When I was in seventh grade, my geography teacher showed us a movie called Nightmare in Red that was about communism. The only thing I remember about it is that it showed footage of a horrendous number of firing squads. If a movie were to be made of fundamentalist Islam, it wouldn’t involve firing squads, but it would involve an awful lot of killings of ordinary people simply living their lives who nevertheless weren’t living up to the fundamentalists’ image of what an ideal Muslim should be doing or saying. The rise of fundamentalist Islam is the big story of the last forty years, yet it is one that many Western progressives seem unaware of. I first became aware of this new political force in the world when Ayatollah Khomeini took over in Iran and there were news reports about how many liberals and leftists were being arrested and killed and how the authorities were suddenly demanding that women cover up. Since in Iran the fundamentalists had actually taken power, there may have been actual firing squads, but in many other places in the Muslim world, there were simply a lot of death threats by fundamentalist vigilante groups followed by actual killings.
Strangely enough, the left here in the West has never thought that fundamentalist Muslims were bad people, even though they hate fundamentalist Christians, who are much milder. But since I knew in a vague way that liberals or leftists in the Middle East had different opinions, I’ve thought for some time now that it might be wise for some conservative professor here in America to bring in one of them as a guest speaker. Such people could not be offensive to the powers-that-be in our schools since such a speaker would be on the left, but at the same time they would be highly critical of Western leftists. It would shock a lot of people out of their dogmatic slumbers. One such possible invitee is Karima Bennoune with her new book Your Fatwa Doesn’t Apply Here: Untold Stories from the Fight against Muslim Fundamentalism. It is all the more convenient to choose her because, although she is from Algeria, she in fact is now a professor of law here in America (at the University of California-Davis).
Much of this book is, as the subtitle suggests, about the lives of ordinary people in the Muslim world who have had their lives disrupted by the arrival of fundamentalists. Some of these fundamentalists have arrived as actual invaders, as in Mali, but most often they arrive in other ways. They come to help with a struggle against an outsider (as did the Pakistani fundamentalists who arrived in Chechnya to help fight the Russians) or they are local people who have gone someplace abroad and have come back as fundamentalists.
Once in place, they institute a reign of terror against anyone (mostly women) who refuses to accept their rules. Bennoune makes it clear that many countries where this happened were places were the Muslims were moderate. (This is what Sole Woyinka said about his native Nigeria, too. See here.) Either the women wore no headscarves, or they wore different ones from those which the fundamentalists wanted them to wear. They lived in harmony with Christians or even secularists. They had their own traditions about how Islam worked, which may have included local saints (as in Mali) or else a Sufi strain (as in Chechnya). But suddenly everyone’s lives were made hellish by all the new rules. Women have to cover up. Women can’t use cellphones. One can’t listen to music or watch sports. Or, in one place, one can’t drink water standing up or use pressure cookers [54]. Or women are blamed for natural disasters if they don’t cover up [119]. Those who object are often beaten or else threatened and even killed. In Mali, there have been lots of amputations. Typically, either the state doesn’t do anything to help the victims, or else goes too far (in Bennoune’s opinion). However, what seems clear is that the victims and their friends and families never seem to use violence themselves.
Again and again, certain themes are invoked amidst all the stories. One is that just a few decades ago people in these places could do things that they now couldn’t do. Another is to blame the U.S. and Americans on the right, whom she regards as racist, for various things such as being imperialists. That of course is only to be expected. But the biggest theme is that the people who should be supporting the victims of fundamentalist violence are leftists in the West, but they never do. Here are some samples of what she and some others say:
“Some Western observers see Muslim fundamentalists as the stalwart representatives of the local standing up to the global. That is not how they are often seen on the ground.” [14]
“A gay Arab or a secular feminist of Muslim heritage who claims to fit in the ‘human’ category just like anyone else is nowadays too confusing, and just not ‘different’ enough to be enticing to a certain breed of occidental multiculturalist.” [18]
She criticizes a piece with an interview with a “veiled American Muslim law professor who assures us that Sharia is simply about ‘ideals of justice, fairness, and the good life.’ She advocates its use in the United States. The piece does not say a word about what the purported application of Sharia has meant in the lives of women (and men) around the world.” [20]
“... the Western (and global) left often refuses to recognize the reality of [fundamentalist] violence and the actual danger posed by its underlying ideology.” She then adds that she is more shocked by the left’s stand than the right’s “because I am in their camp.” [22]
“I struggled to understand why the Western left was defending the Muslim right and not me, or more importantly, their victims.” [24]
“Muslim fundamentalism is just as deserving of critical discussion as U.S. foreign policy or the Israeli government or anti-Muslim bias.” She complains that often Western leftists will change the subject when it comes up. For example, fundamentalist violence against women gets turned into a discussion of how women have to face violence everywhere. [24]
An Algerian journalist says he has to explain to European leftists that “the Muslim fundamentalists are our extreme right.” [24]
As she was repeatedly told wherever she went, the fact that fundamentalists have legitimate grievances against the West doesn’t make them “the legitimate representatives of the wretched of the earth – far from it.” [25-6]
“Strangely, while many feminists of Muslim heritage have been fighting against the impulse to obscure their female compatriots, some Western feminists have fallen in love with the veil.” [121]
“Not one leading international human rights organization ever produced a single major report on [gang rapes by fundamentalists in Algeria] during the 1990s. NOT ONE.” [139]
“Instead, for many victims of the armed groups ... it seemed the international human rights organizations defended the fundamentalists: they ‘closed their ears and talked about rapists as political opponents who defended a just cause.’” [163]
Westerners thought of Islamists as democrats and their feminist opponents as militarists; “I said to Europeans, ‘Wouldn’t you want your army to defend you if you were attacked?’” [from an Algerian feminist, 184]
A Cambridge professor, George Joffe, called those who opposed the fundamentalists “eradicators” for rejecting all compromise with them. The response? “We are eradicated, killed, had our throats cut, and they call us eradicators.” [184-5]
Amnesty International “seemed oblivious to what the fundamentalist agenda itself meant for human rights.” [185]
“Fashionable Western cultural relativists who sometimes justify veiling, FGM [female genital mutilation], and rule by majlis al-shura as authentic and unassailable ‘cultural practices’ are seen by many in Lahore, Niamey, and Tehran ... as simply purveying another kind of racism. Iranian women’s rights activist Mahnaz Afkhami has a name for this new relativism reserved for Muslims today: Islamic exceptionalism.” [197]
“Western multiculturalists sometimes argue that separation of mosque and state is an inherently different issue for Muslims than separation of church and state is for Christians in the West. But like many secularists of Muslim heritage, Sehati, an Iranian believer, has staked his life on the view that ‘religion and politics should be separate.’ He is scathing in his condemnation of his government’s claims to act in the name of God.” [205]
“... she deplores what she sees as the ‘infatuation’ of some Western academics with fundamentalism. ‘People are promoting ideas, which if applied to their life, they would find horrible, but they apologize for or even applaud these ideas in other people’s lives.” [from an Iranian feminist, 208-9]
“There is a tendency within some leftist and feminist circles to label Muslim extremists – who kill, rape, kidnap women and girls and openly target civilians as ‘the resistance,” says an Algerian woman named Helie. Bennoune adds, “Sadly, someone on the left in the West can always be counted on to attack women of Muslim heritage who raise such concerns. Corinna Mullin, a lecturer in Middle East politics at the London School of Economics, accused Helie in an online response of Orientalism and of ‘mimicking Bush.’” [249]
“Yanar Mohammed tells me that because of her open criticism of fundamentalists, she has increasingly limited opportunities to speak to the media, and progressive groups in the West no longer invite her.” [249]
“Horia [a feminist in Afghanistan] is taken aback that some progressives in the West still regard the Taliban as anti-imperialist. ‘I’m shocked some of them call Taliban the freedom fighters. I can’t believe as a Muslim woman that we think that burqa is okay, the way if you want to impose Sharia it’s okay.” [264]
“I hate this word.” The word is “inclusive,” and the speaker is an Egyptian feminist who complains about those Westerners who think that the Muslim Brotherhood should be included in the political process. [295]
“I think the trouble that some human rights advocates have gotten into, when writing about Algeria or when writing about the ‘war on terror,’ is that the ‘Islamist victims’ [that is, Islamists who were victims of imperialism or whatever] to whom they spoke conformed to their preexisting narrative – the state is bad (whether the United States, the Algerian state, or others) and the Islamists are persecuted. As a result, they did not ask other questions, or look for what was left out.” [313-4]
“The international human rights organizations have been my enemies for thirty years,” says one Algerian feminist. [316]
“Often when people mouth platitudes about Islam-religion-of-peace, my eyes glaze over. Have they slept through the last few decades?” [331]
“In academia, I often hear claims that the Islamists represent ordinary people, and their opponents are simply elite.” [333]
There is a lot more to say about this book, which I will take up next time.
Strangely enough, the left here in the West has never thought that fundamentalist Muslims were bad people, even though they hate fundamentalist Christians, who are much milder. But since I knew in a vague way that liberals or leftists in the Middle East had different opinions, I’ve thought for some time now that it might be wise for some conservative professor here in America to bring in one of them as a guest speaker. Such people could not be offensive to the powers-that-be in our schools since such a speaker would be on the left, but at the same time they would be highly critical of Western leftists. It would shock a lot of people out of their dogmatic slumbers. One such possible invitee is Karima Bennoune with her new book Your Fatwa Doesn’t Apply Here: Untold Stories from the Fight against Muslim Fundamentalism. It is all the more convenient to choose her because, although she is from Algeria, she in fact is now a professor of law here in America (at the University of California-Davis).
Much of this book is, as the subtitle suggests, about the lives of ordinary people in the Muslim world who have had their lives disrupted by the arrival of fundamentalists. Some of these fundamentalists have arrived as actual invaders, as in Mali, but most often they arrive in other ways. They come to help with a struggle against an outsider (as did the Pakistani fundamentalists who arrived in Chechnya to help fight the Russians) or they are local people who have gone someplace abroad and have come back as fundamentalists.
Once in place, they institute a reign of terror against anyone (mostly women) who refuses to accept their rules. Bennoune makes it clear that many countries where this happened were places were the Muslims were moderate. (This is what Sole Woyinka said about his native Nigeria, too. See here.) Either the women wore no headscarves, or they wore different ones from those which the fundamentalists wanted them to wear. They lived in harmony with Christians or even secularists. They had their own traditions about how Islam worked, which may have included local saints (as in Mali) or else a Sufi strain (as in Chechnya). But suddenly everyone’s lives were made hellish by all the new rules. Women have to cover up. Women can’t use cellphones. One can’t listen to music or watch sports. Or, in one place, one can’t drink water standing up or use pressure cookers [54]. Or women are blamed for natural disasters if they don’t cover up [119]. Those who object are often beaten or else threatened and even killed. In Mali, there have been lots of amputations. Typically, either the state doesn’t do anything to help the victims, or else goes too far (in Bennoune’s opinion). However, what seems clear is that the victims and their friends and families never seem to use violence themselves.
Again and again, certain themes are invoked amidst all the stories. One is that just a few decades ago people in these places could do things that they now couldn’t do. Another is to blame the U.S. and Americans on the right, whom she regards as racist, for various things such as being imperialists. That of course is only to be expected. But the biggest theme is that the people who should be supporting the victims of fundamentalist violence are leftists in the West, but they never do. Here are some samples of what she and some others say:
“Some Western observers see Muslim fundamentalists as the stalwart representatives of the local standing up to the global. That is not how they are often seen on the ground.” [14]
“A gay Arab or a secular feminist of Muslim heritage who claims to fit in the ‘human’ category just like anyone else is nowadays too confusing, and just not ‘different’ enough to be enticing to a certain breed of occidental multiculturalist.” [18]
She criticizes a piece with an interview with a “veiled American Muslim law professor who assures us that Sharia is simply about ‘ideals of justice, fairness, and the good life.’ She advocates its use in the United States. The piece does not say a word about what the purported application of Sharia has meant in the lives of women (and men) around the world.” [20]
“... the Western (and global) left often refuses to recognize the reality of [fundamentalist] violence and the actual danger posed by its underlying ideology.” She then adds that she is more shocked by the left’s stand than the right’s “because I am in their camp.” [22]
“I struggled to understand why the Western left was defending the Muslim right and not me, or more importantly, their victims.” [24]
“Muslim fundamentalism is just as deserving of critical discussion as U.S. foreign policy or the Israeli government or anti-Muslim bias.” She complains that often Western leftists will change the subject when it comes up. For example, fundamentalist violence against women gets turned into a discussion of how women have to face violence everywhere. [24]
An Algerian journalist says he has to explain to European leftists that “the Muslim fundamentalists are our extreme right.” [24]
As she was repeatedly told wherever she went, the fact that fundamentalists have legitimate grievances against the West doesn’t make them “the legitimate representatives of the wretched of the earth – far from it.” [25-6]
“Strangely, while many feminists of Muslim heritage have been fighting against the impulse to obscure their female compatriots, some Western feminists have fallen in love with the veil.” [121]
“Not one leading international human rights organization ever produced a single major report on [gang rapes by fundamentalists in Algeria] during the 1990s. NOT ONE.” [139]
“Instead, for many victims of the armed groups ... it seemed the international human rights organizations defended the fundamentalists: they ‘closed their ears and talked about rapists as political opponents who defended a just cause.’” [163]
Westerners thought of Islamists as democrats and their feminist opponents as militarists; “I said to Europeans, ‘Wouldn’t you want your army to defend you if you were attacked?’” [from an Algerian feminist, 184]
A Cambridge professor, George Joffe, called those who opposed the fundamentalists “eradicators” for rejecting all compromise with them. The response? “We are eradicated, killed, had our throats cut, and they call us eradicators.” [184-5]
Amnesty International “seemed oblivious to what the fundamentalist agenda itself meant for human rights.” [185]
“Fashionable Western cultural relativists who sometimes justify veiling, FGM [female genital mutilation], and rule by majlis al-shura as authentic and unassailable ‘cultural practices’ are seen by many in Lahore, Niamey, and Tehran ... as simply purveying another kind of racism. Iranian women’s rights activist Mahnaz Afkhami has a name for this new relativism reserved for Muslims today: Islamic exceptionalism.” [197]
“Western multiculturalists sometimes argue that separation of mosque and state is an inherently different issue for Muslims than separation of church and state is for Christians in the West. But like many secularists of Muslim heritage, Sehati, an Iranian believer, has staked his life on the view that ‘religion and politics should be separate.’ He is scathing in his condemnation of his government’s claims to act in the name of God.” [205]
“... she deplores what she sees as the ‘infatuation’ of some Western academics with fundamentalism. ‘People are promoting ideas, which if applied to their life, they would find horrible, but they apologize for or even applaud these ideas in other people’s lives.” [from an Iranian feminist, 208-9]
“There is a tendency within some leftist and feminist circles to label Muslim extremists – who kill, rape, kidnap women and girls and openly target civilians as ‘the resistance,” says an Algerian woman named Helie. Bennoune adds, “Sadly, someone on the left in the West can always be counted on to attack women of Muslim heritage who raise such concerns. Corinna Mullin, a lecturer in Middle East politics at the London School of Economics, accused Helie in an online response of Orientalism and of ‘mimicking Bush.’” [249]
“Yanar Mohammed tells me that because of her open criticism of fundamentalists, she has increasingly limited opportunities to speak to the media, and progressive groups in the West no longer invite her.” [249]
“Horia [a feminist in Afghanistan] is taken aback that some progressives in the West still regard the Taliban as anti-imperialist. ‘I’m shocked some of them call Taliban the freedom fighters. I can’t believe as a Muslim woman that we think that burqa is okay, the way if you want to impose Sharia it’s okay.” [264]
“I hate this word.” The word is “inclusive,” and the speaker is an Egyptian feminist who complains about those Westerners who think that the Muslim Brotherhood should be included in the political process. [295]
“I think the trouble that some human rights advocates have gotten into, when writing about Algeria or when writing about the ‘war on terror,’ is that the ‘Islamist victims’ [that is, Islamists who were victims of imperialism or whatever] to whom they spoke conformed to their preexisting narrative – the state is bad (whether the United States, the Algerian state, or others) and the Islamists are persecuted. As a result, they did not ask other questions, or look for what was left out.” [313-4]
“The international human rights organizations have been my enemies for thirty years,” says one Algerian feminist. [316]
“Often when people mouth platitudes about Islam-religion-of-peace, my eyes glaze over. Have they slept through the last few decades?” [331]
“In academia, I often hear claims that the Islamists represent ordinary people, and their opponents are simply elite.” [333]
There is a lot more to say about this book, which I will take up next time.
I'm afraid that I'm not so sanguine that Leftists would allow her to speak, as the case of Ayaan Hirsi Ali shows.
And the reason that the Christian Fundamentalists of "Fly Over" country are seen as the enemy (even when as you say they are much more mild) is that politically they are a much bigger threat.
And nevermind the cognitive dissonance of recognizing that Fundamentalist Islam isn't a counter-Imperialist movement. Personal constructs would be at risk.
Posted by: Borepatch | 09/29/2013 at 06:19 PM
You could be right. Take a look at what I say in Part 2 of my comments, posted today.
Posted by: John Pepple | 09/30/2013 at 11:55 AM
Everything is very open with a clear clarification of the issues. It was definitely informative. Your website is useful. Many thanks for sharing!
Posted by: increase ranking | 10/03/2013 at 03:57 AM
I almost never comment, however i did a few searching and wound up here Nightmare in Green: Comments on Karima Bennoune’s “Your Fatwa Doesn’t Apply Here” - I Want a New Left. And I actually do have a couple of questions for you if it's allright. Is it simply me or does it give the impression like a few of these responses look like left by brain dead individuals? :-P And, if you are writing at additional online sites, I'd like to keep up with everything fresh you have to post. Would you list of every one of all your public pages like your Facebook page, twitter feed, or linkedin profile?
Posted by: ppi claims | 10/03/2013 at 08:25 AM
ppi claims: There were many stupid comments to this post, most of which were obviously spam, so I deleted them. The comment by "increase ranking" at first looked like spam, but I left it in because it did seem to be an actual comment, even if it was rather lame.
I'm not writing at any other sites, plus I don't have either a Facebook account or a twitter feed. I'm on linkedin, but I don't do much of anything with it, since I signed up for it by accident. But if you look up my name (John Pepple), I suppose you could find my profile.
Posted by: John Pepple | 10/03/2013 at 09:57 AM
Hello! I'm at work browsing your blog from my new iphone 3gs! Just wanted to say I love reading your blog and look forward to all your posts! Keep up the excellent work!
Posted by: franking machine | 10/03/2013 at 01:01 PM