Interrogating Secularism: Race and Religion in Arab Transnational Art and Literature

By Danielle Haque

Interrogating Secularism is a call to rethink binary categories of "religion" and "secularism" in contemporary Arab American fiction and art. While most studies that explore the traffic between literature and issues of secularism emphasize how canonical texts naturalize and reinforce secular values, Interrogating Secularism approaches this nexus through novels written by and about ethnic and religious minorities. Haque juxtaposes accounts of secular experience in the writing of Arab Anglophone authors such as Mohja Kahf, Rabih Alameddine, Khaled Mattawa, Laila Lalami, and Rawi Hage, with Arab and Muslim artists such as Ninar Esber, Mounir Fatmi, Hasan Elahi, and Emily Jacir. Looking at multiple genres and modes of aesthetic production, including AIDS narratives, visual art, and digital media, Haque explores how their conventions are used to subvert the ideals tied to secularism and the various anxieties and investments that support secularism as a premise. These authors and artists critique Western iterations of secular thought in spaces such as art exhibits, airports, borders, and literary discourses to capture how the secularism thesis reproduces the exclusivity it intends to remedy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Syracuse University Press
• Release date: Sep 25, 2019
• ISBN: 9780815654773

Book preview

CRITICAL ARAB AMERICAN STUDIES

Syracuse University Press is pleased to announce the launch of a new series, Critical Arab American Studies. The series features cutting-edge scholarship that adopts interdisciplinary, intersectional, feminist, transnational, and comparative frameworks of inquiry to develop the study of Arab Americans across various fields of research, including history, gender and sexuality studies, critical race and ethnic studies, anthropology, literature, film and media studies, and sociology, among others.

Breaking Broken English: Black-Arab Literary Solidarities and the Politics of Language

Michelle Hartman

Copyright © 2019 by Syracuse University Press

Syracuse, New York 13244-5290

All Rights Reserved

First Edition 2019

19 20 21 22 23 246 5 4 3 2 1

∞ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.

For a listing of books published and distributed by Syracuse University Press, visit https://press.syr.edu.

ISBN: 978-0-8156-3631-1 (hardcover)978-0-8156-3649-6 (paperback)978-0-8156-5477-3 (e-book)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Haque, Danielle, author.

Title: Interrogating secularism : race and religion in Arab transnational literature and art / Danielle Haque.

Description: First edition. | Syracuse, New York : Syracuse University Press, 2019. | Series: Critical Arab American studies | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019020705 (print) | LCCN 2019021743 (ebook) | ISBN 9780815654773 (E-book) | ISBN 9780815636311 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780815636496 (pbk. : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: American fiction—Arab American authors—History and criticism. | American fiction—20th century—History and criticism. | Arab American arts. | Secularism in literature. | Race in literature. | Islam and secularism—United States.

Classification: LCC PS153.A73 (ebook) | LCC PS153.A73 H34 2019 (print) | DDC 813/.54098927—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019020705

Manufactured in the United States of America

For my father

Contents

List of Illustrations

Preface: The Universal Thump

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Race, Religion, Nation

1. Navigating Bodies

2. Curating Religion

3. Novel Formations

4. Secularism and the Apocalypse

5. Religious Geographies and Secular Maps

Conclusion: Imagining Our Own Grace

References

Index

Illustrations

1.Ninar Esber, Torso II

2.Ninar Esber, Les 99 noms du Délicieux

3.Mounir Fatmi, L’évolution ou la mort

4.Mounir Fatmi, Save Manhattan 01

5.Hasan Elahi, Tracking Transience

Preface

The Universal Thump

A dream between us

fogging what we want to see . . .

A prison, but then everywhere else is a prison . . .

Who ain’t a slave, asks Ishmael.

The worst form of government except for all the others, etc . . .

To wipe the glass window with a muddy rag,

enclosing us within the house upon the Malibu hills.

What girds one’s bearing against attention?

What will send the nerves to their first apprehensions?

A picture now.

A tremble.

A night full of furor.

—Khaled Mattawa, from Tocqueville¹

Who ain’t a slave? Tell me that. Well, then, however the old sea-captains may order me about—however they may thump and punch me about, I have the satisfaction of knowing that it is all right; that everybody else is one way or other served in much the same way—either in a physical or metaphysical point of view, that is; and so the universal thump is passed round, and all hands should rub each other’s shoulder-blades, and be content.

—Herman Melville, from Moby-Dick

Who ain’t a slave ? Asked from aboard the Pequod , Ishmael’s question directs readers to meditate on their own psychological captivity, and on that bondage as inherent to being human. If bondage is universal—and it is our minds that are captured—universal freedom is psychological freedom. Yet Ishmael’s ship sails the Atlantic Ocean, which is teeming with boats filled with actual enslaved people. What does this individual psychological freedom entail when humans are being captured and sold? If all humans are indeed enslaved, what does it matter that humans, millions upon millions of humans, are bodily enslaved? The universal thump doesn’t merely land more harshly on some humans than others; some humans aren’t human enough for the blow to count.

Embedded in Khaled Mattawa’s poem Tocqueville, Ishmael’s question resonates differently. While Ishmael deliberates on enslavement of the mind, Mattawa’s speakers grapple with the questions of who is actually freed through political projects of emancipation and what they are liberated into. The poem asks: how does one protect one’s bearing and all that entails—one’s body, beliefs, orientation in the world—from violence, surveillance, inspection, and control? What will send the nerves to their first apprehensions? Nerves: those fibers making pathways, sending impulses, between brain and spinal cord and muscle; those receptive endings that enable us to sense and know what is happening to our bodies. Nerves represent what is sensory, what is in and out of our conscious control, embedded in our skin. Apprehension is capture. What sends us there?

Mattawa’s poem is a searing, lyrical critique of US history and globalization writ large. Those humans who are not enslaved pepper the poem: US presidents, government officials, people with power, money, and, significantly, authority. The poem’s speakers and addressees are multiple, as are its themes; the poem roams widely from Vietnamese sweatshops to child pornography to CIA operatives explaining their trade craft. The poem shifts form and voice, from therapeutic confession to radio interview to refugee account, generating a multivocal critique of the Western narrative of progressive civilization. When one of the speakers in Tocqueville asks another where they find their fellow citizens, the speaker answers, On airplanes. The legacy of the slave ship persists in multiple institutions, here represented by the plane with its cargo of commodities and people, and all its implications of neocolonial tourism, corporate travel, and globalization. The patterns of the transatlantic slave routes are overlaid with new routes, of displacement and forced migration, crisscrossed with new forms of economic colonialism.

What is humanity? Who counts as human, which humans are related to one another, and what counts as inhumane in these two times and spaces, and how are they connected? These questions are not rhetorical: on June 14, 2018, US Attorney General Jeff Sessions defended the Trump administration’s zero tolerance and family separation immigration policies by citing the same passage in Romans that was commonly used to justify slavery: Persons who violate the law of our nation are subject to prosecution. I would cite to you the Apostle Paul and his clear and wise command in Romans 13 to obey the laws of the government because God has ordained them for the purpose of order. Orderly and lawful processes are good in themselves and protect the weak and lawful (Zauzmer 2018). In fall of 2018, Denmark voted on a series of government proposals to regulate people living in low-income and predominantly Muslim ghettos—the official term, despite the fact that 470 Danish Jews were sent to the Theresienstadt Ghetto in 1943. These regulations included obligatory twenty-five-hour-a-week day care for children as young as one year in which Danish language and values would be taught, including lessons on Christmas and Easter (Barry and Sorenson 2018). Nearly identical justifications for civilized values and forced assimilation were used when settler colonists removed Indigenous children from their families in the United States, Canada, Australia, and elsewhere. In both Denmark and the United States, politicians routinely describe migrants and asylum seekers as animals and pathogens invading and infesting. A robust defense of secular governance and human rights would seem the most obvious remedy to all of these policies, yet the policies are enacted in the name of protecting the values and rights (and assets) of secular Western states.

This is a book about the relationship between contemporary literature and art and Western secularism. More specifically, it is about how visual, digital, and literary texts by Arab anglophone writers and Muslim and Arab artists in different national contexts respond to and challenge iterations of Western secular thought in spaces such as art museums, airports, rights discourses, and literary economies. The works in this book highlight how certain secular concepts are adapted and mobilized in these spaces, animating them in order to delineate seemingly benevolent and humanitarian projects such as art exhibits, the human rights novel, and the immigrant bildungsroman. I draw on texts from different geopolitical and geographical locations, using frameworks from postcolonial, transnational, critical race, and queer theories, in addition to Arab anglophone, Muslim American, and Arab American literary studies. I link these texts through the ways in which they use literary and artistic forms to challenge commonly held Western notions of secular society and its motivations towards inclusion, tolerance, and beneficence.

Secularism has a well-documented intellectual genealogy, yet I contest the universalizing ambitions inherent to many definitions of secularism that take for granted that varied secularisms share the same goals. For example, one of the shared features of secularism is the categorization and policing of boundaries between the religious and the secular and between the private and the public; this works very differently as a strategy for governing cultural assemblages in different national contexts.

The definition of secularism as practiced in the global North emerges from the specific context of Western states, while recognizing significant differences within this larger context. In her work on women’s Islamic movements in Cairo, Sherine Hafez refuses to describe her subjects’ desires as religious or secular, instead giving careful attention to moments of slippage and disruption that mirror the individual imbrications, daily negotiations, and unpredictable concomitance of religion and liberal secularity (2016, 9). Hafez reminds us that the projects of secular governments create binaries, but that people—their desires, practices, and subjectivities—cannot be parsed so easily, and these entanglements emerge differently and in complicated ways in different national and cultural contexts.

I enter the debate by examining artistic endeavors that provide counter narratives to the process of secularization as universally liberating and grapple with the shortcomings of secular forms of freedom. For example, US secularism is underwritten by a Protestant ethos in which religion is consigned to the private sphere, and religious subjectivities that do not adhere to this model are considered antimodern. As a result, the ways in which secularism and religion frame contemporary debates in places like the United States create an impasse between acceptable forms of religiosity and those that are dangerous to the body politic. In this case, secularism seeks to spread its economic and political ideologies globally while restricting its membership locally.

I analyze novels by Arab authors who converge in their use of English in their writing, but who otherwise defy categorization, often blurring our literary designations and drawing from a multitude of literary heritages. Resistance to categorization is also a defining feature of each work in terms of genre, as each author critiques the creation of categories that collapse particularities into monolithic wholes and works to undercut these category formations by drawing on local contexts to form aesthetic and cultural rebuttals. The artists whose work I explore intersect through their critiques of how manifestations of secularism inhibit and discipline certain embodiments, specifically Muslim, Arab, and immigrant communities affected by the kinds of laws described above, revealing how militarism, surveillance, and imperialism are buttressed by the logics of secularism. These texts take up entrenched thoroughfares—those ways of thinking about humanness that seem innate but are produced through rigid structures of belonging—and reroute them entirely, imagining more equitable models for enacting the social institutions that bind us together.

Modern Western literary forms—including those pioneered by Herman Melville and Walt Whitman, both cited in Mattawa’s poem—developed in concert with the emergence of secularism as a way of thinking about and ordering relations in the world. Secularism is often broadly conceived as atheism or the absence of or opposite of religion, but this definition depends on a binary between religion and secularism that secularism itself creates.

I’ll begin with one of the most frequently used definitions of political secularism: the separation of religion and state, a foundational tenant of the worst form of government except for all the others (2010, 46). This secularism promises deliverance from religious coercion and psychological bondage into rational self-governance, yet it makes secularism diffuse and abstract. In this definition, secularism removes authority from the Church and concentrates it in the individual. This is part and parcel of Mattawa’s dream between us because we imagine secularization as dismantling divine authority and replacing it with ourselves.

Literature is intimately coupled with the emergence of secularism; it helped describe its contours through its plots and forms. Secularization describes the unhinging of authority from institutional Western European Christianity and is accompanied by a newly unhinged literary imagination. Yet secularization does not merely vacate religious authority; it repurposes and replicates authority, and the limitations of secular thought inhere in this new literary imagination. The nineteenth century saw Whitman and William Wordsworth invent new ways of writing and inhabiting selfhood through poetics. The novel, in turn, developed alongside late-eighteenth-century philosophical ideas about the autonomy of the Western, European man, articulating his journey to Enlightenment through its very form.

Interrogating Secularism aims to provide a more textured sense of how narratives of secularism shape our lives, bodies, and spaces, looking specifically at how authors and artists critique adaptations of secular thought in a range of cultural and literary domains, and through critique topple certain kinds of imaginative assumptions about where authority is actually concentrated and, consequently, what it means to be human. It looks to the intersection of secularism and literature to answer these questions because secularism is itself a narrative—or rather, a constellation of narratives—that tells the story of a turn from the cosmological to the scientific, from theological understandings of human existence to Enlightenment ones, bringing with it new forms of agency. The story of secularization is self-congratulatory, ignoring the imbrications of science and religion that make up its core. It is also a story whose plot has a forward momentum and whose rising action is the universal spread of abstract principles without regard for the bodies and spaces it covers. Throughout the course of this book I attend to questions of the relationship between literary and visual arts and larger political and cultural contexts from the vantage point of one of the key Western narratives: the progressive story of secularization that works in tandem with its miscarried promises of freedom, democracy, and free enterprise. The authors and artists I consider create nuanced reflections on how iterations of secular thought shape some of the most mundane aspects of our lives.

The liberal democratic sphere has long been defined as the end point of the forward march of modernity—a progressive journey always advancing toward more perfect manifestations of modern civilization and the values it produces. Western secularity posits itself as having the monopoly on these values, including religious freedom, bodily sovereignty, individual rights, gender equality, and sexual liberation.² Yet the ways in which these purportedly secular values circulate reveal how they often manifest in exclusive ways in actual spaces. Interrogating Secularism approaches secularism with the premise that religious minorities experience secular governance and citizenship differently. Although these experiences manifest differently in different places, they are linked through ideologies that emerge from Western secularism. However, religious difference is not the only kind of difference that secularism cannot incorporate in practice. Indeed, secular ideologies have played a part in creating Western notions of humanness, including processes of racialization and the naturalization of gender and sexual norms.

Interrogating Secularism examines how liberal democratic accounts of secularism sanction certain kinds of religious expression and embodiment within the public sphere while discounting others, including Islam, as irreconcilable. The modern, secular individual operates in the public sphere according to a specific and exclusionary set of values. For example, Western feminist and LGBTQ rights discourses can use secular narratives of progression to endorse neocolonial ideologies such as pinkwashing and occupation in Palestine, limiting permissible ethnic, religious, gendered, and sexual embodiments. Underlying secular ideologies also inform global structures of surveillance and social control, including human rights discourses and immigration policies. Ultimately the secular emphasis on individual agency conditions our relationship to all sorts of notions of humanness—whether our gender identities or our understanding of ourselves as dominant, not integral, members of the biosphere. Examining how these ideas are packaged is critical for disassembling them, as the modern, secular state is so often held up as the antidote for what ails the world. This happens in scholarly essays that attempt to recuperate colonialism, in justifications for environmental racism based on free-market principles that undercut other ways of understanding human relationships to the biosphere, and in issues of forced migration and settler colonialism.

The secularization narrative takes as articles of faith that secularism is central to modernity, that it enables progress toward universalism, and that it represents development or emancipation. Janet Jakobsen and Ann Pellegrini write in their introduction to Secularisms:

Specifically, secularism is central to the Enlightenment narrative in which reason progressively frees itself from the bonds of religion and in so doing liberates humanity. This narrative poses religion as a regressive force in the world, one that in its dogmatism is not amenable to change, dialogue, or nonviolent conflict resolution. This Enlightenment narrative separates secularism from religion and through this separation claims that secularism, like reason, is universal (in contrast to the particularities of religion). However, this narrative also places secularism in a particular historical tradition, one that is located in Europe and grows out of Christianity (2008, 2).

The secularization narrative works by creating a dichotomy between rationality and irrationality, progress and traditionalism. Literature and art give insight into the ways Western secular ideologies are naturalized into universal human values, structuring the ways that abstract categories like religion and freedom are embodied, legislated, and practiced. Positive secular values—and there are many—cannot be recuperated through Western secular thought alone or through its reformation because this keeps us mired in the secular/religious binary. Literature and art can illuminate and create cultural models that draw on humanistic values found in religious and nonreligious sources.

Political and scholarly debates about secularism have long histories, but since 9/11 and its ensuing conflicts, right-wing politicians have used terrorism and the War on Terror to reframe debates in terms of Samuel Huntington’s theory of a clash of civilizations. Islam has become a touchstone for thinking and writing about secularism in many fields, including anthropology, ethnography, political science, and sociology, which demonstrates the long-standing linkage between secularism and Orientalism in many contexts, but also entails a flattening out of difference. Consequently, it is essential to look at communities that have borne the brunt of 9/11 stigmatization and, more recently, of President Trump’s executive orders and policies concerning border security, travel bans, family separation, and refugee resettlement, including Arab, South Asian, Native American, and Latinx people, all of whom have been under increased scrutiny since 9/11 and under the George W. Bush, Obama, and Trump administrations.³

The works examined in this book refute contemporary politics that frame debates about secularism and modernity solely according to their supposed incommensurability with Islam. Rather, these texts point to broader networks between empire, globalization, and secularization by drawing on a variety of literary influences and tying together myriad histories of exclusion. Analyzing these works with regard to secular narratives reveals how contemporary secular rhetoric draws on a supposedly inherent contradiction with Islam. Yet it also reveals how secular rhetoric emerges from long-standing discourses rooted in Protestantism, and consequently that work on secularism and literature can and should extend outward to include scholarship on other kinds of religious and minority communities, keeping in mind the way in which contemporary arguments about religious freedom in the United States and other Western nations are more often than not framed in terms of a cultural clash with Islam.⁴

Secularism underwrites the story we tell about the evolution of Western, modern, democratic nation-states and their colonial civilizing missions. I propose that the works in Interrogating Secularism write themselves into the historical plot while envisioning a different destination. Because the secularization process and its incumbent values are realized through narrative, it makes sense to rework those stories through fiction and art, giving expression to ways of living that are both tangible and possible. All of these texts can be read together productively, despite and even because of their generic differences, as all use artistic forms to reflect a sense of human fragility and social embeddedness. Reading these texts together reveals how their approaches to these issues differ, but also shows how they are linked by a broader project to resist the ways in which secularism structures our most profound ways of being, including our understanding of what it means to be human, how we can belong to one another, and how to govern ourselves.

1. Mattawa’s poetry here and in the conclusion from Tocqueville, reprinted with permission.

2. Charles McCrary and Jeffrey Wheatley distinguish between secularity and secularism in the United States: By focusing on power, especially state power, in its role in producing and policing subjectivities, scholars of American religion can go beyond merely implicating secularism with its putative ghost (Protestantism) and begin to explore secularism as a flexible strategy of governance consistent to an extent as a formal scheme yet capable of reforming, policing, and defining a variety of cultural contexts, often with contested effects (2017, 259).

3. The attacks of 9/11 are often seen as a watershed moment in the United States and globally, but it is important to recognize that the US government has been policing and repressing these communities since its inception. As Erik Love writes: Limiting the discussion of Islamophobia to the ‘post 9/11’ era obscures the long history of racial discrimination affecting Arabs, Muslims, Sikhs, South Asians, and others in the United States, . . . [which] has thrived in one form or another in the United States since at least the seventeenth century (2017, 3–4).

4. According to the Protestant secular thesis, as McCrary and Wheatley explain, Protestantism begets a regime we might call ‘secularism’ or even an ideology, mood, or episteme called ‘the secular’ (2017, 259). They urge scholars to expand on this framework and focus on secularism in terms of governance (270). Genealogies of secularism establish the idea that largely because of Protestants’ emphasis on the individual, ‘humanity’ and humans have valued selves more highly, imbued them with more rights, and accorded them more responsibilities. Because this valuation does not rely on an institutional church (though in many cases still relies on a concept of god) it can be rendered ‘natural’ (2017, 263).

Acknowledgments

Iam first and foremost thankful to Carol W. N. Fadda and Suzanne Guiod, and to everyone at Syracuse University Press, for a supportive publication process. I am profoundly grateful to Carol for her encouragement and her excellent criticisms and suggestions.

This book would not have been the same without the careful comments of my two anonymous readers, whose superb feedback made it stronger and better. Parts of chapter three and the introduction appeared previously in American Literature, and I thank the publishers of that journal for allowing me to reproduce those sections. I have gained much from the participants and fellow panelists who have engaged with my work at conferences, with particular gratitude to Vincent Pecora and Erik Love.

I am indebted to Louise Cainkar for allowing me to present early versions of chapters on her panels at the Middle Eastern Studies Association conference and the World Congress of Middle Eastern Studies; to Carol Fadda for allowing me to present on the Global Arab and Arab American Forum at the Modern Language Association conference; to Matthew Stiffler and Nadine Naber for allowing me to present on the Arab American Studies Association panel at the Middle Eastern Studies Association conference; and to Brigitte Fielder for inviting me to present my work in her seminars at University of Wisconsin–Madison. I am deeply grateful to Ninar Esber, Hasan Elahi, and Mounir Fatmi for allowing me to reproduce their work in this book. I also want to express my profound appreciation for all of the poets, novelists, artists, and scholars who inspired and informed these pages and whose work is quoted herein.

The genesis of this project was in my graduate studies at the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill, Yale Divinity School, and Cornell University. Elizabeth Anker was instrumental in helping me develop my thinking on secularism and literature. I thank her for her generous mentorship. I thank Mary Pat Brady for challenging me always to think more deeply and write more clearly. And I thank Kate McCullough for always making time for my many questions and for her rigorous reading. To this day, seeing her familiar handwriting on my pages is motivation to keep writing. I am especially indebted to Kate and Mary Pat for their hospitality and friendship over more than a decade. They have given me abundant encouragement and guidance over the years and I am deeply grateful.

I was very lucky to have found many supportive friends in my graduate programs, who through the intervening years have given me advice, encouragement, and hospitality. I would like to express my deep gratitude to Mukti Lakhi Mangharam, who had the thankless task of reading many versions of the book and whose intellectual passion and boundless empathy inspire me. Special words of thanks to Jonathan Senchyne for his incisive comments on my writing and his indefatigable support. Thank you to my Minnesota State University colleagues Laura Harrison, Heather Hamilton, Alisa Eimen, and Edward Ávila for offering insightful feedback on chapters and camaraderie on the tundra. Thank you Kelley Jeannette for being a steadfast friend on the trail and off. I am especially beholden to Caetlin Benson-Allot and Seth Perlow for their help in navigating the waters of this profession and whose friendship keeps me buoyant. And thank you Sharon Kim for never letting me lose sight of what makes our lives meaningful.

My mother showed me by example that art and literature enrich our lives and are an essential part of taking care of people and communities. I hope that this book communicates even just a little of her compassion for others and the delight she takes in the world. My brother and I have been journeying together my whole life, and he has been a source of laughter and reassurance the entire way. I want to thank all of my supportive family, especially Lois, Nisar, Kamaal, Katrin, Lena, Vanessa, Christine, Nick, Jovo, and Susan. I am beholden to all those wonderful professionals who have been caretakers for our children. Thank you Holley Mitchell, Danira Satimkulova, Erika and Martín Ronchietto, and the dedicated teachers of Urban Sprouts and The Children’s House. Your hard work makes mine possible. Omar and Zain may have hampered the actual writing of this book, but they have transformed what I think and feel about being human, and they have taught me what it means to become radically vulnerable through our love of others. My