If the 1971 war is remembered at all in Pakistani political culture, it is remembered as a war between India and Pakistan, and as an episode in the continuing saga of antagonism between the two nation-states. Bangladeshis are simply forgotten except as betrayers of Pakistan, collaborators with India against Pakistan, or at best as brainwashed victims of India’s plot. The tropes – such as ‘Bengali betrayal’ and ‘Indian designs’ – deployed to explain away the secession of East Pakistan serve as devices and convenient frameworks to stunt any meaningful reflection on (West) Pakistan’s own conduct during and before the war. Silence ensues, and endures.

Click here to read the rest.

See Also: 2010: Top 10 (+5) Books

Update: um, how could I have forgotten to mention these three?!

Mumbai Fables  See Rohit Chopra’s review.

Routine Violence: Nations, Fragments, Histories (Cultural Memory in the Present) Read the intro, and this (pdf), and this (pdf).

Precarious Life: The Power of Mourning and Violence (available on scribd!)

…the companies who pulled their ads include Lowe’s, Bank of America, the Campbell Soup Co., Dell, Estee Lauder, General Motors, Goodyear, Green Mountain Coffee, McDonalds, Sears, and Wal-Mart. So many don’t give your money to those companies this holiday season? Or call Lowe’s CEO Robert Niblock at (704) 758-2084 or Executive Support Mr. Andrew Kilby at (866) 900-4650 and let them know what you think about this decision (keep it respectful, please).

                     Ads pulled from All-American Muslim

Of course, the wellspring of Islamophobia & anti-Muslim racism in the US is the state itself. Infiltration of mosques, mapping, surveillance, the many entrapments through a network of informants, witch-hunts, harassment of Muslims by various policing agencies, profiling at airports, coercive immigration policies, detentions and deportations of Muslim immigrants, fascist initiatives such as Special Registrations, racist discourses such as paternalist outreach to Muslims *to fight terror*, not treating hate crimes by members of the society as such, mostly-Muslim to Muslim-only gulags at home and abroad; the list of state’s hate crimes against Muslims, both at home and abroad, but especially those who are ‘out of place,’ is long. So go ahead and boycott Lowe’s, Sears, GM, etc. It needs to be done. Islamophobia needs to be fought on many fronts. But never, never forget the state’s role as the vanguard of Islamophobia.

My comment on the thread:

Reading — not just what is written but what is actually said – is a skill that is learned with patience and perseverance. This skill is enormously helpful in developing the tools needed to critically understand the world around us and how, in many different ways, it has come to be the way it is.

The only link you’ve posted is actually satire/sarcasm targeting those that are pushing for Haqqani to be prosecuted AND are being anti-Ahmadi by claiming that Mansoor Ijaz is Ahmadi, asking if Ahmadis are not to be trusted then how is it that Mansoor Ijaz’s word is trusted to go after Haqqani. The point is to show that when it suits a particular political agenda, people will use something that they themselves consider to be discredited. Here’s what the same blogger has written in a different post: “The anti-Ahmedi and Hudood laws are a disgusting blot in our penal code.”

What the blogger’s post (the one you mentioned) lacks is effectively pointing out that scapegoating Ahmadis and seeing their hand in every nefarious act against Pakistan is hateful and bigoted, ethically wrong, morally abhorrent, and intellectually stupid. The point is that even if Mansoor Ijaz was Ahmadi, SO WHAT? Being the target of Islamophobia and racism, I know how segments of population are marginalized and violated, how rumors are spread about them, how they are projected as being powerful even while laws are made to restrict their rights and incredible acts of murder done to them— all of it done to justify more violence against them and to continue the ongoing legal and cultural violence on them. This whole string is a lesson in the commonalities between those that are anti-Ahmadi and Islamophobes (e.g. Hindutva in India and racists in the West).

Last but not the least; Islam is not a thing or an object that anyone can steal. It has gone on, goes on, and will continue to go on in its many shapes and forms. Those who are so concerned with the so-called defence of Islam slogan have a disrespectful attitude towards this religion and a very high sense of their own worth (also called arrogance). Islam is not a feeble thing that needs people’s protection. Those that claim to be its protectors, by that very claim think of themselves superior to it. And that is an insult to Islam and Muslims.

–

Previously: I

Anti-Ahmadi Muslim bigots have a lot in common with Islamophobes and anti-Semites. The stock rhetoric of Islamophobes and anti-Semites involves the enemy within, a minority cabal of powerful traitors (often with ties to outside enemies), destroying the nation. The nation is shaped and reshaped by naming and attacking the enemy, both within and without. To be identified as the mainstream is to be normative, and that is to be privileged and free from the steam-rolling reserved for those identified as the enemy. To crackdown on those not toeing the mainstream line is a way to shape, steer, and define the community, be it racial, religious, and/or national. To be able to do that and  to posit oneself as the protector of the community is to feel empowered and powerful, and that in the age of imperialism is a commodity short in stock.

—

PS. This sarcasm used to score a point, however necessary it may be to show an absurdity, still plays on the ‘devious Ahmadi’ trope, and is irresponsible writing especially given the history of violence visited on Ahmadis, whether living or dead.

*******

If tear-streaked faces of broken families
begged you to stop killing their sons,
would you reflect and see your wrongs,
or would you still load your guns? 

For every girl who lost a father,
every wife now a widow,
I hope you see that you have spilled,
the blood splattered on my window [1]

I

High on testosterone and brimming with teenage angst, we entered the office of Chief Minister of Punjab. The object was to get a personalized license plate for my friend’s new car. The plan was that in order to get through the “gatekeepers,” I would claim to be the Chief Minister’s nephew, but we hadn’t a clue of what we would do if we were granted his audience. I had probably imagined that the innocence of our request and confidence in our ability to access a high ranking official would be enough to charm the man. Or perhaps, we were sure that we wouldn’t get that far. And we did not. But that provided us with something to laugh about for years afterwards. We had met in college. New to the city and facing similar issues of unfamiliarity with our surroundings, we started hanging out. For two years, until our lives took us on divergent trajectories, we were together in class in the morning, playing cricket in the afternoon, taking tutorials in the evening, and roaming around the city at night. We became the best of friends. Our families too, in time, developed cordial ties.

When he told me that he was an Ahmadi, my heart sank. I thought to myself: why me? Why do I have to be the one who has to decide whether or not that should matter? And, what would my parents say? While I was thinking about what that revelation meant for me and our friendship, I didn’t much reflect on how often he must have been shunned and ostracized in the aftermath of this revelation. That his cautious pace of befriending people, the degrees of closeness, the maintenance of various gradations of friendship and the concordant measured dissemination of personal information, is not merely a matter of his introvert personality and its attendant quirks, did not dawn on me.

The easiest way to proceed was to ignore the differences between us, and to avoid talking about religion. Shared culture and language, common generational concerns and interests, and most important of all, the glue of friendship was enough to hold us together through the years and even across continents. But that was my escape into the liberal conceit of “tolerance,” whereby even as I acknowledged his humanity, I did not have to engage with his experience as a Pakistani Ahmadi – and therefore my own complicity in the violence inflicted on Ahmadis. For a gaze that sees all things religious and signs of religiosity as essentially pre-modern or anti-modern, and religious differences and the terrifying violence therein as mere internecine squabbling that it transcends and is not implicated in, it is perhaps easy to accept an Ahmadi as an Ahmadi and as a Muslim. But this self-serving acceptance, convinced as it is at not having a dog in this fight, consigns itself to irrelevance vis-à-vis the thus far largely, and increasingly, one-sided conversation that needs to be engaged, and the history of marginalization that needs ceaseless elucidation, dissemination, and popular and state acceptance, in order to not only restore but also sustain the full citizenship and socio-cultural standing of Ahmadis in Pakistan.

 II

“[Dipesh] Chakrabarty points to the everyday behavior [in India] that in Europe or Australia would indicate racism, for example, informal unwillingness to sell property to Muslims – to which one could add references to Muslims as dirty or having too many children, or, as in the American South, the remnants left when the smart ones go north. No analogy is perfect: others have found anti-Semitism a useful parallel. One can also link Muslims, Copts, Ahmadis, and Bahais who are labeled in their respective countries as the cosmopolitans, people of mixed loyalty with links to outsiders, secretly privileged and powerful, in short, the language once used of European Jews. In all these cases minorities are forced to play roles not of their own choosing, not least that of foil against which the unity of others – Hindus, the nation –can be constituted, and injustices of class and wealth obscured. The history that identifies Indian Muslims as aliens, destroyers, and crypto-Pakistanis, with its profound moral and political implications for citizenship and entitlements is critical in sustaining that role. It presumably cannot be successfully challenged until, as has happened only partially and very recently in theUnited Statesin relation to African Americans, the social and political interests that sustain belief in fundamental difference are changed.”

Barbara D. Metcalf, “Too Little and Too Much”[2]

Incidents of direct violence on Ahmadis are brushed under the rug, by those who at least acknowledge that a wrong had been done, as the work of a few bad apples and an extremist fringe. The typologies of the day such as Sufi/Salafi, secular/fundamentalist, moderate/extremist, conceived as binaries, are inadequate and ultimately unhelpful since there is no internal stability and coherence to these terms, and also because they generally work as a device to place the self in the former moderate category and the purveyors of violence in the latter extremist category, thereby excusing oneself and finding only and all of the culpability in the latter. Their pernicious effect is to exceptionalize brutality as something that only monstrous life-forms are capable of, instead of seeing brutality as a human trait and that those thought to be brutes are in fact human like the rest of us.

It is also tempting think that those spewing hateful misinformation and spreading rumors are simply misinformed or more derisively as ignorant and therefore innocent of agentive bigotry. That may be, but it is not, or not merely, ignorance or not knowing. It is also the unknowing of what one knows – that Ahmadis live within and transgress the societal norms as much as non-Ahmadis do; that they are shaped by the society at large and the various local, national, and global dynamics at play, in varying ways and to different extents, just as non-Ahmadis are, and hence have as much of a claim in defining and shaping the society at large or what is called the national culture – and having filled the lacunae with a kind of bad knowledge acquired actively or accumulated passively over time. Constructed meticulously from the available reservoir of rumors, caricatures, and stereotypes, this bad knowledge is tied to a malignant project of homogenization through dominating and exterminating those deemed different and beyond the ever-shrinking pale.[3]

Is that judgment too harsh? After all, don’t most sects, religions, and secular ideologies have some variant of the idea of the “chosen people,” the real this-that-or-the-other, which eventually is damning for all else or some particular “others.” I, too, have thought in such terms: “well, they think they are the true Muslims and we think we are – same difference.” But, this difference is not a difference the weight of which is spread equally between two people: I am as different from him as he is different from me, and I have my religious beliefs and practices (individual and collective), and he has his. No. “They” are different from “us” in a specific way and that has very specific and dire consequences for them and none for us for being different from them, other than perhaps their justified suspicion and hesitance in letting us into the inner sanctums of their socio-religious lives. Divorced from troubling questions of power and culture this sometimes desired equivalence of religious difference, read as reality on the ground, becomes false equivalence, one that eschews, covers over, and perpetuates the invisibility of the long history of persecution and violence visited upon those deemed different from the majority “us.”

That “they” share cultural, class, ethnic, and yes, religious past and present, with the rest of us, and like the rest of us participate in all the contestations therein, albeit at a grave disadvantage, is beside the point. They are marginalized and penalized because of that difference, which is after all minute in comparison with the similarities and commonalities between them and other groups within the same class and location. That over-determined difference is assigned a politically charged value. A hierarchy of social power is constructed on the basis of this difference whereby one does not win much solely by being a Sunni (there is, of course, no shortage of poor and marginalized Sunnis), but one sure gets docked for not being one, and much more so for being an Ahmadi. That is where being a Sunni in Pakistan becomes an unfair and unjust advantage and a privilege, making it nearly impossible to be Sunni (though, not only) and not be complicit in the gross injustice meted out to Pakistan’s “minorities.” Such is the hegemony of systems of dominance that it makes collaborators of even those grinding under its weight, pitting one against the other, whereby having a scapegoat or a shared object of ridicule, derision, and bigotry (a class/cultural/religious/linguistic/ethnic/racial/sexual other, or a national enemy within or without) provides a form of social bonding and upward social mobility, however limited.

It is worth quoting Gyanendra Pandey[4] at length, here: “When used in conjunction with ‘religion’ or ‘ethnicity’ or ‘culture,’ these terms [‘minority’ and ‘majority’] result in a curious ambiguity, as Talal Asad has reminded us. For whereas majority and minority belong primarily to a vocabulary of electoral and parliamentary politics, and the shifting terrain upon which these politics are supposed to be carried out, culture (like religion, race, and so on) is ‘virtually coterminous with the social life of particular populations, including habits and beliefs conveyed across generations.’ To speak of cultural, ethnic or religious minorities is therefore to posit what Asad calls ‘ideological hybrids.’ It is ‘to make the implicit claim that members of some cultures truly belong to a particular politically defined place, but those of others (minority cultures) do not—either because of recency (immigrants) or of archaicness (aborigines).’ Or, one might add, simply because of unspecified, but (as it is asserted) fundamental, ‘difference’—as in the case of the Indian Muslims.”

The anti-minority nationalist juggernaut of Sunni dominance that seeks to constitute Ahmadis not only as a numerical minority but also as a social, cultural, political, and economic minority in Pakistan, and thereby constituting a majoritarian unmarked “self,” feeds on the petty social biases and bigoted views of average decent people like ourselves, our neighbors, uncles, and parents. Such views are considered either justified, or ignored (how could uncle Iqbal be a bigot? he’s a nice person after all!), or brushed aside (yes, but uncle Iqbal is a charitable person, and he is not against Ahmadis as persons, and is not rude when he sees one), or defended as benign, or not mal-intended, or at least not explicit, not overt, or not rabid (it’s an ever-sliding scale!). But they are not divorced from questions of socio-political power and machinations of the state, which implicate the good uncle Iqbal in the steam-rolling and hounding of minority “others.”

III

“Galtung’s theory, highly valued in peace and conflict studies, provides a framework for explaining the interdependence and functions of structural, cultural and direct violence in bringing about the systemic exclusion of a population. Structural violence – for example, poverty – among a particular ethnic group such as dalits, encompasses different forms of domination, exploitation, deprivation and humiliation that emanate from societal structures, [and is] often cited to describe the prevalence of caste, class and ethnic inequalities, power relations and domination occupy a central place. Direct violence – for example, a street fights or an inter­national war – harms or kills individuals or members of a group in a targeted manner. Cultural violence refers to those aspects of culture, the symbolic sphere of our existence – exemplified by religion and ideology, art and culture, and empirical and formal science – that are used to justify or legitimise violence in its direct and structural forms.

[…] Galtung theorises that when the triangle of violence stands on legs of direct and structural violence, it projects the image of cultural violence as the legitimiser of both. When the head is direct violence, an event, an image of the cultural and structural sources of violence is revealed. When direct and cultural ­violence are at the foot, structural violence is revealed in the social, economic and poli­tical status of the violated. Galtung claims cultural violence ­motivates actors to commit direct violence and omit counteracting structural ­violence insofar as it imbeds the inevit­ability and righteousness of violence into people’s world views …”

Taha Abdul Rauf, “Violence Inflicted on Muslims”[5]

The violence inflicted on Ahmadis affects all areas[6] of their life: admissions in school, making friends, dealing with mean kids in the playground spewing venom that they have heard their elders speak, employment opportunities, choice of profession, career graphs, marital choices, what they can or can’t say, and whether or not they will live out their whole lives in their own country or will they be chased out[7], or meet an assassin’s bullet[8], or be lynched by a mob[9], – all the while being under the Sword of Damocles. And that is no metaphorical sword.

Though the legal battles involving Ahmadis about who can pray behind whose imam and who is or isn’t a Muslim go back to the early twentieth century, and are successors of the late 19th century Ahl-iHadth vs. Hanafi/Deobandi conflicts over the said issues, as Manan Ahmad explains, “Until 1974, Ahmadiyya were a religious minority within Islam – they could contest elections as Muslims, hold posts, get married, own land – their status was no different than the Sunni majority. Their status was secure in Indian legal code – as above – and it was re-affirmed under Government of West Pakistan v. Begum Agha Abdul Karim Shorish Kashmiri (1969) which judged Ahmadis to be citizens, to be Muslim, and protected under the fullness of law.”[10] In the “legal shift of the Ahmadis’ status from Muslims to religious minority and then to potential blasphemers there were two key moments,” according to Asad A. Ahmed whose detailing of the said process I will attempt to summarize here[11]. Ahmadis were declared non-Muslim in 1974, but no legal means of enforcing this decision were enacted. This allowed Ahmadis, who in their religious praxis were by and large not differentiable from Sunni Muslims, to continue to act and be recognized as Muslims, leaving the anti-Ahmadi agitators legally hamstrung in preventing Ahmadis from being and behaving as Muslims. That Ahmadis “pose as Muslims” (that standard fare of anti-Semitism, or Western Islamophobia, or Hindu nationalist propaganda inIndia that “the enemy within” is duplicitous, dissimulative, and deceptive) became the center of political (and later, judicial) activism which materialized in the introduction of Ordinance XX in 1984. This ordinance criminalized Ahmadi usage of Muslim terminology such as epithets to refer to holy persons, calling their place of worship a Masjid, and azan (call to prayer); and prohibited Ahmadis from Muslim ritual practices such as the actual calling of the azan.

The next round of agitation and the second critical moment in this politico-legal violence on Ahmadis centered at the Ahmadi recital of the Kalima (the ritual declaration of Muslim faith), which was not specifically criminalized by the aforementioned ordinance. The courts ruled that the recitation of Kalima would constitute Ahmadis “posing as Muslims” and is thus within the scope of the Ordinance; therefore outlawing the very core of Ahmadi faith. When argued that the Ordinance violated the constitutional right to assembly, freedom of speech, and religion, the court ruled that the Ordinance did not violate the said constitutional rights since these rights were subject to other provisions of the constitution dealing with public order and morality and that the Ordinance was issued because of Ahmadi insistence to claim a Muslim identity — an act that was itself unconstitutional since the constitution declares them non-Muslim, highlighting once again the irresolvable contradiction between recognizing freedom of religion as a constitutional right and in the same document laying the foundation of restricting Ahmadis from practicing their religion in their own way. The judge, then assumed the role of interpreting the Ahmadi faith, praxis, and intent, and argued that the various resemblances between Mirza Ghulam Ahmed and the Holy Prophet, as laid out by the Ahmadi literature, amounted to the concept of reincarnation, pressing Hinduism (read: India) — that other religious and national “Other”— into service, concluded that it is thus foreign to Islam (read: Pakistan). He then concluded that when Ahmadis recite the Kalima they refer to Mirza Ghulam Ahmad and that therefore amounts to defiling the Prophet and under the purview of Section 295-C, the blasphemy law, enacted in 1986 to criminalizing the defiling of the Holy Prophet’s name.

In another legal case of consequence, the court held that by reciting the Kalima, Ahmadis were violating the constitutional demarcation between the parallel communities of Ahmadis and Muslims, the former having been severed from the latter through the severance of the former with Prophet Muhammad. This time around the court held that when Ahmadis recite the Kalima, they refer to both Mirza Ghulam Ahmad and Prophet Muhammad simultaneously. So, by referring to Prophet Muhammad along with the prophetic founder of the Ahmadi community, they appropriate the religious identity of another community and therefore ‘pose as Muslims,’ which is blasphemous. It is as if the alleged parallel communities are fundamentally different from one another with no points of contact, cross-pollinations, common beliefs and practices, and shared histories. Instead, they are columns, under the heading of one could be written masjid and that of the other ibadatgah (place of worship).

To sum up, Ahmadis were first declared non-Muslims, and then hounded through legal means as posers and frauds, and therefore always already potential blasphemers. With the criminalizing of the defiling of the Holy Prophet by misrepresentation, construed as such presumably by officially sanctioned/defined/recognized Muslims, the sword was firmly in place that cleaved the populace into a privileged majority that was spared (unless!) and those that were not. This sword was to cut down whomsoever challenged the tyranny of a majoritarianism constructed through the liberal legal concept of property rights[12] that submitted Islam and Muslim-ness to the exclusive ownership of Muslims, as recognized by the state and law, and defined as those who believe not only in the finality of Prophet Muhammad, but were also willing to condemn Mirza Ghulam Ahmad (a state-modified Kalima, if you will) and therefore legally willing to be accomplices in the persecution of Ahmadis (or else!).

IV

“That Zafarullah Khan’s memory has been so thoroughly erased from everyday lives – where theorists often prattle on and on about the long memories of the nation-state, such intense and immediate silencings are rarely noted – is indicative of the changed narrative about Ahmadis inPakistan– who are now simply heretics and infidels to be eliminated indiscriminately.”

Manan Ahmed, “We Are All Ahmadi V: Erasures” [13]

 “… Giorgio Agamben has written […] about a figure found in ancient Roman law called the homo sacer. This is a man who is the most vulnerable denizen of the political community, because his absolute vulnerability is the condition for the absolute power of the ruler. The homo sacer is placed under a ban – that is to say, he is banished from the company of other men, and at the same time abandoned by the legal and juridical order.

This state of banishment and abandonment renders the life of the homo sacer less than the politically-defined and legally-protected life of a citizen: he is reduced to what Agamben calls “bare life” or “naked life”. In this state, which lies outside the realms of both politics and the law, the homo sacer may be killed, without any entailment in the form of punishment or reward, by anyone who wishes. [...] The life of the homo sacer is less than a life; consequently, it can be extinguished with impunity.”

Ananya Vajpeyi, “The Bare Life Of S.A.R. Geelani, Ph.D”[14]

The state –that self-interested arbiter of the politics and culture of the nation it shapes and constitutes even as it claims to be merely its representation and self-realization– has, through legislative and judicial means, not only made it increasingly harder for Ahmadis to live as Ahmadis by criminalizing Ahmadis to live as Muslims, but also by being unable and/or unwilling to hold vigilantes to account, has made it fair game for Ahmadis to be coerced, violated, or killed as the persecutor sees fit, who has the legal route at his disposal to inflict violence through the state and/or hang a target on an Ahmadi’s head through the blasphemy law which would materialize in the state or a vigilante doing the job for free.

Not too long ago, it was reported that a pamphlet was published and openly distributed in Faisalabad[15] deeming Ahmadis “Wajibul Qatl” (‘liable to be murdered’) and inciting people to kill them. It listed the city’s prominent Ahmadis. My best friend’s name is on that list. He is a marked man. Abandoned by the state and the society, he is left to fend for himself.

As the space of “illicit and dangerous sex,” the Orient is the site of carefully suppressed animalistic, perverse, homo- and hypersexual instincts. This paradox is at the heart of Orientalist notions of sexuality that are reanimated through the transnational production of the Muslim terrorist as torture object. Underneath the veils of repression sizzles an indecency waiting to be unleashed. The most recent invocation of the perverse deranged terrorist and his naturalized proclivities is found in this testimony by one of the prisoner guards at Abu Ghraib: “I saw two naked detainees, one masturbating to another kneeling with its mouth open. . . . I saw [Staff Sergeant] Frederick walking towards me, and he said, ‘Look what these animals do when you leave them alone for two seconds.’ I heard PFC England shout out, ‘He’s getting hard.’ ” Note how the mouth of the Iraqi prisoner, the one in fact kneeling in the submissive position, is referred to not as “his” or “hers,” but “its.” The use of the word “animals” signals both the cause of the torture and its effect. Identity is performatively constituted by the very evidence—here, getting a hard-on—that is said to be its results. (Because you are an animal you got a hard-on; because you got a hard-on you are an animal.) Contrary to the recent public debate on torture, which foregrounds the site of detention as an exemplary holding cell that teems with aggression, this behavior is hardly relegated to prisons, as an especially unnerving moment in Michael Moore’s documentary Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004) reveals. A group of U.S. soldiers are shown loading a dead Iraqi, presumably recently killed by them, covered with a white sheet onto a stretcher. Someone yells, “Look, Ali Baba’s dick is still hard!,” while others follow in disharmonized chorus, “You touched it, eeewww you touched it.” Even in death the muscular virility of the Muslim man cannot be laid to rest in some humane manner; not only does the Orientalist fantasy transcend death, but the corpse’s sexuality does too; it rises from death, as it were. Death here becomes the scene of the ultimate unleashing of repression.

Reinforcing a homogeneous notion of Muslim sexual repression vis-à-vis homosexuality and the notion of modesty works to resituate the United States, in contrast, as a place free of such sexual constraints, thus confirming the now-liberated status of the formerly repressed diasporic Muslim. This captive/liberated transition is reflected in what Rey Chow terms “coercive mimeticism—a process (identitarian, existential, cultural, or textual) in which those who are marginal to mainstream Western culture are expected . . . to resemble and replicate the very banal preconceptions that have been appended to them, a process in which they are expected to objectify themselves in accordance with the already seen and thus to authenticate the familiar imaginings.” Unlike a (Bhabhaian) version of mimesis that accentuates the failed attempts of the Other to imitate the Self, Chow’s account claims that “the original that is supposed to be replicated is no longer the white man or his culture but rather an image, a stereotyped view of the ethnic.” The ethnic as a regulatory device sustains the fictive ideals of multicultural pluralism. For AlFatiha to have laborated on the issues of Islam and sexuality more complexly would have not only missed the Orientalist resonance so eagerly awaited by the mass media; that is, there is almost no way to get media attention unless this mimetic resonance is met. It would have also considerably endangered a population already navigating the pernicious racist effects of the USA PATRIOT Act: surveillance, deportations, detentions, registrations, preemptive migrations and departures. Thus Al-Fatiha’s performance of a particular allegiance with American sexual exceptionalism is the result of a demand, not a suggestion. The proliferation of diverse U.S. subjects, such as the Muslim American and even the queer Muslim American, and their epistemological conditions of existence are mandates of homeland security, ones that produce and regulate homonationalism.

…

Given the unbridled homophobia (among other phobias) demonstrated by the U.S. guards, it is indeed ironic, yet predictable, that the United States nonetheless emerges as sexually exceptional: less homophobic and more tolerant of homosexuality (and less tainted by misogyny and fundamentalism) than the repressed, modest, nudityshy Middle East. Through feminist, queer, and even conservative reactions to the violence at Abu Ghraib, we have a clear view of the performative privileges of Foucault’s “speaker’s benefit”: an exemplar of sexual exceptionalism whereby those who are able to articulate sexual knowledge (especially of themselves) then appear to be freed, through the act of speech, from the space of repression. Foucault describes it thus: “There may be another reason that makes it so gratifying for us to define the relationship between sex and power in terms of repression: something that one might call the speaker’s benefit. If sex is repressed, that is, condemned to prohibition, nonexistence, and silence, then the mere fact that one is speaking about it has the appearance of a deliberate transgression.” As Sara Ahmed notes, this hierarchy between open (liberal democracy) and closed (fundamentalist) systems obscures “how the constitution of open cultures involves the projection of what is closed onto others, and hence the concealment of what is closed and contained ‘at home.’” Thus those who appear to have the speaker’s benefit not only reproduce, through a geopolitical mapping of homophobia and where it is most virulent (a mapping that mirrors open/closed, tolerant/repressed dichotomies), the hegemonic ideals of U.S. exceptionalism; the projection of homophobia onto other spaces enacts a clear disavowal of homophobia at “home.”

…

The focus on gay sex also preempts a serious dialogue about rape, both the rape of Iraqi male prisoners but also, more significantly, the rape of female Iraqi prisoners, the occurrence of which appears neither news- nor photograph-worthy. Indeed, there has been a complete underreporting of the rapes of Afghani and Iraqi women both inside and outside of detention centers. Major General Anthony Taguba’s report notes that among the eighteen hundred digital photos there are unreleased pictures of females being raped and women forced at gunpoint to bare their breasts, as well as videotape of female detainees forced to strip and rumors of impregnated rape victims. Why are there comparatively few photos of women, and why have they not been released? Is it because the administration found the photos of women even more appalling? Or has the wartime rape of women become so unspectacular, so endemic to military occupation as to render its impact moot? Or could these photos finally demolish the line of reasoning that the United States is liberating Muslim women, a fantasy so crucial to the tenets of American sexual exceptionalism? How, ultimately, do we begin to theorize the connections and disjunctures between male and female tortured bodies, and between masculinities and femininities?

…

Torture [...] works not merely to disaggregate national from antinational sexualities—for those distinctions (the stateless monster-terrorist-fag) are already in play—but also, in accordance with nationalist fantasies, to reorder gender and, in the process, to corroborate implicit racial hierarchies. The force of feminizing lies not only in the stripping away of masculinity, the faggotizing of the male body, or in robbing the feminine of its symbolic and reproductive centrality to national-normative sexualities; it is the fortification of the unenforceable boundaries between masculine and feminine, the rescripting of multiple and fluid gender performatives into petrified sites of masculine and feminine, the regendering of multiple genders into the oppressive binary scripts of masculine and feminine, and the interplay of it all within and through racial, imperial, and economic matrices of power. This is the real force of the torture.

Madrasa Madness

“Mortenson goes to war with the root causes of terror every time he offers a student a chance to receive a balanced education, rather than attend an extremist madrassa.”

G Mortenson & D Relin, Three Cups of Tea,New York: Viking, 2006, p 5

“As the Pakistani government increases investment in secular education to counter radical madrasas, my Administration will increaseAmerica’s commitment.”

Barrack Obama

Mike Huckabee, former Governor of Arkansas, recently commented that Obama “has a different worldview and I think it’s, in part, molded out of a very different experience. Most of us grew up going to Boy Scout meetings and, you know, our communities were filled with Rotary Clubs, not madrasas.” That particular rumor of Obama having attended a “madrasa” in Indonesia, started during the run up to the Presidential election, and is a part of a whole gambit of racist and Islamophobic rumors of Obama being Muslim that came to be called the ‘Muslim Smear.’ The belief that Obama is a Muslim persists to this day, and giving Obama a madrasa past or “background” is a way of marking him as a Muslim by way of raising the specter of extremism, for which Madrasa serves as code. In response, the Obama campaign pointed out that he, in fact, did not attend a madrasa but that he attended a regular public school in Indonesia. In line with how it handled all of the ‘Muslim Smears,’  the Obama Campaign did not address the Islamopohobia lurking barely beneath the surface. Neither did Obama point out that the word madrasa simply means school, and that many schools in the Islamicate world have that word in its title or are casually referred to as that.

Though Quranic studies were conducted in houses and mosques since the seventh century, Madrasa, as a pedagogical institution was established in the 10^th century by the Grand Vizier of Suljuk Sultans in territories that comprise present dayIraq andIran. Madrasas sprouted throughout much of Islamdom and produced erudite scholars for a number of centuries. In the Indian Subcontinent, after the 1857 mutiny, the British changed the court language from Persian to English, which whittled the madrasa curriculum down to just religious law. Knowing English law and English language was required to be an administrator, instead of learning fiqh (jurisprudence), history, science, etc.  This meant that Quranic recitation and memorization came to be the primary educational services provided by a madrasa, whether in purpose built madrasas or in makeshift Quran-schools in the neighborhood mosque, which the children attended at an earlier age to learn Quran before enrolling in secular public schools or attended in the evenings as a supplement to their secular education at a public school. Only a slim minority of madrasa students goes on to study fiqh and other religious studies.

The drone’s eye view collapses histories, geographies, cultures, and lives into one combustible dangerous whole. “Books not bombs at Pakistan literature festival” screams the headline of the Associated Press report on Karachi Literature Festival. Peccavistan’s underground rockers are noticed if only for rocking on “even in a summer of Taliban violence.” Fashion models are supposed to have “thumbed a nose at Taliban” simply by walking down a catwalk in a luxury hotel, supposedly “under shadow of Taliban.” Daniyal Mueenudin warns of the coming revolt of the hungry and Ahmad Rashid of an extremist take over unless the victims of floods are helped, thereby smudging their humanity and rendering them as potential terrorists. Humanitarian Greg Mortenson’s book about his education initiative in Pakistan’s northern areas is subtitled as “One Man’s Mission to Fight Terrorism and Build Nations … One School at a Time” because, as Mortensen was allegedly told by his publisher, “terror sells.” Apparently, unless the prospective donor pisses his pants with fear, his/her pocket cannot be accessed. In places imagined as battlefields of the War on Terror, disaster relief or supporting education is not worthy enough on its own, unless it is billed as winning the hearts and mind of the (potentially) terrorist population.

So, what was remarkable in the recently launched Education Emergency campaign in Pakistan was not only the absence of fear mongering, but its attempt at debunking the “madrasa myth” – an unnecessary distraction from the campaign’s goals that the media and the professional critics of the said threat were sure to lap up. The Guardian reported that the campaign’s claim that 6% of Pakistani children attend madrasas has created some controversy. While the campaign marshals this figure to debunk myths about madrasas, critics, such as Parvez Hoodbhoy, showed concern at the “staggering number” of children attending madrasas. . Based on publically verified data, Andrabi et al however estimate that less than a percent of total enrolled Pakistani students attend a madrasa.[1] This, still, may not satisfy those that are alarmed at the presence of madrasas in their “orderly” and “modern” cities, or at madrasa students’ chanting the Quran all day “sporting little prayer caps” and swarming around the city in the evenings. The question then is: Even if 6 % of all Pakistani children are enrolled in madrasas, so what? What does it matter? Why should that be a cause of concern?

Two assumptions underpin the alarmism around madrasas in general, and the number of children attending madrasas in particular. First, madrasas enroll youth from particular communities, or from a particular ethnicity, or from families with a certain kind of religiosity. Second, poverty and the State’s failure to provide access to education lead people to enroll their children in madrasas. Andrabi et al refute such spurious claims and “found almost no relationship between poverty and the use of madrasas.” In fact, none of the household level factors such as poverty, lack of alternative education options, ethnicity, religiosity, do not hold muster as factors related to madrasa enrolment either, since 75% of the household with one child enrolled in a madrasa have another child enrolled in a public or a private school. Yet, despite several studies stating that there is scant evidence of poverty being the cause of extremism and terrorism, madrasa reform and building affordable secular schools are held up as ways to “drain the swamp” that extremism and terrorism feeds on. A child that commits the Quran to memory, regarded as a prodigy, brings prestige, in this life and the other, to his/her family that celebrates the milestones in the child’s Quranic education and recitals. But in the narratives of war that frame policy recommendations, public advocacy, humanitarian aid, and philanthropic ventures, madrasas can only do one thing: “brainwash” impressionable youth; and there is only one way to see madrasa-enrolled children: future terrorists to be saved from themselves.

Grand narratives like promoting education to fight madrasa-bred extremism elide issues that are pressing but unglamorous. Consider the issue of school infrastructure. It is a very unsexy issue. When one can have monsters to fight and madhouses to reform, why would anyone want to campaign for, say, better toilets for schools? Might the high dropout rate in primary schools have some thing to do with “the drab appearance of buildings, inadequate facilities and an overall repulsive physical environment”? School toilets, if there are any, are inoperable, filthy, and dangerous. Consequently, children have to relieve themselves outdoors, which leaves them vulnerable to diseases such as diarrhea that cause 4000 deaths across the globe and at the least “contribute towards absenteeism and the dropout rate in schools.” The substantial gendered impact of poor state of school infrastructure needs to be taken a stock of, even if there are no bearded fanatics blowing up girl’s schools for the heroic to battle. Surely, one can campaign for greater access to education and improvement of infrastructure, better curriculum, and more humanities and social studies, at the same time, and in my mind, perhaps in that order of emphasis. That is, if one is not obsessed with the “row after row of these burqa women.”

Primo Levi, among other survivors of the death camps, has talked about the figure of the Muselmann, the Muslim, in Nazi concentration camps. In Levi’s words, “This word, Muselmann, I do not know why, was used by the old ones of the camp to describe the weak, the inept, those doomed to selection.” The Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben has commented that, “With a kind of ferocious irony, the Jews knew that they would not die at Auschwitz as Jews.” How does your reading of the understanding of Islam in certain canonical/philosophical texts of the Western tradition [Kant, Montesquieu, and Hegel], help us to understand the use of this appellation in the context of the concentration camp?

I started working on the Muselmann (a term I translate as ‘Muslim’ since that is what the German was taken to mean, according to countless testimonies) when I wrote the introduction to Derrida’s Acts of Religion although at the time I was not quite sure where it was taking me. By the time I read Agamben’s Remnants of Auschwitz, which had just come out in French (the English translation had not yet appeared), I was really taken with the book, and thought that I would have nothing to add. Agamben is after all the first to take Levi seriously on the crucial importance of the Muslim, and to dedicate an entire book to a figure that, though well known in circles familiar with Holocaust literature, has hardly attracted attention, or indeed, any serious reflection.

I subsequently came to suspect that there might be something to add after all, and this for two reasons. The first is that Agamben reinscribes the historical obscurity of the term, ‘Muslim’, its opacity and its strangeness. I do not by any means wish to diminish the strangeness, quite the contrary. I just want to say that this strangeness is even more extensive because of a combination of visibility and invisibility. What I am arguing is that the use of the term in the context of the camp, has a history that can be read on the very surface of major philosophical texts. This all-too visible history is however also marked by its invisibility.

The second reason I thought I may have something to add by way of a footnote, really, to Agamben, is that as complex as Agamben’s argument is – touching as it does on numerous issues and dimensions of language, of ethics, of politics, and of law – it has in this particular context very little to say about religion or about theology. This is particularly surprising to me since it is Agamben, who, after Derrida, alerted me to the importance of the theologico-political (think only ofHomo Sacer, of his analyses of Schmitt and Benjamin, and so forth).

So there were these two factors: the invisible visibility of the term, ‘Muslim’, and of its history, the alleged obscurity of its origins, and the absence of religion and theology in the discussion of the term and the phenomenon in Agamben. Agamben suggests, quite tentatively, that maybe the use of ‘Muslim’ relied on a medieval stereotype. Primo Levi, on the other hand, said the term might have come into common usage because of the way in which people imagined Muslims praying, or because of bandages around the head. Like Levi, I have found none of the explanations I encountered convincing.

So I wanted to explore this double-absence, and from then on, it seemed as though I only encountered symptoms as well as potential, if partial, explanations for this absence everywhere. The first was Kant, who says in his most famous statement on the sublime, in the Critique of Judgment:

“Perhaps the most sublime passage in the Jewish Law is the commandment: Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven or on earth, or under the earth, etc. This commandment alone can explain the enthusiasm that the Jewish people in its civilized era felt for its religion when it compared itself with other peoples, or can explain the pride that Mohammedanism inspires.”

Some commentators do quote this passage in its entirety going all the way to the comment about Islam (“Mohammedanism”), but most of them actually interrupt the quote before Islam appears. They just stop, so that the whole passage becomes exclusively about Jewish law and about how Kant paradigmatically implicated the Jews in the sublime, which is one of the reasons why Kant can become ‘Kant the Jew’. Peter Gordon pointed out to me that what I am showing is not that there is just ‘Kant the Jew’, but also ‘Kant the Muslim’, which I thought was a lovely remark. When you actually look at the context of the Critique of Judgment, you realize that Kant is deploying the language that will later enable Hegel, with the help of Montesquieu, to describe the “religions of the sublime,” religions which, according to an overwhelming experience (if one can use the term at all), enslave their constituencies and subject individuals to their power.

In this early example of absolute subjection (as theologico-political!), such as Kant articulates it, it is impossible to ignore that Kant offers two moments, two paradigms, that are at once distinct and indissociable. The basic terms, which will then coagulate with Montesquieu – and his elaborations of the Muslim as the ultimate example of the despotic subject – and finally with Hegel, are formulated in Kant. In the book I hope I have succeeded to show this genealogy of sorts, but what I would want to do were I to write it now would be to claim that Hegel (by which I mean Hegel’s time, of course) invented the Semites. He invented the Muslim, no doubt, as he provides the clearest and most thorough formulation of what will then be repeated almost verbatim in Auschwitz and in Holocaust literature. But he also invents the Semites. He is the one who basically begins the tradition whereby whatever you say about the Jews you can say about the Muslims (note that Kant does not collapse the two into a barely differentiated unity), and Hegel does this long before Ernest Renan. He also does it before the category of the Semites really gets disseminated. He is writing at the beginning of the 19th century, which is just a few decades after the very notion of a distinction between Aryans and Semites is formulated by Herder and by very few others. Hegel has perhaps not been given enough credit (or blame) for this but to my mind it is really an extraordinary moment in the history of Western thought. And again it is no accident that it is found in Hegel. You could attribute a whole lot of things to Hegel and of course he is not alone, but I think the formulations are truly momentous and revealing.

The argument then is that the “religions of the sublime” are a direct consequence of Hegel’s learning from Kant, since we know that Kant and Montesquieu were the two intellectual heroes of Hegel. It is on the basis of their work that he wrote much of what he did. The moment in the Critique of Judgment quoted above complemented by the new articulation of despotism in Montesquieu and more importantly of the despotic subject – meaning the one who is subjected to the despot – and of Islam being the example, or the Muslim being the example par excellence of subjugation, all come together in Hegel. He points out that both Jews and Muslims are thoroughly submitted, they are slaves. They are slaves to their god. Aside from that, there are differences, yes. One can compare Islam, Christianity and Judaism, and there are slight differences, political here, more or less political there. But for the most part, this is what it is, and there is much more similarity between Judaism and Islam than between either and Christianity (this is something that the German-Jewish philosopher Franz Rosenzweig understood well and opposed explicitly). It is critical that the terms of that submission are precisely those that describe the Muslim in Auschwitz.

I presented this material at a conference in France after which a kind woman, whose name I unfortunately forget, approached me. She told me that she was French but her mother was German and had grown up and gone to school in Germany in the 1930s. This woman had called her mother after having heard my talk and, in response, her mother had read out to her the words of a song that reads roughly as follows:

K-a-f-f-e-e
K-a-f-f-e-e,
trink nicht so viel kaffee!
Nicht für Kinder ist der türkentrank
schwächt die Nerven, macht dich blaß lassen und krank.
Sei doch kein Muselmann,
der ihn nicht lassen kann!

C-o-f-f-e-e
C-o-f-f-e-e,
Don’t drink so much coffee!
The Turk’s drink is not for children,
It weakens the nerves and makes you pale and sick.
Don’t be a Muslim
Who can’t help it!

This is like a contines pour enfants; a children’s song that people still learn, as it turns out. I have since met young German people who know that song and I am told it also appears in an opera.

The figure of the powerless, of extreme weakness and subjection, is not shrouded in mystery: coffee will make you weak, it will make you into a Muslim, aMuselmann. Here the image of Islam in the West is both that it is a political threat and a feminizing threat, a weakness. They are weak, and they make us weak. Coffee was one of the sites of that Christian anxiety, dating at least from the attempts by the Ottoman Empire (“the Turk”) to invade Venice, Vienna, Europe, in short. At some point, though, Christian Europe realizes that the threat may not be as large as initially anticipated. Historians will know this better than I, but if I recall, the battle of Lepanto, and the failure of the Ottoman fleet to invade Venice signals this turn downward in the fear of “the Turk.” Here, by the way, is another instance of a strange phrase concerning which I looked but could not find a history. The Ottoman Empire will, in the nineteenth century, be referred to as “the sick man of Europe.” This profoundly disturbing and evocative figure, said to emerge after the War of Crimea, seems to me to resonate profoundly with the Muslim, for what is he if not the sick man of Europe? You can do a Google search on the sick man of Europe and find enormous amounts of material. It is simply everywhere. Every Ottoman specialist knows it.

There are thus numerous traces, all of which can be found and followed, read and interpreted, that suggest possible venues for a genealogy of the Muslims of Auschwitz. These traces are both visible and invisible on the surface of the modern philosophical tradition, in children’s song, and in nineteenth and twentieth century popular culture. Nothing here diminishes the mystery which the Muslim is, its dreadful paradigmatic dimension. Yet, its genealogy, essentially related to Jews and Arabs as they appear at crucial moments of its articulation in and by Europe, is, it seems to me, less obscure.

The sick man of Europe is like the Muslim: there is no one who knows anything about Holocaust literature or about Holocaust history who does not know about the Muslim. That is the horrifying beauty of it all. It is the most manifest, and yet also the most invisible. Almost everybody I talked to tells me, “I have always wondered why the term Muselmann was used….”. It is just everywhere, and yet there has been no explanation for it. It is, as I said, quite horrifying.

In the book I also write about how in Hebrew the term ‘Muslim’ is not translated but rather transliterated (something which could be rendered as muzelmann, quite distinct therefore from muslemi, i.e. ‘Muslim’, in modern Hebrew). I do not mention the following anecdote in the book but I had an Israeli student with whom I went over this material in a class on Holocaust literature. After I spoke to her about the Muslims of Auschwitz, she recognized the term and said to her grandfather, himself a survivor of Auschwitz, “Grandfather, you have always spoken with me about the Muselmann, but you never told me that the wordMuselmann means Muslim.” She later told me that her grandfather flew into a rage such that she had never seen him in before. He adamantly insisted that this was not the case, that it is not what the word meant, that it never meant that. It is both tragic and even comic, that one could claim that a word is not a word, notthat word. Even in English one finds antiquated spellings of ‘Mussulman’ or ‘Musselman’ for the word ‘Muslim’. But I am not making an etymological argument. I am merely saying that the way the term functioned followed from previous usage, in very different yet related contexts. In Auschwitz, it functioned repeatedly by way of pointing to a similarity between certain peoples in the camp and Arabs praying. But how was this “recognition” possible? And why the popularity, the massive dissemination of the term after the end of the war? When Primo Levi says that ‘Muslim’ is another term like ‘Canada’ or ‘Mexico’ (names given to certain buildings in the camp) which has absolutely no recognizable referential value, or that its connotations have nothing to do with its usage in other contexts, it is simply striking, and to my mind, mistaken.

Of course words function outside of their context but the fact is that something of the common usage remains or is reinscribed. So that when people say ‘Canada,’ it may be a singular name but it is also overdetermined, culturally and discursively, if you will. The building where all the belongings of the dead were gathered and where it was actually (if only relatively) better to work has nothing to do with Canada, per se, and yet it was Canada that was thereby imagined as a place of plenty, toward which one could dream and, if one survived, escape after the war. And people did. And comparable things can be said of ‘Mexico’, which is where they stored blankets that had stripes such that reminded people of the traditional cloth of Mexico.

This is the culture of stereotypes. If one says to a little boy, “You throw like a girl”, the question is: what enables the “recognition” of a “girl” in this boy? What are the conditions that make possible such a slur? It is not because a girl “really” throws like a girl; it is because people think that they can recognize in a bad throw a girlish throw. This is all I am asking: How did that term – even if that is not what it meant to people – come to function? How did that recognition become possible? How could people say, “This looks to me like a Muslim.” When you have a song that says that a Muslim is weak and pale and submissive and can’t help it, and this understanding is ubiquitous in the whole discourse of modern Western philosophy, it becomes no less surprising, but perhaps less opaque.

It is not important that individual people know or endorse what its origins might be (think of the verb “to Jew” in English – would anyone claim that it is not a racial slur if used in a context where Jews are not present, not intended, not known? Or if people do not know, not consciously, that it has anything to do with Jews?). It may well be the case that my student’s grandfather did not know, and still does not know, but then why fly into a rage? It is not simply because of a mistake; it is far more loaded than that. So the stakes are enormous, absolutely enormous, in denying that there could be any parallel, that the Muslim is alive, against all odds, and still dying, in Israel and Palestine. That thought, I would argue, is simply unthinkable, and more: unbearable.

Read the full interview here.

“In this interview, Professor Anidjar engages the most urgent political questions of our times in suggestive and compelling ways. The issues he addresses – secularism, its limits and possibilities; the conflation of religious, ethnic and racial categories; the place of Europe in locating the enmity between Jew and Arab; the figure of the Muslim in Auschwitz; the problem of universalism – force us to question the most basic categories that shape our understanding of the world, thereby opening the space for a more illuminating and critical evaluation of our present historical moment.”