Murder by an abstraction

Condemning the assassination attempt on Malala’s life but not naming the perpetrators - Taliban - is a meaningless, empty and dangerous strategy. More than just moral trickery, such reasoning has concrete legal and policy implications. The cloak of deceitful denial allows pseudo-sympathisers to acknowledge the criminal act, but at the same time defend the perpetrator by blaming externalities and abstractions. To deflect the direct responsibility of a crime off of the individual and place it on the breadth of society, government, the state, global powers or imperialism, then empties the perpetrator of criminal motivation and refills him with a higher, larger-than-life, mission.
The creation of such noblesse oblige is done by converting the agent into a victim. This laundering opens a new line of defense. It suggests (as several Islamists have done over the last few days) that, under certain circumstances, a case of justifiable homicide may be made. However, in the views of the same sympathisers, this flexibility is a limited moral commodity. The defense of a higher moral purpose as the motivation for murder is not a universally available tool for all citizens regardless of class, creed or gender. It is a selective application reserved only for those who are deemed Islamic enough and soaked in the cause of promoting/defending Islam as defined by powerful or political clergymen.
In other words, Malala may be worthy of sympathy due to her status as a minor but does not qualify for justice because of her near-fitna activities. In the minds of these apologists, her would-be assassins were absolved of their crime even before they were caught, despite their stated motivation - which has not been cited as drone attacks but as Malala’s adversarial intent to secularise her society - and even prior to a judicial hearing. In such a world-view, justice must not be blind but dependent on the perceived beliefs or religious weightage of the individuals or parties involved. This notion of justice allows the sympathisers of the criminal to act as judge and jury in condemning the act, but also to actively resist (as in the Salmaan Taseer murder case) the execution of the criminal because they do not recognise the latter as such.
Those who defend Islamists for their ‘different’ rationality - the kind that absolves murder - argue that violence and crime is not the monopoly of Islamists in Pakistan but that this is routinely deployed by non-theocratic sectors and motivations as well as the state. However, the state claims legitimate use of violence when protecting its writ from external and internal challengers. And, while culture and tradition are also abstract entities, crimes motivated in their name are usually rooted in material rather than invisible, divine, faith-based profit. This makes it easier for the legal system and government policy to grapple with and resolve, however inadequately. Governments make laws to protect the state and its citizens from acts of violence. The criminal justice system is meant to check the abuse of all violations and punish perpetrators after determining the victim, judging the damage and applying the requisite sentence.
But rationalising divine motivations makes it near impossible to bring crimes committed in the name of Islam into the legal net. It also negates the principle of the indivisible right to life. Dividing or qualifying this basic right renders those perceived as ‘less Islamic’ as more secular and hence, less worthy of this right.
The singular commonality in this multi-dimensional drama is that all the actors, be they of religious, nationalist, cultural or state politics, routinely and consciously deploy the site of women’s bodies as the stage on which to display their ideologies, and over which they fight their material struggles. As carriers of both the virus and the cure, as victims or agents, women also carry the seed of destruction and resurrection, war and peace. Since violence against women settles men’s scores and restores the pre-crime social order, any initial breach of male community codes requires her elimination, which then qualifies as the metaphorical, literal and justifiable end.
So when sympathisers engage in disassociating the crime from the criminal, which is quite a different exercise from theorising the reasons for the crime, they are guilty of such disembodiment. The evidence may be in the form of a dead body but it has been murdered by an abstraction - American hegemony, imperialism, Islamic freedom, militancy, westernisation, class aspirations, honour, nationalism, secularism, women’s rights. By not recognising the self-confessed murderer, we absolve the criminal and dissolve the crime.
All these actors commit similar crimes but the process of rationalising them is different. The state uses the rationale that it is not punishing citizens but warring against forces oppositional to abstract notions such as sovereignty, honour, independence, Islam. Sometimes, an identity is given to the target-victim but in the end we are left with multiple bodies and the obscured perpetrator - The State.
The defenders of violent cultural rites justify static, male-defined traditions that are invented and reinvented for their specific benefit and to maintain a patriarchal status quo. But the Islamists engage in an opportunist, shifting blame game that first, for years, denied the Taliban even existed and then glorified them as freedom defenders against the infidels, and now reinvents them as victims absolved of all criminal activities.
The army too has been a master of invention and reinvention. From sovereign defender, it is now viewed as collaborator and violator of the human rights of the perpetrator-cum-victim - the writ-violating militant of Fata. However, the same sympathy or label of ‘victim’ does not apply to those writ-rejecting, militant Baloch at the receiving end of the army’s extra-judicial acts.
When the perpetrator is replaced by abstractions such as poverty, injustice, US imperialism, colonialism, Islam, secularism or human rights, it makes available an entire supermarket of different brands of blame. This has allowed actors to shop for any excuse to perpetrate crime and has also enabled the physical criminal to hide behind the abstraction.
Masking real issues with abstractions is not going to resolve the challenges on all fronts - cultural, religious, terrorist or insurgent. The only possibility is to prioritise these in legal terms, and not by order of ideological privilege. Crimes against the state and the citizen must take precedence over imaginaries. Perpetrators need to be held legally accountable for their crimes without deflection and regardless of the motivating compulsions. The state needs to be included in the process of accountability, whether it is violating the rights of militants or insurgents. The sympathisers of criminals need to be held accountable as abettors, if they continue to give refuge to criminals through moral equivocations.
First, we must own all actual victims equally, whether they are murdered, disappeared, or disowned and, at the same time, clearly identify the direct perpetrator. Only then can we begin to negotiate the terms of future engagement in a just manner. Otherwise, the country is going to eclipse as a state of abstractions that is all Ilaqa Ghair (the strange/disowned) with a social imaginary that will only qualify as Ilaqa Ghaib (the dissolved/disappeared).
The writer is a sociologist based in Karachi. Email: afiyazia@yahoo.com