ABSTRACT
Now more than ever, secular and religious Muslims have to confront issues of identity and violence in open and public debate. Until the Iraqi death tolls began to rise after the 2003 preemptive war against Iraq, Colombia was still leading the world in the number of deaths directly attributable to terrorism, with Sri Lanka not far behind. Public perceptions, however, placed the Muslim-majority Middle East at the foreground of terrorism. The events of September 11, 2001, the October 2002 bombings in Bali, the May 2003 “kamikaze” attacks in Saudi Arabia and Morocco, the March 11, 2004 bombings in Madrid, the July 8, 2005 bombings in downtown London, the July 11, 2005, attacks in Bombay, and the staccato repetition of bombings and violence elsewhere, including Jerusalem, Baghdad, Gaza, and Ayodhya, test the limits of civility and trust and inscribed the possibility of “Islamic” terrorism on the global imagination. Ironically, “kamikaze” has become one of the first Japanese words to enter educated Arabic usage. It is the word of choice in Moroccan newspapers and transnational Arabic-language newspapers such as al-Sharq al-Awsat (London), offering an alternative to calling the perpetrators of such attacks either “martyrs” or “suicide bombers,” word choices with starkly different connotations in the political struggle over people’s imaginations (Pekonen 1989: 132).
