BY MARIEME HELIE LUCAS
It is beyond doubt that many people around the world, of various
political opinions and creeds, will feel relieved after the speech the presi-
dent of the United States of America delivered in Cairo. It is apparently a new
voice, a voice of peace, quite far from Bush’s clash of civilisations. But is it
so?
I presume that political commentators will point out the fact
that Obama equates violence on the part of occupied Palestinians to violence on
the part of Israeli colonisers, or that he has not abandoned the idea that the
United States should tell the world how to behave and fight for their rights, or
that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is reduced to a religious conflict, or
that he still justifies the war in Afghanistan, etc.
All these are important issues that need to be challenged.
However, what affects me most as an Algerian secularist is that Obama has not
done away with the idea of homogeneous civilisations that was at the heart of
the theory of the ‘clash of civilisations’. Moreover, his very American idea of
civilisation is that it can be equated to religion. He persistently opposes
‘Islam and the West’ (as two entities/civilisations), ‘America and Islam’ (a
country vs a religion); he claims that ‘America is not at war with Islam’. In
short, ‘the West’ is composed of countries while ‘Islam’ is not.
Old Jomo Kenyatta of Kenya once said of European colonisers:
"When the missionaries arrived, the Africans had the land and the missionaries
had the Bible. They taught us how to pray with our eyes closed. When we opened
them, they had the land and we had the Bible." Obama’s discourse confirms this:
religion is still good enough for us to have or to be defined by. His concluding
compilation of monotheist religious wisdom sounded as if it were the only
language that we, barbarians, can understand.
These shortcomings have adverse effects on us, citizens of
countries where Islam is the predominant and often the state religion.
First of all, Obama’s discourse is addressed to ‘Islam’, as if
an idea, a concept, a belief, could hear him; as if those were not necessarily
mediated by the people who hold these views, ideas, concepts or beliefs. As
Soheib Bencheikh, former grand mufti of Marseille and now director of the
Institute of Higher Islamic Studies in Marseille, once said, "I have never seen
a Koran walking in the street."
Can we imagine even for a moment that Obama would address
himself to ‘Christianity’ or to ‘Buddhism’? No, he would talk to Christians or
Buddhists – to real people, keeping in mind all their differences. Obama is
essentialising Islam, ignoring the large differences that exist among Muslim
believers themselves, in terms of religious schools of thought and
interpretations, cultural differences and political opinions. These differences
indeed make it totally irrelevant to speak about ‘Islam’ in such a totalising
way. Obama would not dare essentialise, for instance, Christianity in such a
way, ignoring the huge gap between Opus Dei and liberation theology.
Unfortunately, this essentialising of Islam feeds into the plans
of Muslim fundamentalists whose permanent claim is that there is one single
Islam – their version of it – one homogeneous Muslim world and consequently one
single Islamic law that needs to be respected by all in the name of religious
rights. Any study of the laws in ‘Muslim’ countries shows that these laws are
quite different from one country to the other, deriving not just from different
interpretations of religion but also from the various cultures in which Islam
has been spreading on all continents and that these supposedly Muslim laws also
reflect historical and political factors, including colonial sources,1 which are
obviously not divine.
This is the first adverse consequence of Obama’s essentialising
of Islam and homogenising Muslims: as much as he may criticise fundamentalists –
who he calls ‘a minority of extremists’ – he is using their language and their
concepts. This is unlikely to help the cause of anti-fundamentalist forces in
Muslim countries.
It follows then that Obama talks to religions, not to citizens,
not to nations or countries. He assumes that everyone has to have a religion,
overlooking the fact that in many instances, people are forced into religious
identities. In more and more ‘Muslim’ countries, citizens are forced into
religious practice2 and pay for dissent with their freedom and sometimes with
their lives. It is a big blow to them, to their human rights, to freedom of
thought and freedom of expression, that the president of the United States
publicly confirms the view that citizens of countries where Islam is the main
religion are automatically Muslims (unless they belong to a religious minority).
Regardless of whether one is a believer or not, citizens may
choose not to have religion as the main marker of their identity; for instance,
they may choose to give priority or prominence to their identity as citizens.
Many citizens of ‘Muslim’ countries want to leave religion in its place and
divorce it from politics. They support secularism and secular laws i.e. laws
democratically voted for by the people, changeable by the will and vote of the
people; they oppose unchangeable, ahistorical, supposedly divine laws as a
process that is alien to democracy. They oppose the political power of clerics.
Obama claims to defend democracy, democratic processes and human
rights. How does this fit in with addressing whole nations through their
supposed, and therefore imposed, religious identities?
Where is the place for secularists in Obama’s discourse – for
their democratic right to vote in laws rather than have laws imposed upon them
in the name of god; for their human right to believe or not to believe, to
practise or not to practise? Secularists simply do not exist. They are ignored.
They are made invisible. They are made ‘Muslims’. Not just by our oppressive
undemocratic governments but by Obama too. And when he talks of his fellow
citizens, the ‘seven million American Muslims’, has he asked them what their
faith is or is he assuming faith based on geographical origin?
In this religious straitjacket, women’s rights are limited to
their right to education and Obama distances himself from arrogant westerners by
making it clear that women wearing the veil is not seen by him as an obstacle to
their emancipation, especially if it is ‘their choice’. Meanwhile, Iran is next
door, with its moral police who jail women whose hair escapes this covering, all
in the name of religious laws. And what of Afghanistan or Algeria where women
were abducted, tortured, raped, mutilated, burnt alive, killed for not wearing
the veil?3
At no point does he raise the issue of who defines culture, who
defines religion, who speaks for ‘the Muslims’ and why this cannot be defined by
individual women themselves – without clerics, without moral police, without
self-appointed, old, conservative, male, religious leaders – if their
fundamental human rights are to be respected. Obviously, Obama trades women’s
human rights for political and economic alliances with ‘Islam’. ‘Islam’
definitely owns oil among other things.
No, this discourse is not such a change for an American
president: Obama remains within the boundaries of the clash of civilisations/religions.
How can this save us from the global rise of religious fundamentalism, which
this discourse was supposed to counter? He claims that "so long as our
relationship is defined by our differences, we will empower those who sow
hatred… promote conflict…" but the only thing he finds we have in common is "to
love our families, our communities and our god". Muslim fundamentalists will not
disown such a programme. In god we trust…
