Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror Read Online Free PDF Page A

Islam, the Wahhabi. Even the pages of the New York Times now include regular accounts distinguishing good from bad Muslims: good Muslims are modern, secular, and Westernized, but bad Muslims are doctrinal, antimodern, and virulent. The self-appointed leaders of “the West,” George W. Bush and British prime minister Tony Blair, have visibly stepped back from a Huntington-style embrace of a war between civilizations to a Lewis-style caution against taking on an entire civilization. After Bush’s early public flirtation with the idea of an anti-Muslim crusade, both he and Blair have taken to warning audiences about the need to distinguish “good” Muslims from “bad” Muslims. The implication is unmistakable and undisguised: whether in Afghanistan, Palestine, or Pakistan, Islam must be quarantined and the devil exorcized from it by a Muslim civil war.
    Lewis opens What Went Wrong? with a reductive discussion of the thirteen hundred years since the birth of Islam in the seventhcentury: “the first thousand years or so after the advent of Islam” were followed by “the long struggle for the reconquest,” which “opened the way to a Christian invasion of Africa and Asia.” In the beginning, there was “conquest” and then followed “reconquest.” The conquest was Islamic, the reconquest Christian. No period in history fits this model of “Christians” confronting “Muslims” better than the time of the Crusades.
    One of the best studies of the Crusades is by the Slovenian historian Tomaž Mastnak, who points out that it was at that moment in history that the Muslim became the enemy. When “Christian society became conscious of itself through mobilization for holy war … an essential moment in the articulation of self-awareness of the Christian commonwealth was the construction of the Muslim enemy.” Mastnak is careful to point out that this was not true of earlier centuries: “When, with the Arab expansion in the seventh and eighth centuries, the Muslims reached the European peninsula, they became in the Latin Christians’ eyes one among those pagan, or infidel, barbarians. Among the host of Christian enemies, they were assigned no privileged place.”
    Militant Christian animosity was initially aimed at all non-Christians; only later did it become focused on Muslims: “It was with the crusade that Palestine ceased to be the Promised Land (terra repromissionis) of the Old Testament and became the Holy Land, terra sancta.” Only with the Crusades did Christendom define a universal enemy and declare a “state of permanent war against the heathen.” No longer just another earthly enemy, the Crusades demonized the Muslim as evil incarnate, “the personification of the very religion of the Antichrist.” This is why the point of the Crusades was not to convert Muslims but to exterminate them: “The Muslims, the infidels, did not have freedom of choice; they could not choose between conversion and death because theywere seen as inconvertible.” Their extermination “was preached by the Popes” and also by St. Bernard, who “declared that to kill an infidel was not homicide but ‘malicide,’ annihilation of evil, and that a pagan’s death was a Christian’s glory because, in it, Christ was glorified.”
    Bernard Lewis treats what is actually a series of different historical encounters—the Crusades, 1492, European colonization—as if they were hallmarks of a single clash of civilizations over fourteen hundred years. Rather than recognize that each encounter was fueled by a specific political project—the making of a political entity called “Christendom,” the Castilian monarchy’s desire to build a nation-state called Spain following its conquest of neighboring territories, modern European imperial expansion, and so on—Lewis claims that these “clashes” were driven by incompatible civilizations. And he assumes that the clashes take place between fixed territorial units that represent