How America Bred Terrorism
A review of ‘Good Muslim, Bad Muslim’
Mahmood Mamdani’s Good Muslim, Bad Muslim is a forensic yet sweeping historical account of the way in which America’s Cold-War machinations nurtured the Islamic terror seen most viciously in 9/11. Taking aim at the narrative that locates terrorism as a uniquely religious phenomena, growing out of the regressive culture of Islamic civilisation, Mamdani reorients our understanding by revealing the concrete political roots of such violence. Tracing the United State’s involvement in the ‘Third World’, Mamdani illuminates the shift in strategy to embrace political violence in order to defeat what were considered regional proxies of the Soviet regime. A shift that, in time, would give the world al-Qaeda, and served to construct an “infrastructure of terror” predicated upon a notion of global jihad. From this perspective, the epochal significance of 9/11 is not so much that it has changed anything fundamental about the US’ approach to global relations. Indeed, Mamdani argues that the US response to the attack echoes the Reaganite crusade against the Soviet “axis of evil”; a continuation of the hypermoralism of ‘good’ vs ‘evil’ grafted onto a different type of adversary, one that is less centralised, more dispersed. Rather, 9/11, in Mamdani’s eyes, signalled the end of American triumphalism, where the politically expedient jihad that was integral to their victory had taken on a life of its own, adopting “truly global dimensions”. Rather than revealing the true face of Islam, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim suggests that the fall of the Twin Towers instead betrays the failures of American empire. Running roughshod over democratic independence, the US conducted a “religious war” which has ‘boomeranged’ back to strike them. But to understand this cycle of violence and revenge, and how exactly Mamdani isolates politics as the driving force, we must examine his path of inquiry.
“Culture Talk,” writes Mamdani in Chapter 1, “assumes that every culture has a tangible essence that defines it, and then explains politics as a consequence of that essence.” Identifying this as central to the discourse surrounding Islam in the wake of 9/11, Mamdani sets out to deconstruct this essentialism, focusing on two of its prominent intellectual purveyors. The first, Samuel Huntington, painted an image of civilisations “marching through history”, immutable and homogenous, destined to conflict in his notorious Clash of Civilisations thesis. “Widely discredited”, Mamdani refers to Said’s charge that Huntington is unable to conceive of civilisational adaptation, preferring instead to think of it as a “stable and undisturbed thing, like a room full of furniture in the back of your house.” Bernard Lewis’ account emerges as more effective, allowing, up to a point, for cultural mutability and contrasting traditions. Yet he still essentialises a distinctly violent doctrinal basis upon which Islamic civilisation is built, to which “Muslims … take refuge in time of crisis.” At the core of these accounts, and in extension Culture Talk itself, however, are fallacies of two kinds.
First, they both presuppose the existence of civilisational cultures, rooted in certain territorial spreads, with boundaries that can be clearly delineated and have largely remained static. Evident in the work of Marshall Hodgson, who detailed a threefold evolution in the idea of the “West” moulded by racial antagonisms; as well as revised understandings of scientific history that have placed Afroasiatic scholars at the centre, this idea is unsubstantiated. Does it make sense to talk of “a self contained history of Western civilisation”, Mamdani asks us, when lodestars of this culture — from Copernicus to the wisdom of the Ancient Greeks — have been the intellectual progeny of Arabic and Egyptian ingenuity? “Cultural identities tend to be cumulative”, observes Mamdani, “Identities shift and histories get rewritten as a result of changing political agendas.” Which brings us to Culture Talk’s second integral flaw, an ignorance of political forces.
Lewis interprets a series of historical events as stages in a millenia-long existential battle of civilisations, “rather than recognising each encounter was fueled by a specific political project.” In his eyes, colonialism was not a product of European economic expansionism, driven by a rapacious desire for gold and spice and other exoctic wares, but emblematic of cultural incompatibility. For the remainder of the Chapter, Mamdani embarks upon an explanation of political Islam’s origins, revealing a plurality of positions and their contextual influences. In doing so, he expands upon the distinction between the cultural and political that his second critique of Lewis seeks to expose, distinguishing between “fundamentalism” as a counter-cultural movement — a reaction within doctrine to modernising forces — and “political identities that use a religious idiom.” The latter stretches from the progressivism of the Civil Rights movement to the Islamism of Bin Laden, underlining the fact that “the involvement of religious movements in politics is not necessarily reactionary”, urging us to reject the reductionist cultural determinism of Lewis and Huntington.
Conflicting degrees of radicalism, and, perhaps more pertinently, of secularism, characterise Mamdani’s account of political Islam’s development. Ranging from the secular reformism of poet Muhammad Iqbal and the religious welfarism of al-Banna and al-Afghani, to the Marxist-Leninist inspired doctrine of Sayyid Qutb, Mamdani convincingly articulates the variety and doctrinal independence of political Islam. Drawing a division between ‘society-centred’ radicalism and ‘state-centred’ radicalism, the former embraces ijtihad (the democratisation and adaptability of shariah law), whilst the latter demands that “the gates of ijtihad’ remain forever closed.” Mamdani’s contention, then, “is that the theoretical roots of Islamist political terror lie in the state centred, not the society-centred, movement”, and that this violent extremism developed through “political encounters.” Rather than being borne necessarily from antiquated religious or cultural forces, Islamist terror was fashioned at the conjuncture of American imperialism and a particular variation of political Islam, articulated by one Abdul A’la Mawdudi. To see precisely how this intersection emerged, Mamdani points us toward the strategic development that succeeded America’s failure in Vietnam.
Off the back of the catastrophe in Vietnam, the US were determined not to repeat the same method of direct involvement. Nixon pushed to adopt the strategy of proxy war, pioneered in Laos to success, as a model for their future conduct in the theatre of the Third World. America considered the fiercely nationalist regimes set up in the wake of the independence movements that rocked the African continent to be Soviet proxies, shifting the locus of the Cold War from South East Asia to Central and Southern Africa. The Nixon Doctrine of proxy war, that “Asian boys should fight Asian Wars”, had its first African venture in the overthrow of Patrice Lumumba in Congo by a network of mercenaries, whose conduct included “robbery, rape, murder and beatings.” But the CIA’s second foray into African imperial meddling — in Angola — was far more significant. For the failure of the US backed South African invasion against The People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola led to more extensive congressional oversight and limits to executive power — in the form of the Clark Amendment — which, ultimately, led to the subcontracting and privatization of war that enabled US-backed terrorism to flourish. As, to circumvent this scrutiny, the CIA consolidated its relationship with regional proxies, embracing the political terrorism of Unita in Angola and Renamo in Mozambique via Apartheid South Africa.
The orchestration and material support given to these groups, Mamdani details, was part of a development toward Reagan’s notion of “low-intensity conflict” (LIC). A naked euphemism, it was distinct from counterinsurgency and direct involvement in the past in the way it shifted “from targeting the armed forces of a government to its political representatives and then its civilians.” As Mamdani chillingly notes, here, for Unita, Renamo, and later, the Contras in Nicaragua, “collateral damage {…} was the very point of their” actions. The Contra’s conducted terror operations to sow instability and eventually undermine the Sandinistas, kidnapping, torturing and executing civilians — all at the behest of US interests, with public relations cover by the CIA and the Reagan administration. These “freedom fighters” — a title bestowed upon them by none other than the President himself — nurtured from the start as a CIA asset, were emblematic of the Reagan doctrine’s fanatical turn in the Cold-War. Couched in hypermoral language, the proactive strategy of “rollback” — a “determined, sustained and aggressive bid to reverse defeats in the Third-World” — superseded the comparatively tolerant “containment” approach. In the fight of Good versus Evil, coexistence is impossible. And for the US, freshly independent nations electing Leftist leaders amounted to a profound ‘defeat’.
It is interesting that Mamdani’s examination of such independence movements is limited to their instrumental role in the development of US strategy. Perhaps more precise and thorough allusions to the political conditions within these nations escaped Mamdani’s account as they were superfluous to his central inquiry. Yet this omission could imply it was the grand Cold-War power struggle, not any revolutionary self-assertion of the Third World, that Mamdani believes is most integral to the shaping of the post-WW2 global order; with liberation movements merely caught in the flotsam of the ‘hot’ cold-war.
Before we continue onto the chapter centred on Afghanistan, we should note too the significance of the secular fanaticism mentioned above; that clash between good and evil. Dangerous self-righteousness is not the preserve of Islam, or religion itself; the will to sacrifice one’s life or kill for an ideal extends beyond religious fervour. People have died for King and Country, for Freedom and Equality, for Liberation and Democracy — just as they have died for Allah and Jihad. As Mamdani elucidates, “both Bush and Bin Laden … employ … the language of good and evil”, both see themselves through the prism of a ‘holy war’. In this sense, we can see clearly that there is nothing practically unique about religion as a progenitor of terror, as some adjacent to the so-called intellectual dark web have argued, but that it is just one possible ‘idiom’ for political convictions to be wrapped in.
And so we turn to the next frontier in America’s crusade against communism. The most pertinent to Mamdani’s thesis, it is in the sands and mountain ranges of Afghanistan that the CIA’s bespoke tactic of political terror, LIC, converged with political Islam, germinating under the US’ protection into the violent Islamism of today.
The initial question of Mamdani’s inquiry is concerned with how political Islam mutated into Islamist terror. After discrediting culturalist interpretations, and detailing the US’ cultivation of terror as a political tactic, the war in Afghanistan offers some answers. Afghan jihad, Mamdani contends, was really a US jihad, determined to defeat the dark forces of the Soviet’s in a ‘holy war’, delivering their antagonist “their own vietnam.” To do so, “sustained cooperation between the CIA and Pakistan’s Inter Services Intelligence (ISI)” provided “maximum firepower to the Mujahideen” and recruited “the most radically anti-communist Islamists.” ISI training camps inculcated in them the “spark of holy war”, and CIA asset Sheikh Abdullah Azzam, one of whose students was Osama Bin Laden, disseminated the religious duty of jihadi violence across the world, “neatly echo[ing]” the extremism of Reagan’s no-compromise ‘rollback’ agenda.”
Moreover, the notion of jihad given as pretense for this alignment was historically shallow. ‘Lesser-jihad’, which is struggle directed outwards to the world, contains two strands. First, notions of ‘just war’, similar to our own secular variations, against occupiers, whether believers or not. This strand has significant historical examples against “enslaving occupiers”, “Ottoman colonizers”, and “Turko-Egyptian and British power.” The second pertained to a war against heretical doctrinal tendencies, similar to the rationale of the Inquisition, and it was this, combined with the notion of statist “standing jihad” that undergirded, at least nominally, the Afghan jihad.
But if its theological justifications were shaky, however, it’s political foundations couldn’t have been more explicit. Political Islam’s integration into the United States’ ideological drama against the Soviets “intensified the ideological character of the [Afghan] war as a religious war against infidel’s everywhere” by casting a global net of recruitment, and hoping to target the Muslim majority USSR satellites of Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan. Thus, Reagan’s strategy acted as a catalyst for the emergence of a globally oriented and potently religious Islamist violence, creating an “infrastructure of terror” through the CIA’s policy to be at “more than arm’s length” through layers of subcontracting. Radicalisation institutions, like the politico-military ‘madrassah’ training schools, emerged as a network of these privatised proxies, recruiting and educating a generation of “Islamic guerillas.”The most prominent of these guerillas was one Osama Bin Laden, recruited explicitly by Saudi intelligence with US approval to “lead this crusade”. He helped construct the CIA funded Khost tunnel complex, the very same complex in which “the United States fought al-Qaeda remnants in its own Afghan war,” some two decades later. The irony of Bin Laden’s trajectory from “the moral equivalent of our founding fathers” — as Reagan emphatically referred to his Islamist pawns — to the world’s most wanted man, symbolises the parallel degradation of the groups the US groomed. Out of the mujahideen came al-Qaeda, and as the civil war struck to fill the vacuum left by Soviet rule, so emerged the Taliban as the stabilising force. This transfiguration was encapsulated most pithily by the Algerian sociologist, Mahmoud Bennoune, when he said: “Your government participated in creating a monster.”
In Mamdani’s account, the American jihad in Afghanistan is thus the pinnacle of the moral bankruptcy at the heart of US foreign policy; a front where Afghan nationalists were radicalised into violent jihadists, where the rise of the Taliban was enabled to protect the interests of US oil companies, and where the “privatisation of information about how to produce and spread violence” empowered Islamists world over.
Mamdani concludes by situating the United States’ response to 9/11 within the framework of secular fanaticism that has run through his narrative. Iraq and Afghanistan were wars of vengeance, Mamdani says, a vengeance that unites both Islamists and America. Identifying a “common ground” of amorality, a “callous disregard for collateral damage”, he once again emphasises the lack of distance between America’s holy war for global hegemony and the Islamists conflict against the infidels. At points, Mamdani suggest a moral equivalency that some may find problematic. Whilst the consequences of both sides actions may be similarly atrocious, it may be legitimate to question whether the intentions behind such actions — the ends in mind — should factor into this ethical judgement. Without descending further down the rabbit hole of metaethics, we can concede that Mamdani’s central point — that of the political nature of islamic terror — is far more difficult to contest. “The point about ideological language,” he writes, “whether its idiom is religious or secular, is that it justifies the use of power with impunity.” The point of this observation is, of course, not to theologise politics, but to understand the nature of Islamism as, first and foremost, political. In doing so, Mamdani suggests we can better determine solutions to this violence. “To deny [popular] support for terrorist groups requires addressing grievances .. that give terrorists so many opportunities to recruit followers,” he writes, impelling us to understand the role of Western foreign policy in the proliferation and motivations for Islamic terrorism.
Indeed, it is this reflection which Mamdani hopes 9/11 will produce. Instead of embarking down the righteous path of revenge, we should take the defining moment of the post-Cold War era as a “moment of freedom, of choice.” America, and those Western nations so often prostrating themselves at its beck and call, should examine its culpability in the disorder we see around us, facing up to the imperialist “despotism” orchestrated abroad in the name of our democracy. In jettisoning the policy prescriptions of Culture Talk, Mandani draws upon the reformist experience of Algeria and Iran to underline the case for the Islamic world (whatever and wherever that may be) to enter into modernity on its own terms; to tussle with the limits and expanses of democracy itself, and build an “Islamic modernity.” To do this, though, the US must recognise the sovereignty of the Third World, to relinquish its dreams of international dominance and settle into the truth of Mamdani’s concluding aphorism that “America cannot occupy the world.” Instead, “It has to learn to live with it.”
