Of Cartoons and Civilizations
Rami G. Khouri in the Daily Star has a thoughtful piece on the Arab-Islamic response to the Danish cartoons. According to him, the outcry isn't about cultural difference, the inherent "extremism" of Islam, or the competing "civilizations" of Western and non-Western societies. It's about politics: in particular, post-colonial antipathy to Western policies that are experienced as new, more subtle forms of control, and which undermine self-determination and meaningful independence. Republished in various European newspapers, the cartoons symbolically express these policies. They are taken as vivid proof of Europe's continuing claim to political and ideological supremacy. In other words, we don't need a civilizational dialogue, as the "moderate" position on the cartoons would have it, since both so-called civilizations presumably want the same thing -- independence and equality. Instead, we need to confront the structures of authority that obstruct these basic goals.
6 Comments:
How on earth do the cartoons 'symbolically' express Western domination over the Muslim East? What are these more insidious forms of control that undermine independence in the Muslim world? And would equality of West and East mean then, that free speech would be curtailed, in order that the religious could not be offended by secularists? Does 'confronting the structures of authority' mean not defending secularlism and free speech? The cartoon protests certainly do suggest politics - but it looks very little like a politics of self-assertion pushing against insidious forms of post-colonialism. The 'Muslim anger' seems mostly manufactured - the cartoons were published late last year, and it's only now they've sparked off any response, after being constantly republished by various Arab governments. In Egypt for example, the government re-published the cartoons late last year during election time so that it could nothc up its religious credentials as against its Muslim Brotherhood electoral opponents. The reaction of those 'Muslim community groups' in the West seems just as opportunistic and artificial. To the extent that the protests do tie in to any popular sentiment in the Muslim world at all, it's mostly a sentiment of weakness and victimization, or at best, frustration at the limits of mass politics and the absence of any genuine political alternatives within their own countries. To impute any more political coherence into the protests beyond that is to patronize Muslim peoples.
check out this report from the London Guardian about how Arab governments are cynically whipping up the anti-cartoon hysteria
http://www.guardian.co.uk/cartoonprotests/story/0,,1704664,00.html
The simple fact that governments of Muslim nations, Muslim NGOs and Islamist activists from across the Middle East and Europe believe that they can force the Danish government to curtail the free speech of its own citizens suggests that these actors sense, as I do, that traditional notions of national sovereignty are on their way out of the West, if not the entire world.
As I have commented on here previously, this breakdown of the Westphalian model of world order, and the Islamist attempts to take advantage of the breakdown, is what should be the real focus of American foreign policy (and domestic policy too; indeed, the decline of the Westphalian system suggests that discrete foreign and domestic policies may soon become obsolete). Global terrorism is just the most obvious manifestation of this phenomenon, but the mistake of the Bush administration and both parties in both houses of Congress has been in treating counter-terrorism as the be-all and end-all of its response to the changing world.
It's clearly true that governments have used the cartoons to manufacture protest -- and quite cynically. That does not mean that the protests in no part express authentic grievances or tap a real nerve. For instance, the protests that turned recently in Afghanistan yesterday began as opposition to the use of pakistani workers by the foreign forces and only later focused on the Danish cartoons. The policies that Arab/Muslims oppose are pretty simple and laid out by Rami Khouri. They include the Iraq war, support for Israel, support for dictators when expedient, and the general resort to double standards by Western countries -- such as the outrage over Iran's nuclear program but so similar outrage when it comes to numerous nuclear powers. These grievances at root concern the drive for independence, and express the sense that Western powers treat Arab/Muslim societies as inferiors. The cartoons symbolize anger at such presumptive superiority. Governments may be whipping up opposition, but it's been successful because it feeds on this experience of inequality. To simply admit this fact is far less patronizing than to imagine that we come from different "civilizations" that somehow can't speak to eachother --a classic orientalist trope. The interesting point, which still needs to be addressed on the blog, is why islam has become the primary language for nationalist assertion. That does indeed express the limits of mass politics, but does not mean that no real political ideas lay behind the protests.
I'm unsure about the Editors' line of argument in the most recent post. Is it that anything Western ridiculing non-Western religion is intrinsically an expression of quasi-racist domination over non-Western societies?
Or is it that, just because there seems to be popular sentiment angered by these specific cartoons, we should oppose the ridiculing of Islam in this particular case, but not in general?
Is that secular radicals should patronize Muslims, by entertaining religious sensibilities that they would otherwise disavow, by limiting free speech, simply because there seems to be a popular reaction to the cartoons?
How are a few cartoons in a Danish newspaper - that nobody knew about until government-sponsored newspapers in Arabic countries started repeatedly reprinting them - linked to any of the policies laid out by the Editors above?
Are the Editors actually saying that, because it seems as if some Muslims believe that the cartoons express Western superiority over Islam, and because many Muslims have legitimate grievances, we too should take these cartoons to be the quintessential symbolic representation of all the hideousness of Western oppression?
In other words, the Editors seem to be suggesting that we should accept the fashionable liberal view of Muslims, as victimized children, so befuddled by their oppression that they spontaneously react to the most minimal provocation? The fact that there are legitimate political grievances out there does not mean that any expression of those grievances should be indulged. The fact is that the cartoons are a complete distraction from substantive political grievances, and to believe otherwise is merely to indicate that one thinks that Muslims are incapable of concentrating on the issues that matter.
All of this asides, given the fact that it's taken so much government effort to whip up this popular sentiment in the first place, indicates that most Muslims throughout the world (unlike the Editors) realize that the cartoons have little to do with the actual Western policies that they oppose. There is nothing in this line of argument that I've advanced here, that suggests that 'Islam' and the 'West' are two civilizations that 'cannot speak to each other'. On the contrary, it presumes far more equality than the benign and condascending view of the Muslim masses that the Editors seem to have adopted. Finally, I don't see Islam as an expression of nationalism or self-determination or any of those things; rather Islamism represents the negation of mass politics in Muslim societies, more a cultural than a political reaction to the contemporary impasse confronting Muslim societies.
Pc, I think you may be barking up the wrong tree here -- Khouri (and I assume the editors) is trying to explain the response to the cartoon. It's not so much that the policies are linked to the cartoons as the responses cant be divorced from the policies (coupled with other local elements). It's a matter of emphasis.
Indeed, I am not sure if you are really disagreeing with the editors here.
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