TOPIA 19 5

Ilan Kapoor
lntroductlon. lslam and Cultural lolltlcs
Te war on terror, the Canadian military mission in Afghanistan, the
disenfranchisement of Arab-Israelis, the expulsion of an eleven-year old Muslim
girl from a soccer tournament in Quebec, Zinedine Zidanes infamous head-butt:
how are we to interpret these recent events? Or rather, how are we to read them
culturally? For, while seemingly disparate, what links each of them is precisely
a cultural framing, a certain understanding of, and relationship with, Muslims
and Islamin this case, as either threatening and fanatical, or subordinate and
victimized. Te public imaginary in Canada and around the world has been so
preoccupied with the question of Islam that it is important that we investigate
why this is the case, as do all the articles that follow in this special issue of TOPIA.
What I want to suggest in this introduction is that it is our notion of culture that
determines how we both conceptualize and answer the question.
1ho Domlnant Vlov. lslam as Cthor
Tere are many views of culture, but for the present I want to focus on two:
one in this section, the other in the next. Te most common and dominant view
characterizes culture as a collection of values, attitudes and traditions. Samuel
Huntingtons Clash of Civilizations (1996) is one possible and infuential
representative of this position. Te book defnes culture as ancestry, religion,
language, history, values, customs and institutions (1996: 21). For Huntington, the
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world consists of a plurality of civilizations (eight to be exact), each distinct and
unique. He emphasizes the inherent cultural diferences between each, believing
they will inexorably result in confict, notably the one involving the West against
Islam. His recommendation is that the West, led by the U.S., should refrain
from interfering in the afairs of other civilizations (1996: 208, 312).
Huntingtons view of culture, typical of late capitalist multicultural politics,
1
is
essentialist. His central question appears to be what is the nature of culture? and
his resulting methodology is about fnding real and authentic cultural traits and
fault lines. Each world cultural system is unique and discrete, bounded by what
he sees as clearly identifable national/geographic or religious boundaries. Each
cultural system emerges as fxedclosed, stable, homogeneous, never changing.
He gives little consideration to the diversity and historical interactions within
and between cultures, or to each ones ongoing transformation. Moreover, there
is an unmistakable multiculturalization of politics present here, so often the mark
of identity politics: others will be tolerated, but only insofar as they are kept at a
distancecontained, isolated, anesthetized; we will interact with them, but only
to the extent that their diferences (precisely what makes them unique) are diluted
or cleansed; other cultures are equal to ours, but we must nonetheless protect
ourselves from them.
Many of the essays in this issue of TOPIA seize on how such a view of culture
results in the phenomenon of othering: despite multicultural commitments
to the equality of cultures, a dominant national identity is normalized by the
state, social elites or the mainstream media, thereby subalternizing others. Tus,
Catherine Rottenberg shows how Arab-Israeli citizens, even when they try to
assimilate, cannot do so because the ethno-political landscape in Israel is founded
on sustaining an Arab-Jewish divide. Similarly, in the Zidane case, Yasmin Jiwani
points out how the state manipulates the star athlete, constructing a unifed
French nation as arbiter of civilized cultural norms. Zidane is promoted as the
multicultural symbol of the Muslim working-class immigrant who can make
it; he is characterized as irrational and beastly when he is deemed to contravene
civilized norms (in the wake of the head-butt); and, fnally, he is forgiven his
transgressions when he publicly apologizes for his bad behaviour.
Much of the same othering process has transpired in Canada. Te articles by
Zine, Lakhani and Philipose underline how media reportage and state policy,
particularly in the aftermath of 9/11 and the 2006 arrest of seventeen Toronto
men for attempted terrorism, have tended to project security concerns onto
issues of education (e.g., funding for Islamic schools) and family law (e.g.,
Sharia law). Te inclination has been to appeal to a sense of Canadianness to
distinguish authentic Canadians from threatening others, and sometimes to even
identify Islamic religious practices as evidence of Canadian Muslims terroristic
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tendencies. Te result has been the normalizing of dominant Canadian identity
as modern, secular and white, and the demonizing of Islam.
Several contributions in this issue emphasize the gender dimensions of such
cultural othering. Safa Lakhani argues that whether Qubcois nationalists
condemn or defend the decision to expel the hijab-wearing Muslim girl
Asmahan Mansourfrom the soccer tournament, the result is the same:
Asmahan is produced as a passive female victim, voiceless and without agency.
Similarly, Shahnaz Khan critically examines mainstream media images of Afghan
women: not only are they depicted as veiled and non-speaking subjects, but their
images are presented without historical or social context, thus stereotyping and
objectifying them.
And such proclivities can be found within Muslim communities as well. Islamist
groups,
2
for instance, portray an idealized and monolithic community that
denies the existence of violence or sexism in the home, and they often seek to
impose notions of the proper or virtuous female on women. Tus, Jasmin Zines
ethnographic study demonstrates how Islamic schools in Canada are gendered
spaces, in which Muslim girls identities are regulated by way of dress, behaviour
and inculcated values (honour, piety, modesty). Here, Islam is not itself immune
to reifed constructions of culture, or indeed to its own othering and patriarchic
practices.
Consequently, whether multiculturalism or Islamism, whether Huntingtons world
view or Bin Ladens, all subscribe to an equally Orientalist and homogenizing
view of culture. Te propensity to see Islam as a threat, as much as the propensity
to romanticize it; the majoritarian tendency to tolerate the minority, as much
as the minoritarian tendency to emulate the majority; the move to reject the
West as much as the move to uncritically embrace it: all feed of one another and
reproduce the same binary structure (us/them, West/Islam, pure/corrupt) written
into the dominant view of culture.
1ho lostcolonlal Vlov. lslam as Cpon and lolltlcal
But there is another perspective on culturea postcolonial one. Calling it
postcolonial may be a sleight of hand, given that it has multiple variants and relies
on several sources (cultural anthropology, cultural marxism, discursive analysis,
deconstruction). I would like to draw out two themes for the purposes of this
introduction. First, rather than asking Huntingtons what is culture? which gives
way to the reifcation of culture, the postcolonial perspective asks how is culture
made? emphasizing its more active and transformative role. Culture is seen as a
semiotic practice (Geertz 1973) grounded in everyday life, through which shared
signs and symbols are deployed to represent our world. Raymond Williams
refers to it as the signifying system through which necessarily ... a social order is
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communicated, reproduced, experienced, and explored (Williams 1982: 13; cf.
Hall 1977: 328). Rather than focusing on cultural identity, which fxes and unifes
culture, the idea here is to see culture as signifying process: this means that culture
is dynamic rather than static, slippery and unfxed rather than stable, plural and
hybrid rather than whole, and negotiated and constructed rather than a given
(Clammer 2005: 103; cf. Williams 1979: 154; Bhabha 1994; Appadurai 1996:
12).
Te second theme of discursivity is what gives the postcolonial perspective its
critical bent. Te semiotic construction of culture involves a will to power,
wherein knowledge is systematized and disseminated (Said 1978: 12; 1983: 216).
Tis process includes the deployment of discursive strategies such as the use of
rhetoric or the construction, repetition and reifcation of powerful images and
stereotypes (Bhabha 1994: 66f.; Derrida 1982: 307f.), such as the images of Islam
and Muslims discussed above. Tis critique also takes into account the enactment
of discourse in institutional practices, for instance the state or corporate media
which fund and widely disseminate a favoured body of knowledge. A power
politics is thus at play, entailing domination of and/or contestation between
representational practices.
Tis postcolonial perspective enables us to view culture not as something separate
and beyond, whose outlines can be precisely and objectively determined from afar
(as in Huntingtons multiculturalism or Islamism), but rather as an immediate and
inescapable shaping of experience. Its contours may well be shifting and imprecise,
but we cannot view, interpret or make our world without it. Culture tints, flters,
gives perspective; yet privileging one colour means excluding others; fltering in
also means fltering out.
Islam, in this view, is not a collection of clearly defnable values or customs,
but rather a contested terrain of lived practices and contingent interpretations.
Fixating on one set of meaningsa real Islam or the true Muslim womanis
an attempt to contain, control or hierarchize the Other. Many of the contributions
in this issue aim at unsettling the propagation of powerful stereotypes that reduce
Islam or Muslim culture to a religious category, equate Muslims with terrorism or
sexual perversion, or assume Islamic religious practice to be monolithic or static.
Tus, Liz Philipose cautions against the feminist view that all traditional or
Muslim law is necessarily oppressive to women. And Shahnaz Khan emphasizes
that holding only local Afghan patriarchies to account for Afghan womens
oppression is linked to a desire to rescue women, and may well be used as an
argument to rationalize foreign military intervention.
Tis contested cultural terrain obliges us to be more self-refexive about, and
accountable to, our positioning as privileged intellectuals, Western(ized) elites,
or women or men; otherwise we run the risk of universalizing our positions or
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speaking for others, thus silencing the subaltern (Spivak 1988). Tis is certainly
the argument put forth by Burwell, Davis and Taylor, who problematize their
own pedagogical practices in general, and the reading of Nafsis Reading Lolita
in Tehran in particular, within the current context of neo-Orientalism and
Islamophobia. In response, they ofer an expressly qualifed and personalized
hermeneutical account of Nafsis text.
For the postcolonial critic, accountable positioning often means having to chart
a complex course. Jasmin Zine speaks, in this regard, of having to confront
oppression from within and without her community, that is, in a way that agrees
with neither mainstream media arguments about Muslim women nor Islamist
ones, and that resists both outwardly secular explanations and straightforwardly
religious ones. Tis complex positioning often implies having to occupy a
borderline position, on the margins of any mainstream. Yet such positioning, such
contestation from the margins, is precisely what enables a cultural politics: it
shows that culture does not only mediate our lives, but is the very site of agency
and change. Tis is evident in Zines study of Muslim girls who challenge the
gender-segregated spaces within their schools and attempt to negotiate a position
that accommodates the status of women in Islam. It is evident in the work of
womens groups in North America and Nigeria which Liz Philipose highlights,
that try to claim womens rights by reinterpreting Islam in a feminist light. It is
manifest in the queer Muslim punk groups described by Ibrahim Abraham;
they demonstrate the possibility of same-sex intimacy without conforming to
either the mainstream bourgeois hetero-homo binary or the hidden homosexual
practices within Muslim communities. And fnally, agency and change are
apparent in Sayed Kashuas book, Dancing Arabs, which, as Catherine Rottenberg
tells us, challenges Jewish readers to re-examine their assumptions about Israel
as a Jewish and democratic state. All of this lays bare notions of the West as
necessarily culturally hegemonic, of Islam as homogeneous and fxed, and of
Muslims as victims in need of rescue.
Te postcolonial view thus underlines the importance of culture to the contested
present. It alerts us to how dominant contemporary discourses on Islam are
constructed, and reveals their attempts to de-politicize, naturalize and mainstream
their Orientalist depictions of Muslims. It warns against dominant strategies
to centre or privilege some discourses (the corporate media, the nation-state,
Western civilization, social elites, religious patriarchs) and produce others (Islam,
Muslims, women, queers, the Tird World). And it sensitizes us to those cultural
acts of resistance aimed at interrogating, defecting or re-presenting domination.
Te articles that follow in this special issue of TOPIA bring much needed attention
to these important postcolonial insights and preoccupations.
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Notes
I thank Shahnaz Khan, Jody Berland, Ryan Clement, Holly Amber Brown, Steven
Logan, Margo Gouley and Mike Hunter for their invaluable contributions to this special
issue of TOPIA. Te journal is grateful to Wilfrid Laurier University for its fnancial
contribution to this issue; and to Shirin Neshat and the Barbara Gladstone Gallery for
permission to reproduce the captivating image on our cover: Shirin Neshat, Untitled,
1996; RC print & ink (photo by Larry Barns).
1. Huntington is actually critical of the multicultural emphasis on ethnic separateness,
which he believes weakens the U.S. (1996: 307). Yet, his argument about the clash of
civilizations is precisely a multiculturalist one, positing distinct and fundamentally difer-
ent world civilizations.
2. For example, religious patriarchs in Canada or elsewhere.
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