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

(51): Historically, the practice of the lesser jihad as central to a 'just struggle' has been occasional and isolated, marking points of crisis in Islamic history. After the first centuries of the creation of the Islamic states, there were only four widespread uses of jihad as a mobilizing slogan--until the Afghan jihad of the 1980s. The first was by the Kurdish warrior Saladin in response to the conquest and slaughter of the First Crusade in the eleventh century. The second widespread use was in the Senegambia region of West Africa in the late seventeenth century... Militant Islam began as a movement led by Sufi leaders (marabout) intent on unifying the region against the negative affects of the slave trade... The thrid time jihad was widely waged as a 'just war' was in the middle of the eighteenth century in the Arabian peninsula, proclaimed by Muhammad Ibn Abdul Wahhab (1702-1792), who gave his name to a contemporary doctrine identified with the House of Saud, Wahhabism. Ibn Wahhab's jihad was declared in a colonial setting, on an Arab peninsula that had been under Ottoman control from the sixteenth century. It was not a jihad against unbelievers. Its enemies included Sunni Muslim Ottoman colonizers and Shi'a 'heretics,' whereas its beneficiaries were a newly forged alliance between the ambitious House of Saud and the new imperial power on the horizon, Great Britain... The fourth widespread practice of jihad as an armed struggle was in the Sudan when the anticolonial leader, Muhammad Ahmed (1844-1885), declared himself al-Mahdi in 1881 and began to rally support against a Turko-Egyptian administration that was rapidly becoming absorbed into an expanding British empire. The battle for a jihad in this context was a battle against a colonial occupation that was both Muslim (Turko-Egyptian) and non-Muslim (British).... Armed with no more than spears and swords, the Mahdists won battle after battle, in 1885 reaching the capital, Khartoum, where they killed Charles Gordon, the British general and hero of the second Opium War with China (1856-1860), who was then governor in the Turko-Egyptian administration. [Of course,] once the victorious al-Mahdi moved to unite different regions..., the anti-colonial coalition disintegrated into warring factions in the north, and a marauding army of northern slavers in the south. As the war of liberation degenerated into slave raids, anarchy, famine, and disease reigned. It is estimated that the population of Sudan fell from around 7 million before the Mahdist revolt to somewhere between 2 and 3 million after the fall of the Mahdist state in 1898.
(53): As in Saudi Arabia and West Africa in previous centuries, the experience of Sudan also showed that the same jihad that had begun as the rallying cry of a popular movement could be turned around by those in power--at the expense of its supporters.
(53): Whereas an armed jihad was not known in the nine decades preceding the Afghan jihad of the 1980s, the call for one in radical Islamist thought can be traced to two key thinkers at the beginning of the cold War: the Pakistani journalist and politician Abdul A'la Mawdudi... and Sayyid Qutb.... As we have seen, Muhammad Iqbal had envisioned Muslim political identity not in terms of a nation-state, but as a borderless cultural community, the umma. The irony was the though the formation of Pakistan gave its Muslim inhabitants self-determination, this was as residents of a common territory and not as an umma. Instead of being the profound critique of territorial nationalism that Muhammad Iqbal had intended it to be, Pakistan was a territorial nation as banal as any other... Mawdudi seized upon this contradiction in his appeal to postcolonial Islmist intellectual. Mawdudi claimed that Pakistan was still Na-Pakistan. For Mawdudi, the Islamic state could not just be a territorial state of Muslims; it had to be an ideological state, an Islamic state. Mawdudi was the first to stress the imperative of jihad for contemporary Muslims, the first to claim that armed struggle was central to jihad and, unlike any major Muslim thinker before him, the first to call for a universal jihad."
(56): Qutb elaborated Mawdudi's thought and took it to a more radical conclusion. He made a distinction between modernity and Westernization, calling for an embrace of modernity but a rejection of Westernization...
(58): The Islamist intellectuals did not always win in the struggle against the ulama. In Iran, the ulama won a dramatic victory. The intellectual initiative in Iran is identified with the work of Ali Shariati, who sought to build on and preserve the revolutionary Shi'a identity as the identity of the oppressed...
(58): The difference between moderate and radical political Islam lay in the following: whereas moderates fought for social reforms within the system, radicals were convinced that no meaningful social reform would be possible without taking over the state. [Hassan Al-Banna vs. Sayyid Qutb]
(60): The key division among radical Islamist intellectuals concerns the status of sharia and thus of democracy in the state. Ijtihad refers to the institutionalized practice of interpreting the sharia to take into account changing historical circumstances... The attitude toward ijtihad the single most important issue that divides society-centered from state-centered--and progressive from reactionary--Islamists. Whereas society-centered Islamists insist that the practice of ijtihad be central to modern islamic society, state-centered Islamists are determined that the 'gates of ijtihad remain forever closed... The emphasis on ijtihad is also key to the thought of Sayyid Qutb and sitinguishes his intellectual legacy from the state-centered thought of Mawdudi. My argument is that the theoretical roots of Islamist political terror lie in the state-centered, not the society-centered, movement."
(61): Culture Talk sees fundamentalism as a resistance to modernity; its critics point out that fundamentalism is as modern as modernity--that it is actually a response to modernity. Both sides, however, seek an explanation of political terrorism in culture, whether modern or premodern. Both illustrate different sides of the same culturalist argument, which downplays the political encounter that I think is central to understanding political terrorism.
(63-64): [in 1975], two major influences, each a lesson from the war in Indochina, informed [a shift in US strategy]. One was drawn by the president of the US, the second by Congress. The executive lesson was summed up as the Nixon Doctrine; the legislative lesson was passed as the Clark Amendment... The Nixon Doctrine held that 'Asian boys must fight Asian wars.' It summed up the lesson of more than a decade of US involvement in Indochina. More specifically, it weight the Vietnam debacle against the conduct of relatively successful proxy wars in Laos... After Tet, the United States tried to bring the lesson of Laos to Vietnam: during the last five years of the war, from 1970 to 1975, 'Americanization' gave way to Vietnamization'
(66): Even at the end of the war, few Americans knew that the US Air Force had fought 'the largest air war in military history over Laos, dropping 2,1 million tons of bombs over this small, impoverished nation--the same tonnage that Allied powers dropped on Germany and Japan during World War II.'