Radical Future Pasts: Untimely Political Theory

9. In Praise of Disorder

283 9 In Praise of Disorder The Untidy Terrain of Islamist Political Thought Roxanne L. Euben In January 2011, an uprising in Tunisia forced President Zine al-Abidine Ben ῾Ali from office, inaugurating a wave of challenges to authoritarian rule from Morocco to Yemen. Deeply entrenched patterns of power and powerlessness were disrupted by a groundswell of demands for dignity, work, and participatory politics. Many of the established shibboleths of American foreign policy in the Middle East were outpaced by events, assumptions of a hardening cold war between Islam and the West temporarily suspended as images of Egyptians converging en masse on Tahrir (Arabic for liberation) Square carrying placards demanding “hurriya!” [freedom!] traveled the globe at lightning speed. In that moment, it appeared as if the demos would remake entirely the dynamics of a region held for decades in the iron grip of autocrats garbed in the trappings of presidents, generals, and kings. But politics, as Max Weber famously pointed out, “is a strong and slow boring of hard boards.”1 Egyptians quickly discovered that they had dispensed with the dictator but not the dictatorship, numerous Bahraini activists were rounded up and imprisoned on flimsy charges in appalling conditions, and spring in Syria devolved into a brutal and protracted winter in which tens of thousands have died.2 In a triumph of hope over experience, many observers expected that the Arab Spring would not only transform Middle Eastern politics but also render obsolete shopworn depictions of the “Islamic world” as a largely undifferentiated cauldron of illiberalism, violence, and anti-Westernism.3 Instead, the increasing power and visibility of Islamist parties, organizations, 284 Roxanne L. Euben activists, and fighters from Tunisia to Yemen has generated fresh anxieties thattheuprisingshaveusheredinan“IslamicSpring”withdireconsequences for the future of liberal democracy, religious tolerance, gender equality, and pacific coexistence. Such new worries are structured by an all too familiar narrative, one in which oppositions between the democratic and the antidemocratic, the egalitarian and the patriarchal, the reasonable and the fanatical are grafted onto a civilizational divide between Islam and the West. This narrative is remarkably resilient despite the abundance of countervailing evidence, in part because it imposes a reassuring sense of order on a rapidly changing and disorderly political landscape. Such comfort, however, comes with a price. As this worldview has proliferated and congealed, it has become increasingly difficult to recognize, let alone make sense of, the wealth of information that challenges the internal coherence of each category and disrupts the line that supposedly divides one from the other. In this way, the very opposition between Islam and the West continues to be a self-fulfilling prophecy, presuming and reinforcing a view of the world in which contradictory, multiple, and cross-pollinating histories and identities are pressed into the service of neat binaries that distort rather than illuminate the political landscape.4 Take, for example, the framing of the protests that erupted in September 2012 in places as diverse as London and Benghazi, Cairo and Nairobi. The provocation was a fourteen-minute “trailer” for a low-budget Americanmade video, The Innocence of Muslims, depicting the Prophet Muhammad as a pedophilic, philandering, and bloodthirsty fraud. Dubbed into Arabic and posted on YouTube several months after what may have been a virtually unnoticed screening in Hollywood, the protests only seemed to gather steam with each passing day.5 Adding to the confusion was a contemporaneous but little understood assault on the U.S. Embassy in Libya that ended with the death of the U.S. ambassador and several other Embassy staff members on the eleven-year anniversary of the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States.6 Within hours, it seems, much English-language commentary had translated the meaning of the protests into a clash of rights.7 Reporters immediately sought the expertise of constitutional lawyers and law professors to interpret events, thus ensuring that the stakes would be framed much as they were during the Danish cartoon controversy: as a conflict between freedom of speech and protection of religion against offence or, more often , as a clash between constitutionally protected hate speech and religious In Praise of Disorder 285 hypersensitivity.8 Once converted into the language of rights, the protests became a matter of law rather than of politics, to be evaluated by the commitments written into American constitutionalism and addressed within the framework of the United Nations Human Rights Council.9 Paradoxically perhaps, widespread...