Radical Skin, Moderate Masks: De-radicalising the Muslim and Racism in Post-racial Societies
186
Radical Skin, Moderate Masks: De-radicalising the Muslim and Racism in Post-racial Societies
186Paperback
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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781783489121 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 08/01/2017 |
| Series: | Challenging Migration Studies |
| Pages: | 186 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.97(w) x 9.04(h) x 0.58(d) |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
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 the politicised Muslim who carries with them a project unbeknown to me at the time.
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 anti-colonial 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 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. 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.
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. 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 self-evident 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. 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.
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. 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 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'. 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. Thus, for me, an auto-ethnography helps highlight the first-order 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?
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 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. 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'. It came to mind because of Williams's confronting response. She asked, 'Are we accommodating different audiences or erasing that which we must repress?'
(Continues…)
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Copyright © 2017 Yassir Morsi.
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