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Interview With Professor Faisal Devji, Part II


By Haroon
Posted on Sat Feb 24, 2007 at 11:49:24 AM EST
Tags: Faisal_Devji, Faisal_Devji_Interviews, Eteraz_Interviews (all tags)

To get the background behind this six-part interview, please go back to the first post. Below, question two of our interview with New School University's Professor, Faisal Devji. (Check out Question One of the interview.)

Eteraz.Org: Question 2:
In Landscapes of the Jihad, you make much of the connections between the Arab Muslim world and Muslim South Asia, specifically with regards to Bin Laden's being located in the latter, not the former.

Do you think that, were Osama bin Laden not a Saudi (or perhaps not even an Arab), he would have gained the attention he did prior to or even after 9/11?

Do you believe it was his involvement in the Afghan jihad that so legitimated him in the eyes of radical Islamists, his Saudi background, or the substance of his position and simply his willingness to take action?

Professor Devji's Response:
While Bin Laden’s leadership was forged in the contingencies of battle, primarily in South and Central Asia, his Arabness is certainly a major ingredient in Al-Qaeda’s globalization. This Arabness, however, only possesses global significance because it has been de-linked from any kind of state-sponsored or state-centred struggle in the Middle East to become a universal moral value.

Unlike yesterday’s Islamism, in other words, whose Arabness was derived from the links of internationalist solidarity that Muslim movements around the world formed with Middle Eastern struggles, militancy today seems to have universalized Arabness by detaching it from the Middle East. Bin Laden can only be a global representative of such Arabness because he is situated outside the Middle East and engaged in battles outside this region.

Middle Eastern struggles, of course, continue to capture the attention of Muslims around the world, who are no different in this respect from the Christians, Jews, etc. who also remain captivated by its battles. But ritual, sartorial and linguistic practices that are marked as “Arab” can only achieve global currency in the Muslim world by being detached from the Middle East itself. Their universalization among militants, who might themselves have little interest in the Arab world, is thus moral rather than ethnic or linguistic in character.

It is an Arabness that is also thoroughly commodified in fragments like checked kaffiyehs or religious phrases pronounced by Bangladeshis or Nigerians in Middle Eastern ways. In this sense militant Arabness is produced and consumed outside the Middle East.

The increasingly formulaic nature of Arabness as a global form is nowhere more evident than in Al-Qaeda itself. Not only is Bin Laden’s classical Arabic locution ill understood even by many of his ostensibly Arab followers, it also presupposes translation to be understood by the majority of the world’s Muslims.

His very refusal to speak in modern standard Arabic, in other words, suggests that Bin Laden’s words are meant for translation, especially into English, which is in fact the language from which his words are translated into other Muslim tongues. English, not Arabic, is the language of global Islam. It is because Al-Qaeda’s founders realized this that they kept English translators at their Afghan camps, and nowadays also append English subtitles to their videotaped pronouncements.

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Tags: Faisal_Devji, Faisal_Devji_Interviews, Eteraz_Interviews (all tags)
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