Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: A Political Perspective on Culture and Terrorism

Mahmood Mamdani

Media interest in Islam exploded in the months after 9/11. What, many asked, is the link between Islam and tenorism? 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. An earlier round of such discussion, associated with Samuel Huntington’s widely cited but increasingly discredited Clash of Civilizations (1996), demonised Islam in its entirety. 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.1 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 US in recent decades. The argument was echoed widely in many circles, including the New York Times.2 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). 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. 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”. The implication is undisguised: whether in Afghanistan, Palestine, or Pakistan, Islam must be quarantined and the devil must be exorcised from it by a civil war between good Muslims and bad Muslims.

I want to suggest that we lift the quarantine for analytical 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 – 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 Westerners. I intend to question the very tendency to read Islamist politics as an effect of Islamic civilisation – whether good or bad – and Western power as an effect of Western civilisation. 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 political – and therefore territorial – terms. Political units (states) are territorial; culture is not. Contemporary Islam is a global civilisation: 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 understand Islam, too, in historical and extraterritorial terms?4 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?

My own work (1996) leads me to trace the modern roots of culture talk to the colonial project known as indirect rule, 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. This claim downplays the crucial encounter with colonial power, which I think is central to the post-9/11 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 punishment – a practice characteristic of colonial encounters. This line of reasoning equates terrorists with Muslims, 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. 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. In so doing, it dehistoricises 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. 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. 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.

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? This dichotomy is increasingly prevalent in Western discussions of relations with Muslim-majority countries. 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, labelled 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 museumised 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. 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 outside.

If the premodern peoples are said to lack a creative capacity, they are conversely said to have an abundant capacity for destruction. This is surely why culture talk has become 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 colonisation. This history assumes that people’s public behaviour, specifically their political behaviour, can be read from their religion. Could it be that a person who takes his or her religion literally is a potential terrorist? 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 texts translate into hijacking, murder, and terrorism?

Some may object that I am presenting a caricature of what we read in the press. After all, is there not less talk about the clash of civilisations, and more about the clash inside Islamic civilisation? Is that not the point of the articles I referred to earlier? Certainly, we are now told to distinguish between good Muslims and bad Muslims. Mind you, not between good and bad persons, nor between criminals and civic citizens who both happen to be Muslims, but between good Muslims and bad Muslims. 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. The terrorists of 9/11, we are told, did not just hijack planes; they also hijacked Islam, meaning ‘genuine’ Islam.

I would like to offer another version of the argument that the clash is inside – and not between – civilisations. 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 civilise the world. Each is convinced that it possesses the sole truth, that the world beyond is a sea of ignorance that needs to be redeemed.5 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 ‘civilising mission’ – or its more racialised version, ‘the white man’s burden’ – or the 19th-century US conviction of a ‘manifest destiny’ have deep religious roots.

Like any living tradition, neither Islam nor Christianity is monolithic. Both harbour 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? Is religion a matter of conviction or legislation? The first alternative gives you reason and evangelism; the second gives you the Crusades and jihad. Take the example of Islam, and the notion of jihad, which roughly translated means ‘struggle’. Scholars distinguish between two broad traditions of jihad: Jihad Akbar (the greater jihad) and Jihad Asgar (the lesser jihad). The greater jihad, it is said, is a struggle against weaknesses of self; it is about how to live and attain piety in a contaminated world. The lesser jihad, in contrast, is about self-preservation and self-defence; more externally directed, it is the source of Islamic notions of what Christians call ‘just war’ (Noor 2001).

Scholars of Islam have been at pains since 9/11 to explain to a non-Muslim reading public that Islam has rules even for the conduct of war. For example, Talal Asad points out that the Hanbali School of law practiced by followers of Wahhabi Islam in Saudi Arabia outlaws the killing of innocents in war. Historians of Islam have warned against a simple reading of Islamic practice from Islamic doctrine. After all, coexistence and toleration have been the norm, rather than the exception, in the political history of Islam. More to the point, not only religious creeds like Islam and Christianity, but also secular doctrines like liberalism and Marxism have had to face an ongoing contradiction between the impulse to universalism and respective traditions of tolerance and peaceful co-existence. The universalising impulse gives the US a fundamentalist orientation in doctrine, just as the tradition of tolerance makes for pluralism in practice and in doctrine.

Doctrinal tendencies aside, I remain deeply sceptical of the claim that we can read people’s political behaviour from their religion, or from their culture. Could it be true that an orthodox Muslim is a potential terrorist? Or, the same thing, that an Orthodox Jew or Christian is a potential terrorist and only a Reform Jew or a Christian convert to Darwinian evolutionary theory is capable of being tolerant of those who do not share his or her convictions?

I am aware that this does not exhaust the question of culture and politics. How do you make sense of a politics that consciously wears the mantle of religion? 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. To try to understand this uneasy relationship between politics and religion, I 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.

Notes

1. Wahhabi is a strictly orthodox Sunni sect; it is predominant in Saudi Arabia.
2. For an account of bad Muslims, see Harden 2001; for a portrayal of good Muslims, see Goodstein 2001; A20.
3. “While more than three-quarters of 145 non-Muslim nations around the world are now democracies, most countries with an Islamic majority continue to defy the trend, according to a survey by Freedom House, an independent monitor of political rights and civil liberties based in New York” (Crossette 2001:4).
4. Amartya Sen has highlighted the flip side of this argument in an interesting article on Indian civilisation: To think of India as a Hindu civilisation is to ignore the multiple sources from which historical India has drawn its cultural resources. Conversely, to try and box civilisations into discrete boxes – Hindu, Muslim, Christian, Buddhist – is to indulge in an ahistorical and one-dimensional understanding of complex contemporary civilisations. I would add to this a third claim: to see also these discrete civilisational boxes as territorial entities is to harness cultural resources for a very specific political project (Sen 2001a, 2001b).
5. Think, for example, of the Arabic word al-Jahaliya that I have always known to mean the domain of ignorance. Think also of the legal distinction between dar-ul-Islam (the domain of Islam) and dar-ul-harab (the domain of war) that says that the rule of law applies only to the domain of Islam.

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The writer teaches at the Department of Anthropology and International Affairs, Columbia University, New York.

Courtesy American Anthropologist

(To be continued)