This slim book of sociological and philosophical musing, a gentle and
intelligent polemic, attempts to answer why violence and the need to belong are
linked together. He notes, for instance, that violence is often committed by those
whose identities feel threatened, citing the Okalahoma City bombings as an extreme
and monstrous example of this. The analysis is not particularly deep, in the sense that
Maalouf offers few concrete examples, studies or research to support his points, and
thus relies on well-argued supposition to press his point; that is not to say that In the
Name of Identity is a shallow book. Quite the contrary. Maalouf’s analysis, especially
of the Arab and Muslim world, is very intelligent, enlightened and useful; his place as
an Arab who lives in France, he claims, gives him a foot in both worlds, a two-faced
Janus vision of identity that he returns to throughout to lend credence to his
argument.
His thoughts about identity, in short, come down to a deconstruction of what
makes up an individual: he concludes there is no one fixed, monolithic identity, but a
series of what Maalouf calls ‘allegiances’: all the various vastitudes of history,
customs, religion, gender, class and the outlooks they entail. The individual,
therefore, is the sum of all their surroundings, society and acts of free will and quirks
of personality. Out of that complexity we build ourselves and our built, and
sometimes, we come to hide those other facets in the name of one part of our
identity. Maalouf does not agree with doing this, but can understand it, even if he
believes that it is morally wrong to force any human being to hold to one allegiance of
their identity, for instance, to Islam, at the expense of their other identities, whether
cultural, as an Arab, gendered or class, (Maalouf, however, stays away from class,
and indeed barely touches on economic conditions and their overwhelming effect on
people, including on all their other identities, a serious weakness it would seem, but
hold still…).
Often, Maalouf gets caught up in the liberal or postmodern understanding of
identity politics to such an extent that he rattles off bills of rights and what people
deserve to have acknowledged, about the needs of individuals to be more
understanding, open, and reflective:
“It is essential that we establish clearly and without ambiguity, and that we
watch over tirelessly, the right of every man to retain and to use freely his language,
which identifies him and with which he identifies himself. I regard that freedom as
even more important than freedom of belief” (etc. etc. The flaws to this kind of
preaching about essential freedoms is self-evident, I think)
This stance can be a commendable and ethical stance, but it can be a little
ridiculous, to read such warbling, which often disconnects itself from the material
conditions that influence human behaviour and seems to have little concrete to offer
(a biological/behaviorist critique of this book would be interesting, along the lines of a
John Gray) . Maalouf does not dwell on the surface, nor does he delve that deep. He
is smart enough to root the construction of an individual to the society that shaped
him and the many years, and deeper centuries, that plant their roots like cat parasites
in our fibres. He is no fool in that regard.
And there is much to commend this book to someone who does not
necessarily share Maalouf’s soft but thoughtful liberalism and enthusiasm for a rights
based ideology of individual freedom. His central and longest chapter on “Modernity
and the Other” contains much that goes against the dominant ideology in the media
and culture: that is, he argues, as an Arab himself, that Arabs, especially Arab
Muslims, are not intrinsically backwards, and do not necessarily have a problem
coping with issues of modernism, multiculturalism and tolerance (Maalouf, who
wrote a history of the Crusades from the Arab side, notes that over the long historical
term, neither religion has overall been more tolerant or enlightened then the other).
In his discussion of Islamist movements and Jihad, he is both disgusted by
their violence and fanaticism but is smart enough, again, as an Arab himself, to
recognise the cultural, material and personal humiliations of the greater civilization
that informs part of his identity. He sees, as many other observers have, that Hamas
or the Iranian Revolution has far more to do with Third World revolutionary
movements then with the history of Islam, that poverty, land hunger, overpopulation,
ignorance and oppression are usually at the heart of why many young men are driven
to acts of violence on a social level, and that it is the failure of liberal humanism,
nationalism, socialism and communism, both suppressed by Western-backed regimes,
to mobilize the masses or provide solutions to poverty and weakness that has made
Islam acceptable again as the guide for action (indeed, he laments for a few pages that
Communism now appears to have been a much more palatable alternative to Islamic
fundamentalism). What is more, and I have argued this relentlessly myself, when the
condition of ‘modernity’, however one wants to define it, is presented to people who
will probably never experience its benefits, who see exploitation, the destruction of
their livelihoods, their cultures, a way of life long solidified by tradition and the blood
of generations melting into air. When telecommunications only allows more
oppression, when the freedom of modernity is denied, then how are they expected to
react? To embrace feminism with open arms when they haven’t enough to eat? To
belief in the free market when they have no jobs? This, Maalouf attests, is all it takes
for desperate situations to seem palatable, and to see the bearers of Modernity,
wealthy, haughty, morally hypocritical, white and Western, as worthy of revenge.
His two later chapters return us to a less grounded analysis. They are much
more dedicated to exploring psychological and individual collapse of identities; as
such, they are more often directed at the young men of 9/11, though the book itself
was written before that day. Maalouf explores the idea of tribes and globalization, as
a fracturing of traditional bonds, as the quickening interaction of diverse cultures and
individuals, that can often seem disorienting, tugging at all those allegiances of our
personality, threatening to unbalance the personal identities we have been born with,
made into, and are that most essential part of ourselves. It can be disastrous but
liberating.
Here, Maalouf sees the fracturing of identities as the primary cause of a return
to traditional religions or cultures: an attempt to cleave all the more tightly to
tradition is to feel grounded in a Utopian simpler time, to avoid the seeming sensory
chaos of a globalized world. It is the negative possibilities of globalization, the loss
of local identities at the hands of homogeneity, that the angry young fundamentalist
feels. The potential loss of unique languages, that most important indicator of
cultural uniqueness, seems a great danger. Is it motivation for political violence,
however? There is a certain logic to this, but I think he overstates this fear, which
dwells in heaven with the ghosts of kings and popes and morals and values. Maalouf
puts forward a positive view of globalization that allows for a colourful mix of
language, culture and thought, and cuisine, across the world; his position on negative
aspects of globalization is decisively straw man. Maalouf’s rosy picture, in which he
denies that the Third World might be a victim and that globalization is not a force that
has anything to do with capitalists in the West. For instance, this kind of drivel:
“Many refuse to make a contribution to the expanding global culture because at some
point they decided once and for all that the world around them was incomprehensible,
bloodthirsty, demented or diabolical. Many are tempted to see themselves as mere
victims – victims of America, of the West, of capitalism, of liberalism, of the new
technologies, of the media, of change…to imprison oneself in a victim mentality can
do the injured party even more harm then the aggression itself.”
is plainly simplistic and even complacent and complicit in the status quo that
perpetuates the problems he opposes, as if only the genuine victims of capitalism or
the West or technological change are just a bunch of whiners and have no legitimate
claim to their anger and frustration.
In many ways, this insistence on globalization as an airy, oncoming,
immaterial cultural force, rather then as something rooted in trade and capital,
revokes the points he made earlier in his book about the effect of colonialism,
imperialism and rampant capitalism on the Arab world. This is, again, the biggest
weakness of In the Name of Identity: whenever Maalouf gets close enough to form a
concrete explanation for why anti-globalization in Pakistan or Egypt is often anti-
Western, he retreats from material critique of any sort and returns to the airy false
certainties of his individual personality centred critique. He misses obvious points
such as the fact that international capitalists in all countries are already globalized and
homogenous in their desires, interests and power; a capitalist in Mumbai has more in
common with a capitalist in New York then he does with the lower classes of his own
people. Instead, again, a hazy rights based declaration of individual autonomy and
protection from violation, one that we could easily agree with if it had any sort of
mechanism for meaning anything other than extortion from Maalouf himself to act
nicer and with an open heart. It divests his criticism of some of its force and clarity,
that much is certain.
I should still point out that Amin Maalouf’s In the Name of Identity is still a
much better book than many others of its sort, especially the anti-Muslim screeds.
His own compassion and tolerance, which despite the amorphous liberal identity
politics, is nonetheless honest, argued and deeply-felt, and well conveyed.
The book is a polemic, but it never descends to the pyrotechnics and empty
rhetoric, emotional, shallow and often, if not idiotic, then divested even of logic and
fact, of say, a Hitchens.(being my personal pet peeve, but there are many many others
out there, on all sides and all political allegiances).
The Existence Machine asked last month if the polemic is itself to blame for
the vacuity of so much political, historical and critical writing out there: I would put
forward Amin Maalouf as an example of polemic that rises above a form that
encourages name-calling, insult, slander and sound bites.
Maalouf is always careful to note his own intellectual and experiential
limitations, and the limitations of his arguments, before making them. He always
ensures to expand upon, explain and detail his arguments, and shows an honest
hesitation to ever leave an ambiguous statement that is too broad to easily defend.
He is never too certain to make sweeping generalisations, and his emphasis on the
maelstrom of personalities demonstrates a more nuanced understanding of human
beings then those that reduce Muslims to religious fanatic automatons. Maalouf
throughout demonstrates humbleness and self-criticism, and is well aware that cannot
fully explain or synthesize all phenomena into a short book. He is always aware of
the limitations of his book, the spoken word, communication in general.
In short, his polemic is not based upon absolute certainty in the rightness of
his position, in his ability to explain away everything in the world according to his
rubric, but upon a deep honesty about his limitations, and an equally deep
commitment to his argument, despite the limitations, that argues for understanding,
tolerance and a painful realisation that violence and fanaticism can have very real
reasons, rooted in fear, misery and poverty, for appearing at the start of the 21th
century.
