Against Islamic exceptionalism

A friend emails me an article, which quotes Newsweek Editor, Fareed Zakaria, justifying the Yale University press decision to drop images of the controversial cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad from a book The Cartoons That Shook the World by Brandeis University professor Jytte Klausen. Zakaria, who is on Yale's board, advised the university that dropping the cartoons would be the expedient thing to do, since publishing the cartoons would provoke violence across the so-called Muslim world. Here is the article, "Yale criticized for nixing Muslim cartoons in book", which will allow you to read Zakaria's contorted apologetics.

Zakaria's argument is absolute nonsense. It is symptomatic of an exceptionalism about representing Islam that has steadily become a kind of common sense and received wisdom among many self-identified liberals and moderates. It is the same hypocrisy that I have witnessed, heard and read among many scholars and activists engaged with various aspects of the lives of Muslim communities-- that an essentialist 'Islamic' framework, other than the 'Western,' should apply to the portrayal of Islam, that the depiction of Islam should follow the standards 'internal' to the Islamic tradition (which, unfortunately, de facto winds up being synonymous with the most conservative interpretations of that tradition), and that in the name of 'complexity' and 'context', exceptions for Islam are justified. What about the fact that there are many in the so-called Islamic world who would support the publication of the cartoons? Do their opinions not matter because Zakaria & Co. think they are a numerical and ideological minority? How about siding with Irshad Manji or Reza Aslan? They too are Muslims.

And Zakaria's worry about violence will be familiar to those who have encountered similar arguments in the South Asian context. The same logic was invoked by the Indian state --- and by Indian intellectuals and public figures--- in calling for a ban on Rushdie's Satanic Verses. Salil Tripathi informs me that Fareed Zakaria's father, Rafiq Zakaria, had supported a pre-emptive ban on the book. Khushwant Singh and Asghar Ali Engineer were other notable figures who had taken the same stand.

That ban did not stop violence, did not necessarily increase the trust India's Muslim minorities placed in the state, and wound up dramatically increasing support for the claim of the Hindu Right that the Indian state meted out special treatment to pampered Muslim minorities. It also led to a chain of events that culminated in the destruction of the Babri Masjid and horrific Hindu-Muslim riots.

I am very well aware of the fact that those with antipathy to Islam and Muslims cynically and routinely invoke arguments about the supposedly 'Western' values of freedom of expression, human rights, equality, etc., to insist that Islam is incompatible with these values and that Muslims must be disciplined at gunpoint into accepting and practicing these values. But the fear that a certain political stance will feed the cause of Islamophobes cannot itself become the ground for treating Islam as a special case.

Compared to the irreverent, critical, and satirical representations of what is considered sacred in Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism or other religious and cultural traditions in academic work or mainstream media in the US, the representation of what is considered sacred in Islam has increasingly got a free pass. An example: the Comedy Central channel refused to depict the Prophet Muhammad in the equal-opportunity offending show South Park, in opposition to the show creators' insistence that they should. Kenan Malik has described this kind of chilling effect as the global legacy of the Rushdie affair (more on his website here).

This claim, I would argue, is defensible even taking into account the Hindu nationalist attacks on scholars of Hinduism. It holds, even as, paradoxically, there has been a spate of right-wing books about the supposed Muslim menace to the West (those books deal with Muslim populations, not necessarily with the realm of what is considered to be sacred in Islam). Ironically, those books deserve protest, in the form of peaceful and rigorous critique, much more than do the cartoons. The claim holds even taking into account cheap stereotypes of Muslims as terrorists and the like. The far-right depictions of Islam are no doubt vile but in this Islam is not alone. Judaism, Hinduism, or even certain denomination of Christianity come in for the same treatment.

Notwithstanding the fact that there have been conservative backlashes and reactions to representations of various other traditions by some of their adherents, there is a different and more lax standard that seems to hold for Islam. In the realm of academic work, for instance, there is a vast amount of material on the constructedness of the sacred for Christianity- the fact that figures to whom divinity was ascribed were human, historical figures; the fact that what is claimed to be original by a faith is often borrowed or adapted from another faith. Similar analyses-- that might be considered radically subversive or heretical-- seem conspicuously absent in the case of Islam. Compared to the vast amount of work on the sexuality of figures associated with Christianity, or a relatively moderate amount on Hinduism, there is simply not as much on Islam. My hunch is that scholars and presses are simply reluctant to explore these areas because of fear of violence, and, possibly, because of the fear that they will feed right-wing populist stereotypes of Islam. A third reason may be that some scholars are reticent to antagonize governments and institutions of so-called Islamic countries with whom they work in partnership or on who they rely on for access to archives.

Islam is entitled to the same respect as any other religious or secular cultural or religious tradition, when it comes to the issue of the representation of the faith. But there is no reason why it is entitled to special treatment. On the Yale decision, the conservatives, including John Bolton and David Frum, who signed a letter of protest to the press, are in the right. Zakaria is wrong.