October 24, 2004

IN his own words, Mahmood Mamdani’s book Good Muslim, Bad Muslim can be described as ‘an interpretive essay that seeks to explain political events, above all 9/11, in the light of political encounters — historically shaped — rather than as the outcome of stubborn cultural legacies’.

Putting emphasis on the fact that prevalent judgments of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ Muslims refer to political identities and not to cultural or religious ones, Mamdani highlights the politicization of culture in today’s world. He refers to the new understanding of culture as ‘culture talk’ and contends that such talk is ‘less social than political’. Culture talk claims to interpret politics from culture and religion, turning these into a political category.

Culture talk is significant because it distorts perceptions and at times it can facilitate violence against particular people. Mamdani highlights a connection between the modern state and political violence and contends, ‘The modern political sensibility sees most political violence as necessary to historical progress.’ Such sensibility is discomfited only by violence which cannot be ‘justified by progress’ and it also distinguishes such violence in cultural terms for a pre-modern society and in theological terms for a modern society’. The cultural explanation always attributes political violence to the absence of modernity, while in a modern society this violence is attributed to immorality or evil. This distinction is noteworthy for Muslims because they have come to be seen as the ‘hard pre-modern core’ in today’s world and consequently the focus of culture talk.

There are two contrasting narratives of culture talk, one considers pre-modern people as those ‘not yet modern’ and the other holds these people as ‘anti-modern’. Mamdani illustrates this difference with a comparison between the early descriptions of Africans and contemporary talk about Muslims. ‘Africa is seen as incapable of modernity, while Islam is seen not only incapable but also resistant to modernity. Africans are said to victimize themselves, hard-core Muslims are said to be prone to taking others to the world beyond’.

One of the most noteworthy argument in the book is the distinction Mamdani makes between ‘Islamic fundamentalism’ and ‘political Islam’, choosing the latter to describe political movements that speak the language of Islam. He notes that the term ‘fundamentalist’ was invented in the US in the 1920s among protestant Christian circles, ‘as a struggle inside religion, not between religions’ and finds the notion of Islamic fundamentalism to be ‘misleading’ when used interchangeably with political Islam. Discussing political Islam and political Christianity, he claims that both came into existence through totally different processes. “Whereas the development of a political Christianity in the US was mainly the work of a ‘fundamentalist’ religious clergy, the development of political Islam has been the work of non-clerical political intellectuals,” he says.

Placing political Islam in the context of the Cold War, he describes 9/11 as the result of ‘an alliance gone sour’ between the US and Al Qaeda. Describing 9/11 as unfinished business of the Cold War, he claims that all contemporary forms of terror were forged in an environment of impunity created by state terror during the Cold War. The Cold War, which was an era of proxy wars, was supported by the active involvement of Christian-right ministries, the network of secular conservative political lobbies and paramilitary mercenary outfits. In its determination to win the Cold War by all means necessary the US used the drug trade as a source of cash to carry out clandestine wars in Indochina, Africa and Afghanistan.

He describes in detail how America’s benevolent attitude towards political terror nurtured terrorist movements in Africa and Asia and later turned into ‘a brazen embrace’ with the Contras in Nicaragua and later Al Qaeda. In fact up to Sept 10, 2001 the US and Britain compelled African countries to reconcile with terror.

In his endeavour to understand how political Islam or specifically right-wing Islamism came to occupy the global centre stage, Mamdani finds the answer in the Afghan war. Afghanistan, which Mamdani calls the high point in the Cold War, presented the US with an opportunity to hand the Soviet Union its own Vietnam. Using Islamic symbols to tap into Islamic networks and communities, the US ideologized the Afghan war as Islamic jihad. The American jihad claimed to create an Islamic infrastructure of liberation but in reality forged an ‘infrastructure of terror.

Consequently the region was flooded not only with the most sophisticated weapons but also with the most radical Islamist recruits. However, Mamdani feels that the real damage the CIA did was not the providing of arms and money but the privatization of information about how to produce and spread violence — the formation of private militias — capable of creating terror. He also claims that the Afghan jihad had a deeper effect on the Pakistani state and society than it did on any other country outside of Afghanistan.

The ‘war on terror’ has come to mimic terror itself. The author highlights eerie similarities between the US establishment and the militants of political Islam. Such as both parties insist that Islam is a political identity, both are determined to distinguish between good and bad Muslims so that the former can be cultivated and the latter targeted, both employ a religious language, both see the world through lenses of power, each has eyes for none but the other in the contest for power and both are informed by highly ideological world views which each articulates in a highly religious political language. The US bombing of Iraq and Afghanistan and the Al Qaeda’s bombing of 9/11 testify that when it comes to the contest for power, the rest of the world exists only as collateral. However, Mamdani feels that there is only a moral not a political equivalence, given the global character of American power.

Characterizing the US as a great power struck by amnesia, Mamdani underscores the habit of official America to walk away from responsibility. Had the US ended the Cold War with demilitarization and a peace dividend, he feels, 9/11 would not have happened. In its fight against terror, he urges the US to review its policies and concludes with the solemn observation saying, “America cannot occupy the world. It has to learn to live in it.”

 

Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War and the Roots of Terror

By Mahmood Mamdani

Pantheon Books

ISBN 0-375-422854

304pp. $24.00

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