hey read the reading and answer the question and please disregard question 6(need writer 55967 as they do this task every week and know how to do it in a perfect manner )
ANTH3021 DISCUSSION PREPARATION GUIDE Name________________________________ Date___________________ Reading: Author / Title__________________________________________ __________________________________________ 1. What was the reading about? State in one complete sentence the theme of this work. 2. How did the author get the information? How did they put together and present this information? Was there a particular structure to the work? Was it qualitative, quantitative, and/or comparative? Was it based on textual research, observation, and/or participation? Etc. 3. What did you learn from this reading? Be specific and concrete. a. b. 4. Note words that are unfamiliar or seem to be used in a special manner to create a particular impression. Define the word in the context of the phrase where you found it. a. b. 5. What questions does this selection bring up for you? Write one or two questions that open the space for discussion about key points in the articles, gaps in the knowledge, new research questions raised. Avoid "yes/no" questions, try to open the space for people to share opinions without trying to lead them to particular conclusions. a. b. 6. (To be filled out in class during discussion) What are some of the best ideas that you heard from other people in your discussion group? Untitled MAHMOOD MAMDANI Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: A Political Perspective on Culture and Terrorism ABSTRACT The link between Islam and terrorism became a central media concern following September 11, resulting in new rounds of "culture talk. This talk has turned religious experience into a political category, differentiating 'good Muslims" from "bad Mus- lims, rather than terrorists from civilians. The implication is undisguised: Whether in Afghanistan, Palestine, or Pakistan, Islam must be quarantined and the devil must be exorcized from it by a civil war between good Muslims and bad Muslims. This article suggests that we lift the quarantine and turn the cultural theory of politics on its head. Beyond the simple but radical suggestion that if there are good Muslims and bad Muslims, there must also be good Westerners and bad Westerners, I question the very tendency to read Islamist poli- tics as an effect of Islamic civilization—whether good or bad—and Western power as an effect of Western civilization. Both those poli- tics and that power are born of an encounter, and neither can be understood outside of the history of that encounter. Cultural explanations of political outcomes tend to avoid history and issues. Thinking of individuals from "traditional" cultures in authentic and original terms, culture talk dehistoricizes the construction of political identities. This article places the terror of September 11 in a his- torical and political context. Rather than a residue of a premodern culture in modern politics, terrorism is best understood as a modern construction. Even when it harnesses one or another aspect of tradition and culture, the result is a modern ensemble at the service of a modern project. [Keywords: Muslims, culture talk, Islamist politics, political identities, terrorism] MEDIA INTEREST IN ISLAM exploded in the monthsafter September 11. What, many asked, is the link between Islam and tenorism? This question has fueled a fresh round of "culture talk": the predilection to define cultures according to their presumed "essential" charac- teristics, especially as regards politics, An earlieT round of such discussion, associated with Samuel Huntington's widely cited but increasingly discredited Clash of Civiliza- tions (1996), demonized Islam in its entirety, Its place has been taken by a modified line of argument: that the terror- ist link is not with all of Islam, but with a very literal inter- pretation of it, one found in Wahhabi Islam,1 First ad- vanced by Stephen Schwartz in a lead article in the British weekly, The Spectator (2001), this point of view went to the ludicrous extent of claiming that all suicide couriers (bombers or hijackers), are Wahhabi and warned that this version of Islam, historically dominant in Saudi Arabia, had been exported to both Afghanistan and the United States in recent decades. The argument was echoed widely in many circles, including the New York Times2 Culture talk has turned religious experience into a po- litical category, "What Went Wrong with Muslim Civiliza- tion?" asks Bernard Lewis in a lead article in The Atlantic Monthly (2002), Democracy lags in the Muslim World, concludes a Freedom House study of political systems in the non-Western world,3 The problem is larger than Islam, concludes Aryeh Neier (2001), former president of Human Rights Watch and now head of the Soros-funded Open So- ciety Foundation: It lies with tribalists and fundamentalists, contemporary counterparts of Nazis, who have identified modernism as their enemy, Even the political leadership of the antiterrorism alliance, notably Tony Blair and George Bush, speak of the need to distinguish "good Mus- lims" from "bad Muslims," The implication is undis- guised: Whether in Afghanistan, Palestine, or Pakistan, Is- lam must be quarantined and the devil must be exorcized from it by a civil war between good Muslims and bad Mus- lims, I want to suggest that we lift the quarantine for ana- lytical purposes, and turn the cultural theory of politics on its head, This, I suggest, will help our query in at least two ways, First, it will have the advantage of deconstructing not just one protagonist in the contemporary contest—Islam— but also the other, the West, My point goes beyond the simple but radical suggestion that if there are good Muslims and bad Muslims, there must also be good Westerners and AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST 104(3):766-775. COPYRIGHT © 2002, AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGICAL ASSOCIATION Mamdani • Good Muslim, Bad Muslim 767 bad Westerners, I intend to question the very tendency to read Islamist politics as an effect of Islamic civilization— whether good or bad—and Western power as an effect of Western civilization, Further, I shall suggest that both those politics and that power are born of an encounter, and neither can be understood in isolation, outside of the history of that encounter, Second, I hope to question the very premise of culture talk, This is the tendency to think of culture in politi- cal—and therefore territorial—terms, Political units (states) are territorial; cultuie is not, Contemporary Islam is a global civilization: fewer Muslims live in the Middle East than in Africa or in South and Southeast Asia. If we can think of Christianity and Judaism as global religions— with Middle Eastern origins but a historical flow and a contemporary constellation that cannot be made sense of in terms of state boundaries—then why not try to under- stand Islam, too, in historical and extraterritorial terms?4 Does it really make sense to write political histories of Is- lam that read like political histories of geographies like the Middle East, and political histories of Middle Eastern states as if these were no more than the political history of Islam in the Middle East? My own work (1996) leads me to trace the modern roots of culture talk to the colonial project known as indirect rule, and to question the claim that anticolonial political resistance really expresses a cultural lag and should be un- derstood as a traditional cultural resistance to modernity, This claim downplays the crucial encounter with colonial power, which I think is central to the post-September 11 analytical predicament I described above, I find culture talk troubling for two reasons, On the one hand, cultural explanations of political outcomes tend to avoid history and issues, By equating political tendencies with entire communities denned in nonhistorical cultural terms, such explanations encourage collective discipline and punish- ment—a practice characteristic of colonial encounters, This line of reasoning equates terrorists with Muslims, jus- tifies a punishing war against an entire country (Afghani- stan) and ignores the recent history that shaped both the current Afghan context and the emergence of political Is- lam, On the other hand, culture talk tends to think of in- dividuals (from "traditional" cultures) in authentic and original terms, as if their identities are shaped entirely by the supposedly unchanging culture into which they are born, In so doing, it dehistoricizes the construction of po- litical identities, Rather than see contemporary Islamic politics as the outcome of an archaic culture, I suggest we see neither cul- ture nor politics as archaic, but both as very contemporary outcomes of equally contemporary conditions, relations, and conflicts, Instead of dismissing history and politics, as culture talk does, I suggest we place cultural debates in his- torical and political contexts, Terrorism is not born of the residue of a premodern culture in modern politics, Rather, terrorism is a modern construction, Even when it har- nesses one or another aspect of tradition and culture, the result is a modern ensemble at the service of a modern project, CULTURE TALK Is our world really divided into the modern and premod- ern, such that the former makes culture in which the latter is a prisoner? This dichotomy is increasingly prevalent in Western discussions of relations with Muslim-majority countries, It presumes that culture stands for creativity, for what being human is all about, in one part of the world, that called modern, but that in the other part, labeled premodern,'' culture stands for habit, for some kind of in- stinctive activity whose rules are inscribed in early found- ing texts, usually religious, and mummified in early arti- facts. When I read of Islam in the papers these days, I often feel I am reading of museumized peoples, of peoples who are said not to make culture, except at the beginning of creation, as some extraordinary, prophetic act. After that, it seems they—we Muslims—just conform to culture, Our culture seems to have no history, no politics, and no debates, It seems 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 salvation lies, as always, in philanthropy, in being saved from the out- side, If the premodern peoples are said to lack a creative ca- pacity, they are conversely said to have an abundant ca- pacity for destruction, This is surely why culture talk has become the stuff of front-page news stories, It is, after all, the reason we are told to give serious attention to culture, It is said that culture is now a matter of life and death, To one whose recent academic preoccupation has been the institutional legacy of colonialism, this kind of writing is deeply reminiscent of tracts from the history of modern colonization, This history assumes that people's public be- havior, 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? That only someone who thinks of a religious 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 sacred