Darryl Li. The Universal Enemy: Jihad, Empire, and the Challenge of Solidarity. Stanford: Stanford University Press. 2020. $30.00. 384 pp. 978-1503-610-873.
The Universal Enemy examines the formation, history, and dissolution of a battalion (“the Katiba”) composed of Muslim men who came from dozens of countries around the world to fight in Bosnia in the early 1990s. The 1000-strong Katiba was semi-independent – it had its own leaders, funds, and religious education program – but served under the flag of Bosnia-Herzegovina, fighting alongside NATO to protect the Muslims (p. 2). Many of its members were granted Bosnian citizenship and settled there after the war – only to be rendered into security threats, stripped of their citizenship, and detained without end after the ascendancy of the Global War On Terror. Following select fighters through the rise and fall of the Katiba allows anthropologist and lawyer Darryl Li to gain a critical perspective on the political formation of our world order, with often incisive results. Beyond the author’s compelling critique of existing studies of jihad (which range from the utterly banal to the thoroughly bankrupt), and of the intellectual poverty and sheer corruption of security studies frameworks, this eagerly awaited book contributes to the urgent project of developing a more adequate understanding of our present.
After an introduction laying out the terms and stakes of the project come four chapters respectively titled “Migrations”, “Locations”, “Authorities”, and “Groundings”. These thematic chapters investigate the overlapping practices of jihad in Bosnia but also offer a model for how to approach it as a universalist project in its own right, that is, as a “structure of aspirations” (p. 11) which promises to transcend, manage, and process difference (on which more below). Then follows an “Interlude” exploring one specific historical episode, a prisoner exchange in 1993, which Li reads as a scene of surprising equivalence or parity between dramatically different universalist projects. The final three chapters focus on what he calls “other universalisms” involved in the afterlife of the Katiba: Non-Alignment (namely, the position of Cold War neutralism and Yugoslavian socialism), peacekeeping (the acclaimed mandate of the international community), and the Global War on Terror (the logic organizing US domination of the world). Each of these other universalisms, like the jihad (indeed in ways that sometimes overlap with it), also works to process and manage difference, whether racial, ethnic, national, or otherwise. And all of these forms are set against a common history of empire and diaspora.
Biography is here a privileged method for inquiring into the overlaps, frictions, and asymmetries between universalisms, because time and again in the book we are shown how individuals pass among and through different universalist projects, be it by affiliation or interpellation. The span of a life shows the unexpected ways that universalisms inflect one another and how some boundaries that are hard in theory are porous in practice. In one example of this confluence, Muslim peacekeepers in Bosnia were posted there on a mission whose ostensive political neutrality did not foreclose their sympathy and solidarity with their fellow Muslims (p. 181); in another example, Cold War Non-Alignment “gave Muslim elites a way of identifying with both the socialist state and the umma at once” (p. 158). While some of the existing literature describes Islam inciting transnational attachments which then are condensed into the figures of the militant, the medic, and the humanitarian (Benthall and Bellion-Jourdan 2003: 69–84), this book shows that these figures are not mutually exclusive. It also shows that nor can any of these universalist idioms alone account for the tangled biographies of Li’s interlocutors, because of the historical complexity of the Bosnian jihad – more broadly, because universalist efforts to manage difference meet their limit in history. To be clear, the implication is not just that universalism is interrupted by historical contingencies; rather, this interruption itself is figured differently, across and within universalist practices, and so there remains the question of how different universalisms reckon with what differences remain unassimilable (cf. Li 2021). Minimally, this approach shows how every universalist project is infused with the inherent tension of having to “incarnate values that are held out to all mankind but have a particular provenance” (p. 209).
The book’s discussion of the political theology authorizing the armed struggle of the Katiba illustrates its style of argument. As one might expect, Li discusses ‘Abdullah ‘Azzam’s famous 1984 fatwa declaring that joining the Afghan jihad is incumbent (fard ‘ayn) on able-bodied Muslims. This signal articulation of the legitimacy of transnational struggle rejected the state’s monopoly on violence. Importantly, Li notes that ‘Azzam’s reasoning maintained a “resolutely localized sense of authority in the Afghan jihad – a struggle that sought control of a state within the international legal order and openly aligned with members of that order” (p. 85). This precision is necessary for a field filled with all manner of outlandish claims about jihad. Then, however, things get interesting: “For the mujahids I have spoken to in nearly a dozen countries, it was ‘Azzam’s miracle stories, not his juristic output, that resonated most widely” (p. 86). If a more conventional analysis would read ‘Azzam’s fatwa as a rejection of state sovereignty, Li has already shown how it operates instead by a logic of solidarity; now, he turns to ‘Azzam’s first book about Afghanistan, a treatise on jihad miracles (karamat), to more broadly understand the political theology involved. He concludes that it is “dispersed, transgressive, and nonexhaustive” (p. 87), as opposed to the centralized, decisionist, and unitary sovereignty of Carl Schmitt and his legatees. Such a political theology is what can justify taking up arms to protect Muslims “in the shadow” of the international state system – without being beholden to it.
A critique of Schmitt in fact undergirds several of the arguments of the book, although it is not developed together. In “Migrations”, for example, Li revisits the German jurist’s distinction between a “true partisan” (whose telluric character makes him a defender of local territory) and a “motorized partisan” (an irregular fighter whose violence is released across the earth). Li relates this distinction to the security studies category of the “foreign fighter”, showing how this term only “reinforces the nation as the default category for legitimate violence” (p. 31). The critique of methodological nationalism is certainly necessary – but Schmitt’s Theory of the Partisan also propounds different forms of enmity (conventional, real, absolute) which lead inexorably back to the question of the political. Reading these fighters as “mobile without being rootless” (p. 32) alongside the battlefield miracles would allow for further reconstructing the political questions of the jihad.
Li hints at such a project, as when he observes that in the literature of the jihad in Bosnia, the umma itself is not the one engaged in competition or conflict; “sons of the umma” may be exhorted to act or defend the Muslims, but the umma itself remains separate from the conflict. That is because the umma is not an actor in global politics as is, for example, the “international community”. He writes that since the Cold War, the “international community” has crystallized as an actor that can be invoked in various sectors (development, relief, human rights, etc.) and that is dominated by the West but is not reducible to it. “This is akin to how the jihad referenced the umma as its horizon of belonging” (p. 173). But what kind of kinship is cited there? The analogy between the international community composed of sovereign nation-states and the umma composed of fellow-feeling believers is something still to be parsed, where we end up caught between theology and geopolitics, even our analysis trapped between “aspiration” and “instrumentalization” (Piscatori and Saikal 2019).
Historians and political scientists have argued that the language of umma has been thoroughly transformed by the secular grammar of the nation-state, so that umma has been recoded to align with the modern categories of “nation” or “society” (e.g., Aydın 2017; cf. Iqbal 2017, 2021). Once again, ethnography shows a way out, because Muslim articulations of the umma always occur in dialogue and argument and contestation, or in what Talal Asad calls part of a discursive tradition, for which the present is not simply the empty ground for staging the teleological progression from past to future. Rather, Asad insists, “in tradition the ‘present’ is always at the center” (2003: 222). But tradition is not defined by the present. Thus although the grammar of the nation-state may have partly conscripted the language of umma in our secular age, we must also “attend to the way time present is separated from but also included within events and epochs”, to perceive how “agents consciously inhabit different kinds of time simultaneously and try to straddle the gap between … experience and expectation” (2003: 222–3). Although social science and security studies might observe that the umma is an “imagined community” rivaling a nation or the “international community”, then, Asad notes that “the crucial point therefore is not that it is imagined but that what is imagined predicates distinctive modes of being and acting” (2003: 197).
Perhaps we could lean in to the insight of the security state to take seriously the umma as what interrupts the logic of the nation. This is what Salman Sayyid finds in the idea of a globalized umma, which cannot be apprehended by the exclusive, territorial limits of the nation; the capital-based networks of the market; or the eclectic terms of a cultural civilization. Instead, Sayyid writes, we might think in terms of a “Muslim diaspora” – not to imply a generic displacement from the world of nation-states but because a diaspora is precisely the “anti-nation,” that which “interrupts the closure of nation” (Sayyid 2014: 108). In this decolonial conceptualization, “the idea of the ummah as a diaspora is an attempt to come to terms with the limits and the crisis of the nation-state”. But, he continues, “the inability of the ummah to fully articulate itself as universal means that it is caught in the logic of diaspora” (Sayyid 2014: 115).
Li’s book had already led us out of this methodological thicket, because in the introduction he gave us a set of terms for reading across concrete universalisms (pp. 11–15). These analytic terms include their idiom, namely a loose set of ideals directed at all of humanity, drawn (for example) from religious traditions or theoretical texts, which as he says is too often the beginning and end of analysis; their horizon of belonging, namely the means by which they include some people and hold out others to be potentially incorporated; mechanisms to process social differences, including a theory of authority to regulate violence and adjudicate between differences; and their institutional formation, which makes speaking in the name of the universal more effective. These terms are helpful not just for reading across the universalist projects he tells us about (jihad, Non-Alignment, peacekeeping, the GWOT) but also, I would think, reading into them (e.g., comparing different jihads).
This methodological intervention ably sets the book apart from the host of tired critiques of universality, but the terms given in the introduction may be read to imply a programmatic grid of legibility. Thankfully, Li also cautions us to admit the limits of comparison: comparison is only one means of working across different universalist projects, because there are structural differences that defy neat contrasts (p. 151). These structural differences mean that universalist projects are asymmetrical to one another: there is no common unit or scale of analysis. Even so, as he shows, people move among them. More interestingly yet, at specific historical junctures these universalist projects confront each other. In the Interlude, he examines an episode when the mujahids forced the International Community to negotiate with them. “Humanity’s representatives and humanity’s enemies shared a stage and shook hands, a scene of dialogue made possible through violence” (p. 135). The importance of the exchange lies in the parity it implies: a recognition across difference “in spite of itself” (p. 136), despite the asymmetry of their struggles and the fact they did not share sources of authority or legitimacy. The prisoner exchange implies an “equivalence”, writes Li (or, I would say, at least a commensuration: Povinelli 2001), between the things or people being traded.
Such commensuration across difference resonates with other efforts to think across “competing universalities”. Judith Butler ends a chapter of that name, in their book written with Žižek and Laclau, by offering translation as a way of thinking about the relationship between particular and universal. Butler writes that critical translation between competing universalist projects will not be in the terms of a single metalanguage, a neutral medium to rule them all, nor will it be discovered by returning to the archaic “condition from which all languages hail”; rather, it is the movement between languages which can open up versions of universality that “shatter” the existing norms of dominance and their claims to universality (Butler, Laclau, and Žižek 2000: 179). Li’s description of the prisoner exchange resonates with how Butler describes the equivocation of competing universalities.
Similar moments occur across The Universal Enemy: another appears in the final chapter, in Li’s reading of a photograph disseminated in 2010 by the family of a detained ex-fighter seeking support for his case. The photograph has him “in his orange Bosnatanamo garb with a stolid expression on his face alongside the following caption: ‘After two years in PRISON in the Immigration Center, we have nothing more to say: THE PEOPLE KNOW!’” (pp. 209–10). Beyond how the caption played on a current election slogan (“the people know”), Li comments that this photo offers
a different imagining of how the Bosnian nation and the umma should interrelate: in other words, a different set of terms for universalism. His beard and jalabiyya signal Islamic piety and the solidarity it promises. But the color and writing on his garments gesture to US hegemony and specifically to GTMO. He is implicitly inviting Bosnians to reject the prerogative of the US to determine on their behalf who speaks for the universal and who is a mere foreigner. The photo says to Bosnian Muslims, I’m not a foreign Arab, I’m a fellow Muslim. I am your brother, don’t you remember me? (p. 210)
Although Li does not follow this further, the temporality of this memory seems to me precisely what is at stake in this image. There is a theological dimension to its claim that extends beyond the decades of this man’s life in Bosnia to find a place under the divine gaze that knows the truth of all “horizons of belonging”. The photo says too, I was one of the ansar, just as you are called to be (Q. 61:14). Don’t you see?
Similarly, when in the next section Li describes former mujahids who were expelled from Bosnia and were “expected to disappear however uncomfortably into the shadows of ‘ordinary’ belonging” (p. 213), he elegantly reads this as an inversion of the brutality of statelessness famously illustrated in Ghassan Kanafani’s novella “Men in the Sun”. However, Li’s figure of “men in the shade” also has an explicitly theological resonance (prophetic hadiths declare that paradise is under the shade of swords; that the wings of angels shade the martyred; that a select few will receive the shade of God’s Throne on the day of resurrection; etc.), admitting which into the terms of analysis would only accentuate the alienation (ghurba) of these men (p. 215). Granting that lingering with Islamic “idioms” has long stood in for substantive analysis (p. 13), the book includes moments such as these where staying with the theologico-political texture of the ethnography may interrupt the effort to make these men “legible as historical subjects” (p. 33). This difficulty is entailed by the book’s expansive project. Its close focus on circulation, recombination, and inflection (p. 232, n. 14), then, is a necessary exchange, through completing which Li opens the possibility of an anthropology of universalism.