Body of Victim, Body of Warrior. Cabeiri deBergh Robinson
hardship and grief of warfare, and hope that a war would bring the international attention that would at last result in the resolution of the Kashmir Dispute.
Hajji Mohammad Rashid was an elder council member for a refugee village near the LoC whom I visited often during my fieldwork. He could not read, but he watched Pakistani, Indian, and international news programs on satellite TV and listened to the BBC and Voice of America–Urdu on the radio. In the spring of 1999, he was interested in what the American public thought about military interventions that were justified in terms of protecting civilians from widespread state and (un)civil violence, particularly the “humanitarian” military interventions in East Timor and Kosovo. He offered his own perspective as well; he was critical of an overreliance on direct intervention to resolve chronic conflict:
Now the NATO has been dropping bombs on Kosovo. I have seen all these things on the BBC dish. So many people are suffering; it is by the grace of God that something is done. But your people are very modern and depend too much on machines. I think that this bombing would not be necessary now if you had remembered that a free market is not the same thing as a just society.
He shared some thoughts about what did make a just society before talking about the tensions in his own village that accompanied such debates. He was particularly concerned about the number of young men who were joining militant organizations to fight in what they called the “Kashmir Jihad”:
Some people say that we in this village should not call ourselves refugees since we are living in our very own Kashmiri homeland, but what this is, it is the practice of the Holy Prophet, peace be upon him, who said, that “he who steps even over the threshold to provide a moral life for his family, he is a refugee and therefore a defender of his people.” I tell this thing to the young men when they are overtaken by emotion to join the jihād [armed struggle]. I tell them that hijarat [protective migration] is also a sunnat-e-rasūl—an honorable practice of the Prophet Mohammad, peace be upon him. I tell them, “Become educated, work hard, study Qur’an Sharif, honor your mother by marrying well, educate your children, especially your daughters.” I tell them, “There are many ways to defend human rights and to fulfill your duty to humanity and to your nation.”
Hajji Mohammad Rashid’s attempts to convince young men not to join militant organizations point to three historical transformations in the regional political culture. The first is a change in the terms that people use to talk about their experiences of political violence and to express the value of resettlement and re-creating enduring social ties after periods of warfare and civil conflict. Among displaced Kashmiri Muslims in Pakistan and AJK, the historical response to political violence and to violence-related forced displacement has been the bodily practice of hijarat and the production of the muhājir (one who has done a hijarat, a refugee) as a social and political identity category within the postcolonial nation-state. The experience of political violence in the current conflict, however, is increasingly incorporated into social life through the concept of jihād, with the production of the mujāhid (one who fights in a jihād, a warrior) as a valued political subject.2 A second transformation reflects a concurrent shift in conceptions of sovereignty in Kashmiri political culture that has shifted the terrain of struggle from the territory of Islam to the bodies of Muslim people, a concern that people expressed by referring to the concept of human rights. Finally, there has been a corresponding evolution in how young men become mujāhids; the practice of jihād is increasingly regulated not by Islamic institutions, but by Muslim individuals and refugee families.
CONDUCTING AND PRESENTING ETHNOGRAPHIC RESEARCH IN A TIME OF WAR
In this book, I investigate these transformations, focusing on the time period of 1947 (when the first refugees from Jammu and Kashmir were displaced into Pakistan) to 2001. I conducted ethnographic research in Kashmiri refugee communities between March 1999 and September 2001. I returned to Pakistan for field visits and archival research in 2003 and early 2005, and then, weeks after I returned to the United States in 2005, a massive earthquake quite literally changed the landscape of AJK. Several of the refugee camps where I had worked slid off the mountainside into the river, and all of their surviving residents were displaced into new camps. I returned to AJK a month after the earthquake and then again in 2006 and 2008. Earthquake relief and reconstruction effort changed the political and economic terrain of AJK as well as its landscape. Many militants refocused their struggle as a “humanitarian jihād,” and the work of international humanitarian and development organizations that came to AJK for the first time opened up new spaces for civil engagement.3
September 2001 became a turning point in the scholarly as well as popular literature on jihadist movements and political Islam; it framed how we examine the “global” and “jihād” in ways that essentialize “Islamic” culture and misunderstand the relationship between Islam as a religious tradition and the social production of Muslims as political actors. By focusing on how Kashmiri Muslim refugees and militants negotiated Islamic and global values before they were widely assumed to be diametrically opposed, I hope to engage readers in this story of how people struggle, in very human and very modern, if discomfiting ways, with the problem of political violence so wrapped into the normality of everyday life as to be almost banal.
It has been my experience that, after presenting a scholarly paper or giving a public lecture, one of the questions will begin, “I appreciate your project to humanize Islamic militants, but. . . .” Such questions initially confounded me, and I’ve learned over the years that it helps if I am forthright about the process by which I came to do this research and eventually to the arguments that I present in this book. So first, I have never aimed to humanize Islamic militants. As I see it, the people who engage in violent politics by any name—militants, mujāhids, jihādīs—are always already human. They are members of communities and, like other people, the question of how they are socialized toward or away from violence (and whether that violence is seen as criminal or is sanctioned) is a core political and cultural question.
Second, I did not set out to study militants at all; I set out to work with refugees and other victims of the Kashmir conflict. I had worked in Indian Jammu and Kashmir State on a humanitarian mission from 1995 to 1996. During that time, I conducted hundreds of interviews with men who had been detained and interrogated during the anti-Indian insurgency. I decided to complete my training as an anthropologist rather than become a professional humanitarian worker because my observations in the detention centers convinced me that peacemaking in the Kashmir region would eventually have to grapple with the ways that experiences of violence have been incorporated into the political cultures of the regions that are a part of the Kashmir Dispute. I knew that I couldn’t work in refugee camps in Pakistan without being willing to engage with militants, but a good field researcher has to be willing to be surprised. It surprised me to discover, for example, that youths from refugee resettlement villages had also become involved in jihadist organizations. I became increasingly uncomfortable with the assumed “deterrent effect of public exposure” in the anthropological literature of political violence.4 I also discovered that public exposure—breaking the silences that obscure political violence—rather than charting a path toward peace actually underpins the social reproduction of political violence as a jihād in Kashmir.
Over several years of fieldwork, I began to understand that “victim” is an unstable political category. It is an easier moral category—and a much more comfortable place to locate compassion than “perpetrator”—but the long history of conflict in the Kashmir region has made many victims and many perpetrators, and many who are both victims and perpetrators. Peacemaking will have to deal not only with the pasts of all of them, but also with all of the parts of their pasts. Peacemaking will also have to engage the transformations of political culture, including the democratization of violence, that are the outcomes of decades of people grappling with normalized violence in the disputed borderlands.
Conduct and Confidentiality in the Ethnography of Armed Conflict
I am often asked how it was possible to conduct research among Islamic militants as a female scholar. In many ways, my gender has been an asset rather an impediment. Azad Jammu and Kashmir is a high-surveillance society and the frontier of an active conflict zone. No one can object to political vigilance in a security zone without bringing suspicion upon himself, but harassment