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

Protestant rhetoric with day-to-day politics. Falwell’s Moral Majority sermons were known as jeremiads. Named after Jeremiah, the Old Testament prophet, a jeremiad “laments the moral condition of a people, foresees cataclysmic consequences, and calls for dramatic moral reform and revival.” In his jeremiads, Jerry Falwell defined abortion as “the biological holocaust,” AIDS as “a judgment of God against America for endorsing immorality,” and “God’s absolute opposition to abortion and homosexuality” as part of the “litmus tests of Bible truth.”
    Protestant fundamentalists had several victories in the last decades of the twentieth century. They were able to make sure that Arkansas and Louisiana passed bills to ensure that equal time was given in the school curriculum to the literal teaching of Genesis alongside Darwinian evolution. Their most notable achievement, though, was the blocking of the Equal Rights Amendment. Phyllis Schlafly, a Roman Catholic leader whose “Eagle Forum” often held joint events with the Moral Majority, chastised feminism as a “disease,” the cause of the world’s illness. Ever since Eve disobeyed God and sought her own liberation, she said, feminism had brought sin into the world and with it “fear, sickness, pain, anger, hatred, danger, violence, and all varieties of ugliness.” Though thirty of thirty-two required states had voted for the Equal Rights Amendment by 1973, Christian right activists were able to halt its momentum: Nebraska, Tennessee, Kentucky, Indiana, and South Dakota all reversed their previous votes for the amendment.
    As early as the mid-1970s, George Gallup, Jr., had polled Americans about their religious views and found that more thanone third—that is, more than fifty million adult Americans—described themselves as “born again,” defined as having experienced “a turning point in your life when you committed yourself to Jesus Christ.” Jimmy Carter was America’s first “born-again” president. Ronald Reagan was the second, and George W. Bush is the third. Presidential candidate Reagan embraced the Christian right publicly when he spoke at the National Religious Broadcasters Convention in 1980, hosted that year by Jerry Falwell’s Thomas Road Baptist Church. Later that year, the Christian right organized a march of several hundred thousand born-again Christians on the Washington Mall for a “Washington for Jesus” rally. Three years later, Reagan boldly introduced the language of self-righteousness, of “good” and “evil,” to American postwar politics when he told the NAE that the Soviet Union was an “evil empire.” By the time of the 1992 Republican national convention in Houston, the religious right showed strong evidence of having consolidated its electoral strength. The party platform included two new planks: one unequivocally opposed abortion under any circumstance, the other denounced the Democrats’ support for gay-rights legislation. In his speech on the opening night of the convention, Patrick Buchanan warned of a coming “religious war” that would plague the United States from within: “It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we shall be as the Cold War itself, for this war is for the soul of America.”
    Jerry Falwell had been right about the civil-rights movement: it did represent a dramatic and successful reentry of religion into politics. The civil-rights and the Christian-right movements illustrate two different forms of political Christianity in the modern world. The contrast between them also shows that the involvement of religious movements in politics is not necessarily reactionary.
    Islamic Reformism and Political Islam
    Long before political Islam appeared in the twentieth century, Islamic reformers had felt that colonialism was the key challenge facing contemporary Muslims. The question was posed squarely by Jamal al-Din al-Afghani (1839-1897), famous as Ernest Renan’s protagonist