What Does Collective Amnesia of State Violence Mean For Young Muslims?

This article, by Razan Bayan—a scholar-activist and PhD student at the University of Notre Dame—explores the overlooked impact of the War on Terror on Muslim identity. Many American Muslims born after 9/11 remain unaware of U.S. state torture practices during this era, a gap in knowledge that may contribute to internalized Islamophobia.

I was nineteen years old when I first learned about Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, and the system of torture the US unleashed following 9/11.

There were plenty of emotions I went through after learning about something so disturbing. Visceral disgust, disappointment, and above all a very deep anger. But remarkably, I felt no shock, at least not initially.

I was a student in a human rights class, spending the semester learning about the worst things humans have done to each other. Torture was a topic of study along with slavery and genocide and the like, so while the gut-wrenching stories from Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib deeply resonated with me, I had walked into class expecting to learn about the worst of the worst acts, and it did not initially shock me when I did.

What did shock me was the realization that, among pretty much anyone who was old enough to remember the early 2000s, Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib were common knowledge.

As a student born after 9/11, I had the naive assumption that what I was learning about torture during the War on Terror was specialized knowledge, that it wasn’t material people encountered unless they studied human rights like me, that I was somehow special for knowing the details of the abuse this country was willing to commit.

It sounds ridiculous. But when every person around my age was shocked when I shared my newfound knowledge, when I did not find a single peer who wasn’t as ignorant as I had been before this class, who could blame me? Only when I started talking to adults aged thirty or older did I begin to realize how blind I’d been.

Every adult who was old enough to remember the early 2000s knew about the practices in Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib. How could they not? It dominated the media cycles at the time, I now know.

But every person I talked to who was too young to remember that period was wholly ignorant of the prisons and the torture. How could they not be? No one told us anything about them, I now realize.

This experience led me to conduct a study proving the existence of a collective amnesia among Muslim Americans of my generation when it comes to Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib. However, I don’t intend to discuss the results of that study, but rather what this collective amnesia means for us, the immediate post-9/11 generation of Muslims.

For me, shedding this ignorance undid years of internalized Islamophobia almost instantaneously. Growing up in a post-9/11 America meant being exposed to Islamophobic narratives of Muslims as inherently violent, but it also exposed me to responses from the Muslim communities that more often than not unintentionally lent credibility to these narratives. I was raised in a country where the Muslim community was constantly justifying its existence. I learned a thousand and one arguments to prove that Islam isn’t really violent, and, through educational programs and interviews, I tried to make the world believe it. I was constantly over-explaining and justifying and apologizing for violence I never committed.

In that class, as I flipped through the pages describing violent act after violent act committed by US soldiers in US detention centers to Muslims, I realized that no one had ever felt the need to continuously explain or justify or apologize for this very real violence. My need to do the same, which I carried almost as long as I could remember, dissipated instantly. My deep anger at the lack of accountability for state violence changed my academic interests as well, leading me to my current research on the history of US militarism and imperialism.

Had it not been for the class I was taking, I might not have been exposed to the reality of the War on Terror at all. My research found that far too many young Muslims are still unaware. There is a collective amnesia that plagues this country, and it took only a single generation to pervade so deeply.
What do young Muslims lose when they don’t know about state violence against Muslims? When violence committed by Muslims is embedded in this country’s history and ingrained in every new generation’s collective memory, but violence against Muslims is never whispered about? When Muslims are always perpetrators of violence, never victims?

These questions are hardly studied because of a tragic irony: an ignorance of the ignorance of post-9/11 state torture of Muslims. That is, the older generations are largely ignorant of the younger generations’ collective amnesia. In my experience, those who remember Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib themselves are shocked to hear that most of the post-9/11 generation doesn’t know about them. This double-blindness is present even between parents and their own children. On multiple occasions, I had parents who learned about my findings test them on their own kids, asking their children born after 9/11 if they knew about Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, and each time they were stunned by their own child’s obliviousness.

We don’t have definitive answers to the question of what this collective amnesia means for Muslim youth, but I suspect that harmful internalized narratives are a large part of those answers.

Judith Butler argued in Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? that the US framed its victims of the War on Terror as fundamentally incompatible with victimhood, but that the pictures from Abu Ghraib broke that frame for many Americans. I fear for the generations of Muslims that, through virtue of their collective amnesia, have not experienced such a frame break.

When imperial violence and militarism are not an essential part of our understanding of the post-9/11 state (or the pre-9/11 state, for that matter), we succumb to an ahistorical perception of the past. But when we are not even afforded victimhood in such a retelling of history, we learn only to repeat the narratives of our own oppression.

Photo from Cyril A on Flickr