Muslims and a book that left me some dollars richer

Good Muslim, Bad Muslim is a book. Would you have read it? I have and, although I do not agree with everything in it, I think it is a good book. It was written and published in 2004 by a scholar whom I deeply respect. He is my compatriot and long-time Makerere colleague, Mahmood Mamdani.

I have mentioned him in these pages before. Once, I believe, it was in connection with the bizarre demonstration staged by one of his colleagues against his administration at the Makerere Institute of Social Research, where he is Director.

I might also have told you that he is the husband of Mira Nair, the famous film director, whose latest offer to East Africa is 'Queen of Katwe'.  I have only seen the trailers of the movie, dramatising the real life story of a Ugandan slum girl who becomes a chess prodigy. Since it is set in one of the Kampala informal settlements where I spent some of my teenage years, and it stars Lupita Nyong’o and David Oyelowo, I will try and catch up with it soon.

Mamdani and his book have been strongly on my mind lately because of the surrealistic events that have been unfolding in the US and elsewhere in the world since January 20th. The book is spot on about our prevalent abysmal ignorance of Islam, a faith with which we intimately live.

It is also a lucid exposé of the tragic blundering that constantly poisons the inter-faith harmony in which we should enjoy our lives, and of which we in East Africa should be justifiably proud. The most important point we need to understand, and never take for granted, is that there is no such thing as a “terrorist” faith, be it Christianity, Islam or African Traditional Religion.

Evil people may and probably will misuse religion, especially the ordinary people’s ignorance of it, to spread and perpetrate their nefarious acts. So-called radicalisation is the misuse of ill-understood beliefs and distorted doctrines in order to pervert vulnerable minds and incline them towards destructive actions.

WHITE SUPREMACISTS

Dylan Roof, a white supremacist, shot African-American worshippers after praying with them at a Charleston, North Carolina, church in June 2015. Alexandre Bissonnette, the alleged slaughterer of worshippers at a Montreal mosque this January, is said to be a supporter of powerful anti-Muslim politicians. These two are just as radical and as terroristic as the two murderers who killed a priest at his altar last July near Rouen. They only bear “Christian” or “Muslim” labels. It is thus nonsense to speak of radical Christian terrorism or “radical Muslim terrorism”.

Similarly, subjecting whole nations to travel sanctions simply because they subscribe to a particular faith risks terrorising them without a scrap of justification. Mamdani is a resident of the US and he is a tenured (permanent and pensionable) professor at Columbia University in New York. He will have to report there soon, although he is currently labouring for his beloved Uganda at Makerere.

Will they let him in, depending on what kind of Muslim he is? Maybe we should not worry. Mamdani is a tough, unflappable survivor. After all, he survived Idi Amin, as he narrates in one of his early books, From Citizen to Refugee.      

Back to Good Muslim, Bad Muslim, my favourite story about it is that it once, literally, dished out 400 US dollars to me! Have I told you this one as well? Well, when you have earned the years of which I now boast, observers begin to say you are in your dotage. Most people think that “dotage” has something to do with our senile love for narrating anecdotes, often repeated ad nauseam.

I prefer to imagine, however, that dotage has something to do with “doting”, an unreserved attachment, especially to our relatives. Grandparents dote on their grandchildren. But I suppose one can also dote on anecdotes. So, doting on anecdotage also wins in the dotage contest.

The Good Muslim, Bad Muslim and 400 hundred dollar anecdote was in my home library, deep in the Ugandan countryside. My son and his wife were visiting me some three years ago and they went browsing and thumbing through the dusty volumes in the library.

WANING MEMORY

I followed them into the book den, and they greeted me with a tantalizing question. What was I doing keeping a stack of dollar bills in a book? They waved the four greenbacks under my nose when I answered their query with a blank stare. I thought they were just using a ruse to give me a monetary gift.

But Stephen, who shares my admiration for Mamdani, assured me that he had found the crisp notes in my copy of Good Muslim, Bad Muslim, which had attracted his attention as he surveyed the shelves. I rather shamefacedly admitted to my children that I do sometimes shove my cash into my books when I do not want to carry it around on me.

I often, however, completely forget about such “banking”, as had happened with my Good Muslim, Bad Muslim transaction. It is not that I am too rich to care about such “petty cash”. Rather, it is one of the effects of my waning memory, coupled with my lifelong carelessness with money anyway. Yet the rationale for my depositing in books is that they are the only objects which I am not likely to neglect.

Indeed, the books I select for my secret cash “caches” are those that I am most likely to revisit sooner or later, either for reference or just a nostalgic re-read. Among these are the spiritual books, verse and language volumes, and, especially the dictionaries. Another secret is that, in the case of unwelcome visitors, who might want to rummage about among my possessions, books will probably rank very low on the list of places to look for cash.

Anyway, you are welcome to look around my library when you visit me. You are even free to thumb through the volumes.