Are You Certain?

You are holding your younger brother’s hand. Your mother is behind you. A soldier is pointing. Left or right. Men and boys to the left. Women and children to the right.

Your mother is pulling your brother. The soldier is pulling you. Your mother is screaming. Your brother is crying. You are fifteen, and the last thing you see of your family is your brother’s face disappearing into a crowd of women being loaded onto buses.

Srebrenica, July 1995. Eight thousand Bosniak Muslim men and boys, separated from their families or captured as they fled, taken to fields, shot in groups, buried in mass graves. Some buried alive. The sorting was ethnic and religious. Not what they had done. What they were.

The authority was the scaffold. The body is on the ground.

It is a Saturday night. You are at a nightclub. The bass is in your chest. Your friends are beside you. You are wearing a shirt you bought yesterday. You are alive in the specific way a person is alive at midnight on a Saturday. A room full of music and strangers who feel like family. In this room you do not have to explain yourself.

Orlando, June 2016. Forty-nine people killed by a man who pledged allegiance to ISIS during the attack. The victims were mostly young, mostly Latino, mostly LGBTQ.

The scaffold’s out-group marking — sex between men as abomination, in Leviticus, condemned again by Paul and by the Quran — is part of the creed of the movement he pledged himself to.

He pulled the trigger. The texts loaded the gun.

The authority was religious. The body is on the ground.

You are twenty-three. You have been in this cell for four years. The paper is smuggled. The pen is shared. You write small. You tell her about the light that comes through the high window at four in the afternoon. You fold the letter into a square the size of a matchbox and put it inside your left shoe. You always use the left shoe.

Iran, July 1988. A fatwa ordered the execution of political prisoners. Proceedings lasted minutes. A few questions were asked. One wrong answer was enough. Those who answered wrong were dead within a day or two. Estimates range from under three thousand to thirty thousand. The bodies were buried in mass graves. Families were not told for months. Most were never told where.

In August 2025 the regime paved over Section 41 of Behesht-e Zahra in Tehran, where political prisoners executed earlier in the decade lay, and made it a car park. Not content to kill the prisoners, the scaffold erased the graves.

The authority was religious. The body is on the ground.

Your wife is beside you. Your daughter is on her lap. She is three. She is holding a cloth doll with one button eye. You said you would fix it.

Inside your trunk: two changes of clothes, a cooking pot, your wife’s wedding jewellery hidden inside a sewing machine, and a photograph of the house you are leaving. The house is not on fire yet. It will be by tomorrow.

August 1947. Trains carrying refugees attacked by mobs on both sides of the new border. Hindu mobs. Muslim mobs. Sikh mobs. Trains departed full of living passengers and arrived full of corpses.

The question was not what you had done. The question was what you believed.

The authority was religious, bilateral, symmetrical. Both sides. All sides. The body is on the ground.

You are Rohingya. You have lived in this village your entire life. Your father lived here. His father lived here.

You are Muslim in a Buddhist country. You have never been a citizen. Your children have never been citizens.

You are making tea. It is five in the morning. The soldiers arrive at quarter past.

August 2017. Villages surrounded at dawn. Men separated from women. Homes set on fire with families inside. About seven hundred and forty thousand fled; over a million are in Bangladesh now. Estimates of the killed run from about seven thousand in the first month to twenty-five thousand. The monks had spent years preparing the ground.

The religion of compassion. The religion of the middle way.

The authority was religious. The body is on the ground.

Mykhailo Kovalenko. He is sixty-two. It is 5 March 2022 and he is getting his family out of Bucha, which is the ordinary thing a man does when the shelling starts.

The car is stopped at a checkpoint on Yablunska Street. He gets out. He puts his hands up, because that is what you do.

He is shot at close range.

His body lies on Yablunska Street for twenty-nine days.

His hands were up. He was taking his wife and daughter away from the danger. There is no version of this in which he was a threat to anyone, and everybody at that checkpoint could see it.

The authority was not religious. The authority was national. Secular. Imperial.

The body is on the ground.

Not every blade requires a scripture. The authority changed. The body did not.

Six bodies. Six ordinary mornings. Six authorities.

Five of these authorities were religious. One was secular. The body was the same every time.

The authority changed every time. The body did not change once.

It was never just religion. It was never just nationalism. It was never just ideology.

It was always certainty.

Your certainty. Unexamined. Untested. Unquestioned. The certainty that you are right, and they are wrong, and because they are wrong something should be done about them.

Name the thing you believe. The thing you are most certain about.

Now place a body on the ground in front of it. A real person. Dead because someone held that belief and acted on it with certainty.

Look at the body. Then look at the belief.

Is the belief worth the body?

If yes — you are the stone, the rope, the bullet, the bomb. The plastic key, the fatwa, the morality police. The mob on the train, the soldier on the street, the monk with the pamphlet. The architecture that made it all feel righteous.

If no — you have just done the only thing this book has asked. You have placed the body before the belief.

The body wins. The body always wins. The body is the only authority that does not collapse into violence. Because the body does not claim to be right.

The body only claims to be here.

Trust the body.