How the American Empire Used Islam; Review of Mahmood Mamdani’s new book Good Muslim, Bad Muslim; America, the Cold War and the Roots of Terror

By Sadik Kassim

Except for the purpose of conquest, “Islam” is not what it is generally said to be in the West today.

The aim of literature, according to the 19th century critic Matthew Arnold, is to perceive life “steadily” and as a “whole”. Alex Carey, in his masterwork on propaganda, argued that in modern times the social sciences have largely supplanted the traditional role of literature to become “the most influential source of enquiry and reflection upon human life and values.” Yet, argued Carey, unlike poets and writers of the past, today’s producers of the social sciences have largely abandoned Arnold’s goal, and as a result, all of us now “see the world more unsteadily than we need”, in a manner more “partial and fragmented.”

This fractured worldview is particularly apparent in America and Europe today in discussions pertaining to Islam where, as the late Edward Said noted, Islam is considered “news of a particularly unpleasant sort.” Where “the media, the government, the political strategists, and academic experts on Islam are all in concert: Islam is a threat to western civilization.” Where “Islamist” terrorism is not considered within the historical milieu in which it developed, but rather, is superficially and conveniently explained away as being a natural outcome of extremist religious tendencies inherent in the religion itself. Enter Mahmood Mamdani whose new book, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim; America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror, is a much needed corrective for remedying the ill-effects of the prevailing paradigm on the roots of “Islamist” terrorism.

Mamdani, a Professor of Government at the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University, starts his book with a well-executed criticism of America’s two most cited gurus on all things Islam, Samuel Huntington and Bernard Lewis. The problem with Lewis, Huntington, and their disciples, according to Mamdani, is that they view Islam through the lens of culture. They assume that “every culture has a tangible essence that defines it” and then explain “politics as a consequence of that essence.” Following 9/11 for example, practitioners of “culture talk” qualified and explained the practice of terrorism as “Islamic”. The term “Islamic terrorism” was thus offered as “both description and explanation of the events of 9/11.”

There are differences, to be sure, in the visions of Huntington and Lewis writes Mamdani. While Huntington warns of an impending clash of civilizations, Lewis warns of a clash within Islam. Specifically, Lewis advocates the notion of “good” and “bad” Muslims: “good Muslims” being modern, secular, westernized and by implication supportive of American policies, “bad Muslims” being doctrinal, anti-modern, virulent and by implication antagonistic of American policies. The major conflict, predicts Lewis, is within Islam itself, and as such, the West must stand by as Muslims fight their own internal war. According to Mamdani, it is Lewis’ notion of “good” and “bad” Muslims and not Huntington’s clash of civilizations thesis that has served as the driving force of American foreign policy today.

Despite their differences, argues Mamdani, both Huntington and Lewis are in agreement on the basic premise that religion drives both Islamic culture and politics and that the motivation for Islamist violence is religious fundamentalism. According to Mamdani this premise is self-serving and morally bankrupt for “ascribing the violence of one’s adversaries to their culture…goes a long way toward absolving oneself of any responsibility.” Specifically, writes Mamdani, “Terrorism is not a necessary effect of religious tendencies, whether fundamentalist or secular. Rather, terrorism is born of a political encounter.” Terrorism, therefore, “needs to be understood as a modern political movement at the service of a modern power. As such, the genesis of the form of political terrorism responsible for the tragedy of 9/11 can be traced to the late cold war.”

The devastating losses of Vietnam, argues Mamdani, affected a significant shift in American cold war strategy. Following the war, American policy planners began to reconsider the practicality of conventional ground warfare as a strategy to check the spread of third world nationalist movements considered a threat to American interests. It is within this context that proxy wars emerged as a more tenable model for military strategy in 3rd world theatres. Rather than send American troops to regions of interest, military and financial funding would be provided to reactionary right-wing armies serving as proxies for direct American intervention. This shift to proxy wars, or as Mamdani dubs it, “the United States’ embrace of terror” went through three distinct phases.

In the first phase, American patronage of terror “was shy, more like the benign and permissive tolerance of the practices of an aggressive regional ally [like] Apartheid South Africa.” The second phase saw the U.S. moving to a “bold and brazen embrace of terror when it came to the counter-revolutionaries in Central America, combining it with patronage of an illicit trade in cocaine as the preferred way of financing its covert operations. In the closing phase the U.S. comes to see the embrace of terror as a “means to an international good [i.e., the defeat of the Soviet Union]”. It is from this third phase that the genesis of modern political Islam can be traced.

Most mainstream histories, both in the West and in countries with a Muslim majority population, cast the war in Afghanistan as being a direct outcome of Soviet invasion. Hapless Afghan Mujahedeen, led by the brave Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and his ilk, responded to incursions by the mighty Soviet empire to preserve their faith. The reality is in fact much different.

American intervention in Afghanistan began at least eight months prior to any Soviet invasion. Just as much has been confirmed by the likes of Zbignew Brzezinski and others, who openly acknowledge that American foreign aid was increased to the Mujahedeen in Afghanistan with the aim of provoking Soviet intervention. This strategy, dubbed the "Afghan Trap", was pursued in the hopes of providing Russia with its own Vietnam.

The Afghan war was, from the beginning, portrayed as being an international Jihad by American policy planners. Support was procured from around the Muslim world to fight the "evil empire". Mamdani writes, "the Islamic world had not seen an armed Jihad for nearly a century. But now the CIA was determined to create one in service of a contemporary political objective." Herein lies the irony. For before the war in Afghanistan, right-wing Islamists "had no program outside of isolated acts of urban terror." Until the Afghan Jihad, right-wing Islamists out of power had neither the organizational or financial resources, and more importantly, lacked the necessary popular support needed for recruiting and training a proper army. Thanks to the policies of Carter and Reagan right-wing Islamism was rescued from "this historical cul-de-sac. The American Jihad, which claimed to create an Islamic infrastructure of liberation, in reality, forged an "infrastructure of terror that used Islamic symbols to tap into networks and communities." An infrastructure manifest in the many charities, organizations, and military Madrassas used to recruit and transform tens of thousands of volunteers into cadres in the service of Empire.

The American Jihad, although successful in the short-term as a catalyst in defeating the "evil empire" has ultimately backfired on American policy planners resulting in many unintended outcomes the effects of which plague the world today. Mamdani spends the rest of his book outlining the long-term effects of the Afghan war on both the Muslim world and on America.

In the closing pages of his book Mamdan writes that, "political Islam is a modern political phenomenon [i.e. Reagan’s crusade against the evil empire], not a leftover of traditional culture." Therefore, “rather than explain away forms of societal terrorism as a racial or cultural affliction…we need to understand that both forms of contemporary terror were forged in an environment of impunity created by state terror during the late Cold War. 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.”

With the exception of a few minor historical oversights and slight generalizations, Mamdani has written a fine book truly in line with the spirit of Arnold. Mamdani’s book is in fact one of the more recent of a spate of books examining the contribution of American Cold War policy in Afghanistan on today’s war on terror. Gabriel Kolko’s Another Century of War, George Crile’s Charlie Wilson’s War, and the collective works of Ahmed Rashid, are but a few that come to mind.

What sets Mamdani’s book apart from the others is that it examines the history of Afghanistan from the perspective of political utility. Mamdani counters Orientalist assertions with political history. His main thesis—that Islamist fundamentalism does not necessarily lead to acts of terror—has, in fact, been recently corroborated by an excellent new study undertaken by Peter Bergen and Swati Pandey on the “Madrassa Myth”. Bergen and Pendey write that:

While madrassas may breed fundamentalists who have learned to recite the Koran in Arabic by rote, such schools do not teach the technical or linguistic skills necessary to be an effective terrorist. Indeed, there is little or no evidence that madrassas produce terrorists capable of attacking the West. And as a matter of national security, the United States doesn't need to worry about Muslim fundamentalists with whom we may disagree, but about terrorists who want to attack us.

So what are Muslims to glean from all of this? It is always easy to use the sordid history that Mamdani and others write of as an excuse to justify our own shortcomings. Blame our failures as an Umma on imperial exploitation of Islam. This approach will result in no substantive reforms. Instead of being slaves of yesterday, we should be free for the morrow, to paraphrase the poet Gibran Khalil Gibran. We must realize, as Tariq Ali reminds us in his excellent Clash of Fundamentalisms, that:

The American Empire used Islam before and it can do so again. Here lies the challenge. We are in desperate need of an Islamic Reformation that sweeps away the crazed conservatism and backwardness of the fundamentalists but, more that that, opens up the world of Islam to new ideas which are seen to be more advanced that what is currently on offer from the west. This would necessitate a rigid separation of State and Mosque; the dissolution of the clergy; the assertion of Muslim intellectuals of their right to interpret the texts that are the collective property of Islamic culture as a whole; the freedom to think freely and rationally and the freedom of imagination. Unless we move in this direction we will be doomed to reliving old battles, and thinking not of a richer and humane future, but of how we can move from the present to the past: It is an unacceptable vision.”

Sadik Kassim is a graduate student studying the immune response to sexually transmitted viruses.