A new film entitled Fitna, the Arabic word for ‘dissension’, by Geert Wilders, a rightwing Dutch parliamentarian, shouldn’t be suppressed and should be made widely available for all to see. Not because it has anything valuable or insightful to offer in the debates and discussions surrounding Islam, modernity or the convulsions wracking much of the Middle East. Quite the contrary, it must be seen so that it can be openly criticized and shown up for the insipid propaganda video it is.
To suppress the film in the name of political correctness has been a gross miscalculation, which has only gone to underscore the seductive mystery its creators have cleverly cultivated. Wilders & Co decided to release snippets of info here and there, as part of an orchestrated strategy to scintillate and tantalize all those individuals and organizations of a sensationalist persuasion, and thereby whip up a torrent of anticipation for a film that can only be described as banal. Fitna is a propaganda video whose ‘aesthetic’ is comparable to those made by radical Islamists and their sympathizers, and whose prime objective is to polarize public opinion by evoking the twin feelings of fear, hatred and suspicion.
The burning of effigies, extremist placards and threats to website staff undertaken by Muslim vigilantes can only be framed as myopic, stupid and morally bankrupt. When ‘Muslim indignation’ takes a violent turn it merely confirms in the eyes of provocateurs like Wilders that Muslims are essentially incapable of participating in rational and civilized debate.
Having seen the film its intent is abundantly clear. It is not, as its apologists claim, a critique of Islamic fundamentalism or even the tribal vestiges of malign practices such as stoning, female circumcision and various other manifestations of gender discrimination and abuse, which have been sanctioned under the banner of ‘Islam’. Wilders enterprise is rather the pathetic and entirely nostalgic (in fact anti-progressive) attempt to salvage an ‘authentic’ and ‘nativist’ conception of Dutch and more generally European identity and ‘indigenous values’. In order to fashion a ‘pristine’ and ‘untarnished’ representation of his narrative he is forced to place it in contradistinction to a determinate and clearly defined enemy, represented by the looming threat of a monolithic and omnipresent ‘Islam’. Fitna on one level is therefore yet another variant of the discursively manufactured ‘clash of civilizations’ thesis first argued for by Samuel P. Huntington in the American journal Foreign Affairs over a decade ago.
Fitna is little more than a desperate attempt of an utterly unremarkable individual trying to make a name for himself by means of insulting and slandering some 1.3 billion people. Wilders’ strategy is simple and unnervingly crude. He endeavors to convince us of his thesis by arbitrarily picking out a few decontextualized lines from the Quran, only to then juxtapose them with footage of obscene violence committed by Muslim extremists in recent history; 9/11, the Madrid Bombings and the London bombings of the 7th of July 2005 are all paraded across the screen in an orgy of violence and mayhem.
The propaganda videos of al-Qaeda and those inspired by their message of violent jihad, rely equally on publicizing a filmic orgy of violence in order to attract recruits to their cause. The latter’s films often splice a myriad of clips documenting violence committed against Muslim civilians in order to wage their own propaganda campaign and in so doing vilify and dehumanize entirely their self-proclaimed enemies. Wilders’ favored strategy is entirely in keeping with such an ‘aesthetic’. He aims to dehumanize Muslim peoples so they emerge as little more than disfigured and cryptic monsters, as solely objects of fear and hatred.
Implicit in Fitna’s narrative is the contention that the Muslim holy book is inherently violent and the sole and determining reason why violence in the contemporary world is committed by members of the Islamic faith. To Wilders’ lights it’s the essentially ‘fascistic kernel’ of the Quran, that when transmitted to the Muslim faithful, necessitates their unforgiving and abhorrent violence. The traces of textual violence within the Quran, much like the laws of natural science, necessarily compel the unchanging and immutable ‘Muslim’ essence to commit unspeakable acts of terror and violence.
Like much Orientalist scholarship, Wilders concludes that Muslims have no free will or ability to denounce, decry or eschew violence, because it is intrinsic to their very ontological constitution, which itself arises from out of the Quran. Their violence emanates from textual violence and this in turn confirms their essential character as intrinsically violent beings. This is the vicious circle perpetuated by Wilders and his supporters. The only solution, according to this narrative, is to do away once and for all with the ‘heinous book’, since it’s subject to only one totalizing and all-encompassing interpretation.
Interestingly, Wilders rambled on quite a bit about having uncovered the ‘pure Islam’ when interviewed on the BBC’s Hardtalk. The ‘pure Islam’ of which he then spoke and continues to refer is a hidden grail also sought after by Islamic fundamentalists. The fact of the matter is that it is Wilders’ very own puritanical Weltanschauung and predilection for purity i.e. his desire for a pure and entirely indigenous Dutch polity that seeks out and constructs its phantasmagoric mirror image, ‘pure Islam’. On this point we can guess both Wilders and Osama bin Laden agree – there is such a thing as a ‘pure Islam’ and both claim they are able to access it, thereby defining and delimiting its scope and contents.
This all happens in a vacuum according to Wilders and his precocious and ill-educated ally, Ehsan Jami. Apparently, geopolitics and the vicissitudes of history have little or no purchase in the attempt to grasp the presence of extremism within the Muslim world. According to Wilders & Co, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the legacy of colonialism, the open and unabashed support and grooming of the so-called ‘Arab Afghans’ by Charlie Wilson and the Reagan Administration throughout the 1980s against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, the various discontents and backlash against globalization and cultural homogenization, the Iraq War, European racism and fear over the dramatic increase in migration, and finally decades upon decades of support for autocratic tyrants in the Middle East, all have very little if anything to do with the modern incarnation of Islamic fundamentalism.
In this way the ‘filmmaker’ is attempting to make an essentialist claim predicated on a perverse, monistic and distorted reading of the Quran. One can do this with pretty much any of the so-called holy books, it’s hardly a chore if one merely wants to arbitrarily pluck quotes and adduce hadiths without rhyme or reason, merely with the objective of vindicating one’s prejudicial point of view.
It is necessary to point out that Fitna doesn’t even succeed on its own terms. The film endlessly returns to footage of extremist imams and laymen spouting off their toxic and warped litany in the hope of vindicating the film’s guiding premise: that it is the Quran that is at issue here and that this book is the reason why Muslims are innately prone and inclined to violence. The vast majority of the film however is fleshed out by non-Quranic sources and the perpetual bombardment of one extremist imam after another ranting and raving of their hatred for the ‘nonbelievers’ and ‘infidels’. These clips in conjunction with emotive and heart-wrenching footage of 9/11, the Madrid and London bombings are manipulatively exploited in order to set aflame viewers’ legitimate anger and fear, and thereby forge in many people minds a poisonous association of ‘Islam’ with some of the most brutal crimes committed against innocent civilians over the last decade.
By reading peoples’ comments on the web it seems that many of the less discerning and skeptical of viewers have bought into the film’s prognosis: ‘Islam’ is essentially and for all time a dangerous monolith, hell-bent on planetary conquest. There is no place for dialogue and discussion, only battle waged on the world stage, and ‘we’ have the bigger guns. The film’s creators furthermore assert the kinship of ‘Islam’ tout court with the modern ideologies of Nazism and Stalinism. No nuance or differentiation is deemed necessary. Even the Bush Administration had the sense to separate ‘Islam’ qua religion from the bastardized postmodern ideology advocated by the likes of al-Qaeda.
The Netherlands and Europe more generally in recent decades have undergone a marked increase in the number of Muslim immigrants reaching their shores, and Fitna is a near perfect example of the reactionary manufacture of an ‘indigenous and native’ European identity in a world where identity politics has increasingly come to rule the roost. Wilders’ efforts are far less concerned with freedom of expression than with the desire to vilify a section of Holland’s immigrant population who represent a nebulous, eerie and dangerous Other transfixed within the grand narrative of a ‘clash of civilizations’.
Wilders has repeatedly emphasized in interviews with Fox News, the BBC’s Hardtalk and elsewhere that if ‘they’ want to come to ‘our’ country ‘they’ have to ‘live’ by ‘our values’. What of second generation Dutch Muslims? The term ‘Dutch Muslim’ is an oxymoron as far as Wilders is concerned, and he has openly advocated the mass deportation of dual-nationals and various others he brands a threat to Holland’s ‘indigenous values’. Let’s quote the man directly himself:
Take a walk down the street and see where this is going. You no longer feel like you are living in your own country. There is a battle going on and we have to defend ourselves. Before you know it there will be more mosques than churches!
Dutch Muslims are to be a priori excluded from Wilders’ vision of what the Netherlands ought to be, as he presents them with what is tantamount to a single uncompromising choice, ‘abandon your Muslim identity or go back to where you came from!’ Such an ultimatum hardly sits well with the long-established image of tolerance hitherto associated with Holland.
If you are left in any doubt as to his flagrant bigotry, during Fitna a graph depicting the precipitous increase of Muslim immigrants entering the Netherlands. The subtext of this visual display not only casts the influx of immigrants as an insidious development, but as an ongoing process of contamination and pollution of the Netherlands’ ‘native purity’. Muslims are effectively microbes and bacteria sowing the seeds of disease and malaise and consequently inducing the equivalent of a ‘cultural epidemic’. In the throes of phantasmagoria Wilders forecasts by dint of a ‘passive revolution’ the Muslim ‘fifth column’ will provoke the ruination of Europe from within. It is in this respect that Wilders’ discourse can feasibly be shown as aligning itself with various tropes reminiscent of European anti-Semitism.
According to this line of argument, Muslims are near-congenitally incapable of assimilation and their fidelity to the European nation-states in which they might have been born and continue to live is always potentially compromised because their allegiance in the final analysis is only to Allah. The obvious point is that this can potentially be alleged against any believer of any faith. English Catholics during the seventeenth century were similarly subject to suspicion and all manner of terrible abuse because it was claimed their allegiance to the Papacy superseded their loyalty to the English crown, which made them, almost in spite of themselves, prone to betray the nation-state in the name of a divine sovereignty. Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan is in large part an exposition and proffered solution to just such a ‘dilemma’. According to the proponents of this not so subtle bigotry, the Muslim is never completely trusty worthy, deserving of suspicion and his or her loyalties remain ultimately inscrutable and clouded in mystery. The campaign to vilify the Swiss born Islamic Studies professor, Tariq Ramadan, is just one example of this. Ramadan in an with the German publication Der Spiegel offers the appropriate retort to an increasingly pervasive accusation alleging the irreconcilable ‘dual-loyalties’ of Muslims:
Oh yes, I am one of the most maligned Muslim intellectuals. Tariq Ramadan, the slippery trickster. They talk about people like me the way they used to talk about the Jews: He is Swiss and European, but his loyalties also lie elsewhere. He says one thing and thinks something else. He is a member of an international organization — in the past, it was world Jewry, today it’s world Islam. I am disparaged as if I were a Muslim Jew.
It is true also true however that resentment felt towards immigrants and the changing composition of European civil societies is also based upon some legitimate grievances. The issue of community integration and a refusal to participate in civic life on the part of some segments of immigrant communities living in Europe certainly exists and should be addressed. It is Wilders’ representation of the issue which is objectionable and must be protested, exactly because it depicts the problem as insoluble as long as Muslims are Muslims. In this way it is a clear assault on the very fact of being a Muslim – at least as far as the believer is concerned.
No single individual, group or nation can claim to define the truth as relayed in the Quran, Bible, Torah,Bhagavad Gita or any other holy book. Apparent calls for unremitting violence are evident in all the holy scriptures of the great world religions and there are extremists and intolerant elements amongst their respective followers. Even a significant constituency of Sri Lanka’s Buddhist monks has in recent years been engaging in violence in the hope of realizing its political aims, itself a product of the still unresolved ethnic strife between the country’s majority Singhalese and minority Tamil populations.
Some of the interpreters of these texts are able to provide us with a reasonable and informed reading and so perhaps offer some persuasive arguments for such a reading, but never a definitive and unassailable exegesis for all time. The sheer number of disparate and often irreconcilable interpretations of the Quran and Sunnah more than aptly demonstrates the limitations and fallibility of any particular exegesis made in a specific time and place. In the postmodern world within which we have all come to live, love and forced to coexist, the Islamic concept of ijtihad has expanded its domain of application and the parameters of its traditional meaning, and has become almost compulsively employed by nearly all those who choose to turn to the Quran for spiritual guidance. It is exactly the pervasiveness of this new ijtihad, or individualized method of reading, as the American lawyer and activist, Ali Eteraz, has pointed out, which permits one to read the Quran as either a literalist or in terms of allegory and metaphor. This is something which has in a roundabout way been even noted by the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek. Putting that to one side for the moment, there’s the added fact that the cultural, linguistic and historical diversity of the Islamic world itself has produced thinkers, poets and philosophers as variegated as Rumi, Ibn Khaldun, Ibn Sina, Ibn Rushd, Abdolkarim Soroush, Laleh Bakhtiar and Tariq Ramadan. ‘Islam’ as we know it is indissociable from the myriad of socio-historical and cultural renderings to which is has been subject since its inception.
Amongst the vast swathe of Muslims it is never an issue of ‘Islamic values Vs Western values’, only extremists on both sides view the obstacles to communal integration in these terms, which are more often than not, rooted in the afflictions of poverty, illiteracy and the institutionalized racism. It was at one time routinely argued that African-Americans were biologically incapable of democratic practice, while the ghettoization, alienation and disenfranchisement of peoples along racial lines was completely ignored as the determining reason for the absence of widespread civic participation. The riots of October and November 2005 in Paris largely by first and second generation North African immigrants can be seen as a further illustration of how discontent and revolt are sown by socio-economic disenfranchisement and alienation, rather than a product of ‘Islam’ and an endemic ‘clash of cultures’.
Right-wing politicians and pundits have resorted to ‘Islamicizing’ social and economic issues, exactly because they either refuse to consider, are simply indifferent to or wish to distract out attention from the underlying socio-economic factors, which more often than not induce segregation along ethnic and thus often along religious lines. The various Muslim communities however, cannot divest themselves of all responsibility and must themselves engage in more concerted efforts in order to reach out and nurture relations within civil society.
The preachers featured in the film are of course hate-mongers and live only to propagate their vile message. Their vitriol is of course pathological and emanates from a plurality of disparate maladies; from sexual repression to the nihilistic urge to negate the mundane and phenomenal world. Extremists such as these of course need to be confronted by the moderate elements within their communities; they of course need be undermined from within by individuals willing to speak out against their vituperative drivel. That is obvious and justified, but at the same time it needs to be recognized that the process of criticism and self-reflection is both gradual and intricate and cannot happen over night, and is only stultified by the inarticulate celluloid slander and obfuscation of bigots such as Wilders. Both extremes of the ideological spectrum believe a ‘clash of civilizations’ is in the offing and each hopes to spark the final countdown to confrontation and conflagration they espy on the horizon. This discourse has reached mythic proportions and its adherents rather than acknowledge this fact prefer to will it into becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. It is up to moderates of all persuasions to inject reason and a modicum of responsibility into this debate, as it has and will continue to affect and impact us all in the years to come.
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This is not a scholarly essay but a piece of journalism written out of necessity.
Even the comparison with al-Qaeda is more than a stretch. For starters you would need to forget the fact that Stalin and Hitler oversaw two of the strongest and most heavily militarized states in the history of the world.
Wikipedia: Geert Wilders, Accessed March 31, 2008
