Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror by Mahmood Mamdani Read Free Book Online

changing political circumstances. There is a difference between Christian fundamentalism, which emerged in the 1920s in America, and political Christianity, a phenomenon that arose in America after the Second World War.
    To speak of fundamentalist Islam, at least in the case of mainstreamSunni Islam, is misleading. Since mainstream Islam did not develop a religious hierarchy parallel to a secular state hierarchy, as historical Christianity did, it lacks the problem of secularism. “Fundamentalism” can be applied to those forms of Shi’a Islam that have indeed developed a religious hierarchy. When this book focuses on political movements that speak the language of religion, they will be referred to as political Islam and not Islamic fundamentalism.
    This book will also question those writers who speak of “religious fundamentalism” as a political category and associate it with “political terrorism.” “Fundamentalism” as a religious phenomenon has to be distinguished from those political developments that are best described as political Christianity and political Islam. Religious “fundamentalism” is akin to a countercultural, not a political, movement. The problem with using the term “fundamentalism” to describe all such movements is that it tends to equate movements forged in radically different historical and political contexts, and obscures their doctrinal differences, including the place of violence in religious doctrine. This is why after explaining the historical context in which Christian “fundamentalism” emerged, and distinguishing it from political Christianity, I won’t use the term “fundamentalism” to describe countercultural movements inside Islam or other religions. And I question the widespread assumption that every political movement which speaks the language of religion is potentially terrorist.
    The clue to the nature of a political movement lies not in it’s language but in its agenda. Just as the onset of political Christianity after the Second World War in America produced movements as diverse as the civil-rights and the Christian-right movements, so did the onset of political Islam during the Cold War give rise to movements with diverse, even contradictory, political agendas.Moderate movements organize and agitate for social reform within the existing political context. Radical movements organize to win state power, having concluded that the existing political situation is the main obstacle to social reform. There are two kinds of radical movements, society-centered and state-centered: whereas society-centered radicals link the problem of democracy in society with the state, state-centered radicals pose the problem of the state at the expense of democracy in society. It is state-centered political Islam that has been the harbinger of Islamist political terror.
    Christian Fundamentalism and Political Christianity
    The term “fundamentalism” was invented in 1920 by the Rev. Curtis Lee Laws and was immediately taken up as an honorific by his Baptist and Presbyterian colleagues who swore to do “battle royal for the fundamentals of the faith.” Karen Armstrong has located this phenomenon in a rapidly growing set of American debates over the validity of biblical literalism then being taken up by the increasingly powerful and entrenched conservative Republicans who supported it. In 1910, the Presbyterians of Princeton defined a set of five dogmas standing for the infallibility of Scripture: (1) the inerrancy of Scripture, (2) the virgin birth of Christ, (3) Christ’s atonement for our sins on the cross, (4) his bodily resurrection, and (5) the objective reality of his miracles. Between 1910 and 1915, they issued a series of twelve paperback pamphlets called The Fundamentals , dispatching some three million copies to every pastor, professor, and theology student in America. Their next step was to try to expel liberals; the fiercest institutional battles were fought where