ABSTRACT
My examination of Ta’ziyeh as the mimetic template of a mode of libera-
tion theology that ultimately does not degenerate into an absolutism of
convictions and allows for the shades and shadows of its own doubts and
uncertainties brings us down to the most fundamental failure of militant Islamism over the last two centuries. In combative conversation with ‘‘the
West’’ (the code-name for European colonialism that culminated in Amer-
ican imperialism), ‘‘Islam’’ was systematically mutated (more than by anyone
else by Muslims themselves) into a singular site of ideological resistance to
foreign domination in Muslim lands. The militant Islamism that ensued was
obviously not the only mode of ideological resistance to attempts at global
domination. Anti-colonial nationalism and revolutionary socialism (of pre-
Soviet, Soviet, and post-Soviet sorts) were equally instrumental in mobilizing people against the barefaced robbery of their homeland and dignity. Constitu-
tional to both sides of this binary – bothEuropean colonialism/US imperialism
and the varied forms of ideological resistances to them-was ametanarrative of
absolutist certainty that in the case ofmilitant Islamismmeant a constitutional
intolerance for opposing or alternative points of view sharing the very same
struggle. The wholesale robbery of the Iranian revolution of 1979 by the Isla-
mist faction is perhaps themost blatant example of amilitant Islamism that for
200 years had been a legitimate and integral component of anti-colonial mobilization, and yet upon the moment of its political victory it viciously
eliminated all its ideological rivals and established a horrid theocracy. That
theocracy notwithstanding, we cannot altogether ignore or dismiss the positive
role ofmilitant Islamismas a cogent andperfectly legitimatemodeof resistance
to global domination by Western Europeans and North Americans just over
the last 200 years alone. That theocracy, however, that Islamic Republic, is the
nightmare at the heart of militant Islamism, which was historically exorcised
and thus categorically concluded amode of revolutionary opposition to global domination that had systematically createdmanners of resistance to it identical
in their proclivity for metanarrative absolutism. With ‘‘the West’’ having now
finally exhausted its historical calamities and conceptually imploded, andwith
the rise of a mode of globalized empire with no particular center to any pre-
sumed periphery, the emerging cartography of global resistance to US-led military adventurism, and the calamities that it causes, requires a radically dif-
ferent mode of participation by Muslims in planetary resistance to this pre-
datory empire.My reflections on amodeof liberation theodicy that accounts for
the success and failures of militant Islamism over the last 200 years, and thinks
through the possibility of amode of resistance that itself does not degenerate into
an absolutist term of metaphysical propositions, is geared towards this end.
