Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire. Deepa Kumar
a whole process of demonization had begun. With wide public support, the military machine was deployed to rain death on innocent Afghans. Anti-Muslim racism—or Islamophobia—was becoming the handmaiden of empire.
I knew then that I had to organize, speak, and write about this injustice. This book is the product of ten years of such engagement with activists in the antiwar movement, students and colleagues at universities across the United States, and feedback from various independent media editors on my articles about Islamophobia. It is a collective product, in this sense—driven by the need to produce knowledge that can effectively push back against the racist propaganda and help to strengthen social movements against war and racism.
First, a note on what this book is not about. This is not a book about the religion Islam. I am not a scholar of religion and do not claim to have any special erudition on this subject. This book is about the image of “Islam,” that mythical creation conjured out of the needs of empire that has led even progressives to claim that Muslims are more violent than any other religious group. It is about the “Muslim enemy” and how this construction has been employed to generate fear and hatred.
Even before I began my study of the history of Islam, of Muslim-majority countries, and of the relationship between East and West, I knew instinctively that the Islamophobic rhetoric that passed as common sense in the United States was dead wrong. I grew up in India in a home where the neighbors on both sides were Muslims, and the azan (the Islamic call to prayer) was an everyday sound. India is home to more than a hundred million Muslims—more than most Arab nations—and, knowing from experience that Muslims are just as complex as any other group of people, I react viscerally to the stereotypes that pass as credible knowledge in the United States, the country where I have spent my adult life.
I am grateful to the dozens of Middle East studies scholars and others before me who have studied the “Muslim world” for advancing my knowledge of this subject and helping me to expose the underlying racism inherent in the logic of Islamophobia. My contribution to this corpus is a focus on Islamophobia in the American context, on which there is very little work (I use the term “American” to refer to the United States in this book only for stylistic purposes, and with apologies to my Central and South American readers). Drawing on my academic training as a cultural theorist, I situate the rhetoric of Islamophobia within the broader political, historical, legal, and societal context from which it emerges to show that anti-Muslim racism has been primarily a tool of the elite in various societies. There is some debate on whether the term “Islamophobia” is adequate to denote the phenomenon of cultural racism against Muslims. While it does have some limits, I continue to use this term not only because it is now widely accepted but also because in this book I study specifically the fear (and hatred) generated against the “Muslim threat.”
The book therefore begins by looking at the first instances in the West when Muslims were constructed as threats to Europe. This takes place in the eleventh century in the context of the Crusades and the reconquest of the Iberian Peninsula. The chapter then goes on to outline the historic relationship between East and West from the eighth to the eighteenth centuries. Such a long view allows us to see that the image of Muslims and Islam in Europe has gone through a series of shifts and changes that corresponded to changes in the political and social realms. Thus, contrary to the idea that the East-West relationship has always been characterized by conflict or a “clash of civilizations,” I show that anti-Muslim prejudice was consciously constructed and deployed by the ruling elite at particular moments. While ordinary people in Europe did accept these ideas, for instance during the Crusades, they have also resisted them. This fluidity is all but erased by Orientalist scholars like Bernard Lewis, the author of the term “clash of civilizations.” Lewis flattens history to argue that
the struggle between these rival systems [Christianity and Islam] has now lasted for some fourteen centuries. It began with the advent of Islam, in the seventh century, and has continued virtually to the present day. It has consisted of a long series of attacks and counterattacks, jihads and crusades, conquests and reconquests.1
For Lewis, the relationship between the “Christian West” and “Muslim East” is primarily driven by conflict; this fundamental characteristic of the East-West encounter therefore necessarily persists into the late twentieth century. Chapter 1 sets out to debunk this conception by locating the image of Islam in Europe in its proper historical context.
Chapter 2 focuses on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a period of massive colonization by the Great Powers. England and France in particular conquered large parts of the Middle East and North Africa. They justified this process of colonization by recourse to a body of ideas called “Orientalism.” In the nineteenth century, various European nations set up centers for the study of the Orient from which there emerged a huge body of Orientalist scholarship integrally tied to imperialism and colonization. In this chapter, and throughout the book generally, I focus mainly on the Middle East and North Africa, because it was these regions, due to their proximity to Europe, that largely informed the development of an elite Western vocabulary about “Islam.” After World War II, the United States took over from France and England, both literally and metaphorically. It began to exercise its hegemony in the region through the borrowed language of Orientalism, but also through the vocabulary of capitalist modernization, which was better suited to the new form of imperialism initiated by the United States. Chapter 3 examines the persistence of Orientalist (and some medieval) views in the twenty-first century. It outlines five taken-for-granted racist narratives about Muslims that flourish today and shows that these myths have a longer history.
The next section is about the American approach to Islam on the political stage. It demonstrates that Islamists have not always been viewed as threats to the United States. Two chapters deal with this history, chapters 4 and 7. Chapter 4 outlines the contradictory policy pursued by the US political elite toward the parties of political Islam. During the Cold War and up until the Iranian revolution of 1979, the United States enthusiastically supported forces that could Islamize the Middle East and serve as a counter to those that posed a challenge to its domination—secular nationalists and the left. In the period after the 1970s, policy makers forged alliances with those Islamists who were on the side of US imperialism and militated against those who refused to play this role. Even after 9/11, when Islamists in general were projected as the arch enemy of the United States, the aforementioned approach would continue.
Chapters 5 and 6 look at the phenomenon of political Islam on its own terms. Chapter 5 shows that the parties of political Islam are not the natural outgrowths of Muslim-majority societies, as some have argued. As in Christian-majority societies, the (misnamed) “Muslim world” has also seen a separation of religion and politics. Understanding this history allows us to see that political Islam is a contemporary phenomenon. Chapter 6 shows that Islamism, often called Islamic fundamentalism, is the product of particular historic conditions in the late twentieth century that also spurred on the growth of Christian, Hindu, and Jewish fundamentalisms.
Chapter 7 sets out to examine post–Cold War thinking within the foreign policy establishment and the path that led up to the era of the “War on Terror.” The chapter unpacks two dominant modes of thought in policy circles—those of the neoconservatives and of the realist/liberal camp. Despite the differences between these wings on questions of rhetoric and strategy, they share a common commitment to US imperialism. Their points of contention revolve around the best ways to maintain US dominance and global hegemony. These differences, however, fell to the wayside in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, when conservative/neocon and liberal Islamophobes came together to prosecute the War on Terror. Since then, the United States has been willing to work out deals with the Taliban or with the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood.
The final section of the book looks at the uses of Islamophobia in the domestic context. Chapter 8 outlines the ways in which the legal system has been bent after 9/11 to prosecute Muslim citizens and immigrants, particularly those of Middle Eastern and South Asian descent. It must be noted that even before 2001, Arabs and Muslims were persecuted by the legal apparatus and treated like potential terrorists. The aftermath of 9/11 witnessed the convergence of domestic and foreign policy, resulting in the construction of the overarching “Islamic terrorist” enemy that must be fought abroad and at home. The corresponding “green scare” (green