Body of Victim, Body of Warrior. Cabeiri deBergh Robinson
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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 of Islam or historical precedent exclusively.
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