This paper engages with the intractable fact that Islamic communities in the United States have become sites that express the force of counterinsurgent warfare. As the War on Terror persists, both abroad and domestically, it has developed its weapons and technologies by virtue of taking Islamic forms of life and their spaces as its experimental means. This has intimately reverberated across local Islamic communities in the US, who have felt the pressures of surveillance, capture, and racial violence most intimately inside mosques and within their souls. This paper depicts an experience of counterinsurgent warfare with particular attention to the practices of securitization that are wielded for and against Islamic communities who are deemed prone to domestic terrorism. Fundamentally, the aim of the paper is to conceptualize the mode of violence that is animated by securitization and to demonstrate how counterinsurgent force is not palpable in matters of security and safety, but within the sensibilities and practices that constitute Islamic conduct.  

Biography

Currently, Mohamad Jarada is a UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of California, Davis. As of July 2024, he begins a faculty position as Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He received his B.A. and Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley’s Department of Anthropology (2014, 2022), and an M.T.S. in the Philosophy of Religion from Harvard Divinity School (2016). His work is invested in understanding what gives modern forms of power their force and normative weight through the mutable shapes that its political, social, and legal modes can take. He investigates two of those modes in his work, focusing primarily on counterinsurgency and slavery. He is currently writing two books that develop this investment. The first, titled Counterinsurgent Force: Islam, Security, and Racial Violence, examines the way local Islamic communities, and their ethical and theological lives, in the United States become sites and objects of counterinsurgent warfare. The second, titled Spiritual Stamina: A Genealogy of Civil Rights, the Police Power, and Slavery, traces how the American conception of civil rights crystallized, in the aftermath of the Civil War, as a technology to legally and metaphysically transform the formerly enslaved into human subjects worthy of contracts, kinship, and entitlements.