Very early in the book you’ve outlined two infamous examples of what you’ve dubbed clashes of un-civilizations in both the Danish Cartoons controversy and the Cronulla Riots. Is it examples like this that have compelled you to write the book now?

They actually both occurred once I started writing and I thought ‘this is so clearly the kind of thing I should write about to introduce the book’. You have these incredible misunderstandings between the Muslim world and the West and these misunderstandings are characterised by a certain arrogance that tends to find a digression in events like say, the Danish Cartoons.

It’s not just arrogance but arrogant ignorance on both sides that you reject in the book.

Well the ignorance is often accompanied by arrogance. Especially for those who don’t have the humility to recognise others’ frames of reference. But ultimately for me, it comes back to arrogance, which is why I say in the introduction that ‘the misunderstandings we’re labouring under are more diseases of the heart rather than [of] the intellect’. Quite intelligent people can harbour them but it has to do with whether or not they have the humility to let people speak within their own frames of reference and understand them on their terms.

In addressing the lack of communication between Islam and the West on the big issues such as jihad, secularism, and concepts of modernity, you outline both the relevant Western and Islamic histories. However this is mostly with an eye to explaining the oft-unknown Islamic interpretation of Western-specific concepts.

Would you say then that you wrote with a non-Muslim audience in mind?

I tried to write in a way that would be understood by a non-Muslim audience but not necessarily exclude the Muslim ones and ended up really just writing what I thought rather than pitching it at a particular audience. From that point of view it’s not a very strategic book; it’s almost written as a form of therapy (laughs).

The essentialisation of the very heterogeneous Muslim population has resulted in some inaccurate labeling and you seem to have captured the Muslim sentiment well with the chapter title “Don’t Call Me a Moderate!”

(Laughs).  I was debating whether or not to put that chapter in but it seems to be one people have responded well to. ‘Moderate’ as a term is not a religious one. We talk about ‘moderates’ when we talk about the Liberal party or the Republican party or so on because it is indelibly a political term so I think a lot of Muslims get frustrated with it because it’s not a term they’d use to describe themselves and because they don’t really have an understanding of what it means beyond the political. That’s an important point because Muslims are not merely political actors; they’re people like everybody else and they’re being robbed of the opportunity to appear in the public space as anything other than a member of some fake political party.

The book asserts that politics and politicians play a crucial, usually negative, role in all this. What do you feel are the main motivators for continually fuelling this blame game?

The politician is not going to be able to sell a message that is introspective and self-critical: we live in an age of quite deep uncertainty, and not just because of the advent of terrorism, but simply within the process of globalisation. The intensification of that process in the last two decades means aspects of ours lives are changing in ways that we haven’t experienced before and we crave more certainty. The politicians who deliver that tend to be fairly successful and one of the ways you can deliver certainty is to talk about how virtuous you are in contradistinction to how problematic or even evil others are.

Bringing it back to a specific point in the book. The issue of Muslim women has become a point of contention in this screaming match, and you’ve actually urged that the women themselves be listened to. Quite a rare and even radical point of view.

(Laughs)

Why does such a seemingly obvious notion remain so radical or rarely expressed?

When we have ongoing debates about the hijab they’re not about the hijab. What’s happening is that women, or their veils, are being used as symbols on which these rhetorical culture wars are being fought. Western politicians and media commentators will talk endlessly about the headscarf as though this piece of cloth is enough to bring down entire societies. You’ll also have Muslim [commentators] who do the same thing and invoke the hijab as some kind of emblem of cultural resistance to what they perceive to be Western cultural hegemony.

I think ultimately what’s at stake here is not really anything to do with the hijab and more to do with feelings of cultural superiority. Accordingly, it doesn’t seem to occur to people that perhaps those Muslim women who do wear the hijab can provide a valuable perspective because Muslim women in this whole scenario are not really people; they’re just symbols and we seem determined to proceed on that basis.

So who do you feel are the people who are capable of bridging this dangerous lack of meaningful communication?

You can have a million books out there; you can have a million media articles but there’s a limit to what it can do because you’re swimming against a tsunami really. I think that it’s going to be human interaction that does it. I’m thinking of how in Victoria people tend to have a fond affection now for migrants who came out from Greece or Italy. Media activism and popular television shows back in the 80’s are part of that but a lot has to do with how these cultures have become embedded in people’s daily lives. People love going to a favorite ristorante down the street in Carlton and they engage in Italian culture and with Italians in that way for example. The publication of books or media commentary, that sort of stuff tends to follow after the fact, but you need that space with human interaction and openness.

And on that note, I’ll say thank you for your time and company this morning

Not at all.

Waleed Aly’s new book 'People like Us: How Arrogance is Dividing Islam and The West' is now available at bookstores nationwide.

Author’s Photograph by Craig Abraham

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