嫌疑犯:反恐、伊斯兰和安全国家

IF 0.4 4区 社会学 0 HUMANITIES, MULTIDISCIPLINARY Utopian Studies Pub Date : 2023-03-01 DOI:10.5325/utopianstudies.34.1.0132
Rhiannon Firth
{"title":"嫌疑犯:反恐、伊斯兰和安全国家","authors":"Rhiannon Firth","doi":"10.5325/utopianstudies.34.1.0132","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"Author Rizwaan Sabir, as a then-MA student at Nottingham University, became known as one-half of the “Nottingham Two” following his arrest along with Hicham Yezza in May 2008. They were detained for six days without charge on suspicion of terrorism for the possession of a document titled the Al Qaeda Training Manual, which was freely available on the internet and from bookstores. Sabir had downloaded it from a US government website for use as primary source material in his proposed PhD research on armed Muslim groups. But Sabir’s arrest, detention, interrogation, and release without charge takes up only about one-fifth of the pages; the remainder covers subsequent events revealing the extent of the surveillance to which he was subject, and his increasing awareness of information held about him not only by the police but by a dizzying array of interconnected authorities. These events include several stop-and-searches by the roadside (each a frightening and infuriating story in its own right), detentions at the border, and an attempt by the UK military to recruit him into their psychological warfare unit. These events occurred more than seven years after the 9/11 attacks that haunt the book, forming a backdrop of ever-increasing securitization against the everyday lives of Muslims in the West. These historical conditions and their political, social and psychological consequences are the subject of the book, as we witness the development of Sabir’s complex trauma and psychological distress.A gripping read from start to finish, the book is a standalone must-read; moreover, The Suspect is not just relevant but indeed essential reading for any scholar of utopia. The book contains a foreword by Hicham Yezza, arrested alongside Sabir, who commends the work for its skillful delineation of “the contours of the intricate lattice of personal, institutional, political, and ideological forces that led to our absurd, preposterous arrests on our university campus for suspected terrorism, and their long-drawn aftermath” (xi). The afterword by lawyer Aamer Anwar situates Sabir’s story in his broader experience of working with Muslims in the British legal system, arguing that while Sabir’s story is well told, it is by no means an isolated case: “it does not matter how educated or integrated we are into British society. . . . When a police officer or agent of the state wants to racially profile and investigate you in the post 9/11 world, they can act with almost total impunity” (195).At first glance, The Suspect is not self-evidently an academic book because it takes the form of a first-person account, broken into readable short chapters (33 chapters of around 5–10 pages each), which helps the reader digest sometimes disturbing material. It is written with a sense of humor: for example, detecting racial profiling when questioned by a border guard claiming to recognize Sabir’s face: “‘Have you been on any aid convoys to Syria?’” Sabir responds, “I have an extremely common face that is often mistaken for somebody else” (123). The bizarre story of the attempted recruitment of Sabir into the British military is also comedic. Major Hussein insists the military do not go around “tapping people on the shoulder” when we can see this is precisely what is happening (125–29). It could comfortably be read by a politically interested nonacademic readership. Nevertheless, as the book develops, it is clearly an intricately thought-out work of social theory whose form is complementary with its function. Although written as a first-person personal narrative, this is skillfully interwoven with analyses of historical events (particularly 9/11), social structures (racism, Islamophobia), and government policies (Prevent, CONTEST), and how these impacted on Sabir’s embodied experience.The book shares the function of consciousness-raising with many utopian books and movements, beginning from embodied experience of oppression before building a structural account.1 It is incredibly well researched; drawing on a range of primary materials including police interview transcripts, government policy documents, letters from the Crown Prosecution Services, responses to Freedom of Information requests, NGO and advocacy organization reports, Home Office statistics, newspaper reports, and many more. It also creates a structural account drawing on theoretical scholarship from critical security studies, criminology, and classic texts in politics and international relations theory.Why should scholars of utopia be interested in a book subtitled “Counterterrorism, Islam, and the Security State”? This indeed seems counterintuitive, and something I asked of myself—given my own historical connection to these events. A word is needed on my own interest and positionality in relation to this book. I was very familiar with the events surrounding the arrest of the “Nottingham Two” because I was studying in the same university department as Sabir at the time. I frequently saw Sabir and Yezza around campus, as I attended many of the same events and protests, such as a peaceful protest in solidarity with Palestine, which features in the book. I was a regular reader of Ceasefire magazine, an independent publication focused on left-wing political theory, art, and activism for which Yezza is chief editor.2 I also attended, alongside hundreds of other staff and students, the protests for academic freedom that took place on campus in the wake of the arrests over the university’s complicity and response. The arrests shook me, so I obsessively kept myself informed of developments at the time.I knew little of Sabir’s trajectory after 2010, except that he achieved his dream of completing his PhD and becoming a successful academic (which is no mean achievement for a working-class Muslim, even aside from the added persecution Sabir was subject to). These events were paradigm shifting for myself and others at the institution. Although aware of rising Islamophobia and securitization following 9/11, and worried about the escalating racist abuse some of my friends experienced in the streets, I never considered that freedom of thought and speech might be under threat for my friendship groups or communities, which had always included Muslims. This is clearly experience from a position of privilege, and it might still be that I personally have no reason to be afraid (although I was/am). Yet as students Hicham and Rizwaan were like me in so many other ways that their Muslimness had never much occurred to me until these events. I knew them to share similar politics to mine, and to be “good guys”: to see them treated as “extremists” was far too close to home, and shattered my previously unquestioned sense of safety to freely hold and articulate ideas I believed in.Herein lies my interest in reading Sabir’s book as an important text for scholars of utopian studies. In the first instance, the book can be read as a dystopia. It mobilizes the familiar device of the alienated minority figure struggling to navigate a frightening security state and surveillance apparatus that unfairly targets them. It rouses and mobilizes political affects of fear, hypervigilance, and paranoia in the reader. Sabir struggles to understand this incomprehensible and secretive state and builds a knowledge base as a means of his own survival within it: to remain free from arrest, maintain a livelihood, and develop his professional career. The knowledge he builds is profiled as “criminal intelligence” (72, 96–99)—and his intrinsic desire for learning means he is increasingly viewed with suspicion, construed as a potential enemy of the very state for which he was seeking to produce knowledge as a productive citizen (30). The tone, style, and themes covered are remarkably like those of canonical authors of dystopia such as Orwell and Zamyatin. The author describes his experiences as “Kafkaesque” (101), and the term is repeated across endorsements and reviews—if only it were fiction! The subject and his voyage into mental distress become the site of dystopia: a frontier between the utopian promises of the West and the securitizations and exclusions that these are built upon.This leads to a second point—the need for utopians to become invested in knowledge of contemporary counterinsurgency tactics, as utopian solutions are increasingly securitized and criminalized. This dynamic is highly racialized. In my own recent book, Disaster Anarchy: Mutual Aid and Radical Action (Pluto Press, 2022), I discuss how Black Lives Matter were excessively policed during the summer 2020 wave of protest. Similarly, Hurricane Katrina, which disproportionately affected Black communities, was policed in a much more violent and militarized fashion than was the “Occupy Sandy” hurricane relief effort, a more diverse movement than is often thought, yet certainly majority white. Nevertheless, my book argues, as does Sabir’s, that counterinsurgency tactics are increasingly being used against leftist social movements regardless of race (132). Repression/criminalization and recuperation/co-optation are two sides of the same coin, which divides social action into that which is helpful to the neoliberal state and capital (therefore mobilized as such, to plug gaps as the welfare state withdraws), and that which is perceived as a threat and quashed. This is inherently anti-utopian because it does not allow for expression of political desires beyond the status quo.Utopians must stand against racism because we should stand in solidarity, as critical and radical people trying to create alternative futures in the present. Counterinsurgency tactics are increasingly aimed at all political activists. Sabir’s case illustrates that they threaten our freedom as academics to think and to speak, and fear is increasingly internalized. Securitization can be understood as an anti-utopian practice that attempts to define and delimit the range of desires and grassroots alternatives that are permissible within the terms of the system. White, middle-class, and depoliticized mutual aid initiatives during the COVID-19 pandemic were lauded by the government and media so long as they did not extend beyond helping neighbors with shopping, keeping the wheels of capitalism turning as the welfare state withdraws. Those mutual aid initiatives that sought to defend groups and communities from dispossession found themselves at the sharp edge of the security state—such as deportation resistances seen in Glasgow, and the defense of squatted spaces from eviction and of long-standing social centers at risk from increasing rents in gentrifying areas. If, as I argue in Disaster Anarchy, the state seeks to capitalize on all social relations, and if those relations that it cannot mobilize as state-friendly “social capital” are criminalized and repressed, then it stands to reason that this dynamic ultimately includes all utopian thought and practice.3 Ironically, it is we scholars, in our roles as academics, who are expected to be at the front-line of this policing of thought, under the Prevent legislation in the United Kingdom. Sabir’s story tells the horrific consequences when individuals and institutions make mistakes undergirded by media and policy-driven racist hysteria and moral panic.Finally, The Suspect culminates in its own utopian vision. Rizwaan Sabir is one of us. He was persecuted because he is a Muslim, but also because this identity intersected with his sociopolitical desires to create a better world. He initially dared have faith in the promise of justice within the legal system, then despite persecution continued to hope and fight for a better world in his scholarly work “for the Muslim community as a whole” (62). It is probably in his articulation of a positive utopian vision that I am least persuaded. Sabir outlines a vision of a community-driven “support hub that exists outside the prying eyes of the surveillance state” (194). It functions to provide a space for those with mental ill-health triggered by racism, Islamophobia, and state violence to authentically express their experiences, thoughts, and feelings, while “resisting the damage that is being done to ordinary Muslims and communities of color by the securitising of the public sector” (194). At this point, I am on board with the vision of what sounds like a grassroots infrastructure and social movement of action-oriented consciousness-raising groups. He goes on to envision the support hub serving as a blueprint for what a future (utopian) National Health Service (NHS) might look like, since the NHS has been prevented from providing authentic psychiatric care, having been coerced into conducting counterradicalization surveillance through the Prevent policy (192).The point at which I differ, however, is at Sabir’s suggestion such an initiative be “autonomous” yet funded through a “central government commitment to dealing with . . . the trauma and harm that emerges as a result of specific government policies and state violence” (190, 192). It is on this final point that I diverge, in a hopefully productive dialogue. I would follow classical anarchist thinkers such as Peter Kropotkin and contemporary anthropologists of the state such as James Scott to argue it is fundamental to the nature of the state to mobilize public services and provide funding as a foil for securitization and surveillance, so the very best one can fight for is autonomy.4 I believe this is a project that utopian scholars can and must fight in solidarity with those who are closer to the front-line of repression than ourselves.","PeriodicalId":44751,"journal":{"name":"Utopian Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4000,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":"{\"title\":\"The Suspect: Counterterrorism, Islam and the Security State\",\"authors\":\"Rhiannon Firth\",\"doi\":\"10.5325/utopianstudies.34.1.0132\",\"DOIUrl\":null,\"url\":null,\"abstract\":\"Author Rizwaan Sabir, as a then-MA student at Nottingham University, became known as one-half of the “Nottingham Two” following his arrest along with Hicham Yezza in May 2008. They were detained for six days without charge on suspicion of terrorism for the possession of a document titled the Al Qaeda Training Manual, which was freely available on the internet and from bookstores. Sabir had downloaded it from a US government website for use as primary source material in his proposed PhD research on armed Muslim groups. But Sabir’s arrest, detention, interrogation, and release without charge takes up only about one-fifth of the pages; the remainder covers subsequent events revealing the extent of the surveillance to which he was subject, and his increasing awareness of information held about him not only by the police but by a dizzying array of interconnected authorities. These events include several stop-and-searches by the roadside (each a frightening and infuriating story in its own right), detentions at the border, and an attempt by the UK military to recruit him into their psychological warfare unit. These events occurred more than seven years after the 9/11 attacks that haunt the book, forming a backdrop of ever-increasing securitization against the everyday lives of Muslims in the West. These historical conditions and their political, social and psychological consequences are the subject of the book, as we witness the development of Sabir’s complex trauma and psychological distress.A gripping read from start to finish, the book is a standalone must-read; moreover, The Suspect is not just relevant but indeed essential reading for any scholar of utopia. The book contains a foreword by Hicham Yezza, arrested alongside Sabir, who commends the work for its skillful delineation of “the contours of the intricate lattice of personal, institutional, political, and ideological forces that led to our absurd, preposterous arrests on our university campus for suspected terrorism, and their long-drawn aftermath” (xi). The afterword by lawyer Aamer Anwar situates Sabir’s story in his broader experience of working with Muslims in the British legal system, arguing that while Sabir’s story is well told, it is by no means an isolated case: “it does not matter how educated or integrated we are into British society. . . . When a police officer or agent of the state wants to racially profile and investigate you in the post 9/11 world, they can act with almost total impunity” (195).At first glance, The Suspect is not self-evidently an academic book because it takes the form of a first-person account, broken into readable short chapters (33 chapters of around 5–10 pages each), which helps the reader digest sometimes disturbing material. It is written with a sense of humor: for example, detecting racial profiling when questioned by a border guard claiming to recognize Sabir’s face: “‘Have you been on any aid convoys to Syria?’” Sabir responds, “I have an extremely common face that is often mistaken for somebody else” (123). The bizarre story of the attempted recruitment of Sabir into the British military is also comedic. Major Hussein insists the military do not go around “tapping people on the shoulder” when we can see this is precisely what is happening (125–29). It could comfortably be read by a politically interested nonacademic readership. Nevertheless, as the book develops, it is clearly an intricately thought-out work of social theory whose form is complementary with its function. Although written as a first-person personal narrative, this is skillfully interwoven with analyses of historical events (particularly 9/11), social structures (racism, Islamophobia), and government policies (Prevent, CONTEST), and how these impacted on Sabir’s embodied experience.The book shares the function of consciousness-raising with many utopian books and movements, beginning from embodied experience of oppression before building a structural account.1 It is incredibly well researched; drawing on a range of primary materials including police interview transcripts, government policy documents, letters from the Crown Prosecution Services, responses to Freedom of Information requests, NGO and advocacy organization reports, Home Office statistics, newspaper reports, and many more. It also creates a structural account drawing on theoretical scholarship from critical security studies, criminology, and classic texts in politics and international relations theory.Why should scholars of utopia be interested in a book subtitled “Counterterrorism, Islam, and the Security State”? This indeed seems counterintuitive, and something I asked of myself—given my own historical connection to these events. A word is needed on my own interest and positionality in relation to this book. I was very familiar with the events surrounding the arrest of the “Nottingham Two” because I was studying in the same university department as Sabir at the time. I frequently saw Sabir and Yezza around campus, as I attended many of the same events and protests, such as a peaceful protest in solidarity with Palestine, which features in the book. I was a regular reader of Ceasefire magazine, an independent publication focused on left-wing political theory, art, and activism for which Yezza is chief editor.2 I also attended, alongside hundreds of other staff and students, the protests for academic freedom that took place on campus in the wake of the arrests over the university’s complicity and response. The arrests shook me, so I obsessively kept myself informed of developments at the time.I knew little of Sabir’s trajectory after 2010, except that he achieved his dream of completing his PhD and becoming a successful academic (which is no mean achievement for a working-class Muslim, even aside from the added persecution Sabir was subject to). These events were paradigm shifting for myself and others at the institution. Although aware of rising Islamophobia and securitization following 9/11, and worried about the escalating racist abuse some of my friends experienced in the streets, I never considered that freedom of thought and speech might be under threat for my friendship groups or communities, which had always included Muslims. This is clearly experience from a position of privilege, and it might still be that I personally have no reason to be afraid (although I was/am). Yet as students Hicham and Rizwaan were like me in so many other ways that their Muslimness had never much occurred to me until these events. I knew them to share similar politics to mine, and to be “good guys”: to see them treated as “extremists” was far too close to home, and shattered my previously unquestioned sense of safety to freely hold and articulate ideas I believed in.Herein lies my interest in reading Sabir’s book as an important text for scholars of utopian studies. In the first instance, the book can be read as a dystopia. It mobilizes the familiar device of the alienated minority figure struggling to navigate a frightening security state and surveillance apparatus that unfairly targets them. It rouses and mobilizes political affects of fear, hypervigilance, and paranoia in the reader. Sabir struggles to understand this incomprehensible and secretive state and builds a knowledge base as a means of his own survival within it: to remain free from arrest, maintain a livelihood, and develop his professional career. The knowledge he builds is profiled as “criminal intelligence” (72, 96–99)—and his intrinsic desire for learning means he is increasingly viewed with suspicion, construed as a potential enemy of the very state for which he was seeking to produce knowledge as a productive citizen (30). The tone, style, and themes covered are remarkably like those of canonical authors of dystopia such as Orwell and Zamyatin. The author describes his experiences as “Kafkaesque” (101), and the term is repeated across endorsements and reviews—if only it were fiction! The subject and his voyage into mental distress become the site of dystopia: a frontier between the utopian promises of the West and the securitizations and exclusions that these are built upon.This leads to a second point—the need for utopians to become invested in knowledge of contemporary counterinsurgency tactics, as utopian solutions are increasingly securitized and criminalized. This dynamic is highly racialized. In my own recent book, Disaster Anarchy: Mutual Aid and Radical Action (Pluto Press, 2022), I discuss how Black Lives Matter were excessively policed during the summer 2020 wave of protest. Similarly, Hurricane Katrina, which disproportionately affected Black communities, was policed in a much more violent and militarized fashion than was the “Occupy Sandy” hurricane relief effort, a more diverse movement than is often thought, yet certainly majority white. Nevertheless, my book argues, as does Sabir’s, that counterinsurgency tactics are increasingly being used against leftist social movements regardless of race (132). Repression/criminalization and recuperation/co-optation are two sides of the same coin, which divides social action into that which is helpful to the neoliberal state and capital (therefore mobilized as such, to plug gaps as the welfare state withdraws), and that which is perceived as a threat and quashed. This is inherently anti-utopian because it does not allow for expression of political desires beyond the status quo.Utopians must stand against racism because we should stand in solidarity, as critical and radical people trying to create alternative futures in the present. Counterinsurgency tactics are increasingly aimed at all political activists. Sabir’s case illustrates that they threaten our freedom as academics to think and to speak, and fear is increasingly internalized. Securitization can be understood as an anti-utopian practice that attempts to define and delimit the range of desires and grassroots alternatives that are permissible within the terms of the system. White, middle-class, and depoliticized mutual aid initiatives during the COVID-19 pandemic were lauded by the government and media so long as they did not extend beyond helping neighbors with shopping, keeping the wheels of capitalism turning as the welfare state withdraws. Those mutual aid initiatives that sought to defend groups and communities from dispossession found themselves at the sharp edge of the security state—such as deportation resistances seen in Glasgow, and the defense of squatted spaces from eviction and of long-standing social centers at risk from increasing rents in gentrifying areas. If, as I argue in Disaster Anarchy, the state seeks to capitalize on all social relations, and if those relations that it cannot mobilize as state-friendly “social capital” are criminalized and repressed, then it stands to reason that this dynamic ultimately includes all utopian thought and practice.3 Ironically, it is we scholars, in our roles as academics, who are expected to be at the front-line of this policing of thought, under the Prevent legislation in the United Kingdom. Sabir’s story tells the horrific consequences when individuals and institutions make mistakes undergirded by media and policy-driven racist hysteria and moral panic.Finally, The Suspect culminates in its own utopian vision. Rizwaan Sabir is one of us. He was persecuted because he is a Muslim, but also because this identity intersected with his sociopolitical desires to create a better world. He initially dared have faith in the promise of justice within the legal system, then despite persecution continued to hope and fight for a better world in his scholarly work “for the Muslim community as a whole” (62). It is probably in his articulation of a positive utopian vision that I am least persuaded. Sabir outlines a vision of a community-driven “support hub that exists outside the prying eyes of the surveillance state” (194). It functions to provide a space for those with mental ill-health triggered by racism, Islamophobia, and state violence to authentically express their experiences, thoughts, and feelings, while “resisting the damage that is being done to ordinary Muslims and communities of color by the securitising of the public sector” (194). At this point, I am on board with the vision of what sounds like a grassroots infrastructure and social movement of action-oriented consciousness-raising groups. He goes on to envision the support hub serving as a blueprint for what a future (utopian) National Health Service (NHS) might look like, since the NHS has been prevented from providing authentic psychiatric care, having been coerced into conducting counterradicalization surveillance through the Prevent policy (192).The point at which I differ, however, is at Sabir’s suggestion such an initiative be “autonomous” yet funded through a “central government commitment to dealing with . . . the trauma and harm that emerges as a result of specific government policies and state violence” (190, 192). It is on this final point that I diverge, in a hopefully productive dialogue. I would follow classical anarchist thinkers such as Peter Kropotkin and contemporary anthropologists of the state such as James Scott to argue it is fundamental to the nature of the state to mobilize public services and provide funding as a foil for securitization and surveillance, so the very best one can fight for is autonomy.4 I believe this is a project that utopian scholars can and must fight in solidarity with those who are closer to the front-line of repression than ourselves.\",\"PeriodicalId\":44751,\"journal\":{\"name\":\"Utopian Studies\",\"volume\":null,\"pages\":null},\"PeriodicalIF\":0.4000,\"publicationDate\":\"2023-03-01\",\"publicationTypes\":\"Journal Article\",\"fieldsOfStudy\":null,\"isOpenAccess\":false,\"openAccessPdf\":\"\",\"citationCount\":\"0\",\"resultStr\":null,\"platform\":\"Semanticscholar\",\"paperid\":null,\"PeriodicalName\":\"Utopian Studies\",\"FirstCategoryId\":\"1085\",\"ListUrlMain\":\"https://doi.org/10.5325/utopianstudies.34.1.0132\",\"RegionNum\":4,\"RegionCategory\":\"社会学\",\"ArticlePicture\":[],\"TitleCN\":null,\"AbstractTextCN\":null,\"PMCID\":null,\"EPubDate\":\"\",\"PubModel\":\"\",\"JCR\":\"0\",\"JCRName\":\"HUMANITIES, MULTIDISCIPLINARY\",\"Score\":null,\"Total\":0}","platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Utopian Studies","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.5325/utopianstudies.34.1.0132","RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"0","JCRName":"HUMANITIES, MULTIDISCIPLINARY","Score":null,"Total":0}
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我经常在校园里看到萨比尔和耶扎,因为我参加了许多相同的活动和抗议活动,比如书中提到的声援巴勒斯坦的和平抗议活动。我是《停火》杂志的忠实读者,这是一本专注于左翼政治理论、艺术和行动主义的独立刊物,耶扎是主编我还和其他数百名教职员工和学生一起参加了校园内为争取学术自由而举行的抗议活动,抗议活动是在校方因共谋和回应而被捕后举行的。逮捕令我震惊,所以我痴迷地关注着当时的事态发展。2010年之后,我对萨比尔的人生轨迹知之甚少,只知道他实现了自己的梦想,完成了博士学位,成为了一名成功的学者(这对一个工薪阶层的穆斯林来说是一个不小的成就,即使不考虑萨比尔受到的额外迫害)。这些事件改变了我和其他同事的思维模式。虽然我意识到911事件后伊斯兰恐惧症和安全问题的加剧,也担心我的一些朋友在街头遭遇的不断升级的种族主义虐待,但我从未想过,我的朋友团体或社区(一直包括穆斯林)的思想和言论自由可能会受到威胁。这显然是来自特权地位的经验,而且我个人可能仍然没有理由害怕(尽管我曾经/现在)。然而,作为学生,希查姆和里兹万在很多其他方面都像我,直到这些事件发生,我才意识到他们是穆斯林。我知道他们和我有着相似的政治观点,并且是“好人”:看到他们被视为“极端分子”太接近我的家了,打破了我以前毫无疑问的安全感,可以自由地持有和表达我所信仰的思想。因此,我有兴趣将萨比尔的书作为乌托邦研究学者的重要文本来阅读。首先,这本书可以被解读为一个反乌托邦。它调动了被疏远的少数族裔人物在一个可怕的安全国家和不公平地针对他们的监控机构中挣扎的熟悉手段。它唤起和调动了读者的恐惧、高度警惕和偏执的政治影响。萨比尔努力理解这个难以理解和神秘的国家,并建立了一个知识库,作为他自己在其中生存的手段:不被逮捕,维持生计,发展他的职业生涯。他积累的知识被描述为“犯罪情报”(72,96 - 99),而他对学习的内在渴望意味着他越来越被怀疑,被视为国家的潜在敌人,而他作为一个有生产力的公民正在为这个国家寻求知识(30)。书中的语气、风格和主题都与奥威尔和扎米亚京等反乌托邦作家的作品非常相似。作者将他的经历描述为“卡夫卡式的”(101),这个词在背书和评论中反复出现——如果它是小说就好了!这个主题和他的精神痛苦之旅成为了反乌托邦的场所:西方乌托邦的承诺和这些承诺赖以建立的证券化和排斥之间的边界。这就引出了第二点——乌托邦主义者需要对当代反叛乱战术的知识进行投资,因为乌托邦的解决方案正日益被证券化和犯罪化。这种动态是高度种族化的。在我自己的新书《灾难无政府状态:互助和激进行动》(冥王星出版社,2022年)中,我讨论了在2020年夏季抗议浪潮中,黑人的命也是命是如何被过度监管的。同样,卡特里娜飓风对黑人社区的影响尤为严重,与“占领桑迪”飓风救援行动相比,它的警察执法更加暴力和军事化。“占领桑迪”是一场比人们通常认为的更为多样化的运动,但多数人肯定是白人。然而,我的书和萨比尔的书一样认为,反叛乱策略正越来越多地被用来对付不分种族的左翼社会运动(132)。镇压/定罪和恢复/合作是同一枚硬币的两面,它将社会行动分为有助于新自由主义国家和资本的行动(因此动员起来,以填补福利国家退出时的缺口),以及被视为威胁并被镇压的行动。这本质上是反乌托邦的,因为它不允许超越现状的政治欲望的表达。乌托邦主义者必须反对种族主义,因为我们应该团结一致,作为批判和激进的人,努力在当前创造另一种未来。反叛乱战术越来越多地针对所有政治活动家。萨比尔的案例表明,它们威胁着我们作为学者的思考和言论自由,恐惧日益内化。
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The Suspect: Counterterrorism, Islam and the Security State
Author Rizwaan Sabir, as a then-MA student at Nottingham University, became known as one-half of the “Nottingham Two” following his arrest along with Hicham Yezza in May 2008. They were detained for six days without charge on suspicion of terrorism for the possession of a document titled the Al Qaeda Training Manual, which was freely available on the internet and from bookstores. Sabir had downloaded it from a US government website for use as primary source material in his proposed PhD research on armed Muslim groups. But Sabir’s arrest, detention, interrogation, and release without charge takes up only about one-fifth of the pages; the remainder covers subsequent events revealing the extent of the surveillance to which he was subject, and his increasing awareness of information held about him not only by the police but by a dizzying array of interconnected authorities. These events include several stop-and-searches by the roadside (each a frightening and infuriating story in its own right), detentions at the border, and an attempt by the UK military to recruit him into their psychological warfare unit. These events occurred more than seven years after the 9/11 attacks that haunt the book, forming a backdrop of ever-increasing securitization against the everyday lives of Muslims in the West. These historical conditions and their political, social and psychological consequences are the subject of the book, as we witness the development of Sabir’s complex trauma and psychological distress.A gripping read from start to finish, the book is a standalone must-read; moreover, The Suspect is not just relevant but indeed essential reading for any scholar of utopia. The book contains a foreword by Hicham Yezza, arrested alongside Sabir, who commends the work for its skillful delineation of “the contours of the intricate lattice of personal, institutional, political, and ideological forces that led to our absurd, preposterous arrests on our university campus for suspected terrorism, and their long-drawn aftermath” (xi). The afterword by lawyer Aamer Anwar situates Sabir’s story in his broader experience of working with Muslims in the British legal system, arguing that while Sabir’s story is well told, it is by no means an isolated case: “it does not matter how educated or integrated we are into British society. . . . When a police officer or agent of the state wants to racially profile and investigate you in the post 9/11 world, they can act with almost total impunity” (195).At first glance, The Suspect is not self-evidently an academic book because it takes the form of a first-person account, broken into readable short chapters (33 chapters of around 5–10 pages each), which helps the reader digest sometimes disturbing material. It is written with a sense of humor: for example, detecting racial profiling when questioned by a border guard claiming to recognize Sabir’s face: “‘Have you been on any aid convoys to Syria?’” Sabir responds, “I have an extremely common face that is often mistaken for somebody else” (123). The bizarre story of the attempted recruitment of Sabir into the British military is also comedic. Major Hussein insists the military do not go around “tapping people on the shoulder” when we can see this is precisely what is happening (125–29). It could comfortably be read by a politically interested nonacademic readership. Nevertheless, as the book develops, it is clearly an intricately thought-out work of social theory whose form is complementary with its function. Although written as a first-person personal narrative, this is skillfully interwoven with analyses of historical events (particularly 9/11), social structures (racism, Islamophobia), and government policies (Prevent, CONTEST), and how these impacted on Sabir’s embodied experience.The book shares the function of consciousness-raising with many utopian books and movements, beginning from embodied experience of oppression before building a structural account.1 It is incredibly well researched; drawing on a range of primary materials including police interview transcripts, government policy documents, letters from the Crown Prosecution Services, responses to Freedom of Information requests, NGO and advocacy organization reports, Home Office statistics, newspaper reports, and many more. It also creates a structural account drawing on theoretical scholarship from critical security studies, criminology, and classic texts in politics and international relations theory.Why should scholars of utopia be interested in a book subtitled “Counterterrorism, Islam, and the Security State”? This indeed seems counterintuitive, and something I asked of myself—given my own historical connection to these events. A word is needed on my own interest and positionality in relation to this book. I was very familiar with the events surrounding the arrest of the “Nottingham Two” because I was studying in the same university department as Sabir at the time. I frequently saw Sabir and Yezza around campus, as I attended many of the same events and protests, such as a peaceful protest in solidarity with Palestine, which features in the book. I was a regular reader of Ceasefire magazine, an independent publication focused on left-wing political theory, art, and activism for which Yezza is chief editor.2 I also attended, alongside hundreds of other staff and students, the protests for academic freedom that took place on campus in the wake of the arrests over the university’s complicity and response. The arrests shook me, so I obsessively kept myself informed of developments at the time.I knew little of Sabir’s trajectory after 2010, except that he achieved his dream of completing his PhD and becoming a successful academic (which is no mean achievement for a working-class Muslim, even aside from the added persecution Sabir was subject to). These events were paradigm shifting for myself and others at the institution. Although aware of rising Islamophobia and securitization following 9/11, and worried about the escalating racist abuse some of my friends experienced in the streets, I never considered that freedom of thought and speech might be under threat for my friendship groups or communities, which had always included Muslims. This is clearly experience from a position of privilege, and it might still be that I personally have no reason to be afraid (although I was/am). Yet as students Hicham and Rizwaan were like me in so many other ways that their Muslimness had never much occurred to me until these events. I knew them to share similar politics to mine, and to be “good guys”: to see them treated as “extremists” was far too close to home, and shattered my previously unquestioned sense of safety to freely hold and articulate ideas I believed in.Herein lies my interest in reading Sabir’s book as an important text for scholars of utopian studies. In the first instance, the book can be read as a dystopia. It mobilizes the familiar device of the alienated minority figure struggling to navigate a frightening security state and surveillance apparatus that unfairly targets them. It rouses and mobilizes political affects of fear, hypervigilance, and paranoia in the reader. Sabir struggles to understand this incomprehensible and secretive state and builds a knowledge base as a means of his own survival within it: to remain free from arrest, maintain a livelihood, and develop his professional career. The knowledge he builds is profiled as “criminal intelligence” (72, 96–99)—and his intrinsic desire for learning means he is increasingly viewed with suspicion, construed as a potential enemy of the very state for which he was seeking to produce knowledge as a productive citizen (30). The tone, style, and themes covered are remarkably like those of canonical authors of dystopia such as Orwell and Zamyatin. The author describes his experiences as “Kafkaesque” (101), and the term is repeated across endorsements and reviews—if only it were fiction! The subject and his voyage into mental distress become the site of dystopia: a frontier between the utopian promises of the West and the securitizations and exclusions that these are built upon.This leads to a second point—the need for utopians to become invested in knowledge of contemporary counterinsurgency tactics, as utopian solutions are increasingly securitized and criminalized. This dynamic is highly racialized. In my own recent book, Disaster Anarchy: Mutual Aid and Radical Action (Pluto Press, 2022), I discuss how Black Lives Matter were excessively policed during the summer 2020 wave of protest. Similarly, Hurricane Katrina, which disproportionately affected Black communities, was policed in a much more violent and militarized fashion than was the “Occupy Sandy” hurricane relief effort, a more diverse movement than is often thought, yet certainly majority white. Nevertheless, my book argues, as does Sabir’s, that counterinsurgency tactics are increasingly being used against leftist social movements regardless of race (132). Repression/criminalization and recuperation/co-optation are two sides of the same coin, which divides social action into that which is helpful to the neoliberal state and capital (therefore mobilized as such, to plug gaps as the welfare state withdraws), and that which is perceived as a threat and quashed. This is inherently anti-utopian because it does not allow for expression of political desires beyond the status quo.Utopians must stand against racism because we should stand in solidarity, as critical and radical people trying to create alternative futures in the present. Counterinsurgency tactics are increasingly aimed at all political activists. Sabir’s case illustrates that they threaten our freedom as academics to think and to speak, and fear is increasingly internalized. Securitization can be understood as an anti-utopian practice that attempts to define and delimit the range of desires and grassroots alternatives that are permissible within the terms of the system. White, middle-class, and depoliticized mutual aid initiatives during the COVID-19 pandemic were lauded by the government and media so long as they did not extend beyond helping neighbors with shopping, keeping the wheels of capitalism turning as the welfare state withdraws. Those mutual aid initiatives that sought to defend groups and communities from dispossession found themselves at the sharp edge of the security state—such as deportation resistances seen in Glasgow, and the defense of squatted spaces from eviction and of long-standing social centers at risk from increasing rents in gentrifying areas. If, as I argue in Disaster Anarchy, the state seeks to capitalize on all social relations, and if those relations that it cannot mobilize as state-friendly “social capital” are criminalized and repressed, then it stands to reason that this dynamic ultimately includes all utopian thought and practice.3 Ironically, it is we scholars, in our roles as academics, who are expected to be at the front-line of this policing of thought, under the Prevent legislation in the United Kingdom. Sabir’s story tells the horrific consequences when individuals and institutions make mistakes undergirded by media and policy-driven racist hysteria and moral panic.Finally, The Suspect culminates in its own utopian vision. Rizwaan Sabir is one of us. He was persecuted because he is a Muslim, but also because this identity intersected with his sociopolitical desires to create a better world. He initially dared have faith in the promise of justice within the legal system, then despite persecution continued to hope and fight for a better world in his scholarly work “for the Muslim community as a whole” (62). It is probably in his articulation of a positive utopian vision that I am least persuaded. Sabir outlines a vision of a community-driven “support hub that exists outside the prying eyes of the surveillance state” (194). It functions to provide a space for those with mental ill-health triggered by racism, Islamophobia, and state violence to authentically express their experiences, thoughts, and feelings, while “resisting the damage that is being done to ordinary Muslims and communities of color by the securitising of the public sector” (194). At this point, I am on board with the vision of what sounds like a grassroots infrastructure and social movement of action-oriented consciousness-raising groups. He goes on to envision the support hub serving as a blueprint for what a future (utopian) National Health Service (NHS) might look like, since the NHS has been prevented from providing authentic psychiatric care, having been coerced into conducting counterradicalization surveillance through the Prevent policy (192).The point at which I differ, however, is at Sabir’s suggestion such an initiative be “autonomous” yet funded through a “central government commitment to dealing with . . . the trauma and harm that emerges as a result of specific government policies and state violence” (190, 192). It is on this final point that I diverge, in a hopefully productive dialogue. I would follow classical anarchist thinkers such as Peter Kropotkin and contemporary anthropologists of the state such as James Scott to argue it is fundamental to the nature of the state to mobilize public services and provide funding as a foil for securitization and surveillance, so the very best one can fight for is autonomy.4 I believe this is a project that utopian scholars can and must fight in solidarity with those who are closer to the front-line of repression than ourselves.
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来源期刊
Utopian Studies
Utopian Studies HUMANITIES, MULTIDISCIPLINARY-
CiteScore
0.40
自引率
0.00%
发文量
27
期刊最新文献
The Future of the Book: Images of Reading in the American Utopian Novel Response 2: “Pessimism of the Intellect, Optimism of the Will” Indian Science Fiction: Patterns, History and Hybridity The Past and Future of Utopian Studies Response 1: Acting Up in Utopia
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