The Mississippi Sheikhs, or Da-da-da

"It's too idiotic to be schizophrenic." --Carl Jung, on Dada

Tuesday morning, I will be flying to Minneapolis—via Milwaukee—before driving four hours into the heart of corn country, to Elkader, Iowa, where I will be attending an international forum on the “true meaning of jihad.” The forum is sponsored by the Abd el-Kader Educational Project, an offshoot of author John Kiser’s truejihad.com, which seeks to promote Abd al-Qader’s life and legacy as a model of jihad for contemporary Muslims. Kiser will be in attendance, as will Abdallah Baali, the Algerian ambassador to the US.

Some time ago, I decided that the best way to navigate the bad faith geopolitical conversation between the US and the so-called “Arab-Muslim world” was to treat the whole thing as an act of Dada-ist performance, a meaningless game that has no goal but to underscore its own absurdity. For an illustration of this principle, I point you toward an exchange between Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and ABC News personality George Stephanopolous. In an interview given earlier this May, Stephanopolous pressed Ahmadinejad about the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden, and asked whether or not bin Laden would be welcomed, should he show up in Tehran. “If you did know that Osama bin Laden with in Tehran, would you show him hospitality? Would you expel him? Would you arrest him?” Stephanopolous prompted. Ahmadinejad’s response: “I heard that Osama bin Laden is in Washington DC.” Stephanopolous: “No, you didn’t.” Ahmadinejad: “Yes, I did. He’s there. Because he was a previous partner of Mr Bush. They were colleagues in fact in the old days. They were in the oil business together. They worked together. Mr bin Laden never cooperated with Iran but he cooperated with Mr Bush.”

The American media line on Mr. Ahmadinejad is, of course, that he’s crazy—crazy being the quality that separates a bad dictator, like Mr. Ahmadinejad, from a good dictator, like Hosni Mubarak. The media likes to set these sorts of traps for Mr. Ahmadinejad, and, in most cases, Mr. Ahmadinejad will try to spring them; not because he’s crazy or stupid, or unpolished or unprofessional, I am convinced, but because he’s an artistic genius. In the defiled pantheon of international relations, Mr. Ahmadinejad is Eshu; the rest of us are just arguing about his hat.

I raise the whole Dada thing because—well, can you think of a better way to wrap your head around an international conference on the meaning of jihad that is hosted by a bunch of Christians in Elkader, Iowa, a town with a population of maybe 1500? Elkader has been working on the margins of American cultural diplomacy for some time—since 1979, in fact, a year of fairly obvious significance in the history of the US and the greater Middle East. Its invitation to this game was based entirely on the most random of historical coincidences. Founded in 1846 and named for Emir Abd al-Qader al-Jaza’iri, Elkader claims to be the only city in the United States that bears the name of an Arab or a Muslim. As the US began trying to polish its image in the greater Middle East in the wake of the Iranian revolution, the story of Elkader’s liberal founders made for good copy in the Arab world, and the US Information Agency promoted the story widely. This alone became the basis for Elkader’s relationship to the Algerian state. As I have written elsewhere, this relationship has, over the last three or four years, become all the more important to both Elkader and Algeria, for a variety of very complicated reasons, encompassing both political and economic ends.

The Abd el-Kader Education Project is somehow connected to this larger political economic agenda, but it also exists as a sort of missionary sideshow to the main event. It testifies to the many different, at times contradictory, impulses at work within the field of cultural diplomacy, particularly the many different interests that are trying to engage with one another through the chimera of something called “moderate Islam.” The scare quotes are there not because I believe Islam to be inherently immoderate, or that Muslims are somehow incapable of moderation, but because, for most people, moderate Islam is really a cipher for de-politicized Islam. That is to say, “moderate Islam” implies an Islam that is not Islamist, an Islam of the private sphere, of psychic interiority—an Islam that is disengaged from the world. This conversation springs from the old Orientalist canard that the “problem” with Islam is that it never had its own Reformation, that it never made an accommodation to the forces of secularism. This is a bad analogy for any number of reasons, not least of which are the couple centuries or more of bloodshed and doctrinal rigidity that came with the Reformation and counter-Reformation in Europe. But as a diagnosis of the present political crisis, it’s particularly galling, in that it does nothing to address or analyze the actual social and political conditions that help to galvanize support for Islamist movements, proposing instead that the cause of Islamism is—same as it ever was—Islam. What we now find in the conversation about “moderate Islam” are a number of “correct” or “corrected” interpretations arising from many different quarters—Elkader being one of the more obscure. And while the advocates of these different positions might be perfectly earnest in their desire to spread peace, harmony, and brotherhood, more often than not, one gets the impression that they are trying to curry favor with power, to enhance their position through a tactical engagement with empire.

As well meaning as the Elkader forum may be, I am—at this point—wary of the whole conversation. And, honestly, I'm not sure what to make of the attempt to promote "moderate Islam" through the legacy of a man whose jihad was at least as real and as violent as it was metaphorical and internal. (More on that later.) At the same time, I find it something of a cause for hope that a bunch of Midwesterners are willing to enter it in good faith. And this, of course, is the difference between the Elkader forum and Dada-ist performance: Elkader is not trying to freak out the squares. Faced with inadequate explanations for the present crisis, they are trying to find better answers. Perhaps that search will lead all of us to better questions.

For more on the exchange between Stephanopolous and Ahmadinejad:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/richard-adams-blog/2010/may/05/osama-bin-laden-mahmoud-ahmadinejad-washington