Author: Arun Kundnani
ISBN No: 9781-781681596
Review date: 26/04/2024
No of pages: 330
Publisher: Verso
Publisher URL:
http://www.versobooks.com
Year of publication: 21/08/2015
Brief:
The Muslims are Coming! Islamophobia, Extremism and the Domestic war on terror, by Arun Kundnani; published 2014 by Verso. Hardback, £14.99, 330 pages, ISBN 9781-781681596
price
£14.99
The Muslims are Coming! Islamophobia, Extremism and the Domestic war on terror, by Arun Kundnani; published 2014 by Verso. Hardback, £14.99, 330 pages, ISBN 9781-781681596. Visit www.versobooks.com.
The Muslims are Coming! is an excellent book that anyone can learn from or reflect on, let alone anyone who is taking or thinking of taking an academic course on terrorism.
Read more by Arun Kundnani at http://www.kundnani.org/. For example a recent post on whether the UK government’s counter-extremism programme will criminalise dissent. As Kundnani writes there: “Disrupting extremism is, in plainer language, censorship of religious and political opinions the government finds unacceptable. Ironically, this is being done in the name of defending ‘British’ values of individual freedom.”
If you are stuck for time, the first, introduction, chapter gives the core of Arun Kundnani’s argument. He has uncomfortable words for liberals besides conservatives: while President Bush set up the war on terror after 9-11, ‘Obama liberalism normalised it, at which point, mainstream journalists stopped asking questions’. Kundnani asks those questions about a war against terrorism that shows no signs of ending and that affects (or infects?) western society – such as the use of torture being more acceptable. Even the death of bin Laden has not halted the ‘war’ that costs hundreds of billions. Although as the author notes, the United States’ Muslim population has important differences from the UK’s, he correctly points to connections between the two countries in terms of counter-terrorism and counter-radicalisation; whether intellectuals and commentators having their say, or practitioners on a ‘shared project’ of a domestic war on terror.
The book is all about that domestic front; ‘radicalisation became the lens through which western societies viewed Muslim populations’ by the end of the 2000s. As Kundnani adds, that took terrorism (or not being a radical terrorist) as a matter of culture, rather than politics; according to Kundnani the policy-makers of the US and UK have made ‘an unfounded assumption that ‘Islamist’ ideology is the root cause of terrorism’.
It’s welcome, because rare, that any American writer takes the UK as seriously as the US as a subject. Not the least achievement of this work is that Kundnani is evidently as at home with the niceties and small details of UK as US culture and geography, which can easily trip up the ignorant. Kundnani as he says has studied and travelled around the UK besides US. Partly because he sees the same trends in both countries; such as surveillance of people merely for having an ideology, which may lead to them inciting, financing or preparing acts of terrorism. Here inevitably the author mentions Edward Snowden. “But central to counterradicalisation practice is another form of surveillance that is addressed less often: using personal relationships within targeted communities themselves for intelligence gathering.” Kundnani’s book is recent enough to have included the Boston Marathon bombing in the States and the murder of Lee Rigby in London; since the book was published, the UK Government has brought in a law that requires teachers and universities to (in effect) snoop on their students for signs of radicalisation. University heads of security have to work out how to enforce that, just as universities and schools (and family doctors) have to decide how that law sits with freedom of expression and teacher-pupil and doctor-patient confidentiality. Ideological activities – dissent – has become criminalised; ‘everyone who rejects the game of false patriotism falls under suspicion’.
Another connection between the US and UK is in Kundnani’s argument that the US government ‘to a large degree … is fantasising into existence the very threat of domestic jihadism it claims it is fighting’. Not that the UK can feel any superior; Kundnani next points out that more are dying in Northern Ireland due to the sectarian-republican conflict than as a result of jihadist violence. But which threat dominates the UK mainland news, and police and secret service budgets?
Kundnani has provoking thoughts for all. That what governments call extremism is ‘to a large degree’ (that phrase again) ‘a product of their own wars’. Liberals don’t come off much better than conservatives. For the UK, the descendants of the African-Caribbean and South Asian settlers after World War Two have grown up in a society ‘that usually saw them as a problem to be solved rather than as fellow citizens with an equal right to shape British life’. Kundnani here repeats a point of his; that those immigrant ‘communities of colour’ came ‘here’, because we (native whites) were ‘there’ – that is, were imperialists and colonialists. Likewise terrorist acts such as the knifing to death on the street of Lee Rigby was justified by the murderers because of violence done abroad.
As that suggests, and the title (which harks back to the Cold War era Hollywood movie The Russians are Coming!), this subject dates not so much from 9-11 but from the 1950s at least. Indeed the book ends with some challenging words from Martin Luther King Junior – whose life readers will recall was cut short violently. Whether a liberal or conservative government is in power, the war on terror continues, the ‘hard power of overwhelming force’ plus ‘soft power’ of culture (Kundnani goes through such TV dramas as Homeland) and ‘widely deployed surveillance’ that he likens to the Stasi in the former East Germany. In the US as the UK, he raises questions about police counter-terror tactics done in our name.
But then this wide-ranging book covers culture as much as politics, concepts such as terrorism and racism as much as vivid individual stories. Kundnani takes on big questions, of identity and injustice for example. This is the best sort of academic book; one that neither grinds an axe nor takes sides, which is not the same as saying that the author sits on fences and refuses to take sides. Rather, he could be described as a democrat that points out the shortcomings of surveillance, both in the sense that the more data you have, the more you can’t see the wood for the trees and in the sense that it hollows out democracy – which is bad even for the young and angry, who embrace conspiracy theories. Kundnani argues that a bland mainstream that suffocates different and radical opinion doesn’t allow real politics; it means that those at the margins can’t express themselves politically. Security measures, such as screening at airports, are the tools for keeping up the status quo.
To condemn terrorism without hypocrisy ‘requires also a questioning of the normalised violence of the war on terror’, Kundnani says near the end of his thought-provoking and challenging work. That quotation is typical of his content and method; to offer a criticism of the mainstream in UK and US politics and culture.
