The shift towards Islamophobia and using the Muslim subject as the singular global strategic threat emerged towards the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union. Even though a case can be made that the 1979 Iranian Revolution intensified the negative representation of Islam and Muslims in the West, particularly in the US, nevertheless, the scope of the demonization was not on the same scale that emerged in the post-Cold War era.
Certainly, the political leadership and the media discourses at the time were filled with anti-Muslim rhetoric and drawing a distinction between Iran (representing a feared aspect of Islam) and the West. It is not surprising that Edward Said’s book, Covering Islam, was written to explore the media demonization of Islam and Muslims after the 1979 Iranian Revolution (Said, 1997). On the other hand, Said’s Orientalism navigated the long history of representations, scholarly writing, and stereotyping that often served as a stable source material for the reproduction of Arab and Muslim otherisation (Said, 1979).
The anti-Iranian and anti-Shia discourses in the Western and Arab press were balanced at the time with constructing a favourable view of the Sunni Afghan Mujahideen, who had an important strategic function in confronting and bleeding the Soviet Union in Afghanistan (Dreyfuss, 2005). Thus, a certain Sunni Jihadi worldview was incubated in the US and Europe that supported, on the one hand, the war in Afghanistan and on the other a readiness to oppose and confront the Iranian revolution, the pretext of defending the eastern gate of the Arab world from the Iranian Shia expansion.
This means that between 1979 and the collapse of the Soviet Union, Islamophobia was given a localised and distinct anti-Shia aim rather than being an all-encompassing strategy to demonise Islam or Muslims as a single category. Importantly, the focus shifted on the “Dual Containment” in the US foreign policy, a policy fixed on countering the Arab Nationalism and Islamic fundamentalism, which included targeting Iran for the Shia revolution and the nationalist Palestine Liberation Organisation, Libya, as well as Iraq until it joined the Arab and Western strategy to reverse, counter, and bleed the Iranian Revolution. In this period, the “Islamic threat” specifically meant the Iranian Shia threat and “our” allies were the Sunni Jihadi fundamentalists which encompassed the full spectrum of Sunni oriented groups and sects.
Navigating this strategy required a careful cultivation of alliances and constructing a narrative that would resonate and enable the Sunni majority governments to mobilise their intelligence agencies to recruit individuals to participate in the two-front war, the Afghan war against the Russians, and on the Iraqi front opposing Iran.
In both cases, the construction of the Sunni Jihadi Islam was the needed “religious” tonic to bring forth foot soldiers into the battlefields in the thousands and unbeknown to then assist the US, Europe, and the Arab and Muslim states in implementing the containment strategy.
The Iran-Iraq war involved a different level of complexity for US foreign policy and followed a balancing strategy centring on containment of both parties and preventing a clear victor from emerging. Arab Nationalism and Islamic fundamentalism, which in the 1980s referred mainly to Iran, formed US’s Dual-Containment policy and translated into supporting the party that was losing the war and maintaining the balance of power between them and cause drain their strategic resources.
Containment is to cause the diversion of resources wherever possible away from being deployed against the US, Israel and any other regional allies. Thus, Dual-Containment explains the US’s readiness to work with Israel to supply Iran with missiles, a policy was subject to a congressional hearing and became known as the Iran-Contra Affair.
The watershed moment for the emergence of Islamophobia, an all-encompassing and undifferentiated in terms of sect and group, is directly connected to the collapse of the Soviet Union, the immediate outcome of the 1st Gulf War, and the Palestinian uprising which provided the stage for problematising Islam and Muslims as a single threatening subject.
The Islamic groups, sects, and organisations played an important role during the Cold War by providing a counter and indigenously framed religious epistemic to counter socialism, communism, and self-determination oriented nationalism, which has proven to be a very successful strategy. However, the end of the Cold War and the shifts into a unipolar world produced contestation and a race at home and abroad to define the emerging “new world order” but, more importantly, a pursuit of opportunities to reshape the US military and economic priorities in the new era.
During this period and post-Cold War, Islam and Muslims become an otherised category in the US with multipronged levels of exclusion and forms of racialised discrimination inflicted upon individuals and groups. The othering process directed at Muslims was unleashed by the political elites that wanted to craft a strategy to contest and maintain power in the post-Cold War, which included a heavy emphasis on the massive military expenditures, which might had been cut after the defeat of the Soviet Union.
As the red “evil empire” came to an end, the machinery for crafting a green menace took shape in the form of Huntington’s Clash of Civilisations thesis, which provided the needed shift and the use of cultural racism as the basis for differentiation and hostility. Using cultural racism as the basis for the Clash of Civilisations thesis is the rebranding of the pre-WWII des-credited biological racism and is offered as a signpost for the same sets of racist attitudes and perspectives that were deployed in the earlier biological version.
In this context, Islamophobia is less about Islam or even about Muslims themselves, their lives and hopes but more about the unsureness of the Western societies as a whole. The Cold War created a common framework and presented the “us” as the good side fighting collectively against “them”, the communists who represented the evil but the question was what to do afterward and what was the path forward.
Targeting Islam and Muslims is the way to define politics, culture, economy, religion, and identity in the post-Cold War period. By magnifying the differences and then transforming them into an existential threat in the mind of the US and Western public, the forging of a fictitious sense of patriotic unity and purpose is possibly actualised.
The US political elites who were suckled on confronting the “evil empire” emerged less confident and unsure about the present and future considering all the global political, economic, and social changes that unfolded rapidly. The use of Islamophobia and demonisation of Islam and Muslims serves the perfect diversion for populists’ politicians who have no real vision for the future and are able to monetise fear to slither their way into seats of power with venomous rhetoric promising restoration and greatness.
Bernard Lewis’s Clash of Civilisation thesis, made popular through the writings of Samuel Huntington, offered the new framing for post-Cold War era by stating: “It is my hypothesis that the fundamental source of conflict in this new world will not be primarily ideological or primarily economic. The great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural. Nation states will remain the most powerful actors in world affairs, but the principal conflicts of global politics will occur between nations and groups of different civilisations. The clash of civilisations will dominate global politics. The faultlines between civilisations will be the battle lines of the future” (Huntington, 1993). For Huntington and the many who adopted his framing, the biggest challenge for the West will come from an emerging Confucian-Islamic connection, primarily concentrated around the asserted right to develop and deploy Nuclear, Biological, and Chemical weapons of mass destruction, which is seen as a counter to the Western powers adoption of non-proliferation. In the Clash of Civilisations thesis, the Western elites and state actors located a new enemy of choice through which the maintenance and extension of military, economic, social, and religious power can be extended.
The thesis translates Islamophobia into a foreign policy paradigm and re-orients Western states’ policies towards confronting the Islamic-Chinese alliance. Islamophobia becomes the tool needed for birthing the new world order. In an article published in the Nation magazine, Edward Said called the thesis “The Clash of Ignorance” whereby “Labels like “Islam” and “the West” serve only to confuse us about a disorderly reality”. Furthermore, Said stated that “neither Huntington nor Lewis has much time to spare for the internal dynamics and plurality of every civilisation, or for the fact that the major contest in most modern cultures concerns the definition or interpretation of each culture, or for the unattractive possibility that a great deal of demagogy and downright ignorance is involved in presuming to speak for a whole religion or civilisation. No, the West is the West, and Islam [is] Islam” (Said, 2001).
Understood correctly, Huntington’s Clash of Civilisations thesis is a call to affirm the worldview of the West, or more accurately the US, by drawing clear distinctions from the Islamic and Sinic civilisations. Here, the Muslim and Islam subjects (as well as the Chinese but this issue will not be addressed in this article) are instruments to forge an internal cohesion in the US that, in Huntington’s mind, is missing at present and is needed to maintain and extend America’s power and domination.
Not surprisingly, Huntington’s follow-up book framed the problem as one of the diversity and asserting that the perceived Western weakness is due to “multiculturalism” which “is in its essence anti-European civilization. It is basically an anti-Western ideology”. (Huntington, 2004) In Who are we?, Huntington is framing it as a question and answering it by problematising the increasing presence of Mexicans in the US and viewing them as a threat to maintaining the cohesive nature of the country due to various factors that prevent assimilation into the American society. Taken together, Clash of Civilisations and Who are we? provide an ideological blueprint for a new conceptualisation of the problems that have beset rightwing and conservative agenda since the Civil Rights and anti-Vietnam War movements.
Precisely, the emergence of the Clash of Civilisations thesis allowed for the state, the far-right counter-jihad movement, the neoconservative movement, sizable segments of the transnational Zionist movement, and assorted liberal groupings including the pro-war left and the new atheist movement to unleash a barrage of Islamophobic discourses to rationalise the new world order and their central role in countering it.
Thus, Islamophobia becomes an ideological policy funnel through which international and domestic alliances and coalitions are formed whereby participants use Islam and Muslim subjectivities as the foil to array their varied political, economic and military interests. All the forces mentioned produced materials to saturate political circles, media coverage, and public discourses to the exclusion or marginalization of the voices that are not committed to this framing. The case of Islamophobia is the same as the way that the anti-communist and Cold War period produced horizontal and vertical domestic and international alliances and forces committed to the policy.
The Clash of Civilisations thesis is a very narrow, simple, and a one-dimensional view of post-Cold War conflicts in the contemporary world. The world has been far more complex and fluid all along. In effect, Huntington’s thesis attempts to define and reduce the sources of conflicts to simply cultural differences between peoples. In this clash, an intense focus on Islam being incompatible with the West and democracy is framed to be the focal point of the post-Cold War era and historical events are mined as a proof for this thesis.
Conveniently, the thesis provides a way to examine conflicts through a lens that dispenses with political, economic, military, and environmental stimuli that historically and contemporary caused war and invasions. “The Clash” becomes a reductionist and an irrational analysis of the causes of conflicts in the world and lead “experts” and “think-tanks” inhabitants to call for mining Islamic textual sources and examining Muslim cultural norms to understand “why they hate us” and the best approach to counter them.
“The Clash of Civilisations” is Islamophobia writ large and acts as the blueprint that informs and shapes discourses around Islam and Muslims. Huntington’s comment that “Islamic culture explains in large part the failure of democracy to emerge in much of the Muslim world” nullifies modern history and politics in the Muslim world. (Huntington, 2003)