Mamdani: Bad Muslim, good American?
By Joseph Were
Aug 2, 2004
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Title: Good Muslim, Sometime in 1953, a young naturalised American, Henry Kissinger who had just finished his doctoral dissertation titled: A World Restored, called on the 33rd President of the United States of America, Harry Truman, the man who ordered the atomic bomb to be dropped on Japan. Kissinger, who was later to emerge as the leading US foreign policy neo-con, likes to recall his conversation with Truman. He says he asked Truman, who had just left office, what he had done that he was most proud of. �I am most proud of the fact that we totally defeated our enemies and that then we brought them back to the community of nations as equals,� Truman answered. After the September 11 terrorist attacks on American cities, Kissinger repeated this conversation when giving the Ruttenberg Lecture at the Centre for Policy Studies in the United Kingdom. However, he told his audience, �We have got to get the sequence straight; we have got to defeat the enemies, then we shall be able to create a community of nations�. In other words, America must retain what a new book, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim, by renowned Ugandan scholar, Mahmood Mamdani, calls �unilateral global domination through military superiority�. This doctrine spurred America�s proxy wars in the Cold War era and is the basis of President George W. Bush�s pre-emptive attacks on perceived terrorists. Arguing that had the United States ended the Cold War with demilitarisation and a peace dividend, 9/11 would not have happened, Mamdani says that all terror is a political rather than cultural phenomenon. �We need to recognise the suicide bomber, first and foremost, as a category of soldier,� he argues and that �pre-emptive war is the logic for genocide�. Mamdani shows how drug barons, religious charities, donor agencies, and international commerce agencies have become vehicles of American terror. In fact, Mamdani concludes that the terrorist attacks on America are, therefore, �the result of an alliance gone sour�. His evidence is a manual for training terrorists that the CIA published in 1985. Titled: Psychological Operations in Guerrilla Warfare, the CIA manual taught its hired fighters that �if the right dose of terror could be delivered with effectiveness... it was only a matter of time before the population was convinced that the only way out of the terror is to give the terrorist what they want: power�. He tells how Sheik Azzam was blown-up in a car bomb in 1989 soon after rejecting a plan, by one of his former students, Osama bin Laden, to terrorise Saudi Arabia and Egypt. That same year, Osama founded al-Qaeda, �the base� in the town of Khost. Before that in 1986, Osama had worked as a major contractor to build a large CIA-funded project, the Khost tunnel complex housed under the mountains close to the Pakistani border to house arms, provide training and medical facilities for the Mujahedeen. The CIA funded the recruitment of fighters for the Afghan Jihad from Kosovo, Algeria, Indonesia, Chechnya, Sudan, Pakistan, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia and handed them to Osama on the recommendation of the head of Saudi Intelligence. Tracing its failures since the late 1970s when popular revolutions swept away US-backed dictatorships in Nicaragua and Iran, he concludes that America today �is a great power struck by amnesia�. Humanity, Mamdani says, is left with a singular challenge: How to subdue and hold accountable the awesome power that the United States built up during the Cold War. He pushes for a non-violent way forward as happened in South Africa where, he says, �once a non-violent way of ending apartheid did appear as an alternative, it was as if the sun had come up and the fog lifted...� Mamdani uses the example in a math book donated to the poor children of Mujahedeen-led Afghanistan by the United States Agency for International Development to argue that even American largesse is selfish. The book asks primary schools pupils of war-weary Afghanistan this question: Like another student of global terrorism, Thomas Friedman, who uses the same example in his book The Lexus and the Olive Tree, Mamdani makes the point that American aid is not philanthropy; it is defence. This book has an urgent message for Africa; a continent that Mamdani says culture talk tends to dismiss as a �historical darkness�. Think about it. The civilised Europeans colonised the primitive native Americans and did them a favour; they wiped them out. Africa too was largely colonised. So the African should have been wiped out and, they still might be. Such thinking is scary. Yet it might become widespread if enough angry America-wary folks imbibe the right dose of Mamdani�s criticism of such manifest Orientalism. Mamdani writes as a Muslim from this �historical darkness� in a world of cultural polarisation where such identity becomes critical. I was listening to Senegalese musician Youssou N�dour�s interview about his album, Egypt, while reading Mamdani�s book. When Youssou N�dour said Islam has been misunderstood, it echoed exactly Mamdani�s anguish at the demonisation of this religion. The book got me to instinctively Google two words: Darfur oil. Then I googled the words � Muslim terrorist.� My googling was not random. Mamdani�s book makes connections such as those, and with no mathematical formula for getting a grip on such things; the temptation to conspiracy theories becomes irresistible. I got 70,000 hits for Darfur and over 700,000 for �Muslim terrorist� but it does not matter. Darfur oil will catch up. America is pushing for a military solution to the conflict there. Launch date for this book will be on August 13 at a public lecture to be held in Hotel Africana, Kampala. |
� 2004 The Monitor Publications
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