Good Muslim, Bad Muslim - Notes
Culture Talk: Or, How Not to Talk About Islam and Politics
The post-Cold War era is marked by the rapid politicization of "culture."
During the Cold War, socioeconomic and political developments were seen as local events.
The new understanding of culture is more political and tied to global events.
Culture Talk assumes every culture has a tangible essence that defines it and explains politics as a consequence.
After 9/11, Culture Talk qualified "terrorism" as "Islamic."
"Islamic terrorism" is offered as both a description and explanation of 9/11.
Culture, not the market or the state, is said to divide those in favor of peaceful existence from those inclined to terror.
The world is divided between the moderns (culture makers) and premoderns (conduits).
Premodern peoples may not be held responsible for their actions and need to be restrained.
Post-9/11, Culture Talk focuses on Islam and Muslims, who are seen as having made culture only at the beginning.
Some believe Muslims just conformed to culture afterward.
Some narratives suggest our culture has no history, politics, or debate, so all Muslims are bad.
Others acknowledge history, politics, and debates, distinguishing between good and bad Muslims.
History seems petrified into a lifeless custom of an antique people in antique lands.
Culture may stand for habit or instinctive activity with rules inscribed in early religious texts and mummified in artifacts.
Two contrasting narratives of Culture Talk:
Premodern peoples lagging behind on the road to modernity, encouraging relations based on philanthropy.
The premodern as antimodern, producing fear and preemptive police or military action.
Earlier depictions of Africans are contrasted with contemporary talk about Muslims.
During the Cold War, Africans were stigmatized as not capable of modernity.
Islam and the Middle East have displaced Africa as the hard premodern core in a globalizing world.
Africa is seen as incapable of modernity, while hard-core Islam is seen as resistant to modernity.
Africans are said to victimize themselves, while hard-core Muslims are prone to taking others along.
There is a parallel between the pre-9/11 debate on terrorism in Africa and the post-9/11 debate on global terrorism.
Internal explanations are sought for the spread of terror.
Aryeh Neier argued that the problem is larger than Islam, lying with tribalists and fundamentalists who identify modernism as their enemy.
Premodern peoples are said to have no creative ability, while antimodern fundamentalists have a profound destructive ability.
Destruction is taken as proof they have no appreciation for human life.
Culture is now considered a matter of life and death, reminiscent of tracts from the history of modern colonization.
Those shut out of modernity are stigmatized as antimodern because they resist being shut out.
People's public behavior, particularly political behavior, is read from their habits and customs.
A person who takes religion literally is seen as a potential terrorist, while someone who thinks of a religious text as metaphorical is better suited to civic life.
How the literal reading of sacred texts translates into hijacking, murder, and terrorism is questioned.
Two Versions of Culture Talk
Contemporary Culture Talk dates from the end of the Cold War and interprets politics from culture.
Neither version is the work of a historian.
Bernard Lewis, an Orientalist, is considered a founding father of contemporary Culture Talk.
The phrase "a clash of civilizations" comes from Lewis's 1990 article "The Roots of Muslim Rage."
Samuel Huntington wrote a second, cruder version, broadening Lewis's thesis to cover the entire world.
Huntington argued that the fundamental source of conflict will be cultural, not ideological or economic.
Conflicts will occur between nations and groups of different civilizations.
The clash of civilizations will dominate global politics, and the fault lines will be the battle lines.
Huntington's argument was built around two ideas:
The "iron curtain of ideology" had been replaced by a "velvet curtain of culture."
The velvet curtain had been drawn across "the bloody borders of Islam."
Islam was cast as an enemy civilization, implying Muslims could only be bad.
Others translated Huntington's point of view into a vision shared in hawkish circles.
The Cold War was seen as a curtain-raiser for a global conflict where the West needs to marshal its cultural resources.
William Lind saw the Cold War as the last in a series of "Western civil wars," with global conflict cast in cultural terms.
Régis Debray saw the new era as defined by a "Green Peril" (Islam), more dangerous than the red scares because it lacks rational self-restraint.
The idea of a clash of civilizations has been widely discredited.
Edward W. Said argued for a more historical and less parochial reading of culture, with the clash being more inside civilizations than between them.
Huntington views civilizational identity as stable and undisturbed.
Bernard Lewis provides a more durable version of Culture Talk, gesturing toward history and acknowledging a clash within civilizations.
Lewis writes of Islamic civilization as a veneer with its essence as an unchanging doctrine in which Muslims take refuge in crisis.
Lewis noted that Islamic religious culture inspires dignity and courtesy but can give way to rage and hatred in moments of upheaval.
Lewis elaborated on the doctrinal core of Islam in What Went Wrong?, claiming the lack of freedom underlies the troubles of the Muslim world.
He added the absence of secularism as another explanation for the gap between Islam and modernity.
Lewis provides intellectual support for the idea of "good" versus "bad" Muslims, driving American foreign policy.
Lewis recognizes fundamentalism is not the only Islamic tradition and that Muslims must decide these issues among themselves.
He counsels the West to avoid a new era of religious wars and remain a bystander while Muslims fight their internal war.
Both Lewis and Huntington represent the official "West."
While Lewis advises waiting for "good" Muslims to triumph, the Bush administration is determined to hasten such a civil war.
If necessary, as in Iraq, it is prepared to invade and bring about regime change.
Culture Talk has turned religion into a political category.
Democracy lags in the Muslim world, according to a Freedom House study.
Stephen Schwartz claims the roots of terrorism lie in the Wahhabi sect of Islam.
Accounts distinguish between good (modern, secular, Westernized) and bad (doctrinal, antimodern, virulent) Muslims.
Leaders like George W. Bush and Tony Blair warn about the need to distinguish "good" from "bad" Muslims.
Islam must be quarantined, and the devil exorcized by a Muslim civil war.
Lewis opens What Went Wrong? with a reductive discussion of the history of Islam since the seventh century.
There was "conquest" (Islamic) followed by "reconquest" (Christian).
The time of the Crusades fits this model best.
Tomaž Mastnak points out that the Muslim became the enemy during the Crusades.
Christian society became conscious of itself through mobilization for holy war.
The construction of the Muslim enemy was an essential moment in the articulation of self-awareness of the Christian commonwealth.
Earlier, Muslims were just one of the pagan or infidel barbarians.
Militant Christian animosity was initially aimed at all non-Christians and later focused on Muslims.
With the Crusade, Palestine ceased to be the Promised Land and became the Holy Land.
Christendom defined a universal enemy and declared a "state of permanent war against the heathen."
The Crusades demonized the Muslim as evil incarnate and the personification of the Antichrist.
The goal was not to convert Muslims but to exterminate them.
Their extermination was preached by Popes and St. Bernard, who declared killing an infidel not homicide but "malicide."
Bernard Lewis treats historical encounters (Crusades, 1492, colonization) as hallmarks of a single clash of civilizations.
He claims these "clashes" were driven by incompatible civilizations between fixed territorial units.
The presumed identity between cultural and political history should be questioned.
Can one speak of Judeo-Christian civilization over two millennia?
Gil Anidjar reminds us that Jewish culture in Spain is better thought of as “Arab Jewish” until 1492.
Moses Maimonides wrote The Guide of the Perplexed in Arabic in al-Andalus.
The loss of al-Andalus in 1492 produced the Zohar and marked the beginning of the second Jewish diaspora.
It does not make sense to think of culture in political-territorial terms; states are territorial, but culture is not.
We need to think of culture in terms that are both historical and nonterritorial.
Otherwise, one is harnessing cultural resources for national and imperial political projects.
Modernity and the Politicization of Culture
Culture Talk springs from policy sciences that service political establishments.
Orientalist histories of Islam and the Middle East have been challenged since the 1960s by various intellectuals.
They came out of antiwar and anti-imperialist movements.
Orientalist histories have rebounded due to the relation between history writing and forms of power.
There are two broad forms of history writing: nationalist and metanationalist.
Nationalist history gives the nation a glorious past.
Metanationalist writings give civilizational histories, locating the nation in a global context.
When Matteo Ricci brought a European map to China, the Chinese were offended because it put Europe in the center.
Ricci produced another map that split the Atlantic to make China seem more central.
The most widely used world map has western Europe at its center, based on the Mercator projection that distorts our image of the world.
Civilizational history of "the West" climaxed in the nineteenth century with European imperialism.
It gave "the West" an identity that marched through time unscathed.
"The West" occupied the center of the global stage, and "the Orient" was its periphery.
Initial criticism of Eurocentric history came from scholars focused on the "non-West."
Marshall Hodgson recounted that history began in the “East” and passed to Greece, Rome, and then Europe.
The division of the world into "the West” and “the East” left out Africa, the pre-Columbian Americas, and the lands of the Pacific, which lacked history.
Marshall Hodgson countered West-centered studies of Islam, showing the notion of "the West" had changed at least three times.
It originally referred to the western Roman empire, then west European lands, then peoples, and finally all European Christendom.
Thus, it developed from a geographical location to a racialized notion.
Historians have been chipping away at the claim of a self-contained history of Western civilization.
Hodgson remarked that the equation of "the West" with "science" presumed Arabic-writing scientists were simply marking time.
Thomas Kuhn claimed Renaissance science represented a paradigmatic break, but recent works challenge this.
Otto Neugebauer and Noel Swerdlow explored the influence of astronomers associated with the observatory of Maragha in Iran on Copernicus.
Copernicus can be seen as a follower of the 'Maragha School.'
Contemporary history of science shows rethinkings in anatomy and mathematics.
The lacuna in the history of science points to a larger historical gap: the place of Arabic-writing Spain in the historical study of the Renaissance.
Eurocentric history constructed two peripheries: one visible, the other invisible.
Part of the invisible periphery was Africa.
The same political project produced self-standing histories of the West and Africa.
Africa was debased and redefined as the land south of the Sahara ravaged during the slave trade.
Scholars questioned the racialized degradation of Africa, eroding the production of Eurocentric history.
Cheikh Anta Diop questioned the racist tendency to dislocate the history of pharaonic Egypt from its surroundings.
Diop targeted the classics, which cast Greece and Rome as eternal components of “the West” and stripped Egypt of its historical identity.
Egypt faced a double loss: its connection with Greece was reduced, and its location in Africa was denied significance.
Martin Bernal based his work, Black Athena, on Diop's foundation.
Bernal showed how Egyptology had been shaped by Western thinking rooted in the imperial German imagination.
He contrasted this with what Greeks said about their debt to pharaonic Egypt.
The Greeks' image of themselves from Egypt was reversed to portray Greece as the product of an Aryan invasion from the north.
Greece was an amalgam of diverse influences, initially African, Phoenician, and Jewish, later northern European.
If Egypt is better thought of as an African civilization, Greece is better thought of as a Mediterranean civilization.
Edward Said summed up the dogmas of Orientalism: portraying "the West" as rational and superior and caricaturing "the Orient" as aberrant and inferior.
The Orient lives according to set rules in sacred texts, is eternal, uniform, and incapable of defining itself.
The Orient is feared or controlled.
Claims that describe civilizations discretely and identify civilizational histories with geographies and polities should be viewed with skepticism.
One has to distinguish between civilization and power.
The notion of an uninterrupted "Western civilization" arises from the vantage point of the West's power.
Like the history of Western civilization, the history of Arabs is linked to agendas, doubling as a history of “Islam.”
Cultural identities get politicized and take on identities defined by the law.
In North Africa, France drew legal distinctions between “Berber” and “Arab,” turning them into mutually exclusive identities.
The nationalist response reified the identity "Arab."
Who is a Berber is now a political question.
Equating political and cultural identities makes everything one-dimensional.
Cultural developments that are amalgams are given one identity.
Conventional Arab civilizational history has been questioned by Africans.
In 1972, the Sudanese civil war pitted “Arabs” in the north against “Africans” in the south.
Sudanese intellectuals challenged the presumption that the adversaries represented distinct cultural identities.
They argued that the culture was the outcome of an integration of multiple ingredients.
Afro-Arab integration in the North was referred to as Arabization, but there was also Africanization.
The point is that even if political identities are singular, cultural identities tend to be cumulative.
Identities shift, and histories get rewritten as a result of changing political agendas.
The aftermath of civil conflicts presents conflicting histories.
Wherever adversaries resolve to live together, an acute need for a new history is felt.
The history of "the West" underwent revision after the Holocaust.
Judaism has been recast as an integral part of Europe.
The post-Holocaust notion of “Judeo-Christian” civilization contrasts with pre-Holocaust notions of a Christian civilization that excluded European Jews.
Ernest Renan distinguished Semites from Caucasians, seeing the Semitic race as lacking variety and amplitude.
The shift relocated Judaism and Jews to the heart of Western history.
The notion of Judeo-Christian civilization crystallized as a post-Holocaust antidote to anti-Semitism.
Fundamentalism should be distinguished as a religious identity from political identities that use a religious idiom, such as political Christianity and political Islam.
Modernity, Fundamentalism, and Political Islam
Political Islam is a modern phenomenon, not traditional, as is fundamentalism.
Political Islam is the twin of political Christianity.
Islam is presented as a political issue because it is considered antithetical to democracy.
The state must be secularized to accommodate Muslims.
Olivier Roy says Islam is not a political project but a cluster of identity symbols.
The success of Islamism is due to the crisis of the national framework.
The Islamist is not a figure from the Middle Ages but a modern cultural product.
Islamist movements are fed by two sources:- Economic inequalities linked to global markets.
Example: The Muslim Brotherhood emerged in Egypt in the wake of the abolition of the caliphate.
The dissolution of the Ottoman Empire led to the emergence of new nationalisms.
The Muslim Brotherhood called for the Islamization of society from below.
Sayyid Qutb, an influential figure in the Muslim Brotherhood, saw society steeped in ignorance.
He focused on a verse in the Koran that prohibited Muslims from befriending Christians and Jews.
Qutb viewed the U.S. as an enemy, drawing from his experiences there.
The Muslim Brotherhood developed a program of social welfare and charitable activities.
It evolved into a political movement that challenged the secular state.
Ayatollah Khomeini turned Shia Islam into a revolutionary movement.
He believed that jurists should govern because they are best qualified to interpret and implement God's law.
In Iran, the ulama (religious scholars) assumed political power.
Khomeini's ideology of revolutionary Shiism challenged the legitimacy of secular rulers.
The Iranian Revolution inspired Islamist movements worldwide.
Islamist movements differ in their goals and strategies.
Some seek to establish an Islamic state through violent means.
Others work within the existing political system to promote Islamic values.
Some focus on social and economic issues, while others prioritize political reform.
Islamist movements also represent diverse interpretations of Islam.
Some adhere to strict interpretations of Islamic law, while others emphasize more moderate and inclusive approaches.
Understanding the diversity of Islamist movements is crucial for analyzing contemporary politics in the Muslim world.