Irfan Ahmad, Terrorism in Question: Decolonizing Anthropology and the Study of Islam (Berghahn, 2026).
Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book?
Irfan Ahmad (IA): Foremost, the post-9/11 global and subcontinental circumstances! In January 2001, I moved from India to the University of Amsterdam to begin my doctorate. I planned to do a historical ethnography of the trajectory of Jamat-e-Islami (JI), a social-religious movement begun in colonial India. Some months into my PhD, I had planned my fieldwork for September. Then the gruesome event of 9/11 occurred.
The changed global politics was evident in its full force during my post-9/11 fieldwork. In Indian public discourse, terrorism was the topic. Muslims—including social, educational, or any institutions run by them—became targets of vilification and surveillance. Formed in the 1970s, the Students’ Islamic Movement of India, a tiny outfit earlier aligned to JI but organizationally separate from it, was banned post-9/11 on the charge of terrorism. The fieldwork pushed me to study terrorism, nay, “Islamic terrorism.”
I have been thinking and reading about this subject since then. The usual questions posed in public, policy, and scholarly debates alike often are: what motivates the terrorists and what are their beliefs? I found these intellectually inadequate, grossly simplistic, and theoretically uninteresting. The book, therefore, asks an unconventional question: who needs the category of terrorists?
In short, while the catalyst to write the book was post-9/11 global formation, the authorial choice lay in how to understand it differently and de-colonially. I weave anthropology, studies of Islam, political theory, International Relations (IR), poetry, and much else together to craft an alternative framework. Against the clichéd interdisciplinary, the framework is indisciplinary, though anchored in anthropology-sociology.
J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures does the book address?
IA: Given its indisciplinary approach, the book discusses many literatures. In developing “What Might an Anthropology of Terrorism Look Like,” it examines the scant anthropological writings on “Islamic terrorism” by Thomas Hauschild (German), Pnina Werbner (British), Anna Simons (American), and Gabriele Marranci (Italian-Australian). These largely voice a securitized view circulated by media-intelligence complex. It also dwells on writings by Tim Ingold and Michael Herzfeld who aptly aim to elevate anthropology’s public voice. However, while Ingold bypasses the political, Herzfeld dismisses truth to stress “reality” and “realism.” Oddly, Herzfeld does not engage with IR where realism is so prominent. The disregard of truth is thus shared by both anthropology and IR. Utilizing resources, inter alia, from poetry and fiction, in contrast I argue how our inquiry should address both the real and the true. To inquire into reality alone may amount to sacralizing power rather than interrogating its hierarchical configuration and operation.
The book’s organizing question orients me to history of ideas and modern politics to examine the categories that preceded “terrorism.” Fanaticism has been a key term at the heart of Orientalism/Colonialism—by the British, French, Dutch, and so on. While not limited to Muslims, it was often used to refer to their faith, tradition, and culture. Fanaticism was manufactured as the opposite of Western/Christian rationality. Recall Karl Barth, a notable Protestant theologian, describe Nazism as “a new Allah, and Hitler as this new Allah’s prophet.” Carl Jung thought similarly. Agamben’s description of Jews in the Nazi camps as “der Muselmann” is thus partial at best.
I also find Agamben’s contention that “the fundamental categorial pair” is naked life versus political existence defective. Carl Schmitt’s friend-foe dualism co-constitutes politics, manifested worldwide, for example, in rampant Islamophobia. From this frame, and building on works of political theorists Robert Goodin, John Keane, Andreas Behnke, Tarak Barkawi, and others, I critique the Kantian democratic peace theory to say that democracy too practices terror. In some ways, democracy itself, even in its “civic” version, is ethnic, dependent as it is on nationalism. Chapter VII is thus titled: “Ethnic Democracy: Facing the Terror of Counterterrorism Agencies.”
Earlier, Chapter III, “Injustice and the New World Order: An Alternative Perspective on Terrorism,” has already presented a counter portrayal of terrorism. Based on encounters with “terrorists,” it discusses them not as “barbarian” but as radical partisans of freedom and equality. This argument is possible only after dislodging of (neo)orientalist literature.
The book also discusses writings on media as an architect of the terrorism discourse, not as its “neutral” reporter. Likewise, it subjects the literature on religion and violence to a thorough critique to present another theory of “religious” violence. Here, it connects the ethnography of a conference on state terrorism in India to an ethnography of a UNDP conference on countering radicalization/terrorism in Oslo.
To complete my response, I want to stress that my engagement with multiple theorists, philosophers, fiction writers, poets, and others is at once abstract and concrete. Terrorism in Question brings lived realities in their “tiny” empirical details in conversation with “big” theories. For example, with a case study of an Indian TV show—telecast after the US-led Western powers had begun attacking Afghanistan—it demonstrates how it used the oppression against Muslim women to support the war on terror as well as establish links between Islam and terrorism. Put differently, abstracta and concreta (ethnographic and non-ethnographic alike) get analytically conjoined in the book to methodologically develop a truly global framework aimed to theoretically arrive not only at the real but equally at the true and truth.
J: How does this book connect to and/or depart from your previous work?
IA: The journey from authoring one book to another is also a journeying of one’s mind (and life) in concert with others. While linked to earlier works, this book practices the idea of “(re)formulating author” most pronouncedly (see below).
J: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?
IA: Scholars of anthropology, decolonial studies, Islam, terrorism, political theory, and methods/fieldwork will find it relevant (hopefully appealing). As for its impact, the Preface states: “rather than being judged simply vis-à-vis the existing corpus of scholarship, this book is instead designed as a discourse in relation to which existing and future scholarship should be critically evaluated.” This statement presupposes a “new” type of author.
To Foucault’s typology of authors as transdiscursive and discursive, Wael Hallaq—arguably a distinct, critical scholar of modernity and Islam—adds docile (inferred from Foucault), dissenting, and subversive (he does not mention transdiscursive, however). It is plausible to think of “reformulating” authors, who, unlike subversive ones, do not only oppose; they also gesture toward, if not fully present, an alternative. Hence the Preface asserts: “beyond mere aspectual criticism…and the registration of complaints… [Terrorism in Question] demonstrates how things can also be other than they are or have been.”
J: What other projects are you working on now?
IA: Stamped by quantified “outputs,” the Gig Academy does not offer much conducive space to think creatively and freely. In the circumstances not of our own choosing, as Marx put it, I am working on many projects.
I plan a book on the anthropology of philosophy, a relatively unrecognized subfield. I want to explore how an anthropology of philosophy may enable us to better understand ideas—and hold thereof—of Habermas, Richard Rorty, Edward Said, and others. This is an old subject that Hannah Arendt broached, inter alia, through vita activa and vita Contemplativa. Accompanying this project is a book provisionally titled, Power/Knowledge in India and Beyond: Critique and Proposal. There are other minor projects too.
Currently, I am putting together Talal Asad’s writings, from early 1970s onward, in a volume. The challenge is to write its theoretical introduction, not a customary summation. Titled Anthropological Essays on Islam and the Middle East, a university press is interested in its publication. Along with its relevance to readers, I hope to present it as a small gift to Prof. Asad on his next birthday.
J: How has the book been received?
IA: Reviews take considerable time. Two journal symposia are upcoming. I have given book talks at Humboldt and Freie Universities, Germany, and Monash University, Australia. I have done two podcasts: with Nous Network and with Dr. Pascal Lottaz of Kyoto University (Japan), watched by over 200,000 people in many languages.
I want readers to know that for authors like me it is a challenge to find publishers in the first place. Like my previous two monographs, I want a South Asian edition of Terrorism in Question at a locally affordable price. However, no India publisher is ready to publish it (I continue to try). A “Left-wing” publisher enthusiastically wrote: “I don't need to tell you the excellence and caliber of your work. … an Indian edition should come out…this year itself.” Weeks later, he declined on flimsy grounds. Another publisher wrote: “Irfan this feels very academic for us. Best of luck…” Mark the word, “feels”!
For a book that critiques the discourse of “Islamic terrorism” to offer an unorthodox argument and whose author is Ahmad or Irfan, (in)formal censorship (or self-censorship) is enormous. India calls itself the world’s largest democracy, even “the mother of democracy”, and plutocratic Western democracies fall for it. That policing of ideas is likely the largest in India is unnoticed. In contrast, director of Berghahn, welcomed the book’s prospectus and sent the manuscript out for review. “Thank you,” Marion Berghahn!
Excerpt from the book
[Terrorism in Question] aims to formulate an anthropology of terrorism. … Rather than rehash the dominant questions—who are the terrorists, what motivates them, or what are their beliefs—it proceeds differently. … [ I]t instead asks a basic question: who needs the category of terrorists? In so doing, the book significantly transforms our understandings of terrorism, anthropology, and the study of Islam, as well as the larger sociopolitical world they partake in. Drawing, inter alia, on my fieldwork with journalists about terrorism and Indian media and interviews with “terrorists” previously jailed in India (many) and Guantanamo Bay (one), it addresses this question on an “awkward” scale, well beyond the nation-state and its interests that terrorism discourses constitute and are constituted by. … The book critically examines the theoretical and methodological contours of the received wisdom about terrorism, anthropology, and the study of Islam. One element of the received wisdom is the hefty but faulty substitution between ethnography and anthropology. Terrorism in Question is an exercise in critique in that beyond mere aspectual criticism, the identification of lacuna, and the registration of complaints, it demonstrates how things can also be other than they are or have been.
א One cannot take anthropology as a given to simply apply it to study terrorism, nor take terrorism or religion as self-evident and waiting to be studied by anthropologists or others. The project is to defamiliarize us with putative notions of terrorism, anthropology, and the study of Islam so as to become truly familiar with them all.
To develop an anthropology of terrorism, therefore, also entails a critical encounter with anthropology itself. As demonstrated throughout this book, this encounter is distinct. As such, it should not be equated with the “reflexive turn” in anthropology associated with Writing Culture. Nor can it be brushed aside as a critique already performed from within and without the discipline since the 1960s. To give a glimpse of the distinction of my critique, consider the following. British anthropologist Jonathan Spencer believes that “anthropology is necessarily always aspiring to some sort of counter-politics” and that when Samuel Huntington and his lieutenants “set out their divisions between ‘friend’ and foe’ and locate them at…civilizational level, anthropology can only object.” Contra Spencer, however, anthropologists themselves have fashioned, long before Huntington did, such an enemy-versus-friend division. Trained in Germany and regarded as the first woman anthropologist of India, Iravati Karve (d. 1970) wrote as early as 1947:
They [Mohammedans] created the first breach in the cultural unity of India. ... their religious center is outside India and their co-religionists have spread all over the world…This consciousness of solidarity with outside Muslims…and religious fanaticism, which sets at naught all human values arising out of a thousand years of association, make it almost impossible to arrive at cultural compromise with this element in the Indian population. They neither respect nor understand the religious, ethical, or aesthetic creation of other people. ... They have left terror and destruction in their wake…
The centrality of fanaticism that Karve allocated to Muslims to wage a near anthropological war between Hindus and Muslims was renewed by Lévi-Strauss under the flag of “puritanism” in Tristes Tropiques. Its…final two chapters discuss Islam in the sub-continent. Lévi-Strauss painted Islam as destruction and “danger,” as did [W.W.] Hunter before and [Atal Bihari] Vajpayee later: “I had to have experience of Islam in order to appreciate the danger which threatens French thought.” For him, Napoleon was “Mohammed of the West.” The experience Lévi-Strauss had had was during his travel to the subcontinent where “it was chiefly the presence of Islam which troubled me.” In Lévi-Strauss’s reading, the subcontinent was “invaded” by Islam. Enacting rank Orientalism, he depicted Muslim culture only in terms of its “inability” and what was “lacking” in it. He found nothing interesting among Muslims, not even their material culture. While he remained “unsatisfied” with Delhi’s Red Fort, “the various storeys” of Jahangir’s tomb in Lahore were “merely repetitions,” denoting “aesthetic indigence.” The Taj Mahal was no more than “a marble imitation of a draped scaffolding” and was “disturbing,” as was the Moghul art at large. While both eat with their fingers, Hindus, “our Indo-European brothers,” “do so delicately and deftly” whereas Muslims do so “deliberately slovenly” because of Mohammad’s “desire for systematic infantilization, and for homosexual imposition of the community through the promiscuity involved in post-prandial cleansing rituals.”
It is important to point out that the description of Hindus as “our Indo-European brothers” by Lévi-Strauss pertains to a repertoire dear to the Nazi ideology. Based simultaneously on language and race and as practiced in Indology…, in this repertoire Europe and India had a shared genesis in the Aryan race. As noted by Sheldon Pollock, this theory posited that India was a genetic sibling of Europe. …
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…Notably, his [Lévi-Strauss’] depiction of Muslim faith “as bigotry permeating Islamic moral and religious thought,” and its “compulsion to destroy all previous traditions,” is not aspectual but structural, encompassing as it does matters from eating habits…and architecture to the very faith and more. Such is the position of the founder of structural anthropology!
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Assembling pieces from multiple anthropological and non-anthropological sources together, I develop, almost brick by brick, an anthropology of terrorism that furnishes resources and tools to cut through the regnant notion that fanaticism equals Islamic terrorism. To this end and in a rehabilitating operation, Terrorism in Question brings forth a neglected notion of fanatics as spokespersons of unqualified universalism and radical equality. In English, a fanatic is also a “visionary.” The nineteenth-century apologist of slavery John Calhoun (1782–1850), who also served as the US Vice President, repeatedly termed abolitionists “fanatic.” To Calhoun, “as blind fanatics” abolitionists would not be satisfied with their immediate demand; “the next step would be to raise the Negroes to a social and political equality with the white.” … Beyond hasty condemnation and while attending critically to their own vision and version of the world—an ethnographic credo—this book examines fanatics as ethical-political subjects and shows a world seldom reported about in the media and rarely broached in scholarship.
א Terrorism is not so much a threat to as it is a requiem of democracy, which, lacking a robust positive identity of its own and riddled with conceptual rots in its nation-statist ambitions, requires an enemy to sustain and enchant itself. Describing terrorists as fanatics exemplifies these rots for it violently pushes fanatics outside the very reason and dialogue that democracy (especially, Habermas’s deliberative sort) claims to champion. Seen differently, terrorists-fanatics are not the enemy of freedom and justice but radical partisans thereof, desperate to rescue them from being pulverized and monopolized by the mighty few so as to truly universalize them. This universalizing impulse is simultaneously a cry for and a tribute to autonomy, individual as much as collective, in a truly global, just polis that is yet to come into being.
An inquiry that institutes and steadfastly demonstrates such a thesis—a “fanatical” one to some, perhaps—is by its very nature interdisciplinary, even in-disciplinary or predisciplinary.… Following Mary Douglas, if Bongo Bongoism…within the anthropological community is often unhealthy to theorization, its practice at the level of an entire discipline and vis-à-vis the outside is unsustainable… As an anthropologist, my mode of engagement with other disciplines pursues a double movement in which I critically scrutinize their assumptions, methods, and objectives as well as those of anthropology. Such an intervention, moreover, is necessary to regain anthropology’s public voice…
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Shortly before his death, Saadat Hasan Manto (d. 1955), an Urdu story writer, scripted his epitaph. “Buried under the heaps of soil, Manto still wonders: who is the great storywriter—God or Manto?”
Manto had a decent burial. Thousands killed and dead due to the GWOT did not, let alone write their epitaphs. Post-invasion, many sites of mass graves emerged in Iraq.
Imagine standing in the midst of such mass graveyards! Imagine the lovers, family members, children, friends, neighbors, and colleagues of those unceremoniously buried in those graves, whom they did not even get a fleeting chance to see or bid adieu! Imagine the many buried there who did not even have a proper body—only its mutilated, disfigured, defaced parts, torn apart from one another! Imagine the pulverized conditions of the families of the soldiers who died or were killed. Imagine the grim state of ex-soldier-participants in the GWOT, the mental trauma, suicidal bouts, and ethical wreckage they and their loved ones endured. Imagine, in the vein of Manto but perhaps without the mix of hubris and complaint with which he addressed God, asking: who is the greater terrorist: the state or ethnicized non-state terrorists?
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…[T]here is a need for an anthropology on a new scale in which the local, regional, national, international, global, and the like are relationally and analytically joined together to craft a new holism: one to reorient anthropology for the future and elevate it to a decolonized public imagination in a quest for the real and the true at once.