Good Muslim, Bad Muslim

This book is incredible. Mahmood Mamdani, as is the case in his other masterpieces, has nailed (an) incredible argument(s) here. In a combination of adeptly researched facts and authoritative analysis, Mamdani touches upon many issue related to the current discourse on terrorism and the infamous war on terror.

This is really a collection of a series of talks given by Mamdani in New York City, Chicago, Kampala and Durban. So it is not as academically intense as his other books are. In other words, if you are scared away from Mamdani's writing by "Citizen and Subject," don't worry. This is much more reader-friendly.

He starts the book with a profound saying by Frantz Fanon from his epic book "Black Skin, White Masks:"

'Man is a yes.... Yes to life. Yes to love. Yes to generosity. But Man is also a no. No to scorn of man. No to degradation of man. No to exploitation of man. No to the butchery of what is most human in man: freedom.'

Then he explains how America's response to 9/11 has resonated with militants of political Islam to assert that "Islam is a political, and not simply a religious or cultural, identity." Both sides of this conflict are determined to distinguish between (and push the "Muslim community" to self-select themselves into) friends and adversaries of the ultimate good--i.e. them. This is in fact where the title of the book has been borrowed from: good Muslims are to be applauded and the bad ones to be demonized. He concludes that "... we need to understand that both forms of contemporary terror [black on black violence in Africa and Islamic terrorism globally] were forged in an environment of impunity created by state terror during the late Cold War." Then he goes on to suggest that "rather than split "our" terrorism from "theirs"--only to excuse the former and demonize the latter, as with "good" and "bad" Muslims--we need to locate and understand both as part of a single historical process." (p. 256)

Then he goes on to talk about culture talk (will explain later) and how modern terrorism is the product of America's behavior versus the rest of the world during and after the so called "cold war." War on terror, from Mamdani's point of view, is more an American revenge aimed at those who come to defy the status quo (i.e. American unchallenged hegemony over the affairs of the world). In some ways, it seems, that the "war of terror" is the scar of Vietnam war's defeat, which is resurfacing in an innovative format.

Below, I will present some of Mamdani's core arguments with the hope to capture the heart of his message in "Good Muslim, Bad Muslim."

My favorite part so far has been Chapter Four: From Proxy War to Open Aggression. In this chapter, Mamdani explains the transition from the Reaganite response to militant nationalism (low-intensity conflict) to the post 9/11 version of intervention (high-intensity conflict). He says: "The shift was made possible by a changed political climate in post-9/11 America: not only had security become a concern, but this concern was received initially with empathy from most of the world. For the Bush administration, this was a golden opportunity to shed the inhibitions of the Cold War and declare open session on militant nationalism. From this point of view, a war against militants nationalism would conclude the unfinished business of the Cold War. The ambition to smash militant nationalism was summed up as a call for "regime change" and--in true Reaganite fashion--"democratization." In a flash of less than two years, the United States moved from the invasion of Taliban-ruled Afghanistan to that of Saddam Hussein-ruled Iraq. Whereas the Taliban had been pinpointed as hosts of al-Qaeda, there was little legitimate effort to connect the invasion of Iraq to the terror that was 9/11. This is because the "war on terror" had moved on, from addressing broadly shared security concerns to targeting militant nationalism." (p. 176)

"The history of America's war with Iraq, from the Gulf war to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, has been the upgrding of propaganda from distortion and exaggeration of known facts to the deliberate invention of lies." (p. 196)

"The defining feature of modern Western imperialism--particularly British and French--was the claim that expanding domains were key to spreading the rule of law internationally. Even the most brutal of dictatorships that were self-consciously western, such as Nazi Germany and apartheid South Africa, insisted that they were upholders of the rule of law. From this perspective, the George W. Bush administration's open disdain for the rule of law is unmatched in the history of Western imperialism." (p. 202)

In a sub-section called Israeli Power and Local Impunity, he explicates how similar American policy in Iraq has been to the Israeli's response to the "Palestinian threat." Then he explains how this similarity grew after the 9/11 events. He quotes Edward said on this:
"did Israel's army, using dozens of tanks and armored carriers, along with hundreds of missile strikes from US-supplied Apache helicopter gunships, besiege Jenin's refugee camp or over a week, a one-square-kilometer patch of shacks housing 15,000 refugees and a few dozen men armed with automatic rifles and no missiles or tanks, and call it a response to terrorist violence and a threat to Israeli's survival?" (p. 213)

The sub-section "the Settler and the Suicide Bomber" revolves around the idea of culture versus political talk when it comes to the concept of terrorism. "The debate on terrorism revolves around two poles, the cultural and the political. Culture Talk seeks the explanation for a deed in the culture of the doer. In contrast, Political Talk tends to explain the deed as a response to issues, to political context of unaddressed grievances." He argues that despite his partiality towards political rather than cultural explanation of political terror, he admits to the predisposition that exist in both of them: "for both, political terror is an inevitable response, either in the grip of a premodern culture or in the face of terrible oppression." (p. 219) He goes on to admit that neither of these explanations considers political terror as an act of choice.

The concluding chapter: "Beyond Impnity and Collective Punishment," is a real masterpiece. He start the chapter by pointing out to a fundamental misgiving that many politicians have (or pretend to have) about the issue of political terror: that of presenting political terror as simply a criminal act and thus necessitating a legal punishment. He argues that "unlike the criminal, the political terrorist is not easily deterred by punishment." He rightly attacks Salman Rushdi's lame argument in an article in the New York Times that "terrorists are nihilists who wrap themselves in objectives but have none." (p. 229) From Mamdani's point of view, terrorism has no military solution. For the same reason, he believes, that "America's bombing campaign in Afghanistan is more likely to be remembered as a combination of block revenge and medieval-type exorcism than as a search for a solution to terrorism." (p.230)

In the sub-section: "America and Israel: The Hart of the Matter," Mamdani has presented a convincing argument that has partly satisfied my personal long-standing questions about the logic behind America's unwavering support for the state of Israel. He goes beyond the conventional account that tends to explain everything with AIPAC. He says: "To understand that enduring motivation, I think it necessary to focus away from special intersts to the American mainstream, so as to understand the ways in which the political project called Israel has come to resonate with American sensibilities." (p. 242)

He argues that "the makers of the strategic alliance have been able to tap into an American sensibility, a reservoir of support, to enshrine this alliance with a halo." Then he goes on to revisit the relationship between the United States and Israel through the historical experience of post-apartheid Africa, to make sense of this historical sensibility. "With the end of apartheid" he writes "the African experience stands for the end of settler colonialism--unlike the American experience, which signifies the triumph of settler colonialism." (p. 242)

"The postwar period [in America] represented a double shift, on grounds of both race and religion. Before the war, it was presumed that whites were Christians; more often than not, the heritage of Christianity was defined in opposition to that of Judaism. The idea of a single Judeo-Christian tradition is mainly a post-Holocaust idea with weak historical depth. It is post-Holocaust America's antidote to anti-Semitism. Contemporary America is a multicultural and multireligious political community that has yet to come to grips with its settler origins." (pp. 243-44)

Even if you don't get to read the whole book, (which is not a hard read at all) I highly recommend the last chapter to be read. You won't regret it.