Poetic Archives of the Massacre

Devji’s concepts — the human element, consciousness external to the movement, ideology, and freedom as an internal quality — de-materialize the Taliban and the larger Deoband tradition through an uncritical assimilation of their poetry into the European discourse of humanism. Devji attempts a negative dismantling of all the elements that constitute the Taliban: aesthetics is separated from political ethics, the sacred is separated from the profane, ideology is separated from the material ideology and determinations of the ‘War on Terror,’ and consciousness is conceptualized as idealism separate from the shariʿa and its moral doctrinal structure. Devji aestheticizes freedom, turning it into an internal quality of the individual and de-politicizing the contemporary positionality of Islamists — particularly those who challenge the logic of an imperialist war.

While the Taliban has its specificity, such aestheticization of their poetry impacts the hermeneutic context of a larger network of Deobandi revivalism — active in South and Central Asia — a tradition focused on perfecting the shariʿa through obedience to a tariqah[9] for the purposes of encountering the real (haqiqa). The very concept of tazkiyah-al-nafs[10] disallows the separation of the believer’s task with his heart and socio-political life. In fact, interventions from the outside — whether by a foreign power or local secular regime — produce an inverted world of non-Islam (jahiliyya) for the believer, making bodily obedience to divine will extremely difficult. This creates a condition for the possibility of struggle towards disalienation.

On May 5, 2013, according to madrassa sources, close to one million people took over a large segment of Dhaka — between the national mosque and the Business District — forming the largest public gathering in the history of Bangladesh. Nearly all of the Qawmi madrassas of the country organized under a single banner, forming Hefazat-e-Islam, a phrase that literally means “to safeguard Islam.” The masses marched in opposition to a series of denigrating — at times even pornographic — depictions of the Prophet Muhammad published in the secularist blogosphere earlier that year. After evening prayer on the day of the march, State forces turned off the electricity for a large segment of the Business District and forcefully removed Islamic journalists, launching what they termed “Operation Flushout.” This operation, which continued until the morning of May 6, involved the disappearances and mass killing of Islamic students and clerics. The administration repressed local media that sought to report on the event and took legal measures against human rights organizations and documentarians that attempted to publish fact-finding reports. Nonetheless, Al Jazeera, along with several key international organizations, reported that hundreds of Islamic clerics and students were killed that night.

In the rest of this essay, we examine the consequences of the May 2013 massacre in Dhaka, Bangladesh. We collected written memories, reflections, poems, novellas, videos, other literary and non-literary artifacts in the aftermath of the massacre. These are some of the forms in which the massacre is memorialized within the Islamist counterpublic.[11] These materials are the remaining traces — like dried blood — of the actual sets of events. It is a living archive that not only allows an immanent embodied critique of a secular society, but provides a marginal possibility for a realist speculation in retrospect. The materials of the archive are a critique of secular time: we simultaneously return to the flesh of the first killings, and stay within the silence of the present moment.

The following excerpt is from a poem written by a Qawmi madrassa student who witnessed the massacre of May 5-6, 2013. The poet speculates on the materiality of forms of death, and its relation to a secular regime, in which the distribution of power is not only operationalized by the State apparatus, but permeates the social life in the ethically ruined city Dhaka.

There is enjoyment in death.

For instance, I am walking and longing for the seductive fragrance of my lover

But, I suddenly stop, and piss on an anthill

Or, I am dating my fifth girlfriend

I tear off some flowers and give them to her as a promise

Like that.

A superficial reading of what the author calls “enjoyment in death” may lead one to think about the agential or intentional structure of the secular persons whom the poet addresses in this passage. Rather, the poet in his ethical judgment of secularity seems concerned about a specific generality that secular regimes produce: a fetish for this world, the duniya and its specific temporality which is naturalized in a final manner. Within this generality there is an affective history: a history of feeling, sensing, touching, smelling, embodying. One feels the dirt, disaster, and ethical corruption in Dhaka, where a massacre is the logical outcome of the structured erasure of Islam as a mode of life. The dynamic in this passage is the presence of Islam as a draft, as a wind, in the form of ethical critique of secular embodiment. In other words, the presence of Islam is within the absence of Islam. The voice in this passage is not of an individual author. But rather, it is a collective muffled voice of the mu’minun — the witnesses of the massacre — who are trapped in modern secularity, but are inspired by a fanaticism for the absent author (of revelations). The poem should not be mistaken as a call for the opposite of death — a philosophy of life. Rather, it should be read as an attempt to make a categorial distinction between two forms of death: the deaths of those charmed by the fetish of Man, and therefore this life, versus the deaths of those who fear Allah- within a larger general history of death.

The condition of the ants drowned in urine and the flower torn to pieces is a minute material representation of the comprehensive and detailed violence of the secular on every living being. Here, the poet’s thinking on the problematic of the secular is neither about secularism as a political doctrine, nor about the secular as an episteme of a particular historical period. Rather, his dwelling is on the fundamental ontology of violence: the violence that constitutes life within the force of secular regimes, configured by the logic of the ‘War on Terror,’ but more broadly, by modernity itself.

Let us leave the post-massacre condition in Dhaka for a moment. If we compare this Islamist poet’s pessimistic observations on unethical secular mannerisms towards smaller, negligible beings like ants, with remarks by a recently released Muslim prisoner on how he survived the indignity of torture through companionships with insects and animals, we observe contrasting positions, grounded in an antagonism between two different worlds. Soon after being released from 14 years in Guantanamo Bay military prison Shaker Aamer explains in a BBC interview how his ethical relationships with other beings like ants and cats helped him survive imprisonment. Aamer says,