ANTH3021 DISCUSSION PREPARATION GUIDE
Name________________________________ Date___________________
Reading: Author / Title__________________________________________
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1. What was the reading about? State in one complete sentence the theme of this work.
2. How did the author get the information? How did they put together and present this information? Was there a particular structure to the work? Was it qualitative, quantitative, and/or comparative? Was it based on textual research, observation, and/or participation? Etc.
3. What did you learn from this reading? Be specific and concrete.
a.
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4. Note words that are unfamiliar or seem to be used in a special manner to create a particular impression. Define the word in the context of the phrase where you found it.
a.
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5. What questions does this selection
ing up for you? Write one or two questions that open the space for discussion about key points in the articles, gaps in the knowledge, new research questions raised. Avoid "yes/no" questions, try to open the space for people to share opinions without trying to lead them to particular conclusions.
a.
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6. (To be filled out in class during discussion)
What are some of the best ideas that you heard from other people in your discussion group?
Untitled
MAHMOOD MAMDANI
Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: A Political Perspective
on Culture and Te
orism
ABSTRACT The link between Islam and te
orism became a central media concern following September 11, resulting in new rounds
of "culture talk. This talk has turned religious experience into a political category, differentiating 'good Muslims" from "bad Mus-
lims, rather than te
orists from civilians. The implication is undisguised: Whether in Afghanistan, Palestine, or Pakistan, Islam must
e quarantined and the devil must be exorcized from it by a civil war between good Muslims and bad Muslims. This article suggests that
we lift the quarantine and turn the cultural theory of politics on its head. Beyond the simple but radical suggestion that if there are good
Muslims and bad Muslims, there must also be good Westerners and bad Westerners, I question the very tendency to read Islamist poli-
tics as an effect of Islamic civilization—whether good or bad—and Western power as an effect of Western civilization. Both those poli-
tics and that power are born of an encounter, and neither can be understood outside of the history of that encounter. Cultural
explanations of political outcomes tend to avoid history and issues. Thinking of individuals from "traditional" cultures in authentic and
original terms, culture talk dehistoricizes the construction of political identities. This article places the te
or of September 11 in a his-
torical and political context. Rather than a residue of a premodern culture in modern politics, te
orism is best understood as a modern
construction. 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. [Keywords: Muslims, culture talk, Islamist politics, political identities, te
orism]
MEDIA INTEREST IN ISLAM exploded in the monthsafter September 11. What, many asked, is the link
etween Islam and tenorism? This question has fueled a
fresh round of "culture talk": the predilection to define
cultures according to their presumed "essential" charac-
teristics, especially as regards politics, An earlieT round of
such discussion, associated with Samuel Huntington's
widely cited but increasingly discredited Clash of Civiliza-
tions (1996), demonized Islam in its entirety, Its place has
een taken by a modified line of argument: that the te
or-
ist link is not with all of Islam, but with a very literal inter-
pretation of it, one found in Wahhabi Islam,1 First ad-
vanced 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 argument was echoed widely
in many circles, including the New York Times2
Culture talk has turned religious experience into a po-
litical category, "What Went Wrong with Muslim Civiliza-
tion?" asks Bernard Lewis in a lead article in The Atlantic
Monthly (2002), 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 So-
ciety Foundation: It lies with tribalists and fundamentalists,
contemporary counterparts of Nazis, who have identified
modernism as their enemy, Even the political leadership
of the antite
orism alliance, notably Tony Blair and
George Bush, speak of the need to distinguish "good Mus-
lims" from "bad Muslims," The implication is undis-
guised: Whether in Afghanistan, Palestine, or Pakistan, Is-
lam must be quarantined and the devil must be exorcized
from it by a civil war between good Muslims and bad Mus-
lims,
I want to suggest that we lift the quarantine for ana-
lytical purposes, and turn the cultural theory of politics on
its head, 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—
ut 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
AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST 104(3): XXXXXXXXXXCOPYRIGHT © 2002, AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGICAL ASSOCIATION
Mamdani • Good Muslim, Bad Muslim 767
ad Westerners, I intend to question the very tendency to
ead Islamist politics as an effect of Islamic civilization—
whether good or bad—and Western power as an effect of
Western 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,
Second, I hope to question the very premise of culture
talk, This is the tendency to think of culture in politi-
cal—and therefore te
itorial—terms, Political units (states)
are te
itorial; cultuie is not, Contemporary Islam is a
global civilization: fewer Muslims live in the Middle East
than in Africa or in South and Southeast Asia. If we can
think of Christianity and Judaism as global religions—
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 under-
stand Islam, too, in historical and extrate
itorial terms?4
Does it really make sense to write political histories of Is-
lam 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?
My own work XXXXXXXXXXleads me to trace the modern
oots of culture talk to the colonial project known as indirect
ule, and to question the claim that anticolonial political
esistance really expresses a cultural lag and should be un-
derstood as a traditional cultural resistance to modernity,
This claim downplays the crucial encounter with colonial
power, 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, By equating political tendencies with entire
communities denned in nonhistorical cultural terms, such
explanations encourage collective discipline and punish-
ment—a practice characteristic of colonial encounters,
This line of reasoning equates te
orists with Muslims, jus-
tifies a punishing war against an entire country (Afghani-
stan) and ignores the recent history that shaped both the
cu
ent Afghan context and the emergence of political Is-
lam, On the other hand, culture talk tends to think of in-
dividuals (from "traditional" cultures) in authentic and
original terms, as if their identities are shaped entirely by
the supposedly unchanging culture into which they are
orn, In so doing, it dehistoricizes the construction of po-
litical identities,
Rather than see contemporary Islamic politics as the
outcome of an archaic culture, I suggest we see neither cul-
ture nor politics as archaic, but both as very contemporary
outcomes of equally contemporary conditions, relations,
and conflicts, Instead of dismissing history and politics, as
culture talk does, I suggest we place cultural debates in his-
torical and political contexts, Te
orism is not born of the
esidue of a premodern culture in modern politics, Rather,
te
orism is a modern construction, Even when it har-
nesses one or another aspect of tradition and culture, the
esult is a modern ensemble at the service of a modern
project,
CULTURE TALK
Is our world really divided into the modern and premod-
ern, such that the former makes culture in which the latte
is a prisoner? This dichotomy is increasingly prevalent in
Western discussions of relations with Muslim-majority
countries, It presumes that culture stands for creativity, fo
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 in-
stinctive activity whose rules are inscribed in early found-
ing texts, usually religious, and mummified in early arti-
facts. 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. Afte
that, it seems they—we Muslims—just conform to culture,
Our culture seems to have no history, no politics, and no
debates, It seems to have petrified into a lifeless custom.
Even more, these people seem incapable of transforming
their culture, the way they seem incapable of growing
their own food, The implication is that their salvation lies,
as always, in philanthropy, in being saved from the out-
side,
If the premodern peoples are said to lack a creative ca-
pacity, they are conversely said to have an abundant ca-
pacity for destruction, This is surely why culture talk has
ecome the stuff of front-page news stories, It is, after all,
the reason we are told to give serious attention to culture,
It is said that culture is now a matter of life and death, To
one whose recent academic preoccupation has been the
institutional legacy of colonialism, this kind of writing is
deeply reminiscent of tracts from the history of modern
colonization, This history assumes that people's public be-
havior, specifically their political behavior, can be read
from their religion, Could it be that a person who takes his
or her religion literally is a potential te
orist? That only
someone who thinks of a religious text as not literal, but
as metaphorical or figurative, is better suited to civic life
and the tolerance it calls for? How, one may ask, does the
literal reading of sacred