Zainab Taonga Chirwa
“We have certainly honoured the children of Adam” (Qur’an 17:70)
This divine declaration is where any conversation about human worth must begin. It is not empire, liberal democracy, or the modern State that bestows dignity; rather, it is Allah (swt). To deny that dignity and reduce some lives to numbers and others to disposable bodies is a grave sin and a great oppression (dhulm).
Yet our present moment is marked precisely by such oppression.
Whether scrolling through social media, watching the news, or tuning into the radio, one is overwhelmed by images of genocide in Gaza, wars in Sudan and Congo, and the daily drownings of migrants in the Mediterranean. In South Africa, femicide, persistent economic apartheid, the rising cost of living, and anti-immigrant vigilantism paint the same picture. One cannot help but feel trapped; even more pervasive, I might argue, is the nagging sense that some lives are valued more than others.
We are told this is just the way the world is. We are told that terrorism is a religious problem, that poverty is a result of a lack of initiative, discipline, and poor decisions, and that our borders must be hardened against certain people. However, these are not truths. They are symptoms.
The Imperial Lie and Its Antidote
The Cameroonian philosopher Achille Mbembe calls this the necropolitical age: a time when the ultimate power of the State is not to give life, but to decide who may live and who must die – who is grievable, and who is disposable. This framework helps us understand the colonial logic that created the slave trade, oversaw genocides, and enforced apartheid. In its imperial project, the West assigned entire populations to the status of the “living dead”, subject to slaughter or perpetual violence without moral consequence.
Ugandan scholar Mahmood Mamdani shows how empire fabricated categories such as the “Good Muslim” and “Bad Muslim” to rationalise this act of State-sanctioned killing. South African thinker and scholar Tshepo Madlingozi named the outcome ‘pariahdom‘: where whole populations are rendered socially, economically, and politically expendable.
Madlingozi grounds Mbembe’s philosophical concept and Mamdani’s political category in the socio-economic reality of post-apartheid South Africa. He argues that for many Black South Africans, political freedom has not ended their social and economic pariahdom. He alerts us that the pariah is not just someone who is killed; they are someone who is kept alive in a state of social death. They are marginalised, impoverished, ghettoised and rendered invisible – deeming their lives ungrievable. What Madlingozi does so well is expand the concept beyond Mamdani’s political target to the everyday reality of the Black poor, showing how the logic of necropolitics continues in times of “peace” through economic structures.
These theories describe the same centuries-long project of empire: killing bodies, killing knowledge (epistemicide), and killing alternative futures. The “Bad Muslim” is not just a political opponent; they are cast as irrational, fanatical, violent, and outside the bounds of humanity – the perfect target for Mbembe’s necropolitical machinery of drone strikes, surveillance, and invasion. Such labels are designed to keep Muslims and oppressed peoples powerless and fearful. However, it ignores a far more powerful, timeless, and global truth, i.e., for every system of dehumanisation, there is a tradition of re-humanisation.
Islam as a Tradition of Re-Humanisation
Islam has always stood as a counter-logic. Where necropolitics strips dignity, Islam restores it. Where empire creates categories of the disposable, Islam insists on the indivisible honour of all creation. The necropolitical order attempts to make you believe that concepts of justice, liberation, and dignity are gifts bestowed by the West; it does so by engaging in epistemicide – the killing of alternative knowledge systems so that the empire’s logic appears at best the only legitimate logic, and at worst, the only logic. However, we know better.
Long before European empires drew their borders, other systems envisioned just societies. One of Islam’s core tenets is ‘adl (justice), not as passive hope but as a divine command: to establish equilibrium, to fight oppression (dhulm), and to place things in their rightful place. A system that creates pariahs is therefore the ultimate dhulm.
A second principle, ihsan (spiritual excellence), defined as “serving Allah as if you see Him, though you cannot see Him, yet He sees you,” extends to every human interaction, not just ritual worship. It is the active practice of seeing and recognising the divine spark in every person – the antithesis of the necropolitical gaze that reduces people to numbers or threats.
Islam also gifts us istighfaar (repentance). Istighfaar is not merely personal cleansing; it is the continual act of returning what has been displaced back to its rightful place. Crucially, repentance is incomplete unless the one who caused harm takes responsibility, seeks forgiveness, and repairs the wrong. Accountability without redress is hollow. In this way, istighfaar becomes a complete template for re-humanisation: an ethic of responsibility, repair, and justice. When we err and repent, we return from a state of displacement (dhulm) to our rightful place of dignity and justice. This is not an abstract idea but a continuous system of accounting for the self and for society. In this sense, Islam offers not only a critique of empire but a living practice of dismantling it.
Reclaiming Epistemic Authority
The project of re-humanisation also requires reclaiming our intellectual heritage from the epistemicide of empire. A prime example is Sayyida Aisha(ra), Mother of the Believers. She was a scholar, political figure, jurist, and narrator of numerous prophetic traditions (ahadith). She was thus not a silent, hidden figure, but an intellectual force whose authority shaped early Islamic thought. Sayyida Aisha’s legacy serves as a direct refutation of the imperial “Good Muslim, Bad Muslim” binary and demolishes the imperial myth that Muslim women’s epistemic voice is foreign and borrowed.
The imperial project thrives on binaries. Good Muslim/Bad Muslim is only one. Developed/Underdeveloped, Global North/Global South, Citizen/Refugee are some other dominant examples of such imperially imposed binaries. These are presented as natural but are manufactured hierarchies designed to discipline entire populations, in which “developed” nations are depicted as advanced and rational, the “underdeveloped” infantilised and waiting to be rescued, and the Global North claims universality. At the same time, the Global South is treated as backward or perpetually catching up. Citizens are deemed worthy of protection, while refugees are stripped of rights and rendered disposable at borders.
Each of these binaries operates as a mask of necropolitics. They justify why some children receive vaccines while others die of preventable diseases, why some economies are cushioned during crises while others are immiserated through structural adjustment. To go beyond the binary is therefore not to demand better labels but to reject the logic of categorisation that empire deploys to divide humanity into lives worth living and lives that may be sacrificed.
The imperial lie claims that liberation, justice, and dignity are modern discoveries – gifts to the world by and from the West. We reject this epistemic violence. Long before colonial borders and liberal democracies, Islam and other traditions envisioned and nurtured visions of justice centred on community, the vulnerable, and the sacred. Reclaiming these knowledges is to refuse the aforementioned binaries. It is to see the necropolitical order for what it is: a machinery of death, irreconcilable with ‘adl (justice).
This is not abstract. Every African life priced cheaply in global markets, every drone strike justified, every drowned refugee ignored – all are calls to us. Our task is not only to expose the system but to embody its opposite: to practise ihsan in our daily lives, to struggle for justice in our communities, to pursue istighfaar collectively, and to honour the spark of Allah in every person. This is the timeless imperative – the fight for the soul of the world, carried out not only in theory, but through the relentless work of rehumanising ourselves, our communities, and our politics.
The humanising project is therefore not a modern invention. Instead, it is a timeless divine imperative. Allahu Akbar (God is greater)
Zainab Taonga Chirwa is writing and podcasting at the edge of tech, identity & African futures, and is the host of StrangersX.
