citizen and subject, mahmood mamdani

(7): apartheid was but an idealized form of rule that the British and French had pioneered--institutional segregation (indirect rule) [doctrine of difference, which aimed at evolution of separate institutions appropriate to the African spirit]

(8): three questions

1. to what extent was structure of power in contemporary Africa shaped in the colonial period rather than the anticolonial revolt?
2. was not racial domination mediate through ethnically organized local powers?
3. is it not the burden of protest to transcend these differences without denying them

(8-9): four objectives

1. question the writing of history by analogy
2. to establish that apartheid was the generic form of the colonial state in AFrica
3. to underline the contradictory character of tthnicity
4. the deracilization of the bifurcated State does not bring with it democratization

(9): critique of dependency theory as a 'unilinear social science' [the charges made in this section feel misplaced]

(12-13): history by analogy versus history as a process [but supposition of universalism? by straddling abstract universalism and intimate particularism, you have an easy answer--but are you really willing to find yourself in the 'middle' on the question of speaking across contexts, etc?]

(16): direct rule -- europe's initial response to the problem of administering colonies; civilizing mission; an unmediated despotism (favored by settler, agrarian capital--which wanted land and free labour)

(17): indirect rule -- mode of domination over a free peasantry; land remained customary; market restricted to products of labour; a legal dualism; a mediated despotism (favored by mining, finance and commerce--which wanted a docile-ish labour force, i.e., migrants)

(18): indirect rule was also a response to resistance, of course

(19-21): four moments

1. the colonial State -- protector of the society of the colons
2. the anticolonial struggle
   
3. independence -- tended to deracialize the State, but not civil society (affirmative action)
4. collapse of embryonic civil society

(22): importance of land being defined as a customary holding, which had three effects

1. African was containerized as a tribesperson
2. colonial powers seized upon the most authoriatarian/monarchical of existing traditions--an ideological construct that mirrored their own practices
3. the Native Authorities were marked by force to an unusual degree--after all, their ultimate authority was the central civil power (a decentralized despotism)

(24): this form of rule/State shaped the nature of resistance that it provoked (peasant insurrectionists fought against a State-enforced version of the customary)

(26): the conservative States removed the sting of racism but kept the Native Authorities intace; the radical States tried to eliminate the Native Authorities but tightenened central control over these communities, intensifying extra-economic pressures on the peasantry

(28): in South Africa, because of the relative strength of industrialization/civil society, the creation of the bifurcated State required an above-average level of force

(29): strong industrialization also meant that cities were the site of struggle

(29-): five developments led to 1994

1. shift to apartheid rule in late 40s -- forced removals
2. this notwithstanding, proletarianization and urbanization continued
3. decade of peace ended in 1973 and 1976
4. original social base was migrant labour--but by 1990, rural migrants appeared as country bumpkins
5. struggle reached a stalemeate by mid-1980s

(31): the struggle lacked a perspective with which to understand urban-rural tensions [voluntarist?]

(37): 'cotton famine' --> colonization [not really situated in the context of the 'great depression', but idea is there]

(38): indirect rule in equatorial Africa was the legacy of the Asian experience and the experience of 19th c. Africa

(39): customary was neighter arbirarily invented nor faithfully reproduced

(39): key--'colonial notion of precolonial was a reflection of the decentralized despotism it was striving to create'

(43): key--colonial period brought the village-based despot, shorn of rule-based restraint, into existence -- no longer were peers or the people a 'check' on their authority

(48): from multiple to singularly despotic -- colonialism built on the 19th century conquest states

(49): importance of 1857 as a pivot, from civilizing mission to Native Authority

(50): what was distinctive, about colonialism, was the newfound 'scope of the customary'

(54): the 'Cheif' as petty legislateor, administrator, judge, policeman

(57) the American car and pilgrammage to Mecca

(59): exactly--indirect rule as colonialism's foot-soldiers run amok

(61): gave rise to a bifurcated reality -- with customary law on the one sdie, and modern law on the other

(67-68, 102): both political resistance and economic reasons (solution to labour problem, for mines) play their role in the fashioning of indirect rule in South Africa [even settlers can get on board, once they've expanded and are looking for 'tribal stability']

(100): apartheid was an attempt to 'freeze' detrabilization, which threatened to destabilize the National Party gov't

(109): the legal dualism was, of course, a reflection of the dual forms of power

(110): two ways in which this was different

1. previously autonomous social domains came within the scope of the NA's authority
2. any challenge to chiefly power would have to reckon with the clout of the central authority

(130): minmalist reforms (Chad, CAR, Zaire, Togo, Kenya, Nigeria) vs. maximalist reforms (Neiger, Mali, Ivory Coast, Senegal, Nigeria, Tanzania)

(135-136): imp--radical regimss as the 'inheritors' of the colonial tradition of rule by decree [problem of the alternative--too easy a critique, here, to say some form of democratic negotiation would have been 'better'. but that doesn't mean, of course, that the centralizing position is defensible, either]

(139): three distortions, the NA brought

1. notion of community rights very one-sided -- couldn't recognize multiple rights in land
2. hitherto rural powers were confused with proprietary rights
3. migrants/strangers were no longer allowed access to the land

(141): straight line from the permanent Settlement to the Buganda Agreement of 1900, which sought to create a landed aristocracy

(143): again, settler capitalists were checked by (1) peasant resistance; (2) strategy of other fractions of capital (example, here, of the Mau Mau)

(144): coercion was central to the customary

(145-146): comment on dependency theory--the 'deepening' of markets (all that dependency theorists see), but customary authority also gave some of these peasants independent access to the means of subsistence

(148-165): importance of 'unfree labour'

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

(159): As the turf war culminated in a seesaw battle for Kabul, the civil war turned vicious. When it became obvious that Hikmatyar's forces were losing ground, the Pakistani army shifted its backing to the Taliban, a group mainly comprising students it had trained since 1980 in madrassahs in the North-West Frontier Province. The ISI saw the Taliban as amenable to tight control and thus a preferable substitute for the now discredited Islamist coalition led by Hikmatyar.
(161): An old man in a mosque in Kandahar...confided about the Taliban to Eqbal Ahmed, "They have grown in darkness amidst death. They are angry and ignorant, and hate all things that bring joy to life."
(172): The shift in Hizbullah's ideological and political orientation toward a secular notion of the state was the result of a leadership struggle that followed two major changes in the region. The first was the end of Israeli occupation in Lebanon and, following it, the end of the civil war (1985-1989) between Hizbullah and Amal, two organizations vying for political leadership of the Shi'a community in Lebanon. The second was the leadership change in Iran after the death of Ayatollah Khomeini, which led to a less-ideological political orientation.
(172): The Hizbullah case reinforces the lesson of the contemporary civil war in Algeria: that reform is better engineered from within than imposed from without.
(175): One can conclude, therefore, that political Islam is a modern political phenomenon, not a leftover of traditional culture. To be sure, one can trace several practices in political Islam--opium production, madrasah education, and the very notion of jihad--to the era before modern colonization. In fact, opium, madrassah education, and al-jihad al-akbar were all reshaped and remade within modern institutions as they were put in the service of a global American campaign against the "evil empire."
(181): On September 22, 1980, when Saddam Hussein invaded Iran with enthusiastic US support, he initiated a war that saw the first use of chemical weapons since the US invasion of Vietnam. Nicholas D. Kristof of the NYT reported that "the United States shipped seven strains of anthrax to Iraq from 1978 to 1988." Training in the use of chemical and biological agents had been provided to Iraqi military officers as early as the 1960s. An official army letter published int he late 1960s noted that "the US army trained 19 Iraqi military officers in the United States in offensive and defensive chemical, biological, and radiological warfare from 1957 to 1967.
(183): [on Iran-Iraq] The sentiment behind it was brazenly articulated by Kissinger in the middle of the Iraq-Iran War, perhaps because he was already out of office: "We hope they kill one another."
(183): Hussein became an example of the price that must be paid by any regime that violates the terms of its alliance with the United States. The 1991 Gulf War was literally a punishment. It was the first time the United States applied the military doctrine it had forged in Laos during the long war from 1964 to 1974: "to compensate for the absence of ground forces by an aerial bombardment of unprecedented intensity, without regard to the 'collateral damage.'"... Former attorney general Ramsey Clark charged that the administration used "all kinds of weapons in violation of international law," from explosives to depleted uranium to cluster bombs. As Iraq's infrastructure was comprehensively targeted, little thought was given to civilian casualties... Eric Hoskins, a Canadian doctor... reported that the bombardment of 1991 had "effectively terminated everything vital to human survival in Iraq--electricity, water, sewage systems, agriculture, industry, and health care."
(184): But George H.W. Bush hesitated to replace Saddam... [He] faced a double dilemma. On the one hand, the Kurdish minority was the group best organized... to take advantage of Saddam's overthrow, but its objective was a Kurdish state that would also include parts of Turkey, a close U.S. ally... On the other hand, there was also the possibility that Iraq's majority Shi'a population, which had religious and cultural ties to Iran, would assert itself, surely dimming America's hopes of isolating Iran. So Bush feared bringing even a semblance of democracy to Iraq. The alternative was to continue punishing Iraq in peacetime, so as to keep the regime from arming effectively against anyone but its own population.
(185): By the time the second war against Iraq started in 2003, the peacetime bombing of Iraq had lasted longer (since 1990) than had the US invasion of Vietnam or the war in Laos. In October 1998, US officials told the WSJ they would soon run out of targets: "We're down to the last outhouse." That was two months before President Clinton... decided to unleash a round-the-clock bombing of Iraq. Round-the-clock bombing began on December 16,1998, and ended on December 19. The mission was called Operation Desert Fox...
(185-186): The UN adopted economic sanctions as part of its 1945 charter, as a way of maintaining global order. Since then, sanctions have been used 14 times, 12 of those since the collapse of the USSR. But Iraq represents the first time a country has been comprehensively sanctioned since the Second World War, meaning that virtually every aspect of its exports and imports was controlled by the UN and subject to a US veto.
(186-187): As the concomitant humanitarian crisis deepened, Iraq and the UN finally came to an agreement on an oil-for-food program.... Iraq was allowed to sell a net amount of oil over six months (initially $1.2 billion net, later $3 billion net). The revenues went directly into a UN account. The United States and Brtain required that nearly one third of this (30 percent from 1996 to 2000, 25% thereafter) be diverted into a compensation fund to pay outsiders for losses allegedly incurred because of Iraq's invasion of Kuwait. Another 10 percent went to pay for UN operating expenses in Iraq. The remainder was controlled solely by the UN controller who disbursed funds to contractors and suppliers of foodstuffs and basic medicines approved by the sanctions committee. But as a working paper prepared for the UN Sub-Comission on the... noted, "Of the revenue from sale, only about half ended up going towards the purchase of humanitarian goods, the majority of the rest going towards reparations and administrative costs..."
(187-188): The effect of comprehensive sanctions was deadly. Because they followed on the heels of a war that had targeted and destroyed Iraq's physical infrastructure, there was a veritable social and demographic disaster. Yet public knowledge... was slow in coming. Part of the reason lay in the fact that the UN human-rights rapporteur... was limited to identifying human-rights violations by the government of Iraq; the rapporteur was prohibited by mandate from looking at human-rights violations as a result of the sanctions.
(189): Even in this age of mass murder, the gravity of these figures should not escape our attention... By 2000, there was a consensus in both the UN and the human-rights community about the excess child deaths directly linked to sanctions: the June 2000 report to the UN Sub-Comission on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights acknowledged that the total deaths "directly attributed to the sanctions" ranged "from half a million to a million and a half, with the majority of the dead being children." Even the minimum estimate was three times the number of Japanese killed during the US atomic bomb attacks.
(190): How and by whom was such a death toll justified for so long?... The simple fact is that the United States consistently used its veto on the Security Council 661 Committee... to minimize the humanitarian goods entering the country... [T]he reason it gave most often was concern over dual use... [A]s of September 2001, the United States had blocked "nearly 200 humanitarian contracts." The most notorious were those needed to repair the damaged water and sanitation systems, given that most excess child deaths were "a direct or indirect result of contaminated water."
(191-192): Forced to take reponsibility for a policy they could neither defend nor influence, many of those in charge of implementing Iraq policy at the UN opted to resign, one after another. The first to resign was Dennis Halliday..., declaring: "We are in the process of destroying an entire society. It is as simple and as terrifying as that. It is illegal and immoral."
(194): Although the use of napalm was banned by the United Nations in 1980, the United States never signed the agreement.
(199): Hersh noted a February 2003 poll showing that 72 percent of Americans believed it was likely that Saddam Hussein was personally involved in the 9/11 attacks.
(204-205): It was when Boutros-Ghali began to assert his independence in practice that Washington's patience ran out. He criticized Washington's preoccupation with Bosnia--"a war of the rich"--and its neglect of Somalia, where "one third of the population was likely to die of hunger," and Rwanda, where he accused the United States of "standing idly by"... In the end, Washington successfully replaced Boutros-Ghali with another African, Kofi Annan... Whereas Boutros-Ghali had been unwilling to follow the NATO command and approve American demands for aerial bombing of the Serbs on a scale more than symbolic, Kofi Annan readily obliged when he stood in for Boutros-Ghali.
(210): The United States supported the call for an international tribunal to try Khmer Rouge leaders for war crimes. When it came to drafting the terms of the tribunal, Washington demanded that the mandate of the court be restricted to the period from 1975 to 1979. Had the years before or after been included, the United States would have run the risk of itself being charged with war crimes. Any scrutiny of the pre-1975 period would have directed the court's attention to the year's of US carpet bombing in Indochina, just as an investigation of the post-1979 period would have brought to light the political cover the United States provided the Khmer Rouge, both at the UN and internationally, against the Vietnamese, who invaded Cambodia in 1978.
(215): In a recent interview with the Israeli historian Benny Morris, former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak spoke of Palestinians in words that few American racists would dare utter in print: "They are products of a culture... in which to tell a lie creates no dissonance. They don't suffer from the problem of telling lies that exists in Judeo-Christian culture. Truth is seen as an irrelevant category. There is only that which serves your purpose and that which doesn't."
(217): Unlike crime, political acts make sense only when linked to collective greivances. Whether we define them as acts of terror or of resistance, we need to recognize a feature common to political acts: they appeal for popular support and are difficult to sustain in the absence of it. If there is a logic behind the practice of collective punishment, it is the acknowledgement that collective punishment can only be a response to political acts, not criminal deeds.
(222): We need to recognize the suicide bomber, first and foremost, as a category of soldier. Does not the suicide bomber join both aspects of our humanity, particularly as it has been fashioned by political modernity, in that we are willing to subordinate life--both our own and that of others--to objectives we consider higher than life? Suicide bombing needs to be understood as a feature of modern political violence rather than stigmatized as a mark of barbarism.

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

(137): The madrassahs were both private and government-funded, and ranged from those who thought of Islamic piety in religious terms to those for whom Islam was also a political calling. In spite of their proliferation, military training was mainly carried out in army camps. The trainees were divided into two groups: Afghan mujahideen and non-Afghan jihadi volunteers. Brigadier Muhammad Yusuf, a chief of the Afghan cell of ISI for four years, confirmed: "During my four years, some 80,000 mujahideen were trained." Ahmed Rashid estimates that 35,000 Muslim radicals from forty-three Islamic countries fought for the mujahideen between 1982 and 1992. United States authorities estaimated that "at least 10,000" received "some degree of military training." A LA Times team of reporters that did a four-continent survey of the Afghan jihad estimated that "no more than 5,000 had actualy fought." Between the withdrawal of Soviet troops in February 1989 and the collapse of Kabul's Communist government in April 1992, another round of "at least 2,500 foreigners" recieved "military instruction of some sort." That made for a total of 7,500, no mean figure... Around this core was a larger group: tens of thousands more studied in the thousands of new madrassahs in Pakistan. Eventually, Rashid concludes, "more than a hundred thousand Muslim radicals around the world had direct contact with Pakistan and Afghanistan."
(138): The real damage the CIA did was not the providing of arms and money but the privatization of information about how to produce and spread violence--the formation of private militias--capable of creating terror.
(141): Steve Galster at the National Security Archive calculated that Congress ultimately provided "nearly 3 billion dollars in covert aid for the mujahideen, more than all other CIA covert operations in the 1980s combined."
(141-142): Besides these external funds, there were the funds generated by the drug trade... Alfred McCoy traced the different steps in the drug economy, beginning with peasant production: "As the Mujahideen guerillas seized territory inside Afghanistan, they ordered peasants to plant opium as a revolutionary tax." It no doubt helped that for the grower the price of opium was five times that for wheat. Also, there was no dearth of processing facilities: "Across the border in Pakistan, Afghan leaders and local syndicates under the protection of Pakistan intelligence operated hundreds of heroin laboratories." Writing in The Nation in 1988, Lawrence Lifschultz pointed out that the heroin laboratories, located in North-West Frontier Province, were operated under the protection of General Fazle Haq, an intimate of General Zia. The next link in the chain was transport, which was provided by trucks from the Pakistan army's National Logistics Cell (NLC)... Finally, the CIA provided the legal cover without which this illict trade could not have grown to monumental proportions.
(143): Prior to the Afghan jihad, there was no local production of heroin in either Afghanistan or Pakistan. The production there was of opium, a very different drug, which was directed to small, rural, regional markets. By the end of the Afghan jihad, the picture had changed drastically: the Pakistan-Afghanistan borderlands becamed the world's leading producers of both opium and processed heroin, the source of "75 percent of the world's opium"... The big push came after 1985. Accounting for less than 5 % of global opium production in 1980, the region accounted for 71 percent of it by 1990, according to this same report.
(143): The worst... was Gulbuddin Hikmatyar, who received more than half of CIA covert resources, estimated to be worth $2 billion over the ten-year war, and quickly came to dominate the Afghan mujahideen... Hikmatyar became the Pakistani army's favorite "contract revolutionary." When introduced to the CIA by the ISI, HIkmatyar was leading an armed guerilla force called Hizb-i-Islami, a creation of the ISI that had little support inside Afghanistan... With a guaranteed long-term subsidy, the Hizb-i-Islami grew into the mujahideen's "largest guerilla army," one that Hikmatyar used "to become Afghanistan's leading drug lord."
(143): Hikmatyar's chief rival was Mullah Nasim Akhundzada, known as the "King of Heroin."... [He] decreed that half of all peasant holdings be planted to opium. He "issued opium quotas to every landowner" and responded "by killing or castrating those who defied his directives."
(150): The Jamaat-e-Ulema-Islam (JUI), a key party in the alliance behind the Afghan jihad, became a part of Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto's governing coalition in 1993. The JUI was the party of Pakistani Deobandis and was the sponsor of the Taliban, the ideological product of Deobandi madrassahs. Entry into government gave the JUI its first opportunity to build close relations with both the ISI and the army. The harvest came soon after: when the Taliban took power in Kabul in 1995, they handed over the training camps to the JUI.
(153): ...heroin-addicted population had gone from negligible in 1979 to 1.3 million by 1985...
(153): There were seven mujahideen groups in all. They reflected every kind of fisssure, internal and external, to which the Afghan resistance was subject. The internal differences in the Afghan jihad were of two different kinds. Teh first involved regional (north vs. south), linguistic (Farsi vs. Pashtun), and ethnic (Pashtun vs. non-Pashtun) differences... A different kind of internal division arose from doctrinal differences, as between Shi'a and Sunni... The overriding ideological difference among the seven mujahideen groups was between two political points of view: traditionalist nationalists and Islamist ideologues. The traditionalists generally came from the religious leadership, whereas the ideologues came mainly from the ranks of political intellectuals.
(154): Two political objectives, one regional, the other global, shaped US policy in Afghanisan. The regional objective was to contain the influence of the Iranian Revolution. This was accomplished with two regional alliances against Iran, one with Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, the other with Iraq. Whereas the United States saw Islamist social movements as a threat, it was eager to reinforce Islamist--Sunni, not Shi'a--state projects. The American strategy provided a political opening for the intelligence agencies of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia to promote exaggeratedly anti-Shi'a Sunni doctrines, chief among them the Wahhabi doctrine from Saudi Arabia and the Deobandi doctrine from Pakistan.
(154-155): ...the Regan administration showed no interest in a negotiated or compromise settlement. It wanted to ally itself with internationalist, militantly anti-Communist Islamist ideologues rather than moderately pragmatic Muslims, a view shared by the ISI.
(156): The seven resistance groups that made up the Afghan jihad were divded into two opposing political constellations, one traditional-nationalist, the other Islamist... The leadership of the traditionalist bloc came from the historic elite of Afghanistan, who were either heads of the Sufi orders or traditional alims versed in Islamic jurisprudence. None of these three mainstream groups received extrenal assistance of any significance. The National Islamic Front of Afghanistan, led by the head of the Qadariyya Sufi order, was considered too "nationalist" and "insufficiently Islami" to recieve funds. The Afghan National Liberation Front was led by the family that headed the Naqshbandi tariqa. It was more of a centrist group..."hardly existed as a military force." The only traditional-nationalist group with a military presence on the ground was called the Movement of the Islamic Revolution... its commanders (in particular, Mullah Masim Akhundzada of the Helmland Valley) were also among the largest drug lords inside Afghanistan.... ...Leaders of the four Islamist groups came from students and faculty active in the Jamiat-i-Islami, the parent Islamist organization at Kabul University in the 1970s. The first split from the Jamiat came in 1975 and led to the formation of Hikmatyar's Hizb-i-Islami (Hizb). A later split from the Hizb led to the creation of the Khalis faction. The fourth Islamist organization was led by Abd al-Rabb al-Rasul Sayyaf, who had studiet at Al-Azhar... The key parties in the Islamist constellation were the Jamiat and the Hizb. After the split with the Hizb, Jamiat had turned into the "main voice for non-Pashtuns, especially Persian speakers."... Led by the most successful of the commanders, Ahmed Shah Massoud, Jamiat developed into "the most powerful party of the resistance" over the course of the war. In spite of that, the Jamiat was not the preferred recipient for CIA support. There was one important reason for this: Jamiat respresented the moderate center...
(159): The United States and its allies had to continue to support a myriad of groups if only to ensure that the jihad continued to have an even chance. The support of different groups turned out to be support for several wars fought by rival groups. This is why as soon as the Soviet army withdrew from Afghanistan and victory seemed at hand, the CIA-supported jihad mutated into a civil war. With the traditionalists marginalized, the Soviet withdrawal of 1989 led to a turf battle between different Islamist groups, pitting the extremists led by Gulbuddin Hikmatyar and the Hizb against the moderates in the Jamiat led by Burhaneddin Rabbani and his spectacularly successful field commander, Ahmed Shah Massoud.

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

(71): Congo became independent on June 30, 1960. Less than two weeks later... its richest province, Katanga, seceded... Led by Moish Tshombe... trained by officers from Belgium, the former colonial power there. Katanga's mines were operated by a Belgian company... in which the Rockefellers were soon to acquire a major interest. Late in the summer of 1960, the Eisenhower administration concluded that Patrice Lumumba... was 'an African Castro' and must be eliminated... On August 18, following a National Security Council briefing, Eisenhower asked his aides whether 'we can't get rid of this guy.' (... [Belgium/US collusion to kill Lumumba]) With Lumumba out of the way, in December 1962 President Kennedy concurred with the use of UN troops to quash the Katangan rebellion. In May 1963, a grateful Kennedy welcomed Mobutu in the White House: 'General, if it hadn't been for you, ... the Communists would have taken over. (72): By the end of 1963, anti-Mobutu rebellion broke out in Kwilu, led by Pierre Mulele, a prominent Lumumbist. The rebels were poorly armed, and there was no evidence of outside involvement. But the CIA did intervene on the government's behalf... By October 1964, the CIA estimated the humber of mercenaries in Conto at more than one thousand... Washington was clear from the outset that there would by no US citizens among the mercenaries. Without American support, however, the mercenaries would have been lame. Four US C-130s with American crews transported mecenaries and their equipment across the west-east span of Congo, roughly the same distance as from Paris to Moscow.
(77): [In Angola], Washington was determined to block any possibility of the MPLA coming to powe, having identified it as a Soviety proxy... Washington's preferred option was to give covert support to the two movements that were opposed to MPLA: the Front for National Liberation of Angola (FNLA), which operated more or less as a surrogate of Congo's General Mobutu, and the Union for the Total Dependence of Angola (Unita), which had few external contacts apart from fledgling ones with apartheid South Africa.... Meanwhile, instead of fighting MPLA, FNLA and Unita took to fighting each other. Faced with an ignominious end, Kissinger opted to back a proxy invasion by regular South African forces.... South African troops entered Angola in mid-October 1975, and Cuban troops followed in early November.
(80): On February 10, 1976, the US Congress passed the Clark Amendment, prohibiting any covert aid to any side in the Angolan civil war. The next month, on March 31, the UN Security Council branded South Africa the aggressor and demanded that it compensate Angola for war damages...
(81): The Angolan fiasco reinforced the lessons of Vietnam, but those lessons provoked contradictory interpretations by the executive branch and by Congress, each asserting a different influence on post-Vietnam US foreign policy... Pulbic resistance... was echoed in Congress with the election of a host of antiwar legislators and led to a number of changes: the draft was abolished; the Pentagon's budget for special operations was cut; the CIA's paramilitary capabilities were reduced and its activities subjected to congressional oversight; and the president was required by the War Powers Act to seek congressional approval before any extended commitment of US troops overseas.... The clearest expression of this surge in antiwar sentiment was the amendment of the Freedom of Information act and the passage of the Clark Amendment. The two years and three months between the passage of the 1973 War Powers Act and the 1976 Clark Amendment marked the high point of the antiwar movement that swept the United States.
(83): Enacted in 1976, the Clark Amenment was repealed in 1985.
(87): CIA chief William J. Casey eventually took the lead in orchestrating support for terrorist and proterrorist movements around the world--from Renameo in Mozambique to Unita in Angola, and from contras in Nicaragua to the mujahideen in Afgahnistan--through third and fourth parties. In a nutshell, after defeat in Vietnam and the Watergate scandal at home, the US government decided to harness and even cultivate terrorists in the struggle against guerillas who had come to power and regimes it considered pro-Soviet.
(91): A State Department consultant who interviewed refugees and displaced persons concluded that Renamo was responsible for 95% of the instances of civilian abuse inthe war in Mozambique, including the murder of as many as ten thousand civilians.
(91): Political terror had brought a kind of war never befroe seen in Africa. The hallmark of the terror was that it targeted civilian life: blowing up infrastructure such as bridges and power stations, destroying health and educational centers, mining paths and fields, and kidnapping civilians--particularly children--to press-grang them into recruits. Terrorism distinguished itself from guerilla struggle by making civilians its preferred target. If left-wing guerillas claimed that they were like fish in water, right-wing terrorists were determined to drain the water--that is, civilian life--so as to isolate and eliminate the fish. What is now termed collateral damage was not an unfortunate by-product of the war; it was the very point of terrorism.
(95): The CIA and the Pentagon called terrorism by another name: "low-intensity conflict" (LIC). The move from counterinsurgency to low-intensity conflict signified a strategic reorientation in US war strategy...
(97): With the shift in military strategy to rollback, a clear distinction was made between counterinsurgency and low-intensity conflict: the ambition of counterinsurgency during the Vietnam era had been to defeat revolutionary insurgents; LIC aimed to undermine revolutionary governments, not just movements.
(109): Following the 1982 coup that installed Montt as dictator of Guatemala, Pat Roberston and other Christian-right leaders lobbied succssfully for the resumption of US military aid to the country. when Montt's army annihilated entire Indian villages, Gospel Outreach members defended the 'scorched earth' campaign in religious terms. One enthusiastic pastor put it: 'The army doesn't massacre the Indians. It massacres demons, and the Indians are demons possessed; they are communists.'
(110-111): Israel emerged as a significant military supplier to El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua in the late seventies and early eighties after those countries were found guilty of human rights violations and the Carter administration terminated military aid to all three... As 'a quid pro quo for El Salvador's decision to move its embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem,' Israel supplied the military regime 'with over 80% of its weaponry for the next several years, including napalm for use against the Salvadoran civilian population'... Israel moved into Nicaragua as soon as the Carter administration cut off aid: 'Israel sold Somoza 98% of the weapons he used against the Nicaraguan population' between September 1978 and his ouster the following July.
(111): Israel's military links with Iran began with the Iraq-Iran War... Retired General Aharon Yariv... told a conference at Tel Aviv University in late 1986 that 'it would be a good idea if the Iran-Iraq wars ended in a tie, but it would be even better if it continued.' Israel and the United States shared the same strategic objective: to prolong the Iraq-Iran War as long as possible. To realize that objective, each armed a different side.
(116): [In Nicaragua] When it came to the practice of terror, governments and private groups shared the same minimal objective: to put into question the ability of a government in power to ensure security of person and property for the population it claimed to represent.
(118) [In sum] The United States' embrace of terror can be plotted as a learning curve that went through three successive phases of the late cold War, from southern Africa to Central America and central Asia. Each phase can be identified with a dicstinct lesson. If the patronage of terror in the opening phase was shy, more like the benign and permissive tolerance of the practices of an aggressive regional ally--apartheid south Africa--the Unites States moved to a bold and brazen embrace of terror when it came to the counter-revolutionaries in Central America, combining it with patronage of an illict trade in cocaine as the preferred way of financing its covert operations. It was, however, in the closing phase of the Cold War that the United States came to see the embrace of terror as the means to an international public good. It did this in two ways: by privatizing and by internationalizing the main operations in the war. Whereas both tendencies were already present in US support of the contras, each truly blossomed only with the anti-Soviet war in Afghanistan, which was so ideologized that it was seen less and less as a national-liberation struggle and more and more as an international crusade: a jihad.
(120-121): The revolutions of 1979 had a profound influence on the conduct of the Afghan War. The Iranian revolution led to a restructuring of relations between the United States and political Islam. Prior to it, America saw the world in rather simple terms: on one side was the Soviet Union and militant Third World nationalism, which America regarded as a Soviet tool; on the other side was political Islam, which America considered an unqualified ally in the struggle against the Soviet Union. Thus, the United States supported the Sarekat-i-Islam against Sukarno in Indonesia, the Jamaat-i-Islaami against Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto in Pakistan, and the Society of Muslim Brothers against Nasser in Egypt.... Israeli intelligence allowed Hamas top operate unhindered during the first intifada--letting it open a university and bank accounts and even possibly ehelping it with funding--only to confront a stronger Hamas as the organizer of the second intifada.
(126-127): 'literally days after the Soviet invasion, Carter was on the telephone with Zia offering him hundreds of millions of dollars in economic and military aid in exchange for cooperation in helping rebels.' Zia held out for more, and the Carter-Zia relationship remained lukewarm. The real warming came with the Reagan administration, which offered Pakistan 'a huge, six-year economic and military aid package which elevated Pakistan to the third largest recipient of US foreign aid'--after Israel and Egypt.
(127-128): Historically, the tradition of 'lesser jihad' itself comprises two different--and conflicting--notions. The first is that of a just war against occupiers, whether nonbelievers or believers. There were four such just wars: Saladin's jihad against the Crusaders in the twelfth century, the Sufi jihad against enslaving aristocracies in West Africa in the seventeenth century, the Wahabi jihad against Ottoman colonizers in the Arabian peninsula in the eighteenth century, and the Mahdi's anticolonial struggle against the combination of Turko-Egyptian and British power in late nineteenth century Sudan... The second, conflicting, tradition is that of a permanent jiad against doctrinal tendencies in Islam officially considered 'heretic.' This is a tradition with little historical depth in Islam.... [T[he notion of a standing jihad--a state institution in defense of state interests--is identified less with historical Islam than with the later history of the House of Saud and the state of Saudi Arabia.
(128): The Afghan jihad was in reality an American jihad, but it became that fully only with Reagan's second term in office. In March 1985, Reagan signed National Security Decision Directive 166, authorizing 'stepped-up covert military aid to the mujahideen, and it made clear that the secret Afghan war had a new goal: to defeat troops in Afghanistan through covert action and encourage a Soviet withdrawal.' The redefined war was taken over by CIA chief William Casey, who undertook three significant measures in 1986. The first was to convince Congress to step up American involvement by providing the mujahideen with American advissers and American-made Stinger antiaircraft missiles. The second was to expand the Islamic guerilla war from Afghanistan into the Soviet republics of Tajikisan and Uzbekistan, a decision reversed when the Soviet Union threatened to attack Pakistan in retaliation. The thrid was to step up the recruitment of radical Islamists from around the world to come train in Pakistan and fight alongside the mujahideen.
(131): Beyond the front-line proxy states and their intelligence agencies, increasingly the intermediaries were private institutions, both religious and secular. The overall effect was progressively to privatize the war on an international basis. From this dynamic emerged the forces that carried out the operation we know as 9/11.
(132): The numbers recruited and trained were impressive by any reckoning: the estimate of foreign radicals 'directly influenced by the Afghan jihad' is upwards of one hundred thousand.
(133): Though Osama bin Laden had been a student of Sheikh Abdullah Azzam, the first Afghan-Arab gatekeeper of the jihad in the mid-eighties, a break between Azzam and bin Laden came twoards the end of the Afghan jihad. The parting of the ways was the result of a disagreement in 1989 over the future of the jihad: bin Laden 'envisioned an all-Arab legion, which eventually could be used to wage jihad in Saudi Arabia and Egypt,' whereas Azzam 'strongly opposed making war against fellow Muslims.' Soon after, Azzam and two of his sons were blown up by a car bomb as they were driving to a mosque in Peshawar. A meeting was held toward the end of 1989 in the town of Khost to decide on the future of the jihad... [A] new organization was created in the meeting[:]... al-Qaeda, 'the Base.'

(134): [T]he Tablighi Jamaat, with headquarters in Pakistan and branches all over the world, [was] founded in 1926 by a Muslim scholar, Maulana Mohammad Ilyas, to 'purify' borderline Muslims 'who had retained many of the customs and religious practices from their Hindu past.

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.'

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.

mamdani on islam:
The public debate that followed 9/11 was defined by two prominent semi-official intellectuals, Samuel Huntington of Harvard University and Bernard Lewis of Princeton University. As in every debate, their disagreement unfolded within a common frame. The ground they shared has come to define political “common sense” in the United States. This common sense is driven by a presumption that the world we live in is divided in two: between those modern and those pre-modern. It is said that those modern make their culture; they have a reflexive attitude to it; they can separate the good from the bad, build on the good and correct the bad; their culture develops historically; and the story of that historical development is what we call progress. The pre-modern peoples, in contrast, are said to be born into a culture; they are said to have a tendency to internalize their culture rather than have a critical attitude to it. Rather than make their culture historically, they seem condemned to live it uncritically, and content to pass it on from one generation to another. Pre-modern peoples are said to wear culture as a badge, or to suffer from it, like a twitch, even a fever. That fever used to be thought of as tropical, now it is more likely to be imagined as desert fever. Prior to 9/11, Africans were considered the quintessentially pre-modern people; now the characterization is more likely to be use with regard to Muslims. It is said that except for a founding prophetic moment and some monuments, Muslims tend to live their culture as a destiny. The claim is that you can read the politics of Muslims from their culture.
(...) The Iraq war was supposed to be a realization of this inspiration. It was said that once bad Muslim were overthrown good ones would rise to the occasion, as indeed Eastern Europeans had done; they would garland American soldiers and that would be the dawn of democracy in Iraq. But, lo and behold, the history of Iraq since 2003 is testimony to thousands, even millions, of so-called good Muslims turning bad overnight. Anybody who followed the public discussion in the US about good and bad Muslims soon realized that good and bad were not adjectives describing the attitude of Muslims to Islam. They were actually adjectives describing Muslim attitudes to Western power. They were not cultural adjectives; they were political adjectives.
(...)This, then, is my first point: all culture, like all politics, is historical; all, without exception. It is not a particularly profound point. Rather, it is simple, and should be obvious, but is not. One would have thought this was settled with the struggle against colonialism. That it is not shows that the power of ideas does not simply flow from their internal consistency and explanatory power, but also from their relationship to the world of power.
(...) There is also no doubt of the existence of political Islam, nor about the
existence of a tendency in political Islam – called jihadi Islam – that has embraced political violence as the way to change the world. So is culture unimportant? I don’t think so. What I want to dispense with is not the notion of culture but the idea that the culture of some peoples is historical and that of other peoples is not. I simply think that culture has to be understood historically.
(...) When I read Sayyid Qutb’s book, Signposts, I was struck by the kind of
resonance it produced in a person like me, that is, one who came of political age in the 1960s and 70s. Sayyid Qutb says in the introduction to Signposts that he wrote this for the Islamist vanguard; I thought I was reading a version of Lenin’s What is to be Done. And when I read the text and encountered Sayyid Qutb’s main argument that you must make a distinction between friends and enemies, because with friends you use persuasion and with enemies you use force, I thought I was reading Mao Zedong on the correct handling of contradictions amongst the people.
(...) Are we to accept Huntington’s and Bernard Lewis’ contention that the history of thought is best understood as developing inside containers called civilizations; one Islamic, another Hindu, another Confucian, another Christian?
(...) Was not Mawdudi’s disillusionment with Islam as a social project and his embrace of a statist project part of a larger shift that had occurred in different types of nationalism, religious and secular? Was not Sayyid Qutb’s embrace of political violence in line with a growing romance with armed struggle in movements of national liberation in the ‘50s and ‘60s – many driven by a presumption that armed struggle was not only the most effective form of struggle but also the only genuine mode of struggle? The fact is that both Mawdudi and Sayyid Qutb were involved in multiple conversations: they were in a debate not only with Islamic intellectuals, whether contemporaries or of previous generations, but also with contending intellectuals anchored in other modes of political thought. And the main competition then was Marxism-Leninism, a militantly secular ideology which influenced both their language and their method of organization and struggle.
(...) We may be able to speak before 1491 of civilizations as separate containers, with transactions at their borders, but no longer after 1491. Globalization begins with modern colonialism, for modern colonialism break the levies of cultural life. Even if European intellectuals – those born and working in European languages – could continue to function exclusively in European languages and think of the European experience as universal, this luxury was not available to intellectuals from the colonized world. For the colonized intellectual, it became a matter of necessity, indeed of survival, to function in languages other than one’s native tongue. The colonized intellectual had no choice but to go universal, which meant to work in more than one family of languages, and become immersed in a deterritorialized culture. We need to distinguish between culture and politics. Politics is overwhelmingly territorial, as in the expression geopolitical. But not culture. The rupture between culture and territory has always been there, but it has been particularly radical since 1491.
(...) Both were non-religious intellectuals; Mawdudi was a journalist; Sayyid Qutb
was a literary critic. It is worth noting the fact that none of the key intellectuals of contemporary political Islam – from al-Afghani to Mawdudi to Said Qutb to Ali Shariati in Iran – have come from the religious domain. In this they resemble key intellectuals that have shaped contemporary political Hinduism, even political Zionism. How does one explain this? To understand why it was so easy for non-religious intellectuals in Islam to come into the religious domain, we have to understand that we were dealing with a religion organized differently from Christianity. Western Christianity, particularly Catholicism, has historically been organized on the model of the Roman empire; and Protestantism has been organized on the model of the nation state. There is an institutionalized hierarchy of power inside the Church, from the floor to the ceiling. Organized power in institutionalized religion has historically functioned parallel to organized power in the state. Part of the question of secularism in the West has been that of policing the line of demarcation between two different powers, in the state and in the Church.
There is no such religious hierarchy in Sunni Islam. There is only the prayer leader, not even a priesthood. In spite of attempts by states to create a hierarchy from the top-down there really isn’t one. This was also true of Shi’a Islam until the creation of vilayat-i-faqih by Ayatollah Khomeini. I think of Ayatollah Khomeini’s innovation as preemptive, as a safeguard against intellectuals from the secular domain, intellectuals like Ali Shariati. We may also note that Ayatollah Khomeini’s innovation is no longer universally accepted in Shia Islam. The most,prominent challenge has come from Ayatollah Sistani, who has argued for religious leaders to
function as a moral presence outside the state, and not as a political force in the state.
(...) Bigotry, however, is not blasphemy. Blasphemy is the practice of questioning a tradition from the inside. In contrast, bigotry is an assault on that tradition from the outside. If blasphemy is an attempt to speak truth to power, bigotry is the reverse: an attempt by power to instrumentalize truth. I have argued that a defining feature of the cartoon debate is that bigotry is being mistaken for blasphemy.
(...) Blasphemy was aimed at the Church as an institutional
power, which is why it is more of a European than an American tradition. I have already pointed out that institutionalized religion in medieval Europe was organized as a form of hierarchical power, with an authority from the floor to the ceiling. No earthly place symbolized the Church as an institutionalized power more than Calvin’s Geneva. Every act was governed by rigid spiritual rule: drunkards, dancers and adulterers were excommunicated; a child who struck his parents was beheaded; and men and women who transgressed Calvin’s code were burnt at the stake. R. H. Tawney wrote of it as “a city of glass, in which every household lived its life under the supervision of a spiritual police.” In this context, blasphemy was a weapon against religiously-sanctioned terror.
(...) The problem, according to this point of view, is
that the laws reflect the cultural sensibility of particular countries in a particular historical period, so that blasphemy laws tend to protect the state religion only, such as Anglicanism in England and Lutheranism in Denmark. Europe also has laws against certain forms of bigotry, particularly anti-Semitism. In England, the net is cast a little wider. The Race Relations Act prohibits the use of a language which would incite racial hatred. But it has yet to prohibit the incitement of hatred against groups defined culturally and religiously. Tariq Modood has pointed out that it has not even been 15 years since Britain’s Commission on Racial Equality denied that the vilification of Muslims was a form of racism. In France, laws limit or outlaw debates on certain issues. It is a crime to deny the Holocaust. But French law also makes it compulsory for schools to teach that colonialism was beneficial for those who were colonized.
(...) What is striking about the Dworkin piece is its silence about hate speech and bigotry and how to confront it. Ask yourself: what, after all, is the rationale for criminalizing Holocaust Denial? Clearly, not free speech. Rather, it is the more urgent imperative for peaceful coexistence between Christians and Jews in post-Holocaust Europe. Let us remember that the very notion of a Judeo-Christian civilization is mainly a post-Holocaust political project. Prior to the Holocaust, mainstream politics did not hyphenate Judaism with Christianity, but opposed one to the other.
(...) My sense is that we are now entering a period where Islamophobia is maturing into an ideology of hate, a grand ideology driven by a core explanation of what is wrong with the world: hence the growing claim that there is a clash of civilizations. The clash of civilizations is, in turn, the ideological arm of the war on terror. This is why it is particularly significant that when the Danish cartoons met with protests, the response was to up the ante from that of defense of free speech to a defense of civilization.