Sentimental Terror Narratives: Gendering Violence, Dividing Sympathy

Sentimental Terror Narratives: Gendering Violence, Dividing SympathyAuthor(s): Anne-Marie McManusSource: Journal of Middle East Women's Studies, Vol. 9, No. 2, Emerging Voices inComparative Literature from the Middle East (Spring 2013), pp. 80-107Published by: Indiana University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/jmiddeastwomstud.9.2.80 .

Accessed: 27/09/2013 09:52

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

Indiana University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Journal ofMiddle East Women's Studies.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 130.132.173.8 on Fri, 27 Sep 2013 09:52:10 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=iupress

http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/jmiddeastwomstud.9.2.80?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp


80 mn JOURNAL OF MIDDLE EAST WOMEN’S STUDIES 9:2

JOURNAL OF MIDDLE EAST WOMEN’S STUDIESVol. 9, No. 2 (Spring 2013) © 2013

80

SENTIMENTAL TERROR NARRATIVES

GENDERING VIOLENCE, DIVIDING SYMPATHY

Anne-Marie McManus

mn

ABSTRACT

Why do novels and studies originating in the United States and Eu-rope sympathetically depict Middle Eastern women who commit or support forms of violence identified as terrorist? This article draws on scholarship on cosmopolitanism and the sentimental novel, as well as on novelistic and journalistic accounts of Palestinian female suicide bombers from the United States and Algeria/France: Barbara Victor’s Army of Roses: Inside the World of Palestinian Suicide Bombers (Rodale, 2003) and Yasmina Khadra’s The Attack (Doubleday, 2005). It argues that sentimental terror narratives use gendered, maternal imagery to produce a liberal stance on terrorism that combines sympathetic comprehension of the forces that foster violence with condemnation of the violence itself. The article uses Syrian novelist Khaled Khalifa’s Madih al-Karahiya (In Praise of Hatred, 2006) as an alternative literary depiction of gender and violence, aimed at a Syrian audience, that produces non-normative forms of sympathy to foster national reconciliation after civil conflict.

The emerging field of gender and terrorism studies casts critical light on representations of female terrorists as the tragic victims of men

and circumstance, but, by focusing on correcting depictions of real-world actors, it neglects to explore how such narratives invite readers to sympathize with women who embrace the very forms of violence we are expected to oppose. If sympathizing with terrorists is widely held to be a dangerous game, why are we asked to do so in the case of women?1 This



ANNE-MARIE MCMANUS mn 81

article reads recent texts in journalism and literature from the United States, Barbara Victor’s (2003) Army of Roses: Inside the World of Pales-tinian Suicide Bombers; Algeria, Yasmina Khadra’s (2005) The Attack; and Syria, Khaled Khalifa’s (2006) Madih al-Karahiya (In Praise of Ha-tred)2 to demonstrate that gendered terror narratives venture into this treacherous terrain to produce a liberal stance on terrorism that com-bines sympathetic comprehension of the forces that foster violence with absolute condemnation of the violence itself. As I argue, it is the fine line of gender that sets limits on this anxious, but necessary, act of sympathy.

My reading method relies on the premise that gendering differenti-ates and produces the boundaries of normative subjectivity, distinguish-ing legible, human subjects—the presumptive “we” that runs through this essay—from unthinkable, abjected monsters (Butler 1993). When a text cloaks a female character in a mantle of feminine virtue, it anchors her as an object of our sympathy. We “should” empathize with her because she epitomizes those norms, like compassion and selflessness, that we, again, should recognize as our own. Sympathy thus acts as a bridge between character and reader, whose belonging to an imagined community of ethical subjects is strengthened through the experience of narrative. This claim about sympathy and literature is so obvious as to be redundant—unless the character happens to be a suicide bomber or to fantasize about maiming other women with acid. In the context of terrorism and the debates over its definition, Talal Asad (2007) argues that the abjection of certain forms of violence as terrorist (i.e., evil, illegitimate, anti-modern) differentiates its discursive opposite: liberal subjectivity, which is good, ethical, and modern.3 Sympathetic female terrorists therefore occupy a strange border zone between normativity and abjection. Telling their stories, in turn, requires an unusual amount of gender work, which has created the genre of sentimental terror narrative.

This article compares fictional and journalistic texts that claim, whether explicitly or implicitly, to shed light on contested historical events in the Middle East: the Second Palestinian Intifada, in the cases of Victor and Khadra, and events in 1980s Syria, less-known among Western audiences, in Khalifa’s novel. It does so without seeking to col-lapse differences in genre, language, and context or to reify female vio-lence as a category for comparative work. The common ground in these texts, which range from a canonical, non-fictional U.S. study of female




suicide bombers to a Syrian novel in which a woman only dreams of violence in the name of Islam, is the refuge they take in figures of femi-ninity in order to grapple with their violent subject matter. This group-ing of texts thus aims to highlight gender-specific narrative strategies as they act in distinct national and transnational contexts. Army of Roses and The Attack, originally written in English and French, respectively, are read in a representational tradition of knowledge production about Palestinians in the United States and Europe, one that often conceals the complex ethical work it demands of its consumers. Both Victor and Khadra struggle to build and delineate bonds of sympathy across the borders of nationally imagined communities. These texts are juxtaposed with a seemingly incongruous novel—Madih al-Karahiya, an Arabic text narrated by a woman in the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood—that subverts gender norms to intervene into a domestic, rather than transnational, context and to build sympathy between Syrians after the trauma of civil conflict. Khalifa’s non-normative engagement with sentiment offsets the narrative techniques of Victor and Khadra to raise new questions about the representation of violence, Islam, and women in the Middle East. Although Khalifa’s novel is read here for its primary engagement with Syrian reading publics, its audiences and afterlife in today’s global mar-ketplace is not so clearly demarcated. At the time of writing, the English translation of Madih al-Karahiya, In Praise of Hatred, was newly off the presses, with publicity asserting the novel’s relevance for readers seeking to understand sectarianism in post-2011 Syria (Jaggi 2012). This article’s analysis of gendered narrative and the forms of sympathy it may build is thus speculative both in its effort to establish a comparative literary vocabulary for texts from and about the Middle East and in its acknowl-edgement of the constantly shifting nature of knowledge production and exchange in the contemporary literary marketplace.

SENTIMENTAL TERROR NARRATIVE

Margaret Cohen (2002, 108 – 9) describes “the primal scene” of the sentimental novel as “a spectacle of suffering that solicits the spectator’s sympathy.” Historically, the sentimental novel emerged during Euro-pean economic and colonial expansion and represented the poor and disenfranchised as objects of sympathy for distant readers (Festa 2006).




The genre is associated with femininity and domesticity, and its stock characters are compassionate mothers and virtuous maids with tragic lives (Black 2009). These suffering characters act out “sympathetic and virtuous [emotions]” and tug at the reader’s heartstrings, giving him or her the chance to produce those same noble sentiments (Rowland 2008, 193). Recent scholarship emphasizes the expansive dimension of sentiment because its imaginative reach transcends nation, belief, and class.4 Yet, because these narratives zoom in on the suffering of distinct individuals from otherwise distant populations, they allow readers who struggle to make sense of the global dynamics of trade, empire, and con-flict “to reel the world home in their minds” (Festa 2006, 2). Sentiment, in other words, is the imaginative lens that can telescope across this macro/micro divide, coaching readers in what Lauren Berlant (2004, 1) has dubbed “the ethics of privilege.” Against a backdrop of political and economic forces that seem to lie beyond anyone’s control, sentimental narrative charges readers with the moral imperative to feel for those who struggle at the bottom of global hierarchies, making “other-directed concern” an integral part of liberal subjectivity (Black 2009, 270). The genre is thus symptomatic of a struggle in the upper echelons of a com-plex, globalizing world to make sense of its rampant inequalities. Bear-ing compassionate witness to another’s suffering may suggest “a social relation between spectators and sufferers,” even a sense of responsibility (Berlant 2004, 1). But rather than propose a truly global ethics of privi-lege, sentimental narratives map crucial boundaries (Festa 2006). With whom do we, a liberal reading public, sympathize—and who lies beyond the limits of our compassion?

Sentimental terror narratives represent Middle Eastern women who commit or support violence as worthy of readers’ sympathy using gendered imagery that links them to the protection/production of life, particularly motherhood. This convention draws the ethical boundary between a woman and the violence she enacts, framing her suffering through maternal compassion and her subsequent violence as a mon-strous transgression. This stark divide between idealized femininity and abjection blocks off the slippery slope that leads from sympathiz-ing with an individual marked as a terrorist to justifying her actions. It thus affirms a normative border between liberal subjectivity and ter-rorism, defining an absolute commitment to life versus the willingness




to destroy it. Indeed, Khalifa’s novel refuses to use the term “terrorist,” framing his narrator’s support for violence in terms of her rejection of femininity, coded through heterosexual desire and reproduction.5 In sentimental terror narratives, the reader is invited to juxtapose wom-anly goodness with the seemingly inexorable political, economic, and military dynamics that foster violence. These narratives guide the reader to distinguish between the individual, a victim of cruel circumstance in the contemporary Middle East, and the circumstances themselves: political and social oppression, violence, economic hardship, and gender inequality. Like their eighteenth-century predecessors, these contempo-rary narratives carve out an ethics of privilege for readers who must op-pose terrorism as a distinct form of violence but who must nevertheless strive to comprehend the political, social, and economic make-up of the Middle East today.

My point is not to argue for moral relativity in the face of violence or to catch liberal reading subjects in a contradiction. Regardless of the distances they bridge in geography, class, or belief, these narratives signal that the need to produce an understanding of terrorism and its causes is an ethical knot in contemporary culture. At their worst, senti-mental narratives construct terrorism as a distant object for the evalua-tion of morally untouchable Western readers, cast women as victims (to be rescued, presumably, by military interventions), and perpetuate the demonization of the male “evildoers” who pull their strings. But at their best, these narratives intervene against the dehumanization of actors identified as terrorists, making their lives and decisions visible through historically contingent forces. Khadra’s novel sets out to do so by educat-ing European readers on the sociopolitical factors that nurture violence, while Khalifa’s text demonstrates the fallacies of sectarian rhetoric at home. In the United States, sentimental terror narratives speak to a need to grapple with questions of individual and collective responsibility for the power structures that foster violence across the world. The focus on individual lives in distant locations opens up the closed nationalism of the George W. Bush era to global perspectives, raising painful ques-tions about U.S. foreign policy and taking a cautious but significant step towards the “decentering of the first-person [U.S.] narrative within the global framework” (Butler 2004, 7).6 Indeed, the frequently heavy-handed gender work in U.S. sentimental narratives signals the anxiety




that accompanies this thorny task of understanding violence in global terms without justifying it locally.

Readers familiar with Edward Said’s (1978) Orientalism may ob-ject that I do not frame this argument as an East/West divide and use the less common construct of liberal subjectivity. This decision reflects in part my underlying claim that the terrorist and the liberal subject are discursively intertwined at the rhetorical borderline of protecting/destroying human life—which is why motherhood is so crucial in sen-timental terror narratives—rather than at the fulcrum of civilization or culture (although these values are often mapped onto cultures as essen-tial values). Furthermore, as Madih al-Karahiya demonstrates, the first audience of sentimental terror narrative is not always Western. Given the devastation wrought in the name of terrorism and counter-terrorism in the region, it should not be surprising that the struggle to articulate an ethical stance towards the object of terrorism is well underway in circles of the Middle East, whether in conversation with Western read-ing publics or in dialogue with local histories, politics, and traditions.

LITERATURE REVIEW: GENDER TERROR

Terrorism is widely understood to violate contemporary norms gov-erning violence and its legitimate uses, notably the mandate to protect non-combatants and the nation-state’s monopoly over the means of violence (Asad 2007).7 Female terrorism—ranging from organizational support to suicide bombing8—is a double crime because it transgresses “conventional notions of gender and power” (Ness 2008, 2) and devi-ates from “prescribed forms of femininity” (Naaman 2007, 935). Laura Sjoberg and Caron E. Gentry (2011) demonstrate that, since the 1970s, depictions of female terrorism in the media and research have revolved around the gender norms that the women are perceived to transgress: They are cast as sexually deviant monsters (abjection) or fragile victims (victimization). These conventions, which constitute the major poles of sentimental narrative, are also consistent with the literature on female violence, which shows that, whether through sensationalism or silencing, women are excluded from traditional understandings of violence and conflict (Alison 2009, Morrissey 2003). Abjection strips female terrorists of political agency by attributing their violence to the “erotomania” of




“disgruntled females” who were neglected by society and their fathers (Sjoberg and Gentry 2011, 71). Robert Appelbaum and Alexis Paknadel (2008) highlight the abjection of a female terrorist in Thomas Harris’s (1975) novel Black Sunday, in which a beautiful Palestinian woman is sexually aroused by the idea of killing Americans. She is made mon-strous through androgyny, with her erect nipples depicted as phalluses, yet she remains salaciously and “sadistically oversexed” (Appelbaum and Paknadel 2008, 403). The abjected body thus becomes “an inadvertent site of eroticization” (Butler 1993, 97). However, in recent years it is the victimization trend that has shaped far more representations of female terrorists, revealing them as tragic individuals, driven to violence by oc-cupation, poverty, gender inequality, sexual assault, and more.9 Themes of motherhood, love for family, and suffering in the face of violence fea-ture heavily in these “tales of loss, dishonor, humiliation, and coercion” (Zedalis 2008, 57). These accounts frequently assume an essential differ-ence between male and female violence: While “religious or nationalist fanaticism” drives men, women only take up arms for “very personal” reasons (Bloom 2005, 145).

In response, feminist scholars have decried the sexism of denying female actors political goals (Alison 2009, Naaman 2007, Ness 2008, Sjo-berg and Gentry 2011). Studies on gender and terrorism call for critical explorations of the nationalist, religious, and political convictions that lead women to take up arms (Berko and Erez 2008, Brown 2011, Gentry 2011, Schweitzer 2008), the gendering of security and terrorism studies (Sylvester and Parashar 2009), women’s embeddedness in social power structures (Skaine 2006), and the propaganda value of female violence for media-savvy organizations (Stack 2011). By asserting women’s agency in real-world cases of terrorism, scholars attempt to redress the “voice-less picture of women terrorists” in public discourse (Sjoberg, Cooke, and Neale 2011, 4). These studies often consist of interviews with female terrorists and their families, with failed suicide bombers, and, in what Anne Speckhard and Khapta Akhmedova (2008) call “a psychological autopsy,” with the family and friends of successful bombers. However, as Claudia Brunner (2007) notes, such political accounts of female vio-lence converge, often inadvertently, with security and counter-terrorism approaches, which reject personal accounts of female terrorism because they create “erroneous policy prescriptions” (O’Rourke 2009, 684) and




obscure “objective framework[s]” to tackle recruitment (Zedalis 2008, 58). The focus on giving voice to real-world actors also leads gender and terrorism studies to neglect the cultural work that victimization narratives perform. Scholars in critical terrorism studies suggest that knowledge about terrorism should be treated as “a social process con-structed through language, discourse and inter-subjective practices” that reflects “the social-cultural context within which it emerges” (Jackson 2007, 246).10 Shifting our focus from the object of representation to the reading publics they target, this research approach is driven by the sense that public opinion on terrorism acts as a powerful legitimating leash on foreign policy11 and builds on a body of scholarship that critically interrogates representational practices in media, political discourse, and terrorism research itself.12

But despite assertions in critical terrorism studies that knowledge on terrorism is “highly gendered” (Jackson 2007, 246), studies of gen-dered representations of terrorism and implications for the reading publics they target remain rare. Two exceptions, both about female suicide bombers, use the lens of neo-Orientalism to show how the gen-dering of terrorism defines Western culture in opposition to so-called Islamic, Arab, or fundamentalist societies. Brunner (2007) argues that victimization accounts of Palestinian women, including Victor’s Army of Roses, identify Arab women as the “irrational other of the rational, enlightened Western self” (958), while Gentry (2011, 179) shows that nar-ratives about female al-Qaeda operatives who are connected to the West shore up “what it means to be a woman in the West”: unveiled, eman-cipated, loyal to country and culture. However, by adopting an East/West binary, these accounts elide the diversity of debates on violence in the Middle East, perpetuating the notion that a vast array of public culture can be resumed in media and organizational legitimizations of female violence.13 This article attempts to fill this gap by addressing the gendering of violence as a form of cultural discourse that defines ter-rorism as an object of knowledge by producing the distinctive ethical stance that its observers should adopt. It is, to my knowledge, the first to treat literary representations of terrorism and violence originating in North Africa and the Middle East in a comparative framework, as the research on terrorism and literature has, to date, been limited to English language novels.14




SENTIMENT IN THE UNITED STATES: ARMY OF ROSES

Victor’s Army of Roses has achieved canonical status since its publica-tion in 2003 and is now a standard citation in studies on female suicide bombing (Brunner 2007). With the subheading “Inside the World of Palestinian Suicide Bombers,” Army of Roses sets out to tell the stories of women behind so many headlines about Israel/Palestine. The nod to media coverage is appropriate; Victor is a journalist specializing in the Middle East and has drawn on this experience in her novelistic career. While Army of Roses is billed as nonfiction, Victor takes editorial and creative license in reconstructing the motives and sufferings of four Palestinian women who became suicide bombers. The study’s tone is at once educational and intimate, assuming a U.S. audience with little knowledge of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and even less sympathy for the Palestinian women in whose name Victor speaks. Previous studies, particularly Brunner (2007), have gone to some lengths in pointing out the problematic aspects of this representational claim. None, however, have addressed the sentimental technique of Army of Roses, which is a remarkable example of the textual work required to navigate this most sensitive of topics. This work produces a painstakingly delineated ethical stance that can acknowledge the human suffering of Palestinian women without legitimating the acts of suicide bombers.

Victor’s (2003) account of Wafa Idris, the first female suicide bomber in the Second Intifada, opens Army of Roses. She is introduced in a passage that emphasizes her attractiveness, a balance of liberal femi-ninity and “Muslim” sexual unavailability:

Of all the Red Crescent volunteers, Wafa was the most animated; she played with a big elastic band, aiming it playfully at the others like a slingshot. She was a full-figured woman with long black hair, tinged with henna, and a round face, made up lightly to accentuate her dark eyes and cupid-bow mouth. On her head was a black velvet cap. It was not surprising, given her cheerful personality and good looks, that I later learned that several Western journalists had asked her out, although, as a good Muslim woman, she had refused their advances (3 – 4).

We learn that Idris is attractive and careful with her appearance, but




does not overdo her makeup. Referred to by her first name throughout the text, Idris is depicted as playful and outgoing, yet unavailable to the Western men who pursue her. The velvet cap signals this “good Muslim woman” does not wear a hijab, suggesting to readers that Idris balances her foreign religious beliefs with a familiar liberal femininity. Tropes of soft beauty and uncovered hair, it should be noted, are conventional in such accounts of female suicide bombers; Davis (2003, 68) describes Loula Abboud, a nineteen year old who killed herself in 1985, as a beau-tiful, petite woman whose “thick black hair caressed a soft, oval face.”

Having established Idris as an attractive, legible woman, Victor’s narrative emphasizes her maternal characteristics. Idris volunteers at the Red Crescent, where she tends to the injured, especially children. We learn that she refused to accept money for her work, “brave[d] bullets to evacuate the wounded,” and only put her “adored nieces and nephews and her widowed mother” above the injured (51). A precocious, maternal self-sacrifice runs through Victor’s emphasis on the young Idris’s love for children and devotion to the injured. Her normative gender creden-tials, it would appear, are unimpeachable. In turn, the primal scene of suffering in this narrative is Idris’s tragic failure to have children. Victor explains that after giving birth to a stillborn child, Idris was declared barren by doctors in the Amari refugee camp. Idris sank into depression; her husband divorced her and married another woman. Idris, in the words of her mother, was forever “tainted:” “she was young, intelligent and beautiful, and had nothing to live for” (41). Such quotes set up the causal link between Idris’s personal tragedy and her violent act, and the reader is invited to imagine the suffering this compassionate, vivacious woman must have undergone to betray the very values, we are told, she held most dear: protecting and producing human life. For how could a woman who couldn’t bear to see a suffering child have become a killer? This paradoxical tipping point of desired motherhood and violence does not only push the heartstring-tugging of Victor’s account to its limit; it draws the gender line of sentimental narrative. The reader is invited to feel sympathy for Idris, who loved life, up to the moment when she destroys life—at which point the traits that established her feminine leg-ibility transform into a sinister disguise. “No one around her could have known,” Victor writes, that under her “doe-brown eyes and long curly hair,” Idris was carrying “ten kilograms of explosives strapped with nails




to make the damage from the blast even more deadly” (21 – 2).15 In sentimental narrative, readers are invited to contemplate,

through the micro scale of individual lives, the macro forces that per-petuate suffering (Woodward 2004). Although Victor (2003, 7) notes that the four women whose stories she tells were “without exception” recruited by men, the true culprit in Army of Roses is the Israeli- Palestinian conflict and the injustices it has unleashed. Victor muses whether Idris was really infertile, or whether the doctors at the camp were unable or unwilling to care for her due to rampant poverty in Pal-estinian society. She explains that humiliation and hopelessness have created “a culture of death” among Palestinians, implicitly contrast-ing Idris’s naturalized desire to produce children with her war-torn environment (28). The sentimental work for the reader is grasping this intersection between “political and economic oppression” and a young woman’s life, which Victor describes as “a fatal cocktail” (46). The point is not to urge the reader to take a side, but to establish a compassionate, apolitical form of concern for this conflict. We are invited to understand that “there are always two sides to the story” and that both societies are riven with political and religious difference (52). Complexity is itself cast as a barrier to reconciliation; “too many variables” stand in the way of peace (60). Victor treats the intractability of the conflict with a certainty verging on fatalism: “If history has taught both sides anything, it is that the Palestinians will not give up the struggle and that the Israelis will not be pushed into the sea” (60). As we view the dead end of politics through Idris’s tragedy, we are encouraged to sympathetically nod with fresh understanding that all this complexity can drive good people to monstrous deeds—a division that is reliant on the normative gender work around Idris in the text.

My aim is not to suggest that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not complex, that people around the world should not attempt to understand it, or that the suffering described by authors like Victor is not real or worthy of empathy. However, Army of Roses suggests that micro-sympa-thy may be the only available response for U.S. readers, mere spectators to a distant tragedy, and thus shuts down the possibility of domestic and transnational forms of political engagement with this ongoing conflict. And while Victor’s effort to contextualize suicide bombing in sociopo-litical realities is a step away from essentialism, Army of Roses limits




the sentimental mandate to women, leaving men to occupy the role of heartless manipulators and propagators of “misguided feminism” (6). Such a bluntly selective reading of how political and economic inequal-ity affects a society is not only inaccurate; it supports the worrying yet durable notion in the United States that Middle Eastern women are in need of rescue from their male peers.

TERROR AND SEDUCTION: THE ATTACK

Yasmina Khadra’s (2005) novel The Attack is, like Army of Roses, a representation of Palestinian actors by a foreign author for foreign audiences and, like Victor’s account, attempts to shed light on the mo-tivations of suicide bombers after the international media frenzy over female violence in the Second Intifada. The Attack is part of a trilogy of suspense-filled novels that aim to make Middle Eastern terrorism, writ large, comprehensible to Western audiences. Critics have accordingly anointed Khadra, an Algerian writer who resides in France and who has been widely translated, a native interpreter who tries “to make certain aspects of Arabic cultures understandable for Westerners… to show how hatred begins and develops” (Garand 2008, 6) and to make the reality of “world hyperterrorism” legible to outsiders (Kadari 2007, 11). Despite this pedagogical claim, Khadra moves well beyond journalistic conven-tion to put the liberal subject’s search for a unique meaning behind sui-cide bombing at the center of his narrative. The Attack depicts one man’s struggle to reconstruct exactly why his wife, Sihem, blew herself up in a Tel Aviv restaurant, melding into one his and the reader’s search for a specific mode of understanding. It draws on the techniques of the detec-tive story, Khadra’s preferred genre, and uses the husband/wife storyline to introduce the titillating notion that terrorists seduced—literally and figuratively—a beautiful, Westernized woman. These gendered dynamics draw the line of sentiment between a compassionate Sihem who suffered and a sexually abjected murderess. It is only Amin, the rational male narrator, who saves the day and affirms the power of the liberal subject to resist the creeping threat of hatred.

Yasmina Khadra is the feminine pen name under which Muham-mad Moulessehoul has written since the 1990s, ostensibly to avoid military censorship while he was serving in the Algerian army. The




presence of a male, Algerian interpreter of otherwise incomprehensible, religiously motivated events for the Western world behind the text of The Attack finds its narrative parallel in Amin, a successful surgeon and naturalized Israeli citizen of Bedouin origin. Khadra’s readers will have little trouble relying on this narrator: an educated and liberal individual who is horrified by suicide bombing but who, unable to escape it, feels compelled to find its unique meaning. Amin is a secular man who expe-riences “equal delight” when he stands before Jerusalem’s monuments to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam (Khadra 2005, 142). He repeatedly as-serts his distance from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and his “distrust” for anyone who espouses “armed struggle and sermons based on hatred” (142). But the trump card in Amin’s trustworthiness is his profession: He is a surgeon, and his commitment to saving human life is the motif of his narrative and the foundation for his refusal to become entangled in politics. “Nothing, absolutely nothing,” he says, is “more important than your life. And your life isn’t more important than other people’s lives” (100). The Attack thus dramatizes the liberal Amin’s journey “through the mirror” into the world of terrorism, where he dutifully learns about the forces of poverty, occupation, and humiliation that underlie the vio-lence he abhors (197). His educational journey is also the reader’s journey across the border of sentiment.

Khadra goes to great lengths to introduce Sihem as worthy of Amin’s love and the reader’s sympathy, foregrounding her beauty, fidelity to her husband, and Westernized style of dress. “A woman of her time,” the stunning Sihem is too proud of her long hair to wear a hijab (156). She remains demurely unavailable to other men, a devoted wife who only speaks of death once—on a night when she was radiant in a white dress—to swear that she could not bear to outlive her beloved Amin. She loves to travel and swim in the sea. She sips lemonade on terraces and wears pink nail polish. We are on familiar territory. Sihem is no mon-ster—she is an ideal image of a modern, virtuous woman. When Amin discovers Sihem became a suicide bomber, her act is treated with tropes of seduction and adultery. Amin describes himself as “a pitiful cuckold” who slaved to make his wife happy while she was “cheating on him the whole time” and begins to suspect that Sihem had an affair with Adel, a member of the shadowy terrorist networks that populate the novel (122). The seductive power of words plays a central role in Sihem’s transforma-




tion from vivacious liberal to suicide bomber. “Other men’s sermons” lured her away from her husband’s (secular) poetry, and Amin demands to hear the tales his rivals span to trick Sihem into abandoning her mod-ern life (108). The voice behind these sermons is Sheikh Marwan, a figure who advocates suicide bombing in the name of Islam and Palestine and who bears a striking resemblance to Ahmad Yassin, a founding member of Hamas who was killed in Gaza in 2004.

Sihem’s seduction catapults her from a sympathetic figure, whose maternal sentiment framed her commitment to the Palestinian cause, to the depths of abjection. “How,” Amin rages, “did you make a monster, a terrorist, a suicidal fundamentalist out of a woman who couldn’t bear to hear a puppy whine?” (156). The normative intertwining of motherhood, non-violence, and sexual unavailability is established in the earliest lines of The Attack, when a child cries out for his mother after an explosion. Amin describes her arrival: “Mama [emerges] from behind a curtain of smoke. She advances through the suspended debris, amid petrified gestures, past mouths opened upon the abyss” (3). This Every Mother is linked to the Virgin Mary “because of her milk white veil and her tormented look” (3). Maternal virtue in the face of violence precludes, even effaces, female sexuality, and silently suffering mothers appear like magic in scenes of horror—inflicted by men—to bestow comfort on the injured. It is no coincidence that Sihem’s suicide note to Amin, the only moment in which her voice is heard, describes a conflict between her de-sire to be a mother and her certainty that, in the absence of a Palestinian state, her children would enter a world wracked by violence. “No child,” she writes, “is completely safe without the protection of a country,” and she emphasizes to her husband that their personal happiness was just that—personal—and therefore inadequate: “You wanted children. I wanted to deserve them” (69). Sihem’s dilemma between her personal desires and wider notions of social and political justice is sympathetic, even compelling, while it remains in the realm of sentiment. However, when she translates this conflict into action and kills eleven children celebrating a birthday, her openness to Sheikh Marwan’s verbal legitima-tions of violence is translated into sexual promiscuity: She has become “the worst slut in the world” (144).16

The language of seduction continues as Amin becomes increas-ingly determined to excavate the meaning of Sihem’s act, which drags




him and the reader deeper into Khadra’s underworld of terrorism. Like Army of Roses, The Attack explains suicide bombing in terms of endemic violence, poverty, and injustice, and the novel features commanders who quite obligingly explain their commitments to outsiders. “We are not Islamists,” says one, citing a lack of security, education, and opportuni-ties for Palestinians; “we are the children of a ravaged, despised people” (158). But pedagogy verges on conversion when a Palestinian group in Jenin kidnaps Amin in what turns out to be an elaborate ruse to force this liberal into violence. The commander explains, “I shut you up in here so you could develop a taste for hatred and a desire to act on it…. I wanted you to understand why we’ve taken up arms” (218 – 9). He hands Amin a gun and invites him to shoot. It is a defining moment in the novel. Once Amin has understood that specific, material forces nurture violence, will he accept suicide bombing as a legitimate response? What if he experiences life under those forces? By literally staging the moment in which a liberal subject walks in the shoes of a terrorist, The Attack opens a direct path from understanding violence to justifying it—with-out the reassuring boundaries of gender imagery. The danger posed to Amin is made explicit when he is depicted as a helpless moth circling “a candle’s deadly light” (163) and as “com[ing] up against the clarity of [a terrorist’s] logic like a fly striking a windowpane” (228). The latter metaphor bluntly conveys the shock of comprehending another system of regulating violence—a shock that may obliterate Amin. Such, it seems, is the threat of gazing too far into the glass of sentimental narrative.

The Attack, however, pulls everyone back from the brink because Amin, unseduced, refuses to shoot: “I don’t fit in [that] world…. I don’t recognize myself in what kills; my vocation is to be on the side of what saves. I’m a surgeon” (229). His profession here performs the work that his gender could not. Amin’s unshakeable commitment to life is based on his medical ability to restore it; Sihem’s, rooted in motherhood, is susceptible to the predatory sermons of men. In this highly normative ending, the male subject rationally asserts the dividing line that his female peer, caught up in so many sentiments about children, failed to discern. When another Palestinian woman disappears to become a suicide bomber, Amin sets out to rescue her. The men who support her decision tell him, “people like you don’t understand,” neatly closing off any previous confusion to assert that there are two essential categories




of people in the world: those who legitimize suicide bombing, and those who do not (250). The novel thus seals off the mutual understanding it had set out to achieve by insisting on a borderline of absolute incompre-hension between liberal and terrorist.

The story of a quest for sympathetic recognition that can only end with a denial, The Attack ends where it began: the explosion of the open-ing scene. This time, no mother intervenes to soothe Amin as he lies dying, and the final lines of the novel affirm—against the unresolved di-lemmas of violence, inequality, and humiliation that it raised—a return to childhood innocence and the individual’s capacity to dream his way out of reality. As Amin conjures up soothing images of his childhood, he is “delivered from his torments” and hears his father’s voice: “They can take everything you own… but you’ll always have your dreams, so you can reinvent your stolen world” (256 – 7). It is small comfort. Despite the ambitious scope of the political and ethical questions The Attack raises, the novel ultimately takes refuge in fantasy, suggesting that its Western readers might well do the same—whether in dreams or, indeed, in novels.

SUBVERTING SENTIMENT: MADIH AL-KARAHIYA

How might sentimental narratives that grapple with female violence in the Middle East take other forms? Is it conceivable that the reeling in of the world and the affirmation of liberal subjectivities would not require the silent abjection of women who take up arms? How might a woman speak from the other side of the mirror into which these sentimental narratives gaze, to borrow Khadra’s metaphor? Madih al-Karahiya is a Syrian novel by a male writer who adopts a woman’s narrative voice. It does not represent pedagogically the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and suicide bombing to distant readers, but rather represents recent events in domestic history to a Syrian audience who would have been famil-iar with the novel’s painful, controversial subject matter. And while Khalifa’s novel does not resolve the above questions about the stakes of representing female violence, its refusal to tie up the ends of sentimental narrative constitutes a productive beginning.

Madih al-Karahiya is set during the struggle between Hafiz al-Asad’s regime and the Muslim Brotherhood, which plunged Syrian




society into conflict for the majority of the 1980s, a period known as “the Events” (al-ahdath).17 This Syrian story is situated within global networks of terrorist groups and intelligence intrigues, a subject Khalifa treats with gusto. The primary narrator of Madih al-Karahiya is an unnamed young woman who embraces sectarian hatred and joins “the Organization,” the Brotherhood (Khalifa 2006, 88). She supports violence against Alawites and fantasizes about throwing acid on impious women, and, although she does not follow through on these desires, the novel relies on gender imagery to navigate the ethical mazes of violence and hatred that are its central concern. However, this imagery does not serve to reassure a liberal reader. Gender norms in Madih al-Karahiya are the stifling pres-sures on a young woman who struggles to cope with competing social claims on her body and its desires. In the opening scene, instead of a stunning woman, we meet an awkward girl on the verge of adolescence who refuses to smile. Her mother sends her to live with her aunts, and the narrator is apathetic. She is fixated on her body and spends hours staring at her breasts; she loves spices and sketches her dreams, trans-lated into bizarre visual codes, to hide their meaning from others. She is not, so to speak, legible, and her isolation constitutes the fertile ground for her hatred.

The literary coup of Madih al-Karahiya is its collapsing of the distance between an unconventionally sympathetic narrator and the reader. Khalifa employs dense stream of consciousness that pulls us into the narrator’s tortured inner world rather than staging her deeds as an object for our observation. This narrative proximity, which Khalifa attributes to his literary debt to William Faulkner, is central to his in-tervention into Syrian literature before 2011. In the 2000s, despite state censorship, the Syrian novel became a public forum to recount and debate the Events, a task linked to building a civil society in Syria (Ab-bas 2009).18 Khalifa (2006) is unique for adopting the voice of a girl who praises hatred, thus giving voice to a silenced population: the Syrians who legitimized—whether in word, thought, or deed—violence against their fellow citizens. This novel pushes Syrian readers to grapple with the reality that their society had been divided, friend against friend, neighbor against neighbor. The narrative intimacy between narrator and reader in Madih al-Karahiya is thus a work of public reconciliation, moving through layers of social repression to attribute one woman’s




hatred to the scars wrought on Syria by the B‘ath state and religious intolerance.

As an adolescent, the narrator is caught between two poles of femi-ninity—one religious, one secular—and struggles to reconcile her com-mitment to her faith with her changing sexual desires. Her aunt Maryam voices a conservative Sunni norm, warning her that “Satan is lying in wait for [her] body” (13) and that the body is “polluted and sinful” (22). The narrator agrees and begins to wish for the death of her sexual de-sires. Meanwhile, her aunts Marwa and Safaa encourage her to embrace her sexuality in song, dance, and dreams of love affairs and children. A battle rages in the house over the narrator’s body. She describes Marwa and Safaa as trying to “rescue me and return me to the way of feminin-ity,” associated with an embrace of life, and suggests that denying her sexuality led her to see her body as “a dark, damp vault” (39). Her first pathway out of this standoff is through Sufism, which permits her to embrace her body and religiosity. Mirroring the abandon of Marwa and Safaa in song, the narrator abandons herself in prayer groups where she experiences visions of the Sufi poetess Rabi’a al-‘Adawiyya, whose po-etry is known for its passionate descriptions of her love for God. Khalifa draws on the Sufi poetic tradition to depict the narrator’s devotional ecstasy in visions that combine physical and spiritual experience. The narrator flies through Aleppo with Rabi’a, enraptured by her touch and fragrance. Constantly seeking a spiritual state that permits her to both transcend and celebrate the female body, the narrator finally touches “the edges of [Rabi’a’s] fingers” and experiences “a tremor… that shakes me to my depths” (28). But despite the power of these visions, the nar-rator watches as Rabi’a disappears where she cannot follow. She remains a young woman in the world, subject to the pressures of her aunts and society. In keeping with the norms of sentimental narrative, it is the in-tersection of private suffering with sociopolitical inequality that pushes the narrator towards violence. However, in Khalifa’s text it is the narra-tor’s frustrated sexual desire for her female classmate Ghada—and not her maternal love for children—that pushes her over the brink of hatred.

The narrator’s school is divided between her friends, conservative Sunni Muslims, and her enemies, promiscuous girls who flaunt their relationships with the officers of the Battalions of Death, whose wealth and power made them untouchable in Syrian society.19 Ghada defects to




join the latter, and the narrator is devastated: “I couldn’t confess that I loved kissing [Ghada] every morning and smelling her scent, occasion-ally my hand accidentally brushed her breast and I felt its heat, perfect in its excessive lust” (67). The narrator’s desire for Ghada and jealousy at her relationship with an officer fuses with her outrage at the corruption and sectarian inequality running through society. Her hatred shifts from the desires she must repress to the external actors who thwart them, and Khalifa thematically links love and hatred, which overcomes her “just as powerful love overcomes the lover” (66). The narrator oscillates between hatred, blistering desire, compassion, and apathy for Ghada, masturbat-ing to her only to wish for her death. As anti-regime activity increases in Aleppo and across the country, her hatred finds its social expression in the Organization.

In this conflict, the narrator embraces hatred as a system “to give meaning to our lives” and to make sense of the competing claims on her body and sexuality (104). Her hatred combines sensuality, coded in invisible hands and climaxes, and religiosity, rendered in the imagery of visions and angels:

I see Aleppo from behind a black face covering and it seems to me the right place to search for hatred, I vaunt [hatred] and I’m overcome with a delicious climax as though elegant hands were caressing my body and lifting me out of the apathy, misery, and fear of the women of my house to a world I see in my dreams, pure like the robes of the angels whom I drew as warriors carrying rifles and shooting the soldiers of the Battalions of Death (137).

The language of translating an inner world into sketched images recalls the illegibility of this young woman, whose veneration of hatred is given ample space in the novel, unchecked and uninterpreted by a rational, liberal narrator. Despite (or perhaps because of) this unconventional strategy, Madih al-Karahiya stops short of following the narrator into an act of actual violence. She remains a sympathetic if challenging nar-rator because, even if she crows over hatred, in the face of real violence she relents and childishly wishes that “Rabi’a al-‘Adawiyya would return to save me” (247).

After she is arrested, the narrator is tortured in prison; she stares at her scarred body and declares hatred “worthy of praise,” calling for it




to “live inside us like intense love that grows moment by moment until it takes root in our souls” (251). This climax of hatred coincides with the narrator’s exposure to brutal state violence, drawing an intimate connection between the two without absolving either of responsibility. Sympathy is forced into a new mold; as she suffers under torture, the narrator is both victim and agent, capable of suffering, vengeance, and profound antipathy.

The novel does not linger in this orgy of hatred. After the climax of the prison scenes, Khalifa adopts a normative gender approach to depict the narrator’s conversion to tolerance through her immersion in the female world of her cell, which includes women of diverse sects and religious convictions.20 The conventions of sentimental narrative are restored with the prominence of motherhood; in prison the narra-tor joins in the preparations for the birth of “our child,” who unites all twenty-two women in motherhood with the pregnant Souheir (266). Through this feminine community, the narrator rejects hatred, which had thrived, she learns, on her abjection of those she wished dead. She at-tributes this inter-sectarian dehumanization to the manipulation of poli-ticians, lamenting “what the politicians did to this country” (341), and to religious intolerance, asserting that “accusations of heresy (tekfir) in the Islamic world is the cause of our affliction” (379). This gendered strategy grounds the project for reconciliation in Madih al-Karahiya, welcoming the narrator into a liberal community through the normalization of her previous conflict. Her new gender identity balances sensual femi-ninity, particularly love for children, and her religious faith. Although she drinks champagne and no longer wears the hijab, the narrator em-phasizes her identity as “a Muslim woman who is tolerant with other religions and sects” (379). This balance breaks down the binary between secular tolerance and religious intolerance sustained in The Attack and freely draws on Sunni Islam, Sufism, secular humanism, and local Syr-ian traditions. The narrator is now overjoyed by her uncle Salim, whose compassion and commitment to Sufism lend him a “tolerant, feminine nature” (331) and befriends an Alawite sheikh whose “tolerant smile closes the distance” between them as they “compete in their memoriza-tion of verses by [the Syrian Sufi thinker and poet] al-Ma’ari” (341).

Despite this optimism, however, Madih al-Karahiya does not have a happy ending. As noted above, Khalifa situates events in Syria within




transnational networks of arms and intelligence, which he treats as ma-terial for a modern-day epic featuring U.S. Central Intelligence Agency agents and indefatigable adventurers like Abdullah al-Yemeni. As the narrator’s descent into hatred is resolved, this global perspective matches one woman’s conversion to tolerance with another’s to hatred; the exu-berantly sensual Safaa, after moving to Afghanistan, embraces Taliban ideology and exchanges places with the narrator. Second, and with a pathos that bespeaks the non-normative sentiment this novel builds for its narrator, the closing lines underscore that in her mid-thirties she remains a virgin, associated with the continued repression of her sexu-ality and her isolation: “All alone, I search for pictures of the dead… to exchange with others like an ugly, virgin lizard” (390). This ambiguous closing line abjects the narrator, rendering her suddenly reptilian and suggesting that she falls short of the gender norms that, in the text, un-derpin a liberal commitment to life. One explanation may be found in her evocation of the presence of the dead, gesturing to the legacy of state and non-state violence that continues to weigh on Syrian society. Madih al-Karahiya thus holds the triumph of an individual’s conversion to lib-eral subjectivity in tension with broader societal factors, pushing us to ask: What is the significance of an individual’s embrace of tolerance in the midst of wider forces—economic, political, social, or religious—that may stifle its expression off the page, out in the world?

CONCLUSION

Beyond the specific challenges of historical memory and reconciliation facing Syrians today, there is good reason to linger over this tension be-tween affirmations of individual liberal subjectivity, performed in each of the narratives dealt with here, and the larger questions of sociopo-litical responsibility and agency such treatments of violence raise. This comparative reading seeks to demonstrate the centrality of gendered sentiment as a representational tool to grapple with ethical responses to contemporary violence associated with political Islam and the Middle East. The prevalence of such narratives in diverse contexts attests to a widespread need to condemn non-state forms of violence without ignor-ing the numerous factors, including state violence, that can perpetuate them—a mode of reflection that is frequently shut down in media and




policy debates in the United States and Europe, leery of sympathizing with the terrorist Other. Both Victor and Khadra dabble at the borders of a stark divide that Asad (2007) forcefully critiques: between a liberal Western subject, who is innocent even of violence carried out by his or her state, and a radicalized Middle Easterner, whose recourse to non-state violence is anti-modern. Khadra’s novel in particular ventures into the murky waters of confronting logics that would admit violence as a form of political action before arriving at its tightly sealed conclusion. But continued recourse to debates over legitimacy and illegitimacy oc-cludes the pressing question for studies of literary and cultural represen-tations of terrorism. This question was most strikingly absent in Victor’s non-fictional account of Palestinian women but also carries over into transnationally pedagogical novels like Khadra’s: What is a reader to do once he or she has sympathized with, and perhaps even understood, the alterity of a distant context through narrative? Is it enough to end on a sentimental note, evacuating questions of social and political en-gagement—whether understood in traditional national frameworks or not—from stories and studies that explicitly position themselves at the intersection of violence, ethics, and political action? Khalifa’s complex novel suggests that imaginative engagement with female agency will not resolve, in neatly gendered formulations, the political impact of senti-mental narratives and that sympathetic recognition may unpredictably establish new bonds of social responsibility across communities. Rather than take refuge in familiar condemnations of male manipulations of duped women or even flights of fantasy into imagined reconciliation, readers at home and abroad might do well to let the tension between their individual sentiment and the material factors that they do not—and in all likelihood will not—control continue to provoke their dis-comfort. Without overstating the utopian potential of sympathy, such readings of sentimental narratives that decenter the first-person nar-rative of liberal subjectivity may initiate new forms of reflection on the local and global causes of violence and on the individual and collective forms of engagement capable of addressing them.

NOTES

1. Judith Butler (2004, 8) describes this as the “deeper fear that we shall be




taken up by [a point of view], find it is contagious, become infected in a morally perilous way.” Elaine Martin (2007), for example, suggests that humanizing terrorism in literature legitimizes it.

2. While writing this article, the author used the Arabic text Madih al-Karahiya and all translations are her own. The English translation was published in 2011 as In Praise of Hatred (Transworld, 2011).

3. On the extensive debate over defining terrorism, see e.g., Dugard (1974), Schmid (1984, 2004), Silke (2004), Tilly (2004), Hoffman (2006).

4. See, for example, Alliston (2002), Black (2009), and Cohen (2002).5. This decision in Khalifa’s novel protests the Syrian government’s use of “ter-

rorism” in the 1980s, a discursive strategy to legitimize violence against its citizens, including those who supported the Muslim Brotherhood.

6. As the U.S. author of one sentimental study on female suicide bombers acknowledges, “people around the world are starting to question whether the United States risks becoming the evil it was determined to annihilate” (Davis 2003, 24).

7. For an extensive philosophical and ethical discussion of these issues, see Frey and Morris (1991).

8. Female suicide bombers first acted in the mid-1980s in south Lebanon and subsequently in conflicts in Iraq, Sri Lanka, Turkey, Chechnya, and Israel/Palestine, particularly during the Second Intifada. For brief biographies of Palestinian female suicide bombers in this period, see VanderKaay (2006). For a history of suicide bombing as “modern-day mytholog[ies] of self-chosen martyrdom,” see Reuter (2004, 13). For a literature review on female suicide bombing, see Ness (2008).

9. See, e.g., Bloom (2005), Davis (2003), Victor (2003).10. See also Gunning (2007) and Jackson, Smyth, and Gunning (2009).11. See, e.g., Zulaika and Douglass (1996) and Jackson (2005). The media has

come under particular fire for its “symbiotic relationship” with terrorism (Houen 2002, 11), fodder for the sensationalism of “infotainment” (Nacos 2002). For an excellent treatment of this issue, see Nacos, Bloch-Elkon, and Shapiro (2011).

12. On media and political discourse, see Kellner (2005), Jackson (2005), Zulaika and Douglass (1996), and Anker (2005). On terrorism research, see Silke (2004), Herman and O’Sullivan (1989), and Jackson (2007). For a literature review on critical terrorism studies, see Jackson, Smyth, and Gunning (2009).

13. See e.g., Hasso (2005) and Naaman (2007).14. For a literature review, see Appelbaum and Paknadel (2008). Other signifi-

cant studies are Scanlan (2001) and Houen (2002).15. This narrative move on Victor’s part is particularly problematic because she

later explains that Idris’s death was an accident; her role had been to transport the explosives.

16. The transference of Sihem’s suicide bombing into a question of sexual infidelity is so complete by the conclusion of the novel that, when Adel denies Amin’s accusation of having had an affair with her, Amin believes him and is released from his suffering: “His words save me from my doubt, from my misery, from myself…. The black clouds above my head go whirling away dizzily, leaving a clear sky…. I’m saved!” (Khadra 2005, 224)




17. See Batatu (1999) and Seale (1990). On its treatment in Syrian literature, see Abbas (2009).

18. In prison literature see Mustafa (2008), Samuel (1990), Jibai (1994), and Bayrakdar (2012). Prominent novels on the 1980s include Hallum (2009), Yazbek (2011), Hassan (2009), and Sarraj (2007).

19. Khalifa is referring to Rifat al-Asad’s elite Defense Battalions, which over-saw the siege of Hama in 1982.

20. After four years of imprisonment with the intelligence services, the narrator is moved to a women’s prison, where conditions are improved.

REFERENCES

Abbas, Hassan 2009 Hikayat didd al-nisyan: qira’a fi ba’d al-nitaj al-riwa’i al-mu’aşsr fi suriya

[Stories against forgetting: A reading of several contemporary Syrian novels]. Al-Adab, 9 – 10.

Anker, Elisabeth 2005 Villains, Victims and Heroes: Melodrama, Media and September 11.

Journal of Communication 55:1 (March): 22 – 37.Appelbaum, Robert, and Alexis Paknadel 2008 Terrorism and the Novel, 1970-2001. Poetics Today 29:3 (Fall): 387 – 436.Asad, Talal 2007 On Suicide Bombing. New York: Columbia University Press.Batatu, Hanna 1999 Syria’s Peasantry, the Descendants of its Lesser Rural Notables and their

Politics. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Bayrakdar, Faraj 2012 Khiyanat al-lugha wa a-samt [Betrayals of language and silence]. Beirut:

Dar al-Jadid.Berko, Anat, and Edna Erez 2008 Martyrs or murderers? Victims or victimizers? The voices of would-

be Palestinian female suicide bombers. In Female Terrorism and Militancy: Agency, Utility, and Organization, ed. Cindy Ness. New York: Routledge.

Black, Shameem 2009 Microloans and Micronarratives: Sentiment for a Small World. Public

Culture 21(2): 269 – 92.Bloom, Mia 2005 Dying to Kill: the Allure of Suicide Terror. New York: Columbia

University Press.Brown, Katherine E. 2011 Blinded by the Explosion? Security and Resistance in Muslim Women’s

Suicide Terrorism. In Women, Gender, and Terrorism, ed. Laura Sjoberg and Caron E. Gentry. Athens: University of Georgia Press.




Brunner, Claudia 2007 Occidentalism Meets the Female Suicide Bomber: A Critical Reflection

on Recent Terrorism Debates. Signs 32:4 (Summer): 957 – 71.Cohen, Margaret 2002 Sentimental Communities. In The Literary Channel: The Inter-National

Invention of the Novel, ed. Margaret Cohen and Carolyn Dever. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Davis, Joyce M. 2003 Martyrs: Innocence, Vengeance and Despair in the Middle East. New

York: Palgrave.Dugard, John 1974 International Terrorism: Problems of Definition. Royal Institute of

International Affairs 50:1 (January): 67 – 81.Festa, Lynn 2006 The Sentimental Figures of Empire. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University

Press.Frey, R.G., and Christopher W. Morris, eds. 1991 Violence, Terrorism and Justice. Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press. Garand, Dominique 2008 Que peut la fiction? Yasmina Khadra, le terrorisme et le conflit israélo-

palestinien [What can fiction do? Yasmine Khadra, terrorism, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict]. Études françaises 44(1): 37 – 56.

Gunning, Joeren 2007 A Case for Critical Terrorism Studies? Government and Opposition

42(3): 363 – 93.Hallum, Mundhir Badr 2009 Awlad Sakiba aw khuruj al-aqdam al-hafiyah [The Children of Sakiba,

or the bare-footed exodus]. Beirut: al-Dar al-‘Arabiyya li’l-‘Alum Nashirun. Harris, Thomas 1975 Black Sunday. New York: Putnam.Hassan, Rosa Yassine 2009 Hurras al-hawa [Guardians of the air]. Beirut: al-Kawkab Books. Hasso, Frances S. 2005 Discursive and Political Deployments by/of the 2002 Palestinian

Women Suicide Bombers/Martyrs. Feminist Review 81: 23 – 51.Herman, Edward, and Gerry O’Sullivan 1989 The Terrorism Industry: The Experts and Institutions that Shape our

View of Terror. New York: Pantheon.Hoffman, Bruce 2006 Inside Terrorism. New York: Columbia University Press. Jackson, Richard 2005 Writing the War on Terrorism: Language, Politics and Counter-Terror-

ism. Manchester: Manchester University Press. 2007 The Core Commitments of Critical Terrorism Studies. European




Political Science 6: 244 – 51.Jackson, Richard, Marie Breen Smyth, and Joeren Gunning, eds. 2009 Critical Terrorism Studies: A New Research Agenda. New York:

Routledge.Jaggi, Maya 2012 In Praise of Hatred by Khaled Khalifa – Review. The Guardian.

September 14.Jibai, Ghassan 1994 Asabi’ al-mawz [Banana fingers]. Damascus: Manshurat Wizarat

al-Thaqafa. Kadari, Louiza 2007 De l’utopie totalitaire aux oeuvres de Yasmina Khadra, approches des

violences intégristes [On totalitarian utopia in the works of Yasmina Khadra: Approaches to fundamentalist violence]. Paris: Harmattan.

Khadra, Yasmina 2005 The Attack. Trans. John Cullen. New York: Nan A. Talese/Doubleday.Khalifa, Khaled 2006 Madih al-Karahiya [In praise of hatred]. Beirut: Dar al-Adab.Khalifa, Mustafa 2008 Al-Qawqa’a [The shell]. Beirut: Dar al-Adab. Martin, Elaine 2007 The Global Phenomenon of ‘Humanizing’ Terrorism in Literature and

Cinema. CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 9:1.Naaman, Dorit 2007 Brides of Palestine/Angels of Death: Media, Gender and Performance

in the Case of the Palestinian Female Suicide Bombers. Signs 32: 4 (Summer): 933 – 55.

Nacos, Brigitte L. 2002 Mass-Mediated Terrorism: The Central Role of the Media in Terrorism

and Counterterrorism. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield.Nacos, Brigitte L., Yaeli Bloch-Elkon, and Robert Y. Shapiro 2011 Selling Fear: Counterterrorism, the Media, and Public Opinion. Chicago:

University of Chicago Press.Nivat, Anne 2008 The black widows: Chechen women join the fight for independence—

and Allah. In Female Terrorism and Militancy: Agency, Utility, and Organization, ed. Cindy Ness. New York: Routledge.

O’Rourke, Lindsey A. 2009 What’s Special about Female Suicide Terrorism? Security Studies 18(4):

681 – 718.Reuter, Christoph 2004 My Life is a Weapon: A Modern History of Suicide Bombing. Princeton:

Princeton University Press.Rowland, Ann Wierda 2008 Sentimental Fiction. In The Cambridge Companion to Fiction in the

Romantic Period, ed. Richard Maxwell and Katie Trumpener. Cambridge:




Cambridge University Press.Said, Edward 1978 Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books.Samuel, Ibrahim 1990 Al-Nahnahat [Little coughs]. Damascus: Dar al-Jundi.Sarraj, Manhal 2007 Kama yanbaghi li’l-nahar [As a river should]. Beirut: al-Dar al-‘Arabiyya

li’l-‘Alum Nashirun. Scanlan, Margaret 2001 Plotting Terror: Novelists and Terrorists in Contemporary Fiction.

Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press.Schmid, Alex P. 1984 Political Terrorism: A Research Guide to Concepts, Theories, Data Bases

and Literature. Amsterdam; New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books. 2004 Frameworks for Conceptualising Terrorism. Terrorism and Political

Violence 16(2): 197 – 221.Schweitzer, Yoram 2008 Palestinian female suicide bombers: Virtuous heroines or damaged

goods? In Female Terrorism and Militancy: Agency, Utility, and Organiza- tion, ed. Cindy Ness. New York: Routledge.

Seale, Patrick 1990 Asad: The Struggle for the Middle East. University of California Press.Silke, Andrew 2004 An Introduction to Terrorism Research. In Research on Terrorism:

Trends, Achievements and Failures, ed. Andrew Silke. London: Frank Cass.Sjoberg, Laura, and Caron E. Gentry, eds. 2011 Women, Gender, and Terrorism. Athens: University of Georgia Press.Sjoberg, Laura, Grace D. Cooke, and Stacy Reiter Neal 2011 Introduction. Women, Gender, and Terrorism. Women, Gender, and

Terrorism, ed. Laura Sjoberg and Caron E. Gentry. Athens: University of Georgia Press.

Skaine, Rosemarie 2006 Female Suicide Bombers. Jefferson: McFarland.Speckhard, Anne, and Khapta Akhmedova 2008 Black Widows and Beyond: Understanding the Motivations and Life

Trajectories of Chechen Female Terroists. In Female Terrorism and Militancy: Agency, Utility, and Organization, ed. Cindy Ness. New York: Routledge.

Sylvester, Christine, and Swati Parashar 2009 The Contemporary ‘Mahabharata’ and the Many ‘Draupadis’: Bringing

Gender to Critical Terrorism Studies. In Critical Terrorism Studies, ed. Richard Jackson, Marie Breen Smith, and Joeren Gunning. New York: Routledge.

Tilly, Charles 2004 Terror, Terrorism, Terrorists. Sociological Theory 22:1 (March): 5 – 12.




VanderKaay, Katherine 2006 Girls Interrupted: The Making of Female Palestinian Suicide Bombers.

In Terror In the Holy Land, ed. Judy Kuriansky. Westport: Praeger.Victor, Barbara 2003 Army of Roses: Inside the World of Palestinian Women Suicide Bombers.

Emmaus, PA: Rodale.Yazbek, Samar 2011 Silsaal [Clay]. Beirut: Dar al-Adab. Zulaika, Joseba, and William A. Douglass 1996 Terror and Taboo: The Follies, Fables and Faces of Terrorism. New York;

London: Routledge.



Sentimental Terror Narratives: Gendering Violence, Dividing Sympathy

Documents

Transcript of Sentimental Terror Narratives: Gendering Violence, Dividing Sympathy