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

in mid-nineteenth-century Paris. When Renan published a piece on “Islam and Science” in Journal des Débats (March 29, 1883), al-Afghani responded in the same journal (May 18, 1883). Renan published a rejoinder the very next day after al-Afghani’s response, acknowledging what a great impression al-Afghani had made on him and praising him as a fellow rationalist and infidel. In his lecture, Renan had claimed that “early Islam and the Arabs who professed it were hostile to the scientific and philosophic spirit, and that science and philosophy had only entered the Islamic world from non-Arab sources.” Al-Afghani’s response was to challenge Renan’s racist assumptions—that the Arabs and/or Islam were hostile to science—and in its place argue a surprisingly modern case, that science, as philosophy, develops everywhere over time.
    Al-Afghani had traveled widely outside his native Iran, from India in the east to France in the west, before he came to Egypt. His traditional madrassah education had included fiqh (jurisprudence) alongside falsafah (philosophy) and irfan (mysticism). His Indian experience both convinced al-Afghani of the future importance of modern science and mathematics and exposed him to Britain’s brutal repression of the 1857-58 anticolonial revolt in India. Whereas early-nineteenth-century Islamic thinkers who embraced progress tended to be enamored with Western modernity and saw Britain and France as benign bearers of progress, al-Afghani highlighted modernity’s contradictory impact. Hisreligious vision came to be informed by a very modern dilemma. On the one hand, Muslims needed modern science, which they would have to learn from Europe. On the other, this very necessity was proof “of our inferiority and decadence,” for “we civilize ourselves by imitating the Europeans.” Al-Afghani had located the center of this historical dilemma in a society that had been subjected to colonialism: if being modern meant, above all, free rein for human creativity and originality, how could a colonial society modernize by imitation?
    This was also a debate about colonialism and independence. Not surprisingly, forward-looking Islamic thinkers looked within Islamic tradition for sources of innovation, renewal, and change. Even if both reformers and radicals spoke the language of Islam, they looked to doctrine and history not just for continuity but also for renewal, and so they provided different answers to the question of how to confront Western modernity and global dominance. The main lines of demarcation in the twentieth century were worked out through debates in three different countries: India, Egypt, and Iran.
    This process was completely different from the earlier development of Christian fundamentalism and political Christianity. Unlike Christianity, mainstream Islam has no institutionalized religious hierarchy; it has a religious clergy, but not one organized parallel to the hierarchy of the state. There is a major debate on the significance of this historical difference. Reinhard Schulze has argued that the absence of a conflict between secular and religious hierarchies is why the problem of secularism does not appear in Islam and why Islamic religious movements are not necessarily antisecular. In contrast, Bernard Lewis claims that the absence of a clear line of demarcation between the religious and the secular indicates the absence of secular thought in Islam. However, Schulzepoints out that modern Islamic discourse is largely secular, concerned more with contemporary political and social issues than with a spiritual concern with salvation or the hereafter, precisely because Islamic societies were able to secularize within Islam, rather than in opposition to it.
    Whereas the development of a political Christianity in the United States was mainly the work of a “fundamentalist” religious clergy—such as Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and others—the development of political Islam has been