A. Dirk Moses: Nach dem Genozid. Grundlage für eine neue Erinnerungskultur [“After genocide. foundations for a new culture of memory], Berlin (Matthes & Seitz) 2023, 160 S.
“After Genocide” – it is difficult these days not to relate the title of the heavily abridged German version of Dirk Moses’ groundbreaking 600-page work ‘Problems of Genocide,’ to Gaza, where Palestinian life is likely to soon cease to exist. But it is precisely in relation to Gaza that the other, actual meaning of the title makes sense: that the accusation of genocide itself is not sufficient to prevent these crimes and that it obscures rather than clarifies them. While the realization is beginning to sink in that Israel’s actions in Gaza are indeed genocide, it is already too late for tens of thousands of people who have been killed, and one senses that the fixation on the genocide paradigm itself may have contributed to this. The institutions of international law are collapsing, and in the moment of their decline, their birth defects are becoming visible.
Unlike the full English version, Moses’ German book makes almost no mention of Palestine. The contemporary case studies are primarily Russia’s actions in Ukraine, but also Sudan, Syria, Myanmar, and China. It was completed before October 7 and probably also takes German sensitivities into account. However, even without explicit reference to Palestine, its main thesis is incompatible with Germany’s state-driven culture of remembrance. In a nutshell: The 1948 Genocide Convention claimed that crimes such as the Holocaust were to be prevented in the future. However, its surgical distinction between military and genocidal intentions (the former aimed at defeat, the latter at destruction) allowed genocidal warfare to escape the narrow definition of the Genocide Convention. Moses says that genocidal and other forms of mass violence against civilians are driven by a pseudo-rationality, namely the pursuit of “permanent security” by preventing anticipated attacks. This is expressed in the unbounded use of terms like “security,” “prevention,” “final solution,” etc. The pseudo-rationality of permanent security normalises genocides but also justifies mass killings and sieges of civilians in non-genocidal or not yet genocidal wars which react to resistance as well as anticipate future threats: with carpet bombing and drone strikes, with the use of nuclear weapons, with starvation and slow death, with colonial crimes of all kinds. In practice, military and genocidal logic and intentions very often go together and are intertwined.
The fact that every child can become a terrorist and every innocent person a “human shield”, in conflicts where the ultimate goal is to combat resistance, makes horrific crimes possible. These then become, almost imperceptibly to the viewer, ethnically and racially charged and escalate into genocide. The targeted populations know from the outset, of course, what criminal dynamics they are exposed to. But the perpetrators, the bystanders, the accomplices can rationalize the crimes by referring to defense and permanent security. Thus “Never again Hamas” inevitably results in the destruction of Gaza, the mass killing of Palestinian civilians, and ethnic cleansing, under the ‘humanitarian’ pretext that this is also done in the interest of the victim population.
The German majority society—in the media, politics, and in academia—has still not forgiven Dirk Moses for exposing the “catechism” of their state-sanctioned memory culture by simply describing its components. With his intervention, Moses had merely suggested getting rid of the ethnic assumptions of the German memory culture and developing it further so that it becomes inclusive of victim memories that are obscured by the singularity thesis with its fixation on ideology.
The German “Historians’ Dispute 2.0,” or whatever one wants to call it, is now unfortunately tainted by, among other things, the fact that Dirk Moses continues to be regularly defamed and associated with Holocaust deniers and relativizers. A discourse analysis of the self-contradictions and empirical falsehoods with which his reputation has been destroyed in the German media is still pending. The May issue of Sehepunkte [points of views], a widely read review journal for historical sciences, recently again alleged in passing that “Moses and others refuse to recognize any special qualities in the Shoah or in Nazi anti-Semitism that fundamentally distinguish the National Socialist mass murder of Jews from colonial genocides,” —and no German colleagues are coming to Moses’ defense. It should go without saying that Moses is aware of the “special qualities” of the Holocaust and the differences between it and colonial genocides. But he analyzes them in their historical context, with the particular temporality that the Holocaust had:
“They planned the elimination of enemy groups in advance. Unlike ‘classical’ imperial violence, much of their violence was deliberately planned. They tried to set the course of history. Seen in this light, the Nazi Reich and its notorious extermination policy mark the culmination of centuries of empire building and the destruction of enemies, both domestic and foreign, whether real or imagined. This imperial project was characterized by a ‘redemptive imperialism’ [Erlösungsimperialismus] because, as Hitler said, it would lead to the historical ‘solution of the German question,’ for which ‘there can only be one path: violence.’ The ‘redemptive anti-Semitism’ [Erlösungsantisemitismus] of the National Socialists was an integral part of this project; after all, the extermination of ‘the Jews’ also represented a fundamental answer to ‘the German question’ for them.” (pp. 104-105)
The contradictory, spiteful, and uncomprehendinginsinuations that have been leveled against him in Germany were refuted in part elsewhere, but this work might be futile. German memory culture must first free itself from nationalistic misinterpretations of the “lessons of the Holocaust.” A new mass murder of Jews, such as that which took place on October 7, 2023, will not be prevented with the German “Staatsräson” [reason of the state] and its illusions of permanent security. Instead, Germany will become increasingly entangled in war crimes and ongoing genocides. As is now the case in Gaza. That is what Dirk Moses is concerned about.
Alexandra Senfft: Ignorierte Opfer. Sinti und Roma kämpfen weiter um die Erinnerung an den NS-Völkermord [Victims ignored. Sinti and Roma continue to fight for remembrance of the Nazi genocide], Forum Wissenschaft (2025) 1, 29-32.
Germany’s commitment to remembering the Holocaust and its historical obligations to the Jews has become a largely ritualized part of its political discourse. However, these German commitments apply far less to the other group of victims whom the Nazis sought to exterminate completely, the Sinti and Roma, even though they were disenfranchised and murdered with the same brutal systematicity as the Jews. After the war, there was a long delay in recognizing the genocide against the Porajmos. To this day, they experience racism, exclusion and discrimination, and are usually marginalized in collective commemorations – if they appear at all.
Alexandra Senfft describes the controversy surrounding the memorial in Berlin’s Tiergarten, which commemorates the Sinti and Roma murdered by the Nazi regime, as a particularly revealing case. It was only in 2012 that it was finally inaugurated, after long institutional resistance and tenaciously stalled on the part of politicians. It was designed by the Israeli artist Dani Karavan (1930-2021), who created an architectural structure composed of sound, sculpture and nature, surrounded by trees. Since 2020, however, the Senate and Deutsche Bahn have been planning a new S-Bahn line, “S21,” whose second phase of construction will tunnel under the memorial. Originally, the memorial was to be completely demolished and then temporarily removed. In the end, a solution was found that will leave the architecture itself somewhat intact, but it is expected that the surrounding trees, which are an integral part of the concept, will be cut down. For many Sinti and Roma, this is a desecration of the site.
Dani Karavan, who died in 2021, supported the Sinti and Roma protest in 2020, deploring that “the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe (opened in 2005) would never have been treated in this way”. Senfft describes how Karavan had already noticed while working on the memorial “that Romani-speaking people were considered second-class victims: ‘As a Jew, I can say that. Nobody is interested in the Sinti and Roma.’” In July 2024, Karavan’s family co-initiated a letter of protest against the S-Bahn line, which was signed by numerous artists and cultural figures. So far, however, it seems that the risks of damage to the memorial are not being taken seriously – although we should probably be glad that things have not turned out even worse.
I find this case particularly interesting for two reasons that are not reflected in the article: First, the Karavan family’s involvement demonstrates a solidarity across victim groups that can be observed in many other contexts. Relatives of Holocaust victims use their positionality to help relatives of Porajmos victims. Even today, Jews and Jewish Israelis stand up for Palestinians; Ukrainians show solidarity with Palestinians, as do Roma; Palestinians show solidarity with Sudanese, and so on. The shared experience of marginalization, disenfranchisement, and threatened or actual genocide gives rise to resistance to attempts by the majority society to pit victim groups against each other and to privilege some over others.
On the other hand, the case also points beyond this. The fact that Dani Karavan was Jewish certainly helped to establish and maintain the memorial for the murdered Sinti and Roma in the German culture of remembrance, and may even have been decisive. But this use of Jewish-Israeli positionality in German remembrance culture is full of ambivalence. Karavan’s first major piece of memorial architecture was a monument to the Palmach Brigade in the Negev Desert near Beersheba, built between 1963 and 1968 – an ensemble of concrete, desert acacia trees, water, and wind chimes. The Palmach was a moderate Zionist paramilitary force that collaborated with the British before the creation of Israel, establishing and defending settlements on the one hand, and fighting the extremist Zionist terrorist organizations of the Irgun on the other. Had the Battle of El Alamein been won and Nazi Germany invaded Palestine, the Palmach would have defended the Jews living there from certain death in the Holocaust. Instead, they fought in the War of Independence against the Arab states and played a key role in the Nakba. In the Negev, where Karavan’s memorial to the Palmach is located, they carried out the ethnic expulsion of the Palestinian Bedouin from their villages; they were given 48 hours to move to Gaza. When Karavan began work on the memorial in 1963, it had been only 15 years since the entire Arab population of Beersheba had been expelled or killed in massacres.
From a narrow anti-Zionist perspective, Karavan’s position and his acceptance of state commissions such as the Palmach memorial might disqualify him from creating a memorial to the murdered Sinti and Roma. But I see it differently: I would like to see a holistic examination of these issues of memory politics and memory culture. The memorial in Tiergarten is important to the Roma and Sinti community and is accepted by the victims’ relatives as a place of remembrance – whereas the “Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe”, in the words of Paul Spiegel, was always intended to be only “the official memorial of the Federal Republic of Germany” and not a “memorial to the Jews in Germany”. The Roma wish for a respectful, i.e. non-ritualized, non-bureaucratized and non-politicized approach to the memorial must be respected. At the same time, we should reflect on the price that must always be paid for the state’s recognition of the victim’s status in the official culture of remembrance, which in this case is once again being paid by the Palestinians. This is the only way to prevent solidarity between victim groups from becoming exclusive and, in turn, marginalizing others.
Peter Beinart: Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning, Gespräch mit Karen Attiah, Bookstore Politics and Prose, Washington DC, February 25, 2025.
Here I am picking an interview with Beinhart, conducted with Karen Attiah, on February 25, 2025 in a crowded bookstore in Washington DC, which I find particularly moving. Beinhart struggles for concrete answers to concrete ethical questions in the face of the destruction of Gaza and the ongoing genocide in Palestine – based on his Jewish faith and his understanding of Jewish tradition. He sees the self-definition of so many Jewish communities in terms of Zionism and the state of Israel and the legitimation of apartheid and genocide as necessary to protect Judaism as an expression of spiritual poverty and the trivialization of Jewish tradition. Almost always, he says, the history of the Jewish people is told only as a story of victims and self-assertion: the Jewish people in a struggle for survival with absolute evil, with “Amalek.” This ignores the fact that in the biblical stories, Jews are also perpetrators and capable of committing mass crimes – like any people. Awareness of the possibility of being a perpetrator is important for spiritual practice and ethical-religious education. He calls for a Judaism in which Jews need and claim equal rights wherever they live, and not the supremacy of a state that denies self-determination and human rights to the members of another people.
Beinhart talks about Jewish friends and relatives, “loved ones”, who have broken ties with him because of his clear stance on genocide. They are silent or turn away from him because they cannot face sincere discussions and do not want to listen. It is impressive that, despite his passionate claims, Beinhart never becomes morally overbearing or hardened. He rejects instrumentalization of the hostages and avoids professions of “empathy”. The empathy he shows to the hostages is all the more credible, including a deep sense of a shared belonging to the Jewish people.
In a longer passage in the conversation he talks about his experiences in South Africa, where a supremacist elite, fearing the violent resistance and revenge of the ANC, also could not imagine the abolition of apartheid. The histories of South Africa and also Irelands teach us that security increases when repressive regimes come to an end, because then terrorist resistance becomes superfluous. Beinhart wants to apply this lesson to Israel/Palestine. Yet, it’s best if you listen for yourself:
Syria, a few months after the fall of the Assad dictatorship: well over 100,000 victims of regime kidnappings are still missing and new mass graves are discovered almost every day. Most of them tortured to death; at least the relatives of the disappeared must assume this. Tens of thousands of those involved in the torture and murder, enabling the “politicide”, are still at large. For “transitional justice” – be it court cases or truth tribunals – resources, strength, structures remain unavailable for the foreseeable future. Most of the population, oppressed and plundered by Assad for decades, lives in indescribable poverty. The West maintains its sanctions, and no one protests against Israel’s invasions and bombings in violation of international law. Assad supporters who have lost their privileges repeatedly carry out attacks on the new regime’s security forces. The new regime is unable or unwilling to prevent its own people and rival gangs from exacting revenge on the communities from which Assad’s supporters mainly come. And even if new massacres are stopped, a new genocide is looming on the horizon, this time against the Alawites.
Germany has offered refuge to over a million people from Syria, but Germans have no idea about the political situation in the country. They are quick to settle for the most convenient explanation: Syria being a multi-ethnic state in a civil war that is sometimes latent and sometimes open. After all, the Assad regime has allegedly long offered minorities a certain degree of protection, but now the Sunni majority is threatening Alawites, Christians and Druze in an “unprecedented Islamization”. This explanation fits with the justifications for Germany’s failed Syria policy, which as early as 2013 refused to take a stand against the murderous regime, pointing to “jihadists, terrorists and extremists in Syria” and how they are endangering “Alawites and Christians”.
But Syrian intellectuals and students who supported the democratic resistance against the Assad regime in 2011/12 and fled to Europe after 2013 tell a different, more complicated story; a story in which Europe and the USA have always been entangled. They speak of “sectarianism” and see the causes of it not, or at least not primarily, in the claim to dominance of Sunni Islam, but in the techniques of domination that the Assad regime has perfected over more than 50 years. These can be read in detail in a black book of Assad‘s regime, published in French in 2022.
These techniques of rule, based on division and repression, and the simultaneous instrumentalization of identities, were accompanied by systematic, inventive torture as a ubiquitous possibility. Since the early 1970s, torture had gradually taken hold of Syrian society in “Suriya al-Assad”, the totalitarian police state identified with Assad, and since the beginning of the revolution in 2011, it could affect anyone, including women and children. The embodied knowledge of torture and its omnipresent possibility, in the Assadian form, came to Germany with the mass exodus from Syria starting in 2013. When I had my first encounters with Syrian refugees in 2015, what most profoundly changed my view of the world – including my world in Germany and Europe – was the confrontation with the omnipresence of the possibility of torture in their stories and in their bodies. Syrian students told me nightmares that I will never forget. Film producer Orwa Nyrabia showed the documentary Silvered Water.Syria Self-Portrait, which uses countless cell phone recordings not only of bombings and war scenes, but also of prison torture, to create a work of art; at great personal risk to herself, Syrian-Kurdish documentary filmmaker Wiam Simav Bedirxan and the director of the film, Ossama Mohamed, who fled to Paris. Later, I read Mustafa Khalifa’s autobiographical novel The Shell House.
An outstanding witness and thinker of this state terror is the political author and journalist Yassin Al-Haj Saleh. In 2023, Matthes & Seitz published a German translation of his book about torture in Syria and its representation at a time when the Assad dictatorship, which called itself “eternal”, seemed to be more firmly in the saddle than ever. But the fact that Assad is now a thing of the past does not make the book any less relevant. The texts compiled into a unified work in the book had initially appeared in Arabic in different contexts. They show connections between torture, confessionalism and Salafism that are still in effect and also point to the so-called West. Yassin Al-Haj Saleh was himself tortured during his 16 years in prison (between 1980 and 1996, under the rule of Assad’s father), convicted of being a member of a communist party. The torture he was subjected to was not so severe as to cause irreversible damage; he was able to overcome it. But he witnessed the most terrible and horrific torture used to break the supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood: torture from which no one can return to life.
The book offers nothing less than a political anthropology of torture. Saleh differentiates between torture that does not preclude survival and torture that inevitably results in death; death under torture and death by torture; torture committed against individuals and torture that affects a collective. The book is full of such distinctions, which allow for a systematic understanding of torture. Saleh probably developed the concepts and typologies during his detention and after his release in order to process his experiences from a political and social science perspective. He is a well-read autodidact who is not part of the academic community, but he is also not a journalist in the strict sense. His writing is not reporting or commenting, but always analytical, organizing, conceptual. He wants to encourage his readers to face the ubiquitous possibility of torture coolly and soberly and to understand it as an extreme manifestation of political violence that, through the collective implicit knowledge of it, sets in motion a cycle of destruction.
He distinguishes phenomenologically between three types of torture in terms of the boundaries they transgress and their intended effects: firstly, the classic investigative or interrogative torture, which transgresses the boundaries of the tortured in order to extort confessions or information. In this case, submission and betrayal help to end the torture. Secondly, there is humiliation and revenge torture, or deterrence torture, which is arbitrary and unpredictable, designed to teach an unforgettable lesson, aimed at society as a whole, to instill unconditional obedience and break any resistance. And thirdly, there is extermination torture, which not only crosses the boundaries of society, but also the boundaries of humanity, where there is no longer any room for discretion, and where an organized murder industry is required. For this kind of torture it is enough to be an offense that the tortured person even exists.
Saleh also differentiates between the various levels of torture: the level of the relationship between the torturer and the tortured, where the act of torture takes place; the level of the apparatus, the organisation required for the torture; the system level – torture as state and as economy; and finally the level of the world that allows the torture to happen, is aware of it and is destroyed by the torture. The intimate knowledge of how torture worked in Assad’s Syria and what it does is revealed in the book in numerous observations that vividly depict the horror of torture without ever going into gory details. Saleh describes the psychology of torture, where the fear of the tortured faces the hatred of the torturer. Both are dehumanized, with the torturer becoming God-like through his power over the body, while the tortured person becomes an object. In order for the torturer to stand firm in the torture relationship and to muster cold or hot hatred for the tortured person, he must accuse them of a crime, and that crime lies in deviating from the will of Assad. To deviate from the will of Assad, it is enough to be human. The torturer claims unconditional love for Assad, is totally identified with Assad and demands a submission that is never enough. Paradoxically, torture allevaites the guilt of the murderer; Saleh quotes Primo Levi: “Before the victim died, he had to be humiliated so that the murderer would not feel the weight of his guilt so much.”
The aim of destroying communities, making human lives dispensable, and destroying worldliness in general is a common feature of all genocidal regimes. Saleh describes Assad-Syria’s killing machines below an industrial level, a “manufacturing system”, not impersonal and systematic as under the Nazis, but carried out with devotion, creatively, requiring direct physical contact, combining routines and reinventions. While the Nazi death economy was capitalist and irrational, the Assad one, also highly bureaucratized, served the rentier economy of a family dictatorship, taken to its extreme consequence. Torture, including in the form of starvation and denial of access to essential goods, as well as in the form of aerial bombardment and the arbitrary infliction of pain through attacks directed against civilians, has a curious relationship with genocidal extermination. At first glance, extermination torture seems to be unnecessary, since the victims will die either way; its purpose is to make the community that is to be exterminated know that torture is worse than death. But it also recognizes that it is dealing with people who must first be dehumanized before they are killed. By contrast, torture was not a necessity for the Holocaust, even if it occurred frequently: “the Nazis felt no need to torture the Jews, since their racist theory asserted a priori that they knew the Jews’ malicious nature, thus excluding them from the outset from any equality and considering them ‘like lice’, so unequal and already dehumanized that they were not worth the trouble of torture, so to speak.”
Saleh also writes about the connection between torture and rape: Both give absolute power over the body. The torture of men in Syria was driven by the same chauvinism, took place in the same macho gender order as the rape of women, with an idea of masculinity that seeks to eliminate the male competitor through torture and to possess the woman without limits through rape. Rape is part of genocidal annihilation; it is intended to make the community incapable of reproduction, as a “deferred murder”. Saleh sees two variants of systematic rape in the IS and the Assad state: While in the IS, religiously veiled, one man owns and rapes many women, in the supposedly secular terrorist state many men assault one woman. (Whether these distinctions are always empirically tenable is another question; they must be understood as ideal types.) In any case, the gradual increase in the veiling of women in Syria since the 1970s is not only a concomitant of increasing Islamization, but also a reaction to the growing threat of rape in a state that practices torture.
Saleh sees the Syrian revolution in its early days as a struggle of the Syrians for the “dignity of their bodies”: to set limits to a state violence that was capable of violating the dignity of bodies in every way and then demonstrated precisely this in excess in its fight against the revolution.
The so-called West, North America and Europe, has largely stood idly by and watched the brutal suppression of the Syrian revolution. The “red lines” that Barack Obama drew in 2012 in the event of the use of chemical weapons were crossed in 2013 with the sarin attacks on Ghouta and with many other chemical attacks, without the US even setting up a no-fly zone over Syria. But the “West’s” role in creating and stabilizing the Assad regime goes far beyond merely standing by and watching war crimes. The destabilization of young democracies in the Middle East after the Second World War, came as a result of Western colonialist and imperialist power politics and wars. The Nakba, the successive mass refugee movements from Israel/Palestine, and the insistence on a confessionally bound Jewish state, which was allied with Western interests, undermined the legitimacy of the constitutional and democratic aspirations in the Arab countries. Since 1946, Syria had been a non-sectarian republic in both name and constitution. Sectarian affiliations and identities were denied and suppressed. It was precisely this alleged secularism that made Syria and its rulers acceptable in the West after the end of the Cold War. Since coming to power in 1970, the Assad family had filled the Syrian security apparatus and most important positions with loyal Alewites, systematically pitting the denominations against each other, fueling confessionalism and using it as a weapon. After the generational change from father to son Assad, it was precisely this form of “minority privilege” and the dual state that made the Assad regime under the London-trained Bashir al-Assad appear modern and potentially open to the West.
The “war on terror” since 9/11 gave the Assad regime’s fight against the Muslim Brotherhood and Islamists a real boost. Even though it was Iran and Russia that provided the military support without which the regime would not have been able to hold out in 2013 and without which it promptly collapsed in December 2024: The anti-Muslim racism produced in the West helped the regime to establish and maintain the murderous kleptocracy. For kleptocracies, ethnicity, affiliation and religion are only a tool to divide the population and curry favor with external powers; a pretext for suppressing any stirrings of freedom and plundering the subjugated population. The Assad regime has done this through extortion, hostage-taking and robbery on an unprecedented scale. The kleptocratic regime was able to present itself to the outside world as a protector of minorities, that were privileged and, for this reason above all, hated by the Sunni majority, as intended from the outset. The anti-Muslim overtones of the fight against terrorism and the omnipresent racism in the Western world provided Assad with international legitimacy or at least tolerance for his crimes: as a well-shaven and well-dressed mass-murdering Bashar al-Assad with his pretty, English-educated wife still seems more “civilized” than a bearded Islamist, who can be heard shouting Allahu Akbar even without TV sound.
Yassin Al-Haj Saleh calls this the “confessional-racist complex”: “the world of identities and origins” that forms the environment for genocide. The book makes clear that the Assad state was not just an exceptional case, but has a “structural equivalent” in international relations. International law itself shows its asymmetrical side here, finding arrangements with dictatorships on the periphery of the powers that uphold it. The Assad regime’s tortures can flourish anywhere. These tortures are only the last consequence of a “modern” attitude that ruthlessly and predatorily enforces its own interests, and uses racism to do so. They are ultimately a new version of the torment and torture of colonialism, while the remaining ties to any notions of justice dissolve. Islamism reacts to this development by “salafizing” itself and forging its own confessional-racist complex. The history of the Assad torture state can teach those of us who do not – or not yet – have to fear torture to no longer externalize torture as the problem of others, but to understand it as the signature of a dysfunctional modern (nation) state that has been taken hostage by an “elite”/gang of robbers.
The last text in the book, and perhaps the most interesting, is devoted to the problem of representing torture and communicating pain. Only representation can make pain collectively, and thus politically, processable. Saleh understands representation as a “combination of expression (the axis of experience and ideas) and formation (the axis of tradition)”. Formation, or composition, formal creation, is not possible without a tradition in which it can be inscribed. But tradition itself cannot provide the new forms of representation needed to express new experiences. The “representation of the terrible” is dependent on existing forms of political-social thought on the one hand, but on the other hand it must creatively develop them further. How can contemporary Arab political thought achieve this? Saleh sees the real problem of Islamism here: like every traditionalist ideology, it is certainly capable of formation and composition, but its expression, its subjectivity, is limited to conflict and negation. It cannot give meaning or expression to the experience of suffering, of being tortured, of trauma, because that would challenge the Islamist understanding of tradition. Ideology demands that everything suffered must only be expressed within the framework of tradition, it is not allowed to go beyond the scope of that framework. Saleh quotes the Moroccan philosophers Mohammed Abed Al-Jabri and Abdallah Laroui: In Arabic thought, there is a special mechanism that always measures the “hidden”, the “unsolved”, the “problem” – all those things that makes one suffer – against a “proof”. “In Islamic jurisprudence, the ‘proof’ is a topic on which a religious judgment already exists.” This thinking in analogies validates all experience only on the basis of an existing, authoritative text. If there is no suitable text for an experience to be processed, the experience becomes a deviation and must be abandoned and marginalized. A “refusal to represent”; and Laroui had assumed that it “originates from a historical trauma perceived as unbearable.” Laroui speculated about a historical disaster dating back to pre-Islamic times, a “disgrace and humiliation” associated with the emergence of the Sunna itself. In Old Arabic, the Sunna is the customs, practices and norms that are supposed to hold the scattered Arab tribes together. Islam has given them a religious dimension: the “Sunna” of the Prophet is the second source of Islamic law after the Qur’an.
Saleh sees, in line with Laroui, the history of the Arab world as full of failed representations. He also sees his own adherence to communism, from which he only broke away during his imprisonment, as a case of this failure. And today? “It seems that we are once again confronted with enormously hurtful events, which this time are again causing strong defensive effects with the purpose of self-protection.” The Sunna is breaking apart once again. The collective identity of Sunni Muslims is only held together by an extremely violent ideology that ignores reality. All the suppressed experiences and events of generations are released in the break-up, “they emerge as formless beasts, demons and monsters, which in turn are not contained by any Sunna.”
What would it take for political thought in Germany and Europe to turn to this chain of traumas and crises of representation in the Arab world, caused also by Western influence, with love, listening, and humanity? And to stop contributing to its continuation through our racism? Saleh describes – without ever resorting to easy psychology – the psychological situation of Islamism as a hopeless state of amorphousness, “a naked, extremely painful existence”. He refers to Hannah Arendt’s reflections on thinking: only through the inner dialogue of the thinking individual with themselves, the creative thought process, the beginning of representation, can the self discipline itself and develop a conscience. In Sufism, Islam has developed traditions for this. At the other end of the scale of possibilities offered by Islam between humanity and inhumanity is the “extreme case” of “homo islamicus, that Islamists strive to mass-produce: a robot that does not think and whose operating system is called Sharia,” and that only finds expression in killing. Another extreme case is the Auschwitz invention of the “Muselman” tortured to death, who wastes away in Assad prison and who, in complete self-abandonment, “has nothing human left.”
At one point, Saleh does make a cultural comparison: ”The Arab cultural heritage offers fewer options for representation than Western modernism with its multilingualism and wealth of forms (…).” The extent to which the “West” offers ways out of the crisis of representation and the extent to which it is responsible for the suffering and the crisis of representation was hotly debated among the tortured and imprisoned in Mustafa Khalifa’s autobiographical novel. The betrayal that Muslims and Arabs who fled to Germany and Europe from Syria and other Arab countries have to endure in the West is all the more bitter. It is one thing to see the Western plans for the real estate “riviera” in Gaza, the helpless and dishonest hand-wringing, the Western support for and participation in the genocide of the Palestinians, and the unchallenged toleration of the invasions and bombing raids in Syria. But equally bad is the threat to the possibilities of representing this horror itself. The possibilities for representation and processing are being increasingly curtailed by political interference in science, art and culture and the failure of the public. The “shame and disgrace” and the “trauma perceived as unbearable” at the root of the crises of representation in the Arab and Muslim world do have their counterparts with us in the Western world – and perhaps, if we are serious about the uniqueness of the Holocaust, they are even more shameful and disgraceful than anything that could ever have happened in pre-Islamic or Islamic Arabia. Assad is gone – but the horror remains. We can learn from Yassin Al-Haj Saleh how to face it and remain human, or become human.
