Paul would never put it so crudely,
but the blank space was embarrassing.
Waldman, The Submission, 9
∵
In 2011, Frankfurt’s Schirn Kunsthalle presented an exhibition on ‘Secret Societies. To Know, to Dare, to Will, to Keep Silence’. The show included works dealing with a range of historical and imaginary secret societies and prominent aspects of these formations such as their elaborate symbolism, close camaraderie, mythologies, or secret rituals. Interspersed throughout the exhibits was one of the few works which dealt with religious secret societies, 19 Suspects by Jonathan Horowitz. The New York-based artist is noted for his comments on political, social and economic developments and also contributed another piece to the exhibition, Official Portrait of George W. Bush Available for Free from the White House Hung Upside Down (2001). (The title describes the work accurately.) 19 Suspects, produced in 2005, also consists of portraits—pictures of the nineteen men held responsible for the execution of the 9/11 attacks appropriated from the photographs released by the FBI soon after the attacks. The pictures were distributed individually or in small groups throughout the exhibition and identified by most viewers only when they recognized one of the more prominent faces. Apart from the title and the larger frame constituted by the show, the exhibit did not contain any inscription, and the visitor was free to entertain her own thoughts unguided by verbal instructions.
Why these men belonged to a secret society of sorts is probably obvious, secrecy being a key strategic requirement of the preparation and execution of the hijackings. The relationship between secrecy and violence committed by Muslims and justified in religious terms, however, presents more intricate problems. Much of the curiosity generated by and reflected in 19 Suspects is captured in an emblematic phrase frequently uttered since the attacks which implies assumptions about the motivation of the attackers as well, “Why do they hate us so much?” Further and more disconcerting questions oftentimes follow. If these Muslims hate us so much and if it is on religious grounds that they hate and attack us, what about other Muslims? Answers are frequently presented in semantically skewed ways: “Islam says … about violence” or “Islam stipulates. …” The faulty semantics which elevates a historical, social, cultural and discursive construct to an agent betrays uncertainty and the desire to remove it. Crucially, the desire to understand the other in this particular religious encounter is driven by fear and the perception of a larger threat. The portraits of the nineteen men who are no longer able to deliver answers to these questions create space for projection and speculation. Indeed, they remain ‘suspects’, their deaths having preceded any legal prosecution, although a number of formal reports have established their responsibility posthumously. But what was it that drove them to the act of mass murder and self-annihilation? The expressions on the faces of the men do not shed any light on the situation. Ranging from expressionless blank faces to faint smiles, no basic human emotion such as anger, fear or joy, is manifest which would explain their action. The portraits thus function as blank spaces not unlike the empty areas discussed in the introduction to this volume by Philipp Reichling and Knut Martin Stünkel. Surrounded by the historical certainties of actions performed after these pictures were taken and before they were appropriated, the inner and individual motivations of the nineteen suspects remain undefined in Horowitz’s work and need to be construed by the viewer.
Individuals frequently classified as Islamophobes1 fill the general void and uncertainty with their own explanations which identify essential principles in Islam that purport to reveal not only why the actions of the ‘19 suspects’ were indeed in line with the religion’s teachings—despite the protestations of so many—but also why alternative representations (the most frequently quoted and dismissed being “Islam is a religion of peace”) are naïve at best and obfuscating at worst. Furthermore, some, albeit by no means all, argue that dissimulation as practiced by sleepers is not merely a political and military strategy, but grounded in a religiously validated and historically rooted principle widely embraced by Muslims in the West.
Given his tendencies to subvert manifestations of economic and political power attested to elsewhere, it may seem odd to associate Horowitz with this Islamophobic discourse. His 19 Suspects, however, reflects with its silence uncertainties of Western liberals how to confront the problem of violence committed in the name of Islam and offers space in which anti-Islamic polemics too can operate. As I will argue in more detail, far from condemning all Muslims as terrorists, liberals too struggle to find explanations and sometimes confirm all too easily stereotypes and views promoted by Islamophobes. Indeed, in its own way, Horowitz’s 19 Suspects not only reflects, but potentially reinforces an attitude of distrust and suspicion. Widespread mistrust and assumptions of secrecy play an important role in this context.
The broader aim of the present article is to explore a particular dynamics which emerges out of Western responses to violence executed by Muslims and justified in religious terms in the contemporary period as portrayed in various cultural expressions. Born out of uncertainty and nourished by conspiracy theories, suspicions are voiced as to what Muslims actually believe and what their stance on terrorism is. This mistrust in turn puts pressure on Muslims in the West to declare themselves, knowing all too well that their explanations might be dismissed by their most ardent critics as strategic lies. In this situation secrecy is largely imagined. It is not produced by those who harbor a secret, but rather by those who presume this to be the case in others. This culminates in a real-life equivalent to the paradox of the Cretan philosopher Epimenides who famously stated that all Cretans are liars. As in 19 Suspects, the idea of a blank space describes well the resulting constellation, marked by a determination to understand the religious other against the backdrop of fundamental and mutual mistrust.
After introducing religiously validated dissimulation as a prominent topic in recent Islamophobic polemics, I am going to examine two forms of creative expressions which seek to capture its effect on Muslims in the West and relations between Muslims and non-Muslims: two novels (Amy Waldman’s The Submission and Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist) and two films (Torn and My Name is Khan). While obviously reflecting the perspectives of the individual authors and filmmakers, all four pieces are marked by an empathetic approach to the experience of ‘ordinary’ Muslims in the West in the aftermath of 9/11 and the ambition of offering a realistic and authentic portrayal. Unlike counter-polemics and apologetics which often mirror accusations with opposite claims, these four pieces endeavor to reflect more than one side and are not as routinized. I am then going to return to Horowitz’s 19 Suspects and explore its representation of terrorists through photographs comparing and contrasting the work with Gerhard Richter’s October 18, 1977, paintings of members of the Baader-Meinhof group also based on photographs.
1 Taqiyya in Islamophobic Discourse
That negative responses to Islam are as old as Islam itself is a commonplace. Developments of the Western polemical tradition reflect changes in the relationship between Muslim and Christian or Western forces as well as transformations in the intellectual and religious culture of the West. Many tropes which are prominent today (such as the violence of Muhammad and his followers throughout centuries) can be traced back as far as the seventh century, whereas others (such as the excessive restrictions imposed on women) have more recent origins. The representation of Muslims as unreliable too has witnessed changes over the years. While Muhammad was discredited by Christians as an impostor and false prophet early in history, it was much more recently that Muslims were portrayed as unreliable colonial subjects which added an important component to the polemics.2 Indeed, in his study On Art and War and Terror, Alex Danchev analyzes the trope of a war between civilization and barbarism that marks American and British rhetoric supporting the ‘global war on terror’ within the context of colonial encounters, citing as an expression of continuous colonial dispositions the question ‘Why Arabs lie’ posed in the twenty-first century by a Washington think-tank.3 An even later chapter in the history of such representations of Muslims shows them as immigrants with transnational loyalties that betray their religious alterity or as international actors who are unreliable in their efforts for peace. As cautiously as one needs to treat such data, a Google search conducted on 6 June 2015 yielded only 648 results for the question ‘Why Arabs lie’, but 37,500 results for ‘Why Muslims lie’, which may very well confirm a shift from national and cultural to religious distinctions.
The allegation that Muslims in the West systematically dissimulate the true nature of their religion and validate their behavior with the help of the religious principle known as taqiyya appears to be a fairly recent development in polemical publications.4 Like others, the trope needs to be understood against the backdrop of a singular, essential and historically rooted vision of Islam and the assumption that all Muslims seek to regulate all areas of their lives and indeed the world according to religious principles—the Shariah, which polemicists portray as a static body of prescriptions. (Bruce Lincoln aptly describes such an attitude to religion as ‘maximalist’, but the Muslim representatives of the ‘minimalist’ counterpart who compartmentalize their world are dismissed by Islamophobes as insignificant or inauthentic.)5 The precise nature of the dissimulated ‘secret’ varies according to author and publication and can involve political plans such as world domination through demographic change, infiltration or military conquest, historically rooted doctrine (most importantly the affirmation of violence as exemplified by Muhammad) or theology. (Some Islamophobes deny that Allah is the same deity as the Biblical God.) The principle of taqiyya itself is sometimes also denounced as the subject of secrecy. Polemicists then speak about ‘meta-taqiyya’.
The polemical suspicion of systematic and religiously validated dissimulation has an important correlation in policing procedures informed by the strategic secrecy of sleepers, although legislators and law enforcement do not seem as much concerned with any specific doctrinal valorization. Nevertheless, the dynamics of mutual mistrust is in full operation here too. As Michael Barkun describes, Muslims are only the most recent religious community in the United States targeted by polemicists and political authorities because they are assumed to harbor secrets and threaten the state.6 Catholics and Mormons too have been criticized in similar ways. Imagined secrets have a particularly nefarious effect in this situation. “Disclosure is impossible even in principle, for there is no secret to be disclosed. The result is either that the alleged secret-keeper can never demonstrate his or her innocence, or those who allege the secret go on to invent its supposed contents.”7 As an important executive response to the 9/11 attacks and the assumption that Muslim institutions in the United States served as the basis for further terrorist activities, the Attorney General’s Guidelines which regulate FBI investigations were revised and allowed for an “initial checking of leads” which is “essentially unregulated and at the discretion of agents.”8 Barkun addresses two concerns regarding the efficacy of this strategy. “It can produce an unintended consequence, namely, an incentive to do that which the new audience desires to see.”9 Furthermore, the exposure to investigations and the pressure to defend themselves against the accusations of harboring secrets is bound to create resentments, especially if these secrets are imagined and dangerous. The accusation of dissimulation thus becomes mutual. The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), often denounced by Islamophobes as agents of dissimulation, declared “Mosques, along with other religious institutions, are open to all Americans and have nothing to hide, but that openness should not be abused by using tactics of deception to spy on a religious minority engaged in lawful activities.”10
According to the study Fear, Inc., the Islamophobic discourse in the United States is driven by a small number of individuals and funding bodies, but it offers in condensed form allegations, suspicions and criticisms which can be found in less pronouncedly polemical discourse as well.11 Several prominent voices put emphasis on the assumption that Muslims in the West practice a religiously validated form of dissimulation known as taqiyya. (The reference to the Arabic term reinforces the impression that this is not simply secrecy practiced for strategic reasons, but rather a distinct concept which cannot even easily be translated into English.)12 Raymond Ibrahim is one of the most frequently cited writers on the subject of taqiyya. In an article about the implications of taqiyya in a military context in which he also discusses endorsements of lying as a strategy of war in Islamic religious history, Ibrahim ascribes a paradoxical nature to Islam since both honesty and falsehood are religiously sanctioned—the former vis-à-vis fellow believers, the latter towards non-Muslims.13 According to the author, the state of war is not restricted to physical confrontations, but rather perpetual. Truces are merely strategic and temporary measures which Westerners in their ignorance of Islamic religion and history misunderstand as sincere efforts to establish peace. “History demonstrates otherwise: whenever and wherever Muslims have been demonstrably stronger than their non-Muslim neighbors, they have always gone on the offensive.”14 In a response to a statement the professor for Islamic law Mohammad Fadel wrote concerning taqiyya for a court case, Ibrahim argued that taqiyya was much more widely permitted than Muslims claimed and that Fadel “appears to have even employed taqiyya’s more liberal sister, tawriya,” a strategy for appearing to say one thing while actually saying another.15
The study Shariah. The Threat to America, authored by William G. Boykin and others and sponsored by the Center for Security Policy, contains a separate chapter on taqiyya glossed as “lying for the sake of Islam” and “‘deceit or dissimulation’, particularly towards infidels.”16 The authors emphasize that both in military contexts and “from a homeland security standpoint, it is important to recognize the use of taqiyya in American and Western civil society.” Like Ibrahim, they specify that statements by Muslims regarding “interfaith dialogue, peace, respect and mutual tolerance” in particular need to be evaluated against the backdrop of an approval of strategic lying. While presenting taqiyya as an important and universal principle, the study also points out that the authors do “not argue for trusting or mistrusting someone in any particular circumstance.”
In 2014, in an argument to consider the practice of taqiyya in court cases, the blogger Enza Ferreri, who was then affiliated with the now dissolved party Liberty GB, expresses her expectation that “If the authority of a court can establish that taqiyya was indeed practiced, Westerners can start to see that lying to them is not only allowed but encouraged by Islam as one of the means of submitting them to it, which is the final goal. As a consequence of this, people in the West may gradually become more and more reluctant to accept everything that Muslims say about Islam and may begin to doubt all the distortions they are currently fed.”17
Islamophobes concur with historical scholarship insofar as both present taqiyya as historically rooted in the earliest days of Islam when the movement was persecuted, but even more so in the sectarian confrontations between Sunni and Shīʿī Muslims. It was the latter who developed the concept as a mode of maintaining spiritual integrity under Sunni persecution and oppression.18 Sunnis who found themselves mostly in positions of political power did not have to develop such strategies. The best-known case of religious dissimulation in Sunni history is that of the Moriscos in seventeenth-century Spain. As Devin Stewart has demonstrated in some detail, Sunni scholars embraced the concept in this situation without consistently adopting the term taqiyya which they seem to have associated with Shīʿī Islam.19 Stewart also offers insights into what medieval and early modern Muslim scholars conventionally regarded as circumstances which allowed Muslims to dissimulate their identity by eating pork, drinking alcohol or even insulting the prophet. Over centuries and across different regions of the Muslim world, scholars accepted only extreme conditions as excuses for what otherwise would have been considered sins or grave offences. Some authorities included the loss of property among such conditions, but most restricted them to the loss of life or grievous bodily harm. While it is therefore clearly the case that taqiyya was not exclusively practiced by Shīʿīs, polemicists make a more general claim and contend that the principle is embraced by Muslims in the West who consider themselves in the same position as Shīʿīs under Sunni rule. As Ibrahim puts it, “Sunnis are currently experiencing the general circumstances that made taqiyya integral to Shiism.”20 Evidence for such an allegation is naturally hard to come by. The affirmation of the principle of taqiyya is mostly inferred from what polemicists identify as ‘doublespeak’ of Muslim leaders in the West. Tariq Ramadan in particular is accused as a ‘taqiyya artist’ who sends different messages to his Muslim followers and a larger non-Muslim audience.21 Likewise, Islamist leaders are said to use a language of political justice vis-à-vis Western audiences in order to legitimize their violent means, but a language of religious obligation vis-à-vis Muslims.22 Employing common tropes of polemics against transnational minorities, different messages are also said to be delivered in different locations, different languages and through different media.
The allegations associated with taqiyya display several distinctive features of twenty-first-century Islamophobic polemics. Apart from the above-mentioned essentializing and selective view of Islam as historically static and maximalist, it is not uncommon for polemicists to produce Qurʾānic hermeneutics and legal decisions on behalf of Muslims, citing passages from canonical texts and explaining what they actually mean for any Muslim. Likewise, it is common to contrast Islam on the one hand and Judaism and Christianity on the other hand. The emphasis on taqiyya challenges claims of shared ethical principles. According to this polemical view, Muslims have ethical double standards which allow them to privilege fellow members of their faith and happily practice lying, a behavior which humans all over the world can easily recognize as ethically objectionable.23 Islamophobes frequently deny that Muslims partake in the same monotheistic tradition as Jews and Christians and insist for example that Allah is actually an ancient Arabian moon god. In the eyes of some polemicists, this also renders Muslim polemics against the Christian Trinity moot—different deities are at stake in the respective theologies. In political terms, the representation of Islam as fundamentally different from Judaism and Christianity as well as a comprehensive and activist view of the world—an ‘ideology’ rather than a ‘religion’—allows Islamophobes to challenge the right of Muslims in the United States to enjoy the religious freedom codified in the First Amendment to the constitution. It is noteworthy that while some authors and politicians insist that Muslims in the West practice taqiyya, others (such as the academically less discredited Daniel Pipes) do not seem to pay much attention to the concept. For some critics, the topic of taqiyya might not be attractive since they seem even more outraged by Western tolerance towards open Muslim intolerance than by Muslim doctrine and behavior.
It is another truism about religious polemics that texts are often written with coreligionists in mind rather than with the purpose of alerting the followers of the target religion to weaknesses in their beliefs. It is plausible to assume that to increase influence on policymakers and public opinion, to sway America’s foreign policy and to reduce the tolerance for the visible display of Muslim identity are common goals of Islamophobes. Although it is unreasonable to discount the impact of violent actions of Muslims on the perception of Islam in the United States, it stands to reason that the polemics which feed on fears of unseen terrors rising, are also significant.24 In 2014, around the time the above-mentioned examples of polemics were published, the Pew Research Center found that Americans felt more negatively about Islam than about any other religious community, Muslims scoring 40 points on the ‘feeling thermometer’ which ranged from a cold 0 to a warm 100.25 What is the significance of these views on interactions between Muslims and non-Muslims in the United States? As outlined above, the following discussion centers on literary and cinematic representations in particular of mistrust directed against Muslims and Muslim responses to this situation. While these issues have been subject to research in the social sciences,26 these creative expressions allow for a closer look into communications and encounters as well as plausible inner thoughts of individuals. While fictitious, they are meant to be representative of the actual experiences of larger constituencies.
2 The Submission
Published in 2011, Amy Waldman’s novel presents a fictitious solution for an actual problem: how to fill the ‘blank space’ left by the collapsed towers of the World Trade Center.27 In The Submission, anonymous proposals are submitted to a jury which selects a garden design. Drama unfolds when the architect is revealed to be named Mohammed Khan, son of Muslim Indian immigrants to the United States. Jury members are confused as to whether he is “the practicing kind” (19), whether Muslims can “opt out of the religion” at all (19) and what his views on holy war might be—to use Lincoln’s terms, they are confused about minimalist and maximalist attitudes. Members of the jury, political leadership and public pressure Khan to withdraw his proposal, and his supporters too are exposed. The book is written from the point of view of different individuals involved in the drama, each of whom representing larger constituencies: various family members of victims who struggle with grief and the public contentions around the memorial, the widow of an undocumented Bangladeshi worker killed on 9/11, local politicians and journalists.
The architect is unwilling to give in. Defiant, the secular Khan at least outwardly embraces his Muslim identity imposed by others. “He had decided … that he would not give in to pressure to withdraw, nor would he reassure anyone that he was ‘moderate’ or ‘safe’ or Sufi, whatever adjective would allow Americans to sleep without worrying that he had placed a bomb under their pillow. It was exactly because they had nothing to worry about from him that he wanted to let them worry” (86). “He had grown a beard on his return from Kabul merely to assert his right to wear a beard, to play with the assumptions about his religiosity it might create” (128). Not coincidentally, the protagonist of Mohsin Hamid’s novel, more conflicted in his political views than Khan, makes a very similar decision and grows a beard. “It was, perhaps, a form of protest on my part, a symbol of my identity, or perhaps I sought to remind myself of the reality I had just left behind; I do not now recall my precise motivations” (130). That beards come up regularly in this context is not surprising. The importance of male facial hair for Muslims in the West is part of a larger and more global history which politicizes Muslim beards.
While the events in The Submission are entirely fictitious (although somewhat modeled on the case of the Vietnam memorial in Washington DC designed by Maya Lin), Waldman offers a realistic representation of the rhetorical exchanges between the different parties, including the polemics of a right-wing radio host and Debbie Dawson, the leader of a local Islamophobic movement who is a thinly veiled copy of the well-known polemicist Pamela Geller. The controversy about the garden illustrates in a condensed form more general patterns according to which such debates frequently take place. Khan’s garden design is first identified as an ‘Islamic garden’, then as a representation of paradise, and finally as a ‘martyr’s paradise’ placed by its nefarious creator at the sacred heart of America’s sacrifice for its freedom.28 Khan rejects these interpretations, but runs into the trope we have already encountered above. He is accused of practicing taqiyya. Dawson declares that “Muslims believe it is okay to lie to convert people to their truth” (130) and “The Muslim who entered this memorial competition practices taqiya by concealing his identity …” (148). She also explains the need to familiarize oneself with the enemy’s terminology: “You can’t fight this threat if you’re not versed in the vocabulary” (147). At a public gathering, members of Dawson’s organization shout ‘taqiya’ to interrupt Khan (245). A fictitious piece of the New Yorker rebuts the accusations, but also illustrates the consequences of the allegations: “His opponents claim, absurdly, that Muslims can’t be trusted because they have religious sanction to lie. This is a bald misrepresentation of the concept of Taqiya, by which Shiites who live under Sunni rule are allowed to disguise their beliefs to protect themselves. But doesn’t Mohammed Khan see that by refusing to discuss the possible meanings of his memorial, he fuels those stereotypes?” (139). Khan finds himself precisely in the circumstances described above by Barkun.
Khan’s response remains defiance. Although several characters acknowledge that he has the law on his side and every right to claim the success of his design and professional achievement, they also recommend that he need not insist on enjoying his right. They push him to be more accommodating and explain himself to his supporters who need certainty. The architect, however, decides to stand his ground and insists on equal treatment. Several characters establish that ultimately it is trust that is at stake, but this trust has eroded too much and is replaced by mistrust and a tendency to assume the worst of the other. This dynamic is particularly vicious in contentions over visual culture which grant a lot of space to use our imagination. The stalemate is shaken up when Asma Anwar, the Bangladeshi widow, makes an emotional statement against terrorism and is later assassinated.
As the reader learns from the epilogue, Khan finally decides to withdraw his design after his supporter Claire Burwell, whose husband had died in the 9/11 attacks, joins a group of Muslim Americans who advocate for Khan to withdraw his contribution on the grounds that the debate had a detrimental effect on the position of Muslims in the US. Claire too is disturbed by Khan’s refusal to declare himself, “Your design becomes more threatening if you won’t change it: it tells me there’s something there, something hidden, you want to preserve” (304). Their exchange also illustrates the Islamophobic tendency to provide exegesis on behalf of Muslims. The architect addresses the jury member in disbelief: “You want me to take out the canals because it reminds you of a line in the Quran” (304). The statement captures the dynamics discussed in this article: the desire to understand the religious other is driven by fear, mistrust and the need for certainty all of which lead to an increase of knowledge about the other as well as to exchanges about their religions, albeit in an atmosphere of hostility and suspicion and sometimes with the paradoxical outcome that religious knowledge is produced on behalf of the other who neither shares nor accepts it.
3 The Reluctant Fundamentalist
Changez, the protagonist of Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist, is another American success story which demonstrates the costs and limitations of this success as well.29 What might be described as the novel’s frame story takes the form of Changez addressing an unidentified American man during a conversation in a teahouse in Lahore. The atmosphere is tense. The American has prepared himself for a dangerous situation and is likely armed. In the course of the novel, it is suggested that he might be an assassin who has come for Changez. The bulk of the text, however, consists of the Pakistani telling the story of his life in the United States. It began in the most promising way when the Princeton graduate from a modest background gained a position at a prestigious firm which values companies, Underwood Samson. Changez also fell in love with a young American woman, Erica. Both relationships, however, took a turn for the worse. Slowly, Changez came to realize that Underwood Samson was part of a global economic system which increased inequalities and American dominance. He describes his first opposition against his employer as third-world solidarity inspired by the hostile look of a Filipino. “One of my colleagues asked me a question, and when I turned to answer him, something rather strange took place. I looked at him—at his fair hair and light eyes and, most of all, his oblivious immersion in the minutiae of our work—and thought, you are so foreign” (67). It is a similar disposition which explains Changez’s first response to 9/11. “I smiled. Yes, despicable as it may sound, my initial reaction was to be remarkably pleased” (72). Growing nationalism, the experience of racial profiling and anxieties about a military confrontation between Pakistan and India turned his initial enthusiasm sour. His relationship with Erica (identified by many readers with Am-erica) too did not have a happy ending. From when Changez first met her, she remained in love with her deceased childhood sweetheart and descended further into depression and likely suicide. To Changez, both Erica and America were stuck in a “dangerous nostalgia” (115). During a job to evaluate a publishing company in Chile, Changez concluded that he had been a servant to a foreign power, contributing to the destruction of his own heritage which is only in part defined by religion. “I reflected that I had always resented the manner in which America conducted itself in the world; your country’s constant interference in the affairs of others was insufferable. Vietnam, Korea, the straits of Taiwan, the Middle East, and now Afghanistan: in each of the major conflicts and standoffs that ringed my mother continent Asia, America played a central role” (156). Changez quit his job, returned to Pakistan, and established himself in Lahore as a politically active professor who campaigns for Pakistan’s economic independence, although the precise nature of his activism remains unclear.
A curious element of the book is its title which captures Changez’s realization that both economic and religious fundamentalists reduce humans to their essences as they see them, not allowing for any other point of view. The capitalists of Underwood Samson are thus as objectionable to him as the religious fundamentalists in his native Pakistan. The prominent presence of economic exploitation and globalization presents Changez’s critique of America in an unusual light as well. Although responses to his imagined or real religious alterity increase his alienation, the experiences in the Philippines and in Chile leave an even deeper impression just as it was their shared modest economic backgrounds which had tied Changez and his mentor Jim together at Underwood Samson. The novel echoes not only the background of its author, who had once worked as a management consultant, but also observations of scholars such as Mark Juergensmeyer who analyze the surge of religious violence in transreligious, transcultural and transnational contexts of economic globalization and growing inequalities.30 Curiously, the movie The Reluctant Fundamentalist, directed by Mira Nair in 2012, reduces the global dimension and emphasizes the religious divisions. The frame story gains greater prominence and with it the question whether Changez has joined a radical religious movement. The location of the publishing company is changed from Chile to Turkey where Changez contemplates his religious identity when visiting a mosque.
In his analysis of Islamophobia in the United States, Andrew Shryock discusses the phenomenon of the ‘good Muslim’ who is a peaceful mystic, socially progressive, politically moderate and a pluralist.31 Promoted by Islamophiles as a representative of true Islam, this discursive character is equally essentializing as the ‘bad Muslim’ and deprives Muslims in the West of their autonomy and possibility for dissent. Neither Waldman nor Hamid creates a ‘good Muslim’ who represents the exact opposite of the terrorist type so vilified by Islamophobes. Both protagonists are critical of aspects of American politics, domestically and abroad. Their religious, racial, national and cultural identities constitute links in the minds of the polemicists to those declared enemies and these views alienate Khan and Changez from their American environments. In order to fit in, they would have to keep their thoughts and feelings secret. Although both protagonists find success elsewhere, neither story ends with reconciliation. For reasons of hostile conditions and personal failure, neither of the two young Muslim professionals finds it possible to live a life of integrity in the United States. Asma too does not have a future in her adopted home. Amongst other reasons, it is the assumption of secrecy which makes Muslim political and democratic dissent in the West too difficult to realize. Muslim citizenship is thus portrayed in a pessimistic light.
4 Torn
Torn, an independent film directed by Jeremiah Birnbaum and released in 2013 to a small audience, shows the aftermath of an explosion in an American mall. Two of the victims are teenage boys whose mothers, the American-Pakistani Maryam and the single white working-class Lea, share their grief and coping mechanisms. Their budding friendship is challenged and eventually shattered once an FBI investigation establishes a bomb as the cause of the explosion and suspects Maryam’s son Walter. His father had already faced a false accusation in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks and his son’s visits to a local mosque seem to substantiate the investigators’ suspicions. In an almost ironic twist of cruelty and realism, the injustice inflicted on Maryam’s husband Ali is identified as a possible motivation for his son’s alleged crime.32 No sooner is Walter exonerated, however, that Lea’s son Eddie becomes a suspect since his profile seems to fit that of a school shooter, a victim of bullying who seeks revenge. Although both mothers initially reject the accusations against their sons with great certainty, they later discover facts about their children’s lives—Walter’s recent interest in Islam, Eddie’s anger—which make them doubt that their sons are actually innocent. The official investigation comes to a halt without producing any results. Ali seeks peace by returning at least temporarily to Pakistan, while Maryam remains in the States and reconciles with Lea. At the end of the film, both boys are shown chatting in the mall while another person deposits a backpack in the food court, thus resolving the uncertainty for the viewer, but not for the characters in the film. While showing in a focused way the dynamics and effects of mistrust, prejudice and hysteria, the film also portrays violent Islam in a light which is uncommon for artistic responses. Focusing on the anger of alienated and humiliated young men, it displays a phenomenological approach not unlike the typology of the ‘radical loser’ proposed by the German intellectual Hans Magnus Enzensberger.33 Questions of mistrust which tend to be colored by cultural and religious difference—‘what do we really know about Muslims’—are translated into the experience of parents, ‘what do we really know about our children’. Viewers unfamiliar with ostracism on ethnic, cultural and religious grounds can thus empathize more easily with the Muslim parents.
5 My Name Is Khan
As far as budget and audience are concerned, My Name is Khan could not be more different from Torn. Released in 2010 to a global audience, the film became one of the most noted productions of Indian cinema at the time. Directed by Karan Johar and featuring superstars Shah Rukh Khan and Kajol, it was also the most expensive Indian film of the year. My Name is Khan has a very distinctive approach to the matter of truthfulness of Muslims in the West. Rizvan Khan, the protagonist, is an Indian Muslim immigrant to the United States who suffers from Asperger’s syndrome. According to the character’s own explanation, he does not recognize unexpressed feelings, but he also cannot lie. Much of his difficulty of interacting with others stems from Khan’s literalism and extreme truthfulness (e.g., when he reveals to the neighbor that the chicken she offered for dinner does not taste good). Other symptoms of his condition are fearfulness and difficulties to adapt. Yet, against the backdrop of Hindu–Muslim confrontations in India, his mother had instilled in Rizvan a fundamental sense of egalitarian morality: good people are good and bad people are bad, not matter what their religious affiliations are. This basic education of the heart secures Khan the love of Mandira, a Hindu single mother. Their marital bliss is then interrupted by the surge of anti-Muslim discrimination and violence after 9/11 which culminates for the Khans in the murder of Mandira’s thirteen-year old son Sameer. Overcome by anger and grief, she sends Rizvan away, challenging him to tell every person in America including the president that neither he nor his son are terrorists. The literalist that he is, Rizvan embarks on a journey through the country in the course of which he spends time with Mama Jenny and a black community in the fictional town of Wilhelmina, Georgia. He finally tracks down the president, but is arrested because his statement “My name is Khan and I am not a terrorist” is taken to mean the opposite. Indian-American journalists campaign for him, revealing that earlier during his journey he had confronted the Islamist preacher Faisal Rahman (likewise fictional) and reported him to the FBI. A final intermezzo happens when Wilhelmina is threatened by a hurricane and Rizvan travels there to help out Mama Jenny, his actions inspiring people all over the country to assist the victims of the film’s version of Katrina. Rizvan is then attacked by a follower of Rahman, but survives to be reunited with Mandira and finally meet the president who in the meantime has become Obama.
Although much of the film’s plot will strike viewers as about as realistic as the somewhat similar story of Forrest Gump, the filmmakers stress that it is much more realistic than movies commonly associated with Bollywood. There is no dancing, very little singing and the actions follow a coherent narrative. The victimization Khan’s family experiences is as extreme as the murder of Asma Anwar in The Submission, and the interactions with Mama Jenny’s community too allow for a fair amount of unrealistic melodrama, but the movie reflects Indian and indeed global perceptions of the general position that Muslims (and to a certain extent African Americans) actually find themselves in in the United States. The film thus frames Islamophobia as a manifestation of racism, although conflicts between Hindu and Muslim Indians also bring religious issues to the fore.
Samuel Bettwy prefaces his historical survey of international cinematic representations of terrorism with a distinction between transnational films which seek to be realistic, reflect different positions and address audiences in more than one country, and those which are opportunistic and driven by the expectations and biases of national markets. Further features of transnational films are international productions, cultural dialogue, the presence of native-spoken foreign languages, critical and humanizing representations of both terrorists and counter-terrorists, and representations of migration and globalization. “It is generally recognized that a transnational, experimental film about terrorism is more likely to be effective in telling a persuasive story to international audiences, because they are more likely to watch it and to perceive it as authentic.”34
According to the criteria outlined by Bettwy, both Torn and My Name is Khan are transnational films. (Indeed, Bettwy discusses My Name is Khan briefly.) To what extent are they likely to successfully convey an ‘authentic’ representation of terrorism and issues surrounding it? To begin with, neither of the films tells the story of terrorists, but rather focuses on the effects of terrorism on a diasporic community associated with them. Apart from discrimination and violence, Rizvan Khan is exposed to suspicion and mistrust, which is nowhere more obvious than in his declaration that he is not a terrorist to be taken to mean the opposite. The viewer, however, is in a comfortable position right from the beginning. Knowing about Khan’s neurological condition, viewers never doubt that he is telling the truth. Unlike Torn’s typical teenager Walter he does not harbor any secrets and unlike Mohammed Khan and Changez in the two novels, he cannot be expected to struggle with the question how much to reveal in an act of defense against unfair intimations. Rizvan’s moral innocence and apolitical character make him an unambiguous bearer of the film’s message which denounces discrimination and decries injustice. Ironically though, he embodies features of the ‘good Muslim’ of Islamophiles whom Andrew Shryock sees as posing “serious challenges to the effective incorporation of Muslims in American society.”35 In Khan’s case, the condition for ideal citizenship is a pathology.
6 Representing Terrorists in Contemporary Visual Art
Unlike these literary and cinematic representations of Muslim life in the West after 9/11, Jonathan Horowitz does not tell a story or, in fact, tries to explain anything. He captures a moment in time, its protagonists frozen in a ‘major event’ codified as historical disaster.36 What distinguishes the work from other visual responses to the 9/11 attacks produced in the United States is its focus on the hijackers while the vast majority of artistic responses concentrate on the iconic twin towers and the victims, portraying human suffering and heroism.
In order to explore the effect of the work further, a comparison with another representation of terrorists can be helpful. Seeing the ‘19 suspects’, German viewers were likely to be reminded of the widely distributed wanted posters showing photos of members of the Red Army Faction. These are only one element in a larger construction of a visual iconography of the group in the media. Gerhard Richter, arguably the internationally most renowned contemporary German artist, produced in 1988 a series of paintings with the title October 18, 1977.37 Richter operated with a distinctive technique of reproducing photographs in a pixelated form on canvas, but the individuals in the paintings of the October 18, 1977 series are recognizable as members of the Baader-Meinhof group, mostly after their death by suicide in the Stammheim prison. While most Germans view these paintings against the backdrop of an iconographical familiarity not shared by most Americans,38 the experience of two fictitious, but presumably American visitors is plausibly captured in Don DeLillo’s short story ‘Baader-Meinhof’, published in the New Yorker on April 1, 2002 when MoMA showed its exhibition ‘Gerhard Richter: Forty Years of Painting’. The female protagonist contemplates the paintings and thinks, “This was Andreas Baader. She thought of him by his full name or surname. She thought of Meinhof, she saw Meinhof, as first name only, Ulrike, and the same was the case with Gudrun” (78). Although she cannot remember the name of Jan-Carl Raspe (“Here were the bodies of Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin, and a man whose name she could not recall. He had been shot in his cell. Baader had also been shot. Gudrun had been hanged,” 78–79), the phrase “whose name she could not recall” and the context suggest that Raspe too is recognizable as a named individual with an individual biography recounting individual circumstances that led to his career as a terrorist. There is not much doubt who these individuals are and why Richter produced paintings based on their photographs. The unnamed protagonist is later approached by a man who engages her in a conversation. “They were terrorists, weren’t they? When they’re not killing other people, they’re killing themselves” (78). Richter’s selection, however, also contains another picture which predated Meinhof’s violent career—it is a “portrait of Ulrike as a much younger woman, a girl, really, distant and wistful, her hand and face half floating in the somber dark around her” (80). Reflecting on her feelings, the female visitor explains, “These paintings make me feel how helpless a person can be” (80). She spots on unidentifiable element: “She saw it as a cross, and it made her feel, right or wrong, that there was an element of forgiveness in the picture, that the two men and the woman, terrorists, and Ulrike before them, terrorist, were not beyond forgiveness” (80). This may be a fictional account, but the visitor’s response seems just as realistic and authentic as the examples of fiction and film surveyed earlier.
How does this experience compare to what awaited the visitor in the Schirn exhibition who stumbled over the first of the 19 Suspects? An article in the museum’s magazine describes it as follows: “Portraits of dark-skinned men, sometimes highly pixelated, some of whom with a twinkle in their eye and a smile on their lips, some with a mustache, surprise the attentive visitor in the exhibition behind the columns and corners. These men are terrorists—as becomes obvious at the latest with the well-known photo of Mohamed Atta. …”39 It is thus the presence of Atta which makes the individuals recognizable as terrorists. German viewers might be familiar with the faces of Ziad Jarrah and Marwan al-Shehhi because of their Hamburg connection, but by and large the men whose photos are displayed as part of the 19 Suspects are quite different from ‘Baader’, ‘Ulrike’ and ‘Gudrun’. As the description in the magazine suggests, their identity is primarily racial. Most viewers are unable to tell the faces of Majed Moqed, hijacker of the plane crashing into the Pentagon, and Fayez Rahis Ahmed Hasan Al Qadi Banihammad, hijacker of one of the planes flying into the World Trade Center, from those of innocent men. The visitor’s experience is thus to discover individual Middle Eastern men, presumably Muslims, who must have some connection to secret societies and who are upon discovery of Atta revealed to be 9/11 hijackers. Are we perhaps meant to reflect on these men as individuals or independent of their association with the eighteen other men? Does the focus on the perpetrators rather than the more commonly represented victims subvert the construction of collective fear in popular media?40 A character in The Submission describes the prevalent fear as follows: “Two years on we still don’t know whether we’re up against a handful of zealots who got lucky, or a global conspiracy of a billion Muslims who hate the West, even if they live in it” (22). 19 Suspects does little if anything to subvert these constructions of the enemy.
Horowitz may alert the viewer to the fact that Atta is the collective face of the group, but this does not change the fact that the only reason they are part of a piece of art is that they—like Baader and other members of the Red Army Faction—are terrorists. Unlike the ambitions of the Germans, however, the 9/11 hijackers’ motivations did not grow out of a publicly contested political past and present. The men came from outside of the country and so appeared their incentives which remain archaic and alien to many Americans. The blank space emerges here from the face-to-face encounter and the inability of the viewer to find certainty in the other’s face or at least some explanation for his act of violence. We know that the nineteen men are not merely suspects, but their inner thoughts and motivations remain uncertain. More importantly, perhaps, the extent to which their views are representative of a larger Muslim community is subject to speculation and anxieties. The emotionless—or indeed ‘blank’—faces of some of the nineteen suspects allow for many explanations, and none. The way the portraits lurk behind corners and among various pieces of art brings to mind the strategy of sleepers who are hiding among us and confirms collective fears. The experience of the viewer and the association between race, religion and terrorism can thus replicate the experience which leads to mistrust against Muslims and reinforces the message promoted by Islamophobes.
The tendency of American visual arts to avoid the representation of Muslim terrorists may be explained as a reflection of an inward-looking perspective and a focus on local afflictions and virtues as well as a secular discomfort with religious rationales for violence, but the United States are producing their own homegrown terrorists too who present their actions as jihad. New chapters of murder and destruction in the name of Islam were still being added to the country’s long history of political violence even after 9/11. While visual artists as well as other representatives of the high arts frequently take several years to contribute their works to a debate, the decisions of print media may be indicative of what the future may bring. Of particular interest is the cover of the August 2013 Rolling Stone which features Dzhokar Tsarnaev, one of the brothers responsible for the bombing of the Boston marathon in April 2013. The backlash revealed that there was no consensus that such a representation was deemed acceptable and brought up criticism reminiscent of the feared effects of the iconography of the Baader-Meinhof gang. Indeed, the magazine’s decision to publicize the terrorist’s face stands in marked contrast to the message of the illustration on the cover of the New Yorker after the killing of Usama bin Laden. While the man is still recognizable, his facial features have been erased. In that sense, the display of the faces of the perpetrators brakes indeed with conventions and invites the viewer to ask questions about individual motivations rather than contemplate pain and destruction.
7 Conclusions
In an article about the debate concerning a forthcoming exhibition about the Red Army Faction, Jan-Holger Kirsch quotes a journalist, “It is imperative for a self-critical democratic society to understand in retrospect the deeper motives of those who challenged it in such an extreme manner …”41 Literature, art and film have the ability to facilitate such efforts to understand. Stories can condense complex social, cultural, political and material processes into the experience of individual characters and make them more understandable. Visual art too is often believed to have similar functions, capturing larger and complex truths in specific constellations.
The examples discussed in this article can be read as interpretations of religious violence and its impact on diasporic communities associated with those who commit the violence. In this context, fiction in particular can serve as an exercise in empathy which uncovers the dynamics unleashed by fear and mistrust. Insofar as both fiction and visual arts are also an exercise in imagination and rely on the collaboration of the reader or viewer, they encourage us to examine such dynamics in a critical manner. In a discussion about his book broadcast by the BBC in March 2009 as part of its World Book Club program, Mohsin Hamid spoke about the significance of imagination.42 When asked why he had chosen the format of the dramatic monologue, the author responded, “I wrote the novel intentionally with blank spaces that the reader gets to fill in.” Elaborating, Hamid explained that it was his ambition to “show the reader a bit of a mirror.” Readers contributed their own meaning and could then reflect on what it is that they contributed and why.
But what is to be done if rather than subverting stereotypes and understanding the dynamics of mistrust, the imagination is fired up by such biases? Mohsin Hamid describes just how little leeway there is. When Changez’s friends fantasize about their future careers, he said he “hoped one day to be the dictator of an Islamic republic with nuclear capability; the others appeared shocked, and I was forced to explain that I had been joking” (29). It is ‘leakages’ such as this which investigators believe reveal a sleeper’s true beliefs.43 No room is left for uncertainty. Amy Waldman’s character Claire Burwell too captures this situation well in the epilogue when she is led on a virtual tour through the garden and asked by Khan to use her imagination. “She had, and with it assumed the worst” (336). According to an expression popularized by the geographer Yi-Fu Tuan, the characters of The Submission understand the garden within their own ‘landscapes of fear’, a term Barkun sees apt to describe responses of policymakers and the general public to the 9/11 attacks. In this case, the American ‘landscape of fear’ has been created by disaster and science fiction movies which predicted the destruction of New York at the hands of mad scientists and other such foes many times.44 Along similar lines, an exhibition on visual representations of terrorism in the media shown at c/o Berlin in 2011 was titled ‘Unheimlich vertraut’ (‘uncannily familiar’).45 Scholars, novelists and artists reveal the powerful effects of landscapes of fear and prejudice and their visual and linguistic cues. The mixture of traditions of religious polemics as well as racial and cultural prejudice is particularly difficult to disentangle under conditions of fear.
Like other scholars who point out parallels between the treatment and experience of Muslims in the contemporary United States and those of other religious communities in the past, Barkun is confident that eventually relations will become less adversarial. In the meantime, however, blank spaces can have unintended consequences. One may stipulate a need for being explicit given the wide-spread desire for certainty and the consequences of uncertainty. This situation imposes restrictions on artistic expression, but rather than undermining an existing dynamic, ambiguity may feed into it as in any other representation. “The collection of data, for example, in the form of sermons, may … either reveal little or—more seriously—‘reveal’ imagined secrets. In other words, even if more information is gathered, misinterpretation may generate the imagined secrets described earlier, for outsiders generate imagined secrets not only when no information appears to be available, but also when only partial data exists and/or those who have the data lack the capacity to interpret it correctly.”46
Bibliography
Al-Rawi, Ahmed. “The Representation of September 11th and American Islamophobia in Non-Western Cinema.” Media, War & Conflict 7, no. 2 (2014): 152–164.
Barkun, Michael. “Religion and Secrecy after September 11.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 74, no. 2 (2006): 275–301.
Barkun, Michael. Chasing Phantoms. Reality, Imagination, and Homeland Security since 9/11. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011.
Beben, Daniel. “Reimagining Taqiyya: The ‘Narrative of the Four Pillars’ and Strategies of Secrecy among the Ismāʿīlīs of Central Asia.” History of Religions 59, no. 2 (2019): 83–107.
Bettwy, Samuel W. “Evolving Transnational Cinematic Perspectives of Terrorism.” Perspectives on Terrorism 9, no. 2 (2015): 42–60.
Bilici, Mucahit. Finding Mecca in America. How Islam is Becoming an American Religion. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012.
Bleich, Erik. “What is Islamophobia and How Much is There? Theorizing and Measuring an Emerging Comparative Concept.” American Behavioral Scientist 55, no. 12 (2011): 1581–1600.
Bleich, Erik. “Defining and Researching Islamophobia.” Review of Middle East Studies 46, no. 2 (2012): 180–189.
Borradori, Giovanna. Philosophy in a Time of Terror. Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003.
Boykin, William G. et al.Shariah. The Threat to America. An Exercise in Competitive Analysis. Washington, DC: Center for Security Policy, 2010.
Clarke, Lynda. “The Rise and Decline of Taqiyya in Twelver Shi’ism.” In Reason and Inspiration in Islam. Theology, Philosophy and Mysticism in Muslim Thought. Essays in Honour of Hermann Landolt, edited by Todd Lawson, 46–63. London: I.B. Tauris in association with the Institute of Ismaili Studies, 2005.
Dakake, Maria. “Hiding in Plain Sight: The Practical and Doctrinal Significance of Secrecy in Shi’ite Islam.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 74 (2006): 324–355.
Danchev, Alex. On Art and War and Terror. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009.
Eisele, John C. “The Wild East: Deconstructing the Language of Genre in the Hollywood Eastern.” Cinema Journal 41, no. 4 (2002): 68–94.
Enzensberger, Hans Magnus. Schreckens Männer. Versuch über den radikalen Verlierer. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2006.
Ernst, Carl W., ed. Islamophobia in America. The Anatomy of Intolerance. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.
Fourest, Caroline. Frère Tariq, translated as Brother Tariq. The Doublespeak of Tariq Ramadan. New York: Encounter Books, 2008.
García-Arenal, Mercedes. Al-Qanṭara 34, no. 2 (2013).
Gottschalk, Peter and Gabriel Greenberg. Islamophobia. Making Muslims the Enemy. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2008.
Hamid, Mohsin. The Reluctant Fundamentalist. Orlando: Harcourt, 2007.
Hammer, Juliane and Omid Safi, eds. The Cambridge Companion to American Islam. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013.
Hoffman, Bruce. Inside Terrorism. 1998. Reprint, New York: Columbia University Press, 2006.
Hoffmann, Felix, ed. Unheimlich vertraut. Bilder vom Terror/The Uncanny Familiar. Images of Terror. Cologne: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, 2011.
Hoyland, Robert G. Seeing Islam as Others Saw It. A Survey and Evaluation of Christian, Jewish, and Zoroastrian Writings on Early Islam. Princeton: The Darwin Press, 1997.
Ibrahim, Raymond. “Taqiyya: War and Deceit in Islam.” In Debating the War of Ideas, edited by Eric D. Patterson and John Gallagher, 67–81. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.
Ibrahim, Raymond. “How Taqiyya Alters Islam’s Rules of War. Defeating Jihadist Terrorism.” Middle East Quarterly (Winter 2010): 3–13.
Jack, Ian. “Introduction.” Granta 84 (2003): 6–8.
Juergensmeyer, Mark. Terror in the Mind of God. The Global Rise of Religious Violence. 2001. Reprint, Berkeley/Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2003.
Kibria, Nazli, Tobias Henry Watson, and Saher Selod. “Imagining the Radicalized Muslim: Race, Anti-Muslim Discourse, and Media Narratives of the 2013 Boston Marathon Bombers.” Sociology of Race and Ethnicity 4, no. 2 (2017): 1–14.
Kirsch, Jan-Holger. “Mythos RAF? Zum Streit um eine noch nicht vorhandene Ausstellung,” Zeithistorische Forschungen/Studies in Contemporary History, online edition 1 (2004).
Kohlberg, Etan. “Some Imāmī-Shīʿī Views on Taqiyya.” Journal of the American Oriental Society 95 (1975): 395–402.
Kohlberg, Etan. “Taqiyya in Shīʿī Theology and Religion.” In Secrecy and Concealment. Studies in the History of Mediterranean and Near Eastern Religions, edited by Hans G. Kippenberg and Guy G. Stroumsa, 345–380. Leiden: Brill, 1995.
Lincoln, Bruce. Holy Terrors. Thinking About Religion after September 11. 2003. Reprint, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006.
Pratt Ewing, Katherine, ed. Being and Belonging. Muslims in the United States since 9/11. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2008.
Schneiders, Thorsten Gerald. “Die Schattenseite der Islamkritik. Darstellung und Analyse der Argumentationsstrategien von Henryk M. Broder, Ralph Giordano, Necla Kelek, Alice Schwarzer und anderen.” In Islamfeindlichkeit. Wenn die Grenzen der Kritik verschwimmen, edited by Thorsten Gerald Schneiders, 403–432. Wiesbaden: VS. Verlag, 2009.
Shryock, Andrew J. “Attack of the Islamophobes. Religious War (and Peace) in Arab/Muslim Detroit.” In Islamophobia in America. The Anatomy of Intolerance, edited by Carl W. Ernst, 145–174. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.
Stewart, Devin J. “Taqiyyah as Performance: the Travels of Bahāʾ al-Dīn al-ʿĀmilī in the Ottoman Empire (991–93/1583–85).” Princeton Papers in Near Eastern Studies 4 (1996), 1–70.
Stewart, Devin J. “Dissimulation in Sunni Islam and Morisco Taqiyya.” Al-Qanṭara 34, no. 2 (2013): 439–490.
Tolan, John V. Saracens. Islam in the Medieval European Imagination. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002.
Tuan Yi-Fu. Landscapes of Fear. New York: Pantheon Books, 1979.
Usselmann, Rainer. “18. Oktober 1977: Gerhard Richter’s Work of Mourning and Its New Audience.” Art Journal 61 (2002): 4–25.
Waldman, Amy. The Submission. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011.
For the term Islamophobia I am relying on the definitions in Erik Bleich, “What is Islamophobia and How Much is There?,” American Behavioral Scientist 55, no. 12 (2011) (“indiscriminate negative attitudes or emotions directed at Islam or Muslims,” 1582) and “Defining and Researching Islamophobia,” Review of Middle East Studies 46, no. 2 (2012). See also Peter Gottschalk and Gabriel Greenberg, Islamophobia. Making Muslims the Enemy (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2008) and Carl W. Ernst, ed., Islamophobia in America. The Anatomy of Intolerance (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). In the present article the term is primarily used to denote a polemical response to Islam by organized activists as also described in the study Fear, Inc. The Roots of the Islamophobia Network in America, composed in August 2011 by Wajahat Ali, Eli Clifton, Matthew Duss, Lee Fang, Scott Keyes, and Faiz Shakir for the Center for American Progress (https://www.americanprogress.org/article/fear-inc/, last accessed July 12, 2024). For German parallels see Thorsten Gerald Schneiders, “Die Schattenseite der Islamkritik. Darstellung und Analyse der Argumentationsstrategien von Henryk M. Broder, Ralph Giordano, Necla Kelek, Alice Schwarzer und anderen,” In Islamfeindlichkeit. Wenn die Grenzen der Kritik verschwimmen, ed. Thorsten Gerald Schneiders (Wiesbaden: VS. Verlag, 2009). I will be using the politically contested terms ‘terrorist’ and ‘terrorism’ to refer in the particular context of this article to political and religious movements which employ violence and the threat of violence to further their aims, in particular by generating fear in the civilian population. For a more detailed discussion and history of the term see Bruce Hoffman, Inside Terrorism (1998; repr., New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 1–41. The ‘West’ refers to Western Europe and North America.
For early representations of Muslims see Robert G. Hoyland, Seeing Islam as Others Saw It. A Survey and Evaluation of Christian, Jewish, and Zoroastrian Writings on Early Islam (Princeton: The Darwin Press, 1997) and John V. Tolan, Saracens. Islam in the Medieval European Imagination (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002) For representations of unreliable colonial subjects popularized through film see John C. Eisele, “The Wild East: Deconstructing the Language of Genre in the Hollywood Eastern,” Cinema Journal 41, no. 4 (2002): 84–86.
Alex Danchev, On Art and War and Terror (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009), 227. For the original citation see Ian Jack, “Introduction,” Granta 84 (2003): 7.
It is unclear when the term taqiyya entered polemical discourse. Juan Cole attributes it to a “weird Scandinavian smear,” but does not provide any specifics. See http://www.juancole.com/2012/04/irans-forbidden-nukes-and-the-taqiya-lie.html (last accessed July 12, 2024). Given how much polemical authors tend to rely on each other, a single polemical source seems plausible, but it does not explain equally well why the term became prominent and why some authors have paid more attention to it than others. Furthermore, the popularity of secrecy as a polemical trope appears to reflect larger developments of polemical discourse and conflict. A noticeable phenomenon in the first two decades of the twenty-first century, Islamophobic conspiracy theories in the US later competed with views associated with the Covid-19 pandemic and other topics for attention.
Bruce Lincoln, Holy Terrors. Thinking about Religion after September 11 (2003; repr., Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006).
Michael Barkun, “Religion and Secrecy after September 11,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 74, no. 2 (2006).
Barkun, “Religion and Secrecy,” 279.
Barkun, “Religion and Secrecy,” 289.
Barkun, “Religion and Secrecy,” 292.
Barkun, “Religion and Secrecy,” 293. Quoting an online statement issued by CAIR in 2002. At the time of writing this article, the statement was no longer available online.
A case in point are reader comments in online editions of newspapers which echo views of Islamophobes in a less organized and informal manner. Such comments on the websites of the Boston Globe and New York Times are explored in Nazli Kibria, Tobias Henry Watson, and Saher Selod, “Imagining the Radicalized Muslim: Race, Anti-Muslim Discourse, and Media Narratives of the 2013 Boston Marathon Bombers,” Sociology of Race and Ethnicity 4, no. 2 (2017).
For this see also Schneiders, “Die Schattenseite der Islamkritik,” 406, who identifies taqiyya as one of the terms and tropes characteristic of Islamophobic writing.
Raymond Ibrahim, “How Taqiyya Alters Islam’s Rules of War. Defeating Jihadist Terrorism,” Middle East Quarterly (Winter 2010). The article is available at www.meforum.org. See also his “Taqiyya: War and Deceit in Islam,” in Debating the War of Ideas, eds. Eric D. Patterson and John Gallagher (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). Much of the material is identical.
Ibrahim, “Taqiyya: War and Deceit in Islam,” 75.
The document is available under the title “Taqiyya about Taqiyya” on the author’s website, www.raymondibrahim.com.
William G. Boykin et al., Shariah: The Threat to America. An Exercise in Competitive Analysis (Washington, DC: Center for Security Policy, 2010).
http://enzaferreri.blogspot.com/2014/01/taqiyya-trials-in-europe.html (last accessed February 25, 2025).
A good amount of scholarship exists on taqiyya as practiced by Shīʿīs. Publications include Daniel Beben, “Reimagining Taqiyya: The ‘Narrative of the Four Pillars’ and Strategies of Secrecy among the Ismāʿīlīs of Central Asia,” History of Religions 59, no. 2 (2019), republished in the present volume; Etan Kohlberg, “Some Imāmī-Shīʿī Views on Taqiyya,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 95 (1975) and “Taqiyya in Shīʿī Theology and Religion,” in Secrecy and Concealment. Studies in the History of Mediterranean and Near Eastern Religions, eds. Hans G. Kippenberg and Guy G. Stroumsa (Leiden: Brill, 1995); Devin J. Stewart, “Taqiyyah as Performance: the Travels of Bahāʾ al-Dīn al-ʿĀmilī in the Ottoman Empire (991–93/1583–85),” Princeton Papers in Near Eastern Studies 4 (1996); Lynda Clarke, “The Rise and Decline of Taqiyya in Twelver Shi’ism,” in Reason and Inspiration in Islam. Theology, Philosophy and Mysticism in Muslim Thought. Essays in Honour of Hermann Landolt, ed. Todd Lawson (London: I.B. Tauris in association with the Institute of Ismaili Studies, 2005); Maria Dakake, “Hiding in Plain Sight: The Practical and Doctrinal Significance of Secrecy in Shi’ite Islam,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 74 (2006); and the special issue of Al-Qanṭara 34, no. 2 (2013) on taqiyya, edited by Mercedes García-Arenal (see also her introduction on 345–355).
Devin J. Stewart, “Dissimulation in Sunni Islam and Morisco Taqiyya,” Al-Qanṭara 34, no. 2 (2013).
Ibrahim, “Taqiyya: War and Deceit in Islam,” 69.
Very critical, but much better documented than the Islamophobic material referenced here, Caroline Fourest, Frère Tariq, translated as Brother Tariq. The Doublespeak of Tariq Ramadan (New York: Encounter Books, 2008).
See Ibrahim, “How Taqiyya Alters Islam’s Rules of War.”
See Ibrahim, “How Taqiyya Alters Islam’s Rules of War,” who states that “right and wrong in Islam have little to do with universal standards but only with what Islam itself teaches” (12).
For an analysis of the significance that the object of fear is invisible see Michael Barkun, Chasing Phantoms. Reality, Imagination, and Homeland Security since 9/11 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 1–18.
http://www.pewforum.org/2014/07/16/how-americans-feel-about-religious-groups/. For a difference between Republicans (who put Muslims at 33 points) and Democrats (who give them 47 points, slightly more than the even less popular atheists and Mormons) see http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/01/29/the-political-divide-on-views-toward-muslims-and-islam/ (both last accessed on July 12, 2024).
See, for example, Katherine Pratt Ewing, ed., Being and Belonging. Muslims in the United States since 9/11 (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2008); Mucahit Bilici, Finding Mecca in America. How Islam is Becoming an American Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012); Juliane Hammer and Omid Safi, eds., The Cambridge Companion to American Islam (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013).
Amy Waldman, The Submission (New York: Farrar, Straus and Gioux, 2011).
Witness the irony of the ‘Islamic-style’ garden in Boston which was renamed ‘paradise garden’ after the original ‘terrace garden’ was misunderstood as ‘terrorist garden’ (https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/16/us/boston-muslims-struggle-to-wrest-image-of-islam-from-terrorists.html, last accessed July 12, 2024).
Mohsin Hamid, The Reluctant Fundamentalist (Orlando: Harcourt, 2007).
Mark Juergensmeyer, Terror in the Mind of God (2001; repr., Berkeley/Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2003).
Andrew J. Shryock, “Attack of the Islamophobes. Religious War (and Peace) in Arab/Muslim Detroit,” in Islamophobia in America. The Anatomy of Intolerance, ed. Carl W. Ernst (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 162.
In her contribution to September 11 (an international collection of short films produced by different directors and released in 2002), Mira Nair documents the case of a Muslim paramedic who went missing after 9/11. Initially suspected of being involved in the attacks, he is later discovered to have died among other first responders. Here too, the discrepancy between imagined and real circumstances is extreme.
Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Schreckens Männer. Versuch über den radikalen Verlierer (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2006).
Samuel W. Bettwy, “Evolving Transnational Cinematic Perspectives of Terrorism,” Perspectives on Terrorism 9, no. 2 (2015): 43. For another survey of a smaller number of films see Ahmed Al-Rawi, “The Representation of September 11th and American Islamophobia in Non-Western Cinema,” Media, War & Conflict 7, no. 2 (2014).
Shryock, “Attack of the Islamophobes,” 147.
See Giovanni Borradori, Philosophy in a Time of Terror. Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003): 85.
The paintings have been part of the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York since 1995 and can be seen on Richter’s website: https://www.gerhard-richter.com/en/exhibitions/gerhard-richter-18-oktober-1977-368.
For a discussion of German and American responses see Usselmann, “18. Oktober 1977: Gerhard Richter’s Work of Mourning and Its New Audience,” Art Journal 61 (2002).
Sabine Weier, “Jonathan Horowitz: politische Kunst nach 9/11,” https://www.schirn.de/schirnmag/jonathan-horowitz-politische-kunst-nach-9-11/ (last accessed February 25, 2025, my translation).
Something along these lines seems to be suggested in the Schirn magazine article which describes the possibilities of art to inspire reflections on fear of terror as constructed by representations of the enemy in the media. Comparisons with artistic responses to the Red Army Faction are again instructive. As critics oftentimes argue, the iconic representation in particular may lionize them and distract from the victims. The latter are the focus of Hans-Peter Feldmann, Die Toten (shown in Berlin’s Hamburger Bahnhof, 8 February 2012–6 January 2013), whose selection is a counterweight to the frequent focus on the perpetrators in German culture. The position of 19 Suspects in the American visual arts offers the reverse.
Jan-Holger Kirsch, “Mythos RAF? Zum Streit um eine noch nicht vorhandene Ausstellung,” Zeithistorische Forschungen/Studies in Contemporary History, online edition 1 (2004). Kirsch cites Gerd Koenen’s article published on 26 July 2003 in Süddeutsche Zeitung.
The program can be accessed through http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00290j7.
See for this the article “Jahar’s World” in the August 2013 issue of the Rolling Stone which tries to explain the discrepancy between Dhokhar Tsarneav’s reputation among his friends and his actions. The magazine quotes a retired agent from the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit, “Most people have a public persona as well as a private persona, but for many people, there’s a secret side, too. And the secret side is something that they labor really hard to protect.”
Barkun, Chasing Phantoms, 68–81. Yi-Fu Tuan, Landscapes of Fear (New York: Pantheon Books, 1979). The term ‘landscape’ describes the phenomenon under consideration well. Connected to the fears explored here are other anxieties such as concerns about the state of traumatized veterans. The popular TV series Homeland demonstrates how these anxieties can be related to those about Islam. One of the protagonists, a Marine sergeant, returns to the US after several years in captivity in Afghanistan, having secretly converted to Islam and endorsed his captors’ plan to attack US targets, although his reasons are rooted in his own personal trauma rather than ideological conviction.
Felix Hoffmann, ed., Unheimlich vertraut. Bilder vom Terror/The Uncanny Familiar. Images of Terror (Cologne: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, 2011).
Barkun, “Religion and Secrecy,” 296.