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- Author: François Burgat x
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The history of Algeria provides here a kind of archetype of all that has been encompassed by the relationship between “Islam and the West” in terms of “extremism.” In the Algeria of the 1970s, the author’s political consciousness became shaped relatively late, not in response to the disparity in wealth distribution—but when, within the field of colonial history, he discovered the scale of the distortion between the arguments and tropes of his “inherited culture” and the ones that developed from his own initial scholarly readings in history.
The author’s discovery of the Muslim “Other” first came through a phase of “intuitive” accumulation, through very extensive youthful travels that were quite without scholarly ambition or methodology. These took him from the “Holy Land” of Palestine and Israel, experienced in terms that were more Christian than they were Muslim; then around the entire arc of the Mediterranean; and finally, around the world.
The introduction outlines the book’s aims and sets out its major arguments and the author’s methodological contributions to the study of Islamism. A coherent approach to political Islam requires dividing it into two aspects. First, the reasons why what the author terms a Muslim “vocabulary” (to distinguish it from the concept of a Muslim “grammar”) has become so popular. The author traces these back to post-colonial identity politics. Second, the conditions in which this Muslim vocabulary has been deployed to serve politics as diverse as those of, on the one hand, the Tunisian Islamist leader Rached Ghannouchi through, at the other extreme, the leader of the Islamic State (ISIS), Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
Even before the alchemy of the rise of political Islam took us from the era of the “fellagas” into the age of the “fundamentalists,” the ethnic and linguistic Othering of Arabness had been quite enough to create powerful reflexes of rejection towards it. Things took a distinct turn for the worse, however, once the Other, after he had “spoken Arab” to us, got it into his head to start wanting to “speak Muslim” too. However, to this day, a strand of the Arab political classes—the one that has easiest access to our media—has remained stuck in a stance of indiscriminate rejection of the Islamist generation, which this chapter examines in detail.
Over the course of a scholarly career, the nature and the quality of interaction with those who share the same field of research is a thorny and important question. The question of which of the representations of the Muslim “Other” is to dominate the public sphere is altogether more important than the individualized ego-quarrels which the hastier (and often the laziest) commentators of academic debates wrap it up in. This chapter synthesizes the author’s critical examination of two main rival theses, associated with the French scholars Olivier Roy and Gilles Kepel, which have structured the French debate on the issue of political Islam.
This chapter continues the critical examination of the theses associated with Roy and Kepel that structure the French debate on the issue of Islamist radicalization. Kepel’s approach, like Roy’s, exacerbated an already-apparent contradiction. This consisted of minimizing the impact of ancient and ongoing North/South relations of domination on the behavior of the players concerned—if not ignoring it altogether. Fixated upon the form in which hostility to the Other is expressed, Kepel’s reading sidelines investigation into—or that takes into any sufficient account—the roots of the rising hostility towards the Western world across whole swaths of the Muslim world. To arrive at a nearly identical result, Roy, almost from thin air, created a jihadi who sprung from nowhere, asking us to believe that this figure was entirely disconnected from its original milieu (Muslims in France). The result was to make it impossible to think through any short-term or historical correlation with the injustices of all kinds endured in this milieu. Kepel, for his part, mentioned such suffering only in passing—all the better to gloss over it.
The weapon of mass destruction against terrorism might well have already been invented. One thing lies at the root of the repeated failure of our “war” against the terrorist: a blind refusal to put that weapon into practice. Granted, the weapon is especially expensive. The privileged of the world order of the 21st century, great and small, “Western” and “Muslim,” seem unwilling to pay its price. The weapon has a name which those who hold power in all its forms have little time for. That name is “sharing.”
At their core, the public relations of the “Arab Pinochets” towards their Western partners have rested on the deterrent power of the “fundamentalism” of their bogeyman dissidents. The idea was thus absolutely unacceptable to them that anyone might convince a Western public that some of these bogeymen might be declared innocent—or that their “crimes” might be reduced to the level of the counter-violence of an opposition forced into legitimate self-defense. This chapter thus examines one testing-ground for this struggle in which the author was closely involved, in particular as when called as an expert-witness for the highly politically contested asylum claims of Islamist figures in several countries.