Two Versions of Culture Talk

Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror
by Mahmood Mamdani, Ph.D.

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Contemporary Culture Talk dates from the end of the Cold War and comes in two versions. It claims to interpret politics from culture, in the present and throughout history, but neither version of Culture Talk is substantially the work of a historian. If there is a founding father of contemporary Culture Talk, it is Bernard Lewis, the well-known Orientalist at Princeton who has been an adviser to the U.S. policy establishment. The celebrated phrase of contemporary Culture Talk — "a clash of civilizations" — is taken from the title of the closing section of Lewis's 1990 article "The Roots of Muslim Rage." Lewis's text provided the inspiration for a second and cruder version, written by Samuel Huntington, a political scientist at Harvard, whose involvement with the U.S. policy establishment dates from the era of the Vietnam War. Whereas Lewis confined his thesis to historical relations between two civilizations he called "Islamic" and "Judeo-Christian," Huntington's reach was far more ambitious: he broadened Lewis's thesis to cover the entire world.

"It is my hypothesis," Huntington proclaimed in an article called "The Clash of Civilizations?" (1993) in Foreign Affairs,

that the fundamental source of conflict in this new world will not be primarily ideological or primarily economic. The great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural. Nation-states will remain the most powerful actors in world affairs, but the principal conflicts of global politics will occur between nations and groups of different civilizations. The clash of civilizations will dominate global politics. The fault lines between civilizations will be the battle lines of the future.

Huntington's argument was built around two ideas: that since the end of the Cold War "the iron curtain of ideology" had been replaced by a "velvet curtain of culture," and that the velvet curtain had been drawn across "the bloody borders of Islam." Huntington cast Islam in the role of an enemy civilization. From this point of view, Muslims could be only bad.

Huntington was not alone. Several others joined in translating his point of view into a vision broadly shared in hawkish circles of the policy and intellectual establishment. The thrust of the new vision was that the ideological war we have come to know as the Cold War was but a parochial curtain-raiser for a truly global conflict for which "the West" will need to marshal the entire range of its cultural resources. For William Lind, the Cold War was the last in a series of "Western civil wars" that started in seventeenth-century Europe; with the end of the Cold War, he argued, the lines of global conflict become cast in cultural terms. Régis Debray, himself an active participant in the ideological struggles of the Cold War, saw the new era as sharply defined by a "Green Peril" — the color green presumably standing for Islam — far more dangerous than the red scares of yesteryears because it lacks rational self-restraint: "Broadly speaking, green has replaced red as the rising force.... The nuclear and rational North deters the nuclear and rational North, not the conventional and mystical South."

The idea of a clash of civilizations, with civilizations marching through history like armed battalions — with neither significant internal debates nor significant exchanges — has been widely discredited. Edward W. Said, the late Palestinian literary scholar who was University Professor at Columbia, forcefully argued for a more historical and less parochial reading of culture, one informed by the idea that the clash is more inside civilizations than between them: "To Huntington, what he calls 'civilizational identity' is a stable and undisturbed thing, like a room full of furniture in the back of your house."

It is Bernard Lewis who has provided the more durable version of Culture Talk. Lewis both gestures toward history and acknowledges a clash within civilizations. Rather than claim an a historical global vision of a coming Armageddon, Lewis thinks of history as the movement of large cultural blocs called civilizations. But Lewis writes of Islamic civilization as if it were a veneer with its essence an unchanging doctrine in which Muslims are said to take refuge in times of crisis. "There is something in the religious culture of Islam," Lewis noted in "The Roots of Muslim Rage,"

which inspired, in even the humblest peasant or peddler, a dignity and a courtesy toward others never exceeded and rarely equaled in other civilizations. And yet, in moments of upheaval and disruption, when the deeper passions are stirred, this dignity and courtesy toward others can give way to an explosive mixture of rage and hatred which impels even the government of an ancient and civilized country — even the spokesman of a great and ethical religion — to espouse kidnapping and assassination, and try to find, in the life of their Prophet, approval and indeed precedent for such actions.

© 2004 by Mahmood Mamdani. Excerpted by permission of Pantheon, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

About the Author

Mahmood Mamdani was born in Kampala, Uganda. A political scientist and anthropologist, he is Herbert Lehman Professor of Government and director of the Institute of African Studies at Columbia University. His previous books include Citizen and Subject and When Victims Become Killers. In 2001 he presented one of the nine papers at the Nobel Peace Prize Centennial Symposium. He lives in New York City and Kampala with his wife and son.