Islam and Democracy: Fear of the Modern World (10 page)

As for the governments, there are some Muslim regimes that find their interests better protected if they base their legitimacy on cultural and symbolic grounds other than on democratic principles. The sacred, the past, ancestor worship seem to be the chosen grounds in most cases. This category groups together regimes as different as the kingdom of Saudi Arabia, the Iranian regime of Imam Khomeini or his caliph (successor), the military regime of Zia al-Haq in Pakistan, and the Sudanese regime that terrorizes its people in the name of the
shari
^c
a.

The same thing that is said about Muslim regimes can be said about the opposition forces. Most of the fundamentalist opposition movements root their struggle for liberation and progress in the past and reject the West and “its democracy.” Other opposition forces claim Western democracy as the basis for dynamizing society and find in it no threat to their identity as Muslims or as Arabs:

An Arab state open to the world and its ideas and enriched by the scientific and participatory heritage of recent centuries would be better able to defend our Arab and Islamic identity than the states that exist today. The Gulf War has clearly demonstrated that it is not the states of today, out of touch with the masses and their interests, frightened alike by rationalism and by the idea of democratic participation, that are able to protect Islam and the Muslims.

The Gulf War produced some very important revelations about emotional dynamics and people’s sense of security. The Saudi and Kuwaiti officials were afraid of other Arabs, especially the Palestinians, and felt safer with their American colleagues. The war also proved that to have a chance at enjoying the wealth generated by oil, Arab youths must at least consider emigrating to the Western countries, to whose banks the petrodollars are automatically transferred. The war intensified the feeling of distrust, not to say hatred, between rich and poor which was already latent in the Arab world. This serious malaise, rooted in economic frustration and unequal opportunity, uses the language of religion as one of either protest and revolt or dissimulation and manipulation.

The mixture of frustration and religion is explosive for the whole Mediterranean area. We must be prepared to be crushed by its violence if we don’t mobilize everyone of all nationalities to analyze it, understand it, and try to redress the bitterness and human degradation that it crystallizes. It is a malaise that affects both intellectuals and the masses. It creates a strong feeling of self- deprecation in young people and increases the mass emigration of the best educated as well as the most dispossessed to the West—a West that has responded by closing its borders and demanding visas for Arabs; that sees itself as owing them nothing, right after a war in which it proclaimed in the press that Middle Eastern oil was essential to its economy. The dream of happiness for many Arabs, from unemployed youths to rich industrialists, is a European vacation. Many take the step, trying frantically to leave, but find the need for travel visas barring the way at all turns. Our nation, frustrated in its desire for full employment and political responsibility, is becoming a huge land of individuals who roam standing in place, one eye on the television and the other on their passports.
^c
Azma
is the story heard everywhere.

When I visit a Muslim country, whether Pakistan or Egypt or Algeria, what strikes me as a sociologist is first of all the strong feeling of bitterness in the people—the intellectuals, the young, peasants. I see bitterness over blocked ambition, over frustrated desires for consumption—of clothes, commodities, and gadgets, but also of cultural products like books and quality films and performances which give meaning to life and reconcile the individual with his environment and his century. In no Western country have I ever seen such intense bitterness over wasted talent, spoiled chances, inequality of opportunity, or absurd career blockage. What always surprises me in the United States, for example, is that even people with the most mediocre talent seem to find a way to use the few gifts that nature has given them. In our country what is unbearable, especially when you listen to the young men and women of the poor class, is the awful waste of talent. “
Ana daya
^c
“
("My life is a mess") is a leitmotiv that one hears constantly. I don’t find this sense of failure which people drag around with them in any European city. For me the absence of moaning and groaning is a sign that I am on foreign territory, where talent follows a “relatively” normal course to emerge, struggle, expand, and flower.
¹⁹

To my mind, this mourning over wasted talent must be taken into consideration if one is to understand how the “Muslims,” and particularly the lower-class youth, who are sorely threatened by high unemployment, mobilize around the opposition between Islam and democracy. Their attachment to this movement is in fact a cry for the opportunity to benefit from the culture of this century and its valorizing skills. But how, I will be asked, can a young person threatened with unemployment oppose democracy and prefer religion as the basis of his struggle to get on in the world? Religion doesn’t create more jobs, after all. But what it does is create a space for renewal and reflection on the universe and its injustices.

An interview I had with Mina, a Moroccan carpet weaver who was hospitalized with a broken wrist incurred in an on-the-job accident, perfectly summarizes the democratic, cultural, and linguistic handicaps suffered by people like her. As a result of her accident, and despite ten years’ seniority, Mina had been fired by the factory where she worked, which offered her no medical coverage or compensation. When during a visit to the hospital in Rabat I urged her to take her case to the labor inspector, she reacted violently. I had apparently touched a sore point. “Listen, Fatima, just because you are educated and I am illiterate, you have no right to treat me like an idiot. You tell me to go see the labor inspector as if I had not thought of it; you tell me to go to the labor union as if I had not thought of it! I tell you that Allah is my defender; he is my union and my inspector!”

Choking with rage about the situation, she tore off the scarf that modestly covered her hair and threw it on the floor in a traditional gesture of extreme agitation. She raised her eyes toward the sky, framed in the little window of her room, and cried, “Allah, you who know all about this
zulm
[injustice], I want you to burn down the factory and crush the boss to bits! Allah, do you hear me? ‘And when My servants question thee concerning Me, then surely I am nigh.’ They told me that you hear the
mazlum
[the one who is wronged]! Where are you, Allah? I need you in this country of monsters!”
²⁰

Meanwhile the nurses were rushing into the room and urging me to leave. But Mina shouted, “Let her alone, let us alone! I am opening my heart! Let me cry! Don’t tell me to shut up or I will add you to the list of the boss and the union!” The door was softly closed; everyone is afraid of someone who in such a state of anger and pain invokes the divine.

Mina continued to pour out her heart: “Fatima, listen carefully to the details, which you don’t know about. I worked ten years without a labor card, without a contract. My name never appeared on any payroll. I was hired every day to work in the factory as if it were the first day. The first year I went with
^c
A
isha to talk to the union; an iron bar from the loom had fallen on us.
^c
A
isha, who is older than I, had more experience. The union sent us to the labor inspector. And do you know what the labor inspector did? He tattled to the boss instead of defending us! The next day the boss called us in: ‘So, you whores, you went to the labor inspector? You betrayed me and washed our dirty linen in public. You could have come and politely asked me to buy you some medicine. Ungrateful monsters! You are fired!’ We didn’t find work for six months. Our names had been reported to all the other factories in the area.”

Mina, like millions of others who live a daily life of frustrated desires, is not a fatalist. A fatalist doesn’t explode in anger and curse the boss. This is where Islam plays a key role in the struggle to preserve dignity. Having God as one’s defender when the boss, the union, the labor inspector violate one’s rights probably doesn’t change things in the short run. But meanwhile, the fired and exploited worker can go to the great palace that never closes its doors: the palace of our symbolic heritage. Mina was fired and left without rights and without money, but she had not forfeited her humanity; she could talk to Heaven and its Master. Islam gives someone like Mina a framework within which to express her pain and to change it into anger and a program for vengeance.

But here we run up against the limits of the traditional symbolic heritage, which doesn’t make it possible for her to conceive of a world where she would have the right to medical coverage and social security, or even less to participate in such a world. For that to happen the imam, the Muslim head of state, would have to invest part of the government’s funds in modern institutions that would permit citizens like Mina to enjoy their rights and force the private sector to cooperate in giving them their rights. Arab industrialists are only “competitive” in the European market because they engage in unregulated capitalism that more or less deprives workers of their rights and gives them no protection. Like the government, Arab businessmen fear democracy and the possibility that their workers might be transformed into responsible citizens who demand their rights. Like the oil princes, they are ready to invest in all the religions of the world if that would block the encroachment of democracy. One of the reasons for unemployment among young university graduates in Morocco is that the factory owner fears letting in among his workers “educated” people who have participated in demonstrations on their campuses. During an investigation in 1987 into the role of women in the textile industry, many workers testified that it was much easier to be hired if one wore a traditional djellaba: “If you wear jeans and a T-shirt you have to wait for hours, and after the interview they tell you that you are not qualified.” Mina has no idea of the modern democratic mechanisms that could change the factory without burning it down. Her outcry, her choice of words, show that only the tradition of democratic rebellion is alive and well. Challenging the boss is the only available possibility, and also, alas, the last resort.
²¹

One part of the world draws all its programs and references only from its symbolic and civilizational heritage: the traditional heritage. It is important to be acquainted, even superficially, with this program, since we are called on to live in a world that is more crowded and interconnected than ever. Despite its extreme politicization and all the financial and administrative manipulations it is subjected to, the Islamic heritage continues to have an extraordinary richness. It expresses the hope of the faithful and offers them two essential things: a sense of identity and the power to struggle.

Muslims today live under the surveillance of non-Muslim satellites that can, if need be and as the Gulf War proved, serve rapacious interests and aim their missiles at civilian populations. As the sole symbolic heritage of millions of the disinherited, Islam is called on to play an important role as their identifying referent, while they await their entry into the field of modern knowledge. This is what makes it necessary for us to examine the two fundamental texts that today confront each other in the conflict between Islam and democracy: the United Nations Charter and the Koran.