No Editor Needs to Decide to Suspect Muslims

Mustafa Can says the suspicion does not require an editor to make a conscious decision. Thousands of individually defensible texts can still create the same associations until Muslims become a dark background against which the Western world sees itself as free, equal and civilized.

When Aftenposten asked him before 2010 to write about the first decade after the turn of the millennium, Can chose the event he believed had shaped that decade’s politics, language and worldview more than any other: the attack on the World Trade Center. September 11, he writes, produced a new human type from the vacuum of fear, “Homo Islamicus.”

A few days after the attack, Can arrived late at a dinner attended by well-traveled and liberal journalists, writers and artists discussing what had happened in New York. One guest eventually turned to him and asked, in a friendly tone, what he thought about the terrorist attack. The question stayed with him precisely because it sounded friendly. He had quickly shifted from being an ordinary person confronting the same incomprehensible images to becoming a representative of something. His background had become a position, and he was expected to carry an entire religion, explain himself in relation to foreign violence and reassure those around him.

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For the record, Mustafa, what do you think about the terrorist attack?

The questions continued: the hijab, the Taliban, Hamas, Salman Rushdie, female circumcision, sharia, Israel, homosexuality, suicide bombers and gang violence. Can says his earlier concept, Homo Islamicus, was meant to describe how a person becomes the bearer of a category, and how that category begins to precede the person. In retrospect, he says, he was describing a beginning.

“Islamist” can evoke Muslim, Muslim can evoke immigrant, and immigrant can evoke refugee, he writes. Crime can summon all three without any of them being mentioned. Can distinguishes Islamism as a real, anti-democratic political ideology that can become violent in its extreme form. But he argues that its place has changed. After September 11, it belonged mainly to terrorism and exceptional security politics. Now, he says, it has entered everyday politics, and suspicion has left the airport security checkpoint to become a model for society.

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Islamists do not like me.