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Aug. 11, 2025 - Conspirituality
04:43
Bonus Sample: Nair, Mamdani, and Culture against the Culture War (Pt 1)

Well, I seem to always be inspired by the person who is considered marginal. Firstly, their spirit of survival, their resilience, their lack of self-pity, the ability usually to laugh in the face of having nothing and to create a kind of sense of flamboyance and life at any cost, despite having you know no resources of any kind that are visible. That's what inspires me and I think in making portraits of the so-called outsiders, I'm also then allowed to question what is that society that deems us an outsider? — Mira Nair on BBC “Masterpiece”, 11/29/04 When official America speaks of good and bad Muslims, we must not think that they are speaking of the attitude of Muslims to Islam. They are actually talking about the attitude of Muslims to the U.S. A good Muslim is simply a pro-American Muslim and a bad Muslim is simply an anti-American Muslim. This is not about Islam, it is about America. — Mahmoud Mamdani, C-Span's Book TV series, hosted by the University of Michigan on April 15, 2005. Want to better understand Zohran Mamdani’s intellectual and emotional heritage? Want to understand how he seems to be thrashing the culture war with, well culture? Matthew did, and so he looked into the films of his mom Mira Nair (Part 1), and the scholarship of his dad, Mahmood (Part 2). Show Notes Masterpiece - Mira Nair - BBC Sounds  Good Muslim, Bad Muslim | Author Mahmood Mamdani  Good Muslim, Bad Muslim | Penguin Random House Secondary Education  Reluctant Fundamentalist, The Ben Affleck, Sam Harris and Bill Maher Debate Radical Islam | Real Time with Bill Maher (HBO)  Sam Harris on the Reality of Islam - Truthdig   Samuel Huntington’s Great Idea Was Totally Wrong | The New Republic #ZeeJLF2018 | Mira Nair A timeline of JK Rowling's anti-trans shift  Mori Araj Suno lyrics  My secret debate with Sam Harris: A revealing 4-hour dialogue on Islam, racism & free-speech hypocrisy - Salon.com  New Atheists and old prejudices - The Chronikler The Clash of Civilizations - If Books Could Kill - Apple Podcasts  President Reagan welcomes al-Qaeda and Mujahideen leaders to the White House, May 1986   For Zohran Mamdani, Mom Mira Nair’s Films Were a Formative Influence Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Time Text
I argued in the book that when official America and public intellectuals like Samuel Huntington and Bernard Lewis speak of good and bad Muslims, we must not think that they are speaking of the attitude of Muslims to Islam.
They are actually talking about the attitude of Muslims to the U.S. A good Muslim is simply a pro-American Muslim, and a bad Muslim is simply an anti-American Muslim.
This is not about Islam.
It is about America.
That is Professor Mahmoud Mamdani speaking at the University of Michigan on April 15th, 2005.
He's giving what I think is the nut graph on his book, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim, America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror, published the year prior.
And this is episode two of Nayir, Mamdani, and Culture Against the Culture War.
Now, part one dropped on Saturday on the main feed, so I invite you to listen in there if you haven't already.
I'm Matthew Remsky.
This is Conspirituality, where we investigate the intersections of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism.
And today, I would add that Professor Mamdani's last line in that clip, that this is not about Islam, it's about America, points to one conclusion that my work on this beat for the last five years has driven me to, that emphasizing religious influence over political encounters can be its own form of spiritual bypassing.
You can follow myself, Derek and Julian, on Blue Sky.
The podcast is on IG and threads under its own handle, and you can support our Patreon.
So these two episodes are about how Zoran Mamdani's parents, the filmmaker Mira Nayer and the scholar Mahmoud Mamdani, prefigure his political rise by laying the groundwork for a powerful counter narrative to the reductions of culture war bullshit.
Between his mom's art and his dad's scholarship, Zoran grows up in a world where complex groups of people cannot be reduced to puzzle pieces on a board game.
And this is where I think his Masala progressivism might ultimately come from, or at least where it was formed, and how it waves away the incurious and venal culture war.
Nayer's films, as I covered in the first part of this two-part episode, are all about the resilience and spirit of outsiders, illuminated through the technique of diaspora verite, a term coined by literary critic Amrdeep Singh.
So thank you, Professor Singh.
Singh shows how Nayer utilizes documentary and realist techniques to shed light on migration and displacement and to challenge cultural, ethnic, religious, and gendered stereotypes.
In part one, I also introduced Mahmoud Mamdani's central concept of culture talk, which is his critique of the casual, lazy armchair discussion between people that assumes cultures have a tangible, unchanging essence.
Culture talk, he argues, uses this fictional essence to explain political events.
Mamdani argues that this approach ignores crucial factors like capitalism or colonialism and reduces diverse groups to homogeneous but amorphous entities.
Now, today I'm going to further unpack how Mamdani describes culture talk, stigmatizing Muslims in America and around the world post-9-11.
I'll dig into the evidence he compiles that political terrorism is a modern political response, often blowback from U.S.-funded anti-Soviet mercenary movements, rather than the expression of some intrinsic cultural or religious nature.
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