NP: Syria, part 4

[Kai Frederik Lorentzen]

Am 19.11.19 um 02:10 schrieb jody2.718 via Pynchon-l:


... which is partly a phenomenon of Islamophobia and partly ...


What?

https://www.city-journal.org/html/theres-no-such-thing-islamophobia-15324.html

Pascal Bruckner:

+ ... The term “Islamophobia” probably existed before these bureaucrats of the empire used it. Still, this language remained rare until the late 1980s, when the word was transformed little by little into a political tool, under the pressure of British Muslims reacting to the fatwa that the Ayatollah Khomeini had pronounced against novelist Salman Rushdie, following his publication of The Satanic Verses. With its fluid meaning, the word “Islamophobia” amalgamates two very different concepts: the persecution of believers, which is a crime; and the critique of religion, which is a right. A newcomer in the semantic field of antiracism, this term has the ambition of making Islam untouchable by placing it on the same level as anti-Semitism ... There remains the mystery of the transubstantiation of religion into race. The racialization of the world has to be the most unexpected result of the antidiscrimination battle of the last half-century; it has ensured that the battle continuously re-creates the curse from which it is trying to break free. A great universal religion like Islam includes a vast number of peoples and cannot be assimilated to a particular ethnic group. The term “Islamophobia,” however, invites confusion between a system of specific beliefs and the faithful who adhere to those beliefs. To contest a form of obedience, to reject dogmas that one considers absurd or false is the very basis of intellectual life, but belief in the existence of Islamophobia renders such contestation impossible. Should we speak, then, of anticapitalist, antiliberal, or anti-Marxist “racism” or phobia?/ But Islam benefits from a special protection. At the very time when Christian minorities in Islamic lands are persecuted, killed, and forced into exile—they are now threatened with extinction by the middle of this century—the word “Christianophobia,” despite UN officials proposing it, has not caught on, and it never will. We have difficulty seeing Christianity otherwise than as a religion of conquest and intolerance, even though today, at least from the Near East to Pakistan, it is a religion of martyrdom. In France, with its anticlerical tradition, we can make fun of Moses, Jesus, and the pope, and picture them in every posture, even the most obscene. But we must never laugh at Islam; if we do, we invite the wrath of the courts. Why this double standard? The Parisian daily Le Monde notes that the satirical publication Charlie Hebdo had devoted only 4 percent of its covers to representations of the Prophet Mohammed, whereas it has been mocking Jesus, Moses, the Dalai Lama, and the pope for 40 years—but this 4 percent earned it a collective assassination by Islamist killers on January 7, 2015. And for criticizing two French Islamist groups with ideological complicity with the Charlie Hebdo murderers, I found myself dragged before a tribunal and charged with defamation. I won the trial—fortunately, since what I was saying was the simple truth./ And here is where the strangest factor in the whole Islamophobia controversy emerges: the enlistment of a part of the American and European Left in the defense of the most radical form of Islam—what one might call the neo-Bolshevik bigotry of the lost believers of Marxism. Having lost everything—the working class, the Third World—the Left clings to this illusion: Islam, rebaptized as the religion of the poor, becomes the last utopia, replacing those of Communism and decolonization for disenchanted militants. The Muslim takes the place of the proletarian./ The baton seems to have been passed at about the time of the fall of the Shah of Iran in 1979, with the resulting rise to power of Islamist revolutionaries, which was the occasion for enthusiastic commentary by Michel Foucault, among others on the left. God’s return on history’s stage had finally rendered Marxist and anticolonialist programs obsolete. The faith moved the masses better than the socialist hope. Now, it was the believer in the Koran who embodied the global hope for justice, who refused to conform to the order of things, who transcended borders and created a new international order, under the aegis of the Prophet: a green Comintern. Too bad for feminism, women’s equality, salvific doubt, the critical spirit; in short, too bad for everything traditionally associated with a progressive position./ This political attitude is manifest in progressives’ scrupulous idolatry of Muslim practices and rites, especially the Islamic veil: “modest fashion” is praised to the skies, so much so that, for certain leftist commentators, an unveiled Muslim woman who claims this right can only be a traitor, a turncoat, a woman for sale. The irony of this neocolonial solicitude for bearded men and veiled women—and for everything that suggests an oriental bazaar—is that Morocco itself, whose king is the “Commander of the Faithful,” recently forbade the wearing, sale, and manufacture of the burka in his country. Shall we call the Cherifian monarchy “Islamophobic”? Shall we be more royalist than the king?/ It’s worth considering this Islamo-leftism more closely, this hope nourished by a revolutionary fringe that Islam might spearhead a new uprising, a “holy war” against global capitalism, exactly as in Baku in 1920, when Bolshevik leaders, including Zinoviev, published a joint appeal with the pan-Islamists to unleash jihad against Western imperialism. It was an English Trotskyite, Chris Harman, leader of the Socialist Workers Party, who, in 1994, provided a theory for this alliance between militant revolutionaries and radical Muslim associations, arguing for their unity, in certain circumstances, against the common enemy of capitalism and the bourgeoisie. Generations of leftists saw the working class as the messianic leaven of a radiant humanity; now, willing to flirt with the most obscurantist bigotry and to betray their own principles, they transferred their hopes to the Islamists ... Walk through the streets of any big European or American city, and you will pass innumerable Baptist, Catholic, Lutheran, and evangelical churches, Hindu temples, synagogues, mosques, pagodas, and on and on. This peaceful cohabitation of diverse expressions of the divine is a wonder of the West. “When there is only one religion, tyranny rules; when there are two, religious war reigns; when there are many, liberty comes,” Voltaire observed. The best that we can wish for Islam is not “phobia” or “philia” but a benevolent indifference in a spiritual marketplace, open to all beliefs. But it is precisely this indifference that the fundamentalists want to eradicate. It cannot be the equal of other faiths, since it believes itself superior to them all ... +