In Defense of Ho(s)tels: Islamophobia, Domophilia, Liberalism

Abstract

I foreground the reconstituted notion of ‘nation-state-as-home’ as central to our understanding of the hostility to and fear of Muslims, Islamophobia, in the contemporary west and beyond. The reconfiguration of the quest from a ‘heavenly home’ into an ‘earthly home’ – a prime signature of secular modernity – led to the consolidation of the nation-state as sort of a ‘natural’ home generating a new kind of love: domophilia – domo + philia, love for home. This love for home, domo, stemming from the Indo-European linguistic root, dem – a zone of possession and imagined security – derives its sustenance from its constitutive obverse, foris/foras, outsider and stranger. What simultaneously connects and separates the two is hostility often manifest, inter alia, in war. Discussing the condition of Muslims in the west and in India, this article aims to demonstrate the complex intimacy between domophilia and Islamophobia. Public expression of Islamophobia, I argue, is not a deviation from but constitutive of liberalism. It is my contention that much of the talk about Muslims' ‘integration’, verily a moderate word for assimilation, is less than adequate to meet the ever-growing challenge of Islamophobia. We need a significantly new way of imagining politics anchored in a ho(s)tel, not in the hegemonic established sense of a ‘home-as-nation-state’ which carries seeds of violence.

Notes

¹All quotes from Andrew Berwick [Anders Behring Breivik], 2083: A European Declaration of Independence (place and name of publication not given, 2011), pp. 411, 572, 1294, 1312, 1324, http://www.kevinislaughter.com/wp-content/uploads/2083+-+A+European+Declaration+of+Independence.pdf (accessed 18 November 2012).

⁴The CD is in Hindi; all translations into English are by the author.

²‘BJP: CD meñ kyahai?’, BBC Urdu, 2007, http://www.bbc.co.uk/urdu/india/story/2007/04/printable/070405_bjp_cd_sen.shtml (accessed 4 November 2007); ‘BJP Campaign Film Targets SP, Congress’, Financial Express, 2006, http://www.financialexpress.com/printer/news/187384/ (accessed 15 June 2009).

³In transliterating Urdu and Hindi words, I have largely followed the Annual of Urdu Studies journal guidelines, also available online, http://www.urdustudies.com/pdf/22/01TitleTranslit.pdf (accessed 18 November 2012).

⁵Irfan Ahmad, ‘Contextualizing Vande Matram’, Manushi. A Journal about Women and Society, 111 (1999), pp. 29–30.

⁶The BJP election CD, given by Yoginder Sikand, is in my personal library.

⁷Irfan Ahmad, ‘Haunting the West: Plural Narratives of a Singular Figure’, Australian Book Review, March (2011), pp. 56–57.

⁸Rudd: ‘There is a Threat from Terrorism’, BBC, 4 August 2009, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/8182704.stm (accessed 4 August 2009).

⁹Matti Bunzl, ‘Between Anti-Semitism and Islamophobia: Some Thoughts on the New Europe’, American Ethnologist, 32:4 (2005), pp. 499–508: p. 502.

¹⁰Bunzl, op. cit., p. 502.

¹¹Andre Gingrich, ‘Anthropological Analyses of Islamophobia and Anti-Semitism in Europe’, American Ethnologist, 32:4 (2005), pp. 513–515: p. 515.

¹²John Bowen, ‘Commentary on Bunzl’, American Ethnologist, 32:4 (2005), pp. 524–525: p. 524.

¹³Bunzl, op. cit., p. 502.

¹⁴ John Gerard Ruggie, ‘Territoriality and Beyond: Problematizing Modernity in International Relations’, International Organization, 47:1 (1993), pp. 139–174.

¹⁵Saskia Sassen, ‘Spatialities and Temporalities of the Global: Elements of a Theorization’, Public Culture, 12:1 (2000), pp. 215–232.

¹⁶Dietrich Von Engelhardt. ‘Romanticism in Germany’ in Roy Poter and Mikulas Teich (eds) Romanticism in National Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 117; Mary Anne Perkins, ‘Cosmopolitanism and Nationalism in the Writings of August Wilhelm and Friedrich Schlegel’ in Mary Anne Perkins and Martin Liebscher (eds) Nationalism Versus Cosmopolitanism in German Thought and Culture, 1789–1914 (Lewiston: Mellon Press, 2006).

¹⁷Arian Chebel d'Appolonia, ‘European Nationalism and European Union’ in Anthony Pagden (ed.) The Idea of Europe: From Antiquity to the European Union (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 172.

¹⁸Bunzl, op. cit., p. 506.

¹⁹Christopher Ansell, ‘Restructuring Authority and Territoriality’ in Christopher Ansell and Giuseppe Di Palma (eds) Restructuring Territoriality: Europe and the United States Compared (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 2–18; Pierre Beckouche, ‘Division of Man, Division of Men: Why is the Territory a Strong Component of Contemporary Collective Identity?’, GeoJournal, 60 (2004), 381–387.

²⁰Bunzl, op. cit., p. 506.

²¹Gary D. Bouma, ‘Religious Resurgence, Conflict and the Transformation of Boundaries’ in Peter Beyer and Lori Beaman (eds) Religion, Globalization and Culture (Leiden: Brill, 2007), pp. 187–202; also see Irfan Ahmad, Islamism and Democracy in India: The Transformation of Jamaat-e-Islami (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), ch. 1.

²⁸‘The Home Rule’, Indianhistory.com, http://www.indhistory.com/home-rule.html (accessed on 13 June 2011).

²²Michael Walzer, Politics and Passion: Toward a More Egalitarian Liberalism (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2004), p. 138.

²³Anthony Smith, Nationalism in the Twentieth Century (Oxford: Martin Robertson, 1979), p. 191; Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990). p. 13.

²⁴Erin Manning, Ephemeral Territories: Representing Nation, Home and Identity in Canada (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), p. xvii.

²⁵Irfan Ahmad, ‘Anthropology of Nationalism, Nationalism of Anthropology: Notes on the Idea and Practice of Indian Anthropology’, paper presented at the Anthropology Colloquium, Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia (20 October 2011); also see Daniel Chernilo, ‘Social Theory's Methodological Nationalism: Myth and Reality’, European Journal of Social Theory, 9:1 (2006), pp. 5–22.

²⁶For a fuller elaboration of this argument in relation to sociology and Indian nationalism, see Ahmad, op. cit., ‘Anthropology of Nationalism’.

²⁷ Oxford English Dictionary: The Definitive Record of the English Language, ‘home, n.1 and adj.’, OED Online, www.oed.com.ezproxy.lib.monash.edu.au/view/Entry/87869?rskey=mezQcm&result=1&isAdvanced=false (accessed 11 June 2011). The change from ‘Home program’ to ‘Radio 4’ took place in 1967.

³²Irfan Ahmad, ‘Modernity and Its Outcast: The Why and How of India's Partition’, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, 35:2 (2012), p. 478.

²⁹Judith Brown, Gandhi's Rise to Power: Indian Politics 1915–1922 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), p. 149.

³⁰Hashim Qidwai, Jadīd hindustān ke seyāsī aur samājī k⪽hayālāt (New Delhi: Taraqqī Urdu Bureau, 1985), pp. 105–119.

³¹Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), p. 32.

³³Aileen Moreton-Robinson, ‘Still Call Australia Home: Indigenous Belonging and Place in a Postcolonising Society’ in Sara Ahmed, Claudia Castanda, Anne-Marie Fortier and Mimi Sheller (eds) Uprootings/Regroundings: Questions of Home and Migration (Oxford: Berg, 2003), p. 23. The song is also available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hV78XFdBTsk (accessed 16 June 2011).

³⁴Qantas.com.au, ‘I Still Call Australia Home’, http://www.qantas.com.au/travel/airlines/i-still-call-australia-home/global/en (accessed on 13 January 2013). Obeying the unethical capitalist ethic of copyright, I don't cite the song which the reader can listen to by clicking the URL in this note.

³⁵Moreton-Robinson, op. cit., pp. 25, 24.

³⁶Larissa Behrendt, ‘Home: The Importance of the Place to the Dispossessed’, South Atlantic Quarterly, 108:1 (2009), pp. 71–85.

³⁷The historian Mark McKenna of the University of Sydney made this point in the Annual History Lecture aired on ABC Radio National, 28 January 2013, http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/specialbroadcasts/annual-history-lecture3a-professor-mark-mckenna/4484202 (accessed 30 January 2013).

³⁸Ann Stoler, ‘Sexual Affronts and Racial Frontiers: European Identities and the Cultural Politics of Exclusion in Colonial South East Asia’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 34:3 (1992), p. 516.

³⁹Cited in Jagannath Azad, ‘Hindustan ke tahzibi ‘anaṣir ki tashkil meñ Urdu ka ḥiṣṣa’, ahang (Gaya; January 1983), p. 22. The full couplet read as follows: ‘is fiz..ay-e-ḥusn parwar ki ḥifaẓat farẓ hai/ye hamara ghar hai is ghar ki ḥifaz..at farẓh hai’.

⁴⁰Prasun Sonwalkar, ‘Shooting the Messenger: Political Violence, Gujarat 2002 and the Indian News Media’ in B. Cole (ed.) Conflict, Terrorism and the Media in Asia (New York: Routledge, 2006), p. 86.

⁴¹ Amar uajala (Agra edition), 22 April 2002.

⁴⁹Benveniste, op. cit., p. 255.

⁴²Emile Benveniste, Indo-European Language and Society, translated by Elizabeth Palmer (London: Faber, 1973), p. 241. I am thankful to Ghassan Hage for directing me to this work.

⁴³Ibid., p. 243.

⁴⁴Ibid., pp. 244–245.

⁴⁵Ibid., p. 239.

⁴⁶Ibid., p. 251.

⁴⁷Ibid., p. 244.

⁴⁸Reinhart Koselleck, Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and Pathogenesis of Modern Society (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1988 [1959]), p. 44.

⁵⁰Linda Bishai, Forgetting Ourselves: Secession and the (Im)possibility of Territorial Identity (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2007), p. 61.

⁵¹Ibid., p. 61

⁵²David Campbell, Writing Security: United States Foreign Policy and the Politics of Identity, cited in Bishai, op. cit., p. 78, italics in original.

⁵³Ibid., italics in original.

⁵⁴Bishai, op. cit., p. 79.

⁵⁵Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International (New York, London: Routledge, 1994), p. 82, italics in original; also see Jacques Derrida, ‘Onto-Theology of National Humanism (Prolegomena to a Hypothesis)’ in Barry Stocker (ed.) Basic Writings (London: Routledge, 2007), pp. 305–323.

⁵⁶ Oxford English Dictionary, ‘home, n.1 and adj.’.

⁵⁷This is based on my observation as a fanatic fan who has watched cricket for over a decade.

⁵⁸Derrida, Basic Writings, p. 316.

⁵⁹Effie Fokas, ‘Introduction’ in Aziz Al-Azmeh and Effie Fokas (eds) Islam in Europe: Diversity, Identity and Influence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 2, italics added.

⁶⁰Jocelyn Cesari, ‘Muslim Identities in Europe: The Snare of Exceptionalism’ in Al-Azmeh and Fokas, op. cit., p. 56, italics added.

⁶¹Jorgen Nielsen, ‘The Question of Euro-Islam: Restriction or Opportunity’ in Al-Azmeh and Fokas, op. cit., p. 35.

⁶²Xavier Bougarel, ‘Bosnian Islam as “European Islam”: Limits and Shifts of a Concept’ in Al-Azmeh and Fokas, op. cit., pp. 96–124.

⁶³Laurie Fenstermacher et al. (eds), ‘Protecting the Homeland from International and Domestic Terrorism Threats: Current Multi-disciplinary Perspectives on Root Causes, the Role of Ideology, and Programs for Counter-radicalization and Disengagement’, http://www.start.umd.edu/start/publications/U_Counter_Terrorism_White_Paper_Final_January_2010.pdf (accessed 11 April 2011).

⁶⁴ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c1EV_IVpYew (accessed 13 January 2013).

⁶⁷Nira Wickramasinghe, ‘After the War: A New Patriotism in Sri Lanka?’, The Journal of Asian Studies, 68:4 (2009), p. 1045.

⁶⁵Eric Fassin, ‘National Identities and Transnational Intimacies: Sexual Democracy and the Politics of Immigration in Europe’, Public Culture, 22:3 (2010), p. 526.

⁶⁶Alain Badiou, ‘The Communist Hypothesis’, New Left Review, 49 (2008), p. 39.

⁶⁸Marc Auge, Non-places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity (London: Verso, 1995).

⁶⁹Steve Bruce, Religion in the Modern World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 96; and Steve Bruce, ‘Social Process of Secularization’ in R.K. Fenn (ed.) The Blackwell Companion to Sociology of Religion (Oxford: Blackwell).

⁷⁰ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBnLa6Llz2g (accessed 12 July 2009).

⁷¹Koselleck, op. cit., p. 49.

⁷²Hannah Arendt, Men in Dark Times (London: Harcourt, 1995), p. 83.

⁷³Here I am indebted to Faisal Devji's The Terrorist in Search of Humanity (Delhi: Foundation Books, 2008); my reading of Arendt is somewhat different from Devji's, however.

⁷⁴‘Zawahiri Praises Osama Bin Laden, Vows to Continue Jihad’, Times of India, 8 June 2011, http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/middle-east/Zawahiri-praises-Osama-bin-Laden-vows-to-continue-jihad/articleshow/8778372.cms (accessed 9 June 2011).

⁷⁵Cited in Irfan Ahmad, ‘Is There an Ethics of Terrorism? Islam, Globalisation, Militancy – Review Essay’, South Asia, 33:3 (2010), p. 496.

⁷⁶Robert Gould, this issue.

⁷⁷John Trumpbour, ‘The Clash of Civilizations: Samuel Huntington, Bernard Lewis, and the Remaking of the Post-Cold War World Order’ in E. Qureshi and M. Sells (eds) The New Crusades: Constructing the Muslim Enemy (Columbia: Columbia University Press, 2003), p. 118.

⁷⁸Ibid. Terry Eagleton notes the link between Islamophobia and current advocates of liberalism such as Salman Rushdie and Christopher Hitchens; see Irfan Ahmad, Islam as Critique: Reason, Revelation, Tradition (in progress).

⁷⁹Ahmad, ‘Modernity and Its Outcast’, p. 483

⁸⁰Pulak Narayan Dhar, ‘Bengal Renaissance: A Study in Social Contradiction’, Social Scientist, 15:1 (1987), p. 30.

⁸¹Gandhi too seemed to hold such a view; see the 1944 correspondence between Gandhi and Jinnah in K.M. Ashraf, Hindu–Muslim Question and Our Freedom Struggle, vol. 2 (Delhi: Sunrise, 2005), appendix 6.

⁸²‘Ayodhya Judgment New Chapter for National Unity: Advani’, Sify.com, 2010, http://www.sify.com/news/ayodhya-judgement-new-chapter-for-national-unity-advani-news-national-kj4v4mijdcf.html (accessed on 1 October 2010).

⁸³For a representative example, see R. Upadhyay, ‘Indian Muslims: Under Siege?’, http://www.southasiaanalysis.org/paper1160 (accessed on 12 January 2013).

⁸⁴Balraj Madhok, Indianization: What, Why and How (Delhi: S. Chand, 1970).

⁸⁵Cited in Christophe Jaffrelot (ed.), Hindu Nationalism: A Reader (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), p. 170.

⁸⁶Khurshid, At Home in India: A Restatement of Indian Muslims (Delhi: Vikas, 1986).

⁸⁷My suggestion here is to see ‘home’ not as an accomplished fact but as a process, what Ahmed et al. call ‘homing’ and Hage ‘making home’; Ahmed et al., ‘Introduction’ in Sara Ahmed, Claudia Castanda, Anne-Marie Fortier and Mimi Sheller (eds) Uprootings/Regroundings: Questions of Home and Migration (Oxford: Berg, 2003); Ghassan Hage, ‘At Home in the Entrails of the West: Multiculturalism, Ethnic Food and Migrant Home-Building’ in Helen Grace, Ghassan Hage, Lesley Johnson, John Langsworth and Michael Symonds (eds) Home/World: Space, Community and Marginality in Sydney's West (Annandale: Pluto, 1997). An analytical advantage of understanding Islamophobia through ‘home/homing’ is that it also allows exploring the everydayness and micro processes of lives. Bunzl, who I cited above, is concerned more with the discourses of the political and bureaucratic elites.

⁸⁸In Introduction to his book on Muslims in Africa, Robinson writes: ‘The conflict began in the seventh century CE, when Muslim armies conquered a great deal of the Mediterranean world that Europe considered its original cultural home’ (italics added); David Robinson, Muslim Societies in African History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. xv.

⁸⁹Rhiannon Donaldson, ‘Revisiting a “Well-worn Theme”: The Duality of the Australian Christmas Pudding 1850–1950’, Eras Journal, 6 (2004), p. 3.

⁹⁰Howard J. Wiarda, The Dutch Diaspora: The Netherlands and Its Settlements in Africa, Asia, and the Americas (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2007), ch. 10.

⁹¹Anjana Singh, Fort Cochin in Kerala, 1750–1830: The Social Condition of a Dutch Community in an Indian Milieu (Ledien: Brill, 2010), ch. 1.

⁹²Paul Rich ‘Ideology in a Plural Society: The Case of South African Segregation’, Social Dynamics, 1:2 (1975), p. 168.

⁹⁵Franz Kafka, Letters to Friends, Family, and Editors (New York: Schocken Books, 1977), p. 44.

⁹³William Connolly, ‘Pluralism, Multiculturalism and the Nation State: Rethinking the Connections’, Journal of Political Ideologies, 1:1 (1996), p. 61.

⁹⁴Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), p. 178.