Seeking the Muslim Gandhi

Abstract

This paper examines the question of Islam and its relationship to violence in Muslim reformer Asghar Ali Engineer’s pre- and post-11 September 2001 works in response to the attacks on the Twin Towers in New York and the Pentagon in Washington, DC. We argue that that while his pre-9/11 approach to violence offers a much more historical and systemic account of violence by viewing it as a societal problem involving a number of different agents, the post-9/11 evocation of Gandhi does the opposite. By evoking the figure of Gandhi in a post-9/11 context, Engineer not only addresses the issue of violence as a peculiarly Muslim one but forecloses any possibility to understanding violence as a historically evolving and systemically operating phemonenon. In ignoring this, Engineer finds himself well accommodated within the larger politics of Empire and its dehistoricised, naturalised, and individualised interpretation of Muslim related violence.