1. The Maintenance of Innocence

Cleansing Empire

The sun pours down over Lord’s. A black man ushers one of Bollywood’s most amiably round-faced actors out from a dark corridor onto the unconfined open field. The men embrace. The stalls are empty, but ball and bat are found. The black man—athletic but young, sweet, and unthreatening—bowls; the South Asian bats and hits what could be a boundary or a winning stroke. He raises his bat, acknowledging the applause of the absent audience in a gesture straight from Bollywood and bearing all the marks of its sentimentality and melodrama. Both are transfigured by joy. It could almost be a scene scripted by an acolyte of C. L. R. James.¹

What the audience knows as we watch this vision from “Who Guards the Guards?” (2004), an episode from the popular British television show Spooks/MI-5, is that the scene is a moment of joy engineered for a former colonial subject by a defunct empire at war with itself. Danny (David Oyelo) is a junior spy for the MI-5, Harakat (Anupam Kher) is a Pakistani ex-militant under the protection, now, of MI-5 and under imminent threat of assassination by MI-6, because the head of the agency, unbeknownst to the team at MI-5, has made a deal with the head of the organization (Path of Light) to which Harakat belonged before he was turned by the British. The scene, offered as a kind of sports-pastoral, enacts a momentary restitution of Empire through a celebration of its gifts to its darker subjects: here the joy of cricket. This vision is far indeed from C. L. R. James: the comity between former imperial subject and declined Empire is poised on the erasure of the violence of imperial history not in any way upon its recognition.

The strategies of the erasure are carefully choreographed, in many ways clumsily obvious, and yet rather mesmerizing. They hinge on two figures, Danny, the abject black spy—yearning for the uninterested blonde, Zoe (Keeley Hawes)—and Zuli, an author based on Rushdie trying get a fatwa calling for his murder removed, played with devilish unamiability by the bald, round-faced Simon De Selva (whose features register as the evil double of Kher’s). Of course, both Kher and De Selva resemble Rushdie. The show justifies Zuli’s ejection from the story within the first ten minutes by transforming it into a self-ejection. As Zuli stalks off into the arms of his new ex-CIA guards, we are to see only his treachery.

The conceit that the MI-5 team is guarding the wrong man, the author, is introduced in the second scene and enables its delineation of a very particular world of Islam. Zuli meets Harakat, his friend, a bookseller, in order to get the fatwa removed. Danny is present to guard the author; there is an assassination attempt in which Danny rolls on top of Zuli in order to protect him. Harakat is a little wounded. As it transpires the assassination attempt was aimed at Harakat, not Zuli. The good British spies were protecting the wrong Muslim all along. Although one spy appears to be a critic, for as he surveils the meeting, before it is violently disrupted, he remarks with what is meant to pass as wit and comes across as the cringe-making labor evinced when the British national commitment to wit makes a citizen try too hard: “There’s only one thing that worries me. The last thing we want is to keep Zuli alive long enough for him to inflict another one of his novels on us” (WGG). That critical wisdom is ratified when Zuli, furious at the attempt, and thinking that he was the target, threatens to call the Home Secretary and rejects the British spies in favor of retired American ones. Yet Harakat, disposable like all Muslims in the show, is murdered right after his treat at Lord’s.

The world of Islam the episode delineates is a marvel of flat simplicity: a good (because turned and hence moderate) cricket-playing Islamist; a bad Islamist making deals with the evil head of MI-6 in (bizarrely) Hebron. A bad apostate author, indulged by the British government because of his uppity friendship with the Home Secretary, who does not have the grace to be grateful to his guards and opts instead for the ex-CIA protectors, thus securing his expulsion from the community of decency and morality into which the show attempts to claw its way. Bombs in Karachi and Peshawar. There are no women in this vision. No engagement with the world of Muslims outside bombs and fatwas, inconvenient (apostate) Muslims, good and bad Islamists, who, although they are Pakistani in this episode, could be in Karachi, Peshawar, or Hebron.

The episode is a significant marker of the refraction into the British and (global) imaginary of the “Islam” that is the subject of this book. An erasure of imperial history that mirrors fully the erasure of its colonial genealogy in this constitution of Islam is achieved through the episode’s arrangement of the tokens of this Islam’s symbolic economy—Islamists, authors, bombs, fatwas—and through its deployment of a favorite trope of postwar British spy fiction: the foregrounding of the ignorant, even thuggish moral unredeemability of the CIA. The concluding exchange between the heads of the two agencies reveals the moral necessity of the narrative of U.S. excess to the ongoing project of British self-exculpation, and to the fortification of postimperial “historical amnesia.”² The show’s recurrent critique of the special relationship, into which the contempt for the CIA is folded, is part of the renewal of British innocence. It continues into the Blair era what Stuart Hall identified as Thatcherism’s forging of “new discursive articulations between the liberal discourses of the ‘free market’ and economic man and the organic theme of conservative themes of tradition, family and nation, respectability, patriarchalism and order.”³ Even as the episode in particular and the show in general attempt to expel the moral contamination of American power, aligning it with the corporations, they position Muslims within these new discursive articulations by attempting to reimagine Englishness as a morally agonized, helpless, and noncorporate counterpoint to American force in relation to Muslims. As such the show returns to what Hall has called “the unresolved psychic trauma of the “end of empire” by imaging English benevolence: “[Thatcherism’s] reworking of these different repertoires of ‘Englishness’ constantly repositions both individual subjects and ‘the people’ as a whole—their needs, experiences, aspirations, pleasures and desires—contesting space in terms of shifting national identity and culture precipitated by the unresolved psychic trauma of the ‘end of empire.’”⁴

In “Who Guards the Guards?” the special relationship is the instrument of the British renewal of innocence, which is, in turn, an attempt to overcome the trauma of the end of empire. It is an innocence asserted in a move that relies on an imperial history it simultaneously expunges. British intellectual superiority relies on knowledge of the world that lies beyond its own borders:

Oliver Mace (MI-6): If you’re asking me is there at present anything we shouldn’t do to achieve our ends? Then frankly I don’t know. Post 9/11 we made a decision that nothing, nobody was off-limits anymore. Look around at what’s been happening since Iraq. We’re up against it. We can’t say any more: this we do not do. In the long term we will be proved right as a strategy.

Harry Pearce (MI-5): Whose long term are we talking about?

Oliver: Before you get on your hobbyhorse, Harry, think about this: Do you think we did this alone, without help from Langley?

Harry: And that justifies it? Part of the reason for all this trouble is that most Americans think anything east of the Hudson is like those blank spaces on medieval maps where they drew in a monster and wrote ‘here be dragons.’ (WGG)

Harry Pearce’s dismissal of American ignorance is, of course, an insidiously brilliant rearticulation of imperial history, for it hides the relationship of the reach of British cartographic knowledge to British colonialism. That knowledge is presented now as a token of British responsibility and offered as a corrective to the imperatives of ignorance underpinning the violence of American world domination.

Zuli’s relationship with his ex-CIA guards can then reinforce this cleansing. His dramatic and unattractive exit into the protection of his ex-CIA guards allows good, benevolent Englishness—here imagined as a loosely liberal critique of Blairite collusion in the war—to secure itself by learning to love the right sort of Islamist. His treachery is fully mirrored by Harakat’s gratitude. In the scene that is an important precursor to the scene at Lord’s, Harakat gives Danny a Wisden 1913:

Harakat: I’m sorry for what Zuli said to you in that meeting, but he was certainly not speaking on my behalf. And gratitude is not one of his things.

Danny: Clearly. (WGG)

The emptiness of the confining room in which this exchange takes place reinforces the intimacy of the scene. Harakat is revealed as the true lover of books as he props the few he has been able to bring on a table to give the room a momentary sense of home. Within the confines of this shelter, which Harakat has tried to turn into an impromptu home, Danny’s growing care for Harakat allows Harakat’s gentleness to become visible to the viewers. That he remembers Danny looking at a row of Wisdens in his bookshop is an invitation to the reader to shift her perception and see the Islamist through his capacity for quiet attention. The reminder of the small, if affectively important, detail from the scene leading to the assassination attempt pulls the reader into an interpretive circle in which the tutelage of the Islamist is to make her aware of the limitations of her own ability to see—and read. Once added to the order of his attention, Harakat’s love for cricket provides implicit testimony of the decency and redeemability that turn him into the right sort of British subject.

Danny’s loyalty to England, combined with his yearning for the very white, unavailable colleague who is being kind to him to help him through a bad phase, makes him the racial subject who justifies the nation. His receipt of Harakat’s gratitude and his anger at Zuli’s ingratitude give cover to the show’s imperial fantasy. The black man who represents the state shows it to be inclusive, just, and worthy of gratitude for its present multiracial and multireligious benevolence and for its past largesse—a historical benevolence that allows someone like Danny to be in England in the first place. At the end of the season, in the episode where he will sacrifice himself to save another spy from Iraqis bent on revenge in London, he tells the gun-waving man (who has already declared, “We are all Al-Qaeda now”): “You will never win. If I’d been born somewhere else, it might have been me holding the gun now. If you’d been born somewhere else, you might be sitting where I am. For all your talk about choices we don’t get to choose those things. But I guess you were just unlucky because somehow you have lost humanity and now have no kindness or pity left in you.”⁵ Danny’s presence ensures the eradication of any viable radicalism on the part of England’s nonwhite subjects. The show sets up a choice between Al-Qaeda, the CIA lovey, or the grateful colored subject, who realizes that being in Britain is morally providential. Born elsewhere, he could, on the show’s terms, have been a damaged, moral monster.

Abject and sacrificial, Danny is the cohesive element in a representation that domesticates James, offering an anodyne reconciliation between nation and racial subject, in order to imagine solutions to a series of problems in political thought, imperial history, and the management of populations in the former and current metropolises of Empire. Perhaps most significant is the solution the episode appears to offer to Euro-America’s ongoing inability to bring its much-stated commitment to freedom in line with the dependence of its ascendancy in the world upon the conquest and enslavement of much of the planet. This ostensibly irreconcilable antinomy is to be worked out, not through a serious engagement with the rest of the planet, but by being brought in line with an internal game of state multiculturalism—in this case, facilitated by putting forward black subjects patronized by the state who are to manage other populations by ensuring their gratitude.

It is a vision that seems fundamentally opposed to the radical notion of politics and culture that was part of the project and conception of Black Britain, at least as envisaged by Hall, and a quick contrast with My Beautiful Laundrette is useful, for historical as well as conceptual clarification. The politics of representation in “Who Guards the Guards?” are far indeed from the critical epistemology that underlay Hall’s notion of Black Britain and that allowed him to write: “My Beautiful Laundrette is one of the most riveting and important films produced by a black writer in recent years and precisely for the reason that made it so controversial: its refusal to represent the black experience in Britain as monolithic, self-contained, sexually stabilized and always ‘right-on’—in a word, always and only ‘positive.’”⁶ “Who Guards the Guards?” presents an equivalence between the nonwhite characters of the show and yet disarticulates them as Muslim and black, flattening them through a sentimentalized relationship with Englishness while mediating their relationship through the state, whose Englishness is based on a whiteness that dispenses occasional inclusion. The nonwhite subjects can only petition for belonging and can have no relations with each other outside the state’s mediation.

This vision is at a significant distance from that in My Beautiful Laundrette, in which British identity is presented as fractious and contested. Its response to Thatcherism’s reorganization of Englishness is not merely to present British subjects as engaged in a dance of petitioning the state for inclusion, but instead to show the complexities and organization of Britons who already belong even if that belonging is not recognized by racists, who seek to shatter it through repeated and systematic acts of violence. In Kureishi’s vision, there is no sentimental attachment to the virtue of any one of the subjects, no attempt to put on display a morality that will earn the generosity of the state or even the nation. This lack of sentimentality is evinced in the refusal to equate victimhood with virtue, in the refusal to produce racial violence as the alternative to virtue or to make the freedom from racial violence something that has to be earned.

Even the somewhat surreally rendered landscape of the scene—in which Omar encounters his friend turned temporary fascist, Johnny, after a long time, as he drives his affluent cousin, Saleem, and Saleem’s wife, Cherry, home—is an antidote to any conception of an English pastoral. As the car stops, Johnny’s band of racist punk friends surround the car and appear to crawl over it. One man moons the passengers, pressing his buttocks against the window. Johnny watches at a distance. Inside the car, Saleem is drunk and Cherry is annoyed.⁷ When the racists surround the car she is also terrified. The scene is already darkly surreal, the frames claustrophobic; and then Omar, who has been looking bored and, as always, a little impervious, gets out of the car as he spots Johnny watching at a distance and goes to shake his hand. Matching visual disorientation with racial violence without erasing the aggression within the internal sphere, the film remains attentive to what Gayatri Spivak calls “the double bind.” I take Spivak’s notion to refer to the (impossible) necessity of inhabiting intimate incommensurables that govern being and social life.⁸ In An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalizalition, Spivak lists a series of double binds. Here are some: between body and mind, “the uselessness of human life (planetarity) and the push to be useful (worldliness)” and, perhaps most pertinent in the context of this book, “between metropolitan minority and postcolonial majority perspectives” and those generated around gender, of which most tellingly she writes, “figure out the double binds there, simple and forbidding.”⁹

The scene blurs the line between the “public” metropolitan sphere and the “private” one of immigrant domestic life—thus refusing to be determined by the double bind that invites the immigrant to hide any aggression within domestic life for fear of feeding the racism lurking outside the door. Omar’s getting out of the car to talk to Johnny is a reminder of the porousness of the division between the two spheres (MBL, scene 4): he went to school with these boys; Johnny was once a friend and will become a lover. The force of this blurring lies in its claim that Omar no less than Johnny is English and the racial violence, fascism, and Thatcherism will have to be fought as citizens who belong, without letting the fact of racism abject those who are considered incompletely English. At the same time, as Gayatri Gopinath has argued in her fine reading of My Beautiful Laundrette, even as queer desire “re-orients the traditionally backward-looking glance” of diaspora, that desire allows Omar to remember the “barely submerged histories of colonialism and racism that erupt into the present.”¹⁰ Moreover, if Johnny’s desire for Omar includes the desire to erase his own racist past, that desire also allows Omar to abject Johnny, as when he yells at him to come back to work (MBL, scene 12). Functioning through their mutual desire, the reversal of Johnny’s relation of power to Omar is further enabled by Omar’s participation in the new aspirational economy of Thatcherism.

My Beautiful Laundrette’s response to the racism and to the Thatcherite project is to produce a structure of representation that simply denies any redemptive racial or sexual binary. As Gopinath points out, the world the film delineates has no space for Tania, or for a queer female subjectivity. In other words, queer male desire cannot function as a substitute for the restructuring of relations of patriarchy and heteronormativity that make queer female desire invisible, and the film is aware of this.

Within the Thatcherite political economy, the enterprising Pakistani businessman can hire an ex-skinhead to eject a Rastafari from the property where he is squatting. The scene is darkly comic and historically symbolic, particularly since the movie has given us a figure of the defeated leftist in Omar’s broken and alcoholic father—a socialist journalist from India and Pakistan who used to counsel Omar’s school friends to do something meaningful with their lives before the possibility of a left working together was taken away by Thatcherism. The room in which the Rastafari has been living has a long wall painted with a mural, a little reminiscent of a Diego Rivera mural, with hammers, sickles, and a large clenched fist raised in a Black Power salute. Against the backdrop of this wall, Nasser (Saeed Jaffery) tosses the Rastafari’s things out of the window; and it is left to Johnny to ask: “Doesn’t look good does it? Pakis doing this kind of thing?” (MBL, scene 9). If Johnny’s question shows his own blend of confused racism (he can’t get away from the term Pakis, yet is a little befuddled because he expects Pakistanis to be better to other marginalized racial groups than he has been), the exchange that follows is no less revealing of Nasser’s opportunism and its aspirational relationship to Thatcherism:

Nasser: Why not?

Johnny: What would your enemies have to say about this? Ain’t exactly integration, is it?

Nasser: I’m a professional businessman, not a professional Pakistani. And there is no question of race in the new enterprise culture. (MBL, scene 9)

In contrast to My Beautiful Laundrette, the visual world of “Who Guards the Guards?” is simple: an open field signifying a liberation whose English provenance is secured by cricket, a confined and anonymously empty room of refuge, some rather obvious play on the ubiquitous surveillance cameras, an office space that is presented in the hues of London’s fashionable modern bars, and—across the series—opening credits with much Bond-aspirational strutting presented in spliced frames that are meant to make spies sexy and contemporary. The list of the actors—Matthew McFadden, Richard Armitage, and Rupert Penry Jones—who play the show’s active leading spies makes the importance to it of the sexual machismo of the Bond films all the more evident.

The stylish formal flatness is reinforced by the flatness of the political vision of “Who Guards the Guards?,” which represents the normalization of a conception of people with Muslim names and of South Asian descent as always caught within the representational grid of this new Islam. Indeed the episode not only marks the normalization of this construct but also puts on display its genealogy, precisely through its replacement of Zuli with Harakat—of the apostate with the Islamist. Harakat’s role as the good doppelganger is achieved through the similarity of the actors’ physiognomies to each other and to Salman Rushdie, enabling a larger historical replacement of the literary author with the Islamist as the preferred subject of left-liberal identification. That the Bollywood actor, Kher, who plays the sweet Islamist, has connections to Hindutva reveals yet another aspect of the flattening circuitry of globalization, in which Bollywood can stand in for the other world of dark people, and that very citation is meant to display the cultural noblesse of the metropole, even as the complexities of the internal politics within “other” groups are rendered invisible through slippages ensured through a system of racial identification that does not permit political differentiation; both solidarity and tension are then absent any political or historical content.

How we get from the representational politics of My Beautiful Laundrette to those of “Who Guards the Guards?” is perhaps best understood by turning to a striking paragraph Talal Asad wrote, ratifying and expanding a point made by the British intellectual Tariq Modood during the Rushdie affair:

The term black, signifying all nonwhite immigrants and their offspring (West Indian as well as South Asian), is used equally by the left and the right in Britain. While for the right it implies a racial or cultural unassimilability, for the left it underlines the experience of racial discrimination and the determination to organize politically against it through a radically reconstructed cultural identity. But South Asians have begun to argue that in using it this way, both right and left share the assumption that South Asian traditions and identities cannot become part of modern Britain. “The drawback with ‘black’ used as a descriptive term,” one South Asian writer observed recently, “is that it defines people not in terms of their own identity but by the treatment [of them] by others; the aspirational use [of black], on the other hand, overcomes this deficiency but at a price of making British Asians have to define themselves in a framework historically and nationally developed by people in search of African roots” (Madood [sic], 1988). This viewpoint does not reject the call for alliances in the face of British racism, but only the assumption that Asians must elaborate their identities in Britain along the same lines as do immigrants from the West Indies.¹¹

Modood’s rejection of the term black, even in its variant as naming a political aspiration, and its promulgation by Asad, raise a number of questions. It is not at all clear why Modood and Asad equate the Asian “elaboration” of their identities with an African “search” for roots. Why, in any case, is a “search” for roots attributed to the project of Black Britain? Why is a South Asian belonging in Britain taken to necessitate an elaboration of South Asian identities? And perhaps most pressing, since this is a position articulated around Islam and its presence in Europe, why is South Asian associated with Muslim?¹²

There is, of course, a larger contradiction in Asad’s passage, predicated on the way he uses Modood’s troubling dismissal of blacks as a group in search of African roots, locating as it does an absence at the origin of blackness in contrast to the generative source and civilization that South Asians can then elaborate, suggesting that Modood’s resistance to the term is based on the simple desire not to be called “black.” Asad’s passage, however, makes clear that the project of Black Britain involved a “radically reconstructed cultural identity”—thus, as Asad seems to know, not a search for roots at all. Moreover, Hall, for instance, insists on the importance of ethnic differentiations and specificities within the idea of Black Britain: “If the black subject and black experience are not stabilized by Nature or by some other essential guarantee, then it must be the case that they are constructed historically, culturally, politically—and the concept which refers to this is ethnicity. The term ethnicity acknowledges the place of history, language, and culture and identity, as well as the fact that all discourse is placed, positioned, situated, and all knowledge is contextual.”¹³

At the same time, Hall recognizes the genealogical contributions of diverse aesthetic traditions in the new politics of representation: “the experience is certainly profoundly fed and nourished by, for example, the emergence of Third World cinema; by the African experience; the connection with Afro-Caribbean experience; and the deep inheritance of complex systems of representation and aesthetic traditions from Asian and African culture. But, in spite of these rich cultural ‘roots’, the new cultural politics is operating on a new and quite distinct ground—specifically, contestation of what it means to be ‘British.’”¹⁴ I have quoted Hall at length because of the way in which his conception of the project of Black Britain shows the diversity possible under the rubric. Equally telling are his ambivalent quotation marks around roots. Hall’s is not a vision of recovery or quest for roots; neither for that matter is Paul Gilroy’s position in There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack, the book Asad engages relatively extensively. That Asad is aware of this makes his presentation of Modood’s position without qualification all the more significant, suggesting that the act of anthropological representation is here also performing a ventriloquial function.

Later in the book, reading a character in The Satanic Verses, Asad associates radicalism with being English and thus, on the terms he has established, damningly with inauthenticity and cultural betrayal: “But Mishal, born and bred in England, is already in a crucial sense English—in her manner of speaking, her attitude towards her mother, her sexual behavior, her dress, and her radical politics” (my italics).¹⁵ This suspicion of radicalism is coupled with a rejection of literature and aesthetic practice, which Asad seems to associate, through the specter of liberalism, with inauthenticity. As interesting as the premise of Englishness as presumptively politically radical is the alternate view that South Asia, which is where Mishal’s family is from, is, a priori, not. On this view, figures such as Ismat Chughtai, Saadat Hassan Manto, Sajjad Zaheer, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, and Josh Malihabadi, to pick only Muslim names from the modern Urdu South Asian literary tradition, did not exist, or were simply traitors. This does not even begin to address the question of the arrangement of attitudes—such as fluid sexual practices, questioning of gender inequities, rejections of the authority of the ulema, social defiance in general—that are now taken to fall under the rubric of radicalism in regional languages and in periods prior to the twentieth century. What would one do with a figure such as the seventeeth-century Punjabi Sufi poet, Bulleh Shah?

Asad continues to develop and expand and make ever more explicit his opposition to literary modes and aesthetic practices.The dismissal works through the performance of a suspicion about the development of literature as a concept in the eighteenth century. The very notion of the concept and its articulation in the West in the moment of Enlightenment thus gives it a suspect genealogy that allows a skepticism about literature to perform an allegorical rejection of Empire. In a later essay the value of Asad’s skepticism about literature and aesthetic practice is secured by producing aesthetic practice as fallen through its association with industrial capitalism. Thus by 2011, relying on the assimilation of Foucault’s “What Is an Author?” into literary criticism’s autocritique in the 1980s and 1990s, Asad is able to take the antipathy to literature he had begun to develop in Genealogies of Religion, in response to the Rushdie affair, and draw a line from the development of the concept of the author and of the literary work to Modernist aesthetics’ relationship with paranoia, which is also for Asad the pathology of Islamophobia. By the end of the essay, Modernist aesthetics, standing in for aesthetics in general, is shown to give us Islamophobia.¹⁶

The moves are quick, the argument gestural, but what remains unclear is what the relationship of the modern concept of literature is to (say) the historical Arabic or even Urdu notions of Adab, Arabic and Persianate poetic practices that precede colonialism, mimetic and poetic practices that intersect with Islamic religious practices in South Asia such as (say) the marsiya (a long poem commemorating the martyrdom of Hussain at Karbala often inaugurating the Shia majlis, a gathering of Shias mourning the death of Husain), nauḥa (a shorter poem commemorating the martyrdom to which South Asian Shias may flagellate themselves), or even naat (a poem celebrating the Prophet often recited at the milad, a gathering commemorating his birth).¹⁷ The complex relationship of these poetic performances to practices of everyday sociality invites attention. The different mimetic registers to be found in them are rich and textured, and allow for a more planetary conception of the relationship between poiesis and life practices.

In the case of the naat at stake is a notion of mimesis in which the description of the qualities of the Prophet, the desire for proximity to him, and the believer’s desire perhaps even to mimic him intersect with Sunnah. Yet even such practice is considered shirk (idolatry—more precisely the sharing out of God’s attributes with others) by Wahhabis. I have encountered members of Sunni dawa movements who express their rejection of these practices precisely because they are perceived as instances of shirk. Such rejections are increasingly part of neo-orthodox attacks on customary religious practices. Asad’s preference for the juridical forms of Muslim practice allows little room to think the relation between Sunnah and poeisis in a form such as the naat. Equally important to the question of the connection between poeisis and life practices is the challenge a form such as the marsiya, with its chronicle-like attention to the martyrological story, poses regarding the relationship between mimesis, repetition, and notions of truth in devotional forms, especially when those forms seek to relate a history.¹⁸

Asad’s dismissal of literature and aesthetics is further fortified by Saba Mahmood, who aligns the antipathy of “progressive secular intellectuals toward those forms of religious authority glossed as traditionalist” with a “certain commitment to the poetic resources of the Judeo-Christian tradition—evident in a literary and aesthetic sensibility.”¹⁹ Forgetting the Western constructedness of the idea of the “Judeo-Christian,” Mahmood assumes a stable separation between “Judeo-Christian” and Muslim traditions, which are then produced as constitutively antithetical to “a literary and aesthetic sensibility.” Moroever, she argues that the precedents to this antipathy include Marx, and the universalist vision such aversion represents needs to be recognized for its “paucity and parochialism,” especially as it is “currently cavorting with one of the most ambitious imperial projects in history.”²⁰ The argument itself is hard to take seriously, both because of its historical elisions and because the intellectuals she implicates in the “cavorting” without bothering to engage or even name their arguments are Gayatri Spivak, Aamir Mufti, R. A. Judy, Emily Apter, Stathis Gourgouris, and, of course, (posthumously) Edward Said, some of the contributors to Critical Secularism, 31.2 (2004), the boundary 2 special volume, the only example Mahmood cites of a set of essays displaying the antipathy she frames.²¹

Yet the exorbitance of the argument is interesting for the way it connects literature, radicalism, Judeo-Christianity, and, in its earliest articulation in Asad and Modood’s work, the willingness to accept the term black in an act of solidarity. Such a repudiation of the use of “black” in an aspiration to solidarity leaves little room for a rejection of the divide and rule pretense of disarticulation on display in “Who Guards the Guards?,” which is absent any political differentiation and cannot imagine any ethically fractious contestation of identity from within. What we have is perhaps more properly understood as divide, rule, and reaggreagate. In the show’s version of this pattern, dark people are divided as Islamist and black but then gathered back together as collectively other to whiteness; the purpose of the divide is thus to defang any united political opposition to the structures of inequity underpinning this reaggregation.

What is so striking about “Who Guards the Guards?,” then, is how it takes the attack on radicalism and the antipathy to literature in this position and puts them to use in the project of the maintenance of imperial innocence, all the while displaying the crucial role it has come to play in the project of left-liberal metropolitan self-exculpation. In this conception, the author’s books are replaced by the author as the more offensive target, the body substituting as all threatening dark bodies must for any thing the mind might produce; and the expulsion of the author can help Empire absolve itself as it continues its quest for a more quiescent dark subject, extending habits of colonial management while seeming through a complex historical alchemy to redress them.

Given Asad’s implicit reliance on Foucault’s “What Is an Author?,” it is perhaps unsurprising that what seems to be at play is a new and inverted form of “the author function.” The name of the author is now to disqualify the work of the author and instead certify the authority of the Islamist who is opposed to authorial excess and to the name of the author on the work itself—as Harakat says, equivocally, to Zuli in the one Urdu sentence in the show: “Agar āp un kitābon se apna nām hatā do ho saktā hai āp ke ūpar se shāyad fatwā hat jā’e” (If you remove your name from those books it could happen that maybe the fatwa is removed from your head) (WGG).²²

Only Liberals Don’t Like Slavery

The figure of the slave is fundamental to Asad’s and Mahmood’s representations of orthodox (Asad) and pious (Mahmood) Muslims. Yet Asad’s attempt to set up a binary in which Muslims can be seen as liberalism’s other reveals a fundamental confusion about liberalism, most visible in his recurrent references to the slave. In Genealogies of Religion, elaborating on a relationship between God and the Muslim believer in which the believer is figured as a slave, he writes a rather remarkable sentence: “For liberals, a slave is primarily someone who occupies the most despised status, and therefore the institution of slavery is utterly immoral (conversely, to be considered fully human, creatures must own themselves).”²³ Much is collapsed here, but I shall point to what I find the most puzzling move: the equation of a Muslim as God’s slave—which is the view Asad is advocating—with the institution of slavery. Why is the metaphor of theological slavery collapsed into the historical institution?

Asad’s rather complicated position on slaves can perhaps be explored better by looking at an exchange between him and Abdullahi An-Naim, archived on the Immanent Frame website. One of the more striking passages is the following, in which Asad seems to think that slaves having some rights by which the masters had to abide in Sharia, as he conceives it, is something that ought to be explored, and developed:

Nevertheless, there is also something about the Sharia which might be further explored—and I don’t know whether you would agree—and that is that beyond the question of musawa, the question of equality, there is the recognition of a legal capacity, which in an important sense all persons, according to the Sharia, have. This is truly a universal principle, if you like. And that is that everybody, even those who are unequal, even men and women who have conventionally and traditionally been unequal, nevertheless have a certain legal capacity and certain, if you like, inalienable rights. They may not be equal rights, in the way in which human rights thinks of them, but nevertheless, they are inalienable rights. Even slaves had certain rights, and the master had to abide by those rights. And I think this is something that we could develop.²⁴

It seems hard to countenance the thought that Asad is suggesting a development of a conception of unequal inalienable rights by which “a master” might abide in order to resist the (imperial) universality of human rights discourse, but that is what he appears to be advocating here. On offer appear to be inalienable rights with inequality. Does this, then, make inequality inalienable? What kind of law and what sort of state would a juridical structure based on developing the rights—or the legal capacity—of the slave produce? How would one conceive of a social ontology based on the development of an acceptance of slavery? Is one meant to exit imperialist uses, or developments, of human rights discourses by aligning oneself with a form of inequality fundamental to the formation of Western imperialism and capitalist modernity?

In the service of exploring Anglo-American liberal philosophy’s ostensible commitment to freedom, Saba Mahmood, too, turns to the figure of the slave. At stake for Mahmood is liberalism’s “unique contribution,” which is the linking of “the notion of self-realization with individual autonomy, wherein the process of realizing oneself is equated with the ability to realize the desires of one’s ‘true will.’”²⁵ Mahmood’s turn to the figure seems influenced by Asad but is framed within the terms of a more elaborate discussion of liberal notions of positive and negative freedom, both of which share for Mahmood the concept of individual autonomy, and come twinned with ideas of coercion and consent. Within the “topography of freedom” so delineated, in order for an individual to be free, her actions must be the consequence of her “own will rather than of custom, tradition, or social coercion.” But within this topography even “illiberal actions can arguably be tolerated if it is determined that they are undertaken by a freely consenting individual who is acting of her own accord.” It is within this discussion, then, that Mahmood invokes the figure of the slave by picking up on the analytic philosopher John Christman’s discussion of the “happy slave.”²⁶ As Mahmood puts it, Christman “considers the interesting situation wherein a slave chooses to continue being a slave even when external constraints are removed.”²⁷ The servitude in Christman’s discussion is to illumine the behavior of a woman who does not want to be free. The figure of the slave it turns out is conceptually fundamental to Mahmood’s account of the pious woman who does not want freedom and in so doing challenges feminist notions of subjectivity.

I am reminded here of Mahmood’s defense of her alignment of Nasir Abu Zayd and Abdulkarim Soroush with the Rand Corporation in response to Gourgouris: “My object of analysis, however, is not their motives or intentions but the discursive assumptions (about knowledge, truth, language) that underpin their methods and programs of reform. Might people be politically opposed and share a set of epistemological and conceptual truths? Could one analyze this convergence critically without being accused of ‘belittling’ the heroes of our stories?” (Mahmood’s italics).²⁸ If Soroush and Abu Zayd do not share the politics of the Rand Corporation but do apparently share an epistemology of secularism and politics, and if epistemology and politics can be separated in this way, why in the same essay are a number of intellectuals accused of “cavorting” with empire through their habitation of the hermeneutic of secularism? It is indeed the designation of this hermeneutic that allows Mahmood to clump together a literary and aesthetic sensibility, the Rand Corporation, Muslim reformers, “one of the most ambitious imperial projects in history,” and eventually even Spivak, Said, Judy, Gourgouris, Mufti, Apter. What dance is this that, though one may be politically opposed to empire, makes one cavort with it so; and how does one decline? Well, might one ask then: What does it mean for Asad and Mahmood to share—as I will go on to show in more detail—the discursive assumptions that underpinned slavery and its attendant racial discourses?

What I want to focus on, in these invocations of the slave—to set up an ostensibly irreconcilable antinomy between liberalism and slavery by Asad and a partially reconcilable one by Mahmood—are the concessions to the terms of a liberalism that quite cheerfully erases a history of racial slavery from its own self-presentation. Slavery and liberalism, as is well known, were well entwined.²⁹ It is simply not clear what purpose such an erasure of racial slavery from an account of freedom serves. The metaphorical turn here both calls upon one of the most fundamental aspects of colonial modernity and effaces it in the service of producing a very particular and, it must be said, truncated account of the relation between liberalism and Muslims.

Let me put this another way, relying on Asad’s formulation: Is it only for liberals that slavery is utterly immoral? If liberals do indeed dislike it, is slavery somehow redeemed? Or, to turn to Mahmood: What about the slave who does want to be free? What about the social collectivities that are formed to fight for freedom? Why perpetuate the discourse of the slave who does not want to be free, upon which the institution of slavery relied, without acknowledging the historical violences that attended it? Why, in other words, participate in philosophy’s historical deracinations?³⁰

It is well known that slavery relied on the narrative of the slave who did not want to be free, yet equally significant is that abolitionists, frightened of the Haitian Revolution and the figure of the rebellious free black, produced consoling narratives about the piety and gratitude of “Negroes” who did not want to be free.³¹ Moira Ferguson has written powerfully of the effect of San Domingo on the work of Hannah More, whose “A True Account of the Pious Negro” tied up piousness with the desire not to be free. Ferguson’s account is economical and helpful:

The “Pious Negro” is a slave who is never freed. An “English Gentleman” who meets the slave in North America discusses slavery with him, only to discover that the Negro’s Quaker Master is so kind that this unnamed slave does not desire freedom. Reading the Bible avidly has taught him what a “very great sinner” he is. After questioning the bondsman closely, the “gentleman” finds him “perfectly” charming, a man with a “heavenly disposed mind.” In the course of this intimate dialogue, they grow mutually attached, the slave weeping because of God’s mercy.³²

The story manages moreover to justify Protestantism through a quick dismissal of “works.” The Englishman quizzes the slave on his “notions of sin,” the “nature and power of God’s grace,” and the “insufficiency of His works alone.”³³ The slave’s joy in discoursing with the Englishman about matters of faith becomes an occasion both for a bid for Protestant theology by slipping in the case for sola fide and for a Providentialism presented subtly through the use of “new world” as a metaphor: “he seemed like a man thrown into a new world, and at length had found company” (34).³⁴ Given the Christian nature of the company, the very presence in this new world allows for a narrative of tribulation ecstatically redeemed by the fellowship of Englishman and Christian Negro, which would not have been possible without the institution of slavery.

Another and somewhat similar attitude toward abolition can be found in Maria Edgeworth’s “The Grateful Negro,” which advocated the gradual phasing out of slavery. The grateful Negro of the title was the one who saved the whites from the murderous slaves, who, inspired by Obeah, seek to murder every white on the island. In Edgeworth’s story the incapacity for gratitude marks the inferiority of human beings; in other words the ungrateful slave would justify slavery by demonstrating the inferiority of the black as a “species.” The bad slave owner “considered the negroes as an inferior species, incapable of gratitude, disposed to treachery, and to be roused from their natural indolence only by force.”³⁵ By contrast, the good master, the reluctant slave owner, who is good to his slaves, who repay that kindness with gratitude, “wished that there was no such thing as slavery in the world; but he was convinced, by the arguments of those who have the best means of obtaining information that the sudden emancipation of the negroes would rather increase than diminish their miseries.”³⁶ Recognizing the inescapability of the institution of slavery and the protection it offered the slaves by contrast to sudden or excessive freedom, “he adopted those plans for the amelioration of the state of the slaves which appeared to him the most like to succeed without producing any violent agitation or revolution.”³⁷ The capacity for gratitude is that which ensures that kindness (without equality or freedom) will elicit the self-induced annihilation of revolution. Gratitude is the antinomy of revolution.

According to Alan Richardson one of the aims of these stories was to make it clear to British laborers that “violent rebellion is associated with African savagery.”³⁸ In Edgeworth’s story this is evident in the defense of partial remuneration for slaves who are paid for extra hours they put in, in order to encourage them to work, a practice that is clearly meant to enable a defense of wage labor and simultaneously showcase to British laborers the desirability of their own condition. More strikingly, the fear of the black revolutionary locates the end of slavery in the self-overcoming of the white woman and man. There is something therapeutic in such an account of the slave who does not want to be free, or who is too grateful to hurt the white master, who can thus be enabled to overcome fear and (eventually) set the slaves free. Slavery will end, thus, when whites understand that the black slave need not be feared. Gratitude and piety make it possible for the master to overcome that terror. Perhaps most chilling today is the lingering presence of these codes and tropes within cultural and political discourse, as is so strikingly on view in the Spooks episode, “Who Guards the Guards?,” and in the philosophical example Mahmood so casually uses.

The limitations and contradictions of historical liberalism cannot foreclose questions of emancipation, or the burden of reimagining possibilities of freedom beyond the limits of narrow construals of rights and property ownership. Following Robin Blackburn’s account in American Crucible: Slavery, Emancipation and Human Rights, one might also consider the radicalization of Enlightenment thought in its popular manifestations in discourses of abolition, emancipation, and most powerfully the Haitian Revolution, arguably the primary event in radical anticolonialism, the influence of this thought on figures such as W. E. B. DuBois, C. L. R. James, Paul Robeson, and Frantz Fanon, to name just a few, and the attempts at producing a just decolonized order in “the Bandung conference of 1956, the Cuban Revolution and the emergence of the Non-Aligned movement.”³⁹ For Blackburn, the development of civil rights and the (often abused and manipulated) idea of human rights are part of this frequently interrupted arc. Asad’s equation (and advocacy) of the acceptance of the relations that underpin slavery with a rejection of “imperialist” human rights ironically confirms the aptness of the trajectory Blackburn lays out. One might well argue for the inadequacy of contemporary notions of human rights, their inability to address the larger structures of capitalist inequality and their instrumentalization by the imperial war machine, but responding to liberal philosophy’s conception of freedom by resuscitating the figure of slavery as an ostensibly anti-imperialist alternative seems like a rather odd way of resisting imperialism. What might one call a hermeneutic that demands such resurrection?

The frameworks regarding religion within which these positions are embedded have acquired greater currency since September 11, 2001. Nonetheless, such an erasure of slavery as I describe is important not only because it reveals the recurrent elisions of imperial history and violence in recent discourse, but also because it forecloses a full recognition of the continuity of violence in the American order. That order and its continuing desire and project to remake the world require a recognition of the relations of American force, and the particularities of its historical relation to modernity and to the world. R.A. Judy has argued that: “America is both the realization of perpetual change and the preemption of change.”⁴⁰ This contradictory attitude can be found explicitly in the Bush administration’s foreign policy snuck in under the cover of the War on Terror. The change that cannot be permitted is, of course, the end to American planetary power; the change that is not only permitted but also necessary is the “annihilation of all organizations of life that escape or deny the ubiquity of the market.”⁴¹ Its annihilating energies are fundamentally antipathetic to the mind. Reckoning with that order and its economies of force requires an account of a longer duree in which the means by which it attempts to consolidate itself are attended to carefully. Such a reckoning requires, moreover, recognition of how its disregard of the mind is manifested, and of how the extinguishing force of that disregard has been repeatedly circumvented.

Figures such as Anthony Bogues, Hazel Carby, Colin Dayan, and Robert Perkinson have argued for the continuities between the practices in Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo, and Bagram and the historical practices of violence such as lynching, the horrific brutality of plantation slavery, the large-scale incarceration of America’s population, the recurrence of practices from slavery via the transformation of the penitentiary into the prison system, the cultivation of practices of torture in Latin America.⁴² Equally significant has been the engagement with French attitudes of counterinsurgency in Algeria, including the showing to soldiers of Pontecorvo’s Battle of Algiers after September 11, 2001.⁴³

If British national self-understanding requires an externalization of the violence of slavery and the erasure of its centrality to the development of the modern British nation and modern capitalism, if it requires a bifurcation of the historical reality of colonial modernity (slavery is what occurs elsewhere, and what the English gave their colonies was civilization, trains, and economic development), the American imperial project separates itself from that earlier history of colonialism by repudiating the British imperial masters. American Empire is anticolonialist! The erasure of the history of the Americas is achieved by the continuing production of new threats that can then be used to normalize practices of violence that have their genealogy in racial slavery and the attempted eradication of the Native Americans, who figure even less in such narratives, as if the Atlantic world, fundamental to the making of modernity, can be so easily cleaved.

Accounts of imperial attempts to remake the world require a serious engagement with these continuities and equally with the practices that seek to make these continuities invisible. The image-making that attempts to remake the world in its own image comes with elaborate, albeit frequently surreptitious, mechanisms and strategies of erasure. That these strategies come most often in the visual forms of film and television makes their grip on representation seem all the more insurmountable, playing as visual media so often do with the illusion that what we see is what there is. It is to the employment of such strategies in two films from the American cultural context that I shall now turn.

Techniques of Innocence

I would like to begin this section with a hypothetical question: What if Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal’s The Hurt Locker had presented its vision of embattled alienation and boredom within a visual landscape of monuments and sites of cultural activity, with the bomb squad extracting and defusing bombs near or around Mutanabbi street (the famed street of booksellers), the Abbasid palace, the National Museum of Iraq, or the National Library?⁴⁴ The question I am asking goes against the grain of what has allowed the film to be seen as a “critical success”: its almost complete absence of history and context, formally manifested in bare frames that present a stark and minimal visual field. The film’s “realism,” which seems to be comprised of a certain minimalism of action and visual density, combined with the documentary quality, reinforces the ennui that pervades it, punctuated with the sudden eruption of violent movement in the form of an explosion.⁴⁵ It offers boredom and its attendant alienation, tense and numbing expectation of the next explosion, and every now and then the explosion itself.

The Hurt Locker presents a vision of the grinding routinization of the encounter with death, and within this stark landscape Sergeant James, the maverick soldier, is an archetypal figure, who quietly brings an American past into this present. The man at the frontier getting on with the work of conquest is reimagined as just getting on with the job. His difference, which might in an earlier incarnation have made him turn against the system, go native, become a renegade of sorts, is brought in line with the compulsion, unstoppable and resistant to his peers, to work. The repetition, determination, and sheer stubborn talent turn the soldier into an exemplary worker—ostensibly devoid of ideology but gamely going about his work in a way that even his recklessness becomes an aid to it. The maverick is the remarkable soldier adapted now to the moment of a new perpetual warfare. Neoliberal warfare turns the technician into a hero, or requires the transformation of the hero into a technician. The tension between maverick as hero and worker as hero suggests that the self-regulation of the technician, the mastery of technē is the fundamental characteristic of the worker-soldier-hero. The qualities of the maverick can then be channeled into the conflict with the peers who cannot do their work because though rule-bound they do not understand its actual imperatives.

It is an extraordinary brew of alienation and work. Indeed, it is work that redeems war even if there is in the limited world of the movie nothing to gain, no prize at the end. What prize could there be? The landscape is either desert or urban dump and invites the suggestion that there is nothing to ruin here and no ruins to indicate a civilization or even an aerial attack. There was no bombing of Iraq, no sanctions, no slow destructive attrition of a population. Moreover, the urban landscape the film presents suggests that there was little to destroy to begin with. This absence, combined with the numbing routine of waiting and explosion, reinforces the impossibility of any engagement with the Iraqis. In Bigelow’s own words: “You’re in an environment I would call a ‘360-degree threat’—the guy on the third-floor balcony could be hanging out his laundry or planning a sniper strike, and you won’t know until it reveals itself. I tried to capture that extremely random and chaotic sense.”⁴⁶ This environment of a “360-degree threat” provides, of course, the formal pretext for not giving us any adult Iraqi with whom there can be the possibility of an equal engagement; yet James gets to show his virtue by befriending a little boy who sells DVDs, dubbed “Beckham”—for who else could he want to be?

But even that friendship reveals the impossibility of any true connection because of what Iraqis are doing to their own kind. Sergeant James’s attachment to the little boy must end, for Beckham too might end up with a bomb stitched into his stomach. The fate of the other young boy Sergeant James confuses with Beckham, disfigured and murdered, with a bomb placed in his stomach, makes clear that Iraqis have only themselves to blame for their plight. The allegory is not subtle: Americans cannot afford to care for Iraqis. And yet American soldiers are being asked to live the terrible anomie and fearful danger of this war to protect these people. At the end of the film, as James returns for yet another interminable tour of duty, trudging out of the plane like a spaceman having to stomp his way across an alien terrain, we are to feel only the misery of that repetition.⁴⁷

The Hurt Locker does not seem to be interested in history. Yet it matches an absence of the Iraqi past with a surreptitious resuscitation from the frontier: the refurbished maverick represents an updated version of the cowboy and reveals an abstraction of the history of the colonization of America, overlaying the threatening frontier—both the space of the attempted eradication of the Native American and of the imagination of a perpetual threat from those being targeted for conquest and extinction—with the desert. The domesticated maverick—now a good soldier—can restore the innocence of that past by being, quite literally, the defuser of violence, not its agent. The film extends that abstraction into a more general abstraction of time, which in turn facilitates an abstraction of war into work. The critical acclaim the film garnered has everything to do with its ostensible contrast with most Hollywood films with aspirations to action, for if those provide constant stimulus The Hurt Locker presents its very opposite: there is no visual clutter here, no abundance of action either. Those absences reiterate the absence of history, which the film manages to transform into nothingness through its rendering of the experience of time as vacant and endless. The emptiness of space and time are the open parameters of soldierly alienation, which could manifest itself anywhere. Iraq need not exist.

At stake in this abstraction of time is the maintenance of American innocence. Even as Empire renews itself it must seem always exceptional and always new, as we see in Zero Dark Thirty, the film that develops and elaborates Bigelow and Boal’s vision. Zero Dark Thirty is a story of a loss of innocence, and in that very fiction lies its elaborate mechanism for the assertion of American innocence. The story’s focus on and focalization through another compulsive, brave, maverick figure allows the figuration of American selfhood as exceptional, relentlessly individual, and in that very individualism never connected to the historical past of the nation of whose mythos it is nonetheless an exemplum. The twist in that exemplum is significant; for in the moral economy delineated by neoliberal warfare the model worker is also the hero(ine). The company woman is maverick. In this representation is revealed the paradox of this self, for it is an individualism without interiority. It is also an individualism that masters itself through the technē of work in order to produce results, and in the possibility of the achievement of such results lies the reproduction of such selfhood.

Jostling uneasily this driven emptiness and yet crucial to it is the narrative of the loss of innocence, which is presented but never explicitly named through Maya’s story. We see it largely in the film’s framing of her facial expressions and the haggard and stressed mien she acquires over time, but also in the fact that she was recruited out of high school and has only had one mission: to search for Bin Laden. The hunt for Bin Laden is presented very much as her thankless journey into a life inhabited by her search, despite the recalcitrance of most of her CIA superiors and the general bafflement of colleagues. The most striking sign of this loss is her induction into torture.

The introduction to torture in the film makes clear that the story of her loss is also an allegory of the state of the nation’s innocence. Perhaps the most striking claim made by the opening shot is that there is no continuity between life before and after September 11, 2001. The screen is a black blankness bearing the legend, “September 11, 2001,” accompanied only by tragic and harrowing recordings of actual calls from some of the victims. The blankness obviates the possibility of any past other than the attack, which becomes the originary event of history—quite literally the “fall” from innocence and prelapsarian purity.⁴⁸

The next shot bears the legend “2 years later,” again on a black screen, and then we see a wooden ceiling, with a ray of sun coming through a small hole on which are superimposed the words, “The Saudi group.” The camera tracks down to show an agent walking to the room to address a man with a cut and bruised face, abjection in his posture and in the angle of his hanging head. The transition from blank screen to a scene of torture signals a fundamental rupture in time. At the same time there is an association implied between the cries and the torture (ZDT, scene 1). The shot with the cries invites a moment of vengeful relief at the cruelty that follows, as it suggests that the suffering will not go unpunished. That the suspect, Ammar al-Baluchi, already looks broken, although his torture is not over and will go on for some excruciating cinematic time, is meant to give the audience some satisfaction.

In the beginning of the film Maya is seen to overcome gradually her aversion to witnessing the actual torture. She repeatedly struggles with the instinct to look away, as Dan inducts her into the process at her request. The film presents that request as an ethical and feminist—ethical because feminist—decision to confront the dirty necessities of her job and not leave them to the men. The film attempts to position the audience in the same ethical space: like Maya, the audience, too, has to learn not to look away. In fact, as the audience, in order to follow the narrative and the action, the viewer has to keep looking and thus become habituated to what is being shown. The film is teaching the audience the necessity of enduring the ability to inflict pain and degradation. We are to understand that the true victim is the torturer, made so by the historical viciousness of the tortured. The film’s justification for the cruelty is on the surface a result-oriented one. It yields information. But the subtler justification is present in the equation between the cries and the subsequent infliction of pain.

The scenes of torture participate in a series of erasures that are central to the theme of innocence. In one scene al-Baluchi has a dog collar placed around in his neck. In another moment he is stripped naked in front of Maya. After Dan has just stripped off al-Baluchi’s shalwar, so Maya can see his genitals, he leaves the room. She responds to the pleading man with the moral certainty of a nun: “You can help yourself by being truthful,” echoing the moral economy of the torturer’s refrain, “When you lie to me I hurt you” (ZDT, scene 3). Maya’s relationship to torture is to ensure the replacement in the public imagination of Lyndie England. What is at stake is the rescue of white (albeit untypical) femininity, and even white feminism, from the taint of the Abu Ghraib photographs. Maya’s education is to both explain England and replace her in the public memory. Dog collars and sexually humiliated men are now to be associated with the averted and austerely dutiful features of Jessica Chastain. At the same time, by being in any way associated with feminism, this attempted recuperation of a very particular and exceptionally privileged, if morally bankrupt, white feminism deals a blow to less solipsistic and entitled global feminisms.

The larger erasure is present in the wider debate about torture in which this film has become enfolded and which replicates the resetting gesture of the first shot of the film. The film’s narrative of the loss of innocence is predicated on a deep forgetting of imperial history. Nowhere is that crafted amnesia more evident than in the transition of the first shot to the first scene. By being linked to September 11, 2001, the use of cruelty is presented as a cathartic memorial. The film’s insistence that torture yields information instrumentalizes it, and at the same time its connection to September 11, 2001, gives that instrumentalization a powerfully affective moral cover, contributing to its normalization. Yet the most striking thing about the first scene is that the first thing Dan says to al-Baluchi is, “I own you Ammar. You belong to me.” As he slaps him around the head, he continues: “Look at me. If you don’t look at me when I talk to you, I hurt you. You step off this mat, I hurt you. If you lie to me, I’m going to hurt you. Now, now look at me.” After a little more abuse and humiliation al-Baluchi is dragged and suspended, his arms pulled up and to the side (ZDT, scene 1).

The phrase, “I own you,” which is, of course, a fairly standard one in contemporary American idiom, itself asks for philology attentive to the history of slavery. How did the phrase become so ordinary? What kind of a dead metaphor is it? What sort of death does the deadness of the metaphor signal? But here the metaphor is not dead; it is in fact resurrected although stripped of its original racial component and now abstracted in such a way that it can be redirected. Even if Dan does not own al-Baluchi, the government he works for does. For the audience learns that he will never be free. As if the film were engaged in some complex psychic acceptance of the argument, “When we abolished slavery, we did not abolish it unconditionally, but with the Thirteenth Amendment qualification that slavery is okay for prisoners: ‘Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.’”⁴⁹

The important point is that after September 11, 2001, the techniques of torture practiced on slaves and then resurfacing in prisons can be cleansed of their historical shame by being repositioned within the ostensible necessity—moral and bellicose—of the War on Terror. Such repositioning can then facilitate the ongoing management of American innocence. The bid to legalize torture may have had its initial superficial, though nonetheless real, prompt in the need to protect and fortify the presidency and to shore up the doctrine of preemption, but an equally significant stake seems to have been in the production of the fantasy for a new generation of Americans that Americans do not “do” torture, even when we do. Cruel and unusual, may not, as Dayan has argued powerfully, be unusual or even considered cruel, but the fiction of the temporally unusual—of the rupture—allows for the moral normalization of cruelty which is thus no longer cruel. The concentration on the techniques of torture, Rumsfeld’s attention to its details, was an attempt to transform it into work and facilitated that normalization to which, of course, the fiction of the moment of historical exception was crucial. The importance of September 11, 2001, as an originary event lies in its facilitation of the narrative of a loss of innocence, which narrative is more important for its production of an innocence that it suggests was there to be lost in the first place.

Within this framework Muslims are important to the extent that they can fortify this narrative in their imagined role as powerful opponents and attackers on whom these techniques can be justifiably applied. At the same time, that framework masks the dispensability of Muslims as a group, for if it were not that group, it would be (as it so often has been) another one. In other words, American power and exceptionalism depend on fictions of the specific iniquity of the group being targeted and at the same time function through techniques and habits of force and management that rely on the interchangeability of all targeted groups.

The film attempts to disarticulate the attack from Muslims, for the only person one sees praying is a senior CIA man. There are “good” Muslims to be found in the CIA. It transfers the antipathy needed to motivate the tension in the film on to Pakistan and the ISI. Pakistan, Maya says, is “kind of fucked up.” Yet the film cannot resist marking Pakistan as unpleasantly Islamic, for in a remarkable (because subtle) scene we see Maya’s sleep unpleasantly disrupted by the Azaan as she scowls, mutters in her sleep, and turns (ZDT, scene 2). The Pakistanis are called “Paks” in what is presented as the hip and efficient (it takes too long to say “Pakistanis”) argot of the CIA bureaucracy, providing a bizarre twist on the derogatory British “Pakis” (ZDT, scene 2). The ISI, too, comes in for jabs at its recalcitrance, and yet nowhere is the CIA’s former intimacy with Bin Laden or the ISI mentioned. It takes a rather stunning feat of denial to make a two-and-a-half-hour film about the search for Bin Laden, set in Pakistan, critical of the ISI, and mention Peshawar—or rather “Pesh”—several times without a serious engagement with the history that had Peshawar host a huge concentration of Western spies and that had the CIA work intimately with, and immeasurably strengthen, the ISI and, of course, fortify Bin Laden’s fantasy of toppling the American imperium and governments in a number of Muslim-majority states. As I will show in the two concluding chapters of this book, it is left to writers like Mohammed Hanif and Nadeem Aslam, in novels such as A Case of Exploding Mangoes and The Wasted Vigil, to redress this historical imbalance, produce a double historical critique, and disrupt the exculpatory binaries produced in films like Zero Dark Thirty.

So impermeable appears the polarity between “us” and “them” set up in Zero Dark Thirty that any serious response seems inadequate, maybe even a little obscene. It is perhaps fitting that two Pakistani columnists, Fayes T. Kantawala and Nadeem Paracha, responded by dropping into an adolescent argot mocking the inaccuracies, stereotypes, and ignorance of the film—Arabic being spoken in the streets, camels in the setting sun, an incomprehension of how fortified the U.S. embassy is, the film’s ignorance about the possibilities of luxury available in Pakistan. In a column titled “Zero IQ Thirty,” Paracha, no fan of Islamism or of the use of religion by the state, responded by annotating pictures of scenes from the United States and from Pakistan with balloons, mocking the stereotypes the citizenry in each country has of the other.⁵⁰ Kantawala (the nom de plume of the painter Komail Aijazuddin, whose paintings I discuss in chapter 5), also a critic of the state and of the religionizing of the nation, dropped, as he periodically does, into teenage tabloid talk. That this tone is a choice is demonstrated by the fact that, a week later, Kantawala would go on to write a powerful and moving piece on the assassination of a Shia doctor and his eleven-year-old son in Lahore, demonstrating a capacity for a solemn register when so required. About Zero Dark Thirty, Kantawala wrote:

“You don’t understand Pakistan!” White Chick screams at her supervisor at one point. And you do, Carrot-top? I wanted to ask. You, who just said “shukran” at a “bar” at the Marriot Hotel after you were served wine in a margarita glass? You? The moment the Marriot Hotel scene came on I knew they’d blow it up. It seemed inevitable that White Chick would be in the one big hotel bombing there was. Don’t worry, she glides out of the back door while stepping over screaming hijabans (what they are doing in the bar at the Marriot I don’t even want to ask).⁵¹

The contemptuous and deliberately absurd responses of these columnists suggest that there is nothing one could seriously say to mitigate a vision that is so utterly predicated on the rightness of the powerful (who are conceived in the film exclusively as American) or perhaps on the power that is always right. Yet located elsewhere the writers see the willed (and willful) ignorance of the filmmakers as pernicious in its (for want of a more profound word) stupidity. It is a stupidity predicated on, indeed enabled by, the innocence allowed the powerful, who do not need to know anything about those whose lives they trample and whose worlds they destroy and who refuse to understand that such ignorance can be consequential.

So deep is the film’s commitment to the rightness of the powerful that it offers a remarkable justification of the doctrine of preemption, through a transformation of the mission to capture Bin Laden into an ex post facto justification for the invasion of Iraq. In a scene when the decision is being made to get Bin Laden the conversation becomes about the role of certainty in political decision making. Maya is impatient with the conversation but says, “Hundred percent he’s there. Okay. Fine. Ninety-five percent, since I know certainty freaks you out.” Earlier on the following exchange has occurred between the emissary from Obama’s office and an advocate for the mission:

White House Man: This is pure risk, based on deductive reasoning, inference, supposition; and the only human reporting you have is six years old from detainees who were questioned under duress. The political move here is to tell you to go fuck yourself and remind you that I was in the room when your old boss pitched WMD Iraq. At least, there you guys brought photographs.

CIA Staffer: You know you’re right. I agree with everything you just said. What I meant was a man in your position—how do you evaluate the risk of not doing something. Hmm. The risk of potentially letting Bin Laden slip through your fingers. (ZDT, scene 11)

The film’s commitment to American power transforms the decimation of countries into a problem from game theory. At the same time, the film consistently presents the “correct” choice as moral because it is associated with the embattled and thus somehow feminist austerity of Maya’s commitment to the enterprise. It is ethical to destroy countries based on a possibility that a suspicion regarding them may be true, and the rightness of the decision in the case of Bin Laden reveals Iraq to have been a risk worth taking. In the alchemical moral world of power: they could have been right and thus were. A woman’s centrality to the process merely helps catalyze the transformation.

The performance of the moral rightness of absolute American power is linked to one of the most intriguing things about the film: the need to make vivid the ongoing threat from those who can only be encountered in any extended cinematic way as subjugated. To confront so total a vision by “humanizing” Muslims, understanding neo-orthodox Islam, trying to explain Muslim thinking and reasoning seems thoroughly inadequate or even absurd. The world is divided into friend and foe, and the right sort of Muslim can be assimilated. That rightness is, in turn, mutable and dependent upon the instrumentalities of any given moment.⁵²

Yet even the very notion of the foe is limited, for there is a mutability to that relation as well. The wrong kind of Muslim was once a declared ally: Bin Laden was a friend; the ISI and the CIA were, shall we say, tight. The metaphor attributed to the Pakistani military of the “used condom” to describe the U.S. disengagement from the Pakistani state after the end of the Cold War illustrates the sense of betrayal and abandonment that underpins the current mutual antagonism.⁵³ The soured intimacy that underpins those relationships requires a different way of conceiving of the current state of global relations. Zero Dark Thirty suggests that forgetting that intimacy merely facilitates the perpetuation of American force.

What’s Islam Got To Do With It?

In a review of Reza Aslan’s No god but God, Tariq Ali—angry at Aslan for calling the war in Iraq a “liberation”—goes after Shi’ism: “The Shia sects and some of their more esoteric beliefs have little to do with Islamic theology.”⁵⁴ It is not clear why Ali feels the need to define Islam in this way, but what is hard to dispute is that it is a position motivated by a need to defend the insurgency. One might be prompted to ask, is there no way to oppose the war short of redefining who gets to be Muslim?

Since September 11, 2001, the multiplication of the divisions of the world into “us” and “them,” in which the “them” is usually populated with some kind of Muslim, has come from unexpected quarters in a number of rather unusual forms. Judith Butler’s circulation of the position that women deciding not to wear the burka in Afghanistan after the Americans removed the Taliban is tantamount to a “decimation” of “Islamic culture,” too, participates in such a stabilization of Islam, which is now only to be construed as an other to the United States:

The fear of the speaker was that the destruction of the burka, as if it were a sign of repression, backwardness, or, indeed, a resistance to cultural modernity itself would result in a significant decimation of Islamic culture and the extension of US cultural assumptions about how sexuality and agency ought to be organized and represented. According to the triumphalist photos that dominated the front page of the New York Times, these young women bared their faces as an act of liberation, an act of gratitude to the US military, and an expression of pleasure that had become suddenly and ecstatically permissible.⁵⁵

Yet again “Islamic culture” and Islam are being defined in opposition to the United States, and—even less conducive to historical or social nuance—the American media. Islam, Islamic culture is that which is not the United States. The solution to the ideological manipulation of feminism in the war is to turn the burqa-clad Muslim woman into a World Heritage Site. As I suggest in the next chapter’s discussion of the current construal of agency and history in relation to Muslim women, women veil for all sorts of reasons, and the practice is enormously contested and diverse, so producing Islam through the veil or the very specific burqa is to (re)conceive Islam only in reaction to the West’s current conception of itself, in this case regarding attitudes toward sexuality and agency.

But perhaps more important than the conception of “them” is the formulation of “us” or “we.” In an admirable attempt to oppose pro-war American nationalism Butler writes:

Perhaps we can hear, in a limited way, about the way in which the al-Qaeda group makes use of Islamic doctrine, and we want to know to shore up our liberal framework, that they do not represent the religion of Islam, and that the vast majority of Muslims do not condone them. Al-Qaeda can be “the subject,” but do we ask where this comes from? Isolating the individuals involved absolves us of the necessity of coming up with a broader explanation for events. Though we are perhaps perplexed, by why there is not a greater public repudiation by Muslim leaders (though many organizations have done that), we cannot quite understand why it might be difficult for Muslim leaders to join publicly with the United States on this issue even as they condemn quite clearly the acts of violence.⁵⁶

Perhaps the most striking thing about this passage is recurrence of the “we.” Who are those it calls into its ambit? Who does it exclude? Is it the “we” of the nation, or of the liberals? If the “we” is the United States and its citizens, where do Muslims fit in that continuum? What, one might ask, is a liberal Muslim: a friend, a traitor, or simply an ontological impossibility? In this passage Butler is very much writing in the tone of someone persuading interlocutors who are part of the same fellowship, but the exclusion of Muslims from this fellowship, their absence from the “we,” raises in turn some questions about the constitution of the nation and the imperatives of belonging. There have been Muslims in North America since before the Republic. To name just a few groups: there were Muslims among the African slaves, and one of the earliest slave narratives was in Arabic by a Muslim slave; the African American Muslim community is large; South Asian and Arab Muslim immigration significantly predates September 11, 2001.⁵⁷ In what sense are those populations not part of the “we”? In other words, who precisely is the “we” to which Muslims and Islam are to provide the other? That such a designation must be slippery is easily evident, because in the very next paragraph it is implied that the Northern Alliance is within this pronomial ambit, suggesting furthermore that to allow the lines drawn in the war to be the parameters of what constitutes Islam only leads to a giddily perpetual and perennially opportunistic metropolitan redefinition of Islam.

An engagement with the question of American force, and the imperial remaking of the world in the interest of change and the market, might well call into question a national “we” in which Muslims are the other and a historical “we” from which Islamist groups are excluded as foes despite the centrality of so many of them to the Cold War. Such an interrogation might then lead to a broader consideration of a less pronomially divided planet, in which the relations of force are thought in terms that do not elide third world realities to privilege first world dispensations; it might also require a more sustained understanding of the intimacy of the historical relations of force that have come to shape the structures of American power and their transformative effect on “local” realities across the world, including those parts of it in which Muslims are a majority. Maybe the questions are not what do Muslims think or why and how can “we” redeem “their” humanity but rather how did the planet come to be so? And then might one ask: How did its becoming so go unnoticed by “us”?