Culture War is not Liberation

I recently intended an informal gathering that featured a long lecture on Islamic politics. One of the points made during this talk really struck me as typical of the problems of Muslim political thought in the current era. The speaker said that Islam was currently the only force capable of resisting the onslaught of Western imperialism and that this was because, to paraphrase, Muslims don't drink liquor and their women don't follow western modes of dress. This, of course, was in a room with many women, at least half of whom were dressed in western clothes. 

I talked to the him later and asked him to clarify his remarks. He then gave me a more nuanced, if flawed, explanation of his words: Western Capitalism is constantly seeking out new markets for its products and the social restrictions peculiar to Islam hamper this expansion significantly. The glaring flaw of this statement is that the one country that, more than any other, imposes all of these social restrictions "with extreme prejudice" is also the most integrated into the global capitalist system. I am writing, of course, of Saudi Arabia. While subjecting women to the most restrictive controls of any country on the planet and imposing strict forms of censorship various cultural practices, they not only function as a leading petroleum exporter but as a major investor as well. They've been more than willing to invest massive amounts of money in the American economy to keep it going, fueling the very culture it is intent on resisting.

I take his point that alcohol and other drugs have been used by those in a position of power to keep their charges in state of thralldom. The use of alcohol to subjugate American Indians is well known. The FLN targeted bars and brothels during the Algerian independence struggle because these institutions were used by the French to demoralize and degrade the Algerian people, weakening their capacity to resist. The penetration of American urban ghettos by liquor stores is widely noted as contributing to the downward spiral of the disenfranchised. These attacks on what can be called the political economy of liquor are not sufficient to justify a total cultural prohibition of the practice. Alcohol consumption, for example, has often been used by progressive and leftist groups to build up comradery and group solidarity. The numerous drinking songs of the Wobblies and other left groups are an example of this (the International makes an excellent drinking song!). The absolute prohibition on consumption therefore can not be justified on political grounds alone. In the hands of an absolute monarchy like Saudi Arabia, the prohibition becomes another means to cultivate subservience to royal fiat. Abstaining from drink does not make you a chic revolutionary and indulging in it does not make you a dupe of imperialism.

The political economy of women's dress is a long and complex topic. It is easy to find justification for a number of views simply by observing the endless conga line of fashion trends that surge into prominence and then fade into oblivion. Coach bags? Those are totallyVeblenian objects of conspicuous consumption, meant to inspire an invidious comparison between those who possess them and those who do not. In previous times, a well-accessorized woman was a reflection of worth of the man who kept her, a form of vicarious consumption. Now these items have become direct status-symbols for the woman, reflecting the increasing integration of women into the mainstream of economic life. 

The endless round of seasonal variations that characterizes fashion in Pakistan serves many purposes: conspicuous consumption, assertion of identity in the midst of enforced religious anonymity, a creative outlet to compensate for narrowing prospects of professional empowerment. While on the subject of fashion, the speaker stated that it was odd that gay men worked as fashion designers for women. Acting on the theory that gay men are rejectors of women, he cited this as an example of the producers of mass culture having contempt for its consumers. This struck me as odd. It would seem to me that if one wanted a form of dress that did not attempt to objectify women as mere sexual objects, gay men (and heterosexual women, of course) would be just the ones to turn to. But I guess its hard to resist taking pot-shots against the gays.

The reasons which prompt individual women to take up the abaya and niqab are too numerous to mention. When this mode of dress becomes a uniform enforced by the power of the state, such as in Saudi, the effect is to reduce women to the status of what Agamben named Homo Sacer: sacred humans. Their rights are guaranteed in the abstract so that they may be violated in the concrete particulars. They are protected by way of abuse. In the words of the No Doubt song Just a Girl, 

"'Cause I'm just a girl, little 'ol me 
Don't let me out of your sight 
I'm just a girl, all pretty and petite 
So don't let me have any rights

'Cause I'm just a girl I'd rather not be 
'Cause they won't let me drive 
Late at night I'm just a girl, 
Guess I'm some kind of freak 
'Cause they all sit and stare
With their eyes"

This perfectly encapsulates the paternal voyeurism that plagues gender relations in most Muslim societies. The restrictions are really protections and any woman who in the least way foregos them is fair game for the male gaze and the male hand. I am reminded of Marx's passage in the Communist Manifesto: 
"Free trade: for the benefit of the working class. Protective duties: for the benefit of the working class. Prison Reform: for the benefit of the working class... the bourgeois is a bourgeois — for the benefit of the working class." 

One could easily rephrase this as:
"Burqas: for the protection of women. Driving restrictions: for the protection of women. Chaperones: for the protection of women. A patriarch is a patriarch, for the protection of women."


What the fight over women's dress in the context of Islam most thoroughly unveils (don't kill me!) is the extent to which women are excluded from this struggle. A political football can't be allowed to dictate its own trajectory. Militant secularists in Tunisia rip the veils from women and then rape them with soda bottles, Islamists (or old-fashioned misogynists) splash acid in the faces of unveiled women, representatives of Saudi state force girls back into their burning school because they don't have their scarfs, veiled women are denied a place in civil society in Turkey, Tunisia, and, increasingly, Western Europe. What is lacking, or, to be precise, actively silenced or ignored, is the voice of Muslim women themselves. The debate over appropriate dress needs to be one internal to the community of Muslim women, without the bearded men or the humanitarian warmongers intervening. Of the Muslim women who have been most active in shaping the debate over hijab, the four most influential have been Fatima Mernissi, Amina Wadud, Maryam Jameelah, Yvonne Ridley, and Asra Nomani. The first three wrote influential books touching on the issue and the last two have been prominent in activism and journalism. Of these four, only the latter has been prominent during the latest phase of the debate: the recent increase in islamophobia in the US and the attempts to criminalize the veil in Western Europe. Whatever side they take on this issue, Muslim women need to play a more prominent role in how it is decided. They should not remain mere objects of debate, but the principal participants.

Both the issue of alcohol and women's dress demonstrate the limits of a culture war as a response to empire. A culture war can easily provide the pretext for a community's incorporation into the global capitalist economy via the ideology of multiculturalism. Multiculturalism is a ploy to support capitalism: it buys off the Muslim leadership, sells out the women, and paves the way for the more thorough capitalization of the Muslim world. We must think dialectically here. It is not a matter of islamophobes getting the government to start concentration camps. The professional islamophobes serve certain very specific goals: invoking the feared Other during a heated election, supporting US foreign policy vis-a-vis Israel. They will come and go as required. It is the ideology of multiculturalism that is the key to the long-term sustainability of capitalism. The dialectic of the closed, mono-cultural, (usually) mono-racial society proposed by the Islamophobes and their secular anti-immigrant allies pitted against the institutional advocates of liberal multi-culturalism will soon give way to a new synthesis: an ‘enlightened’ yet ‘principled’ tolerance that tames the Other, defangs it, and displays it for purposes of ideological reinforcement and entertainment. 

This dialectical process will repeated on a larger, global scale vis-a-vis the West and the Islamic world. The ultimate result will be ‘quaint’ survivals useful for justifying the existence of Western civilization as a way of life and, on the more liberal end, to meet the ideological requirement of tolerance of diversity. These survivals will be economically integrated, their resources, both physical and cultural, will be tapped, but they will be self-policing. Identity politics will give way to identity police. Saudi Arabia and Occupied Palestine are both illustrative examples. 

In the latter case, the West Bank plays the part of the respectable, secular Arab state. It clamps down on the Islamists, negotiates with Israel, and accepts money from the US in order to more effectively control its own people (an example of the latter being the funding of the Dahlan gangs’ attempted take over of Gaza). The Gaza Strip, under the rule of the Islamist Hamas party, acts as a crucible of Islamist political identity. When the pressure increases, the women feel it. Women, for example, can no longer smoke sheesha (hookah) in public. Lingerie ads are now banned, although perhaps this affects the men more than the women. Women are no longer free to have fabulous male hair-dressers. There is a dialectic at work here: the harder that one side asserts its secular/islamic identity, the greater the identity policing performed by the other side. In Gaza, women are slowly being squeezed back into the home while in the West Bank the space of political participation is being restricted to Fatah apparatchiks. The only solution for the vicious dialectic of multiculturalism is a new global project committed to universal emancipation. Partial solutions and parochial battles are no longer sufficient.

More Thoughts on Domestic Violence

One of the acts of a wife which may trigger the chastisement discussed in the earlier post on domestic violence is "nushuz" or disobedience. Nushuz covers many acts, including leaving the home without permission or refusing to have sex with the husband. Because of this, acting in a way that many if not most women living in the west (including Muslim women) take for granted, whether it be freedom of movement, freedom to work outside the home, the right to refuse her husband when she is angry or because she is simply not in the mood, is criminalized in the Shariah. While it is true that a wife may place many stipulations in the marriage contract, most women do not and, to quote Kecia Ali, "this approach misses the forest for the trees" because it "fail[s] to address the basic parameters of the marriage contract itself and the assumptions it is based on." More than this, it fails to take into consideration the universal ethical principles that make life in a diverse, multicultural society possible.

It is this lack of principle that I find to be the most objectionable trait of the Muslim community. All the other evils that I have written about or will write about in this blog, gender injustice, racism, irrational prejudice against Jews and homosexuals, etc., are symptoms of this cardinal failing. Muslims are quite quick to condemn the injustices done to them by invoking universal moral norms or by taking shield behind legal structures that embody these norms, such as the Bill of Rights. On the other hand, when criticism is made of certain Islamic practices, they are just as quick to retreat into the particularities of their own religion, eschewing any universal framework for moral thought. 

While the theoretical foundation can be quite different and specific application may vary, the universal ethical principles which have guided moral decision making have at least one trait in common: they admonish us to place care for the other and care for ourselves on equal footing. This is true whether we are talking about the Golden Rule (in it's Jewish, Christian, or Confucian forms), the principle of utility, the Categorical Imperative, veil of ignorance underlying Rawls' Theory of Justice, or Schopenhauer's injunction to "harm no one; on the contrary help everyone as much as you can." These rules force use to take a universal perspective in our decision making, to consider other people as beings with the same inherent worth as we ourselves possess. This universality is independent of their usefulness to us, our emotional attachment to them, or their familial, cultural, or religious bonds to us. Unfortunately, Islam's version of the universal rule, "Love for your brother what you love for yourself" is ambiguous. While many Muslims interpret the term "brother" (akh in arabic) in a universal sense, embracing all of humanity, there are a large number of Islamist ideologues who interpret this term in an exclusive way, referring only to the brotherhood of Muslims. Another ambiguity, to return to the topic of this post, is the manner in which this principle is applied in practice. 

Islam is the religion of Submission. Muslims seek the pleasure of Allah and a share in his paradise by way of a life-transaction or, in Arabic, deen. This life-transaction requires sincere submission to a number of religious rites, restrictions, and duties. When notions of gender equality are mentioned to Islamic scholars and other ideologues, the most common apologetic tactic is to invoke the notion of this ultimate goal. Yes, we should love for our sisters in Islam what we love for ourselves. In this case, we should want them to go to paradise just as we desire to go to paradise. The way to paradise according to Islam is clear: in the sphere of gender relations it requires obedience to certain norms regarding dress, speech, association with members of the opposite gender, and compliance with certain laws regarding marriage and family life. Islam is not concerned with equality but equity. A good husband is not the one who indulges his wife's desire but one who ensures that she gets to paradise via adherence to the formal code. Indeed, as any member of the Tableeghi Jamaat will tell you, men will be held accountable for the action of "their women." This creates a further incentive, beyond the strictly ethical, to maintain prescribed norms within the Muslim household. The problem with this approach is that it permits virtually any behavior in the name of the benevolent tutelage of the wife and the sanctity of the home.

To what extremes can this attitude lead? Kecia Ali argues that, based on a study of several Sunni legal texts, "The husband's right to derive pleasure from his wife... led the jurists to grant him total control over her mobility." She quotes a striking example from the Hanafi Law Book, Kitab an-Nafaqat, by Al-Khassaf. What measure can the husband take in response to a refusal of sexual relations? "Is it lawful for the husband to have sex with her against her will...? It is lawful because she is a wrongdoer." This is not an isolated opinion, at least not within the Hanafi school which is dominant in South and Central Asia and parts of the Middle East. Marital rape is a serious issue in every community. It does not need a religious sanction or motivation to occur; it is an expression of the desire for absolute power over another. When this illicit desire is fed the fuel of piety and righteousness, when it is combined with the urge to punish a wrongdoer, it is easy for the marital chamber to become a torture chamber.

Zizek on the Qur'an and Science

"We find the same phenomena in some forms of contemporary Islam: hundreds of books by scientists "demonstrate" how the latest scientific advances confirm the insights and injunctions of the Koran- the divine prohibition of incest is confirmed by recent genetic knowledge about the defective children born of incestuous copulation, and so on and so forth. (Some even go so far as to claim that what the Koran offers as an article of faith to be accepted because of its divine origin is not finally demonstrated as scientific truth, thereby reducing the Koran itself to an inferior mythic version of what has acquired its appropriate formulation in contemporary science.)" In Defense of Lost Causes

I have personally seen this taken to such an extreme that scientific expertise is called on to result disputes in the fiqh (Islamic law) of prayer. It was recently argued that the sunnah of doing prostration directly on the earth instead of a rug is confirmed by the fact that the discharge of static electricity between the earth and forehead changes the mental state of the prayer, conferring feelings of peace and contentment. 

A little bit later, Zizek observes that "the true danger of fundamentalism does not reside in the fact that it poses a threat to secular scientific knowledge, but in the fact that it poses a threat to authentic belief itself." Fundamentalism squeezes out of existence any space for enlightened belief, a belief that is not founded on certainty but instead on existential choice as to the constellation of values that will be affirmed.

Who am I?

I am a white convert to Islam. I have written elsewhere of my conversion to Islam giving the rational arguments I found persuasive, describing my experience as an activist against the Occupation of Palestine and against the Iraq War as essential in framing the emotional structure which made my conversion posible. These considerations are true as far as they go, but they are incomplete. I am a white convert to Islam. That needs to be foregrounded to understand the innerworkings of the process of deliberation that resulted in my choice. My conversion can be fruitfully interpreted as a fetishistic disavowal of my own whiteness. Filled with rage at the rank injustices perpetrated against the “third world” abroad and against people of color at home, I sought to distance myself from the cultural and social order that were responsible and, if possible, acquired oppression. Michael Muhammad Knight has written on this phenomenon in his articles for Muslim Wake Up!, so this may not be surprising to some of my readers. I do think that there was something deeper going on here than a case of bad conscience. I never, for example, disavowed my Appalachian heritage or my Irish heritage or my German heritage. I think that I was attempting to give up my status as a pure cartesian subject, a universal man, and embrace a new particularity. The category of white, in western culture at least, is the category of the cartesian subject. It alone is universal, free from history but engaged in the conversation of ideas. All other identities, black, Arab, Indian, Muslim, Jewish, are particular, contingent, bound up inextricably in their specific histories and struggles. The problem, of course, is that this transforms white people into rootless cyphers with no history, no sense of the past while at the same time making it possible to exclude those assigned a particular identity from category of universal humanity that are recognized as the bearers of human rights. It doesn't just suck to be you. It sucks to be. I think this phenomena is profoundly illustrated by the late history of Judaism. From the enlightenment until the rise of the Nazis, the Jewish struggle was to define themselves a cartesian, universal men, as members of a cosmopolitan society free from the particularities of their religion and ethnicity. Judaism itself began to take on this character, transforming, in the guise of Reform Judaism, into a universal monotheism. The Jewish mission then became of one of being the apostles of universality. The failure of this project, culminating in the rise of the Nazis, launched the Jewish people onto a new trajectory: they now seek to particularize themselves, their culture, language and religion. The acme of this particularization is the State of Israel, the ultimate state of exception.

I am a white convert to Islam. I fell in love with a woman of Pakistani descent. This sustained my interest in Islam and, along with my inability to accept the sordid fruit of Zionism, resulted in my rejection of Judaism as a viable religious choice. This is ironic, given that, like many Pakistani women born in this country, her relationship with Islam was and is strained at best. Regardless, I loved her madly, she reciprocated in her own way and we married. The following years were varied in their emotional texture but I recall them as happy. I desperately embraced a Pakistani identity, learning Urdu, reading up on the history and culture of Pakistan, enjoying urdu poetry, listening to Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and Junoon. I even embraced the appropriate even-handed apologetic stance when the subject of the 1971 civil war was brought up. Despite all of this, there were fundamental illusions underpinning are relationship and failings of character on both sides. We divorced and I had to come to terms with my immediate lack of identity once Pakistan had been subtracted from me.

For a time, I seriously considered leaving Islam. I stopped using my muslim name, flirted in my quiet way with non-Muslim girls, didn't pray very much, etc. My Muslim identity was saved by the fortuitous advent of Ramadan and the considerable amount of time that members of the Muslim Student Association spent with me. I swallowed my doubts, completed my degree, went to work in the community. I got married again. But a doubt deferred, like a dream, explodes.

And that brings me to this current project. The only way to find closure, one way or another, is for me to write about and explore the cracks I see in the edifice in Islam. To explore also my own inner life and the hidden springs of my intentions. Some of this blog will be political, some philosophical, some polemical, some personal. I welcome your comments, for and against, Muslim, Atheist, Christian, Hindu, Jew.

I will say, quite clearly, that I am not Irshad Manji. I am not Ibn Warraq. I am not Ayan Hirsi Ali. I still love my Muslim friends and I still see good in the community and beauty in the religion. I am categorically and unequivocally against imperialism, sexism, and racism in all of their forms. I am a hard-core anti-Capitalist and unrepentent Leftist. What brings me to this present venture is my growing feeling that this is simply not enough. To quote Rage Against the Machine, “I'm a truth addict, oh shit I gotta head rush.” I need to reconcile the contradictions I see, in the intellectual edifice of Islam itself, between the ideology of Islam and empirical reality, between the ideals and the practice of the Muslim community. This last is complicated; it is not that Muslims fail to live up to the perfect ideals of Islam. Often, I see Muslims behaving virtuously and courageously in spite of Islam. This especially true when it comes to the rights of women, where I see many people desperately seeking justification in texts for the upright actions dictated by their hearts.