Making the British Muslim: Representations of the Rushdie Affair and Figures of the War-On-Terror Decade

222 Pages·2014·1.32 MB·English

by  Nicole Falkenhayner (auth.)

Making the British Muslim
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MAKINGTHEBRITISHMUSLIM
RepresentationsoftheRushdieAffairandFiguresofthe
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Making the British Muslim
Representations of the Rushdie Affair
and Figures of the War-On-Terror Decade
Nicole Falkenhayner
UniversityofFreiburg,Germany
©NicoleFalkenhayner2014
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Contents
Acknowledgements vi
Introduction 1
Part I TheRushdieAffair
1 TransnationalTakeovers 23
2 TranslationFailures 36
3 AftertheFatwa 64
Part II FigurationsaftertheEvent
4 TheFanaticSon 95
5 MakingtheBritishMusliminLiterature 110
6 MakingtheBritishMusliminFilmandAutobiography 138
Part III EventalizationTemplates
7 EventalizingtheBritishMuslim 153
8 TheFigureoftheMusliminEurope 168
Conclusion 180
Notes 188
Bibliography 205
Index 216
v
Acknowledgements
Books are never the product of an independent monadic mind. This
is especially true of this one, which represents my own research as
much as the atmosphere in which it was conducted: the interdis-
ciplinary research group Idioms of Social Analysis at the University
of Konstanz. The constant discussions and singular esprit maintained
between Andreas Langenohl (the head of the group), Michael W. Nau,
JohannesScheu,DorisSchweitzer,KacperSzuleckiandmefrom2008to
2011haveinformedmyideasofhowscholarshipmakessense–andis
fun.IthankAndreasespeciallyforhisalwaysopenmind–andopenear.
SomeoftheideasdevelopedinthistextwerelaunchedattheGSAand
ACLAannualconferencesin2008and2010,andinseveralseminarsand
colloquiaatKonstanz.Ithankeverybodywhogavemetheopportunity
tospeakaboutmyresearch,wholistenedtomeandwhofurtheredthe
project with sometimes challenging questions and tips. I thank Aleida
Assmann,fromwhomIreceivedsupportduringthefinalstages,aswell
as Ansgar Nünning, for support in sharpening the project at its out-
set, and Doris Feldmann for her generous commentary at the ‘Idioms’
workshop in 2010. I thank the Center of Excellence Cultural Founda-
tionsofSocialIntegrationatKonstanzforfundingtheproject,andthe
GermanAcademicExchangeServiceDAADforfinancingmystayatthe
University of California at Riverside in early 2010, where my discus-
sions with my host, John N. Kim, and with Reza Aslan broadened my
view on the topic from an extra-European perspective. I thank Naoki
Sakai and Levent Tezcan for deeply influential discussions. I thank the
series editor, Anne Sophie Krossa, for her interest and hands-on help,
as well as PhilippaGrandandNaomi Robinsonat PalgraveMacmillan.
IthankKatjaBayandCharltonPaynefortheirhelpwithformattingand
language checks. But, none of this would have happened had not one
personputhertrustinmeandmyideasatwhatwasadifficultthreshold
inmylife:mysupervisorSilviaMergenthal.Ithankherverymuch.
I dedicate this book to my endlessly supportive parents, Helga and
Detlef, as well as to my most constant interrogators and companions:
mypartner,Sebastian,andmydaughter,Marlene.
vi
Introduction
Theyear2009sawthecommemorationofthefalloftheBerlinWall.The
images of the ‘wallpeckers’ at Berlin’s former Todesstreifen had become
the symbolic embodiments of the major shift in the post-WWII world
order and greeted newspaper readers, TV viewers and bloggers on a
nearly daily basis. But the previous eight years had entailed another
shift that, in the present of 2009, demanded to be narrated even more
urgently.Since9/11,anotherproclaimedend-fightbetweentheforcesof
goodandevilhadincorporatedtherhetoricvisionsthathadbeenwell
rehearsedbypoliticsandthepubliccultureoftheUSA’salliesandprodi-
gies during the Cold War era.1 Good, we had been told by George W.
Bush’s hawks, were the USA and Europe, now including its new states,
once lodged behind the Berlin Wall in the hold of the grand narrative
of ‘really existing’ socialism. But evil had undergone a makeover. This
new evil, the media audiences of the West were told, was embodied
bythebeardedheadofOsamaBinLaden,whosymbolizedthesuppos-
edly globalized threat of Islam. Accordingly, an earlier event of 1989
was discussed as part of the social memory of that year: the Rushdie
affair surrounding the publication of Salman Rushdie’s satirical novel
The Satanic Verses (1988). In a classic ‘after this, therefore because of
this’storyline,thebelief-warthathaddevelopedaroundRushdie’sbook
hadtobeseeninconjunctionwiththefallofCommunism.Justasone
totalitarianism was losing steam, cultural commentators now told us,
anotheronehadencroachedonunsuspectingliberals.But,again,thisis
onlyhalfthestorybehindthenowcombinedmemoriesofwallpeckers
andbook-burners.
In 2009 the political, societal and cultural impacts of 9/11 in the
West were looming large and were starting to be investigated from a
historicalandcriticalviewofcultureaimedlessatIslamismthanatthis
1
2 Introduction
Westitself.Rubbingoureyes,weslowlydevelopedaself-reflexiveassess-
mentofwhathadhappenedtotheWestwhileitwashaulingmissiles–
real and rhetorical – at what it believed was Islam. The trouble with
this ‘new evil’ was that it had made the well-rehearsed topography of
the Cold War rhetorical vision collapse. Islamism was not nicely and
neatly locatable behind some well-entrenched wall. The eeriness that
hauntedthenewWesternanxietynarrativewasthatitsenemywasnot
somewhere outside itself – even if waging war in Afghanistan and Iraq
were desperate attempts to find an outside location, as much as the
rhetoric that had made Islam the West’s Other yet again. This Other,
which the West had declared its new enemy in the shock of 9/11, was
an enemy within, which made the new enemy more uncomfortable
than the Other of Communism. What the post-9/11 grand narrative
of culture shock had dramatically declared its enemy was already part
of the West. It thus led to the new episteme of security and surveil-
lance folding unto the centre itself; and only now does the Western
publicseemtoawakentotheeffectsofsurveillancestatelicences,such
as the Patriot Act. Faced with such world-changing political situations,
whywasthememoryofamediaeventsurroundingabooksuddenlyso
important?
The commemoration of the Rushdie affair made it possible to estab-
lishthestoryofIslamisminEurope,andtodevelopagenealogythatled
from this event up to the homegrown Islamist attacks on the London
transport system in 2005. The young European and Arab mujahedin of
the1990sBalkanwars,IslamizationintheEuropeancentres,themega-
eventof9/11,theMadridbombingsandtheDanishcartooncontroversy
could now be lodged as steps in this genealogy that was drawn forth
fromwhatwaspositionedasaninauguratingevent.TheEuropeancoun-
try most engaged in developing this narrative was Britain, Rushdie’s
chosen home for many decades, and a country with a Muslim popu-
lation of fewer than 2 million, or not more than 2.7 per cent of the
total population.2 The scale of public interest that has been focused
on this minority in Britain in recent years, the number of books, arti-
clesandTVprogrammes,governmentstatementsandpoliciesengaged
withwhatonecouldsatiricallycall‘theBritishMuslimquestion’,stands
hardly in relation to the fact of Muslims being actually a small minor-
ity. But British Muslims, like Muslims in other European states, had
becomehighlysymbolic:theywererepresented,researchedandtargeted
as the test case of Europe’s now deeply heterogeneous societies, and as
the rhetorical battleground on which the ideological wars of Europe’s
globalizationanxietywereplayedout.
Introduction 3
The Rushdie affair of 1989 seemed to fit neatly into an emerging
genealogy of British Islamism – as much as into attempts to histori-
cize the emergence of British Muslims as public actors. For many it
had become an event of inauguration either for Islamism in the West
or for the emergence of an assertive European Islam. In Britain, two
monographs were published in 2009 that commemorated the Rushdie
affair,andtheirtitlesarerevealing:publicistKenanMalik’s FromFatwa
to Jihad: The Rushdie Affair and its Legacy3 and A Mirror for Our Times:
The‘RushdieAffair’andtheFutureofMulticulturalism4byreligiousscholar
PaulWeller.Thetwo,bothbroadassessmentsofthemediamaterialthat
theRushdieaffairprovidesinabundance,differintheirconclusionsas
wellasinthestorythattheywishtotell.ForKenanMalik,theRushdie
affairisthesymbolofwhatheseesasthefailuresoftheBritishpolitics
of multiculturalism that followed it. For him, here was the first event
that culturalized British social politics to the effect that cultural differ-
ence became its most prevalent idiom. Malik laments how, during the
1990sandearly2000s,‘culturalsensibilities’startedtodominatepoliti-
caldemandsforequalrightsandequalaccesstoresourcesinsociety.For
the political publicist, British multiculturalism was a system of boxes
intowhichpeoplewerelodgedandwerelodgingthemselvesaccording
to belief, race or creed. The Muslims of Britain, he asserts, became big
players in the culturalist game – but, due to radical Islamist influence,
theyalsobecameitsbiggestlosers.
Weller, on the other hand, collects the massive amount of media
material that ‘made’ the Rushdie affair into a media event. When one
reads these accounts – the sheer mass of newspaper articles and edi-
torials, learned papers, commentary and explanations of, variously,
free speech, the Koran, and postmodern literature, the demands and
life circumstances of Muslims in Britain, the cultural elitism of both
the Thatcherite and the post-Marxist elites in the British public – the
RushdieaffairsuggestsatfirstglanceJürgenHabermas’dreamcometrue.
Here we find massive public communication about one topic, stretch-
ing from the publication date of The Satanic Verses until far into the
1990s and continuing into the recent past, with renewed interest after
Rushdie became an MBE in 2007. But, as one glances over the top-
ics and rhetoric of these materials, Habermasian enthusiasm is in for
a big disappointment: more or less all of this material bespeaks con-
flict, broadens differences even where it wishes to bridge, and freezes
communication into parroting the repetitive arguments of irreconcil-
ability of the rifts between East and West, liberalism and Islam, belief
andpostmodernplay.Weller,inhisintroduction,iscarefultostressthe