Geographies of Enmity: The New Orientalism

For Orientalism was ultimately a political vision of reality whose structure promoted the difference between the familiar (Europe, the West, “us”) and the strange (the Orient, the East, “them”).

Said's groundbreaking work Orientalism (1978) traces the long history of knowledge production about the “East” by Westerners that simultaneously created the “Orient” and “Orientals” and constructed an oppositional relationship between “East” and “West.” He argues that this knowledge production is crucial to the structures of imperialism, supporting the economic, military, and political ambi­tions of Western nations in the East.

Although Orientalism was launched by European actors in the context of their imperial ventures in the East, in the post-World War II period, the United States inherited this European legacy as it became increasingly involved politically, economically, and militarily in MENA (Middle East and North Africa) and South Asia (Gregory 2004; Khalidi 2004; Mamdani 2004). After the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1980s, the United States trained its focus on the “Muslim world” as the primary threat to the United States and its Western allies.

In dominant political discourses, this threat is imagined to derive from funda­mental cultural differences between “Islam” and the “West.” Described by some scholars and political pundits (Huntington 1996; Lewis 2002) as a “clash of civilization,” Islam - or in more nuanced discussions, its radicalized variants - is imagined to be a culture, one that holds values contradictory to those foundational to liberal democracies. This “clash of civilizations” hypothesis has been resound­ingly critiqued. Two of these critiques are particularly relevant for the purposes of this chapter. First, the notion that Islam represents a culture or a civilization is at once reductionist and essentialist and overreaching in scope.

The second important critique involves the question of why this “culture talk” (Mamdani 2004) dominates so much of US popular and political discourse. The answer to this question is that culture talk does political work. It coproduces knowledge and power (Foucault 1977), constructing what “we know” about the “Muslim world” in relation to the political actions the United States takes in Muslim-majority regions of the world. At the extreme, this culture talk has been leveraged to justify the US military actions on behalf of the many values seen to be the provenance of the United States and the West. The invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq were defended, at least in part, in terms of freeing “women of cover” and bringing democracy to the region. What remained hidden behind this rhetoric was the United States' past complicity with both the mujahideen in Afghanistan and Saddam Hussein's regime during the 1980s (Gregory 2004; Khalidi 2004; Mamdani 2003). Instead, the complex political histories of US involvement in the region that lead, at least in part, to the contemporary conflicts are hidden behind the mantle of an insurmountable culture clash.

3.1 Key Components of This Imagined Culture Clash

What are the critical differences attributed to American democratic versus Muslim “culture?” In dominant political discourses, individual liberty, diversity, and toler­ance make up the triumvirate of American values (Abu El-Haj 2010, 2015; Abu-Lughod 2013; Brown 2006).

The second value in the triumvirate is diversity. The United States prides itself on being “a nation of immigrants.” Unlike many other nation-states that construct “imagined communities” (Anderson 1983/1991) around notions of a shared ethnic­ity, the United States has instead imagined its national community around shared democratic values that unite its diverse racial/ethnic groups. Of course, this ideal of diversity is belied by a long history of racial and gender exclusions, beginning with the original constitution's restrictions on voting to free, white, and propertied men and continuing through centuries of denial of citizenship for racially minoritized people and for women. However, with the erosion of racial and gender restrictions on citizenship, the United States has projected an image of itself as a democratic society enriched by its multicultural heritage. The early twentieth-century images of the nation as a “melting pot” that blends all cultural influences have given way to the United States as a “salad bowl” in which each culture contributes its distinct flavor. This ideal of multiculturalism came to fruition after World War II (Melamed

2006). With its newfound status as a global superpower, and in the midst of the Cold War, the United States was in the uncomfortable position of claiming to promote democracy on the world stage while practicing a racial dictatorship (Omi and Winant 1986) at home.

The third leg of the US triumvirate is the value of tolerance. Tolerance as a political value is not instantiated in the US constitution. Nevertheless, it is the implicit glue that holds together this diverse national community. Americans imagine themselves as a nation tolerant of all kinds of differences. Civic education is based around the idea that young people must learn to be tolerant of other ideas and other people. Tolerance has been resoundingly critiqued as a weak tool for promoting equality in a diverse society (Brown 2006). For one, tolerance does not necessarily seek or require mutual understanding or respect; it merely requires that people learn to “tolerate” ideas and people they find disagreeable or reprehensible. Moreover, tolerance fails to acknowledge inequalities and politics that structure interactions between unequal parties. It is typically non-majoritarian views, or even persons, that are seen as needing to be tolerated. However, what is most important for the purposes of this chapter is that in the post-9/11 era, tolerance became a “civilizational discourse.” Brown argues that this civilizational discourse imagines that the United States, as a tolerant nation, must rid the world of intolerance - intolerance that has been most recently attributed to radical Islam.

If the United States is imagined as a national community that values individual freedom, diversity, and tolerance, it is projected against an image of the “Muslim world” as a landscape of oppositional values. In the place of individual liberty, cultural conformity and individual repression reign.

The rich diversity of Muslim-majority countries and communities is washed out by the dominant images of these geographies that produce a monochromatic essentialized Islamic culture. US political discourse, media pundits, and popular opinion do not see the linguistic, sectarian, ethnic, religious, and cultural distinc­tions that exist across these wide geographies. It is not atypical to hear, for example, all Muslims being cast as Arabs, or as Arabic speakers. In the US geopolitical imaginary, the “Muslim world” fails to conjure up the rich diversity that exists both within and across the far-flung Muslim-majority countries, from Morocco to Indo­nesia, Palestine to Pakistan, and Iran to Niger.

It is not only the diversity of peoples in the Muslim-majority world and com­munities that is rendered invisible in the US geopolitical imaginary. It is also the diversity of thought that is inaudible within dominant US political discourses. Construing “Muslim culture” as incompatible with democracy, dominant US polit­ical discourse characterized Muslims as intolerant of diverse ideas and opinions. The historical record of US support for authoritarian regimes in many Muslim- majority countries plays no part in helping explain why individuals have been punished for political speech in many of these countries.

3.2 Imagining Others in "Our" Midst

How have these cultural politics, then, positioned children, young people, and their families living in the United States who are seen to belong to this imaginative geography of the “Muslim world”? The encounter between Samira and her teacher cited at the beginning of the chapter illustrates the reality that many children and youth from Muslim-majority countries and communities living in the United States have had to weather, especially in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, attacks. Positioned as perpetual outsiders to the US national imaginary, these young people (and their families) have routinely faced the presumption that they do not (and cannot) belong as full members of the United States. This presumption reflects the mutable processes of racialization in the United States that produce some citizens as “impossible subjects” (Ngai 2004) of this nation. Similar to Latino/as and Asian- Americans, many members of Muslim-majority transnational communities find it difficult to be seen as full members of the Unites States.

The processes of racialization come along with assumptions about these “impos­sible subjects.” These assumptions are particularly robust around gender roles. Youth from Muslim-majority countries and communities continually battle the presumption that girls and women are uniformly oppressed and that boys and men oppress women and have a tendency toward violence and radicalism. The effects of this latter presumption had dire consequences for Muslim men, when after September 11, 2001, thousands were detained without cause by the federal government. These presumptions about gender roles have also had consequences in public schools where education is seen as a pathway for freeing young women and disciplining young men (Abu El-Haj 2010, 2015; Ghaffar-Kucher 2009, 2012).

3.3 Cultural Imperialism

To experience cultural imperialism means to experience how the dominant meanings of society render the particular perspectives of one's own group invisible at the same time as they stereotype one's group and mark it out as the Other. (Young 1990, pp. 58-59)

In delineating various, interlocking facets of oppression, the late philosopher Iris Young (1990) pointed to the critical role that cultural imperialism plays in control­ling the meanings and representations attributed to groups that are marginalized in society. For children and youth presumed to belong to Muslim-majority countries and communities, the imaginative geographies of the “Muslim world” lead to the two opposite problems produced by cultural imperialism: hyper-visibility and invisibility. Although people living in the United States who are presumptively seen as Muslim have long faced scrutiny, discrimination, and hate crimes (partic­ularly in the aftermath of international incidents such as the Iranian hostage crisis or the first Gulf War), they have been subject to more intensive forms of racism since September 2001. Individuals who “appeared” to be Muslims - from women who wear hijab to Sikh men who wear traditional head coverings and are not Muslim - became highly visible, positioned as outsiders, and potentially dangerous enemy aliens. Much public popular and political discourse has focused on Muslims, with particular attention to the question of whether they can or cannot be fully integrated into US society and whether they pose a specific threat to the nation.

The intensive focus on Muslim identities reduces the complexity and rich cultural, linguistic, ethnic, and national diversity of many different communities to a single dimension associated with radical Islam. The primary focus on Muslim identities makes other kinds of diversities invisible. The perspectives and experi­ences of a wide range of individuals, from those who identify as secular to religious, linguistic, and ethnic minorities from Muslim-majority countries, are almost entirely missing from the discussions. They are simply lumped into a political discourse about Muslims (e.g., Muslim and Arab identities are often collapsed, even though many Arabs are not Muslim; Arabs and Iranians are often mistaken for each other, although ethnic, linguistic, and, for some, sectarian diversity characterizes these groups). This invisibility is not only reflected in broad public discourses but also subtly reinforced in much of the research literature that has focused primarily on the experiences of Muslim youth living in the United States. Some of the research that has built a focus on Muslim religious versus American identities into the design has failed to explore other possible identifications that are also important to, and intersect with, these young people's religious identities (e.g., nation, ethnicity, and sexuality). Moreover, the focus on Muslim youth has overlooked young people who identify as secular or identify more with sources of identification other than their religious ones.

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