Praveen Swamy: Using hate to challenge modernism
The recent violence over an anti-Islam film is part of a wider clash with the idea of the modern republic
Last month, two men stood on a Mumbai sidewalk, holding up posters to a furious mob that was demanding a ban on a movie said to have blasphemed against the Prophet. The counter-protesters’ hand-written placards had some simple advice: “Don’t watch it”. For their pains, the men were threatened and then roughed up. Familiar with the story? Probably not. The counter-protesters go by the name of Dileep D’Souza and Naresh Fernandes. The protesters were pious Bandra boys — not the Kalashnikov-waving Muslims who have ably helped television stations rake it in these past weeks. The film in question was Kamaal Dhamaal Malamaal, a Bollywood flop that appalled the faithful because, according to the Vatican news agency Agenzia Fides, “a priest is portrayed as a lottery maniac”. The church withdrew its objections after cuts were made; to no one’s surprise, the Mumbai Police hasn’t been falling over itself to prosecute the assailants.
Breakdown: India’s outrage industry has had a busy few weeks. The Shiromani Gurdwara Prabandhak Committee has threatened to seek a ban on Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling’s new book, which includes “a hairy man-woman” Sikh character. Hindu priest Rajan Zed, tireless in his pursuit of publicity, has held out dark warnings about Kevin Lima’s forthcoming Mumbai Musical, which tells the Ramayana from the point of view of monkeys.
Large swathes of tropical forest have been expended, in recent weeks, to printing commentary seeking to explain “Muslim rage” — the wave of anger that is purported to have gripped believers from North Africa to Indonesia, because of the release of the crude anti-Islam film, The Innocence of Muslims. From an Indian optic, as this autumn’s epidemic outbreak of clerical madness demonstrates, it is far from clear that the problem is centred around either Muslims or rage. There is a far larger crisis unfolding in what used to be called the Third World, a breakdown of the modernist project that has empowered a variety of politics based around narrow ethnic and religious identities.
Perhaps the most interesting feature of “Muslim rage” is the absence of evidence that it exists; that is, as a force that shapes the political actions of believers, as opposed to a propagandistic tool useful to Islamic neoconservatives, anti-Islam bigots and confused liberals alike. The Innocence mobilisation was propelled, in each case, by reactionary politics, not spontaneous outrage. In Egypt, competition between establishmentarian and revolutionary Islamists, combined with anti-police hooliganism, fanned the riots; in Libya, warlords sought religious legitimacy; in Pakistan, the vanguard was made up of jihadists backed by the military establishment to undermine the civilian order. The bulk of the 23 people reported killed in Pakistan died at the hands of riot police; their targets in Karachi included liquor stores.
Yet, the Innocence violence is hardly exceptional. Ethnic and religious conflicts routinely claim a far larger toll of lives on a regular basis: Sri Lanka’s Buddhist chauvinists, Indian Hindutva groups, and African ethnic groups all have records rivalling the Islamists. Many of these movements have been as successful as the Islamists in transcending geography. The malaise cannot therefore be seen as something intrinsic to what is carelessly called “the Muslim world”; there are larger forces at work here.
In 2002, the British Marxist, Kenan Malik, shocked many with this proposition: “all cultures are not equal”. The real crisis flagged by 9/11, he argued, was not the rise of religious fundamentalism; it was instead growing liberal pessimism about the prospect of a better world. Mr. Malik argued that “scientific method, democratic politics, the concept of universal values — these are palpably better concepts than those that existed previously, or those that exist now in other political and cultural traditions”. These ideas, he went on, were “western”— but emerged there not “because Europeans are a superior people, but because out of the Renaissance, the Enlightenment and the scientific revolution flowed superior ideas.” Post-colonial radicals of an earlier generation would, more likely than not, have been entirely comfortable with this argument. The radical C.L.R. James, Mr. Malik noted, condemned imperialism, but applauded “the learning and profound discoveries of [the] western civilisation.”
Frantz Fanon, despite his trenchant criticism of colonialism, conceded that “the elements of a solution to the great problems of humanity have, at different times, existed in European thought”... Read more:
