Culture Wars

It’s not going too far to say that New Yorkers are seriously reading Mahmood Mamdani these days. I come to this conclusion after I’m told six successive times in one day that his latest book was sold out, at various bookstores in downtown Manhattan. Eventually, in the days to come, not only do I manage to get hold of the book ‘Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, The Cold War and The Roots of Terror’, I also get the opportunity to discuss it with Mamdani himself.

Mamdani is a Professor of Government and director of the Institute for African Studies at Columbia University in New York. A prominent scholar and writer, Mamdani is renowned for his provocative analyses of the tensions of post-colonial Africa and has received extensive international acclaim for his groundbreaking study of colonialism, imperialistic political violence, racism and the modern state among other things. His riveting interpretation of the genocide in Rwanda in ‘When Victims become Killers’ and his insightful exploration of colonial legacies in ‘Citizens and Subjects’ have given an unprecedented perspective to the regional demographic and political undercurrents in Africa. ‘Good Muslim, Bad Muslim’ is Mamdani’s most recent work. Inspired largely by the post Sept 11 scenario in the US, this book is one of the few important counter-narratives to the contemporary Western political analysis of Islam.

“I am a student of history”, Mamdani says, “I had read of how American literature at the time of the ethnic cleansing of Native Americans in mid-19th century was full of praise for fictitious ’good Indians’ at the same time as the American state targeted real live Native Americans as ’bad Indians’. The Nazis used to speak of good and bad Jews during the days of the Holocaust. Under apartheid, white South Africans used to distinguish ’good’ from ’bad’ Africans. When I heard the Bush Administration use the same language after 9/11 in relation to Muslims, declaring open season on what they castigated as ’bad Muslims’, I realized that someone needed to expose the politics of this type of culture talk.”

‘How not to talk about Islam and Politics’ is the way Mamdani subtitles and explains the phenomenon of ‘culture talk’, a theme central to his arguments. Such talk of culture he argues is more political than social and it wrongfully presupposes that political behaviour of people can be read from their religious or cultural habits. Culture talk assumes that ‘every culture has a tangible essence that defines it and then it explains politics as a consequence of that essence’, so it reduces issues to culture and neglects actual political experience. But Mamdani contends that political identities are not reducable to cultural ones,. He emphasises the necessity of distinguishing between cultural/religious and political identity because in the post-911 America because ‘culture talk’ has predominantly focused on Islam. It unduly presumes that there is a fault line running through Islam, which divides moderate Islam from some extremist Islam.

Mamdani traces ‘culture talk’ to the history of modern colonialization, which ‘stigmatizes those who are shut out from modernity as anti-modern because they resist being shut out’. His emphasis on the need to recognize the form of the postcolonial state for a better understanding of the present political configuration in the Third world is somewhat resonant with the arguments in his earlier writing. He also analyzes the transformation of political Islam’s reformist agenda to a radical one in the milieu of the transition from colonialism to postcolonialism. He makes a very pertinent distinction between ‘Islamic fundamentalism’ and ‘political Islam’. Although Islamic fundamentalism is a term that is invariably equated in the Western world with contemporary acts of terrorism, Mamdani uses ‘political Islam’ to describe acts of terrorism perpetrated by Muslims.

In a world divided between the modern and pre-modern, culture (modernity) also seems to have become the dividing line between those who favour peace and those inclined to terror. Mamdani situates terror in its political context. He attributes to ‘culture talk’ the practice of explaining and qualifying ‘terrorism’ as ‘Islamic’ and so ‘Islamic terrorism’ he says is ‘offered as both description and explanation of the events of 9/11’. Speaking of the extent to which such views have permeated that official and public opinion in the US, he says “Culture talk has become official fodder in contemporary America. It is part of the daily diet that the establishment media feeds its readers. Not surprisingly, American viewers increasingly think of politics, especially in far away places, in cultural terms.”

“I was in New York City on 9/11, and I was shocked to read in the press in the weeks that followed that the Koran had become a best-selling book in America”, he says. “Imagine, more and more Americans were flocking to bookshops to buy the Koran because they hoped to find in it an explanation for 9/11. I ask myself how many Afghanis or Iraqis have taken to reading the Bible for an explanation of why America is bombing them. I don’t think many. The sad but true fact is that American intellectuals are far more likely to think of the world, particularly the Islamic and African worlds, in cultural terms. In contrast, I think Afghanis and Iraqis are likely to understand American bombing as a political and not a cultural act.”

Very determined to dispel the predominant notions in the US that secular, Westernized muslims were good muslims in contrast to those who did not seem to conform and were fanatical or bad muslims, Mamdani exposes such rhetoric meaningfully and provides an important insight into the mindset of the current US government. “When the Bush Administration speaks of ’bad Muslims,’ it is really speaking of Muslim critics or opponents of official America and when it speaks of ’good Muslims’ it really is talking of its supporters or agents in Muslim societies. These designations are not cultural but religious; they have little to do with people’s attitude to Islam, and every thing to do with their attitude to official America”, he says.

Mamdani takes on the Western political analysis of Islam with very persuasive arguments, which undeniably break new grounds for the existing international debates on Islam and terrorism. He argues that political Islam emerged as the result of its present day encounter with Western power and that extremist Islamic terrorist movements are a by product of modern times. “I think it is a mistake to see radical Islam as just a linear outcome of earlier forms of Islam. To be sure, radical Islam is a critique of reformist Islam that both preceded and flourished alongside it. But one also needs to understand radical Islam in conversation with competing secular ideologies, particularly Marxism-Leninism. In the 1960s, Marxism-Leninism was the key secular ideology, which highlighted the importance of political violence for political action. I hope my book will convince readers that political violence is not a product of pre-modern cultures, nor of fundamentalist forms of religion, but are deeply associated with particular types of modernist politics, both secular and religious”.

Given his views, Mamdani is obviously concerned about focusing more on politics than culture. He felt that even when it came to culture, he thought of understanding it as a political culture which develops in response to particular circumstances, rather than as something that is just handed down from generation to generation as some sort of a genetic legacy. “From a political point of view, the problem is not fundamentalism, whether Islamic or Christian or Jewish, ”he says. “The problem is political: the emergence in a religious idiom of a political ideology that justifies the centrality of violence in politics”. He talks of many forms of post-war political Christianity, such as the involvement of Black churches in the civil rights movement and Jerry Falwell’s Christian right in the US, and communism for a broader understanding of religiously informed politics.

“When it came to political Islam, I traced this to two key thinkers, Abu ala Mawdudi and Syed Qutb. Mawdudi speaks of Islam as a political ideology, akin to communism. When I read Syed Qutb’s ’Milestones’, particularly the introduction where he says he wrote it for an Islamic vanguard, I thought I was reading Lenin’s ’What is to be Done?’ When I read the main text, particularly Qutb’s distinction between friend and enemy, a friend as one with whom you must use persuasion but an enemy as one who needs to be dealt with by force, I was reminded of Mao ze Dong’s distinction in his essay ’On the Correct Handling of Contradictions among the People”, he says.

Mamdani is no apologist for terrorism, he feels however that an effective campaign against political terror will require addressing real issues and legitimate concerns. “To the extent there are legitimate political grievances that go unaddressed, he says, they will lay a favourable ground for the development of resistance, whether or not it takes the form of terror. For that reason the struggle against al-Qaeda as against other organizations that resort to political terror, is mainly a political and not a military struggle”. He puts forward a coherent theory of the origins of al-Qaeda, one which differs vastly from the mainstream US belief. He comprehensively outlines the way Americans incorporated militant ‘Jihad’ among its strategies during the cold war even as the CIA supplied the pernicious equipment to the so-called Jihadi’s to indulge in terror.

He speaks of ‘a growing common ground between the perpetrators of 9/11 and the official response to it in the form of the war on terror’ and suggests that this war needs to identify terror in all its forms, state and non-state. “An understanding of the history of terror will bring to the forefront the fact that there has been a cycle of terror, whereby non-state terror is the child of state terror. Contemporary forms of non-state terror, including al-Qaeda, were a result of American strategy to win the Cold War after defeat in Vietnam, at a time when the U.S. was constrained by strong popular opposition within the U.S. to overseas military intervention”, he says.

“To win the Cold War in this context, first Kissinger, then Ronald Reagan, adopted a strategy of proxy war”, he explains further. “Reagan allied with apartheid South Africa and gave political support to South Africa creating terrorist movements in former Portuguese colonies like Mozambique and Angola that had come under the rule of militant nationalist movements. He then created the Contras in Nicaragua, another terrorist movement. My second point is that none of these movements were religious. American policy in the late Cold War gave rise to terrorist movements that were both secular and religious. The creation of a political proxy that spoke a religious language was only characteristic of the closing phase of the Cold War, the Afghan jihad.”

Very vocal in his criticism of present day US foreign policy, Mamdani describes the US attack on Iraq as ‘nothing short of an officially conducted and officially sanctioned genocide’. He suggests in the book that there is a direct link between the logic of pre-emptive war and genocide and claims that genocide is the logical conclusion of pre-emptive strikes. Those who commit genocide, he argues, have arrived at a zero-sum point where think they are doing to others what others will do to them if given a chance and so excessive violence is rationalised in the name of self-defense, which is also the raison d’être of pre-emptive war. “The effect of UN sanctions against Iraq were ultimately studied by UNICEF which said they had resulted in the premature deaths of hundreds of thousands of children under five. The effect of the sanctions was genocidal. The policy was a form of state terror. It shared two features with non-state forms of terror. Not only were its victims innocent civilians, victims were usually not the targets. Just as in the al-Qaeda bombings of U.S. embassies in Dar es Salaam and Nairobi, so in Iraq, victims could just as well have been chosen by lottery”, he adds.

Suggesting that democratic states are ‘potentially self-correcting’, Mamdani says, “The capacity of democracies to correct themselves from within was most evident at the time of the Vietnam War. The war came to an end because of two forms of effective oppositions: the Vietnamese resistance and the opposition to the war within USA. Since 1975, every American administration has held the press responsible for creating the anti-war movement. You focused on ’our atrocities’ but not ’theirs,’ so argued each administration. I detail the attempt to tame the press in the book, but the end result is clear with ’embedded’ reporters in the Iraq War. They faced the Iraqis, but had neither eyes nor ears trained to analyze the actions of the American army.”

“The ignominious result of this was, of course, the silence of the media in the face of Abu Ghraib. It is clear that the atrocities at Abu Ghraib were sanctioned from the highest places and yet this fact has been glossed over. America needs a 9/11 type independent Commission to investigate Abu Gharaib, not the internal investigations that the military is pursuing now. With a relatively lame press, the university is the only other institutionalized center of independent thought in the U.S. That too is under attack, with attempts to stifle views critical of Zionism and the state of Israel.”

In the introduction to the Good Muslim, Bad Muslim he begins by writing about ‘the end of a century of violence, one possibly more violent than any other in recorded history’ and puts that in perspective in his conclusion as he calls for a worldwide peace movement to deal with the current dangerously volatile standoff between the political Christian Right and militant political Islam. He feels that the Muslim need to pay critical heed to ‘culture talk’ coming out of America and to recognize it for what it actually is; a distorted perspective. In doing so they can possibly contribute to some meaningful resolution.

‘The Muslim world needs to be aware of the politics of official America’s ’war on terror’, he says. “It needs to search for alternatives independent of both official America and al-Qaeda and its ideological fellow travellers. Muslims must understand that their enemy is not a religion but a form of political power, an imperial state, that is the principal oppressor of most peoples in the world. It is vital that Muslims understand that they are not alone, but surrounded with potential allies, and forge methods of struggle suitable to tapping world-wide support.”