On Suicide Bombing (The Wellek Library Lectures) by Talal Asad

On Suicide Bombing (The Wellek Library Lectures) Reviews

• 
  Murtaza

  This is less a book strictly about the phenomenon of suicide bombing than a critique of the modern liberal state and its relationship to violence and religion. Civilized modern nation states have developed a highly advanced capacity to justify and rationalize their own violence, using a mixture of justifications and emotional conceits to render acts of mass murder, torture and the wholesale destruction of other societies as somehow morally defensible. It is the art of "rendering inhuman acts humane" that liberals have perfected and continue to employ in service of their communities. At the same time, they have retained a capacity for horror at the smaller acts of murder committed by their ostensible barbarian nemeses, particularly the act of suicide bombing.
  
  It strikes me that for a society in which worship of the Self has slowly become the default ideology, the willful destruction of the self (along with the murder of others) entailed in suicide bombing suggests more than a bit of blasphemy. Asad argues that since the suicide bomber escapes the framework of crime, punishment and redemption that is core to post-Christian society and suggests a break with the mental interiority that liberalism is supposed to create in a person, it generates the unique horror in Westerners that it does, particularly when Westerners are the targets of the violence.
  
  In the end modern liberal violence, which includes in itself the justification for the suicidal use of nuclear weapons, boils down to the defense of the community against outsiders at all costs and potentially any price, as well as an inculcated hatred and dehumanization of the Other in order to make such violence possible. In that regard the mechanics of liberal violence are not so different from that which makes suicide bombing possible - a suspension of the "normal rules" governing violence, whether radical Islamic or liberal, that is actually permanent given that conflict is permanent. As Asad suggests, the "practical" extremism of suicide bombing may even be said to belong to the liberal tradition, given that traditional religious traditions specifically impose rules that forbid the transgressing of laws, even in the name of defending ones community in an emergency.
  
  This is a tightly argued book that is academic in tone, but contains many provocative insights.
• 
  Naeem

  I made the mistake of not writing my review immediately after finishing the book and this makes my words a bit hazy. But let me see what I can do about this.
  
  Two general impressions: this is a very serious book that will require my rereading it; and, Asad's erudition is not accompanied by an agile clarity in language.
  
  Primarily through Michael Walzer, Asad contrasts just war theory with how liberal write about suicide terrorists. Asad draws out the similarities between official actions of soldiers and suicide bombers and concludes:
  
  "it is not cruelty that matters in the distinction between terrorists and armies at war, still less that threat each poses to entire ways of life, but their civilizational status. What is really at stake is not a clash of civilizations...but the fight of civilization against the uncivilized. In that fight, all civilized rules may be set aside. Captain Colby observes of war with savage enemies: "If a few 'non-combatants'...are killed, the loss of life is probably far less than might have been sustained in prolonged operations of a more polite character. The inhuman act thus becomes actually humane, for it shortens the conflict and prevents the shedding of more excessive quantities of blood." Clearly, Colby thinks the savage is incapable of such acts of humanity, and he is probably right. But what is especially intriguing is the ingenuity of liberal discourse in rendering inhuman acts humane. This is certainly something that savage discourse cannot achieve." (37-8)
  
  There are two wars: one with guns and one with words. Civilized liberals win both. But, Asad is interested in how far liberals will twist meanings to get themselves to believe that civilization's killing is justifiable, ethical, acceptable, and theoretically plausible. Asad's point is to get us to note the contortions necessary in this double victory.
  
  The liberal argument says Asad is as follows: "that some humans have to be treated violently in order that humanity can be redeemed" (63). Sven Lindqvist says something similar when he argues that progress presupposes genocide. Following Warren Montag we could call liberalism a kind of necro-philosophy. Killing for the sake of a greater good, says Asad, is not limited to the motivation of suicide bombers, it is also at the heart of liberalism. If so, what then explains the horror of liberals towards suicide bombers? This is what Asad tries to explore.
  
  Another long quote:
  
  "In the suicide bomber's act, perhaps what horrifies is not just dying and killing (or killing by dying) but the violent appearance of something that is normally disregarded in secular modernity: the limitless pursuit of freedom, the illusion of an uncoerced interiority that can withstand the forces of institutional disciplines. Liberalism, of course, disapproves of the violent exercise of freedom outside the frame of the law. But the law itself is founded by and continuously depends on coercive violence. If modern war seeks to found or to defend a free political community with its own law, can one say that suicide terrorism (like a suicidal nuclear strike) belongs in this sense to liberalism? The question may, I think, be more significant than our comforting attempts at distinguishing the good conscience of just warriors from the evil acts of terrorists." (91-2)
  
  My translation: Liberals fear the horror that they know all too well; their horror at suicide bombing is the return of liberalism's repressed.
  
  Quote:
  
  "In the long perspective of human history, massacres are not new. But there is something special about the fact that the West, having set up international law, then finds reasons why it cannot be followed in particular circumstances. I find this more disturbing than the sordid violence of individual terrorists." 94
  
  And:
  
  "Today, cruelty is an indispensable technique for maintaining a particular kind of international order, an order in which the lives of some people are less valuable than the lives of others and therefore their deaths less disturbing." 94
  
  And here are the last two sentences in this book:
  
  "Good arguments (and bad) are available to anyone who wants to justify the conduct of insurgents or soldiers, of armies on the battlefield or of torturers in state detention centers. Because in our secular world all these forms of violent conduct are thought ultimately to secure a kind of collective immortality -- what some scholars call civil religion and others pseudoreligion." 96
  
  My translation: Liberalism will not admit that its attempts to secularize itself and to severe the ties from its own Christian origins, leave liberalism looking less secular and more like a religion that cannot come to terms with itself. Soldiers and suicide bombers die and kill for the same reason, because they believe their sacrifice is necessary and that their sacrifice will bring them a kind of immortality.
  
  This is a powerful and challenging book that must be read more than once. It is easily the most sophisticated thing I have read on suicide bombers. The companion piece for it would be Ghasan Hage's article, "Sometime we are all Enthusiasm."
  
  
  
  
  
  
• 
  Prithvi Shams

  The secular horror at suicide bombing but fascination for "just war" has, I believe, never been problematized before Talal Asad. This whole book is based on Asad's thesis that secular morality has a Judaeo-Christian pedigree. "Horror" is a turbulent state of being triggered by the loss of identity. Suicide bombing, in destroying the attacker and the victims' bodies(thus rendering them unrecognizable), in dissolving the sacrosanct line between crime-punishment and loss-restitution, dismantles man's sense of identity, and triggers the horror that we see in Western discourse on Suicide Bombing.
  
  As well as being interested in why suicide bombing is more horrible than nationalistic "just wars" which are systematically homicidal and destructive(such as invasion of Afghanistan-Iraq, Vietnam war), Asad also discusses at length why he thinks the Western attribution of Jihadist emotions to suicide bombings is wrong. He makes an interesting observation that the Palestinian concept of "Shahadah"(martyrdom) doesn't mean willfully killing yourself in war. Anyone who has been gratuitously killed in war can be deemed a "Shaheed"(martyr). This attribution also finds support in Islamic scriptures. In making this observation, Asad based his discussion solely on the context of brutish Israeli occupation and frail Palestinian resistance. What do you do when the odds are so stacked against you that you can't win the war? You dismantle yourself and take the enemy with you, striking horror in their hearts.
  
  But suicide bombing is not restricted to the Middle East and former colonies alone. In South Asian countries like Bangladesh and Pakistan, Islamic militants take civilians hostage in the full knowledge that they won't survive the State response. This is a kind of suicide attack as well, with vastly different motives than one who is helplessly fighting a superior occupying army. No study of terrorism is complete without the extensive study of terrorism in conservative South Asian Muslim countries where youth have not been alienated by an Islamophobic State(in contrast, the State is avowedly partisan towards Islam) apparatus, where privileged children of elite bureacucrats-politicians-businessmen and army personnel desert the high life and fight to establish what they perceive to be an Islamic Caliphate. A study of Islamic terrorism must also expound how the various Islamic discourses(like any other theological discourses) construct an infidel "Other" and impel its practitioners to assimilate or annihilate this "Other". In other words, Edward Said's study of "Orientalism" should also be applied to theological discourses.
  
  And this is where an otherwise excellent book by Talal Asad is glaringly lacking.
• 
  Andrew

  A touchy topic, a forceful analysis. It's not an apology for suicide bombing by any means-- rather, it's an analysis of what they are, why they happen, and why they horrify us Western media consumers more than other forms of violence. It forces the Western reader to ask some rather rough questions, and in an era where we are told again and again that "anything goes" in the social sciences and humanities, it's refreshing to hear that there are still big social ideas and big issues that we're not addressing. Books like these that deserve to be read by a wider audience.
• 
  Maia

  I cannot for the life of me understand why I was not assigned this at any point during my undergrad. This seems to me to be one of the most cogent indictments of liberalism and human rights discourse in the West today. Although published in 2007 this book remains as and more relevant than ever. Just a couple banger quotes from Asad:
  
  "In a liberal democracy, all citizens and the government that represents them are bound together by mutual obligations, and the actions of the duly elected government are the actions of all its citizens. When the government acts against suspected terrorists and inferior military opponents, everone is (rightly or wrongly) involved in the space of violence. There may be criticism by particular citizens of the government's actions on moral or legal grounds, but until these are conceded constitutionally by the government, all citizens remain bound to the space of violence that its representative government inhabits" (29)
  
  "More remarkable than the use of torture by a US regime that is said to be undermining the rule of law in several respects is the absence of any sustained public outrage in the democratic societies of the West...In a war against barbarians, the use of cruelty has always been more acceptable than it has been against civilized enemy populations." (34)
  
  "For many, this seems to be vindicated by the claim that "terrorism has become bloodier," as it perpetrates "large-scale indiscriminate violence." At the same time, it is claimed that in this war against an uncivilized opponent, the use of increasingly sophisticated information technology has allowed the military to identify its targets more accurately and thus to minimize collateral damage. What is certain is that by fighting the enemy at a distance, it has been able to minimize its own casualties. Unchallengeable air supremacy and precision weaponry make virtual impunity of the pilot possible. Furthermore, domestic public opinion in liberal democracies is critical of excessive war casualties in its armies. This humanitarian concern means that soldiers need no longer go to war expecting to dies but only to kill. In itself, this destabilizes the conventional understanding of war as an activity in which human dying and killing are exchanged. The psychological effect of this unequal killing is mitigated by the fact that there is a long-standing tradition of fighting against militarily and ethnically inferior peoples in which it is proper that the latter die in much larger numbers. Since they do not value human life as the civilized do, they will expose themselves to greater risks, even undertake suicidal operations, and therefore suffer more casualties." (35)
  
  "Violence, I argue, is not only a continuous feature of...[the liberal political] community. The absolute right to defend oneself by force becomes, in the context of industrial capitalism, the freedom to use violence globally: when social difference is seen as backwardness and backwardness as a source of danger to civilized society, self-defense calls for a project of reordering the world in which the rules of civilized warfare cannot be allowed to stand in the way." (62)
• 
  Lobstergirl

  
  Judith Butler says this book asks: "Why do we feel horror and moral repulsion in the face of suicide bombing when we do not always feel the same way in the face of state-sponsored violence?" "...our moral responses - responses that first take form as affect - are tacitly regulated by certain kinds of interpretive frameworks. His thesis is that we feel more horror and moral revulsion in the face of lives lost under certain conditions than under certain others. If, for instance, someone kills or is killed in war, and the war is state-sponsored, and we invest the state with legitimacy, then we consider the death lamentable, sad, and unfortunate, but not radically unjust. And yet if the violence is perpetrated by insurgency groups regarded as illegitimate, then our affect invariably changes..." (Frames of War, p. 41)
• 
  Marsha Altman

  Like all of Asad's work, it's a good idea to skim the parts that seem off-topic or uninteresting and focus on the parts that you really want to understand. I'm definitely going to have to give it another read. An interesting point: All suicide attacks - including ones by secular people in other parts of the world - are almost always about protesting military occupation, not religion. Some people ALSO have religion as a motive, or as a justification, but they're primarily about military occupation.
• 
  Johan

  I very much enjoyed this book. It gave me a whole new outlook on the topic of suicide bombing. Asad makes a whole bunch of interesting conclusions and criticises the liberal moralising on the topic. I especially liked the last chapter about horror at suicide terrorism where he weaves in some of his knowledge about Islamic and Christian belief.. This is a short read and there’s also a nice end discussion or epilogue you might want to read through at first if you’re new to the topic.
• 
  Fer Soria

  “ it is a great danger for everyone when what is shocking changes”
  What a powerful sentence, what a powerful book!
  It questions and challenges so many assumptions.
  Read it. Read it please.
• 
  Nikhil

  I remember in the aftermath of the white supremacist attack on the AME church in Charleston how my social media feed devolved into individuals identifying the attack as a terrorist attack and demanding that the media call it as such. One of the articulated feelings can be paraphrased as "white people can be terrorists too." I strongly disliked this line of reasoning. I found it baffling that (ostensibly progressive) individuals would want to compare people like Nasrallah or Ben Bella to the shooter (his name eludes me). This book, by interrogating the Western understanding of terrorism and, in particular, suicide bombing, articulates much of my disquiet.
  
  The text has three main lines of inquiry. First, how are Western notions of terrorism constructed in contrast with Western notions of warfare (in particular, just war). Second, why is the West fixated on determining the motives of suicide bombers. Third, what underlies the West's overwhelming sense of horror at suicide bombing.
  
  Asad argues that underlying the discourse on terrorism and suicide bombing is, essentially, the colonial discourse mutated. Terrorism is constructed as inherently evil and divorced from historico-political contexts because it is the actions of barbaric (read non-white) savages. The suicide bombers actions must have some pathological motive because a reason as simple as the bomber wished to kill individuals he/she viewed as his/her community's enemy in a particular moment in time requires the Western audience to understand why they are viewed negatively. The horror at the suicide bomber is rooted in how the savage/barbarian/brown bomber transgresses Western rituals surrounding death, political participation, sacrifice, and life.
  
  Throughout the analysis, Asad aptly demonstrates the convolutions and contortions Western thinkers go into to place terrorism on a pedestal of evil while simultaneously excusing indiscriminate bombings, plantation slavery, and other forms of state-sanctioned violence that dwarf in magnitude and horror any individual bombing. These contortions are merely the newest manifestation of the colonial discourse wherein political grievances of colonized subjects must be expressed in a tame, ordered way, and, when they do not, are immediately categorized as acts of savagery in which the unruly bodies of brown/black/yellow/red peoples disrupt the ordered life of Western civilization. The flip-side of this fixation on the savagery/horror of suicide bombing is, of course, an erasure of the violence, both historical and contemporary, that undergirds the founding of the West and the modern nation state.
• 
  Thomas

  honestly i only read this because i love Asad’s work on defining “religion” and “anthropologies of secularism” and wanted more but this was all the library had by him. it is a very succinct argument/exploration of how the west views and interprets “terror” and suicide bombing. asad shines light on issues we tend to deem beyond understanding and unworthy of explanation, like suicide bombing, while at the same time we rationalize and justify mass drone killings that are massively more destructive than suicide bombings and just as terrorizing. asad examines the environment and circumstances that can lead to suicide bombing and refutes ideas that it is somehow a part of islam or jihad.
• 
  Aakash

  Its a very interesting book. Talal Asad's questioning of public perceptions about suicide bombers, the supposed war on terror and the presumed conflict of civilizations engages you to think and critically consider the loosely used terms of our life beyond 9/11 and gives a refreshings insight into the culture of death that surrounds the 21st century discourse on terrorism.
• 
  Adam

  A mirror directed back at Western liberal society. A must read not just for its polemics, but because Asad makes you feel uncomfortable with his skepticism, forcing you not to empathize with a suicide attacker, but to realize the blatent contradictions when we try to examine 'why'.
• 
  sara

  Not my kinda topic, but I read it for a book club thing. Not the easiest of reads, but you take away some key points. A must read for anyone speaks on behalf of this topic, or even anyone who has a strong opinion about it.
• 
  Hannah

  I actually really enjoyed this.
  It added new perspective to everything we've been taught since 9/11 and to everything I've learned this semester.
  it flipped a lot of assumptions of their heads and its definitely worth a read, as its only 150 pages and thought provoking.
• 
  Bill Weaver

  This book was recommended to me by a very liberal (leftist) friend who also (coincidentally) happens to be a professor at Yale, so one can assume that Asad's work is fairly well-received in the academic community. Nonetheless, I will attempt my own perhaps rather amateurish but still sincere critique. Asad essentially makes a terrorist's argument, not dissimilar to the argument floated by Charles Manson at his own trial in an attempt to justify his own complicity in the murder of innocents (the Tate-Labianca killings). Asad essentially argues that “the brutality of a state army and of a terrorist group have much in common[.]" (Asad, p. 36) Similarly to Manson, Asad wishes to sweep away the entirety of law or specifically international law in Asad's case, as some sort of con job by the West. Manson too sought to erase society's distinctions, particularly of guilt or innocence, justifying his own acts by pointing to the acts of the U.S. government in Vietnam - a "Tu Quoque" or "you too" argument. Judging by my own perception of the reputation of this book among the current intelligentsia, and comparing it to Manson's reception among the previous crop of elite pseudo-intellectual terrorists such as the Weather Underground, this type of logical fallacy is still quite fashionable among well-respected members of global society, though without giving any credit or even acknowledgement to Manson. As Asad writes it:
  "All constitutional states rest on a space of violence that they call legitimate. In a liberal democracy, all citizens and the government that represents them are bound together by mutual obligations, and the actions of the duly elected government are the actions of all its citizens. When the government acts against suspected terrorists and inferior military opponents, everyone is (rightly or wrongly) involved in the space of violence. There may be criticism by particular citizens of the government’s actions on moral or legal grounds, but until these are conceded constitutionally by the government, all citizens remain bound to the space of violence that its representative government inhabits." (Asad, p. 29)
  The argument is not a new one, nor is it a description of a phenomenon confined to the modern age; even during the Middle Ages, emerging complexity had begun to erase distinctions between combatants and non-combatants. (see, Christopher Allmand, War and the Non-Combatant, MEDIEVAL WARFARE A HISTORY 258 (Maurice Keen ed., Oxford University Press 1999) (noting that St. Augustine as early as the fifth century argued that in a just war all could legitimately be killed and there was no distinction between combatant and noncombatant) Just as Manson did at his trial and later through the media, ultimately Asad seeks to erase these distinctions (or differentiation of subsystems as Niklas Luhmann might put it) between acts of state violence and those of the terrorists whom the state fights against. Asad argues that he is not seeking “culprits,” but rather is concerned with “definitions of death dealing” that ultimately justify “the destruction of civilians and the terrorizing of entire populations [by the state].” (Asad, p. 13) Luhmann would of course point out that these differentiated systems are the very features that define or describe modern systems of communication (or "society"). Asad argues that the “ruthlessness of terrorists often matches the effects achieved in the strategic strikes made by state armies, even when the latter use the language of humanitarian law in which a liberating or self-defensive purpose can be claimed.” (Asad, p. 21) But he fails to see (or acknowledge in any real way) that these distinctions of “humanitarian law” (and the like) define modern society, for better or worse.
• 
  Setaareh

  "In the long perspective of human history, massacres are not new. But there is something special about the fact that the West, having set up international law, then finds reasons why it cannot be followed in particular circumstances. I find this more disturbing than the sordid violence of individual terrorists. It seems to me that there is no moral difference between the horror inflicted by state armies... and the horror inflicted by insurgents... Today, cruelty is an indispensable technique for maintaining a particular kind of international order, an order in which the lives of some peoples are less valuable than the lives of others and therefore their deaths less disturbing."
  
  This book isn't perfect - but I suspect that if there's only one book to be read about the relationship between liberal democracy and suicide bombing by Muslim insurgents, it would be this one. Its claims are by and large true.
  
  Asad does make slippages of scope in certain places. A repeating theme is the unfortunate use of "Judeo-Christian", a questionable binning of wildly different traditions. Asad also acknowledges the etiology of suicide bombing as separate from its use by Islamists: he credits the Tamil Tigers with popularizing the strategy. But this thread is quickly lost as Asad seems to attempt a carving out of conceptual space around suicide bombing by Muslims specifically, while accounting little for the range within this group and importing secular notions that apply much more broadly. None of this is to say that he's wrong. I'm just not sure how closely the project he's in fact done maps on to the project he's claimed to have done.
• 
  Obeida Takriti

  مشكلتي مع الكتاب كانت فقط أسلوب الكاتب المضجر أحياناً..
  إلا أنه كتاب ممتع بمفاهيمه التي تطرح الكثير من الأسئلة على هؤلاء الذين يكتبون عن الحرب على الإرهاب وعن الجهاد..
  ينتقد طرح الغرب كما الشرق لهذا الموضوع كما يضيف الكاتب الكثير من المفاهيم الإضافية تمكن القارئ من فهم المواضيع المماثلة على الصعيد العالمي..
• 
  Hugh

  The climax of Assad’s argument doesn’t hit until nearing the end of the third chapter, but, when it does, it comes like a load of bricks. The distinction between sanctified and barbaric sacrifices to defend certain “ways of life” has never been argued so clearly.
• 
  Madhubrata

  2.5. Parts I couldn't wrap my head around. A text mostly centred around Speaking Back to Western Liberalism, but lol reading it made me realise that my sensibilities are a lot less Western than I had thought.
• 
  Theresa Barkasy

  Compelling ideas, however the execution is unfulfilled.
• 
  Patrick

  Refutations are fudged over, third chapter is illuminating, but stops abruptly at attacking liberalism.
• 
  Severin M

  a provocative inquiry into the relationship between horror and suicide bombing through a dissection of contemporary attempts at explaining it
• 
  Sohum

  Relatively interesting, but not necessarily groundbreaking in its novelty or rigor. And certainly not a terribly lucid read.
• 
  Shane

  This one was disappointing. It was almost all theory, of the so-and-so-said-this-about-this-topic-and-this-is-where-I-differ style. I was hoping for some more history, but there is almost none. The one interesting fact that I took from it was that, between 1980 and 2001, there have been 188 suicide bombings. The majority of those, around 75, came from the Tamil Tigers, a Marxist-Leninist group in Sri Lanka who are resolutely secular.
  
  His main points of discussion are about why suicide terrorism is seen in such a different light than conventional war and why we are so horrified by the fact of suicide bombing as opposed to other forms of terrorism.
  
  Asad falls into the traps of academia that annoy the hell out of me, like explaining current social phenomena by looking back 2000 years ago. In discussing suicide bombing and our reactions to it, he turns to the crucifixion of jesus...blah blah blah.
• 
  Shane

  This book is literally a transcription of a 6 day lecture and reads like one too. Its very academically dry and doesn't seem to have a lot of explanatory notes as to what the subject matter is refering to. There are many points within the text that are not cohesive to the subject matter prior to "supporting" texts and arguments.
  I really feel you have to already be an expert in the subject, or at least have a higher than average understanding of Islam to really find the book interesting. Though I have a more historical understanding of Islam, I still felt that the dryness of this text, its lack of continuity, and its overall lack of explanatory notes in reference to the more far reaching arguments make this a disappointment, especially since the title alone gives us hope of understanding something about this topic.
• 
  Mike Mena

  What is the difference between a suicide bomber and Columbine Shooters (who also killed themselves)? Are there barbaric forms of death dealing? Modern forms of death dealing? Why do people do it? More importantly, why are we obsessed with that question: WHY DO PEOPLE DO IT?
  
  Asad, perhaps one of my favorite scholars, goes in deep in this short hundred pager, you will finish this in a day, it's that good. If you think you know absolutely anything about suicide killings, martyrdom, etc. read this book! It will blow your mind.
  
  Will also be of interest to Foucauldian genealogy, modernity, and post-coloniality scholars.