The repeated use of Obama's middle name -- Hussein -- by McCain surrogates, the whisper campaigns about his supposed Arab parentage and/or madrassa education, and Palin's suggestions that he is "not one of us" are all part of a coordinated effort on the part of increasingly desperate Republicans. In a sort of call-and-response reflex, McCain-Palin crowds have been heard to dutifully shout out "terrorist" and "kill him" at the appointed moment.
It is tempting to see these efforts to portray Obama as an Arab, or as a crypto-Muslim, as little more than a crude attempt to link the presidential frontrunner to the terrorist attacks of 2001 in the minds of an uncertain and fearful electorate. To do so, so the thinking goes, would be to conjure up the darkest fears of soccer moms and dads everywhere, reminiscent of the successful rebranding of George W. Bush in 2004.
Yet the Republicans are really tapping into something much older and much more dangerous: an anti-Arab, anti-Muslim narrative that has held sway over the Western imagination since the late Middle Ages, specifically since the decades surrounding the First Crusade, called in 1095.
Follow me below the jump as I explore this anti-Islam narrative, or discourse.
NB - An earlier version of this diary appeared here here
My starting point is the work of the late French philosopher Michel Foucault, who teaches that the predominant narratives, or discourses, set the rules for what we can and, more importantly, what we cannot say about an object. You can find more theoretical stuff here: Foucault Blog
It dominates every aspect of the way we think, and write, and speak about Islam and the Muslims. It shapes how we listen to what it is that Muslims say and interpret what it is they do. This has left America unable to respond successfully to some of the most significant challenges of the early twenty-first century – the global rise of Islamist political power, the more narrow emergence of Islam-inspired terrorism, clashes between established social values and multi-cultural rights on the part of growing Muslim immigrant populations, and so on.
Central to this anti-Islam discourse is a series of familiar ideas whose roots can be traced directly to eleventh-century Church propaganda crafted in the run-up to the Crusades – before the West had had any real first-hand experience of Islam. In such an atmosphere, a distinct portrait of Islam began to take shape, with the practices and beliefs of the Muslims conceived as the mirror-opposite of Christian virtues: where Christianity represents love, Islam stands for violence and cruelty; where Christ means truth, Mohammad and the Qur'an mean falsehood and deception; where Christians are chaste, Muslims are sexually perverse.
Regrettably, this has meant a decoupling of the Western idea of Islam from its meaning and content as a vital religious, social, and cultural institution in its own right. Incompatible with the West’s interests or outside its conceptual understanding – or at times merely inconvenient – the belief system of the Muslims has been set aside in favour of a denatured Islam that better fits the established discourse.
Thus, there is little incentive for Western scholars or politicians to acknowledge the complex and at times contradictory record of traditional Islamic texts on violence, personal struggle, and resistance – signified in the Western mind under the emotive word, jihad. As far as "we" are concerned this can only be about violence, specifically violence against us.
In this way a necessary, causal relationship between Islam and violence is advanced and countless examples adduced to support it, September 11 being only the most spectacular. Islam is allowed no independent existence becomes effectively a creation of the Western mind. In other words, the West simply cannot "get" Islam.
That perhaps explains why Obama cannot really be expected to challenge the entire premise of the attacks -- that being an Arab, or a Muslim is essentially automatic disqualfication from higher office -- even if he wanted to do so. Nor is there grounds to think that, having most likely survived these attacks and secured the presidency, that he will lead American and the West into anything like a new, more productive relationship with the Muslim world.