4.1: Introduction

The chapter explores the strengths and weaknesses of some conflicting perspectives on human security, with a focus on the contributions of religion to human security and human insecurity. This focus reflects a major concern of post-9/11 conceptions of human security (see for example, Shani et al., 2007; Wellman & Lombardi, 2012; Shani, 2016), but it is really not that new. Islamophobic perspectives in the West can be traced back through the Rushdie affair, the oil crisis of the 1970s, the Suez crisis and post-war decolonisation, back to the crusades, and even to the first wave of Islamic expansion in the 7^th century. According to Edward Said (1995), the Orient – a concept that includes the Muslim world – is fundamentally a Western creation and a tool of Western hegemony. Over the past millennium, a dualism of Orient (East) and Occident (West) has been constructed and maintained through various Western discourses – literary, political, academic, popular, and media – in which the Orient/Muslim world is defined in terms of complémentarité (Laroui, 1990, pp. 155-65) with the West. Thus the Muslim world becomes, by definition, what the West is not. It is portrayed as essentially different and inferior because it is believed to be homogeneous and unchanging, in contrast to the cultural diversity and progress that characterise the modern West, or at least the modern West’s conception of itself. If it is homogenous, it cannot be tolerant, because tolerance depends on (and indeed is) an acceptance of heterogeneity. If it is unchanging, it will never grasp the benefits of modernity, and the Oriental Muslim mind and conscience will always be stuck in the past.

For Said and other critics, this type of Orientalism constituted a rationale for European colonial expansion in the 19^th century (Said, 1995), and it continues to be seen as associated with attempts to maintain American hegemony in the Middle East and parts of South Asia. It also constitutes a lens through which Islam is perceived and portrayed. As such, Western representations of Islam – including academic ones – often reflect Orientalist assumptions. The main theme of these representations has been the irrationality of the Muslim world as it is defined by those representations. In the colonial period, the central stereotype of the Orient related to its sensuality, allowing Victorian Europe to imagine its alter ego, a “world of excess” which “was populated by androgynes, slave traders, lost princesses and the degenerate patriarch” (Turner, 1994, p. 98). The sultan’s harem, surrounded by belly dancers, produced exotic tales of Arabian nights and pages of case material for Freudian theorising. In the post 9/11 Western imagination, this sensuality appears not merely to have been hidden behind chadors and burqas, but to have been destroyed altogether. Yet the sense of exoticism remains. The bearded fundamentalist, the suicide bomber and the veiled woman who collaborates in her own oppression may not be the object of Western fantasies, but they continue to bear the label of irrationality.

A vanished sensual vision of the Orient can be contrasted with perspectives that overemphasise conflict in the historical interactions between of Islam and Europe, and these were preoccupations of Brendon Tarrant who murdered 51 people in March 2019 in the New Zealand city of Christchurch. These mass shootings occurred during Friday prayers at two different mosques, as he live-streamed his attack and published a manifesto explaining his acts of mass murder. The killer specifically focused on the significance of historical discord between the West and the Islamic world, a point emphasised by his inscription of the dates of Western – Islamic battles on his weapons. This was an attack on human security not based on the Christian religion but on a cultural western secular ethno-nationalist worldview similar to the 2011 killings perpetrated by Norwegian killer Anders Breivik. Following the attacks, an Australian far right Senator attracted widespread condemnation (and subsequent electoral defeat) for his assertion the attacks had occurred because Muslims had migrated to New Zealand, essentially blaming them for their own murder. Globalisation contributed to the open and accepting immigration policy of New Zealand, to the killers’ absorption of racist messages, and to the politician’s use of this tragedy to emphasise his political platform. A distorted misuse of religious history and an associated mass killing had further fuelled a narrative of Islamophobia.

These phenomena have a long history, which needs to be appreciated in order to understand present-day human security dilemmas and the conflicting perspectives that respond to them. However, this chapter focuses on more recent developments. The emergence of globalisation provides the context within which diverse perspectives become conflicting perspectives, because it is only when they come into contact with each other that they are able to disagree.

Another major theme of this chapter is the relationship between human security and human rights, which is central to a number of conflicting perspectives. Whether or not human rights should be universal or culturally located is a controversial issue with no easy answer. It has important consequences for discussions of human nature and the concept of Asian values, which has been articulated by political leaders in Singapore, Malaysia, and Taiwan. A related question concerns whether or not human rights should be norm based or criterion based. A norm-based approach assesses human rights situations in relative terms, comparing what actually happens within a given culture; a criterion-based approach is based on universal rules and standards, such as international human rights laws. Another way of asking this is to choose between valuing ends and valuing means. Do we accept relative outcomes including improvements in the human situation within a given culture, or do we always insist on doing the right thing according to moral and legal standards? Can apparent human rights violations be excused when they constitute an improvement on an existing situation? In order to address this question concretely, this chapter draws on ethnographic fieldnotes from a study conducted by one of the authors.