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Violence is a word seemingly meant for theorizing, being as abstract and thus as capacious as any category can be. And indeed the history of its use has only confirmed the all-encompassing character of violence, which can now name almost any kind of action or affect: physical, psychological, and even ideological. And yet this term is also deployed to name the most distinctive and visceral forms of cruelty and suffering, such that it is difficult to treat it merely as another abstract category. Shifting uncomfortably between the particularity of pain and the generality of an intellectual category, violence has until recently been ill served by scholarship. The necessities of justice, for example, have meant that violence is rarely the subject of law in its own right, but used only as a euphemism for some degree of murder or charge of battery. And since historians are especially seduced by legal terminology, perhaps because they have traditionally described and justified power, their efforts to mimic the law by finding some party responsible for something have tended not to deal productively with violence.

Unlike the pacifists and humanitarians with whom he is routinely associated, Gandhi was critical of human rights as a legal and political project. Indeed, he attributed modern violence precisely to the fact that life had become an absolute value, something that could therefore be defended in the most murderous of ways. It was only by disregarding and even throwing life away, Gandhi maintained, that it might be protected. The love of death, in other words, might guarantee life far more effectively, if only as an indirect and unintended consequence, than making an absolute value of the latter.

"The upheavals of the 'Arab Spring' have led many to argue that it marks the decline of globalized forms of militancy in the Muslim world and the return to 'real' politics there. By contrast this essay traces a continuity between the forms of mobilization pioneered by Al-Qaeda on the one hand, and the Arab 'revolutions' on the other. In both cases sacrificial forms of mobilization emerge outside the inherited institutions and categories of statist politics and seek to remake them. Whether they are violent or nonviolent, then, such movements illustrate the remaking of political practice in the global arena." (author's abstract)

Having put an end to his first great movement of non-cooperation following the First World War, Gandhi sat down to learn the lessons of this early experiment in mass politics. In 1926 he went on to impart these lessons to his fellow workers in the Sabarmati Ashram by way of a series of lectures on the Bhagavad Gita. Gandhi was interested in exploring the relations between violence and non-violence, which he thought were so intimate that one could very easily turn into the other. Seeking out the Archimedean point that made such a turning possible, the Mahatma had occasion to criticize any ethics that would divide good from evil on the basis of a moral calculus. How, he asked, was an ethics possible that recognized the intractability of ignorance and compulsion? Any ethical system that relied upon knowledge and choice, he thought, was either deluded or true only for a very small elite. A common ethics, then, had to be one which recognized ignorance and compulsion not negatively, as posing limits to moral life, but rather in the form of positive virtues like duty and obedience. Gandhi's commentary on the Gita was therefore an attempt to think about moral action in the context of ignorance and compulsion, which he did by focusing on the integrity of the act itself divested of the idealism lent it by any moral calculus.

Osama bin Laden's rhetoric has consistently voiced a desire for global equality between Muslims and Christians, or between the Islamic world and the West. Having accused America of hypocrisy as far as its advancement of this equality is concerned, Bin Laden turns his attention to the only form in which he thinks such equality is now possible: the equality of death. This is why he has repeatedly emphasized the need for an equivalence of terror between the Muslim world and America, as if this were the only form in which the two might come together and even communicate one with the other. For Al-Qaeda, terror is the only form in which global freedom and equality are now available. Terror therefore functions as the dark side of America's own democracy, as inseparable from it as an evil twin. So in the aftermath of the 2005 Madrid bombings, Bin Laden issued a statement in which he defined terrorism as an effort to universalize security as a human right, if only by refusing to accept its monopolization by the West. For equality demanded that security should be enjoyed by all or by none.

What is the conceptual status of modernity in the Muslim world? Scholars describe Muslim attempts at appropriating this European idea as being either derivative or incomplete, with a few calling for multiple modernities to allow modern Islam some autonomy. Such approaches are critical of the apologetic way in which Muslims have grappled with the idea of modernity, the purity and autonomy of the concept of which is apparently compromised by its derivative and incomplete appropriation. None have attended to the conceptual status of this apologetic itself, though it is certainly the most important element in Muslim debates on the modern. This essay considers the adoption of modernity as an idea among Muslim intellectuals in nineteenth-century India, a place in which some of the earliest and most influential debates on Islam's modernity occurred. It argues that Muslim apologetics created a modernity whose rejection of purity and autonomy permitted it a distinctive conceptual form.