Good Muslim, Bad Muslim - Tapa blanda

In this look at the rise of political Islam, the author brings his expertise and insight to bear on a question that has been asked since September 11, 2001: how did this happen? Mamdani dispels the idea of "good" (secular, westernized) and "bad" (pre-modern, fanatical) Muslims, pointing out that these judgments refer to political rather than cultural or religious identities. The presumption that there are "good" Muslims readily available to be split off from "bad" Muslims masks a failure to make a political analysis of our times. This title argues that political Islam emerged as the result of a modern encounter with Western power, and that the terrorist movement at the center of Islamist politics is an even more recent phenomenon, one that followed America's embrace of proxy war after its defeat in Vietnam. Mamdani writes with great insight about the Reagan years, showing America's embrace of the highly ideological politics of "good" against "evil". Identifying militant nationalist governments as Soviet proxies in countries such as Nicaragua and Afghanistan, the Reagan administration readily backed terrorist movements, hailing them as the "moral equivalents" of America's founding f