Radical Skin, Moderate Masks: de-Radicalising the Muslim and Racism in Post-Racial Societies

Radical Skin, Moderate Masks

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Challenging Migration Studies This provocative new series challenges the established field of migration studies to think beyond its policy-oriented frameworks and to engage with the complex and myriad forms in which the global migration regime is changing in the twenty-first century. It proposes to draw together studies that engage with the current transformation of the politics of migration, and the meaning of ‘migrant’, from the below of grassroots, local, transnational and multi-sited coalitions, projects and activisms. Attuned to the contemporary resurgence of migrant-led and migration-related movements, and anti-racist activism, the series builds on work carried out at the critical margins of migration studies to evaluate the ‘border industrial complex’ and its fall-outs, build a decolonial perspective on global migration flows, and critically reassess the link between (im)migration, citizenship and belonging in the cross-border future.

Series Editors Alana Lentin, Associate Professor in Cultural and Social Analysis at Western Sydney University Gavan Titley, Senior Lecturer in Media Studies at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth

Titles in the Series Radical Skin, Moderate Masks: De-radicalising the Muslim and Racism in Post-racial Societies, Yassir Morsi

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Radical Skin, Moderate Masks De-radicalising the Muslim and Racism in Post-racial Societies

Yassir Morsi

London • New York

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Published by Rowman & Littlefield International Ltd Unit A, Whitacre Mews, 26-34 Stannary Street, London SE11 4AB www.rowmaninternational.com Rowman & Littlefield International Ltd.is an affiliate of Rowman & Littlefield 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706, USA With additional offices in Boulder, New York, Toronto (Canada), and Plymouth (UK) www.rowman.com Copyright © 2017 Yassir Morsi All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Available ISBN 978-1-78348-911-4 (cloth) ISBN 978-1-78348-912-1 (paper) ISBN 978-1-78348-913-8 (electronic) ∞ ™The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992. Printed in the United States of America

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My Lord, I ask you to expand my breast, make my task easy, undo the knot in my tongue so that my speech will become comprehensible.

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Contents

PART I: Introduction.. 1 1 (My Other) Research Question

3

2 Background (or the Muslim’s Psychic Register) to Question

15

3 (My Auto-ethnographic) Method, Outline and Objectives

25

PART II: FABULOUS

35

4 Introducing (the First Act or) Case Study One

37

5 (The ‘Fabulous’ Mask of) Waleed Aly

47

6 Finding(s) in Case Study One (the First Orientalism)

55

PART III: MILITANT

63

7 Introducing (the Second Act or) Case Study Two

65

8 (The ‘Militant’ Mask of) Hamza Yusuf

75

9 Finding(s) in Case Study Two (the Second Orientalism)

85

PART IV: TRIUMPHANT

93

10 Introducing (The Third Act or) Case Study Three

95

11 (The ‘Triumphant’ Mask of) Maajid Nawaz

101

12 Finding(s) in Case Study Three (the Third Orientalism)

111

PART V: CONCLUSION

119

13 The Social (Ir)relevance of Research

121

vii

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viii Contents

14 (Questioning My) Contribution

135

15 (The Lack of a) Conclusion (or the Möbius Strip)

143

Notes 153 Bibliography 163 Index169

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Part I

Introduction..

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Chapter 1

(My Other) Research Question

1 On 9/11, following the second plane’s collision, and without much thought, I asked myself a rather worrying question. It has haunted me ever since. At the time, I knew little about politics, little about the Middle East or about al-Qaeda. No evidence as to who was responsible for the attacks had been provided, yet somehow, I knew of a responsible Other and I whispered to myself, ‘what have we done?’ 2 I suspect that I am an undisciplined and early scholar who lacks scholarly pace. Case in point, I will start by mentioning the wonderful Ashis Nandy and his brilliant work The Intimate Enemy. It greatly influenced me. And, I recall it fondly. But, I never closely read it and after the next paragraph or so, I will not bring it up again. Instead of dutifully giving a reading of Nandy's important arguments, as a better-paced scholar might, I will simply introduce a point and rush through to my next idea. I only mention his book because of what he provoked in me. For, this is my approach. I wish to trace the impacts of my experiences in reading scholarly work as much as recall the content of the work itself. When I first read Nandy as a wide-eyed student, a most forceful point came to my realisation. And, my then crude attempt to ‘talk back to empire’ began to take shape. This is why I remember his book. In Nandy I found an angle, a trajectory and a path. I found an opponent, and myself, and I awoke politically to gain a misgiving for the ‘states of mind’ of the colonised, awoke to 3

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the politicised Muslim who carries with them a project unbeknown to me at the time.1 I also mention this only because I wish to warn my studious reader that my book’s method (or lack of) is its haphazard style. Throughout my life as a Muslim of the West, I have too often appropriated works and (mis)read them to sound smart or play angry or figure things out as I go along. Such an approach has helped me with the arsenal of complexes that come with growing up as a person of colour. But, because of this wayward method, I am repeatedly, typically, left with a hazy incomplete recollection of things and what I wish to say. I only partly understand and reconstruct what an author like Nandy says. Yes, upon reflection, I have gained a dictionary of anticolonial or anti-racist terms. And yes, I have an impression of the work's importance. But, I rarely achieve a clear or complete view of their thoughts. It has not only shaped the way I think, but how I have learnt to write. I guess this is the result of years of bad habits, and my impatience to fight the West. I admit now that I pursued a tongue of fast-talking intellectualism. Words became my shield and concepts my weapon. So, I flipped quickly through pages and searched about for the aesthetics of a critical postcolonial scholarship to find myself a subjectivity, to fight racism, to be Muslim. I inherited what Nandy calls the ‘the crudity and inanity’ of colonialism. I found this rewarding until my subjectivity collapsed, that is, until I read Fanon.  3 This book resulted from exploring this collapse. It mixes partly read things with partly expressed Islams and partly recalled memories. It is written in the mood of a Dionysian drunkenness, which I will explain in more detail shortly. But for now I wish to put words to what I mean, and say the West is home and it is not; I hate it and love it, and hate to love it; I denounce the rhetoric of freedom in my pursuit of freedom. This dual and ambivalent aim too often imbalances me. Whether I am conscious or not, I read to write in ways where one part of me abrogates the other. With all that said, I also believe a single aim binds my approach. My political habit is to make visible the (less than visible) centre of Western society’s racialised power, to identify the traps of whiteness. I want to mention such debasing power, work through it, and to denounce the illusionary standards it demands from me. I want to explore the many ways I am compelled to be a good or bad Muslim.  I have come to dislike the neatness of the good Muslim, in thinking and talking about Islam and racism. I am repetitive and disorganized. I dislike

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(My Other) Research Question

5

the right angles of today’s scholarship. I hate the performance of a balanced Islam. It is such a lie. The Muslim world is in turmoil and so am I. It is violent. It is regressive. It is burning and harmfully patriarchal and its beautiful and everything in between. It is in a sense to me partly known and a greatly unknown thing, and I must reject the therapeutic tones of a good Muslim who speaks to help ease (a very privileged) white anxiety and speak of it through common sense and a flow of premises. For the Dionysian thrown-ness that I will describe and have and inherited as a Muslim of the West deserves words beyond those of ‘terrorist’ or ‘radical’ or ‘moderate’ or ‘good.’ And, so I ramble to make sense of it all. 4 As a short summary, Nandy describes two types of colonialisms.2 Occupation of lands defines the obvious first, while ‘rationalists, secularists and liberals’ advance the less-obvious second. The second type of colonialism sees elites offer Western thought as a gift to the primitives. Here colonialism masks itself through a noble speech of bettering natives. But the second type is a withdrawal from the first. The root of it lies in the logic of the first type of colonialism. For such lofty aims of liberating us through their culture is an excellent lie, to erase the footprints of Europe’s violence. It helps the colonialists fall into a fantasy of their civility to solve their original barbarity. Hence the undertaking of an Apollonian ‘Westernese’ babble of promoting civility erases the Dionysian results of its making.3 5 For the benefit of the readers, this somewhat messy ‘auto-ethnography’ best start with its major point. In its easiest form, in a single (though vague) sentence, I propose that the Apollonian colonises half of Muslims today. By half, I mean conceptually not numerically. I mean the moderate of the moderate/radical binary. I use the Apollonian to mean the aesthetics of conversation that conceals colonialism’s bloodied past. It stands for the beauty of bleach, of performing a talk about ‘togetherness’, of chatting about diversity, of loving tolerance, of right angles, of neatness and loyalties to nations. It comes from overlooking the concrete, Dionysian conditions of the Other’s coloured bodies and left-behind lives and the forgotten affects of such.  The sweet sounds of the ‘rationalists, secularists and liberals’ almost always divorce themselves from an imperial violence that privileged them.

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Sure, they may criticise such histories, all day long, as a way to forget. But colonialism built infrastructures and markets to empower and naturalise these European tongues. The victories of democracy and liberalism have not become universal and humanist truths and speech from thin air. They have come not only from a logic, a clarity of reason, or from noble self-reflection alone, but also from blood and slavery. The Apollonian is thus the antidote; is a culture of forgetfulness; is neatness; is Europe’s amnesia; is the ruling spirit that makes the Westernese colour-blind with a goodly amount of common sense; is the fashionable mask of the day; is a language that moderates wear when they damn Islamists in the same way Europe damned its Oriental Muslim. The radical becomes the Other-within-the-other, is backward, uncivilised and heathen ... and you know the rest, because Europe taught us “us”.   The Apollonian is thus something like the sublime of the West – a moral, intellectual, metaphysical, spiritual and artistic attraction that marks European civilisation. That makes it different from the Other. It is what allows everyone else to be exotic. The Apollonian thus refers to this sense of greatness and order beyond all possible historical calculations of Europe’s past. It is beyond any true objective measurement or any other culture’s imitation. It just is Western. Any close reading of European history would introduce its underbelly, its Dionysian violence and uninhabited wilderness in the colonies, whereas the Apollonian refers to the beauty of an abstracted democracy and liberalism beyond concrete pasts. It celebrates a historically formless Europe represented by the supposed boundlessness of its Enlightenment values and by the a priori arrival of these values as a gift to us. Such aesthetics makes the idea of democracy seem a logical link to all successes. Today’s accumulated Western wealth, for instance, becomes a selfevident consequence to what is natural about democracy’s doings. It is not the result of colonialism or aggressive military expansion. Thus the Apollonian is a working lie and a seductive siren of a colour-blind tune. It irradiates the ‘positivity’ of Western triumph at the expense of what it hides. Its decorative language of liberalism, rationalism and secularism all but forecloses the worlds, histories and bodies of colour. It conceals all that has been sacrificed in Europe’s trumpeting of self. Put simply, the Apollonian is a beautiful face of Western power – the second colonisation. It shapes our preferences through aesthetic appeal and attraction of its civility and progressive language. The accredited Westernese culture and humanist values give the Apollonian its powerful and abstract currency. For Apollo, as Nietzsche writes, is the god of all plastic art and energies.4 And as the etymology of the name indicates, he who is the shining one. Apollo is the deity of light, and he also rules over the beautiful illusion of the inner world of fantasy.5

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(My Other) Research Question

7

For fair skin, blonde hair and blue eyes for the colonised is a beauty that conceals the conditions of making itself everybody’s criteria. It just is. So too is liberalism. But, it is also because, as Nietzsche writes, ‘Beauty gains victory over the suffering inherent in life’. In a certain sense, we must tell a lie to make pain disappear.6 And what lies must we tell to conceal from ourselves the formation of the West? More importantly, whose pain must disappear? We must also keep in mind Nietzsche’s observations about Apollo as a lie. It is not a direct one. For example, I am of course not suggesting that the West does not discuss its past colonialism. It hides it by knowing it. Perhaps more than any other empire(s), it acknowledges its past sins. But more often than not its sins are not an explanation of the racialised structures of today’s world. Rather the confession becomes a current proof of its self-reflexive greatness. It shows the willingness to criticise itself and be accountable, unlike the despotic Middle Eastern regimes. It is a wonderful act of self-idealisation. How often has the Western voice scorned the wrongs of its past while performing, interruptedly, the same superiority that marked its racism? But it is also embodied in ourselves. The beautiful aesthetics of the Enlightenment define today’s good manners and respectability. It tones policies and becomes the high culture of individuality, logic, reason and progress in everyday speech. Also commonly known as our civility, we perform it to reflect our centredness, our capacity for measurement. The Apollonian is a harmonious tune that expresses a humanist optimism. It controls the disruptive Dionysian emotions within us. In the grip of the Apollonian spirit we cease becoming anything but beautiful or not. But, I should close on this most important point. The Apollonian is a cultural force that works to erase the world of pain (and words) of colour. Its purpose is to blind us from the violence that racism built and binds us to. Hence, above all, I mean by the Apollonian a secondary colonialism detached from its first. I mean a celebrated language that we use to gain favour and recognition, and how while we use this language it erases our histories. It goes without saying because the inclination to speak the language of white supremacy today comes without saying. The language of equality, rights and liberty comes as a gift. Some even say that it will free us Muslims from our darker selves, from Islamism and from even Islamophobia. It comes as a gift, as this book will show, as a Trojan horse.  6 The readers may have noted something. It will make sense shortly. But, the Arabic word ‘Bismillah’ (meaning ‘in God’s name’) remains the part title. Up until it was written, a blank screen stared back at me long after

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my publisher’s deadline. I had spent all my time over editing a swaying voice, looking for a voice. In the end, with a senseless self-surveillance of how I should speak as a Muslim, I gradually withdrew. The word Bismillah replaced the word ‘Introduction’. It stays as a reminder. In its absence and before its appearance I had let go a far more honest voice. I had turned aside my initial more scientific ‘research question’, to now ask: Why could I not write this book? 7 I had not initially planned to write this, or like this. I had wanted to write about the Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) programmes that aimed to de-radicalise suspect Muslims. But, in those first of many unproductive months, I had written nothing and felt a growing pressure to put words on the page. I deleted everything before staring aimlessly at my keyboard for hours a day. Each key on the top row represented a red letter in the present vocabulary of a Muslim’s life: Q for al-Qaeda, W for War, E for Extradition, R for Radicalisation, T for Terror and so on. And I have often thought of the War on Terror as a similar discursive network of an interlinking vocabulary, its language a connection of politically loaded words that interpellate the Muslim. The words tie to form a trap, to catch, to produce and to racialise my experiences as such, the logic of which commits me to a jargon of Otherness (and Y is for You).  And so, among those silent months, in searching for a way out, by fortuitously reading a line from Stacey Holman-Jones, I rejoice somewhat at attaining a method. More accurately, I rejoice at finding a description of my aims. She describes auto-ethnography as ‘a blurred genre ... [that] refuses categorization’.7 It is a fictive tradition where tensions exist with the more positivist sides of academia. For auto-ethnographers weave stories/memories together with academic references to upset standing conventions. They call up emotional moods, sights and discords to piece together the ordinary everyday life.8 Thus, for me, an auto-ethnography helps highlight the firstorder questions. It brings into doubt the assumed ‘objective’ spaces I sojourn in. For how much of ourselves in our scholarly performance do/should we include, and what should we leave out?9  For me, I say, because to a politically agitated Muslim of the day the question is vital: How much ‘I’ of Islam should be left out of ‘I’ the scholar? To throw my answer right away: nothing. I therefore promise to make known my work only through what I show. I drop into the noose of my Islamic peculiarities, into a ‘Muslimitude’, into the cultural language the War on Terror

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(My Other) Research Question

9

compels. In Fanon’s words, I do so because I must. The colonised intellectuals have to first travel to the floor of the pit before they rise.  8 When trying to define the term ‘Moderate’ of this book’s title Radical Skin, Moderate Masks, a powerful image from Patricia Williams’s Reith lectures came to mind.10 I remembered her fifth lecture in the series The Genealogy of Race. Williams briefly mentions how Ford Motors photographed ethnic minorities to capture their workforce’s diversity. Angered but curious by their audacity, I searched for more. I eventually learnt how in an ‘ethnically cleansed’ version of their original ad made for Polish audiences, Ford photoshopped white faces onto their black and brown workers. The Independent quoted Douglas Sinclair, who described how his ‘body was there, dressed in my overalls, the rings on my fingers were still there, but I had glasses on and a white face’.11 It came to mind because of Williams’s confronting response. She asked, ‘Are we accommodating different audiences or erasing that which we must repress?’ I could have asked the same question as to why I could not initially write the book. Williams provides a powerful visual exemplifying the point in a brilliantly crafted final few sentences. She describes herself at a desk writing the lecture. She ‘reaches for a little bottle of White-Out’. She brushes the ‘correctional fluid’ over her fingers. In seconds they melt to the knuckle. Watching herself disappear quietly, she assures us of feeling no pain. It is the subtlest of sensations.12 Williams erases what we must repress: her blackness. I myself am not black. I cannot speak of the lasting, multiple acts of a racial violence that targets a black life and body. I ought to then duly acknowledge this fact and make sure that I do not erase, for I am wholeheartedly indebted to black scholarship. Without its long, illustrious, embodied and painful rejections of the terrors of racism (and without exaggeration), I would remain politically illiterate about who I am as a Muslim and person of colour. Most notably, I owe Fanon almost everything. I must also acknowledge that I write this book as an immigrant (and by extension, a settler) who sits in a university library built on the land of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin nation. 9 Only by looking back can I suggest that Williams’s visual example that accompanied her striking question led me to see liberal society’s use of

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‘correctional fluid’ everywhere. It led me to see the many ways we erase and white-out all that which we must repress. Readers would have also noticed this book title’s unashamed honouring of Black Skin, White Masks. Its influence is beyond erasure. But, what exactly do I owe Fanon? What can I take from a book that discusses the psychology attached to the black body? I acknowledge that racism articulates itself differently and unequally in various contexts. But I believe it shares the hideous feature of an anxious white gaze. It burns its sight into all of colour. Thus reflecting on the dehumanising ways by which the War on Terror portrays the Muslim, I readily identify with a lesson I learnt from Fanon that no matter how difficult it is, I need to admit my arsenal of complexities. I need to explore the Muslim’s register before speaking as a Muslim. For, when I first read Fanon, I had to put his book down. It may not have been about have been about me and my body, it could not be about me, but its truth hurt me. He outlined the psychological deficit whiteness inscribed in the black subject. Could I draw the same analogy for my life as an Arab Muslim? Did I have a right to? At the very least, I can say that he taught me how my very being of Muslim had attached itself to the phantasmic gaze of whiteness. He taught me about my endless pursuit for recognition by that white gaze through wearing the masks of a moderate. It is worth a summary of its impact, for the analogy works up until a point. Black Skin, White Masks begins from the perspective of a colonised black intellectual. Fanon strives to provide the black subject with visibility. He wants to demonstrate how he can acquire a dignifying identity. For the racist– colonialist system violently excludes the black subject for being ‘the enteral victim of an essence’. It excludes him for an appearance for which he is not responsible. Thus, the colonised black man must first ‘say no to those who attempt to build a definition of him’.13 But, importantly, this ‘no’ comes with an alternative ‘yes’. Colonialism’s racist apparatus grants the black subjects social integration only after they accept its own racial conditions. Namely, they must assimilate themselves into the hierarchies of racism’s ‘range of colors’. They can come to accept Europe’s sealing them into their own bodies, into their own particularities, into their own fabricated Otherness. Fanon rejects this. A different solution must exist to make oneself known.14 His attempt to gain self-recognition comes within a racist colonialism. It erases black culture or history beyond Europe’s own representations of what is black. It initially leads Fanon to prove the ‘existence of black civilization to the white world at all costs’.15 For now, I will stop. Since my story begins at the end of the sentence ‘at all costs’. And, I hope this work carries on Fanon’s project of finding a solution to exist through making oneself known to oneself through a different solution to the racist colonialism that seals us.

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(My Other) Research Question

11

10 The white gaze possesses a will to dominate, own, distance or erase. None of what Muslims experience today replaces the white obsession with blackness. No unique Muslim-only racism exists. I also make no dichotomy between blacks and Muslims. No one could tell the history of Islam without Africa or African Americans. I only point to the fact that racism is. One type of hatred learns from the practice of another, plagiarises the rhetoric of the past and evolves to strengthen the same gaze of all who hate. Fanon powerfully reminds us of Sartre’s point, ‘Whenever you hear anyone abuse the Jews, pay attention, because he is talking about you.’ He meant, ‘Quite simply, an anti-Semite is inevitably anti-Negro.’16And, I might add, he the racist, the anti-Semite, is also an Islamophobe. Yes, there are differences in the way racism articulates. And I am wary of the army of thousands who tell me every day that Islam is not a race. But I know not of a culture divorced from its body. Islam in all its many manifestations does not separate itself neatly into a ‘religious’ idea that floats only in my head. It shaped my world before I was thrown into it. The Islamicate embodies my everyday practices: how I eat, talk, worship, look, dress and in what spaces I inhabit. Besides, almost every historian and scholar on the matter will make the same point. Racism has never solely been about the body. The reduction of a people into a corporal ‘them’ works to mark the difference from the cultural ‘us’. It is Otherness inscribed into our body. The Other’s territory, geography, values, looks and skin intertwine with a story about our entire repulsive way of being. On this, Fanon’s telling line of questions on his ‘experience of being through others’ compels a pursuit. For what impact does the Western gaze have in producing the way I embody Islam as their Other? In what way does it erase my story? How do I experience being through them? I might suggest a similar, albeit different, discovery of myself to that of Fanon’s crushing objecthood. I have found Muslims mostly must police the cultural excesses found in ourselves and in our fellow sisters and brothers. For have we not, as Fanon did, also subjected ourselves daily ‘to an objective examination’? Fanon discovered his ‘blackness’, his ‘ethnic characteristics’ and his ‘uniform’. And what do we Muslims discover when ‘we sit down at the fire’? In Black Skin, White Masks, a lesson thus comes about knowing the self through the white gaze. Fanon outed my desire for recognition. I had long been just another Brit, another Australian, far removed from the stereotypical Muslim. I did this mostly by denouncing liberalism through parroting the works of vogue Western social theorists. I was not ethnic, I told myself. Was I a scholar? Reading Fanon I uncomfortably recalled how through the years I performed the role of a PhD-educated critical Muslim. He thus confronted

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me. For since I have come to suspect that the War on Terror coerced me to wear an intellectual mask that negated their presumption of my Otherness. From this, Fanon artfully taught me about what has led to the humiliating practice of chasing my identity. I was either them or not them. In both instances their gaze was my reference. As one of many lasting impression then, he exposed the failures of such complexes. These came to their dead end, in the form of a famous question and answer. He asked himself: ‘What does the black man want? ... The black man wants to be white.’17 Since the attacks of 9/11, I have asked myself, over and again, what does the Muslim want when she or he speaks back to Islamophobia? 11 Muslims typically open a task with ‘Bismillah’, whereas, they say, good social scientists start with a clear introduction to their research. Initially, I followed only the latter custom. When I started a few months ago, I hoped to give a well-thought-out research proposal. I was to lay out the harmful extent to which government-funded deradicalisation (CVE) programmes racialised Islamist terrorism. I planned an initial chapter to introduce this, to astutely hint at my question through a clever analogy. I was to establish its social relevance and to make sense of my overall aims. I worked for weeks on the phrasing. My imagined reader had to see the light bulb that sparked an initial judgement. And then, well-written premises would prove that the West is racist. Through this process, I told myself a most notable, scholarly tone would inflect my objective voice.  Looking back, a saying comes to mind: The best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry. And as I write this line, I think of a similar verse in meaning from the Quran. Man plans, but Allah is the planner. For after months of deleting all, I concluded that I had only mimicked what I saw was an accepted academic way. Copying the institutional standards had merely masked my failure and dishonesty. For the initial book I planned to write on violent extremism proved too difficult.  The War on Terror concedes no neutral point for politically outspoken Muslims. I am the body, the voice and the existence marked by the event and its policing of Muslim excesses. And, the last decade and a half shaped my being a Muslim and destroyed any ability to carry out a scholarly restraint.  It eventually occurred to me that I ought to write about not writing. Disruptive impulses and irregular (Dionysian) thoughts had stopped all attempts at scholarship. It had consumed too much time. These interruptions thus make my book. They ought to follow. And, they do. For my auto-ethnography essentially explores the stifled voice of a Muslim of the West. Therefore

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(My Other) Research Question

13

beneath each numbered subtitle throughout these pages lies a reorientation towards the Dionysian and away from the Apollonian. I move away from stacking evidence-based premises and towards a mindful approach of exploring that which provokes me, stimulates me and remains unfinished as a thought within me. With the erosion of categories, this is messy. But so is the Muslim. Frustration and silence characterised this approach initially. But with no further attempt to change, with no more protests, I have finally come to accept. My indisciplined voice just is. For, in all honesty, as a Muslim I could not write in the language of the War on Terror objectively. Doing the latter would only erase the former.

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Chapter 2

Background (or the Muslim’s Psychic register as) to Question

1 During a trip to Berkeley last April along with three young Muslim friends, we visited a restaurant near our hotel in San Francisco. Along with our American driver and host we spent the hour-long drive from the University of California, Davis, in a discussion on politics. We shared and compared the challenges of being Muslim in Australia and the United States. What struck me was our common flirtations with Islamism, and its eventual fading away. We had learnt to distrust it. But what remained in its absence was a sense of lacking a voice that spoke an ‘authentic’ Islamic response to the Westernese. We had long discredited the ‘moderates’ and their echoes of a concealed Apollonian liberalism. ‘We do not have a political language’, one of us concluded. This remarkable confession is reminiscent of Fanon’s discussion in Black Skin, White Masks of the importance of the French language in Martinique. Fanon had argued that the mastering of the colonisers’ language was the ‘key capable of opening doors that were barred’ but the person who possesses a language ‘consequently possesses the world expressed and implied by that language’.1  A paradox compounded further by the atmosphere of threat, shaped by the War on Terror, the Western Muslim voice resides in a perpetual non-place of transit, to await a resolution to the undecidability regarding our level of menace, of Otherness, of authenticity. Are our voices not bound to a state of what American-Palestinian academic Hatem Bazian refers to as ‘virtual internment’.2 Bazian defines it as a quasi-visible but repressive, intimidating, and confining structure where our subjectivity suspends in a cultural quarantine awaiting the security clearance.3  15

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It was during that drive that I had unwittingly begun to consider more seriously the kind of voice I would use to write my book. Do I have one? And, what is it? But, Allah is the planner. While quietly thinking about the problem, my friends and I walked into Shalimar, a Pakistani restaurant. One of them eagerly pointed out that Professor Ramon Grosfoguel was sitting at the next table. I had met Ramon at the preceding year’s conference, on Islamophobia. After a warm hug, Ramon generously welcomed my friends to sit down with him. A central problem shaped our ensuing conversation and also – unknown to me at the time – the current path of Radical Skin, Moderate Masks. Omar, my friend, had asked Ramon: What voice can a Muslim have? How do we speak? 2 Violent extremism as a discourse has emerged as a field of interest to government and policymakers throughout the Western world. In Australia, the (aptly named) Counter-Terrorism ‘White Paper’ that plans at CVE is the source of government thinking. It underlines the danger of ‘home grown terrorism’ and climaxes in Apollonian language on the importance of building a strong and resilient community to resist violent extremism and terrorism. Similarly, if I may sum up, a generic focus also plagues the theoretical literature that strives to counter violent extremism. Strategies range, sure, but all basically point to correcting some ‘bad’ idea that a radical has. Effectively, it is about fixing the loss of measure or reason or the Apollonian in a radical subject threatening to return to a Dionysian state of nature. Bin Laden and the like, the transnational Islamists, shape the present literature’s understanding of terror. The post-9/11 US-led War on Terror sets the context. The violence associated with the event defines the fanatical ideology of the al-Qaeda exemplar.4 This frame informs the basis of much of what I read. It explicitly orientates the collective thinking to the great threat that confronts the security of the West. But, as Arun Kundnani observes, this almost sole focus on ‘extremist’ becomes reductive.5 It excludes analyses ‘which focus less on religio-cultural ideology and more on terrorism as a manifestation of a political conflict over western foreign policy or as part of a general problem of youth violence’.6  Indeed, I felt the palpable power of the state’s gaze when flipping through sheets of literature. Its aim to spot and treat the religio-cultural Dionysian excess of Islam became an instrumental pursuit for a medical precision to diagnose. It inflected the literature’s governmental tone. Almost all pursued a mandate thus for ‘an effective counter-terrorism strategy’. Vigorous debates occurred only around how this and that scholar privileged one or all of ‘a

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combination of security and law enforcement responses’ with ‘broader strategies to enhance social cohesion’.7  The social scientist’s love for creating classifications caught my eye. But then again, so did the attempt to hide the racism of the approach. Sometimes they only ended up highlighting it. For example, Silber and Bhatt’s 2007 report ‘Radicalisation in the West: The Homegrown Threat’ for the New York Police Department (NYPD) identified four stages of radicalisation. This report was perhaps the most influential.8 It describes the ‘first stage’ of radicalisation as the process ‘prior to exposure to jihadi-Salafist ideology’.9 It identifies how many of these individuals have ordinary lives ‘with no criminal record’. So literally, I thought, all of us. Their use of pre-radicalization is a code word for ‘Muslim’. The radical is the starting point, is the skin we are born in. The instrumental yet fundamentally dishonest language haunted me. Countering violent extremism is easily explained as a search for ‘solutions’ on how to socially engineer the Muslim community to fit into the Western state’s culture of forgetting colonialism. It includes how to solve the problem without taking seriously four hundred years of colonialism erasure of Muslim influence and culture, and the exploitation of their resources. The decorative language of an Apollonian illuminating lie is the second colonialism. It helps make Muslim culture (or lack of) the problem. We become securitised and vigilant and our people become the first frontier against terrorism. They just call this ‘building resilience’ or ‘social cohesion’ or ‘Prevent’ or some other irrelevant bureaucratic lie.  And then every aspect of the Muslim life is brought under the microscope of this scientific, ‘evidence-based’ approach. The gaze utterly shatters and makes fragments of its subject matter. It quarters us and the life of the preradicalised into categories for intellectual pontifications. Personal traumas, economic deprivation, social alienation and discrimination, and even our consciousness of conflicts with Muslims become topics for scholarly thought police. All are potential factors affecting the pre-radical on their possible way to a self-identification with jihad. The typically Apollonian literature also performs an objectivity through a performed and measured sympathy for everyday Muslims. Perhaps more than anything the literature’s anti-racism infuriated me. It avoided the obvious, itself. A powerful state employs academic institutions to circle and dissect its Muslim citizens and their community. It drowns us in a racial language about violence and our capacity to commit such violence. While we feel the burn of its microscope, the ‘good guys’ – the rationalists, liberals and secularists – annoyingly appropriate our grievances. They take our tongues from us, and racism becomes their concern for us.

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3 I remember a lot, but not everything of the following two-hour conversation. It is hard to know which part of it comes from what I have read from Ramon or what he said that night. But I do recall how he carefully explained to three young Muslims and myself how European powers justified its ‘battles’. European/Euro-American colonial expansion and domination constructed a hierarchy of superior and inferior knowledge. They rationalised their assaults against inferior ‘people with the wrong god’ or against those ‘without civilization’. Ramon pointed out our present predicament as an extension of various stages of Othering. He commented on how Europe passed from the sixteenth-century account of ‘people without writing’ to the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century characterisation of ‘people without history’, to the twentieth-century version of ‘people without development’. More recently, we find the early twenty-first-century view of a ‘people without democracy’. In a sense, the colonised is always displaced. We suffer a lack. From this perspective, a huge non-European hole always resides in the core of our constructed being. And, if I followed the conversation properly, Europe persists as an eternal dimension of that lack. It exists always as a certain historical answer to what we, the Other, always must pursue. Notice then, I added to the conversation, how today Islam always speaks of what is missing: democracy, rights liberalism, and even for us three, as Muslims, as we speak of a missing voice. Indeed, what is missing about us is us. And as the night continued, we began to discuss the structures of knowledge in Westernised universities as a perpetuator of such a lack. Ramon defines this erasure of all other forms of (non-Western) epistemologies as an epistemic racism. It as an institutional, barely visible racism that (re)teaches us about us in a language of Europeanness. Epistemic racism deems, alternatively, the subaltern non-Christian voices as inferior and erases them as standards, as epistemologies, as vocabularies.10 Ramon discussed racism’s reliance on a Cartesian philosophy. Western (and thus) modern philosophy, we speculated, is thought to have been (as many claim) founded by French philosopher Rene Descartes. His most famous phrase, ‘I think, therefore I am. ’ set up a radical new foundation of knowledge. It challenged Christendom’s authority of knowledge since the Roman Empire. The new basis of knowledge produced by Cartesianism is no longer the Christian God but this new ‘I’. It pointed to a slow secularisation of key attributes of the divine. The ‘I’ in ‘I think’ therefore I am’ can produce a knowledge that is truth beyond a subject’s location in the world. It is universal in the sense that it is body-less, gender-less, colour-less. In its cultural ‘neutrality’, it sees the world from a similar standpoint to what

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was once known as God’s-eye view. This ‘I’ was a stage built to stand upon. The coloniser, the European male, rose on top to assume the platform and the position of seeing the world. They declared their truth, their method, their science, as a truth that transcended their locality, their culture, their race and gender.  Ramon explained how a huge amount of violence by colonialism helped develop and justify Descartes' conclusions. The fictiveness of an objective ‘I’ is the second colonialism. It could only come about from the conditions the first type created, namely those conditions that destroyed the Other's world and world view. It erased our worldliness; our stage was turned into wood to build theirs. The celebration of a scientific ‘I’ could only come from the cultural and racial hierarchies colonialism instituted. Descartes did not just transcend his own worldly conditions, then. He provided an intellectual model, gave Europe a blueprint to transcend its own violent past and its own coming to be. The cogito had stated ‘I think’ therefore I am’ but would come to mean I am white, therefore I think; and through colonialism, through the power of an epistemic racism, would turn into a modern aspiration for us all, to think is to become white. Hence, we can observe that without exception colonialism privileged ‘Western’ male thinkers and theories. That it created a less-visible hegemonic essentialist ‘identity politics’. The Cartesian ‘ego-politics of knowledge’ in the social sciences is so powerful and so normalised through the discourse of ‘objectivity’ and ‘neutrality’. It hides who speaks and from which power location they speak. So much so, Ramon argued, that when we think of ‘identity politics’ we immediately assume, as if by ‘common sense’, that we are talking about racialised minorities. Westernised academy is still the scientificist discourse of ‘objectivity’ and ‘neutrality’ that hides the ‘locus of enunciation’ of the speaker, that is, who speaks and from what epistemic body politics of knowledge and geopolitics of knowledge they speak. In the existing power relations on a world scale, what we have come to know as science is a white identity politics. Through the myth of the ‘ego-politics of knowledge’ (which in reality always speaks through a ‘Western’ male body and a Eurocentric geopolitics of knowledge) critical voices coming from individuals and groups inferiorised and subalternised by this hegemonic epistemic racism and epistemic sexism are denied and discarded as particularistic.11 They become subjects characterising all non-Christian knowledge as a product of outdated or ‘traditional’ knowledge. Assuming in their own Eurocentric provincialism that it is only within the Greco-Roman tradition, passing through the Renaissance, the Enlightenment and Western sciences that ‘truth’ and ‘universality’ are achieved.

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4 At around midnight on the East Coast of Australia on 11 September 2001, I received a phone call. My stepbrother’s sombre voice directed me to urgently turn on my television, ‘You have to see this’. I listened to commentators speculate about an accident. I tried to make sense of the large black cloud that poured from the World Trade Centre. Then, I leaned in to look closer. It arrived from the corner of my screen. It arched its way towards the South Tower. The second plane introduced the world to a violent face of Muslim alterity, to a radical Other, to Osama bin Laden. It introduced us to the War on Terror. That moment the second plane collided into the South Tower. Somewhat vaguely, I remember a news anchor captured our sense of this rupture. After a few seconds pause, he whispered, ‘Is this really happening?’12 He unwittingly conceded the scale of the attacks, for this should not happen in the reality of America. And however briefly, the second plane suspended Western securities about the politically possible. It is hard to separate that moment from the consequence that followed. For example, 9/11 brought me back to study politics at University. And, during my honour’s year I recall a misguided confidence in reading Walter Benjamin’s Illuminations. I understood little from this brilliant and complex book, except a particular question (which I no doubt misread) led me to the Apollonian. I enjoyed its form and its snippets of writing and manoeuvring, but I most likely (mis)interpreted from a single passage in Illuminations, a challenge. Benjamin asked us to find within an ‘image’ the signs of our ‘historical consciousness’.13 The image would reflect a truth about our modern condition just before it disappears into the predictable rush of ideology. At the time, the challenge animated me greatly. And, as I now look back at 9/11, I have a tentative answer to at least reflect the historical consciousness of my own experience: the image is Osama bin Laden. Naturally, the commentary of 9/11 denounced its horrors of falling bodies, of burning towers and of the loss of innocent life. And, the image of the Islamist emerged as the target for denouncements. Only a day after the 9/11 attacks, the New York Post published a double-paged poster of bin Laden, titled ‘Wanted: Dead or Alive’.14 Many New Yorkers, sharing in a collective will to avenge the attacks, placed the poster on their shop and car windows. For many, 9/11 quickly became the predictable actions of a few murderous terrorists driven by an Islamic-inspired hate in their pursuit of the West’s death. For many, bin Laden came from beyond the ideological innocence of a sleeping America. The initial criticism of 9/11’s horror was thus rarely an assessment of the political sequences that led to terror. In his speech to the Joint Congress,

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President George W. Bush similarly avoided reminding Congress of previous American support for the mujahideen-turned Taliban (with whom al-Qaeda and bin Laden had links too). The Americans in the early 1980s, during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, had armed a band of religious Afghan rebels to fight the Russians as part of its overall strategy during the Cold War. Bush refrained from speaking about previous policies that might have shaped today’s politics, and instead spoke of a faraway evil that was ‘brought upon us in a single day’, and how ‘night fell on a different world’, a world ‘where freedom itself is under attack’.15 The terrorists’ directive commands them to kill Christians and Jews, to kill all Americans, and make no distinction among military and civilians, including women and children. … This group and its leader – a person named Osama bin Laden – are linked to many other organizations. … They are recruited from their own nations and … are trained in the tactics of terror. They … plot evil and destruction.16

Less than 24 hours after the event, with no debate about the political structures from which terrorism arises, without recourse to the political sequences that produce violence, we suddenly had a face of the violent.17 And within weeks, the world media replayed innumerable camera angles showing the second plane’s collision. I remember how each replay interlinked with footage of bin Laden shooting an AK-47 at a wedding. I look back at how a strong narrative about the story of 9/11 began early. I cannot help but suspect that for the consuming public, bin Laden’s face, as the most notable face of the Other, became not only that of a terrorist but also why terrorism happens. As Benjamin promised, I thought. The predictable rush of ideology (through the face of the Other) had come to conceal what the moment may have said about the historical consciousness of our violent times. A culture talk about Islam came rushing in to conceal all that could have been said.

5 I remember what I saw that day. I cannot forget the second plane, the people who fell and how gravity ripped them apart. I recall, rather vividly, the towers collapsing and the giant blackish cloud rushing to chase witnesses. The true victims of 9/11 remain those targeted and their families. But, I cannot help but feel that those images that stayed with me match the anxieties that define the psychic register of being the Muslim Other. For, analogously, did not the second plane also ferociously cease the normalcy of our everyday life?

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Did we as Muslims not also fall subject to the gravity of the spectacle of terror, lose orientation, lose our sense of place as citizens? And, perhaps above all, did not the security of my place collapse in on itself and be delivered to a claustrophobic terrible cloud of inescapable scrutiny? Like Walter Davis suggests, it is not enough to recall these images, but we must also note the anxiety they register and how they become the vocabulary of the most primal fears about our fragility.18 For, as a Muslim of the West, brought into politics through the furnace of the War on Terror, revisiting the moment of the second plane often, I have continually attempted to retrospectively identify who exactly I imagined by ‘we’. For perhaps, my initial whispered question ‘what have we done?’ reflected my almost-instant apprehension about the coming decade’s more pronounced Islamophobia. But, it has forever haunted me. For, did I not also in the moment feel the impulse to point at an Other? Looking back, maybe I unwittingly knew that Muslims would become an accountable ‘we’. For in that first moment, I whispered the logic that drives the War on Terror’s culture speak. I accepted a bond that resides between the everyday Muslim and the jihadist. Or, perhaps the War on Terror’s narrative did not produce a consequential Islamophobia. Maybe, it is the other way around. It is true that Islamophobia increased after 9/11. But, it is telling how the attacks brought Americans, Brits, Europeans and Australians to form some civilisational front against the illiberal excessive coming from Islam. Telling, for I should in my recollections be careful. Islamophobia is a particular kind of racism grounded in the white fears of its own social and economic deprivation – fears integral to its reflexive, mutually constituted histories of racism that has formed the West’s sense of the Other. Following the overshadowing influence of the attacks and the widening receptivity to it after 9/11, much of what has emerged only amplified Islamophobia. While not reaching today’s level of abuse and violence, I cannot help but suspect that Islamophobia before 9/11 was simply awaiting that moment, awaiting the second plane. I am not conspiratorially saying the powers needed an event to justify racism. I am saying that the culture talk of 9/11 marked spatial, moral and political boundaries. The story of the War on Terror came to actualise an already-pre-existing phenomenon. The Muslim Other became contingent on realising the established pattern pervasive in the political and cultural self-expression of the West. The coming ideological rush that Benjamin had awoken in me is of course predictably racism. Hence, a special reconfiguring of the War on Terror’s language has interpolated the Muslim into existence as the signifier of the West’s supposed fragile existence. In this sense, my apprehension about ‘we’ had some justification, for in the years that followed, a blizzard of speculation about the Islam

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of ‘Islamic terrorism’ would confront me with a list of endless questions. And, a crucial, often subtle, invitation to respond inflected many day-to-day conversations. Throughout, whatever my answers, it simply reaffirmed the culture talk of my raceless race. My identity as a Muslim has always been in proximity to the events of 9/11. I look back now and see how the War on Terror ‘called’ forward a preexisting racial ‘we’ (in ‘me’ and in ‘them’). It interpellated Muslims into visibility and into being a political subject endowed with 9/11 as its psychic register so as to assume the podium of answering for the ‘we’. 6 I had increasingly felt displaced as a Muslim in the initial years after 9/11. My then-unquestioned sense of being just another Australian had eroded. The necessary tie between self and the culture around me weakened and my dislocation grew slowly. Without conscious effort I had become solely nothing other than a Muslim as Other. It is hard to describe, but I always felt decontextualised – if that makes sense. Even to myself, my anger or frustration, my place felt delinked from the decades worth of a preceding politics or history. Everything about me simply became about my personality as a Muslim of Islam. But, I had no vocabulary to explain it. More tellingly, I allowed myself to sink into this, especially so when I read about history, politics and international relations. Multiple books on the modern history of the Middle East helped voice my necessary protest against the US-led invasions into Iraq and Afghanistan. The more I read, the more I grew out of place, the more I wanted to. A strong will to detach from society eventually led me to quit my job and wander aimlessly through many years. I lost myself in debates and literature until I brought myself back to university. Before then, I had interpreted the racism I suffered in my life as an innocent result of ignorance. Thus I had mostly blamed Arabs for me being disliked as an Arab. But a colonial structure behind racism’s aggression came to provide me with a lateral thinking about its violence in the years after 9/11. A clear pattern to the then less-than-visible whiteness, less-than-visible epistemic racism, which had shaped my growing sense of displacement, which had taken my voice, began to reveal itself through my studies. 7 At the time of reading Nietzsche I knew very little of the realities of colonialism or racism. More accurately, I had little vocabulary to explain the

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experiences of a Muslim and person of colour. My early university studies were marked by my attempt to find words to align with my realities. But, also, in my auto-ethnography’s regurgitating of my own Muslim subjectivity, I have to be honest. I cannot ignore the Western knowledge I have swallowed as a student majoring in philosophy. For as a student researching for my honour’s thesis on Nietzsche, I enjoyed him the most. He denaturalised the West, or so I thought. I enjoyed him precisely because he turned the very language of my training into an unnatural myth. He gave me a shield to defend myself against racially weaponised words like ‘reason’ and ‘progress’. In summary, The Birth of Tragedy gives my auto-ethnography a vocabulary. As an impressionable undergrad, Nietzsche’s dramatic, tortured, poetic character captivated me and provided me with three crucial and conceptual terms that shaped my language: the Apollonian, the Dionysian and their synthesis. Since my first reading, the robust metaphors of the Apollonian and Dionysian helped me understand the myths of Western modernity. Turning the pages of The Birth of Tragedy, my mind drew instant links between Apollo the ‘god of light’ and the public light of ‘whiteness’ that irradiates my racialised condition. But above all, for much of my early years, the Apollonian and Dionysian metaphors represented a way to think about life’s aesthetic generalities, of the struggle between art and concrete, of an ontological tussle between the world of ideas and the worldliness of the world of the exterminated. It is a struggle between opposing forces that pull our politics in different (often opposing) directions. Though, importantly, even in their opposition to one another, they do not operate as a binary. I take from The Birth of Tragedy my own crucial reading. When discussing this synthesis, Nietzsche does not refer to the unification of opposites. Rather, it is more about how there always exists in one drive the supplement of the other. I took from Nietzsche the key point that the Apollonian and Dionysian are embedded within each other’s order. My examination of them is thus always a question about the nature of their synthesis, rather than a question about the triumph of one at the expense of the other. It is this interaction that my autoethnography claims is the basis of a reading of the War on Terror’s moderate Muslim. It allows me to ask which of the Apollonian or Dionysian forces is dominant in any given ideological narrative, to examine the interplay, the struggle and the contest between them in any given cultural artefact. Their engagement tells a story. And, I see this story as a way to read the War on Terror’s constructions of the Muslim, as a way to articulate a lack of balance between our ‘cultural talk’ and our ‘worldliness’. It is for this reason that I continue to use Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy. For, it helps me explain my argument and outline my book’s scope and justify my repetitious drunk voice and lack of an Apollonian focus.

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(My Auto-ethnographic) Method, Outline and Objectives

1 I probably should explain MORE on why I chose. Considering, from one angle, I aim to highlight the harms of epistemic racism, it may seem strange that I rely on The Birth of Tragedy’s metaphors of Apollonian and the Dionysian. Not least for his evoking of a Greek deity (and all the Europeanness that ancient Greece evokes) and because Nietzsche’s condemnation of the ‘Apollonian spirit’ belongs to an overall romantic call to bring back a lost European culture. So, why do I rely on Nietzsche? Even more so that his book is tainted by a debate about its implicit anti-Semitism?1 As mentioned, my reading has little to do with Nietzsche and everything to do with my initially becoming political. My first intellectual recognition of Islam’s philosophical Otherness came through the book. In Summary, the illuminating triumph of an Apollonian spirit came to represent Europe’s Enlightenment project. And more importantly, the Dionysian came to represent what the project repressed: racism. Hence my use of The Birth of Tragedy shows little concern for its call for European greatness. I have come to read it as a Freudian slip of Europe’s racial tongue, so to speak. In its implicit pursuit of a returning glory, it unwittingly tells of a post-racial habit to come. Ever since, I have found the very idea of a Dionysian excess, a part of our history we wish to forget, which nevertheless shaped our most cherished ideals, a most powerful and compelling thought.2 As is commonly the case with me, one text bleeds into the other and leans into a third to help me form my understanding. In my pursuit to recognise more and more, I remember Sven Lindqvist’s Exterminate All the Brutes and how it became crucial in helping me understand Nietzsche and the Dionysian. The title of the book comes from Lindqvist’s claim that ‘Europe’s core’ can 25

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be written in a single sentence – a few words that explain ‘the history of our continent, our humanity, our biosphere, from Holocene to Holocaust’.3 The sentence says ‘nothing about Europe as the original home on earth of humanism, democracy, and welfare’. Yet the sentence reveals what ‘inhabits Europe’ and the ‘truth it prefers to forget’. The sentence is penned by a character from The Heart of Darkness who turned mad, and who, I might add, is a character in the thrones of a drunken Dionysian spirit. But, perhaps above all, the sentence stands out because of the then historical moment of a gripping terror. Lindqvist first read Joseph Conrad’s famous novel before the sights of the full horrors of the Second World War. In 1949 he described the harrowing experience of witnessing survivors walk away from the German death camps. At the time, a young Lindqvist was reading Conrad’s book, published 50 years earlier. The book became a prophecy of the genocidal practices that would eventually conclude in the Holocaust, a practice Lindqvist traced to Europe’s African colonies.4 Lindqvist thus saw in Conrad a visionary who had foreseen the coming twentieth-century’s horrors. The novel’s protagonist Kurtz expresses this. While sailing down the River Congo, Kurtz scribbles in his notebook. He writes a sentence that captures ‘Europe’s core’ in four words: ‘Exterminate all the brutes!’5 At the heart of this lay a rhetorical question for Lindqvist, the answer to which is stated throughout the book: no. No to whether Europe can create a civilisation without also simultaneously creating a will to ‘exterminate all the brutes’. He argues that until the Second World War, the racism in Nazism was applied to non-European peoples. ‘Before they were its victims’, Europe was Nazism’s accomplice.6 In his Discourse on Colonialism , Aimé Césaire makes a similarly blunt point. He declares that Europe ‘cultivated’ Nazism. It tolerated the ideology ‘before it was inflicted on them … shut their eyes to it, and legitimized it’.7 Césaire defines European colonialism as neither ‘a desire to push back the frontiers of ignorance, disease and tyranny’ nor ‘a project undertaken for the glory of God’. It was not ‘about Europe expanding its proper civilization’ or about generously advancing its liberal ways to educate pagans. Colonialism was simply about dominating the ‘Other’.8 Hitler thus came to simply reapply onto Europe the European will to dominate. He brutally re-enacted a genocidal project that was until then ‘exclusively reserved for the Arabs of Algeria, the coolies of India, and the blacks of Africa’.9 The will to exterminate had long resided within. But, to ‘exterminate all the brutes’ here does not simply mean to kill all Others. It means essentially to turn them first into the Other. It means to kill a political, historical and cultural will.

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And without such a will, the ‘White Man’ employing his own Darwinian language stood tall, stood alone, assuming his ‘race’ to be the finality of nature’s long biological and evolutionary process. The Others were dying out.10 It was nature doing the ‘exterminating’. Therefore, Césaire suspects that within Europe’s enlightening humanism and triumphant liberalism there always hides a forthcoming Hitler; that is, it hides the will to exterminate the Other in order to reinvent itself as universal and master ‘I’ that cannot come without inviting, dominating and exterminating the Other.11 2 I have not met a politician who has not told me that the Iraq War was a mistake. Politicians also recognise the inhumanity of the outcomes. Everyone, it seems, condemns colonialism, condemns brute violence. Everyone is equally horrified at racism. I remain careful while noting as to how politicians, to a tee, move from this argument rather quickly. ‘Colonialism’ is seen to belong to the old times of the Empire, you see. Everyone did it, including Muslims. I need to stop making excuses. Terrorists are real, and they want to kill us all. Some politicians will throw their symbolic arm around me and point out how they agree in sentiment. But they worry more about an unruly Muslim rage and my impracticality. Here they supposedly identify with my immature emotional state and urge me to move forward. Their concession of colonialism is not an analysis of its violence or how it shaped the world we live in today. It is really a performance. They confess to past sins to move forward. And thus, so should I. It is a concession that comes without paying compensation, of course; and all the while the Australian State shoves fleeing refugees into camps or detention centres.  Looking at it awry, we Muslim activists will sit at round tables in crisis meetings with community ‘leaders’, randoms, politicians and police officers. Together we will waste hours discussing the abstract life of a Muslim teenager at school. We might get a sympathetic nod or two about how foreign policy angers the youth. Someone will mention Palestine, someone will mention Islamophobia, someone will mention Trump, Bush, Blair, Howard, Hanson and so on. Then we will all agree to sympathise with the unfair Islamophobia Muslims endure. And, worse, looking for votes, some suitedup blue-tied small L liberal will condemn the red-tie conservative for using divisive language. Once the ritual of performing autonomy and playing critic is over, the proper discussion will take place: how to stop terrorists. Maybe on some unknown psychic register, the latter focus is just a ritual for the state to forgive itself for the former crimes and continuing the second colonialism. 

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3 My auto-ethnography reflects the instant unfiltered mood that comes with writing. As my reader can by now tell, a stream of seemingly unrelated stories connects to attempt to speak with a voice gained from a voice lost. It traces white society’s persistent demands for me to play the Apollonian role of a moderate. I trace the compulsion to speak in a ‘human’ language (read: Western) to ultimately soothe away the privileged fears about the threat of a radical Islam. It looks at the Muslim voice in echoing liberalism’s Apollonian abstraction, a voice that works to erase the world of the body and its Dionysian realities. Sixteen years worth of pressure to correct the ugly image of a violent Islam therefore informs these pages. It informs the blurring of academic thought with painful self-reflections. I agree here with Stephen Tyler, who argued about the difficulties to communicate ‘the cold ambition that comes from print(ing)’. I too find it hard to write about Muslims as a set of data, stats and a collection of quotes. I have lost count of how many times at conferences I have read wordy testimonies of anonymous abstracted Muslims. They are typically shoved into a scholar’s PowerPoint presentation to prove Islam’s normalcy or troubles. But who is this anonymous Muslim who exists beyond the traps of the War on Terror’s discourse? What private conversation compels them to tick 1 in a scale of 1 to 5 on how Australian they feel? It is thus less difficult for me to write about ‘intimacies that come from speech(es)’ within me, within mosques, within everyday conversations. They arrive through internal dialogues and beyond the academic optics of social science.12 Above all I choose an auto-ethnography because it ‘opens up a space of resistance. It creates a gap between the individual (auto-) and the collective (-ethno-) where the writing (-graphy) of singularity cannot be foreclosed’.13 I use it because I refuse the false authority granted to me by the War on Terror to speak as its Muslim. And, all I can say for now is that the turn took me to a place where we find awry mice and Allah’s plans. It took me to a place where I hope to bring to my reader an impressionist version of what I mean when I say I cannot write this book. But who would find interest in my struggles to write? Considering my move towards an auto-ethnographical reflection of the self, I cannot help but wonder. What social importance or scholarly insight would an answer provide for the academe? But here is the Fanonian truth of this self-beating violence: I must go to the bottom of the pit before I can rise again. Hence, mostly, I write as a Muslim for the Muslim of the West. I write for those caught in the shadows of the War on Terror who may wish to recognise on page, and identify in words, what we intuitively know. For I believe it is an act of catharsis to read about racism, as it is to write about it, as it is to return always, first, to

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Fanon, and secondly, to Edward Said and, in particular, to the massive impact of Orientalism. 4 Translated into 36 languages, Orientalism highlights Edward W. Said’s most prominent work in a teeming career. Expected controversy and remarkable adulation marked its wide-ranging reception. But perhaps, most importantly, something else resulted. Demonstrating its repercussions, discerning the workings of Western hegemony, ‘a new kind of dealing with the Orient’ emerges.14 For Orientalism, first and foremost, ultimately calls for a different, more humane, more meaningful observation of the ‘East’. It calls for ‘a longer sequence of thought’ to dissolve ageless lazy stereotypes about the figure of the non-European.15 Needless to say, thirsty for knowledge, I found this all exhilarating. But there was one problem that haunted my many readings and returns to Orientalism – Said persistently called for a responsible adversarial yet ‘secular’ humanist position to challenge the sovereignty of the mainstream national culture. A challenge never sentimental, never self-excusing or self-indulgent, but infused with the most cherished ideals. Justice, compassion, freedom, equality, charity and love lay at the heart of a response to racism. And Said’s passionate advocacy for a ‘critical consciousness’ crowned the call. But, I could not help but escape the question, was his not a rewording, a coded call, for our honouring and adoption of the Cartesian ‘I’? 5 In my first year as an undergrad, six years after 9/11, I searched the humanities shelf in the library to ‘talk back’. I had begun praying at the time and looked without luck for a strong Islamic voice. I wanted to respond to the daily questions about being Muslim in the West. I could not read Arabic or any other Islamicate language. And all the English titles I was directed to of Muslim work were of religious types trying to disprove the trinity. Bored by it, I instead took a rather obvious stop. I had (mis)heard Edward Said say something about knowledge being a form of power. Immediately, I searched for his name and found his seminal work. I remember now amusingly how I stared invigorated at the Penguin edition’s cover: a painting of a naked boy.16 He is wrapped in a python and stands in a mosque, its walls decorated with meaningless calligraphy. I tried to read its script but it was a gibberish string of Arabic letters. I knew enough to smirk as if I got it. Yes, exactly, Orientalism.

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Such gibberish captured so wonderfully the West’s cultural imperialism. It reflected its hubris and reduction of Muslim World to an exotic yet intellectually undeveloped naked society. Little did I know at the time that Said’s book and my multiple (mis)readings would match my own struggles to do as Said called for us to, to ‘talk back’. After I had stared long enough at the image of the snake charmer, I turned to the book’s blurb. It described Orientalism as ‘stimulating, elegant, and pugnacious’. But another line caught my attention. Said, it explained, drew ‘on his own experiences as an Arab Palestinian living in the West’. I wondered about this. For, similarly, my own experiences since 9/11 had attracted me to Said. A dislodged sense of ‘I’ had hailed me into being the Muslim as Other. It had become the primary site of reflections of racism and the West. And, of course, the book did not disappoint. Not always explicit, the crucial theme of the ‘exile’ left its impression everywhere. An openly political work, Orientalism dutifully records the impact of a European culture whose ‘domination has been so powerful a fact in the life of all Orientals’.17 Essentially, Said analyses those analysing him. He does so without accepting the title of ‘Oriental’. Thus, a powerful exilic voice arrives before the reader. We hear powerfully of the ‘disheartening life of an Palestinian Arab in America’. It emanates through a writer who resists his appointed Otherness.18 Fundamentally Orientalism’s allure stems from Said’s own confrontation with the strained life of being a Palestinian in the West.19 With an English name and an Arabic surname, surrounded by almost universal support for Israel, is he not as he precisely describes: ‘out of place’? In a proverbial sense then, the book provided an obvious first stop for any explication of ‘Islam and the West’. It is a timely read in the wake of the War on Terror. For, from an important angle, Orientalism explores a sense of displacement that comes from a Fanon interpellation into Otherness. It examines the ‘Oriental’ figure fated to live what Said calls a ‘uniquely punishing destiny’.20 6 Coincidently in the same semester that I first read Orientalism I also studied Joseph Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness (1899).21 Unknown to me at the time, Said had written a book using Conrad’s personal letters. It guided him to understand the Western self’s struggle with darker aspects of modernity. It signalled the beginnings of his groundbreaking Orientalism. But more so, while reading Conrad’s novels Said had picked up on a recurring theme. Conrad’s homelessness echoes his exilic sense of Said’s displacement as a Palestinian in America. This sense articulated itself through the ‘inconclusive’

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voice of Conrad’s alter ego, the The Heart of Darkness’s lead character Charles Marlow.22 Similar to Conrad’s other novels Marlow’s journey is set in Africa. The Orient becomes the exotic background for European self-discoveries and angst about their universality. From the novel’s first paragraph, Said posts, ‘We knew we were fated, before the ebb began to run, to hear about one of Marlow's inconclusive experiences.’23 Thus, it is a narration of self-doubt, which echoes Said’s anti-dynastic, anti-linear, critical consciousness. Said sees Marlow’s journey up the River Congo as moving backward and forward materially in small and large spirals like the novel’s narration.24 Hence for Said the novel possesses two interplaying narratives: one that openly critiques the horror of European colonialism through its criticism of the character Kurtz, and the other that nevertheless reaffirms the old imperial enterprise of conventionally rendering the world as officially a backdrop for European or Western imperialist stories. Duly characterising The Heart of Darkness as a tangle of half a dozen ‘languages’, weaved together through Marlow’s narration, Said contends that each of the novel’s languages pronounces a different sphere of experience, a different time, a different consciousness. Said’s summary of the novel had stayed with me, till today, for I (re)read Orientalism over the many years in a similar spirally inconclusive way. And although I do not liken the book to the colonial order that produced its discourse, I do tentatively offer a first theoretical assumption, an introductory argument. Orientalism’s incredible success in being so widely read produced its own compelling unwritten discursive rules on how Muslims ought to respond. The book’s fame edifies the easiest route for the out-of-place Arab Muslim to ‘talk back’ to the West. Thus, in dealing with Islamophobia, in liberal societies, for example, audiences find my arguments far more agreeable when I charge opponents with ‘orientalism’ or highlight its oft-cited habits. Representing Europe’s colonial legacy but also Said’s magisterial response, in carrying the title, the term ‘orientalism’ thus takes on a dual meaning. And with this duality in mind, having long welcomed the invitation to talk back to the Orientalist, to counter a European’s hegemonic and debasing gaze, to challenge the European discourse’s persuasion, I began to talk about orientalism through a voice that I had learned to mimic from reading Said’s Orientalism. 7 Over a century ago, Conrad chartered ‘three epochs’ in the history of geographical knowledge. They matched the ‘imperial geography’ of racism.

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He thus offers us a list of the multiple stages of European colonisation. It likewise gives me a framework for this book. Each epoch of geography interpellates the moderate into a position, so to speak. It begins with ‘Geography Fabulous’. Here, Orientalist imaginations fascinate. The then colonised are now a new world of exoticness. It positioned the coloniser as an adventurer or a translator. They learn of knowledge beyond the norms of their own society. ‘Geography Militant’ comes next. This stage coincided with Europe’s violent incursions into the tricontinental worlds of Africa, Asia and the Americas. The lands of the Other become a scene for a war between Europe and the nonEuropean. The war put a gun or sword into the coloniser’s hand. They fight to mould or dominate the ‘backwards’ in the name of building their civilisation. Finally, Conrad arrives at ‘Geography Triumphant’. This last stage reveals itself in the following cartographic images of European settlements: think North America or Australia. It is the killing of Otherness. Here, the coloniser becomes the ‘owner’ of the land; it fully exterminates he brutes.  I do not see these geographies as disconnected or strictly logical. We as Muslims might have to use one or the other on any assigned day. However, these geographies do work successively as a pathway of sorts, in the culture talk of the War on Terror. In providing three positions for a way of speech, they further provide me the names for the three moderate masks I will examine.  But, maybe, more particularly, they express my sojourn in reading Said. Hence my exploration of the many moderate masks we must wear centres on three readings of Orientalism. From one viewpoint, Radical Skins, Moderate Masks explores the influence of Orientalism’s provocations. It surveys its effect (and affect) on me as a Muslim. I eagerly read the book over and again to deal with the War on Terror. These re-readings worked as if I was the proverbial Marlow who travelled into Orientalism’s winding paths of argument. The three readings mirror the three acts of the novel. The first act represents my first reading of Said. His arguments convinced and interpellated me as the subject of Orientalist discourse. It showed me the absurdity of its claims and convinced me to ‘talk back’ and negate them. But, this first superficial reading gives way to a second act. Confronted by the absurdity of Orientalism, I pursue a more authentic idealised Islam. I pursue a ‘Muslimitude’. I try to perform the role of a pre-colonised and authentic Muslim. Finally, I confront the double horror, ‘The horror! The horror!’: first of my Muslimitude and then of Said’s ‘humanism’ as the solution.  My auto-ethnography (from one angle) specifically traces the seductive sway of Said’s Orientalism by the way I have learnt to speak as a Muslim of the West and to deal with the three masks I am compelled to wear. My variant understandings of Orientalism over different times reflect the distinct ‘languages’ of a supposed choice the War on Terror gives us. It reveals a will to abide by an emancipatory call to ‘talk back’ to Islamophobia, and

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how such talk results in wearing the masks of the moderate and how it erases the Dionysian. Thus, grading my experiences of Orientalism, reflecting on my multiple consciousnesses, it analogises my travels as a Muslim into the heart of the War on Terror’s culture talk to arrive at the horror of ending up where I began. My auto-ethnography’s middle chapters travel through three readings of Orientalism, through The Heart of Darkness’s three symbolic acts and through the ‘imperial geography’ of racism. I read my own sense of self, read my own location within Islamophobia through other Muslims, as bearers of the three masks we must wear: the fabulous, militant and triumphant masks of moderate Muslims.

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Part II

FABULOUS

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Chapter 4

Introducing (the First Act or) Case Study One

1 The first act of The Heart of Darkness starts aboard a small ship moored on the Thames River. Conrad creates a story-within-a-story. He uses an unnamed voice to set the scene and to make the novel’s main character Marlow known to his readers. In a sense, the narrator calls Marlow forward as the storyteller and shapes the reader’s expectations. In Marlow’s unique stories, the narrator explains, the ‘meaning is not inside a kernel but outside’.1 After his introduction, Marlow begins to tell his companions about a voyage he once took down the River Congo. He starts the tale by explaining how he has grown to resent life in London. He dislikes ‘the sight of people hurrying through the streets … to gulp their unwholesome beer, to dream their insignificant and silly dreams’.2 He recounts how London, the largest, most populous and wealthiest city in the world, was a dark place in Roman times. Here Marlow constructs the novel’s underlining theme of darkness – the subject of its title – that lurks beneath the surface of even ‘civilized’ persons. Darkness is part of London’s history. It is the Dionysian beneath the current absurd Apollonian lie of silly dreams. The theme, as we shall see in acts two and three, reappears through the novel’s enigmatic character Kurtz. But, I mention all this for another reason. The key point for me here is how the novel’s narrator first calls out Marlow. The idea of a story-within-a story, of meaning being on the outside and not the inside, evoked in me a similar presupposition about the War on Terror’ narrative. It is like some same omniscient narrator sets the scene for my storytelling. It calls me forward to tell a story about being Muslim. It first highlights the figure of the Muslim as a way to hail us into speaking in its language impregnated by a meaning that is 37

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not ‘inside ourselves but outside’. It sets the themes and expectations, gives us the vocabulary and from that moment we become. But you might ask: Who else has the capacity to recognise and respond to its interpellation other than a Muslim to begin with? How can we escape it? Yes, there is circularity to my argument. There is a fatalism to this process. The result of the War on Terror’s ‘subjectification’ of the Muslim describes the process by which its narrative (like the narrator) introduces the Oriental figure of the Muslim as the story’s protagonist. The Muslim is embodied in the major social and political culture talk about the War. And, like the machinations of an old orientalism, the very process of the narrative’s ‘hailing’ of Muslims into the social interactions of discussing the War on Terror is the process of producing us as the Other. Circular; fatalistic; indeed, I am saying that the Muslim as Other precedes the War on Terror. And, yet the War provide the current, updated, empirical sheen and contemporary vocabulary to justify Muslim otherness. Act one therefore is when a Muslim accepts this narrator’s call. It is when we accept the role of telling our story, telling it within the story of the war of terror; a story-within-a-story; when we accept its vocabulary, when we remain blind to its trap. Here, when we speak about ourselves, when we speak about Islam, ‘meaning is not inside a kernel (of a true us) but outside’ of us and part of the War on Terror’s story. 2 We find in Fanon a certain conception of these aforementioned stages. The colonised intellectual goes through similar steps. In Fanon’s first stage the colonised intellectual assimilates as much as possible of European culture and thinking. These intellectuals too believe that everything that is modern and just originates in European philosophy.3 We find, act one: we tell our story through theirs. 3 I visited the Islamic Museum in its opening week in March 2015. A healthy crowd of a few hundred people of diverse backgrounds had gathered there. The building has five main exhibits: ‘Faith’, ‘Contributions to Civilization’, ‘Art’, ‘Architecture’ and ‘Australian Muslim History’. After entering from the foyer, the entrance turns into a hallway that bends around a staircase and moves into a display showing five large columns that form a circle, with each column larger than the former. The tallest column is about four meters, maybe twice my height. The columns are rectangular in

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shape, rendered with a smooth beige, modern and sleek, with sharp triangular cuts at their heads. Each titled, transliterated, into Arabic: ‘Shahada’, ‘Salat’, ‘Zakat’, ‘Sawm’, ‘Hajj’.4 The columns represent the religion’s five theological pillars and turn the spiritual into a concrete, contemporary representation. I find the five columns located in the first exhibit titled ‘Faith’. They capture what I want to say about the Apollonian drive to ‘carve’ out an Islam for the public gaze. They represent for me the designer’s eye for the shape of the contemporary form. The ‘aesthetic disposition’ runs throughout the many displays, as well as being the museum’s founding act of ‘sculpting’ out a modern-looking Islam that is distant from the troubles we commonly associate with the religion as an archaic past of Orientalist curves. I read the column therefore as a telling first display, as symptomatic, a sublimation even, of Australian Muslim hopes for an Islam that stands tall and modern and that evolves from small to big – an Islam that is planted, visible and recognisable to Australia as contemporary and Apollonian in its shape and expression. At the time of my visit to the museum, unformed ideas swirled in my head. I had just read my previous director Salman Sayyid’s article on the problem of measuring Islamophobia.5 His passage about ‘what is at stake’ rung true as I walked through the museum. Sayyid argues that Islamophobia is not simply an intense hostility.6 It is a productive discourse that defines the Muslim in convenient ways. In doing so, it impoverishes the ability of Muslims themselves to elaborate on what it means to be Muslim. Following this thought, I wondered what the museum ought to look like otherwise. What would it look like if it freed itself from the responsibility of correcting demeaning stereotypes? For was the museum not a result of Islamophobia’s ‘productive discourse’? Did it not create a convenient version of Islam for Western public consumption? Did it not exterminate its own brutes? Walking through, I stopped to watch young children jump. They jumped from one square to the next on the museum’s human-sized chessboard. The interactive display celebrated how the Islamic world brought the game to Europe. Sayyid’s question made more sense as I watched the children jump from white square to white square. The War on Terror as a discourse works to determine what positions we can jump to. It sets the range of squares in which we can land upon: fabulous, militant or triumphant. My line of thinking merged with Edward Said’s point about how critique should open up futures. It returned me to the point of how it hopes to transform. Indeed, what future does our response to the War on Terror open for us? The museum confirmed for me that what is truly at stake is how we determine the way we can define ourselves, at stake is telling our story beyond the narratives racism compels us to repeat, beyond the ‘white’ squares that Europe asks us to jump into.

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4 In an exhibit on Muslim civilisation, two identical floor-to-ceiling posters capture what I feel is the museum’s underlining aim of addressing mainstream and negative attitudes. The top half of the poster shows a photograph of a stony European medieval castle with an accompanying sentence that is interrupted by ellipses, which reads ‘the Dark ages’. In contrast, the bottom half of the poster shows a photograph of the interior of a sunlit Andalucian mosque with its detailed ornamental muqarna carvings and elaborate cornices. Gold is the mosque’s dominant hue in distinction to the castle’s grey. The interrupted sentence that started as ‘Dark ages’ thus concludes: ‘weren’t so dark’. The posters inform us of the museum’s attempt to disrupt the existing stereotypes about Muslims coming from an undeveloped culture. They stand at the entrance and exit of a walkway leading its visitors in and out of an exhibit that celebrates what the museum titles an ‘Islamic Contribution to Civilisation’. I intuitively interpret the poster, on my first glance, as an attempt to challenge the dominant Eurocentric reading of Islamic history, which commonly ignores Muslim achievements in science and art. While walking through the exhibit itself, the museum further articulates this aim as I read about the Islamic world’s unheralded engineers, scientists and architects. 5 In a 2007 skit from the community television show Salam Café, Australian Muslim actor and comedian Nazeem Hussain dressed up in traditional Muslim subcontinental dress. He had a long, black fake beard and wore open slippers with socks. He was a parody, a character he named Uncle Sam(eer). Salam Café gave birth to Uncle Sameer. After 9/11 and 7/7, during the then pop culture obsession with Australian Idol, mainstream news media preoccupied itself with radical preachers and hence came the episode ‘Australian Imam’: the search for Australia’s most controversial imam.7 The show created the contestant Uncle Sam(eer) to supposedly ‘embody society’s greatest fears about Muslim radicalism’.8 Uncle Sam(eer) is a caricature of the Islamophobic image that describes a dimwit Muslim as an unintegrated foreigner out of sync with society’s political, moral and aesthetic norms. Hussain’s aim is to challenge the way white society sees Muslims. What makes Uncle Sam(eer) funny, of course, is his Otherness, and how he gets things terribly wrong. Thus there is first a concession from the Salam

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Café writers that they recognise the nature of the typical Muslim stereotype as a scene worthy of mockery. The uncle rants incoherent statements about the religion’s ambitions to dominate. In a few episodes, he stood for mayor of Camden, which at the time led a visceral campaign against the establishment of an Islamic school. And, later still, he resurfaced in the mainstream with Hussain in the show Legally Brown, as an unlikely prime ministerial candidate with a promise to ‘Make Australia Halal’. In 2008, television personality Andrew Denton interviewed ‘Uncle Sam(eer)’ on his popular show Enough Rope. Coming out to laughter and applause, Hussain dressed in a traditional gown spoke in a poorly executed attempt at a silly (what I assume was) Indian accent while carrying an Australian flag. He explains how he is also ‘carrying his passport’ to prove ‘that he is Australian’. While I write this, I remembered again my take on Fanon’s question: ‘What do Muslims want?’ I assume Hussain wanted to challenge the idea that Muslims are not Australian, but it was almost as if carrying his passport revealed the true ambitions of the point of the character. The Salam Café Muslims want to be seen as passport-carrying citizens. It kind of reveals the pervasive logic of act one. It can be done in reverse. Rather than just repeat and say out loud the dominant political and cultural language, rather than repeat whiteness, we can also centre whiteness by showing that we too know what an absurd non-whiteness looks like. We too can laugh at it, because we are not really it, because we carry passports, because we do not have accent. 6 In early 2016, I attended a public conversation titled ‘Islam: What Are We Afraid Of?’ The respected Australian academic Robert Manne hosted Waleed Aly. I keenly listened to their well-articulated, but nevertheless overdetermined, dialogue of abstractions. They epitomised the culture talk of the War on Terror giving focus on bad versions of Islam and democracy. Together they artfully deconstructed generalisations of Islam and the West. I found it hard to concentrate to be honest. For before their 50-odd minutes’ worth of non-discussion about the Muslim world, Manne had caught my attention. He has distracted my thinking ever since. He introduced Aly as ‘an excellent translator’. I kind of mentally clicked my fingers at this, for Manne provided an almost-perfect definition of the role of the supposed native Muslim who

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actively engages with and translates the fabulous language of Islam’s cultural Otherness. A clearly clever and well-balanced voice oozing the sheen of Apollonian measure, Aly dutifully responded to Manne’s many questions playing guide for the audience. It is easier for us to see how Hussain puts on the mask of an absurd foreign Uncle Sam(eer) than it is to see Aly wear a similarly absurd mask of a translator for a foreign Islam. Perhaps, I am sensitive, but while listening, my mind recalled how I came to distrust Aly throughout his career precisely for this fictional role he plays as a translator. This was especially so after I had read his book in which he introduces himself as such. Aly opens People Like Us (2007) with a discussion on how as an Australian Muslim he inherits a position at the ‘Intersection’ between the ‘conceptual entities we very loosely call “Islam” and the “West”’. He explains how he does ‘not pretend to be a disinterested observer’, which is an important ‘disclosure in an age where commentators often claim objectivity’. He finds himself thus subjectively reflecting on how he exists in a space where these entities overlap. He is worth quoting: (Those who occupy) this space are decidedly more familiar with the Islamic tradition than are most westerners, and with Western societies, culture and politics than are most Muslims. That is not a qualification. People in this position can be ignorant, too. But, it does provide unique opportunities.9

Aly’s privileging of ‘conceptual entities’ could only possibly mean he sits at an intersection of culture talk, of ideas, of abstraction, of worlds of glossaryfilled discussions titled ‘Islam’ and the ‘West’ and ‘fear’. He could not as a First World, private school, ‘born and raised’, Western-educated subject intersect in a physical space shared by an occupied Palestinian or a woman who lived under the Taliban. And, he does not suggest that he does. So, where exactly is this space that ignores the life of a racialised body if not the space of the War on Terror’s discourse? I do not wish to say that ideas do not matter or that narratives do not shape subjects (a key point of my book) but I think the Muslim translator within the story of the war on terror is a false position. I’m convinced Aly does not care if it is, it gives him a chance to speak. But, I am in my Nietzschean reading looking for a synthesis between the Dionysian experiences of racism that shape the racialised body and the Apollonian language we use. Hence, I am not convinced that Aly occupies ‘a space more familiar with the Islamic tradition than are most westerners’. I see him as telling a story within a story. Put simply, Aly’s supposed vantage point, the overlap between being Muslim and Westerner, is an illusion. It is worth thinking more deeply than Aly on the nature of this. Do not the ways we experience being Muslim

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refract through being Western? How does Aly preserve the supposed balance of this overlapping space? How does it resist the power of racism and whiteness? Surely for Muslims in the West, Islam entwines with the hegemony of the West so that much of our knowledge about our religious tradition is mediated through a distance. We can only find it by searching for non-Muslim Western scholars who have attained the skills we lack: the scholarly language of Arabic, Turkish, Urdu or Persian and access to primary sources. Without explaining the material and political privileges of being in the First World, I think Aly is in the most meaningful way post-racial, and that his knowledge of Islam (beyond the West) can only be in the Orientalist tradition of an abstracted knowledge. It can only be of the discursive traditions and formations of Islam. It can only come to be because of the War on Terror. This is fine if it comes with its necessary clauses, one of which is that Aly is not a translator. For he is not explaining a lived or embodied experience of the Muslim world from which Islamism emerges – a point painfully evident by the fact that Aly only cites white male scholars when discussing the cultural origins of their violence, both in his book and in his lecture with Manne. What then is Aly ‘translating’, other than the West’s own books behind a mask of a fabulous native? What is at play here other than the interpellation into the role of the Other only to play normal. But, perhaps by translator Manne means Aly makes the debate more intelligible. This is partly true because, like Hussain, Aly translates away its foreignness. He is the intellectual equivalent to Uncle Sam(eer), dressing up in the Otherness that brings attention only to rip off the mask and repeat the most mundane and predictable Apollonian speech about liberalism’s truths and being just another Muslim whose language is the symbolic act of carrying around his passport. 7 One of the books that impressed a lot on my thinking was The Sum of All Heresies. Through reading Frederick Quinn’s book I learned of an overview of the West’s historical imagination about Islam. 10 It became clear to me, as Pnina Werbner argues, that racism forms imaginaries out of cultural fantasies, fears, symbols, caricatures, stereotypes and nightmares that stitch together, without being consistent or coherent, a threatening figure of the ‘Other’.11 In post-Reconquista Spain, centuries before modern definitions of racism existed, Jews and Muslims were forced to convert to Christianity or face expulsion. Shortly afterwards, existing Christians began to suspect converted Jews and Muslims and their offspring

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of not being ‘true’ Christian believers. Eventually, a doctrine developed that this was because their old religion was ‘in’ their blood.12 In the racial imaginary, the Other is seen as a violation of the self and our body, our property, our sacred symbols and autonomy.  The process very often encapsulates an internal sense of our inhuman destructiveness and our capacity for cruelty and violation, which we project onto an external figure. Every racist thinks he or she is compelled to act. A key feature of racist imaginaries is therefore the stringing together of the highly emotional charge of images, rhetorics and narratives of both ‘them’ the perpetrators and ‘us’ the victims. Think only of the semi-obsession our tabloids have in describing the contradictory, fragmentary nature of everything Islamic as a story of an anti-Western threat.  Through each twist and turn of European ideas, then, there emerged the tapestry of common conventions woven into new patterns as required. The Muslim frozen in the tradition of Otherness was an already fit subject for the culture talk of the War on Terror. Often episodic, often eclectic, but with nothing wasted or thrown away entirely, the Islamophobia of today is this extensive body of racial ideas that echoes through the centuries of the modern era, and is found alive and well today in the most popular genres of cultural communication, there to always tell the west’s story.13 8 On June 23, 2014, my friend Mohamad Tabbaa dropped me off to the studios to conduct a pre-interview on the show The Project in a segment titled ‘Muslim-Australians Traveling to Syria/Iraq’. The show’s panellists would interview me on my thoughts on why young Muslims left Australia to fight for the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). By way of background, in that particular moment of time, seizing large swathes of territory in Syria and Iraq, becoming notorious for their brutality, mass killings, abductions and beheadings, the jihadist group ISIS had burst onto the international scene. Earlier that month, the ISIS had declared the establishment of a ‘caliphate’. While passing through the leafy and affluent area of Melbourne’s South Yarra, around the bends of the river, I began to rehearse my responses to potential questions. I could easily guess what they would ask me. I could easily guess what my responsibility as a Muslim, academic and community activist would be. While rehearsing, I found I was overfocused on negating the jihadist. I had committed myself to avoiding this trap and made a personal pledge to not denounce the ISIS. I came to this conclusion not because I support or have sympathies for their cause. My politics and theirs have nothing in

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common. I wanted to sabotage what I saw as a liberal society’s and media’s insistent call for a collective Muslim responsibility to condemn, to distance and to explain ourselves. I wanted to avoid playing what Salman Sayyid so eloquently states as the role of Muslim ‘therapist’ whose job is to ease white anxieties, to soothe away their fears about Islam and to erase a side of illiberal Islam from all aspects of my thinking. As Sayyid argues, the racist kernel at the heart of Islamophobia that drives its logic is a dark wish to erase Muslims.14 In its extreme form it expresses itself through bombs, through calls for genocide. But, the logic has many measures; it works as a Muslim’s own self-erasure and works through the community’s self-policing of dissenting voice. Obeying this logic, criticisms from Muslims must air only within the safe coordinates of society’s democratic values. It is easier to denounce the violence of the state after we make clear our commitment to pursue white respectability; it is easier to dissent within the scope of mainstream expectations of being the good Muslim. The performance of safe criticisms equates to an initiation act, equates to a democratic playing up of one’s critical agency that compares to an expected friendly foreplay that allows us to bed with the state. It gives the impression of a false distance between ourselves and the racist narratives that interpellate us. As I rehearsed my non-answers, I could see their frowns. Drenched in a steady apprehension, unconsciously pressing down my beard, I caught myself in the rear-view mirror, as severe doubts entered my head. I tried to talk myself out of it. For I knew, had been socialised into recognising, that condemnation does not abate Islamophobia. It only defers the abject object of disgust onto another Other. Some brown person had to pay for ISIS, them, their supporters or me. If I did not condemn, I would be that object. When walking towards the Channel Ten studios, the impact of this collective concern hit me. Seeing in my mind my father, mother, colleagues and community members, I felt a sudden immense pressure to conform to the standard line. I told myself to negate the image of the radical, to condemn the ISIS, to show offence at their barbarity and to declare loyalty to Australia. And thereafter I could speak. When sitting in the studio, leading up to my segment with the standard clichés rushing to mind and confronting me with the limitations of engaging mainstream media, I felt trapped. But, within my apprehension, I felt a strength. I had long committed myself to a different politics. It was now just about finding the courage. As I watched the panellists introduce my segment on a monitor showing stock footage of the ISIS, showing militants holding guns and their fingers to the sky, I found it. I adjusted my falling earpiece. I could not hear the voice-over, and, in that moment, I recalled an example I have long used to understand Islamophobia.

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For far from being driven by analysis of Muslim realities, the media reads, analyses and interprets Muslims against ‘frozen’ stock images of us as marching militants.15 So I began to imagine a white upper-middle-class Australian who is unfamiliar with Islam. Horrified by the barbarity of beheadings, I imagined her arriving home tired from work with the television playing in the background. Along with her partner, she prepares the family meal. She would hear nothing of what I say, see only my face in between doing her chores. She would see a bearded brown man (me) interrupt stock images of terrorism, along with trailing headlines describing the ISIS’s violence. What can I truly say on mainstream media about the violence of Islamophobia or white supremacy after I am introduced through the image of a Muslim beheading his hostage? What story is to tell within the story of the War on Terror, what would be heard, other than the sounds of an excuse? Who can I be other than a sympathiser, an Uncle Sam(eer) or Aly? Here, the bind of being or not being the stereotype traps and creates a ‘we’. It traps us on the dock where our humanity is to be judged and weighed. What can you say when anything you say and even your silence reaffirms the very racism you wish to oppose by speaking in the first place?

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Chapter 5

(The ‘Fabulous’ Mask of) Waleed Aly

1 Like most of ours, Aly’s story began in 2001. Australian journalist Martin Flanagan noticed a young man and his family at a Richmond football club training session. Flanagan recalls, ‘Looking around, I saw a young woman in a Muslim headscarf, a young man and two small kids and thought how good this game can be. They were just another Richmond family.’1 I smiled at this. For I recognised the quality that Flanagan saw. He used the word headscarf to make the supposedly powerful point of the normalcy of Muslims being ‘just another’. For even kicking the ball around a park becomes extraordinary, becomes part of a political story. In this case, the hijab is out of place at a training ground. And after 9/11, everything Muslim became a political puzzle to try and make sense of in the world. The War on Terror created the ‘square’ from which Aly could jump. For two of Flanagan’s words could well be the tagline of Aly’s underlining political platform throughout his career: ‘just another’. Despite being Muslim, he is just another, they are a people like us. But, the phrase can only make sense because it is his Otherness that first sticks out. The amplifying attention Muslims gained from the War on Terror is the same spotlight for Aly’s rather obvious political pontifications that allowed him without qualification to become a translator. For really everything he says is related to the spectacle of him being ‘just another’ Australian. When Aly read Flanagan’s story, he decided to contact him. And Aly’s ‘eloquence and intelligence’ stood out. There seems to me a recurring theme. Aly kept defying Flanagan’s assumptions. For, after he had discovered the 47

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young man’s journalistic ambitions, Flanagan offered Aly the opportunity to write an article for The Age.2 2 In 2007, SBS aired the Australian television show Salam Café. The show sat a group of Muslim commentators on a table and before the cameras. They discussed the day’s relevant topics. I very much disliked the show at the time, and perhaps it took me a while to figure it out. A group of friends and I created an online Facebook group that attacked it. I was hasty, silly, unjust and rather immature in my attacks. But, I felt angry and abandoned. I felt there was an explicit sense that the show was begging for its white viewers to distance upper-middle-class Muslims – doctors, lawyers, journalists – from the rest of us problem like Uncle Sam(eer) Muslims. They wanted the white gaze to properly see them for who we were not. More than anything it was an accepting of the call, of the first act, and therefore a ratifying of the white narrative and gaze. It not only legitimised it but as one of the earliest Muslim initiatives to counter Islamophobia it set the tone for Muslim responses. The key point to make is whether responses to the culture talk of the War on Terror, consciously or otherwise, privileged the idea that social acceptance is fundamentally related to moving away from the stigmatised brown Muslim and towards a recognised culturally whiter Muslim. There was also a paradox of sacrifice to their logic that explains my sense of abandonment. The Other Muslim became the ethnic Object outside the national fantasies of what it means to be Australian (read: white), and was constituted in the narrative as a threatening subject, which the White Australia ought to properly worry about (as opposed to worrying about the generalised Muslim). Indeed, presenting the good and local Muslim in contrast to the scary and foreign object is the underlining logic driving Salam Café . The show celebrates its Muslim hosts as each has a quirky, mildly amusing, self-deprecating manner. It is a biographical take on what it means to be Muslim Australians. During the show’s episodes there are short takes on young Muslim teenage girls dealing with everyday issues and on young Muslims of Lebanese origins with stereotypical accents. It attempts to naturalise the Muslim’s place in the fantasy space of the nation. For example, discussing the show in an interview, Salam Café’s main host Ahmed Imam claimed that he ‘enjoys going to the footy as much as the mosque’.3 Clearly, Imam wishes to tell his Australian audience that despite being Muslim he enjoys their national pastimes. So, I can only assume that Imam’s statement offered anecdotal proof that Muslims are normal too. He also

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explained that the show’s ‘humour is probably a reflection of the new kind of Muslim in Australia’.4 He claims this new kind ‘are comfortable living and practising their faith and joking’.5 The statement captures the show’s ambition to present the good Muslim as a departure from the foreign Muslim. Imam also confirms an ‘old kind’ of Muslim, who I can only guess is the troubling Other who lacks the capacity to joke and practice his or her religion. Imam contrasts the vibrant new Muslim against the rigid older Muslim lodged in the audience’s mind as the stereotypical Oriental. In her article about the show, Sacha Molitorisz spends most of her time on host Susan Carland. She describes Carland as ‘sharp, opinionated and has a stud in her tongue’.6 Molitorisz also quotes co-producer Pamela Swain to aid in her description. Swain describes Carland as having ‘a touch of the punk about her’ and as amazingly down to earth and ‘so Aussie’. She has a ‘bit of the rebel about her and is also a feminist’.7 Swain’s declaration that Carland is ‘so Aussie’ says it best. The pursuit of recognition in being so Aussie is not so much a problem, one might argue. Recognition is a fundamental and necessary aim in combatting social inequalities. Indeed, the show’s hosts do get recognised as legitimately Australians. That is because they are. The issue is not whether Carland is authentically ‘Aussie’ or not. It is about how this recognised identity results through a binary relationship that further relegates, negates and distances the radical Other after it maintains it. The point to be made is that the show fundamentally appeals to the subterranean nature of the white fantasy by declaring that familiarity is safe and foreignness is threatening. In the end, Salam Café made the panellists media careers and not much else. They had used the attention that came from War on Terror, accepted the first act to speak, to tell a most boring story-within-a-story. They told everyone Muslims were normal. They erased all major differences that shape the condition of our contemporary existence. And, to this day, I refuse to believe that they did not all love the warm shine of the white gaze on their faces. 3 For me, Aly has come to represent the fabulous moderate best. He epitomises our overperforming a reaction against the radical Muslim. Many in the Muslim community celebrate Aly as a counter to the War on Terror’s racism. The sense that he provides a solution is important, because more than any other, Aly troubles me. Before I move on, I should admit something. Waleed Aly, then Hamza Yusuf and finally Maajid Nawaz are my primary examples of the fabulous, militant and triumphant masks. But they are about me. They externalise an

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internal suspicion of my own performance as a moderate. I should then very explicitly say that what follows is not a precise analysis of their careers. Rather, I give a partial impression of them, of what stood out about them, of my reaction to them. And what stood out are the parts I despised the most about my own performances in life, the parts of me that I heard speak the Apollonian and repress the Dionysian. So with that said, I feel obliged to congratulate Aly for his success. Without sarcasm, I must remind myself to say, ‘Mashallah’. For he, Aly, is remarkably everywhere. His endless performance for the white public gaze is impressive for its stamina if not for anything else. He is a public intellectual, media celebrity, musician, a counterterrorism expert and radio host for numerous shows. He also writes on football and cricket when he is not modelling the cover page for Men’s Style. And as a Gold Logie-winning host for the popular show The Project, Aly intelligently comments on a broad range of issues, and many people listen. He also famously tells us all how we should forgive a racist for their racism. Aly’s politically centred liberal voice, his love of rock music and sporty disposition provide him with the ‘cultural capital’.8 It enables him to express a sense of being a local despite openly identifying as a Muslim. He does not hide his identities, partly because I suspect, as I have mentioned, being Muslim is what brought him into the spotlight. But that said, his religious and cultural background makes him a paradoxical figure. Some see him as the embodiment of a multicultural modern life, and others as duplicitous. He is an ‘insider’ as a consequence of having grown up in Australia without a distinguishing ‘ethnic accent’ and an ‘outsider’ as a person of colour and a Muslim post 9/11.9 Naturally, he has opponents. He attracts vitriolic fits from many white conservatives. Some see him as a fifth column. All turn him into a hero for many Muslims and post-racists. Sometimes I wonder if I would care if he was not a Muslim. I have read far worse commentators. Yet, I almost always carry a feeling of betrayal when I encounter his views. For a while I refused to read him and avoided him as a way to like him – so I could join the fan club so to speak. But, why? As mentioned, it has little to do with Aly himself and the fabulous mask he came to represent for me. He had by a formative stage in my thinking become the specular image of my ‘inner’ moderate who wanted so desperately to explain to the white gaze that we were not terrorists. He had become the image of oneself they want you to be that is simultaneously you and the Other. Aly’s sense of intimacy with translating (explaining) ‘Islamic’ terms – hijab, jihad, al-Qaeda – litters his book. And despite his lack of scholarly Arabic, an opening preface even warns readers of his method of transliteration. Unsurprisingly, in performing (rather than being) translator, Aly turns a

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Dionysian Otherness into an illuminating Apollonian humanism. People Like Us performs the culture talk of the Muslim’s modern struggles to its best. For example, the global riots that resulted from the Danish cartoons became more or less a commentary on absurdity, mostly on those thick Muslims haplessly betraying their prophetic values in the attempt to honour them.10 Aly took ‘comfort in the fact that this [book] is not intended to be a scholarly work. It is a work of passion, and it necessarily contains analysis’.11 And, I had guessed it before I read it. The title gave it away. Aly’s book had an expected aim. He would transfer the Muslim from the darkness of being the Other to the light of being seen as ‘human’. Well, the good Muslims at least were rescued. And only a curiosity to know what shade of humanist white the ‘people’ in People Like Us were drove me through its predictable argument. Of course it would not be done just by saying so. A performance of one’s humanity leads to the project. Hence, his accessible prose straddles the tones of scholarship and popular journalism. It provides access to his commonsensical liberal convictions. They come from the ‘vantage point’ of being a Muslim of the West who can comment on the ‘exasperating nonsense’ of below.12 This sense of transcending the parochialisms of the day prefigures the book’s movement upwards towards an abstract humanism. No sustained discussion hence on the materiality of the colonised order and its ensuing effects breaks through his page after page of liberal transcendence. In fact, colonialism is at times entirely foreclosed. No wonder, I thought. Perhaps Aly has become so honoured a figure because he too participates in the Australian settlement’s cultural act of forgetting colonialism, of a terra nullius for all. Yes, I am sure we all know it happened. We might even condemn it and acknowledge the original owners of the land. But, this reproach and ‘remembrance’ works as a way to relegate it to an ethical speech. When it comes to constructing arguments, explaining the current condition, it somehow miraculously remains absent. Aly set the tone of such concealment early in his book. He gives an example of both his abstractions of the problem and a valorising of the culture talk that he engages in. He describes a cartoon of a couple arguing. From the man’s mouth comes a black speech bubble containing a white square. From the woman’s, it’s the opposite, a white speech bubble containing a black square. The cartoon tells us something is wrong. For Aly deduces the contrasting bubbles represent ‘different ways of seeing the world’. It captures the essence of a ‘dysfunctional relationship’ in which there is ‘talking but no communicating’.13 In this example, Aly ignores how patriarchy genders the unequal positions of which we negotiate relationships. It comes then as no surprise that he also neglects the ‘dysfunctional relationship’ of power itself. For incredibly, without as much as a skip, Aly sees a ‘similar relationship’ between Islam and the

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West. Like the cartoon, no two civilisations apparently talk so much while communicating so little about. Ignoring that Islam has no equivalent ‘talking about’ to the prevalence of Orientalism, he has no equivalent institution; he even goes as much as to say that a ‘mutual stereotyping’ exists. Even if it did, stereotypes in themselves are not the issue. Their use to discriminate are. What hegemonic stereotype of the West exists to oppress it? In ignoring power, each civilisation’s ignorance however becomes comparable. They simply ‘talk across’ each other and the issues rest in a ‘different set of assumptions’.14 Primarily in this colour-blind view, a complete foreclosing of how the modern world forms along inequalities is ignored. As is the question of who gets to speak and who is spoken for. To be fair, there’s a short discussion on page 33 of a 300-odd-page book about the ‘psyche of the colonized’.15 Aly explains that a ‘natural’ Muslim animosity to the West results from the ravaging of colonialism. But even here in the supposed midst of admitting colonialism, he somehow again finds a need to use a white male to defend his argument. The former Lord Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone ‘knows’ animosity. He admits it. And even so, by the end of the page, Aly turns colonialism into fuel for a convenient Muslim identity politics acknowledged by all. Thus, in our ‘psychological malaise’, we now possess a ‘victim mentality’ justified by – of course – select citing from mayors and the Gallup polls. The lack of reading power runs throughout his book, but Aly’s opening cartoon captures it well. For, in it, the two speakers stand on equal footing, staring horizontally (rather than vertically) at each other, their speech bubbles being of the same size. But by Aly’s own admission, his book providing the proof, one in the relationship gets to be cited to prove how the other feels and one gets to poll the other, who is ravaged by a victim mentality. 4 I knew Nazeem Hussain as part of a group of young Muslims engaged in the Muslim Student Associations (MSA) scene. He was a friend before he became a teary mainstream reality celebrity. He had long been a committed community activist against racism. A generous, wonderfully sharp-witted young man, it is hard to dislike Hussain. And, very few do. But every time I watched Uncle Sam(eer) I lost a little of the enormous respect I had for him. The thing I found concerning was I knew enough of Hussain’s politics to guess he was uncomfortable with Uncle Sam(eer). Perhaps I am wrong, but for whatever reason, he still performed the role.

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At the time, Hussain was a law student, who dressed in sports jackets and stylish sneakers. He did not speak with an accent. He did not live the life of those who dress and talk the way Uncle Sam(eer) does. His experience of racism differed. And, I lost count of how many Muslims revealed their offences to me. They saw the figure as a mockery of the prophetic: the beard, the clothes and the advancement of Islam. I never understood why Hussain did not stick to tackling racism in the register he experienced it. Some members of the show had explained to me that Uncle Sam(eer) and Salam Café were disrupting racism by following the great Australian tradition of self-deprecating humour. I guess that proved they were Australian. But, again, like Aly, it ignored power. For if so, then, would it not be a more appropriate skit for the moderate Muslim of Nazeem Hussain’s world to see us watching them try to read the Quran in broken Arabic? Then, in response to their struggle, we could add canned laughter. Hence, for me, we find a better explanation, an unethical sacrifice that the hosts of Salam Café willingly participate in. They mock the most foreign version of Islam to reconstitute themselves as ‘just another’. Perhaps they think mocking accents resists racism precisely because it proves that they too find some Muslims absurdly odd. I discussed here mostly the figure of Uncle Sam(eer) rather than Hussein’s entire career, for I could not shake the fact that he enjoyed performing for the white gaze. The hosts had correctly felt it. They too sensed their interpellation as Muslims into the attention that came from the War on Terror. But they also turned it into a media opportunity to rescue their type of Muslims. No wonder they often relied on the idea that the West had a ‘perspective error’ in viewing Muslims. This argument became their entry point to perform the opposite of the error. This ‘error’ of course consists of a myth and a post-racial reinvention of racism. It is a view to reducing Islamophobia to a stumbling block to the emergence of the ‘full’ proper relationship with Australia. As if, without the troublesome intrusion of Uncle Sam(eer), the relationship would be properly constituted. The outdated Uncle Other figure prevents them. What we encounter thus is the paradox of sacrifice at its purest. The illusion of this sacrifice is that renunciation of the real object of mockery – Uncle Sam(eer) – will make accessible the integration of Muslims into a fictional and whole Australia. And, is this not precisely how Islamophobia truly functions, as a desire to reconstitute the liberal whole that must sacrifice the Other? So too the fabulous moderates sacrifice through their supposed translation. They erase the unintegrated parts of Islam to be able to maintain the illusion

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that it is only the ‘racist’s generalisations’ that prevent the establishment of liberal society as a harmonious, organic and multicultural whole. In adopting this performance of sacrifice, they reduce racism to misrepresentation. And here the true erasure occurs. The Dionysian conditions get foreclosed. Salam Café turns racism into a struggle for proper recognition as ‘just another’. It is the logic of the first act. Racism ceases to become a historical, political history that shaped the modern material formation of the nation state. There are no power imbalances. It is simply what hinders the projection of our true selves onto society. The ‘phantom’ qua Uncle Sam(eer)’s figure becomes for them the materialising of this impossibility of unifying with the West as just another citizen. I could not help but think then that Salam Café’s logic found its true calling in the figure. They wanted to show a watching white audience that beneath the imagery of a funny Other was a ‘just another’ normal and talented crowd of educated Muslims. Hussain’s act was one to wear the mask of Uncle Sam(eer) as a way to symbolically rip the mask of Otherness off. You accept your calling only to say you've been mis-interpellated. For this reason, I struggled to recapture the lost respect that I found in his performance. For the character Uncle Sam(eer) was clearly an act of displacement. His type is a necessary collateral damage in the moderate’s performance. A defence mechanism that shifted society’s aggressive racism to a more acceptable target: the conservative and more visibly ethnic Muslim. There are real Muslims, of course, who speak like that: real Muslims who have accents, real Muslims who want to introduce Islam to Australia. Is Hussain liberating himself or them from racism?

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Chapter 6

Finding(s) in Case Study One (the First Orientalism)

1 My first reading of Orientalism works as a political awakening. A onceassumed truth cracks about being a Muslim of the West. The wildly unsatisfying ‘common sense’ that previously and miserly governed my thoughts about being ‘just another’ breaks. Hence, it is act one; it is the first and most obvious reading of Orientalism. I became enamoured by the book’s erudite examples, and Edward Said’s argument of the absurd European view of Islam arrests me. The first reading of Orientalism represents my gaining of a recognition of how the Europeans see me. But this reading also interpellates us into its Oriental imagery, into Said’s call for us to ‘talk back’. For knowledge of Orientalism compels us to negate it. Said’s pronouncement of the hidden yet familiar recognition of the relationship between power and truths enunciates how my identity as a Muslim tangles with the vocabulary of Orientalism’s collective fib. One of his main points is that Orientalist texts operate to construct the Orient, to become ‘more real’ than any Oriental reality, more real than any experience or expression of that experience which ‘Orientals’ themselves might make.1 Importantly, then, Orientalism is not a correspondence between it and the Orient, but with the internal consistency of its discourse and the ideas about the Orient that come to exist despite or beyond any correspondence, or lack thereof, with a ‘real’ world.2 Orientalism operates as convention, habit, expectation and assumption. A very large mass of writers – among them poets, novelists, philosophers, political theorists, economists and imperial administrators – accepted the basic distinction between East and West as the starting point for elaborate accounts concerning the Orient, its people, customs and ‘mind’. We construct 55

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our knowledge of such according to a discursive field that creates a representation of the object of knowledge, its constitution and its limits; any writer has to conform to this to communicate, to be understood, to remain ‘in the true’ and thus to be accepted. For there are unwritten, sometimes unconscious, signs that ‘link’ the Oriental into our imagination with violence and terror. Essentially Orientalism as a discourse pivots on the West’s grotesque capacity to dominate Orientals in the process of ‘knowing them’ through constructing them.3 Hence, the repetitive absurdity of an entire Eastern world reduced to flying carpets, over-sexualised harems and women-hungry terrorists exists through its production of an imaginative geography. Said argues that we must examine Orientalism as a productive discourse. It weaves together the enormously systematic discipline by which European culture produces ‘the Orient politically, sociologically, militarily, ideologically, scientifically, and imaginatively’.4 It determines unwritten rules, shapes what we can and cannot say about the Oriental, forms lasting habits and solidifies assumptions. Said also shows us how, in the Orientalist canon, ‘Islam’ accounts for the total of any Muslim’s experience. From Islam comes everything and to Islam goes everything, and Orientalism’s aim is to drive this point home with a repeated and relentless monotony. Thus, a recurring theme in Orientalist work is that ‘Islam’ is the regulator of life from ‘top to bottom’, a motif Said characterises as not just intellectually lazy but as a model of intellectual production that would be inapplicable to the serious study of Western culture.5 There the humanities and social sciences engage in ‘complex theories, enormously variegated analyses of social structures, histories, cultural foundations, and sophisticated languages of investigation’, but none of that is found in the Orientalist world of ‘Islam’.6 But, to understand why Said argues that the Orient holds a special place in Europe’s thoughts, it must be noted that as its greatest, richest and oldest colonies, the Orient is not only adjacent, and hence the source of its civilisations and languages, but also works as one of Europe’s most recurring images of Otherness. Throughout, it helped define a contrasting image, idea, personality or experience. Through creating it, Europe created itself. The lagging behind Oriental legitimises the view of a progressive European politics. Thus, while typically frozen in the past, the Muslim Other becomes the antitype of an older European self that is fossilised in Orientalism’s paradigmatic view of Islam. The first reading of Orientalism impels me to recognise this paradigm. Far from being driven simply by a historical analysis of today’s realities, Islam is read through, analysed and interpreted against a stock of Orientalist ideas and imagery of remarkable consistency. So too I recognised the contemporary culture talk of the War on Terror as such. This culture talk demonstrates a continuity of cultural, literary and racist conventions that are now cinematic

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and televisual commonplaces. Has not the ongoing debate about an insurgent Islamism come with an overstimulation of Islamic images? Think of a current affair’s segue into a media piece about terrorism. How many times have we seen a series of snapshots from the Muslim world, like a disjointed slideshow – mosques, hijabs, Muslim’s praying? They work to form the stark crispness of their world against ours. They come to construct a set of disjointed set of pictures that rely only on Orientalism’s capacity to make Muslims and Islam the known Others. 2 Act one is the first mask of the moderate. It is the first because it represents our interpellation into the War on Terror, followed by our pursuing a departure from its claims. In this act we become narrators of our story-within-astory. We perform our normalcy only after we accept that Otherness is the stage. We negate the radical. We do not become terrorists, we do not become bin Laden and we do not become foreign. We negate the negative of stereotypes after we accept that it is our starting point.  But, it is not simply telling the truth about ourselves. We openly act out the inverse impression of the radical. It either comes as a choice or as the unconscious registration of how the War on Terror instructs us to behave. When we wear the first mask, we are generally obsessed with the white stare. And, if the gaze becomes obsessed with the Muslim as an unintegrated thing who hates, for example, our sports, we react. We become obsessed with showing how football crazy we are rather than questioning the myth of integration. With the first mask we accept whatever the narrative creates as the starting point of our identity.  The first mask comes from happily accepting the War on Terror’s call to speak in its culture talk. Thus, it is the paradoxical action of moving away from the stereotype of a radical Islam after we move towards it. It is the mask of the fabulous. My particular mask is an academic one. I long tried to ‘translate’ (read: take) my arguments through the vogue work of lofty social theorists. I wanted to show how integrated I was through an overtly academic voice. I spoke through a Lacan or a Žižek or a Wittgenstein. They ironically helped me speak about being a Muslim trapped in Western hegemony. I tried to translate the foreignness of Islam’s linguistic tradition through palatable familiar philosophies. In a sense act one is a reaction formation. We react not by questioning the myth of integration but by showing how integrated we are and how offended we are at the idea that we are not. We are overly eager to present the opposite.

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It is something similar to the postcolonial theory of mimicry. It is ‘often exaggerated and obsessive’ and somehow does more to highlight our Otherness than negate its foreignness. Hearing our name: Muslim, Islam, immigrant, shariah, jihad, halal and so on and so forth triggers us. After heeding the call, after accepting that we are being spoken too, we then react to it. Importantly, it also represents the moment we come to recognise the absurdity of how we are constructed and wish to talk back. But, hence the trap. While wearing this mask, while trying to talk back, by negating the stereotype, the absurd images of Otherness still frame us. Whatever the War on Terror’s culture talk speaks about becomes the point of repeal. Like seeing yourself in the mirror in reverse, the language still reflects a picture of us. Thus, the first fabulous mask represents our struggle to try and negotiate a representation of our normalcy within the fascinating tales of an Orientalism’s Islam, an Orientalism whose germ is carried through to the culture talk of the War on Terror. We try to cancel our difference but only affirm its Otherness; to tell a story-within-a-story. 3 The War on Terror’s gaze compels Muslims here to perform a type of obsessional exaggeration in our reaction against terrorism. Whatever Islam is, it is. I hold a view about my faith, but I do not wish to give that view and to distract from my current tracing of a Muslim’s reactive ‘love’ as a form of protest against terrorism. I would rather ask whether this reaction is often overdone, extravagant, showy and affected. I am, of course, not suggesting that the view that ‘Islam is peaceful’ is a false reading or feeling, but rather that the War on Terror breeds a compulsiveness to always show the best of me out of context. It demands Apollonian abstractions. For if we were to argue whether Islam’s ‘love’ adapts to the context it finds itself in, then I have little to say about the erasure of the Dionysian. But, if we were to discuss those forgotten concrete and historical conditions in which Islam must overcome, in which it must work through to exercise and find its love, then I have plenty to say. Yes our reflections about Islam ought to adapt themselves to changing situations as genuine emotions do. But, also that these emotions must continually be on display in their abstract, to be judged, to be used to police, is the problem. Any failure to exhibit a palatable Islam that holds the right values almost instantly causes the contrary view. It proves radical Islam. That is, our presentations about a peaceful Islam have achieved only a tightening of the gaze’s fix. Since any poor performance by the moderate to continually and

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always repeat ‘Islam is good’ (in all its formulations) proves that a radical Islam lurks beneath the surface of our previous lies. We have simply taught them to look closer, always waiting for a slip, always waiting for an ah-ha moment. There it is. The ‘real’ Muslim. More so, the fabulous mask denies the more mature ability to learn how to dislike sides of Western aggression without resorting to totalising thoughts of the West. Our criticisms become obscured even to ourselves. My relationship with the West must merely become a checkerboard of satisfaction or dissatisfaction. For above all, perhaps, in my inhabiting of this feeling I never come to know my real feelings about the West truly. I never become able to be ‘real’ in my relationship with Islam for that matter. I am always guarding it against racist attacks. For if any of my incomplete readings about my faith become less than perfect to some liberal standard, then I worry about a symbolic disintegration. Since, suddenly, ‘they become right about us’. It is not just the absurdity of Orientalism we get called into then, but also the acceptance of an ontological distinction in accepting a division between East (the observed) and West (the observer). We are constantly observing ourselves through their eyes. With this distinction comes the accepting and the recognising and subsequent performance of our difference for the benefit of the white gaze. It both alienates us and becomes our expected site of liberation. Would it not be ironic then, and is this not Fanon’s Hegelian point, that while the gaze interpellates us into being the Other, the Other interpellates the gaze into being a gaze? Hence for me Aly has done only one main job. The rest is fluff. His legacy is that he solidifies the white gaze within me. It is not so much that he, Hussain and Salam Café are merely representing themselves. They know what all of us know. If they were not Muslims in this time, no one would care about their Islam. They responded to a call that came to us all. I’m pretty sure it came early, through the Texan accent of the president: ‘You are either with us or against us.’ To be fair to Aly, less interesting and less informed Muslims come to mind as examples of moderates who play this role. But, as explained, this particular memory came to me while writing and it instantly helped me outline mentally and more clearly my point about the first mask. In response to the call, accepting the first podium that the discourse interpolates Muslims to stand upon and speak, when we wear the first mask, we wear the fabulous mask. When we wear the mask, we ratify ourselves before the gaze and retrench in the community the view that our job is to negotiate the stereotype. We suddenly embark on the most tragic of journeys, to prove our normalcy. And, who is normal that needs to prove such? This strategy only reaffirms the culture talk. The moderate Muslim did not break the bind. They solidified its circle.

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I find myself always asking, am I harsh? Were they not Muslims trying their best to deal with the pervasive nature of a humiliating racism? Perhaps, but their success today says something about the way we deal and about the deals we make. 4 As I walk through the museum, I am first struck by something. I see a curiously large life-sized decoratively dressed plastic camel in the room, which dominates the space and I assume sits in honour of the Afghan cameleers, who the museum claims were among the earliest Muslims on the continent. It adds little in the way of narrative but it’s a striking display that suggests to me a disposition to display art for its own striking quality. In a sense the camel brings some sense of Oriental familiarity about the museum that overrides, or at least attempts to mesh with, the actual attempt to narrate the Muslims as part of the modern tapestry of a cosmopolitan Australia. More curiously, for me, were the portraits sitting above the camel explaining the early arrival of Muslims. I found nothing in the display that spoke about the Afghan’s struggles with White Australia, and instead I had to try myself to imagine what life might have been like for them by narrating my own story into the two photographs of a simple mosque and a cemetery. Looking at a tombstone, I found myself searching the remainder of the exhibit for a mention of the ‘Battle of Broken Hill’, where a fatal incident took place on 1 January 1915 when two Muslim men shot dead four people and wounded seven more, before being killed by police and military officers.7 The attack was politically and religiously inspired by the events of the First World War, and it seemed to me that it could also inform modern-day visitors of a history beyond the current trope of the War on Terror, about long-lasting tensions between old empires and new. A few metres away from the plastic camel there is a large erected wall to display eight photographic portraits that profile contemporary Australian Muslims who have achieved success in the areas of sport, literature and business, all in the last two decade or so. Each portrait is accompanied by some of the Muslims’ paraphernalia: football boots, medals, boxing gloves. The entire museum has an open floor plan where one exhibit seemingly leads to the next. Walking through one space I felt I carried with me the ambience and unanswered questions from the space I left behind. Looking at the photos of modern Muslims I still had the question about the early Muslims. I knew all of the personalities displayed but apart from a short paragraph I learnt little about their struggles of being a person of colour in Australia.

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I wanted to know if their stories matched mine, if they struggled with racism growing up and if they had to constantly express their loyalties. Instead I saw something more akin to a presentation of a CV and list of achievements. The exhibit thus said nothing about the struggles of Muslims in that last decade either, which could provide context for visitors to understand their chosen achievements. Did they, like me, fall in and out of love with Australia along the contours of political debates since September 11? Did they flirt with a sense of exit from a sense of belonging? Did they recognise that they did not belong? The portraits are only a snapshot of the part of the Muslim community that has made it their intention to engage in mainstream Australia. Thus, there is nothing to represent the immigrants who are on the margins and whose everydayness cannot be translated into a list of ‘achievements’, no story then about the structural features that shape barriers to fulfilling success, or stories about Muslims who resist integration. In this sense the museum does nothing to explain the frustrations, obstacles and the violence within and without present-day Muslim communities and between generations. There was thus ‘no history’ in the Nietzschean sense because there were no disturbing Dionysian qualities on display that had tugged along with the Apollonian force in shaping history. There was only the soothing illusion of an Apollonian mythology that was aimed to contrast the Islamophobic assumption that Muslims fail to integrate. 5 While writing this I remember returning to YouTube to watch some skits. In one, Uncle Sam(eer) claims that people are scared of what they do not know. Hence he will build ten taxi ranks, ten halal butchers and ten mosques, and Australia will have the first Islamic state. All of these issues are contests in the current landscape, but looking sheepishly away, he promises he wants to make the whole world an Islamic state. I bet he would not say that joke again with the rise of the ISIS today. For then Uncle Sam(eer) had also been redirecting white anxiety to what Hussain thought was a more appropriate outlet for its concern: the absurdity of Muslims who want to take over the West. Today, for that same white anxious audience, the figure is too real. There is a separation then between the emotions we feel as the Other and the Object we think is more deserving. For Uncle Sam(eer) is the anal object par excellence: the partial object of Islam that always stains and disturbs the harmony of a supposed post-racial society. But the reliance of the fabulous moderate on the West’s perspective error does not hinder society’s union as they make us believe. The War on the Terror’s Muslim is, on the contrary, simply a filler. He or she fills in the

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relationship that does not exist and bestows on it a phantasmic consistency of liberal democracy: its Apollonian aesthetics. What appears as the barrier to society’s full identity with itself is its past racist condition built by a Dionysian past. Hence, by transposing onto the Muslims the role of the foreign body that introduces disintegration and antagonism to the whole, the fantasy image of society as a consistent, harmonious, Apollonian whole is made possible. Far from challenging whiteness, Hussain, Salam Café and Waleed Aly reconstitute it through the performance of sacrifice. 6 I remember arguing outside a restaurant with a group of Muslims friends. One of the brothers wore a Muslim gown and had a rather impressive large beard. We were busy chatting about football. We were enjoying each other’s laughter when someone in a car drove past and yelled ‘Terrorists!’ Every single one of us turned around as if they had personally called out our name. And so too, act one of The Heart of Darkness sees an omniscient narrative interpellate Marlow into the role of a storyteller. It calls Marlow into being, but it also begins his departure from the absurd life of London through the story of telling of one’s departure. The first mask compels an attempt to exit from its nonsense, to reverse the gaze, but we can only do this by travelling through it to get away from it. It expects a journey that it demands we take. It expects act two.

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Part III

MILITANT

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Chapter 7

Introducing (the Second Act or) Case Study Two

1 Act two demanded I find proof. It is about the struggle to find and return to a more authentic version of the Muslim. Likewise, my initial reading of Orientalism compelled me to search for an official Islamic image of being Muslim. Inspired by Edward Said’s energetic call for criticism to move beyond how the West frames the Muslim, the second reading marked my pursuing of my own ‘Kurtz’. I wanted the personification of my own ideal Muslim: I turned to Sheikh Hamza Yusuf. But again, another trap. Like in The Heart of Darkness, Marlow similarly sailed down the River Congo chasing a truth represented by the mysterious Kurtz. I began to adopt a persona of an ideal Muslim. I began to mimic the words of today’s contemporary religious authorities. Suddenly, I became a public advocate of an unpopular cause, performing what I assumed was an Islamic informed critical consciousness. I started calling for reform, started calling for a return to a ‘traditional Islam’. But I was neither explanatory nor hermeneutical in the conventional Islamic sense, just always vigorously oppositional. My ideal Islam, of which I overused, just represented me speaking about the same values given to us by European colonialism and calling it a ‘return’. So, suddenly, Islam did everything better; it became better at bringing social justice that democracy lacked, it had the right type of economic system that was not as destructive as capitalism. Again, maybe all this is true. But by now my reader would have noted that I am not interested in such analysis. I trace a mask that reflects my role as a reformer. I played this without a shred of actual knowledge about Islam in the contemporary world, mimicking only the culture talk of the War on Terror. I thus declared some Muslims betray 65

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the great, lost, pure Islam. On the other hand, I, like Marlow, had begun a journey to the heart of its truth. 2 Directly beneath the Museum’s portraits sits another exhibit which can be first sighted from the balcony. In this exhibit, I found a striking expression of the Apollonian and Dionysian synthesis. In it sits Abdul Abdullah’s large oil painting titled  ‘Waleed Aly’ (2011). I saw Aly in an altogether different light from the museum’s previous images of successful Muslims. Abdullah captures a sense of sadness but does not overplay it. A tinge of distance marks a grief without being overwhelming. Hence, in Aly’s eyes, I see an expression of burden written onto his frown. For me, the image of Aly captures a contemplative Muslim reflecting a shared experience, a collective problem. It says something more than about individual successes. Abdullah in his painting subtly toys with the hints of blood staining the art’s aura. The composition evokes in my mind Derrida’s argument on how the zombie represents the inscriptions of the failure of the life/death opposition.1 I could never quite tell if the painting was a celebration of Aly and the Muslims. It inhabited two opposing expressions and made a synthesis. The blood on Aly’s portrait marks a subject who sits at the boundary or the limits of our Apollonian sense of order and life. It blurs the lines and signifies both life and death. For me, Abdullah’s painting transfers the archetypical cultural figure of the zombie onto the Muslims of the West to express ourselves as an ‘undecidable’ subject. We become an identity that inhabits the locality of fundamentally opposing forces between democracy and sharia, between us and them, between Self and Other, and ultimately thus is a synthesis of the Apollonian values and Dionysian realities. I was not sure whether to celebrate the figure in the painting or be cautious of the depressing contagion it inherited. That, I thought, said more about the Australian Muslim experience than the previous portraits or anything else in the museum. The synthesis between the two drives is The Birth of Tragedy’s pivotal point. The book expertly traces their relationship. Nietzsche argues that whenever the Apollonian or the Dionysian dominate society, it must repress the other drive. Wheresoever then the Dionysian spirit prevailed, it necessarily checked and destroyed the Apollonian. And, reversely, wherever the Apollonian successfully withstood the onslaught, ‘the Delphic god Apollo displayed itself as more rigid and menacing than ever’.2 Nietzsche points to the late Greek tragedy as an example of the imbalance. It ‘died by suicide’.3 Pointing the blame at the Greek playwright Euripides, before him, Greek

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tragedy gave no solutions to ethical problems.4 The answers to life were not clear-cut, neither good nor bad. It struck a balance between the two drives. Euripides’s plays remade ‘tragedy purely assuming an un-Dionysian art’.5 It created an Apollonian art incapable of accounting for a Dionysian truth about the worldly condition. The Islamic Museum was this project. By removing the Dionysian, by providing no synthesis, the Islamic Museum makes no important contribution. It represents this second ‘militant’ mask of moving towards an ideal or authentic version that can only be authentic through what it erases. For instance, the Museum shows little of how racism shaped Muslim lives in Australia. It completely ignores it. It says less of the nation’s old fears about non-European migrants. Long-lasting panics that led to the call to keep ‘Australia for the White Man’ go missing. The museum thus overlooks the present character of these anxieties in today’s Islamophobia. Its silence gives visitors no redeeming narrative to explain a minority’s fight to counteract a persistent whiteness. Hence, I could not help but feel that the racism that shaped so much of the diaspora’s experience came through. Its absence defined it and the museum’s responses best.  It’s easy to see the Islamic Museum presenting a necessary, neighbourly counter. Yes, it challenges critics who see Muslims as divisive. But we must take a second glance. The War on Terror also explains our inability to express an Islam with a confidence that addresses our failures and traumas. The museum leaves us with no synthesis but instead an Apollonian resolution that invalidates the Dionysian world. The moderate militants see it their job to resolve this tension by destroying the synthesis and returning the Muslim to the Apollonian through a journey back to a supposed lost authenticity and away from the Dionysian realities of now. 3 Why did I identify with the ‘we’? Why did I respond to the call? I was born in the United Kingdom to Egyptian parents. I cannot remember my earliest memories in their proper sequences, but I am told that shortly after, my parents sent me ‘home’ to Alexandria. I do however vividly recollect my first memories of Egypt at around the age of six. In particular, I remember the day my grandfather took me to Friday prayer. My excited aunties dressed me in a gown and cap, and with a beaming smile my proud grandmother rolled a scent of musk onto the inside of my wrist. She then tucked rosary beads into my hand, kissed my forehead and prayed over me. In the final spare moments, as her hands rubbed my shoulders, she tried to make me memorise the opening chapter of the Quran.

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While walking to the mosque everyone we passed greeted us with a pronounced and loud ‘as-Salam Alaykum’. It is custom to respond. So, I nervously greeted them back with a hush of broken Arabic. In the mosque, listening to the sermon, my fingers ran nervously across the beads in my pocket. I understood perhaps every third or fourth word. I tried to sense the message but my surroundings distracted me. Everyone seemed sombre and unfamiliar. Yet, they smiled as they caught my eyes. An elderly man with a large white beard turned away, however, as he gently moved his lips in prayer. In worship, disciplined, he became my image of the religious. With the second call for prayer, people moved into place. I nervously looked up at my grandfather, who whispered to follow his lead. I did everything he did. I moved my lips as if I recited what he recited. I even borrowed his look of concentrated piety. When the time came, I too raised my right index finger and passed my salam to the angel on each of my shoulders. 4 A close friend of mine, Abdullah, explained how the word ‘jihad’ had now entered common usage in the wake of 9/11. Politicians use it to conjure up fear and all the many non-Muslims think it means unrestrained ‘holy war’. I waved my arms around to reflect his point that they believe that anything goes. Performing my role, taking my journey into idealism, I added: Don’t they know Islam has strict ethical and epistemological justifications for violence? Nodding his head but squinting his eyes, he explained this is not always true. It is amazing, Abdullah described, how some non-Muslims have a better understanding of jihad than some of these ‘silly leaders’. We’re always trying to sugarcoat it. Of course, yes, we gain our knowledge of jihad from our predecessors. There is a consensus to the way we derive our legal axioms and a way to follow the Prophet peace be upon him (PBUH). Abdullah went on to explain how he had recently read my blog review of David Cook’s book Understanding Jihad. Giving me a quick overview, he tells me how Cook dedicates his book to answering the question, ‘What does it really mean?’6 Cook’s book starts by suggesting that ‘there are different types of Jihad’. However, there is a consensus within Muslim works and practice that jihad means ‘warfare with spiritual significance’. Only today’s apologists are trying to change its meaning. Cook traces the meaning of jihad from the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) to Osama bin Laden through six chapters. The first two are most interesting since he grounds his definition in Islamic doctrines and early Muslim communities. Considering the massive scope of the task, he rarely engages deeply with the multiple central and legal or spiritual texts,

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but, nevertheless, he concludes with the main thesis. Cook’s point is to argue that interpretations of jihad as a ‘spiritual’ struggle against one’s desires are somewhat exaggerated.7 He uses Muslim texts, researchers and ideologists to support the thesis that jihad means ‘physical warfare’. In this introduction, Cook argues that al-Qaeda’s literature ‘invokes the legal, religious and military vocabulary of traditional jihad’. Although many Muslims today reject bin Laden’s claim to wage jihad, Cook suggests that Muslims under social and political pressure by non-Muslims are unwittingly revising their traditional understanding of jihad. He implies that Muslims mask reforms by providing elaborate ‘proofs’, as if claiming that jihad as a spiritual struggle is a historical and doctrinal constant throughout Islamic history. In chapter one ‘Qur’an and Conquest’, Cook focuses on the Qur’an and the prophetic traditions. He states that Islam began as the ‘peaceful proclamation of the absolute unity of God’.8 However, within a few years, the Meccans were persecuting the Prophet (PBUH) and his companions. Here, then, Muslim history begins with the Hijra, when the Prophet (PBUH) fled persecution and emigrated to the neighbouring city Medina. Cook argues that Muslim immigrants over time converted Medina’s tribesman to create a growing and more powerful Muslim community. In this context, that jihad arose. It was the religious justification to legitimise Muslim campaigns to gain adherents and control territory. Cook figures that, on average, in his later life the Prophet (PBUH) was involved in nine military campaigns a year. He points out that these campaigns provide sure proof of jihad’s importance to the early Muslim. I bring up this memory for a reason. I agreed with Cook, even though I had not read any of the texts cited. And, even though, politically, I avoided citing white males as the first authority of our tradition. But, I was in the midst of the second reading of Orientalism. I agreed with him solely because the mask I wore at that time demanded it. I needed to believe that other Muslims were in a condition of ignorance about our authentic tradition. If I needed proof of ignorance, I needed not to look beyond myself. But I had set myself up to blame other Muslims for departing from the true path. Whatever side you take in the contest of what jihad truly means becomes irrelevant here. And, what it does mean is not my concern here. I am more interested in how the term becomes a site of contests between Muslims who seek to present before the white gaze the ‘real’ Islam. Years late, for instance, the #myjihad campaign wanted to change the way the War on Terror frames Muslims. It intended to redress the negative representations of Islam as irrationally violent, sexist or backward. The widespread #myjihad ad portrays a smiling Muslim in hijab. She hugs a blonde lady with a Christian cross necklace. The caption says, ‘#myjihad is to build bridges through friendship’.

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The campaign’s success spread across the states. People from diverse backgrounds and religions (or lack thereof) joined. Yes, I accept that the tabloids reduce jihad to some menacing ‘holy War’. But it would be equally disingenuous to reduce jihad to one’s inner struggle. I never quite believed in the neo-liberal mantra of religion being about personal advancement. But, here is the point again about a lack of synthesis. There is and can be no complexity in the mainstream West’s understanding of jihad. It can only mean Holy War or not, and we as Muslims spend our time either affirming or negating this in a pursuit to win back an authentic self. 5 A decade after 9/11, I visited the ‘Sultans of Science’ exhibition in Singapore. It celebrated Islam’s golden age. Displays showed Muslim innovations in mathematics, astronomy, navigation and medicine. A life-sized mannequin of twelfth-century Islamic philosopher Ghazali caught my eye. In a long white tunic, with a spectacular turban and a synthetic beard, it stood in a dimly lit room. On the hour, a spotlight hit the display as a pre-recorded message played from hidden speakers. Ghazali came ‘alive’. The audio in English, with an Arabic accent, selected passages from Ghazali’s famous autobiography Deliverance from Error. The exhibition’s spotlight did not shine on a celebrated Muslim of history, but on the subject of the War on Terror: a hollowed object. The silent mannequin of Ghazali in a dark exhibit represented the absent Muslim beyond the War on Terror. It remained unknown, strange, blurry and unarticulated. But, the discourse functions much like a spotlight. It makes the Muslim visible. It brings it into focus. Thus, it was the museum’s timely use of the spotlight and the coming to life of ‘Ghazali’ that triggered this memory’s relation to Fanon. It came to life in an uncanny form as a thingness spoken for. I listened to the audio of Ghazali admonish the religious teachers of his time for turning believers into docile followers. He ended with a sentence on how he discovered truth ‘without seeking the help of a master and teacher’. I sensed an uncanniness to the message. Islam’s famous philosopher repeated stereotypical Enlightenment ideals about subjectivity. It expressed a Kantian-like ‘exit’ towards an assimilated subject that exited tradition and moved towards a familiar and empirically accredited Westernese discourse of individual liberation. It helped me identify the Other divorced from its own voice. And here, the anatomy of the mannequin furthers my analogy. It is worth noting how it wears a turban and a gown and has a beard. It is Asiatic on the surface

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and empty on the inside. It is empty to make way for the stereotypical liberal Apollonian voice that speaks for it. Similarly, the Muslim as Other is an empty noun that functions as a signifier to reveal or conceal, foreground or foreclose, affirm or deny the limits and the future of the Western village through the use of its own voice. In this intermediate space, prior to the War on Terror’s spotlight, the Muslim of Islamophobia is also a silent and hollow object that passively requires a European gaze to give it meaning, to describe its condition, to speak for it and to hear its voice. The mannequin articulates Islamophobia’s existing double bind where both good and bad articulations are subjected to the same demeaning objectification and political taxidermy. This double bind reveals itself again through the misfortunate example of the museum’s conveniently selected passage from Deliverance from Error. It functions to ‘add’ the Muslim as an object at the precise moment it contradictorily ‘subtracts’ us as a subject. The War on Terror’s key characteristic is thus not ‘hostility’, but is better defined through an Islamophobic desires to create an ideal Other without its Otherness, without its Dionysian history, without its own discourse. The symbolic order of the War on Terror in which we try to tell our story-withina-story is often a pursuit to break from the Dionysian ‘real’. Yet, this ‘real’ captures and restructures the experience of life. Hence, the Apollonian always falls short of totally capturing lived experience, for it inevitably excludes a part of the Dionysian ‘real’, excludes a synthesis. So, what happens is when I hear the likes of Waleed Aly speak their Apollonian language, I always come to believe that something is missing, something is absent. I only allude to it, and never totally capture, a concrete external referent of it, and this inability to know it without knowing it drives my pursuit for an authentic ‘Islam’ which I believe its lost. It creates a constant gradient of desire for ‘Islam’ and a perpetual reaching out for the pure reality behind the Apollonian symbolic representations. It produces a desire that propels me toward a promise of complete satisfaction. Ghazali wrote Deliverance from Error several years after he was tormented by doubt over religion. He speaks of bafflement, confusion and, in the book’s early pages, he reveals himself as lacerated by uncertainties.9 For six months he wavered incessantly between the ‘strong pull of worldly desires and the promptings of the next world’.10 His writing’s urgency and its intensely passionate voice heighten the story of a tormented man who turns into a Muslim saint. I had tried to read in Ghazali an example of the contemporary Muslim caught between an intersection of the War on Terror’s contesting political fantasies that locks us silent, that deny us the solid ground of our own politics, and that reduces us to moderates or radicals.

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I thus found my example in Ghazali. His declaration that Sufism is the only path that quenched his epistemological thirst through its appeal to ‘direct’ experience drove me towards searching for this. He claimed his deliverance from his crisis was ‘solved’ through God, his ‘master’ and a solution what came from beyond the symbolic world. He tells his readers that his constructing of rational proofs, or assembling of arguments, did not achieve the desired results. His soul was ‘restored to health and soundness’ only when ‘a light which God cast into his heart’ cured him of his ‘illness’. 6 Ghazali chooses a homely analogy to illustrate God’s unity in his major work, The Revivification. He uses a ‘chestnut’ to explain Islam’s cosmological claim about the oneness of God and to elaborate on the principle of unity. He tells of how a chestnut has four layers: an outer shell, an inner husk, a kernel, and the oil within the kernel. Those who are content with the chestnut’s outer shell profess God’s oneness with their tongues and not with their hearts. Those who reach the nut’s inner husk are ‘conventional believers’. While those who have approached the kernel, God has accorded illumination and ‘unveiled’ the truth in part. Finally, those who pierce the innermost oil of the nut have reached the deepest level. These rare individuals are ‘annihilated in their faith’ and they glimpse the divine oneness behind all phenomena. They ‘see only unity when they regard existence’. While thinking about Ghazali’s analogy of the chestnut, I asked myself, ‘Am I too just a mannequin?’ An outwardly Thing that only becomes something through being observed by a white gaze, and never as a thing observing, ‘unity when they regard existence’? 7 European history is full of Muslims as mannequins. From John of Damascus’s first eighth-century’s reports on Islam, through the Song of Roland, through to ‘that nodal moment in Christian-Muslim misrepresentation, the Crusades’, a history that made antipathy to Muslims an original ingredient of European consciousness was constructed.11 The ‘Muslim’ as an enemy has a long-evolving history in Western and Christian folklore. But, by the seventeenth century, Europe began to invent a more complex and carefully constructed view of the figure. The Muslim as an oppositional identity evolved from its first archetypical image of a warring

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Prophet Muhammad: enemy of the church, symbolic of all Muslims and a lustful example of a sinner.  Eventually, the Orient as an imagined geography – its people, beliefs and cultures – came to be something of a historical terra nullius. As a blank slate to be rewritten, it came to serve Europe’s colonial and worldly appetite for describing their capture of spice, their marvel, dominance and seafaring adventures. The One Thousand and One Nights tales in Arabic was a colourful, suspenseful, page-turner that brimmed with intrigue and invitation to explore the Muslim world of arches and rolling dunes.12 By the late eighteenth century, the book appeared in French and English and illustrated for its European reader a bawdy, misogynous, virtuous, adventurous imagery of the East.  In the colonial era, as Ziaddin Sardar and Merryl Wyn Davies argue, from the seventeenth century onwards, as Europeans investigated those instances of Muslim civilisation which they found everywhere in the East, men of letters came to the conclusion that these once-great traditions were decayed, enveloped in superstition, ‘wedded more to magic than science and unfit for the challenge of modernity and progress’.11 Today’s contemporary image of the stereotypical Muslim of the War on Terror emerges partly from a reading and encounter with history, but also from tales such as those in One Thousand and One Nights. And like mannequin of Ghazali, in those tales, in my own, the Muslim is half object and half their voice. It is what all ‘racial’ subjects are: a biological and artistic description of the fictional and legendary Other who seeks a pursuit of the self. 8 Fanon argues that the colonised turn against Europe in the second stage. They return to their ‘original’ culture to win their salvation, to shake off white supremacy. Hence they feel the need to come back to their unknown roots. They lose themselves and return to their ‘barbaric people’.13

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Chapter 8

(The ‘Militant’ Mask of) Hamza Yusuf

1 A local to the state of Washington, at age 17, Hamza Yusuf converted to Islam in 1977. He spent a decade studying in the United Arab Emirates, Algeria, Saudi Arabia and Mauritania. In 1996, Yusuf founded the Zaytuna Institute. It soon had an ‘international reputation for presenting a classical picture of Islam in the West’. The revival of traditional study methods and the sciences of Islam remains his dedication. John Esposito and Ibrahim Kalin’s The 500 Most Influential Muslims ranked Yusuf highly. It called him the Western world’s most influential Islamic scholar. Throughout my youth, I heard his name linked to talks about Islam’s intellectual prestige. His lectures became my first stop to explain complicated religious matters. An enjoyable philosophical tone inflected his speeches and attracted me. Even better, Yusuf represented a rich Islamic past. Yusuf very typically speaks with a careful, measured voice that often rises into a passionate plea around crucial points. He helped me separate the War on Terror’s account from an intellectual, forgotten but brilliant Islam. My anger sublimated into enjoying a seductive daydreaming about life in a lost civilisation full of Islamic art and manners. I am not suggesting Yusuf encourages this. No. Again, by whatever design, upon my reflection, he came to represent to me my own practice of splitting Islam into good and bad.  Years after 9/11, however, Yusuf lost his appeal. He became just another white American. Even the title ‘Rock Star of the Muslim world’ signified it. For surely, was his influence not an outcome of their hegemony? Regardless, I lost what I originally saw. Instead, an impression about Yusuf grew in me. I sensed that he sought to calm young Muslims down. I felt subjected to a different kind of preaching. My anger felt managed. Even if he personally 75

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roused against such, he came to reflect a variation of the similar American hubris. He too policed the Dionysian.  I enjoyed his discussions about philosophy and Islam. But when it came to politics I had to turn away, had to pretend I could not hear what he was saying. It was not that I disagreed, or could not accept his view, it was more the clear use of an unchecked racial thinking and colour-blindness that bothered me the most. 2 Yusuf has been consistent from the first day. The terrorists betray Islam. Less than a week after the attacks, Yusuf said that the attackers were ‘enemies of Islam’. Not martyrs, but ‘mass murderers, pure and simple’. Yusuf, whose articles about Islam are published internationally, talked about the attacks, the hysteria that he feared could grip the United States and the role that Muslims and others must play in opposing violence. ‘We’ve got to get to some deeper core values that are commonly shared,’ he said. When asked as to why anyone would do what the hijackers did, he answered: ‘A Religious zealots of any creed are defeated people who lash out in desperation.’ Importantly, Yusuf claimed he could not interpret the attacks in religious terms. ‘It’s politics, tragic politics. There’s no Islamic justification for any of it. … They’re not martyrs, it’s as simple as that’.1 3 Everywhere we find the call for Muslims to fight against their Otherness. But, Tariq Ramadan’s Western Muslims and the Future of Islam comes instantly to mind, and I suspect it is a principle example of a text that forecloses the Dionysian in its attempt to call for Apollonian-drenched reform.2 I admit that I essentially admire, continually read and forever learn from the well-respected Ramadan, albeit I linger with a reservation. I cannot shake a sense of ambiguity. It may sound odd but, I have regularly felt Ramadan is too reasonable, too careful in establishing his thoughts. Conceivably, perhaps, he grows wary of the foul surrounding critics that tarnish his reputation, and he remains forever conscious of how they mistranslate him. He is also a strong and beautiful character, but no matter how many times I try to blame myself, I cannot agree with him. I will try and explain. In Western Muslims and the Future of Islam, Ramadan focuses on the way Muslims in the West see themselves. He argues contemporary Muslims are driven by an inner ‘passion’ and ‘affirmation’.

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Globalisation causes ‘the old traditional points of reference to disappear’, and yet paradoxically it ‘reawakens passionate affirmations of identity that often verge on withdrawal and self-exclusion’.3 His book thus calls for our exit from this state of exile. It calls for us to move towards the awarding liberal state. But, while reading Ramadan, I felt he argues against isolation without full consideration of the impacts of racism. He focuses on the European Muslims’ self-imposed isolation. Despite his recognition of political and economic barriers, a concerned Ramadan laments and stresses over European Muslims’ obsession with the idea of self-protection. He questions their attempts to integrate via ‘the little door’ and criticises closed-minded attitudes, particularly of conservative Muslims, who assume isolation guards their children and their community’s future. Ramadan sees this limiting approach hindering innovation and creativity. Unfortunately widespread, it gives Muslims a false sense of power, might and legitimacy in their Otherness. Working like a ‘decoy’, it only isolates, marginalises, and insidiously strengthens the logic of the dominant system.4 I keep asking whether a self-enforced separation gifts a besieged community a respite, a sense of security, creating spaces that maintain the very tradition’s ‘reference points’ that inform Western Muslims and the Future of Islam’s Islamic solutions’. Also, Ramadan does not adequately warn against the price of integration into mainstream society. What are they for Ramadan, if any? More troubling for me is Ramadan’s suggestion that Muslims who remain in exclusion produce suspicion and distrust in mainstream society. On this point, I am less forgiving. The testimonies of coloured bodies everywhere prove that the actions and beliefs of racialised subjects remain entirely irrelevant to racism and Islamophobia’s suspicions. White society in its whole does not accurately assess the Other before giving us a mark of approval. It is dealing with its own historically persistent neurosis about its violence, a sickness that it projects onto, and calls the Other. After this, Ramadan takes us to Islam’s legal sources to resolve the condition of European Muslims. He uses the sharia to justify his main arguments and compels Muslims to make ‘one’s own’ all that is ‘good, just, or humane’. Islam’s ‘juridical instruments for adaptation’ invite Muslims to accept a ‘principle of integration’ and a subsequent movement into a liberal Europe as full and equal citizens. Thus, Ramadan invites Muslim readers to recognise the fluidity within Islamic law.5 He relies on Islam’s legal flexibility for his call to escape an essentialist view of ourselves as immigrants stuck in our old ways. This returns me to the ambiguity I have in reading Ramadan. I want to believe in Islam as the solution. I pursued it as a solution. But, Ramadan’s cultural talk about Muslims normalises the post-racial fantasy of a whole and

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open Europe. Is it telling that he ties ‘Western Muslims’ to the ‘Future of Islam’? I do not mean to be overly sceptical, but that title almost hints how the latter depends on the former. Maybe then we can read into Ramadan’s principle concern that focuses on the children of Muslim migrants living in the West. He strongly asserts that second- and third-generation Muslims are Western citizens and hence they must think for themselves and resist a ‘bi-polar vision’ that ‘grips’ their minds and ‘breeds within them an inferiority complex’.6 He grants that European Muslims will forever debate, exchange ideas and have discussions with Muslims worldwide, but they must ‘put forward new and concrete ideas’, which remain independent on an intellectual level and on the political and financial levels.7 Hence, Western Muslims should form an Islam through a new arrangement that merges religious principles with an interaction with contemporary Western society. Undoubtedly, Ramadan, who crassly suffers at the hands of bigots, knows Racism burdens people of colour with an obligation to correct ourselves. It assumes as the starting point that the fundamental flaw lies with our cultural attitudes or that part of Europeanness which we lack. It dangles racial punishments above us, suggesting that the lack of self-reform deserves its whip. But, the general tone of Ramadan’s book assumes otherwise. He always shifts attention to the empowering of Muslims, calling for forward-thinking individuals. A positive, life-affirming approach thus governs the logic of his argument and that enables his Muslim readers to identify solutions. It is all, at one avoidable level, deeply Apollonian, deeply post-racial and inevitably only audible to First World Muslims who are craving to share in Europe’s mobility. It unintentionally confirms the liberal faith that we can end racism by adjusting attitudes, and leaves unanswered the economic questions tied to institutional racism, about the relationship between First and Third Worlds. For me, Ramadan, therefore, unwittingly succeeds only in returning the Muslim to liberalism through an appeal to a particular concept of the conscious Apollonian subject that stands independently, leaving behind its problematic Dionysian anchor of the Muslim world. He conceptually removes that part which makes us an undecidable subject. On first reading, Ramadan rescues the Muslim from a dehumanising Otherness, an honoured academic Muslim speaking of palatable humanist and shared truths driven by the sharia. But on second glance, I saw Ramadan as a Muslim rescuing the liberal myth. He paradoxically shares a desire to view Europe as independent from the intrusive Muslim at precisely the same moment he articulates a liberal desire to see Europe as accommodating the Muslim. Or, perhaps I read my own ambiguity in Ramadan; either way I feel his book reflects much of what I want to say about the second mask. He captures

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it well when he says globalisation causes ‘the old traditional points of reference to disappear’, and yet ‘reawakens passionate affirmations of identity’. For was not my awoken passion to find an authentic Islam not precisely this need to affirm my identity. 4 A specific Hamza Yusuf essay captures everything I desire to say about the confines of the Apollonian culture talk that plagues preachers of ‘traditional’ Islam. It touches every fold of his reasoning for Muslim reform. It is conclusively a plea for Muslims to accept responsibility. Sure, but it also disregards the world’s unequal political structures. The essay merely examines Muslims negatively against the merits of the West and against an abstract and lost bygone Islam. It was strange since he had earlier announced that the attacks had nothing to do with religion. But now in the aftermath of the ‘heinous crimes’ that apparently had ‘no parallel’, he realigns with the culture and Apollonian talk about abstract values. Muslims, he says, need to self-reflect about what we do wrong. Yusuf wrote ‘A Time for Introspection’, a frequently mentioned article and the subtitle made me shake my head. ‘The worst enemies of Islam are from within’, it read, as I mumbled frustratingly. Why?8 The article opens with a claim on the uniqueness of 9/11. The use of civilian planes as weapons of mass destruction when they hit the most commonly recognised skyscrapers in the world. Tellingly, the racialism that causes one part of the world to be more ‘recognisable’ goes unchecked in the article. America is the centre of the world. Yusuf makes a similar adjoining claim. Never before have we seen such a ‘terrible indictment of Islam’.  Thus, 9/11 became the moment Islam took its worst hit. And, Yusuf goes on to reproach Palestinians who had allegedly celebrated the attacks. They forsook their faith he argues. They did what Yusuf called shamaatatul ‘aadai’ – rejoicing at the tragedies of enemies. It is ‘explicitly prohibited in Islam’. The Prophet (PBUH) never did such a thing.  The most curious features of the article then appeared. Yusuf asks: ‘We have also seen image after image of Muslims with beards and turbans, who by all outward means look religious and pious – but are they really?’ The question itself worried me, but Yusuf’s audience soon became clear. ‘Unfortunately, the West does not know what every Muslim scholar knows; that the worst enemies of Islam are from within.’ The theme repeated itself throughout and a term came to influence. I have heard it for 15 years since. ‘The worst of these are the khawaarij’, says Yusuf. The term ‘khawaarij’ translates to those Muslims who depart from the mainstream opinion of Islam. According to Yusuf they ‘delude others by the

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deeply dyed religious exterior that they project’. The essay attempts to place the terrorists on the fringes of Islam. Sure, but now we shift the debate from Islam to a bad version of Islam. Either way, we still speak of the Other – dyed or otherwise. Yusuf may not see the terrorists as the proper type of Muslim. But, they are still Muslims. He admits such as he reminds readers of what the Prophet (PBUH) said: ‘Beware of extremism in your religion.’ Yusuf sees the 9/11 supporters as extremists of (the) worst type. They ‘excommunicate all’ who do not share their interpretations. Along with these ‘zealots’ and ‘fundamentalists’ another recurring theme appears.  Yusuf goes on to argue that these extremists come in two types. The first extremists are reactionary, who fall far from the centre. They wish no pluralism. They see the world in artificial black/white, good/evil and us/them terms. According to them, they do only good and those who disagree are evil. Interestingly, Yusuf further contends, ‘They are used often by the Western media in order to scare simple people and cause them to believe that Muslims are insane’. But, even then, Yusuf partly blames Muslims for the Western media’s errors. Unfortunately, he laments, ‘Our communities provide them with much fuel to fire their incendiary flames’. Yusuf moves on to the second group: radical extremists. They too have closed minds, identical to the first. But, they differ in that they will use violence to assist their cause. They believe like every nefarious secret society before them that ‘the end justifies the means’. They see any action as acceptable if it furthers their purposes.  In contrast to these extremes, Yusuf explains, the real Islam is the middle way between excess and neglect. First, Islam’s means must reflect its noble ends. Secondly, Islam is not a secret society of conspirators about whom and whose planning no one knows. Moreover, Islam openly declares its aims, which are recognised by good people everywhere as pure and congruent with their own wisdom and traditions. So, despite Yusuf saying initially that the attacks had nothing to do with religion, they now have everything to do with religion. Even the Prophet (PBUH) warned us against this type of extremists. Yusuf’s article then further strengthens the link by carrying on about Muslims as the cause of their own downfall.  Terrorists, of course, invariably become people ‘who have never taken a true spiritual path to God’. But I found most fascinating the argument that follows. According to Yusuf, part of the problem is that terrorists have not ‘studied the humanities’. One of Yusuf’s gripes, then, is that he can argue with ‘guarantee that you will not find a scholar of poetry among the whole vile lot of these people’. American-born Yusuf then explains how terrorists (all Arabs) have no true knowledge of Arabian culture, which is centred in the idea of futuwwa:

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a word akin to the Western word ‘chivalry’. Thus finally Yusuf’s argument comes to an obvious conclusion: Our real situation is this: we Muslims have lost theologically sound understanding of our teaching. Islam has been hijacked by a discourse of anger and the rhetoric of rage. We have allowed for too long our mimbars [pulpits] to become bully pulpits in which people with often recognizable psychopathology use anger – a very powerful emotion – to rile Muslims up, only to leave them feeling bitter and spiteful towards people who in the most part are completely unaware of the conditions in the Muslim world, or the oppressive assaults of some Western countries on Muslim peoples. We have lost our bearings because we have lost our theology. ... We have almost no theologians in the entire Muslim world. The study of kalaam, once the hallmark of our intellectual tradition, has been reduced to memorizing 144 lines of al-Jawhara and a good commentary to study it, at best.

The reality is, Yusuf concludes, that we are an Umma (worldwide Muslim community) that no longer realises that Allah is the power behind all power; that it is Allah who subjugates one people to another; that He gives dominion to whom He pleases and that He takes it away from whom He pleases. Our understanding of tawhid (oneness of God) has fallen into such disarray that we can no longer introspect when afflictions befall us and then wonder in amazement at why the Americans seem incapable of introspection.

To make the point through a most obvious contrast, Yusuf explains how he personally attended a memorial service in San Francisco with over 30,000 people. The reverend Amos Brown said in no uncertain terms that America must ask herself what she has done either wittingly or unwittingly to incur the wrath and hate of people around the world. Yusuf concludes that Muslims, on the other hand, generally prefer to attack the West as the sole reason for their problems when the truth is that we are bankrupt as a religious community and our spiritual bankruptcy has led to our inability to even deliver the message of Islam to Westerners in a time when they were giving us platforms to do so. It is ironic, he says, that the Western media, while producing many vile programmes on Islam, have also produced and aired material of the highest quality with a high level of accuracy only to be vilified by Muslims because it was not good enough.  The ‘oppressed’ Muslim that he had hinted at was, of course, only in abstract. For now he contrasts that world against the peak of the capitalist order, and takes the United States through a series of culturally loaded rhetorical questions as our standard. In contrast he asks Muslim: Where is our media? Where are our spokespeople? Where are our scholars? Where are our

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literary figures? Yusuf declares the truth is we don’t have any – and so instead of looking inward and asking painful questions such as why we don’t have such things and such people, we take the simple way out by attacking people whom Allah tells us will do mean things, say bad things and plot against us. Conspiracy or not Yusuf concludes we are to blame for the terrible backlash against Muslims. 5 I will not lie. Parts of me felt guilty for questioning Hamza Yusuf. Who am I? What exactly are my intentions? He could fill more truth in a footnote about Islam than I could in a book. Should I really question him? Almost every Western-raised Muslim beyond Salafis has grown to revere Yusuf. How many times has he helped me solve a private argument about my faith?  But if I am honest I cannot help but trace an Orientalism in Yusuf’s vanished ethical past and a pervasive whiteness in his politics that repulses me. And, I noticed myself questioning whether an American-raised Muslim should be calling the Arab world culturally backward? He has earned his right surely, no? Perhaps, I mused, but then again I asked: Does becoming a sheikh mean you lose white privilege? Can Yusuf truly understand the psychic registers of growing up non-white and hearing about your culture’s backwardness regularly? But it’s his timing. Is this the conversation we should be having now? I could not avoid a question. For no matter how brilliant, no matter how learned, no matter how spiritual his knowledge, do his views weaken or strengthen the racial thinking? Does he rely upon or destroy the culture talk of the War on Terror? I wish not to deny the Arab world’s Dionysian conditions. I will not seek to erase them . Rather, it is how we understand the reasons for its decline. But all this aside, as I mentioned, more than anything Yusuf’s timing bothers me. The criticism, its language and his audience show him insensitive to the pervasiveness of racism. His timing proves him ignorant of it. Only a month after 9/11, he talked about vile creatures who lacked poetry. What purpose does this serve other than to reaffirm that Islamist violence comes from uncultured thugs. Will the racists make Yusuf’s distinction between the good and poetic Islam and the rest? Or does it just reaffirm the underlining point of the discourse: them – ‘them’ is the problem. All that Yusuf is disputing is who exactly ‘them’ is. My concerns began as a whisper but grew into a worry. I so badly wanted an authentic Islam that I would ignore the irrelevance of Yusuf’s contrasting Muslims today against a noble poetic and abstract Apollonian past, which

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comes without a proper and sustained reading of politics or the Dionysian we’ve inherited. His views all sounded like my identity as a Muslim – once again – was measured by what culture I lacked, and the more I lacked the more I wanted the real thing. The sole legacy Yusuf left me was with a thirst for a liberating view of Islam that ironically his whiteness could not provide. The journey for authenticity just kept getting deeper and deeper.

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Finding(s) in Case Study Two (the Second Orientalism)

1 My next reading of Orientalism is my second. As discussed, it comes from the idea of reform through the pursuit of an ideal Islam. After my initial reading, and much like my rejection of the ‘absurd’ Oriental, the second reading coerces a journey away from Orientalism towards discovering a ‘true’ Islam. There is an important figure here to discuss. Or, should I say an important concept of who I am as a figure who speaks. For Edward Said, critical intellectuals who foster a political awareness reject Orientalism’s imperial discourse and intervene to broaden our view and give landscape descriptions of ‘the intrinsic conditions on which knowledge (of the Orient) is made possible’.1 Exercising a major part of his intervention, Said stresses on the material conditions of the world as a way to replace the spectral black/white identities of Self/Other as the role of the critic. Part of the unredeemable problem of Orientalism is that the incontrovertible reality of the Oriental’s experience, and its very worldliness, continually eludes the disciplinary and epistemological assumptions of its critics. Hence a critic must always know themselves, for criticism is a dissolvent. As he suggests, it is a form of historically and theoretically informed intellectual energy that erodes ossified dogmas, dismantles artificial walls, overcomes tyrannical hierarchies and opens up new horizons for investigation.2 Alternatively, he argues, the knowledge furnished about this defamiliarised force field is decidedly uncanny, often unnervingly so, and leads to us asking similar question from new position.3 I do not exaggerate when I say I imagined myself possessing an Islamic critical consciousness – one stitched to the ideals of our past. Said became 85

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exemplary, for me, in tying knowledge to politics. He helped me highlight the machinations of colonialism. I pursued ‘embarrassing’ questions and reversals of statements. As a pompous postgrad on the conference floor, I would ask questions like, ‘Why is not Islam our reference to determine the legitimacy of democracy instead of democracy being our hidden reference to determine the legitimacy of Islam?’ I would flip positions and give brash overviews of Europe’s violence to determine everything commonsensical and natural as ‘unnaturalised’ European epistemology. Islam is the solution, I concluded. Let me give a more telling example. Said argued that Orientalism provided a rationalisation for European colonialism, based on a self-serving history in which ‘the West’ constructed ‘the East’ as extremely different and inferior, and therefore in need of Western intervention or ‘rescue’. The list typically includes the absence of private property, the presence of general slavery and the prominence of a despotic government.4 I therefore found myself arguing against private property because it was fundamentally European and thus implicit in Europe’s colonial violence. Islam, I concluded, had a better economic system. In reality I had no clue about whatever I thought an Islamic economic system meant. Another example of my second reading of Orientalism is how Said made visible to me the dichotomous contrast between the static history of Islamicate societies in comparison to the dynamic evolutionary character of Occidental, Christian culture. The crucial feature of this dichotomy is that Christendom is homogeneously and uniformly progressive and dynamic. In contrast, Islamdom is consistently static. While pursuing my Muslimitude, everything revolved around Islam’s ‘movement’. I cited all views of a static Islam as Orientalist – and argued about the perpetual fluidity of tawhid. It sounded great. But without an indepth reading on Islam’s history, I found myself making arguments about its inherent dynamic, rich, intellectual and scientific past. Everything was about readjusting the view, asking the same question from a different angle. The West was still the reference. The second reading was marked then by a high premium on paradox, opposition, discrepancy, distinction and dissensus – rather than clarity, coherence, catholicity, consensus or synthesis. 5 Responding therefore to everyday Orientalist images of barbaric, lustful or violent Arabs, in ‘moving outwards’, I panned out to a landscape view of a European violence to contextualise debates, to readjust the gaze, to move away from portraits of mullahs to landscape views of imperialist histories. But, in the end, the valorising of the West obscured the view of the Muslim from history.

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The Muslim merely became an erased spot in history that allowed me to speak a politics that only spoke of (and hence valorised and made exceptional) the West’s history. My Muslimitude was merely the stuff of legends. 2 Act two is our wearing of the second mask: the militant mask. It represents a ‘journey’. In this act, when we play the moderate, we overperform our role as a reformer who purses an authentic lost and truer Islam. The unconscious register of the War on Terror instructs us to behave as such. It is the act of verbally fighting the bad parts of who we are. We accept the culture talk of the War on Terror and wage a culture war against the terrorists. We split ourselves into good and bad and perform the very same black-and-white thinking of the racism that pressures us. We not only negate the negation, as in the first act. We actively go to war with it. But, it is not merely about winning back the truth of the real Islam. We react to those in the West infatuated with the Muslim as a threat by saying it is not us that threatens but the Other-within-the-other. In the first act, we negated that we were terrorists; in this act, we point to another Muslim. It is the intolerant Salafis, we might typically say. It is the violent Wahhabi, or it is the backward Taliban or it is the infantile youth uneducated in our culture’s civility. It is ourselves who lack poetry or chivalry. We mimic the language of Orientalism, project them onto our own sects, and code them in the native terminologies of Islam. It is the lateral violence of a racial thinking that infects us. Suddenly the problem becomes those who hijack the religion with their politics. In this act, we sacrifice (like the first act) the Other-within-the-other as some short-sighted symbolic act that we pray will give us deliverance from racism or terror. But, more importantly we use this Other-within-the Other to describe a need for a journey towards authenticity. But really the second mask mimics the Islamophobic thinking of the West, except that Muslims perform it on other Muslims. We try to pass on the baton of Otherness to even more undesirable and illiberal Muslims. We merely take us/them as the binary of the West and micro-apply it ourselves, and to do so we must always hold up an abstract standard of a once lost Islam as our criteria. In almost all cases this criteria is void of any reading of history or the world. Thus, something else happens in this second act. We begin to construct an abstract ideal and a non-historical Islam that we attempt to ‘win back’ from the radicals. We construct a ‘Muslimitude’. We mourn a lost past of perfection, of proper cultural and goodly palatable Islam. We judge ourselves against it.

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This mask thus compels a failure in a political thinking by adopting the culture talk. It likely turns into an often-exaggerated attempt to dispel and eradicate the Otherness from within. And, thus it fails to bring together the dichotomy of both Apollonian and Dionysian elements of being a Muslim in the modern world subjected to centuries of colonialism. No cohesive, realistic and balanced reading of the current condition occurs. When I wear this mask, I split history in two and almost always compare the damaged present to some ideal Muslim community of the past. 3 After every terrorist attack, I am sure many readers would have heard the public calls for moderate Muslims to stand up and to win back their religion. The militant–moderates put their hands up. Our response is another form of interpellation. Thus, in playing heroic reformer, we share the view that there is a cultural problem that plagues Muslim societies. We do what the white conservatives ask us to: ‘We take ownership.’ It becomes some performance of honesty as we avoid playing the victim. And you will hear the militant declare that ‘we’ have a problem as they parrot some neo-liberal mantra of ‘pulling one’s socks up’. Sure we have a problem, and most Muslims will agree. I would not write this book if I did not recognise the regressive conditions of the Muslim world. But, again it is the type of problem identified that concerns me. It is the way we talk about it. In almost all cases it is some fluffy missing of Muslimitude values detached from any proper reading of politics. It once again forecloses the Dionysian as we wax lyrical about some Apollonian and indulgent saintly order stolen from us by the bad radicals. I am not talking about real reform, of course, for that must account for the overturning of material condition. I speak here with an example or two in mind. I remember once at Friday prayer listening to the sermon in a university hall. The preacher stopped mid-sermon. Two students were chatting with one another about it going overtime. I assumed that they had a class to attend. But, since we were forbidden to talk during the sermon, the preacher rather angrily pointed them out. He then incorporated their misdemeanour into his speech as he explained that such violations are the reason Palestine remains occupied. We have fallen far, you see, and we have left behind every aspect of the religion. Thus, our oppression, thus, our occupation. Look only at the fact that we double park when we come to the mosque, or, as Hamza Yusuf once described, we leave a ‘sea’ of rubbish behind in Mecca after we perform Hajj.

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This rubbish reflects our cultural backwardness of course, our departure from a Muslimitude, rather than the result of the hyper-consumption of a global capitalist world and all the plastic commodities it creates. At another sermon, similarly, an elderly sheikh berated us all for not having the same level of patience as our tradition’s saints. The sermon’s point was that we failed their standards. So then, he concluded, is it any wonder that God had (through a patient America, presumably) bombed us? For God had promised in the Quran that he would replace us with a better people if we did not live up to such standards. A resulting conflict often proceeds through discourses about the obligation for Muslims to reform and return to some Muslimitude. For the ‘bad’ variant becomes the source and the reason for many things. It tends to explain the terrorist’s motives, to account for their violence and to help understand society’s ‘backlash’.  Sure, I admit, intentions to introspect or take responsibility may be noble, even necessary. But we risk reducing all to an abstract good or bad. The interlinking and multiple circumstances of a Muslim’s life go unread. We simply list Muslims into two columns, a micro-variation of us/them. We become authentic or inauthentic. The talk of such and promotion of our values hence erases the difficult realities of a concrete Muslim world and how violence works. The Apollonian erases the Dionysian. Yes, I too feel the everyday pressure and understand how a reflexive response arises to publicly highlight Islam’s ‘good’. Some of us even see it as a duty. And, yes most liberal audiences agree that all communities have heroes and villains. But notice how we seem to speak only about an Islam full of the latter. Hence the ‘militant’ feels compelled (at least in his or her speech) to split the normal Islam from the dangerous. We must, therefore, speak of ourselves without ambiguity or pause. A culture talk prevails about what belongs and does not belong. For the racist’s gaze is sharp and paradoxically blurry; it is sharp in its sting and blurry in its inability to properly focus and see complexity.  Listen to only how so many romanticise Granada or Cordoba, and you will understand my point. They become idealised pasts to help argue that today’s Muslims have departed from a previous nobility, from a previous highly held ethics, arts and statesmanship. But with this second mask, with this pursuit for an authenticity, we are not reforming the Muslim world. We simply contrast ourselves against an Apollonian abstract light entirely decontextualised from our situation. It awakes the very opposite of the intention. It reminds us of not who we were, but what we are now; what we are missing. For, I visited Andalucía once. I was expecting something special, something lost. The well-kept ruins of pasts mosques, the

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citadels and the palaces only depressed me. They are decorative tombs. Nothing else. I did not a get a picture of a glorious past, but rather of a striking contrast to the misery of the present. I guess that’s the point. We defer our current political weakness into emotions spent dreaming about the strength of our once was and now lost glory. I was not just pursuing an authentic Islam, I was making one to shield myself from the War on Terror’s racism. 4 I did three years as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of South Australia in Adelaide. Without exaggeration, it changed me. There are things that I can say, and others that I cannot, because there are truths I know of and others I have yet to figure out. But, I found my demons, confronted myself, my anger, and saw the masks I myself had worn. I slowly began to learn how to love. I met an influential person who changed my life and then there were the long debates about Islam that I had with nonMuslim colleagues. And, perhaps those years are remembered because they marked the end of my ‘journey’, marked the end of my pursuit for a false authenticity, marked the end of my exhausting search for a true Muslim me. It was not fun. For once that pursuit vanished, I was confronted with a very ugly and insecure me. I remember one such instance. I was staying at my friend Gilbert’s house when we started a discussion about my pursuit for Islam and how it relates to my academic work. I spoke about the need to translate the works of Ghazali and turn into a modern ontological and epistemological model for Muslims to find their voice. Gilbert was a sharp mind. He was not judging, he was not critiquing. He was supportive and was an incredibly generous thinker. Yet, without saying much, apart from a few questions, he nevertheless demanded from me a level of coherence and depth to my political ambitions. His questions gave me the rope that I hung myself with. I knew while I uttered half complete thoughts that I had not done my work. As I started talking about the influence of Ghazali and the pursuit of the ‘real’, of searching for God’s voice, I realised I was simply mimicking Marxist and critical theory to speak. To be sure, I am not saying the project of finding an authentic Islam is not worthwhile, I am not saying it cannot be done or it does not exist. I am saying that I wore its mask. I led myself to believe in it without experiencing it. I could barely speak a word of Arabic, knew little about fiqh, but I so badly wanted to be the form of an authentic Islam, so badly wanted its platform, wanted an Islam without the content, without its intellectual history. I was a mannequin.

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5 The War on Terror makes it hard for us to incorporate contradictory aspects. There can be no synthesis in the Nietzschean sense. It pressures us to underdevelop a mature voice of political thought. Suspicion and hostility mark the public debate. It is either this or that, and makes it almost impossible to explore critical ideas about Islam in a measured manner without some sense of betrayal or loyalty. The War on Terror generates an atmosphere of internal hostility. It does not solely travel from non-Muslim to Muslim. A lateral violence occurs. We absorb and distribute the blame. Existing debates on the difference between Muslim sects and schools heighten in intensity. Our theological conflicts attach themselves onto the culture talk of the War on Terror. Every detail becomes an over-the-top debate. Every misdemeanour supposedly proves how the Other-within-the-other is really to blame. The ‘militant moderate’ begins his journey to help erase parts of ourselves that we must purge, notably to erase the Dionysian elements. Such mechanisms fragment the sense of belonging to a community and world. With this mask on, the ‘reformists’ do the opposite of owning the problem. They scapegoat Muslims. They maintain the War on Terror’s Other’s culture talk. They just point to a different type of inauthentic Muslim to accept the role. Hence, the ‘militant’ mask reflects a compulsion to dissociate from the parts of Islam that the West detests. It leads to an idealisation of a good Apollonian Islam purged of Dionysian Otherness.  Above all, wearing this mask maintains that the issue is about Islam’s culture. We begin to overpolice ourselves. The white gaze is everywhere, even in the most private spaces of our mosques and our minds. We begin to view other Muslims as either personified virtues or personified vices. It comes at various times depending on whether they gratify our projected image of Islam or frustrate it. This, along with similar waves in the experience and opinion of self leads, to a contradiction and misery. We swing between playing the tolerant good Muslim – being happy – and being viciously intolerant towards the bad Muslims – being unhappy. ‘We’ begin to fight the War on Terror along the lines of it being about a cultural ‘we’ and not a world we inherit. We divorce any attempt at a synthesis between our values and the colonial structures we endure. In pursuing this abstract authentic us, which denies the Dionysian conditions we endure, I fell into the trap that is Orientalism. In doing this, we repeat the point Said made about how the Orient is seen as static in history, how it is spoken about in the past tense. In doing so, we neglect Said’s point of how we must foster a political awareness that rejects an imperial discourse that denies us an evolution and synthesis; in doing so, we fail to find a ourselves between what we ought to be and where we are in the here and now. We become either a good or bad idea.

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Part IV

TRIUMPHANT

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Introducing (The Third Act or) Case Study Three

1 Fanon criticises black intellectuals who break from colonialism through ‘negritude’. He sees it as an ideology based on a race that obeys ‘the same rules’ of the colonial logic. This becomes especially clear when these intellectuals use negritude to create a nationalism. Fanon distrusts those who use it to create a postcolonial society held together by the nation as the thing. Negritude as a cultural fantasy of postcolonial nationalism is a political impasse. Fanon sees it as a reverse image of colonialism. It betrays an anti-colonial politics. But, it also often falls into a register of particularism. Ultimately, negritude maintains a politics that seeks recognition. It lacks the basic points of any genuine politics and fight for freedom. 2 In the absence of knowing my religion’s basics, I have come now to realise that I possessed what Akeel Bilgrami calls a ‘nominal’ Muslim’s ‘fundamental commitment’ to Islam.1 In most of my early years of practice as a Muslim, throughout my early teen years and 20s, I repeated what I did as a child that day. I followed my grandfather’s actions and of those around me. I moved my lips, stared for smiles, accustomed myself to unfamiliarity and greeted the salams. Hence, I have always seen my grasp of Islam as something equivalent in analogy to my broken Arabic. I know a little. I can get by, I own bits of its truths; I own pieces of religious words unhinged from a totalising grasp of its narrative. 95

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My faith is one of guesstimates that have often rendered a sense of guilt, an exilic’s sensitivity to what I lack and a pursuit for an authentic solid home version of Islam. Although, despite this, analogously, knowing only the third or fourth word of Islamic theology, I have felt a strong identity as a Muslim. I take the call because my faith roots itself within me and through a grammar of loyalty to God, to the Prophet (PBUH) and my family. And, here lies the paradox of my commitment to Islam that compels me to negate its inauthentic misrepresentations found in the West, to probe my compulsion to seek the authentic that comes without my having knowledge of what an authentic representation of Islam is. 3 Let me explain by way of another memory. Writing the above reminded me of when I first read the notable postcolonial scholar Gayatri Spivak’s essay in a special journal edition on Edward Said, titled ‘Race and Racism’. I came to a realisation on that day about the aforementioned bind.2 I am somewhat embarrassed to admit this but when I first read her essay, my eyes scanned her erudite, theoretical-rich argument only to look for ammunition. I skimmed her work simply to find an intellectual way to charge the West with racism. And, for a long time afterwards, until I recently re-read her essay, I could not comment on its main point about Said or Orientalism. I could only recall the thrill I felt when I read her use of Jack Forbes’ quote on how ‘White people often do not actually know the correct ancestry of non-whites but simply make guesses’.3 I clicked my fingers with affirmation when I first read it. The sentence seized my attention. It felt right, felt perfectly written. While growing up as a Muslim in the West, ever since I can remember I have earnestly looked for white people’s inevitable guesses about Islam, guesses about my culture’s ancestry. In a different context 20 years after Forbes wrote his words, around the same time I first read Spivak’s essay, as an example of my pursuit, I read about how Jyllands-Posten invited cartoonists ‘to draw Muhammad as they see him’. I remember how I firmly examined their 12 cartoons for their guesses. Eventually, I read about of one of the cartoons, which depicted the Prophet wearing a dastar (a turban worn by Sikhs). I reluctantly admit now that I felt a tinge of pleasure in finding this. I gained relief from an example of a Western ‘them’ grouping an Eastern ‘us’ into a single brown monolithic Other. I felt a gladness because it allowed me to point out their Orientalism, to show their error, to provide proof of a gratuitous and racist self-invitation of their ‘drawing’ Muslims ‘as they see’ them. It granted me a reference, a testimony of the West’s fundamental incapacity to see Islam in its authenticity.

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But, when for example, a few months later, I challenged myself to draw an accurate image of the Prophet’s (PBUH) turban, my pen was troublingly suspended in the air. I did not know how. To my embarrassment, the only visual images that ran through my head were images I gained from Hollywood, with a smattering of a few descriptions of half-remembered prophetic sayings. Indeed, I have found it easier to spot the fictitious Oriental than any ‘authentic’ Muslim. Raised in the West, subject to its (blind) epistemic violences, inheriting no traditional Islam as my doxa, Orientalism’s exotic and violent signifiers (which form its obscene glossary) intrude to provide me with the sole reference of being Muslim. Throughout my life’s worth of exercise in negating the Other, in all honesty, I have done the majority of guessing. I admit thus that I too see my lineage and ancestry through the West. In that confrontation, before this bind, I came to reluctantly recognise and confront the paradox of having a strong commitment to defending Islam without knowing how to defend it. The memories of my childhood intertwine with other memories of Ramadan and Eid, with being Muslim before and after September 11. The names Mohammad, Khadiga and Osama form the terrain of both my personal and political life. Islam structures my fantasies and my sins too, structures my hopes and my desires. Its conditions inflict almost every thought, subconsciously or otherwise. More so, it explains who I am. From the mouths of many – family, teachers, friends and Orientalists – I have heard a story about myself as a Muslim that intertwines with the story of the Prophet (PBUH). It ever typically begins in Mecca, with his victory against polytheism, and eventually intertwines with my family’s self-narratives of their aspirations as they move from Alexandria, Egypt, to Melbourne, Australia, via London, the United Kingdom. So, I have wondered, with pen suspended in the air, if I could advance the story. I fear whether I could state my tale through Islam’s own epistemic terms, if I could tell my story as a Muslim beyond the accredited language of Orientalism. 4 Tracing Said’s work in postmodern academia, Ian Almond in The New Orientalist argues that this tendency of constructing an inferior Islam is far from removed in today’s imagination. Almond’s primary concern is the subtle nature of Orientalist invocation, and how even academic critique of modernity and postmodernism inherits many of the Orientalist strands that are common in the West’s representations of Islam. Almond takes issue with what he calls ‘the semantic hollowing out of Islam’.4

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For example, Žižek shows a complete lack of interest in any aspect of the Muslim world which, as a Hegelian excess, does not fit into his own Marxist–Lacanian analysis. Žižek’s non-book about the Iraq War reflects his semantic denial of any ontological depth within Islam. So too is his inability to voice the marginalised Muslim subject, which reminds us as to how the European representation of Muslims remains as the most basic form of shaping the Muslim Other. The Other is simply a non-actor, the shadow of the Self. These Others are only animated to mimic or destroy. With recourse to such Orientalist imagination, Almond critiques Žižek’s claim that this coming century is one of the disengaged subjects, such as terrorists, whose first iconic figure is Osama bin Laden. The characteristic feature that runs through all the Islamist subjects is that the cause of their ambitions remains meaningless, resisting any interpretation, As Baudrillard insists, Islamists are a hollow reality. Almond highlights in Baudrillard the symptom of postmodern thought. Baudrillard defines Islam as the final bastion of resistance against an increasingly unilateral world order, referencing irrational Arabs or hysterical mullahs. Similarly, Baudrillard in The Spirit of Terrorism argues that terrorism is a symptom of a global system. He claims that the United States dominates world order by seizing all the cards for itself, forcing the Other to change the rules. Terrorism is not the result of an external Islam but rather a rejection to a hegemonic good. Terror is globalisation’s radical opposition, hence for Baudrillard the spirit of terrorism is sacrifice. The motive of the terrorists is to give themselves as the symbolic gift of death. The Islamists have no ideological underpinning, and are a pathetic last stirring of a dying reality. What is more alarming is Baudrillard’s overt emphasis on disruption, extremism and the irreducible otherness of Islam. Islam becomes the symptom of the decline of the West, and is just a peripheral consequence of the West, a side effect, or modernity’s hiccup. Almond traces a ‘hollowing out of Islam’. The Islamists simply drive themselves towards death as a form of living. Žižek in The Ticklish Subject argues that the radical dimension of such a death drive is that it is not simply a direct opposition to any life-asserting quality. Instead, the death drive is the Islamists’ ability to reference a ‘nothingness’ that enables them to overcome society’s daily rhythm and become passionately attached to an object that stands in for nothingness. That ‘nothingness’ is Islam. 5 Not so much a fully realised individual as a series of images others construct, Kurtz to his cousin was a great musician, to a Belgian journalist a brilliant

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politician and leader of men, and to his fiancée a great humanitarian and genius. Yet, travelling down the River Congo, Marlow slowly encounters Kurtz’s widespread brutality. As a lustful, maniacal imperialist, we read about Kurtz’s obsession with perpetrating horrific cruelties for ivory. In view of this, Marlow describes the violent, ruthless, ‘savage’ Kurtz as having a ‘hollow core’. The pursuit concludes in a bizarre sequence before a confused Marlow corners a fatally ill and delusional Kurtz, who utters his last words, ‘The horror! The horror!’ In this reading, a series of haunting questions arise that mark the third act of a defeatism. But where and how is Edward Said’s critical intellectual culturally situated? Where do we ideologically stand when we stare back at the Muslim world? The final act ends the journey, ends the idealism that inspired it. Similarly, I confronted two ‘horrors’. Muslimitude symbolically disintegrates, all that was left was a nothingness, and the demise of Said before my eyes, and with it, for me, temporarily, Said as my guide. Secularism and the Westernese won. And, I had no other voice. 6 We wear the triumphant-moderate mask after we split Muslims into bad or good. It represents the final act of ‘arrival’. In this stage we exaggerate the positive attributes of the West. We see the West as the final destination of the political journey. Indeed, they become more an example of the prophetic message than Muslims do. Hence the triumphant moderate turns the West into the true embodiment of Islam. Along with exaggerating the West’s goodness, when we wear this mask we also devalue the Muslim world. We attribute exaggeratedly negative qualities as a way of entirely emptying ourselves of who we are, as a way to preserve our ideals. You are likely to hear the triumphant moderate say things like the Muslim world is full of Muslims but has little Islam, while the West have fewer Muslims but is full of Islam. In a sense the West is the best expression of the previous acts of Muslimitude, for with this act comes the horror of dealing with Islam’s failures. It represents a moment where we cannot reconcile with the Dionysian of Islam. This act of idealising Islam by making it the West also helps the triumphant moderate to properly perceive the West as complex. Europe, America and Australia thus contain both good and bad components. Nevertheless these countries have essentially arrived at the promised land, while the Muslim world remains at a development stage interrupted by its process, perhaps

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stuck forever, never able to move towards becoming properly Islamic. It is stuck in the realm of nothingness. All that remains is for the westernese to assume the place of a “semantic hollowed out Islam”.

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Chapter 11

(The ‘Triumphant’ Mask of) Maajid Nawaz

1 No greater example comes to mind of the triumphant moderate than Maajid Nawaz. It is a tale of one’s arrival. It is a story of ‘Enlightenment’. It is a story of a pupil who excels in the lessons taught by the second colonialism. Maajid Nawaz’s autobiography Radical recalls his escape from the Dionysian world of Islamism to an Apollonian humanism. It covers Nawaz’s journey ‘from Muslim extremist to taking tea at Number 10’.1 The contrast is further analogised by the book’s beginning and end. It starts in an Egyptian prison and concludes with his vibrant liberal activism through his foundation Quilliam. Radical tells of Muslims’ personal struggle and their subsequent ‘inner growth’. Nawaz begins with his path to extremism as an active member of Hizb ut-Tahrir (HT). The power of grievance seduced him to spawn a disabling anti-Western view. He was gripped by a ‘nothingness’. An isolationist and oppositional mindset thus shaped his early thinking. But, above all, Radical rehearses the most common motifs of the Enlightenment tale of redemption. He provides a telling example of this. In an Egyptian jail Nawaz sat next to the assassins of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat. Twenty years had changed the assassins’ views on Islam and violence. But, Nawaz full of conviction explained how he disagreed with them. He preached to them to keep the path and to continue the Islamist cause. Eventually, the lessons went the other way. After I read this story, I thought not much has changed for him since then. Today Nawaz still preaches to the Muslim world about what Islam they should adopt. His destination has changed from delivering us a caliphate to delivering us whiteness. But, his desire to be a revolutionary leader has not. 101

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Perhaps he realised secularism is a better language to fund his fantasy of truth speaker. Nawaz’s departure from HT came slowly and gradually. He described a realisation that he was abusing Islam for the political project of Islamism. Thus, the distinction between faith and ideology became evident. Upon it, he explains how he no longer felt guilty for criticising ‘a political system inspired by medieval norms’. Radical therefore carries a predictable message. The culture talk of the War on Terror runs throughout its pages. Essentially a bad ideology lurks within contemporary Islam to explain the evils of terror. The transformation is so predictable. The autobiography writes itself. Bad Muslim becomes good. For after ‘disheartening experiences’, ‘factional infighting’ and ‘sectarian violence’, he comes to reject political Islam and find his true self. Yet, Nawaz does not sever his links with Islamism by becoming a militant atheist. He came to convert his understanding of Islam through an enlightened faith in humanity. A secular urge came to win back the faith. Effectively everything for Nawaz is a question of good or bad ideas. There is no real description of the life of the Muslim world. The only time Alexandria or Egyptian society is properly explored is through two incidents. The first is when in the Orientalist tradition he stares romantically at the Alexandrian sky’s stars as he whistles out some tale about its beauty. The other is when he describes himself being blindfolded and kidnapped. Ironically, once blinded, his material surroundings become visible in an Egyptian prison. He describes in detail his surroundings. Until that point the Muslim world is an abstract thing whose stars we gaze at. I took from Nawaz’s story what he probably did not want me to take. The kernel of its truth reveals itself in his racially abused childhood. White skinheads tortured his early years for his being a ‘Paki’. He learnt early that the only way to deal with the violence of white society was through gaining their respect. The remainder of the book involves Nawaz desperately chasing white recognition by chasing their respect. First, through the idealism of HT, but when that journey had failed and the violence became too high a price, Nawaz turned to whiteness itself. Thus, throughout he constantly pursues an identification with a Muslim subject that grants him respect from the West. But it betrays a fundamental truth about the book. Radical simply reads as an uninterrupted lifelong process whereby a Muslim subject adopts whatever attributes gain him the attention of the white gaze. Nawaz now travels the world to help combat the rising Islamist tide in Europe and beyond. Nawaz insists his native knowledge of Islamist recruitment tactics can reverse extremism. He plans to falsify the Islamist narrative

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used to recruit Muslims, which sees the West as evil and the cause of Muslim suffering. It eventually took him to No.10 Downing Street. The autobiography reads at times as a patient walking through his previous trauma. There is a sense of Nawaz’s compulsion to repeat his initial Islamist crimes as an unconscious way to re-enact its situations, which causes distress to his now predominantly white audience. It is a conscious effort by him to restitch the cultural excesses of his Islamism into a narrative about redemption and arrival. And, here lays the tragedy of this final triumphant mask. He never really left anywhere to arrive somewhere. The concept of the radical is crucial in his story-within-a-story. 2 I noticed a few of Nawaz’s tricks after watching hours of interviews. For example, he concedes that ‘colonialism’ played a role in the formation of the modern Muslim world. His concession gives the impression that his assessment of Muslim radicalisation is fair and balanced. He is keen to reconstitute his old Islamist narrative of Western imperialism into a new less-harmful Apollonian form. Mentioning colonialism gives the impression that he possesses a historical depth that considers European violence. He sells the idea that he has not whitewashed history. But, he gives no real attention to how colonialism worked. It is merely a rhetorical trick to take the critic’s argument away from them. It is a flick of the wrist to squat away the damaging truths to his newly formed position as a native informant, who speaks fluent Westernese. Terms like ‘colonialism’ and ‘foreign policy’ become structured in the new Nawaz as narrative exploited by Islamists. But, there is a transference here of guilt. Suddenly, colonialism becomes an evil that the Islamists use. Colonialism is not simply a ‘cause’ that can be reduced to a nodal point in Islamist rhetoric. It is the superstructure on which modernity built the global division of us and them. Nawaz’s request that we should take away this discussion from the Islamist is a concession that the First World should represent the realities of those they colonised. It is an erasure of the Dionysian. Similarly, Nawaz’s oft-repeated line that Muslims cower from rather than confront ‘their’ problem with terrorism finds its origins in the fleeting and lazy colonial Orientalist’s tales about disinterested and lazy Muslims, rather than a sustained gaze at that community’s tireless fleet of volunteers. Yet, in this current atmosphere where reaching for lazy stereotypes is easier than research, voices that work to find solutions are drowned out by voices that speak about the supposed lack of Muslim voices.

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Nawaz’s current use of Western secularism as a destination at the end of a linear timeline becomes a means to measure this lack. This linear history ties to Nawaz’s ‘proclivity to speak’ as a champion of de-radicalisation. Since he speaks within the framework of a Western supremacy, formed by colonialism, his discussions of Islam become ever audible to Western audiences precisely because he speaks the language of their culture talk. 3 The English Defence League (EDL) is a grassroots organisation that quickly developed into ‘the main anti-Islamist street protest movement in the world’. Their popularity over the last few years presents a snapshot of anti-Muslim sentiment in Britain at a time when issues of immigration and racism have risen to the fore of contemporary politics. In the past two years, Chris Allen writes that the growth of the EDL has been rapid and somewhat unprecedented. Allen argues that since the organisation’s emergence there have been many commentators who have sought to describe the EDL as a meaningless racist and far-right movement. However, the EDL identify themselves as neither within nor a product of the traditional far right. They claim to be neither racist nor Islamophobic. They argue that ‘the English Defence League do not “fear” Islam’. They claim, ‘We do not have a “phobia” about Islam, we just realise the very serious threat it poses’.2 They continually appeal to the defence of liberalism, even to the point that they claim in a liberal spirit that ‘Muslims can have their faith, that is their right, but when that faith infringes upon our hard fought freedoms, our democracy, our right to freedom of speech and expression then we will counter it at every opportunity because it is a threat to our way of life, our customs, our rule of law’. In an amateur video, published on YouTube (2013), a young member called ‘brother Khaled’ states that the EDL ‘does not discriminate against colored people’. He claims, while drawing a circle around his face with his index finger, to have ‘never been judged by the colour of my skin’. ‘I’ll tell you now’, he concludes: ‘The EDL (English Defence League) is not racist’. Khaled confesses to Islam’s intolerance through his concern over its threat to British liberties. He mourns the loss of diversity, equality and freedom, and warns against his religion’s treating of ‘Kaffirs as less than human’. Muslims ‘attack you’ for being different, he says. He makes a bowing gesture with his hand, which signifies the Muslim’s daily prayer, and states that the religion’s purpose is to turn us all into slaves. The ‘so-called religion’, he continues, means submission and thus etymologically Islam possesses a denial of one’s right for freedom. Islam is primitive

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and intolerant and originates from the Prophet Muhammad’s sixth-century flawed character, and, therefore, Khaled is adamant that the EDL’s targeting of Islam is not about the ‘turbans’ or the ‘skin colour’ of Muhammad’s contemporary British believers, but rather about their beliefs. The view that we ought to separate believer from belief, or separate Islam from its Muslim, is a common argument.3 However, as race scholars Miles and Brown comment, ‘The swords of the crusaders in Jerusalem and of the Christian armies in Al-Andalus were wielded against Saracens and Moors, not an abstract idea.’ Of course, a distinction can be made between a people and an idea. But when the people in question are identified – both by themselves and by their enemy – by that very idea, the distinction starts to lose its difference. If this is true of the past, it is no less true today.4 Similarly, Meer and Modood present evidence to show that ‘it becomes irrelevant – if it is even possible – to separate the impact of appearing Muslim from the impact of appearing to follow Islam’.5 4 I sat and read atheist Sam Harris’s discussion with Maajid Nawaz.6 Harris begins the conversation with a question about a meeting they had in October 2010. Harris had attended the ‘Intelligence Squared’ debate in which Nawaz was pitted against Ayan Hirsi Ali. Afterwards, Harris explained, at a dinner for the organisers, participants and other guests, people were offering short remarks about the debate and otherwise continuing the discussion. At one point, he recalled, Hirsi Ali said, ‘I’d like to know whether Sam Harris has anything to say’. 7 Harris took the opportunity to ask Nawaz: ‘It seems to me that you have a nearly impossible task and yet much depends on your being able to accomplish it. You want to convince the world – especially the Muslim world – that Islam is a religion of peace that has been hijacked by extremists’.8 Nawaz explains how he felt that Harris was implying that he was engaging in pretence by arguing that Islam is a religion of peace. He recalls being asked a particular question by Harris: ‘If I remember correctly, you said, “It’s understandable in the public context, but here in this room can’t you just be honest with us?”’ Yes. ‘Can’t you just be honest with us in here?’ implied that he, Nawaz, hadn’t been honest out there.9 He complains that the debate itself demanded he choose to take a side of war or peace. In his blind acceptance of its conditions, he ‘chooses peace’. In their discussion, Nawaz responded by saying that his honest view is that Islam is not a religion of war or of peace – it’s a religion. Its sacred scripture, like those of other religions, ‘contains passages that many people would

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consider extremely problematic’.10 Likewise, all scriptures contain passages that are innocuous. Religion doesn’t inherently speak for itself; no scripture, no book, no piece of writing has its own voice. He subscribes to this view whether he is ‘interpreting Shakespeare or interpreting religious scripture’, concluding, ‘scripture exists; human beings interpret it’.11 I remember thinking who is the human that is doing the interpreting? Where is it located? By focusing on the universality of human, democratic and secular, he arrives at a common ground. In contrast, for Islam there is no tradition, no consensus, no history, just text. It’s just something the founding subject of history – the human – interprets. 5 In the closing paragraph of his essay Europe Liberalism and the Muslim Question, Bhikhu Parekh concludes that liberalism offers the best way to solve the Muslim question. However, it comes through a critique of presentday liberal assumptions. Liberalism’s qualities, such as its appeal to individual freedom and rights, are capable of reconciling European society’s demands for an integrated and cohesive polity, while still allowing immigrants the autonomy to express their own cultural views. Liberalism has the ideological elasticity that satisfies both the Muslim minority and the European majority.12 Parekh’s underlying point is that we can obtain a cross-cultural approach to persistent political complaints about Muslim immigrants. In this sense, he looks for a balance between liberal Apollonian ideals and social anxieties about the return of the Muslim. His central assertion against much of Western political theory is that it ‘refuses to acknowledge diversity of other cultures’.13 Parekh sees multiple, worthy and legitimate political sources outside of liberalism. He argues that liberals begin ‘to panic about how they are to defend their cherished way of life against its large number of determined critics who now are their fellow citizens’.14 The liberal panic, however, is exaggerated, he argues, and it can be ‘alleviated by redefining the liberal theory of moral and political rationality’.15 Certain liberals, Parekh points out, ‘rightly think that their values rest on reasons they find convincing’, and further cannot understand why immigrants do not rationally agree with these reasons.16 Subsequently, he postulates, liberals accuse immigrants of those Dionysian qualities in being ‘unreasonable’, ‘bigots’, ‘irrational’, ‘lacking an open mind’, ‘fundamentalist’ and ‘obtuse’, and they finally conclude that rational dialogue is a futile exercise. In turn, immigrants resent the description and return the abuse.17 Rationalist liberals, with their appeal to symmetrical and Apollonian arguments, thus get into awkward situations because they ‘set themselves an

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impossible task’.18 Liberals want Muslims and other immigrants to adopt a liberal way of life, but also to give this way of life a wholehearted moral allegiance. Here, we return to the point that Caldwell highlighted. Liberals think that they can give immigrants ‘transculturally convincing reasons’. However, Parekh continues, since liberals cannot find such reasons beyond a certain liberal point, ‘they panic and worry deeply’.19 Parekh thus states that liberal society must come to recognise itself as a ‘distinct cultural community’. Liberals should not colonise society’s public and ‘neutral space’. If liberals believe liberal society to be the ‘embodiment of universal values and rationality … it would place itself on a higher pedestal’. This will inevitably hinder the possibility of dialogue, and allow only liberal ‘moral hectoring and high-minded sermonising’. He suggests that the liberal way of life is historically contingent and embedded in a particular culture or form of social self-understanding. He argues that liberalism is not ‘underwritten by history, mandated by human nature, or grounded in a universal theory of humankind’.20 However, he goes on to defend the liberal way of life by suggesting that ‘good internal and external reasons’ can be given in support of liberalism. According to Parekh, liberal arguments should be based on ‘history, experiences, moral traditions, cultural and religious heritage, circumstances and level of development, as well as known facts about human beings, lessons of human history and experiences of other societies’.21 It is enough, Parekh continues, that good reasons are publicly debated with proper conviction. The liberal society represents one good way to organise human life. This argument, he suggests, is a strong enough moral basis to defend liberalism, and a basis to argue for liberalism as an unavoidable and prudent outcome.22 Parekh sees the public space as a neutral place for various cultures in dispute, negotiation and dialogue along rational and competitive arguments. His public space is a space of contest. Parekh alludes that neutrality in the public space without interference from the state or one dominant culture implies a tolerance for all different individual and competing views.23 In this vein, neutrality is one of the most important liberal ideas. On an important side note, there are various disputes about what neutrality means within liberalism’s contemporary works. Adrian Little, in The Politics of Community (2002), highlights how there are two different types of liberal neutrality, namely consequential neutrality and justificatory neutrality.24 These two types of neutrality reflect the ongoing debate. Consequential neutrality refers to the view that government policies should have a neutral effect on society. Here, government policies should not favour nor hinder any particular view of one group’s version of the good life. Conversely, justificatory neutrality seeks to provide a model where, although government activity is neutral, it may in practice involuntarily help one version of the good over

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others. In the case of the justificatory perspective, it does not matter if the state acts in ways that favour certain groups as long as there is no intentional bias towards them.25 However, it is not the purpose of this book to debate the public space, nor question its neutrality (in itself), rather the purpose is to ask which subject occupies this space. This is why Parekh’s stress on neutralising the public space is misguided: when he argues for the liberal solution, he ultimately still appeals to a liberal subject, a subject born out of Western European thought. Despite his attempts to decentralise liberalism, he too appeals to constructing an Apollonian individuation that assumes a relegating of the Dionysian force. For example, he infers that, politically, the human being, in becoming a political voice that enters a public space, must first be recognised as an independent subject free from other historically and contingent identities such as Islam. He argues that, like all individuals, Muslim immigrants in Europe have several identities. These identities are derived from their ‘gender, occupation, citizenship, country of parental origin, religion, etc’.26 Therefore, Parekh’s abstract individual, the human that occupies the neutral space, is a liberal invention. 6 Regarding Islam in Australia, academic Abdullah Saeed argues at length about how a turbulent history fundamentally shapes today’s contemporary debates about Muslims in the West. Like many authors who write on the topic, Saeed introduces an early chapter that gives a ‘historical background’. Typically, these texts’ articulation of a problematic history reveals how yesterday’s battles provide today’s cultural inertia that shapes contemporary political anxieties and assumptions about foreigner Muslims as unintegrated. This is why Saeed suggests that possibly the most shocking example of an activity that ‘cemented the connection between Islam and violence in the minds of many came on September 11, 2001’.27 But, I cannot help but suspect that many commentators such as Saeed commonly write about the Muslim with an aim to remove the troubling Dionysian element of history. In Saeed’s book, for example, he continually stresses that Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda terrorists are wrongly used to tarnish all Muslims. Saeed addresses history to contest a social impulse to stigmatise all Muslims as a historical Other. In that Apollonian spirit, there is an attempt to distance the Muslim from the political events and to celebrate the prototypical Apollonian and liberal-constituted citizen as a normal everyday subject who happens to be Muslim. In a clear example, Saeed interrupts his chapter’s opening discussion of revolutions, terrorism, the Gulf War and The Satanic Verses with a short

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autobiography by Garry, entitled ‘On Being a Muslim and a Scientist’. It is a personal account of a non-Muslim’s conversion to Islam.28 Garry begins his autobiography in Saeed’s chapter with the sentence ‘I came to Islam just over 16 years ago’, and he goes on to explain that he has ‘an enquiring mind and love(s) learning’.29 In converting to Islam, Garry explains how he gains ‘a sense of spirituality to my life’.30 Garry’s autobiography is placed in the middle of the page within a greyed box. It visibly functions to cut short that reading of history. It sits in between Saeed’s previous discussions about Salman Rushdie in the 1980s and the ensuing section of the book entitled ‘2001: A Difficult Year for Muslims in Australia’.31 It metaphorically interrupts the Dionysian history and stands out on the page with an Apollonian story about Garry’s rationalisation of his conversion. Tellingly, Saeed’s autobiographical ‘interruption’ through Garry’s conversion story offers an example that further explains how Muslims are reconstituted not as subjects of a historical world, but as individual subjects who exist despite assumptions about the Muslims’ history. Through Garry, we have a story of the Other without their worldly Otherness. He exits history. That is to say, there is a common exit that dialectally places the abstract liberal subject as a solution at the expense of a relegated Dionysian history.

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Chapter 12

Finding(s) in Case Study Three (the Third Orientalism)

1 Said openly confesses that he is not an Oriental who writes an ‘authentic’ story of the Orient. Rather, for him, Orientalism reveals the very fallacy of authenticity. The general essentialist paradigms that constitute knowledge of ‘the Orient’ also constitute ‘the Orient’ as an object in the first place. In my third reading of Orientalism, after the exhaustive second reading began to show theoretical cracks, I came to conclude that my attempt to provide an authentic alternative Islam meant that I had accepted the existence of an essentialist Islam. In this reading, Said challenged me to question my own access to an authentic Islam, I was inevitably left with Kurtz’s ‘horror’, for if I followed Said’s argument I would have to accept that it is not possible to reconstruct an authentic past because all reconstructions are provisional on the present. Said thoroughly dismisses the idea that geographical spaces exist with indigenous, radically ‘different’ inhabitants defined by a base religion, culture or racial essence proper to that space.1 Hence, no ‘real’ Orient exists to provide us with a truer account. Said as an intellectual critic simply challenges the epistemological notions of the positivists on the ground that history is a literary artefact and that all historical sources are intertextual. All along, Said encouraged readers to ‘unlearn’ essentialism to start ‘a new kind of dealing with the Orient’.2 More troubling for me however was how Said premises his critical resistance on what he calls a secular humanist position. It was at this stage I refused his tutelage. I still, to my core, had the leftovers of an authentic, solid, Islamic epistemology. For me, Said’s anti-essentialism seemed as problematic as essentialism. I disputed the epistemological 111

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structures that bore an essentialist and traditional view that my religion needed to be eroded along with Orientalism. Betrayed and accusing his work as contradictory, I sought refuge in Said’s critics. James Clifford, I agreed, pointed out the problem well. Said’s castigations of Orientalists for their tendency to negate the reality of human experience raised the exact same difficulties in Orientalism. For if Said denies the existence of a real Orient, how can he claim that any representation is false? What remains of the Muslim after we ease it from Orientalism? Said’s reliance on the general ‘humanist’ as the site of criticism was meaningless to me. It bypassed the local cultural codes that make personal experience articulate.3 Hence, I concluded that Said provided no real alternative to Orientalism, since he firmly grounds his attack within values he derives from the very ‘Western anthropological human sciences’ he attacks.4 Echoing Clifford, I would argue that such a stance, of humanism, of oppositional criticism, is a ‘privilege invented by a totalizing Western liberalism’.5 Aijaz Ahmad captured my desire to disprove Said, and took it further, to my delight. He attacked Said’s Western privileges.6 Ahmed like Clifford highlights the paradox in Said’s critique of the Western humanist tradition, polemically positing how Orientalism assembles a narrative on European literature complicity in infuriation of the Orient. Yet, after Said identifies the Enlightenment as a unified trajectory and master sign, of both Orientalism and colonialism, he posits in the form of a critical consciousness the most familiar words of Enlightenment liberalism, namely tolerance, accommodation, cultural pluralism and relativism, and those insistently repeated words in his work: sympathy, constituency, affiliation and filiation. For Ahmed, what is remarkable is that Said’s resounding affirmation of humanist values evokes that humanism as identity at precisely the time when he unequivocally rejects humanism as history. 7 As Ahmad concluded, I came to believe that such a position of willed neutrality is politically wrong and morally indefensible. What about the ‘facts’ that surrounded prophetic revelation and the centuries of Islamic tradition? Would they no longer speak? Would Islamic history become a literary artefact? I stood at this juncture overly bothered by Said, who I argued turned the label ‘secular’ and ‘human’ colour-blind. Looking back, Said’s ‘humanism’ disappointed me. At this moment, whereas the War on Terror interpellated me into being Muslim, Said misinterpellated me. I had enjoyed his career-long outing of Western imperial hubris. But, it came at a cost, did it not? For the counter identity I should adopt as a critic who talked back confused me. My issue centred around a question I could not initially answer. How could Said attack the Western construction of the ‘Oriental’ but then privilege its ‘secular human’ as history’s primary observer? Was he not going in circles? Namely, we return to where

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we began. The secular comes to ontologically exist as an opposition to the figure of the Oriental. It exists still as the first and proper observer both in the discourse of Orientalism and in Said’s counterargument. What would it mean to speak as a Muslim or Oriental beyond the language of humanism or secularism? Could I? And what of Nandy’s second colonialism? Had not the second type of colonialism brought this language of secularism to the uncivilised through the first colonialism? As I began to subsequently read more Western philosophy, I learnt to dislike Said. I saw Orientalism as a trapdoor. I felt a strong need to question the West without its secular language or performing some Cartesian ‘I’ (in whatever manifestation it took). And in many ways I found Said to be the best critic of Said. In one crucial way, Radical Skin, Moderate Masks is an auto-ethnography of my many different readings of Orientalism. I have often wondered if the word ‘Orientalism’ represses a certain condition and whether my ability to speak back through Said’s humanism has only affirmed my religion’s Otherness. I have often wondered if it provides me a white-out to erase what must remain repressed. At the very least, through tracing Said I can trace the masks that moderates wear. My own variant identifications with Orientalism over different readings reflect the many distinct stages of my own political consciousness and my attempts to talk back. It also reflects the many masks I have worn. Said had after all explicitly argued that ‘all criticism is postulated and performed on the assumption that it is to have a future’.8 This profound comment made visible how critical thought’s interrogation of racism is not merely a disintegrating force. It is also imaginative. It dares to think of an alternative. It is committed to a project of transformation. Said wanted to transform racism into humanism. And, I wanted to transform myself from their Oriental into a Muslim beyond their humanism. It would be years until I re-read Said in a different and more productive light. 2 The third mask of the moderate commonly relegates colonialism to a thing of the past. In summary, in a very real sense, we over-identify with being Western. We wear the mask of a Muslim who speaks as if whiteness should be universal to save us all. Finally, this triumphant mask of the moderate is the victory of the West – it marks the arrival of Muslims at a supposed promised land. The only solution to Islam is a liberal, secular democracy and working with the government. Most tellingly in this third mask, we speak as if we have arrived. We too inhabit the teleological and expected outcome of how politics should be.

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We talk as if we have forever been loyal and have always been a thinking people. We speak as positively functioning and rational humans. In this vein, the triumphant third mask often demands we get offended when we are not recognised as European, American or Australian. Then behind this mask, we cannot wait to tell average Joe how similarly horrified we are about Islamist crimes against our country. You will hear the moderate of this mask tell everyone who is willing to listen how we are all under attack, how our shared values are under threat. Perhaps, more troubling is that when we adopt this mask we commonly speak as if racism/Islamophobia exists as a minor hiccup to a triumphant system of democracy, rather than being a constitutive member in the formation of the West. Everyone becomes inherently racist, not just the West. Here, this is in its purest and simplest form the accumulative mask of whiteness. 3 The triumphant moderate is submerged in the glory of the West’s attraction. The most mature of the moderate’s three masks, the triumphant reflects the accumulation of the previous two. When we wear this mask, we reconstruct our experience to facilitate our sense of gratitude for belonging. We adjust to the current situation of the War on Terror. Reconstructed memories thus mark the non-Muslims’ trustworthiness, warmth, success and intelligence. Islamophobia becomes an explainable and legitimate reaction. And we explain how rare racism is to an overall experience of the goodly lives of being Western, unlike the stink of lives in Saudi, Lebanon and Egypt – where we would not even be able to speak. And, we make no connection between the wealth and opportunity accumulated by the West and the colonised lands left behind. Put simply, the colonised are to blame, for being lazy, backward, lacking business acumen and so on and so forth. Besides, we explain, sometimes our sensitivity to racism is the culprit. Everything about us returns to us. It is the ultimate sealing of subjectivity. Here a clean hospital in the United States is compared to a dirty hospital in Egypt. The latter’s lack of hygiene is ultimate proof of the culture talk riddled in the War on Terror. We give no proper political or historical consideration to Egypt. We simply say its dirty hospitals and unqualified doctors and nurses prove how we lag behind culturally. The power of idealising the West helps us think we belong. It helps us feel we are loved. Specifically our idealisation occurs when we generate positive illusions in maximising the West’s virtues and minimising its flaws. These illusions are like those of a lover. The triumphant moderate celebrates all

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positive traits coupled with the belief that the lover’s faults are minimal. Thus we deem the West’s flaws as actually a special unique part of its current glorious formation. The interpretation of the West typically undergoes several edits and rewrites after the triumphant moderate confronts information about its racial violence. Every jarring fact about its Islamophobia has to be restructured within a paradigm of adoration. It is not that we triumphant moderates simply believe that the West is saintly. We do not. Yes, slavery existed, but only a liberal West could overcome it. Yes, sexism occurs but the West also fights it. Yes, colonialism happened, but let’s be honest – the natives were backward. Yes, aggressive foreign policy justifies Israeli occupation, but if Hamas cared for their citizens like Americans did. Wearing the final mask of the moderate we naturalise the West. It becomes the logical finality of all human political societies. Typically enamoured by it, we express our gratitude for being in a country that allows us to speak. We show our gratitude through celebrating the victories of democracy, secularism or liberalism over barbarity and religious fundamentalism. When we wear the triumphant-moderate mask, we unrealistically lionise the West. It risks disappointment. But instead of confronting our idealisation, we use the power of any disillusionment to call for the West to live up to its standards. For instance we treat casual racists as belonging to a wonderful and talented culture to help elicit their proper Western behaviour. In doing so we enhance their ideal self as everyone’s standard – theirs and ours. We never tell the West to be better Muslims. We tell ourselves to be better Westerners. We make the West the final destination and often speak as if we have ourselves arrived. 4 In his book’s chapter ‘Seeking the Human in People Like Us’, Aly writes admirably on Yasmine. She is a young Muslim professional who refuses a major newspaper’s request to pose with a sullen face. He proudly describes how she says more than just ‘no’ in refusing to wipe away her smile.9 In her refusal, Yasmine is breaking down long-lasting assumptions about oppressed Muslim women. Moreover, Aly highlights Yasmine’s personal achievements that disprove her assumed foreignness. She is a successful woman, her boss is Jewish and as an intern lawyer for the UN she proves wrong the pervasive attitudes about insular Muslims.10 Aly’s Yasmine serves the purpose of speaking to a liberal audience about how normal she is, and in turn she allows the audience to separate her individuality from a revelatory, communal and foreign Islam that dwells in the problems of the Muslim world.11 Aly’s Yasmine allows the Apollonian to separate from the Dionysian. Muslims get reconstituted not as subjects of a historical reality, but as unique

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subjects in themselves. In the same way we have the Other without his or her Otherness. We have Yasmine as the Muslim without any traces of the Muslim world. However, it is not that Aly is distancing himself from grand narratives and reaffirming the ideal that we see that individual before we see ideology. He is not simply appealing to an argument for the audience to see the human before they see the political, as his title suggests. He is directly appealing to the contemporary Apollonian ideology and the prevailing liberal myths that privilege the abstract human as ultimately the proof of who we are. We become our individuality. The submissive Islamic religions like all Dionysian forces need to be relegated for the result and triumph of the Apollonian self. He advances the apolitical, non-ideological myth that the liberal subject is simply reconstituted as neutral when it’s ‘human’. Here, Islam no longer represents a world view, a cosmic or political alternate vision that runs parallel, or in opposition to, the liberal definition of truth. Yasmine’s Islam simply asserts its particular presence by deferring the universal meaning; the term ‘Islam’ imposes a pseudo-logocentricity, holding a required position from which only catalogued Muslim behaviours act as signifiers, all of which cyclically point back to a functional understanding of Islam as a cultural marker. That is to say, Islam is the Muslim individual’s private possession. Is this liberalism’s limit? Is this the price Muslims pay when society determines them as good citizens, by severing their symbolic heads, their link to the traditions within the Muslim world and Islamic thought? The good citizen is the Muslim without a Dionysian element, without a community as a whole. 5 In another display, for example, there is a short film that runs with the message on continuous loop. In the video, British actor Sir Ben Kingsley plays the role of a stoic al-Jazari – a famous Muslim thinker who lived in Islam’s twelfth-century ‘Golden Age’ and who is credited for inventing a ‘thousand mechanical devices’.12 Kingsley educates a trio of British school kids on Islamic history and negates the Eurocentric reading of history premised on a myth of ‘the Dark Ages’ as a universal truth of all cultures. He tells the children that someone has ‘filled their heads’ with the nonsense of a ‘thousand wasted years’ and of ‘a black hole in history’.13 It is in this exhibit that I glanced at the prospectus that I had picked up and started reading the museum’s accompanying words that explicitly make the point about the need to correct the public’s negative view of Islam that

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has ‘filled their heads’. The prospectus outlines its social vision by claiming to want to ‘resolve negative stereotypes’ that many people have learnt to associate with Australian Muslim communities.14 It wants to promote the ‘integration’ of a ‘misunderstood community’ into broader Australia and provide ‘insight into the beauty of the arts inspired by Islamic culture’.15 The prospectus describes the museum as a project that ‘simply put’ wants to reveal to its visitors the ‘marriage that has existed between the civilized world and Islam’.16 When I read the prospectus’ use of the word ‘marriage’, a question came to my mind about the distinct lack of synthesis between the Apollonian and Dionysian that plays out along colonial and colonised contours. After reading the prospectus and walking through the museum, I began to suspect that for the museum to make Muslims historically intelligible, believable and acceptable to its Australian audiences they had to rely on using the legitimacy of ‘Westernese’ and the legitimacy of an Apollonian Islam. Does the museum, in order to gain legitimacy for Islamic achievements, need to describe the Muslim’s past through what Barnor Hesse and Salman Sayyid call the ‘imperially accredited language’ of ‘Westernese’?17 Do they need to explain the East through the West to make the former’s achievement legitimate through the language of the dominant? Sayyid describes the term ‘Westernese’ as a ‘system of significance’ that arises from our giving a reading of history that comes from our assumption that ‘the West’ is the future of ‘the rest’.18 In this view, we imagine Western civilisation as the destination at the end of a linear timeline that we use to plot the points of the Other’s progress. The language of Westernese thus governs what we determine as the truth, the right or the good and the destination. It becomes our ‘proclivity to speak the language of western supremacy’.19 By the time I saw the same poster at the same exhibit’s exit, upon a second glance so to speak, I acquired an opposing reading to my initial interpretation. The museum was not challenging Eurocentrism but integrating Islam into its ‘light’. My focus shifted from its use of mosque versus castle as the two binaries representing the East and the West. Now, I concentrated on the words ‘light’ and ‘dark’. The description of a dark unlit world is so typically an Orientalist motif to describe an intellectual and economic regressive world of the Other outside of history. In this secondary view, the poster came to affirm the imaginative geography of Europe as the fulfilment of human intellectual history. 6 The above-mentioned three masks are ultimately something we wear to protect ourselves from racism. But spending all our ‘psychic energy’ on these

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defences leaves little energy for more rewarding political pursuits. Islam is sealed into a debate about the subjects it creates. And I feel it becomes somewhat politically unhealthy when the need to correct Islamophobia works as a way to refuse access to our experiences. These masks then inevitably work to connect to and correct the culture talk of the War on Terror. Thus for all the obvious problems associated with its abstract talk the first is perhaps the most obvious. By wearing the masks we make the discussion about Islam’s culture more relevant than it needs to be. It starts to seep in as an automatic response to discussions about violence. Our values, ideas and laws are debated by all, and focus on these debates erases together the material and objective conditions in which violence occurs. Over time, the culture talk closes off parts of ourselves to ourselves. It becomes a stockpile of pained and unhappy debates about life experiences. The culture talk is very often then associated with the more anxious, nervous and unpredictable debates about our humanity or loyalty.

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Part V

CONCLUSION

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Chapter 13

The Social (Ir)relevance of Research

1 So, why could I not write this book? In the early months I researched government manuals and dutifully read their websites about their CVE programmes. I scanned the literature on the topic and highlighted endless paragraphs, and scribbled unreadable notes. I paced up and down my house to generate ideas and took the job of a discourse analysis as strictly methodological. I had a plan. First, I would use dot points to sequence my argument, and then gather the data to turn them into solid premises. Throughout, I would organise my findings under subtitles to diligently lead my reader from a question to an answer. Above all, I would argue in a voice inflected with a convincing and authoritative objectivity. But, when the distracting task of gathering data finished, the mask slipped off. I stared at my screen. For at every point of gathering research I suppressed an anger. I ignored a frustration. I used the white-out to mute any emotional criticism. A strong urge to police a radical voice led me to erase any hints of sounding like the stereotype. But, my act of erasure only brought its voice towards me. For like a two-man saw, the moderate and the radical are handles at the opposite ends of the same narrative. They move in tandem. Pulling away brings the other with you. And I came to ask: How do I speak beyond these binaries? To clarify, I am not suggesting that a ‘radical’ exists in every Muslim. I am not suggesting some non-Western foreign essence exists by default in us all. On the contrary, I am not pursuing the voice of an authentic original Muslim. I speak of the nagging suspicion that I have repressed something. The radical exists through society’s stares, through its assumptions. It exists through a discourse and through an entire state’s police mechanisms in securitising 121

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the Muslims’ culture and community. It has shaped the Muslim community’s sense of self and our vocabulary. It does not have to be real. It does not have to be us. The radical is a ghost in the Muslim’s machine. It reflects the absurd duality of the idea of the Other that has become greater to us in its intimacy than the truth of our embodied selves. And so, when I began, I felt a compulsion to celebrate certain criticisms, only within the conformity of a socially sanctioned secular cynicism shaped by white academic norms. Eventually, upon long reflection and after hours of silence, I came to suspect what I know now, which is that being a Muslim caused my writer’s block. For since the War on Terror began, I have learnt a sum of techniques to temper my voice, learnt to look back at loose comments and live with regret if I failed to translate them into a sterile and scholarly tone.

2 Fanon hops on the train and takes his seat, being lured to believe for a time that he was as he has always thought: like everyone else. Yet, the stare of a young boy does not allow him to sit comfortably, nor adopt a universal persona. The voice of a child brings him back down to his racial particularity: ‘Look, a Negro’.1 ‘It was true,’ Fanon laments. He discovered his blackness, his ethnic characteristics which also fall into becoming a bad racialised particular: ‘Mama, see the Negro! I’m frightened! Frightened! Frightened!’2 This moment represents Fanon’s interpellation into blackness. He got dragged into a particularity that he had neglected. It forced him to see the fear of the Other in his own face, it forced him to be aware of his own spatial presence as the Other: In the train it was no longer a question of being aware of my body in the third person but in a triple person. In the train I was given not one but two, three places. I had already stopped being amused. It was not that I was finding febrile coordinates in the world. I existed triply: I occupied space. I moved toward the other ... and the evanescent other, hostile but not opaque, transparent, not there, disappeared. Nausea. 3

3 In those initial months I felt a separation of emotion from the ideas I penned and read. With every written word on the topic I felt a pulling of Muslim away from myself and towards classified categories: traumas, economic

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deprivation, social alienation and discrimination, even our consciousness of conflicts. My wholeness was replaced by sinking into the religio-cultural speak in its pursuit for finding the causes of radicalisation. Thus, while I tried to write, only a formal and affectively bland voice of common sense stuttered through me. A type of osmosis plagued my attempts at sounding like a moderate voice of scholarly reason. My engaging in CVE vocabulary concealed an array of strongly felt (inarticulate) emotions that backlashed against any reasonable position. Dionysus was returning. I too hid behind the same government’s abstract talk which I detested. For concentrating on the intellectual components of the programmes became an act of splitting my thoughts from the life I have lived. It became the machinations of a post-racialism at work. Indeed, during those frustrating initial months, I deleted every attempt at a proper ‘introduction’. I erased what had to remain repressed. My writing and not my deleting was my white-out bottle. And in among the silence, stifled by institutional rules, an unexplainable urge to break free consumed me. From somewhere in the recesses of my mind I heard the re-emerging voice of an Islamist rage. I incautiously enjoyed its seductive arguments. I listened to its anger. I listened to its performance of pursuing a lost dignity. It compelled me to listen, to deconstruct and to repeatedly use my backspace button. The voice demanded I confront the less-than-visible racism that shaped my academic style. And thus well past my deadline my word processor displayed nothing but a blank screen with a blinking cursor. The cursor followed a single word in Arabic, ‘Bismillah.’ For all returns to God. I cannot remember when I wrote it, only that I had. Perhaps, in among my frustration I prayed for divine intervention as an unconscious act to correct an initial neglect of myself. Whatever the reason, reading it triggered a sense of abandonment. It compelled an honesty. For curiosity does not drive this work. I am not inquisitive about racism or whether it shapes the War on Terror’s narrative. I know my answer. I had it before the performance of asking a research question, before this book, before academia. Indeed, if I am honest, proving the existence of racism is not my sole aim. Was it ever? I do not know. I simply hope to destroy its baneful influence on my sense of self. I want to try and seek a freedom from it and from a voice well beyond it and from the masks it compels me to wear. 4 Only now, looking at my life and what I have read, can I see Fanon completes Said. For the former wrote so brilliantly on the affective states exhibited by the racialised, such as the out-of-place ‘Oriental’. Indeed as I read Fanon,

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I read myself as a textbook case. Society’s racialisation of Muslims produced in me psychological states, certain registers and obvious stations to fight my personal struggles. Fanon’s fusion of the analytical and the personal guides Black Skin, White Masks. His reading of social conditions always translates into his highlighting of the emotional results that arise. It brings into visibility the less-visible domains of the Dionysian. Whereas Said spoke as an exile in America, Fanon spoke as an exile to himself. He spoke of the occasion that arose within himself when he had to meet the white man’s eyes. His internal journey supplemented what I found missing in Said’s external analysis of an imperial discourse. It brought the emotional costs out to me following Said and being a ‘secular humanist’. For Fanon outlines Said’s ‘punishing destiny’ through ‘an unfamiliar weight that burdened’ him. The real world challenged his inner claims to just be. It challenged his claims to a universal self. Could I really ever be, or be allowed to be a secular humanist? ‘In the white world’, he states, ‘the man of color encounters difficulties in the development of his bodily schema’.4 He becomes particularised; he becomes fragmented. A growing consciousness of oneself makes one’s body the site of one’s own dysfunction. ‘In the white world’, then, the inner voice of a person of colour becomes exiled from that person’s body. It becomes exiled from the person’s history. The racialised are thus always trying to pull themselves together.5 As I write this, I am reminded of what I read in the CVE literature. It becomes an analogy. Every aspect of the Muslims’ life strung out and separated from each other. My socio-economic status is a category, my psychology is a category, my political consciousness is a category. Each part of my cycle of life parted for the convenience of analysing white gaze. Racism demands that I must return to seek a whole me, a whole and universal Islam. I simply cannot abandon this without the emotional backlash that abandonment provokes. My auto-ethnography hence makes use of Fanon’s uniting of the intellectual and the affective. It helps me read Said. Rather humbly, I follow his interest in a phenomenology of racial experience, and not just in tracing its impacts. My other question of why can I not write this book is a question of how do I know what I know. How do I know racism is at play? Let me explain what I mean here. When I ask this question, I am reminded almost instantly of Brian Klug’s example of a rabbi on a bus. It came to me as a citation through Sayyid’s article ‘A Measure of Islamophobia’.6 The latter’s commentary had an effect on my own reading. It is worth summarising. To help show us the problem of identifying anti-Semitism, Sayyid recalls how Klug imagines a bus journey where witnesses see a bus conductor tell a rabbi to get off the bus. A question arises:

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Is his act anti-Semitic? Is the rabbi thrown out for infringing some rules (e.g. not smoking) or for being identified as a Jew or being misrecognised as a Muslim? 7 For Sayyid the point of the parable is that there is ‘no algorithm’ that determines for us whether the actions of the bus conductor is anti-Semitic.8 Reading it as such is a doggedly interpretive activity. We must learn how. Sayyid highlights the example of immigrants who arrive in societies that mark them as ethnically different. It may take them years to understand that the way in which others react to them reflects an overarching racism. Even then, how do we know the racialised person is not being oversensitive? How can we say with certainty that such an act is Islamophobic or racist or anti-Semitic? The short answer – and how Sayyid reads Klug – is that we cannot. Similarly I cannot know the reasons why I cannot write this book. But, I do know racism is underlining my silence. As Sayyid argues, if being an Islamophobe is a learned activity, then so ‘is detecting it, pointing to it and condemning it’. There is something therefore to be said for the level of proficiency in detecting it. Precisely because, as argued above, before operating as a rejection, racism invites the racialised subject to mis-interpellate himself or herself. It happened to Fanon on the train. I cannot myself understand the sense of disintegration that my interpellation into the War on Terror creates outside of an initial conviction in my pervious normalcy. My sense of abandonment comes as this fantasy disintegrates. It comes because I cannot be both a humanist and a Muslim? Or, rather more accurately, it comes only because ‘I’ disintegrates into multiple categories: this or that, never a whole. This informs my understanding of the exilic and my use of Said against Said. The exercise of interrogating racism must always be an interrogative exercise about discourse and self-learnt by tracing one’s own sense of being out of place. There cannot be an algorithm beyond this. In this sense, I know what I know of racism because I know the myth of ‘I’. The famous racist question, where are you from?’ is perhaps the most informative here. Where was ‘I’ before this question interpellated me into an Other? What imagined location did it occupy prior to the question that brought up my offence? Where is the place from where one is out of place? 5 With the War on Terror as its backdrop, the film The Reluctant Fundamentalist effectively follows a conversation between American ‘journalist’ Bobby Lincoln and Pakistani teacher Changez Khan.

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By way of context, let me summarise the film’s plot. As an undercover CIA informant, Lincoln suspects Khan’s involvement in a local kidnapping. The pair meet in a quiet café in Lahore. Khan tells of his pleasant experiences as a student in America and then as an employee at a prestigious Wall Street company. The film’s actors re-enact Khan’s memories as the film canvasses the political atmosphere of suspicion around Muslims that marks the post-9/11 world. At this point, in the scene, flying home to New York the day after 9/11, Khan retells how security at the JFK airport strip-searched him. After a humiliating interrogation, Khan buttons back his shirt and stares through a window at a small television in the next room. It replays the planes crashing into the twin towers. As the film’s viewer, we can see the infamous footage of the second plane flying towards the World Trade Center. It merges with Khan’s reflection on the window. The plane flies across the bridge of his nose and into his eye. The North Tower collapses down his cheek. The scene collates Khan’s Asiatic face with the ignominious and iconic image of terror to become the enduring face of Islam’s Otherness. The War on Terror and the Other become the same face. Similarly, I have often thought that 9/11 brought me as a Muslim into visibility. But, with a price. It brings me into visibility with violence inscribed onto my being. The scene from The Reluctant Fundamentalist captures my point about the discursive web of the War on Terror. It takes me to Edward Said and what he calls the dehumanising ‘web of racism’, a web ‘very strong indeed’, a web of language holding in the Orient (Muslim) which has come to be its uniquely punishing destiny – a nexus of knowledge and power creating ‘the Oriental’, and yet simultaneously obliterating it.9 It captures what I have been trying to suggest about the simultaneous construction and obliteration of the Muslim through the culture talk of the War on Terror. Perhaps this is equivalent to the moment that Fanon experienced on the train. In this sense, we become both interpellated into 9/11 as a threat and mis-interpellated as the Other. The reflection forces Khan back onto the very domain of Otherness that has been previously foreclosed. Like my own experience after 9/11, its images became suddenly inscribed onto my sense of self and became the language that called me forward to debate my Islam. But there is another point to make here, I feel. Along with Kundnani’s equivocating of the culture talk of the War on Terror with the pervious markers of race, I felt the scene imitates well both Fanon and Du Bois’s idea of ‘twoness’.10 Canvassed by the white man’s gaze, Du Bois asserts African Americans gain a double consciousness: ‘two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings, two warring ideals in one black body’. For, twoness is ‘measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity’.11

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9/11 too brings before its sight the Muslim as the Other. It inevitably creates the DuBoisian ‘tape’ that ‘measures’ our lack of ‘American values’. Perhaps the culture talk leads to what DuBois calls a twoness inscribed into the debate. Terrorism becomes the tape that weighs up our soul, two different parts forever striving, the Apollonian and the hidden Dionysian. Muslims become either the radicals we are not or the moderate we must be; contesting each other in the same Westernese vocabulary, of affirmation or negation, seeking recognition through one and the negation of the Other. I want to spend a few words on this concept of double consciousness, of towness, because the idea goes to the crux of the relationship between moderate and radical. With greater effect than the movie, Mohsin Hamid’s 2007 novel, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, weighs up the burden of the Muslim’s double consciousness well. The novel’s version of Khan engages in a two-hundred page, one-sided, ‘conversation’ with an American stranger (the film’s Lincoln). Unlike the film, the American is not a CIA informant and readers never hear his voice. However, its absence pronounces the productive power of his gaze. The American’s presence works as the DuBoisian ‘tape’ that ‘measures’ Khan’s ‘soul’, for we only learn of what he thinks through Khan’s self-narration. For example, Khan starts with a question on why the American prefers to sit with his ‘back so close to the wall’? and regularly he interrupts the storytelling to address fears: ‘For your own safety, I would suggest that you avoid this yoghurt and those chopped vegetables. What? No, no, I meant nothing sinister; your stomach might be upset by uncooked foods, that is all. If you insist, I will go so far as to sample each of these plates myself first’.12 I found Khan’s failed relationship with his love interest Erica, a white women, better expressive of Hamid’s manipulation of (and thus a pronouncing of) Khan’s twoness. After one abortive attempt at lovemaking, Khan tells Erica to pretend that he is her lost lover who she forever mourns. His act of sacrifice succeeds and ignites her passion, although their intercourse leaves Khan despondent. The pair’s relationship works as an analogy for America’s ‘good’ Muslim, whose brown body is one thing and its role in American fantasies another, and perhaps it is this ultimate lesson—he has to become someone else for Erica to love him—that leads Khan to recognise that he cannot become one of them. In the back of my mind is the Orientalist narrative that sees Muslims totalise their enemy over personal grievances. It would be typically Hollywood to suggest a Muslim turns radical because he could not get the white girl. But, Hamid is better than that, and perhaps he knew what he was manipulating. For, it is precisely this ongoing suspicion of Khan that drives the plot. Although, violence never occurs, the threat of terrorism inflicts the novel’s pages. Even when Khan innocently reflects on everyday life (college,

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work, love), the banality of his threat as a potential ‘Muslim’ always surfaces, and the hovering violence works to amplify his voice. It turns every one of his acts into a possible trigger. Subverting the power of this gaze, however, I also sense that Khan cleverly toys with his twoness and, thus for me, he adopts a character somewhere between Klug’s Muslim and ‘Muslim’. Hamid is subtle here. There is only ever a trace of Khan’s fundamentalism here and there between stories and pages. In one example, Khan admits that America was ‘another world from Pakistan’ and he goes on to explain how ‘four thousand years ago, we, the people of the Indus River basin, had cities that were laid out on grids and boasted underground sewers, while the ancestors of those who would invade and colonize America were illiterate barbarians’.13 Such a biting antiAmerican stance plays the role of a possible slippery slope. It helps readers flirt with the idea that Khan slowly moves toward the role of the novel’s title, a fundamentalist. Captured by the film’s scene and the novel’s voice, I gained a sense that the ongoing and spectral threat of the ‘Muslim’ inflicts my life as a Muslim, who stands judged by an anxious white gaze. It’s not that all Muslims are suspected of being ‘Muslim’, rather, as The Reluctant Fundamentalist shows, Muslims must negotiate the ambience of themselves as a threat whenever there is a contest about their identities, whenever they confront a conversation about who we are. But, it is the empowering sense of teasing the stereotype that resonated and perhaps explains the ‘pleasure’ I find in misrepresentations of Islam. Khan must reluctantly play the role of the ‘Muslim’ without being one. Like Schroeder’s cat, before the American’s gaze, Khan as a ‘Muslim’ is both present and absent, simultaneously innocent and guilty of fundamentalism (dare I say a post-Muslim) and here lays the battle of ‘two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings’ as a form of identity; perhaps like Erica, it reflects that the only way the Muslim will gain attention and be heard is to play the role of the American’s fantasy. In summary, I felt The Reluctant Fundamentalist captured what Edward Said calls the dehumanizing ‘web of racism’. A web ‘very strong indeed’, a matrix of language holding in the Muslim which has come to be its uniquely punishing destiny, a nexus of knowledge and power creating ‘the Oriental’ and simultaneously obliterating it.14 Finding a space between Muslim and ‘Muslim’, adopting a consciousness where he both performs and denies the stereotype, Khan moves within the structure of this web. Despite its initial defiance, however, Khan’s tactical double trick of identification and de-identification traps him, like the pervasiveness of orientalism traps us all. Khan’s subjectivity tangles within orientalism’s symbolic weave of otherness and likewise present-day descriptions of being Muslim

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reside within the verbal and cinematic terrain of the War on Terror’s discourse. Thus, shaped by the political forces of its discourse, I contend that the Muslim remains a complex (im)possible (suspended) subject in a post9/11 world where (self) knowledge remains tentative, contingent and situated within a discussion about the threatening status of our Otherness. I am mindful of Walter Mignolo here. His concept of allocation/relocation craftily posits how the structure of power dialogically constructs ‘oppositional’ identities. Hegemony and Otherness are two players of the same game, where hegemony allocates meaning, Otherness as a relentless place of opposition aims to reallocate and contest the posited meaning.15 Thus, I take from The Reluctant Fundamentalist that Otherness is a doomed site; not just for negating identity, but a site that leads to a negation of the Other as a category for politics. Since, in the Orientalist view, the ‘Muslim’ is totalizing and lays beneath the skins of all Muslim, as its natural ethnic core, a de-essentialist view counters the supposed homogeneity of Muslims by stressing other forms of Muslim life – nationality, Wall Street broker, lover, poet – as if somehow they are more natural and apolitical. Upon reflection, I cannot escape the idea that Hamid’s Khan (who in the end) tells a rather normal tale of life in America invokes this as a counterconcept, which he feels is strong enough to dissolve the dangers of either hegemonic or counter-hegemonic generalisations. For me, he champions the post-racial ideal of having Khan inherit a sufficiently fluid subjectivity that might warrant the cultural redemption of the Other by refusing to play the game. In moving between Moderate and ‘Radical’, I feel Khan challenges his interpellation but at the price of negating the Muslim as an autonomous site which informs how we speak back. In resisting/performing the stereotype, he resists the ratification of any Muslim subjectivity of its own Islamicate making. Furthermore, today’s ‘post-racial moment’ compounds this bind. Its liberal colour-blindness sees essentialised identities, whether literal or practical, as problematic since it echoes the generalisations of racism. Since Orientalism sees a distinct cultural essence defining Islam, typically, as a response, anti-Orientalist positions deny Islam an essentialism. This, however, happens only because of what Sayyid argues is an existing rejection of the Islamicate world, which venture brings into being the substantial specificities in the different ways we become Muslims.16 To repeat myself, I cannot speak as an authority on being Muslim. My condition sways. My Islam is always corrupted. I have never known a neutral ground. I have never breathed in a language not racist. For a traumatic affect comes with the Muslim’s interpellation into the War on Terror. It results from the effect of Khan’s face-off with his own foreclosed Islamic Otherness. I am

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always repressing or dealing with its returns. The ambivalent relation I have with the ‘radical’ thus grows and so does my will to exterminate the brute. 6 I feel a need to again say this out loud; I do not idealise or agree with bin Laden. However, I must also admit that his radical rejection of the West became a voice sowed within. He came to be an imposed language of theirs and my own identification with an alternative. He came to be the image from which I learned to read the rushing forth of our contemporary and racialised liberal ideology. In summary, the three masks I have discussed say something about how the War on Terror thus interpellates me into wanting to first hold onto the old (false) identity from which the racist gaze ejected me. I am Australian, I say. I am British, I repeat. But this also creates an ambivalent aggressive feeling for what the ejection demands I endure. Suddenly, I become intimate with an anger within me. Suddenly the language of bin Laden is given volume. I may disagree with it, I may hate his voice, but I hear it and must deal with it. And how? Either by becoming a radical or a moderate. I must thus repress or sublimate. But I eventually find in Fanon another path. I find this path, I find another call to violence. This is why I chose an auto-ethnography – Fanon. Not only because of his mix between the affective and the analytical, but particularly because of his call for a kind of beautiful violence – his call to participate in a subjective violence that paves a political passage and gives an exit from the colonial order. For only violence transgresses the existing oppressive system of racism; only violence creates the site for a radical re-politicalisation; only violence challenges violence. But of what type? I mean the violence against the self. I mean the radical act of peeling off the white gaze that laces the body of colour and its psychic register. It is a violence directed against the fantasy that keeps Muslims of the West bound to their own subjection and oppression. It is the violence of throwing up that comes through denying the myth of ourselves as singularly bound ethical subjects of a moderate Islam. It comes through tracing the subtlest sensation of how through the application of a white-out fluid we learn to erase all that lies beyond the frame of the West. Thus my auto-ethnography is a work of making visible my self-erasure. It cannot come through merely an analysis, it has to come from the lived experience. Many may read this book and feel it lacks the scientific quality to prove these claim. Yet, am I confident that many Muslims and Others will read it and know of this learned activity, of constantly detecting the self, pointing to the self and condemning one self.

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And, I also aimed to highlight how performing the moderate comes with a cost, as Fanon warned us, how it comes as a Trojan horse. It fails to deliver its promise of gaining white cultural or national recognition that supposedly provides an avenue of escape from racism. It simply keeps us sealed in within its web of language and gaze. 7 At a Melbourne conference on racism in 2013, at Deakin University, I presented a paper on Ghazali that first explored how Islamophobia imagines the ‘Muslim’ as a subject of its discourse. I was keen to use the example of the mannequin that I discussed earlier. Somewhat coarsely, stumbling through, I argued that the ‘Muslim’ is not a subject but an object of Western fantasy. I remember this conference paper not only because it summarises in its earliest edition what I have said to this point, but also because Alana Lentin was in the audience that day. She was one of the keynote speakers and generously attended my talk. No matter how convoluted my argument, from the conference floor, a generous Alana asked if I had read the work of Barnor Hesse. My engagement with both their works and in particular Hesse’s argument on how today’s discussions about racism foreclose the colonial conditions that formed today’s racism led me to understand what I have been briefly labelling as the post-racial. Forgive me again for my work’s pacing issue, but it’s worth in these concluding pages to make a point or two about the post-racial. Following Alana, I suggest that the notion that we are post-racial is in fact the dominant mode in which racism finds discursive expression today across a variety of contexts. The post-racial as Lentin uses the concept, and which I heavily borrow, refers to the ways in which we ignore how allied liberal concepts such as culture and diversity have been incorporated into the denial of the significance of racism.17 This denial marks for a type of erasure. We even use white-out in the ways we have come to discuss racism and anti-racism. At this point, I found the incisive work of Hesse to be valuable and, in all honesty, foundational to my current thinking. But, by way of summarising the historical context of the post-racism, Hesse states that racism has three distinct historical ‘horizons’. The first is the ‘racist horizon’, which existed from 1930s to 1970s. The fight against racism came during this period, and it took place in the context of the horizon’s explicitly racist regimes and cultures. The early Civil Rights struggle and similar movements in the colonies were a response to Western plutocracies’ open commitments to racism during this era.

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The second horizon is the anti-racist horizon. Hesse dates this era’s span from the 1970s to the early 1990s. During this period, the advances made by anti-racist struggles forced Western governments to condemn racism. The condemnation marginalised overt commitments to racism and a consensus began to emerge in Western plutocracies that we should condemn racists. Within this anti-racist horizon, Hesse highlights the internationalisation of the fight against apartheid in South Africa that led to the isolation of the last overtly racist state. However, even with anti-racism as the background, race continued to structure inequalities and imbalances in power in society. The current and third horizon is the post-racial horizon. Beginning from around the mid-1990s onwards, we can characterise the post-racial by a sense that we have seen the ‘end of racism’ and by its assumed removal from the public domain. Hesse sees an example of this in cultural and commercial celebrations of particular types of blackness that began to emerge, such as through the global brands of Benetton. Also, the post-racial led to the canonisation of Nelson Mandela, following his release from Robbin Island, who has become the unique example of an anti-colonial figure. In this horizon, even those who once supported the apartheid now honoured Mandela as a hero. Most of all, Hesse highlights the election of the first black president of the United States and how it singled the arrival of the post-racial. Hesse identifies the postracial by a sense of the ‘foreclosure’, a concept that refers to what must continue to be unspeakable for contemporary regimes of discourse to continue to exercise their power.18 Similarly, I maintain that the abstract celebration of Apollonian liberal thought exercises its cultural and hegemonic power only after it forecloses the excessive Dionysian conditions of liberalism’s history. It is the aesthetic of the third horizon. It is the second colonialism that erases the first. It is what Alana hints is our use of allied liberal concepts to deny racism. It is what I have been trying to say of the moderate’s self-erasure through wearing the masks of fabulous, militant and triumphant. 8 Hesse in his essay ‘Racialized Modernity: An Analytics of White Mythologies’, 2007, argues that such concepts intimately tie with the ways we have come to imagine modernity.19 We have heard the many tales about the triumphant victories of ideas such as ‘rationality’, ‘liberalism’, ‘capitalism’, ‘secularism’ and ‘rule of law’. We say less, however, of how racism conceptually appropriates these concepts as Western things that become distinct from the backwardness and particularities of the East. One of Hesse’s points is that

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these ideas continue today to shape our intellectual modern vocabulary, our field of political and social thought, and maintain a racial order without the need to reference anyone’s skin colour. Despite the increase of recent theorists who oblige us to rethink modernity’s relationship with racism, Hesse argues that their work does not thoroughly interrogate the concept of race itself. While we have found critical studies on racism valuable in helping shift the focus away from a description of people to the study of a broader history, they tend to maintain a reliance on an empirical gaze in order to see the Other. Hesse thus contends that in their current analysis there is still a reduction of race to what is a visible and corporeal body. He argues that sociologist and race theorist Howard Winant exemplifies the problem when he argues that ‘race’ is a concept that signifies and symbolises sociopolitical conflicts and interests in reference to different types of human bodies. And yet Winant also argues ‘that there is no biological basis for distinguishing human groups along the lines of “race”’.20 Despite theorists insisting on a disassociation between the category race and the corporeal, they still take the approach that invokes a visual form of corporeality. Hesse thus sees that existing studies conceptually, if not historically, neglect the formative signifier of Europeanness, which he argues is racism’s defining logic. He considers the ways in which ‘an established yet indeterminate geographical Christian entity’ merges into ‘Europe’, and marks itself as ‘white’ in relation to what it also simultaneously designates as the non-European. From the sixteenth-century onwards, colonial discourses have produced and divided peoples, identities, ecologies, cultures, histories and corporealities as either European or non-European. Hence, the codifications of race emanated directly and variously from broader demarcations drawn at length between Europeanness and non-Europeanness both in and between the metropole and the colony. In this racially constitutive and governmental sense, populations colonised outside Europe were recruited, interpolated and allocated to these assemblages of territory, corporeality, culture, politics and religion and were obliged under law and practice to comport themselves within their designated assemblage of race. It is the repression of this alternative analysis that has become part of the success of race thinking in establishing itself, particularly in terms of biology and ideology, as the object of critique we have traditionally named ‘racism’.21 Whether race was being affirmed or put into question, what was not questioned was the naturalisation of the colonial or racially segregated world, which seemed estranged from the question of racism. But can we honestly separate race as a concept from the possibilities opened up by Enlightenment’s scientific methodologies? Most importantly,

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it comes from the will to order and classify, to rationalise everything from immaterial objects to plants, animals and human beings themselves.22 As Balibar argues, race is the necessary counter-image that helps demarcate the boundaries of what constitutes the ‘human’ of Western universality. Racism and universalism, argues Balibar, each ‘has the other inside itself’ because establishing the contours of a generalised humanity after Enlightenment is dependent on the parallel definition of non-man.23 It must be seen as a cultural and political product of its place and time, namely European modernity.24 I take from Hesse thus a telling point about the post-racial horizon. In it, we have come to distance ourselves rhetorically from what racism created and produced through its inventing of Europe. Whereas we condemn the idea of ‘race’, we do so only insofar as it does not call into question the universality of the claims attributed to the Western colonial regime of international relations, liberalism and democracy. The concept of racism would preserve the Apollonian value of the latter, while discrediting as pathological a particular conceptualisation of race as biology and ideology.25 I take most from Hesse how we cannot avoid the suspicion that the unspeakability of the colonial legacy led to the naturalisation of Western hegemony. Hesse forcefully asserts that we would not exaggerate in saying that discussions of how colonialism formed racism remain ‘unspeakable’.

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(Questioning My) Contribution

1 In the opening of his book A Fundamental Fear, Sayyid argues that of the many spectres that have haunted Western civilisation from time to time, ‘perhaps none is so perplexing or so irredeemably strange as the contemporary resurgence of Islam’.1 It is all too easy, Sayyid argues, to ‘conflate Muslims and ghosts’.2 Ghosts are the remains of the dead. They are echoes of former times and former lives. They are those who have died but still remain. They hover between erasure of the past and the indelibility of the present. Muslims too, Sayyid argues, are often thought to be out of time, ‘throwbacks to medieval civilisations who are caught in the grind and glow of “our” modern culture’.3 But there is another aspect of the ghost in popular genre. It is caught in between, neither here nor there, and is incapable of escaping this world until its issue is resolved. As I thought of this, a series of thoughts interlinked, governed by an initial question: Has not the ‘we’ in ‘what have we’ done something similar? It never comes into proper focus because it was a ‘we’ of ghosts. A post-racial blurriness is its function. The post-racial makes it unspeakable. To help make these indisciplined connections, two descriptions come to mind. First, I recall how Žižek argued, the difference of the War on Terror from the twentieth-century struggles, such as the Cold War, is that while the enemy was once clearly identified as the actually existing communist system, the terrorist threat is ‘spectral’.4 Here, on a similar point, Gil Anidjar describes the spectral in Semites, 2008. He argues that before the ‘War on Drugs’ and the ‘War on Terror’ there was the ‘War on Witches’. For Anidjar, ‘witches’ serve as an example of what Cotton Mather called ‘the Reality of Invisibles’. Along with the evidence (spectral or other) that surrounded them, witches had 135

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to be detected and uncovered. They had to be made.5 They had to be studied. They had to be feared and then burned. The invisible had to be made visible through ‘social-imaginary institutions’ that became ‘more real than the real’.6 In Gourgouris’s words, ‘Foes are essentially legendary; even when real they are invariably constructed and reconstructed, made legendary’.7 2 A few years after 9/11, shortly after I had rediscovered my Islam, I brought a misbahah from a garage at the Islamic Council of Victoria. It was a standard type – a string of 33, eight millimetre, sandalwood beads, with a tassel, a tuft of loosely hanging threads knotted at one end for decoration, that helped me track my dhikr (a devotional act of repeatedly reciting, silently within, sometimes aloud short phrases of Islamic prayer). During my undergrad days, while the War on Terror raged, I wrapped it around my right wrist and took it everywhere. Even when I sat in a lecture theatre, my fingers unconsciously scrolled through each bead, counting. Looking back, my overt display of carrying it was an attempt to show everyone that I was Muslim. Perhaps, even to remind myself. I remember one incident when I sat in the cafeteria and a fellow classmate stared at me as my lips moved and my fingers counted. I purposely averted my eyes, as if I was deep in prayer. I have no idea what she thought of me, but I felt a sense of affirmation when I looked away. My mind raced to tell me that I had reclaimed ownership of my Otherness – as if I had naively resisted the white European’s gaze. I became distraught when I lost those beads. They were neither expensive nor unique, but almost instantly when I patted down my empty pockets searching for them, I remembered my grandparents. Only now upon reflection, when writing these final chapters, can I begin to contemplate upon the reasons why. They represented a fetishised object of my religion, of my racialisation, of my pursuit of an authenticity that came from occupying the space of the diaspora, of the beyond. They were the tools of the exile, a symptom of my displacement. As well as helping me perform dhikr, my holding onto them was a defensive strategy utilised by a psyche of being their Other. The beads initially helped me repress the traumatic memory or ideational content of being a disliked Arab and Muslim Oriental of the War on Terror discourse. They were a link back to the religion of my grandparents and thus they prevented me from entering the restricted domain of a conscious awareness of my sense of alienation, of my Otherness. Ironically, when I did dhikr (Arabic word for ‘remembrance’), they correlated to a wilful act of forgetfulness, an act of repression that I knew very little of my religion. The beads

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were a ‘symptom’, namely a conspicuous-but-seemingly nonsensical feature of being a forgetful Muslim of the West. To return to one of this book’s opening and recurring question, I as Muslim of the West wondered if I could tell a story of Islam, beyond the terms set by the accredited language of orientalism. How do I write this book beyond its language? By clinging to some object endowed with an excessive, disproportionate significance, I was able to appear to others, not as an Other lost in the clouds of the idiosyncratic fantasy world of their orientalism, but, rather, as a real Muslim – that is, someone who can accept and tolerate the harshness of their gaze, of the difficulty of daily existence without complaint, only by remembering God. However, if the fetish object is taken away from the fetishist, this cynical façade of resignation disintegrates, plunging the subject into depression and despair, just as I pat down my empty pockets looking for the lost beads, a reminder of my grandparents. In this sense my book was an exploration of how I had lost my voice as an authentic voice. What happens when I come to realise the way I speak is more a result of the War on Terror than the Quran? The beads are another story-within-a-story, for it is not enough to authentically be Muslim, Arab, un-Australian or from the diaspora. It is more important to tell a story on how these identities are subjected to the conditions upon which they become an identity, caught within the discursive webs of Self and Otherness. Through Said, I embrace thus the conditions of exile; I affirm that my Islam begins, not ends, pursues, not concludes, reaches for a voice beyond. For perhaps the only way to write this book is to write about not writing the first attempt at it. The only way is to explain the journey rather than speak about the particular stations of moderate or radical that the War on Terror demands us to remain stuck in. 3 I recall with interest at the moment I became a Muslim in my classroom. In weekly discussions about ‘European’ politics (ranging from the American and the French revolutions to the Cold War), I was tentatively part of the ‘we’ of students (insofar as I played my role as a leftist). My being Muslim was always absent. For 12 weeks, I never spoke as a Muslim and my classmates never listened to a Muslim. There was no meaning in discussing the base and superstructure. There was no meaning in discussing first- to third-wave feminism. Hence, whenever I did speak, I was interpreted within the discursive horizons of liberal history and its subjectivities and counters. This was the case for all but one week. When we discussed Islamism, my criticism became

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overvisible as those of a Muslim. The tone was set early when my professor pointed at me to help him clarify Islam’s ‘great historical schism’. Apparently being a believer meant I knew enough to teach a class about the difference between Shia and Sunni Looking back now, I say it was interesting mostly because my fellow students continually and outwardly challenged (and all but eradicated) the racial labels of a European ‘us’ and a non-European ‘them’ in their weekly discussions. Yet, they nevertheless (unwittingly) accepted the structure of who spoke about politics and how they spoke. I had to speak within the contours of a 500-year European history, within Westernese, within ‘the western political project that sought to establish a language which would enable the world to be understood in its totality’.8 4 It became clear to me that the Apollonian need to construct a positive Islam beyond the disruptive nature of Dionysus was also tied to a need to overrepresent the colonial gaze of the Other staring upon and judging Islam. But, what remains of a troubled Muslim history that stays in the dark? That is to say, where is the story of Islam of jihad and patriarchy and struggles with Islamophobia, which remain unrepresented in a sterile story of Apollonian abstractions? The museum lacks what Nietzsche calls a synthesis. Here a pragmatic voice may interrupt my reading and suggest that showing the Dionysian presence of the struggle of unintegrated Muslims is unhelpful to the museum’s aims of ‘fostering harmony’. However, the museum needs only hint at the migrants’ troubles of living in Australia without being overly Dionysian in replicating the fearsome excesses of a foreign, alien and threatening Islam. In the halls of the exhibit displaying the story of Muslims in Australia, it could, as one example, easily present as a historical artefact the written lecture of the prominent missionary Reverend George Brown, who addressed a Melbourne audience in 1912 on ‘The Moslem Menace’.9 The reverend was the first to tie Muslims to the threat to Australia’s cultural integrity at the hands of Muslim overbreeding. It could also have played a recording of Sydney’s Radio 2UE’s John Laws to help describe the ambivalent relationship Muslims have had with Australia as their home. The prominent radio announcer told Muslims in 1991: ‘Go home … it’s all simple … if you wish to condemn Australia’s involvement in the Middle East on personal grounds, then go home.’10 I began to count how many times the word Islamophobia or colonialism was mentioned, discussed, sustained and displayed in the Islamic Museum of Australia. I counted the word once, but stopped when I came across a poem,

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titled ‘White-washed “I”: An Ode to Fanon’, by the poet Nahid Kimmie. The museum’s ‘concluding’ piece made me decide how overtly Apollonian the museum really was. The poem’s psychical location amplifies its every word. It hangs on a wall along a corridor that leads visitors out of the building through a fire exit. Its concluding lines tell of how ‘“the wretched of the Earth” gave birth to the new altar. It is time for a new infection, a cultural vivisection. Time for 100% pigment to excrete the white chalk’. The words ‘vivisection’, ‘Fanon’, ‘pigment’, ‘excrete’ and ‘chalk’ bring together a visual image in my mind of a drawn outline of a body in white chalk, like an outline drawn onto the concrete at a crime scene. There was indeed a ‘vivisection’ of the Muslim from troubled Dionysian imagery, but in the process of distancing themselves from the excesses of the Dionysian quality they also distance themselves from the content of history that shaped many of the Muslim politics and expressions today. It is a binary that the protagonist in the poem, Fanon argued, shaped the ‘colonial and colonised’ worlds. I read Fanon as thus saying that the white man’s vision literally breaks up the black man’s body, separating form and content, chalk and pigment. The result is that the black man who mistakenly believes himself, due to the white chalk, as a universal and equal person eventually comes to see himself as fractured and dismembered from his own content. It leads to what Fanon calls a condition of nausea. This nausea is of dislocation, a feeling of revulsion at one’s self because one has been rejected, as Fanon puts it: hated, despised, detested. This nausea is a feeling of complete alienation from one’s own self, and such nauseated experiences usher a massive upheaval, bring forward a will to excrete and result in a crisis of identity. It is, therefore, in the white man’s gaze that the black man emerges in crisis and is aware of himself as the excesses of the white man’s Otherness, as the spilling pigment that threatens to blur the chalk. The colonised are illusionary, peaceful and neat, whereas in contrast the colonised’s world is a place where ‘people are piled one on top of the other’ and ‘the shacks are squeezed tightly together’. The colonised are famished, are suffocating and ‘are hungry for bread, meat, shoes, coal and light’. For Fanon the duality of order and disorder shapes geographical, demographical and psychological senses and division of space, and for me, in a poem tucked away out of site, barely visible, next to an exit door, a division between celebration and censorship. I realised that the Islam of a troubled history was squashed away and famished for attention. It was almost a begrudging nod to the need to mention colonialism, next to a staff exit, where perhaps, unconsciously, curators wanted to avoid confronting their viewers with Europe’s own Dionysian and violent history. In Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon expands on the spatial trope when he famously describes the ‘fact of blackness’ as a spatial reality, a claustrophobic

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condition of being trapped by his skin colour. ‘11I was walled in’, he says. His black skin was a boundary that determined his social boundaries. It was an outline of himself that imprisoned the self. He recounts how he was constantly referred to only as the ‘negro physician’, or the ‘negro’ teacher. It was the colour of his skin and not his refined manners, knowledge of literature or understanding of the quantum theory that marked him. The colour of his skin is thus a trap, a confined space from which there is no escape. He finds himself ‘sealed into that crushing objecthood’, into ‘thingness’. This is how the black man always sees himself, he continues, always in unfavourable comparison, a thing, in relation to that which sees things. 5 To close this book, and before I move on to its final chapter, I would like to bring up an analogy that I hope helps me frame my summary and conclude the point. Like most things, I cannot remember its details and remember mostly the impression it left. The memory stayed with me throughout the War on Terror, throughout the fog of my indisciplined thoughts. I ought at least to describe what parts I can recall for it always reminded me of what not to forget. Some years ago, the well-known website Electronic Intifada showed a provocative black-and-white photograph. Powerful symbolism filled the image, for it captured an enduring picture of resistance – a boy wearing a Palestinian chequered scarf that covered half his face, with his rifle’s barrel running across angry bloodshot eyes. I remember because I involuntarily whispered, ‘terrorist’. To be clear, I did not believe that he was. But rather I stated out loud what I knew. For is not orientalism first an act of naming? It pivots on the West’s grotesque power to construct the Other to become ‘more real’ than our own experience of ourselves.12 Thus a stern Arabic face and a gun need not correspond to any truth other than the consistency of its interlinking stereotypes. For in my whisper, I adopted such; that is, I adopted the act of naming what I saw. Perhaps Electronic Intifada also predicted my reaction. The portrait was only the first scene of a longer sequence. But here my memory somewhat fades. The rest of what I recall is probably my politics forcing itself in. For I can loosely remember how the camera angle moved outwards and upwards. It panned away from a portrait to give a landscape view. It broadened vision. It introduced surroundings. Slowly it came to show a thin figure, of a shoeless boy standing stoically on a mound of rubble. I saw concrete bricks mixed with dirt, with parts of a buried mattress and the remains of a bed smashed

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against the wall. I could see a building’s frame with its façade blown away. The boy looked much older now on top of his home’s remains. Sound and colour were then introduced: sirens blared, cars beeped and a faint scream merged with a flash of red. The photograph became a video. It was as if his surrounding context metaphorically brought life back into his world; as if it moved him away from the stereotype towards a worldliness that gave meaning to his gun. I remember the camera kept transcending slowly upwards towards a God-like gaze from above. But it eventually rested. The young boy now all but lost in a landscape view of a refugee camp. He had moved away from sight, and away from being a symbol of political violence to being one of its victims. But the full articulation of this was yet to come. Throughout the video, throughout its movement outwards, a question never left our computer screens: ‘Is this the face of terrorism?’ The question first came with the portrait of the boy. Now before the view of this stricken landscape an altogether different meaning was given to the same question. It is easy to note the video’s logic. The lived conditions of war/occupation are an unseen, more violent, form of terrorism. But, I cannot help evoke the video as an insightful analogy to explain another point. For does it not help us also expose the War on Terror’s ‘culture talk’? Does it not reflect how today’s persistent debates about Muslims (and their values) since 9/11 conceal a landscape view of colonial history? The racialising eye of the War on Terror rarely looks beyond the portraits of Muslims to see its own violence. A concealment occurs through today’s endless debates about Islam as a compatible culture to democracy. The portraits of good or bad Muslims simply hide the landscape beyond the frame of such discussions. Thus, in this view, the worldliness of the socio-economic becomes an anonymous face of an objective violence rarely discussed. The young boy’s gun is unrelated to his landscape. And he exposes the flawed circularity to this culture talk. His scarf, his eyes and his brown face become the cultural signifiers signifying a violent culture. In other words, in this reading, we encounter a post-racialism. We encounter the de-totalising of history. It deprives us of a cognitive map to best discuss violence. No wonder then, for many in the mainstream West, the emerging Islamist simply becomes an utterly senseless eruption of Islam’s cultural Otherness. It begets itself. It arrives on 9/11 as the second plane does from nowhere. It comes from beyond the frames of our television and thus beyond a history forgotten. I should be careful. It is easy to misunderstand these days. My aim is not to slip through a closet sympathy for terrorists who are really victims upon our second landscape glance. Nor am I solely suggesting the point that we should replace a narrow with a broader view. I had only wanted to introduce

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an example of the post-racial, which is a recurring theme throughout my autoethnography. But, this is not the reason why I chose to speak of this memory. There is another more important point and explains why his analogy helps me summarise. Both portrait and landscape are binaries of the same debate. In the War on Terror’s culture talk we often reduce bad Islam to a totalising culture of one essence, or we reduce good Muslims to a series of portraits that exit beyond any unifying sense of Islam. Hence the camera’s movement matters most to me. And it reminds me of what not to forget. Whatever Islam ought to properly be, it ought to properly be. I will leave it for the theologians. But the Islam of the War on Terror is experienced, articulated, remembered and even neglected through the lived and everyday life of Muslim bodies caught in its web. It cannot reside up high in Apollonian abstracts divorced from its Dionysian struggles. For even when the young boy vanishes in the landscape view, he is still its reference. The video compels me to always question where I do stand when I write.

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(The Lack of a) Conclusion (or the Möbius Strip)

1 Fanon insists in the need of losing himself in negritude. The purpose of this immersion is not to assert some lost stable racial cultural self-identity. Rather it empowers the first steps towards a radical political challenge against oppression. Colonised intellectuals must engage in the process of decolonisation to paradoxically create some distance from the colonial system. For after revisiting the site of oppression and exploitation, they must no longer misrecognise negritude as an oppositional cultural force to racist colonialism. But rather, they must restage it. So, yes. My ‘Muslimitude’ was necessary, but it’s not the final station. It is a step. For as Fanon warns, the initial fantasy of negritude is important for the colonised intellectual. He or she must come down to see what is happening at the very depths of colonialism. Only then can he or she go up. Or as Sartre puts it, talking of Fanon, this born Hegelian has forgotten the occasion when one has to lose oneself in the night of the absolute.1 Only then can one attain a proper consciousness, only through a synthesis of moving from the Dionysian towards the abstractions of the Apollonian.  2 Sitting in the La Trobe University library, seeking to explain my terms, the Apollonian exposed its full splendour. It appeared somewhat serendipitously. I had discontinued my attempt at writing an introduction. I had to prepare for my lecture to teach on the myths of Australian history. The week’s topic was about Australia as a sporting nation. I had to watch the opening ceremony 143

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of the 2000 Sydney Olympics, the content of which became an article of Apollo’s spirited performance.  Before 9/11 I had felt and (tried to) identified myself as a proud ‘Aussie’. But the past decade and a half changed me. Viewing the video was thus strange. As I watched the opening ceremony on YouTube, a smile grew on my face. It opened with a young Nikki Webster skipping into the middle of the Olympic stadium. How time has flown. Initially, the image drew on innocent memories. It brought back a touch of national pride and a celebratory mood. I thought back to how excited I was. But now, today, I longed to demonstrate a different feeling. I had become someone else to who I was 16 years ago. As a Muslim who has given his public life to fighting racism, to justifying his humanity, citizenry and faith, I rewatched the ceremony. In the video, Webster pretends to visit a beach. She sits on a towel, applies sunscreen and then pleasantly drifts off to sleep with a yawn. A day at the beach is supposed to be quintessentially Australian. This is the image the world has of us. And so a global audience of billions watched as the ceremony’s performers rushed in. Through their well-choreographed dance, the performers act out Webster’s ‘dream’, which is apparently Australia’s ‘story’.  Evoking indigenous symbolism, paradoxically, the dream begins with the country’s ‘awakening’, the television commentator explains. Australia evolved from its ancient indigenous origins to grow into today’s prosperous and diverse society. Ironic, I thought, given the ‘History Wars’ that torment the public sensibility. Around the time, ‘debates’ erupted over the national story. Public discussions raged on to what extent the white settlement of Australia constituted an invasion. And to what extent this violation is marked by the massacres, displacement and oppression of the indigenous Australians.  I say ironic, for does not the ceremony accidentally represent a black armband view of history, even if unwittingly? The smooth conjuring up of a narrative about a peaceful, diverse country that moves from an initial ‘awakening’ to a successful multiculturalism could only ever be realistic if it is represented as it is: a dream of a white subject asleep.  The same dreamy script informs the Channel Seven commentator too. He then described how the arrival of the British singled an ‘irresistible force’ that marked the beginning of the modern era. I watched this with a mix of curiosity and annoyance as the ceremony’s organisers showed Captain Cook arrive with the sounds of blaring trumpets. He reaches Australia on a giant bicycle that apparently characterised the HM Bark Endeavour. Cook benignly held a long-feathered pen and a telescope. Of course, I whispered. Could any prop other than a telescope depict discovery, rather than invasion, better?  I listened on as commentators described Australia as a hospitable country that has welcomed people of diverse backgrounds since the eighteenth century. Introducing the section of the ceremony titled ‘Arrival’, the commentator,

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somewhat oddly, explains the coming of immigrants. He describes: ‘some of them convicts, many of them fleeing war and oppression and poverty, all of them seeking freedom and prosperity under the Southern Cross’. The invasion of Australia was put into the same category as immigrants fleeing oppression. An even better expression of this Apollonian nonsense was the statement ‘all of them seeking freedom’. I particularly liked how the colonisers were excluded from these categories. No British generals, or admirals, lords or bureaucrats, or police, or aristocrats or soldiers with guns were mentioned. Only convicts and immigrants were named.  Even this initial use of a colour-blind ‘immigrant’ was typically brief and efficiently applied. It was used to erase the traces of white society’s racism. The ceremony goes on to represent the idea of the ‘Arrival’ of the nonindigenous population to Australia rather strangely. It shows the flooding in of non-white immigrants. The first two groups entering the stadium as a metaphor of their arrival to the country come as overly visible non-Europeans. They are dressed in exotic African and Oriental outfits, beating their drums, wearing their turbans, dancing their way happily into the stadium and the country. I am guessing each continent’s immigrants performed in the order of the Olympic rings. But the segment conveniently and completely erases from memories the official era of the White Australia policy. The nation had long decided that the majority of immigrants coming to Australia must be ethnically and culturally white.  In the end, the ceremony’s performers eventually come together to hold each other’s hands and form the outline of Australia. Turning towards the stadium, they open their arms wide as if to say in the final instance, all are welcome, all are invited. When I finished watching this scene, I paused to ask myself a rather obvious question.  What might asylum seekers sitting behind razor barb wires be thinking when they watched this open invitation for all to come? Despite the ceremony’s wonderfully open gesture, Australia has continued its notorious practice of detaining refugees and their children. Successive governments have continued to deport vulnerable asylum seekers. They ignore the mounting proof that long-term detention causes mental ill-health and wastes the lives of people fleeing persecution. People who arrive by boat are turned away to live in detention centres on Manus Island and Nauru in cruel ‘offshore’ camps. In August 2001, less than a year after the opening ceremony, the Howard government of Australia refused permission for the Norwegian freighter MV Tampa. It carried 438 rescued refugees (predominantly Hazaras of Afghanistan from a distressed fishing vessel in international waters) to enter the country’s waters.  When the Tampa entered Australian waters, the prime minister ordered Australian special forces to board and stop the ship. This act is in direct

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contrast to the ceremony’s outstretched and welcoming arms. The aesthetics of the country’s openness is a perfect illustration of the Apollonian – its appeal through colourful props to show an illuminating storytelling of a nonsensical self-image of love. It demonstrated the depths of the Apollonian concealment of the Dionysian realities of the world we live in.  The video of the opening ceremony eventually ended and I looked at my computer screen. It had now paused on a view of the filled iconic Olympic stadium. Throughout the ceremony, we heard their almost endless applauses. But, what I truly wondered was whether the crowd shared in my cynicism? I asked if anyone remembered the asylum seekers as they flashed their cameras, or sneered at the image of Capitan Cook. When pursuing this line of thinking, I realised the point that I am most keen to make about the way the Apollonian erases. I would dispute any idea that the Olympic games’ organisers or the crowd did not know in general about colonisation, or displacement or the stolen generation. I doubt that they did not know about the large gap in life expectancy between the indigenous and mainstream society. I suspect my readers do not need me to tell them how official celebrations of the nation are often a whitewashed view of history. We know this. Australia knows about its racism. Most liberal states know about their racism. Reporters and commentators who celebrated the ceremony also know about the White Australia policy – of course, they do; we all do. No historian or major political leader in Australia and no major journalist or academic contend that Australia’s colonial period arrived without a degree of violence or dispossession. That the history is so obviously evident is squarely my point about the way we erase. For I see the post-racial as an ideology that deals with the haunting fact that we know (or at least suspect) that racism shaped the modern world. Essentially, the Apollonian spirit is a sense of erasure, a deletion that attempts to negate the fact that it is erasing, that comes not through ignorance or an ignoring of racism but through an aesthetic about our progress, through telling a story of inclusion that frames the Dionysian within a beautiful paradigm.  For instance, as I write this while sitting in La Trobe University’s library, after I gave my lecture, after I watched the video of the ceremony, I stare out the window and see the eucalyptus trees. I reflect on my initial surge of cynicism and my overcritical eye that helped me recognise racism. And, yes, now I stand opposed to it, ready to identify it, to out it. But as I write this, I still remain on Wurundjeri land. Am I not in some sense an extension of the logic of settlement? My body continues to inhabit and consume the goods of existing in a system built on racism.  The example of the Apollonian I wished to highlight was not the ceremony. It was me. I wrote a neat story about my journey from once loving

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Australia to becoming a critic. But for what purpose? I told of a self-narration of struggle with racism since 9/11 that forced a conscious self-reflection of my interpellation into culture talk. But, why? All the while my storytelling forecloses the reality of my body’s location throughout my narrating this. It is the ‘subtlest of sensations’, as Williams reminds us. The Apollonian ideology demands the separation of ideas from the Dionysian body. And, I too occupy a space created by racism. I too must come to write about Islam and being Muslim after I recognise my place in the world. My observations may have changed, but who cares what floats between my ears if my feet remain firmly planted without consideration of where.  3 My family visited Egypt before the revolution. I stayed in Australia to start my PhD. In between images of relatives, of food and of a visit to the pyramids, one photograph they sent stood out. They had befriended a street vendor of about ten years who sold them dragon fruit. She held a cheap plastic knife and worked on a rusted table that she wheeled around. She cut fruit all day and did nothing else. Without supervision, without rest and without going to school, she earned the equivalent of $2 a day. Scores of prickly spikes protrude a piece of dragon fruit as you may know. And my wife asked her if they hurt. The young girl graciously replied that ‘she was used to them’. I remember this story for two reasons. It gave meaning to the girl’s smile in the photograph that broke through a fragile but beautiful brown face. And, her name was Iman. It means faith. The photo absorbed me, mostly because of the contrast between the young girl’s smile and a decrepit, typically poor, old Cairo street. Behind her, wooden panels emphatically shut down a shop. The street looked deserted. Filthy, greyed and cracked red tiles laid a pavement full of litter and dirt. For some reason I focused on the t-shirt that fell over her thin frame. I do not know why, or how to say this, but it had an uncanny familiarity. She was not poorly dressed, but still I knew her clothes were of the poor from Egypt. Her t-shirt had a random Western symbol. It had the number five and nothing else. Then there was a white plastic headband with a butterfly loop that barely held together her hair. All I know is that I could have picked that the photograph was from Egypt a hundred times over. For it had a particular hue, a palatable atmosphere that frames her struggle, a background of everydayness to that struggle, a worldliness that the cities of the Muslim world exist within, and that all of us have got used to.

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4 At the end of The Heart of Darkness, Marlow encounters Kurtz’s fiancée, who remains devoted to the myth of the great Christian who travelled to and rescued a savage civilisation. She asks Marlow for Kurtz’s final words. Rather than tell the truth, Marlow returns some letters, hesitates, before he ‘pulled himself together’ and ‘spoke slowly’. ‘The last word he pronounced was – your name’. Attending a conference to coincide with the tenth anniversary of Said’s death, in preparing my contribution, I remembered Marlow’s lie. My grief with Said led me to draft a paper on how his exilic critic possesses its emancipatory ‘ring’. Its status arrives from its privileged inheritance of the Westernese ‘names’ such as ‘secular’ and ‘humanist’. The cultural power associated with these labels thus interpolates the critic into a tradition of European politics that labels its critical project as legitimate and excludes other epistemologies, such as Islam, in doing so. The powering of ‘naming’ matters, I concluded. Said dissolved the East/West binary only to replace it with the secular/religious binary, which came to provide the same function of rendering one half of the world as the solution and the other its problem. 5 Radical Mask, Moderate Masks focuses on compulsion to be a moderate Muslim. It adopted a confessional vocabulary of my acceptance of a white ‘imaginative geography’. It traced this vocabulary, as a summary, and extension of my argument, within a range of descriptions of being moderate. For I looked at my own role in growing up in the West and at the seductive call to perform the role of the moderate. The three masks did not represent the people in question. They represented my projection of a failed self before the white gaze. Long before I found it hard to write as a Muslim, I found it hard to listen as a Muslim. In summary, the three acts of Orientalism represent how Conrad sees the three geographies of racism: fabulous, militant and triumphant. Returning to the analogy of the chessboard in the museum, they represent my three future steps when discussing politics. They represent three squares of a sealed subjectivity. My main argument of course is that all three reaffirm the culture talk of the War on Terror by using an abstract Apollonian language that helps hide the material violence of racism. What they erase then is the conditions of the ‘Muslim/colonised worlds’ and our own positionality within it. I attempted to exemplify rather than argue. I wanted to describe the subtlest sensations of applying correctional fluid. The methodology of a ‘messy text’

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embodies my experience rather than explicitly stating it.2 The interweaving stories, the repetitiveness, the disconnectedness of it all, aimed to demonstrate rather than persuade the reader of a Muslim’s register. Several stories were at work here. My readings of Fanon and Said mix with my experience as a member of the Muslim community. The War on Terror’s traps inform an illustrative inquiry of my (dis)location as a subject of the West. Various indisciplined thoughts respond to various times and influences. Each memory deals in one way or another with the culture talk of a War on Terror discourse and its self-policing rhetoric. Yes, the three masks also represent three readings of Said’s Orientalism. But they also coincide with three acts of the novel Heart of Darkness and its story-within-a-story. For perhaps above all, I chose Said and Conrad because of the concept of ‘exile’. My exploration of the many moderate masks centres on his ‘critical consciousness’ and what Apollonian traps hide within such a consciousness and await a Muslim who ideally seeks an ‘Islamic’ counter to the War on Terror. For ultimately, I wanted to tell a story about not writing a book and hoped to bring together sporadic writings that set the scene and told through showing. I wanted to weave connections between the messy relationships between the personal and the academic. My auto-ethnography thus reflects the journey of proverbial Marlow who travels into the book’s winding paths of argument. First, convinced that I was anti-Orientalist, and seeking a truth, I eventually confronted ‘The horror! The horror!’ of my performed subjectivity. My book thus explores the influence of Orientalism’s provocations and surveys its effect (and affect) on myself as a Muslim and an Australian-British citizen who eagerly read it over and again, as a self-identified member of a community of stigmatised ‘Others’ and who bears the will to abide its emancipatory call to ‘talk back’. 6 In writing my book, and recalling these multiple readings, when I began I approached Orientalism with a sense of dismissal. I lacked my previous fidelity to Said. Perhaps then, I fulfilled his acknowledged allegiance to the reification of a critical consciousness, residing at the core of his reminder that we must resist static identities as a concept, a form, a psychic state and a mode of thinking. Underlying Marlow’s inconclusiveness, is the unrelenting course of the journey itself, which, despite all the many obstacles, is sustained through the jungle, through time, through hardship and to the heart of it all – Kurtz’s ivory-trading empire. Reading Said made possible for me to see Said, and Orientalism’s contesting voices, contesting arguments and contesting visions.

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One (reading) consciousness highlights the absurd representations of the Oriental, and another (reading) highlights how we remain trapped in the old imperial enterprise where we speak for the West and for what the West did. With the assertion of this voice comes a sense of a ‘lost’ authenticity and an argument that the colonial world was in some ways ontologically speaking lost to begin with, irredeemable, irreducibly inferior. Yet another voice speaks of the coordinates we must traverse, of the multiple travels through its readings that helped me understand the importance of the auto-ethnographic, self-critical, exilic journey of speaking about speaking as a Muslim. It is therefore important to acknowledge that, within the limited field of academia, I have learnt so much from the journey in reading Said, or how in Said’s footsteps I have learnt to explore the role and function of religion in the dissemination of colonial knowledge. As Anijadar argues, for all my criticism of Said’s secularism, one may wonder whether the reverse is true, whether Said and his more proximate followers have had any use for religion and religious studies. One may also wonder whether it matters.3 I have come to recognise that Said’s critical subject’s exilic travels, which explore the possibilities and limits of that paradigm, leave me, as a Muslim, with an important question about the pursuit of ‘hollow’ identities. Although, I remain partly in agreement with Said’s critics that as a subject, his secular intellectual only makes sense through a Western intellectual paradigm, Said’s legacy is to help me confront this, for similarly, whatever Marlow may say to Kurtz’s wife, we readers know it’s a lie. Like we know, through Said, of Orientalism’s secular lie. Perhaps in (re)reading Said we learn that the exilic remains ‘secular’ only in name, as a lie, perhaps hollow, taking a journey through its colonial crimes. But, in telling a story of a secular intellectual’s ability to challenge his or her own Western boundaries, we learn of resistance to identity and we learn of an alertness to history, to the temporal fluidity and multiplicity we inhabit in our being in the world. Said’s interventionist critical politics contest the strategies of establishing ‘truth’ through an array of active and involved decoding and recoding of all values, forms and histories related to the colonial project.4 He never hesitates to remind us of the critical faculty that requires a gesture of transgression against one’s identity – more precisely, a displacement of identity so as to position oneself in or as a certain ‘otherness’.5 For where else should one begin but from within the discursive web of a punishing destiny? The Heart of Darkness thus concludes as it began, with a meta-narrator talking about Marlow telling a story – a story-within-a story, of tales down the River Congo, of a failure to find truth but a vocation gained as a storyteller. So too the vocation of the exilic critic is never to arrive at the destination but to tell a story for power of ‘the playful imagination [is] to change forever our perception of how things are’. Said’s criticism is a sharp, multi-bladed tool of

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demystification that helps turn history, knowledge and current sociocultural practices upside down and inside out. Said’s approach is the ‘contrapuntal’ approach inherent in the sensibilities of an exile that may be called the ‘intifida of the imagination – a holy war’ against the established order created by the powers that be.6 This is why I choose the auto-ethnography – because it is exilic, because like the camera in the video from Electronic Intifada, it allows me to travel between portrait and landscape views, to address from which position I stand. 7 If we drew a line along the Möbius strip – a certain type of elastic band – without lifting our pen, we would return uninterrupted to where we began. Despite the fact that the Möbius strip gives the illusion of having two sides, it only has one. There is no inside and outside. There is only a singular outer surface. There is no similar station, nor stop, only a story-within-a-story to tell, and where we begin and where we end is not as important as the movement between the two. 8 The mainstream’s War on Terror narrative typically offers Muslims a collective job. We must together ‘counter violent extremism’ among the ‘pre-radicals’. This is the working of the narrative that has sealed us in. It offers the Muslim a bankrupt bind. We must embody or negate the stereotype of the bin Laden figure. The bind offers the Muslims the opportunity to distance ourselves from the radical or to be the radical. Either way we must participate in the War on Terror’s vocabulary. Tragically, the Muslims of the West thus always confront the same question: to be or not to be – bin Laden. By this, I did not mean that al-Qaeda is a choice, but that we can only affirm the stereotype or deny it. This is the Trojan horse that is gifted to us by the figure of the moderate. I must therefore confess. I am most days a reluctant ‘moderate’. I must admit it, although I am not pleased to, I am nonetheless. I can only suggest that my confession testifies to a burning feeling of performing for the white gaze. I say it because I recognise the tape that measures me. The overloaded imagery of the violent Islamist, the War on Terror, is a racialised discourse on Islam’s Otherness. It is a paradigm for understanding a post-racism that cheaply offers Muslims of the West no real exit other than to demeaningly perform a self-presentation of our own whiteness.

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I therefore feel my other research question is a question for the Other. For how do you challenge the charges? How do you challenge Otherness without legitimising a language that interpolates you into playing the role of the Other? Ultimately, the question provides a better introduction to what confronts me. Then again, Allah is the planner. For could there be a better analogy for the introduction than the missing ‘Bismillah’? Is my struggle to observe history through my own vocabulary (so to speak) not reflective of CVE’s underlying logic? Its Apollonian language conceals an erasing of the Dionysian excesses from my life that does not fit into its government’s (un) speakability. For it’s not that I do not want to be not bin Laden. It is the question that Williams asked: What am I erasing that which we must repress? And to suggest an answer, let us return to the scene from The Reluctant Fundamentalist where the character Khan sees himself staring at his own reflection which shows the images of 9/11 on his face. Let us hypothetically imagine Khan’s hand swipe across his reflection in a hope of wiping away the image of violence inscribed onto his face, only for him to remove his face entirely. For, really, I have been pursuing this question all along, what must we repress when we wear the mask of the moderate to counter terrorism? Is it the synthesis that is ourselves? For, can the Muslim exist outside of the War on Terror?

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Notes

CHAPTER 1 1. Ashis Nandy, The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self under Colonialism, Second edition (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2009). p.2. 2. Ibid. 3. I borrow the term ‘Westernese’ from Barnor Hesse and Salman Sayyid, “The ‘War’ against Terrorism/the ‘War’ for Cynical Reason,” Ethnicities 2, no. 2 (2002). p.150. 4. Friedrich Nietzsche, “The Birth of Tragedy,” in The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings, ed. Raymond Geuss and Ronald Speirs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). p.16. 5. Ibid p.25,76. 6. Ibid. p.80. 7. Stacey Holman-Jones, “Auto-Ethnography: Making the Personal Political,” in The Sage Handbook of Qualitative Research, ed. Norman K. Denzin and Yvonna S. Lincoln (Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 2005). p.765. 8. Peter Clough, “Crises of Schooling and the ‘Crisis of Representation’: The Story of Rob,” Qualitative Inquiry 5, no. 3 (1999). 9. Holman-Jones. 10. Patricia Williams, “An Ordinary Brilliance: Parting the Waters, Closing the Wounds,” in The Genealogy of Race (BBC Radio 4: The Reith Lectures, 1997). 11. Ibid. 12. Ibid. 13. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans., Charles Lam Markmann, 2008 (reprint of the 1986 edition) ed. (1956). pp.23. 14. Ibid. 15. Ibid. p.22. 16. Ibid. p.92. 17. Ibid. p.3. 153

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154 Notes

CHAPTER 2 1. Fanon p.9. 2. Hatem Bazian, “Virtual Internment: Arabs, Muslims, Asians and the War on Terrorism,” The Journal of Islamic Law and Culture 9, no. 1 (2004). 3. Ibid, p.5. 4. See Minerva Nasser-Eddine et al., Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) Literature Review 2011 and their citations (De Graaff, 2010; B.M. Jenkins, 2002). 5. Arun Kundnani, Spooked! How Not to Prevent Violent Extremism (London: Institute of Race Relations, 2009). p.40. 6. Ibid. 7. Nasser-Eddine et al. 8. Mitchell D. Silber and Arvin Bhatt, Radicalization in the West: The Homegrown Threat (City of New York Police Department, 2007). 9. Ibid. p.22. 10. See Ramon Grosfoguel, “The Multiple Faces of Islamophobia,” Islamophobia Studies Journal 1, no. 1 (2002). p.1–25, and “The Structure of Knowledge in Westernized Universities,” Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology 11, no. 1 (2003). p.73–90; “Epistemic Islamophobia and Colonial Social Sciences,” Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology 8, no. 2 (2011). p.1–11. 11. Ibid. 12. Sara E. Quay and Amy M. Damico, eds., September 11 in Popular Culture: A Guide (Santa Barbara, California: Greenwood, 2010). p.132, 136. 13. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (London: Fontana, 1992). 14. Quay and Damico, eds. p.14. 15. George W. Bush, Address to a Joint Session of Congress and the American People (Washington DC, 20th September, 2001). 16. Ibid. 17. Adam Robinson, Bin Laden: Behind the Mask of the Terrorist (Edinburgh: Arcade Publishing, 2002). 18. Walter A. Davis, Death’s Dream Kingdom: The American Psyche Since 9–11 (London: Pluto Press, 2006).

CHAPTER 3 1. Nietzsche. 2. I should also like to mention that my thinking about both Nietzsche and Conrad was informed by a class I took from Professor John Carroll. The idea of reading Conrad through Three Acts resulted from his work. John Carroll, Terror: A Meditation on the Meaning of September 11 (Scribe Publications 2002) 3. Sven Lindqvist, Exterminate All the Brutes (New York: The New Press, 2007). 4. Ibid. 5. Ibid.

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6. Hannah Arendt too, knew why. Conrad was writing about the genocides of his own time. Arendt’s thesis that Nazism and Communism were of the same stock is well remembered. However, many forget she argues that European imperialists are responsible for ‘terrible massacres’ and ‘wild murdering’, for fathering modern totalitarianism and its colonial genocides (174). 7. Aimé Césaire and Robin D.G. Kelley, Discourse on Colonialism, ed. Robin D.G. Kelley (California: The University of California, 2000). p.36. 8. Ibid. 9. Ibid. 10. See Lindqvist. 11. Césaire and Kelley. 12. Stephen A. Tyler, “Post-Modern Ethnography: From Document of the Occult to Occult Document,” in Writing Culture, ed. James Clifford and George E. Marcus (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986). p.123. 13. Taken from Francoise Lionnet, “Auto-Ethnography: The An-Archic Style of Dust Tracks on a Road,” in Reading Black, Reading Feminist: A Critical Anthology, ed. Henry Louis Gates (New York: Meridian, 1990). p.391. 14. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1979). p.28. 15. Edward Said, “A Window on the World,” The Guardian, 2nd August, 2003. 16. The painting is Jean-Léon Gérôme, The Snake Charmer, c. 1879, oil on canvas (Sterling Francine Clark Art Institute: Williamstown) 17. Said, Orientalism. 18. Ibid. 19. Ibid. p.27. 20. Ibid. 21. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (London: Penguin Classics, 1995). 22. Edward Said, “Conrad: The Presentation of Narrative,” NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction 7, no. 2 (1974). 23. Conrad. p.9. 24. Edward Said, Culture and Imperalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1993). p.22.

CHAPTER 4 1. Conrad. p.6. 2. Ibid. 3. Fanon. p.113. 4. These are, according to Sunni orthodoxy, the five religious pillars of Islam, translated into Testimony, Prayer, Charity, Fasting and Pilgrimage 5. Salman Sayyid, “A Measure of Islamophobia,” Islamophobia Studies Journal 2, no. 1 (2014). 6. Ibid. 7. Waleed Aly, “Legally Brown: Muslim Comedian Finds the Funny in Radical, Be It Jihadists or Bogans,” The Sydney Morning Herald, 24th September, 2013. 8. Ibid.

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156 Notes

9. Waleed Aly, People Like Us: How Arrogance Is Dividing Islam and the West (Sydney: Picador, 2007). 10. Frederick Quinn, The Sum of All Heresies: The Image of Islam in Western Thought (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). 11. Pnina Werbner, “Folk Devils and Racist Imaginaries in a Global Prism: Islamophobia and Anti-Semitism in the Twenty-First Century,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 36, no. 3 (2013). 12. Ibid. 13. Ibid. 14. Sayyid, “A Measure of Islamophobia.” 15. Ziauddin Sardar and Merryl Wyn Davies, “Freeze Framing Muslims: Hollywood and the Slideshow of Western Imagination,” Interventions 12, no. 2 (2010).

CHAPTER 5 1. Cited in Nick O’Malley, “Nothing in Moderation for Waleed Aly,” The Sydney Morning Herald, 1st January, 2011. 2. Glenn D’Cruz and Niranjala Weerakkody, “Will the Real Waleed Aly Please Stand Up?” Media International Australia 156, no. 1 (2015). p.144 3. Kate Duthie, “Salam Café,” The Age (2008). 4. Sacha Molitorisz, “Waleed’s World, Party Time,” The Sydney Morning Herald, 2008. 5. Ibid. 6. Ibid. 7. Ibid. 8. D’Cruz and Weerakkody, “Will the Real Waleed Aly Please Stand Up?” p.145 9. S. Pattanayak, “Insider-Outsider,” in Where Are You From? Voices in Transition, ed. Margaret Kumar, Heather D’Cruz, and Niranjala Weerakkody (Altona Vic: Common Ground Publishing, 2010). 10. Aly, People Like Us: How Arrogance Is Dividing Islam and the West. p.4. 11. Ibid. p.xix. 12. Ibid. p.xii. 13. Ibid. p.xi. 14. Ibid. 15. Ibid. p.33.

CHAPTER 6 1. Said, Orientalism. pp.226–54. 2. Ibid. pp.1, 3–5. 3. Ibid. 4. Ibid. p.3. 5. Ibid. p.198.

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6. Ibid. 7. See Damien Murphy, “Battle of Broken Hill an Act of War or Terrorism Won’t Be Commemorated,” The Sydney Morning Herald, 31st October, 2014.

CHAPTER 7 1. See Jacques Derrida, Dissemination (London: Continuum, 1981). 2. Walter Kaufmann, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1974). pp.88–92. 3. Ibid. p.101. 4. Ibid. p.89. 5. Ibid. 6. David Cook, Understanding Jihad (London, England: University of California Press, Ltd., 2005). p.1. 7. Ibid. pp.2–3. 8. Ibid. p.5. 9. See for account on al-Ghazālī’s “crisis” Ebrahim Moosa, Ghazali and the Poetics of Imagination, 2005 (London: The University of North Carolina Press). 10. Al-Ghazālī. Al-Munqidh min al-dalal. Ed. Farid Jabre. Beirut. Cited in Eric Ormsby (2007). Ghazali (Oxford: Oneworld Publication, 1959). p.87 11. Sardar and Davies, “Freeze Framing Muslims: Hollywood and the Slideshow of Western Imagination.” 12. Quinn. 13. Fanon. p.55.

CHAPTER 8 1. Scheinin, R. “American Muslim Scholar Declares: Terrorists are Mass Murderers, not Maryrs,” San Jose Mercury News, 2001. 2. Tariq Ramadan, Western Muslims and the Future of Islam (New York: Oxford, 2004). 3. Ibid. p.4. 4. Ibid. p.5. 5. Ibid. 6. Ibid. p.5, 225, 128. 7. Ibid.p.6. 8. Hamza Yusuf 2001, A Time for Instropsection, Q News, 14th October, 2001. Accessed at http://www.islamfortoday.com/hamza01.htm.

CHAPTER 9 1. Said, Orientalism. p.122.

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158 Notes

2. Ibid. 3. Ibid. 4. Ibid. p.373. 5. Ibid.

CHAPTER 10 1. Akeel Bilgrami, “What Is a Muslim? Fundamental Commitment and Cultural Diversity,” Economic and Political Weekly 27, no. 20/21 (1992). 2. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Race before Racism: The Disappearance of the American,” Boundary 2 25, no. 2, Edward W. Said (Summer, 1998). 3. Ibid. p.41, The quote comes from Jack D. Forbes, Black Africans and Native Americans: Color, Race and Caste in the Evolution of Red-Black Peoples (New York: Blackwell, 1998). p.232. 4. Ian Almond, The New Orientalists: Postmodern Representations of Islam from Foucault to Baudrillard (London: I.B. Tauris, 2007).

CHAPTER 11 1. Maajid Nawaz, Radical: My Journey out of Islamist Extremism, 2nd edition (Lyons Publisher, 2016). 2. Chris Allen, “Opposing Islamification or Promoting Islamophobia? Understanding the English Defence League,” Patterns of Prejudice 45, no. 4 (2011). 3. See Brian Klug, “The Limits of Analogy: Comparing Islamophobia and Antisemitism,” Patterns of Prejudice 48, no. 5 (2014). Ibid. 676 4. Miles and Brown, 2003. p.166 5. Salman Sayyid and AbdoolKarim Vakil, eds., Thinking Thru’ Islamophobia (Leeds: Centre for Ethnicity & Racism Studies, 2008). p.74 6. Sam Harris and Maajid Nawaz, Islam and the Future of Tolerance: A Dialogue (Harvard University Press, 2015). 7. Ibid. p.2. 8. Ibid. 9. Ibid.p.2. 10. Ibid. p.5. 11. Ibid. 12. Bhikhu Parekh, “Europe, Liberalism and the Muslim Question,” in Multiculturalism, Muslims and Citizenship, ed. Tariq Modood, Anna Triandafyllidou, and Ricard Zapata-Barrero (London and New York: Routledge, 2006). p.188–200. 13. Ibid. p.195. 14. Ibid. The argument that Islam, or multiculturalism, potentially challenges liberal society is made in numerous other works, see Maureen Ramsay, What’s Wrong with Liberalism? A Radical Critique of Liberal Political Philosophy (London: Leicester University Press, 1997). Ralph D. Ellis, “Toward a Reconciliation of

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Liberalism and Communitarianism,” Journal of Value Inquiry 25, no. 1 (1991); Will Kymlicka, Liberalism, Community, and Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989). More specifically in dealing with the Muslim question: Clinton Bennett, Muslims and Modernity: An Introduction to the Issues and Debates (London: Continuum, 2005). J Jocelyne Cesari, “Islam in France: The Shaping of a Religious Minority,” in Muslims in the West: From Sojourners to Citizens, ed. Yvonne Haddad (New York: Oxford Univeristy Press, 2002); Christian Joppke, “Limits of Integration Policy: Britain and Her Muslims,” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 35, no. 3 (2009). Christian Joppke, “Limits of Integration Policy: Britain and Her Muslims,” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 35, no. 3 (2009). 15. Parekh. p.186,196. 16. Ibid. p.196. 17. Ibid. 18. Ibid. p.197. 19. Ibid. 20. Ibid. 21. Ibid. It is also an argument made by many progressive Muslims who believe that the values of liberalism, and appeals to rationality are fundamentally compatible with Islam, and indeed necessary for adoption by Muslims in the West. See Omi Safi, ed. Progressive Muslims: On Justice, Gender and Pluralism (Oxford: Oneworld Publication, 2003). While other works suggest that liberalism, through appeals to Human rights, is already, as Parekh argues, an experience of Muslim societies. Shahram Akbarzadeh and Benjamin MacQueen, eds., Islam and Human Rights in Practice: Perspectives across the Ummah (New York: Routledge, 2008). 22. Parekh. p.196. 23. Ibid. 24. Adrian Little, The Politics of Community: Theory and Practice (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2002). pp.40–42. 25. Ibid. 26. Parekh. p.197. 27. Abdullah Saeed, Islam in Australia (NSW: Allen & Unwin, 2003). p.186. 28. Ibid. p.187. 29. Ibid. 30. Ibid. p.188. 31. Ibid.

CHAPTER 12 1. Said, Orientalism. p.322 2. Ibid. 3. James Clifford, “On Orientalism,” in Twentieth Century Ethnography, Literature and Art, ed. James Clifford (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988). p.261 4. Ibid.

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160 Notes

5. Ibid. p.263 6. Aijaz Ahmad, “Orientalism and After: Ambivalence and Cosmopolitan Location in the Work of Edward Said,” Economic and Political Weekly 27, no. 30 (July 25, 1992). pp.98–116, See also Ashcroft, B. & Ahluwalia, P. Edward Said (New York: Routledge, 1999) for account of Said’s critics. 7. Ahmad. 8. Stathis Gourgouris, “Orientalism and the Open Horizon of Secular Criticism,” Social Text 24, no. 2 (2006). p.2. 9. Aly, People Like Us: How Arrogance Is Dividing Islam and the West. (Sydney: Picador, 2007). p.238. 10. Ibid. 11. Ibid. 12. The video is an award-winning short 2010 UK film, which runs for 13 minutes and is directed by Alan Deakins, titled 1001 Invention and the Library of Secrets. 13. Ibid. 14. “The Islamic Museum of Australia 2013 Prospectus,” ed. The Islamic Museum of Australia (2013). p.17. 15. Ibid. 16. Ibid. p.6. 17. See Hesse and Sayyid, “The ‘War’ against Terrorism/the ‘War’ for Cynical Reason.” and Salman Sayyid, A Fundamental Fear: Eurocentrism and the Emergence of Islamism (London: Zed Books, 2003). 18. Salman Sayyid, “After Babel: Dialogue, Difference and Demons,” Social Identities 12, no. 1 (2006). p.7. 19. I have taken the word ‘Westernese’ and my description from Hesse and Sayyid, “The ‘War’ against Terrorism/the ‘War’ for Cynical Reason.” p.150.

CHAPTER 13 1. Fanon. p.84. 2. Ibid. 3. Ibid. p.85. 4. Ibid, p.84. 5. Ibid. p.83. 6. Sayyid, “A Measure of Islamophobia.” 7. Klug, “The Limits of Analogy: Comparing Islamophobia and Antisemitism.” pp.476–478 8. Ibid. p.477. 9. Said, Orientalism. p.29. 10. W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, ed. Jnr Henry Louis Gates (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). p.3. 11. Ibid. 12. Mohsin Hamid, The Reluctant Fundamentalist (Orlando, FL: Harcourt, Inc., 2007). p.122.

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13. Ibid. p.34. 14. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1979). p.27. 15. See Walter Mignolo, “The Allocation and Relocation of Identities: Colonialism, Nationalism, Transnationalism,” Mester 27, no. 1 (1998) and cited in Alberto Moreiras, “Hybridty and Double-Consciousness” Cultural Studies 13, no. 3 (1999). p.377. 16. Sayyid. p.31. 17. Alana Lentin, “Post-Race, Post Politics: The Paradoxical Rise of Culture after Multiculturalism,” Ethnic and Racial Studies (2012). p.3. 18. Cited in Barnor Hesse, “Self-Fulfilling Prophecy: The Postracial Horizon,” South Atlantic Quarterly 110, no. 1 (2010). p.158. 19. Barnor Hesse, “Racialized Modernity: An Analytics of White Mythologies,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 30, no. 4 (2007). 20. Howard Winant, The World Is a Ghetto: Race and Democracy Since World War II (New York: Basic Books, 2001). p.317. 21. Barnor Hesse, “Self-Fulfilling Prophecy: The Postracial Horizon,” South Atlantic Quarterly 110, no. 1 (2010). p.164. 22. Ivan Hannaford, Race: The History of an Idea in the West (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1996). 23. Etienne Balibar, Masses, Classes, Ideas: Studies on Politics and Philosophy Before and After Marx (New York: Routledge, 1994). p.198, See also Alana Lentin. “‘Race’, Racism and Anti-Racism: Challenging Contemporary Classifications.” Social Identities 6, no. 1 (2000). pp.91–106. 24. Alana Lentin, “Europe and the Silence About Race,” European Journal of Social Theory 11, no. 4 (2008). p.491. 25. Hesse, “Self-Fulfilling Prophecy: The Postracial Horizon.” p.158.

CHAPTER 14 1. Sayyid, A Fundamental Fear: Eurocentrism and the Emergence of Islamism. p.1. 2. Ibid. p.2. 3. Ibid. 4. Ibid. 5. Gil Anijdar, Semites: Race, Religion, Literature. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008) p.3-5 6. Ibid. 7. Gourgouris, “Orientalism and the Open Horizon of Secular Criticism.” 8. Hesse and Sayyid, “The ‘War’ against Terrorism/the ‘War’ for Cynical Reason.” 9. Cited in Arthur Saniotis, “Embodying Ambivalence: Muslim Australians as ‘Other’,” Journal of Australian Studies 82, (2004). p.51. 10. Ibid. 11. Fanon. p.82. 12. Said, Orientalism. pp.226–54.

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162 Notes

CHAPTER 15 1. Fanon. p.102. 2. George E. Marcus, “What Comes (Just) after ‘Post’? The Case of Ethnography,” in The Sage Handbook of Qualitative Research, ed. Norman K. Denzin and Yvonna S. Lincoln (Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 1994). 3. Gil Anidjar, “Secularism,” Critical Inquiry 33, no. 1 (2006). p.53 4. Stathis Gourgouris, “Transformation, Not Transcendence,” Boundary 2 31, no. 2 (2004). p.69. 5. Ibid. p.69. 6. Said, Orientalism. p.10.

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Index

Abdullah, Abdul, painter, 66; Derrida’s argument, 66 accountable ‘we’, 22 adapting ideal Muslim, 65 aesthetic disposition, 39 Afghan cameleers, 60 Afghan versus Russia, 21 Ahmad, Aijaz, 112 al-Jazari, twelfth century Muslim thinker, 116 Allen, Chris, 104 Almond, Ian, 97 al-Qaeda, 3, 8, 16, 21, 151; Islamic term, 50; literature, 69; terrorists, 108 Aly, Waleed, 42, 49, 62; abstracted knowledge, 43; chance to speak, 42; conceptual entities, 42; cover page for Men’s Style, 50; criticism, 59; defying Flanagan’s assumptions, 47; dysfunctional relationship, 51; eloquence and intelligence, 47; foreignness, 43; Mashallah to, 50; People Like Us, 42; politically centred liberal voice, 50;

tone of concealment, 51; translating ‘Islamic’ terms, 50; translator, 41 Andalucian mosque, 40 Apollo (god of light), 6, 7, 24, 66 Apollonian, 5; aesthetics, 62; culture of forgetfulness, 6; and Dionysian, 16, 24; and Dionysian synthesis, 66; face of Western power, 6; making Muslim culture problematic, 17; mythology, 61; racism, 17; sublime of the West, 6; togetherness, 5 Arendt, Hannah, 155n6 Australia: Afghan’s struggle, 60; Counter-Terrorism ‘White Paper’, 16; cruel ‘offshore’ camps, 145; on 11 September 2001, 20, 61; good and bad components, 99; as hospitable country, 144; Islamic Museum, 67, 138; Islam in, 108; Islamophobia, 53; 169

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170 Index

migrants trouble of living in, 138; Muslim and ISIS, 44, 45; Muslim in, 15, 49; Muslims as part of, 60; MV Tampa, freighter, 145; White Australia policy, 145, 146; white immigrants, 145 Australian Imam (serial), 40 Australian Muslim, 39, 42, 60, 66, 117. See also Australia authentic ‘Islam’, 79, 82, 90, 111; lost, 71 ‘authentic’ Muslim, 97. See also authentic ‘Islam’ authentic original Muslim, 121 auto-ethnography, 5, 12, 24; fruit vendor’s experience, 147; self-erasure, 130; struggle with racism, 147; threat of radical Islam, 28; unfiltered mood, 28; use of Fanon’s uniting of intellectual, 124 balanced Islam, 5 Balibar, Etienne, 134 ‘Battle of Broken Hill’ (Murphy), 60 Baudrillard: definition of Islam, 98; hollowing out of Islam, 98; The Spirit of Terrorism, 98 Bazian, Hatem, 15; virtual internment, 15 beauty and victory, 7 Bilgrami, Akeel, 95 bin Laden, Osama, 20, 21, 68, 98, 130; terrain name, 97; violence, 130 The Birth of Tragedy, 24; Apollonian and Dionysian, 66; metaphors of Apollonian and the Dionysian, 25. See also Nietzsche, Friedrich Bismillah (in God’s name), 7, 8, 12, 123, 152

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black intellectuals, 95 blackness, 122; Fanon’s interpellation into, 122 Black Skin, White Masks (Fanon), 10, 15, 124, 139–40; ‘fact of blackness’, 139; knowing about self, 11; ‘negro’, 140; ‘objecthood’ into ‘thingness’, 140 Brown, (Reverend) Amos, 81 Brown, (Reverend) George, 105, 138 building resilience, 17 Bush, George W., 21 camel and Oriental familiarity, 60 Carland, Susan, 49 Carroll, Professor John, 154n2 Cartesianism, 18; ego-politics of knowledge, 19 childhood experience, 67; as-Salam Alaykum, 68 children of Muslim migrants, 78; bi-polar vision, 78 Christendom, 86 Clifford, James, 112 Cold War, 21, 135, 137 colonialisms: crudity and inanity of, 4; elites, 5; occupation of lands, 5 concept of ‘exile’, 149 Conrad, Joseph, 26. See also The Heart of Darkness (Conrad) consequential neutrality, 107 correctional fluid, 9, 10 countering violent extremism (CVE), 16, 17, 123, 124; programmes, 8, 12, 121 cultural ‘we’, 91 CVE. See countering violent extremism dastar (turban), 96 Davies, Merryl Wyn, 73 Davis, Walter, 22

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171

Index

Deliverance from Error (Ghazali), 70, 71 dhikr (remembrance), 136 dimwit Muslim, 40 Dionysian emotion, 6, 7 Dionysian thoughts, 12 Discourse on Colonialism (Césaire), 26; European colonialism, definition, 26 discrimination, 17, 123 Du Bois, 126; terrorism as tape, 127 dysfunctional relationship, 51 East/West binary, 148 economic deprivation, 17, 22, 122–23 EDL. See English Defence League Egypt, 67, 97, 114, 147 Electronic Intifada (website), 140; God-like gaze, 141; sound and colour, 141 emotional criticism, 121 English Defence League (EDL), 104, 105 Enlightenment, 6, 7, 19, 70; Europe’s, 25; scientific methodologies, 133; story of, 101, 112, 134 Enough Rope (show), 41 establishing ‘truth’, 150 Euripides, 66, 67 Europe Liberalism and the Muslim Question (Parekh), 106; cross-cultural approach, 106; neutrality, 107; Western European thought, 108 European colonisation, stages of, 32 European history, 6, 138; Muslims as mannequins, 72 ‘European’ politics, 137 European violence, 86, 103 Exterminate All the Brutes (Lindqvist), 25; ‘Europe’s core’, 26 extremists: radical extremists, 80;

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reactionary, 80 Facebook group, 48 faith, 58, 59, 72, 78, 79; defence of liberalism, 104; and ideology, 102; strong identity as Muslim, 96 Fanon, Frantz, 8, 10, 126; barbaric people, 73; beautiful violence, 130; colonised intellectual, 38; completing Said, 123; exile, 124; experience of being through others, 11; negritude, 143; punishing destiny, 124; and Said mix, 149; Sartre’s point, 11; white man’s humiliating vision on black, 139 Fanonian truth, self-beating violence, 28 fast-talking intellectualism, 4 fiqh, Islamic jurisprudence, 90 First World Muslims, 78 First World War, 60 The 500 Most Influential Muslims (Esposito and Kalin), 75 Flanagan, Martin (Australian journalist), 47; just another, 47 Forbes, Jack, 96 forgetful Muslim of the West, 137 Friday prayer, 67, 88 frustration, 13, 23, 61, 121, 123 ‘fundamental commitment’ to Islam, 95 A Fundamental Fear (Sayyid), 135 fundamentalists, 80 Geography Militant, 32 Geography Triumphant, 32 Ghazali, twelfth-century Islamic philosopher, 70; memory’s relation to Fanon, 70 globalisation, 77, 79

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172 Index

God’s-eye view, 18 Gourgouris, Stathis, 136 Greco-Roman tradition, 19 Gulf War, 108 Hajj, 39, 88 halal, 58 Harris, Sam, 105 The Heart of Darkness (Conrad), 26, 30, 33; conclusion of, 150; imperial geography, 31; lead character, Marlow, 31, 62, 65, 148; story-within-a story, 37; Thames River, voyage in, 37 heinous crimes, 79 Hesse, Barnor, 117, 131; anti-racist horizon, 132; post-racial horizon, 132, 134; racist horizon, 131 Hijra, 69 Hirsi Ali, Ayan, 105 ‘History Wars’, 144 Hizb ut-Tahrir (HT), 101 Holman-Jones, Stacey, 8 holy war, 68, 70, 151 home grown terrorism, 16 hostility, 91 HT. See Hizb ut-Tahrir humiliating racism, 60 Hussain, Nazeem, 40, 52; changes, 53; foreign version of Islam, 53; politics to guess, 52 Hussein, Saddam, 108 I, diversity of, 19 Illuminations (Benjamin), 20, 21 Imam, Ahmed, 48; ‘old kind’ of Muslim, 49 imperial geography, 31, 33 ‘imperially accredited language’, 117 inescapable scrutiny, 22 The Intimate Enemy (Nandy), 3

Morsi_9781783489114.indb 172

Iraq War, 27, 98 ‘irresistible force’, 144 ISIS. See Islamic State of Iraq and Syria Islam: cultural Otherness, 42; and democracy, 41; insurgent Islamism, 57; known Others, 57; legal sources, 77; Muslim experience, 56; open declaration on aim, 80; philosophical Otherness, 25; public’s negative view, 116–17; semantic hollowed out, 100; and the West, 41, 42 Islamicate societies: and Christian culture, 86; moving outwards, 86; static and dynamic, 86; tawhid, 86 Islamic Contribution to Civilisation, 40 Islamic Council of Victoria, misbahah, 136 Islamic Museum of Australia, 38–39; overlooking Islamophobia, 67; removing Dionysian, not vital, 67; War on Terror, 67; word Islamophobia, statistics, 138 Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), 44, 45, 46, 61 Islamic terrorism, 23 Islamism: fostering harmony, 138; ‘great historical schism’, 138; missing voice, 16; response to Westernese, 15; us and them, 138 Islamophobia, 7, 12, 16, 27; condemnation, 45; Muslim initiatives to counter, 48; productive discourse, 39; racism, 22; result of ignorance, 23; stigmatised brown Muslim, 48; talk back to, 32

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Index

jihad, 58; in 9/11 event, 68; non-Muslims understanding of, 68; proof of ignorance, 69; West’s understanding of, 70 jihadist, 17, 22, 44, 50 justificatory neutrality, 107 Jyllands-Posten, 96 Khadiga, terrain name, 97 khawaarij (depart from the mainstream opinion of Islam), 79 Kingsley, (Sir) Ben, 116 Klug, Brian, 124 Kundnani, Arun, 16 Kurtz, 98; ivory-trading empire, 149; widespread brutality, 99 Lebanon, 114 Legally Brown (show), 41 Lentin, Alana, 131 liberal society and multiculturalism, 158n14 Livingstone, Ken, 52 loyalty to God, 96 Mandela, Nelson, 132 Marxist–Lacanian analysis, 98 mask, 57 Mather, Cotton, the Reality of Invisibles, 135 ‘A Measure of Islamophobia’ (Sayyid), 124; anti-Semitic, 125; Islamophobe, 125; no algorithm, 125; sense of abandonment, 125 Mecca, 88, 97 Medina’s tribesman, 69 Meer, 105 Melbourne conference on racism, 131 Middle East, 3, 7, 23, 138 Mignolo, Walter, 129 Miles, race scholar, 105

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173

militant moderate, 88, 91 mimicking Marxist, 90 Möbius strip, 151 Modood, Tariq, 105 Mohammad, terrain name, 97 Molitorisz, Sacha, 49 ‘The Moslem Menace’, 138 MSA. See Muslim Student Associations museum: contemporary Australian Muslims, 60; plastic camel, 60 Muslim as Other, 71; demeaning objectification, 71; political taxidermy, 71 Muslim civilisation, 40; Dark ages, 40 ‘Muslim/colonised worlds’, 148 Muslim immigrants, identities, 108 Muslimitude, 8, 86, 87, 88, 99, 143 Muslim of west, 4 Muslim Other, 21, 22, 23, 56, 98 Muslim paraphernalia, 60 Muslim realities, 46; creating ‘we’, 46; judging humanity, 46 Muslims: Allah, the planner, 152; authentic version of, 65; branded Terrorists, 62; ‘counter violent extremism’, 151; form of interpellation, 88; good manners, 4; in the modern world, 88; Islam’s Otherness, 151; neatness, 4; official Islamic image, 65; regressive conditions of, 88; society’s racialisation of, 124; universal Islam, 124; ‘vivisection’ of the Muslim, 139 Muslim Student Associations (MSA), 52 mutual stereotyping, 52 #myjihad campaign, 69

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174 Index

Nawaz, Maajid, 49, 101; champion of de-radicalisation, 104; departure from HT, 102; in HT, 101; in jail, 101; Quilliam (foundation), 101; secularism, 102 neutrality, 95, 107, 143 The New Orientalist, 97 New York Post, 20 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 6, 7, 23, 24; The Birth of Tragedy, 24; condemnation of the ‘Apollonian spirit’, 25; observations about Apollo, 7 non-Muslims’ trustworthiness, 114 normal Islam from the dangerous, 89 ‘nothingness’, 98, 99 ‘On Being a Muslim and a Scientist’ (Garry), 109 One Thousand and One Nights tales, 73 Orientalism (Said), 29, 31, 33; critical consciousness, 29; Europe’s colonial legacy, 31; Palestinian Arab in America, 30; secular humanist position, 29 Orientalism, first, 55; absurdity of, 59; aim of, 56; distinction between East and West, 55; knowing them through constructing them, 56; political awakening, 55 Orientalism, second, 91, 97; imperial discourse, 85; intellectual energy, 85; towards true Islam, 85 Orientalism, third, 111, 112, 113, 129; three acts of, 148 Orientalist tradition, 102 Oriental Muslim, 6 Other and Object, 61 Other versus Self, 98

Morsi_9781783489114.indb 174

Other-within-the-other, 5, 87 out-of-place ‘Oriental’, 123 ownership of my Otherness, 136 PBUH. See peace be upon him peace be upon him (PBUH), 68, 69, 79, 96; against extremists, 80; Prophets’, 96, 97; story of the Prophet, 97 People Like Us (show), 51 perspective error, 53 The Politics of Community (Little), 107 politically agitated Muslim, 8 politicized Muslim, 4 postcolonial theory of mimicry, 58 post-racial horizon, 132, 134; foreclosure, 132 post-racialism, 141; good or bad Muslims, 141, 142 post-Reconquista Spain, 43; forced conversion to Christianity, 43–44 principle of integration, 77 progressive Muslims, 159n21 The Project (show), 44 proof of ignorance, 69 pseudo-logocentricity, 116 psychic energy, 117 psychological malaise, 52 Quilliam (foundation), 101 Quran, 12, 53, 67, 89, 137 QWERT, present Muslims’ life, 8 ‘Race and Racism’, 96 racialised power, 4 ‘Racialized Modernity: An Analytics of White Mythologies’ (Hesse), 132 racism, 78, 134; black-and-white thinking of, 87; Other-within-the-other, 87 racist: imaginaries, 44;

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Index

whiteness, 114 radicalisation: causes of, 123; stages of, 17 radical Islam: foreignness of Islam’s linguistic tradition, 57; Islam is good, thought, 59; stereotype of, 57 radical Muslim, 49, 122 Radical (Nawaz), 101; colonialism, role of, 103; European violence, 103; initial days and distress, 103; ‘Paki’, 102 Ramadan, Tariq, 76, 77; children of Muslim migrants, 78; memories of Eid, 97 Ramon, Professor, 16; Descartes’ conclusions, 19; epistemic racism, 18; missing voice, 16; Othering, 18 rationalist liberals, 106; distinct cultural community, 107; liberal way of life, 107; neutrality, 107 real Muslim, 137 recognition, 49, 54, 55 reformists, 91 The Reluctant Fundamentalist (film), 125; American journalist, 125, 126; image of terror, 126; Pakistani teacher, 125, 126; and Said, Edward, 126 The Reluctant Fundamentalist (Hamid), 127, 129; America another world from Pakistan, 128; America’s ‘good’ Muslim, 127; character, 152; de-essentialist view, 129; illiterate barbarians, 128; ‘Moderate’ and ‘Radical’, 129;

Morsi_9781783489114.indb 175

175

and Otherness, 129; ‘post-racial moment’, 129; web of racism, 128 The Revivification (Ghazali), 72; analogy of chestnut, 72; conventional believers, 72; oneness of God, 72 Rock Star of the Muslim world, 75 Rushdie, Salman, 109 Saeed, Abdullah, 108 Said, Edward, 39, 112; ‘contrapuntal’ approach, 151; critical intellectuals, 85; footsteps of, 150; intellectual critic, 111; machinations of colonialism, 86; Orientalism and counterargument, 113; ‘the West’ constructed ‘the East’, 86 Salafis, 17, 82, 87 Salam Café (television show), 40, 41, 48, 62; Muslim initiatives to counter Islamophobia, 48; passport-carrying citizens, 41; racism into ‘just another’, 54; talented crowd of educated Muslims, 54 Sardar, Ziaddin, 73 The Satanic Verses, 108 Saudi, 75, 114 Sayyid, Salman, 39, 44, 117; what is at stake, 39 Second World War, 26 ‘Seeking the Human in People Like Us’ (Aly), 115; Yasmine, 115–16 self-idealisation, 7 self-reflexive greatness, 7 Semites (Anidjar), 135 sense of abandonment, 48, 123, 125 shariah, 58 silence, 13, 46, 67, 122, 123, 125 Sinclair, Douglas, 9

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176 Index

social alienation, 17, 123 social cohesion, 17 social-imaginary institutions, 136 spiritual bankruptcy, 81 Spivak, Gayatri, 96 states of mind, 3 story-within-a-story, 49; beads, 137 Sufism, 72 Sultans of Science exhibition in Singapore, 70 The Sum of All Heresies (Quinn), 43 Sunni orthodoxy, 155n4 surroundings, 102, 140 suspicion, 50, 77, 91, 121, 126, 127, 134 Swain, Pamela, 49 Sydney’s Radio 2UE’s John Laws, 138 Tabbaa, Mohamad, 44 Taliban, 21, 42, 87 talk back, 3, 29, 30, 31, 32, 55, 58, 113, 149 tawhid (oneness of God), 81 terrible massacres, 155n6 terrorists, 27; idea of futuwwa, 80–81; no true spiritual path to God, 80 togetherness, 5 traditional Islam, 65, 79 traumas, 122 triumphant mask, 113 triumphant-moderate mask, 115 twoness, 126 2000 Sydney Olympics: audience, 146; Cook, Captain, 144; in YouTube, 144 2001: A Difficult Year for Muslims in Australia, 109 Tyler, Stephen, 28 Understanding Jihad (Cook), 68; al-Qaeda’s literature, 69; Qur’an and Conquest, 69

Morsi_9781783489114.indb 176

universalism, 134 ‘unnaturalised’ European epistemology, 86 victim mentality, 52 violent extremism, 16; countering, 17 Wahhabi, violent, 87 War on Terror, 8, 10, 12, 15, 23, 39, 112, 122, 125; Arab and Muslim Oriental of, 136; correcting culture talk of, 118; culture talk of, 44; erasure of the Dionysian, 58; ‘hailing’ of Muslims, social interactions, 38; hostility, 71; ‘Islamic’ counter to, 149; obsessional exaggeration, 58; post-9/11 US-led, 16; racism, 90; self-policing rhetoric, 149; ‘subjectification’ of the Muslim, 38; web of racism, 126 Werbner, Pnina, 43 West: cultural imperialism, 30; Muslims in, 29 Western aggression, 59 Western boundaries, 150 Westernese, 153n3 Westernised academy: hiding locus of enunciation, 19; non-Christian knowledge, as outdated, 19 Western Muslims and the Future of Islam (Ramadan), 76; ‘affirmation’, 76; children of Muslim migrants, 78; empowering of Muslims, 78; Islam’s legal sources, 77; Muslim to liberalism, 78; ‘passion’, 76; self-enforced separation, 77;

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Index

self-imposed isolation, 77 Western political theory, 106 ‘we’ thought, 135 white ‘imaginative geography’, 148 white gaze, 91 White Man, 27, 124, 126, 139 white obsession with blackness, 10; blacks and Muslims, 11; psychological deficit, 10; self-recognition, 10 White society, 77 ‘White-washed “I”: An Ode to Fanon’ (Kimmie), 139 wild murdering, 155n6 Williams, Patricia, 9; Genealogy of Race, 9 Winant, Howard (race theorist), 133; Europeanness and nonEuropeanness, 133 World Trade Centre, 20 YouTube: brother Khaled, 104; Muslim’s daily prayer, 104;

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177

Nikki Webster, 144; skit, 61 Yusuf, Hamza, 49; calming young Muslims, 75; conversion, 75; cultural backwardness, 89; ‘enemies of Islam’, 76; insensitive to pervasiveness of racism, 82; 9/11 supporters as extremists, 80; ‘oppressed’ Muslim, 81; policing Dionysian, 76; religious matters, explanation, 75; shamaatatul ‘aadai’, 79; thirst for liberating view of Islam, 83; A Time for Introspection, 79; unchecked racial thinking, 76, 82; Western-raised Muslim, 82 zealots, 80; religious, 76 Žižek, 57, 98, 135 zombie, 66

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Morsi_9781783489114.indb 178

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