On Violence

I was reading Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s White Nights by the seafront of the Municipal Sports Stadium in Saida, a place that encapsulates all the contradictions of the city and mirrors the turmoil of my own feelings toward it. Notably, this was the very first work of Dostoyevsky I had ever read, despite being an avid reader. I had, in fact, avoided Dostoyevsky for a pitiful reason. Growing up, reading him was treated by a particular breed of “intellectuals” as a badge of worthiness and cultural credibility. I had read plenty of authors like Gibran Khalil Gibran, Mikhael Nu‘ayma, Amin Maalouf, among many others and I never understood the condescension. What I encountered was a kind of performative elitism of intellectualism that was often reduced to a formula: drinking Arabic coffee in a particular way, smoking cigarettes, listening to Fairuz in the morning, maintaining a cowardly detachment from reality while pontificating virtue and morality with hollow authority, and, of course, reading Dostoyevsky. This repelled me. And so, for years, I kept my distance. 

As I sat reading Dostoyevsky, a child no older than five stopped at my bench, begging me to buy a pack of wipes for less than a dollar. My first reaction was to ignore him until he leaves, just as everyone else was doing. What an irony. “What is the use of intellect in the face of cruelty and the absence of empathy?” I thought to myself. I was not about to join the very breed of intellectuals I abhorred. 

So, I turned to the boy and told him I didn’t need wipes, that this was the only reason I wouldn’t buy from him. I wanted to treat him like a merchant, not a beggar. But he was a child, and my rationalization meant nothing to him. He simply did what he’d been taught to do when someone acknowledged him: he stuck around until I cracked. And I did. I bought the wipes.

I wished I could get up and scold his father but what could he do in the face of crushing poverty and systemic neglect. I grew angry at a government that allowed so much abuse of power and resources that its children were left with no childhood. I grew angry at the aloofness, the numbness, the way everyone around me seemed unmoved by the sight of this boy. I wanted to explode, to revolt, to do something…anything. But all I could do was wipe away a tear and return to reading my very first work by Dostoyevsky.

I came across an academic claim that "it is not necessary to interrogate or torture to attain truths," and that we can respond to our collective critical condition in ways that are self- and world-repairing, generative, and non-violent. What a load of bull crap. When reality is violent, the insistence on non-violence becomes part of the abuse. I was genuinely intrigued by a moment in the article where the author pauses to consider the blind spots that can emerge when one relies too heavily on theoretical knowledge alone. This resonated with both my critique and my complicated affection for academia: its persistent detachment from reality. However, what I was reading was a deeply provocative intervention, especially in the critique of the “combative idiom” that often characterizes theoretical discourse, including the uncritical use of metaphors of violence in discussions about truth. While the criticism of the general dyadic relationship present in theory, implying that the theorist is often detached from the world, is valid, it reductively overlooks the fact that theorists such as Frantz Fanon, Malcolm X, Angela Davis, and Walter Rodney, to name a few, developed their theorizations of violence, self-defense, and resistance by any means in direct relation to lived experience and active struggle to change the world.

Co-creation, auto-theory, and the sacred-scientific overlay are all methods suggested as nonviolent alternatives to the "uncritical" theorization of truth. Although these methods are introduced within the context of a provocative critique of "violent" modes of theorizing, I find myself in agreement with many of their insights. This is not because they are innovative revelations to me, but because they reflect ways of knowing that have long existed in my culture. These ideas resonate deeply because they reflect the basis of the intellectual legacy of Islamic scholars who practiced science, art, and spirituality as a unified whole, long before we were cast as uncivilized. Figures such as Al-Farabi, who was both a philosopher and musician; Ibn Sina, a polymath who wrote philosophical treatises and mystical poetry; Al-Ghazali, a theologian and jurist who also engaged deeply with Sufi metaphysics and ethics; and Ibn Arabi, whose works blended theology, cosmology, and poetic mysticism, all exemplify a model of inquiry where art, science, and the sacred were never in opposition but intimate. In this sense, I also deeply resonate with the decolonial and feminist assertion that scholars shouldn’t feel compelled to hide their love for, or attachment to, the subjects they study. This unapologetic attachment to knowledge is something our tradition has long embraced.

I’m not being exceptionalist. I do not claim that my culture was the only one to hold the key to innovation and investigation. In fact, I resonate deeply with the idea, drawn from Derrida and echoed in something I recently read, that traces of marks invisibly inform new marks to come. There's this notion of an eternal chain of interaction: each mark we make is linked to previous marks, even if we don't see them directly. This idea captures precisely what I believe: that knowledge is not created in a vacuum, it is a cumulative, interactive process. Islamic scholarship of the Golden Age of Islam, for instance, did not emerge in isolation. It was deeply informed by Greek philosophy, and Islamic thinkers not only preserved this knowledge but refined it, expanded on it, and eventually transmitted it to Europe. I am also not being a prisoner of history, to echo Fanon. I am fully aware that reminiscing about past glories does nothing to bring about change. The real leap, as he argues, is to introduce invention into existence. The problem, then, is not that others have drawn upon the traces of our intellectual traditions. The issue lies in how these same traces, were once dismissed as backward or primitive and used to justify our dehumanization and in how, even now, we remain structurally excluded from the very spaces where these ideas are being revalued, repurposed, and credited. So, my frustration is not with the emergence of insights that echo our traditions. It is in the painful reality that we are often unable to re-engage and renegotiate these traditions on our own terms. We are denied the time, space, or material stability to reflect and reclaim them, we are instead thrust into a daily survival mode, where our focus is reduced to basic instincts and worrying about how to make it through the next day. In such conditions, intellectual continuity and cultural self-reflection becomes a luxury. This is a form of violence, epistemic violence. So how, then, does it make sense to insist on nonviolence as the only valid response to such conditions? That choice should be ours to make. 

As long as historical grievances remain unsettled, decolonization remains incomplete, and justice unachieved, there will always be a power imbalance, one that continues to reproduce similar patterns of exclusion and domination and one that insists on a violent response. For example, I participated in the X Page Workshop, a creative writing program for immigrant and refugee women in Canada, designed to amplify marginalized voices and foster community through storytelling. The year I participated in the X Page Workshop, the facilitation team was composed of both, people of color and white Canadian professionals. The co-founder is a Canadian professor of Iraqi origin. Given this makeup, the program was designed with intention and the staff embodied commitment to cultural sensitivity and the valuing of diverse realities. Yet, on performance day, my friends who were in the audience left feeling deeply unsettled. They felt that something was off. It was as if we, the immigrant women with our stories, had been paraded in front of an audience for entertainment and as though we were being presented as subjects of observation and study. There was genuinely no mistreatment in my experience, no microaggressions, no overt signs of insensitivity. In fact, there was clear and sincere care extended by the facilitators. However, that care did not erase the structural and historical issues that lingered beneath the surface. These dynamics carried an affective weight, an inherited discomfort that no amount of good intention could fully neutralize. The performance, while meant to be celebratory and empowering, inadvertently echoed patterns of display and spectatorship. We, the immigrant women, became emotionally legible to the audience only through curated vulnerability. 

I don’t know if Yamen, the child who sold me wipes at the seafront, would have appreciated the enduring philosophy and melancholy of White Nights, whose beauty survives even in translation. Those beautiful words of Dostoevsky won’t secure his bread for the day. I don’t think it’s fair to deprive a child like Yamen of the right to a violent response, not merely a reaction, to the violence of his childhood. The demand for nonviolence from those whose lives are shaped by systemic and generational violence is itself a form of violence. Insisting on this right is not an allegiance to savagery but a commitment to humanity.

This is best captured by Marwan Makhoul, a Palestinian poet who wrote: “In order for me to write poetry that isn't political, I must listen to the birds, and in order to hear the birds, the warplanes must be silent " - or better yet, must be made silent by whatever means neceassry.