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Mahmood Mamdani, Professor of Government and Director of the Institute of African Studies at Columbia University, is widely acknowledged as one of the foremost analysts of the history and politics of the nation state in the developing world. Mamdani’s area of expertise is the constraints imposed by Western colonial and post-colonial powers on the prospects for popular non-Western nationalist movements to create viable states, and hitherto his work has focused on Africa. His books Citizen and Subject, which traces the influence of the colonial state structure on politics in post-colonial Africa, and When Victims Become Killers, which focuses on the causes of the Rwandan genocide, have become required reading for students of the modern African state. So much so that Mamdani is rightly credited with helping to give voice and shape to a whole new generation of critique on the factors that enable and constrain “Third World” political movements to develop in the contemporary globalized order.

Mamdani’s latest book, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War and The Roots of Terror, shifts focus from Africa to the Middle East. But in so doing, it sketches, with similar clarity and insight, the same themes that have bedeviled African national development: most crucially, the ways in which Great Powers, principally the United States, have treated the Middle East as subjugated territory on which to play out their geopolitical ambitions. The results, as Mamdani shows, have been an unmitigated disaster for the populations of many Middle Eastern countries, notably Afghanistan, Iraq and Palestine. But because the US has couched its regional ambitions in the language of morality, Mamdani persuasively argues that the logic and propaganda it uses to facilitate such aggression will ultimately turn in on itself, and lead, not to a world dominated by a US Empire, but to a world with which the US will have to make accommodation.

The book begins with an analysis of the ways in which the “war on terror” has politicised religion, and in particular the pervasive association between “Muslim” and “terrorist” now made in the minds of many in America. Mamdani shows how this propaganda has sought, not to demonize all Muslims, but more insidiously, to divide them into good Muslims who are moderate, and bad Muslims who are fundamentalist. Such a division not only subsumes political fanaticism and religious belief as if there were no differences between the two, but is also racist. Behind this assumption is the idea that fundamentalist Islam is premodern and backward, whereas moderate Islam embraces Western values, which are modern and progressive. From this, it is only a short step to begin to imagine that invading countries to bring them democracy is a form of “liberation.”

In reality, the development of religious fundamentalism, its politicization, and the demonization of particular groups on the grounds of belief need to be seen largely in the context of modern Western politics. As Mamdani points out, while the concepts of the Islamic state and popular Islamic-based political movements have been aspirations for intellectuals and activists in Egypt, India and elsewhere, the promotion of religious fundamentalism as a political entity has largely been the work of the US government. This is evident from the ways in which religious fundamentalism has become increasingly influential within the US itself; a fundamentalism that has successfully hijacked what Mamdani calls “culture talk,” and which has promoted the idea of a “clash of civilizations” between Islam and Christianity for its own political purposes.

It is also evident that, in its pursuit of a policy of fighting covert and proxy wars across the world after its defeat in Vietnam, the US government was among the biggest funders of Islamic fundamentalist groups devoted to fighting a modern “Jihad.”

Mamdani devotes most of the book to an exploration of the ways in which the US government developed the policy of proxy war; the context, Mamdani argues, in which fundamentalist Islamic “terrorists” have flourished in the contemporary world. He traces the beginnings of this policy to the US defeat in Vietnam in 1975, and to the collapse of the Portuguese Empire in Africa around the same time. Defeat in Vietnam led to a new ideology for the American administration: that “Asian boys must fight Asian wars.”