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

"Labeling us, and our acts, as terrorism is also a description of you
and your acts," bin Laden said recently. "Our acts are a reaction to
your acts." In this meandering rumination on modern-day terrorism,
Mamdani takes a controversial step by agreeing with bin Laden, at least
on this point; he argues that groups like al-Qaeda are generally
motivated by legitimate political grievances with U.S. foreign policy.
"In a nutshell," Mamdani writes, "the U.S. government decided to harness
and even to cultivate terrorists" during the latter half of the Cold
War as it sought to roll back the Soviet Union’s global influence. Now,
with that legacy coming back to haunt its creators, Mamdani concludes
that "no Chinese wall divides ‘our’ terrorism from ‘their’ terrorism.
Each tends to feed the other."

Politicizing notions of Islam by differentiating between secular,
Westernized ("good") Muslims and fanatical, medieval ("bad") Muslims,
Mamdani argues, misrepresents the often apolitical character of Islam.
It also dangerously ignores cold war-era American complicity in the
turbulence of the Muslim world through the waging of proxy wars,
particularly the one in Afghanistan in which, says Mamdani, the CIA
created Osama bin Laden.