An international research network exploring the representation of Muslim identities in contemporary cultural discourses.

Workshop Perspectives from Britain and North America

Last Updated on Tuesday, 04 May 2010 22:02

This Workshop was held on Saturday, 5 December 2009 in Birkbeck College, University of London.

The participants included: Hisham Aidi, Nabil Matar, Haideh Moghissi, Kamran Pasha, Sherene Razack, Amena Saiyid, Steven Salaita, Tim Jon Semmerling and Pnina Werbner

Some of the themes they discussed included: Historical perspectives, Production and Reception of images, Representation and Power, and Race, ethnicity and gender

A Report of the Workshop by Madeline Clements

Perspectives from Britain and North America, a day-long workshop held at London University’s Birkbeck College on 5th December 2009, brought together academics and practitioners from both sides of the Atlantic in a continued attempt to map the commonalities that characterise the ways in which Muslims are framed in Europe and North America. Areas of particular emphasis for the day included the production and reception of images of Muslims post-9/11 and questions relating to representation and power, including the way that power elites operate in relation to mainstream media. Framing Muslims’ Principal Investigator Dr Peter Morey opened this final event in the research initiative’s three-year AHRC phase with some observations on how the discourse surrounding Muslims has shifted – or failed to shift – during the course of the project’s duration. He suggested that although one might have anticipated that a network co-ordinated to interrogate the limitations of various representative modes at a particular historical moment and under a specific regime should, with the end of that era, automatically become defunct, the reality was somewhat different. A change in rhetoric might be identified in the period from Bush to Obama and from Blair to Brown, but the underlying policies – and methods by which Muslims are framed – ultimately remain the same.

In the first panel on ‘Muslim Multicultures’ Sociologist Haideh Moghissi’s paper ‘Muslims in Canada: Promises and Pitfalls of Multiculturalism’ highlighted how, in Canada’s multiethnic society, policies designed to ensure religious communities can practice their faith free from abuse have lead in the case of Muslims not so much to a plurality of lifestyles as to segregation and – through the governmental implementation of ‘special measures’ – to stereotyping and racism. In her ensuing discussion of ‘Multiple and Intersecting Identities among British Pakistanis: Negative and Positive Scholarly Frames’, social anthropologist and expert on the translocation of South Asian Muslim cultures, Pnina Werbner, emphasised the importance of ‘intersectionality’ in promoting a radical pluralist framework for understanding stigmatised social categories. Taking Pakistanis in Manchester as a model, she stressed that – far from remaining true to the types defined by dominant societies – individuals perform multiple identities of ‘virtual and moral commitment’ to different cultural domains which are creative, dialogical and situational in nature; and argued that policy makers should look to these internal dynamics when formulating their approaches toward different ethnic groups.

Click here to listen to an MP3 of Panel One ‘Muslim Multicultures’

The second panel went on to explore the ‘Legal Hinterlands’ in which Muslims have, of late, found themselves caught. Speaking on ‘”A Culturally Different Enemy” and Other Everyday Expressions of White Supremacy: Reflections on Torture and Muslims’, Toronto Professor Sherene Razack, who had been tracking discussions of torture, echoed Peter Morey’s sentiments when acknowledging that we might be tempted, four years on from Abu Ghraib, to consider ourselves ‘post’ torture. However, she argued, in a period when ‘Muslim’ has become a racial category from which it seems impossible to disaffiliate, it is now possible for all Muslims to be violated without impunity. As in colonial periods, the violence of torture against this particular group has been strategically mediated through the discourse of the dominant power, which designates savagery as expedient when enacted on ‘savage’ cultures, and foregrounds the moral plight of the torturer over the physical pain of their victim. Continuing with this theme, academic and Attorney at Law Tim Jon Semmerling’s memorable paper, ‘Extraordinary “Renditions”: When Law and Pop Culture Co-Narrate the Bush Administration’s Use of Extraordinary Rendition’, drew attention to the growth of a dangerous reliance in a postmodern world on the myths of popular culture and on higher or ‘legal’ truths as a means of ‘knowing’ the realities of torture, and highlighted the importance of scrutinising such explanatory narratives.

Click here to listen to an MP3 of Panel Two ‘Legal Hinterlands’

 

 

In the afternoon, the third panel turned to the topic of ‘Pasts, Presents and Futures’. Nabil Matar’s discussion of ‘Muslims and Other Peoples in the Early Modern Period’ sought to destabilise stereotypes by setting contemporary framings of an Islamic ‘Other’ against those offered by the fascinating narrative accounts of travellers’ journeys in Western Europe and the Ottoman Empire during the seventeenth-century. Matar’s detailed analysis of these travelogues eloquently illustrated the complexity of Muslim and non-Muslim exchanges and encounters in an earlier period of history. Hisham Aidi’s, ‘Moors, Aztecs and Ideologies of Al-Andalus’ went on to explore how historical memories of an intrusive Moorish presence haunt contemporary discourses, debates and policies relating to the migration and integration of North African Moriscos and Latinos, both in Spain and the US. He argued that this was particularly the case in the period post-9/11, following which anxieties about Islam have increasingly been projected onto Hispanic peoples.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

‘Faith, Race and Belonging’ provided the theme of the final panel, which combined a paper on ‘Barack Obama, Islam and the Discourses of American Racial Belonging’ by the Virginia Tech English Professor, essayist and acerbic critic of the liberal left,  Steven Salaita, and an autobiographical talk entitled ‘Islam and Hollywood’ by the screenwriter and novelist Kamran Pasha. Salaita examined Obama’s handling of the accusations of foreignness and Arab/Muslim alterity lodged against him during the course of his election campaign and his subsequent instalment as President, and highlighted how his assertions of national belonging and normativity in ‘post-racial’ America rely on a retreat from identification with the ‘dark spaces’ frequented by Arabs and Muslims today. Pasha’s lively discussion of his practical experiences as an American Muslim first of consuming limited images of Arabs as a film-loving child, and then of working as an adult with the mainstream media to create more complex representations of Muslims and Islam (as seen illustrated by the TV series, Sleeper Cell), drew the workshop to a cautiously optimistic close. He suggested that – with time – it might be possible to use such popular outlets to modify stereotypes and imagine alternative and more positive futures for Islam and Muslims in the West.

 

Click here to listen to an MP3 of Panel Four ‘Faith, Race and Belonging’

 

Click here to listen to an MP3 of the Roundtable Discussion that ended the workshop

 

Speaker Abstracts and Biographies:

Hishaam Aidi
Abstract: This paper will focus on conversion to Islam among Latinos and the anxiety that that is causing in the US and Spain.
Bio:  Hishaam Aidi received his PhD in political science from Columbia University. He has taught at the University of Maryland and is currently a Lecturer at Columbia's School of International and Public Affairs. He is the author of Redeploying the State (Palgrave 2008), a critique of privatization theory, and editor of Black Routes to Islam (Palgrave 2009).
As a journalist, he has written for various magazines including Africana, The New African, ColorLines, Souls, Socialism and Democracy, and Middle East Report.  He is currently contributing editor of Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture and Society.

Nabil Matar
Abstract: This paper discusses the knowledge that Muslims in the Mediterranean basin had of other peoples, specifically of Ottoman Turks and Europeans (from Britain and France); European presence in Islamic lands and its socio-religious determinants; the economic reasons for European travel and settlement; and Muslim pragmatism in encountering peoples of different ethnicities, religions, and languages.
Bio: Nabil Matar is Presidential Professor of English at the University of Minnesota. His latest book is Europe through Arab Eyes, 1578-1727 (Columbia UP, 2009), and his forthcoming books are Britain and the Islamic World, 1558-1713, which he is co-authoring with Professor Gerald MacLean (Oxford UP, 2010); and an edition of Henry Stubbe's The Rise and Progress of Mahometanism (2011, Brill).

Haideh Moghissi
Abstract: This presentation will focus on how Multiculturalism is played out in Canada in relation to migrants and refugees from Muslim Majority countries. Sharing some of the findings of a five-year comparative research project on the subject, the presentation will suggest the variables (gender, age, class origins, ideology and religious attachment) which foster a readiness to change and those which reinforce nostalgia and resistance. It will also discuss social tensions created in response to special rights and privileges demanded by self-appointed Muslim leaders, and challenges this pose to Canada’s official multicultural policy.
Bio: Haideh Moghissi is Professor of sociology and Associate Dean, External Relations, Faculty of Liberal Arts and Professional Studies at York University, Toronto. She was a founder of the Iranian National Union of Women and a member of its first executive and editorial boards, before leaving Iran in 1984. Her most recent books are Diaspora By Design Muslims in Canada and Beyond (co-authored) (University of Toronto Press, 2009); Muslim Diaspora: Gender, Culture and Identity (ed.) (London: Routledge 2006); Three volume reference, Women and Islam:Critical Concepts in Sociology (ed.) (London: Routledge 2005). Dr. Moghissi has served as Coordinator, Certificate for Anti-Racism Research and Practice (CARRP), Chair of the Executive Committee of Centre for Feminist Research and member of the Executive Committee of Centre for Refugee Studies at York University. Presently, she is the principal researcher in “Muslim diasporas: Heightened Islamic identity, gender, and cultural resistance” project (funded by the Ford Foundation).

Kamran Pasha
Abstract: My talk will focus on the representation of Islam and Muslims in Hollywood and my own experiences as a Muslim navigating the world of high-stakes filmmaking.  I will focus in particular on the challenges Muslim filmmakers face in producing their work, not just from the Hollywood system, but from resistance inside Muslim communities as well.  I will be hitting some controversial topics, such as the nature of anti-Muslim bias within the Hollywood system, as well as the pathologies within some Muslim communities that create obstacles for filmmakers like myself.
Bio: Kamran Pasha has published with Simon & Schuster's Atria Books his debut novel, Mother of the Believers, a historical fiction tale showing the rise of Islam from the eyes of Prophet Muhammad's teenage wife Aisha. His next book Shadow of the Swords, a love story set amidst the Crusades is due to come out in 2010.
Kamran is a writer and producer for NBC's highly anticipated new television series ‘Kings’, which is a modern day retelling of the Biblical tale of King David. Previously he served as a writer on NBC's remake of ‘Bionic Woman’, and on Showtime Network's Golden Globe nominated series ‘Sleeper Cell’, about a Muslim FBI agent who infiltrates a terrorist group.

Steven Salaita
Abstract: My presentation will focus on the discourses of racial belonging during and after the 2008 American presidential election. As the election intensified, questions about Obama's true or secret identity circulated widely, occupying a legitimate element of conversation in news cycles. The reaction of Obama and his political team to those questions was troublesome on numerous levels. In particular, the role of Arabs and Muslims as normative fifth columns became apparent, deployed strategically from the right and reinforced tacitly on the left. My presentation will examine how the postracial celebrations of Obama actually gave way to classically racialist conversations about identity and belonging in the United States, with mythologized versions of Islam central to the process.
Bio: Steven Salaita is Associate Professor of English at Virginia Tech. He is author of four books, most recently The Uncultured Wars: Arabs, Muslims, and the Poverty of Liberal Thought. He is currently working on two book projects, one an analysis of the moral discourses of the Israel-Palestine conflict and the other a critical assessment of Zionist politics and culture.

Tim Jon Semmerling
Abstract: On September 6, 2006, President Bush acknowledged the existence of extraordinary rendition and defended it as “one of the most vital tools in our war against terrorists.” For those who wanted to prove that the Bush administration had been engaging in the capture of Muslims overseas, sending them to third countries, incarcerating them in dungeons, and torturing them for information, Bush’s statement was long-awaited proof that extraordinary rendition did exist. Nonetheless, the official acknowledgement fell short because the American public still knows very little about extraordinary rendition. Indeed, we arrogantly believe we can talk about extraordinary rendition with authority, as if we know the truth of the matter. But the truth of the matter is that our narratives, or “renditions,” of extraordinary rendition are based on scattered and poorly tested evidence of what the program is and who is involved. It is essential to scrutinize these narratives in order to understand what we know of extraordinary rendition.
This paper looks at how law and popular culture inform and borrow from one another to build narratives about extraordinary rendition. First, I show how Vice-President Cheney borrowed from popular culture to promote the legality of extraordinary rendition. Second, I show how films have borrowed from legal-narrative structure of extraordinary rendition to tell the truth of the program, but ultimately choose to limit the truth. Third, I show that despite their reliance on one another, law and popular culture diverge and disagree on at least one aspect of extraordinary rendition in their narratives: the role of the lawyer. I conclude that although we know little about extraordinary rendition, we should realize that how we understand it is derived from an amalgamation of law’s and popular culture’s realms of truth and narrative strategies. How we talk about extraordinary rendition is an important step to understanding the truth of the program. We should, as a result, continually question how much we actually can count on our knowledge of this “vital tool” meant to protect us.
Bio: Tim Jon Semmerling is an attorney at law and a member of the Illinois BAR. His books are Israeli and Palestinian Postcards: Presentations of National Self (University of Texas Press, 2004) and “Evil” Arabs in American Popular Film: Orientalist Fear (University of Texas Press, 2006), which the Arab-American National Museum has awarded “Honorable Mention, 2006 Book Award in Adult Non-Fiction” and the American Library Association and Choice Magazine have awarded “Outstanding Academic Title, 2007.” He has co-authored An Overview of Post-Conflict Justice, for publication by the International Human Rights Law Institute at DePaul University and for the Iraq History Project. Dr. Semmerling has served as Jeanne M. and Joseph P. Sullivan Human Rights Fellow, working with the Iraq History Project; Research Fellow at The Council of American-Islamic Relations, researching the arrests of Muslims after 9/11; and Senior Research Fellow for the International Human Rights Law Institute, providing sentencing research in an enemy-combatant case in the 7th Circuit. Presently, Dr. Semmerling contributes research to the Capital Jury Project, an academic study of jury behavior in death penalty cases, and works for the Sentencing Advocacy Group of Evanston, a capital-mitigation firm in Illinois. In early 2010, he will be launching his own firm, The Mercury Associates, which will develop mitigation cases for defendants who face death penalty sentences.

Sherene H. Razack
Abstract: Its now four years since the Abu Ghraib pictures hit the airwaves and discussions of torture are still everywhere. In this presentation I explore how many contemporary discussions of torture that take place as critique rely upon, even as they install, the idea that the enemy is culturally different from us. Academic panels, for instance, now good naturedly discussed the need for new methods of interrogation now that we are dealing with a culturally different enemy. Examining Errol Morris’s documentary ‘Standard Operating Procedure’ and the book on which it is based authored by Philip Gourevtich and Errol Morris, I trace the work done by the idea that Arab/Muslim means a different kind of human. Ordinary people who torture are produced as people whose actions are justifiable, given the extreme conditions of the encounter between Arabs/Muslims and the First World. I suggest that we are being schooled to get through torture, as the soldiers at Abu Ghraib are shown to be doing in Morris’s film, by appealing to the idea that culturally different humans can only be kept in line through violence.
1Bio: Sherene Razack is Professor, Sociology and Equity Studies in Education, the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto. Her research and teaching interests lie in the area of race and gender issues in the law. Her courses include: ‘Race, Space and Citizenship;’ Race and Knowledge Production’ and ‘Racial Violence and the Law.’ Her most recent book is entitled Casting Out: The Eviction of Muslims From Western Law and Politics. (University of Toronto Press, 2008). She has also published Dark Threats and White Knights: The Somalia Affair, Peacekeeping and the New Imperialism (University of Toronto Press, 2004), an edited collection Race, Space and the Law: Unmapping A White Settler Society (Toronto: Between the Lines, 2002), Looking White People in the Eye: Gender, Race, and Culture in Courtrooms and Classrooms (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998,1999, 2000) and Canadian Feminism and the Law: The Women’s Legal and Education Fund and the Pursuit of Equality (Toronto: Second Story Press, 1991).

Pnina Werbner
Bio: Pnina Werbner is Professor of Sociology at Keele University. She is currently researching puberty rituals in a Tswapong village in Botswana, women and the changing public sphere, the Manual Workers Union. Recent awards include an ESRC large grant to study 'New African Migrants in the Gateway City', and a comparative study of the Filipino diaspora in Israel and Saudi Arabia, supported by a large grant from the AHRC. Her fields of interest include urbanism, ritual and religion, cultural politics, migration, diaspora, and ethnicity. She has published widely on topics that engage with the challenges presented by the rise of Islamic radicalism, the Rushdie affair, cultural hybridity, women, citizenship and difference. She has presented plenary addresses to the Australian, Swiss and American Associations, and been invited to give keynote addresses throughout Europe, the USA, Australia, Israel, Pakistan, and Indonesia. Her most recent edited book is an ASA volume, Anthropology and the New Cosmopolitanism, published by Berg in 2008. Other major publications include, Imagined Diasporas among Manchester Muslims (James Currey 2002) and Pilgrims of Love: the Anthropology of a Global Sufi Cult (Hurst 2003).

Amena H. Saiyid
Bio: Amena H. Saiyid is currently an energy/environmental markets and policy reporter with Platts, a McGraw-Hill publishing company that is a global provider of energy and metals information and the world’s foremost source of benchmark price assessments in the physical energy markets. She has more than 10 years of news reporting experience in the US, which includes coverage of local and state governments for regional newspapers as well as domestic energy and environmental policies, as they are crafted in Congress and the federal government, for specialized energy and environmental publications, Bureau of National Affairs Inc. and Argus Media Ltd. She also has served as a congressional “journalism” fellow in US Senator Patty Murray’s office, working on energy and environmental policy. In the past year, she has freelanced for two leading Pakistani English daily newspapers, the Dawn and The News International, where she has written about US climate change, oil, policies as well as Pakistani attitudes in the wake of the recent spate of suicide bombings.