Concentration camp prisoners called ‘Muslims’ became a figure of absolute subjection

Evidence

The Muslims are everywhere. At the center and at the margins of Europe and its literature, visible and invisible, they figure a disappearing nonact where passivity and subjection endure. Indeed, “Muslims,” this most visible and invisible of words, has been a manifest site, a site of manifestation, an “image,” as Primo Levi says, for absolute subjection, and a figure of recognition-and at bottom, if there were one, the only question I would have is this: How did this “recognition” become and remain possible since the earliest days? … Emil Fackenheim thought it wise to add to their unbearable name yet another name, another calling. The Muslims, he chillingly writes, “may be called the most truly original contribution of the Third Reich to civilization.” — Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab, 688

Categorization

• QUESTION: Why did the term Muselmann come to name the utterly passive, dying prisoner — and how did a Muslim identity become the figure for absolute abjection in the camps?
• XREF: Pairs with Agamben’s Remnants of Auschwitz and the figure of bare life / homo sacer; also resonates with ongoing debates about Holocaust terminology and the contemporary Muslim figure of the enemy.