential in policy circles.
To undertake a political economic analysis to understand the
question of gender inequality in human rights literature, different
kinds of literacies are needed—including but not limited to
neoliberal economics and politics—like the ones evinced in Farris’
own work. Such approaches uncover the structures that maintain
human rights activists’ refusal to take on board a second
generation of critics within the human rights industry of what is
called “Economic and Social Rights,” except as a separate and
separable form of rights that cannot be folded into the rubric of
“human” rights as liberalism defines them. Add to this the refusal
to consider gender equality as an economic and social right and
the insistence on limiting it to the more classically liberal
definition of the first generation of human rights activists, i.e., the
civil and political definition of “human” rights, with its
ontological allegiance to the idea of the individual as the only
possible bearer of (human) rights.
Add your voice and join the discussion
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5.25.16 | S. Sayyid
Response
Reflections on De-Colonial
Counter-Writing
JOSEPH MASSAD HAS BEEN engaged in iconoclasm for some
time. He has sought to break the idols most dear to particular
contemporary forms of life. For example the case of Western
NGOs, which talk the talk of anti-imperialism but can be shown
to walk the walk of empire.
These idols are precious not due to their centrality, but rather to
their presumed innocuous innocence. It would not be unfair to
say that despite Massad’s energy and skill, this has been a hard sell.
It should be apparent, and if it is not let me say it at the onset, that
I do not deplore Massad’s iconoclastic urges (how could I), nor do
I demur from the conclusions he draws, and I certainly do not
wish to be seen as dismissing his project. So the doubts that I want
to mention in this response are as a way of helping to clarify my
own thoughts on these matters. Perhaps they are not so much
direct challenges to Islam in Liberalism but rather have a wider
relevance to what I would call de-colonial counter-writing. With
these caveats in mind, I want to make three points which, while
able to stand on their own, I believe sufficiently connected to be
seen as steps in an overarching argument. The three points are:
what is liberalism in Islam in Liberalism, where is Muslim agency,
and finally what is gained by detailing the relationship between
liberalism and Islam, i.e. what difference does counter-writing
make?
Liberalism
Given the central focus on liberalism in Massad’s book, it is a bit
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odd that it remains somewhat nebulous in his account. Massad is
adamant that his concern is not with liberalism per se, but with
the way in which it interacts with what he also considers a
problematic category: Islam. He states that his primary concern is
to investigate how “Islam figures in the ideologies and polices of
liberal regimes in Europe and the United States” (p. 12). I am not
convinced that if we were to re-write the above sentence as: “an
investigation into the way in which Islam figures in the ideologies
and polices of Western regimes”, we would have a very different
book. The point I am making is not that Massad should have
written a different kind of book, but rather that the amorphous
nature of liberalism is reproduced in his book and this
reproduction has a number of consequences for the overall
cogency of the argument that he wants to develop, as we shall see.
This raises the question: what exactly is the work that the concept
of liberalism does for Massad’s overall argument? The range of
Massad’s references are fairly extensive and include secular
reoccupation of Protestantism, the content of colonial education,
the construction of particular kinds of feminism. One of the
merits of Massad’s approach is that it focuses on the
performativity of liberalism rather than its declarations. For
example, liberals outside the West practice liberalism by reading
books by Nabokov in a capital of an Islamic republic while their
servants hover around them, or by de facto supporting tyranny (as
long as it keeps Islamists out of power). One could imagine a
Wittgenstein-inspired investigation in which the multiple usages
of the concept of liberalism are enumerated as a means of showing
what liberalism is today. There is much to recommend such a
methodology; after all, it would be rather unduly restrictive to
equate liberalism simply with the thoughts enunciated by a set of
exclusively white men in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Massad, however, explicitly states that his book’s focus is on the
role of the liberal regimes of Europe and the United States in
producing liberalism. This take is different from the idea that
liberalism is a product of a series of historical and contemporary
conversations which provide a language-game that many play in
and out of the West. By focusing on the role of liberal regimes in
producing liberalism, Massad risks introducing a rather
uncomplicated instrumentalism in which the global spread of
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liberalism can be traced to the ploys and plots of an
undifferentiated political impulse of the West. By privileging
liberalism as ideology or ethos of specific regimes, Massad lets slip
that the relationship between liberalism and Islam may be more
instrumental than constitutive. Thus, the argument that Massad
makes for the compatibility of liberalism and Western
imperialism appears as being merely contingent rather than
necessary. In this sense, one could argue that Islam in Liberalism is
another variant of the postcolonial literature which has appeared
in recent years (some of which is cited by Massad) which
demonstrates the imbrications between liberalism and Western
imperialism. If Islam is articulated by liberal regimes in pursuit of
their policies, then its relationship to liberalism is contingent on
such articulations. While Massad and the rest of the literature in
this genre can show that the relationship between Islam and
liberalism is not traceable to Sykes-Picot or the Napoleonic
invasion of Egypt, I think such accounts fail to capture the full
importance of this relationship by restricting it to a play of
surfaces, in which representation is distinct from constitution.
5
I suspect that one of the reasons why Massad may wish to
keep representation and constitution as discreet is that he does
not want to fall into the trap of idealist essentialism. The study of
matters Islamicate has become haunted by a fear of idealist
essentialism since at least the publication of Edward Said’s
Orientalism. This fear creates particular problems when it comes
to the formation of collective identities and the role of Islam.
Treating Islam semiotically opens the possibility for the
significance of Islam to be thought of as merely epiphenomenal.
This has consequences for the idea of a Muslim agency.
Muslim Agency?
Islam in Liberalism makes the argument that Islam was deployed as
an instrument of imperial policy from Pax Britannica to Pax
Americana, an argument that is common-place among certain
circles including the Eurocentric left. It is an argument which has
a particular polemical charge which circulates among policymakers, opinion-shapers and, in its various formulations, in the
general culture. This is the case, for example, with the claims that
the Taliban are an invention of the CIA or that Islamism, in
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general, was encouraged and facilitated by Western powers and
their local surrogates to ward off independent-minded (Muslim)
regimes. Massad succeeds in adding erudition and depth to this
line of argumentation by showcasing the long-term nature of
liberal attempts to deploy Islam, but he does little to undermine
the beliefs that the appearance of political Islam is anything but
the result of manipulations and machinations. The relatively weak
emphasis given to the caveats that liberal articulations of Islam
(that is, Islam as deployed by Western regimes) do not exhaust it
means that Islam appears as a form of false consciousness rather
than as the crucible for the formation of sustainable subjectivities.
What Massad calls the ‘multiplication of referents of Islam (e.g.
Islam as culture, civilization, way of life, death-cult, religion), it
could be argued, is not so much a feature of the 19th century
‘liberal regimes’ but rather arises from the role that it has for
Muslims as a master-signifier (Sayyid, 1997: 1-14).
By refusing (at least in Islam in Liberalism) to discuss the
intersection between Islam as the name by which Muslims
become historical agents and Islam as deployed by the Western
conglomerate state, the book risks reproducing Eurocentrism
epistemologically while denouncing it as an
imperial/colonial/racial project. One way out of this problem
would be to take a philosophically pragmatic position and accept
that the relationship between episteme and empire is not that
tight. In other words, a critique of empire does not necessarily
mean a critique of its episteme and, vice versa, by linking
liberalism to the policy of liberal regimes with such careful and
detailed scholarship, Massad seems to foreclose such an option.
Making a difference
Islam in Liberalism joins a growing literature which demonstrates
the ignoble beginning of the Western enterprise in the hope (less
explicitly stated) that such an endeavour will disrupt, if not at least
help dismantle, Western global hegemony. Most of these books
and articles operate in the ground opened up by Edward Said’s
critique of Orientalism. Many of these texts tend to see
Orientalism, not in its ‘weak form’ (that is, simply as a complaint
about how Oriental realities are distorted in the service of
imperial interests) but in its strong version in which Orientalism
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does not so much as distort an already existing Orient, but rather
constitutes it as a means of narrating the identity of the Western
enterprise. The identity of the West is formulated in a series of
contrasts with the Orient, and because liberalism (and its
associated concepts such as democracy) gain their identity not by
their specific content but rather by their attachment to the West,
it is always possible for the West to discard every tenant of
liberalism and still be considered to be liberal as long as it is
considered to be Western. For example, the stealthy installation of
a form of apartheid for Muslims in the global North (in many
aspects pioneered in the occupied territories of Palestine)
proceeds with little hindrance because Muslims are articulated as
antagonistically distinct from Westerners. Thus, it becomes
possible to restrict Muslims’ freedom of movement,
away Muslim children from their parents,
7
6
to take
to deter Muslims
from engaging in critical citizenship, all in the name of upholding
liberal values. While there is little doubt that it is Muslims, and
those who are suspected of being Muslims (Arab Christians,
Sikhs, people of colour…), who bear the brunt of this
reconfiguration of relations between state, civil society and
individuals, the effects of these reconfigurations seep out from
ethnic enclaves into the general grammar of governance,
profoundly altering the relationship between all citizens and
government.
In the story by Hans Christian Andersen, when the boy points out
that the emperor has no clothes, everybody laughs and the spell is
broken, and the royal majesty is humiliated. One can imagine a
contemporary version of this story when books like Islam in
Liberalism, Recalling the Caliphate, The Politics of Piety, Geologies of
Religion, Culture and Imperialism point out again and again that the
empire has no clothes, but nothing much seems to happen. If the
ability to break the spells of Eurocentric delusions is so weak, then
what should be the purpose of a decolonial counter-writing? Or to
put it in more concrete terms, what is to be gained by showing
that Islam and liberalism have a relationship not of exteriority but
of deep imbrication? By showing that liberalism denotes a
philosophy, ideology, culture but, most of all, denotes the West
itself, that it operates more as a cultural marker than just as the
name of a specific assemblage of practices and protocols to do
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with freedom of expression, tolerance, accountably, regularity in
transfer of power, transparency etc., how does change this our
practice? Does decolonization require a decolonial episteme, or
would decolonized epistemology lead to decolonization? If the
correct answer to both propositions is: ‘most probably no’, then
the question arises about the wider purpose of the literature of
which our work is a part. If all we can do as academics is say that
the empire has no clothes, but that disclosure does not bring
about a decolonial epiphany among the flunkeys and courtiers of
the empire, then perhaps we need to do something different.
In the first few pages of Orientalism, Edward Said introduces
Foucault’s category of discourse and Gramsci’s category of
hegemony as being the building blocks of his critique. Many of us
have spent a great deal of our lives focusing on discourse as a
system of representation and perhaps not enough on hegemony as
a play of discourses or, to put it in another way, politics. I would
argue that one of the hallmarks of liberalism is its rejection of
collective identities in favour of rationalist individualism, and this
makes it difficult to conceive of the political as constituted by
antagonism (Mouffe, 2005:10-11). Liberalism is profoundly antipolitical means that conflict is only possible because of
irrationality or error. The pay-off of many studies on the
relationship between Islam and the West (I mean those texts
which are not basically Islamophobia screeds) is to show the ways
in which Islam and the West are not that different and suggest
that if we could embrace our common humanity, the world would
be a better place. Such an embrace cannot so simply wish away
antagonism and difference. As long as we remain within the
framework of speaking truth to power, we will all be hostages to
liberalism. We will be subject to the Stockholm syndrome and
unable to think beyond the language games of our captors,
convinced that the belief in a universal reason will eventually
bring about justice and freedom. To effect a hostage release
requires the recognition that collective identities are antagonistic,
contradictory but that they are also necessary as a foundation for
any and all politics. It is politics which can deliver on the promise
of a better world. Since it is the hegemonic play of discourses
which produced the Oriental world as part of the colonial-racial
world-making of the Western imperial formations, it is the
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hegemonic play of discourses and not truth that will undo that
process of world-making. Ultimately the problem of liberalism is
not that it is pushed by specific regimes which promote particular
forms of life but, rather, the spread of liberalism has become so
internalized that our critiques cannot reach it. Or to put it in
another way, criticizing liberalism, on one hand, and maintaining
a suspicion of politics and the political on the other, is just another
way of supporting liberalism.
The question, then, remains: what is the role of disclosing the
ignoble beginning of Western imperial formations in the project
of decolonization? What needs to be done to turn the good sense
displayed in Islam in Liberalism into a common-sense accessible to
all? Does critique have to give way to the task of imagining
alternatives to the present? Gramsci writes about ‘intellectual and
moral reformation’ as means of building an alternative conception
of the world, a counter-hegemonic narrative that attempts
cultural transformation, but such intellectual and moral reform is
an hegemonic operation, and hegemony is another way of
describing politics. Perhaps decolonial counter-writing requires a
recognition, not just in its content but also in its organisation, that
the enterprise of critique is a political matter.
References
Hirschkind, Charles, and Mahmood, Saba. “Feminism, the
Taliban, and Politics of Counter-Insurgency.” Anthropological
Quarterly 75:2 (2002) 339–54.
Mahmood, Saba. The Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the
Feminist Subject. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005.
Mignolo, Walter. “Epistemic Disobedience, Independent Thought
and De-Colonial Freedom.” Theory, Culture & Society 26:7–8
(2009) 1–23.
Mills, Charles. “Decolonizing Western Political Philosophy.” New
Political Science 37:1 (2015).
Mouffe, Chantal. On the Political, London: Routledge, 2005.
Pitts, J. A Turn to Empire: The Rise of Imperial Liberalism in Britain
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and France. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005.
Said, Edward W. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Knopf, 1993.
Sayyid, S. A Fundamental Fear: Eurocentrism and the Emergence of
Islamism. London: Zed, 1997 [2003, 2015].
———. Recalling the Caliphate: Decolonization and World Order.
London: Hurst, 2014.
5.25.16 | Joseph Massad
Reply
Response to S. Sayyid
Sayyid demands that the book provide a definition of liberalism
per se yet he goes on to agree with me that liberalism is a moving
target and a complex ensemble of discourse, regimes, and
practices. Sayyid’s seemingly hasty and rushed reading of my book
strikes me as having missed central parts of my arguments and
evidence, especially so as he uses the main arguments of the book
as his own critical response to phantom arguments that he thinks I
make in Islam in Liberalism but which are not there. For example,
he strangely presents an unsubstantiated claim that liberalism
functions instrumentally in my book. In fact, if my book has a
single thesis that is repeated and substantiated from the first line
to the very end of the book, it is that Islam in liberalism is
constitutive and not merely instrumental. Indeed, the book speaks
throughout about the imperial liberal production of different
Islams and about its deployment of Islam in liberalism as part of
its identitarian discourse of self and other.
Nowhere in the book do I claim that the West is an
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undifferentiated political agent, but rather the opposite, I show
that the fiction of its historic unity let alone its essential
Westernness are effects of how Islam functions in liberalism. This
is the whole point of the book as recognized by the other
commentators in this forum. I also disagree with Sayyid’s implicit
definition of agency throughout his response. Following Marx, I
believe the agent, träger, literally a carrier, is quite distinct from a
liberal voluntarist intentional individualist understanding of
agency. As for how Islam figures in Muslim ontology and
epistemology, as I clearly state in the book, this is the subject of
my next book to which Islam in Liberalism is an introduction. My
project in this book is concerned solely with Islam in liberalism,
not with Islam and liberalism, let alone Islam in-itself or Islam
for-itself, a project that would require an entirely different
archive and methodology.
Sayyid insists that books must make a socially transformative
difference (“what difference does counter-writing make?”) by
drawing up blueprints for a new world free from oppression,
short of which he believes books fail at their task of critique and
scholarship. Sayyid is risking a certain anti-intellectualism in
demanding that intellectual work is only valuable if it has instant
political efficacies in the form of policy recommendations. I am
tempted to diagnose his demand as a narcissistic fantasy that
wishes for academic books to be single agents of political change
and transformation. Alas, this is a wish that cannot come true.
Add your voice and join the discussion
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5.27.16 | Murad Idris
Response
Liberalism, Islam, Missionaries
FROM THE MID-NINETEENTH century up to recent coverage
of ISIS, a recurrent question has been how to resolve the problem
of Islam so that “it” (or whatever and whoever it stands for)
becomes more hospitable to liberal principles and commitments.
Some approach Islam and liberalism as overlapping but distinct
spheres, translating “Islamic” ideas and contexts into liberal or
illiberal doctrines, often with the aim of making Islam compatible
with liberalism. Others seek to craft a specifically “Islamic
liberalism,” or to give voice to liberal Muslims. Islam emerges as a
problem in the conceptual apparatus and normativity of
liberalism, and liberalism presents itself as that which might save
Muslims from Islam.
Joseph A. Massad’s brilliant new book, Islam in Liberalism, studies
how liberalism constructs Islam as a problem and itself as the
solution. It reorients readers from thinking about Islam and
liberalism to Islam in liberalism, that is, “how liberalism
constitutes Islam in constituting itself” (12), or how liberalism
functions in relation to Islam as an antonymical object it calls into
being as illiberal, not yet liberal, or in need of (liberalism-friendly)
reform. This is a timely and crucial intervention. Recent
scholarship has drawn attention to the disavowed genealogies of
liberal imperialism, studied its hidden operations, and troubled
the status of Islam as an Other to the West and secular liberalism;
Massad builds on these bodies of literature to consider how
liberalism has constituted itself specifically in and out of what it
calls “Islam,” which it marks as one of its lacking others (and
which would be lacking nothing other than liberalism).
Islam in Liberalism synthesizes numerous literatures and discourses
about Islam, and at the same time, offers an original, provocative
reading of what unites constructions of Islam with definitions of
liberalism. The book’s five chapters focus on five topics, each of
which figures prominently in popular discourses, policy circles,
and academic discussions as arenas of liberal anxiety about Islam:
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democracy (ch. 1), women (ch. 2), homosexuality (ch. 3),
pathology and repression (ch. 4), and relations among religions
(ch. 5). Massad’s discussion of “atrocity exhibitions” to describe
how these arenas are presented today is powerful and compelling,
and taken together, the chapters suggest that these arenas are
refashioned and circumscribed in ways that facilitate liberal
intervention surrounding Islam and politics, what it needs, and
how it is to be evaluated. Such interventions and transformations
appear in the establishment of institutions, in the reports of
liberal activists, and in the writings of scholars; in the extreme
case, they are conjoined to the flows of capital, the destructive
invasions of militaries, and “reconstruction” projects by Western
NGOs.
Although Massad states that he does not seek to “investigate the
whole range of concerns that constitute liberalism” (12), Islam in
Liberalism should nonetheless provoke a more general, theoretical
reassessment of its constitution in relation to Islam. Given the
significance of the conceptual, historical, and political architecture
that Massad tracks, my comments and questions are primarily
devoted to thinking with Islam in Liberalism about these five
domains, the kind of liberalism that the book studies, and its
relationship to religion. Contained within his analysis (as I have
also suggested elsewhere) is a potential reformulation of
liberalism, in terms of what it does to constitute itself and Islam.
Based on my reading of Islam in Liberalism, it might be formulated
in three parts: (1) liberalism builds untenable equivalences
between unequal and disparate things, equating the powerful and
the powerless; (2) liberalism’s principles, formulas, and categories
are persistently available as supplements, such that non- or even
anti-liberal thinkers and actors invoke them when turning to
Islam; and (3) the key trace of the theological in liberalism is what
Massad calls the impulse to “rescue and save,” and so a neglected
layer of liberalism’s hidden theology is located in its missionary
practices.
What do we learn about liberalism by understanding it in terms
of the five arenas and in terms of liberal activists and
internationalists as missionaries who seek to “rescue and save”? I
take Massad’s descriptions in Islam in Liberalism (and in Desiring
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Arabs) of internationalist activism as missionary work to form a
significant conceptual point: liberalism might be a number of
other things—a project, an ideology, a morality—but it also entails
missionary practices concerned with rescuing and saving. How far
does this analogy go, and is it only an analogy? Does the idea of
the liberal missionary draw out an analogical relationship between
liberalism and Christianity, Christian missionary and the liberal
activist, the colonial church mission and the international NGO?
Or does the language of the missionary and mission indicate
another layer of the theological impulses that remain embedded in
liberalism? At stake in this question is whether the conceptual and
historical filiation between Christianity and liberalism implies a
more direct continuation of an ideology aimed at saving others,
for which the missionary would be a basic, if neglected figure.
I want to suggest that the importance of drawing out liberalism’s
missionary history can be illustrated by juxtaposing Islam in
Liberalism’s five domains to a text by Samuel Marinus Zwemer.
This American Christian missionary (and founder of the journal
The Moslem World, and later, professor at Princeton Theological
Seminary) spent many years in the Middle East preaching gospel
and empire. On the evening of January 2, 1920, Zwemer delivered
a speech to fellow missionaries under the heading, “The Worth
and the Failure of Mohammedanism.” The so-called “Apostle to
Islam” observed that Islam fails on five counts: children, women,
reason, democracy, and the soul. Islam, he says, “has failed and failed
utterly as a religion for the little child” because the Qurʾān is
neither for nor about children. It “failed in its treatment of
womanhood,” he writes, adapting Qāsim Amīn’s reformist
writings as well as popular Christian polemics, because it gives the
husband despotic power, treats the wife as a slave and object, and
its early protagonists practiced polygamy and pedophilia. Third, it
“dwarfed,” “confined,” and “degraded” the human intellect,
standing against “freedom of thought.” Fourth, it fails because it is
the enemy of democracy by being a religion of war and
persecution. And finally, for Zwemer, Islam fails spiritually and
ethically because it has “eclipsed” Jesus.
8
The categories deployed by missionaries like Zwemer imply a
significant connection between liberalism and Christian
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missionaries. At least four of Zwemer’s five “failures” are central,
albeit to different degrees, to constructions of Islam in the liberal
practices and discourses that Massad studies. Indeed, two of these
five, democracy and women, are chapters of Massad’s book. Just as
Zwemer constructs his Christianity, his West, and their
imperialism as democratic and philogynic by constructing Islam as
despotic and misogynistic, Massad points to how liberalism
constructs itself in these terms, also in opposition to Islam.
Zwemer’s concern with children and the inadequacy of the
Qurʾān intersects with liberal questions about education; liberal
elites, after all, were often concerned with reforming the nation
through education and tended to be involved in founding various
schools.
9
Universities and schools are important to the
histories of Islam in Liberalism, and Massad’s careful attention to
such institutions is no surprise for anyone familiar with his
previous books. Zwemer’s concern with reason (or Islamic unreason) and with the soul (or Islamic damnation) also appear to be
continued in Massad’s account of liberalism, albeit in different
(secularized) form. Zwemer’s belief that reason belongs to
Christianity, and unreason to Islam, has echoes in psychoanalytic
discourses’ pathologization of Islam as a return of the repressed,
which Massad discusses in chapter 4.
One might understand such points of convergence in categories
between liberal activists and Christian missionaries as parallel
branches of a shared European lineage, borrowings and
transpositions, liberal-Christian cross-pollination, or selfpollination. It would require that we rethink, along the lines of
Islam in Liberalism, the development and transfer of these domains
and their discursive antecedents, within Christianity into or
alongside liberalism, in relation to liberalism’s Muslim and nonMuslim constitutive outsides, in the hands of religious and
“secular” missionaries. Does the recurrence of democracy and
women as categories, as well as the continuation of reason and the
soul, across the Christian missionary and the Orientalist, into
liberalism, present another indication of the theological traces in
liberal secularism? Or should we understand early twentiethcentury European and American missionaries to be approaching
liberalism as a supplementary set of logics, much like Soviet
socialists in the 1920s deployed liberal techniques and language
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when they cast Muslim women as a group in need of saving and
liberation (120–22)? Does the concern of missionaries with “the
child,” that is, with education, already imply the status of
liberalism as an idiom that so easily enters critical discourses,
standing out over and above other potentially supplemental
lexica? Should we understand this as the result of its propagation
through various institutions across the globe, especially
educational ones, or does an internal logic undergird its
malleability and availability? What role, in other words, do the
five domains play not only for the history of European
constructions of Islam, but for the conceptual and structural
filiation between liberalism and Christianity, activists and
missionaries?
If, according to Zwemer, the truth that Islam fails to grasp is that
“Jesus is lord and savior,” and that he must be chosen as such,
liberalism demands that the individual, in order to be an
individual, must choose liberalism; this, as Massad notes, is a
weaponized “choice,” for the only choice that liberalism can accept
as a choice is liberalism. The new choice, then, appears as the
liberal form of damnation; Muslims who do not choose liberalism,
like those who do not choose Jesus, are the new forsaken, to be
converted or killed. It is this structure of liberalism, as an ideology
of imperial missionary work in the name of secularism, that Islam
in Liberalism demands that we confront.
5.27.16 | Joseph Massad
Reply
Response to Murad Idris
I am indebted to Murad Idris’s incisive and productive reading of
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Islam in Liberalism, and the important set of questions that he
poses in light of my tracking liberal missionaries alongside their
Christian, and especially Protestant, antecedents. The Zwemer
text, which Idris showcases as a Protestant parallel (or, is it the
same) text to liberal texts producing Islam as the opposite and the
other of secular (or Protestant) liberalism, is indeed yet another
indication of these links. In Islam in Liberalism, I offer the
shorthand that liberal “democracy is the highest stage of
(Protestant) Christianity,” invoking Lenin’s linkage between
imperialism and capitalism. In this regard, Idris asks, “what role,
in other words, do the five domains [Zwemer posits, namely,
children, women, reason, democracy, and the soul] play not only for
the history of European constructions of Islam, but for the
conceptual and structural filiation between liberalism and
Christianity, activists and missionaries?”
My sense is that many filiative connections are present, however,
I fear that the missionary as a figure or a metaphor, or a category
or mode could be read to have an explanatory autonomy of its
own in Idris’ reading, while as Islam in Liberalism insists, it needs
to be always already attached to the economic and the imperial.
Reading the relationship of secularism and secularization to the
economic is most important in this regard. I am thinking of
commercial Western codes and legal commercial adjudication, to
take a couple of examples, being imposed on the colonies as a
central part of this process; but there are others—nationality laws,
passport laws, and of course private property ordinances are other
important features. Clearly, as in the case of Christian
missionaries, certain careers were made possible by the rise of
human rights discourse and associated NGOs that facilitated the
dissemination of liberal missionary ideas in our neoliberal age,
just as an earlier era of imperial conquest facilitated the
movement of Christian missionaries across the colonized Muslim
world. In this regard the recent scholarship of Heather Sharkey,
Paul Sedra, Beth Baron, and Ussama Makdisi, among others,
makes this abundantly clear.
10
That many of the key claims
made by liberalism about Islam were made by earlier Christian
propaganda is also not coincidental but rather reveals the
Christian pedigree of these ideas intellectually, politically, and
economically. This is most salient in the idea of the alleged
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absence of “civil society” in Muslim societies, which accounts for
the absence of “democracy” for many European liberal thinkers
and Protestant missionaries who needed to be recognized by
Muslim states as autonomous from existing Christian
communities (like the Copts in Egypt) and private property,
which would allow them to purchase land to build churches,
schools, orphanages, and associated buildings for their new
parishes—all of which could only take place in the Ottoman
Empire, for example, once the privatization of land took place as
part of the modernization of property laws which would only
happen in the middle of the nineteenth century. That private
property and civil society are enablers of Christian and liberal
missionary infiltration in Muslim societies is another filiative
connection of significance (even Zionist settler-colonialism would
become possible as a result of these changes).
The other salient effect on the local, as many have already argued,
was that many forms of Islamist and even local church activism
and reform (including that of the Muslim Brotherhood and of the
reform of the Coptic Church itself) would be informed or spurred
by these Christian missionary precedents—be they Protestant
missionaries attacking the Coptic Church in the second half of the
nineteenth century or Protestant missionaries adopting Muslim
orphans in the 1920s which spurred the Muslim Brotherhood to
use the missionaries’ tactics to “retake” these children back into
the realm of Muslim society, and as a basis for many of their
charitable organizations. This is also the case with the current
liberal NGOs, many of whose activities and structures have also
been adopted by local Islamist political forces who support and/or
contest their liberal agenda. The transformative aspect of the
Christian and liberal missionaries must, however, always be
linked to the principal imperial aim of transforming the local
economy and its integration in global capitalism, whether from
the nineteenth century through the interwar period as happened
in a place like Lebanon, Palestine, or Egypt, or the more recent
neoliberal era as is happening almost everywhere.
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Add your voice and join the discussion
5.30.16 | Leticia Sabsay
Response
Islam in Liberalism
The “Rescue Mission” and the Future of
Politics
ONCE AGAIN I FIND myself in front of a book written by
Joseph Masad, and not at all surprisingly, I once again find myself
enjoying a great learning experience. When I first read Desiring
Arabs (2007), I particularly liked the way in which Massad
troubled canonical histories through a thorough and clever
analysis of a notable amount of key documentation.
11
In Islam
and Liberalism, Massad again draws on an impressive array of
sources and with his particular wit and strong voice, he
interpellates key authors and debates in order to question political
and theoretical approaches that are taken for granted, with the
aim of revealing the places where progressive critique falls short.
He does so in a way that is always enlightening, and for my own
purposes, most useful.
In this book, Massad takes issue with the liberal attitude with
which Western politics are conceived, and shows us how
liberalism, understood as a mode of thought that defines an
identity for “the West,” is at the center of current and former
forms of Islamophobia and other forms of cultural racism.
Honoring Edward Said’s project, in this book, Massad leads us
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into a profound examination of transnational (albeit
internationalist) contemporary liberal politics in what seems to be
an extension of Said’s project. While Said exposed the many ways
in which the “Orient” was constitutive of self-images of the West,
and Western modernity in particular, Massad shows us how
“Islam,” a slippery and most productive signifier, is constitutive of
liberalism. He states from the beginning that his aim is to show
how “Liberalism as an identity” cannot be thought without
reference to “Islam” as its counterpart (11). And he convincingly
reveals how the figural presence of Islam is the underbelly of
liberalism.
The way in which Massad addresses this co-constitution makes
this book an important intervention. In his study, his aim is not
just to prove the thesis that Islam, in its varying uses, is projected
as the other of Western liberalism, providing it with its
constitutive outside at the level of macro-politics. What we have
here is an account of the specific myriad textural, political, and
tactical practices by which different approaches and
understandings of Islam have helped to give shape, meaning, and
purpose to what liberalism could be—now and then. In sum, his
work is not limited to showing us the structural position of Islam
as the Other. What is offered here is a detailed description and
analysis of how productive this position has been—Lacan with
Foucault? If Massad’s work is not strictly genealogical in method—
when he traces back the histories of liberalism, he tends to look
for continuities rather than discontinuities—it is still clearly
genealogical in its attitude: his stories are designed to question
what under liberal hegemony is taken for granted as an ostensible
truth, if not a fact.
One example of this exploration is the ascendance of “rights
discourse,” where the liberal command to save women, gays,
lesbians and queers from “other cultures” has taken center stage.
This is the theme of two long chapters: chapter 2, “Women
and/in Islam: The Rescue Mission of Western Liberal Feminism,”
and chapter 3, “Pre-Positional Conjunctions: Sexuality and/in
Islam.” I will focus my attention on these two chapters.
In chapter 2, Massad traces back current transnational feminist
imperialism to feminist orientalism, the role of protestant
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Christianity, their links to missionary evangelization (both in
content and forms) and ideas of sisterhood in 1900, which will
later find secularized versions in what he summarily addresses as
second-wave feminism. He links these trajectories with the
systematic orientalist attitude of governments who have always
tended to be feminist abroad and misogynistic at home, with the
role of Cold War and the Soviet Union in this process, and, as a
case in point he offers an extensive discussion of long-lasting
histories of veiling politics among others, which have since then
become increasingly prominent. Through this exploration,
Massad gives texture and content to what many feminists have
pointed out, namely that the Eastern question was always the
Woman question.
In this vein, his review of feminist debates about Western liberal
feminism (called by critical feminists “colonial feminism” among
other names), reveals the ways in which human rights—or more
specifically the framing of women’s rights as human rights—have
been working as a transnational form of governmentality. Rights
appear here as the site where “liberation” or “emancipation”
becomes clearly governmentalized. And Massad shows us how
this form of governmentalization not only becomes a way to
regulate (and manage) populations, but more crucially, one that
regulates the relationship between different populations. In other
words, the field opened up by “rights discourse” not only has
implications for specific communities (this or that group of
women), but more fundamentally, it configures those groups as
such and then frames the relationship between them. In sum, it
has specific geo-political functions that actually grant
transnationality specific meanings, among which the reviving of
Western feminism is not irrelevant.
I totally agree with Massad, and my own work, in its own way, is
also concerned with these rights discourses as a form of
governmental regulation. However, the question I struggle with
here is whether it might be possible to identify any other
productive outcomes that could be opened up by the discourse of
rights, which might have the potential to challenge those forms of
regulation that rights, in their liberal form, actually sustain.
Counter to Foucault, it seems to me that Massad may be too quick
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to disregard any potential for this discourse, or for the signifier
“right.” In my view, an amplified notion of “right” could mobilize a
utopian horizon and by doing so, this signifier could have a
transformative potential. Considering the paradoxical status of
rights, Wendy Brown highlights this possibility.
12
Drawing
on Spivak’s famous statement that “liberalism is something that
we cannot not want,” Brown unravels this bind, and suggests the
utopian horizon that rights might open, and the possibility that
these utopian ideals could be articulated in terms that might undo
their actual liberal presuppositions. After all, people are invested
in rights and, taking into account colonial legacies and mutually
entangled histories, it seems very difficult to completely de-link
them from deeply engrained imaginaries of freedom and justice . .
.
When the juridical restricted version of “human rights,” which
belongs to the transnational (liberal) legal culture, opens up a field
of “expectations” that pertain to the idea of “having the right to,”
or having “the right to claim rights,” this field can be very
productive. It could of course be argued that these expectations
remain within the liberal framework—onto-epistemologically
speaking they belong to a “subject of rights” which seems to be
liberal in its inception—and my own argument on sexual
citizenship goes along these lines.
13
But then, what might be
the political alternative to rights discourse? Ultimately, citizenship
is not exactly the same as “right”; and therefore, although I am not
at all sure that ideas of freedom, justice or equality should be
totally abandoned, as “having the right to claim (or have) rights”
in its most undetermined formulation is often associated with
these ideals, I am not sure either that we should abandon this
horizon altogether. It is along these lines that I find Massad’s
critique of Lila Abu-Lughod’s plea for equality rather unfair—but
it is not my place, nor the occasion to defend her here (139).
In fact, I do not have good answers to this tension around the
confines of these ideals as they are interconnected with rights
either. Massad confronts us with the limits of our own thinking.
And undoubtedly, his work has helped me in my own work on
the pervasiveness of onto-epistemological categories that are
proper to a liberal understanding of the subject. So these are
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honest questions that I would like to think about with him.
I agree with Massad that in this context, “rights discourse”
becomes a Euro-American weapon par excellence, a vehicle for the
enactment of imperial onto-epistemological impulses that work
through strategies of translation that rely on what he brilliantly
identifies as strategies of comparatism, culturalism and
assimilationism. Indeed, the problem of translation and cultural
translation is at the center of contemporary transnational legal
culture and, as Massad remarks, the liberal paradigm that frames
this legal realm relies on the disavowal of its difficulty to address
how notions such as rights, gender, or individuality have different
meanings across contexts (127).
The question of translation, including the dynamics of cultural
translation is central in chapter 3. In this chapter, Massad embarks
on the task of showing how the assumed translatable character of
sexuality already supposes an epistemic violence. Starting by
addressing the historicity of sexuality, via Michel Foucault,
Massad questions the universalizability of sexuality given its status
as a specific historical formation, and remarks, rightly in my view,
that the elevation of sexuality into an onto-epistemological
category paves the way for the non-sufficiently problematized
treatment of heterosexuality and homosexuality, and later sexual
identities such as gay and lesbian, as ontological realities.
Massad outlines in this chapter the assimilationist impetus of the
“Gay International,” and, in response to former critiques, he
makes it clear that for him the question is not about the agency of
those who engage in transnational LGBT politics, but rather, the
pernicious effect that this politics may have on a broader level, not
helping those who do not identify with these categories. Here
Massad makes an interesting move, and proposes refusal (to
accept the terms in which LGBT transnational politics frames the
debate) as a form of resistance. Moreover, he clarifies that it is not
that he does not believe in the possibility of transnational
solidarity tout court (254), but to honor such name, this solidarity
cannot be based on assimilationist forms of translation. This
solidarity should be based instead on the kind of translation that
Talal Asad, Gayatri Spivak, or Judith Butler propose, one that in
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the encounter with “the other language,” confronts us with the
need to question our own categories.
I agree with Massad again on this much-needed distinction. But
then, I wonder how this refusal that he proposes as a form of
resistance might connect with the sort of translation that he
seems to advocate in the field of transnational politics? In other
words, how is this refusal Massad is thinking about politically
articulated? And how does it specifically challenge assimilationist
politics? Surely, as according to Massad, ‘“sexuality is always
already a mode of assimilation in the logic of narcissistic
incorporation,’ such refusal has to be located beyond sexuality.
Massad confronts us here with an abyssal limit: either we give up
any possible dialogue or translation in relation to “the sexual
domain” (as it becomes an intractable field, not just untranslatable,
but also assimilationist), or we try to think what might be there
beyond sexuality that might somehow still be associated with “the
sexual.”
I feel very much in sympathy with Massad’s position. Where we
might differ is how to deal with this limit. Maybe in a more naïve
fashion, I have been trying to find in a sort of “decolonizing” queer
negativity—as a critical approach that questions the fixation of
signifiers (and not the queer as the signifier of any positive
position), a form of critique that therefore questions borders from
the place of a constitutive outside—potential to think about
critical forms of translation that oppose sexuality (as a specific
dispositive) but do not dissolve any and all reference to “the
sexual” as an indeterminate field that evokes, as Massad himself
refers to, pleasures, desires, practices, behaviors, feelings, etcetera.
Massad may well contest this stance, and insist that an antiimperialist and anti-racist move should oppose this.
He might be right, at stake here is the question of the possibilities
of translation. After all, as he puts it, the ultimate task is to study
“how Islam is produced in sexuality,” or in other words, how
sexuality as an onto-epistemological Western category already
depends on the production of Islam as its other. This means that
sexuality has to become something else from the point of view of
anti-imperialist translation. This is the challenge that I believe I
share with Massad, albeit in relation to different political
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constellations, namely the task of undoing sexuality as we know it.
5.30.16 | Joseph Massad
Reply
Response to Leticia Sabsay
I am grateful to Sabsay’s generosity and her serious engagement
with my work. Indeed, I, too, have been informed by Sabsay’s
important work on sexual citizenship and its links to Orientalism,
which I discuss in Islam in Liberalism. It does seem, however, that
we have a differing assessment of whether the discourse and
institution of rights in liberalism could challenge forms of state
regulation that it sustains.
Sabsay invokes Wendy Brown’s understanding of liberal rights as
that which we cannot not want. In her most recent book, Brown
persuasively argues that neoliberalism undermines the very bases
of liberal democracy, which, however, she insists, should remain
the point of departure for those who oppose neoliberalism in
order to bring about what liberalism promises but never delivers.
14
I find this an inadequate framework, let alone an ideal
political agenda to resist neoliberalism. Brown is not blind to the
horrific record of liberal democracy on the question of race,
gender, class, and governance more generally, but she still
believes that liberal democracy carries “the language and promise
of shared political equality, freedom, and popular sovereignty,” to
which we must strive. I have always been wary of this dominant
academic and intellectual preference for the language and promise
of liberalism. For example, would Brown or any American liberal
ever be able to overcome their internalization of American Cold
War propaganda against the Soviet Union and agree to posit
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Soviet socialism as our point of departure to resist neoliberalism
based on the language and promise of Soviet socialism? After all,
Soviet socialism provided so much more than liberalism even
promised to deliver on the questions of race, gender, and class.
Soviet socialism guaranteed the Soviet peoples the right to work,
the right to housing, to free education, free healthcare, free
daycare, among other social benefits. While the Soviet system was
highly restrictive of political and cultural rights and was run by a
Eurocentric managerial class of party apparatchiks who had
disproportionate benefits, often captured by the term “state
capitalism,” why could the socialist and social democratic
promises of the USSR and its 1936 Constitution which promised
a future democratic communist society not be chosen as a point of
departure to combat neoliberalism, let alone liberalism and its
false promises, in the hope of striving and fighting for what
Soviet socialism promised but did not and could not deliver?
Here, I believe that Sara Farris’s insistence in her comments on
my book on the importance of the much-ignored economic, a
point with which Islam in Liberalism is in full agreement, as the
central question to be asked when it comes to Europe’s
relationship to “Islam,” Muslim refugees, and Muslim women,
offers a more promising approach on which to base our resistance
to liberalism and neoliberalism. Abandoning the discourse of
rights and the governmentality it enshrines globally is not
therefore an abandonment of the horizon of “freedom, justice, or
equality,” but rather of the liberal onto-epistemology that makes
them intelligible, as Sabsay fully recognizes. Here, my sense is that
it is socialism that we cannot not want—not liberalism.
Sabsay explains that my book “proposes refusal (to accept the
terms in which LGBT transnational politics frames the debate) as
a form of resistance. . . . In other words, how is this refusal
Massad is thinking about politically articulated?” I can only
answer by insisting that this is not a proposal, but rather an
observation, as this “refusal” is not politically articulated by the
majority of people whom Western European sexuality
interpellates as “sexual,” but whose desires are not the ground of
their onto-epistemological being. It is a passive and not an active
refusal in a sense; in that sexuality as presented by Western
human rights discourse and the Euro-American regimes of
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sexuality as the truth of being, is unintelligible and therefore
untranslatable to most peoples. As the Euro-American ontoepistemology of sexuality has so far failed to produce most people
(excluding elites and increasingly the middle classes) in nonEurope as subjects of sexuality, evidenced by the West European
and Euro-American intransigent Gay- and Straightinternationalist campaigns (launched by governments and by
NGOs) to coerce them into becoming subjects of sexuality, their
refusal is not a conscious one at all. The moment people enter the
incited discourse of sexuality and offer a discursive and political
refusal to it in claiming that they have a “different” form of
sexuality or a differing understanding of the “sexual” would be the
moment their refusal is no longer a refusal, as they would have
been already incorporated in the universal reach of the sexual and
can no longer exist outside it.
Sabsay is correct that I contest the preservation of the “sexual” as a
determinate field, as I am not sure this is a conundrum for
everyone but rather only for those who are subjects of Western
sexuality and who insist on linking all of this as a menu on the
plate of the sexual which is coerced into an identity, and frame it
in identitarian terms. I fear that this attachment to the sexual, as a
potentially rights-bearing category, keeps us within the realm of
the liberal. Desires, pleasures, physical practices, feelings, and
behaviors need not be and are not huddled under the umbrella of
the sexual except within the confines of the onto-epistemology of
Euro-American sexuality. We are not here in the “romance of the
incommensurate,” rather, we are in effect plainly in the realm of
the incommensurate tout court. Western sexual subjects’ insistence
on universalizing their regime of truth is not simply a matter of
refusing to recognize those who are not sexual subjects but a
realization that their subjectivity hinges on eliminating the
ontological life of those who resist. Patchen Markell’s observation
in this regard is most pertinent: “Relations of social and political
subordination . . . [should be viewed] not as systematic failures by
some people to recognize others’ identities, but as ways of
patterning and arranging the world that allow some people and
groups to enjoy a semblance of sovereign agency at others’
expense.”
15
Sabsay and I are obviously in agreement that the
regime of Western sexuality is constituted by/depends on the
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production of Islam as its other. This means that sexuality has to
become something that it can never be from the point of view of
anti-imperialist translation. In short, sexuality becomes something
that we cannot not refuse.
Add your voice and join the discussion
6.1.16 | Alberto Toscano
Response
Liberalism Terminable and
Interminable
ISLAM IN LIBERALISM BEGINS with a stark thesis, whose
intellectual and political consequences Joseph Massad deftly traces
across five distinct if closely interlinked interventions: the
construction of a polemical image of “Islam” is a condition of
possibility for the emergence of liberalism and Europe as
identities. Some might take this combative iteration of the
Saidean critique of Orientalism as a provocation. And yet, reading
these pages in the context (to choose but one) of the diversion of
the Canadian prime-ministerial election campaign by the “debate”
over one woman’s decision to wear a niqab at a citizenship
ceremony, that thesis gains a kind of dismaying self-evidence.
Massad declares that the objective of the book is to show “how
Islam became so central to liberalism as ideology and as identity,
indeed how liberalism as the antithesis of Islam became one of the
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key components of the very discourse through which Europe as a
modern identity was conjured up . . . how in the process of
identification, the emergence of Europe was predicated on a series
of projections, disavowals, displacements, and expulsions in order
to produce a coherent self, cleansed of others to which this self
was opposed in its very constitution” (11). This is a process in
which, though Massad doesn’t explore it further, the “othering” of
Islam from the “sacred space” of liberalism (to borrow from
Domenico Losurdo), intersected with those enacted by discourses
of race, gender and class.
Massad’s own concise formulation nicely sums up the horizon of
his research programme: “liberalism’s external others turn out to
be internal to it.” Though Massad announces at the outset a
forthcoming Genealogy of Islam, which will provide a historical
reconstruction of this antithetical or antagonistic discourse on
“Islam” (Islam in Liberalism is described as an introduction to this
Genealogy that grew far beyond its initial coordinates), and
notwithstanding its rich historical reflections (the treatment of
the imperialist European framing of the “Caliphate Question” is
one of the book’s highlights), Islam in Liberalism is firmly anchored
in contemporary scholarly, political and activist debates.
This raises an interesting conundrum for such a “history of the
present”: “liberalism,” especially via its imperial and AngloAmerican model, has become at one and the same time a
hegemonic and rather amorphous notion, one whose ties to
classical philosophical or political liberalisms is not always
straightforward (despite rote declarations of filial piety vis-à-vis
founding fathers and the like by present leaders). We may easily
agree that today’s self-defined liberals shape their self around an
Islamic other. We may also see a formative role for Islam in the
Enlightenment trajectories of liberal thought (though how
constituent the Islamic referent was for a Locke, a Smith or a
Hume remains on open object of inquiry). But the continuity
between the two cannot be taken for granted.
This is not to say that, in spite of the very ample denotation that
Massad accords liberalism, he is a partisan of the univocity of
liberalism—Islam in Liberalism notes significant shifts over time in
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images of Islam in Europe, as well as, crucially, the way in which
the liberal enlistment of Islam in neo-colonial strategies has also,
in some respects, trespassed the parameters of classical
Orientalism. As Massad observes: “Western and American
cultural and political commitments to democracy are as malleable
as the ‘Islam’ they seek to mobilize for different strategic ends”
(84). The “definitional flexibility of the imperial realpolitik” means
that what is required is “not necessarily an Orientalist
epistemology” (105–6). Notwithstanding this imperialist
flexibility, the fundamental tenets of Said’s Orientalism are still
very much operative, and the demarcation of and from “Islam” is
ultimately reflexive witness to the way in which “much of the
liberal controversy about Islam and democracy has really been
about the West’s own antidemocratic imperial and domestic
commitments” (106).
Islam in Liberalism comprises a sequence of very rich and erudite
forays into pivotal discursive domains in which Western
liberalism has defined itself in defining its Islamic Other
(democracy, “the woman question,” sexuality, psychoanalysis,
“semitism”). Much of the book consists of close readings which
are both illuminating (none more perhaps than his dissection of
the UNDP’s Arab Human Development Report 2005) and unsparing—
especially when it involves refuting his critics, which he does with
a kind of philological relentlessness in expansive footnotes that I
imagine will deter many a potential future critic.
In what follows I’d like to take some distance from the work of
ideological and textual criticism the book undertakes and try to
explore two of what I perceive to be the fulcrums of Islam-inliberalism, which might also extend to Islam-in-the-critique-ofliberalism. Both concern the kind of historical-political work on
epistemologies that Massad has carried out, though I don’t think
they need necessarily require the same Foucauldian allegiances
that he exhibits (273). The first is analogy as mechanism of
ideological capture, the second is subjectivity as an ethno-political
norm.
Now, while it may be argued that analogy is an inescapable
dimension of historical cognition,
16
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current uses of “Islam” in liberal political projects shows it to be a
potent trope in the construction of the political identity of the
West and its projection onto its Others, and in this case “Islam.”
Massad argues this very effectively when he writes about the
present ideological offensive of liberals and “not a few Marxists”
(it’d be useful to have them named and referenced here) for whom
what should be undertaken in the Arab and Muslim worlds is not
a colonial mission civilisatrice but rather a European-style
secularization which would not only transform Islam into a
Protestant-like religion confined to the private sphere but also
would usher democracy and liberal citizenship into the public
sphere unopposed by the alleged antidemocratic precepts of the one
extant Islam . . . if Protestantism is posited as the origin (or a
return to the foundational Greek origin) of a culture of democracy
and liberal citizenship, Islam is posited as the origin of undemocracy, if not of antidemocracy. (73)
This operation shows, above all perhaps, the level of historical
delusion about European history that such polemical analogies
involve—about the unequivocally civilising functions of
Protestantism, here shorn of its inaugural “civil war” in the guise
of the German Peasants’ War of 1525, of its place in further
European wars of religion, of its role in settler-colonialism. It
further demonstrates the critical role of analogy in the
developmentalist ideologies of modernization (racial,
civilisational, technological) that still pervade discourse about the
Arab and Muslim worlds. It is only to the extent that liberalism
can be placed as the redemptive post-historical terminus of such
processes, by polemically demarcating it from its others, that its
own fraught formations and abiding contradictions can be elided.
Here it is worth noting that analogy is not only operative as a
normative historical standard by which liberalism is naturalised in
a kind of philosophy of history, it is also what frequently governs
the treatment of its “Others.” In exploring the history of the idea
of fanaticism, an endeavour which could not but tackle the place
of Islam in the protocols of identification of liberalism, in how it
draws the perimeters of political rationality, I was struck over and
again by the monotony with which “illiberal subjects” (fanatics,
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enthusiasts, and so forth) were likened to one another.
17
Whether it was Keynes referring to Lenin as “a Mohammed and
not a Bismarck” or Russell saying that the Bolshevik Revolution
combined “the characteristics of the French Revolution with those
of the rise of Islam”; Jules Monnerot (once-collaborator of Bataille
in the Collège de Sociologie, later ideologue of the Front
National) declaring that “Communism is the Islam of the
Twentieth Century,” or many rightist Islamophobes inverting the
formula, to declare that “Islam is the Communism of the TwentyFirst Century”—such cognitively empty but politically-saturated
inversions are endemic to liberal-democracy and its self-image
(cousins of the association with Hitler of any inconvenient despot
from Saddam to Milosevic). Demonstrating the resilience of the
analogical imagination, they are interestingly also present in nonIslamophobic interventions, for instance in Foucault’s likening of
Khomeini to Savonarola or Thomas Müntzer.
One of the most striking precursors to such analogies was Hegel’s
remarkable short-circuit between the French Revolution and
Islam as the “Revolution of the East” in The Philosophy of History
and other texts. Though eccentric to liberalism properly so-called
—of whose Lockean and Smithian, as well as revolutionary,
variants he was an insistent critic—Hegel’s in many ways
idiosyncratic positioning of Islam within his system resonates
interestingly with the insights mobilised in Islam in Liberalism,
allowing us to reflect on the ways in which analogy, subjectivity
and history form a potent matrix within the self-conception of
“the West.” To begin with, Islam (or rather, to keep to Hegel’s
analogising name “Mohammedanism”) is literally placed in Europe,
namely in the section of The Philosophy of History covering “The
German World.” As Ian Almond usefully notes, this at first
perplexing inclusion bespeaks, among other things, Hegel’s wish
to compare the “barbaric” character of the polities of mediaeval
Germanic tribes to the military triumph and cultural splendour of
early Islam.
18
The objective was to show that the first was a
necessary precursor to civilisational progress while the latter was
a spiritual dead end. It also echoed Hegel’s deep anxieties,
evidenced in his psychic life (dreams of his wife threatened by
Muslim soldiers) and in his journalistic work on contemporary
geopolitics (as editor of the Bamberger Zeitung in which, as
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Almond again compellingly shows, Hegel included a remarkable
amount of material on Turkey).
But critically, Islam was “in” Europe also in the sense that its form
of subjectivity—which Hegel dubbed “fanaticism” and conceived of
as an “enthusiasm for the abstract” which submitted itself to the
unmediated rule of the One—so closely paralleled that of the
Jacobin wing of the French Revolution, Muhammad here being
the cousin of Robespierre (before he became that of Lenin) and
Islam being considered under the rubric “la religion et la terreur,” or
even likened to the Aufklärung, as in a passage from the lectures
which described Islam as “the religion of the Enlightenment, of
reflection, of abstract thinking, which means in fact that the truth
cannot be cognized, cannot be known.”
19
In spite, or perhaps because of, his dialectical reproduction of
Orientalist schemas, Hegel’s equation of Islam and Revolution
remains of interest for the way in which it both reflexively
provides a scheme for linking history, analogy and subjectivity and
exceeds the liberal demarcation by treating Islam in terms of its
excess of universality (this is of course what also allows him to
sublate, which is to say retain, Orientalist tropes of despotism and
decadence in his own work: as the destructive energies of a
creative fanaticism wane, all that is left is a kind of listless
corruption). It would be of considerable interest here to follow up
on Massad’s insightful linking of his own critique of the
translation of “Islam” as submission to Balibar’s crucial exploration
of the relationship between subject and subjection in the history
of European political thought (282).
20
The way in which the picture of the fanatical Islamic subject, the
subject of submission which is at once too passive and too active,
and thus never format-able as citizen, is a constituent part of the
European theory (and practice) of the subject is certainly a crucial
dimension of any further research of Islam in liberalism (but also
Islam in the critique of liberalism, for instance Hegel’s or Marx’s,
or indeed in Western philosophy more broadly). In Massad’s own
formulation: “Citizenship as the antonym of subjection is not only
Orientalist, it is the very figuration of Orientalism” (54). This
notion of the subject is also, in a manner which is crucial for
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liberalism and for the political self-image of “the West” more
broadly, linked to that of the individual. So much is registered in
another passage from Hegel: “The individual, the Muslim, is not
like the European, who has a variety of viewpoints. If the
European is a convolution of diverse relationships, the Muslim is
one whole and only this one.”
21
Or, the Muslim is
anthropologically and culturally different (and therefore not a real,
which is to say mediated, individual) because he does not have a
proper relationship to difference. He is an indifferent subject of the
One.
Massad himself has provided a crucial component of such a
critique of Orientalist theories of the citizen-subject in his fourth
chapter, on the psychoanalysis “of” Islam. I now wish I’d had
access to Massad’s painstaking and incisive research, especially
into Arab-language material, when I briefly tackled Fethi
Benslama’s work in Fanaticism in my effort to present the way in
which the potential of Freudian psychoanalysis as an atheist
methodology had been squandered in favour of the forging of a
“secular clinic” which ignored all of the pitfalls of collective, or
worse civilisational, psychologies.
22
Such a secular clinic fuses
history, analogy and subjectivity, to propose that individual and
collective psychic formation should repeat (symptomatically, not
in a psychoanalytic way) the normative path of a Western subject.
The making of fin-de-siècle European neuroses into normative
formations across the Arab and Muslim world is perhaps one of
the greatest ironies of the project(ion) of “Islam-in-liberalism.”
Against such a position, it is worth remembering the important
work of Alain Grosrichard, The Sultan’s Court: European Fantasies of
the East, which delineates how European fantasies of the Other’s
(anti-) politics structure our own, how the belief in “their” beliefs
allows “us” to believe we don’t believe. Or, in Mladen Dolar’s gloss
on Grosrichard, the fantasy of the seraglio, and of “Asiatic
Despotism” more broadly, allows the European subject to believe
that “somewhere, in some distant Asian land, there are some
people naïve enough to believe.” Following Talal Asad, from
whom Massad draws repeatedly and effectively in the book, one
could perhaps say that it is in the very notion of religion—
modelled on Christianity, whence the supposedly universal
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models of (Protestant) reformation and secularism—that the
original sin of analogy lies.
In the book’s last chapter, “Forget Semitism!,” Massad shows how
a form of analogy and identification between religions, the
tenuous construction of the “Abrahamic,” can serve a powerful
depoliticising function, blurring the ongoing facts of settlercolonialism and dispossession for the sake of an irenic-redemptive
discourse (in which the pronouncements of a Jimmy Carter
appear as provocatively analogous to those of a Jacques Derrida).
This last sally against a “liberalism with a human face” (341) is in
keeping with the anti-imperialist politics of knowledge driving
Massad’s project—a politics which, as his numerous objections and
refutations suggest, unapologetically requires the abandonment of
many or even most types of contemporary investigation,
academic, non-governmental or activist, into subjectivies, gender
and sexualities in the Arab and Muslim worlds.
By way of a concluding remark, which is to say by way of opening
the discussion on “Islam in liberalism” further, I wonder whether
it is possible further to explore two interlinked issues raised by
Massad’s method and research.
First, is it possible to define the specificity of the Islamic referent in
liberalism (and Europe and the West’s) self-definition-throughothering? One is struck here by the relative invariance over very
long periods of the same stigmatising negative markers, as well as
by the way in which they shade into those ascribed to “other
Others,” so to speak. But also, as in the Hegelian example above,
by the manner in which the supposedly most singularly European
phenomenon, the French Revolution, can be “Islamicized” at the
same time as the figure of Muhammad is treated by analogy with
European revolutionary history. How is Islam-in-liberalism at
different times articulated with racialised, gendered and classed
“otherings.”
23
This opens onto my second and last question, which has to do
with the unity of the democratic liberal West. Massad shows
expertly how so many of the images of Islam are purgative
projections out of the European or Western body politic of its
own anxieties and contradiction, and above all its own despotism,
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its own history of subjectivity as subjection. But an ideological
dominant that can only define itself through such incessant
negative projection however cannot be so consistent after all. To
what extent is “liberalism” or “the West” one? The unity or
homogeneity of many of its effects, and of its discourses, should
not oblige us to infer an internal consistency able to “sublate” an
extremely contradictory history and an unstable present. To
paraphrase Freud, Massad’s work may help us to explore how
“liberalism” (and therefore its critique) might be interminable, in
its shaping of our political imaginaries, but also how it is also
terminable, in many of its operative political and ideological
formations.
6.1.16 | Joseph Massad
Reply
Response to Alberto Toscano
Alberto Tosacano’s engagement with my book is an illuminating
exegesis with much that is fresh and novel, not least his insightful
exploration of the fulcrums of how Islam is produced inside
liberalism. I thank him for a cogent and incisive articulation of my
project, namely his summation of how Islam operates in
liberalism through “analogy as mechanism of ideological capture,” and
“subjectivity as an ethno-political norm.”
Toscano asks an important question: “How is Islam-in-liberalism
at different times articulated with racialised, gendered and classed
‘otherings’?” The book’s point of departure is that liberalism has
many modes of othering, and Islam, as I say in the introduction, is
a central and principal other though not an exclusive one. Africa
and Africans are another major other of liberalism articulated in
relation to this schema. The liberal (and Protestant) discourses on
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Africans—polygamy and homosexuality but also despotism and
dictatorship—often analogize Africans to Muslims through what
liberalism believes are abominable practices. I should note,
however, that what remains most stark in the African case is the
bio-racialization of Africans, which is not always operative in the
same way with Muslims, though it is operative often as I show in
my last chapter on Muslims and Arabs as “Semites.” It should be
emphasized also that unlike Muslims, who are defined primarily
in their relationship to an illiberal and un-European faith,
Africans in these discourses mostly do not get to have a religion,
though the history of European and North American Protestant
missionaries in what is identified as the Muslim World and Africa
(their overlap notwithstanding) is not that dissimilar.
Toscano also asks a question with regards to the alleged unicity
that Europe, liberalism, and Protestantism attribute to their
divided, conflictual history and present. “To what extent is
‘liberalism’ or ‘the West’ one? The unity or homogeneity of many
of its effects, and of its discourses, should not oblige us to infer an
internal consistency able to ‘sublate’ an extremely contradictory
history and an unstable present. To paraphrase Freud, Massad’s
work may help us to explore how ‘liberalism’ (and therefore its
critique) might be interminable, in its shaping of our political
imaginaries, but also how it is also terminable, in many of its
operative political and ideological formations.”
Islam in Liberalism emphasizes throughout that liberalism and
Europe are not the unities they purport to be. Indeed, I clearly
state in the introduction to the book:
The question then becomes whether the production of Islam’s
many new referents was part of the same translational process of
producing its many new antonyms, from being a singular
Christendom or Christianity to many more opposites. I should
note here that the Western and Orientalist deployment of
Christianity and Christendom themselves as singular is based on a
retrospective deployment of a unitary community on what was
historically disunited peoples, doctrines, and churches.
Indeed, the West itself is not only not one, but its unfinished
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constitution is constantly being remade as I show in relation to
the “sexual” question: “The ‘West’ has been normalized as the
‘West’ by a series of ontological and epistemological operations,
including its hetero-homo binarization. It is these operations that
produce it as the West and produce the West’s others as opposites
or approximations of it” (261).
Finally, and in addition to the many liberals I cite, Toscano asks
that I cite the Marxists I cursorily referenced and who also
partake of this liberal ontology. The list of more recent claimants
to Marxism who espouse an onto-epistemology that sees Islam as
the other of democracy and socialism include for example Philip
Bonosky, a Soviet-style American Marxist who represents Islam
as the religion of feudalism,
24
and contemporary claimants to
Leninism like Slavoj Zizek (who is cited in the book), or to
Maoism like the irrepressible Samir Amin, whose fulminations in
support of the Sisi dictatorship (which he presents as a motor of
progress
25
) as democratic progress and liberation from the
illiberal and anti-democratic obscurantism of Islamists continue
uninterrupted through the present. Indeed Amin is explicit that
“in the peripheries, the monopoly of power captured by the
dominant local superclass . . . involves the negation of democracy.
The rise of political Islam provides an example of such a
regression.”
26
Add to Amin the many members of Arab
Communist parties and socialist activists who view Islam as the
enemy of socialism and social democracy as witnessed by the
events in Egypt, Jordan, Tunisia, and Iraq in the last decade) and
many lesser figures. As Toscano shows, these analogical strategies
are shared by non-liberals like Hegel and Foucault as well.
Add your voice and join the discussion
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