Changing Colours of ViolenceGood Muslim, Bad Muslim: Islam, the USA, and the Global War against Terrorism byMahmood MamdaniReview by: Khaled AhmedEconomic and Political Weekly, Vol. 40, No. 17 (Apr. 23-29, 2005), pp. 1690-1692Published by: Economic and Political WeeklyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4416525 .

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a whole generation of Bengali Muslim women teachers, doctors, social reformers and activists, who played an important role in trying to bring about changes in their society.

This legacy of emancipation and em- powerment of Muslim women in Bengal that was developed by generations of Bengali Muslim social reformers and activists, was suddenly disrupted by the 1947 Partition. Most of those among the Bengali Muslim women professionals and intellectuals who could have carried on this legacy, left for East Pakistan. As a result, in an ironical twist of history - what was a loss for West Bengali Muslim so- ciety became a gain for East Pakistan Muslim women's movement. Chakravartty, contrasts the 'gender awakening' as re- flected in the Muslim women's movement in East Pakistan in the 1950-60 period, with the stagnation in the status of the Bengali Muslim women in West Bengal at the same time. In a very perceptive observation, she points out, 'Muslim women in West Bengal deeply felt the absence among them of successors of Rokeya's ideas, and also felt the loss of their East Pakistan counterparts, such as leading activists Begum Sufia Kamal, Mahmuda Khatoon Siddiqua, Sham- sunnahar Mahmud, Khadija Khatun, Nilima Ibrahim and others, who carried on the cultural crusade against seclu- sion by taking part, as an act of emanci- pation, in music, dance, literary discourses, and stage performance (all of which had been forbidden to women earlier) in their country.

Chakravartty gives us a moving account of the nostalgia and the dreams, the suf- ferings and the struggles, in the course of which a generation of uprooted women

changed themselves. It is primarily an account of the lives of middle class Bengali Hindu refugee women in Calcutta (barring a passing reference to 'uneducated women' who worked as, maidservants, washing utensils, cooking in people's homes, sup- plying office tiffins, selling flowers, fruits and vegetables). But there were also the vast masses of Bengali women refugees who came from the so-called lower and backward caste families, the namasudras and poundra-kshatriyas, cultivators and agricultural labourers, artisans and fishing folk. Under the government's rehabilita- tion policy, these families were sent away to far off places like Dandakaranya in central India, and the Andaman Islands across the seas. Here on rocky soils and

infertile land, amidst alien and often hostile social environs, they eked out a miserable existence. Victims of a caste- and class-based rehabilitation policy, they have a different story to tell that is yet to be recorded by historians of the Bengal Partition. M

Notes

1 Re: Prafulla K Chakrabarti, The Marginal Men, Lumiere Books, Kalyani. West Bengal. 1990. Even if one cannot accept his rather sweeping, and often dangerous - generalisations about Indian Muslims and the Bengali Left, Chakrabarti's book remains a major source for researchers engaged in writing the history of Bengali refugees from the then East Pakistan. He meticulously documents the various stages in their migration, and their struggles for rehabilitation in West Bengal, with particular

reference (though biased) to the role of the Left parties in their movement. Among recent books on the 1947 Partition of Bengal and its aftermath, which are reassessing the issue from new perspectives, mention should be made of Ranabir Samaddar (ed), Reflections on Partition in the East, Vikas Publishing House, New Delhi, 1997; Pradip Kumar Bose (ed), Refugees in West Bengal, Calcutta Reserch Group, Calcutta, 2000; and Jasodhara Bagchi and Subhoranjan Dasgupta (ed), The Trauma and the Triumph, Stree, Kolkata, 2003.

2 Triguna Sen, former minister of education in the government of India, in his Foreword, The Marginal Men, op cit.

3 Mention can be made, among others, of H Bhaskar Rao's The Story of Rehabilitation (1967), and Kirpal Singh's The Partition of the Punjab (1972). Among creative writers who had immortalised the tragedy of Punjab, Sadat Hasan Manto occupies a niche of his own, followed by Rajinder Singh Bedi and Amrita Pritam.

Changing Colours of Violence

Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: Islam, the USA, and the Global War against Terrorism by Mahmood Mamdani; Permanent Black, Delhi, 2004; pp 304, Rs 295.

KHALED AHMED

In December 2004 when Mahmood Mamdani spoke to an audience in Lahore,

he took great care to frame his theme in the American context. When an Islamist, a member of Hizb al-Tahrir demanding a universal Islamic caliphate, asked him if he would endorse a return to sharia for all Muslim states of the world, he said he belonged to Africa where the Muslims were a minority community and therefore cared for democracy; in Muslim majority states, he asserted, the Muslims were not agreed on the sharia, implying that they cared little for democracy.

Mahmood Mamdani diagnosis of viol- ence in modernity begins with the non- mercenary nature of Napoleon's army after the French Revolution that gave him his many victories and compelled Hegel to say that nationalism inclined individuals to die for causes of greater value than life itself. The obverse side of Hegel's comment was

that a man fired with a nationalist cause was willing to kill for it. In the 20th century, violence began to surprise less and less, but towards its end, senseless violence bemused the theory-makers. Mamdani says what appears senseless gets discussed in 'cultural terms' when it happens in a 'pre- modem' society; and 'theologically' when it takes place in modern societies. The cultural explanation feeds into the thesis of clash of civilisations and it focuses on 'absence of modernity' as the responsible factor.

Violence and Victimhood

On the other hand, when violence takes place in a modern society it is discussed in theological terms as 'evil', as was the Holocaust in Europe. Yet both kinds of violence are not linked by theorists to historical roots and there is resistance to exploring why the Muslim suicide- bombers kill today and the Nazis killed yesterday. Mamdani is convinced that because we are in the habit of labelling the perpetrators of violence as 'cultural renegades' and 'moral perverts' we are unable to get at the real cause of violence in our times. He settles on the year 1492 as the crucial year when violence began in the modern sense. This was the year when the Spanish king Ferdinand and

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queen Isabella attacked and conquered Granada, the last Muslim stronghold in Europe; and Christopher Columbus set sail for America. One act was the unifi- cation of the state and other was the project of the conquest of the world.

What unification of the state brought about was the nation state. Mamdani goes back to Max Weber (1864-1920) and his obstinately relevant theory of 'monopoly of violence of the state' that Weber consi- dered a marker of modernity and a prereq- uisite for the creation of civil society. Spain as the unified state thought of itself in 1492 in terms of culture and race and therefore set about expelling those who were not Christians and were racially distinct. It drove the Jews out but when some stayed back, declaring themselves Christian, they were subjected to the Inquisition and killed. The Muslims were put through the same treatment in 1499. You leave if you are of different faith; you leave equally if you look different. What was established by the example of Spain was this: the modem state cleanses itself internally by killing; and it annexes more territory by killing there too. The stage was set for the moder state.

Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) in her The Origin of Totalitarianism traced the mod- ern state's internal cleansing to its second project, that of conquering other territories and killing off the population there through genocide. It is the imperialism ofthe modem state which is internalised when it purges its own population to eliminate those who are 'different'. Mamdani aptly quotes Lord Salisbury, prime minister of the premier imperialist state in 1898 (Great Britain), as saying that the world could be divided into two categories, those who were living and those who were dying. He said this when Hitler was aged only nine and would later think of imperialism in biological or Darwinian terms. The Darwinist genocides occurred in Australia and Africa when the aborigines were ostracised against, and the 20th century dawned with Europe dividing the international law of war on the basis of colonial and civilised, meaning that laws did not apply to killings done in the colonies. The first bomb was invented to kill large populations in the colonies and the first one was dropped by Italy in Tripoli in Africa in 1911 from an airplane.

Frantz Fanon (1925-1961) in his Wretched of the Earth (1961) stated the famous formula of violence among the victims of imperialism: the colonised man liberates himself in and through violence.

He thought that this violence was not irrational and senseless but grew out of the script of modernity imposed by the impe- rialist state as the 'midwife of history'. Mamdani says this turning of tables - the victim attacking the imperialist - should not be accepted with any triumphalism but should be carefully analysed if we want to put an end to the victim-becoming-killer cycle. One unfortunate trend in thinking about the causes of violence - as happened in the wake of September 11, 2001 - is self-righteousness about one's own con- dition. How should the victim think? Should she competitively think that she is paramount in victimhood as in power? Should she conclude that what has hap- pened should not happen again to her alone or to entire humanity?

Those who refer to culture while ex- plaining terror can be categorised belitt- lingly as exponents of 'Culture Talk' in order to highlight their rather unscientific consideration of the term pre-modern: that which is not yet modern (arousing philan- thropy) and that which resists and rejects modernism (arousing fear). During the cold war, Africa was pre-modern; now it is Islam. The west Asia now is the domain of the pre-modern - no longer Africa - that arouses fear and loathing. This was done by Bernard Lewis when he coined the term Clash of Civilisations (1990), which was followed upon by Huntington when he wrote his famous Foreign Affairs article of the same title in 1993. Lewis points to the clash within the Islamic civilisation too and wants the west to wait and watch how Islam tackles with its inner conflict before the west tackles the outward- directed 'Muslim rage'. Huntington sees the clash of civilisations on the 'bloody bor- ders of Islam' and 'advises' the US within the framework of realist school of strategy in vogue in America. The Orientalist Lewis waits for the 'good' Muslim to triumph over the 'bad' Muslim while the political scientist Huntington is more 'practical' recommending a 'rollback' of history to eliminate the civilisational danger.

After the US was defeated in Vietnam in 1975 the focus of the cold war shifted to southern Africa where the last European colonialist power Portugal was in the process of collapse. Between the US and the USSR, who should collect the broken pieces of the Portuguese empire in Angola, Mozambique and Portuguese Guinea? The Nixon Doctrine advocated that proxy wars with mercenaries instead of US troops should be fought in regions where the

Soviets were seen to make an advance. The example was Laos where the Americans learned that other nations could fight the US war for money. Much before Afghanistan, this was tried in Africa till the Clark Amendment of 1975 put restric- tions on the US president to wage all kinds of wars abroad without the sanction of Congress. Did this nip the idea of proxy wars in the bud? No, because in 1985 President Reagan got Congress to repeal the Amendment! US was now ready to wage jihad.

Proxy war came back with a vengeance in Afghanistan and reached its most ironic climax in 1996. To Mamdani, the Taliban are the result of an 'encounter between a pre-modern people with modem imperial power, the enforced gender equity of the communists, then the traditional male se- clusion of the madrasas and then the fear that the warriors would turn rapists like the previous mujahideen' (p162). He takes the cue from Eqbal Ahmed: first cold war, then Soviet-propped Marxism, CIA- supported Islamisation - the confused result was the Taliban. Somehow Pakistan was the hub of it all, ideologically and logistically since everyone seems to have passed through here. Mamdani gets the number of Muslims in France wrong when he says they are three million, but he is right in telling us how most of the terrorists of Armed Islamic Group (GIA) in Algeria who turned to France for revenging them- selves against the west had actually had their baptism in Pakistan. To airman Kherbane he could have added Jordan's Zarqavi who is now killing Americans plus other innocent people, including Pakistanis, in Iraq; and Mullah Krekar, the Kurd who has been killing innocent people in Turkey.

Aspects of Terror

The Islamist terror, the book says, has three structural aspects or 'triple con- fluence': ideological (Maulana Maududi and Syed Qutb), organisational (American jihad in Afghanistan) and political (demonisation of Islam by such scholars as Bernard Lewis). The fear that was aroused by the rise of the popular religious parties as Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) in Algeria seeped into the national armies who cut short the process whereby politi- cal Islam was to receive its comeuppance in a democratic way. In Iran the process was not curtailed and the people of Iran are today busy thinking of alternatives to

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the clerical rule that has not brought them much joy. Similarly, Hizbullah, which was set up as a religious organisation with 1,500 warriors exported by Iran via Syria, was now 'secular' in the Lebanese parlia- ment with the additional advantage of not having the Amal shooting it in the back as a secular Shia organisation.

Mamdani makes an interesting point. Islamism is not something monolithic and that a distinction must be made between those who seek to reorganise society and those who wish to capture state power. Organisations like Hizbullah and FIS want social revolution and are not conservative with regard to the edicts of the scripture. On the other hand, the conservative Islamists want to grab the state and then rule without changing the edicts of the scripture. After the conservatives have en- forced 'un-reinterpreted' Islam, society will be recast in the Islamist mould. After that, the Islamist statists can be divided into two categories in Mamdani's effort to split concepts and delve into them for more clarity and definition - all in order to indict America's penchant for a simplistic iden- tification of the 'enemy'. This produces interesting complications, and that jells well with the confusion obtaining on the ground.

The US policy shift from covert proxy war ('multilateral' when waged under the aegis of the UN) to open aggression took place after September 11, 2001. Mamdani must have realised that Pakistani strate- gists like the Pakistani ex-army chief Aslam Beg had missed the point when they clung to the 'proxy war phase' of America while insisting that Washington could not risk 'body bags'. One can put that down to Muslim braggadocio because any average student of American strategy would have remembered Vietnam under a different policy that included 'body bags'. Iraq was to become an important model for the redrawing of the regional political map. The objective is the same: target and liqui- date militant nationalism through regime- change. As for west Asia, which forms a pivot in the current war in Iraq, the ob- jective is defence of Israel on lines dictated by the powerful Jewish lobbies in the US. Mamdani marvels at a complete absence of public debate in the US when it comes to Israel.

What is most scary about the war on Iraq is its illegality. It has scared the European allies equally, which in turn has encour- aged most of the third world states to express their disapproval of the US

action. Now that the US is said by many to be bogged down in Iraq, will it be punished as the Soviet Union was punished for getting bogged down in Afghanistan? Mamdani disabuses many third world 'meta-optimists' by putting it like this: 'Modern western empires are different from empires of old as well as the Soviet Union of yesterday in one important respect: they combine a democratic political system at home with despotism abroad... So long as democracy is living reality at home, democratic empires are potentially self- correcting' (p 239).

The US could have broken away from its manichaeism of the cold war just like South Africa after Apartheid, but it did not. Had it dismantled the global apparatus of empire and offered a peace dividend in 1991 when it talked of a 'new world order', September 11, 2001 would not have hap- pened. Now there are two forces contend- ing against each other: state terror that pretends to uphold law and order, and societal terror that pretends to seek justice. 'When accompanied by a blanket refusal to deal with issues, the call for justice turns into a vendetta'. Both the US and Al Qaeda are veterans of the cold war and both have been scarred by it, seeing the world through 'lenses of power'; both are informed by highly ideological worldviews leading to what Tariq Ali calls two clash- ing 'fundamentalisms' that build their righ- teousness on the demonisation of the other. The rest of the world exists 'only as a collateral'. Both sides are global in their outreach.

Mahmood Mamdani showers his readers with new insights. His cataloguing of facts is only meant to buttress the prin- ciples he extracts from events. He sees hubris in the US-western perception, high- lighted by what former US ambassador to the UN Jeanne Kirkpatrick said during the cold war, left wing totalitarianism was not 'reformable' while right wing totalitarianism - as manifested in 'authoritarianism' - could be reformed from within. Kirkpatrick in fact could be seen as Mamdani' s counterpart on the other side of the fence, considering her ability to produce strategic insights for the US. Mamdani finds that in fact the left wing totalitarian regimes like China and the Soviet Union were able to reform them- selves. Iraq was not allowed to reform itself; and North Korea was allowed to survive, unlike Iraq, because it had nuclear weapons. [13

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