Islam and Democracy: Fear of the Modern World (16 page)

Islam is essentially a dynamic, a fragile equilibrium between two poles: a negative
(hawa)
and a positive
(rahma).
It is a precise relationship between desire and power which keeps the city running and promises not only peace but also the family tenderness that delights us on some holiday evenings. That idea was very strong in Islam at the beginning and is still present in the minds of those who are the victims of selfishness and are reduced to powerlessness by insensitivity to their fate. If we don’t keep this social contract in mind, we cannot understand why all the words that have to do with freedom of thought, creation, and improvisation are condemned and stamped with a prohibition, and why the great criminal of the century, Salman Rushdie, is a writer of fiction who draws from his imagination, not a scientist who describes reality.

In Arabic the imagination—the thought process that poses itself as detached from reality, as the withdrawal into oneself, the place of freedom that the group cannot keep watch on—is called
khayal,
which comes from the same root as the word for horse (
khayl).
The
Lisan al-
^c
Arab
reminds us that a horse is called
khayl
because there is defiance in its gait; it moves with arrogance. In Arabic we say
“yatliq al-inan
“ ("he gives rein to") about someone who acts in a completely egotistical and narcissistic manner.

The intellect is often compared to a horse, and of course Arabian horses are among the most beautiful and elegant in the world because they are fast. Horses and birds are powerful symbols in our vision of freedom. When I participate in an official conference in an Arab country, it often happens at the end that I am asked to sign some declaration or other. When I refuse, I am prey to the solicitations of those who tell me they love me and want me to understand where my interests lie. But their attempts to manipulate me stop as if by magic when I pronounce the fateful words “
Ana tir hurr
“ ("I am a free bird"). The word
hurt
comes right out of the
jahiliyya,
where the freest man was the aristocrat, he who had no master, the opposite of
hurt
being “slave.”

Al-hurriyya,
“freedom,” has always had an ambiguous status in Muslim civilization and has never acquired a patent of nobility or become a positive concept. Its meaning remains tied to the anarchy of the
jahiliyya.
F. Rosenthal is right to observe that “politically, the individual was not expected to exercise any free choice as to how he wished to be governed. At times, he did stress his right to be considered and treated as an equal by the men in power.” Rosenthal also comments that
hurriyya
as conceived by the Sufis means submission to God.
¹⁰
However, the Sufis’ freedom, abolishing the barrier between man and God, threatened the caliphs. In defining man, the Sufis gave him back his rights. The ban on giving the imagination and the mind free play is rooted in the fear of excessive individuality. The public freedoms (
hurriyat
^c
amma)
of which the Universal Declaration of Human Rights speaks have a strange sound in a society that fears individuality, seeing it as the source of all disequilibrium. If since independence the Arab states had put their energy into making us reflect about our liberation, as had been promised during the nationalist struggle, we would have been able to practice those public freedoms, and to compare them with our Islamic heritage. We would have had plenty of time to familiarize ourselves with the freedoms that frighten and disorient all those who hold an ounce of authority. Everyone gets hysterical the moment an adolescent or a woman announces the desire to be free. But let’s go back to that
khayal,
that unfolding of the creative spirit, so still, yet capable of shaking armies and alarming every
shawush
and guardian.
¹¹

I have always been enchanted by the sight of an Arabian horse, slim, high strung, quivering. So much energy within that shiny coat! So much rebellion chafing at the bit! I love to look at men and women who have this same quality despite all the risks it might entail, and the miracle is that I often find it when I search for it.

I have always admired even more the good Arab horsemen— that is, those who don’t try to be smarter than the animal they apparently dominate. I am a dyed-in-the-wool city dweller, born in a place that dates back to the eighth century, where the streets are so narrow that the city gets its supplies from the backs of donkeys. Up to the age of twenty I played side by side with the very slow, more or less docile donkeys that moved slowly down the stone- paved streets.
¹²
On feast days, when I was taken to the outskirts of town to watch the peasants’ games on their superbly harnessed and decorated horses, I always admired not the rider, but the beast. What enraptured me and the other children was that the horse was unpredictable. The moments we loved best were when the rider was thrown. In thinking back on those spectacles of my childhood, I realize that everyone, or at least the children, identified with the horse, not the rider. It wasn’t until I was forty years old that I came across the Arabic proverb well known to all except me: “
Al-khayl a
^c
lam min fursaniha”
("Horses are smarter than their riders").

What is certain is that the Arabs know better than anyone that it is ridiculous to try to master a racehorse, and by extension, to control the extraordinary freedom of the human mind. Just look at the way they set about educating us, and the defiance on one side and violence on the other that characterize the pupil-teacher relationship. One might say, without being too far off, that the basic idea is that a mind is refractory by nature, that it is stubbornly sovereign and resists all influence. If not, why should Lalla Faqiha have kept such close watch on me and beaten me with such vindictiveness? She knew that her power was only Utopian.

Arrogance is condemned in the Koran: “Allah loveth not such as are proud and boastful!” (sura 4, v. 36).
Khayal
(the imagination) and
ikhtiyal
(arrogance) come from the same linguistic root. Imagining is full of risks for society because it is the power to create and to think in images—that is, to create a different reality. “To imagine something,” says the
Lisan al-
^c
Arab,
“is to create an image of it.” Creating an image is what was slapped with a ban, because the images that the pre-Islamic Arabs created were those of idols. They were the reproduction of their personal gods, or the gods of their tribes, each of which might contain only a few families. The member of a tribe was not so submissive to his tribal god as one might think, for if it thwarted him, he simply discarded it.

In Arabic the word for image is
al-sura.
And today the only word we have for photographer is
musawwir.
Everyone has noticed the irritation shown by police and guards at official buildings in Muslim countries when you walk around with a camera. But it’s not about the ban on photographing which exists everywhere in the world in museums that I want to speak. I want to talk about the exaggerated aggressiveness you encounter when you walk around with a camera in an Arab medina. I don’t know how photographers make a living in Arab countries, but every time I have tried to take a picture of a tree or a door or a fly, the incident has turned out badly.

In 1987 a young Egyptian was determined to forbid me to photograph the Sphinx. I managed to calm him down by handing him my camera, just as one would do to mollify an angry child. But I was humiliated and fed up; he was spoiling my vacation. I asked in a small voice how I had disturbed
al-kawn
(the cosmos). Then, weeping, I told him that he was oppressing me and that I was weak (which is the best way to disarm an Arab man). My tormentor gave me back my camera, murmuring with embarrassment, “I don’t know.” However, he should have known that “the people who will be the most chastised by Allah on the Day of Judgment will be the
musawwirun
’ as the ninth-century compiler al-Bukhari tells us in his
Sahih
(collection of authentic Hadith, traditions about the Prophet).
¹³
The angels, it is said, will not enter a house where there is a dog or a
tasawwir
—any representation of a natural object. This was how the cult of idols began; human beings fashioned images that they then began to worship.

According to legend it was a distant ancestor of the Arabs, Luhayy, who “first introduced the worship of idols into the Ka
^c
ba.” He is alleged to have visited Syria, and on seeing the people worship objects to have asked, “What are those?” They answered that they used them to beg for rain from the sky and to triumph over their enemies. He asked them to give him some, then returned to Mecca and placed them around the Ka
^c
ba.
¹⁴
The ban on producing images of human beings forever links in the Muslim unconscious two things that have emerged as supreme in the modern information age: the image and individualism. Creation, imagination, individuality—so many facets of a fabulous, dangerous en- ergy—are like mirrors and dreams.
Khayal,
Ibn Manzur tells us in the
Lisan al-
^c
Arab,
is “the images that seem to exist, whether one is awake or dreaming . . . and that is the reason the shadow in the mirror is called
khayal
as well as what our body projects against the sun.” The words that mean “to create,” like
khalaqa
and
bid%
are dangerous and stamped with bans. All innovation is a contravention of the order of things. In fact, Ibn Manzur tells us,
khalaqa,
in the case of a human being, is synonymous with the word that means “to lie,”
kadhaba.
¹⁵

Three words that are still brandished at us like weapons by the defenders of the faith are
kafir, mulhid,
and
zindiq,
which all mean the same thing: deviation from the right way. Religious fanaticism, like any totalitarian system, has its violent side. Its words function like a guillotine. If he who speaks in the name of God accuses a person of being a
mulhid
(atheist) or a
kafir
(infidel), that is enough to make the accused the legitimate target of punishment. Since creation and innovation mean divergence from the group, every word must be carefully weighed.

It is distressing to state that
kufr
(unbelief) is almost the reverse of
fikr
(thought). They both use the same root consonants, which are rearranged as in a dream or a slip of the tongue. The
kafir
is one who effaces, covers up the benefits he has received; he is, the
Lisan al-
^c
Arah
tells us, an ingrate who does not acknowledge God’s having shown him the right way. The word
zindiq,
borrowed from Persian, means a person who doesn’t believe in the Beyond and the Oneness of God. He is one who “makes things too limited for himself, for he deprives himself of eternity.”
¹⁶
In a mirror effect, the three words reflect each other in the black hole of Satanism.
Zindiq,
synonym of
mulhid
and
kafir,
means falling under the influence of Satan, Shaytan, who plays his games, as we know, on the terrain of
hawa,
“desire” or “passion.” Everything that feels itself to be cramped and confined when within the
hudud
that protect the city is Satanic.

Imam Ibn Kathir, in his commentary on the ritual formula that we pronounce ten times a day (at least),
“A
^c
udhu billahi min al- shaytan
“ ("May God protect me against Satan"), discusses one of the definitions of
shaytan:
“In the Arabic language
shaytan
comes from the root
shatana,
which means straying from usual human behavior and becoming conspicuous by stepping out of the ranks in some way or other.” This definition of
shaytan
is important because it reminds us of the essence of order and the terms of the social contract and the meaning of rebellion: “
Shaytan
is the rebel, whether among human beings or jinn or animals. Everything that rebels is
shaytan
. . . . Shaytan has been so named because he is subversive
[mutamarrid],
because in his behavior and acts he abandons the behavior common to all, the behavior that leads to righteousness.”
¹⁷

The relationship between the general welfare and individual thought, the problem of the public interest and the flowering of the individual must be the focus for the reflection and global debate that Muslims are called on to undertake. This was the choice that was posed in Mecca in year 8: the public interest (peace) or individual interest
(ahwa).
But if the same choice faces us today, the answer does not have the same parameters or the same dynamics and does not call for the same solutions. The conditions for economic and cultural development are such that we no longer need to mutilate ourselves in any way. If the Arab parliaments began to function and the people democratically discussed the highways to be built, the schools to be erected, the jobs to be created, we would have a different vision of freedom of thought than our unfortunate ancestors of the
jahiliyya
had.

The idea of one sole God, which was the message of the Prophet Muhammad—a Meccan by birth and a member of the Quraysh tribe, one of the most powerful in Arabia and thus high ranking within a polytheistic city—was received as simply bizarre. The Koran is the best source on this inability of the Prophet’s contemporaries to understand the homogenization of thought he wanted to bring about: “Maketh he the gods One God? Lo! that is an astounding thing” (sura 38, v. 6). It was not that the notables of the Quraysh disagreed with him; it was that at the beginning they simply didn’t understand what he was talking about: “Does Muhammad want to reduce all the divinities to one? Does he want to hear us all say the same prayer? He knows perfectly well that each of us worships his own god.”
¹⁸
Reducing all beliefs to one had something of the magical about it for them; in verse 4 of the same sura the Prophet is referred to as a wizard.