ABSTRACT
Peace is a rhetorical exercise just as conflict is: given this the world may change. Yet, it is this simple dialectical presence of peace and conflict in the same historical time and political space that has become an anathema to our understanding of the contemporary world politics. We tend to accent peace over conflict with a teleological certainty and philosophical verity, which leads to the invention of an enemy who is responsible for the change of the apparently peaceful situation and one whose belief runs contrary to our idea of civilization. What we fail to notice through such simplistic us-and-them blame games is the various hegemonic structures that indirectly perpetuate the violence and lead to a conflict.
This chapter does not seek to justify violence but rather tries to identify structural violence that lies central to our concept of nation-state and economic practices that either reject the marginal identity or tend to homogenize and include it in the mainstream, the latter being the more fearful proposition. There can be various ways of understanding the politics of violence – through the analysis of policies, the representations and use of symbols in the social sphere, the politics of development and so on. As a student of literature, my attempt would be to look at this issue from the perspective of the rhetorical devices that are employed by the powerful centres. I shall try to analyse two political documents: the fatwa of Osama bin Laden (published on 23 August 1993) and the US document of National Security Strategy 2020 (published after 9/11), and try to show how they both use the same language of absolutism to extend their rhetoric of domination.
Extending this argument, I shall discuss the novel The Terrorist by John Updike and show how he uses the concept of Islam by referring to the different suras of the Quran while creating the character and ideology of the terrorist in his novel. The reading would throw some light on the western creation of the identity of Islam which has been widely commented on by many scholars in recent times.
Finally, I would like to propose that the so-called strife between Islam and western liberalism is not actually located in the clash of the civilizations; rather the rise of fundamentalism proves the emergence of another power bloc, which is opposing the so-called liberal ideology, though arguably from the same rightist perspective.
