The Middle East Amongst Us

Susanne Dahlgren
Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies

Today, anthropologists who study the Middle East are not only needed to describe and analyze the dramatic changes catalyzed by the war in Iraq and the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. We also must use our tools to make sense of the current “value conflicts” played out at “home” in North America and Europe. In doing so ethnographically, Middle East anthropologists can help contextualize the emerging false dichotomies framed as “the West” and “Islam.”

Presently the European Union is attempting to build its relations with its southern neighbors in the Mediterranean in terms of dialogue and the empowerment of democratic elements in those countries. At the same time, Muslim immigrants in Europe are facing more serious problems than Muslim immigrants in the US. Why is this?

“The Muslim Threat”
Specialists of the Middle East have warned about the emerging trend in Europe to focus primarily on religion when dealing with policies and legislation adopted in response to new immigrants. Once newcomers from the Middle East to Europe are reframed as “Muslims,” any resulting conflicts or social problems can be framed as symptomatic of these immigrants’ non-assimilation to European values, that is, caused by the allegedly profound, essential, unchangeable “otherness” of Islam.

In Europe, public debates on Muslim migrants have centered around questions of civil liberties and rights. While it is often the case that those whose “lack of assimilation” is being debated are Muslims, public debates narrow in on a single rationalized topic, such as the right of Muslim women to cover their body. I argue that those who address such questions as a “Muslim problem” to be solved by banning such practices are not only discriminatory, but they are also xenophobic, afraid of the spread of Islam throughout Europe.

The recent announcement by Dutch authorities to forbid women to wear burqa in public places, and the banning of the niqab in the Belgian city of Maaseik on the Dutch border, are the most recent examples of the state limiting personal autonomy and expression. They are also, however, examples of states and municipalities extending their control of the public sphere, in particular, in restricting the space that Muslims may inhabit within that sphere.

Even when the rights of Muslim women to cover their body are advocated, however, what this means in actual practice tends to be unclear to many. While many non-Muslims take veils as a sign of alienation and an outright protest against assimilation, for practicing Muslims, veils and other coverings carry other meanings. As scholars who have studied the European veiling phenomenon report, immigrant women who wear veils often want to identify and be recognized as both a Muslim and European. For these women, the veil might be used as an instrument to facilitate movement in a new and sometimes hostile environment.

Legislating Morality
Anthropologists specialized in the Middle East and South Asia could shed light on the controversial issue of using terms such as burqa and niqab in European legislation. As suggested, these two words carry too many meanings both historically and geographically to be useful in the crafting of legislation. In the Belgian town, niqab seems to have been adopted to refer not only to face veils (niqab in the Middle East and in Internet shops refers to a face veil with eye holes) but also to the long overcoat some Muslim women wear.

Banning long overcoats and robes worn by Muslim women were justified by some in Maaseik because such coverings frighten children. Furthermore, the use of the term niqab in the Maaseik legislation became necessary after authorities in Maaseik claimed the ban of such coverings do not extend to all masks and robes, such as Santa Claus costumes. Thus in this Belgian context, niqab is becoming understood through the practice of law solely as marking someone as a Muslim.

While the concepts burqa and niqab remain controversial, the notion of “public place” in the regulation of these through emerging laws is equally problematic. Would a women’s gathering in a public hall be a public place? What about wedding parties or religious sermons? And who would act as the European mutawwa’un enforcing the implementation of the law? Would they not be the same as the Moral Police in Saudi Arabia who patrol the streets to enforce the dress code there?

Danish Cartoon Affair
Related to fears of a “Muslim Threat” to Europe was the Danish Cartoon affair, which led to lost lives and a consumer boycott of Danish products never seen before throughout the Muslim world.
To recall the events briefly, in September 2005, the conservative Danish newspaper Jyllandsposten published 12 cartoons about the Prophet Muhammad. In reaction, the spokesperson of the conservative Islamic Faith Community of Denmark asked the Jyllandsposten for an apology. After failing to get one, leaders of the Islamic Faith Community traveled round the Middle East campaigning for support for anti-Danish actions.

Asmaa Abdol-Hamid, host of a TV talk show, Adam and Asmaa, about Prophet Mohammed cartoons caused a sharp division among viewers in Denmark by wearing a headscarf on screen, a first in the Scandinavian country at the origin of the cartoons scandal (April 3, 2006). Photo courtesy of Kristian Brasen/AFP/Getty Images

Meanwhile, the Danish Prime Minister declined to intervene on the pretext of freedom of the press. Either you are for the freedom of speech or you must be against it, and if you are against it, you must be against democracy too, became the view of the conflict by many in Denmark.

Several weeks later, violent demonstrations broke out throughout the world and four Danish embassies were set on fire. Several people lost their lives and in my field site, Yemen, the government used the conflict as the perfect opportunity to close critical newspapers and imprison their editors, in one case for a year. Muslims in Europe held peaceful demonstrations and the press in 50 countries reprinted the cartoons in support of freedom of speech, as they perceived it.

Foreign Policy
The Danish Cartoon Affair provided a perfect excuse for European intellectuals, skeptical of the US-led “war on terror”—to embrace an idea of “the clash of civilizations,” a fight between “European values” and those of “others” from the Middle East, giving new meaning to Orientalism. As Ulla Holm of the Danish Institute for International Studies argued in an analysis of the Cartoon Affair, much of the conflict had to do with the relationship between national heritage and identity and state regulation of these. (In Denmark, the church is a state-church). Holm provided a statement by the former Minister of Foreign Affairs and former leader of the Liberal Party (Venstre) Uffe Elleman-Jensen as evidence of this. Elleman-Jensen’s statement:

If we Danes wish to preserve dialogue with other cultures and religions—and even wish that they buy our milk products—then we cannot demand that they accept all our norms, least of all when they are exposed to disdain, mockery and sarcasm. If we insist that they have to tolerate all that, we are all firmly anchored in ‘the Danish village pond’ where everybody is convinced of her/his own infallibility and therefore not able to get on in a globalised world. (Berlingske Tidende, February 8, 2006)

Holm suggests that, while Elleman-Jensen was not wrong to frame the conflict as Denmark’s worst foreign affairs crisis in decades, it is necessary for Danes and others to understand the conflict also as an “internal crisis because the crisis is about national identity. The cartoons have revealed that there exists a close linkage between the domestic and the international sphere, and that foreign policy is about how nation-states perceive themselves on the internal arena.”

Holm concludes that the Danes’ self-perception as Hans Christian Andersen’s Ugly Ducklings has been shattered. While Danes have been raised through the Ugly Duckling fairy tale to view themselves as humble and peaceful agriculturalists who are born ugly but learn to be more graceful and civilized—a tale crystallized in their shared welfare state, which assumedly provides them with a moral right and obligation to exercise their influence beyond the Danish borders—Holm illuminates the fairy tale as having blinded Danes: “the Danish state-nation did not take into consideration that other state-nations and other societies do not consider Danish foreign policies as the best policies in the world.”

Persons and Fundamentalisms
As many like Holm developed more nuanced focuses on fights for and internal conflicts in “European values,” I suggest many European intellectuals unknowingly disclosed their ignorance of the difference between a Muslim person and a person who adheres to an extremist Islamic ideology hostile to what they perceive to be inherent European values. The stereotyped categories of “the West” and “Muslims” are taking on meaning only in relation to current political conflicts on a global scale.

In effect, the inability of intellectuals, politicians and many others to distinguish between a living person who practices dynamic cultural conventions and a fundamentalist ideology is a shared political issue for both “the West” and “Muslims.” The Netherlands and Denmark among other nation-states fearful of losing their national identity are adopting the language of rights to further the power of state to supposedly protect their national identities and interests. Yet, in doing so, they are fostering moral and religious fundamentalists at home and abroad rather than protecting the human rights and civil liberties of persons.

In public debates following the cartoon affair, Muslim demonstrators throughout the world found their sympathizers perhaps not so surprisingly among anthropologists, some who explained that Muslims defend blindly the tenets of their religious authorities because of “Muslim customs and manners,” a tautology blurring ontological texts, contexts and locations. Indeed few Muslim demonstrators actually had seen the Jyllandsposten cartoons. Yet, while the blindness referred to by some anthropologists might have been literally factual in this particular context, such universalizing claims about “Muslim customs” are naturally false.

What many who debated and discussed the Danish Cartoon Affair failed to see was that what was at issue was a conservative newspaper purposely irritating a group of religious fundamentalists in a nation-state that since 2001, when the current liberal/conservative government (with support from the extreme Right) came into power, immigration policies have become extremely tough. Had this historical shift been better recognized, perhaps participants in the debate about the Danish Cartoon Affair would have understood it was a matter that did not merit questioning the potential loss or protection of freedom of speech.

By critically observing and analyzing the “home” front of Europe too, Middle East anthropologists can deconstruct the Orientalism that is re-emerging in front of our eyes, in our backyards, now in the false dichotomization of “the West” and “Islam.”

Susanne Dahlgren is a fellow at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies. Her research engagement with southern Yemen has produced a PhD dissertation, Contesting Realities. Morality, Propriety and the Public Sphere in Aden, Yemen (2004) and articles on legal history, social dynamics, sexuality and the family.