Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror (2 page)

This historical fact was not lost on intellectuals from the colonies. In his
Discourse on Colonialism
(1951), Aimé Césaire wrote that a Hitler slumbers within “the very distinguished, very humanistic and very Christian bourgeois of the Twentieth century,” and yet the European bourgeois cannot forgive Hitler for “the fact that he applied to Europe the colonial practices that had previously been applied only to the Arabs of Algeria, the coolies of India and the Negroes of Africa.” “Not so long ago,” recalled Frantz Fanon in
The Wretched of the Earth
(1961), “Nazism turned the whole of Europe into a veritable colony.”

The first genocide of the twentieth century was the German annihilation of the Herero people in South West Africa in 1904. The German geneticist Eugen Fischer’s first medical experiments focused on a “science” of race mixing in concentration camps for the Herero. His subjects were both Herero and the offspring of Herero women and German men. Fischer argued that “mulattoes,” Herero-Germans born of mixed parentage, were physically and mentally inferior to their German parents. Hitler read Fischer’s book
The Principle of Human Heredity and Race Hygiene
(1921) while he was in prison and later made him rector of the University of Berlin, where Fischer taught medicine. One of Fischer’s prominent students was Josef Mengele, who conducted notorious medical experiments at Auschwitz.

The Native’s Violence

The link between the genocide of the Herero and the Holocaust was race branding, which was used not only to set a group apart as an enemy but also to annihilate it with an easy conscience. Historians of genocide traditionally have sketched only half a history: the annihilation of the native by the settler. The revolutionary theorist
Frantz Fanon has written how such attempts could then trigger the native annihilating the settler. Fanon has come to be regarded as a prophet of violence, following Hannah Arendt’s claim that his influence was mainly responsible for growing violence on American campuses in the 1960s. And yet those who came to pay homage to Fanon at his burial hailed him as a humanist. 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 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.

We find in Fanon the premonition of the native turned perpetrator, of the native who kills not just to extinguish the humanity of the other but to defend his or her own, and of the moral ambivalence this must provoke in other human beings like us. No one understood the genocidal impulse better than this Martinique-born psychiatrist and Algerian freedom fighter. Native violence, Fanon insisted, was the violence of yesterday’s victims, the violence of those who had cast aside their victimhood to become masters of their own lives. He wrote:

He of whom they have never stopped saying that the only language he understands is that of force, decides to give utterance by force…. The argument the native chooses has been furnished by the settler, and by an ironic turning of the tables it is the native who now affirms that the colonialist understands nothing but force.

For Fanon, the proof of the native’s humanity consisted not in the willingness to kill settlers but in the willingness to risk his or her own life.

To read Fanon is to understand not only the injury that fuels the violence of the native but also the fear that fuels the violence of the settler. Anyone familiar with the history of apartheid in South Africa would surely recognize that it could not have been simply greed—the wish to hold on to the fruits of conquest—but also fear, the specter of genocide, that stiffened white South African resolve against the winds of change blowing across the African continent. That same specter seemingly also haunts the survivors of the Holocaust in Israel, yesterday’s victims turned today’s perpetrators.

Before 9/11, I thought that tragedy had the potential to connect us with humanity in ways that prosperity does not. I thought that if prosperity tends to isolate, tragedy must connect. Now I realize that this is not always the case. One unfortunate response to tragedy is a self-righteousness about one’s own condition, a seeking proof of one’s special place in the world, even in victimhood. One afternoon, I shared these thoughts with a new colleague, the Israeli vice chancellor of the Budapest-based Central European University. When he told me that he was a survivor of Auschwitz, I asked him what lesson he had drawn from this great crime. He explained that, like all victims of Auschwitz, he, too, had said, “Never again.” In time, though, he had come to realize that this phrase lent itself to two markedly different conclusions: one was that never again should this happen to
my
people; the other that it should
never again happen to
any
people. Between these two interpretations, I suggest nothing less than our common survival is at stake.

9/11

The lesson of Auschwitz remains at the center of post-9/11 discussions in American society. An outside observer is struck by how much American discourse on terrorism is filtered more through the memory of the Holocaust than through any other event. Post-9/11 America seems determined: “Never again.” Despite important differences, genocide and terrorism share one important feature: both target civilian populations. To what extent is the mind-set of the perpetrators revealed by the way they frame their victims culturally? Not surprisingly, the debate on this question turns around the relationship between cultural and political identity and, in the context of 9/11, between religious fundamentalism and political terrorism. I have written this book as a modest contribution to this debate. Rather than offer the results of original research, this interpretive essay seeks to explain political events, above all 9/11, in light of
political
encounters—historically shaped—rather than as the outcome of stubborn cultural legacies.

The book is really divided into two parts. The first part consists of a single chapter:
chapter 1
offers a critique of the cultural interpretations of politics—what I call Culture Talk—and suggests a different way of thinking about political Islam. It traces the development of different tendencies, including the recent rise of a terrorist movement. The chapters that follow explain how Islamist terror, a phenomenon hitherto marginal, came to occupy center stage in Islamist politics. As such, it provides an alternative interpretation of 9/11. I argue that rather than illustrating a deep-seated clash of civilizations, 9/11 came out of recent history, that of the late Cold War.

I define the late Cold War as lasting from the end of the American war in Vietnam to the fall of the Soviet Union in 1990, with the era of proxy war stretching to the recent war in Iraq. If the war in Vietnam was the last Cold War engagement in which American ground troops directly participated in large numbers, the war in Iraq marks the first post-Cold War American engagement in which that prohibition was fully lifted. Between the two lies an era of proxy wars.

The late Cold War was an era of proxy wars marked by two developments. Both were distinctive initiatives of the Reagan administration’s foreign policy. They also point up important similarities between the Reagan and the current Bush administrations, illuminating the mind-set of the “war on terror” after 9/11.

The changes in foreign policy during the Reagan era were responses to the revolutionary overthrow of pro-American dictatorships. The Reagan administration saw these revolutions, particularly the 1979 Sandinista Revolution in Nicaragua and the Islamist Revolution in Iran, as setting a trend of reversals after Vietnam. It was against this backdrop that the Reagan administration concluded that America had been preparing to fight the wrong war, that against the massing of Soviet troops on the plains of Europe, which was likely never to take place. Reagan called on America to wage the war that was already on: the war against yesterday’s guerrillas who had come to power as today’s nationalists, from southern Africa to Central America. The Reagan administration portrayed militant nationalists as Soviet proxies. The shift in focus made for a shift in strategy and a new name: low-intensity conflict. This initiative was the first distinctive characteristic that marked the foreign policy of the Reagan administration.

The second initiative was the shift from “containment” to “rollback,” which called for the subordination of all means to a
single end: the total war against the “evil empire.” Even though couched in hypermoral language, this venture began as an amoral “constructive engagement” with the apartheid regime in South Africa. As official America held hands with Pretoria, the latter moved to harness political terror as the most effective way to undermine militant nationalist governments in the newly independent Portuguese colonies of Mozambique and Angola. As the battleground of the Cold War shifted from southern Africa to Central America and central Asia in the late seventies, America’s benign attitude toward political terror turned into a brazen embrace: both the contras in Nicaragua and later al-Qaeda (and the Taliban) in Afghanistan were American allies during the Cold War. Supporting them showed a determination to win the Cold War “by all means necessary,” a phrase that could refer only to unjust means. The result of an alliance gone sour, 9/11 needs to be understood first and foremost as the unfinished business of the Cold War.

To the extent my point of view is shaped by a place, that place is Africa. I was a young lecturer at the University of Dar es Salaam from 1973 to 1979. As the U.S. defeat in Vietnam in 1975 coincided with the collapse of the Portuguese empire, the last European colonial power in Africa, the center of gravity of the Cold War shifted from Southeast Asia to southern Africa. From 1980 when I returned to Makerere University in my hometown of Kampala, Uganda, right up to the end of a three-year stay at the University of Cape Town in South Africa in the late nineties, I participated in ongoing debates about the political violence raging in independent Africa: what were we to make of movements, like Renamo in Mozambique and, increasingly, the Inkatha Freedom Party in
South Africa, that targeted civilian populations rather than military concentrations and became my generation’s first experience of political terror? Wary of press and politicians co-opted by the establishment who characterized this form of violence as an unfortunate cultural manifestation—ȁtribal” “black-on-black” violence—we looked for explanations in the rapidly changing political landscape. On 9/11 I was in New York City where I had moved from Cape Town in 1999. The more I participated in teach-ins and discussions around 9/11, and encountered those who thought it signaled the onslaught of “Islamic terrorism” on the American heartland, the more I was reminded of those cultural explanations I had heard the decade before in southern Africa.

I have no intention of explaining away either political ethnicity or political Islam as the result of a Cold War American conspiracy. Political Islam, like the thinking that champions “tribalism,” is more a domestic product than a foreign import. But neither was bred in isolation; both were produced in the encounter with Western power. Political Islam was born in the colonial period. But it did not give rise to a terrorist movement until the Cold War. What particular circumstances made it possible for terrorism to be transformed from an ideological tendency into a political force? There was a common ground that nurtured both “black-on-black” violence in Africa from the mid-seventies and “Islamic terrorism” globally from the early eighties. That common ground was the late Cold War after Vietnam. Even if crafted from local raw material, both political tendencies crystallized as strategies to win the Cold War.

For those worried that I see 9/11 through lenses crafted in an earlier era—the late Cold War in Africa—I can only hope that this perspective will bring fresh illumination to a subject of common concern, without obscuring the ways in which 9/11 has indeed come to mark a turning point for America and the world.

Good Muslim, Bad Muslim

Listening to the public discussion in America after 9/11, I had the impression of a great power struck by amnesia. Acknowledging the epochal significance of the event should not necessarily mean taking it out of a historical and political context. Unfortunately, official America has encouraged precisely this. After an unguarded reference to pursuing a “crusade,” President Bush moved to distinguish between “good Muslims” and “bad Muslims.” From this point of view, “bad Muslims” were clearly responsible for terrorism. At the same time, the president seemed to assure Americans that “good Muslims” were anxious to clear their names and consciences of this horrible crime and would undoubtedly support “us” in a war against “them.” But this could not hide the central message of such discourse: unless proved to be “good,” every Muslim was presumed to be “bad.” All Muslims were now under obligation to prove their credentials by joining in a war against “bad Muslims.”

Judgments of “good” and “bad” refer to Muslim political identities, not to cultural or religious ones. For those who have difficulty thinking of cultural (and now religious) identity as distinct from political identity, don’t forget the predicament faced by earlier conscripts of Western power. Was not the secular Jew, first in Europe and America and then in Nazi Germany, compelled to recognize that Western modernity had turned “the Jew” from just a cultural or religious identity to a political one? Was not historical Zionism the response of secular Jews who were convinced that their political choices were limited by this political identity imposed upon them?