Journal of Religion and Violence

published on April 26, 2022

Muslim Hunger Strikes as Secular Critique in Yemen

The growing internationalism of armed conflict in Yemen has presented challenges to Muslim reformers working to achieve social justice. This paper attends to the ethical dimensions of Islamic activism by exploring the use of hunger strikes to strengthen otherwise fractious political coalitions. Facing pressure from actors willing to evoke the most strident forms of sectarianism to explain, license and justify violence, hunger strikers and their supporters enlist what Abdulrabbuh al-Rubaidi (2018) has called a “new skepticism” toward conventional religious establishments that, for many Yemenis since 2011 especially, have become complicit with authoritarian oppression. With the aim of identifying new currents in Muslim reform across the Global South as sovereign state formations face unprecedented scrutiny, this paper considers hunger strike activists’ turn to what political theorist Achille Mbembé (2019) has called “the necropolitical.” In drawing attention to the relationship between hungry bodies and forms of living death exacted on populations through regimes of national and parastatal violence, Yemeni activists hail the value of older, anti-imperialist discourses for reconstituting Islamic solidarity. The ethical leverage of such activism inheres, it is argued, in manifestations of “the secular,” understood not as something opposed to, or outside of, religion but, pace anthropologist Khaled Furani (2015), as a recognition of finitude whose sensory dimensions, magnified against frailties of sovereignty, knowledge and certitude, guide believers toward otherwise unavailable modes of religious worldliness. Islamic fasting rituals help activists frame and stage finitude. Conducted in ordinary and domestic spaces and coordinated with hunger strikes, in practice as well as through literary and artistic representation, fasting rituals situate hunger strike activism as an exercise in Muslim sovereignty tethered to virtuous self-fashioning.