Islam and Democracy: Fear of the Modern World (14 page)

The Koran is a book divided into 114 suras of varying length, from a few lines to several pages. According to Imam Ibn Kathir, there are 6,000 verses in the Koran, 77,439 words, and not less than 321,180 letters.
¹
It was revealed orally in the Arabic language by Allah to the Prophet Muhammad with the angel Gabriel as intermediary.
²

The Prophet was forty years old when God advised him of his mission. The angel Gabriel visited him on Saturday night, then on Sunday night, and on Monday he revealed to him that he had been chosen by God to be the Prophet to receive the
risala,
the revealed message. This was in A.D. 610 at Hira, a place of retreat near Mecca where Muhammad used to go to meditate.
³
The first verses revealed to him were an order to be informed and to learn:

1. Read: in the name of thy Lord who createth,
   
2. Createth men from a clot.
   
3. Read: And thy Lord is the Most Bounteous,
   
4. Who teacheth by the pen,
   
5. Teacheth man that which he knew not. (sura 96)
   

The revelations succeeded one another from time to time over a period of more than twenty years, from 610 to 632, the date of the Prophet’s death.
⁴
The last verse is supposed to have been revealed to him nine days before his death.
⁵
But he didn’t begin to preach at once; because Mecca, his native city, was hostile to him, he kept his mission secret for three years. He received Allah’s order to begin to preach publicly only in 613, and he continued preaching for ten years, until 622, when the hostility of the city put his life and that of his Companions in danger. He then decided to migrate to Medina.
⁶
He was fifty-three years old, and that year was declared the first of the Muslim calendar, which begins with the Hejira (migration), referring to the exodus of the Muslim community. According to al-Suyuti, at the time of his departure the Prophet had received eighty suras, which are called the Meccan suras; the remaining thirty-four, the Medinan suras, were revealed to him during the ten years he lived in Medina.
⁷
Opinions differ as to the place of revelation of the suras; by Ibn Kathir’s account, the Prophet received twenty-five suras in Medina, and so eighty-nine in Mecca.
⁸

The order of the written Koran was decided on just after the Prophet’s death, according to some sources; others maintain that it was put together by six people during the Prophet’s lifetime; and still others hold that it was done during the reign of caliph
^c
Umar, who acceded to power in 13/634.
⁹
What is certain is that the community very quickly realized the importance of putting the revelations into writing to avoid the danger of forgetting, despite the existence of Companions who had a marvelous facility for faultless memorization. The official version we have today was collected and written down during the reign of the third caliph,
^c
Uthman (23-35/644-55).
¹⁰
This
^c
Uthmani version is accepted by all Muslims, Sunni and Shi
^c
ite alike, as the holy book, unique and unifying, the words with which Allah has honored human beings by showing them the way to peace and prosperity on earth and Paradise in the Beyond. This unanimous acceptance, as can be imagined, is one of the secrets of the power of the text and its hold on the generations that have transmitted it as is for fifteen centuries.

One of the extremist Kharijite sects refused to include sura 12, entitled “Joseph,” on the grounds that “a love story is not permitted in the Koran.”
¹¹
This sect was and still is considered bizarre and highly irresponsible. It was called the
^c
Ajradi sect after the name of its leader,
^c
Ajarrad, who took other very unusual positions: for example, that of his aversion to children. Those who were not born Muslim were regarded as destined for hell; those born Muslim had to be kept apart from the community until they were invited to embrace Islam formally.
¹²
The least we can say about the
^c
Ajradi is that they were rather strange. Daring to reject a Koranic verse, a fortiori a sura, throws discredit on the one who does it rather than on the holy book itself. This attitude among Muslims gives some idea of the importance of this document in the Muslim mentality and the strength of its message, both yesterday and today. But it is the way it has been transmitted from generation to generation and the place it occupies in the early childhood years of believers—the tight interweaving of its music with training in reading, writing, and reciting—that gives an idea of its role as the source of our symbols and the cradle of our imagination.

As a child I did not have the right to touch the holy book; only Lalla Faqiha (the lady teacher in the Koranic school) had that privilege. She taught me for my first three years of school by writing verses on a wooden tablet covered with clay. Every Friday morning each child received his or her prewritten tablet. We set to work to follow the tracings she had drawn on the slate with
smagh,
a special honey-colored ink. That was the way we learned to write. Friday was spent working at this task. Those who like me got
smagh
all over everything, especially the face, were gently mocked by Lalla Faqiha, who used to say that “the day you control the
smagh,
you will have learned writing, and perhaps neatness too, if Allah gives you his blessing.” The tablets were carefully arranged against the wall at the end of the day, with the writing facing the wall. On Saturday morning they were all dry and the writing splendidly neat, and we felt great pride, because it was easy to forget that there had been smears at the beginning.

We, the smallest ones, were always seated at the front, in order to be better watched and to receive “special attention,” as when a child fell asleep and needed to lie down, or when another shyly whispered “Washroom.” As the children got older, they were allowed to sit farther back from Lalla Faqiha. Of course, when you are very little, all the whispering and interesting noise was behind you. But you felt safe. On Saturday morning all the children, holding their tablets, would sit down in their places on their own mats or cushions, with legs crossed in front of them. Under the direction of Lalla Faqiha, we began to repeat the mysterious signs that we had traced the day before. We repeated the musical words while trying to watch the line she was pointing to on the nearest tablet. Afterward she forgot about us as she attended to the older pupils and gave orders to her daughters about preparing lunch for her family. We went home for lunch or brought it, depending on how far each of us lived from school.

Usually children went to the
faqiha
in their neighborhood, unless there had been a big dispute between her and a child’s parents. One time Lalla Faquiha struck my cousin
^c
Aziz, who was very proud and created such a fuss at home that all the Mernissi children (there were ten of us) were transferred to a
faqiha
who lived some kilometers farther away. There we could walk around in the medina for some hours both before and after school. We repeated the reading from our tablets from Saturday to Wednesday, which was recitation day. On that day another person entered the scene: Ba-Faqih (Father Faqih), the husband of the
faqiha.
After taking away our tablets, he made us recite what we had written. The pupil who hadn’t memorized the verses or who pronounced them incorrectly was scolded by Ba-Faqih: “A whole week for three verses and you still stumble! How are you going to get six thousand verses into your little head? God knows if there is anything in that little head.”

Children who recited perfectly were showered with praise. They were chosen to take part in the recitations that were given on religious holidays or when an important personage visited the school. If a child learned quickly and had a beautiful voice he or she was considered a prodigy, and as a result was able to shine in other domains later. I had a good memory but too soft a voice, so I was excluded from the first row in the ritual assemblies during my whole childhood. Later in my classes and seminars I always tried to have students rotate in order to create fluidity and a feeling of hopefulness.

A child begins attending the Koranic school at the age of three. At around six years old, you have already learned writing, mastery of the use of
smagh,
and the importance of neatness, and above all you have developed a prodigious memory. At around five years old you receive the first gift that signifies that you are an important person; a beautiful little Koran with calligraphy and gilding. My father gave me mine one Friday, but he took it back twenty minutes later when a cousin came up to ask me to go out and play: “When you have finished playing, you can have it back. I am going to put it on the windowsill. Then you just have to stand on a stool to get it. You must never drop it on the floor and never touch it without washing your hands and face. If someone asks you to go play, you must mark the page where you are reading with this piece of silk, carefully close it, look for the stool, and put Allah’s book back in its place.”

Throughout the Muslim world generation after generation of the faithful impress on their children the importance of the
risala.
Often in North African or Arab conferences or seminars I can recognize those who went to a Koranic school. They remember telephone numbers without writing them down; they take few notes during the sessions and recall in detail, almost word for word, conversations one had with them years before.

The Koranic school I attended in the 1940s was very like the one my grandfather described to me and the one his grandfather had described to him. And they all strongly resemble descriptions of the schools in medieval texts. Today, of course, the institution has been modernized. The
faqih
has a blackboard and a class list for calling the roll; new materials have been introduced. Nevertheless, the method of teaching remains the same. The Koranic school is probably one of the cheapest to run because equipment is kept at a minimum, and a single teacher teaches children of all ages in the same classroom. Children are supervised the whole day, except for rare moments when the teacher slips away and an older student replaces him. This is probably one of the reasons it has endured and why it still represents the only chance for millions of parents of moderate means to ensure that their children get preschool training.

But the great change is that nowadays there is a complete separation of children of different classes. In my time the division was by neighborhood; rich and poor were in the same school. Today children of rich parents go to English-style kindergartens or French-style
maternelles,
where they learn to read and write by reading “Snow White” and
Alice in Wonderland
in foreign languages, and only a few hours are devoted to the Arabic language and religious education. The majority of poor children continue by the millions to start life in the Koranic schools because they are the only day-care centers available. In Morocco, for example, the number of day-care centers financed by the government is minimal compared with the demand in a country where the birthrate is one of the highest in the world (almost 3 percent annual growth). Placing a child in a private modern child-care facility costs at least $100 a month, and one has to take the child home for lunch at noon and return him or her at two-thirty in the afternoon. Imagine what that would cost an average family, which has more than one child, in a country where the legal minimum wage is less than $150 a month. A neighborhood Koranic school doesn’t cost more than three dollars, and the maids, factory workers, and craft workers leave their children there very early in the morning and pick them up on the way home from work.

It is in the types of knowledge available in each institution that we find the inequalities that today divide the Arab world and create an intense animosity between classes. While the children of the rich are educated from the beginning in both modern and traditional knowledge, the children of the poor are excluded from early training in modern learning, especially mathematics and modern educational games. It is true that many of the
faqihs
and
faqihas
, aware of the need to modernize their methods and course content, ask children to buy mathematics books and certain games. But most of them are not equipped to teach these subjects. This means that those who go to the Koranic school until the age of seven (the age of compulsory public education) start off with a handicap that is difficult to overcome, especially in modern science and foreign languages, which are given priority in Western-style preschool facilities. This difference in the cultural universe of Muslim children, depending on their social class and parents’ income, is probably responsible for the xenophobia and rejection of the West in those who were deprived early in life of access to modern education. Chances of finding employment are in turn closely dependent on mastery of modern knowledge.
¹³

It is interesting to note that most of the petrodollars invested in safeguarding our
asala
(authenticity) are aimed at the propagation of traditional knowledge. The money spent on promoting cultural life in our emigre communities in Europe finances the creation of Koranic schools, while only joint access to both kinds of knowledge can guarantee full employment to young North Africans in a very competitive European labor market: “The Banque Islamique de Developpement . . . has financed, among other projects, the very beautiful and costly cultural center in Evry in the southern suburbs of Paris, where 70,000 Muslims live; there you find separate prayer spaces for men and women (no mixing), a library, a Koranic school, and a magnificent mosque with minaret. The cost of the operation . . . two million dollars.”
¹⁴
Oil money is not being invested to redress the inequalities of access to knowledge, but rather under the cloak of the sacred to cultivate
tc
^c
a
(obedience to authority) and the docility and proverbial fatalism that are continually dinned into our ears.