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

The title of Good Muslim, Bad Muslim captures one of Mamdani’s most central arguments: that the post-9/11 world has been structured around a binary opposition between “good Muslims” and “bad Muslims.” This binary, propagated by both the US government and radical Islamist groups, has reduced complex political and cultural identities into simplistic moral categories. From the perspective of the US government and much of the US media, “Good Muslims” are those who support US foreign policy and condemn terrorism; “bad Muslims” are those who resist or question US hegemony. Mamdani emphasizes that this framework is politically useful but intellectually and morally bankrupt. It allows governments to demand loyalty from Muslim citizens without granting them the political space to dissent. It conflates cultural or religious identity with political allegiance, thereby justifying the erosion of civil liberties, indefinite detention, and racial profiling. Worse, it delegitimizes criticism of US policies as inherently suspect or subversive. Mamdani argues that Muslim thinkers must be given the same space for political dissent as those of any other religious tradition: “In their preoccupation with political identity and political power, Islamist intellectuals were like other intellectuals, whether religious or not” (59). Religion is always concerned with politics, but only Muslims are expected to support US policy uncritically.