Islamophobia And Secularism

Nadeem F Paracha in The Dawn

Prime Minister Imran Khan frequently uses the term ‘Islamophobia’ while commenting on the relationship between European governments and their Muslim citizens. Khan has often been accused of lamenting the treatment meted out to Muslims in Europe, but remaining conspicuously silent about cases of religious discrimination in his own country.

Then there is also the case of Khan not uttering a single word about the Chinese government’s apparently atrocious treatment of the Muslim population of China’s Xinjiang province.

Certain laws in European countries are sweepingly described as being ‘Islamophobic’ by Khan. When European governments retaliate by accusing Pakistan of constitutionally encouraging acts of bigotry against non-Muslim groups, the PM bemoans that Europeans do not understand the complexities of Pakistan’s ‘Islamic’ laws.

Yet, despite the PM repeatedly claiming to know the West like no other Pakistani does, he seems to have no clue about the complexities of European secularism.

Take France for instance. French secularism, called ‘Laïcité’ is somewhat different than the secularism of various other European countries and the US. According to the contemporary scholar of Western secularism, Charles Taylor, French secularism is required to play a more aggressive role.

In his book, A Secular Age, Taylor demonstrates that even though the source of Western secularism was common — i.e. the emergence of ‘modernity’ and its political, economic and social manifestations — secularism evolved in Europe and the US in varying degrees and of different types. 

Secularism in the US remains largely impersonal towards religion. But in France and in some other European countries, it encourages the state/government to proactively discourage even certain cultural dimensions of faith in the public sphere which, it believes, have the potential of mutating into becoming political expressions.

Nevertheless, to almost all prominent philosophers of Western democracy across the 19th and 20th centuries, the idea of providing freedom to practise religion is inherent in secularism, as long as this freedom is not used for any political purposes.

According to the American sociologist Jacques Berlinerblau in A Call to Arms for Religious Freedom, six types of secularism have evolved. The American researcher Barry Kosmin divides secularism into two categories: ‘soft’ and ‘hard’. Most of Berlinerblau’s types fall in the ‘soft’ category. The hard one is ‘State Sponsored Atheism’ which looks to completely eliminate religion. This type was practised in various former communist countries and is presently exercised in China and North Korea. One can thus place Laïcité between Kosmin’s soft and hard secular types.

The existence of what is called ‘Islamophobia’ in secular Europe and the US has increasingly drawn criticism from various quarters. According to the French author Jean-Loïc Le Quellec, the term is derived from the French word ‘islamophobie’ that was first used in 1910 to describe prejudice against Muslims.

L.P. Sheridan writes in the March 2006 issue of the Journal of Interpersonal Violence that the term did not become widely used till 1991. According to Roland Imhoff and Julia Recker in the Journal of Political Psychology, a wariness had already been building in the West towards Muslims because of the aggressively anti-West ‘Islamic’ Revolution in Iran in 1979, and the violent backlash in some Muslim countries against the publication of the novel Satanic Verses by the British author Salman Rushdie in 1988.

Islamophobia is one of the many expressions of racism towards ‘the other’. Racisms of varying nature have for long been present in Europe and the US. Therefore Imhoff and Recker see Islamophibia as “new wine in an old bottle.” It is a relatively new term, but one that has also been criticised.

Discrimination against race, faith, ethnicity, caste, etc., is present in almost all countries. But its existence gets magnified when it is present in countries that describe themselves as liberal democracies.

Whereas Islamophobia is often understood as a phobia against Islam, there are also those who find this definition problematic. To the term’s most vehement critics, not only has it overshadowed other aspects of racism, of which there are many, it is also mostly used by ‘radical Muslims’ to curb open debate.

In a study, the University of Northampton’s Paul Jackson writes that the term should be replaced with ‘Muslimphobia’ because the racism in this context is aimed at a people and not towards the faith, as such. However, he does add that the faith too should be open for academic debate.

In an essay for the 2016 anthology The Search for Europe, Bichara Khader writes that racism against non-white migrants in Europe intensified in the 1970s because of a severe economic crisis. Khader writes that this racism was not pitched against one’s faith.

According to Khader, whereas this meant that South Asian, Arab, African and Caribbean migrants were treated as an unwanted whole based on the colour of their skin, from the 1980s onwards, the Muslims among these migrants began to prominently assert their distinctiveness. As the presence of veiled women and mosques grew, this is when the ‘migration problem’ began to be seen as a ‘Muslim problem’.

The Muslim diaspora in the West began to increasingly consolidate itself as a separate whole. Mainly through dress, Muslim migrants began to shed the identity of their original countries, creating a sort of universality of Muslimness.

But this also separated them from the non-Muslim migrant communities, who were facing racial discrimination as well. Interestingly, this imagined universality of Muslimness was also exported back to the mother countries of Muslim migrants.

Take the example of how, in Pakistan, some recent textbooks have visually depicted the dress choices of Pakistani women. They are almost exactly how some second and third generation Muslim women in the West imagine a woman should dress like.

But there was criticism within Pakistan of this depiction. The critics maintain that the present government was trying to engineer a cultural type of how women ought to dress in a country where — unlike in some other Muslim countries — veiling is neither mandatory nor banned. This has only further highlighted the fact that identity politics in this context in Pakistan is being influenced by the identity politics being flexed by certain Muslim groups in the West.

Either way, because of the fact that it is a recent phenomenon, identity politics of this nature is not organic as such, and will continue to cause problems for Muslims within and away.

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US-China rivalry drives the retreat of market economics

Gideon Rachman in The FT 

Old ideas are like old clothes — wait long enough and they will come back into fashion. Thirty years ago, “industrial policy” was about as fashionable as a bowler hat. But now governments all over the world, from Washington to Beijing and New Delhi to London, are rediscovering the joy of subsidies and singing the praises of economic self-reliance and “strategic” investment. 

The significance of this development goes well beyond economics. The international embrace of free markets and globalisation in the 1990s went hand in hand with declining geopolitical tension. The cold war was over and governments were competing to attract investment rather than to dominate territory. 

Now the resurgence of geopolitical rivalry is driving the new fashion for state intervention in the economy. As trust declines between the US and China, so each has begun to see reliance on the other for any vital commodity — whether semiconductors or rare-earth minerals — as a dangerous vulnerability. Domestic production and security of supply are the new watchwords. 

As the economic and industrial struggle intensifies, the US has banned the exports of key technologies to China and pushed to repatriate supply chains. It is also moving towards direct state-funding of semiconductor manufacturing. For its part, China has adopted a “dual circulation” economy policy that emphasises domestic demand and the achievement of “major breakthroughs in key technologies”. The government of Xi Jinping is also tightening state control over the tech sector. 

The logic of an arms race is setting in, as each side justifies its moves towards protectionism as a response to actions by the other side. In Washington, the US-China Strategic Competition Act, currently wending its way through Congress, accuses China of pursuing “state-led mercantilist economic policies” and industrial espionage. The announcement in 2015 of Beijing’s “Made in China 2025” industrial strategy is often cited as a turning point. In Beijing, by contrast, it is argued that a fading America has turned against globalisation in an effort to block China’s rise. President Xi has said the backlash against globalisation in the west means China must become more self-reliant. 

The new emphasis on industrial strategy is not confined to the US and China. In India, Narendra Modi’s government is promoting a policy of Atmanirbhar Bharat (self-reliant India), which encourages domestic production of key commodities. The EU published a paper on industrial strategy last year, which is seen as part of a drive towards strategic autonomy and less reliance on the outside world. Ursula von der Leyen, European Commission president, has called for Europe to have “mastery and ownership of key technologies”. 

Even a Conservative administration in Britain is turning away from the laissez-faire economics championed by former prime minister Margaret Thatcher, and seeking to protect strategic industries. The government is reviewing whether to block the sale of Arm, a UK chipmaker, to Nvidia, a US company. The UK government has also bought a controlling stake in a failing satellite business, OneWeb. 

Covid-19 has strengthened the fashion for industrial policy. The domestic production of vaccines is increasingly seen as a vital national interest. Even as they decry “vaccine nationalism” elsewhere, many governments have moved to restrict exports and to build up domestic suppliers. The lessons about national resilience learnt from the pandemic may now be applied to other areas, from energy to food supplies. 

In the US, national security arguments for industrial policy are meshing with the wider backlash against globalisation and free trade. Joe Biden’s rhetoric is frankly protectionist. The president proclaimed to Congress: “All the investments in the American jobs plan will be guided by one principle: Buy American.” 

In an article last year, Jake Sullivan, Mr Biden’s national security adviser, urged the security establishment to “move beyond the prevailing neoliberal economic philosophy of the past 40 years” and to accept that “industrial policy is deeply American”. The US, he argued, will continue to lose ground to China on key technologies such as 5G and solar panels, “if Washington continues to rely so heavily on private sector research and development”. 

Many of these arguments will sound like common sense to voters. Protectionism and state intervention often does. But free-market economists are aghast. Swaminathan Aiyar, a prominent commentator in India, laments the return of the failed ideas of the past, arguing that: “Self sufficiency was what Nehru and Indira Gandhi tried in the 1960s and 1970s. It was a horrible and terrible flop.” Adam Posen, president of the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington, recently decried “America’s self-defeating economic retreat”, arguing that policies aimed at propping up chosen industries or regions usually end in costly failure. 

As tensions rise between China, the US and other major powers, it is understandable that these countries will look at the security implications of key technologies. But claims by politicians that industrial policy will also produce better-paying jobs and a more productive economy deserve to be treated with deep scepticism. Sometimes ideas go out of fashion for a reason.