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Username: Mustt_mustt
Post Number: 201
Registered: 8-2003
| | Posted on Friday, January 14, 2005 - 9:02 pm: | 
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Mahmood Mamdani is Mira Nair's husband. Mira is the director of Monsoon Wedding and Vanity Fair.
A question of politics
Professor Mahmood Mamdani tells KALPANA SHARMA that the big difference in the cultural climate of the United States between the Vietnam era and now is the capitulation of the media and the lack of debate. Prof. Mamdani's book, Good Muslim Bad Muslim, has just been published in India.
VIVEK BENDRE
With his recently released book Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: the USA, the Global War Against Terror (Permanent Black, 2004), PROF. MAHMOOD MAMDANI has touched on several central aspects of the dominant attitudes towards Islam and terrorism in the U.S. in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks. Prof. Mamdani is the Herbert Lehman Professor of Government at the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University, New York. He is a recognised expert in African history, politics and international relations and has authored several books including When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda (Princeton University Press, 2002). Prof. Mamdani has lived and taught in Eastern Africa and is currently based in New York.
While in Mumbai to release his book, Prof. Mamdani spoke exclusively to The Hindu about the reasons for writing the book, his concerns about the future of independent debate in the U.S. and his interpretation of the roots of modern-day terror. He explained that he was in New York on September 11 and was intrigued by the sudden interest amongst Americans in Islam. Hundreds of copies of the Koran were bought up as Americans looked for some explanation about why the attacks took place. They tried to locate the motivation for the attacks in religion. He argues that people like Samuel Huntington with his Clash of Civilisations thesis and Bernard Lewis from Princeton, both of whom seek to draw a connection between political behaviour and religion, have influenced the terms of debate in the U.S. It is this assumption that he questions in the book. Excerpts.
WHAT made you choose the title Good Muslim, Bad Muslim for your book?
It imitates the language of the people of the United States. What the book does partly is to turn this language upside down. The title does not refer to Muslims and their attitude to Islam. Rather it is about their relations with the U.S. If you are pro-U.S., you are a good Muslim; if you are against the U.S., you are a bad Muslim. It is not about culture, it is not about religion. It is about political attitudes.
In your talk launching the book, you suggested that the roots of modern terrorist actions lie in the support given directly and indirectly by the U.S. to terrorist movements in Africa in the 1970s.
Yes, I was referring to Africa's first genuine post-colonial terrorist movement. This was Renamo in Mozambique and to a lesser extent Unita in Angola. Unita had a political base and learned terror from the South African army. But Renamo was entirely packaged from the beginning, first by the Rhodesian Military Intelligence and then by the South African Army. Some of the most detailed accounts of Renamo activities came out in the annual U.S. State Department reports. There was never any direct connection with the U.S. except through the "constructive engagement" programme that provided a political umbrella to South Africa. I am convinced that this "constructive engagement" during the Reagan years delayed the end of apartheid by maybe as long as a decade.
Mozambique and Angola were the laboratories for the U.S. before they turned to El Salvador and Nicaragua. The Contras in Nicaragua were publicly supported through a directive during the Reagan administration that allocated something like $19.5 million to the CIA to train a rebel movement. I have read through booklets by the CIA prepared for the Contras that advised on the use of the right amount of terror and the right balance to ensure that the civilian population loses faith in the government.
The next step was the Mujahideen in Afghanistan. Reagan brought the Contras to Washington DC and introduced them to U.S. audiences as moral equivalents of the Founding Fathers of America! He did the same thing with the Mujahideen. This language of morality, democracy etc., presented as a democratic revolution, was entirely dependent on presentation. The U.S. government did not care whether the fellows in-charge were pro-American. In fact, the Afghan group that got more than half the CIA money was led by Gulbuddin Hekmetyar who did not want to be seen as an American lackey.
What about the Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden?
Osama comes on the heels of the Palestinian Islamist Sheikh Abdullah Azzam, who had moved to Saudi Arabia in the 1960s because he felt suffocated in the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO). He taught at the King Abdul University in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia and Osama was his student. Azzam was a known CIA operative and also one of the founders of Hamas. He was considered one of the first gatekeepers of the Afghan jihad. His motto was: no negotiation, no peace, just armed struggle.
When the Afghan war ended, there was a split between him and Osama bin Laden and the Egyptian Ayman al-Zawahiri over who was the enemy. Who should be targeted? Could Muslim rulers be targeted? Osama and al-Zawahiri said they could be targeted if they were allied with the Americans and Azzam felt they could not. This meeting took place in 1989 and marked the founding of the Al Qaeda. A week after that meeting, Azzam and his sons were blown up in a car bomb in Peshawar. And al-Zawahiri and Osama took full charge of Al Qaeda.
After its formation, was Al Qaeda clear that its chief target would be the U.S.?
Al-Zawahiri wrote a manifesto, sections of which have been translated for the first time by a French author, Gilles Kepel (The War for Muslim Minds: Island and the West; Cambridge, 2004). The manifesto, written in early 2000, makes a distinction between the "nearby enemy" and the "faraway enemy" and argues that it would be a mistake to focus on the nearby enemy and that it was better to focus on the faraway enemy. That, of course, is the U.S. He also argues that any effective leadership has to be technologically savvy and has to recognise that the old methods of face to face meetings are unnecessary and passé. The technology available now, particularly the Internet, he says will build up cadres and you don't have to seek them. So he puts forward this model that is of a very different kind of organisation.
It has been argued that since the 1990s, the violence in the Middle Eastern region by Islamist groups has been going down while it has been going up outside this region. That's in line with what al-Zawahiri argues.
Now that George Bush has been re-elected for another four years, how do you see the future? Do you think intellectuals like you and others really cut any ice in the U.S.? Does what you do or write make any difference?
The task is bigger than one thought. It's about how the public debate is being formed in the U.S. and it is about the capitulation of the media. One realises that there's no point being in the university if you're not going to use the platform to engage in the public debate.
The big difference between the Vietnam era and now is the capitulation of the media, the end of an effective independent media and the birth of an embedded media as Iraq showed. That's the big story.
That assault is now moving out to the universities. The two institutions that helped us to form an independent public opinion during the Vietnam struggle were the media and the universities.
How specifically are the universities being targeted?
There is legislation in Congress which says that all universities with area studies departments receiving U.S. government Title 6 funding should be supervised by "oversight committees" to ensure "diversity", "balance" — words that connote liberal trends that are now being utilised to ensure that there is balance between pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli lobbies. The main target has been Institutes that teach Middle East studies. There is an organisation called Campus Watch, a private watchdog, which identifies the target. Its first target has been Columbia University.
A group from Boston called the David Group made a film with seven students from Columbia targeting a Palestinian junior professor, claiming that he had discriminated against them because their views were pro-Israel or because they were Jewish. This professor is up for tenure. The film was never shown publicly. It was shown to private audiences and to the university administration. When members of the department saw it, they pointed out that six of the seven "students" had never attended class and that the seventh was a former army officer from the Israeli army! A part of their larger set of demands is about diversity. They insist that because Columbia has established an Edward Said chair for Middle Eastern studies, so there should be a chair in Jewish studies.
How do you see the future as far as Iraq is concerned?
It has created a debate in the U.S. The ambition of some discredited neo-conservatives is to remake the world through violence. They have created a free-for-all in Iraq. Every oppositional tendency is there in Iraq. It is amazing that the Iraqi resistance has been able to put up such a fight.
There are neo-conservatives who argue that we have not gone far enough and there are those who feel we cannot go any further. There is a purge going on in the administration. Perhaps those being purged are the latter, leaving behind a neo-conservative heaven with no internal debate! But it is too early to tell.
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