Mahmood Mamdani makes a lot of sense. His classifications present a systematic way of understanding causes, origins and types of movements and the role of historical and political events in shaping their future. He explains the interplay of domestic products with foreign interventions in a very interesting way. He emphasizes on the historical and political context of events and supports Edward Said’s exposition of the common dogmas of western understanding of the “Oriental.” He urges policy makers to analyze movements based on their political agenda and not their religion, and distinguish between power and civilization, where the former serves as a source of uninterrupted nature of the latter as in the case of western civilization. But he doesn’t make complete sense to me in 3 ways: I do not agree with his basis of disagreement with Lewis’s classification of Muslims into “good” and “bad,” his separation of fundamentalism from what he calls political Islam and his attempt at presenting Islamic civilization as apolitical.
In agreement with Mamdani, I feel that it is inaccurate to classify Muslims as “good” and “bad” but only because the definition of “good” or “bad” is very subjective. However, I don’t see how Mamdani can escape a classification especially when he himself classifies radical movements into state centered and society centered, where the former “pose the problem of state at the expense of democracy in society,” which is why “state centered political Islam has been the harbinger of Islamist political terror.” Mamdani disagrees with Lewis, but his classification of Islamic movements eventually supports Lewis’s classification. There are different versions of Islam or different interpretations of Islam -as Lewis suggests- which are influenced by historical events and political encounters -as rightly said by Mamdani- but to completely reject Lewis’s point in dividing Muslims into two generalized groups is not accurate to my opinion; perhaps it is better to avoid using “good” or “bad.”
I cannot understand how is it possible to “distinguish between fundamentalism as a religious identity and political identities that use a religious idiom such as and political Islam.” I do not think that fundamentalism can be analyzed as a distinct phenomenon from political Islam. Fundamentalism revolves around nothing but power. Fundamentalists exercise social power grounded in religious beliefs, which I think is a political act, especially because social power can be the means to a greater end, political power. I cannot see how one can separate fundamentalism as mere strict belief in religious fundamentals which Mamdani calls “religious identity” from political Islam, because Islam is anything but apolitical, so is fundamentalism as a face of it.
Islam as a religion not just attempts at regulating social and cultural life, but also political life through an Islamic system of governance. Attempts at secularizing Islamic governance have failed because Islam as a religion does not limit itself to absence of control over political life; it is about Islamic way of governing all spheres of life including political, which eventually renders religion a driving political force. To call fundamentalism apolitical and to separate it from political Islam -which according to Mamdani only exists when politics uses religious identity- is naïve. Mamdani attempts at “metanationalist form of history writing” for Islamic civilization, which no doubt had moments of glory like any other civilization, however, to present its violent face as nothing but reaction to political encounters such as Cold War and detach it from its political soul is simplistic and unworthy of the “glorified” nature of Islamic civilization. If Islamic civilization has no political soul, it cannot be affected by political encounters such as Cold War and therefore cannot react to it in the way that it is doing. It is therefore because of the political nature of Islamic civilization that it responds to political events.