Abstract
The above title seeks to explore how Pakistani Islamist militants’ discursive acts are a crucial constitutive agent in the genesis, production and (re)construction of the sociocultural and political reality of Muslim extremism. Through an analysis of the discourses published in militant Urdu-language newspapers about three key events – the assassination of Osama bin Laden, the controversial YouTube video Innocence of the Muslims (IOTM) and the shooting of the Pakhtun schoolgirl and activist Malala Yousafzai – the author sets out to expose the fallacious manoeuvring strategies deployed by militants in their media rhetoric in order to propagate their polarised world view.
The first chapter introduces the poststructuralist theory of discourse adopted from Laclau and Mouffe and sketches the conservative nature of the selected newspapers: the Jamaat-e-Islami’s daily Jazarat; Al-Amin’s daily Islam; the Jaish-e-Mohammad’s weekly Al-Qalam and the Jamaat-ud-Dawa’s weekly Jarrar. Front pages and op-eds from these papers constitute the core of the data. In the second chapter, a thorough description of the Pakistani media landscape is given, including ownership patterns, circulation figures and relevant legislation. Chapter 3 outlines the radical ideology of Al-Qaeda and contextualises the cases under analysis by discussing the post-9/11 ‘war on terror’ confrontation between Muslim extremists and the West, culminating in the assassination of Bin Laden; the violent reactions to the public distribution of IOTM; and the sociopolitical context of Taliban rule in Swat Valley and the Western support for Malala after being shot by radical Islamists for being vocal about Pakistani girls’ right to education.
Chapter 4 focuses on militants’ discursive reconstruction of the killing of Bin Laden. The incident was depicted as a flagrant violation of Pakistan’s sovereign integrity and a ploy to involve Pakistan in its war of terror. Bin Laden was eulogised for deserting the ‘life of a prince’ and sacrificing himself for the love of Allah (Islam, 6 May 2011). This mystic analogy, the author argues, silenced Bin Laden’s violent resistance in his ascetic quest for justice. Conversely, the Pakistani rulers were denounced as helpless, subservient puppets of the West, together with mercenary intellectuals. Hence, the militants’ argument was that Muslims need to re-establish the Islamic caliphate and displace their corrupt leaders, who have lost all legitimacy (Islam, 20 May 2011) by selling their souls to the Devil for a few dollars (Al-Qalam, 20 May 2011). By denigrating the constructed enemy through negative labelling, militant discourse eventually legitimised the need to destroy them.
In Chapter 5, the author investigates how militants represented IOTM as a ‘blasphemous’ act that showed the true anti-Islam face of the West, corroborating the ‘refrain of God that Jews and Christians can never be [Muslims’] friends’ (Islam, 28 September 2012). The ‘reverence of the Prophet’ was constructed as a master signifier in that an attack on Muhammad is an attack on Islam, conceived of as a totalised system that encompasses culture, territorial sovereignty and civilisation. These floating signifiers acquire their meaning solely in relationship to Islam. Thus, an attack on culture and violation of state sovereignty was constructed as an attack on Islam. This homogenisation strategy, the author argues, served to appeal to a unifying moral and religious authority to justify Jihad against the infidel Other. In addition, the evocation of collective Muslim memory argued for the perpetual nature of the antagonistic affronts between Islam and the ‘world of unbelief’, starting from the pre-Islamic pagan Arabia (Jahiliyyah) and continued throughout the Crusades (Islam, 21 September 2012). This conflation strategy, the author argues, is a manoeuvring ploy to erase the boundaries between the here-and-now and the there-and-then, providing a sense of continuity between the past, present and future. The militants’ argument was that the enemies of Islam ‘will not rest until they occupy every single Muslim country and destroy Islam’ (Al-Qalam, 19 May 2011). More importantly, the invocation of the Battle of Badr and Pharaoh commemorated the victory of the faithful (who were few in number) over the large army of the pagan enemy. Hence, the Islamists’ recourse to analogical reasoning (‘History-as-a-lesson’ strategy) constituted a manoeuvring tactic to validate the inevitability and perpetuity of the civilisational clash between Us and Them.
Chapter 6 describes how the shooting of Malala was discursively rendered in Pakistani Muslim militants’ narratives. The radical Islamist media initially condemned the tragic incident and sympathised with Malala by describing her as ‘our’ daughter, whose passion for education could inspire Pakistani girls and lead to the eradication of illiteracy and poverty in tribal Pakistan. This denial tone (enacted via passivisation, ergativity forms, disclaimers and agency effacement strategies), however, faded away as Malala metamorphosed into a ‘Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) agent’. The real objective of the United States was ‘to destroy our nuclear program and impose its own hegemony in the region’ (Jarrar, 14 October 2012). Muslims were described as besieged by ‘a hydra’ (Islam, 19 October 2012) and thus ‘being denied the right to live – even exist’ (Jarrar, 28 September 2012). The whole ‘drama’ was presented as a mere ‘pretext for attacking Islam, Islamic teachings and values’ (Jarrar, 19 October 2012). The victimhood argument deployed by the militants was evidenced by the killing of 4000 innocent Pakistanis (200 of whom were children) by CIA-operated drone attacks (p. 129). Therefore, Muslims should raise the standard of Jihad to defeat ‘the infidel world’ militarily and impose Divine law (Jarrar, 28 September 2012).
Chapter 7 concludes by discussing how militant discourse categorises the world into cosmological and apocalyptic dualisms. The militants’ master argument is about the inevitability of a perpetual war between Islam and the West. The only escape route from Muslims’ state of siege is linked inextricably to processes of decolonisation through the return to the caliphate system.
The study is very important in that it investigates Islamist extremism in media texts written in languages other than Arabic (in this case, Urdu). It provides a useful description of how the glorification of Jihad and the demonisation of the West is realised through the deployment of narratives that activate preferred cultural/religious frames that exaggerate Muslims’ sense of humiliation and victimhood. Such conspiracy rhetoric serves as a powerful tool to restructure the perceptual experience of an imagined pan-Muslim Umma and justify terrorism as a response to Muslims’ grievances. Despite this focus, however, the author does not always problematise Islamist political argumentation. Dealing with arguments such as claims of Western hypocrisy and ‘double standardness’, for example, could have contributed further to demonstrating the fallacious nature of such Islamist counter-arguments.