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89 5 Gendered Blueprints Transnational Masculinities in Muslim Televangelist Cultures Nabil Echchaibi The tragic shooting in the Texas military base of Fort Hood has reanimated an extant post-9/11 debate about Muslim men as culturally confused, excessively pious, and intrinsically violent. American media coverage initially—and briefly— steered explanations in their conflicted attempt to avoid anti-Muslim bigotry, but a linear link between Muslim men and ideologically induced violence was clearly the underlying subtext informing much of the ensuing coverage of this incident. Major Nidal Malik Hasan, the Muslim Palestinian American behind the shooting rampage, readily became the subject of disjointed and muddled speculations by pundits and journalists linking him to al-Qaeda and questioning the loyalty of Muslims in the U.S. military. CNN’s Wolf Blitzer made sure his viewers understood that the name of the suspect was Arab as he was revealing it for the first time, plastering in the process the neat portrait of a Muslim/Arab terrorist male over a complex situation. The incessant replays of a surveillance video showing Hasan buying coffee at a store wearing a long white kameez (identified loosely by various media reports as “Middle Eastern traditional garb”) hours before the shooting also served as a potent visual cue to cement this easy association. At one point, this video appeared on CNN and MSNBC on one half of the screen, while the other half showed Dr. Zuhdi Jasser, an American-born secular Muslim and former Navy officer, dressed in a suit and tie (read as modern attire) as he was denouncing the terror of Hasan’s actions, as if the shooter’s traditional garb could help us rationalize the irrational and safely find a religious and cultural explanation to this tragedy. What is striking about this type of coverage is not only its spurious logic as more information flows but also and more importantly its consistency in invoking predictable images and narratives to explain anything“Muslim.” This Orientalist trope of the culturally rigid Muslim man continues unabated in these accounts, joining other immanent frames that see Islam as an intransigent orthopraxy, allowing Muslims no self-reflexivity. Following this putative logic, Nidal Hasan is nothing but an invariant extension of the destructively dangerous Muslim male, like 9/11 hijacker Mohamed Atta or the 7/7 London bomber Mohammed Siddique Khan or the 3/11 Madrid bomber Jamal Zougam or the many other men waiting to follow in their footsteps.1 Their propensity to jihad and death is 90 Nabil Echchaibi not limited to disturbed individuals but is usually considered a reflection of the immutability of Muslim cultures and the lack of discursive deliberation in Islam as a whole.2 Inherent in such cultural frames, of course, is a longstanding Western claim that secular humanism, with its emphasis on freedom and individual agency, is the only antidote against the fundamentalism of Islam and the uncritical submissiveness of its followers.3 This Islam-versus-the-West binary, however, has so dominated our view of Islam that we fail to imagine Muslims contesting and negotiating their faith and its place in their daily lives. Instead, we see an unyielding emphasis on angry Muslims on the margins of“modern” global culture resisting and denouncing the homogenizing forces of secular modernity. Following this rather linear evolution of Muslim identities in a post-9/11 context, Muslim men become inevitably vulnerable to political radicalism and even terrorism because they are culturally disaffected and politically disenfranchised. A variety of theories are put forth to rationalize the luring effects of radical and aggressive dissent among young Muslim men both in Muslim-majority countries and in Western societies: high unemployment and lack of social mobility render young Muslim men more bitter and vulnerable to incendiary rhetorics; women outperform men in education, causing men to feel emasculated; dislocated young men turn to a literal interpretation of their religion as a stable marker for their identity in a context of fragmentation born out of living as minorities under constant scrutiny; or even theories with shoddy sociological accuracy, such as the lack of public displays of affection between parents and their children in Muslim cultures, which purportedly explains their proclivity to brutality. Muslim men, as a portrait solidifies around these narratives, suffer from a crisis of masculinity which becomes pertinent only in the context of geopolitical security, augmenting their threat and effectively denying them any form of self-reflexive autonomy. A number of scholars have written about the importance of countering the jarring...

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