Muhammad in the Digital Age 9781477307687

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Muhammad in the Digital Age

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Muhammad in the Digital Age

Edited by Ruqayya Yasmine Khan Foreword by Randall Nadeau

University of Texas Press   Austin

Portions of chapter 3, by Jytte Klausen, were originally published as “The Danish Cartoons and Modern Iconoclasm in the Cosmopolitan Muslim Disapora,” Harvard Middle Eastern and Islamic Review v. 8, no. 1 (2009): 86–118. Copyright © 2015 by the University of Texas Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America First edition, 2015 Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to: Permissions University of Texas Press P.O. Box 7819 Austin, TX 78713-­7819 http://utpress.utexas.edu/index.php/rp-­form ♾ The paper used in this book meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-­1992 (R1997) (Permanence of Paper).

Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data

Muhammad in the digital age / edited by Ruqayya Yasmine Khan; foreword by Randall Nadeau. — First edition.   pages  cm  Includes bibliographical references and index.  ISBN 978-1-4773-0767-0 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-4773-0768-7 (library e-book) — ISBN 978-1-4773-0769-4 (nonlibrary e-book) 1. Information technology—Religious aspects—Islam. 2. Digital media— Religious aspects—Islam. 3. Muhammad, Prophet—Public opinion. 4. Islam in mass media. 5. Muslims—Public opinion. 6. Islamophobia—United States.  I. Khan, Ruqayya Yasmine, editor. II. Nadeau, Randall Laird, 1956–, writer of supplementary textual content.  BP52.M793 2015  305.6′97 dc23 2015023706 doi:10.7560/307670

Contents



Foreword by Randall Nadeau vii

Acknowledgments xi

Introduction 1 Ruqayya Yasmine Khan, with Mashal Saif

1. Muhammad and the Debates on Islam’s Origins in the Digital Age 16 Fred M. Donner 2. Muhammad the Peacemaker, Muhammad the Warrior: Visions of Islam’s Prophet after 9/11 35 Jonathan Brockopp 3. Art History and the Contemporary Politics of Depicting Muhammad: The Case of the Danish Cartoon Controversy 57 Jytte Klausen 4. Postmodern Politics: Manipulating Images of Islam in Contemporary Europe 83 Peter O’Brien 5. Of Cyber Muslimahs: Wives of the Prophet and Muslim Women in the Digital Age 108 Ruqayya Yasmine Khan 6. Behind Every Good Muslim Man: Fictional Representations of ʿAʾisha after 9/11 129 Aysha Hidayatullah

vi Contents

7. Muslimophobia, Racialization, and Mistaken Identity: Understanding Anti-­Sikh Hate Violence in Post-­9/11 America 158 Simran Jeet Singh 8. Finding an Enemy: Islam and the New Atheism 174 Taner Edis

Conclusion 193 Ruqayya Yasmine Khan

Bibliography 197 Contributors 221 Index 227

Foreword Randall Nadeau

Religious founders are the wellsprings of tradition. They engender cultures, peoples, movements, values. They are metaphorically Abrahamic— ancestors, fathers and mothers, of their descendants and devotees. They are the one before and behind the many. But religious founders are also the products of human expression and creativity; they are, in image and form, cultural creations—and they are thus as variable, changeable, and dynamic as culture itself. Their singularity is as illusory as the singularity of religion. Just as there are many Christianities, Buddhisms, and Islams, so too there are many Jesuses, Buddhas, and Muhammads. So, like religions, religious founders are contested. They are many things to many people. One of the greatest differences between adherents and scholars of religion—between insiders and outsiders—is the very notion of the founder. New Testament scholars concluded their search for the historical Jesus in times and places far deeper and wider than the context of the historical figure himself. Scholars of Taoism saw the figure of Laozi disappear before their eyes and concluded (through philological study of the text he purportedly authored, the Daodejing) that the name actually referred to a community of wise elders. And in the second millennium of the Buddhist tradition—one of the only traditions in which adherents themselves discovered the multiplicity of the founder—the Buddha became many Buddhas. But for Christians, there can be only one Jesus; for at least some Buddhists, only one Buddha; and for Muslims, only one Muhammad. Where the religion scholar sees multiplicity, the devotee sees only the one object of worship.

viii Foreword

So it is no surprise, though still a cause of shock and anguish, that adherents may kill in the name of the One. The events in Paris in January 2015, whatever their underlying social and political contexts, were profoundly religious in one important respect: the killers acted in defense of the Prophet. To insist otherwise is to ignore what was, for them, a primary motivation for their horrific acts. We must not assume that the killers represented Islam, or even radical Islam, but we cannot deny that their devotion to the sanctity of the prophetic One inspired them to avenge Charlie Hebdo’s heresy and the mocking denigration of the sacred image. Charlie Hebdo’s cartoonists were themselves engaged in a war of the pen, with the basic presupposition that the Prophet is many things to many people, including an object of derision. It is this basic presupposition that the killers aimed to destroy. Horrific acts in the name of the founder are thankfully rare. But we can find many other instances of intolerance toward those who challenge— whether through academic inquiry, ridicule, or conviction—the authority of the sacred image. • Reactions to academic work by Paul Courtright, Jeffrey Kripal, Wendy Doniger, and other Western scholars deconstructing the Hindu tradition have elicited book bans and threats of violence in India and abroad. The authors’ offense was not ridicule, but scholarly interpretation—demonstrating the historical, psychological, and social contexts of Hindu devotionalism. • In a 2011 conference held at Sichuan University on the history of Taoism, the most pronounced difference between Chinese and foreign scholars was in the depiction of the founder Laozi. The foreign scholars claimed that Laozi is a myth, a mosaic of images assembled over many generations. The local scholars’ insistence on Laozi’s historicity—from his date and place of birth to his remarkable biography and lifespan—was an expression of cultural orthodoxy and nationalist pride. • In October 2014 an Australian pub owner in Rangoon was arrested and jailed for a seemingly innocuous though undoubtedly ribald depiction of the Buddha sporting a set of Beats by Dre headphones. Charges brought against him included heresy and insult to the faith. Unlike the defiant cartoonists of Charlie Hebdo, the pub owner immediately issued an abject apology on the pub’s Facebook page. • Scurrilous depictions of Jesus—such as those by the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, with his infamous photorealistic images of the

Foreword ix

crucified Christ in a pool of urine or blood—evoke condemnations that go beyond simple critique: art exhibitions have been closed and funding revoked, and the culture wars intensified in the name of the One.

These examples could be multiplied, and each is subject to contention. No matter how severe or how mild the reactions may be, religious devotees often feel called to defend the image of the founder. The collection of essays presented in this book could not be more timely, or timeless: the image of the Prophet is and will always be a source of contestation. Some of the essays began as talks given at Trinity University of San Antonio, Texas, in spring 2010 as part of a Lennox Lecture Series titled “Muhammad in History, Politics, and Memory,” organized by Ruqayya Khan. I was privileged to serve as chair of the Department of Religion at Trinity at the time and to receive some credit for the success of the series—credit that was totally undeserved because every aspect of the series was inspired and realized by Dr. Khan as its sole organizer. She further organized a panel—on extraordinarily short notice—for the 2010 annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion on controversies surrounding the siting of an Islamic center in New York City. The AAR panel was attended by an overflow crowd of several hundred scholars as well as local, national, and international press. This panel resulted in the online publication of a special issue of Religions (“Islam in America: Zeroing in on the Park51 Controversy”) within six months of the conference. Finally, Dr. Khan has in this volume brought together a stellar array of scholars spanning religious studies, cultural studies, aesthetics, philology, history, and Middle Eastern studies to produce a work that, in its totality, weaves a rich tapestry of the many images of the Prophet. Though each is one in the religious eye, prophets are many and changing in image and representation. It is our mission as historians of Islam to record and investigate the many interpretations and contested meanings of the Prophet.

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Acknowledgments

This volume has been nearly four long years in the making. Gratitude is due to many parties involved in its formation and publication. The genesis of this volume lies in a fall 2011 lecture series titled “Muhammad in History, Politics, and Memory,” hosted by the Lennox Foundation at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas. Two of the contributors to this volume, Fred Donner and Jonathan Brockopp, were featured in the series. I am grateful for the support granted by the Lennox Foundation, by Trinity University, and in particular by the Department of Religion at Trinity and by its then-­chair, Randall Nadeau, who offered encouragement throughout. Without the valuable assistance of two key research and editorial assistants, this volume would not have been possible. The two names reflect the two phases of this volume’s history: the first phase at Trinity University and the second at Claremont Graduate University in Claremont, California. At Trinity University, Divina Varghese, an undergraduate religion major, did a great job assisting me in all aspects of the volume’s genesis and evolution, including library research, editorial work, website construction, and communication with the volume’s nine contributors. At Claremont, Nayawiyyah Muhammad, a doctoral candidate in the Department of Religion’s program in Women’s Studies in Religion, has done a top-­notch job as my research assistant. Her diligent and careful assistance has exceeded all my expectations; she has been pivotal in facilitating the volume’s coming of age with regard to its index and bibliography, as well as with proofreading, formatting, and much more during the final copyediting stages. I convey my appreciation to the Department of Religion at Claremont for making it possible for Nayawiyyah to provide me

xii Acknowledgments

with such quality editorial support and logistical backing in the production of this volume. The volume has undergone a stringent peer review process, and I extend my heartfelt gratitude to the anonymous reviewers who partook in this evaluation. And of course, many thanks to the nine contributors themselves, who with care and patience attended to the volume’s development and fruition over the four years required to bring it to press. There were several parties I reached out to for the illustrations in this volume and I must acknowledge their responsiveness and offer my great thanks to them for sharing these images and photos: “Amethyst,” the anonymous digital creator of Ninjabi.com, for allowing me use of a few of her online comics; the Infa Yattara Private Library of Timbuktu, Mali, owner Jean Lefe Ag Nouh and representative Curt Meyer (currently held by the High Museum of Atlanta), for the photos of the Qur’an manuscripts; and Vernon Schubel, professor of Islamic Studies at Kenyon College, for his snapshots of the “je suis Ahmed, je suis Charlie” phenomenon on his college campus. I owe much to the University of Texas Press. In particular, I am thankful for the constancy, guidance, and assiduous support shown by its senior editor, Jim Burr, from the inception of this volume to its publication. Jim has been there all along through the ups and downs of this volume’s life span, and the book owes its existence in large measure to his editorial stewardship. I extend gratitude to my colleague and friend Alida Metcalf for first recommending the University of Texas Press to me. Thank you also to the quality staff at the Press, including manuscript editor Lynne Chapman and editorial assistant Sarah McGavick for their diligence and care in relation to this volume. I am also grateful to cover designer Natalie Smith for her fine work. Finally, I convey a special note of gratitude to freelance copy editor Meg Wallace, who performed a meticulous and excellent editorial feat in relation to the manuscript.

Muhammad in the Digital Age

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Introduction Ruqayya Yasmine Khan, with Mashal Saif

I grew up in an Indo-­Pakistani Muslim family in the United States, a family in which three of the five children were named after members of the prophet Muhammad’s family. Reflecting on how the Prophet’s influence on my life seems to have been a matter more of style than of substance, I am reminded of the acclaimed Islamicist Seyyed H. Nasr’s musings: A Chinese Muslim, although racially a Chinese, has a countenance, behavior, manner of walking and acting that resembles in certain ways those of a Muslim on the coast of the Atlantic. That is because both have for centuries copied the same model. Something of the soul of the Prophet is to be seen in both places.1

I discern the soft contours of the soul of the Prophet present in myriad instances while I was a small girl. One such instance was when my mother would chastise or scold me and my siblings by deploying a well-­known dictum (Hadith) of the Prophet: “Paradise lies under the feet of one’s mother.” Another example is when, as a young girl, I hid under my pillow tiny vials of Zamzam water that my father had brought back from the Hajj pilgrimage in Mecca. The Hajj—the fifth pillar of Islam and an amalgam of much older rituals put together by Muhammad—includes a number of practices that pay tribute to the patriarch Abraham and to Hagar, the mother of Ishmael. Something of the healing and magical qualities of the water from the Zamzam well (the miraculous well bestowed by God when Hagar was in search of water in the Meccan valley) no doubt had been communicated to me as a child. Last, but certainly not least, my maternal grandmother sat me on her knee when I was about five years old to teach

2 Introduction

me the recitation of the Arabic Qurʾan. The sweetness and intimacy of this childhood experience stayed with me well into my adult life. As an adult, I admire and relate to the civilizational givens of Islam: its literatures and mysticism, philosophy, art, and architecture. A rich vein of these Islamic civilizational literatures consists of poetry. Consider the profoundly rich poetic corpus of the famous medieval Persian poet Jalaluddin Rumi, or of the great premodern Indian Muslim poet, Muhammad Asadullah Ghalib. Islamic civilization literatures have always embraced internal critiques of mainstream Islam, sometimes satirizing or even lampooning clerics or mullahs who were perceived as knuckle-­ headed. “Mullah-­bashing” has been part and parcel of diverse Islamic regional literatures throughout the more than fourteen centuries since the religion’s inception. In the post-­9/11 digital age, the opposing yet related phenomena of mullah-­cults and Islam-­bashing seem to prevail. An important trait of digital interactions is the capacity for anonymity, which markedly increases the potential for hate-­mongering and for hate crimes in general. Since 9/11 these elements of bitter polemics, hate-­mongering, and associated acts of violence have spiked significantly, embedded in a powerful and yet simplistic master narrative playing out in many parts of the world—the conflict between Islam and the West. Integral to these phenomena is another set of twin phenomena that scholars of Islam term Islamophobia and Islamophilia. Islamophobes uncritically demonize or vilify Islam, Muslims, or Muhammad, while Islamophiles uncritically idealize the religion and yearn for its “Golden Age,” presenting Islam and its Prophet as a panacea to all problems.2 At the risk of oversimplification, mullah-­cults and their devotees thrive on Islamophilia, while Islam-­bashers subscribe to Islamophobia. Barack Hussein Obama weighed in on both of these phenomena in 2012 when he declared that “the future cannot belong to those who slander the Prophet of Islam,”3 and in 2015 when he asserted that ISIL (Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant) is a “brutal, vicious death cult that, in the name of religion, carries out unspeakable acts of barbarism.”4 Many of the digital devotees, warriors, and polemicists of Islamophobia and Islamophilia maintain their anonymity while delivering their messages. These two competing polemical streams feed off of one another and grow in strength and numbers as mediatized images and ideological wars over Islam, Muslims, and Muhammad play out in the digital world. These deadly polemics contributed to events in Paris in early 2015. Two brothers proclaiming to be “defenders of the Prophet” and citing sup-

Introduction 3

Figure 0.1. In the wake of the January 2015 killings at the Charlie

Hebdo magazine premises, students from the French department of Kenyon College, Ohio, USA, hung up photos that read “Je Suis Ahmed” and displayed the picture of Ahmed Merbet, the Muslim police officer who was killed during the shootings. Juxtaposition of the photos with “Je Suis Charlie” posters all over campus helped to alter the nature of the dialogue at Kenyon College about what had happened in Paris.

port from Al-­Qaida in Yemen gunned down a dozen people in the offices of Charlie Hebdo, the Parisian satirical magazine. The dozen included ten journalists and two police officers. One of the most charged and controversial Hebdo cartoons had graphically portrayed the Prophet kissing and necking with another man. The magazine’s cartoons lampooned and satirized what may be termed the conservative mullah-­cults of Islam as much as they did the prophet Muhammad. Within a week after the shootings, thousands of “Je suis Charlie” banners, postings, and images sprang up in Paris and all over the Internet. A few people took to complementing “Je suis Charlie” with “Je suis Ahmed” to commemorate the French Muslim police officer who was killed on the premises of the Hebdo offices.

4 Introduction

The past decade has witnessed an unrivaled volume of trafficking in and dissemination of information and misinformation about Islam, its Prophet, and its followers, largely facilitated by the fact that the tragedy of 9/11 coincided with the advent of the digital age, often dated to 2002. The digital age is marked by an explosion of new media, including Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and Reddit. Digital media have transformed how producers and users obtain, create, manipulate, and exchange information, images, services, and goods. Given the ubiquity of new media and its ease of use, everyone is an author,5 able to disseminate at the click of a button his or her own interpretation of Islam or representation of Muhammad. With the advent of the digital age during the post-­9/11 era, Muslim-­ baiting has become a popular global sport. A 2012 manifestation of this can be seen in a film trailer anonymously posted on YouTube that depicts Muhammad as a child molester and adulterer. Ostensibly as a result of the circulation of the film trailer, riots and demonstrations flared up in Cairo and Tripoli beginning on the infamous day of September 11, 2012. On that same day, the US ambassador to Libya, Christopher Stevens, and several other Americans were killed at the United States diplomatic mission in Benghazi. Politics and polemics fiercely converged in the 2012 American presidential race as the Obama administration and the Romney campaign traded barbs over the cause of the Benghazi killings: circulation of the film trailer or an orchestrated terrorist attack by Al-­Qaida affiliates in the region.6 It is not a coincidence that the riots and killings happened on September 11, 2012, the eleventh anniversary of 9/11. Within days following the killings, the film trailer, titled “Innocence of Muslims” and originally posted by one Sam Bacile two months earlier, had garnered close to five million hits. Parts if not all of the trailer had been broadcast on Egyptian television before September 11, 2012. According to a post in the Guardian: Scenes showing Muhammad anointing a donkey as “the first Muslim animal” were shown, as were scenes implying the Koran was not divinely inspired, but drafted from verses plagiarised from the New Testament and Torah. Scenes with sexual references were not shown. Most of the clips circulating online are dubbed into Arabic.7

Subsequently, YouTube (owned by Google) proceeded to take down the film trailer in a number of Muslim-­majority countries, including Egypt, Libya, and Indonesia. Moreover, citing its “Community Guidelines,” 8 YouTube appended a disclaimer to its posting of the trailer: “The fol-

Introduction 5

lowing content has been identified by the YouTube community as being potentially offensive or inappropriate. Viewer discretion is advised.” Media personalities, political pundits, and scholars of Islam and the Middle East immediately began debating the role of the digital age in the tragic turn of events. Some, like Bruce Lawrence, a noted scholar of Islam, pointed out that our century is profoundly the century of the CyberKingdom, where nothing is off-­limits, no matter how hateful or obscene, a century during which the Internet functions as an “equal-­opportunity offender.”9 Others, such as Fred Donner, a recognized scholar of early Islam and a contributor to this volume, decried the making of the video but asserted that “the solution (some kind of censorship) would almost surely be more dangerous than the problem we face.”10 Still others drew attention to the ease with which the film was disseminated: CNN media commentator Don Lemon pointed out on his show: “Anywhere, anyone, anytime, somebody can do this. . . . All one needs is a video camera, an internet connection. Literally it took two people to make and disseminate the film.”11 Others who debated the tragic turn of events in Benghazi questioned whether this fiasco was just another example of “Muslim rage” or Muslim “religious sensitivity.”12 The latter phrase implies that there are traits or qualities intrinsic to Islam and its cultures that make it, in the words of novelist Salman Rushdie, “particularly susceptible to the rise of identity politics.” Rushdie described it thus to a New York Times op-­ed commentator: “You define yourself by what offends you. You define yourself by what outrages you.”13 Farish Noor, a Malaysian political scientist and human rights activist, has elsewhere described a “division between inside and outside, in-­group and out-­group” that characterizes modern notions of identity and belonging among Muslims.14 Yet others, such as Islam expert and academic Nancy Khalek, insisted on the necessity of going beyond the trope of Muslim religious sensitivity. She stated that “a productive way to talk about this latest [film trailer] issue is to talk about it in terms of Egypt and Libya in particular, not Islam and Muslims in general. This movie and the people behind it and things like it have existed for a long, long time. . . . We have to ask ‘why now, why here, why that?’”15 Precisely such questions were posed by Jytte Klausen, who emphasized the geopolitical dimensions of the tragic turn of events in Benghazi. Klausen, an expert on Islamist terrorist networks (and another contributor to this volume), declared: For one thing, the “perfect storm” appears to be the result of the confluence of various independent vectors driving conflict: the ultra-­Salafists

6 Introduction

in Egypt gaining space on TV due to liberalization (an ultra-­Salafist TV station first showed excerpts from the infamous YouTube movie); Morsi and the [Muslim] Brotherhood are under severe pressure from the ultra-­ Salafists and thought they could gain control of the situation; the jihadist networks preparing events to mark 9/11 and the droning of al-­Libi, a high-­ranking AQ core operative; the inability of the Libyan government to exercise any police power, etc.16

But Klausen also pointed out that this series of events, like the infamous Danish cartoon controversy and its aftermath, acquired their global significance and notoriety primarily because of the Internet and the digital age. As she remarks in her chapter for this volume: “Manipulated ‘insults’ to the Muslim Prophet and, by extension, to all Muslims, and narratives about what Islam permits or disallows are used to mobilize supporters. Each side engages in a kind of virtual global stone-­throwing with violent real-­life repercussions.” Amateurish, tasteless, and offensive though the film trailer or the Hebdo cartoons may be, their existence cries out for dialogue about difficult questions concerning the prophet Muhammad. The most difficult of these questions may be, Why is subjecting Muhammad to critique or satire off-­limits? Muslim theologians and scholars recognize that certain events in Muhammad’s life, as represented in established Muslim sources, are problematic from a moral or ethical viewpoint. Examples include the connection between the Bedouin raid and Muhammad’s new community in Medina, especially during months when there was a recognized truce with Meccan tribes; his marriage to Zaynab, who had been the wife of his adopted son, Zayd; and the incident of the “Satanic” verses. Moreover, Muslim theologians and ethicists recognize that there exist serious and complex issues in various contemporary Muslim constituencies as a consequence of the “model” (or Sunnah) of Muhammad’s life. For instance, it could be asked to what degree militant Islamist groups ideologically justify their hatred of Jews by referring to what they perceive to be the Prophet’s own experiences with Jewish communities. While Muslim theologians and scholars grapple with these difficult questions and issues concerning Muhammad, history will continue to repeat itself—indeed, repeat itself as farce. Muhammad is not off-­limits. Muslim scholars and theologians, especially from diasporic Muslim communities, are increasingly tending to their own theological backyard. On the Internet there is a profusion of

Introduction 7

intra-­Muslim debates on everything and anything pertaining to Muhammad, Islam, and Muslims. Defying regional and national boundaries, numerous virtual Muslim communities and new Muslim identities have been forged through the use of new media. In virtual communities formed via Facebook, Twitter, and blogs, there are many deliberations, debates, and contestations, and even acrimonious bickering, over normative interpretations of Islam, as well as over representations of Muhammad. Within these communities a new generation of Muslims of all types, especially self-­identified progressive Muslims, feminist Muslims, secular Muslims, and ex-­Muslims, is wrestling with aspects of Muhammad’s traditional biographical narratives that they deem problematic. Islamic textual sources themselves, such as classical Islamic biographical narratives, transmit elements that are considered controversial in the contemporary era. Recent debates about these elements speak to the tradition’s vitality and capacity for self-­critique. Modern Muslim theologians, Muslim intellectuals, and lay Muslims continue to subject elements of their religion to internal critique by tapping into this strength and vitality. In the digital age traditional notions of Islamic or Muslim authority are increasingly being decentered. Traditionally established interpretations of the Qurʾan and narratives about Muhammad are facing competition and being challenged. The Sudanese blogger Amir Ahmad Nasr explains, “The digital revolution has given a voice to young Muslims. . . . It is allowing us to criticize the religious establishment and create our own interpretations.” He adds, “Digital media will be to Islam what the printing press was to Christianity, ultimately leading to a Reformation.”17 The veracity of Nasr’s claims is confirmed by my examination of contemporary Muslim women who engage in the production of digital representations of Muhammad’s wives and thus are virtually disseminating readings of the lives of Muhammad’s wives that are female-­centered and in tune with the identities and experiences of Muslim women in the twenty-­first century. As a focal point of Islam, the figure of Muhammad commands interest for many reasons, not least the controversies over his relations with his wives. For instance, the 2012 film trailer contains caricatures concerning his interactions with his wives. It uses images of women, especially of the wives, to demonize Muhammad as well as Islam and Muslims generally. Most of these caricaturized scenarios deal not with Muhammad’s polygamy, but with the ethics of his conduct toward his spouses. As amateurish as the film trailer is, whoever made it demonstrates some famil-

8 Introduction

iarity with the Arabic-­language classical narratives, enshrined in the early Islamic sources, that portray various domestic incidents in the Prophet’s household. Though the film trailer makes offensive caricatures of these incidents— Muhammad groping Zaynab’s breasts, for example—this does not alter the fact that the relevant Islamic sources indicate that the incidents associated with these caricatures were controversial and charged at the time they occurred. For example, Muhammad’s infatuation with Zaynab and his subsequent marriage to her was as controversial in seventh-­century Madinan society as it is now. This is so even though the current sensibilities and values that induce discomfort with some incidents in Muhammad’s personal life were nonissues in his seventh-­century Arabian context.18 Modern Muslim theologians and apologists have dealt with these issues in a number of ways. Some argue that these incidents showcase Muhammad’s humanity—that though he was a prophet, he is depicted with all his mortal weaknesses. Muslim theologians also seek to redeem Muhammad by asserting that his marriage to Zaynab displays a licit channeling of sexual desire. Specifically, Muhammad and Zaynab did not have an affair. Rather, the sources demonstrate that with the divorce and remarriage, the Prophet, Zayd, and other involved parties went out of their way to ensure that nothing illicit occurred. A different, more critical, approach to this issue would be to ask, What about Zayd’s humanity? Zayd, who was raised by Muhammad as his adopted son, lost not only his wife but also his adopted father because just prior to his marriage to Zaynab, Muhammad repudiated both his relation to Zayd and the practice of adoption in general. Proponents of this critical approach would not be convinced by Muslims who suggest that what is negatively attributed to Muhammad can also be brought up with regard to other prophets and messengers of the ancient world. Can what Muhammad did with Zaynab (and to her husband Zayd) be excused any more than what David did with Bathsheba (and to her husband Uriah the Hittite)? The main issues here are ultimately ethical, not necessarily political or technological. And these ethical issues are propelling Muslim scholars and ethicists to increasingly tend to their own theological backyard. This volume brings together two distinct objects of study—Muhammad and digital media—in an unprecedented imbrication of these two very important topics. In the post-­9/11 period a number of trenchant studies have been published on modern Islamist subcultures19 and Muslim cultures at large,20 but in this age of information and technology, none of

Introduction 9

them take Muhammad and representations of him as their focus. This multidisciplinary volume fills this vital lacuna. It also stands apart from other scholarly examinations of Islam in the digital age that have taken as their point of inquiry debates over authority, identity formation, and the forging of Muslim cyber-­communities;21 instead, it examines the impact of digital media on representations and understandings of Muhammad, Islam, and Muslims. A different sort of works on Muslims in the digital age has emerged more recently. These works—both scholarly and journalistic—examine the power of new media to transform the Arab landscape.22 In particular, they examine “how young people literate in the use of new media: Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, blogs, and cellular phones—essentially Internet-­ based tools that allow for the quick and relatively unregulated sharing of information—could confront a disproportionately advantaged opponent and even catch them off guard.”23 They emphasize the ability of digital media in Muslim-­majority cultures to create virtual communities that promote civic engagement and strengthen civil society. As some academic experts working on this topic note, the surge in the use of digital media for affecting social and political change in the Middle East can be traced back to the protests in Iran following the country’s 2009 presidential election—an event that has come to be remembered as Iran’s Twitter revolution. However, recently there has been greater interest in the Facebook revolution of the Arabic-­speaking Middle East. These disparate research foci are brought together in research projects such as Digital Islam, an academic project run primarily by scholars in Prague that analyzes websites, videos, and videogames to study the intersection of Islam, the Middle East, and digital media.24 An important academic resource associated with this research project is the journal CyberOrient: Online Journal of the Virtual Middle East. The articles in the journal range from studies of the Saudi blogosphere to examinations of the opportunities social media provide to Bahraini women.25 As digital media infiltrate virtually all facets of our lives, scholarly examinations of Islam and digital media now pepper a wide range of journals.26 The advent of the digital age is an exciting period for scholars studying Islam, Muslims, and Muhammad also because digitization has made readily available ancient manuscripts and other early source texts, many of which were relatively unknown or unpublished some decades ago. Examination of these manuscripts has been mostly in the interest of textual history rather than material history. The searchability of digital manuscripts has greatly facilitated intertextual comparisons that would have

10 Introduction

been very laborious only two decades ago. The ease and pace of research on manuscripts and other early Islamic documentary sources have witnessed a remarkable increase in the past decade. This book combines study of views and representations of Muhammad with perspectives from new media. It examines three main overlapping themes that frame Muhammad as a focal point: post-­9/11 representations, analyses of conflict, and 9/11 and minority religions. The post-­9/11 representations featured in this book are not only of Muhammad, but also of his wives and of Muslims and Islam more generally. Some chapters prominently feature depictions of Muhammad’s wives by Muslim women, Muslim men, and non-­Muslims. Other chapters engage with Islamophobic representations and the manner in which these affect the lives of Muslims and non-­Muslims in the European and North American contexts. The chapters focus on a range of print discourses as well as digital representations. All of the chapters touch on conflict in one way or another: intellectual conflicts among academics and scholars over the origins of Islam; conflicts over authority, normativity, and authenticity among Muslim feminists and traditional Muslim clerics; or ideological conflicts between Islamophobes and Islamophiles. Two chapters are dedicated to assessing the impact of the 9/11 tragedy on minority religious communities in the United States. The two communities examined include Sikh Americans and the New Atheist movement. Male Sikh Americans have been the target of Islamophobic crimes since 9/11 in light of what is perceived to be their physical resemblance to the stereotypical image of the Muslim terrorist. New Atheists view the 9/11 tragedy as religiously motivated, and they essentialize Islam and construct it as an enemy of secularism and Enlightenment ideals. Despite the diversity of chapters in this book, all of them logically cohere around the focus on Muhammad in the digital age while demonstrating that the 9/11 tragedy has prompted new questions, paradigms, and strategies. The collection is diverse on both disciplinary and methodological grounds. Contributors include Islam experts, historians, political scientists, social scientists, and scholars of international studies and Asian-­American studies who together offer a balance of theoretical and empirical approaches. In chapter 1 Fred Donner accomplishes two goals: first, he takes stock of the many scholarly issues and revisionist interpretations concerning the origins of Islam and offers his own position, and second, he assesses the impact of digital technologies on such work. Donner asserts that Islam

Introduction 11

began as a monotheistic, ecumenical believers’ movement that emphasized pietistic revival. Members of this movement initially included not only the early converts, but also righteous Jews, Christians, and other monotheists. Only about a century later did this believers’ movement begin to define itself more narrowly and to resemble “brand-­name Islam” as we understand it today: a movement whose central features are primacy of the Qurʾan and of the prophet Muhammad. Donner also assesses how scholarship on the origins of Islam is being advanced by digital media, which facilitate digital enhancement, searches of relevant manuscripts, digital comparisons, and web-­based dissemination of materials. Jonathan Brockopp’s chapter engages with post-­9/11 portrayals of Muhammad as both warrior and peacemaker. What for non-­Muslim Westerners may appear to be contradictory or inconsistent facets of the Prophet are essential to the Islamic idea of Muhammad’s perfection and his status as the ideal human being. Among Brockopp’s most vital contributions is his historicization and contextualization of the terms and concepts of war and peace, especially his comparison of their meanings in early Islamic discourses with how they are broadly construed in the contemporary Western world. In sum, Brockopp maintains that in the narratives depicting the life of Muhammad, peacemaking did not imply avoiding war, but rather implied being engaged in the world, sometimes through war, in order to make it a better place. Such an understanding of war and peace in the Islamic tradition favors practicality and stands in contrast to the “messianic vision of the Christian Gospels.” Not surprisingly, many Islamophobes exploit these differences to further their polemical claims without accounting for the complex meanings of war and peace in the Islamic tradition. Shifting to Islam in contemporary Europe, in chapter 3 Jytte Klausen assesses and critiques issues of censorship and Muslim artistic conventions as they relate to the Danish cartoon controversy. Klausen acknowledges that the cartoons acquired their global significance primarily because of the digital age; discusses the stances of key Muslim actors engaged in the cartoon controversy; and considers issues such as respect versus disrespect, formulations of religious blasphemy as they relate to the cartoon depictions of Muhammad, and tensions between secular and nonsecular approaches to dealing with the perceived offenses. According to Klausen, the Danish cartoons did not violate a general prohibition on representing Muhammad, given the centuries-­old tradition of depictions of Muhammad by Muslim artists in diverse cultures. Rather, Klausen postulates, the problem was that the cartoon portraying Muhammad with a bomb in his

12 Introduction

turban—presumably the one most circulated on the Internet—violated deeply held theological prohibitions among Muslims. Peter O’Brien asserts in chapter 4 that postmodern ideas regarding the constructed nature of truth and reality have deeply penetrated European public consciousness and often serve as launching pads for actors who participate in European debates on immigration. For example, to support their xenophobic stances, Islamophobes portray Muhammad and Islam as violent, antidemocratic, misogynistic, and opposed to all European ideals. Conversely, Islamophiles—who are equally cognizant of the power of representation—assert the perfection of Islam and its Prophet while some among them simultaneously rail against the European West, terming it evil, immoral, and hedonistic. The dynamics of these competing ideologies evidence an erosion of ideas about fairness and objectivity and attest to a by-­all-­means-­necessary approach to politics. O’Brien also identifies more constructive and humane approaches to prevailing European debates on immigration. My own chapter examines contemporary Muslim women’s online discourses concerning the wives of Muhammad as they are featured in two online forums and one online comic. The study attests to the agency of digital-­savvy Muslim women, who transport both normative and alternative versions of Islam into the global context. These digital authors posit alternative female-­centered readings of the lives of the Prophet’s wives that further the cause of female empowerment through the dissemination of religious narratives that hold such values at their heart. In these online sources the wives are both celebrated and critically assessed for their intellectual, economic, and business acumen. The online comic in particular both humanizes and critiques certain practices associated with the wives of Muhammad, especially veiling and polygamy. Chapter 6, by Aysha Hidayatullah, examines post-­9/11 writings on the Prophet’s wives that meet the growing demand by the general public for literature on Muhammad and his wives. Such literature and other media use tropes about Muslim women, especially Muhammad’s wives, to either vilify or ennoble Islam, Muslims, and Muhammad. Hidayatullah focuses on Sherry Jones’s The Jewel of Medina and Kamran Pasha’s Mother of the Believers, both of which are narrated from the perspective of the Prophet’s wife ʿAʾisha. Hidayatullah asserts that the objective of both novels is to persuade their intended audiences of the egalitarian character of Islam and Muhammad, as well as to attribute twenty-­first-­century American feminist tendencies to Muhammad and ʿAʾisha—especially given how controversial the figure of ʿAʾisha is among both Muslims and non-­Muslims. This

Introduction 13

is most effectively accomplished through the rhetorical device of having ʿAʾisha tell her own tale, which allows a Muslim woman to speak for herself in a world where Muslim women are almost always spoken for by Muslim men or non-­Muslims. Hidayatullah also demonstrates that both novels are heavily influenced by the discourses of Islamophobia and Islamophilia. In chapter 7 Simran Jeet Singh makes a case that the post-­9/11 impact of Islamophobia has adversely affected Sikh-American communities, as well as Muslim Americans. Singh asserts that the perceived resemblance of Sikh-­American men to media-­disseminated images of Muslim terrorists should be understood as a racialization of religious identity. Singh explores how, despite public discourses in the United States that embrace diversity, there exists deep ambivalence about explicit and starkly visible expressions of religious identity, including hijabs, turbans, and kippas. He also examines the Sikh-­American community’s reaction to what he terms Sikhophobia. In addition to detailing how Sikh-­American coalitions and groups have become increasingly active since 9/11, Singh analyzes the horizontal linkages some have formed with Muslim-­American groups to present a united front against Islamophobia and Sikhophobia. The penultimate chapter, by Taner Edis, charts the rise of the New Atheist movement. Identifying 9/11 as an important catalyst for some members of this movement, Edis argues that New Atheist discourse engages with Islam in two distinct ways. First, New Atheists identify Islam as an extreme version of monotheism that is opposed to Enlightenment ideals and social progress. They tend to essentialize and stereotype Islam as unreformed, patriarchal, misogynistic, and resistant to secularism and science. Second, New Atheist discourse is characterized by strains of Islamophobia that yield an uncritical demonization of Muslims in general as terrorists. Edis points out that such a demonization of Islam stands in contrast to New Atheists’ stated penchant for empirical accuracy. However, the relationship between Muslim Americans and New Atheists is not always strained: Edis highlights some potential shared interests, particularly with regard to support for minority rights and freedom of expression. Notes 1. Nasr, Ideals and Realities of Islam, 82–83. 2. Islamophilia is powerfully captured by an Egyptian political slogan issued by the Muslim Brotherhood: “Islam huwa al-­Hall” or “Islam is the Answer.” 3. “Remarks by the President to the UN General Assembly,” September 25, 2012.

14 Introduction

4. “Remarks by the President at National Prayer Breakfast,” Office of the Press Secretary, February 2015. www.whitehouse.gov/the-­press-­office/2015/02/05 /remarks-­president-­national-­prayer-­breakfast. 5. An interesting corollary to this is voiced in a comment by Muqtedar Khan, an American Muslim intellectual: “the Internet has made everyone a mufti”—an Islamic jurisprudential scholar or authority. Sisler, “The Internet and the Construction of Islamic Knowledge in Europe.” 6. US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton took to the airwaves in the weeks after the killings to insist regarding the film trailer: “Let me state this, and I hope this is absolutely clear, . . . the United States government had absolutely nothing to do with this.” 7. “Low-­budget Muhammad Film Attempts to Depict Prophet as Fraud,” The Guardian, September 12, 2012, www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/sep/12/low-­budget -­muhammad-­film-­prophet. 8. YouTube offers further clarification of its policies: “YouTube staff review flagged videos 24 hours a day, seven days a week, to determine whether they violate our Community Guidelines. When they do, we remove them. Sometimes a video doesn’t violate our Community Guidelines, but may not be appropriate for everyone.” 9. Lawrence observed: “There are no topics so hateful or obscene that they’re debarred from the Internet. . . . It is a century, our century, that belongs neither to the USA nor to China, neither to imperialists nor terrorists, but to the CyberKingdom and to those who grasp the endless good and evil wrought by the Information Age.” Lawrence, “YouTube Terrorism.” 10. Personal e-­mail communication to the editor, Ruqayya Yasmine Khan, September 17, 2012. Used with permission. 11. Don Lemon Show, CNN, September 23, 2012. 12. These phrases had appeared in a 1990 Atlantic Monthly article by Bernard Lewis, “The Roots of Muslim Rage.” 13. Keller, “The Satanic Video.” 14. Noor, “What Is the Victory of Islam?” 15. Nancy Khalek, Brown University, communication on the IslamAAR e-­mail list, September 12, 2012 (used with permission). 16. Personal e-­mail communication to editor, September 17, 2012 (used with permission). 17. In Australian Financial Review, “Come the Reformation.” 18. I would concur with those who maintain that Muhammad’s marriage to another one of his wives, ʿAʾisha, was deemed much less controversial in seventh-­ century Arabia, when sensibilities and mores regarding relationships with individuals termed minors were very different from today. Similarly, it could be argued that polygamy was a more accepted practice then than it is now. I still argue that a few incidents in his life were as controversial then as they are now, and his marriage with Zaynab is one of them. 19. Gary Bunt’s works Islam in the Digital Age and iMuslims share a similar focus. Bunt examines conflicting ideas of religious authority, particularly Sunni authority, that characterize virtual Islamic environments. In Islam in the Digital Age, he focuses on changes in cyber-­environments since 9/11. He discusses elec-

Introduction 15

tronic jihad, examining the various valences of the term jihad and how activities that range from militancy, fund-­raising, and hacking to organizing peaceful demonstrations are all conducted virtually and fall under this blanket term. Bunt’s iMuslims explores the issues of religious authority in cyberspace; the construction of virtual Muslim communities; global Muslim blogging networks and their impact; reconfiguration of discourses and practices; and the use of the Internet for religious debates and polemics and for monitoring and strengthening the limits of Islamic normativity. It also examines the issue of virtual jihad and the ways in which Muslim militants employ the Internet as a tool for furthering their violent agendas. 20. New Media in the Muslim World, edited by Dale F. Eickelman and Jon W. Anderson, takes as its object of study not just the Internet but new media more generally. The contributors examine how new media facilitate dialogue, articulation of dissenting opinions, and the creation of new religious communities that engage with one another through the use of technology. Other important contributions to discussions on Islam in the digital age include Göran Larsson’s Muslims and the New Media and Dorothea E. Schulz’s Muslims and New Media in West Africa. 21. Studies in this vein include Muslim Networks and Transnational Communities in and across Europe, edited by Stefano Allievi and Jørgen Nielsen, which examines the role of information and communication technologies in identity formation among Muslims and the forging of transnational bonds and global communities. Another important work dealing with similar issues is Mohammed El-­Nawawy and Sahar Khamis’s Islam Dot Com. Engaging with the seminal writings of Jürgen Habermas, El-­Nawawy and Khamis study the manner in which multiple identities are created, deliberated, and reimagined by the virtual umma as its members engage in “virtual ritual[s] of identity-­making.” 22. Examples of these works include Khondker, “Role of the New Media in the Arab Spring”; Aday et al., Blogs and Bullets II; Mishal Husain’s video How Facebook Changed the World; DeLong-­Bas, “The New Social Media and the Arab Spring”; and Teague, “New Media and the Arab Spring.” 23. Teague, “New Media and the Arab Spring.” 24. See www.digitalislam.eu. 25. See www.cyberorient.net. 26. Chawki, “Islam in the Digital Age.”

CHAPTER 1

Muhammad and the Debates on Islam’s Origins in the Digital Age Fred M. Donner

Islam’s historical beginnings are shrouded in mystery, or at least uncertainty. One would expect historians who study Islam’s origins to be able to provide a clear, straightforward, and reliable account of what actually happened at the beginning of the Islamic community. But the interesting reality is not straightforward.

The Traditional Narrative of Islam’s Origins We know without a doubt that during the middle decades of the seventh century CE, a new empire speedily came to dominate most of the Near East, including not only Arabia but also geographical Syria, Iraq, Iran, Egypt, and North Africa. The historical figure usually associated with the start of this empire is Muhammad ibn ʿAbdullah (traditional dates ca. 570–632), who is held to be the founder of Islam (literally, “submission to God’s will”) and of the first Islamic community. Traditional narratives compiled during the first few centuries of Islam developed a richly detailed account of Islam’s origins. According to these narratives, Muhammad was a member of the tribe of Quraysh, and was born and raised in the West-­Arabian town of Mecca, located in a desert valley. In Muhammad’s youth Mecca was populated by polytheists who worshiped deified forces of nature and celestial bodies, and it benefited economically from caravan trade with Syria, Egypt, Yemen, and Iraq, and from the fees and taxes collected from pilgrims to the shrine in the center of the city, a black cubic structure called the Kaʿba. According to this traditional Islamic account, at about age forty Muhammad began to have religious experiences while on meditative re-

Muhammad and the Debates on Islam’s Origins in the Digital Age 17

treats near Mecca. Until the end of his life, he continued to have these powerful visions that he understood to be the revelation of God’s word, which he began to recite to others. In time, these utterances and recitations were collected by his followers to form the Qurʾan, Islam’s holy book. The Qurʾan makes clear the fundamental ideas of the new faith, the most important of which by far is monotheism. The Qurʾan incessantly enjoins its audience to be mindful of God in every situation and to acknowledge God as the Creator of all and as sovereign over all, the One who expects and deserves our unswerving devotion.1 The Qurʾan also embraces the concept of prophecy: God has chosen certain individuals to be prophets who receive his revelations for the guidance of their people, and to these prophets God has revealed holy books, including the Qurʾan, the Torah, and the Gospels (Arabic Injil, derived etymologically from Greek euangelion). The guidance contained in these revelations is the blueprint for how Believers should lead their lives until death. After death, each Believer will face the Last Judgment and, depending on how he or she lived, will be sent to heaven or hell. Muhammad’s preaching of these ideas, according to the traditional Islamic account, brought him both followers and stiff opposition in Mecca. After several years of preaching, he and his followers were facing increasing hostility and abuse from skeptical members of his tribe, the Quraysh. Just as Muhammad’s situation was growing desperate, however, he and his followers received an invitation from an unexpected quarter: the town of Yathrib, several days’ journey north of Mecca. Yathrib was locked in tribal strife among its main clans, but a delegation from the town invited Muhammad to serve as their leader and arbiter of their disputes. Muhammad therefore left Mecca in 622 CE and immigrated to Yathrib (subsequently called Medina), an event known as the hijra, or emigration. Muhammad’s hijra to Medina with his followers marked the beginning of the first independent and self-­governing Muslim community.2 In Medina, Muhammad set about consolidating his rule in a process that lasted until his death in 632 CE. He faced many challenges, including reconciling the rival Medinese clans and encouraging positive relations between the Medinese and the newly-­arrived Meccans who had made the hijra with him. There was also a prolonged struggle between the many Jewish residents of the city and Muhammad and his followers. Although at first Medina’s Jewish clans made common cause with the prophet, in time tensions increased, and one by one the main Jewish clans were either ejected from Medina or, in one case, judged guilty of treasonous contact

18 Muhammad in the Digital Age

with a Meccan force that was besieging Medina and killed or sold into slavery. It seems, however, that this was not a consistent pattern, and some Jews seem to have remained part of Muhammad’s community. Muhammad’s ten years in Medina were also marked by a long campaign to outmaneuver, neutralize, or defeat his hometown, Mecca—something he accomplished toward the end of his life so that by the time he died in 632, his new state had come to include all of western Arabia. After Muhammad’s death, his followers faced numerous challenges, especially from towns and nomadic tribes in Arabia that had made agreements to recognize Muhammad’s authority, but now wished to reclaim their independence. After naming and paying allegiance to Muhammad’s successor—primarily in the political sense and not in his role as prophet— his followers embarked on a remarkable series of military campaigns. The initial goal of these expeditions was to win straying groups back to allegiance to Medina and then to expand the borders of that community. Between roughly 632 and 634, the raiding parties, which gradually grew into real armies, succeeded in subduing all groups in the Arabian peninsula. These forces expanded from Arabia into Syria and Iraq, where in the 630s they defeated the forces of two well-­established empires, the Byzantine and the Sasanian Persian, in decisive battles. By the 650s the Believers based in Medina found themselves in control of vast areas in Arabia, in geographical Syria and Iraq/Mesopotamia, and as far as Egypt, western Iran, and the Taurus mountains in Anatolia. The early Islamic conquests continued for another century and took the borders of the new state as far as Spain and Gaul in the west, and Afghanistan and the Indus valley in the east. Although the Arabian conquerors exercised political rule over vast populations, they did not demand religious conversion and appear to have requested only that their new subjects remain peaceful and pay taxes. From the 660s onward, the new state was run by a ruling elite consisting of Believers (Arabic: muʾminun) of Arabian origin and led by the Umayyad family of Muhammad’s tribe, the Quraysh. By the early eighth century, the Believers began to call themselves Muslims, and they have been so known ever since. This picture provided by Islamic historiography is highly detailed and coherent as a narrative, but it is problematic for the historian. For example, according to the traditional narrative, a new state inaugurated this astonishing expansion from western Arabia. But we know that western Arabia at this time was a tribal society, one that knew no system of law except for tribal retaliation (lex talionis), and no tradition of kingship, taxation, or civil policing. Even standing armies were unknown. Rather,

Muhammad and the Debates on Islam’s Origins in the Digital Age 19

tribes contended with one another by organizing more or less extemporaneous, ad hoc raids against other tribes. The historian wonders: How could Arabia, which lacked the institutions and traditions of statecraft, have been the source of such a dynamic state expansion? Further, Arabia lacked the economic foundations to support an expansion of the scope of what happened at the rise of Islam. How, then, was the expansion initiated and sustained, particularly in its early years? Throughout history notable movements of military or state expansion have been based on or have originated in places with significant resources, which the rulers have exploited to fuel the initial stages of the expansion—to pay soldiers, placate dissidents, and buy the cooperation or noninvolvement of allies. Arabia, however, particularly western and northern Arabia, was an area of pastoral nomads and marginal agriculture found in mostly small, scattered oasis towns. There was virtually no surplus of wealth in the society. Hence it remains a mystery as to how the expansion was launched and how it fueled itself in its incipient phase. Other vital questions are related to what we may term the dynamism of the movement. Was this expansion mainly a religious movement or a military movement? Was it mainly an ethnic movement or an example of state expansion? Sometimes its explosive power is attributed to the force of religion: its dynamism resulted from the Believers’ enthusiasm for the new ideology of Islam. Yet the fundamental ideas of Islam—monotheism, prophecy, a holy book, the Last Judgment, piety—were anything but new to the region. All of them were already well known and widely accepted in the Near East, including Arabia, presumably; they had been around for hundreds of years in many cases. The traditional narrative regarding Islam’s origins is problematic for the historian also because of the nature of the sources, which are not documentary in character. They are not letters or inscriptions or records written at the time by the people making the history; rather, they are literary: chronicles, biographical dictionaries, poetry, collections of sayings attributed to the Prophet, and so on, mostly written in Arabic and all written down at a later time. Are these sources deserving of our confidence as testimony about Islam’s beginnings? How did the sources form, and who wrote them? What tendencies do they display? How should we use them to arrive at the facts of history? As these literary sources have been examined by scholars, they have been found to contain not a simple recounting of what actually happened, but a picture that was at least retouched and possibly completely fabricated to accord with later religious, political, social, and legal practices and needs.

20 Muhammad in the Digital Age

Divergent Views of Islam’s Origins Since the 1970s historians’ discomfort with the traditional Islamic origins narrative has led a number of them to propose a range of revisionist interpretations of how Islam began. Most of these revisionist arguments view the obstacles to explaining Islam’s origins as part of a larger problem of interpretation of the sources at hand.3 Several revisionist camps can be delineated: those that question the Qurʾan as a source, and hence the link between the Qurʾan and Muhammad as well; those that question the initial religious character of the movement; and those that question the existence of Muhammad as a historical personality. Problems with the Qurʾan as a Source The general concern with sources for Islam’s origins raises a central question about the Qurʾan, which constitutes a special case. Muslim tradition has considered the Qurʾan text to be contemporary with Muhammad, and until recently Western historians have concurred. As a contemporary text of quasidocumentary character—whether viewed as a collection of divine revelations received by Muhammad (as believing Muslims would have it) or as a text authored by Muhammad or people in his entourage (as Western historians might)—the Qurʾan was considered an unimpeachable source of information about the time and teachings of the prophet. Since the 1970s, however, a series of studies have challenged the assumption that the Qurʾan text we have today is the original text, as well as our understanding of the context from which the Qurʾan came. Günter Lüling’s book Über den Ur-­Koran (“On the Original Qurʾan”), published in 1974, proposed numerous emendations to the Qurʾan that, he contended, revealed it to be a reworking of an originally Christian text hailing from an antitrinitarian community in Arabia. A few years later, in 1977, Patricia Crone and Michael Cook published Hagarism, in which they proposed that the Qurʾan text may have taken form during the rule of the Umayyad caliph ʿAbd al-­Malik (685–705). John Wansbrough’s Qurʾanic Studies, also published in 1977, went much further, arguing that the Qurʾan text coalesced as a “closed canon” of scripture over a period of about 250 years. If true, this would make it impossible to rely on the Qurʾan as evidence for the origins of Islam in the seventh century; it could only be used, like the collections of sayings attributed to the prophet, as evidence of what later generations of Muslims thought had happened, or wanted us to believe had happened, in the early seventh century.

Muhammad and the Debates on Islam’s Origins in the Digital Age 21

The late coalescence theory of the Qurʾan, proposed by Wansbrough, acquired a following during the 1980s and 1990s, but it contains some problems of its own that seem to have limited its appeal since then. One is that the Qurʾan’s text lacks the kinds of obvious anachronisms that are plentiful in the Hadith literature, reports of sayings and actions that are attributed to the Prophet but many of which are clearly of later origin. If the Qurʾan were also a later construct, one assumes, it too would have such telltale anachronisms.4 Also problematic for the late coalescence theory is the fact that in recent years some fragments of the Qurʾan text have been carefully studied and shown to be of very early date.5 Lüling’s 1974 argument that Islam began as an offshoot of some form of Christianity has since 2000 been followed by other hypotheses that allege an even more direct Christian influence in the inception of Islam. Most prominent of the scholars pursuing this line of investigation is Christoph Luxenberg (a pseudonym). In his work Die syrisch-­aramäische Lesart des Korans (English title: The Syro-­Aramaic Way of Reading the Koran), which first appeared in 2000, Luxenberg proposes that certain passages in the Qurʾan that are difficult to understand make more sense if they are read as Syriac rather than Arabic. Syriac, a dialect of the Aramaic language that was widespread in the Near East in the thousand years before Islam appeared, was the literary idiom of the Christian communities of the Fertile Crescent in the centuries before and just after the time of Muhammad, so the implication of Luxenberg’s theory is that Islam originated in a Christian milieu and perhaps as a Christian movement. This approach has been vigorously advanced over the past decade or so by a group of scholars in Europe—the Inarah (“enlightenment” in Arabic) group, based in Saarbrücken, Germany. It is still too early to give a decisive judgment on the validity of Luxenberg’s hypotheses. His detractors have pointed out clear shortcomings in some of his proposed readings of the Qurʾan, but other readings appear to offer constructive possibilities for a better understanding of the meaning of parts of the holy book. The basic idea that the Qurʾan might include words and phrases from Syriac is eminently plausible. Syriac literature employs a highly developed vocabulary for sophisticated religious concepts, something that was lacking in the Arabic of the time, so people who were trying to express religious concepts in Arabic could well have drawn on this terminology. However, the presence of Syriac words and phrases certainly does not make the Qurʾan a Christian book in its origins; it only means that the Qurʾan text is grappling with some of the same theological issues that Christian thinkers had debated before. Indeed, as Gabriel Reynolds has recently suggested, some

22 Muhammad in the Digital Age

of these passages may be seen as the Qurʾan’s response to theological doctrines of Christianity with which it differs.6 Questions about the Islamic and Arabic Nature of Islam’s Origins Some scholars have proposed that Islam began as another religion entirely. Crone and Cook, the authors of Hagarism, proposed that what we call Islam began as a fusion of Jewish messianism and Arabian nativism, an ethnic Arab reaction to encroachment on Arabian territory by the Byzantine and Sasanian empires. In their view, this amalgam was gradually transformed into Islam as we know it during the time of ʿAbd al-­Malik, two or three generations after the Prophet. This theory has not gained many avid supporters since its presentation in 1977, nor has it been decisively refuted. Others have also contended that the rise of Islam began with an Arab nativist movement.7 They see the early phase of expansion not as a fundamentally religious movement, but as an ethnic or protonationalist one, an expansion of the “Arabs,” who only after the establishment of their empire invented Islam to provide a religious justification for their rule over vast populations of Christians, Jews, Zoroastrians, and others. A problem with this hypothesis is that it makes the unwarranted assumption that the “Arabs” possessed a collective political identity at the time. There seems to be little, if any, evidence to support this assumption, which looks like a retrospective projection into the distant past of modern concepts of ethnic national identity. Certainly the Qurʾan offers no support for the idea that Arab identity was the driving force of the movement. What does come across unmistakably in the Qurʾan is the importance of recognizing God’s oneness as the grounds for belief and action in this life: a religious impetus, not an ethnic one. Yet another line of questioning challenges the idea that Islam began in Arabia. Wansbrough hypothesized that the origins of Islam should be sought in the environment of intercommunal monotheistic discourse and debate in Iraq or Syria.8 This idea that Islam originated outside Arabia has been embraced by a number of others, including Moshe Sharon (in an article titled “The Birth of Islam in the Holy Land”) and Gerald Hawting, who advanced it assertively in his book The Idea of Idolatry and the Emergence of Islam, published in 1999. A potential problem for this viewpoint is the unresolved question of why, if Islam had no real Arabian roots, the rulers of the Islamic empire by the middle of the seventh century were themselves of Arabian origin, and why Islamic historiography chose to portray the movement as having started in Arabia. Furthermore, there is

Muhammad and the Debates on Islam’s Origins in the Digital Age 23

no shred of evidence, archaeological or documentary, for the contention that these momentous developments occurred in Iraq or Syria. Challenges to the Historicity of Muhammad’s Existence Other scholars have linked several of these revisionist hypotheses to create a new vision of Islam’s beginnings that dispenses with the prophet Muhammad and the Islamic conquests as myths, argues that the Qurʾan developed relatively late, and explains the emergence of the Islamic empire ruled by the Umayyad dynasty (attested to by inscriptions in the 660s) as the consequence of internal developments in the Sasanian or Byzantine empire. Yehuda Nevo and Judith Koren, in a book published in 2003 and titled Crossroads to Islam: The Origins of the Arab Religion and the Arab State,9 claim that the Byzantine emperors in Constantinople had found that ruling their Near Eastern provinces—Egypt, Syria, Armenia, and so on—was so expensive and troublesome that they decided to quietly transfer regional sovereignty in these areas to local peoples. What the Byzantines wanted, the authors claim, was to have these areas culturally allied to the Byzantines—that is, not hostile to them, but not dependent on Byzantine military defense, financial support, or religious leadership either. The Byzantine authorities therefore subtly encouraged the residents of these places to develop heretical forms of Christianity (such as monophysitism) and to break with the Orthodox faith. They miscalculated, however, and the process of disengagement resulted in the emergence not of a group of low-­ maintenance allies, but of the Arab Umayyad dynasty, which adopted an aggressive and hostile stance toward the Byzantines. This hypothesis includes too much conspiratorial thought and action to make it credible, and it hardly seems likely that an emperor like Heraclius would have wished to voluntarily reduce the size of his empire by shedding provinces, particularly rich provinces like Egypt that provided important tax revenues and grain supplies to the imperial capital. Another recent hypothesis that bears some resemblance to that of Nevo and Koren has been advanced by Volker Popp, a scholar associated with the Inarah school. In an article published in 2007, Popp claims that the prophet Muhammad never existed.10 Popp argues that the rise of Islam came about because in the final war between the Byzantine empire and the Sasanians, the Byzantines defeated the main Sasanian army and overthrew the dynasty but left intact a large force of Arab tribespeople from Iraq whom the Sasanians had held in reserve. These Arab tribespeople rapidly

24 Muhammad in the Digital Age

filled the power vacuum left in Iraq by the collapse of the Sasanian dynasty. They happened to be, it turns out, Nestorian Christians who had a burning hatred for the Orthodox Byzantines, who had long oppressed Nestorians and had finally driven them out of Byzantine domains. Popp argues that these Nestorian Arab tribespeople rallied the other non-­Orthodox Christians of the Near East—the monophysites of Armenia, Syria, and Egypt—to join them in a common effort to drive the Byzantines out of the Near East. This they did, and then they took power in Syria. We know them as the Umayyads. So, according to Popp, the Umayyads, at least in their early years, were not Muslims at all, but Nestorian Christians. However, it is hard to imagine that these Nestorian forces would have had much success persuading the monophysite populations of the Near East to make common cause with them, considering that monophysites and Nestorians had spent the previous century and a half writing bitter polemics denouncing each other as heretics.

A New Paradigm: The “Believers’ Movement” and Its Rebranding as Islam There is a way to approach the problem of Islam’s origins that helps us get beyond the kind of speculation that mars many of the revisionist theories just outlined. It must be admitted that any effort to explain Islam’s origins will, given the limitations of the sources, inevitably involve some speculation. Nonetheless, it makes sense to begin with the text of the Qurʾan, which we can consider to be an early text and hence a good source for the guiding concepts of the early community.11 Examining the Qurʾan’s vocabulary, we find that the words Muslim and Islam occur rarely—only about forty times altogether. On the other hand, Believer (muʾmin), belief (iman), and related words from the same Arabic root occur about a thousand times. From many qurʾanic invocations, moreover, it is clear that the Qurʾan is addressed to the Believers. Certainly, this suggests that being Believers (muʾminin) was central to the community’s self-­identity. We see this reflected also in the early terminology for the head of state or leader of the movement, who in all the extant documents is called amir al-­muʾminin, “commander of the Believers.” For this reason, I prefer to call the movement begun by Muhammad the “Believers’ movement.” Later Muslim tradition generally tells us that Believer and Muslim mean the same thing. But certain passages in the Qurʾan itself make it clear

Muhammad and the Debates on Islam’s Origins in the Digital Age 25

that though the two terms are related, they are not simple synonyms. And when we look more closely at how the Qurʾan describes the Believers, we find not only that they believe in one God, in the Last Judgment, and in the importance of living righteously, but also that the Qurʾan includes righteous “peoples of the book” (ahl al-­kitab)—that is, Christians and Jews—among the Believers. In other words, it seems that the Believers’ movement started by Muhammad, which grew into what we know as Islam, began as a monotheistic and pietistic revival movement that included at least some Christians and Jews. This hypothesis of a nonconfessional or ecumenical character has, of course, many profound implications—among them our perception of the so-­called Islamic conquests. If the hypothesis is true, it means that we cannot picture the expansion as one of Muslims imposing themselves on non-­Muslims, but must see it as monotheistic Believers appealing to the monotheist populations of the Near East—Christians, Jews, and maybe Zoroastrians—to join in a new, more righteous and God-­fearing political order that was to replace the sinful ones of the Byzantines and Sasanians. It was only about a century later that the Arabian ruling elite of this Believers’ movement decided that only Believers who followed the Qurʾan—that is, Muslims—were true Believers, and that Christians, Jews, and others were defined out of the movement. That change marks the moment when Islam, as it has been understood for centuries, emerged from the matrix of the Believers’ movement in which it was born, as a fully independent religious confession distinct from other monotheistic faiths, especially Judaism and Christianity. The process by which this transition from Believers’ movement to Islam took place remains obscure in many of its details. But we can trace one crucial aspect of it to a process or policy of what we might call rebranding, in which two elements loomed large: the idea that the Qurʾan is God’s revelation, and the idea that Muhammad was the prophet to whom the Qurʾan was revealed. This is the most basic way in which we can define a Muslim even today: a Muslim is someone who accepts the Qurʾan as God’s word and Muhammad as God’s prophet. Internal evidence in the Qurʾan shows that the text crystallized very early in the life of the Believers’ community; it was revered by Believers as a source of guidance from the beginning. But Muhammad, who began the religious movement that eventually emerged as Islam, himself may not have loomed so large in the early community. Muhammad is seldom mentioned in the Qurʾan, which is focused relentlessly on God and on the need for Believers to be mindful of God’s will and grateful for God’s

26 Muhammad in the Digital Age

bounty. Believers in the generation or two following Muhammad’s death probably had heard of him and knew a bit about him, but he was, after all, just a prophet, and the Qurʾan (like the Hebrew Bible) is full of prophets. Though we have very few authentic documents dating to the first decades of the Believers’ movement, it is striking that there is no early inscription that includes the phrase “Muhammad is the apostle of God.” This key phrase, part of the Muslim statement of faith, first occurs only in 685–686, on a coin. Thereafter mention of Muhammad as Prophet or apostle becomes increasingly frequent. In other words, the leaders of the early Believers’ movement took a generation or two to fully decide that they were basically different from their Christian and Jewish associates. It took them some time also to clarify that it was reverence for the Qurʾan and the prophet Muhammad that set them apart. Once they had come to this realization, they began to rebrand earlier institutions and practices with new names drawn from the Qurʾan, as a way of terminologically Islamicizing (or qurʾanicizing) them.12 Their primary objective in doing so was to assert their identity as Muslims, distinct from Christians and Jews. Their second objective was to legitimize their state, and their rule over the state, in terms of God’s revealed word. One component of this process was the privileging of the word Islam to designate the community. In the Qurʾan, the terms Muslim and Islam, which are used sparingly, seem to have the meaning of “one who submits to God’s will” (that is, monotheist), and do not yet convey the sense of Islam as a reified religion. A compelling example of this process of qurʾanicization involves the terminology applied to the head of state. In early inscriptions dating to the time of the Umayyad ruler Mu’awiya (r. 661–680), the head of the Believers’ movement is called amir al-­muʾminin, “commander of the Believers.” This title reflects the early movement’s self-­conception as a community of Believers, and also suggests that the one leading it had powers resembling those of a military commander (Arabic amir). This title is also confirmed by non-­Muslim sources from the period, which give in Greek, Syriac, Latin, and other languages a transcribed rendering of the Arabic amir al-­muʾminin. Yet toward the end of the seventh century, the Umayyad amir al-­muʾminin ʿAbd al-­Malik began to refer to himself with a new title: khalifa (Anglicized as “caliph”), literally “representative,” “lieutenant,” or possibly “successor.” ʿAbd al-­Malik and his advisers evidently favored the new term because although amir al-­muʾminin was long established and well understood by everyone, it is not found in the Qurʾan. The word khalifa appears in the Qurʾan only a few times, and its mean-

Muhammad and the Debates on Islam’s Origins in the Digital Age 27

ing is vague. However, it occurs in a phrase that suggests a special relationship with divine authority (the phrase is khalifat allah, “khalifa of God”)— and it is in exactly this form, “khalifa of God,” that the term khalifa first appears on the coins of ʿAbd al-­Malik as a designation of himself as ruler. In this clear case of qurʾanicization, ʿAbd al-­Malik attempted to link the established office of head of state with the Qurʾan, and hence with divine authority, by renaming it using this qurʾanic word. A similar analysis can be applied to classical Islamic terms such as jihad, or “striving in God’s way”; qadi, or “judge”; and hijra, the designation of the Muslim dating era.13 All of these seem to be products of a process of qurʾanicization.

How Digital Media Are Expanding and Improving the Quality of Research It should be obvious from the preceding discussion that much about Islam’s origins remains to be clarified by future scholarship. It is also clear that the severe deficiencies in available source material will make reaching a surer understanding of how Islam began an arduous process. Whether one wishes to embrace the Believers-to-Muslims hypothesis outlined briefly above or one of the other revisionist scenarios that have been proposed, or adhere to something resembling the traditional picture more closely, it is clear that only extensive further work in the sources can hope to resolve the unanswered questions. The good news is that in the years ahead, digital media will provide valuable assistance.14 Digitally Based Text Editions Since the 1970s the pace of publication of classical Arabic texts, many of them devoted to the heroic period of Islam’s origins, has increased dramatically, and thousands of texts that were unknown (or at least unpublished) a generation ago are now available to researchers. This broadened base of traditional Islamic sources holds the promise of allowing scholars to refine, sharpen, and sometimes reshape our understanding of Islam’s origins. The appearance of many texts in this new trove of material has been made possible by digital technologies, which make the preparation and printing of scientifically edited Arabic texts much easier and faster. The appearance of major texts, such as the seventy-­five–­volume Taʾrikh madi-

28 Muhammad in the Digital Age

nat Dimashq of ʿAli ibn ʿAsakir, which contains thousands of traditions about the early years of the Islamic community, has been responsible for a surge in new work on early Islam (including the prophet Muhammad’s life and times), and it is hardly conceivable that the publication of this massive text could have been so swiftly completed without computer-­assisted ­collation and printing.15 We can be sure that digital technologies for handling the challenges of text editing and publishing will continue to contribute to the store of new texts available for the study of Muhammad and his time. Digital Enhancement of Manuscripts and Other Documents Digital technologies can help researchers to attain an accurate reading of the text of surviving manuscript sources, which are often marred by fading ink, overwriting, and other problems that make the original text difficult to discern. Preparation of a digital photograph of a document while it is being exposed to a particular kind of light can sometimes reveal scarcely visible text and make its contours much more clearly evident. Computer programs such as Photoshop can also sometimes be used to increase readability of an otherwise difficult text. A few recent examples of this are the identification of a case of tampering or redaction in an ancient Qurʾan manuscript studied by David Powers,16 and the study of various Qurʾan manuscript leaves of ancient date—including palimpsests, in which the erased lower layer of text can sometimes be recovered—by the Saarbrücken-­based Inarah group and others.17 Digitization of Manuscripts for Study of Variants Digital technology makes an equally fundamental contribution to ongoing research on Islam’s origins through its ability to facilitate the study of unedited manuscript sources or texts that exist in numerous recensions or various versions. This is particularly important to the study of early Qurʾan manuscripts (see figure 1.1) and the plethora of variant readings of the Qurʾan, whether found in actual Qurʾan manuscripts or in the traditional Arabic qira’at (“recitations” or “readings”) literature, which claims to collect the “canonical” or accepted variant readings of certain passages of the Qurʾan text.18 The thousands of variant readings drawn from all sources constitute a corpus so large that it can only with difficulty be tabulated and analyzed

Muhammad and the Debates on Islam’s Origins in the Digital Age 29

Figure 1.1. Digitization of five-­hundred-­year-­old Qurʾan manuscript at the

Yattara Family Private Library, from Timbuktu, Mali.

using traditional methods, so work based on standard methods must be restricted to very limited samples of text.19 Digital collation of such variants will make possible a much more broad-­based analysis. Scholars based at Stanford University and at the Corpus Coranicum project in Berlin, and researchers with the Inarah group in Saarbrücken, are in the process of making digital compilations of variants. Digital Comparison of Late-­Antique Texts A major development in recent years is the increasing pace of research on late antiquity as the historical context in which Islam emerged. The digital revolution has resulted in the publication, or republication in digitized and searchable form, of many late-­antique texts in a variety of languages (Syriac, Aramaic, Hebrew, Coptic, Greek, Ethiopic, Armenian, Pahlavi, Soghdian, and others) that were hitherto either unpublished or available only in scattered and hard-­to-­access publications. Many of these texts are now being placed in comprehensive, searchable databases that allow researchers to quickly find and study any passage in them. As more and more source texts are made available in digital and searchable form or in comprehensive databases, the work of conducting inter-

30 Muhammad in the Digital Age

textual comparisons will be greatly facilitated. It will become possible to much more rapidly identify textual parallels than the years of laborious reading in widely dispersed texts that has hitherto been required. This will prove particularly important for examining the Qurʾan and its possible links to other texts of the late-­antique world. Collective undertakings such as the Corpus Coranicum project of the Berlin-­Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften in Potsdam have already made great strides in assembling such a comprehensive database of late-­antique texts, and the work continues apace.20 This will establish an underpinning for creative new examination of late-­antique sources and their implications for our understanding of earliest Islam.21 Such work will continue to generate new challenges to the old verities about Islam’s beginnings and to unquestioning acceptance of them. Even when these challenges result in reaffirmation of the old verities, their testing against new evidence and new hypotheses is salutary because it enables us to embrace what is sound in them and to understand their limitations with much more confidence. Online Dissemination of Discoveries and Results Although traditional print publication will doubtless continue to be important, the Internet allows scholars to communicate to others their latest findings as soon as they wish to release them. Moreover, research teams can now announce new undertakings in their early stages, which can prevent wasteful duplication of effort. Online connections also expedite the integration of new findings into the work of scholars everywhere, even those working in remote locations without the support of a robust research infrastructure. This makes research collectively more efficient. The new International Qurʾanic Studies Association (IQSA) has announced that one of its main goals is exactly this kind of dissemination of breaking news in the field of qurʾanic studies. Computerized Analysis The availability of much greater amounts and kinds of information thanks to digital technologies opens the way to more ambitious programs of analysis for which computational technologies are indispensable. For example, the full significance of vast numbers of variant readings of the Qurʾan will probably be recognized only with the aid of sophisticated computerized analyses of variant patterns. Similarly, computerized analy-

Muhammad and the Debates on Islam’s Origins in the Digital Age 31

sis will facilitate the identification of distinctive combinations of words in texts like the Qurʾan and make possible some kinds of semantic analysis. Behnam Sadeghi has already undertaken a detailed stylometric analysis of the Qurʾan, a feat made possible only by the use of a computer program.22 A detailed analysis of sprawling patterns of Hadith transmissions is also best pursued with computerized applications. The computerized analysis of networks of people—whether scholars in chains of transmission or people who lived in certain communities—may also yield important understandings of how the early Islamic community was structured. An impressive example is provided by Asad Q. Ahmed’s study of the early Hijazi elite.23 Opportunities for computerized analysis of materials relevant to Muhammad and Islam’s origins are not, of course, limited to the processing of texts. An important dimension of recent work on early Islam is recourse to information derived from nonliterary fields, such as archaeology, numismatics, and epigraphy. Digital technologies have revolutionized the nature of these disciplines. Archaeological fieldwork has been greatly facilitated by the use of digital photography, GPS technology to record stratigraphic and locational data, and computer programs for analyzing masses of archaeological evidence, such as ceramic finds, floral and faunal remains, and so on. And just as computer programs have made possible the analysis of hitherto unmanageable masses of textual data, they can also be used to analyze numismatic data culled from far-­flung collections of seventh-­century coins. Wiki-­Style Group Projects and Online Networking Another way in which digital technologies will facilitate research on Islam’s origins involves the Internet’s capacity to support collective wiki-­ style projects in which hundreds, even thousands, of scholars can participate—sharing information and expertise, debating interpretive possibilities, and contributing to collective undertakings. A desideratum for the study of Islam’s origins and early development, for example, would be a historical and etymological Arabic dictionary that shows how words have evolved in meaning over time by providing precise citations for a word’s use taken from datable sources, particularly documentary sources. Such a project would be prohibitively expensive to carry out using traditional methods, but a collective online project could make dramatic headway within a few years if a sufficiently large number of casual contributors sent material to it. The study of the meaning of qurʾanic variants might

32 Muhammad in the Digital Age

also benefit from a public Wiki site that could serve as an arena for the discussion of different perspectives on the meaning of particular clusters of variants.

Conclusion Despite the many uncertainties that still mark our vision of Islam’s origins, there is reason to hope that the increasing application of digital media will enable us to clear up many of these uncertainties in the years ahead. But one thing is already clear: Islam, as it eventually emerged as a reified religious confession, did not have a simple beginning. It cannot be simplistically extracted from the Qurʾan or from the behavior of its prophet Muhammad—if we even wish to accept that we can be certain about things the Prophet is reported to have said and done. Rather, like all great religious and cultural traditions, Islam as we see it today and as it has been known for many centuries is the product of a very long series of discrete choices made by Muslims of various eras and different places. Moreover, not all Muslims have made the same choices. What we call with deceptive simplicity “the Islamic tradition” is a welter of different points of view expressed in legal treatises, Qurʾan commentaries, devotional tracts, philosophical arguments, biographical reports about the founders of Islam, and even poetry and courtly advice literature. As more than one scholar has pointed out, we should speak not of Islam, but of Islams—many variants of the same basic tradition. It seems certain that this basic tradition did begin with the prophet Muhammad, and we can hope that new research—facilitated by digital media—will help us understand with greater precision how this complex and diverse tradition gradually unfolded, developing out of the original impetus provided by Muhammad’s teachings in the context of the world of late antiquity into which Islam was born. Notes 1. The word that Muslims and the Qurʾan use to refer to the deity, Allah, is simply the Arabic word for God. The word refers to the same God worshiped by Jews and Christians, the Creator of the world and the one who sent others as prophets before Muhammad, such as Abraham, Moses, and Jesus. Moreover, Arabic-­speaking Christians use the word Allah for God in their Arabic liturgies.

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2. The Islamic era of dating begins with the hijra, so 622 CE is year 1 of the Muslim era. 3. The questions posed have a long history that goes back to the second half of the nineteenth century. Some of the first Western historians to systematically study Islam’s origins were giants like M. J. DeGoeje, Ignaz Goldziher, and Julius Wellhausen, who raised profound questions especially about the reliability of the sources. See especially DeGoeje, Mémoire sur la conquête de la Syrie; Goldziher, Muhammedanische Studien; Wellhausen, Prolegomen zur ältesten Geschichte des Islams. However, their studies were not embraced fully until the 1960s, when work by Albrecht Noth and others began to lay out just how compromised the sources are. See especially Noth, Quellenkritische Studien zu Themen, Formen, und Tendenzen frühislamischen Geschichtsüberlieferung. 4. For fuller development of these points, see Donner, Narratives of Islamic Origins, 35–63. 5. Sadeghi and Bergmann, “The Codex of a Companion of the Prophet and the Qurʾan of the Prophet.” 6. Reynolds, The Qurʾan and Its Biblical Subtext. 7. See especially Crone, Meccan Trade and the Rise of Islam; Bashear, Arabs and Others in Early Islam; Nevo and Koren, Crossroads to Islam. 8. Wansbrough, Qurʾanic Studies and The Sectarian Milieu. 9. As the title suggests, Nevo and Koren also embrace a nativist argument. 10. Popp, “Die frühe Islamgeschichte nach inschriftlichen und numismatischen Zeugnissen.” This book is now available in an almost-­complete English translation: Ohlig and Puin, The Hidden Origins of Islam. For some reason the English version omits one chapter of the original German edition, that by Mondher Sfar, “Raisons d’espérer” (pp. 341–365 in the German edition). 11. For more detailed presentations of the ideas sketched in the next several paragraphs, see Donner, “From Believers to Muslims: Self-­Identity in the Early Islamic Community” and Muhammad and the Believers. 12. The remainder of this section draws on my 2011 article “Qurʾânicization of Religio-­Political Discourse in the Umayyad Period.” 13. The original term for the Muslim era was “year X in the jurisdiction of the Believers” (min qadaʾ al-­muʾminin); see Ragib, “Un ère inconnue d’Égypte musulmane: l’ère de la jurisdiction des croyants.” The earliest documents that mention a specific era—Arabic papyri dating to the 660s and 670s—refer to events as having occurred in such-­and-­such a year min qadaʾ al-­muʾminin, “in the jurisdiction of the Believers.” The shift from this term to identification of the era with the hijra emphasizes the community’s link with the Prophet Muhammad, whose hijra, or emigration, from Mecca to Yathrib was taken as the starting-­point of the calendar. Perhaps just as important, the shift effaces the memory of the more ecumenical nature of the original Believers’ movement by erasing the phrase “jurisdiction of the Believers.” This phrase must have become something of an embarrassment to Muslims, once they had more clearly defined their own identity as a separate group, for it showed that the early members of the community referred to themselves, and presumably thought of themselves, as Believers, not yet as Muslims—that is, as members of a charismatic religious movement and community

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of monotheists that had a decidedly more open attitude toward membership than Islam would come to have. 14. For this section, I am grateful to Behnam Sadeghi, Emran El-­Bedawi, and Wadad al-­Qadi for helpful comments. 15. Indeed, the text of Taʾrikh madinat Dimashq had been the subject of earlier publication efforts using more traditional approaches, notably a project begun by the Arab Academy of Damascus in the 1950s, but after four decades that project had produced only a partial edition of the text by the time the digitally based ʿAmrawi edition appeared in full in the 1990s. 16. David Powers, Muhammad Is Not the Father of Any of Your Men. 17. See, for example, some studies of the Ṣanʿaʾ palimpsest by Elisabeth Puin, such as Elisabeth Puin, “Ein früher Koranpalimpsest aus Sanaa II (DAM 01–27.1)— Teil IV: Die scriptio inferior auf den Blättern 17, 18, und 19.” See also Sadeghi and Bergmann, “Codex of a Companion.” 18. On the challenges posed by this material, see Fedeli, “Variants and Substantiated Qiraʾat.” 19. An excellent example is Small, Textual Criticism and Qurʾan Manuscripts, which for practical reasons is limited to the examination of about a half-­dozen Qurʾan verses and their variants. 20. See the Corpus Coranicum website: http://koran.bbaw.de/. 21. For example, Shoemaker, The Death of a Prophet, and Parvaneh Pourshariati, The Decline and Fall of the Sasanian Empire, offer revisionist views based in part on the analysis of scattered non-­Muslim sources (in the case of Shoemaker) or documentary evidence such as Sasanian lead seals (in the case of Pourshariati). 22. Sadeghi, “The Chronology of the Qurʾan.” 23. Asad Q. Ahmed, The Religious Elite of the Early Islamic Hijaz.

CHAPTER 2

Muhammad the Peacemaker, Muhammad the Warrior: Visions of Islam’s Prophet after 9/11 Jonathan Brockopp

The tragic terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, fueled an upsurge in interest about Islam and its founder, Muhammad. Since then, 1,073 English-­language books about Muhammad have appeared, 57 of them in 2014 alone.1 This focus is reasonable, especially given the rise of the so-­ called Islamic State in 2014 and the attack on the offices of Charlie Hebdo in 2015. Yet looking over the titles of these books, it seems that confusion reigns. Was Muhammad an example for peaceful coexistence, even nonviolence? Or was he a warmonger, bent on the total destruction of his enemies? Popular writers, both Muslim and non-­Muslim, have claimed both images and have argued for their claims on the basis of the most authoritative Arabic sources. Further, writers on both sides claim that their vision of the Prophet is the correct one and that the other side is either incompetent or so devoted to their own way of reading the texts that they are willing to distort the truth. Both visions of Muhammad—as peacemaker and as warrior—find clear attestation in the sources. Moreover, Muslim and non-­Muslim scholars alike have written about these two visions of Muhammad for centuries. What is new is the purposeful extremism of the arguments, which allow for little nuance about who the prophet Muhammad was or how he has been received. The motivation for many of these pieces is not to advance understanding but to score polemical points. The polemicists’ job has been made easier by the general public’s limited understanding of war and peace—complex subjects that are fundamental to the ethical landscape of most religious traditions, including Islam. In this chapter, I assess some popular visions of Muhammad in the aftermath of 9/11 as a way of exploring the presumptions the authors make

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about war and peace. I argue that the Muslim understanding of war and peace is different from that found in other major world religious traditions, and many modern authors exploit these differences for polemical purposes. As a scholar of religion, I also hope to suggest something of why these contradictory visions of Muhammad exist in the first place. For Muslims, the fact that Muhammad is depicted as both warrior and peacemaker may add to his perfection as the ideal human being. I argue that what non-­Muslims may perceive as inconsistent or even contradictory positions can actually increase the value of Muhammad as a Muslim example.

Two Opposing Images of Muhammad In 2005, Greenhaven Press published a sourcebook in its At Issue series titled Is Islam a Religion of War or Peace?, edited by Jann Einfeld. The title of this book already sets up a problematic dichotomy: Islam must either be peaceful or warlike; it cannot be both. According to the back cover, the series is designed to “enhance critical thinking skills,” but it does the opposite. Einfeld, who never defines war or peace in the book, gathers writings from people taking the most extreme positions on Islam’s violent nature (authors such as Osama bin Laden, Pat Robertson, Ibn Warraq, and Irshad Manji) and sets them up against works by hapless academics (John Esposito, Sohail Hashmi, Reuven Firestone, and Akbar Ahmed) who argue for more nuanced positions. The only contributor who argues unequivocally that Islam is a religion of peace is George W. Bush, in a two-­page excerpt from a speech that he gave shortly after 9/11. Worse, Einfeld provides no critical introduction to assess these variant positions and supplies only the briefest of resumes for each author. As a result, readers who are already sure that Muhammad is a warrior come away with their convictions assured, while those who presume that Muhammad is a man of peace are left with disturbing questions. Almost entirely missing from Einfeld’s book are the beliefs of the vast middle, including those Muslims who form the majority of the believers and who subscribe to a simple, pious devotion to the founder of their faith,2 as well as those non-­Muslims who maintain a respectful, if uninformed, attitude toward Islam. Nonetheless, it is hard to blame Einfeld for these choices; in many ways they simply reflect popular discourse by media personalities such as Robertson, who makes disturbing claims about Islam in his essay in this collection.

Muhammad the Peacemaker, Muhammad the Warrior 37

Robertson is no expert on Islam. An evangelical minister who ran for president in 1988, he is included in Einfeld’s collection only because his views are shared by a large number of American Protestant clergy. For example, the popular preacher Jerry Vines called Muhammad a “demon-­ possessed pedophile” in 2002 while speaking to the annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention. In an article on WorldNetDaily, Jerry Falwell defended Vines’s claims on historical grounds, pointing out that Muhammad himself was afraid that he was possessed by demons at one point and that traditional accounts mention his marriage to ʿAʾisha when she was a nine-­year-­old girl.3 Similar statements have been made by Franklin Graham, son of Billy Graham, who has said that Islam is an evil and wicked religion, a sentiment that 47 percent of Protestant pastors agree with, according to a 2010 poll.4 The argument forwarded by these preachers is that the 9/11 terrorist attacks and much other violence have been caused by Islam. If Islam is the problem, they contend, then conversion to Christianity will prevent something like 9/11 from happening again. This critique of Islam is as much about the identity of Christianity as it is about Islam: Christianity as a religion of peace compared with a religion of war. These popular religious critiques resonate with more political arguments that use past events to prove that Islam is an essentially warlike tradition. Recently US politicians have cited the seventh-­century “Islamic conquests” as evidence of this warring nature while failing to mention similar exploits by Christian leaders in past centuries.5 Even more problematic is the way these politicians perceive the interaction between the Christian West and the Muslim world to have historically been little more than a series of wars. There has always been another history, ignored by preachers and politicians alike. The same European king who invaded Muslim Spain, Charlemagne, also had a diplomatic exchange with the Muslim caliph Harun al-­Rashid, exposing European towns to the unimaginable wealth and splendor of the Abbasid capital of Baghdad. Trading networks were established across the Mediterranean, and Arabic literature and poetry were so popular that a Christian bishop in Spain lamented: Alas! All talented Christian young men know only the language and literature of the Arabs, read and assiduously study the Arab books. . . . The Christians have forgotten their own language, and there is hardly one among a thousand to be found who can write to a friend a decent greeting letter in Latin. But there is a numberless multitude who express

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themselves most elegantly in Arabic, and make poetry in the language with more beauty and more art than the Arabs themselves.6

The bishop of Cordoba was not alone in his lament. Similar sentiments were echoed by European chroniclers of the Crusades, who found that the first wave of Crusaders had not only made the Middle East their home, but also adopted Middle Eastern customs and food, learned Arabic, and struck nonaggression treaties with the local Muslim princes. The historian Fulcher of Chartres wrote: He who was a Roman or a Frank is now a Galilaean, or an inhabitant of Palestine. One who was a citizen of Rheims or of Chartres now has been made a citizen of Tyre or of Antioch. We have already forgotten the places of our birth; already they have become unknown to many of us, or, at least, are unmentioned. Some already possess here homes and servants which they have received through inheritance. Some have taken wives not merely of their own people, but Syrians, or Armenians, or even Saracens who have received the grace of baptism.7

So amid the Crusader wars in the eastern Mediterranean and the Castilian “reconquest” of Muslim Spain, a significant cultural exchange was under way, during which monks were busy translating works of astronomy, medicine, and philosophy from Arabic, bringing to Europe the knowledge that would fuel the Renaissance.8 The early modern altercations with the Ottomans were equally ambiguous, for while the Hapsburgs were defending Vienna, their European rivals were seeking alliances with Istanbul. At the same time, scholars at European universities were reading Muslim scientific and philosophical texts, and merchants in Marseilles, Genoa, and Venice were getting rich trading with their Muslim counterparts. The history of warfare between Europe and the Muslim world is real, but so also is the history of cultural and economic exchange, or what we might call peace. Muhammad as Warrior One way to try to make sense of this shared history is to go back to Muhammad, the key figure in the story of Islam. Five years after the attacks of 9/11, three books appeared that did just that: Robert Spencer’s The Truth about Muhammad, Reza Aslan’s No God but God, and Karen Armstrong’s Muhammad: A Biography for Our Time. By far the best of these in

Muhammad the Peacemaker, Muhammad the Warrior 39

terms of critical engagement with the primary and secondary sources is Aslan’s book. Aslan holds a Ph.D. in the sociology of religions from the University of California, Santa Barbara, while Spencer and Armstrong are mostly self-­taught. However, No God but God never reached the best-­seller status of the works by Spencer and Armstrong, both of which remain very popular.9 Aslan is also the most ambivalent of the three regarding Muhammad’s identity. In contrast, Spencer and Armstrong are much more confident in their ability to know what Muhammad “was really like according to Islamic texts.”10 In The Truth about Muhammad, Spencer writes that he felt driven to write the book after the Danish cartoon affair to address what he perceived to be a dearth of credible information on Muhammad. Although he allows for some difference of opinion, Spencer seems obsessed with the “true identity, words and deeds” of Muhammad. He presents himself as a dispassionate scholar, merely quoting from the original sources and using jargon (such as a quasi-­A rabic plural for Hadith) to dress up his analysis. Like the preachers and politicians cited above, Spencer is highly selective in his reading of history, but he does not make stuff up. Further, his view of Muhammad is one that is influential in certain circles of Muslims, as is forcefully driven home in his lengthy quotations from jihadists,11 such as this statement made by several extremist Muslim leaders, including the late Osama bin Laden: Praise be to God, who revealed the Book, controls the clouds, defeats factionalism, and says in His Book: “But when the forbidden months are past, then fight and slay the pagans wherever ye find them, seize them, beleaguer them, and lie in wait for them in every stratagem (of war)”; and peace be upon our Prophet, Muhammad Bin-­ʿAbdallah, who said: “I have been sent with the sword between my hands to ensure that no one but God is worshipped, God who put my livelihood under the shadow of my spear and who inflicts humiliation and scorn on those who disobey my orders.”12

Like Spencer, bin Laden seems to suggest that the Prophet’s mission and livelihood were devoted to the subjugation of the world through military might, with God actively supporting his every move.13 It seems, therefore, that Southern Baptist preachers like Vines, polemicists like Spencer, and jihadists like bin Laden have a shared set of interests in preferring this vision of Muhammad. They would appear to have a good argument that Muhammad really did love battle and sought to humiliate his enemies.

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Even a 2008 article that purports to discuss Muhammad as a peacemaker seems to bear out these bellicose views. “The Holy Prophet Muhammad (SAW) as a Messenger of Peace in the World,” by Pakistani scholar Muhammad Hammad Lakhvi, is written for a broad audience. It appeared in English, and it begins with quotations from American and French scholars who recognize Muhammad’s greatness. Typical of this sort of polemic, Lakhvi declares that “the verbatim meaning of ‘Islam’ is peace.”14 Lakhvi’s understanding of peace, however, is one suited to his times, as Pakistan arms itself against India while suffering attacks on its territory as a result of the border war with US-­led forces in Afghanistan. When describing the narrow survival of the Muslim community in Medina after the Battle of the Trench (628), Lakhvi notes a change in Muhammad’s tactics: this battle “proved the invaders to be the worst enemies of peace and hence, it was established that they must be crushed or dominated to maintain and guarantee the peace of the society.”15 Peace through domination is one sort of reading of the sources, and one that Spencer would readily agree with. It is motivated, however, less from an attempt to understand the past and more from longing for an imaginary history in which Islam was the undisputed cultural and military might in the world. From this brief survey, we can see that Spencer’s argument that Muhammad was a warrior is based on an accurate but highly selective reading of the sources. We also see that interpretation of these sources is colored by the circumstances in which Muhammad’s “true identity, words and deeds” are recalled: whether pertaining to the war on terrorism or the simmering tensions between India and Pakistan, context affects how people read history. Therefore, these accounts teach us a great deal about Spencer, bin Laden, and Lakhvi, but little about the prophet Muhammad, who was a man of far more complex character. A currently less popular but more nuanced view of Muhammad is that he was a diplomat and negotiator whose goal for fighting war was not only to punish and humiliate his enemies, but also to lay the foundation for a whole new society. Muhammad as Peacemaker When trying to understand Muhammad as a peacemaker, we are faced with a conundrum. Even those who defend the Prophet cannot deny that he fought in wars and led troops into battle. Muhammad was a strategist, a tactician, and a man of arms, and the Qurʾan declares to the Muslims of Medina: “Fighting is prescribed for you, though it be hateful to you.

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Yet it may be that you will hate a thing that is better for you, just as you may love a thing that is worse for you” (Q 2:215).16 The ambivalence in this qurʾanic command, however, is the key to a better understanding of Muhammad’s character. The phrase “though it be hateful to you” is an explicit recognition that most people find warfare to be an abhorrent activity. Terrorists, on the other hand, elevate violence to a sacred act. This distinction between warfare and terrorism explains the response of Muslim leaders immediately after the terrorist attacks of September 11 who distanced themselves from the perception that jihad can include terrorism. Influential shaykhs, such as the conservative Yusuf al-­Qaradawi and the more liberal Muhammad Sayyid Tantawi, explicitly declared that terrorist attacks are not allowed in Islam and that they go against the example of the prophet Muhammad.17 These condemnations were not widely reported in the West; when they were, they often were presented alongside opinions casting doubt on the sincerity of the statements. Karen Armstrong has devoted many of her writings to allaying Christians’ suspicions regarding Islam by arguing that Muhammad has been badly misunderstood. Her unique vision of Muhammad is most apparent in her 2006 biography of the Prophet. From the outset, Armstrong recognizes that vastly differing views of Muhammad are present in today’s Muslim world: Writing about the Prophet Muhammad was never a wholly antiquarian pursuit. The process continues today. Some Muslim fundamentalists have based their militant ideology on the life of Muhammad; Muslim extremists believe that he would have condoned and admired their atrocities. Other Muslims are appalled by these claims, and point to the extraordinary pluralism of the Qurʾan, which condemns aggression and sees all rightly guided religions as deriving from the one God.18

Armstrong writes of Muhammad being motivated by ideas of jihad, but here she is speaking of jihad in its root meaning of striving or struggle, not merely as warfare: “His life was a jihad. . . . [He] literally sweated with the effort to bring peace to war-­torn Arabia, and we need people who are prepared to do this today. His life was a tireless campaign against greed, injustice, and arrogance.”19 Armstrong’s link between jihad and peacemaking is likely to confuse many readers for three reasons. First, most people misunderstand the word jihad, which covers a much larger field of meaning than simply warfare. Jihad is the principle of activism and engagement in Islamic dis-

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course. In a sociological sense, there can be no Islam without jihad. Therefore, a person can strive ( jahada) just as easily at a negotiation table as on a field of battle. Second, Muslims presume that the will of God is at work in all these jihads. Muhammad’s unlikely success in his skirmishes with the Quraysh tribe in the seventh century is an example. The meaning that Muslims draw from these events was expressed succinctly by the Egyptian scholar Muhammad Abduh (d. 1905): Like other religions, Islam began with its message. But it encountered a quite unprecedented enmity on the part of those who in their perversity oppressed the truth. No prophet had such antagonism or faced such humiliation as Muhammad. . . . The different religious sects inhabiting the Arabian peninsula and neighboring areas joined forces against Islam to root it out and strangle its message. It was a case of the strong against the weak, the wealthy against the poor. Islam in its steadfast self-­defence had nothing to rely on save its inherent truth, pitted against error and the light of its guidance in the darkness of falsehood, to bring it to ­v ictory . . . They waged war against the superior enemy and overcame them, for all their vast numbers, strength and advanced equipment. When the distresses of war were spent and sovereignty passed to the victor, Islam treated the vanquished with kindly gentleness, allowed them to maintain their religions and their rites in security and peace. They gave them protection and safeguarded their possessions, as they did their own people and their property, levying for this service a slight tax on their incomes according to stipulated rates.20

Abduh sees the Prophet as an innocent, persecuted simply for preaching the truth. In his view, Muhammad’s success “against the superior enemy” can be explained only by the providential hand of God. As Lakhvi argues, jihad leads to peace because God punishes the arrogant and rewards moral righteousness, and so we find a third reason Armstrong’s link between jihad and peacemaking can be so confusing. If peace is made possible by war, then these writers seem to be working with a notion of peace that is quite different from what many people, especially many Christians, might think.

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Understanding the Meaning of War and Peace Einfeld’s book title, Is Islam a Religion of War or Peace?, seems to make sense because war and peace appear to be exclusive categories, polar opposites. However, the notion that Islam must be one or the other not only is a facile reading of a complex religious tradition, but also demonstrates a profound misunderstanding of the meaning of war and peace. Warfare is complicated and differentiated; no war is just like another, and time and circumstance dictate both how warfare is carried out and what historians make of it. Likewise, the meaning of peace and peacemaking, in Islam as in other religious traditions, is not at all obvious. This makes Spencer’s job easier: everyone knows what a Muslim terrorist looks like, but there are few images out there for a Muslim peacemaker. As for Christians, they may know that Christians are called to be peacemakers, and they may refer to Jesus Christ as the Prince of Peace, but they often have little content for these categories. In addition to failing to provide definitions for war and peace, Einfeld makes a bad situation worse by including a contribution by Christian apologist Jean Flori, an expert in the history of ideologies. Flori writes that Jesus’s “radically pacifist attitude” is the basis for a fundamental difference between Christianity and Islam: In contrast to Jesus, who condemned the use of violence and weapons, the Prophet Mohammed personally took part in a number of armed expeditions. . . . He balked neither at pillage, nor at political assassination, nor at the massacre of prisoners who were not worth holding for ransom.21

Comparing the founder of one religion with the founder of another seems reasonable, but it completely ignores the very different historical circumstances in which these men lived. Further, Jesus is understood by Christians to be God incarnate, a very different ontological status from Muhammad’s claim to be a prophet. Muhammad’s activities would be more intelligible if compared with those of biblical prophets, such as Moses, who drowned Pharaoh’s army in the Red Sea, and Joshua, whose destruction of Jericho is celebrated in Christian spiritual songs and children’s stories. Also, if Jesus condemned the use of weapons, that lesson has been lost on the legions of Christians who have fought wars since Christianity was granted legitimate status by the Roman emperor Constantine in 311 CE.

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Flori admits as much. He acknowledges that later Christians, such as the Crusaders, did develop notions of holy war, but he argues that a holy war “is completely contrary to the principles of the Gospel and is not a war of conquest but “a war of reconquest,” and so could only be comparable “to a jihad that would be undertaken to free Mecca itself from occupation.”22 These are absurd misreadings of history, but I am less interested in the factual content of Flori’s claims than I am in his rhetorical position.23 In his view, there is something of value in Jesus’s supposed condemnation of war, and it is this distinction that sets Christianity apart from Islam. Note, however, that Flori considers war to be specific (a particular battle or geographic location) and differentiated (war of conquest, war of reconquest, war of defense); it has a beginning and an end. In contrast, peace is described either negatively (opposition to violence) or as a commitment to ideal concepts (harmony or love) that defy specification.24 If we are to truly understand the role of Muhammad in war and peace, we need historical context to properly define these terms. Understanding War Warfare as a social activity has changed dramatically in the 1,500 years since Muhammad’s first revelation. Lakhvi writes that Muhammad was born into “a period of war and fighting.”25 He is correct, but it was also an era of small populations and crude weapons. The famous Battle of Badr (in 624), for example, was a typical contest that would be familiar to readers of the Greek epics. A few hundred soldiers lined up on each side, and champions announced their lineage to one another before engaging in one-­on-­one combat. Once these contests were decided, a melee ensued, but the scale of death and injury pales in comparison to the numbers who die in the smallest of modern conflicts or police actions. The final conquest of Medina (in 630) was another epic battle, according to the sources, but only four people were killed. The small scale of these battles and the fact that the combatants were all of the same linguistic and ethnic group—and often related to one another—makes these battles an intimate affair. Individual heroes knew whom they were killing and why. This in itself is a gruesome fact, but it is quite in contrast to the terrorist attacks of 9/11 or to the mechanized wars of the twentieth and twenty-­first centuries, in which destruction has rained down from aircraft flying far overhead. So it is true that Muhammad fought and planned wars and that the Qurʾan commands Muslims to engage in jihad, but the context for under-

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standing these terms has changed. In fact, it changed almost immediately after the death of the Prophet. When Muhammad died in 632 CE, he left behind a loose confederation of tribes that were more loyal to him personally and politically than they were to any religious ideal. This fact is mentioned directly in the Qurʾan,26 and it is also borne out by the Wars of “Apostasy” that were fought by Muhammad’s successor, Abu Bakr. These wars were required to bring the tribes back into a confederation that they thought had ended after Muhammad’s death. Also after Muhammad’s death were the wars of conquest, some hundred years of empire expansion, and a number of civil wars. These political realities required new interpretations of qurʾanic verses to justify these new kinds of war.27 We must make the same observations for Christianity. The context in which Jesus lived, in Roman-­occupied Palestine with no hope of successful armed resistance against the imperial forces, was vastly different from that faced by Augustine of Hippo (d. 430). By Augustine’s time, Christianity had gone from a persecuted sect of Judaism to the chief religion of the empire. Christian citizens could not so easily avoid participation in warfare, and interpretations of the Gospel that seemed to support pacifism needed revision. This was especially true after newly Christian Rome was sacked by the Visigoths in 410. Augustine therefore developed new and highly influential notions of war and peace for Christianity. In his monumental City of God, Augustine set out one of the key conundrums that mark Christian action in the world: Christians are children of God who have membership in the City of God, yet while they live on this earth they remain subject to its laws, its pain, and its sin. In the City of God, there will be no war, but in the earthly city, warfare is sometimes necessary. Augustine even goes so far as to argue that wars that are fought for just causes “are good things, and without doubt the gifts of God.”28 He cautions, however, that warfare must not be loved for its own sake, or for the wealth or prestige it may provide. Rather, warfare must be only a means toward the end of a harmonious sense of order. War encompasses many different activities. Jesus’s experience of war was that of the Palestine’s occupation by Rome—whose overwhelming military force could and did crush any opposition. In this context, he preached nonviolent resistance. But as the sociopolitical ground shifted four hundred years later, Augustine found a way to justify Christian participation in what he called just war. Muhammad’s experiences of war were very different. These were not clashes between well-­trained armies but local skirmishes among semi-­ nomadic peoples, and a battle was more about honor and individual cour-

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age than it was about geopolitical empire. As with Jesus, the scene shifted radically after Muhammad’s death. Some took jihad to be a spiritual struggle, while others applied it to the civil wars and wars of conquest that created the early Arab/Muslim empire. For both Islam and Christianity, this position of empire also set limits to warfare, and Augustine’s argument that war can only be justified when it leads to social order is precisely the same argument used by early Muslim jurists. For Augustine, order was the very definition of peace. He wrote: “The peace of all things is the tranquility of order.”29 Understanding Peace Augustine’s notion of peace as order is related to Jesus’s teachings, but is quite different from Flori’s imagination of Jesus as a radical pacifist. Both are possible interpretations of peace, but they lead to very different Christian activity. On the one hand, Augustine’s argument that just wars could lead to peaceful order provided the theological foundation for papal expansion of militant Christianity during the Crusades and also for the wars of the Reformation and Counter-­Reformation. On the other hand, Christian warfare is only half of Augustine’s theory. According to Augustine, “we are said to be blessed when we have such peace as can be enjoyed in a good life; but such blessedness is a mere misery compared to that final felicity, . . . the best and greatest peace possible.”30 In other words, whatever we may deem to be peace in this earthly life pales in comparison with the heavenly peace of the City of God. Like Flori, Augustine saw value in a notion of peace that is radical and far removed from the daily struggles of earthly existence. Augustine was tapping into an ancient notion of peace that was long ago described by the Jewish prophet Isaiah in this vision: The wolf and the lamb shall feed together, the lion shall eat straw like the ox; and dust shall be the serpent’s food. They shall not hurt or destroy in all my holy mountain, says the Lord. (Isaiah 65:25)

The prophet Isaiah’s vision of peace here is aspirational, not descriptive. It describes not the world that is, but the world that could be. Historically speaking, the Jews during this period were not even living in Israel, but were exiled in Babylonia, prisoners of war in a foreign land. Peace, therefore, could only be an ideal—beautiful, but impossible to achieve in a

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vicious world. Longing for the coming of a Messiah, they put their hope in a messianic age of peace. As heirs of this legacy, modern Christians speak earnestly of God’s shalom, by which they mean something like an original state of being, the perfection within which God created the world.31 Protestants especially have tended to emphasize this otherworldly aspect of peace and have been wary of becoming involved in politics. The tendency to withdraw from the world, most clearly exemplified by the Amish communities today, preserves the spiritual perfection of a few chosen individuals, but it does not result in or even envision any fundamental change in the nature of the world, which Augustine and many other observers saw as tending toward evil. This tendency had its ultimate expression among modern Christian pacifists, who refused to fight in conflicts such as the two World Wars of the twentieth century. Like the Amish, these pacifists sought to achieve peace through withdrawal from the world, but other pacifist organizations have a strongly proactive ideal of peace. For example, the Fellowship of Reconciliation, founded in the early twentieth century, still devotes itself to nonmilitary solutions to world problems. The Christian Plowshares Movement, which takes its name from biblical prophets’ statements about beating swords into plowshares, was infamous for directly damaging nuclear weapons systems in the 1980s in order to render them useless. Similar movements are known in South Asian religious traditions, where ahimsa (nonviolence) refers not only to abstaining from war, but to a total rejection of violence toward other living beings. The pursuit of ahimsa also can involve withdrawal from the world, as exemplified by monks and nuns in the Buddhist and Jain traditions who strive not to harm any living thing. Even in Hinduism, however, nonviolence is not the norm. Mohandas Gandhi, for example, was strongly influenced by European idealists in formulating his own influential doctrine of nonviolent resistance to foreign oppression. Just as the vast majority of Christians never adopted the direct action of the Plowshares Movement, so also Gandhi’s interpretation was never accepted by a majority of Hindus, who saw his wholesale promulgation of nonviolence as a violation of the law of Dharma.32 In sum, we may observe that in world religions, peace is described both as an otherworldly ideal and as a human reality. In the Christian tradition, Augustine describes this as the perfect peace of the City of God in contrast with the temporary peace and order that can be achieved on earth.

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Heavenly peace is described in many traditions as existent in God’s perfect creation of the world as well as in a future existence of bliss. Meanwhile, these traditions agree that peace is hard to come by in human existence. Augustine sees peace as the ultimate end of war: “It is therefore with the desire for peace that wars are waged, even by those who take pleasure in exercising their warlike nature in command and battle.”33 Likewise, the radical Christians of the Plowshares movement and the Hindus who followed Gandhi were willing to risk social disorder to gain peace. Peace, therefore, has a wide variety of meanings, in Christianity and in other world religious traditions; radical pacifism is one, but even this ranges from passive acceptance to active or even aggressive resistance. More common is peace in this world as social order, and peace in heaven as a world of perfect harmony. Only with this variety in mind can the idea that Muhammad might be a man of peace be fully appreciated. Understanding the Meanings of Peace in the Islamic Tradition Muhammad lived too long to be seen by history as a radical pacifist, even though, like Jesus, he started out as one. During his years of preaching in Mecca he never took up arms, and he did not allow his followers to strike back when attacked; rather, the Qurʾan counseled them to be patient. This is one notion of peace that is still important in the Islamic tradition. Unlike Jesus, however, Muhammad was not killed. He was banished, run out of town by the Meccans in 622 CE. It was among the community of Muslims in the new city of Medina that another notion of peace arose, one very similar to Augustine’s concept of peace as social order. We can see these many definitions of peace most clearly in the Qurʾan, the foundational text of Islam, which records prophetic utterances revealed to Muhammad. The Qurʾan teaches that peace is a divine ideal, an inherent part of God’s own nature, and that this peace is evident in God’s relationship to us in creation and will also be evident in the end of time. It further claims that peace is achievable in earthly existence, and that it must be the goal of our relationships with other human beings. These truths are expressed through God’s many names. God is one (al-­wahid), he is alive (al-­hayy), he is just (al-­ʿadl), and he is called “al-­salam” (Q 59:23)—the Peace, or the Bringer of Peace. God’s direct involvement with the world did not end at creation. Rather, it continues through history as he sends a series of warners and prophets to humankind. In a reference to Noah’s flood, the Qurʾan states:

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We saved [Noah] and his family from the great disaster. We made his companions the survivors. And we preserved his history for subsequent generations. Peace be upon Noah among the peoples. We thus reward the righteous. (Q 37:76–80)

As this passage continues, the Qurʾan describes each of the prophets, from Noah to Abraham, Moses, Aaron, and Elijah, demonstrating that all were “beneficiaries of the divine bestowal of peace.”34 The section closes with the proclamation: Peace be upon the messengers. Praise be to God, Lord of the universe. (Q 37:181–182)

Like Noah, Muhammad was sent to preach God’s peace to the world. In the following verses, the Qurʾan addresses Muslims, Christians, and Jews as “people of the book”: People of the Book, now there has come to you Our messenger, making clear to you many things you have been concealing of the Book, and effacing many things. There has come to you from God a light, and a Book Manifest whereby God guides whomsoever follows His good pleasure in the ways of peace, and brings them forth from the shadows into the light by His leave; and He guides them to a straight path. . . . For to God belongs the kingdom of the heavens and of the earth, and all that is between them; to Him is the homecoming. (Q 5:18–22)

That “homecoming” is nothing other than the end of time, when God will empty the tombs and judge every soul according to its actions: The trumpet will be blown; then behold, they are falling out of their tombs to their Lord. They say, “Woe to us! Who has raised us up from our sleeping place? This is what the All-­merciful promised, and that of which the messengers spoke truthfully.” It was nothing but a single cry; but behold, they are all together, present in front of Us. “Today no soul shall be wronged at all, nor will you be recompensed, except for that which you used to do.

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Today the companions of Paradise are busy rejoicing, they and their spouses, reclining on couches in the shade; there they have fruits, and they have all that they ask for.” Peace! A word from a compassionate Lord. (Q 36:51–58)

As this Sura promises, the believers will enter heaven, a place of peace and plenty. Unbelievers, of course, are consigned to hell, but the Qurʾan emphasizes that this will be a just determination. In one depiction, for example, unbelievers are forced to admit that they ignored the clear message of the prophets before they enter hell. The Qurʾan thus presents God as embodying peace, his sending of prophets as a sign of his peace, and that peace as characteristic of a heaven that awaits the believers. The Qurʾan also speaks directly to Muslims, urging them to treat one another, and also adherents of other faiths, justly and peacefully. But a key difference between the pragmatic nature of the Qurʾan and the messianic vision of the Christian Gospels can be found in the discussion of enemies. Famously, the Gospels urge Christians to “Love your enemies” (Matthew 5:44), an injunction that has inspired small pacifist movements, but otherwise has been ignored or taken metaphorically. The corresponding verse in the Qurʾan seems reactionary in comparison: “But if your enemy inclines toward peace, you should too!” (Q 8:61). Other verses lay out a specific plan for negotiation: “The good deed is not equal to the evil deed; repel [the evil deed] with one that is better. And behold! The one against whom there was enmity will be as a loyal friend to you” (Q 41:34).35 This negotiation culminates in a direct appeal to Jews and Christians, the “people of the book.” People of the Book! Come now to a word in common between us and you, that we serve none but God, and that we associate not aught with Him. (Q 3:56)36

Peacemaking in the Qurʾan, then, is not only an otherworldly ideal, but a human process grounded in God’s own nature and desire for peace. This pragmatic view of scripture is mirrored in the prophet Muhammad’s own actions; the sources record twenty-­seven peace treaties negotiated by the Prophet.37 During the conquests after his death, delegations were sent in advance of the conquering forces, and most major cities, including Mecca, Jerusalem, and Alexandria, were taken with very little bloodshed. The Qurʾan also differs from the Gospels in providing extensive in-

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struction on the ethics of war, and just treatment of captives in warfare and the most vulnerable members of society who suffer the results of war: widows, slaves, and orphans. Therefore, the qurʾanic vision of peace is one that involves a just ordering of society, in other words: Sharia. This term, usually translated as “Islamic law,” is better understood as God’s righteous path, which he intends the believers to follow. It is regularly derided by anti-­Muslim polemicists, but if we return to Augustine we find that harmonious order is the basis for earthly peace in his view as well. Augustine wrote: Peace between man and God is the well-­ordered obedience of faith to eternal law. Peace between man and man is well-­ordered concord. Domestic peace is the well-­ordered concord between those of the family who rule and those who obey.

Civil peace is a similar concord among the citizens.38 The theology of peace expressed both in Augustine’s writings and in the Qurʾan is similar: an aspirational ideal of a faraway heaven, and a practical notion in this world. It is entirely consistent, therefore, that Muhammad’s example of peacemaking was a matter not of avoiding war, but of dealing with its consequences. He did not seek to withdraw from the world in pursuit of a godly ideal, but engaged in the world to make it a better place. Muhammad ended up being a warrior, and there can be little question that the Qurʾan sometimes presents warfare as a way of effecting God’s justice in the world. Remembering that fact, however, makes the qurʾanic discussion of peace all the more impressive. From God’s initial creation, to his sending of prophets and revelation, God appears in the Qurʾan as a constant source of peace. Human beings have a tendency to forget these gifts and commit unjust actions out of ignorance of God’s commands. Therefore, God sends prophets as reminders to the world, a representation of his peace. As a prophet, therefore, Muhammad is a conduit of God’s peace to this world, suspended between heaven and earth. His negotiation of peace treaties is directly tied to his success as warrior, and his establishment of a new religious community is based on his ability to heal significant rifts in the societies of his time. Karen Armstrong is well aware of this context for understanding Muhammad, so her vision of him involves a new concept of peacemaker: not an eschatological figure like Jesus who ushers in a divine realm of unearthly peace, but an instrument of God’s activity in the world, negotiating deals and striking bargains. In her view, Muham-

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mad’s warrior and peacemaker sides are not at all contradictory, but rather two phases of the same impetus. It is entirely understandable, therefore, that in this broken world we have inherited she would see in Muhammad the example we most need in our leaders today: people who know the hard work of making peace in this world.

Theorizing the Need for Difference The Qurʾan’s teachings on war and peace are fully integrated with each other. While some have argued that the Qurʾan’s teachings of peace and tolerance toward others are superseded by the “verse of the sword” and other such bellicose passages,39 I believe that it is no more possible to abrogate the qurʾanic teachings about peace than it is to abrogate qurʾanic teachings about heaven, hell, and the nature of God. God’s own nature as the Bringer of Peace, exemplified by his sending messengers in peace, is a central tenet of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and it is the same divine motivation we see in Augustine’s City of God. What peace we find on earth is but a distant reflection of heavenly harmony and order. Also, earthly order necessitates moments of disorder—whether war or intransigent nonviolent action—to bring about temporal peace. Christian apologists such as Spencer and Flori do a disservice to Christianity more than to Islam when they juxtapose peace in a Christian City of God with peace in a Muslim City of Earth. As philosopher G. E. M. Anscombe points out, this view makes Christianity out to be “an impractical dream religion,” a religion that has no resources to guide individuals through life’s thorniest conundrums.40 In other words, polemicists such as Flori, Spencer, Vines, and Falwell not only have a one-­sided view of Muhammad and Muslims as essentially driven by war, but also have an impoverished view of Christianity, one that overemphasizes its aspirational vision of peace to the exclusion of its pragmatic advice for peacemakers and its practical guidance for fighting ethical wars. A thorough examination of the sources provides us with both a better understanding of the prophet Muhammad and a more profound understanding of the meanings of war and peace in major religious traditions. Finally, it is worth pondering why so many modern authors continue to find inspiration in Muhammad’s life story, especially writers such as Karen Armstrong, who calls Muhammad “a prophet for our time.” Armstrong means here to draw our attention to Islamic history that depicts

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the Prophet as a pragmatist who is not afraid of getting his hands dirty. But her observation can also be turned on its head, since every history of a figure like Muhammad will tell us as much about the historian’s time as it will about the history’s subject. At various points, Muhammad has been depicted as the greatest lawgiver, the mystical pole of existence, the ideal teacher, and the perfect example for how to trim one’s beard.41 As with Jesus, Buddha, and other exemplary individuals, Muhammad embodies the characteristics that his followers most desire to see, some of which appear to be contradictory.42 These multiple views of Muhammad can serve to remind us that focusing on Muhammad only as either a warrior or a peacemaker is a poor reflection of the ways in which religious people remember their founders. It can also blind us to Muhammad’s many other guises. He is also a Sufi who had the most intimate experiences of union with God; the column of light from which all of existence was originally created; a scholar who exemplified a lifetime of devotion to learning; a sinless being who passed on his quasidivine substance to the Shiite imams; and an ideal family man, merchant, and father. As the founding figure of Islam, Muhammad is and will continue to be all things to all people. We should not be surprised, therefore, to find contradictory views of Muhammad in the most ancient sources. Like Spencer and Armstrong today, scholars of past generations sought in Muhammad’s life the answers to the problems that plagued them. Those who depict Muhammad as warrior or peacemaker cannot detract from his standing in Islam; they can only add to it. With their questions they prove that Muhammad’s is the “perfect example” and that the study of his life is a “mercy to the worlds.”43 Notes 1. WorldCat search using Muhammad as the subject heading; February 7, 2015. Some of these are duplicates and reissues of texts originally published earlier. The most popular are Karen Armstrong’s two books: Muhammad: A Biography of the Prophet and Muhammad: A Prophet for Our Time, which are in the collections of 1,801 and 1,394 libraries, respectively. Other popular texts include Tariq Ramadan’s In the Footsteps of the Prophet (1,142 libraries); Fred Donner’s Muhammad and the Believers (1,075 libraries); and Robert Spencer’s The Truth about Muhammad (804 libraries). 2. Ahmed’s piece in the book, titled “The Prophet Muhammad Was a Gentle and Compassionate Man,” does offer important insight into this popular view of Muhammad. Farid Esack describes this as the position held by the “uncritical lover,” by which he means that Muslims are in love with the Prophet, see him as

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nearly perfect, and are not very interested in what historians or scholars might have to say about him. They understand neither the point of historical-­critical scholarship that subjects the sources to literary criticism, nor cartoons making fun of Muhammad. In Esack’s typology, the opposite of the uncritical lover is the polemicist, a category into which bin Laden, Robertson, Ibn Warraq, and Manji all fit. The polemicist is not a scholar but uses the results of scholarship to argue that Muhammad is not worth loving. See Esack, The Qurʾan: A User’s Guide. 3. Falwell, “Muhammad: A ‘Demon-­Possessed Pedophile’?” These preachers are echoing criticisms of Muhammad that have been popular in Christian literature since at least the tenth century, when an anonymous Iraqi Christian depicted Muhammad as a man who had “the sexual powers of forty men,” and who was “constantly involved in planning war.” Reported by Tolan, “European Accounts of Muhammad’s Life,” 233. 4. Yoars, “Protestant Pastors Have Negative View of Islam.” Franklin Graham has also claimed that Barack Obama was born a Muslim, and recent polls suggest that one-­fifth of Americans believe that Obama is a Muslim. Catholic, Orthodox, and mainline Protestant Christian bodies have much more tolerant official positions on Islam and Muhammad. 5. See, for example, comments by US representative Allen West (R-­FL) at a town hall meeting in 2011, captured in a video produced by Shark Tank Media and uploaded to YouTube on February 21, 2011: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v =9MZx38i6iYs. More recently, US representative Joe Walsh (R-­IL) made similar comments. Huffington Post, “Joe Walsh, Muslims in America, Radical Islam ‘A Threat’ More Now than after 9/11.” 6. Alvaro, Bishop of Cordoba, as quoted in Abou El Fadl, “The Ugly Modern and the Modern Ugly,” 35. European appreciation of Muslim learning led to a huge translation project, with Christian scholars set to the task of rendering Arabic texts into Latin. See, for example, Burnett, Arabic into Latin in the Middle Ages; and Burman, Reading the Qurʾan in Latin Christendom, 1140–1560. 7. Krey, The First Crusade, 280–281. 8. Burnett, Arabic into Latin. 9. The Amazon.com sales ranks on September 24, 2011, for these three books were: Armstrong, 26,723; Spencer, 36,474; and Aslan, 672,091. For a local perspective, I inquired at Schlow Centre Region Library and discovered that the Spencer and Armstrong books had been checked out very often in the previous five years (twenty-­three and twenty-­four times, respectively). Spencer’s book reached number 31 on the New York Times hardcover nonfiction list on October 29, 2006, but I have not found that either the Aslan or the Armstrong book made the list, though both have been reviewed in the New York Times. In spite of this evidence, Aslan assured me in a personal interview on September 28, 2011, that his books had outsold Spencer’s “by many times.” 10. Spencer, Truth, 9. 11. Ibid., 186–190. In the middle of several remarks from jihadist preachers, Spencer slips in an innocuous remark from Hamza Yusuf, a major American voice for peace and reconciliation. This provocation can only be meant to slur Yousef ’s reputation. 12. The Arabic declaration was published in Arabic in the newspaper Al-­Quds

Muhammad the Peacemaker, Muhammad the Warrior 55

al-­ʿArabi (London) on February 23, 1998. The English translation (anonymous, but widely available on the Internet) is problematic in several ways, as I discuss in Brockopp, “Jihad and Islamic History.” A revised version of the article appears in Rennie and Tite, eds., Religion, Terror and Violence, 144–159. Einfeld also uses this inaccurate translation of the Arabic text in his collection (Is Islam, 12–16). Oddly, he gives his source as http://fas.usda.gov/, which takes one to the United States Department of Agriculture Foreign Agricultural Service; a search of this website in June, 2012, did not locate the statement. 13. Missing from both accounts are quotations from the Qurʾan urging believers to incline toward peace, and the Prophet’s preoccupation with peace treaties, state building, and equitable treatment of both Muslims and non-­Muslims. 14. Lakhvi, “The Holy Prophet Muhammad (SAW) as a Messenger of Peace in the World,” 1. Lakhvi teaches at the University of the Punjab in Lahore. 15. Lakhvi, “Holy Prophet,” 6. 16. All translations from the Qurʾan are my own. 17. See a list of these voices, with links, at http://www.muhajabah.com/others condemn.php. An oft-­cited Gallup poll of 50,000 Muslims in 2008 found that 93 percent condemned the terrorist attacks. The results of the poll are presented in Esposito and Mogahed, Who Speaks for Islam? 18. Armstrong, Muhammad, 17. 19. Ibid., 19. 20. Muhammad Abduh, The Theology of Unity, 142–143. Abduh’s reading of history is no less selective than that of Spencer. Here he elides the Prophet’s wars in Medina with the conquests of the Persian Empire and much of the Byzantine Empires—events that occurred decades after the Prophet’s death. 21. Jean Flori, “Jihad and Holy War”; reprinted in Einfeld, Is Islam? 63–67, at 65. 22. Ibid., 66. Flori’s piece is juxtaposed in Einfeld’s collection to a much more scholarly examination by Sohail Hashmi (“The Islamic Concept of Jihad Is Comparable to the Christian Concept of Just War,” 50–62) without any explanation or analysis to guide the reader. 23. I will not go into detail about Flori’s misreading of history here. Three observations should suffice. First, Flori’s assertion that the Christian theory of warfare flies in the face of the Gospels is an unusual interpretation, not shared by most Christian theologians. Second, long before the Crusades, Charlemagne extended Christian lands through holy wars of conquest and forced conversion; long after the Crusades, the Spanish conquest of the New World did much the same. Finally, the notion that Christian holy war was not conquest but reconquest was developed first in the nineteenth century—another example that theories of war continue to evolve for both religions. 24. Regarding some of the definitional problems, see Schwerdtfeger, Lienemann, and Kinnamon, “Peace.” 25. Lakhvi, “Holy Prophet,” 2. 26. Q 49:14 and 9:97–102 discuss “Bedouin Arabs” who have submitted begrudgingly only to a military alliance, not to true faith. 27. For an exhaustive history of these changing interpretations, see Afsaruddin, Striving in the Path of God. My thanks to Dr. Afsaruddin for the opportunity to read this book in manuscript.

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28. Augustine, City of God, vol. 2, p. 54 (book 15). Sohail Hashmi opens his article in Einfeld’s collection with a quotation from Ibn Khaldun to the effect that warfare is an inevitable part of human existence—a sentiment that Augustine shared. 29. Augustine, City of God, 2:319. 30. Ibid., 2:314. 31. U. Duchrow, Shalom. 32. von Brück, “War and Peace in Hinduism.” 33. Augustine, City of God, 2:315. 34. Waugh, “Peace.” 35. See also Firestone, “Enemies,” 2:23. See also Q 2:256, 5:32, 16:125, and 29:46. 36. In 2007, a group of Muslim scholars working in Jordan were motivated by this verse to actively take up its call. They reached out to their Jewish and Christian counterparts with an extraordinary document that has laid the foundation for interreligious dialogue on many levels. See www.acommonword.com. 37. Gabriel, Muhammad: Islam’s First Great General. While Gabriel’s book is based exclusively on translations and secondary sources, his assessment of Muhammad as a negotiator is instructive. 38. Augustine, City of God, 319. 39. In his apologetic text War and Peace in the Life of the Prophet Muhammad (Peace Be upon Him), Zakaria Bashier claims that it was “the orientalists of old and new” who created this doctrine of abrogation to slander Islam (p. vii). In fact, it is an ancient interpretation, better explained by the need “in the period following the establishment of the Islamic Empire to justify offensive jihad”; Ridgeon, “War and Peace in Islam,” 158–162. 40. G. E. M. Anscombe, “War and Murder,” 35. 41. For these and many more ways of understanding Muhammad, see Brockopp, The Cambridge Companion to Muhammad. 42. For the expectation of contradiction in biographies of exemplary individuals, see Brockopp, “Contradictory Evidence and the Exemplary Scholar.” For a recent example of this theory applied to Muhammad, see Ali, The Lives of Muhammad. 43. The quotations are from Qurʾan 33:21 and 21:107, which are traditionally interpreted as referring to Muhammad.

CHAPTER 3

Art History and the Contemporary Politics of Depicting Muhammad: The Case of the Danish Cartoon Controversy Jytte Klausen In 2006 protests erupted around the world over the publication in a Danish newspaper, Jyllands-­Posten, of twelve cartoons—caricatures may be a more apt description—portraying Muhammad. Since then, depiction of the Muslim Prophet has become a matter of life and death. Anti-­ Muslim and extremist Islamist groups are locked in a dangerous dialectic of mutual provocation. Each side propagates essentially the same message: Muslims must live their lives following Allah’s law and can therefore not accept the rules of Western democracy. Working in tandem as “best enemies,” anti-­Muslim groups and Islamist extremists often repost each other’s incendiary material online.1 Manipulated “insults” to the Muslim Prophet and, by extension, to all Muslims, and narratives about what Islam permits or disallows, are used to mobilize supporters. Each side engages in a kind of virtual global stone-­throwing with violent real-­life repercussions. Supporters are urged to turn up for street fights at each other’s meetings. We have become so accustomed to this dialectic that the scaling of the US embassy in Cairo and the death in Benghazi of the US ambassador to Libya, J. Christopher Stevens, on September 11, 2012, were initially attributed to local protests against an American-­made film, uploaded to YouTube, titled “Innocence of Muslims.” This was an oversimplification, as it turned out. It is fair to conclude that the producers of the YouTube clip hoped that it would stimulate violent demonstrations following the precedent of the Danish cartoon protest. The clip was posted on the anniversary of the September 11 bombing of the World Trade Center towers in New York City, to coincide with demonstrations marking the day that were planned by extremist Islamist groups and far-­right “counter-­Jihadist” groups in

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Europe and the United States. Inaccurately described as a film, the YouTube clip is in fact an amateur production made up of poorly staged enactments of sophomoric sacrilegious sketches purporting to represent incidents in the life of the Muslim Prophet. Its representation of Muhammad as a pedophilic sex maniac is standard fare in the Islamophobic rants that proliferate on the Internet and in far-­right narratives about “the problem with Muslims.” Paradoxically, Egyptian state censors’ relaxation of their grip in the aftermath of the Arab Spring played a role in the chain of events that culminated in the violent protests against the “Innocence of Muslims” YouTube clip. A trailer for the production was posted on YouTube months before violence occurred in Egypt and elsewhere, but the clip gained few viewers until excerpts were broadcast by the Cairo-­based religious ultraconservative al-­Nas television station. It then came to the attention of the Egyptian authorities, and Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood, the newly elected president, urged Egyptians to join in demonstrations. The TV station was alerted to the existence of the YouTube clip by a Twitter campaign that was produced and promoted by a US-­based Coptic Christian activist, Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, and a pastor in Gainesville, Florida, Terry Jones. Jones had gotten everyone’s attention in 2010, and then again in 2011, for his plans to burn copies of the Qurʾan in a bonfire. And yet the 2012 film protests failed to capture global popular imagination in the way the Danish cartoons had. The Danish cartoon affair unfolded like a soap opera, with many actors and a complex story line of missed opportunities and mixed intentions. The 2012 YouTube clip had its own share of characters who exploited the situation in one way or another. Nakoula, who also used the name Sam Bacile, claimed that he was an Israeli-­American and that he had raised $5 million from about 100 Jewish donors to fund the film. Although this was untrue, the deception was widely broadcast on Middle East media. A Coptic Christian based in the United States named Morris Sadek dubbed an excerpt into Arabic and began advertising it on his Arabic-­ language blog during the first week of September.2 The promotion included, among other items, a picture of Pastor Jones in front of the White House and a bloody cartoon purporting to show the Muslim Prophet. The “screening” of the video was announced to coincide with the “International Judge Muhammad Day,” scheduled for September 11, 2012, in Gainesville, Florida. Jones was at various times urged by Robert Gates, the secretary of Defense; Martin E. Dempsey, chair of the US military’s Joint Chiefs of Staff; and possibly other federal officials not to proceed with Qurʾan-­burning demonstrations.

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The government’s desire to make Jones desist was understandable but posed tricky questions about how to balance security concerns and foreign policy against the pastor’s civil liberties. Put plainly, the government’s message was that because Muslims would react badly, the pastor’s right to free expression here in the United States would have to be curbed. Censoring the pastor carried the risk that Muslims would once again be accused of being violence-­prone and for limiting what many Americans regard as an essential aspect of American civil liberties. The government engaged in anticipatory censorship by making the speaker responsible for the potentially violent actions of his unspecified listeners. The speaker became responsible for tuning his message to unknown rules determined by unknown actors located outside what Jürgen Habermas described as the American Öffentlichkeit (public sphere), the cultural commons of the American free speech tradition.3 It has become increasingly difficult to see the Danish cartoons, or indeed any other representation of Muhammad. Celebrated Persian and Ottoman manuscripts have been removed from public displays and placed in storage so they will be out of harm’s way. Reproductions of the Danish cartoons are available on the Internet, but in contexts communicating danger or violation. Wikipedia has an entry where they can be viewed, and so does an online archive, the Mohammed Image Archive, which was created by free speech activists to protest the widespread censorship of the cartoons. The site mixes reproductions of illustrated Islamic manuscripts portraying Muhammad with unimaginably lurid and crude caricatures compiled from anti-­Muslim sites. Writing about how this state of affairs came about requires a hermeneutic archeology of narratives and images. Layer upon layer of distortion must be removed before a real appreciation emerges of the history of pictorial portrayal of Muhammad. What follows is a study of how the world arrived at the erroneous conclusion that Muslims do not allow depictions of their Prophet and came to accept a ban on the publication of images of Muhammad.

A Short History of the Danish Cartoons and the Protests Against Them The twelve caricatures or cartoons in question were published on September 30, 2005, by Jyllands-­Posten, a Danish broadsheet. Two weeks after publication, the Danish prime minister, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, was presented letters of complaint from a group of ambassadors to Den-

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mark representing eleven Islamic countries and from the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC), an intergovernmental organization of fifty-­ seven Muslim countries. Three thousand Danish Muslims demonstrated in Copenhagen, demanding an apology from the newspaper for insulting Muslims by printing pictures of the Prophet. A furious debate broke out in Denmark about whether or not the paper was justified in soliciting and printing the caricatures. Five months later, violent demonstrations broke out across a swath of countries stretching from Nepal to Nigeria. During those months, diplomats from the Islamic countries, Egypt in particular, and from the OIC and the Arab League carried out a coordinated effort to get the Danish government to engage in intergovernmental conflict resolution. The Danish government, however, refused to recognize the legitimacy of the complaints, and it did not even disclose the existence of the OIC’s letter until February 2006, four months into the conflict. The diplomatic protests aimed to use international disapproval to sanction the newspaper—and the Danish people—for Islamophobia, which for lack of a better definition here is used to connote hateful stereotyping of Muslims. The diplomatic protests dead-­ended in a muddled appeal for “responsible” speech and produced an acrimonious United Nations debate on responsible speech, and on the inclusion of “respect for religious figures” and freedom from defamation of religion to the catalog of UN-­sponsored human rights. The cartoon protests escalated in February 2006 after Middle Eastern religious leaders started making public comments. The International Union for Muslim Scholars, of which Sheik Yusuf al-­Qaradawi, a leading figure in the Islamist movement, is the president, issued a statement on January 29. The statement expressed disappointment that diplomatic channels had failed to elicit an apology from the Danish government and appealed to all Arab and Muslim governments to endorse Muslim people’s anger at this direct insult of the Prophet (peace and blessings be upon him) by the publishing of these offensive cartoons. Arab and Muslim governments should also exercise all possible political and diplomatic pressure on the Danish and Norwegian governments so as to halt organized anti-­Islam campaigns that aim at spreading hatred of and contempt for Islam, its sanctities, and its believers.

It concluded by recommending a trade boycott. The following Friday, February 3, 2006, al-­Qaradawi, an octogenarian Egyptian Muslim scholar and a spiritual leader of the Muslim Brother-

Art History and the Contemporary Politics of Depicting Muhammad 61

hood, delivered a fiery sermon on Qatar TV, telling Muslims across the world to stage a “day of rage”: The ummah [nation] must rage in anger. It is told that Imam Al-­Shafiʿi said: “Whoever was angered and did not rage is a jackass.” We are not a nation of jackasses. We are not jackasses for riding, but lions that roar. We are lions that zealously protect their dens, and avenge affronts to their sanctities. We are not a nation of jackasses. We are a nation that should rage for the sake of Allah, His Prophet, and His book. We are the nation of Muhammad, and we must never accept the degradation of our religion.

Al-­Qaradawi turned the cartoon protests against “our feeble governments,” meaning the governments of Islamic countries, which he accused of toeing the line of the West, and he warned them not to “split from their peoples.” A second warning was directed against the Western governments for being silent about “crimes” offending the Prophet and for causing terrorism because Muslims feel they must take the defense of the Prophet into their own hands. The sermon was transmitted by al-­Jazeera and transcribed on IslamOnline, a website created by al-­Qaradawi in 1997. On the weekend of Qaradawi’s speech and the weekend following, demonstrations against the cartoons became increasingly violent. Danish embassies and offices were attacked in Beirut, Damascus, Teheran, Lahore, and the West Bank, and in Jakarta. The protests coincided with the beginning of the Ashura, when Shiites mark the death of the Third Imam, Hussein ibn Ali, the grandson of the Prophet, whom Shiites regard as Muhammad’s rightful successor. In Lebanon, where 500,000 people turned out for the commemoration, Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah blamed George W. Bush and Zionists for the insult to the Prophet committed by the Danes and turned the procession into a demonstration against the cartoons.4 Sunni radicals and extreme salafists similarly linked the cartoons to attacks by “crusader-­nations” on the Muslims and their Prophet. Mohammed Yousaf Qureshi, a Pakistani religious leader from Peshawar, announced a fatwa offering a reward of $25,000 to anyone who killed one of the cartoonists. Al Qaeda did not pick up on the cartoon protests until March 5, 2006, a month after al-­Qaradawi’s speech, when Ayman al-­Zawahiri issued a statement blaming the United States for the cartoons. Osama bin Laden released a tape with the same message in April. In June 2008, two and half years after protests against the cartoons had begun in Denmark, Al-­Qaeda bombed the Danish embassy in Islamabad.

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The reactions to the Danish cartoons exposed deep rifts within contemporary political Islamism. Moderates, including the Muslim Brotherhood in France and the Netherlands, appealed to European laws and norms for protection. The militants and some more pious groups saw no reason to bother with lawsuits. They held that secular societies of the West notoriously permit all manner of forbidden images, and that their European-­based legal systems, to which the Muslim moderates appealed, were illegitimate according to conservative interpretations of Islamic law.5 The Danish cartoons commanded global attention. Eighty percent of the individuals included in a thirteen-­country public opinion survey conducted by the Pew Global Attitudes Project in 2006 had heard about the cartoons, a number that rose to ninety percent in Jordan and Egypt and in the four European countries surveyed. The survey also showed an overwhelming inclination to attribute fault to the opposite side of the argument. Muslims thought “Western arrogance” was at fault, and non-­ Muslim “Westerners” censured Muslims generally for oversensitivity and a capacity for violence.6 Writers in the Western press often argued that Muslims posed as pious iconoclasts, but they themselves engage in pictorial representation of the Prophet. Surely Christians could not be expected to observe norms that Muslims themselves did not observe, they contended. Muslims in turn complained about the press’s double standards in the treatment of Muslims compared to Christians and Jews, and they decried the cartoons as another instance of spreading Islamophobia. The charge of double standards of press treatment has merit. Blasphemy laws are common in Europe, and in countries where no such laws exist, the media nonetheless often refrain from printing material that may be hurtful to the sentiments of Christians and Jews.

Blasphemy or Islamophobia? Islam does not possess a centralized hierarchy, comparable to the Catholic Church or the European Protestant state churches, that tells believers what to think. Nor does it possess a unified authority to draw distinct boundaries in matters of belief and practice. The difference between Christianity and Islam in this respect cannot be overstated. Furthermore, no scriptural agreement exists about what exactly the problem was with the cartoons. For this reason, the cartoons were an occasion for Muslims to reconsider many kinds of issues: boundaries between the sacred and the secular, and the relationship between religious law and public norms, as

Art History and the Contemporary Politics of Depicting Muhammad 63

well as between religious law and the domain of the private. The Qurʾan is the constitutive scripture for Islamic religious law, but it is ambiguous with respect to figurative representation. Religious scholars were reluctant to issue edicts about the sins of a newspaper in Denmark, a small Western country with a generally positive reputation. The escalation of the conflict eventually provoked respected scholars to issue fatwas, but by that time the scholars had become more concerned about ending the spreading violence than about explaining why the cartoons were offensive to Muslims. Two weeks after the outbreak of violence, forty Muslim clerical scholars, including the American Hamza Yusuf Hanson, issued a fatwa on the cartoons. The list of signatories included Deobandi, Shiite, and Sunni authorities, and grand muftis and professors from Egypt and Saudi Arabia. The televangelist Amr Khaled, who advocates “faith-­based development,” also signed. (The Turkish religious establishment was conspicuously missing.) The forty signatories declared that publishing the cartoons was “an unacceptable crime” and called on “the Danish government and the Danish people” to apologize. The statement included a vague threat that an apology was required “to ensure that Denmark is not isolated from the international community.” Although presented as a religious edict on the cartoons, the statement gave space to qurʾanic directives to be courteous in disagreement and not to react to a provocation with violence.7 The blasphemy argument was a direct response to Islamic radicals’ bid to link the cartoon issue to their broader anti-­Western agenda. In a curious way, the cartoons triggered within the ranks of contemporary Islamism a split akin to an old rift between revolutionary Marxists and reformist socialists over what to do about the institutions of liberal democracy.8 Once a choice is made to work within the institutions, claim-­making becomes a matter of piecemeal reform, and the demand for religious recognition is transformed into a claim for protection under blasphemy laws—where such laws exist and apply to Islam. In the United Kingdom, for instance, a legal complaint about the cartoons would not be appropriate because the blasphemy law protects only the Church of England. In any case, the British media did not republish the cartoons. In countries where only Christians enjoy protection by a blasphemy law, other laws—like so-­called hate speech laws—sometimes give Jews and members of other religious groups protection against group defamation. It is not unreasonable for Muslim groups to want to test the laws. Yet complaints were dismissed in every country where the courts agreed to consider a complaint filed by Muslim associations.

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In the case of concerns about Islamophobia, the issue is not what Islam forbids, but what international secular law says that states should do to guarantee equal treatment of Muslims. This argument shifted the burden of action away from the newspaper to the Danish government. The implied criticism is not that the Danes failed to respond to Muslim pieties, but that they failed to observe a shared commitment to equal treatment of Muslims and Christians. The inherent difficulty with proposing that all faiths are equal is that most faiths regard the others as heretical, so the best human rights can do is to assume a position of neutrality to all faiths and assert the right of believers, but not their faiths, to be treated equally. It is a novel experience for Europeans to be asked to recognize different conceptualizations of the sacred as equally deserving of protection. Put plainly, the cartoons looked blasphemous to Muslims but ordinary to Christians.

What Muslims Do and Do Not Do with Respect to Figurative Representation Was it hypocritical for Muslims to expect a Danish newspaper to observe a taboo that is not even observed by Muslims? Not all Muslims thought depiction in itself was the problem. But many Muslims did believe and say that a taboo—or a close equivalent—exists. Islam insists on a number of religious prohibitions, but interpretations of the law vary among religious schools. Pious Muslims believe that their faith compels them to reflect self-­consciously on the obligations of faith but that there are no ready-­made answers as to what precisely those obligations are. Most Muslims are not particularly pious and have a casual attitude to religious law. Perhaps one in five European Muslim men attend Friday prayers with some regularity, yet even many people who are not observant of religious law considered the cartoons unacceptably insulting. There were religious reasons and not-­so-­religious reasons for the protests. Haroon Siddiqui, a columnist at the Toronto Star, writes that the lesson Muslims drew from the cartoon episode was that in the West, freedom of speech means freedom to malign Muslims. Pretty drawings of the Prophet can be seen in the Topkapi Palace in Istanbul, he writes, but “some centuries ago Muslims came to a consensus against depicting the Prophet, lest it lead to idolatry, a sin in Islam. That consensus holds. Non-­Muslims can no more mock that belief than Muslims can question some article of Christian or Jewish or Hindu faith.”9 Siddiqui’s pithy description of what Muslims do is interesting also for what it does not say. He describes a con-

Art History and the Contemporary Politics of Depicting Muhammad 65

sensus that is experienced and customary but cites no chapter and verse detailing the forbidden behavior. If an immutable law existed it would be written, and there would be no question of a consensus emerging only at some time after the revelation. But how do Muslims explain the miniatures in Islamic art collections and the many pictures that suddenly appeared on the Internet, where the debate over the cartoons raged?10 “Only Shiites do that,” said Rachid Nekkaz, a French self-­made dot.com millionaire who grew up poor and Muslim in one of the banlieues.11 Nekkaz ran in the 2007 presidential election on a multicultural platform. He had no patience with ideas about expanding blasphemy laws or other laws to protect Muslims against the kind of insults hurled by the cartoonists, and he said when I spoke to him: “You need not look if they offend you.” Nonetheless, he too viewed the cartoons as deeply offensive to Muslims everywhere because, as he saw it, they violated a core religious commandment against depiction of the Muslim Prophet.

Art versus Popular Perception I turned to Tim Winter, a lecturer in Islamic Studies at Cambridge University, for an explanation that would reconcile the representations of the Prophet and his companions that can be found in many art collections and museums with the customary view that such depictions simply are not done.12 Winter stated: “Yes, among the courts and the elite these things were popular, but among the common people it was hardly ever done.” What is ordinarily seen in the museums is not art that was public or communally viewed, but art for elite consumption, representing even decadence in the courts of the rulers. The expensive gilded works commissioned by the courts and wealthy traders among the Ottoman Turks, the Safavid Persians, the Uzbeks, and Indian Muslims were for private enjoyment. The courts sustained an artistic class of musicians, poets, and illustrators by commissioning works of poetry, music, and beautifully illustrated manuscripts. This output of exquisite art had nothing to do with what went on in mosques. Winter likened it to pornography, forbidden and hidden from public view. Siddiqui’s claim that a consensus against depictions of the Prophet emerged at some point among ordinary Muslims is consistent with Winter’s view that the pictures we see in museums are examples of the conspicuous and religiously suspect consumption of sixteenth- and seventeenth-­century elites in the Muslims empires.

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Art historians disagree. “It is often said,” write Sheila Blair and Jonathan Bloom, “that the depiction of living things is forbidden in Islamic art, but this is simply not true.”13 Does it make sense to even speak of “Islamic art” if what we have before us is art made by Muslims but not devotional art? We would not presume to call all art by Christian artists devotional art. The argument has intuitive appeal, but faith matters. Is the answer perhaps to recognize the Christian or Islamic part of our iconographic language rather than divorcing devotional art from secular art? Artists use religious imagery to make allegoric statements about human life and feeling, about pain, love, and anxiety, and many other things. Faith leaches into artistic imagery. And when Christians make pictures or sculptures of Muhammad, the sentiments expressed are very different from those generally expressed by Muslim artists. The British Library exhibited a page from a sixteenth-­century Persian illustration of a poem about Muhammad’s life as part of its exhibit on sacred texts in fall 2007. The illustration is shown and is explained on the library’s website.14 The David Collection in Copenhagen and the Freer Gallery in Washington, DC, also exhibit the manuscripts, or at least they did until recently. Meanwhile, the Metropolitan Museum in New York says it will show illustrated manuscripts with depictions of the Prophet in its new section on Islamic art, but only rarely because of the fragility of the manuscripts. What to do with Islamic art is no longer a decision made by the curator alone. It is now a matter of international relations. The Metropolitan was reported to have consulted with twenty Islamic countries before opening its new gallery.15 The Louvre and the Bibliothèque nationale in Paris do not display the manuscripts in their possession portraying Muhammad. Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts has several miniatures from Persian manuscripts. One illustration in particular attracted my attention, a beautiful sixteenth-­century miniature of Muhammad ascending to heaven from Persia (Iran).16 It is not on view at the museum and is available only in the catalog. One curator described her dilemma: “We’ve always known about these images, and no one’s ever had a problem, because they are respectful. . . . I wish this whole issue would go away because it’s so incendiary.”17 Generally, very little figurative art is on display in Islamic art collections, so I had to turn to art books and online image archives for my personal art survey. Syrian Umayyad caliphs had sculptures in the Greco-­ Roman style adorning their palaces, including some that depicted women with naked breasts. But it is hard to locate images of human figures— much less of the Prophet and his family—until the fifteenth and sixteenth

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centuries. Most of the material available comes from a limited number of books. Two important sources of figurative representations of the Prophet are Siyer-­i Nebi, The Life of the Prophet, from 1595, and Khamseh of Nizami, a sixteenth-­century manuscript from India, a page from which the British Library exhibited. The first is a book of illustrations of a poem written two hundred years earlier. It was commissioned by an Ottoman ruler, Murad III (1574–1595), and is housed in the Topkapi Palace in Istanbul. In this book, Muhammad’s face is obscured but it is otherwise a full-­figure representation. The second book uses full-­face representation. Another collection is a fifteenth-­century illustrated history of the “Journey of the Prophet Muhammad,” created by Timurid, an artist from what is today Azerbaijan. Some themes in Muhammad’s life have been particular favorites. Among the more common depictions are of Muhammad riding between heaven and earth on the back of the angel Gabriel or on his horse, al-­Buraq. None of these images are examples of what we would think of as religious or devotional representations. The Prophet is drawn as a statesman, a warrior, and a family man. There are battle scenes and picnics featuring Muhammad and his family. The clothing, the scenery, the food, and the weapons are drawn in contemporary styles, which creates an oddly anachronistic effect. In Ottoman gilded manuscripts, Muhammad is depicted as a sixteenth-­century sultan. The miniatures show off the splendor of the courts in the narration of Muhammad’s exploits, as well as showcasing the artistic abilities of the courts’ artists and the richness of the material. The manuscripts and miniatures contradict the idea that Muslims do not draw pictures of the Prophet, but these are not caricatures. The illustrations extol the virtue or the bravery of the Prophet. Often the faces of Muhammad and his family are obscured by a small veil or simply left as a white blotch, but full-­figure representations with the facial features fully drawn can also be found. What then about the posters and wall hangings for sale in the bazaars of Tehran and Istanbul? Shiites, it is agreed, are avid consumers of religious kitsch depicting Imam Ali, Fatima, and other members of the Prophet’s family.18 This stuff is very different from what one might find in the Islamic art collections housing the Ottoman and Persian miniatures. The style resembles Catholic folk art and Protestant Bible study illustration. The color is vivid or pastels dominate. Fatima’s beauty evokes piety. Imam Ali too is beautiful, with a groomed beard, and the hand clasping a menacing sword tells of courage and strength. An aura can sometimes

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be seen illuminating the body from behind. The Shia take great pains to stress the physical beauty of God’s Messenger and his family. We need not go far to find such things for sale. An American website apparently catering to students has a poster for sale showing Muhammad being escorted to paradise by the angel Gabriel. The poster is a full facial depiction without a veil covering the face of Muhammad.19 Shia and Sunni differences are evident, but it is not accurate to say that only Shias allow depictions of the Prophet, as some of my Sunni friends in Paris and London have asserted. The many Ottoman Sunni manuscripts speak against that claim. Moreover, there is no schism in Islam comparable to the creation of the separate churches of Christianity. Sunni and Shia Muslims share the same living space, intermarry, and have generally coexisted across large swaths of the Middle East and the Caucasus. In European cities where migration has put them in the same poorly served neighborhoods, Shias and Sunnis mingle in mosques. The prayer style varies, as do the holidays in the two traditions, but where Shia and the Sunni Muslims live together, the commonalities are far greater than the divisions. Today’s Sunni radicals’ shrill denunciations of Shias as infidels are a battle cry from those who aim to make true what is not true—or at least is not true yet. Is the difference in practices instead a matter of class and division within Sunni Islam, as implied by Winter and Siddiqui? If so, the high or elite culture of the extended Ottoman court practiced one set of values, and Muslims everywhere else adhered to a more severe set of rules that viewed image-­making as idolatry. But it was not only the decadent Ottomans and Persians who engaged in religiously questionable pictorial representation. Frescos and mosaics in the Roman Empire’s occupation zone in the Middle East were often redacted or paved over, but in Jordan’s desert, off an ancient road to Mecca, sits a cluster of eighth-­century lodges built by a Umayyad caliph. Across the lavishly decorated interior walls and ceilings dance men and women in various stages of undress. I searched the catalogs of art museums for representations that I imagined might have been in the possession of commoners. Artifacts predating the tenth century aside—because they can only with difficulty be described as Islamic—I found only an Iznik tile from the sixteenth century. Iznik is a Turkish town south of Istanbul, known as Nicea in Byzantine times, and it has a great clay works. Iznik tile is not cheap today, and it likely was not cheap five centuries ago, but perhaps a wealthy provincial tradesman might have bought and used such tile for decoration much like the Burghers of Pompeii put up wall paintings with titillating sexual

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motifs. Bans on pictorial representation in Muslim countries were often inconsistently applied. The Taliban’s absolutist injunction against film, music, family snapshots, paintings and sculptures, and even non-­Islamic art is the mad iconoclasm of a reform movement with political ambitions. Eighth-­century Umayyad caliphs, fifteenth-­century Afghan sheikhs and Mughal rulers, and sixteenth-­century Ottoman sultans all commissioned great paintings, illustrated books, and occasionally sculptures populated by people and animals, and sometimes even Muhammad and his family. One thing everyone agrees on is that figurative depictions are never found in mosques. What people do when they revere their Prophet, saints, and angels outside the realm of clerical concern is another matter. My amateur sleuthing leads me to conclude that figurative representation for secular purposes has never been common, but it has been practiced widely, and always to represent Muhammad as a statesman, not as the Messenger of God’s word. The Danish caricatures of Muhammad did not violate a generalized prohibition on figurative representation. They—or rather one drawing in particular, which showed Muhammad with a bomb in his turban—violated a specific prohibition against depicting the prophetic Muhammad, and made matters worse by depicting Islamic faith and belief as violent and its Prophet and messenger as an ugly warmonger.

Muhammad in the Western Imagination The Internet brings together people of diverse religious and cultural backgrounds into one global communicative orgy. Muslims and Christians with no shared history of norms about what constitutes rightful or wrongful speech are thrown together on the Internet’s superhighway. Christians have drawn pictures and constructed sculptures of Muhammad for centuries. Safely cordoned off in separate geographical spaces, Muslims and Christians developed their own semiseparate histories and trajectories about these visual practices. Medieval paintings often found in churches showcase Christianity’s triumph over Islam in the wake of the expulsion from Spain. The Victorians depicted the Prophet as a “Mohammedan” wearing Turkish-­style clothing. Books and instructional material for Bible study tend to portray Muhammad as an exotic-­looking prophet. Mormons have produced many illustrations in the respectful vein because Joseph Smith, the founder of the religion, presented himself as a prophet in the tradition of Muhammad.20 Christian and Mormon religious in-

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struction textbooks portray Muhammad as religious figure in the biblical tradition. The long reach of the Crusades into secular art is illustrated by the depiction of Muhammad in Hell in Dante’s The Divine Comedy. Dante confined Muhammad to the Eighth Circle of Hell in the Inferno section, and a 1491 illustrated version features a picture of the tormented Muhammad.21 It is one of Europe’s most popular illustrated works, and artists from William Blake to Salvador Dali reworked the illustration of Muhammad’s torment as God’s punishment of sinners. Dali’s otherworldly painting of the suffering Muhammad stands apart as a rendering of human pain, mental and physical.22 It is unlikely that Dali ever read the Qurʾan or knew much about Islam, but he knew a lot about both Dante and Blake. The meaning of images is constructed through memory and through overt or covert references to other familiar images. The Danish cartoons were accompanied by interpretative texts. There were two essays by the editors, and most of the cartoons had a short caption providing clues to the interpretation of the image. However, these were never translated, and if they had been translated they would have meant little to non-­Danish viewers. One cartoon had no interpretative text, and though its iconographic meaning appeared to be universal, it was not. Kurt Westergaard, who drew the bomb-­in-­the-­t urban caricature, says he did not for a minute consider that Muslims would interpret his drawing to mean that Islam is the source of extremist violence. On the contrary, he meant to show that radicals wrap themselves in Muhammad’s clothing to justify their agenda. The distinction is conceptual and cannot be inferred from the drawing. Danish readers familiar with Protestant criticisms of Roman Catholic substitution of clerical law for God’s judgment would recognize the drawing perhaps as a classical anti-­clerical statement. Ironically, Muslims too argue that God’s judgment alone is absolute and resist efforts to put God’s message to the service of political agendas. The cartoons are an eclectic mix of illustrations in the style of Bible study textbooks (Muhammad in the desert wearing hippie sandals and holding a walking stick) and racialist caricature (Muhammad with a Semitic nose and a blood-­dripping sword). They are pictorial editorials and reflect present-­day Danish preoccupation with Islamic radicalism, and they were published together with an editorial on the culture pages of the paper. Flemming Rose, the editor at Jyllands-­Posten, said that Muslims’ insistence on special regard for their religious feelings is incompatible with a secular democracy and free speech, “where everybody must

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be willing to put up with sarcasm, mockery, and ridicule.”23 American readers are likely to be more familiar with the argument that civility is a basic requirement of democracy; in Northern Europe rudeness is sometimes regarded as a mark of political virtue.24 The bomb-­in-­the-­turban caricature, which was the one most newspapers chose to reproduce, exaggerates what are presumed to be the physiognomic features of an Arab. These are essentially Semitic features, which explains why so many people felt the cartoon was anti-­Semitic. This particular cartoon was the subject of Muslim anger also because the turban was imprinted with the Shahada, the Muslim declaration of faith: “There is no god except God.” In the brouhaha over this incendiary depiction, it was lost that other cartoons used different stylistic reference terms, and several made fun of the newspaper and took the side of Muslims against the barrage of negative commentary prevalent in Danish political debate.

Islamophobia as Political Rhetoric We speak today of Islamophobia to designate the stereotyping of Muslims in the media, but an earlier conceptual framework was proposed by Edward Said, who introduced the concept of Orientalism to describe the creation of a unitary and alien picture of Muslims and Islam in the Western public imagination. In response to Samuel Huntington’s rhetoric about a clash of civilizations, Said wrote, “Why do you pinion civilizations into so unyielding an embrace, and why do you then go on to describe their relationship as one of basic conflict, as if the borrowing and overlappings between them were not a much more interesting and significant feature?”25 Said died in 2003, but his name has been invoked in explanations of the cartoon crisis, even though blaming the whole affair on Western aggression seems rather to endorse Huntington’s vision of a clash of civilizations. It is true that the diversity and complexity of Muslim life and history is compressed and staged as a morality play, with Muslims as the baddies, in movies, TV dramas, and, alas, cartoons. But that is what caricatures and sitcoms do, and becoming “things to think with” is hardly a uniquely Muslim experience.26 Blacks, women, and Jews have also taken turns in the pictorial history of stereotyping. The Western media had settled into a curious state of non-­engagement with Islam prior to the cartoon debacle. The Salman Rushdie affair in

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1988 created a backlash against Muslims in the United Kingdom and other western European countries. Tensions settled but were never resolved. Eighteen years on, the scars still existed. The conflict over the cartoons reprised many of the same tropes about “insults to Islam” and about Muslims’ prickliness and censorious propensities. The Danish newspaper and its defenders channeled Christian tropes about Muhammad as a violent alien, while the Muslim protesters asserted a puritanical interpretation of the Qurʾan. The adversarial claims drew new meaning from the European political context, wherein Europe’s secular values collided with the dominant modes of Islamist rhetoric—for example self-­conscious assertions of what are deemed normatively Islamic values. Both sides routinely invoked Huntington’s theory that Islam and Christendom are separate civilizations, perpetually rubbing against each other. On the Muslim side, his theory was seen as proved by the Danish cartoonists’ disrespect for Islam. And on the other side, prejudices were sustained in Europe when Muslims responded by torching Danish consulates and embassies, and when an avalanche of death threats were delivered by e-­mail and fax to the offices of newspapers and even of private people who joined the fray. The eagerness for simple explanations overlooked not only that Muslims use the Internet, a very modern medium, for conveying obscurantist threats, but also that Muslims were set against Muslims in the conflict. Like Christians, Muslims struggled to find the proper balance between religious feelings and free speech. The cartoons were republished in Arab and South Asian papers, where the editors often faced stiff penalties.27 In Russia and South Africa, the courts stepped in and banned the cartoons. In contrast, few British and American periodicals published the cartoons.28 Fatima Mernissi, a Moroccan feminist and sociology professor, writes that the progress of Islamicism (her translator’s choice of word) has obscured the secularization of Muslim societies promoted by Arab nationalism in the 1930s and 1940s. Arab nationalism was “proudly modernistic” and pushed an intellectual renaissance that was linked to, rather than separate from, Western political thought. So it is today. “We do not live in separate worlds, but in highly interconnected ones,” she writes with reference to the decline of Arab modernism and the ascendancy of fundamentalism, which she defines as a political project that “sacralizes hierarchy and denies pluralism.”29

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“Nothing Can Be Compared with Him” Europeans generally accept that the Qurʾan forbids depiction of Muhammad and that Muslims have to “throw half of the book away” (in the words of Dutch politician Geert Wilders) in order to live peacefully with Western values. In fact, however, the Qurʾan is ambiguous on the question of figurative representation, and there are only a few passages relevant to the issue. A verse that is sometimes interpreted to contain an injunction reads, “Creator of the Heavens the earth, he has given you spouses from among yourselves, and cattle male and female; by this means He multiplies His creatures. Nothing can be compared with Him. He alone hears and sees all” (42:11, N.J. Dawood’s translation). This verse and another that prohibits worship of false gods (21:52–54) are similar to the Judeo-­Christian prohibition of idol worship contained in the Ten Commandments: “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.” Muslims in Europe are used to living as a religious minority and adapting their private belief to public norms. The cartoons elicited strong emotions, and the religious establishments felt compelled to act. But what could they say? Muslim religious scholars invoked a religious duty to boycott Danish goods but provided little guidance as to what Islamic law had to say in such cases.30 What then does Islamic law say about depictions of the Muslim Prophet made by non-­Muslims? A source on the position of Islamic law with respect to figurative depiction of the Prophet in a nonsacred and non-­ Muslim contemporary context is a fatwa promulgated in 2000 that concerned a sixty-­year-­old frieze depicting Muhammad in the United States Supreme Court. The author of the fatwa is Taha Jaber al-­Alwani, a professor at Al-­Azhar University in Cairo, a member of the OIC’s Fiqh Council, chair of the Fiqh Council of North America, and a highly respected authority on Islamic law.31 The edict asserts that the concrete problem at hand is a sculpture praising the Prophet for his contribution to humanity that is placed in a location of great authority outside the Islamic realm. Al-­Alwani observes that the Qurʾan is ambiguous on the issue of figurative depiction in general, and that it is necessary to turn for guidance to the Hadith, the collection of the prophetic sayings of Muhammad as narrated by his followers.

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There are some thirteen relevant Hadiths. One relates the story of ʿAʾisha, the Prophet’s wife, who told about how the Prophet one day tore a curtain she had put up, which she then made into pillows. Another says, “Angels do not enter the house in which there are portrayals or pictures.” A further Hadith that says “the people who will receive the severest punishment from Allah will be the picture makers” has been used by the Taliban and other groups to support an absolute prohibition—even on movies and cameras—but it is generally regarded as referring to the tribal idol-­ worshipers whom Muhammad fought against and therefore not pertinent to the question of representation. Al-­Alwani argues that interpretation of legal propriety is invariably tied to the intention of image-­making. Figurative representation that aims to depict God is disallowed when it aims to directly emulate divine power or God; alternatively, it is prohibited when it is done in the pursuit of worship of other gods. Islam looks askance at lavish decoration; however, figurative representation for ordinary decorative purposes, such as ʿAʾisha’s cushions, is a different matter and not relevant to questions about the permissibility of the Supreme Court frieze—or of the cartoons. And because angels would not enter the Supreme Court because it is not a house of revelation, the issue of “angels entering into houses with pictures” is also irrelevant. Worship aims to contemplate the abstractness of God, and the interference of images with worship is clearly prohibited. However, the frieze does not attempt to emulate divine power, but praises Muhammad as a statesman. Caricatures, on the other hand, are suspect. Al-­Alwani notes that Muslims have revered the Prophet for his physical beauty, and some of their descriptions are found in the inspired work of Persian and Ottoman artisans; it should be noted that the latter also came from cultures more active in image-­making than the original Arab tribes. The tradition of hagiography lives on in popular culture in the preference for posters and wall hangings depicting the Prophet, Fatima, and Imam Ali as supernaturally beautiful. The Prophet’s personal biography is a model for all Muslims. The emphasis on biography, al-­Alwani argues, helps “believers achieve a balance between his Prophethood and message, which belongs to the transcendental, and his humanity and human-­ness, which belongs to this world.”32 Al-­Alwani concludes that Muslims should be proud to have their Prophet pictured on the walls of the Supreme Court among other lawmakers. For Muslims, Muhammad is not just one lawmaker among others, but in an age “replete with disdainful images of the Prophet Muhammad

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(SAAS), it is comforting to note that those in the highest Court in the United States were able to surmount these prejudices.” Al-­Alwani’s statement preceded the cartoon controversy by five years but speaks clearly to what the problem was with the cartoons. They did not intend to honor the Prophet’s contribution to humanity, as did the frieze. They did not extol the Prophet’s magnificence, as did the Ottoman artists or as do contemporary posters for sale in bazaars. They aimed to make the abstract concrete and likened the message to petty—or violent—politics. They made ugly what is to Muslims beautiful. The reasons for which the Supreme Court frieze is something to be proud of are exactly the reasons so many Muslims reacted angrily to the cartoons. In his intellectual history of iconoclasm, Alain Besançon points out that the Abrahamic faiths—Christianity, Judaism, and Islam—have shared histories of forbidden images, but exactly what is forbidden varies, as does the degree to which it is forbidden: “Different religious regimes do not favor the image in equal measure.”33 A Christian editor—or a non-­ Christian editor who has grown up with a Christian education—readily recognizes that Jesus on the cross with an erection is a forbidden image, but to that editor Muhammad with a bomb in his turban and the Shahada imprinted on the turban is just an image of an angry radical. A great deal about the cartoon crisis can be explained by the fact that Jyllands-­Posten was once sensitive to Christian concerns, but over time the newspaper shifted its position on the general issue of the role of religion in society. It is a change that most of Europe has undergone in the past twenty years. At the same time, European Muslims have dismissed the “myth of return” to their purported homelands or countries of origin and have decided that Europe must recognize Islam as one of the Abrahamic faiths and provide equal public and legal space for Muslims. We are faced with a clash of agendas rather than one of civilizations.

The Problem of Religious Neutrality In contrast to the United States, Europe has a copious catalog of hate speech laws, blasphemy laws, and prohibitions on Holocaust denial and on incitement to political violence and hatred. Arguably Europe is already overly committed to the regulation of speech, and more regulation is not the way to go. In 2007 the Council of Europe recommended that out of consideration for religious freedom, blasphemy should not be regarded as a criminal offense. It stressed instead the importance of penalizing expres-

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sions about religious matters that intentionally aim to disturb the public peace.34 European Muslims increasingly agree, and they point to the irony that four cartoon demonstrators in London were sentenced to six years in prison while all the blasphemy suits against the newspapers that produced and reproduced the cartoons failed, including the Danish suits against Jyllands-­Posten. In Islam and the West, Bernard Lewis puzzles over the irreconcilable pulls on Europe’s Muslim migrants. Describing his encounter with a young French Muslim, he reports that the young man described his father as a Muslim and himself as a Parisian. Islam is not a place; nor is Paris a religion. So Lewis implies that the man made a category mistake, but then he retracts that implication and concludes that the young man’s description is appropriate for a Muslim, “not only because they profess a different religion but also because they hold a radically different conception of what religion means, demands, and defines.” Lewis concludes that Muslims cannot conceive law and religion separately.35 Muslim minorities have faced difficult dilemmas as over the past five decades they have established mosque communities in societies with no supporting traditions or laws. Most of the challenges have been pedestrian, albeit difficult enough. Witness the protracted fights over religious slaughter, mosque construction, and prayer rooms in schools and places of employment. But Lewis’s description of the dilemma over the role of law has been misread to mean that Muslims will not be happy until the sharia has been made into civil code. In Huntington’s version, the dilemma turned into a struggle over the viability of the secular state. Political groups that have made it their political project to make sharia into the law of the land have further aided misconceptions. The Christian churches have not shied away from using the legal code to safeguard religious precepts. Since the 1960s established Christian churches have been in retreat, and yet enough traces of religion in the civic code exist that one should be careful not to overdraw arguments about the secular nature of European states. Meanwhile, efforts to make Islam the basis of legal code, as conceptualized by the Western states, have gained force in Muslim countries in the past decades. The secular 1980 Constitution of the Arab Republic of Egypt reintroduced quasireligious jurisprudence. Article 44 of the new post–­Arab Spring constitution, passed in 2012, prohibits “the insulting of prophets,” ostensibly applying in neutral fashion to all prophets. In practice the article codifies a politicized interpretation of Islamic religious law. The 1992 Saudi Arabian Basic Law reinforced the reliance on religious law

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as the source of jurisprudence. The present Pakistani constitution is the most Islamic the country has had.36 In this fashion, the codification of increasingly inflexible understandings of what Islam allows and forbids has proceeded in Muslim countries in step with modernization. Historically, forms of Muslim authority have been politically and religiously fragmented since the territorial spread of Islam beyond the Arabian Peninsula in the classical period. Prior to the existence of the modern state, religious law was society-­based customary law and geared to the problems at hand, and was therefore often expressed in utilitarian terms as a guide for what to do and what not to do under specific circumstances. The decentralized nature of religious authority means that Islam has been law-­based yet endlessly flexible and variable. Siddiqui’s description of a consensus against making pictures of Muhammad harks back to the idea of Islam as a society-­based faith and presents religious law as customary law. It builds logically on the Qurʾan’s injunction against the worship of false gods and refers in a practical fashion to the biographical accounts of the Prophet’s struggle against the idol-­ worshiping tribes that had taken control of the Kaʿba. Muslims invoke the Prophet and his life as a model and exemplum for their own lives. And no longer are Europe’s Muslims muted by poverty and the myth of return. Increased social stratification and the embourgeoisement of a successful Muslim middle-­class support self-­assertion in religious matters. Anger over the cartoons was fueled by this mix of increased consumer power, growing political assertiveness, and the emergent identity of European Muslims. The Hajj (the annual pilgrimage) and the Kaʿba are symbols of the universal faith that have successfully survived in the diaspora. As it has become wealthier, the Muslim migrant minority in Europe has taken up the obligation to join the Hajj with vigor. Millions of worshipers go every year, and many more aspire to go or celebrate the Hajj vicariously through close relatives and associates who have gone. Olivier Roy has described this renewed interest in “deciding for yourself” as a project of “identity reconstruction.”37 But it is not just identity that is being reconstructed. The tenets of belief are also subject to adjustment in order to accommodate upward mobility and minority status. The biography of the Prophet is itself subject to reconstruction of meaning. The subtitle of Karen Armstrong’s new biography of Muhammad, A Prophet for Our Time, provides a strong clue to the book’s purpose. The title of Tariq Ramadan’s more recent biography tells of “Lessons” for following in the footsteps of Muhammad.38 The radical Islamist invocation of the Ummah as a political ploy has

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infested the public consciousness to such an extent that few observers accept that the community of believers can act with a measure of ideational cohesion. The cartoon conflict highlighted all the usual divisions between terrorist jihadists, authoritarian neofundamentalists, reformist Islamists, and governments and diplomats of various political coloring, but it also activated a groundswell of middle-­class discontent with the increasingly hostile depictions of Islam and Muslims in Western media. Needless to say, there were Muslims who wanted nothing to do with the charges of blasphemy and worse, who thought that the clerics who inspired Jyllands-­ Posten to commission the cartoons deserved what they got. All Danes are not xenophobes, and even the editors and cartoonists who produced the offensive cartoons do not merit the labels that have been thrown at them. We need only to turn to the words of the protesters to realize how dependent these demonstrations were on the protesters’ ability to see the images they denounced as offensive and forbidden. A hacker who goes by the name of DarkblooD, one of many who attacked and defaced thousands of websites in February 2006, including Jyllands-­Posten’s site and several belonging to the Danish government, wrote, “On Sept 29th, 2005 issue of Jyllands-­Posten, I saw and read dreadful news and cartoons. The news and the cartoons were horrifying and extremely disturbing to me.” His incorrect attribution of the day of publication reveals that he saw the cartoons online and evidently not until February 2006. It would have been implausible for a similar sequence of events to take place in the absence of the Internet.

The Boomerang Effect of Censorship After the cartoon episode, Muslim countries started to demand that “insulting the Prophet” be made a criminal offense and a human rights violation. In 2012, in the wake of the Innocence of Muslims debacle, the OIC and the Egyptian government stepped up pressure on the United States and demanded that it criminalize blasphemous representations of the Muslim prophet, and also that YouTube remove the notorious clip defaming Muhammad. The OIC subsequently withdrew the demand for a global ban on blasphemy, but coercive blasphemy laws have become an increasingly important source of repression of religious minorities and press freedom in Muslim countries. The conviction of Saudi blogger Raif Badawi, who was calling for political reform and was found guilty of insulting Islam, is an example. Badawi was at first charged with apostasy, a crime that in

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Saudi Arabia carries the death penalty. The charges were reduced to blasphemy, and Badawi was sentenced to ten years in jail and flogging, 1,000 lashes. In the United States the First Amendment protects Americans from having religious doctrine determine what constitutes permissible expression, and it also protects their right to freely to seek out information. Censorship on the grounds that something may be insulting to Muslims is nonetheless increasingly common.39 Online social media platforms are not bound by such constitutional constraint and have the right to remove content that violates user agreements. YouTube, which is essentially an Internet-­based public utility governed by private guidelines, may remove material that violates certain norms, but it decided not to remove the “Innocence of Muslims” film clip. Media in the United States are notably more restrained than those in Europe, not least with respect to the publication of material that may be offensive to religious sensibilities. With few exceptions, US editors declined to follow the lead of European papers that reprinted the Danish cartoons in solidarity with Jyllands-­Posten. In the public debate that followed Yale University’s censorship of my book The Cartoons That Shook The World, it became clear that such acts of censorship were by no means unique. In a discussion of what he described as Yale’s “gratuitous betrayal of scholarship,” the late Oleg Grabar, a distinguished historian of Islamic Art at Princeton University, revealed that a few years earlier Harvard University Press had similarly deleted an image from one of his books, citing a vague concern about “trouble.”40 Censorship has unintended consequences. The censored illustrations accompanied a discussion in my book about iconoclasm and the history of depicting Muhammad in Western and Islamic art. I pointed out that only some branches of Islam embrace what scholars now call aniconism, the prohibition of human images, and the prohibition has never been systematically applied. One of the arguments of my book is that the 2006 cartoon conflict was stereotypically misreported as an instance of Muslims spontaneously instigating riots when confronted with forbidden pictures. In fact, various interest groups, including state actors, exploited the cartoon issue to make the case that democracy and free speech are bad for Muslims. The January 7, 2015, attack on the editorial offices of the French cartoon magazine Charlie Hebdo rekindled the cartoon controversy. Once again, the media found itself caught between fear of retribution and fear of offense, not sure which argument to pull out. Charlie Hebdo is one of the few media outlets that continued after the Danish cartoon debacle

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to publish cartoons depicting Muslim clerics and sometimes the Muslim Prophet in various guises as a partner-­in-­crime with rabbis and priests. The New York Times came under criticism for posting a very general “do not offend” policy rather than focusing on risk. In a statement, the paper declared: “Under Times standards, we do not normally publish images or other material deliberately intended to offend religious sensibilities.”41 Media organizations with parking lots and street addresses offering a target to teams of trained assassins generally took the more cautious approach, and online media outlets with no physical address felt brave. Buzzfeed, Huffington Post, and other online news organizations printed the cartoons. The Washington Post was the only paper that printed one of Hebdo’s cartoons. Editors who wanted to be brave and prudent at the same time found a solution in pixilation. Having yielded, in the aftermath of the Danish cartoon affair, to the notion that depiction of the Prophet is forbidden to Muslims, Western media and cultural institutions have been colluding in enhancing the misrepresentation of Islam as a censorious faith and in contributing to a restriction on the opportunities available to both Muslim and non-­Muslim readers and students to learn about the diversity of Islam. The motives for this simplification may be well intended or merely a matter of risk-­averse corporate interests. The consequence is an impoverished understanding of the richness of Muslim cultural history and traditions of pluralism.

Notes 1. Jackson, The EDL; Klausen et al., “Keyboard Jihadism.” 2. The Daily Kos, “From Film to Protests.” 3. I have personal experience of this catch-­22. In 2009 Yale University Press published a book I had written about the global controversy over the Danish cartoons, but at the last minute, at the insistence of the Yale president’s office, the press removed the illustrations, which included not only the cartoons but also other pictures featuring Muhammad, among them an Ottoman print of Muhammad going into battle with Ali at his side and an illustration of Dante’s Divine Comedy by Gustave Doré (Klausen, The Cartoons That Shook the World). The university argued that the images could be considered offensive by Muslims and could lead to violence, including attacks on Yale and other American institutions. In an Orwellian twist, my book was said to offer copious evidence that reproduction of the cartoons was dangerous. The press defended its acquiescence in the censorship of my book by referring to the advice of an anonymous panel consisting of academic experts and current and former government officials “that there existed a substantial likelihood of violence that might take the lives of innocent victims

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(“Hot Type,” New York Times, August 26, 2009). The charter of Yale University states that causing offense and “shock, hurt, and anger” is not sufficient grounds for compromising “the free access to information” (Yale College, Statement on Policies with Respect to Free Expression, Peaceful Dissent, and Demonstrations, www.thefire.org/pdfs/348ec2e521f0c1cdb6704998bda45026.pdf ). The president’s office was therefore compelled to defend its decision to censor my book on the grounds that the images would cause such offense in the Middle East that there would be a risk of violence. Thus it was established, without any threats ever having been received, that even images famous in the art history of both Western and Islamic art had become too dangerous to be published in an academic book because they might incite the violent anger of unnamed Muslims. 4. CNN World, “Massive Cartoon Protest in Beirut. 5. Roy, Globalized Islam. 6. Pew Global Attitudes Project, The Great Divide. 7. The Declaration of Fatwa by World Islamic Scholars about Danish Cartoons was posted February 20, 2006, on the website www.theamericanmuslim.org. 8. Roy, Globalized Islam. 9. Siddiqui, Being Muslim, 50. 10. The Zombie Image Archive started collecting images of Muhammad and posting them. Michelle Malkin, a blogger, picked up the argument suggested by the pictures, and the mainstream media took it from her. 11. Interview with Rachid Nekkaz, Paris, December 13, 2006. 12. Personal conversation, London, October 29, 2007. 13. Blair and Jonathan, “Art and Architecture.” 14. British Library, “Picturing the Prophet.” 15. Kennedy, “Placing Islamic Art on a New Pedestal.” 16. Manuscript of the Mihr va Mushtari (“Sun and Jupiter”) of Muhammed ʿAssar of Tabriz by the scribe Muridi al-­Asta-­rabadi, Denman Waldo Ross Collection, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. 17. Linda Komaroff, cited in the Los Angeles Times, “Muhammad on Museum Walls.” 18. Aslan, “Depicting Mohammed.” 19. This particular image appears not to be available anymore, but several other illustrated manuscripts portraying Muhammad are still for sale at http://www .allposters.com/-­st/Islam-­Posters_c19589_p17_.htm. 20. Mormons refer to both Smith and Muhammad as prophets. Joseph Smith is reported to have compared himself to Muhammad in a speech delivered in 1838, “I will be to this generation a second Mohammed, whose motto in treating for peace was ‘the Alcoran [Qurʾan] or the Sword.’ So shall it eventually be with us— ‘Joseph Smith or the Sword!’” Fawn M. Brodie, No Man Knows My History, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1971, pp. 230–231. 21. Anonymous. “Canto XXVIII Circle 8.” 22. A reproduction and description of the history of Dali’s illustration can be found on the “Icons and Imagery” blog maintained by James Stuart O’Neill at http://iconsandimagery.blogspot.com. 23. A copy of the letter soliciting the illustrations can be found in Hansen and Hundevadt, Provoen og Profeten, 15.

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24. Carter, Civility. 25. Said, “The Clash of Definitions,” 82; Huntington, “The Clash of Civilizations?” 26. For a discussion of Claude Lévi-­Strauss’s ideas about totemism, see Leach, Claude Lévi-­Strauss, in particular footnote 8 in chapter 2. 27. An Egyptian paper, El Fagr, had printed one of the cartoons on its front page already on October 17, 2005. The issue is now missing from the paper’s website, but otherwise the editors apparently faced no reprisals. Jordanian, Moroccan, and Yemini papers, and even a Saudi paper, also reprinted the cartoons. The Saudi paper was shut down, and the Jordanian editors were arrested. 28. EJour, a Danish website covering journalism news, found that by the end of February 2006, one or more of the cartoons had been reprinted in at least 143 newspapers in 56 countries. The Associated Press declined to distribute the cartoons to US subscribers. By my count, five regional newspapers and some twenty student newspapers and street papers republished the cartoons. Harper’s Magazine printed them all in the June 2006 issue, along with a critical essay written by Art Spiegelman. 29. Mernissi, “Place Fundamentalism and Liberal Democracy,” 51–67. 30. Echoing statements made by other high-­ranked religious authorities in Egypt and Saudi Arabia, Abdel-­Moeti Bayoumi, a member of the Al-­Azhar Islamic Research Academy, said, “The boycott is the least Muslims could do to defend their Prophet after the majority of Danish people supported their government for not apologising for the offensive drawings.” See Abdel-­Moeti Bayoumi, “Cartoon Battle Turns Uglier.” 31. Al-­Alwani, “Fatwa concerning the United States Supreme Courtroom Frieze.” I am grateful to my colleague Joseph Lumbard for bringing this article to my attention. 32. Ibid., 25. 33. Besançon, The Forbidden Image, 378. 34. Council of Europe, Recommendation 1805. 35. Lewis, Islam and the West, 43 and 57. 36. Section 227 reads, “All existing laws shall be brought in conformity with the Injunctions of Islam as laid down in the Holy Qurʾan and Sunnah, in this Part referred to as the Injunctions of Islam, and no law shall be enacted which is repugnant to such Injunctions.” 37. Roy, Globalized Islam. 38. Armstrong, Muhammad: A Prophet for Our Time; Ramadan, In the Footsteps of the Prophet: Lessons from the Life of Muhammad. 39. Marshall and Shea, Silenced. 40. Grabar, “Seeing and Believing.” 41. Buzzfeed, “Many Outlets Are Censoring Charlie Hebdo’s Satirical Cartoons after Attack.”

CHAPTER 4

Postmodern Politics: Manipulating Images of Islam in Contemporary Europe Peter O’Brien

Introduction Arguably the most arresting and consequential teaching of postmodern thought is that truth is whatever passes for truth. From Friedrich Nietzsche’s contention that “truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions” to Jean Baudrillard’s interpretation of the “murder of reality,” postmodern analysts have variously and richly explored the constructed, subjective nature of truth claims.1 Critics often charge that postmodernism is esoteric, amounting to often clever but ultimately reckless musings of a nihilistic cadre largely and thankfully confined to the ivory tower. By contrast, I maintain that postmodern teaching regarding the constructed nature of truth has penetrated widely and deeply into public consciousness, turning up as a largely taken-for-granted starting point for many actors in the politics of immigration in Europe. I examine how Islamophobes deftly manipulate images of Muhammad in particular and Islam in general as antidemocratic, misogynistic, and expansionistic to support their xenophobic political agenda. With an equally postmodern appreciation of the power of the sign, Islamophiles of various persuasions often invert the negative image of Islam common in mainstream media and politics by exalting a perfect and pristine form of Islam purportedly practiced by the Prophet and his “true” followers. The inverted image projects a dualistic reading of the West as hedonistic, hypocritical, and sadistic. I discern a profound and widespread erosion of the modern Enlightenment ideals of objectivity and fairness in favor of a by-any-means-­ necessary approach to the practice of politics in the postmodern age. At the same time, I draw attention to a less foreboding and less mean-spirited

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interpretation of a postmodern politics that celebrates hybridity through open-minded exploration rather than closed-minded demonization of difference and alterity. I identify signs of this more hopeful and humane approach in the efforts of a younger generation of European Islamists, exemplified by Tariq Ramadan, who reach out to non-Muslim Europeans willing to engage them. I, like others, term this trend post-Islamism. Much research demonstrates that political actors tend to be opportunists. They instrumentally seek and exploit a variety of “opportunity structures,” such as a multiparty versus a two-party system or a centralized bureaucracy versus a decentralized one.2 Among these are ideologies, or “frames” or “schemas,” that enjoy a favorable resonance with the public.3 Political actors turn out to be opportunistic in a second sense as well. They tend to advance their agendas without an objective reason—for instance, calling for a reduction in the number of foreign workers when the economy actually needs them.4 They often seek and celebrate symbolic victories that may have no real impact on the issue at hand. They operate in a largely mediatized political universe in which the semblance of winning counts most.5 In this regard, Stanley Cohen identifies the phenomenon of “moral panics.”6 Moral panic obtains when opportunistic political agents manage to stigmatize a targeted group in such a way that the group’s purported moral deviance becomes convincingly portrayed as an existential threat to the society as a whole. Moral panics tend to take place largely in the realm of symbolic politics, having little or no basis in fact. Noting that these general findings have been corroborated with regard to the politics of immigration in particular,7 I posit that postmodern theory represents an important opportunity structure for various political activists seeking to influence immigration policy. They detect that the mass public prefers fiction to fact and proceed to circulate images of Islam or the West that serve their political interests. I do not mean to imply that activists adopt postmodernism as an allencompassing worldview. Rather, I build on what Charles Taylor labels mutual fragilization—“certainly one of the main features of the world of 2000, in contrast to that of 1500.”8 In an atmosphere of radical moral pluralism—what Zygmunt Bauman terms a heterophilic age, and Ulrich Beck, Anthony Giddens, and Scott Lash call reflexive modernization—humans are bombarded with clashing normative outlooks.9 As Jock Young cleverly puts it, “The deviant other is everywhere” but “everyone is a potential deviant.”10 Although exposure to radical moral pluralism leads some to harden their views, most soften or fragilize them. They develop conscious or unconscious solicitude regarding the moral stances they prefer.

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Morally diffident political opportunists borrow fragments—good-sounding slogans such as “equality for all” or “France for the French”—from a variety of political ideologies despite their philosophical incompatibility because they resonate with mass publics who themselves have become morally fragilized.11 I show how through both the processes of fragilization and fragmentation, the postmodern teaching that truth is whatever passes for truth comes to permeate the politics of immigration in Europe.

Postmodern Politics In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche mused, “Perhaps nobody yet has been truthful enough about what ‘truthfulness’ is.”12 Nietzsche refused to pamper his readers and averred that the epistemological notion of truthfulness was philosophically indefensible despite millennia of presupposing it in the Western tradition. The formally trained philologist interpreted language as the starting point of the yearning for truth. Language depicts a world that we quite understandably want to believe is true or actually out there in a way that corresponds to how our language describes it. But wishing something to be true does not make it so. Indeed, Nietzsche contended that serious scrutiny eventually exposes every truth claim, including the belief in God, to be a self-soothing illusion.13 “The ‘apparent’ world,” we read in Twilight of the Idols, “is the only one: the ‘true’ world is merely added by a lie.”14 The “first perfect nihilist of Europe”15 chastised his readers’ immature yearning for truth and implored them to confront both the constructed and the contested nature of knowledge: But I should think that today we are at least far from the ridiculous immodesty that would be involved in decreeing from our corner that perspectives are permitted only from this corner. Rather has the world become “infinite” for us all over again, inasmuch as we cannot reject the possibility that it may include infinite interpretations.16

Subsequent thinkers in the postmodern tradition have augmented Nietzsche’s seminal insights. Ludwig Wittgenstein, for instance, argued that language, rather than representing more or less accurately the independent meaning or essence of objective things, actually assigns meaning to things. Moreover, “the meaning of a word is its use in the language.”17 But usage varies from one linguistic context to the next depending on the specific rules and understandings of the language application, understood

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loosely as grammar. “Essence is expressed by grammar. . . . Grammar tells what object anything is. (Theology as grammar.)”18 Different grammars or “language games” can therefore impart very different meanings to the same object. Jacques Derrida too underscored the constructed nature of reality when he wrote that “there is nothing outside the text.”19 Baudrillard boldly asserted that “illusion is not the opposite of reality, it is a more subtle reality.”20 “Everything can be called into question,” claims Giorgio Agamben, “except the spectacle itself.”21 We inhabit an age in which there is no business but show business.22 The postmodernist insistence on the constructed nature of truth begs the ultimately political question of how some representations of truth come to prevail over others. Nietzsche, needless to say, had an answer. In The Will to Power, he asked: By which means does a virtue come to power? By exactly the same means as a political party: the slandering, inculpation, undermining of virtues that oppose it and are already in power, by rebaptizing them, by systematic persecution and mockery. Therefore: through sheer “immorality.”23

Michel Foucault has arguably done more than any other postmodern analyst to deepen our understanding of the interconnected relationship between power and knowledge: “Truth” is to be understood as a system of ordered procedures for the production, regulation, distribution, circulation, and operation of statements. . . . It is linked in a circular relation with systems of power which produce and sustain it, and to effects of power which it induces and which extend it.24

The crux of Foucault’s exploration of the “microphysics of power” is that truth is made rather than discovered, and it is made by an interlocking, mutually reinforcing nexus of resources, institutions, administrators, and experts that becomes strategically positioned in such a way as to establish its representation of reality (both normative and empirical) as objective.25 This form of governmentality operates through normalization. The dominant discourse and the institutions and actors that produce and administer it form a definition of normal and therewith simultaneously establish, marginalize, diagnose, and discipline the “abnormal.” The normalizing gaze not only defines and spotlights the negative Other but also conveniently projects back a positive and reinforcing image of the “nor-

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mal” ones who live the dominant discourse’s representation as objective truth. Besides Foucault’s own case studies into sexual, criminal, and psychological deviance, Edward Said’s Orientalism rightfully stands as one of the most celebrated Foucauldian analyses of how a hegemonic discourse functions in all its complexity, in this case to enable and legitimize European domination of the “Orient.” Not all postmodernists discern a single, hegemonic discourse. Indeed, some observe that expanding recognition of the ultimately subjective nature of interpretation disrupts discursive hegemony and fosters radical value pluralism. Etienne Balibar contends: There can be no new “Leviathan” that would regulate belief and officialize knowledge (“institute the truth,” as the modern state has done through its schools and universities), and there is even less possibility for a new “civic religion” that would relativize “traditional” or “revealed” religions and relegate them to private choice.26

Stanley Fish makes a similar point in dismissing the efforts of prominent contemporary liberal philosophers such as John Rawls and Jürgen Habermas to anchor consensual politics in universally reasonable and fair procedures or rules of the game: there can be “no hope of a procedural republic from which divisive issues have been banished and in which we can all just get along.”27 For competing groups enter politics today informed by firmly held worldviews that are not only incompatible but incommensurable, each representing “an orthodoxy to itself, fully equipped with dogma, criteria for evidence, founding texts, exemplary achievements, heroes, villains, goals, agendas, and all the rest.”28 In the absence of commonly recognized standards or principles by which to evaluate vying outlooks, political struggle becomes the final arbiter. “Everything is politics,” declares Fish. There is no escaping “the political game.” “Play it (the lesson is superfluous; what else could you do?) and play it to win.”29 One does this by taking whatever political and rhetorical steps are necessary to make one’s preferred outlook the “prestige discourse” and one’s opponents’ the stigmatized discourse.30 This may shock some as a perilous marriage of Nietzschean nihilism with Machiavellian shrewdness, but is nonetheless the situation we face: We can no longer tranquilize ourselves by pretending to stand with our feet on the ground observing things as they are and dismissing the rest as nonsense. The end of ideology is also the triumph of ideologies, of the

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multiple interpretations of the world seen for what they are. . . . A world of cultural pluralism like the one in which we continue to live is precisely the locus of the end of metaphysics and the emergence into visibility of the interpretive character of all existence.31

Islamophobia The mounting popularity of xenophobic parties and politicians arguably represents the most intriguing and perhaps consequential political development in Europe in the past three decades. Xenophobes have insinuated themselves into the political mainstream, often managing to join coalition governments, such as the Freedom Party in the Netherlands and Austria, the Northern League in Italy, and the Danish People’s Party. Even where such parties have not managed to govern, we discern their influence in “the increasing use of xenophobic and anti-Muslim arguments by mainstream political leaders.”32 Numerous studies find that, in practically every European country, images of Islam and of Muslims tend to be monolithic, negative, and reductionistic;33 they tend to attribute disagreeable behavior (such as higher rates of crime, dropping out of school, joblessness, and extremism) among persons of Muslim heritage to their purported socialization to the “culture of Islam”;34 they tend to be rampant in both politics and media, print and electronic; and they strongly influence public opinion.35 Not surprisingly, then, the 2011 Pew Global Attitudes Survey found that 36 percent of those polled in Britain and France, 55 percent in Germany, and 63 percent in Spain have an “unfavorable” attitude toward Muslims in general. Given the fact that analysis of the stigmatized image of Islam in the press and politics has itself become a major story, the topic of many scholarly articles, conferences and documentaries,36 it is fair to presume that the purveyors of the distortions are aware that they are distortions and that the distortions shape public opinion. Given, furthermore, that few if any of the political activists discussed below are degree-holding specialists on Islam or Muslims and that they also appear to be largely uninterested in contributing to or learning from scholarly treatment of the topic, one can fairly presume that they have political or personal motives for intervening in the subject matter.37 Add to this the “ever-increasing use of the Internet” where virtually no screening of postings takes place.38 For countless non-Muslim Europeans, the “Muslims” they encounter are mostly “mediatized” figures rather than actual human beings.39

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For reasons of limited space, I focus on only three types of caricature common in polemical arguments regarding European Muslims. Islam is presented as antidemocratic, misogynistic, and expansionist. These portrayals often include, or even begin with, parallel insinuations regarding Muhammad. Unflattering renderings of Muhammad have, of course, proliferated throughout European history.40 Here I confine analysis to those of the last thirty years—the digital age—that play a role in the politics of immigration. Ayaan Hirsi Ali has called Muhammad a “perverted tyrant whose teachings cannot be reconciled with democracy”: He is against freedom of expression. If you don’t do as he says, you will be punished. It makes me think of all those megalomaniacs in the Middle East: Bin Laden, Khomeini, Saddam. . . . Muhammad is an example for all Muslim men.41

Listed by Time magazine on April 18, 2005, as one of the “100 most influential persons in the world,” Hirsi Ali has been but one of a chorus of prominent opinion leaders, including Afshin Ellian, Chahdortt Djavann, André Glucksmann, Emmanuel Todd, Oriana Fallaci, Magdi Allam, Necla Kelek, Alice Schwarzer, Helmut Schmidt, Ralph Giordano, Melanie Phillips, Roy Jenkins, and Niall Ferguson, who insist that Islam is incompatible with democracy. Hirsi Ali’s erstwhile political partner in the Dutch parliament, Geert Wilders, went so far as to liken the Qurʾan to Mein Kampf. Giordano “doubts whether anyone who considers holy this charter of a herdsman’s culture can abide by the [German] constitution.”42 The incompatibility indictment, versions of which frequently appear on any number of Islamophobic websites (such as Islam Watch, Politically Incorrect, Die Grüne Pest, Nürnberg 2.0, Racisme Anti-Blanc, and Stop the Islamization of Europe), typically asserts something like the following: both the Qurʾan and the Prophet command followers to submit to the will of God (though typically the word Allah is used to imply a god different from the Judeo-Christian one). After all, “Islam” stems from the Arabic root s-l-m which embraces meanings of “submission, surrender,” as the 2004 film Submission, written by Hirsi Ali and directed by Theo Van Gogh, emphasizes. In her best-selling The Rage and the Pride, Italian author Oriana Fallaci says that Islam “has never wanted to know about freedom and democracy and progress.” It is argued that the creed’s insistence on submission fosters a “slave mentality” among Muslims that makes them dubious of if not inimical to individual liberty, the moral cornerstone of

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democracy.43 Necla Kelek, a German sociologist of Turkish background and winner of Bavaria’s prestigious Geschwister-Scholl prize for courage in the name of liberty, asks doubtingly: “Is a culture capable of democracy that denies to the individual the right of self-­determination?”44 Only freedom-loving individuals demand to govern themselves democratically through laws made by and for the people. Being both doctrinally schooled and culturally socialized to undervalue freedom and equality, former German chancellor Schmidt’s argument goes, pious Muslims are prone to support theocracy rather than democracy.45 Moreover, in contrast to Christianity, whose sacred scripture is said to preach the separation of religion and politics (see Matthew 22:15–34) and whose central figure, Jesus, eschewed politics, the Qurʾan is explicitly political, and Muhammad established a theocracy. But rather than seriously consider that theocracy could constitute the rule of (divine) law,46 critics contend that Islamic theocracy has to degenerate into a “dictatorship of the Mullahs.”47 Prominent French intellectual Bernard-Henri Lévy is so convinced of Islam’s inherent inclination toward dictatorship that he refuses to refer to Islamists with any word other than the neologism fascislamist. Le Figaro columnist Ivan Rioufol prefers nazislamist.48 Of all of Islam’s purportedly undemocratic shortcomings, none seems to perturb the creed’s detractors more than misogyny. Just as Europeans were busy eliminating systematic discrimination against women once and for all, so goes the self-congratulatory line of thought, postwar Muslim immigrants reintroduced grave injustice to emancipated Europe. Predictably, Muhammad bears much of the blame. Particularly virulent scorn is poured on his consummated marriage to nine-year-old ʿAʾisha. On the Internet one can frequently come across such slurs as “Muhammad the Pedophile” (wikiislam.net), “rapist” (western-civilization.com), and “child-fucker” (Kinderficker) (pi-news.net). Select verses are typically plucked from the Qurʾan and quoted out of context to demonstrate Islam’s supposed disdain for women: The Quran in Sura 4:11 says: “The share of a male shall be twice that of a female.” . . . The Quran in Sura 4:34 says: “If you fear highhandedness from your wives, remind them [of the teaching of God], then ignore them when you go to bed, then hit them.”49

Rather than acknowledge that consummated marriages with girls at puberty have been a common practice in many cultures, including Christian ones,50 or that misogynistic lines pepper the pages of the Bible (for in-

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stance, Genesis, 3:16), opportunistic Islam-bashers proffer the essentialist argument that the Prophet’s words and deeds have fostered an Islamic doctrine and culture that make all pious Muslims prone to oppress women. French feminist Elisabeth Altschull does concede that “all religions have their oppressive aspects toward women,” but immediately adds that “none [but Islam] has gone so far, is as systematic, or is as explicit about the inferior status of women willed and created by god.”51 Indeed, the attention of European publics has become riveted on the oppression of Muslim women and girls in Europe through exaggerated focus on such alleged abuses as forced marriage,52 mandatory veiling,53 and honor killings.54 Fictional and nonfictional, but typically sensationalized, films such as 40 Quadratmeter Deutschland (1986), Die Fremde (2010), La Squale (2000), and Brick Lane (2007) and best-selling books such as Hirsi Ali’s The Caged Virgin, Kelek’s Die fremde Braut, and Souad’s Burned Alive tell horrifying tales of Muslim women and girls dragooned into marrying older men they abhor, brutally confined like slaves to tiny flats tucked away from police protection in Muslim ghettos, and, in the worst cases, mercilessly slain by incensed brothers, fathers, and husbands as punishment for consorting with non-Muslim men. The most pessimistic of these caricatures depict Muslim women so firmly oppressed by and socialized to gender inequality that they cannot be relied on to fight for emancipation, unless, that is, they abandon Islam altogether. This interpretation is poignantly expressed in Brick Lane when the protagonist’s mother says to her daughter Nazneen, forced to marry a Bangladeshi man more than twice her age, “If God wanted us to ask questions, he would have made us men.”55 Islam’s illiberal abuses might be sufferable if it were not for its inherent expansionism. If limited to a small, insular diaspora, offensive ideas and actions could be effectively monitored and confined. But Muslims, so goes the argument, are bent on expanding the dar-al Islam (the abode of Islam) into Europe by imposing their creed on nonbelievers. Predictably, Muhammad is said to have set the mold by establishing an army of holy warriors in Medina that went on to wage jihad against the infidels controlling Mecca. After all, regarding unbelievers, the Qurʾan (2:191–193) enjoins adherents to “slay them wherever ye find them, and drive them out of the places whence they drove you out.” On the website islamwatch.org, Hirsi Ali contends that Muhammad built the House of Islam using military tactics that included mass killing, torture, targeted assassination, lying and the indiscriminate destruction of productive goods. . . . A close look at the propaganda pro-

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duced by the terrorists [of today] reveals constant quotation of Muhammad’s deeds and edicts to justify their actions and to call on other Muslims to support their cause.56

Roughly this same message was implied not only in the controversial cartoon published by the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten in 2005, but also in the notorious Regensburg speech of 2006, in which Pope Benedict XVI, quoting an erstwhile Byzantine emperor, referred to Muhammad’s “command to spread by sword the faith he preached.”57 There would appear to be no limit to the number of journalists and other authors who catapult themselves onto best-seller lists with books exposing the alleged designs of radical Muslim cells to transform Europe into “Eurabia.”58 Populist politicians from Enoch Powell and Jörg Haider to Jean-Marie Le Pen, Pim Fortuyn, and Siv Jensen (whose claim that we must “stop this sneak Islamisation of this society” seems to have inspired mass-murderer Anders Breivik)59 have shrewdly garnered votes by spreading fear of the imminent Islamization of Europe. According to Geert Wilders, whose Party for Freedom received 15 percent of the vote in Dutch parliamentary elections in 2010, the aim of the Islamic ideology is to dominate and to submit the Western societies to their belief. . . . Islam is not another branch on the tree of religions—it has to be put in the corner of totalitarian ideologies. That’s why I compare it with communism and fascism—I see the comparisons between the Koran and Mein Kampf.60

One Islamophobic YouTube video with over a million clicks features a map of “Europe 2015” on which France has been renamed “The Islamic Republic of New Algeria,” The United Kingdom “North Pakistan,” Germany “New Turkey,” and so on.61 Shortly after the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, the Islamophobic website Politically Incorrect posted an article titled, “It’s the Islam, stupid!”62 Frequently cited is German journalist Henryk Broder’s allegation that “not all Muslims are terrorists, but most terrorists are Muslims.”63 The purveyors of essentialist images of Muslims neither address nor recognize the formidable evidence that contradicts their neo-Orientalist tropes. Scrutinizing scholarly analyses now abound demonstrating that the vast majority of European Muslims both observe and endorse democratic laws and principles;64 that female Muslims, while balancing multiple pressures of family, career, and religion, most often manage to carve

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out considerable areas of individual autonomy for themselves;65 and that only the tiniest fraction of European Muslims harbors any design of Islamizing Europe—and that even among the zealots, most aim to do so via perfectly legal proselytization and voluntary conversion rather than violent imposition.66 These soberer analyses go largely unheard, drowned out by sensationalist humbug such as the British Nationalist Party’s reinterpretation of Islam as “I.S.L.A.M.,” meaning “intolerance, slaughter, looting, arson, molestation of women (ISLAM).”67 We should not be naïve regarding the real political work such distorting images do in shaping actual policy. For instance, following the example of the Netherlands in 1998, several European governments have established “civics” or “integration” classes targeted specifically at Muslims to inculcate democratic values. Such mandatory, often time-­consuming and expensive courses must be passed before Muslim immigrants may become naturalized citizens or obtain or extend a visa.68 Bans on veiling for Muslim girls and women are either in force or being considered by lawmakers in most European countries.69 Moreover, racial and ethnic profiling of Muslims by police has proliferated across Europe, as have deport-first-prove-later measures for dealing with suspected criminals of Muslim heritage.70

Islamophilia and Europhobia Muslims fight back, often using postmodern tactics. In this section I focus on Islamists. I use the term loosely to include all Muslims who desire to live in a society in which Islamic values—especially as they are interpreted in the Qurʾan, Sunnah, and Hadith—predominate. Due to limited space, I gloss over the significant differences in strategy for achieving the Islamic goal—differences ranging from pietist personal conversion, stressed by such groups as Tablighi Jamaat and Jamaat-un Nur and the Gülen Movement; to nonviolent political action, practiced by the Muslim Brotherhood and its European affiliate the Union of Islamic Organizations in Europe as well as Islamische Gemeinde Milli Görüş; to violent jihadi militant action, promoted by organizations such as Hizb ut-Tahrir, AL-Jamaʾa Al-Islamiya, Supporters of Shariah, and Groupe Islamique Armé. It may come across as the height of folly to associate God-fearing Islamists with godless postmodernism. However, I concur with Olivier Roy, who contends that Islamist activists are best understood as fully integrated into a single global political discourse whose successful ideas and

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tactics they keenly study and dexterously exploit.71 Furthermore, Islamists gain appreciation for postmodernism through the direct experience of being the target of Islamophobic scorn. Needless to say, Islamists deny the accuracy of the negative stereotypes of them circulated in mainstream politics and media. And yet, they must acutely appreciate the fact that for large swaths of the European public these images pass for truth and thus motivate and legitimate the continued domination of Muslims. From this poignant encounter with postmodern politics, it takes no great leap to the postmodern conclusion that one must dominate or be dominated, demonize or be demonized. Indeed, for marginalized groups with severely limited access to tangible power and money, the manipulation of imagery often comes across as the weapon of greatest expediency.72 In a 2002 letter to Mullah Omar in Afghanistan, Bin Laden is said to have written, “It is obvious that the media war in this century is one of the strongest methods; in fact, its ratio may reach 90 percent of the total preparation for the [our] battles.”73 The global Islamic media front tells its Internet visitors: This is the Internet that Allah has enlisted in the service of jihad and the mujahedeen, which has come to serve your interests—given that half the battle of the mujahedeen is being waged on the pages of the Internet— the sole outlet for mujahedeen media.74

I highlight inverted othering. The concept parallels what Schirin Amir-Moazami and Armando Salvatore identify as a duplication effect and Mark LeVine calls a mirror effect, whereby radicalized Muslims recast the stigma of themselves prominent in Europe to produce an equally reductionistic counterstereotype in which the West and Westerners appear evil and Islam and “true” Muslims appear good.75 Because of limited space, I draw attention to only two tropes of this “resistance Islam”: the West is imperialistic; and the West is corrupt to the core.76 The first trope portrays the West, rather than Islam, as a sadistic civilization obsessed with dominating the globe. Echoing a theme common in postcolonial studies,77 Islamists contend that since the Crusades, Europe and the West have harbored and realized imperialist designs on the Orient. Regularly invoking conspiracy theories, self-appointed cyber-imams point the finger at the United States, Israel, and their allies in Europe as today’s “Crusaders and Zionists.”78 Omar Bakri, for example, said in 2004 that western foreign policy had earned the western nations “a 9/11, day after day after day.79 For example, after crediting in his martyrdom video those “people far

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more eloquent than me,” July 7, 2005, London suicide bomber Mohammad Sidique Khan charged: “Your democratically elected governments continuously perpetuate atrocities against my people all over the world.”80 Similarly, Michael Adebolajo, the convicted killer of British soldier Lee Rigby in Woolwich in 2013, justified his actions on YouTube: “Muslims are dying daily by British soldiers. . . . We swear by Allah, . . . we will never stop fighting you until you leave us alone.”81 In the wake of the Boston Marathon bombing of 2013, Hizb ut-Tahrir Britain noted on its website: The context behind political violence, where Muslims are involved, is often casually ignored. . . . Just in the past decade, in a highly charged post 9-11 world, the USA and its allies have committed numerous heinous crimes against Muslims. Whether one looks at the Guantanamo Bay, the deaths of Iraqis on false pretences, the systematic destruction of Afghanistan since 2002, the drone attacks in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia, the attack and intervention in Mali, overt support for Israel’s crimes in Palestine, tacit support for India’s crimes in Kashmir, silence and complicity over Russian thuggery in the North Caucasus, the backing of vicious dictators in the Muslim world or the tacit support for Bashar Al-Assad in Syria until recently, one will see genuine causes for grief, anger and emotion. . . . Moving further, one must assess the extensive coverage afforded to the atrocity that took place in Boston and contrast it with the atrocities committed by the nation who happened to be the victim this time around. A few days prior to the Boston bombings, a NATO airstrike killed 11 children and one woman in the East of Afghanistan. The death of eleven children is, by all accounts, a worse situation than the deaths of three people. Should the coverage and sympathy not be apportioned accordingly? Or are Muslim children viewed as merely collateral damage?82

The appropriate response to Western oppression is resistance. In contrast to Fanon’s revolutionary leftists, however, the Islamists hold up Muhammad as the resistance fighter and liberator par excellence. Like contemporary Muslims, the Prophet and his followers were mercilessly persecuted by the Quraysh elite in Mecca but triumphed in the end. Islamists differ over exactly which of the Prophet’s tactics to emulate. Some, like Tablighi Jamaat, emphasize his thirteen years of peaceful proselytizing (daʿwa) in Mecca; others, such as Jamaʾat-i Islami, his statebuilding in Medina after the hijra; and still others, such as Supporters of Shariah, his ultimate military conquest of the infidels in Mecca.83 Virtu-

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ally all fundamentalists, however, concur that the ultimate recipe for victory lies in Muhammad’s strict observation of tawhid (belief in the one God). According to them, the Prophet’s path (Sunnah) is clearly laid out in the Qurʾan and Hadith and should be followed to the letter. One saying attributed to Muhammad that fundamentalists often cite observes: “The best people are those living in my generation, then those coming after them, and then those coming after.”84 Only in the earliest years of pristine Islam, the Golden Age of the rightly guided, are to be found the divine injunctions, the one and only set of laws humankind needs. Islamists frequently allude to Sayyid Qutb’s widely read Milestones, in which the venerated martyr denounced all human-made laws as the product of ignorance (jahaliyya) and called on his coreligionists to defy and depose them wherever possible. A zealous cybernaut at oumma.com announced: “Laws made by men are made for them and therefore are always unjust, only Qurʾanic law is good because it is impartial.”85 The Salafist Algerian Imam Bouziane drew much indignant attention in France when he dismissed an interviewer’s objection that French law forbids polygamy with the retort, “It is licit in the Quran.”86 Only keeping to the orthodox path will ensure ultimate victory, not only personal salvation in the heavenly Paradise, but here on earth in the restoration for the collective umma of a new Golden Age, when, according to Omar Bakri, “the black flag of Islam flies over Downing Street.”87 In addition to a deep and unquestioning reverence for Islam, Islamist discourse is characterized by the notion that Europe cannot prevail in maintaining its privileged global position, for it is corrupt to the core. The Union for Islamic Development and Culture in Bulgaria, for example, cleverly inverts the argument regarding the subjugation of women by underscoring the objectification of women in Europe: Women can be seen in the streets dressed in clothes that barely cover their underwear (and this is taken as normal) . . . [trying] to appear as sexually attractive as possible . . . and disappointed if no one turns their head to look at them.88

According to the Islamic Party of Britain, for example, “there is nothing in Western societies that remotely resembles good behaviour.”89 In 2004 one Berlin imam from the Mevlana Mosque drew an extraordinary string of unholy associations and hellfire consequences: “These Germans are atheists, these Europeans don’t shave under their arms, and their sweat collects under their hair with a revolting smell. Hell lives for the infi-

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dels! Down with all democracies and all democrats.”90 Islamists in Europe often invoke Jalal al-e-Ahmad’s widely influential notion of “Westoxification” (Gharbzadegi) to warn against excessive contact with, let alone emulation of, Western norms and values. They are wont to quote the Prophet: “Beware of who [sic] you keep as your friends, for you will take the Deen [religion] of your friends.”91 Like Islamophobic ranting, Islamist demagoguery can have grave consequences. Islamists have proved adept at creating what some have called “protection zones” or domains of “Islamic ambiance.”92 Within these “zones of exclusion” persons who refuse to toe the orthodox line are verbally and physically harassed.93 Even outside such zones Islamists exercise pressure on unbelievers. They stage demonstrations or threaten more serious retribution against productions they find offensive, such as Hans Neuenfels’s cancelled “Idomeneo” at the Deutsche Oper, or publications they deem blasphemous, like Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses or the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. Rushdie had to flee his home as a result of death threats, something Hirsi Ali also felt it necessary to do. Van Gogh was slain in 2004 by an enraged Islamist while cycling home in Amsterdam. Ten employees of Charlie Hebdo were gunned down in 2015. And jihadi militants plot terrorist attacks that, when successful—as in New York in 2001, Madrid in 2004, London in 2005, Boston in 2013, and Paris in 2015—wreak devastating human destruction and suffering. As readers can recognize, the Islamophobic and Europhobic discourses feed off of one another. Amir-Moazami and Salvatore discern a “hyperdiscourse of Islam created by auto- and heterostereotypes largely mediated by mass media.”94 Islamophobes and Europhobes at once prey on and rely on each other’s pronouncements about each other to fuel and substantiate their respective orthodoxies. The opposing camps become locked in a self-reinforcing war of manipulated words and images that becomes hermetically sealed off from more nuanced discussion and analysis.95

Hospitable Postmodern Politics Not everyone believes that postmodern politics have to be so starkly Hobbesian or necessarily result in the dreaded “parallel society.”96 Yet, hospitable postmodernism, as opposed to Hobbesian postmodernism, offers no guarantee of harmony, neutrality, certainty, or stability rooted in objective truth. But it does refuse to jettison the possibility that rival

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parties adhering to fundamentally different worldviews can learn to interact with one another via mutually respectful and beneficial practices. Rushdie himself encourages readers to celebrate “hybridity, impurity, intermingling, the transformation that comes from new and unexpected combinations of human beings, cultures, ideas, politics, movies, songs.”97 In order to reap the benefits of insurmountable difference, opposing parties must resist the urge to denounce and dismiss one another. Richard Rorty, for example, proscribes “cruelty,” Stuart Hall “inferiorisation,” and Julia Kristeva “oppression.”98 Chantal Mouffe dubs her preferred manner of coexistence “agonistic pluralism,” in which differing parties come to see themselves not as foes, but as “friendly enemies, that is, persons who are friends because they share a common symbolic space but also enemies because they want to organize this common symbolic space in a different way.”99 Balibar urges “citizenship without community,” and JeanLuc Nancy “being singular plural.”100 Martin Marty’s recommendation of “risking hospitality” holds out the possibility, though not the guarantee, of establishing what Homi Bhabha has called a “third space” where new perspectives previously unimagined can perhaps be found that offer pragmatic, but likely only temporary, ways out of deadlock and seemingly irresolvable conflict.101

Post-Islamism The discourse of the “new cosmopolitan Muslim elite”102 in Europe shares many commonalities with hospitable postmodernism. I prefer the less-than-perfect label “post-Islamists”103 to refer to a new generation of Muslim intellectuals and activists in search of a “fusion of religiosity and rights, faith and freedom, Islam and liberty [that] transcend[s] Islamism by building a pious society with a civil nonreligious state.”104 While their critique of many aspects of modern Western societies is unmistakably informed by the thought of earlier Islamists, such as Qutb and Abul Ala Maududi, post-Islamists eschew the wholesale rejection of Western society associated with both the Islamist pioneers and their contemporary orthodox adherents. “I don’t deny my Muslim roots,” claims Tariq Ramadan, “but I don’t vilify Europe either.”105 The proponents of post-Islamism in Europe tend to stem from the middle class and to be highly, and mostly Western-, educated.106 They operate in a fully “transnational religious discourse”107 that is profoundly in touch with and deeply colored by prominent reformist

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thinkers in the Middle East, such as Abdolkarim Soroush, Muhammad Shahrur,, Fatima Mernissi, Rashid al-Ghannouchi, and Yusuf alQaradawi. These mavericks in Europe are competing for leadership, often successfully, with an older, more strictly anti-Western guard in Islamist associations such as the Union of Islamic Organisations in Europe, Millî Görüş (The National View), and the UK Islamic Mission. They publish their ideas in journals and magazines such as Q-News, The Muslim News, La Medina, and Die Islamische Zeitung, and on websites such as islamonline .com, Islam21.net, oumma.com, huda.de and islam.de.108 Tariq Ramadan is something of a poster child for post-Islamism. His open-mindedness, eloquence, and charisma have made him popular not only among European Muslims—especially young people—endeavoring to balance adherence to Islam with life in Europe, but also with non-­ Muslim Europeans seeking more cordial relations with Islam. He made the list of one hundred most influential persons in Time magazine in 2004, Prospect Magazine in 2008, and Foreign Policy in 2010. He currently is professor of contemporary Islamic studies at Oxford University. Like any devout Muslim, Ramadan reveres the Prophet. Here we cannot possibly treat all the myriad ways in which he invokes Muhammad.109 Suffice it to say that he repeatedly underscores two themes. First, as God’s Messenger, Muhammad was the conveyor of divine wisdom and universal values. But he was also a fallible man, by his own admission. Ramadan relates a story from the Hadith in which the Prophet acknowledged the mistaken advice he gave to the Ansâr of Medina to stop grafting their date-palm trees: “I am a human being. So when I tell you to do something pertaining to Religion, accept it, but when I tell you something from my personal opinion, bear in mind that I am a human being. You have better knowledge in the affairs of this world.” Ramadan implies that not every word attributed to the Prophet needs to be obeyed as if it were a direct commandment from God.110 Second, like most of Ramadan’s audience in Europe, Muhammad was a migrant. After the hijra he saw fit to adapt his lifestyle to the very different setting and culture of Medina. For example, Ramadan recounts the Hadith in which the Prophet instructs ʿAʾisha to provide for the Ansâr entertainment of a kind that was deemed improper in Mecca. “This means,” maintains Ramadan, “that the implementation of rulings must be accompanied by a process of analysis, observation, and inference about contingent social and cultural realities.”111 The divine message of Islam is universal and unchanging, but its effective realization and application must change from place to place and time to time through the exercise of ijtihâd

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(autonomous critical reasoning) by individual pious Muslims.112 Europe is not the Middle East. The proper practice of Islam in Europe, therefore, need not and should not exactly mimic prevailing conventions in the socalled Islamic world.113 Despite his tight contacts to the Muslim Brotherhood movement in Europe, Ramadan is no orthodox Islamophile. Indeed, he chides European Muslims for falling prey to “simplistic versions of ‘us versus them’” that teach that “you are more Muslim when you are against the West” and for using the “alibi that Islamophobia is preventing them from flourishing.”114 Ramadan, the grandson of Muslim Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna, insists that “we’ve got to get away from the idea that scholars in the Islamic world can do our thinking for us. We need to start thinking for ourselves.”115 Arguing that “Islam is not a culture but a body of universal values and principles” that can be adapted to any cultural setting, Ramadan urges European Muslims to abandon their “Pakistani, Turkish or Arab” “ghettos,” both “social and intellectual,” and “integrate themselves into European cultures, which become a new dimension of their own identity. This is a process that is not only normal, but desirable.”116 He not only endorses al-Ghannouchi’s redesignation of Europe from dar-al-harb (the abode of war) to dar-al-Islam (the abode of Islam),117 he augments the designation to dar-al-shahada (the abode of testimony).118 With this notion Ramadan seeks to motivate European Muslims to exploit Europe’s guarantees of democratic rights and religious freedom to fashion a truly independent, “more self-critical” Islam, which not only befits life in Europe but sets an example, or testimony, for Muslims around the globe to follow in the twenty-first century.119 Despite his sincere praise for European democracy, Ramadan resists the undiscriminating embrace of the West common among Islamophobes such as Hirsi Ali. In fact, he maintains that as victims of European colonialism in the past and discrimination in the present, Muslims are especially well situated to point out the darker dimensions of European culture.120 He takes umbrage, for example, at the objectionable combination of ignorance and arrogance that leads many non-Muslim Europeans to identify Western civilization as the sole source of good in world history. Of supercilious European secularists he writes: Convinced that they are progressive, they give themselves the arbitrary right to proclaim the definitively reactionary nature of religions. . . . In the end, only a handful of “Muslims-who-think-like-us” are accepted,

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while the others are denied the possibility of being genuinely progressive fighters armed with their own set of values. By doing this, the dialogue with Islam is transformed into an interactive monologue which massages “our ideological certainties” just as Huntington wanted to ensure “our strategic interests.”121

Non-Muslim Europeans “need to face up to their ignorance, . . . reject the clichés and prejudices that surround Islam,” Ramadan writes, and open their minds to the significant ways in which Islam and Islamic Civilization have enriched humanity, including within Europe itself.122 Post-Islamists contend that Europe has paid too high a price for its secularized modernity. By banishing religion from politics and relegating it to the private sphere, Europe has politically neutralized a powerful source and force for universal human values such as justice, equality, and dignity for all. Furthermore, maintains Ramadan, European nationalism cannot fill the deep spiritual void created by extreme secularism because the former addresses merely how humans are to live but not why and wherefore they exist—that is, it fails to explore the deeper “question of being.”123 Post-Islamists refuse to sacrifice spiritual fulfillment as the cost of embracing modernity. In his popular treatise of 1995, The Permitted and Forbidden in Islam, Ramadan’s theological mentor al-Qaradawi, who is spiritual leader of the Dublin-based European Council for Fatwa and Research, asserts: “No Muslim who believes that Islam is the word of God can conceive that this great religion will ever accept being a mere appendix to socialism or any other ideology.”124 Thus the founding members of the Union des Jeunes Musulmans announced in 1987 their goal to “live our spirituality in the open and not in a reclusive way in the private sphere.”125 Post-Islamists aspire to become full, active, productive citizens of modern European societies not at the cost of being publicly devout Muslims, but rather qua publicly devout Muslims. Amir-Moazami and Salvatore call this outlook “the both/and logic” whereby post-Islamists demand to join the game of modern life but also to change the rules by which it is played.126 Ramadan endorses this fundamental rethinking and renegotiating of European identity with his urging to build a “new ‘We.’”127 This is a new understanding of what it means to be European that includes, rather than excludes, Islam, and that views “Muslims—with their spirituality, ethics and creativity” as a “contribution” rather than a threat.128 This will demand recognition that

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European societies have been changing, and the presence of Muslims has forced them to experience an even greater diversity of cultures. As a result, a European identity has evolved that is open, plural and constantly in motion, thanks to the cross-fertilisation between reclaimed cultures of origin and the European cultures that now include new (­Muslim) citizens.129

A European will discover “new horizons of mutual understandings and shared commitment, horizons of trust” only “by looking outside oneself and taking the risk to open up to other cultures, ideas and values—all of which are part of the difficult but exciting challenge of our times,” Ramadan writes.130 If Europeans, Muslim and non-Muslim alike, fail to meet the challenge, then Europe is destined to be dominated by the politics of demonization, recrimination, and collision generated by those who prefer to see and live the world through the dualistic lens of us versus them.

Conclusion Unfortunately, considerable evidence already exists to corroborate Ramadan’s fear. The symbolic war of words and images waged between Europhobes and Islamophobes all too perfectly typifies a moral panic in which adversaries so effectively demonize one another that they come forth as existential threats to one another.131 I have argued that the tendency toward deliberate demonization manifests the spreading influence on politics of postmodern thought, particularly its nihilist claim that truth is what passes for truth. Sadly, the symbolic sparring has not confined itself to the realm of the sign. It frequently spills over into actual politics with deleterious consequences for real human beings. I have to concur with Nietzsche that wishing nihilism’s disappearance will not make it so. Postmodernism has fully arrived as a philosophy. Its political outlook of a world of insurmountable difference can stand shoulder to shoulder with other rival political philosophies, such as liberalism and nationalism, which hope to overcome diversity through moral universalism or cultural homogeneity, respectively.132 Thankfully, there are those, like the post-Islamists, who appear willing to engage unexampled difference in constructive ways that harbor the potential to establish a more agreeable form of postmodern politics.

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Notes 1. Nietzsche, The Portable Nietzsche, 47; Baudrillard, The Perfect Crime, i. 2. Tarrow, Power in Movement. 3. Bleich, Race Politics in Britain and France; Bowen et al., “An Institutional Approach to Framing Muslims in Europe,” 14. 4. Koopmans et al., Contested Citizenship, 203. 5. Edelman, Constructing the Political Spectacle. 6. Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panics, 9. 7. Lamont, The Dignity of Working Men; Bleich, Race Politics; Koopmans et al., Contested Citizenship; Wiktorowicz, Radical Islam Rising, 150–160; Alexseev, Immigration Phobia and the Security Dilemma; Boswell, The Political Uses of Expert Knowledge; Mourão Permoser et al., “Religious Organizations as Political Actors in the Context of Migration”; Lean, The Islamophobia Industry; Morgan and Poynting, Global Islamophobia. 8. Taylor, A Secular Age, 303–304. 9. Bauman, “The Making and Unmaking of Strangers,” 88; Beck, Giddens, and Lash, Reflexive Modernization. 10. Young, The Exclusive Society, 15. 11. O’Brien, “Making (Normative) Sense of the Headscarf Debate in Europe.” 12. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 93. 13. Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 45. 14. Nietzsche, Sämtliche Werke, 4:481. 15. Nietzsche, Will to Power, 3. 16. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 336. 17. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, sec. 43. 18. Ibid., sec 371 and 373. 19. Derrida, Of Grammatology, 158. 20. Baudrillard, Perfect Crime, 85. 21. Agamben, The Coming Community, 80 22. Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death. 23. Nietzsche, Will to Power, 172. 24. Foucault, The Foucault Reader, 74. 25. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 26–27. 26. Balibar, We, the People of Europe?, 201. 27. Fish, The Trouble with Principle, 14. 28. Ibid., 218. 29. Ibid., 9, 7, 240. 30. Ibid., 217; Gray, Liberalism, 90. 31. Vattimo, Dialogue with Nietzsche, 128–129. 32. European Commission against Racism and Intolerance. 2011. Annual Report on ECRI’s Activities, 7. See also Givens, Voting Radical Right in Western Europe; Bere­ zin, Illiberal Politics in Neoliberal Times; Howard, “The Impact of the Far Right on Citizenship Policy in Europe”; Art, Inside the Radical Right: The Development of Anti-Immigrant Parties in Western Europe. 33. Poole, Reporting Islam; Moore, Mason, and Lewis, “Images of Islam in the UK”; Cesari, Why the West Fears Islam; Navarro, Contra el Islam.

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34. Roy, Secularism Confronts Islam, 88; Rommelspacher, “Islamkritik und antimuslimische Positionen—am Beispiel von Necla Kelek und Seyran Ateş,” 445; Gest, Apart, 56. 35. On politics, see Ansari, The Infidel Within; Sayyid, “Contemporary Politics of Secularism”; European Commission against Racism and Intolerance, Annual Report; Amnesty International, Choice and Prejudice; Ansari and Hafez, From the Far Right to the Mainstream; and Fredette, Constructing Muslims in France. On media, see Poole, Reporting Islam; Deltombe, L’islam imaginaire; Geissler and Pöttker, eds., Massenmedien und die Integration ethnischer Minderheiten in Deutschland; Schneiders, ed., Islamfeindlichkeit; Bahners, Die Panikmacher; and Meijer, “Political Islam According to the Dutch.” 36. Häusler, “Antiislamischer Populismus als rechtes Wahlkampf-Ticket”; Rigoni, “Media and Muslims in Europe,” 476; Hafez, “Mediengesellschaft–­ Wissensgesellschaft?,” 99–100. 37. Schneiders, “Die Schattenseite der Islamkritik”; Bahners, Die Panikmacher; Bowen, Blaming Islam; Lean, Islamophobia Industry. 38. European Commission against Racism and Intolerance, Annual Report, 10. 39. Sunier, “Islam in the Netherlands, Dutch Islam,” 133. 40. O’Brien, European Perceptions of Islam and America from Saladin to George W. Bush. 41. Jansen, “Mohammed.” 42. Bahners, Die Panikmacher, 238. 43. Kelek, Die fremde Braut, 47. 44. Ibid., 223. 45. Schmidt, Religion in der Verantwortung. 46. Khomeini, “Islam and Revolution,” 523. 47. Ahadi and Vogt, Ich habe abgeschworen, 21. 48. Rigoni, “Access to Media for European Muslims,” 210. 49. Infidelesto. “Top 10 Quran Quotes Every Woman Must See.” 50. Schneiders, “Die Schattenseite,” 422–423. 51. Altschull, Le voile contre l’école, 200. 52. Ewing, Stolen Honor. 53. O’Brien, “Making (Normative) Sense of the Headscarf Debate”; Rosenberger and Sauer, eds., Politics, Religion, and Gender. 54. Korteweg and Yurdakul, “Gender Islam and Immigrant Integration”; Doǧan, “Is Honor Killing a ‘Muslim Phenomenon’?” 55. Ali, Brick Lane. 56. Hirsi Ali, “There Is an Alternative to Islam’s Example.” 57. Pope Benedict XVI, “Faith, Reason and the University.” 58. Yeʾor, Eurabia. See also Schwarzer, ed., Die Gotteskrieger und die falsche Toleranz; Fallaci, Rage; Phillips, Londinistan. 59. The Economist, “The Norway Attacks: The Psychotic Killer.” 60. Quoted in Saunders, The Myth of the Muslim Tide, 25. 61. See youtube.com/watch?v=wiLdDe7Eha4. 62. See http://www.pi-news.net/2013/04/its-the-islam-stupid/. 63. Quoted in Bahners, Die Panikmacher, 77.

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64. Tribalat, De l’immigration à l’assimilation; Diehl and Schnell, “‘Reactive Ethnicity’ or ‘Assimilation’?”; Metroscopia, La Comunidad Musulman en España; Pew Global Attitudes Project, The Great Divide; Inglehart and Norris, “Muslim Integration into Western Cultures”; Haug, Müssig, and Stichs, Muslim Life in Germany; Saunders, Myth of the Muslim Tide, 62–66; Cesari, “The Hybrid and Globalized Islam of Western Europe,” 21–80. 65. Gaspard and Khosrokhavar, Le Foulard et la république; Karakaşoǧlu-Aydin, Muslimische Religiosität und Erziehungsvorstellungen; Piela, “Muslim Women’s Online Discussions of Gender Relations in Islam”; Cesari, “The Hybrid and Globalized Islam of Western Europe,” 45–47. 66. Warner and Wenner, “Religion and the Political Organization of Muslims in Europe”; Messina, The Logics and Politics of Post-WWII Migration to Western Europe, 232; Klausen, The Cartoons That Shook the World, 3; Leiken, Europe’s Angry Muslims, 111–112; Saunders, Myth of the Muslim Tide, 101–105. 67. Quoted in Wiktorowicz, Radical Islam Rising, 90. 68. Guild, Groenendijk, and Carrera, eds., Illiberal Liberal States. 69. O’Brien, “Making (Normative) Sense of the Headscarf Debate in Europe”; Rosenberger and Sauer, eds., Politics. 70. Abbas, “Introduction: Islamic Political Radicalism in Western Europe,” 6; Open Society Institute, Ethnic Profiling in the European Union; Rommelspacher, “Islamkritik,” 445; Tyrer, The Politics of Islamophobia, 54–57. 71. Roy, Globalized Islam. 2004. See also Vidino, “The Muslim Brotherhood in Europe,” 11; Wiktorowicz, Radical Islam Rising, 25; LeVine, “‘Human Nationalisms’ versus ‘Inhuman Globalisms’”; Gray, Al Qaeda and What It Means to Be Modern. 72. Shavit and Wiesenbach, “Muslim Strategies to Convert Western Christians”; Wiktorowicz, Radical Islam Rising, 150–160; Safi, ed., Progressive Muslims. 73. Quoted in Younas, “‘Digital Jihad’ and Its Significance to Counterterrorism,” 11. 74. Quoted in Awan, “Transitional Religiosity Experiences,” 222. 75. Amir-Moazami and Salvatore, “Gender, Generation, and the Reform of Tradition,” 68; LeVine, “‘Human Nationalisms,’” 102; Schiffauer, Nach dem Islamismus, 183. 76. Nielsen, Toward a European Islam, 95. 77. Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth; Said, Orientalism; Nandy, The Intimate Enemy. 78. Quoted in Scientific Council for Government Policy, Dynamism in Islamic Activism, 199. See also Kepel, The War for Muslim Minds, 289; Wiktorowicz, Radical Islam Rising, 68; Leiken, Europe’s Angry Muslims, 232. 79. Aidi, Rebel Music, 65. 80. BBC News. “London Bomber.” 81. The video is no longer available on YouTube. 82. Hizb ut-Tahrir, “Boston Bombings.” 83. Leiken, Europe’s Angry Muslims, 82. 84. Quoted in ibid., 66. 85. Quoted in Kepel, The War for Muslim Minds, 260.

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86. Quoted in ibid., 259. 87. Quoted in Wiktorowicz, Radical Islam Rising. See also Mandel, Cosmopolitan Anxieties, 249. 88. Quoted in Ghodsee, “Regulating Religious Symbols in Public Schools,” 119. 89. Quoted in Macey, “Islamic Political Radicalism in Britain,” 167. 90. Quoted in Bawer, While Europe Slept, 16. 91. Quoted in Wiktorowicz, Radical Islam Rising, 58. 92. Schiffauer, Parallelgesellschaften, 69; Bowen, Can Islam Be French?, 105. 93. Kastoryano, “French Secularism and Islam,” 66–67. 94. Amir-Moazami and Salvatore, “Gender,” 68. 95. LeVine, “‘Human Nationalisms,’” 102; Cesari, Why the West Fears Islam, 139–140. 96. Cantle, The End of Parallel Lives? 97. Qouted in Joppke, “Multiculturalism and Immigration,” 488. 98. Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity; Hall, “Conclusion: The Multicultural Question,” 232; Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves, 75–76. 99. Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox, 9. 100. Balibar, We, the People, 76; Nancy, Being Singular Plural. 101. Marty, When Faiths Collide, 1; Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 37. 102. Cesari, “The Hybrid and Globalized Islam of Western Europe,” 115. 103. Roy, “Le post-islamisme”; Schiffauer, Nach dem Islamismus; Bayat, “PostIslamism at Large.” 104. Bayat, preface, x. 105. Le Quesne, “Trying to Bridge a Great Divide.” 106. Khosrokhavar, “The Muslim Brotherhood in France,” 143–144; Ewing, Stolen Honor, 79; Werbner, “The Making of Muslim Dissent,” 115. 107. Mandaville, “Towards a Critical Islam,” 129. 108. Jonker, “Islamic Television ‘Made in Berlin’”; Mandaville, “Information Technology and the Changing Boundaries of European Islam”; Boubekeur, “Political Islam in Europe,” 20–28. 109. See Ramadan, In the Footsteps of the Prophet. 110. Ramadan, To Be a European Muslim, 26. 111. Ramadan, Radical Reform, 98–99. 112. Ibid., 368; see also pp. 22–25. 113. Ramadan, Western Muslims and the Future of Islam, 62–101; To Be a European Muslim, 162–212. 114. Ramadan, “Islam and Muslims in Europe,” 57. 115. Le Quesne, “Trying to Bridge.” 116. Ramadan, “Islam and Muslims in Europe,” 259–260. 117. Kepel, Allah in the West, 152. 118. Ramadan, To Be a European Muslim, 142–150; Western Muslims, 65–77. 119. Ramadan, “Islam and Muslims in Europe,” 257. 120. Ibid., 262–263. 121. Ramadan, “Globalisation Critics Are Naïve.” 122. Ramadan, “Islam and Muslims in Europe,” 257–258. 123. Ramadan, To Be a European Muslim, 172. See also Al-Ghannouchi, “Arab Secularism in the Maghreb,” 117.

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124. Soage, “Yusuf al-Qaradawi,” 29. 125. Bowen, Can Islam Be French?, 22. 126. Amir-Moazami and Salvatore, “Gender,” 73; Cesari, “Hybrid,” 116–118; Boubekeur, “Political Islam in Europe.” 127. Ramadan, “Islam and Muslims in Europe,” 262. 128. Ibid., 258. 129. Ibid., 259. 130. Ibid., 261–262. 131. Morgan and Poynting, Global Islamophobia. 132. O’Brien, The Muslim Question in Europe; Gray, Liberalism.

CHAPTER 5

Of Cyber Muslimahs: Wives of the Prophet and Muslim Women in the Digital Age Ruqayya Yasmine Khan

In the aftermath of 9/11, Muslims who are twenty-­first-­century “digital natives” and members of Muslim diasporas have actively embraced the Internet to engage in intra-­Muslim debates about everything from contemporary Islam and the 9/11 tragedy to Muhammad and other classical Islamic figures, such as Muhammad’s wives.1 The fact that the tragedy of 9/11 coincided with the advent of the digital age has spurred the creation of these vibrant virtual communities of debating Muslim lay individuals and practitioners. This chapter focuses on Muslim diasporic women and their creative use of the Internet in their engagement with female figures from early Islamic history, specifically the wives of the Prophet (hereafter “the Wives”). Most classical sources, both biographical and exegetical, concur that the following twelve women were the prophet Muhammad’s wives: Khadija bint Khuwaylid, ʿAʾisha bint Abi Bakr, Hafsa bint ʿUmar ibn al-­ Khattab, Umm Salama, Zaynab bint al-­Khuzaima, Juwayriyya, Zaynab bint al-­Jahsh, Mariya the Copt, Umm Habiba, Safiyya bint Huwayy, Maimuna bint al-­Harith, and Rayhana bint Zayd. Barbara Stowasser, a noted scholar on women in early Islam, makes several key claims regarding the Wives, and in this chapter, I assess these claims vis-­à-­v is Muslim women’s online discourses on the Wives. Stowasser has identified three sets of personae associated with the Wives in the classical sources: the Wives are seen “as models for the righteous, as elect consorts touched by miracles . . . that marked the Prophet’s career, and as embodiments of emotionalism, irrationality, greed, and rebelliousness.”2 Furthermore, she argues that in the shift from classical to modern Muslim print sources (most of which are authored by Muslim men), two of these three personae receded, and the one that remains is that of the Wives as models for the righteous:

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Contemporary Muslim literature now deemphasizes the miraculous experiences of the Prophet’s wives, just as it also deemphasizes their all-­too-­human frailties. It is as fighters for the establishment of Islamic values—and there mainly by way of impeccable morality and manner of life—that the wives of the Prophet are now depicted. As such, they embody the model behavior that the contemporary Muslim woman can recognize and which she must strive to follow.3

Stowasser makes another important point with regard to the shift from classical to modern Muslim sources. There has been a change in which wife occupies primacy in the discourses: It is [Khadija] who now emerges in the debates on the wives of the Prophet as the most prominent figure, unlike the medieval hadith which placed far greater emphasis upon ʿAʾisha. Modern sources celebrate Khadija as both wife and mother while she was also the Prophet’s most important supporter and his fellow-­struggler in his great jihad that she waged as his deputy from the moment of their first meeting until the day of her death.4

Stowasser is correct about Khadija’s primacy in modern sources, and as we shall see, she continues to occupy primacy of place in Muslim women’s online discourses.

Diasporic Identities, Digital Contestations, and Browser-­Readers The majority of Internet producers and browser-­audiences discussed in this chapter are Muslim women who are digital natives and belong to Muslim diasporas. The Internet can be accessed anonymously anywhere at any time and by numerous means—important considerations for members of minority groups. Göran Larsson emphasizes the importance of anonymity in a way that is relevant to both gender and religion. Given the anonymity of the Internet, he writes, it is a powerful tool that can be used for alternative interpretation and to question the religious authorities. . . . It is generally easier . . . to test alternative opinions online than offline. . . . Hence, it is possible to describe the Internet as an identity laboratory for the creation of a vast number of contesting identities.5

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Larsson’s notion of a “vast number of contesting identities” is crucial to understanding the Internet’s vital impact on the identity formation of diasporic Western Muslim communities, especially among their youth. Mohammed el-­Nawawy and Sahar Khamis note that Internet technology is instrumental in shoring up and addressing the “desire of the diasporic Muslims to learn more about their own faith. They surf the Net to connect with each other and to get information, through Islamic websites, on how to cope with various cultural encounters without deviating from their faith.”6 Though El-­Nawawy and Khamis use the term diaspora with reservations—they also refer to Muslim Internet users as “de-­territorialized” and “identity-­less”7—analysis of the sites I examine reveals that the majority of the female producers, browsers, and readers are connected to diasporic Muslim communities in the West. El-­Nawawy and Khamis have devised an important phrase, “virtual ritual of identity-­making,” to describe diasporic Muslims’ active, sustained discussions and other interactions via the Internet. They argue that this type of Internet use, which is central to diasporic Muslims’ preservation of their religious identity, “involves identity formulation within communities which are being continually ‘constructed, debated and reimagined.’”8 Larsson’s notion of a “vast number of contesting identities” resonates with this claim, and the Internet’s easy access and anonymity enhances the process of contestation and debate. Another idea that is useful for analyzing online discourses is Larsson’s concept of nonlinearity. He observes: Since hypertexts are textual bodies (including pictures and sounds) with links to other texts, the internal order of, for example, a book (which is structured according to chapters and sections and bound together by a cover) becomes more fluid and flexible. In the end, it is the reader who decides the order and structure of the hypertext, that is, the sites he or she chooses to visit.9

If, as Larsson argues, “it is the reader who browses the Internet who has control over the interpretation of the text,”10 it is logical to ask, How can we best describe the interpreter who has control? Is she a reader or a browser-­reader? I posit that browsing and reading are two distinct but perhaps overlapping processes in the interpretive acts unfolding on the Internet. The politics and ethics of Internet scholarship remain in their infancy, but before I proceed further, it is necessary to comment on certain iden-

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tity issues. In this chapter I function as both the scholar-­observer and the browser-­reader, not unlike an anthropologist embracing both etic and emic roles in the study of specific cultures or cultural groups. This is so because each online site bears its own unique virtual culture, and a browser’s experiences and interpretive acts vis-­à-­v is a site cannot be separated from the existence of this virtual culture. The situation is compounded by my particular identity: I am a Muslim-­ American female scholar who is very much a member of the Western Muslim diasporas under scrutiny in this chapter. Hence, the donning of these twin hats is freighted with meaning by my subjectivity and identity. I therefore walk a very fine line as I aim to provide analyses that both approximate an objective academic stance and meaningfully engage with the virtual cultures in which I am immersed. I emphasize that this approximation of objectivity is just that—an approximation at best. No doubt, the female browser-­reader encounters and exercises her interpretive control within a virtual culture linked with each site, and this virtual culture reflects the kinds of hypertexts, including pictures and sounds, that are connected to other texts on the site. Both the what (new content, novel interpretations) and the how (new modes of communication and interaction) of online activity are integral to contemporary Muslim women’s digital engagement with the Wives, and to how this engagement engenders new narratives of female empowerment and agency. In this chapter, my analysis concerns two online forums and an online comic.11 The online forums are named Women’s Initiative in Spirituality and Equality, or WISE, and The Ideal Muslimah.12 The online comic is called Ninjabi.com. Both of the online forums prominently feature the Wives, but the online comic does not explicitly refer to or mention them. However, the central character of the comic is a veiled young Muslim woman, and I argue that she indirectly engages the legacies of the Wives. My rubric for analyzing the sites involves three elements: the owner or sponsor of the site, the producer of a particular post, and the browser-­reader’s virtual culture.

Women’s Initiative in Spirituality and Equality: Khadija, a WISE Woman The Women’s Initiative in Spirituality and Equality forum prominently features Khadija. Its website’s home page presents the forum as reaching out to a global Muslim female community. The sponsor is the American

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Society of Muslim Advancement, a New York–­based nonprofit organization, and the leadership appears to be mainly American.13 Virtual Culture: Global, Theologically Muslim, and Pluralistic Many features characterizing the WISE forum’s home page convey an upbeat and pluralistic online culture.14 Several flourishes tout its modern, global audience, including a link to a YouTube clip of WISE’s third global conference in Istanbul, Turkey, which took place in 2011. The clip features an impressive range of highlights of women of different nationalities (Tunisian, Indian, Afghan, Turkish, Nigerian) speaking out on various women’s issues. The conference appears to have been attended mainly by educated, professional women journalists, politicians, academics, social scientists, political activists linked with the Arab Spring, and clergy members of other faiths, including Judaism and Christianity. The forum’s main page has a professional look and a technologically sophisticated, user-­friendly interface with links to content in several media, including video and audio. The menu headings at the top of the home page are Muslim Women, Current Issues, Resources, Activism, and Talent Bazaar. I clicked on the menu item Activism and found a geographically diverse list of names of women’s groups (under Women’s Organizations/Campaigns). The About WISE menu item on the sidebar of the home page leads to an ambitious mission statement: “To build a cohesive, global movement of Muslim women that will reclaim women’s rights in Islam, enabling them to make dignified choices and fully participate in creating just and flourishing societies.” Browsing the other sidebar menu items, I clicked on Collaboration, which opens a page on Women of Other Faiths. Another sidebar menu item, Change Through Interpretation, leads to links in two languages (English and Arabic) to Shura Council, Jihad Against Violence, and Muftiyyah Training Program. The term Muftiyya caught my eye: the word is the female form of mufti, or jurisprudential scholar. Accessing that link, I learned that the Muftiyya Training Program, which is still being developed, is designed to train Muslim women in Islamic law and jurisprudence, and it will allow women to acquire the credentials necessary to issue legal interpretations and rulings, or fatwas. Intrigued by this theologically progressive program, I returned to the About WISE link and took a second look at the FAQ. The following responses are offered to the question “How is WISE creating change?”

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Change through Communications: WISE has developed a state-­of-­the-­art Muslim women’s portal. No longer will Muslim women be defined by others. This comprehensive portal will serve as a clearinghouse of all information relating to Muslim women (past and present) and Muslim women’s activism, as well as a tool for connecting members of the global WISE network. Change through Action; Change through Collaboration; Change through Interpretation: Change must be created through the interpretation (and reinterpretation) of key Islamic texts. WISE has created a global Muslim women’s Shura Council of Muslim women scholars and activists. Authentic to Islam and as an agent of the 21st century, this Council promotes women’s rights within an Islamic framework through education and advocacy activities.

Visitors can browse two interactive polls at the bottom of the WISE forum’s home page. One poll consistently features the question, “Are you a Muslim woman?” The other poll poses a new question every month or so. When I accessed it in February 2012, I encountered the question, “Are you satisfied with the space designated for women in your Mosque?” And when I accessed it in October 2013, I saw the question, “Should Muslim women participating in events like the ‘Muslim Women Beauty Contest/ pageant’ be required to wear the hijab?” “The Most Influential Woman,” a Post by Noor Saadeh I clicked on the menu item Muslim Women, which has a drop-­down feature that allows the user to browse by category, name, century, or country. I also noticed an interactive link, Recommend Muslim Women, which allows site visitors to contribute to the forum. For each woman’s content there is a captioned link that contains a brief biography and discusses how she embodies the ideals of WISE. Under the time span 500–999 C.E. are entries for twenty-­three women, including seven of the Prophet’s Wives: ʿAʾisha, Hafsa, Khadija, Maimuna, Umm Habiba, Umm Salama, and Zaynab bint al-­Khuzaima. Each Wife has an entry of about two hundred to six hundred words, and each entry generally has two to three source citations. The citations are not of primary Islamic sources, such as the Qurʾan or Hadith, but are of secondary sources, a few that are scholarly and some that are popular, including ones by non-­Muslims.

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The captions for the Wives describe two in terms of their leadership and intellectual abilities (ʿAʾisha and Hafsa), one in terms of her charity (Zaynab bint al-­Khuzaima), and the others mainly as exemplars of motherhood or wifehood. Here, for example, is the caption for the link to ʿAʾisha: “Extensive knowledge of Islam and Islamic jurisprudence; hadith transmitter; social and military leader of the Muslim community.” The mention of Islamic jurisprudence in ʿAʾisha’s caption reminded me, as a browser-­reader, of the fact that WISE offers a program for training female Muslim jurisprudential scholars, so I immediately clicked on the Muftiyya Training Program on the forum’s main page and read this: “The Muftiyyah Program is a world-­class graduate program, which will train contemporary Muslim women jurists and religious scholars.” Larsson’s remarks regarding “control over the interpretation of the text” resonate here, for this browsing informs the interpretation of the captioned text associated with ʿAʾisha.15 Returning to Wives’ captions under the link Muslim Women, I found that the caption for Hafsa, another Wife, simply and powerfully reads: “The Memorizer of the Qurʾan.” The link to Khadija recognizes her as “The first convert to Islam, ‘Mother of the Believers’ and ‘The Best of Women.’” I was intrigued that unlike the other Wives’ entries, Khadija’s contains its own separate link to an International Women’s Day Essay of the Year. The 2007 essay is titled “The Most Influential Woman In My Life: Khadijah bint Khuwaylid,” and it was authored by a Muslim woman named Noor Saadeh. Stowasser’s claim regarding the primacy of Khadija in modern Muslim sources is supported by this hyperlinked essay.16 Saadeh strongly integrates gender into her assessment of Khadija. She draws attention to Khadija as an independent decision maker in her domestic life. Despite ups and downs in her married life, Khadija made her own marital decisions. She was “twice married and twice widowed,” and she proposed to Muhammad herself at an advanced age; in doing so she “broke all customs of the day.” Saadeh highlights also Khadija’s business acumen: “She successfully continued her late husband’s business in the male-­dominated world of trade.” She balanced work and family, for after her marriage to Muhammad, “the business grew as did their family.” Saadeh regards Khadija as a maternal figure and nurturer of the Prophet, and she emphasizes that Khadija embraced both the economic and spiritual aspects of nurturing him. For instance, Saadeh writes that Khadija “supported her husband’s meditative retreats in a nearby mountain cave.” Such statements indicate that Saadeh perceives Khadija as supporting her husband’s prophetic career both financially and spiritually.

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“All of her wealth was spent in spreading the message, sheltering and assisting all those who had embraced Islam,” Saadeh writes. According to Sunni Muslims, Khadija is the first convert to Islam, and Saadeh touts this dimension of Khadija and Muhammad’s relationship by asserting that Khadija “immediately accepted the fantastic story Muhammad told her of an angel that appeared to him announcing his Prophethood,” and that she “stood in solidarity with him and became the first Muslim.” Only in passing does Saadeh pay tribute to Khadija’s role as mother of Muhammad’s offspring. She writes that “she bore him six children” and that “they lived a quiet life . . . surrounded by their children,” but she makes no mention of the children’s gender or names. However, she does cast Khadija as a beloved and loyal wife of Muhammad. She comments specifically on the monogamy of the relationship: “In a polygamous society, they enjoyed a loving and faithful monogamous relationship.” What is particularly noteworthy in Saadeh’s essay is that her mention of Khadija’s role as mother is eclipsed by her praise of Khadija’s economic independence and success. She views Khadija as an eminently Muslim female role model: she chose to accept Muhammad’s religious message and vision, and in so doing, she faithfully stood by her man. Saadeh is not invested in promoting her Islamic credentials by explicitly identifying Hadith or other classical Islamic sources. When she does transmit a Hadith of Muhammad, she simply indicates that she is relaying a point about Khadija “in his words.” An example is, “She believed in me when no one else did; she accepted Islam when people rejected it; and she helped and comforted me when there was no one else to lend a helping hand.” In another instance, Saadeh vaguely cites “the Islamic traditions” in referring to a well-­known dictum from the classical sources comparing Khadija’s centrality as a female exemplar and model to that of another female figure venerated in Islam—Mary, mother of Jesus. Both the form of these classical Hadith (their brevity, their nature as reported or quoted discourse) and the manner in which Saadeh employs them (to support or clinch a point) intriguingly render their use akin to that of sound bites in modern media. Sound bites are very short expressions that get people’s attention, and “newscasters have to take into account the fact that we now live in a ‘sound bite’ world.”17 Keeping in mind again Larsson’s concept of nonlinearity, these references to female exemplars and models in Islam could prompt the female browser to return to the Muslim Women menu item and look up other women in other epochs. Out of curiosity, I clicked on the most recent century and found a fascinating range of female Muslim figures: from the first

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female Muslim astronaut in space (Anousheh Ansari) to the first female prime minister in Pakistan (Benazir Bhutto), to the wife of Malcolm X (Betty Shabazz, described as a “social activist and educator”). The nonlinearity of the browsing experience powerfully shapes the interpretation of the post at hand, Saadeh’s essay on Khadija.

The Ideal Muslimah: Go Khadija with Your Girl Power! No link on the Ideal Muslimah forum provides information on who, or which organization, sponsors it.18 The site is hosted by Muslim Tents and Islamic Web Solutions. Muslim Tents provides free “English Web Site Hosting for Muslims.” It is possible that this forum is indirectly connected to SunniForum.com, which describes itself as a “resource for the propagation of authentic Islamic teachings.” Virtual Culture: Very Conservatively Feminine, Islamist, Diasporic Several artfully constructed flourishes expressive of traditional notions of Muslim femininity characterize the Ideal Muslimah home page, including the use of pink and purple as background colors and, in the top corner, a silhouette of a featureless head-­scarfed woman with her head bowed demurely. Indeed, all the images of women on the site’s home page and related pages show them in full Muslim attire, wearing some combination of burqa, niqab, hijab, and so on. The main menu contains items such as: Turn to Allah, The Islamic Family, Islamic Dress Sense, Your Role Models, For the New Muslimah, Arabic and Urdu Section, and Learn to Sew. This forum’s home page indicates that its audience largely comprises conservative diasporic young Muslim women with a heightened sense of religious identity, presumably living in the English-­speaking West (primarily the United States and United Kingdom). The showcasing of feminine flourishes on this forum’s main page belies the fact that most of the content posted on it—in text, audio, and video— is produced by Muslim men, some of it by Muslim male clerics. For example, several videos about the Wives were authored by Anwar al-­Awlaki, a Yemeni-­American imam and Islamist killed by an American drone attack in September 2011. Many features of this forum’s home page highlight perceived credentials of Islamic authenticity. Here El-­Nawawy and Khamis’s concept of a “virtual ritual of identity-­making”19 is salient, as some of these fea-

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tures—for example, the use of Arabic in transliteration and the flagging of Islamic etiquette, or “Islamiquette”—preserve and promote diasporic Muslim religious identity. The site’s calendar uses the Islamic dating system, and the site’s producers employ the term Muslimah, the feminine form of Muslim in Arabic grammar. They showcase several phrases from the Qurʾan on the home page, particular passages that are known as the modesty verses in modern Islamic discourses. Islamic phrases and forms of etiquette prevail on the home page and throughout the site’s content. Many frequently used Islamic terms are presented in the transliterated Arabic and capitalized—for example, Sahaabah and Sahaabiyaat, the Arabic terms for the male and female companions of the Prophet. In keeping with proper Islamic etiquette, phrases such as “Peace be upon him” are used after the mention of either Muhammad or his companions throughout the text and other media found in this forum. Interactive dimensions present on the main page and on other linked pages—for example, a column in the left margin that poses the question “Who’s Online?”—provide continuously updated information on the “Muslim sisters” who are browsing the website. The breakdown by country of origin is also continuously given, demonstrating that more than 70 percent of the female audience is from North America and the United Kingdom. Clicking on the link labeled Your Role Models produces another drop-­ down menu that includes links to Sahaabah, Sahaabiyaat, Men Scholars, Women Scholars, Pious Men, and Pious Women. The link to Sahaabiyaat leads to a dozen or so entries, and four of these are on the Wives: one on Khadija, two on ʿAʾisha, and one on Umm Salama. All but the one on Khadija are produced by men. The fact that the sole entry by a Muslim woman is about Khadija bolsters the assertion that in Muslim women’s online discourses concerning the Wives, primacy of place is assigned to Khadija, mirroring her place in modern Muslim print sources. Although the preponderance of this forum’s content on the Wives is produced by men, the female browser can contest male-­centered versions of the lives of the Wives and create her own interpretations by comparatively browsing content produced by Muslim women and men. Khadija and Her “Girl Power,” in a Post by Ahlam Yassin Ahlam Yassin posted an entry with the title “Khadija (RA): Girl Power Well before the 21st Century” on September 25, 2011, and it garnered 212 hits.20 Throughout the post, the author displays her credentials as an au-

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thentic Muslimah by peppering it with phrases reflecting Islamic etiquette and by citing selective Hadith from classical sources. With its display of Islamiquette, combined with an innovative and almost feminist read of Khadija, Yassin’s post is a performance of the “virtual rituals of identity-­ making” so central to diasporic Muslims’ active, sustained engagement with the Internet. Her post begins with the following provocative observation: Picture this: a perceptive and intelligent woman, respected and generous, owning a business. . . . If you are like most people, you probably conjured an image of a twenty-­first-­century corporate type, but in fact, the woman I describe is a prominent Islamic figure who lives in seventh-­ century Arabia.

The entry continues with the declaration that “Girl power was alive well before women in the West demanded their rights in what is popularly known as the Feminist Movement.” The use of phrases such as girl power and twenty-­first century and corporate type accentuates the author’s connection with her young audience: educated, working young women interested in professional development. Again, an identity-­making virtual ritual is on display here through the kaleidoscopic quality of Yassin’s post: her practice of Islamiquette-­laced English-­language slang and her use of idioms that command attention and resonate with a young, contemporary female audience most likely associated with a North American milieu. Yassin exhorts her readers to “Take note” that Khadija “wasn’t fazed by” the age difference between herself and Muhammad. She explains that Khadija was “expanding the franchise” and writes, “Is this a woman who knows what she wants or what?!” Yassin describes Khadija as an ambitious woman who knew how to balance work and family and was shrewd in how she chose her husband. She highlights what she perceives to be Khadija’s ambitious qualities by mentioning how Khadija wisely managed her inherited wealth and expanded her business beyond Mecca. Yassin also emphasizes Khadija’s maturity and strength of character. Widowed and twice divorced, Khadija had experienced heartache and marital woes, “and yet she persevered.” Moreover, she raised children “while simultaneously managing her business empire.” Yassin portrays Khadija as being smart and savvy not only in how she chose a husband, but also in the fact that she chose him rather than the other way around. She heard about the Prophet because he had acquired a reputation of being honest and of noble character, “which made him a

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prime recruit for her thriving business.” She “used a good friend as an intermediary” to inquire about the prospect of marrying him. Underneath a proclamation in bold print that “their marriage is one in Islamic history that reflects deep love, commitment and compassion,” the author frames in a dialog box a well-­known and established Hadith transmitted by another wife, ʿAʾisha: I did not feel jealous of any of the wives of the Prophet as much as I did of Khadijah (although) she died before he married me, for I often heard him mentioning her, and Allah had told him to give her the good tidings that she would have a palace of Qasab (i.e., pipes of precious stones and pearls in Paradise), and whenever he slaughtered a sheep, he would send her women-­friends a good share of it. [Sahih Bukhari]21

This use of ʿAʾisha’s Hadith is noteworthy on several fronts. The Prophet’s marriage to ʿAʾisha is emblematic of the heavily patriarchal phase of Muhammad’s life, when he was polygamous and took a child bride, and significantly ʿAʾisha is shown paying tribute to the Wife of the nonpolygamous period. Contemporary Muslim women, in their online engagement with Khadija, reinforce her merit over the other Wives, especially over the controversial figure of ʿAʾisha, who, as Stowasser points out, has primacy of place in classical, male-­authored Sunni discourses. Moreover, the author does not comment on ʿAʾisha’s feelings of jealousy; she simply cites the Hadith to showcase Khadija, then moves on. This gesture corroborates Stowasser’s point that modern and contemporary Muslim discourses on the Wives do not get mired in representing the spouses as female embodiments of emotionalism and irrationality. Finally, the citation of this and another Hadith from Sahih Bukhari underscores Yassin’s familiarity with one of two ninth-­century canonical collections of Hadith. What is most eye-­catching and effective in terms of projecting female self-­empowerment is how the post concludes. Underneath a section with the heading “3 Productivity Lessons for the 21st century Muslim Woman,” Yassin exhorts her readers to “remain steadfast,” “strive for benefits beyond this world,” and “create your own circumstance.” Each item is accompanied by a brief commentary. The gist of the commentary on the first item is that Khadija had a hard life, or experienced “trying circumstances,” before she accepted Islam, and that she persevered in spite of this and attained the status of one of the “noble role models of Islam.” Here Yassin cites another Hadith, this one promoting Khadija and Mary, mother of Jesus, as “among the best women” of their times. Under the

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second item, Yassin emphasizes that despite Khadija’s “business being boycotted once she chose Islam,” “she sacrificed many things, but not her faith.” A go-­getter attitude pervades the commentary accompanying the third and final item. Yassin declares that “a productive Muslimah is never confined by the circumstances she finds herself in.” Though Khadija lived in a time “when woman could not be taken seriously,” she strived hard and experienced many trials. The author ends on a final note of self-­ encouragement and empowerment by advising readers to cultivate the attributes of integrity and sincerity demonstrated by Khadija “and watch as your own circumstances begin to shift.” In short, Yassin celebrates as female Muslim virtues Khadija’s moral conduct and integrity, and her bolstering of her own strength and female agency through various tests and trials.

Ninjabi.com: Of Ninjas and “Ninjabis” The online comic Ninjabi.com is mainly managed and produced by a young woman who calls herself Amethyst. On the website’s About page, Amethyst writes that she majored in digital art in school, loves all things purple (this is evident in the background color of the site’s pages), and resides in the United States. The use of Urdu phrases suggests that Amethyst’s cultural and ethnic heritage is Indo-­Pakistani. This is Amethyst’s first online comic; it is a “joint project” launched in 2005. Three other creators are referenced, including Diamond (Amethyst’s best friend and possible future business partner). Amethyst is evidently the chief artist; hers is the sole name referenced on the site’s Contact page. The team of other creators aids and facilitates her production of the comics. Under the heading “deviantID” appear remarks by Amethyst that emphasize her role as chief artist-­producer and visionary: “I am behind Ninjabi. I want to do many (hopefully [inshaʾAllah]) great things with it, and get it to be a thought provoking, subtle dialogue starter.” Ninjabi.com’s audience is diverse in terms of religion and gender: Muslims and non-­Muslims, women and men.22 That the audience is composed almost entirely of digital natives is evident from the virtual discourses on display: those mainly of the twenty-­something generation. Amethyst writes that “the comic is loosely based on the creators’ lives and [hopes] to deal with many current issues facing Muslim youth,” especially in the aftermath of 9/11. She explains that “the main character is Noor, a hijabi Muslim girl. Her best friends include non-­Muslims and non-­hijabis.”23

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Virtual Culture: Commercial, Chic, and Offbeat The online culture of Ninjabi.com embraces digital natives who rely on Internet slang in their digital communications. For example, each comic has a comments section where users regularly employ abbreviations like lol, fb, and ur. The site is interactive and has multiple links to social media, including blogs and Facebook, allowing “users to communicate in multiple directions and not just from producer to user.”24 The home page has a fetching, fashionable purple-­and-­paisley background and an inviting greeting: “Welcome to Ninjabi.com.” On the left sidebar is a list of menu items, including Blog and Store. The store advertises “Noor dolls” and “Ninjabi gear,” and visitors can complete their purchases with online checkout. Amethyst started the blog in 2007, and she writes about everything from her kitten to the controversy over the “Ground Zero mosque.” The menu sidebar also has items concerning the comic itself, such as Current Comic, Cast, and Archive. Under Cast, visitors can find comics and accompanying vignettes on the cast of characters: Noor (the main character, both in and out of hijab, “as is normal in any hijabi’s life”), Ally (her non-­Muslim best friend), Anny (her Muslim best friend, who is as quirky as Noor), and two male friends named TJ and Anthony. Then there is Snail, “who loves Noor, but he’s not sure why. Might be the hijab.” In the archives are forty-­three comics, posted from 2006 to 2012. Each comic is dated, numbered, and cleverly captioned with a one- or two-­word phrase. A click on each caption pulls up the relevant comic along with comments and links to Facebook and e-­mail. Though Ninjabi.com does not explicitly refer to or mention the Wives, the concept of having a central character who is a hip, veiled Muslim young woman indirectly engages the Wives’ legacies. Modern Muslim discourses on veiling often adduce certain sets of Qurʾanic verses as proof-­ texts to legitimate veiling practices. According to classical Qurʾanic commentary, at least two sets of verses deal with issues of dress and the figures of the Wives. One set of verses clearly concerns the Wives, and the other set is explicitly addressed to the Prophet but indirectly engages the “wives and daughters of the prophet.”25 Ninjabi.com daringly critiques both non-­ Muslim Western stereotypes and Muslim normative conventions concerning veiled Muslim women, thus humanizing them. The conflation of Ninja and hijabi to produce Ninjabi is subversive: it plays with the stereotype of the alien-­looking, threatening image of a Muslim veiled woman in the Western, especially North American, popular imagination. The hijabi wears a dark, loose, somber-­looking garment, just as a ninja warrior does in the popular imagination.

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“Hijab-­Hair,” a Comic by Amethyst Noor, the central character, is a funny, affectionate, offbeat character who likes to make prominent the average-­girl qualities of a hijabi. The comic titled “Hijab-­Hair” (posted January 16, 2009) portrays a frustrated Noor scratching her hijab so much that her non-­Muslim friend Ally, seated next to her, mutters: “Just take it off. It’s just us here.” When Noor removes her hijab, Ally gasps in alarm at Noor’s tangled and tousled hair (see figure 5.1). More than fifty comments are posted in response. Below I reproduce a partial thread of the online commentary. Girl with A Hijab writes: I think this is ssssssssso funny! But girls that wear the hijab are supposed to wear shirts with long sleeves. But I still LOVE this comic strip! Safiya responds: SO FUNNY!! Well she doesn’t need a long sleeve shirt. Obviously she is in her own house ‘cus she took her hijab off. Laila Toure chimes in: Nice! I’m a Peace Corps volunteer in the Islamic Republic of Mauritania. Women here wear a full veil called a melefa. Sometimes, when I’m visiting them in their homes, they’ll let the veil slip back, and yes, melefa hair is pretty close to hijab hair. Helema observes: lol this is so my hair when i take mine off! Muslim girl asks: dont u think u might be giving non muslims a bad impression . . .

Several men also make comments. One obviously very religious Muslim male named Bahr quotes Qurʾanic verses in criticism of the “mockery” implied in the comic strip: (1) If you ask them (about this), they declare: “We were only talking idly and joking.” Say: “Was it at Allah . . . and His Ayat (proofs, evidence, verses, lessons, signs, revelations) and His Messenger . . . that you Were mocking?” (. . . At-­Taubah, Chapter #9, Verse #65)

Another Muslim young man has a very different take: Now this was funny! Great job, so I know now why sometimes my mom and sisters keep their hijabs on even when they come home. They are just being nice and dont want to scare me.

Someone named Avery responds to several of the comments by both women and men:

Figure 5.1. “Hijab-­Hair” comic from Ninjabi.com, by producer

and creator “Amethyst.”

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@Muslimgirl: why would this comic give non-­Muslims a bad impression of us? Like we’re supposed to hide the fact that hijabs can be a little uncomfortable: hot in the summer, that they sometimes itch? I try to show non-­Muslims that we’re just like them, and yes, I tell them that hijabs (though I don’t always wear one) sometimes itch. @Bahr: if you aren’t here to laugh or have a good time, why bother reading these comics? Where on Earth is there any part of this strip that is against Islam? Don’t just quote what someone else has said: do it yourself. What about this strip do you think is so appalling and heretic? @Safiya: yeah, I agree with you totally. She wouldn’t be wearing a short-­ sleeve shirt but she’s in her own house. And so what if she was?

“KA-­POP on the Four Wives Thing,” from a Comic by Amethyst Another comic strip, titled simply “Multiples” and posted in January 2012, contests and critiques the theme of polygamy in Islam. Noor, without her hijab, is framed in this comic along with her friend Ally and a young male. All three are seated on a couch. The two females, a brunette and a blond, dwarf the puny male, and yet the male is shown engaged in a smug reverie that prompts him at one point to nonchalantly declare: “When I get married, I will have FOUR wives. . . . You lucky girls can be the first two.” The next clip shows him not knowing what hit or whacked him (KA-­POP). Maybe it was Noor, who is sitting next to him. He is knocked off the couch and out of the comic, and the final and fifth clip shows Noor explaining to Ally, “He ran into a door,” with Ally responding, “Got it” (see figure 5.2) The humor is understated, even minimalistic. By kicking him off the couch and out of the comic, the two young women are upending the smug and puny male who thinks he can call the shots. Female agency is at the forefront here. The young women are in charge, and there will be zero tolerance for even a mention of anything relating to the topic of “four wives.” Surprisingly, this comic strip has only a few online comments, and they lack the richness of the comments on the “Hijab-­Hair” strip. Amethyst and her team powerfully employ the Internet’s anonymity to explore, test, contest, and shape alternative diasporic identities in the post-­9/11 era. Amethyst advances alternative female interpretations and opinions of the legacies of the Wives and of all things normatively and traditionally Islamic, including beliefs, practices, observances, and etiquette.

Figure 5.2. “Multiples” comic from

Ninjabi.com, by producer and creator “Amethyst.”

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The online commentary accompanying the “Hijab-­Hair” comic is an example of what Larsson describes as a “laboratory for the creation of a vast number of contesting identities” and what El-­Nawawy and Khamis term the “virtual ritual of identity-­making.”

Conclusion Given the centrality to Islam of traditional text sources, the capacity of the Muslim online community to communally and globally debate, deconstruct, tout, access, deliver, and critique information, teachings, interpretations, and claims pertaining to Islam and Muslims is noteworthy. As El-­Nawawy and Khamis point out, the online community “has created new discourses where the power of the traditional sources of religious authority could be decentralized and contested by the general public.”26 Twenty-­first-­century Muslim female digital natives are embedding and evaluating the normative discourses of Islam within the framework of a largely Western-­centered information technology, and thereby powerfully promoting female empowerment and agency. Moreover, by digitally rendering these discourses global and international, diasporic Muslim women are decentering and deconstructing what they deem parochial and traditional elements in their religion.27 Muslim women are producing savvy, current female-­centered readings of many aspects of their religion, including interpretations of what the Prophet’s Wives said, how they lived and acted, and how they are remembered and celebrated. These readings are more in tune with their own contemporary identities and experiences and engender new narratives and discourses of female empowerment. In these new online discourses, Muslim women celebrate the Wives’ capacities and contributions in multiple realms—intellectual, economic, work-­related, and so on—and in so doing, they go well beyond appropriation of the Wives in the modern print context, which frames them primarily as “fighters for the establishment of Islamic values—and there mainly by way of impeccable morality and manner of life.”28 Print discourses on the Wives, both classical and modern, are authored primarily by Muslim men; hence the Internet is clearly enabling Muslim women to produce significant counterdiscourses. In regard to which of the Prophet’s Wives occupies primacy of place in Muslim women’s online discourses, Khadija clearly looms large. Leila Ahmed has argued that pre-­Islamic, rather than Islamic, customs and life shaped Khadija’s horizons, including her economic independence, au-

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tonomy in making her own marriage proposal without a male guardian, monogamous marriage, and marriage to a man much younger than herself.29 This argument may have merit historically, but it certainly has not deterred contemporary Muslim women from appropriating Khadija as a Muslim female role model in their online discourses. Notes 1. El-­Nawawy and Khamis, Islam Dot Com, 117. According to M. Prensky (who appears to have first coined the term), “the most useful designation I have found for them [that is, this generation] is Digital Natives. Our students today are all ‘native speakers’ of the digital language of computers, video games and the Internet.” Prensky, “Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants, Part 1.” In this chapter, I rely upon William Safran’s definition of the term diaspora: ‘“Expatriate minority communities whose members [and their first-­generation offspring] . . . retain a collective memory, vision, or myth about their original homeland—its physical location, history, and achievements.” El-­Nawawy and Khamis, Islam Dot Com, 117. 2. Stowasser, “Wives of the Prophet,” 514. 3. Ibid., 519. 4. Ibid, 521. 5. Larsson, Muslims and the New Media, 188–189. 6. El-­Nawawy and Khamis, Islam Dot Com, 19. 7. Ibid., 143. 8. Ibid., 120. 9. Larsson, Muslims and the New Media 188. 10. Ibid. 11. It is necessary here to comment on issues of informed consent and anonymity. Because I view the online sites examined in this chapter, including their hypertexts, as cultural textual productions, I would concur with M. Thelwall and D. Wilkinson that informed consent does not seem relevant here (Thelwall and Wilkinson, “Public Dialogs in Social Network Sites,” 395). As for anonymity and privacy, they are a more complex matter. For example, the producer of the online comic uses the anonymous moniker Amethyst, but when I contacted Amethyst to obtain permission to use images of her comics, she appeared to be comfortable revealing her identity by divulging her name and providing a full bio. Ultimately, I decided to exercise caution and adhered to copying her anonymous “identity from one public situation (the web) to another (an academic article)” (Thelwall and Wilkinson, “Public Dialogs,” 397). The sponsors and producers of the two online forums and their posts are already “not anonymous” because they have posted “their identity, or clues to it, in the data researched” (Thelwall and Wilkinson, “Public Dialogs,” 397), so I have not altered their names. Hence, the idea of a breach of anonymity becomes problematic when one is dealing with public Internet data. This is not to undermine the vital importance of current debates about the ethical dilemmas pertaining to obtaining online, as well as face-­to-­face, data (Thelwall and Wilkinson, “Public Dialogs; Kozinets, Netnography).

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12. The URLs for the sites are www.wisemuslimwomen.org and www.ideal muslimah.com, respectively. 13. The executive director of the American Society of Muslim Advancement is a nationally known Muslim-­American named Daisy Khan, who was linked with the controversy surrounding the proposed Islamic community center Park51, also referred to as Cordoba House, near Ground Zero in New York City. Certain segments of the American population strongly objected to the proposal to build a religious and cultural site to be used by Muslims on what was perceived as the ground where the tragedy of 9/11 occurred. The Muslim chaplain associated with the proposed cultural center, Feisal Abdul Rauf, husband of Daisy Khan, also figured prominently in the debates. See Religions, “Islam in America.” 14. Though descriptions of site content are in present tense, content may, of course, change over time. 15. Larsson, Muslims and the New Media, 188. 16. Stowasser, “Old Shaykhs, Young Women, and the Internet,” 521. 17. Fraser and Fraser, “Teaching the Sound Bite Generation.” 18. A disclaimer at the bottom of the home page reads: “All material found on Idealmuslimah.com is for information purposes only. The views expressed on [this site] . . . or on linked sites are not necessarily shared by Idealmuslimah.com.” 19. El-­Nawawy and Khamis, Islam Dot Com, 120. 20. Use of the abbreviation RA (Radiallah ʾAnha, or May God be pleased or satisfied with her) signals the author’s awareness of Islamic etiquette, in this case the practice of invoking this Islamic formula after the mention of any of the companions of Muhammad, including all of his wives. A 2003 online biography of Yassin reads: “Ahlam, a Palestinian-­American, is a senior-­year student majoring in political science at La Salle University. Having grown up in Philadelphia, she completed her high school education at Ramallah Friends School. She is currently participating in the Arab-­American Resource Corps, an AmeriCorps program, and is responsible for cultural outreach” (http://albustanseeds.org/programs/al -­bustan-­camp/2003-­camp-­teachers/). She is now a freelance commercial writer. 21. This bracketed attribution appears in Yassib’s post. 22. I would like to thank Esha Mahmood, from Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas, for bringing this comic to my attention. 23. A hijabi girl is a girl who wears the Muslim veil, or hijab. 24. Chris Nolan, e-­mail communication, February 2012. 25. Q 33:53 (the hijab verse) and Q 33:59 (the mantle verse). Also Q 24:30-­31, the so-­called modesty verses, are adduced in this regard. 26. El-­Nawawy and Khamis, Islam Dot Com, 2. 27. Ibid., 119. 28. Stowasser, “Wives of the Prophet,” 519. 29. Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam, 42.

CHAPTER 6

Behind Every Good Muslim Man: Fictional Representations of �Aʾisha after 9/11 Aysha Hidayatullah

Muhammad was a child molester, Muhammad was a pervert, Muhammad was a fraud, Muhammad was a false prophet! Stupid terrorist, go home, go home, go home! No sharia! You beat up your wife too? Are you a molester? You are, aren’t you? . . . Why don’t you go beat up your wife like you do every night? And you go have sex with a nine-­year-­old! Marry her! You beat your women and you rape your children! Attendees of Yorba Linda rally, February 2011

In February 2011 a few hundred demonstrators gathered for a spirited rally outside a community center in the small suburb of Yorba Linda, California, to call attention to the alleged threat posed by Muslims to the values and security of the United States. Local elected officials delivered impassioned speeches, and later that day a large group of demonstrators from the rally jeered Muslim families walking into a gathering inside the community center.1 The demonstrators screamed insults about Muhammad and Muslim men abusing women and girls, invective that is rooted in a long history of Western polemics against Islam and the Prophet. Those polemics have been marked by repeated charges that Muhammad was an oversexed polygamist who kept a harem of women, including the child-­ bride ʿAʾisha, to satisfy his lusts and predatory desires.2 As the verbal assaults at this scene attest, American views of Islam and Muslims retain a fixation on Muhammad’s relationships to his wives, reproducing an image of the Prophet as lascivious and depraved that is used to vilify Muslims in the present.

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In response to Islamophobia in the United States since 9/11, a number of American writers, both Muslim and non-­Muslim, have attempted to remedy negative representations of Islam and its Prophet through mainstream literary and entertainment outlets. Their aim has been to educate the broader American public about Islam and Muhammad, and to dispel enduring stereotypes about Muslims, particularly Muslim women. This chapter takes up a particular subset of such attempts to reach popular audiences: works of historical fiction about the Prophet Muhammad’s wives, particularly ʿAʾisha. Here I focus specifically on Sherry Jones’s The Jewel of Medina (2008) and Kamran Pasha’s Mother of the Believers (2009). These works tell the story of ʿAʾisha with the aim of persuading both Muslims and non-­Muslims of the egalitarian ethos of Islam and Muhammad, and to present ʿAʾisha as an inspirational example of empowerment for contemporary women.3 If, as the saying goes, behind every good man there is a great woman, then demonstrating that there is an empowered woman “behind” Muhammad becomes a centerpiece of the project to change perceptions of women in Islam and promote positive attitudes toward Muhammad and Muslims generally. Readers’ reception of these works takes on an unprecedented scope in online digital formats, exponentially broadening the field of reader and would-­be-reader participation in conversations about the novels. Indeed, all of the author statements, reader reviews, and debates discussed in this chapter played out centrally on the Internet: in the context of online newspapers, tabloids, author/publisher websites, literary and personal blogs, and Muslim discussion forums. On the Internet public responses to both books enter the lives of everyday readers with particular immediacy and proximity, multiplying the political stakes and the pressure on the authors to present ʿAʾisha in certain ways. Jones’s and Pasha’s fictional representations of ʿAʾisha are part of a longstanding tradition of using representations of Muslim women, and of Muhammad’s wives in particular, to vilify or ennoble Islam, Muhammad, and Muslims. However, these novels feature an interesting twist: they recruit the figure of Muhammad’s wife to speak for herself, and they use her as an autobiographical mouthpiece to persuade readers of her female empowerment. The novels’ representations and their reception thus provide insight into the larger interests, motivations, and anxieties of Americans in confronting Islam and Muslims after 9/11. These anxieties perhaps account for why the novels’ portrayals are symptomatic of what Andrew Shryock has termed Islamophilia: a tendency toward “constructing selectively positive images of Islam in re-

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sponse to Islamophobic propaganda.”4 Whereas Islamophobia is based on vilifying Islam as an entirely corrupt and dangerous religion, Islamophilia is inspired by the equally reactionary desire to portray Islam as wholly peaceful and faultless. Both phenomena produce distorted and simplistic images of Islam. The novels by Jones and Pasha attempt to persuade reading audiences that “true” Islam, as encapsulated in Muhammad’s life, empowers women. I argue that in this attempt both novels are shaped significantly by US discourses of Islamophobia and Islamophilia. Still, they also chart interesting new territory in internal Muslim conversations regarding the Islamic past. Possibilities for rethinking contemporary Muslims’ relationships to the Islamic past and for writing a feminist history of early Islam will, however, depend crucially on writers’ ability to transcend the polemics in which many post-­9/11 works on Islam are mired.

The Jewel of Medina Of the works examined here, The Jewel of Medina will likely be the most well known to readers because of the international controversy leading up to its initial publication. The first novel by American journalist Sherry Jones, The Jewel of Medina tells the life story of Muhammad’s favorite wife, ʿAʾisha, from the first-­person perspective of ʿAʾisha herself. The novel was originally slated for publication and release by Ballantine, part of the Random House publishing group, in August 2008. However, in May of that year, Random House announced that it was indefinitely postponing the book’s publication after receiving the reactions of a number of prepublication expert reviewers, including Denise Spellberg, author of a definitive academic book on ʿAʾisha.5 Spellberg warned that the book’s racy fictional representation of the intimate life of Muhammad and his family could “be offensive to some in the Muslim community” and “incite acts of violence by a small, radical segment.”6 Prior to Random House’s announcement, rumors that the forthcoming book was pornographic and disrespectful toward the Prophet had gone viral on the Internet. Those rumors made their way to the website of an English-­language Shiite discussion forum called Husaini Youths, where one member called for an action plan to prevent publication of the book, though that plan did not include any explicitly violent acts. Debates about the book continued in the United States through the summer and fall of 2008 without violent incident. They consisted largely of

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tempered criticism by some Muslim commentators who received little mainstream media attention. Random House’s withdrawal of the book did spark strong reactions in support of the book by vocal free-­speech advocates, political pundits, and prominent North American Muslim personalities. For example, in mainstream news and Internet media, Asra Nomani, Irshad Manji, and Salman Rushdie protested Random House’s decision, calling it an act of censorship that surrendered to radical Muslims’ obstruction of free expression.7 The controversy surrounding the book took on international proportions when in September 2008 two outspoken Muslim personalities in the United Kingdom, Anjem Choudhary and Omar Bakri, made public statements condemning the forthcoming book. Claiming that the novel dishonors the Prophet, they condoned violence as an appropriate and Islamically legislated response to it.8 After the London home of Martin Rynja, owner of the would-­be U.K. publisher of the book, was firebombed by three men that month, Gibson Square Publishing House dropped its plans for publishing the book in the United Kingdom. Subsequently, Beaufort Books, the American publisher that took on the book’s publication after Random House withdrew, finally released The Jewel of Medina in the United States in October 2008, a few weeks earlier than its original anticipated publication date. Beaufort hoped that an earlier release would put to rest what they believed were mistaken preconceived notions about the book. Debates about the novel lost steam after its release, and since then, The Jewel of Medina has been published in Serbian, Italian, German, Swedish, and Spanish editions, and has become an international best-­seller.9 Jones makes plain her agenda in writing The Jewel of Medina in dozens of interviews and statements quoted in mainstream media and on Internet venues. Her intent was to present Islam as an egalitarian and peaceful religion to audiences who incorrectly assume that Islam is violent and oppressive to women. She aimed to do so by acquainting Western audiences with intimate portraits of Muhammad and ʿAʾisha. In an interview with Nomani, Jones clarified her intent to “honor Aisha and all the wives of Muhammad by giving voice to them.”10 In particular, Jones is interested in setting the record straight about the “real” Muhammad and “pure” Islam, uncorrupted by its later history: “I hope my book will help those who read it to understand the true Islam, as Muhammad intended it.”11 According to Jones, Muhammad was a pacifist who engaged in fighting only in limited circumstances that called for self-­defense.12 Perhaps even more important for Jones is “the empowerment of women” in early Islam,

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of which ʿAʾisha is the foremost example.13 In Jones’s estimation, violence and the oppression of women are alien to “true” Islam. In Jones’s novel ʿAʾisha is a bold feminist leader and heroine, active and influential as a political advisor and warrior.14 The fulfillment of ʿAʾisha’s potential in these roles is credited to Muhammad’s attitudes toward women. Jones explains, “He was very respectful toward women and . . . he gave women rights that we didn’t even possess in this country until the early 20th century.”15 When questioned about her decision to portray Muhammad as delaying the consummation of his marriage to ʿAʾisha until she turns fourteen (though historical sources frequently report nine as the age of consummation), she replies: “The Muhammad that I came to know in my reading would not have forced a girl who was not ready.”16 Jones’s Muhammad, then, is ahead of his time in championing girls’ rights and anticipating modern sensibilities about sexual maturity and consent. In line with her views about “true” Islam, Jones attempts to depict Muhammad and ʿAʾisha as protofeminists—as seventh-­century paragons of twenty-­first-­century Western feminist ideals of women’s independence and sexual agency. Jones’s attempt to do so, however, results in paradoxical messages about early Islam’s treatment of women, leaving the reader to wonder whether Muhammad and ʿAʾisha are representatives of “true” Islam or its subverters. The Jewel of Medina often portrays Muhammad and ʿAʾisha as rising above a context and culture that generally subjugates women. Regarding ʿAʾisha, Jones says, “She transcended that cultural limitation of being considered the property of men to become this powerful, empowered woman.”17 It is perhaps for this reason that Jones constructed the story around the theme of ʿAʾisha controlling her own destiny as a woman. Jones explains: “because of the culture she was in,” ʿAʾisha was “wanting to be saved,” but later comes to realize that “no one can do that for her, that she must do it for herself.”18 In the novel ʿAʾisha defies the norms of early Islamic society, freeing herself and living to tell her story. Jones’s depiction of ʿAʾisha is reminiscent of the long tradition in Western literature of portraying Muslim women as victims or escapees of the oppressive bonds of their cultures.19 Since the late twentieth century and particularly since 9/11, tell-­all accounts of Muslim women escaping their supposed captivity have emerged as an especially profitable genre for American publishers. Farzaneh Milani observes that in recent autobiographical works, Muslim women’s captivity is frequently embedded in a hostage narrative. This hostage narrative is a “fascinating twist on the familiar theme of women’s captivity in the Islamic world” in popular English-­language literature, where captivity is “no longer an image

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foisted upon women,” but rather corroborated by a Muslim woman’s own “self-­perception.”20 This narrative relies on “the authority of personal experience” and the narrator’s “urgent plea to be liberated.”21 As market trends in US book sales indicate, American audiences have an insatiable appetite for such personal tales of suffering and imprisonment followed by redemption and rescue, and a fascination with the self-­narrated confinement and misery of Muslim women in particular.22 Jones’s interest in ʿAʾisha and her initial desire to write The Jewel of Medina appear to have been propelled by her concern for the oppression of Muslim women. Jones indicates that she first became interested in the topic of women and Islam during the post-9/11 US invasion of Afghanistan, when she learned of the brutal treatment of women by the Taliban and became disturbed by it “as a feminist.”23 During the course of the research she commenced on Muhammad, Jones explains, she became psychologically captivated by the triumphant figure of ʿAʾisha. In describing her interest, she states: “I didn’t choose Aisha; she chose me,” “I couldn’t stop thinking about Aisha,” and “I was entranced.”24 In ʿAʾisha, Jones sees a young woman “whose destiny was controlled by men, but who was able to rise above this and become this highly accomplished woman.”25 Enchanted by her vision of a woman who overcame her oppressive circumstances, Jones set out to write the story of ʿAʾisha’s self-­empowerment. Jones hopes that her readers will themselves “be inspired to take control of their own destinies.”26 In the book’s prologue, ʿAʾisha addresses women in the contemporary world using the second person: “Where you are, men still want to hide the women away. You, in the now, they cover with shrouds or with lies about being inferior.”27 ʿAʾisha passes her story on so that women today will fight for their lives, as she did for her own.28 Jones thus enlists ʿAʾisha to encourage today’s women to uplift themselves. As the novel unfolds Jones constructs the protofeminist triumphs of ʿAʾisha using a set of representational inverses that emphasize her accomplishments against the dreary backdrop of her and other Muslim women’s generalized subjugation and confinement. It is as if ʿAʾisha’s empowerment comes against impossible odds, through her unlikely defiance of norms that treat women as objects. Thus, ʿAʾisha’s hostage narrative is in full force throughout the novel. The world in which ʿAʾisha struggles to gain her freedom is one ruled by lascivious, controlling men who treat women like property and are fixated on family honor. Girls of marriageable age are secluded in their parents’ houses according to the practice of purdah (a Persian and Urdu term connoting Afghan and South Asian practices of

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gender segregation inserted into the story by Jones). In the time between her engagement and marriage to the Prophet, ʿAʾisha is confined to her parents’ home and is outraged at her experience of being “buried alive.”29 She dreams of being rescued by Safwan (her original betrothed, another fictional addition inserted by Jones) and free to “make my own choices.”30 On the day of her wedding to the Prophet, ʿAʾisha dreads “a life of servitude with . . . an old man” and bemoans being treated like chattel, “as though I were a sheep or goat fatted for this day.”31 As she walks with her bridegroom, her wedding dress feels to her “like chains around my feet.”32 Though she expects greater mobility as a married woman, ʿAʾisha continues to experience confinement. When she is forbidden from fighting alongside Muslim men in battles, she is overcome again by the “feelings of entrapment and helplessness” familiar from her time in purdah.33 Her incarceration is only intensified by dynamics inside the harem of the Prophet, where she fears spending her “life in servitude” to the head wife, or hatun (another insertion of a foreign concept, from Turkish rather than Arab culture).34 The self-­narration of ʿAʾisha’s captivity has the important function of making her self-­empowerment, and Muhammad’s support of it, seem extraordinary and like an exception to the norms of her society. At the age of six, ʿAʾisha is already a budding feminist reflecting on the cruel experience of women in her time.35 She is initially hopeful about the prospect of marrying Muhammad, observing that, unlike other men, he does not treat girls and women like mere chattel.36 On the night of their marriage, seeing the fear in his young, twelve-­year-­old bride’s eyes, Muhammad opts not to have sex with ʿAʾisha yet and instead begins teaching her how to use a sword.37 ʿAʾisha reminds the reader that before Muhammad brought Islam to her people, “women were as chattel. Now we could inherit property, testify in hearings, and write provisions for divorce into our wedding contracts.”38 These feminist victories, though, are tempered by the imprisoning realities and responsibilities of being a wife of the Prophet. When Muhammad receives the revelation of qurʾanic verse 33:53, instituting more stringent requirements for modesty upon his wives (the use of a curtain, or hijab, when relating to men), ʿAʾisha fears her “imprisonment.”39 Though relieved to learn that the curtain will not totally inhibit her public mobility, she is again dismayed to learn that the wives have been commanded to cover their bodies “head to toe, every inch, except for a single eye.”40 Covered in her restrictive garments, ʿAʾisha complains of being

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“trapped by the hijab” and of her life “in a cage.”41 She regrets her secluded life as the Prophet’s wife, and feels as if she is confined in “the dark, cold walls of a tomb.”42 Despite her dismay and protest, the Prophet continues to take multiple new wives, though he claims that he does so only as a statesman.43 Eventually, ʿAʾisha comes to the awareness that life for the wives of the Prophet is “anything but free.”44 In an angry confrontation with the Prophet, she accuses him of undergoing a “transformation from a liberator of women into an oppressor of them.”45 Frustrated, she fantasizes about fleeing her community and its “traditions of male superiority.”46 These fantasies lead her to partake in a plot hatched by Safwan to run away together (another of Jones’s fictional additions). In the end, ʿAʾisha’s triumph comes from the mature realization that the most freedom she can hope for will come from learning to live strategically with patriarchy.47 She can become free only by accepting her proper role as the Prophet’s true wife, one who respects his authority and decisions, earns his trust and respect, and is rewarded by the ability to advise and influence him.48 ʿAʾisha comes up with a plan for a business to empower the women of the harem to earn their own money through paid work as bridal beauticians.49 She also becomes involved in the Prophet’s military strategizing. In one battle, she even leads her co-­wives and other Medinan women to defend themselves, teaching them how to use swords and rallying the women warriors from the Prophet’s own pulpit.50 After the wives’ jealous schemes cause the Prophet to withdraw from them for a month and offer them a divorce, Muhammad entreats ʿAʾisha to make a choice about her marriage for herself. The Prophet asserts that he has never wanted to enslave any women or force them to marry him. He tells ʿAʾisha, “Without the freedom to choose your own destiny, you are nothing but a slave, Aisha. . . . You are free, Aisha. To choose.” 51 She realizes then that “with Muhammad, I was truly free—to speak, to dream, to make mistakes, to be myself,” and she chooses to remain married.52 At the end of the story, Muhammad acknowledges that ʿAʾisha is a courageous fighter who has saved his life, and he bequeaths to her a special sword.53 After his death, she resolves to use the sword courageously and is free at last to choose her destiny.54

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Mother of the Believers Similar scenes of woe and triumph characterize the life of ʿAʾisha in Mother of the Believers, the first novel by the American Muslim screenwriter Kamran Pasha. Published in April 2009, roughly six months after The Jewel of Medina, Pasha’s book is presented as “the story of the birth of Islam” from the perspective of ʿAʾisha.55 Given the firestorm over The Jewel of Medina, Pasha anticipated angry responses to his own book and chose to address them preemptively in advance of its publication. He made clarifications about the book through online press interviews and on his own website and blog, using these venues to establish his credibility as a Muslim and to state his intentions in writing the book.56 Pasha’s strategy was largely effective: Mother of the Believers was met with far less suspicion and controversy and with more positive reviews than Jones’s book. Many of Pasha’s goals appear similar to those of Jones: to defend Islam and to correct American perceptions about Muhammad and the treatment of Muslim women. He hopes to “begin a much-­needed dialogue about the true nature of Islam” and “to spread the message of Islam as a religion of love and beauty.”57 As a faithful Muslim, Pasha also aims at “increasing love for Islam and our Holy Prophet.”58 His self-­positioning as an insider of the Muslim community distinguishes his agenda in its explicitly twofold platform to persuade both Muslims and non-­Muslims of his personal interpretations of Islam. The more muted reaction to Pasha’s book is possibly due to the politics of identity and authenticity. His position as a male practicing Muslim perhaps grants him a measure of authority to speak for Islam that Jones does not possess. Pasha’s overall strategy, like Jones’s, is to portray ʿAʾisha as an empowered woman, as a “scholar, a poet, a statesman, and a warrior.”59 Pasha does not hesitate in identifying both ʿAʾisha and Muhammad as protofeminist figures. He writes, “Aisha’s life single-­handedly challenges the prevalent stereotype of the oppressed and submissive Muslim woman, and she remains a role model for Muslim feminists today.”60 Pasha hopes to convince readers that women are “the heart” of Islam and that “Islam represented a quantum leap forward in women’s rights,” granting them property and inheritance rights “1,200 years before” the West did.61 Through ʿAʾisha’s character, Pasha hopes to demonstrate “the reverence for the sacred feminine in Islam.”62 Pasha writes, “Prophet Muhammad was by all accounts a feminist,” pointing out that according to ʿAʾisha, Muhammad was gentle toward

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women and uniquely compassionate and sensitive toward their concerns.63 He was forward-­thinking, and like ʿAʾisha, he is a role model for today; he was “centuries ahead of the men of his time in his attitudes toward women, and . . . his compassion for women is exactly the model that Muslims in the 21st century need to emulate today.”64 Addressing non-­Muslims, Pasha defends the Prophet against attacks that point to the Prophet’s military engagement, polygamous unions, and marriage to the young ʿAʾisha as evidence that the Prophet was a violent and lascivious pedophile. He states: “I am seeking to end the spiteful attacks on the Messenger of God (SAWS) by pointing out that his attackers are simply bigots who are twisting history.”65 Because he is “a practicing Muslim,” he feels it is his “duty” to do so.66 He explains that polygamy was “a normal reality of life in a world where women outnumbered men due to the daily battles between tribes,” and that the Prophet engaged in the practice in order to aid women.67 In wartime contexts in which widowed women had lost their male providers, the practice of Muslim men taking widows as additional wives provided sustenance and security to vulnerable members of society who would have otherwise faced poverty and hardship. Pasha likewise seeks to normalize ʿAʾisha’s young age at the time of her marriage to the Prophet. He clarifies the reason why he deliberately depicts ʿAʾisha’s marriage as occurring when she is nine years old instead of later: “I have chosen to directly face the controversy over Aisha’s age by using the most contentious account. . . . I have done this is to show that it is foolish to project modern values onto another time and world.”68 He explains that in a time and place with low life expectancy, “early marriage was not a social issue—it was a matter of survival.”69 Thus, he argues, ʿAʾisha’s young age would not have been “controversial or even noteworthy” in its context.70 Overall, Pasha is intent on sending the message to both non-­Muslims and Muslims that Islam “stands for justice and human equality.”71 He laments that after the Prophet’s death Muslim “men started rolling back the reforms he began,” and that this culminated in the “misogyny in modern Muslim counties,” which “finds its origins in culture rather than religion.”72 Pasha observes that in the present moment “both Muslims and non-­Muslims cling to foolish and backwards interpretations of the Qurʾan,” and he calls on Muslims to “re-­examine the original scriptures and find the original meanings as the Prophet, a man of progressive vision, would have seen them.”73 In other words, it is not the core of Islam that is the problem, but rather modern-­day corruptions of it; for Pasha,

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“Islam needs to be rediscovered, not changed” in order to bring justice to women.74 Mother of the Believers is written in the form of ʿAʾisha’s memoir as narrated to her nephew Abdullah ibn Zubayr. The memoir begins with the narration of ʿAʾisha’s own birth, an occasion which ʿAʾisha uses to remind the reader that the Prophet outlawed the practice of female infanticide.75 She is already a firebrand as a child, mouthing off at the enemies of Islam, attempting to rescue Muslims in danger, and spying on the Quraysh.76 When ʿAʾisha and Muhammad consummate their marriage, ʿAʾisha feels loved: “There was no fear. There was no pain. There was only light.”77 As if to remind the reader of Pasha’s purpose for the novel, ʿAʾisha tells her readers that this work is a corrective to male-­centered history: “History follows the deeds of men, but often ignores the women who influenced momentous events.”78 Throughout her memoir, women are heroes and history-­makers: Khadija provides unfailing support to Muhammad and is “the heart of Islam”;79 Sumaya becomes the first martyr of Islam;80 Umar’s sister Fatima defies her brother by converting to Islam in secret, and it is her recitation of the Qurʾan that leads to his own conversion;81 Safiyya the Jewess bravely defects from her people and converts to Islam;82 Umm Fadl, Nusayba, and Umm Sulaym courageously take up arms in conflicts with the enemies of Islam;83 and ʿAʾisha herself leaps out to save the Prophet from an assassination attempt.84 ʿAʾisha is also keen to praise the Prophet for his treatment of women and his peaceful nature. She recalls that he “was not a violent man. I had never seen him strike anyone.”85 He was a “man who hated fighting, whose message had always been one of peace.”86 He was dragged into battle only for the survival of his people.87 She repeatedly reminds her reader that his multiple marriages were conducted for diplomatic reasons or out of compassion for war widows.88 In a scene in which ʿAʾisha comes upon a man who claims he will be killed for running away with a girl against her family’s wishes, she reminds readers that the Prophet had tried to “eradicate the practice [of ] . . . ‘honor’ killings.”89 Muhammad even enjoys helping out in domestic tasks; ʿAʾisha recalls that his “admitted love of the company of women had less to do with sexual hunger than with an innate comfort with their feminine nature.”90 When the Prophet recites verses 33:32–33 and 33:53 about modesty requirements for the wives, he speaks “with the unyielding authority of the leader of a nation, not with the gentle tones of a family patriarch.”91 This is an important detail related to ʿAʾisha’s regretful admission that because she flirted with other men to make the Prophet jealous, she is partly responsible for the scandals that

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occasioned the verses’ revelation. The verses were thus the consequence of other people’s mistakes, and not in accordance with the Prophet’s own wishes. Though Pasha’s stated intent is to tell the stories of “powerful Muslim women who shatter the old stereotypes of the veil and the harem,” Mother of the Believers evokes many of the same themes of captivity found in The Jewel of Medina: ʿAʾisha’s comparison of her circumstances to slavery and death, and expressions of anguish at being unable to control her life.92 When her marriage to the Prophet is arranged, she feels “rage and despair that my own family could bargain away my life so casually.”93 As her mother helps her into her wedding dress, ʿAʾisha feels like her mother is “putting a shroud over me.”94 She reflects on the qurʾanic revelation that allows Muhammad to marry Zaynab, of whom she is jealous, and weeps at “the injustice of life and the cruelties of womanhood.”95 She experiences the veil as “a shroud for a living corpse.”96 Because of the revelation of verses 33:32–33 and 33:53, she regrets that “my life was to become a prison,” and the “bars of my jail would follow me everywhere and were unbreakable.”97 Feeling jealous of her co-­wives and neglected by the Prophet, she relates, “I felt my angry heart scream at the injustice of my life.”98 She laments that her “beauty [is] hidden from the world” and her “sharp mind [is] unable to sparkle in the open light of the sun.”99 However, like Jones, Pasha also narrates ʿAʾisha’s triumphs. She sets out to become a noteworthy woman revered by history.100 A happy result of her “caged existence” is the opportunity to become closer to the Prophet, who engages her political inquiries and allows her to accompany him to battles and diplomatic excursions.101 She later regrets her part in the bloodshed of the Battle of the Camel against Ali, but she points out that in going to war she becomes the only one of the wives to lead a battle, and she is able to leave the Arabian peninsula for the first time in her life.102 Though she drops out of political life after her defeat and remains confined to Medina as the Muslim conquests expand, she perseveres and empowers herself: “Since there was nothing I could do to change things, I decided to make the most of the role that was given to me.”103 She becomes a teacher, and Muslims seek out her advice and her knowledge about the Prophet. Thus ʿAʾisha valiantly endures her trials and leaves her mark on history as a key transmitter of Islamic teachings. Finally, ʿAʾisha leaves her reflections on the true essence of Islam for the benefit of posterity in a manner particularly suited to the concerns of twenty-­first-­century Muslims after 9/11; indeed, her fears about the future corruption of that essence foreshadow the tragedies of the reader’s con-

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temporary moment. She recalls that Muhammad “had always preached a religion of moderation. The stubborn resistance of some Muslims to common sense and their obsession with the letter of the law while ignoring its spirit has always been the bane of our community.”104 She fears that such “dogmatism and extremism may only worsen with time.”105 Still, she remains hopeful at the end of her life: “No matter how many false preachers arise to spread death and corruption in the name of Islam, the true message of our beloved teacher Muhammad ibn Abdullah, the Prophet of God, will never be lost. The message of unity and love for all mankind.”106 ʿAʾisha thus concludes her memoir with an implicit exhortation to her readers to carry out her legacy by remembering Muhammad’s authentic message of human equality and peace.

Feminist Constructs Both Jones’s and Pasha’s attempts to portray Muhammad and ʿAʾisha as protofeminists are informed by understandings of women’s liberation defined by Western feminist norms of the twenty-­first century. Indeed, Jones personally identifies with ʿAʾisha, stating in one interview, “She embodies the woman that I would like to be.”107 Even as Pasha opposes the projection of contemporary values onto the past by bigots who accuse the Prophet of abusing women, he engages in his own projection of twenty-­ first-­century American feminist values onto ʿAʾisha in the interest of depicting her as an empowered woman. Both authors write into the character of ʿAʾisha their own feminist sensibilities, according to which veiling and gender segregation constitute confinement, and an empowered woman is one who challenges her confinement, strives for self-­determination, and takes up public roles in male-­dominated spheres. In The Jewel of Medina, whose title refers to ʿAʾisha’s sword, ʿAʾisha is empowered mostly as a warrior and leader. In Mother of the Believers she is most of all a mother and teacher for the Muslim community.108 The feminist norms informing these novels are also framed at times and to varying degrees by the conventions of the popular romance novel. Some reviewers of Jones’s book disparaged it for being “a second-­rate bodice ripper,” drawing defensive responses in online comments from romance novel readers.109 Rather than participating in such disparagement, I opt to treat romance conventions as a key to understanding these novels. According to Pamela Regis, the romance novel is “a work of prose fiction that tells the

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story of the courtship and betrothal of one or more heroines” and took on its modern form in English beginning in the mid-­eighteenth century.110 The genre of the romance novel is affected by its modern emergence at a time when Europe saw the rise of a belief in companionate marriage and “affective individualism,” the idea that the individual’s fulfillment is the purpose of life.111 According to Regis, the romance novel’s key narrative elements include the initial portrait of a society that is “in some way flawed” and “always oppresses the heroine and hero,” which often leads to an external or psychic barrier to their union.112 The heroine struggles against “the laws, dangers, and limitations” imposed upon her and the hero by social and often religious demands.113 In overcoming the barrier to their union, the she “moves from a state of bondage or constraint to a state of freedom.”114 Romance novels narrate the heroine’s overcoming of the barrier through the narrative element of a “recognition” in which the heroine “is recognized for who . . . she truly is.”115 Frequently this occurs when she comes to “know herself” better and is able to move past her “unsound perceptions” so that she “sees the hero clearly and realizes her love for him.”116 According to Regis, the freedom she achieves by the end of the novel is often “provisional,” “limited,” or “pragmatic” rather than “absolute”; her freedom remains constrained by the literal or symbolic state.117 However provisional this freedom is, though, it is still depicted as a victory because the heroine achieves freedom from the barrier to her union with the hero.118 These narrative elements help to account for many of the plot scenarios and forms of expression in Jones’s and Pasha’s novels. Therefore, we can understand the novels by Jones and Pasha through contemporary feminist norms that are sometimes conveyed by way of romance novel conventions. For example, Jones’s ʿAʾisha is fixated on the ability to control her destiny and make choices for her life.119 In both novels ʿAʾisha dreams of wandering free in the world120 and resents having no choice about initially marrying Muhammad. It is only later, after ʿAʾisha matures as a more self-­aware woman, that her marriage is a truly loving union with the Prophet. Perhaps most significantly, in both novels ʿAʾisha is tortured by confinement, viewing the restriction of her mobility as a form of imprisonment and death, with the veil figuring as both her prison and shroud. Jones’s ʿAʾisha wishes for the sun to touch her skin and complains about the restrictive quality of her garments.121 This reflects the common fixation of Western women on the supposed physical suffocation and discomfort of the veil. Western feminist values conveyed through romance conventions are

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the guiding force in the narration of ʿAʾisha’s response to veiling. The projection of those values onto ʿAʾisha demands that her character be fixated on the veil and that she experience it as deathly entrapment—­perhaps the only response that will persuade US readers of her empowered mindset. As Marwa Elnaggar argues in her review of The Jewel of Medina, it appears that “the only possible reaction of a woman who is supposed to be described as a brave heroine with a fiery spirit . . . is obviously to see [the veil] as ‘oppressive.’ To suggest otherwise, it seems, would mean being disloyal to Western culture and ideals.”122 If ʿAʾisha were to experience the veil in some other way, she might appear to suffer from the false consciousness of a victimized woman who, duped by the oppressive customs of her culture, does not recognize her own subjugation. In that case ʿAʾisha would tolerate her own oppression and live as a pawn of men—a position hardly becoming of an empowered woman who has escaped her cultural oppression.123 As Mohja Kahf observes by drawing on the work of Marnia Lazreg, in Western literature on Arab and Muslim women, women’s roles are often limited to those of victim or escapee of their culture, and an escapee character attached to the conventions or men of her culture is always portrayed as a pawn of men.124 The pawn is the only possible portrayal because according to mainstream Western feminist norms, such attachments could not possibly be self-­willed by a woman who has truly escaped her culture’s oppression of women. On the other hand, both novels do succeed partially in moving beyond the categories of victim, escapee, or pawn. Both portrayals depict a progression in ʿAʾisha’s approaches to self-­determination as she grows into a more mature woman, accepts her role as the Prophet’s wife, and finds agency despite limited choices for herself. In both cases, ʿAʾisha’s empowerment does not rely solely on entering the public sphere and assuming male roles. In line with romance novel conventions, both versions of ʿAʾisha bargain with patriarchy and resolve to make the most of a limited set of roles available to women. The real victory is in achieving a loving union with Muhammad, who respects her for her intelligence and competence. Jones’s ʿAʾisha gains Muhammad’s respect by deferring to his authority, which enables her to advise and influence him. She also trains as a warrior and rallies other women warriors to protect the Muslim community. Pasha’s ʿAʾisha receives a political education from Muhammad by taking advantage of her close access to him. After his death she becomes politically engaged as a warrior herself, and even after her defeat she finds fulfillment in using her intimate knowledge of Islam to teach and mother the Muslim community.

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Moderating Muslims The portrayal of sexuality in both novels is central to their authors’ agenda of countering negative mainstream assumptions about Muslims. Jones’s The Jewel of Medina depicts ʿAʾisha trying to seduce Muhammad and includes references to her nude body.125 It mentions Muhammad’s sexual desire and his having intercourse with his consorts, and it narrates (without much detail) the consummation of ʿAʾisha’s marriage.126 The Jewel of Medina also narrates her romantic encounters with Safwan in physical detail.127 Presumably it was some of these depictions that prompted Spellberg, fairly or unfairly, to call the novel “soft core pornography”129 and accuse Jones of turning ʿAʾisha into a “sex object.”130 Spellberg echoes some Muslims’ reactions to the book: one Muslim commenter on a romance novel blog notes that attributing to ʿAʾisha desire for Safwan is “a huge sin” because it projects adulterous desire onto a revered figure who was exonerated by the Qurʾan against such an accusation, and one conservative Muslim online forum condemns the novel for representing “the mother of the believers with the most nasty and reprehensible descriptions.”130 Jones has denied that there is anything pornographic about her novel and has repeated that her intention is only to honor her characters.131 Pasha’s more subdued sexual details met with tepid responses by Muslims, some positive132 and others negative.133 Mother of the Believers refers generally to the Prophet’s intercourse with his consorts and to his sexual desire;134 narrates with little physical detail the consummation of ʿAʾisha’s marriage;135 depicts ʿAʾisha’s mildly flirtatious exchanges with other men;136 and frequently narrates the physical seductions of the character Hind in slightly more explicit detail, including a same-­sex encounter.137 Pasha maintains that his “very light treatment” of sexuality is “true to Islamic history”; he notes that candid discussions of sex were not unusual prior to the modern period, when Muslims internalized Victorian prudery.138 It seems that Jones’s and Pasha’s depictions of sexuality aim at representing Muhammad and his wives as embodied and flawed human beings in order to make their characters more relatable to readers, and thereby to normalize them. To be fair, the authors must be granted a certain amount of leeway given the genre. Biographical fiction, which relies on a mix of history and fantasy, has seen a steady upswing in recent decades, as evidenced by the spectacular success of authors such as Phillipa Gregory.139 As scholars of autobiography point out, the line that “divides the autobiographical from the biographical, the historical from the fictional” is never

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hard and fast.140 Some of the most heated debates about these two novels take up the question of whether it is at all appropriate to present the stories of Muhammad and his wives and companions using fiction and fantasy. Such questioning is common to discussions of historical fiction, particularly when works take up religious figures. However, when it comes to Muhammad and early Islamic figures, the fictional presentation of history takes on uniquely politicized dimensions and meanings. In the current political climate of the United States, these figures are not merely dead; rather, they are being repeatedly exhumed in order to put Islam on trial. Thus the novels warrant a critical analysis of the literary license taken. In the course of Pasha’s novel, we find that ʿAʾisha comes to recognize some of the “darkness” of the manipulative Hind in herself and realizes that Muhammad is “a man and nothing more.”141 Pasha explains that he intended to emphasize the humanity of his characters: “They were not plastic saints, but flesh and blood human beings just like us.”142 In defending her portrayal of ʿAʾisha’s sexuality, Jones explains her purpose: “It wasn’t to degrade Aisha in any way. It was to show her humanity. If we never are tempted, how can we serve as an example to others?”143 The authors thus aim to humanize Muslim figures who have been vilified in an Islamophobic climate, hoping that American audiences might see themselves in these Muslim characters. The characters are sexually desirous and active, tempted and seduced; they bear no resemblance to American perceptions of the puritanical Muslim extremist. Both novels portray Muhammad and ʿAʾisha as exemplary “moderate” Muslims, strikingly similar to those Muslims today who are associated with a peaceful and “women-­friendly” form of Islam that is perceived as the least threatening to mainstream America.144 Jones depicts Muhammad as a moral, reasonable, and peaceful man; Pasha’s ʿAʾisha endorses a “religion of moderation” while condemning dogmatism, literalism, and extremism. Jones sees the ability to portray the humanity of ʿAʾisha and Muhammad as a victory for Muslims who support freedom of expression regarding matters of faith. Jones points out that discussions of her novel have provided a forum for “the voice of moderate Muslims. Here’s a good opportunity for moderate Muslims . . . to defend their right . . . to read the book.”145 The novels’ depictions of Muhammad and ʿAʾisha as sexual and flawed are thus linked to an agenda to portray and promote so-­called moderate forms of Islam in opposition to those forms deemed extremist and violent. The agenda to present “moderate” Islam as the true Islam through the mechanism of stories of Muhammad’s wives, makes evident the politi-

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cized apparatus of representation that undergirds their telling.146 In the rush to normalize Islam and Muslims for the American public, female Muslim figures become accomplices in presenting a contrived portrait of Islam that may prove just as coercive as Islamophobic representations, since it is Islamophobic representations that set the terms for that portrayal. I do not claim here that “moderate” Islam is a false representation or that it does not exist in reality, but rather claim that these works portray it via an ideologically loaded system of representation bounded by coercive US discourses on an Islam forced into binaries—what Mahmood Mamdani has called “good” (peaceable and politically acceptable) and “bad” (fanatical and politically shunned) Islam.147 These works’ tendency toward Islamophilia is ultimately harmful to Muslims, reinforcing a system of representation that restricts possibilities for self-­expression. As Shryock has pointed out, Islamophilia essentializes Islam much in the same way that Islamophobia does, producing an inverted mirror image of Islam to serve a political agenda. While the authors may not intentionally participate in these discourses, they write in a context already bounded by them.148 These powerful discourses demand conformity to an ideologically limited set of representational choices, making intentionality a moot point. In these novels Muslim women are represented through the eyes of others, often according to “the prejudices and expectations of an imagined, non-­Muslim observer.”149 In the process of seeking politically expedient ways to normalize Islam and Muslims and represent them as relatable, these portraits of ʿAʾisha as a “moderate” (“good”) Muslim inadvertently create a caricaturized image of her and also end up marginalizing other (“bad”) Muslim women, that is, women whose stories may be more complicated and less marketable because they fail to conform to the desires of readers and their expectations for what constitutes women’s empowerment. This hinders the possibilities for a fuller and more nuanced representation of Muslims that is unencumbered by ideological demands.

Self-­Narration and “Original” Islam The ideological framing of The Jewel of Medina and Mother of the Believers surfaces in two powerful rhetorical devices common to these works, both of which manipulate the reader into accepting their credibility. The first device involves the use of biographical portraits and fictional first-­person narration to establish authenticity, real-­life veracity, and the intimacy

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of apparently firsthand storytelling. As Milani has observed of popular autobiographies of Muslim women published in the United States, the firsthand account carries “the authority of personal experience, shares an insider’s perspective and commands more trust and legitimacy” than a third-­person account.150 Marketing of such books presents them as authentic, seldom-­told tales of Muslim women. The works entice readers by offering them an intimate glimpse of what is really behind the veils of Muslim women, so to speak. Biographical portraits appear to lift the veil of mainstream male-­centered histories that have effaced women, and “autobiographical” fiction supposedly grants Muslim women what they have long been denied, at least according to the perception of many non-­Muslim readers and even some Muslims: the opportunity to speak for themselves. One female Muslim reviewer of Mother of the Believers writes, “That Pasha gave Aʾisha her own voice is so refreshing in a world where the Muslim woman is always spoken about, spoken to, and seldom heard.”151 A potentially insidious element of this is the use of Muslim women as mouthpieces to verify and authenticate the authors’ ideological representations. The only thing more compelling than a story about a liberated Muslim woman, it seems, is the story of one who appears to narrate it herself. A second rhetorical device employed in these works is the reference to early Islam to tell the story of “real” Islam. Relying on the premise that the purest and most authentic form of Islam is the earliest Islam of Muhammad’s time, Jones and Pasha are keen to convince readers that “real” Islam is a religion of peace and women’s empowerment. Jones states that her hope is that readers will learn “the origins of Islam and Muhammad’s intentions for the religion, and recognize that violence, hatred, and oppression of women is not Islamic.”152 Pasha asserts that his novel “is based heavily on early Islamic sources” in order to demonstrate that women’s rights and peace “can be deduced from the earliest teachings of my faith.”153 Such idealization of early Islam is certainly nothing new; indeed, it mirrors most Muslims’ continuing conviction that early Islam is its purest and most exemplary form. In the case of the novels, however, the authority attached to the early Islamic past becomes instrumental in constructing the authors’ own presentation of “true” Islam. This second device results in another striking effect: the dehistoricization of Islam. As Shryock observes of works that respond to Islamophobia, a focus on “the origins and essences of Islam” often has the effect of removing Islam from history.154 Likewise, Moustafa Bayoumi has pointed out the tendency of popular books about Islam by so-­called moderate Mus-

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lims to claim that Islam was originally a religion of justice and equality and was only later corrupted by extremists who distorted the religion to serve their own interests. The “hijacking” of Islam by extremists, then, figures as the sole cause of “what went wrong” with it. This premise discounts the authenticity and legitimacy of forms of Islam in later Muslim history, as if to suggest that later Islam is not real Islam.155 In addition, non-­Muslims appear to be innocent bystanders to Islam’s descent into violence and oppression, as if they have no relationship at all to violence in the name of Islam.156 As it relates to the works discussed here, the implication is that non-­Muslims are passive witnesses to the oppressive treatment of Muslim women. Such an implication flies in the face of the long history, documented masterfully by Leila Ahmed, of Western colonial and neocolonial discourses on Muslim women that have coopted feminism as a tool of Western domination; those discourses have hindered and continue today to obstruct the progress of gender reform in Muslim communities.157 The result is the erasure of the historical role of the Western gaze on Muslim women—the very gaze that continues to create the market for such books in the first place.

Storytelling and Feminist Historiography Finally, I would be remiss in discussing popular novels about a central female figure in Islamic history without addressing the most frustrating consequence of ʿAʾisha’s portrayal in them for Muslim feminist readers: the stunting of the very possibilities these works suggest for changing contemporary Muslims’ memory of the Islamic past. One can only imagine how much more productive the novels’ impact on Muslim views of the exemplary past could have been had it not been for the constraints placed on the development of ʿAʾisha’s character because of the ideological demands of Islamophilia. If the novels had not been encumbered by those demands, they may have helped to contribute to the development of a feminist historiography that gives women’s voices greater prominence in early Islamic history. Instead, the exaggerated and forced depictions of ʿAʾisha’s life divest the portraits of the full integrity necessary to make an alternative history of her life credible. The historical narrative of early Islam features significant contributions by many notable female transmitters and companions of the Prophet, among whom ʿAʾisha was foremost. The narration of Islamic history has always been tied to storytelling by both men and women.158 Still, as is the

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case for much of history generally, the narrative of early Islamic history does not fully furnish women’s viewpoints and experiences during the time of Muhammad. The problem of such gaps lingers for many Muslim feminist thinkers and writers. The development of the genre of historical fiction about early Islam is of particular interest as one avenue for developing a feminist historiography that amplifies the voices of women in that history. However, a major challenge to the feminist historiography of Islam is posed by Muslim sensitivities about the veracity of the Hadith—accounts attributed to the Prophet and his companions, which were authenticated and canonized by scholarly authorities during the ninth and tenth centuries. Many Muslims today continue to defend passionately the credibility and authority of those accounts. Even though modernist Muslims and their intellectual heirs have raised the issue of the Qurʾan’s preeminence over the Hadith due to the latter’s plausible fallibility as human transmission, many Muslims have objected to the notion of editing or discounting portions of the Hadith and revising understandings of the Sunna (the life example of the Prophet Muhammad), which is substantiated by the Hadith. While there are a number of works of fiction by Muslims that take up early Islam, the genre remains fraught territory that often provokes discomfort among Muslims who hold dear the documented traditions of the Prophet and the first Muslims. Any discussion of historical fiction about the Prophet’s wives must include mention of two important precursors to the novels by Pasha and Jones that were authored by Muslim women in the twentieth century: Wives of the Prophet (1961), by Bint al-­Shati (the pen name of ʿAʾisha Abd al-­Rahman), and Far from Madina (1991), by Assia Djebar. Though written in entirely different historical and political contexts, both books are examples of widely read works about the lives of the Prophet’s wives that employ a literary form. Bint al-­Shati’s work, though not fiction in the conventional sense, features biographical portraits marked by a narrative style that accommodates her “visualization” of the stories of the wives from her own perspective.159 Writing in the context of mid-­century debates on modernist Islam in Egypt, Bint al-­Shati closely adhered to authoritative historical sources but filled in plausible thoughts and emotions of the wives that are absent from those sources. Djebar wrote Far from Madina in the context of rising Islamist movements in Algeria in the early 1990s; she refers to her book as a novel. Djebar imagines events and women’s experiences not mentioned in historical sources, employing an unusual fusion of historical accounts and fictive narrative rendered by multiple female nar-

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rators speaking in the third and first person to fill in the gaps of a history that has effaced the presence of women at key moments.160 Reminiscent of Bint al-­Shati’s and Djebar’s works is the post-­9/11 volume Untold: A History of the Wives of Prophet Muhammad (2010) by Tamam Kahn, which consists of a combination of expository prose and poetry to reflect Kahn’s meditations on the wives’ experiences. Though they employ different degrees of fictional embellishment, all three works, along with the novels by Pasha and Jones, blur the lines between history and fiction in telling the stories of Muhammad’s wives by incorporating supplemental details imagined by the authors.161 As one might expect, such approaches to the retelling of this history have met with resistance from some Muslims and in certain cases from non-­Muslim historians. This is wholly predictable given that, as Kahn points out, the stated (if not actual) “purpose of the hadith collections is to prevent embellishment.”162 Spellberg, for instance, accuses Jones of engaging in a “deliberate misinterpretation of history” and a “fallacious representation of a very real woman’s life” in The Jewel of Medina.163 A Muslim reviewer of Mother of the Believers worries that readers “may come away from this book without being able to distinguish what was real or not.”164 In her view, “it is not up to the author to add his own elements to true accounts.”165 Responding to such objections, Jones states that “there is so little known about [the wives] and their personalities. So I gave personalities to these women, whether they were actually like that or not.”166 The novel, she explains, is “my vision of what things would have been like based on my own experiences and my own research and my own intuition and observations of human nature.”167 She defends her imagination of ʿAʾisha’s life by arguing that authoritative Muslim accounts are not “rooted in unalterable fact,” but are “an appropriation by men—by her male biographers. It is all interpretation. . . . My novel is simply another interpretation.”168 Pasha disagrees with the claim that the genre of his novel is blasphemous, maintaining that “artistic storytelling” has always been part of Muslims’ heritage. Pasha refers to the Hadith itself as storytelling: “Many of the hadiths . . . are historically questionable, . . . but they have been passed on for generations exactly because they are powerful stories that appeal to the human heart.”169 Both Jones and Pasha invite readers to write their own novels about ʿAʾisha’s life, expressing the hope that their work will inspire many more fictional works about ʿAʾisha.170 Whatever criticism Jones and Pasha have received for their novels, their understandings of the historical record of Islam’s idealized past en-

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gage profound questions also raised by Bint al-­Shati, Djebar, and Kahn: questions about the possibilities for a feminist historiography of early Islam, particularly the prophetic era.171 A feminist historiography would aim to make women more visible in male-­centered histories of early Islam that have often elided their presence and experiences, offering an alternative mode for presenting women as fuller agents of Islam’s sacred history. But how does one appropriate the voices of female figures in meaningful ways without manipulating or distorting them? As Lucia Boldrini has asked: “What are the implications of appropriating another’s voice,” and “how can we refrain from doing so when that person had been deprived of the possibility to tell . . . her story?”172 Commentaries on Djebar’s work point out that it “forces a dialogue between the historical and the fictional, thus consciously problematizing the nature of historical discourse as it has been transmitted.”173 The historical fiction format discussed here may create new possibilities for women-­centered countermemories of the Islamic past that respond critically to “official” history and conventional historical methods.174 Such interventions have the potential to add contemporary Muslims, women in particular, to the chain of transmitters who relay narratives about early Islam. As Djebar has said of her own work, in remembering women’s pasts, she “invent[s] nothing” but merely consults communal collective memories that have always reflected that past differently.175 Such works present the opportunity to challenge the content and meanings of Islamic history, Muslim communal memory, and the Sunna itself. Such challenges, though, are likely to be met with the consternation of some Muslims, especially given limiting notions of what constitutes the authority to define legitimate Islamic knowledge. Will it be only certain Muslim men who retain the authority to reimagine the Islamic past, or could that authority also be held by Muslim women and even non-­ Muslims?176 Djebar, for one, claims the authority to do so through her right as a Muslim to engage in a kind of ijtihad.177 One also wonders if such a task can be accomplished without projecting contemporary desires onto women of the Islamic past, without idealizing them in ways that are restrictive to women in the present, or without yielding to the political pressures of responding to Islamophobia. One wonders, with Kahn, “Can we stay open-­minded to who these lively women might have been? Can we relax and let the poetry of their lives sing to us?”178 As demonstrated here, the ways in which writers choose to navigate Islamophobic discourses in the present moment are likely to affect profoundly the answers to such questions. It remains to be seen if the authors of this potentially innova-

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tive genre will be able to imagine women of the Islamic past beyond the constraints of official histories and the pressure to use memories of Muslims from the past as instruments to exonerate Muslims in the present.

Notes 1. The rally took place outside a relief work fund-­raiser sponsored by the Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA). The fund-­raiser’s speakers included American Muslim leaders Siraj Wahhaj and Amir Abdel Malik Ali. Both speakers, along with ICNA, have been accused of anti-­Americanism by right-wing critics; this alleged anti-­Americanism was cited as a reason for organizing the rally. Malik Ali in particular has garnered attention for his vitriolic statements against the state of Israel, which have led to allegations that he is an anti-­Jewish hate-­monger. The rally in protest of the fund-­raising event was organized by local conservative and Tea Party–­affiliated groups and anti-­Muslim personalities. Speakers included local council member Deborah Pauly; members of Congress Ed Royce and Gary Miller; and Pamela Geller, the co-founder, with Robert Spencer, of the notorious group Stop Islamization of America. The footage was released on the Internet by the Los Angeles chapter of the Council on American Islamic Relations. See “Hate Comes to Orange County,” YouTube, Mar 2, 2011. 2. For a discussion of modern sensibilities and debates on the marriage of Muhammad to ʿAʾisha, see chapter 8 (“The Prophet Muhammad, His Beloved Aishah, and Modern Muslim Sensibilities”) of Ali, Sexual Ethics and Islam. 3. I am grateful to the Wabash Center for Teaching and Learning in Theology and Religion for a generous 2012 Summer Fellowship to support the writing of this piece. 4. Shryock, “Introduction: Islam as an Object of Fear and Affection,” 9. 5. Spellberg, Politics, Gender, and the Islamic Past. Spellberg was the only reviewer publicly identified by name, so some defenders of Jones’s book believed that she was single-­handedly responsible for the book’s censorship. 6. Statement from the Random House Publishing Group. www.randomhouse .com/rhpg/medinaletter.html. 7. See Nomani, “You still Can’t Write about Muhammad”; Adams, “Thinly Veiled”; and Manji, “Irshad Manji discusses Censorship of The Jewel of Medina.” 8. Kelly and Ballinger, “‘My Book Honours the Prophet Mohammed.’” 9. As of 2012, translation rights to the book had been sold for twenty languages. Jones released a sequel novel called The Sword of Medina about the conflict between ʿAʾisha and Ali in 2009. It went relatively unnoticed by reviewers and readers. See the Books section of Sherry Jones’s website: http://authorsherryjones.com/books. 10. Nomani, “You Still Can’t Write about Muhammad.” 11. Keskin, “Interview with Sherry Jones on Her Novel ‘The Jewel of Medina,’ Islam, and Free Speech.” 12. Sherwell, “Author Sherry Jones Defiant over Controversial Book about Prophet Mohammed’s Child Bride.”

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13. Seker, “My Novel Presents a Bold Aisha.” 14. Sherwell, “Author Sherry Jones.” 15. Amanullah, “Author Sherry Jones.” 16. Amanullah, “Author Sherry Jones.” 17. Ibid.; Seker, “My Novel.” 18. Amanullah, “Author Sherry Jones.” 19. Kahf, “Packaging ‘Huda,’” 151. 20. Milani, “On Women’s Captivity in the Islamic World.” 21. Ibid. 22. Ibid. 23. Jones, The Jewel of Medina, 355. 24. Ibid., 355, 356. 25. Sherwell, “Author Sherry Jones.” 26. Jones, Jewel, 358. 27. Ibid., 10. 28. Ibid., 11. 29. Ibid., 20. 30. Ibid., 20–21. 31. Ibid., 41–42. 32. Ibid., 58. 33. Ibid., 124. 34. Ibid., 142. 35. Ibid., 17. 36. Ibid., 48. 37. Ibid., 61. 38. Ibid., 158. 39. Ibid., 161. 40. Ibid., 161–162. 41. Ibid. 42. Ibid., 290. 43. Ibid., 254. 44. Ibid., 169. 45. Ibid., 290. 46. Ibid., 197. 47. Ibid., 188. 48. Ibid., 165, 197. 49. Ibid., 143, 242–243, 257, 285. 50. Ibid., 220. 51. Ibid., 306. 52. Ibid., 305–306. 53. Ibid., 334. 54. Ibid., 341. 55. Pasha, “Muslims Must Embrace Power of Storytelling.” 56. Pasha, “Mother of the Believers: Lessons in Online Buzz.” 57. Ibid.; Pasha, “A Response to ‘A Warrior and a Woman.’” 58. Pasha, “Response.” 59. Reading Group Guide: Mother of the Believers, by Kamran Pasha.

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60. Pasha, “Book.” 61. HistoricalNovels.info, “Kamran Pasha Interview”; Pasha, “Women Retake Islam.” 62. Reading Group Guide: Mother of the Believers. 63. Pasha, “Women Retake Islam.” 64. Ibid. 65. Pasha, “Response.” 66. Pasha, “Response”; Pasha, “Book.” 67. Pasha, “Book.” 68. Ibid. 69. Ibid. 70. Pasha, “Response.” 71. Reading Group Guide: Mother of the Believers. 72. Pasha, “Women Retake Islam”; HistoricalNovels.info, “Kamran Pasha Interview.” 73. Pasha, “Women Retake Islam.” 74. Pasha, “Women Retake Islam.” 75. Pasha, Mother of the Believers, 9, 13. 76. Ibid., 41, 44, 48, 64, 202. 77. Ibid., 163. 78. Ibid., 229. 79. Ibid., 113. 80. Ibid., 51. 81. Ibid., 77. 82. Ibid., 405, 408. 83. Ibid., 209, 257. 84. Ibid., 277. 85. Ibid., 175. 86. Ibid., 252. 87. Ibid., 330. ʿAʾisha also reminds readers that the Qurʾan provides rules about restraint and just treatment of prisoners in battle. As Islam spread, the Muslims treated “conquered people with leniency, giving them the right to worship and live their lives as long as they paid the jizya tribute.” Pasha, Mother, 487. 88. Pasha, Mother, 241, 269, 270, 289, 412. 89. Ibid., 215. 90. Ibid., 290. 91. Ibid., 348. 92. Pasha, “Women Retake Islam.” 93. Pasha, Mother, 128. 94. Ibid., 159. 95. Ibid., 297. 96. Ibid., 353. 97. Ibid., 350. 98. Ibid., 357. 99. Ibid. 100. Ibid. 101. Ibid., 352, 489.

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102. Ibid., 507. 103. Ibid., 489. 104. Ibid., 171. 105. Ibid. 106. Ibid., 527. 107. Keskin, “Interview with Sherry Jones.” 108. The opening epigraph of the book recalls the Prophet’s famous Hadith: “Paradise lies at the feet of mothers.” 109. Janmohamed, “When Islam Meets Bridget Jones”; Maury, Book review of The Jewel of Medina. For romance reader responses, see: SB Sarah, “Book Review: The Jewel of Medina by Sherry Jones,” and “Flag on the Play: The NY Times Book Review.” 110. Pamela Regis, A Natural History of the Romance Novel, 14, 53. 111. Ibid., 56–57. 112. Ibid., 31–32. 113. Ibid., 29, 33. 114. Ibid., 15. 115. Ibid., 36. 116. Ibid., 37. 117. Ibid., 16, 30. 118. Ibid., 16. 119. See for example, Jones, Jewel, 11. 120. Jones, Jewel, 20; Pasha, Mother, 507. 121. Jones, Jewel, 162, 295. 122. Marwa Elnaggar, “Book ‘Jewel of Medina.’” 123. Other women are in fact pawns in Jones’s novel; ʿAʾisha observes “men pawning women” when they are dealing out female captives. Jones, Jewel, 169. 124. Kahf, “Packaging” 151. 125. Jones, Jewel, 97, 147–148, 192. 126. Ibid., 199. 127. Ibid., 170ff, 178 ff. 128. Nomani, “You Still Can’t Write.” 129. Goldenberg, “Novel on Prophet’s Wife Pulled for Fear of Backlash.” 130. “Rise Oh Muslims!” Izhar Ud-­Deen-­il-­Haq, online. 131. Goldenberg, “Novel”; Farzana Versey, “Who Says You Can’t Write about Muhammad?” 132. Safiyyah, “Pasha’s Perfection.” 133. Uzma Mariam Ahmed, “A warrior and a woman.” 134. Pasha, Mother, 290. 135. Ibid., 163. 136. Ibid., 342. 137. Ibid., 88ff, 138. 138. Pasha, “Book.” 139. Gregory is most famous for her novel The Other Boleyn Girl, which was adapted into a major Hollywood film by the same name. 140. Boldrini, Autobiographies of Others, 181. 141. Pasha, Mother, 229, 382.

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142. Pasha, “Response.” 143. Amanullah, “Author Sherry Jones.” 144. Not surprisingly, non-­Muslim conservative readers of the novels, including Spencer, have complained that the novels are evidence of an agenda to obfuscate the violence at the core of Islam. See Spencer, “Book Review”; Pasha “Mother of the Believers: Lessons in Online Buzz.” 145. Amanullah, “Author Sherry Jones.” 146. The use of representations of Muhammad’s mates to serve the political interests of an author or defend the Prophet’s moral character has a long history, the latter purpose being the focus of numerous twentieth-­century modernist Muslim works responding to Christian attacks on Islam. See Spellberg, Politics; Elsadda, “Discourses on Women’s Biographies and Cultural Identity”; Aysha Hidayatullah, “Mariyya the Copt.” 147. Mamdani, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim. 148. I owe this formulation to Kahf ’s arguments about reader reception of the Huda Sha’rawi’s memoir. Kahf, “Packaging,” 149. 149. Shryock, “Introduction,” 19. 150. Milani, “On Women’s Captivity.” 151. Safiyyah, “Pasha’s Perfection.” 152. Seker, “My Novel.” 153. Pasha, “Mother of the Believers: Lessons in Online Buzz.” 154. Shryock, “Introduction,” 13. 155. Moustafa Bayoumi, “The God That Failed,” 79–93. This subtext in the novel directly contradicts Pasha’s ideas about the place of art in Islam that he voices elsewhere. He claims that his life’s goal is “re-­igniting the artistic spirit of the Muslim community” because Islam, “for over a thousand years, saw itself through the prism of art.” Pasha, “The War of Art in the Muslim Community,” 99. 156. Bayoumi, “The God That Failed,” 88, 90. 157. Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam. 158. Conversations with my colleague Taymiya Zaman at the University of San Francisco helped me think through these observations about Islamic history. 159. Djebar, Far from Madina, xiii, xxi. 160. Ibid., xv. 161. Another effort worthy of note is Kahf ’s very brief but delightful set of musings on ʿAʾisha in “Three Traditions for Creative Women in Arabic-­Speaking Society: The Professor, the Diva, and the Yogi.” See Kahf, “‘The Water of Hajar’ and Other Poems.” 162. Kahn, Untold, 9. 163. Nomani, “You Still Can’t Write”; Spellberg, “I Didn’t Kill ‘The Jewel of Medina.’” 164. Bushra, “Review.” 165. Ibid. 166. Amanullah, “Author Sherry Jones.” 167. Ibid. 168. Seker, “My Novel.” 169. Pasha, “Muslims Must Embrace.” 170. Amanullah, “Author Sherry Jones”; Pasha, “Muslims Must Embrace.”

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171. Fatima Mernissi has been foremost in the feminist historiography of Islam in nonfiction formats. See her works The Veil and the Male Elite, The Forgotten Queens of Islam, and Women’s Rebellion and Islamic Memory. 172. Boldrini, Autobiographies, 181. 173. Ouedghiri, “Writing Women’s Bodies on the Palimpsest of Islamic History,” 53. 174. Hoda Elsadda, “Discourses,” 39, 61; Zimra, “‘When the Past Answers Our Present,’” 126. 175. Ibid. 176. Kahn raises precisely this question of who has the authority to reimagine the past in a poem titled “Who Do You Think You Are?” Kahn, Untold, xvii. 177. Djebar, Far from Madina, xvi. 178. Kahn, Untold, 13.

CHAPTER 7

Muslimophobia, Racialization, and Mistaken Identity: Understanding Anti-­Sikh Hate Violence in Post-­9/11 America Simran Jeet Singh Following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, a rash of violence against minority communities spread rapidly across the United States. The hate crimes targeted people who resembled the perpetrators of the attacks, and this targeted violence helped crystallize a new racialized category in modern America: “the apparently Muslim.” This category incorporates people on the basis of both race and religion, and although it is not an officially recognized racial classification, Jaideep Singh argues that it has become “a defining reality for those who fall under its scope.”1 The most adversely affected have been those belonging to Muslim, Sikh, Arab, and South Asian communities. To help researchers better understand the construction of this category, Singh proposes the frame “racialization of religious identity,” a process by which people of diverse religious and ethnic backgrounds are grouped together and hierarchized on the basis of similar features:2 While physical appearance normally correlates to race in the US, in many cases, the visible markers which distinguished the victims of post-­ 9/11 hate crimes were not solely or even primarily racial, but actually religious signifiers, such as the turban or hijab. In this context, these religious symbols became racialized indicators in the eyes of the vigilante racists that carried out these barbaric assaults. Although the subtlety of this distinction was likely lost on these perpetrators of hatred, the phenotypical coding shared by many of the victims of post-­9/11 hate crimes was comprised of two distinct features: a religious and a racial component.3

As Singh explains, the newly constructed racial grouping of “apparently Muslim” has come to incorporate turban-­wearing Sikhs, veil-­wearing

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women, and brown-­skinned men with facial hair. This category is not exclusive to practitioners of particular religions; it also includes individuals on the basis of ethnicity and nationality. To those employing this category, it does not matter whether the subjects are practitioners of Islam—it just matters that they appear to be Muslim on the basis of racial and religious signifiers. Apparent Muslims are also subjected to well-­rehearsed stereotypes, including associations with misogyny, fundamentalism, and terrorism. The frame of racialized religious identity provides a compelling alternative to the more popular frame of “mistaken identity.” This alternative lens retains the historical distinction between Islam and Sikhi, while also accounting for the social process by which Sikhs have come to be included as part of the “Muslim other.” Racialized religious identity allows for historicizing the construction of hate rather than limiting our understanding of violence to what happens in transient moments or ruptures. Looking at hate as a process—as the racialization of a Muslim identity—helps us to better understand hate violence targeting Sikhs within the broader context of Muslimophobia in America. Tracing this social construction also reframes incidents of hate violence against Sikh Americans as intentional acts inspired by fear of and hostility toward a Muslim other as opposed to anomalous, accidental, and isolated events. Finally, the framework of racialized religious identity accounts for the fact that practitioners of Islam are not the only people affected by Muslimophobia. A number of communities have been targeted in hate crimes over the past decade, and much of this violence has been inspired by fear of and hostility toward the Muslim other. As opposed to the simplistic notion of mistaken identity, the lens of racialized Muslim identity better accounts for much of the hate violence we have witnessed in the United States over the past decade.

The 9/11 Attacks and the Racialization of Sikhs September 11, 2001, was a seminal moment in the formation of the new racial category, the apparently Muslim. Photos and videos of the destruction flooded the news media, and these representations characterized the terrorists responsible for the attacks as fitting a Muslim profile. Thereafter, Muslimophobia began sweeping the nation. The increasing mistrust of Muslims fueled a violent post-­9/11 backlash throughout the United States.4 Within a week of the terrorist attacks, Arabs, Muslims, Sikhs, and South Asians registered over a thousand inci-

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dents of criminal discrimination, including verbal harassment, vandalism, assault, and murder.5 According to crime statistics compiled by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), anti-­Muslim hate crimes in the United States increased by 1,600 percent between 2000 and 2001.6 A previous study funded by the US Department of Justice found that approximately 75 percent of hate crimes are not reported in official FBI statistics, suggesting that the actual number of anti-­Muslim hate crimes was likely much higher than reported.7 The dramatic rise of Muslimophobic hate violence directly affected each of the diverse communities that fit the profile of the apparently Muslim. Although the FBI has neglected to track hate crimes committed against Sikhs,8 quantitative studies and qualitative scholarship have shown that practitioners of the Sikh religion make up one of the most adversely affected targets of anti-­Muslim violence.9 The distinctive physical appearance of observant Sikh males in particular—brown skin, turban, beard— correlates with the stereotypical images of terrorists projected in Western media. With law enforcement agencies and news media fanning the flames, the rise of Muslimophobia led Sikh Americans to be publicly profiled as suspicious and threatening. For instance, on September 12, 2001, a turbaned and bearded Sikh male named Sher Singh was traveling from Boston to New York on an Amtrak train that stopped suddenly in Providence, Rhode Island. The FBI had sent federal agents, local police, and bomb-­ sniffing dogs to arrest him. As the train pulled up to the station, officers rushed to the platform, pointed rifles at Singh, and shouted “Get your f——— hands up.” The officers removed him from the train at gunpoint and handcuffed him. According to a report by the American-­A rab Anti-­ Discrimination Committee, bystanders gathered around Singh during the time of his arrest and began shouting obscenities and hateful exclamations such as: “Kill him!” “Burn in Hell!” and “You killed my brother!” Singh reported that one of the arresting officers joined in the vitriol by asking, “How’s Osama bin Laden?”10 Dawinder S. Sidhu and Neha Gohil have pointed out that the arrest of a Sikh-­American male and its widespread publicization exacerbated the racialization of Sikhs in the immediate aftermath of 9/11: News stations replayed the video of his arrest in connection with its coverage of the attacks, thus associating Singh and other turbaned Sikhs with the planners of the attacks. . . . Thus any connection between terrorists and a turbaned male with a long flowing beard was further

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embedded in the hearts and minds of emotional Americans. On the contrary, no media coverage followed news of Sher Singh’s release, just three hours later. There was no reason—beyond the turban and long beard— for the public or law enforcement personnel to be concerned about his presence on a train. In other words, he did nothing to arouse suspicion, aside from looking the way he did in a public space.11

Despite his innocence and relatively quick release, news stations continued to broadcast the arrest and detention of Sher Singh for the next three days, and this continuous loop helped shape and perpetuate the racial category of the apparently Muslim. The unapologetic employment of racial profiling by the federal government and news media offered a further sanctioning for Muslimophobia, and the consequences of these actions would be severe and costly. Just three days after the arrest and detention of Sher Singh, another Sikh American, Balbir Singh Sodhi, would become the first casualty of a hate crime in the post-­9/11 era.

The First Murder The hate-­inspired murder of Sodhi offers a poignant example of racialized identity and Muslimophobia. On September 15, 2001, Frank Silva Roque visited the Wild Hare, a local bar in Mesa, Arizona, where he openly threatened to “kill Middle Eastern people.” Roque was reported to have stated, “If one of them came into the door right now, I would slit their [expletive] throat.” According to police reports, Roque was noticeably intoxicated and upset about the terrorist attacks of 9/11. He was escorted out of the bar, but before he left, he asserted “that something was going to go down real soon and that it might even be tonight” and that those in the bar “might read about it in the newspaper.”12 Witnesses would later testify to hearing Muslimophobic speech from Roque. For example, his co-­worker testified that Roque had said: “We should round them all up and kill them. We should kill their children, too, because they’ll grow up to be like their parents.”13 According to police reports, Roque had told his wife that “all Arabs should be shot” and that he wanted to “slit some Iranian throats.”14 Upon leaving the bar, Roque drove his black Chevy S-­10 pickup truck to a local Chevron station, where owner Sodhi was working outside with his landscaper, Luis Ledesma. Roque approached Sodhi and Ledesma and aimed his .38 handgun through the open window of his truck. Five bullets struck Sodhi, who was killed instantly.15

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Roque immediately sped off to a home that he previously owned and had sold to an Afghan-­American couple. He fired at least three shots at their home before proceeding to a Mobil gas station, where he fired seven shots at Lebanese-­American Anwar Khalil.16 Roque then visited another local bar, where, a patron reported, Roque bragged: “They’re investigating the murder of a turban-­head down the street.” When the police came to arrest him at his home later that day, Roque put up his hands in surrender and announced: “I’m a patriot and an American. I’m American. I’m a damn American.” On the way to the police station, Roque asked the officers driving the patrol car: “How can you arrest me and let the terrorists run wild?” Roque later added, “I wish that my punishment would be sending me to Afghanistan with a lot of [expletive] weapons.”17 Roque folded individuals of diverse backgrounds into the singular racialized category of the apparently Muslim, held them responsible for the terrorist attacks of 9/11, and on that basis, opened fire on members of three distinct communities: Sikh, Afghan, and Lebanese Americans. His words and actions reflect a racialized understanding of a Muslim other. The epithets he used were not limited to practitioners of Islam, but instead fit the broader profile of the apparently Muslim: Arabs, ragheads, terrorists, Middle Eastern, Iranians, turban-­heads, Afghanistan. From this perspective, the racial and religious markers of Sodhi fit into the typecast of a racialized Muslim. Roque’s heightened sense of nationalistic pride and patriotism fed his Muslimophobic sentiments, and juxtaposing his actions with the story of the man he murdered calls attention to competing and intersecting notions of Americanism. Whereas Roque’s sense of national pride carries a claim to authenticity and a determination to defend the homeland, Sodhi’s immigrant background and his own expressions of patriotism offer another interpretation of what it means to be American.

Balbir Singh Sodhi (1949–2011) Sodhi was raised as the eldest of eight siblings in the village of Passiawal in Punjab, India, where his family successfully engaged in farming and business. As religious discrimination and anti-­Sikh persecution escalated in India during the 1980s, the Sodhi family decided to escape Punjab and seek their freedoms in the United States. His younger brother Harjit moved to Los Angeles in 1985, and Balbir followed suit three years later. He lived with Harjit in Los Angeles and worked at a local 7-­Eleven, and eventually

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moved to California’s Bay Area, where he drove a taxi in Walnut Creek. After being robbed in his own taxi, Balbir began to feel uncomfortable and unsafe driving a cab, so in 2000 he and Harjit decided to settle in what they considered to be an especially safe area—Mesa, Arizona.18 They jointly purchased a house and a Chevron gas station, the same gas station where Balbir would be killed one year later.19 Sodhi’s story mirrors that of countless immigrant families. He left the political violence and economic turmoil of Punjab in the 1980s and arrived in the United States seeking freedom of religion and financial stability for his family. He was a devoted family man who would work twelve to fourteen hours a day, carefully save his earnings, and send whatever he could back to India to support his family. Sodhi’s parents, wife, and three children had stayed in Punjab when he moved to America, and they planned to join him once the family could afford it. Despite their physical distance, he remained close with his family by calling them daily. Just twenty days before his death, Sodhi met with his son and daughter-­in-­law and expressed his desire to spend more time with his children.20 Six hours before he was killed, Sodhi called India and assured his wife, Joginder Kaur, that he was safe and had been unharmed by the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, DC.21 Four hours after speaking with his wife, Balbir called his son to inform him of his upcoming trip to India. Balbir planned to visit his wife in Punjab so they could celebrate their silver wedding anniversary together, and he asked his son to take care of the gas station during his travels.22 One hour later, Balbir visited the local Costco to buy US flags and flowers for display at his Chevron station. At the checkout line he noticed that the Red Cross was raising funds for emergency relief workers at Ground Zero, and he spontaneously decided to empty the cash from his wallet and make a seventy-­five dollar donation.23 Balbir completed his purchase at Costco and went straight to his gas station. He was working with his landscaper when a truck slowly approached them from behind. According to court documents, five or six shots rang out, and within minutes, Balbir was dead.

Hate Crimes Targeting Sikhs A large number of hate crimes against Sikh Americans can be understood through the framework of racialized religious identity. Yet we would be remiss to assume that this framework captures every instance of hate vio-

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lence targeting Sikhs. Some hate crimes are specifically directed against Sikhs precisely because of who they are. Targeted discrimination against Sikhs falls into line with the experiences of diverse minority communities in modern America, including those who have faced bias on the basis of race, nationality, gender, and political ideology. The long history of discrimination against specific communities reminds us of the distinct possibility that crimes against Sikhs may very well be the product of directed bigotry and xenophobia. The distinct appearance of Sikhs has historically marked members of this community as targets for bigoted and xenophobic violence. Anti-­Sikh targeting has taken place in the homeland of Punjab and in the diaspora, and it rings just as true today as it did during the tradition’s formative years in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In the United States, the first documented race riot that targeted Sikh Americans occurred in 1907 in Bellingham, Washington.24 The legacy of discrimination against Sikhs, in both the homeland and the diaspora, illustrates that anti-­Sikh sentiment is not exclusively tied to the recent meteoric rise of Muslimophobia. On August 5, 2012, white supremacist and neo-­Nazi Wade Michael Page entered a Sikh place of worship and learning, or gurdwara, in Oak Creek, Wisconsin. The congregants sat together on the floor, singing from the scriptures, when Page pulled out a semiautomatic handgun and opened fire. By the end of his rampage, seven were dead and three were injured. It was the largest massacre of Sikhs in US history. Despite the history of anti-­Sikh targeting in the United States and around the world, experts and analysts have uncritically assumed that Page had intended to target Muslims and had mistakenly attacked Sikhs. Every major news source pointed out that the attack fit into a pattern of hate crimes against Sikhs over the previous decade and interpreted the event within the framework of mistaken identity. Members of the media presumed that all neo-­Nazis and white supremacists are unaware of the difference between Sikhs and Muslims and mistakenly confuse the two, despite the fact that a simple perusal of primary sources demonstrates this assumption to be untrue. For instance, a message board run by the Vanguard News Network, one of the most influential neo-­Nazi outlets in the United States, evidences explicit anti-­Sikh sentiments. On this message board, one commenter gave his response to the massacre in Oak Creek: I see these towel-­headed Sikh a—holes walking around my city also. It disgusts me. What is this vermin doing in Wisconsin? There are no tears which I’ll be shedding for these useless eaters. Apparently President-­

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King Soetoro expressed his grief about this, and mentioned how Sikhs have enriched us so greatly with their religion, culture . . . whatever the [expletive] it is.25

This quotation demonstrates that violence against Sikhs may not simply be a matter of misguided attacks on Muslims. A number of developments since the massacre in Oak Creek suggest that the Sikh community may be a specific target. For example, Page has been linked to another possible hate crime in which two elderly Sikh men were shot and killed in Elk Grove, California, in March 2011.26 After several days of media attention in Wisconsin, a member of the Oak Creek gurdwara reported that a truck pulled up to his car at an intersection, and a white male pointed his arms at him, pretended to fire a gun six times, and shouted: “We’re going to kill all of you!”27 Then just ten days after the massacre, another member of the Oak Creek gurdwara—56-­year-­old Dalbir Singh—was shot and killed at a local convenience store where he worked.28 Although there is no certainty with regard to motive in these cases, these developments suggest that the Milwaukee Sikh community may be a direct, intended target of violence. Current studies of hate crimes do not document violence against Sikhs within a distinct category. Generating a framework more nuanced than mistaken identity or racialized religious identity may allow us to correct this negligence. Analysis along these lines might include critical readings of neo-­Nazi sites such as Vanguard News Network and might uncover anti-­Sikh hate speech such as that expressed by neo-­Nazi leader Alex Linder: Take your dead and go back to India and dump their ashes in the Ganges, Sikhs. You don’t belong here in the country my ancestors fought to found, and deeded to me and mine, their posterity. Even if you came here legally, and even if you haven’t done anything wrong personally. Go home, Sikhs. Go home to India where you belong. This is not your country, it belongs to white men.29

Linder’s statement demonstrates that there is no mistake about the identity of the people he is targeting. He is not targeting Sikhs because he thinks they are Muslim; he is targeting them because they are different, because they are an Other. Like the recent developments in Milwaukee, the anti-­Sikh sentiments on Vanguard News Network demonstrate that hate violence is not committed solely on the basis of ignorance; nor is every instance of hate violence against a Sikh intended for a Muslim.

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The problem is significantly more complex and demands more nuanced and careful attention. Mistaken identity as a framework for understanding violence against Sikh Americans fails to interrogate the motivation behind the violence, diminishes the agency of the perpetrator, limits hate crimes to specified locales, and frames hate as an event rather than a process. In the place of mistaken identity, I have suggested Jaideep Singh’s frame of racialized religious identity. This approach better accounts for hate violence against apparently Muslim communities on the basis of racial and religious signifiers. The Sodhi case demonstrates this process of racialization at work. It would also be a mistake to think that racialized religious identity accounts for every instance of hate violence committed against Sikhs. The long legacy of hate crimes against Sikhs in the United States, the unambiguous anti-­Sikh hate speech on neo-­Nazi message boards, and events in Milwaukee in the wake of the Oak Creek shootings serve as reminders that there is more to hate violence than ignorance. In some instances, people have targeted Sikhs precisely because of who they are.

A Progressive Response to Anti-­Sikh Hate Violence In response to anti-­Sikh violence, various organizations have worked for the creation of horizontal bonds among apparently Muslim communities over the past decade. One such organization, the Sikh Coalition, has been challenging the practice of racial profiling that targets racialized Muslims in security screenings. The Sikh Coalition was founded in 2001 in the wake of post-­9/11 hate crimes and has grown over the past several years to become the largest Sikh civil rights organization in the United States. Founding of and Support for the Sikh Coalition Within an hour of the Sodhi killing—the first casualty of a hate crime in post-­9/11 America—hundreds of community members visited the site of the murder to mourn Sodhi’s death and honor his memory with an overnight candlelight vigil.30 Sodhi’s murder attracted the attention of international media, and the following day Arizona attorney general Janet Napolitano held a press conference in which she voiced words of support for targets of the post-­9/11 backlash. “We will not tolerate acts of bigotry against our fellow Americans,” she said. In a later interview, Napolitano expressed that “no individual should have to be afraid of their safety be-

Muslimophobia, Racialization, and Mistaken Identity 167

Figure 7.1. Harjinder Kaur Sodhi mourns the loss of her husband, Balbir Singh Sodhi, the first casualty of a post-­9/11 hate crime. This memorial commemorating his life was built at the site of his murder, just outside his gas station in Mesa, Arizona. Photo by Fiona Aboud.

cause of the color of their skin, the way they dress, or the religion they choose to practice.”31 For the next several days, Sodhi’s Chevron station became the site of a public memorial patronized by thousands of visitors, and his story permeated national discussions about hate crimes, mistaken identity, and racial profiling (see figure 7.1). On September 22, one week after the murder, more than three thousand people attended Sodhi’s memorial service at the Phoenix Civic Plaza, and sympathizers from around the world sent some ten thousand gifts and letters of condolence. At the service, a number of community leaders shared words of support and empathy, including Maricopa County Attorney Rick Romley, who spoke of the twice-­ victimization of hate crime targets in the United States: “On September 11, America was attacked from abroad. However, with the murder of Mr. Sodhi, we have now been attacked from within.”32 Romley’s words resonated deeply among communities of apparent Muslims. The Sikh community was particularly vulnerable due to the distinctive appearance of its members and its lack of organizational infra-

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structure. On the evening of September 11, 2001, just a few hours and miles removed from the fall of the Twin Towers, three Sikh males—two teenagers and one elderly gentleman—were violently attacked in the Richmond Hill area of Queens in New York City. In response to these hate crimes, a group of Sikhs gathered in New York City under the umbrella of the Coalition of Sikh Organizations of New York and issued a press release condemning the terrorist attacks and requesting the support of police in protecting their citizenry.33 The Sikh Coalition anticipated further attacks and began organizing conference calls, preparing press releases, and distributing press kits to Sikh communities around the country. On September 12, less than twenty-­four hours after the terrorist attacks, the Sikh Coalition launched a website where victims of hate crimes and bias attacks could record accounts of their experiences. In addition to serving as a database of hate crimes in the United States, this log offered targets and victims an opportunity to connect with others who had experienced similar attacks and to interact with one another through a user-­ friendly chat board. These shared experiences of activism and victimization led to the emergence of a virtual community for the apparently Muslim, a community that transcends boundaries of ethnicity, religion, and nation.34 The alliances forged among these communities in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 would continue to strengthen over the next decade as the various organizations openly supported one another. For example, Rajdeep Singh, the Sikh Coalition’s director of law and policy, published an essay on its blog titled “Why We Support Muslims,”35 and in another instance, the Sikh Coalition partnered with the Council on American Islamic Relations to collect information on bias in public schools,36 a research project that would lead to a number of publications and campaigns focused on eliminating bullying and bias-­based harassment of school children. In solidarity with other minority communities, the Sikh Coalition publicly supported the passage of the End Racial Profiling Act (ERPA), and it also publicly condemned the Muslim Surveillance Program conducted by the New York Police Department. Moving Forward on Racial Profiling On October 18, 2001, the Sikh Coalition was formalized as a nonprofit organization focused on preserving and improving civil rights for Sikhs in the United States. Within two weeks this entirely volunteer-­based nonprofit convinced the US Congress to pass a resolution “recognizing Sikh

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Americans and condemning hate-­crimes against Sikh and other minorities.”37 In its first two years, the Sikh Coalition remained reliant on its volunteer base to fight and win a number of civil rights cases, and in September 2003, the organization hired its first full-­time staff person, co-founder and lawyer Amardeep Singh, as legal director. About six months later, the Sikh Coalition opened its first office in New York City. From its formative moments, the Sikh Coalition took on a diversity of civil rights issues. One of its key focus areas has been the intensifying practice of racial profiling at airport security checkpoints. In the post-­9/11 context, this practice has specifically targeted individuals who appear to be Muslim and has exacerbated the crystallization of a racialized Muslim identity. The practice of racial profiling is addressed in a letter issued by the US Department of Transportation on November 19, 2001, which bears the heading: “Answers to Frequently Asked Questions Concerning the Air Travel of People Who Are or May Appear to Be of Arab, Middle Eastern, or South Asian Descent and/or Muslim or Sikh.”38 In the years following 9/11, the Sikh Coalition engaged with the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) to develop screening policies that would minimize discrimination and humiliation of minority communities at airport checkpoints. This engagement has lasted more than a decade and has resulted in a number of press advisories, job trainings, and court cases against the TSA. Despite these efforts, the practice of racial profiling at security checkpoints has continued. These incidents are severely underreported. For example, a report by the Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties in the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) registered only eleven official cases of improper screening by the TSA during the first two quarters of 2011.39 On the basis of its intimate knowledge of Sikh-­American experiences, the Sikh Coalition recognized the problem of underreporting and was determined to show the pervasiveness of racial profiling to the TSA and DHS. In April 2012, the Sikh Coalition launched a new mobile app, FlyRights, that provides air travelers a convenient way to submit formal complaints about improper screening and unfair treatment directly to the TSA and DHS. FlyRights was developed in consultation with other major civil rights organizations, particularly those representing Muslim and apparently Muslim constituencies, such as Muslim Advocates, South Asian Americans Leading Together (SAALT), National Network for Arab American Communities, National Council of La Raza, and the Muslim Public Affairs Council. The app was launched with significant fanfare and

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media attention at the offices of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. Within two months FlyRights had been downloaded over 13,000 times, and travelers of different backgrounds had used the app to register over sixty-­five formal complaints of improper TSA screenings.40 FlyRights received acclaim from a broad spectrum of public figures, including members of the US Senate and House of Representatives. Representative Judy Chu, Democrat of California, spoke about the great contribution the mobile app would make for minority communities: Every time a TSA agent singles out a Sikh American for additional scrutiny at the airport based solely on their religious appearance, it reinforces unfair stereotypes. Up until now, victims of racial profiling at our nation’s airports had no easy way to report these instances or call attention to this unfortunate trend. The Sikh Coalition’s new app changes that. Travelers now have the power to fight racial profiling and discrimination right at their fingertips. I applaud the Coalition for their work in developing this app to ensure that travelers of all backgrounds are treated fairly every time they fly.41

Representative Chu aptly points out that FlyRights reduces the Muslimophobic stereotyping perpetuated by racial profiling in airport screenings and that it also empowers minorities to engage in protecting their own civil liberties. In addition, the app has helped to create awareness of the issue of racial profiling of the apparently Muslim, has offered a resolution to the problem of severe underreporting, and has helped to develop a repository of information to better track and understand racial profiling in the United States. As a platform for people of all backgrounds that has received broad support from diverse minority communities, the FlyRights mobile app has strengthened horizontal bonds among the Muslim and apparently Muslim communities that have been adversely affected by racial profiling in post-­9/11 America. Ongoing Work of the Sikh Coalition These strengthened horizontal bonds were particularly evident following the August 2012 shooting rampage at the Sikh gurdwara in Oak Creek, Wisconsin. Immediately after the shooting, a number of the major organizations with which the Sikh Coalition had partnered issued public statements condemning the hate crime and declaring their support for the Sikh community. A joint statement expressing solidarity with the Sikh commu-

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nity was signed by over 175 groups, many of which had collaborated with the Sikh Coalition in the wake of post-­9/11 hate violence. In the weeks following the tragedy at Oak Creek, the Sikh Coalition garnered the support of over 150 organizations to request that the Senate Judiciary Committee conduct a hearing on the proliferation of hate violence and hate groups in the United States.42 The official letter was endorsed by a number of partner organizations that fall within the category of apparently Muslim, including the Arab Muslim American Federation, the Muslim American Civil Liberties Coalition, and the South Asian Network. Since its inception, the Sikh Coalition has developed into a model organization that concentrates on four areas to preserve civil rights in the United States: advocacy, community organizing, education, and law. In the legal domain, it has fought dozens of cases pertaining to hate crimes, racial profiling, and religious discrimination and has taken on a number of major organizations and companies for violating civil rights, including the US Military, the New York Police Department, New York’s Metropolitan Transit Authority, and the Internal Revenue Service.43 The Sikh Coalition currently employs ten full-­time staff members; has offices in New York, California, and Washington, DC; and has an annual operating budget of over one million dollars. It is one of many organizations working to prevent violent hate crimes such as those that claimed lives in Mesa, Arizona, and Oak Creek, Wisconsin. The Sikh Coalition has not limited its efforts to the Sikh-American community. It works to preserve and defend the civil rights of all communities that have been marginalized, alienated, and targeted in the United States. The work of the Sikh Coalition demonstrates that the racialization of religious identity has had a dramatic impact on relationships among apparently Muslim communities. The experiences and fates of all who fall within the new reality of the racialized Muslim have been woven together, and these communities have worked closely with one another to ensure their collective survival and success.

Notes 1. Singh, “Towards a Theoretical Understanding of the Racialization of Religious Identity in the Post-­9/11 Era.” 2. Ibid. 3. Ibid. 4. For a striking example of this, see Singh, “We Are Not the Enemy.” 5. Ahmad, “A Rage Shared by Law.”

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6. The FBI cited 28 reported cases in 2000 and 481 reported cases in 2001. FBI, “Crime in the United States—2001.” 7. Center for Criminal Justice Policy Research, “Improving the Quality and Accuracy of Bias Crime Statistics Nationally.” 8. Singh and Singh, “How Hate is Counted.” 9. Singh, “Confronting Racial Violence.” 10. Sidhu and Gohil, Civil Rights in Wartime, 100. 11. Ibid., 99. 12. Associated Press, “Police.” 13. Rediff.com, “Sodhi Murder Trial Begins.” 14. State of Arizona v. Frank Silva Roque. 15. Ibid. According to Mark Fischione, deputy Maricopa County medical examiner, five bullets struck Sodhi, three of which were recovered from his body. Fischione also testified that Sodhi died of blood loss within ninety seconds of being shot. 16. Roque would later be charged with and sentenced for these shootings. Fortunately, no one was killed in the latter shootings. 17. State of Arizona v. Frank Silva Roque, 2–3. 18. Yeager, producer, A Dream in Doubt. 19. Sikh American Legal Defense and Education Fund, “The First 9/11 ‘Backlash’ Fatality.” 20. Kaur, “Targeting the Turban,” 25. 21. Southern Poverty Law Center, “Remembering Victims of Hate Crimes.” 22. Kaur, “Targeting the Turban,” 25. 23. Tim Talevich, “Memorial Fund Established for Popular Costco Member in Arizona,” 34. 24. For more information on the Bellingham riots, see: Seattle Civil Rights and Labor History Project, “1907 Bellingham Riots.” 25. Open thread on the Vanguard News Network, http://www.vanguardnews network.com/20120804/open-­thread-­46/. 26. Rogers, “California Police Are Investigating Whether Wade Michael Page Killed Two Sikhs Last Year.” 27. The testimony of Gayatri Das, the man who was threatened, is documented in Sach Production Films, “The Threat.” 28. Singh, “Dalbir Singh Murdered.” 29. Lenz, “White Supremacists React to Sikh Massacre.” 30. Sodhi, “Brother of Slain Sikh in Phoenix Area Saw Love Conquer Tragedy.” 31. Sikh American Legal Defense and Education Fund, “The First 9/11 ‘Backlash’ Fatality.” 32. Associated Press, “Thousands Mourn Sikh Killed in Hate Rampage.” 33. The Sikh Coalition, “Mission and History.” 34. Ibid. 35. The Sikh Coalition, “Why We Support Muslims.” 36. Council on American Islamic Relations, “Sikh Coalition Gather Info on Bias in Schools.” 37. US Senate, A Concurrent Resolution Condemning Bigotry and Violence

Muslimophobia, Racialization, and Mistaken Identity 173

Against Sikh-­Americans in the Wake of Terrorist Attacks in New York City and Washington, DC, on September 11, 2001. 38. Available at www.sikhcoalition.org/documents/pdf/DOTFactSheet.pdf. 39. Amy Bingham, “Ethnic Profiling by TSA?” 40. Amardeep Singh, personal interview, June 20, 2012. 41. Mitchell, “New FlyRights App Aimed at Stopping Racial Profiling by the TSA.” 42. Request for Hearing on Hate Crimes and Hate Groups in the United States, August 21, 2012, http://salsa.wiredforchange.com/o/1607/images/Sikh Coalition_Senate%20JudiciaryHearingRequest_Final821.pdf. 43. Amardeep Singh, personal interview, June 20, 2012.

CHAPTER 8

Finding an Enemy: Islam and the New Atheism Taner Edis

“Science flies you to the moon. Religion flies you into buildings.” Victor J. Stenger, the physicist who coined this saying, soon found it being adopted as a popular slogan among religious nonbelievers. It is available on T-­shirts, stickers, coffee mugs, and more, all conveniently for sale online. As slogans go, this one is fairly informative. Popular New Atheist writers such as Stenger celebrate natural science as a symbol of what humans are capable of when they are not restricted by supernatural convictions. They consider theistic religion to be a social evil that must be vigorously opposed. And one of the most spectacular recent examples of religiously inspired violence is the attacks of 9/11, in which a band of Muslim men prepared themselves with prayers and expectations of a reward in an afterlife, then slammed planes into buildings. September 11, the New Atheists are liable to remark, was a faith-­based enterprise. Without 9/11, it would be hard to imagine a forceful atheist presence emerging in English-­speaking countries. In the United States, atheism has occasionally been a subject of media attention—for example, in the 1960s, when Madalyn Murray O’Hair, founder of American Atheists, was considered the most hated woman in America. Nonetheless, public expressions of atheism have been rare in the United States, not worth mentioning in Australia and Canada, and rendered moot by widespread indifference toward organized Christianity in Great Britain. In the United States, the percentage of people who identify as atheist in surveys has only recently been climbing upward, and even then the numbers remain small compared to much of Europe.1 In academia and among the technocratic classes of modern Western societies, rejection of or indifference toward religious belief is not unusual. Wide areas of intellectual life, especially the natural sciences, are

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now dominated by a naturalistic view of the world. But elsewhere, supernatural beliefs are omnipresent. The notion of a divine creator explains nothing in physics or biology, but public enthusiasm for ideas such as “intelligent design” continues to put pressure on science education.2 Politicians line up to declare their appreciation of religion, especially in the United States. Academia is still hospitable to nonbelief, and many Western Europeans have lost interest in organized religion, but active dissent from religion has not been at the leading edge of either our political imagination or our popular culture for a long while now. So it came as a surprise when atheism became a minor publishing phenomenon. Sam Harris’s The End of Faith (2004) became a best-seller, followed by the phenomenal success of Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion (2006). They were labeled representatives of a New Atheism and attracted considerable media attention.3 Books urging skepticism about religion were not new. There had always been a stream of academic and semipopular books questioning supernatural beliefs. As a philosophically minded physicist with an interest in the relationship between science and religion, I had also contributed to this literature.4 But I expected and experienced what happened to all books of this sort: they received a few good reviews and went on to lead a quiet life in the book stacks of university libraries. The New Atheist authors changed all that. Harris and Dawkins were joined in 2007 by the veteran polemicist Christopher Hitchens, with his own high-­profile atheist book.5 When Daniel Dennett, who has done some influential work in the interstices of philosophy and cognitive science, decided to critically explore religious belief, his 2006 book also attracted wide interest.6 Stenger, who had long been writing about how paranormal and supernatural beliefs collide with modern physics, set out to debunk God, and with his 2007 book became acquainted with the nonfiction best-­seller list.7 It is not entirely clear why a more aggressively polemical form of atheism has become popular recently. Part of the reason must be a backlash against the political influence of conservative Christianity. At the same time, atheists outside of academia have been becoming better connected with one another through the Internet and emerging as an identity group. This helped create a larger market for expressions of dissent from religion. Some of the leading New Atheists, however, point to 9/11 as an important catalyst.8 Sam Harris, whose blistering polemic against faith started the New Atheism publishing phenomenon, describes responding to 9/11 as among the primary reasons for his 2004 book. Though layered

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with complex political motivations, the 9/11 attacks were also unmistakably religious acts; the terrorists thought of themselves as performing a “sacred duty.”9 For atheists frustrated with the way religious faith is seen as a virtue in the broader popular culture, 9/11 as an act of faith became a perfect demonstration of the need for a more critical attitude toward religious commitments. Such a critical attitude, encouraged by the New Atheist authors, resonated especially in the loose but growing online communities of nonbelievers in religion. In fact, many atheist leaders in the United States specifically point to the Internet as vital to the increasing visibility and presence of atheism.10 It is difficult to generalize about online atheism. Nonbelievers are a notoriously individualistic constituency that is hard to organize, partly due to the social stigma and isolation associated with rejecting religion. The relative anonymity and easy entry and exit afforded by Internet groups only reinforce such tendencies. Online atheism includes informal discussion groups, sites such as the Internet Infidels, and much-­read bloggers such as Hemant Mehta, P. Z. Myers, and Greta Christina. They represent a diversity of approaches to dissent from religion; the aggressive posture of the New Atheists is hardly universal. Nonetheless, the New Atheist authors enjoy considerable influence among nonbelievers, including those who have come to think of themselves as part of a movement that has crystallized mainly online. September 11 colors today’s atheistic responses to Islam, often resulting in a special antipathy toward Islam that goes beyond intellectual rejection. Of course, atheists do not accept gods, prophets, or revelations. They object to social orders centered on religious faith. But the negative perception of Islam among the New Atheists and online atheist groups goes beyond their distaste for those conservative forms of Christianity that most affect the lives of most English-­speaking atheists. There are two main ways in which Islam functions in popular atheist discourse today. First, it is taken to be an extreme case of monotheism. Unlike Christianity, which has at least developed some liberal, watered-­ down forms, the New Atheists see Islam as an unreformed, secularization-­ resistant, scientifically backward, particularly rigorous form of traditional faith. Atheists usually think of themselves as defenders of the European Enlightenment and its ideals of social progress. Due to cases of Muslim repression of religious dissent, consistent Muslim support for patriarchal gender roles, and a common Muslim desire for societies guided by reli-

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gious orthodoxy, Islam is a particularly intense representative of everything about monotheistic religion that atheists dislike. New Atheist antipathy to Islam does not stop with political opposition to conservative Islam. It occasionally shades into a second function of Islam that depends on unreflective associations of Muslims with terrorism and similar Islamophobic themes. In such cases, Islam is not just imagined as an intellectual and political rival; it is made into an enemy. Finding an enemy can be invigorating for an emerging movement centered on an atheist identity, but it also stands in tension with most atheists’ expressed commitment to empirical accuracy.

Freedom of Expression and the Limits of Freedom The New Atheist writers sound themes that often accompany religious dissent. They favor freedom of expression and freedom from obligatory religion in the public sphere. Their emphasis, however, is on the legitimacy of providing vigorous public criticism of faith-­based claims, regardless of whether this is perceived as offensive.11 The New Atheists observe that most public discourse, even in ostensibly secular environments, exhibits a pattern of deference to religion. As a result, positions based on religious faith are insulated from public criticism, often in the name of respecting religious beliefs. The New Atheists take this to be a demand for unearned respect and consider religious faith to be a legitimate target not just of criticism but of satire or even contempt. Many atheists today, including those in online atheist communities, have been persuaded that they should actively oppose the deference enjoyed by religion. In 2009 the Center for Inquiry, a leading secular humanist organization, initiated an International Blasphemy Rights Day, celebrated on the anniversary of the 2005 publication of the Danish cartoons satirizing Muhammad. This, together with similar events such as Everybody Draw Mohammed Day, held in 2010 to protest censorship of the satirical television series South Park, expresses resistance to deference to religion and is representative of an online style of activism that characterizes atheism in Western countries today. The New Atheist opposition to faith goes beyond standing against theocracy or organizing to prevent traditional religions from deploying state power—aims that would be shared by many liberal religious people. The New Atheists claim that supernatural beliefs are not only false but socially

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harmful. This could be a difficult position to advocate because religion shapes the social ideals of many devout people. Nonetheless, the New Atheists share a sense of moral universalism with their religious opponents, even though they argue that religious faith, rather than a lack of religious commitment, is an obstacle to human flourishing. Such an uncompromising stance is an assertion of atheist identity. Defense of an identity often relies on drawing a contrast with a different, perhaps threatening alternative. The post-­9/11 image of Islam provides just such a contrast. Nonbelievers can define themselves not just by their rejection of Christianity or Judaism or New Age spirituality, but also by their rejection of Islam. It makes little difference that Islam might be barely present in their environment or that adopting Islam has never been a live option for them. After 9/11, many people became more aware of Islam, or at least of a picture of Islam shaped by the mass media. This Islam stood in stark opposition to secular, liberal, Enlightenment values. Opposing Islam, therefore, could help in delineating the identity of atheists who felt under attack. If Islam had little presence in their everyday lives, that would only mean that Islam was easier to stand against than the religion of family and friends. In fairness, however, there is more depth to atheists’ concerns about freedom of expression and Islam. From the point of view of nonbelievers, Muslim countries and communities today provide much to worry about. For example, some Western countries retain laws against blasphemy or have other means of imposing penalties on perceived insults to religion. But such penalties are almost never enforced and are rarely more onerous than a fine. By contrast, in Muslim-­majority countries, conviction of blasphemy often entails loss of liberty or even of life. Even in Western Europe the present debate over blasphemy laws is strongly influenced by demands from Muslim immigrant communities, including concerns about inflammatory speech concerning Muhammad.12 Many Muslim-­majority states criminalize open nonbelief. Informal sanctions against unorthodoxy are common in conservative Muslim environments. For example, in Turkey, smoking in public during Ramadan can invite a beating by locals, which is typically ignored by the police,13 and public expression of atheism is often considered an unacceptable provocation.14 Formal sanctions against atheist expression are not uncommon. In April 2013 the renowned Turkish pianist Fazıl Say was convicted of insulting Islam. He had made the mistake of stating his atheism and making some mildly mocking remarks about Islam on Twitter, including quoting Omar Khayyam. He then was summoned to the public prosecutor’s office

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in Istanbul to be investigated for violating a Turkish law against insulting religion.15 After his trial Say received a suspended sentence, though later the verdict was thrown into doubt, and a retrial was ordered due to procedural irregularities.16 Similar news from Muslim countries is common. In January 2012 in Indonesia, civil servant Alexander Aan posted a message on a Facebook group saying, “God does not exist.” He was arrested on blasphemy charges and sent to prison for two and a half years.17 Alber Saber, an Egyptian atheist blogger, was convicted of contempt of religion, was released on bail, and fled the country.18 Another atheist blogger, Imad Eddin Habib, was sought by Moroccan police.19 In the spring of 2013 Bangladesh was convulsed by violence from Islamists demanding, in part, the punishment of “atheist bloggers.” At least one blogger was murdered by a mob, and others were arrested.20 Hence a special concern among atheists about freedom of expression in Muslim contexts is not surprising. Instances of suppression of religious dissent in Muslim-­majority countries are especially interesting because of the considerable social support behind such acts. It is not just that news from these contexts includes a constant stream of censorship, blasphemy prosecutions, and fatwas enjoining violence against critics, artists, and musicians. It is also that, especially in these decades of Islamist political ascendancy, persecution of religious nonbelief finds wide approval and can even enjoy democratic legitimacy. Muslim populations have long suffered under authoritarian regimes, and it is not difficult to find rhetorical support for the freedom of expression. And yet very often such support comes in the context of a cultural conservatism that considers religiosity to be integral to an Islamically acceptable public order. Hence even Muslim advocates of the freedom of expression often draw the line at criticism of fundamental religious beliefs.21 There are limits to freedom, and offenses against religious feelings are invariably beyond these limits. New Atheists suspect that censoriousness is inherent to monotheistic religion, and the common reluctance about endorsing full freedom of expression in Muslim-­majority cultures is particularly salient for them. For New Atheist authors such as Harris, Islam is the ultimate bad example, an intolerant religion that suppresses dissent to the extent of casually accepting the justice of killing apostates: “It is . . . a current reality under Islam that if you open the wrong door in your free inquiry of the world, the brethren deem that you should die for it. We might well wonder, then, in what sense Muslims believe that there should be ‘no compulsion in religion.’”22

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Critiques like Harris’s are not models of nuance and sophistication. The New Atheist literature often explicitly positions itself as a vehicle for consciousness-raising rather than scholarly critique.23 Movement building and rallying the troops inevitably require some oversimplification and broad-­brush characterizations that can shade toward stereotyping. Online atheism, which often favors superficial discussions and caters to short attention spans, only intensifies such tendencies. This invites a common and legitimate criticism: New Atheists indulge in essentialism, taking the more conservative, censorious varieties of Muslim religiosity as the most authentic representatives of a timeless essence of Islam.24 This sidelines more liberal-­minded Muslims who support freer expression by drawing on their own religious culture and experience. Since atheists value criticism highly, it is worth pointing out that criticism of Islam that leans heavily on stereotypes or essentialism can misrepresent Muslim culture and religion. It is not criticism of a high standard. Nonetheless, it is possible to make too much of deficiencies in New Atheist portrayals of Islam. There are some significant, probably unavoidable conflicts between the social ideals of most atheists and most devout Muslims. The New Atheists defend an uncompromising version of secular liberalism. Most Muslims, in contrast, take a culturally conservative position. They want to give religion a prominent role in underpinning the social order and providing overall political legitimacy. This is true even if we take into account vigorous debates among devout Muslims on exactly what this would mean, and even if we recognize that theocracy in the form of clerical rule is not very popular.25 Therefore neither conservative Muslims nor atheists are wrong to perceive the other group’s social ideals as threats. If a proper social order depends on religious loyalties, public expressions of nonbelief are suspect as a corrupting influence. Many, perhaps most, devout Muslims think it only reasonable that freedom should have limits, particularly where insults to religion are concerned. Human rights treaty ratifications by Muslim countries are full of reservations and exceptions in this regard.26 From a New Atheist point of view, on the other hand, a better social order does not rely on a sense of the sacred, but instead deploys human ingenuity to the fullest extent possible. Concessions to religious sensibilities, such as protecting communities from criticism they perceive as insults, restrict human capabilities for improving our worldly lives. When the New Atheists use the present state of Islam as a cautionary tale, they enter a complex political debate over the role of religion in modern life, exposing deep conflicts of interest and underlining impor-

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tant rival conceptions of civilized life. Certainly invidious stereotypes and hasty essentialisms abound in the public debate—stereotypes about atheist immorality no less than those about piety dominating all aspects of life for Muslims. And addressing these mistakes should not obscure the deeper, possibly irresolvable political conflicts involved.

Accommodation or Confrontation? New Atheist social ideals give a prominent place to science. Many of the prominent New Atheist authors are scientists: Dawkins is a biologist, Harris a neuroscientist, and Stenger a physicist. As a result, New Atheist literature and online atheist polemics are highly invested in a debate over whether scientific and religious institutions should accommodate one another. Intellectually a certain friction between science and religion is probably unavoidable, given that modern science continually casts doubt on notions of supernatural agency. Some critics of the New Atheism, however, point out that religion is socially powerful and that most people favor religious belief over science when they perceive a conflict. They argue that it is in the best interest of science to promote an accommodation between science and religion by favoring liberal theologies.27 Because this implies muting science-­based criticism of supernatural claims, the New Atheists reject accommodation, preferring confrontation.28 The role of Islam in this debate is, again, that of a bad example. Scientists regularly worry about the common conservative monotheist rejection of Darwinian evolution by natural selection, and especially about the poor state of acceptance of evolution in the United States.29 As it happens, the Muslim world exhibits perhaps the world’s strongest resistance to Darwinian evolution and is host to a wide range of popular pseudoscientific beliefs motivated by religion.30 So the Muslim example might support a confrontationist position such as that of atheist biologist Jerry Coyne, who argues that monotheistic religion is the root cause of creationism and should be confronted as such.31 But scientists from a Muslim background engaged in debates over science and religion favor an accommodationist position,32 and the interests of scientific institutions and atheist movements sometimes conflict.33 The debate over accommodationist and confrontationist approaches to religion, with Islam serving as a bad example, is not confined to matters of science. A similar dynamic can take hold whenever the secular

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Enlightenment outlook of atheists comes into conflict with ideals centered on religious faith. Historically nonbelievers have often criticized the monotheistic religions for subordinating women to men. Questions about accommodating religion also arose in the nineteenth-­century American women’s movement. Some early feminists, such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton, were convinced that Christianity was a major obstacle to women’s emancipation and tried to confront religion. Others, like Susan B. Anthony, observed that criticizing religion would only alienate most women. Movements for social change invariably face opposition by conservative religiosity that sanctifies the existing social order. And it is always a difficult question whether it is best to confront religious beliefs or hope that more congenial interpretations of a religion will gain the upper hand. Today atheists usually continue to oppose traditional monotheistic views of gender roles and sexuality. And Islam represents a patriarchal extreme. This is not just a response to media stereotypes: available social scientific information suggests that “whether we focus on status in public life, popular attitudes, or structural inequalities in well-­being, females tend to fare relatively poorly in places where Muslims predominate.”34 To atheists, Islam comes across as a particularly virulent form of monotheist patriarchy, with practices ranging from modesty measures imposed on women to persecution of homosexuals. Atheist concern about Muslim patriarchy goes deeper than the regular polemical use of Islam as a bad example. For example, the philosopher and influential atheist blogger Ophelia Benson strongly criticizes common Islamic practices in the context of monotheists’ treatment of women in general. After all, today’s most prominent examples of the oppression of women are connected to Islam.35 Defending an uncompromising secular liberal position on gender roles, Benson naturally considers conservative Islam to be very problematic. The agenda of the atheist movement overlaps with that of some prominent women who have renounced Islam and who denounce the conservative Muslim views of gender that predominate in their countries of birth. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, whose renunciation of religion was strongly influenced by her experiences of injustices perpetrated against women in the name of Islam, is well-­known, but she cannot be described as an activist for atheism per se. Figures who have more influence in the online and activist atheist community include Taslima Nasrin, an author exiled from Bangladesh due to her criticism of Islam, and Maryam Namazie, who is exiled from Iran and is now spokesperson for the Council of ex-­Muslims of Britain. Generally feminist atheists such as Nasrin and Namazie are not im-

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pressed with attempts to construct an Islamic feminism, let alone with apologetic arguments that traditional Islam offers a way of life more in tune with women’s created nature. And yet their arguments are posed against a background of a Western feminism that is clearly accommodationist in character: mainstream feminists tend to celebrate feminist theologies and attempt to reclaim religious traditions for women’s interests. One reason that feminist atheism has had limited appeal beyond already secular people is that, as sociological studies consistently indicate, most women are religious—indeed, more religious than men. “Regardless of the stage of life in question and, in nearly all cases, regardless of the kind of religious system and accordant beliefs at stake, women express interest in religion, affirm personal religious commitment, attend religious services, read religious materials, and pray more frequently than men.”36 Many Muslim women are unhappy with their traditional status, especially in modernizing environments, but their aspirations remain religious, or at least are expressed in broadly religious terms. It is awkward for atheists to use Muslim patriarchy as an illustration of the evils of faith. After all, the New Atheism is very much a men’s club. Online atheism and organizations skeptical of religion have noticeably male majorities, both in leadership and in membership. Online atheism is regularly convulsed with debates over whether atheism should have a broader social justice agenda37 and with observations that most atheists appear to operate within a framework of white male privilege.38 Although commitment to gender equality has deep roots in movements of religious nonbelief, atheists are not univocal about feminism. Some atheists clearly use accusations of patriarchal oppression as a way to denigrate monotheisms such as Islam while ignoring their own implicit support of male privilege. This follows a historical trend in Western criticism of Islam: British colonialists and Egyptian westernizers denounced the Muslim treatment of women while being less than supportive of Western feminist demands.39 Therefore, it is difficult for atheists to insist on confronting Islam on gender inequality. While New Atheist authors may suggest that religious faith is an obstacle to the liberation of women, in practice seeking some sort of accommodation will seem more politically sensible even to feminists who are not personally religious.

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Approaching Islamophobia Atheists are not usually drawn toward the political right, since conservatism typically is allied with religion. Nonbelievers are often very aware of being part of a small and disorganized minority, and in the United States, atheists also encounter severe distrust from the Christian majority. Indeed, Americans think less of atheists than even Muslims.40 For these and other reasons, atheists skew liberal in their politics. Where Islam is concerned, however, some leading figures among the New Atheist authors have expressed views similar to those of political conservatives who appear to desire a civilizational war against Islam. Harris is the worst offender in this regard. In The End of Faith, Harris portrays Islam as a particularly violent form of faith-­based madness, contemplates the use of nuclear weapons against Muslims, and endorses torture of terror suspects. According to Harris, To see the role that faith plays in propagating Muslim violence, we need only ask why so many Muslims are eager to turn themselves into bombs these days. The answer: because the Koran makes this activity seem like a career opportunity. Nothing in the history of Western colonialism explains this behavior (though we can certainly concede that this history offers us much to atone for). Subtract the Muslim belief in martyrdom and jihad, and the actions of suicide bombers become completely unintelligible, as does the spectacle of public jubilation that invariably follows their deaths; insert these particular beliefs, and one can only marvel that suicide bombing is not more widespread.41 The bottom line is that devout Muslims can have no doubt about the reality of paradise or about the efficacy of martyrdom as a means of getting there. Nor can they question the wisdom and reasonableness of killing people for what amount to theological grievances. In Islam, it is the “moderate” who is left to split hairs, because the basic thrust of the doctrine is undeniable: convert, subjugate, or kill unbelievers; kill apostates; and conquer the world.42

More recently on his blog, Harris advocated profiling to target Muslims at transportation hubs.43 Hitchens’s writings also give the New Atheism a neoconservative coloration, due to his advocacy of the American conquest of Iraq and interpretation of warfare against Muslim countries

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as a way of advancing Enlightenment values.44 All of this is an interesting reversal of the stereotype of atheists as weak-­kneed, left-­wing academic types. But Harris especially comes across as a fanatic who demonizes whole populations of people. Critics such as the reporter Chris Hedges have argued that the Harris and Hitchens variety of atheism is dangerously utopian, exaggerating the evils of religion while brushing aside the crimes associated with secular utopian projects such as communism.45 The critics are right about Hitchens and Harris. Especially in a work championing reason, it is hard to ignore how Harris disregards intellectual norms. His description of Islam is unrecognizable to anyone who has studied the religion. Indeed, his footnotes mention only a few books from an American and Israeli nationalist point of view—nothing notable from the extensive scholarly literature relevant to his subject. Certainly a writer of a popular book has no obligation to attend to academic details, but he should care enough to get things right and at least have a basic acquaintance with the territory. Instead, Harris goes straight to the Qurʾan to find out how Muslims might be drawn to violence, treating Islam as if it were a form of Protestant scriptural literalism. Such an approach completely ignores how most ordinary Muslims mediate their understandings of their sacred texts.46 It is intellectually irresponsible. Evidently, the New Atheist desire for vigorous criticism of religion does not always result in high-­quality criticism. But Harris and Hitchens are important figures in the New Atheism, with considerable influence on the online atheist movement. And they present an essentialized Islam as an enemy, in a tone of moral panic. This raises the question of whether the New Atheism is infected with Islamophobia. An accusation of Islamophobia, however, is problematic because it can easily become an instrument for silencing legitimate criticism. Muslim interest groups have been quick to accuse critics of Islamophobia, just like Jewish organizations sometimes portray opposition to Israeli policies as anti-­Semitism and conservative Catholic pressure groups eagerly denounce public policies involving contraception as violations of religious liberty. For example, feminist atheists criticizing traditional Islamic views have often been charged with Islamophobia; they find themselves repeatedly having to explain that political and cultural opposition to practices commonly associated with Islam is not analogous to racism.47 Indeed, among atheists Islamophobia is often seen as a false concern because atheists so often encounter the charge as part of efforts to restrict freedom of expression.48 Academic uses of the term Islamophobia are not

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comforting from an atheist standpoint either, as academic explorations of Islamophobia often leave unclear what kind of opposition to Islam would be considered acceptable.49 So the notion of Islamophobia exposes a significant fissure between atheists and the political left—or at least the postmodern, anti-­ Enlightenment left. The uses of postmodern ideas in antiscientific forms of Islamic apologetics have been remarked upon,50 and some human rights advocates have accused Anglo-­American leftists of uncritically supporting Islamists.51 The postmodern left’s tendency toward a kind of pluralist cultural conservatism naturally collides with various concerns of atheists, who usually identify with secular, Enlightenment-­inspired politics. As a result, some atheist critics of Islam have found themselves gravitating toward conservative institutional settings more congenial to treating Islam as a threat and a civilizational enemy. A well-­known example is Hirsi Ali becoming affiliated with the American Enterprise Institute. Another important figure is the anti-­Islamic polemicist Ibn Warraq, who wrote the influential Why I Am Not a Muslim (1995). He has had an increasingly hard-­line trajectory, including a recent stint with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a neoconservative Washington, DC, think tank. His recent criticism of Islam—not just as a religion but as a culture and a civilization—centers on conservative themes of Western superiority.52 Even with all this, it would be inaccurate to say that the atheist movement has developed a conservative quality. Harris’s advocacy of profiling Muslims, for example, has met with a largely negative reception in the atheist blogosphere.53 Atheists from a Muslim background have forcefully pointed out the Islamophobic elements in Harris’s views.54 Though Harris’s call for unapologetic criticism of religion remains much admired among online atheists, his politics regarding Islam do not inspire as much enthusiasm. A comparison between atheists and the Christian Right in the United States is illuminating in this regard. Christians and culturally Christian atheists share some elements of a culture shaped by Christendom’s historical rivalry with Islam, and they also share a media environment full of stereotypes about violent Muslims. We can assume that almost everyone who has commented on Islam online has heard of the “seventy-­t wo virgins.” But the Islamophobia found in the Christian Right is shaped by a sense of religious competition. Atheist distrust of Islam is comparatively superficial. For example, much recent conservative Christian rhetoric about

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Islam in the United States is inflected with Christian Zionism and tends to portray Muslims as terrorists in the context of the Arab-­Israeli conflict. In the apocalyptic Protestant imagination, the most right-­wing-settler elements of Israel enjoy divine favor, and Muslims and Jews have roles in an End Times drama about to culminate in the second coming of Jesus. For a long time Muslims have played one of the villains in this story, often associated with the biblical Gog and Magog, which will assault Israel.55 Today, even a well-­known Jewish Islamophobe such as Pamela Geller has a regular column on WND, formerly WorldNetDaily, a popular Christian Right news site notorious for its support of conspiracy theories and its lurid Islamophobia.56 Atheists in the United States, who generally react negatively to conservative Christian culture, have little to do with this aspect of paranoia about Islam. On the other hand, atheists are also unlikely to explore common interests with Muslims in the manner of some conservative Christians who express admiration for the very visible social conservatism of Muslim populations.57 Neither are they likely to respond positively to Muslim leaders who present Islam as a tolerant religion by emphasizing respect for other faiths and who call for religious unity against secularity. When Feisal Abdul Rauf writes that “the real divide is therefore not between Muslims, Jews, Christians, and Buddhists, but between godly believers and ungodly people—which includes religious hypocrites,”58 the ungodly will not be impressed. The 2012 presidential election in the United States has occasioned much analysis about the rise of the “nones”—religiously nonaffiliated individuals who now make up about 20 percent of the country’s population.59 While explicit atheists are a minority among the nones, this is largely a secular constituency that reacts against a strong presence of religion in politics and public life. Though atheists lack some of the deeper Islamophobic cultural elements associated with the Christian Right, they are wary of religious alliances against secularity perceived as corruption. Perhaps atheists can be faulted for being too focused on their own concerns about freedom of expression to notice serious and indisputable examples of Islamophobia. Nonetheless, atheist reservations about the term Islamophobia are worth taking seriously. Too often charges of Islamophobia obscure substantial and legitimate political differences rather than provide analytic clarity. Consider, for example, the rapid growth of a religiously conservative Muslim population in Western Europe. Amid the diversity of atheist responses to this growth, there is a noticeable undercurrent of concern. This concern is best understood in the context of broader atheist interests. For

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secular people, Western Europe is a success story—one of the few places where religion is no longer a dominant feature of public life. When nonbelievers want to argue that widespread lack of faith is no barrier to a good society, they point to examples such as the Scandinavian countries.60 Going further, they bring up research showing strong correlations between secularity and indicators of societal well-­being.61 But there are also serious arguments that demographic trends, including Muslim growth, stand against continuing secularity in Europe and elsewhere.62 Growing Muslim populations in Europe, then, present challenges to the secular liberal ideals of common citizenship favored by most atheists. Tight-­knit Muslim communities may be accommodated by corporatist varieties of multiculturalism,63 but these approaches conflict with more individualistic understandings of secular liberalism. Indeed, Islam has become central to debates about the limits of multiculturalism and secularity.64 Some atheist responses to such challenges no doubt exhibit undue distrust of Muslims. But this should not be confused with, for example, American conservatives working themselves into an Islamophobic panic at the imaginary prospect of sharia influence on their legal system. Since atheists have much at stake in social experiments such as a secular Europe, signs of fragility in this secularity are a matter for concern. Moreover, the New Atheists retain the Enlightenment hope of universal social progress, of which secularization is a part. This may well be a naive reading of history and of social dynamics today, but, fundamentally, concerns about conservative Muslim growth are due to secular liberal political aspirations. For atheists, Muslims need not be the enemy, but Islam is still a rival.

To Advance Secularity For the New Atheists, the figure of Muhammad can occasion indifference or disrespect. Among online atheists, Muhammad is many things: yet another Middle Eastern prophet with a dubious message, someone so mythicized he is almost a fictional character, or, for those intent on confirming the Internet’s reputation for generating more heat than light, a pedophile. Atheists did not construct a new image of Muhammad after 9/11; they just reused what was already available that opposed Islam, including crude polemical material. This is largely because, even if the New Atheism was catalyzed by 9/11, Islam has been a secondary concern for the emerging atheist movement. Atheists have concentrated on mobilizing and con-

Finding an Enemy 189

necting people who were already skeptical about religion, trying to convince them that a degree of public engagement centered on an atheist identity was a good idea.65 The everyday annoyances that may have galvanized participation have usually had to do with Christianity or a perception of special privileges granted a generic religiosity. Cultural Muslims with skeptical leanings, who may identify with Muslim tradition and civilization without accepting its supernatural beliefs, have not been a significant atheist constituency. This is not to say that a reinvigorated Western atheism has had no influence on cultural Muslims. The relative anonymity and ability to connect with like-­minded people far away afforded by the Internet have been put to use by skeptics in Muslim countries as well. The New Atheist literature is often, for culturally Muslim nonbelievers, also accessible. For example, Dawkins’s The God Delusion has been translated and made available in Turkish, including pirated versions placed online. Furthermore, the influential atheist website of the Richard Dawkins Foundation must have at least some minor influence because for a while a Turkish court had it banned for Internet users in Turkey.66 Nonetheless, especially with the waning attraction of Marxism, atheism is an insignificant public presence among Muslim populations worldwide. So the effect of today’s atheist movement on Muslims who live in a Muslim-­majority environment has probably been small, perhaps negligible. Few Muslims see a need to respond to the New Atheism specifically.67 The presence of atheism might worry some conservative community leaders, who might see it as yet another corrupting influence transmitted by the Internet.68 But then the guardians of Muslim identity could also benefit from finding an enemy. There is no shortage of Muslim resources online that use opposition to an unspecific atheism to strengthen faith. For devout Muslims in the West, where Islam is a minority religion, the New Atheism is another unwelcome source of hostility.69 Nonetheless, compared to right wing nationalist groups in Europe or the crusading elements of the Christian Right in the United States, even the Islamophobic elements in today’s atheism cannot be a significant concern. After all, active religious nonbelief—as opposed to indifference to religion—­ remains small and disorganized. There may even be some common interests that Muslims and atheists can act upon. Religious nonbelief is still largely associated with political liberalism and the left, even if it is the modernist left of the Enlightenment tradition. Atheists are reliable supporters of rights that minorities

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benefit from, as long as these rights are conceived of in individual and universal terms. For example, the particular sensitivity the New Atheism exhibits about freedom of expression should extend to the criminalization of radical Muslim expression in the United States. The 2012 terror-­related conviction of Tarek Mehanna for what amounts to speech alone, with no violence committed, illustrates the problem.70 Too many Muslims in the United States live with well-­founded worries about surveillance and the criminalization of dissent. Atheists should be able to sympathize. Even with some possible areas of common ground, the dynamism and expanding influence of modern Islam will continue to inspire atheist opposition. The vigorous secular liberalism typically favored by atheists71 best accommodates more fragmented, privatized forms of spirituality. Atheists usually want to achieve a public environment where religion is optional, or even better, invisible. This kind of secularity has taken root among comparatively few Muslims. Instead, that secularism is ungodly and undesirable is almost a consensus position among Muslim thinkers, even though they harbor a diversity of views about the appropriate institutional distance between religion and state. This is partly because of negative experiences with secular regimes that suppressed religiously inspired dissent.72 But Western forms of secularism need not attract many Muslims either, even though for Muslims in the West secularism promises to mitigate the advantages Christianity enjoys as a majority religion. Liberal individualism and attendant secularism restrict the scope of community and law-­oriented forms of religious life. Many Muslims think that a completely secular public order impedes their ability to live fully according to their religious commitments. In that case, the serious political differences between most atheists and Muslims—particularly between assertive nonbelievers such as the New Atheists and more tradition-­minded Muslims—are here to stay. Atheists will likely continue to draw contrasts with conservative Islam to sharpen their own identity as nonbelievers. The New Atheism often elicits ambivalent responses from secular people. I share the New Atheist incredulity about the supernatural. I can only agree with anyone who celebrates natural science and prefers a secular politics. But while conservative religious movements do not help,73 I am inclined to think that faith in the benevolence of the invisible hand of the market is more of a menace today than faith in invisible gods. And I find that too many atheists today do not appreciate the sheer ordinariness of Muslims—how Islam is mostly a faith of homemakers and shopkeepers who almost never take to the streets to call for the blood of cartoonists.

Finding an Enemy 191

With any luck, the newly energized atheist movement will eventually settle down and focus on defending and advancing secularity, which has to be done together with liberal religious people, including Muslims. Meanwhile, it seems that atheism has emerged from its academic ghetto, and it is still not clear where it will go. Notes 1. Norris and Inglehart, Sacred and Secular; Green, John C. “The Fifth National Survey of Religion and Politics.” 2. Young and Edis, eds., Why Intelligent Design Fails. 3. Wolf, “The Church of the Non-­Believers.” 4. Edis, The Ghost in the Universe. 5. Hitchens, God Is Not Great. 6. Dennett, Breaking the Spell. 7. Stenger, God. 8. Stenger, The New Atheism. 9. Lincoln, Holy Terrors, 16. 10. See Mehta, “How The Internet Is Reshaping Humanism”; Silverman, “The Future Of (Secular) Humanism (Or ‘So Bright, I Gotta Wear Shades’).” 11. Stenger, New Atheism. 12. Blackford, Freedom of Religion and the Secular State, 180–187. 13. Cumhuriyet, “Erzincan’da, Alevi yurttaşa ‘oruç’ dayaǧı.” 14. Shankland, Islam and Society in Turkey, 170. 15. AFP, “Atheist Pianist to Turn Back on Turkey.” 16. BBC, “Turkish Pianist Fazil Say Convicted of Insulting Islam”; Hürriyet Daily News. “Turkish Pianist Fazıl Say to Be Retried on Blasphemy Charges.” 17. Amnesty International. “Indonesia.” 18. Aboulenein, “Alber Saber.” 19. Benchemsi, “Wanted for Atheism!” 20. Chalmers, “Islamist Agitation Fuels Unrest in Bangladesh.” 21. Edis, An Illusion of Harmony, chapter 6. 22. Harris, End of Faith, 116. 23. See Dawkins, God Delusion. 24. Edis, “A False Quest for a True Islam.” 25. Esposito and Mogahed, Who Speaks for Islam?, chapter 2; Fish, Are Muslims Distinctive?, chapter 2. 26. Chase and Ballard, “Status of Human Rights Treaty Ratifications, with Notable Reservations, Understandings, and Declarations.” 27. See Mooney and Kirshenbaum, Unscientific America. 28. Stenger, God and the Folly of Faith. 29. Numbers, The Creationists. 30. Edis, Illusion of Harmony. 31. Coyne, “Science, Religion, and Society.” 32. Guessoum, Islam’s Quantum Question.

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33. Edis, Science and Nonbelief. 34. Fish, Are Muslims Distinctive?, 201. 35. Benson and Stangroom, Does God Hate Women? 36. McCauley, Why Religion Is Natural and Science Is Not, 266. 37. Christina, “Why Atheism Demands Social Justice.” 38. Reed, “All In.” 39. Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam, chapter 8. 40. Edgell, Gerteis, and Hartmann. “Atheists as ‘Other.’” 41. Harris, End of Faith, 32, 33. 42. Ibid., 113. 43. Harris, “In Defense of Profiling.” 44. Cottee and Cushman, eds., Christopher Hitchens And His Critics. 45. Hedges, I Don’t Believe in Atheists. 46. Edis, “False Quest.” 47. Benson and Stangroom, Does God Hate Women?, chapter 7. 48. Namazie, “Charges of Offence and Islamophobia are Secular Fatwas.” 49. See contributions to Esposito Ibrahim Kalın, eds., Islamophobia. 50. Edis, Illusion of Harmony, chapter 5; Aydın, Postmodern Çaǧda Islam ve Bilim. 51. Tax, Double Bind. 52. Ibn Warraq, Why the West Is Best. 53. Myers, “No Racial Profiling, Please.” 54. Sayeed, “Sam Harris, Uncovered.” 55. Lindsey, The Late Great Planet Earth 56. Geller, “Who Polices the Police?” 57. D’Souza, The Enemy at Home. 58. Abdul Rauf, Moving the Mountain, 43. 59. Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, “Nones” on the Rise. 60. Zuckerman, Society without God. 61. Paul, “Cross-­National Correlations of Quantifiable Societal Health with Popular Religiosity and Secularism in the Prosperous Democracies.” 62. Kaufmann, “Europe’s Muslim Future.” 63. Modood, Multiculturalism, chapter 4. 64. Kalın, “The Context Of Islamophobia.” 65. Niose, Nonbeliever Nation. 66. Butt, “Missing Link.” 67. See Legenhausen, “The New Atheism and Islam.” 68. Al-­Sarami, “Saudi Arabia.” 69. Winston, “‘New Atheists’ Emerge From 9/11.” 70. Greenwald, “The Real Criminals in the Tarek Mehanna Case.” 71. See Blackford, Freedom of Religion. 72. Hashemi, Islam, Secularism, and Liberal Democracy, chapter 4. 73. Saxton, Religion and the Human Prospect.

Conclusion Ruqayya Yasmine Khan

Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-­dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity. William Butler Yeats

A few years ago, I taught an undergraduate course at a Southern California institution. During one of the classes, I asked the class—some twenty-­ five students, of mostly sophomores and juniors—what they considered to be the defining issue of their generation. This was in the context of a class session on Islam and environmental ethics, and I was expecting that climate change would be one of their top issues, if not the foremost one. Much to my shock, only one student declared that climate change was the defining issue of his generation. What his classmates named as the two most pressing issues of their generation were, first, the need for good governance, and second, poverty. US Secretary of State John Kerry identified “bad governance” as the key problem confronting Muslim societies and cultures worldwide in their fight against extremism. This may well be the most serious issue plaguing Muslim-­majority countries in which extremism and militancy are on the rise. In a February 19, 2015, Wall Street Journal op-­ed titled “Our Plan for Countering Violent Extremism,” Kerry declared: “The most basic issue is good governance. It may not sound exciting, but it is vital. People who

194 Conclusion

feel that their government will provide for their needs, not just its own, and give them a chance at a better life, are far less likely to strap on an AK-­ 47 or a suicide vest or to aid those who do so.” It seems that both here and abroad, the generation that most matters—the young—crave trustworthy, competent leadership and governance. On a more mundane level, it is helpful to conclude by reflecting on this volume’s title. Each term in the title is evocative and rich, and must be understood connotatively, not merely denotatively. The volume is not just about Muhammad specifically; it is also about key figures in the traditional biography of Muhammad, including the Prophet’s wives. Moreover, it is not just about Muhammad but also about related textual traditions, representations, controversies, and so forth—all associated with him. This book is also generally about Islam, the Qurʾan, Muslims (including those living in diaspora), the tragedy of 9/11, and various minority communities affected by that tragedy. It is about all of these topics as located in the digital age, as well as about all of them and the digital age. Insofar as the advent of the digital age coincides with the aftermath of the 9/11 tragedy, this volume is very much about assessing the impact of 9/11 within the digital context. This emphasis on the 9/11 and post-­9/11 contexts is timely. Optimally much more than a decade is needed to assess the implications and ramifications of any historical event. A cluster of chapters in the book is dedicated to assessing the impact of the 9/11 tragedy more than a dozen years subsequent to it. For instance, Jonathan Brockopp demonstrates that with the passage of time since 9/11, it becomes ever more compelling to view the two stereotypical dimensions of Muhammad the warrior and Muhammad the peacemaker as complementary rather than contradictory. Furthermore, Brockopp suggests that Christian polemicists in the post­9/11 milieu not only have embraced a one-­sided view of Muhammad and Muslims as essentially driven by war, but also have an impoverished view of Christianity, namely, “one that overemphasizes its aspirational vision of peace to the exclusion of its pragmatic advice for peacemakers and its practical guidance for fighting ethical wars.” Two chapters take stock of the effects of 9/11 on two minority communities in the United States, Sikh-­Americans and the New Atheist movement. With Taner Edis’s chapter on the New Atheist movement, we come to a good understanding of this volume’s stress on taking stock of 9/11 in the digital age. A key insight in the volume is that that the current antipathy toward Islam and Muslims in many parts of the world is not just a consequence of the negative fallout from 9/11. Rather, this fallout, the

Conclusion 195

anonymity of the Internet, and the ease of entrance and exit afforded by digital technologies have conspired to produce a world characterized by widespread levels of such antipathy. Edis asserts that the identity of New Atheists has been bolstered by Internet use and the New Atheists’ special distaste for Islam in the post-­9/11 era. It comes as no surprise then that Muslim-­baiting has become a global sport played by many in the post-­9/11 digital age. As an idea and set of practices, the Internet is foundational to the emergence and consolidation of Islamophobia and Islamophilia. Peter O’Brien illustrates that a “largely mediatized political universe” is ideal for establishing morally delineated binaries of in-­group and out-­group loyalties. Such binaries then produce their own sets of pressures and counter-­pressures. As Aysha Hidayatullah lays it out in her chapter, public frenzy surrounding novels about Muhammad’s wife ʿAʾisha—composed, in part, to counteract Islamophobic tendencies in the post-­9/11 milieu—immediately and powerfully enters the lives of everyday readers in the digital age. In turn, the digital prevalence of the novels’ reception multiplies the political stakes and pressures on their authors to present ʿAʾisha in certain ways. Of course, this volume is also about taking stock of 9/11 and the digital age. New media have contributed enormously to the digitization of nearly all forms of information, expression, identity, discourse, and behavior, including those localized around religious communities. Thomas Friedman has argued that the world of the digital age is flat. Is this true? Jytte Klausen may concur with Friedman and further maintain that accompanying this flatness is a proximity not experienced before. As she expresses in her chapter: “The Internet brings together people of diverse religious and cultural backgrounds into one global communicative orgy. Muslims and Christians with no shared history of norms about what constitutes rightful or wrongful speech are thrown together on the Internet’s superhighway.” Sometimes, according to Klausen, such indiscriminate proximity unleashes virtual stone-­throwing across our flat world. Just as the digital period is an age in which misinformation about anything and everything is widely disseminated on the Internet, it is also an age in which the Internet bolsters the positive phenomena of advocacies and coalition building to counter this kind of misinformation. Simran Jeet Singh discusses the Sikh Coalition, the largest Sikh civil rights organization in the United States, founded in 2001 in the wake of post-­9/11 hate crimes. Singh points out that the Sikh Coalition launched a mobile app, FlyRights, which allows air travelers to submit complaints about improper screening and unfair treatment directly to the Transportation

196 Conclusion

Security Administration and Department of Homeland Security. In my chapter I show that mainstream notions of Islamic or Muslim authority are increasingly being displaced on the Internet. I focus on how diasporic Muslim women are producing savvy, current, female-­centered digital readings of many aspects of their religion, including interpretations of what the Prophet’s wives said, how they lived and acted, and how they are celebrated. These virtual interpretations are in tune with diasporic Muslim women’s own identities and experiences and therefore engender new discourses of female empowerment. Finally, Fred Donner announces the good news that in the years ahead, digital media will help to solve mysteries surrounding Islam’s origins. By way of example, Donner discusses how digitally based media will facilitate the reproduction, publication, search, and comparison of vital manuscripts for the study of the Islam’s origins. Continuing research on Muhammad, Islam, and the digital age will contribute to a number of overlapping academic fields, including religious studies and media studies. Further work on the links between religion and social media will yield new frameworks for understanding religion in our global, virtual world. The poem “The Second Coming” by William Butler Yeats, has always resonated with my imagination. Its apocalyptic and mystical visions come to the fore now as I ponder this moment in an age when repeatedly “things fall apart” and the “blood-­dimmed tide is loosed” all over the world. Some would argue that the world has always been like this, rife with anarchy and violence. Maybe we just hear and see more of this in the Internet age. Yet, it is difficult to argue against the claim that now is an ugly time for the religion of Islam and for Muslims. Yeats writes: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.” How does this help us to understand the horrifying images of beheadings, burnings, bombings, drone attacks, pillaging, and rape that litter our world and are daily featured on digital media? Perhaps it is the practice of kindness and patience with each other—with each Other—that matters above all else. “Love is patient; Love is kind” begins the famous passage in Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians. And this brings to mind the oft-­quoted response that Muslims give to those who are suffering: “Inna Allah maʾ al-­Sabirin.” Indeed, God is with those who are patient.

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Contributors

jonathan brockopp is associate professor of history and religious studies at Pennsylvania State University. His research areas include Islamic history and religion as well as Islamic law in the formative period (7th–­10th centuries C.E.). Among the courses he teaches are Introduction to Islam, Western Religious Ethics, and Muhammad and the Qurʾan. Brockopp’s most recent book is The Cambridge Companion to Muhammad (2010), which he edited and to which he contributed. He has also published Islamic Ethics of Life: Abortion, War, and Euthanasia (2003) and Judaism and Islam in Practice: A Sourcebook (coauthored with Jacob Neusner and Tamara Sonn, 2000). fred donner is professor of Near Eastern History at the University of Chicago. His main interests are the origins of Islam, tribal and nomadic society, early Islamic history, and Islamic historiography, and he offers courses on all these topics. He received his Ph.D. in Near Eastern Studies from Princeton University in 1975, with study in Lebanon (1966–1967) and at the Friedrich-­Alexander Universität Erlangen (1970– 1971). His major publications include The Early Islamic Conquests (1981), Narratives of Islamic Origins (1998), and Muhammad and the Believers: At the Origins of Islam (2010), which has received much acclaim. Donner’s recent shorter publications include “The Qurʾan in Recent Scholarship—Challenges and Desiderata,” in The Qurʾan in Its Historical Context (editor Gabriel Reynolds, 2008), as well as “Fight for God—but Do So with Kindness: Reflections on War, Peace, and Communal Identity in Early Islam,” in War and Peace in the Ancient World (editor Kurt A. Raaflaub, 2006). Donner served as president of the Middle East Studies

222 Contributors

Association (MESA) in 2012 and was elected in that year as a life member of the Scientific Committee of the Tunisian Academy of Sciences, Letters, and Arts.

taner edis was born in Istanbul in 1967. After completing his undergraduate work at Boǧaziçi University, he received his Ph.D. in physics from Johns Hopkins University in 1994. He is currently professor of physics at Truman State University in Kirksville, Missouri. Together with teaching physics, Edis pursues interests in the philosophy of science, particularly concerning disputes over paranormal and supernatural claims. Books he has authored and edited include An Illusion of Harmony: Science and Religion in Islam (2007), which examines science, religion, and pseudoscience in a Muslim context. aysha hidayatullah is associate professor in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies at the Jesuit University of San Francisco, where she teaches courses on Islam, gender, race, and ethics. She received her M.A. and Ph.D. in religious studies from the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her research interests include feminist exegesis of the Qurʾan, femininity and masculinity in various aspects of the Islamic tradition, representations of women in early Islam, racial imaginaries of US Islam, and the pedagogy of Islamic studies. Her forthcoming book, based on her Ph.D. dissertation, “Women Trustees of Allah: Methods, Limits, and Possibilities of ‘Feminist Theology’ in Islam,” examines the emerging body of Muslim feminist scholarship on the Qurʾan. Ruqayya Yasmine Khan is the Mohannad Malas Chair of Islamic

Studies and associate professor at Claremont Graduate University in Claremont, California. She also serves as faculty for the Department of Religion’s doctoral program in Critical Comparative Scriptures. In 2009, Dr. Khan was the recipient of the Fulbright-­Hayes Award at the Institute of Islamic Studies, University of Sarajevo, Bosnia Herzegovina. Khan’s research interests include medieval and modern Arabic literary studies, Qurʾanic studies, feminist theologies in Islam, and contemporary and digital forms of Islam. She teaches courses on Islam, the Qurʾan, Middle Eastern literatures, and women in Islam, and is the author of Self and Secrecy in Early Islam (2008). Khan’s current research project builds upon the focus on Hafsa b. ‘Umar, a female figure in early Islam and one of the wives of the prophet Muhammad, in her 2014

Contributors 223

article “Did a Woman Edit the Qurʾan? Hafsa’s Famed Codex” (Journal of the American Academy of Religion, March 2014, Vol. 82, No. 1).

jytte klausen is Lawrence A. Wien Professor of International

Cooperation at Brandeis University and an affiliate at the Center for European Studies at Harvard University. She has a Ph.D. from the New School for Social Research and a B.A. and M.A. from the University of Aarhus, Denmark. Klausen was a British Academy Fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford University (2003), and a Bosch Public Policy Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin (2004). She is the author of The Cartoons That Shook the World (2009), about the Danish cartoons of the prophet Muhammad and the worldwide protests that followed their publication. Klausen is the author of numerous books and articles on immigrant integration, the European welfare state, and social inclusion. Her book The Islamic Challenge: Politics and Religion in Western Europe (2005) was published in German and Turkish translations. Her new work is on Western Jihadism and terrorism. In 2007 Klausen received the Carnegie Scholars Award for research on the integration of Muslim faith communities in Europe.

randall nadeau received his master’s degree in religion from Princeton University (1980) and his Ph.D. in Asian studies, specializing in Chinese religions, from the University of British Columbia (1990) under the direction of Daniel Overmyer. He has published research on popular religious literature, deity cults, and folk religion in both China and Japan, as well as on methodology in the study of religion, especially Buddhism and popular religious movements. Currently he is conducting research on Confucianism and human rights, attitudes toward gender differentiation and sexual orientation in Chinese religions, and conceptions of human liberation in Asian religious traditions. Since 1990, Nadeau has been teaching at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas, where he offers courses on Chinese and Japanese religions, the Buddhist tradition, popular religion in comparative perspective, gender and religion, and methodology in the study of religion. He has served on the board of the Society for the Study of Chinese Religion and as chair of the Chinese Religions Group of the American Academy of Religion. He has also served as president of the Southwest Academy of Religion. At Trinity University he has served as chair of the University Curriculum Council, overseeing the inauguration of Trinity’s new Common Cur-

224 Contributors

riculum. Nadeau served as chair of Trinity’s Department of Religion from 2005 to 2012.

peter o’brien is professor of political science at Trinity Univer-

sity in San Antonio, Texas. He is author of European Muslims Today: Public Philosophies and Political Controversies (forthcoming from Temple University Press), European Perceptions of Islam and America from Saladin to George W. Bush (2008), and Beyond the Swastika (1996), a study of the impact of the Holocaust’s legacy on postwar German immigration policy. He has published many articles on the presence of Islam in Europe, including “Islamophobia, Euro-­Islam, Islamism and Post-­ Islamism: Changing Patterns of Secularism in Europe,” in the American Journal of the Islamic Social Sciences (2013); “Clashes within Western Civilization: Debating Citizenship for European Muslims,” in Migration Studies (2013); “Islamic Civilization and (Western) Modernity,” in Comparative Civilizations Review (2011); and “Making (Normative) Sense of the Headscarf Debate in Europe,” in German Politics and Society (2009). He has been a Social Science Research Council Fellow at the Free University in Berlin, and Fulbright Visiting Professor at Boǧaziçi University in Istanbul and at the Humboldt University in Berlin.

mashal saif is assistant professor of Islamic studies at Clemson Uni-

versity. Her research interests include Islam in contemporary South Asia and Yemen; the transtemporal dynamics between medieval and modern Islamic discourses; contemporary Muslim political theology; the intersection of religious studies and postcolonial theory; and the anthropology of the state. She is the recipient of a number of fellowships and awards, including the American Academy of Religion’s International Dissertation Research Grant. Saif ’s publications include articles in The Journal of Shiʿa Islamic Studies and the journal Thinking about Religion. She also authored a chapter in the 2010 book Religion and Everyday Life and Culture, edited by Richard D. Hecht and Vincent F. Biondo. Other publications include interviews and encyclopedia articles. Saif ’s dissertation examines how traditional Muslim scholars contest tradition, authority, and sovereignty in post-­9/11 Pakistan.

simran jeet singh is an assistant professor in the Department of

Religion at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas. Singh earned his Ph.D. from the Department of Religion at Columbia University, a master’s degree from Harvard University, and his bachelor of arts from

Contributors 225

Trinity University. He currently serves as a Truman National Security Fellow and Senior Religion Fellow for the Sikh Coalition. Singh formerly served as the Rachel F. and Scott McDermott Fellow for the American Institute of Indian Studies, and in 2013 he received the prestigious Columbia University Presidential Award for Outstanding Teaching. His primary field of research engages with the formations and expressions of devotional traditions in early modern South Asia.

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Index

Abduh, Muhammad, 42 Abraham, 1 Abu Bakr, 45 ahl al Kitab (people of the Book), 25. See also Christians; Jews Ahmed, Akbar, 36, 146 Ahmed, Leila, 46, 126, 148 ʿAisha, 12; as controversial figure, 12–13; in digital Islamic sources, 113, 130; and Hadiths and internet slurs, 90, 98–99; and Islamic jurisprudence, 114; in Islamophobic propaganda, 130; and Khadija, 119; marriage to and relationship with Muhammad, 12, 119–120, 129, 133–135; portrayals of, 74; and preand post-9/11 novelists, 129–130; as a proto-feminist, 12, 132–136; relationship of, with co-wives, 114, 136; as role model and Mother of the Believers, 114, 117; strategically living with patriarchy, 136; Western polemics against, 129. See also wives (of Muhammad) Ali, depictions of, 67 Ali, Ayaan Hirsi, 89–91, 99, 182, 186 Al-Qaeda, 3, 4, 61 Altschull, Elisabeth, 91 Alwani, Taha Jaber al-, 73–75 American Women’s Movement, 182 Amethyst, 120–124. See also digital age: and online forums

Anderson, Jon W., 20 Arab Spring, 110 Armstrong, Karen, 38–39, 41, 51–53 Aslan, Reza, 38–39 atheists/atheism, 10; authors, 174–181, 183–184; bloggers, 179, 182; and feminism, 182–183; on freedom of expression, 177–179; and identity, 178; and Islamophobia, 185; and the New Atheist Movement; 10–13, 183, 194–195; response of, to growing Muslim population, 188; scientists, 181; in Western countries, 177, 187. See also New Atheist Movement Augustine, 45–47, 51–52 Balibar, Etienne, 97 Banna, Hassan al-, 100 Battle of Badr, 44 Baudrilland, Jean, 83 Baule, Sam, 4 Benghazi, 4, 5, 57 bin Laden, Osama, 36, 39 Bint al-Shati, 149–151 British Nationalist Party, 93 Brockopp, Jonathan, 11, 35, 194, 221–222 Bush, George W., 36, 61 Charlie Hebdo, 6, 35, 97. See also Danish cartoon controversy Christianity, 45, 175–176; and conser-

228 Index

vative political influences, 175; and Islam’s origins, 23; and women’s emancipation, 182 Christian(s), 11, 25, 47, 64–65; as ahl al Kitab (people of the book), 25; Amish, 47; art, 66; churches as legal entities, 76; conservative, 187; Crusaders, 38, 44, 46, 70, 94; European Protestants, 63; Fellowship of Reconciliation, 47; Gospel, 11, 17, 50; Nestorian, 24, 37; Plowshares Movement, 47–48; polemics, 194; radical pacifism, 48 Cohen, Stanley, 84 Cook, Michael, 20, 22. See also Hagarism Corpus Coranicum, 30, 34n20 Council on American Islamic Relations, 168 Crone, Patricia, 20, 22. See also Hagarism Cyber Orient: Online Journal of the Virtual Age, 9 Danish cartoon controversy, 3, 39, 58, 59, 69–72; and critique of Muhammad, 6; history of, 59–62; and key Muslim actors, 11; as offensive to Muslims, 64–65; protests about, 57. See also Charlie Hebdo dar-al Islam (the abode of Islam), 91, 99 dar-al Shahada (the abode of testimony), 99 Dawkins, Richard, 175, 189 Derrida, Jacques, 86 digital age, 4, 196; and anonymity, 2, 195; and blogs, 9; and contemporary Muslim literature, 109; and instances of Islamophobia and Islamophilia, 2–5, 58, 62, 64, 71, 88, 96–98, 102, 129–131, 184–187, 195; and Islam, 9, 194, 196; and media dissemination of Islamophobia, 13; and media personalities, 4; and Muslim-baiting, 4; and Muslim diasporas, 109; and Muslim women, 109–111, 113; and natives, 108–109;

and new media, 4, 10, 27, 32, 195; and online atheist groups, 183; and online forums, 110–111; perspectives from, 27; post-9/11, 2, 10, 108, 124, 129–131, 134, 148, 150, 194–195; and post-9/11 representations of Muhammad, 8–11; and primary Islamic sources, 27, 113–114; and research, 27, 32, 196; and scholars, 9; technologies, 28, 30, 31; virtual cultures and communities, 9, 112, 116, 121; and web dissemination of Islam, 11. See also Internet Djebar, Assia, 149–151 Donner, Fred, 5, 10, 16, 196, 221 Edis, Taner, 13, 194, 223–224 Eickelman, Dale F., 20 Einfield, Jann, 36, 43 Elnaggar, Marwa, 143 End Racial Profiling Act, 168 Esposito, John, 36 Eurabia, 92 Europe, 11, 98–102; Muslim population in, 178, 187–188 Europeans, 84, 96, 99–102, 175 Europhobia, 93, 96, 101 extremism, 57 Facebook, 4, 7, 9, 121, 179. See also digital age Falwell, Jerry, 37 Fatima, depictions of, 67 fatwa/s, 61, 63, 73 feminists/feminism: and agency, 124; atheist, 182–183; constructs, 141– 144; Islamic, 7, 10, 116, 135, 137, 149–151; Muslim, 7; Western, 118, 182 Flori, Jean, 43–46, 52 FlyRights, 169–170, 195 Foucault, Michel, 86–87 fundamentalism, 159 Ghalib, Muhammad Asadullah, 2 Ghandhi, Mohandes, 47 Google, 4. See also digital age

Index 229

Guardian, 4 Gülen Movement, 93 gurdwara, 164–165 Hadith, 1, 73, 74, 93, 98, 113, 115, 118; as anachronistic literature, 21; digital transmissions of, 31; Muslim sensitivities about, 150; on portrayals and pictures, 74; as storytelling, 150 Hafsa, 112; in digital Islamic sources, 113, 130; in Islamophobic propaganda, 130; marriage to and relationship with Muhammad, 6–8, 12, 108, 113–115, 118, 129, 136, 193, 195; portrayals of, 74; relationship of, with co-wives, 114, 136; as role model and Mother of the Believers, 114, 117. See also wives (of Muhammad) Hagarism, 20–22 hajj, 1 Harris, Sam, 175, 179–180, 184–186 Hawting, Gerald, 22 Hidayatullah, Aysha, 129, 195, 223; and post-9/11 novelists on Muhammad’s wives, 12–13 hijabi, 120, 122, 135; hijab-hair, 120, 122, 124, 126n23; and veiling discourses, 121 hijra (emigration), 17, 27, 33nn13,17 Hinduism, 47, 48, 64 Hitchens, Christopher, 175, 184–185 Hizb ut-Tahir, 93 honor killings, 139 Huntington, Samuel, 71, 76 ijtihad (autonomous critical reasoning), 99, 151 International Qurʾanic Studies Association, 36 Internet, 6–7, 69, 118, 131, 132, 176, 198; and anonymity, 2, 195; and biographies of Muhammad, 7, 194; blogs, 9; and classic Islamic sources, 7; and contemporary Muslim literature, 109; and intra-Muslim de-

bates, 7; and Islamic authority, 7; media, 27, 32; and Muslim-baiting, 4, 195; and Muslim diasporas, 109; and Muslim feminists, 7; and Muslim identities, 7, 9; and Muslim women, 12, 109–111, 113; natives, 108–109; and online cartoons, 12; and online forums, 12, 110–111; perspectives from, 27; post-9/11, 2, 10, 108–110, 124, 129–131, 134, 148, 150, 195; and primary Islamic sources, 113–114; and research, 27, 32; technologies, 28, 30, 31; and virtual cultures/communities, 7, 112, 116, 121; and wives of Muhammad, 7 (see also Muhammad [prophet]: relationship of and controversies with wives). See also digital age Islam, 16, 26, 32, 48, 89, 99–101, 182, 194, 196; as Arab nativist movement, 22; as Believers’ Movement, 11, 24–26; and Christianity, 23; and conflicts between Islamophobia and Islamophilia, 10; critiques of, 37, 183, 186; debates on origins of, 16; digital, 9, 32; divergent views on origins of, 20–21; and early conquests, 18; egalitarian attributes of, 12; founder of, 16, 35; Golden Age of, 95; and Hagarism, 20; historical origins of, 16, 18–20, 23–24, 151, 196; literary sources on, 19; negative representations of, 129–132; New Atheists’ views of, 13, 176–177; on peace, 48–51; portrayed as violent, 12; and primacy of Qurʾan, 11; revisionist arguments about, 20–24, 33n3; and Sasanian dynasty, 24; stigmatized image of, 13, 88, 130, 132, 178; web dissemination of, 11; Western polemics against, 129, 183 Islamic/Islamism: activists, 93; art, 35, 66; classical figures, 108; discourses, 11; identity-making, 26, 110, 118; feminism, 7, 10, 18, 118, 133, 135, 149–151; post-, 98, 101–102;

230 Index

radicals, 63; traditional narratives, 16, 19, 48; Wars of Apostasy, 45 Islamic State of Iraq and Levant (ISIL), 2, 35 Islamiquette (Islamic etiquette), 117– 118, 128n20 Islamist(s), 90, 95; extremists, 57; terrorist networks, 5 Islamophilia: definition of, 2; occurrences and digital instances of, 12–13, 93, 130, 148, 152 Islamophobia, 83; Jewish, 187; and atheists, 185–186; definition of, 2; occurrences and digital instances of, 2–5, 10–12, 58, 62, 64, 71, 88, 96–98, 102, 129–131, 184–187, 195 Jamaat-un Nur, 93 “Je Suis Ahmed,” 1, 3. See also Danish cartoon controversy “Je Suis Charlie,” 1, 3. See also Danish cartoon controversy Jesus, 43–46 Jews, 6, 11, 64; ahl al Kitab (people of the book), 25; clans of Medina, 17 jihad, 27, 41–42, 44–46, 91 Jones, Sherry, 130–151; and post-9/11 authors on Muhammad’s wives, 12, 13, 130–151 Jyllands-Posten (Danish newspaper), 57, 59, 70, 75, 92 Kahn, Tamam, 150–151 Kerry, John, 193 Khadija: and “Girl Power,” 114–115; in contemporary literature, 109; merits of, 117–119; and monogamy, 115; and polygamy, 115; pre-modern views of, 109, 126–127, 139; as most prominent female figure, 109, 114, 117; relationship of, with Muhammad, 111, 113–119; as role model and Mother of the Believers, 116. See also wives (of Muhammad) Khalek, Nancy, 5 khalifa, 26–27; in Qurʾan, 26–27 Khamis, Sahar, 100, 108, 114, 123–124

Khan, Amr, 63 Khan, Ruqayya Yasmine, 1, 222–223 Klausen, Jytte, 5, 6, 11, 195, 222; and critique of Danish cartoon controversy, 11 Lakhvi, Muhammad Hammad, 40, 41, 44 Larsson, Göran, 109–110, 113 Lawrence, Bruce, 5 Lemon, Don, 5 Lewis, Bernard, 76 Linder, Alex, 165 Luxenberg, Christoph, 21 Maududi, Abul Ala, 97 Mecca, 16–17, 91 Medina, 17 Mernissi, Fatima, 72 Middle East, 9 moral panic, 84 Morsi, Muhammad, 51, 58 Muftiyyah Training Program, 112, 114 Muhammad Image Archives, 59 Muhammad (depictions of ), 57, 70; Christian, 73; family and companions of, 65–67, 69, 131; figurative representations of, 64, 67, 69; graphic representations of, 59, 69; in Islamic art, 66; and manipulation of imagery, 73, 94; and New Atheists, 180, 188; pictorial, 59, 69; in post-9/11 digital media, 8, 10–11; religious prohibitions against, 64, 66, 73–75; Shia, 65, 68; in the Western imagination, 69 Muhammad (prophet), 1, 6, 26, 95–98, 132, 194; and ʿAisha, 12, 119–120, 129, 133–135; authority of, 9, 18; and collection of Qurʾan, 17; as conveyor of divine wisdom and universal values, 98; death of, 18, 25, 45, 46, 138; and digital media, 8; as a family man, 67; as a feminist, 137; and historicity, 23–24; and implementation of Hadith, 99; as Islam’s founder, 16; and Khadija,

Index 231

111, 113–119; as model, 11, 36, 53, 74; and narratives, 7, 89, 90; and polygamy, 7, 119, 124; and popular visions after 9/11 media, 8, 11, 35; and questions of existence, 23; relationship of, and controversies with wives, 6–8, 12, 108, 114–115, 118, 129, 136, 193, 195; representations of, 9, 10, 58, 59, 65; as statesman, 67, 69, 133; sunna, 6, 96; and treatment of women, 129, 133, 137, 139, 142; as warrior or peacemaker, 11, 35–44, 48, 51, 132, 194; and Zaynab, 7–8, 119–120, 129, 133–135, 140. See also ʿAisha; Hafsa; Khadija; Umm Salama; wives (of Muhammad); Zaynab mullah, 2, 90 Muslimahs, 10, 107, 112–113. See also Muslim women Muslim Brotherhood, 58, 60, 93, 100 Muslimophobia, 159–162. See also Islamophobia Muslim(s), 2, 62, 60, 99–101, 176, 180, 189, 194, 196; and anti-Muslim hate crimes, 160; authority of, 77; Believers’ Movement, 24–26; clerics, 10; communities, 7, 10, 124, 193; and conflicts between Islamophobia and Islamophilia, 10; cultural, 189; in the digital age, 8; empires, 75, 76; European, 10, 88, 92; ex-, 7; feminists, 7, 10, 116, 135, 137, 149– 151; modern, 94; new identities of, 7, 25, 98, 107, 147; non-European, 10, 99–101; and postmodern tactics, 93; post-9/11, 4; profiling of, 93; radicalized, 97, 190; rage of, 5; religious sensitivity of, 5; response of, to Western oppression, 94–95; scholars, 6; secular, 7; stereotypes of, 186; theologians, 6, 8; virtual communities of, 7, 126 Muslim women, 10, 109, 112–113; empowerment of, 12, 195; feminist, 7, 10, 118, 133, 135, 149–151; and historiography, 148–151; and identity-

making, 108, 116, 124, 126; and polygamy, 12; and religious narratives, 12; as savvy digital natives, 12, 108, 126, 195; self-perceptions of, 134; stereotypes of, 130–132; veiling of, 12; and wives of Muhammad, 12–13. See also Muslimah Muslim Women Shura Council, 113 Nadeau, Randall, 224 Namazie, Maryam, 182 Nasr, Amir Ahmed, 7 Nasr, Seyyed H., 1 Nasrin, Taslima, 182 Nawawy, Mohammed el-, 100, 110, 116, 125–126 New Atheist Movement, 10–13; criticism of, 180; discourses, 13, 173–191, 194–195; and feminism, 183; and freedom of expression, 177–178; literature, 180–189; social ideas, 181. See also atheists/atheism New York Times, 5 Nietzche, Friedrich, 83, 85–87, 102 9/11 (September 11, 2001), 35–38, 44, 174, 194; aftermath of, 108, 120, 178; backlash following, 158–161, 166–167, 173; as catalyst of Islamophobia, 13; terrorist attack of, 158–161, 166 Ninjabi.com, 120–121 Noor, Farsh, 5 Obama, Barack, 2 O’Brien, Peter, 12, 195, 222; and post9/11 representations of Muhammad, 8–9 Orientalism, 71, 87; neo-orientalist tropes, 92 othering, 94; and minority community experiences, 167, 169–170; and Muslim identity, 169; post-9/11, 158– 166; and racialization, 158–159, 166 Pasha, Kamran, 12, 130–131, 137–151; and post-9/11 authors on Muhammad’s wives, 12, 13

232 Index

polygamy, 114, 124, 129, 138; “Multiples,” 125 Popp, Volker, and questions about Muhammad’s existence, 23 post-Islamism, 97–98, 100 postmodernism, 83, 102; and Islamism, 98, 101; and politics, 85–101 Powers, David, 28, 34n16 qadi, 26 Qaradawi, Yusuf al-, 41, 60, 61 Qurʾan, 2, 17, 25–28, 49, 63, 90, 93, 113, 194; and application of digital media, 32; and Believers’ Movement, 26; and coalescence theory, 21; digital database of, 28; digital technology of, 24, 27–31; feminist interpretations of, 126; and the Gospel, 17, 50; and Islam’s origins, 16, 31; and monotheism, 17; preeminence of, 149; primacy of, 11; problems of, and prophets/prophesy, 17, 26; puritanical interpretations of, 72, 95; revisionist arguments about, 20–23; as a source, 20–21; stylometric analysis of, 31; teachings of, on war and peace, 52, 58; variant readings of, 30; vocabulary of, 24–26; wiki-style, 31 Quresh, Mohammed Yousaf, 61 Qutb, Sayyid, 95, 97 racialization of religious identities, 158–159, 166; and Muslim identity, 169. See also othering Ramadan, Tariq, 84; and transnational religious discourse, 98–102. See also post-Islamism Reddit, 4. See also digital age reflexive modernization, 84 Regis, Pamela, 140 Reynolds, Gabriel, 21 Robertson, Pat, 36, 37 Roque, Frank Silva, 161 Roy, Olivier, 77, 93 Rumi, Jalaluddin, 2

Rushdie, Salman, 5, 71, 72, 97–98, 132; Satanic Verses, 6, 97 Saadeh, Noor, 113–115 Sadeghi, Behnam, 31 Said, Edward, 71, 87. See also Orientalism Saif, Mashal, 1, 224–225 Salafist/s, 5–6, 96 September 11, 2001. See 9/11 sharia, 51 Sharon, Moshe, 22 Shiʿite/Shia, 65; Sunni/Shia differences, 68 Siddiqui, Haroon, 64–65, 68 Sikh Coalition, 13, 166, 168–171, 195 Sikhophobia: definition of, 13; occurrences of, 158–160, 170–171, 193 Sikhs/Sikhi, 158–160: American, 10, 13, 159, 171, 193; minority community experiences of, 167, 169–170; and post-9/11 anti-Sikh violence, 10, 158–166; racialization of, 159 Singh, Jaideep, 158, 166 Singh, Sher, 161 Singh, Simran Jeet, 13, 194, 223; and assessment of impact of 9/11 on minority communities, 10, 13, 194 Sodhi, Balbir Singh, 161–163, 166–167 Spellberg, Denise, 131, 150 Spencer, Robert, 39–43, 52, 53 Stanton, Elizabeth Cody, 180 Stenger, Victor J., 174–175 Stowasser, Barbara, 108–109, 114, 118 Sunnah, 93 sunni, 115 Sunniforum.com, 116 Supporters of Sharia, 93 Tablighi Jamaat, 93, 95 Taliban, 69 Tantawi, Muhammad Sayyed, 41 Taʾrikh madinat Dimash, 27–28 Taylor, Charles, 84 terrorism, 41, 157; against Islam, 42 Torah, 17

Index 233

Twitter, 4, 7, 9; Fazil Say’s remarks on, 178–179. See also digital age Umayyad caliphs, 20, 66, 68; dynasty of, and origins of Islam, 23; as leaders of Believers’ Movement, 26 Umm Salama, 113–117; as Mothers of the believers, 137–141. See also wives (of Muhammad) United States, 75; religious communities in, 10 Vines, Jerry, 37 Wansbrough, John, and coalescence of argument on origins of Islam, 20–22 Westerners, 97 Westoxification, 97 Wikipedia, 59 Winter, Tim, 65, 68 WISE (Women’s Initiative in Spirituality and Equality), 111–113 wives (of Muhammad), 108, 111, 114, 117, 128, 135–136, 194; and advent of digital age, 9; in classical sources, 108, 126; in contemporary literature, 109, 126; and controversies, 7; as exemplars of motherhood and wifehood, 114; as ideal Muslim women, 7, 116; as key figures in Muhammad’s biographies, 194; leadership ability of, 114; legacy of, 121, 124; and most influential list,

113; as Mothers of the Believers, 137–141; and polygamy, 7; used to demonize Muhammad, 7–8. See also ʿAisha; Hafsa; Khadija; Umm Salama; Zaynab World Trade Center, 57 xenophobia, 83, 88; stances of, 12; and violence, 164 Yassin, Ahlam, 117–119 Yathrib, 17 Yeats, William Butler, 193, 196 YouTube, 4, 9, 10; community guidelines of, 4, 14n8; and Innocence of Muslims, 4, 57, 58; Islamophobic videos on, 92. See also digital age Zamzam, 1 Zawahiri, Ayman al-, 61 Zayd, 6–8, 68; and Zaynab, 8 Zaynab, 6, 8, 140; apologist’s approach to, 8; in digital Islamic sources, 113, 130; Hadiths and internet slurs about, 90, 98–99; in Islamophobic propaganda, 130; marriage to and relationship with Muhammad, 7–8, 119–120, 129, 133–135; portrayals of, 74; as role model and Mother of the Believers, 113–114, 117; used to critique Muhammad’s life, 6–7; and Zayd, 8. See also wives (of Muhammad) Zionists, 94 Zoroastrianism, 22, 25