Pankaj Mishra on Islamophobia and integration

Posted on 17th August, 2009 by

A culture of fear — from Saturday’s Guardian

Pankaj Mishra had a lengthy article published on the rise of Islamophobia across Europe in Saturday’s Guardian which covers the gamut of issues raised by Islamophobia from demographic scaremongering through debate on the hijab that left out the women who wear it to the resilience of the anti-Turkish sentiment in the EU. One interesting point which hasn’t been well-made elsewhere, however, concerns the value of Muslim integration. We’d all be accepted if we just became more like the natives, right? Jewish experience shows otherwise:

Voltaire burnished his credentials as a defender of reason and civility with attacks on “ignorant” and “barbarous” Jews who, as slaves to their scripture, were, “all of them, born with raging fanaticism in their hearts”. (The Nazis put together a sizeable anthology of Voltaire’s rants against Jews.) Accused of mistreating their women and proliferating with devious rapidity, and goaded to abandon their religious and cultural baggage, many Jews in the 19th century paid an even higher cost of “integration” than that confronting Muslims today in France.

As it turned out, those Jews who suppressed the Torah and Talmud and underwent drastic embourgeoisement became even more vulnerable to malign prejudice in post-Enlightenment Europe’s secular nation-states. The persecution of Alfred Dreyfus in France convinced Theodore Herzl, the creator of modern Zionism, that “the Jew who tries to adapt himself to his environment, to speak its languages, to think its thoughts” would remain a potentially treacherous “alien” in the secular west. Reporting in the 1920s on Jewish communities exposed to a particularly vicious recrudescence of antisemitism, the novelist Joseph Roth denounced assimilation as a dangerous illusion, blaming its failure on the “habitual bias that governs the actions, decisions, and opinions of the average western European”.

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  • http://ibnatalhidayah.blogspot.com/ Amy

    But then the Jews got themselves a state on someone else’s land.

  • Stephen K. Mack

    Mr. Mishra’s article was very thought provoking and addresses the issue of Western hysteria regarding the other. But from my perspective: 64 year old ,gay(out 6 years),white, male, lived all my life in California(Long Beach,Costa Mesa, and San Diego)USA- Islam does not let people like me exist! I know that this is not a pressing issue for many, but we are 10%of the population. And given the recent executions in Iran of young men for just such crimes against nature and Islam,my political,my existential position toward Islam is a negative one.The proponents of religious pluralism are excuse makers for the inherent sexual violence, and endemic male supremacy of the Abrahamic Tradition. I would like to get on the Tolerance Bandwagon but I’m just not willing to make alliance with my potential murderers.And what of the fate of my brother and sisters in Islam? As a avid reader and philosophical ally of Amartya Sen and his great book ‘Identity and Violence’(a highly sophisticated philosophical rejoinder to Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations[better as an essay in Foreign Policy than as a bloated bestseller]I will assert my right to exist in a secular state where The Enlightenment is still an evolving possibility not a moribund historical artifact. See Robin May Schott’s ‘Cognition and Eros’ for a Feminist critique of ‘The Kantian Paradigm’. A concrete example of the still vital philosophical evolution of the concept of The Enlightenment. Best regards from San Diego,California, Stephen K.Mack

  • http://chartal.blogspot.com/ Ralph Musgrave

    Pankaj Mishra doesnt seem too bothered with getting his facts right. He claimed in the Guardian article that “the British National Party . . . .have repackaged their foundational antisemitism, and now accuse Muslims rather than Jews of secretly conspiring to control the world.”

    This is bunk. I’ve kept an eye on BNP literature for the last 8 years or so. The BNP may be guilty of all sorts of sins, but antisemitism just aint there: at least no more so than it appears in respectable newspapers like The Guardian.