Anti-Muslim polemic literature supplied ideological ammunition for torture at Abu Ghraib.

Evidence

An Iraqi detainee in Abu Ghraib named Amin Said al-Sheikh was asked by a US soldier who was torturing him whether he believed in anything. He replied, “I believe in Allah.” “But I believe in torture,” the liberator of Iraq responded, “and I will torture you.” Another US soldier, meanwhile, struck his broken leg and ordered him to curse Islam. “Because they started to hit my broken leg,” al-Sheikh reported, “I curse my religion. They ordered me to thank Jesus I’m alive.” To me, both the American torturers are morally superior to Ibn Warraq—because Ibn Warraq, here in the United States, gave those monsters the ammunition to perpetrate the crimes they committed at Abu Ghraib. — Hamid Dabashi, Brown Skin, White Masks, 536

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The moral inversion — literature equated with torture as complicity, the torturer ranked above the writer — is a genuinely provocative claim about intellectual responsibility worth returning to.
• SEED: Essay angle: the accountability chain from anti-religion polemic to state violence — when does scholarship become ammunition?
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Hamid Dabashi, Brown Skin, White Masks, 536
• XREF: connects to: Anti-Muslim racism is not continuous from the Inquisition to Abu Ghraib — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 92; The Arab Mind’s homogenizing caricature was instrumentalized to design US torture. — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 206

Related

• Belief in Muslim monstrosity authorized legal torture at Abu Ghraib (similarity 0.79)
• The Muslim-monster fantasy only partially explains Abu Ghraib’s atrocities (similarity 0.79)
• Popular torture imagery in American media normalized real torture of Muslims abroad. (similarity 0.79)
• Abu Ghraib abuses stem from centuries-old anti-Muslim monster imagery, not aberrance (similarity 0.78)