"... perhaps the most extreme form of bare life, is the Muselmann or ‘Muslim’. The ‘Muslim’ was the camp jargon for the inmate reduced to a state of living death, and the term seems to come from the European and Western fantasy of fatalism imputed to Muslims. One survivor of the camps described a ‘Muslim’ as ‘a staggering corpse, a bundle of physical functions in its last convulsions’.

What we find in Auschwitz that is so unbearable is, according to [Giorgio] Agamben, life reduced to mere biological existence. This can be found in the terrible experience of the Muselmann or ‘Muslim’, who is reduced by starvation and suffering to the state of a living death.
No one can bear the sight of the "Muslim".





Agamben describes a film shot immediately after the liberation of Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1945 which dwells on the sight of thousands of naked corpses piled in graves. Since the film is attempting to offer proof of what happened in this camp, no detail is spared. However, at one point the camera captures the sight of those reduced to the state of Muselmänner ("Muslims") or very close to it. These images last only a few seconds before the cameraman draws away from them to return to the corpses: they are more bearable than the sight of living death. Even in the camps the "Muslims" were left excluded, as outside the gaze of both the SS and the other camp inmates. As the one study solely devoted to the "Muslims" reports, "For the prisoners who collaborated, the Muslims were a source of anger and worry; for the SS, they were merely useless garbage. Every group thought only about eliminating them, each in its own way" (Ryn and Klodzinski in RA: 43).

Noys, B., (2005), "The Culture of Death", Berg, p. 93