European Sexual Nationalisms: The Culturalization of Citizenship and the Sexual Politics of Belonging and Exclusion

Posted on December 30th, 2012 by martijn.
Categories: Citizenship Carnival, Headline, Islam in the Netherlands, islamophobia.

Guest Authors: Paul Mepschen and Jan Willem Duyvendak

This article examines the remarkable shift in the social location of gay politics and representations as they relate to the rise of anti-multiculturalism in Europe. Gay issues have moved from the margins to the centre of cultural imagination, necessitating a rethink of the sociology of sex beyond post-Stonewall liberationist perspectives and identity politics (cf. Butler, 2008; Duggan, 2002; Puar, 2007; Seidman, 2001). We do so here in line with Judith Butler’s call to reconsider sexual politics in the light of the temporal politics implicated in progressive narratives: apprehending sexual politics today requires ‘a critical consideration of the time of the now’ (Butler, 2008: 2). We agree. In order to unravel the entanglement of sexual politics with anti-Muslim discourse, we need to analyze how sexual liberation is used to frame Europe as the ‘avatar of both freedom and modernity’ (Butler, 2008: 2) while depicting Muslim citizens as backward and homophobic.

The Netherlands in European perspective
The Dutch case, in our view, provides quintessential examples of the sexualization of European anxieties about cultural and religious diversity. In no other country have discourses of gay rights and sexual freedom played such a prominent role. These narratives are part and parcel of a wave of aversion to (public) Islam in Europe. Recent examples include legal measures against the burqa in Belgium and France, the constitutional ban on minarets in Switzerland, the debates about the veil in various European countries, and the electoral rise of the explicitly anti-Muslim politician Geert Wilders and his Freedom Party in the Netherlands. Islam and multiculturalism have become subjects of heated debate in numerous European countries, including the UK, Denmark, Belgium, France, Germany, Italy and the Netherlands. The convergence of gay rights discourses with these debates unveils a shift in the social location of gay politics in Europe. Gay issues have moved from the margins to the center of cultural imagination and have been recast as an ‘optic, and an operative technology’ in the production and disciplining of Muslim others (Puar 2007, xiii).

Cases of homophobia among Muslim citizens are highlighted, epitomized as archetypal, and cast within Orientalist narratives that underwrite the superiority of European secular modernity. To understand this new politics of sexual nationalism we highlight two developments (Mepschen et al. 2010): the rise of Islamophobia already discussed and the culturalization of citizenship. We briefly focus on these Europe-wide trends before turning to more specific, albeit not unique, characteristics of Dutch social history that may explain why the Netherlands is such an extreme case of sexual nationalism: the remarkable leeway given by the Dutch state to new social movements and hence the enduring influence of ‘the long 1960s’, the strong focus on individual and sexual freedom; and a far stretching, albeit limited, ‘normalization’ of gay sexuality in recent decades.

The culturalization of citizenship and the rise of Islamophobia
The ‘culturalization of citizenship’ in Western European societies denotes the increasing importance attached to culture and morality in shaping citizenship and integration policy (Duyvendak 2011; Geschiere 2009, 130–68; Schinkel 2008). It constitutes a deeply ingrained cultural essentialism that simplifies the social space by symbolically dividing society into distinct, internally homogeneous cultural entities, reducing opponents to a knowable and perceivable essence: his or her culture. This understanding of culture grounds a cultural protectionist outlook: a delineation of cultural diversity as problematic and perilous and a concomitant emphasis on the need to construct and defend European cultural heritage as an alternative to non-Western influence. The ‘sexualization of citizenship’ denotes a temporal politics shaping an imaginary of modern individualism versus subjectivities embedded in tradition, community and family. In order to criticize Muslims as backward and as enemies of European culture, gay rights are now heralded as if they have been the foundation of European culture for centuries.

Sexual freedom and secular nostalgia
In recent decades, secular ideologies and moralities have gained great momentum in the Netherlands, and have become increasingly influential. As the religion scholar Peter van Rooden argues: “Dutch Christianity died when the collective, ritual and ir-reflexive religious practices in which it had articulated itself […] gradually became less important in the lives of believers, in the wake of the popularization of the discourses and practices of the expressive and reflexive self” (2004, 22). This dynamic was part of a broader historical process of ‘de-pillarization’ – the crumbling of the hierarchically organized religious and socialist subcultures (‘pillars’) composed of their own media, schools, institutions and political parties. These pillars, which formed a basic mode of social organization in the country, faded away after the 1960s (Kennedy 1995). Virtually all institutions associated with the old order were attacked as traditional and authoritarian; de-pillarization and secularization were thus interpreted and delineated as a break from oppressive, paternalistic structures. In the process, the religious had become framed and seen as out of sync with progressive secular moralities: as ‘other’. Muslims have been the most conspicuous objects in recent years of what Sarah Bracke refers to as ‘secular nostalgia’ (2011). They are framed as trespassing on a secular moral landscape, distorting the dream of a unified, secular and morally progressive nation (Duyvendak 2011).

Sexuality has been key in shaping this secular nostalgia. Compared with other Western European countries, the Dutch authorities’ corporatist and consensual style afforded greater political influence to the new social movements. The ‘long 1960s’ (Righart 1995) had far-reaching effects – especially in the realms of morality and sexuality – and led to the country’s ‘liberal’ policies on drugs, euthanasia, abortion and lesbian/gay rights. After an initial period of cultural polarization, large segments of the Dutch population have distanced themselves from moral traditionalism. The percentage of Dutch citizens who agree with the proposition that ‘homosexuality is normal’ and who support gay marriage exceeds that in other countries (Gerhards 2010).

In this context, expressions of homophobia have increasingly been represented as ‘alien’ to secular, Dutch ‘traditions of tolerance’. This was aptly illustrated when Khalil El-Moumni, an imam working in Rotterdam, insisted on national television in May 2001 that homosexuality was a dangerous and contagious disease (Hekma 2002). The imam had tread on one of the cornerstones of Dutch cultural self-representation. The Dutch Minister of Integration grilled El-Moumni and other imams in a meeting in which ‘Dutch values were explained’. He and others stated that legal action against El-Moumni should not be ruled out. Sociologist Gert Hekma recalls that the Prime Minister used “the full 10 minutes of his weekly interview […] to tell Muslims to respect the Dutch tolerance of homosexuality,” although the Prime Minister himself was clearly uncomfortable speaking about the issue in public (2002, 242). In a poll on the website of a mainstream gay and lesbian monthly, 91 percent of respondents agreed that “newcomers should tolerate our tolerance or should leave” (Prins 2002, 15). A commentator in the populist daily De Telegraaf argued that El-Moumni’s views could only be found in “the medieval deserts of North Africa.”

The discourse of Pim Fortuyn, whose ascent on the political stage took place shortly after the El-Moumni affaire and – perhaps more significant – after 9/11, capitalized on the trope of sexual freedom as inherently Dutch and was pivotal in ingraining it deeper into the Dutch self-image. He described Islam as a backward culture and a threat to his personal way of life: “I refuse to start all over again with the emancipation of women and gays.” Fortuyn presented himself as a liberated gay man whose way of life and cultural gains were threatened by ‘backward’ Muslims and leftist immigration policies. Fortuyn successfully connected sexual liberation and secularization as markers of the modern, individualistic character of Dutch (national) culture and painted Muslims as trespassers on sacrosanct secular terrain.

The politics of normalization
A third facet of Dutch social history is pertinent here: Dutch gay identity and politics have undergone a far-reaching process of ‘normalization’ that has stripped sexual politics of its deviant and radical character in a more profound way than in many other ‘Western’ countries (Duyvendak 1996). The Dutch gay community has been deeply affected by the emergence of what Lisa Duggan refers to as a ‘new homonormativity’ (2002): articulations of lesbian and gay identity that no longer threaten but replicate and underscore heteronormative assumptions and structures. This is an important development within European and North American gay culture more generally (Duggan 2002; Seidman 2001). As various authors have shown, the rise of neo-liberalism and the commodification of gay culture and identity have played a central role in this (Bell and Binnie 2004; Duggan 2002; Richardson 2005). With the rise of neo-liberal capitalism in the 1980s, culture and identity became increasingly entwined with consumption, while gay men especially were discovered as affluent consumers. The commodification of gay identity and community that followed created a new kind of idealized gay persona. The campy, nonconformist gay man of the 1960s and 1970s counterculture transformed into a champion of bodily perfection, consumption and affluent individualism.

Gay culture and identity, with its focus on unattached, self-fashioning and self-regulating individuality, became folded into a discourse of neo-liberal citizenship. Migrants, on the other hand, have come to be framed as embodying the values and properties that in neo-liberal societies are delineated as problematic: their alleged piety and preference for community and tradition, and their relative social marginalization. To become ‘individual citizens’ in a post-industrial, neo-liberal society, old values had to be unlearned. Gay rights became the litmus test for this integration.

The role of neo-liberalism notwithstanding, in the Netherlands, an ‘assimilationist’ strategy focusing on equal rights rather than ‘queerness’ or radical social change characterized the movement almost from its inception. “The Dutch gay and lesbian movement has accommodated itself to the parameters of the political, cultural and power balance” (Schuyf and Krouwel 1999, 161). Duyvendak (1996) has shown how, unlike in countries such as France and the United States, the Dutch state in the 1980s gave gay men a significant role in managing the HIV/AIDS crisis affecting their community. The radicalization of AIDS activism that shaped the French, US and other ‘queer’ movements played a very small role in the Netherlands, where radical articulations of queer activism remain marginal.

‘Normalization’ does not imply that heterosexual normativity has been surpassed (Seidman 2001). Rather, the popular representation of gay identity has changed from a deviant other to the mirror image of the ideal heterosexual: ‘Normalization is made possible because it simultaneously reproduces a dominant order [….] [L]egitimation through normalisation leaves in place the polluted status of marginal sexualities and all the norms that regulate our sexual intimate conduct’ (Seidman 2001, 326). Homonormativity produces “a politics that does not contest dominant heteronormative forms but upholds and sustains them” (Duggan 2002, 179). Paradoxically, it is the de-politicized character of Dutch gay identity, ‘anchored in domesticity and consumption’ (Ibid.), which explains its entanglement with neo-nationalist and normative citizenship discourses. Dutch gay identity does not threaten heteronormativity, but in fact helps shape and reinforce the contours of ‘tolerant’ and ‘liberal’ Dutch national culture.

Conclusions
As argued, the rise of sexual nationalisms in Europe must be understood as part and parcel of the culturalization of citizenship and the concomitant politicization of home in Europe (cf. Duyvendak 2011; Holmes 2000). Processes of culturalization not only unfold in the form of the spectacular success of nationalist and anti-Muslim political parties like the Dutch PVV, the Danish Folkeparti, or the French Front National (Art 2011), but need to be understood more broadly as a zeitgeist, affecting and transforming political relations and policy within European nation-states at the level of immigration control, ‘integration’ policies, securitization and urban regulation. This discourse can be placed within a broader relational context, ‘neo-liberalism’, and be understood as part and parcel of the project to reinforce or restore the authority of state institutions over the production of (national) citizenship and political subjectivity and the regulation of labor markets and urban marginality, just as this authority is “being undermined by the accelerating flows of money, capital, signs and people across national borders, and by the constricting of state action by supranational bodies and financial Capital” (Wacquant 2008, 76).

Movements for cultural protectionism have thus proliferated throughout Europe, including Western Europe, and have developed and popularized discourses that pit native, ‘autochthonous’ communities against outsiders with, allegedly, aberrant morals and devious intentions (Geschiere 2009; Schinkel 2008). In these discourses the world is represented as divided into different, inimical cultures, and the ‘national cultures’ of Europe are framed as in need of protection against the effects of globalization and immigration (Baumann 2007). Proponents of this new ‘culturism’ (Schinkel 2008) frame migrants as outsiders and emphasize a perceived need for their cultural education and their ‘integration’ in a Dutch, European or ‘modern’ moral universe. Muslim citizens have become the most conspicuous objects of these ‘discourses of alterity’ (Schinkel 2008). Indeed, the rise of neo-culturalism has gone hand in glove with the framing of Muslims as backward, intolerant and incongruous with ‘European’ secular modernity.

As Willem Schinkel argues, the very notion of ‘integration’ that is so central to this logic is what brings ‘society’ into being as a stable, delimited object. Integration discourse is, he argues, “one way to discursively demarcate the space occupied by ‘society’. The idea of a ‘Dutch society’ is fixed precisely through the production of a marker of ‘society’ vis-à-vis the ‘non-integrated’ ‘outside society’ that is part of the process of globalization unsettling the notion of ‘Dutch society’” (2011, 99). Following this approach, nationalism must be understood as a discourse of alterity, symbolically casting (post)migrants out as moral and sexual others, ‘non-integrated’ because of their alleged (universal) homophobia. The figure of the homophobic (post)migrant outsider thus symbolically demarcates the space occupied by the universally homo-tolerant insider.

From the point of view of both immigration and integration studies and the study of sexuality, it seems necessary to get beyond the ‘integration’ imperative. In a critique of Dutch homo-emancipation policy, which is often looked at as a model for sexuality politics, Suhraiya Jivraj and Anisa de Jong have recently warned against a reification of the Dutch model. They argue that the focus on speakability and visibility “fails to grapple with the complex subjectivities of diasporic queer Muslims” (Jivraj and De Jong 2011; cf. Wekker 2009).

This is a solid critique. We argue that social researchers as well as policymakers and activists need to take seriously the diversity and complexity of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and questioning (LGBTQ) cultures and the possibility that queer post-migrants might choose forms of sexual emancipation, of sexual freedom, that deviate from ‘modern’, ‘normative’ articulations (Wekker 2006). At the heart of this approach is a critique of exclusionary assumptions about Muslim and migrant sexualities, and of the temporal politics that has become entwined with progressive discourses.

Paul Mepschen is an anthropologist at the University of Amsterdam. Jan Willem Duyvendak is professor of sociology at the same university. A slightly different version of this article was published in Perspectives on Europe, Spring 2012. A more elaborate version of the argument has been made in Sociology, October 2010.

This is the second post in the series of the Citizenship Carnival. The first one was Nadia Fadil’s What is Integration?

References

Bell, Daniel, and Jon Binnie. 2004. “Authenticating Queer Space: Citizenship, Urbanism and Governance”. Urban Studies 41(9).
Butler, Judith. 2008. “Sexual Politics, Torture, and Secular Time”. British Journal of Sociology 59(1): 1–23.
Bracke, Sarah. 2011. “Sexual Politics in Times of Secular Nostalgia: An Exploration of the Dutch Case.” Presented at the Sexual Nationalisms Conference, Amsterdam.
Duggan, Lisa. 2002. “The New Homonormativity: The Sexual Politics of Neoliberalism.” In Materializing Democracy: Towards a Revitalized Cultural Politics, ed. Russ Castronova and Dana D. Nelson. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Duyvendak, Jan Willem. 1996. “The Depoliticization of the Dutch Gay Identity, or Why Dutch Gays Aren’t Queer.” In Queer Theory/Sociology, ed. Steven Seidman. Cambridge, UK: Blackwell Publishers.
Duyvendak, Jan Willem. 2011. The Politics of Home: Belonging and Nostalgia in Europe and the United States. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Gerhards, Jürgen. 2010. “Non-Discrimination towards Homosexuality: The European Union’s Policy and Citizens’ Attitudes towards Homosexuality in 27 European Countries.” International Sociology 25(1): 5–28.
Geschiere, Peter. 2009. The Perils of Belonging: Autochthony, Citizenship, and Exclusion in Africa and Europe. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Hekma, Gert. 2002. “Imams and Homosexuality: A Post-Gay Debate in the Netherlands.” Sexualities 5(2): 237–48.
Holmes, Douglas R. 2000. Integral Europe: Fast-Capitalism, Multiculturalism, Neofascism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Jivraj, Suhraiya, and Anisa de Jong. 2011. “The Dutch Homo-Emancipation Policy and its Silencing Effects on Queer Muslims.” Feminist Legal Studies 19:143–58.
Kennedy, James C. 1995. Nieuw Babylon in Aanbouw: Nederland in de jaren zestig. Amsterdam: Boom.
Mepschen, Paul, Jan Willem Duyvendak, and Evelien Tonkens. 2010. “Sexual Politics, Orientalism and Multicultural Citizenship in the Netherlands.” Sociology 44(5): 962–79.
Prins, Baukje. 2002. “The Nerve to Break Taboos: New Realism in the Dutch Discourse on Multiculturalism.” Journal of International Migration and Integration 3(3-4): 363–79.
Puar, Jasbir K. 2007. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press.
Richardson, Diane. 2005. “Desiring Sameness? The Rise of a Neoliberal Politics of Normalisation.” In Working the Spaces of Neoliberalism, ed. Nina Laurie and Liz Bondi. Malden, MA, and Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.
Righart, Hans. 1995. De Eindeloze Jaren Zestig: Geschiedenis van een Generatieconflict. Amsterdam: Arbeiderspers.
Schinkel, Willem. 2008. “The Moralisation of Citizenship in Dutch Integration Discourse.” Amsterdam Law Forum. Amsterdam: VU University Amsterdam.
Schuyf, Judith, and André Krouwel. 1999. “The Dutch Lesbian and Gay Movement: The Politics of Accommodation.” In The Global Emergence of Gay and Lesbian Politics: National Imprints of a Worldwide Movement , B.D. ed. Barry D. Adam, Jan Willem Duyvendak, and André Krouwel. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Seidman, Steven. 2001. “From Identity to Queer Politics: Shifts in Normative Heterosexuality and the Meaning of Citizenship.” Citizenship Studies 5(3): 321–28.
Van Rooden, Peter. 2004. “Oral history en het Vreemde Sterven van het Nederlands Christendom.” Bijdragen en Mededelingen betreffende de Geschiedenis der Nederlanden 119: 524–51.
Wacquant, Loïc. 2008. Urban Outcasts: A Comparative Sociology of Advanced Marginality. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.
Wekker, Gloria. 2006. The Politics of Passion: Women’s Sexual Culture in the Afro-Surinamese Diaspora. New York: Columbia University Press.
Wekker, Gloria. 2009. “Van Homo Nostalgie en betere Tijden. Multiculturaliteit en postkolonialiteit.” George Mosse lezing, 16 September 2009.

1 comment.

Citizenship Carnival: What is Integration?

Posted on December 19th, 2012 by martijn.
Categories: anthropology, Citizenship Carnival, Guest authors, Headline, Multiculti Issues.

Guest Author: Nadia Fadil

When I was asked to prepare something for this speakers’ corner, the suggested idea was to do something on the headscarf. Considering the fact that I work on Islam and that the successive headscarf controversies have been in the news for more than three decades now, it seemed wide enough of a topic that could touch and open a large discussion.

I however declined. And the reason has not only to do with the fact that debating the headscarf was something I dreaded doing, after countless of panel conversations and publications. Debating the headscarf was rather part of the problem. Part of the mechanisms, through which our societies continuously produce and place boundaries between in- and outsiders, those who belong and those who don’t. Debating the headscarf becomes, consequently, not so much a means to understand this practice, but a modality through which a specific sartorial practice is turned into an object of investigation and conversation. It becomes displaced from its everydayness. It becomes, in other words, something that needs to be integrated.

Integration was therefore the word that I preferred to address. A word that informs most of the research we do. Whether it concerns the EU enlargement, the question of social redistribution or the ways in which cultural minorities and majorities relate to one another. Integration, we have learned in our manuals, figures as the key concept around which the social sciences have emerged. As twin brother to the concept ‘society’, that we owe to the 18th century French Physiocrats who influenced Adam Smith in his quest for an ‘invisible hand’, integration turned into one of the main languages through which ‘social problems’ – also an invention of that same period – could be addressed. This concept would also bear a strong imprint on our relationship to the world and to other cultures, in our attempt to understand the impact of processes of globalization upon what we consider as “traditional societies”.

It is, however, not my purpose to offer an elaborate historical and philosophical genealogy here. In the brief context of this conversation, I rather prefer to problematize this concern with integration – to take it as a point of departure in order to understand the different connotations it invokes and imaginaries it touches upon. For more than simply figuring as a neutral analytical category, the term integration is also a highly contested and controversial concept – one that has been challenged and disputed.

In preparing for this small exposé, I therefore did what social scientists most often do when looking for answers: I questioned people around me. Starting with my mom, whom I always consult on important issues, and who answered: “it refers to the integration between the Sociale Voorzieningen Hogeschool Antwerpen (where she works) and the Artesis Hogeschool!”. Now, my mom is a very wise woman, but this was not exactly the kind of answer I needed. So I went to the world of the internet and sent a call through email and facebook – one of the main social arenas of our times. Clearly, the answers that I will be sharing with you have no generalizable pretension. They are rather the reflection of viewpoints that are held amongst those who are often given a leading role in one of our main contemporary political dramas, also known as the multicultural debate.

Integration passes through the stomach

“Integration means eating couscous on Christmas.” (Myriam)
“Integration means making tajine [a Moroccan dish] with French frites”. (Fatima)
“Integration is achieved when you debate over the question whether a ‘chocoladebroodje’ belongs to the family of the ‘koffiekoeken.’” (Jeroen)

Food. A central marker of collectiveness and one of the primary means through which boundaries are established – something that has been central in the study of culture and has chiefly been examined by Mary Douglas. Whether it is the (problematic) myth of thanksgiving in the case of the Americas, or the multiple exotic restaurants we observe in our glocalized cities, food is the means by which the first contact passes, and the means through which a first exchange and encounter occurs.

Two elements are, however, central in the way in which food emerges here as a marker of integration. The first one is that these examples illustrate the emergence of new, hyphenated identities. Modes of being which, culturally, can no longer be restricted to one social or cultural group. Notions of hybridity and ‘cultural mixing’ figure as the often used terms to designate these patterns of transformation that occur within a multicultural context, which announce the end of pure identities and the continuous intermixing of influences, the creation of new realities – new tastes even in this context – such as the tajine with French frites.

But the centrality of food does something else. Food also creates a bond, it becomes a means to establish social ties. ‘Once salt has been shared you are part of each other’s life’, so a Moroccan saying goes. Sharing food is not without consequences. It binds individuals and creates ties of mutual obligation, reciprocity and interdependence. Food as something that obliges, and something that integrates.

Integration as the quest for cohesion

“For me it is: assimilating the social and moral code of the host society (yet without disregarding your own), learning the dominant language and showing civic duty” (Fouad)

“From a technical point of view, integration is the result of a successful communication between systems that are intrinsically different through an interface. A person from Antwerp with someone from Brussels or a Greek (…) Integration is the successful operation thanks to an “enabler” such as a common language, openness to other societies, willingness to collaborate” (Özturk)

Finding the right language, sharing common values, looking for the right interface. Integration as the endpoint of a negotiation process between different actors who hold different viewpoints on the way in which society operates. The absence of a commonality – or an “interface” – emerges here as a hazard, as it fails to produce the necessary basis by which the heterogeneous elements come to find one another. Norms and values, the collective language, appear here as the connecting dots, as the point of reference that brings this heterogeneity together. A perspective and viewpoint which echoes the Durkheimian tradition that has taught us to think of society as an organic body, in which commonly shared values and norms – in this case language – figure as the necessary rallying points to avoid fragmentation.

This concern with a set of norms and values lies at the heart of how policy makers and the various institutional actors understand this concept. In the case of Flanders, this has been the case at least since the late eighties. While the first definitions around integration drew a distinction between the public sphere (which drew on a requirement of assimilation to public norms – understood as laws) and the private sphere (where one’s culture and language could be fostered), the successive years have observed a gradual increase of institutional bodies that take it upon themselves to ‘integrate’ actors also in relationship to their customs and norms. The various Dutch and ‘inburgerings’ courses that have been implemented since 2004 and rendered mandatory for non-EU migrants are one example of this. The conditional attribution of social housing to non-Dutch speakers, provided that they learn to speak the language in a limited time frame, is another one.

“Integration is being part of the whole, being able to take part to society. It’s the contrary of social exclusion, and it is by no means limited to migrants or minorities”. (Leen)

“[integration] is trying to be together in a bigger whole. In this way, we constantly integrate. A baby goes to day care and needs to integrate later to pre-school and then school and university, work… the individual always needs to find the right balance between herself and the others, society. Today we approach integration far too much from a cultural lens, while this is not necessarily the case” (Ginette)

Yet through its restrictive application to the question of cultural and ethnic minorities, or the question of culture – as pointed out here by Leen and Ginette – integration turns into something else. It becomes a modality through which a sense of demarcation comes to be established between those who are part of society and those who fall outside of it. It becomes not only a tool to incorporate outsiders – but it also draws differences between those who are subjected to this requirement and those who are exempted from it. Integration becomes, consequently, a means to create difference, and to maintain difference.

Integration as control

“Integration is something that is spontaneously associated and linked with ethnic minorities and ‘allochthons’, as if each person born from an ethnic minority needs to be subjected to integration – the same questions are rarely posed to white Belgians” (Hasna)

“Integration is a utopia… that was invented to make sure that an us/them persists…” (Samira)

“You are only considered integrated once you accept silently that someone has harmed you, and when you can live with the idea that fighting this injustice equals adopting a position of ‘victim’. In other words: “Sois integré et tais-toi!”” (Saïla)

“It’s an instrument of control, because this concept is used to draw differences between the real autochthons and the allochthons, and that allochthons will never become real autochthons. (…) It’s power because you can change the rules and make sure people never integrate” (Ibtissam)

Exit visions of commonality and exchange. Enter the experience of control, minorisation (to paraphrase the well-known work of Jan Rath) and the continuous demarcation of those who are ‘in’ and those who aren’t. According to this reading, integration is not so much a means to establish a sense of collectivity, but rather the very modality through which exclusion is produced. Between the ‘majority’ and the ‘minority’, between the integrated and the non-integrated, between the us and the them – as pointed out by Samira.

Speaking about integration draws boundaries, for it establishes a bond between a collectivity that is imagined as homogeneous, understood as sharing common affinities and excluding particular social groups from the latter. It is the boundaries – of which the discourse on integration figures as an important component – that creates the difference between groups, not the groups themselves (as has been centrally argued by Frederik Barth). The language of integration assumes a common language, commonly shared norms and values and a sense of belonging. It assumes a coherent Self that becomes opposed to a other. In the context of Flanders the Francophone other and “allochthon” other (that primarily refers to the Turks and Moroccans), figure as the reference point through which a sense of Flemish identity comes to be established. While the linguistic differences apply for the francophone, the latter no longer does in the case of ethnic minorities of the second and third generation. ‘Norms and values’ consequently emerge as distinctive markers to consistently maintain and cultivate a difference. It is in this respect that Ibtissam’s sentence needs to be read: “integration is power because you can change the rules and make sure people never integrate”.

Integration, however, also appears as a disciplining concept. As a threat – “thou shall integrate!” – that deliberates over the extent of your acceptability, incorporability within this society. “Sois integré et tais-toi”, to paraphrase Saila – for whom this concept figures as a category which brands her position into that of a subaltern. A subaltern that cannot speak – as noted by Gayarti Spivak, or only to the extent that she learns the language of the dominant group, incorporates its values and norms. The important question that emerges throughout these different comments, therefore, touches upon the degree in which minorities can maintain or hold languages and imaginaries that are not ‘readable’ to the dominant groups. Languages that invoke the subjection to God in one’s sartorial practice, that prioritize a strong relationship with what we commonsensically call “the country of origin”, that hold a different reading of the colonial history or the North-South relationship, or which hold a different conception of the very word integration.

Integration as myth and fantasy

The Dutch sociologist Willem Schinkel already famously argued that Social sciences should do away with its focus on integration and ban the latter altogether from its vocabulary. In so doing, he is not alone.

“Integration is rubbish” (Yasmina)
“Integration is a word that is looking for a signification” (Maarten)
“Integration is a myth” (Graziela)
“Integration is like the horizon. It is a point you never reach. It’s an illusion” (Stephan)
“He who integrates is lost” – (Adorno via Sarah)

Should we then abandon the word integration altogether? The different critiques articulated here seem to point towards this direction. For the word integration implies a coherence that does not exist, and compels certain segments of our population to a set of norms that are not shared by all. The concern around integration is therefore first, and foremostly, a concern about oneself. And a continuous frustration over the impossibility of reaching that goal – “integration is a horizon”. The “utopia” of integration, to paraphrase Samira, emerges as a promise of stability and coherence, yet one which can never be achieved (for there will always be an ‘other’ lurking to spoil that fantasy). Abandoning this term by embracing the heterogeneity that constitutes society, emerges, therefore as main alternative. A heterogeneity that is not an exception, but the founding principle of ‘society’. This also means thinking of society in a new way, and conceptualizing integration in a radically new manner. Integration not as the quest of coherence, but integration as the capacity to live through and with this new norm – the norm of diversity and the norm of absence of norms.

Or as argued by Touria:

“In an ideal world integration would mean: questioning all norms and values by way of encounter, confrontation and cohabitation”

And Olivia:

“(Ideal) integration is creating something new together. It is 1 + 1 = 11”

Integration is…

Rather than abandoning the term integration altogether, one could therefore suggest to give the latter a new meaning. Integration as the capacity to take pluralism as startingpoint. Integration as the ability to live in a multicultural and pluralistic context, to abandon the assumptions on the existence of ‘autochthons and allochtons’ and as the competence to navigate the different – and often conflicting and contradictory – expectations that inform our societies.
Let me then conclude with the following sentences by Mohamed.
Integration– he explains – is achieved:

“when comments like ‘oh your Dutch is so good’ become a legal offense”
“when there are no double interviews anymore between two women just because they both share an Arabic background”
“when a ‘rights and duties’ language no longer stands for ‘learn Dutch and you will be all right’”
And
“When there will no longer be a discussion on whether the term “allochthon” can be used”


Nadia Fadil is assistant professor at Interculturalism, Migration and Minorities Research Center (IMMRC) of the Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium. She works on questions of secularism, multiculturalism and Islam from a critical and post-structuralist perspective. In 2008 she defended her PhD: ‘Submitting to God. Submitting to the self. Secular and religious trajectories of second generation Maghrebi in Belgium’; currently being revised for publication.

This is the full, slightly revised, version of a lecture she gave on Monday 17 December 2012, at the Speakers’ Corner.

This article is the first of a series: The Citizenship Carnival. Stay tuned!

1 comment.

New Series: Citizenship Carnival

Posted on December 19th, 2012 by martijn.
Categories: Citizenship Carnival, Headline, Multiculti Issues.

Closer starts a new series of articles called the Citizenship Carnival. The name is based upon the idea of a blog carnival. Usually this means that editors find good blog posts on a particular topic and putting them together in a blog post that is called a ‘carnival’. This will be a little different in that I am the one who invites people to write on a particular theme; in this case a topic that is somehow related to the issues of ‘citizenship’ and ‘integration’.

Particular social phenomena ranging from sports ceremonies to garden parties have implicit and explicit rules that govern how we act in and upon them. The same can be said for integration and citizenship. Implicit and explicit rules govern our perception of what integration and citizenship is and should be. In abiding by these rules, (or not) politicians, policy makers, media and citizens construct integration and citizenship as something ‘real’ and ‘self-evident’. Some of these rules are out in the open: you have to speak the language, the are some demands with regard to income, you have to abide to the laws of the country and so on. But when we de-construct these rules we find other, more implicit, rules as well that have a heavy bearing on how a nation-state includes and/or excludes particular people.

This series will feature articles that in many different ways ask: ‘What do we actually mean when we talking about migrants, citizenship, integration and so on’? Topics such as ‘integration’, ‘homo-nationalism’, ‘orientalism’ ‘neo-colonialism’ will be addressed in in-depth and long (yes!) articles. Some of them will be first versions of texts used for lectures and papers and others will be based upon articles published in scientific journals and others will be somewhere in between. The first articles will be published this year and the rest in 2013. If you want to contribute to this series, don’t hesitate to let me know.

This post will updated every time there is a new article by linking to it. You can also find the articles with the link: http://religionresearch.org/martijn/citizenship-carnival/

 
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2 comments.

Het spektakel Marianne Vaatstra: Een Nederlander snijdt geen keel door

Posted on November 29th, 2012 by martijn.
Categories: anthropology, Headline, islamophobia, Multiculti Issues.

Zwarte man versus blanke vrouw, elite versus volk, stad versus platteland. Martijn de Koning betoogt dat het spektakel rond de moord op Marianne Vaatstra in 1999 al de kenmerken vertoonde van het latere integratie- en islamdebat.

‘Een keel doorsnijden, dat is iets wat een Fries niet doet’, schrijft columnist Pim Fortuyn oktober 1999 in Elsevier. ‘In het dorp gingen onmiddellijk geruchten dat het een buitenlander moest betreffen, uit een andere cultuur, en ja, die woonden in het asielzoekerscentrum buiten het dorp. Een redelijke gedachte.’

Fortuyn heeft het over de moord op Marianne Vaatstra die in het voorjaar heeft plaatsgevonden. Aanleiding voor zijn stukje is dat een week eerder inwoners van Kollum een hoorzitting hebben verstoord over de verplaatsing van het asielzoekerscentrum naar een andere locatie in de buurt. Dat is in deze periode niet uniek. Door het hele land is er fel protest van comités, soms beïnvloed door radicaal-rechts, die zich verzetten tegen azc’s. Een geluid dat dan nog niet of nauwelijks wordt vertolkt door geaccepteerde politieke partijen.

Inmiddels, dertien jaar later, lijkt het erop dat we de dader niet in het azc moesten zoeken, maar in het nabij gelegen Oudwoude. Dat is schrikken, of zoals een inwoonster van Zwaagwesteinde het verwoordt: ‘Toen iedereen hier dacht dat de dader uit het asielzoekerscentrum kwam, gaf dat tenminste nog enige rust. Je wilt niet dat het een vader van hier is.’ (Trouw, 20-11-12).

Vaak wordt verwezen naar de aanslagen op 11 september 2001 als het moment dat de discussie over islam en integratie echt verhit raakte. Maar terugkijkend naar het spektakel rondom de zaak-Vaatstra, kunnen we vaststellen dat de eerste tekenen van het post-9/11-tijdperk al eerder zichtbaar zijn.

Dat de keel van Marianne is doorgesneden, klopt niet, zo blijkt later, maar destijds was dit kennelijk een heel aansprekend aspect van de moord, want in talloze vroege krantenberichten komt het terug. De Telegraaf (7-5-99) haalt als een van de eerste landelijke kranten een dorpsinwoner aan die het vermoeden uitspreekt dat de manier waarop het slachtoffer is vermoord iets te maken heeft met het azc en zijn bewoners: ‘Dat lijkt me eerder thuis te horen in Oost-Europa.’ Het Parool (14-5-99) noemt daarna een dorpsinwoner bij naam die stelt: ‘Haar keel was van oor tot oor gesneden, zoiets doet een Hollander niet. Da’s meer iets voor het asielzoekerscentrum, dat ligt in hun cultuur. Nederlanders zouden misschien steken of wurgen.’

In de daaropvolgende berichtgeving blijft deze redenering terugkomen. En gaandeweg zien we dat een link wordt gelegd met het onbehagen over de multiculturele samenleving en met het idee dat zaken niet benoemd mogen worden. Het gaat ook al snel niet meer over Oost-Europeanen, maar bijvoorbeeld over een ‘islamitische dader’ (Elsevier, 24-6-00) en ‘een typisch Arabische rituele slachting. Hollanders wurgen liever’. (Dagblad van het Noorden, 30-10-00). Peter R. de Vries brengt een reconstructie met twee donkere mannen die een snijdende beweging maken, met hun vingers langs hun keel. ‘De keel doorsnijden’ wordt een zich herhalend patroon en is een voorbeeld van het idee dat er een directe relatie bestaat tussen cultuur en etnische identiteit enerzijds en criminaliteit anderzijds.

Cultuurdenken

Meer algemeen is het een voorbeeld van cultuurdenken; iets dat destijds en later niet beperkt blijft tot Zwaagwesteinde. In de jaren 90 worden van links tot rechts vraagtekens gezet bij de etnische diversiteit. ‘Mensen met een andere cultuur’ zouden de maatschappelijke samenhang bedreigen doordat culturele verschillen garant zouden staan voor conflicten.

In dit cultuurdenken is iemand die in Marokko is geboren en naar Nederland verhuist, een Marokkaan die een Marokkaanse cultuur heeft. En verder niets. Wat hij of zij doet, vooral datgene dat als afwijkend wordt gezien, is gerelateerd aan of wordt zelfs veroorzaakt door die cultuur. Dat geldt ook voor zijn nakomelingen in Nederland. Dat Marokkanen geen homogene, duidelijk herkenbare eenheid vormen en dat andere identiteiten ook van belang zijn, dat wordt vergeten. Evenals het feit dat mensen geen gevangenen zijn van hun cultuur.

Dat dit cultuurdenken in Nederland in de jaren negentig meer opgeld doet dan elders, blijkt wel uit het feit dat geen enkel ander land in Europa dan al zo veel onderzoek doet naar de relatie tussen etniciteit en criminaliteit; ook al blijkt keer op keer dat die zeer moeilijk hard te maken is.

Maakte het voor Marianne Vaatstra verschil of zij vermoord en verkracht werd door een asielzoeker of een autochtone dorpsgenoot? Voor het publiek klaarblijkelijk wel, ook gezien het feit dat de haatgevoelens jegens asielzoekers destijds in schril contrast staan tot de gevoelens van mededogen die nu uitgaan naar het gezin van de mogelijke dader.

Wanneer we het cultuurdenken in de zaak-Vaatstra ontleden, door te letten op het taalgebruik, zien we de tegenstellingen die in het latere integratie- en islamdebat een grote rol gaan spelen: zwarte/buitenlandse mannen versus blanke/autochtone vrouwen, elite versus volk én stad versus platteland. Dat de moord op Vaatstra snel met asielzoekers in verband wordt gebracht, sluit aan bij een traditioneel xenofoob angstbeeld: de vreemdeling met zijn ongetemde seksuele drift die ‘onze’ vrouwen bedreigt en die moet worden geweerd of beschaafd gemaakt.

Het is een angstbeeld dat ook tekenend is voor de wijze waarop tegenwoordig Europa als morele gemeenschap wordt gedefinieerd. In het artikel ‘Sexual politics, torture, and secular time‘ (PDF) uit 2008 in het British Journal of Sociology, laat de Amerikaanse filosofe Judith Butler zien dat Europa wordt voorgesteld als het voorbeeld voor seksuele vrijheden en moderniteit die moeten worden beschermd tegen verschijnselen als genderongelijkheid, eergerelateerd geweld, huiselijk geweld en gedwongen huwelijken. Niet dat die fenomenen niet bestaan, maar ‘de cultuur’ van migranten wordt er ten onrechte mee gedefinieerd. Wanneer een immigrant maatschappelijk opklimt, is dat ineens niet meer zijn cultuur, dan is dat integratie. ‘Onze’ waarden en normen (in het geval van autochtonen wordt slechts zelden gesproken over cultuur) zijn beter dan ‘hun’ cultuur.

Een concrete variant van deze tegenstelling zou in het post-9/11-tijdperk de film Submission worden, van Ayaan Hirsi Ali en Theo van Gogh. Hiermee presenteerde Hirsi Ali zich als vrije en liberale (ex-moslim)vrouw, die onderdrukte moslimvrouwen wilde bevrijden van moslimmannen. De consequenties van deze manier van denken zijn echter veel groter dan uitingen als deze film. Zoals veel onderzoekers en commentatoren hebben laten zien, was een belangrijke legitimering voor de hele War on Terror het idee dat Arabische vrouwen bevrijd moesten worden van hun vrouwonvriendelijke culturen (PDF).

Lakse elites

Een tweede tegenstelling die in Nederland in het eerste decennium van deze eeuw dominant zou worden, speelt ook al in de controverse rond Marianne Vaatstra: de politieke elite (inclusief het Openbaar Ministerie) en beleidsmakers die ervan worden beschuldigd dat zij ‘de waarheid’ over Marianne Vaatstra verdoezelen om de multiculturele samenleving in stand te houden versus ‘het volk’ dat zijn paradijs verstoord ziet door vreemde culturen en die lakse elites. Deze oppositie zal later terugkomen in het populisme van Fortuyn, Verdonk en Wilders. Die stonden een beleid voor waarin, zo claimden zij, de wil van het volk prevaleert boven de belangen van de elite.

In het gedachtengoed van Wilders, Fortuyn en Verdonk zijn, zij het op verschillende wijzen en in verschillende mate, cultuurdenken en populisme vermengd geraakt. Maar niet alleen bij hen. Vrijwel alle politieke partijen beschouwen vandaag de dag de cultuur van de migrant en de islam als problemen waarmee iets moet gebeuren. Een voorbeeld is de huidige PvdA-minister Lodewijk Asscher die in 2005 stelde: ‘We moeten liberale stromingen dus steunen, en streven naar een Hollandse islam.’ (de Volkskrant, 11-2-05). Het is moeilijk dit soort ideeën te weerleggen. Wie probeert er iets tegen in te brengen, bijvoorbeeld door te wijzen op de al bestaande liberale islam, gaat onbedoeld toch mee in het idee dat de islam een probleem is en bevestigt de tegenstelling nog eens.

Verstoord paradijs

Die tegenstellingen tussen de buitenlandse man en de autochtone vrouw en tussen het volk en de elite, werken in de zaak-Vaatstra nog sterker in combinatie met een derde: het platteland versus de stad. Zoals Peter Geschiere liet zien in zijn boek The Perils of Belonging (2009), berust autochtoniteit op een ideaal van zuiverheid en de zuivere Nederlander is degene die hier ‘het eerst’ was. Zwaagwesteinde wordt na de moord gepresenteerd als het paradijs waar iedereen elkaar nog kent, van echte Friezen, tot voor kort niet verstoord door allerlei zaken die de stad wel kent: criminaliteit, migratie, anonimiteit, enzovoorts. Dat was duidelijk onzin en is ook door dorpsinwoners en de politie in sommige stukken ontkracht. Niettemin, het beeld van het ‘verstoorde paradijs’ (Elsevier, 21-7-01 online 22-5-12) overheerste.

Het aanwijzen van de asielzoekers als dader is vooral een teken dat we het fictieve ideaalbeeld van ons land hoog wilden houden, hier gesymboliseerd door het dorpje Zwaagwesteinde en de mooie, blanke, donkerblonde Marianne Vaatstra. De latere discussies over de islamisering van Nederland, sharia en bijvoorbeeld de gezichtssluier zijn een variant op het verstoorde paradijs: een land dat zijn eigenheid zou verliezen door te veel islam.

Wanneer onderzoekers en commentatoren het hedendaagse islamdebat willen analyseren en verklaren, wordt vaak verwezen naar de aanslagen van 11 september 2001, de moord op Theo van Gogh en de rol van politici als Fortuyn en Wilders. Terecht, maar duidelijk moge zijn dat dat debat een intensivering is van geluiden en gevoelens van onbehagen die er al langer waren en die vervolgens slechts meer geaccepteerd zijn geraakt. De moord op Marianne Vaatstra dateert van 1999: voor Paul Scheffers’ multiculturele drama, voor de El Moumni-affaire (een imam die zich negatief uitliet over homoseksualiteit), voor 9/11, voor Fortuyn en voor de moord op Theo van Gogh.

De drie tegenstellingen in de zaak-Vaatstra leenden zich uitstekend voor politieke exploitatie. De controverse is daarmee een van de vele spektakels die een bedrieglijke plausibiliteit en vanzelfsprekendheid verschaften aan het cultuurdenken. Zo was deze zaak een voorloper van de sociale verdeeldheid waarin we vandaag de dag nog steeds gevangen zitten.

Dit stuk was eerder te lezen in de Volkskrant-bijlage Vonk, zaterdag 24 november 2012

De kranten en de asielzoekers

‘De politie heeft ( ) een sectie van 24 ME’ers achter de hand gehouden om bij ordeverstoringen bij het asielzoekerscentrum de Poelpleats in Kollum direct in te kunnen grijpen. De maatregel is genomen vanwege de geruchten dat de dader van de moord op Marianne Vaatstra onder de asielzoekers gezocht zou moeten worden.’

Leeuwarder Courant, 15 mei 1999

‘In Zwaagwesteinde wordt met verbijstering gereageerd op de uitslag van de dna-test waarmee vaststaat dat de 26-jarige Irakees Marianne Vaatstra niet heeft vermoord. Velen in het dorp hadden gehoopt dat met de arrestatie van deze man de moord op het meisje opgelost zou zijn.’

Leeuwarder Courant, 15 oktober 1999

‘De Kollumer asielzoekers hebben zich erbij neergelegd. Ze zoeken naar manieren om met de verdachtmakingen om te gaan. ( ) Alleen durven ze niet meer. Met een gebogen hoofd lopen de asielzoekers door de supermarkt en de winkelstraat. Om maar niemand aanstoot te geven.’

Leeuwarder Courant, 24 december 1999

‘Direct na de dood van Marianne Vaatstra was duidelijk dat er wel degelijk concrete vermoedens waren in de richting van figuren uit het azc. Die figuren hadden zich verdacht gedragen. ( ) Daar komt bij dat steeds duidelijker wordt dat een flink deel van degenen die verblijven in azc’s geen echte asielzoekers zijn maar gelukszoekers.’

Leeuwarder Courant, opinieartikel van een eigen redacteur, 10 augustus 1999

‘De politie heeft het onderzoek in de moord op Marianne Vaatstra uitgebreid naar het asielzoekerscentrum (azc) in Kollum. Volgens de politie gaat het om ‘uitbreiding van het buurtonderzoek.’

Nieuwsblad van het Noorden, 11 mei 1999

PS
Als toetje, beluister de volgende zeer interessante radiodocumentaire van Joost Wilgenhof bij HollandDoc. Joost Wilgenhof schetst een beeld van een brute moord in het dorp Emmerschans, waarin het saamhorigheidsgevoel een groot goed lijkt en waar buitenstaanders met argusogen worden bekeken. Twee ingrijpende gebeurtenissen wakkeren het saamhorigheidsgevoel in Emmerschans aan. Eerst het fantastische eeuwfeest. En dan de gruwelijke moord op een bejaarde buurtbewoonster. DNA-onderzoek brengt een ongewenste uitkomst.

3 comments.

Vroomheid van moslims is niet zo uitzonderlijk

Posted on November 21st, 2012 by martijn.
Categories: anthropology, Guest authors, Headline, Islam in the Netherlands.

Guest Author: Daan Beekers

Met veel verbazing wordt er gekeken naar de geloofsijver onder Nederlandse moslims, met name als het gaat om de jongere generatie. Vijf keer per dag bidden, wekelijks de moskee bezoeken of een hoofddoekje dragen: volgens velen zijn het bevreemdende verschijnselen in onze seculiere samenleving. Maar deze verbazing is wel erg selectief. Kijk eens naar de duizenden christelijke jongeren die elke zondag in de kerk zitten (niet alleen in de ‘bible belt’ maar ook in de grote steden) of samenkomen op massale bijeenkomsten als de EO-Jongerendag. Laten we eens ophouden moslims steeds weer als de grote uitzondering te beschouwen.

worship

50.000 people worship the Lord. ‘Opwekking 2010’ Bron: Menkema/Flickr

 

Moslim in Nederland 2012

Vorige week bracht het Sociaal en Cultureel Planbureau het rapport Moslim in Nederland 2012 uit, dat laat zien dat het geloof voor moslims, vergeleken met een kleine 15 jaar geleden, onverminderd belangrijk is gebleven. Er zijn volgens het rapport geen aanwijzingen voor een secularisatieproces onder deze groep. Voor de zogenaamde tweede generatie moslims is het aandeel dat wekelijks de moskee bezoekt zelfs toegenomen (dat geldt nu voor een derde van de gelovigen). In de berichtgeving naar aanleiding van dit rapport werd al snel de conclusie getrokken dat Nederlandse moslims ‘religieuzer worden’, hoewel dat over het geheel genomen niet uit het onderzoek kan worden afgeleid.

De reactie op het rapport was echter vooral dat moslims toch maar weer een opmerkelijke uitzondering blijken te zijn in ons ontkerkelijkte land. Dit beeld wordt ook door de auteurs van het rapport zelf opgeroepen in hun conclusies: ‘Centraal in onze bevindingen is de hoge mate van religieuze verbondenheid die gerapporteerd wordt onder moslimgroepen in Nederland, helemaal wanneer we deze verbondenheid vergelijken met die onder andere religieuze groepen (met name christelijke)’. Vergeten wordt dat er, ondanks het drastische proces van ontkerkelijking in de afgelopen vijftig jaar, nog altijd aanzienlijke groepen fervent belijdende christenen bestaan. Onder de Nederlandse jeugd is die groep nog altijd een stuk groter dan die van praktiserende moslims.

Uitzonderlijk gelovig?

Uit recent onderzoek (zie Handboek jongeren en religie) blijkt dat 37% van de Nederlandse jongeren (15-25) zich tot een religieuze denominatie rekent. 10% is katholiek, 10% protestants, 7% moslim en 10% verdeeld over andere groeperingen. Voor al die groepen geldt dat ongeveer de helft ook actief betrokken is bij de geloofsgemeenschap, door bijvoorbeeld regelmatig kerkdiensten of andere bijeenkomsten te bezoeken. Daarnaast is geconstateerd dat de ontkerkelijking rond de eeuwwisseling tot stilstand is gekomen en de kerkelijkheid onder jongeren sindsdien zelfs wat is toegenomen. Bovendien worden bij islamitische en christelijke jongeren vergelijkbare veranderingen waargenomen in de geloofsbeleving, zoals de toegenomen nadruk op persoonlijke beleving en authenticiteit.

Dus wat blijkt: vergeleken met christelijke jongeren is de religieuze betrokkenheid van moslimjongeren helemaal niet zo uitzonderlijk. Zelfs het stabiel blijven van de religiositeit van moslims in de laatste 15 jaar en de toename van moskeebezoek onder de tweede generatie in dezelfde periode lijken in een breder patroon te passen. Waarom wordt er dan toch met zoveel verbazing naar de vroomheid onder moslims gekeken?
Wat zich hier wreekt is dat Nederlandse moslims nog steeds als ‘migranten’ of ‘allochtonen’ worden gezien en als zodanig tegenover de grotendeels ontkerkelijkte Nederlandse bevolking worden geplaatst. Vanuit dat perspectief is het moskeebezoek onder jonge moslims opmerkelijk, namelijk twee keer zo hoog als het kerkbezoek onder jonge Nederlanders. Maar deze stelling snijdt natuurlijk geen hout, want ‘moslim’ en ‘Nederlander’ sluiten elkaar helemaal niet uit. Wat je wél kunt zeggen is dat het moskeebezoek onder jonge moslims ongeveer even hoog ligt als het kerkbezoek onder jonge christenen.

Laten we daarom ophouden moslims te behandelen als het buitenbeentje in ontkerkelijkt Nederland. Moslims zijn één van de religieuze groepen die zich in ons land – in meer of mindere mate – onderscheiden van een dominante seculiere cultuur. Als we dat onderkennen behoeven moslims ook niet meer een eigen SCP onderzoek, zoals Moslim in Nederland, maar kunnen ze gewoon in de algemene religie-onderzoeken worden opgenomen. Dit zal ons misschien besparen van de selectieve verbazing die we nu zien.

Daan Beekers is als antropoloog verbonden aan de Vrije Universiteit. Hij doet promotieonderzoek naar de geloofsbeleving van jonge moslims en christenen in Nederland. Dit stuk verscheen eerder op Trouw, zaterdag 17 november 2012.

0 comments.

The Muslim Brotherhood of Europe

Posted on November 14th, 2012 by martijn.
Categories: Activism, Guest authors, Headline, Islam in the Netherlands, islamophobia, Multiculti Issues, Public Islam, Society & Politics in the Middle East.

Guest Author: Roel Meijer

The following is excerpted from the Introduction of the Muslim Brotherhood in Europe. Editors Roel Meijer and Erwin Bakker. New York / London: Columbia University Press / Hurst Publishers. 2012

Introduction

The Muslim Brotherhood is perhaps one of the most contested Islamic organisations in the world. Founded in 1928 by Hasan al-Banna in Egypt, it established a counterweight to the growing Westernisation of the country under British rule. It is, furthermore, regarded as the oldest Islamic organisation that turned Islam into a political activist ideology. In Egypt itself, the Brotherhood rapidly became more popular as it supported Islamic issues, such as the Palestinian revolt in 1936, and more so as the Egyptian monarchy collapsed and politics became radicalised. With its paramilitary youth organisations, it followed a militant trend that the political parties had already pioneered. It distinguished itself, however, by establishing a secret organisation, which developed into a terrorist cell that plotted the assassination of public figures and carried out bomb attacks on Jewish warehouses and institutions. Banned in 1948, its leader Hasan al-Banna was assassinated in 1949.

Since then, the Brotherhood has experienced a bumpy history. Legalised in 1950, it supported the military takeover of the Free Officers two years later, only to become involved in an unequal power struggle ending, in 1954, in its renewed banishment. The subsequent period of trial (mihna) would last until the early 1970s when President Sadat released the Brothers from prison. The agreement was made that they were allowed to operate and exercise da‘wa, as long as they did not become involved in politics. Aside from a brief clamp-down on their movements just before the assassination of Sadat, the honeymoon with the regime would last until the end of the 1980s, when, once again, the regime started to distrust the movement and its intentions. Despite the Brotherhood’s participation in elections in coalition with political parties or as independents, even winning 88 seats (of 454 seats) in 2005, over the last twenty years, its leaders have been constantly harassed, arrested and released in a cat and mouse game with the Mubarak regime.

The muslim brotherhood in Europe

The presence of the Brotherhood in Europe dates from the 1960s, when leaders such as Said Ramadan and other refugees from Egypt and Syria settled there to escape persecution of the military regimes. As the different chapters of this volume make clear, these migrants never intended to stay and mainly saw Europe as a base to recuperate and eventually reclaim the homeland from the regimes that had banished them. To what extent the rapidly expanding student organisations were part of the Brotherhood remains unclear. In Spain and Germany, the local organisations set up by Egyptians, Syrians and others were extensions of the Middle Eastern organisations of which they were members. In France and the UK, relations were looser and more informal. What is clear is that these organisations gradually became more involved in European society, by helping to build mosques and Muslim societies with and for migrant workers from Turkey, Morocco, Algeria, Pakistan and India. It was only in the 1980s and 1990s, when many of the students and migrants decided to stay in Europe, that these communities started to build the network of Muslim organisations that today cover the continent.

Research and Politics
It would be naive to think that research into the Muslim Brotherhood could be carried out in a political vacuum. The movement’s political ambitions, totalizing ideology and violent history have dogged the movement itself. Moreover, it has put a heavy burden on its current leaders and affiliated organisations, which are always pursued by its past and held in suspicion. At a time when Islam is regarded as a threat to the West and the Brotherhood is considered to be one of its most important political movements, the Brotherhood has come to embody this threat. Thus, researchers are immediately confronted with its negative image. Any volume on the Brotherhood should, therefore, address this negative image and try to separate the valid arguments from the spurious ones.
A cursory glance on the Internet and in newspapers shows that the differences of opinion run deep and emotions evoked by the Brotherhood regularly reach new heights. A dividing line in Europe runs between those politicians, journalists and researchers who believe, on the one hand, that organisations associated with the Brotherhood promote the integration of Muslims into European society and those, on the other side, who regard them as an obstacle to integration.

Accusing the Muslim Brotherhood
The most commonly heard accusation is that Brotherhood-affiliated organisations speak with a forked tongue. While they present themselves as democrats towards the European authorities, with the purpose to acquire good standing and influence, its leaders are suspected to actually be intolerant militants when speaking to their own following.

Another means of discrediting the Brotherhood is to point out the persistent popularity and influence of its historic leaders, specifically those who condoned or promoted violence, such as the Egyptians Hasan al-Banna (1906-49) and Sayyid Qutb (1906-66), and the Pakistani Abu A’la alMawdudi (d. 1973). The Brotherhood’s slogan, ‘Allah is our goal, the messenger is our model, the Quran is our constitution, jihad is our means, and martyrdom in the way of Allah is our aspiration’ is cited ad nauseam. In France, some talk of the ‘secret ambitions’ of the UOIF and its ‘discours de façade’,or ‘le double langage’.

The Muslim Brotherhood is frequently associated with terrorism. Some
critics regard it as the source of all Islamic terrorism, of which Al-Qaeda is
the latest manifestation. However, the most common way to discredit the Brotherhood and its affiliated organisations is to link them to Hamas, regarded by the United States as a terrorist organisation. By far the most fundamental accusation is that the Muslim Brotherhood is taking advantage of the freedom of organisation and expression in Europe in order to take over the continent and Islamise it. Once inside the halls of power, critics discern that the Brotherhood tries to put its plan of infiltration into practice, even becoming the ally of the state in its struggle against terrorism. In the UK, for instance, members of the Muslim Association of Britain (MAB) and the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB) were appointed by the government to the Mosques’ and Imams’ National Advisory Board (MINAB) to fight extremism. But many believe that, ‘far from being an ally in the fight against extremism, the MCB is part of the problem.’

The complexities of the Brotherhoods
This volume is meant to contribute to the discussion on Brotherhood-affiliated organisations. It aims to show that the role of these organisations is a far more complex story than that which is typically portrayed in the press or the political arena. Moreover, it investigates the extent to which the various arguments against the Muslim Brotherhood can be considered valid, one-sided or unfounded.

As with all conspiracy theories that try to portray the enemy as a solid front, the critics often forget that the Brotherhood has been wracked with internal disputes. For instance, the Brotherhood in Egypt supported the Khomeini revolution in 1979, while those branches in Saudi Arabia (organised in the Sahwa) did not. Likewise, the Brotherhood in Egypt supported the invasion of Kuwait in 1990-1, in opposition to the Kuwaiti branch, which was opposed. During the first years of the American invasion of Iraq, the Islamic Party of Iraq was one of the closest allies of the Americans, while other Brotherhood organisations called for resistance against American occupation.

However, not only between branches, but also within national branches, the front has been far from united. Many internal disputes started in the lands of origin and were transported to Europe. For instance, disputes within the Syrian community contributed to the decline of the Brotherhood’s presence in Spain (Chapter 9). In France, the followers of the Syrian Isam al-Attar, organised in l’Association des étudiants islamiques de France (AEIF), clashed with the UOIF, which followed the Egyptian Brotherhood.

As far as we know, the Syrian disputes also spilled over into Germany; and in the UK, the divisions between Egyptian, Iraqi and Syrian branches often complicate internal cooperation. In the past, the fabled organiser Said Ramadan seems to have clashed with Mustafa Mashhur, who is supposedly the founder of Brotherhood International. However, growing preoccupation with the local situation may decrease the impact of disputes in the country of origin on their affiliated organisations in Europe.

As all the authors in this volume point out, the Brotherhood in Europe was founded by students who had fled the Middle East. And it remains, basically, an elitist organisation. Nowhere have the Brotherhood-affiliated organisations succeeded in becoming mass organisations. Neither has its position as an interlocutor with the state always been that advantageous. In France, many Muslims complain about the meekness of the UOIF. In fact, this seems to be the universal flaw of the Brotherhood: becoming interlocked with the state in a pas de deux that revolves around the issue of power, rather than mobilising its followers. The Collectif des musulmans de France criticised the UOIF of spawning the ‘new Muslim notables of the Republic’. Another flaw in the criticism is that critics do not make a distinction between the branches in the Middle East and those in Europe. They neglect these groups’ tremendous differences, which are growing, as several chapters in this volume make clear. Local circumstances induce Brotherhood-affiliated organisations to revise their concepts and create a European version of the Brotherhood’s heritage.

Challenges of Brotherhood heritage.

It seems that, in the European context, it is more useful to look at ideological and practical changes that are made on a daily basis in relation to mixité, headscarves, and citizenship, rather than to keep on pointing at the continued reference to Hasan al-Banna and Sayyid Qutb. Despite this call for a more conscientious analysis of Brotherhood-affiliated organisations in Europe, there are reasons for being critical thereof.

One of the pressing issues is their secrecy, both on the level of the organisations as well as the flow of their money. Some movements seem to be aware of the need to create greater transparency. The suspicions are fed by the categorical denial of all the organisations’ leaders that they are affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood. Stefan Meining (Chapter 10) shows how the suspicions between the Verfassungsschutz and the IGD feed on each other. Thus, both sides have become locked into an endless game of accusations and denials, which derives from the misconception that the Muslim Brotherhood is an antidemocratic, totalitarian movement opposed to the German Constitution.

Finally, the ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood itself still poses problems. Although one should look at the daily influence of, for instance, the European Council for Fatwa and Research (ECFR), the major ideological lines are still not exclusively positive. Even if many of the authors in this volume are able to explain it, the most perplexing aspect of the Brotherhood is the peaceful coexistence of the most contradictory currents of thought. This is evident in Egypt (see Chapters 11 and 12), but is also apparent in Europe.

This book deals primarily with the establishment and expansion of the Muslim Brotherhood in Europe since the 1960s, when its European affiliated branches began to acquire their own dynamics. But clearly developments concerning the Muslim Brotherhood across the Mediterranean cannot be ignored. Due to constant personal, intellectual and financial transnational contacts, the Middle East and Europe have influenced each other. For this reason, we have divided the book into three sections. The first section focuses on more general European and transnational trends within the Brotherhood and Brotherhood-affiliated organisations. It also poses general questions, such as: what are the transnational relations?; are they centrally organised, or should we regard them as networks? In addition, the nature of these organisations will be discussed along with the long-term trends, such as the secularisation of the movement. In the second section, more attention is given to developments in specific countries. Despite a number of prominent works, the history of many of these national organisations is still to be written.

Roel Meijer teaches modern Middle Eastern history at Radboud University in Nijmegen and is senior researcher at the Netherlands Institute of International Relations. He has published widely on Islamist movements, most recently the book Global Salafism: Islam’s New Religious Movement. 
You can find the book on Columbia University Press, Hurst Publishers, Amazon.com

You can download the full introduction chapter here:

3 comments.

Huwelijksdwang – Migratie, Discriminatie en Symboolwetgeving

Posted on October 14th, 2012 by martijn.
Categories: Gender, Kinship & Marriage Issues, Guest authors, Headline, Multiculti Issues.

Met Gastauteurs: Edien Bartels en Oka Storms

Het kabinet, in de vorm van staatssecretaris Teeven, ministers Leers en Donner, heeft in de week van 23 april een tweetal wetsontwerpen ingediend gericht op het bestrijden van huwelijksdwang. Afgelopen week stond dit onderwerp weer in de aandacht vanwege het kamerdebat over huwelijksdwang, vrouwenbesnijdenis en polygamie. Met betrekking tot huwelijksdwang wordt speciale aandacht besteed aan neef-nicht huwelijken. Sinds 1970 is het sluiten van een huwelijk met een verwant in de derde en vierde graad niet meer verboden in Nederland. Dit geldt voor alle westerse landen, behalve in ongeveer de helft van de staten in de USA waar een huwelijk met een verwant, derde en vierde graad, wel is verboden. Opmerkelijk is dat daar andere argumenten een rol spelen; het gaat daar om medische argumenten die door kenners als niet houdbaar worden gekwalificeerd. Waarom dan een verbod op dergelijke huwelijken in Nederland?

Het Wetsvoorstel

Het voorgestelde verbod op huwelijken met een verwant geldt zowel voor Nederlanders van autochtone afkomst als van allochtone afkomst. Maar het nieuwe wetsontwerp wordt gemotiveerd vanuit huwelijksdwang onder de nieuwe generatie van migrantenafkomst die een migratiehuwelijk willen aangaan. Daarbij baseert het kabinet zich op onze studie uit 2005 waarin onder andere wordt gesteld dat huwelijksdwang in geval van verwantschap van partners waarschijnlijk vaker zal voorkomen dan wanneer er geen verwantschap is. In diezelfde studie wordt ook aangegeven dat het hier om een vermoeden gaat omdat cijfers ontbreken en moeilijk naar boven te halen zijn. Een duidelijke omschrijving van dwang is evenmin te geven. Is sociale controle een vorm van dwang? Of is er van dwang alleen sprake wanneer er sancties aan partnerkeuze worden verbonden? Bovendien wordt nadrukkelijk gesteld dat gedwongen huwelijken afnemen. Dit wordt ook bevestigd in de verwerkte literatuur. In 2008 hebben we in Amsterdam onder verschillende groepen bewoners van migrantenafkomst een volgend onderzoek verricht naar partnerkeuze waarin ook gekeken is naar huwelijksdwang. Uit deze laatst genoemde studie komt tevoorschijn dat de trend van afname doorzet en dat het steeds vanzelfsprekender is dat deze jongeren zelf hun partner kiezen. Er komen ook steeds meer etnisch gemengde huwelijken en migratiehuwelijken worden meer en meer afgewezen omdat partners van het land van herkomst steeds meer worden ervaren als ‘van een andere cultuur afkomstig’. Dit wordt bevestigd door de cijfers. Het aantal migratiehuwelijken, tussen in Nederland woonachtige jongeren met een partner uit het herkomst land van hun ouders, is sterk afgenomen.

Waarom dan toch strafbaar stellen van consanguine huwelijken, huwelijken tussen verwanten, op basis van vermoedens uit een onderzoek van 2004-2005? In dat onderzoek werd immers juist aangegeven dat er een afnemende trend is die ook nog eens bevestigd is via onderzoek in 2008 en de cijfers van afname van migratiehuwelijken. Had het kabinet geen andere klussen dan huwelijkswetgeving om te stigmatiseren, of zoals de Volkskrant (24.3.2012. p.12) stelt: “Dat dit nagenoeg het enige bericht was waarmee de ministerraad vrijdag naar buiten kwam, lijkt te bewijzen dat het regeren op een laag pitje is gezet.”

Symboolwetgeving
Het voorstel van het oude kabinet komt neer op stigmatiserende symboolwetgeving over de rug van vrouwen. Er zal dispensatie gegeven worden wanneer blijkt dat er geen sprake is van dwang. Een dergelijke uitsluitingsclausule of omzeilingsclausule moet er wel in opgenomen worden omdat, zoals gemeld wordt, neef nicht huwelijken ook in Nederland van oudsher voorkomen en naar verwachting blijven voorkomen. Dergelijke huwelijken worden ook niet in strijd geacht met de Nederlandse rechtsorde zoals in de brief aan de voorzitter van de Tweede Kamer wordt gemeld. Huwelijken tussen verwanten worden alleen verboden omdat het vermoeden bestaat dat de kans dat het dan zou gaan om gedwongen huwelijken, groter is. De bewijslast wordt hier wel omgedraaid. Er moet bij het aangaan van het huwelijk een verklaring afgelegd worden over eventuele bloedverwantschap. Is dat het geval dan kan er toch nog wel gehuwd worden na een verklaring onder ede waaruit blijkt dat het geen gedwongen huwelijk is.

Kortom: in geval van huwelijken tussen neef en nicht moet bewezen worden dat het niet gaat om dwang terwijl dat in geval van huwelijken tussen niet-verwanten niet ‘bewezen’ of apart verklaard hoeft te worden. Omdat voor alle huwelijken die in Nederlands gesloten worden geldt dat er door de partners aan de ambtenaar van de burgerlijke stand wordt uitgesproken dat men in het huwelijk WIL treden, “Ja ik wil”, gaat het hier om een extra verklaring. Met andere woorden: een huwelijkspraktijk waar al tijden juridisch en moreel niets mis mee is, wordt nu alleen bij migranten gecriminaliseerd. Deze huwelijken zijn verdacht op basis van vermoedens, die inmiddels ter discussie staan en naar het zich laat aanzien achterhaald zijn, maar nooit onderzocht zijn. Voor allochtonen die met een verwant in de derde of vierde graad willen huwen, moet er dus twee maal verklaard worden dat men een huwelijk uit vrije wil aangaat: in een beëdigde verklaring en voor de ambtenaar. Mensen die met een niet-verwant huwen kunnen volstaan met slechts één verklaring voor de ambtenaar: ‘Ja ik wil’.

Een ander argument dat het hier gaat om symboolwetgeving is het feit dat neef nicht huwelijken in het buitenland gesloten, in Nederland erkend worden. Nederland wenst zich uiteindelijk niet buiten de internationale rechtsorde te plaatsen. Mensen die verwant zijn en willen trouwen kunnen dus in België of Duitsland terecht en waarna ze in Nederland hun huwelijk zonder problemen kunnen laten erkennen.

Tegen huwelijksdwang
Dat neemt niet weg dat maatregelen tegen huwelijksdwang genomen zouden moeten worden. In 2009 is er vanuit de Europese Unie veel aandacht aan huwelijksdwang besteed, ook in Nederland. Er zijn voorlichtingscampagnes geweest en er zijn meldpunten ingesteld. Er is discussie geweest over strafbaarstelling. In het Verenigd Koninkrijk is er een speciale vorm van hulpverlening, de forced marriage unit, in de meeste andere landen van Europa wordt de strijd tegen gedwongen huwelijken gevoerd via vrouwen- en migrantenorganisaties cq. meldpunten. In Nederland was een tussenvorm ontwikkeld met een steunpunt in Marokko en initiatieven tot uitbreiding voor Turkije. Maar het programma eer gerelateerd geweld is geëindigd en migrantenorganisaties worden gekort. De subsidie voor het SSR steunpunt in Noord-Marokko is afgestemd in de Tweede Kamer. Welk model Nederland ook kiest om huwelijksdwang tegen te gaan, het VK model met centrale unit, het model van verspreidde initiatieven door particuliere organisaties, of een tussenvorm, op dit moment is er niet veel meer over van het elan, de initiatieven en mogelijkheden tot bestrijding. Ondertussen gebruikt het kabinet huwelijksdwang als argument om migratiepolitiek te voeren.

Edien Bartels

Oka Storms

Martijn de Koning

Dr. Edien Bartels, is onderzoek aan de Vrije Universiteit en deed onder andere onderzoek naar gedwongen huwelijken en partnerkeuze. Dr. Martijn de Koning is onderzoeker aan de Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen en deed onder andere onderzoek naar partnerkeuze en gedwongen huwelijken. Momenteel is hij bezig met onderzoek naar Salafisme. MSc. Oka Storms is eveneens verbonden aan de Vrije Universiteit als onderzoeker en deed onder andere onderzoek naar partnerkeuze. Momenteel werkt zij samen met Edien Bartels aan onderzoek naar consanguine huwelijken.

2 comments.

On the islamization of a global conflict

Posted on September 26th, 2012 by martijn.
Categories: Activism, Blind Horses, Guest authors, Headline, Society & Politics in the Middle East.

Guest Author: Thijl Sunier

Just over a week ago, after a period of relative silence, we could witness the start of another mediated Islam-hype with heated debates, demonstrations and (verbal and physical) violence. The apparent cause this time was the trailer on YouTube of an obscure movie titled “Innocence of Muslims” about the prophet Mohammed. The movie, in which Mohammed is depicted as a violent child molester, a rapist, a con-man and a homosexual, is the product of an obscure anti-Islam activist in the United States. The movie was designed to provoke Muslims deliberately by insulting Mohammed, much in the same way as the mad priest in Florida who burnt the Quran a couple of years ago. After the very-hard-to-find trailer was released, there was a small demonstration in Cairo in which the movie was mentioned along with other grievances against the US. It became a global issue only after an attack on the American embassy in Benghazi in Libya in which the ambassador was killed. Not very surprisingly this aroused strong reactions and a lot of media attention around the world, whereupon the protest spread to other countries. American magazines published grotesque cover images of angry mobs and raging Muslims. The whole circus of Islam critiques was mobilized to express their deep worries about the ‘ever increasing influence of radical Islam across the globe’.

It is remarkable to observe how quickly and relatively easy the commonly invoked discursive infrastructure of reactions and counter-reactions in such kinds of events is revived and repeated. The mediated sequence of public performances follows a basic script in which the same the (rhetorical) questions are posed and the same conclusions are drawn. With every new event this script becomes more established and more predictable.

On the 18th of September I watched a discussion on the German television dedicated to the event. It was a very informative discussion because it presented in a nutshell the dominant narrative that circulates globally. The participants in the debate are the ‘usual suspects’ performing a role in a drama called ‘should we be fearful of Islam?’ There is the senior orientalist who argues that the cause of all this dates centuries back to the 18th century Saudi Islamic scholar Mohammed ibn Abd al-Wahhab. Then there is the pious Muslima who states that only a small group of radicals use violence and that the majority of Muslims thinks differently even if they feel insulted by the movie. There is the journalist of the mainstream German newspaper who states that it is about the clash between freedom of speech and freedom of religion, being absolutely certain that radical Islam is gaining ground. There is the self-proclaimed ‘ex-Muslim’ (former member of a Salafi group in Germany) who knows ‘from the inside’ that it is the duty of all Muslims to hate (and preferably kill) all non-Muslims. There is the left-wing politician who pleas for a close cooperation between moderate Muslims and non-Muslims to overcome radicalism and to avoid schism. Finally there is the right-wing politician who stresses the need for more security measures. It is the repetition of strokes in a continuous play without much prospect for getting much further.

The basic feature of the script that is followed in these debates is that a global, very complex conflict is reduced to a simplified chain of causes in which the explanation boils down to theology and affect: insulting the prophet Mohammed causes rage among Muslims because Islam prescribes them to do so. There is a mutually reinforcing basic consensus among all these different voices that the conflict is about Islamic reasoning and sacred duties.

Those who question this simplistic explanation have a hard time because they have to argue against a dominant narrative. On discussion sites and blogs we find a number of very good analyses of the complexities of the events, but they are ignored largely by mainstream media. Fortunately things do not remain the same completely, however. The more these mediated hypes become predictable standard narratives (the next one is coming up in France as we speak), the more journalists become fed up with it. This is a good sign in my view.

Thijl Sunier is full professor in Cultural Anthropology (VU University Amsterdam). His specializations are Religion (islam, politics and islam, leadership, young people and and islam), migration, ethnicity and nation formation, European History and Turkey.

This blogentry was also published at Standplaats Wereld.

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Amshir – Music, Habitus and Revolution in Egypt

Posted on March 20th, 2012 by martijn.
Categories: Guest authors, Headline, Society & Politics in the Middle East.

Guest Author: Samuli Schielke

 

Today is the last day of the Coptic month of Amshir, a month that is known for stormy and unpredictable weather, bringing cold weather in one day and heat in another, rain in the morning and sun in the afternoon. (For practical purposes, the Coptic solar calendar has since long been replaced by the Gregorian calendar in Egypt, but agricultural calendar and common wisdom about weather changes stick to the Coptic months.) If we want to use a seasonal metaphor for Egypt after the January 25 Revolution, Amshir is certainly more appropriate than the awful “Arab spring” that was invented by western media and has also been appropriated in Arabic usage.

I returned to Egypt in mid-February, or early Amshir, entering a season of unpredictable and bad weather, as well as bad nerves and general worry, and most importantly a sense of disorientation. People far from political activism have lost much of their early enthusiasm and express fear of crime and insecurity – not without a reason, for violent crime has sensibly increased in the past months. Revolutionaries sense that the revolution has been stolen or lost. Protesters shortly filled the squares in great numbers in a new show of strength on 25 January 2012, but soon thereafter the massacre at the football stadium in Port Said and an ongoing campaign against NGOs and anti-military public media figures has shown that the situation has become rather worse than better. The two Islamist parties that gained an overwhelming majority of the parliament have quickly began to lose their aura of piety in the ordinary business of politics. The military council continues to rule the country with much brutality, and yet it has lost most of the credibility and authority it once had also in the eyes of those who do not support the revolutionary movement.

There is a shakiness of everything, a nervous disorientation and expectation of things to come, with shifting moods between hope and a sense of impending doom – underlined by the rapid changes of weather, days of beautiful sunshine and others of pouring rain and cold wind that compel people to stay home and wrap themselves with blankets for the lack of heating.

The inhabitants of Alexandria say that they love the rain and storms of the city. Rainy weather clears the air and gives it a fresh, pleasant taste. Empty lots of land otherwise bare are covered by a thick growth of weeds and flowers. Wet streets glimmer, and there is a sort of magic in the air. But when one tries to meet somebody in Alexandria on a rainy day, people cancel their appointments and tell that they are not going out as long as it rains.

Looking back at things I have written on this blog since the beginning of the revolution, I notice that over and again I have stated that things are contradictory, that some things are getting better and others worse, and many things are getting better and worse at once. Success and failure go hand in hand, as do frustration and action. This shifting, contradictory nature of things and emotions is indeed a characteristic feature of the entire revolutionary period that began in January 2011, a season of emotional, political, and societal Amshir. And just like the ways in which the Alexandrine deal with stormy weather are contradictory, so are the ways in which Egyptians relate to their revolutionary experience.

The sense of freedom that overwhelmed the country since January 2011, the now proverbial “breaking the knot of fear”, has in practice meant an emboldenment that has made life both better and worse. It has opened paths for open expression of political discontent, for a flourishing cultural life, for the rise of Islamist movements to political power, for rapid construction of houses on the scarce agricultural land, for a crime wave, and for good business opportunities for those who have the nerves and wits to seize the day.

F., a man around thirty from a provincial town in the Nile Delta, returned from Sharm el-Sheikh some months ago where he worked as a sales representative for safaris. The Bedouins, the original inhabitants of the Sinai who have profited very little from tourism, have made themselves increasingly independent first from the state, and eventually even from their own tribal leaders. There have been shootouts and kidnappings that have seriously affected tourism. F. had never considered tourism a job with a future, and with a friend he invested his savings to open the first up-market coffee shop in his home town, in style similar to those where the affluent of Cairo and Alexandria gather – only with much cheaper prices. F. doesn’t hold much of the revolution. He says: “People want to have everything at once, as if it that was possible. They don’t realise that things change step by step, and one has to work for it. The customers in the coffeeshop hang around there telling: ‘Down with military rule!’ until early morning but do nothing. They don’t search for work or try to build a future.” F. holds the military council for responsible for all the disasters and massacres that Egypt has gone through in the past months but sees little point in open resistance against them. He argues that the military leadership is corrupt and rich and determined to fight with all brutality to hold it, but picking a fight with them will make it only worse. But while critical of the revolutionaries, he is very well aware that the revolution is a golden chance to make a lucky break. Many people don’t want to invest at the moment, and prefer to wait and see. But F. argues that in a revolutionary time, those who can seize the moment win, and those who wait lose. And business is in fact going very well. While everybody talks these days about the difficult economical situation, F. says that people are actually very happy to consume, and his coffee shop is full every night. While F. is critical of the revolution, and suspicious of Egyptians being capable of democracy and freedom, he seems to be one of the winners, one of those who knew to seize the day.

One of truly tangible successes of the revolution has been a tremendous wave of cultural and artistic activity. Theatres, lectures, concerts, and exhibitions are crowded, and the past year and so has brought new styles of music and art into wider circulation. Y, listening to a new political song on his mobile phone, commented to me in this regard: “The two, and only two accomplishments of the revolution are in music, and in arts. There is so much music, good music, different music these days. And there is all the art in the streets.” There is the art of the revolutionary graffiti, most prominently produced by people from the artist scene on the walls of Tahrir Square and Muhammad Mahmoud Street in Cairo, but much more widely produced by football ultras around the country. There are the many singers and bands like Rami Essam, Cairokee, Iskenderella and many others who have connected revolutionary attitude with the sound of the guitar, with rap, or with a revival of the 1970’s style of protest songs in a way that has significantly expanded the musical taste of many people in Egypt. At the same time, however, this explosive flourishing of arts and music has become a distinctive marker of a revolutionary attitude, and as such also a problem.

AA., one of the young leftist revolutionaries from the village in the Nile Delta who organised a cleanup campaign and a meeting with the village mayor in February and March last year, confronted me yesterday with a self-critique of the revolutionaries’s isolation and inability to reach out to the wider majority of people. “We are so good at arguing, and understand the situation and can analyse it well, but why are we not able to convince ordinary people although they otherwise seem so easily influenced?” The campaign in the village eventually failed, he says, because the activists were not able to gain a popular base that would extend beyond a group of mostly young men, most of them with higher education and living most of the year outside the village. AA., too, lives in Alexandria and only comes to the village on weekends. Relating to the downtown cultural scene of Alexandria which we both frequent, he wonders why it is that a leftist political attitude so often also comes along with a style: guys with beard and long hair, girls smoking imported rolling tobacco, and people wearing Palestinian kufiyas when going to a demonstration. “What do long hair, rolling tobacco, and kufiyas have to do with being revolutionary? And yet I, too, put on a kufiya when I go to a demonstration.” AA. thinks that the development of a revolutionary attitude hand in hand with a revolutionary style and jargon has the detrimental effect of making it in fact more difficult for the left wing revolutionaries to reach out to the people. The spread of a revolutionary habitus in the shape of music, kufiyas, etc. certainly has reached people across class and educational backgrounds, creating a space for creative expressions of a politically and socially critical attitude. But at the same time it has become a distinctive marker of that attitude (very much in the sense of Bourdieu’s theory of habitus, taste, and distinction), and as such it is by nature exclusive. The pop rock of Cairokee has become the sound of a revolutionary attitude among many who did not have a liking for such sound (or such attitude) before, but it is not the music that one would ever hear in a minibus, in a toktok, or in a popular wedding.

[Edit 10 March: An important correction regarding this point: Jakob Lindfors just wrote to me and says that most of the music I mention in this note is very commercial and close to establishment, and that I have completely ignored the politically uncontrollable and quite anti-system wave of popular music called Mahragan which is not played on the tv channels or included in the official soundscape of the revolution. Songs about Port Said, about burning police stations on 28 Feb. etc. It is the sound of the popular youth, the music one does hear in a toktok or in a popular wedding. So I think I was wrong about this. There is no lack of serious revolutionary music on the street level, but there is a lack of awareness and appreciation of it even in many of the revolutionary cicrles. Great music, too, btw./Edit)

The biggest contradictions and uncertainties concern the very issue of revolution itself. Was it a good or bad thing? Was it successful or did it fail? Was it really a revolution? Yesterday evening, some of the village revolutionaries gathered again in S’s guest room in his home in the village. In this circle, much as in circles of leftist and liberal revolutionaries in Alexandria, there was a sense of failure, even impending doom. There is good reason for that sense. A number of public media figures are facing charges for incitements against the state and the military at a military court. Egyptian employees of NGO’s are still facing charges in court after foreign citizens accused in the case were allowed to leave the country following a diplomatic deal that has become a major justice scandal in Egypt. Revolutionaries are facing insults and accusations of being foreign agents, traitors, and infidels. H. is one of the handful of village revolutionaries who lives full-time in the village, working for very little pay in a call shop. His key revolutionary experience was his participation in the street battles of Muhammad Mahmoud Street in November. Frustrated about how little the village revolutionaries were capable of accomplishing, he wonders: “Was the revolution successful, or did it fail? The problem is that it was neither successful nor did it fail. Was there a revolution in the first place? If there was one, it was stolen.” He is contradicted by M.A., an older Marxist teacher, who argues: “Revolutions are not to be measured by their success and failure, because a revolution is an explosive event, and as such fundamentally unpredictable. The very fact that we are sitting here and talking about revolution is proof that there was one. And the attacks that we face are also sign of our success. There can be no revolution without enmity and struggle.” The others in the circle are not so keen to share M.A.’s positive assessment of the situation; they have expected more tangible successes.

Both have a valid point. On short term, the revolution has brought a very brutal and incompetent military government into power, and on middle term, it is bringing the much more competent but fundamentally authoritarian Muslim Brotherhood into power. At the same time, the revolutionary movement has most likely successfully prevented the consolidation of military rule, which seemed quite keen on taking a more permanent hold of power by last summer, but has become dramatically discredited since then. The military rule over Egypt that began in 1952 is causing terrible havoc on its final metres, but it is effectively coming to an end (although that end is likely to take several years to complete). What comes after the stormy changes of revolutionary and counter-revolutionary turns during a year and half of emotional Amshir, is a different question. It may or may not be better. The revolutionary faction will not rule the country for the next few years the come, and it probably never will, except at the cost of selling out its own principles. However, if they are able to even partly overcome their social limitations, and if they are able to defend themselves against violent suppression, they will be a crucial oppositional and critical power that will rule indirectly by compelling those in power to reckon with them.

E., a cultural activist from Alexandria’s leftist intellectual scene, says that this has in fact already taken effect. “The people in Egypt now curse the revolutionaries and the revolution, because Egyptians always curse those in power. By cursing the revolution, they recognise it as in fact being in charge.”

Samuli Schielke is a research fellow at Zentrum Moderner Orient (ZMO), Berlin. His research focusses on everyday religiosity and morality, aspiration and frustration in contemporary Egypt. In 2006 he defended his PhD Snacks and Saints: Mawlid Festivals and the Politics of Festivity, Piety and Modernity in Contemporary Egypt at the University of Amsterdam, Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences. During his stay in Cairo at the time of the protests at Tahrir Square he maintained a diary. This article was also published on his blog.

Samuli Schielke wrote earlier:

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Interview Veena Malik: My Pakistan is infamous for many reasons other than me

Posted on February 25th, 2012 by martijn.
Categories: Gender, Kinship & Marriage Issues, Headline, Society & Politics in the Middle East.

Guest Author: Nazima Shaikh

Closer has the honor to do the first exclusive interview with Veena Malik for the Netherlands by Nazima Shaikh. On 7 March 2011, the whole world knew instantly who the actress Veena Malik was. The Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), uploaded a clip from a live interview on Express TV (Pakistani channel):

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With 1.120.786 million viewers on You Tube, thousands and thousands people discussing and debating about Veena in (social) media worldwide the bridge to the West opens. Now one year later let’s meet Miss Veena Malik.

Caring Celebrity or Controversial Queen?
My Pakistan is infamous for many reasons other than me says Veena Malik

Who is Veena Malik?
I’m a free soul and spirit who loves to be creative and expressing myself. My freedom is precious and I follow my heart and dreams! Born as Zahida Malik, in Rawalpindi, in the beautiful Punjab in my beloved Pakistan on the 26th of February 1987. Looking forward celebrating it and being thankful to Allah. My zodiac sign is Pisces. The creativity and most spiritual sign off all. I have a Bachelor of Arts with major subjects, Psychology, Sociology, and Persian. I speak Urdu, English, Punjabi, Syraki, and a bit Persian.

My height is 5 feet 7 inches, my bust is 36 my waist is 26 my hips are 36 and my weight 50 kg. My hobbies are, besides my work, taking long drives, reading books and shopping. I am a fashion model, film actor, reality TV Star and social worker.

I have the BBBB, Beauty, Body, Brains and Blessed.

My favorite expression is

‘To live and let other people live.’ I believe God gave every individual their own life; it’s a gift, and everyone has equal right to it. No one has a right to interfere in someone else’s and limit their God-given freedom, or impose anything.”

Caring Celebrity
Asalamalaikum Miss Malik. Adaap arz hai, thank you. I feel blessed and a bit excited interviewing you. How are you doing? Walaikumsalaam. Adaap, it’s my pleasure Nazima. I’m fine thank you. Great that The Netherlands thinks of me. I read on Twitter and on Facebook that you post the good and bad stuff (from the media) about me. As I am a sensitive person I intuitively felt it was good. I choose you because being a half-Pakistani Muslim woman, in the (social) media, living in The Netherlands, gives me a connection from woman to woman. I will be happily answering all your questions.

Thanks for noticing my efforts, shukria ji! I’m feeling a lot of warmth and energy. You don’t want to see me blushing here right now. I don’t know if I’m gone use this answer it maybe a bit…No, no I insist. We women have to have faith, trust, confidence in ourselves, and support each other. There are enough backstabbers in the world. Some women are the worst. Especially for strong women like us, who are making the insecure women sizzle personally and professionally! And please call me Veena dear!

How is it to be a Celebrity,  being in the news daily? I don’t have a private life or a secret life just a public life. Everything I do, like having a cup of coffee with someone in a public place, is news. Every smartphone is a camera these days. Of course that comes with being a Celeb. For several years I work hard to reach my dreams and goals as an entertainer in the showbiz industry.

Caring by adopting the boys Zain and Zafar who were earthquake victims in Pakistan. Sponsoring the young girl Payal who was a victim of human trafficking in India is natural to you? I feel like it, so I do it. My thoughts go to  assassinated governor of Punjab, Sir Salmaan Taseer, RIP who said: ”Pehle Insaan Bano, Phir Muselman Bano.” It means, be a human being first and then be a Muslim. Don’t get me wrong, Alhamdulillah, I’m blessed and proud to be a Muslim. What I mean to say is: charity begins at home!

Also caring for the animals? Definitely! I made the decision in 2010, gosh two years ago already, to become a veggie. Why do animals have to lose their lives, for us human beings? Tell me please Nazima! Allah made us all with love!

Why are you in Dubai? Various reasons. I love the climate over here that’s for one. I lived in Pakistan, India and now Dubai. Like a gipsy (laughs, N.S.)! I have been here for four or five years now. Also easy travelling from here to Pakistan and India. There is good food as well and for a girl like me who’s hobby is also to shop, they have amazing shopping malls here. Not to forget the photo-shoot in Dubai and your privilege to use them first!

Cinema Lollywood (Pakistan) & Bollywood (India)
My acting debut as actress was in Lollywood. The movie Tere Pyar Mein (2000) was a box office hit! This year, 2012, it’s my Bollywood Bang. Four movies, three special appearances. The first launch in the movie Gali Gali Mein Chor Hai. This movie is about corruption. (In every street is a thief) and I will appear “Item Song” as an “Item Girl“ called “Chhanno”. It’s a great honor to be asked and launched like this. I’m happy with the result and response. My second item song Fan ban Gayi (I became a fan) was released yesterday and is from the movie Teri Naal Love Hoo Gaya.

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Your acting debut in my beloved Bollywood will be in the movie Dal Mein Kuch Kala Hai (There is something fishy about it). You have a double role and only you are on the banner. It’s a big challenge to perform a double role. Regarding the banner, that’s the decision of the director. I’m also appearing in “Mumbai 125 KM” (3D Horror movie, N.S.), Zindagi 50-50 (All U Need…Love. N.S.) and I have my third special appearance in a song for Mr. Money.

How do you manage to schedule all this work at the moment? I get a lot of energy by working on the different parts of a movie. One time I act, the other time I’m play backing and dancing. Yes it’s hectic, but what’s new about that? Story of my life. So actually it doesn’t feel like work, but I know my responsibility to the producers and filmmakers, they know my schedule. Do you like Bollywood? Any proof of that?

Proof that I love Bollywood? Look at this (photo to the left

Looking too good! Up, close and personal with Arjun Rampal (actor, N.S.) Hot! Your eyes are exactly like mine, we have deep and watery eyes

Career @ International Cinema
I’m taking my first international step in British Cinema. I will be the leading actress in a powerful role. Just two weeks ago I had a meeting with the film crew in Dubai. I can’t go in to details at this moment. Maybe the Dutch Cinema next? No problem to learn Dutch. Suppose a casting or film director wants me for an acting role, it’s necessary for my work, so I will happily do it.

Career @ The Netherlands
What you want to do in the Netherlands? It’s just like Karachi for you a city of 16 million citizens! I can speech, debate on TV or University on several topics about women empowerment from a Muslim female actress/model view. Furthermore, I can do many things at the same time being a creative entertainer. I can be a fashion model, host a program, perform on Indian and Pakistani songs, act and perform in music videos, but also be a show stopper in any fashion shows. I hear there are lots of events every year. I really want to be part of these kinds of programs. I have a lot of fans all over the world. I have such sweet memories of the Netherlands. Let me think… It was probably 2005 or 2006 when in visited your beautiful green country. I was there on 14 August on behave of a charity foundation. You know I’m from Punjab and when I was there I had a lot of fresh milk and your butter, hmmm, loved it.

Career @ Reality Television Shows
Being the first Pakistani doing a political comedy show on national tv in 2008. Next step in 2009 was mimicking celebrities in Miss Duniya. This fame brought you to India in 2010 as celebrity contestant in Bigg Boss. The main presenter was Bollywood actor Salman Khan. This concept and format of reality television Big Brother is created by the Dutch production company Endemol. In 2006 Endemol India was making programs in Hindi from Mumbai. Most successful program celeb format Bigg Boss. Gosh, really? That’s hilarious! I experienced Bigg Boss as a platform in developing my career. That was leading to the media calling me “The hero of liberal Pakistan” because of my ethics, values and my representation of my culture. And later on debating about Bigg Boss on air with the mufti.

The life changing reality television show this year turning you from a Miss to a Mrs. is Swayamvar -Veena Ka Vivaah I have been approached to do this show. I will pick an appropriate groom, marrying him. I gave it a lot of thoughts, of course being skeptical, but I understand the format and concept. I’m excited and nervous to meet my mister Right. The promos have been shot in Agra with the Taj Mahal on the background!

According to Vivek Bahl, Chief Content Officer, “Swayamvar is one of the most sought after shows on our channel, with a very strong viewer connect. We are delighted to bring its fourth season with the dynamic Veena Malik. We at Imagine shall leave no stone unturned to make it a grand affair for her as she makes the decision of her lifetime.”

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The promos are inventive. Touchy music, a super dress and the Taj Mahal as symbol of love, it has to trigger many. Just one question: why Veena? Oh, Nazima. (laughing loud and long, N.S.) Don’t you believe in love ? I want to give love one more chance and I believe in the institute of marriage, Vivaah, Nikaah.

Veena, of course I believe in love. Who doesn’t? Surely give love more than one chance. Like you, I believe in love and marriage. You’re a smart lady of just 26 years young.

Nazima, I have no luck in my love life. Being a Celebrity, never knowing whether he is with me Veena Malik, or just with the girl Zahida Malik? I was 20 years old when I fell for a guy, but then he started hitting me. He was very aggressive towards me. He beat me. That made me really sensitive. Ever since then I’ve been too scared of being hurt to be in a relationship. I believe in love. But to me, it’s scary now, because of that experience. I’ve been thinking about giving it another chance, so this is my chance! As I told you earlier, I’m a very sensitive person. Intuitive, spontaneous and a sucker for love. My zodiac sign is Pisces. Pisces don’t breathe air, they breathe love as air. Like love is our soul to run life on. We dream during daytime and nighttime. You know there were more than 75.000 entries worldwide? Mister Right has called from the globe. It’s a world record, imagine that!

More than 75.000 entries worldwide? Wow. Meaning in my city Nijmegen (165.000 citizens) that’s more or less half of the men in my city. A world record? Hardly can imagine such a response. Too bad that you didn’t meet Endemol earlier for this reality show. I think they will love the format and the 75.000 global entries.

Hahaha, now that’s the spirit Nazima! Selections are made. The next step is bringing the 17 grooms together in one place. You will see their real personalities when they will do a series of tasks to test their compatibility with me and prove their love for me! In April, we start and it will be broadcasted in May/June. My mister Right, adding my life with joy and understanding. And Nazima, friends and family will help me, support me in the most important decision of my life. I will send you an invite to be my personal guest, ok? That’s a deal, Nazima!

Insha Allah, meet your mister Right. You’re first Ramadan in July, as a married woman Mrs. Right, so romantic dear! Thanks for the invitation most appreciated.

Controversial Queen
Are you controversial or is it your reputation? No I’m not controversial. My reputation is because of my line of work, as a female, as a Muslim. I’m just a little girl who is lucky that my work is my biggest hobby. People who work in the Art industry want to create, are expressive, want to feel the adrenaline and are feeding the energy, they want to share it with their audience. Ask any person who creates a poem, who creates a book, who creates a song, who creates music, dance, movies, etc.

How do you deal with the negative response? The threats? My father forced my sisters, who were 12 and 13, to marry. I come from a very poor family. I looked at them and I stood up for myself, and I said no, I’m not going to face this future, and I won’t get married. From then on, I started living my life. We were very, very poor, but I was studying and working. My father wasn’t able to afford my studies. So I said, ok, I will work. People were talking about me, and they were like, ‘Oh, don’t go into this profession, it’s really cheap, you will lose respect.’ But I said no, I have to support myself and my family. I learned all these things from experience. Now my family is very supportive, because I have been supporting them for the last eight years. I’m getting threats, people from Pakistan and India saying they will kill me. But this will not stop me from going back to Pakistan. God willing, I’ll be able to return one day; but I haven’t spent a full week in the country over the past year. And the Taliban, they are threatening me as well. And also those nationalist conservatives in Pakistan who see me as neglecting my own country by appearing on Indian platforms. I don’t know which of these groups my biggest enemy is; they are all my enemies.


Are you the voice of Liberal Muslims? What’s liberal? I’m Allah thankful for blessing me how he made me. I am proud to be a Muslim. Mine religious identity is a personal relation between me and Allah. We women have to have trust, faith and confidence in ourselves. Role model is “Bibi Khadija”(PBUB), the first wife of our beloved Rasoelllah! She sets the norm and standard to be a self-made, independent, working woman and that we have not only our duties as daughter and wives but also our rights as Muslim women. It’s sad I think that in my beloved country Pakistan, where there are more girls and women than men, we are not demanding their rights on education, work, demanding our right to choose and making a stand together. Islamic wise women need respect, no matter what you’re cultural or society background is. Respect your men. Love your men. But don’t forget that God created you for a reason. For whom you are. For how you want to live your life. You should be aware of yourself, of who you are, before you give birth to a new generation of human beings. You must know about the world, you must know yourself, in order to raise the next generation. You’re not worth less than a man. You have every right to whatever you want to be! Always be positive. Life and death is not in our hands, but we can make a difference. As a human being, you can give hope to at least four or five people around you, you can be creative, you can live a life that matters.
I think circumstances forced me to become who I am today, and that’s what’s made me truly independent. Gladly I have so much love and support of my fans. They look up to me, they are proud and that gives so much energy and vibes, like spiritual happiness. The price I am paying to follow my dream and living on my owns terms, is sometimes hard, lonely and though.

The world gets to now you in a passionate debate with a mufti. He admitted to not having watched the tv show Bigg Boss. Claiming you were engaging in immoral behaviour as a contestant. You exposed the double standards of Pakistani media against women. The response from all over the world was huge. So heart touching, supporting and lots of positive energy. Thanking you all again my dear supporters and fans. About the show, first of all, I didn’t know there would be a mufti present, live; it was a complete surprise. Secondly, the presenter and the mufti were saying all kinds of stuff and having no respect. I had no other choice then to stand up for my rights. React spontaneously. I’m involved in an industry in which women are regularly criticized. I’m an independent woman; this is a very big deal in our conservative society. Men in our society cannot tolerate this, they don’t know how to process it. That’s why they criticize me being working in the entertainment industry, it’s about my dignity and freedom. There are so many problems in Pakistan, I’m not the problem.

In Pakistan there was controversy over your nude image on the cover of FHM magazine India. There was ISI written on your arm. ISI, are the initials of Pakistan Inter-Services Intelligence. You say you where topless not posing complete nude and suing the magazine for all the images.
Oh, no really, Nazima, once again? (deep breath, N.S.) I don’t want to talk about it anymore. It’s all said and done. I have a case in court. Let your readers think about it however they want to think about it.

Still I really want to know the answer because there was a Turkish actress, Sila Sahin who was completely nude for the German Playboy. And chief-editor from Dutch Playboy said on the radio he will not ask a female from a cultural Muslim background because of the fuss, fear and threats. Nazima, this FHM stuff is a hard way to learn life trough experience. These images, were morphed and edited by computer software. That’s the reason I’m suing the magazine so people will realize it automatically that I’m on the right stand. Let’s rule something out, ok? If a male actor, or male model, is doing a cover shoot for a magazine, shining his six-pack, do we have a fuss on that? Don’t we all hypostatically run to shop and buy the magazine?

It’s my freedom of choice to do what I want, it’s the freedom of choice of Sila Sahin that she wants to do a shoot for the German Playboy. Furthermore, these magazines are bought by men, made for men from any cultural background. The upsetting thing for men who buy it is that they feel “caught” seeing a female model with their same cultural background. We are Muslim as well, like them. And saying “it’s not from our culture, but I want to see it”, that doesn’t give them the right to treat us bad. Now that’s immoral behavior! These double standards! It’s too bad there are so much hypocrites. They do everything negative and they just criticize people. Believe me when I say I have my own and know my own limits. It’s up to me to decide when and where I draw the limit. I have my own dignity and self-respect!

Omg, really one hour flies fast my dear Nazima, have to go now. It was just like sitting on your kitchen table, so comfy. And this is the first time we met. Next time we will talk about fashion and my singing career.

 

Miss Veena Malik thanks once again for your time. This is like you said in the beginning of this interview a connection from woman to woman just in different positions. Also a big thank you for your Spokesman & PR-manager Sohail Rashid.

 

Veena Malik Official Website

Veena Malik Official Twitter: @iveenamalik

Veena Malik Official FanPage on Facebook

Veena Malik Official Youtube Channel

Nazima Shaikh (1974), half Surinami-Hindustani, half Pakistani, born and based in the Netherlands, is a well-known publicist/journalist/radio-debater on news topics, Islam, Bollywood, political issues and gender in the Netherlands and has extensive knowledge of Pakistan.

Closer is the number one academic anthropology weblog in the Netherlands, founded in 2006 and maintained by anthropologist Martijn de Koning, working as a lecturer and postdoc at Radboud University, Nijmegen and also lecturing at University of Amsterdam. Closer has a large readership ranging from politicians to Muslim activists, from journalists of quality news outlets to academics from Europe, United States and the Middle East and interested readers from all kinds of religious and ethnic backgrounds. Closer is dedicated to all kinds of debates, developments and phenomenons related to Islam and Muslims in Europe and has a special section ‘Society and Politics of the Muslim World’.

Copyright notice:

Copyright belongs to Nazima Shaikh and Closer. Quotes with links to this article are always allowed. It is not allowed to quote more than 200 words. It is not allowed to use the pictures that are displayed here.

6 comments.

Publications 2011 – On Salafism and other tough issues

Posted on January 2nd, 2012 by martijn.
Categories: Headline, Important Publications.

The year 2011 has ended which means making research reports. For our Salafism project at Radboud University Nijmegen, 2011 has been a special year since not only Joas Wagemakers defended his PhD cum laude and prof. Harald Motzki who retired, but it is also the last year of the project. In 2012 a Dutch monograph is planned and several articles will be published. But this is my Dutch and international production of 2011:

Scientific articles (peer-reviewed)
Koning, M. de, Edien Bartels, Oka Storms. (2011). Schadelijke traditionele praktijken en cultureel burgerschap – Integratie, seksualiteit en gender. Tijdschrift voor Genderstudies, 14(1), 35-51.

Koning, M. de. (2011). “Moge Hij onze ogen openen” De radicale utopie van het “salafisme”. Tijdschrift voor Religie, Recht en Beleid, 2(2).

Koning, M. de. (2011). Dialoog en Geloof in Actie. Theologisch Debat, 8(2), 19-26.

Articles (non peer-reviewed / professional)
Koning, M. de. (2011) De transnationale salafiyyahbeweging. Internationale Spectator, 65(10), 516-521.

Bookchapter

De Koning, M. de. (2011). “Melting the heart” Muslim youth in the Netherlands and the Qur’an. In Nicolet Boekhoff-van der Voort, Kees Versteegh and Joas Wagemakers (Eds.) The Transmission and Dynamics of the Textual Sources of Islam. Essays in Honour of Harald Motzki. Leiden: Brill Publishers.

Bartels, E., & De Koning, M. (2011). Submission and a Ritual Murder; The transnational aspects of a local conflict and protest. In T. Salman & M. De Theije (Red.), Local Battles – Global Stakes. The Globalization of Local Conflicts and the Localization of Global Interests (pp. 21-41). Amsterdam: VU University Press.

De Koning, M., & Meijer, R. (2011). Going All the Way: Politicization and Radicalization of the Hofstad Network in the Netherlands. In A. E. Azzi, X. Chryssochoou, B. Klandermans, & B. Simon (Red.), Identity and Participation in Culturally Diverse Societies: A Multidisciplinary Perspective (pp. 220-239). Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.

Koning, M. de. (2011). Tussen de profeet en het paradijs. De morele ambities van de salafiyyah in Nederland. In Musschenga & B. Siertsema (Red.), Het Kwaad. Reflecties op de zwarte zijde van ons bestaan (pp. 180-191). Vught: Skandalon.

Koning,M. De. (2011) Netherlands. In Yearbook of Muslims in Europe, red. Jorgen Nielsen, Samim Akgönül, Brigitte Maréchal, en Christian Moe, 1:243-257. Leiden: Brill.

Papers
Fields of Authorization – Transnational connections of authority in Salafi networks by Martijn de Koning. MESA conference 2010, San Diego. 1-4 December 2010

Key note lecture: Hello Salafists! – Salafism, authority and the issue of public anthropology. Rabat Spring School. Netherlands Interuniversity School for Islamic Studies (NISIS), Institut d’études de l’Islam et des Sociétés du Mondes Musulmans (IISMM), cooperation with the Institute de recherche pour le développement (IRD), Centre Jacques-Berque (CJB) and Centre Marocain des Sciences Sociales (CM2S). 21-25 March 2011

“God doesn’t look at your nationality” – The Salafi movement and religious and ethnic identity politics of Moroccan-Dutch Muslims in everyday life. Paper presented at Religion and Ethnicity in the age of Globalization: perspectives from Europe and India. Convenors: Francio Guadeloupe and Olga Sezneva, University of Amsterdam, and Fatima Alikhan, Osmania University, Hyderabad. 29-30 September, 2011, Amsterdam.

Genealogy of Authority. Position paper Roundtable MESA 2011, Washington DC. 30 November – 5 December 2011

Popularized
Guestview: Ritual slaughter ban reflects fights over food and faith in the Netherlands, available at Reuters FaithWorld, Religion, faith and ethics.

Misc.
Lecture “Zoeken naar een ‘zuivere’ islam. De religieuze zoektocht van moslimjongeren en de opkomst van de salafiyyah” Lezing voor FMV – Federatie van Marokkaanse Verenigingen, Antwerpen, vrijdag 28 januari.

Lecture Argan Debate Series ‘The final fatwa’, Amsterdam, 16 September 2011

Lecture “Fear and Loathing in Europe. Life after 9/11” Lezing voor ICCT’s expert meeting on Freedom from Fear: Answering Terrorism with Public Resilience, 3 October 2011.

Lecture “Op zoek naar een islamitische lente. Over gematigde en radicale islam en waar het eigenlijk over zou moeteng aan.” Lezing voor Stichting de Christelijke Pers – Trouwberaad. 3 oktober 2011

Debate De Arabische Lente in Egypte met Tarek Osman, Rachid Touhtouh en Evert van der Zweerde. Soeterbeeck Programma Radboud Universiteit en Lux Nijmegen. 13 september 2011

Debate Religieuze diversiteit: niets dan problemen?! Met Hans Janssen, Mohamed Ajouaou en Erik Borgman. Soeterbeeck Programma Radboud Universiteit en Lux Nijmegen. 30 November 2011

Contribution tv-programma ‘9/11 De dag die de wereld veranderde’ Zembla (NTR) Deel 3: ‘Het bange land’, zondag 11 september om 20.15 uur

You can find all my publications at the ‘Publications Page‘. This page has been updated with recent publications and I have added several links where you can download articles and bookchapters.

1 comment.

Fantasy, action and the possible in 2011

Posted on December 18th, 2011 by martijn.
Categories: Guest authors, Headline, Society & Politics in the Middle East.

Guest Author: Samuli Schielke

This essay is about Lenin, Tahrir, Islamists, poetry, choice and destiny in an attempt to provide some sort of theoretical synthesis of a confusing experience. It is the very slightly modified transcript of a lecture I gave at the University of North Carolina in Charlotte on 6 December 2011.

First of all, thank you very much everybody for coming here. I had no way to expect if I would get an audience of two or twenty, and it turned out to be more than twenty. I’m very happy about that. Thank you very much to Joyce Dalsheim and Gregg Starrett for inviting me here. And thank you to the University of North Carolina, and the Department of Anthropology and the Department of Global, International and Area Studies. This is a wonderful occasion to try to make some general sense of something which is very confusing: anthropological fieldwork in times of political and social transition. I have been writing a blog, and in every blog entry I have been presenting a different theory that has contradicted the previous day. It is very difficult to make any general kind of theory these days, but I’ll try to take the challenge offered to me in the shape of this presentation, and do some of that.

I’ll start with a little jump to history, because I think that the question which I try to tackle, which is that of the possible – the question: What is to be done? What can one do? Can what I do make a difference? Do I have a choice, and what kind of choices do I have? – is a question that was perhaps theoretically developed in relation to the revolutions more than hundred years ago by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, the to-be leader of the Russian revolution, who in 1901 wrote his very influential pamphlet What is to be done? It is an interesting book to read for various reasons, and I want to open up with it, because he really poses the revolutionary question about the possible in a sense that deals with the tactics, and the conditions one must be able to create to change the paths of action.

Lenin’s book is basically a critique of the social democratic movement, it’s all about polemics against other socialists, and as such it is not very interesting for readers of our times. But it becomes interesting when he argues why the social democratic movement needs a vanguard of professional revolutionaries – because that is Lenin’s answer to the question about hat is to be done: In order to have socialism one must be able to create a vanguard of professional revolutionaries who are able to spread propaganda to all sorts of classes, and when the breaking point of the system comes, they are there, ready to take over. But Lenin also says is that this is a dream. This is a wildly unrealistic, fantastic kind of expectation: to have an all-Russian socialist newspaper, and a secret party apparatus that is there everywhere. But he says: It is a dream, and a revolutionary movement must be able to dream. If it doesn’t, it will become the victim of its own caution.

Lenin’s pamphlet is worth reading also in 2011, the year of the Arab uprisings, for various reasons. One reason is that he was successful. His plan actually worked out. And second, because his success was a terrible one. Lenin offers us a key question: What is to be done? – and a key clue, which is dreaming, fantasy. But he also offers us the historical case of a successful revolution that resulted in a devastating civil war, and, less than twenty years later, in the mass terror by Stalin that killed tens of millions of people. So it is also a very good reminder not to be too romantic about revolutions.

There are moments when revolutions are necessary, and in the Middle East it has come to this point. But even when they are necessary and justified, they are terrible. Things get destroyed, people get killed, and in the end the wrong people seize the power. This has happened in Egypt. The economy is at a standstill. At least a thousand people have been killed. And there seems to be no immediate end to the violence as long as the country is ruled by a military dictatorship that is very brutal in the ways it deals with protests. And it looks like Egypt will be governed for the next couple of years by an uneasy alliance of military rule and Islamist parties. All in all it would look like one should make a sceptical assessment of the current state of the revolution. At the same time, I must add that as a researcher I am a very decided supporter of the Egyptian uprising – so much that in my own work this year it has become very difficult to distinguish between ethnographic analysis and revolutionary propaganda. But I do not support the idea of the Egyptian revolution or the Arab uprisings for their own sake. There is nothing in revolutions that would be valuable for their own sake. They are valuable only insofar they open spaces that didn’t exist before: space to think, to say, to pursue things, to realise things that were inconceivable, or at least unlikely or frustrating just a year ago. And this has definitely changed.

This year in Egypt has been a time of transition when all kinds of people have been struggling with this question, which in Arabic is actually a proverbial question: eh il-‘amal? What is to be done? It is a vast field but I will take us through three concrete case studies which I run through quite hastily: One is revolutionary action; the other one is the dream of the Islamic state; and the third one is literary fantasy. They are all related in quite interesting ways.

Revolutionary action

Revolutionary action is the one which you probably all are better informed about, because it has been very present in the media in the shape of Tahrir Square, in the shape of witty revolutionary activists who speak good English and very capable of conveying their message to the world audience – an important role! It has now become fetishised, it has become copied by various kinds of social protest, it has become a tourist product. The American University in Cairo Press is selling not less than three different glossy coffee table books about the revolution. But it is important to remember that when it originally happened, its power was in its surprising nature. It took everybody by surprise. It took the government by surprise, it took ordinary people by surprise, it took – and this is the most interesting thing – the revolutionaries themselves by surprise.

People went out on the streets not knowing what would happen, not expecting what they could possibly accomplish (inspired and hopeful, however, by the example already set by the Tunisian revolution), but simply angry and frustrated about years and years of social experience that offered them over and over again great expectations of good life and over and over again had disappointed these expectations. People were combining an extreme sense of anger and frustration with a very simple step to occupy the streets that had not been possible in Egypt before. The moment it became possible, the entire picture changed. It required very little in material terms. It required simply the possibility of enough people to occupy streets and to hold out against the police – which had been impossible since 1977, when there was the last uprising in Egypt, which failed. This very moment created a completely new situation, so much that it has become a sort of fantastic, utopian, almost religious moment. Ever since the protesters were able to occupy Tahrir Square in Cairo and other squares across the country, this moment of standing in the square has developed into something that now is an essential part of any idea of changing the country by means of revolution.

When I talk about revolution, I refer specifically to a group of people whom I describe as radical revolutionaries, those people who expect the country to fundamentally change, the people to change, the way the country is governed to change. It is not necessarily related to a political agenda. Most people who feature as radical revolutionaries would in Egyptian terms be liberal or left, but there are also Islamists among them who believe in religious government but don’t believe in the established Islamist parties. This radical revolutionary group, which is a small minority – I think the active core is maybe tens of thousands in a country of 80 million people, and its wider supporters may be about a quarter of the population – has turned this moment of standing in the square into a dynamic continuously surprising momentum that has at the same time amazing powers and deep limits.

Its primary power lies in its spontaneous and surprising nature. We saw this in the 18 days of the revolution in January and February when this ongoing pressure from the street made any attempt to strike a nice neat deal between the government and the opposition impossible, because there was nobody to speak to. There was no revolutionary leadership that could sell the revolution. The movement could not be betrayed by its leaders because it did not have any. This has repeatedly happened, most recently in the events this November, when very brutal violence by the Military Police did not crush the revolutionary movement. Instead of running away and being scared, people flocked into the square. There was again a spontaneous reaction. This has created a form of spontaneous resistance that is able to thwart any attempt of authoritarian restauration, over and again.

However, we should be very careful not to glorify this standing on the square too much. When I speak with people there, there is sometimes this idea that this square is what it’s all about. In order to change the country we need to have revolution, we need to have more revolution. It becomes limiting. When we go back to one year ago, nobody could really even dream of this moment. Now that it has become not only possible but material, it has gained such power over the radical revolutionaries’ imagination, that it has become difficult for them to think of any other way of changing this country.

This has become very evident in the elections where the revolutionary fraction received a fraction of the vote that is actually less than their already small numbers. Most of the revolutionaries failed (or refused) to participate in any kind of election campaigning because they were distrustful of the parties, considering all the parties corrupt and interested in sharing the cake of power and not interested in what the people need – which is all true. If you distrust the Islamist parties in Egypt you should see who is running Egypt’s liberal party: Egypt’s second richest man. There is not much to be expected from that side either. But this distrust also means that there is an incapability of taking to the streets outside the square. It is related to the difficulty of organisation, it is related to lack of funds – for example, certain groups have huge amounts of money. Other groups don’t. When it comes to spreading leaflets, you need to print them and you need to pay money for that. It becomes quite a concrete problem.

Occupying the square is a very ambiguous form of social protest and of changing the country. This was very much seen in the events of the end of November when at first, a new uprising took surprised everybody. Friday 18th of November witnessed big demonstrations which were lead by Islamist parties who were using these demonstrations in order to strike a better power sharing deal with the military, in which they seemed successful. These were cautious demonstrations, and the supporters of the Islamist parties were not making any chants aimed directly against military rule, only against certain ministers. That evening, I was in Alexandria, and some of the young leftists – who had also been in the demonstration but had left it early because they found that the Salafis, the radical Islamists, were dominating it – were very pessimistic. Their sensibility was that the revolution had now really lost. Next day, one hundred and fifty people staged a sit-in in Tahrir Square. The police came to break the sit-in with force, but these one hundred and fifty people were enough to create a momentum where thousands of angry people flocked into Tahrir Square, entered a days-long fight with the police whereby more than forty, possibly one hundred protesters were killed, and forced the Military Council to change the cabinet (even if that of course means nothing). There was a huge breakup of the situation, everybody was shaking – end then the elections came.

This time, the protesters were surprised. They had surprised themselves, surprised the government, surprised the Muslim Brothers who had become very defensive. They had seized the momentum, they had once again half a million people on the square, then came election day. The revolutionaries had thought that the elections will fail, that the Military Council doesn’t want to let them go through anyway, that they will sink in a wave of violence, that the elections are pointless. The elections were successful. There was a 62% voting turnout in the first round, which in Egypt is a historical record – usually the voting turnout been more like 6,2%. It broke the neck of the new uprising because people were suddenly happy. They were happy that they could vote. And in order to have an uprising you need people to be angry.

So again, there was a new surprising moment which showed that the way to the square lacked the capacity, the imagination to go other ways. The revolutionaries standing in the square at that moment actually lacked the fantasy to realise what the elections could possibly mean for Egyptians.

Islamic state

The elections are now bringing a landslide victory of Islamic religious parties. I was just reading the results of the first round – we don’t have the final results because the elections take place in three rounds, different provinces voting at different times (the electoral law requires every polling station to be supervised by a judge and there are not enough judges in the country). One third of Egypt’s provinces have voted now. The results show that about sixty per cent of the vote of the party lists go to two Islamist party alliances, one of them the Muslim Brotherhood who are conservative, and one of them the Salafis who are badass fundamentalists. This has completely surprised some people, but anybody who has actually been following the situation in the streets has not been surprised at all. Actually the Muslim Brotherhood got less votes than one would think. With 36% of the vote, they actually did badly. They should have gotten 50%.

In a country that just had a revolutionary uprising against a corrupt system that was not an uprising in religious terms but one in terms of social justice, or freedom, or human dignity, why did people vote for Islamic parties? One of them, the Muslim Brotherhood, supported the revolution (but sided with the Army very soon afterwards), the other, the Salafis, were actually supporting Mubarak. Why did people vote for them?

The first thing to remember is of course, again, that the revolutionaries are actually a minority in Egypt. The majority of people were never quite that enthusiastic about the revolution. They were enthusiastic once it was successful, but as long as it was still happening they were rather afraid. But there is more to it than that. It is important to realise that this sort of revolutionary enthusiasm and action was not the only thing that has been going on in Egyptian society. Lots of other things have been happening.

One of the things that have been happening for decades is a sense of a moral crisis. Of course, moral crisis is nothing special. People who study morality say that they have never encountered any society that does not have a moral crisis of some sort. Describing things as being in a crisis seems to be essential to moral imagination. But I would say that there has been a serious moral crisis that has to do with the fact that traditional Egyptian conservative, very family-oriented, very much relying on patriarchal alliances, clear hierarchies of age and gender, has become more and more destabilised, first by Arab socialism in the 50’s and 60’s, and then in a more subtle way by consumer capitalism since the 1970’s. It has made people to live more individualised lives, and it has made people’s livelihood in most cases immoral, illegal, and against Islamic principles: stealing, taking bribes, cheating, all kinds of questionable stuff. This is a society where there has emerged an enormous expectation for something that is morally sound. And Islamists can offer that promise. They offer a God-fearing government, a government that is morally sound and does not steal from its citizens.

This is another great dream, one that has not been so much the dream of the people who went out to the streets against Mubarak, but the dream of a much vaster part of the population: Can’t we just have a leadership that is good? Can’t we have a pious, decent person running this country? This is a different kind of dream as compared to the revolutionary dream of transforming the ways in which the country is governed (one focussing on the process and practice of government, the other on the characters of the people in the government), and it leads to different consequences. One of the major consequences is that Egyptians who would not be Islamist radicals in any proper sense, who would think about life in very pragmatic terms, who would be sometimes more conservative and sometimes more liberal, would nevertheless in doubt cast their vote for a religious candidate because they think: We want to give them a try.

The Islamist parties have played their cards very well. The revolutionary fraction, including also breakaway Islamists, has huge problems to compete with these large organisations that have huge amounts of money, that have social welfare projects, and that speak to the people. How do we actually struggle with this? This struggle has so far brought a very important lesson: If you don’t want to just change the government but if you actually want to change the way society works and the way people think about society, if you want to win elections, if you want to have majorities behind you, it is necessary to have something which people cannot disagree about.

This is the power of the Islamist movements in Egypt. Most people think of them as politicians. They don’t actually have full trust in them. As said, their support of an Islamic government is a conditional one. They know that politicians lie. Islamist politicians lie, too. There is no question about that. Many think that they are too extremist, too uptight, but they cannot disagree that these are pious people and that they speak the word of truth. They speak about Islam, and that is true. I don’t like you, but what you say is true. This seems to be crucial when we once again ask Lenin’s famous question: What is to be done? A crucial answers to that question is to be able to develop an ideological standpoint that stands beyond critique in a specific social setting.

The revolutionaries actually have a couple of these. One is the hatred towards all kinds of governmental oppression. This is something on which they rely all the time. One is the promise of dignity and freedom. Right now the Muslim Brotherhood has been able to rally on this promise. It depends on their ability to deliver whether the more radical fraction will be able to reclaim it from them. One in particular has tremendous power: The blood of the martyrs of the revolution is an enormously important asset for the radicals.

We have learned to think of Egypt’s revolution as a peaceful one. It was peaceful because the protesters didn’t carry weapons. But it was not peaceful in the sense that nobody would have gotten killed. A thousand people got killed, and the fact that a thousand people got killed has become the primary power and asset of any radical revolutionary action. Whatever there comes a tactical politician or a Salafi, the radicals can say: Where were you when the martyrs got killed? This is very consciously employed now by the radical fraction which last Friday staged a symbolic funeral for the people who had been killed most recently. And this is once again a reminder not to romanticise revolutions. It is easy to romanticise revolutions, and it is even easier to romanticise peaceful revolutions. But peaceful revolutions, too, need people getting killed.

The question that remains now is: Why could the Islamists in particular seize the day in the elections, and why could the radical revolutionaries not? Why could they, in turn, seize the day and surprise everybody on 20th of November but then lose the momentum? This is a question about what kind of actions are conceivable, and how one can actually change the scope of conceivable actions. What kind of actions have people learned to be good at, and how can people in such transitional state try to learn different kind of actions?

Literary Fantasy

I take quite a detour and turn to literary fantasy. The revolutionary year of 2011 is a year that constantly runs ahead of fantasy. Things happen, and people keep getting surprised, sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse. Sometimes it’s a disaster, sometimes it’s fantastic. It is interesting to go after the issue of fantasy itself, because literature has a lot to do with this uprising.

The ground has been prepared, especially for the more educated parts of the population, by a growing wave of socially critical writing. Blogging has been studied most intensively but actually blogs are just one part of a big scene of people exchanging facebook posts, publishing books, reading poetry in cafes. I recently saw some friends of mine sitting in Tahrir square – they were protesters camping there since a week – and reading from a poetry collection by Amal Dunqul who at the moment has become one of Egypt’s most famous poets. He wasn’t quite that famous before last year. Amal Dunqul (1940–1983) was a communist poet who in the 60’s and 70’s wrote extremely pessimistic and critical poetry. He was against everything. He was against the Camp David Agreements two years before they were signed. He was against any kind of concession to power. He the was the personified refusal. He had one of these famous lines opening one his poems: “Glory to Satan who said no in face of those who said yes.” (Last Words of Spartacus, 1962) In a very religious society like Egypt this is a dramatic way of thinking. Now, people frequently cite this verse.

I had a meeting with a group of teachers in a poor neighbourhood of Alexandria who were writing poetry, and we started talking about this. – This is actually my new fieldwork, which is not about revolution, it’s about writing. I hop I can get rid of this revolution stuff and back to the issue of writing… – We started talking about Amal Dunqul. What did this verse (and others) by Amal Dunqul do, what did it accomplish? There emerged two competing theories. Of course, I lean for the other, but it is important to cite both theories.

One of the two theories was argued for by the poet and teacher Hamdi Musa who said: Literature changes nothing. Look, Hamdi says: Every other cafe in Egypt has Qur’an recitation running on all the time, but the people sitting in the cafe are not getting any more pious from it. If the word of God doesn’t do it, how could my writing change anything? He says that literature is only about immediate personal pleasure. If it is transformative in any way it is transformative to myself. But then others argued: No, that’s not true. Literature changes one’s outlook at the world. It offers something to think about. In the first theory, literature changes nothing, and we are now in Egypt reading Amal Dunqul because something happened and he gives a voice to something that was happening anyway. The other theory says: Because we have been reading Amal Dunqul we think about the world differently, we value protest, which we wouldn’t do if we hadn’t read Amal Dunqul.

My good friend and research assistant Mukhtar Shehata turned the second theory into a dialectical model of fantasy, dreams, and decisions. ( http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=284111558280237) Fantasy, he says, is a space of freedom, completely free from any need to realise it. It depends on what we know and our material conditions; it is not free in the sense we could imagine anything. But it is a space of freedom where we can think up something and we don’t have to worry whether it can happen or not. Fantasy, Mukhtar says, is the ground from which we develop dreams (ahlam in Arabic), in the sense of aspirations. A dream is something that calls to be realised: It is my dream to marry, it is my dream to become a university professor, it is my dream that the world will be a peaceful place – it is all something that calls for realisation. Dreams, then, become something that guide people’s actions. Because they guide people’s actions they make people find themselves in situations where they have to make decisions.

His example is private tutoring. In Egypt, private tutoring is the main income of teachers who are very badly paid. So for everybody who goes to school, the actual studying takes place in the evening in private tutoring, which costs a lot of money. He gave up private tutoring after the revolution. On one occasion, he was speaking with another teacher about it, and his point was that you first have to think, imagine that there could be something else than private tutoring. That is the first step. Second, you have to start to desire it: If only I could live without private tutoring! The third step is that of decisions, of it leading you to moments where you can actually say: No, I’m not going to do it. I do something else. – And this, then, changes the material ground of reality because you make certain choices, and these choices bring you new experiences, and these new experiences create new grounds of fantasy, and the circle goes on.

This could, of course, be easily put into the shape of a liberal or neoliberal idea where everything is about choices, decisions, character, building my capacities, etc.
This calls for caution. When we talk about decisions and choices, we also have to talk about the inevitable. You cannot study the possible without thinking about the inevitable. In Egypt, when you talk about choice, people start talking about destiny (nasib). It’s not in my hand, it’s in God’s hand: I want to marry this girl but in the end I marry somebody else and I accept it. In Egypt, the inevitable usually takes religious shape as the will of God. But no matter what theoretical shape we give to the inevitable, be it the will of God or if it is the material conditions of production in a Marxist theory, the fact is that any sort of choices and decisions have to reckon with the inevitable. We live in a world where our character is cultivated and our choices made under specific conditions that direct and encourage what we can do. But the trick is that our own fantasy is one of these material conditions. Fantasy is not something that is fundamentally different from the ground I am standing on. It is part of these conditions that direct what I can do.

This leads us back to the question about why some people could seize the day in certain moments, and not in other moments.

We are talking here about choice and freedom as limited freedom. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, a phenomenologist philosopher argued in the 1940’s that Human freedom exists only within limitations. Limits are not against freedom. Freedom is only there because there are limits against which we experience our freedom. In Egyptian Arabic this is described with the verb yitsarraf, which means to manage in circumstances that are not of your own making. This is the condition of any answer we give to the question of what is to be done.

Any specific answer, any specific trajectory relies on its own material means and possibilities – the Islamists having vastly more money, for example, and the radical revolutionaries being very well connected to the international media. You have different material advantages that make it possible to do something. But it is also fundamentally related to having learned to anticipate certain kind of situations and to master them well. In a very short time the radical revolutionaries have learned to occupy Tahrir. They have learned to do it so well that in this November they just mastered it. It is a most amazing example of self-organisation. Without any leadership, actually even prohibiting parties and speakers’ stages, they managed to make a much better organised uprising than they did in January. But at the same time, it means that they are really bad at anything else. If you look at the Muslim Brotherhood, they have for decades mastered tactical manoeuvring between an authoritarian government and citizens who want to have a good religious government and society. They have been so good at this manoeuvring that when these elections came and they seemed to win with 36% of the vote but actually lost because they should have gotten 50%, this was because of their mastery of tactical manoeuvring. For the radical revolutionaries, even of Islamist leanings, they became unelectable because they showed absolutely no backbone. A big part of people with Islamist leanings in Egypt who really wanted to have a religious government didn’t vote for the Brotherhood because they thought: We really don’t know what these guys are going to do. (This was a reason for many to vote for the more radical Salafis instead, whose stance and programme are quite clear) Their particular knowledge and imagination of what could be done got them a very strong popular support but also brought specific limitations.

The really interesting question, then, is: How and when can people adapt their knowledge and imagination? My conclusion, a very short one, is that the really revolutionary task is to accomplish a shift in the way people look at the world and understand the scope of what they can do, which leads them to act in a different way. This shift requires fantasy. It requires a kind of active fantasy: not just the kind of passive fantasy of imagining whatever one already was used to, but rather a continuous engagement of going beyond the limits. This is why the Egyptian revolution was possible in the first place: because this shift happened. But its future will very much depend on how different actors in the scene will come to develop their expectations of what is possible (and what inevitable), that is, come up with new answers to Lenin’s question about what is to be done.

Samuli Schielke is a research fellow at Zentrum Moderner Orient (ZMO), Berlin. His research focusses on everyday religiosity and morality, aspiration and frustration in contemporary Egypt. In 2006 he defended his PhD Snacks and Saints: Mawlid Festivals and the Politics of Festivity, Piety and Modernity in Contemporary Egypt at the University of Amsterdam, Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences. During his stay in Cairo at the time of the protests at Tahrir Square he maintained a diary. The text here is part of that diary which you can read in full at his blog. He also wrote “Now, it’s gonna be a long one” – Some first conclusion on the Egyptian Revolution, The Arab Autumn? and Egypt: After the Revolution

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Minister Donner as Mufti: New developments in the Dutch ‘burqa debates’

Posted on September 21st, 2011 by martijn.
Categories: Gender, Kinship & Marriage Issues, Guest authors, Headline, Multiculti Issues, Public Islam.

Guest Author: Annelies Moors
Minister Donner as Mufti: New developments in the Dutch ‘burqa debates’

Following in the footsteps of France and Belgium, on Friday 16 September the Dutch Council of Ministers agreed to prohibit covering the face in public space. Although the headlines already consider it a run race, the draft Bill still needs to be sent to the Council of State, the government’s legal advisory body, before parliament will vote on it. One of the questions the Council of State needs to answer is its compatibility with the Constitution.

This is not the first time an attempt is made to implement a ban on face-veiling in the Netherlands. In December 2005, the Netherlands was the first country in Europe where a parliamentary majority voted in favour of a resolution to ban the burqa (and the niqab) from all public space. Geert Wilders, who tabled the resolution, specifically targeted Muslim women, by proposing a ban of ‘the burqa’ rather than of face-coverings more generally.* His main argument was that the burqa is a sign of Muslim women’s oppression and an obstacle to their emancipation. As it turned out, it was not easy to implement such a ban. A commission installed by the then Minister for Integration stated that a general ban of the burqa would be an infringement of the freedom of religion, whereas a general ban of face-coverings would only be possible for reasons of security. However, the police, public transport, and the security sector all stated that face-veiling was not a security issue. The next Center-Left coalition government no longer aimed for a general ban, but instead worked towards a number of functional bans (in education, health, public transport and for civil servants) using the argument of the need for open communication to maintain the rule of law. It only succeeded in implementing the ban for civil servants.

The recent attempts to ‘ban the burqa’ do not come as a surprise. The new Center-Right minority government has concluded an agreement of support with Geert Wilders’ Party for Freedom (PVV). A general ban on face-coverings was not only included in the coalition agreement, but the issue was also taken up in the Memorandum on Integration presented by the Minister of the Interior, Piet Hein Donner, a few months ago. This document officially declared the end of Dutch multicultural society. It considers Dutch society as a community of citizens with a shared language, values and beliefs, that is grounded in a fundamental continuity of values, beliefs, institutions, and habits, which shape ‘the leading culture’, and to which those who settle in the Netherlands need to adapt. Government needs to ‘confront citizens with behaviour that is contrary to notions of cohesion and citizenship’, if necessary through legal obligations. The document then explicitly mentions face-veiling as a cause of discomfort and hence an issue where the legislature needs to act normatively. The intention is to prohibit covering the face in public from 1 January 2013 as a matter of public order.

Commenting on the decision of the Council of Ministers to move forward with the ban, Minister Donner underlined that face-veiling is contrary to the character and customs of public life in the Netherland where we should be able to recognize each others’ faces. This rather ambiguous formulation seems to hint both at the need to be identifiable and to participate in open communication. This raises the question on which legal grounds this can be demanded from citizens who simply step outside their door. Moreover, if one were to take this seriously, there is a far wider range of forms of public presence that could be taken into account, such as wearing sunglasses (especially reflecting ones that make it impossible to ‘look each other into the eye’) and the use of iPods, cellphones and similar ‘obstacles to open communication’. Perhaps Donner was referring to the sense of discomfort or intimidation people may experience when confronted with someone who wears a face-veil. However, the actual chance to find oneself in such a situation is rather slim, as, on average, less than 3 in 100.000 people wear a face-veil (100-400 persons in the whole country). And again, there is a host of other dressing styles and accompanying behaviour that may cause fear or discomfort. Men in army boots and bomber jackets as well as men in expensively tailored suits and other forms of power dressing can be quite intimidating to particular publics. Whereas legislating against such styles of dress, worn by far larger numbers, would be considered ridiculous (as well as an infringement of the freedom of expression), women wearing face-veils, an extremely small minority, are an easy target.

Donner also used two more specific arguments to legitimize a ban of face-veiling. First, he argues that face-veiling can be considered as contrary to the principle of equality between men and women as only women are required to don a face-veil. The intention here seems to be to protect women against gender discrimination. Resonating strongly with Wilders’ earlier 2005 resolution to ban ‘the burqa’ as a sign of women’s oppression and an obstacle to their emancipation, this reference to gender discrimination implies that wearing a face-veil is considered as a form of gender oppression. However, the women concerned – a considerable number of whom are Dutch converts – underline that they do so by choice, often to the dismay of their families. What then are the grounds to consider face-veiling as a form of gender discrimination the state needs to legislate against? And if it were the case that these women are pressured to wear a face-veil, on what ethical grounds should the state then exclude them – the victims – from education, health care, public transport and public space? It makes, in fact, more sense to consider the ban itself, which disproportionately affects women, as an infringement of the equality of men and women. Moreover, if we are to take Donner’s line of argumentation seriously, this also raises the more general issue of gender difference in dress. Amongst strictly orthodox Protestants some object to women wearing pants. Does this then mean that wearing skirts, as a sartorial practice only affecting women, is also an infringement of the equality of men and women? Should this then also be banned? And what about secular gendered styles of dress, such as wearing high heels, a potential health and safety risk, which also mainly women engage in?

But the most remarkable is Donner’s second argument. Whereas Geert Wilders considers the prohibition of ‘the burqa’ important to stop ‘the Islamization of Europe’, according to Donner face-veiling is a cultural or regional style of dress, rather than one related to Islam. Here he follows the French president Sarkozy who in his speech to parliament in 2009, stated that the burqa is ‘not a sign of religion, it is a sign of subservience’. Obviously, when face-veiling is only considered as a regional style, rather than an Islamic practice, banning face-veils can no longer be considered as an infringement of the constitutional right of the freedom of religion. Whereas it is true that some Muslims who oppose face-veiling follow a similar line of argumentation – it is not really an Islamic practice -, there are also Islamic scholars who support face-veiling. In any case, the face-veiling women themselves strongly underline that they do so for religious reasons. What matters here is that Donner – a practicing Protestant – does not simply express his personal opinion about what is Islamic and what is not, but that he does so in the function of Minister of the Interior. Such a form of direct state interference in the substance of a religion goes against the grain of Dutch secularism. It is ironic that a Minister who strongly underlines the importance of the continuity of Dutch values and institutions, produces such a fundamental break with Dutch ways of organizing the relation between the state and religion. In essence, he proposes that the state acts as theologian. A discussion whether face-veiling is or is not an Islamic practice is an internal Muslim affair and should not be a Dutch governmental concern. It is helpful here to go back to 1985 when the municipal council of Alphen aan de Rijn attempted to ban headscarves in public schools using the argument that wearing a headscarf is not a Quranic obligation. In response to parliamentary questions, the then Minister of Education, also a Christian Democrat, stated that it is not up to public authorities to decide about the correct interpretation of the Quran, and the ban was withdrawn. In a similar vein, it also is not the task of the Minister of the Interior to judge whether face-veiling is Islamic or not, unless he wants to claim the position of ‘state mufti’. In that case, it is, however, unlikely that his views will be considered authoritative in the circles of the women concerned.

* The term burqa is highly problematic. It refers to the Afghani style of full covering (with a grid in front of the eyes), which evokes the Taliban regime and women’s oppression. The women who face-veil in the Netherlands usually wear the Arab style niqab, a thin, mostly black piece of cloth that covers the face, but often leaves the eyes uncovered.

Annelies Moors studied Arabic at the University of Damascus and Arabic and anthropology at the University of Amsterdam. She holds the chair for contemporary Muslim societies at the department of sociology and anthropology at the University of Amsterdam. She is co-director of the research programme group ‘Globalizing Culture and the Quest for Belonging: Ethnographies of the Everyday’, and director of the research programme Muslim Cultural Politics at the AiSSR (Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research). Annelies Moors is the primary investigator of a NWO Cultural Dynamics programme on ‘Islamic cultural practices and performances: New youth cultures in Europe’. She has published widely on gender, nation and religion in such fields as Muslim family law and Islamic marriages, wearing gold, the visual media (postcards of Palestine), migrant domestic labor, Islamic fashion, and wearing face-veils.

UPDATES BY Martijn
27 January 2011: Despite a negative advise the Dutch government persists in banning the face-veil.

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Radicalization Series VI – Muslims and Radicalization – What do we know?

Posted on September 8th, 2011 by martijn.
Categories: anthropology, Headline, International Terrorism, ISIM/RU Research, Murder on theo Van Gogh and related issues, Religious and Political Radicalization, Young Muslims.

Since 9/11 the issue of radicalization of Muslims is top priority on many policy and research agenda’s. A large industry of research, policy making and advising, counter-radicalization programs and so on has emerged. In this post I will focus on research and the very basic question of what we know by now about radicalization. (more…)

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Radicalization Series V: Freedom Fighters, Conflict and Culture Talk

Posted on July 27th, 2011 by martijn.
Categories: Headline, International Terrorism, Multiculti Issues, Religious and Political Radicalization.

Introduction
Anders Breilvik presents himself as a modern crusader; a nativist freedom fighter who engages in a war against islamization and the political establishment that accommodates the rise of Islam. His ideology resembles a copy-paste ideology which we know from other violent activists such as the Dutch Mohammed Bouyeri who killed writer and film director Theo van Gogh. A copy-paste ideology is not ‘just’ a random ideology of a lunatic. It is, for the people involved, a highly sophisticated worldview that gives meaning to the world, provides a sense of direction and enables a person to express their position in the world. The Internet plays an important role here since it makes it very easy for people to assemble and express their own worldview; in the case of Anders Behring Breivik in particular online fantasy games and the anti-islamist blogosphere provided him with clues, thoughts and probably a sense of cohesion as Thomas Hylland Eriksen pointed out.

Now it is important to understand the mindset and motivations of a terrorist and to see, for example, how it relates to (his) everyday life and issues on the ground. This does not mean that we should repeat his misguided anti-islamic viewpoints as for example Bruce Bawer does who in effect repeats Wilders’ statement on Breivik (although Wilders issued his statement later). Wilders sees Breivik as someone who abuses the ‘freedom loving ideals’ of the anti-islamization struggle that is about ‘defending‘ freedom and security. As Adam Serwer argues people like Wilders, Bawer and others seem to be worried foremost that Breivik’s actions are detrimental to the anti-islamization cause implying that his concerns and discourse about islamization for example in the Balkan, Turkey and the problems of the Middle East and beyond, are defensible and accurate (can you imagine such a piece after 9/11 or after the murder of Van Gogh).

It is important I think to see how his ideas (but not his actions) not only are derived from bloggers and politicians but also who they resonate with and are grounded on a grassroots everyday level. I also think the Netherlands can give some clues to that and is relevant here since Breivik partly derived his inspiration from Wilders’ Freedom Party ideology. In this blog therefore I will present some material of the Dutch section of the Ethnobarometer research in which we held focus group discussions on issues of security and culture after 9/11, the murder of Van Gogh and the French riots and Muhammad Cartoons. The research was conducted in 2005 and 2006 and the focus groups consisted all of both Moroccan-Dutch and native Dutch citizens of Gouda (except one group that was a moderate right wing group of native Dutch citizens). We did not aim for a representative sample but for an even division with regard to age, gender and political preferences. I will focus mostly here on the statements of the native Dutch participants. It shows how people struggle with tolerance on the one hand (seen as an important part of Dutch identity) and fear of Islamization and Muslims on the other hand expressed by different modalities of culture talk. While in the case of Bawer, Breilvik and Wilders the presence of Islam and Muslims are seen as the cause of conflict and by definition leading to conflicts, the Ethnobarometer research also revealed mechanisms that can de-escalate conflicts.

Communities of Tolerance
In the Ethnobarometer we can distinguish between four trends or better said four communities of tolerance: Destructed tolerance, Threatened tolerance, Promoting tolerance and ‘Christian’ tolerance.
Destructed tolerance
The first group was no part of any of the researches. Nevertheless via email, internet forums and other types of personal communication we managed to gather some insight in this group. Most outspoken were members of Freespeechsite.net when we tried to recruit participants for the Ethno-barometer.

One member from Gouda responded:

‘This is useless; those Marocs can do everything in Gouda. When you disagree, you will end up with a knife in your back with the police only watching? (been there). During these conversations Muslims will act as poor human beings and the Dutch people are guilty. During these conversations it comes down to the fact that we people from Gouda have to leave everything, giving all our money to them, let them rape our women, let them rob and abuse our children. If not, they stab you; they will destroy your windows, and beat your car to ruin! I have had these talks in Gouda. I am fed up with these talks. It doesn’t help a fuck! They have a free ticket from the state and they can do whatever they want. And do you know how it ended? That they (the police, MdK) wanted to fine because I gave my opinion and you can’t do that (not even if you can prove that they cheat). So a lot of fun with your discussions and that you want to spend your time for useless things. There is only one solution, throw the whole bunch out of the country. Yours sincerely,’

Another member stated:

‘I’m also waiting for the time when we as a host country will be treated with proper respect by our allochtone fellow people, because in my view we Dutch people have to adjust to our ‘fellow countrymen’ and not the other way around (Look for example at the Ramadan wish of our allochtones-fucker JeePee (MP Balkenende, I’m awaiting Christmas with all my heart). As long as that continues, you don’t have to expect any respect for them (a few exceptions left, but you have to search them with a looking glass). Nevertheless I am very interested in the results of your research. Good luck!’

Another interesting group of people were those people we contacted on the streets and a schoolyard. One of them said, for example, ‘I don’t want to talk to Muslims’. This was stated by a mother whose child was the only Dutch child in his class on a primary school. This school also had decided not to celebrate ‘carnaval’ (a Catholic feast) anymore. Instead they choose to celebrate ‘Eid’. The non-Muslim woman was very angry about that. Some Muslims responded that they would come, but most of them (except three) never showed up. These reactions made clear that these people experience a huge gap between Dutch culture and allochtones and, perhaps even more important, that they felt being deserted by Dutch politicians who in their view choose for Muslims and against them (the originally Dutch people). The kind of language used by the different people makes clear that these sentiments are very strong and very vivid. Looking at issues concerning tolerance people in this category tend to feel that tolerance has gone so far that Muslims and the Dutch government have became intolerant towards ‘we Dutch people’ while Muslims and other migrants enjoy all possible fruits of tolerance, at the expense of native Dutch people. Some Dutch people (the authorities, the researcher) constitute a third group they aim at: they see these people as traitors.

Threatened tolerance
The second community of tolerance is a very influential one and probably the most diverse one when we look at for example political preferences. People in this category perceive the virtue of tolerance as very important but fear that it is threatened by Muslims in general and in particular ‘radical Muslims’. One can find atheists and liberals among them who argue that all the freedoms they have fought for in the 1960s (women’s emancipation, liberation from the constraints of religion) is threatened because of the existence of Islam and Muslims in the Netherlands who, according to them, do not agree with these freedoms.

‘An important part of culture is religion. We used to have on the edge of the Dutch Guilder: God be with us. The fact that Muslims in large numbers and it is a group that grows fast, come here with us, means that they undermine my culture. That doesn’t belong to my culture, that doesn’t belong to my norms and values, which make culture. So when other norms and values and another religion come, that pushes aside as it were those things of me, then I think, wait a minute, that is not good’.

‘That is the fear!’ ‘It is not directed against Islam: you are fighting with yourself. What do I feel is important, what people have taught me about what is important and is that affected now? And that insecurity…’ On the question what is affected, one of the non-Muslims answered: ‘My culture. My culture, a new culture enters into that, and their culture grows and grows and grows and mine is getting smaller and smaller and smaller. And my culture is my identity, so I am being forced to change my identity and I really don’t want that, but I have to’.

The image of fear and distrust is a very strong and important one. During the Ethno-barometer it seemed that issues concerning Muslims abroad and issues in Gouda come together.

‘When you see the pictures of people in other countries decapitating each other, when you then see a group of Moroccans in the Netherlands: they look similar, here in Gouda, I know that because of course I talk to other people as well. I am not really afraid for it, I wouldn’t run away from you (she says to one of the Muslims who just told he thought people sometimes see him as a terrorist because he wears a long beard), but it does give you a sense of fear immediately. There are many people with fear. That is because of the pictures on TV, but also because you don’t hear the Muslim community when something happens. They don’t say, well now they do a little bit, but they don’t say: We don’t want this, we do not support this, and we disapprove.

’

The presence of Muslims puts, according to this group, Dutch tolerance under severe pressure and makes them question where the loyalty of Muslims lies: with Dutch society and Dutch people or with fellow Muslims.

Promoting tolerance
The third category of people can be mainly found among political leftists (left wing liberals, socialists). Although they do feel that Islam and Dutch tolerance are not fully compatible they blame the present intolerance on other Dutch people. Especially politicians such as Hirsi Ali and Wilders and the media are held responsible for the current tensions in society.

Back in the old days everyone used to be tolerant, but now many of friends say, let them (migrants/Muslims) fuck off

!

The people in this group tend to highlight the similarities between them and Muslims. Many of them feel truly appalled by what Fortuyn and Van Gogh said about Muslims. During the ethno-barometer discussions it became clear that they were convinced that people who followed Fortuyn were lower class and not very smart people. When differences between them and Muslims are highlighted they tend to exoticise these differences and give them a positive meaning for example by saying that Muslims help each other more then Dutch people do (a statement that can be heard in the former two categories as well). When controversial issues such as homosexuality are concerned these people tend to refer to the time of the pillarization when homosexuality wasn’t accepted among Christians. Muslims, according to them, have to go through the same process of liberating themselves from such opinions but that is only a matter of time. In other words, they can become the same as us tolerant Dutch people. The emphasis they put on tolerance and their reluctance to talk in terms of ‘us’ and ‘them’ is for many people related to the atrocities of the second world war. Racism and anti-semitism are shunned by all people in the research. This rejection of racism doesn’t necessarily mean people like the ‘other’ so much, but because ‘we’ have seen what racism and anti-semitism can do.

‘Christian’ tolerance
The first three groups do not seem to differ about the importance the enlightenment ideal of autonomy. The fourth group does however. While according to the first three groups for example a negative view about homosexuality is intolerant and violates the ideal of autonomy, for this group tolerance and autonomy means that these views about homosexuality must be tolerated as long as it does not harm others. The same can be seen in ideas about women’s clothing. The first three groups are convinced that the fact that women have to wear certain clothing (headscarf or long skirts) is a violation of the ideal of personal autonomy and therefore also intolerant. This group emphasizes the freedom of choice and stresses that if women wear these clothes because they want to themselves, this should be tolerated because it does not violate the ideal of autonomy. This fourth group is made up by orthodox Christians and in some cases also leftist liberals. This group emphasizes dialogue with Muslims in order to gain more understanding and a harmonious relation with the Other. This group tends to avoid conflicts and exotice the Other.

When I came to live in this area (Oosterwei, an area in Gouda with many Moroccans, in popular speech also called ‘Little Morocco’, MdK) and got to know, many people I thought it was so exciting! I thought, oh, I hope I don’t do something wrong and hurt no one. Yes, I was truly afraid of that, because I truly wanted to become closer, but not hurt them. It was so nice to find out every time, you are you and we only want to know what you think about and why you think like that. […] these are always nice discussions, they are hard as well sometimes. Because you meet each other (and open up to eachother, MdK), but you notice, the invasion of Iraq, terrorism, killing each other here on the streets, you have gone through a great deal, disasters and all that, and when you notice how both of you respond to that and why you approve or disapprove, you find out that it generates a lot of respect.

Just like the third group, this group also thinks that Muslims have go through the same staged of development as the Dutch already did. In particular terrorist attacks and problems with Moroccan youth in Gouda, makes them wonder however, how long that will take and if some of ‘them’ are truly willing to become part of Dutch society. Nevertheless this groups is emphasizing the dialogue with Muslims in order to gain understanding. The same we can see for example in the role of the Council of Churches in the Netherlands.

It is quite clear that the common perception is that Islam and radical Muslims in particular form a threat for people’s way of life and society as a whole. When ‘identity’ comes under siege, their own identity, the other and the differences between self and the other become essentialised. In terms of identity politics this means that there is less space for negotiations and making compromises.

Moral protest: Dutch identity, tolerance and respect
In case of Dutch people the defensive and sometimes apologetic stand of Muslims concerning the fear Dutch people experience and concerning their question towards Muslims about being loyal to Dutch standards, leads to a demand for recognition by the Dutch during the interaction of the debates. They wanted recognition that their fears and expectations are legitimate, and they also want to be taken seriously. Even if they know that fears and negative images are sometimes based upon prejudices, they wanted to be able to address that. Calling upon Muslims to condemn terrorist acts is in this sense also a means to let Muslims say that terrible things have happened and that it is not surprising that people are scared. The angry reactions of Muslims about these fears and images did not lead to awareness that some of it was based on prejudice. It only led to a feeling that their grievances were not taken seriously by Muslims. These grievances are real and also major and minor events are real, and they could not be taken away by individual Muslims by stating that ‘no one asked them to wipe away their own culture’ or by saying that ‘terrorism is no part of Islam’.

This paper shows that the same could be the case for the dominant group. In fact the Ethno-barometerproject makes clear that when the different discourses meet during a debate, a call for recognition is the result. Both Bawer and Wilders in their condemnation of Breivik acts still start from the misguided assumption that having different ethnic and religious groups, in particular when of the groups has an Islamic religion, conflicts are unavoidable. Many researches however show that the ethnic dimensions of conflicts most often come into being during the conflict and is only seldom the cause of conflicts. This of course is exactly what Wilders and Bawers do; they point to some problems in society and then add a an ethnic and religious dimension to it by pointing to the alledged agressive and violent nature of Islam.

De-escalation
Conflicts and violence are never unavoidable however. During the Ethno-barometer meetings however it became clear that the boundaries between groups shift and are re-defined according to the topic at hand. The focus in this research is on the relationship between Muslims and non-Muslims. It is therefore not surprising that Muslim identity is an important aspect of this report. This does not mean however that Muslim identity should be taken for granted. Because the Moroccan participants were challenged as Muslims, they often presented themselves as Muslims. This did not happen all of the time. Some of the Muslims stated that they were Moroccan or Berber in the first place and then Muslims. Most of the younger Muslims however made very clear that in the first place they are Muslims and secondly Dutch or Moroccan. When people were talking about social economic deprivation for example, they used terms such as allochtones, migrants and Moroccans. Most participants mixed these terms very often: Muslims referring to themselves as Muslim or Moroccan and in a few occasions as allochtone. Non-Muslims were referring to Muslims as Muslims, migrants, Moroccans and allochtones. Only occasionally they referred to themselves as autochthon or Dutch or Christians.

The presence of orthodox Christians in the first group meant a rearranging of coalitions among the participants. When for example the topic of ‘oppression of women’ was addressed the orthodox Christian girls and Muslim girls joint forces against one of the participants who came up with this issue (a man). We could see a similar example when people talked about insulting people’s religious beliefs or when someone stated that to him every one was equal and he did not care about the religious backgrounds. The orthodox Christians and the Muslims joined each other in explaining the others why people are sensitive when their religion is insulted. Both groups also saw themselves as being a minority and the others as the (secular) majority. It is also the Orthodox Christians who often acted as intermediairies between Muslims and other Dutch people.

This shifting of boundaries brings us to an important point that is visible in all the mentioned discourses above about tolerance and also in the ethno-barometer debates. This is the presence of a so called third party. According to Gert Baumann this Third Party is invisible in the construction of identities that always involve the construction of a self and an other. This Third Party is neither ‘us’ nor ‘you’ and seems, at first sight, not involved in the interaction. Although at first sight the way young Muslims construct their religious identity seems to be diametrically opposed to Dutch identity, it seldom leads to conflicts because most of them have good personal relationships with native Dutch people at work or at school and tend to avoid people whom they deem racists. These native Dutch people can be seen as the third party. The same happens among many Dutch people. In some cases its not the Muslims who they aim at with their frustration but the Dutch government, but also some native Dutch people have good personal relationships with their Moroccan co-workers, neighbours or classmates. In fact during the ethno-barometer debates it sometimes looked like all participants were third parties because in case of generalizations about Muslims or Dutch people, in most cases people said: ‘No, not you, but X people in general’. This clearly relieved the tensions in face to face contacts and brings back into memory the importance of the relationship between self-restraint and tolerance.

Several other mechanisms of de-escalation also became visible during the debates. Stressing common experiences, seeking for solutions instead of blaming people could turn a very emotional and harsh discussion into something more constructive. One of the most striking aspects was the tone and the atmosphere in the discussions remained quite friendly even when there were strong differences in opinion. Restraining yourself from causing inconvenience for other people, which is an important condition of tolerance, seems to be an attitude that existed among all participants. Only in the first group there were strong tensions between some of the non-Muslim participants and some of the Muslim participants. During one session of this group we decided to have an early break because we feared the tensions between two people would escalate. During the break, without us intervening, these two and other participants approached each other and continued their discussion in a friendly and joyful manner. We found it striking that that group was the most outspoken and most polarised group. This can have some relation with their age. Mainly the young people (between 16 and 30) were outspoken and sometimes vicious in their way of discussing. The older people often tried to smooth things down. The other three groups had not that many young people; mostly only one or two.

The Power of Radical Words

It is not difficult to see how Wilders’ discourse resonates and is expressed on a grass roots level, not only in the Netherlands, and how Wilders’ rhetoric is a reduction of a multi-dimensional every day life into a single narrative of islamization. As I have explained elsewhere with my colleagues Edien Bartels, Oscar Salemink and Kim Knibbe, the way that people define their cultural identity is part and parcel of their subjective sense of human security – first and foremost in terms of cultural security, but eventually also in terms of their physical safety. It is when people feel their lifestyle is being threatened that some of them (but usually a minority) feels the need for action and search for political leaders who can be their voice. Since people’s sense of cultural security is linked with the definition of the boundaries between cultural categories, between ‘us’ and ‘them’, and between zones under control and zones outside one’s control, when once ‘secure’ cultural boundaries start to shift, this may create anxiety, fear and resentment. We show how minority identities may enhance the internal sense of security in that group, but may lead to anxieties and (subjectively experienced) insecurity in greater society. It is this sense of cultural security that is stimulated by politicians and their culture talk and, conversely, it makes the logic of culture talk seem to be ‘common sense’. It isn’t however; conflict is not the logical outcome of a pluralist society but every society does need mechanisms for de-escalation of conflicts. Politicians such as Wilders however work to monopolize the political agenda and given their black and white nature of their verbal ammunition they in effect close off the windows to conflict de-escalation. This doesn’t mean of course Wilders is directly responsible or that people in the Ethnobarometer research who hold similar views are responsible. It only shows that Breivik’s grievances are not merely voices in his head; they are out there and they have been for a long time. Breivik’s case may show how dangerous it can be when politicians exploit the culture talk but it also doesn’t mean that Breivik is a representative of those people or of the ethnobarometer participants. It is worthwhile considering that Breivik represents nothing and no one except himself .(I think his copy-paste ideology could be a clue for that). Very hopefull in the Norwegian case now, and contrary to the Netherlands in 2004 when politicians talked about war, is the message of the government. Not repression, but more freedom and democracy.

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Campus Watch, but better – Freedom Party and politics of obstruction

Posted on July 7th, 2011 by martijn.
Categories: Guest authors, Headline, State of Science.

Guest Author: Maurits Berger

The conference Applying Sharia in the West organized by me was reason for Geert Wilders’ Freedom Party (PVV) to make use of the parliamentarian right to ask questions to cabinet ministers, in this case the Ministers of Interior and Education. Some questions were based on faulty assumptions (that our conference was organized in conjunction with the European Council for Fatwa and Research, for instance), other questions required some exegesis (for instance, whether the Ministers agreed that the central questions of the conference would be ‘a sign of progressive Islamization in education’).

The way the whole issue was launched by the PVV was typical of this party’s pr-policies: they hurl as set of statements and assumptions into the public domain, which are then quickly reproduced by the media. Insofar as media is interested in facts and backgrounds, they usually do not inquire with the PVV (because they never respond), but to those who stand accused. The no-response policy by the PVV was very effective, because it brought about the wondrous situation of journalists asking what we thought that the PVV ‘may have meant’ by questions that were either lies or incomprehensible.

What took the PVV three seconds to say, took us three days to rectify by means of press releases and answering journalists and the Ministry’s civil servants who had to formulate the formal answer to the parliamentarian inquiries. Why would you respond at all, colleagues asked, why bother if it is all lies anyway? But that was exactly the reason why we had to react: the lies would stick if we did not deny them. And denying lies, it turned out, is not easy.

This method is as effective as it is perverse. It is as if I would call someone on the radio a whoremonger and would then refuse any comment. In normal life I would have been the person who would have to corroborate such a serious accusation. But not in this life, not here in Holland. Not reacting to insinuations is accepting guilt. And accusing, even insulting, has become part of the freedom of speech. So bring in the mud and the slings.

This method is also successful for other reasons. Imagine that your name is mentioned as part of a parliamentarian question. It happened to one of my colleagues at university. He is a specialist of Islam and I had urged him to write more newspaper articles because we, as academics, had a duty to take part in public debates, especially in issues as sensitive as Islam and Muslims. It was our obligation to make the public aware of what is fact and what is falsehood, so I told him. And then one morning he walked into my office, white as a sheet, stuttering that his name and article were subject of parliamentarian questions posed by the PVV. Their statements were – again – false, their arguments – as usual – nonsense, but that was not the issue. The game of blaming and shaming was played, and my colleague will never write again. One-zero for the PVV.

The ingenuity of the perversity gets better. Many colleagues will shrug their shoulders: as long as it does not affect your academic freedom, let them talk their rubbish. But it is not what they say, not even that they say it, but the prolific way of saying it. The incredible repetitiousness of these kinds of nonsense – the PVV is the party that asks by far the most parliamentarian questions – and the constitutional obligation of the Ministers to answer has made people cautious or even fearful. Better not to have such kind of conferences like ours, because it may cause questions being asked in parliament. Civil servants suffer from the same inhibition: we know there is nothing against such conferences, but perhaps it is better not to subsidize such an event because… you know. The self-censorship has kicked in, and the nonsense has become a measure stick in real life.

The most frustrating aspect is that the PVV is not interested in the content of what they criticize. They were of course immediately invited to attend the conference. But none of them appeared, and no one asked for the conference proceedings. It is Islam, Muslims, Sharia and therefore: bad. And who is interested in badness? I used the argument that our rejection of genocide, fascism or serial killers does not preclude our academic interest in these issues. So, even if a party like the PVV abhors Islam as a ‘totalitarian doctrine aiming at domination, violence and oppression’ (from the PVV’s latest election programme), one would expect that they would like to know their enemy. But no.

This puts scholars of Islam in a particular difficult position. At Leiden we have established the Leiden University Center for the Study of Islam and Society (LUCIS) that aims at catering to the societal and political need for background information on Islam and Muslims. We academics at LUCIS want to leave our ivory towers and step into society. But the only arms we have is knowledge, and the only skills we have is to disseminate that knowledge. We are not prepared at all for the kind of onslaught that we receive from organizations like the PVV.

How to respond? And – more important – how do we get the time to respond? How can we turn the tables so that we can give a quick answer in three seconds and oblige the PVV to spend three days substantiating their ludicrous remarks? At present we are not equipped to do so, and as a reaction we mostly retreat back into our ivory tower where we can continue working on our peer-reviewed articles that ultimately will get us more credits within the university.

This situation has been on my mind for years, and as of recent really started to worry me. Because it is not only academics that are being cornered. The self-censorship has become all-pervasive. That means that the PVV is gaining the upperhand with empty rhetoric that we all know to be nonsense. As academics we fail the means to fight it, but neither can we allow ourselves to rely on the smug assumption that truth will prevail. It won’t, because new truths are being created. We need to change logic and methods – the thing is that I do not yet quite know how and what.

Maurits Berger is Professor of Islam in the contemporary West at Leiden University. He was senior research fellow with the Clingendael Institute from 2003-2008. Before that he worked as a lawyer in Amsterdam, and was researcher and journalist in Egypt and Syria for seven years. His expertise is Islamic law (Sharia) and political Islam.

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Wilders on Trial VII – The dissensus ritual

Posted on June 23rd, 2011 by martijn.
Categories: anthropology, Headline, Multiculti Issues.

Dutch populist anti-islam and anti-establishment politician Geert Wilders was on trial for intentionally offending a group of people based on their religion, incitement to hatred and incitement to discrimination. Today he was cleared on all charges. According to the court some of Wilders’ statements were insulting, shocking and on the edge of legal acceptibility, but should be allowed because they were made in the broad context of a political and social debate on the multi-cultural society. The interesting and complicated thing with that line of reasoning of course is that Wilders himself is constitutive of that debate; he monopolizes the debate and sets the harsh tone and scope of that debate.

The court said that talk of a tsunami of Muslims is ‘blunt and humiliating’ but ‘not subversive and does not incite to hatred or discrimination’. Furthermore, Wilders’ video Fitna could lead to feelings of hatred, but Wilders himself had not generated this feeling, the court said. Following the verdict Wilders said the ruling was a victory for freedom of speech: “I am extremely pleased and happy,” “This is not so much a win for myself, but a victory for freedom of speech. Fortunately you can criticize Islam and not be gagged in public debate.’ ‘Sometimes I meant to be coarse and denigrating,’ and: ‘In a political debate you must be able to say what you like.’
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This blogentry gives an overview of the trial and ends by engaging with the question if this trial was a good idea to begin with.

Opening statement of Dutch MP Geerd Wilders in… door khandaniha

It all started with the announcement of the movie Fitna in November 2007. According to Wilders to movie intendend to show to violent nature of Islam and the Quran (a license to kill). The police and the public prosecutor made it relatively easy to file a complaint against the movie. Immediately after its release the first complaint was filed and the forms necessary were already there. In June 2008 the public prosecutor decided however not to proceed with the prosecution because there were no unlawful elements in the movie. A strange decision. First one stimulates (before seeing the movie) people filing complaints, and then refuse to go on with it. Strange on behalf of the public prosecutor and one might add not very good for keeping confidence in the judiciary system because it stirs up things and leads people into a dead end. In January 2009 the Amsterdam appeals court orderded prosecutors to put Wilders on trial since ‘in a democratic system, hate speech is considered so serious that it is in the general interest to draw a clear line’. The court’s decision to prosecute is also in line with a previous decision in which a particular statement was not seen as inciting on its own, but it did within the particular context it was made. Other groups (including the people who made the complaints, a wide range of actors ranging from lawyers to one of the Salafi mosques in the Netherlands) have tried to frame it as incitement to hatred, insulting a religious group AND blashpemy. The latter however was turned down. The law on blasphemy is very strict and it is not even clear if making insulting comments about the prophet Muhammad is liable. See for more juridical details the brief by my Radboud University colleague Ybo Buruma. Framing it as blasphemy can be seen as attempt by religious status quo the protect the existing status quo, while making a movie bound to be experienced as blasphemous can be seen as an attack on that status quo. The same line of reasoning can be made with regard to incitement to hatred and discrimination and insulting a religious group. In both cases people want to defend their group from attacks that might be disruptive and threatening to the integrity of the group.

Framing the trial

How is the trial sold to the public? As said above, the authorities view the general in terms of ‘general interest to draw a clear line’. It appears to be self-evident that drawing a clear line is a good thing. One can wonder about that. The decision not to prosecute was made because of the context of the public debate in which the film was made which (needs to) leave room for people to make strong statements. In both cases we can see the reaction of the authorities as an attempt to de-politicize the whole issue by bringing it in and out and in again in the judicial system. This of course does not work. Wilders frames it different and contrary to the views of the authorities as a political trial meant to silence a politician who stands up for Dutch culture against the dangers from a violent and intolerant Islam that threatens to sweep the country. Wilders statement at the end of the trial gives a nice idea of how he framed the trial while the next video offers a glimpse of his ideas:

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The Argument
The defense Wilders has put up in trial is that he is just speaking out on the truth about Islam. They called several so-called expert witnesses including Wafa Sultan. Like the other witnesses before her, Wafa Sultan claims Islam is essentially a violent religion striving to conquer and submit the free world. She is not against Muslims as she claims (like Wilders does as well) but the question of a particular Muslim is dangerous depends (in her view) about how deep their religiosity is. If, according to her, the person is very pious and so on, then (given the violent nature of Islamic teachings) the person is dangerous. If the person however appears not to be very pious, one still has to consider the possibility that he is playing tricks and deceives you with his moderate outlook. Anthropologist Gabriele Marranci has explained quite clear why that argument does not add up (see also HERE).Rhetoric such as this reduces the multidimensionality of the lives of Muslims and non-Muslims, making one dimension all-encompassing and primordial while obscuring other dimensions and their mutual influences. Islam as a threat is a collective action frame, aimed at mobilizing people is constructed in order to influence people’s perception of particular events and meanings attributed to those events. If one applies it often enough and when it resonates among people because it appears to be logical and self-evident given particular processes and events people have experienced, such framing works as a mental shortcut that provides people with an effective and efficient way to deal with information. It is a form of persuasive communication used by political and religious elites prior to and during conflicts attempting to mobilize people for collective action. In this case the idea of Islam as a threat is the central organizing idea by which particular incidents and statements are qualified as examples of Islamization. Wilders’ statement in court was very important in this regard. The new government backed by Wilders’ PVV, wanted to build bridges and has as a motto: Freedom and Responsibility. Wilders stated that this motto was not his and ‘I’m not really a building-bridges-type-of-guy’. The other central organizing idea is ‘freedom’ but he talks about a particular kind of freedom. It pertains to freedom of the supporters of the Freedom Party and its MP’s. It pertains to a freedom from governmental interference and being liberated from the totalitarian and intolerant Islam and at the expense of (Muslim) minorities that are neglected and marginalized.

The prosecutor
As was to be expected a little bit the prosecutor sought acquittal on all points of the charge. Maybe surprising for outsiders but note that prosecutors initially declined to press charges against Wilders in June 2008. Prosecutors told the court that Wilders’ statements may be “hurtful” or “insulting” to Muslims, but there was insufficient proof to convict him of trying to polarize Dutch society into antagonistic groups. He has never called for violence. In the summation, prosecutor said Wilders’ statements were made as part of the public debate “about the immigration and integration of nonwestern foreigners, especially Muslims.” “Standpoints can vary considerably and emotions can run high, but … it is a debate that it must be possible to have,” she said.

In one example cited by prosecutors, Wilders wrote in a 2007 opinion piece: “I’ve had enough of Islam in the Netherlands; let not one more Muslim immigrate,” and urged that the Quran be banned. The prosecutors said that statement, like others, was within the legal bounds of public debate. Many of Wilders’ statements seemed to denounce Islam as an ideology or its the growing influence in the Netherlands, rather than being intended as an abuse of Muslims as a people or group, according to the prosecutor. At the end of the day Wilders stated in the first trial “I don’t insult, I don’t incite hate, I don’t discriminate,” he said outside the courtroom afterward. “The only thing I do, and will keep on doing, is speaking the truth.” (copied from Yahoo! News). According to RNW:

Wilders off the hook | Radio Netherlands Worldwide

The prosecutors based their arguments on a few basic principles. In the first place, there is little jurisprudence in Dutch law to fall back on, particularly in the cases of incitement. The jurisprudence on the European level is somewhat broader, including recent cases decided by the European Court of Human Rights against Jean
Marie le Pen in France, and Daniel Féret in Belgium. The lawyers cited both cases, as well as a few cases in Dutch courts.

In addition, prosecutors maintained a very close, cautious reading ofthe law. Statements have to meet very specific criteria to be considered incitement. This is particularly true in the case of a politician taking part in a national debate.

The whole process was quite muddled and in October an appellate court ordered a re-trial that started in February. The important thing is to understand the different historic trajectories underlying the current state of affairs regarding free speech. It is in particular the perceived social evils that constitute the bases of the complaints against Wilders. Because we are in a court system, the way to address these social evils is to demonstrate that people are harmed by it. It is the principle of harm that makes people having to account for their choice (how) to express themselves. This is what the plaintiffs tried to do and they asked for a guilty verdict and a symbolic damages award of 1 euro.

Freedom and Power: dissensus ritual

Now was this trial a good idea to begin with? Many commentators think it wasn’t as for example David Poort shows in a recent Al Jazeera article. Part of the comments there are correct of course. Whatever the outcome Wilders will not stop his extremist message nor will the debate about the limits of freedom of speech be over. And yes probably the fact that Wilders continues to challenge the limits is one of the things many people like so much about him. And yes, a court room may not be the most suitable place for a public debate. Furthermore it is often pointed out that Wilders is criticizing Islam, not the people, and since Islam is not a race nor an ethnicity, the discrimination laws do (or should) not apply. Nevertheless some of Wilders’ remarks on Muslims or calling Islam a ‘desert religion’ clearly uses racialized stereotyping and framing. Also particular cultural markers (such as headscarves) may not be racial but in the debates they can become racialized. This can happen because, although Islam is not a race indeed, Wilders is in fact racializing Islam by seeing it as an immutable and all pervasive category that drives people to intolerant acts. Furthermore besides the Islam-card he also plays the nativism card in which the native Dutch population is also seen as an immutable category constituting a moral community based upon judeo-christian values; a moral community that is in fact white. Furthermore Wilders did, albeit in an indirect manner, incite to violence and hatred by stating about Islam “It is a violent ideology like communism and fascism and we should deal with it that way“. Now how exactly did ‘we’ deal with communism and fascism? Certainly not (only) by drinking tea with communists and fascists.

But there is more to it. During the last years Muslim activists have sought a way to adress their public views in a number of ways; from violent to peaceful and from petitions to demonstrations. Most of it not very effective and sometimes (the murder of Theo van Gogh) with considerable backlash against Muslim communities. The calm reaction of Muslims after the movie Fitna was praised and by some like Hirsi Ali seen as a sign that provocation actually works. By engaging a court case Muslim organisations (including a Salafi mosque) have stepped into ritual of court cases; a ritual that can offer a temporary solution to a complex and difficult political situation and that should transform a tense situation (as was clearly the case with Fitna) into a more balanced situation. It seems however that the whole trial did not lead to balance and social integration of conflictual standpoints, but to dissensus. We can think of other court cases that in similar ways appear to be dissensus rituals such as the US OJ Simpson trial as James Carey has suggested. A dissensus ritual does not (at least not immediately) lead to social integration but to a focus of the public on the existence of social crises and the escalation of such crisis. Relevant questions in this sense are: Does the trial and its verdict have any bearing on establishing, expressing and clarifying the new secularist order in this country? How are religious arguments viewed and how do religious group adjust to secular language in order to defend their claims? The other thing is how secularism plays a role here. The freedom of speech is a secular freedom, but how is it politically used by groups to mobilise people and legitimate their political actions? What does the politicization of the freedom of speech mean and what disciplining aspects play a role? And how does all of this more specific to (debates about) Islam in society? A next issue pertains to ‘group’ (a category used in the complaints). A group is not a thing in and of itself, groups are created for example by speaking about offending a ‘religious group’. The group is constructed on the basis of adherence to a religion, notwithstanding the fact that many people who filed complaints are not Muslim or religious at all. How does the notion of freedom of speech play a role in construction of a group as a coherent, cleary defined category of people?

The distinction between integration rituals and dissensus rituals however is not that strong as anthropologists have shown over and over again. Relegating the conflict between Wilders’ PVV and its supporters on the one hand and Muslims and anti-racism organisations on the other hand, and the state supposedly somewhere in the middle, decreases the conflictual aspects. It confirms that the natural order of how conflicts should be solved in this country is either by trial or by political debate. As such it establishes and reinforces a hierarchical order of how people should respond to the world. This order is not the same as years ago. In the 1990s Janmaat, a right wing leader, was convicted for wanting to abolish multicultural society; nowadays many people feel that conviction was wrong and, moreover, mainstream politicians have declared the failure of multiculturalism over and over again.

When rituals can establish a hierarchical order, power comes into play of course. As Friedman makes clear that not everyone has equal power in deciding what particular words mean. Wilders claims that his freedom his attacked by the trial; for the people who started the trial with their complaints (Muslims and non-Muslims) it is a strategy to have a stronger position in the negotiations over what is  allowed in contemporary society and what is not. For Wilders it is a (forced) attempt to remain master over his own words. Ultimately, as Friedman also makes clear, it is the state who decides in the trial. The fact that many, even those opposing Wilders, deplored that Muslims and others went to trial (and forced the state to do this) is very interesting in this regard. For some it is about warding off the power of the state for others it is concerning that Muslims can actually have power by exercising their rights or by what has been a called a ‘legal jihad‘. And I think here we encounter a problem with the trial against Wilders. The state has shown a reluctant attitude in this trial; first by not wanting to go to trial at all and second (after being forced to go to trial) by seeking acquittal on all charges. It is as if there is a ritual going on but one of the performers is reluctantly playing its part in the performance. This is detrimental for the function of the ritual in many ways. To name a few, it could give people the impression that, according to the state, politicians (such as Wilders) are above the law. It could also give migrants and Muslims (not for the first time) the impression that the state doesn’t really care about protecting them against hate speech and discrimination.

Look for example at the reactions of Moroccan and Muslims spokespersons after the acquittal of Wilders today:

Farid Azarkan of the SMN association of Moroccans in the Netherlands said he feared the acquittal could further split Dutch society and encourage others to repeat Wilders’ comments.

“You see that people feel more and more supported in saying that minorities are good for nothing,” Azarkan said.

“Wilders has said very extreme things about Muslims and Moroccans, so when will it ever stop? Some will feel this as a sort of support for what they feel and as justification.”

Minorities groups said they would now take the case to the United Nations Human Rights Committee, arguing the ruling meant the Netherlands had failed to protect ethnic minorities from discrimination.

“The acquittal means that the right of minorities to remain free of hate speech has been breached. We are going to claim our rights at the U.N.,” said Mohamed Rabbae of the National Council for Moroccans.

This in particular important because there seems to be a double standard at work here. When the Muhammad cartoons affair occurred a few years ago the Belgian Arab-European League (AEL) came up with cartoons that, for example, depicted Adolf Hitler and Anne Frank in bed together. They wanted to show the double standard that was being applied according to them with regard to cartoons referring to Islam and those referring to the Holocaust and the Jews. According to the appellate court however they (after initially a lower court saw no problem in the cartoons)the cartoons were more grieving than necessary for the public debate over the issue of double standards and they had to pay a fine. Unlike the Wilders trial the AEL trial wasn’t a major public and political event and (given the appeal) the prosecutor did its job. It appears that the current debates are so limitless and the behaviour of politicians and opinion leaders in the debate about Muslims and Islam is so blunt to the say the least, without anyone having enough authority among all parties to set some boundaries, that going to court is indeed the only way left to establish some limits. It is clear that the public prosecutor has an important role in that but the way it has operated here may even lead to even less authority for them.

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Open Brief – Geen innovatie zonder wetenschap

Posted on June 20th, 2011 by martijn.
Categories: anthropology, Guest authors, Headline, State of Science.

Guest Authors:
Peter-Paul Verbeek
Appy Sluijs
Beatrice de Graaf

Topteams

In de komende maanden worden cruciale politieke besluiten genomen over de toekomst van het wetenschappelijk onderzoek in Nederland. Nederland lijdt aan een zogeheten innovatieparadox: er wordt veel wetenschappelijk onderzoek gedaan, maar dat creëert onvoldoende economische kansen. Er zijn daarom negen ‘topteams’ gevormd die binnen negen ‘topsectoren’ plannen ontwikkelen om wetenschappelijk onderzoek en innovatie beter op elkaar te laten aansluiten. Komende week presenteren deze teams hun plannen aan de bewindspersonen.

Innovatieparadox

Volgens het Nederlands Observatorium van Wetenschap en Technologie (NOWT) is één van de oorzaken van de innovatieparadox de achterblijvende samenwerking van Nederlandse innovatieve bedrijven met universiteiten en onderzoeksinstellingen. Het valt dan ook te prijzen dat de regering deze situatie wil verbeteren. Maar daarbij mag niet vergeten worden dat fundamenteel wetenschappelijk onderzoek in veel gevallen de motor achter innovatie is.

Antropologisch onderzoek naar kannibalisme in Papoea Nieuw Guinea leidde bijvoorbeeld tot de ontdekking van de prionziektes (Nobelprijs 1976 en 1997), waartoe ook de gekkekoeienziekte behoort. Onderzoek naar atoomkernspinresonantie wordt tegenwoordig gebruikt in MRI’s. Taalkundig onderzoek leidde tot automatische spraakherkenners. Onderzoek naar magnetische lagen leverde nu onmisbare hardware voor computers op. Zulk onderzoek verbetert de kwaliteit van leven en onze materiële mogelijkheden. Stuk voor stuk laten deze voorbeelden zien dat innovaties doorgaans op onvoorspelbare manieren ontstaan uit fundamenteel wetenschappelijk onderzoek. In de huidige plannen zou een aanzienlijk deel van de budgetten van de twee belangrijkste spelers in het fundamentele onderzoek in Nederland – de Nederlandse organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek (NWO), en de Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen (KNAW) – moeten worden besteed binnen de negen aangewezen gebieden. Gegeven het belang van het fundamenteel wetenschappelijk onderzoek is het cruciaal dat deze operatie met grote zorg wordt uitgevoerd.

Excellente output door wetenschap

Volgens het NOWT presteren wetenschappers in Nederland excellent op output in publicaties (2e in de wereld) en op impact van die publicaties (4e in de wereld). Dat is overigens vooral het gevolg van investeringen in het verleden. Ruimte om het budget verder af te romen is er niet: nu al besteedt de Nederlandse staat slechts 0.8% van het BNP aan wetenschap, flink minder dan andere westerse landen, en aanzienlijk lager dan het in de EU afgesproken streefcijfer. De geplande verschuiving van budgetten van fundamenteel naar toepassingsgericht onderzoek betekent dat we een kwalitatief zeer goed systeem (wetenschap) aantasten in een poging een minder goed werkend systeem (innovatie) te verbeteren. Dat kan geen goede ontwikkeling zijn voor een land dat wil opklimmen in de ranglijst van kenniseconomieën.

Wat is dan wel nodig voor structureel succesvolle innovatie?

De basis is het creëren en in stand houden van een vruchtbare voedingsbodem. Dat begint bij creativiteit, durf en een onderzoekende geest: eigenschappen die bij uitstek worden getraind door de uitdaging van fundamenteel toponderzoek. Ten tweede dient het beleid zich op de juiste tijdschaal te richten. Er zitten doorgaans tientallen jaren tussen een doorbraak in onderzoek en de maatschappelijke en/of economische impact daarvan. En dus moeten er structureel langetermijninvesteringen gedaan worden in fundamenteel onderzoek. Ten derde is er breedte nodig. Het is onvoorspelbaar uit welke velden belangrijke innovaties zullen komen, zoals duidelijk werd uit bovengenoemde voorbeelden. Die breedte strekt zich nadrukkelijk uit tot sociaalwetenschappelijk en geesteswetenschappelijk onderzoek. Innovatie betaalt zich niet alleen uit in direct economisch nut, maar ook in indirect kapitaal, zoals sociaal-maatschappelijke, juridische of culturele vooruitgang.

Creëren van vruchtbare koppelingen tussen wetenschap en bedrijfsleven

De oplossing voor de innovatieparadox ligt daarom niet in het eenzijdig overhevelen van middelen van fundamenteel naar toepassingsgericht onderzoek, maar in het creëren van vruchtbare koppelingen tussen wetenschap en bedrijfsleven. Dat kan op twee manieren. Allereerst zou een deel van de gelden voor de topsectoren geoormerkt moeten worden voor fundamenteel onderzoek, gekoppeld aan de domeinen van de topsectoren en onder auspiciën van NWO en KNAW. Zo blijft er een dynamische en vruchtbare poule van wetenschappelijk onderzoek bestaan, die misschien niet onmiddellijk ‘nuttig’ is, maar wel een onuitputtelijke bron voor innovatie blijft. Bovendien kunnen we alleen op die manier (buitenlands) talent werven en vasthouden.

Ten tweede is het van belang dat het bedrijfsleven zélf investeert in innovatie. De cijfers van het NOWT laten zien dat het bedrijfsleven slechts 1.0% van het BNP investeert in Research and Development (R&D). Volgens de Europese norm zou deze investering twee keer zo hoog moeten zijn – sterke economieën blijken nog veel meer te investeren om concurrerend te zijn. Er zijn overigens uitzonderingen: het Nederlandse hightech bedrijf ASML investeert bijvoorbeeld jaarlijks zo’n 500 miljoen euro in R&D en verdient hier goed aan. ASML valt binnen een Topsector, zoals veel andere bedrijven waarvan de R&D investeringen prima op peil zijn. Dit roept de vraag op of extra overheidsgelden in deze gevallen nodig zijn en tot meer innovatie zullen leiden. Misschien belemmeren zulke gelden juist private investeringen in R&D.

Creatief en innovatief onderzoekstalent, bottom up faciliteren

Creatief en innovatief onderzoekstalent kan het beste bottom up gefaciliteerd worden, en niet top down georganiseerd. Dat is te realiseren door een substantieel deel van de innovatiegelden te oormerken voor fundamenteel onderzoek in de topsectoren. Via open competitie moet dit budget worden geïnvesteerd in de beste mensen met de beste ideeën. Daarnaast moet de overheid bedrijven stimuleren om te investeren in R&D, daarbij nauwe samenwerking zoekend met universiteiten en kennisinstituten. Innovatie drijft op goede ideeën van talentvolle individuen in vruchtbare samenwerkingsverbanden. Laat dat talent niet verloren gaan. De Jonge Akademie staat klaar om mee te denken over verdere beleidsontwikkeling.

Namens De Jonge Akademie

Peter-Paul Verbeek
Appy Sluijs
Beatrice de Graaf

De auteurs zijn lid van De Jonge Akademie en hebben dit stuk geschreven namens De Jonge Akademie, een zelfstandig onderdeel van de Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen. De Jonge Akademie is een dynamisch en innovatief platform van jonge topwetenschappers, werkzaam bij Nederlandse universiteiten en onderzoeksinstituten, die samen een breed spectrum van wetenschappelijke disciplines vertegenwoordigen en een visie uitdragen op wetenschap en wetenschapsbeleid.

Over Papoea Nieuw Guinea, kannibalisme en prion-ziektes zie:

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Lees hier de review ‘Understanding Kuru’ The contribution of anthropology and medicine door Shirley Lindenbaum

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“V for Vendetta”: The Other Face of Egypt’s Youth Movement

Posted on June 3rd, 2011 by martijn.
Categories: Guest authors, Headline, Society & Politics in the Middle East, Youth culture (as a practice).

Guest Author: Linda Herrera

“Beneath this mask there is more than flesh. Beneath this mask there is an idea […] and ideas are bulletproof.” – From the film V for Vendetta

Image from Google ImagesIn the summer of 2010 the youth of Facebook, “shebab al-Facebook,” began a campaign of peaceful civil disobedience through the Arabic “We are all Khaled Said” Facebook Fan Page. The success of their “silent stands” throughout the country gave youth a media friendly face as a group that espouses peaceful non-violent forms of civil disobedience to confront oppression and tyranny. The inspiration for the peaceful side of the movement was derived from divergent sources. Analysts writing in the western press were keen to point out the influence from celebrated figures and icons of nonviolence like Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and Gene Sharp and the human rights orientation of the cause. [1] The reputation the youth garnered as deft in nonviolent civil disobedience was well deserved and the silent stands were a feat of group solidarity, DIY youth activism, and the art of on-line to off-line mobilization. [2] But in actuality the youth movement has moved on multiple fronts and employed diverse strategies. The page itself vacillates between using bellicose language and images when talking about the objects of their rage — for example, the police and Interior Ministry — to instructing the community on non-violent peaceful strategies. The two approaches coexist in a symbiotic relation. On the flip side of any mask of peace is often a mask of menace.

From Google Images

The Guy Fawkes mask lifted from the comic book series and film V for Vendetta has been a staple of the page and the movement from the start. V for Vendetta enjoys cult status among certain segments of shebab al-Facebook who fall under the rubric of leftists, anarchists, Mohamed el Baradei supporters, Islamists, post-Islamists — which are by no means mutually exclusive categories. The potent imagery and eminently quotable lines from the film permeate individual Facebook pages and the “We are all Khaled Said” Facebook Fan Page as posts, threads, cartoons, video links, and wall photos.

Cartoon posted on Arabic "We are All Khaled Said" Wall on July 29, 2010. The text reads: "We seek God's aid against misery."

The film, written and directed by Andy and Larry Wachowski and adapted from the comic book characters created by Alan Moore and David Lloyd, is set in a dystopian future that is a totalitarian Britain. The story serves as a warning to governments not to push their people too far and is a reminder to people of the formidable power they possess if they know how to harness it. The antihero, V, whose name stands for vendetta, vengeance, victim, villain, victory, violence, and “vestige of the vox populi,” also denotes “veritas,” truth. V survives a personal ordeal of captivity and torture and dedicates his life to taking revenge on his captors and awakening his fellow citizens to their oppression. He uses the mass broadcast system, the state’s propaganda machinery, to transmit his message. He proclaims:

“[T]he truth is, there is something terribly wrong with this country, isn’t there? Cruelty and injustice . . . intolerance and oppression. And where once you had the freedom to object, to think and speak as you saw fit, you now have censors and systems of surveillance, coercing your conformity and soliciting your submission. How did this happen? Who’s to blame? Well certainly there are those who are more responsible than others, and they will be held accountable. But again, truth be told . . . if you’re looking for the guilty, you need only look into a mirror.”

The speech continues:

“I know why you did it. I know you were afraid. Who wouldn’t be? War. Terror. Disease. There were a myriad of problems which conspired to corrupt your reason and rob you of your common sense. Fear got the best of you and in your panic, you turned to the now High Chancellor Adam Sutler. He promised you order. He promised you peace. And all he demanded in return was your silent, obedient consent. Last night, I sought to end that silence. Last night, I destroyed the Old Bailey to remind this country of what it has forgotten. More than four hundred years ago, a great citizen [Guy Fawkes] wished to embed the fifth of November forever in our memory. His hope was to remind the world that fairness, justice and freedom are more than words — they are perspectives.”

V not only speaks the truth about the complicity of individuals in perpetuating the system, but makes them aware that they hold the power to overturn it. He declares to his fellow citizens:

“You are but a single individual. How can you possible make any difference? Individuals have no power in this modern world. That is what you’ve been taught because that is what they need you to believe. But it is not true. This is why they are afraid and the reason that I am here: to remind you that it is individuals who always hold the power. The real power. Individuals like me. And individuals like you.”

On June 14, 2010, eight days after Khaled Said’s killing at the hands of two officers, a short film, “Khaled for Vendetta,” was uploaded to YouTube with links to it on the Facebook page. A second film, “Khaled Vendetta,” followed on July 29, 2010.
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The five-minute film “Khaled for Vendetta,” written and directed by Mohamed Elm elhoda (Matrix2008 studio), masterfully draws out the parallels between the totalitarian society in V for Vendetta and Egypt under Emergency Law.

The film opens with ominous music from V for Vendetta followed by a fade in and out of Khaled’s image over a black backdrop. The shot cuts to the Peoples Assembly (Majlis al-Sha`ab) session of May 11, 2010, with the then Prime Minister, Ahmed Nazif, announcing the renewal of Emergency Law for two more years. He declares it will be used only to confront drugs and terrorism. Members of parliament applaud. The words “drugs and terrorism” are repeated over and over.

V sets down the first domino.

The next scene opens with a homemade film of a smiling Khaled in what appears to be his bedroom, followed by the now infamous photo taken at the morgue of his mangled face. A text states that Khaled Said was beaten by two plainclothes police under the auspices of the Emergency Law.

The masked man stacks more dominos.

The shot moves to a scene from the original film, a conversation between two police investigators about how everything is connected:

Finch: I suddenly had this feeling that everything was connected. It was like I could see the whole thing; one long chain of events that stretched back […]. I felt like I could see everything that had happened, and everything that was going to happen. It was like a perfect pattern laid out in front of me and I realized that we were all part of it, and all trapped by it.

Dominic: So do you know what’s gonna happen?

Finch: No. It was a feeling. But I can guess. With so much chaos, someone will do something stupid. And when they do, things will turn nasty. And then, Sutler [the leader] will be forced do the only thing he knows how to do. At which point, all V needs to do is keep his word. And then . . .

In the meantime V is setting up an elaborate pattern of dominos in the shape of an encircled “V.” He flicks the first domino and it sets off scenes of violence, chaos, destruction, fire, protests, shouting, upheaval.

The film ends with two still images. The first is of police in disproportionate numbers surrounding a small group of demonstrators. The second and final image is of the people outnumbering and surrounding the police. This closing image no doubt conveys the famous dictum from the film, “People should not be afraid of their governments. Governments should be afraid of their people.”

In June of 2010, after the film was uploaded, a handful of viewers posted comments which are revealing of the movement within a movement.

“Brilliant video . . . Maybe Dr.El Baradei will be our “v” here in Egypt to save? us . . . I recommend this movie for everyone, it is like a mirror to the current situation here in Egypt . . . God bless you”

“Beneath this mask there is more? than flesh. Beneath this mask there is an idea, Mr. Adly, and ideas are bulletproof.”

“It brought the tears to my eyes? I can see it all coming soon isa? [inshaallah] it’s not khaled for vendetta anymore . . . it’s? Egypt for vendetta thnx mohamed for that awesome video”

With the fall of Tunisian President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali on January 14, 2011, an image that immediately started circulating on Facebook was that of a masked man in the foreground of Tunisia’s flag. As Egyptians prepared for their own revolution, the simple image of the masked V made the rounds.

Image posted on Facebook

The appearance of this mask signaled that shebab al-Facebook were becoming restless. Their strategy of silence, even a deafening silence, was perceived as no longer enough to achieve the kind of political change they anxiously desired. And change they got.

In this post-revolution, post-Mubarak period, the mask and spirit of V have been more of less dormant. If events take a turn for the worse, if the crackdown from the military becomes unbearable or a dreaded counterrevolution occurs, V may very well resurface. But for now this seems unlikely, as youth are working in coalitions to develop civil political strategies to meet the changing circumstances. They are making some inroads as they press for democratic change, for working towards the realization of a society that affords people dignity and livelihoods. Yet so much remains unclear. What is certain is that the idea for change has been firmly planted and cannot be eradicated. Ideas after all, as V proclaims, are bulletproof. The struggle continues.

[1] See, for instance, articles about the influence of Gene Sharp in the revolution and articles about the Arabic translation of a comic book about Martin Luther King and strategies of non violence.

[2] For more on the silent stands see the excellent articles by Nadine Wahab and Adel Iskandar.

Linda Herrera is a social anthropologist with expertise in comparative and international education. She has lived in Egypt and conducted research on youth cultures and educational change in Egypt and the wider Middle East for over two decades. She is currently Associate Professor, Department of Education Policy, Organization and Leadership, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is co-editor with A. Bayat of the volume Being Young and Muslim: New Cultural Politics in the Global North and South, published by Oxford University Press (2010).

This is article also appears on Jadaliyya.com. Other articles by Linda Herrera on Closer are:
Two Faces of Revolution
Egypt’s Revolution 2.0 – The Facebook Factor

1 comment.

"V for Vendetta": The Other Face of Egypt's Youth Movement

Posted on June 3rd, 2011 by martijn.
Categories: Guest authors, Headline, Society & Politics in the Middle East, Youth culture (as a practice).

Guest Author: Linda Herrera

“Beneath this mask there is more than flesh. Beneath this mask there is an idea […] and ideas are bulletproof.” – From the film V for Vendetta

Image from Google ImagesIn the summer of 2010 the youth of Facebook, “shebab al-Facebook,” began a campaign of peaceful civil disobedience through the Arabic “We are all Khaled Said” Facebook Fan Page. The success of their “silent stands” throughout the country gave youth a media friendly face as a group that espouses peaceful non-violent forms of civil disobedience to confront oppression and tyranny. The inspiration for the peaceful side of the movement was derived from divergent sources. Analysts writing in the western press were keen to point out the influence from celebrated figures and icons of nonviolence like Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and Gene Sharp and the human rights orientation of the cause. [1] The reputation the youth garnered as deft in nonviolent civil disobedience was well deserved and the silent stands were a feat of group solidarity, DIY youth activism, and the art of on-line to off-line mobilization. [2] But in actuality the youth movement has moved on multiple fronts and employed diverse strategies. The page itself vacillates between using bellicose language and images when talking about the objects of their rage — for example, the police and Interior Ministry — to instructing the community on non-violent peaceful strategies. The two approaches coexist in a symbiotic relation. On the flip side of any mask of peace is often a mask of menace.

From Google Images

The Guy Fawkes mask lifted from the comic book series and film V for Vendetta has been a staple of the page and the movement from the start. V for Vendetta enjoys cult status among certain segments of shebab al-Facebook who fall under the rubric of leftists, anarchists, Mohamed el Baradei supporters, Islamists, post-Islamists — which are by no means mutually exclusive categories. The potent imagery and eminently quotable lines from the film permeate individual Facebook pages and the “We are all Khaled Said” Facebook Fan Page as posts, threads, cartoons, video links, and wall photos.

Cartoon posted on Arabic "We are All Khaled Said" Wall on July 29, 2010. The text reads: "We seek God's aid against misery."

The film, written and directed by Andy and Larry Wachowski and adapted from the comic book characters created by Alan Moore and David Lloyd, is set in a dystopian future that is a totalitarian Britain. The story serves as a warning to governments not to push their people too far and is a reminder to people of the formidable power they possess if they know how to harness it. The antihero, V, whose name stands for vendetta, vengeance, victim, villain, victory, violence, and “vestige of the vox populi,” also denotes “veritas,” truth. V survives a personal ordeal of captivity and torture and dedicates his life to taking revenge on his captors and awakening his fellow citizens to their oppression. He uses the mass broadcast system, the state’s propaganda machinery, to transmit his message. He proclaims:

“[T]he truth is, there is something terribly wrong with this country, isn’t there? Cruelty and injustice . . . intolerance and oppression. And where once you had the freedom to object, to think and speak as you saw fit, you now have censors and systems of surveillance, coercing your conformity and soliciting your submission. How did this happen? Who’s to blame? Well certainly there are those who are more responsible than others, and they will be held accountable. But again, truth be told . . . if you’re looking for the guilty, you need only look into a mirror.”

The speech continues:

“I know why you did it. I know you were afraid. Who wouldn’t be? War. Terror. Disease. There were a myriad of problems which conspired to corrupt your reason and rob you of your common sense. Fear got the best of you and in your panic, you turned to the now High Chancellor Adam Sutler. He promised you order. He promised you peace. And all he demanded in return was your silent, obedient consent. Last night, I sought to end that silence. Last night, I destroyed the Old Bailey to remind this country of what it has forgotten. More than four hundred years ago, a great citizen [Guy Fawkes] wished to embed the fifth of November forever in our memory. His hope was to remind the world that fairness, justice and freedom are more than words — they are perspectives.”

V not only speaks the truth about the complicity of individuals in perpetuating the system, but makes them aware that they hold the power to overturn it. He declares to his fellow citizens:

“You are but a single individual. How can you possible make any difference? Individuals have no power in this modern world. That is what you’ve been taught because that is what they need you to believe. But it is not true. This is why they are afraid and the reason that I am here: to remind you that it is individuals who always hold the power. The real power. Individuals like me. And individuals like you.”

On June 14, 2010, eight days after Khaled Said’s killing at the hands of two officers, a short film, “Khaled for Vendetta,” was uploaded to YouTube with links to it on the Facebook page. A second film, “Khaled Vendetta,” followed on July 29, 2010.
You need to a flashplayer enabled browser to view this YouTube video
The five-minute film “Khaled for Vendetta,” written and directed by Mohamed Elm elhoda (Matrix2008 studio), masterfully draws out the parallels between the totalitarian society in V for Vendetta and Egypt under Emergency Law.

The film opens with ominous music from V for Vendetta followed by a fade in and out of Khaled’s image over a black backdrop. The shot cuts to the Peoples Assembly (Majlis al-Sha`ab) session of May 11, 2010, with the then Prime Minister, Ahmed Nazif, announcing the renewal of Emergency Law for two more years. He declares it will be used only to confront drugs and terrorism. Members of parliament applaud. The words “drugs and terrorism” are repeated over and over.

V sets down the first domino.

The next scene opens with a homemade film of a smiling Khaled in what appears to be his bedroom, followed by the now infamous photo taken at the morgue of his mangled face. A text states that Khaled Said was beaten by two plainclothes police under the auspices of the Emergency Law.

The masked man stacks more dominos.

The shot moves to a scene from the original film, a conversation between two police investigators about how everything is connected:

Finch: I suddenly had this feeling that everything was connected. It was like I could see the whole thing; one long chain of events that stretched back […]. I felt like I could see everything that had happened, and everything that was going to happen. It was like a perfect pattern laid out in front of me and I realized that we were all part of it, and all trapped by it.

Dominic: So do you know what’s gonna happen?

Finch: No. It was a feeling. But I can guess. With so much chaos, someone will do something stupid. And when they do, things will turn nasty. And then, Sutler [the leader] will be forced do the only thing he knows how to do. At which point, all V needs to do is keep his word. And then . . .

In the meantime V is setting up an elaborate pattern of dominos in the shape of an encircled “V.” He flicks the first domino and it sets off scenes of violence, chaos, destruction, fire, protests, shouting, upheaval.

The film ends with two still images. The first is of police in disproportionate numbers surrounding a small group of demonstrators. The second and final image is of the people outnumbering and surrounding the police. This closing image no doubt conveys the famous dictum from the film, “People should not be afraid of their governments. Governments should be afraid of their people.”

In June of 2010, after the film was uploaded, a handful of viewers posted comments which are revealing of the movement within a movement.

“Brilliant video . . . Maybe Dr.El Baradei will be our “v” here in Egypt to save? us . . . I recommend this movie for everyone, it is like a mirror to the current situation here in Egypt . . . God bless you”

“Beneath this mask there is more? than flesh. Beneath this mask there is an idea, Mr. Adly, and ideas are bulletproof.”

“It brought the tears to my eyes? I can see it all coming soon isa? [inshaallah] it’s not khaled for vendetta anymore . . . it’s? Egypt for vendetta thnx mohamed for that awesome video”

With the fall of Tunisian President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali on January 14, 2011, an image that immediately started circulating on Facebook was that of a masked man in the foreground of Tunisia’s flag. As Egyptians prepared for their own revolution, the simple image of the masked V made the rounds.

Image posted on Facebook

The appearance of this mask signaled that shebab al-Facebook were becoming restless. Their strategy of silence, even a deafening silence, was perceived as no longer enough to achieve the kind of political change they anxiously desired. And change they got.

In this post-revolution, post-Mubarak period, the mask and spirit of V have been more of less dormant. If events take a turn for the worse, if the crackdown from the military becomes unbearable or a dreaded counterrevolution occurs, V may very well resurface. But for now this seems unlikely, as youth are working in coalitions to develop civil political strategies to meet the changing circumstances. They are making some inroads as they press for democratic change, for working towards the realization of a society that affords people dignity and livelihoods. Yet so much remains unclear. What is certain is that the idea for change has been firmly planted and cannot be eradicated. Ideas after all, as V proclaims, are bulletproof. The struggle continues.

[1] See, for instance, articles about the influence of Gene Sharp in the revolution and articles about the Arabic translation of a comic book about Martin Luther King and strategies of non violence.

[2] For more on the silent stands see the excellent articles by Nadine Wahab and Adel Iskandar.

Linda Herrera is a social anthropologist with expertise in comparative and international education. She has lived in Egypt and conducted research on youth cultures and educational change in Egypt and the wider Middle East for over two decades. She is currently Associate Professor, Department of Education Policy, Organization and Leadership, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is co-editor with A. Bayat of the volume Being Young and Muslim: New Cultural Politics in the Global North and South, published by Oxford University Press (2010).

This is article also appears on Jadaliyya.com. Other articles by Linda Herrera on Closer are:
Two Faces of Revolution
Egypt’s Revolution 2.0 – The Facebook Factor

1 comment.

Diyanet in Turkey and the Netherlands – Transnational politics and politicization of research

Posted on May 10th, 2011 by martijn.
Categories: anthropology, Headline, Multiculti Issues, Society & Politics in the Middle East.

Guest Author: Thijl Sunier

Do you agree that foreign governments should not intervene in matters of integration, or interfere with the religious life of people in the Netherlands?”
“If this still happens, do you agree that this is counterproductive to integration [of Muslims]?

These questions were posed by liberal MP’s in the Dutch Parliament to the government in February this year following the publication of the research report Diyanet. The Turkish Directorate of Religious Affairs in a changing Environment that I wrote together with colleagues from the Netherlands and Turkey. The Diyanet is a state institution that regulates the mosques in Turkey and a considerable number of Turkish mosques in Europe.

The time that researchers could pretend to work in an academic bubble is definitively over, if it ever existed. It is common knowledge that research results especially those dealing with culture are not just blind data that simply ‘add to our knowledge’. Cultural data are the result of a multilayered process of communication and rhetorical technique. We also know that the conditions under which social scientists carry out research are inextricably linked to political conditions. Data are not ‘neutral’ packages of knowledge up for grasp. They play a role in political processes and they are always part of specific power configuration. Scientific knowledge is socially situated.
It is also common knowledge that the political sensitivity of research on Muslims and Islam in Europe has become particularly critical in the last decade. Doing research in the post 9/11 political climate about issues such as the place of Islam in European societies is caught up in a complex political and social web of opposing requirements and assumptions. The presence of Muslims in Europe has become first and foremost an issue of either integration policy, or security, or both. This has not only determined research agendas, but it has also made outcomes multi-interpretable almost by definition. Researchers on issues such as the application of sharia practices in family legislation in Europe, the different outlooks and convictions of young Muslims, the religious affiliations of women, or even innocent topics such as regulations for Islamic elderly people, cannot ignore the fact that their results bear a high political sensitivity.

Both integration and security have become social engineering industries with their own assumptions and trajectories. Governments and policy makers, providers of research money increasingly ask for ‘hard facts’ about the presence of Muslims. There is of course an abundance of (mainly quantitative) research output that is completely geared towards the policy requirements of the day. Researchers produce readymade data that can be applied instantaneously.
But there are also an important number of scholars that carry out research with a broader scope. Their results cannot so easily be applied to policy development, or, even more importantly, the outcomes are not at all unambiguous. Their research agenda reflect academic debates, theoretical and thematic inquiries, and socially and politically relevant problematic. When the results of such research are published the authors can be brought in awkward positions because the interpretation and hence the implications of the results can be diverted in all different directions completely beyond their control. Discussions may arise about issues that are only loosely related to the topic of the research and so on.

Our research project was commissioned by the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The main question to be answered was to what extent the coming to power of the moderate Islamic Party for Justice and Development in Turkey (AKP) in 2003 has caused a policy shift towards the aforementioned Directorate of Religious Affairs (Diyanet). The relevance of this question arises from the central role Diyanet plays in shaping and organizing Islam, both in Turkey and in Europe. The Diyanet was founded in 1924 by the new Turkish republic as an institute that resorted directly under the prime minister’s office. The first aim of Diyanet was to control religious life in Turkey, a state that had applied a radical secularist policy. Secondly Diyanet had the task to facilitate religious life, to train priests and to issue religious educational material. Although the organization is officially meant for all religious denominations present within the borders of Turkey, the actual fact that over 75% of the Turkish population is of Sunni Islamic background means that Diyanet is de facto a Sunni institute. Since the new Constitution of 1982 Diyanet has adopted the additional task to protect and endorse Turkish national identity.
This makes Diyanet into a pivot in the debate about the separation of religion and state in Turkey and the freedom of religion. Diyanet was primarily designed to control Islam and to prevent Islamic teaching and practice that was not monitored by Diyanet. To what extent is the strong control on religious practices at odds with the freedom of religion and to what extent does the set-up of Diyanet guarantee the religious freedom of other than Sunni Islamic religious groups in Turkish society?
Since 1982 Diyanet operates in Europe, notably in the Netherlands. They facilitate the opening and organization of mosques and the practicing of Islamic duties. They have an arrangement with the Dutch government to send imams who are trained in Turkey for a period of four years to their mosques. Unlike Turkey Diyanet has no monopoly position with regard to religious services in the Netherlands, but they outnumber other religious organizations. An adequate assessment of its position and the possible changes in this position is relevant for European governments and their representatives in Turkey because it may influence the position of Turkish immigrants in Europe. The activities of Diyanet in European host countries and its close connection with the Turkish state is common practice for over 25 years.
In 2003 the AK Party in Turkey obtained an absolute majority during national elections. The AK party has a moderate Islamic agenda and is supported by the emerging internationally oriented but conservative urban middle class. Since Diyanet resorts directly under the prime minister, the question arises whether AKP has influenced the traditional functions of Diyanet with regard to Islam. This is not only relevant in order to understand the position of Diyanet, but also because it touches on the present debate about the future membership of Turkey of the EU and to what extent Turkey meets the ‘Copenhagen criteria’ with respect to the freedom of religion.

The initial motivation to commission this research was related to worries on the part of the Dutch government that the AKP would undermine the secular principles of the Turkish republic and subsequently exert an influence on the mosques in the Netherlands that resort under the Diyanet. Instead of sticking to the formal question about the possible influence of the AKP on the agenda of Diyanet, as good academics we broadened up the question arguing that the growth of the AKP as the most powerful political force in Turkey in the 2000s and consequently the possible changes in the position of Diyanet, should be understood against the background of much more fundamental transformations of Turkish society. Since the 1980s Turkey has witnessed not only the emergence of a successful new urban middle class, but also the gradual growth of a civil society. This has brought Islam into the center of the political debate. One of the most remarkable and, according to some, paradoxical developments is the fact that the political and social forces that made Islam into a pivotal political issue are the same that require Turkey to open up to the world, to democratize and to break down the strong position of the state. So what we have observed in Turkey is a very complex transformation in which some of the traditional political and social dividing lines are put upside down. These transformations are so fundamental that they can hardly be turned reverse anymore even if the present AKP government tends to exhibit some of the nasty statist and authoritarian practices so typical of many of the Turkish governments of the past.
With respect to the situation in the Netherlands we have observed a gradual detachment of mosques organizations from the countries of origin, a process that is taking place since the 1980s. They develop their own agenda despite the fact that they are part of a formal juridical top-down structure. As in the case of Turkey, such developments can only be understood if we place short term research results into long-term social, cultural and political contexts. In short, the outcomes of our research were consistent with the long term developments just sketched, but it did not reveal sudden changes, dramatic developments or breaches in long term trends. In fact the outcomes were nuanced, multidimensional and in many respects poly interpretable. This made the report an ambiguous project.

Our research took place in a very sensitive context. The research was commissioned by the Dutch government dealing with a state bureaucracy of another country. The outcomes are relevant for the discussion about Turkey possible EU membership. What would this membership imply for expected opening up of the border? How should the Netherlands position itself in the debate about the identity of Europe? On the domestic level the issues raised in the report are relevant for the debate on integration and the position of Muslims in the country. In the 1980s the sending of Diyanet imams was welcomed because it would constitute a barrier against radicalism among Muslims. Today the same practice is depicted as unacceptable foreign influence exerted on domestic affairs and an obstacle against integration. The questions in the Parliament with which I started indicate clearly this remarkable political change. The sensitivity of Islam in the Netherlands is further stirred up by the anti-Islamic rhetoric of the right-wing party led by the populist Geert Wilders. There was even a strong rumor that the ministry of foreign affairs wanted to postpone the publication until after the regional elections on the 2nd of March 2011. Some feared that the issue of the ‘long arm of Ankara’ would be used by Wilders to depict the presence of Muslims as a fifth column and to gain electoral benefit.
Also the very strong political polarization among Turks, both in Turkey and in Europe made the outcomes contested. During a public debate in Amsterdam some secular Turks accused us of being too credulous, even naïve by interviewing and citing officials of Diyanet. According to some representatives of organized Islam the report did not pay enough attention to the diversity, debates and contestations among Muslims in the Netherlands.

It is hard to predict what the implications of the report will be. The media attention prior to the publication of the report was considerable, but very moderate and piecemeal afterwards. The editorial office of the main Dutch television news desk mailed us almost weekly to ask when the report would be published. But once it was published they decided that it was not dramatic enough for a news item. And eventually the timing is crucial but completely beyond one’s control: the amazing and dramatic developments in North Africa turned our report (and quite understandably so) into a footnote….!!

Thijl Sunier is VISOR chair Islam in European societies at VU University Amsterdam, Dept. Of Social and Cultural Anthropology. He conducted research on inter-ethnic relations, Turkish youth and Turkish Islamic organisations in the Netherlands, comparative research among Turkish youth in France, Germany, Great Britain and the Netherlands, and international comparative research on nation building and multiculturalism in France and The Netherlands. Presently he is preparing research on styles of popular religiosity among young Muslims in Europe, religious leadership, and nation-building and Islam in Europe.

The research on Diyanet was done by Thijl Sunier, Nico Landman, Heleen van der Linden, Nazl? Bilgili and Alper Bilgili

1 comment.

Oman – State, Tribes and Revolution

Posted on March 31st, 2011 by martijn.
Categories: Guest authors, Headline, Society & Politics in the Middle East.

Guest Author: Corien Hoek

Tribalism
Although Oman normally appears to be a very quiet country the spirit of the revolutions seemed to have reached this country a few weeks ago, putting it at the center of attention in the Netherlands because of a scheduled visit of the Dutch queen at that time. In this media attention a lot of time and effort was devoted to explain that Oman is a tribal society. “Tribal societies lead to civil war when the central authority declines. Tribal leaders become war lords who seize power and tribal wars are imminent. Thus there is little hope that these societies will be successful in transforming their institutions, once they have ousted their dictator.” This bogy dooms large in the media and blur our understanding of the current uprisings when the revolutions and concomitant transformations are discussed that take place in the Middle East. However if one looks at these societies from an anthropological perspective a different image of this social phenomenon, not typical for Middle Eastern societies alone, may arise. Based upon my research in Oman, I will show that in this country, state and nation building over a long period of time has thoroughly transformed the tribal organization even though tribes still constitute the back-bone of society at grass-roots level.  These social formations have an important integrative function, whereby seeking consensus, and negotiating with representatives from all groups concerned are well-proofed methods and conditions for the success of authority and stability within and between the tribes. Moreover equality of the families, their leaders and the members is a guiding principle, in which the Islam has its role too.

Oman: A Confederacy of Tribes
Oman enjoys one of the longest statehoods in the Arab world, only rivaled by Egypt. The state is based on the tribal organisation, which the Arabs brought into the country about two millennia ago. However, in the course of time the state transformed from a confederacy of semi-autonomous tribes headed by the supra-tribal ruler to a nation state with a national government, laws, judicial powers and civil services. State formation has been the important factor in diminishing the power and significance of the tribal system.

The tribe in Oman is made up of clans or factions (fakhdh, pl. fukhudh) which are groups of people bound to each other by obligations deriving from their common descent. While the family is the minimal descent group, the clan represents the intermediate level and the tribe is the maximal descent group with a sense of corporate responsibility and solidarity (asabiya). Members of this kinship system acknowledge a common forebear, whether fictitious or real, who gives them their identity and often the common name. The tribal system is patrilineal and hierarchical even though the leaders (shaykh pl. shuyukh and rashid pl. rushada) elected from specific lineage groups at the various levels, are seen as more equal among equals. The tribe is agnatic endogamous (marriage within patriline c.q. tribe) through the preference of eligible parallel cousin partners. Tribes used to organize their own authority and judicial power through councils (majalis, sing. majlis) and religious courts (al-qada` al-shar`i) on the basis of consensus building and negotiations by representatives of various groups. Thus they functioned as relative autonomous social formations.

Tribes would form regional confederations through alliances with other tribes for example in contiguous areas. The hierarchical organisation of confederations of tribes throughout the country used to determine the national power balance. National leaders in Oman, whether religious or secular, were elected from core tribes, resident in certain areas in the interior provinces of Oman. Since 1744 the Al Bu Sa’id tribe established a ruling dynasty through hereditary succession. The present Sultan Qaboos bin Sa’id Al Sa’id is the fourteenth ruler.

Multi-resources group
Traditionally, the tribe structured territorial and economic links besides kinship and social political relations. A tribe has a distinctive territory (dar, pl. dira) which constitutes its home- and rangeland. Tribal members used to depend for their source of subsistence primarily on the natural resources of the tribal territory. This also determined in a sense their life-style. Thus in the desert and mountain areas, where water is limited, people practiced pastoral nomadism i.e. animal husbandry by natural graze of goat and camel, moving with their livestock to grazing pastures. In areas where water was available, the inhabitants cultivating dates and vegetables could lead a sedentary life in oasis settlements. Finally, people who lived close to the sea could take up fishing. In addition to these subsistence activities (other) members of the tribe were occupied with trading, craft work or other maritime activities, to supplement the income. Depending on the range of territorial lands tribes consisted entirely or dominantly of pastoral people (bedu), or sedentary people (hadhar) or comprised a large variety of occupational groups. When territories did not offer enough opportunities to make a living, members, families or factions could split off, move, or take up other occupations which offered more perspective. The tribal organisation may still consist of occupational groups related to the presence of natural resources, but modern economic activities, not directly related to natural resources, have become a dominant source of income for individual members. Employment in the government (administration, army), the oil- and other industries is pursued by the sedentary and bedouin alike.

From this perspective the tribal organization constituted a flexible, multi-resource and multi-occupational group offering the tribal members a variety of economic options when necessary. Less fortunate members, families or factions of the tribe could depend on the solidarity and common responsibility of others. This proved vital to survive in the unpredictable environment of a desert climate. Similarly on a higher level, forming coalitions between tribes, merging or even subjugation of tribes, or tribal factions, served as much the economic needs of the people, as it was induced by sheer political motivation.

State formation
Omani people converted to Islam in the seventh century. The allegiance of the Islamic community (umma) to one God provided the members of the independent tribes with a principle of social and moral integration. Under the Ibadhi doctrine, developed and professed in Iraq and Oman, the religious leader (Imam) had to be locally elected, which based the formation of the state as early as the 8th century. The religious authority for the state’s leadership was in the hands of representatives from tribes which guarded the Ibadhi principles.

The Imam was nominated and elected by a council of chiefs, while other representatives of the tribes and provinces swore allegiance to him. If the leader did not adhere to the religious principles, he either had to repent or else he could be deposed. The democratic concept of the Ibadhi leadership had parallels with the elected leadership of the tribes in Oman. The ruler depended on the allegiance of the tribes, but the physical power remained with the tribal representatives in their homelands. This gave them a position of relative independence and the possibility to restrict the ruler’s control over the region.

In the course of history the semi-autonomous tribes were integrated into one political entity under a religious power (Imamate), or under a secular power (Sultanate) at times when the religious community did not have the power to provide for the leadership. These periods were interspersed with periods when the more dominant tribes pursued their own autonomy thereby opposing central power.

Political stability as a factor for a beneficent period depended on the balance between the tribes and the national power. A ruler who was powerful enough to unite the tribes, who succeeded in securing the wealth the country derived from its strategic location in the profitable maritime trade (i.e. gaining access to the ports, thereby safeguarding a neutrality towards the commercial activities in the ports, expanding Oman’s maritime empire etc.), and who reinvested the revenues in the country’s development to secure allegiance of the tribes, opened the door to prosperity. Oman’s modern history is a repetition of a successful interplay between these main determinants, whereby the introduction of the new asset: oil, further contributed to the prosperity and stability of the country.

Present time
Since the 1970s oil revenues secure a steady income for the state. Under the rule of the present sultan and his government these revenues are continuously invested in further development of the state and the country. Existing institutions at the national level are strengthened and new ones, related to governing the nation state, added. Moreover the oil wealth is relatively equally distributed throughout the country. Roads, electricity, water, schools and hospitals have been laid out at a high speed and reach even the most remote areas and isolated hamlets.

The significance of the tribal organisation in the context of the modern nation state formation decreases. All tribes co-operate with and participate in the central state organization. Central interests transcend tribal interests. In the beginning of the rapid development process, the tribal system played its part in the distribution of state owned amenities and services throughout the country; all tribes being keen to have their share of the state owned wealth in their own territories. The government, in which tribal representatives participated, naturally underlined this principle of equal distribution, though not necessarily distributing goods only along tribal lines. At the same time representation of the tribe at the national level is losing its significance too. Whereas in the 1980s, the tribes assigned their representatives for the State Consultative Council, since 1991 members for the Consultation Council are elected by the people and represent municipalities (wilayats) rather than tribes. On its part, the government has its representation in the region such as the wali (mayor) police, army, judicial courts and local branches of ministries.

On the other hand, at the grass-roots level of Omani society the tribal organisation still plays its role in matters of kinship, affiliation and as a social network for its members. Tribal leaders often function as mediators between the members of the tribe and between members and the administrative representatives at various levels of society. The chiefs continue to take counsel with the male members of the tribe in their sabla (council hall) in their territories to discuss a wide variety of subjects relevant to the tribe, ranging from tribal history, religious and judicial matters and national and international affairs, to local and economic issues such as palm cultivation, water distribution in the oasis, trade opportunities and last but not least marriages and other family themes. Supporters, advisors and guests are always welcome to join in the sablas. In addition, kinship affiliation and -loyalty bring members informally together on social and cultural occasions such as birth, marriage, death and other celebrations. The tribe therefore is still a strong cohesive force for families and individual members whether close by or living dispersed in the country or abroad. Thus, it supports the integration of people within the region and the country at large.
The society at large however, is clearly transforming from an “ascribed” to an “achieved” society where the individual qualities and achievements gradually obtain more weight than the tribal position and personal status therein of its members. Education, mobility and the process of individualisation play their roles in this development. Individuals join affiliations other than the tribal ones such as social formations based on occupational, ethnic, religious or other identities. These have their own autonomy and integrate themselves in the society through economic, social and cultural participation, playing their role in the development process in the country.

References
Chatty, D., 1986. From Camel to Truck: The Bedouin in the Modern World, New York: Vantage.
Harik, I., 1987. ‘The Origins of the Arab State system’, in Salame, G., ed., : The Foundations of the Arab State, Volume I, London: Croom Helm.
Lancaster, W., 1988. ‘Fishing and the Coastal Communities: Indigenous economies- decline or renewal’, Journal of Oman Studies Special Report, No. 3, 485-494. Muscat.
Wilkinson, J. C., 1972a. ‘The Origins of the Omani State’, in D. Hopwood ed., The Arabian Peninsula: Society and Politics, 67-88, London: George Allan and Unwin.

Corien Hoek is board member of the Dutch Anthropology Association. She did extensive fieldwork in al Sharqiyah region in Oman and in 1998 defended her PhD “Shifting Sands, Social economic development in Al Sharqiyah region, Oman”. Besides her work on socio-economic issues in the Middle East (from an anthropological perspective) she is also board member and co-founder of the MECART Foundation (Middle Eastern Culture and Art) for the exchange of Middle Eastern art and artists and the promotion of better knowledge of the Middle Eastern societies and cultures in the Netherlands.

2 comments.

Egypt: After the Revolution

Posted on March 19th, 2011 by martijn.
Categories: Guest authors, Headline, Society & Politics in the Middle East.

Guest Author: Samuli Schielke

As I write these final notes from the Egyptian revolution on my way back to Germany, I once again curse my amazingly bad timing regarding key events of the revolution. I arrived in Egypt on my first visit three days after the Friday of Anger, was dramatic key moment that made the old system lose its balance. I left five days before Hosni Mubarak resigned. I arrived on my second visit one day after the Essam Sharaf’s caretaker government took over. And I am leaving in the early morning hours of the constitutional referendum that will determine which way Egypt will be going in the coming months.

This decisive moment is just one of the many that Egypt has seen and will continue to see during this year. But as it is the moment when I leave Egypt, I seize it to offer some preliminary conclusions about the Egyptian revolution and the social and emotional dynamics it has released. I make no pretensions to neutrality. My account of the Egyptian revolution is an extremely partisan one, and I would consider it a failure if it weren’t so. There are times to look at things from a neutral distance, and there are times to take a stance. But while taking a stance, I have tried to be fair towards those whose views and actions I do not agree with. It has been difficult.

In November 2010 I spoke with the Egyptian journalist Abdalla Hassan who told me that there will be a revolution in Egypt soon. I replied him that there is no way there will be a revolution in Egypt, and in any case, I find a revolution a bad idea because in revolutions things get broken, people get killed, and in the end the wrong people seize the power. I was obviously wrong about the point as to whether there will be a revolution in Egypt or not. However, at the moment it looks like that all my three reasons to be opposed to a revolution are turning out to be true. And yet I continue to think that the revolution was a good thing, one of the best things that have happened to Egypt since a long time.

To start with, things don’t look too good to be honest. There is strong mobilisation for a “No” vote for the sake of a new democratic constitution to finish the job of the revolution. The activists of the “No” vote who for too long a while were focussed on demonstrations, the press and the Internet, have finally taken to debating and spreading leaflets in the streets. But they are facing a much stronger mobilisation by an unholy alliance of Mubarak’s National Democratic Party, the Muslim Brotherhood, and the Salafis, for a “Yes” vote, with tacit support of the army. A “Yes” vote will mean a consolidation of what remains of the old system, and it will mean early elections that are likely to be dominated by an alliance of the old system and Islamists. In Cairo the “Yes” and “No” campaigns appear to have approximately equal strength, but in Alexandria, where the Salafis are especially strong, they have been not only speaking out loudly for their point of view, they also quite reject the possibility of there being a different point of view. According to newspaper reports, they have been aggressively trying to prevent the “No” campaign from spreading its message in Alexandria. Despite the widely publicised measures to guarantee a transparent election, there are already reports of vote-rigging on the countryside and in Upper Egypt. The odds are at the moment that the “Yes” vote will prevail due to a mixture of trustful expectation of a quick return to normality among a very large part of Egyptians, the organising power of Islamist movements, the tacit “Yes”-campaign by the state media, and some fraud. But the outcome is not certain, and that in itself is a major progress in Egypt. (For more details on the arguments for and consequences involved in a “Yes” or “No” vote, see my previous post)

Scenarios for the future

I spent yesterday, my last day in Egypt, from the morning until the evening meeting my friends in Cairo. They represent a very particular selection of Egyptians. They are all going to vote “No”, and they all think that Egypt needs more social and gender equality, more freedom, and a civil state ruled by a democratic government, without the Muslim Brothers if possible. But their assessment of the situation is different, each coming up with a different scenario of Egypt’s future.

My friend from southern Cairo is the most pessimistic one. She sees that the Muslim Brothers and the Salafis are about to take over, be it directly or indirectly, and that there is a grave danger that the promises of democracy and freedom will be betrayed by a conservative religious turn that will put an end to the little bit of freedom there was for different ways of life in Egypt under Mubarak. In her view, the nationalists and leftist were very naive to join the Muslim Brotherhood in the temporary alliance to overthrow Mubarak because the Muslim Brothers are the ones who will profit now due to their superior organisation. She argues that since the system was so weak that it fell after less than three weeks of demonstrations, it would have been very well possible indeed to gradually reform it. A gradual reform of the old system, she argues, would have been better because it would not have given the Islamists the chance to dominate which they are offered now. Maybe, I say, but now things are as they are. So what to do now? She does not have a plan, but she points out that whatever its political consequences, the revolution has released a longing for freedom and unsettled the logic of gender relations. This shift can substantially change Egyptian society in the coming years, but it needs to get the chance to evolve.

F.E., a long-standing socialist activist, is much more optimistic. “Whatever the outcome of the referendum, we have already gained a lot.” Many socialist and communist movements that were previously working in illegality are now working publicly. Some of them are well connected with the new free trade unions in Egypt’s industrial centres. Left wing parties and organisations are mushrooming. The crucial issue, in F.E.’s view, is to create a functioning network to facilitate their work to compete with the Muslim Brotherhood and the NDP. In F.E.’s view it is in a way good that the Muslim Brotherhood decided to join the “Yes” campaign because by doing so “they have proven to everybody what we already knew: that they are a part of the system”. In F.E.’s view, there is a likelihood that the Muslim Brotherhood comes to power in alliance of parts of the old system. But it won’t be a disaster since it will only be making official what has been unofficially going on since the 1970’s. With the gradual withdrawal of the state from its role as a service provider in the course of economical liberalisation, the Islamist movements and religious actors in general were given the role of non-governmental service providers in the new neoliberal system of governance. Due to this deal, F.E. says, the Muslim Brothers have a societal advantage which the socialists and the labour movement now have to catch up with by entering the streets and the popular neighbourhoods and defeating the Islamists in their home ground. A part of the plan is to raise lawsuits against Muslim Brotherhood-dominated charities which often link their services with ideological conditions, which is against the law on charitable institutions (F.E. is lawyer by training, he knows). But the crucial point is to be there for the people, to offer services and to be socially active: “The poor people cannot afford to be ideological. If you go to them and offer them assistance, they take it. It doesn’t take much ideology to tell the difference between one loaf of bread, and two loafs.” In F.E.’s view, right now is the finest hour of the Muslim Brotherhood, but their days are counted because in the end they are a part of the corrupt old system, and will not be able to solve the problem of social inequality – the issue that took the people to the streets.

W., also a long-standing socialist and since years a cultural activist, is a little less enthusiastic about the networking capacities of the leftist movement. He, too, has been intensively involved in the revolution, and as I meet him in the evening, he is exhausted. Not only has he been participating in a number of cultural activities and a leaflet campaign on the eve of the referendum, he is also a member of the citizen’s checkpoint in the area of the cultural centre where he works. Yesterday he attended the founding meeting of yet another socialist party. He is not so worried about the splintering of leftist parties, however. What troubles him is that trade unions are at the moment so busy presenting their demands to the ministries that they have no concentration for the wider political situation. These demands, which typically involve improved pay and a change in management structures, are known in Egypt currently as “the demands of professional groups” (matalib fi’awiya), which has become something of a curse word. For activists like W, they are an ambivalent business, partly a crucial part of political action, partly detrimental to coordinating the pursuit of more general objectives.

Dr. A., a psychologist concerned with the spiritual aspect of religion as a way to help people find agency in their lives, says that he is neither a pessimist or an optimist: Pessimism and optimism, he argues, are attitudes of the time before the revolution, now is a time to work. He says that when people discuss the referendum with him, he doesn’t say what he will vote, but only encourages them to vote and take the decision in their own hands. He will vote “No”, he says, but what is more important for him is the level of political consciousness and spontaneous activity by young people who never had that experience before. “When I was at the Friday prayer today, after the prayer there were people spreading ‘Yes’ leaflets and others spreading ‘No’ leaflets, people whom I had never before seen being socially active. I went to the guy with the “No” leaflets and thanked him for just that.” We discuss what will happen to this drive of activity if the majority vote will be a “Yes”. I’m concerned that a victory of the “Yes” vote, which would be the first major setback for the revolutionaries (excepting, of course, the Muslim Brothers who go for “Yes”), will cause a major wave of frustration and make many people give up again. The question, Dr. A. replies, is about turning the spirit of revolution into experience. The revolution is an emotional state, and as such it is transient even if it leaves a strong trace on one. But it also comes with a practical experience, and that practical experience is changing a significant part of Egypt in these very days.

Revolution is a sledgehammer: Contradictory changes and social dynamics

That change will be a contradictory one. A revolution is a sledgehammer, good for breaking the walls of oppression and frustration. It is a way of changing things that causes a lot of damage, it is risky, and there is no way to tell how things will eventually turn out. One can draw so many comparisons to the Iranian revolution 0f 1979, to the Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917, to the revolutions of the Eastern Block in 1968 and 1989, and the youth revolution in western Europe and Northern America in 1968 – but the only thing that one learns is that revolutions are fundamentally unpredictable. Afterwards, we will be able to name the actors, the groups, the dynamics, and the decisions that determined the course of events. But beforehand, nobody knows.

What I do know is this: Egypt’s revolution of 25 January built on a number of social dynamics that were present in Egypt already years before, and which have now been partly magnified, and partly transformed.

Number one is the reintroduction of capitalism since the 1970’s after a period of Arab socialism, and the enormous social impact of neoliberal governance that gave enormous wealth to a political-economical elite, some wealth to a new middle class, and an enormous gap of promises and reality to the biggest part of the population. Egypt in the age of Mubarak was a liberal dictatorship, with vast opportunities for investment, beautiful new malls and resorts, space for different lifestyles on the condition of sufficient funds, an extremely stratified class society, and a brutal and arrogant security apparatus that treated citizens like criminals and had criminals on its paycheck. As Walter Armbrust has argued in an early and very fitting analysis, the revolution of 25 January 2011 was directed first and foremost against this conglomerate of big money, class and family privileges, and everyday oppression, and whether and to what degree this conglomerate will change in favour of ordinary Egyptians, will be the primary measure-stick on which the people who undertook the revolution will measure its success.

Number two is the wave of a very particular kind of religious conservatism that Egypt has been experiencing since thirty years. In the past decade this religious conservatism took a markedly unpolitical, primarily socially engaged shape, but it now turns out that this was very much due to the constraints of the Mubarak system that worked systematically to depoliticise social movements. Now religious conservatism has become an openly political (and so have left wing cultural projects, by the way) again, thus also creating new kinds of divisions. Some of my colleagues have argued that the revolutionary protest has offered a new language of dissent, a new logic to think about the relationship of state, society, religion, and the individual which is “asecular” in the words of Hussein Agrama, because it stands outside the contrast of the secular and the religious. This could indeed be the impression if one focusses on the utopian moment of revolutionary protest. But that the utopian moment of a revolutionary protest and now we are in entering the period of transition. The shared spirit of protest has become impossible to hold once the common goal was reached, although it is likely to have some positive effects on Egypt’s politics in the next years. The political developments of the transitional period are providing for a spectacular comeback of that contrast in new forms, most disturbingly in the shape of the Salafis with their rejection of the very idea of democracy as un-Islamic, but also in a less destructive way in the way leftist and nationalist political actors are now rearranging their ranks to face the alliance of the old system and the Muslim brotherhood. Turning Agrama’s analysis around, the re-politicisation of religious conservatism is providing not so much specific norms – after all, Egypt is for the biggest part a conservative and religious society anyway – than specific questions that it obliges Egyptians to ask and answer (I am thinking for example, about the discussion about the Islamic state between R. and Y. in my note from 15 March).

But more important than who will run the country in the next four or eight years is the peculiar nature of this religious conservatism as an integral part of the neoliberal system of governance as F.E the socialist pointed out. The power of Islamist ideals of politics and society over Egypt is interlinked with the experience of an increasingly amoral society moving away from a conservative communal experience towards a competitive, fragmented social experience where morals are learned from the book. The power of the Islamist promise of good life rises and falls with the neoliberal capitalist utopia/dystopia. While I am not much of a socialist myself, I therefore think that socialists and the labour movement may have more to say in future than may seem right now.

Number three is the strained relationship of ordinary people with the state, which for a long time has been marked by seeking the patronage of the state/business authorities, and cursing the humiliation which one experienced while doing so. Burning the police stations on 28 January was a radical, impulsive reaction against this experience, and it has released highly contradictory dynamics. Until today, there is very little police on the streets of Egypt’s cities, although technically the police should have been able to return weeks ago. Partly it has made things better, as people have to suffer a lot less insults and derision than they used to. Partly it has made things more colourful, with street vendors who used to play cat and mouse with the police now working freely in Cairo’s shopping streets. But for a big part, it is a serious problem in face of the increase in crime – and in fear of crime – that followed the revolution, further aggravated by the large number of police firearms that got into private hands on 28 January. The fear of crime and violence is the strongest argument in the hands of those who want things to get back to as they were. Those who want to push for the sake of continuing revolution tend to place the blame on the police itself, seeing in the delayed return of the police to the street a continued campaign of intimidation. But I think that more is at stake. A main reason appears to be that the police officers are very hesitant to take their new role as servants of the people. There is very strong resistance against criminal investigations against police officers. In the beginning of this week, police forces in Alexandria marched out of the courts they were supposed to protect in protest against court cases against three police officers accused of killing protesters. This spirit was most arrogantly marked by the video circulating on the Internet in early March, showing a police chief telling the policemen that “we are the masters of the country.” The burning of the police stations has been a traumatic event for the police force, and an ambiguous one for the citizens who note the new politeness of the few police officers in the streets with great satisfaction, but also suffer from the new insecurity of violent crime. The relation of the citizens and the police will remain an open question for a while, and while there seems to be no return to times past, it is unclear whether a new sound base for policing will be found. The relationship will remain strained. And the weapons that moved to private hands will stay that way, and violent crime is likely to become a more permanent menace in Egyptians’ daily life.

Number four is the crisis of patriarchal authority so dramatically marked in the Oedipal father murder which the revolutionaries committed on Mubarak, the clientelistic father-godfather of the nation. I wrote more about this point back in February, at the moment I want to point out that this was a move by no means a shared undertaking by all Egyptians. A lot of people did not believe that Mubarak would go until the last minute, and did not dare or care to go out to the streets. These people, too, are now claiming the revolution as theirs, but for them it has a different emotional significance. And those who did believe that Mubarak would go and who put their faith into a revolution without visible leaders, had quite different ideas of what would replace the figure of the respected and feared collective father. Things are in the movement, and some are searching for new reliable sources of authority while others are claiming the freedom to speak out what is in one’s heart and yet others are experimenting with non-hierarchical organisation and pluralistic debate. This shift in authority and in the entitlement to a voice will be the biggest and bitterest struggle that Egypt will face in the next decades.

Revolution and emotions

This is why I think the Egyptian revolution is a good thing although things have been broken, people have been killed, and the wrong people are likely to get into power. Egypt of the past decade was marked by an enormous contrast of great promises and high expectations on the one hand, and a sense of humiliation, depression and frustration. The 25 January revolution opened up a different way to feel about the world, and things got into movement. Some things will get back to the way they were, some will get better, a lot of things will get worse. But they are not just happening to people. One can do something about one’s share in the world. So many people in Egypt felt that nothing can be done, and many of them now feel that something can be done after all. They will do that something now, for better or worse.

Revolution is indeed an emotional state, and it is an intense, nervous and stressful one. One cannot go on that way for very long. The turn from the state of revolution to a state of transition is also a time of exhaustion and bad nerves. R., an artist, is sick with a “post-revolutionary flue” as she calls it. Like many others whom I have met, she is emotionally exhausted, and says that the past month and a half has been the most stressful time in her life. Although I myself have spent only three weeks in Egypt since the revolution began, my nerves are wrecked, too. I have started smoking again, and I sleep very badly. And yet unlike many others, I haven’t been through any really bad experiences. But there is a constant anxiety, and it is of the same kind of the anxiety of M. who found it quite wearing to find this country one’s own. Like so many Egyptians who share this feeling, I am anxious because I care. Having lived so long in a country that seemed so stalled, so doomed to face just more and more of the same, it is not a bad thing to be anxious in this way.

Greetings from Egypt in transition!

Samuli Schielke is a research fellow at Zentrum Moderner Orient (ZMO), Berlin. His research focusses on everyday religiosity and morality, aspiration and frustration in contemporary Egypt. In 2006 he defended his PhD Snacks and Saints: Mawlid Festivals and the Politics of Festivity, Piety and Modernity in Contemporary Egypt at the University of Amsterdam, Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences. During his stay in Cairo at the time of the protests at Tahrir Square he maintained a diary. The text here is part of that diary which you can read in full at his blog. He also wrote “Now, it’s gonna be a long one” – Some first conclusion on the Egyptian Revolution

1 comment.

Paradoxes of Arab Refo-lutions

Posted on March 5th, 2011 by martijn.
Categories: Guest authors, Headline, Society & Politics in the Middle East.

Guest Author: Asef Bayat
Serious concerns are expressed currently in Tunisia and Egypt about the sabotage of the defeated elites. Many in the revolutionary and pro-democracy circles speak of a creeping counter-revolution. This is not surprising. If revolutions are about intense struggle for a profound change, then any revolution should expect a counterrevolution of subtle or blatant forms. The French, Russian, Chinese, Iranian, and Nicaraguan revolutions all faced protracted civil or international wars. The question is not if the threat of counter-revolution is to be expected; the question rather is if the ‘revolutions’ are revolutionary enough to offset the perils of restoration. It seems that the Arab revolutions remain particularly vulnerable precisely because of their distinct peculiarity—their structural anomaly expressed in the paradoxical trajectory of political change.

Historically, three types of bottom-up regime/political change stand out. The first is the ‘reformist change’. Here, social and political movements mobilize in a usually sustained campaign to exert concerted pressure on the incumbent regimes to undertake reforms through the institutions of the existing states. Resting on their social power—the mobilization of the grassroots— the opposition movements compel the political elites to reform themselves, their laws and institutions often through some of kind of social pacts. So, change happens within the framework of the existing political arrangements. The transition to democracy in countries like Mexico and Brazil in the 1980s was of this nature. The leadership of Iran’s Green movement currently pursues similar reformist trajectory. In this trajectory, the depth and extend of reforms vary. Change may remain superficial; but it can also be profound if it materialized cumulatively by legal, institutional and politico-cultural reforms.

The second mode of political change is the ‘insurrectionary model’, where a revolutionary movement builds up in a fairly extended span of time during which a recognized leadership and organization emerge along with some blueprint of future political structure. At the same time that the incumbent regime continues to resist through police or military apparatus, a gradual erosion and defection begin to crack the governing body. The revolutionary camp pushes forward, attracts defectors, forms a shadow government, and builds some organs of alternative power. In the meantime, the regime’s governmentality gets paralyzed, leading to a state of ‘dual power’ between the incumbent and the opposition. The state of ‘dual power’ ends by an insurrectionary battle in which the revolutionary camp takes over the state power via force; it dislodges the old organs of authority and establishes new ones. Here we have a comprehensive overhaul of the state, with new functionaries, ideology, and mode of governance. The Iranian revolution of 1979, the Sandinista Revolution in Nicaragua, or the Cuban revolution of 1952 exemplifies such insurrectionary course.

The third possibility pertains to ‘regime implosion’, when the revolutionary movement builds up through general strikes and broad practices of civil disobedience, or through a revolutionary warfare progressively encircling the regime, so that in the end the regime implodes. It collapses in disruption, defection, and total disorder. In its place come the alternative elites and institutions. Ceausescu’s regime in Romania imploded in a dramatic political chaos and violence in 1989, but gave rise eventually to very different political and economic systems under the newly established political structure, the National Salvation Front. Qaddafi’s Libya may experience such an implosion if the revolutionary insurgency continues to strangle Tripoli. In both ‘insurrection’ and ‘implosion’, and unlike the reformist mode, attempts to reform the political structure take place not through the existing institutions of the state, but overwhelmingly outside of them.

Now, Egypt’s revolution, just like that of Tunisia, does not resemble any of these experiences. In Egypt and Tunisia, the rise of powerful political uprisings augmented the fastest revolutions of our time. Tunisians in the course of one month and Egyptians in just 18 days succeeded in dislodging long-serving authoritarian rulers, dismantling a number of institutions associated with them, including the ruling parties, the legislative bodies, and a number of ministries, in the meantime establishing a promise of constitutional and political reform. And all these have been achieved in manners that were remarkably civil, peaceful, and fast. But these astonishing rapid triumphs did not leave much opportunity for the opposition to build parallel organs of authority capable of taking control of the new state. Instead, the opposition wants the institutions of the incumbent regimes, for instance the Military in Egypt, to carry out substantial reforms on behalf of the revolution—that is, to modify the constitution, ensure free elections, guarantee free political parties, and in the long run institutionalize democratic governance. Here again lies a key anomaly of these revolutions– they enjoy enormous social power, but lack administrative authority; they garner remarkable hegemony, but do not actually rule. Thus, the incumbent regimes continue to stand; there are no new states or governing bodies, nor novel means and modes of governance that altogether embody the will of the revolution.

It is true that, like their Arab counterparts, the Eastern European revolutions of the late 1990s were also non-violent, civil, and remarkably rapid (East Germany’s revolution took only ten days); but they managed, unlike in Tunisia and Egypt, to completely transform the political and economic systems. This was possible because the imploded East German communist state could simply dissipate and dissolve into the already existing West German governing body. And broadly, since the difference between what East European people had (one party, communist state) and what they wanted (liberal democracy and market economy) was so distinctly radical that the trajectory of change had to be revolutionary. Half-way, superficial, and reformist change would have been easily detected and resisted—something different from the Arab revolutions in which the demands of ‘change, freedom, social justice’ are broad enough to be claimed even by the counter-revolution. Consequently, the Arab revolutions resemble perhaps more Georgia’s Rose Revolution of 2003 and Ukraine’s Orange Revolution of November 2004-January 2005 where in both cases a massive and sustained popular protest brought down incumbent fraudulent rulers. In these instances, the trajectory of change looks more reformist than revolutionary, strictly speaking.

But there is a more promising side to the Arab political upheavals. One cannot deny the operation of a powerful revolutionary mode in these political episodes, which make them more profound than those in Georgia or Ukraine. In Tunisia and Egypt, the departure of despotic rulers and their apparatus of coercion have opened up an unprecedented free space for citizens, notably the subaltern subjects, to reclaim their societies. As is the case in most revolutionary turning points, an enormous energy has been released in the society’s body politics. Banned political parties have come to surface and new ones are getting established. Societal organizations have become more vocal and extraordinary grassroots initiatives are under way. In Egypt, working people, free from fear of persecution, aggressively follow their violated claims. Laborers are pushing for new independent unions; some of them have already formed the ‘Coalition of the 25 January Revolution Workers’ to assert the revolutionary principles of “change, freedom, and social justice”. Small farmers (with less than ten feddans) in rural areas are organizing themselves in independent syndicates; others continue fighting for betters wages and conditions. The first Organization of the Residents of Cairo’s Ashwa’iyyat (slums), established recently, has called for the removal of corrupt governors, and for the abolition of regime-sponsored ‘local councils’. Youth groups organize to clean up slum areas, engage in civil works and reclaim their civil pride. Students pour into the streets to demand Ministry of Education to revise the curricula. The stories of Coptic and Muslim cooperation to fight sectarian rumors and provocations are already known and need not be repeated here. And of course the Tahrir Revolutionary Front continues to exert pressure on the military to speed up reforms. These all represent popular engagement of exceptional times. But the extraordinary sense of liberation, urge for self-realization, the dream of a new and just order—in short the desire for ‘all that is new’ are what define the very spirit of these revolutions. In these turning points, these societies have moved far ahead of their political elites, exposing albeit the major anomaly of these revolutions—the discrepancy between a revolutionary desire for the ‘new’, and a reformist trajectory that may lead to harboring the ‘old’.

How do we then make sense of the Arab revolutions? These may be characterized neither as ‘revolutions’ per se nor simply ‘reform’ measures. Instead we may speak of ‘refo-lutions’– revolutions that want to push for reforms in, and through the institutions of the incumbent states. As such, refo-lutions express paradoxical processes—something to be cherished and yet vulnerable. Refo-lutions do possess the advantage of ensuring orderly transitions, avoiding violence, destruction, and chaos—the evils that dramatically raise the cost of change. In addition, revolutionary excess, the ‘reign of terror’, exclusion, revenge, summary trials and guillotines can be avoided. And there are the possibilities of genuine transformation through social pacts, but only if the society—the grassroots, civil society associations, labor unions, and social movements—continue to remain vigilant, mobilized and exert pressure. Otherwise refo-lutions carry with them the perils of counter-revolutionary restoration precisely because the revolution has not made it into the key institutions of the state power. One can readily imagine powerful stakeholders, wounded by the ferocity of popular upheavals, would desperately seek regrouping, initiate sabotage, and instigate counter-propaganda. Ex-high state officials, old party apparatchiks, key editor-in-chiefs, big businesses, members of aggrieved intelligent services and not to mention military men could penetrate the apparatus of power and propaganda to turn things into their advantage. The danger can especially be more pronounced when the revolutionary fervor subsides, normal life resumes, hard realities of reconstruction seep in, and the populace gets disenchanted. There is little recourse for realizing a meaningful change without turning refo-lutions into revolutions.

Asef Bayat is Professor of Sociology and Middle East Studies at theUniversity of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He is the co-author of BeingYoung and Muslim (Oxford University Press, 2010) and author of Life as Politics: How Ordinary People Change the Middle East (StanfordUniversity press, 2010).

This post is also published at Jadaliyya.com where Asef Bayat also wrote Egypt and the Post-Islamist Middle East

1 comment.

Tunisia: from paradise to hell and back?

Posted on February 21st, 2011 by martijn.
Categories: Guest authors, Headline, Society & Politics in the Middle East.

Guest Author: Miriam Gazzah

Tunisia is one of my two homelands. Even though born and raised in the Netherlands, I have been feeling more and more Tunisian lately. My father is a Tunisian from M’Saken, a town in the Sahel, near Sousse. Ever since I was a young girl, I have been visiting Tunisia every year during summer holidays. Known in Europe as a warm, Mediterranean holiday paradise, Tunisia is not just that, or maybe even far from that. My parents took us to see the whole country, from the Sahel to Cap Bon, from Carthago to Mahdia. During the four to six weeks spent there every year, my brothers and I got to know the country way beyond its touristic highlights.

I always knew that Tunisia was no paradise. I remember when I was little, I used to wonder why all the men and young boys sitting in the cafes were not at work. No matter what time we passed by – even in the middle of the night – the cafes were always full with men! Little did I know then, that there was no work for them. Luckily my family is relatively well off, but many Tunisians struggle to survive. Because family bonds and social control are strong, people are able to survive, helping each other every way they can. For example, every time we visited one of the sisters of my grandmother, we would bring her food, like a kilo of sugar, bread or meat. Something unheard of in the Netherlands but that is how people get by in Tunisia.

Experiences of repression
Almost all of my cousins have university degrees, but very few of them have jobs on university level. Some of them endured long visa-application processes or married French-Tunisian girls and have moved to France or Germany, in the hope to build a better live there. Life is hard for many Tunisians; unemployment being one of the biggest problems. But that is not all. As I grew older, I started to become aware of the more ‘subtle’ ways the Tunisian president and its accomplices kept the people in a choke-hold. Repression, censorship, the omnipresence of so-called ‘government informers’, the glorification of Ben Ali in public spaces and the media, the corruption of the regime, expropriation of land, and so on have kept Tunisians silent for 23 years. I have experienced the repression of the old Tunisian regime myself or witnessed it in my surroundings more than once.

One year – it was sometime in the 1990s – my second cousin who is also our neighbour, at that time around 25 years old, was not there to welcome us when we arrived from the Netherlands for our summer holiday. It turned out that he had been arrested and put into jail. Knowing him as a very gentle and smart young man, I was surprised to hear of his arrest. Through the grapevine we heard that he might have been arrested, because he had been hanging out with the ‘wrong’ people. The concept of ‘wrong’ people was used in the 1990s to point out ‘Islamists’ or ‘fundamentalists’ or, in short people who wore a beard. He was imprisoned for more than 3 years, without trial and without his family knowing why he was kept imprisoned. Ben Ali has used the fear of the rise of Islamism as an alibi for arresting people who are allegedly ‘against the regime’. A tactic that worked well. Even my own family, including my father, condoned the repression of so-called ‘fundamentalists’ at that time, because ‘we do not want Tunisia to become like Algeria, where people slaughter each other like lambs’. By feeding into the fear of rising fundamentalism and using Algeria as a horrific example, Ben Ali managed to repress a lot of anti-regime currents in the 1990s.

Another example of repression hit home a little closer: my older brother – a big fan of airplanes and airports – was filming an incoming airplane from a road around one kilometre distant from the airport of Monastir. A car drove up behind us and three men in plain clothes stepped out and claimed to be police men. They took the camera and started to interrogate my brother and father in a pretty aggressive and intimidating way. They took the passports of my father and brother, the camera and ushered us to drive with them to the police station. My father and brother were brought inside, my mom, little brother and I had to wait in the parking lot in the burning sun. We waited for more than 1,5 hours before they finally returned, with their passports and camera, but without the tape, of course. An upsetting experience, because of the degrading way they treated us and the helplessness you feel when they take your passports, and you don’t know whether you will ever get them back.

Direct update from M’Saken, Tunisia
As I write this paragraph my father is in Tunisia. It is his first trip to his homeland since Ben Ali has fled. Egypt has been dominating the media for some weeks now, but that does not mean that developments in Tunisia have come to a full stop. In my father’s first call to me, end of January 2011, he states that in our hometown M’Saken, the police station and the (former) office of Ben Ali’s political party RCD are burnt to the ground (see picture, all pictures taken by Hosni El Gourar). He also reports of the absence of the police, at least in M’Saken and surroundings – a very strange and quite frightening phenomenon. He also tells me that in the area there are robberies going on with deadly endings. Even worse maybe, he reports of Ben Ali supporters who join each other in militias – armed and well! – and try to stir up chaos; an attempt to launch a contra-revolution. The situation is thus far from calm.

In order to secure neighbourhoods, young M’Sakeni’s have volunteered to watch over area’s of the town. Committees of security have been founded. Young men safeguard important feeder roads and patrol the area (see pictures). Much to the surprise of many elderly, Tunisian youth have shown the country a new face. Whereas in the past, today’s youth was known as the ‘generation of nothing’, the Jasmin Revolution has turned this image completely around. As perceived by my father, the older generation is confused. Tunisian youth have shown a degree of responsibility that was unheard of. They took action and they changed things. The generation gap seems to have disappeared instantly, says my father.

It is now Wednesday February 16, 2011. My father has just returned from Tunisia. His updated report of the current situation in M’Saken and Tunisia confirms my earlier feeling that all is far from stable. The good news, he tells me, is that “the atmosphere is completely different from the last time he was there in November 2010. People are polite, not so edgy, even traffic has become far less stressful. Inter-human relations have improved enormously. Police are nowhere to be found, but, all in all, every day life seems to return to its ‘normal’ status.” But when he continues to tell of his short stay, it appears that Tunisia is not at all ‘back to normal’.

The Ben Ali aftermath: Rumours about endless enrichment
Ever since the departure of Ben Ali, stories and rumours about the enormous corruption of Ben Ali and the Trabelsi’s keep circulating among the Tunisian people. Especially Leila Ben Ali and her Trabelsi family members are hated for their incredible enrichment on expense of the Tunisian people. Leila, a second wife of Ben Ali, used to be a simple hair dresser, roaming around in nightclub circuits, where she supposedly met Ben Ali. Leila Ben Ali is in Tunisia also known as Leila Gin Tonic- what’s in a name?

Some of the remarkable rumours that my father picked up include the story that Ben Ali supposedly had some Roman pillars dating back a couple hundred years before Christ from the Bardo Museum in Tunis (http://www.informatique-tunisie.com/museebardo/) to be converted into wash bins to be put into his own home. Allegedly his wife Leila had very specific and extraordinary demands concerning the furnishing of her bath room. Replica’s of the original pillars were put back into the museum.

Another rumour that goes around on the streets is that some time after 9/11/2001 the United Nations had granted Tunisia a subsidy for the appointment of 150.000 extra police men to prevent and combat terrorism. It is said that only 50.000 police men were installed and that the funding for the rest disappeared into the pockets of one of the Trabelsi’s who was in charge of this project.

The Trabelsi’s are often said to be the real demons behind the regime. Many of Ben Ali’s in-laws were involved in corruption and illegal practices. Some of them have also been arrested in the mean while. It is often said in popular language that “they [the Trabelsi’s] are worse than the Maffia.”

These outrageous stories of how Ben Ali and his in-laws enriched themselves are the constant talk of the town. Whether all of these rumours are true or not, it is taken for a fact that Ben Ali made himself a very wealthy man. Nonetheless, the exact amount of his financial ability is not known yet. The possessions of Ben Ali and the Trabelsi family include houses (in Tunisia and abroad), cars (Ferrari’s and the like), businesses, stocks, gold, and so on. Watch this YouTube clip where two men ‘steal’ one of Ben Ali’s Ferrari’s with a fork lift:

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The huge wealth acquired by Ben Ali and his family, illegal or not, is a thorn in the flesh of the Tunisian people.

Tunisia…back to the future
Tunisia remains unstable. Many (young) Tunisians still want to emigrate to Europe. Several hundreds, maybe thousands still arrive regularly at the Italian isle of Lampedusa to try to enter Europe. Even though press and media present this as something new, it is not. Tunisians were fleeing the country also way before Ben Ali left. What will happen in the near future remains difficult to predict. In prospect of the elections in September 2011, people are trying to get back to business as usual. Ironically, ‘business’ is what Tunisia lacks: meaning work and especially work deriving from tourism. Work and freedom of speech and expression, that is all that Tunisian youth want. It is a simple request. But not easily achieved for a country where more than half of the population consists of people under 25 years old. Tunisia’s new government will hopefully find a way to give new impulses to the economy, with help of Europe and the United States. But most importantly: tourists must come back to Tunisia as soon as possible. Maybe then paradise will move a little closer to Tunisia.

Thanks to Hosni El Gourar from M´Saken, Tunisia for the pictures.

Dr. Miriam Gazzah is a postdoctoral fellow at the Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research (AISSR) at the University of Amsterdam. She is currently working within the research project: Islamic cultural practices and performances: The emergence of new youth cultures in Europe.
Read more about this research project here: http://home.medewerker.uva.nl/m.gazzah/
Visit Miriam Gazzah’s personal website and blog: http://www.miriamgazzah.nl

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