Mahmood Mamdani

Offers an analysis of the contemporary politics of Islam, examines the roots of modern-day terrorism, and explains why America's rigid supportive policies toward Israel have fueled problems in the Middle East.

America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror

Good Muslim, Bad Muslim

Aaditha

“One unfortunate response to tragedy is a self-righteousness about one’s own condition, a seeking proof of one’s special place in the world, even in victimhood.”

“Native violence, Fanon insisted, was the violence of yesterday’s victims, the violence of those who had cast aside their victimhood to become masters of their own lives. He wrote:

He of whom they have never stopped saying that the only language he understands is that of force, decides to give utterance by force…. The argument the native chooses has been furnished by the settler, and by an ironic turning of the tables it is the native who now affirms that the colonialist understands nothing but force.

For Fanon, the proof of the native’s humanity consisted not in the willingness to kill settlers but in the willingness to risk his or her own life.”

“Aimé Césaire wrote that a Hitler slumbers within “the very distinguished, very humanistic and very Christian bourgeois of the Twentieth century,” and yet the European bourgeois cannot forgive Hitler for “the fact that he applied to Europe the colonial practices that had previously been applied only to the Arabs of Algeria, the coolies of India and the Negroes of Africa.” “Not so long ago,” recalled Frantz Fanon in The Wretched of the Earth (1961), “Nazism turned the whole of Europe into a veritable colony.”

“Lord Salisbury, the British prime minister, claimed in his famous Albert Hall speech on May 4, 1898, that “one can roughly divide the nations of the world into the living and the dying,” Hitler was but nine years old, and the European air was “soaked in the conviction that imperialism is a biologically necessary process which, according to the laws of nature, leads to the inevitable destruction of lower races.” Its paradigmatic example was in Tasmania, an island the size of Ireland where European colonists arrived in 1803, the first massacre of natives occurred in 1804, and the last original inhabitant died in 1869. Similar fates awaited, among others, the Maoris of New Zealand and the Herero of German South West Africa.”

“The unification of the nation led to the birth of the nation-state. Today, political modernity is equated with the beginning of democracy, but nineteenth-century political theorists—notably Max Weber—recognized that political modernity depended upon the centralized state monopolizing violence. The nation-state centralized the formerly dispersed means of violence into a single fist, capable of delivering an awesome blow to all enemies of the nation, internal and external. It was also the political prerequisite for a civil society.”

“The violence of the Holocaust, for example, is explained as simply the result of evil. Like premodern culture, evil too is understood outside of historical time. There is huge resistance, both moral and political, to exploring the historical causes of the Nazi genocide. By seeing the perpetrators of violence as either cultural renegades or moral perverts, we are unable to think through the link between modernity and political violence."

Good Muslim, Bad Muslim America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror

Highlights