An excellent look at one of the fundamental rhetorical moves in discourse about Muslims in America. The good ones/bad ones division connects as well with other racial and ethnic patterns extending through colonialism to the present. All around, an important read.

Significant depiction and reminder of the mutual relationships between the U.S. military, the CIA, Israel, cocaine drug traffickers and opium growers, the religious right, and Ivy League schools that have been intentionally hidden and go without actual accountability. The violence of the settler, especially in terms of the U.S and Israel, is utterly clear and deeply unsettling.

The quotes below were all too relevant despite its publication in 2004. I drive or walk to the grocery store and cannot hide from the signs spanning streets throughout eastern Massachusetts that claim their support of Israel. It's embarrassing, degrading, and exactly what the settlers were looking for.

"The same American liberal, who will uphold your democratic right to criticize any government in the world, including that of the United States, will consider criticism of the state of Israel, as potentially anti-Semitic, in the words of the current president of Harvard, and in effect, if not in intent."

"The state of Israel is a state. It is not a religion or a people. The Israeli state should be submitted to the same scrutiny as any other state, not only for the sake of the Palestinian people or Israeli people, but, now more than ever, for the sake of humanity."

"America’s response to major catastrophes -- first slavery, then the Holocaust -- has crystallized a tendency among Americans to see overseas settlements as a solution, not a problem. In both cases, the American solution was a return home, but a return so marked by a callous disregard for the rights of those who were already home, who had never left home, that in each instance the project turned into one of settler colonialism. How does one explain the insensitivity to native interests that seems to be a special feature of American political history? Could it be that America, both official and unofficial, both privileged and not, which has never dared look its original crime, the expropriation and genocide of Native Americans, in the face, has historically tended to see settler projects as effective ways to cope with major internal dislocations, at the same time projecting them as so many civilizing missions to the world at large?"

Dense, but a solid refutation of the 'clash of civilizations' theory.

A recommendation from a professor.

Fantastic, informative, moving. A must-read. I suspect it may be too introductory-level for someone who's deep into this topic, but I personally learned a ton from it.

You have concentrate quite hard to read this book to follow Mamdani's arguments, but I found, in the end, it was worth it. Mamdani tells a complex story, that pulls together recent history in a cohesive explanation of the emergence of terrorism. He explains how Vietnam, the Nicaraguan revolution, South African apartheid, the Iranian revolution, the Cold War, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the Iraq/Iran war, Jerry Falwell and the American Christian Right,the American relationship with Israel,the Iran Contra scandal and the drug war are all interconnected and part of the story. The author provides a clear, though not simplistic, explanation of how politics and religion can become enmeshed. He provides strong reasoning why America's actions, characterized by a prevailing attitude of impunity,have created global relationships which should be conducted with a spirit of tolerance and collaboration but, instead, are festering under continued evil vs. good ideologies perpetrated by western political propagandists and governments are finding themselves in morally indefensible positions which will be increasingly impossible to back away from.

Spoiler

Honestly this book took me way longer than expected to get though, but that’s because it is definitely a very active read. The material is a bit dense (3/5), but understandable if you dedicate the energy and attention. Time aside, it was VERY worthwhile!!!

As a Muslim American, I think this book is crucial to read and understand the history of what it means to be a Muslim in the current national & global context. The book does require some background knowledge of concepts like settler-colonialism, nationalism, nihilism, etc. to truly understand, so I wouldn’t recommend it as an intro book to this topic, but rather, something to get more details and dive deeper.

Lastly, there are portions that didn’t connect for me (maybe because of a lack of background knowledge), but the book found a way of bringing you back to the author’s main assertions. I am a bit confused about the simplicity of the ending (solution = striving for world peace ?), but I believe that offering a solution was not the author’s intention, and that could actually be its own book, in and of itself.


Overall, a very worthwhile and meaningful read!!!

An important, hard to sit with book. Addresses a lot of the skeletons in the U.S.'s closet... and topics that are politically taboo to discuss.

"America cannot occupy the world. It has to learn to live in it."

This book was difficult for me, as someone born in 1992 and who really came of age in post-9/11 America. My eternal refrain bewailing the state of the U.S.'s public education must be repeated again: many of the political events related in this book were incredibly difficult to understand because I knew nothing or next-to-nothing about them. The Cold War era through, pretty much, George W. Bush's presidency just . . . isn't really taught in most public schools? At least, it wasn't taught in mine.

Still, I think it's a critical text for American citizens, not the least because it contextualizes our place on the world stage and provides a more comprehensive understanding of the political events leading up to the present. Mamdani stresses in the latter part of his book that the U.S. controls public perception of its actions (its atrocities) abroad through carefully controlled media and the framing of our actions in a righteous "good" vs. "evil" fashion. It's also sadly true that they control public perception through the lack of education and the rewriting or plain erasing of historical fact. When you know nothing of the horrors your country committed ten, twenty, or even two years ago in some far-away country you can't even point out on a map, it isn't that hard to be led in any direction a skilled propagandist wants you to be led.

One of the best takeaways from this text was the earlier discussion regarding the perceived morality/justness of colonization - and the amount of violence allowed - based on the so-called "civility" of the place being occupied ("savage" cultures vs. pseudo-Westernized ones). I of course loved that Mamdani did the work of holding the United States responsible for the terror it has cultivated abroad for its own political purposes, terror which has now grown out of our control and which we very desperately refuse to admit culpability for creating (esp. the role of the CIA in working with drug lords and training troops to wage our proxy wars). I also really appreciated the sheer amount of effort that went into drawing connections between key political events spanning half a century and multiple continents. It got muddled at times, both because of my own ignorance and because I think the scope of this work was enormous, but ultimately it provided me, the reader, with a very necessary historical and political context, which I will take into other readings.

My main complaint is that the citations in this edition, at least, were terrible. We had a huge amount of chapter notes tucked away in the back, but no citations on the page indicating that anything was being referenced. I don't care if it's a valid citation style; I think it hurts the credibility of the author's arguments. It was as if he was trying to hide his endnotes for some reason, which is probably not true but is nevertheless the vibe I ended up with.

I also noticed a breakdown in the lucidity of his arguments where the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was concerned, particularly in the last chapter when he begins to discuss the U.S.'s relationship with Israel. I'm not pro-Israel (I actually don't know enough about it to be pro-either of them at this point), but even I could see that his arguments became thin, emotional, and less supported by fact in those sections.

A lot of great information in here, much of which surprised and dismayed me, and some interesting arguments made by Mamdani.