Casting Out: The Eviction of Muslims from Western Law and Politics (review)

The War on Terror has gripped the Western world with internally discriminatory laws and policies, ranging from the denial of habeas corpus rights to restrictions on wearing hijab in public spaces. Sherene Razack's new monograph demonstrates, however, that much more than discrimination is at work. Casting Out highlights how political community is being reconfigured through the socio-legal abandonment of "Muslim-looking" people who increasingly lack "the right to have rights."³ Central to Razack's analysis is Hannah Arendt's concept of race thinking, a world view that differentiates between two orders of humanity, promoting the exclusion of one for the "survival" of the other. Today this thinking circulates as a popular narrative that sees the West as besieged by a Muslim threat. Razack draws on the work of Giorgio Agamben, showing how the resultant exclusion of Muslim peoples gives rise to the "camp"—a state of exception wherein the rule of law, that is, the rules of political community, do not apply.

Part 1 of the book ties together the allegoric figure of the "dangerous" Muslim man anchored to the "civilized" European. Razack first navigates Canada's security certificate program, including its ongoing reformulation, as a parallel legal framework characterized by suspicion, slippery standards of jurisprudence, and indefinite detention. Profiles of terrorism suspects, she shows, rely less on the collection of corroborating evidence than on attempts to link suspects' beliefs to the broader ideological commitments of known terrorists. Chapter 2 examines the documentation of torture and sexual abuse at the Baghdad Correctional Facility (Abu Ghraib) by US Army personnel. Rather than seeing these as isolated incidents or as necessary "culturally specific" interrogation methods, Razack contextualizes the abuse and photographs within a detailed history of white violence used to establish public records meant to demonstrate racial superiority and confirm Western identity and belonging.

Part 2 explores debates within feminist and liberal circles over the status of (Muslim) women, drawing out a third allegoric figure in the Western imaginary: the "imperilled" Muslim woman, envisaged as requiring rescue by the "civilized" European from the "barbarity" of the Muslim man. Chapter 3 analyses the depiction of an epic culture clash between Islam and the West in popular texts by Orianna Fallaci, Phyllis Chesler, and Irshad Manji. Razack shows how these works draw a number of mutually reinforcing links between mainstream feminism and neo-liberal modernization. Chapters 4 and 5 explore Norwegian and Canadian debates on forced marriage and faith-based arbitration in which gender inequality and violence against women have been culturalized as somehow unique to Islam rather than part of a wider pattern of patriarchy. Razack's use of Talal Asad's work on the role of secularism in producing a loyal citizenry to secure state power is especially innovative in this context. The installation of a secular/religious divide, Razack shows, harnesses gender within a broader strategy for managing racialized populations.

This text strives to engage the less-interrogated liberal currents of thought that justify the War on Terror, showing how many arguments that operate through discourses of liberation and equality draw on the same clash-of-civilizations thesis that opposes and elevates Western "values" to "cultures" informed by Islam. While the second half of the book is more cohesive and developed in this respect, some readers may find that Razack overemphasizes the feminist credentials of those she opposes. Even so, she is successful in raising uncomfortable connections between the liberal project of modernity, with its ties to the "free" market and political equality, and an evolving project of empire that relies as much on thinly articulated codes of liberal human rights and democracy as on a patchwork of legal black holes and military occupations.

In calling attention to these parallel trends, Razack convincingly historicizes contemporary socio-legal debates within a persistent colonial logic that produces zones of exception out of a relatively invariant geopolitical view that holds that it is the...