About a week ago I read Ali Eteraz’s article, “Muslim Experience At Ann Coulter Chat Forum.” It was a powerful read, if only because it has forced me to realise that I am guilty of consistently stereotyping the right wing. Other parts of his post also made an impression on me, but I’d like to focus on the following passage (emphasis mine):

What hurt most was the way in which I was blatantly excluded from the conversation as if I were completely invisible. There were postings and conversations in which the commentators spoke to each other about “he,” “the guy,” “the Muslim apologist,” “this experiment.” It was as if I was not there. I was not Ali Eteraz. I didn’t have a name. They described and discussed me without acknowledging me. I was no more to them than a vague idea. Not a person, but a pronoun. It was the most blatant case of linguistic exclusion I have ever experienced because even when a man has called me sand-nigger, it has been to my face and I have felt his spittle hit me and felt the actual tangibility of the moment. This time I felt brushed off like I was a husk. Non-existent.

Besides the fact that I could relate, I had just recently read Cornel West’s essay “The New Cultural Politics of Difference”1 and was strongly reminded of his statement that “[t]he Black diaspora condition of New World servitude … can be characterised as … natal alienation. This state of perpetual and inheritable domination that diaspora Africans had at birth produced the modern Black diaspora problematic of invisibility and namelessness” (261- emphasis his). Eteraz’s experience of “linguistic exclusion” (a beautiful phrase) perfectly mirrors West’s concern with Black “invisibility and namelessness.”

That mental spark was what I needed to cement my conviction that those studying Muslim experiences would benefit from studying Black writers as well. I have to interrupt myself here to note – and this is important – that these aren’t two separate and distinct groups. Rather, I’m concerned with theoretical approaches to understanding Muslim and Black diasporas. Given that the latter is much more established than the former, it would make sense for Muslim academics to learn from their predecessors, especially when the similarities are so abundant. And of course there’s the additional benefit of building bridges between racialised groups, both within and outside the Muslim community.

In that vein, I’ve decided to reconsider West’s essay from the point of someone looking to begin disseminating and legitimising Muslim experiences. In his own words, I wish to use his text as a “springboard … not [a] landing ground” for my own examination of the way a Muslim academic intent on studying Muslim experiences might read West’s paper.

I begin about halfway through his article, not because the first half is uninteresting, but because I think his preliminaries are too broad for my own Muslim-centered thesis. That said, it’s clear he was intentionally general in his opening. What I, personally, am really interested in is when, having established his genealogy, he begins to speak specifically of “the modern Black diaspora” (261). He asserts that “[t]he modern Black diaspora problematic of invisibility and namelessness can be understood as the condition of relative lack of Black power to present themselves to themselves and others as complex human beings, and thereby to contest the bombardment of negative, degrading stereotypes put forward by White supremacist ideologies” (261). That should be pretty self-explanatory. For the most part, in the mainstream media Muslims are depicted as political pawns, incapable of navigating the multiple loyalties that apparently everyone else has no problem managing.

West goes on to highlight two key problems with the “initial Black response to being caught in this whirlwind of Europeanization” (261): its “assimilationist manner” (262) and its “homogenizing impulse” (262). The first refers to a tendency “to show that Black people were really like White people – thereby eliding differences (in history and culture) between Whites and Blacks” (262). The second refers to the “assum[ption] that all Black people were really alike – hence obliterating differences (class, gender, region, sexual orientation) between Black peoples” (262).

Now with regards to the assimilationism, I can’t really formulate an opinion. West acknowledges that Blacks and Whites share a “common humanity” (262), but he argues this commonality is “jettisoned when the claim is cast in an assimilationist manner that subordinates Black particularity to a false universalism, i.e. non-Black rubrics and prototypes” (262). As I have not personally worked out for myself whether or not I believe in any sort of universalism, I don’t yet know how to approach that specific critique. Additionally, West does not explain what is so false about the universalism of which he speaks, nor does he provide examples of “Black rubrics and prototypes.” I think he assumes a certain level of background knowledge and acquiescence on the reader’s part. Lacking this, I’m not going to pursue that point further.

The “homogenizing impulse,” on the other hand, I can sink my teeth into much more firmly. I would argue that Muslims not having originated in any one region (Islam may be Arab by birth, but Muslims usually aren’t), the homogenizing impulse within Muslim communities is stronger than it is within Black communities. We are much more of an unruly body, because in addition to all the differences West listed that as present within Black communities, race is an additional one within Muslim communities. Thus, our homogenizing impulse fails from the very start, and fails more spectacularly than the initial Black one did.

For instance, I am a Sri Lankan Muslim. What this means is that I can’t really fault Sri Lankan Muslims for expecting certain things of me. Or at least, I can’t fault them as much as I can my other South Asian neighbours, who expect me, depending on the situation, to be Pakistani/Indian/etc, to speak Urdu/Hindi/Gujrati/etc, to know what vindaloo is. I’m willing to stand a certain amount of censure for not being able to speak Tamil or even Singhala, but I refuse to have my Muslimness called into doubt because I cannot speak other South Asian languages. In any case, my public Muslimness is inextricably linked to my supposed nationality/ethnicity. In this case, I am speaking purely of encounters I’ve had with people who “look like me.” Things become different when, for instance, I speak to someone who is an Arab Muslim and who assumes, purely on the basis of my skin colour, that I do not know Arabic. The homogenising impulse, then, is one that is determined along lines of race. (For the curious, my Tamil skills are comparable to my Arabic skills, in that I understand both languages pretty well, but don’t have the courage to speak them.) In other words, whereas the initial Black response was to homogenize entire Black communities, Muslims tend to lump each other into groups depending on “race.”

I need to stop here. The fact is I have to submit a “critical response” to West’s article for a class tomorrow. This post, vague as it is, will form the body of it. Right now more than the actual quality of my work, I need to focus on beginning to produce critical works. It’s actually been difficult for me to write this post, as I’m not used to formalising the personal.

I do intend to return to West at some point. I want to consider the following points from his article, as they parallel Muslim experiences:

  1. “… the internalised association with of Blackness with inferiority …” (262)
  2. “The hidden assumption … that we have unmediated access to what the ‘real Black community’ is and what ‘positive images’ are … Any notions of ‘the real Black community’ and ‘positive images’ are value-laden, socially loaded, and ideologically charged” (263).
  3. “… the manner in which Third World authoritarian bureaucratic elites deploy essentialist rhetorics about ‘homogenous national communities’ and ‘positive images’ in order to repress and regiment their diverse and heterogeneous populations” (263).
  4. “I call demystificatory criticism ‘prophetic criticism – the approach appropriate for the new cultural politics of differences – because while it begins with social structural analyses it also makes explicit its moral and political aims. It is partisan, partial, engaged and crisis-centred, yet always keeps open a sceptical eye … The deadly traps of demystification – and any form of prophetic criticism – are those of reductionism, be it of the sociological, psychological, or historical sort” (264).
  5. The entirety of the section titled “The Existential Challenge.”

This morning I had to go to the bank, where my attendant was a young black man who shared the same name as a Tamil friend of mine. The name, an Arabic one, means graceful or handsome. And this young man was able to detect in my Sri Lankan voice the vestiges of a British accent I thought I had lost years ago. This, really, is in essence what I want to study and to celebrate: the beauty of us, us Muslims who, if only we would acknowledge it, resist categorisation.

Bibliography:
1 West, Cornel. “The New Cultural Politics of Difference.” The Cultural Studies Reader. Simon During, ed. New York: Routledge, 1999. 256-267.

Postscript:
I will admit here that I was going to apologise for the scattered nature of this post, for the way it lacks examples of “the concrete, specific, and particular” (257). But it’s my first venture into the world of academia, so no. I’m not going to apologise.