Back in 2002, Mahmood Mamdani published the following article in 'American Anthropologist'.
Good Muslim, Bad Muslim:
whereas all Kaffirs are bad and should be killed
A Political Perspective on Culture and Terrorism
Mamdani isn't a politician. He is a shithead.
ABSTRACT The link between Islam and terrorism became a central media concern following September 11,
No. Islamic Terrorism became a major concern. Why? President Bush launched a War on Terror. It is believed that 1.3 million, mainly Muslim, lives were lost as a result. Tens of millions were displaced.
resulting in new rounds of "culture talk".
Military and intelligence operations. Shitheads may have indulged in culture talk. Nobody cared.
This talk has turned religious experience into a political category, differentiating 'good Muslims" from "bad Muslims, rather than terrorists from civilians.
No. Military and intelligence operations needed to differentiate terrorists from those who posed no threat. Why? Killing people is expensive. You need to pretend you are killing really bad hombres.
The implication is undisguised: Whether in Afghanistan, Palestine, or Pakistan, Islam must be quarantined and the devil must be exorcized from it by a civil war between good Muslims and bad Muslims.
No. That was the ideology of the Islamists. Bush merely wanted regime change followed by the new regime dealing with its militants in its own way.
This article suggests that we lift the quarantine and turn the cultural theory of politics on its head.
What would be the point? Mamdani & Co had no power. They may as well have made miaow miaow noises.
Beyond the simple but radical suggestion that if there are good Muslims and bad Muslims,
which is what Osama believed. The Saudi King was a bad Muslim. He himself was a good Muslim. Mamdani, obviously, was a bad Muslim. His wife was not 'kitabi'- i.e. not Christian, Jewish or Muslim. His son was illegitimate.
there must also be good Westerners and bad Westerners,
If they are kaffirs- they are all bad.
I question the very tendency to read Islamist politics as an effect of Islamic civilization
Mamdani would tell Osama that his politics wasn't an effect of Islamic civilization. It was an effect of Scandinavian Lesbian Civilization. Osama would cry and cry.
—whether good or bad—and Western power as an effect of Western civilization. Both those politics and that power are born of an encounter, and neither can be understood outside of the history of that encounter.
Nonsense! The encounter didn't matter very much.
Cultural explanations of political outcomes tend to avoid history and issues.
Which is why this cretin can provide explanations of no other type.
Thinking of individuals from "traditional" cultures in authentic and original terms, culture talk dehistoricizes the construction of political identities.
It may do. It may not.
This article places the terror of September 11 in a historical and political context.
That would require intelligence. Mamdani has none. Osama & Co wanted the US out of Saudi believing they could take over the Kingdom. America did move to Qatar but the Saudis turned out to be really good at using the carrot and stick to get rid of extremism.
Rather than a residue of a premodern culture in modern politics, terrorism is best understood as a modern construction.
D'uh! Aeroplanes didn't exist in ancient times. Nor did sky-scrapers.
It must be said, there were a lot of silly books and articles about the supposed affinity between Wahhabi or Salafi Islam & terrorism- because that was a claim made by particular Wahhabi or Salafi terrorist outfits- but there were plenty of suicide bombers from other sects or ideologies running around. In any case, the US was keeping its alliance with Saudi Arabia & Qatar while targeting Ba'athist (i.e. Secular) Iraq & Shiah Iran.
Even when it harnesses one or another aspect of tradition and culture, the result is a modern ensemble at the service of a modern project.
Just like everything else. We live in the modern world and thus have modern projects.
MEDIA INTEREST IN ISLAM exploded in the months after September 11. What, many asked, is the link between Islam and terrorism?
Killing kaffirs is considered a good thing. Also, martyrs get 72 virgins in Paradise.
This question has fuelled a fresh round of "culture talk": the predilection to define cultures according to their presumed "essential" characteristics, especially as regards politics,
Mamdani is Muslim. That's why he praises Idi Amin and hates Museveni. Don't get him started on Israel.
An earlier round of such discussion, associated with Samuel Huntington's widely cited but increasingly discredited Clash of Civilizations (1996), demonized Islam in its entirety,
Whereas Mamdani demonizes all non-Muslims.
Its place has been taken by a modified line of argument: that the terrorist link is not with all of Islam, but with a very literal interpretation of it, one found in Wahhabi Islam.
The Brits and the Egyptian Khedive had allied against the Wahhabis in the early nineteenth century. The Brits used the term 'Wahhabi' for followers of Sirhindi & Waliullah in India more particularly in the aftermath of the Mutiny.
First advanced by Stephen Schwartz in a lead article in the British weekly, The Spectator (2001), this point of view went to the ludicrous extent of claiming that all suicide couriers (bombers or hijackers), are Wahhabi and warned that this version of Islam, historically dominant in Saudi Arabia, had been exported to both Afghanistan and the United States in recent decades.
The Arabs in Afghanistan tended to be Hanbali rather than Hanafi and this may have caused some friction.
The argument was echoed widely in many circles, including the New York Times
But the Saudis and Qataris- both Wahhabi nations- got the upper hand with their extremists. By contrast, the Pakistanis- who were Hanafi and had a Bahrelvi (pro-Sufi) majority, were playing a double game. Iran, though Shia, too was quietly helping Al Qaeda.
Culture talk has turned religious experience into a political category, "What Went Wrong with Muslim Civilization?" asks Bernard Lewis in a lead article in The Atlantic Monthly (2002).
What went wrong with Mamdani? Why is he now praising Idi Amin? The truth is there is nothing wrong with Islam or any other Religion. What matters is whether countries do sensible things as opposed to crazy shit. It turned out that the 'War on Terror' was crazy shit.
Democracy lags in the Muslim World, concludes a Freedom House study of political systems in the non-Western world,3 The problem is larger than Islam, concludes Aryeh Neier (2001), former president of Human Rights Watch and now head of the Soros-funded Open Society Foundation: It lies with tribalists and fundamentalists, contemporary counterparts of Nazis, who have identified modernism as their enemy.
Salafis want to return to an older way of life. Nothing wrong with being pious and hard working. But for a country to prosper the participation rate for women needs to rise. Where this happened- e.g. Bangladesh- per capita income began to rise.
Even the political leadership of the antiterrorism alliance, notably Tony Blair and George Bush, speak of the need to distinguish "good Muslims" from "bad Muslims,"
It turned out trusting the Pakistanis was a mistake. They were sheltering Osama.
The implication is undisguised: Whether in Afghanistan, Palestine, or Pakistan, Islam must be quarantined and the devil must be exorcized from it by a civil war between good Muslims and bad Muslims.
There already had been such a war in Algeria.
I want to suggest that we lift the quarantine for analytical purposes, and turn the cultural theory of politics on its head.
Just say 'kaffirs should be killed' and be done with the matter.
This, I suggest, will help our query in at least two ways, First, it will have the advantage of deconstructing not just one protagonist in the contemporary contest—Islam— but also the other, the West, My point goes beyond the simple but radical suggestion that if there are good Muslims and bad Muslims, there must also be good Westerners and bad Westerner.
The contractors getting rich off the war on terror were bad Westerners.
I intend to question the very tendency to read Islamist politics as an effect of Islamic civilization— whether good or bad—and Western power as an effect of Western civilization.
You can't separate Islamist politics from Islam as a religion which created a relatively homogenous civilization.
Further, I shall suggest that both those politics and that power are born of an encounter, and neither can be understood in isolation, outside of the history of that encounter.
This is nonsense. American politics has had no such encounter. Nor is it the case that the British Tory party was created by an encounter with an odalisque.
Second, I hope to question the very premise of culture talk/ This is the tendency to think of culture in political—and therefore territorial—terms.
Yet cultures are associated with specific territories. Britain has British culture. India has Indian culture.
Political units (states) are territorial; culture is not.
No. A culture is embedded in a society which in turn is associated with a specific territory.
Contemporary Islam is a global civilization: fewer Muslims live in the Middle East than in Africa or in South and Southeast Asia.
But Indian Muslims have a different culture from Arab Muslims.
If we can think of Christianity and Judaism as global religions
but we think of Anglicans as different from Ethiopian Christians because there is a difference in language & culture. Similarly, Jews differentiate between Ashkenazis, Sephardics, Mizrahis, Fallashas etc.
— with Middle Eastern origins but a historical flow and a contemporary constellation that cannot be made sense of in terms of state boundaries—then why not try to understand Islam, too, in historical and extraterritorial terms?
History is about what happened in different territories.
Does it really make sense to write political histories of Islam that read like political histories of geographies like the Middle East, and political histories of Middle Eastern states as if these were no more than the political history of Islam in the Middle East?
Yes. Pakistan has a different history from Iran. Both may be Muslim but their cultures are different.
My own work (1996) leads me to trace the modern roots of culture talk
which is older than the Old Testament
to the colonial project known as indirect rule,
Two thirds of India was under direct rule. There was no difference in 'culture talk' between the directly ruled areas and the Princely states.
and to question the claim that anticolonial political resistance really expresses a cultural lag and should be understood as a traditional cultural resistance to modernity.
Some anticolonial resistance did have this characteristic.
This claim downplays the crucial encounter with colonial power,
There was no such encounter in Saudi Arabia- unless you mean Ottoman rule in the Hejaz.
which I think is central to the post-September 11 analytical predicament I described above, I find culture talk troubling for two reasons, On the one hand, cultural explanations of political outcomes tend to avoid history and issues.
Nonsense! Cultural explanations are based on historical events and their consequences. Thus, to explain why England is Protestant, you have to mention Henry VIII and his need for a male heir.
By equating political tendencies with entire communities denned in nonhistorical cultural terms, such explanations encourage collective discipline and punishment—a practice characteristic of colonial encounters.
I suppose this could be said of Islamic colonialism. Kaffirs are bad. Kill them if they don't convert.
This line of reasoning equates terrorists with Muslims,
No. It equates Muslim terrorists with Islamist politics- if that is what those terrorists themselves claim.
justifies a punishing war against an entire country (Afghanistan) and ignores the recent history that shaped both the current Afghan context and the emergence of political Islam.
Pakistan began training Islamist Afghans in the early Seventies. Then a crazy American educated Communist launched a coup. The Soviets intervened to get rid of that maniac. America gave the Pakistanis a lot of money to help the Afghan resistance. The Soviets withdrew and the warlords took over. The Taliban, with Pakistani help, suppressed the warlords but had trouble with the Tajiks and Hazaras. The killing of Ahmad Shah Massood by Tunisian Islamists secured Taliban support for Osama and thus paved the way for September 11 which in turn permitted a largely peaceful replacement of the Taliban government by moderates. Unfortunately, the Americans did stupid shit- e.g. toppling Karzai for the utterly useless Ghani- and thus the Taliban is back in power.
On the other hand, culture talk tends to think of individuals (from "traditional" cultures) in authentic and original terms, as if their identities are shaped entirely by the supposedly unchanging culture into which they are born.
Sadly, Mamdani's Muslim identity seems to have prevailed- which is why he is now praising Idi Amin and condemning Museveni.
In so doing, it dehistoricizes the construction of political identities, Rather than see contemporary Islamic politics as the outcome of an archaic culture, I suggest we see neither culture nor politics as archaic, but both as very contemporary outcomes of equally contemporary conditions, relations, and conflicts.
Which is what the CIA does. There may be some smart academics who can advise them. Sadly, Mamdani isn't smart.
Instead of dismissing history and politics, as culture talk does, I suggest we place cultural debates in historical and political contexts, Terrorism is not born of the residue of a premodern culture in modern politics, Rather, terrorism is a modern construction.
It is ancient. Mamdani must have heard of the sect of the Assassins from which the Aga Khans descend.
Even when it harnesses one or another aspect of tradition and culture, the result is a modern ensemble at the service of a modern project
Like Field Marshall Munir gassing on about Fitna Al-Khawarij. Incidentally, Oman, which is very peaceful, has a type of Islam descended from the Kharijite sect.
CULTURE TALK Is our world really divided into the modern and premodern, such that the former makes culture in which the latter is a prisoner?
No. Don't be silly.
This dichotomy is increasingly prevalent in Western discussions of relations with Muslim-majority countries.
Nonsense! Economic and geopolitical considerations feature in such relations.
It presumes that culture stands for creativity, for what being human is all about, in one part of the world, that called modern, but that in the other part, labeled premodern,'' culture stands for habit, for some kind of instinctive activity whose rules are inscribed in early founding texts, usually religious, and mummified in early artifacts. When I read of Islam in the papers these days, I often feel I am reading of museumized peoples, of peoples who are said not to make culture, except at the beginning of creation, as some extraordinary, prophetic act. After that, it seems they—we Muslims—just conform to culture.
This is what happened to Mamdani. He now praises Idi Amin to the skies. Why? Amin was Muslim. Mamdani is Muslim. Connect the fucking dots.
...We are told that there is a fault line running through Islam, a line that separates moderate Islam, called "genuine Islam, from extremist political Islam.
Nothing wrong with that. Genuine Islam is about piety, thrift, hard-work, family values, being charitable. There is a collective duty to fight but no individual or group of individuals can make that decision for themselves. But this is also the view taken by the State. If our country goes to war, then we can join the army and fight. We can't do so on a whim.
The terrorists of September 11, we are told, did not just hijack planes; they also hijacked Islam, meaning "genuine" Islam.
Saudi Arabia is genuinely Islamic. They dealt with their extremists using a carrot and stick approach. On the other hand, an Al Qaeda offshoot has come to power in Syria. Trump has welcomed its leader to the White House.
I would like to offer another version of the argument that the clash is inside—and not between—civilizations.
Mamdani will contradict himself almost immediately.
The synthesis is my own, but no strand in the argument is fabricated, I rather think of this synthesis as an enlightened version, because it does not just speak of the "other," but also of self, It has little trace of ethnocentrism. This is how it goes: Islam and Christianity have in common a deeply messianic orientation, a sense of mission to civilize the world.
In which case they are bound to clash.
Each is convinced that it possesses the sole truth, that the world beyond is a sea of ignorance that needs to be redeemed.
I suppose both religions have their share of missionaries. The difference is that Christian missionaries tend to be more useful in terms of providing education and medical care. In India, everybody wants to send their kid to a 'Convent' school. Madrasas are the worst option.
In the modern age, this kind of conviction goes beyond the religious to the secular, beyond the domain of doctrine to that of politics, Yet even seemingly secular colonial notions such as that of a civilizing mission"—or its more racialized version, "the white man's burden"—or the 19th-century U,S, conviction of a "manifest destiny" have deep religious roots.
Only in the sense that Communism and Capitalism and Consumerism have deep religious roots.
Like any living tradition, neither Islam nor Christianity is monolithic. Both harbor and indeed are propelled by diverse and contradictory tendencies, In both, righteous notions have been the focus of prolonged debates, Even if you should claim to know what is good for humanity, how do you proceed? By persuasion or force? Do you convince others of the validity of your truth or do you proceed by imposing it on them?
Islam has tended to go with the latter method. I suppose, Christians in an earlier age were just as bad. But Christianity improved over time. Islam didn't.
Is religion a matter of conviction or legislation?
In Pakistan, it is a matter of legislation. That is why Qadianis are not allowed to call themselves Muslims.
The first alternative gives you reason and evangelism;
and terrorism. If you are convinced you will get 72 virgins in Paradise, why not blow yourself up?
the second gives you the Crusades and jihad.
The Crusades ended in 1291. Jihad we still have with us. Western Christians understood that raising productivity is the royal road to prosperity and national security. This involves, inter alia, raising the participation rate for women. Religion is a service industry. It can have high income elasticity of demand. As productivity rises, people can spend more on high quality religious services. We understand that it is better to go to the Church, or the Mosque, than to go to the brothel or the crack den. There is a positive externality associated with religious piety. Equally, cracking down on homicidal maniacs- regardless of their religion- is beneficial for society. Muslims understand this perfectly well. There are plenty of Islamic countries where non-Muslims are eager to work and to live. Moreover, many Muslim countries are badly affected by climate change. The city of Teheran may have to be evacuated because of acute water shortage. Thus Iranians and Iraqis and Moroccans and Indonesians have a common interest in developing or applying new technologies so as to deal with an existential threat facing the whole of Humanity.
How do you make sense of a politics that consciously wears the mantle of religion?
The hope was that such a politics would be favourable to free enterprise and the rule of law. The problem with religion is that it introduces too many 'wedge issues' into politics. In America, it is abortion. Elsewhere it is homosexuality. Once you get to purdah and mandatory beards, you are going down a rabbit hole.
Take, for example the politics of Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda; both claim to be waging a jihad, a just war against the enemies of Islam.
They thought they could take over Saudi Arabia once the Americans withdrew. They were wrong.
To try to understand this uneasy relationship between politics and religion, 1 find it necessary not only to shift focus from doctrinal to historical Islam, from doctrine and culture to history and politics, but also to broaden the focus beyond Islam to include larger historical encounters, of which bin Laden and al-Qaeda have been one outcome
Al-Qaeda was the outcome of the anti-Soviet Afghan war.
THE COLD WAR AFTER INDOCHINA Eqbal Ahmad draws our attention to the television image from 1985 of Ronald Reagan inviting a group of turbaned men, all Afghan, all leaders of the mujahideen, to the White House lawn for an introduction to the media. "These gentlemen are the moral equivalents of America's founding fathers," said Reagan (Ahmad 2001), This was the moment when the United States tried to harness one version of Islam in a struggle against the Soviet Union.
Carter & Brzezinki had already had the idea of applying a Green Islamic belt to the soft underbelly of the Soviet Union. The hope was that the pious 'bazaari middle class' would rebel against Soviet style military dictators or their progeny (the Shah's dad started off as a military dictator).
Before exploring its politics, let me provide some historical background to the moment, 1 was a young lecturer at the University of Dar-esSalaam in Tanzania in 1975, It was a momentous year in the decolonization of the world as we knew it.
It was a horrible year for Ugandans. The Brits had done a far better job running the country.
1975 was the year of the U,S, defeat in Indochina,
combat troops had left in 1973.
as it was of the collapse of the last European empire in Africa.
Portuguese rule was on its last legs. Could things get worse? Yes.
In retrospect, it is clear that it was also the year that the centre of gravity of the Cold War shifted from Southeast Asia to southern Africa.
No. South East Asia was lost after the Tet offensive. Southern Africa didn't matter very much.
The strategic question was this; Who would pick up the pieces of the Portuguese empire in Africa, the United States or the Soviet Union?
Nobody would pick up the pieces. Things would go from bad to worse.
As the focal point of the Cold War shifted, there was a corresponding shift in U,S, strategy based on two key influences, First, the closing years of the Vietnam War saw the forging of a Nixon Doctrine, which held that "Asian boys must fight Asian wars." The Nixon doctrine was one lesson that the United States brought from the Vietnam debacle.
No. The Nixon doctrine was to do with befriending China as a counterweight to the Warsaw pact. It didn't work. China was too poor to be of much use. Nixon had to abandon Pakistan- which was even more useless.
Even if the hour was late to implement it in Indochina, the Nixon Doctrine guided U,S, initiatives in southern Africa.
No. The Americans looked after their economic interests in that part of the world. They weren't going to be dragged into a bush war by the Boers.
In the post-Vietnam world, the United States looked for more than local proxies; it needed regional powers as junior partners, In southern Africa, that role was fulfilled by apartheid South Africa.
That may have been the Tanzanian view. The Chinese had just finished building the Tanzam railway but it wasn't particularly successful. White South Africans were considered good at fighting. They could look after themselves.
Faced with the possibility of a decisive MPLA victory in Angola, the United States encouraged South Africa to intervene militarily.
They needed little encouragement because they were administering Namibia. But they did get American support.
The result was a political debacle that was second only to the Bay of Pigs invasion of a decade before.
Nonsense! Nobody greatly cared.
No matter its military strength and geopolitical importance, apartheid South Africa was clearly a political liability for the United States.
That only became the case in the mid-Eighties.
Second, the Angolan fiasco reinforced public resistance within the United States to further overseas Vietnam-type involvement, The clearest indication that popular pressures were finding expression among legislators was the 1975 Clark amendment, which outlawed covert aid to combatants in the ongoing Angolan civil war.
The CIA was in bad odour. Carter appointed Admiral Turner head of the CIA to carry out a massive purge. Still, the CIA was able to get around the provisions of the Clark Amendment through third parties.
The rest of Mamdani's essay is devoted to instances of the US helping various 'terrorist organizations'- including Al Qaeda. His mistake is to think that the US created these movements. They would have existed in any case. Consider UNITA- now the second largest party in Angola. It was initially assisted by the Chinese before coming under US and South African patronage. However, this was withdrawn after 1992. A pointless war dragged on till UNITA lost its military capacity. Still, since UNITA represented the largest ethnic group (some 38 percent of the population) it would remain a force to be reckoned with.
With hindsight, one might agree with Obama who said US foreign policy consists of doing stupid shit. The problem is that if your rivals are doing stupid shit, you feel you too must do so. This is FOMO- fear of missing out. But, the fact that you do stupid shit doesn't mean you create the world in which stupid shit is done.
Mamdani ends his essay on a note of pure farce.
Islamist organizations will have to consider seriously the separation of the state from religion
In other words, they should stop being Islamic and say 'we don't want a Caliph or 'Supreme Guide'. Let's abolish Sharia.'
notably as Hezbollah has in Lebanon.
Hilarious!
Instead of creating a national political Islam for each Muslim-majority state, the real challenge faced by Muslims is to shed the very notion of a nation-state.
Tear up your passport. Don't pay your taxes.
Whatever the terms of the nation-state—territorial or cultural, secular or religious—this political form exported by the modern West to the rest of the world
Very true. CIA created the first Pharaohs. Who built the Pyramids? It was Halliburton.
is one part of Western modernity that needs to be rethought.
Zohran should get all New Yorkers to tear up their passports. They should refuse to pay Federal Income taxes.
The test of democracy in multireligious and multicultural societies is not simply to get the support of the majority,
No. That is what Democracies must do.
the nation, but to do so without losing the trust of the minority—so that both may belong to a single political community living by a single set of rules.
That's why Mamdani's hero is Idi Amin. Uganda was a paradise under his benevolent rule. He was a good Muslim. Zohran should take him as his role-model.
