Islam and Democracy: Fear of the Modern World (17 page)

For the Arabs of 630, curtailing freedom of thought amounted to destroying not only the 360 gods of Mecca but also the thousands if not millions of little gods created every day by men in their homes and during desert journeys. One could speak of a veritable industry in idols, with each tribe, city, or group ordering a statue of its idol in accordance with its wealth: “If the idol was made in the form of a human being in wood or silver, it was called
sanam.
If, on the contrary, it was made of stone, it was called
watan”
¹⁹

Idols made of wood “would have to be the appanage of the nobles and the wealthy, as they were all imported.”
²⁰
The official idol, which would be placed in the temple or some other public space, represented an ostentatious investment of the group, in contrast to the small models produced by artisans for domestic worship. How were these cults to be consolidated so long as freedom of thought was the very basis of domestic life? But to treat Muhammad’s proposition to reduce the many to One as magic is to ignore the fact that for a prophet nothing is impossible.

Islam came into the world to bring into being the impossible. That is one of its central ideas and one of the reasons for its worldwide success. Worldly problems are not insoluble; their resolution lies in the ability of the members of the group to agree and be unified. This gives Islam its pragmatic character and makes it difficult to disengage it from politics. It does not encourage religious authorities to sink into meditation, as do the Hindu fakirs. Even persons in search of spirituality, like the Sufis, must keep one foot firmly planted in reality if they court credibility and if their main objective is to solve the problems of the city, even if those problems are extremely complicated.

In seventeen years, from 613, the year he began to preach publicly, to 630, the year of his conquest of Mecca, by insisting on this idea the Prophet succeeded in destroying the statues of the gods and goddesses and in unifying the Arabs around
al-wahid,
“the One.” This was an astounding feat, if not a miracle, because at the beginning no one was convinced that peace required this great purgation of the Ka
^c
ba. In fact, no one saw the link between pluralism and violence. For the Quraysh council it seemed simpler for the Prophet to bring his God to the Ka
^c
ba and let others do what they wanted. At a historic meeting at the home of Abu Talib, the uncle and protector of the Prophet and the only man able to advise him, the Quraysh delegation proposed that “he stop insulting our gods” and “we will leave him with his God.” After hearing the statement of the delegation, Abu Talib, who was himself one of the wise men of the city, turned to the Prophet and told him in all simplicity: “Son of my brother, this delegation is the most representative of the tribe to which you belong. They are only asking for justice by demanding that you stop insulting their gods and that in exchange they will leave you to worship yours in peace.”
²¹
The members of the delegation waited anxiously for the Prophet to speak; they wanted to find a compromise and bring peace back to the city. The Prophet’s response was that all he wanted was for them to pronounce one sentence, and one only, and then he would leave them alone, for that sentence would allow them to subjugate all the Arabs and to master the
^c
ajam
(non-Arabs). Relieved, the members of the delegation eagerly responded: “But what is that sentence? We could pronounce ten if you want.” They were anxious to be conciliatory. The Prophet told them that all they had to do was pronounce the
shahada,
the first act through which one becomes Muslim: “Say:
‘La ilaha ilia Allah
‘ [’There is no God but Allah’].” They of course refused, saying, “Ask anything you want, but not that.”

Then the Prophet spoke the words that we still use today when we want to say we have no intention of compromising: “Even if you succeed in capturing the sun and bringing it and placing it in the palm of my hand, I will never change my mind. You pronounce that sentence or nothing.”
²²
The fateful consequence was that the city was thereafter literally torn in two. The accepted Koranic word for expressing this difference of opinion in the city is
shiqaq,
a schism that splits both the community and heaven in two and in Islam lays a curse on the number two. That word,
shiqaq,
occurs at the beginning of sura 38, which describes the preliminary negotiations of the members of the Quraysh council with the Prophet. When they realized that Muhammad would accept no compromise concerning the One, the decision to expel him from the city became the only solution.

Opposition to the One would forever have a negative color, and the words that express it today—words like
hizb
(party) and
shi
^c
a
(group with a different opinion), which are rooted in that epoch— have a sectarian character. They are all ascribable to the split
(shiqaq),
the irremediable rupture. The word
hizb,
which is used throughout the Arab world to designate a political party in the modern—that is, Western—sense, refers to
junud al-kuffar
(armies of the infidels), those “who were leagued against the Prophet and plotted against him"—in other words, the Quraysh, who were for freedom of thought and multiplicity of gods. The concept of
shi
^c
a,
which means “those who see things differently,” is condemned in the Koran as “those who split their religion and became sects”
(al- ladina farraqu dinahum wa kanu shi
^c
an).
²³
Shi
^c
a
refers here to the Jewish and Christian “sects,” for that is the way Islam regards
ahl al-kitab,
the “Peoples of the Book.”

In the beginning everyone was on the right path, then some went astray, and original Islam was born from the sects that had departed from the path, the Christians and the Jews. The Prophet Muhammad, the last Messenger of God, came to correct the division and bring everyone back to the right path—that of Islam. Challenging the consensus, both before and after the time of Muhammad, means deviating. Islam perceives itself—although the West often forgets this—as rooted in the Judeo-Christian tradition, which constitutes its spiritual patrimony, but condemns the Jews and Christians as sects that perverted the initial message. If this dissension had not arisen, the three branches of the Peoples of the Book, those who have had the privilege of divine revelation, would be brothers united.

The splitting of Islam into Sunni and Shi
^c
a is the historical proof that divergence of opinion is seen as a weakening of the group, and that it is better to cast out the disputing group and let it pursue its own course if it is strong enough. Opposition is seen as traumatic, a frightening situation because it recalls the violence of Mecca before the triumph of the One. The possibility for Muslims, both rulers and ruled, to tackle this problem by discussing it and rehabilitating
^c
aql
and
ra
y,
which was proposed by the Mu
^c
tazila and the philosophers, was violently rejected in the Middle Ages and deferred until the nineteenth century. The debate was brought up again by the nationalists when concepts of parliamentary democracy were introduced in the wake of the colonial armies. As we have seen, this second chance to debate the subject of dissension within the community was also rejected. The independent states presented a solid front on the need for unity and after World War II declared war on local oppositions, imprisoned their leaders, and censored their intellectuals. On the brink of the twenty-first century the Arab world now stands in economic disarray because the main cause of that disarray, its undemocratic management, can be analyzed only by using sacred concepts that are heavily loaded against the individual and a plurality of opinion.

The hegemony of the sacred as the language of modern politics is all the more mesmerizing since in Islamic history rallying around the One has always assured a brilliant success. We must remember that the Prophet didn’t begin to preach publicly until 613, when he was over forty years old. It was at this time that the problems with the Quraysh council, in charge of order in the city, are supposed to have arisen. However, the notables of the city, who were responsible for its security, decided only in 622 to expel the Prophet, or rather to silence his message. The year 622 is the year the break between the Prophet and Meccan officialdom reached the point of no return. In order to survive, the Prophet decided to emigrate. He left for Medina, but not to stay there. In the Muslim collective memory, emigrating is not a definitive move; it is only one step on the way of return, a detour to bring one back to the point of departure—Mecca, where the Prophet would return as conquering hero to reduce multiplicity to the One.
²⁴

The Muslim calendar begins at this time, the year 622, when the break between polytheism and monotheism was decisive. The miracle achieved by the Prophet of Islam was to have succeeded in demonstrating in his lifetime that his model was effective. In 630 he occupied Mecca and entered its temple, the Ka
^c
ba, the high holy place of all the Arabs, as conqueror. The unification of Arabia was almost complete when he died in 632. The spiral of success and triumph had been set in motion. In 632 the Roman armies suffered their first defeat in Syria. In 637 it was the Persian armies that were crushed in the battle of Qadisiyya, the battle constantly referred to by Radio Baghdad and the Iraqi press during the war with Iran and during the Gulf War. Jerusalem was taken in 638, Cyprus in 649, Persepolis in 649-50. In 655 the Muslim fleet attacked the Roman fleet southwest of the Anatolian coast, and its commander, the Byzantine emperor, was barely able to escape.

The struggle between
shirk
and Islam was not a battle for a city. It was a cosmic battle for the occupation of heaven and the appropriation of time. All troop movements, any penetration of a foreign army onto sacred soil would reawaken the memory of year 8, called the Year of Triumph, and set the depths of the Muslim unconscious to trembling, bringing to the surface forgotten instincts and archetypes and calling to mind the symbolic events that express them. This is exactly what happened with the deployment of American troops on the sacred territory of Islam, whose psychological center is still Mecca and its environs. Riyadh, the modern capital, does not have this symbolic importance.

The religious language used by the American president in the Gulf War, sprinkled with “God bless America” ‘s, created the gravest confusion by giving many the impression that the satellites themselves were the objects of spiritual machinations. It seemed to be a religious war, a global conspiracy to destroy Islam and win victory for another religion, the religion of arrogant, capitalist America, even though Mr. Bush from time to time used the word “freedom” alongside the word “God.” It might be said that the American president terrorized the Muslims as much with his ritual formula “May God bless the United States of America” as he did with the bombs dropped on Baghdad. In the sadly famous State of the Union message of January 1991, President Bush concluded by saying: “Tonight, as our forces fight, they and their families are in our prayers. May God bless each and every one of them and the coalition forces on our side in the Gulf.”

Wide-eyed, the people asked, “But what God is he talking about?” The alleyways of the medinas were all agog. America, which the Muslim world thought viscerally materialistic, was fighting for its God. The common people did not understand the tenor of that speech, trumpeted by the media throughout the world, in which the American president explained that the object of the war was to defend democracy and freedom: “The winds of change are with us now. The forces of freedom are united. We move toward the next century, more confident than ever that we have the will at home and abroad to do what must be done, the hard work of freedom.” The people were doubly confused: “Is democracy a religion?” the concierge of my building asked me the next day.

The blending of religious phrases with constantly invoked notions of democracy and freedom in the statements of the American president, all interspersed with the continual bombing of the civilian population of Baghdad, did not help the Arab masses see this electronic war as a modern conflict. It was a religious war, and the democracy and “freedom” Mr. Bush cited reeked to them of the seventh century and the later Christian crusades. In cartoons Mr. Bush frequently appears as a
taghiya,
a pharaonic despot. Because it recalled the brute force of the pharaohs against Moses and his followers, the noble objective of the West, the defense of democracy, was completely undercut. The Gulf War, carried out through the most technologically advanced means in human history, plunged the peoples terrorized by the power of destruction into a search for guideposts in the area that eludes understanding: myth and its language of ambiguity.