Changing Colours of Violence

Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: Islam, the USA, and the Global War against Terrorism by
Mahmood Mamdani
Review by: Khaled Ahmed
Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 40, No. 17 (Apr. 23-29, 2005), pp. 1690-1692
Published by: Economic and Political Weekly
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4416525 .
Accessed: 19/06/2014 12:30
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp
.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of
content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms
of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
.
Economic and Political Weekly is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to
Economic and Political Weekly.
http://www.jstor.org
This content downloaded from 195.246.60.17 on Thu, 19 Jun 2014 12:30:54 PM
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
a whole
generation
of
Bengali
Muslim
women
teachers, doctors, social reformers
and
activists,
who
played
an
important
role
in
trying
to
bring
about
changes
in their
society.
This
legacy
of
emancipation
and em-
powerment
of Muslim women in
Bengal
that was
developed by generations
of
Bengali
Muslim social reformers and
activists,
was
suddenly disrupted by
the
1947 Partition. Most of those
among
the
Bengali
Muslim women
professionals
and
intellectuals who could have carried on
this
legacy,
left for East Pakistan. As a
result, in an ironical twist of
history
- what
was a loss for West
Bengali
Muslim so-
ciety
became a
gain
for East Pakistan
Muslim women's movement.
Chakravartty,
contrasts the
'gender awakening'
as re-
flected in the Muslim women's movement
in East Pakistan in the 1950-60
period,
with the
stagnation
in the status of the
Bengali
Muslim women in West
Bengal
at the same time. In a
very perceptive
observation,
she
points out,
'Muslim
women in West
Bengal deeply
felt the
absence
among
them of successors of
Rokeya's ideas,
and also felt the loss of
their East Pakistan
counterparts,
such as
leading
activists
Begum
Sufia
Kamal,
Mahmuda Khatoon
Siddiqua,
Sham-
sunnahar
Mahmud, Khadija Khatun,
Nilima Ibrahim and others, who carried
on the cultural crusade
against
seclu-
sion
by taking part,
as an act of emanci-
pation,
in
music, dance, literary discourses,
and
stage performance
(all of which had
been forbidden to women
earlier)
in
their
country.
Chakravartty gives
us a
moving
account
of the
nostalgia
and the
dreams,
the suf-
ferings
and the
struggles,
in the course of
which a
generation
of
uprooted
women
changed
themselves. It is
primarily
an
account of the lives of middle class
Bengali
Hindu
refugee
women in Calcutta
(barring
a
passing
reference to 'uneducated women'
who worked as, maidservants, washing
utensils, cooking
in
people's homes, sup-
plying
office tiffins, selling flowers, fruits
and
vegetables).
But there were also the
vast masses of
Bengali
women
refugees
who came from the so-called lower and
backward caste families, the namasudras
and
poundra-kshatriyas,
cultivators and
agricultural labourers,
artisans and
fishing
folk. Under the
government's
rehabilita-
tion
policy,
these families were sent
away
to far off
places
like
Dandakaranya
in
central
India,
and the Andaman Islands
across the seas. Here on
rocky soils and
infertile
land,
amidst alien and often
hostile social
environs, they
eked out a
miserable existence. Victims of a caste-
and class-based rehabilitation
policy, they
have a different
story
to tell that is
yet
to
be recorded
by
historians of the
Bengal
Partition. M
Notes
1 Re: Prafulla K
Chakrabarti, The
Marginal Men,
Lumiere Books, Kalyani.
West
Bengal.
1990.
Even if one cannot
accept
his rather
sweeping,
and often
dangerous
-
generalisations
about
Indian Muslims and the
Bengali Left,
Chakrabarti's book remains a
major
source for
researchers
engaged
in
writing
the
history
of
Bengali refugees
from the then East Pakistan.
He
meticulously
documents the various
stages
in their
migration,
and their
struggles
for
rehabilitation in West
Bengal,
with
particular
reference
(though biased)
to the role of the Left
parties
in their movement.
Among
recent books
on the 1947 Partition of
Bengal
and its aftermath,
which are
reassessing
the issue from new
perspectives,
mention should be made of Ranabir
Samaddar
(ed), Reflections
on Partition in the
East, Vikas
Publishing House, New Delhi,
1997; Pradip
Kumar Bose
(ed), Refugees
in
West
Bengal,
Calcutta Reserch
Group, Calcutta,
2000; and Jasodhara
Bagchi
and
Subhoranjan
Dasgupta (ed), The Trauma and the
Triumph,
Stree, Kolkata, 2003.
2
Triguna Sen, former minister of education in
the
government
of India, in his Foreword, The
Marginal Men,
op
cit.
3 Mention can be made, among others, of
H Bhaskar Rao's The
Story of Rehabilitation
(1967),
and
Kirpal Singh's
The Partition
of
the
Punjab (1972). Among
creative writers who
had immortalised the
tragedy
of
Punjab,
Sadat
Hasan Manto
occupies
a niche of his own,
followed
by Rajinder Singh
Bedi and Amrita
Pritam.
Changing Colours
of Violence
Good
Muslim,
Bad Muslim:
Islam,
the
USA,
and the Global War
against
Terrorism
by
Mahmood Mamdani;
Permanent Black, Delhi, 2004;
pp
304, Rs 295.
KHALED AHMED
In
December 2004 when Mahmood
Mamdani
spoke
to an audience in
Lahore,
he took
great
care to frame his theme in
the American context. When an
Islamist,
a member of Hizb al-Tahrir
demanding
a
universal Islamic
caliphate,
asked him if
he would endorse a return to sharia for all
Muslim states of the
world,
he said he
belonged
to Africa where the Muslims
were a
minority community
and therefore
cared for
democracy;
in Muslim
majority
states, he asserted, the Muslims were not
agreed
on the
sharia, implying
that
they
cared little for
democracy.
Mahmood Mamdani
diagnosis
of viol-
ence in
modernity begins
with the non-
mercenary
nature of
Napoleon's army
after
the French Revolution that
gave
him his
many
victories and
compelled Hegel
to
say
that nationalism inclined individuals to die
for causes of
greater
value than life itself.
The obverse side of
Hegel's
comment was
that a man fired with a nationalist cause
was
willing
to kill for it. In the 20th
century,
violence
began
to
surprise
less and less,
but towards its
end, senseless violence
bemused the
theory-makers.
Mamdani
says
what
appears
senseless
gets
discussed in
'cultural terms' when it
happens
in a
'pre-
modem'
society;
and
'theologically'
when
it takes
place
in modern societies. The
cultural
explanation
feeds into the thesis
of clash of civilisations and it focuses on
'absence of
modernity'
as the
responsible
factor.
Violence and Victimhood
On the other
hand,
when violence takes
place
in a modern
society
it is discussed
in
theological
terms as
'evil',
as was the
Holocaust in
Europe.
Yet both kinds of
violence are not linked
by
theorists to
historical roots and there is resistance
to
exploring why
the Muslim suicide-
bombers kill
today
and the Nazis killed
yesterday.
Mamdani is convinced that
because we are in the habit of
labelling
the
perpetrators
of violence as 'cultural
renegades'
and 'moral
perverts'
we are
unable to
get
at the real cause of violence
in our times. He settles on the
year
1492
as the crucial
year
when violence
began
in the modern sense. This was the
year
when the
Spanish king
Ferdinand and
1690 Economic and Political
Weekly April 23, 2005
This content downloaded from 195.246.60.17 on Thu, 19 Jun 2014 12:30:54 PM
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
queen
Isabella attacked and
conquered
Granada, the last Muslim
stronghold
in
Europe;
and
Christopher
Columbus set
sail for America. One act was the unifi-
cation of the state and other was the
project
of the
conquest
of the world.
What unification of the state
brought
about was the nation state. Mamdani
goes
back to Max Weber
(1864-1920)
and his
obstinately
relevant
theory
of
'monopoly
of violence of the state' that Weber consi-
dered a marker of
modernity
and a
prereq-
uisite for the creation of civil
society. Spain
as the unified state
thought
of itself in 1492
in terms of culture and race and therefore
set about
expelling
those who were not
Christians and were
racially
distinct. It
drove the Jews out but when some
stayed
back, declaring
themselves Christian,
they
were
subjected
to the
Inquisition
and killed.
The Muslims were
put through
the same
treatment in 1499. You leave if
you
are
of different faith; you
leave
equally
if
you
look different. What was established
by
the
example
of
Spain
was this: the
modem state cleanses itself
internally by
killing;
and it annexes more
territory by
killing
there too. The
stage
was set for the
moder state.
Hannah Arendt
(1906-1975)
in her The
Origin of
Totalitarianism traced the mod-
ern state's internal
cleansing
to its second
project,
that of
conquering
other territories
and
killing
off the
population
there
through
genocide.
It is the
imperialism
ofthe modem
state which is internalised when it
purges
its own
population
to eliminate those who
are 'different'. Mamdani
aptly quotes
Lord
Salisbury, prime
minister of the
premier
imperialist
state in 1898
(Great Britain),
as
saying
that the world could be divided
into two
categories,
those who were
living
and those who were
dying.
He said this
when Hitler was
aged only
nine and would
later think of
imperialism
in
biological
or
Darwinian terms. The Darwinist
genocides
occurred in Australia and Africa when the
aborigines
were ostracised
against,
and the
20th
century
dawned with
Europe dividing
the international law of war on the basis
of colonial and
civilised, meaning
that
laws did not
apply
to
killings
done in the
colonies. The first bomb was invented to
kill
large populations
in the colonies and
the first one was
dropped by Italy
in
Tripoli
in Africa in 1911 from an
airplane.
Frantz Fanon
(1925-1961)
in his
Wretched
of
the Earth
(1961)
stated the
famous formula of violence
among
the
victims of
imperialism:
the colonised man
liberates himself in and through
violence.
He
thought
that this violence was not
irrational and senseless but
grew
out of the
script
of
modernity imposed by
the
impe-
rialist state as the 'midwife of
history'.
Mamdani
says
this
turning
of tables - the
victim
attacking
the
imperialist
- should
not be
accepted
with
any triumphalism
but
should be
carefully analysed
if we want
to
put
an end to the
victim-becoming-killer
cycle.
One unfortunate trend in
thinking
about the causes of violence - as
happened
in the wake of
September 11,
2001 - is
self-righteousness
about one's own con-
dition. How should the victim think?
Should she
competitively
think that she is
paramount
in victimhood as in
power?
Should she conclude that what has
hap-
pened
should not
happen again
to her alone
or to entire
humanity?
Those who refer to culture while ex-
plaining
terror can be
categorised
belitt-
lingly
as
exponents
of 'Culture Talk' in
order to
highlight
their rather unscientific
consideration of the term
pre-modern:
that
which is not
yet
modern
(arousing philan-
thropy)
and that which resists and
rejects
modernism
(arousing fear). During
the cold
war, Africa was
pre-modern;
now it is
Islam. The west Asia now is the domain
of the
pre-modern
- no
longer
Africa - that
arouses fear and
loathing.
This was done
by
Bernard Lewis when he coined the term
Clash
of
Civilisations
(1990),
which was
followed
upon by Huntington
when he
wrote his famous
Foreign
Affairs article
of the same title in 1993. Lewis
points
to
the clash within the Islamic civilisation
too and wants the west to wait and watch
how Islam tackles with its inner conflict
before the west tackles the outward-
directed 'Muslim
rage'. Huntington
sees the
clash of civilisations on the
'bloody
bor-
ders of Islam' and 'advises' the US within
the framework of realist school of
strategy
in
vogue
in America. The Orientalist Lewis
waits for the
'good'
Muslim to
triumph
over the 'bad' Muslim while the
political
scientist
Huntington
is more
'practical'
recommending
a 'rollback' of
history
to
eliminate the civilisational
danger.
After the US was defeated in Vietnam
in 1975 the focus of the cold war shifted
to southern Africa where the last
European
colonialist
power Portugal
was in the
process
of
collapse.
Between the US and
the
USSR,
who should collect the broken
pieces
of the
Portuguese empire
in
Angola,
Mozambique
and
Portuguese
Guinea? The
Nixon Doctrine advocated that
proxy
wars
with mercenaries instead of US
troops
should be fought
in regions
where the
Soviets were seen to make an advance. The
example
was Laos where the Americans
learned that other nations could
fight
the US war for
money.
Much before
Afghanistan,
this was tried in Africa till
the Clark Amendment of 1975
put
restric-
tions on the US
president
to
wage
all kinds
of wars abroad without the sanction of
Congress.
Did this
nip
the idea of
proxy
wars in the bud? No,
because in 1985
President
Reagan got Congress
to
repeal
the Amendment! US was now
ready
to
wage jihad.
Proxy
war came back with a
vengeance
in
Afghanistan
and reached its most ironic
climax in 1996. To
Mamdani, the Taliban
are the result of an 'encounter between a
pre-modern people
with modem
imperial
power,
the enforced
gender equity
of the
communists,
then the traditional male se-
clusion of the madrasas and then the fear
that the warriors would turn
rapists
like the
previous mujahideen' (p162).
He takes the
cue from
Eqbal
Ahmed: first cold war,
then
Soviet-propped Marxism, CIA-
supported
Islamisation - the confused
result was the Taliban. Somehow Pakistan
was the hub of it
all, ideologically
and
logistically
since
everyone
seems to have
passed through
here. Mamdani
gets
the
number of Muslims in France
wrong
when
he
says they
are three
million,
but he is
right
in
telling
us how most of the terrorists
of Armed Islamic
Group (GIA)
in
Algeria
who turned to France for
revenging
them-
selves
against
the west had
actually
had
their
baptism
in Pakistan. To airman
Kherbane he could have added Jordan's
Zarqavi
who is now
killing
Americans
plus
other innocent
people, including
Pakistanis,
in
Iraq;
and Mullah
Krekar,
the
Kurd who has been
killing
innocent
people
in
Turkey.
Aspects
of Terror
The Islamist terror, the book
says,
has
three structural
aspects
or
'triple
con-
fluence':
ideological (Maulana
Maududi
and
Syed Qutb), organisational (American
jihad
in
Afghanistan)
and
political
(demonisation
of Islam
by
such scholars
as Bernard
Lewis).
The fear that was
aroused
by
the rise of the
popular religious
parties
as Islamic Salvation Front
(FIS)
in
Algeria seeped
into the national armies
who cut short the
process whereby politi-
cal Islam was to receive its
comeuppance
in a democratic
way.
In Iran the
process
was not curtailed and the
people
of Iran
are today busy thinking of alternatives to
Economic and Political
Weekly April 23,
2005 1691
This content downloaded from 195.246.60.17 on Thu, 19 Jun 2014 12:30:54 PM
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
the clerical rule that has not
brought
them
much
joy. Similarly, Hizbullah,
which was
set
up
as a
religious organisation
with
1,500
warriors
exported by
Iran via
Syria,
was now 'secular' in the Lebanese
parlia-
ment with the additional
advantage
of not
having
the Amal
shooting
it in the back
as a secular Shia
organisation.
Mamdani makes an
interesting point.
Islamism is not
something
monolithic and
that a distinction must be made between
those who seek to
reorganise society
and
those who wish to
capture
state
power.
Organisations
like Hizbullah and FIS want
social revolution and are not conservative
with
regard
to the edicts of the
scripture.
On the other
hand,
the conservative
Islamists want to
grab
the state and then
rule without
changing
the edicts of the
scripture.
After the conservatives have en-
forced
'un-reinterpreted' Islam, society
will
be recast in the Islamist mould. After
that,
the Islamist statists can be divided into two
categories
in Mamdani's effort to
split
concepts
and delve into them for more
clarity
and definition
-
all in order to indict
America's
penchant
for a
simplistic
iden-
tification of the
'enemy'.
This
produces
interesting complications,
and that
jells
well with the confusion
obtaining
on the
ground.
The US
policy
shift from covert
proxy
war
('multilateral'
when
waged
under the
aegis
of the
UN)
to
open aggression
took
place
after
September
11, 2001. Mamdani
must have realised that Pakistani strate-
gists
like the Pakistani
ex-army
chief Aslam
Beg
had missed the
point
when
they clung
to the
'proxy
war
phase'
of America while
insisting
that
Washington
could not risk
'body bags'.
One can
put
that down to
Muslim
braggadocio
because
any average
student of American
strategy
would have
remembered Vietnam under a different
policy
that included
'body bags'. Iraq
was
to become an
important
model for the
redrawing
of the
regional political map.
The
objective
is the same:
target
and
liqui-
date militant nationalism
through regime-
change.
As for west
Asia,
which forms a
pivot
in the current war in
Iraq,
the ob-
jective
is defence of Israel on lines dictated
by
the
powerful
Jewish lobbies in the US.
Mamdani marvels at a
complete
absence
of
public
debate in the US when it comes
to Israel.
What is most
scary
about the war on
Iraq
is its
illegality.
It has scared the
European
allies
equally,
which in turn has encour-
aged
most of the third world states to
express
their
disapproval
of the US
action. Now that the US is said
by many
to be
bogged
down in
Iraq,
will it be
punished
as the Soviet Union was
punished
for
getting bogged
down in
Afghanistan?
Mamdani disabuses
many
third world
'meta-optimists' by
putting
it like this: 'Modern western
empires
are different from
empires
of old
as well as the Soviet Union of
yesterday
in one
important respect: they
combine
a democratic
political system
at home
with
despotism
abroad... So
long
as
democracy
is
living reality
at
home,
democratic
empires
are
potentially
self-
correcting' (p 239).
The US could have broken
away
from
its manichaeism of the cold war
just
like
South Africa after
Apartheid,
but it did not.
Had it dismantled the
global apparatus
of
empire
and offered a
peace
dividend in
1991 when it talked of a 'new world
order',
September 11,
2001 would not have
hap-
pened.
Now there are two forces contend-
ing against
each other: state terror that
pretends
to
uphold
law and
order, and
societal terror that
pretends
to seek
justice.
'When
accompanied by
a blanket refusal
to deal with
issues,
the call for
justice
turns into a vendetta'. Both the US and
Al
Qaeda
are veterans of the cold war and
both have been scarred
by it, seeing
the
world
through
'lenses of power';
both are
informed
by highly ideological
worldviews
leading
to what
Tariq
Ali calls two clash-
ing
'fundamentalisms' that build their
righ-
teousness on the demonisation of the other.
The rest of the world exists
'only
as a
collateral'. Both sides are
global
in their
outreach.
Mahmood Mamdani showers his
readers with new
insights.
His
cataloguing
of facts is
only
meant to buttress the
prin-
ciples
he extracts from events. He sees
hubris in the US-western
perception, high-
lighted by
what former US ambassador to
the UN Jeanne
Kirkpatrick
said
during
the cold
war,
left
wing
totalitarianism
was not 'reformable' while
right wing
totalitarianism - as manifested in
'authoritarianism' - could be reformed
from within.
Kirkpatrick
in fact could be
seen as Mamdani' s
counterpart
on the other
side of the fence, considering
her
ability
to
produce strategic insights
for the US.
Mamdani finds that in fact the left
wing
totalitarian
regimes
like China and the
Soviet Union were able to reform them-
selves.
Iraq
was not allowed to reform
itself; and North Korea was allowed to
survive,
unlike
Iraq,
because it had nuclear
weapons. [13
MANOHAR
WHO IS A BRAHMIN?
The Politics of
Identity
in India
Gilles
Chuyen
81-7304-6034, 2004, 294p.
Rs. 725
AN ORIENTAL BIOGRAPHICAL
DICTIONARY
Founded on Materials Collected
(A
New Edition Revised and
Enlarged)
Thomas William Beale
81-7304-525-9,
2004
rpt.,
431
p.
Rs. 795
"THE HEATHEN IN HIS BLINDNESS..."
Asia,
the West and the
Dynamic
of
Religion
S.N.
Balagangadhara
81-7304-608-5, 2005, 503p.
Rs. 1195
THE CITY IN INDIAN HISTORY
Urban
Demography, Society,
and Politics
Indu
Banga (ed)
81-85425-40-X, 2005, 300p.
Rs. 295
(Pb)
EDUCATION AND DEMOCRACY
IN INDIA
Anne
Vaugier-Chatterjee (ed)
81-7304-604-2, 2004,
269p.
Rs. 695
WEBS OF HISTORY
Information,
Communication and Techno-
logy
from
Early
to Post-Colonial India
Amiya
K.
Bagchi, Dipankar
Sinha and
Barnita
Bagchi (eds)
81-7304-613-1, 2005,
298
p.
Rs. 695
AN EIGHTEENTH CENTURY HISTORY
OF NORTH INDIA
An Account of the Rise and Fall of the
Rohilla Chiefs in Janbhasha
by
Rustam Ali
Bijnori
Iqtidar
Husain
Siddiqui (ed)
81-7304-562-3, 2005, 120p.
Rs. 350
GLOBALIZATION AND LOCAL
DEVELOPMENT IN INDIA
Examining
the
Spatial
dimension
Frederic
Landy
and Basudeb Chaudhuri
(eds)
81-7304-540-2, 2004,
248
p.
Rs. 625
- for our
complete catalogue please
write to us at:
* E - ;. gg * ** ;n;~; *
_ E S
- .006
1692 Economic and Political
Weekly April 23,
2005
This content downloaded from 195.246.60.17 on Thu, 19 Jun 2014 12:30:54 PM
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions