“In Tanweer Fazal’s book, ‘Practices of the State: Muslims, Law and Violence in India’, he explains how this state-sponsored identity flattens the Muslims into a homogenous community.”
“Taking a leaf from Jean Paul Sartre’s Nothingness of Being, where he reflects on the Jewish identity being fixed by the anti-semite gaze, in India the state’s gaze fixes the Muslim as Muslim with no freedom to be anything but Muslim. There is an ‘overdetermination’ of a Muslim’s identity from the outside with the person having little or no power to constitute it for oneself. As if their essence lies in the Muslimness and not in being a human. And once denuded of their essence as a human being, a Muslim becomes an easy target for violence. The irony is that although a recipient of persecutory violence, the Muslim is constructed as a violent and treacherous being.”
Read the full review of Tanweer Fazal’s ‘Practices of the State: Muslims, Law and Violence in India‘ by Aparna Vaidik on the Wire
https://thewire.in/books/how-the-indian-state-constructs-muslimness-through-law-and-violence