Untying the Mystique of an Islamic Threat: Western Imageries, the Clash of Civilizations, and a Search for Ontological Security
| Date | 01 June 2018 |
| Published date | 01 June 2018 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0973598418765051 |
| Author | Sanjeev Kumar H.M. |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
1
Professor, Department of Political Science, Faculty of Social Sciences, Delhi University,
New Delhi, India.
Corresponding author:
Sanjeev Kumar H.M., Professor, Department of Political Science, Faculty of Social
Sciences, Delhi University, New Delhi, India.
E-mail: sanjeevp2009@gmail.com
Untying the Mystique
of an Islamic Threat:
Western Imageries,
the Clash of
Civilizations, and
a Search for
Ontological Security
Sanjeev Kumar H.M.1
Abstract
This article begins by arguing that a motivation to tarnish Islam as a religion
has framed the foundations of Western imagery of the Muslim world. It
consists of a negative cultural portrait that depicts Islam as a threat to the
ontological security of the West. Such a representation is centered around
an epistemic conviction that Islam and violence are inextricably intertwined
with each other because the religion is still sedimented in medieval
barbarism and as a civilization, it is yet to graduate out of the syndrome of
dogmatic mono-cultural assertiveness and a retrograding sense of conserv-
ative obstinacy. In accordance to this, Islam emerges as an enemy of the
modernized West that represents liberal cosmopolitanism and multicul-
tural accommodation. Based on this, the article examines as to how such
an epistemic conviction gets envisioned in the Islamophobic narratives of
Samuel P. Huntington, Bernard Lewis, and their subsequent re-invocations
that aim to problematize Islam as the ultimate nemesis of the West.
Jadavpur Journal of
International Relations
22(1) 1–21
2018 Jadavpur University
SAGE Publications
sagepub.in/home.nav
DOI: 10.1177/0973598418765051
http://journals.sagepub.com/home/jnr
2 Jadavpur Journal of International Relations 22(1)
Keywords
Islamophobia, clash of civilizations, demonization of Islam, the Western
imageries, ontological security
Introduction
Western imagery of Islam and the Muslim world has been a product of a
singular monovalent perspective which is founded upon a prejudiced and
textured reading of the religio-cultural trajectories of Islam. The tenden-
tiousness of this reading lies in an epistemology of semantic and semiotic
de-contextualization, through which it attempts at linking the violent
behavior of Muslims to the canonical, theological, liturgical, and juridical
aspects of their faith. Such imagery gets into expeditious circulation because
of Western endeavors at producing knowledge on transnational terrorism
through a systematic engagement in the divisive politics of labeling. In this
process, the discursive formations of the truth disseminated to the wider
global audience as a discourse tends to get manufactured as a desired
commodity through the interaction between knowledge claims and power
structures (Jackson 2005: 18–20).
The politics of labeling itself manifests in the structured attempts of
the West to depict acts of apocalyptical terrorism carried out by Muslims,
as a dependent variable derived out of the mono-causal influence of the
transcendent scriptural and ritualistic contours of Islam. Such an
endeavor is also backed up by a contention that the solutions to the
problem of theistic extremism among Muslims lie nowhere outside but
can be explored within the religion of Islam. Owing to this, the notion
that Islam is a religion that condones violence in the name of god got
deeply embedded in the demotic consciousness of the common populous
in the West (Singer 2006: 417). As a product of such perceptions, Islam
and violence got imbricated into a complex whirlpool of negativities,
and it began to be projected as the ultimate nemeses of the West.
Subsequently, the image of Islam in the demotic opinion started to
emerge as that of a negative millennial force that was pitted against a
righteous liberal West. For instance, in 2006, a Washington Post/ABC
News survey showed that nearly half of the Americans (46%) had a negative
image of Islam and in Europe; Islam was overwhelmingly singled out as a
religion prone to violence (Esposito 2010: 12).
Such kind of an aesthetic distaste which is accompanied by a total
absence of trust toward an entire community has emerged even as the
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