In the wake of the Paris attack by the ISIS, we are seeing the efforts of right-wing and far-right political forces worldwide to try to garner support that has hitherto eluded them, by stoking Islamophobia.
The statements by Donald Trump, a real estate baron who is hoping to become the Republican nominee for President, in the wake of a recent mass shooting at San Bernardino (allegedly ‘inspired by ISIS’), are one instance. Trump has called for a “total and complete shutdown” of all borders to Muslims trying to enter the US (“Until we are able to determine and understand this problem and the dangerous threat it poses, our country cannot be the victims of horrendous attacks by people that believe only in Jihad, and have no sense of reason or respect for human life”); and a national database of Muslims in which all Muslims would be required to compulsorily register.
Another Republican Presidential hopeful Ben Carson, commenting on the policy towards Syrian refugees, said “If there is a rabid dog running around your neighborhood, you’re probably not going to assume something good about that dog.”
Tony Abbott (ousted as Prime Minister of Australia in a mid-term coup inside his Liberal Party), has said in a recent article, “All of those things that Islam has never had – a Reformation, an Enlightenment, a well-developed concept of the separation of church and state – that needs to happen”, and “All cultures are not equal and, frankly, a culture that believes in decency and tolerance is much to be preferred to one which thinks that you can kill in the name of God, and we’ve got to be prepared to say that.”
Trump, Carson and Abbott are raising the spectre of an ‘evil Islam’, supposedly in defence of “the American way of life” and “Western Civilisation” respectively. These concepts invoked by them call for a closer look.
Mass Shootings and Ideologies of Terror
Trump’s argument, that there is hatred against the American way of life, and that therefore ordinary Americans must protect themselves against Jihadists who have no respect for life, is however not based on facts.
Trump, it is no secret, is a great defender of gun violence – he proclaims “100%” a supporter of the Second Amendment (the clause that allows US citizens to keep and bear arms). He is a lifetime member of the National Rifle Association and has a concealed weapon permit. He has said in public that if the teachers at the Oregon college shooting had been armed, then things would have been different. His incredibly elegant remedy for gun violence is simply – more guns.
Gun violence in the US has killed over 300,000 Americans over the past decade. Rather too many of the victims are non-white persons and women. Mass shootings by white men (even those that have deliberately targeted black people and women) are never termed ‘terrorist’ attacks. Those by Muslims (termed ‘Terrorist/ Jihadist’ gun violence) have killed less than a 100 people.
When six black women and three men were shot dead by a white supremacist in the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, all Trump could say was that he found it “incomprehensible.” He did not say the obvious – that this was racist terrorism. When three Muslim members of a family were shot dead by a neighbor who had been directing Islamophobic abuse against them, the US media tried to claim it was a ‘dispute over parking.’ Elliot Rodger in Santa Barbara, California, shot dead seven women out of ‘retribution’ – to punish women who supposedly rejected his advances.
When people kill in the name of Islam, it is called ‘terrorism’ – but when people kill in the name of hating Islam, or hating black people, or hating women, is it any less terrorism?
It is a fact that racist violence in the US has been compounded a hundred fold thanks to the Second Amendment. A mere 27 words long, this is one of the most contentious markers of the “American way of life.” It is not recent: it goes back to 1791 and is influenced by the English Bill of Rights, 1689. So much for ‘reason’ and ‘modernity.’ It says: ‘A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed’. This is an important part of the constitution that justifies the existence of the NRA, the continued difficulty faced by lawmakers in discussing gun control politically, and an important aspect of how an entire society views, or is compelled to view violence, whether it is directed by the State, or by the ‘free individual’ trying to ‘protect’ his property. Definitions of individual freedoms could be very different. The Second Amendment mirrors a society where the sanctification of guns results in weapons being used against people of colour, women, gays, and anyone that the “American way of life” sees as an outsider. It cannot be stressed enough, that the spectre of Islamophobia is a way of diverting the attention away from the way in which their own rights are being eroded.
The Islamic World and The Enlightenment
Tony Abbott preaching about the West’s superior culture and civilization and calling for reform in ‘Islam’ would be amusing if it were not also worrying. For one thing, if Abbott were really knowledgeable and civilized, he would know that Islam is not a monolith; it has many different manifestations and practices, and cultural coda, and ways of seeing – as many, in fact, that Christianity does. Second, he conflates militant Islamism with Islam. Third, he himself belongs to a religion that has not reformed: Roman Catholicism. The Bible has verses (Leviticus 20:13) recommending that gay men be put to death. Just this year, one Vitus Huonder, Catholic Bishop of the city of Chur in eastern Switzerland, has found himself in a legal tangle with a Swiss gay rights group after he quoted these lines during a lecture on marriage and family, to then say ‘[This alone] suffices to clarify unambiguously the church’s position on homosexuality’. The same RC Church still opposes divorce, based on the Biblical injunction that “what God has joined together, no human being must separate.”
And it was the same Church that gagged those who said the earth revolved around the sun. So it does seem besides the point to say that Islam needs ‘reform’ and ‘Enlightenment’ when other religious institutions such as the Catholic Church, for instance, do not allow divorce, when it has taken 2000 years for them to let women use contraception, and considers homosexuality disordered.
In fact, the history of ideas that the Enlightenment and intellectual movements in Europe have their roots in, were preserved precisely because of Islamic cultures with a rich history of thinking on science, philosophy, literatures, and translations. While this is a well know fact, it is now also acknowledged that this knowledge was not only preserved so it was ready to access when a slumbering Europe woke up to make use of it, but was improved and expanded upon, received, circulated widely, and synthesized in a syncretically rich context. Medicine is an important area that illustrates this point. It was when classical medical texts had been translated into Arabic, that a comparative perspective became possible. While preserving knowledge during what are called the dark ages in Europe, translations into Arabic (which was then considered the academic lingua franca of the region), from medical treatises from India and China furthered the world’s understanding of the human body for healing. These influences became apparent when medieval Europe began looking for its classical heritage and translations back into Latin from the Arabic began to unlock this collaborative influence.
In fact its geo-political location enabled Arabic scholarship to access literally the best of both worlds, and untainted by the mind-body dichotomy so inherent to Christianity, medieval Arabic scholarship in science and medicine is characterized by a wonderful openness to diversity of cultures, rather than a rejection of world knowledge based on narrow religious divisions. In fact this is more true of European scholarship, often deeply influenced by Christianity, that sometimes fails to acknowledge the contributions of non-Christian scholars in the field of science and medicine. It was the Arab world which translated entire corpuses of Aristotle, Galen, Ptolemy, gave the west ‘algorithms’ (Al Khwarizmi its originator), made lenses, measured the circumference of the earth (something that took the rest of the world another several centuries to do), had the world’s best stocked libraries, and its first universities.
Imperialism’s Wars on Democracy
It is a widely circulated myths that Muslim majority parts of the world have been more insular, and less open to modernity and democracy. In fact, it was colonial and imperialist powers that brutally culled progressive elements, unseated progressive governments, and nurtured bigotry in those parts of the world that once were home to the best universities, libraries, and most open minds. Here are a few examples.
Syria, 1949: President Shukri Al Quwatli’s democratically elected government was toppled with the help of the workings of the CIA, installing Husni al-Za’im, Chief of Army Staff in his place. He quickly supported US oil interests in Syria and the Trans-Arabian Pipeline. Contrary to the belief that all leaders in the Middle East are incapable of seeing the separation between church and state, even Za’im was secular and strongly opposed the imposition of Islamic law, was in favour of the vote for women, and, as soon as he displayed his secular progressive credentials, there was another coup, setting Syria on an eternal path of instability.
Iran, 1953: As a result of the will towards self reliance, and in opposition to a conservative monarchy, the Iranian people had elected Mohammed Mossadegh – who was also a fine legal mind – as Prime Minister, who in response to a British oil corporation’s refusal to let their books be audited, nationalized their assets to protect Iranian oil reserves. This had popular support because the people saw the oil company as a manifestation of continuing British imperialist attitudes towards Iran. Promptly, a coup replaced him with General Zahedi, who allowed the Shah of Iran, Mohammed Reza Shah Pahlavi to rule. This of course was to be followed by the 1979 Revolution that saw Iran declared an Islamic Republic, with the ascendance of Ruhollah Khomeini.
Iraq, 1960-63: Abd al-Karim Qasim, the Prime Minister of Iraq from 1958 to 1963 was shot and killed after an overthrow of his government by the Ba’athists, supported by the US government and CIA, fearful of Qasim’s land reforms, his demands that oil companies share the profits accrued from Iraqi oil with the Iraqi people, as well as his open support to the Communist Party after he had removed the ban. Iraq however continued to remain a modern society – until the US-led war and occupation, the overthrow of Saddam Hussein and de-Ba’athification by US forces created a chaotic vacuum that came to filled by the IS.
Afghanistan, 1979-89: When the Saur Revolution of 1979 brought the Soviet supported left wing People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) to power, the US, through CIA covert operations (some of the most expensive in CIA history) began arming of insurgents who opposed this regime. The entire game played out in the context of President Jimmy Carter declaring that they would not allow any other power to take control of the Persian Gulf. They created the Mujahideen to counter Soviet Presence in the region. The role of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States – backed by the US – in fueling Islamism in the region is well recognized. The rest is history.
Since then, the US has continued its policy of destabilization of governments in the Middle East. In ensuing conflicts in the region, the US and its allies have armed all parties of the conflict and imposed sanctions after having suppressed any impulse towards peaceful and democratic protest.
And this is not only true of West Asia. In Indonesia (another Muslim majority country), fifty years ago between October 1965-February 1966, killing squads backed by the military who in turn were backed by the US, massacred a million communists. The USA, in this case, used religious fundamentalism as an excuse for the massacre – branding the communists as ‘anti-religious,’ ‘barbaric’ and so on.
In France too, the far-right, Christian racist and anti-immigrant party National Front, led by Marine Le Pen, performed better than usual in the first round of the regional elections. While they failed to win a seat in the second round, there is no doubt that their popularity surged in the wake of the Paris attacks and the resulting Islamophobia and xenophobia.
A refreshing counterpoint to the racist and Islamophobic rhetoric in the world is the instance of the recently elected and extremely popular Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who personally welcomed Syrian refugees into Canada, telling them “Welcome to your new home.”
Closer home, in India too, we are familiar with the RSS attempts to brand Islam and Muslims as a dangerous and violent ‘problem’. These attempts are likely to try to get fresh oxygen from the spurt of Islamophobia in other parts of the world. But there, as in here, it is important to note that there are citizens’ voices that have spoken out against the dangerous discourse of Islamophobia.