A Fundamental Fear: Eurocentrism and the Emergence of Islamism
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A Fundamental Fear: Eurocentrism and the Emergence of Islamism
224eBook
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Overview
Writing in 1997, before 9/11 and before the austerity that has bred a new generation of far right groups across Europe and the US, S. Sayyid warned of a spectre haunting Western civilization. This groundbreaking book, banned by the Malaysian government, is both an analysis of the conditions that have made 'Islamic fundamentalism' possible and a provocative account of the ways in which Muslim identities have come to play an increasingly political role throughout the world.
This is a pioneering, provocative and intricately crafted study, which shows the challenge of Islamism is not only geopolitical or even cultural but also epistemological.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781783601936 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Bloomsbury Publishing |
| Publication date: | 02/12/2015 |
| Series: | Critique Influence Change |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 224 |
| File size: | 461 KB |
About the Author
S. Sayyid is a reader in rhetoric at the University of Leeds. He is the founding editor of ReOrient: The Journal of Critical Muslim Studies. His publications include Recalling the Caliphate and the volume (co-edited with AbdoolKarim Vakil) Thinking through Islamophobia.
S. Sayyid is a Reader in School of Sociology and Social Policy at the University of Leeds, UK.
S. Sayyid is a reader in rhetoric at the University of Leeds. He is the founding editor of ReOrient: The Journal of Critical Muslim Studies. His publications include Recalling the Caliphate and the volume (co-edited with AbdoolKarim Vakil) Thinking through Islamophobia.
Hamid Dabashi is the Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. Born in Iran, he received a dual Ph.D. in the sociology of culture and Islamic studies from the University of Pennsylvania, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard University. Dabashi has written and edited many books, including Iran, the Green Movement and the USA and The Arab Spring, as well as numerous chapters, essays, articles and book reviews. He is an internationally renowned cultural critic, whose writings have been translated into numerous languages.
Dabashi has been a columnist for the Egyptian Al-Ahram Weekly for over a decade, and is a regular contributor to Al Jazeera and CNN. He has been a committed teacher for nearly three decades and is also a public speaker, a current affairs essayist, a staunch anti-war activist and the founder of Dreams of a Nation. He has four children and lives in New York with his wife, the Iranian-Swedish feminist scholar and photographer Golbarg Bashi.
Read an Excerpt
A Fundamental Fear Eurocentrism and the Emergence of Islamism
By S. Sayyid
Zed Books Ltd
Copyright © 2015 S. SayyidAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78360-193-6
CHAPTER 1
Framin' fundamentalism
'Islamic fundamentalism' has emerged as a way of representing and analysing a series of events involving Muslim communities. Accounts of 'Islamic fundamentalism' often begin by listing a number of incidents in the Muslim world which show the growing importance of Islam. For example, John Esposito lists the politics of Sudan, Malaysia, post-revolutionary Iran, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Egypt and Libya as all demonstrating an Islamic revival. P. J. Vatikiotis sees 'Islamic resurgence' as a way of conceptualizing the Iranian revolution, 'tribal' resistance to the Soviet invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, and the establishment of the Zia regime in Pakistan. Michael Fischer cites the replacement of the Pahlavi state with the Islamic Republic, the millenarian revolt in Kano (northern Nigeria), the attempted assassination of the Pope, the activities of the Muslim Brethren in Egypt, the assassination of Sadat, and the seizure of the Grand Mosque by anti-Saudi dissidents as being manifestations of Islamic fundamentalism. One could go on extending the list of events which are presented as the empirical referents of Islamic fundamentalism: the civil war in Algeria, HAMAS's activities against Israeli occupation, the Rushdie affair ... and so on.
What then is 'Islamic fundamentalism'? One way of answering this question is to conceptualize it as a strand within a broader phenomenon, a movement which includes political projects represented by organizations such as Gush Emunim in Israel, Shiv Sena in India, or the Christian Coalition in the United States. In this approach, fundamentalism is not specific to Muslims; they are just one example of something that is a general feature of our contemporary world. However, although resurgent Islam may be only one form of fundamentalism, it is the form which is most often cited as an example of it. Fundamentalism itself is made flesh by drawing upon examples of 'Islamic fundamentalism'. Veiled (Muslim) women and bearded (Muslim) men, book burners and suicide bombers have emerged as fundamentalist icons enjoying recurrent Hollywood canonization (see, for example, Not Without My Daughter and True Lies). Consequently, although representing only one aspect of a global fundamentalism, Islamic fundamentalism has become a metaphor for fundamentalism in general. This would suggest that fundamentalism and Islamic fundamentalism are closely related. To understand Islamic fundamentalism we need a theory of fundamentalism – we need to conceptualize fundamentalism, not just as journalistic slogan, but as an analytical category.
Theorizing fundamentalism
Gita Sahgal and Nira Yuval-Davis are among a number of writers who think it is possible to use fundamentalism as an analytical category. In their opinion, fundamentalism has three main features: it is a project to control women's bodies; it is a political practice which rejects pluralism; and it is a movement that purposefully conflates religion and politics as a means of furthering its aims. Sahgal and Yuval-Davis would have little hesitation in arguing that groups such as Lubavitch Hassids, Hizbollah and the VHP have enough in common to be classed together as fundamentalists. To sustain fundamentalism as an analytical construct, it is necessary to theorize the common features of the various fundamentalist projects, and at the same time to be able to draw distinctions between these and other types of political projects. The three characteristics that Sahgal and Yuval-Davis consider to be constitutive of fundamentalism must, therefore, be common to all forms of fundamentalism and should not be found in other types of political projects.
Problems of governmentality Sahgal and Yuval-Davis consider fundamentalism to be, in many ways, a reaction to the advances of feminism. They argue that fundamentalists see the role of women as having a wider symbolic value, reflecting the morality of their society. This allows them to assert that there is an underlying similarity between, for example, the anti-abortion activities of the Christian Coalition in the United States and the insistence on veiling in many Muslim communities. Despite the many differences between these two groups, they are united by their desire to control women's bodies. According to Sahgal and Yuval-Davis, fundamentalism of all types aims to exercise control over women's bodies. This argument has great resonance; the subordination of women and/or their confinement to 'traditional' spheres is considered one of the hallmarks of the various fundamentalist movements. Popular conceptions of Islamic fundamentalism all trade on the figure of the veiled, passive and subjugated Muslim woman. But can fundamentalism be usefully defined in this way? Would all political movements which aim to control women be considered fundamentalist by Sahgal and Yuval-Davis? For example, Mustafa Kemal and Reza Khan both considered the role of women to be of central political importance. For them, the role of women had symbolic significance because it signalled the position of their societies upon the ladder of progress, and both introduced measures which exercised control over women's bodies. They demanded that women should not be veiled (on occasion, enforcing their demands by physical force). This would lead us to question whether political projects that prevent women from veiling could be considered fundamentalist.
It could be argued that imposing the end of the veil is not the same, in principle, as enforcing the wearing of the veil. The former is 'liberating' and, therefore, is not an exercise in control but its abandonment; the latter, conversely, is restrictive and, as such, can be considered an exercise in control. In other words, control is only exercised when it is a restriction. But why should the enforced removal of the veil be considered liberating and the enforcement of the veil be considered restrictive? It is only by assuming there is a 'natural' female subjectivity (what Elizabeth Spelman calls an 'essential woman') that it is possible uncritically to equate veiling with a restriction (in other words, the 'essential woman' is unveiled and therefore veiling is a violation of that 'natural' subjectivity).
The consequence of assuming that there is an 'essential' woman is that other women who do not match the ideals of this essential figure are considered 'inessential'. The essential woman has characteristics which are culled from particular historical/cultural formations: she speaks a particular language, eats particular foods, consumes particular products, dresses in particular ways, and so on. Her 'essential' status, however, has the effect of transforming her particularities into universals; her particular way of being becomes every-woman's way of being. The effect of this is that women who do not share the essential woman's particularities become lesser women. As Spelman has so persuasively argued, feminists who fail to address the heterogeneity of women end up underwriting cultural and racial hierarchies. Clearly, Sahgal and Yuval-Davis reproduce versions of feminism which endorse the homogeneity of the female subject. The consequence of such endorsements is erasure.
With regard to the question of the veil, Leila Ahmad's work has shown that the reason for thinking that the veil was more repressive than, for example, Victorian corsets had more to do with the way the veil was used as a marker of particular cultural formation. When white women of the nineteenth century saw veiled women, they understood it to be a sign of cultural backwardness and female subordination. They did not make the same assumptions about their own clothes, which for them did not signify female subordination – because they did not signify cultural backwardness. Cultural backwardness – that is a culture not modelled upon a European template – manifested itself in female subordination. By focusing attention on the veil, the critics of the veil have often neglected far more serious issues.
Unless one assumes that there is an 'essential' woman, one has to accept that control over women is being exercised regardless of whether they are being compelled to veil or unveil. In other words, control is a matter of maintaining and producing subjects. If fundamentalism is to be characterized by the desire to exercise control over women, there should be no difference made between modern Turkey, which prohibits the wearing of the veil in certain situations (or even modern France where Muslim schoolgirls were prevented from wearing headscarves at school), and Saudi Arabia, which prevents women from unveiling in public. It is unlikely that Sahgal and Yuval-Davis would see in the French authorities' resistance to Muslim schoolgirls wearing headscarves a manifestation of fundamentalism.
Fundamentalism cannot be defined in terms of exercising control over women. Exercising control over bodies is the function of governmentality itself. Sahgal and Yuval-Davis seem to have a rather vague notion of governmentality which grants credence to the suggestion that attempts to exercise control over women is a feature peculiar to fundamentalism. It is not only in Muslim societies that control of women's bodies has been considered a matter of political significance, nor is it solely a function of particular types of political movements: it can be found in regimes as diverse as those of the Nazis, communists, fascists and the most liberal of the North Atlantic plutocracies. Controlling bodies is what governments attempt to do. For example, legislation which very directly seeks to control women, such as legislation governing abortion, is determined in Britain by votes in the House of Commons – a body overwhelmingly made up of male MPs. Nevertheless, it is unlikely that Sahgal and Yuval-Davis would include the mainstream British political parties in their taxonomy of fundamentalism.
Governance involves the control of all bodies – male and female. This does not mean governance is gender blind or that the control which is exercised impacts equally upon men and women, but it cannot be seriously argued that only fundamentalists wish to exercise control over women. The difficulty with Sahgal and Yuval-Davis's approach is that, by assuming 'woman is woman only', they ignore the massive disciplinary techniques of the contemporary state, and only by this act of neglect can they suggest that a common denominator of fundamentalism is the exercise of control over women. In their eagerness to make corporeal the phantasmagoria of fundamentalism, Sahgal and Yuval-Davis are willing to forget the patriarchy that underlies the disciplinary codes of all existing societies.
Styles of political practice According to Sahgal and Yuval-Davis, fundamentalists assert that their understanding of religion is correct and they 'feel threatened by pluralist systems of thought'. In the case of Islam, they note that fundamentalism has taken the form of a return to the Qur'an and the sharia. This assertion, however, is countered by many writers who strenuously argue that so-called Islamic fundamentalism is not a retreat into traditional interpretations but an innovative and original reworking of canonical texts. For example, Ervand Abrahamian argues that if fundamentalism means literal readings of canonical texts, this cannot apply to Islamic fundamentalists, since their interpretations of Islamic canonical texts tend to be novel and innovative. This is one of the reasons why, in general, the Sunni ulema have tended to oppose Islamic fundamentalists; they regard the 'fundamentalist' interpretations as too allegorical. The way in which Islamic fundamentalists are willing to make pragmatic compromises with programmatic discourses is illustrated by the change in Khomeini's position after he came to power. Previously, Khomeini had argued that only a strict application of sharia was legitimate and that activities not sanctioned by the sharia could not be undertaken. However, once in power, Khomeini realized that such an adherence would be difficult to implement and he was willing to support the needs of the Islamic Republic above a strict adherence to the traditional interpretations of the sharia. The culmination of this process was reached in January 1988, when in letter to Khamenei, the president of Iran, Khomeini declared:
The government is empowered to unilaterally revoke any sharia agreements which it has concluded with the people when those agreements are contrary to the interest of the country or to Islam.
What this makes clear is that the Islamic Republic had the right to abrogate any or all of the sharia, in the wider interests of the Ummah. There is nothing traditional about this ruling; it is not derived from any canonical text and it actually makes observations of Islamic precepts secondary to state interests.
To be fair to Sahgal and Yuval-Davis, they are aware that many scholars object to their understanding of fundamentalism, especially in relation to Islamic fundamentalism. They acknowledge Abrahamian's disagreement but, alas, do not meet any of his criticisms.
Sahgal and Yuval-Davis seriously underestimate the complexity of the relationship between truth and politics. They seem to have a notion of a normal politics in which truth and politics have a relationship of exteriority, in contrast to fundamentalism in which politics is subsumed under truth. It is only because they assume that politics and truth are distinct spheres at the level of the social that they can suggest that fundamentalism can be understood as a conflation of the political with truth.
The truth is one way of describing statements which we consider to be good or useful. In such a pragmatist definition, truth is constructed and not given. Politics, then, is the process by which societies arrive at a new vision of the truth, a new way of describing the good or the useful. To paraphrase Michel Foucault, '[t]he political question ... is truth itself'. As such, truth and politics cannot be separated in the way that Sahgal and Yuval-Davis seem to suggest. Of course, it could be that Sahgal and Yuval-Davis do not share this antifoundationalist vision of the relationship between politics and truth; they may believe that it is possible to speak truth to power. They may believe in a correspondence theory of truth, which would appear to allow them to maintain the distinction between truth and politics. Even this, however, does not allow them to specify fundamentalism in a convincing manner. For, according to Sahgal and Yuval-Davis, fundamentalists would be those who claim that their beliefs are true and reject alternative beliefs. But this condition is not exclusive to those labelled as fundamentalists; for example organizations such as Women Against Fundamentalism would also claim that their beliefs are true and would reject alternatives offered by those they consider to be fundamentalists. Making truth claims about one's beliefs is a common practice. One may disagree about the content of the projects of various movements but one should not make the mistake that political projects are constructed on any other notion than that they claim to represent the truth. It is not only fundamentalists who claim they hold the truth: Nazis, communists, socialists, conservatives – even the parliamentarians of the North Atlantic plutocracies – all practise politics in the service of truth. 'Fundamentalist' presidents like Carter, Zia-ul Haq, Reagan and Rafsanjani, and secularist leaders like Nasser, Stalin and Hoxha, were equally clear about the truthfulness of their visions.
It seems that fundamentalism is being used here as a substitute for what is more commonly known as dogmatism. Dogmatists, however, can be found in all walks of life; liberals, secularists and scientists can be just as dogmatic as those with strong religious beliefs. The rejection of alternative views is not the monopoly of the groups that Sahgal and Yuval-Davis identify as being fundamentalists – unless you broaden the term to include political figures with tendencies as diverse as Margaret Thatcher (who took pride in the acronym TINA: 'there is no alternative'), Mao Zedong, Abraham Lincoln, and many more. The problem with extending the category of fundamentalism in this manner is it suggests that there is no real reason for confining fundamentalism to religious phenomena in the first place. After all, one can easily follow Shabbir Akhtar and read the Rushdie affair as a clash between two forms of fundamentalism – Islamic and liberal. If the category of fundamentalism becomes simply a description of strongly held beliefs – something akin to the belief of Rorty's metaphysicians, based on a rejection of what Vattimo calls 'weak thought' – then it is clear that even the most 'radical democrats' or postmodern bourgeois liberals have a fundamentalist core. If fundamentalism simply connotes that part of our final vocabulary we are not willing to concede, the difference between nonfundamentalists and fundamentalists collapses.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from A Fundamental Fear Eurocentrism and the Emergence of Islamism by S. Sayyid. Copyright © 2015 S. Sayyid. Excerpted by permission of Zed Books Ltd.
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Table of Contents
Foreword by Hamid DabashiPreface to the Critique Influence Change Edition
Acknowledgements
Preface to the Second Edition
Prologue: The Return of the Repressed
1. Framing Fundamentalism
2. Thinking Islamism, (Re)thinking Islamism
3. Kemalism and Politicization of Islam
4. Islam, Modernity and the West
5. Islamism and the Limits of the Invisible Empire
Epiloque: Islamism/Eurocentrism
Bibliography
Index