Body of Victim, Body of Warrior. Cabeiri deBergh Robinson
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social debate and placed conflict-related forced displacement in a global political imaginary. At the same time, the terms mujāhid and jihādī (jihadist) became important as fighters emerged from refugee communities.
The final section, “Body of Victim, Body of Warrior,” describes the contemporary social practice of jihād within Kashmiri refugee communities in AJK and Pakistan. The young refugee men who joined militant organizations fighting in Kashmir were not recruited through traditional Islamist political party networks or through fundamentalist ideological indoctrination in traditional religious institutions. Instead, they sought out militant organizations directly. Their primary sources of information about the conflict in Kashmir were networks of personal relationships (including residents of refugee camps and relatives living in Indian Kashmir) and public media (such as newspapers, satellite television, and the Internet). They describe the Kashmir Jihad as a defense of Kashmiri people from human rights abuses by the state rather than as a defense of Muslim territorial sovereignty (the fundamentalist paradigm) or a means of establishing Islamic legal rule within the modern state (the Islamist paradigm). Jihadist organizations accommodated this image of the mujāhid as the defender of victimized Kashmiri women, and this formulation of the Kashmir Jihad shifted the terrain of struggle from sovereign territory or the sovereign state to the sovereign body.
This story, thus, reveals a surprising convergence: Kashmiri Muslim refugees adopted the language of human rights and humanitarianism to rethink their position in relationship to wider regional, transnational, and global communities. In doing so, they forged a notion of “rights”, as a hybrid of Islamic and global political ideas and practices, and reformulated the Kashmir Jihad as a project legitimized by the need to protect the bodies of Muslim people against torture and sexual violence. Kashmiri refugees emphasized their personal conscience and their understanding of the broader political context over doctrinal regulation. In this, they drew on modern experiences of the self to express ideas about how a Muslim person should respond to experiences of violent transgression of the physical and social body. While this formulation offered many different ways for people to participate in jihād and produced a significant amount of public support, it also loosened the institutional connections between political parties and militant organizations. Indeed, Kashmiri mujāhids and jihādīs cannot produce themselves through the ideological guidance and bodily disciplining of religious institutions, because this notion of rights was created as a relational concept within and by refugee families. Instead, for Kashmiri Muslim refugees who become Islamic militants, the family rather than the mosque or the religious school mediates entrance into jihadist organizations.
This ethnographic reality challenges many current understandings of what jihād is and how it is produced.
ON CONTEMPORARY JIHADS AND THE SPECTACLE OF JIHADIST VIOLENCE
Jihād is no longer a concept that is completely contained by the Islamic religious traditions. It has become an object of public culture on a global scale2 and a concept that mobilizes political and military interventions in the name of multiple (and divergent) ethical goals.3 At the end of the Cold War and through the first years of the so-called War on Terror, media and policy discourses produced a widespread understanding that it refers to Islamic religious warfare, or “holy war.” Scholars of the Islamic traditions objected to this translation; they argued that the term rightly refers to a spiritual struggle for moral perfection rather than to practices of warring.4 Despite these objections, the term jihād came into broad use not only as an indicator of religious warfare, but more specifically to denote terrorism legitimated by theocratic discourses. This created a demand for experts on “Islamic terrorism,” many of whom were not trained in the history, culture, or languages of any particular Muslim society and approached jihād as a universal fundamentalist form of religiously mandated violence against nonbelievers.
In response, scholars with expertise in historical and contemporary Muslim societies turned their focus to jihād’s relationship to the universalizing claims of “Islam” as a religious tradition, and three broad positions emerged. One emphasized trends of continuity within Muslim societies and historical attempts to maintain or regain religious purity, and linked contemporary violence to the origins of the Islamic religious traditions.5 It has been critiqued for making violence central to the study of Islam and for presenting the culture of Muslim societies as unchanged by debates; as if, instead of being a “people without history,” Muslims are a people with nothing but history for whom the work of culture-making is inherently already complete.6 Another position emphasized the political and economic conditions, particularly those of inequality and domination, that shaped jihād practices in the modern era and made them analytically comparable with other (violent) anticolonial, anti-imperial, or liberatory resistance movements.7 A third position has described the Islamic tradition as “hijacked”—the true spiritual meaning of jihād has been captured and corrupted by a very small number of Muslim people who do not represent the true religious tradition.8 This perspective posits, on the one hand, a universal Islam (but one disassociated from violent politics) and, on the other, a historical misappropriation of that “real” universal Islam (by untrained, uneducated, or misguided Muslims who do not understand their own tradition). Critiques of these positions accuse adherents of being apologists for Islamic terrorism.
These studies have illuminated the actual diversity of jihāds, and they offer important challenges to counterterrorism policy analysts. Unfortunately, however, the dominant paradigm has been to analyze “jihād” as its own object. It is therefore not surprising that institutions (like religious schools or militant training camps), religious doctrines (such as Deobandi, Salafi, etc.), and political ideologies (like fundamentalism or Islamism) have been removed from their social contexts and posited as new sites of subject formation and regulation.9 In addition, the methodologies employed to study jihād have had profound theoretical consequences.10 Religious studies focus on the foundational texts and lineages of interpretive exegesis.11 Historians, for their part, have taken up regional traditions and approach jihād as a paradigm that that Muslims have drawn upon in different ways at different times.12 And social science studies of contemporary jihāds are predominantly based on statistical survey methods, structured interviewing, and analysis of testimony or statements of jihadists in detention.13 Unfortunately, a focus on texts privileges doctrinal positions and the cultural productions of religious elites, and basing social analysis on preidentified jihadists presupposes understanding how someone becomes a fighter in a jihād. To actually ask people what jihād means to them, and to further observe how communities and individuals support or subvert processes by which people become mujāhids, requires a sustained ethnographic access that is extremely difficult to achieve and maintain.14 But it is precisely such an approach that one must adopt in order to address the serious analytic challenges posed by the current approaches to the study of contemporary jihāds.
One such challenge is that emphasizing the essential spiritual meaning of the “greater jihād” does not explain how jihād as warfare or armed struggle (the “lesser jihād”) can have a valued place in modern social life and why it cannot simply be de-fetishized by those Muslim scholars and intellectuals who argue the foundationally spiritual meanings of the concept. Another is that, as regards so-called Islamic violence, the role of culture in the process of sociopolitical transformation is contested and contingent; the eventual emergence of new social forms is neither epiphenomenal to cultural production nor culturally overdetermined. Islam in its many political forms provides several alternative models for how Muslims might act when confronted with oppression and violence—hijarat and jihād, for example, are both discussed in Islamic religious texts, both have the status of sunnat (models of behavior), and both address the issue of how to live with political violence. Therefore, why one model becomes more or less powerful at any given moment cannot be explained by a textual or historical hermeneutics that is internal to its object. Furthermore, there is no ritual process of subject formation that embodies Islamic ideology outside of specific historical and social contexts, and religious concepts, symbols, and interpretations are always connected with and inflected through worldly symbols and historical processes of meaning-making.15 Thus, neither the social production of mujāhids nor muhājirs can be explained analyzing either textual explanations