What is it about?
When people are forced to flee their homes — as the Rohingya have fled Myanmar into Bangladesh, or as Afghan migrants have sought safety in Pakistan — they often find themselves trapped in a painful legal limbo. They have lost the protection of their home country but have not been granted full rights in the country where they now live. Western political theory describes this condition as "bare life" — a state in which a person is stripped of legal identity and left exposed to the power of the state without protection. But this paper argues that this political framework, while useful, tells only part of the story. For many displaced Muslim communities, Islamic concepts of migration, patience, and trust in God — known as hijrat, sabr, and tawakkul — provide a source of meaning, dignity, and moral strength that pure political theory cannot see or explain. This paper brings these two perspectives together to offer a fuller and more human picture of what forced displacement actually means and how people survive it.
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Why is it important?
Forced displacement is one of the most pressing humanitarian challenges of our time, and Asia is at its center. The Rohingya crisis in Bangladesh and the Afghan migration situation in Pakistan represent two of the most prolonged and complex refugee situations in the world, yet they are often analyzed through frameworks developed in Western political and legal contexts that do not fully account for the religious and ethical dimensions of how displaced communities actually understand and endure their situation. What makes this paper distinctive is its integration of Giorgio Agamben's influential theory of sovereign power and bare life with Islamic migration theology — a combination that has not been sufficiently explored in existing scholarship. The paper demonstrates that Agamben's framework, while powerful in explaining structural exclusion and legal vulnerability, has a significant blind spot: it does not adequately account for the moral agency, religious resilience, and community cohesion that Islamic concepts of migration and patience sustain among displaced populations. By filling this gap, the paper offers scholars of refugee studies, political theory, Islamic ethics, and Asian politics a richer theoretical toolkit for understanding statelessness. Policymakers and humanitarian practitioners working with Muslim refugee communities will also find its insights practically relevant and timely.
Perspectives
I came to this research moved by a concern that the people most affected by forced displacement — the Rohingya, Afghan migrants, and countless others — are too often reduced in academic and policy discussions to statistics, legal categories, or victims of structural forces beyond their control. All of that is true, and it matters enormously. But it is not the whole truth. These are communities with deep spiritual resources, with rich traditions of making meaning out of suffering, and with ethical frameworks that help them maintain dignity and solidarity even under conditions of extreme vulnerability. I hope this paper encourages readers to take seriously what displaced communities themselves bring to their situation — not just their needs and their suffering, but their wisdom, their faith, and their resilience. Giorgio Agamben gives us powerful tools for understanding how states reduce human beings to bare life, and that analysis is necessary and important. But I believe we also need frameworks that can see and name the humanity that persists even within those conditions. Islamic migration theology offers exactly that, and I hope this paper makes a small contribution to ensuring that both dimensions — the structural and the spiritual — are part of how we think about, write about, and respond to the global refugee crisis.
Dr. Jamil Akhtar
University of the Punjab
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Hijrat and Statelessness: Reimagining Agamben’s ‘Bare Life’ through Islamic Migration Theology in Contemporary Asia, International Journal of Social Service and Research, June 2026, Ridwan Institute,
DOI: 10.46799/ijssr.v6i6.1431.
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