Islam and Democracy: Fear of the Modern World

Other Books by Fatema Mernissi

The Veil and the Male Elite:
A Feminist Interpretation of Women’s Rights in Islam

Doing Daily Battle: Interviews with Moroccan Women

Beyond the Veil: Male/Female Dynamics in Modern Muslim Society

TRANSLATED BY
MARY JO LAKELAND

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English Translation Copyright © 1992 by Perseus Publishing
Introduction to the Second Edition Copyright © 2002 by Fatema Mernissi
Previously published by Perseus Publishing
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ISBN-10: 0-7382-0745-4 ISBN-13: 978-0-7382-0745-2
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Set in 11–point Bembo by Shepfard Poorman Communications, Inc.

Like most Arabs I see daily in my Rabat Muhammad V University neighborhood, I was terrified by the September 11 attack. “But why are we so terrified?” I kept asking with the hysterical edge characteristic of menopausal Arab women, who, unlike men, have the privilege of acting out their fears in public.

On November 11, Brahim screamed at me, “Mernissi, stop interrogating us!” Brahim, who owns the newspaper store in this university area where my colleagues flock to buy papers and hear the latest rumors, has known me since I came to Rabat as a student forty years ago. “You’ve slowed down my business with your hysterical questions for two months!” he went on. I was shocked by Brahims sudden impatience, not only because he usually is so supportive but also because he was giving my sneaky colleagues (who had already nicknamed me Lsika [Little glue] because of my constant questioning) another opportunity to laugh at me.

“You asked Karim, my polite assistant, and me a hundred times,” Brahim continued, “why we are so scared by the attacks on New York and Washington. I repeated a hundred times that it reawakened the Gulf War terror: the killing of innocents. In 1991 innocent Iraqis were killed by American bombs in Baghdad, and in 2001 innocent Americans were killed by terrorists in New York and Washington. But you did not stop bombarding me with questions!” Brahim suddenly looked very tired. “And you know, Mernissi, how all this upsets me. I feel insulted when Americans say that the terrorists are Muslims. How come Americans never heard of Allah’s order:
You shall not kill each other. Allah is merciful
¹
? How come Americans, who use powerful satellites to inform themselves, do not know that Islam condemns violence:
Do not transgress. Allah does not love the transgressors
²
? Does Mr. Bush, the American president, who has the best universities and journalists to inform him, ignore what three-year-old Muslim kids know from kindergarten:
Mercy is what your Lord hath prescribed for himself?
³
It upsets me that this peaceful Islam is not common knowledge.”

I have always been impressed by Brahim, in his sixties like me, and his ease in recalling our childhood education in Koranic schools, humanist Islam. I empathized with his feelings of helplessness. He carried on after few minutes, in a softer voice, as if talking to himself. “How come Americans are not informed that Muhammad, the Prophet of Islam, declared security for Jews in his first Constitution of Medina as part of the Muslim city’s founding principle of global responsibility:
A Jew who follows us has
[a right to]
the same help and support
[as the believers],
so long as they are not wronged
[by him]
and he does not help
[others]
against them?
⁴
The Jews who signed Muhammad’s contract benefited from the Umma’s [Muslim community’s] unflinching solidarity, though they were not to share their beliefs:
The Jews of Bani ‘Aouf form a community with the believers; the Jews have their religion and the Muslims have theirs.
⁵
By god, Mernissi, I tried to calm your anxiety by invoking our peaceful tradition, but you never stopped bugging me and Karim. After all, your job as a professor is not to scare us more by exhibiting your own fears but to help disoriented youth identify pragmatic tasks that will foster peace.”

An unusual silence followed in the normally noisy newspaper store. Everyone expected me to react to Brahim’s public attack by screaming louder than he did (to restore my “public image"), but I did not. Actually, I could not because his last remark, about my failure to focus on peace-weaving, made me feel ashamed of myself. I felt ashamed to feel so helpless about focusing on a tiny but practical initiative to stop the cycle of terror started by the September 11 deaths of innocents in the United States and continuing with the bombing of unarmed civilians in Afghanistan. I left the store and was walking toward the Cafe Ouazzani, where I usually stop for a mint tea, when I heard footsteps behind me. It was Karim, Brahim’s shy assistant.

“Ustada [Professor], I am sorry my boss was so abrupt. He is nervous about the bombs in Afghanistan. He is convinced that only nonviolence can defeat terrorists,” Karim mumbled as insecure kids do when they are about to say something important. He was wearing his generation’s new “traditional” outfit: blue jeans, a white T-shirt, and fake Medina-made Nikes. When I invited him to join me for a tea, he added, “I wish I could advise Mr. Colin Powell.”

In the past I would have laughed at his fancy, but things were not normal. The mere idea that a twenty-five-year-old Arab felt like giving advice to Mr. Powell, one of the most powerful Western military leaders on the planet, struck me as a totally new cultural attitude. However, since September 11Ihave discovered that Arab youth and my generation do not live on the same planet. I would never have thought of giving advice to General de Gaulle, the superboss of colonial North Africa, when I was an adolescent. Arabs like me, born in the 1940s, when the colonizers’ industrial technology was so awe- inspiring that it seemed magic, could hardly even imagine General de Gaulle as real.

As I poured tea into our two glasses and looked at Karim across the table, I realized for the first time that the key force shaping the Arab world today is not religion, as many American experts claim, but information technology (IT). Karim, who is a regular twenty- five-year-old
diplome-chomeur
(an unemployed university graduate), left the Economics Department of Muhammad V university with a
Licence en Sciences Economiques,
a diploma no one even bothered to look at when he started seeking a job. After responding to dozens of advertisements for jobs in state agencies and private business and an aborted attempt to migrate to Spain, Karim ended up hanging out in my university neighborhood and earning roughly 200 dollars a month for helping Brahim sell English-language newspapers in the mornings and in the evenings working the cash register at the cyber- cafe around the corner.

Like most
dipl
ô
m
é
-chorneurs,
Karim taught himself English by simultaneously doing three things Arabs of my generation would have regarded as unattainable science fiction dreams. The first was channel surfing for hours through dozens of foreign and Arab satellite TV channels such as Al-Jazeera, available since the Gulf War even to modest households via a hundred-dollar satellite dish. These dishes are often proudly displayed on the tiny balconies of houses in the shanty towns. The second was to learn by heart the multiple versions of “English Without Teachers” booklets
(Al-Injaliziya min ‘ghayr Mu’allim),
originally published in Lebanon and immediately pirated by Moroccans who offer them for 6dh (50 cents) on the sidewalks by the mosques’ entrances. The third was to find a justification for entering a cybercafé without having to pay the $1 hourly fee for using a computer. In Karim’s case, working night shifts in the cybercafégave him unlimited free access to the Internet, a magic window Sin- bad could never have dreamed of.

“Why Mr. Powell precisely, and what would you tell him if you had a chance?” I asked, intrigued.

“I’d suggest he adopt Saladin’s 1191 strategy,” Karim said. “I’d prefer to talk to Mr. Powell because, like Saladin 800 years earlier at Jerusalem, he won the 1991 Gulf War. And it was a similar situation—the eternal conflict between East and West. Mr. Powell could have prevented the September 11 terrorist attack by making violence economically unrewarding.” He went back to sipping his tea.

Dying to know what he meant by Saladin’s strategy, yet remembering Brahim’s remark about my slowing down business, I asked him first to go back to the store and bring me a “foreign Arab press bouquet.” Since there would be an expensive selection from the twenty-two states in the Arab League, from Palestine to Oman and from Sudan to Morocco I thought Brahim would see no harm in Karim’s returning to sit with me for a while.
⁶

When Karim returned with an impressive load of newspapers, I begged him to explain what he meant by Saladin’s strategy.

“When Saladin reconquered Jerusalem in 1192 and defeated the Christian Crusaders’ army,” Karim replied, “he had the genius to realize that only a peace treaty that guaranteed security and similar opportunities to both the conquerors [the Muslims] and the conquered [the Christians] was good for business. A good military leader is one who can imagine turning a conflict into equal opportunities for both adversaries. In a situation where people can make a living trading peacefully, violence becomes an absurdly costly choice.”

I kept looking politely at Karim while trying to recollect the fragments of my childhood history classes about Saladin to see how Mr. Powell might fit in. Karim was right about Saladin’s unusually civilized treaty, which surprised many of his contemporaries, starting with the Western Crusaders. After he reconquered Jerusalem and took the city from Richard, king of England, and other leaders of the Crusaders’ coalition, Saladin concluded and ratified a peace treaty that focused everyone’s mind on the essential: trade. The proclamation announced that the Muslim and the Christian territories should enjoy equal repose and security so that persons of either nation could go into the territory of the other and return without fear.
That day crowds assembled, and the joy felt on both sides was such as God alone could conceive.
⁷

Yet I did not see what exactly the American Mr. Powell could have done after his triumph over Baghdad in 1991, even if he had studied enough Arab history to know about Saladin’s peace deal 800 years ago.

“Karim,” I said, “if you don’t get to the point more quickly, Mr. Powell would be right never to have listened to you.”

Karim became thoughtful and remained silent for a while before reminding me of the shock he had had in 1994 when, as an insecure adolescent, he had heard the news trumpeted everywhere in the written and televised media that the Saudi king was creating jobs in Los Angeles. “Saudis Buy U.S. Jets,” announced the
Time
magazine headline. “Thanks to a strenuous lobbying effort by the Clinton Administration, Boeing and McDonnell Douglas will sell 50 commercial jets worth 6 billion dollars to Saudi Arabia—generating jobs for tens of thousands of Americans in the voter-rich Los Angeles and Seattle areas.”
⁸
Of course I remembered that event and others like it when American businesspeople bragged in the press about their “achievements” in selling not only commercial but mostly military goods to helpless but oil-rich Arab Gulf states that were unable, as Saddam Hussein showed when he attacked Kuwait, to ensure even their own security. A 1995 overview of arms sales published by the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency revealed that although such sales were substantially decreasing throughout the world after the Cold War, the Middle East scored “higher than ever, with military expenditures representing 54 per cent of public outlays and 20 per cent of these countries’ GNP.”
⁹
I understood all that and sympathized with Karim’s point of view, but I still could not see what he was driving at.

“Karim, I still don’t have a clue about the relevancy of Saladin’s strategy to our modern situation. After all, Saudi Arabia could not order the fifty commercial jets it needed from Casablanca.” I tried to speak in a maternal tone to prevent my shy informant from shutting himself up like a clam.

“Of course the Saudi king could not buy commercial jets from Casablanca,” Karim said. “But it would have been good for business and good for the planet’s security if both the king and the Boeing and McDonnell Douglas chairmen had invested part of their gains in creating ‘Internet cities’ all over the Arab world to produce first-rate engineers. American policy-makers knew even before the Gulf War that they needed to import brains from Third World countries to compensate for their demographic deficit, so why did they not think about the youth of Arab countries, whose oil wealth they needed, as an outsourcing gold mine? Many American companies fostered long-term strategies to invest in and recruit engineers from the Indian city of Bangalore. But in 1990 India had an illiteracy rate and secondary high school enrollment no different than that of our Middle East and North Africa regions!
¹⁰
Nor was the technology infrastructure gap between India and our region great enough to explain why our brains were not considered good investments by American businesses.
¹¹

“Investing in modern information technology institutions to create job opportunities in our region would have helped young people like me gain competence and self-confidence. Instead we have to hang around in mediocre cybercafés, with no teachers to train us properly, and on top of that, we have to pay for each minute of access! If Mr. Powell, like Saladin, had encouraged reciprocity in business ventures for winners [Americans] and losers [Arabs], he would have condemned terrorist propagandists to absurdly unconvincing pantomimes on a planet where prosperity was evenly distributed. Promoting Arab youth as knowledge workers in information technology would have contributed to the prosperity of both America and the Middle East, first by creating needed jobs and second by creating consumers of goods and services.”

Karim stopped abruptly and stood up to say good-bye. “Ustada, I talked too much,” he mumbled as he turned to go back to the newspaper store. But I begged him to answer one last question, promising that it really would be the last.

“Where did you get your information about Saladin and about the IT boom in Bangalore?”