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The Universal Enemy: Jihad, Empire and the Challenge of Solidarity. By Darryl Li. Stanford Studies in Middle Eastern and Islamic Societies and Cultures. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2019. xii, 354 pp. Appendix. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $30.00 Paper
Who and under what circumstances has the right to speak for the universal? That is the question animating Darryl Li's engaging, provocative, and analytically robust book, The Universal Enemy: Jihad, Empire and the Challenge of Solidarity. The book investigates one of the most sensational as well as poorly understood aspects of the 1992–95 war in Bosnia-Herzegovina—the involvement of hundreds of foreign Muslim fighters who fought alongside Bosnian Muslims (Bosniaks) to preserve the newly independent post-Yugoslav state. In doing so, this work also models the kind of transnational ethnography that is capable of pushing past the often-limiting confines of area studies, without sacrificing the depth of its engagement with specific histories, people, and places.
Comprising an introduction and seven chapters, Universal Enemy is the result of over a decade of multisited fieldwork, primarily in Bosnia-Herzegovina, which provides its central ethnographic mise-en-scène, but on occasion also in other places like Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Malaysia, where its author locates his interlocutors many years after the war. Li, who is trained as a political and legal anthropologist, as well as a human rights lawyer, relies on a variety of linguistic, historical, and professional forms of expertise to make sense of the Muslim fighters (mujahids) not as the monstrous avatars of the Global War on Terror, but as a complex and heterogenous formation of mobile actors engaged in an effort to produce a different kind of a universalism. The result is a fascinating, at times poignant, but always stirring book, which stages an anthropological challenge to mainstream conceptualizations of jihad in particular, and political violence in general.
Li develops in this book a conceptualization of universalism as a structure of aspiration, whose relationship to empirical reality is often tenuous but nevertheless posits a horizon of belonging grounded in a promise of transcendence of difference. To call something as seemingly particular as jihad a universalist project might strike readers in the west as odd—but this is precisely Li's point. Not all universalisms are recognized as worthy of carrying that mantle—and...