This version, Wahhabi Islam, it warned, was dominant
in Saudi Arabia, from where it had been exported both
to Afghanistan and the US. This argument was echoed
widely in many circles, more recently in the New York
Times. This article is born of dissatisfaction with
the new wisdom that we must tell apart the Good Muslim
from the Bad Muslim.

Culture Talk

Is our world really divided into two, so that one part
makes culture and the other is a prisoner of culture?
Are there really two meanings of culture?

Does culture stand for creativity, for what being
human is all about, in one part of the world? But in
the other part of the world, it stands for habit, for
some kind of instinctive activity, whose rules
are inscribed in early founding texts, usually
religious, and museumized in early artifacts?

When I read of Islam in the papers these days, I often
feel I am reading of museumized peoples. I feel I am
reading of people who are said not to make culture,
except at the beginning of creation, as some
extraordinary, prophetic, act. After that, it seems
they just conform to culture.

Their culture seems to have no history, no politics,
and no debates. It seems just 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 only
salvation lies, as always, in philanthropy, in being
saved from the outside.

When I read this, or something like this, I wonder if
this world of ours is after all divided into two: on
the one hand, savages who must be saved before they
destroy us all and, on the other, the civilized whose
burden it is to save all?

We are now told to give serious attention to culture.
It is said that culture is now a matter of life and
death.

But is it really true that peoples public behavior,
specifically their political behavior, can be read
from their religion? Could it be that a person who
takes his or her religion literally is a potential
terrorist?

And only someone who thinks of the 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
religious 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 and less talk of the clash of civilizations, and
more and more talk of the clash inside civilizations?

Is that not the point of the articles I referred to
earlier, those in The Spectator and The New York
Times? After all, 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 divides moderate Islam, called
genuine Islam, and extremist political Islam. The
terrorists of September 11, we are told, did not just
hijack planes; it is said that they also hijacked
Islam, meaning genuine Islam!

Here is one version of the argument that the clash is
inside and not between civilizations. It is my own
construction, but it is not a fabrication. I think of
it 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 one thing in common. Both
share a deeply messianic orientation. Each has a
conviction that it possesses the truth. Both have a
sense of mission to civilize the world. Both consider
the world beyond a sea of ignorance, one that needs to
be redeemed. Think, for example, of the Arabic word
al-Jahaliya, which I have always known to mean the
domain of ignorance.

This conviction is so deep-seated that it is even
found in its secular version, as in the old colonial
notion of a civilizing mission, or in its more
racialized version, the White Man's Burden. Or simply,
in the 19th century American conviction of a manifest
destiny.

In both cultures, Christian and Muslim, these notions
have been the subject 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? The first
alternative gives you reason and evangelism; the
second gives you the Crusades.

Take the example of Islam, and the notion of Jihad,
which roughly translated means struggle. A student of
mine gave me a series of articles written by the
Pakistani academic and journalist, Eqbal Ahmed, in the
Karachi-based newspaper, Dawn. In one of these
articles, Eqbal distinguished between two broad
traditions in the understanding of Jihad.

The first, called little Jihad, thinks of Jihad as a
struggle against external enemies of Islam. It is an
Islamic version of the Christian notion of just war.

The second, called big Jihad, thinks of Jihad as
more of a spiritual struggle against the self in a
contaminated world.

All of this is true, but I dont think it explains
terrorism. I remain deeply skeptical that we can read
peoples political behavior from their religion, or
from their culture. Remember, it was not so long ago
that some claimed that the behavior of others could be
read from their genes.

Could it be true that an orthodox Muslim is a
potential terrorist?

Or, the same thing, that an Orthodox Jew is a
potential terrorist and only a Reform Jew is capable
of being tolerant of those who do not share his
convictions?

I am aware that this does not exhaust the question of
culture and politics. How do you make sense of
politics that consciously wears the mantle of
religion? Take, for example the politics of Osama bin

Laden and al-Qaida, both of whom claim to be waging a
Jihad, a just war against the enemies of Islam? How do
we make sense of this?

I want to suggest that we turn the cultural theory of
politics on its head. Rather than see this politics
as the outcome of an archaic culture, I suggest we see
neither the culture not the politics as archaic, but
both as very contemporary outcomes of equally
contemporary conditions, relations and conflicts.
Instead of dismissing history and politics as does
culture talk, I suggest we place cultural debates in
historical and political contexts. Terrorism is not a
cultural residue in modern politics. Rather, terrorism
is a modern construction. Even when it tries to
harness one or another aspect of tradition and
culture, it puts this at the service of a modern
project.

In what follows, I would like to offer you a
perspective on contemporary terrorism from an African
vantage point.

Eqbal Ahmed writes of a television image from 1985, of
Ronald Reagan meeting a group of turbaned men, all
Afghani, all leaders of the Mujaheddin. After the
meeting, Reagan brought them out into the White House
lawn, and introduced them to the media in these words:
These gentlemen are the moral equivalents of America's
founding fathers.

This was the moment when official America tried to
harness one version of Islam in a struggle against the
Soviet Union. Before exploring the politics of it, let
me clarify the historical moment.

1975 was the year of American defeat in Indochina.
1975 was also the year the Portuguese empire collapsed
in Africa. It was the year the center of gravity of
the Cold War shifted from Southeast Asia to Southern
Africa.

The question was: who would pick up the pieces of the
Portuguese empire, the US or the Soviet Union?

As the center of gravity of the Cold War shifted, from
Southeast Asia to Southern Africa, there was also a
shift in US strategy. The Nixon Doctrine had been
forged towards the closing years of the Vietnam War
but could not be implemented at that late stage the
doctrine that Asian boys must fight Asian wars was
really put into practice in Southern Africa.

In practice, it translated into a US decision to
harness, or even to cultivate, terrorism in the
struggle against regimes it considered pro-Soviet.

In Southern Africa, the immediate result was a
partnership between the US and apartheid South Africa,
accused by the UN of perpetrating a crime against
humanity. Reagan termed this new partnership
constructive engagement.

South Africa became both conduit and partner of the US
in the hot war against those governments in the region
considered pro-Soviet. This partnership bolstered a
number of terrorist movements: Renamo in Mozambique,
and Unita in Angola. Their terrorism was of a type
Africa had never seen before. It was not simply that
they were willing to tolerate a higher level of
civilian casualties in military confrontations - what
official America nowadays calls collateral damage.
The new thing was that these terrorist movements
specifically targeted civilians. It sought
specifically to kill and maim civilians, but not all
of them.

Always, the idea was to leave a few to go and tell the
story, to spread fear. The object of spreading fear
was to paralyze government.

In another decade, the center of gravity of the Cold
War shifted to Central America, to Nicaragua and El
Salvador. And so did the center of gravity of
US-sponsored terrorism. The Contras were not only
tolerated and shielded by official America; they were
actively nurtured and directly assisted, as in the
mining of harbors.

The shifting center of gravity of the Cold War was the
major context in which Afghanistan policy was framed.
But it was not the only context. The minor context was
the Iranian Revolution of 1979. Ayatullah Khomeini
anointed official America as the Great Satan, and
official Islam as American Islam. But instead of also
addressing the issues the sources of resentment
against official America, the Reagan administration
hoped to create a pro-American Islamic lobby.

The grand plan of the Reagan administration was
two-pronged. First, it drooled at the prospect of
uniting a billion Muslims around a holy war, a
Crusade, against the evil empire. I use the word
Crusade, not Jihad, because only the notion of Crusade
can accurately convey the frame of mind in which this
initiative was taken. Second, the Reagan
administration hoped to turn a religious schism inside
Islam, between minority Shia and majority Sunni, into
a political schism. Thereby, it hoped to contain
the influence of the Iranian Revolution as a minority
Shia affair.

This is the context in which an
American/Saudi/Pakistani alliance was forged, and
religious madresas turned into political schools for
training cadres. The Islamic world had not seen an
armed Jihad for centuries.

But now the CIA was determined to create one. It was
determined to put a version of tradition at the
service of politics. We are told that the CIA looked
for a Saudi Prince to lead this Crusade. It could not
find a Prince. But it settled for the next best, the
son of an illustrious family closely connected to the
royal family. This was not a backwater family steeped
in pre-modernity, but a cosmopolitan family. The Bin
Laden family is a patron of scholarship. It endows
programs at universities like Harvard and Yale.

The CIA created the Mujaheddin and Bin Laden as
alternatives to secular nationalism. Just as, in
another context, the Israeli intelligence created
Hamas as an alternative to the secular PLO.

Contemporary fundamentalism is a modern project, not a
traditional leftover. When the Soviet Union was
defeated in Afghanistan, this terror was unleashed on
Afghanistan in the name of liberation. As different
factions fought over the liberated country, the
Northern Alliance against the Taliban, they shelled
and destroyed their own cities with artillery.

The Question of Responsibility

To understand the question of who bears responsibility
for the present situation, it will help to contrast
two situations, that after the Second World War and
that after the Cold War, and compare how the question
of responsibility was understood and addressed in two
different contexts.

In spite of Pearl Harbor, World War Two was fought in
Europe and Asia, not in the US. It was not the US
which faced physical and civic destruction at the end
of the war. The question of responsibility for
postwar
reconstruction did not just arise as a moral question;
it arose as a political question. In Europe, its
urgency was underlined by the changing political
situation in Yugoslavia, Albania, and particularly,
Greece.

This is the context in which the US accepted
responsibility for restoring conditions for decent
life in noncommunist Europe. That initiative was
called the Marshall Plan.

The Cold War was not fought in Europe, but in
Southeast Asia, in Southern Africa, and in Central
America. Should we, ordinary humanity, hold official
America responsible for its actions during the Cold
War? Should official America be held responsible for
napalm bombing and spraying Agent Orange in Vietnam?
Should it be held responsible for cultivating
terrorist movements in Southern Africa and Central
America?

Perhaps no other society paid a higher price for the
defeat of the Soviet Union than did Afghanistan. Out
of a population of roughly 15 million, a million died,
another million and a half were maimed, and another
five million became refugees. Afghanistan was a
brutalized society even before the present war began.

After the Cold War and right up to September 10 of
this year, the US and Britain compelled African
countries to reconcile with terrorist movements.

The demand was that governments must share power with
terrorist organizations in the name of reconciliation
as in Mozambique, in Sierra Leone, and in Angola.

If terrorism was an official American Cold War brew,
it was turned into a local Sierra Leonean or Angolan
or Mozambican or Afghani brew after the Cold War.
Whose responsibility is it? Like Afghanistan, are
these
countries hosting terrorism, or are they also hostage
to terrorism?

I think both.

Official America has a habit of not taking
responsibility for its own actions. Instead, it
habitually looks for a high moral pretext for
inaction. I was in Durban at the World Congress
Against Racism (WCAR) when the US walked out of it.
The Durban conference was about major crimes of the
past, about racism, and xenophobia, and related
crimes.

I returned from Durban to listen to Condoleeza Rice
talk about the need to forget slavery because, she
said, the pursuit of civilized life requires that we
forget the past.

It is true that, unless we learn to forget, life will
turn into revenge-seeking. Each of us will have
nothing but a catalogue of wrongs done to a long line
of ancestors. But civilization cannot be built
on just forgetting. We must not only learn to forget,
we must also not forget to learn. We must also
memorialize, particularly monumental crimes. America
was built on two monumental crimes: the genocide of
the Native American and the enslavement of the African
American. The tendency of official America is to
memorialize other peoples crimes and to
forget its own - to seek a high moral ground as a
pretext to ignore real issues.

Conclusion

I would like to conclude with the question of
responsibility. It is a human tendency to look for
others in times of adversity. We seek friends and
allies in times of danger. But in times of
prosperity, the short-sighted tend to walk away from
others. This is why prosperity, and not adversity, is
the real litmus test of how we define community.
The contemporary history of Southern Africa, Central
America, and Afghanistan testifies to this tendency.

Modernity in politics is about moving from exclusion
to inclusion, from repression to incorporation. By
including those previously excluded, we give those
previously alienated a stake in things.

By doing so, we broaden the bounds of lived community,
and of lived humanity. That perhaps is the real
challenge today. It is the recognition that the
good life cannot be lived in isolation.

I think of civilization as a constant creation whereby
we gradually expand the boundaries of community, the
boundaries of those with whom we share the world -
this is why it is so grotesque to see bombs and food
parcels raining on the defenseless people of
Afghanistan from the same source.

-

Mahmood Mamdani
Herbert Lehman Professor of Government and
Anthropology
Columbia University, New York
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