Arya News - Bangladesh has been seeing cases of sting operations, viralisation, and sensationalisation. The accused are not seen as individual offenders having committed specific acts of transgression requiring specific judicial measures, but as criminal aliens always-already at fault and belonging to permanent camps of ideological arch-opponents.
DHAKA – As soon as the latest controversy over Bauls began, an atavistic reference to Syed Waliullah’s Lal Shalu began circulating. It was “seculars” like Waliullah — so went the narrative — who began the vilification of “folk Islam” as represented by the motley mix of Sufis, faqirs, or Bauls. No one mentioned the other, more important eponymous personage Shah Waliullah, whose nephew Shah Ismail Shaheed had written the Tawqiyah tul Iman — which cast a longer shadow on how religious heterology and orthodoxy were conceived in the subsequent two and a half centuries. No one mentioned the Baul Dhangsha Fatwa by Riyazuddin [2nd edition published in 1332 BE or 1925 CE] that brought together the “Shariat’er Alem” to destroy the “bateni darbesh faqirs” or “nyara’r faqir”.
There was no nuanced discussion of how critiques of traditional religious authority in the works of modernists like Abul Mansur Ahmad or Syed Waliullah or in religious philosophers like Abul Hashim involved a certain social pragmatics. But setting aside this debate on the genealogy of anti-Baul rhetoric over the centuries, we could also look deeper into the broader shifts that have been taking place in society, locking society into repeated cycles of “constitutive” outrage.
Digital archive and viralised wounds
Imagine two situations. First, in a pala gaan or bichar gaan , a person utters a blasphemous phrase to refute it. Second, someone has written or said something blasphemous. People screenshot, share, and videotape it, seeking the person’s punishment. Both situations represent bracketing and sharing — and essentially reproducing — an utterance as a way of cancelling it.
In classical rhetoric, there is a figure called procatalepsis , whereby a person raises a viewpoint only to cancel it. The above two instances are both procataleptic reproductions of a problematic viewpoint. The difference is that the first one is carried out in an oral culture, while the second takes place in a digital culture. In oral culture, before an il/literate audience, one must present the viewpoint itself through acting it out, by mimicking it in theatrical enactment. One must present the other viewpoint and only then refute it — either in his own speech or in the dialectical-dialogical form involving a counter- bayati — in temporal sequence.
A group of artists staged a protest on November 28 through Pala Gaan, condemning ongoing attacks on Baul artistes and mazars across the country and demanding the immediate release of Baul artist Abul Sarkar. The event took place at the Central Shaheed Minar with baul singer Aleya Begum, wife of Abul Sarkar, and poet and thinker Farhad Mazhar in attendance. PHOTO: THE DAILY STAR
Popular Islamic sermonisers delivering waz before mass audiences often recount the opponent’s viewpoint — containing what they deem as outrageous views — and then they cancel it by reciting “we all seek refuge in God” [ nauzubillah ]. Such temporal sequencing and the use of indirect discourse are part of any dialectical performance, especially in oral culture.
In a print-cum-digital culture, one can screenshot, videotape, and circulate the sensitive utterance, explicitly indexing who said it. When such an utterance is made viral on social media, there are two acts of reproduction. First, an oral performer [re]produces a phrase to refute it. Second, others circulate, download, upload, share, react to, comment on, and thus amplify the digital record — whether as a video clip or a photo card — reproducing the phrase to call for his/her punishment. The second act of reproduction follows a pattern that has become fairly common over the last two decades since Bangladesh entered the digital era.
There is a catch here. In Islamic jurisprudence, the dissemination or mention ( naql/nashr ) of that objectionable statement ( munkar qawwali/lafz al-munkar ) was prohibited ( nashr al-munkar/taḥrīm našr al-fāḥishah wa-l-munkar ). The point was to contain the harm of the utterance while still adjudicating it, rather than rebroadcasting it in the name of evidence. Any trial of a blasphemy would take place without the exact documentation ( tafsil ) of that statement. It would be alluded to, but not put down verbatim from the mouth to writing.
In Europe, as the justice system included a public adversarial procedure with appeal or review processes, legal documentation of the sensitive speech itself became more normative. This marks a sharp contrast with the Islamic juridical approach: what was to be kept from public circulation in one tradition became the very basis of public scrutiny in another. In modern media[ted] trials, it has instead become common practice to make that munkar or forbidden statement viral.
This is a significant change. The evidence of the utterance becomes part of a circulating archive through the decentralised network of digital media, instead of being obliquely referred to in the confinement of judicial space. Through the digital technology of perpetual reproduction and archiving, the speech becomes a permanent engraving, a wound that never heals. Any signs or gestures by a person — once they are inscribed — are snatched from their control and become a palimpsest for others to copy, paste, refashion, circulate, overwrite, and so on.
If enunciation is thus digitally retained forever, what does it mean for the person who originally produced it? Can s/he make tawbah or repentance and return to God? Repentance is a personal performative act involving interior as well as external rituals whereby a person can hope to be cleansed and redeemed, whereby the original transgression is cancelled. But the digital archive of outrages does not allow such an erasure, cancellation, redemption, or repentance. Any mob or a lone wolf can take up the matter again for a reiterative jeopardy. Just as repentance or forgiveness becomes impracticable, even adjudication lacks closure. The archive of outrage keeps the wound forever open.
The digital archive thus changes the relation between a person and their action. The records do not merely preserve past speech; they also feed into a new regime of law-preserving violence that has become increasingly forward-looking. Forward-looking law enforcement does not extract people from society once they have committed a crime, but proactively pieces society into its smallest units, inciting potential criminals through sting operations, pinning them down as a matter of containing risks. Such anticipatory accelerationism in crime management assumes that every person is pre-inscribed with a modulating risk coefficient.
In recent days, Bangladesh has seen cases of sting operations, viralisation, and sensationalisation under a scapegoat mechanism whereby the accused individuals are treated as tokens or indexes of a bigger threat. The accused are not seen as individual offenders having committed specific acts of transgression requiring specific judicial measures, but as criminal aliens always-already at fault and belonging to permanent camps of ideological arch-opponents [shahbaghis, liberals, etc.]. The pinning down of delinquent individuals becomes a score in endless ideological wars.
Doxxing the indexical
Doxxing is the quintessential gesture of this new ideological culture where every voice in the digital space becomes a potential target in an all-consuming semiotic war. Every presence can now be indexed through tools offered by digital cartography and profiling. Every person can be tracked down. The disembedded digital persona is pinned back onto the body of a specific individual living in such and such locality. The embodied voice, instead of being disembedded and mediated through print or digital media, can be targeted for direct, executive violence.
There is a grammar to this ideological warfare. Before individuals become indexes of ideological camps, at first a site of contestation is produced over a local event that is framed as a symptom of a generalised crisis of reproduction. A couple kissing somewhere, a girl smoking a cigarette, or a teacher raising a rhetorical question in the classroom become quickly framed as shaking the very foundations of society. The fact that such a framing gains purchase is the symptom of a deeper issue. There is a magical element in how people lend credence to un/substantiated allegations of blasphemy, substance abuse, or sexual scandal. This is what we might call performative belief : by collectively affirming a representation irrespective of its truth value, people reenact their integration into the community.
Why does a society become more predisposed to such a violent scapegoating mechanism? Why does it need to scapegoat people or groups to reenact its solidarity? The pervasive violence — both physical and symbolic — in our times is contagious. Social groups become passive spectators of a global spectacle of unfolding genocides, wars, massacres, and technological negation of the ethical substance of human communities. The spectacle decomposes and de-structures the solidarity of the social group. It is precisely by channelling their anger on a scapegoat — an outcast or a “criminal alien” — figures who are treated less as concrete offenders than as symbolic stand-ins for permanent ideological enemies. Scapegoating these aliens thus helps re-establish an archipolitical sense of internal solidarity. Moreover, this macro-level collective disorientation is combined with a micro-level self-reproduction crisis. Thus, cycles of outrage become the performative process of re-enacting the community.
Gift and belonging
When performative outrage becomes integral to group solidarity, it unsettles the foundational concept of the citizen as an abstract holder of rights by dint of being a member of a political society as crystallised into a state — regardless of ethnicity, gender, and so on. In its place comes a resurgent conception of a pre-state community of majoritarian ascriptive identities. This community can reenact its solidarity only by successive scapegoating of various types of criminal aliens — where criminal and alien are two terms locked in a fractal relationship of mutual recursion so that “criminal” entails alienness while “alienness” automatically indicates a criminality coefficient. Such is the precarity of social belonging in a “globalised” world.
The universalist state — often narrated as emerging from the French Revolution and subsequent republican and socialist traditions — was in essence a generalised and expanding regime of depersonalised gift-giving. Analogous forms of generalised, depersonalised obligation can be traced to much earlier and non-Western contexts. That regime of generalised giving is now facing pushback. It is crumbling under an aggressive fossil-fuel-burning financial capitalism exacerbating a social crisis that disables people from reproducing the kind of life that they consider normative.
Instead of imagining a different future together, people are induced to restrict the sphere of giving. Instead of generalised gift-giving, people are falling back on narrower iterations of communitarian ethos. Even at the level of procreation, sexuality, and kinship it is creating a new crisis. All of these phenomena are conducive to a pervasive crisis that in the interwar periods of the 20th century gave rise to xenophobia, militarisation, corporatism, and genocide.
While citizenship becomes more and more communitarian, the community itself slides across possible definitions. The concept of the mob, for example, has defined the undecidability at the heart of the long aftermath of the July insurrection. The horizontal solidarity of the uprising was ruptured early on by serial violence against particular groups, including the mazars . The violence and acts of demolition on August 5 might be said to have the cathartic character of a sparagmos . But its periodic reenactment as a commemorative and co-performative political ritual became controversial. The hotly contested concept of mob thus indexes a series of questions: Who holds the spirit and hegemony of July alliance? What does it mean to enact violence in the name of haqq, people, or revolution? What is the relation between the sovereign constitutive power of people and a legitimate, constituted legal order?
The dichotomy of mob vs people can never be settled with scientific precision, as both are irreducibly polemical categories. A black-and-white contrast between a good people and a bad mob can at best be a polemical characterisation, not a scientific one. All sorts of arguments have been offered to define the dichotomy: people as standing for the general will vs the mob representing a particular will; people fighting for justice while the “spontaneous” and “a/pre-political” mob directly exerting its will, and so on. These arguments do not help in understanding the metastable equilibrium of our late modern techno-societies. The mob is always a certain curation in terms of its quasi-mosaic content and unstable apparatus. It has its own mode of political telos or libido that aspires to stand in for the general will and become hegemonic. The mob exerts executive force, but it is not easy to distinguish it from popular or revolutionary violence.
If we must end on a prescriptive note, we need: a reimagining of “the people” as an inclusive community grounded in generalised gift-giving; a rethinking of victimhood and redemption beyond permanent digital incrimination; and a refashioning of our fragmented, embodied, and precarious presence in the digital semiosphere.