What We Talk About When We Talk About Terrorism

An Interview with Amitava Kumar

by Brian K. Mahoney, August 27, 2010

Writing recently on the Vanity Fair website about the controversy surrounding what has become known as the Ground Zero Mosque, Amitava Kumar wondered if both sides in the affair had missed the point—both those who frame the development as an affront to hallowed ground and those who invoke the Constitutional right to freedom of religion to defend it. (For the record: The site of the proposed Park 51 Community Center—not a mosque—is three blocks from the site of the former World Trade Center, on a side street.) Kumar quotes Huxley—“The propagandist’s purpose, is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human”—and himself concludes: “The real subject of the furor we have been witnessing is not a building but rather the question of whether to grant [Muslims] a measure of ordinary humanity.”

In his latest book, A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm a Tiny Book (Duke University Press, 2010), Kumar, a professor of English at Vassar, examines how this quality of “ordinary humanity” has been denied to Muslims and those ensnared, correctly or unjustly, in the War on Terror. At the heart of the book are two men, Hemant Lakhani and Matin Siraj, who were caught up in questionable sting operations and are now serving long prison sentences for terrorism-related crimes. In retelling their stories, Kumar paints a more complicated portrait of these men than the common stereotype of the Muslim radical allows for. Kumar suggests that if we question the application of the stereotype when confronted with prepackaged terrorism narratives, and allow for the ordinary humanity of those reduced to cultural ciphers, we, too, are helping to end the War on Terror. And doing so without torture, confinement, or intimidation—just imagination.