Ultraist Visualities, Citational Politics, and the Place of Islam

This paper dives into the uncanny conjunction of ultraist vocabularies, in particular the nexus of contestation wherein ISIS and Euro-American rightwing movements conjoin and thrive in each other’s company. While at first thought we might think that extremist groups make for strange bedfellows, they thrive in colloquy and through a rhetoric of shared signs and symbols. Chief among them is the ISIS flag, the visual logo or heraldic device unfurled by this militant group that claims to represent Islamic religious and political authority. At the same time, however, the ISIS flag also is a hallmark of groups that see themselves as the polar opposite of ISIS, including the American alt-right group “Secure America Now” and the German nativist movement “Alternative für Deutschland.” The ISIS flag is not a written sign. Combining the Muslim proclamation of the faith (shahada) and the impression of the Prophet Muhammad’s signet ring, it suggests the group’s carrying forward of prophetic legitimacy and authority. Those conversant in such stylistics comprehend the communicative thrust of this particular pictogram, which, above all, is intended to persuade onlookers that ISIS is the rightful inheritor of the prophetic prerogative. Much like American ultraist groups, the German AfD employs a host of similar stratagems, including the cooptation of Orientalist tropes about the Middle East. To give just one example here, the AfD produced a series of campaign posters promising that, under their aegis, Europe would rise again and not become “Eurabia.” Laced with exclamatory rhetoric, one of the signs trots out Jean-Léon Gérôme’s “Slave Market,” a French painting dating from 1866 in which Arab men gather in a courtyard to assess the quality of a nude female slave offered for sale. As Edward Said has shown, such titillating and sexual scenarios are a hallmark of European Orientalist imagination. Moving up to today’s predicament, we also can propose that such visuals engage in the rhetoric of fear-mongering as it pertains to the female body. The porte-manteau term “Eurabia” pervades alt-right and Islamophobic discourses across the world. It essentially describes the Arabization and Islamization of Europe, through which the continent loses its Christian heritage and population. Pandering a host of conspiracy theories and propelled by a fierce anti-Islamic animus, those who oppose such a miscegenation couch themselves as brave counter-jihadis finding for the survival of Western Civilization. They also strengthen their rhetoric through visual devices that riff off the flag of the European Union, in which the ring of stars is either under attack by scimitars, taken over by Allah, or superseded by the shahada. Here, the pictorial concatenation weaponizes the notions of aberration and the cross-breed, relying once again on the ultraist vocabularies produced by ISIS. The siloed rhetoric of purity comes tumbling town in the in-between spaces where ultraist vocabularies meet and flourish in synchronicity. In this tertiary terrain, the visual rhetoric of extremism appears as if the same language – one which is engaged in a circular citational politics of sorts.