Woolwich Terror, Surveillance, and the ImPossibility of Islamic Reform

Dr. Hasan Azad
Columbia University

Introduction
The killing of off-duty soldier  Lee Rigby on May 22nd , 2013, in Woolwich, UK, overshadowed completely the  NSA scandal  that  came  out  around the same time. The revelations by journalist Glenn Greenwald-through thousands of documents leaked by the former security company employee1 Edward Snowden-that massive surveillance operations are being carried  out by the NSA in the US and GCHQ in the UK, shows that there is no place to hide,2 to borrow from the title of Greenwald's book. The transnational Islamic political group, Hizb ut-Tahrir (HT) Britain's leader Imran Waheed spoke on this issue a couple of weeks later-at a half-day event organized by HT, which seeks to establish an Islamic State in the Muslim world through ideological (non-violent) struggle, in East London-stating that Prism (the clandestine surveillance program under which the United States National Security Agency [NSA] collects internet communications from at least nine major US internet companies) is not just being used to monitor Muslims, but everyone. I argue that today's monitoring of Muslims goes hand in hand with the notion of the need for Islamic reform (or, put differently, the reformation of Muslims).

Muslims across the board have internalized the (Western) logic of the need to reform, and cannot help but do so, given the ways in which (dominant) discourses function,  that  is, they go into creating  people's  everyday sense(s) of being, living, and thinking-as a type of self-surveillance, even  as  many abjure the notion of reform, as the ideas of the need for "reformation" and "enlightenment" constitute  the modern Western  "unconscious  of knowledge:3' I examine Imran Waheed's criticisms of British governmental (media-political) pressures on Muslims to reform, and the "Marrakech Declaration,"4 where "hundreds of Muslim scholars and intellectuals from over  120  countries,  along with  representatives  of  Islamic  and  international  organizations,  as well  as leaders  from  diverse  religious  groups  and  nationalities,  gathered in Marrakesh  ...  to  reaffirm  the  principles  of  the  Charter  of Medina:5' I also examine a conversation between the director of the "anti-extremism think tank," The Quilliam Foundation, Maajid Nawaz, and Sam Harris-one of the "Four Horsemen of New Atheism" alongside Richard Dawkins, Daniel Denet, and the late Christopher Hitchens-published as Islam and the Future of Tolerance: A Dialogue,6 in which the question of the need for Islamic reform is front and center.

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