Good Muslims, Bad Muslims…

By Jim | May 30th, 2008 | No Comments

On the flight back to Tucson from Washington, D.C. last week, I was seated next to a pleasant older couple on their way back from a cruise that dropped them off in several port cities of the eastern Mediterranean. Curious because of my own experiences living in Istanbul, I asked them about that city and about traveling in Turkey. Like most travelers taking in this royal and mad city for the first time, they loved it and wished they had more time there. The people, they said, were very nice. Good people. Not the type of…gulp…”Muslims” we hear about elsewhere. “Good Muslims,” they called them. What went unsaid–the presumptive association of Muslims with mayhem, unkindness, terror, etc–that almost always leaves lump in my throat.

President Bush famously took his turn borrowing the expression “Good Muslims, Bad Muslims,” in a clumsy effort to distinguish between those who do and do not support violence in the name of Islam. This in turn inspired the scholar Mahmood Mamdani to deploy it as the title of his book aboutthe cultural politics of Islam in a post 9/11 landscape. As Mamdani explains, this leaves Muslims in an awkward position of choosing within some abstract construction of good and evil not even of their own making. Mamdani writes, “All Muslims were now under obligation to prove their credentials by joining in a war against ‘bad Muslims.’” Needless to say, this politics of division has been a failure in our times.

So, I, too, did a double-take, but chose not to press the issue with the couple–tired, marooned next to each other on a plane, not to mention that their impressions of the place were generally positive–the scene didn’t feel appropriate for having words over the folly of Bush’s reductive language nor even the harm he has done in the Middle East since I returned to the US from Turkey in July 2001. But here’s what I would have hoped for: a way out of this ridiculous cultural politics that posits a hostile “other.” Former US Ambassador to Oman David Dunford has it right. Maybe travel is the answer, lots of continued contact between people of the US and Middle Eastern countries, with travel serving as just one possible means of critical response to the status quo. So, the Muslims of Turkey are good Muslims. Next country?