By Rajeev Bhargava
The rest of the world should be grateful to Western civilization for
having given it the concept of human rights. There are some things we
cannot do to others, not because it is God’s command, because we will go
to hell or earn spiritual demerit, but because of certain capacities
that people possess. We cannot harm others because this is what we
minimally owe them. This realization does not entail the idea of human
rights as supreme, something over and above all other values in every
context and at all times. It simply means that rights must always count
as one of the most important considerations in our dealings with others.
But how much easier it would be to make this claim more widely
acceptable if it were made with humility, with better knowledge that
other civilizations have given the West equally valuable ideas, and
accompanied by an acknowledgment that the West has given us some
horrible ideas—ethnic cleansing; general epistemic superiority;
ethno-nationalism; large, oppressive, totalizing institutions, such as
the state and church. The vigorous opposition to the idea of human
rights in some parts of the world may be due less to the unacceptability
of its content and more to its association with power and privilege.
Bizarre? Perhaps. Still, it is sobering to think how much more could be
learned—by all—in a climate of humility and mutual respect.
I say this because accompanying the rapaciousness and greed that was
unleashed by the West in Iraq, amidst all the bombings and massacres,
was an unstated claim to superiority, an arrogance that facilitates
wrongdoing and the violation of human rights. In the immediate aftermath
of 9/11, some of us had hoped that the United States would listen, in
time, to the whispers of the oppressed, private murmurs that America
may, more or less, have invited the cataclysmic event upon itself,
“damnable yet understandable payback . . . reaping what empire had sown”1—not
only listen, but do some soul searching, identify the deeper causes of
widespread resentment against America, seriously and responsibly rework
its foreign policy.
The offensive against Al-Qaeda, the deployment of excessive force for
a limited purpose, was justified, we thought—something that might help
track Osama down. But surely wise people with sound moral sense would
capture him, level charges of crimes against humanity in an
international court, and help set new standards of retributive justice.
And then a wider process of reconciliation would be initiated, one that
would give everyone an opportunity to eventually shed at least some
mutual prejudices and misgivings. The principal actors might then
realize the futility of playing out the warped logic of alternating
claims to superiority in a competitive struggle for standing. As
messages of marginalized groups, hidden under the gruesome rubble of
destruction, are finally decoded, greater mutual understanding would
prevail. So some of us dreamt.
The trajectory followed by the principal actors could not have verged
further from what we had hoped. Yes, some good things did happen. The
truth about weapons of mass destruction is out; Bush left office with,
if not a shoe, certainly egg on his face; Obama won; and Osama was
finally nabbed. Alas, it does not come as a surprise to anyone that the
wars meant to come to swift ends continue, the numbers of casualties
mount, and innocents die routinely. American corporations are flush with
funds even as the economy implodes, another recession may be round the
corner, and unemployment in America and several European countries shows
no sign of abating. And in Europe, the home of human rights and the
welfare state, Angela Merkel and David Cameron threaten to withdraw
multicultural policies even before they have been properly introduced.
I cannot hope to cover all the major issues that have emerged since 9/11, not even all those I discussed in my essay published by the SSRC a few months after the catastrophe.
In this short piece, I restrict myself mostly to the condition of
Muslims in Europe after 9/11 and then make some general remarks that are
never voiced in our public and academic discourse. It helps that I am
neither Christian nor Muslim, though I would like to think that I have
embraced something of value from both. I have the advantage of being an
outsider, which offers me the distance from which I might be able to say
things that “insiders” may not even notice.
One of the most conspicuous outcomes of 9/11 is the relentless
securitization of states and the tightening of immigration controls.
Closer surveillance of a few suspects and stricter security checks at
points of entry is not the issue. The truth is that all these policies
smack of cultural racism, to use Tariq Modood’s term.
For instance, immigrants to Holland are given absurd citizenship tests,
such as viewing a clip of homosexuals kissing or nudes on the beach,
intended to gauge the levels of their social tolerance. In the state of
Baden-Württemberg, Germany, parents are asked whether they are willing
to allow swimming lessons for their daughters in order to determine
their own fitness for citizenship. France appears to have gone one step
further, passing an immigration bill that approves DNA testing and
quizzing immigrants on whether or not they respect French values. As
Jocelyne Cesari puts it, “These new measures circumvent the logic of
immigration preceding integration by requiring that immigrants show
signs of integration before even entering the European Union.”
Restrictions extend beyond new entrants to existing citizens. Thus,
in Britain, where a third of all primary-school children are educated by
religious communities, applications for state funding made by schools
run by Muslims are repeatedly turned down. I believe there are only
three to five Muslim schools there currently, compared to two thousand
run by Roman Catholics and forty-seven hundred by the Church of England. Similar problems persist in other European countries.
The problems with these restrictions are manifest in the failure of
many western European states to deal with the issue of headscarves
(France) and demands by Muslims to build mosques and thereby properly
practice their own faith (Germany, Italy) or to have proper burial
grounds of their own (Denmark, Austria). In recent times, as
Islamophobia has gripped the imagination of several Western societies
(exemplified by the cartoon controversy in Denmark), it has become very
likely that their Muslim citizens will continue to face disadvantages
merely on account of their religious community.
The fact is that migration from former colonies and an intensified
globalization have thrown pre-Christian faiths, Christianity, and Islam
together in public spaces,
the cumulative result of which is unprecedented religious diversity,
the weakening of the public monopoly of single religions, and the
generation of mutual suspicion, distrust, hostility, and conflict.
European states are largely clueless as to how to deal with such issues
or how to handle the backlash of radical right-wing-leaning citizens and
politicians. This has been dramatically highlighted by the headscarf
issue in France, the murder of filmmaker Theo van Gogh in the
Netherlands, the referendum against minarets in Switzerland, and the
more recent, horrific murders by Anders Behring Breivik.
Why is this so? Because, despite substantial secularization in
several European states, the formal or informal establishment of the
dominant religion has done little to bolster intercommunity relations or
reduce religious discrimination. As it turns out, the widespread belief
in a secular European public sphere is a myth. Under the pressure of
the demand for equal citizenship rights for new Muslim, Sikh, and other
citizens, the religious bias of European states becomes increasingly
visible. European states continue to privilege Christianity in one form
or another. They publicly fund religious schools, maintain real estates
of churches and clerical salaries, facilitate the control by churches of
cemeteries, and train clergy. In short, there has been no impartiality
within the domain of religion, and despite formal equality, this
continues to have a far-reaching impact on the rest of society.
This, in turn, is because issues of radical individual freedom and citizenship equality only arose in European societies after
religious homogenization had been established. The birth of
confessional states was accompanied by the massive expulsion of subject
communities whose faith differed from the religion of the ruler. Such
states gradually found some place for toleration in their moral space,
but as is well known, it was a tolerance consistent with deep
inequalities and with humiliating, marginalized, and virtually invisible
existences. For instance, Catholic churches in predominantly Protestant
countries could not remain on high streets where the church of the
majority stood; they were tucked away in bylanes. Moreover, these church
buildings could not look like churches (they had to be ordinary
residence halls, for instance).
The liberal-democratization and consequent secularization of many
European states has helped citizens with non-Christian faiths to acquire
most formal rights. But such a scheme of rights neither embodies a
regime of interreligious equality nor effectively prevents
religion-based discrimination and exclusion. Indeed, it serves to mask
majoritarian, ethno-religious biases—evident in the many different kinds
of difficulties faced by Muslims today. September 11 brought this out
into the open. European societies faced a choice: introduce a new regime
of equality in the religious domain, installing radically novel
standards of impartiality with respect to all religions or continue
with, and even reinforce, existing biased institutional arrangements. It
appears they have chosen to go with the latter, and 9/11 has provided
them the justification to do so.
When I first heard the term “Islamophobia” used in the European
context, I dismissed it as hyperbolic. I am not so sure now. I can
understand a xenophobic response from the right wing, but why this
prejudice and fear of Muslims among people who are sane, reasonable, and
rights sensitive? Why does it rankle so easily? Why are left-leaning
liberals so easily alarmed by Muslims? Here I enter a territory where
even angels fear to tread! I put my neck on the block and tentatively
say the unsayable, ready to take back every word scribbled here, if
corrected.
I think it was David Hume who said that animosities are transmitted
from one generation to another and that descendants retain a sense of
hostility to old enemies long after the original motive for enmity has
disappeared. These kinds of judgments, the stuff of which old wives’
tales are made, seem old-fashioned and are in severe disuse in social
science, but as I said, I am willing not only to stick my neck out but
also to spit out bitter words stuck in my throat. The traditional enmity
between Christians and Muslims survives in the collective memory of
both and so too does the urge to compete and settle old scores—not
everywhere, not in everyone (Muslims and Christians in the East are
certainly not part of this), but with sufficient strength to adversely
affect us all.
This is a terrible notion—ahistorical, essentializing, and all that. I
hope we can work out a version that is less troublesome and more
explanatory. But till then, allow me to continue my train of thought. I
remember Wilfred Cantwell Smith’s lament in an article he wrote toward
the end of his life—he died a year before 9/11, I believe—that few in
the West realize how their perpetual reservations about Muslims and the
generally negative perception of Islam follow a pattern set during the
Crusades and for more than a millennia of animosity. A wise, civilized
man, he scrupulously avoided saying that the animus was mutual. Or
perhaps he had reason not to. Because for long periods in the twentieth
century, Muslim elites cozied up to the West, while Europe and America
have returned that favor rarely and only when required by their
interests.
The West has been dealing with Islam since the seventh century. The
two have shared borders with each other, competed with and fought one
another, been each other’s subjects, tried to convert one
another—sometimes successfully—traded with one another, and much else.
When the West was less powerful than Muslims, it feared, sometimes even
hated them. The Prophet was frequently depicted as a fiend with
horns—alas, even Danish cartoons have their own historical legacy. In
the past two imperialist centuries, however, the West has dominated
virtually everyone, including Muslims, arrogantly dismissing their way
of life as inferior. Arabs know and immensely resent this. Americans are
today fielding a retaliatory sentiment in a conflict that did not
originate with them. Before anti-Americanism came into vogue, there
already existed a centuries-old negative, competitive relationship, with
alternating, egotistical claims to superiority.
Two peoples who have ruled one another in the past continue to be
locked in a struggle for power and domination, landing from time to time
smack in the middle of a horrible syndrome. I use this term
deliberately: In my use, “syndrome” points, at the very least, to the
breakdown of basic trust and common understanding between two peoples.
And it encompasses something even more dreadful—a diseased network of
neurotic relations, so completely poisoned and accompanied by such a
vertiginous assortment of negative emotions (envy, malice, jealousy,
spite, hatred) that communities are bound to slide down the slope of
still deeper hostility and frenzied mutual destruction.
Typically, when in the throes of the syndrome, animosity circulates
freely, depositing layer upon layer of mutual grievance. Over time,
chronic paranoia develops, intergroup relations are perverted, and the
two groups begin to play antagonistic games, often fighting over nothing
at all. Groups demand from one another what they cannot really get,
conjure up imaginary grievances, insist precisely on just what hurts the
other most—at times, obsessively desiring the very thing that the other
wants, at others, the exact opposite, always with the sole purpose of
negating the claims of the other. It is an abiding feature of a syndrome
that, rightly or wrongly, both sides feel persistently humiliated and
pushed around.
A syndrome is set in motion by a long chain of closely nested,
mutually interlocking actions between small, impatient extremists
belonging to both groups—but eventually, horrifically, it engulfs almost
everyone. The primary responsibility for the syndrome usually rests
with whichever group is currently dominant, but it can also be triggered
by the weaker group.
Put the Tehran hostage issue, 9/11, the London and Madrid
bombings—large, insane acts of criminality—and the comparatively smaller
issues of headscarves and minarets against this historic backdrop and
they appear in a starkly different light. I know some readers must be
thinking now of one Mr. Huntington. Sorry, folks, but I am not talking
of an inevitable clash of two essentially opposed civilizations. I
merely refer to the possibility of long-term historically formed
dispositions that some people learn and others get sucked into,
collective propensities that won’t just go away on their own but must be
intentionally dislodged or tamed. How I wish someone would try to break
the syndrome! How about wholly disinterested Western help to the
peoples of Libya and Syria, to assist them in throwing out dictators and
setting democratic institutions in motion, and then a dignified exit,
without profit in pocket, demonstrating that material or strategic
interests were never the motive for intervention?
I can’t say how long the syndrome will last. To the outsider, it is
clear that the many communities of Christians, Muslims, and secularists
can scarcely afford to ignore each other. If they don’t learn to deal
with one another constructively, the cataclysmic consequences will
befall the whole of humanity.
Source: http://essays.ssrc.org/10yearsafter911/the-911-syndrome-europe-islam-and-muslims-2/
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