The problem of identity is largely about the question of who sets the terms of the debate. Muslims find themselves in the middle of a long-standing rift between conservative ideology on one hand and a liberal and leftist ideology on another. Among other issues, Islam and Muslims feature heavily in the on-going debate. As the debate stands now, Muslims are prevented from determining the terms of the debate. Muslims become the object of the debate and never the subjects. “Wavering between that (and this), (belonging) neither to these nor to those” (Q 4:143). What accounts for this state of wavering and what fruits will it bear for the Muslim self? What is our strategic advantage in such alliances? In this entry, I want to discuss how our alignment with the Left or Right amounts to a cruel optimism which as Lauren Berlant explains is “an optimistic attachment is cruel when the object/scene of desire is itself an obstacle to fulfilling the very wants that bring people to it.” It is cruel in the sense that there can be no representation and empowerment of the Muslim self if the self is lost in the process of pursuing that illusory optimism.

In an age dominated by the rise of populism and right-wing extremism, there is a perceived sense among Muslims that the left and their newly found liberal allies have rushed to their defense, fighting off the Islamophobia of an antagonizing conservative camp. The altruistic liberal or member of the left comes as a savior – just like the white prophet of Modernity before him – and is seen as a brother-in-arms. Muslims feel the need to reciprocate. They must show solidarity. In pampering to the sensitivities of our newly found allies in the left, Islamophobia and Homophobia become two equally distasteful forms of hate. Examples of this are abundant, for example, the ways in which some Muslims seek out representation in mainstream media by aligning certain Islamic norms (e.g. the hijab) with liberal values (e.g. individual autonomy). This solidarity, however, comes with a hefty price. The two warring liberal and conservatives, camps have devolved into tribes, each with its own pre-packaged set of issues that are presented as being inextricable from one another (e.g. being pro-choice on the one hand, and believing in mask mandates on the other). Jason Brennan explains: “If you want to see one effect of tribalism, consider how beliefs about certain political issues tend to be clustered together, even though these issues have nothing to do with each other.” (Brennan 2016, 41) For existentialists like Soren Kierkegaard, this is referred to as a process of levelling wherein individuals lose their authenticity because they are encouraged to conform to a “common standard, usually a lowest common denominator.”

Furthermore, what we fail to realize is that these Muslim-Left and Muslim-Liberal alliances are not true expressions of reciprocal solidarity but rather a Faustian bargain. The Muslim is only welcomed as a Muslim when his or her commitment to Islam is grounded in a liberal discourse. And for the left, Islam is welcomed only insofar as it is reduced to a culture or identity-politics and embraced only as such. In speaking the language of our liberal savior, the veil becomes a symbol of individual freedom. It is as thought the Muslim subject has chosen to forget the violent origins of the liberal order and the exclusionary dogmas of the left. In an erasure of history – even recent history – the Muslim is no longer cognizant of the fact that the liberal savior is in fact more complicit than his conservative rival in the cultural and economic genocides in the Muslim world. In the script of modernity – a story of redemption and tragedy – the Muslim is subject to the unilinear progress of history, a march towards the “end of history” in which the past, present and future merge/come together. The play, having already been written, leaves not even the future of the Muslim world uncolonized. To be mature, one must do away with premodern affiliations to an asecular Islam and embrace the rationalism of the West.

In the modified postmodern script – although less dramatic – the story is one of existential fatalism. In it, the Muslim ceases to exist as a Muslim because it has been definitively determined, that Islam is a social construct and that all but the precepts of postmodernity are bound to the same fate. The Muslims is once again helpless, for he becomes bound by the contingencies of history and a prisoner to its constructs. For all, under the watchful eye of the postmodern, is contingent except for the indeterminable march and anarchy of history. The only absolute is the absolute maxim that all is relative, and all is contingent. In the final chapter of this play, the Muslim actor also embraces maturity by doing away with a commitment to truths deemed to be essentialist and is heralded into a postmodern world. And if modernity, at the very least, challenged the Muslim world with an explicitly metaphysical doctrine, the postmodern world allures the Muslim world with its sophistry and “post-ideological” allure without admitting or coming to terms with its own latent metaphysical commitments. Despite the divergence(s) between modern and postmodern expressions of liberalism and the left, there is a convergence in that both are driven by a paternalistic desire to project their own narratives onto the unenlightened Muslim.

The problem is not only with beliefs but with the attitude that foregrounds those beliefs. This attitude is willful ignorance. In this sense, ignorance does not refer to the absence of knowledge but a way of knowing wherein “knowledge of what is” becomes “knowledge of what I want” and what I want is to conform. For the Muslim subject, the “self prefers to live in the illusion that it does not have to negotiate its relation to the world” (König 2020, 4). This willful ignorance resists the burdensome facticity of our freedom to create new political realities rather than dwell in a world that is not of our own making. Ignorance, as such, foregrounds our beliefs in a want to cling to that world already seen. The result is an alienation from the self and the world. Ali Shariati defines alienation as assimilation: “The conduct of an individual who, intentionally or unintentionally starts imitating the mannerisms of someone else” . . . “Obsessively, and with no reservation, he denies himself in order to transform his identity.” The Muslim self does not negotiate the possibility that the two are in fact one possibility and that our capacity for freedom might disclose another alternative. From an Islamic perspective the facticity of our freedom is not unconditional. The Arabic word for ‘freedom’ is ikhtīyar but differs from the unconditional connotations of the term freedom in that ikhtīyar which is bound to the root word khara (khayra) meaning ‘good’. As such, ikhtīyar is the cognitive capacity to choose what is good, or the best between two alternatives. In choosing what is good, the self does justice to itself through the exercise of this freedom (Attas 1995, 33-34). The lack of choice is also ironic insofar as the desire to align with the Left or Right is to do with acquiring power and/or representation. Power, however, cannot be sought through a surrendering of the self but rather the capacity to enter history without losing the self in the process (Han 2018, 42).

There is a fine line between engagement and subordination. The former requires a minimal level of parity between the two-engaging camps, and such parity can only be attained vis-à-vis ideological coherency and the articulation of competing visions. Otherwise, we will continue to live in a state of crisis wherein our discourse serves to legitimate a world that is not of our own making. The crisis culminates in an act of self-subversion to conceptual hierarchies and narratives that appropriate and negate the Muslim self. The first narrative, being the triumph of liberal values and the second, postmodern narrative, being the reduction of Islam to a cultural expression. Power, more so, representation, cannot be achieved without a consciousness of what constitutes the self, an integrated set of commitment which distinguishes the self from ‘the Other’. Then, and only then, can we enter the historical process and engage with the Left and the Right as subjects rather than objects. Power requires a vision, a project of the self and a clear recognition of the possibilities at hand.

References

Al–Attas, Syed Muhammad Naquib. Prolegomena to the Metaphysics of Islam. Penerbit UTM Press, 2014.

Han, Byung-Chul. What is Power? John Wiley & Sons, 2018.

König, Pascal D. “Truth versus ignorance in democratic politics: An existentialist perspective on the democratic promise of political freedom.” Contemporary Political Theory 20.3 (2021): 614-635.