Derrida and Islam

Derrida’s฀Islam฀฀|฀฀43 THREE Derrida’s฀Islam฀and฀the฀peoples฀of฀฀ the฀book Islam, it has to be said, stands on the periphery of Derrida’s thought. For a writer who spent the formative years of his life in a Muslim country (Algeria), Islam has never really received any significant attention in his work. Out of the vast library of the Derridean corpus, barely half a dozen texts make some passing mention of Islam. In all of these works, Islam operates in a curious way, sometimes working backstage as just another ‘fundamentalism’, other times singling itself out as the victim of Christian globalization; sometimes it works as the partner religion of Judaism and Christianity, synonymous with both religions as biblocentric monotheisms, other times it becomes something quite different, the Arab Other to Western democracy, a potential pool of violence and fanaticism which seems to deserve special comment. In all these cases, Islam appears to work as a kind of semantic counter, one that can easily be switched from Inside to Outside in the space of a paragraph, one minute the familiar relative of Judaeo-Christian theology, sharing all of its metaphysical failings, the next an alien vocabulary radically different from its Jewish and Christian cousins. The subject of this brief chapter will be to examine in two texts (The Gift of Death [1992] and his more recent ‘Faith and Knowledge’ [1996])1 this oscillation on Derrida’s part between Islam as Brother and Islam as Other, this shuttling back and forth between multiple versions of Islam – and the consequences such a multifaceted array of Islams has, not just for the much-discussed relationship between Islam and postmodernity but also for Derrida’s work itself. Before looking at what Derrida has to say about Islam, it might be worthwhile considering what he doesn’t say. Ever since Brice Parain called différance ‘the God of negative theology’, Derrida’s work has been the subject of two kinds of theological interest. Commentators have either tried to re-describe Derrida as a mystic/ negative theologian – belonging to that medieval Christian tradition of negative or apophatic theology which emphasized the unspeakability of God and tried to define Him through what He is not – or have re-proposed figures from the mystical tradition such as Eckhart and Pseudo-Dionysius as predecessors for deconstruction. Over the years, Derrida has spent a considerable amount of text objecting to both these counts – among which the most significant work appears to be his 1987 essay, ‘How to Avoid Speaking: Denials’. In ‘Denials’, Derrida takes issue with the ‘Greek … and Christian paradigms’ of negative theology and tries to show how, even though ‘the onto-theological re-appropriation [of différance] always remains possible’,2 thinkers such as Pseudo-Dionysius and Eckhart are ultimately concerned with something very different: the preservation of a ‘hyperessentiality, a being beyond Being’.3 Nevertheless, in restricting his choice to Greek and Christian versions of the apophatic, Derrida – who, far from being Greek or Christian, describes himself in Circumfession as a ‘very Arab little Jew’ – is aware of the various traditions he has not included in his face-to-face with negative theology: I thus decided not to speak of negativity or of apophatic movements in, for example, the Jewish or Islamic traditions. To leave this immense place empty, and above all that which can connect such a name of God with the name of the Place, to remain thus on the threshold – was this not the most consistent possible apophasis? Concerning that about which one cannot speak, isn’t it best to remain silent?4 It is an interesting admission – or omission – and one that inspires a number of questions: what exactly is the difference between the Greek/Christian negativity Derrida is willing to talk about and the Jewish/Islamic versions he feels he cannot? Is Derrida hinting at a certain deconstructive success in Jewish and Sufi mysticism, a success not to be confused with their Greek/Christian counterparts and all their Hellenized dependency on the logos and the epekeina tes ousia (the beyond of being)? Or, on the contrary, does Derrida believe the Jewish/Islamic traditions he is unfamiliar with to be just 44฀฀|฀฀The฀critique฀of฀modernity as metaphysically vulnerable as the Greek/Christian negativity he so confidently deconstructs? Derrida’s allusion to the famous last line of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus (Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen)5 remains unclear. Why is the ‘immense place’ of Judaism and Islam so unspeakable? What gives it special treatment? The ‘unspeakable’ (Unaussprechliches) the early Wittgenstein referred to was a very un-Derridean unspeakability, a place outside the world of facts and things; it seems unlikely that Derrida would use such a transcendental space to locate a genuine alternative to the Greek/Christian paradigm. If the meaning of Derrida’s ‘cannot speak’ lies in the fact that the author does not ‘belong’ to the traditions he has chosen to pass over, then the omission becomes even more curious: an Algerian Jew who feels ‘at home’ writing about a German Dominican and a Bavarian phenomenologist, but hesitant in offering comments upon his own (albeit abandoned) faith – or, for that matter, upon an Islamic tradition (Ibn Masarrah, Ibn ‘Arabi, Ibn Rushd) based to a large extent in Moorish Spain, in the very ‘Christian Europe’ Derrida has quite rightly critiqued elsewhere. So what is the real reason for Derrida’s decision ‘not to speak’ of Jewish and Islamic traditions, in his counter-deconstruction of negative theology (for this is what ‘Denials’ is, fundamentally)? Why does Derrida choose to stay in Christian Europe? Perhaps there are no complex reasons, but only straightforward ones: maybe Derrida simply doesn’t know enough about the School of Gerona or the Sefer ha-bahir or Ibn ‘Arabi or Mevlana or Suhrawardi. Perhaps he can’t read Arabic or Aramaic. Perhaps he was too enticed by the possible genealogy of three figures such as Pseudo-Dionysius, Eckhart and Heidegger (each of whom has read his predecessor) to wander off into the strange deserts of Kabbalism or Persian esotericism. There may even be the possibility that Derrida, in a distinctly undeconstructed moment of political correctness, was more attracted by the deconstruction of a European Christian tradition than a nonEuropean Islamic/Judaic one; after all his talk of ‘a Europe united in Christianity’ and the ‘logocentric impasse of European domesticity’,6 perhaps Derrida felt a more pressing need to deconstruct Euro-Christian logocentrisms rather than their Islamic or Jewish equivalents. Derrida’s฀Islam฀฀|฀฀45 This all sounds rather cynical, and perhaps unjustly so. Whatever the reasons for Derrida choosing not to talk about Islamic mysticism, one thing remains clear: Derrida provides the sort of explanation only a negative theologian would offer. His silence, we are told, is the most ‘consistent possible apophasis’ he can offer on the question of Islam. Which does suggest, unkindly or not, that ‘Islamic traditions’ belong to something far too radically autre for a French poststructuralist to write about. Islam becomes the unspeakable Other once again, an Other simply out of place in any critique of Christian negative theology. I have written ‘Other’, but perhaps ‘Others’ would have been a more appropriate term, for there is no single Islamic Other in Derrida’s thought. Aziz al-Azmeh, among many critics, has been one of the most prominent figures in asserting that ‘there are as many Islams as there are situations that sustain it’.7 The idea of a single Islam, ‘generically closed, utterly exceptionalist’,8 bereft of any notion of change or diversity, is a product (for al-Azmeh) of both Islamophobic and Islamophilic discourses. They ignore the radical diversity of Islamic traditions – British Pakistani, Kurdish Sunni, Syrian Alewite, etc. – in their attempt to create ‘nontransmissible [Muslim] lifestyles’ and the idea of a ‘single Islamic community’. It is interesting to keep this in mind while reading Derrida’s references to Islam, for what lies beneath the myriad of contexts for such references in The Gift of Death and ‘Faith and Knowledge’ is a similar conviction of Islam’s radical plurality. The similarity of this conviction, however, has two qualifications: first of all, Derrida’s multiple Islams, far from being based in cultural differences, spring from a variety of different semantic functions, ‘needs’ which necessitate the invocation of different Islams at different points in Derrida’s argument. Second, the array of multiple identities that Derrida offers for the master signifier ‘Islam’ is by no means as consciously presented to us as it is by al-Azmeh, for whom the belief in an ‘invariant essence of Islam’9 is the main target of his attack. Rather, Derrida’s multiple Islams work quietly, almost unconsciously in his texts, appearing often in discreet footnotes on ‘Islamism’, parenthetic references on Algerian violence, incidental remarks concerning ‘non-pagan monotheisms’.10 If al-Azmeh’s radi- 46฀฀|฀฀The฀critique฀of฀modernity cally plural and multi-faced Islam is the raison d’etre of his book, Derrida’s equally protean understanding of the faith is more an incidental effect of his work, a drifting consequence. Derrida’s faint anxiety at not having talked of ‘the immense place’ of Islamic mysticism betrays an awareness of Islam’s marginal status which he has revealed elsewhere. The Czech philosopher Patočka’s failure, in his study of religion and responsibility, to take into account Judaism and Islam as models for a ‘comparative analysis’11 is noticed by Derrida but not immediately ‘denounce[d]’ as a Christocentrism. As The Gift of Death progresses, however, we find a Derrida who grows increasingly suspicious of Patočka’s Ur-Christian genealogy of responsibility, particularly the Czech’s understanding of Christianity as an incomplete project; the possibility in Patočka’s text that ‘Europe will not be what it must be until it becomes fully Christian’12 seems to arouse Derrida’s worst fears of European re-Christianization, regardless of whether the victims are Bosnian Muslims, Turkish Gastarbeitern or Spanish Jews. This concern for an adequate representation of Islam in any European history of ideas becomes coloured with a faint sense of guilt at the Capri seminar, where Derrida begins with an air of collective self-reproach: No Muslim is among us, alas, even for this preliminary discussion, just at the moment when it is toward Islam, perhaps, that we ought to begin by turning our attention. No representative of other cults, either. Not a single woman! We ought to take this into account: speaking on behalf of these mute witnesses without speaking for them, in place of them, and drawing from this all sorts of consequences.13 A number of interesting points arise in this passage. First of all, Islam is introduced as the forgotten relative. It would be unfair to dismiss this as patronising – Derrida’s point is a charitable one, a genuine unease at the way, in an international seminar on religion, no representative from the world’s second largest faith can be found. Nevertheless, this inclusion of Muslims and women with Moonie cults and Jehovah’s Witnesses does suggest more of a specific desire for difference in itself, and rather less an interest in the situation and condition of those differences. This is compounded by an associa- Derrida’s฀Islam฀฀|฀฀47 tion of Islam with topicality – Muslims are not only undeservedly forgotten, they are also newsworthy (or, rather, beginning to be newsworthy). Islam, runs the subtext, is starting to be topical, which should have justified the presence of at least a couple of Muslims on the speakers’ programme. If Islam is suddenly remembered here as being forgotten, it is forgotten again reasonably quickly. The passage ends on a curious resolution: to speak ‘on behalf of those mute witnesses [Muslims, women, cultists] without speaking for them’, and to understand the consequences of this gesture. The remark is slightly cryptic: is Derrida going to try and speak on behalf of Islam? Is he going to try and represent the Unrepresented, if only as a gesture of goodwill in recompense for their exclusion? Just as, in ‘Denials’, Derrida refers to his non-treatment of Islamic and Jewish mysticism with an apophatic affirmation of their omission, similarly in ‘Faith and Knowledge’ he follows this mini-apologia with practically no major reference again to Islam as an independent faith. In seventy-eight pages of a text dealing exclusively with the topic of religion, Derrida refers subsequently to Islam as a religion in its own right (and not as a partner or corollary to Judaism and Christianity) just three times: once in a footnote, twice in connection with terrorism. Even though Derrida genuinely laments the Europhallocentric nature of the seminar, his text seems unable to escape it, even in the moments when it is most lucidly aware of its finitude: In Capri, at the beginning of the session, improvising, I spoke of light and in the name of the island (of the necessity of dating, that is, of signing a finite meeting in its time and in its space, from the singularity of a place, of a Latin place: Capri, which is not Delos, nor Patmos – nor Athens, nor Jerusalem, nor Rome).14 In speaking of the necessity of meeting at a finite point, a venue whose specific cultural connotations (Derrida suggests) always already threaten to undermine the more universal aspirations of an international seminar on religion, Derrida fails to refer to the Islamic faith he had promised to keep in mind at the outset. In listing the centres of world religions which Capri is not, a certain city on the Arabian peninsula is conspicuous by its absence. 48฀฀|฀฀The฀critique฀of฀modernity In one sense, this is a trivial quibble. Like Patočka before him, Derrida’s relative non-treatment of Islam in his essay on religion may be partly justified by his understanding of re-ligion (a word whose original meaning is either re-citing or re-connecting) as an essentially European phenomenon; moreover, any consideration of the etymology of the word as a re-reading or re-linking must remain exclusively Indo-European, allowing little possibility to inquire what a word such as din might mean in the Arabic. Nevertheless, there is something a little discomforting about how, for Derrida, ‘to think “religion” is to think the “Roman”’.15 However technically laudable the intention here may be to stay within cultural specifics and not start extending generalizations to non-European faiths, the consequence of such a remark is that Islam is not a ‘religion’. It remains in the background, on the outside, a satellite faith of over a billion believers, a half-forgotten cult covering a third of the planet’s cultures. The฀Muslim฀as฀brother:฀Islam฀as฀Semitic฀monotheism Islam, however, is not simply invoked as an Eastern tout autre, but often acquires a more familiar identity, either as a Semitic partner to Judaism, or as the third segment of the Abrahamic monotheisms. Sometimes, as in the case of Jewish and Islamic mysticism, Derrida groups Judaism and Islam together as being positively different from Christianity, as possessing some kind of non-Christian quality which alienates them from the Christian heritage of the Enlightenment: Judaism and Islam would thus be perhaps the last two monotheisms to revolt against everything that, in the Christianizing of our world, signifies the death of God, death in God, two non-pagan monotheisms that do not accept death any more than multiplicity in God (the Passion, the Trinity, etc.), two monotheisms still alien enough at the heart of Graeco-Christian, Pagano-Christian Europe, alienating themselves from a Europe that signifies the death of God, by recalling at all costs that ‘monotheism’ signifies no less faith in the One, and in the living One, than belief in a single God.16 To begin with, both Judaism and Islam are seen as two pock- Derrida’s฀Islam฀฀|฀฀49 ets of resistance against what Derrida calls the ‘globalatinization’ (mondialatinisation) of the world, an essentially Christian, Anglo-American wave of modernity that Derrida juxtaposes against Judaism and Islam. As we have seen in Chapter 1, the gesture is basically Nietzschean, although differently coloured. If Nietzsche saw Islam and Old Testament Judaism as resisting Christian modernity through an unashamed emphasis on hierarchy, militarism and custom, Derrida sees rather a common dedication to oneness in the two faiths, a Judaeo-Islamic suspicion of the plural. Two ‘nonpagan monotheisms’, moreover, that have rejected the secularizing modernity of the European project. In this sense, the kinship of Judaism and Islam keeps both faiths safely in the medieval; neither faith has attempted to work through in its theology the necessity of the absence of God, the divine absence that enables the question of morality to be asked. Apart from the fact that this linking of Islam with a pre-modern, medieval purity certainly has its own history as an idea (Hegel; Nietzsche’s situating Morocco in the Mittelalter; Schopenhauer’s belief that Islam was not ‘favourable to civilization’; Gellner’s ‘emphatic and severe monotheism’),17 it also reminds one of something a more recent Muslim thinker has suggested: that Europe sees Islam as a return of the medieval, as the revenge of God, the return of the god the Europeans thought they had killed.18 That Judaism is involved in this medieval enclave of anti-modernity does suggest a momentary geographical alliance of the two – Christianity as the errant, bastard offspring of a Middle Eastern tradition of spirituality and oneness. If Judaism and Islam here connotate life and oneness against a Christian Europe that seems to represent death and shattered multiplicity, the two nevertheless remain ‘alien’ enough to stay on the outside of its boundaries. In a sense, Derrida’s gesture repeats The Antichrist’s association of Islam with life (Islam as the religion which ‘said Yes to life’),19 even if the ‘life’ Derrida feels Islam to be closer to is no Nietzschean embracing of the senses, but rather something more spiritual: a direct and unmediated belief in the ‘life’ of God. Islam, one almost feels, is ‘simpler’ than Christianity; its relationship to the ‘living One’ has yet to be polluted by the multiplicities of modernity. Of course, Derrida stops short of what would 50฀฀|฀฀The฀critique฀of฀modernity have been an ironically Rousseauistic moment in his development of a ‘purer’, technology-free Islam. This pairing of non-European Islam with non-European Judaism, however, alludes to an idolatry and spiritual degeneration in Christianity without ever making the allegation explicit. Set against the Jew and the Muslim, Derrida’s European Christian looks somewhat decadent. If Islam and Judaism are sometimes brought together in opposition to Christianity, at other times Derrida refers to all three together as ‘monotheisms’ or ‘the Abrahamic revelations’. In such moments, a number of characteristics seem to bind Islam together with its two fraternal faiths; these characteristics can be positive or negative, but in all cases they apply just as much to Islam as they do to Judaism or Christianity. The first of these characteristics immediately undermines Derrida’s previous remarks on the special distance between Islam and European modernity: a perceived willingness in all three faiths to use technology (‘tele-technoscience’) in propagating its own message, organizing its activities and disseminating its particular store of symbols: Religion today allies itself with tele-technoscience, to which it reacts with all its forces. It is, on the one hand, globalization; it produces, weds, exploits the capital and knowledge of tele-mediatization; neither the trips and global spectacularizing of the Pope, nor the interstate dimensions of the ‘Rushdie affair’, nor planetary terrorism would otherwise be possible, at this rhythm.20 Derrida uses the word ‘religion’, the Roman word whose etymology is so very European, to cover all three faiths here, even if we suspect that it is Islam that is really being talked about in this paragraph. Partly because Derrida, in the preceding passage, has spoken of the ‘surge’ (déferlement) of faith, a word he has used only once before in the text, exclusively in connection with Islam (‘the surge of Islam’ on page 20). Partly because, in the three examples he gives of the collusion between faith and technoscience, only the televized visits of the Pope appear to be unconnected with Islam (no Jewish or Christian non-state ‘planetary terrorism’ immediately springs to mind). Given what Derrida has already said about Islam and Judaism’s insulation against modernity, his point concerning Derrida’s฀Islam฀฀|฀฀51 the paradoxical nature of this symbolic collusion between faith and science – religion feeding off the very modernity it is opposed to – seem more applicable to a ‘medieval’ Islam making use of mobile phones and the internet than a Christianity already ‘corrupted’ by modernity. Nevertheless, Derrida’s intention is to talk about all three faiths – what he calls ‘the Testamentary and Koranic revelations’21 and for the most part the author of both ‘Faith and Knowledge’ and The Gift of Death does precisely this, subsuming Islam into a sometimes named/sometimes unnamed participant in the Abrahamic faiths. In observing this gesture, it is worth remarking in passing that when Derrida uses a phrase such as ‘religions of the Book’,22 he takes an essentially Islamic position towards the three faiths, one with which neither a Jewish nor a Christian theologian would feel completely comfortable. Of course, the reasons for using such a term are certainly not the same as the ones underpinning the Qur'ānic term ahl al-kitap or ‘peoples of the Book’; what unites the three faiths for Derrida is not their being the common recipients of revelations from an Abrahamic God, but rather a similar set of externally observed characteristics. The first of these characteristics is the desire to appropriate – images, language, territory. Derrida has often drawn attention to the proprietary sense of purity in the French word propre; Islam, like Judaism and Christianity, inherits this desire to purify things through ap-propriation: [The site of the destroyed Temple of Jerusalem] is therefore a holy place but also a place that is in dispute, radically and rabidly, fought over by all the monotheisms, by the all the religions of the unique and transcendent God, of the absolute other. These three monotheisms fight over it, it is useless to deny this in terms of some wide-eyed ecumenism.23 Difficult to say ‘Europe’ without connoting: Athens–Jerusalem–Rome–Byzantium, wars of Religion, open war over the appropriation of Jerusalem and of Mount Mariah, over the ‘here I am’ of Abraham or of Ibrahim before the extreme ‘sacrifice’ demanded of him.24 52฀฀|฀฀The฀critique฀of฀modernity For readers familiar with texts such as Of Grammatology and ‘Violence and Metaphysics’, there is nothing new in this fascination with violence and purity, with the topography of the sacred and how its protection, or violation, necessitates sacrifice. In his early essay on Levinas, Derrida defends Heidegger’s thought from being ‘a new paganism of the Site’25 – in other words, a nationalism of the earth or soil – by distinguishing it from what Derrida calls ‘the Hebraic nostalgia for the Land’. This most Derridean of words, ‘nostalgia’ – the sense of loss for the absent signifier, the longing for the restoration of a lost purity, be it the land of Canaan, the role model of the early Church, or the moral rectitude of an ideal Islamic community as seen in the times of the Prophet – is what seems to be attributed to all three ‘religions of the unique and transcendent God’.26 From Islam as medieval anti-modernity, we have moved to Islam as a flexible, contemporary monotheism (one which can happily make use of satellite television and micro-technology) and on from there to Islam as a transcendental monotheism (one which, like Judaism and Christianity, conceals a pocket of unsignified/unsignifiable reality at the centre of its system). That Derrida, a thinker who admits to ‘pass[ing] for an atheist’,27 should have such an opinion of a Semitic faith is unsurprising; what is interesting, however, is how quickly and easily the identity of Islam can shift to fit its semantic niche in the text. When Eurochristian modernity is the subject, Islam shifts away from Europe, acquiring a ‘foreign’ colour and moving closer to a Jewish fundamentalism, as the entire discourse becomes cultural/geographical; when metaphysics is the question, the cultural specifics of Islam (its geography, its ‘medieval’ anti-modernity, its ‘Jewish’ attachment to oneness and life), which were able to make it so different from European Christianity, suddenly dissolve into cultural transparency, and Derrida is able to talk about Islam, Christianity and Judaism in one single sweep as ‘monotheisms’, united in a deconstructible nostalgia for the absolute. That Derrida will always be able to perform this gesture so effortlessly (almost at the push of a button), making the immense differences in Islam stand out one minute, having them fade away into a different background the next, complicates the direction of Derrida’s text. Islam, in other words, gives Derrida’s forty-year-old Derrida’s฀Islam฀฀|฀฀53 critique of modernity the same dilemmas as it gave Nietzsche’s; neither thinker will ever fully decide whether Islam is a friend or foe, when to speak kindly and carefully of Europe’s marginalized Other, and when to critique indiscriminately yet another Middle Eastern ontotheology, no different metaphysically from the belief-systems it claims oppress it. It is not simply the idea of appropriation that unites the ‘great monotheisms’28 for Derrida, but also the idea of sacrifice – or, more specifically, the paradoxical co-existence of an intense respect for life with an occasional divine demand for it. What would then be required is, in the same movement, to account for a double postulation: on the one hand, the absolute respect of life, the ‘Thou shalt not kill’ (at least thy neighbour, if not the living in general), the ‘fundamentalist’ prohibition of abortion, or artificial insemination … and on the other (without even speaking of wars of religion, or their terrorism and their killings) the no less universal sacrificial vocation. It was not so long ago that this still involved, here and there, human sacrifice, even in the ‘great monotheisms’.29 If Islam is one of the three great metaphysical systems, it is also one of the three great sacrificial faiths. Like the idea of an absolute and transcendent God, Derrida uses the Abrahamic sacrifice to bind together the three faiths and transform them into ‘the religions of the races of Abraham’.30 Once again, the individuality of Islam is dissolved and re-formed in the shape of a carbon copy of JudaeoChristianity, ultimately to serve a higher purpose as the central theme of The Gift of Death: the relationship between secrecy and responsibility revealed by the story of Abraham and Isaac. How the secrecy of God before Abraham (who doesn’t tell him this is going to be a test) and of Abraham before Isaac (who doesn’t know he is to be sacrificed) ultimately endows Abraham with a responsibility towards the absolute Other, one which supersedes the ethical and therefore eludes expression in any language but God’s. What The Gift of Death is, above all else, is the exegesis of an exegesis: Derrida considers not merely the story of Abraham and Isaac, but Kierkegaard’s memorable interpretation of it. For anyone 54฀฀|฀฀The฀critique฀of฀modernity who reads the book with Islam in mind, however, the author of The Gift of Death commits a small but significant error in his analysis of the ‘terrifying secret of the mysterium tremendum that is a property of all three so-called religions of the book’. Derrida presents the story of the sacrifice of Isaac as a key text for all three faiths, and is quite happy to refer to them generically as ‘Judeo-Christian-Islamic’. What soon becomes apparent, however, is that Derrida has not read the version of the sacrifice told in the Qur'ān. Charitably speaking, either Derrida is unaware that the Qur'ānic account of the story of Isaac is different from the account in Genesis, or he is aware of the differences but feels them to be unimportant. Even though the author insists ‘one cannot ignore … the sacrifice of Isaac in Genesis, nor that recovered in the Gospel of Luke’,31 Derrida does precisely this with regards to the version of the sacrifice found in the 37th Surah. In Genesis 22: 1–14, Isaac remains blissfully unaware of his father’s true intent as he accompanies him on the road to the mountains in Mariah. For both Derrida and Kierkegaard, the threeday silence between father and son on their walk up the mountain is of profound significance, ‘linking the question of secrecy to that of responsibility’.32 It underlines, we are told, the ‘common treasure’ of the ‘mysterium tremendum’ which is a property of all three faiths. In the 37th Surah (al-saffat) of the Qur'ān, however, Ishmael (clearly, one of the better-known differences between the Qur'ān and Biblical accounts of the sacrifice) knows from the very beginning that his father is going to sacrifice him. ‘Father, do as you are bidden’, he tells him, ‘God willing, you shall find me steadfast’ (37: 103). The entire discourse concerning Abraham’s silence which Derrida, in his exegesis of Fear and Trembling, reads as the inability of the individual ever to justify his/her relationship to the tout autre, is significantly undermined by the Qur'ānic account of the story, where Abraham tells Ishmael he has dreamt of sacrificing him and asks him for his opinion (37: 102). Ishmael’s filial consent to the sacrifice, in other words, means that what Derrida feels is true about the story for ‘Jews, Christians, Muslims’33 may well be true only for Jews and Christians. The amount of emphasis Derrida places, following Kierkegaard, on the silence of Abraham as he guides Isaac to the mountain-top cannot be repeated in an Islamic context – if Derrida’s฀Islam฀฀|฀฀55 only because this silence, in the Qur'ānic version, simply does not take place. However interesting it might be to speculate how both The Gift of Death and Fear and Trembling could be rewritten from an Islamic point of view instead of a Judeo-Christian one, the most important point to note here lies in what Derrida has not said. This is not to castigate Derrida for not having read the Qur’an (which would be churlish), but rather to be disconcerted by the fact that it doesn’t seem to matter. When Derrida talks about the ‘three so-called religions of the Book’,34 he is really talking about only two of them. He writes of the intended sacrifice of Isaac as ‘a founding event or key sacrifice for Islam’,35 but appears to be unaware of the minor but crucial differences between the two narratives. In order to be able to talk about ‘Judeo-Christian-Islamic morality’ in general, he commits the Levinasian cardinal sin of amalgamating the Other into the Same. If Islam is sometimes seen as the forgotten relative, sometimes the twin victim (alongside Judaism) of an aggressive Christian modernity, sometimes the Abrahamic monotheism, metaphysically indistinguishable from its ontotheological predecessors, there are certainly other moments where Derrida takes pains to point out the uniqueness of Islam. In these moments, Derrida draws attention to a number of special points that underline the singularity of the Islamic faith. The first and most conventional of these characteristics is an image of Islam as the sole victim of Western oppression. Although Derrida’s interest in the historian Carl Schmitt’s study of the Crusades suggests this indirectly,8 it is in ‘Faith and Knowledge’ that we find the most specific conviction of a ‘Judaeo-Christian West’ which isolates Islam in the name of a series of higher values: ‘Wars or military “interventions”, led by the Judaeo-Christian West in the name of the best of causes (of international law, democracy, the sovereignty of peoples, of nations and of states, even of humanitarian imperatives), are they not also, from a certain side, wars of religion?’37 Islam, the most obvious object of any ‘Judeo-Christian’ war of religion, remains unnamed throughout the section, even if at times Derrida replicates Amir Samin’s inclusion of the Orthodox 56฀฀|฀฀The฀critique฀of฀modernity Church in the ‘Orient’ by speaking of a ‘European-Anglo-American’ Christianity.33 Naturally, Derrida’s suggestion of a fundamental continuity between Schmitt’s Crusades and present-day ‘interventions’, both of which bring to light the complicity of the name, allude to the sufferings of orthodox Serbs and other Monophysites as well as Muslims. ‘Religion circulates the world, one might say, like an English word that has been to Rome and taken a detour to the United States.’39 Such a treatment of Islam as a victim of ‘globalatinization’ (mondialatinasation)40 illustrates how Christianity, like Islam, possesses multiple identities for Derrida, who seems to oscillate between Rome and Washington – that is, between a papally-driven evangelical Roman Catholicism and a capital-driven Anglo-American Protestantism – in his identification of Christianity as an oppressive world force. The appraisal of Islam as the sole opponent to a ‘EuropeanAnglo-American’ universalism is by no means an unfamiliar gesture; Baudrillard springs most immediately to mind with his description of Islam’s ‘irreducible and dangerous alterity and symbolic challenge … to the global order’.41 What is most interesting about Derrida’s use of this fairly well-worn metaphor (Islam the final bastion of non-cooperation in a globalised world order) is how Derrida only partially subscribes to the idea. Unlike Baudrillard, whose Islam in The Gulf War Did Not Take Place seldom departs from the image of an unjustly bullied, much put-upon but nevertheless unruly and obstinate child, Derrida’s consideration of the victimhood of Islam is rendered ambiguous by its occasional inclusion/disappearance into ‘the great monotheisms’. There is something faintly paradoxical about the way Islam, in ‘Faith and Knowledge’, is repeatedly associated with and dissociated from the rival monotheisms which both precede and oppress it. The contiguity of these different versions of Islam in the same text approaches the bewildering: if on pages 12 and 13 of the English text Islam is (in contrast to Christianity) the medieval outsider to modernity, on pages 24 and 46 it is the exploiter of technology; if Islam is seen as unique on pages 56 and 73 (and lamented as uniquely forgotten on page 5), it is allied with Judaism as opposed to Christianity on page 13, with all ‘non-Christian fundamentalisms’ on page 42, considered synonymously with both religions on pages 9, 14, 28, 49 and 50, and ultimately seen as part Derrida’s฀Islam฀฀|฀฀57 of a universal, all-encompassing ‘return of the religious’ on pages 4, 5 and throughout the rest of the text. In his essay, ‘Muslims and European Identity’, Talal Asad has already written how Muslims ‘are included within and excluded from Europe at one and the same time’.42 Derrida’s essay, it would appear, operates in a similar fashion, sometimes alienating Islam with the help of a ‘unique’ characteristic, at other times bringing it back into the fold as a Semitic brother, a fellow monotheism. Although Derrida speaks generically of the violenceof which all three faiths are capable in ‘wars of religion’, Islam seems to take on, in Derrida’s own words, ‘an archaic and ostensibly more savage radicalization of “religious” violence’.43 Algeria here is chosen, alongside Rwanda, as an example of how pre-modern cultures (Islamic, African) ‘revenge’ themselves upon technology through ‘tortures, beheadings and mutilations of all sorts’.44 A reactionary frustration with modernity, claims Derrida, is precisely what drives Algerians and Rwandans into the most ‘archaic’, medieval forms of violence: primitivism as the only adequate response to technorationalism. Perhaps it is naïve, even unfair, to ask whether Derrida would include Alabama anti-abortionists, Ulster Protestants and Voortrekker Calvinists in this ‘archaic’ response to modernity. In the footnotes to ‘Faith and Knowledge’, Derrida repeats this link between Islamic fundamentalism and primitivism once again, this time ending in a remarkable point: This is testified by certain phenomena, at least, of ‘fundamentalism’ or of ‘integrism’, in particular in ‘Islamism’ … The most evident characteristics are too well known to dwell on (fanaticism, obscurantism, lethal violence, terrorism, oppression of women, etc). But it is forgotten that, notably in its ties to the Arab world, and through all the forms of brutal immunitary and indemnificatory reactivity against a techno-economical modernity to which a long history prevents it from adapting, this ‘Islamism’ also develops a radical critique of what ties democracy today, in its limits, in its concept and its effective power, to the market and to the tele-technoscientific reason that dominates it.45 At the very beginning of his paper, Derrida had already separated 58฀฀|฀฀The฀critique฀of฀modernity ‘Islam’ from ‘Islamism’, in an attempt to distinguish between a faith and a fundamentalism while acknowledging that ‘the latter operates in the name of the former’. It is interesting that Derrida uses the word ‘Islamism’ to connotate ‘fanaticism … lethal violence, terrorism’, particularly when one of Derrida’s Muslim admirers – Bobby S. Sayyid – offers an alternative, slightly Rortyian definition of Islamists as ‘those who use Islamic metaphors to narrate their projects’.46 Derrida’s denunciation of the cruelty of groups such as the Algerian militants and the Taliban is, of course, wholly valid; nevertheless, there lies beneath the web of references to ‘indemnificatory reactivity’ and ‘techno-economical modernity’ something unsettlingly exclusivist about Derrida’s linking of archaic cruelty with ‘the Arab world’. As with Nietzsche’s Assassins (and, as we shall see, Borges’ theologians and Rushdie’s magical superstitions), Derrida medievalizes Islam with his own purpose in mind – in this case, to show how one half of the dualism of techno-scientific modernity always breeds, and feeds on, its barbaric opposite. Derrida, however, goes farther than even Nietzsche in his awareness of the semantic ramifications of this gesture. Nietzsche, in his desire to live in Morocco to acquire a ‘sharper eye’ for ‘all things European’, displayed but never fully developed his awareness of the usefulness of Islam in any critique of European modernity. Derrida’s closing remark, however, sends out a number of important, if slightly mixed, messages. First of all, Islam is a kind of barometer, one which helps reveal the internal pressures and imperfections of democracy by forcing it to confront its tout autre – Islam, in other words, as that which forces democracy to become undemocratic, which forces the modern to employ the medieval to protect itself. Second, Islam reveals the extent to which democracy collaborates with capital, it highlights and renders transparent the hidden and the opaque by showing the kinds of things democratic countries will do when their profits (their oil supplies, their markets, their transport routes) are threatened. Finally, and most importantly, Islam is invaluable. In saying this, Derrida’s point becomes something quite different from Nietzsche’s desire for a Moroccan eye. Islam is not useful because it can offer, as Nietzsche thought, some kind of non-European perspective on modernity, a set of different lenses for one’s Kantian Derrida’s฀Islam฀฀|฀฀59 spectacles. If Islam has any use at all, it is in fulfilling its medieval half of the civilization/barbarity dualism by provoking modernity: we need violent fundamentalisms, Derrida almost seems to be saying, in order to remind us how those of our own are structurally no different. Only the violence of the fatwa can make us realize how, in order to protect our own concept of the holy (free speech), we have to completely trample on somebody else’s (the reputation of a seventh-century prophet, for example). For ‘we Europeans’, a phrase Derrida employs with not completely convincing irony, Islam brings out the worst in us – and it is precisely this process that Derrida finds so necessary to our self-understanding. Once again, the point is not to enter into the rights and wrongs of Derrida’s view of Islam and European modernity, but simply to emphasize his conviction of its utility. More than anything else – certainly more than any consideration of Islam in itself, its present condition, its customs, its laws, its treatment – Islam can tell us about ourselves. As with Nietzsche’s Moroccan experiment and Sir William Jones’s hope for a ‘more extensive insight into the human [read ‘European’] mind’,47 Islam’s fortuitously aggressive and threatening alterity can help ‘we Europeans’ finally discover who we really are. Up to now we have seen how, in two separate texts, Derrida’s understanding of Islam shifts shape and changes colour according to the demands placed on it. As a partner religion, as an oddity, as unjustly marginalized, as a medieval phenomenon, as a canny manipulator of techno-science, as just one religion among many, as a pool of archaic violence, as a metaphysical system … what we have in Derrida’s treatment of Islam is a proliferation of different identities, each one the response to a certain textual need. What finally remains to be asked is: What are the implications of such a plethora of Islams for deconstruction? What does such a multiple use of Islam say about Derrida’s own strategies? One could argue for a positive reading of Derrida’s approach; that is, an array of different faces of Islam as the only semantically honest way a deconstructive thinker might approach Islam without falling into the logocentric trap (like so many of Said’s Orientalists) of talking about a single, generic entity.48 The conditions under 60฀฀|฀฀The฀critique฀of฀modernity which we may glimpse the Other has always been a central question in Derrida’s work. If Islam really is tout autre for Derrida – an interesting ‘if’ in itself, given Derrida’s origins – then perhaps the only way forwards really was to ‘decentre’ Islam and try to espy something else between the subsequent versions. In ‘At this very moment here in this work I am’ , Derrida has already written how constant interruption is the necessary instability that provides the conditions for glimpsing the otherness of the Other through the broken ruins of one’s own constructions: ‘By interrupting the weaving of our language and then by weaving together the interruptions themselves, another language comes to disturb the first one … Another text, the text of the other, arrives in silence with a more or less regular cadence, without ever appearing in its original language, to dislodge the language of translation.’49 The tout autre works like an utterly unreachable subtext, for-ever receding before all our interpretations, while remaining paradoxically the very condition of their possibility. Through the creation and destruction of all our conceptions of the Other, the continual irruption of the truly Other allows us to glimpse a very secular epekeina tes ousia: ‘At the moment when it erupts, the inaugural invention ought to overflow, overlook, transgress, negate … the status that people would have wanted to assign it or grant it in advance.’50 Through such a subversion of the familiar, the completely unfamiliar may be perceived without any horizon of expectation. In this case, Derrida presents us with a bewildering array of different Islams in order to emphasize how radically diverse and uncategorizable the otherness of Islam really is. The problem with this rather charitable reading of Derrida’s multiple Islams as a textual strategy to come closer to an alien faith is that it de-essentializes Islam. Talal Asad writes: ‘The de-essentialization of Islam is paradigmatic for all thinking about the assimilation of non-European peoples to European civilization.’51 By refusing to treat Islam as a single, substantial entity, Derrida ‘masters’ it and is thereby able to graft on to it any identity he wishes. If he needs to say something generic about sacrifice in monotheistic religions, Islam will be an Abrahamic faith; if the religious use of technology is the subject, Islam as the background to ‘planetary terrorism’ can be Derrida’s฀Islam฀฀|฀฀61 summoned; if the relationship between civilization and barbarity is the issue, a remark about Algerian massacres will suffice. Once Islam loses any kind of ‘essence’ or ‘centre’, it becomes as transparent, nameless and elusive as Derrida’s own différance, working silently, peripherally throughout the text, possessing no stable identity of its own but through this very protean instability allowing other identities (the technological West, civilized Christianity, oppressive Anglo-American Protestantism) to be. If Islam does work as a kind of différance in Derrida, giving others identity while forever relinquishing its own, it is difficult to ignore the political conservatism such a reading of Islam in Derrida’s work would suggest. Of course, the history of the accusations of conservatism which have been levelled at Derrida’s work (from Habermas and Eagleton onwards)52 have often been simplistic, based not so much on readings as on rather willful misreadings of Derrida’s texts.53 Derrida’s work with the anti-apartheid movement and prisoners on death row should lift him well above any ad hominem critique; equally, his remarks on receiving the Adorno Prize on 11 September 2005 hardly place him in the mainstream of American intellectual thought. Nevertheless, in reading Derrida’s peripheral remarks on Islam, one is reminded of Lambropoulos’ The Rise of Eurocentrism – in particular his assertion that Derrida’s work ‘does not undermine authority but gives reasons to celebrate it’.54 Lambropoulos’ book, flawed in many ways (not least of all by dismissing deconstruction as a kind of rap ‘re-mixing’),55 does end with a surprising reading of Derrida, presenting him as an ironic affirmation of Protestant modernity, thoroughly re-inscribed into a tradition of Eurocentric thought. Derrida’s use of the mirage of Islam to supply different visions at different times, his problematic oscillation between an exaggerated insistence on Islam’s individuality and its almost complete denial, and above all the marginal status Derrida ascribes to Islam in his philosophy of religion (even in the moments when he is considering its marginal status), would appear to compromise the courage and subversiveness of Derrida’s thought. If all this results in the semantic emptying of Islam, it is an emptiness that we will see developed to even further extremes in the clever and controversial tropes of Jean Baudrillard. PART฀TWO Islam฀and฀postmodern฀ fiction