Published in the long shadow of 9/11, Mahmood Mamdani’s “Good Muslim, Bad Muslim” remains one of the sharpest accounts of how the Cold War and its aftermath altered the lives of Muslims across the globe. In it, Mamdani traces how American covert wars fostered militant networks, how the language of “culture” replaced the language of politics, and how entire populations were split into caricatures of loyalty and threat. Expelled by Idi Amin in 1972, rendered stateless in 1984, Mamdani built a body of writing that treated colonialism not as a past event but as ongoing structure. Instead of treating violence as the product of some “civilisation,” “culture,” or inherent way of being, he asks us to see it as the result of political decisions, policies, histories, and power struggles. As India’s Muslims are pushed into tests of patriotism, erased from public life, and cast as either compliant or suspect, Mamdani’s work offers a vocabulary for seeing continuity where governments insist on tidy turning points.