`The burning'

Abstract

Based on ethnographic research with Moroccan youth, the article traces debates and vocabularies related to the experience and imagination of clandestine migration to Europe ( l-harg, `the burning'), and the risk to one's life this entails, with a particular focus on the way Islamic eschatology and political theology provide the conceptual framework and ethical horizon within which subjectivity and despair, the de facto exclusion from citizenship, the existential stakes of life and death, are understood and creatively reconfigured. The article engages with the specific way Islamic ethical-political conceptual configurations such as jihad an-nafs, `the struggle of/against the self' in a context of oppression, the risk of heresy (al-kufr, as-shirk) in the experience of despair and suicide, the `remembrance of death' (dhikr al-mawt) and the representation of the Last Day are mobilized in debates among the youth and in the self-description of their predicament. While tracing the youth's specific understanding of theses concepts, the article also relates them to theological and philosophical literatures (from al-Ghazali to Shariati) to which they have access by way of cassette listening, reading, or satellite television. It is written in critical counterpoint with the reflection of Arab psychoanalysts and other secular Middle Eastern intellectuals around the questions of subjectivity and religion, and it was conceived at a time of anxious public debate concerning the problematization of religious violence and the rise of the Islamic revivalist movement.