islam 21c.

co m

http://www.islam21c.co m/po litics/145-the-place-o f-narrative-and-its-impo rtance-part-2/

The Place of Narrative and its Importance Part 2

In part one I explored the relationship between ideology, narrative, and discourse. T he hypothesis f orwarded there was that these modes of thought f orm the mediating structures by which raw sensations turn into perceptions. By positing this description I hoped to show that social change could be generated discursively, since it f ollows that if the way we see something conditions our response to it, a change in the structures that shape our seeing will af f ect responses. In this essay, I will make a case f or using narrativity as a means of af f ecting responses. T here are two key reasons why narrativity is an important arena in which to engage, not least because it is an arena less considered in both general dawah and specif ic Muslim ef f orts in the current climate of hostility. Firstly, narrative (as outlined in the previous essay) sits in between ideology and discursive f rameworks. It is the channel through which ideology (Weltanschauung) is expressed and through which discursive f rameworks are established. Hence, a change in narrative ripples through into everyday perceptions and carries with it precepts of an ideology. T he second reason is that narratives have the power to shape the self -perception of those whom it represents. Narrativity that is, the act of narrativising is an important mode of ref lection since it combines the power to articulate ones sense of being with the imaginative capacity to break out of boundaries set by other narratives about the self . T his as a proposition needs to be assessed caref ully and the f irst section of this essay looks to do exactly that. However, if this is true, the process of narrativity f or Muslims today is very important. In the second section of the essay I concentrate upon the material shape narrativity can assume and critique our present emphasis on non-f iction mediums. Narrative, as the word suggests, incorporates a degree of f ictionality both in terms of ref lecting elements of f iction at the level of composition, and f inding material actualisation in modes through which stories are actually told. For example, narratives are about histories, characters and their interiority, the ways in which circumstances and human actions collude to shape events, and the manner in which the nature of the world is ref lected through events. Secondly, narratives are expressed in narrative art (novels, plays, f ilms), documentaries, biographies, and history books. However, due to a lack of space this essay only points to the need f or Muslims to be involved in and to arrest the modes of narrative production, which lie essentially in the cultural industry. T hus this essay does not explore what kind of narratives Muslims should construct and how they should promulgate them; that task may be gleaned tangentially f rom other essays. For a detailed look at the role of f iction (specif ically novels) in assisting change in social realities, see Darwins displacement of religion or grounds for a new religious experience. In that essay I explore the way in which despite Darwins complex and rather phlegmatic style, the theory of evolution spreads through novels to dif f erent strata of society, especially the non-science reading public. Another essay, Muslim Weekly and the like: the importance of independent media looks at the possible role Muslim newspapers and magazines can play in af f ecting social change. If read individually, these essays seem to point in a number of directions, but if taken together I hope they provide a substantial theoretical methodology. Yet none are to be taken prescriptively since they merely describe possibilities. Whats more, none attempt to even describe content f or that is currently a step too f ar f rom our present condition. To f ully appreciate the spectrum of tools at our disposal seems to me a wiser and saf er terrain to tread. It is in this spirit that this essay is written. Narrative, the self, and society

Narrativity is a capability that we all have. From the child who tells his mother that he f ell down, to the employee who explains to his boss why he is late, we are all engaged in narratavising. In this sense narratives are the stories we tell or, more precisely, the vehicles we use to convey stories. Narratives theref ore are universal and, according to Fredrick Jameson, the central f unction or instance of the human mind1. Abbott tells us that many psychologists have observed the coincidence of the onset in inf ancy of both autobiographical memory and narrative capability2, and Peter Brooks expresses the notion that Our very def inition as human beings isbound up with the stories we tell about our own lives and the world in which we live.3 It is not too f ar a conceptual leap then to move f rom this to the idea that human beings are narrativised beings. {quotes}What this means is that our sense of our self is part of a narrative of which we are subject and in which we are object.{/quotes} We are subjects in so f ar as we are the percipient being who know of objects, to whom the knowing of something is assigned; to whom belongs the unity of being such that to it may be given a history and a temporality. We are objects in so f ar as we locate ourselves in a world, which, though dependent on us to be knowable, is nonetheless independent of us so that we are bound in it spatially. To not grasp this is the Idealists error. Like all other objects human beings are part of the world and we know this through the realities of birth and death. T he f act that we are aware of it means that we are more than object; we are subjects too. David Berman illustrates this cleverly in his introduction to Schopenhauers key tract, The World as Will and Idea.4 If I am thirsty, the knowing of this can be of two types. One type is the outwardly exhibited knowledge of my thirst: if I reach f or a glass of water, you and I can see the action and comprehend that I am thirsty. But I, as a subject, can experience my thirst and thus know of it in a more inward and less mediated way. I do not have to perceive my perched lips or the movement of my hand to know that I am thirsty. In this second regard I am purely subject who knows and not object that is known. My world at that moment is in a kind of duality.5 T here is a reality of an outside world in which the action has taken place and an inward world in which I have realised my thirst and thus acted. I can occupy both positions simultaneously because I am at once aware of myself as being in the world while being separate to it. T his metaphysics of being is the basis on which we may imagine men as narrativised beings. We know of our self both as part of a f abric (object) and as conscious agents within it (subject). {quotes}What bridges these two dimensions is the f act that all human beings are social beings, so that my inward world and the outward world bare inf luence on one another.{/quotes} In this sense, the f act that man is a narrativised being should be understood not purely in an individualistic sense but in a broader cultural sense, concluding thereby that we do not merely locate ourselves in our individual narratives, but in broader narratives woven over time by a culture so that it too may come to know itself . T his notion that identity is produced through an interaction between individuals and society is the product of symbolic interactionism and has become the classic sociological conception of the issue.6 It also begins to intimate why narratives may af f ect human beings. If who we are is given to us through narratives and these narratives are in turn constructed within the matrix of society, then society bears a degree of inf luence in the way we see our self and the way in which we behave. T he f act that we project ourselves, writes Stuart Hall, into identities that are shaped dialogically with a culture means that we internalise cultural meanings and values, all of which helps to align our subjective f eeling with the objective places we occupy in the social and cultural world.7

Simply put, human beings tend to locate themselves in concentric circles: an individual a f amily an ethnicity a nationality a history. In this sense (and in the sense of the metaphysical schema sketched above) the individual is an object within the given narrative since he or she is accounted f or through it. At the same time the individual as subject senses that his or her lif e is their own and so he or she generates a sense of self as independent. Yet their sense of self requires recognition and so they look again to the narratives that help build individuals through representation: a man a husband a f ather an Englishman a Briton British History. T his taut dialectic hides many realities such as those who have power over the means of narrative production can ef f ectively inf luence people. Conversely, those at the margins of cultural power and thus less able to inf luence narrative production are disadvantaged considerably. For example, an American study in the late seventies showed that the way in which a person is charged f or breaking the law is not a straightf orward process.

When a young person is arrested, he or she is handed over to a juvenile officer who decides whether or not to prosecute. This decision is based on a process of negotiation between the juvenile officer, the person arrested and his or her parents. Crucial to the outcome of this negotiation is the picture juvenile officers have of the typical delinquent. In their eyes the typical delinquent is male, from a low income household in an inner city area, belongs to an ethnic group, comes from a broken home, rejects authority and is a low achiever at school. If the suspect fits this picture, he or she is more likely to be charged with an offence. Middle class parents are often more skilled at negotiation than their working class counterparts. They start with an advantage their child does not fit the picture of a typical delinquent. They present their child as coming from a stable home, as having a good background and a promising future. They promise cooperation, express remorse and define the offence as a one off due to high spirits, emotional upset or getting in with the wrong crowd, all of which tends to remove blame from the young person. As a result, the statistics show that delinquency is mainly a working class problem as young people from middle class backgrounds are typically counselled, cautioned and released. Thus what ends up being called justice is negotiable.8

Similarly, the democratic ideal enshrined within the right to be tried by a jury of ones peers may be compromised f or those on the periphery of a culture by the power of narrative. It may seem at this point that the picture I am painting presents every person charged or convicted as having been done so wrongf ully. T hough that would be a misunderstanding of my point which is that the processes by which we convict people or imagine criminality is not so rational or pure it is also not entirely inaccurate. Having presented a metaphysics in which the individual is bound within narrative representations, and shown thereaf ter that narratives are constructed through interaction with society, I wish to make a f urther claim that the way in which narratives construct people ef f ectively draws those people into a closer simulation of its representation. Narratives are modes of representation that provide us a kind of mirror through which we can see ourselves and perceive how others see us. Where narratives do not provide immediate ref lection they provide a general picture of the world in which we can locate ourselves. Either way a narrative is intimately connected to how we understand our self . Once identif ication begins between the narrative and the self , the values and norms ref lected in the narratives, as well as the view of the world they project, begin to be internalised. T his process is long and uneven, presenting opportunities f or the emergence of counternarratives as disruptive f orces in the process of internalisation. But if the narrative is periodically reinf orced, and through various mediums ratif ied, it poses such strong compulsive f orce that an individual acquiesces to it. Behaviour then is more than a simple case of actions determined by individual agency or subconscious impulses; it is in f act the outcome of a complex identif ication process with the meaning and the value of self as f ound within narratives.

T his internal dynamism of a narrative enhances the perception of its accuracy vis--vis its representations. Once the process begins, a type of reciprocity builds up in which a persons behaviour starts to ref lect the behaviour represented in the narrative. As well as this, other people begin to react to the person according to their understanding of the narrative, which f urther ratif ies that persons self -image and draws him/her closer still to the representation. T his process can also occur with entire social groups, in which case the group draws closer to one another. And if they happen to be a group lacking social capital (gypsies, convicts etc), they can derive comf ort f rom one another and f urther endorse the groups representation. T his model of narrative determinability of behaviour is based roughly on Beckers labelling theory. In labelling theory, a label def ines an individual as a particular kind of person9. T he label however is laden with cultural meanings and associations and so sutures the individual with a narrative that is evoked by the label. As such the label operates as a master status in the sense that it colours all the other statuses possessed by an individual.10 {quotes}For example, Muslims today are considered alien, threatening and an inassimilable community, meaning that if one is identif ied as a Muslim they are seen within political dimensions, be they a Muslim doctor or a Muslim student.{/quotes} T he upshot of the labelling process according to Becker is that f or the individual who is labelled, the label can become the controlling one11. Once this happens, their behaviour and their views begin to conf orm to the label. In his novel By the sea, Abdulrazak Gurnah explores the psychological pull colonial narratives had on the colonised subjects of the British empire. Saleh, the central character, explains how these narratives f iltered down:

In their books I read unflattering accounts of my history, and because they were unflattering, they seemed truer than the stories we told ourselves. I read of the diseases that tormented us, the future that lay before us, about the world we lived in and our place in it. It was as if they had remade us, and in ways we no longer had any recourse but to accept, so complete and well fitting was the story they told about us.12

It is cultural products books in this case that carry the narratives produced by the colonisers, which, together with the power they wield and the constancy they can af f ord to lavish on production (time and money), over time ratif ies the narrative. What is of interest is that Saleh seems to consider these well f itting and as such, so complete that they remake him and his contemporaries in ways they cannot avoid but be pulled into a self -recognition through them. About the indigenous narratives he says,

The stories we knew about ourselves before they took charge of us seemed medieval and fanciful, sacred and secret myths that were liturgical metaphors and rights of adherence, a different category of knowledge which, despite our assertive observance, could not contest with theirs.13

What I am not positing is a closed narrative determinism, but at the same time it is also untrue that an imposed narrative can simply be rejected, since even in the act of rejection there is a curious mimesis in play. Anecdotally, the resistance by the Nation of Islam to the trenchant racism of America at the start of the twentieth century, borrowed a f lavour and tone f rom the very narrative it rejected (a point later redressed by Malcolm X when he admitted not all whites were/could be devils). Similarly, many Indian expatriates during the Raj rejected colonial rule and colonial narratives and had adopted what Gandhi called a suicidal policy and the Indian school of violence14. Oddly enough, such attacks and f rustration only conf irmed premises within the colonial narrative about the irrationality of the natives. By the late nineteenth century, imperial ideologues had canonised ideas about the stabilising ef f ect European presence made in places like India and Af rica. Along with this they propagated the idea that the empire improved the societies it colonised. T he earlier cruder theological and quasi-scientif ic expressions of the right of the white man to rule other people had, by this time, subsided f or many to the margins of intellectual acceptability. Yet these new notions were not adopted because they were truer; they served to recast and control native resistance that was growing toward the late nineteenth century. {quotes}If the empire existed f or necessary and altruistic reasons, resistance to it spoke of the irrationality of the natives, their mental immaturity, or, in the case of violent resistance, the essentially violent nature of the natives.{/quotes} Hence Gandhis characterisation of such Indians who advocated violent tactics as intoxicated by the wretched modern civilisation15. T hose who took part in such acts would no doubt have objected to such a description, but what Gandhi was at pains to show was that unwittingly, these people had f allen into the colonial trap of espousing its civilisation, or what I am calling narrative constructions. Writing in the Indian Opinion soon af ter the assassination by Madan Lal Dhingra of Sir William CurzonWyllie, a political aide de camp to Lord Morley the then Secretary of State f or India, Gandhi said,

I must say that those who believe and argue that such murders may do good for India are ignorant men indeedEven should the British leave in consequence of such murderous acts, who will rule in their place? The only answer is: the murderers Is the Englishman bad because he is an Englishman? Is it that everyone with Indian skin is good?16

T he propositional even if attests that Gandhi did not believe such a methodology would work in f reeing India of her colonial yoke. For Gandhi, only a dif f erent narrative about Indian civilisation and its core values could instil a pride and power in his compatriots that would be able to both gain independence and sustain it over and above intellectual and cultural imperialism. Edward Said makes a similar point in Culture and Imperialism . He begins by criticising the over scale images of terrorism and f undamentalism that insist on the subordination of individuals conf orming to dominant norms of the moment. T he irony, he says, is that instead of uniting the West on a conf irmation of its values of moderation and rationality and thus inf orming its actions, the hype imbues us with a righteous anger and def ensiveness in which others are f inally seen as enemies, bent on destroying our civilisation and way of lif e. He then says,

these patterns of coercive orthodoxy and self-aggrandisement [that] strengthen the power of unthinking assent and unchangeable doctrineare slowly perfected over time[and are] answered, alas with [a] corresponding finality by the designated enemies. Thus Muslims or Africans or Indians or Japanese, in their idioms and from within their own threatened localities, attack the West, or Americanisation, or imperialism, with little more attention to detail, critical differentiation, discrimination, and distinction than has been lavished on them by the West.17

Like Gandhi, I assert that such reciprocity is the result of a narrative hold on the imaginations and vision of people who are caught in a ref lexive relationship with established narratives. What is more, if the narrative that one is caught in is not of ones own construction, then such a person while engaging in action is essentially passive. Yet if narratives can catch people in their representative grip thus making them more malleable and controllable, the key to break through is provided by the act of narrativity. By accessing our narrative capacities we enliven, what Homi K. Bhabha may call a liminal space that contains the potential to re-imagine ourselves. But unlike Bhabhas somewhat abstracted realm where boundaries of given binaries overlap and produce sites of hybridisation, I want to imagine this space as one where we locate our imagination and use its subversive capacity to question, invert and alter the f ixtures of a particular narrative. In this liminal space the act of narrativity provides the power not only to inf use a narrative with a sense of ones cultural and individual self , but also draw f rom it a better understanding of the self . However, because we are social beings as stated earlier, this act of narrativity must be enacted collectively and it is f or this reason that Muslims need to arrest the means of narrative production. With this thought in mind and with Bhabha as a ref erence point, we move into the next section. Narrativity, Cultural Products, and Change

[One] must acknowledge the force of writing, its metaphorcity and its rhetorical discourse, as a productive matrix which defines the social and makes it available as an objective of and for, action.18

T he f orce of writing to which Bhabha ref ers is writings capacity, both as object and process, to open up liminal spaces in which the imagination can contest and reconstruct given f ixtures. But if writing has this capacity it is because it is one way in which narrativity materialises and so it is narrativity that carries f orth this potential to open up interstitial spaces. It is because of this potential that narrativity has grown to be a widely used practice in psychological treatment.19 But Bhabha makes a f urther point: writing has the power to def ine its object and theref ore produce an impetus f or action. {quotes}What he does not tell us however is how we move f rom writing as a descriptive and def ining practice to being modally linked to action.{/quotes} To bridge this gap I again parallel writing with narrativity. Firstly, the power of representation inherent in both these modes of ref lection lends them the capacity to af f ect action a point discussed in greater detail in part one of this essay (the relationship between narrative and discourse). T here is another dimension though to how writing and narrativity can generate action, and that is to do with the f act that as ways of producing narratives, they produce their own f ixtures. What this means is that while they are able to open up and deconstruct moments of closures, they also tend towards synthesising new closures. While this can f urther explain how actions grow out of writing and narrativity a f ixture provides a point f rom which to orientate, navigate, and determine action it also problematises the puristic view of narrativity we have thus f ar pursued. If narrativity can contest existing narratives, the very same act can decentre the narratives that emerge in their place. What this means is subtle but important. Narratives need f ormulation through repetition and reinf orcement meaning that the public space becomes a space of constant traf f ic of narratives all competing and conf licting, and it is only when the public domain is viewed in these terms does the meaning of the colonisation of the public space make sense. It is in this context that the act of narrativity can provide exactly the kind of empowerment by which minority communities can resist narrative domination. But f or them to do so they must become agents of narrative production and it is exactly this that is lacking in the Muslim community. In the 2007 issue of Islamica Magazine, the editor makes a lucid observation in his editorial. Admitting a deep-seated bias against Islam in the mainstream media he says,

At the same time, the Muslim world has by and large failed to recognise the importance of communicating its ideals, values and culture in the English language. For some strange reason, Muslims demand accuracy of others in representing their views, but invest little or nothing to ensure this happens.20

T he investment the editor has in mind is explained a f ew lines later. Given that f reedom of the press is almost non-existent across many parts of the Muslim world, it should come as no surprise that the intellectual inf rastructure necessary to tell the Muslim story to the rest of the world is at best, limited.21 T hough the editor implicitly links and in my opinion limits the intellectual inf rastructure to the press, his observation is not wrong. Muslims have f allen into a blinkered epistemology in which we have designated certain f orms as the exclusive f orms of knowledge presentation, f oremost amongst which are the nonf iction book and the medium of lectures. Taking this together with the implicit exclusivity given to the press i n Islamicas editorial, however, means something more still. Muslims, it is possible to deduce, see nonf ictional modes as the only proper modes of knowledge/inf ormation transmission. I theref ore want to go even f urther than Islamicas editor in two respects. One, I want to open up the idea of an intellectual inf rastructure so as to include a diverse range of cultural products, and two, I want to suggest that not only is there an impasse in communication when such products are absent, but our ideals, values and culture remain invisible even to ourselves. A diversif ication of mediums by which we narrate our story is important not just because each medium has its own merits, which is true enough, but because with diversif ication we can reach a wider range of people. It hardly needs saying that if this happens communication becomes strengthened.22 But a call to diversif ication is also a call to opening up our intellectual inf rastructure to f ictional-dramaturgicalnarrative production. {quotes}T hese can include as broad a range of approaches as history books, biographies, novels, poems, f ilm, drama and documentaries, and as modes of narrative production they are all special f or two reasons.{/quotes} All of these deal in one way or another with people and their interiority, a point that is important in helping others see something f rom the eyes of another. T hey can also capture events and meld what happened or is happening with a way of conceiving the world. Joan Rockwell makes this point when she comments on the theme of marriage in literature.23 T he change f rom arranged marriages as the norm to a belief in the right of individuals to court one another she says, ref lected and reif ied the changing values and worldview of the early modern period of European society, as it moved f rom the pressures and requirements of f eudalism to those of bourgeois capitalism. T he signif icance of these mediums also becomes apparent when one asks, as Earnest Fischer does in The Necessity of Art, why so many people read or go to the cinema? To say they seek distraction, relaxation, [or] entertainment, he says, is to beg the question.

Why is it distracting, relaxing, entertaining to sink oneself in someone elses life and problems? Why is our existence not enough? Why this desire to fulfil our unfulfilled lives through other figures, other forms, to gaze from the darknessat a lighted stage where something that is only play can so utterly absorb us.24

T hough Fischer does not himself answer this question, its answer can be f ound elsewhere. John Rutherf ord f or example, suggests that such mediums present themselves as having something important to say about human experiences that the f ictional worldstands in some special way as a microcosm of the world of real experience25 and that through it we come to a better appreciation of ourselves. He explains f urther that such mediums operate through a network of associations because they lay emphasis on associative meaning over and above conceptual meaning. T he word toad, he says, appearing in the context of literary discourse, is likely to stand f or qualities that in our experience [or in our culture] are common to toads (baseness, ugliness, repulsiveness, wretchedness, and so on) in the f irst place, and only secondarily f or a tailless amphibian of the genus Buf o.26 Associative meanings theref ore can be understood as the mechanism by which interstitial spaces are opened up, and to ref rame a point made by Virgina Woolf e such mediums make us know our species better because we can locate ourselves in those interstitial spaces and view things f rom another viewpoint. But that isnt all. Roland Barthes claimed that literature and f or our purposes, other f ictionaldramaturgical mediums was like a machine, a point that Joan Rockwell also stresses when she claims literature is part of the social machinery. Such a view of these mediums suddenly opens them up to not only being vehicles by which mere stories are told but proponents of narratives as I have been conceptualising it a species of ideology. Keeping this in mind we can begin to see that such narrative mediums can assist in assimilating individuals with an ideology. Of course, the converse of this is equally true. If these mediums are absent amongst Muslim communities and if the Muslim community is not in some respect in control of narrative production, then f or many Muslims their ideals, values and culture are vague and perhaps even invisible. T he need f or Muslims to arrest the means of narrative production theref ore is not only important in communicating to non-Muslims, but a way of resisting ideological intrusion by other narratives and making sure our own Weltanschauung is better inscribed in us. {quotes}We may have the The Ideal Muslim but we lack the ideal Muslim represented.{/quotes} One may well retort at this point and suggest that if representation is as essential as I am claiming it to be, then in f act what has actually gone astray is the pedagogy of the Muslims. T his is because f or a Muslim, the ideal Muslim has always been made available in the f orm of the Prophet (saw) and, as if that was not enough, in the shape of the numerous Companions [sahaba] (ra). T hus, they may conclude, what is needed is in f act a rigorous f amiliarisation of Muslims with hadith literature and stories of the companions. T his no doubt is an essential part of marking a Muslims identity and generating a sense of his or her belonging to Islam, but it is not what I have in mind f or two reasons. Firstly, f or a lot of Muslims these traditions have moved into a type of mythic past and so long as they remain f ixed in this psychic space they lack the necessary vigour f or contesting contemporary colonising narratives emerging f rom quarters antagonistic to Islam and Muslims. As such, a narrative is needed itself to re-inscribe these traditions back into Muslims lives. In order to do this, and this brings me to the second point, we need a narrative that is ref lective of the present landscape and which represents present Muslims and their lives. T here is no reason why the traditions of the past, stories of the Quran, or even the Quran itself as symbol cannot be used as positive regenerative devices in our narratives. A good example away f rom present practices is the novel by f irst time novelist Randa Abdel-Fattah called, Does my head look big in this? With good humour and generosity she presents the picture of a teenage girl growing up and experiencing lif e, with the twist that the protagonist is Muslim and one of her dilemmas is wearing the hijab. T hough amateurish at times, the novel plays a mimetic game with the reader who is encouraged to f eel the dilemmas as their own by making possible either an identif ication with the character or her lif e, or just the modern urban surroundings which ref lects those of many diaspora Muslims. In doing this, the resolution, the conf idence, and a sense of voice witty and self assertive become, in between the pages and ones inner reading voice, ones own. {quotes}At the same time, the picture presented to non-Muslims gives access to the interiority of a Muslim f orcing them to recognise a 3D- ness that other narratives deny or manipulate.{/quotes}

A year ago the novelist Martin Amis gave an interview to the Sunday Times in which he said that the Muslim community will have to suf f er until it gets its house in order27. By conf lating an entire community and its concomitant complexities within the metaphor of one house, Amis underscored the manipulation of the dominant western narrative in which, an evil ideology becomes the get out of jail card f or Western f oreign policy. And while there is usually a proviso that the majority of Muslims reject this ideology, the lack of a political context as Arun Kundanani notes, makes it impossible to explain why this ideology has come into existence.28 What happens by def ault then is that the problem comes to be seen as a uniquely Muslim problem of adapting to modern values not only in the Middle East or Asia, but also of Muslim communities in the West. As a novelist, Amis accentuates that narrative even while writing or speaking in other mediums because his non-political occupation lends his analysis a quasi-insight that is harder to achieve if youre a political commentator on Newsnight. Couple that with a recent article by Mark Tran in The Guardian, which quotes Lieutenant General James Mattis, a war veteran of the f irst Gulf war, discussing the importance of the sof ter aspects of power.

This is a battle where perception is more important than reality where it is our narrative versus their narrative. The real battle is for the will of the people.29

Hearing Mattis and Amis together should make us all sit up and pay attention. It is now primarily culture through which the western world establishes its hegemony, even while political resistance dismantles the political dimensions of colonialism. In such a context, Muslims absence in the cultural domain makes them vulnerable both internally in terms of building conf idence around their Islamic identity, and externally in terms of how they are perceived. What is more, a deep understanding of the relationship between ideology, narrative, and discourse opens up a methodological approach in which the f orce of narrativity assumes centre stage. T he step af ter this is f or scholars and Muslim thinkers to systematise the Islamic boundaries around a possible Muslim cultural industry: because the battleground in the West, as both parts of this essay have shown, is the psyche. http://www.martinamisweb.com/documents/voice_of _experience.pdf