CONCLUSION

The increasing number of controversies over the practices and symbols of Muslims in Europe and the United States shows that Islam continues to be perceived as an unthinkable and threatening Other.¹ The global spread of Islam is accompanied by a surprising standardization of the anti-Muslim argument.² But this standardization is not, strictly speaking, the continuation of the “clash of civilizations” model. To believe in that paradigm, one would first have to grant the existence of antithetical civilizations. But today Islam is no longer perceived as a menacing culture but as a form of barbarity and inhumanity. During the years 2000 to 2010, America went from being obsessed with a war on terrorism toward a more general habit of questioning the behavior of all Muslims and deploring their lack of sensitivity and compassion. Over the same period, a similar shift took place in Europe, where the debate about the Muslims’ capacity to integrate as fellow citizens morphed into doubts about their aptitude for civility and even about their humanity. In France, in particular, one of the major consequences of the burka controversy was the way it radically changed the public debate over the criteria of Muslim acceptability. Until 2004, the disputes over head scarves at school were centrally about defining what counted as Muslim adherence to the rules of French citizenship. Since 2008, however, it is in a way the very humanity of Muslims that is being called into question. Whereas before people asked about the compatibility of Islam and citizenship, now they’re talking in a completely different way about the disgust and physical revulsion provoked by the mere sight of a burka or minaret. The figure of the citizen-in-training has been replaced by a monstrous silhouette. Many supporters of a total burka ban claimed that women covered in this way were refusing a fundamental rule of human exchange—the reciprocity of gazes, the idea that one sees the other on condition of accepting to be seen. Thus wearing the burka started to seem like a negation of the humanity both of the person who wears it—now reduced to an object—and of the person who sees it being worn. In Europe and the United States, Muslims are now regarded by many as not just uncooperative citizens but as morally deficient and somehow inhuman.

These changes in the motives for rejecting Muslims are accompanied on both sides of the Atlantic by growing resistance to the ideals of liberal secularism. As Raphaël Liogier observes, the success of the myth of Islamization is due in no small part to the rise of a new European populism that glorifies the exceptional status of Europe and plays on people’s feelings of frustration. Anti-Muslims in Europe and the United States are convinced that they’re being had. In 2012, the extreme right National Front Party in France launched a campaign against halal products, complaining that it was unacceptable to force people to consume such products without their knowledge. Similarly, some French people were outraged by the polygamy of Abdelkader Bouziane, not because he was Muslim but because he looked like a shiftless unemployed person taking wrongful advantage of social-assistance programs.³ Initiatives such as the occupation of the future mosque of Poitiers in October 2012 by nativists of the group Bloc Identitaire, the wine-and-sausage happy hours in the eighteenth arrondissement of Paris, and provocative caricatures of Mohammad all express a reactionary and ritualistic response of the community and are not unlike the indignant reply articulated by antimosque demonstrators in the United States. This is reflexive behavior: the threatened territory of the nation therefore becomes sacred space, and the ideas of “people” and “community” are understood in a particular sense that is more reminiscent of Charles Maurras and Maurice Barrès than of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Jules Ferry:⁴ “It’s the Barrès motif of the soil and the dead that is returning with the aim of objectifying the country’s identity within an orderly nature and time, and thus of suppressing the will of individuals who are then no more than the product of a terroir, a plant grown from a given earth.”⁵

In short, for a majority of Americans and Europeans, Islam remains an opaque object that one is unable to think of in any way other than as a problem, threat, or retrograde legal code. This difficulty can be found to varying degrees among all the participants in today’s controversies. Even intellectuals, activists, and experts who intervene to counter anti-Muslim words and deeds often remain prisoners of the warped paradigms that have become hegemonic. It is no longer possible to discuss Islam’s place in Western societies without systematically invoking a series of normative oppositions: good/bad, moderate/radical, faith/law, West/Muslim, modernity/tradition, and so on. To intervene in the debate to “defend” Muslim rights—“No, not all Muslims are violent”; “Yes, Islam is compatible with democracy”; “No, they’re not secret agents”—may help improve Muslims’ conditions for a time, but it does nothing to change the terms of the debate. Today most analyses that seek to explain the practices and beliefs of Muslims oscillate between two types of argument: “Islam is everything” or “Islam is nothing.” Either one starts off from an orientalist, culturalist perspective and considers that Islam is the essential determining factor that regulates all phenomena in Muslim communities and societies, or one begins from what one hopes is a more emancipated and less essentialist starting point and says that Islam is nothing but one language among others by means of which discriminated individuals and groups claim an identity, rights, and dignity. In both cases, Islam remains an opaque object either because of the omnipotence assigned to it or because of the invisibility to which it has been reduced. That Islam might simply be “something” between “all” and “nothing”—something both banal and specific that can be described ordinarily without drama—is something that Western societies always seem to have a hard time accepting, even leaving aside the particular differences that distinguish European countries from North America or the distinct discursive fields of academia, politics, and the media.

Are the controversies destined to grow ever larger? The different episodes recounted in these pages suggest that even if the determination of leading anti-Muslim activists never subsides, there does seem to be a sort of lifecycle to each affair: they lose steam, slow down, and always risk coming to a complete stop. Cranking things up again requires a plan and some imagination. When it becomes less easy to oppose mosques, a new target has to be found, such as Sharia. When the anti-Sharia movement begins to slow down, a new threat will have to be found and a lot of resources invested in reports, lectures, and demonstrations to convince the public of the reality of this danger. The leaders of the anti-Muslim movements have to work all the harder to keep the mobilization active, since the controversies have the paradoxical effect of producing their own undoing through the very communal processes of more meetings, mutual awareness, and adaptation that each controversy generates between the ostensibly opposed camps. The law also constitutes an important barrier against the unimpeded expansion of these controversies. Commenting on the outcome of the affair in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, and the decision handed down by Judge Todd Campbell on July 18, 2012, the Muslim American association CAIR declared, “It wasn’t pretty, but it worked.” This remark is an apt summary of the way Islam is being built in the United States: the public debate is characterized by verbal violence that is more intense than in Europe, but the law also plays a more decisive role in protecting Muslims. In France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and elsewhere in Europe, people are fixated on Islam’s oppressiveness toward women and denounce the communitarian character of this religion. But arguments such as “Islam is not a religion” and “Mohammad is a pedophile,” even if they may exist on the edges of public discussion, have not gained the same currency in Europe as in the United States. However, Muslim Americans seem to have been much more effective than European Muslims at using the law to their advantage. As a recent Council of Europe report shows, in the past few years European Muslims have become the favorite target of populist parties and the extreme Right, have been on the receiving end of restrictive policies and laws, and have been the victims of repeated discrimination often without the power to defend themselves as well as can Muslims in the United States. The report encourages member governments to “stop targeting Muslims through legislation or policy, and prohibit discrimination based on religion or other beliefs in all areas where it is taking place.” It insists especially on the weak capacity for Muslims to use legal tools and goes on to recommend the empowerment of “independent equality bodies or ombudsmen to review complaints, provide legal assistance and representation in court, provide policy advice and conduct research on discrimination against Muslims and other religious groups.”⁶

In the United States, the most decisive opposition to anti-Muslim movements will likely come not from the Department of Justice or progressive groups or Muslims themselves but from conservative Republicans. In July 2012, some Republicans raised their voices to complain about the neo-McCarthyism of certain of their members. When Representative Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) accused Huma Abedin, a Hillary Clinton aide of Muslim origin, of having ties with the Muslim Brotherhood, Senator John McCain objected strongly to these allegations: “When anyone, not least a member of Congress, launches specious and degrading attacks against fellow Americans on the basis of nothing more than fear of who they are and ignorance of what they stand for, it undermines the spirit of our nation, and we all grow poorer because of it.”⁷ Edward Rollins, Bachman’s former campaign chief, published an editorial on the Fox News website denouncing Bachman’s McCarthyist tactics: “Her unsubstantiated charge against Abedin, a widely respected top aide to Secretary Hillary Clinton, accusing her of some sort of far-fetched connection to the Muslim brotherhood, is extreme and dishonest. Having worked for Congressman Bachman’s campaign for president, I am fully aware that she sometimes has difficulty with her facts, but this is downright vicious and reaches the late Senator Joe McCarthy level.”⁸ Thus even if the radical right’s pressure on the Republican Party remains strong, there are important figures in the party who are capable of pushing back and resisting the development of Islamophobia.

The 2012 elections seem to have strengthened the hand of these more moderate voices. Many of the most extreme candidates when it comes to the rejection of Islam (but also the rejection of the rights of women, the poor, the LGBT community, blacks, and Latinos) lost. For example, Representative Allen West (R-Fla.), one of the leading defenders of the idea that the Muslim Brotherhood is invading America’s suburbs, lost to the Democratic candidate, Patrick Murphy. In Arkansas, state representative James McLean defeated his Republican opponent, Charlie Fuqua, who had proposed deporting all Muslims as a solution to “the Muslim problem.” In Minnesota, Republican representative Chip Cravaack, an enthusiastic supporter of the inquisitional hearings organized by Representative Peter King (R-N.Y.) on Muslim radicalization, was also defeated. As for King and Bachmann, they managed to retain their seats, but by slim margins. Some candidates known for their anti-Muslim attitudes got better results; however, the “anti-Muslim caucus” in the U.S. Congress became weaker and more circumscribed after the 2012 elections than it had been in 2008.⁹

All the same, these results have not translated into better daily lives for American Muslims. Controversies over Islam, on both the national and local levels, continue and remain a lot alike. The American Freedom Defense Initiative, an anti-Muslim group directed by Pamela Geller, launched many provocative advertising campaigns in subways and on buses. In October and November 2012, for example, one could see posters in the New York subway that read: “In any war between the civilized man and the savage, support the civilized man. Support Israel. Defeat Jihad.” Similar posters appeared in the Washington Metro and on San Francisco buses. Although they didn’t necessarily have the same nationwide impact, there have been debates nearly every week in different American cities over a mosque, the sale of halal meat, or whether to recognize Eid al-Fitr and Eid al-Adha as holidays.

How do Muslims react to the persistent verbal and physical attacks that target them? Their attitude has remained mostly the same since September 11, 2001. They continue to fight against the misrepresentations of their practices through educational campaigns and other forms of communication. With the help of civil rights groups and the courts, media, and local associations, they are working to defend their rights and their image. The narrative of the “good Muslim American”—an active citizen and a pleasant neighbor—is not just a rhetorical strategy deployed by leading Muslim American organizations. It actually corresponds to the day-to-day reality of most Muslims today. This is especially evident among younger Muslims for whom the reference to Islam adds a certain cachet to political, artistic, or commercial ambitions but who otherwise declare themselves to be completely American. Certain Muslims, of course, remain skeptical about this feel-good narrative of American Islam. Some mosque-goers and members of conservative organizations believe the young leaders of organizations such as the Muslim Public Affairs Council or Muslim artists and public intellectuals are too eager to collaborate with the American government and chime in with their praise of American “values.” One could, of course, worry about the danger for democracy of these conservative individuals who are less inclined to join the chorus in praise of these values. Such questions, however, inevitably degenerate into a circular, normative discussion that ends up asking if Islam is compatible with democracy. This question entirely skirts the true problem, which is not the alleged opposition between Islam and democracy, or between conservatives and liberals, but the striking mimicking and mirroring that takes place between conservative Muslims and non-Muslims and between conservatives and liberals.

Beyond their different practices, normative references, and symbols, anti-Muslim activists in the West and antiliberal Muslim activists have recourse to the same behavioral and mimetic conception of the social contract. All of them conceive of the social contract as the function of the capacity for each person to conform to a stereotype. The contract model proposed by liberal political theory is a hypothesis, not a code of behavior. It designates no particular society, group, individual, tradition, or conduct. Western anti-Muslim groups, and illiberal Muslim movements are founded on a different idea of the social contract. Both consider that what makes a political community hold together is, rather than the liberal fiction of the social contract, conformity to a stereotype. The person of common sense or, what amounts to the same thing, the devoted believer who scrupulously adheres to all alimentary and vestimentary codes are expected to act properly rather than justly.

The blaming and demands associated with the recriminations voiced by Americans opposed to Sharia and mosques is a displacement of the Puritan ideal of the covenant to which only the elect have the right of way. In this respect, it’s not all that different from the project of the Salafist movement that seeks to re-create the ideal community of the Prophet’s companions. In both cases, the notions of merit, suffering, and sacrifice count for more than do the criteria of equality, reason, and contract. Only the deserving belong to the community—those who have been elected. For anti-Muslim activists, all free riders—that is, all imposters and profiteers—must be excluded; these may be future beneficiaries of “Obamacare,” people living off the labor and taxes of others, or Muslims who exploit to their advantage the First Amendment, which should really protect only Christians.¹⁰ Similarly, for radical Salafists, the exploiters, the impure, and the corrupt must be excluded or eliminated.¹¹ For both groups, the norm of “what is right” is superior to respect for “rights.” The relation to the other in this conception of community is defined, fundamentally, by a suspicion of having been tricked and the need to reestablish a just order. The covenant that unites participants and sympathizers of anti-Muslim or antiliberal movements is not based on the idea of a reunion of saints elected by grace or by the sincerity of their faith. It’s more a uniting of the resentful that brings together all those who feel like losers or who at least have the firm conviction of being in the process of losing something dear—their identity, their safety, their America of “glory days,” the “true” Islam, and so on. And this is indeed what is so scandalous for them: the elect have become the losers, or they at least perceive themselves that way. The feelings of rage expressed in all these controversies erupt from this contradiction that seems to go against the order of things—for some, the divine order.

This explains the constant need to show one’s own merit, a posture of permanent indignation of “the righteous mind.” The controversies over Islam cannot be reduced to an opposition between two visions of the world or two opposed ideologies. Undoubtedly, some among the antimosque and anti-Sharia leadership defend an illiberal vision of democracy, speak of the primacy of popular sovereignty, and argue for the suspension of constitutional rights for certain categories of the population deemed dangerous or deviant. But beyond these few stock traits from the populist handbook, the philosophical and legal reflection within these movements is rather poor. It’s no accident if, up until now, they’ve lost the most important legal battles. What motivates the rank-and-file members of these movements is, above all, a form of political affect. The conceptual discourse paired with this fundamentally reactive political affect is stitched together from various hand-me-downs, with remnants from the Crusades, the Knights Templar, Star Wars, disaster movies, science fiction, the War of Independence, the Bible, and the Constitution. Likewise, the young Tunisians and Egyptians who join radical Salafist groups often have very little background in theology. What attracts them and interests them more than anything, and certainly more than theology, is a form of affect and a particular political performance defined by clear codes and rules of behavior.

In this behavioral approach to the social contract, belonging to the community does not fall to each citizen as a right. Anyone who wishes to enter must agree to follow the rules and prove their good faith. Proofs of loyalty and sincerity are what matter, not arguments. To be included, discreet approval of the community’s principles is not good enough. Inclusion requires a public declaration of faith, a visible sincerity, and a clear willingness to submit and commit—hence the importance accorded to places and practices of high symbolic significance. The visibility of Muslims is scandalous for anti-Muslim Americans. In symmetrical fashion, and for the same reasons, the insufficient visibility of Islam is scandalous for the Salafists and some illiberal Muslim conservatives. Each individual has a choice between simple loyalty or simply leaving. Multiple points of view or divergent behaviors are perceived as threats to the stability of the group. The social contract here means consenting and adhering to the common-sense view. And here common sense no longer means just the ensemble of shared opinions but the acceptable way to feel: a shared, common affectivity; a repertoire of required emotions. The other is thus doubly guilty and excluded—because she doesn’t share the same opinions as the true elect, who deserve to belong to the national community, and especially because she does not feel the same feelings.

Even so, we cannot content ourselves with this opposition between, on the one hand, a behavioral approach to the social contract based on demands to conform to a certain stereotype and, on the other, a liberal perspective based on the presupposition of an ideal individual or citizen because, to a great extent, current disputes in the United States and Europe reveal a behavioral turn to the liberal approach itself. In a context of growing radicalization and polarization of perspectives, liberal ideals of equality, neutrality, secularism, and consensus seem to have turned into stereotypes themselves. To be liberal no longer means simply to believe in principles of justice and fairness but to exhibit certain acceptable behaviors, feel emotions that are expected of you, and repeat certain stock phrases. Put another way, to be liberal now means to laugh at a caricature of Mohamed, to feel worried about a mosque at Ground Zero, and to be disgusted at the sight of a burka—in other words, to conform to a stereotype.

Must one then conclude that liberalism and secularism constitute a double failure, and should one attribute all the present-day conflicts over Islam to their downfall? The critique of liberalism and secularism has been approached by various schools of thought ranging from communitarian to postmodern to postcolonial.¹² Secular liberalism is reproached for its abstract, disincarnated, ahistorical, and unsociological character. It is also denounced for its propensity to turn into an ideology of domination. While presented as the most suitable theory for guaranteeing equality and justice between citizens and the neutrality of the state when it comes to defining the good, it is said to be necessarily informed by a religious tradition, values, and history. In other words, behind the mask of neutrality a particular religion would always be hiding, and behind the pretense to ensure equality would always be a project of domination. The controversies over Islam and the curious mirror effects that they reveal between the different argumentative strategies proposed (liberal versus antiliberal, Muslim versus anti-Muslim) all suggest that the fundamental crux is not the opposition democracy/Islam or religious/secular or liberalism/antiliberalism. The real problem has more to do with the tendency to codify, render explicit, and transform the ideal type into a stereotype—and this across all theoretical and religious currents. For anti-Muslim activists who claim to be defending the Christian heritage of the West and for the antiliberal Salafists, belief is no longer “a social practice of difference” but, on the contrary, a mimetic constraint and a practice of exclusion.¹³ A symmetrical process is under way among many proponents of secular liberalism. The ideal of justice and fairness is no longer that theoretical fiction that, precisely because no one can recognize themselves in it entirely, makes mediation possible. Instead, it is also becoming a model for exclusion and the constraint of assimilation. In both cases, living together is reduced to a matter of respecting a code and an etiquette. The social contract is no longer an accord over the possibility of disagreement based on equality of rights but the permanent constraint of good manners and consensus. The contract is reduced to the obligation to consent or, literally, the obligation to feel certain authorized emotions in a given context—disgust at a burka in Europe, fear of a mosque in the United States, anger at a church in Egypt.

The liberal-secular response to the current controversies over Islam essentially makes use of two tools—law and education—neither of which appears very powerful or capable of convincing the discontented and pacifying these conflicts. I have shown in these pages that there is a large tendency to adjudicate when these conflicts over Islam arise. However, this willingness to turn to the courts also accentuates the propensity toward codification and a transformation of liberal-secular ideals into stereotypes. This is what happens with the frequent slide of law toward theology. Since the U.S. Constitution does not define religion but only the freedom to exercise it, the challenge for judges consists in judging without “establishing,” so as to guarantee religious freedom without defining religion. This challenging dilemma is not new, but it has taken on new intensity in the debates over Islam. The Department of Justice has had to intervene several times and take on the role of a quasi-theological official in order to underscore that the American government does consider Islam a religion and does think of mosques as places of worship. Similarly, the Oklahoma judges assert that Sharia is not a legal code but a type of ethical and spiritual guide. Through a series of declarations and programs directed at Muslim communities, and through its support to Muslim leaders who preach values of moderation and patriotism, the federal government constantly runs the risk of establishing an official Islam.

This theological-political process of constructing a moderate American Islam represents a big constraint on American Muslims. In order for their rights to be respected and protected, they find themselves ordered to conform to acceptable behavioral norms that are often decided against their will for the simple reason that they are not in a powerful bargaining position to define the terms of the debate. Most of the participants in the antimosque and anti-Sharia conflicts denounce the simplistic and reductive oppositional models between good and bad Muslims, political Islam and spiritual Islam, or faith and Sharia. Yet on account of their relative weakness in the media, in the courts, and in political parties and local civic organizations, they are always constrained to adopt and in a sense authenticate these stereotypes whether they like it or not. Lacking the ability to contest the pertinence of the very question, they are reduced to demonstrating that they are indeed good Muslims, that their religion is above all a form of spirituality and faith, and that they harbor no ambition to change the culture of American politics. The slightest attempt to suggest that adhering to Islam is a way of proposing an alternative conception of the world or way of life is immediately inflated into proof of anti-Americanism. For Muslims, to appear different means to be perceived right away as the enemy. This is why the leading Muslim organizations and the two members of Congress who are Muslim—Representatives Keith Ellison (D-Minn.) and André Carson (D-Ind.)—all send the message of the utter ordinariness of Muslims. An entire media industry is rapidly developing with the aim of reinforcing the idea of the good Muslim through books, reality-television shows, films, music, T-shirts, and various foods.

In all the court proceedings, it does seem that the law—independent of its pretense of neutrality and universality—is elevating to the status of concept (for example, the concept of “acceptable” versus “excessive” practices, or “reasonable” accommodation) a collective feeling of fear or a shared wish for exclusion. The law is practicing “savage ontology”; in other words, it is changing “this One of feeling into One of concept.”¹⁴ It thus permits arriving at a consensus, as Jacques Rancière understands that term, of “convertibility between the object of feeling and the object of the law, and in particular…convertibility between an object of fear and the Other which the law must first identity before expelling it.”¹⁵ The rule produced by the law is not determined on the basis of the neutral principles of justice and fairness but in relation to contextual codes of manners and acceptability. The convention follows from consent and not the reverse: “Behind the reference to the law and the universal, it is then a strange knot that gets tied between phusis and nomos, the one determined as the power to consent, the other as the power to suit and to contract.”¹⁶ The law becomes the consecration of consensus and the status quo rather than the guarantee of equality. From this point of view, one must ask about the hegemonic inclination of this model to regulate by law conflicts that relate to the religious. Turning to the courts to settle the question of religious freedom is all the more disturbing in that it excludes from the discussion all those who neither possess the requisite legal knowledge nor have mastery over the techniques of the law. It contributes in this way to a worrisome depoliticizing of the debate even though the stakes of this hegemonic ambition are undeniably political.

It is worth reflecting on the rapid standardization of the discourse on international religious freedom that is developing in North America and Europe at the same time as a parallel standardization of the anti-Muslim line of argument. If inside the United States the courts have so far shown themselves to be careful about respecting the First Amendment and the protection of Muslim rights, the reference to law in the realm of foreign policy is much more ambivalent. The entire policy to promote international religious liberty as led by the American commission dedicated to that cause (the Commission for International Religious Freedom) clumsily mixes together with problematic results a legalist discourse with one that is all-out culturalist and orientalist. Throughout the West associations are being founded to defend religious freedom in the world. At the same time as the American commission finds itself increasingly criticized at home, another commission created along exactly the same lines and with the same goals has appeared in Canada. The European External Action Service, a European Union department created in 2009 and launched in 2010, is also in the process of implementing something very similar, notably through the European Instrument for Democracy and Human Rights Regulation for 2014 to 2020.¹⁷ But the effect of these initiatives is a triple depoliticizing of these conflicts and the powers opposed in each one. First, the question of Islam in the West and of religious liberty in the world gets turned into a legal and technical matter that can be treated outside of all considerations for the power relations on the national or international levels. Second, the hegemonic claim by a Western discourse over international religious freedom creates the fiction of a unified Western world opposite a Muslim world that is also artificially represented as a homogeneous cultural entity. Third, the standardization of this recourse to the category of religious freedom, which would be treated as essentially a legal matter, has the effect of making the opposition between religious freedom and Islam into the fundamental paradigm for understanding world conflicts, thus replacing the opposition between democracies and authoritarian regimes. So, for example, the attacks suffered by religious minorities in Pakistan, Iraq, or Iran are thought through from an abstract and typically orientalist perspective as an effect of Islam and not as a consequence of the undemocratic character of the regimes under which these attacks take place. Similarly, the ongoing revolutions in the Arab world and the arrival in power of Islamic parties only reinforce fears and tendencies to view Islam as synonymous with oppression of minorities.

The call for more education made by those who present themselves as defenders of liberal-secular values constitutes the second leading instrument for the resolution of conflicts. Both obtuse and intolerant populists and Muslims fond of demonstrating their faith excessively and too “ostentatiously” need to be given explicit instructions about the codes of liberal manners. But this pedagogy is problematic because it claims to create and teach in an artificial way the conditions of equality, whereas paradoxically equality is already produced, without being mentioned or codified, through the controversy itself. The latter belongs to the same category of power face-offs as the lovers’ quarrel. In both cases, the parties don’t seek consensus but seek to have the last word.¹⁸ But the possibility of this household scene supposes the existence of a relation of equality and reciprocity:

When two subjects argue according to a set exchange of remarks and with a view to having the “last word,” these two subjects are already married: for them the scene is an exercise of a right, the practice of a language of which they are co-owners…. This is the meaning of what is euphemistically called dialogue: not to listen to each other, but to submit in common to an egalitarian principle of the distribution of language goods.¹⁹

The criticisms leveled at Muslims during the Ground Zero mosque controversy do not derive from the logic of a clash of civilizations. They express disappointment about an unmet expectation; they express blame and reproach. But blame makes sense only within a relational framework if not of perfect equality, then at least of reciprocity.²⁰ One does not blame someone whom one cares nothing about, holds in contempt, does not know, or completely dominates. The participants in the controversies discussed here create, de facto, a relation of equality that falls outside the logic of a clash of civilizations. Paradoxically, it’s the liberal-secular pedagogues who, by wishing to speak, codify, and teach the conditions of an equality of consensus, reactivate the culturalist logic. Anti-Muslim discourse is largely confabulation and delirium—the myth of invasion, of conquest, and so on. But the very act of fabulating presupposes “a pre-existing equality between a wish to speak and a wish to hear.”²¹ As well intentioned as it may be, the turn to pedagogy produces exactly the opposite of the desired effect. The reason, as Rancière points out, is that the community of equals “is not a goal to be reached” through pedagogy and morals “but a supposition to be posited from the outset and endlessly reposited.”²² Making equality explicit serves no purpose if one has not already presupposed equality: “All that strategies or pedagogies of the community of equals can do is cause that community to fall into the arena of active unreason, of explanatory/explained inequality.”²³ This probably explains the very low success rate of institutions that aim to work toward intercultural and interreligious dialogue. It may also explain the inconclusive results of the strategy implemented by Muslim organizations in the West that seek to counter the negative representations of themselves with other positive messages. These organizations’ very reason for being is the project of explaining a community—reduced to an ensemble of codes—to another community, it too reduced to an ensemble of codes. However, even if the actions and encounters that arise from such a project do for a time alleviate misunderstanding and facilitate understanding, the very essence of the project of explaining is inegalitarian: “Every explanation is a fiction of inequality. I explain a sentence to someone because I assume that he would not understand it if I did not explain it to him. That is to say, I explain to him that if I did not explain he would not understand. I explain to him, in short, that he is less intelligent than I am, and that that is why he deserves to be where he is and I deserve to be where I am.”²⁴ These teaching projects also result in the depoliticizing of social relations. If one accepts that the essence of politics is dissensus, not in the sense of an expression of different interests and opinions but in the sense of the “manifestation of a gap in the sensible itself,” then the pedagogy project is, on the contrary, oriented exclusively toward producing consensus. The project presupposes the existence of collective, rational subjects endowed with a certain number of meanings. But “a collectivity can have no wish to speak to anyone.”²⁵ Every community is fundamentally lacking consistence. There exists no homogeneous white Protestant community truly threatened by the mosque at Ground Zero, and there exists no victimized or dominated Muslim community. Yet it is precisely this lack of consistency that makes equality possible and renders vain all explanatory projects. The community of equals “occurs, but it has no place.”²⁶

The question, then, is not to find out how to make it so that discussions of the just and the fair take better account of different conceptions of the good or of the diverse power relations and historical memories present in society, as a number of philosophers of communitarian and postcolonial persuasions would have us do. It is also not about knowing by what cultural institutions or pedagogical treatises one could translate this code into another code. The point is not to give substantive consistency to the liberal-secular ideal but, on the contrary, to give back to it its function as theoretical hypothesis. The goal is to disconnect this ideal from the ensemble of codes and norms of exclusion that it is currently so closely associated with. The “secularization of the secular” proposed by Étienne Balibar implies that one cease reifying the liberal ideals of justice and fairness in the form of Charters of Laïcité, courses on secular morals, codes of good behavior, and republican and nationalist manifestos.²⁷

The reason is that the problem is not fundamentally a cognitive one, nor is it epistemological or even axiological. The principal enemy of the American citizen who goes to war against Islam is finally neither the Muslim nor the liberal-secularist; it is the world. In a context that appears to him as more and more uncertain and threatening, the entire world is his enemy. Therefore, it has to be made into a code in order to master it. “The world,” Barthes says, “is…an obligation to share. The world (the worldly) is my rival. I am continually disturbed by Troublemakers [Fâcheux].”²⁸ Muslims and liberals are troublemakers, among many others. Faced with such a situation, is it really more words that one needs? The bidding war of words, well intentioned though it may be, serves no purpose because “the scene is neither practical nor dialectical.”²⁹ It unfolds independently of whatever the interlocutors may wish to demonstrate. It’s not by stacking words upon words or by opposing positive clichés to negative ones that we will break the cycle of this narcissistic dueling where each party tries to be right. One must first break this discursive chain of scenes and controversies. Conditions must be created for an encounter between individuals, for a spontaneous political conviviality with no pedagogy behind it, that would permit the emergence of the equality of dissensus. The liberation from stereotypes, the creation of an original relation to the other and the real, necessitates the suspension, however surreptitious, of the madness of words: “I divine that the true site of originality and strength is neither the other nor myself, but our relation itself. It is the originality of the relation which must be conquered. Most of my injuries come from the stereotype: I am obliged to make myself a lover, like everyone else: to be jealous, neglected, frustrated, like everyone else.”³⁰ Only a human encounter may create some play, a gap in this irrefutable logic of words. It can make appear the possibility of an original relation, unstereotyped, to the world and the other, a relation of copresence and egalitarian dissensus rather than dialogue.