Abstract

This essay traces the dynamic encounter between Rohingya ulama (scholars), who travel as muhajir (migrants), and Bangladeshi Deobandi Islamists, who re-enact the role of the ansar (helpers), as they explore godforsakenness during two waves of migration in 2016 and 2017. Bringing together theological aphasia and references to contemporary jihad, this ethnographic meditation calls into question the assumptive logics of secular historicism and liberal humanitarianism as it confronts the deathworld of the War on Terror through Islam’s founding texts and traditions. Drawing from Talal Asad’s reading of the secular as “conceptually prior to the political doctrine of secularism” and a formation that contains “a variety of concepts, practices, and sensibilities,” it highlights and unearths the secular core of liberal concepts of humanitarianism, historicity, spatiality, and geography, to specify their uses within the discourse of the War on Terror. The ulama in the border region point to the secular and identify it as a structuring coordinate within the discourse of liberal civil society. At the level of sensibility, the interactions between the scholars and Islamists in the border region reveal a domain consisting of moods, anxieties, and perceptive qualities that runs counter to the affective life immanent to secularity.