notes from "good muslim, bad muslim" by mahmood mamdani (part I)

(7): By the beginning of the twentieth century, it was a European habit to distinguish between civilized wars and colonial wars. The lwas of war applied to wars among the civilized nation-states, but laws of nature were said to apply to colonial wars, and the extermination of the lower races was seen as abiological necessity. In A History of Bombing, Sven Lindqvist writes that bombing originated as amethod of war considered fit for use only against uncivilized adversarires. The first bomb ever dropped from an airplane was Italian, and it exploded on November 11, 1911, in an oasis outside Tripoli in North Africa. The first systematic aerial bombing was carried out by the British Royal Air Force agains the Somalis of 1920. In the Second World War, Germany observed the lwas of war against the western powers but not against Russia. As opposed to 3.5 percent of English And American prisoners of war who died in German captivity, 57 percent of Soviet prisoners--3.3 million in all--lost their lives.
(7): When the mass murder of European Jews began, the great Jewish populations were not in Germany but in Poland and Russia, where they made up 10 percent of the total population and up to 40 percent of the urban population 'in just those areas Hitler was after.' The Holocaust was born at the meeting point of two traditions that marked modern Western civilization: 'the anti-Semitic tradition and the tradition of genocide of colonized peoples.' The difference in the fate of the Jewish people was that they were to be exterminated as a whole. In that, they were unique--but only in Europe.
(8): The first genocide of the twentieth Century was the German annihilation of the Herero people in South West Africa in 1904.
(9): Fanon's critics know him by a single sentence from The Wretched of the Earth: "The colonized man liberates himself in and through violence." This was a description of the violence of the colonial system, of the fact that the violence was central to producing and sustaining the relationship between the settler and the native. It was a claim that anticolonial violence is not an irrational manifestation but belongs to the script of modernity and progress, that it is indeed a midwife of history. And last and most important, it was a warning that, more than celebrate this turning of the tables, we need to think through the full implications of victims becoming killers.
(30): Can there be a self-contained history of Western civilization? (...) Otto Neugebauer and Noel Swerdlow, two distinguished historians of science, explored the influence of 'astronomers associated with the observatory of Maragha in northwestern Iran...' They concluded in their now-classic 1984 work on the mathematical astronomy of Copernicus: 'In a very real sense, Copernicus can be looked upon as, if not the last, surely the most noted follower of the 'Maragha School.'... The contemporary history of science points to a larger historical gap: the place of Andalusia--Arabic-writing spain--in the historical study of the Renaissance.
(31): The reconsideration of African history began with the Senegalese savant, Cheikh Anta Diop, who wrote his major work, The African origin of Civilization, in the 1960s. Diop questioned the racist tendency to disolacte the history of pharaonic Egypt--in which roughly one quarter of the African population of the time lived--from its surroundings, particularly Nubia to the south, thereby denying the African historical identity of ancient Egypt.
(34-35, and whole chapter): important points about the constructedness of "culture," its situatedness in politics.
(36): The notion of a Judeo-Christian civilization crystallized as a post-Holocaust antidote to anti-Semitism. In the same way, I propose to distinguish between fundamentalism as a religious identity and political identities that use a religious idiom, such as political Christianity and political Islam, which are political identities formed through direct engagement with modern forms of power.
(39): Karen Armstrong concludes her historical discussion of fundamentalism with the observation that fundamentalism is not a throwback to a premodern culture but a response to an enforced secular modernity.
(45): Long before political Islam appeared in the twentieth century, Islamic reformers had felt that colonialism was the key challenge facing contemporary Muslims. The question was posed squarely by Jamal al-Din al-Afghani (1839-1897)... Whereas early-nineteenth century Islamic thinkers who embraced progress tended to be enamored with Western modernity and saw Britain and France as benign bearers of progres, al-Afghani highlighted modernity's contradictory impact. His religious vision came to be informed by a very modern dilemma. On the one hand, Muslims needed modern science, which they would have to learn from Europe. On the other, this very necessity was proof 'of our inferiority and decadence,' for 'we civilized ourselves by imitating the Europeans.' Al-AFghani had located the center of this historical dilemma in a society that had been subjected to colonialism: if being modern meant, above all, free rein for human creativity and originality, how could a colonial society modernize by imitation?
(47): ...the development of political Islam has been more the work of non-clerical political intellectuals such as Muhammad Iqbal and Mohammed Ali Jinnah in colonial India, and Abdul A'la Mawdudi, Sayyid Qutb, and Ali Shariati in postccolonial Pakistan, Egypt, and Iran respectiviely. The glaring exception was Ayatollah Khomeini. The secular discourse in Iran has tended to resemble that in western Christianity precisely because only in revolutionary Iran has clerical power received constitutional sanction. Whereas fundamentalist clergy were the pioneers of political Christianity, the pioneers of political Islam were not the religious ulama (scholars), but political intellectuals with an exclusively worldly concern.
(48): The shift from a reformist to a radical agenda in political Islam is best understood in the context of the tranistion from colonialism to postcolonialism, and can be highlighted by the history of a single mass organization, the Society of Muslim Brothers, in Egypt. The society was founded in MArch 1928 when Hassan al-Banna, a young teacher inspired by the ideas of al-Afghani, among others, heard a plea for action from workers in the town of Ismailiyyah. Echoing al-Afghani, he argued that Muslims must draw on their own historical and cultural resources instead of imitating other peoples. The six-point program of action that al-Banna devised focused on creating an extenisve wlefare organization and disavowed violence. It was the defeat of Arab armies in 1948 and the subsequent creation of the State of Israel that convinced the society to expend its energies beyond welfare to armed politics... Said to be a state within a state, with its own 'armies, hospitals, schools, factories, and enterprises,' the society was banned in Egypt on December 6, 1948, and relegalized in 1951. When young army officers... came to power in 1952, the society gave them full support. But the society soon split with Nasser and sided with those who called on the military to recognize the freedom to form political parties and to hand over power to a civilian government. Nasser moved to arrest those calling for a civilian order; more than one thousand society members were arrested. In Nasser's prions, some of them abandoned their vision of reform and created a new and potentially violent version of political Islam. If the reform vision was identified with the thought of Hassan al-Banna in the formative period of the society, the extremist turn was inspired by the pen of Sayyid Qutb (1906-1966), writing in prion. The experience of such brutal represssion under a secular government was one influence shaping the birth of a raedical orientation in Egyptian Islamic thought.