The Muslim in the Mirror

by Arshin Adib-Moghaddam

Few things are more frustrating than the doxa to which a hybrid and multifarious object such as "Islam" is all too readily reduced by formulaic provocation and paranoiac reaction. The current "cartoon war" between "militant" Muslims and "militant" liberals in the "West" is a case in point. Once again, people are led to view themselves and others in binary terms. On one hand, to many peoples in the non-Muslim world, "Islam" represents an antagonistic force which threatens to compromise the rational universalism and secular humanism of Western Enlightenment. For Muslims, on the other hand, the "West" in general and the United States in particular embody an exceptionally destructive form of savage, heavily armed nihilism. The production of both categories, far from undergoing a process of critical examination, has been given over to a machine of escalating ideological incitement, which "al-Qaedaizes" Islam and "infidelizes" the West, withering the will to understand others.

Why is it, one may ask, that this parody of what "Islam" and the "West" represent, involving as it does a perennial cycle of reductions and counter-reductions, is so readily accepted? Why is there such a mutual desire and passion to conquer, liberate, and possess the other -- a rather incestuous dialectic between two societies that have institutionalized the Abrahamic prophecies, albeit in different ways. As if the "West" and "Islam" needed to be constantly produced and reified. As if it were essential to know the other's "difference" from us. As if it were obligatory to decide between "us" and "them." Those who are involved in the current clash of reductionisms would have done well to remember the parable of Babel: the transparency of our world was destroyed once and for all. Instead, alas, hubris is the norm, with Danish, French, German, and Norwegian journalists claiming to represent the secular present of "Western liberalism" and neo-fundamentalists in the Islamic world claiming to defend the sacrosanct essence of "Islam."

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