What can you say to a man who tells you that he prefers obeying God rather than men, and that as a result he's certain he'll go to heaven if he cuts your throat?
———VoltaireFootnote 1INTRODUCTION
At 9:50 a.m. on 22 October 2014, Michael Zehaf-Bibeau shot and killed Corporal Nathan Cirillo in front of the Canadian National War Memorial in Ottawa. Minutes later, Zehaf-Bibeau stormed into the nearby Canadian Parliament and became embroiled in a gun battle with security forces before he was killed. Following the attack, the Canadian Prime Minister issued a solemn statement that emphasized how Zehaf-Bibeau's actions constituted a “terrorist” attack against the nation, and linked it to an “ISIL-inspired” attack earlier that week.Footnote 2 Since these events, Zehaf-Bibeau has become the infamous “face of homegrown terrorism” in Canada and his actions have sparked renewed concern over the perceived threat posed by “fanatical,” Islamist “jihadis.”Footnote 3 Not everyone, however, was so quick to brand Zehaf-Bibeau a “terrorist.” Numerous journalists pointed to the possibility that he was suffering from mental illness and drug addiction, raising the question of whether his actions should be interpreted as the products of pathology and disease, rather than religion or ideology.Footnote 4 Still others have refused to characterize this as terrorism altogether, maintaining instead that it should be considered a “criminal” act.Footnote 5
As political leaders, political scientists, sociologists, law enforcement authorities, and even medical professionals continue to debate the precise significance of Zehaf-Bibeau's actions, it seems timely to reflect upon the ways in which similar sorts of “fanatical,” religiously motivated “crime” have traditionally been framed and understood. Indeed, these current discussions bear striking similarity to debates that were taking place over a century and a half ago during the heyday of British colonial rule in India, at a time when colonial officials were attempting to deal with an “epidemic” of “fanatical” assassinations along the North-West Frontier.Footnote 6
At 10 a.m. on 9 January 1901, Captain Johnson departed the civil hospital in Loralai, Baluchistan, along with his assistant Makhan Singh, to pay a house call to the Assistant Political Agent. They proceeded through the town's bazaar and immediately passed by a small hill. Upon hearing a sudden noise from above, both men looked up to see a man charging toward them from the top of the hill, shouting and waving a drawn sword. Johnson turned to avoid the attacker, raising his right arm in an attempt to ward off the impending sword blow. With a single swing, the attacker managed to sever Johnson's arm completely from his body. Stunned, Johnson fell to the ground and the attacker began to slash repeatedly at his head, killing him instantly. As the assailant continued to hack away at Johnson's mutilated body, Singh attempted to draw him away by shouting and throwing rocks. At this point, the assassin turned his attention toward Singh, and pursued him back into the bazaar, whereupon he was promptly seized by a policeman, and then “quietly” allowed himself to be arrested.Footnote 7
The prisoner, a Pashtun man named Doulat, was found to be “in a high state of nervous excitement” when he was brought before British authorities, and he was immediately identified as a “fanatic.”Footnote 8 During questioning, Doulat claimed he had recently returned from Kandahar, where God had “put it into his heart” to kill “either a Sikh or a white man.” He stressed that no one else knew of his intention to commit this act, that he had no particular complaint against any British official, and that he did not even know whom he was attacking. Because Doulat was in such “an excited state of mind,” he was deemed unfit for an immediate trial, and placed in solitary confinement despite his insistent “prayers” that he be executed immediately.Footnote 9
Doulat's case was an example of a very special type of crime that existed at the fringes of British India. Known as “murderous outrages,” “fanatical outrages,” or “ghazism,” these were crimes that typically involved a sudden, seemingly unprovoked, and murderous assault against British officers or their Indian subordinates. Perpetrators of these crimes were disposed of in swift, summary trials under one of the most brutal-minded and draconian laws ever passed in British India: the Murderous Outrages Act of 1867 (henceforth MOA).Footnote 10 The MOA granted colonial authorities along the North-West Frontier a sweeping range of executive powers that allowed them to bypass India's regular judicial codes and procedures in order to prosecute “fanatics.” In Doulat's case, his identification and subsequent conviction as a “fanatic” was based on both his professed desire to kill an “infidel” and his evidently deranged mental state. This twin emphasis on religious motivation and mental illness reappears again and again throughout the colonial records documenting these crimes and, as we have seen, is one which still persists today.
During the past decade, discussions of religious extremism and “fanatical” violence have come to dominate both public and academic discourse. As a result of the attacks on the World Trade Center on 11 September 2001 and the new geo-strategic and security imperatives brought about by the subsequent “War on Terror,” policymakers and intellectuals have demonstrated a particular interest in tracing the historical roots of these contemporary issues.Footnote 11 The problem with much of this work, as Kim A. Wagner has recently argued, is that it often tends to uncritically reproduce the same Orientalist tropes and stereotypes that have historically constituted the ways these very same issues have been understood and represented.Footnote 12 Thus, rather than helping us to better understand the present through the past, this work ends up perpetuating and projecting past fallacies into the present.
The purpose of this paper is to provide a corrective to this often problematic and flawed understanding of the history of “fanaticism” and the problems associated with it. It approaches these topics through an examination of how British colonial authorities conceived of and responded to the problem of “murderous,” “fanatical,” and “ghazi” “outrages” along the North-West Frontier of India. By unpacking the various religious, cultural, and psychiatric explanations underpinning British understandings of this phenomenon, I explore and deconstruct how these different discourses interacted in order to create the powerful legal and discursive category of the “fanatic.” As we shall see, this was an existentially threatening class of criminal that existed wholly outside the bounds of politics, society, and sanity, and therefore needed to be completely destroyed.Footnote 13 Here the subjectification of the “fanatic” ultimately served as a way to activate the colonial state's “sovereign” need to punish and kill.Footnote 14 But still more striking in these cases is the way in which the legal definition of “fanaticism” remained highly vague and subjective. Far from providing a clear explanation of what constituted “fanaticism,” the MOA granted officers wide discretion on this point. As such, the term “fanatic” became a sort of blank discursive label that could be manipulated by the creative and often flexible interpretations of individual colonial officials, making what was already a powerful form of executive prerogative even more deadly.
FANATICISM AND THE COLONIAL WORLD
Today, the term “fanaticism” immediately conjures up images of religious radicalism, bigotry, backwardness, and often brutal violence. The “fanatic” has become the quintessential “other”—an existentially threatening and dangerous individual who stands entirely outside of all acceptable standards set by society. As Alberto Toscano has recently pointed out, this contemporary picture of “fanaticism” draws elements from eighteenth-century Enlightenment thought that believed religious intolerance and political stridency were the principal causes of political violence, social destabilization, and intellectual backwardness.Footnote 15 Voltaire, in particular, was a vociferous critic of “fanaticism,” believing it to be a form of infectious and murderous mental illness that was completely antithetical to peace and stability in society.Footnote 16 It is important to note, however, that Voltaire's critique was directed primarily toward the problems he saw within European society, rather than an external “other.” Indeed, the problems of “fanaticism” did not begin to be associated almost exclusively with the extra-European world until Hegel, who singled out Islam for particular censure. As he saw it, Islam's universalizing aspirations precluded the creation of alternative political subjectivities, allegiances, and identities beyond the religious, effectively demanding that its adherents become “fanatics.”Footnote 17
In the colonial world, Hegel's ideas were combined with theories about religious, cultural, and racial backwardness to explain the disorder and violence that Europeans encountered when attempting to impose their rule. Muslims were widely considered by Europe's imperial powers to be uniquely sensitive subjects who were difficult to govern and prone to violence and rebellion due to their inherently “fanatical” tendencies.Footnote 18 During their brutal, nineteenth-century conquest pacification of the Caucasus, for example, Russian officials blamed the bloody and protracted nature of the fighting on the inherent “savagery,” “irrationality,” and “fanaticism” of the local Muslim population.Footnote 19 In the case of French North Africa, colonial administrators used similar language to demonize the Senussis, giving rise to what Jean-Louis Triaud has termed the “black legend” surrounding the “peril” of confrèrisme (religious brotherhoods or associations).Footnote 20 American imperialists in the early twentieth century also frequently resorted to claims about the “primitive,” “savage,” and above all “fanatical” nature of the Muslim population of Mindanao in the Philippines in order to justify their brutal military occupation of that region.Footnote 21
In British India, concerns about Muslim “fanaticism” can be traced back to the debates over the establishment of Christian missions in the second decade of the nineteenth century. Many Company officials were fearful that missionaries would inflame the “excitable” religious sensibilities of their Indian subjects, particularly Muslims. As Thomas Sydenham put it, “I do not know any description of men who are more jealous of any violation or insult offered to their habits and prejudices than the Mussulmen, from that character of bigotry and fanaticism for which they have been distinguished, I believe in every period.”Footnote 22 Interestingly enough, many of the arguments mounted in opposition to the missionaries also contained sharp critiques of their own particular brand of Christian “fanatical” zeal, and were thus much more in line with Voltaire's original criticisms. Despite this initial resistance towards missionary activity, however, British imperial ideologies became increasingly tinged with Christian evangelical ideas over the next several decades.Footnote 23 This perceived tension between both Muslim and Christian “fanaticism” reached its culmination during the Rebellion of 1857, which William Dalrymple has described as a “clash of rival fundamentalisms.”Footnote 24
The Rebellion shook British power to its core and provided a sobering lesson for the British about the inherent dangers of “fanaticism,” whether it was the bigoted bloodthirstiness of Muslim rebels or the strident Clapham reformism of officers like Herbert Edwardes. But Muslim “fanaticism” was singled out for special blame, and a virulent wave of anti-Muslim hysteria swept across British India in the wake of 1857. Many British officials believed the revolt had been the product of a widespread and carefully orchestrated Muslim “conspiracy,” and became obsessed with the notion that Indian Muslims were somehow part of an endemic culture of seditious and “fanatical” criminality that sought to overthrow British rule.Footnote 25 In many ways, this mirrored the deep-seated fears and suspicions held by both Russian and French colonial administrators toward various forms of Muslim religious sociability, particularly the influence of “secret” Sufi orders, which they believed were breeding grounds for anti-colonial conspiracies and violence.Footnote 26
The proliferation of anti-Muslim sentiment in India following the events of 1857 helped fuel the colonial state's increasing reliance on the use of anthropological and ethnographic data to determine the relative “loyalty” or “treachery” of entire communities.Footnote 27 In the case of some Muslim groups, including the “martial” Punjabi Muslims who would help form the backbone of the post-1857 Indian Army, these types of ethnographic labels helped secure them a privileged position as loyal servants of the Raj.Footnote 28 Many others, however, were branded as being habitually “criminal” or “fanatical.” By portraying these communities as endemically threatening and destabilizing to colonial rule, British officials justified their often brutal and coercive treatment at the hands of the state. Although there were some British officials, including George Otto Trevelyan and Alfred Lyall, who challenged some of these negative Muslim stereotypes following the Rebellion,Footnote 29 events over the following two decades—including the notorious “Wahhabi” scare of the 1860s and 1870s, the publication of W. W. Hunter's infamous The Indian Musalmans in 1871, and the assassination of Viceroy Mayo by a Pashtun Muslim prisoner in Port Blair in 1872—served to highlight the ever-present danger and existential threat that so-called Muslim religious “fanatics” posed to the Raj.Footnote 30 Indeed, as Hunter warned in his book, there would soon come a time when all of India's Muslims would be “transformed into a mass of disloyal ignorant fanatics.”Footnote 31
CRIMINALIZING FANATICISM
Nearly a half-century before the alleged mass conspiracy of Muslim sedition and criminality described by Hunter became part of the colonial imagination, British authorities were already routinely using charges of “fanaticism” to stigmatize the activities of a variety of different Muslim castes and communities throughout India.Footnote 32 The julaha (weaver) communities of North India, for example, were frequently described by British authorities as a “bigoted” and “fanatical” Muslim caste. In so doing, these officials obscured the socio-economic grievances that drove julaha participation in a series of disturbances between 1813 and 1849 by recasting these events within a “law and order” narrative in which the colonial state was forced to intervene in order to correct rampant “caste-bound lawlessness.”Footnote 33 This same “criminalizing rationale” was also used to great effect in constructing similar, ethnographically driven typologies that branded other Indian communities as hereditarily “predatory” or “criminal,” including the Bhils, Pindaris, Thugs, and Sansiahs.Footnote 34 The colony of so-called “Hindustani fanatics” that was established in 1831 by the followers of Sayyid Ahmed of Rai Bereilly near Sitana along the North-West Frontier provides yet another example of enduring British anxieties and concerns over the existence of “fanatical” criminal organizations.Footnote 35
One of the most notorious “fanatic” Indian communities identified by the British before 1857 was the Mappilas (known in colonial terminology as “Moplahs”) of the Malabar Coast. Between 1836 and 1921, they were at the center of a series of violent agrarian revolts that were fueled by a complex combination of economic, political, and communal grievances, and which were mobilized and articulated through a language of ritual and religiosity.Footnote 36 The British colonial authorities at the time, however, dismissed any notion that these movements were symptoms of economic hardship or represented a form of political action, and instead blamed them on the inherently “fanatical” tendencies of the Mappilas.
In a Minute from February 1852, Henry Pottinger, the Governor of Madras, confidently declared, “Their murderous outrages appear to be solely caused by revenge and fanaticism.”Footnote 37 T. L. Strange, a local judge who was subsequently appointed as the head of a special commission to investigate these disturbances, reached a similar conclusion. In his exhaustively compiled and meticulously researched report, Strange found, “In no instance can any outbreak or threat of outbreak that has arisen be attributed to the oppression of tenants by landlords.”Footnote 38 Instead, he fixated on the ritualistic and religious aspects of these revolts, cementing the notion that Mappila violence could be understood entirely as a product of religious “fanaticism.” “The pride and intolerance fostered by the Mahomedan faith,” Strange wrote, “coupled with the grasping, treacherous and vindictive character of the Moplahs … have fomented the evil.”Footnote 39 His interpretation of these events also led him to one other crucial conclusion: that these uprisings were not merely the result of actions undertaken by a few individual participants, but were encouraged, abetted, and celebrated by the entire Mappila community. In so doing, Strange succeeded in creating an enduring image of the Mappilas as inherently and irredeemably “fanatical” and violent.Footnote 40
In October of 1854, the Indian Legislative Council passed a landmark law intended to deal decisively with these persistent “fanatical” outbreaks. The Act for the Suppression of Outrages in the District of Malabar (Act XXIII of 1854), more popularly known as the “Moplah Act,” created a specific legal-political category for “Moplahs” and granted the colonial state extensive powers to detain, prosecute, and inflict communal punishments against individuals connected or even suspected of being connected with these attacks. It also included the brutal-minded proviso that allowed the bodies of convicted Mappilas who had either been executed or killed in action to be burned.Footnote 41 The destruction of the body through burning, it was believed, would “terrify” Mappila fanatics, who otherwise embraced death and martyrdom, by denying them entry into Heaven as a reward for their actions.Footnote 42
Colonial officials and the public alike applauded the Act for its highly coercive and despotic provisions, arguing this was the only way to effectively deal with such a viciously “fanatical” community.Footnote 43 In addition to its striking similarities to other draconian colonial legislation that targeted habitually “criminal” communities, including the Thuggee Act of 1836 or the later Criminal Tribes Act of 1871, the Moplah Act set an important precedent for understanding “fanatical behavior.” By reducing Mappila grievances to the inevitable expressions of an endemically “fanatical” and “bigoted” community, colonial authorities fundamentally depoliticized their actions and effectively rendered them as nothing more than signifiers of barbarism, backwardness, and lawlessness.
FRONTIER FANATICISM
Claims about the “exceptionality” of the North-West Frontier and the propensity of its Pashtun population for violence and turbulence played a formative role in shaping the way British officials attempted to administer this region throughout the colonial period. According to this logic, the frontier was unsuited to the “norms” of regular laws and administrative institutions, and required a firm hand to control its inherent disorder.Footnote 44 Religiously motivated violence, in particular, was seen as one of the greatest threats to order. Shortly after assuming control of the frontier in 1849, the new Punjab Government bluntly described the Pashtuns as “priest-ridden fanatics, and bigoted followers of the Prophet.”Footnote 45 As Henry Walter Bellew put it, “They are … extremely bigoted, are entirely controlled by their priests, and are at all times ready for a jahâd, be the infidels black or white.”Footnote 46 The concept of jihad (a material or spiritual struggle in the cause of Islam) was one that frontier inhabitants had repeatedly deployed to organize resistance against foreign incursions dating as far back as the Mughals.Footnote 47 Throughout the British period, the frontier was periodically rocked by revolts and uprisings cloaked in the religious rhetoric of jihad. These included the prolonged guerrilla campaign led by Mullah Powindah in the 1890s, the 1897 Uprising, and the great 1936 revolt that took some sixty thousand British troops two years to suppress.Footnote 48
Aside from these more organized, large-scale displays of religiously motivated violence, frontier officials were also quite concerned with the propensity of the frontier's inhabitants to engage in individual acts of violence. For example, in late January of 1856, Deputy Commissioner of Dera Ismail Khan John Nicholson reported that he had been obliged to shoot and kill a “fanatic” named Painda Khan who had attacked him at the entrance of his compound. In his report, Nicholson stated that Khan had “become religiously insane some months ago,” and concluded that such an incident was unsurprising “in a country in which so much religious enthusiasm still exists.”Footnote 49 Between 1849 and 1867, at least sixteen Europeans and their subordinates were killed or wounded in similar sorts of attacks, prompting the creation of the MOA in 1867.Footnote 50 The MOA was closely modeled on the Moplah Act of 1854 and provided similarly wide-ranging executive powers, including the right to summarily execute convicted “fanatics” and burn their bodies. However, though the MOA gave official legal status to the crime of “fanaticism,” it provided only a vague and subjective definition of what this type of criminality entailed.
While drafting the new law, legislators had been torn over how to precisely define and characterize these attacks. In the bill's original version, individuals who committed these sorts of assaults were referred to as “ghàzìs,” a term that the Punjab Government had overwhelmingly endorsed in their own correspondence petitioning for the creation of the new law.Footnote 51 Objections to the use of the term were raised as soon as the draft bill was put up for discussion before the Legislative Council. Derived from the Arabic word ghazw or maghāzī (raid), ghazi was an honorific term that referred to a “holy warrior” who fought in the cause of Islam.Footnote 52 British descriptions of ghazis, however, were almost universally derogatory.Footnote 53 In the religiously charged climate of the 1857 Uprising, ghazis fighting within the ranks of the rebel armies had become notorious amongst the British for their religious zeal and ferocity. Ghazis were noted for adopting overtly religious symbols such as the green banner of Islam, and for the highly ritualized preparations they underwent before entering into battle, in which they would swear oaths on the Koran and don either green tunics and turbans or the white clothes worn by pilgrims before undertaking the Hajj.Footnote 54 What most impressed British observers was the sheer “frenzy” they exhibited in battle. In addition to their bloodcurdling battle cries about the need to kill “infidels,” ghazis became famous for launching brutal and often reckless assaults against the British lines. This led many observers to conclude that they were not merely unafraid of death, but actively courted martyrdom.Footnote 55
Yet, despite its strong associations with religiously motivated violence and fanaticism, British legislators were reluctant to use the term ghazi to describe “fanatical” crime along the North-West Frontier. The bill's chief architect, Henry Maine, pointed out that if the British were to formally associate a venerated and revered Muslim term with criminality, they would both cause offence to “respectable” Muslims and encourage the further glorification of such acts.Footnote 56 In lieu of ghazi, a committee in charge of revising the bill suggested swapping it with the phrase “political or religious fanatic,” but this, too, proved contentious. Viceroy John Lawrence strongly opposed the measure, arguing that it would make it much more difficult for the government to try these individuals if it first had to prove that their actions had been inspired by either of these motives. Rather than limiting the definition of what constituted a “fanatic,” Lawrence urged the Council to instead expand it.Footnote 57
The Council was divided by Lawrence's suggestion to omit any explicit references to political or religious motives when it came to defining these sorts of crimes,Footnote 58 but he ultimately carried the day. Nowhere did the new law make any mention of what precisely constituted a “fanatic” or a “fanatical act.” Instead, “fanaticism,” as defined by the MOA, became a category that was ambiguous and highly subjective, yet legally authoritative; it was something that anyone could identify, but no one had to define. For those who supported the measure, the logic behind it was simple enough. As Commander-in-Chief Charles Mansfield so aptly put it, an overly precise definition would have required “very refined discussions” between the adjudicating officers.Footnote 59 By keeping the definition of fanaticism obscure, colonial officers trying these cases were given a free hand to deal with these types of crimes as swiftly and severely as possible.Footnote 60 And swift and severe they were. Offenders tried under the MOA were almost invariably executed, usually within a day or two of their arrest and trial (sometimes even on the same day),Footnote 61 and their bodies were often burned afterward.Footnote 62
The new law's vague definition of fanaticism also ensured that frontier officers could apply its provisions flexibly, and often creatively. Between 1867 and 1877 the MOA was used to prosecute just five cases,Footnote 63 but over the next two decades this number increased drastically. In 1881 the law was extended to Baluchistan, and between then and 1905, ninety-three cases of fanatical outrage were recorded in that region alone. Of these, at least forty resulted in execution; another sixteen saw the “fanatics” killed outright before they could be captured; and in only eleven cases was the sentence of death commuted to either rigorous imprisonment or transportation.Footnote 64 Between 1895 and 1905, there were twenty-three recorded cases of “fanatical outrage” along the Punjab frontier (after 1901 the North-West Frontier). Twelve of these cases resulted in execution, eight saw the attackers killed outright, and in one, exceptional case the accused was acquitted.Footnote 65 In all likelihood, the true numbers were even higher. In 1896, an inquiry launched by the Government of India found an alarming number of cases in which the law had been applied in either questionable or entirely illegal circumstances.Footnote 66 In other instances, officers had either improperly or only “casually” reported MOA cases.Footnote 67 It is therefore difficult to obtain an exact picture of the frequency with which this law was used, which raises questions about how many other cases either fell between the bureaucratic cracks or were simply never reported. This became such a persistent problem that the government felt compelled to remind its officers that the provisions of the law were only meant to be applied to “true” cases of fanatical outrages. “The Government of India admit that it is difficult to define what is a fanatical outrage, and what is not,” they conceded, “but provided that it is clearly understood that the special treatment provided for fanatical outrages is applicable to such outrages only.”Footnote 68
The Moplah Act of 1854 and the MOA of 1867 are two prominent and striking examples of the often brute and “sovereign” nature of colonial power. As such, they differ significantly even from other forms of exceptional colonial legislation, such as the Criminal Tribes Act of 1871 or the Punjab Frontier Regulation of 1872 (later revised into the Frontier Crimes Regulation of 1887).Footnote 69 Unlike in the latter two examples, where the state at least attempted to survey, regulate, and control groups it identified as inherently threatening or criminal, the Moplah Act and the MOA had no such ambitions. Instead, these laws excluded “fanatical” communities and individuals from the protection and rights that would normally be afforded to them under regular law, and effectively relegated them to what Giorgio Agamben calls the sphere of “bare life”: a space where all legal rights and norms cease to exist, and where the sovereign's power to decide is converted into a fundamentally biopolitical decision over who may live and who may die.Footnote 70 These laws did not seek to reform, but simply to kill.
Despite their obvious similarities, we must recognize an important distinction between the ways in which Mappila violence and the violence of frontier “fanatics” were defined and understood. Unlike the legal category of the “Moplah,” which was based on religion, ethnicity, and caste, “fanatic” in the MOA remained much more elusive and ill-defined. Although the law was obviously targeted at the frontier's Muslim population, officials deliberately refused to define “fanaticism” in terms exclusive to either religion or ethnicity.Footnote 71 As a result, the category of the “fanatic” became powerful precisely because of its flexibility and ambiguity. As we shall see in the next section, these ambiguities led to an interesting set of discussions among frontier officials over the precise causes of and “cures” for these types of crimes. Some saw these attacks as the acts of desperate, lonely, mentally ill, “lone wolves,” whereas others saw them as the products of an endemically backward society.
PATHOLOGIZING THE POLITICAL
In 1849, the district collector and magistrate of Malabar, H. V. Connolly,Footnote 72 claimed that Mappila fanatics were akin to “mad dogs.”Footnote 73 Seven years later, the joint magistrate of Malabar, C. Collett, similarly noted how the phenomenon of fanaticism resembled a sort of “disease” that had managed to “infect” the entire Mappila community.Footnote 74 As we have already briefly seen, depictions of fanaticism as a sort of pathology were an integral part of European conceptions of this phenomenon dating as far back as the Enlightenment.Footnote 75 In the colonial context, psychiatric and medicalized language was similarly used to discredit acts of resistance by colonized peoples. By reducing certain forms of undesirable behavior to pathologies, colonial authorities were able to render the statements and actions of their subjects “unworthy” of serious consideration.Footnote 76
For example, following the Mau Mau Rebellion in Kenya, British authorities turned to the psychiatrist J. C. Carothers in order to provide the “official” account of the revolt.Footnote 77 In his report, entitled Psychology of the Mau Mau, Carothers pathologized the Mau Mau Rebellion by presenting the Kikuyu as an endemically anxious and mentally deficient community, thereby erasing any political element to the movement and replacing it with the psychopathological.Footnote 78 Another prominent example of how colonial authorities deployed psychiatry and colonial medicine to delegitimize the actions of colonial subjects can be seen in the treatment of the “amoks” of the Malay peninsula. Popularized in the British imagination through numerous literary accounts,Footnote 79amok was a Malay word that entered into the English language to describe cases of indiscriminate and seemingly unmotivated violence directed by one individual against those around them (giving rise to the expression “to run amok/amuck”).Footnote 80 Although amok encompassed a much wider variety of meanings during the precolonial period, British and Dutch colonial officials stripped it of its political and social power by reducing it to a primitive variant of European psychiatric disorders.Footnote 81
Colonial conceptions of madness were understood in fundamentally cultural terms, giving rise to the notion that colonized peoples suffered from collective, “culture-bound” psychological disorders.Footnote 82 Africans, for example, were believed to be prone to mass forms of “religious hysteria” and “psychic epidemics.”Footnote 83Amok, in particular, was the most notorious and best known of these culture-bound syndromes,Footnote 84 and was often used as a frame of reference for understanding apparently similar phenomena in different colonial settings. Carothers used the term “frenzied anxiety” to refer to a specifically African version of running amok,Footnote 85 and even the “fanatical” violence perpetrated by the inhabitants of the North-West Frontier was frequently compared to amok. In A Year on the Punjab Frontier (1851), Herbert Edwardes described the “fanatical” frenzy exhibited by the Bannuchis during their struggle against the Sikhs as being akin to running amok.Footnote 86 During the 1866–1867 Legislative Council debates over the drafting of the MOA, Maine made the connection between these two phenomena quite explicit, claiming that amok represented the “nearest counterpart” to fanatical outrages.Footnote 87 Referring to Frank Swettenham's book Malay Sketches (1900), J. G. Lorimer also pointed to the striking similarities between fanatical outrages and amok and concluded that both were “peculiar, apparently, to Muhammadans.”Footnote 88
Thus, like the amoks of the Malay Peninsula, or the endemically psychopathic Africans described by Carothers, the Muslims of the North-West Frontier were also depicted as a population that was uniquely susceptible to collective, culture-bound pathologies. In a letter from April of 1896, Major-General James Browne, the Agent to the Governor-General in Baluchistan, described ghazism as a “dangerous” and “contagious” disease with the capacity to spread throughout the local population like wildfire.Footnote 89 To illustrate his point, Browne described his own terrifying experience of a spontaneous fanatical outbreak that took place in a crowded Kandahar bazaar in 1879:
On the first raising of the cry of “ghaza,” Sir Oliver St. John was fired at in one place. In another place, a small Pathan boy of about 11, who was standing quietly beside me the moment before, snatched a chopper and a white Arum lily (the Mahomedan emblem of martyrdom) from a butcher's shop. He wounded and stabbed some Sikh soldiers, but was fortunately knocked down before doing further mischief. He was secured and carried off, hurling implications on all kafirs, and taunting all the Mahomedans he saw with cowardice and atheism; his curses being re-echoed and applauded from every closed lattice and blind alley within hearing in the adjoining bazaars.Footnote 90
In Browne's view, there was something inherent to the Muslim socio-cultural world that made them prone to spontaneous, religiously motivated fanatical outbreaks. “[T]he vast majority of the lower class of Afghans,” he concluded, “whilst having no wish to become ghazis, are perfectly and painfully conscious of their own dangerous susceptibility to, and powerlessness to resist, the national and religious rabies of ghazi outrage which they themselves describe as ‘having seen blood.’”Footnote 91
Other officials noted how these fanatical outbursts seemed to possess a uniquely gendered aspect, and believed that they were undertaken by men who felt the need to validate their masculinity.Footnote 92 For example, both Browne and F. MacDonald observed how Pashtun men could be induced to commit these sorts of crimes in order to avoid being shamed by the “jeers” and “taunts” of women.Footnote 93 This notion of a scorned, emasculated, or “henpecked” man venting his wounded masculinity through acts of violence, as Jonathan Saha has recently noted, was also prevalent in both British characterizations of violent insanity in colonial Burma and in cases of amok.Footnote 94
Closely related to this was the idea that this type of violence represented a way for desperate and humiliated men to reclaim some portion of their lost social status by committing what was seen as a “manly” and “glorious” form of suicide. In November of 1900, Captain M. A. Tighe, the Political Agent in Southern Baluchistan, suggested that a fanatic who “ran amok” at Sibi in March of 1899 had done so because he was sexually impotent: “It was also said that he had found life not worth living, and that his wife had gone astray with another man. For these reasons he had determined to destroy himself and was, therefore, easily persuaded to die in what was considered a meritorious death by becoming ‘a martyr for the faith.’”Footnote 95 Lieutenant-Colonel C. E. Yate, the Agent to the Governor-General in Baluchistan, similarly observed how conventional suicide was “practically unknown” among Pashtuns, and that “whenever a Pathan who from impotency, disappointment in love, loss of money or land, or any other cause, gets tired of life, his form of suicide is to go out and kill some body and get killed in return.”Footnote 96
Other explanations focused more on the mental and physiological aspects of this “disease.” According to J. G. Lorimer, “fanatical” attacks were produced by a combination of mental instability and the use of mind-altering narcotics. He therefore urged the government to implement stronger checks to both detect individuals who were mentally deranged, and also to restrict the sale of drugs “which produce insanity.”Footnote 97 W.R.H. Merk, the Commissioner of Derajat, similarly observed in 1900 how, “as a rule,” most fanatics were “drawn from the lowest classes, men usually of miserable physique, whose minds, already debased and enfeebled by indulgence in sexual passions (generally unnatural lust) or in intoxicants, have been thrown off their balance by the wave of feeling that has passed through the masses or is affecting the population as a whole.”Footnote 98
Regardless of the varied explanations about the root causes of these attacks, the one thing that remained relatively consistent was the proposed cure: summary execution followed by the destruction of the fanatic's body through burning. Despite being a highly controversial form of punishment,Footnote 99 burning remained the de facto way of dealing with the bodies of executed fanatics throughout most of the British period. Those who supported this practice often used medical analogies to justify their position. Writing in August of 1897, Captain C. Archer compared fanaticism to a “virus,” and claimed that burning was a sort of medical way of cauterizing the wound and preventing infection from spreading.Footnote 100 According to Browne, the only way to stamp out the “bacillus of the ghazi rabies” was to destroy that “which can only be fed by the hopes of a future life, can only be starved by the collapse of all future spiritual hopes for the soul, as the result of the annihilation of the body.”Footnote 101
By the turn of the twentieth century, however, it was increasingly evident to a number of officials that their attempts to contain fanaticism were failing, and some began to question the conventional wisdom about how best to deal with these types of criminals. In May of 1900, W. J. Cunningham argued that the immediate execution of fanatics actually hindered British attempts to stamp out this breed of crime. “The first thing towards the repression of this form of crime,” Cunningham wrote, “is to understand it; but the present system of dealing with it neglects almost every opportunity for bettering our information. The criminal is treated as a dangerous beast and put out of the way as soon as possible after it is ascertained that he has committed murder.”Footnote 102 Realizing this was the case, frontier officials increasingly began to concern themselves with the “mind-attitude” that led individuals to commit these fanatical crimes.Footnote 103 A renewed emphasis was placed on designing new forms of punishment that were specifically adapted to the unique psychology of these “fanatics.”
A common refrain amongst frontier officers was that executions had little deterrent effect since “fanatics” actively courted martyrdom. As Archer put it in November of 1900, “Death is a singularly inappropriate punishment for criminals who profess to look, and in most cases do sincerely look, upon death as a desirable thing.”Footnote 104 Instead, he argued, the British should deny these individuals their martyrdom and adopt a more “degrading” form of punishment. To this end, he recommended that “fanatics” be subjected to a series of severe public floggings designed to humiliate and shame them in the eyes of their peers, thereby removing any notion that these were somehow glorious and uplifting actions.Footnote 105 Other officials suggested that “fanatics” be sentenced to life imprisonment with hard labor in one of the jails located in the plains of India, where the hotter climate would provide “a very real terror” to someone used to the much cooler temperatures of the frontier.Footnote 106 The added benefit of both these punishments was that they allowed time for the criminal to “cool down” from their “fanatical frenzy” so that they could appreciate the full extent of the punishments being inflicted upon them.Footnote 107 Thus, aside from their overtly physical aspects, these new punishments emphasized the need to maximize their psychological impact. Whether meting out the shame of being whipped or the “terror” of being exiled from the company of one's countrymen and imprisoned in a foreign land, or ensuring that “fanatics” could fully appreciate the effects of their punishment, British officials increasingly concerned themselves not just with the destruction and punishment of the body, but of the mind and soul itself.
This newfound emphasis on addressing the minds of “fanatics” was also exhibited in more “benevolent” approaches. W.R.H. Merk, for example, believed the threat of “fanaticism” would only be removed once the British were able to “reform” the “native mind.” Noting how “fanaticism,” particularly amongst Muslims, had previously been quite prevalent in the North-West Provinces, Awadh, and upper Bengal during the early nineteenth century, Merk argued that the British had managed to vanquish these forces through reform and education.Footnote 108 Because many British officials believed that “fanaticism” was fueled largely by primitive and fundamental misinterpretations of Islam that were spread by the preaching of radical mullahs,Footnote 109 it was hoped that increased contact with educated and enlightened Muslims—and, of course, non-Muslims—would help to discredit the practice.Footnote 110 Other officials, including C. E. Yate, proposed that involving jirgas (councils) more directly in the regulation, investigation, and punishment of these crimes would help to enforce tribal responsibility and also improve the goodwill of these communities toward the British, whose reputation had suffered due to their highly unpopular way of dealing with these crimes.Footnote 111 Following the aforementioned murder of Captain Johnson, Yate noted with great approval how a jirga had sentenced several members of Doulat's family and his friends to rigorous imprisonment for abetting or failing to stop his crime, and he believed that this would act as a strong deterrent against similar acts.Footnote 112
Although British descriptions of frontier “fanatics” were permeated by medicalized and psychiatric language, these individuals were never accorded the status of “lunatics” in its strict medico-legal sense.Footnote 113 Instead of incarcerating and treating fanatics along with other criminally insane persons, they were simply executed or disposed of. This provides a stark contrast to most other colonial settings, where authorities framed similar bouts of homicidal violence as legitimately insane acts.Footnote 114 “Fanatics” were thus deprived of the rights attributed to both normal criminals as well as the criminally insane. It is also important to emphasize just how varied the British explanations for “fanaticism” were—they did not form a coherent discourse. Officials often disagreed with one another about the causes of and solutions to “fanaticism.” There is an interesting tension, for example, between the ways that officers sometimes emphasized the individual and solitary nature of these crimes, while at other times claiming that they were the products of a pathology that was endemic to the frontier's Muslim community. Far from being a stable category, then, “fanatic” remained a highly mutable and fluid term, no doubt owing in large part to the failure of the MOA itself to provide any sort of authoritative definition.
READING “FANATICISM”
So far, this paper has concerned itself with the various colonial representations of fanaticism along the North-West Frontier. This section moves beyond this colonial discourse and toward an alternative reading of the significance and meaning of these events. One of the largest problems with any attempt to do so is one of sources. “Fanatics” left very little behind in terms of written records, and those fragments that have survived are found predominantly in extracts of testimonies, trial proceedings, and reports produced and mediated by colonial officials.Footnote 115 Any reading of these documents tends to reveal more about the mentalities of colonial officials than about the colonized, making it difficult to discern where the colonial subject ends and the “subaltern self” begins.Footnote 116 Nevertheless, there are productive ways of reading these records “against the grain” of colonial discourse, which allow us to obtain a much more nuanced and complex picture of these events.Footnote 117 Indeed, as Ann Laura Stoler has suggested, it is not enough to simply deconstruct colonially generated narratives in order to read events like these as acts of resistance on the part of the colonized.Footnote 118 Instead, we should be attempting to provide a much more layered story where both the biases and the limitations of colonial interpretations, as well as the complexity of colonial motivations are combined into a varied set of negotiations and relationships.
Representations of “fanatics” as religiously motivated bigots enabled colonial officials to dismiss their actions as the politically meaningless expressions of deranged and violent lunatics. In reality, however, these were actually much more complex and often deeply political acts.Footnote 119 In January of 1869, a Pashtun man named Shereen was convicted of stabbing and murdering a sepoy named Dyab Singh during an afternoon auction in Bannu. In his testimony, Shereen claimed that he knew that Singh was a “kaffir” because he was eating sugar cane in the middle of the day during Ramadan, and had stabbed him because he was “an enemy to his religion.” Based on this, the presiding officer concluded that this was “one of those border cases which savours entirely of fanaticism.”Footnote 120 The overtly religious overtones of Shereen's statement, however, belie the fact that he did not just kill any infidel, but deliberately targeted a soldier wearing a British uniform. Indeed, in the overwhelming majority of MOA cases, the victims and intended victims were British officers, Indian sepoys, policemen, or prominent local Indians who were known to be in the employ or under the influence of the British.Footnote 121 Sikh soldiers like Singh were particularly popular targets for assassins,Footnote 122 no doubt owing to the significant animosity that Sikh rule had provoked when they controlled the frontier.Footnote 123 Thus, while many of these attacks were communicated through the language of religiosity, they were also highly politicized acts in that they targeted “sahibs” or other representatives of the British colonial administration.Footnote 124
Attacks also appear to have been provoked by major political developments along the frontier. In June of 1883, a Pashtun man was arrested and executed for the attempted murder of two British soldiers outside the Quetta cantonment. During his deposition the accused fanatic claimed he had first been inspired to kill a “Feringi Kafir” (foreign infidel) four years earlier, during the wave of anti-British sentiment that had swept across the frontier during the Second Anglo-Afghan War.Footnote 125 Following the murder of Colonel LeMarchant in 1899, the investigating officers similarly acknowledged how the attack came at a time of heightened political tension. Citing the recent murder of another British soldier by a fanatic just a few weeks earlier, Commissioner of Peshawar F. D. Cunningham went so far as to concede that these two murders were blowback from the suppression of the recent 1897 Uprising, with the Uprising itself believed to have been motivated by a recent explosion in the circulation of fanatical literature and preaching.Footnote 126
One of the most striking things when reading over the “confessions” of convicted “fanatics” is their similarity. While this can be partly explained by the British propensity to represent (and sometimes misrepresent) these crimes as “fanatical” acts in order to invoke the automatic killing power of the MOA, it is also clear that the prisoners themselves were able to seize upon and shape these colonial representations to suit their own agendas. Most of these confessions follow a general sort of script in which the fanatic freely admits their guilt, and boast about how they will ascend to Heaven as a reward for becoming “ghazi” martyrs. The figure of the ghazi as a revered warrior of the faith appears to have been a well-known archetype within frontier culture that was invoked by “fanatics” in order to lend honor and respectability to their actions. For example, in two of the earliest MOA cases, from 1869 and 1871, it was the accused who first suggested to their interrogators that they should be considered “Ghazees.”Footnote 127Ghazis were often honored and praised for their valor in frontier society, and their exploits were a particularly popular theme in local oral histories, poetry, and music. In 1881, shortly after the termination of the Second Anglo-Afghan war, British authorities became alarmed by the growing popularity of a Pashto song that was being performed openly in public gatherings all over Peshawar, Kohat, and Derajat. The song told the tale of Afghan resistance against the British invaders during the recent war, and some of its more inflammatory verses celebrated the killing of the British ambassador Louis Cavagnari in Kabul during the uprising led by Ghazi Muhammad Jan Khan Wardak: “The sword of Ghazi Muhammad Jan is powerful/ May he continue to possess courage, as he is to save the honor of Khorasan/ The Ghazi Muhammad Khan has wielded his sword well/ He defeated the (British) troops and killed the murdar (mean) Cavagnari/ He drove to London the bastard English/ May the great God give him victory.”Footnote 128 Much to the annoyance of the British, the graves or place of execution of these types of ghazi heroes were also sometimes converted into shrines.Footnote 129
It is important to emphasize that not all of the frontier's inhabitants celebrated these so-called ghazis, and that large numbers of Muslims actually condemned them. Following the murder of Colonel LeMarchant at Peshawar in March of 1899, Fida Muhammad, a local mufti (Sunni Islamic legal scholar) and barrister, wrote to the British authorities on behalf of the Peshawar Islamia Club to denounce the “barbarous action” of LeMarchant's killer. In his letter, Muhammad stressed that these acts did not reflect the true teachings of the Koran, and that the local Muslim community was doing everything in its power to discourage their glorification.Footnote 130 Similarly, in June of 1900, the Lahore branch of the Punjab Anjuman-i-Islamia issued a fatwa (formal legal ruling) against these “foul murders perpetrated in the name of religion.”Footnote 131
These attacks also seem to have offered the individuals who perpetrated them an outlet for venting personal grievances and grudges. In May of 1898, a Pashtun man named Arsalla Khan was convicted of murdering Colonel Gaisford, the political agent of Thal Chotiali. In his report to the Government of India, Colonel H. Wylie insisted that the “case was one of pure “Ghaza,” in which the murderer gloried up to the last.”Footnote 132 Yet there was significant evidence to the contrary. According to E. G. Colvin, the man who first arrived on the scene after the attack, Khan had a troubled history with the British authorities in the area. Several years earlier, Khan had served in the Zhob Levy Corps at Fort Sandeman before being dismissed for bad conduct. Afterward, he had found work as a chowkidar (watchman) in the Military Works Department, but was removed from that post after losing a key to the bungalow he guarded. “All this points to the probability of there having been other motives besides pure fanaticism,” wrote Colvin, “although I believe he had never had any dealings whatsoever with Colonel Gaisford personally, and indeed was ready to kill any sahib.”Footnote 133
Although it will never be possible to fully capture the complex affective “life-worlds”Footnote 134 inhabited by these so-called “fanatics,” it is clear that their actions were much more sophisticated and multifaceted than the standard colonial narrative of backwardness, bigotry, and mental instability would have us believe. While religion was obviously a crucial way of mobilizing and communicating these events (and undoubtedly there were many individuals who genuinely believed they were serving some higher religious purpose), there were a number of reasons a person might commit an attack of this sort. In many cases, these were politically motivated acts of anti-colonial resistance. Not only did they deliberately target representatives of the British administration, but they also frequently occurred in the wake of intrusive and disruptive interventions on the part of the colonial state.Footnote 135 Other times, it appears that individuals were seizing upon a recognized and (in some quarters) respectable practice in order to vent grievances or exorcize their own personal demons.Footnote 136 By claiming to be a ghazi warrior, otherwise powerless or disaffected individuals were able to obtain a measure of fame (or notoriety) they may not have otherwise have possessed. British officials were certainly sensitive to this fact, and many insisted that trials and executions be done in camera in order to avoid lending ghazis a platform through which to promote themselves.Footnote 137 Narratives of ghazi violence, therefore, cannot simply be understood through a binary opposition of “backwardness” or “resistance,” but must accommodate the very complex, personal circumstances that drove individuals to commit these acts.
CONCLUSION
In The Indian Musalmans, Hunter concluded, “Insurrection and fanatical ebullitions are the natural incidents of an alien Rule; and so long as the English remain worthy of keeping India, they will know how to deal alike with domestic traitors and with frontier rebels.”Footnote 138 In the case of the North-West Frontier's “fanatical” and psychopathically murderous ghazi assassins, the colonial state responded swiftly and mercilessly. The MOA enabled officials to exercise the brute and “sovereign” power of British colonial authority in order to kill “fanatics.” The concept of the “fanatic” thus served as a powerful legal category. It denoted a pseudo-psychotic criminal who existed totally beyond the pale of law and even sanity, and therefore needed to be killed in the name of preserving the stability of the colonial regime. But although the language of pathology, disease, and madness permeated British descriptions of these crimes, ghazis were never accorded the same legal status as the criminally insane, nor were they treated as such. Instead of being incarcerated in asylums, they were simply executed. As such, the treatment of these frontier “fanatics” tells us a very important and different story from many of the conventional narratives about the operation of colonial psychiatric and disciplinary regimes.Footnote 139 Rather than attempting to reform or even regulate the behavior of these frontier criminals, the colonial state simply annihilated them.
British representations of “fanaticism” were also part of a much wider European (and American) imperial tradition of stigmatizing and repudiating the actions of rebellious and recalcitrant colonial subjects by placing limits on what constituted legitimate or “real” political action. Thus, whether it was Russian anxieties about the threat miuridizm, French fears about the “peril” of confrèrisme, or American shock at the primitive “savagery” of the Moros of Mindanao, the problem of “fanaticism” tended to be articulated in strikingly similar terms. It was, in many ways, a well-recognized shorthand that was readily drawn upon to justify the often brutal and violent treatment of these colonial subjects by the state. However, far from being a stable and well-defined concept, “fanaticism” remained an ambiguous and elusive idea. Indeed, the very breadth and scope of its application to various groups across the imperial world suggests that it was its flexibility and elasticity, rather than its exactness, which lent it its power.
Returning to the point I made at the beginning of this paper, it is clear that these colonial responses to fanaticism resonate deeply with today's so-called “War on Terror.” At a time when Western states increasingly face the problem of curbing home-grown radicalism and terrorism, it seems especially important to reflect on how proposed expansions to policing and surveillance powers bear striking resemblances to the sorts of unrestrained executive authority and privilege granted by laws like the Moplah Act and the MOA.Footnote 140 Many of the same tensions that characterized British attempts to define “fanaticism” are being reproduced in contemporary discourse. Just as British colonial officials vacillated between emphasizing the “lone wolf” nature of these crimes and blaming them on wider problems endemic to Muslim culture and society, modern observers seem similarly torn when it comes to discussing how to prevent the “radicalization” of young people.Footnote 141
The concept of “fanaticism,” as we understand it today, remains firmly rooted in the discourses of the past. The Russian Federation, for example, draws heavily on old imperial notions about Islamic savagery in order to justify its pacification campaigns against various so-called “terrorist” groups.Footnote 142 The same can be said of the American case. During a recent address given to the United Nations on 24 September 2014, President Barack Obama singled out “fanaticism” as one of the greatest ongoing threats to the security of the global community, and described terrorists and religious extremists such as al Qaeda and ISIL as a “cancer” ravaging the “Muslim world.” Obama's speech made it clear that there could be no negotiation with these types of religiously motivated “fanatics,” and that the “only language understood by killers like this is the language of force.”Footnote 143 Though perhaps unbeknownst to him, Obama's speech effectively replicated the same stereotypes about “Muslims fanaticism” that British colonial officials deployed along the North-West Frontier over a century ago. “Fanaticism” has proven to be a resilient, if not highly malleable, discursive concept. As this article suggests, it is precisely this flexibility that has ensured that it remains a powerful and often deadly legal and political category.
