Conspirituality - Bonus Sample: Nair, Mamdani, and Culture against the Culture War (Pt 1)
Aired: 2025-08-11
Duration: 04:42

[00:00:03]  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.
[00:00:22]  They are actually talking about the attitude of Muslims to the US.
[00:00:27]  A good Muslim is simply a pro-American Muslim and a bad Muslim is simply an anti-American Muslim.
[00:00:36]  This is not about Islam., it's about America.
[00:00:41]  That is Professor Mahmoud Mamdani speaking at the University of Michigan on april fifteenth, 2005.
[00:00:48]  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.
[00:00:59]  And this is episode two of Nair Mamdani and Culture Against the Culture War.
[00:01:05]  Now, part one dropped on Saturday on the main feed, so I invite you to listen in there if you haven't already.
[00:01:12]  I'm Matthew Remsky.
[00:01:14]  This is Conspirituality, where we investigate the intersections of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism.
[00:01:23]  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.
[00:01:46]  You can follow myself, Derek, and Julian on Blue Sky.
[00:01:50]  The podcast is on I.G and threads under its own handle, and you can support our Patreon.
[00:01:58]  So these two episodes are about how Zoran Mamdani's parents, the filmmaker Mirnair 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.
[00:02:16]  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.
[00:02:28]  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.
[00:02:41]  Nair'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 Amardeep Singh.
[00:02:57]  So thank you, Professor Singh.
[00:02:59]  Singh shows how Nair utilizes documentary and realist techniques to shed light on migration and displacement and to challenge cultural, ethnic, religious, and gendered stereotypes.
[00:03:13]  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.
[00:03:28]  Culture talk, he argues, uses this fictional essence to explain political events.
[00:03:35]  Mamdani argues that this approach ignores crucial factors like capitalism or colonialism and reduces diverse groups to homogeneous but amorphous entities.
[00:03:46]  Now today I'm going to further unpack how Mamdani describes culture talk stigmatizing Muslims in America and around the world post 911.
[00:03:57]  I'll dig into the evidence he compiles that political terrorism is a modern political response, often blowback from US funded anti-Soviet mercenary movements rather than the expression of some intrinsic cultural or religious nature.
[00:04:18]  Conspirituality bonus episode sample.
[00:04:21]  To continue listening, please go over to patreon dot com slash conspirituality where you can access all of our main feed episodes ad free as well as four years of bonus content that we've been producing.
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