Language Matters: a post-election Re-reading of Islamist Political Thought

Language Matters:

A Post-election Re-reading of Islamist Political Thought

Roxanne L. Euben

Mildred Lane Kemper Professor of Political Science

Wellesley College

Working Draft

Please do not cite or quote without permission of author

Barack Obama’s post-election rhetoric regarding the “Muslim world” has signaled a critical paradigm shift from his predecessor. The new president’s characterization of the United States in his inaugural address as a “nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus and non-believers”; his formulation, invoked in several different contexts, that America will offer a hand of friendship to a Muslim world willing to “unclench [its] fist”; the emphasis on his own mixed lineage and experience living in Muslim countries; his pledge to close the Guantánamo Bay prison camp; his interview with Al Arabiya; and the promise to address the Muslim world from a Muslim capital during his first 100 days in office, all suggest a deliberate attempt to shift away from the hardening rhetoric of a new Cold War between the West and Islam and reframe American foreign policy toward Muslim societies.¹ Obama’s rhetoric has enormous symbolic importance even if it has yet to issue in dramatic departures from previous U.S. foreign policies regarding, for example, Hamas or Iran’s nuclear program. At this particular juncture, its significance lies less in the specific policies it may presage or the greater sensitivity to Muslim sensibilities it reveals than in its underlying logic: implicit in these rhetorical gestures is the understanding that, as Obama put it in his interview with Al Arabiya, “the language we use matters,” that words and categories do not simply reflect but also create the world in which we live.

There is perhaps no better illustration of this point than the Manichean worldview Obama’s rhetoric aims to displace, one in which oppositions between us and them, democratic and antidemocratic, tolerant and intolerant, egalitarian and patriarchal are grafted onto a civilizational divide between the West and Islam. Paradoxically, the paradigm of “Islam versus the West” is endorsed and reinforced by those who inject radically different content into each of the opposing terms, from Islamists who see themselves as the forces of light against infidel darkness, to patriots who depict America as God’s bulwark against encroaching heathendom, to proponents of the “clash of civilizations” thesis who posit a future riven into two clearly delineated and constitutively antagonistic cultural traditions (Mahbubani 1992; Huntington 1993, 1996). As this worldview has proliferated and congealed in recent years, it has become increasingly difficult to recognize, let alone make sense of, the wealth of information that challenges or disrupts it. In this way, the very opposition between Islam and the West becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, presuming and reinforcing a view of the world in which contradictory, multiple and cross-pollinating histories and identities are pressed into the service of neat binaries that distort rather than illuminate the political landscape ( R. Euben 2002a).

Social theorists, philosophers, translators and linguists have long emphasized the power of language to produce as well as describe human beings’ understandings of the world. By contrast, the polarities that have governed much of popular, policy and even scholarly discourse about Islamism have implicitly or explicitly resisted this very possibility, as has a great deal of Islamist and Muslim discourse about the West. At a moment when a new American president is calling into question many of the shibboleths of the Bush Administration and much seems possible that did not before, it is increasingly critical to ask: what would it mean to take seriously Obama’s argument about the constitutive power of language in our ongoing attempts to name, define, understand and engage Islamism politically? What are the appropriate terminologies, distinctions and methods that enable the complexities and paradoxes of Islamist politics to come into view? How might such an endeavor productively unsettle the Manichean division between Islam and the West, along with the political certainties such categories simultaneously posit and reinforce?

In this paper, I offer necessarily abbreviated and provisional answers to these questions. I do not do so, however, as a prelude to providing policy recommendations or analysis of the factors that inhibit or accelerate the transformation of American foreign policy ideas. My approach is different and my focus is elsewhere. In contrast to the largely positivist scholarship on the subject, a critical premise of the following discussion is that the terminology of “Islam versus the West,” along with homogenizing characterizations of Islamist politics and reductionist Islamist rhetoric regarding the nature and intent of the West, are not just assertions about the world but constitute complex systems of representation. Such systems articulate and define a range of categories and norms; organize human experience into narratives that assemble past, present and future into a compelling interpretive frame; specify the range and meaning of acceptable and desirable practices; and posit identities to which people feel an intense loyalty despite persistent disagreements about the precise object of such allegiance.

In Wittgenstein’s (1980, 64e) language, the grammar of these systems is “really a way of living, or of assessing one’s life...it’s passionately seizing hold of this interpretation.” So understood, the purchase and resilience of such systems depend less upon the strategic advantage they are thought to facilitate or the political interests they express than on the deeply human desire to make sense of the world and locate oneself within a rapidly shifting geo-political landscape. Expressed in and reinforced by the daily linguistic practices of ordinary people as well as pundits and policymakers, this grammar often resists argumentation and counter-evidence because “[w]hat stands fast does so, not because it is intrinsically obvious or convincing; it is rather held fast by what lies around it”(Wittgenstein 1969, §144). What this means is that efforts to understand and engage Islamism politically cannot simply dispense with such grammar by reference to all that it misses, distorts and excludes. Practices, commitments and policies embedded within these systems of representation are not relinquished by piling on contradictory evidence but rather, in Linda Zerilli’s (1998, 449) words, by “coming to see differently what has been there all along.”

Toward this end, in the following pages, I first navigate through increasingly confusing matters of terminology and definition. I then go on to argue that careful consideration of the heterogeneity of Islamist arguments shows that Islamists cannot simply be characterized as violent, antidemocratic and oppressive of women, labels invoked so frequently in scholarly and popular literature on the subject that they have become virtually synonymous with Islamist politics. Such characterizations do capture crucial dimensions of Islamist politics, yet they also sidestep the paradoxes its variegated and often contradictory expressions present. Instead, I want to argue that Islamist politics can be productively read in terms of and against the grain of such broad categorizations as antidemocratic, antiwoman or violent, that is, as commitments that, at different moments in various locales, both encourage and constrain broad-based political participation, disrupt and ratify hierarchical gender norms, resist and reproduce state-sanctioned brutality. The point of reading such arguments and practices in this way is not to suggest that Islamists are secretly democratic, feminist and opposed to violence. Rather, the point is to “see differently what has been there all along” by drawing attention to the complexity and contradictions erased by easy generalizations on the one hand, and the often unacknowledged fluidity and cultural adaptability of otherwise familiar political categories on the other. This further suggests that, in the context of mutually constitutive polarities between “civilizations” with supposedly antithetical politics, seeing differently must ultimately entail seeing bi-focally.