Islam and the Politics of Culture in Europe: Memory, Aesthetics, Art [1. Aufl.] 9783839421765

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Frank Peter, Sarah Dornhof, Elena Arigita (eds.) Islam and the Politics of Culture in Europe

global local Islam

Frank Peter, Sarah Dornhof, Elena Arigita (eds.)

Islam and the Politics of Culture in Europe Memory, Aesthetics, Art

We gratefully acknowledge the support of the Berne University Research Foundation, which provided funds toward the publication of this book.

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de © 2013 transcript Verlag, Bielefeld

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Cover layout: Vlad Atanasiu Proofread & typeset by the editors Printed by Majuskel Medienproduktion GmbH, Wetzlar ISBN 978-3-8376-2176-1

Islam and the Politics of Culture in Europe: Memory, Aesthetics, Art Introduction: Islam and the Politics of Culture in Europe Frank Peter, Sarah Dornhof, Elena Arigita | 9

The ‘Cordoba Paradigm’: Memory and Silence around Europe’s Islamic Past Elena Arigita | 21

Culture, Identity and Civilisation: The Arabs and Islam in the History of Spain Fernando Rodríguez Mediano | 41

Istanbul’s Multiculturalism Reimagined in Contemporary British Fiction Nagihan Haliloğlu | 61

Narratives of Belonging and Exclusion: Offering the Museum of Islamic Art as a lieu d’identité Riem Spielhaus | 75

Visual Government and Islamophobia Frank Peter | 93

Veiled Bodies, Vile Speech: Islam, the Carnivalesque and the Politics of Profanation Maha El Hissy | 127

On Tattoos and other Bodily Inscriptions: Some Reflections on Trauma and Racism David Tyrer | 143

Seeing Difference, Seeing Differently Sarah Dornhof | 163

Fun and Faith, Music and Muslimness: Dynamics of Identity of Dutch-Moroccan Youth Miriam Gazzah | 187

Performing Vision: Re-presentation in Islam Wendy M. K. Shaw | 203

Confronting Images: Jahangir versus King James I Valerie Gonzalez | 219

From Haptic to Optical, Performance to Figuration: A History of Representation at the Bottom of a Bowl Laura U. Marks | 237

List of Authors

| 265

Acknowledgements

The idea for this book matured in the course of a conference series organized in 2010 and 2011 within the research network “Configurations of Muslim traditions in European secular public spheres” (2008-2011) funded by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO). First and foremost, we would like to thank Martin van Bruinessen and Werner Schiffauer for their support. We are indebted for discussions and feedback to Alexandre Caeiro, Jeanette Jouili, Schirin Amir-Moazami, Nadia Fadil, Sarah Bracke, Ruth Mas, Annelies Moors, Christine Jacobsen, Riem Spielhaus, Maleiha Malik, Heiko Henkel, Knut Graw, Dietrich Reetz, Jörn Thielmann, Saira Malik, Arzu Ünal and Sara Ludin. It is thanks to them and to institutional support from ISIM in Leiden, the European University Viadrina in Frankfurt (Oder), Casa Árabe in Cordoba and Madrid, Zentrum Moderner Orient in Berlin, Utrecht University, the University of Amsterdam and KU Leuven that this collaborative project proved possible. We are also grateful to Jørgen Nielsen from the Centre for European Islamic Thought in Copenhagen for his support. Casa Árabe in Cordoba generously contributed to the final conference. Jenny Schroth provided professional logistical help at Viadrina University. Samuli Schielke kindly helped to organize a conference which was graciously hosted at the Zentrum Moderner Orient.

A Note on Transliteration This volume uses a simplified transliteration system. With the exception of the ’ to indicate the ‫ ء‬and the ‘ to indicate the ‫ﻉ‬, no diacritical marks are used. NonEnglish words have been italicized only on their first occurrence. Words which are reasonably familiar to the English-speaking reader have not been italicized and are rendered in their conventional form.

Introduction: Islam and the Politics of Culture in Europe Frank Peter, Sarah Dornhof, Elena Arigita

In debates about Islam, references to multiculturalism are manifold. While the meaning and the very legitimacy of the term multiculturalism are hotly contested, the meaning of culture is given a relatively easy ride. ‘Culture’ in multiculturalism is confined to group identities and collective ways of life. These group identities are problematized in multiple ways; not only are the homogeneity of cultures and the boundaries of cultural groups debated, but the very feasibility of talking about discrete cultures is regularly questioned. Nevertheless, the debate about multiculturalism builds strongly on notions of culture as group identity, while controversies about multiculturalism center around issues of recognition and legal rights. The studies assembled in this volume suggest shifting the focus and exploring other dimensions of ‘culture’. In the fields of film, literature, commemoration, comedy, music and art institutions, the chapters study ‘culture’ in relation to the political rationalities of governing Islam in Europe. Culture is approached here neither as group identity and collective way of life, nor as the fundamental symbolic structures enabling the cognitive organization of reality. Nor is culture simply what the professional practitioners of culture claim to do. Rather, culture refers to semiotic practices which link the making of subjects with specific configurations of the social in which ‘culture’ is represented as a distinct sphere (Bennett, 2003). Culture signifies here a set of knowledges, traditions, techniques and authorities which act upon the social by building on and shaping the aesthetic and affective dispositions and faculties of subjects. Over the past two decades, there have been significant developments in European cultural production. The ways in which Islam as religion relates to culture have become more complex through a number of interrelating processes. In the course of the 1990s, the predominant trend in the public perception was the

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emergence of Muslim religiosities which, to varying degrees, had been disconnected from specific cultures (Roy, 2002; Mandaville, 2001). Much has been said about community bonds newly created beyond the homeland and about the growing importance of references to universal Islam. Another process was intersecting with this one, although less noticed back then, and it complicated the narrative of ‘deculturalization’. This was the emergence of “popular cultural manifestations of ‘Islam’ in Europe” (Swedenburg, 2001). In the 1990s, it was particularly important in the field of music. Today, Muslim writers, artists and musicians have achieved varying degrees of prominence (Chambers, 2011; El Asri, 2009), and a new market for pious art forms is emerging in Europe and North America (Gazzah in this volume; van Nieuwkerk, 2011). Separated from this pious art scene not by a boundary, but rather by zones of passage and interstitial places, there are numerous artists with complex personal relations to Islamic cultures who cannot easily be placed in a distinct category. Impressionistic evidence would suggest that many artists – writers, filmmakers, visual artists, etc. – with biographical ties to Muslim countries have been led in the course of the past decade to engage intensively with Islam, previously a topic of minor importance (Bourget, 2008; Tarr, 2005, pp. 198-202). Indeed, the place of Islam in public culture more generally has changed, particularly since 9/11. While Islam and Muslims have, as is widely acknowledged, been providing material for various cultural practices and artifacts in Europe for many centuries, European Muslims have rarely been featured in this kind of production. This is now changing fast. Numerous novels, comedies, films, and comics attest to it. At the same time, many efforts are being made to incorporate Islam into European cultural memory and art. A number of art institutions have embarked on initiatives to define the field of historical and contemporary ‘Islamic art’ and to promote it (Spielhaus in this volume; Winegar, 2008). The logic at work here, it has been argued, is that of the ‘cultural game’, turning the work of non-European artists in general into representations of ‘their culture’, and charging the individual artist with the burden of the group (Oguibe, 2004; Kosnick, 2007). Likewise, a conflictual process of rewriting European memories has been initiated, aiming to recognize the entangled and shared histories of Islam and Europe. The history of Spain, and al-Andalus in particular, has become a paradigm for the ideal of multiculturalism and tolerance. Today it is reformulated in multiple variations and has been subjected to critical questioning (Arigita and Rodríguez Mediano in this volume). The topos of intercommunal coexistence in the Ottoman Empire is emerging as another narrative of tolerance (Haliloğlu in this volume). Rewriting Islamic histories of Europe intersects in many ways with an ongoing surge of interest in Europe’s

Introduction | 11

colonial history. Whereas the history of colonialism had long remained a minor academic field, these debates are now fought out in public. They are taken up in novels and movies and broad public debates, and contribute to defining the present of Europe as a postcolonial one. As suggested above, these developments relate to a broader political picture. There can be no doubt that they are facilitated by sometimes powerful institutional incentives. Winegar has argued that US art professionals who organize events displaying “‘another side’ of the Middle East” are “(m)otivated by the rationale of building what is often referred to as a ‘bridge of understanding’”. In her view, this motivation is inscribed into a broader strategy of “American cultural elites” who seek to safeguard their “liberal belief” in universal humanity against the polarizing war-mongering (Winegar, 2008). In some European countries, Muslim cultural production benefits from State subsidies under programs to contain radicalization, and for several years the US State Department has been sending “hip-hop ambassadors” to various parts of the world to win over young Muslims (Aidi, 2011). The examples could continue at length. One way to frame this development in broader terms is proposed by Žižek, who has described how a “tolerant liberal multiculturalism” is being reshaped in the 21st century. Žižek’s starting point is a shift in the political constellation of Europe which results from anti-migrant racism going mainstream. According to him, opposition to such racism by “progressive liberals” is less categorical than it appears at first sight. What this seemingly outright rejection of racism affirms as possible and necessary is, indeed, only the “experience of the Other deprived of its Otherness – the decaffeinated Other” (Žižek, 2011). It is, as Lentin and Titley pointedly formulate it, a “cost-free politics of multiculturalism” which is emerging in the current context (Lentin and Titley, 2011, p. 5). The various initiatives currently directed at Islam fit within this political framework of ‘depriving the Other of its Otherness’: they aim to promote recognition of the civilizational achievements of Muslims, many of which are now shared globally, and to promote artistic work by Muslims designed for global consumption. This analysis certainly has its merits. It correctly identifies how many in this field of culture rationalize their support for Islam-related initiatives. At the same time, this perspective also raises questions. For one, we can ask what conditions are necessary to secure liberal multiculturalism as cost-free in the long term, and how the threshold of ‘cost-free’ would be defined for different configurations of multiculturalism. More importantly, one wonders if the political transformation sketched out here is supported to determine cultural practices on all levels fully and in identical ways? What would be the effect of adopting different analytic

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scales when examining how practices are connected to these broad transformations (cf. Graham 2012)? Another set of questions, more central to this volume, has to do with the concept of culture in debates about multiculturalism. Briefly put, these debates are marked by a tendency to consider ‘culture’ as subordinate to politics and to define it in relation to group identity. Culture, in this logic, is what enables the identity of a group, and it is this identity which legitimates or renders necessary a debate about collective ‘rights’ (Reckwitz, 2001). As to cultural practices, they are of interest in this debate primarily as the expression of a given identity whose protection is debated in terms of (il)legitimacy, in both the political and the judicial sphere. In a sense, the very structure of the debate about ‘multiculturalism’ – a debate where the rights of culture are ultimately decided by politics – reinforces the idea that culture can be controlled and contained in political programs. The inverse question – about how political programs are reshaped, intentionally or otherwise, through individual or collective practices of culture – is asked less often. The predominance attributed here to concepts of law and politics is no accident. It fits into a wider pattern of how the category ‘Europe’ is approached in scholarly studies. Broadly speaking, we can currently identify three dominant ways of rationalizing Europe in relation to Islam, and to some extent they overlap. First, Europe and the nation-states constituting it are defined as normative orders. Normative orders may refer to values, legal norms, or to the political theories to which these orders of justification refer back. The reference to conflicting norms and values (both terms are often used interchangeably) – whether with regard to freedoms, gender or secularism – is an indispensable element in analyses of current controversies, and it is one way to conceptualize ‘Europe’ as a space. Second, Europe is defined as a set of social spaces. It is certainly difficult to avoid thinking of Europe or, for that matter, religion, in social categories. Sociological studies of migration have greatly shaped current debates about Muslim religiosities. Nevertheless, it is hotly debated today whether we are witnessing an undue ‘Islamization’ of problems which are basically social. The notion that controversies about Islam need to be understood in relation to social processes which are more fundamental than normative orders and partly independent of them is increasingly widespread. Third and finally, Europe is conceived as an entity whose identity is a historical one. From this perspective, the space for possible configurations of Islam in Europe and its representation are examined on the basis of the historically constituted matrix of the present day. This volume broadens the perspective and offers a number of analytical approaches to explore the relationships between Islam and the politics of culture

Introduction | 13

in Europe. Our focus is on Europe as a space emerging through images and sounds, narratives, laughter, fantasies and memories which are inscribed in bodies and sensibilities. A common thread throughout these chapters is the visibility of Islam and the way it is visualized. The accrued visibility of Islam has been much commented upon since the 1990s. Its relationship to processes of Islamic revival among ‘second-generation’ Muslims, not least women, has been highlighted (Göle and Ammann, 2004; Jonker and Amiraux, 2006). As a central locus to many conflicts, it has become the quintessential expression of the transformation Europe’s Muslim populations and Europe herself are undergoing. In the context of debates on multiculturalism, the visibility of Muslims has often been approached as a problematic of representation, and the challenge it implies has been formulated in terms of recognition or misrecognition. Research into the visibility of Muslims is thus centrally concerned with the nature of images and narratives representing Muslims as a social group, which – historically situated or ahistorically – serve as the Other to European identity. Visibility tends to be used synonymously with representation and referentiality. Images are taken for cultural codes whose semantics offer the possibility to arrive at an unambiguous interpretation. While the struggles over interpreting offensive images are endless, they have not shaken belief in the transparency of meaning. The idea that images are readable subsumes visuality to semantic codes – often identified as frames – and marginalizes the aesthetic and sensible experience involved in any encounter with images and words alike. This relative disregard for the visual is by no means exceptional. W.J.T. Mitchell (2002) has argued that this disregard is part of a more general pattern. He maintains that we tend to analyze only the social construction of the visual field without paying much attention to the visual constitution of the social field. Given the status of Said’s critique of Orientalism in studies of representations of Islam, it is not uninteresting to note that Said himself pointed out his uneasiness with regard to the visual. In an interview conducted in 1998 by W.J.T. Mitchell (1998), he claimed not to have an elaborate vocabulary for talking about visual arts. Some chapters in this volume focus more particularly on the visibility of Muslims in its problematic dimensions. They devote serious attention to the fact that, as the many controversies about images and their interpretation demonstrate, ways of seeing images cannot be completely regulated and controlled. Indeed, as we shall see here, images themselves can be used to evoke complex meanings that play on ambivalence and excess. Learning to see such complex and ambivalent representations of difference, capable of disturbing and extending established modes of perception, is one way through which the subordination of the image to linguistic codes can be overcome (Dornhof in this volume). From a different point

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of view, the problematic racialization of Muslims offers grounds to challenge the idea of sweeping visual regimes that neatly determine the representation of Muslims. Like Jews, Muslims in Europe can be seen to be in a position of indeterminacy, i.e. difficult to categorize in ethnic terms and at the same time adherents of a religion deemed excessive by comparison with conventional notions of religion. Europe’s Muslim subjects metaphorically display a kind of ghostly visibility, where the tension between different bodily inscriptions creates indeterminacy and excess (Tyrer in this volume). This reflection opens up new perspectives for analyzing movies like Submission by Theo van Gogh and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, often referred to as the paradigmatic expression of European Islamophobia. The indeterminacy in identifying Muslims as racial subjects raises the problematic of recognizing anti-Muslim racism as racism which still entails notions of race as naturally and transparently manifest in the body. The visibility of Muslims must also be discussed in relation to the various modes of spectatorship and rationalities of governance which structure them. When analyzing specific media, it is important to reflect upon the way in which meta-categories such as liberalism, secularism, or multiculturalism are used. Many understandings of these notions tend to obscure tensions and contradictions within practices of government. They lead us to think about practices in terms of systems and to conceptualize change exclusively as systemic change. When we shift attention to the heterogeneous rationalities of spectatorship and visualization coexisting in governmental practices, we are better placed to discern the moments and spaces where inconsistencies and tensions within government enable shifts and transformations in the visualization of Muslims. These shifts are important in the cultural media produced today (Peter in this volume). While often related to the promotion of Muslims as the ‘decaffeinated Other’, these media cannot necessarily be reduced to it. Indeed, the very idea that alterity – the Other – can be reworked at will through cultural media needs to be interrogated. As many ongoing debates show, questions eventually arise about what is shown, the right way to see it, and whether it should be shown at all. How these questions are debated and answered is not arbitrary, but will always, to some degree, escape direct programming and control. In current cultural productions, humor appears in different ways as a means to create common subjectivities, whether by breaking up and differentiating categories such as Muslims and Europeans, or by turning social norms and hierarchies upside down in a carnavalesque manner, or through acts of profanation. Profanation can be seen in the way in which satirical works appropriate religious icons and religious norms to reformulate them in vilifying, pornographic or otherwise distorting words and images (El Hissy in this volume).

Introduction | 15

But we can also see how such appropriations of religiously regulated visualities simply offend Muslims while relying on institutionalized polemics against Islam. This kind of offense, which often claims to criticize Islamic fundamentalism, must be distinguished from profanation. While the former reproduces symbolic otherness, the latter creates differences void of any determined use. Whether we focus on acts of profanation, humor or differentiated views, such approaches share an understanding of cultural politics that does not subsume culture to a predefined matrix of ‘politics’, considering instead the political transformations that are effected through cultural practices. By putting forward this perspective on cultural politics, the limits of asking whether or not art productions should be permitted, tolerated or desired as ‘cultural expression’, as something that finds its ultimate rationality in the culture and identity of a group, become apparent. ‘Memory’ functions today as a partial proxy for culture, and just like culture it is closely constrained by geopolitical boundaries which at the same time it serves to define. Memory politics are examined here as a major site to flesh out and make legible notions such as European culture and Western civilization and how they relate – or not – to Islam and Muslims. Indeed, the ‘memory boom’ which Europe has witnessed in recent decades has in many ways been furthered by the aim to incorporate Islam. In the context of this recent ‘boom’ in academic and political interest for cultural memory, historians like Jay Winter (2006) and David Berliner (2005) have warned against the conflation between memory, culture, and national identity. They draw attention to a specific kind of memory act which “overextends” memory so that past histories are remembered as the foundation of a group’s cultural identity. In the process, such memory acts produce an essentialized and competitive notion of culture. The memory of al-Andalus is a case in point when it is turned, as today, into a paradigm for tolerance and ‘convivencia’. Representations of Europe’s history in ‘grand narratives’ of a tolerant cohabitation of different cultures and religions terminated by the Reconquista tend to employ the memory of al-Andalus to make exclusive claims about whether or not Islam is part of Europe. Unlike these exclusivist representations of the European heritage, chapters in this volume show how memory is a heterogeneous complex, combining narratives, counternarratives and silences that are expressed through manipulations, appropriations and mediations, but also through forgetting and oblivion (Arigita in this volume). From this angle, the analytical focus shifts to how memory can introduce ruptures and changes into the present, disrupting narratives of cultural or civilizational continuity based on a dualistic divide between Europe and its Other. Rothberg suggests the notion of “multidirectional memory” to analyze the dynamic processes of transfer, “interference, overlap, and mutual constitution of seemingly

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distinct collective memories” (Rothberg, 2006, p. 162). Memories of the Holocaust, Rothberg argues, have not always blocked other memories from view, but have helped to articulate traumatic legacies of colonialism and decolonization. Turning to recent representations of Muslims in Germany, Bodemann and Yurdakul (2008) have similarly shown how public interventions and novels relate to and “borrow” from Jewish narratives. Crucial for any traumatic experience to be remembered and worked through is the notion of testimony, or the listening of another (Felman and Laub, 1992; Caruth, 1996). This is also true of what Marianne Hirsch (1997) has called “postmemory”, designating a transgenerational space of remembrance that is dominated by traumatic events and narratives of previous generations. Postmemory may be helpful in understanding how postcolonial writers, filmmakers and artists explore an emphatic and imaginative remembrance of slavery, colonialism and decolonization in the absence of direct experience of such traumatic histories. Postmemory is not limited to a cultural group but can draw connections across temporalities and cultures (Ward, 2007). Notions such as postmemory or multidirectional memory thus transform the idea of testimony from an act of witnessing into more heterogeneous aesthetic assemblages of fictional and documentary writing, film and other artistic work. Memory, and the aesthetic innovation it inspires, can create what Rothberg, drawing on Michael Warner’s work, calls a “counterpublic testimony” (2006, p. 179). Here, a public is characterized by the reflexive circulation of discourse, constructing a social entity among strangers through multiple forms of address. From this perspective, memory does not necessarily function as foundational history, but creates associative links between different collective histories. Recent controversies in Europe about offensive images have led to a broader debate on the status of images and the arts in Islam. As so often, the positions adopted in this debate have tended to become polarized. On the one hand, the (partial or general) prohibition of images is presented as a feature of Islam and, of course, evaluated in different ways. For some, it is yet another addition to the list of Islam’s deficiencies, for others, part of the normative edifice of Islam and of Muslim sensibilities requiring protection. On the other hand, numerous voices have rejected the case for Islamic aniconism or iconoclasm, drawing attention to historical image-making traditions with Islamic or other themes. This debate has its limits, not only because it is primarily interested in the regulation of images, but also because it presupposes that images are understood as either mimetic representation or, as supposedly is the case for Muslims, as its denial, i.e. a refusal to distinguish between the image and its referent. What is lost in this debate is the broader question about how to conceptualize the making of images, their

Introduction | 17

ontological status, and the way they are seen. This obscures the possibility that Muslim protests about certain images emerge from within a different practice of visuality (see Mahmood, 2009). That is the question this volume seeks to highlight as both prior to and inseparable from any discussion about the meaning and offense caused by images. This problematic can be approached from different perspectives. The critique of European art history and its implied normative understanding of what constitutes an image is one important starting point. Adopting such a perspective can lead to an examination of how Muslim practices of prayer rely upon a performative gaze of believers which does not fit conventional categories derived from histories of European art (Shaw in this volume). In this account, the directed gaze of Muslim believers is led through and beyond a focus on specific objects – such as the negative space of the mihrab in prayer – and the sensory field more generally. This means that the act of gazing ultimately turns inward, and what it accomplishes can be described as the believer drawing closer to God. Differences in visual practices and perception are not necessarily a question of different aesthetic traditions, but may also appear in the form of tension, disruption or paradox within an image. From this point of view, Mughal art, so often read as a typical example of aesthetic syncretism, presents dynamic forms of appropriating the Other in or as an image. The encounter between the opposed logics of Mughal allegorical, and European illusionist portraiture, for example, creates a powerful dialectic tension within the image which unsettles the power constellations associated with different ideas of representation (Gonzalez in this volume). From a different perspective, the particularity of Islamic nonrepresentational art can be approached through certain of its forms. Among these, in particular, haptic space, emerging through the breakdown of the figure/ground distinction, which invites “not distant contemplation but intimate involvement, the eyes moving over the surface as though touching it” and discovering “momentary ways to make sense of them” (Marks, 2010, p. 54, 63); and the abstract line, a line that “seems to move for the pleasure of moving rather than to reproduce a preconceived form”. These forms enable an aesthetics of becoming which is specific to Islam, but not exclusive to it nor simply the opposite of ‘representational art’. On the contrary, these forms contribute to European artistic production, which adapts them in multiple ways (Marks in this volume). The history of how ceramics from Islamic Spain travel to Christian lands in Europe and transform shows how the abstract line is tamed and becomes figurative during the Renaissance. However, the broader history of the unfolding of Islamic aesthetics in Europe is more dialectical and includes an inverse movement with the rise of abstract art since the late 19th century.

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References Aidi, H., 2011. The Grand (Hip-Hop) Chessboard Race, Rap and Raison d’Etat. Middle East Report.41(260), pp. 25-39. Bennett, T., 2003.Culture and Governmentality.In: J. Z. Bratich, J. Packer and C. McCarthy, eds. Foucault, Cultural Studies, and Governmentality. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Bodemann Y. M. and Yurdakul, G., 2008. Learning Diaspora: German Turks and the Jewish Narrative. In: Y. M. Bodemann. The New German Jewry and the European Context. The Return of the European Jewish Diaspora. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. Bourget, C., 2008. 9/11 and the Affair of the Muslim Headscarf in Essays by Tahar Ben Jelloun and Abdelwahab Meddeb. French Cultural Studies. 19 pp. 71-84. Caruth, C., 1996. Unclaimed Experience: trauma, narrative, and history. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Chambers, C., 2011. British Muslim Fictions. Interviews with Contemporary Writers. Basingstoke: Palgrave. El Asri, F., 2009. L’expression musicale de musulmans européens. Création de sonorités et normativité religieuse. Revue europeenne des migrations internationales, 25(2), pp. 35-50. Felman, Sh. and Laub, D., 1992. Testimony: crises of witnessing in literature, psychoanalysis, and history. New York and London: Routledge. Göle, N. and Ammann, L., eds. 2004. Islam in Sicht. Der Auftritt von Muslimen im öffentlichen Raum. Bielefeld: transcript. Graham, H., 2012. Scaling Governmentality. Cultural Studies. 26 (4), pp. 565592. Hirsch, M., 1997. Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory. Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: Harvard University Press. Jonker, G. and Amiraux, V., eds. 2006. Politics of Visibility. Young Muslims in European Public Spaces. Bielefeld: transcript. Kosnick, K., 2007. Migrant Media: Turkish Broadcasting and Multicultural Politics in Berlin. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Mandaville, P., 2001. Transnational Muslim Politics. Reimagining the Umma. New York and London: Routledge. Mahmood, S., 2009. Religious Reason and Secular Affect: An Incommensurable Divide? Critical Inquiry, 35(4), pp. 836-862. Marks, L.U., 2010. Enfoldment and Infinity. An Islamic Genealogy of New Media Art. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press.

Introduction | 19

Lentin, A. and Titley, G., 2011. The Crises of Multiculturalism. London: Zed Books. Mitchell, W.J.T., 2002. Showing seeing: a critique of visual culture. Journal of Visual Culture, 1(2), pp. 165-181. Mitchell, W. J. T. and Said, E., 1998. The Panic of the Visual: A Conversation with Edward W. Said, Boundary 2(25), pp. 11-33. Van Nieuwkerk, K., ed. 2011. Muslim Rap, Halal Soaps, and Revolutionary Theater. Austin: University of Texas Press. Reckwitz, A., 2001. Multikulturalismustheorien und der Kulturbegriff. Vom Homogenitätsmodell zum Modell kultureller Interferenzen. Berliner Journal für Soziologie, 11(2), pp. 179-200. Rothberg, M., 2006. Between Auschwitz and Algeria. Critical Inquiry, 33(1), pp. 158-184. Roy, O., 2002. Globalised Islam.The Search for a New Ummah. London: Hurst. Oguibe, O., 2004. The Culture Game. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Swedenburg, T., 2001. Islamic Hip-Hop versus Islamophobia: Aki Nawaz, Natacha Atlas, Akhenaton. In T. Mitchell: Global Noise: Rap and Hip-hop Outside the USA. Wesleyean University Press. Tarr, C., 2005. Reframing Difference. Beur and banlieue filmmaking in France. Manchester: University of Manchester Press. Ward, A., 2007. Psychological Formulations. In: J. McLeod, ed. The Routledge Companion to Postcolonial Studies. New York and London: Routledge. Winegar, J., 2008. The Humanity Game: Art, Islam, and the War on Terror. Anthropological Quarterly. 81(3) pp. 651-681. Žižek, S., 2010. Liberal multiculturalism masks an old barbarism with a human face. The Guardian. 3 October (online). Available at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/oct/03/immigration-policyroma-rightwing-europe. >Accessed 23 August 2012@.

The ‘Cordoba Paradigm’: Memory and Silence around Europe’s Islamic Past Elena Arigita

This chapter is set against the backdrop of the numerous debates and controversies that have arisen in connection with the new visibility of Islam following September 2001 and the growing fear not only of terrorist acts, but especially of the social tensions inherent in a geostrategic view based on the Islam vs. the West paradigm for European and western societies in general. Over the course of the last decade, arguments about the compatibility or – in most cases – incompatibility between Islam and so-called ‘European values’ have stimulated public debate, which in turn has led to a series of very different initiatives: educational and cultural programmes, citizenship initiatives, intellectual debates, awards, recognitions and so forth. All of these are diverse in terms of both goals and target audiences. However, what they have in common is that they are explicitly aimed at transcending historical narratives about Europe that exclude Islam or consider it foreign to the essence of Europe as a civilisation, a culture and an identity. Moreover, these initiatives try to find references or legitimacy in the history of Europe for current challenges related to an urban landscape that is visibly more multicultural, and where monolithic discourse about the Muslim ‘other’ is being transformed into multiple discourses with new nuances and greater complexity. Beyond strictly academic debates about deconstructing the idea of Europe and its narrative, these types of local, national and European initiatives, including cultural programmes, national debates and initiatives for dialogue, as well as commemorative events and new readings and disputes about places of memory and commemorative dates, are creating new narratives about Europe with regard to Islam that have the specific aim of providing a response capable of changing the dominant narrative according to which Islam is essentially absent from Europe and inserting it into European history.

22 | Elena Arigita

In many of these cases, the history of al-Andalus plays a central role as a model and reference point for a counter-narrative designed to welcome Islam and subvert the powerful image of Islam as the historical ‘other’ for Europe and the West. It would be impossible to include an exhaustive or even selective list of the initiatives that use al-Andalus as a symbol and reference point, but given that the territorial framework for this chapter is Cordoba, three important examples in which Cordoba is evoked as a symbol of coexistence merit inclusion here: The British Cordoba Foundation (2005) is an independent research and public relations organisation that explains the choice of its name as follows: Why Cordoba? At times when human minds and intellects clash, the spirit of Cordoba is evoked. The symbol of human excellence, intellectual ingenuity and spiritual elation, Cordoba, the city, civilization and people, remains living evidence of the ability of minds and aspirations to meet, collaborate and strive for the common goal of advancement and success.1

The Cordoba Initiative, founded in the United States in 2004, is an association that promotes interfaith and intellectual dialogue, and whose choice of Cordoba for its name is explained thus: The name Cordoba was chosen to symbolize the time in history when Muslims, Jews and Christians lived together in peace and harmony and created a prosperous centre of intellectual, spiritual, cultural and commercial life in the city of Cordoba in Southern Spain.2

In the city of Cordoba itself, the Fundación Paradigma de Córdoba was established in 2010 as the successor to the earlier project founded by the intellectual Roger Garaudy3, and it includes a museum and library as part of a larger project for

1 2 3

Why Cordoba? [online] Available at: http://www.thecordobafoundation.com/ [Accessed 17May 2012]. About us. [online] Available at: http://www.cordobainitiative.org/ [Accessed 17 May 2012]. Roger Garaudy (1913-2012) was a French philosopher whose intellectual and political activism reflects a very particular and unique intellectual journey along the 20th century. During his youth, he took part of the French Resistance and was imprisoned in Algeria. Later he joined the French communist party, becoming a prominent militant, deputy and senator. He was also a firm supporter of the conciliation between Marxism and Christian humanism. However his legacy has been deeply marked by his conversion to Islam in 1982, his commitment to the Palestinian cause and a very controversial book published in 1996 with the title The Founding Myths of Modern Israel. The book was banned and Garaudy was fined in France for Holocaust denial, which is against the law, but he upheld his thesis and gained considerable support in Arab and Islamic countries,

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intercultural and interfaith dialogue. According to its website, the foundation’s statutes express its essential purpose: To remember the central role of Cordoba in that era (9 th – 13th century), the reciprocal interchange of the cultures of the East (Chinese, Hindu, Arab and Persian) and West (GrecoRoman and Judeo-Christian) and the symbiosis in al-Andalus between the three Abrahamic religions: Jewish, Christian and Muslim, fomenting “the exceptional cultural dimension of the city of Cordoba according to the principles and cornerstones of ecumenism, universality and dialogue”.4

The image presented in these paragraphs – also called the ‘spirit of Cordoba’ – is particularly powerful as an evocation of tolerance and intercultural coexistence and, with this same meaning, it has slipped into both political discourse, as seen in President Obama’s reference to Cordoba during his famous speech at the University of Cairo,5 and into a number of cultural productions and educational programmes. However, how is this evocation of the past experienced in the city itself? How is the ‘spirit of Cordoba’ mobilised, who promotes it, who is it targeting, for what purpose and with what results? And most especially, do areas of shadow, silences and oblivions exist in this celebration of the past? This chapter intends to show how cultural politics in a modern local context feed on overarching narratives with which they interact from the standpoint of their own specific characteristics. This requires some analysis of power correlations and tensions between different actors who promote or observe the incorporation of the city’s history into public memory in a project for the future.

4 5

particularly Iran. In 1987 he had settled in Cordoba where, with the support of the local authorities, he established the Roger Garaudy Foundation for the Three Cultures, with the aim of promoting interreligious and intercultural dialogue. However, the polemic about Holocaust denial provoked a standoff, and in 2010, when Garaudy had retired from public life due to advanced age, and doubtless influenced by the candidacy for the European Cultural Capital, the Roger Garaudy Foundation became the Cordoba Paradigm Foundation, managed by local representatives of social and cultural life with the aim of promoting Cordoba as a place of cultural and religious encounter. La Fundación Paradigma Córdoba. [online] Available at: http://www.paradigmacordoba.es/ [Accessed 17 May 2012]. The reference to Cordoba by President Obama in his speech at the University of Cairo on 4 June 2009, while including a historical error by placing the Caliphate and the Inquisition in the same time period, had enormous repercussions in the media that were welcomed in the city. Obama’s celebrated words were: “Islam has a proud tradition of tolerance. We see it in the history of Andalusia and Cordoba during the Inquisition.” The President’s Speech in Cairo: A New Beginning. [online] Available at: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/NewBeginning [Accessed 24 May2012].

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This local context is, then, the city of Cordoba, and the timeframe for this study spans the years when the city was promoting its candidacy to become the European Capital of Culture in 2016, a status ultimately awarded to the northern city of San Sebastian in June 2011. A central part of this unsuccessful project was the Arab-Islamic legacy as a reference point for dialogue and coexistence and a bridge between Europe and the Arab-Islamic world. During the years when the candidacy was being promoted, not only were institutions, foundations and local companies mobilised, but the citizens of Cordoba also experienced the project with growing interest and excitement. In this context, several controversial episodes also occurred with regard to Cordoba’s most emblematic building: the former Mosque and current Catholic Cathedral. During this period, while Cordoba was trying to define a cultural project for the future within the framework of a public European call for proposals, this ‘place of memory’, the Cordoba MosqueCathedral, generated demands about its historical past, as well as some silences, that revealed how many different actors, with objectives that were not only diverse but at times at odds and contradictory, were laying claim to al-Andalus.

On the politics of memory, the historical past, oblivion and silence Narratives about history, i.e., how a historical discourse is constructed, form an essential part of memory studies. The interrelationship between memory and narrative is clearly a quite multi-disciplinary terrain, where different research methodologies drawn from history and the social sciences have made important contributions. If we take the concepts of ‘memory’ and ‘narrative’ as a starting point to reflect on how Europe and Islam relate, we must first consider two questions. The first concerns how to distinguish memory from history, two concepts that are generally differentiated intuitively. It is easy to conclude, looking at how Europe is defined, celebrated and delimited with respect to its neighbouring regions and what claims are conventionally made about the essence of Europe, that the underlying views contradict historical knowledge.6 It is not easy, however, 6

Particularly in the case of the ‘history of Spain’, contemporary Arabism and historiography have made notable contributions, specifically in this history of alAndalus. This chapter does not intend to provide a rigorous and exhaustive survey, but it is important to recognise the influence of the works by Eduardo Manzano before embarking upon this discussion. “La construcción histórica del pasado nacional”, In Juan Sisinio Pérez Garzón, Eduardo Manzano, Ramón López Facal and Aurora Rivière, (2000). La gestión de la memoria: La historia de España al servicio del poder. Barcelona: Crítica, pp. 33-62; Pedro Martínez Montávez (2011). Significado y símbolo

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to define the distinction between memory and history. The French historian Pierre Nora gives memory a central role relative to historiography in his monumental work Realms of Memory: Memory is always a phenomenon of the present, a bond tying us to the eternal present; history is a representation of the past. Memory, being a phenomenon of emotion and magic, accommodates only those facts that suit it. It thrives on vague, telescoping reminiscences, on hazy general impressions or specific symbolic details. It is vulnerable to transferences, screen memories, censorings, and projections of all kinds. History, being an intellectual, nonreligious activity, calls for analysis and critical discourse. (Nora, 1997, p. 3)

Following this line of thought on history and memory, Juan Sisinio Pérez Garzón (2000), in La gestión de la memoria: La historia de España al servicio del poder, notes that: History, as a discipline that manages memory, must re-examine sources of information; it must relinquish intentionalist or teleological explanations and open itself up to new documents of social memory to capture the continuous interrelationship between the local, national and international and to understand differences, to comprehend and place itself in the position of the “other”. (Pérez Garzón, 2000, p. 3)

This quotation is particularly important when addressing the narrative about the Islamic legacy in the history of Spain, since the interpretation of this period has been a constant source of dispute among academics in Spain (though not exclusively) when determining its influence on the idea of Spain and Spanish identity (Stallaert, 1998). Beyond the academic debate, in the last decade – i.e., in an overall context of societal fear of Islam and violent terrorist attacks in cities – the history of al-Andalus has reached a broad swath of the public through pseudohistory books, genuine bestsellers that trace some sort of continuity in the thesis that Islam is involved in a secular battle against Spain. Fear of Islam in Spain after the 11 March bombings also feeds on a pseudo-historical revisionism determined to demonstrate that the threat of Islam is present and has been a continuous thread in the history of Spain and, as some of the titles of essays and new literature for popular consumption on Islam indicate, that certain passages from history expose

de al-Andalus. Almería: CantArabia, Fundación Ibn Tufayl de Estudios Árabes and Caja Granada; and Fernando Rodríguez Mediano, 2011. “Al-Andalus, España y la inexistencia de las culturas”. Revista de Occidente, 362-363, pp. 75-95.

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Islam as, essentially, an ‘anti-Spain’ religion.7 However, what is most interesting about Pérez Garzón’s quotation is his insistence on the need to open up to new sources in order for history “to comprehend and place itself in the position of the ‘other’” instead of wielding “intentionalist or teleological explanations”, and to search for new sources that can help to understand the interrelationship between the local, national and transnational. Adopting a position of otherness has benefitted immensely from anthropology’s contribution to memory research, although it has in itself been subject to rigorous questioning. Ever since Maurice Halbwachs coined the term ‘collective memory’, it has evolved towards a common usage that deviates from its original meaning, which for Halbwachs was the reconstruction of the past in the present, in which each small trace of the “past in the present” is designated as memory: We might perhaps be led to distinguish two kinds of activities within social thought: on the one hand a memory, that is, a framework made out of notions that serve as landmarks for us and refer us exclusively to the past; on the other hand a rational activity that takes its point of departure in the conditions in which the society at the moment finds itself, in other words, in the present. (Halbwachs, 1992, p. 183)

Particularly in the last decade, out of foresight or even concern, literature on memory has discussed the overuse of memory and the undeniable boom in memory studies. Historians like Jay Winter have emphasised the dangers that result when memory becomes tangled up with identity, i.e., the overextension and lack of definition inherent in the concept of ‘memory’ in relation to others, like ‘culture’ and ‘identity’ (Winter, 2000). Certainly, the danger of overextension exists, but there is no consensus on the definition of the term or among the different types of opposition. However, the question posed by Nora does frame the objective of this study, which is to tackle

7

These works basically argue the same thesis, although there are nuances of difference and some are more schematic or elaborate than others: Cesar Vidal, 2005. España frente al Islam: de Mahoma a Ben Laden [Spain versus Islam: from Mohammad to Bin Laden]. Barcelona: La Esfera de los Libros; María Rosa Rodríguez Magda, 2006. La España convertida al Islam [Spain Converted to Islam]. Barcelona: Áltera, and 2008. Inexistente Al Ándalus: de cómo los intelectuales reinventan el islam [Non-Existent alAndalus: how intellectuals reinvent Islam]. Oviedo: Nobel; Gustavo de Arístegui, 2006. La Yihad en España: la obsesión por reconquistar al-Andalus [Jihad in Spain: the obsession with reconquering al-Andalus]. Barcelona: La Esfera de los Libros. Another genre, the reverse or antithesis of this type of revisionism, includes historical novels that recreate al-Andalus as a lost paradise.

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the question of historical narratives in relation to the politics of memory. Furthermore, as David Berliner has noted, the very concept of memory, along with that of culture, makes it possible to observe the continuity and persistence of representations, practices, emotions and institutions (Berliner, 2005, p. 205). In the case of the memory of al-Andalus, it is only possible to allude to contemporary claims to an idea about the historical past which, while not experienced, can nonetheless be reconstructed and claimed, can produce emotions and can possibly give new meaning to certain traditions. Demands about the need to comb through the past in order to build a different present, to remember in the sense of evoking, reminiscing and commemorating different origins (and therefore rejecting other ones), make it possible to talk about discourses related to the idea of mobilising memory as a resource to legitimise a different narrative. The second important question we need to consider is silence. In “Memories between silence and oblivion”, the oral historian Luisa Passerini considers memory in relation to various types of silence, on the one hand, and oblivion on the other: … silences, oblivions and memories are aspects of the same process, and the art of memory cannot but be also an art of forgetting, through the mediation of silence and the alternation of silence and sound (Passerini, 2003, p. 250).

Thus, for Passerini, studying memory also entails the study of oblivions and, quite importantly, silence, which is not simply the absence of memory. For her, silence must be studied in relation to discourse and acts of representation, and the different forms of silence must be examined as well: “taking silence into account means watching out for the links between forms of power and forms of silence” (Passerini, 2005, p. 249), and invites us to reconsider how the identity of one group relates to another. Where memory and remembrance are usually seen as indispensable for social cohesion, she completes this relationship and points to cases in which society or a group opts for silenceand it is not imposed by a regime. In the current context, when the politics of memory are usually framed as conflicts between divergent narratives, Passerini’s concept of ‘histories of silence’ can be used to inspect the issue of the presence and absence of Muslim and other alternative voices that diverge from the official discourse in the celebration of Cordoba as a symbol. Therefore, the two themes that form the framework of this study of contemporary Cordoba and the symbolic capital of its history are, firstly, the formulation of new historical narrative/s regarding memory and secondly, the search for the silences and oblivions in those narratives that welcome Islam as part

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of the historical cultural identity and as a reference point for the construction of citizenship. In these two themes, the local dimension is constantly influenced by a transnational dimension, making Cordoba’s Islamic past a reading for the present.

The Cordoba of al-Andalus as a ‘paradigm’ in the European Capital of Culture 2016 competition Cordoba’s race to be chosen European Capital of Culture was an unusually long one, judging by the experiences of other cities. It was conceived in 2002, and promoted from the very beginning by local businesses with the aim of stimulating the service sector through tourism, although the dream of being named capital dates back to 1992, the year that Madrid was awarded the title. An account of the city’s candidacy and failed dream published in 2012 by the journalist Marta Jiménez and the poet Elena Medel (Jiménez and Medel, 2012) – natives of Cordoba who were professionally and emotionally involved in the project – reveals the intricacies behind this decade-long ‘voyage’ that they designated “the voyage to nowhere”.8 The piece constitutes a first-hand source that provides not only details about the candidacy but, particularly, information about the collective emotions of the population of Cordoba. Additionally, it provides a critical commentary on a model of cultural management that, in their opinion, focused to an excessive degree on the political-institutional dimension and connected poorly with other civil initiatives and the citizenry in general, despite great citizen support for the candidacy. For the study of Cordoba and its legacy presented in this paper, Jiménez and Medel’s account provides a privileged window onto the story, because it constructs a tale, i.e., a narrative of the history of the candidacy, and because a good part of this tale features the symbolic capital of al-Andalus. Over the course of ten years, the contents included in Cordoba’s candidacy project emphasised the image of a city of European culture, with elements of the Islamic past used to form a varied mosaic of proposals – as well as controversies – part of which incorporated the echoes of a much larger debate about Islam and Europe at the local level. The very motto of the candidacy, “The future has roots: celebrating diversity”, contains an allusion to the past and its projection into the future. Furthermore, one of the three key themes of the project was called “The Cordoba Paradigm”. The dossier defined its objectives thus:

8

“The Voyage to Nowhere” is the title of a Spanish film of 1986 written and directed by Fernando Fernán Gómez, who also stars in it. It is a drama that depicts the extremely difficult social conditions in Spain in the 1940s and the decline of professional comedians with the arrival of the cinema.

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[The two programme areas within this theme] seek to bring a modern reading to an old legacy, to draw lessons for today from the city’s symbolic roots in diversity and intercultural dialogue. They aim to show how that heritage can be made meaningful for the present, and how those time-honoured values can lay the foundation for a new collective European outlook. Cordoba thus provides Europe with a fully-operational paradigm within the framework of the new city-based diplomacy.9

The programme for these themes features an Atlas of Cordoba that charts a “geography of values” and spotlights the city as a “European ambassador over a number of routes that rediscover and highlight the evidence of intercultural dialogue”. This itinerary formulates a programme focused on world dialogue, the Andalusi legacy for Europe, the revision of Orientalisms and a series of cultural activities related to “cultures for peace and inclusion”. The expressions in the dossier are sufficiently eloquent and result in a project designed to define Cordoba as a bridge between cultures and its historical legacy as a paradigm, and provide the opportunity to revisit this legacy as an argument to construct cultures for peace and inclusion. Since the slogan “Cordoba Paradigm” is based on the thinking of IranianCanadian philosopher Ramin Jahanbegloo, it is relevant to note here that he himself, in the prologue to Jiménez and Medel’s book, states that “humanism has no future in Europe, except in Cordoba” (Jiménez and Medel, p. 13). Cordoba’s symbolic capital, or the ‘Cordoba Paradigm’ – to use the term coined by Jahanbegloo, which he proposed and defended in articles and his essay (originally published in Spanish) Elogio de la diversidad (2007)10 – evokes and is a model for contemporary concepts of intercultural coexistence and tolerance. In an article published in El País in 2007, he described the symbolic capital of the Islamic legacy in Spain as follows: Today, Spain, like the rest of Europe, is striving to somehow incorporate a rapidly growing Muslim population without losing sight of the diversity of its historical legacy. As many know, while Europe languished during the late Middle Ages, in Andalusia, Muslims, Jews and Christians together formed a complex social fabric based on close and fruitful cultural

9

Propuesta de Candidatura Córdoba 2016, 2011 selection dossier, p. 57 [online] Available at: http://www.cordoba2016.es/files/enlaces_dossieres.html [Accessed 25 May 2012]. 10 This essay, which translates into English as “in praise of diversity”, includes a selection of articles and speeches by the author on dialogue between cultures and the universality of the values of democracy.

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collaboration. Spain, a relatively homogenous society since “coexistence” came to an end in the 15th century and after the expulsion of the Jews and Moriscos, has fewer Muslims than France or Germany. However, it is the only country in Europe where it is possible to have a genuine debate on intercultural understanding and dialogue between different faiths today. The Cordoba paradigm does not only demonstrate the possibilities of interchange through dialogue in which people from different religions and cultures can live in the same space, distinguishing common values and territories without coming to hate either what they are not or those who are not like them, but also highlights the strength of Europe’s diversity of identity, which could encourage greater permeability between the frontiers of Islamic and European civilisations on the south and north shores of the Mediterranean. The Andalusian experience symbolises the potential for universality that human cultures have in terms of communicating with each other. (El País, 11/07/2007)11

Jahanbegloo himself actively supported Cordoba’s candidacy, not only as a member of the last delegation that defended the Cordoba dossier on 27 June, but also earlier, as a participant in the Ibn Rushd Encounters (31 January – 5 February 2011),12 a discussion forum held for the first time in Cordoba to promote continuity, where he put his knowledge at the service of mobilising the city’s symbolic capital. In a text included in the Encounters programme, Jahanbegloo traces the link between the past, the present and the proposal for the future: Today, the main question that Europe and Europeans must answer is how to overcome their fear of Islam and promote the Cordoba model instead of the logic of the Spanish Reconquista of six centuries ago. Of course, after this question comes another: what is the best way for Europe and Europeans to understand and accept their Islamic origins, while Muslims in Europe must revise their perception of Islam as a non-European religion. (Jahanbegloo, 2011)

A very telling indication of the success that this conception of the Cordoba paradigm had on a political-institutional level can be seen in the declaration made

11 Ramim Jahanbegloo, 2007. Tribuna: Excepción española [Tribune: Spanish exception]. El País, [online] 11 July. Available at: http://elpais.com/diario/2007/07/11/opinion/1184104806_850215.html [Accessed 16 May 2012]. 12 El paradigma de Córdoba: Identidad y diversidad. Encuentros Averroes-Córdoba, 31 de enero-5 de febrero 2011 [The Cordoba paradigm.Identity and diversity, Ibn RushdCordoba Encounters]. [online] 5 February 2011. Available at: http://www.casaarabe.es/noticias-arabes/show/encuentros-averroes-cordoba [Accessed 25 May 2012]. This forum highlighted its connection to and continuity with the Averroes Encounters begun in 1994 in Marseilles and held in 2009 in Rabat.

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by Mayor José Antonio Nieto a few hours before learning of the jury’s decision. Nieto had been elected to the post only a month earlier, but he took the project on and represented it, demonstrating a political-institutional unity that went beyond political differences: If they choose Cordoba, they are going to be talking about coexistence, dialogue, tolerance, tradition and modernity and at this time, this discourse is taking place not only between continents and countries, but also in European cities, many of which have integration problems due to religious, ethnic or racial differences.13

However, this issue was more complex in other arenas, or at least its complexity revealed very different dynamics and expressions. In fact, the use of these images, concepts and symbols in the political-institutional discourse was not free from inconsistency or even controversy, but was more or less cloaked and/or silenced or resolved with evident unease. Indeed, at this point, it is appropriate to consider some of the situations that arose in the local context and involved other actors and discourses on the fringe of the official narrative about the ‘Cordoba Paradigm’, in which silence was used as a strategy. In an article in 2000 entitled “The Generation of Memory: Reflections on the “Memory Boom” in Contemporary Historical Studies”, Jay Winter, who largely focuses on memory and World War I, argues that narratives stoked by the politics of memory and the national level do not have the capacity to obstruct local memories because, as he says: Most projects of commemoration have been created far from the centre of political power. Second- and third-order elites have done the original work of remembrance, but frequently their work, originating within civil society, has been taken over by groups in power who feel they have the right and the need to tell us through commemoration how to remember the past. And the framework they tend to adopt is redemptive: Hope springs from tragedy; life moves on. (Winter, 2001)

13 La candidatura propone un marco de tolerancia en el seno de las ciudades [The candidacy proposes a frame of tolerance within the cities]. Diario de Córdoba [online] 28 June 2011. Available at: http://www.diariocordoba.com/noticias/temadia/la-candidatura-propone-un-marco-detolerancia-en-seno-de-las-ciudades_648759.html [Accessed: 16 May 2012]. As mayor following the municipal elections of 22 May 2011, José Antonio Nieto defended the dossier.

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Winter also warns that when considering the politics of memory from the perspective of the state, space must also be made for groups outside the seat of power that construct and contribute as agents of memory. For that reason, he argues, other groups must also be involved in the work of remembrance.

Cordoba on the last leg of the ‘voyage’ and the controversy surrounding the Mosque-Cathedral as a ‘place of memory’ The particular focus of this paper is the context of the final years of Cordoba’s candidacy as they relate to the politics of memory and the types of actors that participated, as well as the question of whether important absences or silences and oblivions existed (especially among the ‘other groups’ referred to by Winter). Which elements played a key role or were silenced? How was a project for the future constructed for a city that used specific images to create a symbol of Cordoba as a ‘paradigm’ of/for European culture? How did this project dovetail with the reality of the city on a local level? If Cordoba has a recognisable image around the world, it is the hall of pillars in its Mosque. Declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1984, it is the most important tourist attraction in the city and also the central image of the evocation of al-Andalus in Cordoba. However, the Mosque today is a Catholic Cathedral and this twofold dimension – tourist/historical and religious – is a steady source of different types of paradox and controversy. During the last leg of the candidacy, situations arose around the Mosque-Cathedral that questioned or refuted the main idea argued in the dossier, that Cordoba exemplified tolerance and coexistence. These controversies were a manifestation of a social fear of Islam, and at the same time they revealed the asymmetries between the narrative of tolerance being promoted and the reality of the local context. In their account, Jiménez and Medel criticise the end result of the night tours of the Mosque-Cathedral, which were promoted as a tourist attraction that would stimulate highly-desired overnight stays by tourists and subsequently produce income for the city’s service sector. The night tours consist of a sound and light show that introduces visitors to the monument. Inaugurated on 7 October 2010, after overcoming resistance from church leaders and delays, the final result was controversial and generated a mixture of frustration and astonishment that was covered by the media.14 According to the authors:

14 Manuel J. Albert, 2010. Usted está en una catedral [You are in a Cathedral]. El País [online] 14 January. Available at:

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It seemed like the church was aiming to create anything but a cultural product, using a catechistic tale full of psalms and Gregorian chants. The semantics of exclusion, the nullification of the true architectural, symbolic, cultural and tourism value of the building: some feared it would distance us from the dream of concord so strongly promoted by the Cordoba candidacy. (Jiménez and Medel, 2012, p. 52)

However, this tension – epitomised by how the tour’s official story was received – was nothing new. In fact, in the last few years, the Mosque-Cathedral has gradually taken shape as a territory subject to the claims and challenges of divergent narratives that see it as a reference point. The idea of Andalusi coexistence as a model for the present is in contrast with that of Islam as a parenthesis, with all of the possible nuances that may exist between the two narratives. In 1991, the Mosque had hosted an Islamic-Christian dialogue dedicated to the Pakistani poet and thinker Muhammad Iqbal. Iqbal himself visited the Mosque in 1931, prayed there, wrote a poem in its honour and, according to the local Cordoba report, was the first Muslim to pray in front of the mihrab since the Mosque became a Catholic Cathedral. In its events section, the local press occasionally publishes recollections of visits by distinguished figures, thus contributing to the creation of a local public memory. Throughout its contemporary history, the Mosque has been one of the places designated for official visits by high-level dignitaries, and the local press recollects visits by Muslim leaders, who have been able to pray in front of the mihrab without any objection.15 The first dispute arose, paradoxically (and it was, indeed, a coincidence), the same year that Cordoba embarked upon its quest to be the European Capital of Culture. On 2 and 3 March 2003, the city hosted the Third Conference on Muslim Women16 convened by the Junta Islámica, one of the pioneering Islamic associations in Spain, mainly made up of Spanish converts, which was very active in obtaining recognition for Islam as a religious minority and official

http://elpais.com/diario/2010/01/14/andalucia/1263424936_850215.html [Accessed 28 May 2012]. 15 In a report in March 2003, the newspaper Diario de Córdoba recollected the 1974 visit by Saddam Hussein, who prayed in front of the mihrab in the Mosque-Cathedral. Sadam Husein llevó su rezo a la Mezquita en un viaje oficial [Saddam Hussein prayed in the Mosque in an official visit], Diario de Córdoba [online] 2 March 2003. Available at: http://www.diariocordoba.com/noticias/cordobalocal/sadam-husein-llevo-su-rezo-amezquita-en-un-viaje-oficial_44404.html [Accessed 28 May 20102]. 16 III Congreso de la Mujer Musulmana [3rd Congress of Muslim Women [online] 2 January, 2002. Available at: http://www.webislam.com/noticias/42096iii_congreso_de_la_mujer_musulmana.html [Accessed 28 May 20102].

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representation before the state in the 1990s. Lately it has been recognised for its promotion of interfaith dialogue, among other activities. In the course of the standard tourist visit to the monument, some of the participants spontaneously decided to pray, but were thrown out of the temple by the Mosque-Cathedral’s private security service.17 The incident at the Mosque encouraged the chair of the Junta Islámica, Mansur Escudero18, to take up the claim that the Mosque-Cathedral should be a space for ecumenical encounters and to make ‘shared prayer’ his personal cause, leading him in December 2006 to ask the Vatican to allow the temple to be shared as a model of Islamic-Christian dialogue.19 Escudero continued to demand shared use of the Mosque-Cathedral in the following years and was able to attract as many endorsements (particularly from outside the local context of Cordoba) as rejections (largely within Cordoba).20 The rejections came not only from nonMuslims, but also from Muslims living in the city, although there were different

17 El Cabildo catedralicio prohíbe el rezo de musulmanes en la mezquita de Córdoba [The Cathedral Authority prohibits Muslims praying in the mosque of Cordoba]. Webislam [online] 12 March 2002. Available at: http://www.webislam.com/noticias/42134el_cabildo_catedralicio_prohibe_el_rezo_de_musulmanes_en_la_mezquita_de_cordo ba.html [Accessed 28 May 20102]. 18 Sheikh Mansur Abdussalam Escudero (1947-2010). Escudero was one of the key figures in Spanish Islam, both on the political-institutional level and in terms of interreligious dialogue. His sudden death in October 2010 interrupted his personal project regarding shared use of the Mosque, the symbol of his proposal and a way of understanding Islamic-Christian dialogue. The article dedicated to him in El País by his friend (and colleague in this pursuit), the theologian Juan José Tamayo, provides a good overview of the history of Escudero and the Mosque-Cathedral. Juan José Tamayo, 2010. “Mansur Escudero, el san Francisco de Asís del islam” [Mansur Escudero, the Saint Francis of Assisi of Islam]. El País [online] 4 October. Available at: http://elpais.com/elpais/2010/10/04/actualidad/1286180225_850215.html [Accessed 28 May 2012]. 19 Sheikh Mansur Abdussalam Escudero, 2007. La Mezquita-Catedral de Córdoba: Espacio de oración compartido [The Cordoba Mosque-Cathedral: space for shared prayer] Webislam [online] 10 Marzo. Available at: http://www.webislam.com/articulos/30964la_mezquitacatedral_de_cordoba_espacio_de_oracion_compartido.html [Accessed 28 May 2012]. 20 The conservative newspaper ABC dedicated many pages to the dispute and included views that opposed Mansur Escudero’s initiative from academics, politicians and members of Cordoba’s civil society, particularly Catholic organisations, who criticised the initiative as “a publicity stunt” carried out on the margins and against institutions. Rafael A. Aguilar, 2007. Mansur Escudero, así, no [Mansur Escudero, this is not the way]. ABC [online] 14 January. Available at: http://www.abc.es/hemeroteca/historico-14-01-2007/abc/Nacional/mansur-escuderoasi-no_153908885438.html [Accessed 28 May 2012].

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nuances, since their reasons were quite different. In the local context, Kamal Mekhelef, the spokesperson for the Association of Muslims of Cordoba and liaison with the city council for the organisation of spaces for Islamic worship in the city, responded in the local edition of the newspaper ABC, disagreeing with the initiative and emphasising that Muslims in Cordoba have different priorities. His response to questions about the possibility of a conflict (always a part of local press reports) was resolute: With respect to brother Mansur, he is wrong here. His intention in making this request may be praiseworthy, but he is going about it the wrong way. There are other ways to do things. Perhaps he has not studied the repercussions for the city of Cordoba, for the coexistence that already exists, which hasn’t faced any real problems until today. He hasn’t weighed the repercussions this could have on a social level, in the sense that there are strong misgivings, especially among Catholics, which you can see in the press. He has even offended a few people. They see this as pressure, that the Muslims are exerting pressure to get their hands on the Mosque again.21

In his statement, Mekhelef identifies coexistence with the absence of conflict, revealing at the same time that in terms of the controversy, a response of silence and discretion is the key to maintaining social peace in a context in which he also alludes to the fear of Islam (“They see this as pressure, that the Muslims are exerting pressure to get their hands on the Mosque again”). For Mekhelef, then, as the association’s spokesperson, silence or discretion is the best strategy to avoid conflict, and the Mosque-Cathedral is accepted as a place of memory that should not be connected to the presence of a Muslim minority in modern Cordoba, since the narrative of the conquest, of “getting their hands on the Mosque again”, could result in social tension or conflicts. The controversy around the Mosque-Cathedral seemed to recede until 2010, when at the height of the holy week of Easter, the high season for tourism in Cordoba, several members of the Association of Young Austrian Muslims who were visiting the city clashed with employees of the private security firm guarding the building, who had not allowed the young people to pray in front of the

21 B. López, 2007. Rezar en la Mezquita no es una necesidad vital para los musulmanes de la capital [Praying in the Mosque is not a vital necessity for Muslims in the city]. ABC online] 21 January, 2007. Available at: http://hemeroteca.abc.es/nav/Navigate.exe/hemeroteca/cordoba/abc.cordoba/2007/01/ 21/044.html [Accessed 27 May 2012].

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mihrab.22 The event had repercussions in the international media to the point of provoking a reaction of solidarity from a North American tourist who, after learning of the incident that had taken place a few days earlier, decided to perform a yoga asana in front of the mihrab in solidarity with the young Austrians’ religious expression. One of the most remarkable details related to this act, which the tourist herself described as an “act of civil disobedience”, was that the first reports in the local press explained that it had been a mistake: the National Police had received a call saying that a tourist was performing an Islamic prayer, but that in fact she had merely been feeling unwell and the police just called an ambulance. According to the Diario de Córdoba, it was therefore a “humanitarian service”. 23 However, the website of the Junta Islámica revealed that it had really been a protest and uploaded a telephone interview with the tourist, who turned out, moreover, to be an archaeologist. She later wrote an article about the Mosque as a World Heritage Site and the conflict over shared prayer, arguing that as long as shared use was not allowed, UNESCO should reconsider including the building on its world heritage list (Monteiro, 2010). The differing stories surrounding the controversy of Islamic prayer in front of the mihrab and the positions adopted regarding the symbolic importance of the Mosque-Cathedral (which, furthermore, emerged just as the city was embarking upon a cultural project that invoked tolerance and coexistence) thus revealed different views of how to articulate the idea of coexistence, and were generated on and for two different levels: local and transnational. The representation of the city and the narration of its historical past, of which the Mosque-Cathedral is an eloquent remnant, differed on these two levels and it came to a showdown that was resolved with silence. When the silence was revealed, it was met with confusion and uneasiness on the part of the local representatives and authorities questioned by the media about the controversy of the Austrian tourists’ Muslim prayers. Returning to the account by Jiménez and Medel and the evaluation of Cordoba and its candidacy by the European committee, their story features a character who they describe with a healthy dose of humour and irony, defining her as the “bad

22 Liberados los dos detenidos por “la provocación” en la mezquita de Córdoba [Release of pair held over “provocation” in the Mosque of Cordoba]. El País [online] 2 April (2/4/2010): http://sociedad.elpais.com/sociedad/2010/04/02/actualidad/1270159207_850215.html [Accessed 28 May 2012]. 23 Alerta a causa de una turista mareada que parecía rezar [Alert over a giddy tourist who seemed to be praying]. Diario de Córdoba [online] 7 April 2010. Available at: http://www.diariocordoba.com/noticias/cordobalocal/alerta-a-causa-de-una-turistamareada-que-parecia-rezar_551450.html [Accessed 28 May 2012].

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guy” in the story. Danuta Glondys, a member of the jury and head of Krakow’s candidacy in 2000, presented herself, according to the authors, as the defender of the rights of minorities and criticised the Cordoba project to the point of making the Cordoba representatives quite uncomfortable. Jiménez and Medel tell how, at one point during the visit, Glondys “became interested, as was her wont, in the presence of minorities: why hadn’t any immigrant or gypsy artists attended?” (Jiménez and Medel, 2012, p. 89). Whether or not Glondys’ criticism played an important role in the eventual failure of the Cordoba candidacy can only be a matter of speculation, as Jiménez and Medel make clear. However, this question about the lack of minorities is depicted as both a marginal issue and a source of some discomfort to the two authors and, they say, to the representatives of Cordoba’s candidacy, in contrast to the Polish jury member, who seemed to see it as an important weakness in the dossier and in the visit. And this is the key point: why did minorities, who were so visible in the articulation of the project, 24 have no role in the official visit to the city? The question is not trivial. The visibility of the Muslim minority in contemporary Cordoba and the attention paid to their needs as a religious minority did not have a clear correlation in the claim to the public memory of the Andalusi past as a model for intercultural coexistence. The ‘Cordoba Paradigm’ was articulated as a model for an unrelated space, not for the city’s urban space. The call made by Muslim Association spokesperson Mekhelef to fashion an appropriate place for prayer outside the Mosque-Cathedral suitable for the size and needs of the community, with its subsequent visibility in the urban setting, has been deferred indefinitely and Cordoba’s Muslim community, which has two small prayer centres in poor condition, continues to see its request put on hold by the parties that have responsibility for local government. Did the European Capital project have the capacity to generate dynamics of coexistence with its own Muslim minority beyond what was expressed in its dossier? Of course, the failure of the dream has indefinitely postponed a prospect that entailed many questions. But the uneasiness on the part of the Cordoba representatives in the face of the Polish jury member’s questions and their improvised responses do not seem to indicate that the city’s ethnic and religious minorities were going to participate actively in the project. In any case, the conclusions we can derive from the evolution of the controversy over shared prayer and the positions expressed, not only among the political and church authorities but within the Muslim ‘community’ itself, highlight the distance between a public memory promoted by cultural politics and 24 The ‘Cordoba Paradigm’ theme included a cultural programme dedicated to another minority with roots in the city, the gypsies, in the section “The Roma, a European people”.

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collective memory. Here again, Winter’s warnings that “collective memory is a term that should never be collapsed into a set of stories formed by or about the state” (Winter, 2001, p. 59) merits consideration. In this respect, the distinction between public memory and collective memory as expressed by Johannes Fabian (2007) can be used to demonstrate the opposition between a public memory whose very nature is to be documented, fixed and conveyed (through cultural programmes, local accounts, textbooks, commemorations, etc.) and collective memory, whose documentation requires not only the search for written sources, but also ethnographic work and, in this particular case, an exploration of received public memory. The controversy about shared prayer in the context of the European Capital of Culture candidacy provides an opportunity to investigate the conflict – which is not a binary opposition, but takes place on several levels – between the different discourses of memory and, therefore, to reveal the asymmetrical power relationships that are established between the different discourses of memory and the discourses in relation to silences and oblivions.

Conclusions This chapter has tried to articulate a perspective that can be used to identify actors, explore power correlations in the construction of a new narrative on Islam and Europe, and show how a discourse that acts as a reference point in the overall public context of defining new geostrategies is structured as an economic and cultural (political) project in a local context. The intersection between these different spaces, in which a new narrative about Islam and Europe is constructed (or an earlier one reconstructed), presents a very complex scenario, where different projects for commemoration and remembrance are mobilised around different actors with different objectives, forming, and at times opposing, a public memory with collective or group memories. The story of how the Cordoba European Capital of Culture candidacy was implemented and received in the city itself shows how the project ran up against the interference of a local conflict that was in turn fed by its global repercussions. Observing these actors in this conflict reveals the different ways that they defined the symbolic capital of the Mosque-Cathedral as a place of memory, while using a strategy of silence to avoid conflicts that might arise from a social fear of Islam and the narrative of Islam as the historical enemy. This silence was important for the political-institutional actors as they aspired to provide Cordoba with an economic and cultural project using the “Cordoba Paradigm”, but it was also important for the Muslims in the Association of Muslims of Cordoba, for whom silence made it possible to articulate their own idea of “coexistence” in the urban

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space, which, in short, translated into a new visibility (in the form of a suitable space for their needs), but not into claiming the Andalusi past as their own, aware as they were that this would continue to elicit memories of the invasion.

References Berliner, D., 2005. The Abuses of Memory: Reflections on the Memory Boom in Anthropology. Anthropological Quarterly, 78(1), pp. 197-211. Fabian, J., 2007. Memory against Culture: Arguments and Reminders. Durham: Duke University Press. Halbwachs, M., 1992 [1952]. On Collective Memory, trans. Lewis A. Coser. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Jahanbegloo, R., 2011. Regreso a Córdoba [Return to Cordoba]. In: El paradigma de Córdoba: Identidad y diversidad. Encuentros Averroes-Córdoba, 31 de enero-5 de febrero 2011 [The Cordoba paradigm.Identity and diversity Ibn Rushd-Cordoba Encounters]. [online] Available at: http://www.casaarabe.es/noticias-arabes/show/encuentros-averroes-cordoba [Accessed 25 May 2012]. Jiménez, M. and Medel, E., 2012. Córdoba 2016.El viaje a ninguna parte. Cordoba: Almuzara. Monteiro, L. D., 2010. The Mezquita of Córdoba is made of more than bricks: towards a broader definition of the “heritage” protected at UNESCO World Heritage Sites. Archaeologies: Journal of the World Archaeological Congress, 7(2), pp. 312-327. Nora, P., ed. 1996. Realms of memory: rethinking the French past. Volume I: Conflicts and Divisions. Translated by Arthur Goldhammer. New York: Columbia University Press. Passerini, L., 2003. Memories between silence and oblivion. In: K. Hodgkin and S. Radstone, eds. Contested Pasts: The Politics of Memory. New Yorkand London: Routledge, pp. 238-254. Pérez Garzón, J.S., Manzano, E., López Facal, R. and Rivière, A., 2000. La gestión de la memoria. La historia de España al servicio del poder [The management of memory. Spain’s history at the service of power]. Barcelona: Crítica. Stallaert, C., 1998. Etnogénesis y Etnicidad en España: una aproximación histórico-antropológica al casticismo [Ethnogenesis and Ethnicity in Spain: a historical-anthropological approach to casticismo]. Barcelona: Proyecto A. Ediciones.

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Winter, J., 2000. The generation of memory: reflections on the ‘memory boom’ in contemporary historical studies. GHI Bulletin 27, pp. 69-92. [online] Available at: http://www.ghi-dc.org/publications/ghipubs/bu/027/b27winterframe.html [Accessed 27 September 2012].

Culture, Identity and Civilisation: The Arabs and Islam in the History of Spain Fernando Rodríguez Mediano

A few years ago, Sylvain Gouguenheim, in his book Aristote au Mont SaintMichel: les racines grecques de l’Europe chrétienne, proposed a particular reading of medieval European cultural history and the contribution made to it by Arab culture. Contrary to the idea that an important part of the knowledge of the classical world had been preserved thanks to medieval Arabic translations that were eventually transmitted to Europe, Gouguenheim tried to prove the existence of an autonomous cultural transmission process that was not dependent on the Arab-Muslim world and which he interpreted in terms of identity and civilisation. In medieval Europe, there was a group of learned individuals who had always been attracted to Greek culture, in which they detected an “origin”, and they embarked upon a search that was located “in the very heart of Europe’s cultural identity” and that was essential in the formation of “European civilisation” (Gouguenheim, 2008). As is well known, the book ignited an immediate polemic in the French academic world. Without attempting to enter into the arguments in this controversy, I would like to take as a point of departure the problem that Gouguenheim poses in his work, expressed in the use of terms like “cultural identity”, “civilisation” and even “roots”, a word that appears in the subheading; in other words, the relationship between history and identity and especially the existence of a supposed “European cultural identity” and its relation to Islam. I would like to discuss this issue in the Spanish case in order to investigate how national historiography has addressed the question of al-Andalus.1

1

This text revisits the argument presented in an earlier article from a different angle: Fernando Rodríguez Mediano, 2011. “Al-Andalus, España y la inexistencia de las culturas”, Revista de Occidente, 362-363, pp.75-95. It was written under the auspices

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The Spanish case is, indeed, unique. The prolonged presence of a Muslim country on the medieval Iberian peninsula – al-Andalus – placed Spain in the position of needing to define its own cultural identity against Islam. The first impression appears to support Gouguenheim’s argument, insofar as there is a prevalent idea that the medieval struggle between the Spanish Christian kingdoms and the Muslims (which culminated in 1492 with the conquest of Granada and the end of the last Muslim kingdom on the peninsula) was a crucial episode in the formation of a Spanish identity. Spanish nationalist historiography in the 19th century called this long episode the Reconquista, an ideologically loaded term that survives and even thrives today. The debates on identity that this concept carries with it have survived as well. On the one hand, for example, the Reconquista is seen as the expression of an eternal Spanish “maurofobia”, or hatred of the Moors, the reflection of a permanent process of forming “identity” and “otherness” with respect to Islam (Maíllo, 2011, pp. 11-19). On the other hand, and from the opposite point of view, the Reconquista can be transferred to the contemporary world, freighted with conflict, to challenge the possibilities of integrating Muslims into present-day Europe.2 Inherent in this position is a criticism of the myth of multiculturalism, according to which al-Andalus and medieval Spain constituted a paradigm of the ‘coexistence’ of three cultures and three religions. From the multiculturalist viewpoint, this supposed coexistence failed precisely after the conquest of Granada with the establishment of ideological uniformity in Spain, the foundation of the modern Inquisition, the expulsion of the Jews in 1492 and the forced conversion of the Muslims of Castile in 1502. Tolerance or intolerance, Christian or pluri-religious identity: there is no need to identify the politics behind these debates and the reading of the history of Spain that they propose. To a certain degree, their value lies in the fact that they highlight the problem that al-Andalus poses for Spanish historiography, a problem that cannot be resolved by either exclusion or integration. A detailed analysis of Spanish historiography reveals the extent to which the great discourses on identity related to the Reconquista or ‘coexistence’ are in fact insufficient and cannot explain the complicated epistemological exercises undertaken by historians to construct some meaning around al-Andalus and its traces. In this text, I present a brief overview of these exercises from two significant moments in the construction

2

of the research project “Islam y disidencia religiosa en la España Moderna: entre la reforma protestante y la católica” (FFI2010-17745), directed by Mercedes GarcíaArenal. The bibliography on the historiographical uses of the Reconquista is lengthy. Here I only cite the recent study by Martín F. Ríos Saloma, 2011. La Reconquista: una construcción historiográfica. Madrid: Marcial Pons.

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of a national or proto-national historiography: the 16th and 17th centuries (the imperial age, the so-called Spanish ‘Golden Age’) and the first half of the 20th century, the time of the conflicts that would lead to the Spanish Civil War. Given that this text began by citing Gouguenheim’s book on Europe’s “Greek roots”, I will start by addressing the degree to which these roots were problematic.

The Orient in Spain (16 th - 17 th Centuries) In his study on Cartago Africana (African Carthage), Gaspar Ibáñez de Segovia, Marquis of Mondéjar, wrote: “Writers offer us many pieces of news, so unknown that they are met with contempt at first out of ignorance, until observation makes them credible […]; and of the others, many belong to the history of the East, the Greeks concealed them with such a heavy veil that many long centuries, with a touch of the mythical, passed and they were as disregarded as scorned until, in our time, knowledge of the Eastern languages has been applied by many with great happiness, many doubts have been dispelled and the methods to clarify the others discovered.” (Mondéjar, 1664)

The Marquis of Mondéjar was one of the most important 17th-century Spanish scholars, an essential figure in the emergence of critical historiography in Spain and one of a group of Spanish thinkers known as novatores who anticipated the world of the Enlightenment. He was also one of the few Spaniards who could be considered a full member of the Republic of Letters, the learned community that constituted the common European intellectual world beginning in the 17th century, united by the circulation of letters, ideas, books and shared discussions. The Marquis of Mondéjar was also an Orientalist. As such, his interests fell within the broad intellectual movement that prompted extraordinary growth in the interest in Eastern languages and books in 16th and 17th century Europe. The reasons for this phenomenon have been fully studied: the emergence of a spirituality based on a direct relationship with the Bible and, therefore, with the original languages in which it was written; the project of evangelising the world, linked to European imperial expansion; the awareness, in short, that a great amount of knowledge was hiding in books written in Eastern languages, and especially Arabic.3 All of these are factors in a far-reaching cultural mutation. For

3

These arguments resulted in the formation of a cliché repeated on many occasions. To give just one example, that of Roger Bacon and his defence of learning languages like Hebrew, Arabic and Greek, cf. Victor Segesvary, 1978. L’Islam et la Réforme. Étude

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at least a century before Mondéjar’s work cited above, the Renaissance paradigm of re-reading the classical universe had been answered in different places and by different intellectuals for whom the Greco-Latin cultural frame of reference was insufficient. For many, Latin antiquity was directly identified with the Roman and papal intellectual world and therefore the reaction against it was sharply local in character. One such case is the group of Florentine intellectuals known as the Aramei, or Arameans because, when faced with the influence of Rome, they argued that the origins of Florence were Etruscan and that the Etruscan language had been developed from Aramaic. Another example is that of the 16th-century French intellectuals who constructed a Gallic origin for France. For example, Guillaume Postel, one of the founders of modern European Orientalism, raised the banner of an “Israeli-Gallic” monarchy in France (Dubois, 1972, p. 257-8). This is a perfect example of one of the 16th-century ideologies about origins that combined a personal, local reference (in this case, the “Gauls”) with an Eastern, Biblical reference (the “Hebrew”). The relative contempt that Mondéjar felt for the ancient Greeks, whose arrogance had led them to ignore the Eastern languages, illustrates well how this process functions to reveal national or proto-national thought in all its consequences. Since the mid-16th century, an anti-Latin reaction had been felt in Spain, where the Greco-Latin cultural reference point gave way to a more powerful Eastern, Biblical one (Fernández Albadalejo, 2001, pp. 135-163). Ideological and historiographical exercises were emerging from the confluence of several serious problems that modern European historiography had to address: questions about origins as a way of possibly reconstructing some sort of primitive knowledge and writing a sacred history; the confrontation with people, languages and chronologies that differed from European variants; and the need to fine-tune the critical instruments of history in the face of an accelerated reconfiguration of the field of knowledge. Building on this nucleus of problems, the relationship between modern Europe and Eastern languages and cultures is complex and cannot be reduced to the logic of religious clashes, the affirmation of identity or imperial domination. This is also true in Spain’s case. The logic of the Reconquista, according to which the radical exclusion of Islam was an essential component of national identity, is of limited relevance, especially in a microscopic analysis. It is not just that the concept of Reconquista per se was coined much later, in the 19th century, and that its fortune was tied to the construction of a 19 th-century nationalist historiography. The

sur l’attitude des réformateurs zurichois envers l’Islam (1510-1550). Lausanne: Éditions l’Age d’Homme, p. 76.

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fundamental issue is that Islam and al-Andalus are ubiquitous in the history, the landscape and the language of Spain, and this is extremely problematic to manage. Since the 16th century at the latest, Islam has been the object not only of ideological exercises in constructing a political identity, but also of a process of forming a body of knowledge, of searching for grammatical tools, founding libraries, compiling and printing history books and reflecting on past instruments of knowledge. To the extent that these epistemological exercises imposed their own logic, the very search for identity was substantially modified. When an erudite, pre-Enlightenment critic and novator like the Marquis of Mondéjar criticised “the common ignorance of Eastern languages that dazzled all the ancients, circumscribing the limits of their knowledge to the Greeks, who they believed to be the source of all the sciences, and to whom the ambitious also limit the etymologies of peregrinating words, as if their origin had flowed from them”, and affirmed, on the contrary, that a grasp of Eastern languages was the “key to true knowledge” (Mondéjar, mss/9881, f. 225), this is more than a somewhat relevant erudite commentary. It is the expression of a complex cultural model that, from at least the mid-16th century, challenged humanist culture and the historical narrative of the origins of Spain in a search for an Orientalising reference point with which to explore the limits of a sacred history. How was this orientalising cultural model expressed? How can it be traced in the face of the great identity narrative of the Reconquista? An early example can be found in the idea of the long-standing presence in Spain of the Jews, who had left their mark on elements such as toponyms (Reyre, 1995). This ancient Jewish presence in the country was first discussed in a commentary on the book of the prophet Obadiah by renowned Biblical scholar Benito Arias Montano, one of the leading intellectuals in the 16th century in Spain. From that moment on, the information was disseminated in Spanish historiography in several ways: as an element of a Messianic ideology; as the anthropological and providential explanation for the origin of the American populations (Moreno Mengíbar and Martos Fernández, 1996); and as a claim made by Spanish Jewish conversos to Spanish origins in a distant past before the death of Christ that would legitimate their presence in Spanish Christian society (García-Arenal and Rodríguez Mediano, 2009).4 This brief account of these questions is indicative of the main elements in this Orientalising model, which uses the Bible as a reference point to link the ancient history of Spain to divine providence.

4

For the Jesuit Jerónimo Román de la Higuera, the famous historian and forger who probably was himself a member of a Jewish converso family from Toledo, the Spanish Jews were innocent of the death of Christ, as they had been the first Spaniards to convert to Christianity and the ancestors of the Toledo Mozarabs.

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One example of how this same logic was applied in modern Spanish historiography to explain the Arab presence in Spain can be found in the work by the Cordoba artist and humanist Pablo de Céspedes. When writing about the antiquity of the Great Mosque of Cordoba, Céspedes explained that “although the entire temple seems to be made by the Moors in their Arabic way, after considering it well and examining all the walls, experts, architects and those who know of the walls built by the ancients will see the great differences that exist in this temple” (de Céspedes, n.d., p. 329).5 Thus the construction of the Great Mosque proved to be extremely old: an ancient temple, inspired by that of Solomon, and dedicated to Janus, a figure ultimately identified with Noah. That the ruins in al-Andalus could be attributed to other Eastern peoples is not strange at all. Indeed, Adán Centurión, Marquis of Estepa, said that the so-called Turpiana Tower, the old minaret of the Mosque of Granada, had probably been built not by “Moors and Gentile Romans”, but by the Phoenicians, “not only because they were the ancient founders or inhabitants of Granada, but because this was their form of building” (Estepa, 1632, f. 3). In this example, the intentions of the Marquis of Estepa are clear: some years earlier, when the Turpiana Tower was torn down, a box appeared that contained, among other things, a parchment written in Arabic, Latin and Spanish, with a layout in the form of a magic checkerboard and containing a prophecy attributed to St John. It was supposed to have been brought to Granada by the reputed first bishop of the city, St Caecilius, meaning that it was allegedly from the first century of Christianity and thus seemed to constitute proof of the ancient link between the city and the origins of Christianity in Spain, beyond its recent Muslim history. By affirming that the tower was very old, the Marquis of Estepa wanted to prove that the parchment found in it was authentic and, possibly, that some Eastern presence in Spain, perhaps the Phoenicians, could show that not only had Arabic been spoken on the Iberian Peninsula well before the Muslim conquest of 711, but that it was also related to the first evangelisation of Spain. This example is an illustration of a cultural and ideological exercise designed to integrate Arabic language and culture, decoupling it from its relationship with Islam. It is a mechanism that can be identified in all European Orientalism, but it acquired a particular slant in Spain. The question can be traced in different areas. The first is the discussion about whether there had been an “Arab” or “Mauritanian” conquest before 711, a question that is found in classical Latin sources and in epigraphy and which was handled in controversial

5

In J. Rubio Lapaz, 1993. Pablo de Céspedes y su círculo: Humanismo y contrarreforma en la cultura andaluza del Renacimiento al Barroco. The study by Rubio Lapaz in this volume is quite illustrative of the claim to a Hebrew past as a way to surmount a “‘corrupt’ classical evolution”, p. 32.

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ways. For instance, the omission of a line alluding to a “bello maurorum” in the reproduction of a well-known Latin inscription, which revealed a reticence to admit a “Moorish invasion of Baetica” (Atencia Páez, 1995), led to an abundance of allusions to this invasion in the historiography, beginning with the renowned Cordoba historian Ambrosio de Morales, one of the fathers of Spanish archaeology and history, who had already spoken of an invasion of “Mauritanians” in the era of Marcus Aurelius (de Morales, 1568, ff. 303v-304r). The possibility that there might have been “Moors” in Spain before the Muslims was important for some Moriscos (the name given to Christians of Muslim origin), who were forced to convert to Christianity at the beginning of the 16th century. One of them, Miguel de Luna, used this reference to an old Mauritanian presence in Spain as a historiographical strategy to argue that the Arabic language had been used in the country long before the Muslim conquest (de Faría, mss. D,.IV.21., f. 29v) and thus demonstrate that Arab culture could be integrated into Christian society. These historiographical exercises that tried to de-Islamise Arab culture to better assimilate it into an Orientalising cultural model took advantage of an especially important 16th-century occurrence: the mass contact between Rome and Eastern Arab Christianity. One of the events that exemplify this closer relationship was the founding of the Maronite College in Rome in 1584, a beacon that brought a large number of Maronite Christians to the Catholic capital, where they played a key role in the linguistic and theological codification of Arab Christianity. Almost in parallel, Rome initiated a substantial publishing venture in Arabic, the Medici Oriental Press (or Typographia Medicea Orientale), whose founding charter stated that it would print a Bible in Arabic “at the service of Arab Christians in the East and those in Granada in Spain (per servitio de christiani arabi quali sono in Oriente et Granatini in Spagna)” (Tinto, 1987, p. 95) i.e. the Moriscos. Clearly there was some awareness that an Arab Christianity existed which, in the case of Spain, could be projected back to a Mozarab past, in other words, to the Christians who had lived in al-Andalus. Of course, the uses of Mozarabism were quite diverse, tending to affirm the existence of a medieval Spanish Latin and Christian culture which had been able to survive for centuries despite and in opposition to the Muslim occupation and that had been forged amid persecution and martyrdom. However, for the same reason, Mozarabism was another ingredient that made it possible to think of al-Andalus in terms not of rupture, but of continuity. There is insufficient space here to go into detail about the tools used to affirm and contemplate this continuity. In a field as sensitive in modern Spain as genealogy, for example, legends can be traced which, as in one Andalusian town, aver that one of the leaders of the Muslim conquerors had married the niece of a

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Christian archbishop and secretly converted to Christianity, creating the possibility that a mixed family had maintained its faith in secret throughout the entire Muslim era (Guerra de Lorca, 1499, ff. 274r-275r). This is just one of the examples of the construction of historical continuity using a genealogical fiction. From a linguistic point of view, one of the most extraordinary works in this respect is the Recopilación de algunos nombres arábigos, or Compilation of Some Arabic Names, by Diego de Guadix. Guadix had learned Arabic as a young boy, having lived among Moriscos. A translator for the Inquisition, he was in Rome during the last decade of the 16th century, where he collaborated with the great Italian Orientalist Giovanni Battista Raimondi on the Medici Press in its great project to print the Bible in Arabic. It was in this city, apparently, that he wrote his Recopilación, a work that he intended as a dictionary of Spanish words with an Arabic etymology. Guadix’s method was rather rudimentary and based on a simple phonetic similarity between words, but nonetheless it allowed him to assert that an enormous number of Spanish words had descended from Arabic. Guadix’s argument was that Arabic was a very ancient language, given that Hebrew was the original language of humanity and Arabic was merely “the Hebrew language, although corrupt”. Therefore, if a Spanish word resembled one Arabic word and a different Latin word, it had to come from Arabic, since it was the older language. In fact, and for the same reason, many Latin words had also descended from Arabic. Thus, “it is low and poorly understood to say or think that there can only have been Arabic words in the lands and places where, at some time, Moors arrived […] because the Arabic language and its antiquity do not go with or should not be measured by the time of the sect of the Moors but by the time of the nation of the Arabs; and this is where Gentile Hebrews were and lived in Arabia, because these Hebrews […] lived in Arabia [and] were called Arabs and this was many centuries before Abraham” (Guadix, 2005, pp. 150-151). In tracking down an Arabic origin for an extremely high number of Spanish words, Guadix established a direct link between Spanish and the origins of humanity, with Hebrew, the language spoken by Adam, Noah and Abraham. To do this, Guadix categorically disconnected Arabic from the Muslim religion and refuted the relationship between knowledge of Arabic in Spain and the arrival of the Muslims in 711. Guadix’s book remained unpublished until a few years ago, although it had an influence on the principal works of Spanish lexicography, such as Tesoro de la lengua castellana (Treasure of the Castilian Language) by Sebastián de Covarrubias. Regardless of whether or not it was widely disseminated, however, it is a work that clearly shows a certain cultural environment in which the Arab presence in Spanish history was integrated into a providentialist explanation linking Spain to an East that was, ultimately, Biblical. This narrative finally turned

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the Arab presence in Spanish history into a protagonist of the sacred history of humanity. This idea was developed in many directions and eventually connected with another important idea that took shape in the European culture of the era: that Arabic was a classical language, like Greek or Latin, whose written monuments were the reflection of an ancient culture and wisdom that had to be recovered using the same philological and historiographical tools. Originally, this idea was born of an awareness that Arabic texts contained great wisdom, a body of knowledge that was first discussed in terms of medicine, astronomy and philosophy, but that eventually led to a new consideration of historical sources. Examples of this include the opinions of Diego de Urrea, the first professor of Arabic at the Universidad de Alcalá de Henares, who poured scorn on Spanish historians who wrote about the Arabs or al-Andalus without knowing Arabic, and warned that “as we in Europe learn Latin to know about the things of religion and other things of life, so in Asia and Africa, those who follow Mohammed learn the true Arabic that was spoken during the invasion of Spain and lost like Latin” (Vizaña, 1904, p. 97). Arabic, therefore, was a classical language like Latin, an idea that opened the door to a reappraisal of Arab history books as an authorised source with which to write the history of Spain. To what extent, however, did these intellectual and historiographical exercises replicate conflicts of identity? At a time when local histories were beginning to proliferate, with the appearance of countless books that dealt with the antiquity and grandeur of different cities and peoples, it is not difficult to find claims to great figures in history or great Arab monuments as components of identity. For instance, Ambrosio de Morales praised the stature of the Great Mosque of Cordoba, the main monument in his city, as well as eminent Cordoba Muslims: “Averrois […] Abenzoar, Rasis, Abenragel and many more, whose works, which we have, are held in high esteem by the erudite. [Cordoba] had kings, valiant men in war, and such great feats in it, that our histories will never cease to lament the damage they did to us. And although they were Moors, they were born in Cordoba, and being infidels did not detract from the magnanimity and nobility of their natural character.” (Morales, 1575, ff. 113 and 120 ff)

Even more exceptional is the way in which the figure of the Persian Avicenna, who still had tremendous prestige as a doctor, was manipulated. For the Seville historian, poet and archaeologist Rodrigo Caro, Avicenna was a “Moor, a famous doctor from Seville” (Caro, 1634, f. 70v). However, Pedro de Medina, the author of a book on the grandeurs of Spain, said that Avicenna had been from Cordoba, although his story was somewhat more complicated. De Medina told of a tradition

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according to which Avicenna was not the true author of his work on medicine, but only the translator of St Isidore of Seville. In the process of translating this work from Latin to Vulgar Latin, from the latter language to Arabic and from Arabic to Latin again, St Isidore’s work became riddled with mistakes that had to be corrected (Medina, 1944, p. 84). This is a fine example of a contradictory process in which, on the one hand, a prestigious figure like Avicenna was appropriated and turned into a native of Cordoba, while on the other, the Muslim reference was rejected and the merits of Avicenna’s medical study were attributed to the most famous of the Spanish intellectuals and bishops of the Visigothic era, St Isidore of Seville. All of the above can be summarised as follows: in contrast to explanations that emphasised the construction of a Spanish cultural and political identity based, to a large extent, on a confrontation with Islam (the model of a Reconquista that would have brought an end to the rupture which was represented by al-Andalus), another very different model existed, an Orientalising model in which the Arab component was an important part of the link between Spain and sacred history, or the East. To assert this role, different exercises took place, such as the deIslamisation of Arab culture, which facilitated its integration. At the same time, a crucial event occurred: Arabic was converted into a classical language and, therefore, an object of knowledge (García-Arenal and Rodríguez Mediano, 2010). Doing this required epistemological exercises that are beyond the simple definition of identity in terms of the opposition between Christianity and Islam, between oneself and the other. In actual fact, the array of situations which led to the appropriation – or lack thereof – of the Andalusi past reveals the actors’ puzzlement, the expression of a problem of identity that did not appear to have a clear solution and that was expressed in linguistic, archaeological, genealogical or religious terms.

Muslim Spain: the continuity of Spanish identity (20 th Century) One of the fathers of archaeology and the history of contemporary Spanish art was Manuel Gómez-Moreno (1870-1970). It is not possible to detail his many interests and almost unfathomable opus, which covers a chronology that ranges from prehistory to the Renaissance and constitutes a viewpoint that aimed to be coherent about Spain’s existence and identity, problems that obsessed Spanish historians of his generation. One of the fields in which Gómez-Moreno’s work was particularly important was the study of so-called “Mozarab Art”. The Mozarab myth was discussed above in reference to the idea of a uniquely Spanish Arab Christianity.

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Without entering into a discussion of the problems inherent in the use of the expression “Mozarab Art”, or even the term “Mozarab” on its own, for GómezMoreno, this style adopted the Visigothic tradition through the filter of the Arabs, creating its own particular fashion, which had “a fresh invention, an individualism, which seems to have appeared earlier in Visigothic art and was only discovered again in the East, but also continued to give shape to Spain later, now that respect for trans-Pyrenean rules has been lost” (Gómez-Moreno, 1919, vol. I, p. 2). This art, then, had links to the Visigothic world and the East, affirming Spain’s uniqueness vis-à-vis Europe. This relation between Spain and the East was decisive for Gómez-Moreno and the Arabs had played a key role in it. Thanks to their presence in Spain, the country had been saved from the European decadence of the 10th century, creating a nucleus of civilisation in Cordoba that eventually spread to all of Europe. This encounter between Spain and the East, however, only repeated what had taken place much earlier in pre-Roman times and had forged a Spanish identity that was clearly distinct from Europe. Through this millennial East, Gómez-Moreno connected Spain to a civilisational narrative that began with Adam, with the first humans and their migrations, through which the nation could once again find the indigenous traces of its identity (Gómez-Moreno, 1958). In this founding narrative, of course, a special place was set aside for the Iberians, the protagonists of several of Gómez-Moreno’s studies and of great interest to Spain’s nascent contemporary archaeology. Iberism has been used in many ways in Spanish historiography, but all of them refer to an indigenous population originating on the peninsula, which different waves of conquerors have controlled. For a perspective that was strongly dominated by the idea of origins and eager to identify itself with a national identity, the Iberians represented the perfect intellectual tool to apply to the history of Spain, of the Basques, of Catalonia, etc. Iberism was used in part to link the Iberians to the Berbers, i.e., the supposedly indigenous peoples of North Africa. In the inauguration speech for the 1941-1942 academic year at the Geographical Society, General Antonio Aranda spoke about “Spanish-Moroccan unity” as the basis for “our [colonial] actions [in Morocco]”. For Aranda, this “SpanishMoroccan unity” was based on a basic racial unity between Spaniards and Berbers, complemented by “the ongoing fusion to which [Spain] was subjected for seven centuries”. All of this ensured “a degree of closeness [between Spaniards and Moroccans] verging in many cases on complete equality”, an equality whose only separation could be marked by religion, “a totally unbreachable barrier, but not an aggressive one” (Aranda Mata, 1942, p. 5). The connection between this conception of a “basic unity” reinforced by centuries of fusion with the Arabs and the Orientalist idea formulated by Gómez-Moreno is clear. The circumstances of

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General Aranda’s speech, however, were quite unique: this was right after the Spanish Civil War (1936-39), a crucial event that established the 40-year dictatorship of General Francisco Franco in Spain. One of the reasons for the rebel army’s triumph was the collaboration of thousands of Moroccan soldiers, whose participation on the Spanish fields of battle was decisive in the outcome of the war. General Franco’s profile was that of a colonising military man, the representative of an army forged ideologically, politically and militarily by the Moroccan experience. Until the 1956 independence, North Morocco would largely represent the logistical and political rearguard of the Franco regime (Balfour, 2002). In this context, the propaganda of the dictatorship strongly emphasised the idea, which already existed, of a secular community between Spain and Morocco, a “Spanish-Moroccan fraternity” (Mateo Dieste, 2003a). In fact, in some of its most extreme manifestations, created amidst the enthusiasm accompanying the military victory in Spain and the German successes in World War II, these Moroccans seem to be transformed into Spaniards. Indeed, an important Falangist (i.e., fascist) Spanish author, Agustín de Foxá, referred to them as such in a poem dedicated to a certain Abdelaziz, the literary and symbolic figure of the Moroccan soldiers in General Franco’s army: “Because I know that your blood / is defending my bells, / my books in the Escorial / and my carved guards: / that on the other side of the mountain / the Godless men await you / with tanks of Jewish gold / and a hundred banners from Asia / […] The poets of Castile / will tell you with brave tongue / You also have your brilliance / Spaniard with the bronzed skin!” (García Figueras, 1953, pp. 284-285)

The allusion to a Moroccan defending “my books in the Escorial” is striking: most of the Arabic manuscripts in the Escorial library come from an act of piracy, the robbery of the library of Moroccan Sultan Muley Zidan at the beginning of the 17th century. Indeed, the image only makes sense if the Moroccan Abdelaziz is turned into a Spaniard (“Spaniard with the bronzed skin”), a common enemy of the “Godless men” fighting in tanks paid for with Jewish gold. Another Spanish fascist writer, perhaps the most brilliant and extreme of all, Ernesto Giménez Caballero, placed special emphasis on this idea that the “Moor” was a genuine Spaniard, that, in effect, Africa begins at the Pyrenees and that Spain had nothing to do with the liberal European countries of the north. Furthermore, thanks to the “Moors”, Spain had recovered part of its truly authentic nature, which had been forgotten as a result of socialist and republican influences, such as, for example, “respect for women”:

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“Another very Spanish contribution from the Moors on 18 July was to refresh the Spanish memory about another aspect of honour: the woman. Socialist, democratic and republican Spain had forgotten, by dint of liberal morphine, our intimate credo towards women. The reds turned the Spanish woman into something worse than a public object: into a militiawoman. They dressed her in coveralls and made her crawl on lorries and through trenches like a monkey, embraced by ‘all’: communising her, dehumanising her, making her commonplace instead of a human being. On 18 July [the beginning of the Spanish Civil War], the Moor contributed his Calderonian zeal, the virile idea he inherited from classical and Christian, Romano-Germanic Spain, that woman is something private, intimate, affectionate, chaste, the mother of sons and warriors; but never merchandise for exchange. Along with the sense of ‘honour’, the Moor also brought to Spain his zealous respect for the woman of highly Spanish lineage.” (Giménez Caballero, 1943, pp. 25-6)

This exceptional citation brings Spaniards and Moroccans together on one point, their treatment of women, which today is used to demonstrate an unpardonable cultural flaw. This conception of the “Spanish Moor” is somewhat surprising, considering that the Franco regime was based, politically speaking, on a “national-Catholic” ideology in which the national identity was exclusively identified with the Catholic religion, the victor over Islam in the extremely long medieval conflict of the Reconquista. Despite this apparent contradiction, the fiction of the “SpanishMoroccan fraternity” was able to work because discourses about Spanish identity were particularly ambiguous. The base concept of “Hispanidad”, which referred to a type of community between Spain and the peoples colonised by the country, especially in America, is a polysemic concept that at times refers to religion (Spain as an evangelising nation), at times to language (the peoples that speak Spanish, especially in South America) and at times, in short, to race in the biological sense (González Calleja and Limón Navarro, 1988). The definition of the “Spanish-Moroccan fraternity” suffers from the same ambiguity. Often, as has been seen, it alludes to an Iberian-Berber racial unity, maintained over time and through innumerable foreign invasions. This is a widespread idea found in both academic literature and in the political propaganda of the era, which was eager, as noted above, to legitimise the events of the Spanish Civil War and specify the differences between traditionalist Spain and the liberal Europe of the north. However, this argument did not stop the colonial administration from applying severe racial segregation measures according to biological and eugenic ideas, despite the lack of racial laws in Spain (Rodríguez Mediano, 1999; Mateo Dieste, 2003b). Racial unity on its own, though, does not explain this Spanish-Moroccan unity that was activated during the war. Miguel

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Asín Palacios, in a well-known, oft-cited article written immediately after the conflict, asked: “why did the Moroccan Muslims fight on our side?” (Asín Palacios, 1946; Manzano Moreno, 2000). His response was religious in nature. In the Civil War, religious affinities between Christians and Muslims (the belief in one God, in the divine revelation, the sacred consideration of the figure of Christ) were more important than the differences, creating a kind of political and moral community in the midst of a universal conflict that pitted the men of God against the Godless. Miguel Asín Palacios is a very important figure in historiography in Spain. In addition to being a priest, he was possibly the most outstanding Arabist in Spanish history. Recognised as a world authority during the first third of the 20th century, he was a member of several academies and founder of the Escuelas de Estudios Árabes de Madrid y Granada, two centres of Arabic studies. After the war and until his death in 1944, Asín was one of the central figures in the academic world of the Franco era. Inspired, generally speaking, by neo-scholastic philosophy, his is the work of a historian of religions, philosophy and culture who took particular interest in mystic Muslims and their relation to mystic Christians. One of his bestknown and most controversial works is La escatología musulmana en la Divina comedia (Muslim Eschatology in the Divine Comedy), in which he attempted to show that Dante had found inspiration in the motifs of Muslim eschatology when he wrote his magnum opus. This is not the place to discuss in detail the controversy that the book sparked after its publication in 1919, especially among Italian scholars of Dante, for whom it was difficult to admit that Dante had “imitated” Muslim themes. It is important, however, because it highlights the idea of cultural transmission that underlies Asín Palacios’ hypothesis, which is a transposition of the intellectual project that inspired Spanish Arabism to understand al-Andalus within the more general problem of “Spain’s being”. As noted, the work of the Spanish Arabists is permeated by obsessive inquiries into the problem of origins, as seen in the systematic use of terms like “trace”, “origin”, “lineage”, “inheritance”, “influence” and so forth (Celli, 2005, p. 34). It is a semantic field that wants to inscribe change within the framework of the continuity of culture and identity. The concept can be related to that of “survival”, as it was used in colonial anthropology (Hammoudi, 1988). In the Spanish case, the search for these processes of cultural continuity between al-Andalus and Spain is a constant in Spanish Arabism, as seen, for example, in the classic work by Julián Ribera on the Arab origins of the institution of the Justice of Aragón, in which the Valencian Arabist, a teacher of Asín Palacio, traced a theory of cultural “imitation” (Ribera, 1897). However, as Asín’s work shows, this process of “imitation” was not limited to the study of the survival of the Andalusi world in

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medieval Christian society, but must be understood as part of a more overreaching civilisational and religious process that involved the history of the East and West. This idea can be found in Asín’s important studies on Muslim religiosity and its relation to Christianity. According to Asín, scholastic theology essentially found its inspiration in the works of Averroes and was no more than an adaptation of the dogma of the Eastern Christian Church performed by thinkers like Averroes himself, al-Ghazali and Ibn Tufayl (Asín Palacios, 1914). Regarding Sufism, Islam had not autonomously developed a mystical tendency; this only emerged after contact with Eastern Christian monasticism. From there, it reached alAndalus, where it flourished exceptionally and was eventually transmitted to the 16th-century Spanish mystics (Asín Palacios, 1931). This was, then, a tremendous process of civilisation in which Islam was transformed into the transmitting agent of Eastern Christianity and in which Spain played the key role. However, Spain was not merely one more link in the chain. According to Asín, the process of the “assimilating Eastern culture” did not alter “the eternal law of the continuity of Iberian thought”, given that the Spanish could identify with Arab-Andalusi culture, where “still circulating below the false, artificial surface of the new religion were the instincts, tendencies and ethnic aptitudes of a people who, before submitting to Islam, had thought and felt other dogmas, similar in substance, but with a richer emotional content and a more complete philosophical development” (Asín Palacios, 1914, p. 29). To some extent, the key to Asín’s reasoning lies in this affirmation of the invariability of Spanish thinking, capable of surviving below the superficial layer of the Islamic religion, bestowed with the invigorating spirit of its own identity. This is how the expression “Muslim Spain” (Marín, 1994; Viguera, 2004), acquires full meaning, given shape by classic Spanish Arabism. It involves an affirmation of the continuity of al-Andalus, at the expense of distancing alAndalus from its Muslim character, a “de-Islamisation” of al-Andalus in favour of an invariable Spanish identity. This is a constant idea in the historiography, permeated by the search for a secular Spanish identity. The Spanish architect and historian Fernando Chueca Goitia, for example, in his study of the “native constants” of Spanish architecture with regard to Muslim architecture, said, “we do not […] want to single out a nuance of foreign influence in Spanish-Muslim architecture, which is as Spanish as any other found in Spain under the guise of one style or another” (Chueca Goitia, 1971, p. 81). Surely, this idea that a remote, invariable identity exists under the “guise” of different styles is reminiscent of the old idea of a prisca theologia, an ancient theology that is eventually identified with Christian theology. It is, to a large extent, one more expression of the

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construction of a sacred history in which the divine reference has been replaced by references to civilisation and identity. Perhaps one more example – though extreme – of this idea of Spanish continuity is pertinent here. Ignacio Olagüe, an author who subscribes to a fascist ideology, denied the existence of a Muslim conquest in his book entitled Les arabes n’ont jamais envahi l’Espagne, thus affirming the indigenous character of al-Andalus (Fierro, 2009). This concept has found a new formulation in a relatively recent book, La Historia General de Al-Andalus (The general history of al-Andalus) by Emilio González Ferrín. From a viewpoint clearly opposed to the fascist ideology of Olagüe, Ferrín postulates a similar argument about the nonexistence of the conquest and sets out the idea of a uniquely Spanish process that eventually produced the European Renaissance (González Ferrín, 2006). This reading of the Andalusi past, then, is based on obsessive reflections about origins and considerations about Spanish continuity that try to integrate the fact of al-Andalus via its de-Islamisation and the evocation of an East seen as the model for the great processes of civilisation. In the Spanish case, this was an erudite exercise that required that Arabic be affirmed as a classical language and, therefore, had to emphasise its separation from the colonial world, from the Morocco of the Spanish protectorate, the world of spoken Arabic: the great classical Andalusi culture versus North African decadence.

Conclusion Sylvain Gouguenheim embarked on a quest for the roots of European identity, which he found in a continuity of cultural transmission that gave rise to a vast civilisational process. Although concepts like “identity”, “culture” and “civilisation” have long been criticised, they still seem to exercise their reifying power, determining how processes of cultural transference and the construction of identity are understood. The fiction of the continuity of meaning makes it possible to legitimise the political positions of today as well as explanations in terms of civilisation (such as, for example, that al-Andalus was the basis for the European Renaissance) that look to the past, reproducing the false problem of origin. This logic ignores discontinuities, ruptures and changes in meaning. For the history of Europe, what al-Andalus poses is the problem of discontinuity. This is a problem that appeals, of course, to the changing forms of identity and, as such, is handled according to the circumstances and imperatives of each contingency, such as in the Civil War, when the needs of war and politics mobilised propaganda around the idea of “fraternity”. It is, however, a problem that also appeals to the construction of knowledge. It is impossible to deny the interested character of the

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production of knowledge, but also to ignore the capacity for the transformation of meaning facilitated by the accumulation of knowledge, for example, with regard to critiquing the instruments of authority. This is the case, for example, with reappraisals of Arabic literature or the uses of the Bible in modern Europe. Surely, rather than thinking in terms of “civilisation” (Prosperi, 2007), it is the “facts of civilisation” that should be considered or, perhaps, the fragmented cultural forms that circulate, as they are used, discarded or transformed with changing meanings.

References Aranda Mata, A., 1942. Presente y porvenir de Marruecos. África.Revista de tropas coloniales.1(1942), pp. 3-9/9. Asín Palacios, M., 1914. Abenmasarra y su escuela. Orígenes de la filosofía hispano-musulmana, Madrid: Real Academia de Ciencias Morales y Políticas. Asín Palacios, M., 1931.El Islam cristianizado. Estudio del sufismo a través de las obras de Abenarabi de Murcia. Madrid: Plutarco. Asín Palacios, M., 1946. ¿Por qué lucharon a nuestro lado los musulmanes marroquíes? Obras escogidas. Madrid: CSIC, vol. 2, pp. 125-152. Atencia Páez, R., 1995. Aportaciones de la historiografía al estudio y localización de las ciudades romanas de Andalucía. In: J. Beltrán and F. Gascó, eds. La antigüedad como argumento. Historiografía de arqueología e historia antigua en Andalucía, Seville: Junta de Andalucía-Consejería de Cultura, pp. 84-103. Balfour, S., 2002. Deadly Embrace. Morocco and the Road to the Spanish Civil War. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Caro, R., 1634. Antigüedades y principado de la ilustrísima ciudad de Sevilla. Seville: Andrés Grande. Celli, A., 2005. Figure della relazione. Il Medioevo in Asín Palacios e nell’arabismo espagnolo. Rome: Carocci. de Céspedes, P., 1993. Discurso sobre la antigüedad de la catedral de Córdoba y cómo antes era templo del dios Iano. In J. Rubio Lapaz, 1993. Pablo de Céspedes y su círculo. Humanismo y contrarreforma en la cultura andaluza del Renacimiento al Barroco. Granada: Universidad. Chueca Goitia, F., 1971. Invariantes castizos de la arquitectura española. Madrid: Dossat. Dubois, C.-G., 1972. Celtes et Gaulois au XVIe siècle. Le développement littéraire d’un mythe nationaliste. Paris: J. Vrin. Estepa, Marqués de, 1632. Información para la historia del Sacro monte. Granada: (unnumbered).

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Faría, J. de [n.d.].Dialogismo y lacónico discurso: en defensa de las reliquias de San Cecilio […], [manuscript]. El Escorial Library. Fernández Albadalejo, P., 2001. «Materia de España» y «edificio» de historiografía. Algunas consideraciones sobre la década de 1540. In: Guadalupe Rubio de Urquía. La encuadernación: historia y arte. Madrid: Efeda, pp. 135-163. Fierro, M., 2009. Al-Andalus en el pensamiento fascista español. La revolución islámica en Occidente de Ignacio Olagüe. In: M. Marín, ed. Al-Andalus / España. Historiografías en contraste, siglos XVII-XXI, Madrid: Casa de Velázquez, pp. 325-349. García-Arenal, M. and Rodríguez Mediano, F., 2009, Jerónimo Román de la Higuera and the Lead Books of Sacromonte. In: K. Ingram ed. Conversos and Moriscos in Late Medieval Spain and Beyond. Leiden: Brill, pp. 243-268. García Figueras, T., 1953. Mística y poesía del Alzamiento nacional en Marruecos. In: Miscelánea de estudios varios sobre Marruecos. Tetouan: Editora Marroquí. Giménez Caballero, E., 1943. España y Marruecos, África, 22, pp. 25-26. Gómez-Moreno, M., 1919. Iglesias mozárabes. Arte español de los siglos IX al XI. Madrid: Centro de Estudios Históricos. Gómez-Moreno, M., 1958. Adam y la prehistoria. Madrid: Tecnos. González Calleja, E. and Limón Navarro, F., 1988. La Hispanidad como instrumento de combate. Raza e imperio en la Prensa franquista durante la Guerra Civil española. Madrid: CSIC. González Ferrín, E., 2006. Historia General de al-Andalus. Europa entre Oriente y Occidente. Cordoba: Almuzara. Gouguenheim, S., 2008. Aristote au Mont Saint-Michel. Les racines grecques de l’Europe chrétienne. Paris: Seuil. De Guadix, D. [n.d.]. Recopilación de algunos nombres arábigos que los árabes pusieron a algunas ciudades y a otras muchas cosas. E. Bajo Pérez and F. Maíllo Salgado, 2005. Edition, introduction, notes and indices. Gijón: Edicions Nigra Trea. Guerra de Lorca, P., [n.d.]. Tratado de la vida y martirio de St. Cecilio. [manuscript] Biblioteca Nacional de España [National Library of Spain]. Hammoudi, A., 1988. La victime et ses masques, Essai sur le sacrifice et la mascarade au Maghreb, Paris: Seuil. Maíllo, F., 2011. Acerca de la conquista árabe de Hispania. Imprecisiones, equívocos y patrañas. Gijón: Edicions Nigra Trea. Manzano Moreno, E., 2000. La creación de un esencialismo: la historia de alAndalus en la visión del arabismo español. In: G. Fernández Parrilla and M.

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C. Feria, eds. Orientalismo, exotismo y traducción. Cuenca: Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha, pp. 23-47. Marín, M., 1992. Arabistas en España: un asunto de familia, Al-Qantara, 13, pp. 379-393. Mateo Dieste, J. L., 2003a. La “hermandad” hispano-marroquí. Política y religión bajo el Protectorado español en Marruecos (1912-1956). Barcelona: Bellaterra. Mateo Dieste, J. L., 2003b. Pourquoi tu ne m’écris plus? Les rapports mixtes et les frontières sociales dans le Protectorat espagnol au Maroc. Hawwa, 2, pp. 241-268. Medina, P. de, 1944. Libro de grandezas y cosas notables de España. In: Á. González Palencia, ed. 1944. Obras de Pedro de Medina, Madrid: CSIC. Mondéjar, Marqués de, 1664. Cartago africana, sus nombres, fundación y aumento. Pamplona. Mondéjar, Marqués de, (n.d.). Contestación a los reparos hechos a las Disertaciones eclesiásticas, Biblioteca Nacional de España [National Library of Spain], mss. 5557. Morales, Ambrosio de 1568. La Crónica General de España, 3 vols. Alcalá de Henares: Juan Íñiguez Lequerica. Morales, Ambrosio de 1575. Las antigüedades de las ciudades de España que van nombradas en la Crónica. Alcalá de Henares: Juan Íñiguez Lequerica. Moreno Mengíbar, A. and Martos Fernández, J., 1996. Mesianismo y Nuevo Mundo en fray Luis de León. Bulletin Hispanique, 98, pp. 261-289. Ribera, J., 1897. Orígenes del Justicia de Aragón. Zaragoza: Comas. Rodríguez Mediano, F., 1999. Delegación de Asuntos Indígenas, S2N2. Gestión racial en el Protectorado español en Marruecos.Awraq, 20, pp. 173-206. Olagüe, I., 1969. Les arabes n’ont jamais envahi l’Espagne. Paris: Flammarion. Prosperi, A., 2007. L’Europa e le altre civiltà, le altre civiltà e l’Europa. In: M. A. Visceglia. Le radici storiche dell’Europa. L’età moderna. Rome: Viella, pp. 231-254. Reyre, D., 1995. Topónimos hebreos y memoria de la España judía en el Siglo de Oro. El Criticón, 65, pp. 31-53. Rubio Lapaz, J., 1993. Pablo de Céspedes y su círculo. Humanismo y contrarreforma en la cultura andaluza del Renacimiento al Barroco. Granada: Universidad. Tinto, A., 1987. La Tipografia medicea orientale, Lucca: M. Pacini Fazzi. Varias cartas de erudición [n.d.].[Manuscript]. National Library of Spain.

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Viguera, Mª J., 2004. Al-Andalus prioritario. El positivismo de Francisco Codera. In: F. Codera. Decadencia y desaparición de los almorávides en España. Pamplona: Urgoiti, pp. ix-cxxxvii. Viñaza, conde de la, 1904. Los cronistas de Aragón. Discursos leídos ante S.M. el rey don Alfonso XIII, presidiendo la Real academia de la historia, en la recepción pública del excmo. sr. conde de la Viñaza, el día 13 de Marzo de 1904. ed. facsimiles of the 1904 original, 1986. Zaragoza: Ed. Cortes de Aragó.

Istanbul’s Multiculturalism Reimagined in Contemporary British Fiction Nagihan Haliloğlu

Any discussion of multiculturalism needs to take into account the fact that the word simultaneously means two related concepts of different register: as Kenan Malik points out, “the lived experience of diversity” and “manag[ing] diversity” (Malik, 2012). More and more, multiculturalism rears its head in public discourse as the management of different cultures living together, a political process which has been declared dead many times over in Europe. The proponents of multiculturalism, those who consider it more as ‘the lived experience’ and don’t want to let go of it simply because the political processes have failed, look further afield, to see in what kind of spaces a functioning multiculturalism was/is made possible. The need to discover ‘multiculturalism elsewhere’ is reflected in the popularity of both non-European books that deal with cultural diversity, and European writers’ own efforts to imagine multiculturalisms that are lived outside and/or on the margins of Europe. This explains the popularity of writers such as Alaa al Aswany in Cairo, Elif Shafak and Orhan Pamuk in Istanbul, as they write about the multicultural past and present of these cities. In this study I will look at two British efforts at trying to (re)locate multiculturalism in Istanbul, in Jason Goodwin’s The Janissary Tree (2007) and Barbara Nadel’s Passion for Killing (2007). I will start by situating Turkey historically within multiculturalism debates and then examine how in fiction Istanbul is re-imagined as an ersatz setting where one can observe how cultural diversity operates in different historical and geographical contexts. This instrumentalization of Istanbul, I argue, is a means of rapprochement between Europe and Turkey in Turkey’s bid to be a part of the European community. Construction of a future together requires a reconstruction of the past, and I suggest that this is what these books set in Istanbul are working towards. These British novels that re-imagine the Ottoman past also reveal

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Britain’s and by extension Europe’s strained relationship with the legacy of the Ottoman Empire. Politicians and writers make much of Istanbul’s heritage of cultural diversity and claim, emboldened by theorists of multiculturalism such as Chandra Kukathas and Will Kymlicka, that the Ottoman past can provide lessons in multiculturalism that Europe can learn from today. In contemporary political discussions, multiculturalism as a problem engendered and contained by the nation-state is discussed with reference to the millet system, which is perceived as the Ottoman state tool developed to organize the multicultural society of the Ottoman Empire. 1 Notwithstanding the detractors of the idea that the millet system was a full-fledged apparatus with an easily identifiable structure (Braude, 1982), from Kukathas’ description of an ‘imperial state that does not seek integration of the diverse peoples’ to Kymlicka’s ‘non-liberal religious tolerance’ (1995, p. 155), Ottoman multiculturalism is referred to as a functioning method, indeed a management method, of keeping diverse cultures living together in peace in the same commonwealth. The effort towards ‘integration’ is the key element that distinguishes different countries’ approach to how different cultures living side by side should be managed, as it also distinguishes between the oft-twinned concepts of cosmopolitanism and multiculturalism. Both cosmopolitanism and multiculturalism are used for social situations in which different cultural groups need to share the same public space, and they are constructed as two different responses to the presence of cultural diversity. While cosmopolitanism is perceived as a more laissez-faire, eclectic life style that implies incorporating aspects of different cultures into one’s own, multiculturalism is taken to be more about the preservation of different life styles in an environment where members of communities need to interact with people of different worldviews. While discussion continues as to whether the social fabric of the Ottoman Empire was cosmopolitan (i.e. an integrative culture that incorporated differences) or multicultural (i.e. separated communities that guarded their differences), some scholars of cosmopolitanism read the interest in the lived experience of cultural diversity in the Muslim Orient as a pragmatic effort to tease out the liberal heritage of Muslim societies that are imagined and constructed as intolerant today (Zoubaida, 2002). It is true that Muslim countries feel the need to prove liberal credentials, with historical proof where possible. This proves particularly tricky

1

According to Will Kymlicka’s definition, in the Ottoman Empire each religious community was its own millet, under its own theocratic control. Thus there was tolerance of different religions, however, each community strictly controlled its own members. The millet system, as Kymlicka puts is, was “a federation of theocracies.” (1996, p. 155)

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for Turkey where until the 1990’s the troubled relationship with the Ottoman past did not allow an easy engagement with the imperial heritage. The early republic’s attempts to legitimize itself as a secular nation-state included a wholesale rejection of the Ottoman past, which was Muslim and multicultural at the same time (Çınar, 2005; Özyürek, 2006). However, in recent years the multicultural heritage of the Ottoman Empire has presented itself to the reluctant members of the Turkish secular elites as a means through which they can reconnect to Ottoman history. This rediscovered past has a legacy of coexistence of different cultures, a marketable quality that many contemporary European countries such as Great Britain and the Netherlands hold dear. Engaging with the desire to establish multiculturalism as a positive lived experience, Turkish politicians, men and women of letters find they have to admit that not all had been bad, that the Ottomans seemed to have possessed that elusive Holy Grail for Europe. Thus, the rediscovery of Ottoman multiculturalism works as a tool of rapprochement not only between Europe and Turkey, but also between the secular Turkish elites and the Ottoman past. Nadel and Goodwin come to Ottoman/Turkish multiculturalism from different angles. While Nadel is a journalist, Goodwin is a historian of the Byzantine Empire, and accordingly, while Nadel explores the remnants of Ottoman multiculturalism in contemporary Turkey and tries to give a taste of the new Turkish multiculturalism that is being formulated in Istanbul, with different ethnic and religious groups taking pride of place, Goodwin sets his crime novels in the 1830’s, the beginning of the end for the Ottoman Empire. In Nadel, the setting is one where the Ottoman social order that accommodated religious and cultural difference has already been replaced by the Turkish nation-state project; in Goodwin it is one of fin de siècle, when Ottomans are looking to Europe for inspiration in order to reform their malfunctioning institutions, and when the life style of the ancien regime is having to be abandoned. The books of the two writers taken together show us once again how reconstructions of the past are informed by today’s concerns. Nadel’s emphasis on the endurance of cultural diversity in Turkey calls for an exploration of multicultural social fabric in Ottoman times – a call answered, as it were, by Goodwin’s novels. Nadel asks us to jog our memories and Goodwin obliges; through fiction, historical memory is reshaped for both British and non-British audiences. Turks are recognized as the descendants of an Empire that was contemporary to the British, and Turkey as a country that had the lived experience of multiculturalism connected to Empire contemporaneously to the British, flying in the face of historiography that puts non-European nations ‘in the waiting room of history’ (Chakrabarty, 2000). Thus, contemporizing the past, the books work towards contemporizing the present, suggesting that Europe and

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its neighbors inhabit the same extended space and the same time – the same chronotope. Goodwin’s The Janissary Tree begins with the Sultan reviewing his new military corps, the New Guard that has replaced the eponymous janissaries a decade ago. The Janissary Corps, that wonderful multicultural 2 invention of the Ottomans, is described as having ‘degenerated’ into a mafia-like organization before Sultan Mahmud II decided to put an end to it in 1826.3 The New Guard is the product of a rejection of the way the Ottoman military managed their troops, and the state’s newly avowed intention to ‘modernize’ the corps. It is to replace the by nature multicultural body of the janissaries with a much more standardized, much more Europeanized model of an army. As historians have pointed out, modernization and/or the adoption of European forms of organization in the Ottoman Empire always started with the military, and Goodwin alerts the readers to the fact that this process of looking to Europe as a model for modernization and reform had started, as one may expect, not in 1923 with the establishment of the republic, but almost a century before that. The victims in the story are New Guard cadets, which suggests that the serial killer is an ex-janissary who has been put out of a job by the abolishment of his corps, driving home the message that they will not go away so easily. With his crime of choice, Goodwin, as a historian, alerts the reader to the fact that each historical period has its own ghosts to appease. Just as the secular elites today, though with much less conviction in the last few years, may want to relegate the

2

3

I use the word superficially here, in the sense that they were recruited from different religious and ethnic groups. Janissaries were a corps of soldiers trained from a very young age, chosen among the children of non-Muslim families of the Empire. The idea behind this selection was that, should the soldier hold a very high position in the army, he would have no family ties that could pose a threat to the Ottoman dynasty. The Encyclopedia Britannica describes them as follows: “(Janissary, also spelled Janizary, Turkish Yeniçeri, New Soldier or Troop), Member of an elite corps in the standing army of the Ottoman Empire from the late 14th century to 1826. Highly respected for their military prowess in the 15th and 16th centuries, the Janissaries became a powerful political force within the Ottoman state. The Janissary corps was originally staffed by Christian youths from the Balkan provinces who were converted to Islam on being drafted into the Ottoman service.” The Janissaries had replaced the traditional sipahi, and were, in late 14th century, as the etymology makes clear, the New Corps of their time. When their time came, they too would be replaced by yet another ‘New’ corps, the New Guard. This is how Goodwin’s narrator describes the state that the Janissaries have degenerated into towards the end of their time: “Once the Ottoman Empire’s crack troops, the Janissaries had degenerated – or evolved, if you liked – into an armed mafia, terrorising sultans, swaggering through the streets of Istanbul, rioting, fire-raising, thieving and extorting with impunity. […] For decades they had held the empire to ransom. The New Guard had finally settled the account.” (2007, p. 9)

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successes of the Empire to obscure history books, so does Sultan Mahmud in the novel want the memories of the janissaries forgotten, the murderer found and punished at once. To put an end to the violence, the expertise of one Yashim, a eunuch sleuth who appears in a series of Goodwin’s novels, is called for. While the body of evidence in the Goodwin novel is the corpse of a New Guard soldier, the central one in A Passion for Killing is a kilim, found with the first corpse of Nadel’s novel in the same car, rumored to have once been owned by T. E. Lawrence. The image of T. E. Lawrence, is, of course a very suggestive one as it points to a shared history between the UK and Turkey, and a very troubled one at that – with the UK’s recent forays in the Middle East, Lawrence’s role, and his failed (depending, again, on what you choose to remember and what you choose to forget) mission in the region. The kilim and Lawrence allow for a couple of afterwords at the end of the novel, one explaining Lawrence’s mission, and the other ‘The Ottoman Empire in the First World War’: “Once the war was over, Lawrence became quickly disillusioned with regard to the treatment of the Arabs by the British, the French and their allies. […] It was with great anger and trepidation that Lawrence watched the western empires carve the Middle East up into the deeply troubled region of falsely created states we see today.” (Nadel, 2007, p. 332)

The afterwords articulate, more than anything else, the contemporaneity of the Ottoman Empire with the Allies, and show that these powers were equally implicated in the way maps were drawn at the beginning of the last century. The falsity of the said states lies, as internecine violence in the region has shown, in no small measure in their ethnicity and/or sectarian based notion of the nation, and, raising the specter of a troubled Middle East, Nadel reminds us that we need to celebrate multiculturalism wherever we find it, in order to fight the homogenizing and centralizing excesses of state structures. The kilim, as we learn about its journey in the Middle East, in a way comes to stand for the region as well. It has changed hands so many times that at the end of the novel the detectives find it difficult to identify the legal owner: it has been stolen, sold and bequeathed many times over, and as such, much more than the motive of the murder, remains the core of the mystery and suspense in the novel. 4 Detective İkmen looks at a photo of it being held by Lawrence:

4

The kilims are important also as artefacts from the past that Turks have always been able to exhibit with pride. As İkmen’s daughter opines they are “one of the few things from the ‘old days’ that were ‘funky’” (Nadel, 2007, p. 24)

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“A tall thin weeping willow, or Tree of Life […] dominated the carpet. Delicate and at the same time sinuous, in the hands of these two foreign and, in Lawrence’s case, alien men, the Kerman was like a precious traveller from another time if not from another world entirely. Its central design struck something deep inside İkmen. He didn’t know what it was, but when he had first seen this picture tears had risen, as from a great underground river, and burst across his eyes like a rainshower. The Englishman, Melly, had said he completely understood why that had happened.” (Nadel, 2007, p. 71)

The kilim is thus given an almost otherworldly, talismanic quality that works across nations and faiths, able to move hard old men like İkmen to tears. Nadel draws our attention, over and over again, through the statements of different characters, to the motif of the kilim as the Tree of Life, “which is sacred in all three religions.” (2007, p. 35, emphasis mine) And of course Istanbul is the place where all three religions have lived in harmony for centuries, protest the narrator and the characters. To prove how intertwined different communities are, Nadel thinks up improbable names and surnames, some of which hardly look/sound Turkish, labyrinthine marriages and adoptions between different faiths. This gives much room for complexity, and hence opens up narrative space for long resolutions – vehicles, naturally, of crime fiction. Further into the investigation, detective İkmen goes to interview the only surviving victim of a male serial killer who sexually assaults and then brutally murders his male targets. The victim is Esad, a Jewish boy, and he tells the detective about the perversion of the killer. The door opens and in comes a hijabi girl who tells Esad “We mustn’t miss namaz” and then Esad introduces her as his girlfriend and explains that he is a recent convert to Islam (Nadel, 2007, p. 36).5 This is a casual scene from A Passion for Killing; a scene that does not necessarily propel the plot forward, but is there, quite clearly, to make a point about Istanbul’s multiculturalism. Coming one third into the novel, it surprises the reader only marginally. From the very first pages we have been introduced to Detective İkmen’s best friend, pathologist Sarkissian, subsequently referred to as ‘the Armenian’, the almost agnostic İkmen’s devout wife Fatma, his Albanian sorcerer mother, and his Jewish son-in-law Berekiah. Nadel’s Istanbul is one that is bristling with cultural and religious diversity, as if the ruptures of the Turkish nation-state project never happened.

5

Recently in fictional narratives that deal with multiculturalism, love stories between Jewish boys and Muslim hijabi girls have been cropping up. In Buket Uzuner’s novel İstanbullular (Istanbulites) that follows the lives of various kinds of Istanbul inhabitants, again in quite a carnivalesque manner, there is a prominent storyline exploring the attraction between a hijabi girl and a Jewish boy.

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In Nadel’s Istanbul, particularly in the person of İkmen, who is described as proud both of the Ottoman heritage and the accomplishments of the republic, people seem to have resolved the tension between the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic. Nadel thus almost wishes a post-republican (project) Istanbul into presence, where people have learned to either forgive or suppress their ressentiments resulting from the dismantling of the Ottoman way of life, indeed, the mismanagement of the cultural diversity present in the Ottoman lands. The republican revolution, whose draconian measures included the change of the alphabet, abolition of turbans and çarşaf, and change of the weekly holiday, and whose authoritarian effects can still be felt today, has seen a certain mellowing down in the past decade with the policies of the current Islamic leaning government. In Nadel’s book, reconciliation seems to have been accomplished, and the present nation-state moment is, unproblematically, reconsidered to contain previous moments including the Ottoman. The current lived moment is a palimpsest of experiences that can now be unearthed. Nadel’s multi-faith exchange quoted above conjures up, by necessity, the history of how those characters came to be in that same space, and when considered along the historian turned novelist Goodwin’s janissary story, fiction does the work of archaeology: “Yashim looked along the street. An imam in a tall white cap lifted his black robe a few inches to avoid soiling it in a puddle and stepped quietly past the café, not turning his head. A small boy with a letter trotted by, stopping at a neighbouring café to ask the way. From the opposite direction a shepherd kept his little flock in order with a hazel wand, continually talking to them, as oblivious to the street as if they were following an empty pathway among the hills of Thrace. Two veiled women were heading for the baths; behind them a black slave carried a bundle of clothes. A porter, bent double beneath his basket, was followed by a train of mules, with logs for firewood, and little Greek children darted in and out between their clattering hooves. Here came a cavass, a thickly-padded policeman with a red fez and pistols thrust into his belt, and two Armenian merchants, one swinging his beads, the other counting them with slender fingers while he spoke.” (Goodwin, 2007, p. 34)

The parading of Istanbul’s different ethnic ‘characters’ in the novel, as if in a Karagöz shadow play6, provides the perfect background for the crime genre, as

6

One of the most important characteristics of the Turkish Karagöz shadow play is that there are set characters which allow for funny misunderstandings between their different idioms and accents. Apart from Karagöz, the wise buffoon, and Hacivat, the didactic urbanite, there are Albanian and Greek characters, along with characters such as the slow-witted ‘Karadenizli’ (from the Black Sea region), and the kabadayı, the

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different cultural heritages bring with them different histories and different resentments that could easily erupt in today’s Istanbul as complex crimes. The carnivalesque7 display of one ‘ethnic’ character after another in these novels leads us to the question that lies at the heart of the discussions of multiculturalism. Do these novels represent a society that nurtures organic bonds between communities, or is the Ottoman miracle characterized by keeping these communities separate in their own spaces, thereby preventing any confrontation or any productive synthesis? Is a society multicultural when members can lose their original identity and float among all the different communities in that society in a cosmopolitan manner, or when a person is recognized for his/her ‘true’ identity through which he/she attains rights and responsibilities? While in the novel we are given the descriptions of multicultural street scenes, i.e. the ‘lived experience’, there is little to no discussion as to how these communities were in large part segregated from each other, for, as certain historians argue, the Ottoman method of ‘managing diversity’ was to minimize interaction between communities and give them semiautonomy in their allocated neighborhoods (Aktay, 2012, p. 470). In Goodwin’s novel the above multicultural scene remains mostly a tableau vivant; in Nadel, on the other hand, there is ample – but questionable as to its authenticity in contemporary Istanbul – interaction between members of different ethnic and religious communities, including scholarly cooperation, which was de rigueur both in Islamic Spain and the Ottoman Empire (Bulliet, 2004; Mazower, 2004). It is interesting to note that it is not the history-trained Goodwin but journalismtrained Nadel who highlights a more integrative, cosmopolitan sense of multiculturalism: “Süleyman looked at Arto Sarkissian who said, ‘This gentleman lives across the road’. ‘I am a Muslim scholar. Leyla was a Jewish scholar,’ the man, who had to be at least eighty, continued. ‘We were friends. We spoke of and enjoyed differences. It is the Turkish way.’ ‘Yes …’ ‘My grandfather, he was an Armenian,’ the old man said. Though still tearful, he was nevertheless in his stride. ‘I don’t care who knows it! Leyla knew it. You know what she

7

street tough guy. For more information see Kudret, Cevdet. 2004. Karagöz. İstanbul: Yapı Kredi Yayınları. I use the term primarily to mean ‘relating to the Carnival’, as the Baklahorani Carnival in Istanbul was the time when Christians were allowed to be loud and rowdy and to be more visible than at other times of the year. That it was banned in the 1940’s and that the ban was lifted in 2009 is yet another sign of Turkey coming to terms with its multicultural past. The Bakhtinian sense of the carnivalesque, however, applies not so much to Goodwin’s but more to Nadel’s novel, as it features a more topsy-turvy world where Turks turn out to be Armenians, Jews Muslims, and straight men gay.

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was doing here so late into the night on her own? She was going through archives taking notes for a book she wanted to write – a book about all the Turks who saved Jews from the concentration camps in the Second World War. If this is the work of people who call themselves religious…’” (Nadel, 2007, p. 135)

This passage is symptomatic of Nadel’s writing, her urge to drive the point home with superfluous explanations. Nadel would have the reader believe that this übermulticultural engagement ‘is the Turkish way’, as if the whole city is the venue for a never-ending conference on interfaith relations and confessions. Naturally, the Muslim scholar comes from Armenian stock, and he feels it incumbent upon himself to add to the truths that the investigation will reveal by protesting his ancestry. This is Nadel’s nod to the idea that Turks are now becoming more accepting of ethnic differences, and more open to talking about the Armenian question. Indeed, the multiculturalism chronotope becomes diachronic as Nadel conjures up not only the remnants of the Ottoman millet system but also the heroisms of the republic. Saving Jews from concentration camps is a strong and multivalent metaphor for Turkey’s cultural and ideological membership of Europe; it is indeed a narrative device used by many contemporary European fictions. Apart from the indigenous non-Muslims, in both novels there are also European characters that are integral to the plot. In The Janissary Tree, Watson to Yashim’s Sherlock is one Palewski, the ambassador of the now/then defunct Polish Empire, which the Ottomans, Goodwin’s narrator conveniently lets us know, continue to recognize “to irritate the Russians” (Goodwin, 2007, p. 105). In A Passion for Killing, the scene of the crime is the Forest of Belgrade – “So named because of the Serbs, from Belgrade, who were once entrusted to guard it by Sultan Süleyman the Magnificent” (Nadel, 2007, p. 29)‒ right next to a compound where the foreign diplomat community is living. Detective İkmen, when not interviewing what seems to be every single member of the remaining non-Muslim Istanbul community, is up at the complex delving into the complex marriage lives of the diplomatic corps. Naturally, the detectives’ investigations take us to spaces where crimes can be committed without being in view of the public. Whereas in Nadel this space is a ravine in the Forest of Belgrade, in Goodwin, it is the just as thickly paneled streets of old Istanbul. In The Janissary Tree the killer communicates with the public and his fellow ex-janissaries through the poetry of their heterodox Karagözi sect 8 and the clues direct Yashim to look for one of their meeting places, 8

My understanding is that the Karagözi sect is fictional. It is quite telling that Goodwin chooses the name of the multicultural shadow play mentioned above for the name of the secret brotherhood of the multicultural body of the janissaries. At all events, this is

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the ‘fourth tekke’ in the narrow alleyways of the city. Yashim chases after the changing cartography of the city, visits archives and embassies, including the English one, to consult or steal maps that will reveal to him the location of the tekke he is looking for. The maps that he has acquired and that are of different dates are of little help to him as Istanbul seems to shape-shift through fires and reconstructions every few decades. “He had spent the morning asking people if they remembered a Karagözi tekke. He had supposed that a redundant tekke could become anything from a shop to a tea-room. It hadn’t occurred to him until now that the most likely fate for an abandoned tekke was to be adopted by another sect. A Karagözi tekke would become someone else’s.” (Goodwin, 2007, p. 219)

Yashim’s search for the ‘original’ use of buildings provides a vehicle through which Goodwin gets to tell the reader about certain moments in the history of the city, including the conquest by Mehmed II, underlining the palimpsestic quality of urban space. While the search for the next crime scene takes the reader to the moment of the conquest of the city, the search for the owner of the kilim in A Passion for Killing gives us a short history of the passage from empire to republic as İkmen questions one of the English diplomats: “‘Lawrence of Arabia, yes’, Ikmen said with a smile. ‘I have seen the movie. Peter O’Toole and Omar Sharif. Yes, he was a heroic figure for you.’ He looked pointedly across at the Englishman. ‘The Ottoman Empire was by then a dying and corrupt administration. Some years later, as I am sure you are aware Mr. Melly, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk changed everything.’” (Nadel, 2007, p. 57)

Just how Atatürk changed the country and spearheaded a cultural revolution that not only relegated religion to the private sphere but also made ‘Turks’ out of all the ethnicities that lived in the Empire, İkmen does not go into. Indeed, the way the city still seems to be teeming with non-Muslim Istanbulites in Nadel’s novel seems to suggest that it was a painless process, that a reduction of the city’s nonMuslim population never really occurred. She insists on the ‘lived experience’ aspect of multiculturalism and chooses to forget the fatal ‘mismanagement’ of diversity that occurred during the transition from empire to nation-state. Should

how one ex-janissary describes the strength of the fraternal bonds within the corps: “We were more than a family. We had a world within a world. We had our own food, our own justice, our own manner of religion. […] There are various ways to serve God and Mohammed. To join a mosque is one way, the way of the majority. But we Janissaries were mostly Karagözi.” (Goodwin, 2007, p. 52)

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we put that down to Nadel playing it safe, there is still the telling picture she provides us with: Sarkissian, (‘the Armenian’ as she insists on calling him throughout) working in his lab “behind him on the wall, a stern portrait of Atatürk looked down impassively” (Nadel, 2007, p. 21). Just as the wishful administration of the Sultan hoped the janissaries would silently go away, the early republic thought that the non-Turkish peoples of Turkey, along with their memories, would go away as well. As such, both books are about remembering and forgetting certain parts of history, and the return of the repressed. Together the books imagine a past and a present for Turkey in which multiculturalism plays an important role. It is presented as a legacy that extends through time, with the magic touch of fiction, without the caesura of the nation-state. While for a long while it was the break with the Ottoman past that seemed to be the saving grace of the Turkish republic, now, through a post-republican sense of multiculturalism, it is the possibility of continuity that is cultivated that seems palatable to Europe. Enduring multiculturalism becomes the strongest chronotope for narratives about Istanbul – as Mikhail Bakhtin puts it “[t]ime […] thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible; likewise, space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot and history.” (1981, p. 84) As a chronotope, multiculturalism legitimizes and encourages the present Turkish moment becoming invested with the past and contemporizes Turkey both with Europe, and with its Ottoman past. Making multiculturalism one of the driving themes of their novels and illustrating, sometimes too fervently, that the Ottoman Empire enjoyed and managed a diversity of cultures, the novels seek, if not the genealogy, the elective affinities of multiculturalism, the concept that has become the philosopher’s stone for social peace in European societies. Taken together, the two books challenge the idea of ‘first in Europe than elsewhere’ (Chakrabarty, 2000, p. 6) and show that if not before, contemporaneously to Europe Turkey had and has the lived experience of multiculturalism. Thus, in the words of Nilüfer Göle (2012, p. 5), Turkey functions as the constitutive outside, an ersatz place for debating issues of plurality and diversity where one can discover new ways of managing difference and relating the self to the other. Being instrumental in discussions of community and society, Turkey, as portrayed in these novels, shakes off its time lag and then is hauled out of the waiting room of history. This makes Europe’s rapprochement with a Muslim country and the way its state is/was run possible. The books thus reveal the special status of Turkey in its ability to field critique at Europe’s presumed superiority in minority and race relations, not necessarily through the method of provincializing, but through reminding Europe collectively of a shared, multicultural past.

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References Aktay, A., 2012. Bir kentsel ayrışma modeli olarak Osmanlı İstanbul’u. Hece Dergisi Medeniyet, Özel Sayısı, pp. 470-475. Bakhtin, M., 1981. The dialogic imagination: four essays. Translated by C. Emerson and M. Holquist. Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press. Braude, B., 1982. Foundation myths of the millet system. In: B. Braude and B. Lewis, eds. Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Empire: the functioning of plural society. New York: Homes & Meier, pp. 69-88. Bulliet, R. W., 2004. The case for Islamo-Christian civilization. New York: Columbia University Press. “Janissary” Encyclopaedia Britannica. Available at: http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/300350/Janissary [Accessed 1 July 2012] Kudret, C., 2004. Karagöz. İstanbul: Yapı Kredi Yayınları. Chakrabarty, D., 2000. Provincializing Europe: postcolonial thought and historical difference. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Cinar, A., 2005. Modernity, Islam, and secularism in Turkey: bodies, places, and time. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Goodwin, J., 2007. The janissary tree. London: Picador. Göle, N., 2011. Islam in Europe: the lure of fundamentalism and the allure of cosmopolitanism. Translated from French by Steven Rendall. Princeton: Markus Wiener Publishing. Kukathas, Ch., 2004. Theoretical Foundations of Multiculturalism. [pdf]. Available at: http://econfaculty.gmu.edu/pboettke/workshop/fall04/theoretical_foundation s.pdf [Accessed 1 July 2012] Kymlicka, W., 1995. Multicultural citizenship: a liberal theory of minority rights. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Malik, K., 2012. What is wrong with multiculturalism? Available at: http://kenanmalik.wordpress.com/2012/06/04/what-is-wrong-withmulticulturalism-part-1/ [Accessed 1 July 2012] Mazower, M., 2004. Salonica: city of ghosts. London: Harper Collins Publisher. Nadel, B., 2007. A passion for killing. London: Headline Book Publishing. Özyürek, E., 2006. Nostalgia for the modern: state secularism and everyday politics in Turkey. Durham NC: Duke University Press. Uzuner, B., 2007. İstanbullar. İstanbul: Everest Yayınları.

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Zubaida, S., 2002. Middle eastern experiences of cosmopolitanism. In: S. Vertovec and R. Cohen, eds. Conceiving cosmopolitanism: theory, context and practice. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Narratives of Belonging and Exclusion: Offering the Museum of Islamic Art as a lieu d’identité for Muslims Riem Spielhaus

“[T]he museum – an institution founded on the secularization of religious fetishes – assumes a pedagogical role in providing models not only of cultural understanding, but also of authentic religious belief; in a global conflict in which the opponents of the New World Order are often said to be characterized by a medieval mindset, the antique objects of the museum point the way toward a brighter future in which the right kind of Islam will prevail, modernized, and rejuvenated under aegis of Euro-American tutelage.” (Flood, 2007, p. 44)

At this point in time, the Museum of Islamic Art at the Pergamon Museum in the very heart of Germany’s capital, Berlin, finds itself in an exceptional situation, facing a whole range of changes and opportunities to reposition its collection. A new director took office in 2008, ten years before the re-opening – scheduled for 2019 – of the Pergamon Museums complex, which will undergo an extensive renovation to restructure the presentation of the collection of Islamic art. This inspires revisiting the museum’s concept. Furthermore, this moment of opportunity from the museum’s perspective coincides with a new political paradigm of recognition and integration of Islam and Muslims into the German nation state. Apparently, this gives room to develop a new political vision for the museum that is capable of enhancing its symbolic function for the national discourse far beyond being a major touristic attraction. The case study of the Museum of Islamic Art in Berlin, presented below, is the outcome of a broader interest in the connections and interrelations between conflicting stories about and different perspectives on Europe’s history that either present European and Muslim identities as irreconcilable or portray Muslims as

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part of Europe’s past and present (Larsson and Spielhaus, forthcoming). The starting point for this interest is the hypothesis that, at least in many cases, inclusive and exclusive narratives of Europe are largely interdependent. Remarkably, inclusive initiatives and their storylines have rarely been studied, or have at least not received as much attention as negative depictions, stereotypes or discrimination of Muslims. Within academia, growing attention is paid to conflicts about the visibility of Islam – mosque buildings, for instance, or religious clothing from headscarves to full face veils – and to anti-Muslim attitudes among Western European populations (cf. Shoomann and Spielhaus, 2010). However, exclusive and anti-Muslim narratives appear to have effects beyond those intended by their proponents. In response, several initiatives at local, national and EU-level have entered the argument by setting a counter-narrative of a Europe inclusive of Muslims. It is this intersection that seems worth investigating, because the exclusive and inclusive narratives provoke and strengthen each other by mutually enhancing the relevance of the discursive setting on which they depend. A discourse is thereby crafted that frames major problems and conflicts of current societies in a certain logic and terminology – the terminology of religious conflict circling around the ‘problem of Islam’. This framing provides the terrain in which Muslims, and in fact anybody engaging in any way with Islam, are navigating. Their public actions and statements unavoidably relate to visible and audible narratives of exclusion. A very diverse set of actors is involved in presenting both exclusive and inclusive narratives, including Muslims and non-Muslims, politicians, government officials, journalists, artists and writers, other public figures, as well as historians, sociologists and academics from several other disciplines, Islam experts (by dint of scholarship or other credentials), and political and social activists. All of them can be found in each of the camps arguing that Muslims belong or do not belong to Europe. With reference to Islam-related issues, not only right-wing and newly emerging political movements, but also established and mainstream political parties are revisiting the question of how much multiculturalism and religious pluralism Europe or nation states can handle. In some cases, the same parties and media provide spaces to voices that, in response to present and historical accounts of conflict, lobby for accommodation and inclusion, often by referring to the historical presence of Muslims in Europe or a long history of dialogue and cultural exchange. In taking the repositioning of the Museum of Islamic Art at the Pergamon Museum in Berlin as a case study, this chapter approaches the use of Islamic art and history as an inclusive narrative that presents Islam and Muslims as part of and contributing to European and specifically German national history and

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culture. Looking at how the presentation of originally imperial collections of Islamic art are redefined, negotiated and eventually offered to Muslims as a space for integration and identification, this paper addresses a very specific and limited debate in terms of the actors involved, but at a place with great symbolic power. It touches on evolving issues around the representation of Islam and the order of the visual as it concerns the object, its presentation in temples of the world’s highcultures, and the museum’s users.

Narratives of Inclusion against Narratives of Exclusion Before describing the initiatives of Berlin’s Museum of Islamic Art that accompany its repositioning within both the city’s museum sector and the global scene of collections of Islamic Art, I want to briefly characterize the German national discourse on Islam that constitutes the context for these activities. In 2006 the former Federal Minister for Interior Affairs, Wolfgang Schäuble, initiated the German Islam Conference, a long-term negotiation between state representatives and carefully chosen German Muslims. In doing so, he constituted, for the first time, an intentional domestic policy approach towards Islam and Muslims in the country at federal level. What Frank Peter has called “welcoming Muslims into the nation” (Peter, 2010) represented a significant shift from ignoring the decadesold demands of Islamic associations to be acknowledged as religious communities in line with the German constitution (Rohe, 2011, p. 57-58) to a policy of recognition. As Peter argues, the state combines the recognition of Islam as part of Germany with the “project of normalizing Muslim immigrants” (Peter, 2010, p. 119). This new domestic Islam policy hence follows the paradigm of integration that constructs and addresses immigrants as Muslims (Peter, 2010, p. 119) and Muslims as immigrants (Spielhaus, 2012). Whether religious or not and whether migrants or descendants of immigrants or not, Muslims are approached as potentially in need of integration or potentially disintegrated. This strategy is innovative insofar as it claims to recognize Islam as a part of Germany, and hence displays an inclusive approach. However, Levent Tezcan, a German sociologist, characterizes the counter-effects of the current governmental concept of integration as both culturalizing and separating the objects of this policy while always preserving those in need of integration as a group (Tezcan, 2011, p. 375). Unlike Christian immigrants, Muslims are perpetually constructed as potentially disintegrated and not belonging. Hence, Islam has become a very relevant subtheme in the discourse on integration, and migration is now seen as a

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fundamental political issue for the federal German government under Chancellor Merkel (Brunn, 2013). In this process, the entitlement to represent Muslims and Islam has turned into a matter of political power, fought over with remarkable determination. A highly contested field emerged, with on the one hand fierce competition between different Islamic organizations and individuals claiming to speak for and to represent Muslims in Germany and to characterize what and how Islam is, and on the other reluctance on the part of the government to grant recognition and acknowledge these claims. The contest has been further amplified by the intervention of non-Muslim actors, including government1, media and academia, in the debate on the legitimate representation of Muslims in Germany (Peter, 2010; Spielhaus, 2011a). As to representation in the cultural sector, or rather the lack of it, the following personal account provides insight into how immigrants and their descendants have felt excluded for a long time. Mely Kiyak, the daughter of Turkish guest workers, was invited to deliver a keynote at an international conference held by the GoetheInstitut, Germany’s international agency for cultural relations. In her speech the author and freelance journalist claims that “we, persons with a migration background” do not occur in German mainstream culture, and she asks: “Am I really part of present German culture? Of the one produced today? And how could I tell?”2 She recalls looking for people like herself in books, literature and movies of national repute which, except for Angst essen Seele auf (a film made by Rainer Werner Fassbinder in 1974), an empathic song by Udo Jürgens about Greek guest workers, and works produced by creative artists with a migration background, have neglected them, ignored them, and forgotten that they existed.

1

2

Again the German Islam Conference exemplifies this. Besides representatives of Islamic organizations, the Interior Ministry selected five ‘unaffiliated Muslims’. Several of them represent positions critical of Islamic organizations or Islam in general (Peter, 2010). This selection has been understood as a strategy to indirectly critique Islamic organizations in order to antagonize the declared objective of recognizing Islam as a religious community (Spielhaus, 2011a). “Bin ich wirklich Teil der aktuellen deutschen Kultur? Derjenigen, die heute entsteht? Und woran könnte ich das erkennen?” (Translated by the author; Kiyak, Mely. “Deutsche sollten zu ihrer Nationalkultur stehen.” In: Die Welt. 25. April 2008).

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“I look for the topos guest worker or immigrant in prose, in poetry, on stage, in visual arts, music, opera, and ballet. So I read Wolf Dietrich Schnurre, Günter Grass and Martin Walser.”3

Mely Kiyak continues her list of places she is searching: in pop literature and generation portraits Generation Golf, Nutella or Ally Mc Beal4. “I read them all and cannot find myself, they have all forgotten me. […] They forgot to report that in the classrooms next to them on the West German side of the wall, in shops and clubs, in all the places these contemporary German writers describe, there were also Turks.”5

But immigrants are not actually forgotten in public German debates, Kiyak says: “Yes, there are many non-fiction books about me, political talk shows, the newspapers are filled with reports about people like me, about immigrants and Muslims, but I want to be more than a political issue. It is difficult to be confronted with a contemporary culture that does not see me as part of the present.”6

Immigrants appear as problems but not as part of German history, cultural reflections about it or personal literary memories. While it might be easy for Kiyak to identify with Germany, identifying with German culture is a lot more challenging. Yet there is an important aspect to her speech: it was given at a major cultural institution of the German state, and was then published by Die Welt, an established German newspaper with a nationwide impact – even in conservative

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“Ich suche den Topos Gastarbeiter oder Migrant in der Prosa, in der Lyrik, auf der Bühne, in der bildenden Kunst, in der Musik, in der Oper, im Ballett. Ich lese also Wolfdietrich Schnurre, Günter Grass und Martin Walser.” (Translated by the author; Kiyak). Here Mely Kiyak refers to the three publications Generation Golf by Florian Illies, Nutellakinder by Malin Schwerdtfeger and Generation Ally by Katja Kullmann from the genre of contemporary German literature that portrays German generations. “Ich lese sie alle und finde mich nicht. Komisch, dachte ich manchmal, Nutella habe ich auch gegessen, aber die haben mich alle vergessen. Die haben vergessen zu berichten, dass in den Klassenzimmern neben ihnen, auf der westdeutschen Seite der Mauer, in den Läden und Clubs an allen Orten die die deutschen Gegenwartsliteraten beschreiben, auch Türken waren.” (Translated by the author; Kiyak). “Ja, Sachbücher gibt es viele über mich, Polittalkshows auch, die Zeitungen sind voll mit Meldungen über solche wie mich, über Migranten und Muslime, doch ich möchte mehr sein, als ein Politikum. Es fällt schwer, mit einer Gegenwartskultur konfrontiert zu sein, die mich als Bestandteil der Gegenwart nicht sieht.” (Translated by the author; Kiyak).

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quarters. The claim of the immigrant’s daughter that her kind has been forgotten has thus become visible and seems finally to be heard. This indicates the prospect for fundamental change in German cultural institutions, even if for many descendants of immigrants these changes are still progressing too slowly. Museums, at least their permanent exhibitions, appear to be places where change is particularly slow in this regard. It therefore seems particularly interesting to explore the repositioning of a museum in a society that is shaped by migration.

Reflecting the role of a museum in an immigration society The renowned Museum Island in Berlin is home to the Museum of Islamic Art at the Pergamon Museum. Its current director, Dr. Stefan Weber, a specialist in the architectural history of Syria in Ottoman times, took up his new position in 2008, declaring his aim to recruit new visitors for the Museum Island in Berlin’s city center. “Unfortunately, Islam has become a favorite topic in election campaigns,” the museum’s director writes in his fourth biannual newsletter to the Friends of the Museum of Islamic Art, referring to objections following a statement by the German President at the time, Christian Wulff, during his speech at the twentieth anniversary of German reunification on October 3, 2010. In linking the process of German unification after four decades of Cold War to the contemporary challenges of integration and religious plurality, Wulff stated: “But Islam has now also become part of German identity.”7 For Stefan Weber the fierce media debate about this speech, and indeed many other disputes about the Muslim presence in the country, implied the need to develop a new strategy for the institution, which, as he puts it, arises from the responsibility for objects of Islamic art. “As the Museum has in its care the cultural heritage of Muslim societies, we are aware that Muslim history is as varied and Muslim cultural creativity is as diverse as is humanly possible. But watching a talk show on TV, we immediately notice that no one mentions cultural history and that some participants’ statements testify to their total ignorance of the eminent cultural achievements, of the many layers of historical experience and of the social realities of the Muslim world. Competent in cultural history, the Museum of Islamic Art is necessarily charged with the task of providing a differentiated and nuanced cultural history

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Christian Wulff, Speech to mark the Twentieth Anniversary of German Unity: “Valuing Diversity – Fostering Cohesion”, Bremen, October 3, 2010, online. Available at: http://www.bundespraesident.de/SharedDocs/Reden/DE/ChristianWulff/UebersetzteReden/2010/101003-Deutsche-Einheit-englisch.html [accessed 1 August 2011].

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of the Muslim world and of withstanding gross simplifications motivated by political ambition.” (Weber, 2010b, p. 6)

Attracting thousands of tourists every day, the museum does not lack visitors. However, the new director called for a different goal: he aims to attract Muslims, especially with an immigrant background and from socially challenged environments. Weber seeks to turn the museum into a “symbolic home for Muslims in Germany”8, a space of belonging that offers positive identification with the cultural heritage of Islamic regions. In a contribution to a dossier by the German Cultural Council (Deutscher Kulturrat), he further develops this vision for the museum: “The 100 years and more of the museum’s history are a mirror of German history, and the current task of the museum is very significantly derived from the current social developments of our country. First, in the area of migration and cultural education it may, as a public and symbolic space, perform a leading role by introducing German Muslims to a classic public educational institution. This will not only strengthen participatory processes in the community, but also offer cultural and historical foundations for collective identity formation (Weber, 2011a, p. 22).9

It is noteworthy that he explicitly frames this concept within a context of Germany as a country of immigration, especially as other museums do not. The nearby German Historical Museum, for instance, still manages to largely ignore the history of migration after World War II in its permanent exhibition and in the general museum concept.

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Stefan Weber (translated by the author), quoted in Gabriela Walde, “Umzug mit OrientLounge: Berlins Islamisches Museum verändert sein Konzept: Weg von der Ästhetik, hin zur vergleichenden Kulturgeschichte”, in: Die Welt, January 14, 2010, and Gudrun Meyer, “Museen mit Mission. Weltweit investieren Kunsthäuser Millionen in ihre islamischen Sammlungen. Aga Khan IV. gibt ein Gastspiel in Berlin – und auch deutsche Institutionen entdecken den muslimischen Besucher” in: Focus, 11/2010, pp. 96-99. “Die über 100-jährige Geschichte des Museums ist ein Spiegelbild deutscher Geschichte, und auch die heutige Aufgabenstellung des Museums ergibt sich ganz wesentlich aus den aktuellen gesellschaftlichen Entwicklungen unseres Landes. Einerseits kann es im Bereich Migration und kulturelle Bildung eine Leitfunktion wahrnehmen, indem es als öffentlicher und symbolischer Raum deutsche Muslime an eine klassisch öffentliche Bildungseinrichtung heranführt. Dadurch werden nicht nur partizipatorische Prozesse des Gemeinwesens gestärkt, sondern auch kulturhistorische Grundlagen kollektiver Identitätsbildung angeboten.” (Translated by the author; Weber, 2011a, p. 22).

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Founded with the arrival in Berlin of the Mshatta Façade 10 in 1904, the Museum of Islamic Art in Germany’s capital is located in a building and institution of high symbolic relevance, shaped by complex tensions between the imperial facets of highculture and the intrinsic orientalist structure of the collection. However, the new director, conscious of this burden and still committed to many aspects of highculture, is working on a concept that locates the museum differently in the context of the city and German society. His approach – set out in German newspapers, professional journals and academic publications, presented in the tours he guides and the lectures he gives – counters dominant representations of Islam in the media and aims to provide an alternative narrative. The Museum of Islamic Art attempts to offer itself as an inclusive space within a context marked by practices of exclusion. In his guided tours, Stefan Weber leads visitors through all three collections of the Pergamon Museum: the Collection of Classical Antiquities, the Museum of the Ancient Near East, and the Museum of Islamic Art. His tour program comprises carpets, porcelain and wooden handcraft from Spain and Aleppo, and leads visitors through the monumental reconstruction of archaeological built ensembles, from the Pergamon Altar, the Market Gate of Miletus, and the Ishtar Gate with the Processional Way of Babylon, to the Mshatta Façade. All these monuments that made the Pergamon Museum world-famous, he emphasizes, were excavated in countries that today have a majority of Muslim inhabitants.11 In this manner, the director of the museum embeds his presentation of Islamic Art into a broader narrative, pointing out commonalities in architecture and aesthetics as well as historical connections through trade and philosophical exchange. Why should Greek monuments and ideas be inherited only by ‘the West’ or Europe? If they visualize ‘our’ roots, aren’t these roots clearly shared with Islam? By asking these questions, Stefan Weber dismantles and confronts presumptions of exclusive narratives. Most of all, he offers his museum not only as a lieu de mémoire (Nora, 1996) but also as a lieu d’identité. Museums for Islamic art, in his understanding, are cultural storages which can adopt the function of cultural memory. The objects in their collections, Weber points out, can testify to the cultural achievements of predominantly Muslim societies which are not reflected upon in current TV talk shows and other media representations. “As cultural storages, museums for Islamic art adopt the function of cultural memory: the thousands of objects in their collections testify to the cultural achievements of

10 Cf. Enderlein and Meinecke, 1992. 11 Guided tour at the Museum of Islamic Art by Stefan Weber, Berlin, July 26, 2010.

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predominantly Muslim societies, which today have largely fallen into oblivion.” (Weber, 2010a, p. 76)

This oblivion engulfs non-Muslims and Muslims alike. Therefore the museum’s new pedagogical engagement aims to address its diverse audience with different messages: to non-Muslims it aspires to convey respect for historical Islamic wealth and for Muslims it intends to foster pride about the cultural achievements of their ancestors that can then empower them “to become a self-confident part of this society” 12, as Weber explains in an interview with Forum am Freitag13 (Weber, 2011b). According to Stefan Weber, public institutions and museums in general have a responsibility and are facing the “challenge […] to come to terms with these new realities and to find ways of representing the subject of migration as such,” while the Museum of Islamic art could offer a high-cultural home to Muslims (Weber, 2010a, p. 71). “The museum provides a symbolic space for citizens who originate from Muslim societies and, as a public institution, can offer them a cultural home. This allows a positive reaffirmation of Muslim culture for population groups which usually find themselves in a defensive and peripheral position because in public discourse negative connotations are attached to their collective identity. Positive images of identity are essential for their self-esteem and for the experience of being acknowledged in one’s identity.” (Weber, 2010c, p. 71)

Weber argues that the direct effect of such engagement can be seen as furthering integration and counteracting “the emergence of parallel societies” (Weber, 2010c, p. 72). In this way he positions his efforts in line with dominant perceptions of Muslims as immigrants in need of integration if they are not potentially to pose a threat to social order. The museum’s director perceives and presents the preservation, restoration and study of objects from predominantly Muslim societies as “per se a sociopolitical task” (Weber, 2010c, p. 72).

12 “[…] in der heutigen Gesellschaft ein Teil dieser Gesellschaft zu sein, ein selbstbewusster Teil” (Translated by the author; Weber, 2011b). 13 Forum am Freitag is an online platform by public broadcaster ZDF, intended as a pendant to the Christian Word for Sunday, one of the oldest German TV programs. This Islamic counterpart is aired online only. It addresses Muslims and non-Muslims alike and primarily features representatives of Islamic organizations, Muslim minorities, and private individuals (see Spielhaus, 2010).

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Weber’s new approach for his museum shares with the German Islam Conference initiated by the Interior Ministry the paradigmatic attempt by a major institution of the German state to choose a narrative of inclusion of Islam and Muslims. Another link between the two initiatives is their desire to educate populations about the real Islam: for non-Muslims the initiative aims at abating their fear of Islam and opening their eyes to the positive aspects of Islamic culture and religion, and for Muslims it seeks to normalize the ‘Muslim immigrant’, or as Frank Peter puts it, to “remake the Muslim subject into a self-governed individual” (Peter, 2010, p. 139). This pedagogical mission pertains to the aforementioned ongoing contest for representation. Who is legitimized or authorized to speak for and represent Islam? Who and what is recognized as a representation of Islam?

Debates about Islamic art As a matter of fact the question of what is Islamic about collections, museums and exhibitions of Islamic art is far from uncontested among art historians and other researchers engaged in the discussion of contemporary presentations of cultural production that are conceptualized as Islamic art (cf. Grabar, 2000, Flood, 2007, Winegar, 2008). Stefan Weber reflects upon the very term that labels the collection under his supervision. This term goes back to the 19th/20th century and was established by collectors and researchers, not by those who crafted, bought or used the objects that are labeled as such. The museum’s director points out that the objects in his collection came from a wide diversity of regions. He also notes that objects from other regions with Muslim populations, such as sub-Saharan Africa, are not represented. It is not Muslim life and practice that produced this “storage of memory” but European merchants and travelers and their presentations (Weber, 2009, p. 16). The stories told with the objects collected as Islamic art cannot, for this reason, totally avoid replicating a certain gaze and world order. The term acquires its peculiarity from being “an invented rubric that must accommodate a vast array of artistic production stemming almost 1,400 years and spanning every continent”. Emphasis lies “on elite artistic production rather than material culture, and on the central Islamic lands at the expense of the Maghrib, East Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa” (Flood, 2007, p. 32). Remarkably, objects from after about 1800 are excluded from the canon. In her analysis of post 9/11 presentations of Islamic art, Jessica Winegar draws our attention to the secular frame inherent in the selection of certain kinds of cultural production as Islamic art. Certain objects of contemporary cultural production that are categorized as Islamic are acceptable because they represent “a benign and spiritually enlightened Islam”, critique contemporary Islam, or

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emphasize past Islamic achievements. This feature of the selection, evaluation and translation of art works is “never a neutral process governed by universal aesthetic principles; rather it is deeply political” (Winegar, 2008, p. 652). At the same time, cultural production shaped by contemporary mainstream Islam is denied inclusion in the category of art (Winegar, 2008, p. 667). In the current modes of displaying cultural production from Muslim majority countries and the Middle East, Winegar suggests, these features of the conceptualization of Islamic art serve certain functions. Especially since the early 2000s, Islamic art is increasingly attributed the agentive capacity to build “bridges of understanding” in contexts of so-called civilizational conflict (Winegar, 2008, p. 652), to promote “Islam’s nonthreatening side” (Winegar, 2008, p. 670). Objects and collections of Islamic art are valorized as representing a peaceful but historical Islamic glory. They become “repositories of an originary Islam corrupted through time” (Flood, 2007, p. 43). Finbarr Barry Flood speaks of a new and, in his opinion, particularly disturbing way in which the objects of Islamic art are increasingly co-opted into an emergent “exhibitionary regime that not only aims to project a model of peaceful coexistence but to locate and provide an appropriate model of Islam itself” (Flood, 2007, p. 43). Many of the well-meant initiatives for dialogue and cultural mediation are based on the notion that turning back to this glory past can stimulate a perception of Muslim contemporaries as humans capable of producing not only destructive terrorist acts, but also objects of unimaginable beauty and skillfulness. Flood highlights the “implicit contrast between ‘modern’ (intolerant) interpretations and manifestations of Islam and their more tolerant (and better informed) predecessors” that lies at the heart of such presentations (Flood, 2007, p. 43). But not only do such attempts to deploy historical Islamic art convey a certain notion of the cultural decline of Islamic societies; they also confront us with a striking paradox that objects from the (medieval) past might convert those extremists who “are often said to be characterized by a medieval mindset” (Flood, 2007, p. 44). This notion is at the heart of “increasing pressures on secular institutions to bolster and promote the right kind of Islam” (Flood, 2007, p. 43) that are clearly embedded in an understanding of a pedagogic mode of democracy that assumes that subjects of the state need an appropriate education in order to become citizens (Chakrabarty, 2005). Concrete examples can be found in newly established Centres for Islamic Theology at state-run universities in Germany, and in manifold activities in the field of art and culture. Understandably, such pedagogical activities are met with considerable suspicion from Muslim communities, as they

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directly compete with their internal struggles about religious authority and the representation of different interpretations of Islam. Dipesh Chakrabarty describes the tensions faced by state-run institutions of knowledge production and dissemination such as universities and museums over how knowledge and educational content should be displayed and to what end, relating these to a struggle between pedagogic and performative modes of democracy. The pedagogic mode is subjected to a notion of the citizen as a product of education. It assumes “that becoming a citizen, possessing and exercising rights, called for appropriate forms of education” and that it therefore “fell to the educational institutions of modern societies to provide citizenly competence” (Chakrabarty, 2002, p. 5). In the 1960s a contrary notion gained importance, portraying the human as already political and not requiring any preparatory work in order to be able to acquire his or her rights as citizen (Chakrabarty, 2002, p. 6). Institutions that were key to ensuring the exercise of educating citizens according to the pedagogic notion consequently felt the tension between pedagogic modes of democracy and performative modes, which entail “debates about the past, its representation and ownership, debates often driven by the so-called politics of identity” (Chakrabarty, 2002, p. 7). In some parts of the world, significant changes in museum concepts were prompted by consumerist considerations, demanding entertainment in addition to education, resulting in the foundation of heritage museums. Even today, the tension persists between educational attempts to convey abstract knowledge and the idea of opening up museums to convey an experience of the lives in which the objects on display were once embedded, raising questions about how a religiously framed museum can achieve this without being transformed from a secular space into a space of religious practice.

Spatial, social, educational and spiritual distance The museum’s location on an island in the east of the inner city, at the center of political power and at a socio-cultural distance from Muslim neighborhoods, poses a challenge of which Weber is well aware. It is part and parcel of those state-run institutions and manifestations of education and political power which were laid out under the Prussian King Friedrich Wilhelm II as a representational urban Centre for a colonial empire, with the former palace14, the university across the

14 This was demolished in the 1950s by the GDR regime but there are now plans to rebuild it.

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street from the opera house, six museum complexes, and finally the Berliner Dom, the principal cathedral of the Protestant Church. This architecture is intended to symbolize state power and by design subjects any spectator to its very hierarchy. Before they can identify with the museum as a lieu d’identité, German Muslims need to become visitors and physically reach this spot in an area of the city far removed from their daily life. It is not only the external architecture, but also the interior of the museum that pose a challenge in appealing to Muslim families, especially those of rural origin who came as unskilled laborers, as Weber explains: “Visits to museums neither belong to their usual pastime nor do mediation strategies and style of museum exhibitions meet their specific tastes. The design of museum exhibits, which is directed towards educated, well-to-do target groups, increases their reluctance (80% of our visitors are qualified for higher education).” (Weber, 2010c, p. 72-73)

There seem to be more tensions to this than those derived from social and educational background. Some relate to the positioning of exhibits, channeling the spectator’s gaze towards them. Objects which once formed part of religious practice no longer do so. A sense of loss about the Pergamon Altar, excavated in the Turkish city of Bergama, might be revived by seeing mihrab niches and precious calligraphies valued on aesthetic grounds and not for their content or the practices for which they were created. The pedagogical approach of the museum here clearly comprises the secular gaze. The lieu d’identité that the Museum of Islamic Art aims to provide, therefore, can be expected to remain a space shaped by bourgeois traditions, entrenched in various ways of maintaining and legitimizing power structures that are exclusive along many lines – like socio-economic status and education, like practices of religion and memory. The memories it evokes might include memories of Muslim societies, but certainly consist of and are heavily shaped by memories of Berlin as a European imperial capital (Kamel, 2004). These memories are sustained, arranged and presented by the German state and its officials, and from this very fact they derive their symbolic power. Their counterparts might be seen in selfarranged spaces of memory and practice, mosques and prayer rooms, where Muslims themselves are hosts, often located in Berlin’s backyards. Here, identification rests in the present and is generated in everyday religious practice.15

15 We also find self-determined spaces in the frame of museums, for instance in the concept of the “heritage museum”. A prominent example for such an approach is the National Museum of the American Indian, located right next to the Congress in Washington and, through a declared “partnership with Native people and others”,

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Nonetheless, within the frames of the secular, this specific museum is in the process of opening itself up to social practices and shared experiences, breaking with conservatory considerations by inviting whirling dervishes, Muslim authors, and experimental fusions of jazz and oriental orchestras. By also showing a temporary exhibition of photos of street art calligraphies from the Arab Spring in 2012, the museum overcomes the contextual separation of the historical and the contemporary that Winegar has identified as one of the dominant features of representations of Islamic art in the US (Winegar, 2008, p. 664). The Museum of Islamic Art, though often shortened to “Islamic Museum”, is not conceptualized as a Museum for Islam as a religion, but remains a space for the display, study and conservation of products of high culture from certain regions of what has been called the ‘Islamic World’. This broad concept for the museum remains unquestioned by its new director, notwithstanding all his innovations. Even though art is a secular concept and the museum a secular space, paradoxically the reference to Islamic art as Islamic reproduces a religious framework, even though in many cases a religious context is provided by neither the object nor its use (Winegar, 2008, p. 653). The German museologist Susan Kamel identifies the dilemma of presenting and categorizing objects created in regions with an Islamic dominance or a Muslim majority (Kamel, 2010). This is strikingly similar to a feature of the current integration debate, which conceives immigrants from Muslim majority countries as Muslims, regardless of their religious background or actual affiliation. In a paradox move, they are continuously forced back into religious identities, well in contradiction to the secularizing mission of the integration project.16 Weber is certainly not unaware of this dilemma. He is critical about the reduction of “Muslim cultures with multifarious ways of life […] to religious concepts and motivations” in current discourse, as well as about the depiction of different world regions as if owned by one religion. The director points out that “cultural and social realities of humans are much broader than their religious

“committed to bringing Native voices to what the museum writes and presents”. Current director Kevin Gover is presented as Pawnee, one of the Native American nations. Different parts of the exhibition are designed by members of different Native nations, and the show positions objects of material culture accompanied by the voices of members of different communities who not only describe their way of life but also address issues of identity and belonging. Online: www.nmai.si.edu/about/ [last accessed 15 September 2012]. 16 This is where Levent Tezcan’s seems to offer a fruitful explanation with his observation about the collateral effect of integration debates and policies as upholding the status of immigrants and their descendants, especially those marked as different because of their religion, skin color or ethnicity, and keeping the distance in place.

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affiliations” (Weber, 2010c, p. 73). Yet these are the trouble spots where the different logics and concepts of a museum have to be negotiated, especially in a museum that navigates in a highly politicized field like Islam or, as James Clifford argues, in all museums “which feature non-Western, tribal, and minority cultures” (Clifford, 2003, p. 34). Museums, Weber maintains, should stress the diversity of regions, highlighting the contexts of production, use and display, the roads the objects have traveled and also the history of the collection. In this way, they could portray the religious, social and cultural diversity and, indeed, pluralism of Muslim majority regions, positioning themselves as spaces for an inclusive narrative. Such a notion of the mission of a museum indicates the direction that the future presentation of the collection of artifacts will probably take when the Museum of Islamic Art reopens after its reconstruction in 2019. We can be curious as to how far this rearrangement of the museum will succeed in making transparent the museum’s history and its origin in the German colonial project. Showing the diversity of Muslims, however, could be a tangible way of addressing Muslim visitors not only as a homogenous community that is currently crafted by attempts at integration within Islam politics in Germany. It could also be a way of directly addressing different and diverse Muslim minorities from national, ethnic and linguistic collectives, religious minorities, or differences along the lines of gender, age or professional groups. It is to be expected that many immigrants from Muslim majorities will still not feel attracted to the museum or to being configured as heirs to religiously framed cultural productions. The author Mely Kiyak, mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, might not be satisfied by this particular offer and may continue to search for her history in the National Historical Museum, museums for contemporary art and other institutions of mainstream German ‘high culture’.

Acknowledgment My thanks go to Stefan Weber, the director of the Museum of Islamic Art, the staff of the museum, the visitor's service of the Pergamon Museum as well as the research project Museological Laboratory: On Curating Arts and Cultures from Islamic Influenced Countries co-directed by Susan Kamel, for the hospitality and openness that inspired my engagement with their project to reconfigure the museum. Elena Arigita, Sarah Dornhof, Nancy Magidson and Frank Peter have contributed to my thoughts on this issue with valuable comments to previous versions of this article, for which I am grateful.

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References Brunn, C., 2013. Religion im Fokus der Integrationspolitik. Ein Vergleich zwischen Deutschland, Frankreich und dem Vereinigten Königreich. Wiesbaden: Springer VS. Chakrabarty, D., 2002. Museums in Late Democracy. Humanities Research, 9(1), pp. 5–12. Chakrabarty, D., 2003. Globalisation, Democratisation and the Evacuation of History. In: J. Assayag and V. Bénéï, eds. At home in diaspora: South Asian scholars and the West. New Delhi: Permanent Black, pp. 127–147. Clifford, J., 2003. On The Edges of Anthropology (Interviews). Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press. Enderlein, V. and Meinecke, M., 1992. Graben, Forschen, Präsentieren. Probleme der Darstellung vergangener Kulturen am Beispiel der Mschatta-Fassade. Jahrbuch der Berliner Museen, 34, pp. 137-172. Flood, F. B., 2007. From the Prophet to postmodernism? New world orders and the end of Islamic art. In: E. C. Mansfield, ed. Making Art History. A changing discipline and its institutions. New York and London: Routledge, pp. 31–53. Grabar, O., 2000. The implications of Collecting Islamic Art, 1850-1950. In: S. Vernoit, ed. Discovering Islamic Art, Scholars, Collectors and Collection, London: I.B.Tauris. Kamel, S., 2004. Wege zur Vermittlung von Religionen in Berliner Museen: Black Kaaba meets White Cube. Wiesbaden: Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften. Kamel, S., 2010. Coming back from Egypt. Working on Exhibitions and Audience Development in Museums Today. In: L. Guzy, R. Hatoum and S. Kamel, eds. From Imperial Museum to Communication Centre?: On the new Role of Museums as Mediators between Science and Non-Western Societies. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann Verlag, pp. 35-56. Kiyak, M., 2012. Deutsche sollten zu ihrer Nationalkultur stehen. Die Welt, 25 April. Available at: http://www.welt.de/politik/article1937794/Deutschesollten-zu-ihrer-Nationalkultur-stehen.html. [Accessed 2 August 2012]. Kuhn, N. 2011. Wege nach Arabien. Der Tagespiegel, 30 November. Available at: http://www.tagesspiegel.de/medien/tv-doku-wege-nacharabien/5905926.html. [Accessed 4 August 2012] Larsson, G. and Spielhaus, R., forthcoming. Europe with or without Muslims – two contradicting histories. In: M. Andén, ed. Facing cultural Borders in Europe. New York and London: Routledge. Meyer, G., 2010. Museen mit Mission. Focus, no.11, 15 March, pp. 96-99.

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Nora, P., 1996. Between Memory and History. In: P. Nora, ed. The Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past, Vol. 1 – Conflicts and Divisions. Translated by A. Goldhammer. New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 1– 20. Peter, F., 2010. Welcoming Muslims into the Nation. Tolerance Politics and Integration in Germany. In: J. Cesari, ed. Muslims in Europe and the United States since 9/11. New York and London: Routledge, pp. 119-144. Rohe, M., 2008. Islamic Norms in Germany and Europe. In: A. Al-Hamarneh and J. Thielmann eds. Islam and Muslims in Germany. Leiden: Brill, pp. 49–81. Roy, O., 2007. Secularism Confronts Islam. Translated by G. Holoch Jr., New York: Columbia University Press. Schepelern Johansen, B. and Spielhaus, R., 2012. Counting Deviance: Revisiting a decade’s production of surveys among Muslims in Western Europe. Journal on Muslims in Europe, 1(1), pp. 81-112. Shooman, Y. and Spielhaus, R., 2010. The Concept of the Muslim Enemy in the Public Discourse. In: J. Cesari, ed. Muslims in Europe and the United States after 9/11. New York and London: Routledge, pp. 198-228. Spielhaus, R., 2010. Media making Muslims: the construction of a Muslim community in Germany through media debate. Contemporary Islam, 4(1), pp. 11–27. Spielhaus, R., 2011a. Measuring the Muslim: about Statistical Obsessions, Categorizations and the Quantification of Religion. In: J. S. Nielsen et al., eds. Yearbook of Muslims in Europe. Vol. 3, Leiden: Brill, pp. 695-715. Spielhaus, R., 2011b. Wer ist hier Muslim? Die Entwicklung eines islamischen Bewusstseins in Deutschland zwischen Selbstidentifikation und Fremdzuschreibung. Würzburg: Ergon Verlag. Tezcan, L., 2011. Das muslimische Subjekt – Verfangen im Dialog der Deutschen Islamkonferenz. Konstanz: Konstanz University Press. Walde, G., 2010. Umzug mit Orient-Lounge. Die Welt, 14 January. Available at: http://www.welt.de/welt_print/kultur/article5842234/Umzug-mit-OrientLounge.html. [Accessed 26 August 2012]. Weber, S., 2009. Pensée – Der Begriff “Islamische Kunst” und seine Implikationen heute. In: A. S. Bruckstein Çoruh and Hendrik Budde im Auftrag der Berliner Festspiele, eds. Taswir – Islamische Bilderwelten und Moderne. Berlin: Nicolai, pp. 15-19. Weber, S., 2010a. Kollektives Gedächtnis und kultureller Speicher. Chancen und Aufgaben des Museums für Islamische Kunst im Pergamonmuseum, Museumskunde (Schwerpunkt Migration), 10(1), pp. 52–59.

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Weber, S., 2010b. News from the Museum of Islamic Art in Berlin 2/2010. Online publication by the Museum für Islamische Kunst SMB. Available at: http://freunde-islamische-kunstpergamonmuseum.de/app/download/4809392002/Museumsbrief%2B22010%2BEnglish.pdf. [Accessed 5 October 2011]. Weber, S., 2011a. Kollektives Gedächtnis und kultureller Speicher. Die Rolle des Museums für Islamische Kunst im Pergamonmuseum im heutigen Diskurs. Islam Kultur Politik. Dossier zur Politik und Kultur, Januar-Februar 2011, pp. 22–23. Available at: http://www.kulturrat.de/islam/islam-1.pdf. [Accessed 2 July 2012]. Weber, S., 2011b. Islamische Kunstschätze. Kamran Safiarian besucht den Leiter des Museums für Islamische Kunst. ZDF – Forum am Freitag, 23 December. Online. Available at: http://www.zdf.de/ZDFmediathek/beitrag/video/1526954/IslamischeKunstschaetze, [Accessed 12 August 2012]. Weber, S., 2010c. Collective Memory and Cultural Storage. Tasks and Opportunities for the Museum of Islamic Art in the Pergamon Museum. In: L. Guzy, R. Hatoum and S. Kamel, eds. From Imperial Museum to Communication Centre?: On the New Role of Museums as Mediators between Science and Non-Western Societies. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann Verlag, pp. 71-78. Wedel, C., 2011. Schätze des Islam – Jahrhundertprojekt Museumsinsel. (TV feature), 3Sat, 1 December. Winegar, J., 2008. The Humanity Game: Art, Islam, and the War on Terror. Anthropological Quarterly, 81(3), pp. 651–681. Wulff, C., 2010. Speech to mark the Twentieth Anniversary of German Unity: “Valuing Diversity – Fostering Cohesion,” Bremen 3 October. Available at: http://www.bundespraesident.de/SharedDocs/Reden/DE/ChristianWulff/UebersetzteReden/2010/101003-Deutsche-Einheit-englisch.html. [Accessed 1 August 2011].

Visual Government and Islamophobia Frank Peter

Introduction Since the early 1990s, the new visibility of Muslims has been regularly remarked upon, both in public debates and in research (Göle and Ammann, 2004; Amiraux and Jonker, 2006). This visibility, mostly associated with the appearance of young covered women, has been examined as indicating a new phase in the presence of Muslims in Western Europe and as a trigger for often controversial reconfigurations of Europe’s public spheres. This chapter pursues this line of analysis and extends it by examining conditions of visibility. I am not so much concerned with Muslims’ passage from absence to presence, i.e. to public visibility, but with the ways of seeing and making visible and the discourses which shape this visibility. I would like to address these questions in relation to different types of widely distributed French media products – a TV movie series (Aïcha by Yamina Benguigui, 2009; 2011), the comic book L’Affaire du voile by René Pétillon (2006), and – on a concluding note – a newspaper cartoon by Plantu, also published in 2006, in Le Monde. My discussion is set within a broad and lively field of studies. A significant number of authors have addressed the representation of Islam and Muslims in Europe and the US with a certain emphasis on news media (Poole, 2002; Geisser, 2003; Deltombe, 2004; Schiffer, 2004; Hafez, 2002; Morey and Yaqin, 2010; 2011). These studies concentrate strongly on representations of Islam which depict it as the Other of the West by relying upon reductive tropes, stereotypes, and essentialization. Such representations are attributed a crucial role in generating current states of fear and perceptions of threat in the West. This chapter will explore a different perspective by taking the case of commercially successful media products in France which are primarily characterized here by their internal

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differentiation of Islam and the temporalizing forms of representation which are employed. The simplest yet fundamental point made here is that differentiating visualizations of Muslims should not merely be defined by their distance or opposition to (dichotomic and timeless) Orientalist stereotypes, as the framing of current debates about the representation of Islam suggests. Rather, these visualizations have to be analyzed in relation to the distinct rationalities of power, i.e. ways of constructing the means, aims and subjects of (self-)government (Rose and Miller 1992), which make them function. Put another way, it is argued here that the political efficiency of visualizations of Muslims cannot be fully captured by relying solely on categories which classify them as, to different degrees, negative and harmful to Muslims or not. In the current context, the visual government of Islam is not only a matter of repressive power. Indeed, one important commonality revealed by an analysis of the movie Aïcha and the comic book L’Affaire du voile is that both assume a differentiated government of Muslims, built in part on positive forms of power, to be possible. These media not only show the spectator – or allow the spectator to envision – the simple possibility that government of Muslims may assume forms which are differentiated and relatively restrained, i.e. liberal. The act of viewing already implicates the spectator in these forms of (self-)government, in multiple and sometimes diverging ways. From this perspective, Aïcha and L’Affaire du voile affirm the possibility of liberal government and at the same time define and enact its form, scope and subjects: they affirm the possibility of letting specific groups of Muslims lead their own lives and, simultaneously, they structure the space in which they live them with a view to supporting ‘moderate’ Islam. Secondly, I will examine (visual) images of Islam and Muslims not merely as representations, but rather as media for multi-sensorial events involving images, text, music. These media support different types of spectatorship which depend upon various perceptual and affective modes and establish a number of distinct relations between spectator and image. The second set of questions, therefore, concerns spectatorship, i.e. the analysis of socially configured positions of the viewing subject and ‘what’ she expects to perceive in an image. My analysis will highlight the different ways in which one can relate to images of Islam by considering the movie Aïcha. I will continue my discussion of spectatorship in the study of L’Affaire du voile with reference to a kind of disinterestedness which is essential for comedy and through which access to this kind of spectatorship is limited.

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The Debate on Islamophobia Debates on media representation of Islam in Europe almost invariably bring up the topic of Islamophobia (cf. Allen, 2010) and it is important to outline how the notion of Islamophobia is approached here. I should start out by saying that I use the term Islamophobia as a generic concept for a variety of terms like antiMuslimism, anti-Muslim racism, anti-Islamic sentiments, etc. While the differences between these terms are, rightly, stressed by many authors, they nevertheless share a number of important features with regard to their understanding of politics, and it is on this aspect that I would like to focus here. Now, as has been pointed out, usages of the concept of Islamophobia often rely upon relatively basic and sometimes only implied definitions. In the introduction to a volume titled “thinking through Islamophobia”, Sayyid points to the “paucity of [the] current formulation” of the notion of Islamophobia (Sayyid, 2010, p. 1), which Bleich labels an “emerging” concept (Bleich, 2011). Nevertheless, it is possible to identify the implicit grammar of this concept. This grammar applies not, of course, to those studies which concentrate on studying the usages of this term (e.g. Shryock, 2010). Nor does it apply to the many cases where Islamophobia is used to designate, in a general sense, conditions of antagonism or fear or processes of racialization. Rather, this grammar refers to usages of the term which address the criteria used for identifying a specific practice as part of Islamophobia. First, and most obviously, Islamophobia designates a repressive form of power which primarily constrains individuals in their freedom. The second common feature concerns the representational mechanisms associated with Islamophobia, i.e. its stereotypical, monolithic and essentializing representation of Islam. In the 1990s, the influential Runnymede Report had argued that criticism of Islam should be considered Islamophobic only when the internal diversity of Islam and its capacity to develop are negated (Runnymede, 1997). Along similar lines, the EUMC Report of 2006 limits application of the term Islamophobia to “unjust stereotypes and generalizations” (EUMC, 2006, p. 62). The third feature concerns the illegitimacy of Islamophobia, already indicated in the above quote from the EUMC. The passionate criticism directed against this term indicates the strength of its implicit moral condemnation. Both critics and users of the term agree that if the term rightfully exists and if it can be applied, it would designate a phenomenon which tends to be indefensible inside the framework of the liberal democratic State. Fourth and finally, the term Islamophobia is closely related to the delimitation of a legitimate sphere of criticism of Islam (see EUMC, 2006). As Sayyid has remarked, references to Islamophobia are linked to distinctions

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between “good” and “bad” Muslims. It is difficult, in the current context, to dissociate the identification and condemnation of Islamophobia from evaluations of threats associated with Islam and Muslims (Sayyid, 2010). There are clearly numerous situations today where such a concept of Islamophobia as repressive and illegitimate power can be applied plausibly. However, the concept is also in several respects problematic and it is worth reflecting upon the limits of applicability which follow from these problems. The problems it raises for this particular study are related to the so-called political dimension of the concept, sometimes disqualified as polemical or denunciatory. This political dimension in itself is not a reason for being skeptical about the term or dismissing it. Nor should it lead us simply to search for a (more) balanced definition of the term. Rather, we have to first ask in which sense the concept is political and in which way the mainstream concept of Islamophobia configures what is political and what is not. In this respect, the concept Islamophobia is unsatisfying, since it places the phenomenon it describes outside the realm of legitimate politics, much like racism1, while configuring itself as apolitical. This depoliticization can be seen notably in the realist bend of the Islamophobia concept. The above reference to “unjust stereotypes and generalizations” and the countless warnings about “amalgams”, i.e. mixing Islam on the one hand with various negatively connoted phenomena – fundamentalism/terrorism/etc. – on the other, all point to a fundamental reliance on unproblematized notions of a neatly ordered reality which allows the use of unambiguous categories (politics as distinct from religion, radical as distinct from moderate/liberal, etc.) and is thought to be accessible in unmediated ways. Such references to Islamophobia tend to depoliticize the work of representation and of all the mediating procedures – hermeneutical, conceptual, visual, etc. – which are involved. To the degree that criticism of Islamophobia is based on notions like ‘biased representation’, ‘amalgam’, ‘emotionalizing’, ‘polemic’ or ‘fantastic’, it implies a denial of the necessary political dimension to representation and implicitly reiterates the possibility of consensual representation from an unmarked and rational perspective. Such usages of the concept of Islamophobia not only evoke the fantasy of an end of politics – those politics which are part and parcel of producing representations and doing research. Also, by placing so much emphasis on monolithic and/or essentializing images as the defining feature of Islamophobia, differentiation is turned into a positive value in itself, and the issue of the political dimension and any effects of differentiating representations of

1

“Throughout Europe, racism has become a category of abuse, a means of declaring one’s political opponent an immoral and unworthy person.” (Miles, 1993, p.83).

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Islam remain curiously under-examined. In brief, in the context of the liberal State, Islamophobia is construed as reprehensible, regardless of individual perspectives and positions. It is partly for this reason, of course, that the sheer right to existence of this term is so often challenged. A comparison with the racism concept allows us to identify another important feature. With regard to currently prevalent understandings of racism, Hesse has made the crucial observation that racism is defined as an exceptionalist ideology which for unknown reasons survives and is “residually translated against the international humanitarianist grain into the world of human rights and liberaldemocracies” (Hesse, 2004a, p. 133). Hesse argues that the Holocaust paradigm has led to the emergence of a specific conceptual logic of the term racism, which tends to preclude the integration of racialized experiences – such as colonial inclusion, Orientalism, exoticism, etc. – that apparently resist assimilation to the paradigmatic history of the extermination of Jews. Standard concepts of racism today frame it as something which is in fundamental contradiction to the liberal State: “In this way the concept of racism is doubly-bound into revealing (nationalism) and concealing (liberalism), foregrounding (sub-humanism) and foreclosing (non-Europeanism), affirming (extremist ideology) and denying (routine governmentality)” (Hesse, 2004b, p. 14). These observations are highly relevant to understanding the restrictions of the current prevailing concept of Islamophobia, often conceived in analogy to ‘racism’. As Hesse rightly points out, it is difficult or impossible to think phenomena of “colonial inclusion” and “routine governmentality” inside the framework of racism. It seems to me that the same holds true of current understandings of Islamophobia in relation to policies of ‘integration’. The application of the concept of Islamophobia is today largely limited in Europe to phenomena and groups situated beyond the mainstream (and the question which is then examined is how far their ideas reach into the mainstream). Public and academic examinations of the Islamophobia phenomenon center on a small number of controversial politicians and political groups, intellectuals and websites. A key common denominator of these groups is precisely their opposition to the policies of ‘integration’ which are today pursued to varying degrees in all European countries.2 The difficulty of simply separating Islamophobia from ‘integration’ of Muslims or ‘engagement’ with them has been shown by Tyrer in his study of representations of ‘moderate’ Muslims and Islamophobia in the UK (Tyrer, 2010). 2

Moreover, their status as potential agents of Islamophobia remains contested because of the ever recurring question about how to distinguish between “legitimate criticism of Islam” and what transcends it (Schneiders, 2009; 2010).

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Indeed, it would be important to examine how ideological Islamophobia relates in particular contexts to today’s policies of governing Muslims – policies which are to a large degree about ‘integration’. There is no a priori reason why Islamophobia – if we associate it with the fear, rejection and othering of Islam, as most studies do – should only lead to practices of repression and exclusion, and not also to productive exercises of power. This possibility raises tricky questions about the critique of Islamophobia which cannot be sidestepped. Likewise, it cannot be simply assumed that repressive power can be separated analytically from other forms of power. As to the policies of ‘integration’ – a term which can be provisionally circumscribed as the attempt to reconfigure citizenship of Muslims as their “conditional acceptance” inside the nation (Peter, 2010) – it is, in fact, to techniques of productive power that they would often resort. Finally, the often implied opposition between Islamophobia on the one hand and various forms of ‘integration’ policies needs to be questioned with regard to the effects of the latter. Hesse and Sayyid have argued that current discourses about immigration in the UK “project […] a future in which the ‘immigrant’ minority will be indistinguishable from the national (e.g. ethnically unmarked) majority, but consecrates a present that permanently defers such possibility” (Hesse and Sayyid, 2006). This observation is today entirely valid for the debate on immigration in France. To sum up, the prevailing use of the concept of Islamophobia restricts a priori the designated phenomenon to negative forms of power. Construed as a category of illegitimacy, it is only with difficulty serviceable for the analysis of policies of ‘integration’ in liberal democracies. Finally, it privileges a specific set of representational forms – notably stereotypes and essentialization – as necessary features of Islamophobia. I want to argue that such a concept is not ideally suited for the study of mainstream media productions in France. The following analysis will focus on visualizations of Islam which do not fit into the category Islamophobia defined as an ideology of repressive power, but which can nevertheless not simply be disconnected from the latter. I will analyze these visualizations of Islam as governmental techniques and examine their efficiency and their limits in the regulation of Islam. Fundamentally, I suggest considering the partial abandonment of monolithic and essentialistic elements in representations of Islam, and the increasing spread of differentiation, by placing it in the analytical framework of (self-) government. The analysis will make apparent that when it comes to visualizations of Islam, the grounds of critique cannot always be universalized as easily as the concept of Islamophobia today implies. The complex rationalities which make these visualizations function raise questions which are both more specific to particular media techniques and genres

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and more general in that they bring us back to the broad field of (legitimate) politics in France.

Yamina Benguigui’s Aïcha The first case I am going to discuss is the TV movie Aïcha by Yamina Benguigui. Born in 1957 in Saint-Quentin in northern France to Algerian parents, Benguigui (born Belaïdi) is a well-known French filmmaker. Benguigui also produces and presents a number of TV shows and is engaged in anti-discrimination work. A member of the Parti Socialiste, she has been a councilor responsible for human rights and anti-discrimination in the Paris administration since 2008. In 2012, she was appointed deputy minister in charge of francophonie. Her popularity originally derived from a series of successful documentaries about immigration from the Maghreb to France, released in the 1990s. She also directed a documentary, in 2005, about racist discrimination on the job market (Le plafond de verre). This film was awarded a prize by the French Senate. In 2001, Benguigui released her first fiction movie, Inch’Allah dimanche, which also won her a number of prizes (Fauvel, 2004).3 The TV movie Aïcha was aired in 2009. Its production was subsidized by the regional council of Ile-de-France and the national agency for social cohesion and equal opportunities (Acsé)4. A huge success with more than five million viewers 5, a follow-up film was produced and broadcast in 2011. According to Benguigui, the original scenario was written with six episodes in mind, and these will now be produced. The first part of Aïcha is presentedas follows: “Some kilometers from Paris, on the other side of the northern périphérique, rises an urban ghetto, with innumerable dilapidated building blocks where the concrete is flaking everywhere and the steel is rusty.

3

4

5

The narrative of this movie, set in 1974, is about an Algerian woman, Zouina, and her three children. Together with her mother-in-law, she joins her husband in France, where Zouina is largely confined to the house and disoriented. Her husband shows her no respect and is sometimes violent; her mother-in-law considers her a servant. However, at the end of the movie, Zouina has managed to familiarize herself with the new environment, established relations with neighbors and other people, and even made her husband Ahmed change, albeit very slowly. In 2006 Acsé replaced the Fonds d’Action et de Soutien pour l’Intégration et la Lutte contre les Discriminations, which evolved out of the Fonds d’action sociale pour les travailleurs musulmans d'Algérie en métropole et pour leurs familles, created in 1958. http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=40981488163. [Accessed 23 March 2012].

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A multiracial society took root here long ago, and families of French stock have left. In building 216 lives the ‘model’ family, the family Bouamaza, of Algerian descent. Our heroine, the oldest daughter, Aïcha, 25 years, is regarded as a model in the entire neighborhood. But she can no longer stand the pressure of her community group: she wants to fly with her own wings, conquer her independence, and finally cross the Rubicon. On the other side of the périphérique, to live in the city of light. Will she succeed?”6

Instead of summarizing the narrative of this movie, I would like to open my discussion of it by looking at the configuration of the work – the spaces, temporalities, and subjectivities which make the narrative plot intelligible. This configuration is not stable. Rather, the film’s plot progresses by working on this configuration and more particularly, by moving and shifting a couple of basic constituent oppositions. These oppositions are well-known to anyone familiar with French public debates. In fact, while Benguigui is regularly credited with insider knowledge of the banlieue and personally emphasizes her long-term expertise on this topic, the movie’s visual and, to a lesser degree, its narrative imaginary are in many respects unlikely to surprise the audience7. At first sight, the oppositions might be regarded as stereotypes, a term to which I will come back. They concern, first of all, the environmental contrast between the banlieue and Paris as spaces. In this movie, the separation between them is constantly referred to as a social separation. Racial discrimination – a central topic of the movie – is one factor sustaining this separation and also resulting from it. A second opposition is constituted by the contrast between the immigrant parents and their children, the so-called second generation (or les jeunes). This opposition is reiterated throughout the movie by stories and events typically related to the two generations: the problem of return to the home country, which arises for Aïcha’s father after his retirement; the problem of finding a job in an environment of discrimination, and the identity crisis which can be triggered by unemployment; the surveillance of the young women by their parents (the first episode starts with Aïcha’s cousin trying to commit suicide because she is pregnant out of wedlock); the superstitious religious practices of the parents, etc. Finally, a third set of oppositions, intersecting with the generational set, highlights masculine subjectivities: assertive and loud and a little bit violent in the banlieue (e.g.

6 7

Translated from “L’histoire” at http://aicha.yaminabenguigui.fr/. >Accessed 3 February 2012@. It would be interesting to examine how the use (now subject to criticism) of “enquêteurs” or “fixeurs” – people from the banlieue who help to identify sites where filmmakers can shoot – contributes to stabilizing the representation of the banlieue. Benguigui also employs enquêteurs. See Libération, 12 and 26 October 2006.

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Aïcha’s father; her pseudo-fiancé and cousin), softer outside (e.g. her boyfriend Patrick, son of the erstwhile local mayor). The first simple, yet important point to make here concerns the structure of this binary configuration, which is neither stable (i.e. essentialist) nor monolithic. The opposition between the “multi-racial society” of the banlieue and the “French” society symbolized by Paris is in part constructed from stereotypical features, such as conceptions of gender roles and subjectivities which have long been presented as typically Muslim and/or Arab. However, the fixity of this opposition is filtered by the factors of time and discrimination. Time refers here to the generational conflict, which indexes the non-given character and relative fluidity of group boundaries and properties. The factor of discrimination – whose effects show notably in the progressive drift towards politicized religion of Aïcha’s cousin, Nejma, after not finding a decent job in spite of her good degrees – signals that banlieue society is simultaneously internally differentiated, evolving, and partly determined by the outside (i.e. not given). By highlighting this differentiation, I am not saying that this configuration is not stereotypical in the sense that it does not reduce complex differences. What I want to underline first of all is that it is neither monolithic nor essentializing. Secondly, while this kind of internal differentiation is certainly schematic, it builds on notions which are directly relevant to various types of expert discourses in France. It needs to be stressed that the way categories such as second-generation immigrant, generational conflict and discrimination are visually narrated is linked to their extremely widespread usage in public and academic debates, and is largely indebted to sociological studies. In the movie, these categories are embodied in the context of a comedy, i.e. by individuals whose acts are sometimes intended to be both tragic and comic. “Humor”, as Benguigui emphasizes 8, is a crucial mechanism in banalizing the lives of the Bouamaza. 9 The second episode of Aïcha promises to present “the tragicomic daily adventures of a normal family from France (bien de ‘chez nous’)”. Nevertheless, while many scenes in the movie comically rework these categories, they derive their intelligibility from prior discourses and, more particularly, from a specific political rationality which conceptualizes Islam as a central feature of the socio-cultural milieu of the

8 9

See e.g. http://culture.blog.pelerin.info/2011/02/yamina-benguigui-Aïcha-est-unesheherazade-des-temps-modernes/ [Accessed 18 March 2012]. This dimension prompted La Croix to conclude its review with a reference to the highly successful movie La vie n’est pas une longue fleuve tranquille (1988). The movie recounts the turbulent life of a conservative Catholic bourgeois family after their discovery that one of their children was the subject of a mix-up after birth and has been growing up in a working-class family. After they adopt this child, their orderly lifeworld slowly but inexorably starts to disintegrate. La Croix, 9 May 2009.

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banlieues (Peter, 2008). In brief, the first point to note here is that, insofar as the portrayal of the banlieue is stereotypical, the stereotypes are to some degree of a new kind. They connect to expert debates on the banlieue and Islam, and are neither essentialist nor monolithic. These oppositions between society in the ‘banlieue’ and ‘Paris’ shift in the course of the film. The basic storyline of the movie transcends the constraints which I identified above with reference to the oppositions structuring the movie’s configuration. The movie’s narrative is about the open-ended attempt by Aïcha to reconcile these oppositions in and through her life. This open-endedness is a crucial element of the movie. Not only does the suspense of the story entirely depend upon this open end, i.e. on the freedom of the protagonists and the potential to surmount structural constraints. Positive identification with Aïcha as a heroine is, moreover, only possible if the spectator assumes her liberty – if she sees her way of being and acting as having a significant impact on her life, if her moral dilemmas are worth watching, contemplating, etc. It is important to note that the open-endedness of the story line reconfigures the structural constraints in a neoliberal perspective as individual challenges. What ultimately counts is the individual. This is not to say that this perspective on the individual simply erases the numerous references to structural racism in the movie. The heroism of Aïcha, strongly emphasized by Benguigui, is constructed in relation to the obstacles she has to overcome in her life. However, there is a tension between individual and structure in the plot which makes for very different perceptions of the movie. I will come back to this point later. As I said, Aïcha’s life is not lived simply between these opposites, but she seeks to reconcile them in her life: to find a job in Paris despite coming from the banlieue and to maintain contact with her family despite her planned marriage to Patrick (whom she tries to persuade to convert to Islam, but whom her father considers not to be a real man and hence not a suitable candidate anyway). While both these ‘challenges’ remain largely or entirely unresolved at the end of the second episode, in many other respects Aïcha already embodies transcendence of these oppositions. She is able to maintain close attachments to the older women in her extended family, helps to calm the family after their horrified discovery that the baby of her unmarried cousin is “black”, and lands a job with a Parisian fashion company (but in an agency just by the highway separating Paris from the banlieue). In all these respects, Aïcha is the exact opposite of her cousin Nejma, whose trajectory has been determined by identical conditions. Nejma – after failing to get a job – works in the halal burger shop of a cousin trying to profit commercially from the piety trend in the banlieue. Nejma’s failure to find an internship soon turns her into an embittered and cynical person – the opposite to

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Aïcha, who embodies a (sometimes stubbornly) cheerful and smiling character. Nejma’s frustration and despair is exacerbated by an unhappy affair with the head of a local Muslim association. She tries to exact revenge on him by taking over the association, and starts to use it as a vehicle for her political aspirations, a move which is strongly condemned by her entire family. Aïcha not only seeks to overcome the fragmented spaces of French society. One could go even further and say that, by being herself and acting as she does, she already integrates them. Her persona is not conceivable outside the fractured space she inhabits. However, visually the movie denotes that overcoming these structural oppositions is never complete, but rather a wearisome process. The shift from sequences in the banlieue to those in Paris is regularly bridged by short interludes fast-forwarding the highway or subway to Paris. These interludes remind the spectator of the dividing line between the banlieue and Paris. Showing an exhausted Aïcha on her way into the city, they indicate the difficulty of spanning the two spheres. So far the characterization of these ‘two spheres’ has been only cursory, and I would like to elaborate on this point in order to specify in which sense Aïcha’s life can be considered an attempt to merge these two spheres: under which conditions does she do so – and what is left out of this synthesis? I pointed out above that there is a tension between individual and structural dimensions in the narrative. This tension can be related to two distinct rationalities which contribute in fragmentary ways to structuring the film’s narrative. One of them rationalizes culture, here including Islam, as diversity, i.e. as an individual resource and competence; the other is a rationality which places the individual inside the milieu of an Islamic banlieue, emphasizing the structural and collective constraints which determine her life10. In order to outline the effects of these two rationalities, I will start to analyze the film’s configuration of religious and cultural practices in the Bouamaza family. Aïcha embodies a specific kind of woman from the banlieue. She is Muslim in the sense that her family celebrates Eid and would not accept a non-Muslim husband for her. However, when her cousin Nejma becomes involved in Muslim association activities and leads a group of local veiled woman – almost all converts – to make demands about mixed genders in the public swimming pool, the family is upset and worried. Her mother Malika accuses her of being ignorant of the Qur’an, other women in her environment are upset that she plays with liberties acquired with such great difficulty by previous generations of women. The conflicts about Nejma’s activities culminate in the public demonstration by covered women demanding separate hours in the public swimming pool, and it is

10 See Peter, 2008.

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clear that the controversial nature of Nejma’s activism is closely related to a specific transgression of the private/public divide in matters of Islam. This behavior can be contrasted with Aïcha’s. The particular gender roles imposed on Aïcha by her parents and wider family are presented as a strictly private matter. They are accepted by Aïcha as an obligatory condition for maintaining good relations with her family. Her attempts to convince her boyfriend to take on a second Muslim name – she suggests the name Barak – are staged as an intimate conversation on the deserted banks of the Seine, where the two lovers debate their life-plans and their doubts, and reassure each other of their mutual affection and trust. Having said this, I do not want to argue that a specific private-public divide, whether it be related to laïcité or republicanism, determines the limits of what is acceptable and what can be merged. Such dividing lines – secularist, republican, etc. – are important in some respects, but first, they are obviously porous and crossed by numerous interrelations. One case in point here would be the simple fact that the ‘private’ issue of religious inter-marriage and conversion is addressed at length in the movie.11 More generally, as many have pointed out, the question to ask is not whether religious or cultural identities are allowed to enter the public sphere in France or elsewhere, but how (that is, under what conditions) and which ones. As Asad put it in relation to the UK: “[…] what is crucial for government is not homogeneity versus difference as such but its authority to define crucial homogeneities and differences” (Asad, 1993, p. 267). The point I want to make here is that the cultural and religious specificity of Aïcha and her family is delimited and legitimated not simply in relation to specific understandings of liberty rights and of the secular public sphere, understandings which are related to the principle of laïcité or the Republic. Rather, this specificity, and ultimately its protection through the law, is legitimated in terms of diversity, i.e. as a kind of difference which tends to be conceptualized as individual resource and competence. At the same time, the movie reconfigures the public sphere composed of subjects of rights into a public conceived as a space for the marketing and consumption of entertainment, music and fashion, a public characterized by ways of doing and being, rather than by deliberation. As Faist writes, diversity “as a potential mode of incorporation” does not emphasize “the rights of migrants or national cultural minorities but the ‘positive’ effects of cultural plurality and

11 The film was strongly criticized by the website ripostelaique.com for its support for conversion to Islam. The principal concerns of ripostelaique.com are globalization and the islamization of France. See “Aïcha de Yamina Benguigui: l’islam au pays des ‘ouioui”’, at http://ripostelaique.com/Aïcha-de-yasmina-benguigui-lislam-au-pays-de-ouioui.html. >Accessed 24 February 2012@.

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competence for private companies and public service delivery. Correspondingly, there is a semantic shift from the recognition of collective identities to that of individual competences” (Faist, 2009, p. 177). Such a concept of diversity can be applied to the kind of difference embodied by Aïcha. Working in the fashion industry, her descent from Algerian parents and her social network in the banlieue are assets she can draw on to promote her career in the company. Moreover, the cultural practices of the Bouamaza family are presented as parties with music, dancing and colorful gowns. The wedding celebration in the opening sequence of the first episode (figure 1) and the celebration of the circumcision of the ‘black’ grandson Bakir in the closing scene of the second episode are staged as a party of this kind. With music in the background, the visualization of cultural practices becomes, here and elsewhere, the stuff of which music video clips are made. To put it briefly, the inclusion of Muslims into France which Benguigui stages in this movie is not defined with reference to some political or legal edifice, but largely depends upon the commodification of cultural practices through globalizing music and fashion industries. Put another way, it is this commodification which allows her to defend the liberty rights in question. As I pointed out before, specific forms of Islamic practices are also problematized in the movie. Indeed, one could easily argue that the movie contains a number of images, stories and sequences which are deprecatory about certain kinds of Muslim lives. The portrayal of converts as people who have chosen Islam for the most superficial reasons and are extraordinarily ignorant about their religion is one example. The fact that the campaign for limited gender separation in the public swimmingpool is merely the result of cousin Nejma’s strategic use of religion for her own political ends might be seen as belittling this mobilization and depriving it of legitimacy. The story of Nejma’s affair with a Muslim activist who exploits her naiveté and leaves her unexpectedly – by texting her cellphone – confirms the notion that ‘in Islam women are merely objects’ and again portrays public Muslim activism as insincere. However, it would be wrong to consider these images simply as a continuation of well-known (Orientalist) notions and representations of Islam. There are other ways of seeing these images (with the exception of the last example, I would argue), and one of them is of general importance for the reception of the movie and Benguigui’s presentation of it. The problem I grapple with here is a general one in studies of racism or Islamophobia. Stoler points out that a central characteristic of racial discourse is that it

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“invariably draws on a cultural density of prior representations that are recast in new form; that racism appears at once as a return to the past as it harnesses itself to progressive projects; that scholars can never decide among themselves whether they are witness to a legacy of the past or the emergence of a new phenomena all together” (Stoler, 1995, p. 90).

The study of Islamophobia regularly confronts similar problems when examining the functioning of images which can be traced back to the Orientalist tradition. Benguigui herself emphasizes that some of the phenomena now considered to be “problems” in the banlieue are the result of bad social conditions generally speaking. This argument implies that structural changes are necessary, and Benguigui has sought to draw attention to these changes – for example new housing policies or the introduction of “ethnic criteria” in measurements of discrimination – in many of her statements on the banlieue.12 Importantly, this way of reasoning – which is, as I said, widespread in France – turns the initial ‘problem’ – veiling, conversion to Islam, etc. – into merely secondary phenomena. A similar reasoning can be detected in some of Benguigui’s statements about Aïcha. In the press release by France 2, Benguigui not only highlights the importance of employment for citizenship, but also asserts that the difficulty of finding a job is the “cause of all identity problems [quêtes identitaires] in these territories”. According to her, this is the problem she is seeking to thematize through the persona of Nejma, who turns to religion after failing to get a job.13 Benguigui thus thematizes disruptive Islamic phenomena as part of the broader Islamic milieu of the banlieues. Put another way, while Benguigui differentiates between a kind of cultural Muslim identity on the one hand and problematic forms of piety on the other, the latter is a transformation of the former, and in this sense they are both part of a broader milieu which is characterized through Islam and which constitutes the object of governmental practices. The story of Nejma is intended as an appeal for new structural policies in the banlieues, whereas the comic and condescending portrayal of the converts is an attempt to pacify public upheaval about the veil. This view of the movie – a view which emphasizes how history makes people – is certainly intelligible to part of the audience, but it is received in different ways. In a heated TV debate with controversial journalist and writer Eric Zemmour, Zemmour made this reading of the movie his starting point. Designating Benguigui as the “archetypical Bo-Bo” (i.e. well-intentioned ‘leftist’ bourgeois) from Paris, he found fault with the film for reinventing reality by rendering 12 Libération, 18 March 2009. 13 See Communiqué de presse France 2, 27 January 2009. Available at: http://www.sondageonstv.com/Aïcha002.htm. >Accessed 19 February 2012@.

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everything as stories of “victims”, i.e. victims of discrimination.14 While the legitimacy of highlighting structural racism in the movie is thus judged in very different ways in public debate, there can be no doubt that this reading of the film, intended by Benguigui, is one which is today easily understandable. The important point which follows from this for my discussion is that such a reading assigns an ambiguous status to ‘problems’ such as veiling and the turn to religion more generally. While these practices are in some sense problematic, they are mere epiphenomena of more fundamental problems and, more generally, their appearance can be fully rationalized and understood. Benguigui’s intended reading of the film thus constitutes complex problems which can be solved in different ways. While solutions can be achieved through measures with exclusionary effects, such an approach is not the only one in this reading of the film. Furthermore, the fact that this reading conceives of problems as socially determined, at least to some degree, enables claims that these problems are to be accounted for morally by the State. It is to such claims that Zemmour reacted by designating Benguigui a Bo-Bo. So far, my discussion has been centered on the different discursive rationalities structuring the narrative of Aïcha and some debates concerning it. While this kind of analysis is highly important, it needs to be complemented. I want to suggest one other approach which accounts more suitably for the relationship or spectatorship many of the highly enthusiastic spectators established with Aïcha. More particularly, I am interested in the spectator’s empathy with Aïcha and her family. Benguigui has remarked that she was overwhelmed by the reactions she received after Aïcha was aired. Spectators had sent letters asking questions and giving advice “as if Aïcha was real, because for them she is”. 15 This phenomenon is, of course, not specific to the film Aïcha. The fact that Aïcha has become a serial certainly helps to stimulate this kind of empathy with the movie’s characters and in particular with Aïcha. Now, in the letters sent by spectators to the film’s producers, empathy leads to a reflection on motivated action or, more generally, on how to lead life – one’s own and/or that of the object of empathy – in an

14 See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZgraWDK39IM. In this debate, Benguigui stressed the ease of conversion to Islam – “one can understand the appeal” [of it – F.P.], she related the appearance of converts and new forms of veiling – what she called “the political veil in quotation marks” – to the crises of growing up which, in her view, are also a causal factor of conversion, and argued that it was necessary – for “us Muslims” – to defend these Muslims and for society to be less concerned about them. 15 Interview with Benguigui. Available at: http://www.lepost.fr/article/2009/07/20/1627563_Aïcha-de-yamina-benguigui-undouble-telefilm-2x90-fin-2009-et-4-nouveaux-episodes-en-2010.html. >Accessed 3 March 2012@.

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appropriated way. Such reflections are, of course, more generally important to spectatorship. Cartwright has coined the term “moral spectatorship” to refer to the process of “how ‘I’ (the spectator) respond when I believe that I ‘know how you feel’; what is produced ‘in me’ when feelings are projected through representations; and how I act in response to that process, whether I am cognizant of my affective response or not” (Cartwright, 2008, p. 49). In this perspective, film is not a medium for whatever message, but rather a mechanism for generating empathy which affects moral reflection on motivated action. Obviously, this reflection can relate in various ways to the movie’s plot. I want to reformulate this approach in order to relate it to subjectification and spectatorship. Foucault has defined “mode of subjection” as “the way in which people are invited or incited to recognize their moral obligations” (Foucault, 1984, p. 353). Building on Cartwright’s link between empathy, affect and morality, film can be considered as a mode of subjectification which enables, through empathy, a specific kind of moral work on the self. To be sure, this moral work can take on very different forms. It can concern the constitution of certain issues as moral ones, the problems relating to a specific moral issue, the reiterative recognition by an individual of oneself as a moral subject endowed with freedom to transform oneself, or the kind of moral subject one wants to be. Thinking about moral spectatorship does not deny the multiplicity of ways of seeing Aïcha. It simply leads us to consider more carefully that empathy is, among other things, related to morality and subjectivity. The important point for me here is that these reflections allow us to problematize the representational basis of concepts of Islamophobia, i.e. Islamophobia understood as deprecating and stereotyping representations of Islam. If we think about spectatorship as a mode of subjectification, the emphasis shifts from thinking about images and their potential exclusionary effects to the question of what kind of subjectivities are formed in the process of viewing movies. Depending on how much importance we want to give to empathy and identification as part of spectatorship – both are arguably crucial for the success of mainstream movies – this latter perspective might be very relevant. There is obviously not a conclusive answer to the question what kind of subjectivities are formed through watching Aïcha. Benguigui herself has emphasized the importance of her character Aïcha being “kind” (bienveillant) and at the same time determined to realize her “dreams” in spite of persistent obstacles. 16 This set of

16 In an interview, Benguigui emphasized that Aïcha’s “kindliness” (bienveillance) is a crucial characteristic of her persona: “Elle essaie de sortir de ce territoire, mais c’est terriblement compliqué et elle y est inexorablement ramenée. Mais elle veut s’en extraire, est bienveillante – c’est important ! – et a les rêves de n’importe quelle jeune

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personal traits, of course, fits in well with her aim to promote incorporation as diversity in a context which she characterizes as structurally racist (a racism to which the response is individual, i.e. kindliness and perseverance). However, the work on the self which it shapes is not necessarily directly related to the moral dilemma or structural problems I identified earlier in my analysis of the film.

Figure 1: Opening sequence of episode one © B. Fau/Elemiah

fille française.” See http://culture.blog.pelerin.info/2011/02/yamina-benguigui-Aïchaest-une-sheherazade-des-temps-modernes/. >Accessed 22 February 2012@.

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Figure 2: Aïcha with her mother © B. Fau/Elemiah

Pétillon’s L’Affaire du voile My discussion of Aïcha has emphasized that the film internally differentiates French Muslims as a group. The same can be said of my second case, the comic L’Affaire du voile (2006) by René Pétillon. Pétillon is a well-known French cartoonist working, since 1993, for the satirical journal Le Canard enchaîné. He is also the author of the comic book series about private investigator Jack Palmer, a somewhat naive and confused anti-hero. Jack Palmer’s adventures can be followed in more than a dozen volumes. Some of these volumes, notably Jack Palmer’s investigation into Corsican politics (adapted for cinema), have been commercially very successful. In 2006, L’Affaire du voile was released, equally a success. An Arabic translation, for markets in France and potentially in Algeria and Lebanon, was carried out immediately. L’Affaire du voile is about the search for young Lucie, daughter of Clara and Jacques Pélérin, a divorced middle-class couple, both physicians. At the beginning of the story, Jack Palmer mistakenly identifies Lucie as a convert to Islam – with the adopted name of Yasmina Fatwa – and finds a trace of her during a demonstration in defense of the right to wear hijab. Given that Yasmina lives in an école coranique to which her mother does not have access, Clara Pélérin is assisted by Jack Palmer in kidnapping her daughter, only to find out that the girl

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‘liberated’ is not her daughter, but the ‘real’ Yasmina Fatwa, a pious convert who willingly lives in the school. This story intersects with that of the two imams, the Salafist Bozo-Bozo and the ‘moderate’ Hadi and their families. Hadi’s son, Rachid, falls in love with Latifa Bozo-Bozo while their fathers struggle over the control of a Parisian mosque. When Imam Bozo-Bozo finds out that his daughter is secretly meeting Rachid, he sends his daughter into the école coranique where Yasmina Fatwa lives and studies. Jack Palmer knows of the relationship between Rachid and Latifa, since he stumbled into them during one of his strolls in the neighborhood. He puts Clara Pélérin in touch with Rachid to organize the liberation of Latifa Bozo-Bozo and Yasmina Fatwa. In brief, and I will come back to this point, the entire story is about seeing and recognition, misrecognition and obstacles to seing.

Figure 3: Jack Palmer ” Editions Glénat

As I said, L’Affaire du voile differentiates the group of French Muslims. Palmer’s investigations lead him to encounter a variety of Muslims and Muslim institutions – “fundamentalists”/”Salafists”, their Muslim adversaries, the Muslim leader Said

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Asal (embodying the suit-wearing pseudo-moderate Muslim), a Muslim seminary run by “Salafists” in Mantes-la-Jolie, Muslim patients and relatives in hospital demanding treatment by a female physician and, importantly, a variety of imams. While Imam Hadi is depicted as a relaxed person (with weak authority in his family), at ease in his relations with non-Muslims and women, his adversary Imam Bozo-Bozo and the head of the école coranique come across as highly respected and autocratic leaders. This story of discovering the complexity of French Muslim milieu is told as one in which obstacles to transparency and visual ambiguity progressively give way to precise identifications and differentiations. In this sense, it is structured, on one level, by Orientalist conceptions of veiling as loss of visibility and control (Yeğenoğlu, 1998). Palmer’s slow and unsuccessful search for Lucie Pélérin partly results from his inability to see and to see properly and to make others see what he wants them to see (figure 3). When Rachid points out Latifa to him, he is unable to identify her among the group of covered women during the demonstration; he walks past Mme Pélérin, who has covered herself for the visit to Imam Hadi (who has already heard about them walking through his neighborhood), and is unable to form a picture for himself of Yasmina Fatwa, who is sitting in a bus full of ‘identical’ looking, black-clothed, covered girls. Unsuccessfully, he wants to make a pious shop owner look at a picture of Lucie. While he is walking around the streets, youths make fun of him by pointing in one direction, telling him that a covered girl went that way, and then adding that another covered girl went the other way (figure 4). These visual obstacles are overcome through cooperating with Rachid and his father, Imam Hadi. This cooperation itself is a result of Palmer’s ability to differentiate between different ways of being Muslim. Acquiring proper knowledge and vision is essential for Palmer to move forward in his search. As the story progresses, the reader is thus enabled to make distinctions between Muslims and shown, via the persona in the comic book, how to see specific types of Muslims‘correctly’.17 From the outset, the need to differentiate and to abandon – and laugh about – old clichés of Muslims is shown to the reader, for example in a comical sequence when Palmer visits a hammam in his search for Lucie. There, a client advises him not to bring his cellphone into the bath. When Palmer asks whether this is forbidden by Islam, the client responds that the humidity damages them.

17 For example, when a Salafi Muslim – recognizable in the book by his dress code – accompanies a covered woman to the hospital, the receptionist does not wait for him to finish talking, but already knows that he is asking for a female dentist.

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As anyone familiar with French media will recognize, the often comical journey into French Islam by Jack Palmer heavily draws on current accounts of French Islam. The figure of Said Asal, for example, is closely modeled on Tariq Ramadan (figure 7). The persona of the female convert to ‘radical’ Islam, here embodied by Yasmina Fatwa, has been well known to French publics since the controversy around the Lévy sisters – both converts – who were expelled from school for wearing headscarves during the last headscarf affair (Lévy and Lévy, 2004). More generally, the lines of division between Muslims which structure the plot closely correspond to the usual way in which France’s Muslim community is mapped in public perception (with decreasing dangerosity: i. Salafi Islam, including a disproportionate number of converts; ii. Tariq Ramadan and the ‘Islamist’ Union of Islamic Organizations of France (UOIF); iii. ‘moderate’ Muslims). Pétillon did, indeed, study literature on Islam and Salafist websites before writing the comic. He did not meet any Muslims or experts, however, for fear of “being blocked”. Pétillon claims that while the book is intended to be entertaining and “light”, he nevertheless tried “to make the reader understand what I have understood myself”18. This is well received and understood by some readers, as comments on the internet show. Pétillon’s avoidance of “amalgam” and his criticism of “clichés of Islam” are mentioned here favorably.19 A feature as least as important as differentiation – the second feature highlighted by Pétillon20, critics21 and readers on the internet22 – is its lack of provocation and/or its balanced satire of both Muslims and other persons. (This fact is received in different ways by readers, some claiming that Pétillon shied away from controversy.) The emphasis which is placed upon the measured use of satire – or, from the opposite perspective, cowardice – is certainly in part due to the context, given that L’Affaire du voile was published in the middle of the Danish cartoon controversy (February 2006). Pétillon himself has distanced himself from the Danish cartoons while defending freedom of expression. Acknowledging that the turban bomb cartoon “can be considered racist” (while the other cartoons are

18 Le Temps, 4 February 2006. 19 http://www.bedetheque.com/album-53490-BD-L-affaire-du-voile.html; http://www.amazon.fr/productreviews/2226132457/ref=cm_cr_dp_all_helpful?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=1&sort By=bySubmissionDateDescending; http://www4.fnac.com/avis-L-affaire-du-voile/1p1752267.>Accessed 8 July 2011@. 20 AFP, 15 November 2006; Libération, 6 February 2006. 21 Libération, 6 February 2006. 22 http://www.amazon.fr/productreviews/2226132457/ref=cm_cr_dp_all_helpful?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=1&sort By=bySubmissionDateDescending. >Accessed 3 November 2011@.

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harmless, in his opinion), he associated himself in 2006 with calls for moderation and dialogue23.

Figure 4: Jack Palmer searching for Lucie ” Editions Glénat

No doubt, Pétillon’s position and reflection about the use of satire are determined by the Danish cartoon controversy, but they cannot, obviously, be reduced to it. In this respect, it is noteworthy that his comic book L’enquête corse in 2001 had won him wide praise, apparently also in Corsica, because of his ability to make “all sides” laugh.24 The point I want to make is that apart from differentiation, the criterion of measured use of satire structures the production and at least part of the reception of the comic book. This is not to say that the use of satire is measured, a relative term which simply refers back to the speaker and her position, but that Pétillon and part of the audience accept ‘moderation’ as a relevant criterion for judging (and debating) the merits of this kind of book. This is a significant fact. Just as importantly, however, it has to be noted that this will to make measured use of satire does not override the fundamental condition – and outcome – of reading this comic book, which we might identify, drawing on Bergson, as the ability to be a “disinterested spectator” (Bergson, 1980, p. 63). I noted above that Pétillon himself intended his book to be both entertaining and informative. The condition for laughing about important issues – without in general denying their importance – is a kind of indifference or disinterest, or rather, the option to adopt

23 AFP, 9 February 2006. 24 L’Express, 22 October 2009.

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such a position momentarily. As Bergson put it: “look upon life as a disinterested spectator: many a drama will turn into a comedy” (Bergson, 1980, p. 63). It might be argued that comic books in general depend upon and facilitate the adoption of disinterest and ‘coldness of emotion’ through certain genre conventions (such as the portrayal of bodily injuries as not having serious effects). However, the possibility of adopting such a position depends on various factors, and is not equally shared by the reader-spectator public of L’Affaire du voile, who relate very differently to the reality cartoonized in the book. I would like to elaborate this point with regard to the ways in which humor functions in the comic book. When we look at the comical panels or sequences in the book, we rapidly notice that there are two relatively distinct types of humor at play. Briefly, there is a specific way of laughing about ‘non-moderate’ Muslims – and there is a different way of laughing about the non-Muslim persona and Imam Hadi plus family in the comic book.

Figure 5: “It’s the man who decides” ” Editions Glénat

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Figure 6: Imam Bozo-Bozo not shaking hands ” Editions Glénat

Figure 7: The delicate problem of stoning adulterous women ” Editions Glénat

My starting point for thinking about laughter is that humor is shared, as already pointed out above. This is not to say that laughter cannot create lines of division, but that “jokes are the expression of sociality and possess an implicit reasonableness” (Critchley, 2002, p. 79). This reasonableness results from the fact that humor relates “to a shared but specific life-world” (Critchley, 2002, p. 90) and contributes to redefining it. Both ways of laughing imply elements of incongruity and contradiction, of course. However, the element of incongruity emerges out of different sets of relations. In one case, incongruity refers to the gap between human intentions and acts, or the gap between an individual’s self-

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representation and his outside perception. An example would be Imam Hadi, who all through the story keeps saying “It’s the man who decides” (figure 5). The story makes abundantly clear that this does not apply to his case and that his wife is the main decision-taker. Here, one can laugh about an individual who is and remains inside the ‘we’-group whose common sense enables the joke. In fact, laughter is directed not so much at the individual Imam Hadi, but primarily at the comical type of the hen-pecked husband. As Bergson points out, “when comic is associated with persons, it none the less retains its simple, independent existence, it remains the central character, present though invisible, to which the characters in flesh and blood on the stage are attached” (Bergson, 1980, p. 70). This can well be applied to stereotypical characters in comic books. As hen-pecked husband, Imam Hadi simply embodies a type of person in French society. The same can be said about Lucie’s father, failing to live up to his image of himself as caring father; about Jack Palmer, the totally incompetent private investigator, etc. As to Salafi Muslims and Said Asal, laughter about them is not restricted to this kind of comedy, but also relates to their difference from a ‘we’. Laughter about them is laughter about members of a group whose collective behavior is inadequate or simply weird in relation to the ‘we’ group addressed in this comic book. This is the case when the Salafi imam refuses to shake hands with a woman and his colleagues start shouting “Islamophobia! Provocation!” in reaction to the outstretched hand of the female employee who ‘simply’ wants to greet him (figure 6). Another example would be Said Asal’s remark, to Clara Pélérin, that the “delicate problem [of stoning adulterous women – F.P.] needs to be dealt with in a spirit of openness and moderation”. This, and the subsequent suggestion by Asal’s female assistant that a moratorium on stoning should be implemented, leaves Madame Pélérin speechless and rolling her eyes (figure 7). Another example, where Pétillon plays on the link between visual and text by disrupting it, concerns the demonstration against the prohibition of the veil – or, as it is phrased in the comic book, “in favor of the headscarf”. Here, the image shows a group of covered women escorted by men walking down the street – towards the spectator – and shouting in unison “The veil is my choice” (figure 8). The compact composition of the group contrasts with the claim to individuality. The latter is further weakened by the fact that one of the men also shouts the slogan. The incongruity constructed in this image ascribes a mixture of harmlessness (most of the women are smiling), stupidity and falseness to those defending the right to wear hijab in public schools.25

25 Pétillon has declared himself to be “resolutely in favor” of the law prohibiting headscarves in public schools. While he was at first undecided, the deliberations of the

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In short, the comic book invites the reader to laugh in different ways. In one case, laughing is related to the description of common features of a shared life-world, in the second case to the description of what is outside. The comic book plot – the search for Lucie Pélérin – interweaves many comical sequences with a problematization of seeing Muslims and images of Islam. The suspense of the story partly derives from Palmer’s difficulties in seeing and recognizing Muslims as the kind of Muslims they are. In the course of drawing a differentiated picture of French Muslims, clichéd images are exposed as wrong and new visual codes for different types of Muslims are introduced. As to the use of comedy in L’Affaire du voile, it generates complex effects. Comedy allows some Muslims, e.g. Imam Hadi, to be incorporated into the ‘we’ group by making them embody standard comical types. However, the comic also portrays a group of Muslims as different – i.e. funny, weird and false – from the ‘we’-group. With regard to ‘non-moderate’ Muslims, comical elements are employed to incite a polarizing laughter about someone. More generally, this kind of laughter enables and depends upon a distanced and disinterested relationship with a topic – Islam in France – which more often than not is the cause of concern.

Figure 8: “The veil is my choice!” © Edition Glénat

As in the case of Benguigui’s Aïcha, the work of differentiating between specific types of Muslims does not put an end to the use of an encompassing category Islam. On the contrary, differentiating Muslims implies specifying the various types of relations between them: the broader Muslim community is tied together

Commission Stasi persuaded him to support a law, he claims. Le Temps, 4 February 2006.

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by affective bonds, such as in the case of Rachid and Latifa, and by doctrinal debate and strife, as in the case of their fathers. The debate and strife between Imam Hadi and the Salafists are what brings him into contact with Jack Palmer and Lucie Pélérin and leads him to help them – they share the same problem, namely those Muslims designated as Salafists in the comic book. However, the difference between Salafists and Imam Hadi is not stable. The last panel sequence of the book is dedicated to the meeting between Imams Hadi and Bozo-Bozo where they dispute their differences – i.e. the status of women – in light of the planned marriage between their children. The prospect of a more unified Muslim community thus looms on the horizon. Importantly, the convert Yasmina Fatwa does not fit easily into this kind of Muslim community. Yasmina Fatwa stands apart insofar as her religiosity is portrayed as self-willed and sincere. All other Muslim women in the book either openly oppose hijab or are associated with a milieu which constrains their choices. This is not the case for Yasmina Fatwa. She cannot be seen as a woman who needs to be liberated. On the contrary, she personifies the convergence of autonomy and a ‘radical’ Muslim subjectivity. The work of differentiation and regulation of Muslims which L’Affaire du voile performs comes unstuck when the figure of the ‘radical convert’ to Islam appears. There is a structural tension between the individual choice the convert is portrayed as making and the regulation of Muslims, through a combination of family and mosque politics and police work, which is set up in the course of the story. The comic does not offer any clue as to how the convert Yasmina might be included in a narrative of the future reconfiguration of French Muslims as a ‘moderate’ Muslim community.

Coda: Plantu’s Je ne dois pas dessiner Mahomet My previous discussion emphasized, as one of the common points of Benguigui’s Aïcha and Pétillon’s L’Affaire du voile, the explicit aim of drawing a more differentiated picture of Islam in France. Both media products participate in the increasing circulation of new taxonomies of Muslims in France and Europe. Secondly, both Benguigui and Pétillon consider that their works are intended to rationalize and calm down the current debate. Thus Pétillon has claimed that one of his aims is to “dedramatize” the debate about Islam in France 26. These claims have, of course, to be related to the positions of their respective authors. As I have

26 Interview with Pétillon by Pierre Labousset (2006), http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x4hyj_rene-petillon_news. >Accessed 26 July 2011@. As to Benguigui, see above.

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pointed out already, there are ways of seeing and reading these products which make them compatible with policy measures whose effects on Muslims might well be considered dramatic. Likewise, the assurance with which the need and ability to ‘differentiate’ is being claimed by the authors might be surprising given the schematic features of these works. But the simple point I want to make here is different. I would like to argue that these claims are significant in that they constitute a positioning in the debate about the government of Muslims in France. By positioning themselves – in an easily intelligible way, if we judge by spectators’ comments – against monolithic views of Islam, and by affirming the possibility of “dedramatizing” the situation, the makers of Aïcha and L’Affaire du voile assert visual and textual differentiation – i.e. a specific kind of knowledge – as a means to the (self-)government of Muslims. Simultaneously and more fundamentally, they assert more indirect and productive technologies of power as able and sufficient to deal with the problems currently related to Islam. The previous analysis identified some techniques of government: by staging Islam as musical and sartorial culture which can be commoditized and put into circulation; by showing life stories of discrimination and extremism which construct Muslims as an object of security government; by enabling moral spectatorship and self-conduct; by establishing distanced and disinterested relationships of laughing with and over Muslims. Having said this, there are, however, limits to the potential for producing such constructions of Islam and Muslims. These limits have to be emphasized. They indicate that the various techniques which are used here to visualize Islam are unable to fully capture it in a coherent manner and subject it as planned to governmental regulation. These limits are apparent in both Aïcha and L’Affaire du voile. The narrative of the movie Aïcha is characterized by a tension between the individual and structure. This tension not only makes for different perceptions of the movie. It also weakens the central aims which Benguigui set for herself, namely to draw attention to racism and to the ability to overcome the obstacles it poses. As to the comic book L’Affaire du voile, the narrative of how French Muslims can transform themselves into a ‘moderate’ religious community excludes the convert Yasmina Fatwa. Her unconstrained choice for ‘radical’ Islam disturbs the portrayal of how Islam and freedom relate to each other, and it is unclear how she can be part of the regulation of Muslims. I would like to conclude by pointing to the Danish cartoon controversy in France as one moment where the public visual appropriation of Islam becomes determined and limited by the criticism from Muslim voices in the public sphere in France, Europe and beyond. I have already mentioned that René Pétillon distanced himself from the Danish cartoons, and in particular from the cartoon

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depicting Muhammad with a turban bomb. As cartoonist for Le Canard enchaîné, he had, during the controversy, produced a cartoon (entitled “Jusqu’où on peut aller?”), which provoked discussion at the newspaper and was ultimately not published. Here, we see a newspaper editor saying to a cartoonist: “Your cartoon of Muhammad who is doing this thing with the camel … je ne le sens pas”. The cartoonist responds: “Censor! Coward! Traitor”. 27 Pétillon’s criticism of the Danish cartoons, which as I said remained unpublished, problematizes censorship by distinguishing it from what might be called ‘simple decency’. In contrast to Pétillon, another cartoon commenting on the crisis achieved global notoriety. This is a cartoon by Plantu (figure 9), a prominent cartoonist working for the journal Le Monde. In his annual publication of his drawings for Le Monde (Plantu, 2006), Plantu has offered some reflections on the cartoon controversy. In fact, it is noteworthy that the chapter dealing with the cartoon controversy, unlike the other parts of the book (usually without text) and the general style of the series, gives primacy to the written word. In his reflections, Plantu struggles to come to terms with the controversy. On the one hand, he is at pains to emphasize the contingency and illegitimacy of the uproar about the cartoons. He claims that the media vehicle – an ordinary newspaper, not a satirical magazine – determined how the cartoons were seen by part of the public. He adduces the well-known story about the Danish imams manipulating images during their trip to the Middle East. Ambiguously, he states that the legitimate debate about Islam and violence – on the basis of the cartoon showing a man with a turban bomb – had been suppressed by the “mediatized polemic” about the prohibition, valid “for many Muslims”, on representing the Prophet Muhammad’s face. On the other hand, he identifies a number of causes for which the Danish cartoonists are to be held responsible, perhaps the most important one being that they created the impression that the target of their satire was the Prophet. Apparently placing the Prophet Muhammad in the category not quite human, he later on states categorically that the job of the cartoonist is not to criticize deities and non-earthly beings, but political leaders (Plantu, 2006, p. 10). His defense of “political drawings” as a “space of spontaneity and liberty” (Plantu, 2006, p. 8) is thus conditional and dependent upon the confused category of “Gods”. This oscillation between a defense of freedom understood as absence of constraints and some vague notion of self-imposed limits to what can be shown in

27 http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xe67q9_petillon-l-ironiste-du-canard-encha_news. Pétillon was refused entry to Algeria, together with three other French cartoonists, for an exhibition of newspaper drawings. Le Monde (11 October 2006) claims that the refusal to let them enter was a reaction to some of the drawings in the exhibition, including Pétillon’s about the headscarf affair and the Danish cartoon controversy.

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cartoons is fully played out in the drawing published by Le Monde. When asked by the paper’s editors to react to the burning of French cultural centers in the Middle East, Plantu was keen not to further escalate the conflict, while at the same time wanting to create something edgy (énervant). Starting to write the sentence “I am not allowed to draw Muhammad”, then letting the letters dance and building them into forms, he added a hand drawing, and finally decided that “I have to go entirely for ambiguity” (Plantu, 2006, p. 9). The final drawing is presented by him as open to any interpretation: the pictured face somehow similar to that of the “imam” surveilling the drawing scene, but also to anyone else, while the hand is that of a right-handed person and so cannot possibly be Plantu’s. By visualizing the prohibition on portraying Muhammad, a face emerges; neither the depicted face nor its author can be identified. While Plantu’s cartoon is often seen as turning the prohibition into the stuff of the prohibited image, Plantu himself – in this text – states a different aim: to disable unambiguous referentiality and the unequivocal attribution of authorship. The fact that some readers saw a resemblance to Leonardo da Vinci in the depicted person was to him the greatest compliment, he claims.

Figure 9: Je ne dois pas dessiner Mahomet … (reproduced by permission)

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Conclusion I have argued the benefit of considering the partial abandonment of monolithic and essentialistic elements in representations of Islam, and the increasing spread of differentiation, by placing it in the analytical framework of (self-)government. My analysis has identified some techniques of government which build on this visual and textual differentiation: showing life stories of discrimination and extremism which construct Muslims as an object of security government; staging Islam as musical and sartorial culture which can be commoditized and marketed to a public composed of consuming subjects; enabling moral spectatorship and self-conduct; establishing distanced and disinterested relationships of laughter with and about Muslims, which enable a variety of governmental policies. As media representations which differentiate and as media for visual and multi-sensorial practices, Aïcha and L’Affaire du voile do not conform to Islamophobic media products as conventionally defined. While both Aïcha and L’Affaire du voile contain numerous images which are familiar from Orientalist media, these images are temporalized and linked here to a restricted group of Muslims. However, these two media products cannot simply be disconnected from Islamophobia. They contribute to reproducing Islam as a disruptive phenomenon which needs to be rationalized and rendered governable. They do not merely offer a differentiated portrayal of Muslims. Temporalizing the phenomenon Islam, one could also argue that they contribute to continually reproducing the one Muslim community which over time must be differentiated again and again into different types of Muslim. This is what the governmental techniques employed in these media have in common. Even staging Islam as commodified culture – as in Aïcha – cannot simply be severed from the problematization of Islam and security government: they are joined together by the generational narrative – including the fact that the future of the children is always uncertain – and the reference to the Islamic milieu of the banlieue. If we adopt the perspective outlined here, the current debate about Islamophobia is partially reconfigured. There are clearly many instances where using the concept Islamophobia as an ideology of repressive power is plausible quite simply because in many cases the will to misrepresent Islam or to spread hatred are obvious or even openly stated. In many other cases, however, like the ones examined here, the need to make the grounds of critique explicit in specific cases is clearly apparent. The critical dimension of the concept Islamophobia is then tied to a new set of difficult, but perhaps less polarizing questions. These questions concern the kind of images we want to produce, how we look at them and what status we grant them; they are about laughter, whether we want to laugh

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at others and how we laugh; they relate to what we consider legitimate ways for the State to intervene in the field of culture and, ultimately, they even embrace the big question of what we consider desirable, legitimate or good ways of government.

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Terrorism Laws. The War on Terror and the Classifications of the ‘Dangerous Other’. Bielefeld: transcript, pp. 79-108. Peter, F., 2010. Welcoming Muslims into the Nation.Tolerance Politics and Integration in Germany. In: J. Cesari, ed. Muslims in the West after 9/11. Religion, Politics and Law. New York and London: Routledge, pp. 119-144. Plantu, 2006. Je ne dois pas dessiner … Paris: Seuil. Poole, E., 2002. Reporting Islam.Media Representation and British Muslims. London: I.B.Tauris. Rose, N. and Miller, P., 1992. Political Power beyond the State: Problematics of Government. The British Journal of Sociology, 43(2), pp. 173-205. Sayyid, S., 2010. Thinking through Islamophobia. In: S. Sayyid and A. Vakil, eds. Thinking through Islamophobia. Global Perspectives. London: Hurst, pp. 1-4. Schneiders, T. G., ed. 2009. Islamfeindlichkeit: Wenn die Grenzen der Kritik verschwimmen. Wiesbaden: VS Verlag. Shryock, A., ed. 2010. Islamophobia/Islamophilia. Beyond the Politics of Friend and Enemy. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Stoler, A. L., 1995. Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things. Durham: Duke University Press. Tyrer, D., 2010. ‘Flooding the embankments’: Race, biopolitics and sovereignty. In: S. Sayyid and A. Vakil, eds. Thinking through Islamophobia. Global Perspectives. London: Hurst, pp. 93-110. Yeğenoğlu, M., 1998. Colonial fantasies. Towards a Feminist Reading of Orientalism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Veiled Bodies, Vile Speech: Islam, the Carnivalesque and the Politics of Profanation Maha El Hissy

Unexpectedly, comedy and parody have developed recently into one of the newest and most popular trends in responding to and commenting on issues related to Islam in Germany. Numerous stand-up comedians, authors, art directors and satirists are engaging in performances and art productions, a new approach that can be coined as ‘Islam light’. This might be hard to believe, though, since many comic approaches to religious issues concerning Islam have unleashed furious and violent reactions all over the world. However, this comic reading of the divine offers a trendy answer to the debates on where to place Islam in this huge divide between modernity and tradition, thus opening up a heterogeneous space beyond a mere dichotomy. Irony and humor are the new popular modes of talking about the sacred, whether by unveiling the absurdity of the content, questioning archaic beliefs in the light of contemporary and fashionable lifestyle, or reading different verses of the Qur’an against each other or against other religious texts. A radical nuance is added by focusing on topics about sexuality, loathing, secretion, the monstrous, and the evil opposed to the sublime, an act that fouls the pure. Another even more subversive approach is to divulge that sanctity derives from an obsession with the exact same matters that religious texts want to regulate or forbid, i.e. sex, prostitution, promiscuity, homosexuality and more. Profaning or actually defaming the divine is what Michail Bakhtin (1965; 1993) discusses in his theory about the medieval carnival in Europe, among other features of the carnivalesque, a theory that has been rediscovered in the last few decades especially by scholars of literary and cultural studies. According to Bakhtin, the medieval carnival was a time when all rules and social norms were

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suspended. This is the annual time of liberation when the king would be parodied, the fool would dress as a king and the king as a fool, when costumes and masks are used to subvert hierarchies, when the street becomes a common place for coarse language, swear words, blasphemy. In short, it is a time when social norms are temporarily turned upside down. In fact, it is the symbolic demise of the king which was regarded as the most daring among all actions during carnival time. Interestingly, the festivity that is meant to introduce the period of fasting – the word carnival is derived from “carne levare”, which means “removing meat” – is celebrated with rituals evolving around the human body, its orifices, especially the mouth and the anus, as well as human feces, thus shaping what Bakhtin refers to as the grotesque body. It is exactly through those practices focusing on the flesh and other lusts that the sacred, the untouched, is turned into earthly substance close to the mass, which happens by highlighting its mundane and mortal character, a sacrilege only permitted during the limited time of medieval carnival. Since abstinence and spirituality are based on transcending the flesh and all related lusts, profanation is easily achieved by turning the rule upside down, hence the focus on corporeal matters. One of the reasons why Bakhtin’s theory has lately been rediscovered is the fact that it offers a prevailing analysis of popular and contemporary tendencies in transcultural and migration literature and other works of art, for this theory is concerned with questions of social hierarchies and the connected dialogism that takes place “in resonance with the voices of others” (Stam, 1989, p. 95). Various art productions by immigrants, for instance, expose diverse phenomena of hybridity, heteroglossia, fusion, and subversion, which correspond with Bakhtin’s idea of a utopian time of medieval carnival, when all class difference is intermitted and social orders reorganized. Since the contemporary theatrical, literary and general art scene of immigrants in Germany is mainly shaped by Turkish-German immigrants, most of them allude to issues relating to Islam and Muslims in Germany as well as their ‘compatriots’ in Turkey. With regard to religious issues, irony and carnivalesque actions are best performed through profanation of the divine, which I attempt to discuss here in the light of two examples, a book and a play: The first is the book Bibel vs. Koran: Sie werden nicht glauben, was in den heiligen Büchern steht! (Bible vs. Qur’an. You won’t believe what is written in the holy books!) (2011) written by the German author Simon Akstinat, who opposes different verses of the Qur’an and the Bible and comments on the not distinct but rather surprisingly very similar content of the two Holy Scriptures. The two books are, interestingly, not read against each other but as complementary. Framed with ironic comments on the

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absurd and often contradicting content of the two holy texts, the writer succeeds in underlining the profane character of the divine script. The second example is the play Schwarze Jungfrauen (Black Virgins, 2006) co-authored by the Turkish-German writer Feridun Zaimoğlu and German author Günter Senkel. It centers on a biological attribute, the hymen, as a determining factor for female Muslim identity in Germany today. In their play, Muslim women plead in vulgar tones for chastity, and establish through virginity a space of their own. The ribald language and the content of five monologues, performed by different women, are contrasted with the celibate lifestyle that the speakers intend to lead. The paradox that these women produce is a parody of Muslim identity and orthodox religious belonging today. Although the speakers aggressively urge sexual abstinence, their focus on corporeal matters defames the divine, thereby interrogating whether it can be really regarded as such

I. Loathing the Divine: Simon Akstinat’s Bible vs. Qur’an Sperm, female breasts, menstrual blood, whores. At first glance, it would be hard to tell that all these words stand for issues raised in two of the most famous and influential books of human history: the Bible and the Qur’an. The Holy Scriptures are thus concerned with earthly issues evolving around lust and the flesh. Pointing out these facts, however, is seen as a way of defaming the sacred. Transforming what is regarded as sacred into earthly matters shapes the core of Giorgio Agamben’s “In Praise of Profanation”. In this short essay, he points out that “religion can be defined as that which removes things, places, animals, or people from common use and transfers them to a separate sphere” (Agamben, 2007, p. 74), thus alluding to the etymology of the word ‘religion’, which means to tie or to fasten to God. According to Agamben then, religion describes that which has been transferred to the realm of gods, whereas profanation is precisely about bringing all that which has been consecrated back to “the free use of men” (Agamben, 2007, p. 73). Agamben comes to the conclusion that ‘religio’ thus does not unite men and God, but rather ensures they will remain separate (Agamben, 2007, p. 75). According to Agamben, play is one crucial way to transform the sacred into the profane – a term that originally means outside of the temple – thereby introducing an unusual approach to what is thought of as holy or untouchable. It is in between the two realms of the sacred and the profane that the precarious position of holy texts is to be located, where they are tied to God on the one hand and still should remain accessible to human beings on the other. There is probably

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no need to list those many incidents when criticizing, questioning, not to say mocking the contents of those holy texts, and especially the Qur’an, triggered vast furious reactions. The fatwa issued against Salman Rushdie because of his book The Satanic Verses (1988), which was regarded by many Muslims as blasphemous; Theo van Gogh’s short movie Submission (2004), causing broad controversies that led to him being killed; the Jyllands-Posten ‘Muhammad cartoons’ controversy, or recently the protests in response to the film The Innocence of Muslims (2012), are only a few examples of attempts to keep the sacred separate from the ‘popular’ or the ‘profane’. With the Holy Scriptures being located between the ‘sacred’ and the ‘profane’, they stand for the touched and untouched at the same time, thus provoking controversies whenever readers or critics of the Qur’an, for example, indulge in irony, question the content, or even go so far as to deconstruct it. The desire to preserve the sacred text from becoming profane is what shapes all controversies surrounding the presence of Islam in Europe. So who dares to scrutinize the Qur’an still? And the more important question is: why would anyone want to do so? In the last few years, and with the increasing number of Turkish immigrants in Germany and all the debates on Germany being a multicultural country, mocking Islam has been a growing trend expressed in several works of art, especially parodic performances, thus opening up an option for something that we can refer to as ‘popular Islam’, an approach to religion that results from means of profanation and sets out to deconstruct the boundary between the sacred and the earthly. Without such an approach, made possible through works of art, the presence of Islam in Europe would be fueled by violent responses to questioning the content, or radical attempts at separation from mainstream culture. One of the most recent performances profaning the Qur’an is the book Bibel vs. Koran: Sie werden nicht glauben, was in den heiligen Büchern steht (Bible vs. Qur’an: You won’t believe what is written in the holy books) published in 2011 by the German author Simon Akstinat. In this book he refers to all the abovementioned corporeal issues, covering a whole range from excretion via sexuality to promiscuity, all of which he traces in the Qur’an as well as in the Bible, adding his own ironic comments. In the introduction to the book, Turkish-German standup comedian Serdar Somunçu writes: “There are books that everyone knows very well even though no one has read them. And there are others that the whole world talks about even though one has to be a proficient researcher in order to understand them. There are some books that make people fight until death and there are others that make people beat their brains, some books cause despair and

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others just get dusty on bookshelves. Only a few books unite all those different facets and remain fully accessible only to the most clever and educated. That’s how I’ve felt towards the Bible and the Qur’an for a long time now.” (Akstinat, 2011, p. 7)

Somunçu is alluding exactly to what Agamben regarded as a means of profanation: contingence, or to be more precise, direct contingence. Akstinat practices a profanation of the Holy Scriptures, and particularly of the Qur’an, by unveiling the sexual implications of content and the calls for violence that can be found in the two Holy Scriptures, demystifying marvelous creaturesand using bawdy language to comment on the verses. The firm border that is meant to separate the sacred from the profane is blurred in particular by the verses he selects for comment and the way he ironizes these passages with his comments. It is through irony and play that he points out the huge gap between archaic content and modern lifestyle. Although the book is directed against both the Bible and the Qur’an, one has to bear in mind all the specific restrictions surrounding such a reading of the Qur’an. This starts with the mandatory purifying rituals of reading, since many Muslims believe one can only touch the Qur’an after washing oneself, and so the performance of purity starts with the act of touching the divine text or book cover. This surely adds to the level of subversion in Akstinat’s text when ‘pure’ reading is converted into a play of irony, smudging the pure and further desecrating the content. Akstinat introduces his book with different quotes reflecting suspicious reactions to those holy texts. Goethe, Voltaire, Schopenhauer, Rousseau, Einstein and Marx are some of the examples that Akstinat refers to at the beginning of his book, as he draws attention to a range of statements about what makes those two holy texts dangerous or violent. In this case, Akstinat embeds reading the Qur’an in a discursive relationship with the Bible. Through his deconstructive reading he comes to the simple conclusion that Islam and Christianity might seem on the surface to be contradicting beliefs but that they are actually very similar – perhaps a lot more than one might assume – and this is, according to Akstinat, the reason why the two religious views are in a state of constant combat with each other. Akstinat’s book is divided into chapters on “war and games”, “sex and matrimony”, “rules and punishment” and “belief and superstition”, again divided into subchapters covering a wide range of topics such as “breasts”, “foreigners”, and “the character of God”. Akstinat opens up ‘new’ topics to practice a different exegesis of the Bible and the Qur’an. His reading, the ironic comments and the use of colloquial language invert the sacred into something profane. In addition to

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this, Akstinat’s selective reading limits the topics raised in his book to those passages in the Bible and the Qur’an built around sexuality and the corporeal. In the afterword to his book, he admits that his selective reading is meant to be onesided. The author further explains that the common reading of those texts seeks solely to underline the positive side of the content. This is where he applies a subversive reading that depicts the “dark passages” of the Qur’an and the Bible (Akstinat, 2011, p. 109). According to Akstinat, this is an appropriate way to obtain “a full picture” (Akstinat, 2011, p. 109). With lots of irony and wit, the author starts the first chapter of the book, entitled “War and Games”, by mocking the call for violence and war in the two holy books. According to Akstinat’s reading of the Qur’an, all Muslims, for example, have to fight until all temptation has come to an end and until all people believe in Allah, a call for violence that Akstinat comments on as follows: “Until now, only one out of six billion people are Muslim, which means that we still have a long way to go” (Akstinat, 2011, p. 15), therein unveiling all the controversy around a deviant divine. Similarly, the German author ironically comments on sacred stories about sacrifice, such as that of Abraham preparing to slaughter his son. In the part of the book entitled “Inventive Murders and Loathing Charts”, Akstinat lampoons Abraham’s story as a form of sacred cannibalism glorified in the Bible and the Qur’an (Akstinat, 2011, p. 26). The writer takes it from there and lists a number of violent punishments and killings that the holy texts wish to see visited on sinners and infidels. Cannibalizing the content and carnivalizing the text correspond to a large extent. In Bible vs. Qur’an, further mockery carnivalizes corporeal matters on a different level. Akstinat exposes the paradoxes of both the Bible and the Qur’an, which plead for chastity while focusing on lust and bodies. There is a biblical obsession, for example, with female breasts, with husbands being encouraged to remain loyal to their wives’ breasts and not to be driven by those of female strangers (The Bible, Book of Proverbs, 5:19). The same obsession with the female body exists in the Qur’an as well, where believers are promised a paradise with full-breasted virgins (The Qur’an, 78:31). This is repeated in several verses in the Qur’an, promptingAkstinat to wonder whether this does not turn the life of a Muslim after death into an “erotic entertainment park” (Akstinat, 2011, p. 37)1. Likewise, Akstinat’s observations on issues such as sperm, menstrual blood and masturbation ridicule the texts. As is generally known, both the Qur’an and the Bible address these issues by declaring them impure or forbidden. The German

1

Akstinat does not, however, name other references to virgins and female breasts in the Qur’an. Further examples can be found in 44:45, 52:20, 56:22, 55:72.

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writer then describes how Ayatollah Khomeini pursued some of these imperatives in an article published in Der Spiegelin 1980, commanding men, for example, to wash themselves if they ejaculate after fornication with animals (Akstinat, 2011, p. 41)2. At this point Akstinat recalls with irony Khomeini’s opinion that the Bible is not so easy-going on sodomy, and in so doing he draws attention to all the perversion in readings of Islam by contemporary religious icons such as Khomeini. This distancing from the original text entails a plea to return to it and to inspect its imperatives. Similarly, many contradictions surround the issue of prostitution. However, contrary to all the widespread prohibitions of prostitution, Akstinat introduces verses in the Bible and the Qur’an that do not actually forbid harlotry. The Bible mentions, for example, widowers who pay prostitutes a visit (Akstinat, 2011, p. 43). In Shiite Islam, there is a hint of indirect prostitution hidden behind the pretext of the so-called lust marriage, a form of matrimony which, according to Akstinat, can last for the minimum of an hour, and which forces the husband to pay a dower to those women that he takes for pleasure (The Qur’an. 4:24). The combination of the dower and the temporary pleasure basically rename harlotry and indicate an exception to the alleged ban. In the final chapter of his book, Akstinat uses another means of profanation by questioning or demystifying miraculous creatures such as angels. In fact, he undermines all mystery and marvelousness surrounding these celestial beings when he reinterprets various verses in the two holy books. According to the author of Bible vs. Qur’an, if one follows all the Holy Scriptures say about angels and their responsibilities, such as the brutal castigation of infidels and interrogations under torture of the dead in their graves, then these creatures should rather be identified as berserkers (Akstinat, 2011, p. 71). Akstinat continues with verses about ghosts, magicians, and witches, all examples with which he highlights the irrational stories that readers decide to believe for the sake of worshiping their religious texts (Akstinat, 2011, pp. 72-75). What Akstinat is doing is to identify absurdity or superstition in divine verses. The author’s decision to use everyday or colloquial language brings these sacred beings back to the sphere of earthly matters. This applies not only to the comments that Akstinat integrates between the cited verses but also to his translation of the Holy Scriptures, not a conventional translation but rather an

2

See the issue of Der Spiegel published on January 21, 1980. See: http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/print/d-14319471.html [Accessed 26 September 2012]. The quotation in Der Spiegel is from the collection “Das Königreich der Gelehrsamkeit” published in 1970 by Moewig Verlag in Munich. The book contains a series of lectures that Khomeini gave at the faculty of theology in Nadschaf during his exile in Iraq. The lectures were transcribed into written text or recorded by his students.

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informal one. A verse from the Qur’an quotes Muhammad, for example, complaining to God that his people consider the Qur’an to have been abandoned. However, the translation of the Qur’an by L. Ullmann (1865) that Akstinat quotes in this chapter, which is not a common one, describes the holy text as “empty gibberish” (Akstinat, 2011, p. 81).3

II. Virgin Bodies, Vulgar Speech: Black Virgins and the Carnivalesque Black Virgins adopts a different approach towards the sacred focus on an anatomic characteristic in combination with indecent language. The play by Zaimoğlu and Senkel premiered in Berlin in 2006, and was directed by the Turkish-German scriptwriter and film director Neco Çelik. The play is based on interviews that Zaimoğlu, the most popular among Turkish-German writers, claims to have conducted with Muslim women living in Germany. Together with the German author Günter Senkel, he collected statements made by young Muslims on a wide range of topics covering sex, their relationships with a male other, their political views, and their understanding of Muslim identity. The interviews were subsequently transformed into a stylized literary language for stage performance. It is left unclear to what extent the statements were changed during this process of literary transformation, and one could even argue that the performed monologues are pure fiction mainly fabricated by the writer and thus not to be regarded as authentic or documentary material at all. The play features the lives of five Muslim women in Germany performed in spoken monologues on stage. However, the “Neo-Muslims” – a term used by Zaimoğlu to describe the religious and cultural views of the female speakers – do not tell the expected tales of suppression and isolation. Instead, they vulgarly and daringly speak of, and even embody, widespread taboos: they unveil stories about facials, oral sex, vaginas, their first sexual experience and more. They even talk very cheekily about chastity, thus subverting widely held images of the meek Muslim woman. In the play, the Neo-Muslims even go as far as praising Taliban, Jihad, and the attacks of September 11. All holy content is not just profaned but even defamed, implying that a sacred, isolated religious context is no longer possible in the heart of European modernity. In Black Virgins, Feridun Zaimoğlu paints a commonly held picture of Muslim women isolated in German society today. However, the representation of the nude, passive, lascivious, or suppressed oriental woman, especially familiar from 19th-

3

The word “gibberish” (Geschwätz) does not occur in the Arabic version of the Qur’an.

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century paintings, is transformed into one of aggressive subjects. The confrontational stage performance consists of five monologues spoken by five women, and in this respect the theatrical genre reverses the popular autobiographical writing by Muslim women often criticized by Turkish-German writers and literary scholars for portraying victimhood. In fact, the subversion of the image of tamed and often mute female Muslims can be understood in the play as a response to orientalist views, and thus challenges the dichotomy between center/periphery, self/other, male/female in several ways, as the following analysis reveals. In several similar earlier writings, Zaimoğlu focused on an ethnically homogenous group, usually second-generation Turks living in Germany. Black Virgins is an exception. National background varies in the play, yielding to religious unity. A Bosnian, a Turk, and a German convert can be identified among the speakers. The conversion case, in particular, demonstrates that the center of the majority culture has been affected by the increasing presence of a new religious minority. If Islam was a religion brought to Germany mainly by Turkish guest workers in the sixties, it is now part of German and European reality and not necessarily a foreign or emergent element. In several interviews, both Feridun Zaimoğlu and Neco Çelik refer to the interviewed women as “Neo-Muslims”. This designation first signals the rediscovery and revival of Muslim beliefs. Secondly, it underlines variation in current religious orientation. ‘Neo-Islam’ takes up, yet deviates from, what I would call ‘traditional Islam’. The new orientation is based on religious extremism and is meant to separate the neo-Muslim group from the German majority. Socalled ‘Neo-Islam’ is a response to, or a rejection of, German or European discourses of power. One of the interviewed women sums up the motivation behind her religious orientation as follows: “I know that my impertinence is against all expectations. You think you know the way I am. And I am objecting to that, to leave a vulgar impression behind” (Senkel and Zaimoğlu, 2006, p. 52)4. It is through the defilement of the pure that a new Muslim self-awareness is forming at the margins of German society. It responds to power relations between the center of the German majority and the periphery of isolated Muslim women. In Zaimoğlu and Senkel’s Black Virgins, Muslim orientation is neither the result of a cultural heritage nor of a generational conflict, but rather a means of selfassertion. Political, religious, and cultural discourses are consequently negotiated over the female body, and specifically over virginity, which is a choice made by 4

“[…] ich weiß doch, dass ich Zumutung gegen Vermutung setze, ihr glaubt, zu wissen, wie ich bin, und ich spreche dagegen an, um einen richtig vulgären Eindruck zu hinterlassen.”

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the interviewed women themselves and not imposed on them. Striving for a place of their own, the interviewed Muslim women choose to underline their distinction from their German peers, for instance, by pleading for virginity or the headscarf. Anatomical characteristics, as well as appearance, serve to distinguish the speakers from both the male as well as, generally speaking, the cultural ‘Other’. The female body offers a space to practice a religious belief. In this manner, virginity is not understood as a biological stage, but as a feminist stance. In Zaimoğlu’s play, it is denoted as a way towards female self-empowerment. Through the rejection of defloration, the speakers believe they can invert female subordination to the male ‘Other’. Instead of serving as mere objects of desire, the Muslim speakers become autonomous subjects by means of their preferred celibate lifestyle. The image of Muslim misanthropes is supported by the stage design, in which the speakers do not even interact with each other. The stage is divided into two floors, each with three cells separated by walls. Each performer stands here to recite her monologue, eachwearing a male thermal shirt. Each of them acts while locked up in a room similar to a cell, designed to emphasize the self-imposed isolation. One of the black virgins is a quadriplegic. Seated in a wheelchair in the bottom cell during the whole performance, she personifies the state of social immobility that the speakers choose to apply to their lives. Thus Zaimoğlu and Senkel’s play subverts all widespread clichés about female suppression and isolation in Islam, and builds separation from the outside world as a decision taken by the ‘Neo-Muslims’ themselves. By choosing to lead a chaste lifestyle, the speakers often set themselves against others in order to underline their NeoMuslim extremism: Germans are, for example, referred to in the play as “pornographers in combat against Muslims” (Senkel and Zaimoğlu, 2008, no.4); Muslim women selling autobiographical stories about female suppression are regarded as traitors and referred to in the play as “pseudo-modern sluts” (Senkel and Zaimoğlu, 2011, p. 53). Hate speech is targeted in the play against all that is different. The characters construct ‘Neo-Islam’ not only by praising their own beliefs, but also by defaming other holy icons such as the Bible, Christianity, Judaism, or even less radical forms of Islam, regarded in the play as a threat to a new, rising ‘Neo-Muslim’ identity. Surprisingly, and against all expectations evoked by the title of the play, some of the speakers tell stories about their sexual encounters, also with lesbian women. In fact, the extremely obscene language is sometimes meant to reveal what is behind covered bodies, for example, by giving detailed descriptions of erotic scenarios. Accordingly, virginity does not stand in the play only for sexual abstinence, but can also be read like the colonial metaphor for undiscovered

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territory. In her famous book Imperial Leather, the feminist scholar Anne McClintock argues that expeditions and imperial conquests have often been preceded by fantasizing the terra incognita as female and veiled. Hence, the male traveler was encouraged to subjugate the dark, unknown foreign soil to prove his potency (McClintock, 1995, pp. 22-74). However, this metaphor is modified in the play: vulgarity and aggression replace the fantasy of female inferiority. Furthermore, the voyeuristic gaze following women into their private sphere is replaced by exhibiting stories of Muslim women on stage, which is to be regarded as a moment of de-exoticizing the oriental woman. Instead of fantasizing about lives behind locked doors, glimpses into these lives are captured and performed on stage. Fantasies of female subjection are actually replaced by a militant, rather male appearance, barely showing any signs of the female body. The black virgins on stage resemble alien or monstrous creatures, meant to deter others. The quadriplegic, for example, describes herself in her monologue as an “Islamist dwarf”, a “veiled monster” and a “veiled cripple idiot” (Senkel and Zaimoğlu, 2006, p. 53), referring to the veil as a “facial mask” or a “latticework of the face” (Senkel and Zaimoğlu, 2006, p. 52), thereby converting the holy and pure into something monstrous. The androgynous appearance is a further way of inverting clichéd inscribed female roles. This is supported in the play by Neco Çelik’s staging, where the female actors perform not wearing headscarves, but bald, in addition to their male costumes mentioned before. Together these signifiers suggest a nude appearance on stage at odds with the black virgins’ plea for chastity. However, despite the pseudo-nude appearance, the production leaves no room for fantasies of erotic or sensual oriental women. In fact, the theatrical performance itself, together with the staging of female Muslim identity, subverts all clichéd ideas about Muslim women being covered behind the veil. Instead of being the hidden object of a voyeuristic gaze, the Muslim women on stage become the subject of sight. Moreover, the fact that some of them call for the full veil is an act of self-empowerment. Being fully covered limits the agency of sight on them while it deprives the other from seeing the untamed subjects of speech. The excessive talk about virginity and sex is supported by the set, with its allusions to scenes and settings from the red light district. With the promiscuous episodes throughout the monologues, the lighting changing from one cell to another, the daring stories about sexual encounters as well as the anonymity of the female speakers, the stage is turned into something similar to a brothel. Their vulgar idiom, performed while standing in those showcase cells, and the intense talk about female intimacy are exposed to the public in a subversive tone of redefining Muslim identity in Germany.

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It is not only through the excessive talk about sex that profanation is consummated in Black Virgins. The divine is also highly politicized and commercialized, whether through the call for a “Holy War” or by promoting a “fashionable Islam” and a “trendy Muslim lifestyle”. In Zaimoğlu and Senkel’s play, extremism is meant to perform a separatist movement from the political discourses of the majority culture. What is remarkable about their speech is the fact that the monologues are conceived as a performative invective supported by the call for virginity, which is to be understood allegorically as a rejection to intermingling with the other. Occluding the female body is a metaphor for isolation, which, interestingly, contradicts the prophecy of a Muslim Europe, since this rejection of biological reproduction scuppers the black virgins’ wish for procreation. Apparently, the new Muslim grouping is formed as a military front fighting exclusion through extremism. The ‘Neo-Muslim’ religious and political orientation is meant to respond to an existing discourse of power. One of the speakers predicts, for example, an Islamic Renaissance in Germany. She believes Muslims were forced into the periphery because they do not comply with the expectations of mainstream culture. She also accuses the German majority of not hearing Muslims. Her statement exemplifies the attitude of several ‘Neo-Muslims’ in the play. They do not fight to place themselves in the center of German society. Instead, they prefer to envisage taking revenge when Germany, as one speaker contemplates, becomes a Muslim country in the future (Senkel and Zaimoğlu, 2008, no.10). In fact, Black Virgins traces an alliance of Muslim women that seems to have been formed at the margin of German society. One of the Muslim preachers declares on stage what she calls the “Holy War”. In her monologue she praises Bin Laden, the September 11 attacks, and even anti-Semitism. She goes as far as applauding Taliban for leading the war in the name of God, and glorifies them by saying: “The whole civilized world believes Muslims are nothing more than idiots; heroes with carpet cutters plan the severest attack of all times. They hate and hatred ennobles their belief. They plan, implement their plans and strike the arch-enemy. Have I mourned the victims [of September 11th – M.EH.]? Even though official mourning was declared in Germany? Not for a second. Did America cause anything but dirty wars?” (Senkel and Zaimoğlu, 2008, no.9)

Thus, apocalyptic visions are fantasized at the margin together with an imaginary league of Muslims across national boundaries, with one of the speakers proclaiming, for instance: “Viva the Islamic resistance in Iraq and Palestine!” (Senkel and Zaimoğlu, 2008, no.10)

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Fundamentalism is contrasted in the play with milder orientations. But even these orientations develop within structures of power. The Bosnian woman states, for instance, that Germany “debauched” her: “I am happy that Germany debauched me. Otherwise I would have remained a Bosnian peasant woman and that I do not give a shit about being” (Senkel and Zaimoğlu, 2006, p. 49). Her attitude is a response to what some of the interviewed women refer to as “western freedom”. However, it is noteworthy that she describes the changes she undergoes in Germany as being “debauched”. Apparently, she bases her statements on circulating codes that endorse binaries such as agnostic modernity versus archaic tradition. Unlike other radical orientations, she prefers going with the stream, as it enables her to move away from backwardness. Throughout the monologues the black virgins often refer to what they call “foreigners’ Islam”, raising questions about trading with belief. Apparently, there are religious views, in this case Muslim ones, being imported to Germany, for instance, by immigrants. Especially with the stage resembling a shop window, the speakers perform as if they were promoting a product that they want to distribute among as many people as possible. Bearing in mind that the speakers are actually advocating the veil as a “highly fashionable silk bonnet” (Senkel and Zaimoğlu, 2006, p. 46), i.e. promoting textile wares, the play can be regarded as a performance of “Islam for sale” or “Islam on sale”. It is the converted black virgin in particular who personifies the Islam boom in Germany, hence the talk about the “market value” (Senkel and Zaimoğlu, 2006, p. 46) of this religious conviction, quite apart from the fashion industry that is, according to one of the ‘NeoMuslims’, trying to profit from the Muslim headscarf on runways (Senkel and Zaimoğlu, 2006, p. 50). With this attitude towards consumption, the “NeoMuslims” tend to “bargain with God” (Senkel and Zaimoğlu, 2008, no.9), thereby shifting the border intended to separate the holy from the profane, which is inevitable in the contemporary Muslim presence in Europe (See: El Hissy, 2012). With the everyday challenges of consumption, it is nigh impossible to leave divine icons untouched without adding a commercial flair, thereby desacralizing what is holy while intending to perform the exact opposite. Beside the daring gaze, it is also the preaching voice that supports the act of subversion or defamation of holy icons. In Islam, women are encouraged to abstain from speaking out in public and having their voice heard since, according to widespread belief, a female voice can evoke male sexual desire. Paradoxically, the black virgins advocate sexual abstinence with the exact same medium that is believed to be a cause of sexual arousal. Furthermore, women in Islam are not allowed to practice the service of a muezzin. The stage arrangement, with some women performing in the upper cells, alludes to the call to prayer and the sermon,

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and this is meant to both mock and subvert the virtuous attitude expected from Muslim women.

III. In place of a conclusion: The Carnivalesque and the Future of Profanation The profanation discussed above is part of the Muslim presence in European society. It persists discursively and resonates with the religious turn in Europe. This transition results from the rapid boom of Islam and all attempts to redefine European identity, also in relation to the Muslim other. Conservative religious belonging and the return to religion is encountered with profanation and demystification of religious icons, bringing the sacred back to the use of human beings. Different art productions that ridicule religious icons are being repeatedly attacked for being blasphemous, for they approach what is supposed to remain untouched in the realm of celestial matters. Such an approach blurs the limit between the earthly and the divine, and hence threatens the clear distinction between them, as the two examples discussed above illustrate. Reactions to Zaimoğlu’s play were pretty controversial, since the prophecy of an intensive presence of Islam in Europe is menacing to the majority culture. However, Black Virgins is actually a parody of Muslim identity. Especially the dissonance between the vulgar language and the chaste object of speech mocks Muslim attempts to establish a religious belonging among all contemporary political, cultural and economic challenges. The black virgins are selfcontradicting personas with all those conflicting ideologies being performed on their bodies. In consequence, ‘lifestyle Islam’ or ‘Islam light’ can only lead to a parodic version of extreme religious identity. A compromise between archaic views and fashionable lifestyle can only result in paradoxes. While calling for a ‘pure’ or orthodox Muslim identity, the speakers inevitably refer to Christian practices: for instance, confession, the speech act structuring the whole play, which is not practiced in Islam. Furthermore, the black virgins seek in their monologues marriage with God and want to borrow their isolated and celibate lifestyle from nuns. One of the speakers even wishes to spend her entire time in liturgy, and even refers to the veil as “nuns’ garb” (Senkel and Zaimoğlu, 2008, no.1). Orthodox belief is actually not opposed to, but rather interwoven with, syncretism and this defines an understanding of Muslim identity that is more complex than a simplified dichotomy. It is exactly this syncretic character that Akstinat is underlining through his satirical reading of the Qur’an and the Bible. Reading the two books as complementary is in itself an ironic commentary on religious orthodoxy.

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Moreover, Akstinat selects those verses in particular that call for violence or sexual obscenity and offers a new reading of the very lines that are worshiped without being really read at all or being read differently. It is through the means of irony and ridicule that he profanes what is regarded as untouched. The profanation or defamation practiced in the play and the book commentaries stand for the impossibility of the ‘pure’ identity that many Muslims strive for in Germany today. Zaimoğlu, Senkel and Akstinat demonstrate what lifestyle Islam presents, which results in a parody of Muslim belonging. It is mainly through a carnivalesque reading, as well as the highlighting of earthly and bodily matters such as trading, politics, violence, and sex, that Muslim identity can be defined today. With these challenges of modern lifestyle, all attempts to follow a book dogmatically result in veiled bodies and vile speech.

References Agamben, G., 2007. Profanations. New York: Zone Books. Akstinat, S., 2011. Bibel vs. Koran: Sie werden nicht glauben, was in den heiligen Büchern steht! Frankfurt am Main: Eichborn AG. Bakhtin, M. M., 1987. The Dialogic Imagination.Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press. Bakhtin, M. M., 1993 [1965]. Rabelais and His World. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. El Hissy, M., 2012. Getürkte Türken. Karnevaleske Stilmittel im Theater, Kabarett und Film deutsch-türkischer Künstlerinnen und Künstler. Bielefeld: transcript. McClintock, A., 1995. Imperial Leather. New York and London: Routledge. Senkel, G. and Zaimoğlu, F., 2006. Schwarze Jungfrauen. Theater heute. No. 5, pp. 46-55. Senkel, G. and Zaimoğlu, F., 2008. Schwarze Jungfrauen. Hamburg: Hoffmann and Campe. Stam, R., 1989. Subversive Pleasures.Bakhtin, Cultural Criticism, and Film. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Yeşilada, K. E., 2008. Turkish-German Screen Power – The Impact of Young Turkish Immigrants on German TV and Film.GFL.German as a foreign language.No.1, pp. 73-99.Available at: http://www.gfl-journal.de/1-2008/yesilada.pdf. [Accessed 25 September 2012].

On Tattoos and other Bodily Inscriptions: Some reflections on trauma and racism David Tyrer

Introduction Despite all the talk about the visibility of Muslims in the west, Muslim visibilities remain problematic. Discussions about the under-the-radar threat posed by ‘clean skins’ previously unknown to security services (Tyrer and Sayyid, 2012) might be the most obvious reflection of this difficulty, although there are others: from the innocent non-Muslims ‘mistaken for’ Muslims and subjected to Islamophobic attacks (Tyrer, 2011) to the innocent Muslims ‘mistaken for’ terrorists and subjected to racial profiling or worse (Patel and Tyrer, 2012), the problematic visibility of Muslims has emerged as one of the central questions concerning the Muslim presence. Because our understanding of Islamophobia itself lies at the heart of this problematic, in this chapter I want to use visibility as a point of entry into a wider question about what often manifests as a traumatic encounter between minority Muslim populations and the postcolonial western nation states in which they reside. On the one hand this has been marked by the trauma of racialisation’s ‘crushing objecthood’ (Fanon, 1967, cited in Hesse, 1997, p. 100), and has been manifested in what Poynting and Mason (2007) have termed the ‘resistible rise of Islamophobia’. On the other hand we have a rather different face of trauma: the idea of a presence that interrupts the closure of the nation; a jarring alterity that is represented as threatening ‘our’ way of life, and which, even when not posing an existential threat to ‘us’, places excessive strain on collective goodwill as much as systems for multicultural governance, and repeatedly reveals its apparently antidemocratic nature. But perhaps there is a more helpful way of reading the traumatic encounter with Muslims that can help shed light on Islamophobia. This is the underlying

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concern of this paper, and I want to use the problem of visibilities as a way of engaging it. In order to do this, I want to begin by considering two techniques used in Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s Submission Part 1: the use of bodily inscriptions, and the use of veil. This chapter is not concerned with Submission, but instead it uses these techniques as an entry point into a wider set of issues concerning the problematic visibilities of Muslims.

Intermezzo A famously harrowing scene in The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (2009) depicts Lisbeth Salander being violently raped by a lawyer. Shortly afterwards she tattoos him with the words “I am a sadist pig and a rapist”.

Act 1 At times when the dangerous frisson of inkage seems to have been lost through its ubiquity, tattoos can still perform political work. When Lisbeth Salander tattoos Bjurman, she bears witness to her experience of sexual violence, and by committing it to memory she also finds a way of resymbolising her trauma. The tattoo also inscribes boundaries and limits onto the body of Bjurman, modifying his corporeal identity by revealing the real nature of his crimes. Submission, Part 1, the 2004 collaboration between Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Theo van Gogh, also deals with stigma and boundaries. Submission claimed to highlight the gender violence experienced by Muslim women and was structured around four fictionalised, yet nevertheless harrowing, accounts of experiences including incestuous rape. A repeated motif in the film is Arabic script tattooed onto the naked bodies of Muslim women. Just as the tattooing of Bjurman in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo leaves a mark that lies beneath the respectable veneer of his lawyer’s suit and tie, the tattoos in Submission also purport to subvert the “respectability” accorded to covering, lying etched on skin and displayed through sheer veils. But there is also a fundamental difference in the work of tattoos in the films, in that the tattoos work through different economies of stigma. The etymology of stigma is in the puncturing of skin, and tattooing practices have a long associative history as stigma (cf. Atkinson, 2003). In The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, the marking of Bjurman also works as a reversal of the stigma traditionally associated with victims of sexual violence in patriarchal societies, so that it is the perpetrator, rather than the victim, who receives the stigma (in contrast to Lisbeth’s own tattoos, which take the form of a playing out and symbolisation of trauma). In contrast, Submission, Part 1 does not involve a similar play with stigma, but rather

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concerns the ways in which stigma is marked on women’s bodies. The film involves depictions of gendered violence in an attempt to draw attention to questions about gender rights in Islam. The tattoos in Submission are therefore intended to explore the idea that Islam inscribes identities and boundaries onto the bodies of women, and the relationship between this and gendered violence. Both The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and Submission therefore deal with questions concerning gender and power. For reasons of length, it is beyond the scope of this chapter to explore these questions about gender. Instead, since Submission is commonly read in relation to its analysis of gender, I am more concerned here with focusing on what the film stands to reveal about underlying questions of race. In this I acknowledge that race and gender are closely related and that the positionings and experiences of subjects are inscribed at the intersections between multiple discourses including gender, race and class (cf. Mirza, 2008). However, although my reading of race through Submission implicitly recognises that the position of Muslim women in relation to race is centrally gendered – that is, racially gendered – my focus is in fact on a broader question about the ways in which identities and bodies are constituted in the film, and its central concern with corporeality. As such, Submission poses ontological questions concerning bodies and identities, forcing us to shift beyond an ontic understanding of the category Muslim to analysis of the ways in which the category is constituted. In turn it poses questions concerning the ways in which Muslim visibilities can be understood as problematising assumed essential ethnic identities and visibilities. The film is therefore framed by a wider set of questions concerning the relationship between bodies, identities and visibilities. In this, it sits in a wider context of discussions about Muslims which have emphasised the idea that Islam problematises underlying, assumed primordial, ethnic and racial markers of difference, and the assumption that this is gendered (cf. Yuval-Davis, 1992). Similar lines of argument have been expressed elsewhere, highlighting the notion that Muslim identities are constructed, and that such constructions interrupt the assumed naturalcy of racial and ethnic identities (cf. Tyrer and Sayyid, 2012). The tattooing of Arabic script onto the bodies of women in Submission can therefore be read as a reference to the idea that Muslim identities problematise the natural (raced/gendered) body. The fact that not all the performers in the film were Muslim reflects this, since while we are able to read them as ethnically marked and as women’s bodies, it is only through the superimposition of the Arabic script that we can read them as possible Muslim bodies. This technique seeks to establish a unity among women’s bodies and the bodies of the ethnically marked, and posits their Muslim marking as being the product of an inscription (by whom?) onto the

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bodies of women. This recentres the idea of the natural body in contrast to the idea of an artificial inscription on bodies which marks them as Muslim. But tattoos work through an ambiguous logic of bodily modification, posing a central question about their permanency and their relationship to the flesh that reinforces this effect. This opens the possibility for a more fundamental critique of the ways in which race works through Submission, and its relationship to a wider field of racial politics. In so far as identities and bodies are constituted through power and have no essential or innate kernel that exists independent of discourse, the tattoos reveal the discursive practices through which all identities are constituted. To apply the category of Muslim is not simply to recognise a body through apprehension of some stable essential markers of difference, but it is to inscribe it as Muslim, and to place it into a framework which also enables us to understand what its Muslimness means and how it can be brought into visibility. The portrayal of bodies in Submission is thus marked by two central tensions. First, there is a question concerning whether the inscriptions depicted in the film are actual inscriptions of Muslim identities or whether they are more helpfully read as inscriptions of orientalised characterisations of Muslim identities. In other words, a tension is introduced between the idea of Muslim identities as they are expressed by subjects, and the ways in which subjects are classified as Muslims. Second, racial and ethnic marking also works through a similar discursive logic. The racial categories we use are not essential or natural, but are themselves the product of inscriptions; the fact that they do not appear so is not evidence of the naturalcy of race, but rather of its naturalisation. Racial inscriptions might seem natural, but their violence is only elided by the fact that we have several centuries worth of experience of performing such fundamentally violent acts of racial inscription in the most routinised and canalised of ways on a daily basis. While Submission attempts to play on the question of bodily inscriptions associated with Muslim identity politics, it does not do so by reproducing actual inscriptions of Muslim identity, but rather by inserting a characterisation of what these are held to mean within a wider critique of the emergence of a Muslim subject position. In this, it also fails to play out the question of racial as/inscription which enables us to read the body as unproblematic. As Eyerman has noted, the bodies depicted in Submission are not simply marked (by the film makers) as Muslim, but they are also racially gendered, since “[a]ttractiveness and skin tone appear to be the key signifiers guiding the selection [of the performers used in the film - DT]. The bodies of the women had to attract the eye of the viewer, impressing the audience with their beauty, vulnerability, and virtue, at the same time as their dark bodies signified race and sex.” (Eyerman, 2008, p. 98-99). This establishes the bodies on view in Submission as not simply natural bodies

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problematised by the surface inscription of Muslim identities, but as being racialised within an orientalised inscription. This framing also complicates the film’s reading of gender, since they are not simply gendered through the inscription of Muslim identities, but also as a modality through which their raciality is inscribed. In this sense, the Arabic inscriptions in Submission cannot be read as drawing attention to the problematisation of natural bodies, since the emergence and consolidation of Muslim identities actually problematises racially gendered modes of constituting bodies, rather than interrupting natural bodies. That is, while the film’s inscriptions centre the unproblematic or natural body, Muslim identity politics do not in fact displace the natural raced body, but rather they interrupt the very idea that the raced body is natural and unrelated to the exercise of power. The inscription of race is no less contingent than the inscription of Muslim identities, and nor is it more natural. Race and gender do not simply work in isolation from one another, so it is not possible to speak of the natural gendered body any more than it is possible to speak of the natural raced body. Rather, the mode of subjectification is inscribed through the intersections of race and gender, so the natural bodies on display are in fact made visible in specific ways. This exoticisation and fetishisation constructs the natural woman beneath the inscription of Muslim identities as the submissive object of the gaze, and in this orientalism is no less gendered than Muslim identity politics, although it might be gendered in different ways. The emphasis placed on Muslim identities as problematising the natural body naturalises these prior inscriptions and elides the politics of the body and visibility which is played out in contemporary contests over Muslim identities and rights, including contests involving Islamic feminists themselves. Thus, Submission does not simply concern one straightforward struggle over bodies, but wider ways in which bodies are struggled over in a world in which the persistence and taken for grantedness of race and orientalist discourse tends to go unnoticed and unremarked. The dimension of these struggles with which I am concerned is that of race, although it is worth noting that Muslim women’s bodies have become problematised more widely within contemporary racial politics in quite distinct ways, most notably through the repeated appropriation of women’s rights by the far right in Europe, which has attempted to mobilise fears of Islamisation around the notion that a key marker of this is the presence of burkawearing women. The far right’s appropriation of women’s rights and burka does not simply reflect a straightforward engagement with women’s rights, but more fundamentally engages with a problematic visibility, and it can also be read as a struggle over bodies and the (re)production of problematic populations, since the

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rhetoric of the far right conflates the burka, the spread of Islam and the decline of Europe. A further elaboration of the work of the tattoo helps to illustrate the different contests at stake over Muslim visibilities and the inscriptions on Muslim bodies. In the novel Noir, Robert Coover recounts the tale of an Asian woman, Michiko san, who is repeatedly kidnapped and passed between two rival gang leaders who communicate with each other through tattoos etched onto her body. Each tattoo subverts the previous inscription, until her entire body is covered by four centuries of yakuza history. At this point gang members angry at the curious respect which seems to emerge through this curious protocol organise a showing of Michiko at a museum of modern art, at which they execute their leaders by firing tattoo needles into their brains. Michiko, of course, survives. But the thing about tattoos is that they are wont to fade and lose their definition, “[s]uffering the fate of all history, which is only corruptible memory. Time passes, nothing stays the same; a sad thing. A haiku somewhere on her body says as much” (Coover, 2011, p. 25). As with Submission, the tattoos in Noir draw our attention to the idea of women’s bodies as passive bearers of histories and traditions inscribed onto them. But this metaphor also opens the possibility for reading the work of the tattoo in Submission, Part 1 as not simply an inscription on an unproblematic, ontic body, but rather as an alternative inscription to the inscription of the racially gendered body; neither is any more or less contingent than the other, and neither is immutable or unproblematic. In other words, the rival inscriptions on show simply offer competing ways of marking and othering Muslims. The tattoos in Submission, Part 1 do not summon bodies into visibility in isolation from wider tropes of racial fetish, but are fundamentally bound up with them. Of particular importance is the film’s technique of shrouding these bodies in sheer veils. These have the effect of exoticising and eroticising the racially gendered body, but in the context of the continued fascination with veiling and Muslim women, they also naturalise racial thinking in two ways. First, they are framed in a context of contemporary moral panics about forced veiling which have given rise to attempts in a number of European countries to ban burka, even in spite of the tiny numbers of women involved (cf. Moors, 2011). This frames the Muslim body as an object of patriarchal religious authoritarianism, and elides the ways in which the veil emerges as a key trope of orientalist discourse. Second, since I am primarily concerned in this chapter with race, it is important to note that the veil centres race by rendering it absent. If the tattoo is intended to be read as an inscription which problematises the racial body, the veil also obstructs its visibility. In other words, the assumption is that beneath this device lies an unproblematic natural body that is rendered somehow ghostly through the

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superimposition of the veil. This absence of race simultaneously enhances its significance by inserting an anxiety concerning its apparent occlusion. In the case of Submission, there are different possibilities for reading the inscriptions and visibilities at stake in the film. For example, one could read Submission as drawing attention to the position of those caught between an Islamic discourse and an orientalist discourse. But the central difficulty of sustaining such a reading would be that the tattoos are represented as an inscription on the raced body, whereas the raced body is not represented as constituting any inscription at all: it just ‘is’. Thus the film cannot easily be read in these terms as a critique or even as an ironic invocation of orientalism. The film instead forces open a wider question concerning the ontologies of raced bodies and visibilities. In another context, Lorentzen and Bazan (2009, p. 199) have noted that tattoos mediate between being and appearing. This is not simply an ontic distinction, but it is ontological: what does it mean to ‘be’, and what does it mean to be made visible? In the case of Submission the assumption would be that the state of being is racial, but that a particular form of inscription mediates this and what we see is a surface that is Muslim. In other words, this surface overwrites the corporeal body. The corporeal is overwritten by the surface inscription and its integrity is somehow called into question as the tattoos themselves break the skin. The body itself is displaced as the centre of this exercise; the other becomes somehow incorporeal, haunting the image from behind the veil and beneath the tattoo, but no longer properly there. Ghostliness is a helpful metaphor for thinking through the constitution of Muslim subjects (Tyrer and Sayyid, 2012). The phantasmatic excess of the other figures in wider discussions about Muslim identities (Daulatzai, 2007, p. 135), whether in relation to the fantasy projections of Islamic conspiracy and Islamisation (Geisser, 2003, p. 82; Rivera, 2005, p. 33-34), or the spectral, problematic visibilities through which these are imagined. To be ghostly is also to be orientalised; Mirzoeff (2002, p. 243) notes that the ghostly are constructed in opposition to western reason, and that the problematic figure of the ghost was a staple of colonial discourse on the illicit spirituality and nebulous threat posed by others. To Mirzoeff: “The Jewish ghost is the vantage point of this hauntology, not because Jewishness is claimed as a new paradigm, but precisely because of its ambivalences and ambiguities. Jewishness, like the ghost, is an identity that is not identical to itself. How is Jewishness even to be defined: as a religion – but what of secular Jews? As an ethnicity – but isn’t that the Nazi game? As a nation – but what of anti-Zionist Jews? […] the Jew is literally a ghost,

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something that resembles the human even as it is not human, rather like the cyborg of our own time. Like the Terminator, the ghost says: ‘I’ll be back’.’’ (Mirzoeff, 2002, p. 244)

To Mirzoeff, this hauntology establishes the ghost as in a liminal space between the visible and the invisible. But visibility is the work of biopower; even in the panopticon “the prisoner could neither be perfectly visible nor be constantly aware of disciplinary surveillance. Consequently, they were not disciplined, but simply punished: they became ghosts” (Mirzoeff, 2002, p. 241). The establishment of ghosts is not simply a result of the lacuna at the heart of governmentality, but rather it emerges from the prior work through which subjects are themselves brought forth into the world. The ghost is the remainder left over in the interval between zoe and bios, between pure life and life that has been made the object of politics. In this sense, in spite of the differences between Islamophobia and antiSemitism (cf. Tyrer, forthcoming) there is a parallel between Jewish and Muslim minorities, both of whom occupy an indeterminate position in relation to raciality. In the case of Muslims, this problem is exacerbated, since anti-Semitism is more widely recognised as a form of racism than is Islamophobia, based on the recognition of Jews as racial. In contrast, Muslims are simultaneously fixed as improperly racial (Tyrer, 2010), as religious, and yet as improperly religious. This places Muslims in a peculiar and indeterminate position; while their construction as religious positions them as inadequately racial, in wider terms their putative religiosity is frequently constructed as an aberration from what religion should properly mean. For example, the Swiss ban on minarets was based on the logic that minarets were not a religious expression, but a political one. Muslims are ghostly, not because they are invisible, but rather because they are indeterminate beings whose very modes of being appear through the cracks between pure life and politically qualified life. One of the implications of this is that if Muslim identity politics interrupt biopolitical racial categories, they also interrupt other modes of constituting subjects through classifying practices. Notably, Muslim identities interrupt western modes of constructing a clear distinction between the secular and the religious (cf. Sayyid, 1997). In doing so, they do not only interrupt racial, but also religious classifications. The problematic visibilities of Muslims emerge because Muslim identities cannot be classified as purely racial or purely religious within the terms of the Eurocentric grammar on which such categories are based, and the subsequent attempts to discipline Muslims can be read on one level as a series of attempts to reinstate the hold of such categories of race (and religion). Muslims therefore seem somehow incorporeal and ghostly, slipping through the cracks between categorisations of political forms of life. If modern racism constitutes the

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racialised as being marked by a libidinal lack (Marriott, 2005, p. 160) so that in Fanonian terms the Other is an absence within and an exaggerated form without, Islamophobia reverses this, constituting Muslims as possessing a lack without (incorporeality) and an excess within (Islam). Muslims are not constituted as excesses (bodies) without souls, but rather as excesses (souls) without bodies. Excess figures in contemporary Islamophobia in various ways: excessive difference, excessive politicality, and excessive/deviant religiosity, and the practices for regulating life which emerge as a consequence of these centrally concern the attempt to tame this excess. As such Muslims take the form of the ghostly. Submission employs the technique of veiling as a means of problematising what Muslim identities mean to supposedly naturally racial bodies, but in doing so refigures the corporeal as shrouded and ghostly. This is the figurative work of the veil, but this work cannot be understood outside the context of race. The veil conjures Muslim visibilities in particular ways, constituting them as spectral, in a logic which is also gendered, so different modes of this problematic visibility are constituted in different ways: male visibilities tend to emphasise particular forms of subversion and indeterminacy (the threatening subject that can slip beneath the radar) in contrast to the problematic visibilities of Muslim women. The construction of the veiled as lacking agency is not simply a question about subjectivity, but more fundamentally it is also a problem of incorporeality, by which the veil takes the form of a void without which conceals the excess within. One way of reading this excess within is to understand it in terms of the concealment by the veil of the properly raced body. In this, one could argue that the device of the veil in the film conversely enables the problematic visibilities of Muslims to be made more apparent, since their vestiges are revealed through the sheer veil. However, such a reading would be problematised by the fact that the bodies depicted in the film are not Muslim bodies, but rather purportedly natural bodies which are Islamised through the addition of supplements (inscriptions, veils) which make them Muslim. What we see is not therefore a Muslim body, but a body problematised by Islam; thus, rather than playing out its intended question of how Muslim identities problematise natural bodies, the work of the film is instead to play out a wider trope of Muslim incorporeality contingent upon implicit racial certainties. But the eroticisation of the veil in the orientalist imaginary is contingent on the capacity of the veil to tantalise with the open question of what lies beneath. The possibility remains open that if we remove the veil then we can set free a properly constituted corporeality – in other words, a pure raced being. Equally, the possibility remains that the being behind the veil will be racially

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different; the orientalised, eroticised, Other – the other who, by dint of not being white, can be seen as being properly racial. Writing in an entirely different context, Du Bois used the veil as an analytical metaphor through which to introduce the problem of the double consciousness of the raced subject. The problematic with which Du Bois was concerned can be reformulated in Lacanian terms as “the first object of desire of the Negro as Other is to be recognised by the other (world). Therefore, within what Lacan calls the symbolic order, the Negro as other is always subjected to its intersubjective Other” (Adell, 1994, p. 61). The veil is, to Du Bois, white; it only allows the Black subject to see him/herself through white eyes. In this usage, the veil is not a reference to something which conceals the ontic raced body; rather it concerns the ways in which the raced body comes to be understood in racially gendered terms. In this context, to read the veil through Du Bois’ reworking of the veil metaphor opens two further possibilities. First, to read the physical veil of contemporary Islamophobic discourse through Du Bois’ figurative veil opens the possibility of reading the various contests over Muslim women and veiling not simply as questions of the false consciousness of a Muslim subjectivity problematising naturally raced bodies, but rather in terms of contests over the terms on which racialised subjects are constituted and brought into visibility; that is, whether they are seen through white eyes or whether there is an alternative politics in play through which the limits of this racial politics can be established and its logics and practices contested. The ghostliness of Muslims emerges from such contests. Second, this double consciousness can also be read in relation to trauma, a point to which I shall turn in due course. The Muslim excess within is therefore not a condition of ontic racial purity, but rather a condition of uncertainty and anxiety surrounding the continued utility of race in the regulation of life and death. It is a condition dependent upon the ways in which veiling interrupts the veil of race. But this is not simply a problem of visibility and the impossibility of reading stable meanings from unproblematic surfaces. Rather it is a problem of inscription. Race works through inscription; it inscribes bodies as racial through symbolic acts, the violence of which frequently goes forgotten and unremarked as a consequence of its hegemonic nature. These practices are central to the ways in which pure life is transformed into bios. The raced subject is one of whom we can speak as an object of politics, and the raced body is not therefore a pure life. With all their innumerable differences, including skin colour, bodies are not naturally racial. Bodies become racial, which is to say that as they are placed into racial categories (‘populations’), their political existence is established. The ghostly, then, are those on whom different inscriptions have been made: do we constitute them as racial subjects, or as

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religious subjects? As the inscriptions on the body of Michiko san demonstrate, such inscriptions are not once and for all, but are contingent and contested, and the contests over the visibilities of Muslim women’s bodies do not simply concern our ability to recognise the pure life which underlies inscriptions made in Islamic discourse or the inscriptions themselves. Rather, these contests play out in the ways in which the inscriptions on them as racial run into the inscriptions on them as religious (and therefore, as improperly racial). Here we are confronted with the fundamental incoherence at the heart of Submission, Part 1. The film does not play out actual Muslim identities, whatever an actual Muslim identity is. Rather, it plays out a characterisation of Muslim identities; an othering. As such, the paradox of Submission lies in its unintentional highlighting of the tension that exists within hegemonic attempts to classify bodies, either as naturally racial, or as essentially religious. That is, both the racial inscriptions and the religious inscriptions on display in the film reflect the wider ways in which Muslims are drawn forth as forms of politically qualified life based on their insertion into a particular Western symbolic order: these are not necessarily Muslim bodies, after all, but bodies classified as Muslim based not on the agency of subjects or on appeals to Islam, but rather based on classification and critique of Muslim identities. Muslims, those ghostly and incorporeal beings, might haunt the film, but they are not on display. This is not simply a problem of rival inscriptions within hegemonic discourse, but rather it points to an underlying political problem through which, as beings are inserted into the symbolic order and subjectified, they are transformed into the objects of politics. The ghostly apparitions which result are not the product of an inadequate raciality or of an excessive religiosity, but are rather the remainder that resides in the space between zoe and bios. Or, to phrase it slightly differently, they are a reminder of the real itself. In this, we can also read them through the notion of trauma.

Act 2 Muslim visibility emerges from the ways in which beings are inserted into the symbolic and how as a result they are constituted as subjects. But the problem of Muslim visibility cannot be understood outside the context of the ways in which Muslim identity politics poses fundamental challenges to the logics on which they are constituted as forms of political life (whether as ‘racial’ or ‘religious’). The problem of Muslim visibility has been manifested in a number of ways; it is reflected in debates over how to recognise a Muslim (particularly, a threatening Muslim) (Tyrer and Sayyid, 2012). It is also reflected in the problem of mistaken identities racisms (cf. Puar, 2007; Sian, 2009), which perhaps best illustrate the

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ways in which race underpins Muslim visibility (Tyrer, 2010). In this respect, the canonical cases are nearly always taken to be non-Muslims – and primarily Sikhs – who have been subjected to racist harassment and violence based on the mistaken belief that they are Muslims. Such cases are numerous, and have led to campaigns by Sikh organisations such as SALDEF in the United States to combat this wave of anti-Sikh hate. Another face of the ‘mistaken identity’ form can be found in the numerous cases of innocent Muslims who have been subjected to attacks or arrests – or, in the case of Mahar Arar, extraordinary rendition – based on the erroneous belief that they are terrorists. Revealingly, the latter form is rarely if ever framed under the mistaken identity rubric. In a particularly famous case, a Brazilian electrician named Jean Charles de Menezes was shot dead by armed police on a London underground train in July 2005 after being mistaken for a terrorist; Patel and Tyrer (2012, p. 152) note a range of racial misrecognitions throughout the incident. A number of issues emerge from this. First, as Puar notes in relation to racist violence, the mistake is actually the very point of the exercise, so the mistaken identity framing is itself problematic (Puar, 2007, p. 187). Second, the contradictory use of this rubric occurs because it is made contingent upon the primacy of race as the mode for making racialised subjects visible. Third, the primacy accorded to race as a natural form, rather than something which mediates and produces visibilities, also gives rise to the discrepant reading of anti-Muslim racism as a non-racism. The problem of how to symbolise Muslims is not merely an abstract question concerning the application of the correct category to describe Muslims. It is a political question which concerns the ways in which beings are inserted into the symbolic and the difficulty which arises when their beingness interrupts their classification and subjectification itself. In other words, to speak of the interval between zoe and bios is to speak of a reminder of the real which exists beyond the symbolic and has the capacity to poke through at certain moments, causing a crisis of symbolisation. Muslims are racialised as a jarring presence, and as limit figures, both in the sense that they are frequently described in racist discourse as possessing identities and customs which are incompatible with western democracy (and which thus expose its limits), but also because of the ways in which they expose the limits of race itself. The mode of representing them falls within logics described by Ralph Grillo (2007) as emphasising their “excess of alterity”, but this excess of alterity is better understood as a pure alterity assumed to be unmediated by the ‘civilising’ effects of subjection to racial logics. This Muslim excess is the political surplus (Tyrer and Sayyid, 2012); the difference that escapes straightforward classification and taming. The split face of this is the difficulty in classifying Muslims as properly religious, as a result of which, in the campaign to

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ban minarets in Switzerland, these were classed as not religious but political. Islam figures in contemporary representations as possessing the capacity to pervert – it can apparently subvert or overwrite racial inscription or the ascription of the category ‘religion’ – and also itself possessing the capacity to be perverted. This is not simply a case of the Muslim presence being in conflict with specific understandings of race and religion, but is rather a manifestation of the ways in which this itself entails their ability to evade straightforward placement into clear biopolitical categories. In this, the Muslim excess is the difference which eludes straightforward symbolisation and spills out beyond the conventional classifications that are routinely used in the regulation of life. This is a political problem, and Islamophobia emerges as a technique through which the name Muslim can be introduced in order to resolve this tension. The work of Islamophobia is to insert the name Muslim into the field of racial politics, yet this move is couched in terms of its own denial, through the marking of Muslims as improperly racial (and improperly religious). This makes Muslims subject to particular modes of symbolisation and thus offsets the difficulty that arises when these ghostly figures emerge. It also shores up the symbolic authority of race at a time when its hold has weakened as a result of the various critiques of ideas of biological racial difference and by the emergence of racialised populations who choose to describe themselves through the application of the naming Muslim (Tyrer and Sayyid, 2012). The problem of Muslim recognition illustrates the epistemic conditions surrounding the emergence of Islamophobia, which have to do with the symbolic limits of race and the eruption of the real. Discussions about Muslim identities and visibilities tend to play out around an assumed distinction between race and religion. In this it is still relatively common to see race posited as an ontic certainty while religion is represented as an inscription on the naturally racial body. As we already know from the various critiques of race, it is anything but natural, but rather involves corporeal inscriptions that produce particular visibilities. The bind this produces is whether Muslim is in fact the form of natural life which interrupts this racial signification. The naming of Muslims through contemporary racial politics is not a means instituting a category that exists in opposition to race, but rather of instituting possibilities for regulating forms of life that are marked as interrupting both race and religion. If Islamophobia names Muslims in very distinct ways as problematic limit figures, then it is helpful to draw a distinction between Muslim as the product of the agency of racialised populations – that is, as a stratagem of Muslim identity politics – and Muslim as a naming instituted by Islamophobia. In this it is helpful to substitute for the latter an alternative naming: Muselmann.

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Muselmann is deployed by Agamben (1999) as a limit figure between life and death. It is helpful to reread the routine representation of Muslims in populist Islamophobia – a deathly, ghostly presence; a form of life but not in its properly qualified manifestation – in terms of the Muselmann. Žižek revisits this figure to ask: “[I]s not the paradox of the Muselmann that this figure is simultaneously life at its zerolevel, a total reduction to life, and a name for the pure excess as such, excess deprived of its ‘normal’ base?” (Žižek, 2006, p. 113)

In the context of racialised subjects, excess deprived of its ‘normal’ base is one that appears to lack subjecthood in the terms of a biopolitical exercise that conflates raciality with subjecthood. In the case of Muslim minorities in the west, the condition of possibility for the emergence of Islamophobia is precisely that a mass movement has occurred through which members of racialised minorities have rejected ascribed racial identifications with self-chosen religious identities. Because of the centrality of race to modernity, this move places the ontology of the social into crisis, and can best be understood as the trauma proper of the encounter between Muslim minorities and Western states. As Dean notes, the Muselmann is the “unsymbolizable point of the Real. The Muselmann can be considered neither animal nor human. Nor can his experience be formulated in terms of authenticity or inauthenticity. Instead, the Muselmann is the point at which all such oppositions break down. He emerges as an excess of the Real.” (Dean, 2006, p. 71) The real has a traumatic quality. In fact, it structures trauma: “While reality, according to Lacan serves as the external boundary which enables us to totalise language, to make out of it a close and coherent system, the Real in his schema is the internal limit of this, the fold that remains unfathomable and prevents reality from becoming seamless; it disrupts us, but we cannot grasp it. It has been described variously as ‘brushing up’ against something unknown in a dark room without realising what it is and the uncanny sensation that this induces, the void or the abyss around which subjectivity hinges. This non-symbolised kernel makes its appearances in the symbolic order in the form of traumatic returns (of the repressed, in the Freudian sense), disruptions, schisms, and things cast as both other, and, at the same time and all too worryingly, ourselves.” (Peters, 2007, p. 172)

The effects of the eruption of the real can thus be read as traumatic. In this I read trauma as an event which appears to rip through the symbolic fabric itself (Berger,

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1999, p. 25). As Butler (2005, p. 20) notes, trauma is not recollected, but it is produced through an intersubjective relationship between subject and analyst, contingent upon the passing of information from the Other to the Other. Trauma therefore relies upon a split, or double, consciousness; in this there is a parallel with the introduction of the veil into discussions about Muslims and its centrality to their visibility. This is a way of offsetting the difficulties attendant upon the emergence of beings who appear as an eruption of the real, and as somehow unsymbolisable. Trauma also disrupts memory and cannot be managed simply by seeking to recover some “repressed or timeless memory” (Butler, 2005, p. 20), but rather it is something that is worked through. In this sense the notion of bodily inscriptions that disrupt some prior natural identity are not reliant upon the attempt to recover the unproblematised body, but rather they rework it. In the case of Submission, Part 1, the violence of tattooing is not simply about stigma, but centrally about trauma; it marks the eruption of the real on the body and in doing so it simultaneously binds the inscriptions of Muslimness and raciality. It provides a symbolic framework within which the trauma can be played out. As such, while the work of Submission purports to highlight how Islamic traditions and histories are inscribed onto natural bodies, in fact, it does something rather different. Rather than playing out the inscription of Islamic traditions, memories, histories onto women’s bodies, the orientalist imaginary on which it draws works to provide us with a series of inscriptions which demonstrate the ways in which Muslims are classified as others, and how western memories and histories of Muslims as others can be invoked in attempting to fix the presence of these limit figures who seem so difficult to recognise, make visible, and name. Thus, the inscriptions of Submission do not play out the inscription of Muslim histories onto the passive bodies of women through Islamic discourse, but rather the inscription of orientalised and racialised memories of encounters with others and their relationship to race.

Conclusion How Muslim bodies become visible to us is not a result of some self-evident nature that they possess, but as with all bodies it is made possible through a political rupture which establishes meanings and possibilities for reading and inscribing difference. Muslim visibility is bound up with a symbolic question which emerges from the ways in which they are transformed from pure life into Muslims, and how this plays out in the context of biopolitical exercises which constitute what it means to be racial and what it means to be religious in specific ways. Here it is helpful to turn to the ways in which Muslims are marked as others by introducing

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the term Islamophobia. Islamophobia emerges in the wake of the symbolic challenges presented by a presence that seems to place the ontology of the social into crisis (cf. Tyrer and Sayyid, 2012) by interrupting racial as/inscriptions. In other words, it emerges as a technique for managing a presence which exceeds symbolisation; that is, an interruption of the real which reveals the limits and contingencies of symbolic fabric of race itself. But why Islamophobia? Phobia works through a logic distinct from other modalities of fear and affect in the sense that it is always moored to a named object. Another way of expressing this is to recognise that phobia introduces a symbolic dimension; it provides symbolic resources which can be drawn upon in the face of wider symbolic failures. Trauma always exceeds symbolisation, because it is structured around the real. Trauma thus seems somehow to defy signification, bursting through the symbolic field ‒ as Muslims are endlessly represented as doing, with their seemingly excessive alterity, and their stubborn defiance of symbolisation (reflected in the raft of questions that have emerged in recent years: who are ‘they’?). The accountings of race and misrecognition, of competing corporeal inscriptions, of veils covering bodies, and of the ghostly all draw attention to the problem of encountering the real. Berger notes that “all societies’ representational systems seek a wholeness, a seamlessness, a sense that the important questions have been answered, that social harmony, if not entirely achieved, is at least well understood and close at hand. But this wholeness always breaks down, for no symbolic order is coherent. A gap, a rip, appears, which cannot be accounted for.” (Berger, 1999, p. 25). This traumatic encounter accounts for the ultimately failed attempt to incorporate the trauma of the encounter with the Other who seemingly defies racial logics into collective memory through recourse to familiar racial metaphors. This does not simply frame modes of representing Muslim bodies but also underwrites the techniques by which Muslims can be constituted as politically qualified forms of life and summoned into visibility. In other words, the problematic of Muslim visibility is fundamentally related to wider practices through which life itself can be regulated in the face of a presence which shows the limits of the modern racial project. Muslims are not unique in being improperly racialised subjects; race is fluid, contested, and contingent. It is impossible to have a perfectly racialised subject given that race itself is inherently contradictory and at all times contested. However, Muslim identity politics has presented specific challenges to the hold of race, since they have not simply involved rearticulating (Omi and Winant, 1994) racial signifiers already in use in the racial vernacular, but have rather involved the displacement of race, as a result of which the anxieties contingent upon the

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challenge to race thinking have been most radically highlighted by the presence of Muslims.

References Adell, S., 1994. Double Consciousness/Double Bind: Theoretical Issues in Twentieth-Century Black Literature. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Agamben, G., 1999. Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive. New York: Zone Books. Atkinson, M., 2003. Tattooed: The Sociogenesis of a Body Art. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Berger, J., 1999. After The End: Representations of Post-Apocalypse. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Butler, R., 2005. Slavoj Žižek: Live Theory. London: Continuum. Coover, R., 2011. Noir. London: Gerald Duckworth Publishers Limited. Daulatzai, S., 2007. Protect ya neck: Muslims and the carceral imagination in the age of Guantánamo. Souls, 9(2), pp. 132–147. Dean, J., 2006. Žižek’s Politics. New York and London: Routledge. Eyerman, R., 2008. The assassination of Theo Van Gogh: from social drama to cultural trauma. Durham: Duke University Press. Garner, S., 2007. Whiteness: An Introduction. New York and London: Routledge. Geisser, V., 2003. La Nouvelle Islamophobie. Paris: La Découverte. Grillo, R., 2007. An excess of alterity? Debating difference in a multicultural society. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 30(6), pp. 979–998. Hesse, B., 1997. White governmentality: Urbanism, nationalism, racism. In: S. Westwood and J. Williams, eds. Imagining Cities: Scripts, Signs and Memories. New York and London: Routledge, pp. 85–102. Lorentzen, L. A. and Bazan, L. E., 2009. Ahora la Luz: Transnational Gangs, the State, and Religion. In: L. A. Lorentzen, J. J. Gonzalez Ill, K. M. Chun and H. D. Do, eds. Religion at the Corner of Bliss and Nirvana: Politics, Identity, and Faith in New Migrant Communities. Durham: Duke University Press, pp. 184206. Marriott, D., 2005. En moi: Frantz Fanon and René Maran. In: M. Silverman, ed. Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin White Masks. New interdisciplinary essays. Manchester: Manchester University Press, pp. 146-179. Mirza, H. S., 2009. Race, Gender and Educational Desire: Why Black Women Succeed and Fail. New York and London: Routledge. Mirzoeff, N., 2002. Ghostwriting: working out visual culture. Journal of Visual Culture, 1(2), pp. 239-254.

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Moeckli, D., 2007. Stop and Search Under the Terrorism Act 2000: A Comment on R (Gillan) v Commissioner of Police for the Metropolis. Modern Law Review, 70(4), pp. 659-670. Moors, A., 2011. Fear of Small Numbers? Debating Face-Veiling. In: S. Sayyid and A. Vakil, eds. Thinking Through Islamophobia: Global Perspectives. London: Hurst, pp. 157-164. Omi, M. and Winant, H., 1994. Racial Formation in the United States: from the 1960s to the 1990s. New York and London: Routledge. Patel, T. and Tyrer, D., 2011. Race, Crime and Resistance. London: Sage. Peters, F., 2007. There is no Sexual Relation. In: N. Rumens and A. CervantesCarson, eds. Sexual Politics of Desire and Belonging. Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi B.V., pp. 171-188. Poynting, S. and Mason, V., 2007. The resistible rise of Islamophobia: antiMuslim racism in the UK and Australia before 11 September 2001. Journal of Sociology, 43(1), pp. 61-86. Puar, J. K., 2007. Terrorist Assemblages: homonationalism in queer times. Durham: Duke University Press. Pugliese, J., 2006. Asymmetries of Terror: Visual Regimes of Racial Profiling. Borderlands, 5(1), e-journal. Available at: http://www.borderlands.net.au/vol5no1_2006/pugliese.htm Rivera, A., 2005. La guerra dei simboli: Veli postocoloniali e retoriche sull’alterità. Bari: Edizioni Dedalo. Sayyid, B. S., 1997. A Fundamental Fear: Eurocentrism and the Emergence of Islamism. London: Zed Books. Sian, K., 2009. The Persistence of Sikh and Muslim Conflict in Diasporic Context: Sikhs in the UK. Unpublished PhD thesis: University of Leeds. Tyrer, D., 2010. Reconsidering Islamophobia’s mistaken identities. In: N. C. Tiesler for MEL-net and Our Shared Europe, eds. Muslims in Europe and Islamophobia. Online Conference Dossier. Available at: www.melnet.ics.ul.pt Tyrer, D., 2011. Flooding The Embankments: Race, Biopolitics and Sovereignty. In S. Sayyid and A. Vakil, eds. Thinking Through Islamophobia: Global Perspectives. London: Hurst, pp. 93-110. Tyrer, D., forthcoming. The Politics of Islamophobia: Race, Power and Fantasy. London: Pluto Press. Tyrer, D. and Sayyid, S., 2012. Governing Ghosts: race, incorporeality and difference in post-political times. Current Sociology, 60(3), pp. 353-367.

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Yuval-Davis, N., 1992. Fundamentalism, Multiculturalism and Women in Britain. In: J. Donald and A. Rattansi, eds. Race, Culture and Difference. London: Sage, pp. 278-292. Žižek, S., 2006. The Parallax View. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Seeing Difference, Seeing Differently Sarah Dornhof

Images of Islam in Europe are no longer confined to representations in the news media, academic discourse or museum displays of ‘Islamic art’. Our ideas of Islam are increasingly influenced by representations in the field of public culture. Taking recent cinema films and photographic campaigns in Germany as my examples, I shall be discussing the specific way in which Muslims are depicted and, in conjunction with this, how Islam is addressed in the context of art. These depictions are characterized by a ‘different’ perspective that deliberately tries to avoid common clichés and stereotypes about Islam. The questions I want to ask about these images, which are informed by the imperative of seeing Muslims ‘differently’, address responses to Orientalist or Islamophobic stereotypes and, related to these, what makes this perspective ‘new’. I want to explore the hypothesis that this critical exploration of Orientalist clichés in artistic sites generates an imagery of Muslims that reconfigures Europe’s relationship with Islam by addressing autonomy and agency. Instead of portraying Muslims simply as a foil to a liberal, western subject, images in public culture frequently target identification and empathy, humor and irony. More and more depictions of Islam convey the impression that Muslims themselves are speaking through the pictures and stories, providing their own perspectives on clichés – as if poking fun at stereotypes, exposing and re-interpreting them, or reformulating them in distinct idioms. Many works of art are inspired by an effort to break with the picture of Muslims as passive, unresisting husks susceptible to cultural and religious coercion, presenting instead specific forms of autonomy and agency within a context of culture and religion. These are images that depict Muslims as active subjects rather than naturalized bodies, where the category ‘Islam’ is not simply a projection screen for western fantasies and fears, but itself

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constitutes a response to the challenges which Muslims are posing to contemporary forms of liberal freedoms. The following examples will, I hope, demonstrate that autonomy in this sense is a central theme of the depiction, in which personal freedom of choice is not shown to be antagonistic to cultural and religious norms, but joins them in a relationship of tension. It is a hallmark of current depictions that they do not underscore incompatibility between Islam and liberal democracy but, on the contrary, emphasize options for mediating between tradition and self-determined behavior. Autonomy is not conceived in opposition to Islam, but treated as relational within a Muslim milieu. A dualistic scheme of perception thus becomes a relationship of tension where autonomy is contemplated as differentiated, conditional and incomplete. At the same time, Muslim agency becomes a field that needs to be understood and perhaps regulated by appropriate means. When autonomy is seen as differentiated, and its boundaries and ‘correct’ use are considered as a problem, concepts such as liberation and emancipation alter their meaning. Rather than a temporal, progressive approach to these concepts, emphasizing the tension between autonomy and subjugation generates a rather more locational perspective on forms for regulating and containing autonomous efforts to live Islam in Europe. With that last point, I intended to indicate that depictions which offer a different perspective on Muslims – depicting Muslims as active, emancipated and self-contradictory individuals – pursue a political rationality that positions Muslims within Europe as a self-evident fact, and links this with certain questions about how – not whether – this localization is achieved. In this sense, the rationality associated with a new perspective on Muslims in artistic fields differs from colonial and Orientalist rationalizations, which aspired to liberate and civilize Muslims. Equally, it differs from a security discourse that constructs Muslims as political adversaries and a radical Other. This kind of aesthetic does not simply replace other modes of representation, but correlates with other rationalities behind the images. The repertoire of motifs associated with the depiction of Muslims seems fairly limited, focusing on veils and prayers, the family and sexuality, although the same motifs can assume quite different meanings, functions and effects in the context of different rationalities. The image of a veiled woman can, for example, serve as a sexualized projection screen for western fantasies (e.g. Yeğenoğlu, 1998; Frübis, 2012), as an imperative for liberation in colonial, military and humanitarian projects (e.g. Mahmood/Hirschkind, 2002; Rygiel/Hunt, 2006; Wenk, 2012), or indeed as a representation of an individualized legal subject in debates about wearing headscarves and veils (e.g. Gaspard and Khosrokhavar, 1995; Venel,

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2004; Moors, 2010). There is no single rationality for images of Muslims; rather, different ways of addressing Islam compose a “topology of power” (see Collier, 2009; Dornhof, 2012), or perhaps a field of political rationalities (see Peter in this volume; 2008; 2010) where images and discourses compete, contradicting or endorsing one another. This is why the same pictures can be perceived in different ways or can defy clear-cut attribution. Their rationalization is what makes them objects within visual culture, and positions them against other pictures and other ways of seeing.

‘Honor’ and autonomy in German cinema The following examples are not initially about the veil, but about cinematic approaches to the Muslim family and the issue of cultural conflict. Since early this century, media representations and academic discourses have frequently linked the theme of the Muslim family to themes such as forced marriage, violence, sexual hypocrisy and honor killings. In literature of the same period, autobiographical accounts of these experiences have formed a genre of their own, endorsing a neo-conservative political discourse and drawing support from these quarters (Mahmood, 2008). These themes also occur in feature films, broadly linking the Muslim family to the oppression of women, although a little later and not across such a wide spectrum of movies. By examining two German cinema productions – Ayla (2009) by Su Turhan and Die Fremde [When We Leave] (2010) by Feo Aladağ – I would like to demonstrate, however, that choosing the Muslim (Turkish) family as a theme serves less to illustrate the oppression of Muslim women than to convey to a broad audience the ambivalences and internal conflicts experienced by individual members of the family as a result of cultural tensions. These movies are about conflicts between different value systems, although they are not simply staged as a clash of cultures, but as a matter of attitudes, interventions or personal negotiations. The films differ in their specific presentation of normative conflicts, but what they have in common is that they offer an inside view of a Muslim family from various angles, conveyed through protagonists personifying variations on the conditioned agency of Muslims. Neither Ayla nor When We Leave draws on the model of a progressive narrative of emancipation and rescue. It would be more accurate to call them variations on dealing with the ambivalences and pressures faced by young Muslims – and especially young Muslim men – as they are torn to and fro by different emotions and social norms. Whereas autobiographical books, such as those by Ayaan Hirsi Ali (2006; 2007) and Fadela Amara (2003), draw wider conclusions from a personal story of

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emancipation about conditions for women who have been coerced by a predominantly Muslim environment, movies like Ayla and When We Leave take the structural conflicts as a familiar backdrop against which they can develop dramatic stories. This does not banish the old tales of violence and oppression, but these are secondary and create the framework for a different approach to autonomy. In the feature films, the oppression of Muslim women, which has accumulated such recognizable concepts, imagery and categories from sociological and media perspectives, becomes the stuff of drama, and is thus ineluctably absorbed into the ebb and flow of suspense, the twists and turns of plot, dialogue and emotional states. Both Ayla and When We Leave went on release in Germany in the spring of 20101. Both stories focus on the conflict between a father and daughter and on a family conflict around the concept of honor. In both movies, the driving force behind the plot is a strong, attractive, young woman who resists her family’s traditional rules (Sibel Kikelli in When We Leave and Pegah Ferydoni in Ayla). In each case, the drama is spun out around a narrative familiar from media and sociological accounts of honor killings 2: a young woman, who has grown up in Germany and been sent to Turkey to be married at a young age, takes her child, leaves her husband and tries to build an independent life back in Germany. She and her family in Germany find themselves at odds with different normative expectations and the social pressure of their Turkish milieu. In both films, the conflict escalates when her two brothers attempt to kill the young woman. In both films, however, the structural causes of honor killings tend to play a secondary role. Nor is ‘honor’ presented as a central reason for a cultural conflict. Instead the focus is on the moral implications of honor and autonomy, which are a challenge to every individual character within the scheme of tension. Both movies also shift the drama to a Turkish family network in a German city, and as a result the conflict about honor interfaces with the many options for agency presented by this setting. When We Leave, in the first ten minutes, at least sets up an impression of the suffering young Umay has experienced at the hands of her violent husband in a desolate suburb of Istanbul, before the drama proper begins

1

2

When We Leave was written and directed by Feo Aladağ, a writer, actor and director born in Austria married to a director and writer of Turkish origin, Züli Aladağ. The film received maximum federal funding and won a number of prizes at the Deutscher Filmpreis and Deutsche Filmkritik awards, being nominated as the German contender for the foreign film Oscar. Ayla, by Turkish-born German director Su Turhan, attracted considerably less attention. The murder of Hatun Sürücü in Berlin in 2005, which triggered a prolonged debate about honour killings and forced marriage, bears particular parallels to the lives of the women in the two films, especially to Umay in When We Leave.

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with the family conflict in Berlin. Ayla relegates the honor killing narrative to a subplot that cuts across the central drama of the film, which is the love story between Ayla and Ayhan. Ayla and Ayhan live in a Turkish neighborhood of Munich, but they find it easy to move between the German and Turkish ‘worlds’. Ayla leads a regular double life: by day she is the nice Turkish woman in the children’s nursery; in the evening she dons sexier attire and a blond wig to work in a night-club cloakroom. Ayla’s father has had his problems with this double life for some time, so he disowns her. This existing conflict about his daughter’s honor is compounded by another honor conflict in Ayhan’s family: his sister leaves her husband in Turkey, wanting to live in Germany as a single mother. Ayhan, as the older brother, has a duty to resolve this family conflict. He unwillingly comes under growing pressure from his younger brother to threaten their sister. When she runs away, it is with Ayla that she and her child find refuge, and Ayla then helps her escape to Holland. The plot is quite rudimentary in its construction, but what is more interesting is the representation of the idea – personified by the two central characters, Ayla and Ayhan – of mediating between two worlds and managing to reconcile opposites. This potential to mediate or reconcile two worlds – German and Turkish – is the film’s central theme. To that end, the opposites are initially exaggerated, and so we find a purely Turkish milieu at the heart of a big German city, characters talking either German or Turkish, and who hold either modern views – like Ayla and Ayhan – or traditional, religious ones – like Ayla’s sister, who wears a headscarf, and Ayhan’s fanatical brother, who from the outset plans the honor killing with their father. The only two German characters in the film are similarly one-sided. Ayla’s colleague at the nursery, big, blonde and Bavarian, is an amiable, simple soul, lacking in confidence, without a regular boyfriend, and full of prejudices about Turks. Ayla’s boss in the night club is an understanding young man, portrayed as pale, gentle, and not at all pushy about his liking for Ayla. Ayla and Ayhan flit with ease between all these clear opposites, until suddenly Ayhan’s sister appears, plunging them both into a dramatic conflict. This conflict, which sets love against duty, clearly indicates the boundaries of mediation. Ayla does not hesitate for a moment in sacrificing her love and turning against Ayhan in order to protect his sister from him and his family. Ayhan, still attracted to this pugnacious, independent Ayla, is drawn further and further into the eddy of violence unleashed by his family on his sister. When the crisis strikes, he comes across as weak, governed by others with no will of his own. His free will is not restored until he has aimed a pistol at his sister and probably only fails to pull the trigger because Ayla steps between them. Only now does he find the resolve to stop his brother going for his sister with a knife. The ending suggests

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that Ayhan and Ayla can make up, now that a fortuitous resolution of the conflict has demonstrated where mediation fails and a clear stance is needed, even if it means turning against one’s partner and one’s family. Ayla’s father, on the other hand, is mollified at the end of the film. Even if he does not approve of his daughter’s lifestyle – this conciliatory conclusion suggests – a daughter living her own life in Germany is something a Turkish father can ultimately accept. Stylistically the film operates with elements that reinforce the mediation of opposites on which the narrative rests. Ayla does not fall far short of a comic-strip Superwoman. She is slender and tough, with wild hair and large eyes. She can do karate, she walks and runs about town with a purposeful gait, and she is sketched with dynamic movements and sharp contours. Besides, she can change appearance: in the evening she conceals the friendly, modern Turkish woman under a blond wig, doubles her eye size with make-up, and wears high heels and a mini-skirt for her job as a cloakroom attendant in a night club. With the same agility she slips on the red wedding dress designed by her sister, who is putting together a Turkish wedding collection for her first fashion show. For Ayhan she is a seductive femme fatale and at the same time a natural beauty captured on his camera. For her father she is a German whore and yet somehow his daughter. To combine so many opposites without imploding, the character needs the exaggeration of the comic-strip Superwoman, and this lends the film a light touch. The characterization of Ayhan builds on another stylistic device that likewise facilitates mediation between powerful opposites. Ayhan is a photographer, and his studio specializes in Turkish wedding photos. Mediated by the camera, the oriental cliché finds its place in this contemporary Munich interior in the form of photographic images and backdrops. Moreover, as a photographer Ayhan can distance himself from things and look at them objectively, adopting an aesthetic perspective and only intervening on formal grounds. As a photographer, he is not bothered whether a marriage is happy or not; all he wants is a good snap of the bride and groom. Of course, this attitude causes him problems when he stops being a detached observer and his own family and feelings come into play. At this juncture he cannot observe from a distance and mediate, but is compelled to make a clear choice and act on it. Ayla is a film about the compatibility of opposites, about living in two worlds, about young Turks in Germany. In this respect, the idea of a clash of cultures is absorbed into the harmonious reconciliation of differences. This reconciliation is also about seeing: under the layer of prejudice, what seems alien conceals a familiar face. The options for mediating between differences are provided in the film by the stylistic devices of a comic-strip heroine and the detached, indifferent contemplation of artificial arrangements by a studio photographer. The mediation

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of opposites stumbles across its limits when it is no longer a matter of aesthetics and perspective but an existential issue. Honor and shame – this film conveys – are not categories that lend themselves to different views, like the categories Turks and Germans. Honor is a matter of life and death. Agency is not confined to seeing or mediating between different positions, but demands a clear yes or no. The movie When We Leave looks at the themes of cultural conflict and Muslim agency from a different perspective. Unlike in Ayla, the honor killing is not a marker of differentiation in relation to agency and autonomy, but an extreme example at the focus of the protagonists’ ambivalent emotional states. The conflict is less a matter of cultural clash, but unfolds inside individuals as a fundamental ambivalence, so that every character carries this conflict within. The drama unfolds through a growing estrangement between the central character Umay and her family. After fleeing Turkey, Umay returns to her family in Berlin. Her Turkish husband does not want the “German whore” back, but their son must be returned to Turkey to live with his father. To protect her son, Umay takes refuge in a women’s shelter. Her younger sister blames her for the threatened cancellation of her own marriage. Her brothers are involved in a punch-up after disparaging remarks are made about her, and when they find out where she is staying they threaten and insult her. Umay’s husband tries, with her parents’ support, to abduct the child. Meanwhile, Umay repeatedly attempts to restore links with her family, but she is rejected every time. In despair she turns up at her sister’s wedding, but she and her son are thrown out. In narrative terms, the tension steadily builds up, escalating with an attempt on Umay’s life and the death of her child, but this plot primarily provides the background for portraying the characters with their emotional make-up and personal ambivalences. This movie is not about mediating between antagonistic cultures or between traditional and modern views. It sets out instead to portray the tension between individuals and the social norms that frame them. The opposites in the film are not sited primarily between the cultures or even between the genders, but within each individual character. In an interview, director Feo Aladağ described her principal aim as addressing the “universal need for unconditional love”, the need to be loved and respected for what we are. The work does not set out to stigmatize anything in particular: All the characters in my film are caught up in serious conflicts. The men, too. That results in an inability to speak, futile acts, violence and a lot of tears. I was determined to get away from stigmatizing a gender or an ethnic group. Instead I wanted to show how even the father suffers from the pressure for ‘honor’. What it basically demands is: Kill your kids for my sake. (Kappert, 2010)

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Although it is not apparent why the “universal need for unconditional love” is played out around such an extreme and conceptually problematic issue as honor killing, the movie When We Leave is quite clearly about the feelings of its characters and the development of internal conflict. In stylistic terms, this inner tension is achieved by aestheticizing bodies and physical expression. There is little dialogue. A great deal is conveyed by eye contact, by protracted shots of faces, by atmospheric views of urban landscapes, by light and shade, color, reflections, rear views, music. Even when the characters do speak and act, the looks exchanged, the tear-filled eyes and the silent faces usually undermine the accompanying words and deeds. This creates the impression, especially with the men but also with the mother, that they are talking and acting against the grain and consequently coercing their own selves. It is not only the male characters who are trapped within the normative pressures of the code of honor and the inner turmoil this unleashes. The men do, however, appear to be overtaxed by their inner conflicts and hence tend towards violence or self-destruction. The character of the father, who shows understanding when his daughter runs away and displays love and tenderness towards her, becomes increasingly unhappy and mute in the course of the dramatic events that he himself has provoked. Finally he suffers a heart attack, after giving his sons – entirely through eye contact – the order to kill their sister. Alongside this stylization of internal conflict for the Turkish characters, the portrayal of the German characters feels somewhat shallow. Umay’s old friend, and the new colleague she falls in love with, are presented as helpful, friendly people, sympathetic and reliable, but also cautious and passive compared with Umay’s swift resolve. The new boyfriend in particular – himself quite exotic with his East German moped – is shy and hardly dares to ask questions. In encounters with German characters – as generally in the film – little is conveyed through the spoken word and a great deal through looks and atmosphere, but whereas the camera dwells for a long time on the faces of the Turkish family, the expressions of the Germans convey little tension and conflict. Their eyes seem to reflect precisely what they are saying and doing at the time. Their looks do not express inner resistance to their actions, but can be read as words and actions in themselves. If we consider the vehemence of inner conflict with regard to the gender order, we find that in both films – Ayla and When We Leave – it is above all the men who suffer under the clash of values and are ill placed to resolve it rationally. Like the fathers, the brothers find it hard to extract themselves from rigid sexual morals and the pressures of family honor, which take possession of them like some higher power. The young women are evidently pained by the conflict between wishing

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to determine their own lives and nevertheless regarding themselves as part of the family. They do, however, succeed at decisive moments in this conflict in taking quick, courageous decisions and bearing the consequences with strength. Meanwhile the sensitively drawn male characters – the younger brother in When We Leave and the lover and the older brother in Ayla – are sucked into the violence until ultimately, as if guided by a will other than their own, they turn their weapons on a sister they love. By contrast, the other brothers come across as fairly crude and wooden. But these are the ones – the older brother in When We Leave and the younger brother in Ayla as antagonists to the female characters – who drive the dramatic plot. Like the women, they have also reached clear decisions and are capable of resolute action. They are, of course, taking bad decisions by obtaining the weapons, planning the murders and ultimately being prepared to kill, or indeed killing. But they are hardly plagued by doubt and they do not hesitate long in choosing violence as a way of reinstating violated norms and possibly resolving their own inner conflicts. The fathers in both films, on the other hand, are torn hither and thither and portrayed as vulnerable. They suffer in silence and are physically crushed by the weight of their decisions to harm the daughters they love. Islam is present in both movies but it plays a subordinate role in relation to the conflict about family honor. Both films explicitly stress that Islam can be a selfevident aspect to the life of Turks in Germany, but that it has nothing to do with honor. In When We Leave it is Umay’s Turkish employer who says as much to the parents when visiting them in an attempt to mediate. In Ayla it is the pious, warmhearted sister who seeks to mediate and reacts with horror and a lack of comprehension when she hears about the dramatic defense of family honor. The movies also portray aspects of Muslim life in an undramatic and relatively positive way: women with headscarves, men of different generations praying together at the mosque, family gatherings to celebrate circumcision or break the fast. On the other hand, no imams appear to intervene in the family conflict, nor are the brothers shown in anything like an Islamist milieu. This is how both movies highlight how Islam is a self-evident part of Turkish family life in Germany without necessarily being a cause of conflict and certainly without providing a justification for violence. Each in its own way, the films Ayla and When We Leave shift the idea of a cultural conflict between Islam and modern western life towards a tug-of-war between social pressures and the potential for individual agency. As a story of mediation in one case and via the state of inner turmoil in the other, both movies address the tensions between a Turkish family and personal life choices without assuming that these are per se incompatible. They are not so much about

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fundamental opposites as about the potential to act against that background of tension, about mediation and the existence of ambivalences. This establishes a limited framework for autonomous action and free choice, distinct both from a paradigm of oppression and liberation and from a liberal model of personal free will and reason. I maintain that this framework, autonomy limited by family ties and differentiated by gender, constitutes a specific scheme for perceiving Muslims. This scheme relates to a rationality that privileges a subjective, artistically mediated perspective on Muslims and generates, from this standpoint, new ways of portraying and new formats of knowledge about family constellations and gender differences in Muslim milieus. To what extent this mode of representation, with its differentiated take on autonomy as a function of position within the family and of gender, contributes to maintaining a category of ‘Muslims’ in a hierarchical relationship to non-Muslims becomes apparent when we consider the mechanisms of Orientalism and Islamophobia. An aesthetic view of subjects who act and speak may be able to undermine the hierarchical positioning of the category ‘Muslims’, but it is important in this context to bear in mind the social and gender framing of the subject’s scope for action, because it could counter the subversion and preserve ideas of Muslims in a subordinate relationship to non-Muslim Europe.

Orientalism and public culture Rather than distinguishing clearly between two separately conceived unities – Islam and the West – this perspective on conditional and differentiated forms of agency hones in on a continuation of Orientalism that must not be conceived as a binary order but as an authoritative knowledge. In his review of Said’s work Orientalism (1978), Talal Asad (1980) was quick to point out that the book’s principal achievement was to identify the “authoritative structure of Orientalist discourse” (p. 648). This structure, he observed, not merely reflected European fantasies about the Orient, but constituted a still burgeoning complex of theories and practices, like a screen filtering our every perception of culture (Asad, 1980, p. 649). Orientalism therefore serves as a structural condition for representations of Islam rather than as an epithet for those representations. Even for Said, Orientalism is not a uniform, consistent concept. Apart from an academic discipline, Orientalism designates forms of knowledge that circulate through Western discourse in literature, scholarship and diplomacy about the East. Orientalism is “a style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction made between ‘the Orient’ and (...) ‘the Occident’” (Said, 1978, p. 2). At the same time, Said describes Orientalism as a “corporate institution for dealing

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with the Orient-dealing with it by making statements about it, authorizing views of it, describing it, by teaching it, settling it, ruling over it: in short, Orientalism as a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient” (p. 3). There are also passages in the book where Said distinguishes between manifest and latent Orientalism (pp. 206-225), drawing attention to the psychological dimension of the desire which forms the basis for the observations of many post-colonial theoreticians, first and foremost Homi Bhabha. If we follow Asad’s emphasis on Orientalism as a practice of representation and a form of power through which Europe’s cultural hegemony is maintained, we can then analyze images of Islam in terms of how they participate in a hierarchical positioning of Muslims – not so much by contrasting them sharply with non-Muslims, but rather by means of a differential determination of central concepts crucial to the West’s self-perception and identity. Autonomy is one of these concepts, and I tried to illustrate above how the representation of Muslims in cinema does not convey autonomy simply as an essential characterization of a liberal subject – something you either have or you don’t – but as something embedded within different applications, ideas and conflicts which must therefore be evaluated severally and in context. In considering the concept of Islamophobia, which has widely replaced the concept of Orientalism, Salman Sayyid (2009) similarly points to the preservation of a hegemonic interpretation of the West as it is today, arguing that Islamophobia does more than denote an erroneous view of Islam, upholding a scheme of perception whereby ideas of Islam are subordinate to ideas of the West. Islamophobia, he reasons, serves the restoration of that very same hierarchical distinction between Islam and the West that is currently challenged by articulations of postcolonialism and Islamism – articulations which undermine the hegemonic narrative of Western history as a history of the modern era (pp. 16-17). “Islamophobia emerges in contexts where being Muslim has a significance which is political. What Islamophobia seeks to discipline is the possibility of Muslim autonomy, that is, an affirmation of Muslim political identity as a legitimate historical subject”. (Sayyid, 2009, p. 17)

In this sense, Islamophobia can be seen as a contemporary version of Orientalism, but one which clings far more vigorously than Orientalist imagery ‒ where deprecatory clichés blend with colonial desires ‒ to a purely defensive image of Western superiority, already crumbling in many places. In this respect, Islamophobia denotes those derogatory representations of Islam which depict Muslims as a threat to an idea of the West still predicated on clear definitions of

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cultural and state identity and on clear-cut distinctions between freedom and oppression, between the West and Islam. Islamophobia rejects postcolonial representations, seeking to deprive them of legitimacy by means of imagery laden with fear. However, in this sense Islamophobia is a critique of representation which, in the final analysis, upholds the antagonism between Islam and the West by setting culturalist against postcolonial representations. Rather than the ‘West’, it posits a Europe that still believes it can mark itself out wholesale against Muslims and postcolonial subjects, and which therefore feels existentially threatened by the porosity and blurring of this demarcation. In this respect, Islamophobia denotes the discourse of right-wing populism, but it is easily rebutted because this view of a culturally homogenous Europe is so evidently an illusion. Rather than replacing a dualist juxtaposition of Islam and the West with a no less dualist juxtaposition of postcolonial critique and Islamophobic representation, I believe it is far more important to analyze the concrete power effects of images and discourses by looking at them in terms of their visual rationalities. Depictions of Muslims in the field of public culture often do not convey a blanket criticism or rejection, but rather an effort to combine different narratives and perspectives and to make these productive in a regulated manner. As we have seen, today we can examine depictions of Islam to see how they let Muslims speak, how Muslims are portrayed as individual agents with their own personified stories, memories and desires. As a rule these ‘other’ stories are neither inevitably threatening, negative or ridiculous, nor simply critical or subversive. Rather than reading such depictions either as a defensive strategy for devaluing Muslims or as a form of post-colonial resistance to hegemonic aspirations, we should develop an eye for how these images are embedded within productive power mechanisms which generate their own exclusions and clichés, and also their own potential for resistance.

From the imperative of visibility to the imperative of ‘another’ way of seeing Since the 1990s, visibility has been a central topos in research into Islam in Europe. It signaled the new visibility that can be associated with the self-assured appearance of Muslims in European public life and with their criticism of the culture of modernity (e.g. Göle and Ammann, 2004; Jonker and Amiraux, 2006). At the same time, visibility is addressed as a power mechanism of the dominant culture, paradigmatically expressed in the unveiling of Muslim women. This places visibility in the context of the Enlightenment project for emancipation, used

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in both colonial and feminist discourse to equate unveiling with liberation (e.g. Yeğenoğlu, 1998; von Braun and Mathes, 2007; Dennerlein, Frietsch and Steffen, 2012). In the research, visibility is understood critically as the regulated visibility of the female body pivotal to a modern Western ethos. Meyda Yeğenoğlu argues in this respect: “… that the colonial feminist discourse to unveil Muslim women in the name of liberation was linked not only to the discourse of Enlightenment but also to the scopic regime of modernity which is characterized by a desire to master, control, and reshape the body of the subjects by making them visible.” (Yeğenoğlu, 1998, p. 12)

If, however, we look at these two approaches to visibility together – the new, selfassured presence of Muslims, especially young Muslim women, in the European public sphere, and the visibility imperative that links the unveiling motif to the idea of the emancipated, free, autonomous subject – we arrive in turn at a complex, high-friction representation of autonomy. On the one hand, the new visibility of pious young Muslims subverts Western views of coercion and subjugation as opposites to freedom. Few would now deny that the headscarf and veil may be worn as a result of personal free choice. On the other hand, there are many examples of discourse and imagery that see this kind of free choice as a problem: not only as an expression of false consciousness, but as a problem of communication, identification, self-exclusion, proselytizing, or health and child welfare. The equation between unveiling and liberation gives way to new requirements for the identification and regulation of complex spaces and practices, making the veil not a symbol, but a center of behavior options, liberties, acts of resistance and forms of coercion. This means that it is too simple to criticize a Western scopic regime based on the opposites visibility and non-visibility, veiling and unveiling, freedom and force. A critical perspective of depictions of Islam needs to distinguish between scopic regimes and modes of representation and recognize the correlations between them in order to explain how the category ‘Muslims’ is made visible in specific contexts by specific means. In the context of public culture, depictions of Muslims are characterized less by the visibility imperative than by the imperative of ‘another’ way of seeing. Unlike in academic discourse, travel literature or media reports, depictions of Muslims in public culture do not necessarily arouse functional expectations to do with the representation and explanation of an alien reality. They may equally be accepted as experimental configurations of a utopian, forgotten, dreamed or otherwise invented fiction. However, expectations of the representation of Muslim

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reality cannot always be isolated from the artistic exploration of a fictional setting. However much the subjective view is stressed, works and artists often also convey an intimate knowledge of what they are depicting. The director of Ayla, for example, himself came to Germany from Turkey and probably knows the milieu he describes in his film from first-hand experience. The director of When We Leave, Feo Aladağ, emphasizes how meticulously she researched the film and how important it was for her to choose and work with performers (amateurs and professional actors) who would give the film as authentic a feel as possible. Familiar insights into what is depicted and an authentic presentation combine, however, with a personal artistic idiom and form of expression. It is here, at the level of artistic expression, that I detect the imperative to see Muslims differently and to see otherness in Islam. I speak of an imperative because this way of seeing is not just about an individual artist exploring a subject-matter, as the representation of Islam combines with a political task and urgency which inscribes every artistic articulation from the outset in historical, sociological and political discourses. Art, especially art in the realm of public culture, can hardly shirk from the task of depicting Muslims beyond those Orientalist and traditional, religious schemes of perception and presenting Islam in its diverse potential manifestations. Intimate insights into the inner contradictions and potential agency of the characters tend to mean that Islam is not necessarily seen as an obvious, unchanging reality, but understood as a construct and a changing experience of discursive and intersubjective relations. Seeing Islam differently, then, also means historicizing, criticizing and creatively appropriating conventional representations. If Islam appears as a changeable construct, then Muslims can no longer be seen as passive victims, but must inevitably participate in changes that occur in their religion and in other perspectives on Islam. Whether the connotations are positive or negative, the imperative of seeing differently is linked to attributing responsibility for manifestations of Islam to the decisions, ideas and actions of Muslims, and to the observation skills of every viewer. This idea of seeing Muslims differently and recognizing that as a political necessity – an opportunity and duty for Europe – was illustrated by a banner strung across the front of a building during the 7th Berlin Biennale (late April to July 2012). It showed a young, dark-haired man in a leather jacket with his face and hands turned upwards in prayer. Over his head, in large letters, we see a phrase used by Chancellor Angela Merkel in the fall of 2010: “Multiculturalism has failed, completely failed.” At the bottom of the picture it says “Re-Branding European Muslims”, and in slightly smaller print attention is drawn to an event at the Steirischer Herbst art festival in Graz in September 2012 and the corresponding website. The website explains that this banner is the prelude to a

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campaign by the art collective ‘Public Movement’, to be continued in the form of a gala during the festival in Graz. What the artists hope to achieve with their ReBranding European Muslims campaign, according to the short text on the website, is to seize the failure of multiculturalism as an opportunity to reach a new understanding of Europe through a different perspective on Muslims. This call to give Muslims in Europe a new image with the aid of marketing techniques and to see them, after the failure of multiculturalism, not as a problem but as a hallmark for Europe, is just one pregnant example of the trend in public culture to try to see Muslims differently, beyond the familiar clichés and stereotypes. The focus is not on representations of an objective reality, but on subjective perspectives which can open up other potential spaces and visions. The imperative for ‘another’ way of seeing cannot, therefore, be understood in isolation from opening up those new spaces which bring with them other thematic approaches to Islam in its relationship with Europe, deconstructing and reconfiguring the category ‘Muslims’.

Zenith Photographic Competition “Islam in Deutschland?” The quest for artistically mediated perspectives on Muslim life in Germany, combined with the imperative of seeing Islam and Muslims differently, recently acquired an explicit formulation with a photography competition launched by the Eastern affairs journal Zenith - die Zeitschrift für den Orient. Together with the foundation Mercator, and under the patronage of Christian Wulff 3 when he was still President of Germany, the journal announced this nationwide competition in the summer of 2011. The theme was “Islam in Germany?” Editor Daniel Gerlach’s aim was to invite perspectives that “reach beyond the big buzzwords and red rags in this debate” (Gerlach, 2012), and that do not show the same old motifs, like women in headscarves and local greengrocers, thereby countering the monopoly on interpretation held by the mass media (Erdmann, 2011). The jury included picture editors from major magazines like Geo and Stern. Readers were also encouraged by Zenith’s website to give their opinions on the entries.

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Wulff, in his first major address to mark the 20th anniversary of German unification, had just referred to Islam as part of Germany, a remark that provoked great controversy. Zenith editor Gerlach traced the idea to devote a photo competition to “Islam in Germany?” to this controversy.

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Figure 1: Re-Branding European Muslims, 7th Berlin Biennale 2012, Auguststrasse 10 (photo: Sarah Dornhof)

Apart from the theme “Islam in Deutschland?” there were no further stipulations about the form or content. The competition brief urged photographers and amateurs to explore the idea of belonging to Islam visually and without resorting

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to familiar images. The 84 entries, 50 of which were judged and can still be found on the website, do, indeed, compose a mosaic of (mostly documentary) perspectives on how Muslims and Germans live together. They portray daily routines and curiosities, the trivial and the surprising, the sad and the humorous, rather than the usual fear-inspiring images of fundamentalism, a social underclass and the oppression of women. The photographs thus redefine the real themes and motifs associated with the idea of “Islam in Deutschland?” Their message often centered on where people are at home and what it means to be alien, on family and neighborhood, the contrast between modern and traditional, the search for identity (see, for example, “Gropiusstadt” by Lukas Fischer (Readers’ Prize), “Alien Homeland” by Kai Löffelbein (1 st Prize) and “In Search” by Agata Szymanska-Medina (2nd Prize)). The theme of conversion also plays a role (see “Made in Germany” by Laurent Quint; “Converting” by Lia Darjes), as does the confident Muslim woman (“Neo-Muslima” by Sybille Baier, “Quite Normally Different” by Ann-Kathrin Kampmeyer). This photography competition is thus a place where a new form of knowledge about Islam emerges, authorized by a kind of subjective and experimental seeing. This is not about a sociological perspective which explains things, but an aesthetic perspective, which discovers things and casts a personal eye, taking nothing for granted, on the object of contemplation. The competition entrants know the districts, the parks and the festive halls; they visited homes, families, friends, and took their pictures there. There is no need to leave it exclusively to experts or Muslims to determine the perspective on Islam in Germany. For the competition it is enough to know places of encounter and above all to develop an eye for them and to be able to see for oneself how – not whether – Islam and Muslims belong to Germany. One work, which took third prize, stands out among the predominantly documentary submissions. It is a series of staged self-portraits reflecting different ways Muslims can be seen. The entry is called “We, they and I” and it is by Feriel Bendjama, who has put together three rows of colorful variations on the theme of the headscarf taken from three different perspectives. On her own website, Bendjama explains the series as follows: “The 12 self-portraits show different perspectives on the Islamic headdress. In the photographs you can see a woman with the Islamic headscarf. Sometimes you see the headscarf from the perspective and wishful stance of Muslims. Sometimes from the clichéd perspective of non-Muslims, and the woman with the red headscarf shows facets of a Muslim woman that do not normally conform to conventional ideas. In my work I reflect my personal observations and encounters with the headscarf.” (Feriel Bendjama, 2012)

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In a style that is both pointed and humorous, the images convey ideas that might be associated with religious Muslims, prejudiced non-Muslims and a personal experience with veiled women. Muslims might overhastily see the woman in the headscarf as pious, pure, morally supreme and well educated. Viewers who harbor prejudices about Muslims will see the woman in the headscarf as oppressed, unable to speak for herself, a prisoner, condemned to silence. The last row, meanwhile, is intended to illustrate that the woman behind the headscarf is a woman like any other rather than a reflection of idealized or stereotyped ideas, playing different social roles, often with ambivalence. A woman in a headscarf can have her secrets and unexpected sides, she can be threatening and challenging, intellectual and seductive, she can cater to social gender images and wish for others. ‘We, they and I’ works with the tools of caricature by using stereotypical symbols to reduce complexity.

Figure 2: We, they and I © Feriel Bendjama, 2012. Reproduced by kind permission of the artist.

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At the same time, the work is a metapicture (see Mitchell, 1994) in the sense that it makes seeing and images its own theme. Feriel Bendjama is not, however, simply addressing one stereotyped take on Muslim woman, but three different perspectives on the same object, through which the object – the veiled woman – acquires a different tone and connotations each time. Common to all the perspectives is the dissection of one view of the veiled woman into a series of images, symbols and motifs. ‘We’, ‘they’ and ‘I’ do not fundamentally differ in the way we make pictures, but in what we see in the pictures and how the pictures convey truth and knowledge. As a metapicture – a picture about how pictures are seen – the work does distinguish, however, between the group perspectives ‘we’ and ‘they’ on the one hand and the subjective perspective of the ‘I’ on the other. Only in the bottom row does Bendjama pose with open eyes; in the other two rows her eyes are shut. Here we recognize two distinct scopic regimes, one where the Muslim woman is shown as the object of a collective gaze, or a screen for projecting collective fantasies, and another where the object of view is simultaneously a subject that returns the gaze, looking at the viewer in a manner that is unsettling, disturbing or not quite easy to read. This uncertainty at the moment of seeing, prompted because our knowledge about the object of view is confronted with potentially different meanings induced by the subject of the gaze, enables us to perceive ambivalences, multiple significations and shifts in meaning. The challenge of seeing Muslims in Germany and Europe differently cannot, it seems, be resolved simply through subjective documentary work, but needs moments when looks are exchanged, when commentary is reciprocal, and when ambivalence and multiple meaning emerge.

Conclusions I have tried with these examples to cast light on the political implications of a perspective on Muslims in the field of public culture that focuses on the scope for agency and autonomy within a framework of Muslim normativity. In these depictions, the category ‘Muslims’ is not so much a projection screen or an empty husk for western fantasies and fears, but the reflection of a representation that lends itself through artistic form to historicization, criticism and other kinds of appropriation. The continuity of themes such as the veil, family, sexuality and prayer occurs because the imperative of this ‘other’ take implies a critical response to Orientalist and Islamophobic stereotypes. The other take can be seen here as a take which cannot be equated with a critical stance that exposes, unmasks, and produces ‘true’ images. This other take does not necessarily reject clichés and stereotypes. It offers, rather, a private, subjective perspective on the ambivalences

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and the scope for agency that can be discerned in stereotyped images when they are not regarded as projections by a Western viewer but as images of talking, acting subjects. Like the photographs in the last row of Bendjama’s work, images can return the gaze and tell their own private, ambivalent stories, even if they are simultaneously stereotypical projections, or hard to distinguish from them on first sight. Bendjama’s work, like some of the stylistic devices I discussed in relation to the movies Ayla and When We Leave, convey this view of clichéd, nowadays unquestioned images of Muslims, which can also be staged, reflected back and reconfigured. The category ‘Muslims’ is reconfigured by a gaze that penetrates into the depths or the inner realm of the representation, so that, rather than the category being rejected, something else can be seen in it, something different, something complex, ambivalent and changeable. I have linked this perspective to a political rationality which makes it necessary to see Muslims as autonomous subjects in order to influence the specific use and limits of autonomy. This is not about inclusion or exclusion, but about spaces where individual action can be regulated. In that sense, depictions that focus on the autonomy of Muslims generate specific knowledge about those spaces for agency where free choices and options for action can be managed. The two movies I described here take a differentiated view of their characters’ autonomy as a function of their position within the Muslim family, their gender and their religious views. This places violence and autonomy within a gender order that in turn is embedded in an order within the family and within a Muslim milieu. This differentiation rapidly shows where the potential for action and its boundaries lie. Honor is then not simply a problem for Islam or the Turkish family, but presents daughters, fathers, brothers, mothers and friends with quite dissimilar moral challenges and options. This rationality of addressing Islam in a manner that above all contemplates the responsibility, autonomy and moral entanglement of the individual cannot be isolated from a mode of representation which, as described above, does not simply reject stereotypes, but prefers to see them in another way. The imperative of seeing differently mediates to some extent between the political need to identify the potential for action and intervention generated by Muslim lives in Europe and the tendency to disseminate an artistic, intimate and reflective perspective on Muslims in Europe. In that sense, artistic works offer a possible response to the crisis of European identity by inviting people – like the campaign ‘Re-Branding European Muslims’ – to learn to see Europe through fresh eyes by looking at Muslims in a fresh light.

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References Amara, F., 2003. Ni putes ni soumises. Paris: La Découverte. Asad, T., 1980. Reviewed work(s): Orientalism by Edward Said. The English Historical Review, 95(376), pp. 648-49. Ayla, 2009. (Film) Directed by Su Turhan. Munich: Zorro Film. (Official website: http://ayla-film.de/) Bendjama, F., 2012. We, they and I. Available at: www.feriel-bendjama.de [Accessed 10 July 2012]. Collier, St. J., 2009. Topologies of Power. Foucault’s Analysis of Political Government beyond ‘Governmentality’. Theory, Culture & Society, 26(6), pp. 78-108. Dennerlein, B., Frietsch, E. and Steffen, Th., eds. 2012. Verschleierter Orient – Entschleierter Okzident? (Un)Sichtbarkeit in Politik, Recht, Kunst und Kultur seit dem 19. Jahrhundert. Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag. Die Fremde (When we leave), 2010. (Film) Directed by Feo Aladağ. Berlin: Majestic. (Official website: http://www.diefremde.de/) Dornhof, S., 2012. Rationalities of Dialogue. Current Sociology, 60(3), pp. 382398. Erdmann, L., 2011. Zenith-Fotopreis 2011. Wie sieht der Islam in Deutschland aus? Spiegel online, 28 June. Available at: http://www.spiegel.de/politik/deutschland/zenith-fotopreis2011-wie-sieht-der-islam-in-deutschland-aus-a-770862.html [Accessed 06 July 2012]. Frübis, H., 2012 Orientalismus re-visited – Zur Repräsentation des Orients in der Malerei des 19. Jahrhunderts. In: B. Dennerlein, E. Frietsch and Th. Steffen, eds. Verschleierter Orient – Entschleierter Okzident? (Un)Sichtbarkeit in Politik, Recht, Kunst und Kultur seit dem 19. Jahrhundert. Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, pp. 137-162. Gaspard, F. and Khosrokhavar, F., 1995. Le Foulard et la République. Paris: La Découverte. Gerlach, D. 2012. Editorial. Zenith. Zeitschrift für den Orient, 13(1), p. 3. Göle, N. and Ammann, L., eds. 2004. Islam in Sicht. Der Auftritt von Muslimen im öffentlichen Raum. Bielefeld: transcript. Hirschkind, C. and Mahmood, S., 2002. Feminism, the Taliban, and politics of counter-insurgency, Anthropological Quarterly, 75(2), pp. 339-354. Hirsi Ali, A., 2006. The Caged Virgin. An Emancipation Proclamation for Women and Islam: A Muslim Woman’s Cry for Reason. New York, London, Toronto, Sydney: Free Press.

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Hirsi Ali, A., 2007. Infidel. New York, London, Toronto, Sydney: Free Press. Jonker, G. and Amiraux, V., eds. 2006. Politics of Visibility. Young Muslims in European Public Spaces. Bielefeld: transcript. Kappert, I., 2010. “Ich wollte nicht stigmatisieren”. Ein Gespräch mit der Regisseurin Feo Aladağ. Taz (online) 25 Febuary. Available at: http://www.taz.de/1/archiv/digitaz/artikel/?ressort=be&dig=2010%2F02%2F 15%2Fa0177&cHash=3da9fe184f/. [Accessed 20 July 2012]. Mahmood, S., 2008. Feminism, Democracy, and Empire: Islam and the War on Terror. In: J. Scott, ed. Women’s Studies on the Edge. Durham: Duke University Press, pp. 81-114. Mitchell, W.J.T., 1994. Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Moors, A., 2010. Fear of small numbers? Debating face-veiling in the Netherlands. In: S. Sayyid and A. Vakil, eds. Thinking Through Islamophobia: Global Perspectives. London: Hurst, pp. 157-164. Peter, F., 2010. Welcoming Muslims into the Nation. Tolerance Politics and Integration in Germany. In: J. Cesari, ed. Muslims in Europe and the United States since 9/11. New York and London: Routledge, pp. 119-144. Peter, F., 2008. Political Rationalities. Counter-Terrorism and Policies on Islam in the United Kingdom and France. In: J. Eckert, ed. The Social Life of AntiTerrorism Laws. Bielefeld: transcript, pp. 79-108. Public Movement, 2012. Re-branding European Muslims. Available at: http://rebrandingeuropeanmuslims.org/ [Accessed 17 June 2012]. Rygiel, K. and Hunt, K., eds. 2006. (En)Gendering the war on terror: War Stories and Camouflaged Politics, London: Ashgate. Said, E., 1979. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books Edition. (Originally published by Pantheon Books in 1978). Sayyid, S., 2010. Out of the Devil’s Dictionary. In: S. Sayyid and A. Vakil, eds. Thinking Through Islamophobia: Global Perspectives. London: Hurst, pp. 518. Venel, N., 2004. Musulmans et Citoyens. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, coll. “Partage du Savoir”. Wenk, S., 2012. Verschleiern und Entschleiern: Ordnungen der (Un)Sichtbarkeit zwischen Kunst und Politik. In: B. Dennerlein, E. Frietsch and Th. Steffen, eds. Verschleierter Orient – Entschleierter Okzident? (Un)Sichtbarkeit in Politik, Recht, Kunst und Kultur seit dem 19. Jahrhundert. Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, pp. 47-68. Von Braun, Ch. and Mathes, B., 2007. Verschleierte Wirklichkeit. Die Frau, der Islam und der Westen. Berlin: Aufbau Verlag.

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Yeğenoğlu, M., 1998. Colonial Fantasies: Towards a Feminist Reading of Orientalism. London and New York: Cambridge University Press.

Fun and Faith, Music and Muslimness Dynamics of Identity of Dutch-Moroccan youth Miriam Gazzah

Introduction: The religious and the popular In the last decade or so the place and meaning of religion in Dutch society have become increasingly scrutinized. Due to 9/11, the rise of global (Islamic) terrorism, the murder of Dutch movie-maker and writer Theo van Gogh (2004), the ongoing unrest in the Arab world in the past decade and the recent Arab Spring, Islam in particular has been a centre of political and media debate. In the Netherlands, Dutch-Moroccans are often presented in this debate as the epitome of Dutch Islam. This has led to a double folded tendency. On the one hand, DutchMoroccans are increasingly addressed as Muslims by the Dutch public. On the other hand, Dutch-Moroccans have started, in part due to this imposed identification, to prioritize their religious identity in public (Gazzah, 2008, pp. 1821; Buitelaar 2008, p. 239). The religious is relocating itself within Dutch society. Believers from different religious traditions are re-configurating their identities, taking inspiration from a range of old and new cultural repertoires. For that reason, the religious is increasingly found in “unexpected” places: a Christian music festival, a Muslim dating event, a dance party in celebration of the end of Ramadan and so on. The mixing of popular culture and religion is a trend that receives growing scholarly attention (Lynch, 2007; Van Nieuwkerk, 2011). Fun and faith. For some this may sound like a contradiction in terms. Reality shows otherwise. Devout believers have always been looking for ethically legitimate forms of leisure. In the case of Dutch-Moroccans, the Islamization of their identity/identities can be observed in different life-style choices: fashionable veiling by Dutch-Moroccan girls, the consumption of halal commodities ranging

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from shampoo to food, downloading ringtones voicing a sura from the Qur’an, decorating bedrooms with Qur’anic calligraphy stickers and so on. This trend shows how the creating and shaping of Muslim subjectivities of Dutch-Moroccan youth does not only occur along the lines of Islamic practices and rituals such as praying, fasting and going to Mecca for pilgrimage, but also along the lines of other, new popular culture repertoires. In this chapter, I take Dutch-Moroccan youth and their music consumption and production as my starting point. Music – and its adjoining popular culture – is not a space that pertains to the religion field per se, but it is a space in relation to which processes of creating Muslimness take place. Even more so because the status of music within Islam is far from uncontested. Music’s associations with haram behaviour make it a heatedly debated topic among Muslim scholars and ordinary believers. Choosing which music to listen to (if at all), visiting concerts, talking about music with friends – online and offline – if we analyse these social dynamics, then it becomes clear that most have a religious dimension to them, whether implicitly or explicitly (Gazzah, 2008, pp. 141-187). In order to shed light on these dynamics, I take the following question as my guideline: what is ‘Islamic’ about the way Dutch-Moroccan youth consume and produce music? Or, in other words, how can we define Muslimness within the context of music consumption and production by Dutch-Moroccan youth? To answer this question, I zoom in on three matters. First, I briefly describe the controversial status of music within Islam. For a long time, Islamic scholars and Muslim laymen alike have been discussing the compatibility of music and an Islamic life style. Dutch-Moroccan youth have their own take on this. Second, I outline the contours of the DutchMoroccan music scene and the way producers and promoters have ‘Islamized’ the scene to a certain extent. Third, I present some concrete examples of how Islam is expressed in the interplay between music, Dutch-Moroccan youth culture and the shaping of Muslimness. How do Dutch-Moroccan consumers and producers authenticate their Muslimness within the context of their musical activities? 1

The Debate on Music and Islam The debate on the permissibility of music and performance in Islam regularly arises, in the real world and in digital spaces where Dutch-Moroccans meet: in random meetings with young Dutch-Moroccans and on community websites targeting Dutch-Moroccan youth, on chat forums dealing with Islamic issues and

1

Research for this publication has been funded by the Cultural Dynamics programme of the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO).

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on websites dealing with youth culture topics such as music and party calendars, in articles and magazines aimed at Dutch-Moroccan youth, during cultural events. The literature that deals with the standing of music within Islam discloses how for many years Muslim scholars, supposedly ever since the death of the Prophet Muhammad, have been discussing music’s permissibility. Scholars have placed limitations on the kind of instruments permitted, the audience, the lyrics, the conditions under which music is performed and enjoyed, the lawfulness of the female voice, and so on (Gazzah, 2008, p. 155; Van Nieuwkerk, 2011, p. 19). Most of these rulings are based on verses in the Qur’an or in the Hadith, or Sunna.2 In sum, music’s ambiguous position is mainly caused by a strong emphasis on Islamic values and norms regarding gender-mixing – especially in public spaces – the prevention of illicit sexual relationships between men and women, and the taboo on alcohol use. A great deal of these fears can be further traced back to the singing and moving body, in particular the female body which is thought to (be able to) cause fitna3 and corrupt the moral of the umma.4 Music is ambiguous because it has the potential to corrupt Islamic norms or prevent people from performing their Islamic duties, but whether there is a real danger of straying from the right path depends on the specific social context. A central element in this entire debate is thus the nature of the social context: who is performing for whom, what is the occasion, in what kind of location does the performance take place and what is the audience doing? The determining issue is the risk of situations arising in which norms regarding gender segregation, the respectability of the performers and their audience, the occurrence of illicit activities, such as the use of alcohol or drugs, homosexuality, illicit sexual relations, prostitution, and dancing of men and women, are transgressed. The normative discourse that dominates within the Dutch-Moroccan community considers music and performance and Islamic piety to be incompatible or at least questionable (Gazzah, 2008, pp. 186-187). This discourse is also linked to socio-cultural norms determining good and bad Moroccans/ Muslims. DutchMoroccan identity is inherently linked to an Islamic identity, meaning that Moroccanness is (almost) always bracketed together with Muslimness. Hence, a ‘good’ (Dutch-)Moroccan is also deemed to be a ‘good’ Muslim. This sociocultural identity is thus intrinsically tied to a religious identity (Gazzah, 2008, pp. 186-187). The link between a cultural and a religious identity has prompted some

2 3 4

Sunna refers to the sources that describe the prophet Muhammad’s practices during his lifetime. Muslims consult it to decide whether certain practices are allowed. Islamic concept denoting chaos. Islamic concept denoting the community of believers.

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producers of events targeting a Dutch-Moroccan audience to cater for this ideology by ‘Islamizing’ their events to some extent. My previous research has shown that Dutch-Moroccan youth draw on a set of recurrent statements that either argues against or in favour of music. First, devoting too much time to music is deemed haram – if listening to music or playing music keeps you from performing your religious duties, such as praying, it is obviously not commendable. Second, the content of the lyrics should not be about un-Islamic topics, such as drugs, alcohol, or sex. Third, the social context within which the music is performed or consumed should be in accordance with Islamic norms (no mingling between unrelated men and women, no alcohol, etc.). Fourth, the kind of people present when making or listening to music also defines to a certain extent what is acceptable and what is not (again this relates to gender norms, which are in themselves far from uncontested among Muslims). Fifth, the associations certain music genres may evoke play a decisive role in what kind of music can be played in whose presence. Finally, the fact that music can influence your emotional state of mind and consequently can affect your behaviour and possibly make you lose your inhibitions is considered an important factor in declaring music haram (Gazzah, 2008, p. 58). These arguments are also found, in some form, in the literature and verdicts uttered by Muslim scholars. In practice, young Dutch-Moroccan consumers of music specifically emphasise the nature of the lyrics. They are often mentioned as a factor that can make music haram. Chaima5 (24, student, Amsterdam) says: Music must be like a good book. It must entertain, but I also want to learn from it. There are many different ideas [about music], especially in the Middle East. Some say that music is not good for your heart and spirit. Well, maybe that is the case. I think music is like a good book: you can learn from it, but it can be fun as well. Food for thought. I do not like music that is about nothing, I consider that bad for my heart and soul. And it is a waste of time. And when I sleep and I still hear that tune in my head. I find that annoying. But music that talks about the world, that contains a message, I consider that an enrichment. So I believe that too little distinction is made between music that is about something and has a particular educational element. Few people would like to recognize that. And those who say that music is bad for your heart, they never say why exactly that is. So I miss arguments there. They refer to some scholar … I go my own way. I decide whether it [the music] is beneficial or not. Beyonce or all that rap music about women and gold; that is not really advisable for little children to see [on TV]. Or songs that degrade women and call them bitch and so on. That is music I find really horrible. A lot of people put this category of

5

All the names of the persons interviewed are pseudonyms.

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music together with music that contains a message and a moral code. I find that a bad thing. That way people are kept stupid.6

Mina (25, student, Rotterdam) says: The boundary lies with the lyrics, when they are not compatible with Islam; when there is cursing, when all kinds of diseases are wished upon someone, certain obscene sounds – am I listening to music or to an X-rated video? – that is the limit. But I listen to music, either Islamic music or not, I do listen to music. But it must fit my principles. That what Islam preaches, it should all be able to combine. As soon as I have the idea that that is not the case any more, I quit.7

The arguments that Dutch-Moroccan youth put forward should not be seen as irrevocable judgments. Rather, they are used to distinguish between different levels of legitimacy. This shows that there is room for interpretation. Moreover, this room for interpretation becomes enforced by the fact that in Islamic jurisprudence there is no final ruling on the status of music (Van Nieuwkerk 2011, pp. 4-5; Otterbeck, 2008, Alagha, 2011, pp. 149-174). This results in a rather large grey zone wherein there is room for multiple and differing opinions and interpretations. This enables Dutch-Moroccan youth to formulate very personalized, customized standpoints on this issue (Gazzah, 2008, pp. 157-169). Another remarkable issue that transpires among Dutch-Moroccan youth’s discourses on the permissibility of music is the tendency to underscore autonomy in relation to their religiosity. ‘It is their life, and they make their own choices’ is an often heard phrase. They stress their personal relationship with Allah and they are only accountable to Allah (see Gazzah, 2008, pp. 11-186). Mina puts it like this: I should listen more to the Qur’an. That is my duty. But that does not mean that I should not listen to music any more. It fills up my life. Just like art and culture … I went to an exposition of Islamic art [in Amsterdam]. That is just an enrichment. I will never forget that … Beautiful … I am proud of that. But that does not mean that art that does not have anything to do with Islam does not make me happy. As long as it fits within my parameters of my Islamic life style. Be it clothing or art, those are the ornaments of life. Those are the things that give colour to life. I am totally convinced of that … If you look at a landscape, Allah made that, right? That gives you inspiration, right? Why shouldn’t you find that

6 7

Interview.Chaima. 22 July 2011. Interview. Mina. 13 October 2011.

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beautiful? That is Islamic too, right? Even though the artist may not even be Islamic, but that is beyond the point!8

The Dutch-Moroccan music scene is, obviously, not a phenomenon that pertains to the religion field per se, but it is a space in which processes of creating Muslimness take place. Many of the social dynamics going on – at concerts and parties, on stage, behind the scenes and in the (online) social activities surrounding the scene – indicate the different values and meanings attributed to being Muslim. Lifestyle choices of Dutch-Moroccan youth are (partly) guided by their own Islamic principles. Music that does not fall within the self-prescribed boundaries is considered ‘not good for you’. Shaping an ethical self, consciously constructing your Muslimness, and embodying this process by making certain ethically motivated choices, is a trend that is increasingly visible among Dutch-Moroccan youth.

The Religious in the Scene Most of the music events targeting a Dutch-Moroccan audience are not Islamic by design, meaning that they are not promoted as ‘Islamic’ or religious in any way. This does not imply that these events are purely secular and void of religion. Most of them implement certain Islamic norms such as the absence of alcohol (or drugs), the absence of references to sex and violence in the programming (i.e. decent acts and genres), programming parties in line with the Islamic calendar (Eid-al-Fitr, in Dutch: Suikerfeest), the implicit behavioural code regarding the interaction between men and women, sometimes segregation of the sexes and early starting and finishing times for events. I consider this an indirect reaction to the normative discourse that sees ‘danger’ in music and musical events. By trying to avoid associations with haram behaviour and situations that are described above – associations that always lie in wait – audience, organizers, music producers, and consumers seek to legitimate their actions. Islamization is thus instigated by producers as well as consumers of these events. From the point of view of the producers, Islamizing events has an important commercial purpose. It is a way for organizers to erase or lessen the negative associations and ideas evoked by musical events among the DutchMoroccan community. By implementing such elements, organizers hope to increase the Islamic legitimacy (for its audience) and to make it more acceptable for Dutch-Moroccan youth (and their parents) to come (Gazzah, 2008, p. 151). For

8

Idem.

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consumers, this (albeit implicit) Islamization is in tune with their desire to reside in an environment that is adjusted to their socio-cultural and religious identities (p. 149). A lot of emphasis is placed on ethics. Ethical codes, such as modesty and decency, are thought to be good virtues in any Muslim. These ethics make a Dutch-Moroccan event in some way more halal than visiting a Dutch discotheque. Ahmed, a Dutch-Moroccan producer and promoter of concerts, festivals and events targeting a Dutch-Moroccan audience is clear about his intentions. His events must be in line with Dutch-Moroccan socio-cultural and religious identities. He says: The yardstick is that our parents should be able to walk around. My parents have always been present at my events everywhere. Can my parents walk around freely without being exposed to weird things? What is weird for them, so to speak. If you take that as your benchmark, well then you need have no doubts. My parents have already been on the hajj and they pray five times a day. They are just normal, liberal, so to speak. But we are not so liberal that we celebrate carnival in the middle of a café carrying around beer on our shoulder blades. That’s a bit too far out of line. It is not that I am so very ethical or righteous. No, it is more an argument drawn from my target group perspective. I want a specific audience. Take business reasoning as my starting point: how can I reach the widest possible audience? I could focus on the people who drink [Bacardi] Breezers. There are plenty of them [among Dutch-Moroccans]. Well, I say, that’s not my thing. It’s not because I am a saint. Not at all… We wanted then and I still want to organize events for the whole family … I do not want people to be drunk at my party and that my father and mother see drunk people with a tray of beer on their arm, or drug use. Well, that is a cultural and religious standard that I want to keep. You know, with us [Dutch-Moroccans] the cultural and religious are difficult to separate, they often coincide. So, I organize events that way, that is what I want to achieve. 9

Amin, another Dutch-Moroccan event-producer/promoter, argues along similar lines. He specializes in organizing Islamic music events. The lyrics of the music are essential to his ethical boundaries. Songs about alcohol, “such as often heard in raï music” Amin says, are not his cup of tea. Then again, “the lyrics need not be only songs of praise like the original, traditional anasheed songs used to be.

9

Interview. Ahmed. 21 February 2012.

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Zain Bikha10 and Outlandish11 sing about orphans, AIDS, social injustice”. Amin explains: There are books written on it, by Tariq Ramadan and Mohammed Qutb, on Islamic art. He [Ramadan?] considers Fairouz, a Lebanese singer, who sings about nature and stuff, as an Islamic singer. He also sees the Indian poet Tagore, who writes on certain philosophical matters, as an Islamic poet. That human thing, I am a fan of this Dutch singer-song writer, Stef Bos...I visit his concerts, because his songs have a certain profundity to them. I find that interesting. And that is also what I consider to be Islamic…the music is the frame, so to say. If music is only made to dance to, that is what shaabi music is all about, when people are asked [during concerts] to dance and they are literally spurred and encouraged to that….well, that I do not find interesting [Islamic, MG].12

To comply with certain Islamic moral codes, on a practical and on a more social and ethical level, Amin and Ahmed circumvent negative associations and achieve a level of halalness. This halalness is accomplished by (decent, Islamic) artists singing decent lyrics, a controlled environment in terms of absence of alcohol and the like, and a norm for interaction between male and female visitors that is in line with Islamic ethics (promoting decency and modesty).

Digital Debates on Music and Muslimness The standing of music within Islam and the general view on this debate adopted by Dutch-Moroccan youth are interesting because they have triggered a discussion that has led producers and promoters to take account of sensitivities to the issue, resulting in the implementation of some Islamic elements at their events and a gearing of conduct to Islamic ethics. This Islamization is not only instigated by external factors. Internal, personalized wishes to live a life in accordance with Islam are equally important in this Islamization process. In fact, it would be rather problematic to distinguish between the two kinds of Islamization. The Islamization imposed by Dutch society and the internalized aspiration to make lifestyles compatible with Islam are certainly interconnected. Analysing their mutual impact and which came first is beyond the scope of this chapter. In their discourse, producers Ahmed and Amin disregard the significance of imposed

10 Zain Bikha is a South African Islamic pop singer: http://www.zainbhikha.com/#loop [Accessed 2 July 2012]. 11 Outlandish is a Danish hip-hop group, often associated with the Islamic pop music scene. Their music targets a mainstream audience as well. 12 Interview.Amin. 9 September 2011.

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Islamization and clearly express a view that the Islamization of their events is the product of their internalized and embodied, personalized desire to act in accordance with Islamic ethics. But what happens outside the realms of these institutionalized events with prearranged conditions? How is Islam reflected in the interplay between music, Dutch-Moroccan youth and the shaping of Muslimness in concrete interactions between Dutch-Moroccan youth? The internet is a space wherein many haphazard, non-proscribed, non-institutionalized interactions between Dutch-Moroccan youth take place. In fact, from the Dutch-Moroccan music scene an online space has evolved that thrives on the shared interest of Dutch-Moroccan youth in music, events and other related topics, such as new releases and the exchange of music (like mp3 files). In this final section I look into some online interactions between Dutch-Moroccan youth taking place at the intersection of music, religiosity and subjectivity. Maher Zain13 is an Islamic pop musician who released his second album in April 2012. In May 2012, he performed in Rotterdam to a sold-out theatre.14 Hundreds of youngsters, mainly girls (veiled and unveiled) of Moroccan and Turkish decent – his main fan base in the Netherlands – enjoyed the performance of this Swedish-Lebanese singer. The concert was meant to be in line with Islamic ethics. This meant, at least according to the presenter of the night, that “we all remain seated” and implicitly this also meant no dancing, only clapping and waving. Mina (25, Dutch-Moroccan student and a big Maher Zain fan) started to send out tweets during the concert. She continued to report on it via Twitter the day after. Rashid, one of her followers, responded rather crudely to her spontaneous public expression of enjoyment, reminding her that music is haram: Mina: Maher Zain yesterday was amazing masha’Allah15! Rashid: Maher Zain is in the country and we get mass hysteria about halal music. If there is a well-known scholar in the country, everybody looks away. Blehg! Rashid @Mina: By the way, it is not really decent that Zain mentions the name of Allah and so on with all these ‘forbidden tones’ and rudely said: music. Mina @Rashid: I do not agree with you. Nasheed makes us remember Allah (pbuh) and our beloved Prophet (pbuh) Rashid@Mina: You are wrong to call Zain’s music nasheed. Nasheed should conform to certain requirements. Zain just makes music. That is for one.

13 http://www.facebook.com/MaherZain#!/MaherZain/info [accessed May, 2013]. 14 Field notes, 20 May 2012. I was present at this concert. 15 An exclamation of wonder and praise, lit. ‘what God has willed’ (Becker, 2011, p.12).

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The fragments above are only a short excerpt from the conversation unfolding on Twitter between Mina and Rashid. The conversation was initially instigated by the tweet Mina sent out saying how wonderful Maher Zain’s concert had been. It continued the next day with arguments going back and forth on the haram or halal status of music. The ongoing discussion on the permissibility of music among DutchMoroccan youth is a topic that has spread from the real world to the digital world. Dialogues between advocates and opponents and those who take a middle position are to be found all over different online spaces where Dutch-Moroccans congregate. It is to be expected that the theme is discussed in forums dedicated to Islam and religious affairs, but the issue also regularly pops up in spaces that are (totally) not meant to deal with religious topics. As I mentioned earlier, young Dutch-Moroccan music consumers struggle with the contested status of music and put a lot of effort into their interpretation of Islamic rulings in relation to their own musical practices. Some ‘admit to’ music being haram, but compensate for this by expressing their good intentions (niyya). Some just dispute the normative discourse that links music and performance to un-Islamic behaviour. Others justify their musical practices with the argument that even Islamic scholars do not agree on this topic, and if there is no agreement, there is no final ruling (Gazzah, 2008, pp. 186-187).16 The argument between Mina and Rashid which occurred in the Twitter conversation is a good example of the digital version of this debate. The issue of the status of music within Islam has become a standard theme in many web communities and online spaces dedicated to Dutch-Moroccan youth. You can find snippets of it on many sites. Whereas the discussions used to take place mainly on web forums and bulletin boards, which are more public and anonymous in character, the discussion has meanwhile spread to social media network sites (like Facebook and Twitter), making it often a personal conversation between (two or more) individuals. In these online discussions emphasis is frequently placed on the responsibility Muslims have to make autonomous, educated, individual choices. The point here is often not to convince others of what is right, but rather to perform and present one’s own Muslim subjectivity, a subjectivity which is seen to be realized and achieved by interacting with other Dutch-Moroccans. For the participants, the significance of fashioning personal positions in the debate lies in engaging in order to negotiate their own interpretations of what Islam means to them. By debating the permissibility of music, they enable themselves to express and construct a

16 See Gazzah (2008) for a detailed analysis of this debate (pp.141-186).

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sense of Muslimness. By discussing, and at the same time performing and presenting themselves as Muslims, they engage in a process of communicating the boundaries of Muslimness. It is in this interactive process of expressing, communicating and reacting that a kind of Muslimness is fulfilled. These discussions often reveal a recurring pattern. One feature of this pattern is that there is always someone who ‘condemns’ all music (and related activities). Sara (32), a Dutch-Moroccan freelance journalist, speaking of those who continually condemn music as haram and always ‘preach the faith’ online, says: Nothing is changed. There is always someone who says ‘it’s just music’. And there is always someone who says ‘it is from the shaytan’ [the devil, MG]. That will never change, you will always have supporters and opponents. There will be no end to that discussion. There will be no end to Islam. There will always be people who preach the faith and believe that their job is to say how it is. They see it as their duty. And of course you have the haters, who pass judgment on people. Look, you are not supposed to go wagging your finger at someone and say he’ll go to hell because he goes to a concert.17

Jan, a producer of Dutch-Moroccan events, explains his way of dealing with this phenomenon as follows: You always have a few fanatics who are looking for everything they perceive to be wrong. And who get their energy from entering into [online] discussions or start them [discussions] … [We] just ignore it. Whenever you react, you just feed them … We say: we are like television. You can choose to visit our activities, visit our website, or you can choose not to. You can visit our fan page on Facebook, you can subscribe to our newsletter, you know. There are many ways to get in touch, or not to. And yes, so be it. Yes, I’m not quite worried about what people think. And yes, they are still there, people who think it is un-Islamic, and feel the need to express that and respond to what we do. What I see happening is that the people who visit these [web] forums, soon react to these people themselves. There are plenty among them who are tired of it and say: yo dude go somewhere else to tease people …18

Jan puts his trust in the self-regulating character of the web forums. Sara sees this kind of discussion as an inherent part of the Dutch-Moroccan virtual community where ‘the preachers’ – for whom ‘Islam is always on’ (Bunt, 2009) – feel it is their religious duty to point others to the right path. Bunt suggests that because of the pervasiveness of internet (RSS feeds, blogs, alerts, social media status updates,

17 Sara. Personal interview. 28 July 2011. 18 Jan. Personal interview. 22 July 2011.

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podcasts, etc.), through the use of PDAs, BlackBerrys and other mobile phones and tablets, “Muslims have the opportunity to put Islam ‘always on’” (pp. 10-11). Bunt even goes as far as to say that “… there are many people for whom being online in the name of Allah represents an obligation” (p. 11). For those people it is a must to mingle in discussions on music and its permissibility. For those internet users who see it as their duty to guide others to the right path of Allah, going online has become part of their daily religious experience (De Koning, 2008, p. 15). The same type of discussion and its recurrent patterns can also be found in the feedback sections of YouTube videos. A YouTube video report 19 of Marmoucha’s Suikerfeest (a party that was organized in celebration of Eid-al-Fitr) in 2007 triggered a debate that ran on for four years, from 2007 until 2011. Reactions vary from people stating how much they enjoyed the event to people declaring the whole thing un-Islamic, referring to illicit behaviour like flirting, dancing, and celebrating the end of Ramadan in a discotheque (the venue was a concert hall). The majority of responses are negative and affirm the haram status of the event. A second element that often recurs in these online discussions is that the ‘opponents of music’ are also reproached by others to do something haram. One contributor says it is haram “to surf the web all the time looking on YouTube to be able to respond to these things, it is also haram to waste your time.” Another one says: “Did you especially look for this, to say it is haram? Who knows what you are up to? The ones who reproach others are often the ones who are up to the most [haram behaviour, MG].”20 The internet has caused the debate on the permissibility of music and Islam to pervade unexpected spaces: YouTube, websites dedicated to artists and events, social media websites and online event calendars. As a consequence, visitors to these digital spaces are encouraged and prompted to formulate their position within this debate. Some reject the whole discussion from the outset because they find discussing this topic futile. For others, it is a way to perform and express a sense of Muslimness in relation to other young Dutch-Moroccans. It is irrelevant whether one of the discussants is persuaded by another’s point of view. Rather, the significance lies in the fact that by entering into a discussion one is enabled to perform and express a certain sense of Muslimness. Some people seem excessive in this. Among those for whom ‘Islam is always on’, it has become an obligation to be online and to contest whatever they consider un-Islamic.

19 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TLn2Q0TioiU [accessed May, 2013]. 20 Taken from: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TLn2Q0TioiU [Accessed May, 2013].

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The above examples also demonstrate the fluidity and interconnectedness of online and offline worlds. Online presence is never only a reference to the virtual world, but always speaks back to the offline world too, in whatever shape or form. By being present online, by entering into discussions on (in this instance) the permissibility of music in Islam, internet users not only create a sense of Muslimness by connecting with others and discussing this Islamic topic, but their participating in online debate is also a sign of their existence in the real offline world and a reflection of this physical presence. Being online is thus also always a matter of observation and performance. Internet users observe; they observe what is going online and offline, and reflect on that in discussion rooms, chat sessions, on their social media profile websites, via Twitter, etc. By the same token, by doing this observing and reflecting, they simultaneously make their presence in the online world meaningful, and they assert their existence in the offline real world by projecting their reflections on real life experiences online (De Koning, 2008, p. 13). By reflecting on real time events, such as the Marmoucha event, internet users, i.e. Dutch-Moroccan youth, affirm their presence in the online and offline world. The subjectivities that are performed online are not either virtual or real, but must be seen as the product of a relationship of dialogue between the offline and online world. As Hoover and Echchaibi write: “… [d]igital cultures both express and mediate our vital need for meaningful social interaction, and as such arguably form an extension of our social experience” (p. 9). It is in this sense that digital space and physical space are in fact inseparable.

Conclusion The online debates between young Dutch-Moroccans show that performance of Muslimness, in this case debates relating to the Dutch-Moroccan music scene, is not a one-way phenomenon. It is, in fact, by discussing, or indeed opposing, other points of view that Muslimness is expressed and performed. This dynamic indicates that what is considered Islamic is far from an uncontested space. It is the anonymous and open character of the internet that enables Dutch-Moroccan youth to discuss the boundaries of Muslimness without having to be (immediately) confronted with their opinions in everyday (offline) life. Besides the digital debates, the meaning of what is Islamic in the DutchMoroccan music scene can be observed in how consumers and producers deal with their own Muslimness and the perceived, expected or desired levels of Muslimness of others moving around in the scene. My chapter shows that what is perceived as religious – and what not – is not arranged along straight, consistent lines. The

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boundaries between what is secular and what is religious have increasingly become fluid. Dutch-Moroccan youth are claiming and reconfiguring popular culture elements, such as visiting certain musical events, listening to particular music, or debating and reviewing performances (or the deliberate choice not to do these things) as belonging to the religious realm, even though these events may not be religious to begin with. In view of the increased imposition of Islam upon the current identities of young Dutch-Moroccans, the appropriation of music (or popular culture in general) in the process of shaping Muslim selves and producing religiosity must be seen as an aesthetic performance of religiosity in itself. How Islam is interpreted, discussed, imagined and performed shines through in the way DutchMoroccan youth make Islam, or at least their interpretation of it, connect and interact with popular culture, music, consumption and (life) style (cf. Sunier, 2009, p. 17). Thus, the repertoires Dutch-Moroccan youth draw on to shape, form and constitute their Muslimness are not always religious per se. Popular culture – and I have taken music as an example of that – is increasingly transformed into arenas wherein Muslimness is expressed, contested and validated. Whereas media and some research reports continually reduce Muslim identity to religious practices like praying and fasting, new research, including this chapter, shows that DutchMoroccan youth transcend the dichotomies of religious versus secular or religious versus cultural and aim for a religiosity experience, if you will, that takes inspiration from various fields, including popular culture and youth culture (cf. Mandaville, 2009; Lynch, 2007). In such a way, Dutch-Moroccan youth make the construction of selves a continuous, recycling process of reflection, performance and negotiation. Reflecting consciously on, for instance eating halal food, listening to certain types of music (or not), or wearing a (fashionable) hijab (headscarf), is at one and the same time an internal construction of Muslimness (predominantly meaningful to the believer self and thus functioning as the shaping of an ethical, pious self) and also a performance of Muslimness towards the outside world (cf. Roy, 2006; Moors, 2009). However, not all choices are easily and unconditionally accepted by others (be they Muslims or non-Muslims) as ‘Islamic’ – as the examples from digital space show. Therefore negotiation about the validity and legitimacy of certain choices being presented as Islamic constitutes another important part of this process of creating Muslimness (cf. Van Summeren, 2007, pp. 276-277).

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References Alagha, J., 2011. Pious entertainment: Hizbullah’s Islamic cultural sphere. In: K. van Nieuwkerk, ed. Muslim Rap, Halal Soaps, and Revolutionary Theater: Artistic Developments in the Muslim World. Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press, pp. 149-175. Bunt, G., 2009. iMuslims: rewiring the house of Islam. North Carolina: The University of North Carolina Press. Brouwer, L., 2009. The internet as a vehicle of empowerment: Dutch Moroccan youths on the Islam debate. In: C. Timmerman, J. Leman, H. Roos, B. Segaert, eds. In-Between Spaces Christian and Muslim Minorities in Transition in Europe and the Middle East Series. Bruxelles: Peter Lang, pp. 219-230. Brouwer, L., 2006. Dutch Moroccan Websites: A Transnational Imagery? Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 32(7), pp. 1153-1168. Brouwer, L., 2004. Dutch-Muslims on the internet: a new discussion platform. Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs, 24(1), pp. 47-55. Buitelaar, M., 2008. De Islamisering van identiteit onder jongeren van Marokkaanse afkomst. In: M. ter Borg & M. Borgman, eds. Handboek Religie in Nederland: perspectief, overzicht, debat. Utrecht/Zoetermeer: Forum/Meinema, pp. 239-252. Campbell, H., 2010. When religion meets new media. New York and London: Routledge. De Koning, M., 2008. Identity in transition. Connecting online and offline internet practices of Moroccan-Dutch Muslim youth. Institute for the study of European transformations (ISET)/ London Metropolitan University. De Koning, M., 2009. Islam is Islam. Punt uit? Migrantenstudies, 1, pp. 59-72. Gazzah, M., 2008. Rhythms and Rhymes of Life. Music and identification processes of Dutch-Moroccan youth. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Hoover, S.M. and Echchaibi, N., 2012. The “Third Spaces” of Digital Religion, a discussion paper. Boulder: The Center for Media, Religion, and Culture University of Colorado Boulder. Leurs, K. and Ponzanesi, S., 2012. Digital Multiculturalism in the Netherlands: Religious, Ethnic and Gender Positioning by Moroccan-Dutch Youth. Religion and Gender, 2(1), pp. 150-175. Lynch, G., ed. 2007. Between Sacred and Profane: Researching Religion and Popular Culture. London: I.B.Tauris. Mandaville, P., 2009. Hip-Hop, Nasheeds, and ‘Cool’ Sheikhs. Popular Culture and Muslim Youth in the United Kingdom. In: C. Timmerman, J. Leman, H.

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Roos, B. Segaert, eds. In-Between Spaces Christian and Muslim Minorities in Transition in Europe and the Middle East Series. Bruxelles, Series: Dieux, Hommes et Religions – Volume 18, pp. 149-168. Moors, A., 2009. “Islamic Fashion” in Europe: Religious Conviction, Aesthetic Style, and Creative Consumption. Encounters, 1(1), pp. 175-201. Van Nieuwkerk, K., ed. 2011. Muslim Rap, Halal Soaps, and Revolutionary Theater: Artistic Developments in the Muslim World. Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press. Otterbeck, J., 2008. Battling over the Public Sphere: Islamic Reactions to the Music of Today, Contemporary Islam, 2(3), pp. 211-229. Roy, O., 2006. Islam in the West or Western Islam? The Disconnect of Religion and Culture. The Hedgehog Review, 8(1/2), pp. 127-132. Roy, O., 2005. De globalisering van de islam. Translated by F. door Walter van der Star, Amsterdam: Van Gennep. Sunier, T., 2009. Beyond the Domestication of Islam. A Reflection on Research on Islam in European Societies. Inaugural speech, Free University of Amsterdam, 27 November. Available at: http://www.visor.vu.nl/nl/Images/Oratie%20rede%20Sunier_tcm54126831.pdf [Accessed 1 August, 2012]. Van Summeren, C., 2007. Religion Online: The Shaping of Multidimensional Interpretations of Muslimhood on Maroc.nl. Communications, 32, pp. 273295.

Performing Vision Re-presentation in Islam Wendy M. K. Shaw

The historic and intellectual roots of art historical practice have emphasized an approach to visuality in Islam grounded in Eurocentric norms of mimesis and representation. Despite the oft-discussed absence of any theological prohibition against the image, this difference in cultural norms of visuality has resulted in widespread and persistent understandings of Islam as “iconoclastic” (Naef, 2007; Flood, 2002; Gruber, 2009). Yet Islam might be considered iconoclastic not so much in forbidding the image as in recognizing the image as powerful, less in and of itself than in emphasizing the role of the viewer as the performer of meaning. Just as the neologism heteronormativity underscores the role of normative gendered social practices in producing homosexuality as its Other, the neologism imagenormativity might describe a normative mode of understanding other cultures, such as that of Islam, through the lens of a normative mode of visuality particular to the European/Christian/Western tradition. Whereas a pure iconoclasm might imply a purely aniconic inward religious practice that uses no focal objects, Islam does not fit such a definition in that it makes use of material objects to focus the attention of the worshipper. The most important of these is the Ka‘ba, towards which all ritual prayer is directed. The mihrab in each mosque plays a secondary role in directing the attention of the congregation towards the Ka‘ba. Finally, relics of the Prophet Muhammad (and in regional contexts relics of secondary saints often associated with Sufi practices) often also provide a focal point of worship. If not based on the paradigm of the image, the icon, or the idol, how does perception function in the relationship established between the worshipper and these votive objects?

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Focusing on these practices of visuality not always considered central to art historical frameworks but inherent to Islamic religious practice, this article proposes that many aspects of Islamic ritual promote a gaze with a performative function through which the believer comes to witness the sacred presence of the Prophet Muhammad. The ritual aspect of this performance reverses the modality of scientific temporality, enabling the prophet, and through his prophecy, God, to exist in the universal present constructed through ritualized practices of the gaze. Thus rather than functioning through paradigms of representation focusing on the relationship between signifier and signified in the devotional object, Islamic visuality focuses on the performative role of the believer that affects the presence of the sacred. Differing from the Eurocentric norms of representation on which art historical interpretation is often grounded, the concept of performative visuality in Islam offers an alternative receptive paradigm for Islamic visual culture.

The Ka‘ba The worshipper engages the sacred aspect of the Ka‘ba through multiple rituals that establish a sensory relationship between the believer and the central focal point of all ritual prayer (salat). The history of these rituals, dialectically rejecting and yet also incorporating pre-Islamic practices, indicates the limited role played by mimetic representation in the distinction between ritual nexus and idol. Rather, the visuality that emerged in Islamic ritual practice replaced the semiotics of the idol, where signifier and signified overlap completely, and that of the icon, where the signified inhabits the signifier, with an emphasis on the performance of the worshipper who uses the object less as a material form than as a lens through which to experience Islamic revelation. Islamic ideas about the relationship between idolatry and representation emerged within the framework of the traditions that bracketed it, in particular the Greek Orthodox and Hindu traditions, as well as the pre-Islamic Arab traditions discussed later in this paper. In ancient Greek, eikon refers to a “portrait, image, statue, likeness, and finally, simile”, what in the modern world has come to be understood as a “sign that resembles its referent” (Wharton, 2003, p. 4). Through this function of resemblance, the icon makes present what is absent, but in doing so, also emphasizes absence as a boundary that can only be crossed through a process of faith. Thus an Orthodox Christian icon simultaneously engages both functions of representation in English: that of resemblance, and that of making present. In contrast, the term idol implies a value judgment, indicating an illegitimate object of worship or a false god as well as the actual presence of that god within the object, such that signifier and the signified coincide and cannot be

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separated. Unlike an attack on an icon, which is a desecration, an attack on an idol actually destroys the god it purportedly represents (Eastmond, 2003, p. 77). The distinction between an icon and an idol is thus not simply one of the legitimacy of faith that grants the acknowledged god immortality but permits the mortality of the false god(s). It also embodies the very function of representation itself: to make present the absent, but to retain a limit between the represented reality and the representation as actually perceived. In the Islamic context, an idol does not necessarily have anything to do with the image; rather, it needs to be understood as any replacement for the Real (including that potentially in representational images), which can only be the singular God. Islam, then, is not iconoclastic in that it eschews the image, but in that it eschews the conflation of representations engaged through iconic practices, and views such practices as idolatrous. Rather than thinking of Islam through the trope of ‘lack’ in relation to the image, one might instead think of the other traditions against which it is implicitly contrasted, especially the Christian tradition, as having a ‘need’ for the image which Islam does not have. Independent from the religious need for images, the Islamic world has produced fewer representational images than other cultures; as Christiane Gruber details in her examination of portraits of the Prophet Muhammad, this does not mean that religious images were never used, or that Islam can be considered as having a positive restriction on the image that might be termed iconoclastic (Gruber, 2009). The primary concern of Islamic injunctions against taswir was not the concept of representation per se, but the elimination of the worship of idols that was perceived as a threat to nascent Islam. The Prophet Muhammad and his followers destroyed the traces of pagan practice in Mecca in 630, including the idols worshipped by the house of the Quraysh, his own tribe, at the Ka‘ba. The sculptures that were destroyed included a red agate statue of Hubal, the primary male deity of Mecca, who guarded and guided the seven divination arrows that guided decision-making within the clan (Faris, 1952, pp. 23-24). The Ka‘ba also contained wall paintings depicting the prophets holding divining arrows, a magical practice frowned on in Islam. However, the image (possibly a portable icon) of Mary holding the baby Jesus in her lap (probably in the pose of the Virgin Enthroned) that was in the Ka‘ba is said to have been spared (King, 1985, p. 268). In sharp contrast, a hadith related by the prophet’s youngest wife Aisha indicates that he always destroyed objects in his home that were marked by a cross, which in later centuries often proved more problematic in mixed Christian-Islamic contexts than icons (Flood, 2002, p. 645; King, 1985, p. 270). Although the eighteenth-century Yemeni commentator al-Shawkani expanded the notion of the cross to forbid all representations (tasawir) on garments, curtains, or carpets, these

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hadiths actually point to the role of both the image and the symbol as signs of doctrine ('Isa and Glidden, 1968, p. 252). Whereas the cross potentially promoted the doctrine of the crucifixion, a similar danger was not perceived for the figural image of Mary and Jesus, as Islam accepts the miracle of the virgin birth. The problem was not with the idolatrous quality of the image, but with the doctrinal implications of the sign. This problem was no different from the symbolic problem inherent in the transformation of the Ka‘ba. Even cleansed of idols, the Ka‘ba itself retained symbolic power inherited from the pagan era, a transition documented in The Book of Idols by the Baghdadi scholar Hisham ibn al-Kalbi (737–819).1 His description of the Ka‘ba as a sign of pagan regression from the religion of Abraham plays a key role in explaining the need for the renewal of revelation through the Prophet Muhammad. According to Islamic tradition, God commanded Abraham to found the Sacred [Space] (haram) where the Ka‘ba is located as the first house of worship. According to al-Kalbi, thereafter visitors to Mecca would carry away a stone of the Sacred [Space] as a token of reverence, and, back home, circumambulate the stone as they would have circumambulated the Ka‘ba. The affiliation of such stones with Abrahamic practice legitimated similar use of objects in Islam, both as part of the pilgrimage to Mecca and as part of visits to reliquaries and tombs throughout the Islamic world. Nonetheless, the fine line between worship through the object and idolatry remained a key point of differentiation between Islam and precedent belief systems: “The Arabs were passionately fond of worshipping idols. Some of them took unto themselves a temple around which they centered their worship, while others adopted an idol to which they offered their adoration. The person who was unable to build himself a temple or adopt an idol would erect a stone in front of the Sacred House or in front of any other temple which he might prefer, and then circumambulate it in the same manner in which he would circumambulate the Sacred House. The Arabs called these stones baetyls (ansab). Whenever these stones resembled a living form they called them idols (asnam) and images (awthan). The act of circumambulating them they called circumrotation (dawar).” (Faris, 1952, p. 28)

1

While the historical veracity of such sira literature (describing the history of the life of the prophet and the compilation of the Qur’an) has been extensively contested among scholars, it retains a discursive function within Islam in defining the parameters through which the religion understands its own relationship with neighboring practices (Donner, 2006).

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Thus worship focused on a physical act of circumambulation that needed an object at its center – not as an image, as in the Euronormative traditions, but as a nexus in which the iconic and the aniconic were potentially interchangeable. Whenever a traveler stopped at a place or station in order to rest or spend the night, he would select for himself four stones, pick out the finest among them and adopt it as his god, and use the remaining three as supports for his cooking-pot (Faris, 1952, p. 28). While al-Kindi seems to ridicule such construction of the sacred through a personal and potentially arbitrary act of selection, it is this very arbitrariness which suggests an aniconic understanding of the idol or icon, which functions less as a visual representation than as a means of focusing the presence of a god(dess) through the practice of a worshipper seeking intercession. What makes the stone into an idol is not resemblance, but presence. Ironically, it was precisely this practice of worshipping a stone (albeit a relatively large one) that enabled Christians to condemn Muslims as idolaters. In the eighth century – at around the same time as al-Kalbi was writing the Book of Idols– both the Patriarch Germanus of Constantinople and John of Damascus describe Muslims as venerating an inanimate stone in the desert which John of Damascus claimed was believed to represent the head of Aphrodite (Vasiliev, 1956, p. 27). A hadith of the ninth-century scholar al-Bukhari even relates that Caliph ‘Umar said, “I know that thou art a stone, without power to harm or to help, and had I not seen the Messenger of God kiss thee, I would not kiss thee” (Vasiliev, 1956, p. 27). For al-Kalbi, and presumably for all Muslims who did not perceive any contradiction between the renunciation of idols and worship at the Ka‘ba, something essential had changed in the meaning invested in the stone. Rather than relying on representation and embodiment, as an icon or an idol, the stone signaled an action of the prophet which could be repeated by the worshipper. The Ka‘ba stone no longer represented a physical presence, but a performative remembrance. What, then, does the black stone (believed to be a meteorite) ensconced in the Eastern corner of the Ka‘ba signal? The only portion of the building revealed to view from behind the kiswa, the heavy gold-and-velvet brocade covering embroidered with Qur’anic verse that drapes the Ka‘ba, and surrounded by a silver frame that holds together its fragments, the black stone of the Ka‘ba serves as the nexus of worship during the circumambulation of the structure during the pilgrimage. 2 More than simply viewing the stone, believers symbolically kiss the

2

While the ideal would be to kiss the stone, the physical limitations of crowds generally lead worshippers to touch or point towards it during the circumambulation.

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stone, usually pushed by the crowds from several meters away. Even if this repeats the act of the Prophet Muhammad as commemorated by the Caliph ‘Umar, the question remains: if the stone is in no sense embodied by a deity as in an icon or idol, what was the prophet kissing? The stone embodies the history of revelation as completed by the Qur’an, and thus the inevitable inception of Islam. It is believed to have fallen from heaven to instruct Adam and Eve as to the location of the first altar to God after their fall from heaven. Forgotten before the flood of Noah, it was rediscovered by Abraham, who reestablished it as a temple. It remained part of the temple until its reconstruction after a flood in 602, while the site was under the protection of the Quraysh tribe to which the Prophet Muhammad belonged. According to biographies of the prophet, the various tribes cooperated until it came to the symbolic act of placing the black stone, when the tribes began to compete for the honor. A respected elder called a halt to the quarrelling, suggesting that the first person to enter the sanctuary would solve the problem. The young Muhammad entered, and proposed that a mantle be laid on the ground with which all the tribes could participate in raising the stone. This re-placement shifts the nature of the embodiment associated with the stone from one of pre-Islamic Arabian paganism, towards the embodiment of an action. The signifier of the stone as sign shifts from one that is material (the deity) to one that is temporal (the action). The holiness of the stone derives not simply from its heavenly origin, but its signaling the process of revelation through Adam and Abraham presaged by the Prophet Muhammad’s engagement with it. For the believer, the stone thereafter becomes a signal of actions infinitely reenacted through ritual performance.

The Mihrab Although not in itself a visual nexus, the stone nonetheless serves as the omphalos of all Islamic prayer. While in the Euronormative tradition the term focal point might serve equally well to express this centrality, the function of the Ka‘ba as center underscores a key difference of the Islamic tradition, in which the hierarchy of perception does not begin with the eyes but with the heart. Ritual prayer points towards the Ka‘ba, but visuality is secondary to directionality (qibla), the only absolute spatial/architectural requirement of a space of prayer other than cleanliness. Nonetheless, since the first Islamic century, this direction has been marked through a niche known as a mihrab.3 One can imagine the Islamic world

3

Nuha Khoury distinguishes between three types of mihrab: the flat mihrab image (surat mihrab), generally located on tombs and commemorative structures, which lacks

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as a world of vectors (mihrabs) that point towards a center (the Ka‘ba) through which believers, through their spatial alignment to these arrows during the performance of ritual prayer, enact singular community that transcends geography and temporality. Yet the mihrab is not simply an arrow towards the omphalos, but also, in tandem with the minbar (which represents the two-stepped stool from which the prophet preached raised up on six more steps and from which the imam preaches from the center, leaving the top steps to symbolically represent the absent prophet), the mihrab also signals the position of the prophet as the imam at the first mosque at his house in Medina. As Estelle Whelan shows, the location of the mihrab two bays north of the main axis of the mosque, initially established during the expansion of the Mosque of the Prophet at Medina during the early eighth century, which quickly became standard throughout the Islamic world, “marks the point toward which Muhammad himself had faced when leading the prayers in his courtyard at Medina … [and] dramatically underscores the intangible presence of the Prophet before his congregation” (Whelan, 1986, p. 214). This function of a mihrab overlaps with its formal development from colonnaded bay to niche as it moved from its pre-Islamic meanings as a symbolic frame for a ruler, a statue, an image, or incense, through its Qur’anic meanings as a part of a building, a sovereign’s audience hall, or a temple sanctuary, and towards a new function that, emptied of a devotional object, became a symbolic indicator of the prophet as leader towards the divine (Whelan, 1986, p. 206). While Khoury proposes that the uses of the mihrab in the Qur’an give it the qualities of a monument, what is perhaps most striking is that ordinary and extraordinary space become equally designated as sacred through some Qur’anic uses of the term, suggesting the role of the observer over the role of architectural form in designating the space as mihrab (Khoury, 1993, p. 59). For example, “Imran’s wife said, ‘Lord, I have dedicated what is growing in my womb entirely to You; so accept this from me. You are the One who hears and knows all,’ but when she gave birth, she said, ‘My Lord! I have given birth to a girl’ – God knew best what she had given birth to: the male is not like the female – ‘I name her Mary and I commend her and her offspring

directionality and functions as commemorative sign through the representation of a mihrab shape (shakl mihrab), the semicircular niche structure which Estelle Whelan refers to through the term mihrab muwajjaf, that has been a universal feature in mosques since the first Islamic century. As will be discussed, the term mihrab has both a complex derivation and historically refers to a plenitude of architectural forms; however, here I use it in its most basic contemporary use, that of the semi-circular niche that indicates the qibla wall (Whelan, 1986; Khoury, 1998).

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to Your protection from the rejected Satan.’ Her Lord graciously accepted her and made her grow in goodness, and entrusted her to the charge of Zachariah. Whenever Zachariah went in to see her in her sanctuary [mihrab], he found her supplied with provisions. He said, ‘Mary, how is it you have these provisions?’ and she said, ‘They are from God: God provides limitlessly for whoever He will’.” (Qur’an 3:35-38)

If one reads only the section concerning Zachariah’s visit, the mihrab appears to be a shrine. However, the context suggests that this is less of an architectural space than one delineated in its sacralization through the bounty showered on Mary. Likewise, “He said, ‘Give me a sign, Lord.’ He said, ‘Your sign is that you will not [be able to] speak to anyone for three full [days and] nights.’ He went out of the sanctuary (mihrab) to his people and signaled to them to praise God morning and evening.” (Qur’an 19:10-11)

While here the translated terms sanctuary, as used here, and prayer chamber or even mosque, as used in other translations, suggest architectural form, the text itself offers no form for the mihrab beyond a space marked by the sacredness performed by prayer, a space of sutra. This does not preclude, however, its implication of architectural form, particularly in reference to clearly secular space, as in its uses in relation to King Solomon and King David. “They made him whatever he wanted – palaces, statues, basins as large as water troughs, fixed cauldrons.” (Qur’an 34:13) “Have you heard the story of the two litigants who climbed into his private quarters? When they reached David, he took fright, but they said, ‘Do not be afraid. We are two litigants, one of whom has wronged the other: judge between us fairly– do not be unjust– and guide us to the right path.” (Qur’an 30:21-22)

As modern subjects, with a precommitment to the modern use of the word mihrab to designate an architectural niche as well as our cultural practice of making a binary distinction between symbolic and physical space, we may not see the role of the mihrab as it developed from the pre-Islamic to the Islamic eras in the same way. Rather, we might understand the Qur’anic mihrab as a space that gained its meaning and form through its function, not the other way around. Thus when it became a standard part of mosque architecture, it functioned within a performative rather than an architectural paradigm. Through ritual, it not only serves to

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delineate the sacred space (sutra) of the prophet or imam, and through him, the entire congregation; it also serves as an icon which not only requires no representation, but also no materiality at the actual site where the prophet is commemorated. This function signifying the prophet as imam, as opposed to mere directionality, is underscored by the absence of a mihrab in private spaces of prayer within the home – the mihrab indicates a function that is fulfilled only as part of congregational, and not part of private, worship. As at the Ka‘ba, this commemoration is only enacted through performative congregational ritual that depends on a visual cue.

Relics Beyond the stone of the Ka‘ba and the directionality of the mihrab, the widespread veneration of relics of the prophet provides perhaps the most direct example of the performative visuality inherent in many aspects of Muslim religious practice. Although Islamic jurists such as Taqi al-Din Ahmad ibn Taymiyya (1263–1328) objected to the use of intermediaries as a contradiction of the Islamic principle of the indivisible unity of divinity, as Brannon Wheeler points out, traditions related to the relics of the prophet “do not appear to be understood primarily as a means to venerate the Prophet Muhammad’s physical body.” He proposes instead that, “the Prophet Muhammad’s relics and their distribution seem to reflect and stress his physical absence, and the concurrent spread of Islam to the widespread centers of civilization where these relics have been carried” (Wheeler, 2006, p. 80). Wheeler explains that those bodily objects that have been most conducive to use as relics, including the fingernails and in particular the hairs of the prophet, are precisely those body parts identified with the symbolic association between the sanctuary of Mecca and the wilderness of Eden, established through the prohibition of their cutting during the ritual of the hajj, and their ceremonial cutting thereafter. The close association between these bodily relics and the sacred period of the hajj is established by early stories in which the prophet collects and distributes his ceremonially shaved hair and beard, cut nails, and the water from his rinsed mouth to his followers, following the desacralization ritual (ihlal) after his worship at the Ka‘ba. Such relics were to be taken from the prophet and distributed throughout newly established Islamic realms, creating a network of direct links with the presence of the prophet parallel to that of the spread of textual contact with him established through the transmission of texts, particularly the hadith. Thus bodily remains of the prophet functioned in the same manner as the texts that recorded his presence and activities, legitimizing Islam in far-flung regions and encouraging its continual re-transmission through the relocation of

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textual and reliquary remains of the prophet. The shedding of the beard and nails serve as a reminder of the fall from Eden (in which we humans had no knowledge of our bodily presence, coverings, or nakedness), and thus of the necessity for the Muslim state that would recognize and attempt to recoup, as well as possible, that ideal world of grace. In this way relics, although bodily, point not only to the absence of the prophet, but also to our awareness of the body that itself points to our collective fall from grace since the Garden of Eden (Wheeler, 2006, pp. 7278, 80, 94-98). If bodily relics point to the presence and practices of the prophet through a system of synecdoche, footprints of the prophet function as visual signs of his presence transformed from the temporality of the past into the material witness of the present. For non-believers, the imprint of a foot, usually on stone and often impossibly large, suggests sculpture: a carved mark created by human hands, and therefore, when transmuted into a code of belief, a potential site of deception. However, for believers, the fact of a footprint on stone, impossible outside the world of the miraculous, its impossibility emphasized by its material and size, serves as evidence of miracles, and thus also as a marker of faith. The footprint thus simultaneously marks the faith of the viewer and the anterior presence of the prophet who left his trace. In contrast to the embodiment that characterizes the icon or the idol, in the case of the footprint, presence hovers over absence, creating an anthropomorphic representation of temporality translated into materiality. In the Islamic context, the role of a footprint as a trace is underscored by the double meaning of the word athar as it appears in the Qur’an, indicating both the literal footprints Moses and his servants retrace during a journey (Qur’an 18:64) and the tracks of ancestors and prophets that are to be followed, as opposed to the more literal footprints of Satan indicated by the term khatawat (Denny, 2001). As with the flexibility of the term mihrab between the metaphysical space of the sutra and the physical space of the shrine, the footprint seems to move the concepts of temporality and physicality that appear oppositional in a modern epistemological framework. Such sites of sacred emptiness indicated by form, often referred to as “empty space aniconism”, are shared in earlier Mesopotamian and in Vedic traditions (Mettinger, 1995). The tenth-century BC temple of Ayn Dara is marked by approximately one-meter-long footprints of the deity that appear to walk towards and then stop before the shrine. Likewise, one of the earliest symbols of the Buddha before the second century AD, when figural representation became common, was the footprint indicating his presence in a biographical or legendary scene. After figural representation became more common, the footprint was divorced from its narrative content, becoming instead an isolated cult object or

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symbol. Actual footprints in natural surroundings on stone were understood as serving as evidence of his legendary travels. In contrast to representation, which emphasizes and in a sense thus contains the presence of the holy figure, the footprint emphasizes his existence as presence while eliminating the distraction of the body. Thus in Buddhism, footprints suggested the boundary between the Buddha’s visibility and invisibility (Hasan, 1993). The Buddha must be represented as invisible, as his actual bodily presence might be so distracting that it would render his actual characteristics, as embodied in actions, invisible against the physical distraction of presence. This consideration is echoed by Islamic images of God, described by ninetynine attributes or names rather than a given form. Yet the hadith, as related by alBukhari, echoes the Hebraic idea that God created Adam in his own “form”. The thirteenth-century scholar Muhyi al-Din ibn al-‘Arabi, one of Islam’s most influential mystical theologians, explained this by pointing to the use of the comprehensive name of God, Allah, as describing the form of Adam. Ibn al-‘Arabi claimed that this meant that among all creation, only humans had the capacity to display the full range of divine names attributed to God (Chittick, 1994, p. 22). Thus form should not be understood as a physical property, but as a quality brought out through faith and action. By causing the believer to become aware of the absence of the prophet, and through him the fleeting presence of divine revelation, votive objects such as relics represent the prophet without taking recourse to the image; they rely on the receptive performativity of viewing rather than on the nature of the image to show, display, or represent, transforming the external experience of the gaze into the inward vision of faith, a visual mode generally outside the purview of art historical investigation. In the Islamic tradition, commemorative footprints seem to mark sacred actions. Thus a stone footprint of the prophet Abraham is protected by a gilded cage in front of the entrance to the Ka‘ba where he set the stone of the first temple to God. Similarly, the footprint of Muhammad on the stone in the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem marks the place where he is believed to have mounted his winged steed Buraq to set off on his ascension to divine presence during the Night Journey (mi‘raj). The belief parallels that held by Christians since the fourth century that marks on the rock in the center of the Church of the Ascension on the Mount of Olives were actually footprints made by Christ at the time of his Ascension (Hasan, 1993, p. 335). Although most footprints of the prophet are portable, and served as important markers of divine baraka for the Mamluk, Ottoman and Mughal dynasties, their association with the mi’raj suggests that these footprints too were created at moments of divine action – a moment when, as in a mosque, the prophet has removed his shoes and sanctified the ground onto

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which he steps. To look upon a footprint, then, is to witness the moment in which the prophet is not simply a man but is engaged in intercourse with the divine. It does not simply mark the faith of the believer, but transforms him or her into a witness of miracles. Such a function can perhaps best be understood through comparison with three other traditions of religious viewing: that of the icon, that of the reliquary, and that of the patron framing a narrative vision in the Western tradition. The notion that the footprint brings the prophet into presence as though hovering over the space where he once trod resembles the function of the icon, in which a believer comes into the presence of the saint through the intermediary of the image. Yet unlike with the medieval tradition of body part reliquaries, the object does not feature the limb of the saint in the gesture of performing a sacrament, but the absence of such form. Moreover, with an absence of intercession in Islamic tradition, the Islamic relic, unlike the Medieval Christian relic, cannot achieve its power through the promise of communication with an intercessor in God’s heavenly court (Hahn, 1997, p. 23, p. 26). However, if we understand the footprint as a moment of witness, then the believer does not need to encounter the prophet as intercessor. Rather, the believer is like those patrons of the Middle Ages and Renaissance who depicted themselves as so invested in worship as to become witnesses to key miracles of their faith, such as the Annunciation. Just as such portraits emphasized the piety of the patron and therefore helped to justify their worldly power, possession of the footprint of the prophet in the Muslim world often served as a marker of a right to rule or to sanctify sites of worship (Hasan, 1993, pp. 336-337; Wheeler, 2006, pp. 78-79). As in the cases of the Ka‘ba and the mihrab, the believer experiences the presence of the prophet through his or her performative act of viewing the relic or footprint. While this does not rely on a mimetic image, the use of a physical sign to access a plane beyond sensory reality suggests an act of representation in a different modality than that emphasized under art historical models deeply rooted in Eurocentric imagenormativity. This may have caused blindness to other modes of representation within the Islamic context. As Whelan points out: “Because Islam has produced no decorative cycles incorporating a religious iconography centered on the life of Muhammad, modern scholars may have underestimated the power of symbolism related to his person, especially in the early mosque, even though the literature abounds in episodes revealing the reverence shown towards his relics in the Umayyad period and later.” (Whelan, 1986, p. 215)

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Similarly, in her consideration of the progressive abstraction, veiling, and verbalization of visual depictions of the prophet Muhammad, Christiane Gruber suggests that “[e]ven though methodological tools from Western art history have been adopted to explore traditions of icon-making and depictions of the sacred in a variety of cultures, these have rarely been utilized to examine the practice of making and viewing pictures in an Islamic context, due to the prevalent belief that traditions of ‘religious iconography’ simply do not exist in Islamic artistic practices” (Gruber, 2009, p. 232).

Addressing this challenge to move beyond the image as religious symbol, the relationship between the believer and the relic becomes a means of thinking of art less through its material qualities than through its effect of providing access beyond that of sensory perception. Rather than indicating the forbidden nature of the image, these practices of visualization rendered the imagistic representation of the prophet as practised from the thirteenth century onwards to be perceived increasingly as unnecessary and counterproductive compared to more abstract representational modes (Gruber, 2009). Objects towards which Muslims direct their perceptive faculties during devotional practices – the Ka‘ba, mihrabs, and relics – point to a mode of visual practice that emphasizes less the relationship between sign and signifier indicated in the mimetic image and more the performative aspect of the gaze engaged between the believer and the object of votive attention. Rather than using mimetic representation in which faith removes the gap between the signified and signifier, as in the icon or the idol, the Islamic votive object enacts the presence of the prophet as leader of the Islamic community in perpetuity. Thus rather than forbidden, the representational devotional image (as examined by Gruber, 2009) fits within a broader and more dominant practice of a religious gaze in Islam that aims to access the symbolic presence of the prophet as leader of the Islamic community through performative visuality rooted in faith.

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References Abdel Haleem, M. A. S., 2010. The Qur’an. English Translation and Parallel Arabic Text. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Chittick, W. C., 1994. Imaginal Worlds: Ibn al-‘Arabi and the Problem of Religious Diversity. Albany, NY: State University Press of New York. Denny, F. M., 2001. Feet. In: J. Dammen McAuliffe, ed. Encyclopedia of the Qur’an. Leiden: Brill, pp. 198-199. Donner, F. M., 2006. The Historical Context. In: J. Dammen McAuliffe, ed. The Cambridge Companion to the Qur’an. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 23-39. Eastmond, A., 2003. Between Icon and Idol: The uncertainty of imperial images. In: L. James, A. Eastmond and R. Cormack, eds. Icon and Word: The Power of Images in Byzantium. London: Ashgate, pp. 73-86. Faris, N. A., 1952. The Book of Idols: Being a Translation from the Arabic of the Kitab Al-Asnam by Hisham ibn-al-Kalbi. Available at: http://www.answering-islam.org/Books/Al-Kalbi/index.htm. [Accessed 29 January 2011). Flood, F. B., 2002. Between Cult and Culture: Bamiyan, Islamic Iconoclasm, and the Museum. The Art Bulletin, 84(4), pp. 641-59. Gruber, C., 2009. Between Logos (Kalima) and Light (Nur): Representations of the Prophet Muhammad in Islamic Painting. In: G. Necipoğlu, ed. Muqarnas. Volume 26: An Annual on the Visual Cultures of the Islamic World. Leiden: Brill, pp. 229-262. Hahn, C., 1997. The Voices of the Saints: Speaking Reliquaries. Gesta 36(1), pp. 20-31. Hasan, P., 1993. The Footprint of the Prophet. In: M.B. Sevcenko, ed. Muqarnas, Volume 10: An Annual on Islamic Art and Architecture. Essays in Honor of Oleg Grabar contributed by his students. Leiden: Brill, pp. 335-343. 'Isa, A. M. and Glidden, H. W., 1955. Muslims and Taswir. Translated from the Journal of Al-Azhar. In: E. Graf, ed. 1968. Festschrift Werner Caskel. Leiden: Brill, pp. 250-268. Khoury, Nuha N. N., 1998. The Mihrab: From Text to Form. International Journal of Middle East Studies, 30(1), pp. 1-27. Khoury, Nuha N. N., 1993. The Dome of the Rock, The Ka‘ba, and Ghumdan: Arab Myths and Umayyad Monuments. In: M.B. Sevcenko, ed. Muqarnas, Volume 10: An Annual on Islamic Art and Architecture. Essays in Honor of Oleg Grabar contributed by his students. Leiden: Brill, pp. 57-65.

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King, G. R. D., 1985. Islam, Iconoclasm, and the Declaration of Doctrine.Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, 48(2), pp. 266-277. Mettinger, Tryggve N. D., 1995. No Graven Image? Israelite Aniconism in Its Ancient Near Eastern Context. Stockholm: Almquist & Wiksell. Naef, S., 2007. Bilder und Bilderverbot im Islam: vom Koran bis zum Karikaturenstreit. Munich: C. H. Beck. Vasiliev, A. A., 1956. The Iconoclastic Edict of the Caliph Yazid II, A.D. 721. Dumbarton Oaks Papers, Vol. 9 and 10 (1955-1956), pp. 23-47. Wharton, A., 2003. Icon, Idol, Totem, and Fetish. In: L. James, A. Eastmond and R. Cormack, eds. Icon and Word: The Power of Images in Byzantium. London: Ashgate, pp. 3-13. Wheeler, B., 2006. Mecca and Eden: Ritual, Relics, and Territory in Islam. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Whelan, E., 1986. The Origins of the Mihrab Mujawwaf: A Reinterpretation. International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, 18, pp. 205-223.

Confronting Images, Confronted Images: Jahangir versus King James I in the Freer Gallery Mughal group portrait by Bichitr (circa 1620) Valerie Gonzalez

The celebrated Mughal group portrait with Jahangir sitting on an hourglass painted by Bichitr circa 1620 (Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D. C.) lends itself well to considering the trope of image and representation in Islam1 (figure 1). The miniature’s hybrid iconography features, among the figures depicted here, a faithful copy of a portrait of King James I of England. Traditional art historians have always superficially considered this painting to be a typical example of Mughal aesthetic syncretism. Yet beneath this apparent stylistic blending of obviously different traditions, the two opposing principles of Mughal allegorical and European illusionist portraiture produce an aesthetic combination that creates a powerful tension in the painting. Given that a work of art is not robotic, conflicting tension, disorder or disturbing elements are not necessarily signs of failure or success. They can equally be both and that is entirely part of the creative process. Nevertheless, in this essay the point is not an aesthetic appreciation of Bichitr’s work but a critical examination of this dual configuration that raises fundamental questions about artistic appropriation, self-representation and representation of the Other in pre-colonial Mughal India, questions that were never addressed critically in proper aesthetic terms. It is often argued that the artifact’s complex plasticity unintentionally results in a paradox that is viewed not

1

Bichitr was a young Hindu follower of Abu al-Hasan ibn Aqa Riza, of Iranian origin, who was one of Jahangir’s famous leading court artists. His name, inscribed on the footstool under Jahangir’s seat, certifies the painter’s work. The first thorough study of this painting was done by Richard Ettinghausen (1961). Since then, no focused investigation has been done on this work.

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as an artistic failure or as an illustration of a cultural clash, but rather as a semantization generating a “surplus of meaning” in the image (Ricoeur, 1976). Phenomenological analysis offers a method for unraveling the paradox created in Bichitr’s pictorial work by juxtaposing the portraits of Jahangir and King James and setting up this representational dialectic between East and West.

The Painting’s Project: A Multi-referential Allegory of the Mughal Emperor and State Recalling the well-known evidence of the picture’s basic content and purpose is crucial to sustain this essay’s argument. Part of a famous series of allegorical portraits of Jahangir, Bichitr’s hyperbolic depiction of the haloed Great Mughal on an allegorical throne includes, in an obvious hierarchical order from top to bottom, a Sufi sheikh over a non-identified Ottoman sultan, King James I and the Hindu artist himself. As the other existing serial portraits of the European monarch attributed to John de Critz the Elder and Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger or from their workshops reveal, this representation in Bichitr’s folio is to be a faithful imitation (figures 2 and 3). Most likely it results from a Mughal copy of a painting that Sir Thomas Roe, the English ambassador to the Mughal court, had offered Jahangir2 as a gift. The copy has been inserted appropriately into an imperial allegory, delivering a clear political message of dominance and submission3. However, within the Jahangiri allegorical imagery, this picture by Bichitr illustrates more specifically Jahangir’s metaphysical thinking about the true global order and his predicament about the superiority of the spiritual over worldly power. Being ill, and devoted to mysticism, the sovereign elaborated on this philosophy towards the end of his reign. As such, the painting represents a sort of testament to a lifetime’s experience dedicated to governance and religion.

2

3

This event is historically documented. Upon receipt, Jahangir ordered his painters to copy the portrait, as the artistic practice of copying was highly valued at the Mughal court (see Milo Cleveland Beach, Ebba Koch and Wheeler Thackston, 1997, p.202; Amina Okada, 1992; Gregory Minissale 2006a, pp. 144-45). See the discussion about representations of the ruler with attendants, courtiers and religious men in Mughal and Persian miniatures in Richard Ettinghausen (1961); Robert Skelton (1988); Gregory Minissale (2006a, p. 155; note 141).

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Figure 1: Allegory of Jahangir seated on an hourglass, circa 1620, by Bichitr (active 1615-1650), at the Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington D. C. Or “Jahangir Preferring a Sufi Sheikh to Kings”. Opaque watercolor, gold, and ink on paper. 25.3 x 18.1 cm.

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Figure 2: King James VI and I, artist unknown, 1604 Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh

The pictorial translation of Jahangir’s religious-political vision relies on a multireferential iconography and a highly structured composition, producing meaning by intersecting many levels of representation; political, religious, philosophical, ethical and sociological. An intricate mix of cross-cultural symbolism, typical of the Jahangiri allegories, depicts an otherworldly image of the ‘world-Seizer’ with two flying cherubs on a turquoise background evoking the heavens, and two angels writing a eulogy on the base of the throne wishing the ruler a life longer than a thousand years. An inscription in the decorative cartouches grants him the title “Light of the faith”. The main action in the scene is where Jahangir offers a precious book to the Sufi sheikh, dominating the towering arrangement of the attendants4. Another inscription hints at the significance of this gesture and the placement of the sheikh above the Ottoman and English sovereigns: “Though

4

The saint could be Husayn, a spiritual descendant from Sheikh Husayn Salim Chishti, whom Akbar (Jahangir’s father) visited in the hope of having a male heir. When his son was born Akbar gave him the saint’s name Salim, and he was later named Jahangir. Other portraits of a Sufi old man closely resemble this one, suggesting that an original faithful depiction of such a man had been copied at various moments.

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outwardly shahs stand before him, he fixes his gaze on dervishes”. At the lowest level and modestly placed in the corner, the artist’s self-portrait holding another self-portrait in his hand as a gift to his patron completes this dense composition mapping the work’s pictorial field in a psycho-social geography centered on the otherworldly representation of Jahangir. So, functioning as a metaphorical tableau of abstract concepts and values, the aesthetic ontology of the miniature is of mythical and symbolic nature although the iconography comprises, as is frequent in Mughal painting, customized portraits and a fair amount of stylistic realism combined with a predominantly two-dimensional plastic structure. If we content ourselves with this literal iconographic reading of the image, its message appears fairly intelligible in spite of the aesthetic intricacies. At first glance, the English portrait seems to fit into the composition both semantically and stylistically, caught in the web-like contours that bring all the group’s figures together into a compact and coherent whole. However, a close-up view reveals that the artist has managed to subtly break this contouring procedure in order to respect the plastic integrity of the European model or the faithful copy of it he was using. In a cultural context that valued cultural borrowing, the transplant of this portrait once again implies a fully accepted Mughal appropriation of a foreign iconography through which the painter could also demonstrate his skill as a talented copyist5. Some parts of the representation, namely the feather in the monarch’s hat and the white lace of his collar and sleeve, appear spared from the cropping design, and blend with the surrounding space, giving an accurate sensation of depth and space in this particular tiny location in the painting. As a result, if the contoured part includes King James’s depiction in the series of figures, by the same token those areas left free to exist in the three-dimensional space produce a peculiar optical effect: the figure seems to pop out of the painting’s plane. Although discrete and subtle, this ambivalent treatment of the English portrait enhances its alien status and confronts the viewer with a first hint of differentiation in a chain of tension and separation between the overall pictorial order of the Mughal allegory and that of the imitated portrait of King James.

5

As we know, cultural borrowing constituted a valuable practice at the Mughal court: it was considered a powerful stimulus for artistic creation. The frank hybridity of Mughal painting attests to this cultural feature.

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Figure 3: King James VI and I, circa 1604-1605, by John de Critz the Elder. National Portrait Gallery, London

Confronted Images, Confronted Kings As tends to happen with allegorical complexities, every single iconographic element and plastic strategy in this strictly programmed representation was assigned a specific goal in a tightly ordered fashion to ensure the precise formulation of the painting’s message. Conceived as a flawless continuum, the work’s plasticity should impeccably fulfill highly defined expectations of perfect correspondence between intent, form and content. Any disruption would consequently compromise the complex intellectual theory and the artifact’s aesthetic mission as a highly discursive representation. In the light of these parameters, transplanting King James’ illusionist image into the Mughal allegory definitely appears disruptive and disabling.

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Although the European portrait displays almost the same naturalistic, plastic treatment of the body and face as the rest of the group, it does not observe the same rules for representing figures and does not share the same ontological space, its mimetic sphere of existence naturally opposing the symbolically constructed space of the allegory. Indeed, in addition to the three-dimensional accentuation of parts of his clothing, King James’ posture – facing the viewer almost head on in a manner characteristic of Renaissance-Baroque portraiture – contrasts sharply with the profile and three-quarter views of the other principal figures. Rather than merely lending the monarch an eccentric allure, this contrast is crucial to the aesthetic and discursive function of the work, as the postures determine both the portrait’s particular ontology and the nature of its dialogue or non-dialogue with the viewer. To shed light on the binary scheme in Bichitr’s painting, we must delve further into the methods and aesthetic choices reflected in the portrayal of each individual. As we know, based on princely protocol and principles of social hierarchy, Mughal portraits of high-ranking individuals avoid the full frontal view in order to establish a deliberate physical remoteness and ritualistic distance from those who behold them both inside and outside the picture 6. But more than that, the profile and three-quarter presentations in Bichitr’s depiction fulfill a precise rhetorical function in relation to the image’s discursive agenda. By at once revealing and concealing the figure’s appearance, the profile and three-quarter poses suggest that hiding part of the body is as meaningful as exposing it. Both processes aim to control the way the protagonists appear in order to enhance their symbolic status and the particular semantic roles they play in the allegorical message of the work. Therefore, with its very recognizable profile and attributes of cosmic power, the semi-revealed presentation of Jahangir constructs an ontological order, positioning him far above the rest of the world. At the same time, it magnifies his presence by crafting a visionary spectacle, an event as theatrical, dramatic and awe-inspiring as an epiphany. The flamboyant halo and the complex allegorical throne in particular help to stage the imperial image as a mystical vision of stratospheric dimensions, proclaiming with great visual power the concept of his absolute authority and unfathomable superiority by divine will. Apart from the emotional effect it clearly achieves, this aesthetic manipulation very importantly inscribes the painting’s ontological space within a surreal sphere of myth and symbol.

6

On Mughal culture in general, the reference par excellence remains Annemarie Schimmel (2004). For the ritual distance imposed by imperial ceremonial, see Gülru Necipoğlu (1993, and 2000, pp. 56-57).

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Before this superhuman imperial presence stand the more realistically depicted attendants who, nevertheless, are totally involved in the work’s mythical construction. At least that is how the group representation, without exception, was conceptualized, as evidenced in the clearly delivered narrative exposed above. As far as the sheikh, Ottoman sultan and artist are concerned, their body language and forced representation perfectly demonstrate the reception of and response to the imperial parousia they witness7. The three-quarter profile view of their bodies oriented in Jahangir’s direction marks their submissive and respectful attention to the latter’s extraordinary mode of being, in spite of avoiding looking at his handsome face; his head’s irradiating light is so unbearable that one of the putti has to tape his eyes (figure 1). This rhetorical and psychological effect of the threequarter profile body position is completed by the protagonists’ hand gestures, also ceremoniously tending towards the emperor8. The emphatic attitude of the painter displaying a work to his patron echoes Jahangir’s solemn book offering towards the top of the image. These two coordinated gestures create a rhetorical pattern that sustains both the visual composition and the symbolic order of the image. Semantically, the repetition of the act of giving emphasizes the symbolic value of allegiance, attribution and submission that gift exchanges convey, particularly when they involve books associated with the divine truth or religious knowledge and piety9. The careful pictorial arrangement formally translates the semiotic intent of the figures’ gesture by means of an invisible connecting line between Jahangir and his humbler subject, the artist. The self-portrait Bichitr holds and displays – a miniature within the miniature – forms the terminal point of a dynamic directional line that dialogically connects all the figures together from the top to the bottom and the other way around10 (figure 1). The starting point of this invisible line lies in the black book in Jahangir’s hand, one of the most powerful visual markers in the image. The book physically joins the monarch to the crowd facing him through the sheikh’s open arms, initiating the dynamism of the underlying connection that binds the different figures together in a cascading effect. Noticeably, the revered religious man is the only figure in some form of physical proximity with Jahangir

7

Needless to say that parousia refers here to the purely phenomenological concept “to become present” and not the Christian event of the same name. 8 The sheikh deploys his arms and hands toward the ruler to receive the book. The Sultan joins his hands in a prayer-like gesture also in the direction of the ruler, while the artist similarly holds a painting in his hand towards the latter. 9 See Erika Cruikshank-Dodd (1969). 10 For a recent study of the geometrical construction of Mughal paintings as an expression of the relationship between the represented figures see Gregory Minissale (2006a, pp. 59-64, pp. 66-67, and pp. 72-83).

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through the receiving of the book, the other main characters standing at ritual distance in accordance with Mughal etiquette. The characters’ gaze is another entirely connective and discursive element that engages the three figures in question in the painting’s allegorical elaboration. As Oleg Grabar wrote about Persianate miniature in general: “All the miniatures of a certain quality are organized by a circuit of gazes that the protagonists launch at each other. It is a complex and passionate game of clue that, as in an embroidery, organizes the relationships among the persons” (Grabar, 2000, p. 133)11. But to fully understand how those circuits produce meaning, it is essential to examine the plastic and semiotic rendering of the gaze itself. In Bichitr’s work, the gaze of the sheikh, sultan and artist paradoxically appear to have been depicted realistically and yet seem somehow elusive and abstract. Oriented laterally, following the directional logic of the profile and three-quarter view, their gaze is not physically linked or linkable from point to point with any precise object12. Yet, the target of this seeing process, as signified by the body language of these figures, is unambiguously Jahangir. With all three following the same left-right direction, their bodies construct another hidden geometrical pattern of connecting lines that spread across the picture’s surface and steadily converge towards Jahangir 13. In deliberately avoiding the strategic physical spot of the eyes, this pattern places the glance beyond the physical realm into the mental realm. It transforms physical seeing into an internalized gaze which becomes a visualized thought 14. The inscription, “Though outwardly shahs stand before him, he fixes his gaze on dervishes”, also refers to an inner act of glancing, turning Jahangir’s philosophical thought about the superiority of spirituality over worldly power into a metaphor. Standing in marked contrast with this portrayal of the emperor’s dialogue with the attendants, King James’s representation, seemingly untouched by the luminous imperial presence, places his attention and thought somewhere else out of the scene. His ‘photographic’ look and the positioning of his body towards the outside

11 Alexandre Papadopoulo (1980) was one of the first scholars to point out the network of gazes in Persianate painting. Several other studies approach the topic: Johann Christoph Bürgel (1988, pp.145-147); Gülru Necipoğlu (1993); Gregory Minissale (2006a, pp. 80-81; 2006b; and 2007). 12 On the role of the performative gaze in Renaissance portraiture see the recent book by Peter Gillgren (2011). 13 This is a concrete example of the general process in Mughal painting that Gregory Minissale describes in this way: “whereas the paradigm of all order in European art was the depicted body, in Mughal art it is the geometrical relationship created between bodies that takes precedence in these paintings and it is this aspect that art history must address” (Minissale, 2006a, p. 17) 14 For an Islamic paradigmatic conception of the topic of the gaze see my textual study of Qur’an 37:44 (Gonzalez, 2002, pp. 121-128).

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world immediately extract him from the carefully constructed circular linkage between the other individuals. Even his hand points in another direction, towards the ground in a down-to-earth gesture of regal presentation as it rests on his sword, as in similar European royal portraits (figure 1). While the rest of the group are busy with their encounter with the otherworldly Mughal emperor in a dream-like world from which the miniature’s viewer is excluded, King James breaks this internal pictorial logic by addressing or making eye contact with him/her. Through what the scholarship on Renaissance portraiture calls “the performative gaze”, the European monarch invites the viewer into the scene and establishes with him/her some form of proximity, if not intimacy15. In doing so, he opens a breach into the painting’s mythic fabric through which the spatiotemporal world penetrates and surrounds his portrait’s tiny area, thereby introducing the ordinary space of existential reality into the extraordinary space of the allegory. This plastic configuration has the inevitable effect of projecting King James out of the painting’s self-contained symbolic space, and, more importantly, of designing another distinct aesthetic field, limited to and constrained by the micro-zone of his portrait. Consequently, the graphic line that was meant to wrap all the figures together in a flawlessly united group becomes a separating border at this level, remapping the painting into two ontologically distinct plastic spaces forming two centers instead of one. It could be argued that the sheikh, the Sultan and the artist, being realistically portrayed like King James, also belong to the same rational spatial field, and that consequently there is not a double center in the painting, but several centers. This viewing of the image would be valid, had not the three Asian figures been given this tight aesthetic linkage to Jahangir’s surreal depiction through their body language and placement. While for this very reason the imperial portrait is not separate and not separable from the assembly facing it, this linkage fully inscribes the three main characters into the symbolic space of the allegory. Being both present and absent from the scene by virtue of the unique phenomenology his portrait induces, King James belongs to the allegory in terms of narrative and iconography, but not in terms of aesthetic ontology. His image is inserted into it, but separated and insulated by its own micro-pictorial, illusionist field. In sum, unexpectedly, at least in the light of the painting’s intention, the painting features two images in one, an apparent and a subliminal image figuring two monarchs in aesthetic rivalry.

15 For a theoretical discussion on the topic of vision and its implication in painting see Norman Bryson (1983); Michael Baxandall (1988); Frederick Hartt and David G. Wilkins (2002); Thomas Puttfarken (2000).

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Visual Dichotomy, Binary Perception, Double Discourse The careful planning of the group portrait and even Jahangir’s hyperbolic depiction are simply unable to neutralize the English portrait’s mimetic operations or prevent it from fully performing the play of illusion within its own space in the second image. Whether intentional or unintentional, and subliminal as it may be, the presence of this second image provokes a phenomenological discontinuity in the painting’s narrative logic and the way it is visually comprehended. The pictorial composition, intended to focus attention unequivocally on Jahangir’s glorious centripetal image, splits into two competing poles of optical attraction, virtually doubling the painting’s phenomenology into two successive sequences and creating two different views of the scene, ultimately producing two versions of the same narrative. Depending on how the viewer approaches the painting, focusing on either Jahangir’s portrait or the one of King James, both images dynamically alternate and overlap, and emerge and disappear or fade away. Phenomenological analysis of the structure of beholding engaged by the work will help explain this complex process. Before proceeding with this analysis, it is worth providing a brief theoretical exposé of aesthetic phenomenology as a particular hermeneutic approach that puts aside the psychological (culturally determined) factors engaged in the experience of an artwork. The elucidatory power of this method resides in the strict focus it places on the cognitions delivered by the artwork as an objective given, and on the pre-interpretative reception they induce in the viewer. Two stages are identified in the phenomenology of perception, a pre-logical or pre-intellective stage, followed by a stage of interpretation when the visual information perceived by the senses is processed by the psyche and intellect. The pre-logical stage might be seen as objective and the intellective or psychological stage as subjective. To offer a simple example, everyone seeing an object bearing the color red sees it objectively as red, or almost-red as Jean-Paul Sartre put it, (unless the seer is prevented by a physical condition from seeing the color red as red). This is for objective reasons rooted in the essential properties of the color red. But equally everyone experiences the color red differently, interpreting or associating it with other data in different ways, and hence constituting it subjectively in their own consciousness. When our phenomenological analysis delves into artistic complexities, distinguishing objective from subjective perceptions is, of course, a very delicate exercise. Yet this method allows us to obtain a more precise and

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objective view of the specific ways in which the art is being perceived and of the primal mechanisms of response to which it is subjected16. To return to our painting, during the first stage the viewer’s attention is gripped by the catchy allegorical imagery and driven by the complexities of its visual discourse, while its flat geometrical layout (tarh) and web of connecting lines guides his/her eyes to travel through the predominantly two-dimensional representational structure. When, however, the eyes discover the image of King James, this process comes to a halt as the viewer is caught by the performative device. Operating within the standard modalities of illusionist painting, which enable the representation to be inscribed in existential reality, this device has the immediate effect of projecting the gaze out of the two-dimensional trajectory into which it was initially launched, into a virtual three-dimensional space. In simple terms, from screening the painting laterally from side to side and vertically from top to bottom, the gaze suddenly switches to looking horizontally across the unfolding depth between the performative portrait and the viewer. This shift in the movement and trajectory of visual perception inevitably constructs a double frame for viewing the painting. When the eye falls on King James’ portrait, the forces of illusionist aesthetics take over the perceptive experience, momentarily toning down, if not canceling, those mental and psychological effects of the allegory’s symbolic expression. As an illusionist space-creating device, this portrait conditions a different viewing of the painting in the sense that it privileges three-dimensional qualities at the expense of patterning and abstract design. This phenomenon may be compared to the zooming of a camera that changes the manner in which we see things, with those in focus appearing more distinct than those in the background. Similarly, through the lens of space and depth formed by the European image, the metaphorical picture subtly metamorphoses itself into an aesthetic construction that, although mixing two-dimensional and three-dimensional features, appears primarily as a set of spatial objects and fleshy figures, with various levels of naturalism depending on the accuracy of the modeling and shading. For example, seen in this way the fine perspective seems to emphasize the hourglass throne, while the picture’s lavishly ornate frame, originally a decorative band, becomes an opening like Alberti’s window, through which King James communicates with the exterior world. Then, by virtue of an optical phenomenon similar to that produced by a traveling camera, when the viewer’s gaze switches focus and exits

16 For a theoretical aid to phenomenology see the canonical works by Maurice MerleauPonty (1974, original 1945), and Galen A. Johnson (1993). New updated studies show the ever growing relevance of phenomenology to the study of art: Joseph Pary (2010); Paul Crowther (2011); Valerie Gonzalez (2001 and 2003).

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the mini-zone around King James, the effects of this second illusionist version of the painting are turned off, becoming dormant and subliminal again. By inference, on returning to the main configuration centered on Jahangir, the gaze reactivates the perceptive stimulations induced by the allegory, which thereby retrieves its full aesthetic and cognitive integrity. But whether activated or not, the very presence of this second image within the overall form impairs any unidirectional conceptualization of the work. With a second center brought into view, this image doubles its discursive and semiotic structure, injecting surplus meaning with the potential to undo the socio-symbolic order of the entire scene. Not one but two narrative versions of this scene exist in suspension, encapsulated in the work’s pictorial fabric: the main and most apparent allegorical story led by the chief figure of Jahangir, and the latent subliminal version re-centered on King James I. In this latent image the story is no longer about the Mughal emperor performing before attendants including the king of England, but about King James I at the center of a group that includes the Mughal emperor. This reshaping of its discourse could only expand the already rich multiple meanings of the painting, but not without challenging its metaphysical proposition. For instead of just formulating the Jahangiri allegory, the representation actually delivers a complex dialectic between metaphysical idealism and metaphysical realism17.

A Challenging Surplus of Meaning In re-setting the painting’s iconography within the spatiotemporal world, the second image logically relocates the narrative itself into existential reality. While the allegory takes place in a composite time combining past, present, cyclical recurrences, and timelessness, the English portrait re-situates it in the reality of a re-enacted, re-actualized and re-instituted present18. This double ontological definition of time and space in the work’s binary pictorial field requires a reformulation of its intended monosemic metaphysical proposition into two possible options. Consequently the painting’s primary message, Jahangir’s personal conception of truth, turns into a dual dialectical instantiation of this

17 To simplify, metaphysical idealism and metaphysical realism are philosophical conceptions that both derive from a broader view called “monism”, “according to which all of reality is really of one kind”, in The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 18 As Gregory Minissale puts it, “the logic behind the reading of these [Mughal] pictures is the conflation of past time with the present in a cyclical structure” (Minissale, 2006a, p.144; see also Notes 93 and 103, pp.186-187).

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concept, more precisely a dialectic opposing two brands of monism (a unitary metaphysical view or conception), idealistic and materialistic monism, aesthetically expressed in the duality of symbolic and illusionist figuration. Indeed, in the timeless imaginative timeframe of allegory, instantiated truth is the product of the representation of a mind (in this case Jahangir’s mind), where one of the mental phenomena is belief19. Mystic thought about the preeminence of Sufism is a subjective view. Accordingly, in this imagery the individual Jahangir constitutes both the source and location of this truth by defining the idealistic order. Although the protagonists and setting are the same, the second subliminal image delivers a different approach to truth. In the factual space and time of the scene’s mimetic version, centered on King James whose cognitive matrix is existential reality, the mythical outcomes of idealist monism, such as representationalism and conceptualism, are unconceivable truths. Within the boundaries of the European performative image, therefore, Jahangir’s personal idealism is invalidated. Mirroring the laws of Nature in its aesthetic constitution, this second image-center may possibly instantiate only one truth – objective material truth beyond all psychological projection. Unlike Jahangir’s idealism, which posits his own superhuman person as the source and location of truth, in the naturalistic European portrayal truth resides nowhere and spatiotemporal reality is everywhere mimetically represented. Consequently, what King James’ imitative portrait simply manifests, through both its detachment from the Jahangiri allegorical presence and its full inscription within the phenomenal world, is the materialistic truth of Nature. In this respect, it conforms to the precepts of image construction established in the Renaissance, whose model is reality optically perceived. As difficult to grasp as it may seem, this dialectic of truth is of decisive importance for the painting’s signifying system, as it then turns out to deliver two antinomic claims. The dual-option enunciation of truth puts Jahangir’s personal claim into perspective against another claim of a different nature, so that the truth of spatiotemporal reality instantiated through King James’ mimetic performance calls into question the truth of myth instantiated by Jahangir’s visualized idealism, and vice versa. While obviously there is no ‘true truth’, the confrontation of these contradictory views highlights “the insurmountable ambiguity and contingency of all meaning and truth”, ultimately implying their potential invalidity20. In other

19 For specific philosophical terminology and definitions see “Idealism”, “Critical Realism”, “Metaphysical Realism” and “Truth”, again in The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy. 20 See The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy (1997) on Maurice Merleau-Ponty.

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words, in the painting’s visual discourse, reality and myth, and the reality of myth and the myth of reality, challenge each other dialectically so that eventually none of the two claims can be really validated or refuted21. As a result, the establishment of Jahangir’s truth cannot be fully accomplished within the painting itself. The forces of relativism unavoidably weaken the transcendental vision of a universal ruler elevated above all humanity by exposing it to a competing vision centered on another ruler, an edgy representational situation that creates a relationship of rivalry. The fact that each ‘competitor’ has the potential to deconstruct the other’s vision and claim shakes the very foundations of the painting’s mythical theory and discourse. However, as dialectical processes are inherently undecided about the validity or invalidity of their outcomes, we can say that the mythological deconstruction remains latent in the painting, a possibility that only the viewer can realize by means of interpretative viewing. But while relativism somehow attenuates the persuasive force of the emperor’s thought in the work’s overall discourse, it also injects his thought with greater substance and depth. To conclude this exploration of Bichitr’s work, although its established status and visibility in scholarship and academic illustrations (book covers, posters, plates etc.) have turned it into a typified, almost commoditized specimen of Mughal imagery, it remains thought-provoking. It contains much more than is assumed in so many respects – aesthetic, semiotic, etc. – and certainly has much to offer any inquiry into representations of the self and the Otherin and of Islam. Bichitr’s painting offers a fascinating example of appropriation of foreign images in the pluralistic socio-political context of pre-colonial Islamic India, where crosscultural encounters would spring from desire and curiosity, rather than imposition. As a product of a full appreciation and articulate knowledge of the European artistic tradition, the grafting of King James’ I portrait also permits contemplation of the purely aesthetic, phenomenological consequences of the utterly implicative gesture of borrowing and insertion. In the objective evidence of its forms, this group portrait shows how paradoxes, contradictions and unplanned occurrences, understood as enhancing rather than diminishing the work, are among the multiple implications that such a gesture can entail. While we may safely suspect that the Mughals themselves did not envisage or observe the double image in the painting, it does not mean that it is not there. Unseen and unforeseen aspects remain key elements in the life of this work. After all, what would transculturation be without its unexpected and transformational effects?

21 On the dialectics of myth and reality see the landmark book by Mircea Eliade (1949).

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References Baxandall, M., 1988. Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy: A Primer in the Social History of Pictorial Style. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cleveland Beach, M., Thackston W. M. and Koch, E., 1997. King of the World: The Padshahnama: An Imperial Mughal Manuscript from the Royal Library, Windsor Castle. London: Thames and Hudson. Bryson, N., 1983. Vision and Painting: The Logic of the Gaze. London and New York: MacMillan Press. Bürgel, J. C., 1988. The Feather of the Simurgh, The Licit? Magic of the Arts in Medieval Islam. New York: New York University Press. Crowther, P., 2011. Phenomenology of the Visual Arts (even the frame). Stanford: Stanford University Press. Cruikshank-Dodd, E., 1969. The Image of the Word, Notes on the Religious Iconography of Islam. Berytus, Archaeological Studies, Volume XVIII, pp. 35-79. Eliade, M., 1949. The Myth of the Eternal Return. New York: Pantheon Books. Ettinghausen, R., 1961. The Emperor’s Choice. In: M. Meiss, ed. 1961. De Artibus Opuscula XL, Essays in honor of Erwin Panofsky. New York: New York University Press, pp. 98-122. Gillgren, P., 2011. Siting Federico Barocci and the Renaissance Aesthetic.London: Ashgate. Gonzalez, V., 2002. Le piège de Salomon, la pensée de l’art dans le Coran. Paris: Albin Michel. Gonzalez, V., 2001. Beauty and Islam: Aesthetics in Islamic Art and Architecture. London: I.B. Tauris. Gonzalez, V., 2003. The Comares Hall in the Alhambra and James Turrell’s Space that Sees: A comparison of Aesthetic Phenomenology. In: G. Necipoğlu, ed. Muqarnas, Vol. 20: An Annual on the Visual Culture of the Islamic World. Leiden: Brill, pp. 253-278. Grabar, O., 2000. Mostly Miniatures, An Introduction to Persian Painting. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Hartt, F. and Wilkins, D. G., 2002. History of Italian Renaissance Art: Painting, Sculpture, Architecture. New York: H.N. Abrams. Johnson, G. A., ed. 1993. The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetic Reader, Philosophy and Painting, Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press. Merleau-Ponty, M., 1945. Phenomenology of Perception.Translated by M.B. Smith, 1974. New York and London: Routledge.

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Minissale G., 2006a. Images of Thought, Visuality in Islamic India, 1550-1750. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press. Minissale, G., 2006b. The Dynamics of the Gaze in Mughal Painting. Marg, 58(2), pp. 50-59. Minissale, G., 2007. Seeing Eye-To-Eye With Mughal Miniatures: Some Observations on the Outward Gazing Figure in Mughal Art. Marg, 58(3), pp. 40-49. Necipoğlu, G., 1993. Framing the Gaze in Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal Palaces. Ars Orientalis, 23, pp. 303-342. Necipoğlu, G., 2000. The Serial Portraits of Ottoman Sultans in Comparative Perspective. In: S. Kangal, ed. 2000. The Sultan’s Portrait: Picturing the House of Osman. Istanbul: Isbank, pp. 56-57. Okada, A., 1992. Imperial Mughal Painters. Indian Miniatures from the 16th and 17th Centuries. Paris: Flammarion. Papadopoulo, A., 1980. Islam and Muslim Art. London: Thames and Hudson. Pary, J., ed. 2010. Art and Phenomenology. New York and London: Routledge. Puttfarken, T., 2000. The Discovery of Pictorial Composition. Theories of Visual Order in Painting 1440-1800, New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Ricoeur, P., 1976. Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning. Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press. Schimmel, A. and Waghmar, B. K., 2004.The Empire of the Great Mughals.History, Art and Culture. Translated by C. Attwood. London: Reaktion Books. Skelton R., 1988. Imperial Symbolism in Mughal Painting. In: P. Parsons Soucek, ed. 1988. Content and Context of Visual Arts in the Islamic World: Papers From a Colloquium in Memory of Richard Ettinghausen, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, 2-4 April 1980. Published for the College Art Association of America by the Pennsylvania State University Press, pp. 177192.

From Haptic to Optical, Performance to Figuration A History of Representation at the Bottom of a Bowl Laura U. Marks

Introduction Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1987) celebrated abstract line and haptic space, two aesthetic forms that were liberated from depiction. The two philosophers did not realize that they were indebted to Islamic aesthetics. But the abstract line’s refusal to delimit a contour, and haptic space’s blurring of the relationships between figure and ground, were developed most strongly in Islamic art. In three chapters of Enfoldment and Infinity: An Islamic Genealogy of New Media Art (Marks, 2010) I traced how Islamic non-figurative aesthetics entered European art and thought from the Middle Ages on. These aesthetics planted seeds of abstraction and performativity in European figurative art, which would fully flower in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. They include aniconism, algorithmicity, and haptic space and abstract line. I argued that implicit subjective positions got smuggled into European art as well. Enfoldment and Infinity also addressed some of the Islamic sources of Western philosophy. I demonstrated that, in their selective westward travels, Islamic aesthetics and Islamic thought both underwent transformations: they became deeply absorbed and they were refashioned, remade figurative, to suit the figurative thought of Christianity. It was not until the late nineteenth century that, in Western art, the non-representational power of Islamic aesthetics began to be rediscovered. The philosophy and aesthetics of becoming never disappeared from Western thought and art. Their resurgence in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries owes a great deal to the latent Islamic presence in Western culture.

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This chapter focuses on one period in this history, namely the Christian conquest of the Iberian peninsula from the Muslims. During the ethnic cleansing of the peninsula, Islamic influences went underground, or became enfolded. Elsewhere I examine in detail how this enfoldment occurred in philosophy (Marks, forthcoming). Here I would like to study how it occurred in art, in the plastic changes in ceramic design. Islamic ceramics, even when they are figurative, possess qualities of abstract line, haptic space, and performativity that resist being simply representational: I will call this an aesthetics of becoming, which we will see in ceramics in Andalusia and their eastern Islamic and precedents. Yet as the market for and production of these wares came to be dominated by non-Muslims, their designs gradually lost their performative qualities and settle into a more conventional figuration. Observing these changes does not constitute a judgment of quality, which tends to retrospectively compare a work to precedents; rather I seek to appreciate the changes in the works’ formal qualities as indications of ongoing cultural invention, rather like what Alois Riegl called Kunstwollen. First, though, I will suggest that an Islamic philosophy of becoming, articulated by Ibn Sina and others, parallels the aesthetics of becoming in ceramics. Taken up by the Scholastics, the philosophy of becoming gradually gave way to one that privileged representation, indeed figuration. Yet the way that Islamic philosophy and art privilege becoming over being deeply informed European thought and art in late medieval times and the early Renaissance.

Philosophy of Becoming Contemporary philosophy that privileges becoming over being, fluidity over identity, has deep roots in Islamic philosophy, and particularly in the work of Abu ‘Ali al-Husayn ibn Sina (980-1037).1 Like his predecessors, Ibn Sina was dealing with the question of how to reconcile God’s unity with the multiplicity of the created world, without attributing to created things an existence independent of God. Briefly, Ibn Sina’s solution in The Logic of The Healing was to argue that being applies to all entities, existence to actualities that have been realized. Everything that is contingent must be caused by something else, except for the one being that is necessary in virtue of itself, God. God is the one predicate. God’s essence and God’s existence are identical, while for other beings, existence is accidental to essence. Considered in itself, each effect is radically contingent (Goodman, 1992; Wisnovsky, 2000; Janssens, 2006). As the seventeenth-century

1

This is a summary of part of my essay “A Deleuzian Ijtihad” (Marks, forthcoming).

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Persian philosopher Mulla Sadra Shirazi summarized, for Ibn Sina “an essence is in itself indifferent toward existence or non-existence” (Janssens, 2006, p. 3). Ibn Sina’s doctrine of the ontological indifference of essence, or the univocity of being, was, as Robert Wisnovsky writes, a concept “made almost from scratch, using materials that were still quite raw in the year 1000” (Gilson, 1948, chapter 4; Wisnovsky, 2000, p. 115). The strength of Ibn Sina’s new approach was that it built an ontology around a God that was utterly unknowable, without attributes: a profoundly non-representationalist ontology, since Islam was (speaking generally) a profoundly non-representationalist religion. In medieval Europe, Christian theologians recognized the power of a rationalistic defense of monotheism—as well as the other forces of philosophy— and they adapted Arabic rationalist philosophy to their interests and made it their own. Ibn Sina’s works, as well as those of the rationalist philosophers writing in Arabic in Andalusia, including Ibn Rushd (Averroës) and Maimonides, and other Islamic philosophers, were initially met by suspicion in medieval Europe, because the Church could not accept rationalism’s assault on the faith. But eventually their ideas captured the attention of Christian scholars, who initially learned Arabic to benefit from Islamic works, and then in the great translation movement of twelfthcentury Andalusia collaborated to translate them. Ibn Sina’s The Healing was translated in Toledo by the Jewish philosopher Abraham ibn Da’ud, with the aid of an unnamed Latinist (Burnett, 2005). In the next century, the Scholastics Roger Bacon, Thomas Aquinas, Henry of Ghent, and Duns Scotus, among others, adopted Ibn Sina’s categories of existence, clearly attributing them to him. However, in order to make use of Ibn Sina’s proof of the existence of God, Christian philosophers and theologians had to tweak it to accommodate the Christian trinity. The theologian Henry of Ghent (1217?-1293) adapted Ibn Sina’s Islamic neo-Platonist theory that God emanates the universe in a descending series of beings, beginning with the First Intelligence, to argue that the Son of God is the First Intelligence, and that the Holy Spirit also emanates from God (Counet, 2002). The metaphysician Meister Eckhart (1260-1328) adopted many of Ibn Sina’s concepts, including the division of beings into necessary (wajib) and contingent (mumkin) and his profoundly Islamic argument for the unity of God. But he adapted the latter to a trinitarian Christian God, “threefold in Person and onefold in his nature” as Godhead (Anwar, 2005). Medieval Christian thinkers thus added representation to Ibn Sina’s ontology in order to describe a tripartite God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. In this way Ibn Sina’s magnificent concept of a Being without attributes lost its univocity, being ontologically divided into three secondary entities. It became representational,

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and, we can also say, figurative. For Christianity, in that it affirms a human Christ and a God in Whose image he was created, is fundamentally a figurative religion. For centuries afterward, Western philosophy labored under representationalism. It took a long time to restore Ibn Sina’s concept of Being as Being to philosophy.

Art of becoming: haptic space and abstract line Like the philosophy of Ibn Sina, much religious Islamic art can be characterized as non-representational, a performative art whose forms privilege fluidity and transformation. Islamic non-representational philosophy has its counterpart in non-representational art; an art of becoming accompanied a philosophy of becoming. This non-figurative aesthetics in Islamic art arose from aniconism. The history of this aesthetics is commonly dated to the rise of the ‘beveled style’ in ninth-century Samarra, a form of ornament in which deeply etched lines swirl around forms that emerge and recede depending on how you look at them. The beveled style swept the Islamic world, in carved and molded stucco, carved wood, and stone. In two-dimensional artworks, swirling lines that resist defining contours proliferated in manuscript illumination, mosaic and painted surfaces, textiles, and many other media, in a form that early art historians termed the arabesque. As I argued in Enfoldment and Infinity, this non-figurative aesthetics is very well characterized by Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts of haptic space and abstract line, which they freely adapted from the art history of Alois Riegl. Riegl’s term haptic, coined in Late Roman Art History, characterized early Egyptian works that isolate objects and adhere them to the picture plane, effectively providing a near view: inviting the eye to touch them rather than behold them from a distance (Iverson, 1993). Riegl observed the breakdown of figure-ground distinction in late Roman and early Christian decorative art of the fourth and fifth centuries, writing that its ambiguous figure-ground relations “cause the observer’s eyes to pay attention neither to the organic significance of the motifs nor to their inorganic harmonization but to the regular flickering of adjacent areas of light and dark (in the case of reliefs) or of various colors (in the case of paintings)” (Riegl, 2004, p. 154). This describes the subjective effect of haptic space. The concept of abstract line can be identified in Riegl’s meticulous history, in Questions of Style, of the vine-scroll motif, which finally liberated itself from naturalistic depiction in the Islamic arabesque. It is notable that Riegl’s concepts, arising as they did from studies of craft and decorative art, were considered minor concepts as long as art

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history concerned itself mainly with figurative arts: they have returned to prominence with the more recent art-historical interest in abstraction. Deleuze and Guattari adapted the concepts of haptic space and abstract line and newly valued them as aesthetic forms that resist figuration. They do not associate them with Islamic art, instead giving preference to what they call “nomad art”; and, following Worringer rather than Riegl, they locate the abstract line in Gothic art. But haptic space and abstract line are powerful concepts to appreciate the inventiveness of Islamic art. The abstract line, Deleuze and Guattari wrote, is a line free from depiction; “a line that delimits nothing, that describes no contour, … that is always changing direction”; a line that is not anthropomorphic but has a life of its own (1987, pp. 497-498). The related term, haptic space, is a space organized from within and experienced intensively. It is characteristic of what Deleuze and Guattari call smooth space, as opposed to striated space, which imposes an external order on space; smooth space is organized intensively. We could say that haptic space, and smooth space in general, privilege becoming, while striated space privileges representation. Similarly, abstract line seems to move for the pleasure of moving (as Paul Klee said) rather than to reproduce a preconceived form; again, an aesthetics of becoming. In both abstract line and haptic space, form is not imposed from without, as in figurative art, but generated from within. In Enfoldment and Infinity I discussed numerous examples of haptic space in Islamic, modern, and contemporary art, and argued that they appeal to an embodied, subjective perception. Representation and abstraction are not binary opposites. Often the lines that delineate a figurative image seem to have a life of their own, and this animated quality of the line surely informs the pleasure people feel in looking at figurative images. Similarly, haptic space often erupts in figurative paintings, in indistinct passages and shimmering patches of color. Conversely, of course a non-figurative line can obey rules, as in formal calligraphy; writing always disciplines the abstract line to some degree. And haptic space can become formulaic and lose its quality of becoming. Generally, though, the more an artwork invites an embodied perception, the more haptic space and abstract line are at play. The term ‘horror vacui’ has been used in an Orientalist and even racist way to characterize methods of filling negative space. For example, see this description by Ettinghausen, Grabar and Jenkins-Madina of an Iranian earthenware dish, adapting the Sasanian royal theme of the hunt. The bowl depicts a hunter on horseback, a cheetah perched behind him, surrounded by birds and abstract letterlike motifs.

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“This design … does not … exhibit any of the single-minded dedication to the royal theme that characterized the original pieces; there is no sign of excitement while the animal is being hunted nor of any dramatic impact of the heroic moment. Out of a horror vacui the motifs – including not only human figures and animals but also floral designs, and bits of script – are crowded into dense and often uncoordinated all-over designs with only enough background showing to permit the distinguishing of individual elements.” (2001, p. 118).

This description is written from a point of view that values narrative—the “dramatic impact of the heroic moment.” Narrative in a visual medium relies on optical visuality, the capacity to clearly distinguish figure from ground in order to imaginatively project oneself into the characters depicted (Marks, 2000). Crowding the space with forms seems, from this point of view, regressive. But what if telling a story that requires psychological identification is not the point? What if the point is to create an abstraction with a feeling of visual intimacy, a tactile appeal? If we understand these techniques not as reactionary modes of horror vacui but as considered variations on haptic space we can better appreciate the artists’ inventiveness in all their great variety. The authors of the above description (probably Ettinghausen, given his writing elsewhere on horror vacui) do evaluate the work on formal as well as narrative levels, evaluating the coordination of the motifs, but even here the dominant criterion seems to be that ornament should be subordinated to narrative, or, to use Riegl’s term, to “argument”. Riegl privileged artworks that established a balance between ornament and argument, or ornament and naturalistic motif: ornament has a framing function, but it cannot constitute a work of art in itself (Olin, 1992). He held that Greco-Christian art, given its figurative content, had a “conceptual” or spiritual purpose, while he dismissed aniconic Islamic art as conservative and lacking conceptual purpose. Yet Islamic figurative art switches the valuation of ornament and argument. These works do not lead the viewer away into mental narrative; they involve her on the surface of the image in a delightful visual conundrum where motif and ground, figuration and ornament mingle inseparably. In all these ways figuration was inseparable from haptic space.

Performativity in Islamic Art Now let me briefly suggest that the aesthetics of becoming are performative, in the sense that they initiate an act in time. To indicate how non-representational art is performative, we could invoke the speech-act theory of J. L. Austin (1962) as readily as the fundamental principle of Islam that God is the only creator. Speech-

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act theory accounts for certain sentences that rather than represent a state (“You are married”) bring it about (“I now pronounce you husband and wife”). And the Qur’anic principle that God is the only creator emphasizes the performative nature of the universe, as in the two well-known verses in which God says “Be!” to a thing, at which point the thing then is (Qur’an 16:40 and 36:82; Wisnovsky, 2000). Haptic space, abstract line, and performativity (as well as other aspects of Islamic aesthetics I do not discuss here, such as algorithmicity) create new states in time. They appeal to an embodied beholder to contemplate them in time and witness the ways they transform within perception. As Oleg Grabar wrote (1992), ornament does not represent but mediates; it brings about a new state. In Grabar’s distinction between ludic and liturgical functions of ornament, we may consider haptic space and abstract line to be ludic in the way they set up a perceptual game, without fixed end, for the pleasure of the beholder.

Byzantine and Islamic performativity: talismans and ceramics Many communities outside Latin Christendom from the tenth to fourteenth centuries shared a culture of sympathetic magic, in which objects do not represent the world so much as perform an intervention in the events of the world. The performative qualities of Islamic art have much in common with early Byzantine art, which was also at many points an art that did not represent but brought about a new state. The Byzantine context helps us to understanding how some performative objects invoke their referent through mimesis, a performance of presence. The Byzantine icon is considered not to represent the deity or the saint but to enact its absence as presence (Mondzain, 2004). The term mimesis as I use it here refers not to the Aristotelian concept of imitation, but to the concept of manifestation of presence that was cultivated in Byzantine thought (Pentcheva, 2006a). In eleventhcentury Byzantium, writes Bissera Pentcheva, a Neoplatonic concept of empsychos graphe, living painting or inspirited painting, arose, according to which objects manifest the divine presence through material change. The eleventh-century Byzantine theologian Michael Psellos asserted that “the people involved with the divine affairs, [apprehend] the affinity of all the visible things to each other and to the invisible powers” (Pentcheva, 2006b, p. 152). Pentcheva notes that Psellos, a Neoplatonist, was evidently aware of Proklos’ text “On Providence”, which argues for correspondence between invisible and visible worlds.

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Neoplatonism of course informed many circles of Islamic thought, from al-Kindi to the Ikhwan al-Safa’ to Ibn Sina. The Ikhwan al-Safa’ of tenth-century Basra for example, assert in their encyclopedia that the human body corresponds in its parts to the universe (Ikhwan al-Safa’, n.d.). The Ikhwan influenced the Islamic popular culture of sympathetic magic in their teachings on magic squares, which spread to Iran, North Africa, and in the twelfth century Islamic Spain, in some cases through Jewish intellectuals such as Abraham ibn Ezra of Toldeo (Cammann, 1969). Humbler and secular objects were held to have performative qualities in both Byzantine and Islamic societies. Perhaps the most popular performative object was the talisman. Talismans (are supposed to) enact a command: protect me from sickness, protect this house, harm my enemy, etc. Often they took a micrographic form. Popular among Byzantines were textual amulets, tiny rolled or folded scrolls as protection against harm: sometimes Gospels, sometimes powerful words borrowed from other religions, particularly texts from the Torah (Skemer, 2006). In the Islamic world, magic squares and other works of miniature writing made popular talismans in Safavid Iran, North Africa, and the Ottoman empire (Blair, 2006; Marks, 2010). Though both Islam and Byzantine Christianity officially disapproved of talismans, ceramics, as relatively secular objects, were able to employ their power in fairly harmless ways. Talismanic animals, knots, and other motifs populate both Islamic and Byzantine ceramics. Eunice and Henry Maguire (2007) argue persuasively that Byzantine non-religious art came to acquire functions similar to that of the religious icon. After Byzantine art ceased to use animal motifs to symbolize Christ, images of lions, cheetahs, and birds of prey came to operate in a talismanic way. They became not symbols, as in Western Christian art, but ‘profane icons’ with protective powers.2 Images of animal combats occur far and wide, appearing in Mesopotamian artifacts and ancient Chinese art and later in Iranian, Greek, Roman, Coptic, Catholic, and Islamic art (Hartner and Ettinghausen, 1964). But Maguire and Maguire propose that the performative role of animal combats in Byzantine art is unique, at least in Christian art, because they do not simply represent the animal, nor employ it metaphorically, but actually make its power present. Ceramics often depict a saint slaying a dragon, a dragon tied in knots, or a bird of prey, sometimes attacking snakes. Maguire and Maguire argue that these were apotropaic means of preventing sickness from spoiled food or drink. Moreover, circles, knots, crosses, not just ornament (or symbol) but

2

The Quinsext Council of 692 forbade representation of Christ as a lamb; later, iconophiles condemned animal imagery in religious contexts, because the iconoclasts (in an interesting reversal of Islamic iconoclasm) had destroyed human images but left animals whole (Maguire and Maguire, 2007).

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controlling devices—performative images. Byzantines, like ancients, endowed circles with apotropaic qualities, associated with protective objects like mirrors and round shields. A bowl decorated with a knotted snake calls on the apotropaic power of knots to confuse demons, again in the hope of making its contents safe for the partaker. A knot may confuse devils in itself, or it may be an abstract knotted snake. Animal and knot motifs occur in Islamic ceramics as well. Knot motifs likely share the apotropaic quality of Byzantine knot-motif ceramics, though it is debatable whether they derive from snakes (Baltrušaitis, 1955; Gombrich, 1979). Animals usually refer to the courtly practice of the hunt; I have not come across arguments that animals depicted on Islamic ceramics had talismanic powers, and it seems unlikely, given that the Qur’an expressly condemned ascribing powers to figurative images. Rather, it is pious words which often have a talismanic function on Islamic everyday objects. Examples abound throughout the Muslim world of ceramics decorated with pious phrases. A dish decorated with words like baraka or yumn would have a mildly performative effect, bringing a blessing upon the user and averting trouble.3 Thus as well as privileging the performative qualities of abstraction, Islamic ceramics, like their Byzantine counterparts, sometimes extended their performativity into a mild sympathetic magic.

Becoming-Figurative in Andalusian Ceramics In what follows I will trace the transformations that the abstract line, haptic space, and performativity, all in ceramics, undergo as they move from Islamic to Christian contexts. We will see that European and Christian motifs are added, and moreover, that the designs progressively favor the depictive line over the abstract line and illusionistic space over haptic space. At first these changes occur not slowly but in saccades, in negotiations between the ceramists and their market. Then Islamic aesthetics recede deep into latency in the European ceramics they inspired, paralleling the expulsion of human Muslims from the Iberian peninsula. Although I am fond of abstract line and haptic space, I do not mean to deplore their diminishment in the changing styles of Andalusian, Spanish, and (later) Italian ceramics. Christians on the Iberian peninsula received Islamic ideas and images in many ways, from assimilation to rejection, and sometimes both at once. Maria Rosa Menocal and her colleagues have written extensively and poetically about this ambivalent reception of Islamic culture (Menocal, 2002; Menocal,

3

I discuss such performative ceramics in Chapter Eight of Enfoldment and Infinity (Marks, 2010).

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Dodds and Balbale, 2008). Another idea that I find appealing is Francisco PradoVilar’s concept of the Gothic anamorphic gaze in the intercultural relations of thirteenth-century Castile. Alfonso Xsought to integrate the Muslim minority; his law code, the Siete Partidas, says Christians should endeavor to convert Moors “by kind words and suitable discourses, and not by violence or compulsion”. It was a policy, Prado-Vilar writes, of seduction and repression. What he calls the Gothic anamorphic gaze is “informed by experience and direct knowledge of culture and religious diversity, rather than by dogma and ingrained stereotypes of alterity” (Prado-Vilar, 2004, pp. 72-73). Such an anamorphic gaze would be open to ideas and images from another religious culture, yet interpret them in terms of its own: to be seduced by its images and to repress that seduction, to fit those images into a more familiar context. Under the influence of the traffic among Muslim and Christian ceramic artists and consumers, figures become abstract; abstractions become figurative. To think in terms of an anamorphic gaze would allow us to appreciate all variants in the transformation of Islamic motifs for Christian consumers, rather than elevate the Islamic originals over the Mudejar ‘copies’; for to do that would be to fall into the same trap that had art historians criticizing Islamic ceramics as awkward copies of Sasanian motifs. For example, this description of a group of blue and manganese-painted fifteenth-century ceramics—“The decoration of these dishes is characteristic of Mudéjar pottery, not only in the use of debased Islamic motifs such as the pine-cone, stylised leaf-and-bud, alafia inscriptions, chevrons and scalework, but also in the horror vacui, the cramming of every available space with small motifs, and in the radial layout of the design” (Ray, 1987, p. 306)— somehow manages to criticize both Islamic (“horror vacui”) and post-Islamic (“debased”) aesthetics. So I do not wish to denigrate the later ceramics for their awkwardness, but to appreciate that awkwardness as the sign of emergence of something new. The gradual Christianizing of ceramic designs parallel a much more violent ethnic cleansing of the Iberian peninsula. The expulsion and genocide of Muslims and Jews from Spain remain a world-historical crime; but the dishes are innocent. They live on as witnesses of the repression of Islam in Europe, and allow us to see the creative ways Islamic aesthetics went into hiding. And as with other repressions, the repressed return to claim justice for historical violence. Let us see how becoming-figurative occurs in Andalusian ceramics.

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Figures in the Round The theme of a figure or figures in a round frame might have originated in Sasanian ceramics (Ettinghausen, Grabar and Jenkins-Madina, 2001), though it is also a common East Asian motif; it also occurs in Byzantine ceramics. In medieval figurative ceramics, well-balanced composition took precedence over naturalism. We see similar compositions in Islamic, Byzantine, and European ceramics. For example, a bowl with bird from the principality of Antioch (modern Turkey/Syria), 1200-1268, incised decoration with green and yellow glaze, at the Victoria and Albert [illustration 1]. The shapely bird is all curves—belly, back, beak and legs—and swooping tail. From above, a birdlike ornament balances the composition.4

Illustration 1: Bowl with bird from Antioch. Source: Victoria and Albert Museum

4

This dish comes from a period too complicated to determine aesthetic influences, Islamic or Byzantine. The principality of Antioch was populated mainly by Armenians and Greek Orthodox. However, many Muslims had lived there before the crusade that established the principality and murdered Muslims. Likely the dish is based on an Islamic design.

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Illustration 2: Bowl with Portuguese ship. Source: Victoria and Albert Museum

In the thirteenth century, the city of Málaga in the Kingdom of Granada was the center of ceramic production. Its specialty was lusterware with a gleaming coppery glaze, a technology received from the east: Iran, Iraq, Syria, Fatimid Egypt. From this tradition Andalusian Muslim artisans produced a great variety of vessels, some ornamented with Arabic or pseudo-Arabic script, some with arabesques and geometric ornament. Granada became increasingly Islamic from the twelfth century, with Jews but very few Christians (who would have been Mozarabs, Arabized Christians) in its population.5 So we can imagine that its visual culture drew largely on Islamic precedents, except for the innovations exerted by European demand. Málaga ceramics often feature the formal vegetal arabesques descended from Umayyad designs, as well as knot patterns, geometric patterns and interlace, and epigraphy. When they feature figures, these play against sgraffito patterns of arabesques and abstracted plant forms, seeming to grow from them. Sometimes decorative Kufic or pseudo-Kufic writing share the space. They also include many lovely variants of a broad dish at the center of which a hare, deer, or other animal cavorts or an archer or musician performs. Painters inventively arranged the motifs

5

1125 is the year Alfonso I of Aragon attempted to invade Andalusia, after which time Andalusian rulers viewed Mozarabs as potential subversives (Harvey, 1990).

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to occupy the circular shape of the dish, continuing a practice evident in ceramics from Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Egypt since the tenth century.

Illustration 3: Deep dish with deer, Manises. Source: Metropolitan Museum of Art

These works’ formal arrangement played down the figure-ground distinction in many ways. A stunning bowl from Málaga at the Victoria and Albert [illustration 2] featuring a Portuguese sailing ship may have been commissioned by a Portuguese maritime merchant (Victoria and Albert, n.d.). The curving prow and sails, flags and mast of the ship fit elegantly into the roundness of the bowl; a school of fish populates the space below the ship; and lozenges with abstract motifs protect the bowls’ remaining edges from emptiness. Then, between these forms, the painter has filled the ground with curls and flowers. The overall effect is of a beautifully balanced, abstract composition within a circle. Some Andalusian and Valencianceramics, like comparable eastern Islamic works, pursue the figure-ground relation en abîme, by filling up the negative space created by a figure, and then filling the negative spaces within the negative space. (Indeed we might question the term ‘negative space’, which privileges figure over ground.) The ingenious device of the ‘contour panel’, “a reserved area that frames

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and follows the contour of figures and focal points, separating them from the background decoration,” originated in Persian ceramics (Mack, 2002, p. 102; Hess, 2004a). It occurs in Syrian and Fatimid Egyptian ceramics as well, elegantly creating a means for figure and ground to merge in a unified composition while maintaining the figure’s integrity. (We often observe the same method for filling negative space in the ‘cloud cartouche’ of calligraphy, in which an illuminator paints a protective ‘cordon sanitaire’ around the words and fills in the remaining space with ornament.)

Emigration and commerce Málaga ware became a hot international commodity. The great traveler Ibn Battuta recorded in about 1350 that “At Malaqa there is manufactured excellent gilded pottery, which is exported thence to the most distant lands” (Halsall, 2001). The Italian term maiolica initially referred to imports, deriving initially from the Spanish obra de malequa / obra de Malachia, ‘Málaga ware’ (Pérez, 1992; Mack, 2002; Hess, 2004b). Andalusians suffered through complex and interminable tumult in the wars between the Emirate of Granada and Christian kingdoms. Ceramists were among the refugees who fled Granada. Many of them moved to Christian-ruled areas, especially Manises in Valencia. In the 1350s and 1360s the de Buyl family of landowners in Manises encouraged Muslim craftsmen to emigrate from Granada and arranged to promote their wares for export, keeping 10% of the profits (Randall, 1957; Mack, 2002). There they lived under temporary protection. Working, as before, for Christian clients, they now also taught their trade to Christian artisans. Organized trade passed from Manises, port of Valencia, to Pisa, port of Florence, through the transshipment point of Majorca; the term maiolica came also to indicate works shipped through Majorca (Pérez, 1992; Mack, 2002; Hess, 2004b). Valencia, unlike most of Christian-ruled Spain, had a majority Muslim population from the time after the conquest. In 1250 James I presented a surrender charter to the Muslims of the Uxó valley in Valencia that supported a separate, self-governing Muslim society (Harvey, 1990). They continued to speak Arabic: “it was Valencia that kept Arabic alive after it had died in Granada,” L.P. Harvey notes (1990, p. 119), also noting that, since Manises is a port, Muslims there remained in communication by sea with other Muslim communities. So we can imagine that for some time the Muslims of Valencia lived autonomously and were under little pressure to adapt to Christian customs.

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Yet, as Harvey also notes, subject Muslims “sought to have no history, to live discreetly and unperceived” (1990, p. 68). Twelfth-century laws and surrender documents were contradictory, on one hand granting Muslims the freedom to travel, on the other seeking to confine Muslims in fear that they would emigrate, leaving the land uncultivated and crafts abandoned. Whether Muslims stayed or tried to leave, their Christian overlords harassed them. Blending in was crucial for survival. Did Islamic motifs go into latency just as subject Muslims attempted not to draw attention to themselves? Or did Christian influence, at least on ceramic production, come in the seemingly more innocuous form of market demand? Manises potters developed new styles from the Islamic repertoire that suggest answers to these questions. The figure in the round continues to cavort on these dishes, with new decorative motifs filling the background. These included an overall pattern of vine tendrils tipped with ivy, chains of little flowers, and dots. In fifteenth-century Valencian ceramics, a dotted floral motif began to replace the arabesque, eventually supplanting it completely (Valencian Lusterware, 1970). Those little flowers with their five petals and, sometimes, five-lobed leaves are bryony.6 Sometimes bryony flowers are depicted with six petals (so they might be daisies, another popular motif) and three-lobed leaves. It strikes me that bryony would have appeared a neutral motif, less obviously Islamic than the arabesque while filling the same function as a background motif. On a deep dish, probably made in Manises, 1435–1465, in the Cloisters collection of the Metropolitan Museum, a deer stands alertly, legs stick-straight but flanks and long neck curving, antlers streaming back from its head like long flowing locks [illustration 3]. A few remarkably lively vines make large, loose spirals around the creature, terminating in graceful brushy flowers almost the size of its head. Closely comparable is a dish from Paterna or Manises, 1400-1450, painted in blue on buff ground, at the Victoria and Albert Museum. An eagle painted in a few confident strokes fills the height of the dish, its curving tail feathers merging with the lower edge of the dish. Delicate spiraling vines terminating in two large feathery flowers (which resemble the deep dish with a deer at the Cloisters so much that I wonder if it’s the same artist) flank the bird, and large and small blue dots and circles augment the composition.

6

Bryony is a vine in the squash family found throughout Europe and in Northern Iran (Wikipedia). It is poisonous, but also has been used as a diuretic and to soothe coughs; the Roman agriculturist Columella mentions it among the herbs that the housewife preserves in the spring (Qantara, n.d.).

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Illustration 4: Detail, plate with “archer of love”, Manises. Source: Louvre. Photo by Laura Marks

Rise of optical space, figuration, and ‘argument’ As I noted in Enfoldment and Infinity, we can see abundant traces of Islamic plastic thinking in the arts of Renaissance Europe (Marks, 2010). Yet as I suggested above, as Islamic forms are naturalized in their Christian environment, or made for Christian clients, they re-become figurative. The haptic space and abstract line of Islamic art give way to figuration and faciality, to use a term of Deleuze and Guattari. In both Valencian lusterware and Italian maiolica ceramics, we witness an increasing emphasis on figures and, more importantly, contours, a gradual becoming-figurative of the design and diminishment of overall patterns of abstract line. Sometimes bunches of grapes, ivy leaves, bryony, and other larger motifs enlarged, becoming more like figures on a ground and replacing the Islamic-style figure-ground oscillation with regular series that tend to organize visuality.

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Illustration 5: Detail, armorial plate, Manises. Source: Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

We see the process of becoming-figurative in a plate from Manises (c. 1450) in the Louvre [illustration 4]. In a motif that suggests love’s archer, a smiling lady in stylish European dress has just drawn her bow, wounding a smaller male figure, also smiling, who clutches at the arrow through his neck. This unusual motif must have been taken from European courtly arts: perhaps it was a commission. The figures, new to the repertory of figurative composition in the round, sit rather awkwardly in the field of bryony flowers. The lady’s skirts billow a bit to fill one edge of the circle, but the rest of her figure and the male figure float awkwardly in the space. To the Islamic repertoire of birds, ducks, hares, fish, and leopards, export ceramics add the lion rampant, emblem of Florence (visible in illustration 5). By 1420, wealthy Italians were commissioning objects personalized with coats of arms [illustration 4]. The center of the dish is often dominated by the coats of arms of Spanish, French, and Italian royalty and nobility (Mack, 2002; Valencian Lusterware, 1970). These heraldic devices were often stenciled for mass production, while the floral patterns and lettering continued to be drawn freehand (Victoria and Albert Museum, n.d. 2). Egyptian Mamluks used shieldlike blazons (Komaroff, 2004), and the Nasrids adopted the Spanish use of a heraldic device. Floor tiles from the Alhambra in 1350-1400 (Victoria and Albert) feature a shield crossed by a banner saying “Wa-la ghalib illa-Allah” (There is no conqueror but God). Still, the coat of arms is much more prominent in Spanish and Italian commissions. Another common central motif is the Christian monogram IHS.

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Illustration 6: Lusterware dish from Paterna or Manises, 1400-1450. Source: Victoria and Albert Museum. Photo by Laura Marks

In a Deleuzian vein I would say that as these ceramic styles become absorbed into the Christian world, they become not only figurative but also facial, in the sense that their patterns seize up around signs of Christian and earthly powers—coats of arms and the Christian monogram—that command submission (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987). Is the Christian monogram for Jesus more ‘facial’ than the Arabic words such as Allah, mulk (wealth), and baraka (blessing), that decorate Andalusian ceramics? I suggest that it is. Often Arabic texts in religious contexts seem imposing, hortatory, and commanding submission. But these luxury ceramics were not for Muslim religious use. The lovely ceramics with their playful animals, drinkers, dancers, and words of general blessing do not compel attention and belief but appeal to the visual pleasure of rhythm. This is not the case in the increasingly figurative and facial ceramics for the Spanish and Italian markets. In non-figurative designs as well the abstract line tends to thicken up, gradually losing its non-depictive quality and becoming a contour. In the course of the fifteenth century, motifs in which abstract lines create haptic space, which we may call arabesque, occur less frequently, and they are rendered more simply (Valencian Lusterware, 1970). A further distinction is that Islamic patterns tend to avoid arrangements of two or four motifs. This served historically to distinguish Islamic from Christian

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objects, but also prevented the form from resolving into binaries. Designs based on units of five, six, seven, and their multiples lead the eye outward into complexity: they first address the body, the eye moving as it pleases, and only later does the mind enjoy understanding of the pattern.7 But a composition based on units of four need not resolve into binaries. One example is a lusterware dish from Paterna or Manises, 1400-1450, at the Victoria and Albert [illustration 6]. It is covered with a pattern of scrolls, circles, and dots in gold. On top of this, painted in blue, eight sprigs of a parsley leaf, flower, and bud spring from two concentric tendril rings. The pattern is based on sets of four, but the outer ring is rotated 45 degrees with respect to the inner ring, i.e. the blue sprigs counterpoise each other, so instead of a cruciform one sees an overall pattern of blue and gold. Nevertheless, the change that occurs when Christians take up Islamic objects is remarkable. Often on ceramics made for Christian clients the cruciform, a facializing binary, gradually replaced Islamic patterns. Binary and cruciform patterns make fewer demands of the eye, instead leading to a mental resolution that is also a judgment: this or that, up or down, heaven or hell. They thus recommend themselves to a disembodied, mental looking that already knows the meaning of what it sees. When it iterates with greater complexity, the basic binary organization of Christian pattern produces what Deleuze and Guattari call “all kinds of arborescences and dichotomies” (1987, p. 179) that only confirm existing binaries. In Riegl’s terms we can observe that ornament gives way to argument in the shift from Islamic to Renaissance aesthetics—and the balance remained in favor of argument until the late nineteenth century.

Italian Ceramics Adapt Islamic Designs As early as the eleventh century Italy was importing bacini (painted bowls) from North Africa, Andalusia, Sicily, and Egypt to set into church façades. At this time Italian potters were producing ‘archaic maiolica’ (an anachronistic term) based on Islamic imports; local production increased in the thirteenth century and came to dominate in the fourteenth century (Mack, 2002). During the fifteenth century Italian ceramics continued to adapt Islamic designs. Sometimes these copies developed into indigenous products, as in the Tuscan figurative zaffera or oak-leaf ceramics, produced in quantity for hospitals and pharmacies, that clearly adapt the Valencian motif of animals romping on a field of bryony flowers (Rasmussen, 1989). Rosamond Mack notes that these works show “a new sensitivity to

7

Even the most austere of Islamic geometries appeals to an embodied look. Of course, there is still an organization: Islamic patterns are not utterly deterriorializing.

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contrasts and interpenetrations between the dark blue leaf forms and bright white background that relates to Islamic ceramics” (2002, p. 99). They do maintain the delicate interplay between figure and ground of the Valencian ceramics, though the serrated leaves are much larger than the delicate bryony flowers, becoming figures themselves, especially because the dark cobalt pigment expands during firing, rising into relief [illustration 7].

Illustration 7: Tuscan figurative zaffera (oak-leaf) pitcher, 1430. Source: Louvre. Photo by Laura Marks

In the course of the fifteenth century, decoration on Italian ceramics grew more typically Italian, Catherine Hess notes (2004b). They depicted coats of arms, busts, emblems, and narrative scenes and adopted the new pictorial techniques of chiaroscuro, volumetric modeling, and linear perspective. The Renaissance motifs required clear figuration and, in the case of the complex Biblical and mythical narratives, deep space. Painters did not create original scenes but copied them from drawings, sometimes using stencils. Technological advances allowed Italian ceramic painters to draw with precision and model figures. The glaze pigments copper green, manganese brown

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and purple, and cobalt blue dissolve and diffuse in the glaze, softening lines. Beginning in 1430-1450, Italian ceramists developed orange, yellow, red, black, and white paints made of insoluble pigment particles with just enough binder to hold them together. These allowed painters to draw with precision, shade figures, and even use impasto (Kingery, 1993). Diffuse blue and green pigments created soft backdrops for crisp narrative scenes, as W. David Kingery analyzes in a plate (c. 1525) made by Nicola da Urbino for Isabella d’Este, now at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. Depicting the story of Perseus and Andromeda, it combines flowing (soluble) blue and green pigments for the background with precise brushwork in insoluble white, yellow, and orange for the figures.

Illustration 8: Pitcher, Montelupo, 1490/1510. Source: Museum of Decorative Arts, Berlin. Photo by Laura Marks

This technological breakthrough tamed the abstract line with finality into an obedient contour—or more positively, it freed artists to choose whether to tame

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the line, and in most cases they did. It made possible the portraits and detailed narrative scenes that were so important to the emergent Renaissance humanist taste. The term maiolica, initially meaning Islamic imports, came to designate all Italian tin-glazed ceramics. The 1557 pottery manual Art del Vasaio by Cavaliere Cipriano Piccolpasso listed Islamic designs common on Italian maiolica: arabesques, strapwork, knots, as well as Chinese porcellana. Italian ceramic painters also incorporated Spanish Islamic designs with Renaissance, Ottoman Iznik, and Chinese motifs to produce some wonderfully original syntheses (Mack, 2002). Some of these look quite strange, as the Renaissance interest in humanist figuration and narrative competes with Islamic abstraction. Haptic space and abstract line are tamed, becoming no more than frames for figures. Yet at the same time the thrill of the grotesque, a Renaissance style adopted from newly discovered Roman ornament, challenged the corporeal stability of figuration (Marks, 2010). It is fascinating how Italian artists found ways to make a border between the figure and the patterned background. Mack notes that Italian potters adopted the contour panel “without modification” (2002, p. 102). It seems increasingly important to keep the background from growing into the figurative and narrative scenes. This struggle plays out most dramatically on armorial jugs (boccales), which show how artists struggled to balance ornament and argument on a difficult shape.8 A wonderfully strange armorial jug from the Florentine family Lamberti, Montelupo, also signed by Cafaggiolo, (1490/1510, Inv. Nr. 1891, 212) at the Museum of Decorative Arts in Berlin, bears a shield with the Florentine rampant lion (illustration 8). Red ribbons gracefully inhabit the white space upon which the shield is set. Three thick leafy bands, in blue with orange and green flowers, attached under the spout, cascade down the sides of the pitcher. They in turn become not borders but figures, for they are banded by blue contours. Thus cordoned off in the small areas outside the blue contours, ‘negative space’ is no longer the right term for the little islands of arabesque: they seem more like ghettoes. And yet these pockets of arabesque open up somewhat randomly, up the side of the pitcher, between the blue leafy bands. Overall it is a fabulous exercise in redefining contours as figures in order to further marginalize negative space— quite comparable to the strategies of Nishapur potters. It looks like the shield with its lion is supposed to be the center, but that is rather crude; the painter’s creative interest went to the framing devices.

8

As well as the pitcher discussed here, see the armorial jugs in Rasmussen, 1989.

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Illustration 9: Detail, pitcher, Montelupo, 1490/1510. Source: Museum of Decorative Arts, Berlin. Photo by Laura Marks

Thus the abstract line of Andalusian ceramics thickened up and became figurative as it entered European markets and was taken into the hands of European artists. We might say that the ‘Gothic anamorphic gaze’ that had earlier typified Christian openness to Muslim culture was supplanted by a gaze of disavowal, capable of ignoring the latent traces of Islamic aesthetics in European art. These objects provide a concrete parallel to the way Islamic philosophy also traveled into Europe, becoming representational, its origins gradually effaced. This whitewashing of Islamic presence from art occurred in the context of ethnic cleansing—particularly of Andalusia, as it was re-formed as Christian Spain. Islamic aesthetics went decisively out of fashion. Looking at the way these objects changed over a few centuries allows us to reconstruct the paths by which Islamic culture and thought survived ethnic cleansing by taking on disguise and going underground. Like Islamic philosophy, Islamic aesthetics went underground, or I would say became enfolded again, in European art and thought. Yet Islamic art’s forms of becoming, including haptic space, abstract line, and performativity, had entered so deeply into European art they would never be extricated. The centuries since have witnessed a dialectic between figuration and abstraction, being and becoming, in which Islamic

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concepts and Islamic aesthetics unfold in Western contexts again and again— though under other names.

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Halsall, P., 2001. Medieval sourcebook: Ibn Battuta: travels in Asia and Africa 1325-1354. Available at: http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/source/1354ibnbattuta.asp [Accessed 10 July 2012]. Hartner, W. and Ettinghausen, R., 1964.The conquering lion, the life cycle of a symbol. Oriens, 17(31), pp. 161-171. Harvey, L. P., 1990. Islamic Spain 1250-1500. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hess, C., ed. 2004a. The arts of fire: Islamic influences on glass and ceramics of the Italian renaissance. Los Angeles: The J. Paul Getty Museum. Hess, C. 2004b. Brilliant achievements: the journey of Islamic glass and ceramics to renaissance Italy. In: C. Hess, ed. 2004a, pp. 1-33. Ikhwan al-Safa’. N.d. The third epistle: from the third division; on the rational soul: the universe is a giant human being, trans. David Simonowitz. Unpublished manuscript. From the Epistles of the Brethren of Purity (Rasa’il Ikhwan al-Safa’). Iverson, M., 1993. Alois Riegl: art history and theory. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Janssens, J., 2006. Ibn Sina and his influence in the Arabic and Latin world. London: Ashgate. Kingery, W. D., 1993. Painterly maiolica of the Italian renaissance. Technology and Culture 34(1), pp. 28-48. Komaroff, L., 2004. Color, precious metal, and fire: Islamic ceramics and glass. In: C. Hess, ed. 2004a. pp. 35-52. Mack, R. E., 2002. Bazaar to piazza: Islamic trade and Italian art, 1300-1600. Berkeley: University of California Press. Maguire, E. D. and Maguire, H., 2007. Other icons: art and power in Byzantine secular culture. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Marks, L. U., forthcoming. A Deleuzian ijtihad: unfolding Deleuze’s Islamic sources occulted in the ethnic cleansing of Spain. In: A. Saldhana, ed. Deleuze and race. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Marks, L. U., 2000. The skin of the film: intercultural cinema, embodiment, and the senses. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Marks, L. U., 2010. Enfoldment and Infinity: An Islamic Genealogy of New Media Art. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Menocal, M. R., 2002. The ornament of the world: how Muslims, Jews, and Christians created a culture of tolerance in medieval Spain. Boston: Little, Brown, and Company.

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List of Authors

Elena Arigita is an assistant professor in Arabic and Islamic Studies at the University of Granada. Her research interests and recent publications deal with leadership, authority and Islamic movements in Spain. She is the author of El islam institucional en el Egipto contemporáneo (2005) and has co-edited a special issue of the journal The Muslim World on “Authorizing Islam in Europe” (2006). Sarah Dornhof is a Postdoctoral Fellow in Cultural Anthropology at the European Viadrina University, Frankfurt/Oder. Her research deals with transformations in imaging Islam through contested concepts of art, critique and offense. Her publications include Weder Huren noch Unterworfene. Geschlechterkonstruktionen und Interkulturalität in der französischen Gesellschaft (2006). Maha El Hissy was educated in German, Arabic and Hispanic Studies in Cairo, Bayreuth and Munich. She works at the Institute for German Philology at the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich. Her research interests lie in transcultural and postcolonial literature. She is the author of Getürkte Türken. Karnevaleske Stilmittel im Theater, Kabarett und Film deutsch-türkischer Künstlerinnen und Künstler (2012). Miriam Gazzah is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research (AISSR), working within the NWO (Cultural Dynamics) funded research program “Islamic Cultural Performances: New Youth Cultures in Europe”. The topic of her subproject is ‘From ethnicity to Islam? Moroccan/ Muslim music scenes in the Netherlands’. She is the author of Rhythms and Rhymes of Life: Music and identification processes of Dutch-Moroccan youth (2008).

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Valérie Gonzalez is a specialist in Islamic art history and visual culture, and Lecturer in the Department of Art and Art History at Stanford University. Her research interests include aesthetics, visual concepts, and visuality in Islam. In addition to numerous articles, she is the author of Insights on Islamic Aesthetics, Visual Culture and History (2006), Le piège de Salomon, La pensée de l’art dans le Coran (2002), Beauty and Islam, Aesthetics of Islamic Art and Architecture (2001), and Emaux d’al-Andalus et du Maghreb (1994). Nagihan Haliloğlu was born in Turkey and educated in Turkey, UK and Germany. She is the author of Narrating from the Margins: Self Representation of Colonial and Female Subjectivities in Jean Rhys’s Novels (2011). Her research interests include modernism, postcolonial literature, translation studies and travel writing. She teaches courses on multiculturalism at the University of Fatih Sultan Mehmet in Istanbul. Laura U. Marks was born and educated in the United States, became a Canadian citizen, and teaches at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver. She is the author of The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses (2000), Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media (2002), Enfoldment and Infinity: An Islamic Genealogy of New Media Art (2010), and many essays. She has curated over 40 programs of experimental media art for venues around the world. Fernando Rodríguez Mediano is a Researcher (Investigador Científico) at CSIC (the Spanish National Research Council). He is on the Editorial Board of AlQantara and Hespéris-Tamuda, and director of the CSIC series “Estudios árabes e islámicos. Monografías”. His areas of expertise are: sociology of religious elites in Morocco (15th-17th centuries); Moroccan hagiographical and biographical literature; relations between Spain and Morocco (16th-17th centuries); Spanish Protectorate over Northern Morocco (1912-1956); origins of Spanish modern Orientalism (17th century). Among his publications are Un Oriente español: Los moriscos y el Sacromonte en tiempos de Contrarreforma, co-authored with Mercedes García-Arenal (2010). Frank Peter is Assistant Professor of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Bern. His current research examines secular rationalities and Islamism in France. Among his publications are Les entrepreneurs de Damas: nation, impérialisme et industrialisation (2010) and Movimientos Islamicos transnacionales, co-edited with Rafael Ortega (2012).

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Wendy M.K. Shaw is co-director of the Program in World Arts at the Center for Cultural Studies, University of Bern, Switzerland. She is the author of Possessors and Possessed: Museums, Archaeology, and the Visualization of History in the Late Ottoman Empire (2003) and Ottoman Painting: Reflections on Modernity from the Ottoman Empire to the Turkish Republic (2011), as well as articles on museums, archaeology, and artistic production in Turkey. She approaches the field of Islamic art history by examining processes of intra-cultural continuity and intercultural translation across the era of modernization. Riem Spielhaus is a researcher at the Erlangen Centre for Islam & Law in Europe (EZIRE) at the Friedrich Alexander University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, and the author of Wer ist hier Muslim? (2011). Her recent studies take a critical view of the establishment of the Muslim as a research category. Spielhaus has been a member of several working groups initiated by the German government, local administrations and civic organizations engaging with Muslim representatives, including the first “German Islam Conference” (2006-2009). David Tyrer is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology and Political Theory at Liverpool John Moores University. His research interests lie in the areas of racism, postcoloniality, Islamophobia, conflict, and post-structuralist political theory. He is the author of Race, Crime and Resistance, with Tina Patel (2011), and The Politics of Islamophobia: Race, Power and Fantasy (Decolonial Studies, Postcolonial Horizons) (forthcoming 2013)