Zohran & the Specter of Islamic Postliberalism

Zizek, Houellebecq & the Muhammad Option

We first covered the relationship between Islam and postliberalism in our pod episode with

Shadi Hamid

, where we discussed his book The Problem of Democracy and his essay on Houellebecq’s Submission.

Given Zohran Mamdani’s victory in the NYC Mayoral Democratic Primary, we thought we’d continue our series on Islam by getting into the specter of an Islamic postliberal politics.

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In 2010, zealously patriotic New Yorkers protested against the proposal to build the Cordoba House—an Islamic cultural center dedicated to multi-faith dialogue—at Ground Zero. In their eyes, the “9/11 mosque” would be an affront to the memory of those killed, on top of being opposed to “American values” (freedom, Christianity, feminism, capitalism??). The idea was scrapped and replaced with the Calatrava-designed Oculus: an eye-shaped luxury shopping mall and transit hub.

I was left to wonder how much more a temple to the “all-seeing” gods of global capitalism honored the memory of those killed than a space devoted to dialogue among believers in the one true God.

In the early aughts, the same neoconservatives—among whom were evangelical Christians on the “Religious Right”—who railed against the dangers of worshipping Allah were rather sheepish when it came to the dangers of worshipping the false gods of global technocracy and the free market. More recently, the populist right (the neocons’ successors) have sounded the alarm bells about Zohran Mamdani’s winning the Democratic ticket for the NYC mayoral election, fearing—on top of his socialist policy platform—he will impose Shar’ia law and open the door to Islamic extremism.

neoliberalhell

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As you should know by now, Cracks in PoMo offers you spicy takes on matters of cultural politics, political philosophy, and political discourse—but NEVER on politics proper. Thus, we will not be endorsing any candidates (as if our opinion actually mattered…no one cares what we—or you—think!). Rather, we wanted to take this opportunity to continue our series on Islam by commenting on the relationship between Islam, capitalism, and postliberal politics.

Islamic Fundamentalism & Global Capitalism: 2 sides of the same coin?

In his 2002 book Welcome to the Desert of the Real, Slavoj Zizek argues that as much as neoconservatism postured itself as the enemy of Islamic fundamentalism, they are ultimately two sides of the same coin. In addition to literally being funded by neoliberal Western leaders (as Adam Curtis reminds us in several of his documentaries), fundamentalist Islamic regimes exist in a symbiotic relationship with their so-called enemies.

Fundamentalism rose in the Arab world in part as a reaction to the excessive power and decadent amorality of Western capitalist countries. But beneath this zealous opposition was an envious resentment, a covert desire to surpass the power of these Western countries. They were well aware that in order to survive, they must hop on the global capitalist bandwagon. Over time, most Islamist regimes have either maintained the facade of Islamic zeal while being functionally capitalist, or have completely shed their anti-Western, anti-secularist posturing and totally caved toward a neoliberal Western model (as Zizek says, you can’t have “‘capitalism without capitalism,’ without the excesses if individualism, social disintegration, relativization of values...”).

When the media told us that we were caught in an epic battle between liberalism and antiquarian fundamentalism, they were in reality mystifying the true battle, the true choice in front of us: global capitalism or the Lacanian “Other”—anti-globalization of a left-wing persuasion. And so, Zizek concludes the book by proposing that if Islamic cultures truly want to counter the modern threats of secularism, globalization, and neoliberal capitalism, they ought to turn toward socialism rather than toward fundamentalism.¹

Again, Zizek contends that Islamic fundamentalism’s anti-modernism is a mere performative facade masking its deeply modernist tendencies (Wahabism is an anti-traditional—or as he says, a “Protestant”—approach to Islamic jurisprudence).

Zizek goes on to argue that among the world’s great religions, Islam poses the strongest challenge to the modern emphasis on individualism and the cult of wealth. Thus, it is within Muslims’ interest to opt not for fundamentalist authoritarianism, but for an Islamized version of socialism—which in his eyes converges with the monotheistic opposition to individualism and the worship of worldly comfort. (Read more about the postmodern sensibilities of Islamic metaphysics in our piece on the Queer/Muslim horseshoe).

Houellebecq’s Chestertonian Islam

Surely, many monotheists will take issue with Zizek’s (and Zohran’s) socialist affinities. Socialism’s collectivist bent, and its readiness to cede the agency of individuals and smaller non-State institutions over to the State, risks propagating other false idols (namely Statism) that are antithetical to the communitarian ideal of most monotheistic religions (especially Christianity). (Pope Benedict XVI² and Dorothy Day perhaps have the most nuanced takes on the risks and benefits of socialism).

Perhaps Muslims disillusioned with neoliberal capitalism, but who find an Islamized version of socialism to be an inadequate alternative, may find hope in the “Chestertonian Shar’ia” found in Michel Houllebecq’s 2015 novel Submission.

Despite calling himself an enemy of Islam, many have commented that Houellebecq inadvertently made a strong case for a moderate form of Shar’ia taking over secularized European countries like France. In the novel, Mohammad Ben Abbes is elected as president of France. His platform was presented as an alternative to the secular liberalism, Islamized socialism, right-wing nationalism, and Islamic extremism.³

Ben Abbes’s government promotes (while stopping short of enforcing) religious practice⁴, traditional family values, redistribution of wealth, and socialized programs. It seems to merge the communal sensibility of Islam (the unity of the Umma) with that of Christian social teaching—namely with Chestertonian distributism:

It soon became clear that Mohammed Ben Abbes had other ideas apart from Islam; in a press conference he declared to general astonishment that he was influenced by distributism. Actually he had already mentioned this multiple times during his campaign, but since journalists are very naturally inclined to ignore information that they cannot understand, these statements were not passed on to the public. This time he was the sitting president of the republic so that it was necessary for them to bring their research up to date.

And so the public learned over the next few weeks that distributism was an economic philosophy that had been developed in England at the start of the 20th century by thinkers such as Gilbert Keith Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc. It wanted to take a ‘third way’ between capitalism and communism (which it understood as state capitalism). Its basic idea was the overcoming of the division between capital and labor. The normal form of economic life was to be the family business. If certain branches of production required large scale organization, then everything was to be done to ensure that the workers were co-owners of their company, and co-responsible for its management. […]

An essential element of political philosophy introduced by Chesterton and Belloc was the principle of subsidiarity. According to this principle, no association (whether social, economic or political) should have charge of a function that could be assigned to a smaller association. Pope Pius XI in his encyclical Quadragesimo Anno, provided a definition of this principle: “Just as it is gravely wrong to take from individuals what they can accomplish by their own initiative and industry and give it to the community, so also it is an injustice and at the same time a grave evil and disturbance of right order to assign to a greater and higher association what lesser and subordinate organizations can do.”

The Muhammad Option?

Could it be possible for moderate Muslims to advance an Islamized version of distributism? I certainly have my doubts. As I mentioned in our first piece in this series, I fear that Islam’s lack of a humanistic anthropology (no Incarnation) would make it hard to foster a genuine communitarian/subsidiarian ethos that values the agency of individuals/small institutions via public policy. But it’s certainly not impossible (I think of Islam’s robust sense of community when I walk past Muslims in Little Palestine in BK celebrating iftar during Ramadan…which rivals your average church’s sense of community.)

If anything, Christians (esp. subsidiarity-pilled, Benedict Option-y ones) should spend lest time creating a bogeyman out of Islam and should instead look for ways to forge a postliberal coalition with Muslims. As much as Christians should not be naive about the dangers of Islamism (which needless to say is much more dangerous than Christian fundamentalism), we have much more in common with God-fearing Muslims than with godless neoliberals. Christians have certain strengths that Muslims generally lack (namely, a robust anthropology and human rights tradition, subsidiarity) and vice versa (zeal, reverence for the transcendent, rigorous morals).

More to come in our post on what both the Left and Right misunderstand about Islam’s relationship with violence. Stay tuned.

1

This means that the choice for the Muslims is not only either Islamo-Fascist fundamentalism or the painful process of 'Islamic Protestantism' which would make Islam compatible with modernization. There is a third option, which has already been tried: Islamic socialism. The proper politically correct attitude is to emphasize, with symptomatic insistence, how the terrorist attacks have nothing to do with the real Islam, that great and sublime religion - would it not be more appropriate to recognize Islam's resistance to modernization? And, rather than bemoaning the fact that Islam, of all the great religions, is the most resistant to modernization, we should, rather, conceive of this resistance as an open chance, as 'undecidable': this resistance does not necessarily lead to 'Islamo-Fascism', it could also be articulated into a Socialist project. Precisely because Islam harbours the 'worst' potentials of the Fascist answer to our present predicament, it could also turn out to be the site for the 'best'.

2. "In Wilhelmine Germany, too, Catholic groups felt closer to democratic socialism than to the rigidly Prussian and Protestant conservative forces. In many respects, democratic socialism was and is close to Catholic social doctrine and has in any case made a remarkable contribution to the formation of a social consciousness."

from Without Roots

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Whereas Ramadan presented sharia as forward-looking, even revolutionary, Ben Abbes restored its reassuring, traditional value-with a perfume of exoticism that made it all the more attractive. When he campaigned on family values, traditional morality, and, by extension, patriarchy, an avenue opened up to him that neither the conservatives nor the National Front could take without being called reactionaries or even fascists by the last of the soixante-huitards, those progressive mummified corpses-extinct in the wider world —who managed to hang on in the citadels of the media, still cursing the evil of the times and the toxic atmosphere of the country. Only Ben Abbes was spared. The left, paralyzed by his multicultural background, had never been able to fight him, or so much as mention his name.

4

[T]imes had changed. More and more families— whether Jewish, Chris-tian, or Muslim-wanted their children's education to go beyond the mere transmission of knowledge, to include spiritual instruction in their own traditions. This return to religion was deep, it crossed sectarian lines, and public education could no longer afford to ignore it. It was time to broaden the idea of republican schooling, to bring it into harmony with the great spiritual traditions-Muslim, Christian, or Jewish—of our country.

It took us years to understand that, for all Ben Abbes's ambitions-and he's hugely ambitious—his plans had nothing to do with Islamic fundamentalism. There's an idea you hear in far-right circles, that if the Muslims came to power, Christians would be reduced to second-class citi-zens, or dhimmis. Now, dhimmitude is part of the general principles of Islam, it's true, but in practice the status of dhimmis is a very flexible thing. Islam exists all over the world. The way it's practiced in Saudi Arabia has nothing to do with the Islam you find in Indonesia or Morocco. In France, I promise you, they won't interfere with Christian worship—in fact, the government will increase spending for Catholic organizations and the upkeep of churches. And they'll be able to afford it, since the Gulf States will be giving so much more to the mosques. For these Muslims, the real enemy—the thing they fear and hate—isn't Catholicism. It's secularism. It's laicism. It's atheist materialism. They think of Catholics as fellow believers. Catholicism is a religion of the Book. Catholics are one step away from converting to Islam-that's the true, original Muslim vision of Christianity.