President Obama’s speech in the immediate aftermath of the massacre inside the Pulse nightclub in Orlando was brilliant and compelling. His case against using the term “radical Islam” was convincing and pure common sense. This isn’t about religion; it’s about terrorism! Those far right conservatives who want to “name the problem” as it were, never actually make the case as to why it is necessary to be more effective in the fight against terrorism. As the President said, it isn’t a strategy, just a political talking point and one, it appears, that is designed to create a political advantage for those wanting to use the well worn political tool of scapegoating people to generate fear. It is a dangerous strategy as modern history shows and one which the President reminded us today is utterly unAmerican!
According to a brief ABC report, Obama didn’t set the precedent. That distinction would go to his predecessor, George W. Bush, who famously stated in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks that, "Americans understand we fight not a religion. Ours is not a campaign against the Muslim faith. Ours is a campaign against evil." Hilary Clinton agreed referring to Trump’s ranting in support of regular media use of the term as simple “name calling” (although she has recently reconsidered her position here)! It is also bad strategy.
Aside from the obvious need to avoid stigmatizing the vast majority of law abiding, peaceful Muslim-Americans, who contribute valuable intelligence to security apparatuses in stopping terror attacks, we need to prevent ISIS from making this a religious issue in our effort to also deprive them of legitimacy. As Obama has stated repeatedly of ISIS,
"They try to portray themselves as religious leaders — holy warriors in defense of Islam...That’s why ISIL presumes to declare itself the ‘Islamic State.’ And they propagate the notion that America — and the West, generally — is at war with Islam...[rather] We are at war with people who have perverted Islam."
Obama has stated that far from his opponents’ view that failure to state the issue in the way they do, he actually understands it much better! Specifically, he gets the need to keep the vast majority of Muslims on our side and dampen the appeal of ISIS recruiters to Muslim youth. The best way to do this is not to associate their faith with mindless terrorism and the mass murder of innocent people. Obama has said that the ISIS ideology is an utter perversion of Islam, not merely an extreme version of it!
So why do Republicans reject such common sense rationales in favor of stigmatizing descriptions of terrorism that offend most law abiding Muslims? VOX has also pointed out that “...George W. Bush was also reluctant to define the conflict in terms that emphasized religion.” But in the wake of the Charlie Hedbo attacks in early January 2015, routine calls from around the globe to “name the problem” as radical Islam began to mount and pressure built up on the Obama administration to get on board as it were! Instead, Obama stuck to his original rationale in refusing to do so. As he explained to CNN’s Fareed Zakaria in the month immediately following the attacks in Paris;
I think that for us to be successful in fighting this scourge, it's very important for us to align ourselves with the 99.9 percent of Muslims who are looking for the same thing we're looking for — order, peace, prosperity. ... The Middle East and South Asia are sort of ground zero for us needing to win back hearts and minds, particularly when it comes to young people.
It became extremely important not to fall into the terrorists’ trap of defining this war as one of one faith against another as well as not succumbing to ISIS’s perverted version of Islam as anything but just that all of which meant always avoiding the use of the term “Islam” altogether in public discourse on the subject of terrorism by Jihadist groups. If there is one thing that both the Bush and Obama administrations have in common on this issue is the desire to avoid offending law abiding, pro-US Muslim-Americans by any public association of their faith with terrorism no matter how qualified or oblique. Currently, many of Obama’s opponents still call for the public use of the term, regardless. But why?
Since the start of Al Qaeda attacks on US targets in the early 1990s, Conservatives have repeatedly characterized the “war on terror” as an obvious clash of civilizations, an ongoing war with no end or beginning but which is as transcendental in nature as their other, more religiously based belief, in the ongoing war between good and evil. Conservatives tend to have a myopic and dogmatic view of history as ultimately a transcendental and universal battle of good against evil rather than a temporally conflict between specific forces with specific causes that were neither inevitable nor necessary. Liberalism and ideologies to the left see the primacy of the human subject in determining the meaning, process and outcome of history. Any given conflict can end up in a variety of eventual outcomes depending on the balance of forces and a variety of social influences on events. People shape history, not fixed, objective conditions. In addition, history is always in flux and not rigidly linear as conservatives tend to see it.
Thus, conservatives tend to see a rigid objective set of fixed transcendental conditions such as “human nature” or the universal battle between good and evil that where outcomes are more or less inevitable or predetermined by a fixed nature of things that is beyond effective human intervention. It is for this reason that the two basic philosophies have very different ideas about change. Thus, the left tends to be more “historicist” (a pejorative term originated by the rationalist philosopher Karl Popper) in their outlook while the right tends to see ongoing fixed, transcendental forces (like “good” and “evil”) that are outside human control and human history. It is for this reason that one continually hears the left criticize the rights analysis as ahistorical.
The Muslim social scientist, Mahmood Mamdani, explicates the philosophical basis of the public debate on Islam and contemporary world politics in a brilliant book called Good Muslim, Bad Muslim (2005) where he attempts to deconstruct western discourse on the conflict between Islam and the west. In an article where he describes the main themes of the book, he states that the cultural (here read religious) explanation of politics, which becomes part of the good/bad value judgement aspect of western perceptions, “...tend to avoid history and issues.” In Mamdani’s view, thinking in cultural or religious terms in analyzing outcomes, “...dehistoricizes the construction of political identities.” He believes that the western tendency to see itself as dynamic and adaptive while seeing “non-modern” people as unchanging and one dimensional is one place where western “understanding” goes awry. He notes that both Christianity and Islam are not monolithic and are both highly complex. As he says, “Both harbor, and are indeed propelled by, complex and contradictory tendencies...” which require in depth examination and which are both shaped more by internal conflict than conflicts between one another over time.
By looking at religion or culture in a fixed, ahistoric or one dimensional manner, we are unable to see how traditional views can react to modern circumstances with modern motivations. We fail to this because we loose sight of the dynamic nature of history and instead focus on the fixity of transcendental notions. Mamdani explains that political identity and human action get “dehistoricized” by conceiving of people’s identities, views and behavior as “...shaped by the supposedly unchanging culture into which they are born.” He sees how history often forces an interaction between the old and the new. He explains;
Rather than see contemporary Islamic politics as the outcome of an archaic culture, I suggest that we see neither culture nor politics as archaic but both as very contemporary outcomes of equally contemporary conditions, relations, and conflicts. Instead of dismissing history and politics, as culture talk does, I suggest we place cultural debates in historical and political contexts. Terrorism is not born of the residue of pre-modern culture in modern politics. Rather, terrorism is a modern construction. Even when it harnesses one or another aspect of tradition and culture, the result is a modern ensemble at the service of a modern project.
The transcendental fixity of the “good/evil”, “modern/traditional”, “backward/advanced” dichotomies, does not allow for the historic examination of Islamic/western relations to see how one deeply affected the other through exploitation or colonization. Nor do we see Islamic society is a reaction to modern phenomenon like colonialism and neo-colonialism rather than the outcome of stagnation born of religion. It merely results in a deeply racist, ethnocentric western narrative whereby a supposedly “uncreative” people without real culture or history stubbornly refuses to become “civilized” at the behest of the west and go on an inexplicable violent rampage in the face of modernity. This is the reason that the focus on religion is so important to movement conservatives; it takes the tell tale details of history out of the discussion and replaces them with a self serving narrative about fixed categories like evil, backwardness and tradition. Westerners begin to see Muslims as inherently listless and non-dynamic simply forming part of the general landscape along with the trees and the wildlife. Their very history and culture, in Mamdani’s words, seem to have “...petrified into a lifeless custom” incapable of the same meaningful transformation one sees in the western world. Such ahistoric narratives will never allow for the necessary understanding to resolve pressing global issues such as poverty, oppression and despair. It does however provide an ongoing and self serving justification for US intervention abroad in defense of its own political and economic interests!
Thus, Mamdani’s book goes into the long and often tormented history of relations between Islam and the west from the colonial past to the cold war to modern relationships shaped by western geo-strategic considerations and corporate globalization. Mamdani states that Bush’s question “Why do they hate us” is naive beyond belief! He explains that, “When it comes to the Middle East, we all know that the United States stands for cheap oil and not free speech.” Mamdani thus implores that we make history relevant in our discussion instead of focusing on good and evil and religious beliefs which themselves are in flux and which are also products of history. Bringing history back in, so to speak, allows us to look at the way US/UK interests affected the evolution of Islamic society to where it is today and the shape politics took in those highly colonized societies. “Islamic extremist terrorism” is more a product of many years of consistent US/UK intervention in the Persian Gulf over the course of the twentieth century and its dampening effect on democratization and modernization than as a result of the “nature” of Islam as a faith. Perhaps there is something Obama understands that Trump doesn’t.