On Suicide Bombing

Talal Asad

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9780231511971
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Anthropologie

Like many people in America and around the world, Talal Asad experienced the events of September 11, 2001, largely through the media and the emotional response of others. For many non-Muslims, "the suicide bomber" quickly became the icon of "an Islamic culture of death"—a conceptual leap that struck Asad as problematic. Is there a "religiously-motivated terrorism?" If so, how does it differ from other cruelties? What makes its motivation "religious"? Where does it stand in relation to other forms of collective violence?

Drawing on his extensive scholarship in the study of secular and religious traditions as well as his understanding of social, political, and anthropological theory and research, Asad questions Western assumptions regarding death and killing. He scrutinizes the idea of a "clash of civilizations," the claim that "Islamic jihadism" is the essence of modern terror, and the arguments put forward by liberals to justify war in our time. He critically engages with a range of explanations of suicide terrorism, exploring many writers' preoccupation with the motives of perpetrators. In conclusion, Asad examines our emotional response to suicide (including suicide terrorism) and the horror it invokes.

On Suicide Bombing is an original and provocative analysis critiquing the work of intellectuals from both the left and the right. Though fighting evil is an old concept, it has found new and disturbing expressions in our contemporary "war on terror." For Asad, it is critical that we remain aware of the forces shaping the discourse surrounding this mode of violence, and by questioning our assumptions about morally good and morally evil ways of killing, he illuminates the fragile contradictions that are a part of our modern subjectivity.

1

TERRORISM

ON THE EVENING of the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, President Bush made a statement in his address to the nation:

Good evening. Today, our fellow citizens, our way of life, our very freedom came under attack in a series of deliberate and deadly terrorist acts. The victims were in airplanes, or in their offices; secretaries, businessmen and women, military and federal workers; moms and dads, friends and neighbors. Thousands of lives were suddenly ended by evil, despicable acts of terror. The pictures of airplanes flying into buildings, fires burning, huge structures collapsing, have filled us with disbelief, terrible sadness, and a quiet, unyielding anger. The acts of mass murder were intended to frighten our nation into chaos and retreat. But they have failed; our country is strong.¹

The next day, Mr. Bush opened with another statement: “I have just completed a meeting with my national security team, and we have received the latest intelligence updates. The deliberate and deadly attacks which were carried out yesterday against our country were more than acts of terror. They were acts of war. This will require our country to unite in steadfast determination and resolve.”² Later, both the Bush administration and the U.S. media fixed on the phrase War Against Terrorism (or Terror).

Many commentators asked why the deployment of organized violence against terrorism was being described as a war. Among those skeptical of this usage was Alain Badiou, who made the obvious point that in the past, when governments responded to terrorism—especially in the context of colonialism—they spoke not of war but of police action. Governments that had had to deal with the Baader-Meinhof group in Germany, the IRA in Britain, ETA in Spain, or the Red Brigade in Italy, typically described their responses as “security measures” or “police actions,” rather than using the term “war.” Badiou proposed that in its capacity as a world power the United States had privileged war as the sign of its presence. From the beginning, he said, its political formation was achieved through a long history of military encounters across the North American continent and abroad.³

I want to take up the other half of the question, however: why is the term “terrorism” so prominent today when talking about certain kinds of contemporary violence—not only in the United States but also in Europe, Israel, and other parts of the world? One suggestion has been that the previous violent groups in Europe were all operating within the framework of the nation-state and were therefore insiders; the present adversaries (Muslim terrorists) are outsiders—even when they are citizens of the liberal democratic state or inhabitants of its governed territories. On the other hand, however reprehensible it was to liberals, the violence of Marxists and nationalists was understandable in terms of progressive, secular history. The violence of Islamic groups, on the other hand, is incomprehensible to many precisely because it is not embedded in a historical narrative—history in the “proper” sense. As the violence of what is often referred to as a totalitarian religious tradition hostile to democratic politics, it is seen to be irrational as well as being an international threat.

The last written statements of the leading attacker against the World Trade Center apparently contained Islamic themes. Religion was therefore a favorite explanation of what had happened, and the stream of articles and television programs grew, claiming to lay bare the Islamic roots of terrorism. The religious ideology behind terrorism that virtually everyone would come to hear about was jihād, described by university professors and journalists as the Islamic concept of holy war against the infidel. The Anglo-American orientalist Bernard Lewis popularized this view as a “clash of civilizations.” In the first, conquering phase of Islamic history—wrote Lewis—the organized violence called jihād was a culturally distinctive expression of Muslim intolerance and arrogance towards non-Muslims. Subsequently, with the decline of Islamic civilization and the triumph of the West, Islamist violence came to represent a fanatical resentment against modernity. Many commentators who have followed this line of thought have insisted that unless and until the Islamic world is radically reformed, the extreme danger of terrorism in our so-called age of jihadism will remain.

Yet another—more complicated—story can be told, one that doesn’t lend itself so easily to the popular drama of a clash of civilizations.

It is rarely noted in polemical accounts that for many centuries after the early conquests the majority of the populations in countries with Muslim rulers remained Christian, active as such in many spheres of public life, and that therefore public institutions and practices in the early Muslim empire were largely continuous with the Christian societies it incorporated. Indeed, in crucial respects, the Islamic empire was the inheritor of Byzantium, and the histories of both sides of the Mediterranean have always been intertwined through the exchange of ideas, practices, and commodities. It is true that in the earlier centuries Muslim armies penetrated Christian lands, but at first the European Christians did not regard the battles between themselves and Muslims as expressions of a cosmic struggle between good and evil.⁴ It was only with the Crusades that the papacy promoted the ideology of a unified Christendom at war with a unified Islam. These were the first militant incursions of European Christians into Muslim lands, and some centuries later they culminated in the great European empires of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The histories of Europe and Islam cannot be completely separated.

The trouble with the clash of civilizations talk is not simply that it ignores a rich history of mutual borrowings and continuous interactions among Christians, Jews, and Muslims. It is that the very identity of a people as European (or Islamic) depends on the definition of a selective civilizational heritage of which most of the people to whom it is attributed are in fact almost completely ignorant—a heritage with which even individual members of the elite (the civilization’s guardians) are only incompletely familiar. This legitimizes the internal inequality of those embraced by the civilization as well as their difference from other peoples. In other words, it is not simply that a heritage is invariably selective; it is that the people are defined by the civilization that is supposed to be their heritage. And yet, sociologically, the people who are said to belong to that civilization are highly differentiated by class and region and gender.

All histories are selective, of course, but what they leave out and how they interpret what they select are more interesting than the mere fact of selection. Thus when polemicists speak of Christianity as the essential core of Western civilization—or the origin of modern democracy—they do not have in mind the Orthodox churches of Eastern Europe or the ancient Christian congregations of the Middle East. And yet central doctrines of Christianity (the Trinity, Atonement, etc.) as well as major institutions (monasticism) first emerged there and not in Latin Christendom. This leaves it unclear as to whether talk about Christianity as the essential midwife of our modern secular world (“the point where, thanks to religion, a society with no further need for religion arises,” as Marcel Gauchet puts it)⁵ is to be understood as a theological argument or a sociological one.

In Western histories of Islam, jihād has been a central theme, al though in Islamic thought jihād is not a central notion. Nevertheless, it has been compared by Western historians to the medieval Christian concept of the Crusade. The only difference, we are given to understand, is that while the Crusade is no longer part of Western modernity, jihād is integral to an Islamic civilization that is largely rooted in religion. But the differences are more complicated than this civilizational contrast would suggest. To begin with, the theory and practice of the Crusade were closely connected with the rise of the papal monarchy (and afterward with the sacralization of territorially based kingship), and there is no parallel story for the Muslim world in the case of jihād. The Arabic word for “holy,” muqaddas, is never applied to “war,” harb, in the classical texts. And because there has never been a centralized theological authority in the Islamic world, there was never a consensus about the virtue of religious warfare. Thus in the first two centuries of Islamic history jurists residing close to the revered sites of Islam (in Mecca and Medina) had a different view from those who lived in Damascus and Baghdad, the successive imperial capitals. The former maintained that the pursuit of jihād (and even stationing oneself in military camps at the frontier far from the original centers of Islam) was not an obligatory duty for all Muslims, that there was merely a requirement that some Muslims undertake the defense of Islamic territory, and that in any case other religious acts had greater merit. In later centuries the legal theory of jihād came to be articulated in the context of a distinction between dār ul-harb (the domain of war) and dār ul-Islām (the domain of peace) making jihād appropriate only to the former. Of course, this theory didn’t prevent Muslim rulers from waging war on one another in the domain of peace or from making treaties with Christian neighbors. Muslims fought Muslims, sometimes with Christian allies. But legal categories other than the ones I have mentioned were employed to legitimize or condemn such conflicts.

Islamic debates on this subject, in which jurists belonging to the different schools engaged one another, evolved in complex relation to historical events. The legal ideas put forward in these arguments cannot be reduced to the simple doctrinal binary (unremitting distance from and hostility toward all non-Muslims, unqualified solidarity among and loyalty to all Muslims) that recent polemical writing in the West has made familiar. From very early on, another juridical category was established, called dār ul-‘ahd (the domain of treaties), that allowed for peaceful trade and social intercourse between Muslim and non-Muslim territories. Most premodern Islamic jurists ruled that it was fully permissible according to the sharīʾa (the religious law) for Muslims to live as subjects to a Christian prince (as in Spain), so long as they were able to practice Islam openly. The Ottoman Empire alone made a succession of treaties with Christian powers over the centuries that allowed European merchants to establish themselves within imperial lands with extraterritorial privileges. (The social situation of ordinary non-Muslim subjects within Muslim-majority countries varied at different times and in different places, but in general it tended to worsen when outsiders attacked Muslims.)⁶

In colonial times, a further reformulation of the doctrine of jihād took place: Muslims living under a non-Muslim government (and therefore technically in dār ul-harb) were not to undertake jihād as long as they were able to practice Islam and allowed to maintain its central institutions. Nevertheless, Muslim rebels against colonial regimes sometimes invoked jihād, and in recent years militant Is lamists have raised jihād to the level of an individual religious duty (fard al-‘ayn). But such usages have not had the support of most Mus lim jurists, for the legal preconditions of jihād—it has been argued by Muslim scholars—must include both the presence of a genuine threat to Islam and the likelihood of success in opposing it. Terms like jihād, dār ul-harb and dār ul-Islām are therefore not parts of a transhistorical worldview; they belong to an elaborate political-theological vocabulary in which jurists, men of religious learning, and modernist reformers debated and polemicized in response to varying circumstances.

In brief, there is no such thing as a clash of civilizations because there are no self-contained societies to which fixed civilizational values correspond. On the contrary, the penetration of European economic, political, and ideological powers in the Middle East—especially since the beginning of the nineteenth century—led to many practices being changed. European states conducted their strategic and commercial rivalries throughout the lands of a weakened—and eventually a broken-up—Ottoman Empire, building and controlling transport systems (the Suez Canal being the most important), promising and establishing a national home in Palestine to the Jews, dividing up the Middle East into mandates and spheres of influence, making unequal treaties with sovereign Arab polities, exploiting petroleum resources, and so forth. The United States has simply continued in this interventionist tradition with its own strategic and economic interests in the Middle East and has invoked new justifications for intervention in the present.

My concern, I stress, is not to find culprits but to point to a few of the complicated connections that give us a better picture of contemporary problems in the area that Europeans first called the Middle East. Thus Saddam’s cruelties were certainly his own, but the fact that the United States supplied him with vital military intelligence in his aggressive war against Iran and the Europeans helped him manufacture chemical weapons that he used against Iranians as well as Iraqi Kurds complicates the question of culpability—if culpability is to be assigned. Although the French support for the Algerian coup that suppressed the FIS after its electoral victories in 1991 did not determine the subsequent massacres, their support is not unconnected with what followed. Similarly, although the brutalities of the Islamic Republic of Iran are not caused by Western states, the regime’s emergence is not unrelated to the CIA coup (supported by Britain) that inaugurated the dictatorship of the shah in the 1950s. And again, Mubarak’s political repression and use of torture are not, of course, dictated by U.S. imperialism (although the Bush administration has made use of this skill by proxy), but the war against terror has certainly supplied him and other regimes in the region with greater justification for cruelty. As George Packer so nicely put it in his interesting essay on liberal internationalism: “How can the U.S. fight jihadism without supporting dictatorships?”⁷ In the case of Iraq, however, the United States decided to destroy a dictatorship and dismantle a state for its own reasons. No person who has followed the ensuing events can doubt that the rise in jihadism and the vicious sectarian killings are closely connected with the U.S. invasion and occupation.

In a densely interconnected world—more so than ever before—it is not sensible, in my view, to talk about the overriding need for reform in so-called Islamic civilization without at the same time re-appraising the attitudes, institutions, and policies in Western countries. Clearly, if reform is needed in Muslim-majority countries—and reform is certainly being demanded by their populations—it is needed no less in Europe and the United States, not least in the many ways that their policies impinge on the Middle East. Yet the idea of autonomous civilizations is difficult to shake.

It is in this connection that one might turn to Richard Rorty’s recent worry.⁸ Another major attack by terrorists in the West, he fears, would probably spell the end of historical democracy there: “The measures [Western] governments will consider it necessary to impose are likely to bring about the end of many of the sociopolitical institutions that emerged in Europe and North America in the two centuries since the bourgeois revolutions.” The connection between external violence and the sociopolitical institutions internal to Western democracy is, however, more complicated than Rorty suggests here. Long ago, Max Weber observed that European forms of freedom and democracy were made possible in part by the forcible expansion of the West over many centuries into the non-European world—and in spite of the simultaneous growth of a standardizing capitalism. This led him to fear that the ending of the West’s territorial expansion in which the drive for freedom was deeply embedded would seriously compromise its democracy.⁹ Weber did not, of course, foresee the spread of neoliberal capitalism around the globe—largely through the activities of financial institutions internal to today’s Western democracy (the IMF, the World Bank, the U.S. Treasury)—nor its fearful consequences in growing economic inequality and political instability compounded by global warming (aggravated if not caused by disproportionate energy use in the rich, industrially advanced countries). He could not anticipate the serious population dislocation and political instability in the poorer south that now encourage waves of illegal migration toward the north or the alarm and compassion that this would generate in Euro-American countries, leading to repeated calls for further military intervention in the south—to restore political order, to provide humanitarian aid, to punish so-called rogue regimes, to secure energy resources. At any rate, the implications of these tasks for Western democracy are at least as serious as the activities of terrorists, and both together inhabit a space of violence that is far more inclusive than Rorty’s account suggests. If Weber’s account of Western democracy is at all valid (and I am persuaded that it is), then what one finds is a shift in which the violence that yesterday facilitated freedom at home is today facilitating a creeping unfreedom. I stress that my concern here is not to blame the West but to substitute the idea of a historical space in which violence circulates, in which our wider aims are too often undermined by our own actions, for the simple agentive model that many commentators employ, in which rational democrats in the West react defensively to destructive terrorists from the East.

Critics who argue that the language of the clash of civilizations facilitates the discourse on terrorism are right. But the question remains: why is the term “terrorism” so prominent today? Before attempting an answer to this ...