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

discrete civilizations over the fourteen-hundred-year history. To understand the political agenda that drives such civilizational histories, we should question the presumed identity between cultural and political history.
    To avoid Lewis’s distortions, one needs more details at key historical turning points. Can one, for example, speak of Judeo-Christian civilization over two millennia as does Bernard Lewis? The Israeli cultural historian Gil Anidjar reminds us that Jewish culture in Spain is better thought of as “Arab Jewish”—rather than Judeo-Christian—and that the separation of “Jews from Arabs” did not occur until 1492. Moses Maimonides (1135-1204) wrote The Guide of the Perplexed , “the most important work of Jewish philosophy ever written,” a text “possibly written in Hebrew script, but ‘speaking’ to us in Arabic and/or Judeo-Arabic” in al-Andalus. And it was the loss of al-Andalus in 1492 that producedthe major text of Jewish mysticism, the Zohar and also marked the beginning of the second Jewish diaspora.
    It does not make sense to think of culture in political—and therefore territorial—terms. States are territorial; culture is not. Does it make sense to write political histories of Islam that read like histories of places like the Middle East? Or to write political histories of states in the Middle East as if these were no more than political histories of Islam there? We need to think of culture in terms that are both historical and nonterritorial. Otherwise, one is harnessing cultural resources for very specific national and imperial political projects.
    Modernity and the Politicization of Culture
    Culture Talk does not spring from the tradition of history writing but rather from that of the policy sciences that regularly service political establishments: Bernard Lewis is an Orientalist, and Samuel Huntington a political scientist. Orientalist histories of Islam and the Middle East have been consistently challenged since the 1960s by a diverse group of such intellectuals as Marshall Hodgson and Edward Said, Cheikh Anta Diop and Martin Bernal, Samir Amin and Abdallah Laroui. These thinkers came out of the ranks of the antiwar and anti-imperialist movements of the 1960s, and they were followed by a whole generation of historians. But even if discredited as an intellectual anachronism by two generations of scholarship, the Orientalist histories have managed to rebound.
    The key reason lies in the relation between history writing and forms of power, and there are two broad forms of history writing: nationalist and metanationalist. If nationalist history writing has been mainly about giving the nation—a very modern and contemporary political subject—an identifiable and often glorious past,metanationalist writings have given us equally glorified civilizational histories, locating the nation in a global context.
    When the sixteenth-century Italian missionary Matteo Ricci brought a European map of the world—showing the new discoveries in America—to China, he was surprised to find that the Chinese were offended by it. The map put Europe in the center of the world and split the Pacific, which meant that China appeared at the right-hand edge of the map. But the Chinese had always thought of China as literally the “Middle Kingdom,” which obviously should have been in the center of the map. To please his hosts, Ricci produced another map, one that split the Atlantic, making China seem more central. In China, maps are still drawn that way, but Europe has clung to the first type of map. The most commonly used map in North America shows the United States at the center of the world, sometimes even splitting the Asian continent in two. Today, the most widely used world map has western Europe at its center. Based on the Mercator projection, it systematically distorts our image of the world: even though Europe has approximately the same area as each of the other two peninsulas of