Book Notes

In the Name of Identity: Violence and the Need to Belong, By Amin Maalouf. Translated by Barbara Bray. New York: Arcade Publishing, 2000. Pp. 164. $22.95, cloth.

How are murderous identities made? If ever there was a time that this question pressed, and pressed hard, on our collective consciousness it is now, in the wake of the devastating events of September 11. The question is the focus of Amin Maalouf’s short and engaging book, first published in France in 1996, and recently issued in its first North American edition.

Maalouf’s self-described task in this book is “to try to understand why so many people commit crimes nowadays in the name of religious, ethnic, national or some other kind of identity,” how what he calls “identities that kill” are made and sustained. His answer is simple and straightforward:

murderous identities are born of humiliation. Thus, if we want to address the problem of ethnically or religiously motivated violence, we must work to counter the conditions under which people are humiliated or denigrated for being part of some ethnic or religious or national group.

For Maalouf, the key condition that makes it possible for some to humiliate others is a failure to understand the true nature of identity. Identity, he reminds us, is neither monolithic nor static, “it is built up and changes throughout a person’s lifetime.” As such, it is a shifting composite of a great number of different, often conflicting, allegiances and attachments, including one’s allegiances to one’s family, neighborhood, village, and country, to one’s religious, ethnic, linguistic, and racial group, to one’s profession, favorite soccer team, or political movement.

Maalouf refers to these constitutive allegiances as “genes of the soul” though he cautions that they are in no way understood to be innate. Indeed, time and again, he returns to the point that we are not born but rather made—and make and remake ourselves—in relation to the world in which we live and the choices that it presents to us. It is a point that bears repeating, he says, because a failure to recognize the fluidity, multiplicity and malleability of identity is not only misguided but also dangerous. The danger is twofold. First, a failure to recognize the complexity, the multi-dimensionality, of the Other makes their dehumanization easier. Second, imposing on the Other a rigid, singular (and usually inferior) identity will provoke them, in anger and defiance, to pick up arms to ‘assert their identity.’ This, he says, is how ordinary men are “transformed into butchers.”

Maalouf places great theoretical emphasis on the cognitive dimension of the failure to understand the true nature of identity. At times, the text reads as though Maalouf viewed the contemporary problem of identity-based violence primarily as a cognitive distortion that might be solved if we only could find a way of reforming long-standing but unexamined habits of thought that imprison us in outdated and dangerous ways of seeing the world. But at other times, the text suggests that the view he wants to put forth is a little more complex. He discusses at some length the cognitively distorting effects of asymmetrical power relationships—how these cause people on both sides of the relationship to reify the Other, for example.

He also discusses the causal importance of what many perceive to be an American-led push toward globalization to generating a sense of humiliation, marginalization and alienation in members of non-western, non-hegemonic ethnic, religious and national groups. In what becomes, after September 11th, a rather chilling passage, he asks: “How can they [non-westerners] not feel their identities are threatened? That they are living in a world which belongs to others and obeys rules made by others, a world where they are orphans, strangers, intruders or pariahs? What can be done to prevent some of them feeling they have been bereft of everything and have nothing more to lose, so that they come, like Samson, to pray to God for the temple to collapse on top of them and their enemies alike?”

In response, he proposes what he calls a “moral contract”—a reciprocal agreement of mutual recognition between presently dominant and subordinate groups in the world, such that all people everywhere may legitimately feel that they are equal participants in the emergence of a “common civilization,” that they are reflected in it and reflect it in turn. Within a given society, the moral contract would take the form of an agreement between members of the majority culture and those of minority cultures to treat each other as equals, and to take seriously the constitutive nature of the other’s culture. To this end, each must be prepared to give up his claim to cultural purity. Majority members must not predicate full-fledged membership on a complete abandonment by minority members of their cultural heritage; rather, they must be prepared to accept them as full members in light of—indeed, in celebration of—their cultural (or ethnic or religious) difference. For their part, members of minority cultures must be prepared to adapt, at least minimally, to the basic rules and values of the majority culture, even if this means abandoning some of their cultural practices.

It is difficult to try to define the concrete principles according to which a moral contract to be applied within a given society might be structured. What constitutes a “minimal” adaptation by members of cultural minorities to the basic rules and values of the majority culture, for example? How much can legitimately be required of them? And how much can be required of members of the majority culture vis-à-vis minorities? Even more difficult is conceptualizing the structure of Maalouf’s proposed moral contract between the West and the Rest. What would it look like? And, sadly, what hope is there for such a contract given current geo-political realities?

Maalouf makes no pretense to even know how to begin to address these important questions. But this is, ultimately, of little consequence, for the book’s principal merit lies in that it raises these questions—and many others—in the first place, and does so in a way that invites his readers to continue to think hard about the seemingly intractable problem of identity-based violence in the world today. His book is certainly not the place to end one’s inquiry, but it is a useful place to start.

—Sandra J. Badin

Copyright © 2002 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College
Harvard Human Rights Journal / Vol. 15, Spring 2002