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Punishing Violent Thoughts:
Islamic Dissent and Thoreauvian
Disobedience in Post-/ America
REBECCA RUTH GOULD
American Muslims increasingly negotiate their relation to a government that is suspicious of
Islam, yet which recognizes them as rights-bearing citizens, within a culture they claim as
their own. To better understand how the post-/ state is reshaping American Islam, I
examine the case of Muslim American dissident Tarek Mehanna, sentenced to seventeen
years in prison in for providing material support for terrorism. I read Mehanna’s verbal
and visual depictions of his persecution in relation to the American dissidents Mehanna
claims as intellectual predecessors, above all Henry David Thoreau and John Brown, while situ-
ating this dissent within a long history of American activism
Under a government which imprisons anyone unjustly, the true place for a just man is
also a prison.
Henry David Thoreau, “Resistance
to Civil Government”
Well over three million Muslims live in the United States.
Islam is the third-
largest US religion, following Christianity and Judaism.
American Islam is
more than a demographic phenomenon; scholarship is gradually revealing a
rich literary Muslim American tradition, in many languages, and comprising
many cultures, including slave narratives in Arabic that date back to the earliest
days of the American republic.
Yet for many within, as well as outside, the
United States, the phrase “American Islam”still sounds like a contradiction
College of Arts & Law, University of Birmingham. Email: r.r.gould@bham.ac.uk.
Besheer Mohamad, “A new estimate of the U.S. Muslim population,”Pew Research, Jan.
,atwww.pewresearch.org/fact-tank////a-new-estimate-of-the-u-s-muslim-
population.
John Esposito, “Muslims in America or American Muslims?”, in Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad
and John L. Esposito, eds., Muslims on the Americanization Path? (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, ), –,.
See, for example, Muhammad al-Ahari, ed., Five Classic Muslim Slave Narratives: Selim Aga,
Job Ben Sulaiman, Nicholas Said, Omar ibn Said, Abu Bakr Sadiq (Chicago: Magribine
Press, ).
Journal of American Studies, Page of
©Cambridge University Press and British Association for American Studies
doi:./S
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in terms. President Trump’s Muslim ban is only the latest in a long series of
attempts to represent Islam as inherently alien to American culture. The reli-
gious, ethnic, and even linguistic implications of American Islam defy ingrained
stereotypes. Americans who complicate the monochromatic image of America
frequently evoke surprise while traveling abroad when they diverge from these
stereotypes.
The false perception of a monochrome America retains its hold
on the popular imagination, within the United States and globally.
Yet America has been multi-confessional and multiethnic since its beginnings.
While America’s diversity results in part from historical factors, including its
precolonial indigenous populations and slavery, this diversity has more recently
been affected by a substantial number of migrants from South Asia, Afghanistan,
and the Arab world, many of whom, although not all, are Muslim. First-gener-
ation Muslim Americans increasingly link the non-American aspects of their
history, be it Pakistani, Egyptian, Iraqi, or Afghan, to their American selves.
These hybrid identities are redefining the content of American Islam, and this
redefinition calls for rigorous scrutiny and critical theorization.
This essay tracks the transnational trajectory of one such hybrid identity,
formed in the context of a post-/ US-led war on terror: the American-
born Muslim Tarek Mehanna (b. ), from Sudbury, Massachusetts, of
Egyptian descent. Mehanna was convicted of providing “material support”
to foreign terrorists in and is currently serving a seventeen-year prison
sentence.
Political theorists and legal scholars have written eloquently and
persuasively about the dangerous legal precedent set by Mehanna’s case.
They have focussed on how this precedent empowers the US government to
criminalize protected speech, and to prosecute thought as dangerous in
itself, apart from its actual consequences.
While informed by such legal analyses, this essay takes a different turn.
Through an analysis of his sentencing statement, delivered in , and the
visual sketches that preceded it, I explore the intellectual origins of
Mehanna’s mode of dissent, and analyze his location within the American
tradition of civil disobedience.
I focus on how Mehanna’s appropriation of
The experience of African Americans abroad has been extensively documented in this
regard. See Gary Totten, African American Travel Narratives from Abroad:Mobility and
Cultural Work in the Age of Jim Crow (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, ).
The Supreme Court ruling around which the prosecution built their case against Mehanna
is Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project (), at www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/pdf/
-.pdf.
See Andrew March, “A Dangerous Mind?”,New York Times, April ,SR; Amna
Akbar, “How Tarek Mehanna Went to Prison for a Thought Crime,”The Nation,
Dec. ,atwww.thenation.com/article/how-tarek-mehanna-went-prison-thought-crime.
A more recent source for Mehanna’s thinking which was not formally taken into consid-
eration while working on this article are the posts on a Facebook page curated by his
Rebecca Ruth Gould
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Thoreau fits into a longer history of American dissidence. While recognizing
that Mehanna’s failure thus far to critically interrogate the violent premises of
some of his Islamist texts is a significant weakness in his thinking to date, my
interest lies more in his adaptation of core elements in American intellectual
history to a Salafist Muslim identity.
Alongside its status as a litmus test of the
limits of the American justice system, Mehanna’s case marks a new, yet famil-
iar, moment in the history of American civil disobedience.
In bringing this complex legal precedent to bear on the study of Muslim
American intellectual history, I want to suggest how, due to its progressive
transnationalization and its changing internal demographics, American
studies has entered a new phase. Mehanna’s case matters, and not just for
what it tells us about the changing ethos of the US justice system and its
increasing reliance on “innuendo and association”in a post-/ age.
Equally, it is important for what it teaches us about America’s changing intel-
lectual landscape. While Mehanna’s Muslim identity made him a target for
prosecution, his familiarity with the classics of American literature and
iconic moments in American history conditioned his ethics of dissent.
Mehanna’s program for political action, including its problematic association
with violence, belongs to an evolving indigenous tradition of American Islam,
of which Mehanna’s is but one of many versions. While Mehanna, who
affiliates with Salafism, a form of Islam that originated in Saudi Arabia
which is linked to the conservative Hanbali school of Islamic jurisprudence,
does not speak for all or even most Muslims, his thinking overall offers
insight into the dialectics of American and Muslim identity today. In order
to understand as well as resist the appeal of violence domestically and globally,
we must come to terms with its original context, including its American
history.
THE CASE AGAINST MEHANNA
On April , Tarek Mehanna received a seventeen-year prison sentence
for providing “material support”for al Qaeda. As legal scholar Amna Akbar
brother, and regularly updated with reports from prison: www.facebook.com/Free
TarekMehanna. This page has over , followers as of this writing.
The main Islamist text that Mehanna translated and disseminated on the Internet and
which was a focus of his conviction is Muhammad bin Ahmad as-Salim (Isa al-Awshin),
“ Ways to Serve and Participate in Jihad, at-Tibyan”(pdf at Internet Archive,
ia.us.archive.org). Although the prosecution could not demonstrate any use of this
work by al Qaeda, Mehanna’s promotion of this text was nonetheless regarded as “material
support”for this terrorist group. See Wadie E. Said, Crimes of Terror: The Legal and
Political Implications of Federal Terrorism Prosecutions (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
), .
This phrase is taken from Akbar.
Punishing Violent Thoughts
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notes, the government provided no evidence that Mehanna “acted at the
group’s request, or even that he ever met or communicated with anyone
from Al Qaeda.”
It was not necessary for the government to prove collusion
with any terrorist organizations in order to secure a conviction. It was enough
to demonstrate that Mehanna “created and/or translated, accepted credit for
authoring, and distributed text, videos, and other media, to inspire others to
engage in violent jihad.”
The ruling against Mehanna, and his extreme punishment, have been
criticized by scholars of the First Amendment as “not properly founded in
First Amendment law or statutory interpretation.”
Critics note that in
Mehanna’s case “material support”amounted to nothing more than posting
on an online forum, maintaining a blog, and translating into English Arabic
material supportive of jihad.
There were related charges, including a trip
to Yemen that the prosecution claimed was motivated by the intention to
join a terrorist training camp, but these charges were never proven and did
not constitute the basis of the case against Mehanna. As matters currently
stand, Mehanna will pass the years – in solitary confinement in a super-
max prison, as a result of his controversial beliefs.
Mehanna’s conviction typifies the legal culture of post-/ America. Already
in , it was possible to point to “twelve hundred Muslim and Arab men”who
were detained by US authorities in late and to the “subsequent interroga-
tion of eight thousand more.”
Yet with regard to the crime with which he was
charged, Mehanna’s conviction marks a new stage in the US war on terror. It
indicates that the government need not provide evidence of the intention to per-
petrate a terrorist act in order to secure a felony conviction. According to one
legal scholar, Mehanna’s conviction “may have succeeded in pushing the doctri-
nal envelope,”effectively changing the meaning of “material support”within US
law.
Another specialist in the First Amendment notes that the case of
Mehanna, like that of Julian Assange, illustrates “the complexities associated
with the exercise of First Amendment liberties in an emerging global theatre.”
Ibid.
Quoted from United States of America v. Tarek Mehanna and Ahmad Abusamra, archived at
www.investigativeproject.org/documents/case_docs/.pdf.
Nikolas Abel, “Note –U.S. v. Mehanna, the First Amendment, and Material Support in the
War on Terror,”Boston College Law Review, (), –,.
On the “material support”accusation see George D. Brown, “Notes on a Terrorism Trial:
Preventive Prosecution, ‘Material Support’and the Role of the Judge after United States
v. Mehanna,”Boston College Law School Faculty Papers, , Paper .
Paul M. Barrett, Muslims in America: The Struggle for the Soul of a Religion (New York:
Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, ), .
Brown, .
Timothy Zick, The Cosmopolitan First Amendment (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, ), .
Rebecca Ruth Gould
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In his capacity as a representative of the US government, the prosecuting
attorney in Mehanna’s case offered his own view of legal boundaries and
norms. He told the jury that while it is “not illegal to watch something on
the television,”it is illegal “to watch something in order to cultivate your
desire, your ideology, your plots to kill American soldiers, or to help those,
as in this case, who were.”
Relying on charged, emotional language, and in
effect calling on the jury to disregard the First Amendment in assessing
Mehanna’s guilt, the prosecutor created a precedent for treating the cultiva-
tion of an unpopular ideology as a crime, and suggested that reading a
public document may be subject to legal sanction, depending on one’s motiv-
ation (and, by implication, on one’s ideology and religion). The prosecutor’s
assertion implies that, while it is permissible for people of certain beliefs (law
enforcement officials, or, for example, non-Muslims) to read dangerous mate-
rials, the same material is forbidden to those with different beliefs.
As the prosecutor acknowledges, Mehanna was not accused of violent acts, or
even of intending to commit such acts. The prosecution’s strategy went beyond
criminalizing intent. To the extent that it is illegal “to watch something in order
to cultivate your desire [or] your ideology,”criminality resides in the motives
that accompany reading and watching, not in the acts themselves. Given that
motives spring inseparably from beliefs, the prosecutor proposed to criminalize
thought. Such (mis)readings of the law directly result from a post-/ legal
culture, which treats terrorism as a crime that must be preemptively addressed.
As Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez stated in ,“we simply cannot and
will not wait for these particular crimes to occur before taking action.”
These
documents demonstrate that the security agenda of the post-/ state is in
tension with the free exercise of religion and the right to freedom of belief.
In addition to heralding a new phase in the legal interpretation and appli-
cation of the First Amendment, Mehanna’s ideological situation is distinctive
in itself. As his sentencing statement (discussed in the next section) shows,
Mehanna forges a chain of solidarity across racial and religious borders.
When he addressed the judge and jury in a Boston courtroom following the
announcement of his seventeen-year sentence, Mehanna also addressed a
diverse cross-section of the American public, and situating himself within
the American dissident tradition. His statement drew extensively on
American ideologies, both violent and nonviolent, to justify his intellectual
United States v. Mehanna, No. ‐‐GAO (D. Mass. ), day ,–.
Alberto Gonzales, “Remarks at the World Affairs Council of Pittsburgh on Stopping
Terrorists before They Strike: The Justice Department’s Power of Prevention,”at www.
usdoj.gov/ag/speeches//ag_speech_.html. Gonzalez’s statement is discussed in
Robert Chesney, “Beyond Conspiracy? Anticipatory Prosecution and the Challenge of
Unaffiliated Terrorism,”Southern California Law Review,,(), –.
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trajectory. This American dissident trajectory, Mehanna argued, had brought
him into conflict with US government. The relation that Mehanna triangu-
lated, between US dissidence, government surveillance, and Muslim piety,
calls on us to rethink the parameters of civil disobedience in post-/
America. In bringing liberal conceptions of freedom and agency into
conflict and dialogue with religious conviction, Mehanna departs from
society’s mainstream secular liberalism and returns us to faith-based action.
“IT’S BECAUSE OF AMERICA THAT I AM WHO I AM”
On April , when his sentence was announced, Mehanna read a pre-
pared statement that is suffused with a rhetoric suggesting an awareness of
its own posterity. By virtue of its historical significance, as well as the range
of its examples and the scope of its arguments, this document is a key text
in the canon of American dissent, and an important primary source for
American Islam in the post-/ period. The testimony begins by explaining
Mehanna’s refusal to cooperate with the FBI agents who offered him the
chance to become a collaborator in exchange for avoiding prosecution. His
opening sets the tone for the narrative that follows:
Exactly four years ago this month I was finishing my work shift at a local hospital. As I was
walking to my car I was approached by two federal agents. They said that I had a choice to
make: I could do things the easy way, or I coulddo them the hard way. The “easy”way, as
they explained, was that I would become an informant forthe government, and if I didso
I would never see the inside of a courtroom or a prison cell. As forthe hard way, this is it.
Here I am, having spent the majority of the four years since then in a solitary cell the size
of a small closet, in which I am locked down for hours each day.
Dramatically setting forth the events leading up to his arrest, Mehanna details
the conflict with the state that ultimately resulted in his long-term incarcer-
ation. In presenting his version of the case, Mehanna persuasively argues
that he was punished for his principled refusal to become an informant and
to cooperate with the authorities.
Mehanna’s claim is reinforced by the facts of the case: the most damning evi-
dence against him was provided by a felon-turned-informant, who financed
Mehanna’s trip to Yemen (claimed by the government to have been in search
of an al Qaeda training camp), and who later admitted to planning a terrorist
attack in a US shopping mall.
In exchange for immunity from prosecution,
Kareem Abuzahra was a co-collaborator who was granted immunity in order to testify in the
case against Mehanna and was a key witness for the prosecution. However, as noted by
several commentators, his testimony was compromised by his admission that he was
willing to lie. See Brown, .
Rebecca Ruth Gould
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this individual agreed to testify against Mehanna. Due to this agreement, a man
who plotted a terrorist attack against the United States remains unprosecuted
(and indeed protected from prosecution) while Mehanna, who was never
charged with planning such attacks, was punished with a seventeen-year
prison sentence. After presenting himself as a scapegoat who refused to cooper-
ate with the FBI, Mehanna dwells on his dual identity as a Muslim American.
I wasn’t born in a Muslim country …I was born and raised right here in America and
this angers many people: how is it that I can be an American and believe the things I
believe, take the positions I take? Everything a man is exposed to in his environment
becomes an ingredient that shapes his outlook, and I’mnodifferent. So, in more ways
than one, it’s because of America that I am who I am [emphasis added].
After affirming his American identity, Mehanna recounts coming of age as
an Egyptian American learning about the world through the historical narra-
tives he read in American public schools. Mehanna recounts how the Batman
comic book series opened his eyes to the fact that “there are oppressors, there
are the oppressed, and there are those who step up to defend the oppressed.”
As Mehanna grew older he found this paradigm confirmed in every narrative
he encountered. “I gravitated towards any book that reflected that paradigm,”
Mehanna explains, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,The Autobiography of Malcolm X, and
I even saw an ethical dimension to The Catcher in the Rye.”Mehanna’s
account of American political history is structured by a tripartite ethical frame-
work: the oppressed, such as enslaved African Americans; the oppressor; and
those who, like radical abolitionist John Brown, defend the oppressed.
Mehanna invokes Harriet Tubman, Nat Turner, and John Brown for their
“fight against slavery”; Emma Goldman and Eugene Debs for their advocacy of
“struggles of the labor unions, working class, and poor”; the German-born Jew
Anne Frank, persecuted and killed by the Nazis; Rosa Parks, Malcolm X, and
Martin Luther King Jr. for organizing the “civil rights struggle”; the commun-
ist revolutionary Ho Chi Minh, who helped the Vietnamese “liberate them-
selves from one invader after another”; and, finally, Nelson Mandela, who
fought South African apartheid.
Ranging across the globe, these are key
figures in progressive US middle-school curricula.
More debatable in terms of historical accuracy, but revealing of his invest-
ment in American history, is Mehanna’s take on Paul Revere’s midnight ride.
“Tarek’s Sentencing Statement,”Appendix to Glenn Greenwald, “The Real Criminals in
the Tarek Mehanna Case,”Salon, April ,atwww.salon.com////the_real_-
criminals_in_the_tarek_mehanna_case. All future references are to the unpaginated text at
this link. Mehanna’s statement is available on numerous websites, including the dedicated
website for Mehanna’s case at http://freetarek.wordpress.com.
See, for example, the lesson plans in Joy Hakim, Johns Hopkins University Teaching Guide
and Resource Book (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ).
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Arguing that it was conducted in order to “warn the people that the British were
marching to Lexington to arrest Sam Adams and John Hancock then on to
Concord to confiscate the weapons stored there by the Minutemen,”
Mehanna treats Paul Revere’s ride as an example of jihad. “There’s an Arabic
word to describe what those Minutemen did that day,”he states. “It was a
word repeated many times in this courtroom. That word is jihad.”Mehanna
here positions himself within the history of American dissidence, presenting
it also as a history of violence. He also reclaims the term “jihad”while linking
it to a progressive agenda, as many prominent Muslim Americans have done
in recent years, partly in order to clarify the nonviolent aspects of its meaning.
Mehanna’s lineage of abolitionism, the labor movement, anti-Nazi mobiliza-
tion, Jim Crow laws in the American South, and South African apartheid is at
once cosmopolitan and conventional. This list of milestones could have been
lifted from many US textbooks on world history. The major difference
between his version of American history and the state-sponsored one is
Mehanna’s presentation of the American Revolution as a form of jihad
against British imperialists. Mehanna may have been introduced to the figures
he mentions while attending Lincoln-Sudbury Regional High School, yet he
adds to a familiar rendering of American history an incipient SalafiIslamist
activism that introduces a new struggle of the oppressed against their oppressors.
Perhaps due to the United States’historical status as a primary military target
for Islamic radicalism, the scope for reading Islamic dissent sympathetically in
relation to the other Third World liberation movements has historically been
minimized in US contexts. Against a dominant American version of world
history that tends towards either indifference or hostility towards Muslim lib-
eration movements, Mehanna’s sentencing statement extends the range of
American nonviolence by integrating Islamist dissent into its ethical core.
Mehanna’s outrage at US-perpetrated injustice in Iraq, Afghanistan, and else-
where in the Muslim world is familiar to any regular reader of the news, but his
endeavor to link his own radicalism with dissident strands in American history
strikes a more unusual note. From Martin Luther King Jr. to Gandhi, many acti-
vists critical of US politics prior to Mehanna have grounded their programs for
political action in genealogies of American dissent. But transpiring as it does in
apost-/ world that constructs Muslims and Americans as antagonists,
Mehanna’s combination of American dissidence and Muslim activism demands
close attention. Mehanna’s critique of American imperialism lays a narrative foun-
dation for his status as an American dissident and complicates a US liberalism that
has engaged in only limited ways thus far with Muslim points of view.
For one such use of “jihad”see Amina Wadud, Inside the Gender Jihad: Women’s Reform in
Islam (Oxford: Oneworld, ), as well as below, n. .
Rebecca Ruth Gould
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My discussion of Mehanna’s case has three goals. First, I bring together the
words and images through which Mehanna engaged with Henry David
Thoreau. Second, I trace the implications of Mehanna’s merger of Salafi
Islamism with this American political thinker for our understanding of
American intellectual history. Third, I consider how the controversies
stirred by Mehanna’s views and persecution make Thoreauvian modes of
dissent meaningful within a post-/ world. Whereas, read on his own
terms, Thoreau’s early writing can be seen to support a withdrawal from pol-
itics, many subsequent engagements with Thoreau’s writings have activated
other latent possibilities within his political thinking. In registering the disson-
ance between what Thoreau likely intended and the meaning his words have
since acquired, I clarify their ongoing relevance, as well as their relation to
violence.
WORDS AND IMAGES
I will now turn to Mehanna’s verbal and visual commentaries on his impris-
onment, composed prior to his conviction in , while he was awaiting trial.
Like nearly all prison literature, these texts traverse the threshold of public and
private writing, making a general statement while bearing witness to an inner
struggle. From the prison cell where he was held under solitary confinement
from to , Mehanna gave visual form to his incarceration.
Whereas Mehanna’s visual work explicitly signals his debt to Thoreau, his sen-
tencing statement only alludes to Thoreau indirectly, through the persona of
abolitionist John Brown (–). I will therefore first discuss Mehanna’s
handling of Thoreau’s early essay on civil disobedience in his art before con-
sidering how Thoreau mediated Mehanna’s encounter with John Brown in
the sentencing statement.
At the top of Mehanna’s sketch of life in prison is an inscription consisting
of an extended citation from Thoreau’s“Resistance to Civil Government”
(), a text which later came to be known –to Gandhi, Hannah Arendt,
Martin Luther King Jr., and the many others who have drawn sustenance
from it –by the title “On Civil Disobedience.”
“Resistance to Civil
Government”was composed in Concord, a mere eighteen miles away from
Sudbury, the town where Mehanna grew up, and only four times further
“Resistance to Civil Government,”was based on a lecture originally entitled “The Rights
and Duties of the Individual in Relation to Government”(). The essay was first
called “Civil Disobedience”in the posthumous edition of Thoreau’s writings: A Yankee
in Canada, with Anti-slavery and Reform Papers (). See Nancy Rosenblum,
“Introduction,”in Henry David Thoreau, Political Writings, ed. Rosenblum (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, ), vii–xxxi, xii.
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away from Springfield, the town where John Brown launched his abolition
campaign.
In an early sketch prior to his trial, Mehanna portrayed a tableau consisting
of rows of bricks towering over a prisoner. Graffiti selectively adorns the
bricks’surface. The upper half of one wall is covered with a quotation from
Thoreau, and the manner of inscription evokes Mehanna’s confinement.
Thoreau’s words read as follows: “I could not help being struck with the fool-
ishness of that institution which treated me as if I were mere flesh and blood
and bones.”
“If there was a wall of stone between me and my townsmen,”
Thoreau continues, “there was a still more difficult one to climb or break
through before they could get to be as free as I was.”Thoreau had good
reason to minimize his confinement, and to stress its limited impact on his
psyche, given that he was only imprisoned for one evening in the local
Concord jail. Mehanna was incarcerated under different circumstances, yet
he incorporated Thoreau’s words into his graffiti: “I did not for a moment
feel confined, and the walls seemed a great waste of stone and mortar”
(“RCG,”). Although he faced a much longer incarceration, Mehanna’s
kinship with Thoreau is obvious. Their shared tendency to privilege the spir-
itual over the material reflects how both thinkers ground their political
thought in religious conviction. “The state never intentionally confronts a
man’s sense, intellectual or moral, but only his body,”Thoreau continues in
Mehanna’s citation. “It is not armed with superior wit or honesty, but with
superior physical strength.”The passage famously concludes with a mixture
of defiance and a promise of peace: “I was not born to be forced. I will
breathe after my own fashion”(“RCG,”). Thoreau’s insistence on the sov-
ereignty of his conscience over the materiality of the state was to become a
central platform of Mehanna’s political theory.
Turning from the words to the image: sticks marking the passage of time
cover the bottom four rows of bricks. A flower blooms above the bricks,
inscribed with the words “FREE AAFIA.”Mehanna here aligns himself
with Aafia Siddiqui, a Pakistani neurologist currently serving a sentence of
eighty-six years in solitary confinement in a Texas prison. The same year
that he was sentenced, Mehanna wrote a short essay in which he recollected
meeting Siddiqui in person. She was a “frail, limp, exhausted woman who
could barely hold her own head up straight in a pale blue wheelchair.”
The harshness of Siddiqui’s sentence is due to what her sentencing judge
Henry David Thoreau, “Resistance to Civil Government,”in Thoreau, Political Writings,
–,. Future references to this text are given parenthetically in the text, with the abbre-
viation “RCG.”
Tarek Mehanna, “The Aafia Siddiqui I Saw,”in Dr. Aafia Siddiqui: Other Voices (Silver
Springs, MD: Peace Thru Justice Foundation, ), .
Rebecca Ruth Gould
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called “enhancements”for, among other things, terrorism. Siddiqui was con-
victed of attempting to kill her US interrogators when she was detained for
questioning in Afghanistan.
Taken from her Pakistan residence and arrested
in , Siddiqui was convicted in .
While media coverage has focussed
on alleged ties to al Qaeda, the attempted murder for which Siddiqui was con-
victed is unrelated to such allegations. Aafia has acquired “iconic status”in
some parts of the Muslim world as an exemplar of the hypocrisies of the
US-led war on terror.
Her case has received considerable media attention
in Pakistan especially, and continues to strain US–Pakistan relations. In
incorporating Aafia’s story into his tableau of prison life, Mehanna affiliates
himself with a transnational network of Islamist political prisoners who are
incarcerated for their thoughts, publications, translations, and comments on
internet forums.
To return to Mehanna’s image: completing the visualization of arbitrary
justice, Aafia’s name is topped with the Arabic letters (la ‘ilaha ‘ila l-
Lah), meaning “There is no God but God,”the Islamic confession of faith.
To the right of these words is a poster, partially obscured by the frame, which
reads, “ADMINISTRATION SEGREGATION UNIT RULES: GIVE UP
YOUR HUMANITY.”Beneath this sign, as if to negate the directive above
it, block letters spell the word NEVER. These words develop the Thoreauvian
insistence on the sovereignty of the individual conscience over any nation’s
law. In a passage which Mehanna no doubt applied to his own situation,
Thoreau called on the state to “recognize the individual as a higher and independ-
ent power from which all its own power and authorityare derived”(“RCG,”).
When he insists on the absolute prerogative of the individual over the state,
Mehanna is influenced as much by Thoreau’s articulation of this prerogative
as by the Muslim sources he cites at length in his social-media posts.
Two rows below the quotation from Thoreau, a pair of outstretched hands
reach towards a Quran. The sacred text is labeled as such in Arabic and
English. To the left of these images are six prison bars (Figure ). When
viewed together, the bars and the image at the bottom of three columns of
stars and a white blotch trace, in purple and white lines, the US flag. The
image of the flag captures the paradox Mehanna seeks to expose: the
American Republic, created to protect life, liberty, and the pursuit of
A chronology is given in Middle East Journal,,(), and ,(), .
For a collection of accounts of what is known about Siddiqui’s case see the articles listed by
the New York Times at http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/s/
aafia_siddiqui/index.html.
Declan Walsh, “The Mystery of Dr Aafia Siddiqui,”The Guardian, Nov. ,atwww.
theguardian.com/world//nov//aafia-siddiqui-al-qaida.
See the official Facebook page at www.facebook.com/FreeTarekMehanna.
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Figure . Mehanna’s prison sketch ().
Rebecca Ruth Gould
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happiness, is now actively undermining these commitments by persecuting the
free speech of its Muslim citizens.
Mehanna’s verbal solidarity with Aafia is reinforced by a second sketch,
entitled “Tribute to Aafia”(Figure ). “The male and female believers are
allies [awliya’] of one another”(al-Tawbah :), reads the inscription
along the top. Although the first citation alludes to a suggestion of gender
equality, the Quranic citation beneath those words reinforces patriarchal
difference: “Men are the protectors and maintainers of women”(al-Nisa
:). Both citations are given in Arabic, followed by English translation.
The first quotation participates in a growing trend within American Islam
to bring transnational feminism into conversation with Muslim learning,
while the second reinstates a patriarchal hierarchy.
Like the flag that adorns the bottom right corner of the sketch, representing
the persecution of Muslim Americans, Mehanna’s citations serve a dual
purpose: they protest injustice while appropriating a history of American
dissent. In her exegesis of Thoreau’s political theory, political theorist Leigh
Jenco documents how, carried to its logical conclusion, Thoreau’s political
theory could be seen to underwrite a withdrawal from the political realm.
While for Thoreau “physical coercion is both necessary and sufficient for
the enforcement of political obligations,”writes Jenco, the state’s reversion
to force “is at odds with the holistically perceived higher law that grounds
Thoreau’s moral duty.”
When Mehanna uses Thoreau to advocate a civil
disobedience that privileges the individual over the masses as the locus of pol-
itical protest, he adapts this form of dissent to a Muslim American reality,
through a process that transforms both elements in this compound identity.
This individualist orientation brings Mehanna even closer to Thoreau’s con-
ception of civil resistance than the more collectively focussed forms of civil dis-
obedience articulated by Martin Luther King Jr. and Gandhi. In the passage
cited by Mehanna, Thoreau argues that no coercion from the state can over-
ride the individual’s ethical prerogative. Unlike Thoreau, King regards the
resistant body as a primary locus of political resistance. By contrast, Thoreau
and Mehanna focus on the work of the individual conscience in critiquing
the state. Their shared rejection of the state’s claims to legitimacy aligns
Mehanna to Thoreau and contrasts with the collectivism of King and other
civil rights activists.
See, for example, Asma Barlas, “Believing Women”in Islam: Unreading Patriarchal
Interpretations of the Qur’an (Austin: University of Texas Press, ).
Leigh Kathryn Jenco, “Thoreau’s Critique of Democracy,”Review of Politics,,(),
–,.
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Thoreau memorably wrote in the essay quoted by Mehanna, “law never
made men a whit more just; and, by means of their respect for it, even the
well-disposed are daily made the agents of injustice”(“RCG,”). Thoreau’s
insistence on the ethical limits of the law finds its way directly into
Figure . Mehanna, “Tribute to Aafia.”
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Mehanna’s political thought, which converges and stands in tension with
older currents within Islamic thought that similarly validate a higher law,
shariʿa. Although classically shariʿadenoted a form of law that incorporated
all aspects of human existence, for most modern Muslims shariʿasignifies pri-
marily “a spiritual resource, a connection with God, and a way to discipline the
inner self.”
Mehanna is troubled by what Hallaq refers to as the “eviscer-
ation”of shariʿain modernity, wherein it has come to reference a primarily
private realm. Like many Salafis, and Islamic modernists generally, he wishes
to situate shariʿamore publicly, such that it can ground political decisions
and thinking. Yet, as Hallaq also recognizes, any attempt to modernize
shariʿain this way is fraught with contradiction, because Islamic law originally
developed in a world that thought differently about the relation between
public and private spheres.
Whereas in classical Islamic thought the individ-
ual conscience lacks sovereignty, it plays a more decisive role within
Thoreauvian political theory, and in most strands of American political
thought that have developed from this beginning.
Mehanna’s dialogue
between Salafism and Thoreauvian political theory transpires within this
this maze of contradictions.
Against this analogy between American transcendentalism and Mehanna’s
Salafimodernism, it might be objected that Thoreau did not directly endorse
violence (although he did endorse a perpetrator of violence, John Brown). On
these grounds, Mehanna’s use of Thoreau to elaborate his version of justice
might be seen as a selective interpretation. It is true that “Resistance to
Civil Government”presents a largely negative account of political action,
and dwells more concretely on the dangers of acting wrongly than on the
means and strategies for acting rightly. Additionally, and arguably in contradis-
tinction to Mehanna, Thoreau defends the legitimacy of avoiding politics tout
court. Thoreau states,
It is not a man’s duty, as a matter of course, to devote himself to the eradication of any,
even the most enormous wrong; he may still properly have other concerns to engage
him; but it is his duty, at least, to wash his hands of it, and, if he gives it no thought
longer, not to give it practically his support. (“RCG,”)
Wael Hallaq, The Impossible State: Islam, Politics, and Modernity’s Moral Predicament
(New York: Columbia University Press, ), x.
See Talal Asad, Thinking about Secularism and Law in Egypt (Leiden: International
Institute for the Study of Islam in the Modern World, ).
I do not intend to suggest that classical Islamic thought has nothing to say about the indi-
vidual conscience, just that there is a difference in emphasis, and that Thoreau, rather than
Islam, is closest to Mehanna in terms of his approach. For a discussion of the individual con-
science in Islam grounded in classical sources see M. Mujeeb, “The Status of Individual
Conscience in Islam,”Studies in Islam,,(), –.
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While not an explicit rejection of violence or of direct political action, this
passage can be read as a justification for withdrawal from the political realm.
However, Thoreau’s vision of the appropriate grounds for political action
should inform our understanding of the circumstances under which this
essay was composed, including the night Thoreau spent in jail for his civil dis-
obedience. Thoreau acted without drawing attention to his dissidence. It is
legitimate to avoid politics, Thoreau believed, so long as this avoidance does
not increase another’ssuffering. Paying a poll tax to support an unjust war,
in this case the Mexican–American War (–), as the US government
required him to do, was for Thoreau unconscionable.
ABOLITIONIST AND SALAFI MILITANCY COMPARED
The ideology underlying Mehanna’s controversial views on violence also
echoes the actions of another crusader against US-perpetrated injustice
whom Thoreau, more than any other American writer, memorialized: the abo-
litionist John Brown. More than years after his death, Brown remains a
controversial hero. His ethics of bloodshed, like Mehanna’s, leave little
room for mercy. Brown’s legacy closely parallels that of Mehanna, not least
because of the links between his Christian fundamentalism and Mehanna’s
Salafism. Brown famously led a violent slave uprising at Harper’s Ferry in
, and was soon afterwards publicly hung. Like Mehanna, Brown endorsed
violence as a means of resisting extreme injustice. Prior to leading the slave
rebellion in Harper’s Ferry, Brown oversaw the killing of five white settlers
in the slave-owning settlement of Pottawatomie Creek, Kansas.
(Notably,
it was for his organization of the uprising, rather than for these murders,
that Brown was hung; the former was considered action against the state
and therefore subject to capital punishment.) Mehanna stands accused of no
such violent crime. Both activists, however, share a concern with social
justice, and believe that attaining social justice may require violence,
whether exercised by them or by others. Mehanna’s explicit identification
with Thoreau in his sketch and with Brown in his sentencing statement
further links the two figures.
On October , one day before the jury’s sentence of death by hanging
for Brown, Thoreau mounted the platform of the town hall in Concord,
For further on Thoreau’s support of political activism in relation to his skepticism towards
politics see Jonathan Mckenzie, “How to Mind Your Own Business: Thoreau on Political
Indifference,”New England Quarterly,,(), –.
Zoe Trodd, “Writ in Blood: John Brown’s Charter of Humanity, the Tribunal of History,
and the Thick Link of American Political Protest,”Journal for the Study of Radicalism,,
(), –,.
Rebecca Ruth Gould
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Massachusetts to deliver the speech called “A Plea for John Brown.”In this
and in a later essay written for Brown’s memorial service, Thoreau discussed
Brown’s rebellion as “a revolution in behalf of another and an oppressed
people.”
Thoreau’s endorsement of Brown’s raid indicates an evolution in
his thinking about violence and nonviolence beyond his earlier essay of
, and reveals common ground between Thoreauvian political theory
and Muslim militancy. As Turner suggests in his reading of Thoreau, conjoin-
ing aesthetic and legal theory can make of civil (or uncivil) disobedience a
“public statement through the artistic re-creation of the act of refusal and
public meditation on its significance.”
Stated otherwise, Thoreau and
Mehanna made their private consciences publicly political through their
words and images.
Although Thoreau and Brown parted ways on many substantive issues,
Thoreau’s memorialization of Brown and his efforts to save him from execu-
tion reveal an important dimension of his intellectual agenda. Thoreau praises
Brown as “a superior man”who “did not value his bodily life in comparison
with ideal things”(“PJB,”). The ideal dissident, in Thoreau’s understand-
ing, is willing to lay down his life for his beliefs. Thoreau also praises Brown for
recognizing that the individual is “the equal of any and all governments”
(“PJB,”). Revealing a kinship with Brown’s Calvinism, Thoreau implicitly
acknowledges that there are occasions when violence is the only legitimate and
viable form of resistance.
In maintaining that individual conscience will
ultimately prevail over the state’s violence, Thoreau and Mehanna cultivate
a sovereign human conscience, which they consider more efficacious than
bodily protest. Thoreau refers to this conscience as the “higher law”; for
Mehanna, it is shariʿa. For both, this ethical hierarchy defines their respective
positions within the American dissident tradition. The respective distance of
Mehanna and Thoreau from the teachings of Gandhi and Martin Luther King
Jr. regarding the efficacy of nonviolence is linked to their greater openness to
violence and, ultimately, to their more militant politics.
Brown’s concept of the sovereignty of the individual conscience was
observed and appreciated by Emerson as well, following the former’s visit to
Henry David Thoreau, “A Plea for John Brown”(), in Thoreau, Political Writings,
–; and Thoreau, “The Last Days of John Brown”(), in ibid., –. Future
references to these essays are given parenthetically in the text, with the abbreviations
“PJB”and “LDJB.”
Jack Turner, “Performing Conscience: Thoreau, Political Action and the Pleas for John
Brown,”Political Theory,,(), –,.
For a suggestive account of the political dimensions of New England Puritanism that
informs this reading of Thoreau and Brown see Michael Walzer, The Revolution of the
Saints: A Study in the Origins of Radical Politics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, ).
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Concord on a lecture tour. According to Emerson, Brown believed that “one
good, believing, strong-minded man is worth a hundred, nay twenty thousand
men without character, and that the right men would give a permanent direc-
tion to the fortunes of a state.”
Neither Thoreau nor Emerson dwelt on their
substantive divergences from Brown, and equally, neither advocated violence.
Their support of Brown was strategic: they saw it as a means of bringing slavery
to an end, and of forestalling and delegitimizing Brown’s execution. As
Truman John Nelson notes, the chronology of Thoreau’s stand for Brown
ought to inform its interpretation: “it took place before Brown had had his
day in court …and inevitably made his death a martyrdom.”
In defending
Brown, Thoreau was also defending the principle of “innocent until proven
guilty,”and asserting his right to defend unpopular voices in the name of
justice. It was an alliance forged from adversity. Yet a century and a half
later, parallels between Thoreau’s approach to violence and militant social-
justice agendas like Mehanna’s are increasingly evident.
Brown insisted that “any man more right than his neighbors constitutes a
majority of one”(“RCG,”). All three thinkers –Thoreau, Brown, and
Mehanna –vest their faith in the sovereignty of the individual. From their
point of view, even one righteous person who practices justice is adequate to
shift the balance of right and wrong. Brown raided a US government
arsenal with only twenty-one men in his “battalion,”yet persuaded that his
cause would triumph. Thoreau viewed with contempt the pragmatism of his
contemporaries, who judged Brown crazy. In a speech he read at Brown’s
funeral, Thoreau pointed out that if Brown had “gone with five thousand
men, liberated a thousand slaves, killed a hundred or two slaveholders, and
had as many more killed on his own side, but not lost his own life, these
same editors would have called [his rebellion] by a more respectable name”
(“LDJB,”). Brown’s willingness to live and to die for a cause in
defiance of mainstream liberal politics gives the dissident spiritual leverage
over the state responsible for his incarceration. In Thoreau’s view, this spiritual
prerogative (which he calls “the higher law,”anticipating Mehanna’s concep-
tion of shariʿa) is the source of the dissident’s power. Mehanna’s writings
from prison rely heavily on this concept of an individual conscience acting
upon a higher law.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson, –, Volume IX, ed.
Edward Waldo Emerson and Waldo Emerson Forbes (Boston and New York: Houghton
Mifflin Company, ), .
Truman John Nelson, “Thoreau and John Brown,”in The Truman Nelson Reader, ed.
William John Schafer (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, ), –,,
original emphasis.
Rebecca Ruth Gould
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In defending Brown’s character, Thoreau compares him with the American
revolutionaries of , expressing the same admiration that Mehanna felt for
figures like Paul Revere. Whereas the Revolutionaries “could bravely face
their country’s foes,”Brown “had the courage to face his country herself, when
she was in the wrong”(“PJB,”). As Turner notes, “What Thoreau most
admires about Brown is his willingness to hold not simply America’s enemies
to moral account, but America itself.”
Thoreau’s own practice of holding
America to account no doubt served as a model for Mehanna, who also
cited US violence as a basis for his opposition to his government. His senten-
cing statement referenced the massacre perpetrated by Sergeant Robert Bales,
who killed sixteen Afghan women and children while on a tour of duty in
Kandahar in .“When Sgt. Bales shot those Afghans to death,”stated
Mehanna, “all of the focus in the media was on him –his life, his stress, his
PTSD, the mortgage on his home –as if he was the victim. Very little sym-
pathy was expressed for the people he actually killed.”Controversially, Bales
was tried in a military court in the United States, rather than in
Afghanistan, among those who most directly suffered from his crime. Bales
was sentenced to life in prison, without parole.
Mehanna’s sentencing statement contains other allusions to Thoreau, par-
ticularly to the latter’s writing on John Brown. For example, Thoreau insisted
that Brown “could not have been tried by a jury of his peers because his peers
did not exist”(“PJB,”). Similarly, Mehanna follows his discussion of Bales
in the sentencing statement with the claim that the media’s biases imperil the
integrity of the justice system, making it impossible for a jury to deliver a just
verdict. “I wasn’t tried before a jury of my peers,”Mehanna states, “because
with the mentality gripping America today, I have no peers. Counting on
this fact, the government prosecuted me –not because they needed to, but
simply because they could”(emphasis added). Mehanna here compares his
own prosecution to that of John Brown, as filtered through Thoreau’s writ-
ings. Implicating Thoreau in this conversation introduces a new dimension.
Both Mehanna and Brown openly advocate violence in ways Thoreau did
not, and both do so on religious grounds. Each dissident regards his conscience
as sovereign. They thereby elevate their political convictions and chosen faith
Turner, .
For a discussion of Bales’s case from the point of view of legal theory see Michael D. Smith,
“Mapping the Geolegalities of the Afghanistan Intervention,”in Irus Braverman,
Nicholas Blomley, David Delaney, and Alexandre Kedar, eds., The Expanding Spaces of
Law: A Timely Legal Geography (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, ),
–. Bales has recently accounted for his actions in an interview for GQ with
Brenden Vaughn: “Robert Bales Speaks: Confessions of America’s Most Notorious War
Criminal,”at www.gq.com/story/robert-bales-interview-afghanistan-massacre, accessed
Nov. .
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over the laws of the state, which for them is based on precarious ethical
foundations.
“Resistance to Civil Government”was not the only work in which Thoreau
set forth his views on the conditions under which rebellion against the state is
both legitimate and necessary. Ten years after delivering “Resistance to Civil
Government”to the Concord community, Thoreau called an assembly in
Concord’s town hall to plead for John Brown. He had been disturbed by
reports that, following Brown’s raid, some of his Massachusetts neighbors
had begun to advocate for his execution. Thoreau was determined to
contest their vilifications. As his biographer reports, Thoreau was “instantly,
totally caught up in the passion of the moment”and “decided to make a
public speech to right the imbalance”of the public sentiment that was
turning against Brown.
He rang the bell himself to call the meeting to
order when the town’s selectman whose job it was to ring the bell for such
meetings refused. Thoreau then proceeded to offer a plea to his neighbors,
not, as he clarified, in the hopes of saving his subject’s life, which, as any
realist could have seen, was already forfeited, but rather for the sake of
saving Brown’s“character, –his immortal life”(“PJB,”).
Compared to his speech on Brown at Concord’s town hall, Thoreau’s
earlier refusal to pay the poll tax to fund the Mexican–American War was a
passive act of resistance. Thoreau was only jailed because of his unintended
encounter with a tax collector. Although Thoreau acted with political convic-
tion, his journey to jail was not intentional; nor was his release, which was
secured by a friend who paid his taxes on his behalf. The political implications
of such passive action are limited; waiting for specific circumstances is obvi-
ously not the most effective way of overturning existing political norms.
By contrast, Thoreau’s plea for John Brown was an act of mobilization.
Thoreau’s attempt to persuade his neighbors of the justness of Brown’s
cause was possibly his most political act. Not yet a theory of violence,
Thoreau’s“Plea for John Brown”is a program for revolutionary political
action. It proposes to overturn the existing social order, however gradually.
While “Resistance to Civil Government”argues that every citizen is obliged
to avoid perpetuating evil through nonviolent means, by , in a state of
mounting frustration over the continuation of slavery, Thoreau was ready
to acknowledge that under the right circumstances, political violence may be
legitimate and necessary for combating injustice.
Not everyone is obliged to engage in political violence, but when conscience
dictates and when the cause is just, Thoreau accepts this form of dissent. While
Robert D. Richardson, Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind (Berkeley: University of
California Press, ), .
Rebecca Ruth Gould
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praising Brown’s character, Thoreau reflects on the appropriate scope of pol-
itical action, including the conditions under which violence is justified. “It was
[Brown’s] peculiar doctrine,”Thoreau writes, “that a man has a perfect right
to interfere by force with the slaveholder, in order to rescue the slave. I agree
with him”(“PJB,”). This acknowledgment that force is legitimate under
certain conditions highlights an unresolved ambiguity in Thoreau’s concept of
civil disobedience, which in part accounts for its range of appropriations, from
the pacifism of Tolstoy and Gandhi to the militancy of Mehanna.
The strat-
egy Thoreau followed when he refused to pay the poll tax did not exhaust the
range of legitimate political options. Political theorists who treat Thoreau as
primarily or exclusively a theorist of nonviolence miss these incendiary dimen-
sions of his political thought. Thoreau’s ambivalence towards violence (more
than his more publicized rejection of it) is part of what makes him relevant to
Mehanna, who came of age in a country that, with respect to conflicts in the
Middle East, had demonstrated a preference for short-term violence over a
longer-term quest for peace.
Four months before his conviction, Mehanna circulated a series of quota-
tions he had been collecting on the topics of violence, terrorism, freedom,
the law, and prison. He had extracted these quotations from the writings
and speeches of Malcolm X, Howard Zinn, Robert Fisk, Usama bin Laden,
Sayyid Qutb, and Thoreau, indicating his source in each case. This is an eclec-
tic but carefully selected list; US radicalism and Islamic dissent are closely
intertwined in Mehanna’s thinking. Mehanna prefaced the collection with
the remark that the quotations were “selected from various books I have
with me in my cell that I feel to be relevant to my trial in one way or
another.”
One of the Malcolm X quotations directly touches on the legitim-
acy of violence: “I don’t go along with anyone who wants to teach our people
nonviolence until someone at the same time is teaching our enemy to be non-
violent.”
Although Thoreau is typically remembered as a pacifist who
retreated to his home by Walden Pond instead of entering the political
arena, the militancy expressed in his writings and speeches on Brown directly
anticipates Mehanna’s approach to violence against the state.
Gandhi, for example, claimed that “until I read that essay I never found a suitable English
translation for my Indian word, Satyagraha …There is no doubt that Thoreau’s ideas
greatly influenced my movement in India.”Quoted in George Henrick, “Influence of
Thoreau and Emerson on Gandhi’sSatyagraha,”Gandhi Marg, July ,–,.
“Tarek Mehanna: A Selection of Timely Quotes,”at https://freetarek.wordpress.com/
///tarek-mehanna-a-selection-of-timely-quotes, accessed Nov. .
Malcolm X, By Any Means Necessary (New York: Pathfinder, ), .
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A MUSLIM AMERICAN PROJECT
While its Islamic inflection is obvious, Mehanna’s thinking opens a new
chapter in the intellectual history of American radicalism. As Mehanna
insisted in his sentencing statement, “It’s because of America that I am who
Iam.”This text, which is destined to become a foundational document
within the history of American Islam, integrates a Muslim American identity
into the American project. Emma Goldman, Anne Frank, and Nelson
Mandela all feature as predecessors for Mehanna’s conception of political
action. Mehanna’s approach is characterized above all by syncretism, and his
insistence on the sovereignty of the individual conscience over the laws of
the state is distinctively Thoreauvian. Indeed, Mehanna affirms that he
gleaned his eclectic dissident history from his public education, and under-
scores that his worldview looks beyond his specific religion. “With each strug-
gle I learned about,”he recounts, “I found myself consistently siding with the
oppressed, and consistently respecting those who stepped up to defend them –
regardless of nationality, regardless of religion”(emphasis added).
When, in , Mehanna was awarded the Sacco and Vanzetti Social Justice
Award by the Community Church of Boston, named for Nicola Sacco and
Bartolomeo Vanzetti, two Italian-born anarchist immigrants who were wrong-
fully convicted for murder and electrocuted in , the award committee
implicitly linked his Muslim activism to the history of American radicalism.
The Sacco and Vanzetti Commemoration Society made the link explicit when
they published a speech by Laila Murad of the Tarek Mehanna Defense
Committee on their website entitled “Yesterday Sacco and Vanzetti; Now
Tarek Mehanna.”
Mehanna’s eclectic dissident genealogy, combined with his belief that soli-
darity along the lines of class, race, and conviction runs even deeper than reli-
gious affiliation, is one version of a distinctive yet heterogeneous American
Islam that is increasingly visible within American culture, albeit in undertheor-
ized ways.
While Mehanna’s Salafiinterpretation of classical sources is but
Sara Mulkeen, “Sudbury Man Convicted on Terrorism Charges Receives Award,”MetroWest
Daily News,Jan. ,atwww.metrowestdailynews.com/news/x/Sudbury-
man-convicted-on-terrorism-charges-receives-award#ixzzHMQPaHQ. For the Sacco and
Vanzetti case and background see Paul Avrich, Sacco and Vanzetti: The Anarchist
Background (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, ).
See http://saccoandvanzetti.org/sn_display.php?row_ID=. The speech was delivered in
Boston on Aug. .
Studies that showcase the diversity of American Islam include Zareena Grewal, Islam Is a
Foreign Country: American Muslims and the Global Crisis of Authority (New York:
New York University Press, ); and many of the essays in Juliane Hammer and
Omid Safi, eds., The Cambridge Companion to American Islam (New York: Cambridge
University Press, ).
Rebecca Ruth Gould
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one of many voices in the diverse confessional landscape of contemporary
Islam, his persecution by US authorities is the prism through which many
American Muslims have come to experience what Thoreau called, with
more than a small dose of irony, our “civil government.”
One of the more eloquent testimonies to what Egyptian American writer
Leila Ahmed has called the “quiet revolution”of American Islam is the com-
mencement address delivered to Harvard’s graduating class of by then-
senior and president of Harvard’s Islamic society Zayed Yasin. In a speech
boldly entitled “My American Jihad,”for which Yasin received a death
threat purely on the basis of its title before the text of the speech was released,
the Muslim American informed Harvard’s graduating class of his personal
affection for both the Quran and the US Constitution. Yasin’s title was
chosen in order to reclaim the original meaning of jihad as spiritual struggle
from later, more militant, interpretations.
“As a Muslim and as an
American,”stated Yasin, “I am commanded to stand up for the protection
of life and liberty, to serve the poor and the weak, to celebrate the diversity
of humankind.”
Yasin added that no “combination of faith, culture and
nationality [that endorses] a community of the human spirit”could see a
“contradiction”between the ethical claims of the US Constitution and the
Quran. A similar reclamation of the word “jihad”occurs in Linda Sarsour’s
keynote speech at the Islamic Society of North America convention in
, which was rapidly picked up by the conservative media as posing a ter-
rorist threat.
Although Mehanna struck a different balance between Islamic
dissent and American radicalism that brought him closer to the violent aboli-
tionism of John Brown, each of these examples reveals Muslim Americans
bringing “American”and “Islam”into a new kind of union. From the perspec-
tive of American history, and of the history of Islam in America, it is notable
that Mehanna and Yasin are exact contemporaries, both born in .
For the controversy preceding the speech see, among numerous media sources, “Free Speech:
Testing,”Harvard Magazine, July–Aug. ,–,.
Cited and discussed in Leila Ahmed, A Quiet Revolution (New Haven, CT and London:
Yale University Press, ), . The full text of the speech is reprinted, under the
changed title “Of Faith and Citizenship,”in the Harvard Magazine, July–Aug. ,,
and at http://harvardmagazine.com///of-faith-and-citizenship.html.
Samantha Schmidt, “Muslim Activist Linda Sarsour’s Reference to ‘Jihad’Draws
Conservative Wrath,”Washington Post,July ,atwww.washingtonpost.com/news/
morning-mix/wp////muslim-activist-linda-sarsours-reference-to-jihad-draws-con-
servative-wrath/?utm_term=.beba. The fifteen-year gap between these two
example, both of which caused tremendous controversy and placed the speakers in grave
danger, indicates that, unfortunately, no progress has been made in terms of educating
the general American public regarding the meaning of “jihad.”
Punishing Violent Thoughts
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The foregoing is not intended to suggest that Mehanna’s views ought to be
embraced. Mehanna’s uncritical relation to many aspects of the Muslim trad-
ition is worth noting, as is his lack of interest in recognizing the contingency of
the historical and political processes through which his readings of classical
Islamic sources have been formed. Many commentators have made these
points, from both secular and Muslim perspectives, have recognized the con-
tingency of these processes within their broader analyses of Salafism.
Mehanna endorsed violence, often uncritically, in ways that are not clearly
aligned with Islam and that have broader social-justice implications.
For
example, during the trial, the jurors were presented with a photo of
Mehanna celebrating with friends in front of Ground Zero. Although such
visual evidence can be interpreted in many ways, the prosecutor used this
material to argue that Mehanna took an infantile delight in the deaths of
the victims of the World Trade Center attack.
It is difficult to determine
where to situate such anecdotal detail within Mehanna’s broader political
thinking, yet such evidence places him at a distance from Brown, whose nobil-
ity of character was such that, in Thoreau’s words, in “teaching us how to die”
he “taught us how to live”(“LDJB,”).
A civil society such as the one Thoreau advocated for must guarantee the
right to dissent from the political mainstream without risk of imprisonment.
I have reserved my critique of Mehanna’s embrace of violence in order to
better understand his position within the history of American dissent that
was largely founded by Thoreau and the abolitionists. Mehanna’s case is
one of many that reveals how the US justice system’s cooptation by the war
on terror has shifted the jurisdiction of the state and rearranged relations
between public and private spheres. This cooptation has also exposed tensions
internal to the liberal political imagination, which claims to be grounded in
tolerance yet all too frequently refuses to give its opponents space for free
expression when irresolvable antagonisms shape public debate.
Many recent studies contribute to various lines of critique, including Henri Lauzière, The
Making of Salafism: Islamic Reform in the Twentieth Century (New York: Columbia
University Press, ); Alexander Thurston, Salafism in Nigeria (New York: Cambridge
University Press, ); Joas Wagemakers, Salafism in Jordan: Political Islam in a Quietist
Community (New York: Cambridge University Press, ); and Laurent Bonnefoy,
Salafism in Yemen: Transnationalism and Religious Identity (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, ).
See, for example, his appeal to Osama bin Laden as “my real father,”discussed in Innokenty
Pyetranker, “Sharing Translations or Supporting Terror? An Analysis of Tarek Mehanna in
the Aftermath of Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project,”American University National
Security Law Brief,,(), –,.
United States v. Mehanna, day ,, cited in Brown, “Notes on a Terrorism Trial,”.
In support of this point see the important critique of tolerance by Wendy Brown, Tolerance
in the Age of Identity and Empire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, ).
Rebecca Ruth Gould
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Instead of imprisoning those we disagree with, let me conclude by offering
an alternative, drawn from a different intellectual tradition than that invoked
thus far. In place of the classical liberal attempt to eradicate difference through
John Rawls’s concept of overlapping consensus, political theorist Chantal
Mouffe proposes “agonistic pluralism”as a framework wherein “conflicts
can take the form of an agonistic confrontation among adversaries.”
Agonistic pluralism turns antagonism into agonism, and violence into dis-
agreement. Violence does not thereby disappear, but it is mediated, debated,
and engaged, and thereby made consistent with coexistence. Agonistic plural-
ism incentivizes democratic speech and neutralizes the appeal of violence. This
framework for managing radically opposed points of view approaches ideo-
logical difference in a way that keeps these differences in tension rather than
suppressing or privileging a single point of view. Hence agonistic pluralism
is eminently suited to managing the tensions that Mehanna’s American-
style Salafism would necessarily create within any diverse liberal society, such
as the contemporary US. Mouffe’s agonistic pluralism offers a more promising
strategy for engaging with political and religious ideologies that are hostile to
the state than does the post-/ legal system’s practice of preemptively crim-
inalizing, and incarcerating, dissent.
Mehanna’s objections to US actions abroad call for debate. In the absence
of incitement to violence, incarceration is counterproductive. The moral chal-
lenges posed by the bombing of Iraq, Afghanistan, and even (via drones)
Pakistan, as well as the war on terror within US borders, offer a parallel in
certain respects the moral challenge posed by slavery in the nineteenth
century. Thoreau made clear that he perceived violence as the best course of
action in response to slavery in , and thereby revealed a potential affilia-
tion between his political theory and Mehanna’s jihadist embrace of violence.
As at the height of slavery, the public remains by and large passive in the face of
their government’s excessive use of force. Now, as then, the majority prefers a
problematic status quo to an uncertain peace. Now, as then, there are many
reasons why an impassioned activist might become impatient with nonviolent
protest, and might be persuaded of the necessity of violent action.
I have undertaken to show how, notwithstanding his alienation from, and
persecution by, the United States, Tarek Mehanna defines himself as an
American dissident. His intellectual genealogy began in Boston rather than
Egypt, and was first awakened by reading Harriet Beecher Stowe, Malcolm
X, and J. D. Salinger rather than ideologues of the Muslim Brotherhood
such as Sayyid Qutb and Hassan al-Banna. Mehanna’s many frames of refer-
ence recalibrate existing alignments between various schools of political
Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox (London: Verso, ), .
Punishing Violent Thoughts
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thought and various cultural traditions. That Mehanna’s relation to violence is
uncritical is a weakness in his thought, but it is not a crime. Mehanna speaks
from within an American cultural milieu because he is American. Given
Thoreau’s description of John Brown as “the most American of us all”
because he stood up for “the dignity of human nature”(“PJB,”), it is
easy to see why Mehanna chose to juxtapose Thoreau’s essays to the Quran
when sketching the view from his prison cell.
Scholars within American studies and beyond have recognized that the
global circulation of knowledge requires us to become acquainted with an
increasingly “innumerable number of archives”formerly excluded from
purview in order to plumb the relevance even of such canonical texts as the
essays of Henry David Thoreau.
In the wake of this global turn, which
shapes our disciplines as well as our daily lives, Thoreau’s writings enable us
to examine how terrorism has changed the ways we write and think about pol-
itical dissent. Mehanna’s visual and verbal exegesis of Thoreau, and his inser-
tion of a Muslim voice into American history, tell us much about the potential
for cross-confessional solidarity in post-/ America to reconstruct a broader
political agenda. To make these claims for the importance of Mehanna’s voice,
and the wrongfulness of his imprisonment, is not to defend any ideology that
condones violence. Violence is indeed the weak spot in Mehanna’s extant
work, and he has not offered an adequate statement regarding his views,
which may of course have evolved since . Instead of dwelling on the
limits of his thought, I have sought here to demonstrate how this body of
work helps us move beyond empty polarities that oppose Islam to the West,
and recognize the confluence of beliefs, cultures, and ideologies that informs
post-/ America, notwithstanding the many violent attempts from the
highest echelons of power to undermine our diversity.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
Rebecca Gould is a Professor of the Islamic World and Comparative Literatures at the
University of Birmingham. Her books include Writers and Rebels: The Literatures of
Insurgency in the Caucasus (), After Tomorrow the Days Disappear: Ghazals and Other
Poems of Hasan Sijzi of Delhi (), and The Prose of the Mountains: Tales of the Caucasus
(). I wish to thank Elizabeth Gould for editorial assistance in preparing this article.
Brian T. Edwards, “The World, the Text, and the Americanist,”American Literary History,
,(), –,.
Rebecca Ruth Gould
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