Reviews and Essays

Mahmood Mamdani, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim (Pantheon, 2004)

On September 16, 2001, while stepping down from the presidential helicopter, George W. Bush told the world, "…this crusade, this war on terrorism, is going to take awhile." In referring to the war on terror as a "crusade," Bush not only infused religious fervor into mainstream political discourse, but he also alluded to a civilizational rift between the "West" and Islam, thus echoing the thought of conservative ideologue Samuel Huntington. In the days that followed, however, the Bush Administration refined its rhetoric to a more politically correct one, telling the world that there is in fact no clash of civilizations occurring, but rather one within Islam between "good Muslims" and "bad Muslims," this time invoking another conservative intellectual, Bernard Lewis.

In Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror, Mahmood Mamdani argues that there is no such thing as a "good"—or for that matter a "bad"—Muslim, and that using such terms "masks a refusal to make a political analysis of our times." In this poignant and revelatory book, Mamdani tells us that the events of 9/11 are the result of an "alliance" between radical Islamists and the United States government "gone sour" and need "to be understood first and foremost as the unfinished business of the Cold War." Accordingly, Mamdani illustrates the emergence of twentieth-century political terror and organized radical Islam as a product of the United States’ desire to wage covert proxy wars aimed at thwarting Communism in Third World countries. In doing so, Mamdani weaves together an incisive analysis of U.S. foreign policy from the onset of the Cold War to the present, a story that takes him across three continents.

Mamdani sees Indochina in the 1960s as the birthplace of the U.S. strategy of fighting the Cold War through proxies relying on CIA-backed mercenary forces instead of deploying national ground troops. In northern Laos, beginning in 1962, the CIA led an army of more than 30,000 local mercenaries for over a decade, a mission largely unbeknownst to the American public. "As the opposition to the Vietnam War mounted back home," Mamdani notes, "the advantages of proxy war became clear: waged in secret, it was at the same time removed from congressional oversight, public scrutiny, and conventional diplomacy."

The origins of the U.S. liaison with contemporary political terror, according to Mamdani, lie in southern Africa, beginning well before the proliferation of the radical Islamist movements of the 1980s and ’90s. In Angola, despite Congressional legislation banning support of any sides of the ongoing war, the CIA backed the anti-Communist Unita movement, which had ties to South Africa’s Apartheid regime. Mamdani notes that during the devastating war in Angola, "UNICEF calculated that 331,000 civilians died of causes directly or indirectly related to the war." The U.S. also embraced South Africa via a policy known as "Constructive Engagement," so that it could tap into its military resources to support the anticommunist terrorist outfit known as Renamo—which Mamdani calls Africa’s "first genuine terrorist movement"—in Mozambique.

From Africa, the main theater of proxy war shifted to Central America, where the Reagan Administration openly embraced terror and drug lords to propagate Low Intensity Conflict. In Nicaragua, Mamdani aptly explains how the CIA wed the terrorism of the Contras to electoral politics, which was clearly a dangerous mix. As the author writes of this multi-faceted anti-Sandinista effort, "The point of harnessing terror as part of an electoral campaign was to turn it into a form of blackmail that could be switched off and on at will." For American readers in the midst of a U.S. presidential race stained by terror, the Nicaraguan example seems particularly chilling.

Afghanistan, however, is Mamdani’s main case and point. Launched near the end of the Carter Administration in 1979, the Afghan Jihad was initiated and backed by the CIA against the Soviets in collusion with Pakistan’s intelligence bureau, the ISI. To fight the Jihad in Afghanistan, the CIA recruited fringe radical Islamists from across the world—including one Osama bin Laden—to ensure that the Soviets would incur losses in Afghanistan that equaled those of the United States in Vietnam. In CIA-backed Pakistani and Afghani training camps throughout the 1980s, the preliminary structures of Al Qaeda were born. "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," Mamdani maintains. His discussion of the relationship that developed between radical Islamists who would later carry out attacks against the United States and the CIA is especially distressing. In fact, the key leaders of every terrorist attack of the end of the 20th century—from New York to France to South Africa—turned out to be veterans of the Afghan war.

Good Muslim, Bad Muslim offers a nuanced and complex examination of the political context of the terrorist attacks of 9/11. At the outset it also provides a theoretical framework in which to consider 9/11, one which will undoubtedly challenge non-academic readers—Mamdani’s intended audience. In these pages, Mamdani examines the notion of "Culture Talk," the tendency to view political events through cultural histories employed by governments and intellectuals in pursuit of power, which stigmatizes Third World people as archaic or barbaric. Mamdani’s critique of "Culture Talk"—whose formulation he accredits to Lewis and Huntington—debunks the widely held notion that radical Islam is a throwback to pre-modern times. Mamdani effectively illustrates—in theoretical as well as practical terms—that political Islam is a product of modern, secular political events.

Mamdani reminds us that 9/11 was indeed a day in which the world changed, but that it shouldn’t separate us from the historical events of the past 50 or 500 years or cloud our memories with "political amnesia." In some ways, after finishing this book I felt disheartened and overwhelmed, the corrupt and destructive nature of socio-political affairs at home and abroad all too apparent. But at the same time Mamdani’s work leaves room for optimism in the face of an era defined by widespread political terror and war, urging readers to emulate the last global movement for peace—the one which brought an end to the war in Vietnam.