Culture Talk
Authors: Mamdani Mahmood 
Published: January 2025

In his book Persecution and the Art of Writing (Glencoe, IL: Free Press,[c1952]), Leo Strauss, the University of Chicago political philosopher, analyzedthe technique of writing under repression. He discussed medievalphilosophers who had written under repression – al-Farabi, Maimonides,and Spinoza – but this was not an esoteric exercise. The cold war had begunonly three years before, and American officialdom tended to see a communistbehind every book. “In a considerable number of countries which, forabout a hundred years, have enjoyed a practically complete freedom of discussion,”wrote Strauss, “that freedom is now suppressed and replaced bya compulsion to coordinate speech with such views as the governmentbelieves to be expedient, or holds in all seriousness.”Persecution, Strauss noted, “gives rise to a peculiar technique of writing,”one “in which the truth about all crucial things is presented exclusivelybetween the lines.” But what if only some are conscious of the growingrepression and thus write between the lines, while most have so internalizedthe repression as common sense that they translate it into a narrow agenda?Surely, in such a case the most appropriate response is to broaden the parametersof the discussion in order to not just read between the lines, but alsobeyond the margins. In what follows, I will try to do so by identifying andcommenting on the issues driving the debate between participants.Debate One: Culture and PoliticsOne of the most amazing news items I read in the weeks following 9/11 wasin The New York Times: Sales of the Qur’an had soared in the United Statesas more and more Americans sought to read it for clues as to what had motivatedthe hijackers. In the months and years that followed, I wondered if thepeople of Afghanistan or Iraq, even Fallujah, were reading the Bible for anexplanation for the bombs raining upon them from on high. I doubt that anyof them really did. I wondered what explained this difference.I am convinced that the difference lies in how the public debate on9/11 has been framed by public intellectuals in the United States. Mostpublic intellectuals, especially the quasi-official ones, share assumptionsthat I call culture talk. The core assumption is that you can read some people’spolitics – the politics of those who are not “modern” – from their culture,for culture is not something that they make; rather, it is their culturethat makes them. Even those who accept that all cultures are historicalassume that cultures grow in separate containers called “civilizations” thattalk and exchange, but only do so at the margins. Since they all developalong the same lines, you can tell who is more and who is less developed.In addition, it is characteristic of the less developed that they require anexternal impulse to get out of a vicious circle. The historical responsibilityof the more advanced culture, then, is either philanthropic – to bring“development” or “democracy” to those less fortunate – or that of policingthe world by imposing a quarantine on those likely to act out of resentmentor anger.Culture talk has a history. It is about taking the moral high ground andis as old as colonialism. Democracies have always had to justify colonialismto their populations as a selfless and philanthropic endeavor. Not surprisingly,the justificatory literature on colonialism typically identifies vulnerablegroups in the target countries – those who need to be saved – andturns them into so many proxies. This is how one needs to understand thenineteenth-century British preoccupation with the talk of saving Indianwomen (by ending practices like sati, polygamy, and the ban against widowmarriage) and children (child marriage), or entire populations in Africafrom possible enslavement, as well as the contemporary American preoccupationwith female genital mutilation. It used to be called “the WhiteMan’s Burden”; now it is called “humanitarian intervention.” ...