Islamophobia and Hellenophilia: Greek Myths of Post-colonial Europe more

in Salman Sayyid & Abdoolkarim Vakil (eds), Thinking Through Islamophobia: Global Perspectives, Hurst & Co. Rodanthi Tzanelli Islamophobia and Hellenophilia: Greek Myths of Post-Colonial Europe The conundrums of plurality History lays hold on identity in unexpected ways, obscuring the norms that regulate „the inherent debatability of the past‟.1 Such norms reside in the systemic environment of nation building, in which history becomes a property that „those who exercise power jealously guard and hedge around with rules for its ownership‟.2 When a national community seeks to negotiate a place in an environment regulated by forces external to it, the principle of selection is applied by its spokespersons time and again to purify it from potentially threatening elements. This essay is primarily concerned with the political nature of such selections, prioritizing in particular the role of „Islam‟ as a plural and malleable force rather than a fixed starting point in Greek nation formation. „Islam‟ stood in the national imaginary as a blank slate on which Greeks projected those aspects of their history and „character‟ deemed scandalous by their significant political others. Greek Islamophobia was a processual condition of owning and discarding, of selecting in order to be accepted by others. The process of selection itself was far from fair or just, if justice is not identified with a Kantian imperative but seen instead as a good that is claimed by different interest groups at any given time in a polity. If „Islamophobia‟ is the phovos (fear) of Islam, then for a peripheral country such as Greece it harbours the paradox of a political diplopia that allowed the „nation‟ to survive through times of hardship, often at the expense of minority cultures. It is easy to lapse to simplifications of convenience and reproduce a formulaic conceptual complex: as the introduction advises the concept communicates a widespread culture of fear. Rather than trying to promote an all-embracing definition of the term, this essay examines its contextual emergence and diachronic development. In the Greek context, one conditioned by political pronouncements of the country as the origins of 1 2 Arjun Appadurai, „The Past as a Scarce Resource‟, Man (N.S.) 16/2, (1981), p. 201. Michael Herzfeld, Anthropology through the Looking-Glass: Critical Ethnography in the Margins of Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 58. 1 European civilization (of the triumph of Kultur over Zivilization3), Islamophobia can be examined in three forms: the first refers to the concept as a historically situated encounter of a yet-to-become nation with an equally ill-defined predecessor of its Turkish counterpart, the Ottoman empire. The second form of Islamophobia involved Greek statist responses to transmutations of Islam – notably, the Turkish nation of the Kemalist and post-Kemalist era. The Greek state‟s target would subsequently diversify to embrace the newly born Albania of the following century, rendering it as an accessory to Turkey and the Slavic Balkan peoples, especially those who had espoused communism. The final form of Islamophobia comprised a metanarrative of the first two. This originated in the dual institutional development of Greek identity as the product of Western civic traditions and the sacred child of a theological discourse upheld by the Orthodox Church. Not only does this sum up the ideological complex of Greek nation building, it also uncovers the native horror for Islamic culture as one of its preconditions. The marginality of Greece in the geopolitical arena would eventually translate into a redeeming narrative, according to which Greece stole the seeds of Western civic-democratic teachings to implant them in Europe‟s Eastern backyard, the southeastern Mediterranean region. The tree that grew out of this venture was supposed to bear the fruits of universal progress. The fact that, to this date, Greeks consider themselves a „European‟ people with an Eastern habitus but Western civilité bears testimony to their split mentalité: Eastern by proximity but Western by necessity. By habitus I allude to the cultural ethos, the anthropological definition of habit as a ritual and a way of life, but also the moral sphere occupied by a People. I do not intend to reify Greekness in this essay, only to track the historic trajectories of habitual self-narrations, the ways in which the plurality of identity was and is performed and produced in everyday life. Inevitably, however, I find myself trapped in the selfsame allegorical imperative that gives shape to a distinctive cultural habitus: a way of life becomes a binding force when it is „imagined‟ (as in Anderson 1991), narrated and performed by individuals for the collective. This essay may be placed amongst those debating the genealogical conundrums of Islamophobia, outlining the conditions of its emergence in a Greek context. But the very examination of context necessitates a discussion of its morphology – for, as a heuristic device, it exists only in relation to other, similar 3 Nobert Elias, The Civilising Process, vol. I: The History of Manners (Oxford: Blackwell, 1978). 2 conditions, such the fear of communism or more generally the fear of the heterodox (those of a different doxa, a different objectified social order). Hence, for the Greek „nation‟ Islamophobia has always been a convoluted version of xenophobia. The term refers to the phóvos (fear) of the xénos,4 the inseparable pair of the „foreigner‟ who is excluded from, and the „guest‟ who is invited in the intimate sphere of the home, the patria or masculinized homeland. Fatherland gives away the hierarchical structure of national identity by gendering its qualities: of course Islamic minorities, Greek diasporic groups and communist constituencies partook in Greek nation building, an intimate voice would admit; the denial of credit for their contribution in majoritarian political discourses only serves to prove their significance. In such discourses, Hellenic norms served to demonstrate how noble common causes were betrayed by friends or insiders - the Kavafian Efiáltes who knows your weaknesses from within. As Balibar has it, the fear of the stranger (a „nightmare‟, as efiáltes denotes) enables the „imagined community‟ to define its internal limits, constructing „a problematic of purity, or better, of purification‟ and „indicat[ing] the uncertainty of identity, the way in which the “inside” can be penetrated or adulterated by its relation with the “outside”, the foreign‟.5 A nation institutes its People, its unifying signifier,6 „not by suppressing all differences, but by relativizing them and subordinating them to itself‟. 7 Simultaneously, however, discursive constructions of a unified People seek a place in a wider human hole, a polity that exceeds the boundaries of the nation. If, internally, the nation is dependant upon politicized cultural characterizations („us‟ and „them‟, natives and aliens, outsiders and insiders8), externally it strives to assert its belonging in a transnational public sphere.9 Systemic political belonging mirrors thus subsystemic (national) integrative processes. All European nations were constructed through radical distinctions between members and non-members.10 4 5 Gerard Delanty and Patrick O‟Mahony, Nationalism and Social Theory (London: Sage, 2002), p. 163. Ėtienne Balibar, Masses, Classes, Ideas (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 63. 6 Stathis Gourgouris, Dream Nation: Enlightenment, Colonization and the Institution of Modern Greece (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), p. 18. 7 Ėtienne Balibar, „The Nation Form: History and Ideology‟, Review, 13 (1990), p. 347. 8 Ulf Hedetoft, „National Identity and the Mentalities of War in Three EC Countries‟, Journal of Peace Research, 30 (1993), pp. 281-300. 9 Ėtienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities (London: Verso, 1991); Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (New York and London: Verso). 10 Wilfred Spohn, „National Identities and Collective Memory in an Enlarged Europe‟, in Klaus Eder and Wilfred Spohn (eds.), Collective Memory and European Identity (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), pp. 116. 3 In what follows I attempt to outline the various forms Greek Islamophobia assumed in the course of modern Greek history, arguing that all of them took shape through intercultural encounters. This has implications: first it suggests that I do not regard „Greek identity‟ as unchanging but as a dialogical product of plural nature (e.g. „identity‟ and Greekness are understood in relation to a series of identifications and negations). Second, I advocate a geopolitics of identity, tracing Greece‟s political others through space: geographical proximity matters. This leads me to the third point, which relates to Islamophobia‟s role in Greek nation building: the plurality of Greek „Islam‟, its mediations through Turkish, Balkan and Western discourses, presents it as a problematique of both academic and practical nature rather than the project of a singular political agency. Even my essay should be read as an objective account but as an epistemological contribution that opens the floor to further academic and political dialogue. Western histories, Eastern routes The process of Greek nation-formation is representative of past and present geopolitical visions of Western European belonging.11 Greece was institutionalized in the early nineteenth century with the help of three powerful patrons (Britain, France and Russia) who strived for control in the Southeastern Mediterranean region. This political interest partly originated in the Western philhellenic project – the desire of politicians, art connoisseurs, travellers and scholars from western countries to retrieve from the nineteenth-century Greeks an imagined ancient civilisation on which the West had formed its self-image as „European‟ and „civilized‟.12 This crypto-colonial13 project (the symbolic colonisation of regions that fell in the cracks of neat political classifications by powerful Western countries) was a perverted version of nationalism: a few centuries down the line, the modern Greeks had become a completely different amalgam of „races‟, a fragmented ethnos with radically different experiences and cultural dispositions from those attributed to the fictional characters of the Hellenic polis by Western dreamers. These modern Greeks could not live up to Western demands, because of their many alleged shortfalls: they were disorderly, „Oriental‟ in 11 Stathis Gourgouris, „Nationalism and Oneirocentrism: Of Modern Hellenes in Europe‟, Diaspora, 2 (1992), 43-71. 12 Martin Bernal, Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilisation, I: The Fabrication of Ancient Greece (London: Vintage, 1991). 13 Michael Herzfeld „The Absent Presence: Discourses of Crypto-Colonialism‟, South Atlantic Quarterly, 101/4 (2002b), pp. 899-926. 4 their habits (e.g. liars and unreliable just like their former Ottoman rulers), and with aspirations to become a great nation that controls the region - a rather inconvenient development for Western economic interests. As Said14 has explained, the denigration of the colonized assisted in the consolidation of Orientalist projects. In Greece‟s case this denigration was coupled with the internalisation of an excessive Western admiration for things Hellenic (what I call Hellenophilia), such as ancient Greek philosophy, democracy and order. At various points in the history of modern Greece this past played the role of both the other/stranger, who lives outside Greek history, in the domain of Western Orientalism, and the same, who belongs to the process of Greek ethnogenesis. This Greece stood naked, „without columns‟ to borrow Holden‟s apt metaphor,15 and therefore exposed to external criticism by powerful political others who multiplied with the passage of time. In the same way that Todorova saw in Western conceptions of the Balkans Europe‟s „incomplete other‟,16 modern Greece stood between the two geopolitical poles (East and West) as Western Europe‟s incomplete self-image. I use this genealogy to suggest that modern Greek Islamophobia was the offshoot of Western Orientalism, and that it did not relate to the fear of Islam as such, but the fear of Western criticism for Islam‟s alleged adulterating properties. I stress the modern dimension here, because the Ottoman past and its religious-political dimensions point in a slightly different direction I explore later. Concealing the damaged, Orientalized image behind the purified, Christian European „face‟ became for Greeks a habitual move in political encounters and negotiations with Western countries from within - and later without - Europe. In the 1850s this tension conditioned a temporary occupation of Athens by the British fleet, and in 1870 it led to Greece‟s temporary falling from European grace due to its widespread brigand crime.17 In 1919 Britain and France assisted in, but did not solely instigate, the revival of Greek-Turkish rivalries in Asia Minor (a region coveted by Greeks even before the First World War), which precipitated a catastrophic conflict (1919-1922) and 14 15 Edward Said, Orientalism (London: Penguin, 1978) Holden David, Greece without Columns: The Making of the Modern Greeks, (London: Faber and Faber, 1972). 16 Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 13. 17 Rodanthi Tzanelli, The ‘Greece’ of Britain and the ‘Britain’ of Greece Performance, Stereotypes, Expectations and Intermediaries in ‘Neohellenic’ and Victorian Narratives (1864-1881) (Saarbrücken: Verlag Dr Müller, 2009), part I. 5 inadvertently contributed to the rise of Turkish nationalism.18 Significantly, the expelled populations of Asia Minor, who regarded themselves as both pure Hellenic descendants and cosmopolitan subjects of high culture, were seen in the Greek metropolitan context as half-Oriental groups that were granted citizenship rights they did not deserve. Not only did poverty and explicit Greek policies of Hellenization in the newly-acquired Macedonia push them to the North of the country in search for jobs and residence, they also gave them a social identity that some historians recognise as left-wing and working class. Ensuing internal and external conflicts (dictatorships, another World War and a civil war) promoted an identification of their working-class identity with the new global communist „threat‟ that would haunt Greece in the decades to come. During the Second World War, the British and American governments were involved in the Greek civil conflict (1944-1949), globalizing thus the Greek Question and its patrons. In the Cold War era Greece was caught between the Western and Soviet spheres of influence, which split the country into two equally ruthless factions (royalists and communists). Things turned „right‟ for the worse when a dictatorship (1967-1974) marshalled the belief that Hellas is the cradle of European civilisation, bestowing it also with a conservative Christian Orthodox dimension.19 As a result, Greek foreign and domestic policies were overdetermined by what Diamantouros (1983) calls „underdog culture‟: a combination of Christian and Hellenocentric exclusiveness, which renounces foreign interventions and attacks cultural and political difference. In order to be European the modern Greeks had to both exorcise Turkish habits and stay away from those political beliefs the Balkanized „commies‟ (a label wrongly attached to many deviant identities at the time) introduced in a politically divided Greece. The internalized discourse of Greek exceptionalism, demonstrated in the fact that Greek culture, though European by historical association, is politically marginalized and constantly ignored in academic debates on European identity, has been the focus of critical scholarship. 20 The idea of Greek exceptionalism echoes Anderson‟s modular argument, according to which 18 Charles Eddy, Greece and the Greek Refugees (London: Allen & Unwin, 1931); Michael L. Smith, Ionian Vision: Greece in Asia Minor 1919-1922 (New York: St Martin‟s Press, 1973); Paschalis Kitromilides, Mikrasiatiki Katastrophi ke Elliniki Koinonia (Athens, 1992). 19 Michael Herzfeld, „Ethnographic Phenomenology of the Greek Spirit‟ in J. Revel and G. Levi (eds.), Political Uses of the Past: The Recent Mediterranean Experience. London, Portland Or: Frank Cass, 2002a) pp. 13-15. 20 Thomas W. Gallant „Greek Exceptionalism and Contemporary Historiography: New Pitfalls and Old Debates‟, Journal of Modern Greek Studies 15/2 (1997), pp. 209-216. 6 Hellenic Greekness is constantly and retroactively21 narrated for internal and external consumption. Internally, this fulfils the needs of the Greek imagined community to see itself as a uniform entity progressing in linear, historical time. 22 Externally, it provides the nation‟s significant others with a familiar reference point that secures the unanimous recognition of Greek modernity.23 Social to cultural: experience and allegory The fear of Western criticism was superimposed on a more intimate encounter with Islam nevertheless: another retroactive narration of Greek national identity placed Greek-ness centuries before the establishment of the state in the nineteenth century, during Ottoman rule. This produced another version of Islamophobia, which was hooked on pseudo-religious understandings of Greek nationhood that Orthodoxy allegedly protected from oblivion after the fall of Byzantium. It is in this conjunction of circumstances that Occidental versions of Islam were domesticated to produce a semi-theological narrative of Greek modernity: the myth of the „secret school‟ (kryfó scholió) the progenitors of the Greek nation held in dark cellars during the four centuries of Ottoman occupation to educate young generations, highlighted both the „oppressive‟ nature of Islam and the fusion of ethnic liberation with the Western pedagogical project of nationalism. I will explain what I mean though a story. Ideological viewpoints are also experiential ones: take for example how official registers place the etymological origins of my hometown 24 at the very borders of „Europe proper‟. The name is associated with a controversial denial: the town is the Mi („no‟)-Chania (of Crete). This etymology is the site of a local experience 25 accompanied by a mythical presentation of Michaniote history that has acquired the value of oral tradition. Onomatopoieía (name-making) reveals the dramaturgical nature of name-production in society, the ways the social is constructed through story telling. Insignificant though it may seem in the grand scheme of European politics, the core myth of Michaniote origins works as an allegory for the place of Greek identity 21 Slavoj Žižek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology (London and New York: Verso, 1999). 22 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London and New York: Verso, 1991), p. 193. 23 Rodanthi Tzanelli, Nation-Building and Identity in Europe (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2008a), p. 5; „The Nation has Two Voices‟, European Journal of Cultural Studies, 11/4 (2008b), p. 499. 24 Nea Michaniona is a town situated on the western side of the Thermaikos Gulf, 75 km away from Thessaloniki, the largest city of northern Greece. 25 Wilhelm Dilthey, Selected Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), pp. 209-210. 7 in Europe. By allegory I refer to public announcements of narratives that take place elsewhere (alloú) – otherwise put, public speech (in the agorá or public market of the city state) with private meaning. Historically, the town of Michaniona belongs to a cluster of villages and towns (Angelochori, Kerasia, Baktse, Perea) founded by refugees who fled the coastal parts of the crumbling Ottoman empire after or during the last Turkish-Greek war. „Néa‟ (new) Michaniona claims direct descent from „Palaiá‟ (old) Michaniona, a village close to the historic town of Peramos. The myth of Michaniote origins26 maintains that the originary Michaniotes were Cretans from Chania who abandoned their native land because they could not accept the Ottoman „yoke‟. Another anti-Turkish version has it that these Cretans were warriors who fought for the last Byzantine emperor, Constantine Paleologos, during the Ottoman siege of Constantinople (Istanbul) in 1543. These warriors perceived the fall of the Byzantine capital as a sign of their own military incompetence. Ashamed, the survivors sailed in Propontis. Their trek ended when they approached the peninsula of Kyzikos, where they decided to stay and found 13 villages, vowing to forget their origins and start anew. Their determination to obliterate this past convinced them to name one of the new villages Mi-Chania. The passage from collective reconstructions of tradition to its official recording presents us with a rueful replacement of historical discourse, traditionally used by Greeks in self-presentation to powerful outsiders, with narratives of custom:27 the legend created analogies between the movement and settlement of Asia Minor and Propontis refugees in 1923 and the journey of Cretan warriors in 1453. As a result, this local tradition retained a close relationship with the national tradition28 of the collapse of Byzantium, still presented by Greeks as the Christian progenitor and guardian of Greekness. It may not be coincidental that this legend appeared in the local newspaper in the beginning of the 1990s, when Michaniote society was undergoing economic and ethnic-social changes that threatened established notions of local identity and national belonging (e.g. incoming labour migrants and a rapid cosmopolitanization of rural Greece). As Collard has explained, Greeks have a 26 The Peramos Homepage 1998. http://members.aol.com/peramos (consulted 12 December 2003-05 March 2004); Evangelos A. Bogas, I Michaniona tis Kyzikou (Athens: unknown, 1964); Special Issue of Nea Michaniona Press (1993) 70 Years Since the Foundation of Michaniona, 1923-1993. 27 Herzfeld, Anthropology; David Sutton, Memories Cast in Stone: The Relevance of the Past in Everyday Life (Oxford, New York: Berg, 2000). 28 Elizabeth Tonkin, Narrating Our Pasts: The Social Construction of Oral History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 87. 8 tendency to describe things that they never experienced, such as the Ottoman occupation, but to avoid narration of more recent experiences in terms of misremembering. She argued that this historical regression might be the result of a change in the way identity is handled locally. A collapse in dichotomies (we versus the „others‟) that kept this narrative alive is often symptomatic of such change. 29 Pressures imposed on Greece in the aftermath of the 9/11 tragedy, alongside the transformation of the Mediterranean region into a de facto „melting pot‟, a transit zone for immigrant populations that cross the „Oriental borders‟ of Africa and Asia to join an enlarged Europe, may also account for the re-emergence of this local tale of origins. The symbolic merges with the physical/geographical into a socially meaningful allegory: the Cretans both embody the ultimate Greek values of heroic self-sacrifice and patriotism (ideals related to the Ottoman and Turkish rule as well as the Second World) and the stereotype par excellence of the uncivilized – they are, in other words, the Greek „savage within‟.30 The denial of Cretan identity by the alleged founding fathers of Michaniona symbolizes both the departure of the Michaniote community from the margins of Greekness and the very practice of forgetting this marginality. The narrative process itself „purifies‟ Michaniote Greekness from its Ottoman/Turkish legacy, reinstating its „European‟ status. CHANIOTES = MICHANIOTES = GREEK MARGINALITY MEMORY MI-CHANIOTES = REFUGEE INTEGRATION = GREEK IDENTITY FORGETTING The story proffers a version of Islamophobia that assisted in the construction of a distinctive nationalist façade. Its pronouncement became a habitual (as in habitus) strategy that both resolved internal cultural inconsistencies and externally imposed marginalization.31 Global phenomena with Balkan implications 29 Anna Collard, „Investigating “Social Memory” in a Greek Context‟, in Elizabeth Tonkin, Maryon McDonald and Malcolm Chapman (eds.), History & Ethnicity (London and New York: Routledge, 1989), pp. 89-109. 30 Herzfeld, Michael. The Poetics of Manhood: Contest and Identity in a Cretan Mountain Village (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985), p. 9. 31 Ulrich Beck, „The Cosmopolitan Society and its Enemies‟, Theory, Culture and Society, 19/1 (2002), pp. 17-44. 9 I presented this story because it linked subjective histories to past global transformations. Before discrediting such homological thinking as peasant trivia, we may want to examine other potential ramifications it may have – especially those that linked the destinies of ethnic groups that occupied the same neighbourhood. I refer to Greece and Albania for reasons not immediately evident. Suffice it to repeat that from the outset I viewed Greek identity and Islam as plural, a move that allowed me to present them as hosts of many influences. Here I move on to explicitly regard Greece as a host of migrations – precisely the underlying point my compatriots inadvertently made through their legend. In contemporary politics cultural migrations allegedly reenact civilizational clashes32 – yet another form the nationalist discourse of resurrection may assume. But, unlike Huntington‟s apocalyptic mantra, my argument serves to stress the functional role such clashes (fusions) may have in the production of identity. In a different theoretical jargon we might have discussed this as the cosmopolitan condition, but this would deviate me from my point here. What I am trying to say, contrary to the rhetoric of „anti-immigration‟ politicians and elements of the popular press, is that patterns of movement and mobility are not an „unfortunate accident‟ or the result of any weakness of will in guarding borders as Huntington would have it. Rather, they are an integral element of the workings of the global economy, and have been since at least the late nineteenth century when the so-called „great transformation‟33 created a market society in which the needs of the capitalist economy began to direct the policies of states. The needs of the economic system continue to drive the movement of human populations, but at the same time differentiate people according to their perceived usefulness. I will, nevertheless, move beyond a purely economic take to remind that human migrations do not facilitate capital mobility solely: ideas, customs and cultural perceptions are part of the luggage that slips customs control but never escapes prejudice upon arrival at the host country. In the context of transcontinental labour mobilities Greek Islamophobia has manifested itself as Albanophobia. Ironically, such global scenarios take us back to the local scene: Michaniona was split into political camps for example, when an Albanian student was elected flag-carrier in a local parade in 2000 and in 2003. Given the peculiar place of Albanian identity in modern Greek history (some times as a 32 33 Huntington Samuel, „The Clash of Civilizations‟, Foreign Affairs, 72/3 (1993), 22-49. Polanyi, Karl (1944) The Great Transformation, Boston: Beacon Press. 10 Slavophone, at other times as a Muslim and communist „other‟), the bewildered student found himself representing the Greek archenemy.34 Today the fear of pollution informs certain Greek attitudes towards immigrants, conflating notions of race and culture. In 1996 anthropologist Nadia Seremetakis, then Advisor to the Greek Ministry of Public Health, discovered an association between Albanian (and other) immigration to Greece after the opening of E.U. borders, and stories about „waves of infections crossing Greek frontiers.‟35 Research into migrant labour in Greece showed that Greek attitudes towards Albanian workers are biased, manifested in the use of pejoratives such as „dirty‟, „cunning‟, „untrustworthy‟ and „primitive.‟36 The idea of dirt gestures towards a form of symbolic racialization of cultural difference, supporting Greek self-perceptions not simply as European, but as European par excellence (Greeks as the purest descendants of European civilisation). Needless to add that this mode of cultural engagement does not apply to all foreigners: qualifications are introduced for the same ethnic categories when individuals, including immigrants, manage to join the community – to become („be christened‟) „natives‟. Naming, acquiring a Christian name, translates into claiming, demarcating one‟s own territory to safeguard it from foreign invasions. The informal vocabulary is accurate: the personal and the political may continue to occupy different domains in Greek culture but they communicate when Greeks engage in the politics of property. In any case, through this remark we arrive at the same destination: associations of crime, pollution and political disorder are as old as the Hellenocentric project of European modernity. The „criminal‟ label serves an important role here as a reassertion of basic Enlightenment assumptions about one‟s humanity – the criminal is after all the law-breaker who forgoes the right to be treated as a full and free human being. Here we gain valuable insight into the ways the first two versions of Islamophobia communicate with the third variation, which relocates Western discourses of human progress in the Balkan space. 34 Rodanthi Tzanelli, „Not MY FLAG! Citizenship and Nationhood in the Margins of Europe (Greece, October 2000/2003)‟, Ethnic & Racial Studies, 29/1 (2006), pp. 27-49; „The Politics of “Forgetting” as Poetics of Belonging: Between Greek Self-Narration and Reappraisal (Michaniona 2000/3)‟, Nations and Nationalism, 13/4 (2007), pp. 1-20. 35 Nadia Seremetakis, „In Search for Barbarians: Borders in Pain‟, American Anthropologist, 98/3, pp. 488-91. 36 Gabriella Lazaridis and Eugenia Wickens, „ “Us” and the “Others.” Ethnic Minorities in Greece‟, Annals of Tourism Research, 26/3 (1999), p. 648. 11 But I rush: first I want to argue that contemporary Greek Albanophobia is not just homologous but also a historically evolved variation of a nineteenth-century scholarly controversy that presented the Illyrian-Slav „races‟ (the alleged Albanian progenitors), as the main polluting source of Hellenic civilisation – or, at least, what survived of it in the modern Greeks.37 The controversy mirrored geopolitical conflicts in Europe, translating them into the Aryan project that resurfaced in a Nazi context but also in other post-colonial environments around the world. We find this fear of racial-as-cultural contamination in the debate on the nature of nineteenth-century Greek banditry, a phenomenon that continued living in double representational regimes until its extinction: in national politics it remained a form of resistance against Ottoman rule, whereas in the international political arena it figured as a form of „crime‟ perpetrated by Albanians, Vlachs and „Turks‟.38 The Albanian-Vlachs of this discourse were Turkish conspirators, and therefore a source of contamination too. It is not coincidental that the same separation of good from bad brigands was applied by political „dissidents‟ during the Greek civil war to communists who engaged in guerrilla warfare with Western and Greek military: in this case, one side‟s hero was another‟s villain, but the practice itself defined who is one of our own and who is a criminal. Again then we see how a separation of the private from the public served to protect national boundaries. Hence, adopting a diachronic perspective is necessary to appreciate the significance of this separation, especially since subsequent changes in political conditions of the Balkan Raum would pave the path for long-term quarrels among emerging nation-states. With the foundation of a separate Albanian state (1911), the Albanian populations of southern Greece (the so-called Arvanites) were deemed by the Greek state to be assimilated, Hellenized, ex-Slavs; the Albanian groups of the North, however (Muslims by religion and Albanian citizens after 1913) were regarded as enemies of Greek unity and purity. The „Northern Epirus‟ Question, that part of Albania that the Greek state tried to incorporate before the foundation of the Albanian state in 1911 on the grounds that a substantial Greek minority existed in the region, fuelled hatred against the Muslim Albanian groups in the region, which became the main target of Greek nationalist propaganda. The ensuing controversy over the name 37 38 Elli Skopetea, Fallmerayer (Athens: Themelio, 1999), p. 155. Rodanthi Tzanelli, „H(a)unted by the “Enemy” Within: Brigandage, Vlachian/Albanian Greekness, Turkish “Contamination” and Narratives of Greek Nationhood in the Dilessi/Marathon Affair (1870)‟, The Journal of Modern Greek Studies, 20/1 (2002), pp. 47-74. 12 of the FYROM in the aftermath of the collapse of Yugoslavia further complicated the picture, casting Albanian Muslims as potential usurpers of Greek territories. A process of minoritization poisoned interethnic relations in the Balkans, sowing crossnational discord and suspicion. In this conjunction, the Albanian and the Muslim, (and in context of the 1940s Greek civil conflict the Yugoslav communist) merged into a single nightmare to sustain a phobia that was neither solely directed against Islam nor intended specifically for Albanians; the target was also communism, which by the 1950s had been ostracized from the Western sphere of modernity. Communism, Islam and Albanian identity were consigned in the same pit of backwardness, in turns coloured black, accused of disorder and excluded from the Greek nation that was still fighting for a place in global politics as the unrecognised descendant of Europe. Islam in modern Greece But Islam as a culture and a polity is part of Greek modernity. The Muslim presence in Greece is not new – if anything, it dates back to the selfsame history that reinvented the Michaniote community. The Lausanne Convention (1923) that ended the Greek-Turkish war and regulated the exchange of populations between Greece and Turkey did not include the Muslim communities of Western Thrace. This minority, the only officially recognized one in Greece, consists of Turks, Pomaks and „Gypsies‟39, numbers about 112,000 people and is governed by its own internal hierarchies based on language and religion. A number of problems regarding incomplete (educational and administrative) integration and bilateral political pressures (from Turkey and Greece) suggests that the projection of a coherent 39 The term retains a moral ambiguity. Scholars tend instead to refer to „Roma‟ populations whose entry in the Byzantine empire is described in equally ambivalent terms (as an „invasion‟). This is significant, as some Greek historians tend to examine these movements in the same way they view the Illyrian movements of medieval times - through the prism of Fallmerayer‟s theory. Thus, language figures as the primary criterion to designate such ethnic groups. The Roma‟s linguistic identity is probably prioritised to match a specific reading of Roma history through official Byzantine records that „bear testimony‟ to their 'hellenization' in the middle ages by the fictitious Byzantine „Greeks‟. Some also suggest that „Roma‟ („free man‟) is the preferred self-designation of these ethnic groups, a claim that does not take into account social context. In Greece for example the 'Gypsy' (gýftos) retains bad connotations, as it is habitually used to describe low-life individuals. To be a gýftos is to be homeless, stingy, petty, dirty and therefore coloured black – another clear link between ideas of „dirt‟ as matter out of place and racial belonging. Gypsies are historically linked to India (the Sind region that now belongs to Pakistan) from which they moved to Persia and then to Byzantium fleeing Ottoman persecution. Interestingly, the Greek word athínganos (from which modern 'gypsy' comes) is literally the 'untouchable' – a clear connection between race and civilization that may even date back to the Hindu caste system. The term „gypsy‟, however, has also been used by the Roma to generate plausible links with Egyptian civilization. All these designations suggest implicit (classificatory) uses of Roma identity in Orientalist discourse. 13 „community‟ image outwards provides security for these populations.40 Raising claims to Turkishness functions as a form of „symbolic capital‟: often, „Islamization‟ becomes a resentful reaction to external pressures originating in extreme nationalist reactions, racism and covert social exclusion. Navigating through the structures of a nation-state that was born to be the core of Europe „proper‟ but was eventually interpellated as its political pariah turned these ethno-religious groups into a psychological miniature of Greek nationalism. I do not equate Islamophobia against these groups with racism, however: Greece‟s centrality in Europe‟s self-image as white and civilized, may suggest Islamophobia‟s communication with Western racism in this context, but the history of Greek diasporas - including that of Asia Minor flags the difficulty to support any neat racial demarcations in a Greek cultural context. A more important mythical overlaying41, which flattens Greek history under the burden of a globalized „war on terror‟, prioritizes recent configurations of modernity in relation to transantlantic developments, drawing local versions of Islam into this vortex. For the Greek state the new „Islam‟ has to be treated as a shared enemy – or. As George W. Bush bluntly put it in 2005, either you side with us or with them. The Athens 2004 backstage is indicative of this development: coerced into „inviting‟ NATO troops to „guard‟ the Olympic athletes from potential terrorist attacks, and in order to reciprocate for the favourable comments on Greece‟s progress on the Olympics by New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg who presented Athens as the birthplace of the Olympic phenomenon, the Athens Organising Committee (ATHOC) acted as the nation‟s spokesperson.42 Little room was left for the expression of resentment against a West whose gratitude for the gift of Hellenic civilization is eternally deferred (this is a gift that British colonizers „stole‟, after all, if we count the Elgian theft in the equation). These perverted feelings could only find an outlet in ceremonial aspects of Olympism that narrated the nation‟s dramatic comeback in the cosmopolitan arena. Ceremony and politics complemented each other nevertheless: four years before the Games, the Greek socialist government had approved the construction of the first large-scale mosque and Islamic cultural centre for the needs of the Muslims in Athens, but the project was met with criticism by the Democratic Party because it was incorporated into legislation involving the 2004 Olympiad 40 41 Dimitris Antoniou, „Muslim Immigrants in Greece‟, Immigrants and Minorities, 22/2 (2003), p. 162. John Hutchinson. Nations as Zones of Conflict (London: Sage, 2005). 42 Rodanthi Tzanelli, „Giving Gifts (and then Taking Them Back): Identity, Reciprocity and Symbolic Power in the Context of Athens 2004‟, The Journal of Cultural Research, 8/4 (2004), p 432. 14 essential for the rectification of the Greek political and cultural image abroad. The politicisation of the controversy was not clear-cut 43 but subject to the needs of the moment: a former minister and member of the then ruling party had also argued that for such a gesture to be realized there should some form of reciprocity from Turkey, whereas a socialist deputy had expressed fears that the Islamic cultural centre would turn into an international terrorist hub.44 The internalisation of an American Islamophobic discourse threatens to tear away the solidary fabric of the nation-state in the same way that it divides otherwise peaceful localities. Extremist political organisations do the greatest damage with their adherence to the binary logic of Christian Hellenocentrism. Take for example the socialists‟ preference to nominate a Greek Muslim in the 2006 elections - a grand political statement in light of Ankara‟s attempts to create a climate of „controlled tension‟ in western Thrace.45 Right-wing nationalist groups such as LA.O.S. (Laikos Orthodoxos Synagermos) were quick to interpret this as an irresponsible attack on „national values‟46 when it could also be considered as a gesture of inclusivity. The selfsame attitude was adopted on other occasions, when political parties tried to diffuse tensions by extending the hand of friendship to „strangers‟ (such was the case of former conservative leader, Evert, who supported the naturalisation of the Albanian flag-carrier in 2000, even though certain clauses applied to this gesture). Such statements, replete with covert hostility against a nebulous „Marxist threat‟ that is unleashed on Greek Orthodoxy, affects economy and de-Hellenizes education,47 repeat the post-Second World War Albanophobic leitmotif in which the „enemy‟ is both communist (often conflated with „socialist‟) and Muslim. No institution holds faster to Eurocentric Hellenophilia than the Greek Church, which operates as a state within the state. The Orthodox faith is inextricably intertwined with Greek identity: for many centuries and in the absence of an 43 See also Hellenic Republic, Embassy of Greece, „Islam does not Identify itself with Terrorism, Greek PM Says‟, Washington DC at http://www.greekembassy.org/embassy/Content/en/ArticlePrint.aspx?… (accessed 31 January 2009). 44 Antoniou, „Muslim Immigrants‟, p. 170. 45 See E Kathimerini, 12 May 2006 46 Yannis Kouriannidis, „Karachasan Candidacy: Playing with Fire‟ (10 May 2006) at http://www.egrammes.gr/print.php?id+2086 (accessed 31 January 2009). 47 See opening statement of Hellenic Lines, 17 April 1996 at http://www.e-grammes.gr (accessed 31 January 2009). 15 administrative core, it operated as a cohesive force for the Greek ethnie.48 Because during Ottoman rule the colonized ethnic groups were placed under the millet system, administrative units based on religious belief, religion developed into the most immediate form of ethnic identification.49 It has been noted that an emerging secular conception of identity-as-citizenship clashed with religious understandings of identity in the nineteenth century during the formation of Balkan imagined communities. But Christian religion remained the definitional element of the Rum-millet that included other ethnies except for the Greek. In fact, despite its secularisation, Greek nationalism always drew upon the religious vocabulary to articulate itself.50 The tradition of Byzantium, which is claimed as modern Greek heritage and presented as yet another version of the „Fortress Europe‟ discourse, fuses with the apparently contradictory history of ancient Hellas, also retroactively presented as modern Greek heritage. Byzantium corresponds to the intimate face of Greekness (that of a feminized Romiosini, the Greekness of the Rum-millet), whereas ancient Greece is the public façade of the nation. In between these two traditions stand the „dark ages‟ of Ottoman rule, the so-called Tourkokratía that seals modern Greece‟s fate as the fallen angel of Western modernity. The secular language of nationalism meets the religious language of sin to paint a discourse of political theodicy from which modern Greece cannot find absolution. The predicament of Greek modernity the Orthodox Church suggests presents Islam as Satan‟s reincarnation from which we can be redeemed only if we turn our back to some 400 years of shared history – if we forget who we are and how we arrived here. But stoning Greek Islam (the „Eve of Europe‟) is a rational choice that provides little consolation, as in Greek folk wisdom the Antichrist is also embodied by the treacherous „Frank‟,51 the Westerner who stole the riches of Hellenic wisdom without reciprocation. Orthodoxy‟s predicament of Greek modernity is a hoax: Greek Christians are invited to choose between a rock and a hard place. One only need mention the indecorous outburst of the Metropolite of Kalavryta Ambrosios in 2000 during the episodes in Michaniona, who presented the 48 Victor Roudometof, “Nationalism, Globalization, Eastern Orthodoxy: „Unthinking‟ the „Clash of Civilizations‟ in Eastern Europe”, European Journal of Social Theory, 2/2 (1999), p. 255. 49 Roger Just, „The Triumph of the Ethnos‟ in E. Tonkin, M. Chapman and M. McDonald (eds.) History and Ethnicity, (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1989), pp. 71-78; Anastasia Karakasidou, Fields of Wheat, Hills of Blood: Passages to Nationhood in Greek Macedonia 1870-1990 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997); Paschalis Kitromilidis, „“Imagined communities” and the Origins of the National Question in the Balkans‟, European History Quarterly, 19/2 (1989), pp. 166-176. 50 See Tzanelli, Nation-Building, ch. 6. 51 Charles Stewart, Demons and the Devil (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), p. 141. 16 Greek flag as an inalienable Greek property (just like one‟s „wife and car‟) that cannot be „appropriated‟ or „borrowed‟ by an Albanian immigrant. 52 The subtext of this comment, sexist and nationalist at the same time, erected symbolic boundaries to protect Greekness from an imaginary Islamic invader. The statement, which caused immense embarrassment to the Greek government, the Archbishop and other highranking members of the Greek Church, did not differ that much from other ones made by the extreme right. Likewise, a local bishop publicly renounced the creation of a mosque in the centre of Athens as objectionable by the „average Greek‟ 53 – a discourse embellished with the idea of an oncoming danger. The constitutional recognition of Orthodox religion as the Greek state religion comprised a violation of the European Convention on the Defence of the Fundamental Human Rights, which Greece has signed.54 Such „cultural intimacy‟55 came at a heavy price: for a long time, the clash of the spirit and the letter of the European Convention with the spirit and the letter of the Greek Constitution posed serious obstacles to Greece‟s European integration. An explicitly theological discourse eventually met a legal one, when the Greek constitution recognised the Muslim community‟s religious life. This comes in the form of appointment of muftis, the respect of Islamic family law, the administering of vakif (endowments), the training of minority teachers at the Academy in Thessaloniki and the management of Islamic religious schools (medrese). These legal privileges do not always resolve racial tensions on the ground, and there have been reports of administrative discrimination.56 It is telling that the construction of the mosque in Paiania for Athens 2004 was supported by the embassies of Arab countries: following a pattern pursued by other European governments, the Greek Ministry of Foreign Affairs sanctioned a form of diplomatic subcontracting (a reversal of the pattern of Ottoman capitulations involving the surrender of extra-territorial privileges to a Muslim power by a non-Muslim one57), which inadvertently excluded the alleged beneficiaries of this venture from the negotiations (the Thracian muftis and any Greek 52 53 Tzanelli, „Not MY FLAG!‟, p. 39. Antoniou, „Muslim Immigrants‟, p. 170. 54 Adamantia Pollis, „Greek National Identity: Religious Minorities, Rights, and European Norms‟, Journal of Modern Greek Studies, 10 (1992), p. 189. 55 Michael Herzfeld, Cultural Intimacy (New York: Routledge, 2005). 56 Antoniou, „Muslim Immigrants‟, p. 164. 57 Yahya Michot, „Muslims in Belgium‟, Muslim Politics Report: Council of Foreign Relations, 15 (September/October 1997). 17 bodies representing the Muslim minority).58 It also nevertheless took a problem out of a dead end, a context plagued by ethno-religious conservatism before which even state power cowers. The unbearable ‘thin-ness’ of cosmopolitanism This reactive attitude stands in striking contrast to the situational recognition of Islam as a cultural component of Greek culture. This is a strange game that calls for the recognition of cultural fusions as valuable while seeking ways to efface difference in the name of purity and monism. The official face of Greekness is generously supported by the surviving archaeological interest in Greek heritage (both Byzantine and Hellenic) whereas its Ottoman survivals stand apart as its poor relatives, exotic displays for both internal consumption and the global „tourist gaze‟.59 These tendencies relocate the Orientalist movement within the Greek continental margins, revealing the ambivalence the self-christened „children‟ of Hellas feel towards Europe‟s „true lineage‟ to follow Sardar‟s comment.60 Occasionally, this Ottoman past dissolves into a post-national landscape, and at other times it re-emerges with vengeance: consider the initiative of the Benaki Museum of Islamic Art in Athens, currently hosting an exhibition of „snapshots‟ of Islam (photo project „The Modern Arab World‟) to dispel enduring stereotyping of Islamic cultures, and juxtapose it to the resentment displayed against Muslim immigrants in Greece by Greek workers and other natives.61 In practice, Greek society is evolving into a „multicultural melting pot‟, but Hellenocentric resistances to change are as strong as ever. Aesthetics renegotiate political mentalité primarily for the middle classes: take for example the cafes of Thessaloniki that are hosted in buildings surviving the Ottoman era, or the tavernas that serve Turkish-Greek delicacies to bon viveurs and foreign visitors alike. Myrovolos, an eaterie at the centre of the city‟s market, remained a katagógion (underground facility) that gathered questionable characters for decades, as I found out in my student years. In more recent years, however, it was smartened up to attract both a neo-Orientalist clientele and local folk musing over „the old days‟ of Anatolian 58 59 Greek Helsinki Monitor, „Easter Stories of Church-State Interweaving‟, 24 April 2003. John Urry, The Tourist Gaze (London and New Delhi: Sage, 1990). 60 James Brooks, „Deep Roots of Islamophobia‟, Reading Islam, 13 February 2007 at http://www.readingislam.com (accessed 30 January 2009). 61 Iason Athanasiadis, „Snapshots of Islam: An Athens Museum Seeks to Promote Understanding of the Modern Arab World‟, Newsweek, 8 September 2008 at http://www.newsweek.com/id/156321 (accessed 31 January 2009). 18 culture. Greco-Roman and Byzantine architecture is maintained intact; its adulteration by consumerist needs is not welcome. But rebétiko, a music culture that migrated to the mainland together with Asia Minor refugees at the start of the twentieth century to revamp Greek cultural taste, operates as a welcome cosmopolitan statement, despite its historical specificity. So does the infamous tsiftetéli, a Turkish-Greek version of belly dancing transmogrified in the era of global ethnic music into a bodily expression of individualism,62 a feminized art of self-presentation that draws upon Orientalist stereotyping of sensuality to complement the virulent face of Greekness preserved in eghoismós.63 Photo 1 62 See Herzfeld, Anthropology, p. 160; Jane Cowan, Dance and the Body Politic in Northern Greece (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990). 63 Drawing on the idea of egoism as self-centredness, the term refers to masculinized self-presentation (the public display of social identity). See Herzfeld, Poetics of Manhood, p. 11. 19 Η Πρίγκηπος, a café-bar in the centre of Thessaloniki, is very popular with students and visitors alike. It was named after an island (Büyükada) of the Propontis (the Straits that link Europe with Photo2 Asia). The building, part of the pre-liberation period architecture of the city, is situated opposite the house of Kemal Atatürk, the ‘founding father’ of modern Turkey, which is now hosting the Turkish consulate. Photo 1 is a snapshot of the façade: the style is reminiscent of the old Greek coffee shops (kafeneíon); photo 2 shows a corner of the interior, replete with a water-pipe (nargilés) and an image of the Byzantine Aghìa Sofìa, a former Christian temple in Istanbul that figures in Greek nationalist discourse as part of the Greek-European heritage (Image courtesy of Paraskevi and Evelyn Tzanelli, 2009). In a country whose global image was shaped by a Mexican Zorbas and a salad that is Greek only in name, cosmopolitan Orientalisms deal a blow to Islamophobic intransigence and its Hellenocentric origins. A question remains, however: how much of this translates into social change of universal significance and applicability and how much is simply mobilized for the „conservation‟ of a public façade that safely stirs away from European criticism? 20