Historical tropes singling out Islam are not new but must not be mainstreamed
Adding insult to deepest injury, following the Christchurch White Nationalist terror attack, Australian Senator Fraser Anning’s Islamophobic remarks on official parliamentary stationery were shared worldwide on social media and put the Australian electoral process in considerable infamy. Yet, the comments he made about Islam were by no means fringe and have been a recurring theme in Occidental discourse for at least a thousand years and documented by the late historian Edward Said in his classic book Orientalism. The demonization of the Prophet Muhammad as a despot, child molester and misogynist have been repeated with impunity by not only right wing fanatics but by Oxbridge professors and even a Nobel laureate in literature like V.S. Naipaul. The vilest of these critiques have repeatedly been challenged for historical authenticity and even in legal courts in Europe, but still persist just as many anti-Semitic tropes do against our Jewish brethren.
So the usual argument at the heart of this visceral fear and loathing of Islam is that the religion has a history of expansionism and evangelism and that the scriptures are exclusionary and supremacists. No doubt Islamic scriptures in their literal form have many supremacist and exclusionary attributes which would not be compatible with modern liberal societies. However, such scriptural issues are by no means exclusive to Islam and are an issue in all the Abrahamic faiths. Indeed, even ostensibly pacifist faith traditions like Buddhism have found exclusionary and violent manifestations in places like Myanmar. Thus singling out Islam for such issues is disingenuous, particularly since much of the criticism comes from adherents of other faith traditions with similar histories.
More significantly, such attacks on Islam fail to appreciate that most Muslims are working to modernize interpretations of Islam for we see these literalist tendencies as caustic and corrosive to our own internal harmony. A vast majority of jihadist violence is carried out by Muslims against fellow Muslims. This in and of itself suggests that as with other absolutist faith traditions, Islam too is struggling with reconciling scriptural dogma with modernity. This struggle also includes reinterpretations of Sharia law, which has become another dog whistle for right wing fanatics in the media. Most Muslim countries are finding ways to use principles of independent reasoning in Islam, known as “ijtihad” to modernize interpretations of Sharia law. So while surveys of Muslim migrants may show that they will overwhelmingly support “sharia,” they are absolutely not likely to support every literal element of seventh century sharia any more than contemporary Jews would support every element of Talmudic laws; Catholics would support every Papal Indulgence; or Hindus would support every Vedic law.
It is high time that the media recognize such nuances in their communications about Islam. The clichéd but wise phrase from Alexander Pope’s eighteenth century Essay on Criticism — “a little learning is dangerous thing” — is poignantly apparent in Australian media coverage of Islam. This in turn feeds into the pseudo-intellectualism of the far-right who will be quick to start quoting the Quran’s more incendiary verses out of context and indoctrinating their minions with hate. If they are truly sincere regarding concerns about absolutist ideologies, they should be willing to then question all religious traditions as well as secular political ideologies that foment exclusion. If historical injustices committed by Muslims, including slavery, are their rallying cry they should also be willing to chastise the pernicious history of White colonialism and expansionary “discovery doctrines.” The reality is that racism, exclusion and discrimination are sadly all too common human failings that have infected each and every creed. No faith tradition or ethnicity should feel immune to such sinister tendencies.
What multiculturalism offers is an opportunity to collectively confront such tendencies which we all have and to find ways of transcending them. It should be noted that indigenous and Aboriginal politics must also recognize the dangers of exclusion if carried too far. Let us not forget that the Nazis tried to use Nativist politics by comparing themselves to indigenous people of the Americas in some of their propaganda. We should celebrate historical primacy of settlement of communities and preserve unique attributes of cultures like language, music and art that arose in isolation but not get anchored in such a history so as to exclude or to feel threatened by a more blended future.
Multiculuralism does indeed lead to conflict, but all human progress has occurred through some measure of social conflict. Living in homogenous isolation as some societies like Japan have argued for is unsustainable for purely practical reasons of resource distribution but also for ensuring a more collectively informed and wiser planetary population. Each society brings its own set of comparative advantages in terms of biological resilience to certain climatic conditions and pathogens as well as a range of specific skill sets which can lead to collective good when allowed to develop with opportunities. This should be the way forward in engaging with Islamophobia rather than either being an apologist for an “angelic terrorist” impacted by his father’s cancer to hate; or unearthing the sad skeletons of Gallipoli in a bellicose statement from the Turkish presidency. The burden of confronting exclusion, extremism and hate falls on us all — Muslims and non-Muslims alike. Tropes and canards that single out one community in what is a collective human failing must be resolutely rejected.
Saleem H. Ali is Distinguished Professor of Geography at the University of Delaware (USA) and a Professorial Research Fellow at the University of Queensland. He is a citizen of Australia, Pakistan and the United States.