Prompted by Multiculturalism and the ‘war on terror’ Rising East 4
Suicide bombers deserve no sympathy; indeed they place themselves beyond either our compassion or our retribution. Although jihadists appear to believe that martyrdom opens the gates of paradise, it may also be that self-slaughter is a means to evade capture and humiliation by the enemy. If so, Muhammed Atta failed: there can be few posthumous punishments more mortifying to a mujahaddin than to be fictionalised by Martin Amis.
Like Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent, the starting point for Amis’s ‘The last Days of Muhammad Atta’ was an obscure fact. Amis prefaces his story with a quotation from the 9/11 Commission Report: ‘No physical, documentary, or analytical evidence provides an explanation of why Atta and Omari drove to Portland, Maine, from Boston on the morning of September 10, only to return to Logan on Flight 5930 on the morning of September 11’. What follows purports to take us inside the mind of the terrorist and to offer a possible account for his mysterious detour.
In the Author’s Note to The Secret Agent, Conrad informs us that its inception was the anarchist ‘attempt to blow up the Greenwich Observatory [in 1899]; a blood-stained inanity of so fatuous a kind that it was impossible to fathom its origin by any reasonable or even unreasonable process of thought’. The tale is Conrad’s attempt to mentally lay hold of ‘the fact of a man blown to bits for nothing even most remotely resembling an idea, anarchist or other’.
Both writers offer an exploration into the psychology and motivations of terrorists. Indeed Conrad’s Professor, who straps explosives to his body which he can detonate with a press of a button, is the first would-be suicide bomber in English literature. He is malignant, misanthropic, nihilistic, apocalyptic and physically puny:
And the incorruptible Professor walked, too, averting his eyes from the odious multitude of mankind. He had no future. He disdained it. He was a force. His thoughts caressed the images of ruin and destruction. He walked frail, insignificant, shabby, miserable – and terrible in the simplicity of his idea of calling madness and despair to the regeneration of the world. Nobody looked at him. He passed on unsuspected and deadly, like a pest in the street full of men.
Given the different historical contexts which produced late nineteenth century anarchism and early twenty-first century Islamism, what is striking is how little Amis adds to Conrad’s portrait. The fictional Muhammed Atta’s ‘disgust’, ‘animus’ and ‘detestation of everything’ makes his face so ‘comically malevolent’ ‘that he is amazed he is still allowed to walk the streets’. He is merely a nihilist masquerading as a mujahaddin.
Amis repeatedly tells us that Atta ‘wasn’t like the others’: ‘he was not religious; he was not even especially political.’ He is an ‘apostate’; ‘he didn’t expect paradise. What he expected was oblivion’. He is indifferent to ‘people dying in Palestine’; he is not ‘persuaded’ by arguments about ‘moral equivalence’. We are told that the others nurse grievances against America, holding it ‘responsible for this or that many million deaths’, but Atta views this as the unintentional clumsiness of the all-powerful: ‘Every time it turned over in its sleep it entrained disasters that would have to roll through villages’.
Moreover, Amis’s explanation of Atta’s mysterious detour – that that he goes to collect ‘holy water’ from a dying Imam, which he knows to be Volvic, so that he can telephone the others claiming that the water will absolve him of the crime of ‘self-felony’ while they will burn in the ‘hell of jet fuel’ – not only leaves the mystery as impenetrable as ever but also prompts the question: if Atta is so completely atypical, what insight into the mind of an Islamic terrorist is his story supposed to provide?
According to Amis, Atta’s ‘core reason’ is a desire to get in on the action: ‘He had allied himself with the militants because jihad was, by many magnitudes, the most charismatic idea of his generation.’ In Amis’s essay, the motivation for terrorism is glossed as the desire 'to feel you are a geohistorical player'; it is the 'drastic elevation of the nonentity'. Repeatedly, Amis refers to Atta’s rivalry with the others, as if they were little boys competing to see who can piss higher against the wall: ‘the peer group piety contest’; ‘his group was competitive not only in piety but also in nihilistic élan, in nihilistic insouciance’; and again ‘the emphasis of their rivalry was not jihadi ardour so much as nihilistic insouciance’; ‘a peer group piously competitive about suicide’. These repetitions suggest, not only that the suicide bombers are in fact all the same, but also that none of them has any conviction or motivation beyond coming first in the Pop Idol contest for Martyrdom.
Conrad too had contempt for his revolutionaries whom he described as variously lazy, envious and resentful (Verloc), personally inadequate (all of them), naively deluded (Michaelis), cynical (Yundt and Ossipon,) or nihilistic (the Professor). But he also confessed ‘that there had been moments during the writing of the book when [he] was an extreme revolutionist’. Chapter Eight, in which Verloc’s wife Winnie takes her ‘heroic’ elderly mother to the Alms House in the ‘Cab of Death’, is justification enough for revolution: a ‘maimed’ driver whips his ‘infirm’ horse in order to provide for his ‘“missus and four kids at ’ome”’. The simple-minded Stevie, overcome with ‘horror at one sort of wretchedness having to feed upon the anguish of another’ calls out ‘“Bad world for poor people!”’ Being a ‘moral creature’ he wants justice and suggests the police. With unconscious irony his conventional sister Winnie puts him straight: ‘“[The police] are there so that them as have nothing shouldn’t take anything away from them who have”’. Moreover, Conrad does not show a stable society being threatened by foreign scum but a web of connections between police, government ministers, diplomats and revolutionaries. Conrad’s plot corroborates the Professor’s analysis:
“You revolutionists are the slaves of the social convention, which is afraid of you; slaves of it as much as the very police that stands up in defence of convention.[ …] The terrorist and the policeman both come from the same basket. Revolution, legality – counter moves in the same game …”
But because Amis limits his focus to one (supposedly atypical) terrorist, who has neither family nor history; because he entirely ignores the social and political context, he can only produce a portrait of a psychopath with a bad case of bile.
Conrad attended to ‘his business’ of writing novels with ‘complete self-surrender’. Amis, who regards the author as the god of his creation, seems incapable of imaginatively inhabiting his characters; he is in the business of self-assertion. Standing in an interminable line at airport security, Atta has an epiphany: ‘Whatever else terrorism had achieved in the past few decades, it had certainly brought about a net increase in world boredom.’ (Atta is so pleased with this paradox that it is repeated later in the story.) But this is the apercu of the jaded frequent flyer (Business Class) rather than of a man who is about to seek immortality, or even oblivion. The suspicion that this is Amis talking is confirmed when he makes the same point in his essay on terrorism, where he tries to aggrandize his irritation at being inconvenienced at airports and underground stations by rebranding it ‘superboredom’. Amis is so incensed at the fact that his six-year-old daughter’s rucksack is searched by airport security that he tells us (apparently seriously) that he wanted to say ‘stick to people who look like they’re from the Middle East’(II, p5).
On an average day in the Gaza strip, Palestinians trying to get to work can expect to queue for hours each way at Israeli checkpoints. The Israeli investigative journalist Amira Hass even reports that ‘one Gazan doctor could not get permission to accompany his terminally ill mother to the hospital in Tel Aviv. She died alone’. It is not known whether the historical Atta went to Palestine but he would certainly have known about the grinding frustration and humiliation of being unable to move freely even within your own country. The fictional Atta, like his creator, hasn’t got a clue. It would seem that Amis is hijacking the Twin Towers tragedy in order to re-inflate his flagging reputation.
In his essay on terrorism Amis says: ‘People of independent mind should now start to claim the spiritual highground. We should be with Joseph Conrad’. But if we place The Secret Agent shoulder to shoulder with ‘The Last Days of Muhammad Atta’ we can only say: what a falling off was there. Out of a failed bombing, which killed only one of the perpetrators, and which would now otherwise be completely forgotten, Conrad created one of the masterpieces of twentieth century literature. Out of suicide attacks which caused mass murder and achieved worldwide notoriety, Amis has squeezed out one fairly forgettable short story. It, and its accompanying essay, would be best passed over in silence were it not for the attention they have been accorded and the fact that Amis is not alone. With Bernard Lewis as their founding father, Sam Harris, Paul Berman, Peter Beinart and Christopher Hitchens seem to be engaged in a peer group contest for most ‘stringent critic of Islam’ (Hitchens’ phrase); to be limbering up for their ‘liberal’ Crusade. Attaboy Amis!
In an article for The London Review of Books, ‘Bush’s Useful Idiots’, Tony Judt indicts America’s liberal intelligentsia (among them those cited above) for failing to oppose both US foreign policy and the erosion of civil liberties at home. He argues that although this failure began before 11 September 2001, it has subsequently accelerated. Liberals, once floundering, have found a new cause:
For what distinguishes the worldview of Bush’s liberal supporters from that of his neo-conservative allies is that they don’t look on the ‘War on Terror’, or the war in Iraq, or the war in Lebanon and eventually Iran, as mere serial exercises in the re-establishment of American martial dominance. They see them as skirmishes in a new global confrontation: a Good Fight, reassuringly comparable to their grandparents’ war against Fascism and their Cold War liberal parents’ stance against international Communism. Once again, they assert, things are clear. The world is ideologically divided; and – as before – we must take our stand on the issue of the age. Long nostalgic for the comforting verities of a simpler time, today’s liberal intellectuals have at last discovered a sense of purpose: they are at war with ‘Islamo-fascism’. (21 September, 2006)
Amis has not only enlisted in the Good Fight, quoting extensively from Berman and Harris, he is trying to edge out ahead. Paul Berman’s, otherwise ‘excellent’, Terror and Liberalism is in Amis’s view ‘almost absurdly respectful’ of the corpus of Sayyid Qutb.
Although Amis presents Harris and Berman as liberals bending over backwards to be generous to Islam, a sampling of Harris’s views would suggests otherwise: ‘The truth that we must finally confront is that Islam contains specific doctrines about martyrdom and jihad that directly inspire Muslim terrorism. […] their religion is fast turning into a cult of death. […] We will find Muslims tending to side with other Muslims, no matter how sociopathic their behavior. […] It is time we admitted that we are not at war with "terrorism." We are at war with Islam. […]The idea that Islam is a "peaceful religion hijacked by extremists" is a dangerous fantasy’ (Washington Post Dec 02, 2004).
Since Amis’s main sources on ‘the issue of the age’ are the Orientalist, Bernard Lewis, and these ‘recently recycled experts on Islamo-fascism’, it is unsurprising that he has difficulty entering into the mind of Islamic terrorists.
Indeed Amis seems in part to have written ‘The Age of Horrorism’ (it will never catch on) in order to recycle an abandoned work of fiction. The essay devotes a lot of time to describing this 'thriving novella' about 'a diminutive Islamist terrorist', which for obscure reasons Amis could not complete: 'Writing is freedom; and as soon as that freedom is in shadow, the writer can no longer proceed. The shadow, in this case, was not a fear of repercussion. It was as if, most reluctantly, I was receiving a new vibration or frequency from the planetary shimmer. The novella was a satire called The Unknown Known'.
It’s possible to think of lots of reasons why one would abandon a novel in which a Pakistani terrorist plans to scour all the madhouses and prisons in the country for 'compulsive rapists' in order to unleash them on Colorado, but 'planetary shimmers' isn't one of them.
Amis (like the Pope) tells us that he respects Islam. He repeats this several times at the beginning of the essay: ‘Naturally we respect Islam. But we do not respect Islamism, just as we respect Muhammad and do not respect Muhammad Atta’. Initially, he distinguishes between ‘moderate’ forms of Islam and fundamentalist Islam or Islamism. The former is ‘deceptively well-represented on the pages of the op-ed page and the public debate’, but in reality ‘Islamism, as a mover and shaper of world events, is pretty well all there is.’ This statement is made in the context of other religions, which also ‘have their terrorists’, but Amis claims ‘we are not hearing from those religions’.
Embarrassing though it is for Amis to be on the same side as a god-botherer, Bush stated loudly and clearly that he was under divine orders to invade Iraq. One would not have to agree with the view of Iranian President Ahmadinejad, that responsibility for the Holocaust should have resulted in a homeland for the Jews in Bavaria, to accept that the founding of the state of Israel has been a major factor in destabilising much of the Middle East and beyond. Zionism, and American fundamentalist Protestantism, are powerful shapers of world events. Moreover, just as there are many kinds of Christianity, there are many forms of Islam (Sunni, Shia, Sufi, Wahabi, Ahmadi). The division into Good Muslim, Bad Muslim, as Mahmood Mamdani has argued in his book of that title, usually means little more than compliant or critical of US foreign policy.
Once he gets into his stride, Amis (following Sam Harris) abandons even this rudimentary distinction, declaring that ‘Islam it totalist.’ After the collapse of the Ottoman Empire ‘Islam, in the end, proved responsive to European influence: the influence of Hitler and Stalin.’ In Amis’s usage, Islam is indistinguishable from Islamism. It is a totalitarian cult: ‘Anti-semitic, anti-liberal, anti-individualist, anti-democratic, and, most crucially, anti-rational’. Like Nazism and Bolshevism, it is a ‘cult of death’ with the added bonus of ‘supernatural reward’. At the end of the essay Amis offers ‘broad answers’, culled from Bernard Lewis’s What Went Wrong?: the problem is ‘the institutionalised irrationalism of […] the Islamic world’. Amis concludes from his reading: ‘No doubt the impulse towards rational inquiry is by now very weak in the rank and file of the Muslim male’. He thanks Christopher Hitchens for codifying ‘that peculiarly Islamist triumvirate of self-righteousness, self-pity, and self-hatred – the self-righteousness dating from the seventh century, the self-pity from the 13th […] and the self-hatred from the 20th’.
This view can be traced back to the Orientalists in whose work, as Edward Said argued, Islam is paraded before us as a monolithic, unique, Oriental totality set apart in its essential nature from Europe, the West and the rest of humanity. Lip-service may be paid to classical, medieval or modern periods but Islam is always Islam.
Amis’s essay is such a mishmash of misinformation and contradictory assertions that it is difficult to know where to begin. Although wide open to the influence of Nazism, Islamic culture is elsewhere condemned for its ‘extreme incuriosity’ and ‘tradition of intellectual autarky’. Amis states that: ‘Present-day Spain translates as many books into Spanish, annually, as the Arab world has translated into Arabic in the past 1,100 years’. But the question of translation has nothing to do with an Islamic tradition of intellectual autarky (it was Islamic scholars who translated Aristotle and introduced his ideas to Europe) and everything to do with economics and politics. In countries such as Pakistan, with high levels of illiteracy and low GDPs, there is no literary superstructure; there are not enough media to sell books to a wide public so the costs of translation and book production are prohibitive.
Moreover, in Arabic countries, as Moustapha Safouan has shown in Why Are the Arabs Not Free: The Politics of Writing, there is also the complicating factor of classical Arabic as the language of the elite. In order to reach ordinary people, works of western philosophy and literature would have to be translated into the vernacular Arabic of Egypt, the Gulf states and North Africa; languages that are as different from each other, and from classical Arabic, as Latin is from Italian, Spanish and French. Safouan argues that the backward culture of Egypt and the Gulf States results from deliberate policies of rulers anxious to maintain their authority. These repressive regimes, not only own or control the publishing houses but, through their policy of repression and censorship, ‘produce the terrorists’. ‘Islamic incuriosity’ is a figment of Amis’s imagination; rather, as Safouan points out, vast numbers of Muslims in Egypt and the Gulf States are denied access to works in translation, and to the liberal tradition within Islamic culture, by regimes that America supports.
Indeed, given what Amis calls the ‘limitless and gluttonous freedom’ that the West enjoys, it is particularly surprising (and culpable) that he does not refer to a single work in translation from Arabic. The range of reference in ‘Horrorism’ is almost exclusively English and American: he views Islam through the lens of Berman, Harris and Lewis and entirely ignores the work of Islamic scholars. He quotes from Conrad and Philip Larkin but, with the exception of the Iranian dissident Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran (which is about the Western canon), he demonstrates an ‘extreme incuriosity’ towards novelists and poets from the Middle East and indeed towards the entire body of literature from the Muslim world. It’s enough to make one nostalgic for the good old days of Orientalism (1978), which Edward Said criticised for ignoring social and political conditions so that ‘the Orient studied is a textual universe’. According to Said, the Orientalists’ project was to control ‘the redoubtable Orient’ but it was also ‘the East made known, and therefore less fearsome, to the Western reading public’. Amis’s is an impoverished and degraded Orientalism; it studies no texts and its project is the East made strange and more fearsome.
According to Amis, Islamic countries need to immerse themselves in Western culture but not the other way around. This intellectual arrogance has serious consequences: only from a position of pristine ignorance would it be possible to assert that ‘there is no momentum, in Islam, for a reformation’. On the contrary, as the work of Tariq Ramadan and Reza Aslan has shown, there is a widespread movement for ijtihad, the use of independent reasoning to re-evaluate and adapt Islamic law and to reconcile this with democratic principles. In a series of books (Western Muslims and the Future of Islam; To Be a European Muslim; Islam, the West, and the Challenge of Modernity) Ramadan has called upon Muslims in the West to reconcile and embrace both their Islamic and Western identities and has deplored attempts to construct artificial oppositions between the two, calling instead for the creation of a what he calls ‘a "New We" based on common citizenship within which Buddhists, Jews, Christians, Muslims and people with no religion can build a pluralistic society.’ Ramadan has also been highly critical of Islamic regimes (as a result he is banned from his native Egypt) and has been an outspoken advocate of reform so long as this takes place within Islam.
Amis’s ignorance of ijtihad (or religious interpretation) leads him to assert that ‘the dominion of the male is Koranic – the unfalsifiable word of God, as dictated to the Prophet’. He quotes from an unidentified translation, as if this were irrefutable proof that Islam advocates the oppression of women: ‘Men have authority over women because God has made one superior to the other […] As for those [women] from whom you fear disobedience, admonish them, forsake them in their beds apart, and beat them. [4:34]’(III, p. 4). However, although Muslims believe that the Quran in Arabic is a revealed text, its translation opens up the possibility of a variety of interpretations and the sura from which Amis quotes has been the subject of considerable debate by Islamic scholars. In No God but God, Reza Aslan quotes two different translations:
“Men are the support of women as God gives some more means than others, and because they spend of their wealth (to provide for them)...As for women you feel are averse, talk to them suasively; then leave them alone in bed (without molesting them) and go to bed with them (when they are willing).” (Translated by Ahmed Ali)
“Men are in charge of women, because Allah has made some of them excel the others, and because they spend some of their wealth.. And for those women you fear might rebel, admonish them and abandon them in their beds and beat them. (Translated by Majid Fakhry)
Aslan explains that ‘because of the variability of the Arabic language, both of these translations are grammatically, syntactically and definitionally correct’. He goes on to argue: ‘If religion is indeed interpretation, then which meaning one chooses to accept and follow depends on what one is trying to extract from the text: if one views the Quran as empowering women, then Ali's; if one looks to the Quran to justify violence against women, then Fakhry's.’ Amis is either unaware that any ambiguity exists or is only interested in representing the Quran as the holy book of wife-beaters.
Indeed the treatment of women and issues of sexuality provide the main thrust of Amis’s critique of Islam. He calls for (an implicitly Western-led) ‘revolution – the liberation of women’ and justifies the war in Afghanistan on the grounds of ‘the great waves of women hurrying to school’. He claims that the failure of many Islamic states is largely due to ‘the obscure logic that denies the Islamic world the talent and energy of half its people’. Amis is certainly right that equality of the sexes and freedom from oppression are human rights, which should be strenuously supported. However, they cannot be imposed by the violent interventions of foreign powers. Indeed, Amis’s convoluted catechism – ‘all men are not my brothers. Why? Because all women are my sisters. And the brother who denies the rights of his sister: that brother is not my brother’ – recalls Gayatri Spivak’s formulation of imperialism as ‘white men saving brown women from brown men’.
Arguably, the discourse of saving Muslim women has been used as a front for military aggression in Afghanistan; certainly there has been less insistence on rescuing women in those Islamic countries, such as Saudia Arabia and Kuwait, which are America’s allies. (Amis does dwell on the photograph of a Saudi newscaster who had been beaten by her husband but he stops short of calling for the bombing of Riyadh.) There has been very little attention to the freedom women enjoyed under Saddam Hussein’s rule and the extent to which this has been eroded since the invasion of Iraq.
But it is when Amis turns his attention to the ‘sexualisation of Islamist governance’ that he hits rock bottom, urging us to employ his main research tool, Google: ‘type in “sex” and “al-Sistani”, and prepare yourself for a cataract of pedantry and smut’. Amis presents Muslim men as either repressed and vindictive virgins (Sayyid Qutb and Muhammed Atta) or paedophile polygamists. He tells us that the Islamic Republic of Iran lowered the age at which a girl can be married from 18 to 9 years old. He quotes VS Naipaul on the effect of polygamy and serial marriage in Pakistan: ‘the man moves on, “religiously tomcatting away”; and the consequence is a society of “half orphans”.’ And in order to really ram home the extent of the Muslim male’s sexual perversion, Amis resorts to fiction. He tells us that in his abandoned novella, he went at the task ‘with enthusiasm’:
I had Ayed stand for hours in a thicket of poison ivy, beneath an elevated walkway, so that he could rail against the airiness of the summer frocks worn by American women and the shameless brevity of their underpants. I had him go out in all weathers for evening strolls, strolls gruelingly prolonged until, with the help of a buttress or a drainpipe, he comes across a woman “quite openly” undressing for bed. Meanwhile, his sisters are all dating. The father and the brothers discuss various courses of action, such as killing them all; but America, bereft of any sense of honour, would punish them for that. The family bifurcates; Ayed returns to the rugged borderland, joins the “Prism”, and courts his quartet of nine-year-old sweethearts.
Later we find out that ‘none of Ayed’s wives understands him’; they all want a divorce because of his use of a sinister-sounding sexual ‘belt’. In the tradition of gutter-press innuendo, Amis suggests that ‘one way of ending the war on terror would be to capitulate and convert. […] My middle daughter, now aged nine, still believes in imaginary beings (Father Christmas, the Tooth Fairy); so she would have that in common, at least, with her new husband’. Lock up your daughters: the Muslims are coming!
Amis not only contrasts Western sexual equality with Islamic sexual perversion, the entire essay is predicated on the supposed opposition between Islamism and Westernisn. Even the failings of Westernism are misguided virtues: in particular the ‘multicultural relativism’ which makes us slow to ‘question anything that calls itself religion’; and our respect for the ‘exotic’ practices of the Other which enfeebles any condemnation of suicide bombers or shame-and-honour killings. Westernism is also guilty of being too ‘attractive’, of ‘tantalising good Muslims’ to the point where their thoughts turn ‘to murder’. Westernism, although capable of ‘glinting violence’ is ‘impeccably bland’. According to Amis, we are just too nice.
In an essay on ‘Islam and Western Self-Disgust’ for The Guardian (30 September, 2006), Hanif Kureishi explores the confusions within (what Amis calls) Westernism and the ways in which we are not simply engaged in fight between Islam and liberalism:
After 9/11 there has been much talk about a "clash of civilisations", as though Islam and liberalism are only ever opposed to one another, with one or other of them being defeated in the end, as communism was. The underlying idea here is that in the future we will all pursue the same ideals, and indeed become similar in character to one another: it could be called a globalisation of personality.
But these seemingly opposed philosophies - one of certainty, fixity and moral absolutes based on the unshakeable authority of one book, while the other is one of postmodern scepticism, doubt and flux - are not alien to one another in the way we might think. There is mutual fascination, and far more mixing or "multiculturalism" than we would like to admit.
Kureishi argues that socialism, and its ideal of a society based on co-operation, equality and creativity, has been replaced by consumerism and a moral void that ‘Islam can occupy’. ‘Most Muslims want a higher standard of living, job opportunities, good healthcare, housing and pensions. But Muslims are far more aware than we are of our self-deceit, of the "spiritual" price we pay for our freedom. They can see that the beautiful ideas we are peddling - democracy, free speech, individualism - bring considerable negatives with them.’ The Western ‘stew of corruption’ of the Islamists’ fantasy is mirrored in our media’s obsession with obesity, anorexia, self-harm and addiction; the body ‘out of control’: ‘From this point of view the Muslim is telling us what we already feel about ourselves but cannot yet own up to’. As Kureishi argues, ‘If the home-grown British bomber is our headache, he is also our symptom’. Moreover, we cannot ‘claim to be enlightened, liberal and democratic while unleashing a whirlwind of disaster and death on the Muslim world, day after day.’
Kureishi exposes the fact that ‘our notions of “East” and “West” are screens on to which we can project our fantasies’. Amis’s essay is a catalogue of fantasies about Islam which mirror the Islamists’ fantasies about the West. It is a project that plays into the hands of extremists on both sides and obscures the more complex reality. Just as the Islamist wants to save Muslim women from promiscuity and sexual objectification, Amis wants to save her from the veil and subjugation. (Meanwhile, women themselves, while welcoming solidarity, may object to the patronising assumption that they are helpless victims.) The Islamist wants to claim victory over the USSR in Afghanistan, Amis wants to deny the Mujahaddin played any significant role. (In the process the extent of America’s backing of Osama bin Laden is overlooked.) The Islamist sees democracy as Western interference, Amis asserts that ‘the Middle East is clearly unable [..] to sustain democratic rule’. (Meanwhile, moderates in the Middle East, such as Abbas in Palestine, are left out in the cold; and the West watches idly as Israel attempts to reduce the fragile democracy of Lebanon to rubble.) Wahabists insist theirs is the one pure authentic Islam, Amis parades before us a monolithic, totalitarian Islam. (The reality, as Reza Aslan demonstrates, is that ‘God may be one. Islam is not.’ It has always been subject to regional and historical variations.) The Islamist sees any criticism of Islam as Islamophobia, Amis rejects any defence of Islam as Political Correctness. In this hall of distorting mirrors, meaningful dialogue and genuine multiculturalism – the testing of one’s value system through engagement with others – becomes impossible.
Amis’s anti-Islamicism is sourced in America but, like the virus of Islamism which he sees poisoning the world, anti-Islamic thought is spreading here in England. Salman Rushdie is a veteran of The Good Fight. Ian McEwan has been weighing in with broadsides against politically correct responses to Islam and his recent novel Saturday launches covert missiles into enemy lines. Now Amis is clambering onto the bandwagon. There are doubtless many more mugging up on The Subject of the Age and preparing to compete in the peer group contest for Critic of Islam. We look to our writers and intellectuals for penetrating insight not the projection onto others of our fears and self-disgust. Given the almost daily diet of deliberate provocation of Muslims in the West and the equally cynical exploitation of Muslim anger by Islamists, moderate voices are, contrary to Amis’s assertion, not being heard.
Hanif Kureishi’s novel, The Black Album; his film, My Son, The Fanatic; and his collection of essays, The Word and the Bomb represent the only body of work by a contemporary novelist which has offered not only a critique of the anti-Semitism, homophobiaand subjugation of women that exist within Islamism, but also an account of the racism, economic injustice, and disastrous foreign policy that have fuelled it. It is telling that in both Christopher Hitchens’s essay on Islam and in Amis’s, Kureishi’s work is passed over in silence. But if we do not want the War on Terror to slide into Harris’s War on Islam it will be necessary to continue what Kureishi has called ‘the arduous conversation.’ This involves listening, as well as speaking truth to the power of both Islamism and Westernism.
Jesse Thomas is reading politics at the School of African and Oriental Studies, London. Susie Thomas lectures on British Literature at the University of Delaware in London. She is the author of Hanif Kureishi: a reader’s guide (Palgrave 2005)
Prompted by Multiculturalism and the ‘war on terror’ Rising East 4
Lift not the painted veil which those who live
Call Life: though unreal shapes be pictured there,
And it but mimic all we would believe
With colours idly spread behind, lurk Fear
And Hope, twin Destinies; who ever weave
Their shadows, o'er the chasm, sightless and drear.
In politics the emotion of fear often grows at the expense of everything when one no longer has a strong desire for anything at all
In recent weeks the British Government has launched its own version of the Headscarves debate, a debate which has been rumbling around Europe since the mid 1990s and which first took off in the Islamic world a decade previously, as recounted by Orhan Pamuk in his recent novel Snow.
In that novel, the hero, named Ka, a poet who has spent some years in Germany, returns to the city of Kars, where it is always snowing, and where there has been an outbreak of suicides amongst young girls, linked apparently to the ban on wearing the niqab. As a poet, whose vocation is to put the truth into words as musically as possible, and, for that reason, to rigorously eschew involvement in any kind of ideology, secular or religious, Ka is both fascinated and horrified by the radical Islamists he meets, and equally attracted and repelled by their Marxist adversaries. He can understand and even empathise with both points of view , but he also recognises that they have much in common and both are enemies of the poetics of truth.
In Isaiah Berlin’s terms the Islamic and Marxist radicals are both hedgehogs rather than foxes. At the beginning of his book Berlin quotes a couplet from Archilochus which says ‘the fox knows many things but the hedgehog knows one big thing’. The hedgehogs, those who relate everything they know and feel to a single central overarching system , whether it be that of religion, science, or a political ideology, possess a single universal organising principle through which they make sense of the world and their place in it. When this big idea is challenged in any way, hedgehogs tend to curl up in a ball and become very prickly. In contrast the foxes pursue many interests, explore many varieties of experience, and follow many trails in pursuing their engagement with the world. As Berlin puts it: ‘their thought is scattered and diffuse, moving on many levels, treating things for what they are in themselves, rather than seeking to fit them into some all embracing scheme of things’.
Ka, as a poet, is by definition a fox, but as an intellectual he also has hedgehog tendencies. As we will see, teachers and educationalists working in the multicultural classroom also have to walk this particular tight rope.
In Britain the immediate issue has focused on the dismissal of a teaching assistant in a primary school for wearing the niqab, on the grounds that this prevents her from communicating adequately with her pupils and hence fulfilling her contractual obligations. Her defence was to claim that there was no such impediment and that the niqab was a legitimate expression of her religious values and cultural identity . In France and Turkey the issue has been the right of pupils to wear the hijab in the classroom; in France the state ruled against the practice on the grounds that this contravened the secular status of the school and its mission to educate the citizen pupil, irrespective of race, religion, or ethnic origin. In other European countries similar objections have been raised to the wearing of the Chador and burqa in settings where it can be construed as a challenge to norms of civic interaction based upon universalistic criteria of public recognition .
Islamic feminists retort that far from disqualifying Muslim women and girls from participating in the public realm, wearing the veil , in its many forms, empowers them. As Niufe Gole eloquently puts it in her book The forbidden modern: civilisation and veiling:
‘Veiling is the most salient emblem and women the most crucial agents of contemporary Islam and the struggle for its own version of modernity. No other symbol reconstructs with such force the otherness of Islam to the West. Women’s bodies and sexuality re-appear as a political site of difference and resistance to the homogenising and egalitarian forces of Western modernity. The contemporary veiling of Muslim women underscores the insurmountable nature of the boundaries between Islamic and Western Civilizations. Through veiling women gain a public identity which distances them from their gender role in the domestic sphere – they become an active force in the Umma (the worldwide Islamic community) for the first time ‘.
So here Niufe Gole takes up the thesis of a clash of civilisations and turns it against its progenitors. The thesis, first expounded by Samuel Huntingdon, sought to provide a rationale for US foreign policy in adopting a more aggressive global reach to construct a new world order based on the principles of freedom, democracy and the American way. Gole takes up the thesis and uses it to construct a form of strategic engagement with the cultural and ideological hegemony which the US, following the Huntingdon agenda, has so ruthlessly pursued since 9/11.
It is not surprising that the classroom and the lecture hall should be a privileged site for the staging of this so called clash of civilisations. After all, the school , the college and the university are public institutions charged with the education and broader social formation of a new generation of citizens. Historically they have been charged with a specific civilising mission – to bring education and culture to those deemed to be without them. According to this enlightenment model learning is a civilising process designed to transform children from little monsters or wild beasts into useful, and if possible cultured members of society. Its programme was originally formulated in the 18th century in the following terms :
Receive them and with tender care
for reasons use their minds prepare
shew them in words their thoughts to dress
to think and what they think express
their manners form, their conduct plan
and civilise them into man.
Reason could be replaced by Faith, or Science by Art , and the formula would remain essentially the same. Within the secular tradition rationalist and romantic pedagogies, deriving on one side from Diderot and JS Mill, and the other from Rousseau and Goethe, have offered radically different strategies for delivering the civilising mission: the rationalist pedagogue stresses the power of fact, the importance of observation, logic and procedural learning; the romantics focus on sentimental education, the body, and the transforming power of the arts. Within the history of state education each has influenced the development of different parts of the curriculum. In faith schools and religious seminaries, whether they are Catholic or Protestant, Jewish or Muslim, rational theology and evangelism have also offered different routes to the same goal.
The one thing all these approaches have in common is to consider education as a means to show children and young people how to clothe otherwise wild thoughts and inchoate feelings in some form of appropriate address. This mode of civility involves adopting and showing respect for particular canons and conventions of representation (whether related to big ideas or institutions). Proficiency in the grammar of these normative forms constitutes the hidden curriculum, and the capacity to utilise and apply these ‘laws’ to specific contexts of learning or ‘subjects’ is what is tested and examined . The laws may be those of History or the Holy Book, Scientific Logic or Creationist Myth, aesthetic or moral codes, but respect for them is inculcated as a condition of participating in and bonding to an authorised community of practice.
The one big idea, whether it be secular or religious, is often realised through strong classification and framing of subjects and delivered through highly visible and sometimes authoritarian pedagogies – although romantic or evangelical education predicated on the student discovering a sense of vocation, hence learning to listen to the inner vision or voice of his or her special calling ( aka civilising mission ), may require more exploratory and self regulated modes of transmission.
Of course what children are being made to respect radically differs, depending on whether they are attending a Madrasa in the mountains of Afghanistan or a creative writing programme in an Ivy League Liberal arts college. Moreover what earns children the respect of their peers may have nothing to do with any of this. Indeed it may involve challenging or rejecting the knowledge claims of the institution, or substituting alternative worldviews. Catholic seminaries are notorious for producing rebellious free thinkers! Equally the more hedgehoggy the curriculum, the more closet foxes the system is likely to produce.
In general then educational systems produce different versions of the civilisational thesis. When Ghandi was asked what he thought about Western Civilisation he famously replied, that it would be a good idea. The barbarisms committed in the name of this Civilisation are matter of historical record. And of course Ghandi was speaking for, and from, an ancient civilisation which long predated and helped to found the European one. However he also subscribed to the view, first systematised by Arnold Toynbee, a hedgehog if ever there was one, that world history can be understood as a clash or succession of civilisations, linked to the rise and fall of Empires. The central tenet of civilisational analysis – its big idea – is that you can understand every aspect of a society, or culture, and the behaviour and attitudes of groups within it by reference to some single over-arching principle – the spirit of capitalism, or Islam for example.
It was however just this Big Idea, this totalising vision of history, which was challenged by the radical educational movements which emerged in the 1960s. We might call this the revolt of the foxes. The programmes of deschooling, and dialogics associated with the work of educationalists like Ivan Illych, Paolo Freire and other, saw the classroom as a kind of playground of ideas, a laboratory in which students would test out what was to be learnt from the existing corpus of world knowledge for its relevance in understanding and transforming the local realities of their own lives in the world outside the school.
It was a bold – and in part, a big idea. In retrospect it can be seen that the attempt to revolutionise the curriculum and pedagogy of the school and university, by challenging the authority of the dominant canon and its conventions of representation, created the conditions for the recuperation of this project. Firstly by Marxist and Feminists who in the name of their one Big Idea – Class Struggle or Resistance to Patriarchy – seized upon the pedagogic methods of radical educationalism and converted them to their own Great Cause; secondly as part of a reaction to this ‘counter hegeomics’ by those who wished to make the educational system fit for a very different purpose, namely to enable the transition from an industrial to a post industrial (or rather post Fordist) knowledge-based economy. The modularisation of the curriculum and the shift to invisible pedagogy – the foxes’ charter – provided these post-modernisers with both an instrument and a rationale for deconstructing what remained of the Big Ideas associated with the rationalist and romantic paradigms of the Enlightenment.
This double movement of ‘deconstruction’ in turn set the stage for the culture wars of the 1980s, again centred in the classroom, and focused around what was to count as really useful knowledge. Student identity politics pivoted around more or less essentialised notions of racial, gender and sexual identity, each proclaiming their own autonomous regimes of truth. The counter movement to this, stressing the values of dialogue, heterotopia, and irony, had limited appeal: these might be the mots d’ordre for high flying post colonial intellectuals and artists, but it didn’t play well with hard pressed communities struggling to assert identity based claims over scarce amenity and resource.
The development of multiculturalism has to be read as part of this wider story. Multiculturalism begins as a response to the ‘culture conflict’ thesis – the idea that the children of immigrants, and ethnic minorities more generally are caught in a kind of push-me-pull-u situation between their parental culture and its traditionalist values, and the modern consumerist youth culture of their peers. It is the clash of civilisation thesis writ small and reduced to an inter-generational (quasi-Oedipal) dynamic.
For the early multiculturalists the task of the school was to somehow mediate, or in some versions broker the transition between these two value systems, principally by providing a platform in which both would be represented in the curriculum, and a dialogue between them encouraged. In practice what happened was a one sided engagement: saris, samosas and steel bands were encouraged while skinhead haircuts, football crews, garage bands and indeed everything associated with white working class youth culture was left outside in a kind of unofficial sin bin, where it became a recruiting ground for racialist organizations like the BNP.
The real action or interaction took place elsewhere, through the emergence of a youth cultural politics linked to the anti-racist movement. In the UK there was Rock against Racism and the Anti Nazi league, who sponsored concerts and encouraged the growth of fusion and cross over music and life styles. To be caught ‘between two cultures’ was now no longer to be in a state of existential crisis, but to be at the privileged centre of new forms of creative practice in the arts associated with the emergence of a diasporic, post colonial identity. Cultural Hybridity was celebrated and the displaced person/refugee/asylum seeker recruited as an avatar of the nomadic condition of the postmodern intellectual.
By virtue of its close connection to the cultural industries, it was not long before this movement was discovered to be good for business. From the 1980s onwards ethnicity in both its purified and hybrid versions was branded and marketed worldwide. In this reified/commodified form niche ethnicities fitted as well into the segmented global music and life style market as they did into the modularised curriculum. On the streets Afrocentric rap and hip hop customised into countless local variants established themselves as the big vibe of the new mega slums which have grown around global cities across the planet. Meanwhile in the Academy, with a little help from poststructuralism , epistemological relativism ruled OK..
So happy clappy multiculturalism – everyone in their own groove, doing their own style thing, and respecting the right of everyone else to do the same – becomes the humanized liberal face of neo-liberalism and its policies of de-regulation. En route it has created the conditions for the emergence of an altogether more lethal politics of difference. Firstly because it has generated a backlash amongst communities who have little or no stake, materially or ideologically in either the neo liberal academy or the consumer society; and secondly because it has served as the basis of a purely gestural anti-racism that does nothing to tackle the root causes of racial exclusion or discrimination, whilst at the same time providing a weak defence of both universalism and relativism against the growth of separatist movements which feed off just these injustices.
But still we have to ask: why is it that Islam or rather Islamophobia, have become the Achilles heel of the multicultural project? I think this has to do with more than the opportunism of a political class that sees in appeals to social integration a way to shore up its shaky purchase on a disenchanted electorate who have increasingly disengaged from both the national imaginary and civic life. It rather has to do with a strategy of evasion of a far deeper crisis of representation bearing on the state of the body politic in Western democracies.
Let’s begin by thinking about the nature of Islamophobia. In the New Introductory lectures to psychoanalysis Freud defines phobia as the chief symptom of hysterical anxiety:
‘What the patient is afraid of is her own libido – the difference between this situation and that of realistic anxiety lies in two points: that the danger is internal instead of an external one and that it is not consciously recognized. In phobias it is easy to observe how this internal danger is transformed into an external one – how a neurotic anxiety is changed into an apparently realistic one .One can save oneself from an external danger by flight, fleeing from an internal danger is a difficult enterprise.’
As my opening quote from De Toqueville indicates, symptoms of hysterical anxiety can also be detected in the field of political ideology. When the governing class finds itself powerless before real problems that is has not the energy to master, but which threaten its very identity, it resorts to a purely gestural politics which substitute a fictive problem that can be solved purely in terms of discourse and symbols. The headscarf is one such fictive problem: focusing on it enables the real problems posed by the so called war on terror and the realistic anxieties this has created in the electorate to be evaded. By means of this displacement the headscarf debate – whatever position is taken – sustains the illusion that some kind of magical solution to the situation in the Middle East is possible by the deployment of purely symbolic action.
But what kind of internal threat does Islam represent within this scenario? And how is this threat externalised so that it finds its rationale and support in the real world of historical events – events from which we cannot flee because their occurrence is as unpredictable as their distribution is calculated? My argument is that to understand what is at stake here we have to look at the role of the veil and the face in Western culture and what the hijab and the niqab as symbols of Islam have come to unconsciously represent within that cultural frame. I will first look briefly at how the face and the veil are understood in everyday cultural contexts, and how the issues have been addressed by philosophers and social scientists, as well as by Islamists.
Let’s begin with some commonplaces. In Western cultures the face is the primary medium of self presentation, of embodied being in the world. We talk of face to face encounters, of showing our face at social gatherings, of maintaining, losing or saving face; of what happens in the ‘interface’. In the idioms of contemporary youth culture ‘to be a face’ means to be recognizsed and respected amongst your peers. In contrast to be self effacing, or worse , to be faceless, means to lack any sense of positive identity, to be less than a person, to be part of an anonymous mass. The face is thus a prime site of individuation in a culture which prizes individuality and hence it is a source of great anxiety as well as aspiration – will our faces fit, will they conform to canons of good taste? How can we manage our faces so that we give the best impression of ourselves to others? We try to put a good face on things but it may not always work. Our faces may give us away; show our feelings as other than what we are making them out to be. Erving Goffman is the great analyst of this kind of social facework. In Interaction Ritual he writes:
‘The term face may be defined as the positive social value a person may effectively claim by the line others assume he taken during a particular encounter. Face is an image of self delineated in terms of approved social attitudes. A person cathects his face, his feelings become attached to it …..One’s own face and the face of the Other are constructs of the same order. It is the rules of the group and the definition of the situation which determines how much feeling one is to have for a face , and how that feeling is to be distributed amongst other faces. A person may be said to have or be or maintain face when the line he effectively takes is conveyed to other participants and confirmed by evidence. A persons face is not lodged in or on the body but diffused and located in the flow of events in the encounter.’
The current fascination with body language is symptomatic of the importance of impression management in the network society, where so much depends on what happens at the human interface of organisations. All those the manuals about how to read the tell tale signs of what the other is really thinking and feeling as unwittingly revealed by their facial expressions or physical gestures, how to decipher the true motivations and intentions of your business colleagues or life partners and so on…. . Even intercultural competence is now indexed to facility in facework.
Today in the age of carnal capitalism, when the body shops of maintenance, repair, transformation and perfection are proliferating, and the pleasures and pains of the body are becoming the sole measures of value, the face has become hyper-valorised as a natural symbol of health and beauty, associated with flawless complexion and eternally youthful bloom, and all supported by a global multibillion dollar cosmetic industry. Facial blemishes, from adolescent acne to scars and wrinkles, have become a powerful sign of moral stigma. Noses that are out of joint, eyes with bags under them, lips that are less than full, chins or cheeks that sag, foreheads with worry lines etched in them, these are the corporeal signs of a de-faced identity.
However there is also a residual disquiet that this may be a somewhat superficial way of understanding the human condition. On the face of it things seems one way, but in fact something else might be going on. What you see is not always what you get. To give capitalism or communism a human face may just be a cover story for dehumanising forms of economic exploitation or political oppression. You cant always judge a book by a cover, especially if it is Adair Turner’s Just Capital or the Communist Manifesto. The face may be a mask , concealing more than it reveals about the self.
Emmanual Levinas is the great philosopher of the face considered in its ontological dimensions, and his work has recently been taken up by Judith Butler in an interesting way in the context of her discussion of the philosophical consequences of 9/11 for Western thought. I take issue with some of her political conclusions but her attempt to re-position Levinas as going beyond Heidegger (and Derrida) in thinking through the moral limits and conditions of the Western metaphysical tradition is, I think, judicious and timely.
Levinas agrees with Goffman: one’s own face and the face of the Other are constructs of the same order. But for him the constructs are not social but ethical, and bear on the elementary structures of recognition which define what it is to be human. For Levinas the Face of the Other makes an ethical demand on me that I cannot refuse. He argues that ‘to recognise and respond to this face, to understand its meaning means to be awake to what is precarious in another life, namely the desire of the other to recognised not as Other , but as a subject to the same ethical constraints. He writes:
‘The face of the Other in its very precariousness and vulnerability is at once a temptation to kill and an interdiction – thou shalt not kill . The incommensurability of the human face with what it represents points to something that is unrepresentable about the human condition – namely that it depends on something which is beyond its own immediate grasp’.
This idea may seem itself difficult to grasp, and Levinas’ style of writing certainly does not make the task any easier. But a simple story may perhaps illustrate what is at stake here. In the early 1990s I attended a demonstration against the Poll Tax in Central London. The situation turned violent, with the police riding their horses into the crowd who were jeering and insulting them. Some of the crowd rolled marbles along the ground in an attempt to get the horses to fall over. At one point a police horse reared up and came down on the chest of a demonstrator who had slipped on one of these marbles and fallen to the ground. It was impossible to tell whether this was an accident – perhaps the horse had panicked and the rider could not control it – or a deliberate act of violence. However what happened next was that some of the demonstrators, enraged by what they interpreted as a premeditated act of brutality, seized hold of the rider and pulled him to the ground where they set about kicking him. In the process the policeman’s helmet rolled off revealing the frightened face of young man in his early 20’s – about the same age as the injured demonstrator. As soon as this happened, two things followed: most of the demonstrators backed off : someone shouted ‘leave him alone – get an ambulance, there are two injured people here’. But one of the demonstrators, seeing the policeman lying there defenceless started kicking him in the face, until he was pulled off by the others.
In Levinas’ terms, the true ‘face’ of the State – that is its ethical conditions of existence – is not revealed in the brutality of the police, but rather in the actions of those in the crowd who recognised in the fear shown by young man once he was no longer protected by his ‘uniform’, not just an incitement to ‘kick a man while he was down’ , or ‘give him a taste of his own medicine’, but rather an interdict against doing so.
For Levinas the meaning of the Face cannot be captured by its personification in a visual image. From this perspective the photographs of Bin Laden portraying him as the face of Evil or alternatively as the heroic face of Militant Islam frame his actions in such a way as to veil their true meaning as a focus for the ethical gaze. If ontological truth is a revelation of what is behind or beyond physical appearance – if it is something which is unveiled primarily in and through the embodied discourse of the Other rather than through the immediate world of the senses, then we have to face up to the fact the face of the Other speaks to us of something that is both immanent and transcendent . I wouldn’t have recognised you , we say to someone we haven’t met for a long time, and whose face has maybe aged , or changed in some way; but at the same time, the ‘you’ whom we address belongs to a different order of meaning around which we compose a principle of familiarity which allows the relationships to be sustained across whatever might otherwise erode it.
Strangely enough Levinas’ metaphysical propositions have recently be corroborated by the physical sciences. Neuro-scientists have discovered that face recognition is hardwired into the brain – it is innate and universal. We say ‘ I never forget a face’ , and the fact is that we often can pick out ‘faces’ in a crowd , sometimes upon the most fleeting acquaintance, whilst the faces of those who are close to us remain unmistakeable . I’d know you anywhere. Police identity parades are premised on this capacity, even though as we know mistakes are often made. In fact the development of face recognition technologies as a method of security surveillance and suspect identification relies on decomposing the face into a unique combinatory of distinctive features in a way that supposedly eliminates the possibility of human error or misrecognition. For faces can of course physically closely resemble one another, as in the case of twins, or lookalikes. Racial stereotyping also reduces our capacity to recognise differences between, say ‘black’ faces, hence ‘they all look he same to me’. The limit case is people with certain neurological disorders who are quite unable to recognise their own face, let alone other people’s, as in one famous case described by Oliver Sachs, of a husband who mistook his wife for a hat.
Nevertheless these exceptions prove the rule. And the rule was first stated by Rudolf Topffer , the originator of picture stories or comics over 150 years ago in an essay he wrote about physiognomic perception. He argued that any representation of a human face, however inept, childish and poorly drawn, possesses a unique character and expression . In other words out of even the sketchiest features, we compose a meaningful gestalt. Topffer distinguishes between permanent traits indicating character and variable traits which indicate emotion such as laughing eyes and weeping mouths. It is the combination of these two kinds of trait that creates a unique configuration of meaning . As the art historian Eric Gombrich put it ‘ discover expression in the staring eye or gaping jaw of a lifeless form’, and Toffler’s law will come into operation: it will be classed not just as a face but will acquire a definite character and expression; it will be endowed with presence.
Neuroscientists and evolutionary psychologists now regard the capacity to read faces into ink blots, rocks or tree trunks, and to imbue the sketchiest of face doodles with a distinctive presence, as something that marks humans out from other any other species. If you show an infant two dots drawn quite closely together on a sheet of white paper it will smile because it sees in them a representation of a human face, and in particular its mother’s face. These are eyes without a face, in which nevertheless the baby recognises the maternal presence, and in such a way as to compose the features into a model in its mind’s eye. In his theory of the mirror stage Lacan , following Levinas, similarly argues that the child forges a sense of itself as a distinctive being through such a specular capture of the (m)other.
So the face’s importance stems from the fact that it is both physical and metaphysical, it is a metonym – the part that stands for whole bodily presence – and a metaphor for the fragility of human existence. Equally the face belongs to the order of mimesis, the mirror in which the self is reflected in the (m)other’s eyes, and masquerade, a site of impression management inviting recognition as other than who or what we are. Finally as a medium of communication, the face is both analogic (conveyed by the sensorium: kissing, pouting, smiling etc) and digital ( it can be de and re-composed into system of distinctive, kinetic features).
Now increasingly these different orders of representation have become confounded . It is no longer so easy to tell what is simulation and what is dissimulation. It is this deep crisis of representation , and the anxieties which flow from it , that, in my view has created the conditions for a hysterical focus on the veil , and its racialisation in the discourse of Islamophobia.
Greek women wore a linen veil over the back of the head; the Roman woman favored the palliolum, a veil that was arranged over the hair and fell to the shoulders. The Middle Ages saw an abundance of veils decorating the extravagant head-dresses of the times. In England, during the reign of Elizabeth I, veils of a shawl-like nature were fashionable, and it was at that time that the white bridal veil probably became popular for the first time in England. The black crepe veil has been worn for mourning since early times. The Spanish mantilla, usually a black or white triangular veil of blonde lace, is worn on the head and falling over the shoulders. The veils of nuns and nurses are patterned after the early forms of the veil. The 20th cent. brought forth a great variety of veils—from large veils worn during the early years of the automobile to delicate, decorative nose veils. The modern veil, of chiffon or net, is often embroidered or embossed. Veils have often had symbolic meanings—of modesty, of religious humility, of bondage. Only since c.1925 have Muslim women been allowed to remove their veils, long symbolic of their servile position. However, with the resurgence of Muslim fundamentalism in the 1980s, the veil was once again required in some Muslim nations.
This passage from a current online Wedding Dress Catalogue, lifted word for word from an entry in an Encyclopaedia published by Columbia University (2004) manages to provide at once an inventory of Western customs of veiling and, in its concluding sentence, a summary of the misrecognitions to which this has given rise in relation to Islam.
In the West to veil the face is a sign of occupying a liminal position; it signifies being in the world, but not quite of it. This may involve a state of transition between two statuses, or being in some way on the margins of society, outside its conventional forms of intercourse. It may be about wishing to hide or disguise your true identity; or desiring to withdraw from or protect yourself against social intercourse and ward off evil influences. And sometimes a number of these at once. For example according to culture and context the widow’s veil can signify a process of mourning , involving a temporary withdrawl from the world, or a means of indicating that the women is not available to potential suitors , or that she occupies a permanent liminal status between life and death, as she waits to rejoin her husband in another world beyond the grave.
Liminality is what connects the balaclava worn by a bank robber, or member of the IRA , the scarf or hoody worn by members of a street gang or fighting crew , the bridal veil , the wimple and habit worn by nuns, and the face masks worn by soldiers, doctors , scientists and whole populations seeking to avoid being infected by viruses, pollutants, nuclear radiation and poisoned gas . These different kinds of veil all speak to the precariousness of the situation of those who wear them – and the danger , direct or indirect, which they either face or represent to the social order. We could say the veil is the public face of liminality – it is an actant across a range of narratives which forge a subliminal link between diverse networks of usage and meaning . When anyone ‘takes the veil’ in any of these contexts their meanings get anchored within this chain of associations, whether or not they know or like it.
At the same time these veils both mask and mimic the precariousness of the human face even as they attempt to suspend or deflect its ethical gaze. More recently we have seen the emergence of the ‘postmodern’ veil – the adoption of forms of veiling that play capriciously with their own symbolism and history: the veil as fashion accessory.
Just because it symbolises and enacts liminality, the veil – and by extension those who wear it – becomes a focus of both anxiety and fascination. The veil signifies a world that is secret , hidden, private, resistant to penetration by public scrutiny. Within the field of desire it is read as a either provocation or seduction, an invitation to enter a forbidden pleasure garden. In both cases what is involved is a transgression of the interdict against violation which constitutes the ethical gaze . Often the public and private registers of transgression are elided.
When during the Spanish Civil war anarchists pillaged monasteries and raped and murdered the nuns, they imagined they were liberating the People from the false consciousness of religion and centuries of sexual and political oppression by the Catholic Church; what they were actually doing was satisfying male lust in the name of human emancipation, in an act of political revenge for the many atrocities committed by Franco’s fascists.
In Islam wearing the veil signifies the opposite of liminality – it represents a position of ontological security, bound up with an ascribed status, whose precise forms and usages are defined by religious law and sanctioned by social custom. In countries where great heat and sandstorms prevail there is also functionality to wearing clothing which protects the face, and especially the eyes. The veil, whether in the form of hijab, burqa, or niqab, and whether it just covers the hair, the face or the whole body, thus represents the public face of Islam – and in Levinas’ terms, it becomes the privileged focus of its ethical gaze.
Over the last hundred years conflict between these two opposed orders of meaning has occurred in two contexts. Within countries such as Algeria, Iran, Turkey, Egypt and Afghanistan , movements of modernisation associated with Western (often Marxist) ideas have enforced unveiling ; and counter movements of Islamisation have enforced veiling.
Secondly in the process of colonisation and decolonisation powers such as France, Germany, Britain and now the USA have sought to liberate Muslim women from the veil, as part of their alleged civilising mission; while resistance movements have sought to reinstate the veil as a symbol of the struggle for liberation from these occupying forces.
Franz Fanon in his study ‘Unveiling Algeria’ was the first and one of the most perceptive analyst of this dialectics. He argued that the desire of the French authorities that Muslim women unveil was both strategic – it was a away of penetrating the closed world of the family and community which was nurturing resistance to French rule, and involuntary, in that the veil symbolised everything that was unrepresentable about European desire for its Others.
To which Edward Said later might have added: And if the Veil of Islam was to be ripped off these women, what would be discovered underneath it if not an inscrutable smile – the mask of mysteriousness which two centuries of Orientalism has placed upon their faces as tokens of Eastern Promise.
Certainly the veil may evoke a double voyeurism : on the part of the spectator , a fantasy about the secret delights or dangers hidden within; and on the part of the wearer , a secret thrill of seeing without being seen – of ‘spying’ on the world from a superior vantage point of emotional disengagement and invulnerability, so that in psychoanalytic terms it functions as an avatar of the primal scene.
In terms of social facework, the niqab and burqa ( but less the hijab) do tend to marginalize those who wear it, but only because of the negative responses the wearing of these items evoke in Western societies. At the same time they literally circumscribe the field of vision, and limit the sensorium filtering out some of the noise, and smell of the city but also reducing the scope of engagement with it . Peripheral vision in particular is restricted, so that it requires a very great deal of confidence and trust to walk down a street wearing a heavy veil across the face.
Walking as if through a desert sandstorm, brushing off the darting glances of hatred, fear, curiosity, anger, lust thrown at them by strangers who walk past them as if they were not there, as well as filtering out the countless images of naked desire that swarm towards them from advertising hoardings and newspapers, these are figures in an landscape not of their making or of ours. If they have come to symbolise what is unrepresentable, unspeakable about what the West desires of its Others, it is not just because they are a site of such a massive ‘anxiety of influence’, but because in asserting their right to exist beyond these phantasmagoric projections, they cannot return the West to its own ethical gaze, even if they wanted to. Which many do not.
So we are apparently left with a series of undecidable questions: Is a woman veiled so that she might be protected from the male gaze , or to prevent her from seeing and being in the world? Is a woman unveiled so that she might be emancipated or defiled? Is the burqa a shroud worn by the living dead evoking the spectral figures of uncanny and all that is unheimlich about the mother’s body. Or is it a portable home from home, creating a defensible space though which female agency is sustained?
The questions are difficult to pose because there is no simple either/or answer , and they are unresolvable in so far as there is no third standpoint easily available from which some kind of useful dialogue between the different orders of interpretations might be sustained. It is as difficult to shrug off Eurocentric assumptions about the body and its modes of representation – they literally inhabit us, we live them unconsciously, as it is to abandon customs and beliefs of a religious habit based in ancient Sharia law.
The challenge facing those of us who work in the multicultural classroom, whether in the primary or secondary school, college or university is how to construct and sustain such a third space. For we are dealing with young people some of whom wear outrageously sexy and provocative clothing as a way of hiding in the light, and some of whom wear the niqab as a way of becoming visible in the dark. Each operates a radically different culture of respect and ways of facing the other down. How are we going to build bridges between them?
We are hampered by two facts: first, as I have suggested, we are operating in an atmosphere of political hysteria in which a purely symbolic or gestural response to the fall out from the ‘war against terror’ is being proposed. This is expressed in a series of veiled threats to the Muslim community: police yourselves and drive out the fundamentalists or we will come in and do it for you. To which they respond with another series of veiled threats: leave us alone and don’t attack our religion or way of life, otherwise it will be the fire next time.
Secondly we have inherited a pedagogy of enlightenment, which , in all its modes, rationalist, romantic or evangelical is stuck in the dialectics of veiling or unveiling whereby racism is false consciousness and its lies and prejudices have to be exposed or unmasked .
Or, once the true facts are unveiled, the real feelings of identification with the Other will spontaneously emerge. Anyone who has tried to do this work, knows that it is not as simple as that. Racism , or the racist imagination, has its reasons, which reason does not know. The battle for hearts and minds has to engage with the body politics of race in a rather more subtle way. But that as they say is another story.
Professor Phil Cohen is Director of the London East Research Institute. A version of this article was first given to a Conference on Intercultural Education at the University of Copenhagen in October 2006. A fuller version will appear in the author’s forthcoming book ‘Race and the Other Scene’
© 2004·06
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