All That You Authorized or Protested

Through an arresting direct address, Youssef Rakha articulates his theory of “postmuslim” identity, a literary and intellectual project that accounts for both the long and bracing history of Islam and the pessimism of contemporary Arab Muslim life. Rakha narrates the ongoing genocide of the Palestinians—and the reactionary responses to it—as one testimony among many that provides the most recent account of his theory. By giving context to his essay, “Jab, Cross, Infidel,” Rakha explores his relationship with the West, the English language, and the vulnerability of writing about an Arab Muslim subjectivity beyond the mainstream literary imaginary. “Jab, Cross, Infidel” was published in Volume 73 Number 2 and is featured in the collection Postmuslim: A Testimony, out from Graywolf Press.

I wake up to what I go to bed with. Without dreams. Nightmares are my days into weeks into months. Will you stand with me next year or the next? I will be then as my people now. Wandering the carnage you authorized or protested.

—Fady Joudah

In Egyptian Arabic, Westerners are informally called khawagas—and that’s how I choose to address you, my English-speaking readers. All through the essays that make up Postmuslim: A Testimony (which includes a slightly longer, differently arranged version of “Jab, Cross, Infidel”), it comes up again and again: khawaga. It’s a term that implies distance and familiarity, admiration and resentment. Being a modern human being, I was formed as much by the West as anything, and resentful as I remain of how the West views me, I cannot help loving at least some of the things that formed me. From the values of the Enlightenment, which I assume should apply to me as much as to my white counterparts—to horror movies, to boxing, Postmuslim shows how the word “khawaga” mirrors my vexed love.

The babies being killed on my screens are the wrong tribe. From your khawaga perspective, that is. I imagine all your life you’ve been taught to think that Arab Muslims are medievally minded terrorists. Those Palestinians are no exception; it’s their barbaric violence against Israeli overlords that is to blame for what’s happening to their babies. Those who abuse Judaism by turning it into an excuse for killing children might be a different religion from you, but, since the end of World War II, at least, they’ve been integrated into the same white-dominated tribe. You speak of Judeo-Christian, never Judeo-Christo-Muslim civilization, right? Jews are rarely seen as an Other in the way Arab Muslims are, and it is precisely because their victims are that Other that Israelis can claim they’re killing them to save Western civilization.

As they become aware that a trapped, defenseless population is being systematically terrorized and exterminated, the fair-minded among you use their rights and freedoms to stage protests. They even assemble unarmed flotillas that sail through the Mediterranean to break the siege. In vain. Jews are the khawagas’ traditionally victimized minority, with both the Holocaust and the Zionist movement, the latter responding to centuries of antisemitism, being exclusively European phenomena. Now, to make up for your crimes against them, which no Arab Muslim ever had anything to do with, you embraced Zionism—you gave the Zionists those babies’ ancestral lands and helped them to establish a state there, by force. For nearly a century now, your institutions have unwaveringly supported that state, calling it secular and democratic even though it is premised on ethnically cleansing the majority of those who inhabit its territories, killing or expelling them from their homes, preventing them from returning and importing Jewish settlers to replace them, and excluding anyone who is not a Jew from full citizenship.

Never mind occupation, apartheid, torture, assassinations, psych-ops, and encroachments on sovereign territories. Never mind “A good Arab is a dead Arab” being a common, freely expressed view across Israeli society since the day Israel came into being or the recent quasi-constitutional “Jewish nation-state” law—passed in 2018—calling the right to self-determination in Israel/Palestine “unique to the Jewish people,” and regarding “the development of [exclusively] Jewish settlement as a national value.” Anyone who questions Israel’s right to kill journalists and imprison minors is deemed antisemitic. And would that be the case if Zionists weren’t so embedded not just in khawaga society but in globalization’s money-and-arms nexus–unlike the Arab Muslim barbarians they feel they’re within their right to eliminate? Now as before, no matter what the Israelis do, they still receive all weaponry and funds they request and are made to look like a seamless part of the so-called civilized world even as they openly flout every one of that world’s supposed principles. And so, however much you protest, your governments block legal action to stop the Israelis, prohibit bearing arms against them, fire journalists when they don’t lie to protect them, and punish activists and politicians who arraign them.

True, many of you also deplore the “humanitarian tragedy” being live-streamed. Your cultural institutions covertly acknowledge the victims, celebrating art by or about them that they would otherwise guiltlessly ignore. But as the babies continue to explode, their little corpses piling up higher and higher in the sky, it’s clearer than ever before that your value system—“human rights”, “the rules-based international order”, “our democracy”—is all smoke and mirrors. The protection and dignity it grants are only available to a particular clade of person and—conditionally, sometimes—its symbiotic partners. Even among khawagas, in fact, what rights and freedoms can be exercised are essentially cosmetic placards. When those placards have been raised, they have shown that you can be civilized and humane, yes. But—think Vietnam, think the War on Terror—they almost never made a difference in the real world. In their hearts even the most compulsive placard raisers among you must know this. And yet you’re locked into careers predicated on the same value system: journalism, civil society, academia, the arts. You need to believe or pretend to believe that, without any change in the way the global economy operates, “peaceful protest” can change the world. That “people power” fuels history’s inexorable forward march in the way of (liberal) virtue. Just as long as you pay attention to your vote, your consumer choices, your pronouns, your carbon footprint.

Meanwhile the star traders of the morality marketplace are using their access to exclusive outlets to ponder the error of letting security devolve into genocide—as though that is the only thing wrong with a political arrangement now literally dependent on killing children. Attributing the baby corpses to the kind of strongman politics from which they set themselves apart, liberal khawagas willfully forget not just that the whole liberal democratic system has turned out to be a façade but also that, in the world at large—through inter-governmental organizations, grant-making institutions, any number of “well-meaning” interventions—liberalism has acted as a subtler instrument of the same drive to imperial hegemony. It has tried to make everyone culturally and morally the same, or else reduced identities to essentialized rigidities and transactional labels; through globalization, it has eradicated grassroots modes of connection; it has reduced the meaning of life to consumption and debt.

In such times as these, you argue, the West can no longer be the central reference point. Then you go on taking all your cues from and addressing all your disquisitions to the West.

In those ways and others, the babies being killed on my screens have reconfirmed my sense that, no matter who they look at, khawagas—according to James Baldwin, as I quote him in Postmuslim, people who regard themselves as the makers of the modern world—can only see a positive reflection or a negative distortion of their likeness. Arab Muslims are dispensable barbarians not just because they are racially distinct from you but because their way of life and worldview might be different from yours: they have not or not fully embraced the scientism, capitalism, and violence that inheres in the metaphysics of matter you uphold; they refuse to equate being civilized with being racially, culturally, and politically subjugated; they do not cloak their irrational, premodern convictions in a narrative of intra-European redemption.

Dead babies have also reconfirmed my sense that Arab Muslim movers and shakers who uncritically embrace “human rights” and “democracy” have colonized souls. Arab Muslims who believe it is their own societies’ inability to adequately ape the West that is holding us back, not a racially capitalist geo-economic system inherited from colonial times that privileges the empires that meddled in our world by default—they are colonized. There were many moments when—in my journalism, my creative work, or my social media posts—I criticized Arab Muslim activists, artists and intellectuals for championing your purported principles in a way that betrayed their own cultural, moral and human context. I was denigrated, and my creative work disadvantaged, as a result.

In 2011, for example, after joining massive protests demanding Western-style political freedoms and democracy, I pointed out that the Islamist takeover those protests enabled was in reality a complete catastrophe. Almost overnight, regime change heartily endorsed by the Obama administration was reduced to an absolute handover of power to a corrupt, ultraconservative, theocratic organization. And, appearing to take place through the ballots, this process was sold to the public as the ultimate political salvation: a realization of “the people’s legitimate aspirations,” and so on. In Libya, Yemen, and Syria, the same kind of uprising followed by Islamists vying for power had already ignited bloody, sectarian, and protracted civil wars, spewing out new iterations of the death cults posing as fundamentalist religious movements. But when I spoke out against what was happening, activists and intellectuals aping Western liberals had the gall to call me an Islamophobe. Already I could see it all around me in the “revolutionary” Arab world: complete institutional collapse, millions dead and displaced, even a “refugee crisis” in the West. And yet…

Listen, khawaga! I am an Egyptian who holds no other citizenship and remains a Cairo dweller by choice. Is it even conceivable to you that I might be happy in my own country? Even happier than you are in yours? I have no interest in living where you live or transforming my part of the world into an anodyne Xerox of yours.

If I write in English, it is not to illustrate your democracy activists’ emaciated image of me as the victim of an “authoritarian” nightmare you refuse to see past, ignoring your own manifestations of tyranny and violation. It is not to jump on the bandwagon of sudden, temporary relevance prompted by some “Middle East” disaster in your news. And it is categorically not to demonstrate that I can be as good as a white person at regurgitating imperialist bullshit cloaked in liberal piety. No. If I write in English, it is to enact my Arab Muslim subjectivity in all its rich complexity. For your benefit. It is to complicate and expand your view not just of my part of the world but of the way the “freedom” that Western imperialism has always promised its interventions would bring about actually functions for people like me and what your value system translates to in our lives. To tell you something you don’t already know.

Your entitlement and self-adulation were the air I breathed while I was putting together Postmuslim. Faced with mass infanticide as the ultimate manifestation of your moral superiority, I’d spent an inordinate amount of time thinking about how the modern world, so much of which you got to fashion in your image, has made me subhuman and expendable. But I was more or less done with the book by the time I realized what I was really doing in those essays. By excavating my life for what it has meant to interact with you, I was simply affirming the existence of a world beyond yours. An Arab Muslim world which never shows up in the exclusive outlets where, cool and cerebral, the pundits of liberal morality find genocide an appropriate occasion to lucratively reconsider the lessons of World War II—not until it is filtered through your worldview, anyway. A world which, like someone murdered in their infancy, has never had a chance against Narcissus.

In Good Girl— a recent read—Aria Aber refers to the Afghan heritage as a rotten apple the immigrant father plants in his Berliner daughter’s breast. From misogynistic tradition to being the target of neo-Nazi violence to the sheer indigence of the ghetto, absolutely nothing about being born to Afghan parents is vaguely positive. Beyond the horrors by which Western libertarianism and affluence negatively identify themselves when it comes into their line of vision, the Afghan identity is not even interesting. That apple, I’m thinking—admiring Aber’s searing honesty and her exquisite prose—is exactly what your world has made of my identity.

From the Reconquista erasing all Arab Muslim influence in Iberia, reversing what religious, racial, and cultural Convivencia Arab Muslim rule had permitted, to Islam being “written out of [modern science’s] story during the Renaissance, because a Greco-Roman heritage was a more appealing story than one that acknowledged any debts to Islam,” as the historian Glen M. Cooper says. And from Samuel Huntington declaring that “Islam's borders are bloody and so are its innards” tothe numberless ways in which Edward Said’s Orientalism shows khawagas preying on Arab Muslim culture and society, only to other, exoticize, and objectify us, turning us from human peers with intellectual and aesthetic agency into ancient, inert material into which only they, the khawagas, could breathe life, forging thought and art of their own…

Aber’s rotten apple is what results when your world gobbles up some fifteen centuries’ worth of Muslim civilization to self-righteously shit out: a shameful, venomous fruit worthy of excision. But for whatever reason, thank God, your empire’s insatiable hunger for money and power has not done to Egypt what it did to Afghanistan. Unlike the father in Aber’s book, I have not been forced to emigrate. And so, constrained by your world as I remain, I get to inhabit another—physically as well as mentally. I live among peers who, their absurdities and confusions notwithstanding, share not just my cultural references but interpersonal instincts vastly superior to yours. And that is only one of the reasons that, in my world—which I write to make you aware of—I’ve come to see Aber’s rotten apple as a magic gemstone. A portal not just into glorious legacies but also into the vicissitudes of history and your deepest, ugliest lies and a heart with which I get to love you without having to hate myself. Even as I see you mass murdering babies because they happen to be born into it, my identity is a gift and a fuel.

Since the horror began to unfold on my screens, it has felt both opportunistic and worthwhile, having excavated my life, to submit my findings to you in the form of a book to be published and sold, even though theorizing a perspective I’ve called postmuslim is something I’d been working on since 2012. What I mean by “postmuslim” is simply a postmodern orientation that, instead of Western modernity, centers the Muslim experience. That involves drawing on our glorious heritage and engaging with our present-day discontent in equal measure. And, in this context, the thought of taking advantage of Palestinian suffering to advance my career is disgusting, but equally the need to speak of how October 7 made it possible to acknowledge and embrace a much older, much broader Arab Muslim grief feels necessary. Besides, the aftermath of the crime is the perfect moment to trace the thirty-year journey by which, past station stops like 9/11 and the Arab Spring, I’ve come back to myself. A harrowing trajectory: from rebelling against my identity, through letting you gaslight me into thinking the problems that having it involves are not your fault, to looking at my screens now. From being an Arab Muslim born in 1976 to having to see all those babies die—thank you for that grief.

It turns out opportunism and placard raising can go hand in hand, too. And it is to steer clear of both of them that, in “Jab, Cross, Infidel” as in all of Postmuslim, I kept my rage at bay, clinging to the intellectual and the narrative registers of my plaint. I could barely manage it. Letting loose my anger would imply assuming the moral high ground to harangue you—or else succumbing to the bottomless depths of my many-tiered despair. To the best of my ability, I wanted to avoid polemic and sentimentality. I wanted my vulnerability to remain whole, so you can see its power. So I let the layers and latitudes of Muslim experience of the past balance out modern alienation and despair, drawing on Andalusian philosophy, Abbasid poetry, Ottoman multiculturalism. Everything is treated with as much playfulness as lucidity permits. My professional life as a journalist and writer is a major topic, but at the deepest level it’s my personal odyssey—my need to love and be loved, even physically—that informs what I have to say.

In two of three essays written in response to October 7, boxing—which I happened to be practicing at the time—felt like a good way to set out symbolic parameters for the modern Muslim condition: the terror and delight of imminent mortality, dancing to save your life, conflict and confrontation; the “moral” conditions for potentially fatal violence, a fair fight, courage and honor as opposed to chickenshit thuggery; the need for a sense of purpose and belonging, God’s silence, ongoing discipline and distress… Combining such tropes with sparks of early Muslim history in “Jab, Cross, Infidel”—or else with snippets of rudimentary literary theory, in the other piece—I think I managed to sublimate both rage and grief into something that speaks to my identity at this moment without being either exploitative or activist. Something that, showing you all that I object to in your view of me and all that sets my worldview apart from the way you operate, manages to be not just modern but modern and Muslim. Allow me to quote Postmuslim on some specific implications of what it means to be me:

“A relaxed attitude toward the body—in contrast to the Protestant work ethic and the more general Christian antipathy to eroticism—its exertions and its pleasures. The social grace and friendliness that come of generosity with time. An aversion to making moral failures public (the concept of satr dictates that, all other things being equal, it is better to keep an immoral act private—to minimize its harm). A layered understanding of truth, arguably more like poststructuralist ideas of language and reality than the one-on-one notion of a clear statement describing an absolute fact that informs so much contemporary Western morality. And a willingness to relinquish control of the world to an unseen greater power, without the need for superstition or magical thinking: accepting not so much fate but the limitations of being human (and, also endorsing social solidarity, those of being an individual alone). A refusal, that is, to play God: The (faithful) slaves of the Beneficent are they who walk upon the earth modestly, the Qurʾan says, and when the foolish ones address them answer: Peace.”

As I tell it in “Jab, Cross, Infidel,” I started boxing at the peak of my midlife crisis. I came to the sport from a place of “undirected limerence”—a “longing for connection, a discovery, a person” so intense it was painful—which I eventually understood to be that selfsame grief I’ve been telling you about, the grief of a whole identity: “I’ve emerged with more muscle in my arms and legs than I’d ever had in my life. But questions about being me, being an Arab Muslim in 2023, stalk my every breath. An astonishing amount of grief is involved, not just over horrors going down, but for all the triumphs that could’ve been. And, jumping rope, shadowboxing, it occurs to me this might be all my limerence was about. Dumb grief demanding not so much a voice but meaning.” And so…

Coming to a slow stop, now—deep breath—I think of Oliver McCall circling the boxing ring like a dervish in a trance, in the course of his second, 1997 fight with Lennox Lewis. Tearing a rupture in the fabric of expectations by failing to defend himself. What does it mean for a boxer to break down in tears mid-fight, succumbing so completely to the melancholy impulse when he is supposed to be performing his role as a modern-day gladiator? What does it mean to be me?