The Trembling of the Shadow (Istikhfāʾ): Surveillance, Concealment and Guarding of Potentiality

Abstract

Israel’s settler–colonial project has, from its inception, demanded the near-total legibility and knowability of Palestinian life. The village files, permit regime, checkpoint system, surveillance architecture, population and biometric datasets are all iterations of a single imperative: that Palestinian life and existence be rendered transparent and, therefore, governable. Istikhfā', a Palestinian political practice of concealment, is theorised here as both a tactic within the repertoire of resistance and a form of life that reorganises the body, the sensorium, temporality, and the social itself. Reading Walid Daqqa’s theoretical writings from inside Israeli prisons alongside Wisam Rafeedie’s fictionalised account of his own nine years of clandestine existence, and al-Faṭāfṭa’s historicisation of concealment in the occupied territories since 1967, this article reconstructs the shift from coercive forms of surveillance to what Daqqa called the “nightclub”: the solicitation of voluntary self-exposure. It then reads the refusal of this self-inflicted transparency as an ontology of disappearance. The central argument is that istikhfāʾ as a form of life is generative of various capacities: for knowledge production, the sustainment of political selfhood, the deferral of colonial capture, and, ultimately, resistance as an active political praxis. These capacities are otherwise unavailable within the horizon of total transparency. Drawing on Daqqa’s children’s story, the article articulates an argument that emerges from both the story and its employment of Sufi dialectics, in which the inner truth of istikhfāʾ lies precisely in these capacities and their overall effect of preserving the potentiality that such practices both protect and actively produce.