is prohibited by the liberal multicultural consensus, under the banner of respect for difference, I would argue that racism is what is protected under the banner of free speech through the appearance of being prohibited.
We should here supplement Ahmed’s presentation with different examples which render visible the perhaps unexpected implications of her theoretical propositions. Consider the paradox of Chomsky, when he wrote the preface to a book by Robert Faurisson, a Holocaust denier, defending the author’s right to publish the book. Chomsky makes it clear that he is personally disgusted by Faurisson’s reasoning; but the problem, as he goes on to say, is that once we start to prohibit certain opinions, who will be next in line? The question is thus: how to counteract the fake liberal prohibition on racism? In the Chomsky mode, or by replacing it with a “true” prohibition?
Another unexpected example: according to Jean-Claude Milner, a unified Europe could only constitute itself on the basis of a progressive erasure of all divisive historical traditions and legitimizations; consequently, a unified Europe will be based on the erasure of history, of historical memory. Recent phenomena such as Holocaust revisionism, or the moral equation of all victims of World War II (Germans suffered under aerial bombardments no less than did the Russians or the British; the fate of Nazi collaborators liquidated by the Russians after the war was comparable to that of victims of the Nazi genocide, etc.), are the logical outcome of this tendency: all specified limits are potentially erased on behalf of abstract suffering and victimization. And this Europe—and this is what Milner is aiming at all along—in its very advocacy of unlimited openness and multicultural tolerance, again needs the figure of the “Jew” as a structural obstacle to this drive to unlimited unification. Contemporary anti-Semitism, however, no longer takes the same form as the old ethnic anti-Semitism; its focus has been displaced from Jews as an ethnic group onto the State of Israel: “in the program of the Europe of the twenty-first century, the State of Israel occupies exactly the position that the name ‘Jew’ occupied in the Europe before the rupture of 39–45.”48 In this way, the anti-Semitism of today can present itself as anti-anti-Semitism, full of solidarity with the victims of the Holocaust; the reproach is just that, in our era of the gradual dissolution of all limits, of the fluidification of all traditions, the Jews wanted to build their own clearly delimited nation-state. Here are the very last lines of Milner’s book:
If modernity is defined by the belief in an unlimited realization of dreams, our future is fully outlined. It leads through absolute theoretical and practical anti-Judaism. To follow Lacan beyond what he explicitly stated, the foundations of a new religion are thus posited: anti-Judaism will be the natural religion of the humanity-to-come.49
Is Milner, a passionate pro-Zionist, not relying here on the same logic as used by Ahmed? In his view, are Jews not caught in the same paradoxical predicament as, say, British Muslims: they were offered civil rights, the chance to integrate into UK society, but, ungrateful as they are, they persisted in their separate way of life? Plus, again similarly to Muslims, they are perceived as being excessively sensitive, seeing “anti-Semitism” everywhere. Milner’s point is thus that the official anti-anti-Semitism, which issues prohibitions (recall the case of David Irving), is but the form of appearance of a secret anti-Semitism.
Returning to Ahmed’s line of argumentation: the hegemony of multiculturalism is thus not a direct form of hegemony, but a reflexive one:
the hegemonic position is that liberal multiculturalism is the hegemony. This is why the current monocultural political agenda functions as a kind of retrospective defense against multiculturalism. The explicit argument of New Labour is that multiculturalism went “too far”: we gave the other “too much” respect, we celebrated difference “too much,” such that multiculturalism is read as the cause of segregation, riots and even terrorism.
I totally agree with the general principle that “hegemonies are often presented as minority positions, as defenses against what are perceived to be hegemonic positions.” Today’s celebration of “minorities” and “marginals” is the predominant majority position. But we could add a series of other examples, such as the neocons who complain about the terrors of liberal political correctness, presenting themselves as protectors of an endangered minority. Or take those critics of patriarchy who attack it as if it were still a hegemonic position, ignoring what Marx and Engels wrote more than 150 years ago, in the first chapter of The Communist Manifesto: “The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations.” Such an insight is still ignored by those leftist cultural theorists who focus their critique on patriarchal ideology and practice. Is it not time to start wondering about the fact that the critique of patriarchal “phallogocentrism” and so forth was elevated into the main question at the very historical moment—ours—when patriarchy definitively lost its hegemonic role, when it was progressively swept away by the market individualism of rights? What becomes of patriarchal family values when a child can sue his parents for neglect and abuse, or when the family and parenthood itself are de jure reduced to a temporary and dissolvable contract between independent individuals? (And, incidentally, Freud was no less aware of this: for him, the decline of the Oedipal mode of socialization was the historical condition of the rise of psychoanalysis.50) In other words, the critical claim that patriarchal ideology continues to be the hegemonic ideology is the form of the hegemonic ideology of our times—its function is to enable us to evade the deadlock of the hedonistic permissiveness which is actually hegemonic.
On February 7, 2008, the Archbishop of Canterbury told BBC Radio 4’s World at One that the adoption of certain aspects of Sharia law in the UK “seems unavoidable”: the UK has to “face up to the fact” that some of its citizens do not relate to the British legal system, so that adopting parts of Islamic Sharia law would help maintain social cohesion. He stressed that “nobody in their right mind would want to see in this country the kind of inhumanity that’s sometimes been associated with the practice of the law in some Islamic states; the extreme punishments, the attitudes to women as well”; however, an approach to law which simply said “there’s one law for everybody and that’s all there is to be said, and anything else that commands your loyalty or allegiance is completely irrelevant in the processes of the courts—I think that’s a bit of a danger.” Muslims should not have to choose between “the stark alternatives of cultural loyalty or state loyalty.” The issue of whether Catholic adoption agencies should be forced to accept gay parents under equality laws already showed the potential for legal confusion: “The principle that there is only one law for everybody is an important pillar of our social identity as a Western democracy. But I think it is a misunderstanding to suppose this means people don’t have other affiliations, other loyalties which shape and dictate how they behave in society and that the law needs to take some account of that.” People may legally devise their own way to settle a dispute in front of a designated third party as long as both sides agree to the process. Muslim Sharia courts and the Jewish Beth Din come into this category: the country’s main Beth Din at Finchley in north London oversees a wide range of cases including divorce settlements, contractual rows between traders, and tenancy disputes; in a similar way, Muslims should be allowed to choose to have marital disputes or financial matters dealt with in a Sharia court.51
However, notwithstanding all my sympathies for Rowan Williams, I think the devil hides in the details of his proposal, where the old dilemma of group rights versus individual rights explodes with a vengeance. Williams is careful enough to emphasize two limitations of his proposal: (1) individual Muslims should retain a choice: they should not be forced to obey the Sharia, just permitted to choose it; (2) the Sharia should be implemented only in certain areas, applying norms which are not in conflict with the general law (marital disputes, not amputations of hands for theft . . .). But if we really follow these two principles, then nothing radical really happens: if some group of people wants to regulate its affairs in a way which adds new rules without infringing upon the existing legal order, so what? Things become problematic the moment we move a step further and concede to one particular ethnic-religious community a more substantial role as
