Hamzah Saif: The explosive growth in work on ‘terrorism’ as a pathology, which now overwhelms the academic and popular conversation on violence in areas of American imperial expansion, and among which Haroon Ullah’s work may be counted, critically buttresses the construction of apolitical and ahistorical ‘terrorism’. Consider what sort of subject is imagined and subsequently created by this Pew survey of “Muslim views of ISIS”, this paper by prominent academics wondering whether poverty causes people to become terrorists and and this speech by Tony Blair on that terrorism can be defeated by education. Certainly, the emphasis is not on the subject’s historical or political formation, with the history of imperial projects being particularly absent. Instead such production focuses on the present malformation of the terrorist. Unable to participate in our political society – not a part of the ‘we’ of which Butler reminds us – it is almost as if the contemporary militant, whose mysterious reasons for existence such works probe, has magically appeared. Historically and politically vacant, such ‘terrorism’ can be apprehended as mad violence wherever it occurs. This plays a key role in establishing the co-victimhood of Paris and Beirut. When Paris reels from ‘terrorism’, Beirut can send condolences with a reminder that it suffers from the same affliction. Co-victims from the Muslim world demand equal, or more stridently, commensurate recognition of their misery. Invoking the well-trod philosophical terrain that suffering is not a consequence of violence itself but of arbitrary violence, this discourse establishes the Muslim world as afflicted by identically indiscriminate explosions that similarly claim innocent lives. […] How, then, to recognize and value life and death in Beirut and Kenya? Judith Butler asks Euro-America to recognize that lives in the Muslim world inhabit the same social, that ‘lives over’ there are interdependent on lives ‘here.’ To draw Butler’s argument further through a recourse to Edward Said, we need to recognize not only that our lives are interdependent, but also that the subjectivities produced in the periphery and the metropole are intimately tied to each other. In other words, we need to question the construction of the liberal subject that is identical in Beirut and in Paris; we need to trace the history of the power that has produced Pakistanis who eagerly insist after the Paris attacks that “in all honesty, we are the same people as you.” Such an interrogation means to see that War on Terror policies that deny personhood to lives ‘over there’ are critically facilitated by the waving of the chimeric flag of equality that claims that lives in Karachi are the same as those in Paris, and are afflicted by the same ‘terrorism’. Bombs and bullets surely flew in Paris. Deaths and horror were registered, as they were elsewhere where violence has visited. A violence does link Paris and Peshawar, Euro-America and the Muslim world. But it not the violence of ‘terrorism’. It is the savagery of a liberal imperial project that is violently ejecting radical critique from the imperial periphery through the promotion of the illusory liberal ideal of equality, while reducing the Euro-American condition to one of survival. It is this imperial project that co-victimizes us.
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