At Freedom's Limit

Islam and the Postcolonial Predicament

Sadia Abbas

• Publisher: Modern Language Initiative
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780823257881
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern Literary
• Index: Literature

The subject of this book is a new "Islam." This Islam began to take shape in 1988 around the Rushdie affair, the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989, and the first Gulf War of 1991. It was consolidated in the period following September 11, 2001. It is a name, a discursive site, a signifier at once flexible and constrained—indeed, it
is a geopolitical agon, in and around which some of the most pressing aporias of modernity, enlightenment, liberalism, and reformation are worked out.At this discursive site are many metonyms for Islam: the veiled or "pious" Muslim woman, the militant, the minority Muslim injured by Western free speech. Each of these figures functions as a cipher enabling repeated encounters with the question "How do we free ourselves from freedom?" Again and again, freedom is imagined as Western, modern, imperial—a dark imposition of Enlightenment. The pious and injured Muslim who desires his or her own enslavement is imagined as freedom's other.At Freedom's Limit is an intervention into current debates regarding religion, secularism, and Islam and provides a deep critique of the anthropology and sociology of Islam that have consolidated this formation. It shows that, even as this Islam gains increasing traction in cultural production from television shows to movies to novels, the most intricate contestations of Islam so construed are to be found in the work of Muslim writers and painters.This book includes extended readings of jihadist proclamations; postcolonial law; responses to law from minorities in Muslim-majority societies; Islamophobic films; the novels of Leila Aboulela, Mohammed Hanif, and Nadeem Aslam; and the paintings of Komail Aijazuddin.

1. The Maintenance of Innocence

Cleansing Empire

The sun pours down over Lord’s. A black man ushers one of Bollywood’s most amiably round-faced actors out from a dark corridor onto the unconfined open field. The men embrace. The stalls are empty, but ball and bat are found. The black man—athletic but young, sweet, and unthreatening—bowls; the South Asian bats and hits what could be a boundary or a winning stroke. He raises his bat, acknowledging the applause of the absent audience in a gesture straight from Bollywood and bearing all the marks of its sentimentality and melodrama. Both are transfigured by joy. It could almost be a scene scripted by an acolyte of C. L. R. James.¹

What the audience knows as we watch this vision from “Who Guards the Guards?” (2004), an episode from the popular British television show Spooks/MI-5, is that the scene is a moment of joy engineered for a former colonial subject by a defunct empire at war with itself. Danny (David Oyelo) is a junior spy for the MI-5, Harakat (Anupam Kher) is a Pakistani ex-militant under the protection, now, of MI-5 and under imminent threat of assassination by MI-6, because the head of the agency, unbeknownst to the team at MI-5, has made a deal with the head of the organization (Path of Light) to which Harakat belonged before he was turned by the British. The scene, offered as a kind of sports-pastoral, enacts a momentary restitution of Empire through a celebration of its gifts to its darker subjects: here the joy of cricket. This vision is far indeed from C. L. R. James: the comity between former imperial subject and declined Empire is poised on the erasure of the violence of imperial history not in any way upon its recognition.

The strategies of the erasure are carefully choreographed, in many ways clumsily obvious, and yet rather mesmerizing. They hinge on two figures, Danny, the abject black spy—yearning for the uninterested blonde, Zoe (Keeley Hawes)—and Zuli, an author based on Rushdie trying get a fatwa calling for his murder removed, played with devilish unamiability by the bald, round-faced Simon De Selva (whose features register as the evil double of Kher’s). Of course, both Kher and De Selva resemble Rushdie. The show justifies Zuli’s ejection from the story within the first ten minutes by transforming it into a self-ejection. As Zuli stalks off into the arms of his new ex-CIA guards, we are to see only his treachery.

The conceit that the MI-5 team is guarding the wrong man, the author, is introduced in the second scene and enables its delineation of a very particular world of Islam. Zuli meets Harakat, his friend, a bookseller, in order to get the fatwa removed. Danny is present to guard the author; there is an assassination attempt in which Danny rolls on top of Zuli in order to protect him. Harakat is a little wounded. As it transpires the assassination attempt was aimed at Harakat, not Zuli. The good British spies were protecting the wrong Muslim all along. Although one spy appears to be a critic, for as he surveils the meeting, before it is violently disrupted, he remarks with what is meant to pass as wit and comes across as the cringe-making labor evinced when the British national commitment to wit makes a citizen try too hard: “There’s only one thing that worries me. The last thing we want is to keep Zuli alive long enough for him to inflict another one of his novels on us” (WGG). That critical wisdom is ratified when Zuli, furious at the attempt, and thinking that he was the target, threatens to call the Home Secretary and rejects the British spies in favor of retired American ones. Yet Harakat, disposable like all Muslims in the show, is murdered right after his treat at Lord’s.

The world of Islam the episode delineates is a marvel of flat simplicity: a good (because turned and hence moderate) cricket-playing Islamist; a bad Islamist making deals with the evil head of MI-6 in (bizarrely) Hebron. A bad apostate author, indulged by the British government because of his uppity friendship with the Home Secretary, who does not have the grace to be grateful to his guards and opts instead for the ex-CIA protectors, thus securing his expulsion from the community of decency and morality into which the show attempts to claw its way. Bombs in Karachi and Peshawar. There are no women in this vision. No engagement with the world of Muslims outside bombs and fatwas, inconvenient (apostate) Muslims, good and bad Islamists, who, although they are Pakistani in this episode, could be in Karachi, Peshawar, or Hebron.

The episode is a significant marker of the refraction into the British and (global) imaginary of the “Islam” that is the subject of this book. An erasure of imperial history that mirrors fully the erasure of its colonial genealogy in this constitution of Islam is achieved through the episode’s arrangement of the tokens of this Islam’s symbolic economy—Islamists, authors, bombs, fatwas—and through its deployment of a favorite trope of postwar British spy fiction: the foregrounding of the ignorant, even thuggish moral unredeemability of the CIA. The concluding exchange between the heads of the two agencies reveals the moral necessity of the narrative of U.S. excess to the ongoing project of British self-exculpation, and to the fortification of postimperial “historical amnesia.”² The show’s recurrent critique of the special relationship, into which the contempt for the CIA is folded, is part of the renewal of British innocence. It continues into the Blair era what Stuart Hall identified as Thatcherism’s forging of “new discursive articulations between the liberal discourses of the ‘free market’ and economic man and the organic theme of conservative themes of tradition, family and nation, respectability, patriarchalism and order.”³ Even as the episode in particular and the show in general attempt to expel the moral contamination of American power, aligning it with the corporations, they position Muslims within these new discursive articulations by attempting to reimagine Englishness as a morally agonized, helpless, and noncorporate counterpoint to American force in relation to Muslims. As such the show returns to what Hall has called “the unresolved psychic trauma of the “end of empire” by imaging English benevolence: “[Thatcherism’s] reworking of these different repertoires of ‘Englishness’ constantly repositions both individual subjects and ‘the people’ as a whole—their needs, experiences, aspirations, pleasures and desires—contesting space in terms of shifting national identity and culture precipitated by the unresolved psychic trauma of the ‘end of empire.’”⁴

In “Who Guards the Guards?” the special relationship is the instrument of the British renewal of innocence, which is, in turn, an attempt to overcome the trauma of the end of empire. It is an innocence asserted in a move that relies on an imperial history it simultaneously expunges. British intellectual superiority relies on knowledge of the world that lies beyond its own borders:

Oliver Mace (MI-6): If you’re asking me is there at present anything we shouldn’t do to achieve our ends? Then frankly I don’t know. Post 9/11 we made a decision that nothing, nobody was off-limits anymore. Look around at what’s been happening since Iraq. We’re up against it. We can’t say any more: this we do not do. In the long term we will be proved right as a strategy.

Harry Pearce (MI-5): Whose long term are we talking about?

Oliver: Before you get on your hobbyhorse, Harry, think about this: Do you think we did this alone, without help from Langley?

Harry: And that justifies it? Part of the reason for all this trouble is that most Americans think anything east of the Hudson is like those blank spaces on medieval maps where they drew in a monster and wrote ‘here be dragons.’ (WGG)

Harry Pearce’s dismissal of American ignorance is, of course, an insidiously brilliant rearticulation of imperial history, for it hides the relationship of the reach of British cartographic knowledge to British colonialism. That knowledge is presented now as a token of British responsibility and offered as a corrective to the imperatives of ignorance underpinning the violence of American world domination.

Zuli’s relationship with his ex-CIA guards can then reinforce this cleansing. His dramatic and unattractive exit into the protection of his ex-CIA guards allows good, benevolent Englishness—here imagined as a loosely liberal critique of Blairite collusion in the war—to secure itself by learning to love the right sort of Islamist. His treachery is fully mirrored by Harakat’s gratitude. In the scene that is an important precursor to the scene at Lord’s, Harakat gives Danny a Wisden 1913:

Harakat: I’m sorry for what Zuli said to you in that meeting, but he was certainly not speaking on my behalf. And gratitude is not one of his things.

Danny: Clearly. (WGG)

The emptiness of the confining room in which this exchange takes place reinforces the intimacy of the scene. Harakat is revealed as the true lover of books as he props the few he has been able to bring on a table to give the room a momentary sense of home. Within the confines of this shelter, which Harakat has tried to turn into an impromptu home, Danny’s growing care for Harakat allows Harakat’s gentleness to become visible to the viewers. That he remembers Danny looking at a row of Wisdens in his bookshop is an invitation to the reader to shift her perception and see the Islamist through his capacity for quiet attention. The reminder of the small, if affectively important, detail from the scene leading to the assassination attempt pulls the reader into an interpretive circle in which the tutelage of the Islamist is to make her aware of the limitations of her own ability to see—and read. Once added to the order of his attention, Harakat’s love for cricket provides implicit testimony of the decency and redeemability that turn him into the right sort of British subject.

Danny’s loyalty to England, combined with his yearning for the very white, unavailable colleague who is being kind to him to help him through a bad phase, makes him the racial subject who justifies the nation. His receipt of Harakat’s gratitude and his anger at Zuli’s ingratitude give cover to the show’s imperial fantasy. The black man who represents the state shows it to be inclusive, just, and worthy of gratitude for its present multiracial and multireligious benevolence and for its past largesse—a historical benevolence that allows someone like Danny to be in England in the first place. At the end of the season, in the episode where he will sacrifice himself to save another spy from Iraqis bent on revenge in London, he tells the gun-waving man (who has already declared, “We are all Al-Qaeda now”): “You will never win. If I’d been born somewhere else, it might have been me holding the gun now. If you’d been born somewhere else, you might be sitting where I am. For all your talk about choices we don’t get to choose those things. But I guess you were just unlucky because somehow you have lost humanity and now have no kindness or pity left in you.”⁵ Danny’s presence ensures the eradication of any viable radicalism on the part of England’s nonwhite subjects. The show sets up a choice between Al-Qaeda, the CIA lovey, or the grateful colored subject, who realizes that being in Britain is morally providential. Born elsewhere, he could, on the show’s terms, have been a damaged, moral monster.

Abject and sacrificial, Danny is the cohesive element in a representation that domesticates James, offering an anodyne reconciliation between nation and racial subject, in order to imagine solutions to a series of problems in political thought, imperial history, and the management of populations in the former and current metropolises of Empire. Perhaps most significant is the solution the episode appears to offer to Euro-America’s ongoing inability to bring its much-stated commitment to freedom in line with the dependence of its ascendancy in the world upon the conquest and enslavement of much of the planet. This ostensibly irreconcilable antinomy is to be worked out, not through a serious engagement with the rest of the planet, but by being brought in line with an internal game of state multiculturalism—in this case, facilitated by putting forward black subjects patronized by the state who are to manage other populations by ensuring their gratitude.

It is a vision that seems fundamentally opposed to the radical notion of politics and culture that was part of the project and conception of Black Britain, at least as envisaged by Hall, and a quick contrast with My Beautiful Laundrette is useful, for historical as well as conceptual clarification. The politics of representation in “Who Guards the Guards?” are far indeed from the critical epistemology that underlay Hall’s notion of Black Britain and that allowed him to write: “My Beautiful Laundrette is one of the most riveting and important films produced by a black writer in recent years and precisely for the reason that made it so controversial: its refusal to represent the black experience in Britain as monolithic, self-contained, sexually stabilized and always ‘right-on’—in a word, always and only ‘positive.’”⁶ “Who Guards the Guards?” presents an equivalence between the nonwhite characters of the show and yet disarticulates them as Muslim and black, flattening them through a sentimentalized relationship with Englishness while mediating their relationship through the state, whose Englishness is based on a whiteness that dispenses occasional inclusion. The nonwhite subjects can only petition for belonging and can have no relations with each other outside the state’s mediation.

This vision is at a significant distance from that in My Beautiful Laundrette, in which British identity is presented as fractious and contested. Its response to Thatcherism’s reorganization of Englishness is not merely to present British subjects as engaged in a dance of petitioning the state for inclusion, but instead to show the complexities and organization of Britons who already belong even if that belonging is not recognized by racists, who seek to shatter it through repeated and systematic acts of violence. In Kureishi’s vision, there is no sentimental attachment to the virtue of any one of the subjects, no attempt to put on display a morality that will earn the generosity of the state or even the nation. This lack of sentimentality is evinced in the refusal to equate victimhood with virtue, in the refusal to produce racial violence as the alternative to virtue or to make the freedom from racial violence something that has to be earned.

Even the somewhat surreally rendered landscape of the scene—in which Omar encounters his friend turned temporary fascist, Johnny, after a long time, as he drives his affluent cousin, Saleem, and Saleem’s wife, Cherry, home—is an antidote to any conception of an English pastoral. As the car stops, Johnny’s band of racist punk friends surround the car and appear to crawl over it. One man moons the passengers, pressing his buttocks against the window. Johnny watches at a distance. Inside the car, Saleem is drunk and Cherry is annoyed.⁷ When the racists surround the car she is also terrified. The scene is already darkly surreal, the frames claustrophobic; and then Omar, who has been looking bored and, as always, a little impervious, gets out of the car as he spots Johnny watching at a distance and goes to shake his hand. Matching visual disorientation with racial violence without erasing the aggression within the internal sphere, the film remains attentive to what Gayatri Spivak calls “the double bind.” I take Spivak’s notion to refer to the (impossible) necessity of inhabiting intimate incommensurables that govern being and social life.⁸ In An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalizalition, Spivak lists a series of double binds. Here are some: between body and mind, “the uselessness of human life (planetarity) and the push to be useful (worldliness)” and, perhaps most pertinent in the context of this book, “between metropolitan minority and postcolonial majority perspectives” and those generated around gender, of which most tellingly she writes, “figure out the double binds there, simple and forbidding.”⁹

The scene blurs the line between the “public” metropolitan sphere and the “private” one of immigrant domestic life—thus refusing to be determined by the double bind that invites the immigrant to hide any aggression within domestic life for fear of feeding the racism lurking outside the door. Omar’s getting out of the car to talk to Johnny is a reminder of the porousness of the division between the two spheres (MBL, scene 4): he went to school with these boys; Johnny was once a friend and will become a lover. The force of this blurring lies in its claim that Omar no less than Johnny is English and the racial violence, fascism, and Thatcherism will have to be fought as citizens who belong, without letting the fact of racism abject those who are considered incompletely English. At the same time, as Gayatri Gopinath has argued in her fine reading of My Beautiful Laundrette, even as queer desire “re-orients the traditionally backward-looking glance” of diaspora, that desire allows Omar to remember the “barely submerged histories of colonialism and racism that erupt into the present.”¹⁰ Moreover, if...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• The Argument
• 1. The Maintenance of Innocence
• 2. The Echo Chamber of Freedom: The Muslim Woman and the Pretext of Agency
• 3. Religion and the Novel: A Case Study
• 4. How Injury Travels
• 5. Cold War Baroque: Saints and Icons
• 6. Theologies of Love
• Notes