Unsettling Colonial Modernity in Islamicate Contexts [1 ed.] 9781443893749, 9781443873178

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Unsettling Colonial Modernity in Islamicate Contexts

Unsettling Colonial Modernity in Islamicate Contexts Edited by

Siavash Saffari, Roxana Akhbari, Kara Abdolmaleki and Evelyn Hamdon

Unsettling Colonial Modernity in Islamicate Contexts Edited by Siavash Saffari, Roxana Akhbari, Kara Abdolmaleki and Evelyn Hamdon This book first published 2017 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2017 by Siavash Saffari, Roxana Akhbari, Kara Abdolmaleki, Evelyn Hamdon and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-7317-9 ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-7317-8

To the people of Palestine and Standing Rock, on the frontlines of resistance against the violence of settler colonialism.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Foreword ..................................................................................................... x Sherene H. Razack Acknowledgments .................................................................................... xiv Introduction ................................................................................................ 1 Unsettling Colonial Modernity: Islamicate Contexts in Focus Siavash Saffari, Kara Abdolmaleki and Roxana Akhbari Section I: Coloniality and the Discontents of the Modern Nation-State Chapter One ............................................................................................... 28 Origins of Identity Confusion: Is the Path Dependency of Late 19thCentury Egypt Still Shaping Its Present Politics? Ahmed El-Sayed Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 49 Reimagining Mediterranean Spaces: Libya and the Italo-Turkish War, 1911-1912 Jonathan McCollum Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 67 Nation and Identity Construction in Modern Iraq: (Re)Inserting the Assyrians Mariam Georgis Chapter Four .............................................................................................. 88 On Protectorates and Consultanates: The Birth and Demise of Modernization in the Gulf States Ali Karimi and Frederick Kim 

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Section II: The Aesthetics of Decolonization: Sights, Images, and Stories Chapter Five ............................................................................................ 104 Casablanca: From Protectorate to Neoliberal Polis – Reading the City through Order and Progress Rouzbeh Akhbari and Felix Kalmenson Chapter Six ............................................................................................. 122 Unsettling Orientalism: Edward W. Said’s 1978 Book and its Covers Katherine Bischoping, Rawan Abdelbaki, Kritee Ahmed, Krista Banasiak and Duygu Gül Kaya Chapter Seven.......................................................................................... 140 Queering Middle Eastern Contemporary Art and Its Diaspora Andrew Gayed Chapter Eight ........................................................................................... 156 Iranian Literary Modernity, Critical Regionalism, and Print Culture of the Thousand and One Nights Rasoul Aliakbari Chapter Nine............................................................................................ 172 A “Failed Modernity” or a “Crisis” of Modernity?: A Reading of Amin Maalouf’s The Rock of Tanios Khalid Alhathlool Section III: The Colonial Gaze and the Muslim Other Chapter Ten ............................................................................................. 192 The Bosnian Muslim Subaltern in Modern Europe: From Myth to Genocide Jasna Balorda Chapter Eleven ....................................................................................... 211 Alternative Spaces of Young Muslim Leaders: Experimenting with Laïcité within the French Mosque Ayúe Özcan 

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Chapter Twelve ....................................................................................... 232 Of Terrorism and Barbarism: Orientalism and Settler Colonialism in Canadian Discourses of Citizenship Azeezah Kanji Chapter Thirteen ..................................................................................... 259 Canadian Multicultural Citizenship and the ‘Crisis’ Over the Veil: Cultivating Internal Exclusions Nisha Nath Chapter Fourteen ..................................................................................... 288 The Need for De-Centering Anti-Islamophobia Critiques: Proposing a Demarcation Roxana Akhbari Contributors ............................................................................................. 303 Index .........................................................................................................311

FOREWORD SHERENE H. RAZACK

In 1991, a few weeks after I began teaching at the University of Toronto, I met with a student who was doing research on Muslim women from several different countries. It struck me as unusual that all of the women in the research sample identified first as Muslim, and only second, if at all, as members of a particular nation or region. I suggested to the student that the identity “Muslim” was not one that came first with everyone. I offered my own case as an example. Although I come from a Muslim family, my first impulse always is to call myself a Trinidadian, and to identify as someone from the Caribbean. Indeed, my first book, published in 1991, quaintly describes me as “a Canadian of West Indian origin.” Expressing her frustration at my inability to grasp the nature of her research project, the student angrily retorted that as a stigmatized minority, ‘Muslim” was not a category I could disaffiliate from. For me then, however, stigma and racism wore many faces. Anti-Asian racism has not only targeted Muslims. In the 1970s and 80s, anti-Asian street racism took the form of “Paki” bashing in Toronto and in Vancouver, where I spent my undergraduate years, someone who looked like me could still also be called (anachronistically) “damned Hindu” by white boys joyriding in a convertible. By the 90s, the Sikhs and their turbans fascinated racists everywhere. The student was clearly ahead of her time, as far as antiMuslim racism went, however. By 9/11, I had come to agree with her that one could no longer disaffiliate. Regardless of my own history and inclination, I had become “legible” in Canada first and foremost as a person of Muslim origin. The legibility quickly became global. I remember, for instance, a kindly waiter in a remote small town in Australia who, in 2002, asked me if I preferred my sausages to be halal. Light brown skin and a South Asian looking appearance was enough to tip him off as to my imagined dietary needs. The editors of this collection borrow the term “Islamicate” to refer to “the dynamic mosaic of social and cultural life forms that exist not only in Muslim majority societies, but also in diasporic Muslim communities.” In using the term “Islamicate,” the editors take for granted that “Muslim” is

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how we all must identify. They acknowledge that their collective thinking was shaped in the post “War on Terror” years when Muslims everywhere came to be considered as the enemies of the West, and when wars and colonial occupations and the intensive regimes of securitization they require, are first and foremost racial projects, widely understood apocryphally as a clash of civilizations. Considered as both new and old enemies of the state (the crusades have a ghostly presence), where do those of us identified as Muslims stand on the landscape of settler colonialism? How can our practices of solidarity disrupt the native/nonnative binary and still recognize the pressing issue of Indigenous sovereignty? This collection is informed by these questions. Its approach is to follow the ghost of colonialisms past as they haunt the colonial present, tracking nation building in Islamicate contexts, in the dynamics of anti-Muslim racism (the editors use the word Islamophobia), and in the creative ways we might renegotiate modernity without descending into nativisms and fundamentalisms. If, for the editors, the vexed question of identity joins the vexed question of who is a settler, the answer lies in anti-colonial alliances that acknowledge “the white nature” of colonialism. On this point I whole heartedly agree. To take just one example, whiteness goes almost completely unacknowledged in contemporary discussions sparked by Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. A televised interview with the commissioner, Mr. Justice Murray Sinclair, named to the Canadian Senate in 2016, reveals a scene played out regularly on television and at elite institutions across Canada. A resolute and patient Justice Sinclair explains that Canadian teachers must be prepared to teach about Indigenous peoples. He is careful to note that this means teaching about how Indigenous lives are devalued and he mentions several Indigenous communities where there have been what is called an epidemic of suicides. The television interviewer, Steve Pakin, of TV Ontario, appears to only hear that non-Indigenous teachers must now be trained to teach about Indigenous culture and he aggressively challenges Justice Sinclair that this would put non Indigenous teachers at risk of being accused of cultural appropriation.1 In ten seconds, we can go from the widespread dehumanization of Indigenous peoples and their extraordinarily high suicide rates, to the challenges non-Indigenous peoples face in solving the problem of assisting Indigenous peoples into modernity. Muslims do not face the colonial game of improvement in the same way as do Indigenous peoples, and our eviction from humanity is

 1

http://podcasts.tvo.org/theagenda/video/2369250_480x270_512k.mp4

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differently organized, but we also regularly confront white innocence and a colour line of modernity/pre-modernity, in our case an insistence that the problem is our violent religion and culture. As Fanon insisted, the colonial project is a racial project of accumulation. Today, with anti-Muslim racism at an all-time high in North America (and not just with Donald Trump as the new president of the United States), it is hard not to see the race line underpinning responses to Muslims. For instance, the argument that Muslims possess an innate incapacity for rational thought and have a pre-disposition to violence gives coherence to many a security hearing for those suspected of involvement in terrorism. Psychologists and psychiatrists serving as expert witnesses guide the court in understanding Muslims and their cultural predisposition for violence. Muslim savagery is read in the personality of the detainee, and in his practices of religiosity. ‘How many times do you pray?’ is still a popular question for interrogators. Elsewhere I have written of the sentencing of Omar Khadr by a military commission at Guantanamo, and specifically of the testimony of the psychiatrist Michael Welner, testimony that was the core of the state’s case against Khadr. Welner relied upon Nicolai Sennels, a far-right propagandist of anti-Muslim racism, who maintained that Muslims had “a catastrophically damaged gene pool.”2 Lest we are tempted to believe that such positions belong only to the fringe (a fringe with legal authority nonetheless), we should keep in mind how an old fashioned biological racism lies just beneath the contemporary scientific gaze on Muslims. Socio-biological and psychological lines of argument abound whenever explanations for radicalization are being sought, for instance. Radicalization experts often blame Islam itself or the Muslim family and propose that the answer lies in greater surveillance of all Muslims. As we renegotiate our place on stolen land, and consider in the words of the editors of this collection, “the globalized condition of colonial modernity,” we would do well to consider the colour line that runs through modernity, and understand how this line both limits and enables practices of solidarity among Indigenous and racialized peoples. An article in the New Yorker reminds us that the story of the Muslim Other in North America is an old story of intense racism, as well as a story of immigration. Hot Tamale Louie, an Afghan immigrant named Zarif Khan, came to the American Midwest in 1907, making his way from the frontier between Afghanistan and Pakistan. He began selling tamales from

 2

Sherene Razack, “The Manufacture of Torture as Public Truth: The Case of Omar Khadr.” In At the Limits of Justice: Women of Colour on Terror. Eds. Suvendrini Perera and Sherene Razack, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014, pp. 57-85.

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a cart (as did many other Afghans). Close to Khan’s old stomping ground, Gillette, Wyoming, has now given birth to a virulent “Stop Islam” movement. The Muslims in this area trace their presence to Tamale Louis’s time and their history, like Khan’s, is one of repeated evictions from citizenship but also historical moments of inclusion. The founder of “Stop Islam” is Bret Colvin who fondly remembers that his greatgrandfather “used to shoot Indians for the cavalry for five dollars a head.”3 Colonial modernities have long been unsettled by figures such as Khan who was a wealthy man when he was murdered by a nephew in Pakistan, a man with a widespread reputation for enterprise but also great generosity.

 3

Kathryn Schulz, “Citizen Khan,” The New Yorker, June 6 & 13, 2016, p. 89.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book results from a two-day international, interdisciplinary conference, entitled Unsettling Colonial Modernity: Islamicate Contexts in Focus. The conference was held in April 2015, at the University of Alberta (Canada), located on unceded Papaschase Cree Territory in Treaty Six Territory, the traditional meeting ground and home for First Nations (Cree, Saulteaux, Blackfoot, Nakota Sioux) and Métis people. As the editors of this volume, we believe that we cannot meaningfully discuss the condition of coloniality in Islamicate contexts without having first acknowledged the continued imposition of a racially hierarchical, economically exploitative, and ecologically destructive system of settler colonialism upon the very land on which we gathered for our meeting. The UCM conference gave us the unique privilege of connecting with a fabulous team of scholars at the University of Alberta who provided thoughtful advice and generous support both in the course of making preparations for and during the conference itself. We are grateful to faculty members whose excellent feedback as our project advisors helped us shape this project with care since its initial launch in 2014, as well as to our panel chairs whose insightful engagements with the presenters remarkably elevated the quality of the conference. Thank you Yasmeen Abu-Laban, Karyn Ball, Zohreh Bayatrizi, Michael Frishkopf, David J. Goa, Andrew Gow, Jocelyn Hendrickson, Joseph Hill, Jenny R. Kelly, Susanne Luhmann, Mojtaba Mahdvai, Ann McDougall, Iman Mersal, Sourayan Mookerjea, Nisha Nath, Michael O’Driscol, Lahoucine Ouzgane, Joseph Patrouch, Malinda Smith, Jaro Stacul, Chloe Taylor, and Terri Tomsky. The conference included three distinct components: keynote lectures, panel presentations, and poster presentations. We are deeply grateful to our keynote speakers, Sherene Razack and Parin Dossa, for the two magnificent talks they delivered. We also acknowledge all of our panel presenters whose remarkable research ideas constituted the intellectual core of the conference. Many thanks to Rawan Abdelbaki, Zubair Ahmad, Kritee Ahmed, Rouzbeh Akhbari, Roxana Akhbari, Rasoul Aliakbari, Khalid Alhathlool, Afshan Amjad, Mark Ayyash, Jasna Balorda, Krista Banasiak, Katherine Bischoping, Derek Bryce, Valentina Cappuri, Elizabeth Carnegie, Ahmad El-Sayed, Andrew Gayed, Marriam Georgis, Riva Gewarges, Duygu Gül-Kaya, Roshan Jahangir, Felix Kalmenson,

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Azizah Kanji, Ali Karimi, Zahra Kasamali, Abdie Kazemipur, Frederic Kim, Fouad Mami, Jonathan Mccollum, Falak Mujtaba, Alia O-Brien, Ayse Ozcan, Axel Pérez, Arun Rasiah, Mauro Saccol, Muna Saleh, Katherine Sameh, Asma Sayed, Zeina Sleiman, Itrath Syed, Abubakr Tandia, Zeina Tarraf, Sheena Wilson, and Jihan Zakarriya. Finally, we acknowledge and appreciate the participation of our three (then) undergraduate presenters with whose terrific poster presentations we inaugurated the conference. Thank you for sharing your work Rouzbeh Akhbari, Belen Samuel, and Samina Sana. We would like to extend a special thanks to Jasmin Hirschberg for her invaluable help and for capturing some wonderful moments from the conference in her photos, and to Nav Kaur, the Outreach Coordinator of the Alberta Public Interest Research Group (APIRG), without whose selfless help this conference could not have happened. The generous funding support of the Office of Interdisciplinary Studies, University of Alberta Faculty of Arts, Kule Institute for Advanced Study (KIAS), Alberta Public Interest Research Group (APIRG), Department of Educational Policy Studies, and Academic Women’s Association – University of Alberta enabled us to make this conference free of charge for the presenters and for the public. We appreciate their support. As well, we are grateful to Barb Heagle and Pamela Sewers (Office of Interdisciplinary Studies), Lois Harder (Faculty of Arts), Catherine Anley (Employment Equity Advisor), and Asma Sayed for their crucial help at various levels throughout the project. Our publisher, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, has been closely involved in the development process of this book. We are grateful to our Commissioning Editor, Victoria Carruthers, for her diligent support, and to our Designer, Sophie Edminson, for her competent guidance during the laborious stage of typesetting and production. Special thanks go to Cindy Chopoidalo for her careful and thorough proofreading of the manuscript and her rigorous attention to details. Last but not least, we thank all of our authors for having patiently worked with us throughout the various stages of the coming together of this book. Their original and thought-provoking scholarship has been and will continue to be an endless source of inspiration for us. Siavash Saffari, Roxana Akhbari, Kara Abdolmaleki, and Evelyn Hamdon March 2017

INTRODUCTION UNSETTLING COLONIAL MODERNITY: ISLAMICATE CONTEXTS IN FOCUS SIAVASH SAFFARI, KARA ABDOLMALEKI AND ROXANA AKHBARI

For nearly a century, debates about a condition code-named modernity have held a critical space in Muslim-majority societies at both theoretical and practical levels. Throughout this period, a perceived tension between modernity and Islamic traditions has been one of the defining features of many social, political, and cultural studies. Within South Asia, Middle East, and Northern Africa, a wide range of critical questions regarding democratization, the rights and status of women, socioeconomic development, globalization, and the trajectories of change in social and cultural values continue to be examined with reference to the analytical framework of Islam and modernity. Similarly, in the Western academy the question of compatibility or incompatibility of Islam and modernity has long preoccupied Orientalists and scholars in various fields of social sciences and humanities. As a collective effort, this book offers an alternative approach for analyzing the lived social, political, and cultural experiences of people from Islamicate contexts in relation to historically constructed (and presently sustained) asymmetrical global power structures, and beyond the false binaries of Islam/modernity, and Islam/West. To this end, the contributions in this volume examine, from a wide range of perspectives and disciplinary backgrounds, the historical encounters with, past and present responses to, and ongoing efforts to unsettle and transcend what we identify as colonial modernity, within Islamicate contexts.1 The 1

The term Islamicate was originally coined by the prominent American historian of Islam, Marshall G. S. Hodgson, who used it in his 1974 book, The Venture of Islam, Volume 1: The Classical Age of Islam, to describe “the social and cultural

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Introduction

analytical starting point of this approach is an understanding of colonial modernity as a condition whose introduction into Islamicate contexts was facilitated historically by the gradual expansion of European colonialism into South Asian, Middle Eastern, and Northern African societies. Also informing our approach is the recognition of the many modes through which, in Europe itself, and in North America by extension, people from Islamicate contexts have been, and continue to be, otherized in the constitution and the advancement of the project of modernity. The wider intellectual and academic context in which our collective project has taken shape is a growing skepticism about the unilinear and Eurocentric conceptions of modernity and of the history of the modern world. This skepticism is today manifested in a range of critical discourses, such as indigenous modernities, multiple modernities, and alternative modernities, as well as a rich body of literature provincializing Europe, unveiling the darker side of its modernity, and calling for the decolonization of knowledges, norms, and practices that were made hegemonic in the course of Europe’s colonization of the world. It is in dialogue with these global counterdiscourses that the present book sets out to bring to light many social, political, cultural, epistemological, and aesthetic modes of resistance, within both Muslim-majority and diasporic contexts, aimed at subverting and unsettling the globalized condition of colonial modernity.

(Re)Historicizing an ‘Encounter’ We begin our inquiry into the condition of colonial modernity, and its unfolding and unsettling in Islamicate contexts, by probing the two categories of modernity and coloniality. For Jürgen Habermas, the former refers to an historical and epistemological shift in Europe, articulated by “the philosophers of the Enlightenment.”2 At the sociopolitical and socioeconomic level, Habermas contends, what characterizes modernity is a move toward “the rational organization” of society and the development complex historically associated with Islam and the Muslims, both among Muslims themselves and even when found among non-Muslims” (59). Building on Hodgson’s and other, more recent conceptions, in this volume we use the term in its most inclusive sense, to refer to the dynamic mosaic of social and cultural life forms that exist not only in Muslim-majority societies, but also in diasporic Muslim communities. 2 Jürgen Habermas, “Modernity: An Unfinished Project,” in Habermas and the Unfinished Project of Modernity, ed. Maurizio Passerin d’Entreves and Seyla Benhabib (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1997), 45.

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of “the universalistic foundations of morality and law.”3 Anthony Giddens, too, traces the rise of modernity to the European Enlightenment, describing modernity as “modes of social life or organisation which emerged in Europe from about the seventeenth century onwards and which subsequently became more or less worldwide in their influence.”4 Expanding on these modern modes of life, other commentators have pointed to a number of developments, particularly the formation and consolidation of the nation-state, and the emergence of industrial capitalism and the globalizing patterns of industrialization and urbanization.5 Absent from such conceptualizations of modernity by Habermas, Giddens, and a host of other commentators, is any meaningful attentiveness to the link between this historical shift and the momentous event that preceded the age of Enlightenment in Europe, namely the rise of European colonialism in the late fifteenth century. Though the scholarship dealing with the question of modernity in Islamicate contexts is also largely inattentive to this critical link, the historical development that has been dubbed the “encounter with modernity”6 is nevertheless understood by many as a consequence of the nineteenth-century acceleration of European colonialism in Asia and Africa. This description, though it is analytically both limited and limiting, is not entirely unfounded. The nineteenth century was marked by a sequence of European military advances into areas ruled by Mughal, Ottoman, and Qajar empires. The French military campaign in Egypt and Syria, which lasted from 1798 to 1801, was an attempt by Napoléon Bonaparte to counter Britain’s eastward expansion. The Russo-Persian wars of the early nineteenth century, which resulted in the loss of Qajar territories in the Caucasus, were yet another harbinger of European domination in the region. It was following these military defeats that Ottoman and Qajar rulers launched a series of modernization programs in an effort to compensate 3

Ibid. Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1991), 1. 5 See Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Boston: Beacon Press, 1944); Derek Sayer, Capitalism and Modernity: An Excursus on Marx and Weber (London and New York: Routledge, 1991); Luciano Pellicani, The Genesis of Capitalism and the Origins of Modernity, trans. James G. Colbert (New York: Telos Press, 1994); Prasenjit Duara, The Crisis of Global Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). 6 Keith David Watenpaugh, Being Modern in the Middle East: Revolution, Nationalism, Colonialism, and the Arab Middle Class (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 17. 4

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Introduction

for the perceived backwardness of their societies vis-à-vis, and to catch up to, major European powers. In Ottoman territories, a comprehensive Tanzimat program, including military, educational, legal, and institutional reforms, was introduced in 1839 by Sultan Abdülmecid I. Concurrently in Egypt, similar measures were implemented during the reign of Muhammad Ali Pasha. Of the Qajar kings, it was Naser al-Din Shah, who in the 1850s embarked on a quest to introduce European-style reforms by creating Iran’s first modern educational institution, a postal system, and a modern military force. The quest for modernization in Islamicate societies continued throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as newly emerged nation-states, with support from Western-educated and Westernoriented technocrats, sought to design and build their societies anew in the image of modern European societies. Turkey under Mustafa Kemal Atatürk and Iran under Reza Shah and Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi are prototypical examples of these Eurocentric modernization projects.7 This twofold condition, namely the initiation of modernization programs under the ominous shadow of Europe’s military dominance and the decided Eurocentricity of these programs, positively reveals the conspicuous interwovenness of coloniality and modernity in the contemporary history of the region. Importantly, however, and contrary to what the conventional historiography of modernity in Islamicate contexts suggests, such interwovenness was neither exclusive to a particular regional context, nor did it begin in the nineteenth century. In this regard, and in identifying the category of colonial modernity as the subject of our inquiry and critique, we propose that a critical analysis of the encounter with and the responses to modernity in Islamicate contexts would benefit from the analytical insight offered by the modernity/coloniality framework. The framework owes much of its theoretical credential to the “Modernity/Coloniality/Decoloniality” (MCD) project, a collective effort launched in the late 1990s by a group of leading Latin American scholars including, among others, Enrique Dussel, Walter Mignolo, Edgardo Lander, Anibal Quijano, Arturo Escobar, and Fernando Coronil. For MCD theorists, far from being distinct and divisible, modernity and coloniality have historically represented two coconstitutive forces, the latter embodying the “darker side” and the “hidden agenda” of the former.8 Where Habermas and Giddens trace the birth of modernity to the advent of Cartesian logic or Kantian critique, MCD theorists regard the colonization 7

See Touraj Atabaki, The State and the Subaltern: Modernization, Society and the State in Turkey and Iran (New York: I. B. Tauris, 2007). 8 Walter Mignolo, The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), 2.

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of the Americas as the inaugural point of modernity.9 Extending on and bringing together the contributions of mid-twentieth-century dependency and postcolonial theorists, MCD scholarship underlines the connected histories of the colonizer and the colonized, the center and the periphery, within the global context of a capitalist colonial modernity. Concomitantly locating various regions of the world in the fifteenth-century matrix of an expanding European colonial modernity, Dussel, for instance, notes that while European Atlantic voyages were prompted by a desire to circumvent the Ottoman blockade and open alternative trade routes with Asia, the conquest of the Americas gave Europe its first and most decisive comparative advantage over its mighty eastern Muslim rivals.10 Although it acknowledges the historical realities of the rise and fall of empires and fierce imperial rivalries between European and non-European powers, Dussel’s account nevertheless proposes that it was only Europe that sought, and through the force of colonialism managed, to establish global hegemony and a “world system.”11 Placing coloniality front and center in investigating the global experiences of modernity, as Dussel does, is predicated on an understanding of coloniality both as the condition of the global hegemony of European capitalist modernity, and as the broader context in which countries of the periphery embarked on their paths to modernization. From this perspective, the historiography of modernity in Islamicate contexts cannot begin with the nineteenth-century acceleration of European military expansion into Asia and Africa, but with the very dawn of European colonialism in the late fifteenth century. This is precisely why Dussel stresses linkages between European colonial projects in Asia, Africa, and the Americas, and Mignolo regards the nineteenth9

Enrique Dussel, The Underside of Modernity: Apel, Ricoeur, Rorty, Taylor, and the Philosophy of Liberation, trans. Eduardo Mendieta (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1996), 132. 10 Ibid., 134. That European preoccupations and competition with the Ottoman Empire was a key factor triggering Europe’s conquest of the Americas is corroborated by commentators such as Eric Mielants, who argues that “it was precisely the inter-city-state competition for access to Eastern markets and the threat of the expanding Ottoman Empire that led to the discovery of the Americas.” See: Eric Mielants, The Origins of Capitalism and the ‘Rise of the West’ (Philadelphia: Temple University Press 2007), 85 11 Ibid., 132. Similarly, British military historian Geoffrey Parker argues that in the period between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, the military superiority of European nations vis-à-vis their imperial rivals enabled them to establish the first global hegemony in history. See Geoffrey Parker, The Military Revolution: Military Innovation and the Rise of the West 1500-1800 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996 [1988]), 154.

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century assault on Mughal, Qajar, and Ottoman territories as part of a global design that had begun to take shape several centuries earlier with the invasion and settlement of the Americas.12 It is now well-understood and well-documented that by the time the military encounters with European colonial modernity occurred, the territories under Mughal, Ottoman, and Qajar rule had already been incorporated into a world system of capitalist modernity in which major European powers constituted the center and the colonized world the periphery. Thus, Karen Armstrong points out that in the Mughal context, by the mid-eighteenth century, Bengal had been transformed by the British into a site for the production of “raw materials for the industrialized Western markets.”13 Similarly, Janet Afary notes that the peripherization of Iran and the incorporation of its economy into the global capitalist system had commenced with the establishment of expansive trade links with Europe, the immediate result of which was the transformation of the Iranian economy from subsistence-based to cash-crop production.14 Other historians, including Juan Cole, trace the formation of this asymmetrical trade system to the early sixteenth-century expansion of the Portuguese empire into the Persian Gulf, which was aimed at challenging Ottoman influence and controlling “the Hurmuz spice trade and the Bahrain pearl fisheries.”15 The postcolonial disenchantment with colonial modernity and the postmodern doubt about the emancipatory promises of the European Enlightenment have, in recent years and decades, opened spaces for the articulation of alternative historiographies narrating the condition and content of modernity in South Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa. Highlighting the precolonial emergence of a range of sociopolitical and socioeconomic patterns of change in these geographic areas, some historians challenge the conception of modernity as a European phenomenon and a product of occidental rationalism. For Indian historian Sanjay Subrahmanyam, for example, modernity is a post-sixteenth-century shift in the Eurasian civilizational zone with diverse histories and a

12

Mignolo, The Darker Side, 184. Karen Armstrong, Islam: A Short History (New York: Modern Library Chronicles, 2002), 147. 14 Janet Afary, The Iranian Constitutional Revolution: Grassroots Democracy, Social Democracy, and the Origins of Feminism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 17-19. 15 Juan Cole, Sacred Space And Holy War: The Politics, Culture and History of Shi'ite Islam (London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2002), 37 13

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multiplicity of normative and structural constellations.16 In a similar vein, Iranian historian Mohamad Tavakoli-Targhi regards modernity as an ethos whose foundations in the Persianate context already existed before the encounter with European modernity.17 While the historiographies of Subrahmanyam and Tavakoli-Targhi lend themselves to the articulation of alternative notions of modernity, or alternative modernities, a number of other scholars stress the need to abandon the very discourse of, and to theorize alternatives to, modernity. One advocate of this total departure, Hamid Dabashi, contends that modernity is an entirely European project introduced into Islamicate contexts “through the gun barrel of colonialism.”18 For Dabashi, at a time when the very philosophical tenets of modernity are in question, any attempt to theorize multiple or alternative modernities is in effect an exercise in multiplying the sites of this crisis.19 Dabashi’s The World of Persian Literary Humanism (2012) provides an example of seeking out alternative categories for interpreting current realities and imagining future possibilities through a close and critical (re)reading of literary and cultural traditions as articulated in distinct societies, regions, and empires.

Multiple Modernities: Between the Procrustean Bed and the Nativist Trap In Civilization and its Discontents (1930), Sigmund Freud proposes that the process of building a civilization is identical to that of the psychic development of an individual. In his analysis, apart from the psychic superego, a civilizational superego is at work in preparing the subject for modern life. He thus posits that the two processes are indeed “interlocked.”20 The formation and evolution of civilization, Freud adds, is a “process in the service of Eros, whose purpose is to combine single 16 Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “Connected Histories: Notes towards a Reconfiguration of Early Modern Eurasia,” Modern Asian Studies 31, no. 3 (1997): 737. 17 Mohamad Tavakoli-Targhi, “The Homeless Texts of Persianate Modernity,” Cultural Dynamics 13, no. 3 (November 2001): 265. 18 Hamid Dabashi, Islamic Liberation Theology: Resisting the Empire (New York: Routledge, 2008), 43. 19 Hamid Dabashi, The World of Persian Literary Humanism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 187, 220. For Dabashi, the literary answer to the philosophical crisis of modernity “must be sought in manners of dissolving that allknowing [European] subject or retrieving its irresolution in varied literary traditions” (187). 20 Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents (New York: Norton, 1962), 79.

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Introduction

human individuals … into one great unity, the unity of mankind.”21 Freud then suggests that “under the influence of cultural urges, some civilizations, or some epochs of civilization … have become ‘neurotic.’”22 The backdrop of Freud’s thinking and the particular “civilization” or “epoch” that he has in mind is European modernity, and the “discontent” that he diagnoses holds true especially when we take heed of the notion of human mastery over nature, which sits at the heart of Enlightenment thought. In Freudian terms, maintaining the modern world order necessitates making a hierarchical differentiation between nature and civilization, curbing the former in the interest of advancing the latter. It is precisely this distinction that informs Francis Bacon’s belief in a divine right to exercise “dominion over nature,”23 and René Descartes’s view of modern humans as “masters and possessors of nature.”24 Yet, the will to dominate nature is only one form of violence inherent in Europe’s Enlightenment modernity. The rise of fascism, anti-Semitism, and, more recently, of Islamophobia, in the very birthplace of European modernity, reveals a tendency to violently suppress, even eliminate, any entity deemed to be the other of the modern subject. Despite its European origins, this tendency has found some of its most devastating manifestations in the European colonial peripheries: the Americas, Asia, Africa, and Oceania. What exacerbates this violence in the colonial periphery25 is that the encounter with European modernity in these formerly colonized zones, 21

Ibid., 59. Ibid., 81. 23 Stephen Gaukroger, Francis Bacon and the Transformation of Early-Modern Philosophy (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 78. 24 René Descartes, Discourse on Method, trans. Richard Kennington (Newburyport, MA: Focus Publishing, 2007), 49. 25 The terms “core” and “periphery” originated from Dependency Theory literature, which explains the unequal division of wealth between developed and underdeveloped countries, or what is now called the global North and the global South. Focusing on colonial and neocolonial relations of domination, Dependency Theory, in its varied accounts, posits that the accumulation of wealth in developed countries (the core) comes at the price of the exploitation of natural resources and cheap labour, and the creation of obsolete technology markets in underdeveloped countries (the periphery). See: Andre Gunder Frank, Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America (New York, Monthly Review Press, 1967); Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (Washington DC: Howard University Press, 1974); Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World System: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World Economy in the Sixteenth Century (New York: Academic Press, 1976). 22

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either by sheer military might or by what Abdullah Laroui identifies as “cultural imperialism,”26 has imposed a sudden epistemic shift on these regions, not originating from their traditions nor having any attachment to their cultures. As noted earlier, colonial and imperial relations have turned European modernity into a procrustean bed, upon which other societies and their traditions are laid. As the local agents of this relation, comprador intellectuals have sought either to saw off the legs of local traditions or to stretch them out of shape so as to align them with Eurocentric frames of reference. This colonial and imperial violence has undermined nonEuropean regimes of knowledge production and has erased from the historiography of modernity the role of the nexus within the Eurasian civilizational zone, between East Asia, the Indian subcontinent, Persia, the Ottoman Empire, and European city-states; it has fabricated the illusion that only the European can think. Postcolonial theory is, in part, an attempt to theorize strategies for countering this epistemic violence. The formerly-colonized world is now in the midst of fundamentally altering its relation to Europe by proposing alternative and multiple modernities, thus unsettling the very categories of core and periphery. At the same time, the shadow of doubt that is cast, from within Europe, on the basic tenets and legacies of Enlightenment modernity reveals that the (previously) modern world is now enthralled in an age of postmodern doubt, wherein history, politics, ethics, and culture are interrogated about their secret ideological convictions. The combination of these factors creates a window of opportunity for a complete reshaping of the political-cultural ancien régime of the world. A present challenge in Islamicate and other non-European societies is that negotiating alternative and indigenous modernities requires, firstly, a thorough interrogation of European modernity and, secondly, a deep insight into the cultural flux, interconnectedness, and dialogical exchange. Within such a new context, wherein once-hegemonic paradigms have lost their significance, the precise nature of these alternative and multiple modernities, and exactly what any culture may take home from interactions, exchanges, and dialogues with other cultures, remain openended questions. These attempts to unsettle Western hegemony and to renegotiate modernity, despite their progressive and emancipatory possibilities, run the risk of regression into “nativism”27 or “cultural particularism.”28 26

Abdullah Laroui, The Crisis of the Arab Intellectuals (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 100. 27 Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage Books, 1993), xxiv.

10

Introduction

Nativist and culturally particularist tendencies, according to Mehrzad Borujerdi, ground their logic on a doctrine which has emerged out of the post-colonial condition and which “calls for the resurgence, reinstatement, or continuance of native or indigenous cultural customs, beliefs, and values.”29 Within post-colonial studies today, the term nativism has come to represent “a cultural reflex on the part of many Third World intellectuals from Southeast Asia to the Caribbean, eager to assert their newly found identity. The proponents of nativism were adamant about ending their condition of mental servitude and their perceived inferiority complex vis-à-vis the West.”30 The fundamental attempt of nativist thought is to return to a utopian past, an absolute form of local and collective agency.31 Such a nostalgic return to an Edenic past is, of course, impossible under the present, relentless globalization of capital. Furthermore, nativist projects and discourses take for granted (and even reinforce) various aspects of the colonial condition and the logic of coloniality. Indeed, as Edward Said adroitly observes, Eurocentrism and nativism are binary forces that “feed off each other.”32 While the latter emerges in response to the former and its colonial consequences, it nevertheless accepts and assumes “the consequences of imperialism, the racial, religious, and political divisions imposed by imperialism itself.”33 Cultural particularism is essentially “self-defeating”34 for two reasons: First, a harmony among various nativist ideologies will not be possible without recourse to universal principles, and, second, adherence to particularism (aka nativism) would require an ignoring of relations of power between various nativist groups, minorities,

28

Akbar S. Ahmed, Postmodernism and Islam: Predicament and Promise (London and New York, Routledge, 2004 [1992]), 130. Also see Roxanne L. Euben, Enemy in the Mirror: Islamic Fundamentalism and the Limits of Modern Rationalism: A Work of Comparative Political Theory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999); Seyla Benhabib, The Claims of Culture: Equality and Diversity in the Global Era (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002); Mahmood Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002). 29 Mehrzad Boroujerdi, Iranian Intellectuals and the West: The Tormented Triumph of Nativism (Syracuse, Syracuse University Press, 1996), 14. 30 Ibid., 14-15. 31 Ali Mirsepassi, Political Islam, Iran, and the Enlightenment: Philosophies of Hope and Despair (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 45. 32 Said, Culture and Imperialism, xxiv. 33 Ibid., 228. 34 Ernesto Laclau. Emancipation(s) (London: Verso, 1996), 26.

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or ideologies, which will lead to “sanctioning the status quo in the relations of power between the groups.”35 In contemporary Islamicate contexts, instances of nativist traps are abundant, from the anti-Western rhetoric of Iran’s rulers who have proclaimed themselves as the spokespersons of authentic Islam, while brutally crushing any form of dissent within the country, to the criminal violence of such groups as al-Qaeda and the Islamic State in the name of resistance against imperialism. These political movements are almost always fueled by nativist intellectual discourse. In Egypt, Sayyid Qutb; in India, Abul Ala Maududi; and in Pakistan, Israr Ahmad are some cases in point, who have offered fundamentalist interpretation of Islamic scripture. The trap of nativism also lies in the path of anticolonial and postcolonial scholars today. It is, thus, imperative to make a clear distinction between emancipatory articulations of anti-imperialism, and the “anti-imperialism of fools.”36 The latter is ever present today in culturally relativist discourses that justify the calamities of religious fundamentalism and equate all attempts at Islamic reform with Islamophobia and Westerncentrism. As several commentators have cautioned, there exists a fine line between fostering a much-needed indigenous modernity and the selfdelusion of particularism or “self-apartheid.”37 Thus, it is absolutely imperative to distinguish a radical critique of coloniality and Islamophobia in Europe and North America from the denial of human rights, subjugation of women and LGBTQ people, political oppression, and restriction of free speech by appealing to the ideas of resisting the empire, decolonization, and/or the revival of local religious and cultural traditions. It is true that, even in their imported and top-down modes of implementation, modernization programs in Islamicate and other nonEuropean contexts have alleviated a number of socioeconomic ailments, including the areas of poverty, health, sanitation, or literacy. Still, in these contexts, just as in Europe itself, modernization has also introduced tensions that are inherent to a “commodity economy” which contains in itself the internal and external tensions of the modern era; it generates these tensions over and over again in an increasingly heightened form; and after a period of progress, development of human powers, and emancipation for the individual, after an enormous extension of human

35

Ibid. 27. Tariq Ali, The Clash of Fundamentalisms: Crusades, Jihads and Modernity (London, New York: Verso, 2002), 126. 37 Laclau, Emancipation(s), 27. 36

12

Introduction control over nature, it finally hinders further development and drives humanity into a new barbarism.38

In other words, European modernity has broken the Enlightenment’s promise of human autonomy and freedom. Critical Theory’s critique of late modernity and capitalism starts precisely from this premise. Perhaps, then, it would be useful to utilize Critical Theory alongside postcolonial theory in order to re-examine some of the foundational tenets of Enlightenment thought while avoiding particularism. Combined with the radical critiques of modernity from its European bedrock, the theoretical insight that emerges from the (former) colonial periphery can offer a much desired third way to transcend the colonialism/nativism binary. In this regard, thinkers and scholars who adhere to the idea of a third way should be regarded as important as their European counterparts. A common thread in the thinking of these postcolonial thinkers of the periphery is that their critiques of Europe’s Enlightenment modernity do not degenerate into nativism and cultural essentialism.39 They walk a very fine line between two traps: 1) Embracing the norms and values of an increasingly neoliberal global north, and 2) Succumbing to tyrannical and regressive cultural and religious traditions in their home countries. Their contributions, in distinct ways, serve the project of negotiating a third way between the clashing binaries that have dictatorially defined our contemporary and connected histories. As a number of the contributions in this volume demonstrate, bringing together these varied critiques of modernity also allows us to re-read, through a fresh lens, a wide range of aesthetic productions in Islamicate and other non-Western contexts that tackle the questions of modernity and coloniality. Eurocentric and modernist discourses have generally been dismissive of these works, a dismissal that has cast doubt on the very intellectual capabilities of non-Europeans to develop alternative modes of knowing and understanding.40 Yet the potentials contained in these works of literature and art for arriving at alternative visions of a shared world, an interconnected humanity, and a common ecology are endless. Artists and 38

Max Horkheimer, Critical Theory: Selected Essays, trans. Matthew J. O’Connel (New York: Continuum, 1975), 227. 39 We may recall for instance that in Culture and Imperialism, Said distinguishes between nativist anti-imperialist discourses and what he considers to be the far more “imaginative” liberation discourses of figures such as Aimé Césaire and Frantz Fanon who call for a new soul and a new humanity (Said, Culture and Imperialism, 307). 40 See Hamid Dabashi, Can Non-Europeans Think? (London: Zed Books, 2015).

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belletrists capture the zeitgeist of an age with much more detail and animation than any historian. Whereas historiographies of modernity often depict a once-hegemonic and now-shifting condition in broad strokes and detached terms, aesthetic productions capture the emotions and psyches of people who have been under the grindstone of domination. Indeed, under the glance of an adroit critic, these acts of resistance can be grouped and theorized to light the path to decolonization and indigenous modernity.

Contemporary Settler Colonial Violence from a Relational Angle Against the backdrop of the above-discussed historical and conceptual links between European colonialism and Eurocentric modernization projects within and without Europe, in the present section we seek to revisit contemporary challenges of liberal multicultural settler colonialism. We do this by reflecting on the particular place and time of a two-day conference that led to the publication of this book. The conference, which bore the same name as the title of the present volume, was held in April 2015 at the University of Alberta, in Edmonton, Canada, on an Indigenous territory within a settler colonial state and amid the Canadian state’s gestures of apology for its historical injustices toward racialized populations. Acknowledging our particular positionality as non-white, immigrant-citizens or immigrant-residents of a white settler colonial society, we, organizers of the conference and authors of this introduction, take the opportunity here to reflect on the relational angle of common experiences of diasporic communities from Muslim-majority societies with other marginalized ethnic groups in Canada. The initial idea for the conference was conceived much earlier than 2015, while we were graduate students, each in a different discipline, yet all sharing similar concerns and intellectual proclivities. Though it was not always explicitly acknowledged, our collective thinking took shape in multiple ways in relation to our positionality. On the one hand, in the early 2010s, when we began our conversations about organizing this conference, the racialized othering of Muslims and Muslim-looking people was in full swing in Canada, echoing the “War on Terror” years, the invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq, and the rise of Islamophobia in North America and Europe. The defenders of the Canadian state’s heavy involvement in the Afghanistan war and those who sought to expand the already expansive security apparatus frequently depicted Islam and Muslims as the others of the West and its modern civilization. On the other hand, since the 1988 apology to the Japanese Canadian community, the Canadian state has

14

Introduction

been offering various gestures of apology to different racialized groups in the country in response to their long histories of grassroots redress movements. In the heat of Canadian state apologies to racialized communities, we would like to underline the ways in which the commonalities of experiences of settler colonial violence in racialized diasporic communities and Indigenous populations have been obscured in state discourses of apology. In doing so, we intend to draw the attention of anti-colonial scholars and activists to the growing need, especially in the age of apology, for strengthening cross-ethnics solidarities and networks of resistance in Canada’s grassroots redress culture. Examining self-representations of North American nation states in the context of political apologies is especially important as these representations tend to have significant implications for reinforcing the disproportionate accumulation of the capital in these regions – partly through shaping the processes of global (im)migration and racialization that exclusively benefit North America. An example of a political apology that nicely captures the global impact of self-representations of nation states is Canada’s 2008 apology to Aboriginal peoples. In 2008, one year after the United Nations declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (followed by decades of Indigenous activism and negotiations between Indigenous peoples and the U.N. member states), the Canadian state offered its second formal apology to Aboriginal peoples.41 This apology, entitled The Statement of Apology to Former Students of Residential Schools, was delivered by Stephen Harper, the prime minister of Canada at the time, and particularly addressed the Canadian government’s explicit role in genocidal practices of Indian Residential Schools (IRS). The significance of Canada’s 2008 apology is that it was followed by the government’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, promising to redress its past injustices against Aboriginal peoples; Canada’s TRC allowed the Canadian government to represent itself as the first “established democracy” with a national Truth and Reconciliation Commission (especially in 2009, the UN International Year of Reconciliation).42 It is 41

Giving a full account of Canada’s contemporary redress movements is outside the scope of this short introductory chapter. For a complete account of these movements, please see Jennifer Henderson and Pauline Wakeham, “Introduction,” in Reconciling Canada: Critical Perspectives on the Culture of Redress, ed. Jennifer Henderson and Pauline Wakeham (Toronto, Buffalo, London: University of Toronto Press, 2013); and Dian Million, Therapeutic Nations: Healing in an Age of Indigenous Human Rights (Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 2013) 42 For a more complete account of Canada’s contemporary redress movements, please see Jennifer Henderson and Pauline Wakeham, “Introduction,” in

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not a small irony, then, that as we write the Introduction to this volume almost a decade after the Canadian government’s second apology to Indigenous peoples, the government is starting to take the first small steps toward investigating the nationally tragic issue of missing and murdered Indigenous women; to catch a glimpse of this irony, note that in February 2016, there is still a vast difference between the number of missing and murdered Indigenous women recorded by NWAC, the Native Women’s Association of Canada, (4000 Indigenous women), and by RMCP, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (1200 Indigenous women).43 In this context, and given the political implications of official historical records of nation states, misrepresenting common experiences of colonial violence in different racialized communities in Canadian government’s discourses of apology is deeply problematic. A clear example of this kind of misrepresentation is the construction of the Aboriginal-non-Aboriginal dichotomy in state discourses of apology to Indigenous populations. For instance, in Jane Stewart’s 1998 address, a sharp distinction has been introduced between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal peoples in Canada; in fact, in the context of framing the blameworthy social group in the mistreatment of Aboriginal peoples, Stewart lumps together white supremacist European settlers and all other displaced social groups, including former Black slaves and other racialized (im)migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers.44 We suggest that the lack of historical specificity in the Canadian state’s constructed category of “non-Aboriginal” is a benignlooking, but in effect politically alarming, move for isolating diasporic and Indigenous aspects of racial violence in Canada’s colonial history. Without making historical specifications by explicitly acknowledging white supremacy in colonial practices of settler states in Western multicultural societies, the states’ apologies cannot go beyond reconciliatory gestures, to

Reconciling Canada: Critical Perspectives on the Culture of Redress, ed. Jennifer Henderson and Pauline Wakeham (Toronto, Buffalo, London: University of Toronto Press, 2013); and Dian Million, Therapeutic Nations: Healing in an Age of Indigenous Human Rights (Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 2013). 43 John Paul Tasker, “Confusion Reigns over Number of Missing, Murdered Indigenous Women,” CBC News, February 16, 2016; accessed March 25, 2016, http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/mmiw-4000-hajdu-1.3450237. 44 Please see the Introduction and the Statement of Reconciliation sections of Jane Stewart’s 1998 address on the Government of Canada’s website, in the section of Indigenous and Northern Affairs Canada at https://www.aadnc-aandc.gc.ca/eng/ 1100100015725/1100100015726.

16

Introduction

use Henderson’s and Wakeham’s phrase,45 that aim to sustain the international reputations of nation states in neoliberal markets. At another level, obscuring common historical lived experiences of colonial violence in different ethnic groups in Canada dismisses potential transformative cross-ethnic anti-oppression alliances at present and thereby is likely to disrupt the political futurity of such potential initiatives. Bearing this relational angle in mind, we suggest that analyzing Canada’s cultures of redress from the lens of the current focus of the UCM project on Islamicate contexts would enrich our understanding of misleading self-representations of North American nation states. In Canada, the government’s only “War on Terror”-related apology is Stephan Harper’s belated 2007 apology to Maher Arar. Arar is a dual citizen of Syria and Canada who was arrested in New York’s JFK airport (for suspicion of his ties to Al Qaeda) on his way back from a family trip in Tunisia to his home in Canada in 2002; after the government of Canada refused to interfere in his arrest in New York, he was sent to Syria where he was imprisoned and faced torture.46 What stands out about Harper’s apology to Arar is that unlike other state apologies that were offered to racialized communities, this apology was offered to an individual. In this case, even the very form of Harper’s statement, namely the fact that it was addressed to an individual, as opposed to a group of people, misrepresents the collective harms that colonial anti-Muslim sentiments have inflicted upon diasporic communities from Muslim-majority societies in Canada. It implies that Arar’s ordeal was an accidental by-product of the putatively just war launched by the United States (and backed by its allies) on the perceived threat of terror in Afghanistan and Iraq, and leaves the broader issue of the conformism of the Canadian government in this war untouched. In this sense, Harper’s apology to Arar doubly misrepresents the violence of Arar’s rendition; not only does it decouple anti-Muslim forms of colonial violence from all its other forms by detaching the “War 45

Jennifer Henderson and Pauline Wakeham, “Introduction,” in Reconciling Canada: Critical Perspectives on the Culture of Redress, ed. Jennifer Henderson and Pauline Wakeham (Toronto, Buffalo, London: University of Toronto Press, 2013): 4. 46 For details about Arar’s rendition and Harper’s apology to Arar, please see Yasmeen Abu-Laban and Nisha Nath, “From Detention to Apology: The Case of Maher Arar and the Canadian State”, Canadian Ethnic Studies Volume 30, Number 3 (2007): 71-98, and Pauline Wakeham, “Rendition and Redress: Maher Arar, Apology, and Exceptionality” in Reconciling Canada: Critical Perspectives on the Cultures of Redress, eds. Jennifer Henderson and Pauline Wakeham (Toronto, Buffalo, and London: University of Toronto Press, 2013) , 278-295.

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on Terror” from long histories of colonial modernity, it also decouples the rendition of Arar from all other “War on Terror”-related injustices in Muslim-majority societies and diasporic communities from those societies. Without ignoring or denying the distinctness of the moral and political claims of Aboriginal peoples in multicultural settler colonial contexts and for the sake of envisioning transformative anti-colonial solidarities, our critique of state discourses of apology for misrepresenting common experiences of colonial violence seeks to broadly problematize the decoupling of diasporic and Indigenous-related racial injustices in Canada. In the past decade or two, questions about conceptual connections between immigration-related and Indigenous-related colonial injustices have generated remarkably insightful debates in critical race and ethnic studies as well as Indigenous studies. These debates have mainly highlighted the complexities of the concepts of land and Indigeneity in anti-colonial, decolonial, and postcolonial scholarship, especially in a neoliberal age. Mahmood Mamdani, for instance, challenges the Native-non-Native legal binary in postcolonial Nigeria (especially in a neoliberal age) as a remainder of the legacy of the colonial law that had been enforced through the imposition of the direct-rule and indirect-rule Africa.47 In a neoliberal age, Mamdani argues, the Native-settler dichotomy in Nigeria reinforces the structural interplay between the global commodity economy and the state: on the one hand, global capitalism dynamizes and generates migrant displaced labor. On the other hand, the state penalizes those more dynamic individuals as settlers of the land (and thereby serves Imperial purposes by making vulnerable displaced groups more vulnerable). Likewise, in conversation with Bonita Lawrence and Enakshi Dua’s project of decolonizing antiracism theory,48 Nandita Sharma and Cynthia Wright point out the harmful tendency of creating discursive hierarchies among expropriated populations in settler colonial contexts by dividing them into two groups of Native and non-Native; In a neoliberal age, they argue, the state deploys the language of “cultures” in order to allocate specific lands to specific groups of people. These policies problematize the presence of migrants as those who do not belong by “calling for people to stay ‘fixed’ in their space.”49 Such space allocations, as Sharma and Wright show, are very much racialized and create a dualistic hierarchy between natives and 47

Mahmood Mamdani, “Beyond Settler and Native as Political Identities: Overcoming the Political Legacy of Colonialism,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, Volume 43, Number 4 (2001): 651-664. 48 Benita Lawrence and Enakshi Dua, “Decolonizing Antiracism,” Social Justice, Volume 32, Number 4, (2005): 120-143. 49 Ibid., 123.

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Introduction

nonnatives. Drawing upon Etienne Balibar,50 they challenge the naturalization of drawing ethnic boundaries as being part of the neo-racist state-centered practices that seek to govern racialized groups in the spirit of colonial legacies after the official end of colonialism. More recently, Iyko Day has made an elaborate case for coalitional practices that unite anti-capitalist movements of Indigenous people and people of color by taking issue with the reductionist analytic tendencies implicit in the Indigenous-settler binary in relation to the land and the Black-non-Black binary founded on racial slavery.51 She probes the discursive construction of these kinds of political exceptionalism in neoliberal contexts and problematizes the discourse of decoupling the issue of racializing immigration from the issue of land-acquisition colonialism.52 Day re-links the settler status to white supremacy and warns against generalized notions of settler positions as over-simplifying the complex internal racial dynamics of settler colonialism in a neoliberal age. Following the lead of the emerging critical anti-colonial scholarship that questions the decoupling of immigration and Indigeneity in examinations of colonial modernity, the present volume adopts an analytic focus on what has been provocatively referred to as “Islamicate contexts” in an effort to avoid installing exclusionary anti-colonial theoretical hierarchies among differently racialized social populations; the use of the adjective Islamicate (as opposed to Islamic) in the title of this project and in the analyses of the authors of chapters in this volume reflects our intention to reject reductionist political identity binaries such as the Muslim-non-Muslim, Native-non-Native, or the Black-non-Black, and to make space for studying colonial modernity in relational ways through non-binary practices of anti-colonial solidarity. We thus hope to initiate further conversations between the diverse body of scholarship on antioppression struggles in Islamicate contexts and the broader anti-colonial literature.

50

Etienne Balibar, “Is There a Neo-Racism?” in Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities, eds. Etienne Balibar, Immanuel Maurice Wallerstein, 17-28 (London, New York: Verso, 1991). 51 Iyko Day, “Being or Nothingness: Indigeneity, Antiblackness, and Settler Colonial Critique,” Journal of Critical Ethnic Studies Association, Volume 1, Number 2, (2015): 102-121. 52 For a full account of the discourse of decoupling racialization from landacquisition colonialism, see Patrick Wolfe, “Recuperating Binarism: a Heretical Introduction,” in Settler Colonial Studies, Volume 3, Number 3-4 (2013): 257-279.

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Structure of the Book The book is organized thematically in three distinct yet interrelated sections. Section I, Coloniality and the Discontents of the Modern NationState, takes a broad historical perspective on the various ways in which the encounters with European colonial modernity shaped the subsequent formations of the modern nation-state and the dynamics of nation-building in Islamicate contexts. Section II, The Aesthetics of Decolonization: Sights, Images, and Stories, focuses on aesthetic dimensions of colonial modernity in Islamicate contexts, both at the level of the imposition of colonial aesthetics and the decolonial acts of resistance. Finally, Section III, The Colonial Gaze and the Muslim Other, examines lived experiences of anti-Muslim colonial violence in Europe and North America, from historical, ethnographic, legal, political, and epistemic perspectives Section I begins with Ahmed El-Sayed’s chapter, “Origins of Identity Confusion: Is the Path Dependency of Late 19th-Century Egypt Still Shaping Its Present Politics?.” Reflecting, at the outset, on a major event in the modern history of the Middle East and North Africa, namely Napoleon Bonaparte’s 1798 conquest of Egypt, the chapter examines the impact of European colonial domination on the subsequent projects of nation-state building advanced by the ruling classes in Egypt throughout the nineteenth century. In particular, El-Sayed traces the present tension between national and religious identity in Egyptian society to two critical historical episodes: the implementation of a series of modernization programs under Mohamed Ali Pasha between 1805 and 1849, and the subsequent British occupation of Egypt in 1882. Chapter Two, “Reimagining Mediterranean Spaces: Libya and the Italo-Turkish War, 1911-1912,” also probes the relationship between the nineteenth century encounter with European colonialism and the formations of nationalist consciousness in the Middle East and North Africa region. The chapter’s author, Jonathan McCollum, delineates the contours of the geographical imaginaries of Italian and Ottoman imperial nationalisms, and how participants and pundits of the conflict incorporated Libya into their national spaces. In examining the rise of Ottoman nationalism, McCollum draws attention to the interplay between a European discourse of exporting progress and development to the colonial periphery, and endeavors within the Ottoman Empire to overcome a perceived state of backwardness vis-àvis European imperial rivals. Chapter Three, “Nation and Identity Construction in Modern Iraq: (Re)inserting the Assyrians,” continues the theme of the formation of nationalist consciousness, albeit here in a postcolonial context. The author, Mariam Georgis, focuses on the

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Introduction

experiences of Iraq’s indigenous Assyrian minority, to show that the process of nation-state building in the country has sought to construct a homogeneous Arab national identity at the expense of marginalizing other ethnic, religious, and linguistic groups. While Georgis focuses on Iraqi policies after the state’s independence from Britain in 1932, she nevertheless points to a series of earlier events including the rise of Ottoman nationalism and the creation of new (colonially constructed) borders in the aftermath of the fall of the Ottoman Empire, which set the course for the erasure of Assyrian (and other non-Arab) identities within the postcolonial Iraqi nation-state. The final chapter, “On Protectorates and Consultanates: The Birth and Demise of Modernization in the Gulf States,” also inspect the lingering legacy of coloniality in postcolonial states. The chapter’s authors, Ali Karimi and Fredric Kim, examine the impact of Britain’s colonial policies on modern architectural practice in the Gulf region. In surveying modernization projects launched in the region during the colonial period, Karimi and Kim highlight the all-toofamiliar civilizational discourse that accompanied, and served to legitimize, colonial rule. Comparing and contrasting the main projects in Bahrain, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar in the period between the 1950s and the 1970s, the authors make a case that the legacy of British colonialism accounts for the present shapelessness of these states. Section II begins with Chapter Five, “Casablanca: From Protectorate to Neoliberal Polis - Reading the City through Order and Progress,” which results from a creative collaboration between Rouzbeh Akhbari and Felix Kalmenson. The theoretical insights offered by Akhbari and Kalmenson are based on a two-part performance and installation series that the authors created by turning a derelict slaughterhouse in the Sidi Moumen neighborhood in Casablanca, Morocco, into an exhibition and a social space. In it, they have included an allusion to various European companies that sought to promote public health in Casablanca by advertising for soap that promised a whiter, cleaner, and purer skin to the inhabitants. The site of the slaughterhouse and the art exhibition work as reminders of the relations of power between the colonizers and the colonized as well as points of entry into a discussion of the ongoing colonial and postcolonial tensions that mark Moroccan society. The relations of power between the colonizer and the colonized are further examined and unsettles in Chapters Six and Seven, both of which engage with visual artistic representations that seek to unsettle entrenched conceptions of the colonial gaze. Chapter Six is titled “Unsettling Orientalism: Edward W. Said’s 1978 Book and Its Covers,” by Katherine Bischoping, Rawan Abdelbaki, Kritee Ahmed,

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Krista Banasiak, and Duygu Gül Kaya. The authors examine the covers of Edward Said’s Orientalism, and specifically how designers and publishers from around the world have taken up the opportunity to unsettle Orientalist discourse by visually resisting, subverting, or interrogating it. Using specific examples, they argue that book covers produced in Islamicate contexts work to unsettle Orientalism by highlighting the gazes of Orientalized subjects. Chapter Seven, “Queering Middle Eastern Contemporary Art and Its Diaspora,” Andrew Gayed analyzes the photographs and artworks of Egyptian artist Youssef Nabil so as to investigate the codification of Middle Eastern masculinity through a visual language, and destabilize homo-colonial discourses of Western modernity in a discussion rooted in sociological ideas of gender, nationalism, and sexuality and the triangulation of identity and oppression that could arise at their intersection. Gayed also engages with the linguistic and cultural implications of the Eurocentric discourse on sexuality and the undesirable ramifications of it replacing the precolonial, indigenous discourse in Egypt. To him, Nabil’s photography, Gayed explores alternative masculinities that unsettle commonsensical understandings of masculinity in the Middle East. In Chapter Eight, “Iranian Literary Modernity, Critical Regionalism, and Print Culture of The Thousand and One Nights,” Rasoul Aliakbari approaches this unsettling of the colonial gaze by transcending the East/West binary in historical accounts of Iranian literary modernity. The chapter sets off with an overview of Iranian literary modernity and offers a fresh outlook of it, transcending previous accounts, which either highlight or discount European influence on Iranian literary modernity. Instead, Aliakbari focuses on trans-regional connections in the emergence and formation of Iranian literary modernity, to which The Thousand and One Nights serves as a case study that involves Iran, India, Egypt, and the Ottoman Empire. Through a comparative analysis of style and content of various instances of The Thousand and One Nights, the author contends, some of the dynamics underlying the formation of Iranian literary modernity can be unveiled. The same tension and negotiation between various responses to European modernity animates the discussion on Chapter Nine, “A ‘Failed Modernity’ or a ‘Crisis’ of Modernity?’: A Reading of Amin Maalouf’s The Rock of Tanios.” Here, Khalid Alhathlool critically examines the representation of modernity as a “failed project” in the Arab world in Maalouf’s 1993 novel. Alhathlool argues that Maalouf's particular understanding and depiction of modernity emanate from a colonial encounter that continues to shape Arab experiences of modernity in the present context. Alhathlool, examines the characters in the novel as mouthpieces of various ideological positions towards modernization. He

22

Introduction

also interprets the novel as a historical account of the Egyptian occupation of Lebanon and compares the differences between Ottoman and Egyptian rule there, which, in his view, Malouf vehemently oppose in the novel. Section III focuses on complex layers of living through anti-Muslim colonial violence in Europe and North America. It begins with Jasna Balorda’s historical account of the persistence of anti-Muslim sentiments in the Balkans. In particular, Balorda’s “The Bosnian Muslim Subaltern in Modern Europe: from Myth to Genocide” presents a genealogy of the Bosnian genocide in the 1990s. Underlining the orthodox Christian roots of modern racism in Europe, Balorda traces the ethnic cleansing project of the Serb nationalists in the Bosnian war back to European orientalist stereotypes of Muslims in the 1389 battle of Kosovo Palja. In doing so, her chapter draws upon refreshing historical imageries to unpack the cultural, scientific, and sexual underpinnings of the contemporary othering of Muslims in Europe. Continuing the subject of the tension between Islam and the predominantly Christian Europe, Ayúe Özcan’s “Alternative Spaces of Young Muslim Leaders: Experimenting with Laicite withing the French mosque” explores the ways in which young leaders of the mosques in France continue to challenge what Özcan refers to as the liberal secular myth. Bringing in an ethnographic perspective, Özcan introduces and makes a case for the simultaneous practicing of religion-inclusive secularity and secular-friendly religiosity in the everyday lives of young French mosque leaders. The next two chapters of this section grapple with the lives of diasporic communities from Muslim-majority societies in Canada. These chapters draw upon legal reasoning and political theory respectively in order to disentangle the systemic exclusion of diasporic communities from Muslim-majority societies in Canadian discourses of citizenship. Azeezah Kanji’s “Of Terrorism and Barbarism: Orientalism and Settler Colonialism in Canadian Discourses of Citizenship” closely studies the two Canadian legislative initiatives of Strengthening Canadian Citizenship and Zero Tolerance for Barbaric Cultural Practices Act. Kanji argues that these two pieces of legislation are not exceptions to the myth of innocent national liberal multiculturalism, but rather are perfect exercises of liberal disavowal. Her chapter takes issue with two specific representational aspects of these pieces of legislation, namely the representations of terroristic and misogynist violence in Muslim communities. In the same vein, but with a different focus, Nisha Nath’s “Canadian Multiculturalism and the ‘Crisis’ over the Veil: Cultivating Internal Exclusions” presents an accurate critique of canonical liberal theories of citizenship that perpetually exclude Muslim (or Muslimlooking) women. Nath’s chapter presents a much-needed elaboration and

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critique of the Canadian School of liberal multiculturalism where the emphasis is ironically put on the coexistence of unity and diversity within a framework of normative citizenship. Drawing upon Rita Dhamoon’s analysis, Nash provides a differently-oriented narrative of citizenship than that which liberal theorists of citizenship might offer. Finally, speaking to the previous chapters of this section, Roxana Akhbari’s “The Need for Decentering Anti-Islamophobia Critiques: Proposing a Demarcation” brings in an epistemic perspective to analyze the critical literature on Islamophobia in multicultural Western societies. Akhbari’s chapter makes a case for shifting the current emphasis in anti-Islamophobia scholarship away from the mindsets of white supremacists. She suggests that a more transformative way of studying Islamophobia includes noting the epistemic agencies of people with Islamicate cultural backgrounds for unsettling global Islamophobia in diaspora.

Bibliography Abu-Laban, Yasmeen and Nisha Nath, “From Detention to Apology: The Case of Maher Arar and the Canadian State.” Canadian Ethnic Studies 30, no. 3 (2007): 71-98. Afary, Janet. The Iranian Constitutional Revolution: Grassroots Democracy, Social Democracy, and the Origins of Feminism. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996. Ahmed, Akbar S. Postmodernism and Islam: Predicament and Promise. London and New York: Routledge, 2004 [1992]. Ali, Tariq. The Clash of Fundamentalisms: Crusades, Jihads and Modernity. London and New York: Verso, 2002. Armstrong, Karen. Islam: A Short History. New York: Modern Library Chronicles, 2002. Balibar, Etienne. “Is There a Neo-Racism?” In Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities, edited by Etienne Balibar, Immanuel Maurice Wallerstein, 17-28. London and New York: Verso, 1991. Boroujerdi, Mehrzad. Iranian Intellectuals and the West: The Tormented Triumph of Nativism. Syracuse, Syracuse University Press, 1996. Cole, Juan. Sacred Space and Holy War: The Politics, Culture and History of Shi'ite Islam. London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2002. Coulthard, Glen. Red Skins, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2014. Dabashi, Hamid. Islamic Liberation Theology: Resisting the Empire. New York: Routledge, 2008.

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—. The World of Persian Literary Humanism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012. Day, Iyko. “Being or Nothingness: Indigeneity, Antiblackness, and Settler Colonial Critique.” Journal of Critical Ethnic Studies Association 1, no. 2 (2015): 102-21. Descartes, René. Discourse on Method, trans. Richard Kennington. Newburyport, MA: Focus Publishing, 2007. Dussel, Enrique. The Underside of Modernity: Apel, Ricoeur, Rorty, Taylor, and the Philosophy of Liberation. Translated by Eduardo Mendieta. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1996. Freud, Sigmund. Civilization and Its Discontents. New York: Norton, 1962. Gaukroger, Stephen. Francis Bacon and the Transformation of EarlyModern Philosophy. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Gibney, Mark et al. (ed.). The Age of Apology: Facing up the Past. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008. Giddens, Anthony. The Consequences of Modernity. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1991. Habermas, Jürgen. “Modernity: An Unfinished Project.” In Habermas and the Unfinished Project of Modernity, edited by Maurizio Passerin d‘Entreves and Seyla Benhabib, 38-58. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1997. Henderson, Jennifer, and Pauline Wakeham. Introduction to Reconciling Canada: Critical Perspectives on the Culture of Redress, edited by Jennifer Henderson and Pauline Wakeham, 3-27. Toronto, Buffalo, and London: University of Toronto Press, 2013. Hodgson, Marshall G. S. The Venture of Islam, Volume 1: The Classical Age of Islam. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1974. Horkheimer, Max. Critical Theory: Selected Essays. Translated by Matthew J. O’Connel. New York: Continuum, 1975. Laclau, Ernesto. Emancipation(s). London and New York: Verso, 1996. Laroui, Abdullah. The Crisis of the Arab Intellectuals. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976. Lawrence, Benita, and Enakshi Dua. “Decolonizing Antiracism.” Social Justice 32, no. 4 (2005): 120-143. Mamdani, Mahmood. “Beyond Settler and Native as Political Identities: Overcoming the Political Legacy of Colonialism.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 43, no. 4 (2001): 651-664. Mignolo, Walter. The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012.

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Mielants, Eric, The Origins of Capitalism and the ‘Rise of the West’. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2007. Million, Dian. Therapeutic Nations: Healing in an Age of Indigenous Human Rights. Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 2013. Mirsepassi, Ali. Political Islam, Iran, and the Enlightenment: Philosophies of Hope and Despair. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Parker, Geoffrey. The Military Revolution: Military Innovation and the Rise of the West 1500-1800. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996 [1988]. Said, Edward W. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Vintage Books, 1993. Sharma, Nandita, and Cynthia Wright. “Decolonizing Resistance, Challenging Colonial States.” Social Justice 35, no. 3 (2008): 120-138. Subrahmanyam, Sanjay. “Connected Histories: Notes towards a Reconfiguration of Early Modern Eurasia.” Modern Asian Studies 31, no. 3 (1997): 735-762. Tasker, John Paul. “Confusion Reigns over Number of Missing, Murdered Indigenous Women.” CBC News, February 16, 2016. Accessed March 25, 2016. http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/mmiw-4000-hajdu1.3450237. Tavakoli-Targhi, Mohamad. “The Homeless Texts of Persianate Modernity.” Cultural Dynamics 13, no. 3 (November 2001): 263-291. Wakeham, Pauline. “Rendition and Redress: Maher Arar, Apology, and Exceptionality.” In Reconciling Canada: Critical Perspectives on the Cultures of Redress, edited by Jennifer Henderson and Pauline Wakeham, 278-295. Toronto, Buffalo, and London: University of Toronto Press, 2013. Watenpaugh, Keith David. Being Modern in the Middle East: Revolution, Nationalism, Colonialism, and the Arab Middle Class. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. Wolfe, Patrick. “Recuperating Binarism: a Heretical Introduction.” Settler Colonial Studies 3, no. 3-4 (2013): 257-279.

SECTION I: COLONIALITY AND THE DISCONTENTS OF THE MODERN NATION-STATE

CHAPTER ONE ORIGINS OF IDENTITY CONFUSION: IS THE PATH DEPENDENCY OF LATE 19TH-CENTURY EGYPT STILL SHAPING ITS PRESENT POLITICS? AHMED EL-SAYED

Introduction At the onset of the nineteenth century, a significant development took place that reflected the popular perception of the legitimacy of the ruler in Egypt. In 1805, mainly due to popular support, Mohamed Ali, an Albanian soldier who first came to Egypt in 1801, managed to become the Ottoman Viceroy of Egypt. Instead of calling for independence or a native ruler, the Egyptian clergy (i.e. the ulama) mobilised the masses to force the investiture of Ali,1 who could not even speak Arabic,2 as the country’s ruler. Clearly then, neither the ruler’s origin nor his foreign appearance was relevant to his popular acceptance. Rather, what seemed to matter as “legitimacy credentials” were the ruler’s religion, clerical support, and the Sultanate’s endorsement. It is true that Egyptians demanded change, but only within this Islamic-Ottoman framework. This argument may appear more vividly in the course of the French campaign on Egypt (1798-1801). Only a few years before the emergence of Ali, Napoléon Bonaparte seized

 1

Umar Makarm, the head of the notables, and the Muslim clergy played a crucial role in the support of Ali. See Martin Sicker, The Islamic World in Decline: From the Treaty of Karlowitz to the Disintegration of the Ottoman Empire (Westport, Conn: Praeger, 2001), 105; Daniel Crecelius, “Nonideological Responses of the Egyptian Ulama to Modernization,” in Scholars, Saints, and Sufis; Muslim Religious Institutions in the Middle East since 1500, ed. Nikki R. Keddie (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), 177. 2 Khaled Fahmy, All the Pasha’s Men: Mehmed Ali, His Army, and the Making of Modern Egypt (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2002), 72.

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29

control of Egypt in 1798. In hindsight, it may appear that Bonaparte and Ali had much in common: both were Europeans representing foreign empires, both were descended from military backgrounds, neither could speak the language of the land, and neither had substantially lived in Egypt before their seizure of power. To overcome the religious difference, Bonaparte declared his conversion to Islam and became known as “Ali Bonaparte.”3 Bonaparte was clearly aware of the importance of the religion factor, but his unconvincing conversion failed to secure him the support of the ulama. Moreover, the Ottoman Porte treated the campaign as foreign occupation, and allied itself with the British against the French. Bonaparte, as a consequence, failed to acquire popular acceptance, and Egyptians rebelled twice in the span of two years against French presence in Egypt.4 Contrary to this position, the Albanian Ali was the people’s choice; thanks to the perception of religious affiliation and his alliance with the clergy, Ali possessed “the one important element of authority which force alone could not command, legitimacy.”5 Even for some Egyptian Copts (Christians), the dynamics of religious identification did work in a similar manner. Under French rule, a group of Copts formed what became known as “‘the Coptic legion’ that served under French commandment. The legion, following the French withdrawal from Egypt, joined the French back to Europe and served in campaigns there.”6 Such an alliance with occupation forces seemed unproblematic for some Copts who were religiously closer to the Christian French occupier. This absence of nationalist feelings was further boosted by the fact that Egypt had not had an Egyptian ruler since the demise of ancient Egypt, and did not have one until 1952.7 For centuries, no particular privileges were associated with being recognised as Egyptian, and political power rested solely with Mamluks or Ottomans. The pervasiveness of the affiliation mentality and the presence of religion as a bonding factor

 3

Juan Ricardo Cole, Napoleon's Egypt: Invading the Middle East (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 126; Charles D. Smith, “Nationalism and Minority Identities in Islamic Societies,” in Nationalism and Minority Identities in Islamic Societies, ed. Maya Shatzmiller (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2005), 66. 4 There were two fierce uprisings against the French in 1798 and 1800, both of which were largely instigated by the ulama and Muslim preachers. See Andrew McGregor, Military History of Modern Egypt: From the Ottoman Conquest to the Ramadan War (Westport, CT: Praeger Security International, 2006), 43, 46-47. 5 Crecelius, “Nonideological Responses,” 177. 6 Smith, “Nationalism and Minority,” 66. 7 Eugene L. Rogan, The Arabs: A History (London: Penguin Books, 2012), 286.

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marginalised notions based on Egyptian belonging. It was thus unsurprising that Egyptians appeared to identify themselves more with religion than with nationality. This paper contends that to date, despite the subsequent evolution of an Egyptian national character, this character remains mostly conflated and confused with its religious roots. Since its inception, due to the indeterminacy and even the unintentionality of producing a nationalist project, it is hardly possible to define Egyptian nationalism without reference to its religious basis. The aim of this study, then, is to reconsider the relationship between religious and national factors in the formation of Egypt’s modern identity, and to provide a historical prism to Egypt’s present-day ideological rivalries. To this end, the paper cursorily tracks landmark developments that provoked a sense of territorial patriotism and its first episodic clash with Islamic affiliation.

The Emergence of a National Identity The Creation of an Army: The Seed of Unintended Nationalism Despite his initial reliance on popular/religious legitimacy, Ali himself was an outright foreign absolutist who unhesitantly crushed any dissent to his ruling. As such, he did not have the slightest interest in limiting his powers or promoting national belonging. Nevertheless, it was he who unintentionally paved the way for the emergence of Egyptian nationalism and constitutional demands. The trigger of change was what may ostensibly seem irrelevant: the introduction of cotton as a cash crop to the Egyptian economy. The significance of this measure was not limited to its enormous economic gains, because, importantly, it did provide Ali with the necessary funds to establish an army based on Egyptian soldiers.8 Considering that the last time Egyptians were recruited into the military reserve was in the Pharaonic era (ancient Egypt),9 the enormity of this development can only be conceived. In essence, even Ali was not keen to recruit Egyptians, but after massacring the Mamluks and failing to tame Albanian soldiers or to recruit Sudanese slaves, Ali was left with the undesirable option of drafting Muslim Egyptian peasants.10

 8

Fahmy, All the Pasha’s Men, 10-11. Smith, “Nationalism and Minority,” 66; Edmund Clingan, Century of Revolution: A World History, 1770-1870 (Bloomington, Indiana: iUniverse, 2013), 142-43. 9 Arthur Goldschmidt, Historical Dictionary of Egypt (New Jersey: Scarecrow Press, 1994), 54. 10 Fahmy, “All the Pasha’s Men,” 85, 89-93. 8

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As many nationalists see it, through the pride of serving in the newlyformed army, Egyptians were able to identify themselves as a distinct nation.11 Although historical evidence demonstrates the inaccuracy of this claim, it is still true that the introduction of an army was crucial for the evolution of Egyptian nationalism for a different set of reasons.12 At the time, Egyptian society was essentially divided into two classes: the Turkish-speaking elite, which basically consisted of Turco-Circassians, and the Arabic-speaking Egyptian peasants.13 Though linguistically and ethnically distinct, the two classes did interact through professions at the peripheries, such as interpreters, servants, or secretaries. Nevertheless, due to its structure, the army allowed these classes to interact on a large scale for protracted periods of time. The officers’ corps mainly consisted of Turco-Circassians, while the Egyptians were the soldiers of the army. The discriminatory practices and humiliation inflicted on Egyptian soldiers were so severe that many Egyptians resorted to self-maiming, desertions, fleeing the country, or even refusing to marry, in order to spare their potential sons a similar destiny.14 The distressing experiences of military service did provide Egyptians with a bond that distinguished them from the Turkic class – a bond of misery.15 Ali’s successive wars against the Ottoman Empire further supported the feeling of a differentiation;16 at the time, Egyptians became conscious that the Sultanate was an entity that they had to fight against, and thus the Ottoman-affiliation mentality was empirically challenged on the battlefields. However, these sociopolitical developments under Ali did not bring a parallel constitutional development due to, arguably, three main obstacles. First and foremost, Ali was a powerful and able autocrat who never felt the need to compromise in respect of his domestic powers. Second, a proper

 11

Barak A. Salamoni, “Historical Consciousness for Modern Citizenship: Egyptian Schooling and the Lessons of History during the Constitutional Monarchy,” in ReEnvisioning Egypt 1919-1952, ed. Arthur Goldschmidt et al. (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2005) 177-178; Fahmy, All the Pasha’s Men, 19. 12 For an analysis of these reasons, see Fahmy, All the Pasha’s Men, 19. 13 See, for example, Joel Carmichael, The Shaping of the Arabs: A Study in Ethnic Identity (New York: Macmillan, 1967), 344. 14 Fahmy, All the Pasha’s Men, 101, 107, 261. 15 Ibid., 84. 16 Alexander Mikaberidze, Conflict and Conquest in the Islamic World: A Historical Encyclopedia (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2011): 297. Ali’s wars against the Sultanate proved that loyalty was not for the Ottoman Sultan; the “army was crucial for "educating" the population of Egypt to believe that fighting for Mehmed Ali and his family was tantamount to giving one’s life for the sake of the ‘nation.’” See Fahmy, All the Pasha’s Men, 19.

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constitutional structure could have likely provoked a national bias that would not have served Ali, a foreigner who relied extensively on nonEgyptians to run the country’s affairs. Third, though it is true that the army inspired a bond among Egyptians, it was too early to materialise into action due to the lack of political will, national figures and press, institutional vibrancy, or an educated middle class. Consequently, although there was no real manifestation of Egyptian nationalism under Ali, his reforms and political gains set the stage for the inception of an early form of Egyptian nationalism that will be discussed in the following sections.

Hereditary Ruling and Political Autonomy Boost Nationalist Bias After a series of wars against the Ottomans, Ali had to acquiesce to the terms of the 1840 Convention of London that significantly curtailed the size of his empire and forced him to recognise the Ottoman suzerainty. Although the treaty seemed unfavourable to Ali, it did grant him hereditary rule of both Egypt and Sudan.17 By limiting the line of succession to Ali’s dynasty, the Sultan’s prerogative in deciding Egypt’s ruler was largely restricted and, in turn, Ali’s successors enjoyed de facto autonomy. Moreover, as the ruling family, Ali’s dynasty settled in Egypt, and thus some of the subsequent rulers were born and raised in Egypt.18 It was accordingly not problematic for some of them to be identified as Egyptians19 and to make decisions of a nationalist tenor. Among the most significant decisions in this regard was Saeed Pasha’s (1854-63) decree to limit military service to one year, admit Egyptians as officers to the army, and to expand conscription to include sons of mayors, village sheikhs, and Copts.20 The decision largely shifted army service from its religious,

 17

Mikaberidze, “Conflict and Conquest,” 297. For example, both Saeed Pasha (1854-63) and Khedive Ismail (1863-79) were born and mostly raised in Egypt. See Ahmed Hussein, The Encyclopaedia of the History of Egypt: Part Three (Cairo: Dar Al-sha’b, 1979) (in Arabic), 989-91, 1009; Dan Richardson, Egypt (London: Rough Guides, 2003), 148. 19 For example, in one of his speeches, Saeed Pasha said, “as I consider myself Egyptian, it is my duty to raise these people (Egyptians) […] until I make them good to serve their country a useful and beneficial service” (Hussein, “The Encyclopaedia of the History of Egypt,” 990). 20 By reducing the time of service to one year, conscription became far less repulsive than it used to be. See Hussein, “The Encyclopaedia of the History of Egypt,” 997; J. C. B. Richmond, Egypt, 1798-1952: Her Advance Towards a 18

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classist basis to a more national, encompassing one.21 This novel nationalist element was further boosted by the political desire to consolidate Egypt’s autonomy. Throughout the 1850s and 1860s, developments such as “[t]he substitution of Arabic for Turkish as Egypt's official language in 1856 […] and the access of native Egyptians to most positions of state power all formalized the separation between Egypt and the Ottoman Empire.”22 Hence, the Egyptianised character of the dynastic rulers and their will to ensure autonomy permitted the notion of nationalism to gain some grounds. Still, this burgeoning concept needed a medium to support its growth into a social reality. For that reason, it was hardly possible to imagine its evolution under Ali due to the absence of a social class that could accommodate the dynamics of national belonging. Yet, “[b]y the time of his death in 1849, Mohammed Ali had created a significant change in the Egyptian's life, he had educated an Egyptian middle class which was a source of rebellion for his heirs.”23 This class was nurtured by Ali’s educational reforms, such as introducing a new, non-religious schooling system and sending Egyptian delegates to learn at European universities and institutes. After returning to Egypt, these Egyptian delegates brought with them knowledge and notions of national belonging. “Many of the ideas which inspired Egyptian national feeling were imported from Europe. Political liberty and love of country became important components of Egyptian patriotism.”24 This stratum of educated Egyptians

 Modern Identity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977), 73. Alexander Schölch claims that Saeed was partly motivated by “his predilection for everything military – which often assumed tragicomic traits – and his pederasty disposition.” See Alexander Schölch, Egypt for the Egyptians!: The Socio-Political Crisis in Egypt, 1878-1882 (London: Garnet Publishing/Ithaca Press, 1981), 23. Supposing the validity of this claim, it still seems irrelevant to the recruitment of these segments to the army or to the limitation of the military service to one year. 21 It also allowed for the recruitment of Ahmed Orabi. See Hussein, “The Encyclopaedia of the History of Egypt,” 997; Stephanie Cronin, Armies and StateBuilding in the Modern Middle East: Politics, Nationalism and Military Reform (London: I. B. Tauris & Co Ltd.: 2013), 36. 22 Abdeslam Maghraoui, Liberalism without Democracy: Nationhood and Citizenship in Egypt, 1922-1936 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 43. 23 Judith Cochran, Education in Egypt (London: Croom Helm, 1986), 4; Milton Viorst, Sandcastles: The Arabs in Search of the Modern World (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1994), 92; Donald M. Reid, Whose Pharaohs?: Archaeology, Museums, and Egyptian National Identity from Napoleon to World War I (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 97. 24 Richmond, “Egypt, 1798-1952,” 116.

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was relatively successful in spreading national concepts as reflected in the proliferation of vocal national press throughout the 1870s.25 In that sense, prompted by Ali’s sociopolitical transformations, the Egyptian body politic was ultimately prepared to accommodate another notion of belonging, premised on attachment to the Egyptian territory. Therefore, although powerless and largely decorative, the creation, in 1866, of the Advisory Council of Representatives (Egypt’s first semi-parliamentary body) signalled a landmark development in institutionalising a decadeslong process of reform and social evolution. One of the prerequisites for the Council’s candidacy was to “belong to the Egyptian territory.”26 The Council was not meant to alter the ruler’s power monopoly. But, by the mid-1870s, the shift in the power balance between Egypt’s ruler, Ismail, on the one hand, and European Powers and the Ottoman Porte, on the other, allowed the Council to pioneer the first constitutional movement. The following section further examines the incremental role of the Council in pushing forward notions of Egyptian nationalism and constitutional rule.

The Constitutional Role of the Advisory Council of Representatives of 1866 On the whole, European influence in both the Ottoman Empire and Egypt had significantly increased since the 1840s.27 However, by the second half of Khedive Ismail’s reign, European interference had developed into European control. Ismail had a propensity to obtain European loans, in the name of the Egyptian state, to finance his ostentatious lifestyle while

 25

By the late 1870s, the national press, such as Al-Tegara, Al-Dawlia, and Elwatan, played a critical role in boosting patriotic sentiments. See Hussein, “The Encyclopaedia of the History of Egypt,” 1045. 26 The Basic Regulation of the Council (BRC) stated in Article Two that among the requirements to run for the council is “to be known to the [Egyptian] government that he (the candidate) is one of its affiliate folks and from the sons of the homeland [Egypt].” 27 “The London Convention of 1840, resolving the Second Egyptian Crisis, marked the Ottoman entry to continental European politics” (Louise Fawcett, International Relations of the Middle East [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005], 39); “The 1840 Treaty of London [...] made Britain, in effect, the guarantor of the legal apparatus connecting Egypt juridically with the Porte, thus drawing her deeper into Egyptian affairs as a permanent stakeholder” (Robert T. Harrison, Gladstone’s Imperialism in Egypt: Techniques of Domination [Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1955], 36).

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35

lacking the ability to repay them.28 Ultimately, under the pressure of unpaid debts and to avoid Egypt’s bankruptcy, Ismail had to accede to European monitoring of Egypt’s revenues and expenditures. The monitoring took different forms, starting in 1876 with the Caisse de la Dette and Dual Control, and ending with the 1878 International Commission of Inquiry (Inquiry Commission), which made recommendations, inter alia, to restrict Ismail’s unfettered authority.29 The burdened Khedive had to submit to the Commission, and a Cabinet of Ministers was formed to run the country instead of Ismail. Egypt’s first responsible cabinet, nevertheless, was headed by an outright Britainloyalist and did include two foreign ministers to ensure European control over the country’s budget.30 The cabinet, which was dubbed the European Ministry, became Europe’s overt tool to run the country. The Khedive’s “loans obsession” eroded both his political status as a powerful ruler and, most importantly, Egypt’s autonomy. Watching from a distance, the powerless Caliph had too little influence to affect the trajectory of events in the Egyptian Vilayet. Instead, as his only source of authority, Sultan Abdülhamid II (1876-1908) invested more in his spiritual status “and emphasized his position as Caliph, or nominal head of all the world's Muslims.”31At the outset, Ismail appeared to reluctantly accept the hegemony of the new cabinet. It was thus other domestic actors – formally unrelated to the Khedive – that voiced their anger against the European-

 28 Richmond, “Egypt, 1798-1952,” 102. For more information on Ismail’s loans, see F. Robert Hunter, Egypt Under the Khedives, 1805-1879: From Household Government to Modern Bureaucracy (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1984), 39. 29 Richmond, “Egypt, 1798-1952,” 106-107. The Caisse de la Dette had an AngloFrench administration to control some of the revenues of the Egyptian government, and the Dual Control was composed of “English and French Controllers of Revenue and Expenditure for the whole of the Egyptian government” (Richmond, “Egypt, 1798-1952,” 104-05). 30 Nubar Pasha, the head of the Cabinet, was a proponent of a British protectorate over Egypt. The foreign ministers in his Cabinet were “River Wilson [British, who] was made the Minister of Finance and Blignieres [French, who was] Minister of Public Works” (Richmond, “Egypt, 1798-1952,” 107). 31 William Hale, Turkish Foreign Policy since 1774 (New York, NY: Routledge, 2013), 22; Nazeer Ahmed, Islam in Global History: From the Death of Prophet Muhammed to the First World War (Concord, CA: American Institute of Islamic History and Culture, 2000), 165.

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Chapter One

controlled cabinet.32 The army was a notable platform for a subtle war between the Khedive and European powers. The cabinet’s plans to downsize the army were conceived to serve European interests, and provoked army officers to organise a protest in which the head of the cabinet was physically assaulted by angry officers.33 As the situation in Egypt appeared to be heading out of control, Ismail promptly seized on the chance and sacked the European cabinet on the pretext of its incompetence at running the country. By getting rid of the European Ministry, Ismail was aiming at restoring his full powers as the actual ruler of Egypt. Aggravated by “Ismail’s audacity,” European powers accused the Khedive of fomenting disorder, particularly the army protest, to eventually sack the cabinet. Whether this claim was true is uncertain,34 but it was definitely in the interest of Ismail to regain his political status and witness the failure of the European Ministry. Ismail was definitely aware that sacking the cabinet would upset the powers, and thus, he needed the support of nationalists for a much-anticipated confrontation. Such a political opening enabled the Advisory Council to enter the political scene as a fully-fledged actor. Although, under European influence, the Council was for the first time given the authority to approve new taxes, the Council continued to exhibit loyalty towards the Khedive.35 Owing to this position, there was an attempt under the European cabinet to dismiss the Council. The Council decisively intercepted this decision and insisted on overseeing all of the cabinet’s measures. Some historians cite evidence that the Council’s defiant position was orchestrated by the Khedive, while others consider it ultimate proof of growing Egyptian patriotism.36 At any rate, this institutional enthusiasm, at least at the outset, attracted the attention of the nationalist movement and made it possible for the Council to assume a role in Egypt’s power struggle. Hence, following the departure of the European Ministry, the Council members convened

 32

Richmond, “Egypt, 1798-1952,” 109; see Schölch, “Egypt for the Egyptians,” 110. In particular, the cold war between the Khedive and the European Cabinet allowed the press to benefit from the situation and criticise both sides. 33 Hussein, “The Encyclopaedia of the History of Egypt,” 1045; Richmond, “Egypt, 1798-1952,” 109. 34 Some cite evidence that the army protest was planned and organised by the Khedive himself (Schölch, “Egypt for the Egyptians,” 67). On the other hand, some Egyptian historians blame Nubar Pasha’s reckless decisions for the political deterioration and the army’s unrest (Hussein, “The Encyclopaedia of the History of Egypt,” 1045). 35 Richmond, “Egypt, 1798-1952,” 109. 36 Schölch, “Egypt for the Egyptians,” 77- 85; Hussein, “The Encyclopaedia of the History of Egypt,” 1046.

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37

with different representatives of Egyptian societal forces to form the National Assembly. The Assembly drafted a manifesto of its demands that included, inter alia, the formation of a national government [free from foreign ministers] and a constitutional order whereby the cabinet would be fully accountable before an elected Council.37 This national/constitutional momentum provided clear political support for the Khedive and his decision to sack the European cabinet. Without delay, the manifesto of the National Assembly was unconditionally accepted by Ismail amid wide condemnation from European ministers and consuls. This acceptance brought the political struggle between Ismail and Europe to the surface. Bringing words into action, the Khedive formed a European-free cabinet, and the new national government introduced a Draft Constitution to the Advisory Council for discussion.38 The Europeans, for their part, had to act decisively and set an example of the ramifications of defying their interests. European political leverage was deployed on the Ottoman Porte to depose Ismail. It was highly unlikely that the Caliph, in his own right, would have been able to dethrone the Khedive. Yet, with the instigation and support of the Europeans, Ismail realised that he had no choice but to accede to the Ottoman Firman, which replaced Ismail with his own son: “[T]his was a symbolic act as the Ottomans had effectively lost political control of Egypt from the time of Mehmed Ali's governorship. Nevertheless, it preserved the outward appearance that Ismail's removal had been carried out by a Muslim ruler rather than by the Europeans.”39 The new Khedive, Tawfik, having personally witnessed what happened to his father, was not willing to meet a similar destiny. As such, Tawfik dismissed the Council, declined to sign the Draft Constitution, and appointed a new government headed by another European-loyalist.40 Although economically successful, by all standards, the new government was overtly repressive and actively sought to uproot the national movement.41 In particular, the army was a scene for discriminatory policies against the Egyptian element. This time, however,



37 “The manifesto was signed by 60 members of the Council, 60 members of religious institutions led by the Sheikh of Islam [Rector of Al-azhar], the patriarch of the Copts and the Jewish chief rabbi, 42 of the merchants and dignitaries, 72 working and retired employees and 93 officers” (Hussein, “The Encyclopaedia of the History of Egypt,”1047). 38 Hussein, “The Encyclopaedia of the History of Egypt,”1047-1048. 39 Gábor Ágoston and Bruce Alan Masters, Encyclopedia of the Ottoman Empire (New York: Facts on File, 2010), 206. 40 Riyad Pasha. Richmond, “Egypt, 1798-1952,” 120. 41 Schölch, “Egypt for the Egyptians,” 130; Richmond, “Egypt, 1798-1952,” 123.

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Chapter One

as discussed in the following section, unlike their ancestors who resorted to despair and self-maiming, Egyptian officers responded in ways that reflected the extent of the transformation of the Egyptian identity in the second half of the 19th century.

Constitutional Nationalism The Egyptian Army’s First Political Role under Orabi Under Tawfik, the Egyptian army was targeted with overtly discriminatory policies favouring Turco-Circassian officers, despite the proven incompetence of those officers,42 at the expense of their Egyptian peers. Seeking to end the bias, three Egyptian officers, headed by Ahmed Orabi, sought to communicate the army’s complaints to the Prime Minister, but eventually they were all arrested.43 Further aggravated, the Egyptian army stormed the Ministry of War and freed the arrested officers. Caught off guard, Tawfik sought to contain the situation by dismissing the War Minister, and the three leading officers were pardoned and reinstated in their positions. Furthermore, Sami Albaroudy became the new War Minister to pacify the political tension. Albaroudy himself was living proof of the social changes Egypt had been through. Despite being of Circassian descent, Albaroudy was a prominent nationalist figure, a close friend to Orabi, and a poet in Arabic.44 The government also sought to relieve some of the injustices in the army, but it remained unrealistic to anticipate restoring normality as if nothing had happened. The ramifications of the army insubordination were too grave to be contained by a mere renewal of the army’s allegiance to Tawfik, or by Tawfik’s public assurances that “he wanted to pardon and forget the incidents.”45 The under-surface gap of mistrust, between Tawfik and the army, clearly indicated that a second round of confrontation was yet to happen. Before

 42

The successive defeats of the Egyptian army in Abyssinia were mainly attributable to the poor performance of the Turco-Circassian officers. See Schölch, “Egypt for the Egyptians,”136; Hussein, “The Encyclopaedia of the History of Egypt,” 1035-1036. 43 In the beginning, the Prime Minister promised to address the grievances, but eventually, the three Egyptian officers were arrested and committed to a martial trial. See Schölch, “Egypt for the Egyptians,”138; Hussein, “The Encyclopaedia of the History of Egypt,” 1064. The three officers were Orabi, Ali Fahmy and Abdelaal Helmy (Richmond, “Egypt, 1798-1952,” 126). 44 Richmond, “Egypt, 1798-1952,” 126. 45 Schölch, “Egypt for the Egyptians,” 150.

Origins of Identity Confusion

39

the fall of the axe, consequently, the competing actors were attempting to strengthen their political front. The Egyptian officers, for their part, had manifested their material power, but still lacked political cover. On the other hand, the provincial notables and politicians of the constitutionalist movement – who were largely marginalised after Tawfik’s rise to power – seemed capable of providing such cover. Fitting like a hand into a glove, a political and nationalist alliance was forged between them and the Egyptian officers.46 This development led to the expansion of the army’s demands to include not only army-related affairs, but also the establishment of a constitutional structure and the reconvocation of the Council of Representatives.47 Through the involvement of Egyptian soldiers and officers, almost all of them from a peasant background, it was easier to attract a wider base of support from Egyptians, including villagers and the illiterate, for the national cause.48 At the regional level, the French conquest of Tunisia further fuelled the popularity of the Egyptian army and the need to strengthen its capabilities to defend the country against foreign threats.49 On the whole, these circumstances, domestic and regional, boosted the popularity of the army and its perception as a patriotic institution. While these new dynamics were coalescing, the precarious relation between the

 46

Ibid., 158. Although this analysis largely draws on the one offered by Schölch, it highlights the importance of nationalist aspirations as one of the driving forces for the alliance between the Egyptian officers and the nationalist/constitutionalist movement, not merely “the socio-economic interests” of “indigenous landowners.” Moreover, by default, in an agrarian society whose population included a large majority of illiterate peasants, it is reasonable that those who would spearhead the national movement would be educated upper classes, but this does not necessarily mean that they were only driven by economic interests. By the same token, Schölch insists that one of the main motives of the officers to seek the support of the constitutional movement was their fear for their personal safety (“Egypt for the Egyptians,” 160). This study takes the position that this motive is inherent to being a human, and it is unnecessary to be even mentioned or discussed. 47 Although some sources mention that the constitutional demands were included in the army petition from the beginning, the more cogent view is that such demands were included at a later stage after the incidents of February 1881. See Schölch, “Egypt for the Egyptians,”153-54; Hussein, “The Encyclopaedia of the History of Egypt,” 1064. 48 See Erez Manela, The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism, 1917-1920 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 66; Schölch, “Egypt for the Egyptians,” 159. 49 Elizabeth Thompson, Justice Interrupted: The Struggle for Constitutional Government in the Middle East (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 70; Schölch, “Egypt for the Egyptians,” 159.

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Khedive and the army came to an end when Tawfik sought to abruptly trim the army’s influence. Tawfik dismissed Albaroudy, and ordered the movement of some army regiments in a manner that threatened the Egyptian officers’ control over the army.50 This was a conclusive moment for Orabi, who had to assert his leadership and the political weight of the army. With no delay, after securing wide support for his move,51 Orabi declared that he would lead an army protest to Tawfik’s palace to announce the nation’s demands. The protest day, September 9, 1881, of which the War Ministry and European consuls were also notified,52 was more like an open-invitation event for everyone to come and watch. In a glamorous show of force, Orabi reconfirmed his leadership over a united army and surrounded the Khedivate palace with no resistance from the royal guard. People from all walks of life had gathered to witness what they could hardly believe: Orabi, the peasant officer, announcing the nation’s demands on Tawfik in the middle of the palace square. The demands were mainly the dismissal of the cabinet, ending the injustices in the army and the foundation of constitutional order. Unsurprisingly, again, powerless Tawfik acceded to these demands by dismissing the cabinet and allowing elections for a new Council to draft a constitution.53 The army’s first political role was an extraordinary exception to Egypt’s path dependency. For the first time in Egypt’s modern history, the authority of the ruler was not challenged by external forces, but by native Egyptians calling for the establishment of a constitutional order.

 50

Schölch, “Egypt for the Egyptians,” 160; Hussein, “The Encyclopaedia of the History of Egypt,” 1067. 51 “Orabi had sent a flyer to different parts of the country asking the country’s notables and dignitaries to support him to demand a constitution, [and as a result] letters of support and confidence came from everywhere” (Hussein, “The Encyclopaedia of the History of Egypt,” 1068). 52 Hussein, “The Encyclopaedia of the History of Egypt,” 1068; Schölch agrees with this account except that the announcement was made to the British representative not including the other European representatives (Schölch, “Egypt for the Egyptians,” 161). 53 Some scholars adopt the view that the election of the Council’s delegates was fair and free from manipulation (see, for example, Hussein, “The Encyclopaedia of the History of Egypt,” 1076). On the other hand, Schölch opines that Sharif Pasha, the Prime Minister, was able to pull the strings from the backstage to control the electoral outcome (“Egypt for the Egyptians,” 193). However, right after the election, the development of a strong disagreement between the Council and Sharif Pasha, which led to the dismissal of the latter, may give more credit to the first opinion.

Origins of Identity Confusion

41

In comparison with the events of 1805 that brought Ali to power, in 1881 there had been a shift from a clerical leadership to a nationalist one in which military officers occupied the social fore instead of the ulama. Likewise, instead of supporting a ruler with no power restrictions, in 1881 the demand was the foundation of a constitutional system based on a competent legislature. It could be said that the army’s first political role was also the first real manifestation of modern Egyptian patriotism, and the moment when the Egyptian military claimed a commitment to higher notions rooted in patriotism, rather than mere loyalty to the ruler. By the standards of the time, the publicity, visibility, and accessibility of the protest and the symbolic value of the place (the palace square) almost rendered Orabi’s procession a formal ceremony for power transition. However, on the other hand, in both 1805 and 1881, Egyptians neither called for independence nor for an Egyptian ruler. The 1881 version of Egyptian nationalism had components of patriotism and bias toward the Egyptian element, but still acquiesced to the spiritual and religious hegemony of the Ottoman Caliphate and its representative ruler. It was sufficient for the 1881 movement to take part in the power-making process with no intention, at least at this early stage, to break ties with the Caliphate tradition or provoke Islamic sensibilities. However, this coexistence between rising nationalism and Ottoman affiliation was very short-lived, as will be discussed in the following section.

The Collapse of Egypt’s First Constitutional Order Although the army’s movement led to the adoption of Egypt’s first constitutional document (the 1882 Basic Regulation of the Council of Representatives), the emerging constitutional order was soon to collapse. Rather than any deficiency in the new political order, it was the British occupation that put an end to Egypt’s first constitutional experience in 1882. The emergence of national constitutionalism gravely threatened the interests of traditional power makers in Egypt (the Ottoman Porte, the local rulers, and European powers).54 The notion that a supreme document would govern the relationship between the ruler and a legislative body and their respective powers temporarily drained the absolutist reserves of political power in Egypt. The process leading to the adoption of the 1882 constitution, furthermore, implied the recognition of popular will and created a novel source of abstracted legitimacy independent from

 54

Nadia Farah, Religious Strife in Egypt: Crisis and Ideological Conflict in the Seventies (New York: Gordon and Breach Science Publishers, 1986), 89.

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Chapter One

traditional vessels of authority. This evolution was already in direct competition with the hereditary Khedival structure, as it did demote it from its quasi-regal status to a mere political entity subject to limitations by domestic actors. Moreover, this manifestation of patriotic ideology was deemed a potential threat to the Ottoman spiritual hegemony and European interests. In sum, the introduction of a localised legitimating process based on national ideas trimmed the Khedive’s powers, could not be reconciled with foreign occupation or interference, and constituted a menace to the religious affiliation to the Caliphate. As such, in a rare moment, the three powers did work in harmony to neutralise their common enemy, the nascent constitutional nationalism. This construction of interests led to an anomalous outcome, as the Islamic Caliphate, which had always prided itself on defending its Muslim Vilayets, was backing the non-Muslim invaders: “both Khedive Tawfik and the Ottoman Caliph were strong allies of Britain. In order to quell the nationalist movement they tacitly supported the British invasion of Egypt in 1882.”55 But, in fact, the Ottoman support to the British did not remain tacit for long. Later, the Caliph used his religious authority to publicly facilitate and serve the British occupation. When Orabi chose to lead the Egyptian army against the British, he was declared a “rebel” and a “violator of the orders of Allah and his Prophet” by the Ottoman Caliph.56 At the time, the Egyptian nexus to the Sultanate was merely vestigial, with no real power for the Ottomans to either defend or impose their authority over Egypt. Surprisingly, however, the Sultan’s declaration dissuaded a number of Egyptians and officers from continuing the war for fear of violating teachings of Islam.57 After the dissemination of Orabi’s rebellious status, some of the army officers said: “then we are against the Sultan, violators to Allah’s book [Koran] and his Prophet’s Sunnah [Prophetic practices] … and there shall be no reward for that who dies as a sinner.”58 This is not an attempt to attribute the defeat of the Egyptian army to the Sultan’s declaration, but rather to pose the question: How could Islamic belonging to the Ottoman Caliphate convincingly justify the antithesis of Islamic dogma, submission to non-Muslim control? In his analysis, Juan Cole offers an insightful answer:

 55

Farah, “Religious Strife in Egypt,” 89. Richmond, “Egypt, 1798-1952,” 131; Thompson, “Justice Interrupted,” 74. For the text of the Sultan’s declaration, see Hussein, “The Encyclopaedia of the History of Egypt,” 1108. 57 Thompson, “Justice Interrupted,” 74; Hussein, “The Encyclopaedia of the History of Egypt,” 1108-09. 58 Hussein, “The Encyclopaedia of the History of Egypt,” 1108. 56

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In the nineteenth century the Ottoman sultans began occasionally to lay claim to the office of the Caliphate, a claim that some literate Egyptians accepted by the 1860s. Although their actual power over Egypt diminished to that of a liege-lord, the sultans' moral and spiritual authority actually increased as the religious establishment acquiesced in their desire to combine the vicarship of the Prophet with the steppe sultanate. … An Iranian diplomat reported in 1880 that “fanatics around Sultan Abdülhamid II felt that the only way to prevent the Europeans from pushing the Ottomans out of Europe altogether was for the sultan to gather to himself the kind of support from the Islamic world as a whole that only recognition as caliph could generate. The sultan decided to send out a proclamation of his station as caliph to Egypt, India, Iran, and Central Asia. Many but not all Egyptians accepted this call, with all its implications for authority, during the Revolution [Orabi’s movement]. The Ottoman sultanate continued to have great influence in Egypt during the vicerergal period …. The manuscripts and periodical literature I consulted convince me that literate Egyptians for the most part saw themselves as loyal subjects of the sultan. With Abdülhamid (r. 1876-1909) insistently laying claim to Caliphate, his moral authority may have actually increased in the late 1870s and early 1880s, especially among the ulama and the literate classes.59

It was, then, the acquiescence of clergy and literate classes to the religious status of the Caliph and its ramifications that consolidated the Sultan’s spiritual hegemony. Although 19th-century Egyptian nationalism was anti-imperialist, it was still loyal to the Islamic Caliphate.60 As a consequence, the focus of the nationalist movement was never independence or the creation of a nation-state, but rather a greater role and better treatment for native Egyptians. It was believed that religious affiliation to the Ottoman Caliph could walk hand-in-hand with territorial nationalism. Egyptian patriotic ideas were mainly modelled on the European paradigm, “but underlying these imported ideas were the ancient pride in Islam and the longing to restore its power and its glory.”61 Orabi



59 Juan Ricardo Cole, Colonialism and Revolution in the Middle East: Social and Cultural Origins of Egypt’s Urabi Movement (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press: 1993), 27. 60 Donald Malcolm Reid, "The Urabi Revolution and the British Conquest, 19891882," in The Cambridge History of Egypt: Volume 2, ed. M. W. Daly (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) 218; John Coatsworth et al., Global Connections: Politics, Exchange, and Social Life in World History: Volume 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 309. 61 Richmond, “Egypt, 1798-1952,” 116; Abd al-Raতman Sharqawi, Orabi Leader of the Fellahin (Cairo: General Egyptian Book Organization, 1989), 11.

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himself, in his memoirs, denied vehemently that he had any intention to rebel against the Ottoman Caliphate, and other prominent figures of the Orabist movement shared the same conviction.62 In fact, Egypt’s intellectual and political elite was strongly loyal to the Islamic Caliphate and its religious patronage. Therefore, the clash between the Caliph and the military leader left Egyptians perplexed, as they had to face a hard choice between the country and the Caliphate. It was a sobering moment, revealing the incompatibility between nationalism and imperial Islamic identity. But many Egyptians were unable even to cope with these competing ideologies of belonging; rather than being decisive, they appeared uncertain. One of these moments of confusion was captured in an account of a British official who described an Egyptian officer as follows: He seemed to be lost in wonder as to who were his friends and who his enemies, wrote the English manager of the Alexandria waterworks after the bombardment [of Alexandria by the British fleet], of the policeman assigned to his protection by the Egyptian authorities. The feelings of that policeman were probably typical of those of the ordinary Egyptian in the early autumn of the 1882.63 [Emphasis added]

In that sense, the course of the British colonisation of Egypt did not only involve a confrontation between a colonial power and a native army but also parallel contests between absolutism and popular will (Khedival ruling/constitutional order), and between religious notions and national ones. The defeat of the Egyptian army did not particularly restore the status quo, as the British almost became the sole power holders, but it suspended the evolution of constitutional nationalism in Egypt. However, though unsuccessful and ideologically immature, the first nationalist movement led by Orabi did introduce the mantra “Egypt for Egyptians”64 and manifested a distinct Egyptian identity that came to full fruition in the course of the 1919 Revolution. In addition, the movement triggered a social perception that linked the Egyptian army to notions of patriotism

 62

Abdulrazzak Patel, The Arab Nah‫ڲ‬ah: The Making of the Intellectual and Humanist Movement (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013), 151. 63 Richmond, “Egypt, 1798-1952,” 131. 64 The term was first invented by the Egyptian newspaper Abu Naddarra, but gained momentum in the course of the Orabist movement. See Richmond, “Egypt, 1798-1952,” 116; Erez Manela, The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism, 1917-1920 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 66.

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and nationalism.65 This reputation would be further deployed in the military takeovers of 1952, 2011, and 2013. It is thus important to note, at least from a historical standpoint, that the political role of the Egyptian army has been traditionally viewed as anti-imperial and pro-national integrity, unlike the historical reputation of some South American armies, for instance.66 This element had been heavily utilised to justify and accept the Egyptian army’s political interventions. Furthermore, arguably the most important lesson of the national movement of the 1882 was the empirical experience that religious affiliation (and its modern version of the Islamic Ummah) may diametrically contradict with the very core value of nationalism and the sovereignty of a modern nation-state. Nevertheless, the inherent defect of Egypt’s nationalism largely remained untreated for the most of the 20th century and into the present day. In clearer terms, on the whole, the intellectual design of Egyptian nationalism has lacked clarity in terms of the position of nationalism with regard to religion (except for the eras of the 1919 revolution and Nasserism); it is mostly unclear which comes first: religion or national interests. This pitfall can be attributed to the fact that Egyptian nationalism was a collateral consequence of a modernisation project of a foreign ruler and not a planned project. To date, the relationship between modern Egyptian Islamism and nationalism seems to be locked in the same square; they are mutually exclusive ideologies that pretend to co-exist most of the time, but not when it truly matters.

Conclusion The evolution of a modern Egyptian identity was an unintended side-effect of Ali’s reform policies. Under Ali’s successors, due to the emergence of an educated middle class, political desire to assert de facto independence from the Ottoman Porte, and overt European meddling with Egyptian affairs, nationalist sentiments gained momentum and began to influence Egypt’s politics in the late 1870s. The Egyptian army spearheaded the first nationalist movement, leading to the adoption of Egypt’s first official constitution. However, rather than being a specifically-designed project, Egyptian nationalism was more of a reaction to injustices and discrimination inflicted on Egyptian natives. Accordingly, the nationalists’

 65

Hafez Ghanem, Egypt’s Difficult Transition: Why the International Community Must Stay Economically Engaged (Brookings, 2014). 66 See, for example, Alain Rouquie, The Military and the State in Latin America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 131-32.

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goal was not the creation of a nation-state, or gaining independence from the Porte, but merely empowerment for the Egyptian population. In practice, nationalism meant a bias towards the Egyptian element under the spiritual suzerainty of the Ottoman Caliphate. As such, the conflicting positions of Orabi and the Sultan regarding British occupation were not easy for Egyptians to assimilate. Despite the clarity, and perhaps nobility, of Orabi’s position in defending his country against foreign occupation, the Caliph’s designation of Orabi as a rebel had the effect of demoralising the Egyptian army and its supporters. However, despite the early warning that religious affiliation may contradict the notion of modern nationalism, Egypt’s subsequent history reveals that this lesson has been largely forgotten. To date, the inability to define a formula for the co-existence of these competing identities, nationalist and religious, still permeates Egypt’s ongoing political crisis and sharpens the rivalry between national statists and Islamists.

Bibliography Ágoston, Gábor, and Bruce Masters. Encyclopedia of the Ottoman Empire. New York, NY: Facts on File, 2010. Carmichael, Joel. The Shaping of the Arabs: A Study in Ethnic Identity. New York, Macmillan, 1967. Clingan, Edmund. Century of Revolution: A World History, 1770-1870. Bloomington, Indiana: iUniverse, 2013. Coatsworth, John, et al. Global Connections: Politics, Exchange, and Social Life in World History: Volume 2. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Cochran, Judith. Education in Egypt. London: Croom Helm, 1986. Cole, Juan Ricardo. Colonialism and Revolution in the Middle East: Social and Cultural Origins of Egypt’s Urabi Movement. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press: 1993. —. Napoleon's Egypt: Invading the Middle East. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Crecelius, Daniel. “Nonideological Responses of the Egyptian Ulama to Modernization.” In Scholars, Saints, and Sufis: Muslim Religious Institutions in the Middle East since 1500, edited by Nikki R. Keddie. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972. Cronin, Stephanie. Armies and State-Building in the Modern Middle East: Politics, Nationalism and Military Reform. London: I. B. Tauris & Co Ltd.: 2013.

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Fahmy, Khaled. All the Pasha’s Men: Mehmed Ali, His Army, and the Making of Modern Egypt. Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2002. Farah, Nadia. Religious Strife in Egypt: Crisis and Ideological Conflict in the Seventies. New York: Gordon and Breach Science Publishers, 1986. Fawcett, Louise. International Relations of the Middle East. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Ghanem, Hafez. Egypt’s Difficult Transition: Why the International Community Must Stay Economically Engaged. Brookings, 2014. Goldschmidt, Arthur. Historical Dictionary of Egypt. New Jersey: Scarecrow Press, 1994. Hale, William. Turkish Foreign Policy Since 1774. New York: Routledge, 2013. Harrison, Robert T. Gladstone’s Imperialism in Egypt: Techniques of Domination. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1955. Hunter, F. Robert. Egypt under the Khedives, 1805-1879: From Household Government to Modern Bureaucracy. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1984. Hussein, Ahmed. The Encyclopaedia of the History of Egypt: Part Three. Cairo: Dar Al-sha’b, 1979 (in Arabic). Maghraoui, Abdel-Slam. Liberalism without Democracy: Nationhood and Citizenship in Egypt, 1922-1936. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006. Manela, Erez. The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism, 1917-1920. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. McGregor, Andrew. Military History of Modern Egypt: From the Ottoman Conquest to the Ramadan War. Westport, CT: Praeger Security International, 2006. Mikaberidze, Alexander. Conflict and Conquest in the Islamic World: A Historical Encyclopedia. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2011. Nazeer, Ahmed. Islam in Global History: From the Death of Prophet Muhammed to the First World War. Concord, CA: American Institute of Islamic History and Culture, 2000. Reid, Donald M. “The “Urabi Revolution and the British Conquest, 19891882.” In The Cambridge History of Egypt: Volume 2, edited by M.W. Daly. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. —. Whose Pharaohs?: Archaeology, Museums, and Egyptian National Identity from Napoleon to World War I. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002.

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Richardson, Dan. Egypt. London: Rough Guides, 2003. Richmond, J. C. B. Egypt, 1798-1952: Her Advance Towards a Modern Identity. New York: Columbia University Press, 1977. Rogan, Eugene L. The Arabs: A History. New York: Penguin Books, 2012. Rouquie, Alain. The Military and the State in Latin America. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989. Salamoni, Barak A. “Historical Consciousness for Modern Citizenship: Egyptian Schooling and the Lessons of History during the Constitutional Monarchy.” In Re-envisioning Egypt 1919-1952, edited by Arthur Goldschmidt et al. Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2005. Schölch, Alexander. Egypt for the Egyptians!: The Socio-Political Crisis in Egypt, 1878-1882. London: Garnet Publishing/Ithaca Press, 1981. Sharqawi, Abdel-Raতman. Orabi: Leader of the Fellahin. Cairo: General Egyptian Book Organization, 1989. Sicker, Martin. The Islamic World in Decline: From the Treaty of Karlowitz to the Disintegration of the Ottoman Empire. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2001. Smith, Charles D. “Nationalism and Minority Identities in Islamic Societies.” In Nationalism and Minority Identities in Islamic Societies, edited by Maya Shatzmiller. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2005. Patel, Abdel-Razzak. The Arab Nah‫ڲ‬ah: The Making of the Intellectual and Humanist Movement. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013. Thompson, Elizabeth. Justice Interrupted: The Struggle for Constitutional Government in the Middle East. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013. Viorst, Milton. Sandcastles: The Arabs in Search of the Modern World. New York: Alfred Knopf, 1994.

CHAPTER TWO REIMAGINING MEDITERRANEAN SPACES: LIBYA AND THE ITALO-TURKISH WAR, 1911-1912 JONATHAN MCCOLLUM

Introduction Ernest Gellner’s enduring definition of nationalism—that it is “a political principle, which holds that the political and national unit should be congruent”1 —though admirable for its terse precision, fails to capture a most significant and contentious aspect of nationalism and the statebuilding projects in which it is implicated, namely that nations and political units must ultimately reside in a specific geographic space. Carving out these national spaces has been and remains a leitmotif of modern history, generating a raison d’être for most revolutions and a casus belli for sundry wars across the globe. If there is a modern political imaginary, a recent episteme that divides the current political culture from its premodern antecedents, it is the national imaginary, which links nation and political unit to a given territory. 2 James Gelvin labels this diffuse social imaginary a “culture of nationalism” and lists amongst its primary tenets the assumption that “nations enjoy a special relationship with a particular territory that is the repository for that nation’s history and memory.”3 It is on the geographic plane that nationalisms are legitimized

 1

Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983), 1. Eric Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 14. Hobsbawm contends that “[t]he basic characteristic of the modern nation and everything connected with it is its modernity.” 3 James Gelvin, “Pensee 1: “Arab Nationalism” Meets Social Theory,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 41 (2009), 11. 2

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and become the accepted building bloc(k) of the modern world: the nationstate. The ideological and the physical thus intersect on the soil claimed by nations, and the activities of defending, conquering, defining, and migrating to and from imagined national spaces are the sine qua non of modern history. Stressing that conflicts over territory are the sites in which nationalist ideologies meet their material limitations, in the following pages I set out to recover two failed imperial nationalisms: Italian colonialism and Ottomanism. Pairing these two together may appear at first unexpected because the Italian state and its nationalism persist, whereas Mustafa Kemal’s Republic of Turkey stamped out the last vestiges of an Ottoman state in the early 1920s; however, the Ottoman and Italian imperial fates are entwined, and the contemporaneous unraveling of the Ottomans’ Mediterranean empire and the rise of a short-lived Italian hegemony in the same spaces provide a glimpse at the contingency of two competing national imaginaries that collided in the central Mediterranean corridor.4 Italy’s first national war, fought precisely a half-century after its unification, was a colonial effort to wrest the territory of what is now Libya from the Ottoman state and was of central import to the construction of Italian nationhood. 5 And yet, the Italian imperial designs for the territory to be its “quarta sponda” (fourth shore) and the geographical and imperial imaginaries that accompanied it foundered a few decades after its victory in the Italo-Turkish War (1911-12). Likewise, an Ottoman imperial nationalism, with its own attendant geographical and demographic imaginaries, followed its soldiers into the field and provided the principles by which its officers understood and implemented their defense against their Italian opponents. This chapter thus employs the territory of Libya as a heuristic device to scrutinize two distinct imperial nationalisms and the ways in which they incorporated geographic spaces into their national syntax. The integration of Libya into these national and imperial lexicons points towards a reevaluation of the relationship between empire and nation. Nationalism has either been perceived as the death knell of the “old empires” or as inherently antithetical to imperialism. As the modern colonial empires of Europe acquired possessions overseas, they carried with them the seeds of their own destruction, transplanting a culture of nationalism into their



4 Julia Clancy-Smith, Mediterraneans: North Africa and Europe in an Age of Migration, circa 1800-1900 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2012), 198. 5 Ruth Ben-Ghiat and Mia Fuller, Italian Colonialism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 2.

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newly-acquired territories. However, such views tend to disregard the fungible and protean capacities of national identity. This chapter thus follows a more recent vein of scholarship on empire that stresses the more ambivalent and elastic relationship between empire and nation. 6 For Italians, empire and nation overlapped, as expansion in the Mediterranean could provide the means of recapturing its emigrant nation.7 The nation, perceived as losing its lifeblood through emigration, could only be cured of this hemorrhaging through a settler-colonial expansion into North Africa. For the Ottomans, however, it was not migration but alliance and conversion to Ottomanism that could save its nation/empire. Seeing these two modalities of nationalism emerging from a dialectic charged by the conflict over the imperial space of Libya, I take up an examination of two prominent nationalist actors whose efforts manifest the material conditioning of their ideologies and the imperial designs of their nationalist thought. First, on the Italian side, I investigate the political activism of Enrico Corradini, the founder of the most successful PostRisorgimento nationalist movement in Italy. One of the most vociferous advocates for the Italian seizure of Libya, his name became synonymous with Italian nationalism.8 Second, from the Ottoman camp, I proceed with an investigation not of an ideologue nor a political activist, but of a military officer: Ismail Enver Bey, the future Enver Pasha, a commander of the Ottoman forces in Cyrenaica for the duration of the conflict. An early member of the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), a participant in the 1908 “Young Turk Revolution,” and a commander in the suppression of the countercoup of 1909, Enver Bey had already risen to distinction prior to his deployment in Libya to organize resistance to the Italian invasion. While historians have long considered the CUP a cryptoTurkish nationalist society, more recent studies have questioned its supposedly Turkocentric arrogance and shown its allegiance to a more inclusive project of Ottomanization rather than an adherence to an exclusionary policy of Turkification.9 As a leading member of the CUP,

 6

See Adria Lawrence, Imperial Rule and the Politics of Nationalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Sarah Shields, Fezzes in the River: Identity Politics and European Diplomacy in the Middle East on the Eve of World War II (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 7 Mark Choate, Emigrant Nation: The Making of Italy Abroad (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008). 8 Ronald Cunsolo, “Enrico Corradini and Italian Nationalism” (Diss., New York University, 1962). 9 See Hasan Kayali, Arabs and Young Turks: Ottomanism, Arabism, and Islamism in the Ottoman Empire (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press,

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Enver Bey embodies a current in Ottoman nationalist politics that shifted course not by dint of intellectual ambivalence, but on account of changing circumstances. In many ways the careers of Enver Pasha and Enrico Corradini mirror one another: both were ebullient nationalist leaders whose relevance dissipated soon after the First World War as Mustafa Kemal’s Turkish nationalism and Benito Mussolini’s Fascism supplanted their respective movements. Examining these two leaders in parallel has the potential to magnify the ways in which these two nationalisms converged in their designs for the territory of Libya. Further, the differences between their geographical imaginaries of empire will bring into sharp relief the consequences of ideology for the territory’s inhabitants. While this chapter selects these strains of nationalism for investigation, I do not consider these the only significant contestants in the constellation of nationalisms in play at this period. Certainly, the Italo-Turkish War and the subsequent colonial war of occupation were of considerable import for Arab and later Libyan nationalists, amongst others the young Egyptian nationalist Abd al-Rahman Azzam Bey, the first secretary general of the Arab League, journeyed to the territory to join in the fray.10 Furthermore, by taking up the Italo-Turkish War as my subject of inquiry, my approach truncates the periodization of this conflict. If this chapter were concerned more with the development of either Arab or Italian nationalisms over the course of the longer war for occupation, the Italian war for Libya (191131) would be a more appropriate appellation for this struggle.11 My point is therefore not to delineate the variety of competing nationalisms but to expose how two imperial nationalist currents intersected in North Africa. It is their particular articulation with the territory of Libya and the geographical imaginaries they produced that concern me.

The Geographical Imaginaries of Libya It is, of course, an anachronism to refer to the geographic space in which the nation-state of Libya persists to this day (who knows if it will continue) as Libya. For the Ottoman Empire of 1911, the territory was divided into three parts: Trablusgarp vilâyeti (the province of West

 1997); Michelle Campos, Ottoman Brothers: Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Early 20th Century Palestine (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010). 10 Dirk Vandewalle, A History of Modern Libya, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 27. 11 Nicola Labanca, La Guerra italiana per la Libia, 1911-1931 (Bologna: Societa editrice il Mulino, 2012), 11.

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Tripoli), Fizan vilâyeti (the province of Fezzan), and Bingazi müstakil sanca÷ (the autonomous Sanjak of Benghazi). For Europeans, the territory followed the Ottoman designations, labeling the three provinces Tripolitania, Fezzan, and Cyrenaica, in reference to the seventh-centuryBCE Greek colony of Cyrene. Despite the division into separate administrative regions, Europeans and Ottomans often labeled the entire region Tripolitania (or Trablusgarp in Ottoman Turkish) in reference to its largest city. The title Libya was introduced to the country only in 1934 when Fascist Italy conjoined the three provinces into one administrative unit. The introduction of this title, a reference to the ancient Roman province of Libya, attempted to bridge Fascist Italy’s empire to its Roman antecedent by associating Mussolini’s imperial ambitions with a glorious Roman past. Ironically, the title stuck even after independence, not because of the absence of other names, but because both the Sanusi monarchy of 1951 and Muammar Gaddafi’s regime after 1969 hoped to dampen the centrifugal forces of regional divisions by adopting the Italian geographical designation. Our present difficulty with the proper historical designation of Libya in the Ottoman and early colonial period provides a glimpse at a radical transformation in Mediterranean space of which the Italo-Turkish War was part and parcel. The territories that became Libya required hardened borders and boundaries that both the Ottomans and Italians attempted to provide through the nationalization of the territorial gap between British Egypt and French Tunisia and Algeria.

Corradinian Nationalism, Settler Colonialism, and the End of Emigration Florentine novelist, theater reviewer, playwright, and journalist Enrico Corradini’s ascendancy as a political commentator accelerated rapidly after the disaster of Adwa in 1896, in which Italian forces suffered a humiliating loss at the hands of their Ethiopian foes, precluding any further expansion of their colonies in Eritrea and Somaliland. Deeply troubled by what he saw as an evermore inept foreign policy, Corradini devoted his literary pursuits to the expounding of his own political ideals: he penned two unabashedly nationalist novels, La patria lontana (The Distant Fatherland) and La guerra lontana (The Distant War), and organized l’Associazione nazionalista italiana (The Italian Nationalist Association) along with Alfredo Rocco and Luigi Federzoni in October of

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1910 and its literary arm, the journal L’idea nazionale, in March of the following year.12 Emerging at a time when liberal opportunist Prime Minister Giovanni Giolitti was seeking allies to offset the growing pressure from socialists and syndicalists, Corradini’s nationalists swung more political weight than the meager thousands of adherents that filled the ranks of his association would suggest. Germany’s volition to expand its Weltpolitik into the Mediterranean, precipitating the Second Moroccan Crisis of 1911, pushed Giolitti into the arms of the nationalists because, with France’s increasingly strident stance in Morocco, it seemed to be Italy’s last opportunity to seize Tripolitania from the Ottoman Empire with the blessings of the other Great Powers. Corradini, having recently returned from an investigative voyage to Argentina and North Africa, mounted a press campaign to promote popular approval for the invasion of Tripolitania.13 From a string of conferences held in May of 1911 and a series of articles relating his eyewitness accounts of Tripolitania and Cyrenaica first published in L’idea nazionale, Enrico Corradini composed his argument for intervention and occupation of Libya in his L’ora di Tripoli (The Moment of Tripoli). 14 While he attempted to appeal to his readers’ eagerness to reclaim national prestige after the humiliation of Adwa, he was more concerned with explicating the importance of Tripolitania as the fourth shore of Italy. Responding to proponents of a “peaceful colonization,” amongst others Luigi Einaudi and Francesco Saverio Nitti, who saw in Italy’s immigrant communities in South America and North Africa an indispensable relief valve (“una valvola di sfogo”) for Italy’s overpopulated and indigent urban and rural areas, Corradini answered back that the increasing emigration was indicative of a near-fatal wound that threatened to sap the vital energies of the nation.15 Between 1880 and 1915, over thirteen million Italians abandoned their homeland in search of a new life on different shores—an emigration incomparable to any other in recorded history. 16 Despite this immense outflow of people, population density between 1861 and 1911 still increased by nearly 40 percent from

 12

Nicola Labanca, Oltremare: Storia dell’espansione coloniale italiana (Bologna: Società editrice il Mulino, 2002), 112. 13 Enrico Corradini, Il volere d’Italia (Naples: Francesco Perrella, 1911), 143. 14 Enrico Corradini, L’ora di Tripoli (Milan: Fratelli Treves, 1911), v. 15 Tullio Pagano, “From Diaspora to Empire: Enrico Corradini’s Nationalist Novels,” MLN 119, no. 1 (2004), 67-69. 16 Choate, Emigrant Nation, 1.

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87 to 123 persons per square kilometer. 17 Imperial expansion into Tripolitania presented the cure for Italy’s terminal illness, its “diminutio capitis” (diminishing population), that had rendered it a “nazione proletaria” (proletarian nation).18 For Corradini, empire was not an economic venture in the traditional sense; he did not advocate imperialism to obtain valuable raw materials or to uncover new export markets. Empire in this respect was to be a settlercolonial endeavor to recapture the nation’s most valuable resource, its citizens. Having witnessed the conditions of Italian immigrants in Tunisia, Corradini explained that the French preferred to hire Arabs rather than Italians for multiple reasons: “First of all, the Arab worker requires far less pay; secondly, he is immune to the spirit of subversion ‘à la Européenne’ and doesn’t strike.”19 e economic structure of European colonial regimes, Corradini thus explained, merely served to perpetuate the proletarianization of Italians on a global scale. Forced to compete with Arabs for work in North African colonies, they could only hope for shortterm contracts or wages as low as their native competitors. Corradini’s observation of the plight of the European immigrant laborer in the Mediterranean corresponds to the then-contemporary Zionist labor struggles in the First and Second Aliyot. Yet, while the Second Aliyah’s response was a campaign for the conquest of labor through the collectivization of land usage, Corradini supported an expansion of the Italian state, a veritable conquest of land, and the establishment of fair labor practices under the auspices of Italian law.20 In contrast to socialists, he explained, “Our thesis is the opposite of what the socialists support. Socialism says: ‘The politics of colonial conquest is in opposition (contraria all’utile) to the proletariat!’ We say: ‘In opposition (Contraria all’utile) to the proletariat is emigration.’”21 The reasons for his objection to socialist support for emigration and aversion to colonial conquest were the economic needs of the Italian worker. He announced that even “in France, the most civilized of nations, the foreign worker, that is the Italian emigrant, is subjected to a condition of inferiority to the national worker.” 22 A “sincere” socialism must therefore actively support the

 17

Claudio Segre, L’Italia in Libia, Dall’eta giolittiana a Gheddafi (Milan: Feltrinelli Editore, 1978), 14. 18 Corradini, Il volere d’Italia, 59; Corradini, L’ora di Tripoli, 21. 19 Corradini, L’ora di Tripoli, 42. 20 Gerson Shafir, Land, Labor and the Origins of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, 1882-1914 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989). 21 Corradini, L’ora di Tripoli, 21. 22 Ibid., 24.

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proletariat, not by promoting an economically injurious system of exploitation of foreign laborers, but by encouraging imperial expansion.23 Imperial conquest, for Corradini, thus deviates from the European “capitalist” pattern typical to other western European empires. “Ours, on the other hand, will be a typical populist colonization, or, if you will, proletarian.”24 As such, the acquisition of land was the motivating factor for imperial expansion and the ultimate goal of conquest. Given these colonial designs, it is not surprising that Corradini’s discussion of the land of Tripolitania and Cyrenaica conforms to the observed tropes of settler colonial literature. Lorenzo Veracini explains that in such literature the traditional colonial encounter is rendered into “a settler colonial ‘nonencounter,’ a circumstance fundamentally shaped by the recurring need to disavow the presence of indigenous ‘others.’”25 Or, as Gabriel Piterberg has shown, land is metaphorically “emptied” before it is physically “emptied.”26 Emptying the land of its inhabitants and justifying the Italian seizure of Ottoman territory are interwoven in Corradini’s vehement appeal for war. For a text devoted wholly to an impending conflict with the Ottoman Empire, the term Ottoman is conspicuously absent from his L’ora di Tripoli. Only on a few occasions did he apply the word in reference to the Ottoman Empire, always reminding the reader of its senescence as the “moribund Ottoman Empire” (il ruinante Imperio Ottomano).27 Instead of conceding an Ottoman nationality or nation, he divided the inhabitants of its last North African possession into his own national groupings: “the native Berbers, the Arabs, and the Turks.”28 The Turks, having supplanted the Arabs as the rulers of the territory, had no claim to what he termed “il principio di nazionalità” (the national principle). Having thus distinguished the Turks as an alien tyranny in Tripolitania, he asked rhetorically, “against which nationality will we advance: against that of the Turks, against that of the Arabs, or against that of the Berbers.”29 Through a discursive sleight of hand, Corradini thus metaphorically emptied the territory of colonial others by first dividing them and then championing their conquest:

 23

Ibid., 239. Ibid., 238. 25 Lorenzo Veracini, “Introducing Settler Colonial Studies,” Settler Colonial Studies 1 (2011): 2. 26 Gabriel Piterberg, “Erasures,” New Left Review 10 (Jul. Aug. 2001), 31-33. 27 Corradini, L’ora di Tripoli, 7. 28 Ibid., 11. 29 Ibid., 11. 24

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Therefore, the national organism fractures (si rompe) and dies (and everything dies in this world, nations just as individuals); therefore, the national organism dies, and we have nothing but to carry the corpse to the cemetery. That is to say, dead individuals are delivered to the cemetery; dead national peoples are subjugated (si sottomettono). And it is just, because they no longer possess the forces, that is the national organization (ordinamento), to appreciate (far valere), as much as they can appreciate, the territory upon which they live: and therefore that relationship of equity which first existed no longer exists between them and their territory.30

Corradini thus mobilized his national principle to forcibly eject the inhabitant nationalities, categorizing and dismissing them as either tyrannical Turks or indigent natives, from the territory of Tripolitania. His ideology of nationalism uncannily anticipated the National Socialist quest for Lebensraum in Eastern Europe with its infatuation with ethnic taxonomy and its annihilation of peopled spaces in the name of national expansion. Corradini’s national ideology was also grounded in reality. Though he did mention Libya’s former incorporation into the Roman Empire, his goal was never to resurrect the glory of Rome and extend Italian territory throughout the Mediterranean.31His own national designs emanated from the very real circumstances of the Mediterranean. France, pushing in from Algeria and Tunisia, and England, already in firm control of Egypt, left little room for Italian expansion in the region. Tripolitania and Cyrenaica were the last scraps that had not yet been incorporated into a European map of the Mediterranean. For all his references to Libya as a “florid oasis” in the desert, his ultimate appeal for imperial conquest came from a more sober appreciation of the limits of Italian expansion in the ever-shrinking spaces of a Mediterranean divided into national territories.32 Ultimately, Corradini’s nationalism provided a vision for expansion that would take decades to reach fruition when Mussolini reinvigorated efforts to Italianize Libya through increased investment in settlement. Nonetheless, the nationalist campaign for conquest yielded some immediate results and provided a further impetus for Giolitti’s government to invade.

 30

Ibid., 12. Ibid., 13. 32 Ibid., 15. 31

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Seizing Tripolitania Leading the fleet charged with occupying Tripolitania and Cyrenaica were the first-class iron dreadnoughts of the Italian Navy, Vittorio Emanuele, Regina Elena, Roma, and Napoli. By 2 October 1911, they were anchored off the port of Tripoli, and after a delay of 24 hours, they commenced their bombardment of the city’s outlying forts. Thus, the first shots of the ItaloTurkish War landed on the Arab port of Tripoli. Bowing to the demands of the war hawks in his government and the popular campaign lobbying for invasion, Prime Minister Giovanni Giolitti had probed his European counterparts for their reactions to an Italian occupation of the Ottoman Vilâyets of Tripolitania and Cyrenaica. In fact, Italian ministers had long demonstrated more concern about the repercussions of their North African venture on the Eastern Question than about its military feasibility. In planning for the war, the Italians had amassed an expeditionary force of 34,000 men, 6,300 horses and mules, 1050 wagons, 48 field guns, and 24 mountain guns, which, the Italian General Staff assumed, would be more than enough to overwhelm the small Ottoman garrisons in the territories totaling no more than 5,000 men. 33 The Italian strategists, believing that the rapid capture of a few significant ports would be sufficient to bring the Ottomans to the bargaining table, planned for a naval war of short duration. When the first troops met fierce resistance not only from the Ottoman garrisons but from the local population, the Italian General Staff expressed wonder. The General Staff attributed the fact that the population “became hostile” to “the efficacy of Turkish propaganda” and ascribed the Turkish successes at repulsing Italian attacks to “their admirable knowledge of the intricate and treacherous locality.”34 Hoping to mollify the population, Rear Admiral Borea Ricci made a proclamation assuring the rights of the inhabitants of Tripoli to their property and abolishing the Ottoman practices of conscription and the head tax.35 The proclamation asserted the altruistic desires of the Italian occupiers, who sought to lead the country from its “deplorable economic conditions” to one of general welfare, to bring Tripolitanians “from



33 Renato Tittoni, The Italo-Turkish War (Kansas City, MO, 1913). The work is a translation and compilation of documents of the Italian General Staff on the conduct of the war. 34 Tittoni, The Italo-Turkish War, 26. 35 Luigi Goglia and Fabio Grassi, Il colonialismo italiano da Adua all’Imperio (Rome; Laterza, 1981). The book contains a selection of official government documents and private accounts of Italian colons and soldiers.

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poverty to wealth, from misery to prosperity.”36 However, the benevolent effusions of the navy proving ineffectual, the Italian occupiers soon resorted to more coercive means to ensure the passivity of the Arab population. The first of a series of deportations, according to a directive signed by Giolitti, sent 595 Arabs to isolation and imprisonment on the islands of Tremiti on 26 October 1911.37 Before the end of the first month of combat, the Italian advance had stalled just outside of the range of their heavy naval artillery. The Italians, better equipped and supplied, failed to dislodge the Ottoman armies of Turkish officers and local Arab recruits that laid siege to their positions. Writing for the Berliner Tageblatt, Gottlob Adolf Krause, a German linguist in residence in Tripoli in 1911, marveled at the coordination of the Arab and Turkish forces in response to the Italian invasion: With such calm and confidence everything is executed! The Turkish officers proved themselves outstandingly in a difficult and distressing situation, the whole of Turkey can be proud of them. An entire flotilla of a great power arrived to occupy an undefended city devoid of any soldiers. And the Tripolitanian Police! How have these brave men, who are mostly Arabs, managed to perform their most difficult duty day and night without falling to sleep?38

This unexpected close cooperation between the Ottoman garrison forces and the local population astonished European spectators and frustrated Italian plans to occupy the country. An analysis of this coordination of efforts between mainly Turkish officers and local irregulars provides a new perspective on late Ottoman history, one in which the Ottomans could still maintain a multiethnic empire in an age of nation-states. But what were the contours of this alliance between local and metropole?

 36

Ibid., 161. Nicola Labanca, Un nodo. Imagini e documenti sulla repressione coloniale italiana in Libia (Maduria: Lacaita, 2002), 121. 38 Peter Seebald, “Die italienische Kolonialeroberung von Tripolis – gesehen mit den Augen eines deutschen Antikolonialisten, Gottlob Adolf Krause (1850-1938), in Libyen im 20. Jahrhundert. Zwischen Fremdherrschaft und nationaler Selbstbestimmung, ed. Sabine Frank and Martina Kamp (Hamburg: Nahost Informationsdienst, 1995). 37

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Nationalism, Territory, and an Ottoman Mission Civilisatrice Enver Bey, then a major in the Ottoman Army and a leader of the Young Turk Committee of Union and Progress, departed for Cyrenaica on 9 October 1911 to recruit Libyan irregulars to fight the Italians then ensconced in Tobruk. Lamenting to a close friend Maria Sarre from his time as a military attaché to Berlin, Enver expressed his worries that “Tripolitania, that poor country, is lost for the moment, and who knows? Perhaps forever?” 39 Although he saw little hope in reclaiming the territory—the officials in Istanbul were unaware that the Italian advances into the hinterland had been effectively repulsed—the sole reason for his mission “of the utmost secrecy,” he explained, was to “perform a moral duty that the Islamic world expects from us.” 40 That Enver Bey would justify his government’s commitment to wage war with the Italians as an Islamic moral duty is indicative of a persisting Ottoman policy, which, with some success, legitimized its existence as the protector of the faithful.41 After smuggling himself through British-occupied Egypt, Enver arrived on the outskirts of Tobruk to take command of a growing army of Arab soldiers commanded by mainly Turkish officers. Within a few months he had assembled an army of 20,000 with over 10,000 camels at his disposal for supply. He found the Sanusi Sheikhs eager to bring what troops they could muster to fight against the Italians. Despite the Sanusiyya’s (a Sufi sect with considerable influence in Cyrenaica) troubled past with Istanbul, Enver’s familial relations with the Sultan (he was married to Naciye Sultan, granddaughter of Sultan Abdülmecit and niece of the reigning Sultan Mehmed V Reúad) impressed them greatly:

 39

M. ùükrü Hanio÷lu, Kendi mektuplarnda Enver Paúa (Istanbul: Der Yaynlar, 1989), 79. The collection of these letters is in itself quite a story. The letters, written in French and German to a close friend, Maria Sarre, and later entrusted to the care of another of Enver’s German connections, the naval attaché Hans Humann, were only a few years ago brought to public attention by Hanio÷lu, who located them amongst the papers of German journalist, professor, and publicist Ernst Jäckh, who had bequeathed them to Yale University. 40 Ibid., 79. 41 Selim Deringil, The Well-Protected Domains: Ideology and the Legitimation of Power in the Ottoman Empire, 1876-1909 (London: I. B. Taurus, 1999). Deringil maintains that the Ottoman Empire, faced with a “crisis of legitimacy,” integrated Islam into its legitimating discourse, paying acute attention to its role in the world as the protector of Islamic peoples and the sacred cities of Mecca and Medina.

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“The Arabs are ignorant to the title Enver Bey, … but they do respect the name of the caliph. I reign here as the son-in-law of the Sultan, and my country can also be proud of me from the perspective of my advantageous marriage.”42 The Ottoman Sultan ruled also as “Caliph of the Faithful,” a title whose significance has often been ignored, and yet one that retained considerable traction with the obstreperous Sanusi Sheikhs.43 Enver would later receive a letter from the head of the Sanusi order, Sayyid Ahmad al-Sharif, who pledged to support his cause: Hail to the vanquisher of the enemies of the fatherland and of the religion, the son-in-law of his majesty the Sultan, the symbol of strength, whose wisdom makes him the greatest of the great men of the world, the leader of all virtuous monarchs, … the light to all Sanusi Sheikhs, both living and dead …44

Enver’s position as commander in the region of Tobruk as a Turk amongst Arabs who spoke different tongues was met with no disapproval or anxiety. Enver often employed an Islamic discourse to explicate his cause and for whom he fought: And you ask me now if I would side with the Turks or with the Arabs! For me and for Sayyid Ahmad (the Sanusi Sheikh) nationality does not exist in Islam. Thus you see, that I will defend us by whatever means and will forget everything for that fight.45

Yet, the Islamic inflection of his speech should not mask the national intentions he had on the territory of Cyrenaica. Whereas Corradini’s nationalism rendered Libya a fertile, feral land ripe for imperial expansion, Enver’s imperial territory was one peopled by fellow believers whose alliance with Ottoman officers must be exploited as an opportunity to Ottomanize the territory. Shortly after his arrival in Cyrenaica, Enver set about establishing a school for the children of his irregular soldiers. After a few months of instruction, he could boast that “today we gave out prizes to the young pupils, it was their trimestral exam.

 42

Hanio÷lu, Kendi mektuplarnda Enver Paúa, 92. Rachel Simon, Libya between Ottomanism and Nationalism: The Ottoman Involvement in Libya during the War with Italy (1911-1919) (Berlin: K. Schwartz, 1987). Simon contends that the Sanusiya, with all their misgivings about Ottoman Sunni Orthodoxy, never desisted from referring to the Sultan as the leader of the believers. 44 Hanio÷lu, Kendi mektuplarnda Enver Paúa, 151. 45 Ibid., 188. 43

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Everyone was amazed with their progress in such little time.” In the midst of a war and with serious logistical obstacles to overcome, Enver Bey devoted his time and attention to schooling the locals. He extolled his contentment at seeing his “150 young Bedouin pupils at the school accompanied by their parents who had previously feared seeing a school even from a distance” and excused his small handwriting in his letters to his friend as a means of preserving paper for his students.46 The war Enver waged was not just against the Italians, but one against the backwardness of the empire’s peoples. It was to be a war of imperial construction bringing the light of the Ottoman state to the benighted subjects of the empire. It was an operationalization of what Ussama Makdisi labels “Ottoman Orientalism,” a late nineteenth-century modernizing nationalist discourse of progress, an imperial effort to discipline and reform imperial subjects of a segmented empire of modern and pre-modern spaces.47 Enver, educated at the elite schools of the capital and a representative of the modern vanguard of the CUP, enacted his own mission civilisatrice amongst his soldiers and their families. Organizing his Bedouin irregulars into companies, he even arranged for them to dress the part by distributing khaki uniforms of Ottoman regulars to replace their “national costumes.”48 He reported with effusive pride that the Sanusi Sheikhs found “that the color of the military uniform adapted very well to the color of the terrain and that the troops dressed in this manner would be better protected.”49 At this point, the majority of his irregulars eagerly replaced their clothing with new uniforms, and thus Enver “had won for the motherland a completely regular army which will serve her very well.”50 Enver, an Ottomanizing missionary of progress, perceived his role as military commander as one of conversion. Rather than merely charging the Italian lines, he had to transform the land and people of Cyrenaica from its Oriental state—he even uses the term to describe the Sanusiyya—into a progressive military force. He expressed with pride the providential force he had acquired for his nation: I have become the master of the situation. Into my hands has fallen a power (the Sanusiyya), a force for which the various powers of Europe, the Italians, the French, the English spend millions to have in their hands.

 46

Ibid., 142. Ussama Makdisi, “Ottoman Orientalism,” The American Historical Review 107, no. 3 (2002): 768-96. 48 Hanio÷lu, Kendi mektuplarnda Enver Paúa, 150. 49 Ibid., 150. 50 Ibid., 151. 47

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Even the Khedive had tried to appropriate and employ them against us. And thus, this force has come to me without my spending a dime.51

The land itself is of little use without the human force that sustains it. While Corradini’s territory must be acquired to recapture the rapidly depleting life force of the Italian nation that an accelerating emigration threatened, Enver’s national force could be accessed through an aggressive incursion into the same land, not to claim the territory but its inhabitants. Even as peace with the Italians appeared to be on the horizon, on 30 August, Enver wrote of the opening of school facilities in the fortress of Guebgueb. In the same letter in which he expressed his concerns of a rebellion in Albania and war clouds forming over the Ottoman Balkan territories, he detailed his enormous efforts in educating the people of Cyrenaica: “God help us in this ordre de civilization. There is so much to be done in this country and that is enough to encourage a desire to work.”52 After centuries of soldiers trampling the area the population and their environs have become “primitive, their homes, their habits.”53 Had it not been for the minimal efforts of the Sanusi, “the population … would now be completely illiterate and without any religion.”54 The taming of this “mountainous terrain” presenting “enormous difficulties” could only be achieved through a rigid education and the absorption of the people into a progressive nation. 55 The territory could only be recovered for civilization via its people. Enver’s Cyrenaica was not empty of people, but empty of progressive Ottomans.

Conclusion “Wenn wir unsere Ideale nicht verwirklichen können, dann können wir wenigstens unsere Wirklichkeit idealisieren.” (If we can’t realize our ideal, then we can at least idealize our reality.) Attributed to a “German book” Enver Bey read while stationed in Cyrenaica.56

The geographic space of Libya provided a venue for idealizing the reality of two struggling empires. Corradini’s “nazione proletaria” and Enver’s “sick man of Europe” both envisaged the land of Libya as a means of

 51

Ibid., 152. Ibid., 172. 53 Ibid., 173. 54 Ibid. 55 Ibid. 56 Ibid., 168. 52

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recovering a wayward population. For Corradini, an idealized Libya would be a haven for an Italian proletarian diaspora capable of regenerating the nation’s life force through reincorporation into an Italy with four shores. To create such a port of refuge meant that the territory would have to be emptied of its inhabitants, first discursively through the denial of an Ottoman nation-state, and second, physically through occupation, conquest, and subjugation to a settler-colonial force. For Enver, on the other hand, the territory itself was merely the staging area of an Ottoman mission civilisatrice that could restore Ottoman hegemony over the region through the educating and disciplining of a potential citizenry. The dialectic that emerges between these two competing nationalisms at once signals the repercussions of their ideological variations and the ultimate unity of their intentions. While it would take decades for Corradini’s designs to take root in Libya, the result of the emptying of its indigenous inhabitants was the death by warfare, disease, starvation, and thirst of half a million Libyans over the course of the Italian occupation, a sobering statistic considering that population figures for Libya in 1911 range from one to one and a half million. 57 The particular form which Italian colonialism pursued in Libya bears the marks of Corradini’s nationalist empire. As opposed to other nation-states that emerged from a period of colonial rule, Libyans were deliberately excluded from governance throughout the four decades of Italian rule. The repercussions of Italian occupation reverberate even today as Libya’s weak-state or failed-state status is often attributed, at least in part, to the lack of institutions and state-building under the Italian settler-colonial regime.58 In the wake of World War II, when it came time for Libyan nationalists to govern an independent state, the regime of King Idris I (1951-1969) lacked both the infrastructure and professional classes that had developed in Egypt, Tunisia, and Algeria under respective British and French colonial rule. Had an Ottoman Orientalist style state-building persisted, the results may have been far more amenable to the Libyan population. And yet, nationalist designs on Libya, whether Ottoman or Italian, concur in their idealization of space—both set out to build on Libyan soil a definable modern national space that would separate it from similar spaces constructed on its flanks. The Italo-Turkish War was thus intended to complete the nationalization of the Mediterranean.

 57

Ali Ahmida, The Making of Modern Libya: State Formation, Colonization, and Resistance, 1830-1932 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), 1. 58 See both Ahmida and Vandewalle.

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Bibliography Ahmida, Ali. The Making of Modern Libya: State Formation, Colonization, and Resistance, 1830-1932. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994. Ben-Ghiat, Ruth, and Mia Fuller. Italian Colonialism. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Campos, Michelle. Ottoman Brothers: Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Early 20th Century Palestine. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010. Choate, Mark. Emigrant Nation: The Making of Italy Abroad. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008. Clancy-Smith, Julia. Mediteraneans: North Africa and Europe in an Age of Migration, circa 1800-1900. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2012. Corradini, Enrico. Il volere d’Italia. Naples: Francesco Perrella, 1911. —. L’ora di Tripoli. Milan: Fratelli Treves, 1911. Cunsolo, Ronald. “Enrico Corradini and Italian Nationalism.” Diss., New York University, 1962. Deringil, Selim. The Well-Protected Domains: Ideology and the Legitimation of Power in the Ottoman Empire, 1876-1909. London: I. B. Taurus, 1999. Gellner, Ernest. Nations and Nationalism. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983. Gelvin, James. “Pensee 1: “Arab Nationalism” Meets Social Theory.” International Journal of Middle East Studies 41 (2009): 10-12. Goglia, Luigi and Fabio Grassi. Il colonialismo italiano da Adua all’Imperio. Rome: Laterza, 1981. Hanio÷lu, M. ùükrü. Kendi mektuplarnda Enver Paúa. Istanbul: Der Yaynlar, 1989. Hobsbawm, Eric. Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Kayali, Hasan. Arabs and Young Turks: Ottomanism, Arabism, and Islamism in the Ottoman Empire. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997. Labanca, Nicola. La Guerra italiana per la Libia, 1911-1931. Bologna: Societa editrice il Mulino, 2012. —. Oltremare: Storia dell’espansione coloniale italiana. Bologna: Società editrice il Mulino, 2002. —. Un nodo. Imagini e documenti sulla repressione coloniale italiana in Libia Manduria: Lacaita, 2002.

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Lawrence, Adria. Imperial Rule and the Politics of Nationalism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Makdisi, Ussama. “Ottoman Orientalism.” The American Historical Review 107, no. 3 (2002): 768-796. Pagano, Tulio. “From Diaspora to Empire: Enrico Corradini’s Nationalist Novels.” Modern Language Notes 119, no. 1 (2004): 67-83. Piterberg, Gabriel. “Erasures.” New Left Review 10 (2001): 31-46. Seebald, Peter. “Die italienische Kolonialeroberung von Tripolis – gesehen mit den Augen eines deutschen Antikolonialisten, Gottlob Adolf Krause (1850-1938).” In Libyen im 20. Jahrhundert. Zwischen Fremdherrschaft und nationaler Selbstbestimmung, edited by Sabine Frank and Martina Kamp. Hamburg: Nahost Informationsdienst, 1995. Segre, Claudio. L’Italia in Libia, Dall’eta giolittiana a Gheddafi. Milan: Feltrinelli Editore, 1978. Shafir, Gerson. Land, Labor and the Origins of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, 1882-1914. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989. Shields, Sarah. Fezzes in the River: Identity Politics and European Diplomacy in the Middle East on the Eve of World War II. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Simon, Rachel. Libya between Ottomanism and Nationalism. The Ottoman Involvement in Libya during the War with Italy (1911-1919). Berlin: K. Schwartz, 1987. Tittoni, Renato. The Italo-Turkish War. Kansas City, MO, 1913. Vandewalle, Dirk. A History of Modern Libya. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Veracini, Lorenzo. “Introducing Settler Colonial Studies.” Settler Colonial Studies 1 (2011): 1-12.

CHAPTER THREE NATION AND IDENTITY CONSTRUCTION IN MODERN IRAQ: (RE)INSERTING THE ASSYRIANS MARIAM GEORGIS “Iraqi history teaches us that your grandfathers were always the source of the right ideas and science, and this is how they were before Islam. It is well known that long before Islam, Hammurabi’s laws set an example to others, and that the civilizations of Babylon, Assyria and Sumer were the cradle of world civilization. This is how you Iraqis were five thousand years ago.” Saddam Hussein, February 17, 1979 “Nebuchadnezzar was, after all, an Arab from Iraq, albeit ancient Iraq.” Saddam Hussein, July 17, 1979

Introduction The global expansion of the Westphalian state system, wherein one nation is territorially bounded inside a state, is one facet of colonial modernity. The area known as the Middle East was socio-politically reconfigured into nation-states by Western powers following the First World War. 1 Specifically, a series of agreements such as the Sykes-Picot Agreement,



1 See Rashid Khalidi, Resurrecting Empire: Western Footprints and America’s Perilous Path in the Middle East (Boston: Beacon Press, 2010); Keith David Watenpaugh, Being Modern in the Middle East: Revolution, Nationalism, Colonialism, and the Arab Middle Class (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014); Edward Peter Fitzgerald, “France’s Middle Eastern ambitions, the SykesPicot negotiations, and the oil fields of Mosul, 1915-1918,” The Journal of Modern History 66, no. 4 (1994): 697-725; Douglas Little, Orientalism: The United States and the Middle East since 1945 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2008); Mahmood Mamdani, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, The Cold War, and the Roots of Terror (New York: Three Leaves Press, 2004).

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Treaty of Sèvres, and the Treaty of Lausanne between major European powers determined the existing borders of many Middle Eastern countries, including the geographical territory that became the modern state of Iraq. This chapter seeks to problematize the exclusionary practices of modern nation-state building by looking at the case of the Assyrians in Iraq. Many scholars have examined the role of violence in the process of nation- or state-building.2 Historically, Iraq’s nation-building project, as all nationbuilding projects, has attempted to construct a homogeneous national identity through the exclusion of segments of society considered not to belong. One such mechanism is enacting policies aimed at re-writing the history of the Iraqi state to construct an exclusively Arab national identity. It is important to note that the rise of Pan-Arabism in the early and midtwentieth century was, to a large extent, a by-product of colonialism. However, this historical revisionism via nation-building in modern Iraq has resulted in the marginalization of various religious, linguistic, cultural, and ethnic minorities. To narrow the scope of this work, I use the case of the Assyrians to examine how certain subjects came to be constituted as Iraqi citizens while the Assyrians were deemed as not belonging to the Iraqi nation. In Exalted Subjects: Studies in the Making of Race and Nation in Canada, Sunera Thobani posits that the national subject is exalted above all others as the “embodiment of the quintessential characteristics of the nation and personification of its values, ethics and

 2

See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991); Janice E. Thomson, Mercenaries, Pirates, and Sovereigns: State Building and Extraterritorial Violence in Early Modern Europe (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994); Thomas G. Mitchell, Native vs. Settler: Ethnic Conflict in Israel/Palestine, Northern Ireland, and South Africa (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2000); Andrea Smith, Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2005); Anibal Quijano, "The Challenge of the ‘Indigenous Movement’ in Latin America," Socialism and Democracy 19, no. 3 (2005): 55-78; Annie E. Coombes, Rethinking Settler Colonialism: History and Memory in Australia, Canada, Aotearoa New Zealand and South Africa (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006); A. Dirk Moses, Empire, Colony, Genocide: Conquest, Occupation, and Subaltern Resistance in World History (New York: Berghahn Books, 2008); Gary B. Nash, Red, White, and Black: The Peoples of Early North America, 6th Edition (Boston: Prentice Hall, 2010); Sherene Razack, "A Hole in the Wall; A Rose at a Checkpoint: The Spatiality of Colonial Encounters in Occupied Palestine," Journal of Critical Race Inquiry 1, no. 1 (2010): 90-108; Sherene Razack, Malinda Smith, and Sunera Thobani, eds., States of Race: Critical Race Feminism for the 21st Century (Toronto: Between the Lines, 2010).

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civilizational mores.” 3 On the other hand, the outsider is a ‘figure of concern’; “properly defined as devoid of the qualities and values of the nation – as being quite alien to these – the stranger provokes anxiety, if not outright hostility.”4 The aims of this chapter are, first, to disrupt common narratives of the Iraqi nation-state by examining the processes through which the Indigenous Assyrian minority came to be seen as not to belong; and second, to re-insert the Assyrians as an Indigenous minority into the fabric of Iraqi society and politics. Joyce Green writes, “we come to know ourselves through the selective, collective construction of significant events that form a unifying mythology – unifying for those who are included; alienating for those who are excluded.” 5 Drawing on this understanding of history and its role in constructing the nation, I begin with theoretical considerations of the relationship between the nationbuilding process and the removal of Indigenous inhabitants. This is followed by an exploration of Iraqi studies to challenge the depiction of Assyrians as a religious minority or ‘refugees from Turkey’ – effectively stripping them of their identity as native inhabitants of Iraq. The argument is complemented with an analysis of Iraqi policies of genocide and assimilation to delineate the process by which Assyrians were ‘cast out’6 of the Iraqi nation. Put differently, I analyze the campaign of historical revisionism wherein Mesopotamian heritage was Arabized, simultaneously appropriating the Assyrian identity into the making of an Iraqi nation while erasing their identity and existence. These two processes have worked together to erase the Assyrians (or those who continued to identify as Assyrian) and were part and parcel of the nation-building process of modern Iraq. It is important to outline a few things at the onset. The decision to identify a historical starting point is arbitrary and inextricably embedded within power relations. I am defining ‘modern Iraq’ as beginning with the British mandate in 1920 when it was first carved out as a state, with the contention that this place has had different meanings and different names throughout its history for different peoples. This chapter does not examine

 3

Sunera Thobani, Exalted Subjects: Exalted Subjects: Studies in the Making of Race and Nation in Canada. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007: 3. 4 Ibid., 4. 5 Joyce Green, “Towards a Detente with History*: Confronting Canada’s Colonial Legacy,” International Journal of Canadian Studies 12, Fall (1995): 86. 6 I am drawing on Sherene Razack’s Casting Out: The Eviction of Muslims from Western Law and Politics to think about how Assyrians have come to lack the ‘right to have rights.’

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the different examples of oppression that have taken place since the Iraqi state’s inception, such as the violence against the Shi’a Arabs, Kurds, Jews, Yazidis, and other peoples. I am not excluding these stories because they are unimportant, but because this chapter’s focus is to map out the experiences of conquest, dispossession, genocide, and assimilation that Assyrians have experienced during different periods and under different regimes. Finally, I am using the term Indigenous with the recognition that it is mostly associated with native inhabitants of North America, Latin America, Australia, and New Zealand who were colonized by Europe. I argue that this term extends to native inhabitants of the Middle East, specifically the Assyrians of Iraq, who have also experienced conquest, dispossession, colonialism, and erasure in their homelands.

Erasing Indigenous Peoples The erasure of Mesopotamia’s Indigenous inhabitants cannot be studied in isolation; rather, it must be studied in conjunction with the modern phenomenon of nationalism and nation-building that has required – even necessitated – the removal of those identified as ‘outsiders’ or ‘foreign.’ In part, this is how sovereignty works, by building one concrete nation ‘inside’ to keep chaos ‘outside.’ This is also how nation-building and nationalism functions; the modern state of Iraq was created to be an ‘Arab state,’ meaning those who did not identify as ‘Arab’ could not be part of the nation. Patrick Wolfe examines the relationship between genocide and the settler-colonial tendency, which he calls the “logic of elimination.” Specifically, he asserts that “land is life – or, at least, land is necessary for life. Thus contests for land can be – indeed often are – contests for life.”7 Wolfe argues that an understanding of race as a social construct is not enough. That is, a race cannot be taken as a given; it is made in the targeting.8 It follows that “Indigenous North Americans were not killed, driven away, romanticized, assimilated, fenced in, bred White, and otherwise eliminated as the original owners of the land but as Indians.”9 Similarly, Deborah Bird Rose observes, “to get in the way of settler colonization, all the native has to do is stay home.” 10 Thus, the main

 7

Patrick Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” Journal of Genocide Research 8, no. 4 (2006): 387. 8 Ibid. 9 Ibid., 388. 10 Deborah Bird Rose, Hidden Histories: Black Stories from Victoria River Downs, Humbert River and Wave Hill Stations (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 1991): 46.

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motive for elimination is not race, religion, or ethnicity but access to territory: “territoriality is settler colonialism’s specific, irreducible element.”11 While the settler-colonialism of North America, New Zealand, and Australia by Europeans are specific experiences, a number of scholars have examined the logic of erasing Indigenous peoples and its extension to the logic of erasing or the oppression of other racialized peoples. 12 Accordingly, I am extending this understanding to the experiences of conquest, colonization, dispossession and the settlement of the Assyrians’ ancestral homeland in the Middle East. I argue there are similarities between these experiences, which will be fleshed out in the sections to follow; and, more importantly, that territoriality is a fundamental element to constructing the ‘nation.’ In First Voices: An Aboriginal Women’s Reader, Patricia Monture and Patricia McGuire assert, “the land is who we are as peoples. To know who you are you must also know where you come from. This means understanding the relationship you have with the territory of your people.”13 Accordingly, the dispossession of Indigenous peoples from their ancestral lands has had a profound impact on their identity. Moreover, this dispossession has also resulted in their social, political, and economic

 11

Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” 388. See Liora Lukitz, Iraq: The Search for National Identity (London: Frank Cass, 1995); Thomas G. Mitchell, Native vs. Settler: Ethnic Conflict in Israel/Palestine, Northern Ireland, and South Africa (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2000); John Joseph, The Modern Assyrians of the Middle East: Encounters with Western Christian Missions, Archaeologists, and Colonial Powers (Leiden: Brill, 2000); Vahram Petrosian, "Assyrians in Iraq," Iran and the Caucasus 10, no. 1 (2006): 113-47; Paul Isaac, "The Urgent Reawakening of the Assyrian Question in an Emerging Iraqi Federalism: The Self-Determination of the Assyrian People," Northern Illinois University Law Review 29 (2008): 209-43; Hirmis Aboona, Assyrians, Kurds, and Ottomans: Intercommunal Relations on the Periphery of the Ottoman Empire (Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, 2008); Shamiran Mako and Sargon Donabed, "Ethno-Cultural and Religious Identity of Syrian Orthodox Christians," Chronos 19 (2009): 69-111; Hannibal Travis, Genocide in the Middle East: The Ottoman Empire, Iraq and Sudan (Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 2010); Sargon Donabed, Reforging a Forgotten History: Iraq and the Assyrians in the Twentieth Century (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015); Andrea Smith, "The Colonialism That is Settled and the Colonialism That Never Happened," Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education and Society, June 2014; also Coombes, Rethinking Settler Colonialism; Nash, Red, White, and Black; Razack, “A Hole in the Wall.” 13 Patricia A. Monture and Patricia D. McGuire, ed., First Voices: An Aboriginal Women's Reader (Toronto: Inanna Publications and Education Inc., 2009): 3. 12

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marginalization. Brenda Mcleod writes, “the physical loss of lands and resources for First Nations accompanied by repressive government policies, have separated First Nations from their lands and resources, either through harvesting resources with little or no return to First Nations communities or by restricting access and economic development for the benefit of those same communities.”14 This experience of identity as being attached to a land is also applicable to Assyrians. Along with other mechanisms of erasure, Assyrians’ removal from their lands15 has had a profound impact on their social, cultural, political, and economic structure. Nations are not built on territory alone; states must engage in a process of nation-building, including founding myths embedded within historical discourses. Isabel Altamirano-Jiminez argues that the nation requires a sense of ‘sameness’ based on tradition when expressing itself through the language of nationalism. Specifically, Altamirano-Jiminez contends, “the construction of nationalism is a political process in which historical models are evoked, gender roles are constructed, and symbols, customs, and political and social practices are selected in the assertion of the right to a homeland.” 16 In her examination of myth-making in Canada, Green asserts “the events that are designated as memorable and their

 14

Brenda Mcleod, “First Nations Women and Sustainability of the Canadian Prairies,” in First Voices: An Aboriginal Women's Reader, ed. Patricia A. Monture and Patricia D. McGuire (Toronto: Inanna Publications and Education Inc., 2009), 155. 15 The removal of Assyrians from their ancestral lands that coincide with the geographical entity which is present-day Iraq can be traced through historical periods. For example, in 1933 during the Simele Massacre wherein over sixty villages were razed. For a detailed account of the destruction of these villages, see Sargon Donabed, Iraq and the Assyrian Unimagining: Illuminating Scaled Suffering and a Hierarchy of Genocide from Simele to Anfal (Diss., University of Toronto, 2010). From the 1960s and onwards, the Iraqi government engaged in the removal of Assyrians from their lands in various phases and to different degrees. See “Cultural Rights and Democracy: Iraqi Assyrians a Case Study for Government Intervention,” Iraq Sustainable Democracy Project (November 2006). Another notable historical period is the Anfal Campaign in 1988. See Sargon Donabed, Reforging a Forgotten History: Iraq and the Assyrians in the Twentieth Century (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015). The invasion of 2003 continued this history of cleansing areas in Iraq from their original inhabitants. This occurred in cities where entire districts like Dora in Baghdad were emptied, in the north, which became the Kurdistan Regional Governorate and in Mosul following the occupation of ISIS. 16 Isabel Altamirano-Jiminez, “Nunavut: Whose Homeland, Whose Vices?” in First Voices: An Aboriginal Women's Reader, ed. Patricia A. Monture and Patricia D. McGuire (Toronto: Inanna Publications and Education Inc., 2009), 151.

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interpretation through the lens of ‘H’istory shape our collective consciousness…However, the ‘H’istorical record is seldom acknowledged to be contingent and subjective.”17 Moreover, justifications are made for violence and assimilatory policies against the Indigenous population, including the denigration of the culture of the Other. 18 However, in addition to violence, the case of the Assyrians shows the appropriation of their history by the Iraqi state in its quest for legitimacy and a leadership role in the Arab world. This will be discussed in the sections to follow.

Iraqi Studies For the most part, Iraqi studies either completely exclude Assyrians from the ‘story of Iraq’ or distort their identity. The latter is committed through the removal of the Assyrians’ ethnicity and referring to them as merely ‘Christians;’ or, similarly, through the fragmentation of their identity by dividing them denominationally or linguistically and referring to them as ‘Chaldean,’ ‘Syriac,’ or ‘Jacobite.’ Lastly, their identity is distorted by inaccurately referring to them as ‘migrants from Turkey’ following the First World War. The exclusion of Assyrians and the distortion of their identity are not mutually exclusive; they often occur simultaneously. The confusion with regards to the names used to refer to this community can, in part, be attributed to various European missionaries, conquest, colonialism, and scholars who have studied this community but are either not from the community or have not consulted members of the community. More importantly, as in any other community, there have been internal debates and different responses by various segments of the community to these historical experiences, which have further resulted in the complication of their name. 19 Shak Hanish takes up the appellation issue and discusses the internal debate among Assyrians regarding their identity. There are concerns with some of his arguments, but he concludes as follows:

 17

Green, “Towards A Detente With History,” 86-87. Ibid., 87. 19 I am not arguing that contemporary Assyrians are not fragmented along denominational lines. Rather, I am contextualizing this fragmentation as an effect of historical colonial modernity, with the understanding that this fragmentation is real today. The post-2003 sectarian turn in this debate within the Assyrian community is very much analogous to the sectarianization of Iraqi politics (and the region) broadly. That is, Assyrian politics occur within the wider Iraqi context, which has taken on an increasingly sectarian dynamic since the invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003. 18

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Chapter Three the common features of a nationality are language, geography, history, tradition and norm, and even religion in some cases. Language is the most important component of a nationality. Almost all these people still speak Aramaic, which is now called simply Syriac. Therefore, it is fair to argue that they are one nationality and should have a united name.20

Although the appellation issue is important, scholars who have carefully traced the genealogy of such developments in terms of the Assyrian name have taken it up elsewhere.21 Accordingly, I am using the term Assyrian here to refer to those who self-identify as Assyrian, who are defined as follows: Remnants of the people of ancient Mesopotamia, succeeding the SumeroAkkadians and the Babylonians as one continuous civilization. They are among the first nations who accepted Christianity. They belong to one of the four churches: the Chaldean Uniate, the Syrian Orthodox Church, the Syrian Catholic Church and the Assyrian Church of the East. Due to the ethnic-political conflict in the Middle East, they are better known by these ecclesiastical designations. The Assyrians use classical Syriac in their liturgies while the majority of them speak and write a modern dialect of this language. They constitute the third-largest ethnic group in Iraq with their communities in Syria, Lebanon, Turkey, Iran, Russia and Armenia. Today they remain stateless, and great numbers of them left their homeland and settled in Western Europe, the United States, and Australia.22

For the purpose of this work, I am setting the appellation debate aside to focus on the issues of erasure – in its various forms – of the Assyrians in modern Iraq. An examination of the entire field of Iraqi studies is beyond the scope of this chapter. Accordingly, I look at some of the prominent scholarship, or what have come to be seen as credible sources, on the history of modern Iraq in contemporary studies, as Iraq has been elevated to center stage of

 20

Shak Hanish, “The Chaldean Assyrian Syriac People of Iraq: An Ethnic Identity Problem,” Digest of Middle East Studies (2008): 43-44. 21 See Sargon Donabed, "Rethinking Nationalism and an Appellative Conundrum: Historiography and Politics in Iraq," National Identities 14, no. 4 (2012): 407-31; also see Joseph, The Modern Assyrians of the Middle East; Petrosian, “Assyrians in Iraq;” Aboona, Assyrians, Kurds, and Ottomans; Hanish, “The Chaldean Assyrian Syriac People of Iraq;” Mako and Donabed, “Ethno-Cultural and Religious Identity of Syrian Orthodox Christians;” Isaac, “The Urgent Reawakening of the Assyrian Question in an Emerging Iraqi Federalism.” 22 Agnes G. Korbani, The Political Dictionary of the Modern Middle East (Washington, DC: University Press of America, 1995): 26.

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Middle East studies since the invasion of 2003. I seek to examine the depiction of Assyrians in these works and, similarly, who constructs the Iraqi ‘nation.’ In “Contested Nations: Iraq and the Assyrians,” Sami Zubaida defines Assyrians as “Christian mountain tribes” and mostly “refugees from Turkish Kurdistan under British protection.”23 He asserts that Assyrians were “one community which actively resisted integration into the new nation-state and, as a result, were subject to violent attacks by the nascent Iraqi army in 1933.”24 There are a number of issues with this depiction of Assyrians. The Assyrians who came to settle in Iraq after the still-unrecognized genocide of 1915 by the Young Turks must be contextualized. 25 The borders between Turkey, Iraq, Syria, and Iran were modern constructions; Assyrians traditionally inhabited these lands, even after the fall of their empire. Donabed writes, “not unlike the scramble for Africa following the Berlin Conference in 1884, Assyrians, like many native African peoples, found themselves fragmented by arbitrarily created boundaries that would become the basis for internal and external components of otherisation.”26 In other words, those Assyrians who fled the genocide in present-day Turkey were arguably moving within their traditional territories as they saw this division of their population between four modern nation-states as artificial.27 In addition, the only members of the community who are labelled as Assyrian are the “migrants from Turkey,” while the Assyrians who found themselves ‘inside’ the newlycreated Iraqi state were reduced to a “religious minority.” 28 In “The Fragments Imagine the Nation: The Case of Iraq,” Zubaida examines

 23

Sami Zubaida, “Contested Nations: Iraq and the Assyrians,” Nations and Nationalism 6, no. 3 (2000): 366. 24 Ibid., 373. 25 While this paper focuses on Assyrians’ erasure from Iraq, the projects of modernization in the Middle East, particularly in the Ottoman Empire and Iraq are linked in terms of erasing Indigenous Assyrian Identity. The genocide carried out by the Young Turks in Turkey was facilitated by the birth of nationalism; that is, it was part of a vision for creating a ‘modern’ Turkish nation which necessitated the removal of territory’s non-Turkish inhabitants. 26 Donabed, Reforging a Forgotten History, 55. 27 Ibid., 76. 28 For a historical discussion of Assyrians as native inhabitants of Mesopotamia, see Sargon Donabed, Iraq and the Assyrian Unimagining: Illuminating Scaled Suffering and a Hierarchy of Genocide from Simele to Anfal (Diss., University of Toronto, 2010); Fadi Dawood, Refugees, Warriors and Minorities in Iraq: The Case of the Assyrians London: University of London, SOAS, 2014); also see Joseph, The Modern Assyrians of the Middle East; Aboona, Assyrians, Kurds, and Ottomans; Travis, Genocide in the Middle East.

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different constructions of the Iraqi nation, focusing on the schism between Sunni and Shi’a Arabs. However, he does insert a caveat that his paper does not deal with the “Kurdish question” and makes a reference to “religious minorities.”29 Here, Assyrians are completely absent on the one hand, but they are misidentified as merely a ‘religious minority’ on the other hand. Similarly, in A History of Iraq, Charles Tripp identifies the inhabitants of Iraq at the beginning of the mandate as Sunni, Shi’a, Kurdish, Jewish, Christian, Yazidi, Sabaean, and Turkmen, and refers to Assyrians as “recently arrived” from Turkey. 30 Phebe Marr refers to ‘Ancient Mesopotamia,’ but only in terms of the past with no connection to presentday Assyrians. Much like other Iraqi studies scholars, she identifies the people of Iraq as Sunni and Shi’a Arabs, Kurds, and other minorities, including Christians. Marr also divides Assyrians into Catholics and Nestorians and refers to them as settlers in the northern areas of Iraq after the First World War. 31 Toby Dodge’s Inventing Iraq: The Failure of Nation Building and a History Denied provides a good analysis of the role of colonial powers and policies in shaping the future Iraqi state. 32 However, there is no mention of Assyrians, which does not account for the myriad levels of coloniality at work in Iraq. In all these cases, either Assyrians are absent, or the name is only given to those migrating from Turkey; the Assyrians already inside Iraq have been stripped of their ethnic identity and reduced to a religious minority. This rudimentary analysis of Assyrians in Iraqi studies is important because it highlights several interconnected issues. Iraqi studies has predominantly focused on the dynamics and politics of Sunni and Shi’a Arabs, and more recently, the Kurdish question/element in Iraq. To that extent, there has been almost no mention of Iraq’s Indigenous minority, the Assyrians. Where they are mentioned as a race or ethnicity, they are often depicted as having migrated from Turkey and not Indigenous to Iraq. Similarly, and just as problematic, is the division of the Assyrian ethnicity along denominational lines such as Chaldean, Syriac, etc. This erases their entire history in Mesopotamia and denies their attachment to the land;

 29

Sami Zubaida, “The Fragments Imagine the Nation: The Case of Iraq,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 34 (2002): 205-15. 30 Charles Tripp, A History of Iraq, 3rd Edition (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 31 Phebe Marr, A Modern History of Iraq, 3rd Edition (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 2012): 18. 32 Toby Dodge, Inventing Iraq: The Failure of Nation Building and a History Denied (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003).

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Assyrian towns and villages are ancient and serve as an integral part of their cultural heritage. Moreover, the denial of Assyrians’ right to their ancestral lands has economic consequences, as these lands are worth millions of dollars.33 Subsequently, this results in the marginalization of Assyrians economically, culturally, and politically. I am not suggesting that this is the result of malice on the part of intellectuals or Iraqi scholars. However, I am suggesting that it speaks to the successes of the nationbuilding project of modern Iraq, which has erased its Indigenous component and presented itself as an ‘Arab’ nation with a ‘Kurdish problem.’

Iraqi Policies The fragmentary nature or the lack of a unified national identity has been a major concern of Iraqi studies, especially after 2003 when scholars were looking to explain why Iraq had failed to transition to a democracy after over a decade of ‘democratic nation-building.’ Many of the studies regard this perceived fragmentation as a result of the colonial establishment of the Iraqi state after the First World War, which placed previously sovereign or autonomous groups together to create the new state of Iraq.34 Of course, there is considerable scholarship that speaks to the existence of an Iraqi national identity and that critiques this perceived inherent ‘fragmentation,’ seeing it as a consequence of the ‘sectarianization’ of the Iraqi state under the Anglo-American occupation. 35 This debate is not the focus of this particular work; rather, this section seeks to problematize the construction of an Iraqi national identity on two counts. The first point is that the model

 33

Iraq Sustainable Democracy Project, “Cultural Rights and Democracy: Iraqi Assyrians a Case Study for Government Intervention,” November 2006. 34 See William R. Polk, Understanding Iraq (Toronto: Harper, 2005); Peter Sluglett, Britain in Iraq: Contriving King and Country (London: I. B. Tauris, 2007); Gareth Stansfield, Iraq: People, History, Politics (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007); also see Lukitz, Iraq; Zubaida, “The Fragments Imagine the Nation”; Dodge, Inventing Iraq; Tripp, A History of Iraq; Marr, A Modern History of Iraq. 35 See Sabah Alnasseri, “Imperialism, Political Islam, and Iraq” (paper presented at Socialist Register – Global Flashpoints: Reactions to Imperialism and Neoliberalism, Toronto, Canada, November 2007); Tareq Y. Ismael and Max Fuller, “The Disintegration of Iraq: The Manufacturing and Politicization of Sectarianism,” International Journal of Contemporary Iraqi Studies 2, no. 3 (2009): 443-73; Tareq Y. Ismael and Jacqueline Ismael, Iraq in the Twenty-First Century: Regime Change and the Making of a Failed State (New York: Routledge, 2015); Sa’ad Naji Jawad, “Iraq from Occupation to the Risk of Disintegration,” Contemporary Arab Affairs 9, no. 1 (2016): 27-48.

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of Pan-Arabism meant the exclusion of those groups who did not identify as ‘Arab;’ and second is that the Iraqi state enacted policies that resulted in the ‘Arabization’ of Mesopotamian heritage. This was, in part, an attempt to ‘Arabize’ all groups in the search for a pan-Arab identity by giving these diverse communities a common heritage and to garner legitimacy and prestige in the Arab world. This process has been taken up by scholars such as Amatzia Baram36 and Eric Davis.37 However, going beyond the examination of this process as one aspect of the nation-building of the Iraqi state, I argue that the dispossession of Assyrians from their ancestral lands and the appropriation of their Mesopotamian ancestry were part and parcel of the nation-building process in the construction of the modern Iraqi state. As such, this particular analysis positions Assyrians as Indigenous to what is today known as Iraq. Donabed echoes Wolfe in his assertion that Iraq’s deliberate policy to contain any spread of Assyrian nationalism cannot be regarded as mere hatred due to ethnic and/or religious differences; rather, it “must be understood as a deliberate requirement of Iraqi nation and state building, formulated ostensibly around an exclusively Arab national identity.” 38 Accordingly, the 1933 Simele massacre constitutes the first act of genocide by the Iraqi state in response to a perceived ‘Assyrian problem’ wherein three hundred to five hundred civilians were slaughtered by the Iraqi army. This was followed by the looting and destruction of more than sixty Assyrian villages in the surrounding area.39 Donabed asserts, “this violent foundational moment in Iraq’s struggle for independence, as referred to by Elie Kedouri is analogous to the ending of the British mandate in Palestine in early 1948 and the beginning of Plan Dalet, which led to the April 1948 massacre of Palestinians at Deir Yassin, Israel.”40 Similarly, in The Crystallization of the Iraqi State, Zoe Preston contends, “the massacres at Simele exemplified the problem of Iraq’s state-building,



36 Amatzia Baram, Culture, History, and Ideology in the Formation of Ba'athist Iraq, 1968-89 (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1991). 37 Eric Davis, Memories of State: Politics, History, and Collective Identity in Modern Iraq (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). 38 Donabed, Iraq and the Assyrian Unimagining, 2010. 39 See Sargon Donabed, Reforging a Forgotten History: Iraq and the Assyrians in the Twentieth Century (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015); Fadi Dawood, Refugees, Warriors and Minorities in Iraq: The Case of the Assyrians London: University of London, SOAS, 2014); Yusuf Malek, The British Betrayal of the Assyrians (Chicago: The Assyrian National Federation and The Assyrian National League of America, 1935). 40 Ibid., xvi.

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which could only progress via nation destroying.”41 The importance of this event is evident in the Iraqi state’s depiction of Assyrians as ‘foreign’ or collaborators with a much-resented colonial power – a foreign occupying power. Fadi Dawood writes: the Iraqi narrative of these events, published in the al-Istiqlal newspaper, claimed that the attacks were a necessary measure in order to protect the ‘Arabness’ of the Iraqi people against the colonial aggression of the British, and against Assyrian political leaders who were trying to destroy the sanctity of the Iraqi state and the fragile social cohesiveness that was emerging so soon after independence from Britain in 1932.42

For the Assyrians, these events set the course for their experiences in modern Iraq; the massacres and the repercussions from them would affect the Assyrians and Iraq as a whole, as the Assyrian ethnic and cultural identity became undesirable following 1933. 43 From the Iraqi point of view, as was shown in the previous section, the Assyrians were depicted as foreign people; “this ideology, taken a step further, gave the atrocities at Simele a façade of inevitability and necessity.”44 Marion Farouk-Sluglett and Peter Sluglett refer to Pan-Arabism in Iraq as involving the “propagation of the theme that twentieth century Iraqis were the direct descendants of the Mesopotamians and Babylonians, in an effort to promote feelings of loyalty and pride in the new country.” 45 Baram provides an extensive account of the ideological element of the ‘Arabization’ of Iraq. Specifically, the Mesopotamian component was introduced in 1969 in order “to satisfy, on the ideological level, Kurdish demands to be treated as equals to Arabs in their common homeland, because it presented Iraqi history from remote antiquity as a common history of Arabs and Kurds alike.”46 While Baram gives a detailed account of the policies with which the Iraqi state used the Mesopotamian heritage to construct an Iraqi national identity, he does not connect Mesopotamia to contemporary Assyrians, whose history is being appropriated. This served not only to deny Assyrians’ heritage and ties to their homeland, but to feed the constructed idea of their ‘foreignness.’ That is, the ‘Assyrian’ identity

 41

Zoe Preston, The Crystallization of the Iraqi State: Geopolitical Function and Form (London: Peter Lang, 2003): 251. 42 Dawood, Refugees, Warriors and Minorities in Iraq, 220. 43 Donabed, Iraq and the Assyrian Unimagining, 82. 44 Donabed, Reforging a Forgotten History, 241. 45 Marion Farouk-Sluglett and Peter Sluglett, Iraq since 1958: From Revolution to Dictatorship (New York: I. B. Tauris, 2001): 17. 46 Baram, Culture, History, and Ideology, 21.

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increasingly came to be identified with “‘those Nestorian foreigners’ brought into Iraq by the British rather than the descendants of the ancient Assyrians whose history successive regimes in Iraq (and Syria as well) would appropriate as part of a larger but vague Arab ummah (nation) or sha’b (people).”47 Indeed, the Ba’ath regime adopted various policies to this end. One such policy was to invest financially and foster local archaeological research to instill awareness in Iraqi people of the importance and relevance of the country’s ancient history.48 This period also witnessed the introduction of ceremonies, names, and symbols into the political and cultural life of Iraq, such as the Mosul Festivals, which depicted scenes from Iraq’s ancient past. This was designed to construct a “direct continuation of the civilizations of the Mesopotamian valley.” 49 Likewise, during the Babylon Festival, a central float features King Nebuchadnezzar presenting a banner to his “grandson, flag bearer of the Twin Rivers, President Saddam Husayn.”50 These appropriations of Mesopotamian heritage are problematic for various reasons, at the very least for being historically inaccurate – even distorted. For example, what was labelled as the Mosul Festival was historically Akitu, an Akkadian word for harvest. This marked the Assyrian/Babylonian new year, which Assyrians continue to celebrate to this day. Accordingly, where Baram – and Davis, to a lesser extent – view these policies as an attempt by the government to construct a unified nation, I draw on the work of Donabed to posit that these cultural reforms must be seen as assimilatory attempts that Arabized all periods of Mesopotamian history, leaving no room for an Assyrian identity separate from an overarching Arab one. Specifically, “the propagation of Arabisation and Ba’thification, which subsumed the Assyrians as well as other communal groups into a monolithic identity, resulted in the elimination of any modes of identification of these groups outside the acceptable norms of Ba’thism and Arabism.” 51 For the Assyrians, this consequently meant that they were no longer recognized as a distinct group by the state; “this is analogous to the assimilatory policies, with intent to purge, of various nations (both ethnic and civic) against Indigenous populations in settler states.” 52 Thus, the nation-building project of modern Iraq has had two simultaneous effects. First, successive

 47

Donabed, Reforging a Forgotten History, 231. Ibid., 25. 49 Ibid., 38. 50 Baram, Culture, History, and Ideology, 49. 51 Donabed, Reforging a Forgotten History, 244. 52 Ibid., 244. 48

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Arab regimes, the Ba’ath regime in particular, drew on the Mesopotamian heritage not only to point to a glorified past, but also to establish legitimacy and garner prestige in terms of Iraq’s role as a regional hegemon. Davis writes, “the Ba’ath regime politicized historical memory far more than any prior regime, using its access to massive oil revenues during the 1970s and 1980s to engage in the rewriting of history on a scale never seen before in Iraq or anywhere else in the Arab world.”53 Second, while these policies effectively constructed a history for those deemed part of the Iraqi state, they simultaneously erased the identity and existence of Assyrians as Indigenous people in modern Iraq. More specifically, “Assyrians had effectively become a nonentity; they had been almost completely unimagined (or deconstructed) as a distinct Indigenous ethnoreligious, cultural and linguistic group.”54 This pattern of erasure would continue in Iraq, including during the 1988 Anfal Campaign, which involved mass executions, the use of chemical weapons, the destruction of villages, land appropriation and destroying cultural property in northern Iraq. While Kurds, Assyrians, and other minorities were targeted indiscriminately, this genocidal campaign is most often associated with or referred to as a solely Kurdish genocide by academia as well as international organizations and mainstream media.55

Conclusion Examining Iraqi policies designed to construct an Iraqi national identity, it is clear that the story of Iraqi people as descendants of Mesopotamia was essentially constructed. That is, the Iraqi government, under different regimes and to different extents, but especially during the Ba’ath period, embarked on a conscious process that included the excavation of ancient Mesopotamia, the restoration of various archaeological sites, the inauguration of festivals and celebrations based on folklore, and

 53

Davis, Memories of State, 3. Donabed, Reforging a Forgotten History, 253. 55 See George Black, Genocide in Iraq: The Anfal Campaign Against the Kurds (New York: Human Rights Watch, Middle East, 1993); “Anfal: Camapgin against the Kurds” BBC News, June 24, 2007 http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/4877364.stm; Dave Johns, “The Crimes of Saddam Hussein: 1988 The Anfal Campaign” Frontline: World, January 24, 2006, http://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/stories/iraq501/events_anfal.html; Khaled Salih, “Anfal: The Kurdish Genocide in Iraq,” Digest of Middle East Studies 4, no. 2 (1995): 24-39; Carole O’Leary, “The Kurds of Iraq: Recent history, future prospects,” Middle East Review of International Affairs 6, no. 4 (2002): 17-29. 54

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educational policies to reflect these. Conversely, the Assyrian people, in addition to speaking the language, continue to practice traditions and oral histories tying them to their ancient past. It is important to note the role of academics in Iraqi studies as agents of knowledge production in perpetuating this particular narrative of Iraq. Put simply, knowledge and practice are not separate enterprises; they are inextricably connected and mutually constitutive within social, political, and economic power relations. This paper has sought to re-establish Assyrians as Indigenous people of Iraq and to delineate the process by which they were erased. I have specifically examined the way in which Iraqi studies and Iraqi policies have both contributed to this erasure. Although Iraqi policies have committed genocide both in the physical sense as well as the cultural, it is important to think about the other forms of violence and erasures that Indigenous peoples experience. For instance, the Assyrians’ exclusion from Iraqi studies is important because the academic enterprise is capable of committing epistemic violence. Drawing on the work of Gayatri Spivak, I am arguing that the erasure of the Assyrian identity in the canons of Iraqi studies is a form of epistemic violence 56 – the infliction of harm on subjects through discourse. It has become commonplace to think and write about Iraq as having three groups – Sunnis, Shi’as, and Kurds – vying to define the new state. In this regard, Shi’as and Kurds, while historically marginalized groups, are not discursively marginalized because they are included in scholarly works on Iraqi politics, whereas the Assyrians are not. The historical marginalization of these groups, the Shi’as and the Kurds, is also well documented,57 while the erasure of the Assyrians – physically, historically and culturally – is not. Moreover, the Shi’a and Kurdish identities were not erased from modern Iraq; even during the Ba’ath regime, the national



56 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Basingstoke: Macmillan Education UK, 1988): 24-28. 57 See Noah Berlatsky, Genocide and Persecution: The Kurds (Detroit: Greenhaven Press, 2013); George Black, Genocide in Iraq: the Anfal campaign against the Kurds (Human Rights Watch, 1993); Mehdi Noorbaksh, “Shiism and ethnic politics in Iraq,” Middle East Policy 15, no. 2 (2008): 53-65; Michael Kelly, Ghosts of Halabja: Saddam Hussein and the Kurdish Genocide (Westport, CT: Praeger Security International, 2008); Jake Tapper, “Massacre Highlights Saddam’s Reign of Terror” ABC News, March 1, 2006, http://abcnews.go.com/International/story?id=1674089; Yitzhak Nakash, The Shi’is of Iraq (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003); Graham Fuller and Rend Rahim Francke, The Arab Shi’a: The Forgotten Muslims (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999).

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census has included a ‘Kurdish’ identity. That is, their existence is allowed, even if on the periphery of Iraqi society. The works cited here are a few examples of the broader understanding of the state of Iraq as composed of Sunni and Shi’a Arabs, Kurds, and other minorities. Scholarly work such as this perpetuates the myth- making of the Iraqi states’ identity based on three groups, and it is this narrative of Iraqi history and society and politics that I want to contest. Of course, the Iraqi state is not alone in engaging in this type of myth-making; accordingly, it is vital to situate the experiences of this Indigenous minority with those of other Indigenous groups in order to gain an understanding of the myriad ways in which colonial modernity has operated. That is, re-inserting Assyrians into the story of Iraq – specifically, as Indigenous – challenges the logic and operations of colonial modernity on several important grounds. First, the division of and reformulation of this geographical territory into four modern states by major European powers was a pivotal moment in the division of Assyrians across arbitrarily constructed borders that shaped their identity as well as political, economic, and social positions in each state. Second, the fundamental logic of national statebuilding in each of these states, specifically Iraq, necessitated the removal and/or assimilation of the Indigenous Assyrians as a racialized, threatening ‘other.’ Finally, tracing the constructive and deconstructive logic and workings of colonial modernity serves to render unnatural and deliberate what has been constructed as natural, inevitable, and modern.

Bibliography Aboona, Hirmis. Assyrians, Kurds, and Ottomans: Intercommunal Relations on the Periphery of the Ottoman Empire. Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, 2008. Alnasseri, Sabah. “Imperialism, Political Islam and Iraq.” Paper presented at Socialist Register – Global Flashpoints: Reactions to Imperialism and Neoliberalism, Toronto, Canada, November 2007. Altamirano-Jiminez, Isabel. “Nunavut: Whose Homeland, Whose Voices?” In First Voices: An Aboriginal Women's Reader, edited by Patricia A. Monture and Patricia D. McGuire, 143-153. Toronto: Inanna Publications and Education Inc., 2009. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1991. “Anfal: Camapgin against the Kurds.” BBC News, June 24, 2007. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/4877364.stm.

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Moses, A. Dirk. Empire, Colony, Genocide: Conquest, Occupation, and Subaltern Resistance in World History. New York: Berghahn Books, 2008. Nakash, Yitzhak. The Shi’is of Iraq. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003. Nash, Gary B. Red, White, and Black: The Peoples of Early North America. 6th Edition. Boston: Prentice Hall, 2010. Noorbaksh, Mehdi. “Shiism and ethnic politics in Iraq.” Middle East Policy 15, no. 2 (2008): 53-65. O’Leary, Carole. “The Kurds of Iraq: Recent history, future prospects.” Middle East Review of International Affairs 6, no. 4 (2002): 17-29. Petrosian, Vahram. “Assyrians in Iraq.” Iran and the Caucasus 10, no. 1 (2006): 113-147. Polk, William R. Understanding Iraq. Toronto: Harper, 2005. Preston, Zoe. The Crystallization of the Iraqi State: Geopolitical Function and Form. London: Peter Lang, 2003. Quijano, Anibal. “The Challenge of the ‘Indigenous Movement’ in Latin America.” Socialism and Democracy 19, no. 3 (2005): 55-78. Razack, Sherene. Casting Out: The Eviction of Muslims from Western Law and Politics. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008. —. “A Hole in the Wall: A Rose at a Checkpoint: The Spatiality of Colonial Encounters in Occupied Palestine.” Journal of Critical Race Inquiry 1, no. 1 (2010): 90-108. Razack, Sherene, Malinda Smith, and Sunera Thobani, ed. States of Race: Critical Race Feminism for the 21st Century. Toronto: Between the Lines, 2010. Rose, Deborah Bird. Hidden Histories: Black Stories from Victoria River Downs, Humbert River and Wave Hill Stations. Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 1991. Salih, Salih. “Anfal: The Kurdish Genocide in Iraq.” Digest of Middle East Studies 4, no. 2 (1995): 24-39. Sluglett, Peter. Britain in Iraq: Contriving King and Country. London: I. B. Tauris, 2007. Smith, Andrea. Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide. Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2005. —. “The Colonialism That is Settled and the Colonialism That Never Happened.” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education and Society, June 2014. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, edited by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, 271-313. Basingstoke: Macmillan Education UK, 1988.

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Stanfield, Gareth. Iraq: People, History, Politics. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007. Tapper, Jake. “Massacre Highlights Saddam’s Reign of Terror.” ABC News, March 1, 2006. http://abcnews.go.com/International/story?id=1674089. Thobani, Sunera. Exalted Subjects: Studies in the Making of Race and Nation in Canada. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007. Thomson, Janice E. Mercenaries, Pirates, and Sovereigns: State Building and Extraterritorial Violence in Early Modern Europe. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994. Travis, Hannibal. Genocide in the Middle East: The Ottoman Empire, Iraq and Sudan. Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 2010. Tripp, Charles. A History of Iraq. 3rd Edition. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Watenpaugh, Keith David. Being Modern in the Middle East: Revolution, Nationalism, Colonialism, and the Arab Middle Class. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014. Wolfe, Patrick. “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native.” Journal of Genocide Research 8, no. 4 (2006): 387-409. Zubaida, Sami. “Contested Nations: Iraq and the Assyrians.” Nations and Nationalism 6, no. 3 (2000): 363-82. —. “The Fragments Imagine the Nation: The Case of Iraq.” International Journal of Middle East Studies 34 (2002): 205-15.

CHAPTER FOUR ON PROTECTORATES AND CONSULTANATES: THE BIRTH AND DEMISE OF MODERNIZATION IN THE GULF STATES ALI KARIMI AND FREDERICK KIM

Introduction Efforts to characterize the context of the construction boom in the Persian Gulf often fall flat, resorting to the tired catch-alls of oil cities, skyscrapers in the desert, or pop-up cities without an identity. However, these are the same catch-alls that have been used for over fifty years and continue well into the 21st century. What, then, has produced this condition of constant placelessness in which over half a century of architects have come and gone, and yet ephemerality continues to be the status quo? This chapter examines the origins of architectural practice in the Gulf region as a phenomenon born at the end of the colonial era and flourishing postindependence. The encounter between the Arab states of the Persian Gulf and the decolonizing British government produced a particular context in the region where nation-building and the establishment of an architectural landscape were the key components of modernization. Modernity as a construct would soon become inextricably linked to architectural practice in the region and by the turn of the 21st century became the harbinger for the region's notion of speculative capital as progress. By comparing key projects from the 1950s to the 1970s in Bahrain, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar, we can see the forces that have launched Gulf architectural practice on its current trajectory. These projects would establish the mode in which architectural practice would continue to occur for the remainder of the 20th century, and reveal the fundamental cultural, institutional, and professional legacies of the British presence in the region. More importantly, we contend that there is a context to the

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seemingly amorphous architectural landscape of the Gulf, a context born in the critical period between protectorate and consultant-led city-state. The British role in the Persian Gulf began primarily as a commercial endeavor and a matter of securing trade to India and the rest of the empire. While the British were present in the Gulf in the 18th and 19th centuries, the colonial project was absent in the Gulf and far less involved than in India. Over time, this role in the Gulf would develop into a strategic and diplomatic one, particularly after the discovery of oil in the Gulf in 1932. The political residencies were tasked with securing British interest by regulating the states’ international affairs (such as insuring the autonomy of the Gulf states), and acting in the interest of British businesses. In practical terms, this was accomplished through political agents and British advisors to the rulers. Far more than just playing an advisory role, however, the British exerted enough pressure to deny the Ottomans control of the Gulf in 1913, and implemented the treaties that ensured that any exploitation of oil was mediated “only [by] people appointed by the British government.”1 With regards to architecture, the legacy of British colonial rule was two-fold: first was establishing a legal and professional framework for business to be conducted; and second was imparting the ideological framework that fueled modernization efforts in the Gulf and would contribute to the influx of British professionals into the region. As opposed to being interested in the cultivation of an architectural project, the colonial administration allowed British consultancies to capitalize on oil wealth. This was clear to the architectural profession in England at the time; as Garratt states: “the British have more chance than anyone else in the Middle East because of the language, the system of law and the tradition of British involvement.”2 The role the British played allowed for the formation of an international market while skirting the sedimentation of architectural language, educational institutions, or maintaining a pace of development that would allow for local practices to form naturally. The case studies presented in this chapter are Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, and the UAE, ordered chronologically by the date in which oil exports began. These dates allow us to simultaneously track the influx of capital, foreign architects and population growth as well as creating a timeline of British involvement over time. The similarities between the Gulf states allow for a reading of British policy as cities transition from impoverished pearling towns to urban centers for the consumption of consultant services. These countries also share similar urban conditions, history, language, and 1

John A. DeNovo, American Interests and Policies in the Middle East, 1900-1939 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1963), 204. 2 John Garratt, “Middle East Success Needs Homework.” Building 224 (1977): 42.

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forces (influx of immigrants, discovery of oil, small population) which, as the case studies will show, contributed to the entire region entering the international market within a few years of one another. The similarities shared by these countries not only allow us to draw a timeline for the region’s development, but also highlight the nature of the consumptiondriven approach as a means of establishing a country’s brand within the international scene later in the 20th century.

Administrator as Architect Modernization occurred first in Bahrain, in which the architectural landscape was controlled by the state, and the British implemented a development program. Bahrain’s development would become a precedent for the rest of the countries in the Gulf, not only as an urban phenomenon but also as a testing ground for various regional policies. In contrast to the other Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states, modernization occurred prior to the discovery of oil, giving the state time to organize without the pressures of rapid growth and sudden wealth.3 The trajectory of modernization as a phenomenon separate from oil is a critical one that, when combined with the Bahraini colonial context, reveals a narrative in which development can be read as a nuanced and contextual effort rather than one hijacked by the speed of the post-oil boom. Whereas Dubai and Qatar began to develop largely in the 1950s and 1960s through business with British consultancies, Bahrain’s colonial rule began earlier, and many of the administrative buildings were commissioned and built by the administrators themselves (as opposed to consultants). While we can see both the rhetoric of modernization and the use of architecture to represent progress similar to the other states, the centralization of the project allowed the process to occur less as transactions of purchasing architectural commodities, and more as an exercise in state-building from within the state itself. The long period of colonial rule meant that much of what would become architectural practice in the other states after independence was in Bahrain an administrative endeavor rather than a paid service. In this case, the role of the architect as private consultant was integrated into state apparatus and played by administrators who were supplemented by contractors and engineers. The primary example of this in Bahrain was Sir Charles Belgrave, the financial advisor to the rulers of Bahrain Sheikhs Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa and Salman bin Hamad Al Khalifa respectively, and arguably the man who ran Bahrain from 1926 to 3

Charles Dalrymple Belgrave, Personal Column (London: Hutchinson, 1960), 84.

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1957. Over the course of his thirty-year tenure in Bahrain, Belgrave would gradually transition from being advisor to becoming the main court judge, police chief, planner, architect, and jack-of-all-trades for the country. Belgrave had been an administrative officer in Egypt before being hired by the ruler of Bahrain (through British recommendation) to act as his financial advisor. The British policy was not to run the state but to regulate through advisory roles, so while Belgrave was brought in as a separate consultant, “his position was closely tied to the colonial aims of the British in the region.”4 Charles Belgrave’s contribution to the architectural landscape was as a non-architect who developed an architectural agenda for the country. His arrival began the importation of architectural types that he associated with governance, civilization, and civic obligation towards the Bahraini people. His insistence on the development of parks and public spaces, and making official the unofficial landscape of Bahrain, heralded the transition from informal spaces and laws into formalized spaces and codes. In Belgrave, we also see an individual simultaneously playing the role of a consultant and a colonial administrator. Although not an architect himself, Belgrave took it upon himself to oversee the construction of several buildings (schools, hospitals, a prison, oil pipelines, the airport, and roads), and in the case of his most notable project, Bab al Bahrain, he was also the designer of the building. Belgrave saw his role as one of responsibility towards the Bahrainis and developing the country in the Bahrainis’ best interest (at times despite protestations). A large part of the civilizing project also mandated the importation of colonial subjects from India and Pakistan to fill roles that Bahrainis could not, a solution that would be implemented in Qatar, the UAE, and Kuwait as well. This began with the police force, who were retired Punjabis, but soon extended to engineers and laborers and professionals to staff the building. Belgrave’s foremost urban contribution was the Manama waterfront, which was completed through a combination of land reclamations and expansions of the northern end of Manama. The advisor’s goal was to create a modern harbor for the capital city, and the centerpiece of the waterfront was Bab al Bahrain (similar to the Gateway to India), which acted as the main entry to the market. Belgrave designed the building in 1945 as both a governmental complex and symbolic entryway; the Bab was a combination of modernist and vernacular architecture heralding the next stage of urban life in Bahrain. Its design spoke of a continuity of 4

Louis Allday, “Asian and African Studies Blog.” The British Library, February 28, 2014; accessed November 21, 2014, http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/asianandafrican/2014/02/theadviserέΎθΘδϤϟ΍charlesbelgraveand-modernbahrain.html.

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cosmopolitan life into the oil era as opposed to being seen as a colonial artifact or foreign insertion.5 Belgrave’s flexibility and his role as a jackof-all-trades allowed him to pursue development on several fronts, developing parks and civic spaces as easily as reforming land regulations or organizing dinners for foreign dignitaries. This flexibility would over time however infuriate the local population who complained that Belgrave played far too many roles and did not approve of a British face to the Bahraini government. His role in managing the different elements of the Bahraini government also hampered the development of governmental agencies operating in their own spheres of authority and tasked with planning and development. Despite Belgrave’s work, there were no town planners in Bahrain nor governmental agencies charged with planning until 1968. At that time, the Bahraini government requested a town planner from the British Ministry of Overseas Development, and A. M. Munro was hired to set up the Physical Planning Unit under the Ministry of Municipality and Agriculture in Bahrain. Bahrain’s first master plan would be completed by 1968: “before this master plan proposal there was no clear picture how the town should expand, [or] where the main roads should be built.”6

Modernity by Osmosis: From Oil Town to Nation Kuwait’s oil exports began in 1945, over ten years after those of Bahrain, but the country gained its independence in 1961, ten years before Bahrain and the rest of the GCC. In contrast to the development of Bahrain’s early years, undertaken by an administrator concerned with modernization, Kuwait’s development sprang from the presence of the oil-town of Ahmadi and progress that occurred by osmosis. The town of Ahmadi was developed by the Kuwaiti Oil Company (KOC) between 1946 and 1956 as a colonial company town. Three things made the town into a colonial island within Kuwait: the importation of British employees and Indian laborers, the planning done by Wilson Mason and Partners, and the planning policies that guaranteed a Western lifestyle for the employees. Wilson Mason and Partners completed their plan in 1947, in collaboration with KOC Building and Engineering representatives in London and Kuwait, in a plan that also included hospitals, cinemas, churches, and other amenities. The garden-city aspect of the design made the city into an 5

Nelida Fuccaro, Histories of City and State in the Persian Gulf: Manama since 1800 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 193. 6 David L. Smith, “The History of Land Use and Development in Bahrain,” Town Planning Review 85, no. 4 (2014), 548.

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oasis in the desert, and this would become the model for solutions to the rest of the Kuwaiti landscape. Far more than just an urban precedent, however, the town of Ahmadi would also impart a legacy of clear racial/colonial hierarchies that the city enforced. For example, in the hospitals of Ahmadi, Indian doctors would treat Indian patients, and British doctors would treat British patients; the segregated nature of the town would in many ways find itself instilled in both the urban fabric and the mentality of Kuwaitis as a result. Four years after the master plan of Ahmadi, the Kuwaiti master plan was completed by Minoprio, Spencely, and MacFarlane. The objectives of the MSP master plan of Kuwait were both infrastructural and civic, the role of plantings and beautification a part of the legacy of the Ahmadi development. The lion’s share of the work in Kuwait was done by the five main British contractors known as the Big Five, who were “British at the instruction of the political agency there.”7 Delays in the planning process, however, meant that for much of the 1950s, Kuwaitis living in the poor infrastructure of the old city would look to Ahmadi’s planned town with envy as a colonial enclave with better governance and higher standards of living. The modernization of Kuwait was underscored by the notion that modern architecture was a key component of the country’s development. The British advocated modernism as a way for Kuwait “to [assert] itself as a newly independent modern nation through the benevolent investment of its oil wealth into its architectural development in the name of progress.”8 The case of Kuwait presents a development in the GCC relationship between the British and the locals. As opposed to modernization being an imposed process, it is through the autonomy of the oil company (as a semi-public entity) that notions of modernization were diffused into the Kuwaiti milieu. Modernization instantiates itself less as a pure governmental exercise as in the case of Bahrain, but rather as a public/private venture which can be imported, tested, and then implemented. Kuwait’s contribution to the development of the architectural landscape was the beginning of the move from a British-led administration to local governance and foreign consultants. In Kuwait we see the privatization of the colonial relationship of practice and modernization. As one practicing architect would note on the shifting nature of practice in the region: “a few years ago an architect’s clients were in effect British advisers or British engineers. Today a client 7

Reem I. R. Alissa, Building for Oil: Corporate Colonialism, Nationalism and Urban Modernity in Ahmadi, 1946-1992 (Diss. University of California, Berkeley, 2012): 16. 8 Ibid, 107.

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is much more likely to be the Ruler himself, or a minister, or a committee of local people.”9 In Kuwait, the government’s role is to provide autonomy to the oil industry and the autonomy of its own planning processes, but it pays for and is channeled by the private models of Ahmadi or the practices of consulting groups.

Qatar and the UAE: The Introduction of Private Consultants to the Gulf After development had begun in Bahrain and Kuwait, Qatar would initiate her own projects in the aftermath of oil exportation in 1949. By the 1950s, the transition had been made from British administrators dictating the model of growth, as in Bahrain, to semi-public entities in Kuwait, to the era of private consultancy beginning in Qatar and the UAE. The beginning of this era is highlighted by one of the earliest and most critical projects in Qatar at the time: the Doha State Hospital. The design for the 100-bed hospital was decided by an open RIBA competition. The Qatari government chose to hold a competition as the result of an agreement between Hugh Hale, the State Engineer to the Government of Qatar, and Bill Spragg, the secretary of RIBA.10 Of 76 entries, John Harris, a young architect and graduate from the Architectural Association in the UK, was named the winner. The competition win allowed the unknown John Harris “to become established on the international scene at a time when comparable opportunities for other British practices to work overseas were few.”11 In the context of a recession in Britain, for an architect of John Harris’s experience to win such a large project and then establish his practice is a fantastic success story even by current standards. The win not only cemented his place in Qatar, but also allowed Harris to become a key player in the Gulf throughout the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s on a scale comparable to the starchitects of today. Harris credits his success to his ability to adapt to the context of the rapid development of the Gulf and its impatient clients. His primary innovation in Qatar came in the form of developing a contract for separate foundations, which allowed construction to begin far earlier than in a typical project; the contract “subsequently [became] a characteristic of major project construction in 9

Christopher Mitchell, “Development in the Middle East: The Practice of Architecture,” British Society for Middle Eastern Studies Bulletin 3, no. 2 (1976): 89. 10 A. E. J. Morris and John R. Harris, John R. Harris Architects (Westerham, Kent: Hurtwood, 1984), 6. 11 Ibid, 6.

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the Middle East, where speed is often a prime factor.”12 It was the link between British officials in the Qatari government and British academia/practice that allowed John Harris to come into the commission, but similar opportunities were increasingly available in the region. The sudden emergence of opportunities in the Gulf attracted many young British architects from schools or war services in an overcrowded domestic market to make their names in the Gulf. In 1957, Architectural Design magazine published a Middle Eastern issue in which several projects from the region were showcased, while claiming there was a lack of technical experts in the region and plenty of opportunities for inexperienced professionals to cut their teeth. Building magazine cited the “free-spending” and “vast amounts of oil money” as reasons to seek work in the Gulf. There was no shortage of debate on the ethics of practicing in the Middle East, and the primary question that practitioners had to face was establishing a context in which they could work. In an article on the Middle East, Architectural Design magazine stated it was critical that “serious architects seek to develop a regional style” in an effort to contextualize their work and that architects had to “prepare [their] own brief” to work in the region.13 John Harris’s practice became part of the professional context in Qatar, laying the foundations for waves of consultants, international architects, and projects in the years to come. The rapid population growth and changing urban life in the years to come prompted Qatar’s first master plan by British firm Llewelyn-Davies in 1972. The belated nature of master planning in the Gulf is in part the product of the rapid growth of the post-oil-boom, as well as the administrative restructuring that occurred after independence from Britain. While public administration existed in Qatar by the 1950s, independence allowed for extensive administrative restructuring in the creation of new ministries related to urbanization and infrastructural development. “The centralization of governance enabled petrodollars to be efficiently invested in the urbanization process,”14 and the rapid growth continued through the 1970s and 1980s, during which time many westerners continued to be involved in Doha’s planning. The race to convert oil wealth to progress 12

Ibid, 6. Raglan Squire, “Architecture in the Middle East,” Architectural Design, March (1957): 98. 14 Florian Wiedmann, Ashraf M. Salama, and Alain Thierstein, “Urban Evolution of the City of Doha: An Investigation into the Impact of Economic Transformations on Urban Structures/Doha'nin Kentsel Evrimi: Ekonomik Donusumun Kentsel Yapilar Uzerindeki Etkisine Bir Ornek (Company Overview) (Report),” METU Journal of the Faculty of Architecture 29, no. 2 (2012), 44. 13

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and modernity became, over time, a race to convert oil wealth into international capital. The narrative of modernization, which had initially been formed as a way of justifying reforms, laws, and practices that would allow the British to do business in the Gulf, was transformed by the latter half of the 20th century into a capitalist complex centered around consumption. By the time Dubai and Qatar initiated their own developments, they had the experiences of Kuwait and Bahrain to draw upon, as well as a more developed pool of regional professionals to choose from. Equally important was the competition between states “as each state [was] trying to get the advantage of the other.”15 The flocking of consultants, architects, engineers, and laborers to these oil cities began to shape a cycle in which cities ceased to be entities suited for a particular population and became highway signs that aimed at attracting speculators and global capital. In today’s world, no city better exemplifies this phenomenon than Dubai. Through the developments of the early 20th century, we can see in the Gulf states the transition from top-down modernization in Bahrain to the beginnings of Dubai, in which modernization transforms it into an agent for speculative capital. From the late 1940s onward, Dubai had numerous contracts with exclusively British firms to develop projects. Projects such as the Al-Maktoum hospital and the British Bank of the Middle East, as well as the business-friendly nature of the Al-Maktoum family, motivated the British political agent to move from Sharjah to Dubai in 1953. Sheikh Rashid Al-Maktoum’s ambitions to turn Dubai into a business-hub for the region prompted a series of large-scale projects, one of which was a master-plan for the fledgling city, designed by John Harris, after his hospital win in Qatar. The invitation to prepare the master plan was the result of a meeting between John Harris and Sheikh Rashid orchestrated by the British political agent Sir Donald Hawley at a summer cocktail party in London in 1959.16 Harris’s master plan for Dubai was developed in the early 1960s, coinciding with Sheikh Rashid’s other developmental projects. The projects, done largely under British supervision and with cheap labor from India and Pakistan, included the dredging of the Dubai creek (by British firm Halcrow and Partners and funded by a loan from Kuwait), as well as electrification of the city. Harris’s plans also coincided with the new land laws in Dubai, which were adapted from the Sudanese land laws: “another example, though in a different sector, of consulting expertise contracted through regional 15

Ibid. 74. Michele Bambling, “Lest We Forget: Structures of Memory in the UAE,” UAE’s Pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2014 (Global Data Point, June 16, 2014), 109.

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networks based on British spheres of influence (the Sudan was also a part of the British Raj at this time).”17 At the time, Harris’s master plan was lauded for its flexibility and sensitivity in continuing the road patterns of old Dubai while also accommodating plots that could be used for development and encouraging investment. There was also criticism that in the hurry to produce the master plan, Harris simply “drew the new city on top of the old one drawn from aerial photographs.”18 In any case, the plan would prove short-lived, as Dubai’s population quickly outgrew it and Harris would prepare a new master plan in 1971. Several more master plans would then be created after Harris’s recurring failure to account for the rapid growth of the city. Arguably, the greater success for Harris in Dubai was designing the first iconic skyscraper: Dubai’s International Trade Center, for which he received the commission in the 1970s. The fifty-story building would be the tallest structure in the UAE for over twenty years. The DITC was opened in 1979 with the Queen of England in the audience. This unveiling in combination with the opening of the Jebel Ali free-trade port the same year heralded Dubai’s arrival on the international scene, and the full instantiation of the current era of architectural development that centered around modernization as the ability to attract investment, business, and clientele from around the world. Whereas thirty years prior, the main concerns were the provision of water, electricity, and healthcare, the preoccupation now became how to purchase an identity and create a brand for the city that would make it known throughout the world. This is not to be understood as a breaking away from the trajectory of modernization, but in fact its apotheosis. Once the basic provisions of civilization had been fulfilled, the project of modernization became one of capitalist consumption driven by the pace that had been set years prior, but also one of self-reflection and the need to prove to the world that the developing countries had modernized. This need, in the case of Dubai, came from the competitive nature of the Gulf city-states, but more so out of the context in the UAE and the competition with the other emirates for ascendancy. It becomes clear from the case of Dubai that the contemporary state of modernization is one born of the need to cement its autonomy and ascendancy, and confirm its hard-purchased modernity. In response, the architectural landscape has become one of rapid projects and a built environment of quick iconic transactions.

17

Stephen Ramos, “The Blueprint: A History of Dubai’s Spatial Development Through Oil Discovery,” Working Paper, Dubai Initiative, Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard Kennedy School (November 2009): 14. 18 Bambling, “Lest We Forget,” 110.

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Conclusion The Gulf today can be seen as the site of two overlapping projects: the project of modernization and the project of practice. The project of modernization was one of importing laws, iconography, and development, as driven by the notion of progress. The project of practice, as we understand it in an urban and architectural sense, is the transition from a state architect in an administrative role to state-advisors selecting architects to state-funded consultants as separate entities. Modernization was the impetus behind the transformation, and was an imparted legacy of British rule, its momentum sustained by British presence as a pressure applying force in the domestic market. Over the course of the 20th century, modernization passed through different stages and developed its own character as it leaped from the various countries until it became the capitalist project it is today. From its beginnings as a White Man’s Burden with Belgrave saying “‘Forward!’ to the Backward,”19 the act of modernization was heavily linked to state-building and the importation of architectural types while still being integrated in a milieu as a result of the trajectory of pre-oil development. While there was no architectural practice as such in early 20th- century Bahrain, the rooted nature of Belgrave’s role allowed for the steady influx of technicians, the development in part of an architectural language native to the country, and during his time a steady transformation of Bahrain. Belgrave came in as a consultant, but acted in the capacity of a ruler due to his integration into the Bahraini government. His goal was modernization and his methodology infrastructural, architectural, and urban. In Kuwait, modernization occurred through integration via a grass is greener mentality, as Kuwait allowed for the autonomy of the oil town of Ahmadi, which over time became a role model for Kuwait City as Ahmadi’s innovations would be imported locally there. In Qatar and Dubai, modernization would become capitalism as it shed its colonial associations and became absorbed locally as a consumption-driven project to which the state of practice owes its existence today. Throughout this process, we see identity grow increasingly to become the primary question for both locals and for foreigners. Particularly in the cases in which there were no urban precedents nor developments of any similar scale, the speed of growth for the sake of catching up resulted in an environment in which architects had to generate their own contexts. The nature of consultant work, as rapid and mercenary as it was, resulted either in no project, or a sense of responding 19 James Bell, “He Said 'Forward!' to the Backward,” LIFE (November 17, 1952): 17072.

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to bare minimum conditions. It is precisely this inability to tap into any sense of project or context, while also under pressure to produce quickly to make up for lost time, that has caused the lack of rootedness in the Gulf. Ephemerality is born out of a pattern of consumption of services, as a process engendered by the British influence. This was also further exasperated by rapid growth that prevented the implementation of meaningful planning. The inability to implement plans fully was in part a consequence of the inability to organize administrations to prepare for growth in a pre-independence context. The nature of British involvement in the region created a particular trajectory for architectural practice and consulancies. This trajectory could have very well been a different one had there been alternate economic or political conditions. The timing of post-colonial British involvement in the region, the largly transactional resource based relationship (Bahrain being the primary exception) meant that the region's own take on modernization was particularly ammendable to speculative capitalism. The increased role of the British in the region after the discovery of oil coincided with European architecture modernism which meant that modernization in the Gulf placed a heavy emphasis on city-building, public housing, and a suite of nation-building exercises similar to those of post-war Europe and the United States. The civilizing project was then distinctly architectural and aimed at the creation of legibile nations, markets, and an even playing field in which oil could be traded for the trapping of modernity. It must be said that the aim here is not to demonize the British (or other foreign actors) for securing their interest or for creating a cult of progress. Nor is the goal to place blame on rulers or decision-makers who acted in the context of their time or whose decisions seem shortsighted in retrospect. The goal is to outline the context that has produced this shapelessness and to classify it as a force produced by lopsided and ultimately misinformed markets with plenty of purchasing power to be exploited. Establishing this context as a critical exercise serves to ground work in the region and help steer practice in a new direction. It must be also stressed that placelessness is not only a foreign narrative for the Gulf, but one that the locals have applied to themselves as well. This is in large part a product of the unwillingness on the part of the country’s residents to claim ownership of the realities that seem un-authored by them. The current era of consultanates (the era of big government, big capital, and consultancies) can only be reimagined by the establishment of a position on context. Context here means understanding that there is no lapse in national memory nor an ahistorical reading of the 20th century as a haphazard gold rush. The professional landscape of the time had its foundations as a

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product of the British administrative efforts laying the groundwork for business, be it oil, architects, or contractors. The landscape is also indebted to the notions of development, modernization, and progress as a commodity. The architectural landscape can find its origins in Bahrain as a state concoction, in Kuwait as public-private process of osmosis, or in Qatar and Dubai as purchasing progress from foreign parties. It is clear that the current architectural landscape of the Gulf countries is not one that emerged suddenly out of the desert, but rather one that had been gestating in the sand dunes for well over a century.

Bibliography Alissa, Reem I. R. Building for Oil: Corporate Colonialism, Nationalism and Urban Modernity in Ahmadi, 1946-1992. Diss. University of California, Berkeley, 2012. Allday, Louis. “Asian and African Studies Blog.” The British Library. February 28, 2014. Accessed November 21, 2014. http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/asian-and-african/2014/02/theadviser-έΎθΘδϤϟ΍-charles-belgrave-and-modern-bahrain.html. Bambling, Michele. “Lest We Forget: Structures of Memory in the UAE.” UAE’s Pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2014. Global Data Point, June 16, 2014. Belgrave, Charles Dalrymple. Personal Column. London: Hutchinson, 1960. Bell, James. “He Said ‘Forward!’ to the Backward.” LIFE (November 17, 1952): 170-72. DeNovo, John A. American Interests and Policies in the Middle East, 1900-1939. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1963. Elsheshtawy, Yasser. Planning Middle Eastern Cities: An Urban Kaleidoscope in a Globalizing World. Planning, History, and the Environment Series. London and New York: Routledge, 2004. Fuccaro, Nelida. Histories of City and State in the Persian Gulf: Manama since 1800. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Garratt, John. “Middle East Success Needs Homework.” Building 1977: 224. Gray, Alexandar S. “Winning Designs in Doha Hospital Competition.” The Architects’ Journal, September 17, 1953, 337-55. Mitchell, Christopher. "Development in the Middle East: The Practice of Architecture." British Society for Middle Eastern Studies. Bulletin 3, no. 2 (1976): 89-91.

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Morris, A. E. J., and Harris, John R. John R. Harris Architects. Westerham, Kent: Hurtwood, 1984. PrakƗsh, VikramƗditya. “Failure of the Master Plan.” Dubaization. October 5, 2011. Accessed November 16, 2014. https://dubaization.wordpress.com/op-eds/failure-of-the-master-plan/. Ramos, Stephen. “The Blueprint: A History of Dubai’s Spatial Development through Oil Discovery.” Working Paper, Dubai Initiative, Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard Kennedy School, November 2009. Smith, David L. “The History of Land Use and Development in Bahrain.” Town Planning Review 85, no. 4 (2014): 548. Squire, Raglan. “Architecture in the Middle East.” Architectural Design, March (1957): 72-106. Vale, Lawrence J. Architecture, Power, and National Identity. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992. Wiedmann, Florian, Ashraf M. Salama, and Alain Thierstein. “Urban Evolution of the City of Doha: An Investigation into the Impact of Economic Transformations on Urban Structures/Doha’nin Kentsel Evrimi: Ekonomik Donusumun Kentsel Yapilar Uzerindeki Etkisine Bir Ornek (Company Overview) (Report).” METU Journal of the Faculty of Architecture 29, no. 2 (2012): 35-61.

SECTION II: THE AESTHETICS OF DECOLONIZATION: SIGHTS, IMAGES, AND STORIES

CHAPTER FIVE CASABLANCA: FROM PROTECTORATE TO NEOLIBERAL POLIS – READING THE CITY THROUGH ORDER AND PROGRESS1 ROUZBEH AKHBARI AND FELIX KALMENSON

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We gratefully acknowledge the support of Aaron and Ash Moniz for providing the logistical and curatorial support for this project, as well as the local Moroccan artists and cultural activists, Mohammed Rahmo, Khalid Khoauja, Hasna Yafi, and many others who helped activate the space with their valuable input. We also appreciate the support of Kathy Bishoping, associate professor at York University, and her team member, Duygu Gül Kaya, who provided invaluable feedback on earlier versions of this text.

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Introduction The North African landscape has been reshaped many times by European powers seeking to engineer environments that facilitate the application of hierarchical models of government that militaristically transform the other into docile bodies that exist merely to contribute to the proper functioning of a grander imperial project. The implementation of these political agendas has been coupled with the promotion of ‘authentic’ tourist experiences through what Timothy Mitchell identifies as “Enframing,”2 a process that refers to a European restructuring of the colonial urban fabric so as to adjust sightlines with the aim of framing colonized subjects. Enframing encompasses personal and social hygiene, centralized housing for the working classes, planned urban infrastructure, and the establishment of a strict distinction between work and living spaces. By situating the notion of colonial enframing within a historical perspective, we identify how it has reproduced over time, and continues to (in)form relations with global markets, international institutions and various industries. Our case-study of the embodiment of this colonial spatial practice—in built form and social architecture—is the French-led ‘modernization’ of Casablanca and its suburbs, which functioned as an experimental platform for

 2

“Enframing” is a chapter in Timothy Mitchell’s Colonizing Egypt, in which he looks at urban design as a political tool for forcing the masses to conform to systems of colonial oppression. See Timothy Mitchell, Colonizing Egypt (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991) 50-57.

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a new urbanism that later entered European landscapes.3 We examine the restructuring of Casablanca as a whole, with a specific focus on the neighbourhood of Sidi Moumen and the decommissioned slaughterhouse within its boundaries. Constructed in 1922 by Parisian architects Albert Greslin and Georges-Ernest Desmares, the slaughterhouse centralized the practice of meat processing as part of a broader ideological campaign on the teachings of Eurocentric social and personal hygiene. In this paper we use our project Order and Progress—a two-part4 performance and installation series created in the aforementioned abattoirs—as a point of departure to unpack the ongoing colonial tensions that have marked the North African polity. This dialogue unfolds chronologically, considering the Modern redevelopment of Casablanca and the continued erasure of informal settlements under the pretense of urban renewal, as a tool for the scientific management of Moroccan bodies.5 We continue by looking at the early postindependence period in Morocco, and how the gradual spatial appropriation of these modernized environments by their local users marked sites of resistance and modes of decolonizing the cityscape and its racial geographies. Lastly, we trace the colonial legacies of the early 20th century in recently adopted neoliberal frameworks that replicate asymmetrical power relations. These mechanisms translate into policies that successfully transfer state capital into the hands of a small elite through an ever-increasing emphasis on privatization and attraction of foreign investment in major construction projects. In each section, we use Order and Progress to assist in visualizing the process of decay in Casablanca’s Modernist edifices and to represent various forms of counter-cultural appropriation that allow voices that struggle to be heard to enter into a power negotiation with the leaders of the march for industrial progress.

Colonial Modern in Casablanca “The [French] concept of observing everyday dwelling related uncritically to already existing ethnological and anthropological studies and Orientalist narratives of African space.”6

 3

Marion von Osten, “Architecture without Architects – Another Anarchist Approach,” E-Flux 6 (2009): 9, accessed March 12, 2016. 4 Order and Progress was part of an artist residency titled Boxes, Zones and Quarters, curated by Ash Moniz. 5 These architects were members of CIAM (Congrès International d’Architecture Moderne) who met annually to report on their ongoing analyses of French-led urban projects in a variety of sites, including occupied colonies. 6 Von Osten, “Architecture Without Architects,” 9.

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International Colonial Modern – loosely defined as a global practice in urban development – can be understood as a system of centralized planning that contains various modes of living within categories that conform to European standards, creating familiar spaces for their consumption.7 The reification of these colonial practices in architectural development was often coupled with problematic ahistorical ethnological analyses in which subjects and their environments were studied as “problems” to be solved. In the lexicon of French architects and planners observing North African Medinas, terms such as chaotic, capricious and disorganized abounded. The old city (or Medinas) in Moroccan urban centres such as Casablanca, Tangier, and Marrakech functioned as dynamic systems incorporating residential and commercial spaces that expanded in response to population influx and a complex set of economic/social conditions. Informed by Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier’s conflation of the separation of city functions – residential/ commercial/industrial/leisure – with a “rational” modern living system,8 Service de L’Urbanisme9 sought to undermine the dynamic mix of functions that marked the medina. They identified the Medina as not only inefficient condensed masses of population but also as threats to public health and national security. In so doing they disregarded how the inhabitants of these spaces situate their livelihood in relation to their immediate environment. This Modernist preoccupation with political transparency and social hygiene led to the introduction of a series of architectural resolutions to what the head of the city’s renewal project, Michel Ecochard, identified as problematic in the Casablanca vernacular.10 These mandates included the implementation of apartheid strategies that segregated the city into mostly European-occupied urban centres and newly developed suburbs that were inhabited by the local Moroccan community, divided into districts for Muslims, Christians, and Jews.11 Between these districts, a ‘zone sanitaire’ or “intermediate empty zone” – in which residential construction was

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Mark Crinson, Modern Architecture and the End of Empire (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2003), 1. 8 In the Athens Charter, he clearly distinguishes these spaces as a standard for urban planning. See Congrès Internationaux d'Architecture moderne (CIAM), Athens Charter, 1933, trans J. Tyrwhitt (The Library of the Graduate School of Design, 1946), 12-15. 9 The Service de L’Urbanisme of Casablanca included the young George Candilis, Vladimir Bodiansky, and Shadrach Woods. See Von Osten, “Architecture without Architects.” 10 A building method concerned with usefulness not aesthetics or monumentality. 11 Von Osten, “Architecture without Architects,” 11.

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prohibited – was incorporated directly into the city’s urban plan in an attempt to further demarcate the space of visibility of the colonial subject. Supplementing these colonial architectural and urban practices were a set of didactic programs implemented by the Protectorate that focused on public health and individual hygiene. These programs were housed in structures that espoused a visual language consistent with the ‘rationalised’ urban conglomerations developed by the Service de L’Urbanisme.12 A major part of the political educational mandate within these new ‘hygiene schools’ was the advent of rhetorical campaigns that focused on food preparation, consumption, and sanitation, in addition to marketing personal hygiene goods, such as manufactured soap and skin treatment, to the domestic captured markets. Most of the marketing efforts in the African continent that involved the promotion of soap products included disturbing imagery that promised a “white,” “clean,” and “pure” skin to individuals with darker skin tones. These images were often coupled with problematic mottos, such as “teaching the virtues of cleanliness” or “lightening the white man’s burden,” which were used explicitly in Pears soap advertisements, particularly in British-held territories across the continent (Fig. 5-1).

Fig. 5-1

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The Hygiene school in Oran (Hammam Bou Adjar) of Algeria is one such example.

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An extension of these ideologies of hygiene and management of contagion was the implementation of centralized meat processing, as exemplified with the establishment of Casablanca’s slaughterhouse in the early 1920s. Functioning within the broader ideological framework of colonial modernity, this slaughterhouse consisted of rooms that were dedicated to raising and slaughtering various livestock, including swine for the consumption of Christian settlers. Prior to its construction, preparation and consumption of animal products were typically small-scale operations situated in the historic bazaars or ceremonial gestures carried out in neighbourhoods or households. When we visited Casablanca in 2014, we used the slaughterhouse as the site of two performances, Unburden and Burden, in which we interrogated the relationship between space, coloniality and tensions around the notion of global progress.13 The first part of the series, Unburden, took place in an abandoned room in the abattoir, which was designated for the slaughter of pigs and has since 2000 remained untouched (Fig. 5-2). When the project began, the room was derelict, strewn with donkey feces, a desiccated dog, and a recently killed cat, with the ceiling shedding large sections of concrete. After a lengthy process of removing rubble and other accumulations, we cleaned the room and made a few alterations to the blood drainage basin to turn it into a functional pool. We freshly painted the space: the floors were painted white to mark the movements of visitors, and the basin indigo blue to reference the dye central to the traditional cloths of Sahrawi and Berber peoples. The space was turned into a public hammam/spa equipped with a decorative fountain, a basin filled with water and Saharan sand, public towels, videos displaying a water fountain installed on a dune in the Sahara, and three major staples of Morocco’s diet and exports; salt, oranges, and olives (Fig. 5-3). In the centre of the room was a large vinyl banner that advertised Pears soap, visually functioning as a border that kept bathers out of view from the space’s entrance. Visitors were invited to scrape the dead skin from their feet with salt, eat oranges and olives, and discuss how notions of cleansing and whiteness have colonial roots in historical and contemporary Moroccan narratives. Discussions initially centred on Pears’ use of “White Man’s Burden” rhetoric at the turn of the century and its ideological linkages to slum-clearance and urban revitalization projects.

 13

Both performances were positioned as spectacles that happened simultaneously with the 2014 World Cup held in Brazil. The title of the series, Order and Progress, was itself partially inspired by the motto on the modern Brazilian flag, “ordem e progresso.”

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Mid-1950s and Post-Independence Morocco “We are all engineers, we are all architects. If we have a basic structure or land, we just start to build.”14

Throughout the process of reconstructing the colonial city, including the development of new urban centres, industrial plants, and resource extraction, the Service de L’Urbanisme failed to account for the influx of rural workers, leading to a housing crisis. Faced with worsening conditions, workers and local residents organized resistance movements to counter an exclusionary urbanism that divided the city. In response to the continued systematic indifference towards the poor housing situation in Casablanca, a number of informal housing units started forming at the margins of the ‘zone sanitaire.’ In conception, these communities were similar to rudimentary versions of the old medinas, which functioned both as housing and as sites of informal sector commerce. Soon after their emergence, these networks of unplanned houses were identified as threatening to the governing bodies of the French Protectorate, as they acted as sites of continuous demonstrations and strikes in response to the lack of jobs and social services. Faced with these complex social geographies, Ecochard advocated for the implementation of Cartesian grids (termed the Ecochard Grid) into these intertwined networks of habitats, establishing residential blocks that incorporated designs specific to European suburban vertical and horizontal apartment units. In a weak gesture towards the vernacular, Ecochard augmented the established European standard with extended walled balconies that claimed ‘inspiration’ from the anthropological studies of courtyard Moroccan architecture. The Ecochard Grid subsequently became the universal industrialized language for rapidly-built workers’ housing and other territorial expansions in the region. Carrière Centrale (now known as Hay Hadidi) is the most widely publicized15 example of these geometric interventionist developments. Throughout the late period of the protectorate, the neighbourhood was a site of workers’ struggle initiated in the margins of the sanitary zone and adjacent to the city’s slaughterhouse, which was itself situated in that zone (Fig. 5-4).

 14

Von Osten, “Architecture without Architects,” 22. Photographs of the developments were published in international architectural magazines. It was commonly referred to and discussed in CIAM (Congrès Internationaux d'Architecture Moderne) meetings. 15

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As the French contractors were continuously faced with local protests in the process of these developments (especially as the 1956 independence of Morocco neared), some residential projects were put on hold or went unmaintained by the authorities. This shift in power dynamics between the foreign institutions and the newly-formed Moroccan governing bodies left modernist structures open to interpretation and appropriation by local dwellers. Moreover, this relocation of power from the hands of the planners to those of the users had resulted in a paradigmatic shift in the politics of top-down urban projects such as Carrière Centrale. The users gradually formed spaces that were responsive to their needs in a variety of ways. Balconies were often turned into enclosed rooms to maximize the spatial efficiency of the units; the grid road structure was slowly taken over by pop-up additions that turned the buildings into storefronts; and the stream of incoming immigrants returned to the vernacular modes of construction.16 In this process of decolonial (re)appropriation, many environments around the city were repurposed as the ‘zone sanitaire’ vanished and, according to newer standards, the ancient abattoir was decommissioned. Its abandoned site, however, was slowly explored and turned into a counter-cultural venue for street artists and musicians. The white walls of the old structure were transformed into politically loaded canvases for local and international graffiti enthusiasts and activists. In the process of reabsorbing a decommissioned plant into the urban fabric and

 16

Horia Serhane, an urban theorist from Morocco, has stated that people in the hut settlements learned about building practices in the city quarter, the Medina, which was already a multiethnic town structure before the French occupied the country. See Von Osten, “Architecture without Architects,” 22.

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assigning a new role to it that considers its history, the locals have essentially turned it into a forum where a site of slaughter became a place for discussion and gathering.

Fig. 5-5

Conclusion “If we want to make tourism a veritable motor of development then every single Moroccan must see himself as a tourism promoter mobilized to win the wager.”17

Although the immediate post-independence period saw some disruptions to the uneven social, political, and economic geographies that had defined Casablanca and Morocco, these have largely been reproduced structurally and ideologically. The ruptures in the geographies of exclusion in the immediate independence period have, in recent decades, become reinscribed along divisions of class, internationality, and relationship with

 17

H.M. King Mohammed VI, quoted in Nicolai Scherle, “Tourism, Neoliberal Policy and Competitiveness in the Developing World: The Case of the Master Plan of Marrakech,” Political Economy and Tourism: A Critical Perspective (New York: Routledge, 2011) 207.

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the Makhzen.18 Furthermore, the regulation of circulation and mobility that defined the colonial city has not altogether disappeared, but has merely expanded to frame the migration flows between the global north and the global south.19 Morocco, meanwhile, has continued to be shaped by the intervention of global actors – state, corporate or NGO – in a process that introduced sweeping neoliberal ‘reforms’ under the guise of ‘aid’ and processes of ‘democratization.’20 This began in the 1980s with a set of ‘structural adjustment programmes’21 by the IMF as part of a debt rescheduling agreement, with provisions including the ‘liberalization’ of foreign trade, and the privatization of predominantly state-run service and industrial sectors.22 This wholesale gutting of the public sector was performed with a general disregard of its effects on the political and social stability of the country. If the international community laments these developments, it is primarily because of their effects on the tourism industry. As one British consultant puts it: In the coming decade, there are likely to be strong demands on the public purse, fuelled by the county’s social problems, the high unemployment rate and ongoing labor disputes, which, in the past, has diverted funds from tourism development. Further privatization could, however, alleviate that problem.23 In other words, advocating the purported trickle down effects of neoliberalism as a solution. This process of privatization, however, had little effect in decentering power from the state and instead reinforced it by allocating the spoils of those state sales in the hands of Makhzen, extending “the conditions for capitalist class formation alongside older neo-patrimonial and clientelistic formations of power.”24 The state thus reemerges in a role reminiscent of the one it undertook during the protectorate, serving as a redistributor of resources among foreign and domestic elites and as a market de- and re-regulator.25

 18

The word makhzen literally means "warehouse" in North African Arabic (from ۚazana), where the king’s civil servants used to receive their wages, but this usage of the word became synonymous in Moroccan Arabic with the elite. 19 Von Osten, “Architecture without Architects.” 20 Koenraad Bogaert, “Contextualizing the Arab Revolts: The Politics behind Three Decades of Neoliberalism in the Arab World,” Middle East Critique 22 (2013): 6. 21 Scherle, “Tourism, Neoliberal Policy and Competitiveness in the Developing World,” 209. 22 Ibid., 210. 23 Ibid., 214. 24 Bogaert, “Contextualizing the Arab Revolts,” 11. 25 Ibid., 13.

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The fundamental restructuring, or rather, reinscription of regimes of extraction and capital accumulation have subsequently re-configured the city and built environment along the old lines of social, economic, and political exclusion that had previously defined the colonial city, predictably replicating the bidonvilles26 that accompanied it. Strategies by the postcolonial neoliberal state have also differed little with regard to how to alleviate the social deficits that have reasserted the bidonville as a necessary reaction to a sustained lack of housing and employment options. As in the earlier colonial regime, emphasis has been placed on the architecture and urban form of the bidonville with little rigorous work being done to alleviate the fundamental inequities that continue to replicate this urban form.27 For the current state, as with the protectorate, the existence of the bidonvilles not only externalizes and formalizes the systemic inequality in the distribution of wealth and resources, but also represents a threat to the exertion and extension of state power. Formed of ‘impenetrable spaces,’ inaccessible to police cars or army vehicles,28 the bidonville is capable of functioning outside the governed and regulated body of the city. As such, the bidonvilles have acted (as in the colonial period) as focal points for resistance against oppressive state policies,29 representing a rupture in the state management of dissent. The 2003 Casablanca bombings, whose perpetrators were residents of the ‘infamous’ Sidi Moumen bidonville,30 led both state representatives and international commentators to reposition the bidonvilles as spaces that “breed despair and religious extremism.”31 As a result, the 2003 bombings provided the state with impetus and moral justification to implement extensive slumclearance. The Villes Sans Bidonvilles Resettlement Program (VSBP),32 a

 26

A French term for a shantytown built of oil drums or other metal containers, especially on the outskirts of a North African city. 27 Koenraad Bogaert, “The Problem of Slums: Shifting Methods of Neoliberal Urban Government in Morocco,” Development and Change 43 (2011): 726. 28 Ibid., 724. 29 Many of the Moroccan protests of 2011-12 focused on issues of high unemployment, rampant corruption, jailing of activists, poor living conditions, and rising prices of goods. Reported on Al Jazeerah, “Anti-Government Protesters Rally in Morocco,” 12 Aug 2012. 30 As discussed in the second section of this paper, Sidi Moumen is adjacent to the former Carrière Centrale, the bidonville that was the focal point of resistance in the colonial period and experienced considerable clearance and Modernist construction by French authorities. See Tom Pfeiffer and Zakia Abdenebi, “Real Estate Downturn Boosts Morocco Slum Clearance,” Reuters, 23 April 2009. 31 Ibid. 32 Bogaert, “The Problem of Slums,” 721.

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project in part funded by USAID, the European Investment Bank, the French Development Agency, and the World Bank,33 with the goal of actively managing bidonville populations,34 is a notable example of such implementations. With an emphasis on clearance and resettlement instead of upgrading,35 VSBP reconstructed French modernist urban forms that facilitate an active management of the urban fabric and dissenting bodies, while dispersing said communities and networks of dissent into the urban periphery.36 The rate of demolition is staggering with up to 25,000 units cleared per year by 2010,37 with a claimed 4.3% decline in informal settlements from 2004-10.38 This emphasis on demolition and resettlement is amenable to a goal-based measuring of progress,39 a quantity that can then be represented as a sign of state benevolence and reform in sight of the Morocco 2020 tourism plan.40 However, the vast project of resettlement has been met with a deficit in investment in accompanying social support networks and job creation initiatives, with many new housing settlements located away from schools and other infrastructure.41 This deficit exacerbates conditions that were in part alleviated by the presence of informal networks of trade42 and mutual cooperation within the demolished bidonville communities. Furthermore, the new ‘social housing’43 is still largely cost-prohibitive to many residents of the bidonville communities whose experience of irregular or low income is not conducive to regular government-backed mortgage payments,44 water

 33

Ibid., 722. Ibid., 721. 35 Najib Lahlou, “Lessons from the ‘Cities Without Slums’ Program in Morocco,” World Bank Website. 36 Bogaert, “The Problem of Slums,” 724. 37 Lahlou, “Lessons from the ‘Cities Without Slums’ Program in Morocco.” 38 Ibid. 39 Koenraad Bogaert, “The Problem of Slums,” 726. 40 This plan seeks to increase the number of yearly tourists to Morocco to 20 million by 2020, further expanding the tourism industry that has become vital in the Moroccan economy under Mohammed VI. 41 Lahlou, “Lessons from the ‘Cities Without Slums’ Program in Morocco.” 42 Bogaert, “The Problem of Slums,” 724. 43 In reality, privately-owned buildings are constructed on government-subsidized lands. Developers are offered cut-price land if they sell some floors of their apartment blocks to slum families below the market price. 44 In 2004, the FOGARIM fund was created to help facilitate the purchase of new apartments by those with modest or irregular incomes. However, by 2010 only 34

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and electricity bills, and new taxes.45This has resulted in defaults on payments or cycles of debt consistent with the neoliberal restructuring of citizenship and housing markets. Lamia Zaki sees this process as an attempt to reframe the bidonville resident as a consumer, “replacing the notion of absolute human rights with that of a right to services.”46 This process re-incorporates the bidonville site into the neoliberal city as well as the citizen’s body through ‘market-integration and responsibilization’47 as a form of neoliberal biopower. Many of the new constructions have continued the failed urban planning policies of the colonial period through the concentration of massproduced low-cost apartments in the urban periphery,48 replicating the polarized social and economic geographies of the colonial period. Unsurprisingly, these relocations have not been willingly embraced by citizens of the bidonvilles, resulting in forced evictions followed or accompanied by protests.49 In conversation with journalist Soraya El Kahlaoui, these protestors claimed that the “Moroccan state has usurped a policy of colonizers.”50 The policy of eviction and resettlement that has marked the neoliberalisation of the city has motivations beyond the imposition of new securitized regimes and the remaking of the citizen as consumer. A major undercurrent in the resettlement campaign has been the expropriation of high-value lands for the expansion of large-scale urban development projects such as the Morocco Mall. One such instance occurred on February 6, 2014, when Moroccan security forces demolished 36 homes and evicted the residents of Douar Ouled Dlim to sell the land they occupied to the Riyadh Development Corporation (based in Saudi Arabia) for an expansion of the wealthy Rabat neighbourhood Hay Riad.51 As Bogaert suggests:

 10% of the target population was actually able to access these funds. See Bogaert, “The Problem of Slums,” 723. 45 Ibid., 724. 46 Lamia Zaki, “Transforming the City from Below: Shantytown Dwellers and the Fight for Electricity in Casablanca,” Subalterns and Social Protest: History from Below in the Middle East and North Africa (New York: Routledge, 2008), 116-37. 47 Bogaert, “The Problem of Slums,” 724. 48 Ibid., 726. 49 Soraya El Kahlaoui, “Moroccans Without Land, Moroccans Without a Country,” SHAM(e) Forum Maroc, 18 Dec 2014. 50 Ibid. 51 Samira Errazzouki, “Descendants of Moroccans’ Veterans Face Violent Eviction,” Huffington Post. 11 Feb 2015, accessed 12 March 2016.

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Chapter Five This often entails the imagination of the city more in relation to outsiders (e.g., tourists and foreign investors) instead of thinking of the city in function of the original city-dweller. In these development strategies, the exchange value of the city (i.e., how can we sell the city?) is privileged over and above the use value of the city (how can we make the best possible city for its actual residents?).52

This process of remaking the city for the consumption of the global mirrors the enframing that occurred under the colonial regime, with a systematic repackaging of the country in light of a royal-sanctioned tourism industry and foreign-driven property markets. Looking back at the sites of the 2003 Casablanca bombings, one notices that many of them were, as Jamal Bahmad notes, “real or imagined icons of unequally distributed wealth in the city.”53 In consideration of this fact, it becomes clear that religious extremism is perhaps not so much the problem as a failure of the current regime and its underpinning neoliberal economic policies to meaningfully address the social, economic, and infrastructural issues faced by Morocco’s most vulnerable. In light of this context, the presence of the abattoir becomes integral as a site of alternative culture and focal point for dissenting discourses to be creatively articulated. Furthermore, the building itself represents the tensions within a regime that externalizes itself by constructing sleek international-style financial and commercial complexes, with an undercurrent of demolishing colonial and dissenting histories. It is this erasure of historical memory to which Order and Progress speaks. The second part of Order and Progress, Burden, was a public ‘spectacle’ in which two taxicabs raced across the main thoroughfare of the abattoir, dragging piles of rubble in a half-hearted attempt to reach the end point (Fig. 5-6). The rubble was culled from the transformation of the site for the first intervention, Unburden. The taxis hired for the performance are the ubiquitous ‘white cabs’ or ‘Grand Taxis,’ a form of share taxi, typically large white 1970s or 1980s S-class Mercedes sedans that have served as the most common form of transportation for Casablanca’s working class communities, whose members cannot afford to own a car. These cabs have long been the cheapest option to travel across town, as the driver drops off and picks up fare-sharing passengers along the way, operating with little government interference. These cabs

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Bogaert, “Contextualizing the Arab Revolts,” 15. Jamal Bahmad, “From Casablanca to Casanegra: Neoliberal Globalization and Disaffected Youth in Moroccan Urban Cinema,” Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication 6 (2013): 18. 53

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are often sites of vibrant debate about social issues and one of the only places where Moroccans openly and freely express disapproval or condemnation of issues pertaining to the local government or the kingdom as a whole.54 In the past few years, as a result of the construction of the relatively expensive cross-town tram line, the central government has pushed for the white cabs to be phased out, claiming that they are dangerous and that they pollute considerably. This development not only threatens the jobs of hundreds of cab drivers and the mobility of thousands of Moroccans, but also silences the debates possible among the small groups of cab riders. The result of the staged race was that one of the taxi’s ‘burdens’ tore from its hitch as it wedged into a ridge in the raceway, and it completed the race without the pile of rubble. Following that incident, the question of who the winner was arose: the one who had successfully shed his burden, or the one that held firm and continued to shoulder it. Ironically, the ‘white cabs” used in the performance of Burden are not the conventional cabs used by the working class of Casablanca, but rather ones that are solely dedicated to the movement of tourists throughout the city. No longer sites of radical dialogue, these cabs re-perform the authentic for the foreign body, enacting Mohammed VI’s call for Moroccans to act as vessels for tourism,55 even while the rubble of colonial history and neoliberal demolition is dragging behind. The race, in turn, embodies the performance of ‘race for progress’ that is inherent in the King’s message. It hints at the restructuring of the economy in favour of policies of market ‘liberalization’ and privatization, which seek to draw global capital through showpiece mega-projects. This restructuring of the economy puts the city – as mentioned earlier in this section – on display for the use of ‘the outsider,’ relegating the working class and low-income classes to the periphery.



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Youssef Sourgan, "The White Taxi in Casablanca: A Mirror into the City's Social Life," Morocco World News RSS. 13 Sept. 2013, accessed 12 March 2016. 55 Nicolai Scherle, “Tourism, Neoliberal Policy and Competitiveness in the Developing World: The Case of the Master Plan of Marrakech,” Political Economy and Tourism: A Critical Perspective (New York: Routledge, 2011), 207.

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Bibliography “Anti-Government Protesters Rally in Morocco.” 12 Aug 2012. Al Jazeerah . Athens Charter, 1933. Translated by J. Tyrwhitt. Boston: The Library of the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University, 1946. Bahmad, Jamal. “From Casablanca to Casanegra: Neoliberal Globalization and Disaffected Youth in Moroccan Urban Cinema.” Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication 6 (2013): 15-35. Bogaert, Koenraad. “The Problem of Slums: Shifting Methods of Neoliberal Urban Government in Morocco.” Development and Change 43 (2011): 709-731. Bogaert, Koenraad “Contextualizing the Arab Revolts: The Politics behind Three Decades of Neoliberalism in the Arab World.” Middle East Critique 22 (2013): 213-34. Crinson, Mark. Modern Architecture and the End of Empire. Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2003. Çelik, Z. Urban Forms and Colonial Confrontations: Algiers under French Rule. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.

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El Kahlaoui, Soraya. “Moroccans Without Land, Moroccans Without a Country.” SHAM(e) Forum Maroc 18 Dec, 2014. https://shameforummaroc.wordpress.com/2014/12/18/the-demolitionof-douar-ouled-dlim-in-rabat/#more-555. Errazzouki, Samira. “Descendants of Moroccans’ Veterans Face Violent Eviction.” Huffington Post. 11 Feb 2015.

Lahlou, Najib. “Lessons from the “Cities without Slums” Program in Morocco.” World Bank Website.

Mitchell, Timothy. Colonizing Egypt. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991. Pfeiffer, Tom, and Abdenebi, Zakia. “Real Estate Downturn Boosts Morocco Slum Clearance.” Reuters, 23 Apr 2009.

Sourgan, Youssef. "The White Taxi in Casablanca: A Mirror into the City's Social Life." Morocco World News RSS. 13 Sept 2013. Scherle, Nicolai. “Tourism, Neoliberal Policy and Competitiveness in the Developing World: The Case of the Master Plan of Marrakech.” Political Economy and Tourism: A Critical Perspective. New York: Routledge, 2011. Von Osten, Marion. “Architecture without Architects – Another Anarchist Approach.” E-Flux 6 (2009).

      

CHAPTER SIX UNSETTLING ORIENTALISM: EDWARD W. SAID’S 1978 BOOK AND ITS COVERS1 KATHERINE BISCHOPING, RAWAN ABDELBAKI, KRITEE AHMED, KRISTA BANASIAK AND DUYGU GÜL KAYA

Introduction This research project begins with a curiosity about the ways in which visual imagery can be used to unsettle Orientalist discourse. We draw on Edward W. Said’s foundational definition of this discourse as one that dichotomizes the so-called West and Orient, claiming that the so-called West offers a standpoint from which an objective, knowing gaze can be cast upon its Oriental counterpart, (re)producing purported truths that sustain imperial power relations. Our inquiry does not rely only on Said’s definition. We also turn to the covers of Said’s 1978 book Orientalism, in order to examine how designers and publishers from around the world have taken up the opportunity to visually resist or subvert Orientalist discourse. Orientalism and its covers stand in an intertextual relation here;2 that is, cover designs can serve as first-glance introductions and commercial invitations to a work, and as sites in which designers

 1

We thank Bojan Baüa, Zhipeng Gao, Sakis Gekas, Burak Köse, Larry Lam, Azar Masoumi, Manal Sallam, and Hazel Smith for generously assisting us, and RouzbehAkhbari, Andrew Gayed, Felix Kalmenson, Itrath Syed, and Sheena Wilson for thoughtful feedback. 2 Graham Allen, Intertextuality (New York: Routledge, 2011).

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creatively suggest interpretations of it. 3 Yet, reading a work can unfold new readings of its cover image; as Jacques Derrida notes, a final meaning is always being deferred.4 An inquiry such as this, focused on multiple representations of a single work, invites interrogations of these representations’ differences. We were initially stymied about how to avoid reinscribing a Western vs Oriental dichotomy as the basis of our interrogation. Adopting the more flexible analytic category of the Islamicate context, we formulated the more open, inductive question of whether and how cover designs from countries with a Muslim majority tended to address Orientalist discourse in distinctive ways. We quickly noted that, of the 65 cover designs we identified, the 13 hailing from Islamicate contexts—specifically, Albania, Bangladesh, Egypt, Lebanon, Indonesia, Iran, Pakistan, and Turkey—used imagery in ways that swam against the global tide. In this paper, we will summarize how cover designs from non-Islamicate national contexts overwhelmingly tend to ironically poke at the content of Orientalist knowledge. We then discuss how those from Islamicate contexts more commonly explore the political and personal consequences of such knowledge, and the ontology upon which it relies. Throughout this analysis, we focus on how Orientalism’s cover designs depict the gazes of artists, subjects, and knowers, and connect these to that of the viewer.

Methods We located most of our 65 editions of Orientalism by translating Said’s name and the title of the work into multiple languages, aided by WorldCat, an online international library catalogue. Other possible editions were found in critical reviews, on readers’ fan sites, such as GoodReads and LibraryThing, on the websites of publishing companies and booksellers, and on eBay. We translated the text surrounding the cover images to confirm which were relevant. Reverse image search engines were used to identify cover images wherever possible. Herein, our shorthand is to speak of cover designs by referring to the countries in which they were published, for example, “a Brazilian cover,” providing more detail only for

 3

Ned Drew and Paul Sternberger, By Its Cover: Modern American Book Cover Design (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Architectural Press, 2005). 4 Jacques Derrida, Positions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981).

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designs discussed at length. Our collection of images can be viewed on Pinterest.5 As mentioned, our analysis regards a book and its cover as intertextually related. Further, because our analytic strategy included seeking out the titles of cover images, the characters, settings, narratives many of them purported to depict, the biographies and national contexts of their creators, and the ways in which the images presently circulate, this layered information also entered the intertextual dialogue. Finally, we offer a situated reading, not an absolute one. As we sometimes note, our selves, our biographies, and our varied knowledges of the national contexts in which these editions were published are implicated in how we interpret their covers. New information about an image could bring us to wholly new readings, and to further reflection on the pertinence of Derrida’s concept of différance to our process.6 We also understood our affective responses to images to be relevant, adopting Michelle Rosaldo’s conception of emotions as “thoughts somehow ‘felt’ in flushes, pulses, ‘movements’ of our livers, minds, hearts, stomachs, skin. They are embodied thoughts, thoughts seeped with the apprehension that ‘I am involved.’”7

Unsettling Orientalist Knowledge through Irony The predominant global trend in covering Orientalism is to use images from Orientalist visual art—that is, from a body of European works of fine arts and design whose common ground was to present what audiences could interpret as Oriental characters, settings, and lifeways. As Linda Nochlin has discussed, these works are the visual complements of the literary, historical, and social scientific works that Said critiqued, and that have sustained projects of empire.8 It is no coincidence that Orientalist art flourished in the 19th century, hard on the heels of Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt and Syria. Of our 65 cover designs, eight had no illustrations. Of the remaining 57, only ten had illustrations that we did not consider Orientalist, such as a photograph of Said; all others included Orientalist images, largely from the

 5

See “Orientalism, by Edward W. Said,” Pinterest, accessed March 1, 2016, https://www.pinterest.com/kathyb0506/orientalism-by-edward-w-said/. 6 Derrida, Positions. 7 Michelle Rosaldo, “Toward an Anthropology of Self and Feeling,” in Culture Theory: Essays on Mind, Self, and Emotion, ed. Richard A. Shweder and Robert A. LeVine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008): 141. 8 Linda Nochlin, “The Imaginary Orient,” Art in America 71, no. 5 (1983): 118-31.

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19th century and early 20th century. A valuable exemplar is “The Snake Charmer” (c. 1879), a painting by Jean-Léon Gérôme, the so-called “poster boy” for Orientalist art,9 that covered the first and subsequent US editions10 and was later adopted by publishers in Spain, Norway, the UK, and Vietnam. This work shows a dim hall in a state of deteriorating grandeur, its stone floor crumbling and an ancient weapon taking pride of place on an ornate, calligraphy-embellished tile wall. The strong diagonal line of the weapon points down to a group of well-armed, pipe-smoking men seated on the floor. The line of their gaze is, in turn, directed intently toward a nude boy who performs before them on a small carpet, a python entwining his slender form. Together, boy and python look toward the weapon, the line of their gaze completing the stable triangle that is the core of the painting’s composition. Through the detail with which he and others presented Orientalized subjects and their settings, Gérôme laid a powerful claim to knowledge of an Orient that is violent, indolent, sensual, and animalistic, in a state of neglected opulence. 11 Of the tropes so common in the Orientalist art appearing on the covers we surveyed, “The Snake Charmer” lacks only the fantasied odalisque and the desert, which stands as a symbol both of a spiritual contemplation that contrasts with Europe’s rising secular materialism and of the decline of once-glorious civilizations. 12 By representing a stock of knowledge about wantonly childish figures in hasbeen lands, this painting and others like it prime a logic in which it is morally incumbent on Western empires to spread their enlightenment.13 As the first cover image for Orientalism, “The Snake Charmer” was a bold, ironic choice reflecting Said’s radical appropriation of the hithertorespectable label of Orientalism. As Linda Hutcheon explains, irony works by appropriating the language of an intimately familiar dominant

 9

Jonathan Jones, “Jean-Léon Gérôme: Orientalist Fantasy Among the Impressionists,” The Guardian, July 3, 2012, accessed January 15, 2016, http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/jonathanjonesblog/2012/jul/03/jeanleon-gerome-orientalism-impressionists 10 This cover can be viewed at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Orientalism,_first_ edition.jpg 11 Nochlin, “The Imaginary Orient.” 12 Michael J. Heffernan, “The Desert in French Orientalist Painting During the Nineteenth Century,” Landscape Research 16, no. 2 (1991): 37-42. All but three of the unillustrated covers emphasized colours such as burnt umber, dark orange, sand yellow, and gold, possibly gesturing again toward the desert. 13 Nochlin, “The Imaginary Orient.”

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discourse, powerfully destabilizing and unsettling it. 14 One can imagine enthusiasts of Orientalist art purchasing the book, only to find that the cover designer had taken an admired painting and cast it under a light of scrutiny, turning it into something so bad as to be laughably good. Other designers have cropped or altered the images with which they are working in ways that make their juxtaposition with Said’s thought all the more extreme. For instance, a Brazilian cover design cropped all context out of a scene of rapine from Eugène Delacroix’s 1827 painting “La Mort de Sardanapale” so that it appears to be an everyday happening, rather than part of the cataclysm of a mythic emperor’s death. The cover of the Russian edition embellished a camel rider and the desert horizon from Prosper Marilhat’s 1844 work “Arabes syriens en voyage” with a shimmering aura. However, as Orientalism has now spent decades on social science bookshelves in several countries, we suspect that the ironic use of “The Snake Charmer” or other Orientalist cover illustrations has been doing less and less to destabilize the discourse. All five of us have observed that the Orientalist covers of editions that we had owned before beginning this project had lost their capacity to shock us. Instead, they had come to stand for Said’s book, to have become renormalized as its brand or logo, and to no longer signify the discourse that Said criticizes. Their jokes had turned stale. We suspect that in other ways the Orientalist imagery subtly distances many readers from the persistent, far-reaching issues that Said diagnosed. First, the era in which so many of the cover images were created may seem remote, allowing Orientalism to seem like something that happened back then; few covers take the tack of Swedish publisher Ordfront’s 2000 edition, which uses a current photograph of lushly patterned cushions, connecting Orientalism to contemporary practices of commodifying the Other. 15 Second, although Orientalist art was and is produced in many countries, surprisingly few publishers use images created by their countrymen and women. A German cover uses Italian art, an Italian cover uses British art, a British cover uses French art, and so forth. The effect is a scapegoating one, in which Orientalism is often something perpetrated over there. Finally, in almost every instance, the gaze of the Orientalized subjects that these covers show is directed toward one another, the distant horizon, or other spaces of contemplation. In “The Snake Charmer,” for

 14

Linda Hutcheon, Irony's Edge: The Theory and Politics of Irony (New York: Routledge, 1995). 15 Sanjay and Ashwani Sharma, “White Paranoia: Orientalism in the Age of Empire,” Fashion Theory 7, no. 3-4 (2003): 301-17.

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example, the central triangle of the composition has such mutual, selfreferential gazes at its core. As Nochlin has argued about “The Snake Charmer,” when viewers are not invited to identify or engage with a painting’s subjects, they become voyeurs of a scene that seems fixed as though in amber.16

Unsettling Orientalism by Returning the Gaze We now turn to covers of Orientalism from Islamicate contexts, as they offer alternatives to the global tendency to contest Orientalist discourse with its own art, in an ironic and perhaps distantiating fashion. Only five of the 12 illustrated covers from Islamicate contexts include Orientalist art, compared to 42 of the 45 illustrated covers from elsewhere. Of even greater interest to us is what stands out about the covers from Islamicate contexts on their own terms. Foremost, it is how the subjects depicted on them unsettle Orientalism through the gaze. We came to this conclusion by noticing, first, that four of the 12 cover illustrations from Islamicate contexts, in comparison with only two of the 45 from elsewhere, employ a technique of artistic perspective that permits viewers to see subjects who appear to look directly at them, following them with their eyes. According to Catherine Lutz and Jane Collins, some analysts would argue that this “short-circuits the voyeurism identified as an important component of most photography; there can be no peeping where the other meets our gaze.”17 Viewing these covers, we did find the subjects on them to evoke our sympathies in a way that the languid, remote Orientalist odalisques had not. The subject of Indonesia’s Pustaka Pelajar 2010 edition of Orientalisme (Fig. 10-1) is a prime example. The design emphasizes the direct gaze of her eyes by outlining them in three ways: with the abstracted eye-shaped framing of her photograph, with her niqab, and with kohl. Following Hanneke Grootenboer’s analysis, we observe that it is because the image’s visual frame is so intensively narrowed that the woman’s eyes come to stand for her gaze, rather than her face or person.18 Moreover, her gaze struck us as decidedly agentic, as simultaneously displeased, challenging, and disappointed in what it surveyed. We imagined that, were

 16

Nochlin, “The Imaginary Orient.” Catherine Lutz and Jane Collins, “The Photograph as an Intersection of Gazes: The Example of National Geographic,” Visual Anthropology Review 7, no. 1 (1991): 139. 18 Hanneke Grootenboer, Treasuring the Gaze: Intimate Vision in Late EighteenthCentury Eye Miniatures (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 74. 17

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we reading this edition, this woman’s gaze would address us insistently whenever we put the book down, sharing her assessment of the discourse Said was discussing. This cover invited us to consider the impact of Orientalist claims to knowledge, rather than reiterating such knowledge. A more complex narrative of gazes, agency, and the consequences of Orientalism can be read into the covers of the Egyptian editions of AlIstishraq: al-MafƗhƯm al-GharbƯyah lil-Sharq [Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the East], published by Al-Hay'ah al-'Ammah lil-Kitab.19 On these covers, the book’s title occupies a generous, empty, central space. In the margins, layered with hand-written letters from the Latin alphabet and repetitions of the English word “tradition,” are strewn four small photographs of women who appear to be from Orientalist paintings come to life. This cover was initially an enigma to us all, including Rawan Abdelbaki, our Egyptian co-author. Yet, the enigma demanded to be solved; the women themselves seemed to insist on it. The charm of their poses was belied by the tension we read in their facial expressions. One of them appeared to be near tears. Another, who looked directly toward the photographer and toward us as viewers, appeared stoic, dismayed, and defiant. Eventually we came to interpret the central space on which the Egyptian editions’ titles were written as akin to that of a postcard on which Orientalist texts and images could be inscribed and transmitted; looking closely at the cover, we even noticed a fragment of a postmark. We arrived at this interpretation when we traced two of the photographs to an online site trading in old postcards of what are called nus ethniques.20 From there, we learned of their late-19th-century to early20th century production by a Swiss photographer named Jean Geiser (c. 1848-c. 1923), who worked in North Africa. As Malek Alloula has demonstrated, the supposedly ethnographic photographs taken by Geiser and others bore little relation to their subjects’ lifeways, but played a powerful role in trafficking harem fantasies abroad.21

 19

One of these covers can be viewed at Elmeda, accessed March 1, 2016, elmeda.net/spip.php?article2243. 20 “Cartes postales anciennes d’Afrique du nord.” ABC de la CPA, 2005-2013, accessed January 15, 2016. http://www.cartespostales-afriquedunord.com /scenes_types_nusexo.html 21 Malek Alloula, The Colonial Harem, trans. Myrna Godzich and Wlad Godzich (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986).

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Fig. 6-1. Cover design by Pustaka Pelajar, Indonesia, 2010. Reproduced by kind permission.

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The images are also significant because they afford us a glimpse, albeit an indirect or implicit one, of an Orientalist. Through the women’s gazes, we palpably sense their photographer’s discomfiting presence in a moment when the political is personal; by contrast, the subject of Fig. 10-1 had seemed to commune directly with us, the viewers. This intimation of the photographer’s presence matters because one of the great absences that Nochlin identifies in Orientalist painting is of Westerners themselves, despite their busy presence in the Orient. 22 The paintings present a unidirectional, controlling gaze, says Nochlin, one that brings the Orient into being. Via this gaze, Said tells us, Orientalized individuals are often “seen through, analyzed not as citizens, or even people, but as problems to be solved or confined.”23 They are not expected to gaze in return. The covers of Orientalism from non-Islamicate contexts never show both Orientalized subjects and their Western counterparts. However, three of the 12 illustrated covers from Islamicate countries do. Particularly intriguing issues about what gazes between co-present Orientalist and Orientalized subjects can mean are raised by Turkish publisher Metis Yaynlar’s ùarkiyatçlk: Bat'nn ùark Anlayúlar [Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient] (Fig. 10-2). It is a candid photograph in which Pierre Loti (1850-1923), a French naval officer and novelist, comes ashore from a ship and is saluted by an Ottoman soldier, who regards him with a friendly and respectful gaze. Unlike the passenger behind him, Loti is holding his hat in one hand, a gesture that we read as reciprocating the soldier’s greeting to some extent. However, Loti is looking down. The effect is that viewers are invited to join the soldier in looking at him. Here, notably, it is not the Orient that is the passive object of an Orientalist gaze. Rather, it is an Orientalist who is the object of two gazes: those of the soldier and of the viewer. To understand the significance of the soldier’s gaze requires some background on Pierre Loti. In co-author Duygu Gül Kaya’s experience as an academic from Turkey, Loti is a figure well-known in Turkey’s cultural and historical landscape, attracting both love and loathing. In the late Ottoman and early Republican years, he was exalted as a friend and defender of Turkey who stood against the imperialistic desires of Western powers. In 1920, January 23 was celebrated as a holiday in Loti’s name in gratitude for his defense of Turkish interests against French military

 22 23

Nochlin, “The Imaginary Orient.” Edward W. Said, Orientalism (Toronto: Random House Canada, 1978), 207.

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incursions. 24 In 1934 his name was given to a hilltop offering a spectacular view of the Golden Horn. But Loti was also a dubious figure. In 1922, the new Kemalist elites banned him from visiting the country and patriotic intellectuals denounced him as a “charlatan” who insulted Turkish culture while claiming to praise it.25 The extravagant Orientalism of Loti’s 1879 semi-autobiographical novel, Aziyadé,26 has something to do with this; within its opening pages, Turks avidly throng to a public hanging and a harem woman sets her childlike, sea-green eyes on the narrator, initiating their illicit romance. Today, Loti remains controversial, being criticized by the ruling Islamist-conservative AKP (Justice and Development Party) for ridiculing Turkish values.27 The soldier’s gaze at Loti is connected to broader discussions of Turkey’s ambivalent relationship to the West, often dubbed a love-hate relationship.28

 24

Ayúe Hür, “Piyer Loti Tepesi mi, ødris-i Bitlisi Tepesi mi?” Agos, June 19, 2012, accessed May 10, 2016. http://www.agos.com.tr/tr/yazi/1729/piyer-loti-tepesi-miidris-i-bitlisi-tepesi-mi 25 Ayúe Hür, “Piyer Loti Tepesi mi, ødris-i Bitlisi Tepesi mi?” 26 Pierre Loti, Aziyadé (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1879). 27 Nurullah Çetin, “Pierre Loti Türk'ü aúa÷layan bir oryantalisttir,” Yeni Mesaj, June 20, 2012, accessed May 10, 2016. http://www.yenimesaj.com.tr/pierre-lotiturku-asagilayan-bir-oryantalisttir-makale,12002025.html. The AKP does not take issue with tourist-friendly Orientalist images exemplifying what Erkan Ercel, in 2014, called Ottoman nostalgia. These images include Amadeo Preziosi’s (181682) painting, “The First Shop of the Confectioner Hac Bekir in Bahçekap, Istanbul,” which appears on ørfan Yaymclk’s 1998 edition of Oryantalizm, and from which a popular confectionery draws its logo. Michel Foucault’s 1978 conception of tactical polyvalence, in which a discourse is not a jigsaw of inherently related parts, so much as a collection of sometimes contradictory fragments that can each be put to multiple purposes, may be relevant to understanding such uses of Orientalist imagery in Turkey and the varied reception of Orientalist tropes in the lands they represent. 28 Meltem Ahiska, "Occidentalism: The Historical Fantasy of the Modern," The South Atlantic Quarterly 102, no. 2 (2003): 351-79; Edhem Eldem, “Ottoman and Turkish Orientalism,” Architectural Design 80, no. 1 (2010): 26-31.

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Fig. 6-2. Cover design by Metis Yaynlar, Turkey, 2001. Reproduced by kind permission.

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At the heart of the Turkish national identity is a tension between a desire to become as powerful and authoritative as Western subjects and a desire to distinguish the Turkish self from the West and preserve an authentic Turkish identity. This tension repeatedly fuels debates at formative passages in Ottoman/Turkish history, such as during the Kemalist project of modernization and the present-day issue of seeking accession to the European Union.

Unsettling the Ontology of Orientalism (and Orientalism) The final way in which cover designs from Islamicate contexts unsettle Orientalism is to draw our attention, via their use of the gaze, to ontological questions. The three covers we now discuss can be interpreted as problematizing acts of knowing, situating knowers, and blurring the knowledge of a Western-Oriental dichotomy upon which Said had observed Orientalist discourse to depend. In so doing, they disrupt Orientalism’s Enlightenment ontology, but also unsettle Orientalism’s claims. That Said’s Orientalism lies orthogonal to an accumulated body of earlier works, including classics of Orientalist literature, humanities, and social science written in several languages, is astutely stated in visual form in Albanian publisher 2LindjePerëndime’s design for Orientalizmi (Fig. 10-3). At the same time as we interpreted this cover to communicate that Said’s text permitted a gaze through a new window into other texts, unsettling their claims to knowledge, we also took it to provoke the question of whether Said’s window and gaze were necessarily definitive. Could an infinite series of books offer infinite new perspectives? This question connects to a much-discussed ambivalence in Orientalism: Said alternates between gazing with apparent certainty onto the realities of Orientalism, and subscribing to a Foucauldian view in which certainty and realities are impossible because all knowledge claims are representations.29 A cover design that we took as an invitation to muse about Said’s standpoint as a knower is the 2007-08 one for SharqүshinƗsƯ, from Iranian publisher Nashre Farhange Eslam.30 The design is simple. It uses an Annie



29 See James Clifford, “Review of Orientalism,” History and Theory 19, no. 2 (1980): 204-23; Lata Mani and Ruth Frankenberg, “The Challenge of Orientalism,” Economy and Society 14, no. 2 (1985): 174-92; Edward W. Said, “Orientalism Reconsidered,” Cultural Critique (1985): 89-107. 30 This cover can be viewed at “Orientalism: Sharghshenasi,” Ketab Corp, accessed March 1, 2016, http://shop.ketab.com/addprod.asp?id=16935&cat=1& pgs =3&pic=A.

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Fig. 6-3. Cover design by 2LindjePerëndime, Albania, 2009, reproduced by kind permission.

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Leibovitz photograph of Said in three-quarter profile, chin on hand like Rodin’s “The Thinker.” The same photo appears on an edition of Orientalism from China, where we read it as a straightforward portrait of a thoughtful author. However, on this Iranian edition, the photograph is duplicated, so that one image of Said faces left (or westward) in the background of the design, overlapped by another that faces right/eastward in the foreground. In duplicate, he appears somehow stressed or troubled. We read this design as emphasizing Said’s biography, as a person whose youth and childhood were passed “between worlds.”31 The design suggests that Said’s biography informs his perspectives, questions, and conclusions. Our reading is undoubtedly influenced by familiarity with the scholarship that has critiqued or sympathetically extended Orientalism.32 The earliest edition we have from Turkey, published by Pnar Yaynlar in 1982, raised the question of how Orientalism might have read had Said written it from a Turkish location. At first glance, the Western/Oriental dichotomy of which Said writes appears to be exemplified by this edition’s cover. Surrounded by the smoke of a city under siege, we see the heads and shoulders of a resolute, uniformed British officer and a glowering, turbaned Arab man, in an image that pits tropes of despotically violent Arab masculinity against a noble, rational Western one. However, that the image comes from the poster for the 1966 UK film Khartoum33 confounds this reading. The film concerns the battle for control of the Sudanese capital, which in the late 19th century had been under the political rule of Egypt and, in turn, the Ottoman Empire, albeit under British fiscal control. In 1883, Muhammad Ahmad, an insurgent who believed himself to be the Mahdi, a prophesied leader, set siege to Khartoum. He is the Arab in the image, and British General Robert Gordon is the Westerner. Yet that Ahmad is played by Laurence Olivier in brownface, and that Gordon leads Egyptian troops under the Ottoman flag, while wearing the Ottoman fez, means that the Arab in the image was, offscreen, a Westerner, while the Westerner in the image represented the Ottoman empire in an Arab vs. Arab battle. Orientalism is not quite up to explaining this because its focus is on the discursive constitution of an Oriental Other, a category that clumps together Muslims, Arabs, Moors, Saracens, Semitic-speaking peoples, and so forth, willy-nilly. Yet, most people in Turkey are non-Arab Muslims,

 31

Edward W. Said, “Between Worlds,” London Review of Books 20, no. 9 (1998): 3-7. 32 See, for example, Mani and Frankenberg, “The Challenge of Orientalism.” 33 The poster can be viewed online at: “Khartoum (film),” Wikipedia, last modified on 27 February 2016, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khartoum_(film).

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and their relations with Arabs have historically been complex. The notion of Ottoman Orientalism 34 has been developed to refer to how Ottoman elites internalized, appropriated, or mimicked Western Orientalism, especially in the context of the modernization agenda of the nineteenth century. They embraced the Orientalist “logic of time and progress”35 in their perceptions and representations of “the Oriental within—generally the Arab, the Kurd, the Bedouin,” 36 often concluding that those groups were stuck in a pre-modern condition, and that the empire’s periphery urgently needed intervention. Pnar Yaynlar’s cover design therefore invites Turkish nationals to reflect on how internalizing Orientalism affects others, while Metis Yaynlar’s cover design (Fig. 10-2) had asked how internalizing Orientalism affects the Turkish self. That the questions are simultaneously possible suggests how differently Orientalism might have turned out had it been written in Turkey, or other Islamicate contexts with non-Arab majorities.

Conclusion Our analyses of cover images of Orientalism from around the globe have focused on three strategies by which they unsettle Orientalist discourse. The first, predominating in non-Islamicate contexts, is to undermine the knowledge claims of Orientalist visual artists by ironically setting the title of Orientalism upon them. The second strategy, that of problematizing Orientalism by highlighting Orientalized subjects’ gazes, is found largely in Islamicate contexts. There too, we find cover designs that can be interpreted as questioning the Enlightenment ontology from which Orientalist knowledge claims derive their confidence. In so doing, these designs raise questions about Said as a knower, and Orientalism as his knowledge claim. All five of us often write and read in the largely non-Islamicate context of Canada, and have come to realize that the cover designs available for our English readings of Orientalism all make the same tired, distantiating joke. We close with a fantasy about a cover that would emphasize the echoes of Orientalist discourse into our time and our political context, in which there has been a push to forbid women to wear face-coverings when taking the citizenship oath, and in which the Charter of Rights and

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Ussama Makdisi, “Ottoman Orientalism,” The American Historical Review 107, no. 3 (2002): 768-96; Eldem, “Ottoman and Turkish Orientalism.” 35 Makdisi, “Ottoman Orientalism,” 769. 36 Eldem, “Ottoman and Turkish Orientalism,” 27.

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Freedoms risks being undermined by the anti-terror Bill C-51. We picture an Orientalism unsettlingly introduced with “The Snake Charmer, or The Anatomy of the 21st-Century Savage,” 37 Iranian-American artist Shoja Azari’s 2013 reimagining of Gérôme’s “The Snake Charmer.” Azari supplants the ancient weaponry that appears in the original painting with Kalashnikovs and rocket-propelled grenades, and introduces two veiled women into the audience. The revised painting is centered within a collaged smorgasbord of sensationalized media images of the dangerous terrorist.38 Through his anti-Orientalist parody, Azari points to the narrow binaries through which the so-called Orient has persistently been imagined: those of the war-obsessed jihadi man and the mysteriously veiled woman. The image thus showcases contemporary Orientalism and its continuity with that of the past, announcing, “This is how we got here.” Were it to cover Orientalism, Azari’s work would destabilize Canadian readers’ security as knowers of a past phenomenon, urging us to instead question our complicity in reproducing Orientalism and the inequalities it legitimizes.

Bibliography Ahiska, Meltem. "Occidentalism: The Historical Fantasy of the Modern." The South Atlantic Quarterly 102, no. 2 (2003): 351-79. Allen, Graham. Intertextuality. New York: Routledge, 2011. Alloula, Malek. The Colonial Harem. Translated by Myrna Godzich and Wlad Godzich. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986. “Cartes postales anciennes d’Afrique du nord.” ABC de la CPA, 20052013. Accessed January 15, 2016. http://www.cartespostalesafriquedunord.com/scenes_types_nusexo.html Çetin, Nurullah. “Pierre Loti Türk'ü aúa÷layan bir oryantalisttir.” Milliyetçi, May 7, 2015. Accessed January 20, 2016. http://www.milliyetci.com.tr/yazi/pierre-loti-turku-asagilayan-biroryantalisttir.html Clifford, James. “Review of Orientalism.” History and Theory 19, no. 2 (1980): 204-23.



37 This image can be viewed at: “Shoja Azari: The Snake Charmer or The Anatomy of the 21st Century Savage, 2013,” Artsy, accessed March 1, 2016, https://www.artsy.net/artwork/shoja-azari-the-snake-charmer-or-the-anatomy-ofthe-21st-century-savage/zoom 38 Kisa Lala, “Shoja Azari: Illusion and Disillusion,” Huffington Post, December 10, 2013, accessed January 15, 2016. http://www. huffingtonpost.com/kisa-lala/illusion-and-disillusion_b_4304188.html

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Derrida, Jacques. Positions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981. Drew, Ned, and Paul Sternberger. By Its Cover: Modern American Book Cover Design. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Architectural Press, 2005. Eldem, Edhem. “Ottoman and Turkish Orientalism.” Architectural Design 80, no. 1 (2010): 26-31. Ercel, Erkan. “Psychoanalysis, Fantasy, Postcoloniality: Derivative Nationalism and Historiography in Post-Ottoman Turkey.” PhD diss., York University, 2014. Foucault, Michel. History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction. Translated by Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage Books, 1978. Grootenboer, Hanneke. Treasuring the Gaze: Intimate Vision in Late Eighteenth-Century Eye Miniatures. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. Heffernan, Michael J. “The Desert in French Orientalist Painting During the Nineteenth Century.” Landscape Research 16, no. 2 (1991): 37-42. Hür, Ayúe. “Piyer Loti Tepesi mi, ødris-i Bitlisi Tepesi mi?” Agos, June 19, 2012. Accessed January 15, 2016. http://www.agos.com.tr/haber.php?seo=piyer-loti-tepesi-mi-idrisibitlisi-tepesi-mi&haberid=1824 Hutcheon, Linda. Irony's Edge: The Theory and Politics of Irony. New York: Routledge, 1995. Jones, Jonathan. “Jean-Léon Gérôme: Orientalist Fantasy Among the Impressionists.” The Guardian, July 3, 2012. Accessed January 15, 2016. http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/jonathanjonesblog/ 2012/jul/03/jean-leon-gerome-orientalism-impressionists Khartoum. Directed by Basil Dearden and Eliot Elisofon. 1966. UK: United Artists, 2002. DVD. Lala, Kisa. “Shoja Azari: Illusion and Disillusion.” Huffington Post, December 10, 2013. Accessed January 15, 2016. http://www. huffingtonpost.com/kisa-lala/illusion-and-disillusion_b_4304188.html Loti, Pierre. Aziyadé. Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1879. Lutz, Catherine, and Jane Collins. “The Photograph as an Intersection of Gazes: The Example of National Geographic.” Visual Anthropology Review 7, no. 1 (1991): 134-49. Makdisi, Ussama. “Ottoman Orientalism.” The American Historical Review 107, no. 3 (2002): 768-96. Mani, Lata, and Ruth Frankenberg. “The Challenge of Orientalism.” Economy and Society 14, no. 2 (1985): 174-92. Nochlin, Linda. “The Imaginary Orient.” Art in America 71, no. 5 (1983): 118-31.

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Rosaldo, Michelle. “Toward an Anthropology of Self and Feeling.” In Culture Theory: Essays on Mind, Self, and Emotion 1984, edited by Richard A. Shweder and Robert A. LeVine, 137-57. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Said, Edward W. “Orientalism Reconsidered.” Cultural Critique (1985): 89-107. —. “Between Worlds.” London Review of Books 20, no. 9 (1998): 3-7. —. Orientalism. Toronto: Random House Canada, 1978. Sharma, Sanjay, and Ashwani Sharma. “White Paranoia: Orientalism in the Age of Empire.” Fashion Theory 7, no. 3-4 (2003): 301-17.



CHAPTER SEVEN QUEERING MIDDLE EASTERN CONTEMPORARY ART AND ITS DIASPORA ANDREW GAYED

Introduction Current literature engaging with Middle Eastern homosexuality is focused on issues of modernity, multiple modernities, and the West’s claim to modernity. Modernity 1 as a time period signals social, political, and historic conditions (typically urbanization, mass production, democratization, etc.) at the end of the nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century. Characteristically within Eurocentric writings of art history, such as that of Paul Wood, Western modernity was seen as the pinnacle of the advancement of modern industrial societies and social progress.2 While Wood tries to foster dialogue with art produced in contact zones and the impact of the exotic Other on the rest of Europe, he still writes in unwavering favor of European exceptionalism and an imperialist account of history. While paying lip service to the fact that “European knowledge of the wider world was partial, and unmistakably framed by a growing sense of European superiority,” 3 such criticism is lost in his dismissive reading of Orientalist visual art. Furthermore, overarching statements that claim “it was the art of Manet and his followers, the impressionists, that definitively established the connection between modern subjects and modern techniques” reproduce the same Eurocentric canon that relegates the Other as marginal/derivative, and ignores the Egyptian modernist painter Mohamed Nagy (among countless other non-

 1

Not to be confused with Modernism, which points to the cultural trends that respond to the conditions of Modernity in a myriad of ways, such as modern art. 2 This is evident in his book, Western Art and the Wider World (Chichester, West Sussex: John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 2014) 3 Wood, Western Art and the Wider World, 143.



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Western artists) who visited impressionist painter Manet in Giverny in 1918, and later exhibited in the Paris Salon.4 Scholars such as Walter Mignolo, Irene Silverblatt, and Sonia Saldivar-Hull are but a few who question this new imperial structure of power, and examine how modernity can be used to colonize social and cultural practices in the name of Western advancement. They argue that modernity was formed by European philosophers, academics, and politicians, and that modernity involves the colonization of time and space in order to create a border in relation to a self-determining Other and its own European identity. In this way, Europeans colonized the world and built on the ideas of Western civilization and modernity as the endpoints of historical time, and Europe as the center of the world.5 Mignolo also goes as far to say that coloniality6 is constitutive of modernity, and there is no modernity without coloniality. 7 Ultimately, the literature on Arab sexualities contends that the West created a discourse around sexuality that the Middle East never had, leading to the notion of homocolonialism, imperialist ideologies in the name of sexual tolerance. As a push against colonial forces and imperialism, homosexuality in the Middle East was then made into an illegal identity category, an identity category that, I argue, did not exist prior to this increased contact with Western explorers and travelers.

Modernity as Imperialism With scholars unpacking the impacts of Western Modernity and its legacy,8 much attention is given to issues of language and translation—so simply “speaking” about Arab homosexuality has its pitfalls. For example, the Arabic word for sex, jins, appeared sometime in the early twentieth

 4

Saeb Eigner and Zaha Hadid, Art of the Middle East: Modern and Contemporary Art of the Arab world and Iran (London: Merrell, 2010), 19. 5 Walter Mignolo, The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011). 6 This is a term that Mignolo uses in his writing, and signals modernity’s elaborate façade of “civilizing” as its necessary foundation in the terror-logic of imperial rule. See Mignolo, The Darker Side of Western Modernity, x. 7 Ibid., 3. 8 Kathryn Babayan, Afsaneh Najmabadi, Dina Al-Kassim, Valerie Traub, Rahman Momin, Joseph Massad, Samar Habib, and Jocelyn Scarlet are only a handful of scholars working to unpack the baggage of Western modernity and its colonial implications. Further discussions on the colonial models, with which they engage, are included in my literature review at the onset of this chapter.



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century and held the meaning of both biological sex and national origin.9 The word, derived from the Greek genus, had existed in Arabic since ancient times, holding biological meanings of type, kind, and ethnolinguistic origins. As late as 1870, its connotations of sex and nationalism had not yet come into usage. 10 Similarly, in the 1950s, translators of Freud coined the non-specific term for sexuality, jinsiyyah, which also means nationality and citizenship. Here, post-contact and under the auspices of colonialism, we see how the Arabic language changed to include sexuality discourses as a part of identity discourses, many times indistinguishable from one another. The conflation of sex, sexuality, nationality, and biology introduces an identity discourse that did not exist in the Arabic language prior to the late nineteenth century. This marks a significant shift in local identity scripts being colonized by Western modernity narratives, erasing with it the previously fluid gender norms. This is relevant when looking at surviving Middle Eastern and later Islamic literature from the fourth to thirteenth centuries that narrate examples of homosocial relations and gay desire, none of which illustrates “gay” as existing as a stable identity. Discussing the homoerotic liaisons between the Mamluk elite in late-medieval Egypt and Syria, Everett Rowson states that the public expression of homoerotic sentiments (especially in poetry) was fully sanctioned by Islamic societies both before and during the Mamluk period of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, but too-public homosexual behavior was not condoned.11 Likewise, Traub illustrates that Arab-Islamic texts speak frequently of the androgynous beauty of beardless boys and explicitly about anal intercourse and fellatio.12

 9

Jins’ connotation with nationalism, as I am using it here, did not come into usage until the era of Western modernity. It is worth noting, however, that the etymology of the term draws biological and taxonomical relations to species, origin, sort, and kind. Nationalism in the more contemporary notion of national identity is the later meaning of jins and came to be incorporated during this time period. 10 Joseph Massad, "Re-Orienting Desire: The Gay International and the Arab World," Public Culture 14, no. 2 (2002): 371. 11 Everett Rowson, "Homoerotic Lisaisons among the Mamluk Elite in Late Medieval Egypt and Syria," in Islamicate Sexualities: Translations Across Temporal Geographies of Desire, ed. Kathryn Babayan and Afsaneh Najmabadi (Cambridge, MA: Center for Middle Eastern Studies of Harvard University, 2008), 204-238. 12 Valerie Traub, "The Past is a Foreign Country? the Times and Spaces of Islamicate Sexuality Studies," in Islamicate Sexualities: Translations Across Temporal Geographies of Desire, ed. Kathryn Babayan and Afsaneh Najmabadi



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In establishing the complexities of terming a historically Arab homosexuality, even the term Middle East becomes highly problematic as we try to decolonize identity narratives, for the term was a geopolitical and military description coined by European cartographers at the turn of the twentieth century amid the rise of oil explorations. 13 The issue then becomes, how can we speak about a homosexuality that did not exist as an identity, about a place that is colonially termed, and in a language created to stabilize unstable Arab sexualities? Given the colonial hangovers of modernity narratives discussed earlier, even notions of labeling are extraordinarily complicated when considering non-Western examples of homosocial couplings. As Tarik Bereket and Barry Adam’s research on gay identities in Turkey contends, the contemporary concept of gay as a particularly generational and classed identity category, dependent on a certain social status and education level. However in MSM (male sex with men) relations, terms such as active and passive dictate how the individual performs his masculinity, and are more socially relevant categories at the local level.14 These ideas of masculinity scripts are relatively in line with Judith Butler’s notion of performativity, reiterating a type of masculinity that serves to define an identity as either active or passive; the passive subject refuses to take on the active image of the hyper-masculinized, as it conflicts with his identity script as passive. The subtle signs exchanged between an active and passive individual in public and social settings are an example of the codification present in some Youssef Nabil’s photographs. Accordingly in this chapter, I aspire to uncover the visual language that speaks about local sexuality scripts to both the Arab world and the diasporic community in North America, a language that can help navigate these murky waters of subtlety and codification.

Codification and Subtlety While elsewhere I have examined Youssef Nabil’s photographs in the context of nationalism, exile, migration and diaspora, I intend to focus this

 (Cambridge, MA: Center for Middle Eastern Studies of Harvard University, 2008), 24. 13 Kathryn Babayan and Afsaneh Najmabadi, Islamicate Sexualities: Translations Across Temporal Geographies of Desire (Cambridge, MA: Center for Middle Eastern Studies of Harvard University: Distributed by Harvard University Press, 2008), ix. 14 Tarik Bereket and Adam Barryd, "The Emergence of Gay Identities in Contemporary Turkey," Sexualities 9, no. 2 (2006): 131-151.



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analysis on a series of seemingly homoerotic and subversive photographs that transcend our current understanding of Middle Eastern sexuality. This discussion will focus on Arab homosexualities in terms of desire and alternative masculinities rather than Western notions of homosexuality predicated in “born this way” campaigns. These campaigns are not conducive to understanding broader issues of homocolonial discourses or how queer Arabs living in the West experience their sexuality. That said, I do not wish to reduce the Western model of homosexuality to an essentialist and colonial ruse. Western scholars, such as Judith Butler, argue that gendered identity is an ongoing performance rather than a predetermined genetic identity. It is important to understand here that neither model categorically fits the gendered or sexual identity of the diaspora, nor do they account for the cultural dichotomies negotiated by non-Western subjects in the West. My intent is to engage with how the Middle Eastern diaspora in North America experiences the impact of homo-colonialism in a less historiographical discussion, and one more rooted in sociological ideas of gender, nationalism, and sexuality, as well as the triangulation of identity and oppression that could arise at their intersection. In another article, The Exilic Aesthetic, 15 I have outlined the formal elements Nabil employs in his artistic practice. His photographs, comprised of hand-tinted silver gelatin prints, become, once again, a site of relevance as we recount the history of photography and the effect of hand tinting on the reality of his photographs. Daguerreotypes amazed the world in the 1830s, but having images appear in full colour rather than the rich sepia tones of early photographs became inescapable. In response, photographers attempted to add colour by hand-tinting the developed photographic image in a series of “colourizing” techniques referred to as “overpainting.” 16 These colourizing technologies and techniques were attempts to produce an image that best mimicked realism, and best created an authentic representation of reality. Thus far, I have argued that Youssef Nabil hand-paints his photographs to create an illusory realm within his

 15

Andrew Gayed, "The Exilic Aesthetic: Articulations of Patriotism by the Expatriate," Persona Journal, The Department of Theatre and Film Arts at the Superior School of Art in Portugal, Experiments and Displacements 2, no. 1, (2014): 37-54. A revised version of this text can also be found in Andrew Gayed, “Nationalism, Migration and Exile: The Photographs of Youssef Nabil” (MA thesis, Carleton University, 2014). 16 Patsy G. Watkins, “The Painted Photograph, 1839-1914: Origins, Techniques, Aspirations,” in Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 74, no. 1 (1997): 217.



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photographs in a way to alter and control the representation of his identity. Though elsewhere I have already argued this contradictory use of handpainted photography as a method of manipulating personal images is a subversive way to interject lived experience, it is also a method of rewriting Western scripts of Modernity to introduce local narratives of Middle Eastern sexuality. I begin this analysis with an artwork that references the history of Arab representation and homo-Orientalist imagery. This Orientalist method of representation depicts Arab men as sexually perverse and overly sexual, and seeks to establish their unstable identity categories. It is a method of representation, in which Arabs and Muslims can only be objects of European scholarship but never its subject or audience. In Malik Sleeping, Paris, 2005, 17 we have a post-Orientalist depiction of Malik, who functions as both the subject and object. Here, traditional depictions of the European odalisque are subverted and gender norms are also reimagined. The male figure is not nude, but his pants are suggestively lowered. His back faces the audience, which allows us to objectify him and penetrate him with our gaze. This passive pose is not in keeping with traditional depictions of men in the history of visual culture, in which men are usually dominantly placed in the frame and assert eye contact with the viewer. Here, this idea of subverting gendered expectations has parallels to the larger scope of Middle Eastern homosexual desire and the reconceptualization of sexual identity. As discussed previously in the case of Turkey, contemporary homosexual identity is not commonly labeled as gay identity; in fact, it is the minority of men who have sex with men that actually identify as gay. However, they have adopted active versus passive models of identity and masculinity, which manifest themselves in unspoken codes and signs. What I want to think about, then, is why this image is perceived as homoerotic. What is it about this man’s manifestation of his masculinity that is not in keeping with Western notions of masculinity, which have a very specific history of the hypermasculine Marlborough Man and the cowboy genres of representation? Also, what deviation of masculinity is present here that re-codifies this male body as homoerotic? These are larger issues that I intend to address in future research projects, and only begin to address in this analysis. With this codification of masculinity in mind, I would like to discuss the process of meaning-making in interpreting both masculinity and homosocial desire through Nabil’s photographs. In Ahmed in Djellabah,



17 Emin, Tracy, Youssef Nabil, Simon Njami, Mark Sealy, and Michael Stevenson, Sleep in My Arms (South Africa: Cape Town, 2007), 21.



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New York, 200418 and Ali in Abaya, Paris, 2007,19 we have two depictions of men: one wearing an abbeya (Ali), which is traditionally used in prayer, and the other a gallabaya (Ahmed), which is traditionally worn around the house or as outerwear. These distinctions are relevant, for the codification of masculinity and homoeroticism lies in these details. Ironically, the gallabeya, which signifies that this is a private scene, is almost less eroticized than the abbeya, which would be for public prayer. The photograph of Ali focuses on his hairy chest and the slit in the abbeya, which is very teasingly opened to the man’s midsection (and even lower) to accentuate an erotic tension. While the insinuating nature of the man in the gallabeya sprawled on the bed with his legs open to the viewer certainly has its implications, I wish to think about how sexuality is experienced in the public and private spheres, and the religious implications when these spheres intersect. Here, I am suggesting that the private becomes public, and there is a de-privatization of homoerotic codification, which is something very different than when looking at historic representations of same-sex desire in Middle Eastern literature. I focus on the geography of the diaspora elsewhere, and it will not be overlooked here. The fact that these photographs were taken in both New York and Paris (and the artist wants audiences to know this by including the locations in the titles) further implicates how the diasporic subject experiences their sexuality in the liminal and in-between identity category discussed earlier. Emphasizing the geography of diasporic identity once more, the bulk of Nabil’s photographs that I analyze are taken outside of Egypt. However, I want to once more look at how the narrative shifts and changes when the location is Egypt. In What Have We Done Wrong, Cairo, 1993,20 two men sit ambivalently on a bed, avoiding each other’s gazes, and sit in deep contemplation, if not sorrow. While a sexual narrative is not explicit, the deep psychological turmoil of a homosexual encounter is at the forefront of this photograph. The main thing I wish to focus on here is the location: What Have We Done Wrong takes place in Cairo.



18 Emin et al., 65. (Also available on artist’s website, accessed January 30, 2015, http://youssefnabil.com/works/cinema/#/46) 19 Ibid., 71. (Also available on artist’s website, accessed Jan. 30, 2015 http://www.youssefnabil.com/works/cinema/#/39 20 Ibid., 37.



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Let us juxtapose this narrative with Not Afraid to Love, Paris, 2005.21 The sexual assertiveness present in this photograph is most certainly distinguished from the fear and trauma experienced in the Cairo representation. In the Paris narrative, the colours are much brighter and much more vibrant than the subdued pink and dark blacks in the Cairo picture. Where What Have We Done Wrong, Cairo has an ominous underground feeling of hiding and shame due to the colour palette, lighting, and dramatic tension, Not Afraid to Love, Paris uses colour to imply stability and comfort. Even though the figures are not gazing at each other, the tension is relieved. It is because of this juxtaposition that the subversive nature of these photographs is subtle and seemingly problematic. Each image reflects the general attitudes of the locations, after which it was named. Cairo depicts a sense of shame and wrongdoing, where Paris implies freedom and a sense of peace. Each image seemingly adopts the homonormative tone of its cultural geography. Rather than reduce these complex images to part of what Joseph Massad calls the Gay International, a mission of homocolonialism and Western exceptionalism, I argue that by expressing and representing the real impact of of these cultural attitudes and emotion surrounding them, Nabil is reverting to local identity narratives and codes of masculinity and desire. Nabil’s photographs show the homosocial relations visible in premodern social couplings in the Middle East (as outlined earlier in the surviving Middle Eastern and later Islamic literature from the fourth to thirteenth centuries, narrating examples of homosocial relations and gay desire). These local narratives lie in the disidentification of normative Queer identity as it exists in the West and, instead, adopt a queerness rooted in male relations with men rather than predicating an identity category. This fluidity allows the subjects in Nabil’s photographs to function outside the prescribed assumptions associated with Western queerness, and rather resembles the sexuality scripts that existed in the pre-colonial period. This is not to say that colonialism completely erased the local sexuality narratives outlined by Babayab, Najmabadi, Habib, and many others, and it does not assume an unproblematic notion that those sexuality scripts existed in a pure state. Bearing in mind Homi Bhabha’s writings on hybridity and the location of culture, we can assume that a pure and uncontaminated sexuality script never existed in the Middle East,

 21

Ibid., 53. Interestingly, this image appears on the cover of Brian Whittaker’s book, Unspeakable Love: Gay and Lesbian Life in the Middle East (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006).



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even before colonization. What I suggest is to highlight how artists such as Youssef Nabil use photography to illustrate the local sexuality scripts that have become predominantly and overwhelmingly the Western Queer narrative. This narrative is steeped in identity formations that erase the fluid sexuality as seen in the Mamluk Elites of late medieval Egypt, or the homosocial female companionship in seventeenth-century Safavid Iran.22 I argue that the revival of these local sexuality scripts is seen in Youssef Nabil’s homoerotic photography, and that they have an openness to reject the rigidity of a Western Queer identity category. Rather, Nabil’s photographs illustrate homosocial relations void of the mandatory homosexual identity that, I have argued, is a product of Western modernity. The display of male intimacy as relating to homosocial couplings, rather than a gay sexual imagery, helps illustrate the complicated and immensely subversive nature of manifesting the sexuality of the diaspora in a visual language. In Rashid With a Shisha in his Mouth, Paris, 2004,23 we have a scene of a topless young man reclining in shorts, in the act of smoking a shisha, an Egyptian water pipe. Once again rejecting a mandatory homosexuality and instead illustrating a moment of homosociality, Rashid is demonstrating a masculinity that is extremely vulnerable and arguably passive. With the seductive insinuation of Rashid smoking the shisha pipe, we are left with a culturally specific image of a young man engaging in the highly normative act of smoking a shisha with his friend. The vulnerability adds to a reading of the photograph as homoerotic, as it conflicts with the machismo that has been internalized in Western masculinity. With the anomalies of male relationships and of male bodies, Nabil is able to allude to a fluid same-sex desire without labeling the subject of the scene as homosexual. This distinction is essential, as it loosens the grip of the totalitarian gay identity that has been associated with Western queerness and makes it possible for local sexuality scripts to be both vocalized and visualized.



22 This is in reference to Kathryn Babayan, "'In Spirit We Ate Each Other's Sorrow': Female Companionship in Seventeenth-Century Safavid Iran," in Islamicate Sexualities: Translations Across Temporal Geographies of Desire, ed. Kathryn Babayan and Afsaneh Najmabadi (Cambridge, MA: Center for Middle Eastern Studies of Harvard University, 2008), 239-274. Due to the subject matter of Youssef Nabil’s photographs, I do not engage with female desire or lesbian relations in this particular analysis. Babayan’s text, however, illustrates another example of fluid identity formations present in Islamicate regions prior to colonization. 23 Emin et al., Sleep in My Arms, 67.



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The crux of this argument lies in the Middle Eastern diaspora in North America using these local identity narratives of alternative masculinities and codification in a transnational setting. In this way, the localization of homosexual desire, even in Western settings, such as Paris, can further help us understand these local networks of identity on a global scale and how the diasporic subjects in North America frame desire, using narratives that derive from their cultural heritage. What I want to see is whether we can reach a narrative that works beyond the dichotomy of oppression or acceptance, and instead examines a negotiation of diasporic sexuality by incorporating different sociological strategies to help self-identification categories become less dichotomous.

Conclusion Narrative psychologist Sekneh Hammoud-Beckett has coined the term “letting-in” as a way to negotiate and alter Western narratives of coming out. This is a process that she describes as the conscious and selective invitation of people into one’s “club of life,” as she puts it. Here, letting-in is a process that is highly relevant to the diaspora, as it is a way to alter perceptions of what it means to live a truly gay life, and falsifies the Western need to become more visible in order to be complete. Nabil’s artworks, discussed thus far, exemplify networks of communications that are different from the global-to-local homocolonial imposition of gay identity that most contemporary literature on the topic focuses on. Instead, I argue that these local networks are let-in by homosexual, queer, maledesiring subjects in North America, and Middle Eastern diasporic subjects then create an alternative coming-out narrative and identity script to the inscribed Western models. The visual reading of Rashid With a Shisha in his Mouth, Paris, 2004 can illuminate how local instances of homosociality cite traditional sexuality scripts, and reject the Western queer identity narrative that becomes exclusionary in non-Western contexts. These photographs become just one set of examples of how local networks of identity are transmitted through visual language and how alternative sexuality scripts are written.24

 24

Though the dominant historiography of art contends that all non-Western art be compared and drawn from Western examples, it does sometimes prove valuable to take the art-historical narrative within a global context. To illustrate my point on subtlety and the difference between a homosociality and an overt homosexuality, we can compare American photographer Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs. The subtlety and identity nuanced within Youssef Nabil’s photographs are nowhere to be seen in the vivid depictions of gay pleasure, BDSM, and gay sex. Avoiding



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Rahman Momin argues that Islamophobia and homophobia reinforce one another through a process of triangulation. Explaining the lack of belonging to either a Western or Arab discourse of sexuality, Momin claims the Muslim community sees a gay Muslim as an unviable identity, stemming from homophobia and larger systemic issues of racism in our post-9/11 societies. Similarly, Western gay communities also see the gay Muslim as an unviable identity due to Islamophobic and neo-Orientalist discourses that are used to other and isolate Arab narratives in themes of terrorism and social oppression. 25 With the unquestioned assumption of inherent homophobia within an Arab identity, the Western gay community upholds the impossibility of the gay Arab, and fits their existence within pre-existing models of Western homosexuality. Here, the gay Arab is stuck in a perilous existence, within an in-between status that makes them an unviable subject in both communities. It is this in-between or liminal existence that the current discourse on Western homosexuality does not account for; this also indicates an urgent need to re-conceptualize the terms in which we understand homosexual identity and its manifestations in social and cultural texts. Referring to the Middle Eastern diaspora in North America as Arab culture continued in America, 26 articulating Arabness becomes a difficult battle between rigid versions of the “Arab” and the “American.” The dichotomization between the familiar (Europe, the West) and the strange (the Orient, the East)27 was reinforced by US media, and, interestingly enough, by the immigrant community itself in an

 value judgments on either set of artwork, it is necessary to highlight the different visual strategies seen in the American gay art movement, and contrast these strategies with the subtlety and strategic identity shifts present in contemporary photography of the Middle East and its diaspora. While I will not touch upon the work of John Ibson in this project, his writing on American photography before the Civil War in the 1950s shows a homosociality similar to that of the male relationships found in the photographs of Youssef Nabil. These mid-century American photographs highlight a sexuality script that is closer to the pre-modern sexuality script we see in the Middle East, one that rejects the totalizing label of gay identity. For more information, see John Ibson, Picturing Men: A Century of Male Relationships in Everyday American Photography (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2002). 25 Rahman Momin, Homosexualities, Muslim Cultures and Modernity (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). 26 Nadine Naber, "Decolonizing Culture: Beyond Orientalist and Anti-Orientalist Feminisms" in Arab and Arab American Feminisms: Gender, Violence and Belonging, ed. Rabab Abdulhadi, Evelyn Alsultany, and Nadine Naber (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2011), 78. 27 Ibid.



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attempt to distance itself from the media outlets seeking to define them. This leads to an intensification of culture by diasporic communities in North America due to this East versus West, Islamophobic discourse. Arab cultures28 in North America then become more culturally conservative and religiously stringent, even more so than their counterparts in the homeland. Nadine Naber recounts that many of her neighbors in San Francisco had more socially conservative understandings of religion, family, gender, and sexuality than their counterparts in Jordan.29 This conflict has to do with issues of culture and hybridity, their intersection, and how diasporic subjects articulate culture. What I argue is that given the importance of lived experience and firsthand accounts within sociological studies of expatriation, portraits such as those of Youssef Nabil’s lend themselves to an understanding of the transnational experience and illuminate how culture and nationalism are articulated by the Middle Eastern diaspora in North America. The artworks of Youssef Nabil provide an exceptional case study to understand how culture and identity are navigated through political art production and how art is used as a means of necessity and an instrument for self-actualization. The question we need to ask, then, is how we can work through this predicament of identity without re-inscribing the neo-colonialism of Western gay identity and ultimately reproducing Orientalist understandings of the East-West divide. How can we work past these harmful representations of trauma but still reflect the real lived pain experienced by gay transnational subjects? How can we move towards the possibility for non-viable subjects to become viable, and eventually move towards a place of healing? Theorizing about imperialism and international human rights law, Judith Butler writes that certain lives are not considered lives at all; they cannot be humanized, because their dehumanization occurs at a level that gives rise to a physical violence, delivering the message of dehumanization that is already at work in the culture. 30 This is how we can begin to define unviable and viable identities: dehumanization lies within the neo-Orientalist understanding of Arab sexualities within the strict parameters of being sexually stringent and “backwords” to the sexual models of the West. It is at this site of negation—negation of the local sexual narratives that existed long before contact with the West, negation of models of homosociality that exist



28 This is not only specific to Arab communities; other immigrant communities also function within similar paradigms when outside of their homeland. 29 Naber, "Decolonizing Culture," 81. 30 Judith Butler, “Violence, Mourning, Politics,” Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2004), 34.



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today and function within their own local forms—that the gay Arab becomes an unviable subject to both the Western and Arab communities, to which they belong. Reviving the local models that existed and continue to exist today, but not conflating them to the Western visibility and coming-out measuring-stick, can result in these Queer Arab subjects becoming viable and living lives void of exile and exclusion in both their cultural and diasporic identities. Momin has argued that intersectional identities (such as gay Arabs in the West) contribute to a disruption of modernity narratives that underpin Western exceptionalism through queer politics. Here the sheer existence of gay Arabs in Western communities (and even those still living in the Middle East) is a disruption of normative identity in either community setting. I wonder how we can bring this discussion of existence to one of codification rather than visibility. While being socially visible or invisible is politically relevant, if not integral, to our discussion, it is important to better identify how masculinity and gay desire are codified in a visual language, and how this language becomes a transcultural way to discuss complex issues such as these and represent a multiplicity of experiences. Overall, gay Arab societies enjoy subtle networks of expressing sexualities and identities, and these networks have been strongly influenced and changed by discourses of modernity and Western imperialism. What I have found in my study is that the legacy of modernity has not yet erased these subtle networks of communication, and in-between subjects are conflicted by adhering to multiple identity narratives from multiple cultural sources. As we see the plight of the Queer Egyptian in What Have We Done Wrong, Cairo, 1993, we can interpret this gloom as the colonial pressure of Western homosexuality and the imperialism of a Queer identity category that actively erases culturallyspecific sexuality narratives that already existed. With the intimate artworks Nabil produces in Paris, Brooklyn, Harlem, and numerous other locations outside of Egypt, it becomes evident how diasporic identity and sexuality can globally portray the culturally-specific local narratives of sexuality. In this way, we can see how local sexuality narratives are not passively being colonized by Western Queer discourse; instead, localized understandings of sexualities are being internalized and conceptualized by the diaspora, as exemplified in Nabil’s photographs. With the vulnerable images of Rashid taken in Paris or Ahmed in his djellabah in New York, artworks such as those of Youssef Nabil can contribute to understanding these local identity narratives, and how they manifest themselves in the lives of diasporic subjects globally.



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Bibliography Abdulhadi, Rabab. "Where is Home? Fragmented Lives, Border Crossings, and the Politics of Exile." In Arab and Arab American Feminisms Gender, Violence, and Belonging. Edited by Rabab Abdulhadi, Evelyn Alsultany and Nadine Naber, 315. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2011. Abdulhadi, Rabab, Evelyn Alsultany, and Nadine Christine Naber. Arab and Arab American Feminisms: Gender, Violence, and Belonging. Gender, Culture & Politics in the Middle East. 1st ed. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2011. Babayan, Kathryn, and Afsaneh Najmabadi. Islamicate Sexualities: Translations Across Temporal Geographies of Desire. Harvard Middle Eastern Monographs; 39. Cambridge, MA: Center for Middle Eastern Studies of Harvard University, distributed by Harvard University Press, 2008. Bereket, Tarik, and Adam Barryd. "The Emergence of Gay Identities in Contemporary Turkey." Sexualities 9, no. 2 (2006): 131-51. Butler, Judith. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London; New York: Verso, 2004. Eigner, Saeb, and Zaha Hadid. Art of the Middle East: Modern and Contemporary Art of the Arab World and Iran. London, England: Merrell Publishers Limited, 2010. Emin, Tracy, Youssef Nabil, Simon Njami, Mark Sealy, and Michael Stevenson. Sleep in My Arms. South Africa: Cape Town, 2007. Gayed, Andrew. "The Exilic Aesthetic: Articulations of Patriotism by the Expatriate." Persona Journal, the Department of Theatre and Film Arts at the Superior School of Art in Portugal. Experiments and Displacements 2, no 1 (2014): 37-54. —.“Nationalism, Migration and Exile: The Photographs of Youssef Nabil.” MA thesis, Carleton University, 2014. Hammound-Beckett, Sekneh. "Azima Ila Hayati - An Invitation in to My Life: Narrative Conversations about Sexual Identity." International Journal of Narrative Therapy and Community Work 2007, no. 1 (2007): 29-39. Massad, Joseph Andoni. "Re-Orienting Desire: The Gay International and the Arab World." Public Culture 14, no. 2 (2002): 361-85. —. Desiring Arabs. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. Momin, Rahman. "Queer as Intersectionality: Theorizing Gay Muslim Identities." Sociology 44, no. 5 (2010): 944-61.



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—. Homosexualities, Muslim Cultures and Modernity. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Mignolo, Walter. The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011. Murray, Stephen O., and Will Roscoe. Islamic Homosexualities: Culture, History, and Literature. New York: New York University Press, 1997. Naber, Nadine. "Decolonizing Culture: Beyond Orientalist and AntiOrientalist Feminisms." In Arab and Arab American Feminisms: Gender, Violence and Belonging. Edited by Rabab Abdulhadi, Evelyn Alsultany, and Nadine Naber, 78. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2011. —. Arab America: Gender, Cultural Politics, and Activism. Nation of Newcomers: Immigrant History as American History. New York: New York University Press, 2012. Najmabadi, Afsaneh. "Mapping Transformations of Sex, Gender, and Sexuality in Modern Iran." Social Analysis 49, no. 2 (2005): 52-76. —. "Types, Acts, or What? Regulations of Sexuality in NineteenthCentury Iran." In Islamicate Sexualities: Translations Across Temporal Geographies of Desire, edited by Kathryn Babayan and Afsaneh Najmabadi, 275-96. Cambridge, MA: Center for Middle Eastern Studies of Harvard University, 2008. —. "Genus of Sex or the Sexing of Jins." International Journal of Middle East Studies 45, no. 2 (2013): 211-31. —. Women with Mustaches and Men without Beards: Gender and Sexual Anxieties of Iranian Modernity. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. —. "SPECIAL SECTION - Reorienting Sexuality: Reflections on the Study of Sexuality in the Middle East and North Africa - Mapping Transformations of Sex, Gender, and Sexuality in Modern Iran." Social Analysis. 49, no. 2 (2005): 54. Nabil, Youssef. Artist’s website. Accessed January 30, 2015. http://www.youssefnabil.com/works/cinema/#/39 —. Artist’s website. Accessed January 30, 2015. http://youssefnabil.com/works/cinema/#/46 Rowson, Everett. "Homoerotic Lisaisons among the Mamluk Elite in Late Medieval Egypt and Syria." In Islamicate Sexualities: Translations Across Temporal Geographies of Desire, edited by Kathryn Babayan and Afsaneh Najmabadi, 204-38. Cambridge, MA: Center for Middle Eastern Studies of Harvard University, 2008. Traub, Valerie. "The Past is a Foreign Country? The Times and Spaces of Islamicate Sexuality Studies." In Islamicate Sexualities: Translations



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Across Temporal Geographies of Desire, edited by Kathryn Babayan and Afsaneh Najmabadi, 1-40. Cambridge, MA: Center for Middle Eastern Studies of Harvard University, 2008. Watkins, Patsy. “The Painted Photograph, 1839-1914: Origins, Techniques, Aspirations.” Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly 74, no. 1 (1997): 217. Whitaker, Brian. Unspeakable Love: Gay and Lesbian Life in the Middle East. Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press/Saqi Books, 2006. Wood, Paul. Western Art and the Wider World. Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2014.



CHAPTER EIGHT IRANIAN LITERARY MODERNITY, CRITICAL REGIONALISM, AND PRINT CULTURE OF THE THOUSAND AND ONE NIGHTS RASOUL ALIAKBARI

Introduction Iranian literary modernity has been theorized in various ways. Most commonly, tradition and modernity have been dichotomized as antagonistic modes of literary production, and European modernity has been recognized for its role in Iran’s modern literary history. For instance, Mohammad R. Ghanoonparvar focuses on twentieth-century Iranian literature and suggests a straightforward link between familiarity with the West on the one hand and the emergence of Iranian modern literariness on the other. In his Western-oriented account, “the European education of some writers of this period, such as [Mohammad ‘Ali] Jamalzadeh and [Sadeq] Hedayat, and their direct exposure to Western literature as well as access of writers to many Persian translations of Western works, were influential factors in this new era in Persian literature.”1 Furthermore, Kamran Talattof views Qajar literature as in decline and maintains a contrast between traditional and modern Persian literatures.2 Utilizing a Persianist framework for his Iranian literature survey, he affirms the European-oriented account as he argues that, for Iranian literature to move from the traditional to the modern phase, it had to incorporate Western ideology. Iranian literary modernity, Talattof claims, emerged in the late

 1 Mohammad R. Ghanoonparvar, Prophets of Doom: Literature as a SocioPolitical Phenomenon in Modern Iran (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1984), 8. 2 Kamran Talattof, The Politics of Writing in Iran: A History of Modern Persian Literature, 1st ed. (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2000), 19.

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19th and early 20th centuries, “when traditional forms of poetry came under attack by a new wave of writers who, mostly through their contact with the West, approached literature in a radically different way [...] This literary episode was characterized by modernist ideas such as the use of Western literary forms, new styles, and the promotion of nontraditional culture.”3 Denunciation of Arabic lexicons, simplification of the Persian language, promotion of ancient Persia over the Islamic period, and adoption of Western literary forms are some of the features of Iranian literary modernity Talattof identifies.4 Assuming a contrary angle, Hamid Dabashi has dismissed the concept of literary modernity as a colonial construct that is categorically inapplicable and has, instead, argued for an autogenetic, internal dynamism in Persian literature. While he acknowledges an encounter between “Persian literary humanism” (or Adab-e Farsi) and the imperial enterprise, 5 Dabashi contends that popularization of literary language did not occur as a consequence of colonialism. Rather, different stages evolved within Persian literary humanism, as revolutionary paintings by Kamaleddin Behzad (c.1450-c. 1535) and Reza Abbasi (c. 1565-1635) and the cosmopolitanism of Mughul court poets reaching the Ottoman Empire and central Asia “had already pushed Persian literary humanism toward an ethos, and ultimately chaos, or a will to resist power entirely domestic to its universal course. This was long before European imperialism had fully entered the scene.”6 While these theories vary from highlighting (almost exclusively) Western (literary) modernity to discounting it categorically, they underestimate trans-regional connections, such as those existing between Persian, Arabic, Turkish, and Indian linguistic and literary fields during the formation of the Iranian modern literary ethos in the 19th century. Responding to the Eurocentric theorizations of modern Iranian literature, Kamran Rastegar has aptly pointed to the need to go beyond the binarity of Persianism vs. Arabism. As a consequence of European-oriented approaches, Rastegar informs us, no chief comparative literary project has been carried out between 19th-century Persian and Arabic literatures, “or indeed with reference to any other regional language. What has been lost is the consideration that relations between these two and other regional languages could account for a major part of the trajectory of literary

 3

Ibid., 4. Ibid., 25. 5 This and later Persian transliterations are based on Iranian Studies scheme. 6 Hamid Dabashi, The World of Persian Literary Humanism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 228-29; italics in the original. 4

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modernity in these languages.”7 Motivated by Rastegar’s criticism, this study will withdraw from a Euro-Persianist standpoint, my term for theoretical efforts to explain (exclusively so) Iranian modern literary circumstances in the shadow of European developments. Without disputing the afore-cited impact of Western European literary innovation on modern Persian literature, I will argue for the significance of domestic recastings of Western European literary modernity in such contexts as Egypt, India, and the Ottoman Empire in the 19th century as they informed the articulation and shaping of Iranian literary modernity. I will demonstrate my argument through a critical regionalist examination of the print culture of The Thousand and One Nights (hereafter referred to as the Nights) in 19th-century Iran as it was informed by corresponding contemporaneous textual occurrences in Egypt, the Ottoman Empire, and India, where the emergence of the Nights was partly prompted by colonial modernity. I will utilize critical regionalism as my basis for the study of the 19thcentury publication history of the Nights. Originating in architecture and finding its way into cultural studies, this term signifies a theory and frame of praxis that links vernacular literary, cultural, or socioeconomic identities as distinct from the global. Gayatri Spivak, in dialogue with Judith Butler, has regarded critical regionalism as moving “under and over nationalisms,”8 a possibility between borders. These possibilities present “discernibly unified, local yet globally comparable, regional practices – both socio-economic and cultural, both residual and emergent – through which one or more regions manifest their critical difference but also their engagement with the global.”9 Also, as Powell notes, critical regionalism is “the very act of forging, through cultural criticism, the broader cultural, political, historical, and geographical connections around a particular text, image or artifact of local cultural conflict that enacts the new model of region.”10 As such, as an approach in literary history studies, critical regionalism acknowledges global hegemonic influences but simultaneously

 7

Kamran Rastegar, “Literary Modernity between Arabic and Persian Prose: Jurji Zaydan’s Riwayat in Persian Translation,” Comparative Critical Studies 4, no. 3 (2007): 361. 8 Judith Butler and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Who Sings the Nation-State? Language, Politics, Belonging (New York: Seagull Books, 2010), 94. 9 Jose E. Limon, “Border Literary Histories, Globalization, and Critical Regionalism,” American Literary History 1, no. 2 (2008): 168. 10 Douglas R. Powell, Critical Regionalism: Connecting Politics and Culture in the American Landscape (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 19.

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recognizes the complexity of local textualities in their critical interface with the global.

Trans-Regional Print Culture of the Nights The Iranian Episode Little scholarship exists on the Iranian print culture of the Nights from a critical regionalist perspective to inform the understanding of the formation of Iranian literary modernity.11 Despite the prevalent discourse claiming an increasing gap in the 19th century between the Arabic and Persian literary and linguistic domains, it seems that Iranian literary modernity, which emerged in the early 19th century, took its impetus not only from Egyptian but also from Ottoman and Indian literary arenas, leading to a trans-regional consciousness underlying the Iranian experience of modern literariness. A demonstrative example is the Nights, which reached the vernacular print culture of Persia through Egyptian, Ottoman, and Indian routes around this time. Regarding the Iranian politics of composition prior to the 19th century, it should be noted that knowledge of Arabic was mainly a prerogative of belletrists, religious elites, and court circles. These groups would not have difficulty reading the Nights in Arabic and, thus, translation into Persian would not have been deemed necessary. However, as of the early nineteenth century, simplified Persian began to acquire importance in both governmental correspondence and literary composition. Qa’em Maqam Farahani (1779-1835), poet, prose writer, and politician, promoted simplified Persian by cleansing it of convoluted sentence structures and imagery. This simplification enhanced efficiency in correspondence, but, more importantly, indicated the growth of a reading community beyond traditional literary circles, madrasa (religious schools), and Persian courts. In this volatile climate of linguistic dynamism and readership expansion, Bahman Mirza, a courtier in Tabriz, ordered ‘Abdollatif Tasuji to translate

 11

Rastegar’s Literary Modernity between the Middle East and Europe follows the modern journeys of the Nights in England, Egypt, and Iran based on Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of cultural capital and presents on the formation of literature as an autonomous category of legitimization (7). Though I refer to this work, I differ with Rastegar over the so-called legitimization or autonomy of the field of literariness. I maintain that textuality is consumed and interpreted by readers within particular times and spaces, hence the inevitable and varying conditionality of literariness. However, this distinction is not the main focus of the present writing.

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“this novel recension from Arabic to Persian, the finest of languages.”12 That Persian is called the finest of languages is of precedence in Persian literary humanism.13 However, given the contemporary politicization of language – particularly its simplification in order to serve the interests of the emerging and expanding middle-class – the approbation of Persian is politically charged and signifies the formation of the modern literary ethos of the Persian language. Yet, Iranian literary modernity had its roots, beyond Persian language and culture, in trans-regional experiences and translations of literary modernity in vernacular languages and cultures in the neighboring linguistic, literary, and cultural fields. New material circumstances for the production of literature were occurring in Egypt and the Ottoman Empire. That the first Iranian print edition of the Nights, in the 1830s, was produced in Tabriz, and not in Tehran or other major cities of the time, is an indicator of the significance of trans-regional connections among Persia, the Ottoman Empire, and Egypt. Add to this the contemporaneous proliferation of the Nights in Arabic and Persian editions in India. Tasuji’s Nights was intended for two major purposes. The project was initially commissioned as a translation from Arabic into Persian. The career of the translator was almost concurrent with the initiation of modern Iranian book history. The latter occurred as printing presses were established in Tabriz around 1816-17.14 In fact, Tasuji came to learn of this new development in Tabriz, and his translation of the Nights was printed in two volumes of lithographic editions in the 1840s. Naser al-Din Shah Qajar (1831-96) had been familiar with the Nights since childhood, and had access to the first lithographic printing of the book as a boy.15 Young Naser al-Din had been even tutored by Tasuji in the Tabriz court. Thus, already enamored by the stories of the Nights, he ordered a lavish illustrated manuscript production of the book. The project proved costly (6.850 tumans, according to Bakhtiyar) and time-consuming (It took about seven years). The manuscript reproduction of the Nights, importantly

 12

‘Abdollatif Tasuji, trans. Hezar-o yek shab (Tehran: Hermes, 2004), 8. Sa’di and Hafez, prominent Persian poets, have praised the Persian language in their oeuvres. 14 Monica M. Ringer, Education, Religion, and the Discourse of Cultural Reform in Qajar Iran (Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda Publishers, 2001), 11. Press history in Persia dates back to the Safavid era, when Armenians used print machinery, but their use of the technology remained limited to religious books that were not written in Persian. 15 Abbas Amanat, Pivot of the Universe: Nasir al-Din Qajar and the Iranian Monarchy, 1831-1896 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 66. 13

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enough, was “the last outstanding specimen of the traditional art of the book in Qajar Iran.”16 The illustrated work was completed in 1859. The Nights was reproduced in print and as an illustrated manuscript around the mid-19th century, a testimony to the importance it acquired so soon after its re-emergence in Iran. These different re-productions, the illustrated recension and lithographic edition, signalled a transition in Iranian literature from the manuscript mode to print culture. The Nights marked the ending of the Iranian culture of exquisite illustration and manuscript production and the initiation of printed literary culture. In fact, the Nights is one of the earliest secular works of literature that made its way to press in Iran.17 However, the exact date of publication for Tasuji’s Nights stimulated some confusion. Suggesting that the translation of the Nights was begun in 1843, Mahjub doubts that the Nights was published in 1845 or 1847.18 Despite the earlier confusion over dating, there is consensus over the sources of the Iranian Nights. Aryanpur maintains that Tasuji produced the Persian translation from the Egyptian Bulaq edition and not from a manuscript.19 In fact, while the Bulaq and Calcutta II editions were almost contemporaneous with Tasuji’s translation of the Nights, “both [Egyptian and Indian] editions differ considerably in wording, and a particularly peculiar lacuna proves the Bulaq edition beyond reasonable doubt to constitute the basis for the Persian translation.”20 Rastegar points to the Egyptian edition of the Nights as affecting Tasuji’s vision of the social function of the work as legitimizing the field of literariness outside religious and monarchical systems.21 Nonetheless, one can also contend that the Egyptian readership context may have influenced the commissioner’s/translator’s view of the emergent reading community in Iran. This is evident from the preface of the translation, in which Tasuji acknowledges a community of readers who were not familiar

 16

Ulrich Marzolph, “The Persian Nights: Links between the Arabian Nights and Iranian Culture,” Fabula: Journal of Folktale Studies 45, no. 3-4 (2004): 284. 17 Ringer, Education, Religion, and the Discourse of Cultural Reform in Qajar Iran, 34. 18 Mohammad Ja’far Mahjub,“Tarjome-ye Farsi-ye Alf-a leyla va leyla” [“Persian Translation of Alf Laila wa laila”]. Sokhan 11, no. 1 (1962): 48. 19 Yahya Aryanpur, Az Saba ta Nima: tarikh-e sad-o panjah sal adab-e Farsi [From Saba to Nima: A Hundred and Fifty Years of Iranian Literary History], vol. 1 (Tehran: Entesharat-e Zaddar, 1994), 183. 20 Marzolph, “Persian Nights,” 285. 21 Kamran Rastegar, Literary Modernity between the Middle East and Europe: Textual Transactions in Nineteenth-Century Arabic, English, and Persian Literatures (New York: Routledge, 2007), 69.

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with Arabic or the ancient flowery Persian style and were in need of simplified Persian. Tasuji acknowledges the elitist character of the Arabic language and the subsequent necessity of the Persian translation “so that everyone could enjoy [the text].”22 In fact, the Persian Nights proved so popular with the Iranian reading public that it was re-printed several times during the nineteenth century, as Amanat points out;23 Mahjub further lists 14 Persian prose editions of the Nights published between 1843 and 1947, as well as a poetic translation of the Nights in 1899-1900.24 An illustrated chapbook containing the frame story of the Nights was published in 1863; additionally, a total of at least seven additional lithographed editions of the Persian Nights were published between 1872 and 1938.25 The reprint history indicates the growth of a public reading market for the first time in Iranian literary history. Tasuji’s translation is “certainly one of the first in Persian which may be associated with the nascent concept of a reading public.”26 With regard to the emerging popularity of the Nights in 19th -century Iran, it is useful to review the speech of ‘Ali Asghar Hekmat, Iran’s minister of Education and Charities, to the Iranian Literary Society (Anjoman-e Adabi) in 1929, which began as follows: The book that has come to be known in Eastern and Western literatures as Alf-a leyla va leyla is one of only a few books that speaks of the times of antiquity and is the finest existing reminder of the customs of the ancient Orient. Articulating the significance of this book, from both historical and literary perspectives, is a greater task than one may be able to properly carry out in the short period of time that I have been given.27

Hekmat’s description of the Nights is based on two assumptions: he maintains a connection between the discourses of literature and history for the purpose of establishing a canon, and he assumes a high status and a perennial presence for the Nights in the literary canon of the so-called Orient. However, these assumptions are not endorsable. The Nights had not been a perennial work in Persian literature. The first complete Persian version of the Nights was produced in the 19th century. Also, while aesthetic valuation was a traditional literary concern, the need to establish

 22

Tasuji, Hezar-o yek shab, 8. Amanat, Pivot of the Universe, 461. 24 Mahjub, “Tarjome-ye Farsi,” 48-49, 53. 25 Marzolph, “Persian Nights,” 285. 26 Rastegar, Literary Modernity between the Middle East and Europe, 70. 27 “Historical and Literary Significance,” in Hezar-o yek shab (Tehran: Donya-ye ketab, 2008), 7. 23

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a national literary canon had intensified during the enterprise of nationbuilding as of the 19th century. Establishing a national literary canon – as Hekmat’s lecture evinces – became an important effort in the overall project of cultural engineering that would lead to consolidation of nationhood. Moreover, Rastegar correctly questions Hekmat’s ignorance of the emergent popularity of the Nights in Persian literature. In Rastegar’s words, Hekmat fails to ask “What circumstances led to the translation of the text into Persian only as late as the 1830s, if the text had been known from antiquity for its rich and authentic heritage, particularly in relation to Iran?”28 Studying the material circumstances leading to the modern reemergence of the Nights in print questions its supposed historical canonicity in Persian literary humanism. Furthermore, Rastegar explains this reappearance in connection to European hegemonic colonialism. The new interest in a Persian Nights, Rastegar contends, “emanates from a colonial framework as much as it points to the continuing connections between Arabic and Persian cultural spheres during this period – all willfully overlooked by Hikmat.”29 Nonetheless, it is equally important to inquire about the very choice of print material – why the Nights became a major literary and cultural icon for the transition from manuscript to print culture production in Iran. This query should signify the importance of a critical regionalist perspective in understanding Iranian literary modernity.

The Egyptian Episode To answer the question of why the Nights became so important in print, we must consider such material circumstances as place and medium of publication. Regarding the place and medium of the Nights, Rastegar has correctly noted that “[t]he speed with which Tabriz court appears to have gained access to a copy of the Bulaq press edition of Alf layla is evidence of exchange and contact on literary and cultural levels with Egypt and other parts of the Arab world.”30 Enjoying a progressive cultural and political climate under the governance of ‘Abbas Mirza and Bahman Mirza, Tabriz literary circles had come to learn of the modern literary movements in Egypt, and later in Syria and Lebanon, such as the Nahda literary and cultural reformative movement that was aimed at intellectual modernization. This modernization was due to political and civil

 28

Rastegar, Literary Modernity between the Middle East and Europe, 66. Ibid., 67. 30 Rastegar, Literary Modernity between the Middle East and Europe, 71. 29

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reorganizations – known as Tanzimat – in the Ottoman Empire (1839-76) as well as Egyptian encounters with modern European culture and literature. In this Arabic literary and cultural renaissance, the Nights assumed a high status, much of it sparked by Antoine Galland’s French adaptations of the stories between 1704 and 1712, which reflected the book’s high regard among modern European readers and writers during the 18th and 19th centuries. There and then, the Nights, as a literary Orientalist chronotope, had proved important for the development of the novel and English literary capitalism.31 More importantly, however, as a hybrid corpus, the Nights served to modernize Arabic literature as the work featured domestic themes in an edited and printed compilation, hence its blend of the pre-modern and modern as well as Oriental and European overtones. The Nights was also useful as a source of literary topoi and leitmotif for the formation of modern Arabic genres such as the novel.32 The chronotopal blend of modern and pre-modern found in the Nights made it an apt vehicle for Egyptian literary modernity, such that the Nights has been continuously republished, recast, and re-adapted ever since its modern re-emergence in the 19th century.

The Ottoman and Indian Episodes While it is important to consider both Egyptian and Iranian linguisticliterary fields, as Rastegar does in Literary Modernity between the Middle East and Europe, it is equally imperative to situate the Nights in the broader trans-regional contexts, such as the Turkish and the Indian, which informed the book’s print conditions in Iran. The resurgent importance of the Nights in Egypt should particularly be coupled with a view of the tales’ circulation in the Ottoman Empire. It has been indicated that the first printed translation of the Nights in Turkish was produced in six volumes by Ahmet Nazif, poet and religious judge, between 1842 and 1851.33 The translation was carried out during the Tanzimat period, in which simple language was encouraged, as opposed to Ottoman Turkish, as one aspect of the reformative agenda, in order to serve a larger audience. Also, the

 31

On the rise in popularity of the Nights among the English readers and writers in the 19th century, see Muhsin Ali, Scheherazade in England: A Study of NineteenthCentury English Criticism on the Arabian Nights (Washington: Three Continent Press, 1981). 32 Stephen Sheehi, Foundations of Modern Arab Identity (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2004), 79. 33 Hande A. Birkalan, “The Thousand and One Nights in Turkish: Translations, Adaptation, and Issues,” Fabula: Journal of Folktale Studies 3, no. 4 (2004): 225.

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Tanzimat period marked a new interest in Turkish language and literature. Therefore, both the Turkish and Iranian editions of the Nights seem to have been contemporary with the volatile dynamism of politics, language, and culture. This dynamism indicates a transitional experience that characterizes the contours of vernacular Iranian and Turkish literary modernities. However, these similarities cannot be overstated. In Turkish literature, acquaintance with the Nights preceded this period, and “many of the tales and motifs included in the Arabian Nights had become a part of Turkish oral tradition.”34 More importantly, and with respect to manuscript culture, one should note that the first Turkish translation of the Nights, titled Binbir Gece (Thousand and One Nights), was produced by Abdi in the fifteenth century.35 This makes the Turkish trajectory of the Nights discernibly different form the Iranian one. Unlike the Turkish translations, “Persian translations apparently were not prepared before the beginning of the nineteenth century.”36 Perhaps most important is the suggestion that tales of Sindbad – not featured in early Arabic compilations of the Nights – might have found their way into European translations of the Nights through Turkish manuscripts.37 Relatively continuous presence in the Turkish trajectory of the Nights, especially before the modern European infatuation with the work, is important, as it challenges a straightforward, West-East account of the popularity of this composition in the Asian context. In turn, this is also important for a critical regionalist perspective, since it indicates the significance of vernacular textual circumstances as opposed to the colonial hegemonic vogue. It is likely that Iranian literary circles knew of the Turkish manuscript and print versions of the Nights. The likelihood is especially reinforced given the numerous Iranian modernization projects in the 19th century that were inspired by the Ottoman examples.38

 34

Ibid., 221. Ibid. 36 Marzolph, “Persian Nights,” 282. 37 Birkalan, “The Thousand and One Nights in Turkish,” 224-25. 38 These enterprises mostly pertained to modern education, journalism, and political institutions, of which there are numerous examples. In 1872, Mirza Hosein Khan Sepahsalar (1828-81), Iranian diplomat and prime minister, established a translation school called Dar o-Ttarjomeh, where Turkish language was taught beside French, English, and Russian (Ringer, Education, Religion, and the Discourse of Cultural Reform in Qajar Iran, 148). The major Iranian newspaper, Ruznameh-ye Vaqaye’-e Ettefaqiyyeh (started publication in 1851) partly followed the example of the first Turkish newspaper, Taqvim-i Vaqayi [Calendar of Events] (started in 1832) (Peter Avery, “Printing, the Press, and 35

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Compared to the Ottoman publication history of the Nights, the Indian episode suggests a more discernable European influence. Publication of the Nights in India mainly served to facilitate British colonial enterprises in India and in the region. For this purpose, the Calcutta I edition of the Nights was printed in two volumes between 1814 and 1818. Its editor, Shaykh Ahmad Shirwani al-Yamani, teacher at the College of Fort William of the East India Company, prepared the Nights in order to instruct British colonial soldiers in the Arabic language and culture.39 The Calcutta II edition appeared in 1839-42 under similar circumstances. The Calcutta I edition of the Nights may have in turn inspired a production in Persian in India, where the Persian language had historical antecedence and was still a significant vernacular tongue. It is noteworthy that Catalogue of the Arabic and Persian Manuscripts in the Oriental Public Library at Bankipore, India has referred to a manuscript collection of one hundred tales from the Nights, which was compiled in 1836.40 Moreover, two Persian editions of the Nights were printed in Lahore, as listed by Naushahi.41 The appearances of the Nights in Arabic and then Persian in India may well have promoted its publication in Iran. The link between Iranian and Indian sociopolitical and literary fields is especially strong, considering the

 Literature in Modern Iran,” in The Cambridge History of Iran, Vol. 7: From Nadir Shah to the Islamic Republic, ed. Peter Avery, Gavin Hambly, and Charles Melville (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 816. Moreover, Akhtar, the first Persian journal in Istanbul, was established in 1875 and prevented the Qajar government from containing the spread of political reform debates (Ringer, Education, Religion, and the Discourse of Cultural Reform in Qajar Iran, 247). Istanbul was later the publication venue for Hajj Zayn al-‘Abedin Maraghei’s Siyahatname-ye Ebrahim Beig (1903), the travel account that was highly influential in spreading ideas of cultural and political reform on the eve of the Iranian Constitutional Revolution (1905-07). Most importantly, Mirza Malkom Khan (1833-1905), the prominent Iranian modernist, encouraged a deChristianized, non-Occidentalized modernization program for Iran following the examples of Egypt and the Ottoman Empire (Ringer, Education, Religion, and the Discourse of Cultural Reform in Qajar Iran, 220). 39 Robert Irwin, Arabian Nights: A Companion (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 43. 40 Maulavi Abdul Muqtadir, Catalogue of the Arabic and Persian Manuscripts in the Oriental Public Library at Bankipore. vol. 8: Persian Manuscripts. Biography, Romances, Tales and Anecdotes (Panta: Oriental Public Library, 1925), 195. 41 S. Arif Naushahi, Catalogue of Litho-Print and Rare Persian Books in Ganj Bakhash Library, Islamabad, vol. 2, Iran (Islamabad: Pakistan Institute of Persian Studies, 1986), 552.

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flow of material culture between the two regions around the time of the modern emergence of the Nights. In fact, the first Persian newspaper was prepared by Rom Mohan Roy (1772-1833) in India.42 Later, Mirza Mohammad Ali Shirazi released another Persian newspaper, Ihsan alAkhbar va Tuhfat al-Akhyar [The Best of News and the Highest of Blessings], in Calcutta. The newspaper reached Iran in 1851, provoking British officials with its anti-colonial content. Most important of all these newspapers is Habl al-Matin [Firm Bond], published between 1983-1912 in Calcutta, which appealed to Iranian intellectuals (a category that was formed in the 19th century) and religious leaders as its contents pertained to Iranian religious and reformative issues.43 The Qajar officials’ importation ban did not stop its circulation in Iran, and Habl al-Matin continued to exert an influence over Iranian readership even after the Constitutional Revolution. To these must be added a considerable number of Persian books that were printed in India for the newly emerging and expanding readership in Iran. Haji Musa’s catalogue features a list of these works under “Mosibat.”44

Conclusion While the British colonial project encouraged the publication of the Nights in India for the purpose of instructing British soldiers in the Arabic language and culture, it is important to note that subsequent editions of the Nights were put to different uses. In order to address the Iranian print adaptation of the Nights, it is useful to assess its function in the literary modernization of Iran. In his examination of popular print culture, Gary Kelly considers three major questions: “Who reads the material? How do they obtain it? And, how do they read it?”45 Though it may not be feasible – due to the lack of archival data/scholarship – to satisfactorily answer these questions, it serves a point to examine style and content among the printed versions of the Nights, as this can reveal some of the dynamics underlying the formation of modern literariness in Iran. Tashuji’s Nights, among other texts, successfully served to facilitate the transition from an ancient flowery language to a simplified, more efficient medium. Bahar, a national bard and critic, deemed Tasuji’s translation a matchless literary

 42

Avery, “Printing, the Press, and Literature in Modern Iran,” 820. Ibid., 833-34. 44 Ulrich Marzolph, “Persian Popular Literature in the Qajar Period,” Asian Folklore Studies 60, no. 2 (2001): 224-25. 45 Gary Kelly, “Course Description, Comparative Studies in Popular Culture.” University of Alberta, Modern Languages and Cultural Studies. March 31, 2015. 43

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piece,46 crafted during the time the Persian language was being modernized to later become the national language of Iran. In fact, the translation served the interests of the incipient Iranian readership. The embourgeoisement of the prose indicated that literary readership would no longer be an elitist and/or courtly prerogative. Rather, as an indication of literary modernization, Persian literature left elitist circles and found its way into the public sphere during the Qajar period, as the transformation of the Persian Nights from courtly manuscript chronotope to print material suggests. Moreover, regarding form and content, Mahjub has allocated an area to stories of romance and adventure in his categorization of Iranian popular literature.47 A modern literary phenomenon in the making during the Qajar period, popular literature has been regarded as “narrative works of a pseudo-historical or purely fictional character printed and distributed in relatively large quantities.”48 That this area features the Nights is an indication of the book’s status in the formation of modern Iranian literariness. The Iranian Nights was intended to encourage bourgeois ethics through its themes. Tasuji’s preface confirms the thematic mixture of amusement and education as he envisions a community of readers for his lucid translation: “But they use this device to interest a variety of tastes in their words […] so that they learn from it.”49 The co-existence of entertainment and ethical instruction seems to be a classic aim of literature; however, with the onset of the modern era, it becomes an important means to incorporate and enculturate various social sectors under the bourgeois framework. Blending instruction with fictional entertainment was a successful formula that English anti-Jacobins, for example, used to counter radical threats from the French Revolution at the turn of the century and achieve nation-wide, class-inclusive public readership for the first time in modern English history.50 Interestingly, some English adaptations of the Nights, a major Oriental chronotope, were used in such a way during the 18th and 19th centuries. Though blending entertainment and pedagogy occurred in different circumstances and on different grounds in the Iranian literary landscape, the Iranian Nights was

 46

Mohammad Taqi Bahar, Sabk-shenasi [Stylistics], 3rd ed., vol. 3 (Tehran: Amir Kabir, 1970), 369. 47 Mahjub, “Dastanha-ye ‘amiyane-ye Farsi,” 66. 48 Marzolph, “Persian Popular Literature,” 219. 49 Tasuji, Hezar-o yek shab, 7. 50 Richard D. Altick, The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Reading Public, 1800-1900, 2nd ed. (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1957), 76-77.

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cleansed of its explicit erotic references, rendering it suitable for the public audience in order to address the needs of the newly-emerging popular literary readership beyond the Persian court and classical literary circles. Featuring stylistic lucidity and sexually-cleansed contents, the composition proved apt for the growing Iranian public readership of the nineteenth century, to which the reprints of the Nights attest.

Bibliography Ali, Muhsin. Scheherazade in England: A Study of Nineteenth-Century English Criticism on the Arabian Nights. Washington: Three Continent Press, 1981. Altick, Richard D. The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Reading Public, 1800-1900. 2nd ed. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. 1957. Amanat, Abbas. Pivot of the Universe: Nasir al-Din Shah Qajar and the Iranian Monarchy, 1831-1896. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. Aryanpur, Yahya. Az Saba ta Nima: tarikh-e sad-o panjah sal adab-e Farsi [From Saba to Nima: A Hundred and Fifty Years of Iranian Literary History]. Vol. 1. Tehran: Entesharat-e Zaddar, 1994. Avery, Peter. “Printing, the Press, and Literature in Modern Iran.” In The Cambridge History of Iran. Vol. 7, From Nadir Shah to the Islamic Republic, edited by Peter Avery, Gavin Hambly, and Charles Melville, 815-70. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Bahar, Mohammad Taqi. Sabk-shenasi [Stylistics]. 3rd ed. Vol. 3. Tehran: Amir Kabir, 1970. Bakhtiyar, Mozaffar. “Ketab-arai’-ye Hezar-o yek shab (noskhe-ye ketabkhane-ye Golestan) [Illustration of The Thousand and One Nights (Golestan palace museum manuscript)].” Nameh-ye Baharestan 5 (2002): 123-30. Birkalan, Hande A. “The Thousand and One Nights in Turkish: Translations, Adaptation, and Issues.” Fabula: Journal of Folktale Studies 3, no. 4 (2004): 221-36. Butler, Judith, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Who Sings the Nationstate?: Language, Politics, Belonging. London and New York: Seagull Books, 2010. Dabashi, Hamid. The World of Persian Literary Humanism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012. Print.

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Ghanoonparvar, Mohammad R. Prophets of Doom: Literature as a SocioPolitical Phenomenon in Modern Iran. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1984. Hezar-o yek shab. Translated by ‘Abdollatif Tasuji. Vol. 1. Tehran: Hermes, 2004. “Historical and Literary Significance.” Introduction to Hezar-o yek shab [The Thousand and One Nights], by ‘Ali Asghar Hekmat. Tehran: Donya-ye ketab, 2008. Irwin, Robert. Arabian Nights: A Companion. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Kelly, Gary. “Course Description, Comparative Studies in Popular Culture.” University of Alberta, Modern Languages and Cultural Studies. 31 March 2015. Limon, Jose E. “Border Literary Histories, Globalization, and Critical Regionalism.” American Literary History 1, no. 2 (2008): 160-82. Mahjub, Mohammad Ja’far. “Dastanha-ye ‘amiyane-ye Farsi.” Sokhan 10, no. 1 (1959): 64-68. —. Tarjome-ye Farsi-ye Alf-a leyla va leyla” [“Persian Translation of Alf Laila wa laila”]. Sokhan 11, no. 1 (1962): 34-53. Marzolph, Ulrich. “Persian Popular Literature in the Qajar Period.” Asian Folklore Studies 60, no. 2 (2001): 215-36. —. “The Persian Nights: Links between the Arabian Nights and Iranian Culture.” Fabula: Journal of Folktale Studies 45, no. 3-4 (2004): 27593. Muqtadir, Maulavi Abdul. Catalogue of the Arabic and Persian Manuscripts in the Oriental Public Library at Bankipore. Vol. 8: Persian Manuscripts. Biography, Romances, Tales and Anecdotes. Panta: Oriental Public Library, 1925. Naushahi, S. Arif. Catalogue of Litho-Print and Rare Persian Books in Ganj Bakhash Library, Islamabad. Vol 2: Iran. Islamabad: Pakistan Institute of Persian Studies, 1986. Powell, Douglas R. Critical Regionalism: Connecting Politics and Culture in the American Landscape. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007. Rastegar, Kamran. “Literary Modernity between Arabic and Persian Prose: Jurji Zaydan’s Riwayat in Persian Translation.” Comparative Critical Studies 4, no. 3 (2007): 359-78. —. Literary Modernity between the Middle East and Europe: Textual Transactions in Nineteenth-Century Arabic, English, and Persian Literatures. New York: Routledge, 2007.

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Ringer, Monica M. Education, Religion, and the Discourse of Cultural Reform in Qajar Iran. Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda Publishers, 2001. Print. Sheehi, Stephen. Foundations of Modern Arab Identity. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2004. Talattof, Kamran. The Politics of Writing in Iran: A History of Modern Persian Literature. 1st ed. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2000.

CHAPTER NINE A “FAILED MODERNITY” OR A “CRISIS” OF MODERNITY?: A READING OF AMIN MAALOUF’S THE ROCK OF TANIOS KHALID ALHATHLOOL

Introduction Writing in the 1980s, Amin Maalouf often engages with two competing contemporary representations of Islam: the Islam of the past, as it is diversely reconstructed, and the Islam that is to play a role in today’s world. His approach is to read this history against a present that is rife with foreign domination, poverty, and devastating religious and sectarian wars.1 In this endeavor, he follows numerous contemporary Arab intellectuals and writers in seeking continuity between the distant past, with its perceived cultural strengths, and the present situation of today. Within this genealogy, the past is then interrogated to extract not only solutions to today’s problems but positive models to be emulated.2

 1

Self-reflective examination and the demand for critical engagement have dominated a wide spectrum of post-1967 Arab intellectuals. Numerous conferences and publications have been devoted to critique, reflecting various perspectives, and expressed with varying levels of sharpness and consistency. This can be observed by looking at the titles of major conferences held in that period. For more on the critique of notions of authenticity versus modernity, see Sadeq Jalal Al-Azm, AlNaqd Al-Dhati ba’d Al-Hazima (Beirut: Dar Al-Tali’a, 1969); Abdullah Laroui, AlIdiyolojiyya al-‘Arabiyya al-Mu’assira (Beirut: Al-Markaz al-Thaqafi al-‘Arabi, 1995). 2 It should be noted, however, that the appropriation of this same past varies greatly from one author to another, and between one ideology and another. In his study of contemporary Arab ideology, Abdullah Laroui alludes to a growing concern with authenticity marked by the rise of the nationalist state, a sentiment

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In preparing this chapter, I had noticed a shift in the way modernity is perceived in Maalouf’s later works. The analysis of Tanios, for which Maalouf received the Prix Goncourt, shows a noticeable change in the worldview typical of Maalouf’s early works, such as in Leo the African and Samarkand.3 In these earlier novels, Maalouf attempts to read the present into the past and perceive the past in the present. I would therefore argue that, in appropriating the past, Maalouf is presenting the argument

 that is present amongst rulers and the opposing intelligentsia. For Laroui, the quest for authenticity is closely associated with an interest in tradition. See Laroui, AlIdiyolojiyya al-‘Arabiyya al-Mu’assira, 15. 3 I draw on Lucien Goldmann’s concept of worldview as “a convenient term for the whole complex of ideas, aspirations, and feelings which links together the members of a social group and which opposes them to members of other social groups” (Lucien Goldmann, The Hidden God: A Study of Tragic Vision in the Pensées of Pascal and the Tragedies of Racine, trans. Philip Thody [London: Routledge, 1964], 17.) Goldmann contends that all members of any given social group attain a class consciousness, but in different degrees, and never completely. What is of interest for researchers, according to Goldmann, are the few cases in which exceptional individuals either achieve or come very near to achieving a completely integrated and coherent view of what they, and the social class to which they belong, are trying to do. I am obliged to revise the concept of worldview to fit my purposes in this chapter because I am interested in something that exceeds the individual author. The concept of worldview will therefore be employed here in order to elucidate the world and the contexts that have led to the production of this work in its current form. More importantly, as Goldmann puts it, the imperative is not only to interpret them but also to explain them. However, I am aware of the fact that the concept of worldview, with its almost inseparable association with class, cannot be employed here without some alterations and modifications. The particular conception of class mobilized by Goldmann is not relevant to the context of this chapter, where religion, culture, identity, and modernity are more decisively indicated. What I have found extremely useful, instead, is the distinction that Goldmann draws between a social class and a social group. Goldmann accepts that economic position is of primary importance in determining an individual’s social role and ideological orientation, but uses the term “group” rather than “class” to describe an individual’s position within a given economic structure. My understanding is that the concept of “worldview” is heavily dependent on his intellectual position. In other words, I argue that Maalouf’s feelings, aspirations, and ideas are held in common with a particular intellectual and social group defined and determined by their secular enterprise as Arab writers. These feelings, aspirations, and ideas have developed as a result of failed or failing national projects and political, social, and economic disintegration, but are not able, as yet, to find an effective solution to the contradictions resulting from the confrontation between modernity and tradition, West and East.

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that the origin and roots of modernity are found in Arab/Islamic civilization. Leo the African and Samarkand map the intersections between Western and Islamic civilizations.4 These intersections emerge in these two novels in his re-imagining of the biography of Hasan Alwazzan, the medieval Muslim traveller of the first novel and, in the second, a fictionalized depiction of the life, wisdom, and legacy of Omar Khayyam (1048-1131), the Persian polymath, philosopher, mathematician, astronomer, and poet. Both novels narrate the story of the fall of the Islamic civilization, with a special focus on the idea of loss as well as susceptibility to a potential cultural return to an Islamic “golden age.” Leo opens with Andalusia falling to the Castilians. Confronted by this threat, the people of Granada start to reflect on the powerlessness of their state by posing two principal questions: first, what has been the cause of this powerlessness in the face of their enemy? Second, how can the situation be rectified? By raising these questions, Leo accomplishes two objectives: the novel depicts “Islamic civilization” as declining, while answering the questions of why it has declined and how it might be reformed if not revived.5 Similarly, Samarkand engages with issues of discursive authenticity. However, in this novel, Maalouf also proposes a theory of reform that draws upon the historical experience of modernization in Iran, or what is today called the Persian Constitutional Revolution (1905-1911). Khayyam’s legacy is similar to the ‘progressive’ legacy represented by the character of Leo, inasmuch as Khayyam too represents the glorious side of the Islamic civilization, even if this representation concerns only the last remnants of this period. He lives at a time of the rapid decline of the Islamic civilization of the Mashriq (as opposed to its other side in the Maghreb and Andalusia). This “decadence” is represented in the narrative in the rise of Al-Sabbah, who stands in reaction to political despotism and social degeneration. The invocation of Leo’s and Khayyam’s biographies reveals much about the sociopolitical, intellectual, and cultural milieux of the time, as well as the characters’ reactions to the rise of dogmatic theology. In Samarkand, we encounter Khayyam as an adult living at the beginning of a decline in the sphere of intellectual activities crucial to previous eras. In

 4

Amin Maalouf, Leo the African, trans. Peter Sluglett (London: Abacus, 1994); Samarkand, trans. Russell Harris (London: Abacus, 1994). 5 Maalouf is far from being the first Arab writer to use the novel form to think through these questions. Precedents exist as far back as Mohammed Hussein Haikal’s Zainab (Cairo: Dar Al-Ma’arif, 1912).

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regard to former eras of Islamic history, the novel principally refers to figures who attest to the flourishing of an authentic, glorious culture. It is unclear whether the novel considers the rise of orthodoxy in the fourth century of Islamic history either as a rupture from previous centuries or as a return to an assumed and foregone orthodoxy of early Islam. This point is left ambiguous in the novel and, to my mind, the time span adopted seems to suggest that the rise of dogmatism during Khayyam’s time is a deviation from a more ‘progressive’ and tolerant ‘right path.’ This path would then enable freedom of expression and intellectual endeavor to develop in the first two centuries following the original rise of Islam. Such a perspective complements arguments that have been advanced by many Orientalists. Sarah Stroumsa, for instance, argues, “Historically, indeed, Islamic orthodoxy had the final word. One cannot ignore the fact that this typical freethinking of Islam appears in its full-fledged, outspoken form only on a very limited scale and for a relatively short period: the ninth and tenth centuries.”6 For Khayyam, then, the intellectual climate of free and independent thinking, characteristic of the tenth and eleventh centuries, has already been lost to the past.7 Nonetheless, the trope of decline reverberating through these two novels goes further in suggesting a sense of loss. Both these novels offer a particular version of the past with a strong emphasis on the period referred to, in historiographical studies, as the ‘era of Islamic humanism.’ This exalted period attests to the legacy believed compatible with many modern, progressive Islamic ideals. Its ‘revival’ is shown to be both possible and helpful in integrating the Muslim world into ‘modernity.’ It is for this reason that, in Samarkand, Maalouf depicts the brief years of ‘democracy’ brought about by the Constitutional Revolution as part of the legacy of Khayyam’s time. Both novels thus attempt a reconciliation between Islam and modernity similar to that which has been sought, since the nineteenth century, by

 6

Sarah Stroumsa, Free Thinkers of Medieval Islam: Ibn Al-Rawandi, Abu Bakr AlRazi and their Impact on Islamic Thought (Leiden: Koninklijke Brill NV, 1999), 240. 7 However, it should be remembered that the spirit of rationalism had not died, but had shifted from the Mashriq to the Maghrib side of the Islamic world, where it flourished until its climax in the thirteenth century when Arab-Spanish Andalusia produced such great masters as Ibn ‘Arabı, Ibn Masarrah, Al-Majritı, Ibn Bajjah, Ibn Tufayl and, finally, the great master of rationalism, Ibn Rushd himself. See, for example, Mohammed Al-Jabri, Nahnu wa Al-Turath (Casablanca: Arab Cultural Centre, 1993).

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both classical Islamic reformism and contemporary Islamic liberalism.8 For Maalouf, the ‘good’ past is personalized in the ‘liberal’ and ‘secular’ fictional characters of Leo and Khayyam. Here, he is claiming that a particular version of the past is authentic, in the hope that it will add impetus to a contemporary Arab/Muslim secular movement. Both novels celebrate voices of rationalism, peace, and coexistence, thereby presenting a pluralist culture to the Arab-Muslim world. Maalouf’s suggestion is that secularism has been pivotal since Islam’s very origins, entailing that the Muslim world need not copy Western secularism but can, and indeed must, revive its own secular traditions. At the same time, Samarkand and Leo appear to impugn the Islamist notion of authenticity. Maalouf argues that religious fanaticism and fundamentalism have not only emerged from, but also provoked the decline of, Islamic civilization, suggesting that contemporary Islamic culture is a deviation from an ‘original’ state. One could go further here and claim that Maalouf is actually attempting to reclaim the past from radical Islamism.9 In viewing former Islamic orthodoxy as the main cause of the stagnation of Islamic civilization, Maalouf approaches the argument posed by many contemporary Arab secularists. Here, rather than the ‘dialectics’ of modernity, it is the resurgence of radical Islam in contemporary Arab society that is to be viewed as the biggest threat to the integrity and viability of secularism, democracy, and development.

 8

In fact, Maalouf does not propose an unprecedented approach to the past but rather brings to prominence a number of ideas that have been widely circulated among Islamists since the time of Muhammad Abduh, though adding a liberal twist to them. In addition, I use the concept of “Islamic liberalism” to refer to a wide range of ideas and strands that cannot be reduced to one deterministic aspect. However, the term refers principally to those who attempt to reconcile Islam and modernity, and with a tendency to privilege the latter. For more on Islamic liberalism, see Leonard Binder, Islamic Liberalism: A Critique of Development Ideologies (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1988). 9 The 1970s and 1980s saw the rise of discourses of particularism, especially in the Arab-Muslim world, where Islamic particularism became the dominant discourse. The majority of Islamic intellectuals and schools have one notion in common: the call for the retrieval of an original cultural essence. This trope of “return” implies that all non-Islamist political forces and ideologies are foreign and do not correspond to Arab-Muslim identity. Thus, they claim that “socialism, liberalism and Marxism are not only extraneous, but ipso facto temporary, surface irruptions, the work of minorities out of keeping with the atemporal rhythm of the essence” (Aziz Azemh, Islams and Modernities [London: Verso, 1993], 81).

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However, unlike radical liberals, Maalouf does not fully negate the Islamist notion of return. Instead, he proposes an alternative that can be considered a compromise: a synthesis between this notion of return and a notion of Western modernity. As with other writers who have engaged with the past in a similar manner, Maalouf seems to suggest that the future lies with a form of Islamic liberalism confined to a veritable ‘Muslim bourgeoisie.’

The Rock of Tanios Maalouf’s The Rock of Tanios constitutes a departure from his former works.10 He seems to have abandoned the notion of historical authenticity and now takes the past, and regional history, to be barren and incapable of serving the integration of the Arab world into modernity. The rest of this paper focuses on how this change in Maalouf’s thinking is represented in his 1993 novel. The central premise of Amin Maalouf’s The Rock of Tanios is the reconstruction, and subsequent demystification, of the life of Tanios, a fictional character living in a ‘semi-fictional’ Mount Lebanon of the 1820s -1840s. The novel tells the story of the village of Kfryabda and its founding myth through the voice of a local, contemporary, and unnamed historian, who in many ways acts as a cipher for Maalouf. In doing so, it depicts the life of Tanios in a constant state of transformation against a society that is static and unchanging. The novel then establishes a dialectic between traditionalism and modernism. While the former is attributed to a society seemingly paralyzed by the weight of its tradition, the latter is mobilized through the forces of Tanios’s interactions with ‘the other.’ Here, Tanios projects the nature of these encounters back on to a country whose past and present, he believes, should be reinvented. The Rock of Tanios takes place during a period of history that marked the earliest ‘direct’ cultural encounter between Europe and the Arab world in modern times. For many Arab historians and cultural critics, this nineteenth-century contact was the first time that Arabs discovered, to their shock, the ‘reality’ of their ‘stagnation’ and ‘backwardness’



10 Amin Maalouf, The Rock of Tanios, trans. Dorothy S. Blair (London: Abacus, 1995).

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compared to modern Europe.11 It was also the age that witnessed the beginning of a questioning of the self, and in the same breath, the other.12 Tanios spends his early childhood as a happy, privileged child, who is well-adjusted in his community. However, this harmonious identification with his community and its traditional social structures is shattered upon his discovery of the strange circumstances surrounding his birth. Tanios is led to question whether his biological father is his ‘legal’ father, Gerios, or actually the Sheikh. This discovery makes him conscious of his ‘inauthentic’ status in the village, where genealogical relations are otherwise of crucial importance. The novel deploys the metaphor of “illegitimacy” to articulate the processes of social alienation and psychological fragmentation. On one level, illegitimacy serves as a metaphor of freedom for Tanios within his community because, as the Sheikh’s suspected son, he serves as an odd ‘shield’ from the Sheikh’s authoritarian feudal rule. This is because Tanios’s birthright enables the transgression of social codes and conventions, while illegitimacy also functions as a metaphor for fluidity. Tanios’s illegitimacy initiates his sense of fragmentation. Unable to deal with his unconventionality, Tanios searches for alternatives beyond the delimiting structures of the village. This narrative then progressively amplifies his sense of fragmentation in relation to a wider cultural identity. From this point onwards, the narrative depicts Tanios’s struggle for reintegration. The fluidity of his identity is a motif that reaches into the wider world and history, beyond the rigidly primordial, striated system of the village. However, what makes this process of de-alienation almost impossible for Tanios is the fact that his self-fragmentation runs parallel to the socio-political and cultural fragmentation of his region. In a narrative that mirrors the history of the period, Tanios’s life is an allegory of the disintegrating Arab or Ottoman world in its first encounter with modernity. Maalouf, therefore, interrogates a number of historical worldviews to structure this novel on two levels. The first competing views are embodied by the characters of Roukoz and the English clergyman. At first, Tanios serves as a student or a disciple while these two ‘masters’ introduce him to

 11 See Albert Hourani, Arab Thought in the Liberal Age, 1798-1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963). 12 The aesthetic representation of modernity, particularly in the form of the encounter between the Orient and its “advanced” “Other,” produced many literary writings during this age, including Amin Rihani’s Kharij al-Harim (1915), Issa Ibaid’s Thuraya (1922), Mahmoud Taimour’s Rajab Afandi (1928), Taha Husayn’s Al-Ayam (1929), and many others.

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new ideas constituting opposing worldviews. Tanios does not definitively align himself with either position. Instead, the novel emphasizes that it is only where ideological projects are tested and put into practice that Tanios’s position becomes apparent. Roukoz is the first voice to engage with Tanios’s interrogation and reinterpretation of the village’s structures. The narrative initially establishes Roukoz as a rival to the Sheikh in terms of this representation. He is the Sheikh’s former majordomo, who has been banished from the village after being accused of theft by the Sheikh. He now resides at the outskirts of the village after returning from a three-year exile in Egypt, where he has managed to accumulate significant ‘modern’ capital and wealth. Roukoz represents new and ‘modern’ values antagonistic to the traditional feudal system. However, what most attracts Tanios to Roukoz is his individuality and autonomy, two elements that prove foundational to the formation of his identity. The alternative worldview is represented by the English Clergyman. He is introduced into the narrative when Tanios’s consciousness as an individual is beginning to form under the influence of Roukoz. The relationship with the Englishman is an opportunity for Tanios to further ‘refine’ his new identity. From the outset, the clergyman is presented in a positive light. He is seen by Said beyk as a noble man because, “after getting to know that fine metropolis, instead of going to Istanbul or London, he chose to come and live in our humble village [Sahlain]. God will reward him for this sacrifice.”13 Roukoz’s worldview is presented through his own actions and interactions with Tanios. However, the Clergyman’s worldview is reflected in the changes Tanios goes through as a result of his studies; that is, in regard to what the Clergyman’s school teaches in the neighboring Druze village of Sahlain. Roukoz’s introduction to Tanios of a world transcending the limitations of the village still remains local, because it takes the modern Egyptian project as its reference point. In contrast, the Clergyman’s worldview takes Tanios beyond the local to the ‘universal,’ with his school serving as the marker defining Tanios’s relationship with the world. Tanios stops visiting Roukoz when he starts to attend the Clergyman’s school. His relationship with the village simultaneously takes a positive turn. Indeed, it is the decision to send the children to this school against the desire of the Patriarch, the religious leader of Mount Lebanon, which

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Maalouf, The Rock of Tanios, 83.

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reconciles Tanios “with his family, with the castle, the village, with himself and his birth.”14 I will therefore focus on the representation of the two principal worldviews rather than present a close, detailed analysis of the The Rock of Tanios: the view of the Egyptian, who represents the local, and the Englishman, who represents the ‘universal.’ Kfryabda becomes a site of negotiations between these two different worldviews as the conflict between Egypt and the Western superpowers intensifies. From the outset, the novel argues that opening up to the outside world is both necessary and inevitable to counter the village’s long-standing backwardness and isolation, but the pressing question concerns the direction this change should take. The novel’s representation of the modernization project of the Egyptian, Muhammad Ali, emerges from this ambivalence. The narrator draws out the contrast that is inherent to this relationship between the two levels of representation, communicating proclaimed ideals against the reality of Ali’s historical reform project. Tanios is attracted to the Egyptian’s proclaimed reforms, which, for him, present a break from the past and ‘the structure of feeling’ of the village, as Raymond Williams would identify it.15 Ali’s project also represents a more secular vision of reality, a vision of human endeavor as progress towards an infinitely more exciting, liberated existence forged by man alone and free of divine intervention. For the Mount communities, it is, most importantly, the promise to end the Dhimmi contract system. Ussama Makdisi perceives the Egyptian invasion of Lebanon as the invasion of a modern army with modern power: a power that had “colonized” Egypt.16 He acknowledges the modern policies of the Egyptian occupation of Lebanon, such as the abolition of certain distinctions that had vexed Christians, the reduction of financial corruption, and the pacification of urban Syria, but he looks at the Egyptian occupation of Lebanon in light of Egyptian “efforts to conscript the population and to extract raw materials….”17 Most importantly, the primary difference between Ottoman and Egyptian rule in Mount Lebanon

 14

Ibid., 85. ‘Structure of feeling’ here refers to the common set of perceptions and values shared by people of the village, as articulated in the novel. See Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977). 16 Ussama Makdisi, The Culture of Sectarianism: Community, History, and Violence in Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Lebanon (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 52. 17 Makdisi, The Culture of Sectarianism, 52. 15

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is the substitution of the indirect rule of the Ottomans for a far more coercive and centralized Egyptian regime.18 This is the change that Maalouf appears to criticize most vehemently in the novel, perceived as a policy that has disrupted the internal homogeneity of the communities. These aspirations and promises, therefore, constitute the terms against which the modernizing project of the Egyptians is to be evaluated. Tanios retains an ambiguous attitude with regard to the ideological preferences of both the Egyptians and the social forces that compose the village, thus guaranteeing that he does not identify with either party. By contrast, the narrator’s claim to present an account of history from the local people’s perspective constitutes a representation of the Egyptian reformers that both belittles and undermines them. In order for this level of representation to be persuasive, the narrator endorses an ideological position contesting the validity and the integrity of the Egyptian reforms. Although this is a temporary position, it is nonetheless one that reclaims a unique cultural identity for ‘the natives.’ However, I would argue that this is not what Tanios wishes to achieve, because the novel does not want to subvert Egyptian reforms in order to demonstrate the sophistication of Kfryabda’s social existence. It is from this complex position that great significance should be read into the return of the exiled Tanios at the end of the novel. The eventual defeat of the Egyptians does not entail the triumph of the local people, at least not for Tanios and the narrator. Instead, we become aware, again, of Maalouf’s claim of historical revision to the mythical character of Tanios. Here, Maalouf transforms an imagined particularist and nationalist historical figure into a universal and liberal one. The basis for this transformation then enables the novelist to present the character of Tanios as an antithesis to nationalism and pan-Arab nationalism. “Between two worlds, Tanios? Between two forms of revenge, rather? The one by bloodshed, the other by contempt.”19 Tanios’ feelings of estrangement and displacement remain unresolved following his return from exile. In the closing pages of the novel, he finds himself at a turning point, facing the choice between life and death; that is, between the ‘death’ of staying at the village or the decision to migrate and therefore enable himself to live. Here Maalouf posits the choice between two identities. The first is Tanios’s newly acquired sense of individual subjectivity, inspired by liberal ideas of modernity in the reception of the ‘other’ to challenge homogeneous identities. The second is an all-

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Ibid. Maalouf, The Rock of Tanios, 227.

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encompassing, self-enclosing identity represented by the traditional collectivity of the village. Confronted with this choice, Tanios decides willfully to disappear at the end of the novel. As readers, we are nonetheless presented, not with the destiny of one individual, but with an unending trajectory because, for people like Tanios and the ‘contemporary’ narrator himself, it is their first encounter with modernity. The narrator’s tone then becomes more ominous when contemplating the fate of those who have come after Tanios. Indeed, their ‘attachment to the soil’ suggests a romantic and, above all, an unbreakable bond with their ancestors’ land. On the other hand, the enduring emphasis on roots and collective existence suggests that even if hybridity seems to occur perpetually (as the narrative seems to suggest), it has been disavowed by forces of tradition and particularism since the dawn of modernity. Aside from the village, such forces also serve to hinder the possibility of mobility and migration as a product of the emerging logic of the nation-state. Finally, we see that the narrator of the novel chooses, like Tanios, to flee “Purgatory,” rather than remain, destined for a metaphorical death: “I finally yielded. I murmured my apologies to all the ancestors and climbed up in my turn to sit on the rock.”20 In the end, the novel does not actually propose “disappearing” as the most desirable solution, for it is depicted as an unwanted compromise that Tanios and his like are obliged to make. The metaphor of the “Rock” in the novel’s title gives us an idea of this idealization; if exile or migration are compromises, then they are idealized as such. I take the Rock as a metaphor for Tanios’s legacy, signifying the inescapable destiny awaiting those who follow in his footsteps. The Rock represents his attempt to transcend the “predicament” of negating the self or other, only through the choice of either migrating or becoming estranged from the collectivity. The closing lines of Tanios, therefore, display, in spite of their rhetorical ambivalence, a state of certainty that replicates the static nature of the Rock. Tanios’ ideals and aspirations are as solid and durable as the Rock. It should also be noted that the conclusion Maalouf provides to Tanios privileges a certain course to modernity. Despite accepting the binary opposition of tradition and modernity, the narrator of Tanios insists that the only way “forward” is in the direction of progress, development, modernization and, ultimately, Europe. Whilst still in Famagusta in his involuntarily exile and contemplating his return to Kfryabda, the only possible options he can entertain are those of “bloodshed,” referring to the

 20

Ibid., 273.

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Emir, or “contempt,” in reference to the Egyptians.21 For Tanios, “the local” inevitably leads to “purgatory,” even by way of the Egyptian Pasha’s ambitious project of modernization. In contrast, the “forward” is to be found in the opposite direction: “To the West. To Genoa, Marseilles, Bristol. And beyond, to America.”22 The novel’s ending offers a profoundly tragic vision in which, to borrow a Goldmannian term, the unnamed narrator is incapable of overcoming the conditions and limitations of his situation. He does so to an even greater extent than Tanios, who is not only trapped between the world of Kafryabda and its region (be they under the rule of Ottomans or Egyptians), but also lost when he contemplates the brave new world of the West. Tanios is ultimately incapable of reaching the answers that would reconcile the two worlds, uniting the values of tradition and of modernity. Tanios finds himself pressured to accept the two opposing worlds, but his acceptance of both worlds inevitably limits his capacity for action and change. At one point, he is seen to support Roukoz’s and Adel effendi’s objection to feudal lordship, alongside their intention to abolish it and its unjust privileges. Yet Tanios is unable to challenge the Sheikh’s authority, even when the right opportunity arises, and the feeling remains that his ideals will inevitably place him apart from others and from the society in which he lives. By extension then, society’s very imperfection will always be a threat to any new values that Tanios acquires. The narrator’s use of the word “purgatory” is worth examining in more detail. Despite its Christian or specifically Catholic connotations, this word is here used to refer to an existence between the pre-modern and the modern, thus capturing the experience of impasse. Modernity is subsequently viewed, as Saree Makdisi puts it, as “a future condition, a future location, a future possibility. Modernity is always already displaced and deferred: it is always on the other side of the river, or up the stream – or up in the sky.”23 In the words of the narrator, “to disappear” is to cross to the “other side of the river” and to be true to oneself. To disappear is to be modern, while to stay in “purgatory” is to live in a state of continuous transition between the pre-modern and the modern. It is this understanding of the experience of modernity that I find problematic in Maalouf. Maalouf’s work poses a challenge to those who attempt to evoke a cultural identity built upon a precolonial heritage, so

 21

Ibid., 227-28. Ibid., 227. 23 Saree Makdisi, “Postcolonial Literature in a Neocolonial World: Modern Arabic Culture and the End of Modernity,” boundary 2 22 (1995): 90. 22

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overlooking the colonial bridge that connects the present to this past. He thus reads modernity not as temporality, but as a future condition. This teleological understanding of modernity is created by maintaining a sense of continuity between the narrator and Tanios, one that suggests the continuing absence of modernity in the village. Tanios’s identity intersects with that of the narrator to such a degree that they could be understood as a “pan-character.” Moreover, the narrator is destined to live out what Tanios originally started. He rejects tradition, critiquing as well as reconfiguring notions of particularity, and ultimately chooses exile rather than sacrificing his individuality and liberal ideals. Clearly, the “modernist” ethic is outside the traditional worlds of Roukoz and the Sheikh, insofar as it refuses to be revolutionist and instead provides an insufficient social correlative to the ideals that Tanios embodies. Although Tanios may represent a modernist ethic, he is not provided with a social correlative sufficient to lend him material reality. Caught between spiritual rejection and social integration, Tanios can only conclude his personal tragedy by disappearing. We then understand why he is not present during the most critical event in the novel: the “revolution” that ends feudal privileges and appoints Roukoz as the village chief. The novel’s great interest in politics then appears suddenly to be abandoned. Upon Tanios’s return to the village, no one raises the question of whether Roukoz represents progressive reformist ideals or is merely another version of the Sheikh. There appears even less a need to pose these challenging questions when the Sheikh returns. Therefore, the novel only dramatizes Tanios’s challenge to society in intellectual terms that transcend social relations, so keeping this challenge in a realm eternally divorced from the material world. In the last section of the novel, the narrator focuses upon a dramatization of Tanios’s disenchantment, drawing a contrast between his dreams and the reality. The rationale is to win the reader’s sympathy for Tanios and his values by exalting this sense of failure, while omitting any critique of Tanios’s failure to engage with existing social relations. These “repressed” questions then contradict Tanios’s implied “rejection” of this world. Although the novel criticizes the world of the village, the fact that Tanios and the narrator struggle in their decisions to opt out shows that the world of the village is not “fully” rejected. The issue remains unresolved of whether an individual should turn his back completely on the values and traditions endorsed by the village, for in doing so, he would “endanger” and sacrifice the unique identity claimed of the village and its people.

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The danger here lies not in the “sacrifice” itself, but in the alternatives available. The failure of Tanios’s “modern,” perhaps “European,” project ignores the potential of other projects for the “region,” be they nationalist or Islamic. However, Roukoz and the Egyptians signify a “backward” and “pre-modern” order in the novel’s discourse, and their defeat is evidently to be celebrated according to this logic. The return of the Sheikh also marks the return of a “pre-modern” order more “local” than that of the Egyptians, thus symbolizing a move from history into the realm of myth. Tanios’s disappearance is, therefore, essential because the author wants to maintain the notion that history repeats itself. To what, then, do these contradictions in the character of Tanios actually amount? I have argued that the conflict between the traditional and the modern is central to Maalouf’s work. In the relationships between Tanios and Roukoz, and Tanios and the English clergyman, we may decipher fictional microcosms of the conflict between the local and the national, and the transnational and universal. These relationships are not strictly defined, being that Tanios is neither insider nor outsider, neither local nor universal. The double-edged nature of his relationships, in their blend of antagonism and emulation, is instead responsible for producing the complex structure of cultural forces that make up the novel. Having accumulated a very different “cultural capital,” Tanios returns to his society in a state of ambivalence, first spiritually and later physically. His estrangement is an expression of a modern bourgeois class increasingly disconnected from traditional society. Tanios does not belong fully to his society or to Europe, and at times he opposes them both. He embodies a group desiring at once to destroy “traditional” societies, while confronting “superior” discourses that are Eurocentric in nature. Tanios’s life, therefore, explores a very modern ideological dilemma in constituting a contradictory amalgam of the “local” and the “universal.” As a Lebanese Christian, he belongs “culturally” to the West while continuing to adhere strongly to traditional social and cultural structures. However, the paradox is that Tanios cannot belong to both worlds without being estranged from one or the other. It is one that cannot even be resolved when represented as a myth. If the “enlightened” Tanios belongs culturally with the West, as symbolized by the English clergyman, he still remains socially and politically closer to the traditional world of the village. Tanios’s decision to leave the village may be driven by his alienation, but it is also of a piece with the narrator’s despair when faced with the threatened disappearance of any prospect of “positive” or progressive change in his society.

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Maalouf’s novel is primarily concerned with economic relations, insofar as Tanios is almost completely disconnected from the economic realities of his community. Economic contradictions can then explain his tense relationship with Roukoz, for it is primarily for such reasons that Tanios is drawn to Roukoz in the early stage of his estrangement from his society. In turn, economic factors place limits on their friendship, for Roukoz holds the economic “ideals” that Tanios upholds, while Tanios remains closer to the village in cultural terms. When he is appointed as the chief of the village, Roukoz receives a reception from the people suggesting that he shares with them the culture of the village. However, his economic perspective is very different from the villagers, as he represents a new form of capitalist economic relations. Roukoz embodies the contradiction of combining the traditional political structures of the village with a Western capitalist economy. He is economically progressive while remaining culturally outdated; therefore, Tanios takes Roukoz to represent “half” of the ideals of modernity. Moreover, Roukoz lacks the most significant “half:” that of the “civilizing” culture of modernity. The limitations of Roukoz’s “project” become clear when he is rejected by the people and thus fails to overcome the traditional forces of feudalism embodied by the Sheikh. Amongst the different interpretations possible here, I take this moment in the novel to present an argument for the need to refine Roukoz’s “capitalist orientation” with the cultural ideals Tanios has learnt from the English clergyman. Yet Tanios has also failed to serve as the instrument for the introduction of liberal values, and this joint failure suggests that there will be a full economic and cultural return to the traditional feudal order.24



24 It is worth recalling that Hourani draws a conclusion contrary to the conclusion of the novel, observing that a bourgeois class did emerge in the period covered by the novel. First, the Egyptians brought to Syria the modern concept of direct centralized administration, “which in the end was to threaten the traditional autonomy of the mountain” (Hourani, Arab Thought in the Liberal Age, 17981939, 131). Second, the alliance between the Egyptians and Bashir II provoked another form of foreign intervention. The British, being opposed to the Egyptian presence in Syria, allied themselves with the enemies of Egypt and Bashir to encourage a level of local discontent that grew into the revolt of 1840, which is depicted in the novel. See Mallouf, The Rock of Tanios, 132.

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Conclusion Contrary to the novel’s claims that the return of the Sheikh marks the return of the traditional system, many historians consider the period between 1831 and 1840 to coincide with the advent of modernization in the Middle East. All the major participants in the Eastern Question – Muhammad Ali, the reforming Ottomans, and the Europeans – conceived of themselves as embodying a new age. However, as Ussama Makdisi notes, historians tend to gloss over the implications of this modernization: By depicting the changes during this era as the imposition (by Egyptians, the reforming Ottomans, and the Europeans) of a fully formed and independently standing modernity on a passive and traditional local society, they have understood sectarianism as an upswelling of primordial religious solidarities provoked by the modernizing policies of the Egyptian occupation and the Tanzimat.25

The novel suggests that, despite these changes, the return of the Sheikh indicates that the traditional status quo was destined to remain. Yet Albert Hourani argues that, by 1840 and the end of Bashir II’s rule, new social and economic relations in Lebanon had emerged within a system firmly tied to individual communities. Such a system had been enforced by Bashir’s policies, which had set Maronites against Druzes and encouraged certain tendencies within each community. Bashir’s policies had helped the Maronites to increase in number and migrate to lands traditionally inhabited by the Druze; as a consequence, the merchants and artisans of the new Christian market-towns, such as Zahla and Dayr al-Qamar, were no longer willing to accept the lordship of the local Druze families.26 In addition, the defeat of both Roukoz and the Emir suggests the instigation of a permanent rupture from “traditional” structures. Tanios, therefore, ends with a sense of crisis and disintegration hardly indicative of persistent, outmoded “traditional” structures. It is, instead, indicative of the dialectic of modernity or, as Saree Makdisi puts it, “the crisis of modernity in the Arab world is partly the product of the Arab experience of colonialism in the nineteenth century and the early twentieth but also of the neocolonial conditions that exist in – and, indeed, help to define – the Arab world today.”27

 25

Makdisi, The Culture of Sectarianism, 52. Ibid., 133. 27 Makdisi, “Postcolonial Literature in a Neocolonial World,” 105. 26

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Bibliography Al-Azm, Sadeq Jalal. Al-Naqd Al-Dhati ba’d Al-Hazima. Beirut: Dar AlTali’a, 1969. Al-Azmeh, Aziz. Islams and Modernities. London: Verso, 1993. Al-Jabri, Mohammed. Nahnu wa Al-Turath. Casablanca: Arab Cultural Centre, 1993. Amin, Samir. Unequal Development: An Essay on the Formation of Peripheral Capitalism. Translated by Brian Pearce. Sussex: The Harvester Press Limited, 1976. —. Eurocentrism: Modernity, Religion, and Democracy: A Critique of Eurocentrism and Culturalism. Translated by Russell Moore and James Membrez. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2009. Binder, Leonard. Islamic Liberalism: A Critique of Development Ideologies. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1988. Goldmann, Lucien. The Hidden God: A Study of Tragic Vision in the Pensées of Pascal and the Tragedies of Racine. Translated by Philip Thody. London: Routledge, 1964. Haikal, Mohammed Hussein. Zainab. Cairo: Dar Al-Ma’arif, 1912. Hourani, Albert. Arab Thought in the Liberal Age, 1798-1939. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963. —. The Emergence of the Modern Middle East. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981. Kassab, Elizabeth Suzanne. Contemporary Arab Thought. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010. Laroui, Abdullah. Al-Idiyolojiyya al-‘Arabiyya al-Mu’assira. Beirut: AlMarkaz al-Thaqafi al-‘Arabi, 1995. —. The Crisis of the Arab Intellectual: Traditionalism or Historicism? Translated by Diarmid Cammell. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1976. Maalouf, Amin. Leo the African. Translated by Peter Sluglett. London: Abacus, 1994. —. Samarkand. Translated by Russell Harris. London: Abacus, 1994. —. The Rock of Tanios. Translated by Dorothy S. Blair. London: Abacus, 1995. Mahmoud, Zaki Naguib. Tajdid Al-Fikr Al-Arabi. Beirut: Dar Al-Sharouq, 1971. Makdisi, Saree. “Postcolonial Literature in a Neocolonial World: Modern Arabic Culture and the End of Modernity.” Boundary 2 22 (1995): 85115.

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Makdisi, Ussama. The Culture of Sectarianism: Community, History, and Violence in Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Lebanon. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. Stroumsa, Sarah. Free Thinkers of Medieval Islam: Ibn Al-Rawandi, Abu Bakr Al-Razi and their Impact of Islamic Thought. Leiden: Koninklijke Brill NV, 1999. Williams, Raymond. Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977.



SECTION III: THE COLONIAL GAZE AND THE MUSLIM OTHER

CHAPTER TEN THE BOSNIAN MUSLIM SUBALTERN IN MODERN EUROPE: FROM MYTH TO GENOCIDE JASNA BALORDA

Introduction In any thorough analysis of ethnic stereotypes used in the Bosnian war (1992-1995) to target the Muslim population for annihilation, it is impossible to overlook the links between the social constructs used to define the group locally and broader European mechanisms of group identity formation used historically to target all non-Christian others, particularly those symbolically placed in the context of Orientalism. In fact, looking at the Bosnian context, which, after 500 years of Ottoman rule became integrated into modern Europe only with the 19th century invasion of Austria-Hungary, can provide the researcher with significant insights into the particular subaltern identity patterns that emerge as a result of a power dynamics of early modern Europe, which builds itself imaginatively as a binary opposite of that which is perceived as Oriental, barbaric, perverted and ultimately inferior. By pointing out these links and similarities between the early modern European mechanisms of Islamophobic othering, and the persisting ethnic stereotypes which directly contributed to the violence and mass murder of this group almost a hundred years later, we will demonstrate that the Balkan perpetrators were not merely carrying out an innovative plan of extermination, but were inscribing themselves into a larger European project of exclusion and violence against Muslims, who to this day remain seen as an obstacle to the perseverance of the European cultural project, which is closely linked to the moral values of white Christianity and the hegemonic aims of Christendom. A number of elements have influenced the emergence of early European Islamophobia. On the one hand, it appeared as the result of very

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concrete physical threats manifested in the shape of dynamic and overwhelming Islamic conquerors, such as the Golden Hordes, who are always portrayed in European art as dark-skinned, flesh-eating diabolical monsters. On the other hand, it is an extension of an already existing, ancient, European anti-Semitism,1 which is obvious, particularly in the way the blame for the death of Christ, traditionally imposed on the Jews, later became similarly blamed on the followers of Mohammad, who are also portrayed as the seed of Satan and the occupiers of the Holy Land.2 In fact, one of the best-known works of the early Renaissance and the pinnacle of Western literary accomplishment, the 13th-century Dante’s Inferno, places the Prophet Mohammad in the ninth circle of hell,3 the one created for schismatics and sowers of discord, indicating the Christian anxiety that Islam could cause a rebellion within or even a disintegration of the Christian Church. In short, Islam was seen as, above all, a challenge to Christianity, and the fact that it allowed polygamy and divorce was believed by the Church to be the cause of an increasing number of converts, even amongst Christians.4 The key event, however, that mobilized the Christian imagination in relation to Islam was certainly the invasion of the Iberian Peninsula by Arab Moors, which lasted for 300 years in much of modern Spain, and also parts of France and Portugal, and almost 800 years in Granada. It was crucial in the process that marked the gradual arrival of modernity in Europe and, accordingly, the transformation of religious resentments into full-blown modern racisms. The long-term existence of a common Islamic enemy on the territory of Europe provided then, as it still does today, the common ground needed for the construction of modern Europe as an idea based on a shared Christian heritage on the one hand, but also a rigid, violent and exclusionary stereotyping mechanism, particularly in relation to Islamic otherness, on the other. Indeed, in the 11th-13th centuries, the struggle against the Moors became linked to Christendom as a whole, and

 1

Frighteningly so, as connections between the stereotypical portrayals of Muslims and Jews persist in contemporary society. The French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo shows members of both religions as bearded men with hooked noses and religious headgear, very reminiscent of the way the Nazi Der Stürmer portrayed the Jews. 2 Edward Said, Orientalism (London: Penguin Books, 1985). 3 The 1415 painting by Giovanni Da Modena, The Last Judgment, in the Cathedral in Bologna, depicts a scantily-clad, turbaned, and bearded Muhammad in agony as he is pulled into the pits of hell by demons. 4 Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire (Chicago and London: Haymarket Books, 2012).

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took the shape of the just war as Christian knights were encouraged to battle the infidels rather than each other. When the Pope began mobilizing for crusades, the image of Islam as a religion of promiscuity, a deviant, violent, licentious, and heretical creed, was strengthened by the idea of Islam as a geo-military target, which was supposed to advance larger political goals of Christendom.5 In Europe, the Islamic threat soon became clearly identified in racial terms, being equated with inferiority and darker skin, as demonstrated in the law of Toledo from 1445. The expulsion of Moors and Jews from Spain is, indeed, a significant moment in determining the modern history of racial thinking in Europe. The targeted populations were placed outside of the community and subjected to mass violence. The concept of cleanliness of blood, or Limpieza de sangre, which was introduced in 15th-century Spain and lasted well into the 19th century, was thus more focused on ancestry than religion, and resulted in converts being banned from most official positions, as all upwardly-mobile families had to show proof of heritage dating back generations.6 In fact, converts were the main targets of the Spanish and later Portuguese Inquisition, which can be credited with burning thousands of people alive. The elements of racethinking are obvious here, as it was the custom for a nobleman to provide proof of his ancestry by holding his arm up, showing the blue veins beneath the pale skin, demonstrating that his blood had not been contaminated by the darker race. In this example, we thus recognize not only that with modernity, the nature of stereotyping becomes more rigid and the outcome more violent, but also that racism in Europe is deeply intertwined with the history of Christian thinking. As J. Kameron Carter explains in Race: A Theological Account, Christian anti-Judaism became biologized, thereby racializing itself, resulting in Christianity becoming the basis for the cultural hegemony and the white hegemony of the West.7 It was, in fact, the European understanding of the religious other that also became the lens for understanding racial difference in the new world, as the primary relationship between Christianity and indigenous heathenry became biologized into modern racism. Through war and reconquest to consolidate the Spanish nation-state, the dark skin of ethnically-cleansed Islamic Moors became merged with their religious otherness; hence,

 5

Joseph O'Callaghan, Reconquest and Crusade in Medieval Spain (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 19. 6 Michael Mann, The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 7 J. Kameron Carter, Race: A Theological Account (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).

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indigenous heathens in the Americas became identified with dark-skinned heathens in Europe.8 According to Ian Law, “The rise of race as a central feature of the modern world system from 1400 onwards has been etched into our memory and understanding of the world by key forms of genocide.”9

Early European Orientalist Reflections on Bosnia Just as Christian Europe managed to finally cleanse itself of its Islamic heritage, or so it was believed, the new Islamic conquerors, the Ottoman Empire, started attacking from the East, quickly conquering much of Eastern Europe. In Bosnia, a Christian Empire in the Western Balkans, this conquest meant drastic consequences. At the time of its fall, Bosnia was already severely divided between different religions. The fall of the Roman Empire left it split between Eastern and Western Christianity, while its autochthonic form, the dualist Bosnian Church, struggled to survive squeezed in between these two powerful poles. When the Ottoman Empire conquered the region in 1463, the Bosnian Empire was therefore already divided between religions in a complex and conflicting interaction. For various reasons, including the difficulties in preserving indigenous Bosnian Christianity, which faced continuous accusations of heresy and assaults by both Papal Rome and Byzantine Constantinople, but also due to the benefits offered by the acquisition of positions in the new world order, the population began to convert to Islam in large numbers.10 This historical moment is of overwhelming importance for the process of identity formation, not only in Bosnia, but the Balkans as a whole, where the adoption of the new religion of the occupiers has become an obstacle to communication between ethnic groups, a hindrance to the creation of unified and homogeneous nation-states, and a persistent casus belli, particularly in relation to the recent Balkan wars of 1992-95. The reason for the latter lies in part in the particular style of colonialist indirect rule, which elevated the local Muslim Bosnian population to a position of aristocratic influence, allowing it to adopt a system of exploitation of Christian serfs within the feudal Bosnian society, thereby creating a lasting

 8

Junaid Rana, “The Story of Islamophobia,” Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society 9, no. 2 (2007): 148-62. 9 Ian Law, Racism and Ethnicity: Global Debates, Dilemmas, Directions (London: Pearson Education, 2010): 13. 10 Mustafa Imamoviü, Historija Bošnjaka (Sarajevo: Bošnjaþka zajednica kulture Preporod, 2006): 13.

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ethnic rift between the native groups which previously lived in relative harmony. Indeed, in spite of the fact that colonial theory defines indirect rule as a cost efficient model of foreign control typically used by the British Empire in Africa and elsewhere which practiced empowering native traditional elites through a system of privilege to carry out the goals of the colonisers, including the policing of other, less privileged groups, we observe here that a very similar divide et impera approach was used by the Ottoman empire not only in Eastern Europe, but also in the Middle East (Iraq). Postcolonial theorists like Mamdani, have thus, correctly noticed that this type of rule was particularly harmful to colonised societies as it created ethnic cleavages and animosities within these decentralised despotisms that persisted long after the colonialists abandoned their protectorates.11 On the other hand, the impact of this type of rule, might not have been nearly as harmful or as long lasting if it wasn’t for the specific, dominant power relations which characterised the modern European context after the fall of the Ottomans, including the prevailing European attitudes towards the local Muslim populations, which became identified with the Ottoman invaders and thereby also racialized and socially constructed as a blood contaminant, only to finally become the crucial European projection of the Orient, thus constituting the essence of modern European otherness.12 In other words, Europe seemed incapable or unwilling to integrate its Islamic heritage within its self-perception despite the fact that Islam has significantly contributed to the development of cultures and identities in large parts of the continent. Indeed, European Islamophobia, which, by the 19th century and the ultimate weakening of the Ottoman Empire, became one of the deeply ingrained archetypes in the European subconscious, was reflected in its visions of Bosnia in both direct and indirect ways. Ottoman Bosnia became, for Europeans, an Orientalist stereotype, a secret and mysterious oasis of transcendental sexual pleasures combined with visions of uncleanliness and promiscuity, as demonstrated in early 20th-century Austrian erotic literature which fantasizes about Bosnian harems, even though these never really existed in this part of Europe. Not only that, but in the Western imagination, Bosnia became a part of the Near East, as exemplified in the image of the “turbaned and cross-legged men, sitting

 11 Mahmood Mamdani, Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1996): 37. 12 The fact that the local Muslim populations are still constructed in Europe as a physical threat to this day can be seen in the many articles and commentaries that accuse Balkan Muslims of terrorism and links with ISIS and/or Al-Qaeda.

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under their dilapidated verandas, or on their little shabby shop-boards, smoking all day long, and fingering their beards.” Indeed, even the travelogues and ethnographies of the time locate Bosnia, and often the Balkans, in the Near East.13 With the change in British foreign policy in 1844 that led to increased public interest in the region, British enthusiasts travelled increasingly to explore this part of European Turkey.14 As the power of the Ottoman Empire waned and Bosnia was annexed by Austria-Hungary in 1908, the imagined difference between the East and the West became even more pronounced and recognized in the different architecture of Bosnian towns – part Oriental, part European – and the Bosnian people, who, compared to the modernity and vigour of their Austrian counterparts, were seen as decadent and primitive. British expatriate Paulina Irby wrote that Bosnia constantly reminded her of Asia and that, in spite of being close to European civility, this was the most barbarous and savage of all the provinces of Turkey in Europe. Indeed, travellers such as Irby routinely placed Bosnia outside of Europe, comparing it to Timbuktu, Kurdistan, or even India. Even more frightening to these prejudiced explorers was the fact that Europe, in the form of Christian Serbia, lay so close, yet had little influence on the local traditions and practices, which remained Muslim. The Muslim other is therefore symbolically expelled from Europe, in relation to territory, customs, traditions, and worldviews. The dominant construct of European modernity is used to define the notion of the backwards and savage Oriental other as the exact opposite of the progressive and civilised modern European. The denial of the Slavic Muslims’ Europeanness, therefore, simultaneously means the denial of their belonging within the sphere of modernity, which is constructed as a racial category and linked with Christianity. Indeed, as the French colonial bureaucrat Alain Quellien wrote in his PhD thesis at the beginning of the 20th century: “For some, the Muslim is the natural and irreconcilable enemy of the Christian and the European; .

 13

In 1898, William Mille locates the Balkans in the Near East; and in 1931, Geoffrey Rhodes uses the same term to describe Dalmatia and Bosnia. Even as late as 1949, writers such as Lawrence Durrell described Sarajevo as an 18th-century Turkish town. In The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory entry on Orientalism, J. A. Cuddon situates the beginning of the East in Bosnia (Sarajevo in particular). 14 Edmund Spencer, Travels in European Turkey, in 1850; Through Bosnia, Servia, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Thrace, Albania, and Epirus; With a Visit to Greece and the Ionian Isle (London: Colburn, 1851).

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Islam is the negation of civilization, and barbarism, bad faith and cruelty are the best one can expect from the Mohammedans.”15 The task of re-Europeanizing Bosnia was, therefore, undertaken vigorously by many such well-wishers. In a chapter called “Orientalizing Disease,” Brigitte Fuchs establishes that there was an influx of Western physicians into Bosnia in the early 20th century, who operated mostly through Orientalist stereotypes, depicting Muslim women as primitive and uncivilized for breastfeeding their children for longer than a year and not employing the modern methods of using cow’s milk instead. The Islamic way of life and particularly traditional Muslim feminine veil was also blamed for prevalent diseases such as Osteomalacia16, while some of the European doctors did not hesitate to call their Muslim clientele animals, unprincipled, indolent, or spineless.17 Even Bosnian music was criticised for its eastern melancholy and its lack of the martial rhythms of the West.18 Ironically, instead of demonstrating the backwardness of the music, this example of scientific racism actually testifies to the militaristic nature of European modernity, which oppresses symbolically only with the aim to also colonize. Indeed, the death of the Ottoman Empire also meant that the Balkan Peninsula was up for grabs, and the powerful European countries competed to widen their spheres of influence. Travelogues frequently described and generalised about Oriental music therefore attempting to justify the invasion and oppression of what was portrayed as inferior Islamic cultures in Europe. The following British example from 1909 carries a similar massage: “Native Turkish music, it must be admitted, is still very primitive in character. The airs are generally either wild and plaintive, or sentimental and melancholic, presenting little variety and – in common with the folkmusic of Southern Europe – generally they are invariably pitched in a minor key.”19 Overall, it is obvious that, due to their perceived Orientalism, Bosnian Muslims were seen as outsiders in Christian Europe,

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Fernando Bravo Lopez, “Towards a Definition of Islamophobia: Approximations of the Early Twentieth Century,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 34, no. 4 (2011): 558. 16 Softening of the bones typically due to lack of vitamin D 17 Christian Promitzer, Sevasti Trubeta and Marius Turda, ed., Health, Hygiene and Eugenics in South-Eastern Europe to 1945 (Budapest and New York: CEU Press, 2010). 18 Maude Holbach, Bosnia and Herzegovina: Some Wayside Wanderings (London: John Lane, 1910): 188. 19 Lucy Mary Jane Garnett, The Turkish People, Their Social Life, Religious Beliefs and Institutions, and Domestic Life (London: Methuen & Co, 1909): 181-82.

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which saw in them another kind of White man’s burden, to be oppressed and colonised.

The Influence of European Orientalist Stereotypes on Local Opinions and Practices Placing Bosnia, due to its relationship with Islam, within the fantasized Orient would not be nearly as harmful if it remained at the source of the idea. However, the power balance between Western and Eastern Europe resulted in these stereotypes strongly influencing and affecting the local populations of the Balkans, with ethnic cleansing taking place in places like Serbia, Greece and Bulgaria in the attempt to re-Christianise the region. As European modernity emerged from the solidification of the power of the nation-state, national awakenings were swiping across the continent, represented by cuius regio eius religio, the Latin phrase for Whose realm, his religion, a general European political agreement that, in addition to meaning consolidation and homogenization of a territory under one rule, also meant a rejection of non-Christian minorities in Europe. The Western idea of re-Europeanizing Bosnia, therefore, basically meant the eradication of its Muslim component so that when the local Christian groups argued that Bosnian Muslims were originally Serbs or Croats, respectively, and should therefore, along with their territory, be included (and assimilated) into larger Serbian or Croatian nation-states, they were in fact taking on a larger European project, remaining faithful both to their own territorial ambitions but also to political incentives from main European centres of power.20 The idea of the Muslim other as reflected in the myth of Kosovo Polje (the field of Kosovo), was particularly important for the Serb nationalist project. In the 1389 battle of Kosovo Polje, Serb Prince Lazar defended the country from the invading Ottoman army, but this battle, which to this day is deeply engraved in the Serb national consciousness, was far from merely a battle of empires. In fact, it was, along with other similar battles of its time, an attempt to stop the spread of Islam in Europe and defend Christianity as the cradle of European spirituality and moral codes. This is why, in Serb nationalist mythology, the defeat in the battle of Kosovo Polje represents not only the ultimate misfortune of the nation, the end of Serb independence, and the fall of the Serb Empire, but also the failure of the Serb Christian gatekeepers to stop the spread of Islam in Europe. In other words, when Serb ethno-nationalists today fantasize about the

 20

Noel Malcolm, Bosnia: A Short History (London: Macmillan, 1994).

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revival of their 14th-century empire, they are not only wishing to reacquire the lost territories of the time, but are also attempting to erase the totality of four hundred years of Ottoman rule, including all its consequences, primarily the spread of Islam in the region, but also the emergence of the population of Slavic Muslims.21 The importance of the myth of Kosovo for the Serb nationalist consciousness and the bloody Balkan wars of 1992-95 is best exemplified in Serbian president Miloševiü’s speech in 1989 in Kosovo, alluding to the new battles to come as a continuation of the ancient battle of Kosovo Polje. The way the battle of Kosovo is told and retold today has little historical validity. The final version, the one most influential for the modern revival of Serb ethno-nationalism, was published by Vuk Karadžiü and depicts a Serb hero knight, Miloš Obiliü, killing Sultan Murat to avenge the death of Prince Lazar. In the myth, the death of Prince Lazar is blamed on treason by a Serb, Vuk Brankoviü, who, according to legend, sold valuable war documents to the Ottomans, thus becoming an eternal symbol of the treacherous nature of Slavic Muslims and their influence on the fall of the Serb Empire. In several versions of this myth, Prince Lazar is depicted as Jesus, Muslims are presented as the evil and doomed alien seed, while Kosovo is the Serb Golgotha, again demonstrating how broader Christian European imagery and racialized political attitudes are used to target local Muslim Slavic populations. In fact, the betrayal of Lazar by Brankoviü is shown in 19th-century paintings of the Last Supper, where Lazar is the kind Christ and Brankoviü the plotting Judas, a motif well-known from much earlier anti-Semitic European art. As the killer of Sultan Murat, Miloš Obiliü becomes a symbol of revenge against Muslims and a national role model for all Serbs, making genocide a holy and desirable act. The cathartic moment in the myth, when Prince Lazar dies, is not only equated with the death of Christ, but also shown as the death of the entire Serb people, who in this moment of ultimate sacrifice become the people of God, or, as Serb nationalist discourse insists, the heavenly people. Seen from a nationalist Serb perspective, the nation cannot become resurrected until all descendants of Lazar’s (Christ) killers are erased from the Serb nation,22 again facilitating that decisive tie between genocide and patriotism so crucial for this case.23 The fact that what was initially antiSemitic European imagery was used as a key resource in 1990s genocidal

 21 Michael Sells, The Bridge Betrayed: Religion and Genocide in Bosnia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996): 31. 22 Ibid., 44. 23 Branimir Anzuloviü, Heavenly Serbia: From Myth to Genocide (New York, US: University Press, 1999): 12.

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propaganda to stereotype and condemn Slavic Muslims shows that, in their genocidal imaginations, Serb nationalists are inscribing themselves into a larger European project of targeting non-Christian minorities, basing their hatred not on their own, personal experiences with their Muslim neighbours, but on general European otherness-related archetypes. An older hatred is projected onto a new enemy. Similarly, in Njegoš’s The Mountain Wreath (1847), a key piece of both Serb nationalism and genocidal propaganda, a vengeful bloodbath of Slavic Muslims is shown as a sacred and glorious act, a blood baptism, after which Serbs go to church to receive communion without previously having to confess, as if the act of genocide itself is purifying and resulting in a state of grace.24 As in the myth of the battle of Kosovo, the Muslims are here exterminated at Christmas, portraying the symbolic resurrection of the Serbian people. In this literary work, we reach the essence of Serb racism. In The Mountain Wreath, Njegoš uses the term Turkifiers, a common term used in the Balkans by Christians to describe Slavic Muslims, but also by Serb military commanders in the 1990s to refer to the process of conversion of local Christian populations to Islam as not Islamisation but Turkification, symbolizing that the person had in fact not only changed religion but race. This type of reasoning very much reflects the initial European Orientalist idea that equates Muslim Bosnia with Turkey. In this way, the Muslims have lost not only their right to the faith of their ancestors, but also to their Slavic roots, the betrayal of which permanently relegates them to the enemy category.25 These ideas are the essence of a racist Balkan movement called Christo-Slavism, which asserts that all Slavs are Christian by nature, so that conversion to a non-Christian religion would thus mean the complete loss of ancestral faith, roots, and ultimately, race. The idea of a primordial connection between Slavs and Christianity is, of course, nonsense, as Slavs themselves were polytheists before they converted to Christianity, but the movement, which has played a significant part not only in the development of the national consciousness of Christian groups in the Western Balkans, but also the self-understanding of Slavic Muslims, reflects a deeper and much older European anxiety related to the contamination by the dark Orient. This image of a group identity, which loses a racial foundation in one group (Slavic), but never becomes adopted in another (Turkish), effectively means a complete deletion of the group’s

 24 25

Petar Petroviü-Njegoš, Gorski Vijenac (Beograd: Beoknjiga, 2003). Ibid.

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identity, a denial of their right to territory26 and, ultimately, as a consequence, necessitates their physical disappearance27 in much the same way as similar identity processes have necessitated disappearance of other non-Christian groups in Europe. The Slavic Muslim thus becomes the ultimate doppelgänger, one of Us but one of Them at the same time, the ultimate symbol of the brotherly betrayal; both Slavic and non-Slavic, both European and non-European, a painful reminder that diversity imposed through conflict is an integrated element of European identity, including its modern racial form.

The Use of Orientalist Stereotypes in the Bosnian War By the end of the 1990s, the Socialist Yugoslavia, a country that housed, in peaceful co-existence, Slavic Muslims and their Christian neighbours under the slogan of brotherhood and unity, was falling apart. The global demise of communism and the victory of American neoliberalism necessitated an ending of progressive socialist regimes like the Yugoslavian, creating an economic crisis of vast proportions and while political and economic reasons for the split are important to explore, we will here focus on the re-emergence of European Orientalist stereotypes in the region, which provided an ideological fundament for the mass murder that followed. Indeed, the idea that Bosnia could be ruled by Slavic Muslims, as the majority group, evoked in the minds of Serb nationalists the return of the Turks. In his travels across the Serb-dominated territories, Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadžiü would sit with his soldiers, drinking local alcohol and singing: “Serb brothers, wherever you are, with the help from God, for the cross and the Christian faith, and our royal fatherland, I invite you to go fight at the battle of Kosovo.”28 Bosnian Serb commander and war criminal Ratko Mladiü also used ancient symbolism to raise the morale of his troops. Before going to battle, he would evoke the images of the first Serb uprising (1804) and the subsequent rebellion against the Ottoman military leaders Janissaries.29 However, the modern stereotypes also included an elaborate use of science to justify the murders and fix Muslims in the role of Oriental outsiders in Europe. In one of numerous scientific racist justifications for

 26

Ibid., 17. Michael Sells, The Bridge Betrayed, 355. 28 Branimir Anzuloviü, Heavenly Serbia: From Myth to Genocide, 109. 29 Sells, The Bridge Betrayed, 50. 27

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cleansing of Muslims in the Bosnian genocide, Biljana Plavšiü, a Bosnian Serb professor of biology, states: “The truth is that Muslims are in fact turkified Serbs, but they are genetically deformed material. Now, with every generation, this deformity increases in concentration and becomes worse, thereby determining their thinking and behaviour, typical only for them and rooted deeply in their genes.”30 Here, the religious Islamic component is constructed as a blood contaminant, a fixed and unchangeable feature that requires extermination. On another occasion, in 1994, Plavšiü stated that she and other Serbian nationalists were unable to negotiate with the Bosnian Muslims due to genetics, a theory popular among Serb intellectuals of the time. She pointed out that the deformed Muslim genes became aggressive over time and were attempting to invade the healthy ethnic tissue (Serbs), much like cancer, giving scientific justification to the theory that the downfall of the Serb nation would be caused by inter-breeding with Muslims, a theory painstakingly echoing Nazi scientific racism. Dragoš Kalajiü, Serbian painter and essayist, took this idea even further, claiming that this inferior gene was passed on by the Ottomans, but that it in fact stemmed from African Arabs, in an attempt to place the fair- skinned Slavic Muslims into the category of dark otherness, as it is constructed in the wider colonial European imagination.31 Indeed, even though Serb history was never marked by a personal mass encounter with Arabs, the imagery demonstrates the desire of Serb nationalists to be included in European colonialist history, which is justified in the attempt to become symbolically accepted in the main circles of power by emphasizing the values of Christendom and rejecting those of Islam. There are numerous other stereotypes used in the Bosnian war and as pro-genocide propaganda that demonstrate how deeply ingrained European prejudices, typically used to target Jews, have been adapted by the nationalist consciousness of Eastern Europe in order to target its own Muslims. Ironically, the personal experiences of Christian Slavs in relation to their Muslim neighbours, in a history marked very much by tolerance and coexistence, are completely overlooked in favour of an obvious participation in what is seen as dominant European ideology. Traditionally, the main stereotype used for Jews and Slavic Muslims alike in European history is greed. In the case of Slavic Muslims, the Ottoman Empire created this group out of the local, Christian population, through voluntary or forced conversion, often giving its members

 30

Omer Bartov and Phyllis Mack, eds. In God’s Name: Genocide and Religion in the Twentieth Century (Oxford and New York: Berghahn Books, 2001): 189. 31 Ibid.

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important positions and lands that Christian serfs would work on. Of course, most Muslims were not, in fact, aristocrats, but peasants, but the overwhelming European anti-Semitism greatly affected how other nonChristian groups were viewed in general, and so the greed stereotypes became dominant in the case of Slavic Muslims as well. In fact, according to Serb and Croat mythology in the Balkans, Slavic Muslims betrayed their Christian faith for money, making them traitors and cowards. On the other hand, Muslims, contrary to European Jews, were once in fact a part of us but chose to exclude themselves in pursuit of Oriental gold. A traditional Serb saying about Slavic Muslims asserts: “They sold their faith for dinner,”32 insisting on the banality of reasons for the betrayal of the Christo-Slavic race.33 Furthermore, the fact that the Slavic Muslims in all things appear like Us, but are not Us, makes them invisible and impossible to recognize, their Oriental heritage becoming even more a matter of fantasy and exaggeration. This becomes the reason for the second key stereotypical image related to Slavic Muslims: the intruder as a cuckoo, who plants his seeds in our nest without our awareness. Problematically, as much as Slavic Muslims in Bosnia, particularly during the era of Socialist Yugoslavia, insisted on proving their Europeanness, giving their children ethnically neutral or Christian-Slavic names in order to avoid stigma, their invisibility made them even more of a threat in the eyes of nationalists.34 The idea of sexual infiltration correlates with general European fears of being bred out by the non-Christian other, evident also in Nazi literature of the 30’s and 40’s, which uses similar symbolism. Not only were the Muslims in Socialist Yugoslavia regarded as breeding machines, taking the necessary resources away from the Serbs, but ironically, their modern invisibility was also a direct result of Yugoslavia’s project of reEuropeanizing Slavic Muslims, obvious particularly with the niqab ban imposed immediately following World War II. During the last Balkan wars, the idea that Muslims were only pretending to be secular citizens, while in fact they were plotting, in the privacy of their homes, to breed the Serb race out by creating harems in which Serb women would be continuously raped, was commonly disseminated in the nationalist media, and reflects similar European fantasies from the early 20th century. A

 32

Sells, The Bridge Betrayed, 45. Balorda, Surviving Genocide: An Analysis of Post-War Ethnic Identities of Bosnian Muslims, 120. 34 Tone Bringa, Kako biti Musliman na bosanski nacin (London: Princeton University Press, 1995). 33

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significant body of feminist literature3536 makes the connection between imperialism and patriarchy, particularly in relation to the need to use feminine bodies in order to assert male power. The slogans used by Croatian military propaganda maintained that a rape of a Croat woman was similar to the rape of Croatia, re-establishing that traditional, yet sinister link between the territory of the nation state and a body of a woman which the nation state is practically being built or destroyed upon, but the imagined Oriental quality of the Islamic femininities necessitated rape also through the need to undress/unveil the hidden sexuality of the exotic other, typical also for current European perceptions of Islam and operationalised in the debates on the burqa ban. The mass rapes of Muslim women in the Bosnian war, which were a result of a military strategy to breed out the Orient focused on impregnating the woman trough contaminating her body with Christian seed, thereby annihilating her ability to carry out the reproductive role within her group37. The images of the ongoing battle between civilised Christian Europeanness and the attacking wild, alien Islam, along with the images of Serbs as crusader knights, were often used in Serb and Croat nationalist texts and other kinds of propaganda.38 In a famous 1990s speech, Croatian president Tuÿman echoed the words of earlier Croatian politicians from the time of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia when he spoke of the contamination of Europe by the Orient, and stated that Croatia would accept the task of Europeanizing Bosnian Muslims.39 This stereotype, based on the idea that all members of non-Christian religions are alien to Europe, has in modern times taken on another dimension. Famous Serb writer Miodrag Paviü, for example, spoke of Slavic Muslims as defenders of militant Jihadist Islam. In a 1990 speech in the US, on Capitol Hill, Serb ideologist Dobrica ûosiü manipulated modern fears of aggressive Islam when he maintained that: In the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina, ethnic and political subdual of Serbs and Croats by Muslims, who are increasingly under the influence of a militant Arabic Islam, has caused a depression, a feeling of inequality and migrations of Christians, mostly Orthodox Serbs, towards whom a part

 35

Angela Davis, Women, Race and Class (New York: Vintage Books, 1983). Dian Million, Therapeutic Nations: Healing in an Age of Indigenous Human Rights (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2013)

36

37

Alexandra Stiglmayer, Mass Rape: The War Against Women in BosniaHerzegovina (University of Nebraska Press, 1994) 38 Said, Orientalism. 39 Sells, The Bridge Betrayed, 95.

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Chapter Ten of the Muslim population is traditionally antagonistic. We cannot fail to notice the aggressiveness of Islam, in the past decades on the Yugoslav territories, particularly in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo and Serb Sandžak. This cunning and meticulously organized aggressive Islamisation causes inter-religious tensions and conflicts in ethnically mixed regions and results in the suppression of Christian culture in this part of Europe.40

Similarly, Arkan, the notorious Serb paramilitary commander, publicly stated: “Muslims can look for a state somewhere else, if Iraq or Iran give them a piece of their territory so they can execute Jihad there if they want. They have nothing to look for in Europe.”41 The notion of Jihad here also demonstrates the evolution of Orientalist stereotypes from colonial times to the relevant forms of othering in the age of terrorism, the postcolonial nature of which should by no means be underestimated. Finally, the images of Muslims as killers of Christ, a typical European stereotype apparently used to categorize all significant non-Christian groups in Europe, is all-powerful in Serb nationalist literature and media. Such key literary works as The Mountain Wreath and various depictions of the battle of Kosovo, along with different Church texts, all use the image of Muslims as the seed of Satan. Miodrag Popoviü explains that the process of demonization of the Turks as a mythical enemy existed in Church texts long before it was ever used in folk poetry. In the church tradition, the image of the Sultan Murat as mythical evil and a comparison of the enemy with mythical fire snakes, children of the beast or dragon, or children of Satan, were very popular.42 The church has, in this context, served as a disseminator of ancient superstitions, and is responsible for their survival in modern times. Modernity, we conclude, is thus more a product of the early European identity formation processes, related to the values and political goals of Christendom, conquest, colonisation, and slavery, than it is about progress, civilisation or even novelty. If European modernity is marked by its path towards progress in terms of the developments in science and technology, its ideologies certainly predate it and are darker and more sinister in character.

 40

Balorda, Surviving Genocide: An Analysis of Post-War Ethnic Identities of Bosnian Muslims, 126. 41 Jasna Balorda, Preživjeti genocid: Analiza postratnih etniþkih identiteta Bošnjaka (Sarajevo: Mauna-Fe, 2009): 117. 42 Branimir Anzuloviü, Heavenly Serbia, 59.

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Conclusion As we have seen, the history of European Islamophobia is of crucial importance not only in relation to the social construction of European identities, but also because of its central place in the European modernity project, which is based on the relationship between Christianity and its enemies, with the aim to realize political aspirations of colonial Europe. The significance of Islamic otherness is particularly seen in the final racialization of the Islamic subject, which becomes identified with dark skin, and is transported into the colonies where it serves as a justification for mistreatment of colonial subjects. The European projections of Islamic otherness are thus crucial for the development of national projects in the Balkans, where Slavic Muslims are seen as traitors of Christianity, killers of Christ, and polluted by the dark Ottoman gene that turns white Slavic Muslims, symbolically, into European blacks – a de facto white man’s burden, demonstrating the importance of colonialism in the formation of modern European identities. Indeed, the historical relationship between Islam and Christianity is reflected in the treatment of Bosnian Muslims in the local context, as Christianity serves as the basis for the racial and cultural hegemony of the West. As a result of the dominant European discourse directed from the main centres of power, the ethnic groups living with Slavic Muslims abandon their own experiences in order to participate in larger European racist propaganda projects, thereby proving their loyalties and renouncing their own participation in the dialogue and coexistence with the Islamic other. Indeed, the invasion of the Christian Balkans by the Ottoman Empire and the emergence of Slavic Muslims across the region have, within the hegemonic discourse of the 19th century, become a crucial element in the formation of Serb national consciousness. Serb nationalism identifies itself with the idea of Christian gatekeeper knights whose task is still to defend Europe from invading infidels, even though this imagery was not dominant in pre-modern Serb mythology, which in fact operated with more complex understandings of Islam. In fact, the age of the nation-state and the ascension of post-Ottoman states onto the stage of European modernity has resulted in a discourse that is increasingly hateful and discriminating, even genocidal. Slavic nationalists thus reiterate their loyalty to Europe and its hegemonic politics by emphasizing the idea of Slavic Muslims as Turkifiers who have, by converting to the religion of the non-Christian invaders, effectively become included in a dark and foreign, Oriental race, turning them into permanent outsiders in Europe, a

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foreign body that needs to be expelled in order to restore European homogeneity. The Bosnian genocide should thus, inevitably, be seen as a continuation of these Orientalist European stereotypes, which portray Slavic Muslims as the ultimate traitors of their Slavic Christian faith due to their inability to fit into the cuius regio eius religio model, condemning them to certain death. The ethnic cleansing of the 1990s is therefore not only a result of a lasting European unwillingness to accept and integrate Islam into its self-identity, but also a direct continuation of earlier, but similar, attempts to cleanse and re-Christianise Serbia, Montenegro, Bulgaria, Greece, Spain and others, reasserting the power and the hegemonic rule of white Christianity and facilitating it further through production of racist knowledge. European modernity can be said to have emerged through defining itself in opposition to its Islamic otherness, which it has been unable to incorporate into its self-understanding, thereby casting complexity and diversity aside and emphasizing the importance of Christianity and the rule of the Church for its self-determination. The very idea of modernity is in Europe used in order to symbolically oppress those who are excluded from it and label them as non-civilized and barbaric. The expulsion of European Muslim others in relation to politics (cuius region eius religio), laws (burqa bans) and symbolism (denial of Islamic modernity) all set the stage for genocide, which is not directly committed by the main European centres of power, but is certainly conceptualized there. The foundation for this genocide is, indeed, at the very heart of European modernity.

Bibliography Anzuloviü, Branimir. Heavenly Serbia: From Myth to Genocide. New York: New York University Press, 1999. Balorda, Jasna. Preživjeti genocid: Analiza postratnih etniþkih identiteta Bošnjaka. Sarajevo: Mauna-Fe, 2009. Bartov, Omer, and Phyllis Mack, eds. In God’s Name: Genocide and Religion in the Twentieth Century. Oxford and New York: Berghahn Books, 2001. Bravo, Lopez Fernando. “Towards a Definition of Islamophobia: Approximations of the Early Twentieth Century.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 34, no. 4 (2011): 556-73. Bringa, Tone. Biti Musliman na bosanski nacin. London: Princeton University Press, 1995.

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Carter, J. Kameron. Race: A Theological Account. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. Centar za Istraživanje i Dokumentaciju. Srbi o Srbima, Jesmo li þudovišta. Sarajevo: Bake-Line, 2001. Davis, Angela. Women, Race and Class. New York: Vintage Books, 1983. Garnett, Lucy Mary Jane. The Turkish People, Their Social Life, Religious Beliefs and Institutions, and Domestic Life. London: Methuen & Co, 1909. Hall, Stuart. Representation and Signifying Practices. London: Sage Publications, 1997. Holbach, Maude M. Bosnia and Herzegovina: Some Wayside Wanderings. London: John Lane, 1910. Imamoviü, Mustafa. Historija Bošnjaka. Sarajevo: Bošnjaþka zajednica kulture Preporod, 2006. Jahoda, Gustav. Images of Savages: Roots of Modern Prejudice in Western Culture. London: Routledge, 1998. Judah, Tim. The Serbs: History, Myth and the Destruction of Yugoslavia. New Heaven and London: Yale University Press, 1997. Klaiü Nada. Srednjovijekovna Bosna – Politiþki polozaj bosanskih vladara do Tvrtkove krunidbe (1377g.). Zagreb: Eminex, 1994. Kumar, Deepa. Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire. Chicago and London: Haymarket Books, 2012. Law, Ian. Racism and Ethnicity: Global Debates, Dilemmas, Directions. London: Pearson Education, 2010. Malcolm, Noel. Bosnia: A Short History. London: Macmillan, 1994. Mamdani, Mahmood. Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1996. Mann, Michael. The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Million, Dian. Therapeutic Nations: Healing in an Age of Indigenous Human Rights. Tucson: University of Arisona Press, 2013 O'Callaghan, Joseph F. Reconquest and Crusade in Medieval Spain. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003. Petroviü-Njegoš, Petar. Gorski Vijenac. Beograd: Beoknjiga, 2003. Promitzer, Christian, Sevasti Trubeta, and Marius Turda, eds. Health, Hygiene and Eugenics in South-Eastern Europe to 1945. Budapest and New York: CEU Press, 2010. Rana, Junaid. “The Story of Islamophobia.” Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society 9, no. 2 (2007): 148-62.

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Said, Edward. Orientalism. London: Penguin Books, 1985. Sells, Michael. The Bridge betrayed: Religion and Genocide in Bosnia. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. Spencer, Edmund. Travels in European Turkey, in 1850; Through Bosnia, Servia, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Thrace, Albania, and Epirus; With a Visit to Greece and the Ionian Isle. London: Colburn, 1851. Stiglmayer, Alexandra. Mass Rape: The War Against Women in BosniaHerzegovina. University of Nebraska Press, 1994.

CHAPTER ELEVEN ALTERNATIVE SPACES OF YOUNG MUSLIM LEADERS: EXPERIMENTING WITH LAÏCITÉ WITHIN THE FRENCH MOSQUE AYùE ÖZCAN

Introduction Mosque leaders play an important role in transforming the mosque site, its young congregants, and eventually the surrounding society. This chapter will investigate the ways in which young 1 leaders imagine the mosque space in relation to French secularism and republican values. Studies of Islam in France have largely focused on the issues of headscarves and terrorism, reinforcing the rigid model of French secularism as an oppressive force against Muslims, and perpetuating the claim of religious revivalism with a vengeance.2 In these studies, the headscarf is depicted as a Muslim practice of revolt against the state discourse of laïcité, and

 1

In view of my informants’ self-interrogations, youth in this study is not treated merely as a cohort based on age, nor even as a cohesive group, but as a social construct based on willingness to receive new information and process it within multiple social, cultural, and political discourses using an innovative approach. Hence, these leaders are not necessarily young in age, but have a youthful-minded character. For more on youth as a social construct, see Jane Pilcher, Women of Their Time: Generation, Gender Issues and Feminism (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate Publishing, 1998). 2 Gilles Kepel, Allah in the West: Islamic Movements in America and Europe, (Stanford: Stanford University Press: 1997); Susan J. Terrio, Judging Mohammad: Juvenile Delinquency, Immigration and Exclusion at the Paris Palace of Justice, (Stanford: Stanford University Press: 2009); Christian Joppke, Veil: Mirror of Identity, (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press: 2009).

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Islamic terrorism is thought to have emerged as a violent response to discrimination from the state and mainstream society. Only a few of those studies have taken a new approach to understanding the Muslim perceptions of how Islam and secularism negotiate, still mainly focusing on headscarf practices. While all of these studies are expressive in understanding the distinctiveness of French secularism, we need further research covering a wide range of organizational Muslim practices in particular places to understand how Muslim groups reconceptualize this long-standing tradition, and struggle to be included within the French model by reconfiguring it and practicing a religion-inclusive and secularfriendly model in their everyday lives. This is a new approach that I suggest based on my observations, including the oral and written accounts of my research subjects. Understanding young French Muslim leaders in the mosque is vital for several reasons. First, they influence Muslim youth in their understanding and practicing of Islam vis-à-vis the secular demands of the French state and society. Their approach is based on introducing a secular-friendly Islam to their communities. Accordingly, they inform young congregants on how to balance modern secularism with being a Muslim, starting within the mosque, and then continuing this process in their public lives. Second, while negotiating religion and secularism, Muslim leaders transform the meaning of the secular both as an epistemological category and a sociopolitical concept. While secularism 3 as a modern liberal concept is a contested term, it is usually used to signify a worldview that celebrates scientific advancement, placing itself distant to religion.4 And yet, it is not necessarily the antithesis of religion. Some scholars, such as Charles Taylor, argue that faith cannot be divorced from one’s life, even in the contemporary Western world. 5 However, secularism in France is a product of the republican mindset, which is against all types of authority, including the monarchy (dating back to the French Revolution) and, more recently, religion. This mindset defended the state 6 against church authority at the beginning of the twentieth century, so secularism has taken

 3

In this article, I investigate the understandings of secularity in a Western context. It has different perceptions and practical outcomes in non-Western contexts. 4 Ernest Gellner, “Marxism and Islam: Failure and Success,” in Power-Sharing Islam?, ed. Azzam Tamimi, (London: Liberty for Muslim World Publications, 1993), 36. 5 Charles Taylor, A Secular Age, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press: 2007). 6 For the purposes of this study, I view the state as a black box without describing the inner workings of its different domains such as ministries.

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up a different meaning in France since then. As a result, French secularism, or laïcité, refers to science, progress, reason, and state neutrality with regard to religion.7 It excludes everything that relates to religion, as well as all other particularities, from public life. Hence, France has developed a particular secular form of governance known as laïcité, which takes a blind approach to religious, cultural, and ethnic differences, while embracing everyone as being French in the public space.8 In this respect, although the accommodation of religious diversity in a secular nation-state has been one of the most surprising and challenging issues in contemporary Europe, it has taken a distinctly visible form in France, where a top-down politics of inclusive nationalism is officially exercised. Eventually, Islam suffered the most from this philosophy due to its public visibility and its problematic relationship with Christian Europe throughout history. In this context, young Muslim leaders suggesting a diversity-based laïcité model to France reconceptualize the long-standing tradition of French secularism. In result, they take religion out of its private cluster, hidden from and invisible to the public eye and life, and make it an integral part of a religion-inclusive and secular-friendly society. Third, by using the republican discourse of serving the public as responsible individuals, they empower Muslim youth, especially those in the banlieues,9 who experience socioeconomic limitations at a high level, to take leadership and encourage them to act on their religious, cultural, and national values as responsible citizens. This balancing mechanism is particularly influential in imagining Muslim youth as leaders of their society with open minds, and the mosque as a school in which leadership is taught and applied to train Muslims who are loyal to their country, religion, and community at the local, national, and global levels. In this respect, youth leadership in the mosque plays a vital role in the lives of young Muslims who are trained by the leaders, and in French social life at large. The starting point is reclaiming the mosque from excessively conservative leaders who have been using the mosque solely for religious purposes. Therefore, mosque leaders stand out from all young leaders because not only do they fulfill the aforementioned functions, but they also

 7

Riva Kastoryano, Negotiating Identities: States and Immigrants in France and Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 47. 8 Joppke, Veil: Mirror of Identity. 9 Banlieue is the French term for a suburb of a large city. Since the 1970s, the term has been increasingly used to describe low-income housing projects (HLMs) for immigrant workers and French of foreign descent who live in the suburbs.

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make the mosque a reference site to achieve those missions for their agenda. Furthermore, they address their young followers and the larger community through the mosque space, which they eventually transform into a laïcité-informed religious platform. The mosque as a new space in which religion and laïcité meet is configured and applied primarily by young mosque leaders. In this chapter, I connect the aforementioned aspirations within the spectrum of religion and laïcité concepts, and investigate the changing interplay of private and public spaces and republican principles from an authority/autonomy perspective, along with their implications within the context of French secularism.

How Does Religion Meet Laïcité in the Mosque Space? Young Muslim leaders promote the transformation of the mosque as a dynamic space of living that includes both religious and secular aspects of life, which are complementary. This process can only be grasped through a thorough analysis of how such leaders perceive secularism and religion, and how they function and influence youth as a whole. This analysis is vital due to the growing presence of young leaders in the mosque, and influence on Muslim youth and the larger French society as they suggest a different model, which will be explained in this section at length. My major point is that, when the divine and worldly matters are reconciled in a productive way, a revised version of French laïcité and the classic version of republicanism become political tools to help this process take place effectively in a de facto multicultural society.

Rethinking the Secular-Religious Divide Young leaders have gained power in recent years in their attempt to transform the mosque space into a site where religious diversity and laïcité meet. This agenda is based on several philosophical directives that essentially challenge the treatment of secularism and religion as mutually exclusive domains of life. By incorporating Islamic values into modern secularism, they struggle to make peace between these two “opposing” concepts. This is an endeavor that rests on modifying the political norms of the monolithic universality of modern secularism imposed by the state and the commonsense ideals of the French public. This is, however, not an acknowledgment of a Western secularism imposed on non-Western societies. It is, rather, an attempt to establish the grounds to lead a meaningful life in a non-Muslim secular country. This attempt is in fact

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relevant to daily life, as secularism is already ingrained in Islam in the sense that people function in some common structures that organize our lives, such as education, construction, or transportation. The intention of the mosque leaders is to find a way to make these worldly affairs coexist with Islamic values without violating their religious essence. Hence, secularism is not necessarily seen as a conceptual property of the West; it is more of an ongoing project that is subject to constant change to address the conditions of various societies differently in each context. It might not even be applicable in certain societies, yet minority Muslim populations have constantly been in a philosophical and practical dialogue with secularism in Western societies. As Wael B. Hallaq rightfully argued in The Impossible State, the modern state is a bad fit for Muslims mainly because of the different philosophies behind modes of governance in the Islamic tradition and the history of the European modern nation-state. 10 Where the former is organized around a God-centered cosmos, the latter is based on a universality dictated by the state, which promotes a secular model in public life that pushes religion to the private and invisible corners of society with no influence on politics, economics, social norms, or other common domains of life. This secular neutrality is a precondition of the modern nation-state, and it is only possible for Muslims to gain representation equal to that of other citizens on the condition that they leave behind their particularities and internalize the universality of statesanctioned policies. Rejecting this biased neutrality of the secular, Talal Asad claims that secularism as a pattern of political rule represents neither political nor legal neutrality because of the false assumption that the secular is an epistemology that is neutral to all communities regardless of their religion or lack thereof.11 In this sense, secularism that is based on the secular is an exclusive political system that prioritizes a certain value system over another. Asad argues that secularism is not a religious concept, as it excludes all religions, and particularly Islam because of its greater public visibility and need for public recognition such as wearing a headscarf. In this respect, Asad maintains that although European secularism does not denote a religious system, it is far from being neutral; rather, it is based on the European Enlightenment, which makes a universal definition of religion that relies on a distinctively Christian

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Wael B. Hallaq, The Impossible State: Islam, Politics, and Modernity's Moral Predicament (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013). 11 Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003). In this article, I use the term “secularism” both in the political and social senses.

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and/or Judaic epistemology and ontology.12 This is why liberal secularism is more resistant to accommodating Islam than any other major religion. James K. A. Smith, in his criticism of Asad’s argument, suggests that the liberal secular myth is essentially religious, although it might not be overtly Christian.13 By the same token, Charles Taylor asserts that faith is embedded in the secular mind of the modern-age person. Whether religious or not, whether Christian-based or not, the liberal myth does not have room for Muslim cosmologies.14 In this context, young mosque leaders are in search of a model that shatters these epistemological and political concepts by suggesting a religion-friendly secularism that does not counter religious values, but instead incorporates them into its essence and allows them to contribute to society on all levels. This could pave the way for a state that promotes diversity and cultural richness. I argue that this would be a paradigm shift that changes the meaning of secular from a strictly no-religion or no-Islam zone to a religion-friendly sphere that welcomes all religious or nonreligious groups. This way, the French state could keep its promise of exercising laïcité properly by protecting its citizens from all kinds of pressure, and being a guarantor of individuals to practice their religions freely by keeping equal distance from all religious and non-religious groups. To meet this purpose, Riva Kastoryano proposes “institutional assimilation,” which rests on including Islam in the institutional framework of the state as a proper path to integration in, de facto, multicultural countries, especially in countries applying rigorous secularism such as France. 15 She holds that institutional assimilation consists of a reconceptualization of secularism from neutrality, the strict division of public and private, 16 and sameness, to a moderate and evolutionary secularism by incorporating respect for difference through

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Mayanthi L. Fernando, The Republic Unsettled: Muslim French and the Contradictions of Secularism (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2014), 132. 13 James K. A. Smith, “Secularity, Religion, and the Politics of Ambiguity,” Journal of Cultural and Religious Theory 6, no. 3 (2003). 14 Taylor, A Secular Age. 15 Riva Kastoryano, Negotiating Identities: States and Immigrants in France and Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 173. 16 Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger with Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991).

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institutional adjustments. 17 In this section, I reverse this model and contend that young Muslim leaders are beginning to introduce a new form of religion-friendly secularism in France by first integrating secular matters into their religious space. In other words, the starting point is a secular-friendly religiosity that emerges within the mosque.

Secular-Friendly Religiosity In order to bring about long-lasting change in French politics and society, with its established republican tradition in theory, Muslim leaders start with themselves and incorporate the principles of laïcité into their religious institutions by giving those principles a religious touch. In this reverse model of institutional assimilation, secularism is integrated into religiosity. Leaders do so by challenging both the dominance of traditional ways of organizing the mosque as a strictly religious space and the inapplicable separation of private and public domains in French secularism.18 The main principle is to blend religion and secularism, and contextualize the private and public qualities of a given space, rather than perceive them as fixed categories as theorized within French laïcité more than in any other secular model. According to this model, secular and religious are not treated as mutually exclusive epistemologies, but are seen as complementary units of life. By doing so, the mosque becomes a site of real life activities rather than remaining merely a unit of worship. Islamic values are connected to secular components of life, and the philosophical values, which are often discarded in favor of ritualistic practices, are taken to the foreground to maintain Muslim integrity and stay connected to the French life. For example, academic education, which is considered to be within the secular educational framework, is treated as an integral part of Islam and integrated into mosque programs. If the modern educational system provides students with better education than other models, then its methods should be taken up, harmonized with Islamic philosophies of

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Tariq Modood and Riva Kastoryano, “Secularism and the accommodation of Muslims in Europe,” in Multiculturalism, Muslims and Citizenship: A European Approach, ed. Tariq Modood, Anna Triandafyllidou, and Ricard Zapata Barrero (London: Routledge, 2006), 173-74. 18 Seyla Benhabib, “Models of Public Space: Hannah Arendt, the Liberal Tradition, and Jürgen Habermas,” in Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Craig Calhoun (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1992); David Harvey, “Social Justice, Postmodernism, and the City,” in Readings in Urban Theory, ed. Susan Fainstein and Scott Campbell (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1996).

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progress, and presented to youth as two value systems that are interdependent and intertwined – not contrasting at all. In a nutshell, modern scholarly education enters the private space of the mosque. This is achieved by ascribing a religious value to academic education. Another challenge taken up by the young leaders is designing the mosque space as a gender-inclusive environment outside of prayer times. Despite opposition from some congregants with conservative views that are cultural rather than religious, they work in gender-mixed groups to help young members understand the value of sharing and complementing each other as men and women. Introspectively, this helps them distinguish culture and religion, and make the mosque a lived space that is relevant to their lives. From a social perspective, they follow the principle of gender equality from an Islamic standpoint, for example, by respecting religiously-dictated physical distance between men and women, displaying this French Muslim image to the public, and making themselves part of the society as active citizens. In this process, each seemingly secular aspect of life is given a religious character as long as it serves a progressive and humanistic purpose. Hence, this process changes how religion is interpreted and imagined in one’s life.

Dr. Bachir: “Respect the Law…. Adhere to the Major Principles of Islam” Dr. Bachir is a medical doctor in his early forties, who also serves as the head of the cultural center of the Al-Hidaya Mosque located in a Paris suburb. He is considered a charismatic and a highly respected leader of his community. Dr. Bachir appreciates a moderate blending of French values with Islamic ones. When I asked him to talk about how he viewed the differences between life in Algeria and France, he told me about his personal experience as a student and a family member in a religious and non-religious setting: In the Muslim culture, we look after our kids until they finish their studies. The Qur’an promotes familial ties and solidarity. Taking care of parents and children is a religious obligation. Even after childhood, it is recommended that the family take the responsibility for supporting young members until they get a job and a place to stay. I came here as a medical student, and had to work until I graduated because my family stayed back in Algeria. That was a lot of work. But I did it, like all other students in France. It was tough, but I learned a lot. However, these days, even in Algeria, family ties are not as strong as before. Human relations are more personal, like in France. We need to fix this by incorporating family and

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community ties into our daily lives. The mosque helps us reinforce social cohesion between families, communities, and generations within the Islamic principles.

When I asked him to tell me more about what he appreciated in France most, he went on to describe them in Western terms:19 One has to respect the attributes of Western civilization, such as respect for others, law, neighbor relations, work ethics, punctuality, shopping style, well-ordered life patterns, etc. The Western world is more advanced in social administration, election regimes, technology, and science. In Islam, politics, economics, and social life are all intertwined. But this is not valid in non-Muslim countries, especially in France. Even in difficult situations, French Muslims are obliged to respect the law if they do not want to be isolated from the society, and they should certainly adhere to the major principles of Islam while doing this.

Dr. Bachir appreciates secular virtues within a religious framework. He does not shy away from valuing Western modes of living that offer an advanced way of organizing life, while criticizing Muslims and holding them partly responsible for their isolation. He mentions the importance of mingling with French society based on these Western values and on principles of Islam, and his training of youth is based on this mindset. The secular and the religious come closer and become complementary across different domains such as family ties and technology, as Dr. Bachir discusses. He recognizes the public/private divide in France without blindly submitting to it. He often refers to the necessity of complying with Islamic principles in the sense that families should play a more important role in our daily lives, and that we need to be less individualistic by appreciating our communal affiliations. Dr. Bachir’s statement is a clear indication of a negotiation of the public/private aspects in many components of life in order to function efficiently in a non-Muslim society.

Religion-Friendly Secularism As they incorporate laïcité into a religious space, Muslim leaders attempt to make religion an integral part of French society through the mosque. In

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Although grouping countries under one overarching category is problematic in terms of discarding the inner differences within the major category, this umbrella categorization includes countries with similar modern secular traditions to those of France.

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other words, they move on to the next step by suggesting a religionfriendly laïcité to a rigid application of French political and societal norms. Mosque leaders motivate their young followers to focus on virtues that are common in all religions and celebrated as universal. According to Nikola Tietze, young Muslims achieve this by presenting religion in a form that is acceptable in France.20 He argues that religious identifications are culturalized in order to enter the public sphere without risking exclusion. This method of integrating Islam into a safer cultural model is intended to safeguard religious assertion in the context of French laïcité, which does not recognize the public visibility of cultural distinctions such as religion and race, as they are believed to threaten the republican unity that relies on the common good of French society. He discusses hip-hop as an example of an expression of Islamicity in the disguise of a suburban culture. In line with this argument, he also holds that young Muslims generally restrict direct public expression of their religiosity to mosques. As I draw my arguments on this culturalizing strategy of religion, I extend it to a “secularizing” strategy of religion using commonsense cultural norms. I argue that mosques are sites in which religious identities are not only declared directly, but are also blended with other forms of expressions such as social, cultural, and political statements and activities that reflect the secular principles of France, in order to enter and change the public sphere to be more religiously inclusive. Letting young women congregants wear their headscarves and even jilbabs21 during a community event organized by the Al-Hidaya Mosque is an application of this model. In these events, young members collect food from volunteer stores and distribute it to people in financial need in the neighborhood. Every month they visit major chain stores, spend the entire day introducing themselves to random customers, and ask them to make food donations. They set up a stand with pictures from their previous activities and empty boxes to be filled with donated food. These events are particularly important because they put Muslim youth in direct contact with local society under commonly-shared values, using the mosque affiliation as a point of contact.

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Nikola Tietze, “Religiosity among Young Male Muslims in France and German Public Spheres,” in Islam in Public: Turkey, Iran and Europe, ed. Nilufer Gole and Ludwig Ammann (Istanbul: Istanbul Bilgi University Press, 2006). 21 A jilbab is an Islamic loose-fitting garment for women, covering the entire body except for the hands and face. It is worn in some Muslim countries as a traditional religious outfit.

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During one of these events at a major local grocery store, I witnessed unfriendly reactions from some customers as one of the organizers approached them in her jilbab to tell them about their event and ask for donations to feed the poor. When I asked her how she felt about receiving such treatment from people just because she was wearing a jilbab, she declared her willingness to keep her jilbab on as she interacted with the customers: I know the challenges of wearing a jilbab while talking to non-Muslim French customers. I also know that this is a laic country. I am well aware of that. But this is also a chance; a chance to show them that I am wearing a jilbab, but I am here for a good cause, and I am not a threat. I just want them to understand this, and to not associate my jilbab or Muslim identity with something negative. They first view me as a threat or a misfit in society, but as we continue to talk and communicate our intentions, they begin to appreciate this community work intended to help poor people. This interaction actually breaks the prejudice against practicing Muslims.

This can be read as a declaration of young Muslims’ desire to normalize Islam as a social value in public discourse and to introduce it as an organic part of France that functions, like all other segments of the nation, for the common good of the society. There is not a denial of laïcité, but rather an inclusion of religion into it through commonalities rather than provocatively-declared differences. Most leaders I spoke with told me that they choose to be visible not for the sake of declaring a religiously challenging physical visibility, but for building mutual trust and gaining respect by “culturalizing” religious principles under common values of charity and outreach, which are celebrated as secular human virtues and culturally acclaimed in France. My respondents told me that they perceived these values as part of a religious duty and a social obligation to the French nation, and that a French Muslim could achieve a sense of building his religion and nation simultaneously, and be a valued member of his/her society while maintaining this perception. During our interviews, Amor, a twenty-sevenyear-old Algerian immigrant leader in Al-Ihsan Mosque, located in the suburbs of Paris, told me many times that it is a communal responsibility to act on these principles, and to introduce Islam to non-Muslims as the religion of a great civilization through Islamic art and science, rather than orientalizing cultural symbols or religious clichés such as eating

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couscous22 or not eating pork. Amor advised a group of young men in the mosque, “Why Muslims don’t eat pork has nothing to do with Islam. That’s where your job starts.” He then went on to explain that they could only properly present Islam in France by studying, finishing their academic education, and introducing Islam as an advanced culture to French society, because education is an essential part of Islam that is often neglected among Muslims.

The Meeting of Authority and Autonomy in a Republican Mosque French secularism originates from a republican tradition. This section will provide an analysis of how this tradition has been reframed by Muslims. Here I problematize an interesting aspect of the French republican practices of the state. To achieve the common public good principle of a republican nation, which basically entails the preservation of social norms, beliefs, and values as the glue that holds the society together,23 some major French philosophers of the 18th and 19th centuries highlighted a balance mechanism within the republican tradition. This mechanism rests on the interconnectedness between authority (discipline) and autonomy (selfmastery). In this equilibrium, it is equally essential to follow the commongood objective by accepting state authority and to act as a free individual without being pressured by an external force. In her discussion of the contradictory practices of the French republic, Mayanthi L. Fernando argues for the necessity of this interconnectedness, both in theory and in practice.24 Her standpoint is based on Rousseau and Durkheim, who are both influential figures in shaping modern France. Rousseau’s savage man has the potential to use his free will and yet is surrounded and guided by basic rules of human life, and he is in need of a social contract regulated and protected by the government as a separate but crucial institution from the sovereign person. 25 Similarly, Durkheim holds that collective or common consciousness is vital in preserving the functioning of social

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Couscous is a traditional dish made of wheat and served with a meat or vegetable. It is a staple food in virtually all North African cuisines, mainly those of Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco. 23 Émile Durkheim, The Division of Labor in Society, 1893 (New York: Free Press, 2013). 24 Fernando, The Republic Unsettled. 25 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract (London: Penguin Books, 1969 [1762]).

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institutions that are all necessary for the existence of the modern organic society.26 Durkheim adds to this argument: Thus very far from there being the antagonism between the individual and society which is often claimed, moral individualism, the cult of the individual, is in fact the product of society itself. It is society that instituted it and made of man the god whose servant it is.27

By confirming that there is in fact no antagonism between the society and individual, since they are interdependent, he takes the position of accepting public authority and autonomy28 within the commonality of a shared system.29 By citing these two French philosophers, Fernando makes the argument that these positions reveal the true nature of French republicanism, and contemporary republicans defer to this interconnectedness through strict control systems and monitoring of citizens in order to craft them into a desired model of republican citizenship.30 This became more apparent after the killing of eleven people during an armed attack on the satirical weekly newspaper Charlie Hebdo, known for its critical stance against all religions, including Islam, and its caricatured depictions of the Prophet. The attack was committed in January 2015 by two young brothers who were French citizens born to Algerian immigrants. After the Charlie Hebdo attacks, the state prepared to take extra measures to safeguard the century-old laïcité, especially among its young Muslim citizens.31 One attempt to accomplish this was by reinforcing democratic republican values through control and surveillance in public schools. This intention was officially declared, as John Lichfield noted in an Independent article on 22 January 2015: “President François Hollande said

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Émile Durkheim, “From Mechanical to Organic Solidarity,” in Sociology: Introductory Readings, 3rd edition, ed. Anthony Giddens and Philip W. Sutton (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2010). 27 Émile Durkheim, Sociology and Philosophy (New York: The Free Press, 1974), 59. 28 Mark S. Cladis, A Communitarian Defense of Liberalism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), 115. 29 Lydia Morris, “Sociology and Rights: An Emergent Field,” in Rights: Sociological Perspectives, ed. Lydia Morris, (London: Routledge, 2006), 4. 30 Fernando, The Republic Unsettled. 31 Aurélie Collas, “Après les attentats, l’école exalte la laïcité,” Le Monde, December 9, 2015.

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that in the future: “Each time that … words are uttered that go against the fundamental values of the school and the Republic, action will be taken.”32 French secularism is promoted and even imposed by state authorities through multiple methods, one of which is the Secularity Charter, which forbids racial or sexist behavior and which has had to be signed by all children and their parents since September 2015. Another state-imposed practice is the compulsory celebration of Secularity Day in schools each December 9th as the anniversary of the church- and-state law. Drawing our attention to control mechanisms in educational institutions, Fernando argues that “contemporary republicans violate the essential pillars of republicanism when they rely on public institutions such as schools to impose on young Muslim girls a particular type of citizenship at the expense of stripping their emancipation.”33 In this particular example, the state functions as the sole authority, and Muslim girls are expected to yield to state power and let it make a decision on their behalf. Thus, they are deprived of their individual agency. In fact, Muslim girls negotiate their personal autonomy and religious authority by appropriating these two simultaneously; yet, the French state refuses to acknowledge this by posing binaries of personal choice or religious obligation. When Muslim girls use the personal choice discourse, they are then disqualified from exercising their religious freedom because the French state asks them to prove that it is a religious obligation confirmed by religious authorities. Even when they do so, it is still not protected under law for two main reasons: either because the headscarf is considered to impinge on the freedom of conscience of unveiled girls and constitutes a violation of their religious liberty, or because it is understood as an imposition on women by religious leaders, fathers, and brothers negating personal freedom, and thus it is claimed to be an authoritative doctrine violating the secular liberal and republican norms. As a matter of fact, it is almost impossible for Muslim girls to defend their act of wearing the headscarf as a legitimate practice within French secularism, due to the French state’s anxiety to suppress any attempts of deviation from the laic principles and republican values as understood by the French state without any compromise, negotiation, or room for an alternative interpretation, or even a suggestion to apply its original principles based on a balance between authority and autonomy.

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John Lichfield, “French Children to Receive Intensive Training in 'Republican Values' and Respect for Religions,” The Independent, January 22, 2015. 33 Fernando, The Republic Unsettled.

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The interplay of the two forces of individual freedom of choice and acceptance of religious authorities is vital in maintaining the integrity of a Muslim citizen. As Fernando suggests, they are in fact taking a Rousseauian and Durkheiman position by reconciling the contemporary republican contrast between autonomy and authority. They also share a similar problematization of the private and public spheres in contemporary France in the sense that personal autonomy, which is ascribed to the public sphere, coexists with the religious doctrines that are considered a private matter by secular law and public discourse in France. Hence, Fernando concludes, “Muslim French are some of the only real republicans left in France.”34 My analysis suggests that French Muslims not only use their personal autonomy and adhere to Islamic authorities at the same time, but, as discussed in the previous section, also appropriate French laïcité as a sociopolitical contract, which they claim as their system. They contextualize it to include Islam in the theoretical model and put it into practice in the mosque by educating congregants about the benefits of French secularism, and organizing events that present them as equally valuable members of society. In other words, they appreciate the French laïcité for its equal treatment of each citizen, and they appreciate religious doctrines such as the irrevocable pillars of Islam. That is to say, both Islamic texts or Muslim scholars/leaders and French laïcité function as the authoritative powers that need to be reconciled and crafted with personal autonomy by young Muslims. When it comes to reading Islamic texts, these scholars and teachers always encourage people to read from different sources and come up with their own interpretations in their own contexts.

Dr. Bachir: “Do Your Own Research!” During a casual conversation with the young members of Famille92, the youth center of Al-Hidaya Mosque, Dr. Bachir advised them to do their own research, even on Islamic matters already “solved” by respected Muslim authorities. He told them that applying the principles of Islam in France required a contextual approach with a critical mindset towards religion. According to Dr. Bachir, each fatwa or Islamic teaching is given in its own context, and we cannot take one aspect as a global reference. He gave us the example of the European Committee for Fatwas: “Even though they take unique conditions into account while making binding

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Fernando, The Republic Unsettled, 180.

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decisions on a religious matter, one needs to be careful before taking up these decisions as the sole truth.” Dr. Bachir respects the director of the Paris Mosque, whom he describes as having close ties with the French authorities, so their fatwas make sense in the French context. He has concluded that, despite all these authoritative institutions, Muslim individuals need to consult with other opinions from different reliable sources with competence in Islam, since there is no ultimate religious leader in Islam like the pope in Catholicism. The main point of his advice is that he places great responsibility on individuals to research from their own particular contexts instead of jumping to ready-made conclusions derived from a single source. This way, they can break free from impractical cultural applications of religion, such as gender segregation, as has been discussed earlier.

Safia and Farouk: “Do Not Blindly Submit to any Dictation!” Following this principle, Famille92 functions almost as a youth organization in which each member is expected to perform individual expressions, attend lectures, ask questions, make their own conclusions, and act on commonly-made decisions. Safia, the head of the community events program, is a thirty-five-year-old native French woman of Algerian descent. She encourages each member to take the initiative and actively participate in organizational activities, in hopes that this will help them acquire self-value 35 and be beneficial to their communities as well as society as a whole.36 By adding a public character to the mosque, Muslim youth are expected to move out of their comfort zone, gain awareness of their self-value as individuals, contribute to their immediate communities and the larger society in compliance with the Islamic and republican values through hands-on experience, and eventually bring more diversity to French laïcité. Most members are included in the decision-making process, using their personal autonomy as an essential step in youth leadership.37 Giving them voice for this is essential. They design the mosque space accordingly to

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Alfred Kohn, “The Truth About Self-Esteem,” Phi Delta Kappan 76 (1994), 282. 36 Jonathan R. Olson, H. Wallace Goddard, Catherine A. Solheim, and Lisa Sandt, “Making a Case for Engaging Adolescents in Program Decision-Making,” Journal of Extension 42, no. 6 (2004). 37 Carole A. MacNeil, “Bridging Generations: Applying ‘Adult’ Leadership Theories to Youth Leadership Development,” New Directions for Youth Development Special Issue: Youth Leadership 109 (2006).

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reflect the individual value of each member. When Farouk, a forty-twoyear-old mosque leader who immigrated from Algeria to pursue a higher education, organizes his monthly discussions, he refrains from talking too much and lets participants speak, ask questions, criticize, and analyze the subject matter, which is usually selected by the participants. The talks particularly target young people under twenty-five years old, and are conducted in a gender-mixed environment, usually in a room within the mosque building. Participants are typically seated in a circle, and the speaker either sits or stands within this circle in order to make it an interactive session, giving everyone an equal representation. During these discussions, the participants are constantly reminded of the basic tenets of Islam, laïcité, and republican values of keeping the balance between authoritative forces and free minds. Farouk started one of his lectures by asking the participants to list the five pillars of Islam, and as they continued, he called on everyone to name the three principles of the French Republic by highlighting the importance of developing their own understanding: The five pillars of Islam have particular meanings and functions in our lives such as generating solidarity, maintaining good relations with other people, and spiritual clearance, so we need to practice those with full awareness. Practicing Islamic doctrines without awareness would lead to hypocrisy. We, as young Muslims, need to improve our understanding of Islam in relation to our society…. We are all French, and we will fight for our country if needed. The principles of liberté, égalité, and fraternité are meant to keep our nation united, and progress. If you have to work at an interest-based bank, it is ok to do so because you should respect its regulations. But do not blindly submit to any dictation! We should also be visible as Muslims by making a good example to our society.

Whenever conditions to make a choice between Islamic and French values arise, leaders encourage their followers not to settle for what is being offered in their immediate surroundings, but rather to reach out to a variety of sources, do their own research, discover the true meanings behind concepts, and find a way to balance these forces and keep them in harmony. Within this approach, Muslim youth are expected to actively participate in society by contributing to achieving the common good, making their individual choices freely, and getting out of their private cluster.

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Amor: “Take the Initiative!” The mosque youth leadership prioritizes individual effort above any topdown dogma. In the mosque, members are encouraged to use their selfjudgment, break free from any imposed cultural or religious dogma in the family or community, develop their own agenda, and act as future leaders. The mosque is considered an essential site to practice this type of leadership. At the end of an iftar 38 organization at the mosque, Amor praised young congregants for their efforts and encouraged them to claim their mosque and organize future events: You are the new Muslims and will serve your community by being active, so take the initiative! You are of great importance to Islam. France is a great capital for Islam. You need to act on certain values even outside of the mosque, and religious sites. You are responsible ambassadors of Islam here. The mosque needs you all year long, not only during the month of Ramadan. The mosque cannot find young Muslims who know how to lead groups, manage the mosque, and how to communicate with non-Muslims. That is why you need to take action. Mosque is not only for praying. We will change this. We will make this into a space where diverse groups function on a variety of projects.

As is clear in this message, young congregants need to be actively involved in redesigning and transforming the mosque space from a primarily religious site into a more public space relevant to social life in France. Young Muslims are given credit for their enthusiasm and public recognition through responsibly acting on this philosophy. Most mosque leaders with whom I spoke told me that their main aspiration to get involved in mosque activities is to elevate Muslim youth to well-educated standards in accordance with Islamic principles and French values. It comes with its challenges, but they keep working.

Conclusion The mosque has long been kept as a strictly religious space that separates Muslims from mainstream society in multicultural European contexts by contributing to the arguments that oppose Islam and French secularism. Young mosque leaders challenge this with a practical approach to make Muslim populations a part of French society through the use of the mosque space in various ways, incorporating Islamic, secular, and

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Iftar is the Ramadan evening meal, when Muslims break their fast at sunset.

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republican values. The mosque is turned into a secular public space blending religious traditions with active participation in all domains of life. This change breaks the state-sanctioned and commonsense private/religious and public/secular divisions by suggesting an approach that is based on a contextual interpretation of Islam and a remodeled secularism that resonates with the daily lives of French Muslims. This is, however, only the first step of introducing a religion-friendly secularism to France, as this blend of religion and secularism needs to be developed and extended into a variety of settings and domains of life in order to produce a greater effect on French society. This move will then require further research to analyze its transformative effects on society as a whole.

Bibliography Asad, Talal. Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003. Benhabib, Seyla. “Models of Public Space: Hannah Arendt, the Liberal Tradition, and Jürgen Habermas.” In Habermas and the Public Sphere, edited by Craig Calhoun, 73-99. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1992. Cladis, Mark S. A Communitarian Defense of Liberalism. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992. Collas, Aurélie. “Après les attentats, l’école exalte la laïcité.” Le Monde, December 9, 2015. Durkheim, Émile. Sociology and Philosophy. New York: The Free Press, 1974. —. “From Mechanical to Organic Solidarity.” In Sociology: Introductory Readings, 3rd edition, edited by Anthony Giddens and Philip W Sutton, 25-30. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2010. —. The Division of Labor in Society. 1893. New York: Free Press, 2013. Fernando, Mayanthi L. The Republic Unsettled: Muslim French and the Contradictions of Secularism. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2014. Gellner, Ernest. “Marxism and Islam: Failure and Success.” In PowerSharing Islam?, edited by Azzam Tamimi, 36. London: Liberty for Muslim World Publications, 1993. Habermas, Jürgen. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, translated by Thomas Burger with Frederick Lawrence. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1991. Hallaq, Wael B. The Impossible State: Islam, Politics, and Modernity's

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Moral Predicament. New York: Columbia University Press, 2013. Harvey, David. “Social Justice, Postmodernism, and the City.” In Readings in Urban Theory, edited by Susan Fainstein and Scott Campbell, 415-35. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1996. Joppke, Christian. Veil: Mirror of Identity. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2009. Kastoryano, Riva. Negotiating Identities: States and Immigrants in France and Germany. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002. Kepel, Gilles. Allah in the West: Islamic Movements in America and Europe. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997. Kohn, Alfred. “The Truth About Self-Esteem.” Phi Delta Kappan. 76 (1994): 272-83. Lichfield, John. “French Children to Receive Intensive Training in 'Republican Values' and Respect for Religions.” The Independent, January 22, 2015. MacNeil, Carole A. “Bridging Generations: Applying ‘Adult’ Leadership Theories to Youth Leadership Development.” New Directions for Youth Development Special Issue: Youth Leadership 109 (2006): 27-43. Modood, Tariq, and Riva Kastoryano. “Secularism and the accommodation of Muslims in Europe.” In Multiculturalism, Muslims and Citizenship: A European Approach, edited by Tariq Modood, Anna Triandafyllidou, and Ricard Zapata Barrero, 162-79. London: Routledge, 2006. Morris, Lydia. “Sociology and Rights: An Emergent Field.” In Rights: Sociological Perspectives, edited by Lydia Morris, 1-17. London: Routledge, 2006. Olson, Jonathan R., H. Wallace Goddard, Catherine A. Solheim, and Lisa Sandt. “Making a Case for Engaging Adolescents in Program Decision-Making.” Journal of Extension 42, no. 6 (2004). Pilcher, Jane. 1998. Women of Their Time: Generation, Gender Issues and Feminism. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate Publishing. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. The Social Contract. 1762. London: Penguin Books, 1969. Smith, James K.A. “Secularity, Religion, and the Politics of Ambiguity.” Journal of Cultural and Religious Theory 6, no. 3 (2003): 116-22. Taylor, Charles. A Secular Age. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007. Terrio, Susan J. Judging Mohammed: Juvenile Delinquency, Immigration and Exclusion at the Paris Palace of Justice. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009. Tietze, Nikola. “Religiosity among Young Male Muslims in France and

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German Public Spheres.” In Islam in Public: Turkey, Iran and Europe, edited by Nilufer Gole and Ludwig Ammann, 335-69. Istanbul: Istanbul Bilgi University Press, 2006.

CHAPTER TWELVE OF TERRORISM AND BARBARISM: ORIENTALISM AND SETTLER COLONIALISM IN CANADIAN DISCOURSES OF CITIZENSHIP AZEEZAH KANJI

Introduction This analysis centers on two pieces of legislation introduced by the Canadian Minister of Citizenship and Immigration in 2014 to fortify the ostensibly vulnerable borders of Canadian citizenship: the Strengthening Canadian Citizenship Act1 (which, among other alterations to citizenship law, permitted citizenship-stripping for terrorism convictions) and the Zero Tolerance for Barbaric Cultural Practices Act2 (which amends citizenship and criminal legislation to prohibit the already-prohibited polygamy, forced marriage, and “honour killing”). By selectively targeting such racially-marked acts of violence as terrorism and “honour killing” through the highly symbolic medium of citizenship discourse – which defines the legal, social, and imagined boundaries of the national community3 – these pieces of legislation legally reified and cast out the

 1

Strengthening Canadian Citizenship Act, SC 2014, c22. The denationalization provisions of Strengthening Canadian Citizenship were subsequently repealed by the Liberal government, which succeeded the Conservative regime behind the legislation. However, even though the particular law is no longer in force, it serves as a revealing illustration of how Canadian citizenship is contoured through the discourse of terrorism. For additional cases, see footnotes 6-8, infra. 2 Zero Tolerance for Barbaric Cultural Practices Act, SC 2015, c29. 3 Gordon Christie, “Aboriginal Citizenship: Sections 35, 25 and 15 of Canada’s Constitution Act, 1982” Citizenship Studies 7, no. 4 (2003): 481.

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figures of the “dangerous Muslim man” and the “imperilled Muslim woman:”4 the constitutive others of Canadian identity. Strengthening Canadian Citizenship and Zero Tolerance for Barbaric Cultural Practices are elements of a broader matrix of governmental power employed since the launch of the “war on terror” to derogate from the citizenship of Muslims in Canada, or to exclude Muslims from citizenship altogether. Recent examples of such derogations and exclusions include: the ban on niqabs at citizenship oath-swearing ceremonies – announced as a regulation in December 2011, overturned by a decision of the Federal Court in 2015;5 Canadian security agencies’ wrongful branding of Maher Arar, Ahmad El-Maati, Abduallah Almalki, and Muayyed Nureddin as terrorist threats, and complicity in their secret detention and torture in Syria(and also in Egypt, in the case of El-Maati);6 the government’s recalcitrant refusal to request the repatriation of Canadian Omar Khadr from Guantanamo Bay;7 and the government’s active frustration of Canadian citizen Abousfian Abdelrazik’s efforts to exercise a fundamental right of citizenship and return to Canada from Sudan, where he had been incarcerated and tortured.8 Moreover, these two pieces of legislation are embedded in a social context and semantic web that impart racialized meaning to the forms of violence they address; as Robert Cover put it in his seminal work, “Nomos and Narrative,” “[n]o set of legal institutions or prescriptions exists apart from the narratives that locate it and give it meaning.”9 The “grammar of race”10 underlying popular and legal interpretations of these acts ensures that “terrorism,” “honour killing,” “polygamy,” and “forced marriage” are understood – virtually commonsensically – as offences primarily connected with

 4

The epithets are Sherene Razack’s, from “Imperilled Muslim Women, Dangerous Muslim Men and Civilised Europeans: Legal and Social Responses to Forced Marriages,” Feminist Legal Studies 12 (2004): 129. 5 Ishaq v The Minister of Citizenship and Immigration 2015 FC 156. 6 Frank Iacobucci, commissioner, “Internal Inquiry into the Actions of Canadian Officials in Relation to Abdullah Almalki, Ahmad Abou-Elmaati and Muayyed Nureddin” (2008), . 7 Canada (Prime Minister) v Khadr 2010 SCC 3, [2010] 1 SCR 44. 8 Abdelrazik v Canada (Minister of Foreign Affairs) 2009 FC 580, [2010] 1 FCR 267. 9 Robert Cover, “The Supreme Court, 1982 Term – Foreword: Nomos and Narrative,” Harvard Law Review 97, no. 1 (1983): 4. 10 Stuart Hall, “The Whites of Their Eyes: Racist Ideologies and Media,” in The Media Reader, ed. M. Alvarado and J. Thompson (London: BFI, 1990).

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Muslims and Islam, even while the racialization of Canadian citizenship is never so overtly or crudely proclaimed. Indeed, it does not need to be. “In the landscape of racialized sentiments,” Ann Laura Stoler reminds us, “the word race need not be spoken.”11 In what follows, I analyze the contemporary racing and gendering of Canadian citizenship through the inter-articulated discourses of Orientalism and settler colonialism, focusing on the representations of terrorism and femicide in these discourses to define the boundaries of Canadian identity. I argue that in the Canadian context of White settler colonialism, legislative initiatives such as the Strengthening Canadian Citizenship and Zero Tolerance for Barbaric Cultural Practices Acts should not be understood as simply examples of “illiberal liberalism:”12 the use of exclusionary means to safeguard liberal values from illiberal incursion. Rather, the extra-territorialization of terroristic and misogynistic violence through projection onto the excluded Muslim outsider – and the accompanying representation of Canada as non-violent and antipatriarchal – is an exercise in liberal disavowal: the denial of the “founding” and “preserving” violences13 of the Canadian state against its racialized others, to save the national mythos of multicultural innocence. I begin by tracing these violences, which undergird the development of Canadian citizenship as an institution – for, as Jacques Derrida recognized (commenting on Walter Benjamin’s “Critique of Violence”14), the violences that “preserve” a legal order are intimately connected to those involved in “founding” it.15

Racial and Gendered Formations of Canadian Citizenship: White Supremacy in the Multicultural State In their introduction to the anthology Unsettling Settler Societies, Daiva Stasiulis and Nira Yuval-Davis point to the central role of



11 Ann Laura Stoler, “Colonial Aphasia: Race and Disabled Histories in France,” Public Culture 23, no. 1 (2011): 129. 12 Liav Orgad, “Illiberal Liberalism: Cultural Restrictions on Migration and Access to Citizenship in Europe,” The American Journal of Comparative Law 58, no. 1 (2010): 53. 13 Jacques Derrida, “Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundation of Authority,’” in Acts of Religion (New York: Routledge, 2002). 14 Walter Benjamin, “Critique of Violence,” in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings (Schocken, 1986). 15 Derrida, “Force of Law,” note 13.

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citizenship/immigration law in racing and gendering national identities in settler colonial states: [r]estrictive immigration legislation formulas were used to explicitly restrict the migration or settlement of undesirable migrants […] Such strategies were generally flexible enough to meet the needs of employers and the resource development strategies of state authorities, but restrictive enough to deny settlement and other citizenship rights to those who were deemed racially and ethnically undesirable.16

As Sunera Thobani has demonstrated, Canadian national identity was forged through the exaltation of the (White, male) Canadian subject, against the “non-preferred race immigrant” (marked for exclusion and marginalization) and the “Indian” (marked for extermination and dispossession).17 The post-World War II “international crisis of whiteness” – the demise of the acceptability of overt White supremacy as the basis for social policy – ushered in Canada’s turn to an official policy of multiculturalism.18 If all settler colonial societies must “naturalise” their presence “in a place that their own tales admit was not originally theirs,”19 multiculturalism now serves as the origin myth explaining and legitimating the establishment of the Canadian polity on Indigenous land: the narrative of multiculturalism is back-projected onto the story of Canada’s birth, to represent the nation’s conception as a moment of multicultural encounter between British, French, andIndigenous.20 But despite the universalizing discourse of liberal multicultural citizenship, not all citizens are considered equal “insiders” of the nation-state’s “imagined

 16

Daiva Stasiulis and Nira Yuval-Davis, Unsettling Settler Societies: Articulations of Gender, Race, Ethnicity and Class (Sage Publications, 1995), 12. 17 Sunera Thobani, Exalted Subjects: Studies in the Making of Race and Nation in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007). 18 Ibid., 150. 19 Scott Lauria Morgensen, “Theorising Gender, Sexuality and Settler Colonialism: An Introduction,” Settler Colonial Studies 2, no. 2 (2012): 9. 20 See, for example, Prithi Yelaja, “Multicultural Canada: A Haven from NorwayStyle Violence?” CBC 4 August 2011, . (“the roots of multiculturalism in Canada can be seen in the country's earliest beginnings, as three founding cultures — aboriginal, British and French — were soon joined by many more from around the globe”).

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community.”21 The boundaries of national identity continue to be drawn through differentiation from various others.22 And so, “[w]hile some might believe in the promise of universality – that one can infinitely expand the ambit of who is entitled to rights and freedoms – race and other markers appear and reappear to patrol the borders of belonging to political communities.”23 For example, Leti Volpp argues that while citizens of the United States who appear Middle Eastern, Arab, or Muslim may theoretically be entitled to rights in “war on terror”-era America, they do not represent the nation in the post-9/11 American imagination; Arabs and Muslims are interpellated as antithetical to the nation’s sense of identity, and so stand outside the kinship network that constitutes the nation.24 However, the boundaries of identity in contemporary liberal democracies are not drawn using such crudely explicit ethno-racial classifications as Middle Eastern or Arab or Muslim; rather, the criteria for exclusion are more frequently articulated using the language of (avowedly universal) liberal values.25 A supposedly unique and homogenous commitment to gender equality is extolled as a key marker of the civilizational identity of “the West,” and as a line dividing this idealized “West” from the benighted “Rest.”26 As Sherene Razack trenchantly

 21

The phrase is from Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (Verso, 2006). 22 M. Banks and A. Gingrich, “Introduction: Neo-Nationalism in Europe and Beyond,” in Neo-Nationalism in Europe and Beyond: Perspectives from Social Anthropology, ed. A. Gingrich and M. Banks (London: Berghahn, 2006), 9. 23 Leti Volpp, “The Citizen and the Terrorist,” UCLA Law Review 49 (2002): 1595. 24 Ibid., 1594. 25 Fiona B. Adamson, T. Triadafilopoulos, and Aristide R. Zolberg, “The Limits of the Liberal State: Migration, Identity and Belonging in Europe,” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 37, no. 6 (2011): 843; Liz Fekete, “Enlightened Fundamentalism? Immigration, Feminism and the Right,” Race and Class 48, no. 2 (2006): 1; Christian Joppke, “Immigration and the Identity of Citizenship: The Paradox of Universalism,” Citizenship Studies 12, no. 6 (2008): 533; Triadafilos Triadafilopoulous, “Illiberal Means to Liberal Ends? Understanding Recent Immigration Integration Policies in Europe,” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 37, no. 6 (2011): 861. 26 Jasmin Zine, “Unsettling the Nation: Gender, Race and Muslim Cultural Politics in Canada,” Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism 9, no. 1 (2009): 146. See also Susanne Bygnes, “Gender-Equality as Boundary: ‘Gender-Nation Frames’ in Norwegian EU Campaign Organizations,” European Journal of Women’s Studies 19, no. 1 (2012): 7; Kerstin Duemmler, Janine Dahinden, and Joelle Moret, “Gender Equality as ‘Cultural Stuff’: Ethnic Boundary Work in a Classroom in Switzerland,” Diversities 12, no. 1 (2010): 19; Anna Korteweg and Gokce Yurdakul, “Islam, Gender, and Immigrant Integration: Boundary Drawing

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observes, “[i]n the ‘war on terror,’ Muslim cultures and traditions become innate characteristics that permanently mark Muslims as belonging outside the polity. Gender is crucial to the confinement of Muslims to the premodern, as post-colonial scholarship has long shown. Considered irredeemably fanatical, irrational, and thus dangerous, Muslim men are also marked as deeply misogynist patriarchs who have not progressed into the age of gender equality, and who indeed cannot. For the West, Muslim women are the markers of their communities’ place in modernity.”27 Therefore, even though Canada now proudly defines itself as a “multicultural” nation28 – whose pluralism is hailed as a testament to Canadians’ virtuous and exemplary tolerance – not all differences are welcomed and incorporated into the Canadian mosaic. Despite its promise of equalizing inclusivity, multiculturalism permits the perpetuation of the deeply racialized distinction between (White) “natives” and (non-White) “strangers,” between “host” residents who set the terms for inclusion in the nation and “guest” residents who must abide by them.29 White supremacy, then, is rearticulated within and through the discourse of multiculturalism. Andrea Smith has identified the “the three primary logics of white supremacy in the US context” – also applicable to Canada – which include: “(1) slaveability/anti-black racism, which anchors capitalism; (2) genocide, which anchors colonialism [and genocide here should be read not only as physical extermination, but also social extermination as a

 in Discourses on Honour Killing in the Netherlands and Germany,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 32, no. 2 (2009): 218. 27 Sherene H. Razack, Casting Out: The Eviction of Muslims from Western Law and Politics (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), 16. 28 Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, Part I of the Constitution Act, 1982, being Schedule B to the Canada Act 1982 (UK), 1982, c11, s 27. 29 On the perpetuation and reinforcement of White Eurocentric privilege through the discourse of multiculturalism in Canada, see Jasmin Zine, “Introduction: Muslim Cultural Politics in the Canadian Hinterlands,” in Islam in the Hinterlands: Muslim Cultural Politics in Canada, ed. Jasmin Zine (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2012), 21-27; Lois Harder and Lyubov Zhyznomirska, “Claims of Belonging: Recent Tales of Trouble in Canadian Citizenship,” (2012) Ethnicities 12, no. 3 (2012): 293; Elke Winter, “(Im)possible Citizens: Canada’s ‘Citizenship Bonanza’ and its Boundaries,” Citizenship Studies 18, no. 1 (2014): 46. More generally, see Ghassan Hage, White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural Society (New York: Routledge, 2000). On the hostguest dynamic, see Marianne Gullestad, “Invisible Fences: Egalitarianism, Nationalism and Racism,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 8, no. 1 (2002): 54-55.

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people – through assimilation, for example];30 and (3) orientalism, which anchors war.”31 (Andas Jonathan Boyarin, Nelson Maldonado-Torres, Ramon Grosfoguel, and others have elucidated, the intertwining of antiBlack, settler colonial, and Orientalist discourses has a long and broad history, pre-dating by far their current iterations in liberal democratic states in North America.32) These racializing logics intersect with heteropatriarchy, producing a political organization structured by hierarchies of race, gender, and sexuality.33 I focus here specifically on the relationship between two strands of the racial triple-helix explicated by Smith – the logics of anti-Muslim Orientalism and anti-Indigenous genocide – in contemporary discourses of Canadian citizenship, analyzing how they function together to maintain White supremacy within the framework of multiculturalism. The Strengthening Canadian Citizenship and Zero Tolerance for Barbaric Cultural Practices Acts illustrate the dynamics of the racing and gendering of Canadian citizenship in the era of the “war on terror.”

 30

Patrick Wolfe, “Land, Labor and Difference: Elementary Structures of Race,” American Historical Review 106 (2001): 866; Patrick Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” Journal of Genocide Research 8, no. 4 (2006): 387; Patrick Wolfe, “Structure and Event: Settler Colonialism and the Question of Genocide,” in Empire, Colony, Genocide: Conquest, Occupation, and Subaltern Resistance in World History, ed. A. Dirk Moses (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2008). 31 Andrea Smith, “Indigeneity, Settler Colonialism, White Supremacy,” Global Dialogue 12, no. 2 (2010). 32 Jonathan Boyarin, The Unconverted Self (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009); Nelson Maldonado-Torres, “Reconciliation as a Contested Future: Decolonization as Project of Beyond the Paradigm of War,” in Reconciliation: Nations and Churches in Latin America, ed. Iain S. Maclean (London: Ashgate, 2006); Nelson Maldonado-Torres, “Race, Religion, and Ethics in the Modern/Colonial World,” Journal of Religious Ethics 42, no. 4 (2014): 691; Ramon Grosfoguel, “The Long-Duree Entanglement Between Islamophobia and Racism in the Modern/Colonial Capitalist/Patriarchal World-System: An Introduction,” Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge 5, no. 1 (2006): 1. 33 Andrea Smith, “Heteropatriarchy and the Three Pillars of White Supremacy: Rethinking Women of Color Organizing,” in Color of Violence: The INCITE! Anthology, ed. Andrea Smith, Beth E. Richie, and Julia Sudbury (South End Press, 2006).

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Strengthening Canadian Citizenship Enacted into law on June 19, 2014, the Strengthening Canadian Citizenship Act amended (or, in the language of the Government of Canada website, “improve[d]”) several sections of the Citizenship Act to “increase the efficiency of the citizenship program,” “strengthen the requirements to become a citizen,” “strengthen program integrity and combat fraud,” and “honour those who serve Canada.”34 It also empowered the Minister of Citizenship and Immigration to strip citizenship from dual citizens convicted on terrorism charges anywhere in the world. The specific amendment permitting forced denaturalization reads: The Minister may revoke a person’s citizenship if the person, before or after the coming into force of this subsection and while the person was a citizen, […] was convicted of a terrorism offence as defined in section 2 of the Criminal Code — or an offence outside Canada that, if committed in Canada, would constitute a terrorism offence as defined in that section — and sentenced to at least five years of imprisonment.35

Defending the Strengthening Canadian Citizenship Act in the National Post, then-Minister of Citizenship and Immigration (and subsequently Minister of National Defence/Minister for Multiculturalism) Jason Kenney represented engagement in “terrorist” activities as constructive renunciation of Canadian citizenship: If a Canadian passport-holder maintains another nationality while waging war against Canada or committing a serious act of terrorism, this should be construed for what it so obviously is: a violent severing of the bonds of loyalty implicit in the idea of citizenship... Canada should [not] be forced to welcome them back as though the fundamental breach of mutual loyalty never occurred.36

“Terrorism” is defined in the Canadian Criminal Code as any act or omission

 34 Government of Canada, “Strengthening Canadian Citizenship,” last modified 8 December 2014, . 35 Strengthening Canadian Citizenship Act, note 1, s 8. 36 Jason Kenney, “The Case for Revoking Canadian Terrorists’ Citizenship,” National Post 12 February 2013, .

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(i) that is committed in whole or in part for a political, religious or ideological purpose [...] with the intention of intimidating the public, or a segment of the public, with regard to its security [...] or compelling a person, a government or a domestic or an international organization to do or refrain from doing any act, whether the public or the person, government or organization is inside or outside Canada, and (ii) that intentionally causes death or serious bodily harm to a person by the use of violence, endangers a person’s life, causes serious risk to the health or safety of the public or any segment of the public, causes substantial property damage [...] if causing such damage is likely to result in the conduct or harm referred to [previously], or causes any serious interference with or serious disruption of an essential service, facility or system, whether public or private [...].37 Terrorism-related offences criminalized in the Code, and punishable by imprisonment for up to ten years, include “providing, receiving or recruiting a person to receive training;”38 “entering or remaining in any country for the benefit of, at the direction of or in association with a terrorist group;”39 “leaving [or attempting to leave] Canada to participate in [the] activity of a terrorist group” or to “facilitate terrorist activity;”40 and “providing,” “collecting,” or “making available” property or services for “terrorist purposes.”41 The range of “terrorism offences” providing grounds for citizenship-stripping under the new provision was, therefore, both expansive and vaguely-delineated. Furthermore, the Strengthening Canadian Citizenship Act contained no protection against revocation for individuals erroneously or illegitimately convicted as terrorists by foreign governments: the inaccurate tarring, incarceration, and torture of Arar, ElMaati, Almalki and Nureddin42 – and, more recently, the trial of Mohamed Fahmy in Egypt43 – indicate that wrongful conviction of Canadian “terrorists” is not such a remote possibility. Yet, as Mario Bellissimo, immigration lawyer and president of the Canadian Bar Association

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Criminal Code, RSC 1985, c C-46, s 83.01(1)(b); upheld as constitutional by the Supreme Court of Canada in R v Khawaja 2012 SCC 69, [2012] 3 SCR 555. 38 Ibid., s 83.18(3)(a). 39 Ibid., s 83.18(3)(d). 40 Ibid., s 83.181 and 83.191. 41 Ibid., s 83.02 and 83.03. 42 See supra note 6. 43 “Who Are the al-Jazeera Journalists Tried in Egypt?” BBC News, 13 February 2015, .

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Immigration Law Section, pointed out, a citizen had greater access to the courts to contest a parking ticket than to challenge the deprivation of citizenship.44

Removing Tolerance for Barbaric Cultural Practices Where the Strengthening Canadian Citizenship Act promulgated a narrative driven by the figure of the Muslim terrorist – the “dangerous (internal) foreigner”45 against whom the nation must be defended – the Zero Tolerance for Barbaric Cultural Practices Act featured an additional archetypal character in its “clash of civilizations” drama: the “imperilled Muslim woman” who requires rescue from her male co-religionists. Introduced by then-Minister of Citizenship and Immigration Chris Alexander on November 5, 2014, the Act is intended to “demonstrate that Canada’s openness and generosity does not extend to early and forced marriage, polygamy or other types of barbaric cultural practices”46 – closely echoing the language of the Conservative government’s earlier revisions to the citizenship test guide.47 The government website posting heralding this latest anti-barbarism initiative proclaimed: “Canada will not tolerate any type of violence against women or girls, including spousal abuse, violence in the name of so-called ‘honour,’ or other, mostly genderbased violence.”48 Barbaric Cultural Practices introduced amendments to several pieces of legislation – the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act, the Civil Marriage Act, and the Criminal Code – the effects of which include: x creation of a new immigration inadmissibility provision for polygamy, so that temporary and permanent residents who practice polygamy in Canada may be subject to removal;49

 44 Cited in Audrey Macklin, “Citizenship Revocation, the Privilege to Have Rights and the Production of the Alien,” Queen’s Law Journal 40, no. 1 (2014): 1. 45 Rita Dhamoon and Yasmeen Abu-Laban, “Dangerous (Internal) Foreigners and Nation-Building: The Case of Canada,” International Political Science Review 30, no. 2 (2009): 163. 46 Government of Canada, “Zero Tolerance for Barbaric Cultural Practices Act: An Overview,” last modified 5 November 2014, . 47 Government of Canada, Discover Canada, last modified 3 July 2012, . 48 Government of Canada, supra note 46. 49 Zero Tolerance for Barbaric Cultural Practices Act, supra note 2, Part 1.

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x establishment of a new national minimum age for marriage (at sixteen years old);50 x criminalization of active and knowing participation in a forced marriage ceremony, including by parents or other family members;51 x restriction of the provocation defence, so that lawful conduct by the victim can no longer qualify as provocation; this is to “address concerns that the [defence] has been raised in several so-called ‘honour’ killing cases in Canada.”52

Illiberal Liberalism? Or Liberal Disavowal? The Conservative government’s changes to Canadian law are consonant with the introduction of restrictive citizenship and hard-line civic/cultural integrationist policies across a range of liberal-democratic polities.53 Increasingly, these states are employing liberal norms as boundarymarkers to delineate their borders of membership. Restrictions on women’s religious attire in public spaces, mandatory integration courses, citizenship tests assessing the liberal values of aspiring citizens, citizenship-stripping measures introduced or contemplated in several countries – all are examples of exclusionary, illiberal measures defended by their proponents as necessary for protecting liberal values, norms, and ways of life in the face of illiberal threats, particularly in this era of the “war on terror” and “clash of civilizations.”54 Some citizenship theorists have interpreted these initiatives as exercises in “illiberal liberalism,” the use of illiberal means to produce or safeguard liberal ends. Liav Orgad explains: “liberal states, in order to preserve what they perceive as a liberal regime, are resorting to illiberal means to guarantee liberal values. Here

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Ibid., Part 2. Ibid., Part 3. 52 Ibid,, Part 3. 53 Triadafilos Triadafilopoulous, “Illiberal Means to Liberal Ends? Understanding Recent Immigration Integration Policies in Europe,” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 37, no. 6 (2011): 863. 54 Ibid.; Orgad, supra note 12; Matthew J. Gibney, “Should Citizenship be Conditional? Denationalisation and Liberal Principles,” Refugee Studies Centre Working Paper Series no. 75, 2011, . 51

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lies the paradox: either the liberal must tolerate illiberal practices, or turn to illiberal means in order to ‘liberate’ the illiberal.”55 By framing liberal democracies’ restrictive and exclusionary citizenship policies as a problem of “illiberal liberalism” – a deficiency of liberal toleration for illiberal difference – these critiques reproduce the juxtaposition of liberal, autonomous agents who tolerate, against illiberal, culture-bound subjects who may (or may not) be tolerated.56 Moreover, the exclusions, oppressions, and violences of liberalism itself disappear, pushed outside the margins of the liberal-versus-illiberal framework. Instead, oppression and violence are projected onto the illiberal Other, the outsider seeking to enter the liberal polity or already threatening its liberalism from within. This disavowal of liberal violence preserves the innocence of liberal thought and values, so that liberalism is retained as a good political theory – although unfortunately prone to (possibly existentially necessary) descents into illiberalism when confronted with the dangerously illiberal other. Critics of liberal theory, however, have long noted its intimate connection with imperial expansion, colonial domination, and indigenous dispossession.57 This connection is more than incidental, superficial, or accidental; rather, liberal thought was central in the justification of the settler colonial project, so that liberalism and settler colonialism should be seen, as Kevin Bruyneel argues, as “mutually constitutive logics.”58 For example, while John Locke is hailed as a founding father of the more tolerant strain of liberalism,59 the labour-based theory of property he

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Orgad, supra note 12 at 92. Yasmin Jiwani, “The Great White North Encounters September 11: Race, Gender, and Nation in Canada’s National Daily, ‘The Globe and Mail,’” Social Justice 32, no. 4 (2005): 53; see generally Wendy Brown, Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008). 57 See, for example, Uday Mehta, “Liberal Strategies of Exclusion,” Politics and Society 18, no. 4 (1990): 427; Bhikhu Parekh, “Superior People: The Narrowness of Liberalism from Mill to Rawls,” Times Literary Supplement 25 February 1994, 11. 58 Kevin Bruyneel, “The American Liberal Colonial Tradition,” Settler Colonial Studies 3, no. 3-4 (2013): 311. 59 In his seminal study, William Galston dubbed the “two concepts of liberalism” Enlightenment and Reformation liberalism. While “thick,” Enlightenment conceptualizations (associated with the figures of Kant and John Stuart Mill, and their promotion of autonomy) are occupied with the promotion of a particular vision of the good and substantive way of life, “thinner” Reformation notions (identified with Lockean toleration) view liberalism as a framework for managing 56

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developed in his Two Treatises of Government legitimated the expropriation of Indigenous land in North America: “[b]y calling America vacant, by beginning property in land through enclosure and cultivation,” Barbara Arneil writes, Locke provided “an ethical justification for taking Indian occupied land.”60 Indeed, liberal theory is situated on a foundation of racial and gendered hierarchy. If, as Charles Mills suggests, “[l]iberalism […] has historically been predominantly a racial liberalism, in which conceptions of personhood and resulting schedules of rights, duties, and government responsibilities have all been racialized,” it has also – simultaneously and intersectingly – been a “gendered” liberalism, in which conceptions of personhood and its effects have all been gendered.61 The result is a political theory that has systemically and structurally rationalized a raced and gendered ascriptive hierarchy, and justified the exclusion and domination of those relegated to inferior or incomplete personhood.62 These constitutive violences of liberalism – and of the liberal settler colonial state – are concealed in Canadian citizenship discourse through the logics of Orientalism and Indigenous genocide, maintaining liberalism’s conceit of innocence and universality.

Violence, Settler Colonialism, and Orientalism in Canadian Discourses of Citizenship Representations of violence – legitimate violence versus illegitimate violence, civilized violence versus barbaric violence, violence made (hyper)visible versus violence made invisible – are important sites for the construction and assertion of Canadian (and Western or liberal democratic) identity. The Strengthening Canadian Citizenship and Zero Tolerance for Barbaric Cultural Practices Acts draw on a deep well of Orientalist discourse to project violence onto the intolerant, retrograde, irrational, and cruel Orient, which is juxtaposed against the liberal, progressive, rational, and humane Occident.63 Concurrently, the logic of

 pluralism in culturally and religiously diverse societies. See William A. Galston, “Two Concepts of Liberalism,” Ethics 105, no. 3 (1995). 60 Barbara Arneil, “The Wild Indian’s Venison: Locke’s Theory of Property and English Colonialism in America,” Political Studies 44, no. 1 (1996): 60. 61 Charles Mills, “Racial Liberalism,” PMLA 123, no. 5 (2008): 1380. See also Carole Pateman and Charles Mills, Contract and Domination (Polity, 2007); Barbara Arneil, “Women as Wives, Servants and Slaves: Rethinking the Public/Private Divide,” Canadian Journal of Political Science 34, no. 1 (2001): 29. 62 Ibid. 63 Edward Said, Orientalism (Vintage, 1979).

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Indigenous genocide operates to obscure the raced and gendered violences of settler colonialism lying at the heart of the Canadian nation-state. The radical instability of the textual definition of “terrorism” – for, as Conor Gearty wryly observes, “the whole point of the subject of terrorism [is] that there [is] no definition. The importance of the subject, its utility to those who mattered, relied upon the impossibility of it ever being tied down”64 – is resolved by its sub-textual racialization. The assumption of a Muslim male monopoly on terrorism is so hegemonic that it is virtually taken as common sense.65For instance, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police's publication Radicalization: A Guide for the Perplexed perplexingly insisted that “virtually all of the planned or actual terrorist attacks in Western Europe and North America since 9/11 have been carried out by young Muslims” – without citing a single supporting source or statistic.66 Public Safety Canada reports similarly fixate almost exclusively on Muslims and Muslim groups as the source of terror in Canada, and all but one of the twenty-six completed terrorism prosecutions under Canadian anti-terrorism law have been of Muslims.67 (Incidents of White supremacist and extreme right-wing violence have instead been charged under non-terrorism sections of the Criminal Code, such as murder, attempted murder, or assault.68)

 64

Conor Gearty, Can Human Rights Survive? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 110. 65 Deepa Kumar, “Framing Islam: The Resurgence of Orientalism During the Bush II Era,” Journal of Communication Inquiry 34, no. 3 (2012): 254. 66 Royal Canadian Mounted Police, “Radicalization: A Guide for the Perplexed” (2009), . 67 Public Safety Canada, “2014 Public Safety Report on the Terrorist Threat to Canada,” last modified 16 December 2015, ; Public Safety Canada, “2016 Public Report on the Terrorist Threat to Canada,” last modified 25 August 2016, ; Craig Forcese, “Informal Tabulation of Completed Terrorism Prosecutions in Canada Involving Incidents Occurring After the Enactment of the 2001 Anti-Terrorism Act,” 14 September 2016: . 68 Catherine Solyom, “Q&A with Craig Forcese on National Security and Canada’s Antiterrorism Legislation,” Montreal Gazette 8 October 2015, . See, for example, R v Bourque, 2014 NBQB 237.

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The Strengthening Canadian Citizenship Act invoked and reinforced images of dangerous Muslim masculinity to demarcate the borders of Canadian identity. Pointing out what is obvious but often unsaid, Audrey Macklin has noted that the “target of denationalisation” in Canada and in other jurisdictions with citizenship-stripping legislation – that is, “the convicted terrorist, or the suspected terrorist, or the potential terrorist, or maybe the associate of a terrorist” – “is virtually always Muslim and male.”69 In Canada, the (at least) seven targets for denationalization proceedings initiated by the Conservative government were all Muslim men convicted of terrorism offences in Canada: Zakaria Amara, Asad Ansari, Saad Khalid, and Saad Gaya were four of the so-called Toronto 18, who hatched an abortive plot to bomb several sites in Toronto in 2006; Hiva Mohammad Alizadeh and Misbahuddin Ahmed were apprehended in the RCMP’s (bizarrely-named) Project Samosa investigation, and sentenced (to 24 years and 12 years, respectively) for planning bombings in Canada in 2010; Mohamed Hersi received a ten-year sentence for attempting to travel to Somalia to join the militant group al-Shabaab in 2014.70 The possibility of forced denaturalization produced Canadian Muslim men as subjects whose citizenship is strippable, and therefore always-already precarious: citizens by sufferance, who enjoyed no “right to have rights”71 but only a “privilege to have rights.”72 While the discourse of terrorism applied to Muslim populations serves to justify expulsion from the political community at home and waging of the “war on terror” abroad, the labelling of Indigenous activism in Canada as “terrorism” functions to delegitimize opposition to the settler colonial

 69

Audrey Macklin, “The Return of Banishment: Do the New Denationalisation Policies Weaken Citizenship?” (2015), . 70 “Toronto 18’s Zakaria Amara Among 1st to Lose Citizenship Under Bill C-24,” CBC News, 26 September 2015, ; “Canadian-Born Saad Gaya, Convicted Terrorist, Targeted for Revocation of Citizenship,” CBC News, 1 October 2015, . 71 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2001). 72 Macklin, supra note 44, 7; see also Leti Volpp, “Citizenship Undone,” Fordham Law Review 75 (2007): 2579.

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state, and its denial of Indigenous sovereignty, rights, and security.73 In the contemporary anti-terrorism context, the logics of Orientalism and Indigenous genocide are connected both institutionally and discursively. Security infrastructure and instruments developed to manage the “Muslim terrorist threat” post-9/11, such as the Integrated National Security Enforcement Teams (INSETs), have also been employed to also target Indigenous groups.74 Moreover, the representation of oil-producing states in the Middle East as supporters of terrorism is deployed by lobbyists promoting development of the Canadian tar sands as an “ethical oil” alternative: simultaneously “demonis[ing] Indigenous and environmental resistance” to the tar sands, and “justifying wars abroad and securitisation ‘at home.’”75 Like terrorism, “honour violence,” polygamy, and forced marriage are paradigmatic examples of violences overwhelmingly associated with particular culturally- and racially-marked communities – even as this racialization is disavowed by government representatives, who deny that the Act targets any particular cultural community (ostensibly being concerned instead with “cultural practices” that transcend community boundaries).76 But as Lila Abu-Lughod remarks, the “honour crime” is [m]arked as a culturally specific form of violence, distinct from other widespread forms of domestic or intimate partner violence, including the more familiar passion crime. Neither values of honor nor their enforcement through violence is ever said to be restricted to Muslim communities, nor are honor crimes condoned in Islamic law or by religious authorities. Yet somehow their constant association with stories and reports from the Middle East and South Asia, or immigrant communities originating in these regions, has given them a special association with Islam.77

 73

Pauline Wakeham, “Reconciling ‘Terror’: Managing Indigenous Resistance in the Age of Apology,” The American Indian Quarterly 36, no 1 (2012): 1. 74 Jen Preston, “Neoliberal Settler Colonialism, Canada and the Tar Sands,” Race Class 55, no. 2 (2013): 42; see also Jeffrey Monaghan and Kevin Walby, “Making Up ‘Terror Identities’: Security Intelligence, Canada’s Integrated Threat Assessment Centre and Social Movement Suppression,” Policing and Society 22, no. 2 (2012): 133. 75 Preston, supra note 74 at 53. 76 See the Parliamentary debates on the Act. Canada. Parliament. House of Commons. Debates, 41st Parliament, 2nd Session, 16 June 2015, . 77 Lila Abu-Lughod, Do Muslim Women Need Saving? (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 114. Uma Chakravarti likewise argues that “the violence becomes associated with the uniqueness of Asian cultures, with irrational

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Indeed, the Canadian Department of Justice’s own website describes “honour killings” as “often relat[ed] to specific cultural communities where some immigrants to Canada had maintained cultural practices from their country of origin,” and all the examples of “honour killing” cases listed involved South Asian, Arab, or Turkish perpetrators.78 The starkly dichotomous framing of their gendered violences as opposed to our gendered violences – implicit in the labelling of the former as “barbaric cultural practices” deserving “zero tolerance” – denies the possibility of any similarity or common ground between the two.79 Furthermore, the identification of “honour killings,” polygamy, and other such practices with certain communities stigmatizes the “dangerous Muslim men” who are thought to commit such “barbaric” acts of violence and, by extension, the “cultures” responsible for producing them – while Muslim women are abjectified as “imperilled” subjects, victims of “death by culture.”80 The use of broad culturalist explanations for certain forms of violence against women tars entire communities with the same indiscriminate and essentializing brush. Conversely, the portrayal of “mainstream” gendered violence as an individual – as opposed to cultural – problem bars recognition and scrutiny of Canada’s own “tolerated residuum”81 of gendered violence. As Leti Volpp argues, the “culturalization” of violence against women enables the “[e]xtraterritorializing of problematic behaviour by projecting it beyond the borders of ‘American [or Canadian] values;” this “has the effect both of equating racialized immigrant culture with sex-subordination, and

 communities and aberrant and archaic patriarchal practices refusing to modernise.” See Uma Chakravarti, “From Fathers to Husbands: Of Love, Death and Marriage in North India,” in “Honour”: Crimes, Paradigms and Violence Against Women, ed. Lynn Welchman and Sara Hossain (London: Zed Books, 2005). 78 Department of Justice, “Preliminary Examination of So-Called ‘Honour Killings’ in Canada,” last modified 30 December 2016, . 79 Pascale Fournier, “Introduction: Honour Crimes and the Law – Public Policy in an Age of Globalization,” Canadian Criminal Law Review 16 (2012): 110. 80 Uma Narayan, “Cross-Cultural Connections, Border Crossings, and ‘Death by Culture’: Thinking About Dowry-Murders in India and Domestic-Violence Murders in the United States,” in Dislocating Cultures: Identities, Traditions and Third-World Feminisms (London: Taylor and Francis, 1997), 81. 81 “In North America, despite laws against rape, intimate partner violence, and sexual harassment, society collectively tolerates a startlingly high level of ongoing abuse. This is the ‘tolerated residuum.’” See Jennifer Nedelsky, Law’s Relations: A Relational Theory of Self, Autonomy, and Law (Oxford University Press, 2011), 325.

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denying the reality of gendered subordination prevalent in mainstream white America.”82 The Canadian government’s proclamation that the Zero Tolerance for Barbaric Cultural Practices Act is necessary to prevent application of the provocation defence in cases of “honour killing” exemplifies this dynamic of projection-and-denial. The provocation defence has never been successfully invoked by a defendant claiming he or she murdered for the sake of “honour.”83 On the contrary, as a recent study conducted by Pascale Fournier, Pascal McDougall and Anna Dekker reveals, the defence disproportionately operates to partially excuse White men charged with intimate femicide: their analysis of 54 Canadian cases found that twenty-five percent of accused White men successfully pled the defence, versus eleven percent of men of “other”(ed) ethnicities.84 The provocation defence provides just one particularly salient example of how culturally-laden assumptions about gender, masculinity, femininity, relationships, power, emotion, and violence have been incorporated into the legal system – assumptions screened from view by the logic of Orientalism. The “instrumentalization” of the oppression of particular racialized women enables the “invisibilization” of other societally-pervasive gendered violences.85 Yasmin Jiwani’s study of dominant media representations of missing and murdered Aboriginal women demonstrated how “the national press coverage repositions Aboriginal women as criminals, victims of sexual crimes, militant rebels and inassimilable others […] enabl[ing] the Canadian state to maintain its position of limited involvement in alleviating the conditions of Aboriginal women ‘over here’ all the while attempting to rescue women ‘over there,’ in Afghanistan or

 82

Leti Volpp, “Blaming Culture for Bad Behaviour,” Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities 12 (2000): 115; see also Leti Volpp, “Feminism Versus Multiculturalism,” Columbia Law Review 105, no. 1 (2001): 1181; Dana M. Olwan, “Gendered Violence, Cultural Otherness, and Honour Crimes in Canadian National Logics,” Canadian Journal of Sociology 38, no. 4 (2013): 533. 83 Canadian courts rejected the defence in R. v. Nahar ([2004] BCJ No 278) and R. v. Humaid ([2006] OJ No 1507). 84 Pascale Fournier, Pascal McDougall, and Anna R. Dekker, “Dishonour, Provocation and Culture: Through the Beholder’s Eye?” Canadian Criminal Law Review 16, no. 2 (2012): 161. 85 Alexandra Dobrowolsky, “Interrogating ‘Invisibilization’ and ‘Instrumentalization’: Women and Current Citizenship Trends in Canada,” Citizenship Studies 12, no. 5 (2008): 465.

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elsewhere.”86 Indeed, as multiple critics have pointed out, the Conservative government’s obsession with the plight of Muslim women coincided with studied silence and inaction on the crisis of violence against Indigenous women.87 If, as Andrea Smith posits, sexual violence is not simply an instrument of colonialism, but also its animating logic88 – so that “it is through sexual violence that a colonizing group attempts to render a colonized peoples inherently rapeable, their lands inherently invadable, and their resources inherently extractable”89 – then rendering violence against Indigenous women invisible also renders the very structure of the settler colonial state invisible.

Conclusion The relationship of law to violence is intimate. The legal order not only rests on a foundation of violence,90 but also organizes, regulates, and disciplines the field of violence: legitimating some forms of violence while delegitimating others, revealing some while hiding others.91 The legislative expulsion of “terrorism” and “barbarism” from the space of Canadian national identity disavows the violences fundamental in

 86

Yasmin Jiwani, “Symbolic and Discursive Violence in Media Representations of Aboriginal Missing and Murdered Women” in Understanding Violence: Contexts and Portrayals (2009), ; see also Yasmin Jiwani and Mary Lynn Young, “Missing and Murdered Women: Reproducing Marginality in News Discourse” Canadian Journal of Communication 31 (2006): 895; Kristen Gilchrist, “‘Newsworthy’ Victims? Exploring Differences in Canadian Local Press Coverage of Missing/Murdered Aboriginal and White Women” Feminist Media Studies 10, no. 4 (2010): 373. 87 For example, see Emma Paling, “Why Does Canada Care More About ‘Honour Killings’ Than Missing Aboriginal Women?” Vice 7 March 2014, online: . 88 Andrea Smith, “Not an Indian Tradition: The Sexual Colonization of Native Peoples,” Hypatia 18, no. 2 (2003): 70. 89 Andrea Smith, “Queer Theory and Native Studies: The Heteronormativity of Settler Colonialism,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 16, no 1-2 (2010): 41. 90 Robert M. Cover, “Violence and the Word,” Yale Law Journal 95 (1986): 1601. 91 Scott Veitch, Law and Irresponsibility: On the Legitimation of Human Suffering (Routledge-Cavendish, 2007); Nathaniel Berman, “Privileging Combat? Contemporary Conflict and the Legal Construction of War,” Columbia Journal of Transnational Law 43 (2004-2005): 1.

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constructing that identity. By fortifying the logics of Orientalism and Indigenous genocide, the Strengthening Canadian Citizenship and Zero Tolerance for Barbaric Cultural Practices Acts bolster the structure of the White supremacist settler colonial state, in all its barbaric terror.

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Wakeham, Pauline. “Reconciling ‘Terror’: Managing Indigenous Resistance in the Age of Apology.” The American Indian Quarterly 36, no. 1 (2012): 1-33. “Who Are The Al-Jazeera Journalists Tried In Egypt?” BBC News, 13 February 2015. . Winter, Elke. “(Im)possible Citizens: Canada’s ‘Citizenship Bonanza” and its Boundaries.” Citizenship Studies 18, no. 1 (2014): 46-62. Wolfe, Patrick. “Land, Labor and Difference: Elementary Structures of Race.” American Historical Review 106 (2001): 866-905. —. “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native.” Journal of Genocide Research 8, no. 4 (2006): 387-409. —. “Structure and Event: Settler Colonialism and the Question of Genocide.” In Empire, Colony, Genocide: Conquest, Occupation, and Subaltern Resistance in World History, edited by A. Dirk Moses. Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2008. Yelaja, Prithi, “Multicultural Canada: A Haven from Norway-Style Violence?” CBC, 4 August 2011. . Zine, Jasmin. “Introduction: Muslim Cultural Politics in the Canadian Hinterlands.” In Islam in the Hinterlands: Muslim Cultural Politics in Canada, edited by Jasmin Zine, 21-27. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2012. —. “Unsettling the Nation: Gender, Race and Muslim Cultural Politics in Canada.” Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism 9, no. 1 (2009): 146-63.

Legislation Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, Part I of the Constitution Act, 1982, being Schedule B to the Canada Act 1982 (UK), 1982, c11. Criminal Code, RSC 1985, c C-46. Strengthening Canadian Citizenship Act, SC 2014, c22. Zero Tolerance for Barbaric Cultural Practices Act, SC 2015, c29.

Case Law Abdelrazik v Canada (Minister of Foreign Affairs) 2009 FC 580, [2010] 1 FCR 267. Canada (Prime Minister) v Khadr 2010 SCC 3, [2010] 1 SCR 44. Ishaq v. The Minister of Citizenship and Immigration 2015 FC 156. R v Bourque, 2014 NBQB 237.

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R. v. Humaid ([2006] OJ No 1507). R v Khawaja 2012 SCC 69, [2012] 3 SCR 555. R. v. Nahar ([2004] BCJ No 278).

Parliamentary Debates Canada. Parliament. House of Commons. Debates, 41st Parliament, 2nd Session, 16 June 2015. .

CHAPTER THIRTEEN CANADIAN MULTICULTURAL CITIZENSHIP AND THE CRISIS OVER THE VEIL: CULTIVATING INTERNAL EXCLUSIONS NISHA NATH

Introduction In June 2015, the Conservative-led Canadian government passed into law the Zero Tolerance for Barbaric Cultural Practices Act. This act formally criminalized forced marriage and polygamy, and amended immigration legislation to create new polygamy-specific inadmissibility provisions that facilitated the deportation of individuals on that same basis. In a government backgrounder, the act was described as demonstrating that Canada’s openness and generosity does not extend to early and forced marriage, polygamy or other types of barbaric cultural practices. Canada will not tolerate any type of violence against women and girls, including spousal abuse, violence in the name of so-called ‘honour,’ or other, mostly gender-based violence.1

The act was roundly criticized as deeply racialized legislation that targeted Muslims, particularly given a raft of repressive policies and legislation passed by the government which overtly and covertly targeted Muslim citizens and non-citizens.2 In October 2015, the act resurfaced as political capital when, in the midst of a Canadian federal election 1

Government of Canada, “Backgrounder Archived – Zero Tolerance for Barbaric Cultural Practices Act: An Overview” (November 5, 2015): http://news.gc.ca/web/article-en.do?nid=900339. 2 See Faisal Kutty, “How Harper Sows Fear of Muslims in Pursuit of Votes,” The Huffington Post Canada, September 9, 2015, http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/faisalkutty-/stephen-harper-sows-fear-muslims_b_8094044.html.

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campaign, Conservative candidate and then-Minister of Citizenship and Immigration Chris Alexander promised that should the Conservatives be re-elected, a police tip line would be put in place to encourage vigilant Canadians to report “barbaric cultural practices” in the name of protecting women and girls. Talk of the tip line came during an already intense assault on citizenship rights by the government, including debate over the right of Muslim women to wear the niqab during citizenship ceremonies. Focusing on the link between surveillance, regulation, and the preoccupation with and anxiety over Muslim women, this chapter examines reports in the Montreal Gazette over a 25-year period (19852010) in order to track the regulation of Muslim women in the Canadian province of Québec.3 The intense form of citizenship regulation evident in the aforementioned cases is not new, but is instead indicative of the historical ways in which marginalized, racialized, non-normative, and dissident citizens and non-citizens have been and continue to be regulated by the Canadian state. First, I argue that the regulation of Muslim women in Québec is historical and entrenched, predating markers such as 9/11 and the 2007 reasonable accommodation crisis. A stress on the newness of these debates reifies liberal narratives of citizenship change that presume that waves of progressive liberalization have led to the substantive evolution of multicultural liberal democratic citizenship. Second, I highlight the theoretical implications to challenging the liberal timeline. I treat citizenship as a form of regulation, and draw on the work of Giorgio Agamben, David Theo Goldberg, Rita Dhamoon, and Holloway Sparks to stress how securitization, racialization, regulated inclusion, and notions of dissidence, are integral to the governance of citizens. In adopting this approach, an alternative understanding of citizenship change is available, one that accounts for the experiences of marginalized, racialized, nonnormative, and dissident groups.

Liberal Stories of Citizenship Citizenship has been understood as “a status of equal membership within a bounded polity.”4 There is increasing consensus, however, that this understanding of citizenship cannot adequately explain a growing list of 3

Yasmin Jiwani, “‘War Talk’ Engendering Terror: Race, Gender, and Representation in Canadian Print Media,” International Journal of Media and Cultural Politics 1, no. 1 (2005): 16. 4 Rainder Bauböck and Virginie Guiraudon, “Introduction: Realignments of Citizenship: Reassessing Rights in the Age of Plural Memberships and Multi-Level Governance,” Citizenship Studies 13, no. 5 (2009): 439.

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anomalies that challenge both dimensions of this description.5 These anomalies signal a problem with the universality presumed by liberal citizenship, and a problem with the legitimacy of the borders of states. This tension between the lived realities of citizens and liberal citizenship’s normative and descriptive dimensions exposes a citizenship consensus that is tenuous, elitist, and oppressive. The dominant citizenship consensus in Canada is reflected in a body of scholarship by liberal theorists of differentiated citizenship. This “Canadian School”6 treats citizenship as a status, an institution and/or assemblage of rights and responsibilities, and is primarily concerned with providing reassurance that the group-based claims of differentiated citizenship are consistent with liberalism. This rehabilitative work rejects formal equality, and insists on the coexistence of unity and diversity within a framework of differentiated citizenship; it is predominantly normative and heavily culturalist, framing nationalist contestation in often abstract philosophical terms.7 In one liberal rendering of the controversies over the religious dress of Muslim women, the period after 9/11 is understood as illiberal in that there is rampant anti-Muslim racism, a new state-sponsored security agenda that surveils a citizenry it is contracted to protect, and a crisis over integration that has gone off the rails. Here, a citizenship consensus was interrupted by the events of 9/11. In another liberal rendering, the regulation of Muslim women as a problem to be solved is read through the lens of reasonable accommodation, a legal term in which “federal/provincial/territorial antidiscrimination measures place a positive duty on employers, service providers and landlords…to accommodate people’s needs for reasons associated with recognized discriminatory grounds.”8 Here, the Canadian 5 Ibid., 439; Cynthia Weber, “Designing Safe Citizens,” Citizenship Studies 12, no. 2 (2008): 129. 6 Gerald Kernerman, Multicultural Nationalism: Civilizing Difference, Constituting Community (Vancouver and Toronto: University of British Columbia Press, 2005). 7 Ibid., 6-8. With the works of Charles Taylor (1994) and Will Kymlicka (2007, 1998, 1995) treated as canonical, this body of scholarship finds its historical legacy in the insistence that we need not make a choice between the secessionist nationalism of the Québec sovereignty movement and the anti-nationalism of the pro-federalist contingent. The other citizenship stakeholders, identified as the aboriginal historical nations and ethnocultural minority groups, tend to be read through a lens that has de facto prioritized a secessionist/federalist debate. 8 Laura Barnett, Julia Nicol, and Julian Walker, “An Examination of the Duty to Accommodate in the Canadian Hunman Rights Context,” Library of Parliament (January 10, 2012): 2,

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legislative framework, including the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, is characterized as a catalyst for Canadian and Québécois anxiety over Muslim women. The conflict to be reconciled is between individual and group-based rights. Reasonable accommodation becomes a sliding signifier, departing from its more constrained legal application to stand-in for a host of earlier liberal citizenship discourses (such as tolerance, multiculturalism, or interculturalism). In this way, reasonable accommodation isa powerful and productive strategy of diversity management, and Québec’s reasonable accommodation crisis becomes a marker of time, where the debate and anxiety over Muslim women is identified as beginning and ending with the crisis itself.

Background Certainly, in the post-9/11 context, Canadian Muslim women have been a pointed site of citizenship anxiety, regulation and cultivation. During this period, no less than a dozen racialized and gendered controversies have erupted, largely, but not solely, in the francophone province of Québec, wherein the public presence, participation, and integration of Muslim women who wear hijabs, niqabs, or burqas have been debated ad nauseam. In September 2003, a private school in Québec expelled Irene Waseem for wearing a hijab. The Québec Human Rights Commission (QHRC) began an investigation, and in its non-binding legal opinion9 found that the school was wrong to forbid Waseem from wearing her hijab, and that private not-for-profit schools have the same obligation as public schools to make reasonable accommodations for religious beliefs. In the fall of 2005, the Québec government stated that it would not force Québec private schools to accept the hijab, stating that each institution could apply rules as they saw fit.10 The following year, the language of reasonable accommodation would enter into popular discourse with the Supreme Court of Canada’s (SCC) decision in Multani.11 The court overturned a lower court decision and allowed a Québec schoolboy, who was an

http://www.lop.parl.gc.ca/content/lop/researchpublications/2012-01-e.pdf. 9 Jeff Heinrich, “Muslim Council Calls for Inquiry into Hijab Settlement,” Montreal Gazette, February 1, 2005. 10 “Private Schools Can Reject Hijab: Quebec,” Montreal Gazette¸ October 5, 2005. 11 Multani v. Commission scolaire Marguerite-Bourgeoys, [2006] 1 S.C.R. 256, 2006 SCC 6 (Can.).

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orthodox Sikh, to wear his kirpan to school under certain conditions.12 The backlash sparked by the decision was intense, with many Québecers perceiving the ruling to be a federal government imposition of multiculturalism on Québec, a province that has formally adopted a policy of interculturalism, and one that has been grappling with a sovereignty movement since the 1960s. Moreover, the decision was a lightning rod in the province, introducing reasonable accommodation as a primary frame for the regulation of Québec Muslim women. The following two years constitute Québec’s ‘reasonable accommodation crisis.’ Coinciding with provincial election speculation was a significant increase in media reporting of a variety of reasonable accommodation cases in the summer and fall of 2006. Some of these included pregnant Muslim women who did not want to be seen by male doctors in Montreal-area hospitals; a Montreal YWCA installing frosted glass windows so that Hasidic Jewish congregation would not see women exercising; the offering of prenatal classes including fathers in deference to expecting mothers who are Sikh, Hindu and Muslim; and Mario Dumont seeking a reasonable accommodation to say Merry Christmas at the National Assembly’s final session on December 14.13

By mid-January 2007, the results of a survey on racism revealed that 43% of Québecers defined themselves as mildly racist, 15% as moderately racist, and 1% as very racist. The results were largely reported as ‘59% of Québecers are racist.’14 While attacked on methodological grounds, the results of the survey added to the reasonable accommodation breaking point: Hérouxville. This small Québec municipality passed a series of Islamophobic “life standards” for future immigrants. Some of the listed standards included affirmation of the public and private celebration of Christmas; that no ceremonial daggers are allowed in school; that there shall be no provision for prayer spaces in schools; that stoning women is 12

The parents and the school administration had originally negotiated a reasonable accommodation wherein the kirpan was concealed under the boy’s clothing. The governing board of the school refused to ratify this on the grounds that it violated a prohibition against students carrying weapons. 13 Yasmeen and Baha Abu-Laban, “Reasonable Accommodation in a Global Village,” Policy Options, September 2007, http://www.yorku.ca/lfoster/201516/RESP%204052/modules_files/Reasonable% 20Accommodation%20in%20a%20Global%20Village_abulaban.pdf, 30. 14 Yasmin Jiwani, “Editorial: Focus from Quebec,” R.A.C.E. Link (2007): 2, https://www.concordia.ca/content/dam/concordia/docs/RACElink-2007.pdf.

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forbidden, as is burning women with acid; that boys and girls are allowed to swim in the same pool; that one cannot walk around with one’s face hidden except on Halloween, and; that women are allowed to dance, drive, and make decisions for themselves.15 That same year, the decision to bar a hijab-wearing girl from playing a game of soccer in Québec16 received international attention,17 with Muslim girls subsequently barred from participating in a tae kwon do tournament, a judo tournament, and an indoor soccer game. A Muslim woman training to be a guard at a Québec jail was dismissed because she “insisted” on wearing a hijab.18 A Muslim female baggage screener was suspended from her job at the Toronto airport because she had modified her uniform. Just days before the provincial election, Québec’s Chief Electoral officer announced that Muslim women wearing a face-obscuring veil would not be required to lift their veils in order to verify their identity,19 a decision that sparked fury, and an organized and racist backlash led to the decision being overturned.20 Finally, Québec civil society organizations would weigh in. The Québec Council on the Status of Women called on the government to ban visible religious symbols for anyone working in public institutions, leaders of Québec’s two biggest trade unions called for a charter of secularism, and Québec Premier Jean Charest moved to introduce an amendment to Québec’s Charter that would prioritize equality of men and women over freedom of religion.

15 Sourayan Mookerjea, “Herouxville’s Afghanistan, or Accumulated Violence,” Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies 31, no. 2 (2009): 177. 16 Jan Ravensberger, Andy Riga, and Kevin Dougherty, “Charest Applauds Hijab Call: ‘Ref Applied the Rules’. Barring of Muslim From Soccer Match Kicks Off Nationwide Controversy,” Montreal Gazette, February 27, 2007. 17 Chris Lackner, “Egypt Shows Yellow Card Over Hijab Ban,” Montreal Gazette, March 9, 2007. A representative of the foreign ministry of Egypt would send a representative to the Canadian Embassy in Cairo to express concern about the case. 18 Jan Ravensberger, “Prison Guard Trainee Might Be Allowed Hijab: VelcroFastened Headgear Could Clear Way for 19-Year-Old Islamic Woman to Continue,” Montreal Gazette¸ March 15, 2007. 19 Philip Authier, Kevin Dougherty, and Hubert Bauch, “Covered Heads at Poll Booths Queried: Call to Remove Full-Face Veils. Niqabs and Burkas May Be Illegal: Boisclair,” Montreal Gazette, March 24, 2007. 20 Andy Riga, Irwin Block, Hubert Bauch, Kevin Dougherty, and Elizabeth Thompson, “Veiled Threats: Quebec’s Chief Electoral Officer Has Changed the Law, Obliging Everyone Who Votes to Show Their Face. It’s an Extraordinary Measure to Ensure ‘Crazies’ Won’t Disrupt Polling to Protest Against Muslim Women Voting in Full Veil,” Montreal Gazette, March 24, 2007.

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While the government established a commission of inquiry21 led by prominent liberal academics Charles Taylor and Gérard Bouchard to ease tensions, examine accommodation practices in Québec and formulate recommendations, the crisis would continue long after their 2008 final report was released.22 In 2007, the federal government introduced legislation that would have prevented niqab-wearing women from voting. In 2008, the federal government opposed the right of a sexual-assault complainant to wear her niqab while testifying in court. In 2009, an Egyptian immigrant enrolled in a language class for new immigrants in Montréal was asked to remove her niqab. When she refused, she was expelled from the course. In 2010, in response to a request by Québec’s health insurance board for clarification, the QHRC ruled that a woman must uncover her face to confirm her identity when applying for a Québec medicare card.23 That same year, the Québec government tabled 21 The Consultation Commission on Accommodation Practices Related to Cultural Differences was established in February 2007. 22 Jeff Heinrich, “Gazette Exclusive: ‘Enough About the Hijab;’ Quebecers Should Accept Head Scarf and Move On, Report Concludes,” Montreal Gazette, May 20, 2008. In their 2008 final report, the commissioners stressed a responsibility for “open-mindedness” and desire for change with the “majority ethnocultural group,” and suggested that the crisis was perpetuated by the media. The report concluded that no one has the right to impose or forbid that a woman wear a hijab, that women who wear a hijab suffer intimidation and discrimination, that there is a strong feminist current amongst Muslim women, that the hijab does not represent a real threat to Québec values, that the meanings of the hijab are multidimensional, and that the harm is greater if we deny women the freedom of choice to “display [their] deeply held convictions.” Also see, Jeff Heinrich, “Time for Quebecers to Be More Open: Report; Shake Off Angst. Get Used to Living in Globalized Society, Bouchard-Taylor Report Urges.” Montreal Gazette, May 17, 2008. The commission also stressed that it was possible to reconcile “Québecers” with practices of “harmonization” when such measures: demonstrably respect Québec society’s fundamental values; do not create privilege; encourage interaction; are framed by guidelines instead of spiralling out of control; and, are founded on the principle of reciprocity. Despite problematizing the crisis itself, and distancing itself from the language of accommodation, the commission ultimately contributed to the overall liberal frame in which these debates were considered questions of identity and accommodation. 23 Of the 146,000 applications for health care ID in 2008-09, ten were from clients asking for special accommodation because of their niqab or burka. Marian Scott and Scott Dougherty, “Remove Niqab to Get Medicare Card, Quebec Commission Rules,” Vancouver Sun, March 16, 2010, http://www.vancouversun.com/life/food/Remove+niqab+medicare+card+Québec+ commission+rules/2690121/story.html.

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legislation that if people wished to obtain or deliver public provincial services (including health care or university education), they could not do so if their faces were covered.24 In 2011, then-Immigration Minister Jason Kenney announced new rules banning face coverings when taking the Canadian citizenship oath, a policy that the Federal Court of Appeal later confirmed was unlawful. This would be followed in 2013 with the Québec government tabling a controversial values charter, which would have prevented all people from wearing conspicuous religious symbols from working in the public service. Yet, all of these debates far predate 9/11 and the reasonable accommodation crisis. In the early 1990s, another series of similar debates in the province of Québec took place about the public presence, participation, and integration of Muslim women who wear some type of Islamic veil.25 Set in the context of the ongoing controversy over the veil in France, as well as the bitterly close Québec sovereignty referendum in 1995, debate over Muslim women and veiling received sustained attention in the period following the 1990-91 Persian Gulf War. 26 24

The Liberal government would be defeated in the election in 2012 before the bill was passed. 25 Internationally, the regulation of Muslim women wearing Islamic coverings, particularly in France, featured in the Montreal Gazette in the late 1990s with a report on ‘l’affaire du foulard’ in 1989, when three “north African girls” were suspended from junior high school because they refused to remove their hijabs. The principal of the school described wearing hijabs as a “proselytic declaration,” worrying that these three girls could be 1000 or 50,000, a concern echoing the racist worries of the extreme right in France over the “Lebanonization of France.” See Jeffrey Ulbrich, “Three Girls Create Firestorm in France: Education Officials, Muslim Leaders Clash Over Religion in Schools,” Montreal Gazette, October 23, 1989. 26 Alexander Norris, “Report Lays Out Guidelines on How to Accommodate Cultural Differences,” Montreal Gazette, August 25, 1993. Starting in 1993, reasonable accommodation itself received attention as the government released a report offering guidance to institutions negotiating accommodations with “newcomer” cultural groups, given that the “proliferation of diverse cultural practices brings the potential for conflict.” This negotiation was characterized as between “established cultural groups – like English and French Québecers, Catholics and Jews – and those relative newcomers, like Chinese Canadians, Muslims and Hindus.” The report listed a number of “non-negotiable” cultural practices, including cultural pluralism, parliamentary democracy, the division of church and state, and French as the common language. Also see, “A Helping Hand for Immigrants: Quebec’s Plan Would Help to Integrate Newcomers,” Montreal Gazette, December 5, 1990. Echoing discussions to come, the minister of Cultural Communities and Immigration would later describe a “moral contract” to which

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For example, in December 1993, Québec Judge Richard Alary expelled Wafaa Moussiyne from his courtroom for refusing to remove her hijab. Alary was reported as having said: “When one goes to Rome, one lives like the Romans. If I went to Saudi Arabia, my wife wouldn’t like it because she’d have to follow (Saudi custom).”27 As part of an investigation, Alary made a 15-minute appearance before a sympathetic Québec Judicial Council composed of five middle-aged “FrenchCanadian” men, and offered no apology.28 In her appearance, Moussiyne was interrogated about the strength of her religious convictions, with the implication that she was not devout and wore her hijab as a legal tactic. The council ultimately dismissed the complaint of racial intolerance, ruling that Alary had not erred, and that he was entitled to question her religious conviction.29 Months later, Émilie Ouimet was expelled from school because her hijab contravened the school’s dress code, which restricted students from “marginalizing themselves” by wearing distinctive clothing. In justifying the dress code, the principal stated that “Distinctive clothing like a hijab or neo-Nazi regalia could polarize aggression among young people.”30 In December 1994, Dania Baali was told to find a new school because her hijab violated a new dress code. Ultimately, Ouimet’s parents filed a complaint with the QHRC, and in February 1995, the QHRC released a study ruling in favour of Ouimet, authorizing her to wear her hijab at her public school. The study stated that public schools could not block access to their services by students wearing an “Islamic veil” for religious reasons, that the right to equality was guaranteed by the Canadian and Québec Charters, that every child had a right to receive public education, as well as the right to attend the educational establishment of one’s choice.31 In response, the school board stated it would not pressure schools those seeking to immigrate to Québec would be bound, adding the rule of law, the peaceful resolution of conflict, the equality of citizens, and the equality of men and women to this list of non-negotiable cultural practices. 27 Samana Siddiqui, letter to the editor, “Big Difference,” Montreal Gazette, March 4, 1994. 28 Alexander Norris, “Didn’t Mean to Offend Muslims, Judge Says: But He Offers No Apology for Expelling Woman Who Wore Hijab to Court,” Montreal Gazette, February 4, 1994. 29 Geoff Baker, “Judge Cleared in Hijab Case,” Montreal Gazette, February 17, 1994. 30 Paul Wells, “Hijab Ban at Louis Riel Fuels Debate About Religious Expression in Schools,” Montreal Gazette, September 10, 1994. 31 Pierre Marois, “Religion, Private Schools, and the Duty of Reasonable Accommodation: Looking Beyond the Trees to the Forest” (2005),

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to change dress codes.32 Then, in May 1995, the Federation of Québec Teachers voted that no “signe ostentaire” be permitted in Québec schools, in effect calling for a ban of the hijab.33 Both before and after 9/11, one point is clear: Muslim women, both those who do cover and those who do not, have a fundamentally precarious status. Both are positioned on the borders of belonging, and the cultivation of the subjectivity of each produces a disciplinary message to the other. For Muslim women in Canada, citizenship status is not coterminous with substantive belonging, nor is it coterminous with the formal guarantees and entitlements that all citizens supposedly possess.

The Theoretical Challenge This historical tracing of these moments demonstrates how liberal renderings of the governance of Muslim women are analytically limited given three significant erasures within this scholarship: an erasure of the processes of racialization, securitization and the ways in which citizenship is regulated through dissidence. These analytic gaps ill-equip this body of work to describe, map, and analyze shifts in the experiences and governance of Canadian Muslim women in Québec. Drawing on Agamben’s work on the state of exception, Goldberg’s work on the racial state, Sparks’ notion of dissident citizenship, and Dhamoon’s work on regulated inclusion, this section examines the data from The Montreal Gazette and argues that these regulatory strategies and frames are not aberrations, but are historically rooted within a citizenship regime that governs through racialization and the exception, securitization and notions of dissent.

http://www.cdpdj.qc.ca/en/publications/docs/article_religion_accommodation.pdf; David Koussens, “Neutrality of the State and Regulation of Religious Symbols in Schools in Québec and France,” Social Compass 56, no. 2 (2009): 206. 32 Carolyn Adolph and Irwin Block, “I’ll Ignore Hijab Ruling: MCSC Chairman; Muslim School Changes its Policy, but Pallascio Adopts Hard Line,” Montreal Gazette, February 16, 1995. 33 Sheila McDonough, “Perceptions of the HijƗb in Canada,” in The Muslim Veil in North America: Issues and Debates, ed. Sajida Sultana Alvi, Homa Hoodfar, and Sheila McDonough (Toronto: Women’s Press, 2003): 124. In addition to listing a number of non-negotiable matters, including co-education, curriculum, and equality between the sexes, the group pronounced themselves against female circumcision, and asked for a public discussion as to what degree of conduct was reasonable in terms of “freedom of religion, liberty of conscience and equality between men and women.”

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Citizenship Regulates through Race First, the Canadian School has neglected processes of racialization when, in fact, citizenship regulates through race. The diversity narrative for citizens racialized as non-white has been remarkably static in the mainstream scholarship in that it reads as a history of relatively uncomplicated liberal progress.34 This radical de-historicization erases the ways in which Canadian citizenship as a colonial form of governance has always been precarious for bodies racialized as non-white. The historicity of Agamben’s notion of governing through exception opens up analytic possibilities that challenge the citizenship trajectories offered in liberal theories of differentiated citizenship.35 Given that not all individuals are regulated in the same way in a state of exception,36 Goldberg’s racial state offers a way to root our thinking about the constitution of the subject, while broadening the conversation on the exception. In The Racial State, Goldberg demonstrates how the state is implicated in conditions of racist exclusion, but also how the modern state has always conceived of itself as racially configured.37 The racial state describes a state of governance where race is integral to the conceptual and institutional emergence, development and transformation of the modern state;38 states are racial because they reproduce certain local conditions of racist exclusion, because of the ‘racial’ composition of its personnel, or because of the racialized implications of its policies.39 The racial state (re)produces, constitutes and affects “racially shaped spaces and places, groups and events, life worlds and possibilities, accesses and restrictions, inclusions and exclusions, conceptions and modes of representation.”40 States are racial in terms of their modes of population “definition, determination and structuration.”41 Theories of Canadian citizenship must address how Canadian policy has continuously governed through racialized and gendered zones of 34 Janine Brodie, “Meso-Discourses, State Forms and the Gendering of LiberalDemocratic Citizenship,” Citizenship Studies 1, no. 2 (1997): 229. 35 Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).. 36 Rob Aitken, “Notes on the Canadian Exception: Security Certificates in Critical Context.” Citizenship Studies 12, no. 4 (2008): 382. 37 David Theo Goldberg, The Racial State (Malden, MA, and Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2002), 2. 38 Ibid., 4. 39 Ibid., 2. 40 Ibid., 104. 41 Ibid.

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exception. Agamben focuses our attention on the way in which Muslim women are delinked from their political and legal subjectivity through racialized securitization and the exception. Goldberg provides a conceptual opening to comment on the tension that lies at the core of liberal government: the government must govern, in part, through freedom. In the context of the Canadian citizenship story, this analysis is useful given the paradoxical relationship between universality and particularity in liberal multicultural governance. If states operate on a homogenizing imperative, liberal multicultural states like Canada that attempt to foster structures of heterogeneity are marked by a set of contradictory aims. The language of managing diversity or determining the limits of multiculturalism signifies this tension between homo- and heterogeneity.42 Positioned within these contradictory aims, the depoliticization of race through the discourse of pluralism makes sense in a state that is attempting to contain particular types of heterogeneity.43 Liberalism must take the freedom of the subject seriously so multicultural governance does not operate to suppress diversity entirely, but facilitates “the playing out of diversity along certain less threatening paths.”44 Diversity is not intended to thrive freely – it is taught how to.45 For example, during the period examined here, there are four key strategies that exceptionalize racism and have governance and regulatory consequences for Muslim women: 1) a stress on rules and procedures; 2) the inversion of power; 3) the characterization of racism as unintentional and attitudinal, and; 4) the dehistoricizing of racism. First, appeals are consistently made to the neutrality of rules. Not only is formal equality stressed, but issues are framed as a conflict between the host society (White and Christian Québec) and its guests (Muslim women and men). For example, for Justice Alary, the eviction of Wafaa Moussiyne from the courtroom was about courtroom decorum – nothing more. This was also the case for Émilie Ouimet, and Dania Baali, in which the nun in charge of the school stated that the school would not accept any derogation from its uniform, and that the girl’s expulsion was simply

42

Ibid., 30. Ibid. 44 Kernerman, Multicultural Nationalism, 101. 45 Gerald Kernerman, “The Multicultural Panopticon: Paradoxes of Unity, Identity, and Equality in Canada” (PhD diss., York University, 2000, http://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk2/ftp02/NQ56236.pdf), 92. 43

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about the uniform.46 The appeal to the formal application of rules and procedures is also evident in the sports-related hijab cases. Moreover, when the issue reached the domain of private schools, a discourse of entitlement to make whichever rules one wants emerged strongly.47 With each set of rules contextualized within a specific institutional milieu, the power of the appeal to rules is that it desystematizes and depoliticizes the fact that all of these racialized women are being evicted from the public realm for not having integrated properly, a primary way in which the racial state regulates itself. Second, racism is characterized as exceptional through a narrative in which power is inverted and it is Muslims that are demanding to be treated exceptionally; they are characterized as taking advantage of the law through the suggestion that, with accommodations, there are now two sets of laws. The repetitive statement that newcomers are asking to be treated special disconnects the accommodations from the reality that they are intended to rectify discrimination or inequality, as well as to allow minority groups to function as fully integrated citizens. For example, the leader of the right-wing Action Démocratique du Québec (ADQ) party, Mario Dumont, suggested that it is time to stop “‘getting down on our knees’ to the demands of certain minorities.”48 In a letter to the editor, a reader responded to the issue of banning girls who wear hijabs on soccer fields by suggesting that this was not about reasonable accommodation or religious tolerance, but about publicity and the promotion of a culture of victimization.49 This is significant for non-normative citizens who are both subject to rules in terms of adherence, but not entitled to claim the rights associated with rules. Third, racism is treated as attitudinal or exceptional, not as systemically entrenched. The presumption is that real racism is intentional and motivated. For example, the head of the Canadian Council of Muslim Women, Alia Hogben, described the soccer ruling in 2007 as a lack of

46 Irwin Block, “Principal Stands Firm on Hijab Ban at School: ‘We Will Not Accept Any Derogation From Our Uniform,’ Nun in Charge Says,” Montreal Gazette, December 6, 1994. 47 S. Boghdady, letter to the editor, “Nothing Discriminatory in Dress Code,” Montreal Gazette, September 26, 2003. 48 Jack Jedwab, “What Counts in Polling are the Questions And How They Are Interpreted: Polls on Quebecers’ Attitudes Toward Minorities Were Flawed,” Montreal Gazette, January 20, 2007. 49 Nathan Elberg, letter to the editor, “It’s About Promoting Culture of Victimization,” Montreal Gazette, March 8, 2007.

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judgement.50 In a 2007 editorial, the accommodation crisis is described as a problem based on too little information and preconceptions.51 The editorial goes onto to suggest that the referee’s ruling to expel the girl from the game is “ridiculous,” but when put in the context of reasonable accommodation, takes on “distinctly uncomfortable overtones.” In September 2007, then-Governor General Michaëlle Jean described racism as situated within ignorance and misunderstandings; she simultaneously acknowledged that Muslim women in Canada are amongst some of the most educated women in the country, yet still have exceptional difficulty in finding employment.52 Part of the work being done here relates to tolerance as a strategy of governance that recodes “inequality, subordination, marginalization and social conflict [...] as personal and individual, on the one hand, or as natural, religious, or cultural on the other.”53 This echoes liberal theories of differentiated citizenship wherein racialized processes are recoded as cultural, and political and economic vocabularies are replaced by “emotional and personal” ones.54 In Québec, the citizenship narrative is told as a story of identity, culture and nationalism, through which all crises and their potential resolutions are located and defined. This is evident with the process associated with the reasonable accommodation commission. Public forums become confessionals wherein accommodation stories are personal narratives of disparate events, not the story of a society that cannot neutralize the space of integration. Given that the capacity of marginalized, racialized and/or dissident citizens to move into the public space is key to their experiences as citizens, the recoding and depoliticization of that space becomes profoundly disempowering for those needing to make political claims. Fourth, racism is decontextualized. For example, in 2003, despite the history of hijab, the QHRC suggests that the Waseem case was exceptional

50

Jeff Heinrich, “Muslims Decry Soccer Referee’s Call on Hijab: Effect is to Isolate Children: Leaders. Ruling Wasn’t Racist, Says Head of Council, But Showed Lack of Judgment, Forethought,” Montreal Gazette, February 27, 2007. 51 Editorial, “Ridiculous Ruling on a Head Scarf,” Montreal Gazette, February 27, 2007. 52 Elizabeth Thompson, “Our Debate is ‘Healthy’: Minorities Hearings. Michaelle Jean Says Canada Should Follow Quebec’s Lead,” Montreal Gazette, September 26, 2007. 53 Wendy Brown, Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2006), 15. 54 Ibid.

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and that there has been much progress.55 In her assessment of Waseem’s case, Diane Guilbault of the Québec Council for the Status of Women suggests that hijabs are now so common in Montréal that it is no longer an issue.56 She further observes that the “hijab impulse will pass,” meaning that, by the end of the school year, she had noticed that some girls were no longer wearing them.57 Or, in response to the issue arising at the Montréal airport in which a woman was unnecessarily asked to remove her hijab, the spokesperson for Citizenship and Immigration Canada (CIC) stated that the incident seemed to be “limited in scope” and did not represent CIC policy.58 This assessment was made even though the Montreal Gazette reports that another five women had made similar complaints in the past several months.59 And, despite the storm of controversy accompanying the accommodation cases in 2006 and 2007, as well as his own recognition of the ADQ’s xenophobic election strategy, Premier Jean Charest described the case of Hérouxville as an exception, born simply out of fear.60

Citizenship Regulates through Security That security is performative, elastic, and multidimensional, yet rooted in intersecting systems of oppression, is meaningful given security’s intimate link with citizenship. However, the primary tension in liberal theories of differentiated citizenship is that of the individual versus the collective. This tension has shaped virtually all notions of crisis and conflict, and is partial in that a narrow focus on unity and diversity reflects an absenting of security when, in fact, citizenship regulates through security.61 Mainstream liberal theories of differentiated citizenship have not simply excluded security, but have presented “security and multiculturalism as

55

Jeff Heinrich, “Hijabs a Common Sight at Public Schools: Quebec Human Rights Commission Rules in 1995 Case,” Montreal Gazette, September 24, 2003. 56 Ibid. 57 Ibid. 58 Kazi Stastna, “Hijab Hassle Haunts Airport: Complaint Filed. ‘Head Scarf Is an Act of Devotion,’” Montreal Gazette, June 26, 2004. 59 Ibid. 60 David Johnston, “L’affaire Herouxville Born Out of Fear: Experts: Controversial Policy Posted Online. Charest Dismisses Resolution as ‘Isolated Case,’” Montreal Gazette, January 30, 2007. 61 In the mainstream literature, the security of the nation is addressed, but rarely is the language of ‘security’ used, nor is there attention paid to the productive nature of security or crisis discourses.

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oppositional.”62 This framing is significant given that liberal multiculturalism itself is better described as a mechanism of security, or a way of regulating difference in that it “secures meanings about the nation and belonging,” a process referred to by Dhamoon as “multicultural securitization.”63 Over the period examined here, a number of security permutations operate in coordination with each other: Muslim women are endangered by Islam, fundamentalism and Muslim men; Muslim women are a danger to themselves; Muslim women are a danger to the nation or us; and Muslim women are a danger to Western women. In the early period, the discourse centers on the Muslim woman as passive, submissive and threatened by her culture, her religion and Muslim men. While this does not disappear fully, increasingly the movement is away from the supposed security of Muslim women, to a concern that Muslim women are a threat to themselves and to the nation. In this shift, as more ethnically defined narratives of Québec as a nation take hold, the veil itself takes on a particular kind of multi-dimensionality, at times signalling submission, but increasingly signalling provocation, an aggressive political agenda, refusal to integrate, and ultimately intolerance towards the host society. The common thread here is that it is the presence of Muslim women that is a threat. In the case of Émilie Ouimet’s expulsion from public school, the principal equated the hijab with neo-Nazi insignia and described both as signs that could cause aggression in the face of the “greater harmony” the school’s strict dress code was trying to promote.64 While this particular linkage is unique in the study period, this connection between the hijab and a host of patriarchal and oppressive symbols and practices is present throughout. Moreover, in terms of discourses of (in)security, the school’s policy is notable in that the restriction is premised on the notion that students are not allowed to marginalize themselves. Here, the root of the dysfunction, or the source of the anxiety or threat is located in Ouimet herself, not in people’s reactions to her. This process of ongoing correction or discipline threatens with the consequence of eviction or exclusion, a powerful lesson to learn because it suggests that presence alone is reason for eviction. 62

Rita Dhamoon, “Security Warning: Multiculturalism Alert!” in Ashgate Research Companion to Multiculturalism, ed. Duncan Ivison (Surrey, UK: Ashgate, 2010): 256. 63 Ibid., 256-257. 64 Wells, “Hijab Ban at Louis Riel Fuels Debate About Religious Expression in Schools.”

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There is also the story of a female Saudi doctor doing her residency in Montréal, who was attacked immediately following 9/11. The response from the hospital was that female Muslim students would no longer be on call for nights.65 While clearly a measure inspired by the security concerns of Muslim female students, this resolution to the problem once again frames it as one of presence. The alternate solution is that Muslim women be provided with security and supported in their efforts to function as full citizens. The former solution was one in which her security concerns were located in her presence, which ultimately required that she be evicted once again from the public. A similar narrative develops in the case of elections. When Québec’s chief electoral officer bowed to racist pressure and intimidation by unilaterally reversing his decision that Muslim women wearing a niqab would not be required to show their faces to vote, he stated that his concern was the “integrity and serenity of the electoral process.”66 When election officials breathed a “sigh of relief” the day after the election and the headline read “A Veil of Rain, Not of Women,”67 we see that the security concerns are not about the interests of Muslim women as active, engaged, and present citizens. The consequence of being identified as the source of the dysfunction, or the embodiment of the threat, is not just the concretization of a racialized and gendered security discourse, but also one in which the target is evicted so that society can function as normal. Underscoring the diversity welcomed in multicultural and intercultural societies is the ongoing threat that as a marginalized, non-normative and dissident citizen, one may be subject to eviction – temporary or otherwise – if one’s presence proves too disruptive, distracting, or dangerous. Consequently, these citizens function within a constant state of uncertainty or (in)security.

Citizenship Regulates through Notions of Dissidence Third, mainstream liberal Canadian citizenship scholarship idealizes inclusion and belonging, focusing narrowly on passive as opposed to governmental belonging, with the former meaning that citizens or aspiring nationals may claim to belong to the nation and expect to fit into it and

65 John MacFarlane, “Medical Resident Tells of Assault,” Montreal Gazette, September 18, 2001. 66 Riga et al., “Veiled Threats.” 67 Don Macdonald, “A Veil of Rain, Not of Women,” Montreal Gazette, March 27, 2007.

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feel at home.68 In the case of the latter, the claim to belong to the nation involves “inhabiting the national will” by actively enjoying the right to contribute to the governing and management of the nation or the state.69 Civil liberties, or more specifically dissent or the refusal of inclusion, have been left outside of the analysis, when in fact, citizenship regulates through notions of dissidence. As articulated by Dhamoon, “The essential premise of inclusion politics is that by reorganizing and expanding existing socio-political arrangements in ways that are more hospitable and reflective of diversity, democracy will be further legitimized.”70 A more careful approach to inclusion is needed. Here, Dhamoon cautions against the capacity of inclusion to reproduce hegemony, and the disciplinary power of the terms of inclusion. She also warns about the ways in which strategies of inclusion can “mask and obscure” relationships of power that maintain inequity; practices of inclusion can be “deployed to co-opt more radical agendas for social change and domesticate them,” and; the premise of including the excluded normalizes borders and boundaries.71 The presumptions regarding inclusion in mainstream Canadian citizenship scholarship also reflect the observation of Sparks, who notes that sustained attention to the role of dissent in democratic life is missing from participatory and democratic views of citizenship.72 This erasure is evident in liberal theories of differentiated citizenship. Sparks defines “dissident democratic citizenship” as “the public contestation of prevailing arrangements of power by marginalized citizens through oppositional, democratic, non-institutionalized practices that augment or replace institutionalized channels of democratic opposition when those channels are inadequate or unavailable.”73 Dissent is meaningful because it deepens our understanding of who active and self-governed citizens are, as well as how citizens coalesce and mobilize as a political community.74 68

Sedef Arat-Koc, “The Disciplinary Boundaries of Canadian Identity after September 11,” Social Justice 32, no. 4 (2005): 41. 69 Ibid. 70 Rita Dhamoon, “Exclusion and Regulated Inclusion: The Case of Sikh Kirpan in Canada,” Sikh Formations 9, no. 1 (2013): 7. 71 Ibid., 7-8. 72 Holloway Sparks, “Dissident Citizenship: Democratic Theory, Political Courage, and Activist Women,” Hypatia 12, no. 4 (1997): 82. 73 Ibid., 83; emphasis added. 74 Ibid., 74. Sparks identifies six different ways people living in democratic polities can dissent or contest prevailing norms or arrangements of power: 1) using violence; 2) exiting; 3) remaining in the polity but choosing silence or inaction; 4) using formal institutionalized channels to contest the state; and, 5) using

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Depoliticization is central to how regulated inclusion works, and over the period examined here, this is accomplished through narrow notions of political subjectivity, as well as the strategic deployment of liberal values to defuse dissident politics. For example, Muslim women are consistently interpellated into the political realm if their clothing causes controversy. Despite their complicated, overlapping and shifting rationales for their choice of dress, this temporary invitation into the political is extended to them as objects of investigation. Just as the (in)security of Muslim women is defined narrowly by dominant voices, so too are their contributions and relevance as citizens. Treated as static subjects, the singular voice of Canadian Muslim women is presumed to be available primarily for explanation. For example, in the interrogation of Wafaa Moussiyne by the Québec Judicial Council, the Council stated that it was impossible for them to believe that wearing the hijab was part of Moussiyne’s religious convictions, given that she had appeared in court twice without it.75 Not only was Moussiyne subject to a devotional litmus test, but unlike others, her religious devotion must not only remain constant, but must be demonstrably so. If her public display is insufficient, those in a position to judge will be inclined to think that some type of deception is involved.76 Or, when Muslim women who wear veils are invited into the conversation on reasonable accommodation through the Bouchard-Taylor commission, they are invited in with an expectation of what they should know. While this becomes a complex negotiation between claiming a voice, being burdened with a voice, and being heard, a consistent theme over the period is that Muslim women must continually rearticulate and explain the myriad reasons why they may or may not cover. For example, in an article about clothing and teenage girls, a 15-year-old Muslim girl explains, “When you wear the hijab, people come up and ask questions. They expect you to know about your religion.”77 While a relatively benign question in some contexts, this assumption presumes that for Muslim girls to make a institutionalized and marginalized channels to address the state and the wider polity. Ibid., 84. 75 Baker, “Judge Cleared in Hijab Case.” 76 On this front, the Moussiyne case is unique in this time period because it is her lack of devoutness that is seen as problematic. This narrative quickly shifts in subsequent cases, where the devoutness associated with a Muslim woman wearing a hijab, niqab, or burqa becomes threatening. 77 Liz Warwick, “Express Yourself: Clothes Reflect Only Part of a Person, Girls Say. But What You Wear Can Convey What You Like, Even How You’re Feeling. Series: All About Girls,” Montreal Gazette, October 24, 1994.

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real choice, they must know everything about their religion before they don a hijab. Not only does this suggest that there is not a learning or evolving thought process involved in Islam, as there is with other religions, but that there is a certain unidimensionality expected of adherents. The assumption here is that the relationship Muslim women have to their faith cannot change, unless it means rejecting it. A corollary trend is that certain types of palatable resistance are available to marginalized, racialized, and/or dissident citizens. In some cases, the softening of dissent is a carefully negotiated strategy. In calling for an end to anti-Muslim prejudice, Salam Elmenyawi, the spokesperson for the Islamic Centre of Québec, tempers his message and asserts, “Montreal is a beautiful city, with a wonderful and generous people. Among them are more than 75,000 Muslims, who live, work, and enjoy every aspect of life, in harmony with the rest of the society, contributing to the well-being of the city and its citizens.”78 Elmenyawi’s strategy of sweetening his dissent fits within the host/guest framework wherein the guest must be loyal and grateful, yet not too provocative, in order to continue to function within the host’s home. This strategy becomes particularly heightened during the public forums at the reasonable accommodation commission. For example, Heinrich reports that during a public forum in which people expressed concern about the flood of immigrants, the threat to secular values, and the importance of preserving Québec’s Roman Catholic heritage, some immigrants “preached the virtues of blending in, not standing out.”79 Or, Jeff Heinrich describes several Arab immigrants arriving at a public forum, with “Medhat Attalah, a Rimouski marine specialist from Egypt, [saying] Québec should stay secular as a hedge against religious extremism of the kind he knew in his native country.”80 The suggestion here is not that these words are not authentic. Rather, it is simply to remember that marginalized, non-normative, and dissident citizens are constantly negotiating the bounds of political subjectivity. This means that it is essential to reflect upon the ways in which diversity governance and conceptions of security are implicated, as well as why particular forms of resistance or discourses of dissent are deemed

78

Salam Elmenyawi, “Rooting Out Prejudice,” Montreal Gazette, April 26, 1998. Jeff Heinrich, “Diverse Portraits of Modern Quebec: Bouchard-Taylor. Protesters Disrupt Open-Mike Forum,” Montreal Gazette, November 28, 2007. 80 Jeff Heinrich, “A Chorus of Resentment in Rimouski: Reasonable Accommodation Hearing. But Other Participants Urge Tolerance, Saying We’re Richer for New Arrivals,” Montreal Gazette, October 2, 2007. 79

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unacceptable. Liberal theories of differentiated citizenship generally neglect this. From this perspective, it is meaningful that in describing the public forum hearings, Heinrich identifies No One is Illegal, a grassroots anticolonial immigrant and refugee rights collective, as a “militant proimmigrant group.”81 Or, that less palatable analyses, such as Ameria Elias’s assertion that Muslims are often unjustly singled out and that this is not simply an issue of ignorance, are linked to “the heart of recent Islamic revivalist movements that angrily target Western policies.”82 Or, we can consider the controversy over a poem published in an Arab-language Montreal newspaper in 2007, written by a young male Lebanese Montrealer in reaction to Hérouxville’s code of conduct. In it, the poet adopts the voice of a Muslim woman who wears an Islamic veil, who is reacting to those who criticize her veil. The poet, Haydar Moussa, explains, “She’s criticizing anyone who tries to bring her down, who tells her, ‘Your veil is bad for our society’” … “She’s saying: ‘You made mistakes and I never said anything. So why criticize me for something that is very personal?’”83 Reaction to the poem in the letters to the editor was furious: the poem was called an outrage, the work of hypocritical fanatics, extremist propaganda, or contemptible: “Haydar Moussa’s poem got me so upset I couldn’t breathe. It seemed like extremist propaganda to me. Why do they let people like this in? What can they contribute here? Why do they come here if we’re all sluts and degenerates? What makes them think that they are better than us? I wonder what would happen to me if I wrote that kind of a poem in an Arab country (against Muslim women, let’s say).”84 A final regulatory strategy in the study period is the premise that dialogue is always good, debate is always healthy, and inclusion is always desirable. In 1994, Québec Cultural Communities minister Bernard Landry suggested that the solution to the problem of the hijab and religious freedom was establishing limits through encouraging reflection and discussion to form a societal consensus. This discussion was to be framed

81

Jeff Heinrich, “Hearings Not ‘A Freak Show’: Critics Chastised. Commissioners Speak Out in Laval,” Montreal Gazette, October 2, 2007. 82 Sophy Khwaja, “Breaking Barriers: Muslim Women are Working to Change Society’s View of Islam,” Montreal Gazette, April 7, 1997. 83 Jeff Heinrich, “Muslim Poem Stirs Up Yet More Controversy,” Montreal Gazette, February 13, 2007. 84 Caroline Brossoit, letter to the editor, “Poem Was Extremist,” Montreal Gazette¸ February 15, 2007.

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by tolerance, but that tolerance has its limits.85 This commitment was echoed in the 1995 QHRC report, wherein the hope of the study was to “open public debate on religious pluralism.” Asked to comment on the often racist public conversations on reasonable accommodation, Madam Louise Arbour, then-Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, asserted that the debate was “healthy.”86 Then-Governor General Michaëlle Jean also referred to the forums as a “healthy exercise,” remarking that it was good to “bring these things out in the open and talk about where we go together and how we define our citizenship.”87 A few points are worth noting here. First, dialogue is not necessarily undesirable; rather, the concern is the presumption that dialogue is the solution. This presumption is located within strategies of governance that are fundamentally not concerned with establishing the particular prerequisites for meaningful and just dialogue. Consequently, as Dhamoon’s notion of regulated inclusion suggests, the invitation to dialogue with marginalized, racialized, and/or dissident citizens often comes with a cost. Second, in making its way out of the legal realm and into sociopolitical discourse, reasonable accommodation was recoded from its more circumscribed legal meaning and its firm rooting in substantive equality. This transition is important because, as the idea of reasonable accommodation was flooded with issues of identity and nationalism, it became an attempt to “[chart] aspirations or [provide] symbolic social connections for people.”88 These are not issues that courts are well equipped to handle, and these are issues that are replete with power. This movement away from the legal realm can, to some degree, be characterized as disempowering for racialized and religious minorities, as their chain of recourse becomes ambiguous. The invitation to dialogue, particularly when it is contained within the bounds of reasonable accommodation, opens up an array of issues for negotiation amongst individuals and groups that are marked by imbalances of power.

85

Irwin Block, “Quebec Won’t Support Hijabs in Public Schools, Landry Says,” Montreal Gazette, October 26, 1994. 86 Hubert Bauch, “Arbour Welcomes Immigrant Debate: Better to Air Frictions Than to Let Them Fester, UN Rights Chief Says,” Montreal Gazette, February 9, 2007. 87 Thompson, “Our Debate is ‘Healthy.’” 88 Hubert Bauch, “Laws Won’t Defuse the Issue, Experts Warn: Charter of Rights Not Likely to Be Amended,” Montreal Gazette, September 29, 2007.

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Third, the invitation to dialogue is always coded with purpose. In the case of the reasonable accommodation forums, what was the purpose of the public consultations? In 2007, Charles Taylor stressed the importance of the public hearings: “‘It’s important for us to reach as many people as possible and give them the opportunity to express themselves freely […] A lot has remained unsaid [about immigrants] and there’s an unease that has not yet clearly been expressed.’”89 In a September 2007 editorial regarding the reasonable accommodation hearings, this “project” was identified as so important “that we simply cannot afford for it to be scuttled or hijacked.”90 The paper would go on to note that minority communities (amongst others) criticized the exercise as being “by whites for whites,” which the paper acknowledged was, in part correct. Yet, the editorial went on to state that, despite this, there is an important part in this process for minority input, not only to express their concerns but also to acknowledge and try to defuse the angst of the majority. Minority groups would be foolish to snub the commission. Do they expect a fairer hearing on the talk shows?91

Not only is the commission a type of collective indulgence that racialized and/or religious minorities are supposed to tolerate, but, insidiously, they are also expected to participate in it and be grateful for the invitation. The responsibility of Muslim women is to ease the majority’s concerns. If they do not come, this is a sign of separateness as well as their inability to be reasonable. If they do come, they should brace themselves to be on the defensive and be patient with their reassurance. The picture here is not one in which the commission offers no space for voice and engagement. Certainly, there are important moments of resistance that the commission hearings did in fact enable or inspire. Rather, we should be troubled when this becomes the standard against which the choice to be excluded is labelled as something subversive and antagonistic. When this becomes the case, the political realm and the political repertoire of marginalized, non-normative, and dissident citizens narrows significantly. Moreover, the discursive move that concretizes the authority of the commission does so by rendering all things associated with the commission (the process, the consultations, the commissioners themselves, and the final report) as neutral and apolitical, despite the fact 89

Ann Carroll, “Let the Debate Begin: Quebecers Get a Say; Commission Unveils Timetable on Accommodation Hearings,” Montreal Gazette, August 15, 2007. 90 Editorial, “Bouchard-Taylor Study Deserves a Fair Chance,” Montreal Gazette, September 8, 2007. 91 Ibid.; emphasis added.

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that the commission represents a distinct strategy of governance through regulated inclusion.

Conclusion This chapter examined citizenship discourses and practices that regulate Canadian Muslim women through race, security, and notions of dissent. The purpose here has been to provide a differently-oriented narrative about the citizenship trajectory than might be offered by liberal theorists of differentiated citizenship, both in terms of scope, but also in terms of complicating presumptions that an evolutionary and linear citizenship ‘path’ was disrupted by events such as 9/11 or the reasonable accommodation crisis. Across the 25-year period covered, there is remarkable continuity in the presence of Muslim women as sites of collective anxiety, fixation, and moral condemnation, subjects who are granted narrow political subjectivity in that their political world is assumed to be contained by their dress. This is accompanied by a long history in which Muslim women or girls have been evicted from public spaces because of their head coverings, which demonstrates the formal outcomes of tenuous belonging. Moreover, the frequency and fervour with which Muslim women are excluded from public spaces suggests that goals such as integration are not necessarily the primary interest of diversity management strategies such as multiculturalism, interculturalism, or reasonable accommodation. In this way, this chapter has demonstrated the need for a better way to characterize the often ambiguous consequences of being folded in through regulated inclusion. The focus on racialization and the racial state, securitization, regulated inclusion, and dissidence yields a narrative that more fully captures the complexities of citizenship for those who occupy the margins, with attention paid to shifts in citizenship regulation, as well as major continuities. Put differently, these regulatory strategies are not aberrations, but are historically rooted within a citizenship regime that defies explanation as being linearly progressive and increasingly inclusive, yet signals just how profoundly liberal this regulation is.

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Match Kicks Off Nationwide Controversy.” Montreal Gazette, February 27, 2007. “Ridiculous Ruling on a Head Scarf.” Editorial, Montreal Gazette, February 27, 2007. Riga, Andy, Irwin Block, Hubert Bauch, Kevin Dougherty, and Elizabeth Thompson. “Veiled Threats: Quebec’s Chief Electoral Officer Has Changed the Law, Obliging Everyone Who Votes to Show Their Face. It’s an Extraordinary Measure to Ensure ‘Crazies’ Won’t Disrupt Polling to Protest Against Muslim Women Voting in Full Veil.” Montreal Gazette, March 24, 2007. Scott, Marian, and Scott Dougherty. “Remove Niqab to Get Medicare Card, Quebec Commission Rules.” Vancouver Sun, March 16, 2010. http://www.vancouversun.com/life/food/Remove+niqab+medicare+car d+Québec+commission+rules/2690121/story.html Siddiqui, Samana. “Big Difference.” Letter to the editor, Montreal Gazette, March 4, 1994. Sparks, Holloway. “Dissident Citizenship: Democratic Theory, Political Courage, and Activist Women.” Hypatia 12, no. 4 (1997): 74-110. Stastna, Kazi. “Hijab Hassle Haunts Airport: Complaint Filed. ‘Head Scarf Is an Act of Devotion.’” Montreal Gazette, June 26, 2004. Taylor, Charles. “The Politics of Recognition.” In Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition, edited by Amy Gutmann, 2573. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994. Thompson, Elizabeth. “Our Debate is ‘Healthy’: Minorities Hearings. Michaelle Jean Says Canada Should Follow Quebec’s Lead,” Montreal Gazette, September 26, 2007. Ulbrich, Jeffrey. “Three Girls Create Firestorm in France: Education Officials, Muslim Leaders Clash Over Religion in Schools.” Montreal Gazette, October 23, 1989. Warwick, Liz. “Express Yourself: Clothes Reflect Only Part of a Person, Girls Say. But What You Wear Can Convey What You Like, Even How You’re Feeling. Series: All About Girls,” Montreal Gazette, October 24, 1994. Weber, Cynthia. “Designing Safe Citizens.” Citizenship Studies 12, no. 2 (2008): 124-142. Wells, Paul. “Hijab Ban at Louis Riel Fuels Debate About Religious Expression in Schools.” Montreal Gazette, September 10, 1994.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN THE NEED FOR DE-CENTERING ANTI-ISLAMOPHOBIA CRITIQUES: PROPOSING A DEMARCATION1 ROXANA AKHBARI

Introduction An overview of the critical literature on global Islamophobia reveals an almost exclusive focus on analyzing the ignorance of white supremacists manifested in their misconceptions of Islamicate subjectivities. Although these critiques of Islamophobia provide a helpful epistemic apparatus for combating Islamophobic white ignorance, they do not adequately address the epistemic resistance strategies of people with Islamicate cultural backgrounds living in multicultural Western societies. In this chapter, I will argue that this focus on white supremacists’ misconceptions makes most critiques of Islamophobia white-centered and ignorant of the epistemic agency of people with Islamicate cultural backgrounds. Next, I will draw upon the feminist philosophical literature on epistemologies of ignorance in order to introduce a theoretical framework for taking issue with the unitary logic of banishing Islamophobia through correcting the colonial ignorance of white supremacists regarding Islamicate subjectivities. Finally, in light of the theoretical framework that I introduce, I will discuss Parin Dossa’s project of exploring alternative epistemologies that South Asian and Iranian women in Canada offer for transcending the Western/Non-Western dichotomization as an example of a de-centered critique of Islamophobia that intentionally focuses on the epistemic agency of people with Islamicate cultural backgrounds.

 1

An earlier version of this paper has been previously published with the same title in Islamophobia Studies Journal, Vol.7, special issue on comparative approaches to studying Islamophobia, new academic press, Vienna (2016): 9-21.

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The Logic of Global Islamophobia in the Minds of White Supremacists: Three Critiques In his 2008 article “The Politics of Voluntary and Involuntary Identities,” Nasar Meer examines the discriminatory consequences of the legal recognition of racial minorities without admitting the racialization of Muslims in multicultural Western societies. In particular, he studies the case of the Islamophobic rhetoric involved in the British legislators’ rejection of the 2005 proposed legislation to expand the notion of racism in Britain’s third Racial Relations Act (RRA, in effect since 1976) and its later amendments. This proposed legislation demanded the expansion of the legal protection provided by the RRA to the groups subject to cultural as well as biological racism.2 However, as Meer notes, the expansion of the RRA was denied to Muslims (unlike Sikhs and Jews) on the basis of a putatively sharp distinction between racial minorities and Muslim minorities – a distinction that completely disregarded the quasi-ethnic process of the formation of Muslim identities in Britain. This denial of legal protection, in turn, created a harmful hierarchy of racial identities vs. Muslim identities, subverting the original purpose of the RRA. The case that Meer studies is an instance of the contemporary Western legal dichotomization of race and religion (including the dichotomization of racial minorities in general and Muslim minorities, in particular), and social struggles to transcend this dichotomy in the face of intense social hostility towards people with Islamicate cultural backgrounds. In a followup study in 2009, Tariq Modood and Nasser Meer dig deeper for the formative causes of cultural racism that has been manifested as antiMuslim sentiments in Europe. They discuss cultural tendencies that pave the way for anti-Muslim sentiments in the context of their analysis.3 In these projects, Meer and Modood reveal a substantive aspect of social discrimination against Muslims in multicultural Western societies; namely, the legal denial of the distinctive vulnerability of Muslims, due to the ways in which white supremacists perceive their Muslimhood. Pointing out the dangers of denying the Muslims’ distinctive victimhood in diaspora is a significant step towards mapping out the underlying logic of global Islamophobia. A detailed identification of this logic as constructed in the

 2

Nasar Meer, “The Politics of Voluntary and Involuntary Identities: Are Muslims in Britain an Ethnic, Racial or Religious Minority?,” Patterns of Prejudice 42, no.1 (2008): 62. 3 Nasar Meer and Tariq Modood, “Refutation of Racism in the ‘Muslim Question,’” Patterns of Prejudice 43, no. 3-4 (2009): 335.

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minds of privileged white subjects, in turn, is required to banish global Islamphobia. In a somewhat different context, Roksana Bahramitash engages the same project of mapping out the Islamophobic logic of white supremacy; she examines non-governmental means of pervasive anti-Muslim feelings across North America. In her feminist analysis of the white subjects’ imageries of Muslim people, Bahramitash goes beyond acknowledging the distinctive contemporary victimhood of Muslims; she explores the orientalist nature of liberal feminism by presenting its genealogy. In particular, she draws connections between liberal feminism in the postcolonial era (referring to it as “orientalist feminism”) and the feminist dimension of the colonial project of orientalism in the colonial era (referring to it as “feminist orientalism”). Next, she identifies the most effective self-proclaimed feminist propagandists of contemporary efforts in North America to ‘protect’ civilization from the perceived primitive and misogynist nature of the religion of Islam, keeping the flame of the socalled “war on terror” burning among neo-conservatives. She argues that misleading images of Muslim people are popularized mainly through cultural products. The foci of her analysis are two North American bestsellers: Geraldin Brooks’ Nine Parts of Desire and Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran, two different attempts to persuade a wide audience in Western societies of the dark world of women in Muslim cultures, through their “aura of authenticity.”4 The two narratives upon which Bahramitash focuses are significantly different. In Nine Parts of Desire, Brooks, as a white woman, gains access to the private world of Muslim women. She “observes” Muslim women from the perspective of a white middle-class woman from Australia who was raised as a Catholic and converted to Judaism as an adult.5 Therefore, she describes Muslim women from the point of view of an outsider to Muslim cultures. In Reading Lolita in Tehran, however, Nafisi presents her experience of an Iranian woman (a person with an Islamicate cultural background) living through the situation of women under Islam in postrevolutionary Iran. Having finished her PhD in English Literature at Oklahoma University, Nafisi returns to Iran after the Islamic revolution to teach at the university. She ends up giving weekly semi-private lessons in English Literature to a group of eight women in her own apartment in Tehran.

 4

Roksana Bahramitash, “The War on Terror, Feminist Orientalism and Orientalist Feminism: Case Studies of Two North American Bestsellers,” Critique: Critical Middle Eastern Studies 14, no. 2 (2005): 227. 5 Ibid., 229.

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Bahramitash finds the perspectives of both narrators problematic. She takes issue with two aspects of Brooks’ account of the Muslim world. First, she criticizes Brooks’ caricature of the treatment of women in Muslim countries by examining their treatment in Saudi Arabia. Next, she questions Brooks’ argument tracing the roots of the bad treatment of Muslim women in Saudi Arabia to the Qur’an.6 In her analysis of Nafisi’s narrative, Bahramitash underlines Nafisi’s inattentiveness to post-colonial theory in her semi-private English Literature lessons and her impatience with less-privileged women in her social interactions with women as narrated in the book. Despite their differences, however, Bahramitash argues that these two narratives both communicate to a wide public a negative message about women in Muslim countries, and they do so effectively by targeting the very audience that “would potentially be opposed to” the “war on terror,” namely feminists.7 This kind of academic research that intends to reveal the logic of global Islamophobia as constructed in the minds of white subjects in Western societies is not peculiar to anti-Islamophobia discourses that emerged after or shortly before, and in anticipation of, the launch of the “war on terror.” In 1993, for instance, Homa Hoodfar studied the persistence of colonial images of Muslim women, prior to the “war on terror” talk. She problematizes the meaning of the veil in the minds of white supremacists by contrasting that popular image with diverse lived experiences of this complex cultural practice and discussing women wearing it in different contexts. Exploring the nuances of this cultural practice, Hoodfar highlights the resistive aspect of veiling in the lives of Muslim women, both in Muslim countries and in diaspora. The relevant part of her project for the purposes of my argument in this paper is her examination of veiled women in Western contexts and her specific focus on young Muslim women in Montreal. In her research, Hoodfar, like Bahramitash, goes beyond acknowledging the distinctive victimhood of Muslims. She presents a careful study of the dynamics of the frustration that Canadian veiled women felt in their attempts to intermingle and establish fruitful social and intellectual relationships with non-Muslim Anglo/Québécoise women. In this context, she presents a complex picture of the significance of the veil in Canada by noting the marked difference between the lived experiences of veiling for white Canadian women who converted to Islam and those of

 6 7

Ibid. Ibid., 234.

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non-white, non-Anglo/French Canadian veiled women.8 As she explains, some Québécoise women who converted to Islam and chose to wear the veil did not experience their veil as an obstacle to their professional and educational achievements, whereas non-white, non-Anglo/French Canadian veiled women constantly experienced social marginalization and felt like outsiders in their social interactions. Hoodfar concludes that “the veil by itself is not so significant, after all; rather, it is who wears the veil that matters.”9 More importantly, she points out the resistive aspects of putting on the veil in Western societies, and mainly underlines two such aspects of this practice in the context of her study. On the one hand, she notes that many non-white, non-Anglo/French women who chose to wear the veil in Canada did so in order to fight the patriarchal standards legitimized in their communities in the name of Islam. This way, they managed to secure the respect of their communities and also created models for young women in those communities. In their creative resistance, Hoodfar argues, these women succeeded in questioning the justificatory foundations of many patriarchal cultural customs perpetuated in the name of Islam in their communities. However, she also notes that these women achieved their goal at the cost of feeling silenced by negative images of Muslim and Middle Eastern women held by Anglo/Québécoise women. In other words, in their fight against sexism in their communities, the women in Hoodfar’s study faced another dimension of social oppression: the consequences of the racist misconceptions of white supremacists toward Muslim women. In Hoodfar’s terms, “white North American feminists, by adopting a racist construction of the veil and taking part in daily racist incidents, force Muslim women to choose between fighting racism and fighting sexism.”10 Here again, people with Islamicate cultural backgrounds pay a social price for white subjects’ misconceptions. On the other hand, Hoodfar argues that another resistive aspect of choosing to wear the veil on the part of Muslim Canadian women is a political strategy to assert their Muslim identity as a response to their felt social marginalization. As Hoodfar puts it, “many Muslim women who are outraged by the continuous construction of Islam as a lesser religion and the portrait of Muslims as ‘less developed’ and ‘uncivilized’ feel a strong need for the Muslim community to assert its presence as part of the fabric

 8 Homa Hoodfar, “The Veil in Their Minds and in Our Heads: The Persistence of Colonial Images of Muslim Women,” Resources of Feminist Research 22, no. 3/4 (1993): 14. 9 Ibid., 15. 10 Ibid., 16.

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of Canadian society.”11 This kind of resistance seeks to demand full social and political recognition for veiled women as Canadians. Thus, the logic of this resistance understands and responds to the Islamophobic oppression causing the marginalization of veiled women in the first place. In fact, this kind of demand for recognition responds to the oppressive logic of Islamophobia in the minds of white supremacists by performing the negation of “the veil in their minds.”12

An Epistemic Analysis of Anti-Islamophobia Critiques These three critiques are important examples of three kinds of emphasis that the growing anti-Islamophobia literature puts on elaborating the underlying logic of global Islamophoia, mainly as it is constructed in the minds of Islamophobic subjects. In my analysis of this critical literature, I will focus on these three kinds of projects because of their important differences in focus (despite their common objectives), as discussed in the previous section of this paper. My suggestion is that while these three kinds of critiques reveal complex psycho-social realities of global Islamophobia, they also exemplify the focus of Islamophobia studies on the mentality of white supremacists. The problem with this focus on the mentality of white supremacists is that it probably limits the political implications of most helpful critiques of Islamophobia by producing the impression that there is a singular solution to the problem; namely, that reeducating white Islamophobic subjects is the only effective political strategy to eliminate Islamophobia. Put in epistemic terms, the only kind of politically relevant knowledge whose inaccuracy is challenged by these critiques is white subjects’ imageries of Muslim people, especially of Muslim women. Of course, these white imageries are part of the problematic dominant epistemology in multicultural Western societies that constitutes and perpetuates the oppression of people with Islamicate cultural backgrounds. But, one also notices the alarming lack of serious attention in the critical literature on Islamophobia to another kind of politically relevant knowledge that is obscure in the study of Islamicate cultures. There is no detailed engagement with non-white epistemologies, such as the intentional dynamics of the creative ways in which people with Islamicate cultural backgrounds have managed to understand and respond to the Islamophobic gaze of white supremacists in diaspora. In the context

 11

Ibid., 15. Referring to the title of Hoodfar’s article, “The Veil in Their Minds and in Our Heads: The Persistence of Colonial Images of Muslim Women.”

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of scrutinizing global Islamophobic oppression, acknowledging the playful active subjectivities of those affected by the Islamophobic white gaze is required to transcend the harmful dichotomies that subordinated Islamicate cultures in the first place. Without such an acknowledgement, critiques of Islamophobia risk picturing Muslims as merely passive victims of white subjects’ misconceptions of them. Unaccompanied by further specifications, the only social change that such a passive picture evokes is correcting white subjects’ misconceptions. It is as if we are directed to choose between two necessarily opposite social phenomena, either compliance with Islamophobic oppression or revolt against it by reeducating white supremacists. I think it is important to examine what has shaped and contributed to this dichotomous, politically paralyzing conception of oppression-resistance and the resulting exclusive focus of an overwhelming majority of critiques of Islamophobia on the issue of oppression. I suggest that the emerging philosophical literature on epistemologies of ignorance offers a helpful conceptual framework for comprehendingthe shortcomings of white-centered anti-Islamophobia critiques and imagining alternatives to them. Exploring the significance of not-knowing or ignorance, epistemologists of ignorance scrutinize the systemic inattentiveness of canonical fields of popular and scholarly knowledge to subordinate subjectivities. In their anthology Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance, for instance, Shannon Sullivan and Nancy Tuana reveal an often-ignored aspect of white privilege: the epistemic privilege of notknowing for white subjects. As they put it, “Far from accidental, the ignorance of the racially privileged is often deliberately cultivated by them, an act made easier by a vast array of institutional systems supporting white people’s obliviousness of the worlds of people of color.”13 Here, I will briefly explore the epistemic projects of critical race and gender theorists such as Charles Mills, Maria Lugones, Allison Bailey, and Shannon Sullivan in order to reveal the dehumanizing nature of white subjects’ ignorance and the social complexities that it involves. Along the way, I will explain how these projects could lend conceptual clarity to understanding the logic of the three anti-Islamophobic critiques that I discussed in the previous section of my paper and what it seems to me they all overlook. In his two important contributions to philosophical formulations of race, Racial Contract and “White Ignorance,” Mills draws upon literary

 13

Shannon Sullivan and Nancy Tuana, “Introduction,” Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance, ed. Shannon Sullivan and Nancy Tuana (Albany: State University of New York, 2007), 3.

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examples such as Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man in order to unveil the ways in which white subjects systemically misrepresent the lives of people of color. He traces the philosophical roots of the systemic racial ignorance he examines to the social contract theory. In particular, he argues that the social contract theory conceptualizes Western political cultures as essentially inclusive and egalitarian, making the actual histories of racism and sexism in a country such as the U.S. sound like exceptions to, or deviations from, Western egalitarian political culture.14 This theory, then, he argues, explores a contract between those who are considered to be people under a misrepresentation of the world’s history; namely, white people. Hence he uses the phrase “racial contract” to refer to the social contract theory. He takes issue with the contrast between nonracial ideals of the social contract theory and white people’s actual treatment of people of color in the process of nation-building, and then frames the main inadequacy of the social contract theory as overlooking this undeniable contrast. Mills describes neglecting this contrast as a cognitive problem: “the white moral cognitive dysfunction”15 that allows white supremacists to actively reinforce racial injustice while they think they are acting rightly. He thus utilizes the framework of social contract theory for overcoming its own inadequacies. Thus, in order to fix this racial contract, he recommends a revisionist program that reveals the persistent moral cognitive dysfunction of white supremacists. Bailey and Sullivan, on the other hand, provide detailed case studies in order to challenge the unitary logic of resistance on which Mills’s wellreceived formulation of racial discrimination in epistemologies of ignorance is grounded.16 Using the theoretical schema of the logic of “curdling” introduced by Lugones, Baily points out the limits of Mills’ cognitive revisionist program against white ignorance. In her influential book, Pilgrimages: Theorizing Coalition Against Multiple Oppressions, Lugones presents a pressing criticism of liberal understandings of resistance and agency, under which resistance goes unnoticed if it does not explicitly oppose the logic of oppression. In the alternative picture of political agency that she offers, a behavior counts as resistant insofar as it understands the logic of oppression and moves against it, and she also

 14 Charles Mills, “White Ignorance,” Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance, ed. Shannon Sullivan and Nancy Tuana (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007), 17. 15 Charles Mills, Racial Contract (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1997), 94-95. 16 Mill’s Racial Contract has been very influential on the writings of philosophers such as Linda Martin Alcoff, who have theorized systemic social ignorance.

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clarifies that moving against the logic of oppression is a response to oppression that is not exhausted by the unitary logic of oppression.17 A response to oppression that refuses to oppose its unitary logic avoids being reactionary by embracing the actual multiplicity of ways to gain different levels of control against the grain of the dominant power. In fact, such an inclusive, playful response is more robust and less noticeable by the oppressor, as it adds more than a not to the mentality of the oppressors. Lugones’s phrase for describing the logic of non-liberal forms of resistance is the logic of curdling. Avoiding the risk of turning things upside down,18 the logic of curdling acknowledges the ambiguous, uncertain nature of political coalitions against multiple forms of oppression, and minimizes the fear resulting from such uncertainties by adopting a playful attitude to focus on resistant intentions. Informed by Lugones’s criticism of the misleading epistemic tendency to see a behavior as either resistant or repressed,19 Bailey emphasizes a broader notion of the project of undoing white ignorance that includes the “strategic uses of ignorance by people of color.”20 She explains the significance of seeing subordinate groups of people as resisting subjects at the same time, by providing examples of cases in which people of color have strategically used dominating white subjects’ tendencies to see wrongly, in their own advantage. In particular, she cites Frederick Douglass’s description of his own strategic compliance with white expectations of black people as ignorant, in order to gain information and learn to write. Douglass recalls, “when I met with any boy who I knew could write, I would tell him I could write as well as he. The next word would be ‘I don’t believe you. Let me see you try it.’ I would then make the letters, which I had been so fortunate as to learn, and ask him to beat that. In this way I got a good many lessons in writing, which it is quite possible I should never have gotten in any other way.”21 In a similar way, Sullivan draws on Lugones’s notion of strategic ignorance in order to make a case for the achievements of Puerto Rican leaders’ use of jaiba politics, deciding to fight within the U.S. political

 17

Maria Lugones, Pilgrimages: Theorizing Coalition Against Multiple Oppressions (Lanham, Boulder, New York, and Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2003), 13. 18 Ibid., 24. 19 Ibid., 13. 20 Allison Bailey, “Strategic Ignorance,” Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance, ed. Shannon Sullivan and Nancy Tuana (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007), 90. 21 Frederick Douglass, quoted in Bailey, “Strategic Ignorance,” 88.

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system instead of demanding increased autonomy. The strategic use that these leaders make of white U.S. citizens’ misconceptions of Puerto Ricans as passive and unmanly has enabled them to redistribute their wealth from the U.S. mainland to the island. This strategic ignorance has, effectively, reduced the risks of direct confrontation for demanding the independence of Puerto Rico from the U.S. The relevant part of Bailey’s and Sullivan’s projects for the purposes of my paper is that an epistemology of racial ignorance that leaves out the strategic epistemic resistance of people of color does not go beyond shortsighted political solutions and is less likely to actually alleviate persistent racial injustices. Following the lead of Lugones, Bailey, and Sullivan, I would like to suggest that critical analyses that promise to combat the cultural and economic supremacy of the global North/West over the global South/East in general, and the dominance of white subjects in multicultural Western societies in particular, should aim higher than offering or implying resistance strategies in line with the negation of the logic of white racial oppressions. In particular, a careful examination of strategic uses of white ignorance on the part of people of color is necessary for critical theoretical approaches that analyze the role of knowledge-and-ignorance-production in the perpetuation of different kinds of white privilege. More specifically, in the context of anti-Islamophobia discourses, the epistemology of ignorance insight that I elaborated in this section can push these discourses out of their current exclusive focus on white subjects’ mindsets. The next section explains what it takes to push anti-Islamophobia critiques out of their current focus on white subjects’ misconceptions. I will examine this much-needed shift of focus with a specific example of a recent critique of Islamophobia in Canada, which, I think, can be best understood as emphasizing political strategies for unsettling global Islamophobia that are informed by strategic uses of white ignorance on the part of people with Islamicate cultural backgrounds in diaspora.

Alternative Approaches in Islamophobia Studies: Noting Non-Liberal Subjectivities In her medical anthropological project, Parin Dossa elaborates alternative epistemologies that South Asian and Iranian women in Canada offer for transcending the dichotomy of Western/non-Western worlds. The subjects of Dossa’s study are women immigrants or refugees who narrate their experiences of displacement and resettlement in Canada, in psychiatric contexts. In a white settler society, the only recognition that the narrating subjects of Dossa’s study could have expected for sustaining their integrity

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in the face of multiple examples of social marginalization in diaspora is mental illness resulting from the intrinsically chaotic conditions of their countries of origin. My argument is that the intentions of the narrating subjects of Dossa’s study can be best understood as a deliberate use of white supremacists’ medical misconceptions of themselves as mentally ill, for their own advantage. The kind of story-telling approach that these women develop in psychiatric contexts, I suggest, is constitutive of their attempts at creating counter-hegemonic epistemic spaces to challenge white supremacy by reasserting a substantial degree of control over their lives through re-gaining their emotional well-being. In counter-hegemonic spaces that they create, the Muslim women in Dossa’s study narrate themselves in ways that would have been otherwise impossible in their hostile condition in which their presence is perceived only negatively, as unintelligible recipients of services and drains on the economic system in a neoliberal system.22 In this way, these women open up new possibilities to flourish collectively despite the pressures of white supremacy in liberal contexts. It is also important to note that the kind of agency that I argue women in Dossa’s study exercise through their story-telling is very likely to go unnoticed in the liberal context in which it appears. However, a non-liberal understanding of the logic of resistance, such as Lugones’s conception of the logic of curdling that I discussed in the previous section of this paper, allows us to elaborate the intentional aspects of these women’s narrated experiences of Islamophobic oppression under a medical gaze. In such a picture, the compliance of these women with psychiatric categories that tend to alienate them can be understood as a strategy to transform white supremacy from within it. This strategy, however, does not explicitly oppose the logic of white supremacy through medicalizes the kind of social marginalization that contributes to the suffering of these women. Their story-telling, I suggest, should be seen as their critical engagement with medical categories such as anxiety, depression, or PTSD as a way of reducing the risks of resisting white supremacy directly in a white settler society. This kind of critical engagement with constraining liberal categories reflects the response of these narrating women to the Islamophobic oppression in their host society. Such a response, as I explained above, requires an understanding of the logic of oppression, but cannot be exhausted by the negation of that logic.

 22

Parin Dossa, Politics and Poetics of Migration: Narratives of Iranian Women from the Diaspora (Toronto: Canadian Scholars’ Press Inc., 2004), 28.

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Finally, I think it might be helpful to address and explain away the kind of uneasiness that this suggestion tends to cause in anti-Islamophobia scholarship and activism. In the face of Western governments’ explicitly Islamophobic legislative actions, such as Canada’s Bill C-51, my project of revisiting academic studies that imply a deliberate stepping back from immediate political crises, such as Dossa’s exploration of Muslim women’s contemplative story-telling in psychiatric contexts in diaspora, might sound untimely. I would like to insist that such an alleged untimeliness is not only productive for the radical political agenda of the critical literature on Islamophobia; it is in fact essential for its long-lasting success. What is philosophically important about an invitation to re-visit anti-Islamophobia projects that explicitly pivot around highlighting nuanced, non-liberal subjectivities of people who have been degraded by the Islamophobic gaze is that it introduces a deep scepticism of the adequacy (as opposed to the necessity) of the need for legal intervention to change the social status of people with Islamicate cultural backgrounds. In the case of Canada’s current pervasive security political climate, for instance, my invitation makes room for casting serious doubt on the often implicitly assumed sufficiency of political struggles against governmental discriminatory legislative actions. This kind of invitation, of course, does not deny the necessity of resisting institutional discriminations against subordinated cultures, but it decisively warns against the potentially reductionist grip of such resistive intentions. Social movements against complex forms of late-modern social discriminations become reductionist insofar as they allow idea of making collective progress by opposing institutionally enforced injustices limit their political ambitions. Therefore, my invitation is, in effect, a call to resist becoming too attached to the idea of making reactive progress by opposing unjust structural Islamophobic changes. This critical call would ideally bring the inevitable issue of political time to the attention of scholars and activists concerned with global Islamophobia. It questions the assumption that de-centring antiIslamophobia critiques from the mentalities of white Islamophobic supremacists sounds untimely in the face of political upheavals such as explicitly Islamophobic governmental legislative actions. This questioning is based on a concern with what constitutes political (un)timeliness. As Wendy Brown argues, “the practice of critical theory inherently involves a set of concerns with time.”23 Her reason for explicitly discussing



23 Wendy Brown, Edgework: Critical Essays in Knowledge and Politics (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2005), 8.

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(un)timeliness in critical theory in the face of crisis – or what she calls dark times – is that in late modernity, the collective perception of a political crisis might create the tendency to experience the present as eternal; this tendency, in turn, might lead to a dangerous political condition in which the only alternative political horizon would seem to be resisting the imposed crisis. In particular, Brown examines the affective dimensions of experiencing the present as eternal in moments of crisis by pointing out the feelings of fear and disorientation that underlie this specific experience. In order to overcome these unbearable feelings, she argues, one needs to deliberately stay away from being governed by what the present might seem to point towards. Describing this kind of staying away from being governed by the “present” as “swerving” the present,24 Brown suggests that critical theory could intervene in such situations by reconfiguring the very notion of time that declares the critique untimely or, in other words, by “breaking with the time’s own self-perception.”25 Such a critical theory, as she puts it, offers a historical understanding of the present crisis and at the same time suggests that the present is not necessarily continuous with what has been. She examines Benjaminian historical materialism as a kind of critical theory that offers such an understanding of time. The kind of historical materialism that Benjamin discusses in his “Theses on the Philosophy of History” takes the Marxist historical materialist perspective of the necessity of class abolition and protects it against the conformism of considering class abolition as the only political ideal. Benjamin’s method for disinfecting historical materialism from its potential conformism is specifically based on a reconceptualization of the notion of time. An orthodox historical materialism understands the notion of time reductively in terms of a temporal continuity between the past, present, and future by conceptualizing collective historical progress at present (in the late modern period) as moving towards class abolition. This understanding of the notion of time leaves out the existential modes of human life outside the class division of society. A Benjaminian historical materialism, then, enriches an orthodox historical materialist interpretation of history by furnishing it with existential modes of human life, such as giving an account of oneself without explicitly resisting class exploitation. Enlarging one’s conception of history in such a way as to include these existential modes of human life, Benjamin shows, involves an understanding of time that exceeds an orthodox Marxist homogeneous way of framing this

 24 25

Ibid., 12. Ibid., 14.

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notion. As Brown notes, Benjaminian historical materialism “renders the present historically, yet arrests history from the present.”26 Such a non-homogeneous understanding of the notion of time makes the convergence of collective political imaginations on resisting structural changes at the grip of imposed political crises symptomatic of a reductionist attachment to the idea of making reactive progress in history. In order to overcome this kind of paralyzing convergence in the field of anti-Islamophobia studies, I have argued that explicit attention needs to be given to the nuanced subjectivities of people with Islamicate cultural backgrounds who have refused to explicitly negate the logic of Islamophoic oppression in their collective attempts to transcend the dominance of white cultures. The final section of this paper provided an example of overcoming the convergence of political imaginations in antiIslamophobia scholarship by suggesting that my invitation to re-visit projects such as Dossa’s study in Canada in the face of its poisonous Bill51 political climate be taken in the spirit of understanding late modern history along the lines of historical materialism in the Benjaminian sense.

Conclusion As I have discussed in this chapter, from an epistemic point of view, studies of global Islamophobia that exclusively focus on examining antiMuslim mindsets of white supremacists risk picturing people in Muslim majority societies and their diasporic communities as mere victims of the Islamophobic white gaze. Although it is important to carefully elaborate the logic of global Islamophobia in the minds of white supremacists, in order to transform the condition of global Islamophobia, more explicit emphasis needs to be put on epistemic agencies of people affected by the Islamophobic white gaze. Highlighting the need for understanding the interconnectedness of oppression and resistance in political theory, I have suggested that bringing in more sophisticated conceptual frameworks on the political nature of knowledge and ignorance can be helpful for paying attention to resistive intentions under conditions of systemic oppression. The conceptual framework that I have engaged with for this purpose is epistemologies of ignorance; in particular, using the notions of white ignorance and strategic uses of white ignorance in this literature, I have explained how critiques of Islamophobia can shift their focus of analysis on epistemic agencies of diasporic communities from Muslim majority societies for unsettling global Islamophobia.

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Brown, Edgework, 13.

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Bibliography Bahramitash, Roksana. “The War on Terror, Feminist Orientalism and Orientalist Feminism: Case Studies of Two North American Bestsellers.” Critique: Critical Middle Eastern Studies 14, no. 2 (2005): 221-235. Bailey, Allison. “Strategic Ignorance.” In Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance, edited by Shannon Sullivan and Nancy Tuana. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007. Benjamin, Walter. “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, edited by Hannah Arendt. New York: Schocken Books, 1968. Brown, Wendy. Edgework: Critical Essays in Knowledge and Politics. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2005. Dossa, Parin. Politics and Poetics of Migration: Narratives of Iranian Women from the Diaspora. Toronto: Canadian Scholars’ Press Inc., 2004. —. Racialized Bodies, Disabling Worlds: Stories Lives of Immigrant Muslim Women. Toronto, Buffalo, and London: University of Toronto Press, 2009. Hoodfar, Homa. “The Veil in Their Minds and in Our Heads: The Persistence of Colonial Images of Muslim Women.” Resources of Feminist Research 22, no. 3/4 (1993): 5-18. Lugones, Maria. Pilgrimages: Theorizing Coalition Against Multiple Oppressions. Lanham, Boulder, New York, and Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2003. Meer, Nasar. “The Politics of Voluntary and Involuntary Identities: Are Muslims in Britain an Ethnic, Racial or Religious Minority?” Patterns of Prejudice 42, no. 1 (2008): 61-81. —. and Tariq Modood. “Refutation of Racism in the ‘Muslim Question.’” Patterns of Prejudice 43, no. 3-4 (2009): 335-354. Mills, Charles. Racial Contract. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1997. —. “White Ignorance.” In Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance, edited by Shannon Sullivan and Nancy Tuana. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007. Sullivan, Shannon, and Nancy Tuana, ed. Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007.

CONTRIBUTORS

Rawan Abdelbaki is a doctoral student in Sociology at York University. She holds a BA in Sociology and Political Science from the University of Toronto, and completed her MA studies at York University (Sociology) with a research review paper titled Neoliberalism and Canadian Immigration: Rethinking the Land of (In)Opportunity. Rawan’s research interests lie in the areas of transnational migration, citizenship, political economy, and racialization. Her work is inspired by a smorgasbord of theoretical traditions, namely Marxist, feminist, anti-racist, and postcolonial approaches. She has presented her work at Qualitative Analysis conference (London, Ontario; 2014, 2015) and the Discourses on Migration & Mobility conference (Hammamet, Tunisia, 2016). Kara Abdolmaleki is a doctoral candidate in the Comparative Literature program at the University of Alberta. He holds a master’s and a bachelor’s degree in English Literature from University of Tehran and Kurdistan University. He has worked with The Canadian Review of Comparative Literature and Inquire Journal of Comparative Literature in various capacities. His work has been published in the International Journal of Iranian Studies, Film International, Tehran Review, and The Guardian. His research interests include modernity and modernism, Critical Theory, Film Studies, Postcolonial Theory, Iranian Studies, and Psychoanalysis. Kritee Ahmed is a doctoral candidate in Sociology at York University. He holds an MA in Political Economy and a Bachelor’s in Public Affairs & Policy Management from Carleton University. His presented paper “Engaged Customers, Disciplined Public Workers and the Quest for Good Customer Service under Neoliberalism” can be found online in the second volume of Engaging Foucault. Kritee is currently working on a book chapter on observational methods on public transit. His research interests centre on public services and public transit, cultural studies, race and racialization, and the thought of Michel Foucault. Rouzbeh Akhbari is a Tehran-born installation and video artist whose practice is research-driven, often interventionist in approach and situated at the interdisciplinary nexus of postcolonial theory, political economies

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Contributors

and critical architecture. Akhbari’s projects have appeared at journals such as Scapegoat, SHIFT and Prefix Photo. His work has been exhibited locally and internationally at la Fabrique Culturelle des Abattoirs (Casablanca), Le Cube (Rabbat), Birch Contemporary (Toronto), 8-eleven (Toronto) Justina M. Barnicke (Toronto), Art Mur (Montreal) and Art Museum of Nanjing University (Nanjing). He is currently an MVS fellow at University of Toronto’s faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design. Roxana Akhbari is a PhD student of Gender, Feminist, and Women's Studies at York University. Her research focuses on theorizing global implications of nation-state apologies to racialized communities in North America, examining cross-ethnic anti-racist alliances between different redress-seeking movements, and conceptualizing the ways in which the notion of white supremacy has been/should be framed in this context. Her disciplinary background is in philosophy (especially, epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of language, and philosophical psychology). She has previously worked on epistemic justifications for ontological antidualist views of the nature of human mind, as well as epistemic dimensions of anti-Muslim sentiments in multicultural Western societies. On the latter, drawing upon the feminist body of scholarship on Epistemologies of Ignorance, she has studied the ways in which diasporic communities from Muslim-majority societies continue to exercise epistemic agency despite the global active production of anti-Muslim sentiments. Khalid Alhathlool is an Assistant Professor in the English Department at Al-Imam Muhammad Ibn Saud Islamic University, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. He holds a PhD degree from Warwick University, UK, in English comparative literature, obtained in 2013. His research interests include postcolonial studies, world literature, cultural theory, modernity and modernism, and Arabic fiction. Rasoul Aliakbari is a PhD student in Comparative Literature at the University of Alberta in Canada. His article, which he presented in Unsettling Colonial Modernity Conference in April 2015, reflects his first attempt at mapping out the history of A Thousand and One Nights. Rasoul continues to explore the print cultures of the Nights in Anglo-American, Arabic, and Persian contexts in relation to the formation of cultures of modernity. His broader interests include studies of nation-building, print modernity, popular culture, and world literature.

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Jasna Balorda, PhD, is a lecturer in Sociology at the Department of Social Sciences, Liverpool Hope University, UK. Her field of research is focused around the complex relationships between modernity and violence, including modern genocide, colonialism and post-colonialist tendencies as well as the new totalitarianisms of modern Europe and the West. Her undergraduate and taught postgraduate degrees are in Social Psychology and Cultural studies from Roskilde University Denmark, after which she spent six years at the University Of Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, working as a research assistant at the Institute for Research of Crimes against Humanity and International Law. The results of this research were published in the book Surviving Genocide - An Analysis of Post-War Ethnic Identities of Bosnian Muslims, which was awarded for high quality innovative research by the Bosnian Ministry of Sciences and Culture. In 2009, she was also awarded the University of Leeds Research Scholarship to conduct a comparative doctoral study of the Holocaust, Bosnian and Rwandan genocides the results of which have been published in several high profile academic journals. Krista Banasiak earned an MA from the University of Toronto and is a PhD Candidate in Sociology at York University. Her dissertation examines the relationship between social structure and lived experience through an analysis of women’s stories of belly dancing, exploring themes of Orientalism, male and colonial gazes, and embodiment. Krista’s article “Dancing the East in the West: Orientalism, feminism, and belly dance” appeared in the Journal of Critical Race and Whiteness Studies’special issue on Edward Said. Her other research interests include qualitative methods, globalization, and the media. Her essay on “Violence in the media and its social consequences” was published in the edited book, Violence in Canada. Katherine Bischoping is an Associate Professor in Sociology at York University. Her research concerns the behind-the-scenes work of qualitative methods, narrative analysis of Chinese oral histories, and discourse analysis of cultural texts, from mystery novels to the book covers of sociology classics. Katherine is co-author of Analyzing Talk in the Social Sciences: Narrative, Conversation, and Discourse Strategies (Sage, 2016) and is presently co-editing a Special Issue of Oral History Forum d’histoire orale on “Generations and memory: Continuity and change.” Her co-authored article on covers of Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish appeared in the 2016 volume of The Annual Review of Interdisciplinary Justice Research

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Contributors

Ahmed El-Sayed is a PhD Fellow at the Centre for Comparative and European Constitutional Studies, University of Copenhagen, Faculty of Law. There, he also teaches courses in Public International Law to bachelor’s students. Having graduated from the Law School, Cairo University, El-Sayed started his legal career as a Public Prosecutor in 2005 in Cairo, Egypt. In 2009, he read an LL.M. in human rights at SOAS, University of London (British FCO office sponsored Chevening scholarship). In 2012, while being on a professional scholarship in Washington D.C., (U.S. Department of State sponsored Fulbright/ Hubert H. Humphrey Fellowship) he was promoted to a judge and assigned to Mansoura Court of first instance. During his stay in the D.C., he conducted two fellowships at the Federal Judicial Center and Project on Middle East Democracy respectively. Andrew Gayed is an art historian and researcher interested in photography, Middle Eastern contemporary art, identity politics, and migration/diaspora studies. Gayed is a Ph.D. candidate in Art History and Visual Culture at York University, and holds an M.A. in Art History, and a B.F.A. in Visual Arts. His research investigates Middle Eastern contemporary art, with a focus on photographic art being produced by the North American diaspora. This includes Middle Eastern artists working from Canada and the United States, creating artwork surrounding diasporic identity. Gayed’s research is located at the cutting edge of interdisciplinary and transnational inquiry in art history, gender studies, and cultural studies. Gayed has been the recipient of notable awards including the SSHRC Joseph-Armand Bombardier Doctoral Award, a SSHRC JosephArmand Bombardier Masters Award, and the Ontario Graduate Scholarship. Gayed has presented his research at keynotes and conferences internationally including lectures at UC Berkeley, Duke University and Oxford University on two occasions, in addition to presentations before Canadian audiences. Mariam Georgis is a settler and doctoral candidate in the Political Science Department at the University of Alberta, on unceded Papaschase Cree territory in Treaty Six territory. She specializes in International Relations and Comparative Politics of the Global South. Her dissertation, “Postwar Iraq: A Postcolonial, Grassroots Approach to the Crisis of Democratic Nation Building” first, examines and problematizes the Anglo-American invasion and ensuing crisis of the nation-building project in post-2003 Iraq. Second, using a critical postcolonial, history from below perspective, it explores potential alternatives to ‘democratization’ by

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emphasizing Iraqi voices and perspectives. Her research interests include, international relations theory, race and Indigeneity, critical postcolonial theories, nation building, and Middle East politics with a focus on Indigenous politics. She is the author of “(Re)inserting Race and Indigeneity in International Relations Theory: A Post-Colonial Approach” (with Nicole V.T. Lugosi). Originally an Assyrian from Iraq, she was raised on Anishinaabeg and Haudenosaunee territory. Evelyn Hamdon is a PhD candidate in the department of Educational Policy Studies at the University of Alberta and her current research on anti-oppression educational practices focuses on identity and difference as they are represented in popular culture and media, with a specific focus on Arab/Muslim women as they are represented in film. Additionally her research includes the application of this knowledge to the development of emancipatory and equitable educational practices. She is a past recipient of the Isaac Killam Scholarship as well as a past holder of a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Scholarship and the author of Islamophobia and the Question of Muslim Identity: The Politics of Difference and Solidarity (Fernwood, 2010). Felix Kalmenson is a Russian-born artist, with a practice in installation and video. His work is concerned with the mediation of histories and contemporary narratives by political, institutional and corporate bodies examining how innovations in the field of communication and technology serve to redefine publicness, sovereignty and power. Kalmenson has exhibited internationally including; ACAC (Aomori, Japan), Success (Perth), Museum Abteiberg (Germany), Minsheng Art Museum (Shanghai), AGO (Toronto), ZK/U Center for Art and Urbanistics (Berlin), Aaran Gallery (Tehran), Le Cube (Rabat), La Fabrique Culturelle des Anciens Abattoirs (Casablanca), Centro Negra (Blanca, Spain) and The New Gallery (Calgary). Kalmenson is currently on a research project through the generous support of the Chalmers Arts Fellowship in London and Beijing studying imperial gardens as sites for the representation and construction of colonial power. Azeezah Kanji received her Juris Doctor from University of Toronto’s Faculty of Law, and LLM specializing in Islamic Law from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. She serves as Director of Programming at Noor Cultural Centre, a Muslim educational and cultural institution in Toronto. Azeezah writes a regular opinion column for the Toronto Star on issues of race, gender, law, and national security;

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Contributors

her writing has also appeared in the National Post, the Ottawa Citizen, Open Democracy, and Rabble. She was the 2016 Hancock Lecturer at Hart House, University of Toronto. Ali Karimi is a Bahraini graduate of the Harvard Graduate School of Design where he received a Master in Architecture. His interests are in social housing, public space, and infrastructural re-imaginings of the Gulf countries. Ali has worked in Brussels with OFFICE KGDVS, in New York with SO-IL, Dubai with HOK, in Chile with Elemental, and attained regional experience in public and private projects through his time in Bahrain with Gulf House Engineering. Ali has also conducted research on government-built housing in the GCC with the Affordable Housing Institute in Boston as a Joint Center for Housing Studies Fellow; and in Havana with a grant from the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies. His work has been published in San Rocco, CLOG, Wallpaper Magazine and the GSD Platform Books. Duygu Gül Kaya is a PhD candidate in Sociology at York University and holds an MA from Bo÷aziçi University, Istanbul. Her research interests include memory studies, theories of transnationalism and diaspora, and debates around citizenship and belonging. She co-organized the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council-funded workshop “Violent confrontations, discursive constellations, and new aspirations: Reflections on pluralism, diaspora and transnationalism through the lens of youth formations” held in May 2012 at York University. Duygu co-edited a Special Issue for Sikh Formations: Religion, Culture, Theory (Vol 9, Issue 3, 2013), in which she co-authored the article "Violence, memory, and the dynamics of transnational youth formations.” Her book reviews have appeared in Canadian Journal of Sociology, Journal of Contemporary European Studies, Memory Studies, and on H-Memory. Her most recent article appeared in International Journal of Middle East Studies in 2015. Frederick Chando Kim is an architect and instructor based in Zurich. His professional experience includes work at agps architecture, Safdie Architects, SOM San Francisco, and Gensler Los Angeles. Frederick Kim received his Master of Architecture I from Harvard Graduate School of Design and his Bachelor of Science in Art and Design from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Frederick is currently teaching at the chair of Prof. Dr. Marc Angélil at ETHZ. He has previously taught at Boston Architectural College and has reviewed student work at the BAC, ETHZ, GSD, MIT, and WIT.

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Jonathan McCollum is currently a doctoral candidate in the Department of History at the University of California Los Angeles. His PhD dissertation, tentatively entitled “Ottomanism at War: Citizenship, Nationalism, and Minorities in the Ottoman Empire, 1911-1912,” involves the Italo-Turkish War and its regional significance in the emerging nationalisms of the Mediterranean. Jonathan’s previous Master’s research at Brigham Young University approached European fascisms in a comparative framework. His research interests include colonialism and modernity in the Mediterranean, minority politics in the late Ottoman Empire, and the confluence of warfare, humanitarian aid, and education in nation-building in the early twentieth century. Nisha Nath is a lecturer in the Department of Political Science at the University of Alberta, located on unceded Papaschase Cree Territory in Treaty Six Territory, the traditional meeting ground and home for many Indigenous Peoples, including Cree, Saulteaux, Blackfoot, Métis, and Nakota Sioux. Her current research explores links between racialization, security and dissent to understand changing citizenship practices in Canada before and after 9/11. She is also examining two state-based iterations of citizenship at The Canadian Museum of Human Rights and The Canadian Museum of Immigration at Pier 21 as a way to disrupt how the positioning of belonging and inclusion as primary goods skew how we recount citizenship histories. She is a contributing editor on the Dissent, Democracy and the Law Editorial Board for the Dissent, Democracy and Law Research Network. Her work has appeared in the Canadian Journal of Political Science and in Canadian Ethnic Studies. Ayúe Özcan is a lecturer and program coordinator of Turkish at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She earned a Ph.D. in Anthropology from Syracuse University with a dissertation focusing on how Muslim youth reconcile Islam with French secularism through the use of the mosque space in the Paris area. Her areas of specialization within anthropology are the everyday lives of Western Muslims in relation to state policies and cultural values in their respective societies, multiculturalism, youth identities and their uses of public/private spaces. She has published scholarly articles and presented papers for academic conferences. She started teaching Turkish language and culture as a Fulbright FLTA at Syracuse University. She joined the Department of Linguistics at Illinois after teaching at Columbia University as a visiting lecturer.

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Contributors

Sherene Razack is a Distinguished Professor of Critical Race, Gender and Citizenship Studies in Education at the University of Toronto, and the Penney Kanner Endowed Chair in Women’s Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. She has published widely on feminism, race, gender, settler colonialism, and imperialism. Her books include: Dying from Improvement: Inquests and Inquiries into Indigenous Deaths in Custody (University of Toronto Press, 2015); At the Limits of Justice: Women of Colour On Terror (co-edited with Suvendrini Perera) (University of Toronto Pres, 2014); States of Race: Critical Race Feminism for the 21st Century (co-editor with Malinda Smith and Sunera Thobani) (Between the Lines, 2011); Casting Out: Race and the Eviction of Muslims From Western Law and Politics (University of Toronto Press, 2008); Dark Threats and White Knights: The Somalia Affair, Peacekeeping and the New Imperialism (University of Toronto Press, 2004); Race, Space and the Law: Unmapping a White Settler Society (Between the Lines, 2002); Looking White People In the Eye: Gender, Race and Culture in Courtrooms and Classrooms (University of Toronto Press, 1998); and Canadian Feminism and the Law: The Women’s Legal Education and Action Fund and the Pursuit of Equality (Second Story Press, 1991). She is a founding member of Researchers and Academics of Colour for Equality. Siavash Saffari is an Assistant Professor of West Asian Studies, in the Department of Asian Languages and Civilizations, Seoul National University. He earned a PhD in Political Science from the University of Alberta, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship at Columbia University. His research interests include Middle Eastern and Islamic politics, modern Islamic political thought, modern Iranian social and intellectual history, modernity/coloniality/decoloniality, and development/postdevelopment. His publications have appeared in several peer-reviewed journals and edited volumes. He is the author of Beyond Shariati: Modernity, Cosmopolitanism, and Islam in Iranian Political Thought (Cambridge University Press, 2017).

INDEX

‘Abbas Mirza, 163 Aboriginal peoples, 14-15, 17 Afary, Janet, 6 Afghanistan, xii, 13, 16, 249 Agamben, Giorgio, 260, 268-270 Age of apology, the, 14 Ahmed, Misbahuddin, 246 Akitu, 80 Akkadian, 74,80 Al Qaeda, 11, 16, 196 Alexander, Chris 241, 260 Alf-a leyla va leyla, 162 Alizadeh, Hiva Mohammad, 246 Alternative epistemologies, 288, 297 Amara, Zakaria, 246 Anfal Campaign, 72, 81 Ansari, Asad, 246 Anti-Jacobins, 168 Anti-Muslim feelings, 290 mindsets, 301 Orientalism, 238 prejudice, 278 racism, x-xii, 261 sentiments, 16, 22, 289 violence, 19, 22 Anti-Semitism, 8, 193, 204 Appellation issue, 73-74 Appropriation, xi, 73, 78, 80-81, 106, 112, 125, 172 Arab African, 203 citizens of the United States, 236 culture, 150-151 intellectuals, 172 Moors, 135, 193 nationalism, 20, 52, 68, 77-79,

181 people, 55-56, 59-61, 70, 76, 79-80, 83, 135-136, 144145, 150, 152, 203, 248, 278 secularists, 176 states, 70, 88 world, 21, 73, 78, 81, 143, 176177, 187 Arabic, 28, 31, 33, 38, 114, 141142, 157, 159-160, 162-167 Arabization, 69, 78-80 Arar, Maher, 16-17, 233, 240 Architectural practice, 20, 88, 90, 98-99 Architecture, 89-91, 93, 99, 105, 111, 115, 158, 197 Armstrong, Karen, 6 Art, 12, 20-21, 112, 123-127, 136137, 140-141, 144-146, 148152, 161, 193, 200, 221 Asad, Talal, 215-216 Assimilation, 46, 69-70, 73, 80, 83, 199, 216-217, 238 Assyrians, 19-20, 67-83 Australia, x, 70-71, 74, 290 Autonomy human (personal), 12, 179, 214, 222-226, 243 political, 32-33, 35, 89, 93-94, 97-98, 297, Bahman Mirza, 159, 163 Babylonians, 74, 79-80 Babylon Festival, 80 Bacon, Francis, 8 Bahramitash, Roksana, 290-291 Bahrain, 6, 20, 88-94, 96, 98-100 Bailey, Allison, 294-297 Balibar, Etinne, 18 Belonging, 30, 33-34, 42, 44, 68,

312 150, 197, 236-237, 268, 274275, 282 Benjamin, Walter, 234, 300 Benjaminiam historical materialism, 300, 301 Bill C-51, 137, 299 Binbir Gece, 165 Biological racism, xii, 289 Bonaparte, Napoléon, 3, 19, 28-29 Book covers, 21 Book design, 21 Book history, 160 Bosnia, 192, 195-202, 204-206 Bosnian Church, 195 Empire, 195 War, 192, 202-203, 205 Brankoviü, Vuk, 200 Brooks, Geraldine, 290-291 Brown, Wendy, 243, 299-301 Bulaq (edition/press), 161, 163 Caliph, 35, 37, 42-44, 46, 61 Canada Canadian Race Relations, 1415, 233-235, 248, 269, 282, 292 Canadian School, 269 Charter of Rights and Freedoms, 136, 262, 267 Indian Residential Schools, 14 missing and murdered Indigenous women, 15, 249250 Native Women's Association of Canada, 15 Public Safety Canada, 245, 255, Royal Canadian Mounted Police, 15, 245-246 Strengthening Canadian Citizenship Act, 22, 232-234, 238-241, 244, 246, 251 Truth and Reconciliation Commission, xi, 14 Zero Tolerance for Barbaric Cultural Practices Act, 22

Index 232-234, 238, 241, 244, 249 251, 259 Capitalism, 3, 5, 8 Caribbean, x, 10 Casablanca, 105-107, 109, 111, 113, 115, 118-119 Chaldean, 73-74, 76 Chemical weapons, 81 Christendom, 192-194, 203, 206 Christians, 29, 73, 76, 107, 180, 193, 201, 205 Christo-Slavism, 201 Citizenship citizenship-stripping, 232-233, 239-242, 246 regulation, 260, 269, 273, 275, 282 dissident, 268, 275-276 City construction, 91-93, 95-97, 99 re-making, 118 Clash of civilizations, xi, 241-242 Cognitive revisionist program, 295 Cole, Juan, 6, 42 Collectivism, 10, 69, 73, 182, 222, 273, 282, 299-301 College of Fort William of the East India Company, 166 Colonial histories, 15, 119 law, 17 legacies, 18, 106 modernity. See modernity Colonialism, 18-20, 22, 50, 53, 64, 68, 70-71, 141-142, 144, 147, 157, 163, 187, 207, 232, 234, 237, 243-245, 250 Coloniality, 2, 4, 5, 10-12, 20, 76, 109, 141 Colonization of the Americas, 4-5 Comparative analysis, 21 Conquest 5, 19, 39, 55-57, 64, 7071, 73, 195, 206 Consultants, 90, 93-96, 98 Corradini, Enrico, 51-57, 61, 63-64 Critical regionalism, 156, 158

Unsettling Colonial Modernity in Islamicate Contexts Critical theory, 12, 299, 300 Cuius Regio Eius Religio, 199, 208 Cultural particularism, 9-10 Cyrenaica, 51, 53-54, 56-58, 60-63 Dabashi, Hamid, 7, 157 Day, Iyko, 18 Decentralised despotism, 196 Decolonization, 2, 11, 13, 17, 88, 106 Deir Yassin, 78, Denationalization, 232, 246 Dependency theory, 5, 8 Descartes, Rene, 8 Dhamoon, Rita, 23, 260, 268, 274, 276, 280 Dialogue, 2, 9, 106, 119, 124, 140, 207, 215, 279-281 Diaspora, 23, 64, 140, 143-144, 146, 148-152, 289, 291, 293, 297-99, 301 Dispossession, 70-71, 78, 235, 243 Disenchantment, 6, 184 Dissent, 11, 30, 115-116, 118, 268, 276, 278, 282 Diversity management, 262, 282 Divide et Impera, 196 Doha, 95 Dossa, Parin, 288, 297-99, 301 Douglass, Frederick, 296 Dua, Enakshi, 17 Dubai, 90, 96-98, 100 Dussel, Enrique, 4, 5 Ecochard, Michel, 107, 111 Egypt, 3-4, 11, 21, 28-30, 32-38, 40-46, 53, 57, 60, 64, 91, 123124, 135, 142, 146, 148, 152, 158-160, 163-164, 166, 179180, 186, 233, 278 Einaudi, Luigi, 54 Ellison, Ralph, 295 Embourgeoisement, 168 Enlightenment, the, 2-3, 6, 8-9, 12, 133, 136, 215 Enframing, 105, 118 Enver Pasha, Ismail, 51, 52 Epistemologies of ignorance, 288,

313

294, 295, 301, Epistemic violence, 9, 82 Eurasia, 6, 9 Eurocentrism, 2, 4, 9, 10, 12-13, 21, 106, 140, 157, 185 Euro-Persianist, 158, Europe, 2-6, 8-9, 11-13, 29, 33, 35, 37, 43, 50, 57, 62-63, 70, 74, 99, 125, 140-141, 150, 164, 177178, 182, 185, 192-99, 202-203, 205-208, 213, 245, 289 Exile, 143, 152, 179, 181-182, 184 Fanon, Frantz, xii, 12 Farahani, Qa’em Maqam, 159 Feudalism, 186 Fezzan, 53 Forced marriage, 232-233, 241-242, 247, 259 First World War, 52, 67, 73, 76-77 France, 22, 54-55, 57, 193, 211-213, 216-222, 225, 228-229, 266 French, 3, 22, 28-29, 39, 53, 55, 62, 64, 106-107, 111-112, 116, 126, 130, 164, 168, 197, 211-214, 216-229, 235, 266, 292 Freud, Sigmund, 7, 8, 142 Fundamentalism, 11, 176, 274 Gaddafi, Muammar, 53 Galland, Antoine, 164 Gay, 142-143, 145, 147-152 Gaya, Saad, 246 Gaze colonial, 19-21, 191 on Muslims, xii, 122, 293, 299, 301 Gellner, Ernest, 49 Genocide, 22, 69-70, 75, 78, 81-82, 192, 195, 200-201, 203, 208, 237-238, 244-245, 247, 251 Giddens, Anthony, 3-4 Giolitti, Giovanni, 54, 57-59 Global capitalist system, 6 East, 21, 128, 150-151, 173, 197, 297 North, 12, 114, 297

314 South, 114, 297 West, 297 Globalization, 1, 10 Goldberg, David Theo, 260, 268270 Golden Horde, 193 Goldmann, Lucien, 183 Guantanamo, xii, 233 Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), 90, 92-93 Habermas, Jürgen, 2-4 Habl al-Matin, 167 Harper, Stephan, 14, 16 Headscarf, 211-212, 215, 224 Hedayat, Sadeq, 156 Hegemony, 5, 9, 35, 41-43, 50, 64, 194, 207, 276 Hekmat, ‘Ali Asghar, 162-163 Hersi, Mohamed, 246 Hérouxville, 263, 273, 279 Historical memory, 81, 118 Homelands, 70-72, 74, 79, 151 Homocolonialism, 141, 147 Homoerotic, 142, 144-146, 148 Homosexuality, 140-141, 143-144, 148, 150, 152 Homosocial, 142-143, 145, 147-148 Honour killing, 232-233, 248-249 Hoodfar, Homa, 291-292 Iberian Peninsula, 193 Identity cultural, 79, 151, 178, 181, 183 Muslim/Islamic. See Muslim national, 20, 30, 38, 5, 68, 7779, 81, 133, 142, 235-236, 250, 280 sexual, 144-150 Idris I, King of Libya, 64 Ihsan al-Akhbar va Tuhfat alAkhyar, 167 Illiberal liberalism, 234, 242-243 Imperialism, 9-11, 50, 55, 141, 151, 152, 157, 205 Inclusion politics, 276 India, 11, 21, 43, 89, 91, 96, 158, 160, 166-167, 197

Index Indigenous genocide, 238, 244-245, 247, 251 inhabitants, 64, 69-70 land, 235, 244 peoples, xi-xii, 14-15, 18, 71, 81-82 populations, 14-15, 73, 80 sovereignty, xi, 247 studies, 17 territory, 13 women, 15, 250 Indirect rule, 181, 195-196 Indirect-rule Africa, 17 Individualism, 223 Industrialization, 3 Interculturalism, 262-263, 282 International Colonial Modern, 107 Iraq Anglo-American occupation, 77 Ba’thification, 80 Ba’ath regime, 80-82 British mandate, 69, 76, 78 sectarianization of, 73, 77 Iraqi Studies, 69, 73-77, 82, 85 Iran borders, 75 Constitutional Revolution, 6, 23, 166-167, 174-175 Islamist regime in, 11 Modernization of, 4, 166 peripherization of, 6 Irony, 15, 124-126, 138 Islam, xxi, 13, 22, 29, 43, 60, 172, 175-176, 193-196, 198-201, 205. 207-208, 211-213, 215217, 219-222, 225-229, 290-292 Islamic Caliphate, 42-44 civilization, 174, 176, 221 classical Islamic reformism, 176 conquerors, 193, 195 discourse, 61 history, 175 humanism, 175 liberalism, 176-177

Unsettling Colonial Modernity in Islamicate Contexts literature, 142, 147 otherness, 193, 207-208 reform, 11, 176 societies, 142 State (ISIS), 11 traditions, 1, 41, 215 Ummah, 45 Islamicate, x-xi, 1-5, 7, 9, 11- 12, 16, 18-19, 21, 23, 123, 127, 130, 133, 136, 142-143, 148, 153154, 288-294, 297, 299, 301 Islamophobia, xi, 8, 11, 13, 23, 150, 192-196, 198, 207- 209, 238, 253, 288-291, 293-294, 297, 299, 301 Italo-Turkish War, 19, 49-53, 58, 64, 66, 309 Italy, 50-55, 61, 64-66 Jacobite, 73 Jamalzadeh, Mohammad ‘Ali, 156 Jewish (Jews), 37, 70, 76, 107, 193194, 203-204, 263, 266, 289 Khadr, Omar, xii, 233, 257 Karadžiü, Radovan, 202 Karadžiü, Vuk, 200 Kenney, Jason, 239, 266 Khalid, Saad, 246 Knowledge production, 9, 82 Krause, Gottlob Adolf, 59, 66 Kurds, 70-71, 74-76, 79-86 Kuwait, 20, 88-94, 96, 98, 100 Lahore, 166 Laïcité, 22, 211-214, 216- 217, 219221, 223, 225- 229 Land appropriation, 81 Late modern history, 301 Lawrance, Bonita, 17 Leadership, 40-41, 73, 213, 226, 228, 230, Liberal differentiated citizenship, 261, 282 theories of differentiated citizenship, 269, 272-273, 276, 279 Liberalism, 33, 47, 77, 83, 114, 120,

315

176-177, 188, 202, 223, 229, 234, 242-244, 253-261, 270 Libya, 19, 49-54, 57, 60-66 Limpieza de Sangre, 194 Linguistic, 20-21, 31, 68, 73, 81, 142, 157, 159, 160, 164, 309 Literariness, 156, 159, 161, 167-168 Literary history, 156, 158, 161-162, 169 modernity, 21, 156-164, 170 modernization, 167-168 Local, 9-11, 41-42, 58-62, 80, 89, 92-94, 104, 106-107, 111-113, 119, 142-152, 158-159, 177187, 192, 195-203, 207, 213, 220-221, 250, 253, 269, 304 Locke, John, 243 Logic of elimination, 70 Lugones, Maria, 294, 296 Maalouf, Amin, 21, 172, 174, 177 Maghreb, 174 Makdisi, Ussama, 62, 66, 180, 187 Malkom Khan, Mirza, 166 Mamdani, Mahmood, 10, 17, 24, 67, 85, 168, 209 Manama, 91-92, 100 Maraghei, Hajj Zayn al-‘Abedin, 166 Marginalization, 235, 272, 292-293, 298 Masculinity, 21, 135, 143, 145-148, 152, 246, 249 Mashriq, 174-175, Mass executions, 81 Mechanisms of erasure, 72 Meer, Nasar, 289 Mental illness, 298 Mesopotamia, 70, 74-76, 78, 81 Mesopotamians, 69, 78, 80-81 Middle East, 1,3, 6, 19, 21, 25, 28, 29, 33-34, 39, 43, 46-48, 51, 6571, 74-76, 81-89, 94-96, 100101, 114, 117-120, 141, 147, 150-155, 159-164, 187-188, 196, 240, 247, 257, 306-308 Mignolo, Walter, 4, 141

316 Migration, xii, 14, 50-51, 65, 114, 143-144, 153, 182, 205, 234236, 242, 251, 255-256, 298, 302-306, 309 Mills, Charles, 244, 255, 294-295 Modernity alternative modernity(ies), 2,7 and Islam, 1, 175 capitalist, 5-6, 96 colonial, xii, 1- 6, 17- 19, 67, 73, 83, 109, 141, 143, 158 European, 7-9, 12, 21, 156, 197, 199, 20-208 indigenous modernity(ies), 2, 9, 11, 13 multiple modernities, 2, 7, 9, 140 Western, 21, 140-142, 145, 148, 152 Modernity/Coloniality/ Decoloniality 4, 21, 24, 140142, 148, 154 Modernism, 93, 99, 140, 177, 217, 303-304 Modernization, 3-5, 11, 13, 19, 21, 28, 46, 75, 88-93, 96-100, 105, 133, 136, 163, 165-168, 174, 180-183, 187 Mosque, 22, 211, 213-222, 225-229, 309 Mosul Festivals, 80 Mountain Wreath, the, 201, 206 Mughal Empire, 3, 6 Muhammad Ali Pasha, 4, 19 Multani, 262, 286 Multiculturalism, 22-23, 217, 230, 235-239, 249, 256, 262-263, 270, 273-274, 282, 284, 287, 309 Muslim identity, x, 44, 221, 292 leaders, 22, 211-215, 217, 219, 266, 287 other, xii, 19, 191, 197, 199, 208 women, x, 198, 205, 233, 237,

Index 247-251, 255, 260-266, 268-270, 272-279, 281-285, 287, 290-293, 298-299, 302, 307 Muslim-majority societies, 1-2, 13, 16, 17, 22, 304 Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, 4 Myth of Kosovo Polje, 199 Myth-making, 72, 83 Nahda, 44, 48, 163 Naser al-Din Shah, 4, 160 Nafisi, Azar, 290-291 Nation-building, 19, 68-70, 72, 7778, 80, 88, 99, 241, 252, 295, 304, 306, 309 Nation-state, 3-4, 19-20, 27, 43, 4547, 52, 59, 64, 67-69, 75, 158, 182, 194-195, 199, 207, 213, 215, 235, 245, 304 Native-settler dichotomy, 17 Nativism, xi, 9, 10-12, 23 Nature, x, xi, 8-9, 12 Nazif, Ahmet, 168 Neocolonialism, 8, 151, 187 Neoliberal age, 17-18 Neoliberalism, 77, 83, 114, 120, 202, 303 Nestorians, 76 New Zealand, 68, 70-71, 84 Nitti, Francesco Saverio, 54 Non-Aboriginal peoples, 15 Non-liberal forms of resistance, 296 subjectivities, 297, 299 North America, xii, 2, 11-14, 16, 19, 68, 70-71, 86, 143-144, 149151, 238, 244-245, 248, 268, 286, 290, 292, 302, 304, 306 North Africa, 1-2, 6, 19, 50-52, 5456, 58, 65, 105-107, 114-115, 117, 128, 154, 222, 266 Obiliü, Miloš, 200 Oil economy, 81, 89-90, 93, 95-96, 143, 247 town, 88, 92, 98

Unsettling Colonial Modernity in Islamicate Contexts Orgad, Liav, 234, 242-243, 255 Orientalism, 20-22, 62, 122-139, 150, 154, 192-193, 197-198, 205, 210, 232, 234, 238, 244245, 247-249, 251, 254, 256, 290, 302, 305 Othering, 13, 22, 192, 206 Ottoman, Bosnia, 196-206, 209-210 Caliph, 35, 37, 41-46, 61 empire, 5, 9, 19-21, 28, 31, 3334, 37, 46, 48, 51, 54, 56, 60, 65, 71, 75, 83, 87, 135, 157-158, 160, 164, 166, 195-198, 203 Orientalism, 62, 66, 136, 138 Porte, 29, 34, 37, 41, 45 Ottomanism, 50-51, 61, 65-66, 309 Pahlavi, 4 Pakistan, xii, xiii, 11, 91, 96, 123, 166, 170 Pan-Arabism, 68, 78-79 Paris, 41, 131, 138, 141, 145-149, 152, 206, 211, 218, 221, 226, 230, 309 Particularism, 9-12, 176, 182 Petar Petroviü Njegoš, 201 Persian Gulf, 6, 88-89, 92, 100, 266 literary humanism, 7, 24, 157, 160, 163, 169 literature, 156-158, 161-163, 168-171 Persianate, 7, 25 Persianist, 156 Photography, 21, 127, 144, 145, 148, 150 Plan Dalet, 78 Plavšiü, Biljana, 203 Political exceptionalism, 18 Political time, 299 Politics of hygiene, 105-109 Polygamy, 193, 232-233, 241, 247248, 259 Popular literature167-168, 170 Portuguese empire, 6

317

Postcolonial theory, 9, 12, 303 Prince Lazar, 199-200 Print culture, 21, 156-161, 163, 167, 304 Private, 58, 90, 93-94, 100, 116, 146, 213-219, 225-229,240, 244, 251, 262-263, 267, 271, 286, 290-291, 308-309 Procrustean bed, 7, 9 Progress, 11, 19-20, 51, 60-63, 79, 88, 90-93, 95, 98-100, 104, 106, 109, 116, 118-119, 136, 140, 163, 174-175, 178, 180, 182, 206, 213, 218, 227, 269, 273, 299-301 Prophet Muhammad, 42-43, 93, 223 Provocation defence, 244, 249 Public, xii, 20, 35, 38, 41-52, 50, 60, 71-72, 83, 85, 91-95, 99-100, 107-111, 114, 118, 131, 142146, 153, 162, 166, 168-170, 197, 212-226, 228-231 Qajar, 3-6, 156, 160-161, 165-171 Qatar, 20, 88-100 Québec, 260-286, 291-292 Queer, 21, 140, 144, 147-149, 152153, 250, 256, Racial contract, 294-295, 302 state, 268-271, 282, 284 Racialization, 14, 18, 207, 234, 245, 247, 260, 268-269, 282, 289, 303, 309 Racialized groups, 14, 18 Radicalization, xii, 63, 245, 255 Razack, Sherene, x, xii, 68-71, 86, 233, 236-237, 255, 310 Reading public, 162, 168-169, 260-263, 266-267, 271-272, 277-282, 284, 286 Reconciliatory gestures, 15 Redress, 14 Reductionist political identity, 18 binaries, 1, 12, 18, 137, 224 Regional hegemon, 81

318 Regulated inclusion, 260, 268, 276277, 280-282, 284 Religion, xii, 22, 28-30, 45, 61, 63, 71, 74, 151, 160-161, 165-166, 171, 173, 188, 193-195, 199203, 205, 207-210, 212-226, 229-230, 234, 238, 252, 254, 264, 266, 267-268, 274, 277278, 286-290, 292, 308 Religious minority, 69, 75-76, 289, 302 Republican, 130, 211-214, 217, 220, 222-229 Resistance, 2, 11, 13-14, 19, 40, 51, 58, 106, 111, 115, 247, 278, 281, 288, 292-298, 301 Rock of Tanios, 21, 172, 177, 180 Roy, Rom Mohan, 167 Russo-Persian wars, 3 Sabaean, 76 Said, Edward W., 10, 20-21, 122, 129 Sanusiyya, 60-62 Scientific racism, 198, 203 Secular, 22, 125, 161, 173, 176, 180, 204, 211-222, 224-225, 228-229, 264, 278 Secularism, 176, 211-217, 219, 222, 224-225, 228-229, 264 Securitization, xi, 260, 268, 270, 274, 282 Security, xii, 13, 107, 117, 137, 233, 240, 247 Sepahsalar, Mirza Hosein Khan, 165 September 11, 2001, x, 150, 236, 245, 247, 260-262, 266, 268, 275, 282 Service de L’Urbanisme, 107-108, 111 Settler colonialism, xi, 13, 18, 22, 53, 71, 232, 234, 243-245 Sexuality, 21, 140, 141-152, 205, 238 Sharma, Nandita, 17 Shi’a (Shiite), 70, 76, 82-83

Index Shirazi, Mirza Mohammad Ali, 167 Shirwani al-Yamani, Shaykh Ahmad, 166 Sikh, x, 263, 289 Simele Massacre, 78-79 Sindbad tales, 165 Siyahatname-ye Ebrahim Beig, 166 Slavic Muslims, 197, 200-205, 207208 Smith, Andrea, 237, 250 Social contract theory, 222, 295 Solidarity, xi, xii, 14-18, 187, 218, 227, South Asia, 1, 6, 247 Sovereignty, xi, 45, 70, 247, 263, 266 Space, 1, 6, 17-20, 22, 49-53, 57, 62-64, 91-92, 105-109, 112, 115, 126, 128, 141, 211, 213214, 217-219, 226, 228-229, 242, 250, 263, 269, 272, 281282, 298 Sparks, Holloway, 260, 276 Speculative Capital, 88, 96, 99 State apologies, 13-17, 182 State-building, 64, 68, 78, 90, 98 State of exception, 268-269 Story-telling, 298-299 Strategic ignorance, 296-297 Subaltern, 22, 68, 192 Subrahmanyam, Sanjay, 6 Sullivan, Shannon, 294-295 Sultan Abdülmecid I, 4 Sultan Murat, 200, 206 Sunni, 76, 82-83 Sykes-Picot Agreement, 67 Syria, 3, 16, 74, 80, 124, 142, 163, 180, 233, Syriac, 73-74, 76 Tabriz, 159-160, 163 Tanzimat, 4, 164-165, 187 Tasuji, ‘Abdollatif, 159 Tavakoli-Targhi, Mohamad, 7 Tehran, 160, 290 Territory, 13, 34, 49-50, 52-53, 56-

Unsettling Colonial Modernity in Islamicate Contexts 57, 60-61, 63-64, 68, 71-72, 83, 193, 197, 199, 202, 205, 206 Terrorism, xii, 22, 150, 206, 211212, 232-234, 239-240, 245247, 250 Third World, the, 10 Thobani, Sunera, 68, 235 Thousand and One Nights, the (Nights), 21, 156, 158-159, 161, 163-165, 167, 169 Toledo laws, 194 Tolerance, 22, 141, 203, 232-234, 237-238, 241, 244, 248-249, 251, 259, 262, 271-272, 280 Toronto 18, the, 246 Tradition, 1, 7, 9, 11-12, 41-42, 45, 55-56, 72, 74-75, 82, 89, 109, 128, 145-146, 149, 156-157, 159, 161-162, 165, 176-179, 182-187, 193, 196-198, 203206, 212-213, 215, 217, 222, 229, 237 Tragic Vision, 183 Treaty of Lausanne, 68 Treaty of Sèvres, 68 Tripoli, 53-60 Tuana, Nancy, 294 Turkifiers, 201, 207 Turkey, 4, 50, 59, 69, 73-76, 123, 130-132, 135-136, 143, 145, 197, 201 Turkmen, 76 Ulama, 28-29, 41, 43 Unimagined, 81 United Arab Emirates, 20, 88-89, 91, 94, 97 Universal, 3, 10, 111, 157, 179-181, 185, 214-215, 220, 235-236, 244, 270 Universalism, 3, 214-215, 235-236, 244, 261, 270 University of Alberta, 13 Untimeliness, 299-300 Urbanism, 106-108, 111 Urbanization, 3, 95, 140 Vernacular planning, 91, 111-112,

319

158-160, 165-166 Violence, xii, 8-9, 11, 13-17, 19, 22, 68, 70, 73, 82, 151, 192, 194, 232-234, 240-241, 243-245, 247-250, 259 Volpp, Leti, 236, 248 War on Terror, xi, 13, 16-17, 233, 236-238, 242, 246, 290-291 Western -educated elites, 4 -Oriental dichotomy, 123, 130, 133, 135, 144, 288, 297 academy, 1 capitalism, 186 Christianity, 195, civilization, 141, 174, 219 exceptionalism, 147, 152 hegemony, 9, 207 imperialism, 152 lifestyle, 92, 219 literature, 156-158, 162, 193 markets, 6 modernity. See also Modernity, 21, 140-142, 145, 148, 177 multiculturalism, 15, 23, 288289, 293, 295, 297 powers, 67, 125, 130, 180 queerness, 144, 147-152 secularism, 176, 214-215 women, 274 world, 212, 219 Westerncentrism, 11 Westphalian state system, 67 White America, 249 Christianity, 192, 194, 199, 207208, 270 hegemony, 194 ignorance, 288, 294-297, 301 innocence , xii, 234, 243 man’s burden, 98, 108-109, 199, 207, men, x, 235, 249 Muslims, 207 privilege, 118, 237, 290-291, 294, 297

320 settler colonial society, xi, 13, 234, 297-298 skin, 20, 108, supremacy, 15, 18, 23, 234-235, 237-238, 245, 251, 288-289, 290-295, 298, 301 women, 290-291 Whiteness, xi, 109, 235 World system, 5-6, 195

Index Worldview, 173, 178, 178-180, 197, 212 Wright, Cynthia, 17 Yazidis, 70 Young leaders, 22, 213-214, 218 Young Turks, 75 Youth, 135, 212-214, 218-220, 225228 Zone sanitaire, 107, 111-112