Beheadings may have a long history, but the transmission and consumption of films shot exclusively for this purpose form a recent phenomena and one that makes us interrogate some deeply rooted ideas. One wonders what (if, at all) is Islamic about such spectacles when only a tiny portion of fundamentalists commits such acts of terror, says Anwita Ghosh.
News of systematic air strikes in the Levant region seldom grabs us by the scruff of our neck. The world has silently grown immune to bombings, these bombings, and to countless others. They fall into those little spaces between headlines and op-ed pieces as we shift our wobbly attention to the supplementary tabloid. We immerse ourselves in myriad images and lose our way where words and thoughts do not impede us. Our transfixed gaze arrests our senses, if not our attention – and the staged spectacle of brutality lets us relive those moments of utmost wakefulness. The faceless victims of Abu Ghraib and the dazed, bloodied boy in Aleppo do not make us cringe so much with revulsion as they make us crave for facts and a narrative coherence. To satiate this lack, the modern mind has graduated to the pleasures of video binging. A film’s speed gives it a powerfully realistic and powerfully present momentum that the frozen, “dead” photograph can never attain. Walter Benjamin goes as far to claim “the film is the art form that is in keeping with the increased threat to his life which modern man has to face.”[i]Do we have a new brand of terrorism, where terrorists are honed impresarios and the act of decapitation becomes the fodder of modern, visual diet?
How does, then, one situate the tradition of beheading videos in this “now” and the response they have garnered so far? Do we have a new brand of terrorism, where terrorists are honed impresarios and the act of decapitation becomes the fodder of modern, visual diet? Beheadings may have a long history, but the transmission and consumption of films shot exclusively for this purpose form a recent phenomena and one that makes us interrogate some deeply rooted ideas. One wonders what (if, at all) is Islamic about such spectacles when only a tiny portion of fundamentalists commits such acts of terror. This article clearly distinguishes Islamism from Islam and Islamists from Muslims. Islamism is the sentiment that expresses the movement of politicized Islam. Islamists, on the other hand, are those who use the tool of Islamism to propagate an ideology and justify a political goal through religion. Islamist is also an adjective that describes features of Islamism. My willingness to try and complicate the understanding of Islam and also of modernity should be taken as something deliberate. For this Islam/fundamentalism vs. West/modernity binary not only undercuts the essay’s view that fundamentalism and modernity are imbricated, but it also locks us into the same oppositional and adversarial essentialisms that I desperately want to avoid.
More than 90% of the attacks on acid attack victims around the world are targeted at the faces. The face is an index not simply of “mind” in the abstract, but the individuality of an unmistakable personality.
Face of the “Other”
On 12 October 2015, members of Shiv Sena smeared Sudheendra Kulkarni’s face with black ink. On 20 February 2016, Soni Sori was intercepted by three young men who forcibly rub a black liquid over her face. It turns out to be a corrosive agent that causes her skin to burn. More than 90% of the attacks on acid attack victims around the world are targeted at the faces. The face is an index not simply of “mind” in the abstract, but the individuality of an unmistakable personality. The human face is a bearer of meaning that far surpasses the body in expressiveness. And the “face-to-face” encounter with another person provides grounds for the optimal perception of message – both verbal and nonverbal – from that other person. It is no accident that normal conversations are carried out face-to-face. This has led psycholinguist Herbert Clark to describe the face-to-face situation of communication as the “canonical encounter”[ii] of human beings. Rendering a person faceless, therefore, simultaneously becomes a way of turning that person into an object, stripping one of the “unmistakable personalities” (the head being the only body part which, when removed, can be easily identified as belonging to that person) and the ultimate decision of power over the individual- the taking of life itself. This suitably explains the etymological root of the word “capital” in the expression “capital punishment.” The Latin word capitālis means “of the head”, since in the ancient times a death sentence typically meant the offender lost his head and “de-capitation” literally meaning “removal of the caput (head).”Most European nations have a vivid history of beheading, which has always been quite controversial in nature, most notable being the practice of the guillotine. By the late 1800s, as empires spread their reach, white Europeans and North Americans came to associate beheading almost exclusively with the racial or the cultural “other.”
Beheading as a form of execution is rife with conflicting ideas and symbolism. However, religious executions and sacrifices, down the centuries, have all been instances of beheading more often than not. Judith in the Old Testament decapitated Holoferness, while Herod ordered the beheading of John the Baptist. Politically as well, Western kings and Muslim caliphs continued the tradition by displaying the opponents’ severed heads on platters or pikes. Decapitation, as a punishment, was widespread from Roman times, where it was considered preferable to crucifixion, through the Middle Ages to the modern era. From Cicero to Anne Boleyn to Robespierre, beheading has been often the punishment handed down to those deemed to be enemies of the state. Most European nations have a vivid history of beheading, which has always been quite controversial in nature, most notable being the practice of the guillotine. By the late 1800s, as empires spread their reach, white Europeans and North Americans came to associate beheading almost exclusively with the racial or the cultural “other.” Never mind that Indians were themselves beheaded by whites, or that the French did not outlaw the guillotine until 1977. American troops decapitated a Japanese soldier in 1945 and propped his head on their tank for a picture. They did the same again to an Iraqi soldier in 1991. But this time, Life magazine- that had declined to publish the World War II photograph – put the new picture on its cover. Such is the notorious history of beheading. However, since the late nineteenth century, beheading as a form of execution has gradually been banned throughout the world with a few exceptions like Qatar, Iran, Yemen, and especially Saudi Arabia, where beheading is still a legal form of execution and the majority of the executions carried out by the Wahhabi government are public beheadings that can well be called public spectacles.
Curiously enough, Jihād is not one of the Quran’s main themes. In fact, the word and its derivatives appear no more than forty-one times and out of these only ten times they refer unambiguously to warfare.
Beheading and Jihadists
Curiously enough, Jihād is not one of the Quran’s main themes. In fact, the word and its derivatives appear no more than forty-one times and out of these only ten times they refer unambiguously to warfare. Historian Karen Armstrong explains: “The “surrender” of Islam requires a constant jihād (struggle) against our inherent selfishness; this sometimes involves fighting (qital) but bearing trials courageously and giving to the poor in times of personal hardship was also described as jihād.”[iii] Yet despite a systematic Quranic teaching about military violence, there are clear mentions of decapitation as a form of punishment. And the danger of blindly imitating Muhammad’s external behaviour in the hope to acquire his interior attitude (of total surrender to God) gets an impetus through such scattered references of decapitation as an accepted form of execution to be meted out to the infidels. For instance, the following passage:So, when you meet [in a fight (Jihād) in Allāh’s Cause], those who disbelieve, smite at their necks till when you have killed and wounded many of them, then bind a bond firmly (on them, i.e. take them as captives). Thereafter (is the time) either for generosity (i.e. free them without ransom), or ransom (according to what benefits Islām), until the war lays down its burden. Thus [you are ordered by Allāh to continue in carrying out Jihād against the disbelievers till they embrace Islām (i.e. are saved from the punishment in the Hell-fire) or at least come under your protection], but if it had been Allāh’s Will, He Himself could certainly have punished them (without you). But (He lets you fight), in order to test you, some with others. But those who are killed in the Way of Allāh, He will never let their deeds be lost, Sura Muhammad 47:4 [iv]
But the Quran is not a coherent revelation; it came to Muhammad piecemeal in responses to particular events, so (as in any scripture) there were inconsistencies- not least about warfare. In some passages, Muslims are told to live at peace with the People of the Book (Quran 8:61), in others they are required to subdue them (Quran 9: 29).
But the Quran is not a coherent revelation; it came to Muhammad piecemeal in responses to particular events, so (as in any scripture) there were inconsistencies- not least about warfare. In some passages, Muslims are told to live at peace with the People of the Book (Quran 8:61), in others they are required to subdue them (Quran 9: 29). These contradictory instructions occur throughout the Quran and people have developed various exegetical strategies to rationalise them. The scope of this article divests us from probing deep into these inconsistencies and their implications. What is apparent, however, from the above quoted passage is that the purpose of this command to smite above the neck and to cut off the fingertips was to instil terror into the hearts of the “unbelievers”. This seems to be the self-explanation of the Quran, even though some commentaries (tafsir) give a soft touch to this verse (ayah). One cannot, therefore, hurriedly dismiss the historical roots of beheading in Islam. Islamic history does have its fair share of famous beheadings. According to Ibn-Ishaq, Muhammad’s earliest biographer, the prophet approved the beheadings of around 600 to 900 men from the Jewish Banu Qurayza tribe following the Battle of the Trench (627 AD).
The first modern instance of Islamist beheading dates back at least to the First Chechen War (1994-96), when a young Russian soldier, Yevgeny Rodionov, who refused to convert to Islam, was beheaded. However, it was American journalist Daniel Pearl’s beheading in 2002 by Al-Qaeda member Khalid Sheikh Mohammed that amassed huge international attention and inaugurated the so-called image warfare in the Holy War of Terror. It was the first time a beheading was filmed for the purpose of dissemination.
The first modern instance of Islamist beheading dates back at least to the First Chechen War (1994-96), when a young Russian soldier, Yevgeny Rodionov, who refused to convert to Islam, was beheaded. However, it was American journalist Daniel Pearl’s beheading in 2002 by Al-Qaeda member Khalid Sheikh Mohammed that amassed huge international attention and inaugurated the so-called image warfare in the Holy War of Terror. It was the first time a beheading was filmed for the purpose of dissemination. Soon enough followed a series of such “show” executions by Islamic militants. In May 2004, during the Iraqi insurgency, independent businessman Nick Berg was beheaded by al-Zarqawi. Over the course of 2004, Jama’at al-Tawhid wal-Jihad would take responsibility for seven more beheadings of foreigners. Eugene Armstrong and Jack Hensley, both US citizens, and Kenneth Bigley, a British citizen, were kidnapped on September 16, 2004 and subsequently decapitated. Shosei Koda, a Japanese citizen, was beheaded on October 30, 2004, by Tawhid and Jihad jihādists operating under their new name “al-Qaeda in Iraq.” Instances of beheadings against foreign nationals diminished after 2006. Although such actions against Iraqi citizens continued, those remained generally unreported in the Western media. The emergence of ISIS during 2013 brought a resurgence of the use of beheadings as an instrument of terror. Beginning in 2013 and accelerating in 2014, reports of retaliatory beheadings carried out by jihādists began to increase. Since August 2014, a total of eight Westerners, three Americans, two British, and two Japanese are reported to have been beheaded. The actual number is probably much higher.
In Discipline and Punish, Foucault has argued that historically “a hidden execution was a privileged execution, and in such cases, it was often suspected that it had not taken place with all its customary severity.” The Pearl execution video is an out and out violation of such a “privileged execution” and it is precisely this violation that accentuates not only its gruesomeness but also its veracity.
Beheading Videos of Daniel Pearl and Nick Berg
Images of the abduction and murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl were the first “about-to-die images” of beheading to surface on the Web. On 21 February, 2002, Pearl’s gruesome execution video titled “The Slaughter of the Spy-Journalist, the Jew Daniel Pearl” was released over the Internet as a jihādist recruiting film. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault has argued that historically “a hidden execution was a privileged execution, and in such cases, it was often suspected that it had not taken place with all its customary severity.”[v] The Pearl execution video is an out and out violation of such a “privileged execution” and it is precisely this violation that accentuates not only its gruesomeness but also its veracity. Visibility is the meaning of this violence, as this is cruelty that needs to be “seen”. The case of Daniel Pearl has, in fact, been the most ideal type according to jihādist standards, for Pearl was an American and a Jew. As such, he was being held personally responsible for the occupation of Palestine, the mistreatment of Muslims by the Israeli forces, the unlawful detention of terrorist suspects in Guantanamo bay and the growing American intervention in the Islamic countries. The video, which lasts 3 minutes and 36 seconds, shows Pearl addressing the audience as he speaks directly into the camera.As is evident, the purpose of the beheading video was not to kill the hostage (an act which could have been accomplished much more cleanly with a bullet in the back of the head). Instead, the purpose has been to create an event to be videoed, designed as a virtual bomb. We now have the terrorist as a film director.
At about 1 minute 55 seconds into the video the decapitation graphically takes place. The last 90 seconds of the video show the list of demands scrolling, superimposed on an image of Pearl’s severed head being held by the hair. As is evident, the purpose of the beheading video was not to kill the hostage (an act which could have been accomplished much more cleanly with a bullet in the back of the head). Instead, the purpose has been to create an event to be videoed, designed as a virtual bomb. We now have the terrorist as a film director. (In an article in The New York Times, November 14, 2004, entitled “The Terrorist as Auteur,” Michael Ignatieff addressed this phenomenon for the first time). The defenceless prisoners are actors who neither speak for themselves nor act on their behalves. Rather, by coercion, they follow the script of the kidnappers.
For it is the face that is the most condensed of spaces in these moving images of a beheading video. The image of the headless corpse is powerful not just because it is a picture of a body in pain, but it is a picture of a “displaced” human face, or what was once a human face.
Daniel Pearl’s body is simultaneously sacrificed and used to testify on behalf of Islamic fundamentalism. Pearl’s tortured body, therefore, is transformed into a space for competing identities and multiple discourses – a rhetorical condensation of America, of Jewishness, of Zionism. However, I would like to differentiate the face from the body here. For it is the face that is the most condensed of spaces in these moving images of a beheading video. The image of the headless corpse is powerful not just because it is a picture of a body in pain, but it is a picture of a “displaced” human face, or what was once a human face.
The second American (after Pearl) to die in a “show” execution by Islamic militants was the independent businessman Nick Berg in May 2004. Much like Pearl, Berg is shown looking straight into the camera while following the usual protocols of confession. Nathan Roger, drawing an interesting parallel to Walter Benjamin’s idea about figures gazing out of images and creating the illusion of being able to actually see their spectators, writes: “Therefore, instead of audiences simply being spectators to Berg’s execution (with little or no emotional engagement) they are instead transformed into witnesses (who register different emotional responses from enjoyment to horror).”[vi] The video bore the title, “Abu Musab al-Zarqawi Shown Slaughtering an American.” After Berg’s speech detailing his familial origin, the central militant figure reads aloud a long statement, in which he specifically says that they had tried to trade Berg for prisoners at Abu Ghraib, but the U.S. Government had refused. At the end of the speech, the masked men converge on Berg- two of them hold him down, while one decapitates him with a knife. A scream can be heard as men shout “Allahu Akbar” or “God is great.” The video generated much skepticism regarding whether Berg had died. Within days an open letter was posted on islamonline.net, tackling the uproar over Berg’s “alleged beheading” and claiming that the video was, in fact, faked. While on the other hand, according to Time magazine, Central Intelligence Agency officials confirmed that there was a “high probability” that the knife was wielded by al-Zarqawi himself. One finds this obsession with information (or what the New Republic called “the facticity of evil”[vii]) almost pathological in nature, but perhaps the only way to confront these all-too-real spectacles of atrocity.
Spectacles of atrocity—sometimes turned into music videos—air on such websites as Ogrish.com, bestgore.com, and a number of personal blogs some of which describe themselves as “a vast supermarket of death and dismemberment,” as well as on YouTube and Google Video, which boast a worldwide audience. East and West behold each other in a symbiotically contemptuous, symbiotically transfixed gaze as these beheading videos are turned into veritable forms of entertainment.
Forking Paths – Modernity and Fundamentalism
The timing of Berg’s beheading video was extremely critical. The beheading occurred right when the images of the U.S. abuses in Abu Ghraib prison came to light. This means that Berg’s beheading photos surfaced in a context already filled with contradictory images offering alternative interpretive cues about the war’s direction, legitimacy, and salience. What I find crucial here, is the frightening intimacy of these presumably antagonistic images of the Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib and the beheading videos of Berg and others. The faceless victims of Abu Ghraib are now the martyred protagonists of these decapitation videos performing the acts of being faceless all too literally. What the photographs and the controversies over them reveal is not that the United States is innately more barbaric than the Muslim world, or vice versa for that matter. It can hardly be overstated that since 9/11, East and West have joined together in a diabolical duel of violent images and actions. What troubles me, however, is the double-way traffic of this “theatre(s) of punishment.”[viii] We not only confront such spectacles of execution, but we even extract “the luxury of [these] momentary Saturnalia”[ix] from them, however conflicting it might appear. It is well known how attending public hangings at “Tyburn hill,” was a popular pastime in Elizabethan and Stuart England. Despite our modern notions of brutality of such events, these ceremonies were elaborately staged and exquisitely paced rituals seething with suspense, tension, crisis, reversals, and revelations. Above all, they were breathtaking spectacles. And it seems, late modernity has surely retained its debt to the Early Modern period in this respect. In 2004, footage of Islamic terrorists beheading a young Japanese hostage was broadcast on a large screen during a rock concert held in Tokyo. Spectacles of atrocity—sometimes turned into music videos—air on such websites as Ogrish.com, bestgore.com, and a number of personal blogs some of which describe themselves as “a vast supermarket of death and dismemberment,” as well as on YouTube and Google Video, which boast a worldwide audience. East and West behold each other in a symbiotically contemptuous, symbiotically transfixed gaze as these beheading videos are turned into veritable forms of entertainment. These frighteningly sophisticated, choreographed video productions are sites of a complex, discursive and hybridized relation that these Islamist fundamentalist groups share with Western modernity as such.Instead of asking what it is about Islam that has produced this clash, I think the question should be what it is about (late) modernity that produces such “fundamentalist” religious movements? Are they mere consequences of the existence of modern states or do they radically disrupt the order imposed by modernity?
Particularly in the wake of the 9/11 terror attacks, scholarship on Islam has been dedicated to establishing, describing, and demonstrating a direct, casual link between Islam and terrorism. Muslim violence is often represented as terrorism alone and thus morally and politically illegitimate. Moreover Islam’s attachment to terroristic violence and its “barbaric” manifestations such as beheadings and the massacre of children in schools or suicide-bombings are often cited as evidence of its anti-modern character. Indeed, Islam and its terrorists are repeatedly cited as hostile agents to the modernist project and the progressive liberal values associated with modernity. (Modernity thrives on a notion of time as structured, ordered, and imbued with historical purpose, coupled with progress and evolution.) Francis Fukuyama has likened the reactionary or anti-modern character of contemporary Islam to the worst strains of totalitarian thought, using the pejorative term “Islamo-fascism”[x] While decoding such expressions like “Islamic terrorism”, Alain Badiou prudently points out that, “the predicate “Islamic” has no other function except that of supplying an apparent content to the word “terrorism”, which is itself devoid of all content (in this instance, political).”[xi] The emptiness of the term terrorism, even when made understandable through the appendage of certain predicates, makes it a vacuous opponent of democratic regimes. The war against terrorism amounts to nothing more than “the abstract form of a theatrical capture of an adversary (“terrorism”) which in its essence is vague and elusive. The war against nothing: save against what is itself removed from any war.”[xii] The tragedy of such a meaningless project is of course the damage and suffering inflicted around the globe in the name of such a vacuous struggle. Instead of asking what it is about Islam that has produced this clash, I think the question should be what it is about (late) modernity that produces such “fundamentalist” religious movements? Are they mere consequences of the existence of modern states or do they radically disrupt the order imposed by modernity? Indeed, modernity and fundamentalism maybe seen as forked paths but they hardly run parallel to each other forever, and the immediacy of beheading videos manifest their enmeshed nature in more than one way.
Image via www.newstarget.com
Reference
[i] Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, Hannah Arendt, ed., Harry Zohn, trans. (New York: Schocken, 1969), 238.
[ii] Herbert H. Clark, “Space, Time, Semantics, and the Child,” in Cognitive Development and the Acquisition of Language, Timothy E. Moore, ed. (New York: Academic Press, 1973), 27-63.
[iii] Karen Armstrong, Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (London: Vintage, 2015), 166.
[iv] Muhammad Al-Hilali and Muhammad M. Khan, Interpretation of the Meanings of The Noble Qur’an: A summarized Version of Al-Tabari, Al-Qurtubi, and Ibn Kathir with comments from Sahih Al-Bukhari (Riyadh, Saudi Arabia: Darussalam Publishers, 1996), 726.
[v] Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Alan Sheridan, trans. (UK: Penguin, 1991), 58.
[vi] Nathan Roger, Image Warfare in the War on Terror (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 119.
[vii] “The Face of Evil” (editorial), New Republic, June 24 (2002) Vol. 226, Issue 24:8.
[viii] Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 113.
[ix] Ibid., 60.
[x] Francis Fukuyama, “Has history started again?”, in Policy, 18 (2002), 3-7.
[xi] Alain Badiou, Infinite Thought (London: Continuum, 2003), 115.
[xii] Ibid., 117.
