Mahmood Mamdani: “Good Muslim, Bad Muslim”

One of the scholars I discovered through my young Bangladeshi friend Mahmud — whom I met while he was studying at university in İzmir — is Mahmood Mamdani. My Bangladeshi Mahmud, knowing the subjects I was working on, told me that I absolutely had to read Mahmood Mamdani. After a bit of research, I found out that his book Good Muslim, Bad Muslim had been translated into Turkish. The subtitle reads: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror. I won’t be discussing Good Muslim, Bad Muslim in detail — I’ll just share its chapter titles: Modernity and Violence; The Culture Talk, or How Not to Talk About Islam and Politics; The Cold War After Indochina; Afghanistan: The Cold War’s Most Important Episode; From Proxy War to Open Aggression; and Beyond Impunity and Collective Punishment.

Despite his young age, my Bangladeshi friend Mahmud was a true intellectual. His curiosity led him to know about Mamdani — or so I thought back then. Perhaps being Bangladeshi, he’d noticed an author with Indian roots. Mahmood Mamdani, of course, is known primarily for his work on Africa. I never got the chance to ask Mahmud about it, but the topics Mamdani explores can only be grasped through a genuinely intellectual interest. His book Neither Settler nor Native: The Making and Unmaking of Permanent Minorities also deserves special attention. From its title, it’s clear that Mamdani extends his analysis beyond the native–settler binary created by colonial encounters to address minorities as a distinct group. After a quick search online, I came across an interview with him in Middle East Monitor titled Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, and the Nation-State. In it, Mamdani spoke about Israel’s colonial aggression in recent years that has shocked the world. It’s also easy to find his essays online.

I don’t recall ever discussing Zohran Mamdani with my Bangladeshi friend Mahmud. To be honest, I only later realized the family connection between the two Mamdanis. Today, the world knows the name Zohran Mamdani — who, it turns out, is the son of Good Muslim, Bad Muslim’s author, Mahmood Mamdani. I think that’s a noteworthy detail. From what I can tell, Zohran Mamdani — recently elected mayor of New York — is not someone who fits neatly into familiar political molds. Writing this, I can’t help but think back to Obama’s election. For a brief time, people were drawn to him simply because of his name, “Hussein,” but during Obama’s presidency, there was no real break from neoconservative policies; in fact, Zionist interests became even stronger. Zohran Mamdani, in contrast, has emerged as a politician in open conflict with Zionist lobbies in the U.S. — and that’s what makes him stand out.

There are reasons I’ve mentioned Zohran’s father. Yes, the family’s Muslim identity is striking, but the key lies elsewhere: in the themes that came up during Zohran Mamdani’s campaign and his early speeches after election. These show that his significance runs deeper. I’d say there’s a parallel between the issues Mahmood Mamdani explored in his scholarship and the ones Zohran prioritizes in his politics. That parallel might explain, at least in part, how Zohran Mamdani came to be elected mayor of New York. From that perspective, I see him not as a marketing tool in America’s global politics, but as a reflection of an internal reckoning within the U.S. itself.

The United States and Britain developed Israel as a colonial project — a new settler state in the heart of the Islamic world. Yet they’ve been unable to advance that project any further. Despite the devastation, Palestinian resistance managed to halt Anglo-Saxon and Zionist expansion at a certain point. Since the early 1990s, Britain and the U.S. have entered a new era of colonial aggression in the Muslim world. And yes, Zionist Jews have been at the forefront of this expansion — but the crimes of dispossession, ethnic cleansing, genocide, and exile ultimately fall squarely on Britain and the U.S., the Anglo-Saxons themselves. Today, the genocide in Gaza makes clear that Britain still seeks to sustain this system. The role played by British-made weapons in Sudan’s catastrophe proves it. In the U.S., the tension caused by complicity in Israel’s crimes runs even deeper. The backlash from Zionist lobbies to Mamdani’s election points directly to that.

It seems the problems created by colonialism will be discussed much more in the days to come.