Both hawkish and accommodating Islam policies presume culture, not history, drives action

Evidence

Significantly, both confrontationist and accommodationist positions are racist. Arun Kundnani argues that the conservative and liberal approaches to the problem of “Islamic extremism” are steeped in cultural racism. Conservatives believe that the problem arises from Islamic culture’s failure to adapt to modernity (as discussed in Chapter 3), while liberals assert that it is not Islam but rather Islamism, seen as a totalitarian ideology like fascism or communism, that drives political violence. What is missing in both accounts are the historical conditions that drive Islamist parties and movements. Absent a historical analysis that sets out to explain human action within particular contexts, they posit that culture—whether Muslim culture (conservatives) or Islamism as totalitarian culture (liberals)—drives the actions of extremists. Both, therefore, are forms of cultural racism that dehumanize people and turn them into empty vessels driven by demonic ideologies. As Kundnani puts it, in “the West, people make culture; in Islam, culture makes people.” Thus, the confrontationist and accommodationist approaches are both built on racism; one is of a conservative kind while the other is liberal, which reflect the limits of acceptable discourse in the political establishment. — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 417

Categorization

• XREF: Directly feeds the reader’s MOC frame that the fix must attack an operating system — here the shared cultural-racism premise uniting the two policy poles shows representation itself is the hinge. — connects to: Orientalism treats Islam as an essentialized cultural synthesis insulated from economics and politics — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 294; Muslim-world upheavals are driven by social and economic factors, not by Islam — Edward W. Said, Covering Islam: How the Media and the…, 73; Islam’s historical adaptability across polities refutes inherent-essence claims (+1 more)
• SEED: The Kundnani aphorism ‘in the West, people make culture; in Islam, culture makes people’ is a compact thesis-statement usable to open an essay on how liberalism’s accommodationism is still enemy-making.

Broader Connections

• Muslim-world upheavals are driven by social and economic factors, not by Islam #contradicts (0.80) — Edward W. Said, Covering Islam, 73
• Orientalism treats Islam as an essentialized cultural synthesis insulated from economics and politics #corroborates (0.75) — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 294
• Islam’s historical adaptability across polities refutes inherent-essence claims #corroborates (0.75)
• The reified notion of Islam has hindered rather than helped understanding of Muslim societies #corroborates (0.75) — Edward W. Said, Covering Islam, 83