Salman Rushdie gave a PEN/Pinter Prize Lecture the other day and used the occasion to talk about “jihadi-cool,” the Telegraph reported.
The so-called “jihadi-cool” image romanticises Isil, using rap videos and social networking to recruit followers – posing with AK-47s and bragging about their “five star jihad” in videos showing fighters lounging around in luxury villas as they urged the destruction of the West.
Rushdie defined “jihadi-cool” as “the deformed medievalist language of fanaticism, backed up by modern weaponry”, saying: “It’s hard not to conclude that this hate-filled religious rhetoric, pouring from the mouths of ruthless fanatics into the ears of angry young men, has become the most dangerous new weapon in the world today”.
I think he’s right. I think the element of adventure, excitement, glamor, flash, let’s pretend in terrorism gets too little attention.
He said: “A word I dislike greatly, ‘Islamophobia’, has been coined to discredit those who point at these excesses, by labelling them as bigots. But in the first place, if I don’t like your ideas, it must be acceptable for me to say so, just as it is acceptable for you to say that you don’t like mine. Ideas cannot be ring-fenced just because they claim to have this or that fictional sky god on their side.
“And in the second place, it’s important to remember that most of those who suffer under the yoke of the new Islamic fanaticism are other Muslims…
“It is right to feel phobia towards such matters. As several commentators have said, what is being killed in Iraq is not just human beings, but a whole culture. To feel aversion towards such a force is not bigotry. It is the only possible response to the horror of events.
“I can’t, as a citizen, avoid speaking of the horror of the world in this new age of religious mayhem, and of the language that conjures it up and justifies it, so that young men, including young Britons, led towards acts of extreme bestiality, believe themselves to be fighting a just war.”
The language that conjures it up and justifies it is very important. Language is very important, just as ideas are very important. They aren’t just the froth on the coffee.
Rushdie was speaking as he accepted the PEN Pinter Prize, established by the writers’ charity English PEN in 2009 in memory of the Nobel Prize-winning playwright Harold Pinter.
The prize is awarded annual to a British or British-based writer who “exemplifies the spirit of Harold Pinter through his or her engagement with the times”.
Each year the winner shares the prize with an international writer who has risked their own safety in the name of free speech. Rushdie chose Mazen Darwish, a Syrian journalist and lawyer who is currently in prison.
There are so so many to choose from.
I wonder what term Mr. Rushdie would have us use for those instances that aren’t legitimate criticisms of Islam. We ‘ve all seen them, like the claims that Muslims will outbreed the native population of this or that country and impose Sharia law on it within a decade or so.
Why does Rushdie need a term for bad arguments? Do we invent terms for bad criticisms of Mormonism, Hinduism or Christianity? Islamophobia is a term designed to silence all criticism of the ideology of Islam, especially the legitimate criticisms. The bad criticisms can be easily refuted. With legitimate criticisms, apologists need to change the topic and Islamophobia allegations succeed quite well in this regard.
We don’t need a term for bad arguments, but it is useful to have a term for a particular attitude. When a group is particularyly targeted for bad criticism, so that this bad criticism resembles the bad arguments by racists, I see nothing wrong with having a term for it. Just as we have “anti-semitism” for hatred against jews. And yes “anti-semitism” is often enough used to silence critics of israel.
Maybe where you’re from. Where I’m from, using Islam as a code word for “brown people” is an everyday occurrence.
The term “Islamophobia” is problematic because it’s too broad and imprecise, however, let’s not pretend that there aren’t a shit-load of bigots out there using Islam as a pretense to make their racism more acceptable. In my opinion, that’s exactly why we need to be very careful and precise in our critique of Islam. We need to avoid giving cover to bigots, while still forcefully resisting oppressive ideas.
If you oppose ISIL, or any other Islamist savagery, you WILL find yourself associated with people who have other motives: anti immigration racists, weird religious nuts like Robert Spence and Pamela Gellar etc. etc.
But this is not unique to religious issues. If you opposed Hitler, you’d find yourself next to Stalinists. If you opposed Stalin, you’d be conflated with the loony Right in the U.S.
‘Islamophobia’ is a term like ‘pinko’ or ‘cold-warrior.’ It has abdicated useful meaning because it has been coopted as a ‘shut up, that’s why’ pseudo-argument.
Islamophobia is a shitty term because, like homophobia before it, it coopts a clinical psychological diagnosis and conflates that term with behavior or speech that is usually better described using the word “bigotry”. Now we aren’t always comfortable calling people “bigots” or “racists” so we use a milder term that merely implies that they are being irrational.
Rushdie even uses the word wrong in the above:
The word he wants there is “fear”. Fears can be rational, by definition a phobia is irrational. If someone actually is “islamo-phobic” then they have a problem.
But even if we allow for the colloquial use of the term “phobia” in this case I still don’t think the term is being used correctly. Perhaps a better use for the term would be as a way to classify “islamophobia” would be to define it as the state of hysteria induced when anti-Islamic bigots make outrageous and inflammatory accusations against Muslims or Islam in order to score political points or drive policy in preferred directions. Now we absolutely know that this happens. It’s half of Fox News’ pro war propaganda machine. That would be an acceptable use of Islamophobia to me. Otherwise call people bigots if thats what you mean.
4. LykeX says
“Maybe where you’re from. Where I’m from, using Islam as a code word for “brown people” is an everyday occurrence.”
So do these “Islamophobes” have the same degree of concern about Hindus and Hispanics?
“let’s not pretend that there aren’t a shit-load of bigots out there using Islam as a pretense to make their racism more acceptable. In my opinion, that’s exactly why we need to be very careful and precise in our critique of Islam. We need to avoid giving cover to bigots, while still forcefully resisting oppressive ideas.”
Yes, but let’s look at how this plays out in practice. Sam Harris says we have to be able to criticize bad ideas that there is a causal relationship between bad ideas like martyrdom and Jihad and Islamic terrorism. Instead of debating Sam’s thesis and offering counterarguments, Reza Aslan (and others) cry Islamophobia and change the subject to a discussion about diversity in the Muslim world, which is an irrelevant diversion to a topic nobody disputed in the first place. By conflating criticism of Islamic doctrines with an attack on all Muslim people, Aslan shuts down the discussion about the bad ideas (Aslan does not want to discuss the bad ideas head on, he want to pretend they aren’t there).
Stated differently, the fear of giving cover to bigots is too easily being exploited by apologists like Aslan to shut down the debate about ideas. In some liberal circles, quoting directly from the Koran and the Hadith will get you labeled a bigot.
No, but then we don’t have that many Hindus or Hispanics. I’ve heard of occasional problems with Sikhs, presumably because the turbans make them very visible.
Harris may not be the best example in this regard, given his history of advocating racial profiling. Frankly, he has a history of painting with a very broad brush.
I’m not that familiar with Aslan, so I’ll defer judgment. I’m not convinced that it’s as irrelevant as you think, though. It’s easy to demonize a group by applying broad labels that don’t actually fit and in such a case, it’s entirely on point to respond by pointing to diversity in that group.
The fact that the critique comes through doctrines isn’t a guarantee that it’s not bigoted. That would depend on exactly how the critique is formulated. To take the example of suicide bombing, the majority of Muslims, even in places like Palestine, do not support the practice. As such, you have to be quite precise to criticize the doctrine and practice, not the larger group, which doesn’t support either.
For the record, I’ll agree that “islamophobia” can definitely be used to derail a discussion. Maybe it’s just that I meet the other side of it a lot more often, so that’s what I focus on more.
Will it? In my experience, people get criticized for what they say before and after giving the quote, not for the quote itself.