Book Review: The Universal Enemy: Jihad, Empire, and the Challenge of Solidarity, by Darryl Li

Published date01 August 2021
Date01 August 2021
DOIhttp://doi.org/10.1177/0090591720973159
Subject MatterBook Reviews
706 Political Theory 49(4)
The Universal Enemy: Jihad, Empire, and the Challenge of Solidarity, by Darryl Li.
Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2019, 384 pp.
Reviewed by: Pınar Kemerli, Global Liberal Studies, New York University, New York,
NY, USA
DOI: 10.1177/0090591720973159
In the post-9/11 world order, the participants of transnational jihads are
frequently referred to as “enemies of humanity,” tapping into the histori-
cally vilified figure of the hostis humanis generis. Darryl Li’s important
book takes up this demonized figure in an earlier incarnation—the 1992–
1995 war in Bosnia-Herzegovina. The Universal Enemy explores the
lives, experiences, and fates of the “mujahids” who came to Bosnia in
order to fight alongside their Bosnian co-religionists.1 This is a welcome
and refreshing perspective for those who are interested in this particular
type of warfare and militarism. Whereas the vast majority of contempo-
rary works on jihad instead focus on the Afghan jihad, al-Qaida, and
Daesh, Li’s book presents a portray of jihad from within a European con-
text—albeit in its Balkan margins—and thereby enables a more capacious
reconsideration of how issues of race, nationality, “whiteness,” “Islam,”
and the idea of European identity inflects this political violence.
Further, and more importantly, Li’s book emphatically distances itself
from the discourses of “terrorism” and “jihad studies” that are often products
of structural racism and anti-Muslim bigotry. Instead it explores the Bosnian
jihad as the site of a distinct form of political violence that pursued a univer-
salist project of Muslim unity and integrity, and in this context generated
novel forms of solidarity as well as exclusions. The political theologies
informing this violence and animating the fighters is undoubtedly “Islamic,”
but what “Islam” meant to diverse people who took part in this violence, and
how they enacted it, was neither straightforward nor necessarily scriptural.
Indeed, some of the best parts of Li’s books trace the fascinating mobilities of
Islamic ideals, texts, stories, and practices within the context of the jihad’s
evolution along with the travels and transformations of its practitioners them-
selves. As Li shows, the ansar—the foreign Muslims who traveled to Bosnia
to take part in the jihad—read and reimagined diverse forms of Islamic texts,
stories, miracles, and other supernatural elements, whereby they did not sim-
ply “justify” the violence they enacted, but more importantly, they gave exis-
tential meaning and theological import to their experiences and in this process
sought to generate an exemplary community of Muslim brotherhood and

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