Cyber Homo Sacer

A critical analysis of cyber Islamophobia in the wake of the Muslim Ban

BY ZEINAB FAROKHI

Hatred toward marginalized communities, particularly Muslims, in the West is at its peak in the IT era, where social networking sites (SNS) like Twitter, Facebook and Instagram dominate digital spaces.

The reliance upon SNS, as well as their ubiquity and accessibility, not only allow far-right extremists and Islamophobic discourses to proliferate at alarming rates, but also help create Islamophobic cyber communities that connect like-minded groups worldwide. Research conducted by Imran Awan (onlinelibrary.wiley. com/doi/abs/10.1002/19442866.POI364), Matthew L. Williams and Pete Burnap (academic.oup.com/bjc/article/56/2/211/2462519) and Walid Magdy, Kareem Darwish, and Norah Abokhodair (arXiv:1512.04570v1) are very informative in this regard.

Despite general perceptions, anti-Muslim rhetoric in cyberspace is hardly organic. Rather, in many cases it is carefully orchestrated to present Muslims as “radicals,” “extremists” and “terrorists,” thereby criminalizing and dehumanizing them.

The analysis of two hashtags, #BanMuslims and #Muslimban in “Cyber Homo Sacer: A Critical Analysis of Cyber Islamophobia in the Wake of the Muslim Ban” (www.jstor.org/stable/10.13169/ islastudj.6.1.0014#metadata_ info_tab_contents), demonstrates how the Muslim body in cyberspace has become a site of contestation and a space of exception, where the law that ought to restrict the dissemination of hatred and fake news, despite being present, restricts itself from operating. Moreover, it shows how the enactment of the state of exception is carried out upon Muslim bodies in cyberspace as well as how they have been placed between outside and inside, exception and rule, where juridical protection makes no sense and offers no succor.

Furthermore, the parallel drawn between Girgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer:

In this way, this figure expelled from society is included in the form of exclusion and therefore stands both outside and inside the law simultaneously. The homo sacer analogy shows that Muslims have been forcefully reduced to homo sacer, to “bare life,” and thus stripped of any social and political rights and dignity. Muslims are being excluded, expelled and even killed virtually in cyberspace, all of which encourages their death in the “real” world.

THE HOMO SACER ANALOGY SHOWS THAT MUSLIMS HAVE BEEN FORCEFULLY REDUCED TO HOMO SACER, TO “BARE LIFE,” AND THUS STRIPPED OF ANY SOCIAL AND POLITICAL RIGHTS AND DIGNITY.

Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1998) conception of homo sacer and Muslim bodies shows that in cyberspace, where the exclusion of bodies can occur, Muslims render a homo sacer figure par excellence: those who cannot be sacrificed but can be killed with impunity. In the context of cyber space, I refer to this figure as cyber homo sacer who can be injured or killed endlessly by anyone with full impunity. In other words, in cyberspace, the Muslim body is reduced to a depoliticized, naked or bare life who can be excluded or exempted from society. They, therefore, can be violated by anyone with full impunity.

By focusing particularly upon the proliferation of virulent, anti-Muslim rhetoric and discourse on Twitter, as well as following the hashtags #Muslimban and #BanMuslim, I demonstrate how the concept of homo sacer helpfully illuminates the ways in which current Islamophobic and anti-Muslim sentiment online can be understood as a refiguration of Muslims as bodies that exist in a state of in-betweenness. Trump’s Muslim Ban, which originally barred Irani, Iraqi, Libyan, Somali, Sudanese, Syrian and Yemeni nationals from entering the U.S., made him the hero of anti-Muslim movements. Trump supporters deployed Twitter hashtags such as #BanMuslims and #Muslimban to endorse it. According to some users, politics like the Muslim Ban are paramount and the contagion (read “Muslims”) should be quarantined outside the system for the wellbeing of Western society.

Some users argue that the ban is necessary because Muslims are inherently dangerous, are actively seeking to Islamize the public sphere and have no intention of integrating into mainstream society. Others indicate that Muslims threaten Western civilization and should be banned from entering the West. Some users even go further, demanding that Muslims in the West be removed and exterminated, if not from the world. Such comments reveal the degree of violence and horror directed at Muslim

bodies in cyberspace. Given that users demand the annihilation of Muslims, whose lives are seen as unworthy of being lived, the Muslim body becomes an instantiation of the cyber homo sacer-ian figure.

While policies like the Muslim Ban legitimize removing the rights of particular Muslim communities and thereby reducing them to homo sacer, cyberspace expansively reproduces and maintains this already homo sacer-ian figure. While considering the ban, the Trump administration created conditions wherein the bodies of Muslims were forcefully stripped of dignity, social and political rights, and abandoned to be injured, expelled and killed within cyberspace. In fact, the Islamophobic rhetoric manifested in cyberspace reinforces Muslims’ exclusion from the nation, and Muslims become a single threatening entity — the unwanted, dangerous citizens that need to be disposed of to maintain the nation’s “safety.” Thus, Muslim bodies in cyberspace become a battlefield, a locus of state-sponsored violence that is often overlooked by the law.

Put differently, in cyberspace Muslims fall into the space of exception — they are in the system, but their rights are not fully recognized. Thus, they live in a zone where the law operates through its absence when it comes to the question of Islamophobic discourse. Hence, cyberspace is a zone in which Muslims and other minorities are abandoned and reduced to homo sacer.

These online discourses, triggered by exclusionary politics like the Muslim Ban, help dehumanize Muslims, thereby deepening and reifying widely held stereotypes about Muslims as “violent,” “subversive,” “animalistic,” “inhuman” and unworthy of living in a “civilized” society like the West. Such negative comments circulated on Twitter testify to the excessive politicization of Islam and Muslims’ bodies, which subject them to different types of biases and prejudices that result in vilifying and, ultimately, the homo sacer-ian depoliticization of the Muslim body. Such depoliticization further entrenches the already pathologized Muslim body established by mainstream media and results in excluding Muslim bodies from the nation-state.

Given all this, the question remains: How might individual Muslims and Muslim communities resist this profoundly violent figuration and positioning as bare life, as cyber homo sacer? Further research should track not only the perpetrators of such tags, but also investigate how such violent rhetoric might be productively countered. Additionally, considering that the reduction to bare life is likely not only the experience of Muslims, further research should also seek to document the potential avenues for powerful coalitional modes of resistance that bring groups together — to reclaim their dignity and safety while keeping their differences intact — between Muslims and, for example, other racialized minorities, the impoverished and the otherwise “debilitated” (Jasbir Puar, “The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability,” 2017).

Subjecting Muslims to the status of homo sacer is without a doubt a matter of profound concern. Such a (virtual) reality must propel us to formulate tactics that can shift the dispersal of netizens toward more responsible and responsive rearticulations of online politics and policies. ih

Zeinab Farokhi is a PhD candidate at University of Toronto’s Women and Gender Studies Institute.