How the Rest Became the West in the Mars One Fatwa Controversy: spaceflight, globalism, risk to life, and strategic occidentalism in the UAE (original) (raw)

Cambridge MPhil Research, 2015

Abstract

On February 2014, the UAE’s General Authority of Islamic Affairs released a fatwa prohibiting Muslims from a one-way Mars voyage (calling it suicide), a response to Mars One, for which 500 “Saudis and other Arabs” had volunteered. Mars One immediately requested the Authority “cancel” its fatwa, citing Islamic sources to argue the necessity of a Mars voyage. In July, the UAE established its Space Agency, planning for a Mars probe in 2021 to celebrate the bicentennial of independence from Britain. The resulting discourse online between Mars One, western media, and political/commercial/media bodies in the UAE raises questions not merely about the UAE and Islam, but also about spaceflight and humanitarianism in global public discourse. Timothy Mitchell writes that the state operates beyond traditional boundaries, adopting Foucauldian techniques of power—not a Hobbesian hierarchy of centralized control but a discursive “effect” circulating even among non-state actors. Employing this framework to the UAE’s relationship with western and globalized spaceflight, I examine corporations and media outside borders of U.S., UAE, British, and Dutch states. UAE actors’ condemnation and support of spaceflight both rely upon reference to the west, exercising “strategic occidentalism” in a discourse enabled by Mars One. Mitchell’s discursive western power flattens across this global discourse, dangerously constricting the existential and political possibilities for answering the fundamental challenge of the fatwa controversy: What does, or should, humanity sacrifice for science? In order to realize “the peaceful uses of outer space,” the international community should come to terms with these asymmetries in global public discourse. “How the Rest Became the West in the Mars One Fatwa Controversy: Spaceflight, globalism, risk to life, and strategic occidentalism in the UAE” Based on research during MPhil in the Department of the History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge, under the supervision of Mary Brazelton. (Cambridge MPhil research)

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