The politics of representation after 9/11

In other words, the various issues that have been central to the relations between Muslims and the US have been characterized by practices that have been implicated in the production of meanings and identities. These meanings and identities cannot be separated from the relations that have developed between Muslims and the US. In contrast to the traditional orientations, I suggest that the relations have been more than these issues; rather, the practices of representation of Muslims by the US.

By representation, I mean the ways in which Muslims have been discursively represented by policy-makers, scholars, journalists, and the others in the United States and its close allies. This does not refer to the "truth" and "knowledge" that the center of capitalist power, the US, has discovered and accumulated about Muslims, but rather to the ways in which regimes of "truth" and "knowledge" have been produced and constructed in order to justify governance and certain interventions.

Although the construction and representation of Muslims in the Western discourse started long before, it became quite apparent after the Cold War, and more intense after September 11, 2001. After the collapse of the USSR, the center of capitalist power did not have any common enemy, and hence a new domain of thought was necessary to construct. Different intellectuals emerged in the US to construct this "new enemy." Not only that, they also constructed the world as a "unipolar" one in which the US is the only superpower able to dominate world politics. This kind of construction has two dreadful consequences.

First, it gives an unprecedented status to the US and encourages it to strengthen its domination over the globe at any cost. Secondly, it overlooks and questions the legitimacy and compatibility of other civilizations alongside the American one. For instance, Samuel Huntington, in his theory, "the clash of civilization," constructs a future clash between civilizations, and he suggests that the US dismantle and emasculate any kind of military as well as economic build-up in other countries especially in the East, and to exploit their differences. Many critics think, this kind of construction is an intellectual blunder as it precludes peaceful co-existence.

As the "Muslims" appeared as a "domain of thought" in Western discourse, Muslim societies witnessed a massive landing of experts, mostly Western, each in charge of investigating, measuring, and theorizing about this or that little aspect of Muslim societies. The proliferation of experts on the "Muslim issue" in the West became more intense after 9/11, and Muslims became an "object of knowledge" and a "new problematization" in the Western discourse. It is interesting, yet an irony, to see how various "problems" were gradually and suddenly discovered in Muslim societies and Muslims were problematized and constructed with various negative images in the Western discourse, and how one-fifth of the world population was put under a regime of control and intervention by these discursive practices.

It is remarkable to see how Muslims were treated as a homogeneous mass or a monolithic entity despite their political, religious and cultural diversity, and how the horrific actions of a handful of fundamentalists, a tiny deviated fraction of the whole Muslim spectrum, are made a representation for the whole community, in other words, how Muslims are often judged en masse by the standards of their worst representatives. In the Western media and academia, Muslims are discursively constructed as the "other." Many of these constructions equate Islam with evil through portrayals of Muslims as an irrational, uncivilized, threatening and uniquely fundamentalist "other."

"Islam has attacked us," said Franklin Graham in North Carolina shortly after the September 11 attacks (NBC Nightly News, November 16, 2001). Like his father, the Revered Billy Graham, Franklin Graham is one of America's most powerful evangelical leaders. He delivered the benediction at George W. Bush's inauguration, and is heir to his father's extensive ministry. Americans of all faiths were asked to embrace one another and unite against terrorism. Mr. Graham's words, however, dismiss any interfaith dialogue: "The God of Islam is not the same God," he alleged. "Islam," Mr. Graham concluded, "is a very evil and wicked religion."

Mr. Graham's perception of Islam as an "evil" religion strikes a familiar tone in the United States. Here, hostilities with elements within the Muslim world are commonly constructed and presented as a conflict between good and evil. President Bush responded to the September 11 attacks by launching a "crusade" against terrorism. He promises to "rid the world of evil," to "fight the evil ones," and has inventoried an "axis of evil" constituted primarily of Muslim nations.

The discursive construction of Muslims in the Western discourse is painful, yet interesting. Muslims have been constructed with negativity as opposed to the positivity of the West. "America was targeted for attack," said President Bush, "because we're the brightest beacon for freedom and opportunity in the world."

"This conflict," he continues, "is a fight to save the civilized world," because the terrorists hate freedom and democracy. The President's declaration: "You are with us or you are with the terrorists" implies a binary construction of spaces. The social production of space implicit in these terms is bound with the production of difference, subjectivities, and social order. This distance, which is not a simple marker of cultural diversity, is branded with inferiority and negativity (terrorist, evil, militant, backward, underdeveloped, poor, lacking, traditional, and so forth). When these kinds of negative images are constructed on a group of people, they automatically become preamble to certain treatments and interventions, and thus, the former justifies the latter.

The construction and representation of Muslims as "others" by different negative images has some obvious implications. First, it limits the social space of Muslims in the West. Starting from their inner-self to the job market to the global arena, Muslims suffer from a considerable amount of distress, lack of a sense of belonging, and massive insecurity. Second, the displacement of Muslims from the West becomes legitimate. As the general public starts viewing Muslims as a potential threat to the West, any form of physical and cultural violence towards them goes on without any major challenge and protest. The oppression of Muslims does not create any sympathy in the minds of the Western people. Third, from the part of constructing agency, we find different ideologies justifying their claims and constructions. It leads the Muslim subjects to react in various forms, ranging from death, through submission and internalization of inferiority, to a variety of resistance -- from everyday forms through sporadic uprisings to mass political mobilization. Fourth, the construction deploys a regime of control and governance on them. It signals a significant shift in power relation between the US and Muslims -- the relations of domination and subordination.

If Islam/Muslim is juxtaposed with the US, and the relation is constructed in such a way that the former is inimical/antithetical to the latter, then the survival of each increasingly depends on the limiting autonomy (power) of the other. The US had this inimical relation with the former USSR, and the end result was the collapse of one!

Muslims cannot afford to ignore that the US is a powerful reality. Muslims should always negotiate with the US in a peaceful manner rather than with violence and terrorism. The US should also keep in mind, as one of the anti-war protesters in Toronto, Canada wrote in his placard, "War for peace is like sex for virginity." We should not, however, eliminate the room for peaceful co-existence. The superpower US has to remember and act upon the fact that terrorism cannot be fought through military war, but only by bringing justice and eliminating the roots of frustration. History, both old and new, is rampant with examples of great powers that wasted their resources and hence lost their privileged position in the world, through improving their war apparatus but overlooking the system of justice. Both Muslims and the US have to find common ground to minimize tensions and conflicts, and seek for all-encompassing global solidarity and security based on universal justice, mutual recognition, and tolerance. Re-opening a door for a civilizational dialogue is of paramount need.

The author is a PhD candidate in the Graduate Programme in Sociology at York University, Canada.