Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror (33 page)

Herein lies the continuing relevance of Vietnam. The lesson of Vietnam was that the battle against nationalism could not be won as a military confrontation: America would need to recognize the legitimacy of nationalism in the era of imperialism and learn to live with it. Just as America learned to distinguish between nationalism and Communism in Vietnam, so it will need to learn the difference between nationalism and terrorism in the post-9/11 world. To win the fight against terrorism requires accepting that the world has changed, that the old colonialism is no more and will not return, and that to occupy foreign places will be expensive, in lives and money. America cannot occupy the world. It has to learn to live in it.

Notes

Introduction: Modernity and Violence

4 On a world scale: The phrase is Bernard Lewis’s, but it was popularized following Samuel Huntington,
The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order
(New York: Simon and Schuster,
1996).

4 The violence of the Holocaust: For a discussion of group violence as evil, see Ervin Staub,
The Roots of Evil: The Origins of Genocide and Other Group Violence
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). On the relationship between evil and historical time, see Paul Ricoeur,
The Symbolism of Evil
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1969); Alain Badiou,
Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil
(London: Verso, 2001); Georges Bataille,
Literature and Evil
, tr. by Alastair Hamilton (London & New York: Boyars, 1997); Malcolm Bull, ed.,
Apocalypse Theory and the Ends of the World
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1995); and Alenka Zupancic,
Ethic of the Real: Kant, Lacan
(London: Verso, 2000). I am thankful to Robert Meister of the University of California, Santa Cruz, for suggesting this latter set of readings.

5 In 1499, seven years: Karen Armstrong,
The Battle for God: A
History of Fundamentalism
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000), pp. 3-8.

6 “Of the two main”: Hannah Arendt,
The Origins of Totalitarianism
(New York: Harcourt Brace, 1975), p. 207.

6 The idea that “imperialism”: Herbert Spencer wrote in
Social Statics
(1850), “The forces which are working out the great scheme of perfect happiness, taking no account of incidental suffering, exterminate such sections of mankind as stand in their way.” This is a train of thought Charles Lyell had pursued twenty years earlier in
Principles of Geology:
if “the most significant and dimunitive of species … have each slaughtered their thousands, why should not we, the lords of creation, do the same?” His student, Charles Darwin, confirmed in
The Descent of Man
(1871) that “at some future period not very distant as measured in centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races.” “After Darwin,” comments Sven Lindqvist in his survey of European thought on genocide, “it became accepted to shrug your shoulders at genocide. If you were upset, you were just showing your lack of education.” See Sven Lindqvist,
“Exterminate All the Brutes”: One Man’s Odyssey into the Heart of Darkness and the Origins of European Genocide
(New York: New Press, 1996), pp. 117, 107, 130.

6 Similar fates awaited: Except where indicated, all quotations are from Lindqvist,
“Exterminate All the Brutes,”
pp. 141, 119, 149-51, 158, 160.

7 The first systematic: Sven Lindqvist,
A History of Bombing
(New York: New Press, 2001), pp. 1-2.

7 The gassings of Russians: Arno J. Mayer,
Why Did the Heavens Not Darken? The Final Solution in History
(New York: Pantheon, 1988).

8 In his
Discours:
Aimé Césaire,
Discours sur le colonialisme
(Paris: Présence Africaine, 1995), p. 12.

8 “Not so long ago,”: Frantz Fanon,
The Wretched of the Earth
(London: Penguin, 1967), p. 75; for a discussion, see David Macey,
Frantz Fanon, A Biography
(New York: Picador, 2000), pp. 471, 111.

8 The first genocide: See Mahmood Mamdani,
When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and Genocide in Rwanda
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), pp. 10-13.

8 The revolutionary theorist: Fanon,
Wretched of the Earth;
also see Macey,
Frantz Fanon
, p. 22.

9 Fanon has come to be regarded: Hannah Arendt,
On Violence
(New York: Harcourt Brace, 1970).

9 “He of whom”: Fanon,
Wretched of the Earth
, pp. 33, 66, 68, 73.

10 Anyone familiar with: For a journalistic account of the specter of genocide in the white South African imagination, read Rian Malan,
My Traitor’s Heart: A South African Exile Returns to Face His Country, His Tribe, and His Conscience
(New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1990).

Chapter One: Culture Talk; or, How Not to Talk about Islam and Politics

17 During the Cold War: Reinhard Schulze,
A Modern History of the Islamic World
(New York: New York University Press, 2002), p. xiii.

19 In a rare but significant example: Aryeh Neier, “Warring Against Modernity,”
The Washington Post
, October 9, 2001.

20 “It is my hypothesis,”: Samuel Huntington, “The Clash of Civilizations?”
Foreign Affairs
72, no. 3, summer 1993, p. 22.

21 Huntington’s argument was built: “The Velvet Curtain of culture has replaced the Iron Curtain of ideology as the most significant dividing line in Europe.” Samuel Huntington, “The Clash of Civilizations?” p. 31.

21 For William Lind: William Lind, “Defending Western Culture,”
Foreign Policy
84, fall 1991, pp. 43–44.

21 Régis Debray, himself: Régis Debray,
Tous azimuts
(Paris: Odile Jacob, Foundations pour les études de defense nationale, 1990), pp. 44-45, cited in Roxanne L. Euben,
Enemy in the Mirror: Islamic Fundamentalism and the Limits of Western Rationalism, a Work of Comparative Political Theory
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), p.
6.

22 Edward W. Said: Edward Said, “The Clash of Definitions,” in
Reflections on Exile and Other Essays
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000), p. 581.

22 “There is something”: Bernard Lewis, “The Roots of Muslim Rage,”
The Atlantic
, September 1990. Available at
www.theatlantic.com/issues/9oSep/rage.htm
.

23 To this, he added the absence: The proprietary equation of secularism with Western modernity—and thus the presumption so dear to Bernard Lewis that there can be no secularization without Westernization—has been critiqued recently by Amartya Sen. See Amartya Sen, “Exclusion and Inclusion,”
Mainstream
(New Delhi), November 28, 2001; also see Amartya Sen, “A World Not Neatly Divided,”
New York Times
, November 23, 2001. Also see Bernard Lewis,
What Went Wrong? Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 103, 159.

23 Warning the policy establishment: Lewis, “Roots of Muslim Rage,” available at
www.theatlantic.com/issues/90sep/rage.htm
.

24 Democracy lags: “While more than three-quarters of 145 non-Muslim nations around the world are now democracies, most countries with an Islamic majority continue to defy the trend, according to a survey by Freedom House, an independent monitor of political rights and civil liberties based in New York.” Barbara Crossette, “As Democracy Spreads Islamic World Hesitates,”
International Herald Tribune
, December 23, 2001.

24 As if taking a cue: Stephen Schwartz, “Ground Zero and the Saudi Connection,”
The Spectator
(London), September 22, 2001.

24 Even the pages of the
New York Times:
For an account of bad Muslims, see Blaine Harden, “Saudis Seek to Add U.S. Muslims to Their Sect,”
New York Times
, October 20, 2001; Susan Sachs, “Anti-Semitism Is Deepening Among Muslims,”
New York Times
, April 27, 2002. For a portrayal of good Muslims, see Laurie Goodstein, “Stereotyping Rankles Silent, Secular Majority of American Muslims,
New York Times
, December 23, 2001, p. A20.

24 Lewis opens: Lewis,
What Went Wrong?
p. 4

25 One of the best studies: Tomaž Mastnak,
Crusading Peace: Christendom, the Muslim World, and Western Political Order
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002), pp. 95-125.

26 The Israeli cultural historian: Gil Anidjar,
“Our Place in al-Andalus”: Kabbalah, Philosophy, Literature in Arab Jewish Letters
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), pp. 1, 6, 15, 22, 172.

27 Orientalist histories of Islam: I am thankful to Tim Mitchell for gently persuading me to explore the debate around Orientalism.

28 Based on the Mercator projection: Marshall G. S. Hodgson, “In the Center of the Map,” in
Rethinking World History: Essays on Europe, Islam and World History
(edited with an introduction and conclusion by Edmund Burke III), (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 29-34; Edmund Burke III, “Introduction,” in ibid., p. xvii.

29 Hodgson should have added: Christopher Miller,
Blank Darkness: Africanist Discourse in French
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 1985).

29 “The West” referred: Marshall G. S. Hodgson,
The Venture of Islam: Conscience and History in a World Civilization
, vol. 1:
The Classical Age of Islam
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), p. 53.

30 With the advantage of accumulated findings: Noel Swerdlow and Otto Neugebauer,
Mathematical Astronomy in Copernicus’s De Revolutionibus
(New York: Springer-Verlag, 1984), pp. 42.-43, 295. For an elaborated discussion, see George Saliba,
Rethinking the Roots of Modern Science: Arabic Manuscripts in European Libraries
, occasional papers, Center for Contemporary Arab Studies (Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University, 1999), pp. 6-7.

30 The contemporary history of science: Saliba,
Rethinking the Roots of Modern Science
, p. 13. It is well known that the European Renaissance was nourished by sources as diverse as Greece, China, India, Arabia, and Africa. The long list of inventions developed elsewhere and then diffused into Europe included gunpowder, firearms, the compass, the sternpost rudder, decimal notation, and the university, among others. Francis Robinson notes that at least sixty Greek authors in fields including philosophy, medicine, mathematics, physics, astronomy, geography, and the occult sciences were translated into Arabic during the ‘Abbasid Caliphate alone. Rather than just a passageway through which a literary global heritage poured, fertilizing Europe’s post-Renaissance modernity, could it be that Andalusian Spain and classical Islam were the crucibles in which that early modernity was nurtured? See Burke, “Introduction,” in Hodgson,
Rethinking World History
, p. xix; Francis Robinson, “Modern Islam and the Green Menace,”
The Times Literary Supplement
, January 21, 1994, quoted in Euben,
Enemy in the Mirror
, pp. 12, 173.

31 The reconsideration of African history: Cheikh Anta Diop,
The African Roots of Civilization
(Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 1974).

31 Diop questioned: Today, Diop has been turned into an icon of North America-based Afrocentric scholarship, which seems preoccupied with proposing African identity as an “identity of color” and with incorporating ancient Egypt into a historically continuous notion of “black civilization,” not only parallel to but also longer than “western civilization.” Of greater significance, in my view, is Diop’s pioneering critique of dominant nationalist scholarship of “the West.”

31 In the study of classics: An important strand in nationalist African scholarship has been concerned with historicizing—and thus relativizing—the divide between North Africa and sub-Saharan Africa. Samir Amin showed that the Sahara was more a bridge than a barrier prior to the initiation of the Atlantic slave trade. Abdallah Laroui demonstrated the problem with isolating the history of Africa from that of the Mediterranean. Barry Boubacar wrote a history of Senegambia, a region that lies on both sides of the geographic divide. See Samir Amin,
Unequal Development: An Essay on
Social Formations of Peripheral Capitalism
(New York: Monthly Review Press, 1976); Abdalla Laroui,
The History of the Maghreb: An Interpretive Essay
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977); Barry Boubacar,
Senegambia and the Atlantic Slave Trade
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).