The Culture of Throat Slitting and the Profession of Beheading: Where is the Rationality?

Volume 4|Issue 15| Winter 2016 |Articles

Abstract

Among the aims of this paper is to place violence in its various contexts and investigate the rationalities that trigger it. Specifically, it focuses on beheading as a form of violence. The motivation for this is what appears to be a dearth of academic studies on this practice. The author aims to dissect the discourse of beheading by deconstructing it and interrogating its sources of authority. It also attempts to think about preliminaries that might be useful for the formulation of a cultural strategy with universalist leanings to humanize and deepen values and ensure their fair distribution. This paper addresses the above in the context of a main problematic and three approaches to it. The problematic is how to understand the "culture of throat-cutting" and the profession of beheading prevalent in some fighting groups? What exegetical grounding is relied upon? How rational is this grounding? What effect does this have on relations between cultures and peoples? What strategy to use to create a "culture of life"? The three approaches are a genealogy of violence (an anthropological-historical approach), beheading (an investigation of the policy and the function), and the culture of throat slitting (corrupt interpretation and a crime against humanity). 

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Professor of Higher Education at the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at Sfax, Tunisia, he specializes in issues of modern and contemporary Arab thought. He has published several books in that field, most recently The Discourse of Arab Urbanism: A Study of Issues, Mechanisms, and Limits. He was awarded the Arab Prize for the Social Sciences and Humanities from the ACRPS in 2014-15.

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