A protest on behalf of migrant workers in Qatar near the FIFA Congress in Zurich.

May 2015. Martyn Ziegler/PA Archive/Press Association Images. All rights reserved.The Kafala (sponsorship) system emerged in the period between the 1950s and 1960s following the abolition of slavery in the region.

It is a mechanism used in the GCC, and countries such as Jordan and Lebanon, to regulate a guest worker program whereby a migrant workers status is bound to his or her employer or ‘kafeel’ for the duration of their contract.

This system was utilized and solidified in the GCC after an influx of workers after the discovery of oil. Kafala has been discussed in the context of modern slavery and exploitation, and its misuse has also allowed for the facilitation of sex trafficking.

Yet the wider social, economic, and political background through which this sponsorship system operates is not given adequate attention in the literature. The issue of race and racism in the Gulf need to be addressed in order to tackle the problem of modern day slavery. 

Xenophobia in the Gulf manifests itself in an ‘attitude of disdain’ towards women from other backgrounds

Whilst gender is certainly a contributing factor to abuse, certain evidence suggests that problems such as racism can be just as important, if not more important in the harsh treatment of women, dispelling the claim that gender attitudes alone fuel abuse. 

Xenophobia in the Gulf manifests itself in an ‘attitude of disdain’ towards women from other backgrounds, particularly towards those from Asia and Africa. The UN has identified a general global trend that ties the presence of migrants, refugees and non-nationals with an increase in discrimination and racist attitudes.

Although academic attention focuses predominately on male abuse of women, it is important to acknowledge the role that matriarchs and women in general have in abusing migrant domestic workers. Women domestic workers are observed by some of their employers, who happen to be Arab women, as inferior. Violence can be seen a way for Arab women to regain control of their agency, something they have lost in the traditional conservative norms of the societies they live in.

Even though the constitution of countries such as Qatar prohibits discrimination on the grounds of gender, race, religion, according to this report “legal, cultural, and institutional discrimination existed against women, non-citizens, and foreign workers”. For instance, in Qatar spousal rape is not considered illegal and there is no specific law concerning domestic violence.

There are intertwining political, economic, and cultural factors that have contributed to migrant workers taking on an alien identity. Culturally, as domestic workers work near families and households, there is a deep reluctance on the part of employers for intervention by the state, especially if they believe that their domestic help has gained access to sensitive information about the family.   

It is also partly due to these suspicions that unjustifiable mistreatment of workers by their employers take place. For example, employers can sometimes harbor resentment about the motivations of workers, especially those that appear too close to male members of the family. 
most of these countries lack vigorous anti-discrimination laws

This ‘silence’ on the part of the state can be viewed as the continuation of a larger political strategy to keep large swathes of Arab migrants at bay because of the socio-political ramifications this may have. 

Indeed, it can be argued that the reluctance has been shown today with the hesitancy of the Gulf region in taking in Syrian refugees for fear that radical and populist ideas may incite instability in the region. 

The Kafala system cannot be divorced from the wider arena in which it is host to. The Gulf still lacks a robust and independent civil society to pressure and hold the government accountable for its civil rights violations.

It has not helped that most of these countries lack vigorous anti-discrimination laws that could go some way in changing attitudes towards migrant workers in the region. Even though there are swaths of evidence where workers document the dehumanising treatment they receive from their employers, governments fail to act.

Governments usually opt to target those not educated or literate, according to NGOs in Bahrain. The Bahraini labour market prefers Bangladeshi unskilled workers because they are exploitable – they require low pay and can withstand harsh working conditions and, in addition, some of these workers are illiterate.

It is time for the issue of race and racist attitudes to become central to any discussion on the continued exploitation of workers in places like the Gulf. 

When it comes to tackling modern day slavery in all its forms, there is no room for political correctness.

Madawi al-Saud is a final year PhD student at Brunel University and activist working with victims of trafficking and exploitation in the Gulf.

Courtesy: Open Democracy
 

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Freedom of thought needs an atmosphere of tolerance where people can speak their mind and no one is forced to accept the beliefs of others. In the Middle East, though, tolerance is in short supply and ideas that don't fit the expectations of society and governments are viewed as a threat.

Where religion is concerned, the "threat" can come from almost anyone with unorthodox ideas but especially from those who reject religion entirely.

Increasingly, atheists in Arab countries are characterised as dangerous extremists – to be feared no less than violent jihadists.

Persecuting atheists is the inevitable result of governments setting themselves up as guardians of faith. Among the 22 Arab League countries, Islam is "the religion of the state" in 16 of them: Algeria, Bahrain, Comoros, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Libya, Mauritania, Morocco, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, the UAE and Yemen. 

For most of them, this is more than just a token gesture; it also serves political purposes. Embracing religion and posing as guardians of morality is one way for regimes to acquire some legitimacy, and claiming a mandate from God can be useful if they don't have a mandate from the public.

State religions, in their most innocuous form, signal an official preference for one particular kind of faith and, by implication, a lesser status for others. But the effects become far more obtrusive when governments rely on state religion as an aid to legitimacy – in which case the state religion has to be actively supported and policed. That, in turn, de-legitimises other belief systems and legitimises intolerance and discrimination directed against them. 

The policing of religion in Arab countries takes many forms, from governments appointing clerics and setting the theme for weekly sermons to the enforcement of fasting during Ramadan. 

To shield the government-approved version of religion from criticism, a variety of mechanisms can be deployed. These include laws against "defaming" religion and proselytising by non-Muslims but general laws regarding public order, telecommunications and the media may also apply.

In Algeria, for instance, the law forbids making, storing, or distributing printed or audiovisual materials with the intention of "shaking the faith" of a Muslim. In Oman, using the internet in ways that "might prejudice public order or religious values" is an imprisonable offence.

For Muslims who publicly abandon Islam the problem is even worse. In Mauritania, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, the United Arab Emirates and Yemen anyone convicted of apostasy faces the threat – at least in theory – of execution.

Using a state religion as an aid to legitimacy turns the personal beliefs of individuals into a political issue, because disagreeing with the state's theological position also implies disloyalty to the state. Those who happen to disagree must either conform or risk becoming not only a religious dissident but a political one too.

Equating religious conformity with loyalty to the state allows Arab governments to label non-conformists not merely as dissidents but extremists. This in turn provides an excuse for suppressing them, as has been seen in Egypt with the Sisi regime's campaign against atheism and in Saudi Arabia where "promotion of atheist thought" became officially classified as terrorism.

Although Saudi Arabia's war on atheists stems from fundamentalist theology, in Egypt it's the opposite: the Sisi regime presents itself as a beacon of religious moderation. To describe the Sisi brand of Islam as moderate, though, is rather misleading. "Militantly mainstream" might be a better term. Theologically speaking it is middle-of the-road and relatively bland but also illiberal and authoritarian in character.

The result in Egypt is a kind of enforced centrism. While allowing some scope for tolerance – of other monotheistic religions, for example – the regime sets limits on discourse about religion in order to confine it to the middle ground. The main intention, obviously, was to place Islamist theology beyond the bounds of acceptability but at the other end of the spectrum it also means that atheism, scepticism and liberal interpretations of Islam have become forms of extremism.

Defining 'extremism'

Absurd as it might seem to place atheists in the same category as extremists such as terrorists and jihadists, the issue hinges on how "extremism" is defined: extreme in relation to what? Violent and intolerant extremism is a global phenomenon but confusion arises when governments try to define it by reference to national or culture-specific values.

Arab states are not the only offenders in this respect, though. They have been assisted by western governments defining "extremism" in a similar way – as rejection of a specific national culture rather than rejection of universal rights and international norms.

In its effort to prevent radicalisation of students, for example, the British government defined extremism as "vocal or active opposition to fundamental British values". Also in the context of eradicating extremism, the education minister talked about actively promoting "British values" in schools.

Approaching the problem in this way invites other countries to do likewise – even if their own national and cultural values would be considered extreme in relation to universal rights and international norms. Thus, Saudis can justifiably claim that atheism is contrary to fundamental Saudi values. Furthermore, the British minister's idea of instilling British values into British schoolchildren is not very different in principle from "instilling the Islamic faith" in young Saudis – which the kingdom's Basic Law stipulates as one of the main goals of education.

This article was first published on al-Bab.
 

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Mashrou' Leila performing in Byblos, Lebanon

Last Friday the Doha News website did something rather shocking – at least, by Qatar's standards. It posted an article entitled: "What it's like to be gay and Qatari". Attached to the article was a note from the editors explaining their decision to publish it:

"Doha News is aware that any extra-marital affairs in Qatar are illegal, and we do not advocate breaking the law. It seems that many people are upset about this post because it shares a view they do not agree with.
"Please understand that our intention is simply to foster communication, and the opinion piece is the view of one person who wanted to share what it’s like to be gay in Qatar."

The article – by a young man using the pseudonym "Majid" – talked of gay Qataris who disguise their sexuality by being loudly homophobic in public and then travel abroad for forbidden pleasures. It talked of others who appease society by getting married and raising a family: "They put a Band-aid on a wound. The wife will get conjugal visits and the men will just go their own way," he wrote.

"Majid" continued:

I feel like my country hates me … If I had a choice, if there was a magic pill I could take to make me straight, then I would take it. I don’t want the misery of this life.
I am in constant turmoil and anguish – how do I reconcile who I am with my faith that says I shouldn’t exist? I am the worst of the worst, I am vermin.
I don’t wish to impose anything on anyone, but I also don’t want to live with paranoia and I don’t want to feel like a birth defect.
I don’t want to raise the rainbow flag from the roof – I don’t see that compatible with this country. But we need to find our own way.
I want people to accept us. Live and let live – you don’t have to like me but you don’t have to persecute me.

Yesterday, Doha News had a second article – by Jassim al-Maadadi, a 25-year-old engineer. It was wrong for the topic of homosexuality in Qatar to be discussed in an article by Doha News, Maadadi said: 

"I believe that talking about it in the media brings legitimacy, be it directly or indirectly, to a topic that is considered by the law and religion of this country to be illegitimate. Discussing this topic in public introduces a grey area on the matter that essentially does not exist … there is no grey area in Qatar’s view on homosexuality."

In response to "Majid",  Maadadi said his experiences living abroad had not changed his opinion of homosexuality:

"I tried to stay away from gay people when possible. With that said, when I lived in those countries, I lived in societies where homosexuality was accepted. So I had to live by their rules, and not intervene."

On the same basis, he suggested others should respect Qatar's intolerance of gay people: "I don’t think that is too much to ask."

But Maadadi didn't totally accept the idea – very widespread in Muslim countries – that homosexuality is "a choice" (and, by implication, a sin that should be punished). 

"Some people do it because they want to adhere to a western trend that has been celebrated by western media in recent years, while others might not have a choice. In the case of the latter, I believe that it is something psychological and that it should be medically treated."

Among the educated classes in the Middle East this is often seen as a modern or progressive view, and it keeps countless psychiatrists employed even though the scientific evidence is that homosexuality cannot be "cured" and attempts to do so may be harmful.

Maadadi continued:

"I also believe that many families are failing to prevent their children from being exposed to homosexuality. With the presence of the internet, learning about things like this is just a click away …
"I do not believe that children will automatically become gay once they learn about homosexuality. However, I think that if they do find out about it at a young age, they may begin to sympathise with it. This could then have an effect on their personality."

Maadadi also reminded Majid of "the culture which he is a part of, the religion which he represents, and the country which he is from. Qatar is a Muslim country, and in it homosexuality is not tolerated."

The effect of saying this is to deny the possibility of change and deny anyone's right to press for change. "Majid" should put up and shut up because he happens to have been born in Qatar. "Majid" is also, apparently, required to act as a representative of Islam – a matter in which he was probably never given a choice. Qatari law does not allow him to leave Islam and in theory he could be executed if he did.

Opening up debate

These two articles by Maadadi and "Majid", and the discussion threads attached to them, provide an interesting snapshot of current Arab debates about homosexuality. The fact that such debates are taking place at all – and with a variety of Arabs joining in, both gay and straight – is a significant development. 

Back in 2004-2005, when I was writing my book, Unspeakable Love, about gay and lesbian life in the Middle East, homosexuality was still very much a taboo subject. It was invariably condemned on the rare occasions that mainstream media broached the topic and news reports of arrests and court cases spoke cryptically of "shameful acts" and "deviant behaviour".

During Egypt's notorious Queen Boat trial in 2001 there was virtually no public support inside the country for the 52 men accused of "debauchery". Even the most prominent local human rights organisation refused to speak out, fearing that to do so would damage its reputation.

It was a very different picture in 2014 when TV reporter Mona Iraqi instigated a police raid on a Cairo bath-house and, after boasting about her achievement on Facebook, faced a huge social media backlash.

This change has probably been influenced in part by western debates about same-sex marriage and gay clergy but the effect has not always been positive. The Saudi religious police, for example, learned of a connection between rainbows and gay rights and began suppressing "emblems" of homosexuality inside the kingdom. More importantly, though, the growth of social media over the last decade or so has given an outlet to voices that previously went unheard. Changing attitudes is a slower process but in some parts of the region that is happening too. The picture below is from a Mashrou' Leila concert in Lebanon earlier this month. 

It's worth recalling President Obama's remark in 2011 that the Emir (since retired) was eager to promote reform and democracy everywhere in the Middle East – except in Qatar.

But where does Qatar stand in all this? In that context it's worth recalling President Obama's remark in 2011 that the Emir (since retired) was eager to promote reform and democracy everywhere in the Middle East – except in Qatar.

Qatar's TV international station, al-Jazeera, behaves in a similar way with its gay coverage. Search its website and you'll find plenty of sympathetic stories about gay people in the US, Russia, Bangladesh, Turkey, Kenya, etc, but somehow the plight of gay Qataris seems to have escaped its attention.

In religious terms, Qatar is Wahhabi like Saudi Arabia and attitudes among the more traditional sections of its society are very similar. Unlike Saudi Arabia, though, Qatar purports to be modern and open to the world, endlessly hosting international conferences (not to mention the 2020 World Cup).

Sex outside marriage is illegal in Qatar and, under the current penal code, sodomy between men is punishable by up to three years in prison. However, unlike some countries (such as Egypt), Qatar doesn't systematically use the law to persecute gay people. Even where such laws are not much used, though, their existence has other adverse effects by legitimising acts of discrimination and sometimes creating opportunities for extortionists.

Sex outside marriage is illegal in Qatar and, under the current penal code, sodomy between men is punishable by up to three years in prison. However, unlike some countries (such as Egypt), Qatar doesn't systematically use the law to persecute gay people. Even where such laws are not much used, though, their existence has other adverse effects by legitimising acts of discrimination and sometimes creating opportunities for extortionists.

Although Qatar's criminalisation of homosexuality has often figured in debates about its hosting of the World Cup, "Majid" doesn't mention it as a major problem in his Doha News article; the attitudes of people around him seem a far more immediate concern.

Qatar's history of anti-gay lobbying

The most alarming aspect is that far from challenging these attitudes the Qatari regime has a long history of promoting them at an international level. It does so by making alliances with organisations in the west which oppose gay rights, often under the guise of protecting "familyvalues" or developing "inter-faith dialogue".

Qatar's latest move in this connection was to join the recently-formed "Group of Friends of the Family" (GoFF). In February this year, Qatar (along with Egypt and Belarus) persuaded GoFF to demand the withdrawal of a set of UN-issued postage stamps celebrating LGBT rights. 
 

                Qatar objected to UN stamps celebrating LGBT rights

Qatari meddling in this area goes back a long way, however. In 2004, Doha hosted a conference to "defend the family" and fight progressive social policies at the United Nations. Officially opened by Sheikha Mousa bint Nasser al-Misnad, a wife of Qatar's ruler at the time, it was largely organised by the Mormon church and participants included the late Cardinal Alfonso Trujillo, who campaigned against condoms on behalf of the Catholic church, and Mahathir Mohamad, the dictatorial former prime minister of Malaysia who had sacked and jailed his deputy for alleged homosexuality. 

Another participant was Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the Qatar-based Islamic scholar who became famous through his appearances on al-Jazeera television. At the time, Qaradawi was also supervising the IslamOnline website which made a particular point of explaining to its readers "the fact" that "homosexuality is a matter of choice".

Sheikha Mousa, meanwhile, has acquired a reputation in the west for "good works" and has even been described as "the enlightened face of a profoundly conservative regime". But besides donating a million dollars to a charity founded by former US president Bill Clinton, she established al-Aween – Qatar's first centre to combat "deviation from acceptable social behaviour" and "provide specialised treatment for all kinds of behavioural deviation".

In an article on al-Aween's website a senior consultant in psychiatry called Dr Abdul Alim Ibrahim explained that the development of gay rights in some countries is the result of pressure from "powerful homosexuals" and is "not based on scientific studies".

However, Dr Ibrahim did think the Zimbabwean president, Robert Mugabe, "went too far" in describing gay people as lower than pigs and dogs.

This article was first published on al-bab.  

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When the poor die of heat in India, “the world’s largest democracy” it’s called “natural disaster”; but when they meet a similar death in the “illiberal” Gulf region, it’s called “modern-day slavery”

During the summer of 2015, India suffered an extreme heat wave. Over 2500 people—primarily from the southern states of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana—lost their lives, either directly from heatstroke or from lack of access to water or healthcare. Many of these people were from the poorest strata of Indian society, already malnourished or reliant on day labor in order to survive. The Indian state’s response was weak at best, and in many cases, it was individual citizens and charity organizations that assisted in easing the suffering of those most impacted.

This is not a surprising scenario, given the Indian state’s increasingly neo-liberal orientation. Indeed, the state has almost entirely moved away from a sense of obligation to the poor, replacing political discourse around poverty (garibi) with rhetoric about entrepreneurial citizenship and ties between the public and private sectors. Narendra Modi’s campaign for prime minister, his popularity among well-to-do non-resident Indians (NRIs), and his recent “Make in India” initiative seem to have cemented the newly liberalized country’s alignment toward global capitalism and the West.

While there were a handful of news and opinion pieces about the disappointing response to this national tragedy, mostly from within India, the national and international media overwhelmingly represented the attendant deaths as the result of a “natural disaster.” This representation underplayed how state policies, ongoing caste stratification, and a widening gap between the rich and the poor are responsible for who lives and who dies in the country. This was a tragedy indeed, but one evacuated of necropolitics, or the ways that states produce sovereign power through the management of death.[i]

As I followed the events in India from my home in the United States, I could not help but compare the news coverage of the heat wave with the ongoing representations of heat-related deaths in Qatar—primarily impacting construction workers building the stadiums and other infrastructure for the upcoming 2022 World Cup. Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have expressed great concern over deadly labor conditions in Qatar’s extreme heat, and a series of articles by the Guardian under the heading “modern-day slavery” have estimated that deaths from World Cup construction will total in the thousands, averaging from one a day to a dozen a week until the games.

In the news coverage and activist discourse about labor in Qatar—and in other GCC countries—the state and the small citizenry are portrayed as the sole harbingers of these deaths: an authoritarian regime and its decentralized, citizen-run migration sponsorship system (kafala) breeding the conditions for hyperexploitation of the world’s subaltern masses, who descend upon the Gulf looking for economic opportunities that they cannot find in their home countries. A large majority of these workers are South Asian, primarily Nepali and Indian. Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, which suffered the most casualties as a result of the 2015 heat wave, are two of India’s largest labor-sending states for GCC countries.

It seems imperative, particularly in an era of neo-liberalism, privatization, and a receding state, to pay closer attention to which deaths become necro-political (i.e. within the purview of the state’s responsibility) and which remain merely tragic, and even normalized as part of everyday existences in the Global South.

That representations of heat-related death would be so different in India and Qatar might not seem that strange to most readers. On the one hand, we have a migration system that many have labeled “modern-day slavery,” and on the other hand, conditions of extreme poverty that many consider tragic but commonplace in the “developing world.” There is an irony here, however, that is hard to ignore: given slightly different circumstances, the men who die building Doha’s modernity could easily be among those who perish in India’s natural disasters. Yet, those who stay put under conditions of extreme poverty in the “world’s largest democracy” die deaths that carry little national or international import, whereas those who live and die under the sun of an illiberal state have become beacons for international media coverage, activism, and scholarly critique.

Is an illiberal death different than a liberal one? In an era of neoliberal citizenship, what is the political life of illiberal death? I want to suggest here that the sensationalization of exploitation, suffering, and death in the Gulf obscures similar conditions of daily life in parts of the world that are not at all disconnected from these so-called authoritarian contexts. As I and many who work on the interconnectedness of South Asia and the Arabian Peninsula have argued, labor, family, religion, and identity on both sides of the Persian Gulf are produced within overlapping transnational networks of capital, kinship, ethnicity, and citizenship.[ii]

Not only are multinational corporations, expatriate employers, and middlemen recruiters central to producing the conditions of possibility for migrating to the Gulf and for “staying put,” but the Indian state itself participates in citizenship regimes and nationalist projects that exceed the territorial boundaries of India and reach into the Gulf, both historically and in the present day. In many cases, those who are able to migrate to the Gulf have economic and social capital that allows them to escape the poverty their compatriots suffer at home, even as it propels them into new forms of constraint as well as opportunity. What erasures are required for us to turn conditions of relative privilege—the ability to become diasporic—into narratives of exceptional dehumanization?

It seems imperative, particularly in an era of neo-liberalism, privatization, and a receding state, to pay closer attention to which deaths become necro-political (i.e. within the purview of the state’s responsibility) and which remain merely tragic, and even normalized as part of everyday existences in the Global South.

Few remember the earthquake in the state of Gujarat that claimed almost twenty thousand lives in 2001, or the deadly pogroms against Muslims in the same state in 2002—pogroms that led Modi to be classified as a war criminal by the US state, a classification that was only recently lifted in order for him to make his much-celebrated tour of the United States, meet the president, and face adoring crowds of Indian middle-class diasporics. These large-scale events bookended the World Trade Center attacks in 2001, but they remain local, while 9/11 has become a global catastrophe. I am of course not the first person to suggest that some deaths matter more than others.

Postcolonial, feminist, ethnic studies, and queer theory scholars have made similar arguments for many years, employing a range of examples from around the world, both contemporary and historical. I want to add to these observations by exploring how states that are classified as liberal and democratic are increasingly absolved of the life and death of those who reside within their borders in ways that illiberal states—and illiberal organizations, most often labeled “terrorist”[iii]—are not.

Describing quite similar everyday lived experiences in such disparate ways reinforces the idea that the world is divided into two seemingly opposing spaces, forms of power, and even temporalities (one developing, one hyper-modern). These representational practices obscure the violence upon which “liberal” states have emerged and the ways that they continue to exercise power over death in uneven and highly undemocratic ways. In the process, they also center the neo-liberal subject and displace that subject’s complicity in structures and processes of inequality that can never be contained within the territorial borders of any state.

In the Gulf, it seems that there are two distinct forms of migration: exploited and mercenary, usually categorized as “migrant” vs. “expat.” Thus, when activists and scholars refer to “migrant labor” and its problems, my scholarship—previously with Indian middle classes in Dubai, and now with students and educators in Doha’s Education City—does not fall into this category. However, my research in Doha has provided the lens for the questions I pose in this piece, and in particular, it was the content of my interviews with faculty and staff at American branch campuses, which I was in the process of transcribing in the summer of 2015, that led to my desire to explore how literal and metaphorical death operate in conjunction to recuperate particular myths of liberalism and its others.

My interlocutors were quite aware of their position as expats and not migrant laborers: “migrant labor” tested their liberal values, while also shaping their daily lives in Qatar. North American faculty and staff represented themselves as simultaneously privileged and powerless. They recognized the luxuries that working in Qatar afforded them while acknowledging and being troubled by the country’s dismal labor conditions; but given an illiberal and repressive state, what could they possibly do to produce change? Some entirely exempted themselves from complicity in the system, employing nannies and maids they claimed to treat better than the Qataris, who they blamed for labor abuses. Others brought migrant labor issues into their classrooms for discussion, but within the framework of Gulf exceptionalism. Only a handful discussed with me the similarities between Gulf hierarchies and those in liberal contexts, noting the exploitation of undocumented workers or structural racism in the United States, for example.

Expatriate discourses around labor conditions highlighted their lack of privilege as non-citizens, the expectation that they are transient subjects, and the belief that illiberal power is more repressive than liberal power; in the process, they absolved themselves of responsibility in reproducing and benefitting from a system that they found distasteful. These are some of the pleasures of temporary illiberal belonging; one can remain a liberal subject while participating in a status quo that allows in many cases for greater class and race privilege than available at “home.”[iv]

For their peers in the metropolitan academy, the political life of illiberal death extends to metaphorical death—it is the context of the necropolitical authoritarian state that marks the impending demise of liberalism itself. Activists for migrant labor rights in Abu Dhabi, for example, have found hypocrisy in a New York University campus offering a liberal arts education in a place where migrant laborers have no rights and academic freedom is not guaranteed. Faculty at Yale’s main campus have expressed similar concerns about the university’s branch campus in Singapore, another presumably illiberal context, which, like the Gulf and China, is seen as threatening to the freedoms attributed to higher education in the West. During the height of opposition to the Singapore campus, for example, Seyla Benhabib wrote:

If our purpose is to set a model for a liberal arts education, why not engage India, the country with a free and contentious public sphere and an extra-ordinary intellectual life both in India and in the Indian diaspora? Experiments in democratic education are best performed with in genuinely open, multicultural and multi-faith democracies, such as India, rather than in the artificial, boutique-like security of places like Singapore or Abu Dhabi.

There is an artful forgetting that allows for such a celebration of India in contrast to Abu Dhabi and Singapore. The present climate at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) in New Delhi, one of the country’s most prestigious institutions, where student activists have been subject to arrest, violence, and accusations of being “anti-national” in their critiques of state policies, directly contradicts the supposed freedoms that the Indian state claims to provide its citizens. While the events at JNU will likely be folded into a narrative of Indian democracy-in-action, what narratives would emerge if similar state crackdowns took place at Qatar University, NYU Abu Dhabi, or Yale-NUS? 

This is not an exceptional situation for India, and yet the forgetting involved in representing the country as “genuinely open” is one that recuperates the life of liberalism while furthering what Gyanendra Pandey has called a “politics of indifference” to actual life. This indifference allows states and citizens in liberal democracies to simultaneously naturalize the idea that they care about the poor while doing nothing to actually alleviate poverty. Herein, India and the United States emerge unsoiled by the kinds of practices that authoritarian illiberal states employ, and their ongoing projects of slow and fast death continue to be exempted from the mythologies of liberalism as a form of freedom, equality, and civilization.

Additionally, through the act of critiquing illiberal death, the scholar/journalist/activist is not only absolved of complicity at home, but also gathers forms of cultural and material capital; there is therefore liberal profit built into the political life of illiberal death. In her new book, The Intimacies of Four Continents, Lisa Lowe explores how liberalism was produced in conjunction with the violence of slavery, settler colonialism, and indentured labor, and that the forgetting of these intimacies reproduces violence in “liberal humanist institutions, discourses, and practices today.”[v] The continued representation of Gulf exceptionalism and the distinction of illiberal death in contemporary discussions across a range of disciplines and media erase the intimacies that scholars of the Indian Ocean have tried to bring forward. These erasures are not natural disasters, but rather performances of ongoing violence that implicate us all.

Courtesy: Jadaliyya

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