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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