It is imperative that we come to terms with an increasingly glaring fact: the idea of America is dead. America as a global archetype of leadership is in decline. America’s crisis is not geopolitical but existential. The images of militarized police firing tear gas canisters evoke the image of power as violence. That is, without doubt, a form of power that we as Muslims are all too familiar with. There is, however, a more latent form of power that evades our gaze: it is the management of dissent. Power mediates dissent by “managing the threshold” through future-making, which in turn includes excluding other futures. This occurs when the horizon becomes absolute, the end of time as we know it, and the norm and natural order-of-things. It is the Real. It thrives not on an engineered “collective history” but rather on forgetting that the order is not an absolute and closed reality but a situation. It is to forget that the order and ‘eternal present’ is not natural but rather the expression of a will-to-power created not in the image of God but in the image of the powerful.

The concept of power as threshold management represents the hidden dimensions of US imperialism. It accounts for the epistemic violence grounded in a Eurocentric metaphysical horizon. The world that is created by that episteme is a flattened world wherein the possibility of horizontal and vertical transcendence is rendered impossible if not undesirable – all in the name of an ill-named enlightened secularity. Thus, what we are witnessing is the hegemony, not only of military and economic imperium but regimes of knowledge that circumvent the boundaries of our thinking and alternative horizons. We have forgotten that America is not the sum of its law and institutions but first and foremost, an idea as an ‘eternal present’ and future. The geographical borders of a nation, when absolutized, become borders of the mind. A prison cell with its paper windows becomes a [myopic] world. The theatrical spectacle in DC comes to define the impermeable limiting boundaries of politics. The choice is reduced to a choice among lesser evils rather than eradicating evil altogether. We no longer recognize the evil of two lesser choices. Given the seeming impossibility of a non-American future and the illusion that we must somehow “catch up” to America, the colonized Muslim hyphenates Islam; American-Islam. They hope, that through that hyphenation, the fragile link to the empire, Islam can find its proper place in the present world and pre-determined future. The domesticated Muslim is caught in a trap; unable to recognize the ways in which the power of an idea operates at the level of consciousness. The fundamental problem of the domesticated Muslims is the absence of consciousness. As Sartre reminds us, consciousness is fundamentally characterized by its negating capacity, that is, the ability to negate meanings as given, the world-as-it-is, with new meanings of the world-as-it-ought-to-be. Similarly, the absence of consciousness means the inability to think beyond the world-as-it-is as though the world we occupy represents a sort of eternal present that is insurmountable. In the absence of a consciousness which can demarcate the world-as-it-is from a world-as-it-ought-to-be, the highpoint of American politics has become the erosion of the boundaries that demarcate the Muslim self from the ‘Other’ creating a condition wherein our identity structures are subordinated to an alien political system. Carl Schmitt warns that when the collective self “no longer possesses the capacity or the will to make this distinction, it ceases to exist politically [and religiously]. If it permits this decision to be made by another, then it is no longer a politically free people and is absorbed into another political system.” (Schmitt 1976:49) because “once absorbed into this “other” political system, any form of Islamic politics ceases to be” (Sabet 2008, 11)

However, the idea of America and its capacity to manage dissent through the exercise of positive power is in rapid decline. Zbigniew Brzezinski, a former National Security Adviser, understood the problem and what was at stake. In an aptly titled book ‘The Choice: Global Domination or Global Leadership’, he warns that the very future of America depends on its shift from domination to leadership, from violence to power, from an Empire to a Republic. In an op-ed for the New York Times, Brzeziński warns of “global political awareness” that will undermine America’s hegemony-via-violence. Brzezinski’s proposition represents a shift in policy-thinking. He explains, “cultural superiority, successfully asserted and quietly conceded” has the effect of “reducing the need to rely on large military forces to maintain power of the imperial center” (Brzezinski 1997, 21). Foreign Policy-thinking during the cold war was dominated by the logic of excessive force and concomitantly an arms-race with the USSR. In a post-USSR war, Brzezinski realized that 5000 US military bases across the world are not mediums for power nor can they secure its global hegemony. It can only be powerful through a hegemony-via-leadership. What Brzezinski failed to formulate was that the real choice was between the Republic and Capitalism. Empire and violence are products of Capitalism and not anomalies. In other words, the illusion that the problem is not with America but the lack of it and that the violence exerted by Pax Americana at home and abroad is an anomaly and a deviation from what America ought-to be. The reality is that Capitalism is integral to the very idea of America. More so, the death of America is not a symptom of Capitalism’s failure but, paradoxically, its success. More so, Capitalism has dissolved any sense of a collective “we” in America and has created in its place an aggregate of atomized and alienated individuals whose relationship with the ‘Other’ is grounded in competition. The “we” is no longer a community with energy but merely a society, an association of alienated individuals rendering the possibility for radical change through communal change an impossibility.

American Christians, having lost hope in the establishment, are no longer moving across the Right-Left political spectrum but dropping out of it altogether. For conservatives like Robert Dreher, the only option for Christians in America lay outside of the Republican Party. Reforming the establishment is no longer a possibility. Instead, Dreher argues, Christians in America ought to adopt a more radical strategy, the Benedict Option which calls for a withdrawal from the establishment and its hegemonic culture. On the other end of the old-spectrum, the constituency of the now-defunct Democratic Party is coalescing around a new movement that is by large anti-establishment. Voting for neoliberal democratic candidates like Joe Biden is framed not in terms of alternative futures but as the lesser of two evils and a necessary capitulation. When we vote, it is not because we have faith in the establishment but because there are seemingly no alternatives. The death of the collective “we” meant that the establishment must retort to violence as a medium. America can no longer create power because the violence it exerts terminates the possibility of using the obedience-subject as a medium.

Where does the Muslim world stand in relation to the decline of America as a global archetype? The decline of America has created a condition wherein pax americana is no longer able to blur or negate the boundaries between the Muslim self and the ‘Other’ (i.e., the Empire). The use of violence in its domestic politics has exposed its Achilles heel and the clay feet of its crumbling global leadership. The decline of American leadership and the emergence of a global political consciousness in the Muslim world has seen the rise of the umma as an alternative category to that of the liberal west. Steve Simon of the RAND Corporation emphatically warned that the: “most hazardous” of these global developments is “umma-itis,” the growing tendency for younger Muslims to believe they are part of an embattled supranational community — the umma — while deriding more local affiliations” (Simon 2005). The decline of pax americana represents a moment for strategic intervention: demarcating the umma from the ‘Other’ (i.e., Empire) will represent a high-point in Islamic politics. As Carl Schmitt explains, “as long as a people exists in the political sphere this people must, even if only in the most extreme case … determine by itself the distinction of friend and enemy. Therein resides the essence of its [religio-]political existence. (Schmitt 1976:49) Thus, when we speak of a distinct and global umma we are “setting boundaries of demarcation and determination, against being absorbed in another political system”. The Prophetic constitution in Medinah stated, as one of its first clauses: “They (the Muslims) shall constitute a separate political unit (Ummat) as distinguished from all the people (of the world).” More so, this prophetic demarcation is inherent in the very etymology of the world umma which in contrast to the word ‘nation’ has “no racial or territorial connotations.” As Al-Barghouti explains, it stems from Amm which as a verb means “to head for, to quest, to lead, to guide, or to mean and intend” and as a noun it means “destination, purpose, pursuit, aim, goal and end” (Al-Barghouti 2008, 37). The etymological and Qur’ānic definition of an Ummah indicates that the Muslim Ummah is defined neither by borders nor by numbers, for example the Qur’ān states that “Surely Ibrahim was an Umma”, but by its having “an image of themselves as a collective, and when this image is guiding them to do things in certain ways distinct from others” (Al-Barghouti 2008, 37). The demarcation of the umma from empire through a self-image amounts to reclaiming consciousness: imaging a world-as-it-ought-to-be. The extent to which this self-image can serve as an alternative to America will depend on our boldness to think about a post-American world.

Ali Harfouch (@a.s.harfouch) has a Masters in Political Studies from the American University of Beirut. He researches and writes on Islamic political theology and modern political theory.

References:

Sabet, Amr G.E. Islam and the Political: Theory, Governance and International Relations. London: Pluto Press, 2008.

Barghouti, Tamim. The Umma and the Dawla: The Nation State and the Arab Middle East. London; Pluto Press, 2008.

Brzezinski, Zbigniew. The Choice: Global domination or Global Leadership. Basic Books, 2009

Schmitt, Carl. The Concept of the Political, trans. George Schwab. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996.

Simon, Steve. Unavoidable Clash of Islam and the West?, 2005. https://www.rand.org/blog/2005/01/unavoidable-clash-of-islam-and-the-west.html