By Patricia Kubala

Joseph Massad. Islam in Liberalism. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2015.

“Islam is at the heart of liberalism, at the heart of Europe; it was there at the moment of the birth of liberalism and the birth of Europe. Islam is indeed one of the conditions of their emergence as the identities they claim to be. Islam, as I will show, resides inside liberalism, defining its identity and its very claims of difference. It is an internal constituent of liberalism, not merely an external other, though liberalism often projects it as the latter….”

With this origin story, Columbia University Professor Joseph Massad opens his latest book, Islam in Liberalism. A work of scholarship written in the tradition of Edward Said, the book seeks to persuade its readers to understand the history of the West, and its celebrated commitment to liberal democracy, differently. The book’s project, clearly and forcefully stated, is to trace:

“the intellectual and political histories within which Islam operated as a category of Western liberalism, indeed, how the anxieties about what this Europe constituted and constitutes—despotism, intolerance, misogyny, homophobia—were projected onto Islam and that only through this projection could Europe emerge as democratic, tolerant, philogynist, and homophilic, in short Islam-free.”

The notion that Europe and the West as idea, identity, and universal ideal, have been produced through a series of imagined opposites – the Orient and Orientals, Semitism and Semites, Islam and Muslims – is not new, as Massad himself acknowledges. Yet he aims to demonstrate just how constitutive Islam is and has been to the West’s self-identity as liberal, free, and democratic. This “Islam” does not so much refer to a clearly defined entity in the world as it does to a multiplicity of referents (religion, culture/cultural tradition, civilization, geographical entity, etc) that are mobilized within various registers of liberal discourse. Massad assembles an extensive range of sources from the eighteenth century to the present to describe an entire political, academic, and civil society edifice organized around the production of Euro-American liberal identity through the invocation of “Islam” as its antithesis and outside Other, an Other that is then represented as being in perpetual need of rescue and reform, a need which, in turn, serves as a justification for liberal empire.

The first three chapters (“The Democracy Offensive and the Defenses of ‘“Islam’”; “Women and/in ‘Islam’”: The Rescue Mission of Western Liberal Feminism”; “Pre-positional Conjunctions: Sexuality and/in ‘“Islam’””) document this liberal enterprise of self-making in three movements: (1) the disavowal and projection of liberal anxieties about (Europe’s own) intolerance and despotism onto an Islamic Other, thereby (2) producing Europe/Euro-America as a stronghold of freedom and rights, and in turn this (3) Islamic Other is produced as being in need of (humanitarian, military) intervention. In this way, liberal imperialism is disavowed and is instead carried out as an operation of universalizing inherent human rights and freedoms. The three chapters describe this enterprise in the spheres of democracy and human rights, women’s rights, and sexual rights, respectively.

The fourth chapter, “Psychoanalysis, ‘Islam,’ and the Other of Liberalism,” analyzes the pathologization of Islam and Islamism in the writings of European and Arab Francophone psychoanalysts (Abdelkebir Khatibi, Moustapha Safouan, Fethi Benslama, Adnan Houbballah). The last chapter, “Forget Semitism!”, chastises modern European philosophers (Hannah Arendt, Jacques Derrida, Emmanuel Levinas, Louis Massignon) for participating in the liberal endeavor to equalize Islam alongside Judaism and Christianity as “Abrahamic” religions, and in doing so suppressing the history of (anti-Muslim and anti-Jewish) Semitism and Orientalism, whilst remembering only (anti-Jewish) anti-Semitism.

Taken together, the five chapters investigate how what Massad provocatively calls the “choice of liberalism” has colonized the modern Euro-American political, social, psychoanalytic, and philosophical imaginations. Simply stated, the “choice of liberalism” is choose liberalism, or you will be forced to choose it. On one side of this equation are Christian and liberal Europeans, as well as native elites, who are already capable of making liberal choices, whose desires, aspirations, and values are liberal ones, including the desire “to save and rescue non-Europeans from their anti- and un-European cultures and modes of life.”  On the other side of this equation are “the Muslims,” who in this context signify all those who refuse to choose liberalism, and are therefore pathologized in liberal discourse as intolerant, homophobic, misogynist, and in need of a liberal intervention to cure them “of their un-European, un-Christian, and illiberal ways.” Here the hubris of liberal empire converges in tragic irony with the core of liberal political doctrine, which values the individual’s right to choose above all else.

Massad’s book will strike some readers as a work of passionately engaged scholarship by a committed public intellectual — and others as ideologically driven, intellectually redundant, clumsily argued, and replete with ungracious and irrelevant ad hominem attacks directed at civil society activists and fellow academics.

The book suffers from its imprecise use of the term “liberal,” and it inadequately attends to historical shifts and contradictions within liberal discourse, liberal political theory, and the pragmatics of liberal empire. There are brief discussions of the nineteenth-century liberal theorist John Stuart Mill’s views on Oriental despotism, and the anti-suffragist Lord Cromer’s advocacy for unveiling-emancipating Egypt’s women. Massad aptly notes the hypocritical gap between their positions on domestic and foreign issues (“John Stuart Mill,” he writes, “was a democrat at home and a despot abroad,” whereas “Cromer was in fact a misogynist at home and a feminist abroad”). But Massad never explores this gap, and, as is often the case in the book, he offers ideological motivations in lieu of explanation.

An especially disappointing omission is a lack of discussion of the ways in which “Islam” has been put to use by different liberal theorists and politicians in their debates with each other on matters such as religious freedom, citizenship, and the goods and evils of empire; surely this is also part of the history of Islam in liberalism, but this is not Massad’s project. There is a passing reference to Edmund Burke’s views on Islamic law and how he used them to argue against Britain’s imperial policies (one of the more interesting moments in chapter one), and it’s a pity Massad does not incorporate into his discussion studies such as Denise Spellberg’s Thomas Jefferson’s Quran: Islam and the Founders (published in 2013, perhaps after Massad’s manuscript was completed).  In this respect, one could actually say that we learn very little about Islam in Liberalism in this book.

Yet in the contemporary Euro-American political context, we need this kind of scholarly interrogation of the work that taken-for-granted concepts and categories do in the world, and of the naturalized assumptions that structure and limit our collective political imagination. But there are serious limits to this kind of intellectual and political history in the way that Massad executes it. There are no humans in the book, other than those who produce texts. And there are very few glimpses of the other life-worlds that liberal projects seek to re-make or exploration of the complexity of ways in which people embody, proselytize, subvert or otherwise relate to liberal values and norms. This is especially an issue, for me, when Massad dismissively reduces the work of NGO workers and political activists on the ground in local contexts to ideological collaborators with or dupes of empire. The problem here is that while Massad’s entire project is premised on undermining the binary Islam/Liberalism, so often his writing and argumentation seem to forget the “In” in the book’s title, binaries are reinforced, and differences once again reified.

Jean-Léon Gérôme, The Snake Charmer, 1880.
This painting adorns the cover of Edward Said’s 1978 book, Orientalism.

In the first three chapters, very little of the argument feels new, as most of Massad’s points have already been made by Massad himself in previous works, or by the authors of the secondary sources that Massad cites extensively in these chapters (amongst them Talal Asad, Wendy Brown, Inderpal Grewal, Wael Hallaq, and of course Edward Said). The last two chapters hold more intellectual interest because of Massad’s careful textual analysis (of Freud and the Francophone Arab psychoanalytic thinkers Khatibi, Safouan, Benslama, and Houbballah in chapter four and of Freud, Derrida, Massignon, and Arendt in the final chapter on Semitism), but still here the arguments feel predictable.

This is in large part because, in the last two decades, there has been a proliferation of scholarship on Islam and liberalism, and religion and secularism (Talal Asad, Wael Hallaq, Charles Hirschkind, Saba Mahmood, Hussein Agrama, Wendy Brown, Tomoko Masuzawa) that critically analyzes secular-liberalism and its universalizing claims. Through this scholarship we have learned a great deal about the history of Western imperialism and colonial reconfigurations of life-worlds, and the continuation of these projects under the banner of secular-liberalism. Massad’s book is an important contribution to and extension of this conversation, but he does not move beyond it theoretically. As Massad himself stresses, however, the ideas generated by this scholarship prevail within an elite circle of academic thought, and they have not gained disciplinary hegemony in many corners of American academe. They certainly have not come to prevail in Euro-American media and political and civil society discourses.

Which leads me to my concluding point: Joseph Massad’s Islam in Liberalism is not so much a theoretically innovative intellectual contribution as it is a demand. And what is it that Massad wants from us, his readers, as well as the authors of the texts he critiques? For this reviewer, what unites the five chapters is Massad’s relentless repetition that at the heart of Euro-American liberal discourse and identity, there is a disavowal, a forgetting. This disavowal appears in academic and philosophical textual production on Islam, the Middle East, and the Muslim World; in mediatized representations; in humanitarian campaigns; in explicit comparisons between Islam and the free and civilized world. It takes on many forms – the denial of imperial aims and ambitions under the guise of humanitarianism, the suppression of the memory of slavery and intolerance and gender violence in Europe and America, the forgetting of Semitism and the remembering only of anti-Semitism, the naturalization of categories such as “sexuality” and “gay” — but it is always there.

Massad’s demand on us, as scholars and readers, is that we remember these things, in the hope, perhaps, that one day, our political imaginaries can lead us elsewhere. The last sentence of the book, in the chapter “Forget Semitism!,” reads: “The lesson that Said wanted to commit to Palestinian memory was therefore simple: To forget Semitism, to forget the Semites, we must always remember them.” It is this demand and this struggle to remember that pulsates in every page of the book, in every sentence of the writing. And for the urgency and integrity of that struggle, Massad and Islam in Liberalism earn my respect.

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Patricia Kubala is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Anthropology, U.C. Berkeley. She writes about religion and cultural production in modern Egypt.