On December 12, 2025, at about 2:24–2:25 in the afternoon, Sharif Osman Hadi was shot in the head while traveling by rickshaw on Box Culvert Road in the Paltan area of Dhaka. It was Friday. The attack occurred after Jummah prayers, in front of the Baitus Salam Jame Mosque (reports vary in transliteration: Salam/Salah). CCTV footage shows the battery-powered rickshaw moving through the nearly empty streets of the weekly holiday when a motorcycle closed in and pulled alongside, and the helmeted pillion rider fired at close range before the motorcycle sped away. The bullet entered near Hadi’s ear and exited through the opposite side—reports differ on whether it entered from the left or right. What is not disputed is the severity: severe brain and lung injuries, brainstem involvement, life support, ventilator, with doctors reporting retained fragments. He was rushed first to Dhaka Medical College Hospital, then transferred to Evercare Hospital. On December 15, he was airlifted to Singapore for advanced treatment.
There is something almost liturgical in the precision of political violence: the timing, the method (helmeted motorcyclists, faces not visible), the target (the head, always the head, the seat of speech). The rickshaw—that most vulnerable of vehicles, open to the sky, to the street, to history. Hadi suspended now between life and death, between being and erasure, in that terrible threshold where Bangladesh itself seems to live.
I write this not as a journalist—I leave that necessary work to others—but as someone attempting to understand what Osman Hadi represents, and why that representation was deemed so intolerable that it required this most extreme form of negation. What I want to suggest is that Hadi’s body, his presence, his very mode of being-in-the-world, poses a philosophical and political problem that neither Bengali nationalism nor its apparent opposite, Western liberalism, can accommodate. He is the remainder, the supplement, the trace that both systems attempt to erase but cannot, because his existence reveals the founding violence on which both edifices rest.
The Face and the Touch
The July uprising of 2024 that toppled Sheikh Hasina’s government was, in its initial formulation, premised on what Emmanuel Levinas calls the “face of the Other”—that ethical encounter which commands responsibility without conditions, which cannot be reduced to knowledge or power. The students who stood before armed police, like Abu Sayed with his arms spread wide in that now-iconic photograph, presented their bodies as pure vulnerability, pure appeal. This was Levinasian ethics at its most radical: the face that says “thou shalt not kill” before it says anything else, before any politics, before any identity.
But something happened in the months after the uprising. Osman Hadi—the son of a madrasa teacher from Jhalakathi, who studied at Nesarabad Kamil Madrasa before entering Dhaka University’s Political Science department—began to articulate a different politics: not the politics of the face, but what we might call, following Jacques Derrida’s monumental study “On Touching—Jean-Luc Nancy,” a politics of touching. This is not a metaphor. When Hadi campaigned, greeting voters in mosques at dawn, traveling by rickshaw through the neighborhoods of Dhaka-8, he enacted a form of political community grounded not in abstract recognition but in material proximity, in the warmth of bodies assembled, in what Nancy calls the “partage” (sharing/dividing) of being-with.
Derrida’s “On Touching” is, among other things, a sustained meditation on Christianity’s theology of touch—the laying on of hands, the Eucharistic incorporation, Thomas’s need to touch the wound. But what Hadi practiced, perhaps without reading a word of continental philosophy, was an Islamic phenomenology of touch: the handshake (musafaha) as prophetic practice, the gathering for prayer where shoulders touch, the ummah understood not as an abstract concept but as the material warmth of bodies assembled in common purpose. This is touching as tawassul—nearness, connection, the opposite of alienation. It is, in Derrida’s terms, “the thinking of touch as the origin of sense itself, the touching-upon-touching that opens onto the world.”
Consider the CCTV footage and photographs showing Hadi during his campaign, or seeking votes at neighborhood mosques. There is something deliberately anti-spectacular about these images, something that refuses the distance that modern politics demands. He does not stand on stages; he sits on floors. He does not broadcast; he converses. He does not represent a constituency; he becomes contiguous with it. This is precisely what makes him intolerable to both the legacy of Bengali nationalism and to liberal modernity: he insists on a politics of immanence, of material presence, of what Nancy calls “the sensible transcendental”—the claim that meaning emerges not from abstract ideals but from the touching of bodies in space.
The Bengali Muslim as Metaphysical Absence
To understand why this is dangerous, we must excavate the archaeology of Bengali nationalism itself. Here I must make a claim that will trouble many: Bengali nationalism, as it was formulated in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, was never secular or inclusive in the way its contemporary defenders imagine. It emerged from Hindu revivalism, from the bhadralok’s search for cultural authenticity in the face of colonial modernity. The very word “Hindutva” was coined by Chandranath Basu in Bengal in 1892, not by Savarkar. Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay’s “Ananda Math,” the foundational text of Bengali nationalism, explicitly excluded Muslims from its vision of the nation; as later commentators note, in its revisions, the enemy shifted from the British to coded references to Muslims—“Nere” and “Jobon.”
This is not ancient history. This is the genetic code of Bengali identity as it was transmitted into the twentieth century and into Bangladesh itself. The “Bengali Muslim” emerges in this framework as what we might call, borrowing from Lacanian psychoanalysis, a lack—not an identity but an absence where an identity should be, a wound in the symbolic order, a jouissance that both troubles and constitutes the system. The Bengali Muslim, as one contemporary theorist describes it, is an “impossible possibility,” a “horizon of possibility” that can only be touched momentarily, in the event, before receding again.
This is not melodrama; this is phenomenological description. When Bengali nationalism defined itself through images of Hindu glory and medieval Hindu resistance to Muslim rule, when it made “Hindu” and “national” synonymous terms, it created a conceptual apparatus in which the Bengali Muslim could only exist as anomaly, as exception, as that which must be perpetually explained or apologized for. An anecdote circulates among those who knew Hadi at Dhaka University: on his second day of class, wearing his madrasa panjabi and topi, sitting in the front row of his political science class, a professor allegedly mocked his pronunciation of an English word. Hadi produced his pocket dictionary—the pronunciation was correct. The professor, enraged, banished him to the back of the classroom.
Whether the details of this story are precisely accurate matters less than what it reveals about the symbolic violence that structures the university space. Hadi himself said that he wore the panjabi and topi not because they were more pious or more Islamic, but “as part of my cultural struggle”—not, in other words, as a claim to religious superiority, but as an interruption of the tacit assumption about what a “proper” Bengali intellectual looks like. He understood, intuitively, what postcolonial theory has labored to articulate: that colonialism does not end with political independence; it persists in the racialized aesthetics of legitimacy, in the continued hegemony of bhadralok taste, in the barely concealed contempt for those who smell of the madrasa, who speak Bengali with the wrong accent, who insist on praying when they should be secularizing.
The Violence of Erasure
After the shooting, the Dhaka Metropolitan Police identified suspects through CCTV footage analysis: Faisal Karim Masud and Md. Alamgir Sheikh. Their passports were blocked to prevent them from fleeing the country. A claim circulated—first through digital investigative outlet The Dissent using OSINT tools, then amplified across social media—that CCTV footage showed Faisal Karim entering the Inqilab Cultural Centre with three others on December 4, speaking with Hadi, and later attending a meeting with him on December 9, just three days before the attack. Photos allegedly showed both Faisal and Alamgir campaigning with Hadi near the Shilpakala Academy. Bangladesh’s Foreign Ministry summoned the Indian High Commissioner, with government officials urging cooperation to prevent suspects from fleeing and to facilitate the extradition of Sheikh Hasina and others. The Chief Adviser’s Press Secretary wrote that “BAL [Bangladesh Awami League] terrorists targeted Osman Hadi to kill him—to silence his voice.”
These are the facts, insofar as we have them. But facts alone cannot explain the pattern, the systematic nature of what we are witnessing. Mahfuj Alam, who resigned from his position as information adviser, noted that “invisible foreign assets” manufactured consent for attacking Hadi; “there was no outcry, no protest at that time.” This is the crucial point: not the violence itself—though that is terrible enough—but the silence that preceded and enabled it, the failure of recognition that made Hadi’s body available for this violence.
When I speak of silence, I do not mean total silence. The interim government responded; investigations were launched; political figures condemned the attack. But there was a quality of silence from certain quarters—from those segments of the intellectual and cultural elite who position themselves as progressive, as advocates for human rights, as voices for the oppressed. This is not about naming individuals for their failures, but about recognizing a structural pattern, what we might call a frame of erasure—not the dramatic violence of war, but the quieter violence of non-recognition, of being rendered, in advance, un-seeable.
Judith Butler writes of “frames of war” that determine which lives are recognizable as lives, which deaths are mournable as deaths. What we see in the selective response to Hadi is the operation of these frames. The distant Palestinian—tragic, unambiguously a victim—can be mourned. The secular student activist can be mourned. Even the madrasa student can be mourned, so long as he knows his place, so long as he performs the appropriate gestures of modernization. But Hadi, who insists on his piety and his modernity, who refuses the choice between tradition and progress, who speaks of sovereignty and justice in an Islamic idiom while organizing multi-party resistance rallies—this figure cannot be easily processed. He is illegible to the liberal imagination.
Consider the revealing example of the Gaza Freedom Flotilla. In October 2025, Shahidul Alam—renowned photographer, founder of Drik Picture Library and Pathshala Media Institute—joined the Freedom Flotilla Coalition sailing toward Gaza. On October 8, Israeli forces detained him in international waters. He was held at Ketziot prison, where he later described being forced to kneel with his hands tied behind his back while Israeli soldiers urinated on the cell floor. He was released on October 10, traveled to Turkey, and returned to Dhaka on October 11 as a hero of Palestinian solidarity. The interim government, led by Chief Adviser Muhammad Yunus, worked through diplomatic channels to secure his release.
This is the kind of activism that global progressivism can celebrate: distant, righteous, unambiguous. But when violence occurs at home, when the victim is someone whose politics do not fit the neat categories of liberal recognition, the response becomes more complicated, more hesitant. This is not hypocrisy in the simple sense—it is something deeper, more structural. It is the way that liberalism’s supposedly universal categories of human rights and dignity remain tacitly coded, subtly exclusionary, unable to fully recognize those who refuse to privatize their religious commitments or who articulate their politics in a traditional register.
And illegibility, in the economy of recognition, easily becomes disposability.
Liberalism’s Impasse
Let us be clear about what liberalism cannot contain. Liberalism, as a political theology, is premised on the privatization of the religious, the evacuation of transcendence from the political sphere. It inherits from the Enlightenment a deep suspicion of “tradition” as the site of superstition, backwardness, un-reason. The ideal liberal subject is the individual emancipated from communal bonds, choosing his own path, constructing his own identity. Community, in this framework, is something you opt into, not something you are thrown into, to use Heidegger’s term.
But what if—as Talal Asad has argued for decades—Islam is not best understood as a “religion” in the liberal sense (a set of private beliefs) but as a discursive tradition, a form of argument extended through time about the proper form of life? What if the ummah is not an “imagined community” in Benedict Anderson’s sense but what some theorists call an “effective community”—a form of sociality grounded not in abstract identification but in ritual practice, in the five daily interruptions of capitalist time, in the Hajj’s annual staging of global Islamic presence?
Hadi represented precisely this alternative modernity. He studied political science at Dhaka University, entering in the 2010–11 academic year. He taught at Saifur’s coaching center and later became a lecturer at the University of Scholars. He was no stranger to “modern” institutions. But he refused the logic that says modernity requires the shedding of Islamic identity, that progress demands secularization. Instead, he articulated—through practice more than theory—a vision of tradition as the navigational tool for modernity, not its opposite.
This is what some call the “traditionalist turn” in global politics, the recognition that the Westphalian model of the nation-state, the liberal model of the autonomous individual, the secular model of progress—that all of these are not universal human developments but particular cultural formations, European formations, that have been violently universalized. And if we are entering an era where different civilizational traditions reassert their own paths to modernity, their own forms of political organization, their own relationships between the religious and the political, then figures like Osman Hadi are not anachronisms. They are harbingers.
This is precisely why he must be eliminated. Not because he is backward, but because he represents a future that neither Bengali nationalism (with its Hindutva genealogy) nor global liberalism (with its Christian-secular assumptions) can accommodate. His body—praying five times a day, fasting in Ramadan, speaking of the ummah and sovereignty in the same breath—literally embodies the collapse of the secular/religious binary that organizes modern politics.
Zionism, Hindutva, and the Modernist Production of Minorities
The parallels with Palestine are not metaphorical. Zionism and Hindutva are both modernist ideologies that emerged in the late nineteenth century as responses to European colonialism. Both are, paradoxically, products of the very modernity they claim to resist. Both produce “proper” subjects (the secular citizen, the modern nationalist) and “improper” ones (the Muslim who will not assimilate, who insists on his difference). Both are premised on an ethnic nationalism that requires, for its coherence, the exclusion or subordination of the religious other.
Just as Hindu nationalism in Bengal emerged alongside the fear that Muslims were outbreeding Hindus, that demographic trends threatened Hindu primacy, so Zionism has always been haunted by the “demographic threat” posed by Palestinian natality. In both cases, the violence is not an aberration but the logical outcome of the system. When your national identity is premised on ethnic or religious exclusivity, the other becomes not just different but threatening, not just alien but a cancer to be excised.
Jamaat-e-Islami’s secretary general described Hadi as “a symbol of unity of the people against Indian hegemony,” adding that the attack on him was “part of a broader plan by those who want to turn Bangladesh into a tributary state of India.” This is not paranoia; this is historical memory. The partition of Bengal in 1947 was supposed to create a homeland for Bengali Muslims. Instead, it created a state that was dominated first by Punjabi elites in West Pakistan, and after 1971, by an independence movement that, while successful, never fully resolved the question of what Bangladesh’s relationship to its Islamic identity would be.
Sheikh Mujib’s solution was to emphasize Bengali ethnicity over Islamic identity. Zia-ur-Rahman tried to articulate a territorial “Bangladeshi” nationalism. But neither solution satisfied those who insisted that Islam was not merely a private faith but the constitutive basis of collective identity. Hadi’s Inqilab Mancha, formed in August 2024 after Hasina’s ouster, explicitly calls for “standing against all forms of domination to protect independence and sovereignty and to build a state based on justice”—a formulation that refuses to choose between Islamic and national identity, insisting instead that they are mutually constitutive.
This is the bind. Secular Bengali nationalism cannot accommodate him because he refuses to privatize his Islam. Liberal internationalism cannot accommodate him because he speaks of sovereignty and the ummah rather than individual rights. And the Bengali intellectual class, formed in the crucible of Hindu-Muslim antagonism, cannot see him except through the lens of “communalism,” that magic word that transforms any assertion of Islamic identity into a threat to the social order.
The Silence That Speaks
When Hadi was shot on December 12, the bullet entered his brain and exited, with doctors reporting retained fragments, causing severe injury to brain and lung tissue, with brainstem involvement. He was placed on life support, his condition described by doctors as “extremely critical,” requiring ventilator support. The interim government announced it would airlift him to Singapore for advanced medical treatment—which happened on December 15. But in those first crucial hours and days, there was an unevenness in how different sectors of society responded, an asymmetry in who spoke and who remained quiet.
This unevenness is itself a form of violence—what we might call, following Derrida, the violence of the archive, the violence by which certain lives are recorded and others are not, certain deaths are mourned and others pass without comment. The documents I have read invoke Ahmed Sofa, who argued that no one influenced Bengal’s society and politics as much as Bankim Chandra, that the influence of “Ananda Math” on Bengal’s socio-political life was immense—and yet Sofa’s own work on the erasure of the Bengali Muslim from historical memory remains largely unread, certainly by those who claim to speak for liberal Bangladesh.
There is a formulation that haunts me: that the Bengali Muslim is not an epistemological category but a lack, a “metaphysics of absence,” that Bengali Muslims achieve consciousness through a wound, through the jouissance of that lack. This is not abstract theory; this is phenomenological description. To be a Bengali Muslim is to be perpetually aware of your own contingency in the national narrative, to know that your great-grandfather’s history is not taught in schools, that your mosque’s architecture is not celebrated as part of “Bengali culture,” that your festival of Eid takes second place to Durga Puja in the calendar of national recognition.
And when you insist on your presence, when you refuse the role of the grateful minority, when you say—as Hadi has said throughout his activism—that Bangladesh’s sovereignty requires resistance to Indian hegemony, that the nation’s founding principles have been betrayed, that Islam is not a private faith but a public good, then you become dangerous. Not dangerous in the sense of threatening violence, but dangerous in the ontological sense: your mere existence threatens the carefully constructed fiction of a secular, progressive, liberal Bangladesh that was always a bhadralok fantasy.
A Politics Beyond Recognition
What would it mean to think politically from Hadi’s position? Not to romanticize him—he is, by all accounts, a complicated and controversial figure. But to take seriously the philosophical and political challenge he poses?
It would mean, first, abandoning the fantasy that liberalism is a neutral framework, that secular nationalism is the inevitable endpoint of political development. It would mean recognizing that the Enlightenment project, for all its genuine achievements, was also a European project, one that emerged from specifically Christian debates and carried Christian assumptions even in its most secular formulations. The idea that religion can and should be private, that communities are voluntary associations, that individual autonomy is the highest political good—these are not universal truths but particular cultural commitments.
Second, it would mean taking seriously the possibility that discursive traditions—Islamic, but also Hindu, Buddhist, Confucian—might offer resources for thinking about justice, community, and the good life that are not inferior to Western political philosophy but simply different, structured by different questions and different histories. When Hadi speaks of building a “just state” grounded in Islamic principles, this need not mean theocracy in the sense of clerical rule. It might mean something closer to what some scholars call “Islamic democracy”—a form of political order that takes seriously both popular sovereignty and divine law, seeing them not as contradictory but as mutually limiting and enriching.
Third, it would require what the Pakistani philosopher Hamza Alavi called “decolonizing the mind”—refusing the internalized hierarchies that make us see Western education as “modern” and madrasa education as “backward,” that make us hear Islamic political vocabulary as “fundamentalist” and secular political vocabulary as “neutral.” When Hadi campaigned by distributing muri and rock candy, meeting voters at dawn prayers, this was not primitive populism. It was a deliberate enactment of a politics grounded in everyday life, in the masjid as a space of political assembly, in material sharing as the basis of community.
The irony is that this is closer to Nancy’s “being-with,” closer to the communism that Nancy and Derrida gestured toward in their late work, than anything in contemporary liberal politics. But because it comes wrapped in Islamic idiom, because it emerges from the madrasa rather than the philosophy seminar, it is rendered illegible, threatening, eliminable.
The Traditionalist Turn
There is a sense, globally, of what we might call a “traditionalist turn”—the exhaustion of liberal globalism, the recognition that different civilizational traditions will be the navigational tools for the future. This is not a “turn” so much as a return of the repressed. Liberalism and secular nationalism never actually succeeded in privatizing religion or evacuating tradition from politics; they only succeeded in defining certain traditions as legitimate (moderate, reformed, compatible with modernity) and others as illegitimate (fundamentalist, backward, dangerous).
What we are seeing now, from Turkey to India to Hungary to Brazil, is the exhaustion of that distinction. People are insisting that their traditions—whether Islamic, Hindu, Christian, or Buddhist—can be the basis for modern political formations, that secularism was not the endpoint of history but one option among others, an option that, for all its achievements, also licensed new forms of domination and erasure.
This does not mean all traditionalisms are equal, that all resurgent nationalisms are equally valid. The Hindu nationalism of the BJP is explicitly premised on the subordination of Muslims; its traditionalism is inseparable from fascism. Christian nationalism in America is similarly bound up with white supremacy. Any emancipatory traditionalism would need to distinguish itself from these ethno-nationalisms, to insist that fidelity to tradition does not require the exclusion or domination of others.
Can Islamic politics do this? The history is mixed. There are versions of Islamic politics that are rigidly exclusionary, that treat non-Muslims as at best tolerated dhimmis. But there are also versions—and here the work of scholars like Asad, Ebrahim Moosa, and Abdullahi An-Na’im is crucial—that emphasize the pluralism internal to Islamic tradition, the recognition that ijtihad (independent reasoning) and maslaha (public interest) allow for forms of governance that can accommodate religious diversity while remaining grounded in Islamic political theology.
I do not know if Hadi’s vision is the latter or the former. What I know is that he was not allowed to fully articulate it, to test it in political practice, before a bullet entered his head.
The Body on the Threshold
Hadi remains, as I write this, in what the doctors describe as “extremely critical” condition, now receiving advanced treatment in Singapore. He exists in that terrible threshold between presence and absence, between the body that speaks and the body that is silent, between the trace and the erasure.
There is something almost unbearable about this suspension, and not only for his family—his wife who received death threats in November, his ten-month-old child, his siblings who describe him as the “backbone” of the family. The suspension makes visible the precariousness that has always characterized the Bengali Muslim’s position in the nation: present but not fully recognized, counted but not fully grievable, alive but not quite allowed to live. Hadi’s body, teetering between life and death, becomes a kind of allegory for the position he has always occupied—the figure who cannot be fully incorporated into the nation but who also cannot be fully expelled, whose presence is both necessary (as the constitutive outside that defines what the nation is not) and intolerable (as the remainder that reveals the nation’s incompleteness).
On September 5, 2025, Hadi wrote: “Death’s verdict is made in heaven, not on earth. I will leave, but my children will fight. Their children will fight. From age to age, the children of freedom will keep the flag of independence flying. There is no use in threatening us with death. We have set foot on this earth from our mother’s womb for martyrdom.”
This is not bravado. This is a theological anthropology. In Islamic thought, shahada (martyrdom) is not simply death for a cause; it is the completion of life’s purpose, the moment when the soul returns to its origin, when the temporal opens onto the eternal. To live with this understanding is to live without the fear that is the primary weapon of political domination. It is to become, in Agamben’s sense, “ungovernable”—not because you are anarchic, but because the ultimate authority you recognize is not earthly power.
This is why, I suspect, the selective silence of certain intellectuals is so profound. They cannot process a politics whose ultimate horizon is not the secular future—progress, development, rights—but the eschaton, the Day of Judgment, the weighing of deeds. This is not irrationalism; it is a different ratio, a different way of calculating what matters. And liberalism, which prides itself on tolerance, finds itself utterly unable to tolerate this.
Conclusion: Touching the Untouchable
I began by invoking Derrida’s “On Touching—Jean-Luc Nancy,” that vast, brilliant, occasionally maddening book about the philosophy of touch. Derrida shows how Western philosophy has been haunted by touch, by the fantasy of immediate contact, of presence without mediation. But he also shows that touch is always already structured by language, by difference, that the touching hand and the touched surface are never simply present to each other but are always separated by an infinitesimal gap, the space of the trace.
What does it mean, then, to say that Hadi practiced a politics of touching? It means that he refused the politics of representation (speaking for), which maintains distance between representative and represented, in favor of a politics of contiguity (being with), which seeks to minimize that distance. But it also means recognizing that this touching is never complete, never total, that community is not fusion but what Nancy calls “com-pearance”—appearing together while remaining distinct, sharing a world without collapsing into identity.
Hadi’s crime, in the eyes of those who plotted his murder, was to practice this politics in an Islamic register, to show that ummah could be the basis for democratic solidarity, that the masjid could be a space of political assembly, that tradition need not mean reaction. He touched the untouchable—not the Dalit in caste terms, but the untouchable space of Islamic modernity, the possibility that Islam could be both traditional and revolutionary, both rooted in salaf (the pious predecessors) and oriented toward a genuinely new future.
Whether he survives—whether he recovers enough to return to his infant child, to his comrades, to the political work he began—remains, as of this writing, uncertain. The doctors in Singapore are monitoring him closely. But what his shooting reveals is that the violence of erasure—the violence that seeks to make certain bodies, certain possibilities, certain futures simply impossible—is alive and well. It operates not only through the brutality of bullets but through the more genteel violence of selective recognition, of uneven mourning, of the asymmetry that says: yes, it is tragic, but what can you do, these people have always had their conflicts.
Against this, we must insist: Osman Hadi is not a symptom of Bangladesh’s backwardness. He is a harbinger of the crises and possibilities that attend the exhaustion of secular liberalism, the return of the suppressed traditions, the struggle to imagine political forms adequate to our genuine pluralism. His body, suspended between life and death, calls us to thought, to responsibility, to the difficult work of building worlds where different traditions can coexist without one claiming to be the universal standard by which all others are judged.
This is not relativism. This is the recognition that the alternative to liberal universalism is not chaos but a messier, more difficult negotiation between incommensurable commitments. It is, to borrow a phrase from Dipesh Chakrabarty, learning to “provincialize Europe”—to recognize that European modernity is one modernity among possible others, not the telos of human development.
Osman Hadi, whatever his limitations, was attempting this work. He deserved the chance to continue it. That chance was stolen by a bullet, yes, but also by the structures of recognition that made his body always already expendable, his life always already ungrievable, his politics always already illegible.
We owe it to him—we owe it to ourselves—to break those structures, to learn to see differently, to touch what we have been taught is untouchable. This is the ethical demand his suspended body makes on us: not to romanticize him, not to agree with everything he said or did, but to recognize him, to count his life as a life, his words as words, his politics as politics. To see that when we allow certain bodies to be shot with impunity, when certain deaths receive less mourning than others, we are not preserving liberal order. We are revealing that liberal order was always already premised on a prior violence, an exclusion, an erasure that Hadi’s body, in its terrible vulnerability, finally makes visible.
May he recover. May he return to his child, to his comrades, to the masjids where he prayed and campaigned. But whether he returns or not, his body has already done its work: it has shown us what we refuse to see, touched what we refuse to touch, insisted on a presence that no silence can fully erase. This is the paradox of erasure: the trace that is effaced remains as the mark of its effacement, the absent presence that testifies to the violence done to it. Hadi is already, in this sense, shaheed—not dead, but a witness, bearing testimony by his very existence to the incompleteness of every politics that claims to have overcome violence, achieved modernity, transcended history.
His life was—is—a muqawama, a resistance. And resistance, as we should have learned by now, is never futile. It is the insistence that another world is possible, that what has been erased can be remembered, that the body that cannot be easily represented can nevertheless make itself present, can touch us, can command our responsibility.
Osman, amarey chaira jayesh na, bhai. Do not leave us, brother. We are still here, still watching, still bearing witness. And we will not let them erase you.