1 Sleeplessness and Fever: Images of Suffering in Muslim-Majority Contexts viewed by Muslims in Minority Contexts In the opening chapter of Regarding the Pain of Others, writer Susan Sontag points out that “there are many uses of the innumerable opportunities a modern life supplies for regarding—at a distance, through the medium of photography—other people's pain.” (13) The account of Virginia Woolf contemplating the photographs of General Franco’s killing and mutilation of Basque rebels in Spain as “barbaric” is considered in light of the fact that he had honed these strategies as a “commanding officer in Morocco...but more acceptably to ruling powers, his victims had been Spain’s colonial subjects, darker-hued and infidels to boot.” (10) In the same chapter, Sontag progresses to bring up photographs of dead Palestinian children, mutilated Bosnians, and a butchered Taliban soldier, emphasizing the fact that, in each case, simple images of human suffering do not inherently necessitate an understanding of the outrageousness of war and its associated violence, but rather can be utilized, viewed, and interpreted in a variety of manners. (6-16) Battles between Moroccan tribesmen and Spanish colonial forces; Palestinians engaged against a dominant Israeli state; the brutal ethno-religious cleansing of the Yugoslavian war; the Taliban insurgency against United States (U.S.) military forces. They are all conflicts taking place in separate contexts, with separate histories, and separate trajectories, but each is a critical episode in the modern history of the global community of Muslims, henceforth referred to as the Ummah. It is clear that Muslims, and the images of their pain, suffering, and death have been “regarded” (as Sontag puts it) in a variety of manners by human beings all over the world; what follows is that they are also viewed, interpreted, and utilized by Muslims themselves. 2 Islam is a religion with a creed (aqeedah) that emphasizes the oneness of the worldwide community of its adherents. Scholars particularly point out a narration of the Prophet Muhammad (SAW) stating that “The believers in their mutual kindness, compassion, and sympathy are just like one body. When one of the limbs suffers, the whole body responds to it with sleepfulness and fever" (“Riyad as-Salihin” 224) In the modern era, the norms of interaction amongst this community of believers have fundamentally changed: ubiquitous digital communication networks have rendered the instantaneous sharing of the image across vast distances both easy and commonplace. Muslims living in any location, whether as a minority or a majority, can view images of their fellow believers suffering, in pain, dead, or dying. I myself grew up as a Muslim in the United States, the son of a Pakistani immigrant. In attending Islamic schooling from a young age, I grew up with children from the diaspora of many different nations. As such, I found myself more widely aware of conflicts, suffering, and instances of death occurring around the world; the happenings in Iraq, Palestine, Somalia, Sudan, and Kashmir were deeply personal to the families of my closest friends. In the era of widespread usage of social media platforms, it is likely that a Muslim with a strong hold on their aqeedah will face images of other members of their believing community suffering and dying regularly as a result of violence and humanitarian disasters around the world. In fact, they may even go seek such images out, in an attempt to more effectively render themselves as a component of this “one body” of believers. Islamic doctrine at the same time emphasizes respect for the sanctity and privacy of the human body, both dead and alive. Ahmed Al-Dawoody, Legal Adviser for Islamic Law and Jurisprudence at the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), points to the Quranic 3 tory of Cain and Abel: Cain, after murdering his brother, Abel, is sent a raven digging in the ground; a sign for him to appropriately cover and bury his brother’s corpse, an indication for the respect that Islam places upon the human body even in death; it can not be simply left out and exposed for all to gaze upon. (Al-Dawoody par. 2) A general distaste (tahreem) of image-taking of humans (tasweer) during life is especially pronounced after death in religious doctrine: strongly based upon the Islamic aversion to icons as an outcome of polytheistic beliefs, an unacceptable practice for members of a strictly monotheistic faith. A potential disparity between these two positions leads to the question whether the viewership of digital images of Muslims suffering and dying, particularly on social media platforms, actually facilitates the “same body” metaphor that the Prophet (SAW) elucidated. In order to make a determination on this matter, I will begin with a deeper analysis of the Prophet’s hadith (sayings of the prophet recorded and transmitted by his closest companions), more fully elaborating his meaning and intent as I understand it, and then progress to an analysis of how Muslims such as myself in the United States, members of a minority religious community within a nation, utilize and interpret digital representations of death and suffering of fellow believers in different Muslim-majority contexts around the world. I will then conclude with a comparison between the Prophet’s narration and how the digital’s role in representing the suffering and death of Muslims, for Muslims, contributes or detracts from his message. As Peter Mandaville writes in Islam Encountering Globalization, the “ummah as a world community of Muslims had its initial incarnation in the group which accompanied Muhammad (SAW) on the migration (hijrah) in 622 AD” (64) The hijrah referred to was a migration of the community of believers in Muhammad’s message, who had been facing persecution and threats 4 of death, from the city of Mecca to the city of Medina. Mecca at the time was a tribal city led by the Quraysh tribe (Muhammad’s family), and dominated by non-Muslims, whereas Medina “did not possess a clear hierarchy of clan organization,”and also contained a community of existing Muslims known as Ansar who welcomed the fleeing Muslims into their homes. (Mandaville 63) Mandaville contends that, “for those who participated in the first migration, it was not the relatively short geographic separation between Mecca and Medina which mattered, but rather the much more dramatic (and, one would imagine, initially disorienting) split with their tribal kin-groups.” (63) This change, from a tribal based sense of community to one based upon a common set of beliefs and principles formed the foundation for the ummah as Muslims understand it today. The hadith referred to in the introduction must be understood in this context. As a group of fellow believers, the prophet declares his community to be one body in terms of their mutual kindness, compassion, and sympathy, and that, just as a body will provide a holistic response to one part of it being struck ill, so will the believers as a whole respond to even one believer or subsection of believers being afflicted. It is important to note that the prophet does not directly indicate that the body will successfully heal or combat the disease, but rather that it will experience sleeplessness (as-sihr) and fever (al-hami), symptoms typically associated with battling a disease, and generally understood as unpleasant. It is this paradigm that must be considered in interpreting the level of congruity between this narration and the usage/interpretation of digital images of Muslims’ suffering on social media by Muslim-Americans: a systemic response of struggle against the affliction, represented by unease 5 and discomfort in the short term, as well as this response being a direct result of mutual kindness, compassion, and sympathy. In Distant Suffering: Morality, Media, and Politics, French sociologist Luc Boltanski puts forth the idea of “an unfortunate who suffers” and “a spectator who views the suffering.” (114) The spectator, in this scenario, is someone who can see the suffering, but is not “undergoing the same fate” and is not “directly exposed to the same misfortune.” (Boltanski 114) Boltanski also sets forth the principle that, in his analysis, the spectator can not “intervene directly” or in other words, “unify the framework within which he acts and the framework within which the unfortunate struggles in such a way as to bring together in a single situation the two originally different situations.” (114) The only “morally acceptable framework” to operate under for the spectator then, according to Boltanski, is to “show an interest which takes account of the misery he observes...if not to intervene directly in his life then at least to place himself in an active disposition of someone concerned for him.” (114) The primary route for doing this, under his framework, would be “to pass on the spectacle, to communicate it to others.” (Boltanski 114) This passing-on, however, can not be an authentic one-to-one description; the spectator must in some way represent the scale of the unfortunate’s suffering as well as the depths of their experience in witnessing this suffering. (Boltanski 114) This specific representation, according to Boltanski, “frees a space in which emotion can be displayed within a discourse.” (114) The writer posits three possibilities for this displayed emotion: considering the suffering as “unjust” by expressing indignance at a perceived persecutor; considering the suffering as “touching” by “ignoring the persecutor and equally distanc[ing] itself from the unfortunate in 6 order to bring fore to the presence of a benefactor”; and lastly, considering the suffering as “sublime”, an aesthetic consideration for the suffering without necessarily “dismissing sympathy for the unfortunate”, a sort of exposure of oneself to “naked suffering” that “allow[s] oneself to be taken over by the horrific” without necessitating any “benefactors or prosecutors,” and then endeavoring to pass the representation of this suffering as best they can to others, carried out by agents that Boltanski refers to as painters. (Boltanski 114-116) This last methodology, in its underpinnings, bears a certain resemblance to “The Pornography of Death” described by writers such as Geoffrey Gorer, in the sense that a “titillation” of “our curiosity about the mystery of death” produces a certain type of fantastical pleasure. (51) Although written in 1999, it is interesting to note the parallels between the “morally acceptable framework that Boltanski describes and modes of sharing images of suffering on social media platforms. On these platforms, digital images of human suffering are uploaded openly for numerous spectators; yet, direct intervention from these spectators is not always possible. It is important to note that Boltanski does not claim that intervention is totally impossible. Rather, he claims that if we accept the fact that the spectator is unaffected in terms of undergoing the same misfortune, we can also conceive that the idea of this individual practically unite two radically separate frameworks into a new, united, and fundamentally different framework is difficult and quite unlikely. The action of passing along a representation of the suffering alongside a “displayed emotion” as Boltanski describes is built into nearly all social media platforms: users forward and share images along with captions or reactions of their own, either directly to other users or to a larger group. Displaying indignance at a persecutor, or bringing attention to a benefactor, can be 7 done easily on top of a passed on image of someone else’s suffering or death, whether it be on Facebook, Whatsapp, or Twitter, through quoting and captioning mechanisms. Even the third mechanism of, as Boltanski refers to it, “sublimation”, though less readily apparent in terms of directly expressed communication, is an important element of these digital infrastructures. Passing on suffering through an aesthetic appreciation for its nature is done directly and indirectly by online communities which rank, order, vote up, and effectively distribute images and videos expressing pain with certain aesthetic sensibilities that catch the eye and attention, as these centralized networks are governed by entities who derive profit off of user engagement. Such outcomes, inherent to the platforms themselves, are also thus prevalent among Muslim-Americans who utilize them, particularly in relation to viewing images of the suffering of fellow Muslims in Muslim-majority contexts where their parents, or friends’ parents are often from. The “frameworks” of spectator and the unfortunate, as Boltanski describes, are particularly different; images of groups of Palestinians and Sudanis being struck by live ammunition, starved Yemeni children carried by women in full niqab, and Syrian children foaming at the mouth as a result of chemical attacks can be quite distant and removed from the daily life of a Muslim living in a non-Muslim majority society, where the reality of Islamophobic violence may be present, but quite different to the suffering and dying they are viewing in the foreign lands that their forefathers come from, weakened and destabilized by a colonial world order. I recall two large social media “awareness campaigns” amongst Muslims-Americans for such issues in Muslim-majority contexts, led by respective immigrant diasporas and then carried up by the rest of the community. The “RedforKashmir” campaign involved the usage of hashtags (#RedforKashmir) and the changing of users’ profile pictures to a bright, blood red color to 8 protest against India’s decision to occupy and annex the autonomous region of Kashmir. The purpose clearly fell in the first method of Boltanski’s framework: indignation, and to “raise awareness of the Indian government’s bid to integrate the region into India against the will of the people living there.” (“Going Red for Kashmir”, par. 3) Due to complete curfew, military police incursion, and temporary internet lockdowns in the region, images and videos of the abuses, violence, and killings themselves were limited, but videos of interviews with certain Kashmiris in confidential locations showing marks on their body and detailing their verbal accounts of what had happened to them were quote tweeted by accounts such as @doaMuslims (documenting oppression against muslims) with excerpts from the video displayed: “After being stripped naked and receiving 4 electric shocks, I was made to drink a gallon of water and then they punched my abdomen. I vomited and I urinated.” Images such as these, propagated and shared by accounts with Red Profile Pictures, many of whom being Muslim members of the South Asian diaspora in non-Muslim majority societies, were clearly directed at fostering indignation towards the perceived persecutor, in this case, the Indian government. The #BlueforSudan effort was another campaign that operated off of communicated pictures of suffering, as social media users changed profile pictures to a baby blue color, used the hashtag, and widely shared pictures and videos of the Sudanese ruling government’s brutal killings of protestors in the capital of Khartoum. The color was representative of “Mohamed Mattar, whose favorite color was reportedly blue,” an engineering student who was “reportedly shot while trying to protect two women during the bloody dispersal of the protest camp outside the military headquarters.” (Bendimerad and Faisal, par. 2-5) In this situation, the overall messaging of the campaign was directed at fostering support for the Sudanese people as 9 benefactors in their role towards battling the oppression, whilst sharing images of additional protestors suffering and dying. This campaign spread to non-Muslim majority contexts primarily through Sudanese-Americans, and then transferred to the broader nexus of the Muslim-American community, clearly falls under the category of the second pathway that Boltanski describes, a propagation aimed at bringing attention to the presence of the individuals battling the oppression. Another authentic prophetic narration of Muhammad (SAW) deals with the issue of seeking to impart change on a situation or framework which is fundamentally different to one’s own, reported in the most authentic forty hadith of Imam al-Nawawi himself. In it, the prophet states: “Whosoever of you sees an evil, let him change it with his hand; and if he is not able to do so, then [let him change it] with his tongue; and if he is not able to do so, then with his heart — and that is the weakest of faith.” (“40 Hadith Nawawi” 34) In a commentary provided by Dr. Jamal Ahmed Badi of the International Islamic University in Malaysia, it is explained that the usage of the hand implies a direct effort to change the evil itself, in the sense of directly helping those fleeing oppression by offering them refuge, or even in certain cases defending them against those seeking to do them harm. (Badi, 168) In the case that this is not possible, the believer must progress to advice of the tongue, warning the people who are doing wrong that it is the “consequence of evil, and encouraging and motivating them [towards] good actions.” (168) Dr. Badi goes on to elucidate upon the principles of this forbidding of evil by the tongue, documented heavily in the Islamic tradition, and known as “Inkaarul Munkar”. (168) Inkarul Munkar, according to Dr. Badi, involves “not instigat[ing] or provok[ing] the people, but us[ing] a good argument, as Allah says: Call to the way of your Lord with wisdom and beautiful admonition, and argue with them in ways that are best. [Surah an-Nahl (16): Ayah 125]” (169) If 10 even this is not possible for the Muslim, due to a possible risk to their lives or inability to reach or affect the evil being committed in a verbal manner, then the least that they must do is change their heart, by “disliking the evil that they come across”, and directly relating this to their creator, saying to themselves: “O Allah, there is nothing that I can do to change this bad situation that You dislike and disapprove except that I hate it to take place. I do not agree to it. O Allah forgive me, guide me and save my heart to be influenced by it.” (Badi, 170) An eye must be kept towards Islamic sensitivities regarding the open display and image capturing of dead bodies, as previously touched upon, and additionally the guidelines of seeking to directly change a situation through action, seeking to directly speak out against the evil (but in a calm, reasoned manner, without unnecessary provocation or instigation), and then, if all else fails, feeling a dislike for this evil internally. Muslims in non-Muslim majority contexts’ usage of social media to display and spread dead Muslim bodies in Muslim majority contexts, in a manner meant to either encourage immense indignance and anger or promote support for individuals battling oppression by way of digital frameworks based upon aesthetic sensibilities, may have certain intersections with these guidelines; but in many cases they actually dismiss several of their sensitivies and principles, aligning more regularly with Boltanski’s framework of moral acceptability. Bodies are displayed openly, used to drive engagement in an aesthetic manner, and both instigation and provocation can often be the goal. The “sleeplessness and fever” meant to be experienced by the ummah in response to any one part of it being afflicted appear to be readily encouraged by sharing images of an individual's death; but it must be considered whether such symptoms are based upon the “mutual kindness, compassion and sympathy” shared through the bonds of community as the Prophet describes,or 11 rather individuals feeling that, as spectators, the only manner in which they can “show an interest that takes account of the misery” of the unfortunate is to propagate imagery of their pain and suffering in attempts to cause indignation, sympathy, or appeal to aesthetic subtleties. As Sontag clearly demonstrates, such images of pain, suffering, and death are used, viewed, and interpreted in a variety of manners and according to various ends: displaying them is not a moral good in itself. Muslims in non-Muslim majority contexts, rather than seeking to act, speak, and genuinely feel something in the heart, representative of the efforts that the Prophet was referring to in his metaphor of the community as one body, are first seeking to act appropriately as spectators in the digital realm. Works Cited 40 Hadith Nawawi - Sunnah.Com - Sayings and Teachings of Prophet Muhammad (ﺻﻠﻰ اﷲ )ﻋﻠﯿﻪ و ﺳﻠﻢ. https://sunnah.com/nawawi40/34. Accessed 20 Dec. 2019. Al-Dawoody, Ahmed. “Respect for the Dead under Islamic Law: Considerations for Humanitarian Forensics.” Humanitarian Law & Policy Blog, 1 Nov. 2018, https://blogs.icrc.org/law-and-policy/2018/11/01/respect-for-the-dead-under-islamic-la w-considerations-for-humanitarian-forensics/. 12 Badi, Jamal Ahmed. Sharh Arba’een an Nawawi: Commentary on Forty Hadiths of An Nawawi. International Islamic University of Malaysia, https://ahadith.co.uk/downloads/Commentary_of_Forty_Hadiths_of_An-Nawawi.pdf. #BlueforSudan: Why Is Social Media Turning Blue for Sudan? https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/06/blueforsudan-social-media-turning-blue-suda n-190613132528243.html. Accessed 20 Dec. 2019. DOAM. “New Torture Stories Emerging from #Kashmir... "After Being Stripped Naked and Receiving 4 Electric Shocks, I Was Made to Drink a Gallon of Water and Then They Punched My Abdomen. I Vomited and I Urinated." TRT #RedForKashmir #StandWithKashmirpic.Twitter.Com/ZmFGuKRubc.” @doamuslims, 23 Sept. 2019, https://twitter.com/doamuslims/status/1176207819797946368. “Going #RedForKashmir Spreads the Word for Silenced Kashmiris.” Going #RedForKashmir Spreads the Word for Silenced Kashmiris, https://www.trtworld.com/asia/going-redforkashmir-spreads-the-word-for-silenced-kas hmiris-28829. Accessed 20 Dec. 2019. Gorer, Geoffrey. “The Pornography of Death.” Encounter Magazine, vol. 5, 1955, pp. 49–52. Mandaville, Peter. “Reimagining the Ummah? Information Technology and the Changing Boundaries of Political Islam.” Islam Encountering Globalization, 2002. ProQuest Ebook Central. Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others. Picador, 2003. 13 The Book of Miscellany - Riyad as-Salihin - Sunnah.Com - Sayings and Teachings of Prophet Muhammad ()ﺻﻠﻰ اﷲ ﻋﻠﯿﻪ و ﺳﻠﻢ. https://sunnah.com/riyadussaliheen/1/224. Accessed 19 Dec. 2019.
Enter the password to open this PDF file:
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-