Jacques Derrida argues the Hollywood figure of the zombie is an example of the problem we face when two opposing elements cohabit the same space. Zombies are both dead and alive. They disrupt “binaries” and undermine pure categories. The zombie is thus: “undecidable”.
In a classic horror movie, the hero simply kills his “enemy”. However, he cannot kill a zombie. They are dead. He therefore needs to act beyond the classical approach. He needs a creative solution. In Hollywood it is straightforward. The hero breaks the rules. He sends zombies back to the stable category of “the dead” by beheading them.
There is an infamous photograph of 911 survivors entirely covered in the collapsing twin tower’s black dust. They look like walking statues. They were ashen, colorless, but still walking towards safety. They looked both dead and alive. They looked like zombies. They signaled an undecidability. They brought about anxiety.
We might ask, is not the third-generation Muslim growing up in the West after 911 today’s cultural zombie?
Today’s young Muslim-Australian who remains emotionally, politically and culturally attached to the “outside” Muslim world remains a problem. His self is a “space” that cohabits opposing elements. The young Muslim poisons the inside/outside binary. He disrupts the binaries of “here” and “there”. He is an “undecidable”.
Within the social doxa, society fixes the young Muslim between difference and citizenry, past and present, inclusion and exclusion. He is between negotiating and wanting Shari’ah and democracy.
News media might well induce the belief that the Muslim is in a contest with the democratic citizen. The citizen is the basic ”thing” that gives meaning to democracy’s subsidiary qualities and values. It is the “pin” that holds up today’s elections, and laws, liberal values and perspectives.
The citizen allows society to describe and attribute rights and freedoms. Whereas, within the same social paradigm, the Muslim is “old and moralistic”. The Muslim apparently cannot find a place in the current tolerant society. He thus challenges citizenry, and yet paradoxically this same society uproots the Muslim from his own Islamic traditions. The Muslim is in transit. His identity exists ‘beyond’ the modern ontology. He is neither here or there.
Similar to the Hollywood hero, liberal society thus faces a dilemma. The Muslim challenges categories, and produces anxieties about the enemy within. However, democratic societies cannot deny the Muslim’s freedom to interpret religion without undermining the idea of a citizen. How does liberal society deal with what it determines to be illiberal elements without itself being illiberal?
So how does liberalism deal with third-generation Muslims who wish to use their rights to express an Islam that has loyalties to the Muslim world; that challenges Australian interests; that questions secular values?
Similar to Hollywood’s hero who creatively kill zombies, liberal society must break its own rules. They must attempt to “behead” the Muslim youth, symbolically. They must attempt to remove one pole of the two opposing poles. They must remove the Muslim world as a guide, the community as a whole, Islam as a universal and singular religion, they must promote an individualist vision, to remove the source that guides a Muslim as an entirely embodied being that is constituted within the Shari’ah. It must sever the body, from the head, the public Muslim from the private Muslim.
Australian public academic, Waleed Aly unwittingly offers a perfect description of the beheaded Muslim. He carelessly squeezes Islam out from a Muslim character and presents her ontological corpse as a principal example of an integrated citizen. In the chapter, Seeking the Human, in his book People Like Us, Aly writes admirably on Yasmine who is a young Muslim professional working woman. Here, Aly tells an intriguing story of a fascinating individual. Aly mentions how her smile resists the crude taxonomy of negative stereotypes.
In one story, Yasmine refuses a leading newspaper’s request to pose with a sullen face. Aly claims, she is breaking down long lasting assumptions about Muslim woman. Yasmine says more than just “no” in refusing to wipe away her characteristic smile which “flashes broadly and brightly”.
However, in Aly’s description he makes no mention about what makes Yasmine a Muslim. Yasmine is just Yasmine. Here, Aly defers Islam. It remains undefined. He leaves it as the unsaid. Yasmine has little to do with the Muslim world. She is an empty signifier. Aly performs the role of the Hollywood hero and reaffirms the “Australian” category because he slices away one of the two clashing elements of “here” and “there”.
Aly has removed the unfamiliar element. Islam becomes unrepresentable in its representation. It becomes an ambiguity, something unjudged. The individual’s private possession. He places the shari’ah in the background. Islam becomes irrelevant when he tells the familiar story of the ordinary Australian citizen who so happens to be Muslim. This is in many ways is the price young Muslims face for integration, their symbolical heads, their link to the traditions within the Muslim world and Islamic thought.
Yassir Morsi is a Phd candidate and lecturer in Political science and Islamic Studies at the University of Melbourne.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect New Civilisation’s editorial policy.
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A well articulated and thought provoking piece of writing. I agree, th
An open letter to Rashid al Ghannouchi
I think the ending would have been much better if the writer avoided t
Sahar
One of the most poignant critiques of liberalism I’ve read in a while ; and accurately positions the political condition of Muslimness in today’s post-911 climate. The article departs from the tireless defensive discourse that explains the Muslim condition with its piercing and challenging response to this hegemonic narrative.
But a question for editors of the journal: why is there a caveat for this article and not the others? I thought this journal was meant to provide a new space to engage on such issues? The caveat used in this way conveys a contradictory message and is inappropriately used, especially considering it’s not been used in other articles. The inconsistency of distancing oneself from the article and not others puts into question the inclusive and ‘neutral’ position the journal has assumed.
NewCiv
Dear Sahar,
Thank you for your comment, we hope that you find the various articles here informative and challenging in the perspective taken and articulated.
Regarding your question re. editorial policy: we have only recently re-launched, and though we have received a number of submissions this was the first submission from outside of the regular contributors that has been published. It will be a standard procedure that any and all submissions from other than the regular contributors will have the message appended at the end.
This is not necessarily an advocacy of or a difference with the position taken in the article, it is simply for the sake of consistency as we proceed with publishing contributions from varying different perspectives as we move forward.
We hope that you continue to benefit from the articles at New Civilisation, and please do circulate all articles you think relevant to all those who you believe would be interested in them.
Confuzzled
Wow, first of all, let me express my shock at learning that all Muslims are male!
I guess as female and Muslim, I’m not only like the zombie that the author zealously refers to, but a zombie squared! I’ll be here, waiting for a Hollywood hero type to come and behead me – twice – so as to not challenge the author’s subconsciously engrained notion of male primacy in Islam which has surfaced in this article.
Apart from this point, which struck me immediately, this article amused me. I am sure it is intended to be a refreshing departure from the usual ‘apologetic’ stance of Muslims who are attempting to collude with the ‘pins’ (or citizens) in this country. However, it reeks of mediocrity, and opinions that have not been thought through or expressed properly. It is elitist and delusional, and attempts to paint all those pin-colluding, liberalist Muslims (all male, of course) as inferior and sell outs.
I would love for the author to put us inferior Muslims to shame, and to share how he’s managed to live and breathe such an illiberal and fearless version of Islam that aligns with the most unadulterated interpretation of Shariah he alludes to.
While he does that, I’d recommend all readers quickly make sure their houses are boarded up for the impending zombie apocalypse.
Mo
Sorry, confuzzled, in respect to your above comment, I think you missed the point; so could you please elaborate on were you got the idea that the author is saying you can only be a Muslim if you are male? Also he did not mention “inferiority” or ” sell outs” , but rather the post was about illiberal solutions to liberal problems?
I think your venom is entirely uncalled for, and I have no idea why you are talking it so personal. Sorry sister but you gave a horrible reading, try clearing your heart and giving it another go, your post smacks of defensiveness — your not yasmine or Waleed Aly are you ?
Wasallams
NewCiv
While we wish to encourage a robust discourse in respect to published work, and will not intervene in any good natured banter between commentators, please avoid ad hominem comments going forward.
Newuser
How elitist can it be as it is on a independent online journal and makes use of popular culture. But I have to say to the author that you should have used gender-neutral pronouns so as to counter predictable pseudo feminist (read PC gone mad) criticism.
I think it is shortsighted to render the above article as advocating a ‘radical’ or ‘fanatic’ criticism of liberalism combined with irrational acceptance of ‘fearless version of Islam’. I just read it as a critique of ideology and the fantasies of progressive, one-size-fits-all liberal solutions that are parroted by every crackpot self-professed healer of modern ills.
I congratulate the author for going beyond the boundaries of the given liberal hegemony. Keep up the good work. Never trust those who are easily offended. More politics less police.
Sahar
Confuzzled,
While you clung on to the misuse of pronouns, perhaps you should have paid more attention to your use of contradictory adjectives: how is the article both elitist and mediocre? How does it then demonstrate ideas that have not been thought-through? Resist the urge to speak for all Muslim women, or all women for that matter.
I think the zombie analogy captures both life hallowed out by ideology and the limit, the other, of such programming. So putting aside the heavy urge to trump everything that doesn’t sit well within my need to affirm the woman’s position (whatever that maybe), I see the figure of the zombie as bare life.
yassir
Confuzzled
I am not going to respond to the charges, I feel they are unwarranted. Although, credit where it is due, I will congratulate you on the term “pin-colluding”. I love it!
MashAllah.
You’re right. I did not properly define what I meant by “pin”. This part at least was poorly expressed.
The pin is analogous, I mean that it stops meaning from “moving around too much”. Ideology without a “pin” loses its shape and becomes meaningless; there is no way to know what is right from wrong. I mean something like Lacan’s “a point de capiton”
For example, Islam calls for our consciousness of the “uniqueness of one God”. This consciousness gives meaning to Islam. You would probably get a scholarly consensus that “Tawheed” is the Muslim’s “pin”. It is Islam’s defining feature. Tawheed thus ties how Muslims understand all things Islamic; God knows best.
In my post, I was suggesting the citizen, loyal to fulfilling his liberal social contract, is “a point de capiton” that gives meaning to a liberal’s understanding of society. It pins down liberalism and liberal society’s meaning.
On the contrary then, the liberal Muslim cannot collude with “pins”. The Muslim half in the “liberal-Muslim” hybrid actually loosens the pin’s hold on what it means to be liberal. Liberalism starts to “move around”, hence, the social anxiety that accompany Muslims living in western society.
just because you are curious, I’m hardly practising an “unadulterated fearless” version of shari’ah, but then, my failure is not your success. I’m just a zombie trying not to lose his head, make dua, iA.
Thanks for taking the time to read and comment on my post. Much appreciated.
Salam
Sarmadr
brilliant article…i understand more about zombies now! and love the analogy.
I’ll actually use this zombie analogy in other walks of life now…and the analogy of how/what someone is trying to behead it…thereby maybe protecting myself from a “beheading”.
good stuff really. Good stuff.
Also loved the comments’ discourse.