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AMERICA AND POLITICAL ISLAM<br>
____________________________________________________________________<br><br>
ZNET<br>
Terror War<br>
January 29, 2005<br>
<a href="http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=40&ItemID=7131" eudora="autourl">http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=40&ItemID=7131<br>
</a>by Mahmood Mamdani<br><br>
I was in New York City on 9/11. In the weeks that followed,
newspapers<br>
reported that the Koran had become one of the biggest-selling books
in<br>
American bookshops. Astonishingly, Americans seemed to think that
reading<br>
the Koran might give them a clue to the motivation of those who carried
out<br>
the suicide attacks on the World Trade Center. Recently, I have
wondered<br>
whether the people of Falluja have taken to reading the Bible to
understand<br>
the motivation for American bombings. I doubt it.<br><br>
Why the difference? I suggest we look at the nature of the public debate
in<br>
America as a key ingredient in shaping public opinion.<br><br>
The post-9/11 public debate in the US has been inspired by two Ivy
League<br>
intellectuals -- Samuel Huntington at Harvard and Bernard Lewis at<br>
Princeton. From Huntington's point of view, the Cold War was a civil
war<br>
within the west. He says the real war is yet to come. That real war will
be<br>
a civilizational war, at its core a war with Islam. From this point
of<br>
view, all Muslims are bad.<br><br>
Bernard Lewis, in contrast, makes a more nuanced claim. He says that
there<br>
are good secular Muslims and bad fundamentalist Muslims, and that the
west<br>
needs to distinguish between them. He identifies a secular point of
view<br>
with western culture so completely that, for him, a secular Muslim
is<br>
necessarily a westernized Muslim. A neoconservative guru, Lewis was a
major<br>
inspiration behind the Iraq War.<br><br>
Their differences aside, Lewis and Huntington share two assumptions.
The<br>
first is that the world is divided into two -- modern and
pre-modern.<br>
Modern peoples make their own culture; their culture is a creative act
and<br>
it changes historically. In contrast, they assume that pre-modern
peoples<br>
have an unchanging, ahistorical culture, one they carry along with
them;<br>
they wear their culture as a kind of badge, and sometimes suffer from
it<br>
like a collective twitch. The second assumption is that you can
read<br>
people's politics >from their culture. I call these two assumptions
Culture<br>
Talk.<br><br>
The aftermath of the Iraq War has turned into a crisis for theory. It
is<br>
increasingly clear that the designation of some Muslims as good and
others<br>
as bad has little to do with their orientation to Islam, and everything
to<br>
do with their orientation to America. Simply put, good Muslim is a
label<br>
for those who are deemed pro-American and bad Muslims are those
reckoned<br>
anti-American. Culture Talk is not only wrong, it is also self-serving.
How<br>
convenient it is to see political violence as something wrong with
the<br>
culture of one party rather than an indication that something has
gone<br>
wrong in the relationship between two parties.<br><br>
Political Islam<br><br>
Contemporary, modern political Islam developed as a response to<br>
colonialism. Colonialism posed a double challenge, that of foreign<br>
domination and of the need for internal reform to address
weaknesses<br>
exposed by external aggression.<br><br>
Early political Islam grappled with such questions in an attempt to<br>
modernize and reform Islamic societies. Then came Pakistani thinker Abu
ala<br>
Mawdudi, who placed political violence at the centre of political
action,<br>
and Egyptian thinker Sayyed Qutb, who argued that it was necessary
to<br>
distinguish between friends and enemies, for with friends you use
reason<br>
and persuasion, but with enemies you use force.<br><br>
The terrorist tendency in political Islam is not a pre-modern
carry-over<br>
but a very modern development.<br><br>
Radical political Islam is not a development of the ulama (legal
scholars),<br>
not even of mullahs or imams (prayer leaders). It is mainly the work
of<br>
non- religious political intellectuals. Mawdudi was a journalist and Qutb
a<br>
literary theorist. It has developed through a set of debates, but
these<br>
cannot be understood as a linear development inside political Islam.
Waged<br>
inside and outside political Islam, they are both a critique of
reformist<br>
political Islam and an engagement with competing political
ideologies,<br>
particularly Marxism-Leninism.<br><br>
Let us remember that the period after World War II was one of a<br>
decades-long secular romance with political violence. Armed struggle was
in<br>
vogue in national liberation and revolutionary movements. Many
political<br>
activists were convinced that a thoroughgoing struggle had to be armed.
The<br>
development of religious political tendencies that glorify the
liberating<br>
role of violence is a latter-day phenomenon. Rather than a product
of<br>
religious fundamentalism, it is best thought of as both religious
and<br>
secular, a sign of the times.<br><br>
The late Cold War<br><br>
That said, we are confronted with a singular question: How did
Islamist<br>
terror, a theoretical tendency that preoccupied a few intellectuals and
was<br>
of marginal political significance in the 1970s, become part of the<br>
political mainstream in only a few decades? To answer it, we need to
move<br>
away from the internal debates of political Islam to its relations
with<br>
official America, and back from 9/11 to the period that followed
America's<br>
defeat in Vietnam, the period I call the late Cold War. My claim is
also<br>
that this question is best answered from a vantage point inside
Africa.<br><br>
Decolonization reached a momentous point in 1975. The year the
Americans<br>
were defeated in Vietnam was also the year the Portuguese empire
collapsed<br>
in Africa. The result was a shift in the centre of gravity of the Cold
War<br>
from south-east Asia to southern Africa. Who would pick up the pieces
of<br>
the Portuguese empire in Africa, America or the Soviet Union?<br><br>
The defining feature of the new phase of the Cold War was the
strong<br>
anti-war movement within America opposed to direct military
intervention<br>
overseas. Henry Kissinger, the US secretary of state, designed a
strategy<br>
in response to the changed context: if America could not intervene
overseas<br>
directly, it would intervene through others. Thus began the era of
proxy<br>
war, one that was to mark the period from Vietnam to Iraq.<br><br>
Angola was the first important American proxy intervention in the<br>
post-Vietnam period. Kissinger first looked for mercenaries to counter
the<br>
independence movement in Angola, and then followed with a nod to
apartheid<br>
South Africa. The South African intervention was discredited<br>
internationally as soon as it became public knowledge and led to a
powerful<br>
anti- war response in Congress: the Clark Amendment terminated all<br>
assistance, overt and covert, to anti- communist forces in
Angola.<br><br>
The administration of Ronald Reagan raised proxy war from a
pragmatic<br>
response to a grand strategy, called the Reagan Doctrine. Developed
in<br>
response to two 1979 revolutions -- those of the Sandinistas in
Nicaragua<br>
and the Islamists in Iran -- the Reagan Doctrine made two claims. The
first<br>
was that America had been preparing to fight the wrong war -- that
against<br>
Soviet forces on the plains of Europe -- and meanwhile was losing the
real<br>
war, that against Third World nationalism. Reagan called on America
to<br>
fight the war that was already on, against yesterday's guerrillas now
come<br>
to power. Arguing that there could be no middle ground in war, the
Reagan<br>
administration portrayed nationalist governments newly come to power
in<br>
southern Africa and central America as Soviet proxies that needed to
be<br>
nipped in the bud before they turned into real dangers.<br><br>
The Reagan Doctrine also turned on a second initiative, one that involved
a<br>
shift from "containment" to "rollback", from peaceful
coexistence to a<br>
determined, sustained and aggressive bid to reverse defeats in the
Third<br>
World. To underline the historical legitimacy of this shift, it brought
the<br>
language of religion into politics. Speaking before the National<br>
Association of Evangelicals in 1983, Reagan called on America to
defeat<br>
"the evil empire".<br><br>
Evil is a theological notion. As such, it has neither a history nor<br>
motivation. The political use of evil is two-fold. First, one
cannot<br>
coexist with evil, nor can one convert it. Evil must be eliminated. The
war<br>
against evil is a permanent war, one without a truce. Second, the
Manichean<br>
battle against evil justifies any alliance. The first such alliance,
dubbed<br>
"constructive engagement", was between official America and
apartheid South<br>
Africa.<br><br>
"Constructive engagement"<br><br>
It is through "constructive engagement" that official America
provided<br>
political cover to apartheid South Africa as it set about developing
a<br>
strategy for proxy war in the former Portuguese colonies of Mozambique
and<br>
Angola. As the Reagan administration moved from "peaceful
coexistence" to<br>
"rollback", so the apartheid government redefined its regional
strategy<br>
from "detente" to "total onslaught".<br><br>
The bitter fruit of constructive engagement was Africa's first
genuine<br>
terrorist movement, called Renamo. Created by the Rhodesian army in
the<br>
early 1970s and nurtured by the apartheid army after 1980, Renamo<br>
consistently targeted civilians in Mozambique to convince them that
an<br>
independent African government could not possibly assure them law
and<br>
order. At the same time, when terror unleashed by Renamo became the
subject<br>
of public discussion, the apartheid regime explained it in cultural
terms,<br>
as "black on black violence", as an expression of age-old
tribal conflict,<br>
of the inability of black people to coexist without an outside
mediator.<br><br>
America's responsibility for Renamo was solely political. But without
an<br>
American political cover, it would have been impossible for apartheid
South<br>
Africa to organize, arm and finance a terrorist movement in
independent<br>
Africa for more than a decade -- and to do so with impunity.<br><br>
Constructive engagement was a period of tutorship for official
America.<br>
America created and wielded the Contras in Nicaragua just as
apartheid<br>
South Africa did Renamo in south central Africa. Under CIA tutelage,
the<br>
Contras blew up bridges and health centres, and killed health
personnel,<br>
judges and heads of cooperative societies. The point of terror was not
to<br>
win civilian support, but to highlight the inability of the government
to<br>
ensure law and order. It was to convince the population that the only
way<br>
to end terror was to hand over power to terrorists. This lesson in
the<br>
electoral uses of terror was learnt by others, including Charles Taylor
in<br>
Liberia and the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) in Sierra
Leone.<br><br>
It is worth drawing some lessons from the history of terror after
Vietnam.<br>
Terror was a strategy America embraced when it had almost lost the Cold
War<br>
in 1975. Mozambique and Nicaragua were the founding moments of that<br>
history. Both Renamo and the Contras, the pioneer terrorist movements,
were<br>
proxies of South Africa and America. Both were secular in orientation.
The<br>
development of a religious proxy -- terror claiming a religious<br>
justification -- was characteristic of the closing phase of the Cold War
in<br>
Afghanistan.<br><br>
Rollback on a global scale: Afghanistan<br><br>
The Afghan war was the prime example of "rollback". In the
history of<br>
terror during the last phase of the Cold War, the Afghan war was
important<br>
for two reasons. First, the Reagan administration ideologized the war as
a<br>
religious war against the evil empire, rather than styling it a war
of<br>
national liberation such as that it claimed the Contras were fighting
in<br>
Nicaragua. In the process, the CIA marginalized every Islamist group
that<br>
had a nationalist orientation, fearing that these groups might be
tempted<br>
to negotiate with the Soviet Union, and brought centre-stage the
most<br>
extreme Islamists in a partnership that would "bleed the Soviet
Union<br>
white".<br><br>
Second, the Reagan administration privatized war in the course of<br>
recruiting, training and organizing a global network of Islamic
fighters<br>
against the Soviet Union. The recruitment was done through Islamic<br>
charities, and the training through militarized madrasahs. Unlike
the<br>
historical madrasah, which taught a range of subjects, secular and<br>
religious, from theology and jurisprudence to history and medicine,
the<br>
Afghan madrasah taught a narrow curriculum dedicated to a narrow
theology<br>
(jihadi Islam) and gave a complementary military training.<br><br>
The narrow theology recast Islam around a single institution, the jihad;
it<br>
redefined the jihad as exclusively military and claimed the military
jihad<br>
to be an offensive war entered into by individual born- again devotees
as<br>
opposed to defence by an Islamic community under threat. The jihadi<br>
madrasahs in Pakistan trained both the Afghan refugee children who
were<br>
later recruited into the Taliban and the Arab- Afghans who were
later<br>
networked by the organization called al-Qaeda ("the Base"). If
national<br>
liberation wars created proto-state apparatuses, the international
jihad<br>
created a private network of specialists in violence.<br><br>
America did not create right-wing Islam, a tendency that came into
being<br>
through intellectual debates, both inside political Islam and with<br>
competing secular ideologies, such as Marxism-Leninism. America's<br>
responsibility was to turn this ideological tendency into a
political<br>
organization -- by incorporating it into America's Cold War strategy in
the<br>
closing phase of the Cold War.<br><br>
Before the Afghan jihad, right-wing political Islam was an
ideological<br>
tendency with little organization and muscle on the ground. The
Afghan<br>
jihad gave it numbers, organization, skills, reach, confidence and
a<br>
coherent objective. America created an infrastructure of terror but<br>
heralded it as an infrastructure of liberation.<br><br>
Mahmood Mamdani is Herbert Lehman Professor of Government, Department
of<br>
Anthropology and School of International Affairs, Columbia University,
New<br>
York.<br><br>
Copyright © 2005 Mahmood Mamdani and Z Magazine<br>
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