http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/reviewofbooks_article/7082/
Faisal Devji's new book draws some daring parallels between the
outlook of militant suicide bombers and that of Western humanitarians
but it ultimately projects the author's own search for political
meaning on to the al-Qaeda network.
by Philip Hammond
August 2009
--
It is now commonplace to argue that al-Qaeda is better understood as
an idea rather than as an organisation. In contrast to the
sophisticated global super-network that haunted the West's
imagination after the 11 September 2001 terror attacks, al-Qaeda is
now more realistically discussed as a 'brand' with small-time
franchise-operators and amateurish freelance imitators. Yet the
attempt to comprehend the 'idea' of al-Qaeda has given rise to its
own delusions.
UK government policy, for instance, aims to 'support vulnerable
individuals' who are 'at risk' of being radicalised by extremists.
Officialdom assumes that the problem is somehow external to British
or Western society, and that the extremists' toxic 'messages of hate'
can be countered by promoting Britain's famous 'shared values' (1).
Faisal Devji's analysis of contemporary terrorism unsettles such
complacent assumptions.
As Devji observes, for example, the men who carried out the 7/7
London bombings 'attended no mosque regularly, evidenced little
internet use at home and had no real association with any radical
figure, let alone an al-Qaeda sleeper lurking in some Islamic school
or bookstore'. Only one, Jermaine Lindsay, had any known history of
political activity, and his 'activist stance over racism and the wars
in Afghanistan and Iraq put him in the mainstream of British
political concerns'. Perhaps they were 'radicalised simply by
watching television', as Osama bin Laden claims to have been.
One of the most striking aspects of Devji's highly-praised 2005 book,
Landscapes of the Jihad, was that it placed al-Qaeda firmly in the
context of Western political culture. Rather than viewing militant
Islamism as an alien threat, he drew surprising parallels between the
jihadis and the followers of other, more familiar, contemporary
movements, such as anti-globalisation and anti-war protests. Devji
further develops this theme in his latest book, The Terrorist in
Search of Humanity, arguing that 'alongside the environmentalists or
pacifists who… are their intellectual peers, the men and women
inspired by al-Qaeda's militancy consider Muslim suffering to be a
"humanitarian" cause that, like climate change or nuclear
proliferation, must be addressed globally or not at all'.
The motivations of al-Qaeda-style suicide bombers rarely have
anything to do with any direct experience of oppression or injustice.
Rather, their acts are 'committed out of pity for the plight of
others', argues Devji, 'the same abstract and vicarious emotion that
characterises the actions of pacifists or human rights campaigners'.
Examining the speeches of leading figures such as bin Laden or Ayman
al-Zawahiri, Devji notes that they offer no alternative political or
utopian vision. Instead, they use 'the language of humanitarianism',
and even model their proposals for jihad on the West's 'air strikes
of humanitarian intervention'. Indeed, a frequent complaint of the
militants is that the West fails to live up to its own proclaimed
human rights standards, giving their rhetoric more the character of
an internal critique than an exotic foreign ideology.
Devji pores over the terrorists' videos and websites, ruminating on
the intimate details of events and drawing on a range of political
thinkers, from Hannah Arendt to Michel Foucault. The danger of his
approach is that, as he tries to tease out the significance of
contemporary suicide bombing, he risks seeing meaning and purpose
where none exists. Much of the time this seems a risk worth taking,
as he arrives at some useful insights. Of particular interest is his
analysis of how 'the War on Terror has increasingly become a
quasi-criminal rather than a military operation'. Contemplating
practices such as the US military's use of contractors, or its
perpetration of abuse at Abu Ghraib, Devji notes how 'modern war has
been dragged down from its technical heights to the messy level of
interpersonal relations', so that war is conducted in a way that
exacerbates the military's own 'cultural and institutional fragmentation'.
Yet while the logic of his argument ought to lead him to focus on
Western societies, and particularly on the rise of the 'humanitarian'
and environmentalist thought echoed by al-Qaeda's rhetoric, Devji
instead takes a detour to South Asia, his own area of academic
specialism. In particular, he develops an extended comparison between
contemporary 'martyrdom operations' and Mahatma Gandhi's ideas about
sacrifice. While this allows Devji to take a fresh look at al-Qaeda,
free from 'medieval exoticism' and the usual fixation with the Middle
East, it is questionable how much is gained in terms of
understanding. Worse, it seems to compound Devji's tendency to
attribute an intellectual coherence and importance to al-Qaeda which
it does not really warrant.
The overall argument of the book is that, like other forms of
'global' politics, today's militant Islamism represents a 'search for
humanity as an agent and not simply the victim of history'. Not only
that, but the would-be holy warriors are, according to Devji, more
successful in this quest than the humanitarians and environmentalists
with whom he compares them. It is evidently not Devji's intention to
glorify suicide bombing, though at times he appears to come close.
'Martyrdom is noble', he maintains, summarising the militant outlook
in a way that mirrors his own argument, 'not because it will result
in the political, economic or religious triumph of Islam so much as
because it allows Muslims to exhibit the fundamentally human virtues
of courage and sacrifice, thus doing their duty to represent humanity
itself as a global agent rather than victim'.
Can suicide bombing really be about 'turning humanity from victim
into agent'? This unlikely claim is built around a shaky scaffolding
of arguments describing, but unfortunately not really explaining, a
contemporary crisis of political subjectivity. Where his analysis
implicitly suggests the confusion and disarray of the West, Devji
instead ascribes purpose and agency to al-Qaeda.
Devji argues that our contemporary ideas about humanity and the
global were brought into being during the Cold War era, by
technologies of nuclear destruction and space flight. These
technologies transformed our view of humanity by undermining the
humanist conception of subjectivity, he contends: once we were able
to observe the world from space, for example, we began operating on a
non-human scale; once we possessed the possibility of nuclear
annihilation, traditional values of courage and sacrifice were
rendered irrelevant. Into the space once occupied by humanism rush
'humanitarian' ideas.
This humanitarian outlook is an attempt to imagine global humanity,
but it offers only a limited vision of humanity as victim, with no
greater goal than bare survival. Islamist militancy goes one better,
Devji argues, in that it supposedly attempts to transform humanity
into a potential actor. Like humanitarianism, it too sees the
'impossibility' of humanist subjectivity, but at the same time also
refuses the abstract, statistical humanity conjured up in Western
humanitarian concern for victimhood, condemning this as hypocritical.
Instead, properly human virtues of bravery and sacrifice are realised
through the suicide bomber's self-immolation, and expressed in his
ability to see a horizon beyond mere survival (loving death rather
than simply life, in the terrorists' phrase).
Devji's mistake is to take the decline of humanist subjectivity at
face value, attributing it essentially to technical causes and seeing
it as inevitable and permanent. The 'impossibility' of the humanist
subject is the big untold story here (2). Similarly, globalisation is
invoked as the implacable cause of the hollowing out of local or
national politics, whereas the opposite scenario seems more plausible
(3). It is the collapse of politics that makes a flight to the
'global' seem attractive, whether in the form of cosmopolitan
humanitarianism, planetary ecological concern or rootless global
jihad. Equally, it surely makes more sense to see al-Qaeda as a
symptom of the crisis of political subjectivity, rather than as some
sort of creative response to it. As an idea, al-Qaeda is just not
that big, and it's not that clever.
--
Philip Hammond is reader in media and communications at London South
Bank University, and is the author of Media, War and Postmodernity,
published by Routledge in 2007 (Buy this book from Amazon(UK)).
--
The Terrorist in Search of Humanity: Militant Islam and Global
Politics by Faisal Devji is published by C Hurst & Co. (Buy this book
from Amazon(UK).)
--
(1) See, for example, £12.5 million to tackle radicalisation and help
prevent extremism in communities, Department of Communities and Local
Government, 3 June 2008
(2) See The 'Death of the Subject' Explained, by James Heartfield,
Sheffield Hallam University Press, 2002
(3) See Hollow Hegemony: Rethinking Global Politics, Power and
Resistance, by David Chandler, Pluto Press, forthcoming
,
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