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Suspect Community and Orientalism

 

            
             "From Guantánamo to Pakistan: One Man Shares his Story" is an article documenting the story of Iqbal Madni (Ahmed, 2011). Madni is an Islamic scholar who was detained by the United States government in September of 2002. He was detained in Jakarta by Indonesian authorities. The violence he experienced was on account of his "race" because he matched the description of the suspect community, and not for any other legitimate reason. Madni was held in Guantánamo Bay, a black site, for over five years. .
             Extraordinary rendition is the practice of secretly sending terrorist suspects to be interrogated in a country that has limited laws for the humane treatment of the convicts (Natalie and Joseph, 2012). Experiences such as rendering detainees led them to the loss of their legal rights, as black sites remove people from the protection of the law. In such practices, torture is highly valued in the structure of dehumanizing and demonizing. Many wish for the Guantánamo Bay to be closed due to the many reports of torture, as stated in, "A Framework for closing Guantánamo Bay" (Ivey, 2009). In "Surviving the Dragnet: 'special interest' detainees in the US after 9/11," Shubh Mathur (2006) reports several cases of violence exhibited on Muslims during the post 9/11 sweeps. Meghana Nayak (2006) documents the "racialized and gendered violence" of George Bush's US administration. .
             While there has been a lot of research on suspect communities being targeted, perhaps there has not been as much focus on the amount of prisoners that have actually been convicted and the specific types of tortures being inflicted. In this paper I will be extending Nayak's model of orientalism by relating it to the experiences of Iqbal Madni (Nayak, 2006 & Ahmed, 2011). I will argue that Iqbal Madni's experience was one of racialized and gendered violence because he matched the description of the suspect community; and the types of torture he experienced are examples of demonization and dehumanization types of orientalism.


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