mehreenkasana:

In addition to carrying the crushing weight of their own dead unacknowledged or (worse) justified by the West, Muslims are demanded to carry the psychological mass and guilt of others’ dead as well by mere association with Islam. And while mourning in solidarity is an endlessly powerful political action that provides immense room for compassion and commitment to better and more stable life and less destruction, this mourning in solidarity never occurs for Muslims. In fact, there is no mourning. The specter of Islam erected in the Western imagination is such that it forces the Muslim Other into a political position of simultaneously being part of a gigantic monolithic community and suddenly no-community at all. It is emotionally taxing but more significantly, it confuses and as we have seen before, confusion – once appropriated – often radicalizes. Context does not excuse what The Kouachi Brothers did. But context provides us the information we need to understand the downward spiral of two siblings. In what appears to be a regular Western thinking pattern – an amnesia of a political kind – the radicalization that the two brothers underwent had little to do with divine Islamic revelation overnight and more to do with the material conditions they found themselves locked within. This includes the Iraq war and torture at Abu Ghraib.

As we bury our dead and instantaneously forgotten in the ground along with those who, too, wanted free speech (take, for example, the 2,332 killed in 2012 alone), we worry if we should apologize for incoming allegation A, B or C. We worry if we should apologize for our dead or not dying fast enough, as the #KillAllMuslims tag suggests. When a shooting occurs or a blast goes off, we nervously scan for skin that resembles ours, accents that inflect as ours do, mannerisms that look un-Western, names that could belong to our sons and fathers, brothers and husbands, friends and colleagues, and we preemptively raise our hands above our heads to provide our status of no complicity. We count our apologies before we can count our own dead. There is no Je Suis Yemen or in more domestic terms, no Je Suis NAACP. There is no Je Suis Muslim for every 30 Muslims killed for one American. We condemn, although it isn’t heard. At least not by the likes of Maher or Murdoch or others. It’s tricky and a little funny in a sad way: Organizing political action against extremism is viewed as suspicious under a State that executes surveillance on Muslim organizations, companies and communities. The paradox isn’t fun to live in. It also isn’t fun to know that when Anders Behring Breivik executed 77 innocent people in the summer of 2011, no anchor on CNN or Fox News, no politician of any party, no hashtag on any social media network demanded that Christians provide collective condemnation and apology to prove they are not fundamentalists. Above all, there was no invocation of Us versus Them. No civilizational discourse that posited Christians as diseased monsters that needed immediate intervention.

Full text here.