The Perfect Victim

Since humanity can only be embodied in hierarchical and abstract ways, it is best manifested in the figure of the victim’s bare life. Replacing inherited theological conceptions, the notion of Muslims as victims leads to the replacement of religious conversion by an ethical identification with their suffering. Militant violence is an act of identification, whose problem is to avoid the responsibility for Muslim victimization that everyone is seen as sharing in the global arena.

Sleeping Beauty

No longer a regulative ideal, humanity has emerged as an empirical reality with our ability to count, measure and alter its global body. But while it is real, humanity possesses no political agency, and has thus been conceptualized since the Cold War in negative ways, as the actual or potential victim of atomic, pandemic or environmental extermination. In the same period, the Muslim ummah, newly conceptualized as an empirical and global community, has also come to be understood primarily as a body of victims. New forms of militancy are geared towards waking this community to its potential for agency, but can only do so outside states and institutions and by the fragmentation of ideology and action into networks of sacrifice that abandon the language of humanism for humanity as an inhuman or impersonal ideal.

In the Bellies of Green Birds

By claiming to love death more than their enemies do life, Al-Qaeda’s militants reject liberalism’s principal value. In doing so, they also open the possibility of moving beyond victimhood and all the other negative characteristics of humanity’s modern reality. Whether or not it is nihilistic, this attitude not only allows for a relationship of intimacy with the militant’s enemies, but also offers him the potential of exiting the human race itself in post-human visions of the martyr as an animal or bird.

Arabian Knights

Global forms of militancy have accentuated the fragmentation of the Middle East as a region that is already divided economically between Europe and Asia and open to new influences from other Muslim lands. Sectarian conflict becomes possible in this context of fragmentation, giving global rather than regional meaning to the Muslim conflict and turning the Middle East into a symbolic form. The caliphate serves to name a new global vision of Islam beyond the Cold War geographies that had for so long defined politics and thought in the region.

Laws of Uncertainty

How can responsibility for the victimization of Muslims be located in a global arena where potentially everyone can be adjudged guilty? Its universality allows such responsibility to break down the distinction between political and other dimension of action, rendering indiscriminate the violence of victimization as well as that meant to avenge it. But rather than invoking some universal doctrine by which to judge responsibility, the globalization of militancy leads to the repudiation of any such criterion. Instead, everyone is to be judged by the faithfulness to self-professed principles, with those willing to suffer most in their name demonstrating the truth of these values.

Insulting the Prophet

Militancy is not the only form that the globalization of Islam takes. It was preceded by decentralized and uncoordinated waves of protest over insults said to be made against Muhammad. These mobilizations have always been distinct and separate from the narratives of jihad, sometimes even overshadowing them. Like Al-Qaeda’s militancy, though, they propose no alternative to Western hegemony and ask only to be included within it. More so than with militancy, there is no theological dimension to such protests, which create a global audience by way of media spectacle.

GWOT

The emergence of Al-Qaeda resulted in the deterritorialization of the war waged against it. Neither an old-fashioned enemy operating through institutions like states and armies, nor a civilian and purely criminal enterprise, its networked form of militancy ended up fragmenting and disrupting the hierarchies of Western military force from the inside. This became evident in juridical enclaves like Guantanamo Bay as well as in the culture of torture and abuse at Abu Ghraib.