The cultural politics of religious defiance in Islam: how pseudonyms and media can destigmatize

ABSTRACT

Religious defiance that results in publicly leaving religion (apostasy) is an enormous taboo in Arab communities despite the recent surge in apostates’ numbers. Drawing from research on stigma, apostasy, authorship, and critical studies, I explore how a transnational Arab community, which emerges in the crossfire among democratizing politics of self-expression, regulation of public identity by digital technologies, and vast opposition networks, uses digital technologies and the politics of naming to destigmatize its identity. Extending the literatures of stigma and apostasy to ex-Muslims, I conclude that this case reveals religious and nonreligious Arabs’ common struggle against violence and the need for structural changes to protect digital technologies’ emancipatory potential.

KEYWORDS:

• stigmatized identity
• apostasy
• ex-Muslim
• digital media
• pseudonyms

ORCID

Natalie Khazaal http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7430-9794

Notes

1. Micah Luxen, “Facebook Challenges Legitimacy of Some Native Names,” BBC News, March 3, 2015, http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-trending-31699618 (accessed August 5, 2016).

2. The poll also found that 22 percent of Arabs express doubts about religion (37 percent in Lebanon) compared with only 16 percent in Latin America. WIN-Gallop International, Global Index of Religiosity and Atheism, http://www.wingia.com/web/files/news/14/file/14.pdf (accessed August 5, 2016).

3. In recent decades takfir has been increasingly used as a central tenet of the ideology of militant groups and a justification for political violence, e.g. by al-Qa‘ida against the Iraqi Shi‘a community, or by ISIS against all who oppose its rule, which has kindled the outrage of the targeted communities and the broader Muslim Umma. In 2014, the new Tunisian constitution criminalized takfir. According to James Mukulec, even Islamic clerics emphatically indict the practice of takfir, and some high-profile Jihadi leaders argue against its excessive use as justification for violence. James Mukulec, “Contesting Takfir: Islamists Movements and Normative Debates Surrounding Apostacy,” paper presented at the International Studies Association annual meeting (New York, February 15–18, 2009), 14–18.

4. David Bromley, The Politics of Religious Apostasy: The Role of Apostates in the Transformation of Religious Movements (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1998).

5. Simon Cottee, The Apostates: Why Muslims Leave Islam (London: Hurst, 2015).

6. Converts to other religions are outside the scope of this project. Arab apostates come from former Christian and Muslim backgrounds; ethnically one or both of their parents are Arab; and they reside in Arab countries and Arab diasporas, forming a transnational community reflected in this study. Because the majority of ethnic Arabs come from Muslim backgrounds, there is a greater number of ex-Muslim Arab apostates. In addition, the latter are overwhelmingly represented in the sources I study, hence this study's focus on Arab-Muslim apostates [shorthand: “Arab apostates”].

7. Majallat al-Mulhidin al-‘Arab, http://arabatheistbroadcasting.com/program/magazine (accessed December 23, 2016).

8. See Erving Goffman, Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity (New York: Touchstone, [1963] 2009). Stigmas are socially constructed; what is stigmatized in one society may not be in another even if the concept and practice of stigma exists in all societies See Belle Rose Ragins, “Disclosure Disconnects: Antecedents and Consequences of Disclosing Invisible Stigmas across Life Domains,” The Academy of Management Review 33 [2008]: 196.

9. Bruce Link and Jo Phelan, “Conceptualizing Stigma,” Annual Review of Sociology 27 (2001): 363, 367.

10. Cottee, The Apostates, 167.

11. Ibid., 168.

12. Penny Edgell, Joseph Gerteis, and Douglas Hartmann, “Atheists as ‘Other’: Moral Boundaries and Cultural Membership in American Society,” American Sociological Review 71 (2006): 211–34; Steve Farkas et al., For Goodness' Sake: Why So Many Want Religion to Play a Greater Role in American Society (New York: Public Agenda, 2001), 10–11.

13. Edgell et al., “Atheists as ‘Other’,” 214.

14. Cottee, The Apostates, 168.

15. The concept of civil death is not specific to Arab and Muslim-majority countries. Even Jewish apostates in the Russian Empire suffered from civil death. See Don Seeman, “Apostasy, Grief, and Literary Practice in Habad Hasidism,” Prooftext 29 [2009]: 398–432.

16. Anh Nga Longva, “The Apostasy Law in Kuwait and the Liberal Predicament,” Cultural Dynamics 14 (2002): 259.

17. Ragins, “Disclosure Disconnects.”

18. John Pachankis, “The Psychological Implications of Concealing a Stigma: A Cognitive–Affective–Behavioral Model,” Psychological Bulletin 133 (2007): 339.

19. Cottee, The Apostates; Anna-Kaisa Newheiser and Manuela Barreto, “Hidden costs of hiding stigma: Ironic interpersonal consequences of concealing a stigmatized identity in social interactions,” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 52 (2014): 58–70.

20. Laura Smart and Daniel M. Wegner, “The Hidden Costs of Hidden Stigma,” in Social Psychology of Stigma, ed. Todd F. Heatherton and Robert E. Kleck (New York: Guilford Press, 2000), 220–42.

21. Kristin P. Beals, Letitia Anne Peplau, and Shelly L. Gable, “Stigma Management and Well-Being: the Role of Perceived Social Support, Emotional Processing, and Suppression,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 35 (2009): 867–79; Brenda Major and Richard H. Gramzow, “Abortion As Stigma: Cognitive and Emotional Implications of Concealment,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 77 (1999): 735–45.

22. Newheiser and Barreto, “Hidden costs”; Alexandra Sedlovskaya et al., “Internalizing the Closet: Concealment Heightens the Cognitive Distinction Between Public and Private Selves,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 104 (2013): 695–715; Pachankis, “The Psychological Implications”; Deborrah E.S. Frable, Camilla Wortman, and Jill Joseph, “Predicting Self-Esteem, Well-Being, and Distress in a Cohort of Gay Men: the Importance of Cultural Stigma, Personal Visibility, Community Networks, and Positive Identity,” Journal of Personality 65 (1997): 599–624; Robert Granfield, “Making It by Faking It: Working-Class Students in an Elite Academic Environment,” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 20 (1991): 331–51.

23. Paul Willis, “Laboring in Silence: Young Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Queer-Identifying Workers’ Negotiations of the Workplace Closet in Australian Organizations,” Youth and Society 43 (2011): 957–81.

24. Goffman, Stigma.

25. Eden King et al., “Predictors of Identity Management: An Exploratory Experience-Sampling Study of Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Workers,” Journal of Management 43 (2014): 1–27.

26. Katelyn McKenna and John Bargh, “Coming Out in the Age of the Internet: Identity ‘Demarginalization’ Through Virtual Group Participation,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 75 (1998): 681–94; Frable et al., “Predicting self-esteem”; Pachankis “The Psychological Implications”; Nicole Defenbaugh, “Revealing and Concealing Ill Identity: A Performance Narrative of IBD Disclosure,” Health Communication 28 (2013): 159–69.

27. Link and Phelan, “Conceptualizing Stigma,” 381.

28. According to James Raven, more than 80 percent of the novels published in England between 1750 and 1830 were anonymous. James Raven, “The Anonymous Novel in Britain and Ireland, 1750–1830,” in The Faces of Anonymity, ed. Robert Griffin (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 141–66.

29. Griffin, The Faces of Anonymity, 7.

30. Maria del Carmen Camus Camus, “Pseudonyms, Pseudotranslation and Self-Censorship in the Narrative of the West during the Franco Dictatorship,” in Translation and Censorship in Different Times and Landscapes, ed. Teresa Seruya and Maria Lin Moniz (Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009), 149.

31. Edward Mooney, “What Is ‘an Existential Contribution’?,” Topos 1 (2014): 9.

32. Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” Image-Music-Text (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977): 147; Michel Foucault, Aesthetics, Methods, and Epistemology, ed. James Faubion (New York: The New York Press, 1998) vol. 2, 206.

33. Antonio Calgagno, “Foucault and Derrida: The Question of Empowering and Disempowering the Author,” Human Studies 32 (2009): 38.

34. Foucault, Aesthetics, Methods, and Epistemology, 209–12.

35. Calgagno, “Foucault and Derrida,” 42.

36. Cottee, The Apostates, 168.

37. All information on AAM was revealed in confidential email correspondence with author, June–August, 2016.

38. Herbert Plutschow, Japan’s Name Culture: The Significance of Names in a Religious, Political, and Social Context (Folkestone, UK: Japan Library, 1995), 1.

39. Marshal Hodgson, The Venture of Islam (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), 7–8; Salahudin Ahmed, A Dictionary of Muslim Names (London: Hurst, 1999), xi.

40. William Roff, “Onomastics and Taxonomies if Belonging in the Malay Muslim World,” Journal of Islamic Studies 18 (2007): 387.

41. Roff, “Onomastics and Taxonomies,” 390.

42. See Fedwa Malti-Douglas and Genevieve Fourcade, The Treatment by Computer of Medieval Arabic Biographical Data: An Introduction and Guide to the Onomasticon Arabicum (Bloomington: Indiana UP, [1976] 1994).

43. As Ben Baz shares in an interview, he chose to include his real name to encourage other non religious Arabs to do the same. He was accused of attempting to spread atheism and sentenced to prison, forced labor, and deportation from Kuwait. “An Atheist in Kuwait: Interview with Ben Baz Aziz,” TheHumanist.com, April 24, 2014, http://thehumanist.com/features/interviews/an-atheist-in-kuwait-interview-with-benbaz-aziz-part-1 (accessed August 5, 2016).

44. Andrea Brighenti, “Visibility: A Category for the Social Sciences,” Current Sociology 55 (2007): 323–42.

45. John McDowell, “Towards a Semiotics of Nicknaming: The Kamsa Example,” Journal of American Folklore 94 (1981): 15.

46. Vivian de Klerk, “Nicknaming across Cultures: Borrowing and Other Linguistic Tricks,” Nomina Africana 12 (1998): 1–17.

47. Roff, “Onomastics and Taxonomies,” 390.

48. Some laqabs appear in Latin orthography and capitalization is inconsistent.

49. Salman Rushdie, Joseph Anton: A Memoir (New York: Random House, 2012), 23.

50. Sarah Iskafi, The Sin of Greed: Memoirs of an ex-Muslim (True Beginnings Publishing, 2014).

51. Sarah Iskafi, e-mail message to author, May 11, 2016.

52. Martin McLaughlin, “From Lepidus to Leon Battista Alberti: Naming, Renaming, and Anonymizing the Self in Quattrocento Italy,” Romance Studies 31 (2013): 152–66.

53. Hala Guta and Magdalena Karolak, “Veiling and Blogging: Social Media as Sites of Identity Negotiation and Expression among Saudi Women,” Journal of International Women’s Studies 16 (2015): 115–27.

54. Julio Jensen, “Kierkegaard and the Self-Conscious Literary Tradition: An Interpretation of the Ludic Aspects of Kierkegaard’s Pseudonymous Authorship from a Literary-Historical Perspective,” Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook 20 (2015): 171; Patricia Waugh, Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction (London: Routledge, 1993), 7.

55. SKS [Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter] 1 (Copenhagen: Gad, 1997), 356.

56. Lewis Hyde, Trickster Makes this World: Mischief, Myth and Art (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2008).

57. Foucault, Aesthetics, Methods, and Epistemology, 211.

58. Qur’an 49, 11.

59. Frank Manning, “Nicknames and Number Plates in the British West Indies” Journal of American Folklore 87 (1974): 130.

60. Richard Antoun, “On the Significance of Names in an Arab Village” Ethnology 7 (1968): 159.

61. Qur’an 111.

62. Annemarie Schimmel, Islamic Names (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1985), 4.

63. Charles Pfukwa and Lawrie Barnes, “Negotiating Identities in Guerrilla War Names in the Zimbabwean War of Liberation,” African Identities 8 (2010): 212–4.

64. James Gelvin, The Arab Uprisings: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2015).

65. Marwan Kraidy, The Naked Blogger of Cairo: Creative Insurgency in the Arab World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), 11.

66. Yves Gonzalez-Quijano, Arabités Numériques. Le Printemps du Web Arabe (Arles: Sindbad–Actes Sud, 2012), 166.

67. Link and Phelan, “Conceptualizing Stigma,” 378.

68. Thomas Allmer, Critical Theory and Social Media: Between Emancipation and Commodification (London: Routledge, 2015).

69. David Berry, Critical Theory and the Digital (London: Bloomsbury, 2014).

70. On resistance see Michael Warner, “Publics and Counterpublics,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 88 (2002): 413–425.

71. See for example, Sophia Hyatt, “Facebook ‘Blocks Accounts’ of Palestinian Journalists,” al-Jazeera, September 25, 2016, http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2016/09/facebook-blocks-accounts-palestinian-journalists-160925095126952.html (accessed January 3, 2017).

72. Berry, Critical Theory, 11.