Islamic Liberation Theology

Resisting the Empire

Hamid Dabashi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781135982959
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book is a radical piece of counter-intuitive rethinking of the clash of civilizations theory and global politics.

In this richly detailed criticism of contemporary politics, Hamid Dabashi argues that after 9/11 we have not seen a new phase in a long running confrontation between Islam and the West, but that such categories have in fact collapsed and exhausted themselves. The West is no longer a unified actor and Islam is ideologically depleted in its confrontation with colonialism. Rather we are seeing the emergence of the US as a lone superpower, and a confrontation between a form of imperial globalized capital and the rising need for a new Islamic theodicy.

The combination of political salience and theoretical force makes Islamic Liberation Theology a cornerstone of a whole new generation of thinking about political Islamism and a compelling read for anyone interested in contemporary Islam, current affairs and US foreign policy. Dabashi drives his well-supported and thoroughly documented points steadily forward in an earnest and highly readable style.

1 Resisting the empire

I ain’t got no quarrel with those Vietcong…no Vietcong ever called me nigger.

Muhammad Ali

Over the last 200 years, until the threshold of the twenty-first century, Muslims around the world have been engaged in a vital confrontation first with European colonialism and after the demise of that calamity with the rise of the US empire. This fateful confrontation has meant a systematic corrosion of the innate cosmopolitanism of Islamic cultures and its gradual mutation into a singular site of ideological resistance to foreign domination—in both political and cultural terms. The rise of Islamic ideologies worldwide corroborated the centrality of European capitalist modernity in which its colonial edges were categorically denigrated and denied agency—areality against which a series of anti-colonialideologies and movements took shape, among them both Christian and Islamic liberation theologies. In this chapter I intend to give an account of the outdated bipolarity between “Islam and the West” that for two centuries defined the terms of domination and resistance in the entire Muslim world. My intention here ultimately is to argue that the amorphous nature of capital in its current stage has generated an equally amorphous empire, and the dialectic of these two historical forces will perforce generate a succession of different and differing modes of resistance to it by people inevitably disenfranchised by its operation and devastated by its ravages. My ultimate intention in this book is to see in what particular terms might militant Islamic movements, beyond and above the current vicious cycle one can call the Bush—BinLaden syndrome, have a share in this legitimate resistance to a predatory empire.

“People of this part of the world ought to know that Americans care.” It was an unguarded moment at an apparently impromptu press conference with President Bush, and there was nothing particularly unusual about this nonsensical and blasé phrase, which I heard and watched on CNN on Friday September 2 2005—nothing except, President Bush was not in Baghdad, Basra, Kandahar or Kabul. He was in Biloxi, Mississippi, visiting the ravaged area a few days after Hurricane Katrina had devastated New Orleans and the tri-state region surrounding it, from Louisiana to Mississippi to Alabama. President Bush was not in “this part of the world.” He was in Biloxi, Mississippi. When did Biloxi, Mississippi become “this part of the world,” to the President of the USA? Strange. But true.

The mutation of Biloxi, Mississippi, into “this part of the world,” when a US president is caught off guard exporting in reverse his vacuous foreign policy vernacular into a devastating domestic scene cannot and should not be dismissed as yet another indication of President Bush’s by now proverbial penchant for dyslexic expressions and outlandish remarks. President Bush was never more accurate and precise, eloquent and correct, in his reference to Biloxi, Mississippi, as “this part of the world.” The scenes of poor, hungry, and frightened colored people, roaming around the dead bodies of their neighbors and loved ones, while watched over by heavily armed, mostly white, military patrols in armored personnel carriers, brandishing machine guns and automatic rifles, was almost identical with similar scenes from Baghdad, Basra, Kandahar, and Mazar-e Sharif. Hurricane Katrina had blown away the carpet under which this massive poverty and destitution was systematically brushed. Was this the USA? Where is the “Third World” these days? It has always been in “this” or “that part of the world.” But never presumed in Biloxi, Mississippi. When hungry and poor people, left by their presumably elected officials to their own non-existentdevices, had begun entering supermarkets to find food and survive, the first thing that local and federal officials sent to the area was sharp shooters to shoot and kill the “intruders.” It was straight out of the 1950s propaganda machinery of racist states that reports of rape and murder began circulating in order to justify the shoot-to-kill order issued by federal and state officials. For days after the carnage of Katrina, the local and federal government kept sending heavily armed military troops to the area instead of medical personnel, social aid workers, civil engineers, etc. The New York Times and CNN were competing with each other reporting on how more troops were being sent into New Orleans in order to restore “calm” in the area. Protecting the absolute and irreconcilable principle of capitalism and private property was far more sacrosanct than saving human lives, people dying in their own excrement and being eaten by rats. “New Orleans has become exactly like Baghdad,” began a poem circulating on the Internet at just about this time:

• Wow, see how drowned in sadness looks New Orleans,
  Worse than Bam¹ now appears New Orleans-
  Just like Baghdad, liberated from law and order,
  Is now New Orleans, oh world is so full of wonders -
  Black Folks, their fortunes all on retreat,
  Hungry and mourning swim through their streets-
  Ready at hand were of course plenty of police officers,
  With canon balls and tanks, guarding shops, banks, offices- All awaiting President Bush who soon came up with his orders
  That voice of black folks ought to be warded-
  New Orleans the city of legendary Jazz and heartwarming Blues,
  Full of black folks playing the trumpet with their souls all bruised-
  In their voices rings the sound of being left to their own devices,
  With no connections, no protection, throwing their own dices-
  They are still all in bondage and yes indeed also in slavery,
  Though this time around hidden behind a veil full of embroideries-
  Upon this veil is cast the shape of—are you ready?—“democracy,”
  Hiding the fact that black folks are rebelling against this hypocrisy—
  From the other side of the veil you can hear the sound of Blues
  Linking their nights of sorrow to their days of abuse:
  “I come from the backs burned by lashes,
  I come from bodies covered with wounds and ashes—
  I am from the Sunday slave markets of yore,
  I am black, soft like cotton not anymore—
  I am black, full of abandoned hopes and in desperation,
  Talk to me, tell me of kindness, not of cotton plantations”—
  Did the black people not have enough pains of their own,
  Did they need to be in a Katrina zone?—
  A Hurricane in New Orleans—call it Katrina, Larry, or Dan;
  Hurried furiously looking just like a gang of Ku Klux Klan—
  Killing on its way all the black people it could,
  And if they survived, homeless they stood—
  The news came finally from the White House:
  “Beware of black folks: male, female, husband and spouse:
  That according to the rule at the time of war
  They will be shot and killed by the US army at supermarket door—
  “These are all thieves and plunderers,” said President Bush,
  No hungry person and a loaf of bread, when shove came to push!²

This was a poem not by an American poet, or even a poet from that huge and hollowed hole called “the West.” The poem was by Hadi Khorsandi, an expatriate Iranian satirist, unable to return to his own homeland because of his political views. Having lived in London and then Los Angeles for a while, and now effectively living nowhere except in the no-man’s-land of the Internet, where he runs a website and tells the world what he thinks of it in his mother tongue. Between President Bush referring to Biloxi, Mississippi, as “this part of the world,” and Hadi Khorsandi composing a poem on the predicament of his fellow human beings in the no-man’s-land of the Internet, the fate of the globalized planet, the state of defenseless and atomized individuals, the whims of the amorphous capital that reigns supreme, and then the cries and whispers of the incompetent empire that seeks to rule it, are all cast and narrated. Does this world have a shape, or is it as shapeless as the nebulous capital that spins it? Is the abysmal pit of the “war on terrorism” the hellhole from which arises a hurricane of a different sort—a senseless, shapeless, shoreless violence, with no beginning, no middle, and no end, breaking poor people’s already dilapidated roofs on their head, while their richer neighbors have always already fled the scene of the crime?

This empire is amorphous, nationless, nameless, merciless. It is not American, so far as millions of anti-war activists are concerned, ordinary Americans from all walks of life who poured into streets of their cities and towns condemning Bush’s warmongering and crying out loud, “Not in Our Name!” Resisting this empire has no cultural designation, no denominational domain. It is as global as the monster it seeks to face.

Among the side effects of Hurricane Katrina in 2005 was the restoration of a modicum of decency to an otherwise entirely bankrupt US media. On the fourth anniversary of 9/11, the criminal negligence at the root of exposing millions of impoverished Americans to hazardous conditions—just one collateral damage of its predatory pursuit of a whimsical empire—finally forced some observers to dub the catastrophe in New Orleans and its surrounding areas the “anti-9/11.”³ It was of course a matter of time that the corporate take over of the US media would soon start whitewashing the terror experienced by millions of people in Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi. But nevertheless, among homes and dreams, Hurricane Katrina had also blown away not just poor people’s livelihood but also the cover of the corruption at the vilest and crudest core of the US predatory capitalism and the massive poverty that it generates and sustains not just all around the globe but in its own backyard—and thus the perfectly apt reference of President Bush to Biloxi, Mississippi, as “this part of the world,” for this indeed was part of the rest of the world, akin to Baghdad, Basra, Falluja, Kandahar, Kabul, and Mazar-e Sharif all left in ruins, while between the two of them Bush and Bin Laden had found the planet earth too small for their megalomaniac egos.

By virtue of that very minor slippage, of calling Biloxi, Mississippi, “this part of the world,” if indeed anyone was watching and listening, it was no longer possible to think, read, and write about Islam and Muslims without simultaneously doing the same about other sites of legitimate resistances to the predatory pursuit of power and capital by US neocons—sites of resistance that were no longer limited to Afghanistan, Iraq, or Palestine, but that had indeed gone around the globe and come to include “this part of the world,” Biloxi, Mississippi, and its environs, and then beyond them from East LA to the Bronx and Harlem. “It’s not just Katrina,” as Cornel West put it in an essay published pointedly on the fourth anniversary of 9/11,

it’s povertina. People were quick to call them refugees because they looked as if they were from another country. They are. Exiles in America. Their humanity had been rendered invisible so they were never given high priority when the well-to-do got out and the helicopters came for the few. Almost everyone stuck on rooftops, in the shelters, and dying by the side of the road was poor black.⁴

Cornel West was never so precise in pointedly dissecting the fate of his people. “Charlie Parker,” said West of the legendary jazz musician, “would have killed somebody if he had not blown his horn. The history of black people in America is one of unbelievable resilience in the face of crushing white supremacist powers.” Cornel West did not spare those who had joined the ruling elite to justify the horrors of a racist culture:

They shot brother Martin dead like a dog in 1968 when the mobilization of the black poor was just getting started. At least one of his surviving legacies was the quadrupling in the size of the black middle class. But Oprah [Winfrey] the billionaire and the black judges and chief executives and movie stars do not mean equality, or even equality of opportunity yet. Black faces in high places do not mean racism is over. Condoleezza Rice has sold her soul.⁵

In the aftermath of Katrina, “it was a war of all against all,” Cornel West concluded, “‘you’re on your own’—in the centre of the American empire.”⁶

How do we read Islam and Muslims in the aftermath of not just “9/11” but also of “anti-9/11,” of a subdued class warfare at the heart of the (flailing and incompetent) US empire? Did Persians perish in destitution when the Achamenids were ruling the world? Did Romans live in poverty when their generals went about conquering the earth? Did Dickens mean to say something about the poverty and destitution of the British when their colonial officers went around the globe colonizing people? There is no reading of any enduring and meaningful resistance to the predatory US empire (Osama bin Laden and co. are neither enduring nor meaningful) unless and until Cornel West’s reading of the plight of poor people in the USA is wedded to a larger calamity that the US military is causing around the globe. There is much confusion in the USA, and by extension around the world, about what is happening in and about Islam, to and by Muslims—as they all live under the shadow of the American empire. This confusion is not accidental. It is both historically rooted and deliberately manufactured. There are professional spin doctors, without as much as a preliminary knowledge of the very languages that Muslims speak, shamelessly adding to this systematic mystification of Muslims, confounding the abysmal level of public knowledge about the world at large with their own pathological ignorance and a malignant proclivity to side with power and partake in it. As the historically illiterate US propagandists are manufacturing an Islamic threat based on a violent ideology, they are in fact propagating, ipso facto, a violent ideology of their own, corresponding with a predatory design to rule an unruly world. This is and will remain (as long as it lasts) an empire with no hegemony, except a hegemony by proxy—the manufacturing of a fictive enemy that like the effigy of a phantom fear they put together and burn in public squares (until of course a hurricane comes and blows away all the cover-up of the massive poverty over which presides the phantasmagoric nightmare of a global empire). The central task of these spin doctors, and the propaganda machinery they represent,⁷ is to separate the fate of the poor and disenfranchised in the USA from those of the people in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the rest of the world, via the creation of an imbecilic, when not nauseatingly fake, mode of patriotism. Uniting the fate of poor people in the USA with those around the globe and then asking if Muslims have anything positive, progressive, and constructive to say about that mass of humanity in turmoil is the only way that not just Islam but any world religion can have any meaningful presence in the world.

It is imperative to combat the professional spin doctors who are in the business of manufacturing fictive enemies around the world, while whitewashing the horrors of the impoverished masses, and clear the air of this massive, deliberately manufactured confusion and come up with a clear and concise conception of the predicament of Muslims, inseparable from the rest of mankind at large, just before and then in the aftermath of 9/ 11, and then place it right next to the predicament of their American counterparts of the “anti-9/11.” If the US media yet again does not whitewash the Katrina catastrophe, the “anti-9/11” must supersede and dismantle the massive propaganda machinery it set in motion in the aftermath of 9/11. For this time around there are no dark-skinned Arabs and Muslims categorically to blame—just dark-skinned Americans lying dead, dying, and decaying, or else left homeless and hungry while “the richest most powerful,” as the joke goes, country in the world stood by and watched.

How do we clear the confusions at the heart of the global fear of the “Islam” manufactured by the US neocons—and how do we proceed from there to see what are the emerging patterns of legitimate Islamic resistances to US imperial designs? Very simply—by beginning at the ground zero and the year zero of the US imperial age—the iconic 9/11, and then work our way towards the “anti-9/11.” To combat the propaganda machinery, predicated on a pathological contemporaneity, of the US neocons and their penchant for muddying the waters, we need first and foremost to denounce the horrific events of 9/11 without the slightest hesitation, equivocation, prevarication, evasion, “buts, ifs, however, nevertheless,” etc. The indiscriminate acts of violence perpetrated on that horrific day are not justifiable on any scale, basis, or assumption. 9/11 was a singular act of diabolic insanity, horrific insignia of vicious violence at the service of no cause, an ignoble manifestation of deranged minds incapable of figuring out where the core of a global injustice is located and thus lashing out at the iconic signs of an imperial project, irrespective of the sanctity of innocent lives they thus desecrated and wantonly wasted. To the degree that this act of deranged violence was done in the name of Islam, Islam itself, outside any quotation mark, is accountable for the carnage of 9/11. But that degree is as tenuous as Judaism being responsible for the criminal atrocities of Baruch Goldstein in particular or Zionism even in more vicious and systematic ways piling one generation of vicious injustice upon Palestinians after another. The same holds true in the distinction we must make between the Christianity of poor people (liberation theology of Latin America) and that of the Crusaders or Christian missionary accomplices of European colonialism—or between Hinduism and the criminal thugs representing the BJP in India. Osama bin Laden has a similar claim on Islam, and he does, as Baruch Goldstein has on Judaism, Jim Jones on Christianity, or the BJP on Hinduism. None of such comparisons or contrasts should detract from the more fundamental fact that insane acts of violence, whether committed in the name of Islam, Christianity, Judaism, or Hinduism, must be categorically and consistently denounced.

Once we categorically denounce such indiscriminate acts of violence, we also need to separate the actual reality of the events of 9/11 from the nauseating propaganda machinery into which they were fed in order to justify the Bush administration’s even more horrid acts of violence. If we do not make that distinction, we will inevitably end up in the rise of pathological conspiracy theories that in fact attribute the events of 9/11 to some secret design by the US government itself.⁸ Instead of falling into that trap, we need to separate the sheer insanity of those acts of random violence in 9/11 from any subsequent abuses to which they were put by a neocon-inspired global warmongering. Perfectly legitimate sympathy with the victims of 9/11 and their bereaved loved ones must never be marred by the fact that they are viciously abused in a politics of mourning to justify the terrorizing war that the Bush administration has unleashed. Quite to the contrary: the memory of the innocent victims of 9/11 must be turned around and used for the cause of peace and legitimate resistance to this predatory empire.⁹

Equally important is not to allow the legitimate global anger against the US imperialism in general and against the Bush administration’s criminal neocon project in particular to be translated into an illegitimate sympathy for the equally criminal atrocities of Osama bin Laden and his associates. At the mercy of both George W. Bush and Osama bin Laden are innocent people the world over, whether in New York and New Orleans or in Kandahar and Baghdad. That a band of criminally minded neocons have taken over the sacrosanct institutions of a democracy and driven it to sheer criminal madness around the globe, does not mean that equally criminal adventurers like Osama bin Laden or Abu Musab al-Zarqawi are harbingers of truth, salvation, freedom, and democracy. It is imperative for us to see that Francis Fukuyama, Samuel Huntington, and Bernard Lewis are Ayman al-Zawahiri and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in business suits, cleanshaven, wearing colorful ties, and speaking a passable English. In a contorted worldview and moral derangement there is no difference between Bush, Blair, Berlusconi, and Bin Laden. Anger with any one of them should not amount to sympathy for the other.

Along the same argument, we also need to place the historical amnesia subsequently loaded in the iconic sign of “9/11” (before the “anti-9/11” scandalized it) in the context of the last 200 years—when and how did Islamic Ideology as a mode of resistance to European colonialism emerge, when and how did it serve its purposes and die out, what and whence are the current globalized terrorist exchanges between the two camps of President Bush and Osama bin Laden, and ultimately what lays out into the future, signs of hope, reasons for despair, loci of critical attention to articulate the modes and manners of resisting a globalized empire—infinitely superior in its manners of inflicting pain, causing terror, wreaking havoc, and spreading fear than any presumed enemy it says it wants to fight.¹⁰

Once the air is thus cleared of any confusion of ideas and sentiments, we are ready for a critical encounter with the events of 9/11.

The apocalyptic events of September 11 2001 and the subsequent unleashing of the massive US military machinery in Afghanistan and Iraq that they occasioned once again brought Islam to the forefront of global attention. The US-led invasion of Afghanistan (2001) and Iraq (2003)—both predominantly Muslim countries—and the rise of the Arab and Muslim world in anger and fear have resuscitated the specter of a massively politicized Islam as the single most defiant mode of political resistance to the rising US empire. The continued Israeli occupation of Palestine and the cycle of genocidal, homicidal, and suicidal violence that it has occasioned is a deep wound in the side of Muslims the world over—unable to dismantle the last vestige of a European colonialism in their midst, unwilling to live with its extension into a military base for the US imperial operations in their midst. Under the pretext of a US—Israeli strategic alliance, Israel as a quintessentially colonial settlement now categorically functions as a military hardware integral to the operation of the US empire. While the so-called Israeli intellectuals are busy debating Zionism and post-Zionism, one- or two-state solutions, what they call their country links its European colonial herita...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Introduction
• 1 Resisting the empire
• 2 The end of Islamic ideology
• 3 Blindness and insight
• 4 Islam and globalization
• 5 The Shi’i passion play
• 6 Liberation theodicy
• 7 Malcolm X as a Muslim revolutionary
• Conclusion: Prolegomena to a future liberation theodicy
• Notes