On Being Human by Osman Latiff

In the Qur’ān, Allāh instructs the believers to address one another in fair terms, not to ridicule and insult one another and consider one’s self better than others. The verse in Sūrah al-Ḥujarāt cautions the faithful:

49:11 - Believers, no one group of men should jeer at another, who may after all be better than them; no one group of women should jeer at another, who may after all be better than them; do not speak ill of one another; do not use offensive nicknames for one another. How bad it is to be called a mischief-maker a after accepting faith! Those who do not repent of this behaviour are evildoers.

‘Aṭā ibn Abī Rabāh said the warning is with respect to saying to your brother, “O dog, O donkey, O pig.”85 Dehumanisation always starts with language, often followed by images. We see this throughout history. During the Holocaust, Nazis described Jews as Untermenschen—subhuman. They called Jews rats and depicted them as disease-carrying rodents in everything from military pamphlets to children’s books. Hutus involved in the Rwanda genocide called Tutsis “cockroaches”. Indigenous people are often referred to as “savages”. Serbs called Bosnians “aliens”. Slave owners throughout history considered slaves subhuman animals.

Stereotypes are what skew a person’s perception of a group. People’s perceptions of others can sometimes confirm existing cultural stereotypes disseminated in the media, in school textbooks, films, religious centres and among people. Abdo highlights the deep-seated ignorance Americans have of the Muslim presence in the Americas. The distant Otherness they might look on Muslims with is not all too distant if they had known that Muslims have been in the United States from colonial times, since many slaves that were brought to America from West Africa were Muslim. The author points to names like Bullaly (Bilali), Mahomet (Muḥammad), Walley (Wali)…to unpeel the syncretised landscapes to which those Muslims were bound.86

In Sūrah Yūsuf, there is a very touching point that requires our reflection. When the brothers of Prophet Yūsuf gather together, motivated by a pathological envy, to do harm to Yūsuf, they say:

12:9 - [One of them said], ‘Kill Joseph or banish him to another land, and your father’s attention will be free to turn to you. After that you can be righteous.’ 12:10 - [Another of them] said, ‘Do not kill Joseph, but, if you must, throw him into the hidden depths of a well where some caravan may pick him up.’ We notice in the first instance that Prophet Yūsuf is introduced with respect to his name. In the subsequent verse when the older brother takes the lead, conscientiously objecting to the initial proposal, he too mentions Yūsuf by his name. What he also proposes is less severe than the first proposition. Where the pronoun “him” as in “Do not kill him” could have conveyed the same point, Allāh instead describes the brother saying “Do not kill Yūsuf”.

Some scholars suggest that this may be to reinforce the familial bond, and that the sanctity of human life is still present in the encounter.

Naming is personalising, the attributing to another a sense of belonging. The name is something chosen and selected and thereafter conferred onto someone. It evokes a sense of the sentimental, conjuring up thoughts of birth and ceremony, of family and happiness.

Naming is akin to bestowing of an identity through the connotations of the name itself, of an ideal, a characteristic, a persona. The Muslim might begin his conversations by introducing himself and asking another what his or her name is. One can sometimes find that the name itself can open up an entire conversation.

In the Holocaust when speaking of prisoners, Nazi guards avoided using names or even words like ‘people’ or ‘individuals’ or even ‘men’, referring to them instead as “pieces” or “items”. The purpose was to strip victims of all importance and render their lives meaningless. Using words such as “corpse” or “victim” were forbidden; the dead were instead akin to blocks of wood, completely irrelevant. In a secret memorandum, dated June 5, 1942, the human beings marked for death in mobile gas chambers at Chelmno are always referred to as “the cargo” or “the items.” Perpetrators of genocide rarely see their victims as individuals, seeing them instead as a mass of bodies and corpses. When we hear of the deaths of thousands of victims, the number disallows a personalising with each life. The atrocity indeed stands out, but the sorrow of a personal tragedy often escapes us. Nazi guards had to ensure that identity cards were removed from their victims, that gas chambers took the place of summary executions, that victims were never addressed by their names or even in terms that denoted human presence.

Using the media framing of a national outpouring of compassion which emerged from the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut on December 14th 2012, George Monbiot sought to correlate humanitarian compassion between American children murdered in the gun attack at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut on December 14th 2012 and children murdered in Pakistan from American drone strikes. In Monbiot’s example, it is the outcome of the Iraq War, in line with the newspaper’s critical position on the war, and its effect on children that is highlighted. However, the empathic outlook, the merging together of both types of victims is intended to show how we situate disparate lives lost in our cognitive schemas. Monbiot brings to light the dozens of children killed in drone strikes authorised by Presidents Bush and Obama, 64 in the first three years of Obama’s time in office and 69

children killed in one of Bush’s earlier strikes. He comments on the indifference to the child victims of the American drone attacks as being part of a process of depersonalisation, ‘they belong to the other: to the non-human world of bugs and grass and tissue.’87

A 2018 BBC One documentary ‘Killer in Our Classroom: Never Again’88 was based on the February 2018 Parkland, Florida school shooting. This was a shooting in which 19-year-old Nikolas Cruz entered Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School and killed fourteen pupils and three members of staff. He followed students from the school who had organised a mass youth-led campaign calling for stricter gun laws in America. Part of the emotive thrust of the documentary centres on the stories of some of the students affected by the shooting. On being shown a graphic of Building 12-First Floor with scattering of dots in different classrooms indicating where people died during the shooting, one of the students stated that “Every time a dot would turn blue, or a dot would turn yellow, like I knew who that was, and it was just really upsetting.” A second said that “I know every single dot, and I know who every single one of those dots are, like every single one. And I felt as if I just like experienced it all over again”. Another stated that “The worst thing is that when you do give names to the dots, it hurts”. The students were able to place an entire life, experience and memory behind the ‘dot’, and thus enabling the framing of those lives as worthy and treasured to articulate different temporalities, values and priorities.

For Kristoffer Goldsmith, Sergeant in the United States Army deployed between January-December 2005 in Sadr City, it was the diffusion of images of suffering into his self-consciousness that brought him to a point of contesting the dehumanisation of Iraqi people. Goldsmith describes a photograph of a man ‘missing his face, there is no skin left on his head’. The photograph was in its ‘incompleteness’ representative of a grievable victim. It led to Goldsmith recognising the humanness of the Iraqi man: “this is somebody’s brother, this is somebody’s husband, this is somebody’s son, and this is somebody’s cousin. The only reason that we’re desensitized to it is because they’re not white, they’re not American soldiers.”89 In the Iraq War the Iraqi Other undergoes a derealisation and becomes ‘spectral’ and we see how dehumanisation functions as a precursor to violence and results in abuse and violence through omission of a frame for the life lost.

In the Shakespeare play, The Tempest, the character Trinculo’s first thought upon coming across Caliban is that he could be put on exhibit in England: ‘not a holiday fool there but would give a piece of silver…When they will not give a doit to relieve a lame beggar, they will lay out ten to see a dead Indian.’ The exhibition in photographs of cruelties inflicted on those with darker complexions in exotic countries continues this offering, oblivious to the considerations that deter such displays of our own victims of violence; the Other, even when not an enemy, is regarded only as someone to be seen, not someone (like us) who also sees.

Sontag calls on us to consider the wounded Taliban soldier begging for his life, whose fate was pictured prominently in The New York Times and who also had a wife, children, parents, sisters and brothers, some of whom may one day come across the three colour photographs of their husband, father, son, brother being slaughtered – if they have not already seen them.90