A R T I C L E Copyright © 2004 SAGE Publications (London,Thousand Oaks,CA and New Delhi) 1468-7968 Vol 4(4):451–476;047469 DOI:10.1177/1468796804047469 www.sagepublications.com The predicament of diaspora and millennial Islam Reflections on September 11,20011 PNINA WERBNER Keele University,UK ABSTRACT This article considers the production of an Islamic utopian or millennial discourse by British South Asian Muslims in the diasporic public sphere and its possible impact on the younger generation of Muslims growing up in the UK. Associated with such a discourse, the article considers the vulnerability of diasporas – the process whereby global events can precipitate radical diasporic estrangement, leading to self-estrangement. Such estrangement is fed by moral panics, expressed in the speeches of politicians, in newspaper columns and global news reports. This exposes the fragility of multicultural discourses in the public sphere in the UK. KEYWORDS British Pakistanis ● Islamic radicalism ● millennialism ● Muslims ● political Islam ● Utopia INTRODUCTION However settled modern diasporas are, they must nevertheless navigate complex loyalties in times of international crisis. September 11 highlighted the way that utopian discourses may assume, in rare instances, a violent form among certain millenarian groups, and the tragic dilemmas and predicaments such violence creates for diasporas settled beyond their countries of origin. I consider, first, the production of an Islamic utopian or millennial discourse as a transnational imaginary pervading contemporary Muslim society worldwide. Second, I argue that millennial discourses may prevail without mobilization for action, a feature highlighted by speeches made in the diasporic public sphere by first-generation Pakistani settlers in the UK. The danger is, however, that for a younger generation of 452 ETHNICITIES 4(4) Pakistanis growing up in the UK, such discourses may be interpreted as a call for violent action. The article thus highlights the vulnerability of contemporary Muslim diaspora communities and the process whereby global events have precipitated among them a sense of radical diasporic estrangement. Such estrangement, I show, is fed by public moral panics surrounding the danger of Islamic ‘terror’ or ‘disloyalty’, expressed in the speeches of politicians, newspaper columns, and global news reports. Hence, Pakistanis in the UK have had to contend since 1988 with a series of global crises, from the Rushdie affair and September 11 to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and these, I argue, have set them apart from the wider South Asian diaspora in the UK, despite a shared history of migration. MILLENNIALISM, UTOPIANISM AND ISLAM On the whole, discussions of Islamic ideological revivalist or ‘fundamental- ist’ movements have not been cast within a comparative framework of millennial or utopian studies. Conceptually, such discussions have remained highly empirical and context-specific, locked in ‘Middle East Studies’ and lacking a comparative sociological dimension. Early historical accounts of religious utopianism or millenarianism tended to focus almost exclusively on Jewish and Christian millenarian movements and their expression in apocalyptic texts such as the Book of Daniel and the Book of Revelations. Of these scholarly works, Norman Cohn’s The Pursuit of the Millennium (1957) remains a classic. In his analysis, Cohn recognizes a key feature of European Christian millenarian movements – their association with a far more widely pervasive discourse of anti-Semitism, which extended well beyond any particular movement. Nevertheless, Cohn’s analysis, as with most analyses of millenarianism, is on specific movements, religious organizations and utopian communities. In contrast, I suggest how millen- nial discourses may also exist and be widely pervasive without formal organization or effective mobilization. The gap between discourse and organization is not unusual. Reflecting on cargo cults in New Guinea, Peter Worsley cites Firth (1955) to argue that, ... a ‘climate’ of Cargo ideas may exist without producing any actual Cargo organisation. On Tikopia there were ideas of the bringing of the Cargo in the name of a deceased Tikopia ... yet these elements did not fuse into a Cargo cult. I myself found a similar situation among an Australian aboriginal tribe: the belief that the Whites could summon unlimited quantities of goods from the cities of Australia and Europe; the rumour that a new Bible had arrived foretelling the imminent end of the world, the destruction of the Whites and the WERBNER ● THE PREDICAMENT OF DIASPORA AND MILLENIAL ISLAM 453 salvation of the Blacks ... Yet again, these elements did not combine to form a coherent Cargo doctrine, let alone a cult organisation. (Worsley, 1957: 252) Hence, Worsley argues, in the absence of a ‘flashpoint’ or ‘suitable leader- ship’, ‘activist millenarian ideas are unlikely to arise, or if they do arise will be confined to a clique’ (Worsley, 1957: 252). The millennial vision in contemporary Islam, as articulated by a wide range of movements, is of ‘return’ to the pristine Islam of the time of the Prophet. This period is conceived of as a golden age of unity (tawhid), harmony, lawfulness, economic prosperity, and peace (Roy, 1994: 60–4; see also Eickelman and Piscatori, 1996: 34–5), a ‘Time of Bliss’ (Navaro-Yashin, 2002: 106). In this latter sense, even though in reality most Islamist or salafiyya movements are nationalist in their orientations, it is also often imagined as the moment when Islam will fulfil its promise to become the only and final universal religion, and will prevail globally as a total way of life. The vision is of the ideal city or the perfect moral commonwealth (Davis, 1981: 26–31; see also Levitas, 1990: 161–4; Kumar, 1991: 11 passim),2 so that the ‘sacred community grouped around the God-given text voiced by a charismatic emissary who is simultaneously a man like any other stands at the origin of Islamic political memory and at the end point of Muslim political aspirations’ (Lindholm, 1996: 270). Taking Davis’s (1981) definition, the vision of a new Islamic golden age combines features of millennialism and utopianism, seen both in terms of process and final vision. In terms of process, the arrival of the millennium usually involves some form of divine intervention along with a fantasy of salvation (p. 32). In terms of vision, Davis argues that the millenarians ‘pay little attention to what will emerge after the cataclysm’ (p. 31), often even denying the validity of detailed analysis (p. 34). By contrast, utopian visions are usually highly detailed accounts of a perfectly ordered society. Although exceptionally, Davis tells us, some millennial thinkers do venture to ‘describe the coming kingdom in all its perfection’, in most instances, the picture remains ‘blurred’ (p. 35) or lost in ‘a welter of partial schemes and fragmentary reforms’ (p. 35). Absent in millennial thinking is the ‘blueprint’ quality of utopian visions (p. 36), which combine totality, order and perfec- tion (p. 38). The extent to which attempts are made to describe the Islamic perfect society in detail, in terms of its unique, often non-western, secular features, differs between Islamic groups and movements, with some devoting conferences and books to describing the shape of ‘Islamic economics’, education, law or modes of governance (as exemplified, for example, by the Al Muhajiroun website on ‘al khilafah’, http://www.muhajiroun.com), while others remain extremely vague about the organization of the ‘Caliphate’, the ideal Muslim world society, when it comes to concrete detail. Like other utopias, the Islamic one too must be grasped as a narrative, 454 ETHNICITIES 4(4) myth, or fable. It fabulates an earthly paradise, charting the way it will come into existence. Visions of present-day Islamic millenniums and their mode of achievement differ in this respect. Some groups espouse personal moral reform, the education of desire,3 as the route to salvation; others attempt to impose this reform through coercion (as was the case with the Taliban); and still others work for violent revolution, while the majority hope for the coming of a divinely inspired charismatic reformer; in Sufi parlance, ‘the renewer (mudjaddid) of a hundred years [or] of the millennium’. Hence, while the transcendental vision is one, routes to the millennium differ. Much of the discussion about millenarianism in Islam focuses on Mahdism or Shi’a occultation of the hidden, ‘twelfth’ Imam following the death of Ali (see Ahmed, 1988: 61–4).4 A widely pervasive belief among the Shi’a (and other current revivalist groups) is that the millennium will be preceded by the coming of the Mahdi and a confrontation with a mythical figure, the Dajjal, the equivalent of the Antichrist, before right prevails. Others highlight the need for this-worldly personal asceticism and reform. The focus on Mahdism disguises, however, the more pervasive millennial tendencies in contemporary Islamic movements. The millennium in Islam, as indeed in all three monotheistic faiths, is not to be confused with the Jewish or Muslim paradises (Eden, jannat), or the Christian Kingdom of Heaven. Whether or not the millennium lasts a thousand years, or comes at the turn of a millennium, its imaginary is that of an earthly kingdom.5 Writing of the Judeo-Christian tradition, the Manuels (1979: 15) argue that: ‘Utopia is a hybrid plant, born of the crossing of a paradisiacal, other-worldly belief of Judeo-Christian religion with the Hellenic myth of an ideal city on earth.’ In this respect, movements of jihadinvolving martyrdom, which lead through death to paradise, are not the same as those aiming for earthly Islamic utopias. Nevertheless, such utopias share with other utopian visions, including the Marxist-socialist one, a longing for totality and perfection. Second, utopian visions are pitched against present chaos and perceived anarchy, evoking the ignor- ance, jahiliya, of the pre-Islamic city-state. Their eschatological ideas of salvation often envisage the overpowering of a terrible opponent, the beast of the apocalypse, the Antichrist, or in contemporary Muslim cosmology, America, the West and capitalism as omnipotent, evil Satanic forces.6In this sense, like other utopias (Levitas, 1990: 122, 170–4), the Islamic one contains a critical reformist message about the present. It espouses the control of base passions and total dedication to the common good. Never- theless, because of their tendency to promote absolutist or totalitarian visions, utopias have frequently been subjected to anti-utopian counter- narratives (Kumar, 1987; 1991); in the case of Islam, Salman Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses (1988) is an example of a contemporary anti- utopian text which sets out to describe the paradoxes and limitations of Islamist utopian visions of the perfect society. WERBNER ● THE PREDICAMENT OF DIASPORA AND MILLENIAL ISLAM 455 Given the pervasiveness of current millennial discourses in the Muslim world, it is somewhat surprising that in the volumes on fundamentalism edited by Marty and Appleby (1993a, 1993c, 1995), only passing mention is made of Islam as one of the ‘messianic’ religions which has recently emerged in the late modern world (see, for example, Rapoport, 1993: 448; and Marty and Appleby, 1993b: 626, 636). A more sustained analysis of the utopianist elements in such religious movements, in which Islam is included alongside Judaism and Christianity, is suggested by S.N. Eisenstadt (1995: 273). Like most scholars of utopian and millenarian movements, Eisenstadt too stresses that they occur during periods of transition, change and uncertainty, or, more specifically, among persons ‘dislocated’ or ‘banned’ from the cultural or political centre and positioned on the periphery (see also Levitas, 1990: 194). In similar vein, Christopher Hill has described the rise of millennial and utopianist movements in 17th-century England as a response to the failure of the reformation and the ‘experience of defeat’ it generated (Hill, 1984). A related view locates the rise of messianic cults in the developing world in the context of the encounter with colonialism and imperial domination, so that when political independence was ultimately achieved, it could be seen to fulfil ‘in tangible form ... the religious promise of liberation and renewal voiced by native prophets’ (Lanternari, 1963: xi). Their vision of the past-as-present-future has led Eisenstadt to argue that new utopianist religious movements are simultaneously modern and anti- modern, traditional and anti-traditional. While they are grounded in ‘an eschatological vision that combines the reconstruction of the mundane world according to a sharply articulated transcendental vision’ of a pristine past (1995: 263), their modernist stress on the primacy of politics and totali- tarian universalism, and their rejection of complex traditions in the name of a ‘pure’, authentic tradition make them uniquely modern, as does their acceptance of science and media technologies. Hence, another widely shared feature of millenarian movements is their stress on the opposition between pure and impure. This is part of their moral Manicheanism. The same stress on purity often makes them highly ritualistic if and when they assume formal organization. The millennium implies the end of suffering. It is an apocalyptic, redemptive moment, the ‘final destructive struggle in which a world tyranny will be overcome by a ‘chosen people’ and through this the world will be renewed and history brought to its consummation’ (Cohn, 1957: 20). As a form of rhetoric, millenarian discourses may constitute a critical political commentary on world events that can be empowering in its own right. To the extent that this commentary is millennial and redemptive, it demands no immediate action. Much like invocations of Marxist utopias advanced by the radical left in Europe, the articulation of utopian Islamic visions is a badge of moral virtue which does not necessarily imply a serious willingness to give up the material comforts of bourgeois society. The 456 ETHNICITIES 4(4) decisions to mobilize, organize and act are further steps which most people never take. Yet the discourse may travel widely across national boundaries and be shared by believers in widely dispersed places. This has occurred in the case of Muslim millennial discourses throughout the Muslim world. They are widely articulated in the UK among immigrant-settlers with nationalist-religious political tendencies, despite the evident need of British Muslims to create durable bridges to the West. Of course, there also are Muslims who advocate liberal, democratic points of view, as Hefner (http://www.ssrc/sept11/hefner, also 2002) argues, but the millennial discourse attracts more attention. MUSLIMS IN THE UK AND MILLENNIAL DISCOURSES Pakistanis number about half of the 1.5 million Muslims settled in the UK. For scholars like myself whose research has focused on the Pakistani dia- sporic public sphere in the UK, their ambivalent response to the global crisis following September 11 was predictable. It was embedded in a wide- spread discourse of Islamic millennialism, pervasive in Muslim gatherings, and echoing a global utopian rhetoric. This millennial rhetoric is hybrid, rooted in anti-colonial struggles and calling for equal citizenship rights in the UK. It can be heard on many different occasions, from commemorations of the life of the founder of Pakistan, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, to celebrations of the birth of the Prophet. In these events, the more conservative religious nationalists among local Pakistanis, usually aspiring community leaders locked in factional battles among themselves, enunciate a virtual discourse of global Islamic hegemony. This vision of global hegemony is a story that Muslims tell themselves in the confines of their own arenas, far from the gaze of other publics. It is an empowering millennial discourse that starts from a sense of the cataclysmic failure of the present-day Islamic community. In a series of speeches which I recorded in Manchester in different mosques, speakers, most of them lay, spoke of this experience of failure and sense of colonial domination. As one speaker put it, Today the Muslims are being humiliated in London, Moscow and Washington – since we have started looking at them and turned our back to Medina, since then human beings started being humiliated. We ruled over the whole world as long as we were obedient to Allah but today, why are the Muslims being ground down? Because we have aimed to have worldly, material (ayashi – luxury items) pleasures. And we are getting the punishment of turning our back on the Prophet’s door. And now today Pakistan has become Palestine ... and Bangladesh is suffering from storms, 13 lakh [1.3 million] are being killed in Afghanistan, and Palestinians are being tortured. What is the reason for all WERBNER ● THE PREDICAMENT OF DIASPORA AND MILLENIAL ISLAM 457 that? As Iqbal [the great Urdu nationalist poet] says: ‘Ye Muslims! You dress like Christians and in your civilisation you are Hindus. These are the Muslims. Look, even the Jews will laugh at you [shame you]. (Speech at Friday prayers before Eid, Dar ul Aloom mosque, 5 May 1989, not long after the outbreak of the Rushdie affair) Like Jewish fundamentalists’ explanations for the Holocaust, speakers suggest that God has abandoned Muslims because of their sinfulness. The trauma of Partition, the loss of three wars with India, the debacle of the 1967 Six Day War, Palestine, Kashmir, Chechnya, Afghanistan and Iraq, are read as signs of a cosmic Islamic crisis. Another speech recorded the following day in the same mosque echoes this sense of crisis and defeat: The Prophet said – have fear of God otherwise you will be humiliated. In Pakistan people are each other’s enemies, they are killing each other, in Bangladesh 35 lakh are dead because of the floods, the Palestinians are being ground down; the reason for all this is that we have forgotten God and the Prophet. Were not Umar Abdul Aziz, Khalid Saifullah and Muhammad Bin Qasim the servants of Rasool Allah [God’s Prophet]? ‘As long as you obeyed me you ruled over the world.’ Now you are seeking help from Moscow and Washington and have turned your backs on Allah so God will turn his back on you. (Eid el Fitr, 6 May 1989) Moosa has argued that ‘rethinking Islam today takes place in the shadows of the genocide of Muslims in the Balkans and the pervasive sense of psychological defeat it brings to the collective Muslim psyche’ (Moosa, 2000: 25). The problem he identifies is that any such rethinking must confront an earlier ‘triumphalist ideology: an age when Islam was a political entity and an empire’ (2000: 35). The speech of a Pakistani leader of a very strict Naqshbandi Sufi order with Deobandi tendencies, based at another Manchester mosque, invokes the vision of apocalyptic redemption from imperial domination. The speech was printed in English in the order’s magazine, Ibn ul Waqt, in December 1999, and is cited here verbatim. It highlights a tendency among more radical Muslims to demonize the West and stress the need for ritual purity as a precursor to redemption. How can we be beaten by the kuffaar? Simply because we have left Allah and Rasoolullah [God’s Prophet] have we been, and still are being, punished. Consider the nation we are being punished by – America. If this nation goes to a place where our mothers and sisters live, and then have children from them (whose fathers will be Jews and Christians), what will be the state of us! To say such a thing is relevant. Rasoolullah sallallahu alayhi wa sallam [God’s Prophet peace be upon him] has stated that we will be persecuted. Who will you turn to, to complain? Who will listen to you? Allah will surely listen on the condition that we repent. If we repent today then Allah will be on our sides. If all the people of Iraq go into prostration today and repent to Allah, promise not to have alcohol sold there anymore, promise to implement purdah, and beg to 458 ETHNICITIES 4(4) Allah, then if you do not see a tornado destroy the kuffaar, then you might question the Oneness of Allah. (Farooqui, 1999: 20) As early as 1987, well before the Rushdie affair and the first Gulf War, speeches in Manchester envisioned the ultimate global triumph of Islam. Despite present failures, as one orator declared, God will not forsake us ... Muslims will remain on this earth; they will not die out but will spread throughout the world. Judaism will die out. Christianity will die out. Hinduism will die out, and one day the name of Islam and only Islam, ‘God is one and Muhammad is His Prophet’, will remain. And when this day occurs – I may or may not be here to see it – it will be a day when the conscience of the Muslims will be fully awakened, and they will be able to differentiate between theirs and others, and [they] will be able to unite. (Speech by an educated Muslim cleric in the Barelvi tradition before the start of an eid milad-un-Nabi procession, to Muslims assembled at the Manchester Town Hall in 1987) The speaker makes clear that the achievement of the final rule of Islam is a vision that he himself may not witness. His words are thus not a call for organized action, but an expression of desire and faith in a future millen- nium when Muslims will rule the earth. His sentiments are echoed in a speech made in another mosque in Manchester promoting strictly reformist (UK Islamic Mission) tendencies, in 1989: ... But listen, no matter how much trouble you make, our religion (din) will prosper and will spread, but you don’t know it. You are ignorant. This is a complete way of life, this is the straight path and it will surely succeed, and a time will come when there will be Muslims all over the world. (Speech made at the Medina mosque, 12 May 1989) Or, as another speaker puts it: ‘Oh God, for the sake of your greatness please make Muslims successful honourably and destroy the enemies of the country. May Islam achieve fame and shame non-belief’ [kufr, apostasy]’ (speech on Eid Zoha, 13 July 1989). The contemporary ‘Khilafat’ movement, advocating the restoration of the caliphate, which includes a wide variety of organized chilliastic and militant groups from Jammat-ud Dawa, Al Muhajiroun and Hizb ut Tahrir, to the Taliban and Al Qaeda, espouses an anti-nationalist, pan-Muslim utopian ideology. It draws its inspiration from Sayyid Qutb, an Egyptian member of the Muslim Brotherhood (the Ikhwan) executed in 1966, who denounced most Muslim regimes as jahiliyya, and legitimized their over- throwing (on Qutb see Binder, 1988: 170–205). In his article ‘Paving the Way’ Qutb argues that the ultimate objective of the Islamic movement of Jihad is to establish: ... [the] headquarters of the movement of Islam, which is then to be carried throughout the earth to the whole of mankind, as the object of this religion is all WERBNER ● THE PREDICAMENT OF DIASPORA AND MILLENIAL ISLAM 459 humanity and its sphere of action is the whole earth ... there are many practical obstacles in the establishing of Allah’s rule on earth, such as the power of state, the social system and traditions and in general, the whole human environment. Islam uses force only to remove these obstacles so that there may not remain any wall between Islam and individual human beings.7 Radical Islamic groups, some based in the UK, denounce the fatalism and inaction of the Muslim majority and promote militant action, in the first instance against the regimes of Muslim countries. Against this, in spite of the resemblance to Islamist revolutionary utopian discourses, British Pakistani diasporic rhetoric is rooted in a political imagination that makes no serious attempt to implement its millennial fantasies. Moreover, counter- ing the conservative camp is a social democratic one to which most Pakistani British Labour Party members, city councillors and MPs belong. These two camps also reflect major political divisions in Pakistan itself between different political parties – broadly speaking, the Muslim League and some religious parties versus the Pakistan People’s Party. The latter recruits from the majority Barelwi stream of Islam which is traditionalist and relatively apolitical. Even when lay orators or Muslim clerics, like those cited above, position themselves imaginatively at the hub of a global civilizational battle centred on the UK, their fantasy is not underpinned by fundamentalist organization or violent mobilization. MUSLIMS IN THE UK: A SPIRAL OF ALIENATION? Despite such millennial discourses, for a while it seemed that new diasporas in the West had achieved a golden age: of creativity, freedom, civil rights, equal citizenship, and – along with these – prosperity. They were the fortu- nate few who had escaped postcolonial underdevelopment, poverty and oppression to create flourishing communities in the West. The dark side of diaspora – persecution, racism, exclusion – so familiar from the histories of the Jewish, Black, Armenian, Indian and Chinese diasporas, had been banished, or so it seemed, forever. Thus Karen Leonard (2000), writing about South Asians in America, highlights the efflorescence of voluntary activities and popular culture in what has increasingly become a successful, prosperous diaspora community, only occasionally divided by religious or national conflicts and loyalties. In the UK, too, the South Asian community has prospered overall, although Pakistanis in some depressed northern British towns have not shared this general affluence. Despite this, like other South Asians, they have felt themselves to be more fortunate than those they left behind on the subcontinent. But global crises such as September 11 or the confrontation between 460 ETHNICITIES 4(4) India and Pakistan over Kashmir bring out the dark side of diaspora. They may also divide complex diaspora communities such as the South Asian one in the UK and, as a consequence, raise serious questions about multi- culturalism and the kinds of cultural commitments minorities might legiti- mately foster. In the UK, the South Asian diaspora is segmented, encompassing Indians and Pakistanis, Bangladeshis and Sri Lankans. It is multi-faith and linguistically plural. Despite the fact that Pakistanis in the UK, like Sikhs and many Hindus, are mostly Punjabis – a fact expressed in their tastes, lifestyles, clothing, food, music, and customary wedding popular culture – they prefer to highlight their Muslim identity, especially in public political contexts. They increasingly see Islam as their most valued, high-cultural identity, especially as the British-born younger generation begin to lose touch with their Punjabi popular cultural roots. Pakistani parents insist that their children learn to read the Qur’an in Arabic and respect prohibitions on alcohol and premarital sex. After September 11, however, privileging a Muslim identity in the public sphere has become potentially problematic. Alleged acts of Islamic terror have tarred local Punjabi Muslims, despite being for the most part aspiring bourgeois pragmatists, with the brush of Muslim extremism. These allegations have cast into jeopardy past Muslim demands for public respect and multicultural rights within British society. While Hindus and Sikhs seem to be on a path of progressive integration, South Asian Muslims, in many respects identical culturally, seem to be bent on a path of self- destructive self-exclusion and progressive alienation from the western societies in which they have voluntarily chosen to settle. There are two trajectories evident within the South Asian community. One is positive, leading to mutual respect and toleration. The other is negative, leading to spiralling estrangement. Both trajectories contain their own contradictions. The first hint that British Pakistani Muslims were beginning to draw a line within the Muslim diaspora community between themselves and an alien – alsoMuslim – ‘other’, came following the arrest of more than a dozen Algerians in Leicester, a city widely known for its racial tolerance and progressive multicultural policies. Appalled by the arrest, Muslim leaders in Leicester, mostly South Asians by origin, announced that they ‘were more shocked than anyone. We didn’t know who these people were but we knew they were not involved in our community.’ The Algerians arrested, they said, had ‘almost no contact at all with Leices- ter’s mainstream indigenous Muslim community’ (Wright, 2002: 12, emphasis added). Evident here are the linguistic contortions increasingly required by local Pakistanis to distinguish Good Muslims from Bad Muslims in the UK, ‘our’ Muslims from Muslim ‘others’ (in the upshot, most of those arrested were released without charge). An important theoretical distinction is at stake here. The attack on the