Islam and Democracy: Fear of the Modern World (15 page)

Nevertheless, judging by the dynamism of the protest movements based on the sacred, one must conclude that, despite all these attempts to manipulate the Koran, there is somewhere a power that these verses communicate. It gives a very strong sense of self and of one’s rights, however much they are flaunted, and the energy to get angry and to imagine the world otherwise. This is what makes it important to familiarize ourselves with the words, symbols, and primordial scenes, the axial concepts surcharged with emotion, fifteen centuries old, that the dissidents reawaken and reactivate. Among them are
haqq
(right, truth) and
batil
(error, injustice). It was to the cry of
haqq
and
batil
that Imam Khomeini stirred up the wave that chased the shah out of Iran in the late 1970s. That same
haqq
was invoked by the crowds, furious about the bombs on Baghdad, in the streets from Lahore to Nouakchott by way of Kuwait and Riyadh. But each person put in the cry for
haqq
his or her own anxieties and frustrations.

In order to understand why the word
haqq
stirs up the crowds, we have to go very deep into our collective memory. We must turn the calendar back to the zero time and plunge into the
jahiliyya,
the pre-Islamic era. What was Mecca like before Islam? All voyages are, of course, an adventure; they are a foray into
al-gharib,
“the strange"; we know it and we prepare for it. But it is impossible to find anything
more gharib
than the
jahiliyya.
With its violence and anarchy, the pre-Islamic era seems to resemble the life that is so familiar to us today. We have a feeling of
deja vu
so troubling that we no longer know, as in the ancestral myths, whether we are going forward or backward in time.

Is the
jahiliyya
behind us?

Unlike the names Judaism and Christianity, which refer to persons (Juda and Christ), the word
islam
refers to a relationship: submission. The Arabic linguistic root
istislam
means “to surrender"—to lay down weapons ending a state of war (
harb). Istislam
and
tasallum
(to receive) result in a truce halting hostilities;
salam
is one of the words for prisoner of war.
¹
The identity of the partners in this truce becomes clear when one reads the historical accounts of the year 8 of the Hejira (A.D. 630), the year of
fath
(success), when the Prophet returned to Mecca as conqueror and Islam became the official religion of the Ka
^c
ba, the religious center of pagan Arabia. The truce was between the Meccans and Allah, with the Meccans renouncing
shirk,
the freedom to think and choose their religion, which was incarnated by the 360 gods enthroned in the Ka
^c
ba. In exchange Allah guaranteed peace in the city, where violence was a problem. The word
shirk
is the opposite of
islam;
it is its negative in the formula that creates order on earth and in heaven.

The freedom of opinion and religion of which the Universal Declaration of Human Rights speaks reactivates for Muslims the idea of
shirk,
which etymologically means simply “to join together,” and also “to participate.” It has a negative connotation because it is used to describe the disorder and confusion predating the year 630, the date of the conquest of Mecca, when the Prophet tumbled the gods from their pedestals:

This passage from Ibn Sa
^c
d is the key to decoding not just one but several enigmas that modern Islam confronts. The first is fear of personal freedom, from which comes the ban on the artistic reproduction of the human face. The second is the exclusion of women from politics, which is tied to the triumph of the monotheistic One. Among the 360 gods of the Ka
^c
ba, the most powerful were goddesses. These goddesses did not have the face of
rahma,
the tenderness associated with the nurturing mother, for they wallowed in the bloodbaths of the sacrifices they demanded—sacrifices all the more cruel because useless. These goddesses did not succeed in bringing about the maternal miracle that they were supposed to guarantee. The feminine would be doubly stamped with the sign of invisibility. Women would be veiled, first because they were identified with the violence of the goddesses, and then in order to homogenize the
umma
(community) and cleanse the city of everything that smacked of the pre-Islamic disorder. We will return to that primordial scene, when Islam’s social contract was concluded: peace in exchange for freedom,
rahma
in exchange for
shirk.

Before 630 freedom of thought did exist, and gods swarmed in the Arabian heavens and had their place in large numbers in the temples, and also in each household. At the time that Judaism and Christianity were comfortably established among their neighbors in the Mediterranean area, the Arabs continued to reject monotheism and became “famous for the worship of idols,” we are told by Ibn al-Kalbi, the author of one of the rare and fascinating works on pre-Islamic religions:

Shirk
is the most appropriate word for translating the word “freedom” in Article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which is posed as an ideal to be attained: “Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion. ..."This article is the very definition of the
jahiliyya,
the chaotic pagan world before Islam. What it proposes is regression to the zero time. The United Nations translators, charged with putting the charter into Arabic, reeled under the weight of the task, using four words to render “freedom to change his religion":
haqq hurriyat taghyir al-diyana,
instead of the more appropriate word,
shirk,
which is found in the Koran, from beginning to end, not less than 160 times.
⁴
It is in that brief Article 18 and the concept of
shirk
that the conflict between Islam and democracy lies as a philosophical debate, a fundamental debate that was blocked for fifteen centuries, supported by the power of the palaces. The question is simply this: Do we love Islam because the police impose it on us? Obviously not. We love it for all the beautiful things that the police can neither offer nor take away—particularly a superb concept like
rahma.

In 1979 I interviewed a Black Muslim in Berkeley in order to find out how a Californian like him had come to Islam, and it was the word
rahma
that was decisive for his conversion: “That was the word. That was the code. I searched for it for so long. And here it was!” A Syrian friend brought him to the San Francisco mosque one Friday. That day the imam chose as the text for his sermon the verse that we are taught as youngsters and say when we have fear of the dark:
“Kataba rabbukum
^c
ala nafsihi al-rahma”
("Your Lord hath prescribed for Himself mercy,” sura 6, v. 54).
Rahma
is a rich concept with multiple facets: sensitiveness (
al-riqa
), tenderness (<
alta
^c
attuj),
and also forgiveness (
al-maghjira
). It is everything that is sweet and tender, nourishing and safe, like a womb.
Rahma
has its roots in the uterus,
rahm.
Rain is
rahma,
because it brings prosperity
(al-khayr
).
⁶
The
umma,
the mythic Muslim community, is overflowing with
rahma,
as is the relationship of love that links the members of a family and makes each one concerned about the fate of the others.

The clamor of the fundamentalist youth of today is, among other things, an appeal to that Islam of
rahma,
where the wealthy of the cities are sensitive to the anguish of the poor. Their outcry is the plaint of the unloved child of the family cut off from modern knowledge and its sciences that promise work and dignity. Reducing the outcry of the young to a declaration of war against the wealthy of the planet—that is, against the West—is to make a serious error in understanding their anguish. Peace in the world, and especially the strategies for realizing peace, depend in part on analyzing that anguish. If the camera is focused on the violence of the fundamentalist, the strategy is to cut him down. If, however, the focus is on his anguish, his fear of being forgotten in the great feast of knowledge, which is one of the most attractive promises of modernity, then letting him participate in the feast is the solution. This is what makes it interesting for us to go back to the Ka
^c
ba in year 8, when Islam was only a hope for peace, in order to understand its message and what it had to struggle against.

Islam, with its sole God, triumphed in 630 because it succeeded in realizing what the 360 gods enthroned in the Ka
^c
ba, expressing pluralism and freedom of thought and belief, were powerless to guarantee: the establishment of
rahma.
Violence was so widespread in Mecca at that time that even the gods were battered when they didn’t please men. Muhammad’s victory was swift and decisive because the Arabs suffered from insecurity, from
fitna,
violence in the city. The
jahiliyya,
Tabari tells us, was the gross behavior, the cruelty that resulted from ignorance.
⁷
An informed person cannot be violent and cruel. Islam proposed to put an end to that, to establish
rahma.
The first word of the Koran revealed to the Prophet was an order to read: “
Iqra.”

Like the other monotheistic religions, Islam promises peace at the price of sacrifice—the sacrifice of desire,
hawa. Rahma,
peace in the community, can exist only if the individual renounces his
ahwa
(plural of
hawa),
which are considered the source of dissension and war. The
jahiliyya
saw the unbridled reign of
hawa,
desire and individual egotism. Islam was to realize the contrary:
rahma
in the community at the price of the sacrifice of
ahwa,
individual desires and passions.
Rahma
in exchange for freedom is the social contract that the new religion proposed to the citizens of Mecca. Renouncing freedom of thought and subordinating oneself to the group is the pact that will lead to peace;
salam
will be instituted if the individual agrees to sacrifice his individualism.
Hawa
means both “desire” and “passion,” but it can also signify “personal opinion.” It is the unbridled individual interest of a person who forgets the existence of others in thinking only of his own advantage. Desire, which is individual by definition, is the opposite of
rahma,
which is an intense sensitivity for the other, for all the others, for the group.

From the beginning Islam was able to establish only a fragile peace, one that was constantly threatened from within by desire, the most unpredictable expression of individualism. Submission to the group was confused with
^c
aql
(reason), and all indulgence of preferences and individual desires was labeled irrational.
⁸
Hawa
was thus equated with mindless passion. The threat of pre-Islamic disorder would always hang heavy over the city, for the danger is inherent in human nature. In every person sleeps a potential
jahili;
peace is only a shaky equilibrium. The words
hawa
and its plural
ahwa
occur some thirty times in the Koran as the negative pole of the ideal city.
Hawa
is the chink, the crack through which dissension and disorder can infiltrate.
⁹

But—and this is the genius of Islam—
hawa
is not to be excluded or eradicated; it must rather be managed in such a fashion that it will not exceed the
hudud,
the sacred limits. Islam doesn’t reject anything; it manages all things. Its ideal schema is equilibrium. In normal times everything can move within a state of equilibrium which does not put the security of the group in danger. Individual excesses can be contained. There is no clergy to monitor and punish, for the fundamental design is not a prison, but equilibrium. The key adage that mothers and teachers hammer into the little brains of Muslim children every day is “
a
^c
mal wa qayyis
“ ("everything in moderation"). It is up to the individual, in the absence of a watchful clergy, to maintain a sense of moderation and never lose sight of the interests of the community. Individuals should enjoy themselves, but also keep a feeling for the collectivity. Human beings do not live alone in a desert; they should not shock the people around them. They ought not to deprive themselves, but they shouldn’t exaggerate either. These guidelines keep
hawa
in check, for when the community is threatened, it can drag the ship down into chaos.

This is a possible reading of the Salman Rushdie affair: the imam, who watches over the cosmic equilibrium to see that the vessel of Islam continues to sail on a hostile planet, condemned the outpourings of the imagination as a deadly attack. Salman Rushdie is a writer of fiction. He creates from the imagination, the most indomitable refuge of individuality, a person’s little secret garden that escapes all censorship, all compromise. An individual can be forced to submit, but his imagination can never be controlled.

It is also a possible reading of the cabal against the progressive intellectuals who have tried to introduce the Western philosophy of the Enlightenment since the Second World War. Finally, it is a reading of the declaration of war against the Mu
^c
tazila, who in the Middle Ages proposed to discuss
ra*y
(personal opinion) and the place of
^c
aql
(reason). I could extend the list. The fact is that for fifteen centuries the imagination has been condemned to pursue its course beyond the
hudud,
outside the walls. That presents no danger if our great minds are in Paris or London or the United States. The imagination is the locus of all subversions; when the enemy satellites are keeping watch, it is not the moment to wallow in one’s individuality. We shall come back to this issue, for the way in which the role of
ra
y
is settled is crucial for the future of Islam and its survival in the twenty-first century. It is absolutely necessary that the
umma
root its security somewhere else than in the ban on free thought. We cannot continue to stifle the imagination, the freedom to ponder and dream, for that is the locus of invention, the source of wealth in the electronic age! This is the great issue that Muslims are called on to confront and resolve. Fanatical, uncultured leaders, little versed in modern science, cannot give us a solution. They must drape themselves in their
rahma
and humbly reflect and learn.