![Sample our Humanities journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5939/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Humanities.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
In light of the recent visibility of police violence, the American public has increasingly called for law enforcement reforms. What remains missing from these conversations is how reformist or counterinsurgency policing in the United States as developed during the domestic War on Terror depends on anti-Muslim racism and invokes the specter of a so-called “Islamist Caliphate.” This essay troubles racialized notions of the caliphate and narratives about Muslim youth radicalization by considering the relevance of the caliphate concept to Muslim Americans in the surveillance age. It examines how youth of color in Greater Los Angeles, CA, targeted by surveillance infrastructures, invoke stories from the Islamic past to reckon with their own tribulation under emergent regimes of antiterror policing. As such, it probes into how the emergent grammar of a caliphate of care enables ethico-political projects to create the time and space for Islamic virtue to thrive in Southern California.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Hussein Agrama, Shalini Shankar, and Soham Patel for their comments on earlier drafts of this essay. I am especially appreciative to the Humanities Studio at Pomona College and the Department of Cultural Anthropology at Duke University for inviting me to workshop this essay with faculty and students.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, Statement of Michael P. Downing.
2 Ibid.
3 The conceptual opposition of consent and force articulates a certain modality of cruelty that is constitutive of violent interventions under liberal empire. See Asad, “Thinking About the Secular Body, Pain, and Liberal Politics.”
4 For an analysis of the logics, strategies, and racial foundations of antiterror programs in the US, see Akbar, “National Security’s Broken Windows;” Kundnani, The Muslims Are Coming; Nasir, “Mad Kids, Good City;” Nguyen, Suspect Communities.
5 On the racialization of Muslims and Islam in the United States and beyond, see Naber, “Introduction;” Nasir and Patel, “The Asianist is Muslim;” Rana, Terrifying Muslims; Razack, Casting Out.
6 In his discussion of black political theology, George Schulman suggests that states of exception always offer possibilities of contesting the state’s sovereignty, most notably through religious traditions that offer a divine-based “countersovereignty.” Such possibilities can be most notably found in “ordinary language,” where the habitual embodied usage of words and concepts “entails rather than precludes creative agency” (Schulman, “White Supremacy and Black Insurgency as Political Theology,” 35) Applying this discussion to the case of post-9/11 police surveillance, attending to Islamic revivalism in Muslim American communities and the grammar of their concepts opens a space to examine countersovereignty rooted in opposition to the racializing powers of the US security state.
7 Dylan Rodriguez explores transformations to “White Being” with the rise of counterinsurgency governance in the United States, and more specifically, in global cities like LA. He frames the notion of “domestic warfare” based on the US Army Counterinsurgency Field Manual, which he argues serves as an epistemological and political foundation to contemporary anti-black and racial-colonial policing in LA and other urban centers. Curiously missing from this discussion is how General David Petraeus authored the field manual for the American occupation of Iraq, as well as how the US military and domestic policing apparatuses, including the LAPD, have predominantly targeted Muslims as its test subjects for its counterinsurgency strategies. See Rodriguez, White Reconstruction: Domestic Warfare and the Logics of Genocide.
8 Following Giorgio Agamben (2003), scholarship on sovereignty has increasingly turned to biopolitics and questions of “bare life.” Instead of examining sovereignty anchored in the modern state, I draw on recent debates in indigenous studies and Islamic studies to consider how custodians of Islamic tradition uphold Muslim ontological and epistemic sovereignty under colonialism by re-establishing Islamic regimes of care of the self. See Wilson Chacko Jacob, For God or Empire; Audra Simpson, Mohawk Interruptus; Sturm, Becoming Indian.
9 For an ethnography on race, questions of solidarity, and political formations in the context of modern jihad, see Li, The Universal Enemy.
10 For a summary of this intervention in the anthropology of Islam and how it differs from the “everyday Islam” approach, see Fadil and Fernando, “Rediscovering the ‘everyday’ Muslim.”
11 Mahmood, Politics of Piety.
12 In her examination of Muslim American social movements in Northern California, Sunaina Maira argues that “there is a great deal of overlap that blurs the boundaries of what is sometimes easily glossed as ‘religious’ and ‘secular’ activism” (Maira, The 9/11 Generation, 11). While this might be the case in civil and human rights organizing, which Maira examines in her ethnography, I show that in Greater LA Islamic tradition offers an alternative to rights-based frameworks that promise emancipation through inclusion into the liberal nation-state. Maira, The 9/11 Generation: Youth, Rights, and Solidarity in the War on Terror.
13 Aziz Rana argues that the foundations of American liberty have been overwhelmingly shaped by the United States’ status as a settler empire. Settler ideology fuses ethnic nationalism, republicanism, and Protestant theology to claim active control over religious, political, and economic life, while denying these privileges to racialized others. Although the US State in the 20th century came to privilege an idea of freedom that emphasized security from external threats over autonomy, social movements forged in critique of US imperialism have drawn on and sought to universalize the ideal of self-rule. I show that Muslim American anti-surveillance political organizing fuses virtue and self-rule through the caliphate of care. See A. Rana, The Two Faces of American Freedom.
14 In Islamic tradition, the story of the Battle of Uhud has been told and interpreted through various exegeses on Surah Imran (Chapter of Imran) in the Qur’an, in which it appears. The verses offer a twofold reproach to the Companions (sahaba) of Muhammad that took part in the battle. Firstly, God chastises the Companions for not heeding Muhammad’s orders, and secondly, for their lack of faith during and after the battle. However, more positively, the Qur’an comforts the Companions by arguing that if they maintain their faith that they wil triumph over their enemies both in the world and in the hereafter. While some commentators of the Qur’an claim that the Companions were punished for disobeying Muhammad, most Sunni exegeses argue that irrespective of their actions God hands out victories to Muslims and non-Muslims as He sees fit. For the faithful a defeat serves as a test toward maintaining faith in God and His plan. It is this version of the story that Shaykh Hasan draws upon and emphasizes in his lecture. See: Nasr et. al, The Study Quran, pp. 168-170; M. Asad, The Message of the Qur’an, pp. 101-104.
15 Clarifying the temporal arrangement of Asad’s conceptualization of tradition, Ovamir Anjum writes, “traditional discourses are not merely nostalgic: they relate to a past (when the authentic practice was instituted) and a future (how a correct performance and its fruits can be secured in future) through a present (how it is linked to other practices, institutions, and social conditions)” (Anjum, “Islam as a Discursive Tradition: Talal Asad and his interlocutors,” 661). See also Asad, “The Idea of an Anthropology of Islam;” Asad, “Thinking About Tradition, Religion, and Politics in Egypt Today.”
16 Zargar, The Polished Mirror.
17 For a detailed account of virtue as the telos of Islamic ethical practice, see Mahmood, Politics of Piety.
18 J. Rana, “The Racial Infrastructure of the Terror-Industrial Complex.”
19 Ibid., 128.
20 My use of national security citizenship draws on recent scholarship analyzing how the overlaps between neoliberalism and emerging paradigms of security have produced new forms of belonging and subjectivity in the surveillance age. See Reeves, Citizen Spies; I. Grewal, Saving the Security State; A. Rana, “Against National Security Citizenship.”
21 Deeb “Emulating and/or embodying the ideal,” 249.
22 Macintyre, After Virtue, 144
23 Pandolfo, Knot of the Soul, 16.
24 Cemil Aydin argues that modernist calls to resuscitate the caliphate among Islamists have only been possible by the emerging racialized notion of an “imagined Muslim world” (The Idea of the Muslim World, 126). The Muslim Americans here certainly imagine themselves as part of a broader Muslim world, but do not aim to install the caliphate as a political office. For more on Muslim American conceptualizations of tradition, ethics, and the so-called Muslim World, see Z. Grewal, Islam is a Foreign Country.
25 March, The Caliphate of Man, 104.
26 In this arrangement Islamic scholars (ulema) play an important role in guiding ordinary Muslims on how to cultivate the ethical aptitudes. It rejects secular authority and modern state sovereignty by reclaiming pastoral power for Islamic scholars and promoting public piety in accordance with the shari”a and divine sovereignty. Muslim Americans similarly look to Islamic scholars for guidance on how to restore the caliphate in Greater LA.
27 Sayyid, Recalling the Caliphate, 113.
28 On the concept of moderate Islam, see Corbett, Making Moderate Islam; Mamdani, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim. As mentioned, in the post-9/11 period MPAC and its founder Salam Al-Marayati have worked closely with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and local and federal police on various community-based policing programs targeting Muslims Americans.
29 Maldonado-Torres argues that decolonial ethics is defined by “its oppositional nature in contexts defined by modernity/coloniality” and involves ethically reorienting “the self in conditions of systematic dehumanization” (“Race, Religion, and Ethics in the Modern/Colonial World,” 7, 16). The project to install the caliphate of care can be described in terms of decolonial ethics insofar as it emerges in response to surveillance and involves constituting a communal ethics in contexts of anti-Muslim racism.
30 Davidson, “In Praise of Counter-Conduct,” 16.
31 Death, “Counter-conducts: A Foucauldian analytics of protest.”
32 Recent studies concerned with reframing the normative analyses Muslim youth politics in Europe through the lens of radicalization have also draw on Foucault’s conception of counter-conduct. See, de Koning et. al, “Islamic Militant Activism in Belgium, The Netherlands and Germany: ‘Islands in a Sea of Disbelief’.”
33 While his ideas remain a cornerstone for those involved in Islamic politico-theological projects of the Muslim Left, Sherman Jackson has recently come under fire for his involvement with de-radicalization initiatives. See Al-Arian, “The Political Impotence” and Jackson, “From Demagoguery into the Lizard’s Hole.”
34 For more on the shared goals, as well as tensions between, decoloniality and abolition in debates about anti-Muslim racism, see Kazi, “Reform, Abolition, and Decoloniality.”
Additional information
Funding
Notes on contributors
M. Bilal Nasir
M. Bilal Nasir is currently the Chau Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Intercollegiate Department of Asian American Studies at Pomona College. Spanning over two years of ethnographic research in Greater Los Angeles, CA, his work examines emergent forms of Islamic activism launched in response to the anti-Muslim racism and policing. Specifically, it considers how South Asian American, Arab American, and Black American Islamic scholars and pious youth draw on traditions of Islamic ethics to forge social movements in critique of racialized surveillance. Nasir’s work has been published or is forthcoming in Anthropological Quarterly, Nova Religio, and Asia Shorts.