You might also like this article by Leora Auslander, ‘Bavarian Crucifixes and French Headscarves: Religious Signs and the Postmodern European State’, which I found very perceptive.

What we disagree on, it seems, is the role that intellectuals play in directing these emotions towards Islam. I am generally weary of ascribing complex phenomena to intellectual guidance alone. If you are including right wing ideologues or speech writers under the rubric of intellectuals, it is difficult to argue that they have not been instrumental. But even then, I think, the idea has to have some appeal to begin with. Anti-Islamism has come after some experimentation in the 1990s. Neo-Nazism had limited appeal because of its history. Racism was too blunt for a liberal society. Anti-immigration was too loose. But anti-Islam struck a chord. It is concrete enough, attracts clumsy attention to itself, and it focuses emotions on questions of value, which is perfectly compatible with liberalism. Parties like the BNP in the UK and the far right in Norway still slip easily from anti-Islamism to anti-immigration and back, but anti-Islamism connects with issues beyond the limited rants of such parties and meshes well with Europe’s wars abroad.

You make a convincing case with regards to France and, given France’s typical emphasis on official culture and prominence of public intellectuals, it makes sense. But Salvatore’s article is a case in point of the limitations of abstracting from the French model (her laicité model, thus the dynamics between state authorities and religious groups, is by no means standard in Europe). Where the role of the state and intellectuals in this debate is stunted, the terrain is much more difficult to read. As you might expect, things are rather different in Scandinavian countries and the Netherlands (to point out places where I have lived for substantial periods of time). It wasn’t high-profiled intellectuals, but rather populist parties and popular media (the latter sometimes unwittingly, in their search for topics that sell) that cushioned this “conceptual leap,” as you call it.

I will have to read Laborde’s article more carefully. It critiques very well the nature of the political and cultural crisis that makes Islam the focus. Many thanks for that and the link to the minaret book.

And there’s another conceptual leap involved in seeing Islam as some kind of problem. Since there are only four minarets in Switzerland, and only about 4% of the population is Muslim, maybe most Swiss people actually have very little contact with Muslims or Islam. So why would it suddenly occur to anyone to see Islam as a threat?

I suspect that someone must be convincing people to make that conceptual leap, and that it’s probably someone who writes newspaper articles or makes speeches, i.e. some kind of cultural producer. You mentioned right-wing parties. Political parties have their own cultural producers (or if you like, ideologues). So maybe we should ask: who are those people, what is their background, and why would it be in their own interest to portray Islam as a threat?

I was thinking of intellectuals because I did a bit of research a while ago on Tariq Ramadan, and noticed that three of Ramadan’s main adversaries in France (Alain Finkielkraut, André Glucksmann and Bernard-Henri Lévy) are philosophers who are have long been prominent in the French media. Finkielkraut and Glucksmann played a major role in the campaign to ban the Islamic headscarf in French state schools. Moreover, all five signatories of a much-discussed 1989 anti-headscarf manifesto were philosophers. I guessed that for these intellectuals, whose stock-in-trade is secular, someone like Ramadan might be a worrisome rival in debates about Islam in France, because he obviously knows much more about Islam than they do. The more credibility and influence he gains, the more they risk being marginalised in such debates.

I suspect that this whole issue might be fundamentally about the question of who gets to define national culture. When a philosopher like Pierre-André Taguieff calls for ‘the defence of the cultural identity of France’, I think he’s actually defending his own authority to define that ‘cultural identity’. If knowledge of Islam came to be considered a requirement for understanding French society, that authority would be threatened.

I went to a seminar recently in Cairo for the launch of a book on the Swiss minarets issue, Les minarets de la discorde, edited by Patrick Haenni and Stéphane Lathion. There’s an Arabic translation available as a free download.

Thanks for reading my blog!

Interesting that you should bring up these issues, Ben. Much of the Christian clergy, at least on the official level, has been largely against the minaret ban. In a country like Norway, a new generation of Christian Democrats are openly considering opening up to Muslim membership in order to replenish the depleting party base. But, on the other hand, I have not observed any particularly intellectual edge to the attack on Islam (not that they do not exist, of course).

It is difficult to generalize, given the variations between countries. But what seems to be a common thread in many cases is that right wing parties have been feeding on a middle/lower middle class disgruntlement with the political class, including immigration policies and the EU.

Love the blog, btw.

Hmm. The Christian clergy? Christian churches have been losing followers and influence in most of Europe for some time, and are perhaps competing among themselves for fewer and fewer believers. Could it be that they see Islam as an especially threatening form of competition?

Intellectuals whose stock-in-trade is secular (scientists, philosophers, liberal intellectuals, etc.) have been fighting the power and influence of the Christian clergy — their rivals — in Europe for centuries. They finally won, more or less, by confining the clergy’s influence to narrow spheres of social practice, and by winning a consensus that religious truth can’t compete with scientific truth. Are they attacking Islam because they’re afraid they’ll have to go through the power struggles of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment all over again, this time with the Muslim clergy?

One thing I hope, is that they are treated with a minimum of respect and dignity and not “broke” by repeated rape and abuse to “condition” them to take on this job… as other mafias in the world do. I really do hope that the lebanese mafias and authority are better then this… But I really doubt so. If you have more information on this, please share…

Interesting that “the goat’s nose” story was still going around that late. I hadn’t heard it from any of the elders in the family.

I first heard this theory on the origins of the word “influenza” from the Armenian doctor who brought me into the world in the mid-50s (in Beirut, of course): Peter Manoogian (bless his memory).

http://chomsky.info/onchomsky/20091011.htm

and as we say in Lebanon, ma hada ahsan men hada.

As I understand it, he is going after bigger fish. You have to keep in mind that M14 political parties issued objections to banning Persepolis and the issue was discussed at the ministerial level (and the threat of ban thereafter rescinded). Pierre’s remark on hypocrisy is also part of a longer debate that has been going on in the press for a couple of years now and involving intellectual heavyweights such as Hazim Saghiyah, Samah Idriss, Abbas Baydoun, and Paul Shawul — and even a court case against al-Adab publishing house. And while credit is due to Now Lebanon, I am sorry to say that it remains peripheral to this debate.

I’ve been working on censorship in Lebanon for a while now. Presumably, the “liberals” he’s talking about are March 14, and I know that the one media outlet that’s been concerned as much as (or possibly more than) al-Akhbar with censorship is Now Lebanon, which has covered many censored items, from Help to Persepolis to How Nancy Wished that Everything was an April Fool’s Joke to Gad el-Meleh.

I dislike their editorial line as much as you do, but when it comes to the question of censorship, I’ve got to give credit where credit is due.

And for the record, while I can’t say if the actual paper had anything to say about it (their archives aren’t available online), I do know that L’Orient-Le Jour’s blog did have a short segment on Help being banned.

One place where I have not only not seen anything against censorship, but in the case of Gad el-Meleh, quite the opposite, has been al-Manar. I can’t say one way for the other about other TV channels though.