Body of Victim, Body of Warrior. Cabeiri deBergh Robinson
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There is also the challenge of confronting the violence in/of jihād. Images of violence associated with jihād circulate on a global scale, yet the spectacle of that violence and the human experiences of suffering associated with it have no single, stable political meaning. Whether the suffering that first comes to mind was caused by the 9/11 attacks or by unmanned drones bombing a village suggests whether a person thinks of jihād as a practice that is offensive, even terroristic, or a legitimate use of violence to defend Muslim people from external aggression. Other spectacles of violence are even less stable; for instance, the marks of torture inscribed on the bodies of prisoners interrogated for their political activities or beliefs are read very differently across diverse publics. Even images of violence that are intended to reveal a simple truth about violent events instead reveal that the corporeal wound does not speak for itself. The most eloquent expression of this that I have encountered is from Susan Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others. She wrote that photographers think about their material “as unmasking the conflict, but those same antiwar photographs may be read as showing pathos, or admirable heroism, in an unavoidable struggle that can be concluded only by victory or defeat.”16 Divergent interpretive publics come to very different conclusions about what the corporeal wound is evidence of, and they come to very different conclusions about how they should respond to what they see and what they “know”. In this sense, the interpretive processes by which Muslim publics evaluate violence carried out in the name of Islam are quite similar to the social practices of evaluation and rationalization that are a part of the process of legitimating modern political violence in general.
The Kashmir Jihad and the Pakistani State
Here, I would like to clarify what my argument is not. It is well documented that the Pakistani state funds various militant groups as part of a long-term proxy-war strategy vis-à-vis India and that international Islamic organizations have links with some of the militant groups active in the Kashmir region.17 I do not deny that they exert influence. The people who participate in the Kashmir Jihad, however, are very well aware of the different uses that various states will make of them, and they have their own uses for state and non-state sponsors as well. The common analytic perspectives that explain changes in the social mobilization of violence on the ground by analyzing the intentions and stratagems of Pakistan or any other government are insufficient. I am also not focused on political elites or their explanations of the political goals of their movements; many of the young men involved in militant organizations, both those allied with political parties and those purely organized to conduct jihād, are members of multiple political associations, some of which have contradictory ideological underpinnings or political goals. Overt statements about political affiliations might or might not represent aspirations or commitments for Kashmiri refugees in the current context; and in many cases, people have many different political affiliations that they deploy as needed in different local, regional, national, and transnational contexts. This reality presents a problem to anyone seeking to correlate party or organizational membership, or even participation, with a specific political or religious position. Furthermore, they often join associations explicitly for the infrastructural support that they offer, rather than as an endorsement of a position. Rather than being the end point of separating young men from the family, the life histories of Kashmiri refugees who have become jihādīs suggest that the family, as a model and moral structure and as an aspiration, penetrates even into the militant training camp. conflict analysis in the Kashmir region has remained firmly on states and political elites,18 but in order to understand how decades of armed conflict have changed the regional political culture, it is necessary to take serious measure of the new social formations that have emerged from people’s long struggles with and against violence.
It is also not my argument that Muslim refugees in AJK are the only victims of political violence in the Kashmir region, or that they haven’t perpetrated great violence upon others.19 It is a terrible truth that there are many victims in this long conflict and that basing political claims on the defense of victims has heretofore contributed to greater victimization rather than to the emergence of sustainable systems of accountability or to a durable peace. Understanding the emergence of jihād on the ground requires engaging an important social reality: violence is actually a very small, if highly visible, part of the practices of jihād—most of which are not violent most of the time. These practices raise ethical debates, produce new cultural aesthetics, and shape the desires and aspirations of the social imagination.
Regarding the Modernity of Politicized Islam and Personhood in Muslim Societies
My argument that contemporary jihāds, like other modern violent political movements, unfold over time through discussion, debate, and conflict over legitimate practices and limitations, brings into question the role of Islam as a religious tradition in the process of sociopolitical transformation. It also engages two theoretical debates in the interdisciplinary study of political movements—including violent ones—that employ an Islamic moral language. One of these debates is about whether Islam as a religious tradition is inherently already political or whether it requires some kind of social work to make it politically accessible. The other, a corollary in some ways, is about how to explain the paradox of overtly politicized uses of Islam—that both fundamentalist ideology (which argues that individuals should model their behavior on the past as a site of authentication and authority) and Islamist ideology (which argues that the state apparatus should enforce traditional Islamic legal systems to reform Muslim society) depend, in their appeal and practice, on modern political forms and subjects. I contend that it is important to make analytic distinctions between “Islamic fundamentalism,” “Islamism,” and “political Islam.”
Islamic fundamentalism and Islamism are distinctly modern movements, even though they rhetorically claim a return to an uncorrupted and universal past.20 As modern ideological forms, however, fundamentalist and Islamist trajectories have important distinctions.21 For this reason, while there are legitimate objections to the use of the word fundamentalism in application to Islam, it is a valuable marker of the debate among Muslim intellectuals in which Islamist ideologies diverged from their reformist and revivalist influences. Fundamentalist thinkers (whose arguments first cohered and became prominent in the 1920s and 1930s) argued that individuals should model their behavior on the past as a site of authentication and authority. They were interested in establishing a proper Islamic sociopolitical order, and they argued that it would be achieved through organized movements to reform individual Muslims and society more broadly. In this, the intellectual task was the excavation and reaffirmation of foundational principles and the organized effort to reshape society by those principles.22
Islamist thinkers (whose arguments diverged from the fundamentalist position in the 1940s and became prominent in the 1960s), on the contrary, were explicitly interested in articulating a political ideology based on this foundational Islam. Islamist ideologues argued that Islam constituted a total system for the governance of public and political life as well as for individual piety and social organization. Indeed, the term Islamist emerged from these thinkers’ explicit effort to distinguish themselves from other Muslims in general, and from fundamentalist thinkers specifically; an Islamist is someone committed to what Abu A'la Maududi, ideologue of the South Asian Islamist party the Jamaat-e-Islami, termed in Urdu the “nizām-e-islāmī” (the total system/order of Islam).23 Eventually, Islamist thinkers argued for the total institution of Islamic governance and the institutionalization of Islamic law. Yet, “because Islamic symbols are filled with different patterns of meaning . . . there exists no clear consensus on how to determine the substance of the posited concept of order,”24 and Islamist positions vary on what form Islamic governance should take and on the specific character of the law. Significantly, Islamists’ arguments were not based on classical notions of caliphate and territorial sovereignty but were instead interested in the modern bureaucratic state and the use of political parties to organize formal institutional politics.25 Islamist political parties are typically made up of closely affiliated associations; the political party itself, which may be concerned with administration or diplomatic efforts; a wing concerned primarily with charitable activities and the provision of social welfare; and a militant wing, which may or may not be active.26
One of many vexing questions in the study of Islamic fundamentalism