For Patrice Champion, in memory of
Belgrade and Sarajevo

First published in French as Un racisme imaginaire. Islamophobie et culpabilité © Éditions Grasset & Fasquelle, 2017

This English edition © Polity Press, 2018

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ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-3064-9

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Bruckner, Pascal, author.

Title: An imaginary racism : Islamophobia and guilt / Pascal Bruckner.

Other titles: Racisme imaginaire. English

Description: Medford, MA, USA : Polity, [2018] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018001630 (print) | LCCN 2018029268 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509530663 (Epub) | ISBN 9781509530649 (hardback)

Subjects: LCSH: Islam--Public opinion. | Islamophobia--Western countries. | Islam--Western countries. | Islamic fundamentalism--Western countries. | Islam and politics--Western countries. | Political correctness--Western countries. | Racism--Western countries. | Western countries--Ethnic relations.

Classification: LCC BP52 (ebook) | LCC BP52 .B7813 2018 (print) | DDC 305.6/97--dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018001630

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This book is the outcome of many articles published since 2003 in Le Figaro, Le Monde, and Libération. I devoted about a dozen pages of The Tyranny of Guilt (Princeton University Press, 2010) to Islamophobia. I have also included here a lecture given at Indiana University, Bloomington, in 2012, and at Yale, on the inversion of the debt between anti-Semitism and Islamophobia. This lecture was published in English by Indiana University Press in 2015 in an essay collection edited by Alvin Rosenfeld under the title Deciphering the New Anti-Semitism. It appeared in France in the Revue des Deux Mondes in June 2014.

In 1910, André Quellien, a writer working for the French minister of the colonies, published a work entitled Muslim Politics in French West Africa.¹ Addressed to specialists and imperial officials, it offers moderate praise for the religion of the Quran as ‘practical and indulgent’, and better adapted to the ‘natives’, whereas Christianity is ‘too complicated, too abstract, too austere for the rudimentary, materialistic mentality of the negro’. The author of this report thought it important to emphasize that so long as it was treated tactfully, Islam would become French colonialism’s best ally and favour European influence and control. Because the religion of the Prophet ‘wrests these peoples away from fetishism and its degrading practices’, Quellien argued that it was imperative to stop seeing Islam as fanaticism and to treat it instead with a benevolent neutrality, thus foreshadowing the great Arabist Louis Massignon (1883–1962), a left-wing Catholic who specialized in Muslim mysticism and advocated dialogue between Islam and the Roman Catholic Church. Thus Quellien denounced the ‘Islamophobia’ that was rampant among colonial officials, but he was just as opposed to the ‘Islamophilia’ peculiar to Romantic orientalism: ‘singing the praises of Islam is just as biased as describing it unjustly’. Islam must be objectively considered as a tool for governing. Here, Quellien writes as an administrator concerned about social peace: he deplores the temptation to demonize a religion that keeps the peace in the empire, no matter what abuses – minor ones, in his view – it may commit, such as the continuing practices of slavery and polygamy. Since Islam is colonialism’s best ally, its followers must be protected from the harmful influence of modern ideas and their ways of life must be respected (an attitude found today on the far left and in English-speaking countries).

During the same period, Maurice Delafosse, another colonial official residing in Dakar, wrote: ‘Whatever may be said by those for whom Islamophobia is a principle of governing natives, France has nothing more to fear from Muslims than from non-Muslims in West Africa [...]. Thus Islamophobia has no more raison d’être in West Africa, where, on the other hand, Islamophilia (in the sense of a preference granted Muslims) is said to create a feeling of distrust among non-Muslim peoples, who are the most numerous.’²

Islamophobia: the term probably already existed in the nineteenth century, which explains its spontaneous use by imperial officials. As for its antonym, Islamophilia, whether erudite or popular, since the seventeenth century it has been a constant in European history, which is still massively fascinated by Islamic civilization.³ But after the Iranian Revolution of 1980 the expression ‘Islamophobia’ underwent a mutation that weaponized it. Between the expulsion of the American feminist Kate Millet from Teheran in 1979 for having protested against the regime’s requirement that Iranian women wear a veil, and the Rushdie affair in 1988, which exploded under the influence of British Muslims, this dormant word suddenly awoke and became active in another form. A word does not belong to the person who created it but to the one who reinvented it to make its use widespread. This lexical rejuvenation makes it possible to kill two birds with one stone: stigmatizing traitors to the Muslim faith, on the one hand, and shutting up godless Westerners, on the other.

In 1789 and again in 1791, France abolished the crime of blasphemy, which had caused centuries of conflicts between Catholics and Protestants (the Restoration later reinstituted another law against sacrilege that was intended above all to muzzle the press, but it was repealed during the July Monarchy and definitively abrogated in July 1881). In his report on the planned penal code, a member of the Constituent Assembly, Lepeletier de Saint-Fargeau, wrote that it was necessary ‘to get rid of this crowd of imaginary crimes swelling the old collections of our laws. You will no longer find in them the great crimes of heresy, lèse-majesté, sorcery, or practising magic, for which, in the name of the divine, so much blood has soiled the earth’.⁴ A magnificent proposal that might seem outdated today if so many obscurantist forces, led by UN-accredited lawyers and theologians from the Middle East, were not doing all they can to revive this crime of blasphemy, this ‘oral crime’ that challenged the social and cosmic order and that under the Old Regime was often punished, in France and in Europe, by cutting off the offender’s tongue, sewing his mouth shut, or even torturing and killing him. In the spirit of Lepeletier de Saint-Fargeau ridiculing blasphemy, we might describe the accusation of ‘Islamophobia’ as ‘imaginary racism’. An untethered signifier in search of a use, this expression agglutinates at least two different meanings: the persecution of believers, which is obviously reprehensible, and the questioning of beliefs, which is practised in all civilized countries. Criticism of a religion falls within the domain of the spirit of examination but certainly not within that of discrimination. Striking a religious believer is a crime. Debating an article of faith, a point of doctrine, is a right. Confusing the two is an intolerable amalgamation.

To put the point still more clearly: insulting a veiled woman in the street, setting fire to, damaging, or looting a mosque, or anathematizing a group of Muslims is tantamount to spitting in the face of the Republic and all its citizens, Christians, Jews, Buddhists, or unbelievers. Although these aggressions must be ruthlessly punished and places of worship protected as part of the national heritage, we must not inhibit or prevent free speech with regard to religious systems. These are two different orders of magnitude. There is already so much real discrimination connected with skin colour, appearance, skills, social status, and accent that it seems pointless to add other forms of discrimination that are fictive or fantastic. Let’s imagine that in the eighteenth century the Church had replied to the attacks of Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, d’Alembert, and Co. by accusing them of ‘racism’ (the word did not exist at the time). Let’s imagine that the same defence continued down to the twentieth century, and that in response to every challenge to the Bible made by free-thinkers, the ecclesiastical authorities had tried to censure the expression of these arguments by arguing that they constituted the crime of Christianophobia. Christianity would have remained frozen, congealed like a phantom vessel, incapable of evolving, of reconsidering its heritage. It was the attacks of its adversaries that regenerated it, awakened it from its long dogmatic slumber.

Let’s face it: the undertaking conducted here may be doomed in advance. The expression ‘Islamophobia’ has entered the global lexicon. It has become a juridical, political shield that makes it possible to ward off all criticisms, but that is not a reason for giving up. Languages sometimes fall ill, as we have seen in the history of totalitarianism in the twentieth century. To borrow an expression from Camus, which is repeated ad nauseam: ‘calling things by the wrong name adds to the affliction of the world’. The battle is first of all philosophical: anyone who expropriates words, expropriates brains and places mendacity at the heart of language. For the time being, the fundamentalists have won the vocabulary battle, but there is still time to stop this excessively well-oiled machine. Delegitimizing the term ‘Islamophobia’, instilling doubt about it, putting it permanently between quotation marks – that is the goal of this essay. To win the war against fundamentalism, we have to fight it first on the terrain of ideas. Here I offer a small toolbox for deconstructing the witch-hunt and rejecting the blackmail.

On 16 May 2013, the French parliament, acting on a proposal made by the Front de gauche, decided to eliminate the notion of ‘race’ from legislation, ‘in order to move our society forward on the ideological and pedagogical level, even though we are all convinced that this symbolic gesture will not suffice to do away with racism’ (François Ascensi).¹ During his campaign, the presidential candidate (François Hollande) had in fact supported this move, in order to cut the ground from under ‘all the nauseating theories’. The delegate who presented the proposal, Alfred Marie-Jeanne,² emphasized that the word ‘race’ is an ‘aberrant concept’. Having served as the basis for the worst excesses, ‘it has no place in our juridical order’. Already taboo in common discourse, the term has more or less fallen into disuse, except in far-right homilies and in rap songs. The initiative is revelatory of our desire to resolve problems by nullifying them. If there are no longer any races, then the word ‘racism’ ought to disappear. There are no longer any races except the proliferating race of racists, who are proliferating like vermin in need of re-education. To eliminate these differences, we have to stress one difference that cannot be overcome, that of the racist, who is cast out into the absolute otherness of the barbarian. Thus all we have to do is cut out the tumour, eradicate the accursed word, and everything will be fine.

The approval of this law occurred in the context of a new wave of hostile acts among citizens of various groups, and thus of a tendency the inverse of that proclaimed by the elites. In the schools, in the street, in the media, and in song lyrics, the fine drama of unanimity disintegrated into insults, fights, and diverse abusive epithets such as ‘feujs’ (Jews), ‘rebeus’ (Arabs), ‘gaulois’ (Gauls), ‘céfrans’ (French), ‘noiches’ (Asians), and many more. The hymn sung to happy coexistence corresponds to the image of a fragmented humanity. We have never shouted so much at people in the name of their origins, their beliefs, or the colour of their skin. In a movement already noted by those most lucid observers, Paul Yonnet and Pierre-André Taguieff, anti-racism never ceases to racialize every form of ethnic, political, sexual, or religious conflict. It constantly recreates the curse that it claims to be fighting. A strange mechanism whose genealogy should be traced; it is probably connected with the collapse of the communist project. Everywhere, racial struggle seems to be supplanting class struggle, as Raymond Aron already feared sixty years ago.³ Everything has become racial: cultures, religions, communities, sexual preferences, thoughts, eating habits. Hasn’t the neologism ‘pauvrophobie’ (‘pauperphobia’) recently been invented (ATD Quart monde, October 2016) to denounce discriminations in job insecurity? A purely linguistic poultice that will in no way improve the situation of those excluded, but that reassures social actors. With this strange contradiction that assimilates fear to hatred, ‘phobias’ are proliferating. To fear a group, a gender orientation, a belief, or a working-class accent is already to display loathing, to oscillate between aversion and mental illness. The phobic person is twice guilty, on both the psychic and the social levels. We haven’t nullified the problem, we’ve just moved it. Everything that distinguishes humans ends up setting them against one another. The slightest disagreement or uneasiness is translated into a racial disqualification: as soon as one person feels attacked, even by a look or an expression, he can accuse you, point an avenging finger at you.

What should an anti-racism, rightly understood, consist in? The wisdom to live together, the attraction of diversity when individuals of all origins encounter one another in the same space, but also a discerning intelligence capable of distinguishing what is a matter of humiliation from what is a matter of freedom of expression. Let us recall that the goal of a wise politics is to prevent discord and avoid war. But anti-racism, which has become the civil religion of modern times, has been transformed into a permanent war of all against all, a rhetoric of recrimination. The contraction of time and space brought about by new technologies and means of transportation leads to the abolition of the distances that used to protect us from what was far away. But on a planet where human tribes, constantly on the move, collide with one another, the pressure becomes oppressive. The net tightens, arousing a feeling of claustrophobia and even of rejection. Globalization reflects this historical moment, at which the Earth becomes aware of its limits and humans become aware of their interdependence. The universe ceases to be the common space of their intercourse and becomes the site of their mutual torments. Since people are now separated from each other by no more than a few hours in an airplane or a train, they are deprived of the distance required by any relationship and plunged into the intolerable proximity of the global village, precisely where distances, intervals, need to be re-established so that everyone rediscovers his place. The opening-up promised by modernity, the marvellous possibility of leaving behind the local, the native, the tribal, is converted into a new confinement on the global scale, not so much a broadening of horizons as the perception of the horizon as a new enclosure. Since there is only one world, that of population explosions, natural catastrophes, and mass migrations, it is more necessary than ever that people conceive of themselves as large groups. Tensions increase because individuals come closer to one another, rub shoulders, are forced to share space. To build bridges between people, you have to start by restoring the gates that delimit each person’s territory.

Finally, the dominant ‘racism’, that disease of world unification, is no longer connected solely with a wish to exterminate, as it was in Germany, Turkey, Cambodia, or Rwanda; it is above all a desire to confine. It expresses the desire to be among one’s own kind and to drive out intruders: the danger facing multiracial societies is as much the dictatorship of a majority that imposes its law as it is the juxtaposition of communities hermetically sealed off from one another, communicating no more than the strict minimum. In this configuration, everything that distinguishes people ends up wounding them. So sensitivities have to be handled with extreme care, and one has to think twice before saying anything at all. Any offensive remark, class contempt, comment on physical appearance, or even a compliment can be interpreted as discrimination. All that remains is humour, which mitigates clichés and routs them, whereas racist jokes confirm them by making people laugh at the expense of this or that category of others.

A major change in modern times: in Western countries, the politics of identity is tending to replace help for the disadvantaged. The People, as presented mythically by the left and the republicans, is disappearing in favour of minorities. Everywhere, the ethnic is supplanting the social, the ethical is supplanting the political, and living memory is supplanting cold history. Everywhere the loathsome habit of defining oneself by one’s origins, identity, or belief is settling in. Difference is reaffirmed at the very time that we want to establish equality, at the risk of involuntarily continuing the old prejudices connected with skin colour and customs. This tendency is contemporary with the explosion of the judicial in the modern world. The courtroom is becoming the site where reparations compensate victims and nail to the pillory the villains who have dared to cross the line. If in the democratic age the court trial has become the pedagogical trope par excellence, that is because it is where everyone defends the most cherished cause of all, oneself, and displays before witnesses one’s suffering and one’s humiliations. The trio of the attorney, the judge, and the plaintiff consecrates the court as the emblematic stage on which the human adventure is played out in the age of identity.

As for the critique of political correctness (a euphemism that has been raised to the rank of an art de vivre), it is itself another kind of conformism, a convention of the unconventional, an orthodoxy of heterodoxy that merely doubles one dead-end by adding another. We’re not going to insult one another to show our freedom of opinion. The fact that we have to restrain ourselves in making judgements regarding those close to us is not a simple matter of censorship but the minimal decency that we owe each other in pluralistic societies. Politeness, as Kant already pointed out, is politics writ small. If a Donald Trump could be elected president of the United States, it is because in the course of his campaign he ignored this elementary courtesy, insulting Mexicans, immigrants, blacks, Muslims, Chinese, and indeed anyone who objected to his programme. But this popular spokesman, who likes to be clownish and Neronian and who defends an isolationist and protectionist credo, is himself no more than the counter-product of American political correctness, to which he replies with the politically direct or even the politically abject. In him, the verbal discipline propagated by the Republican or Democratic elites has as its counterpart impulsive effrontery, insults used as arguments, ad hominem attacks, mockery of women and the disabled, death threats against his rivals, a call for the army to practise torture, to commit war crimes... in short, the rhetoric of the mafioso and not that of a responsible politician.

What is political correctness? An allergy to naming things, a sweeping-away of difficulties, the impossibility of saying anything without using metaphor, displacement, gibberish. Words are blurred the way genitals are blurred on some statues, and as piano legs, according to popular legend, were skirted in the Victorian period to avoid offending polite society. Saying what is the case, saying what one sees, would be shocking. Now ‘to stigmatize’ is to mention that which must not be mentioned. We ‘stigmatize’ as soon as we point to a problem. Let us recall that during their respective terms as president, both Barack Obama and François Hollande seemed incapable of speaking of ‘Islamic terrorism’ or ‘radical Islam’, instead always using indirect or neutral expressions to describe our enemies. The contemporary taboo seeks to shelter not only beliefs or ideas, but whole areas of reality. In certain American universities, for example, students have protested the mere use of the term ‘Islamism’ or ‘radical Islam’, regarding it as inappropriate.⁴

In our multiracial and multicultural societies, insulting minorities is prohibited by law. And that represents progress. It is one of the taboos that constitute what we are. Since 1945, the overt expression of racism, what in English is called ‘hate speech’, has been connected with an intention to commit murder. The fact that people are no longer allowed to proclaim loud and clear on television or in public that Jews, Arabs, blacks, North Africans, whites, Catholics, or Muslims should be killed is in itself a good thing. The counterpart of this progress: to avoid being accused of racism, one has to proceed with kid gloves, resort to neutral expressions that lead to neither reproach nor prosecution. A kind of lexical decorum weighs on our speech. Describing a person, a minority, or a religion requires an acute sense of nuances. Metaphors that say one thing for another proliferate, and presuppose that everyone will be able to decipher them. But to extend this prudence to the products of human culture, to ban a priori any criticism of a system, of a religion, is to risk amputating freedom of thought. That risk was taken in France by the Pleven law of 1972, which created a new crime of ‘provoking discrimination, hatred, or violence’ committed against individuals ‘because of their membership or non-membership in a specific ethnic group, nation, race, or religion’.⁵ The broadening of incrimination to religious convictions provided an opportunity that was seized by fundamentalist, Catholic, and other groups to sue the authors of films they considered defamatory – Je vous salue, Marie, by Jean-Luc Godard (1985), The Last Temptation of Christ, by Martin Scorsese (1988), and The People vs. Larry Flynt, by Miloš Forman (1996). These groups contended, on the grounds that certain words are weapons, ‘loaded guns’ that can wound (as Jean-Paul Sartre, speaking of collaborationist writers after the war, had already emphasized, citing Brice Parain), that speech mocking or showing contempt for religious faith should be censured. From the death sentence passed on Salman Rushdie for having, according to his accusers, blasphemed against the Prophet in his novel The Satanic Verses, to the affair of the cartoons depicting Muhammad that ended with the cold-blooded murder of Charlie Hebdo’s whole editorial team on 7 January 2015, there is a fine line between a satirical judgement of other people’s beliefs and maximal outrage. It therefore seems that we are faced with a choice between offence and acquiescence. To the delicate question of blasphemy radical Islam adds an important nuance: it kills offenders and does not bother with precautions. Everything that used to be part of the spirit of the Enlightenment – criticism, but also anti-clerical, theological, and philosophical discourse, as well as satire – is now supposed to be seen as defamation.

Finally, the quarrel over Islamophobia is revelatory of another phenomenon: the continual emergence of ‘new forms of racism’ that are noted with anxious uneasiness. The word ‘racism’ has acquired a galloping obesity, swallowing up in its definition all sorts of behaviours, attitudes, and rites that had up to this point not been connected with it. Anti-racism, like humanitarianism, is a rapidly expanding market in which each group, in order to exist, has to allege that it has suffered a wound that makes it special. These are no longer associations of citizens who have joined together to combat racism; they are religious or community lobbies that invent new forms of discrimination to justify their existence and receive the maximum of publicity and reparations. Claude Lévi-Strauss already noted this fact: ‘nothing so much compromises the struggle against racism, or weakens it from inside, or vitiates it, as the indiscriminating use of the word racism, by confusing a false but explicit theory with common inclinations and attitudes from which it would be illusory to imagine that humanity can one day free itself’.⁶ A consistent anti-racist is a sleuth who discovers a new form of segregation every morning, delighted to have added this new species to the great taxonomy of progressive thought.