Islam and Democracy: Fear of the Modern World (2 page)

“Ustada! By looking at Al-Jazeera TV, of course! This TV station saved my life by allowing me to continue my education after having left the university with a diploma everyone regarded as inadequate. And believe me, its programs, which teach you the technique of
jadal
[the art of controversy], helped me gain something the university failed to give me: self-confidence. Now, Ustada, I really have to go, and remember, you promised that would be your last question,” Karim added with a wide grin to signify that he was skeptical about my promise.

After he left, I ordered more tea and sat there, overwhelmed by a discovery that until then had been at the initial stage of short intuitive flashes, or
lawami,
as the Sufi, the mystics of Islam, call them.

The static Arab world of my generation, which was taught by our parents and teachers to “sit, obey, and be quiet,” is gone. A dynamic new Arab world has emerged, in which constant mobility in both mental and physical space, juggling with divergent opinions, and selecting from different cultures have been instinctively adopted by our youth as techniques for survival. The master educators of this new Arab world, which is still classified by the disoriented International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank as “illiteracy- ridden,” are neither the religious teachers at mosques nor the instructors at state schools and universities but the designers of satellite TV programs. I wonder if the American visionary Alvin Toffler had ever thought of the Arab world as a possible place for his futuristic “power-shift” previsions:

As Toffler so rightly predicted, knowledge is truly revolutionary because “it can be grasped by the weak and the poor as well.”
¹³
Arab satellite TV is enabling such a revolution by allowing freedom-of- opinion-starved young people, formerly hostages to local obedience-inspired education, to teach themselves
jadal.
Satellite-dispatched information is thus undermining the legitimacy of the holders of force and wealth by proving that indeed “knowledge is the most democratic source of power.”
¹⁴

In the Koran, Allah’s seventh-century book revealed to the Prophet Muhammad, the word
jadal
seems important because it “appears in 29 verses,” explains Abdel Magid Turki, the scholar who in 1978 reissued in Paris the Arabic original of
The Art of the Techniques of Chaining the Arguments.
¹⁵
It had been condemned by Arab despots and their in-house
imams
since its initial publication in the eleventh century; they considered it one of the most dangerous of books.
¹⁶
A1 Baji, its author, reminded his readers that the best strategy for a Muslim to gain power over his enemies is to practice the technique indicated in verse 125 of Sourat 16
(An-Nahl,
The Bee), which says,
Reason with
them
[jadilhum]
in the most courteous manner.
¹⁷
The genius of the Al- Jazeera team, formed by Arab men and women media professionals who gained their experience working in the London-based Arab Section of the British Broadcasting Corporation, was to reintroduce
jadal,
the art of polemics and controversy, as the basic concept of their most-watched programs. Through this approach, they have recruited millions of Arab viewers since Al-Jazeera started broadcasting in 1996.
¹⁸
The two most popular programs,
Ar-Ra’y al Akhar(The
Other Opinion) and
Al-Itijah al Mu’akiss
(The Opposite Direction), bring together groups with divergent opinions and encourage them to defend their positions by using
jadal
—logical arguments that allow the viewers to draw their own final conclusions.

A modern dictionary shows that the word
jadal
shares the same root as
majdoul
(a silk braid) or
jadala
(to quarrel) and ends up with
jidal,
which means to contest.
¹⁹
Convincing the enemy by using
jadal
was the most potent method the Prophet used to preach and increase the number of his followers, explained Al Baji in his eleventh-century Muslim Spain, whose rulers were already so deeply infected by megalomaniac despotic temptations that they weakened their armies and made it easy for Christian forces to throw them out of Europe two centuries later.
Jadal
operates, al Baji explained through his 230-page book, on the assumption that the human brain operates rationally and that you win someone over by leading him, via a strategically ordered cascade of arguments, to adopt your own opinion. He believed this technique to be the best of all sciences, and the most important, because it is the way to understand and distinguish between what is “true”
(al haq)
and what is “impossible”
(muhal).
²⁰
Where
jadal
is used, force is unnecessary, al Baji repeated, and he cited an impressive number of Koranic verses and
hadiths
(the Prophet s sayings and acts) to make his point.

The art
of jadal
also gave Muslims a rich genre of literature called
nazar
(contemplation) and
hilafiayat
(dissenting opinions), created during the most brilliant centuries of Islamic civilization and including the works of such thinkers as Al Ghazali (502/1111), Ibn al-Qassar (398/1007), and Ibn-al-Sa
⁽
ati (694/1295).
²¹
Another genre often linked to this
jadal
literature is the
A dab al Baht
(how-to manuals of polite conversation), which go into the details of using body language and theatrical tricks to enhance one’s communication skills as a power base. Among the “stars” who authored such manuals were Ibn ‘Aqil (513/1119) and Samarqandi (d. 600/1657).
²²

When modern Muslims fighting colonization needed to tap humanist Islam in the nineteenth century to help start their nationalist movements, they had no trouble legitimizing the secularist constitutions that introduced the elected parliaments in most Muslim states today.
²³
(That these Muslim states managed to rig their parliamentary elections during the Cold War era is another story.) But secularism, a system whereby people elect their rulers, was brought about by enlightened Muslim religious authorities who argued the Koran and
shari’a
by tapping precisely this
jadal
tradition.
²⁴
This humanist tradition vanished when the West backed despots in the Muslim world during the Cold War era but now seems to be reemerging as triumphant as ever, thanks to information technology.

One reason why state extremism has lost ground in the Arab world is the mass exodus of channel-surfing citizens who each evening desert their national television, where only the chief is allowed to talk, and migrate happily through the dozens of satellite channels with offices in London, Dubai, Beirut, or Qatar. In the early 1990s, there were many
fatwa
and laws forbidding the “satanic satellite dish” in order to keep public television’s monopoly in countries such as Egypt, Iran, and especially Saudi Arabia, explained Mouna Nairn in a hilarious article published in
he Monde
in 1995 under the title “The Mushrooming of Satellite Dishes Is Threatening Established Powers.”
²⁵
These control-driven
fatwa
were badly needed by the local censors because public television stations were faced with the fatal choice to “adapt or die.”
²⁶
The Saudi regime’s attempts to silence the satellites reached its peak when it threatened to fine the owners of the diabolical product “from 36,000 to 180,000 dollars.”
²⁷

The Saudi king was not the only one who felt threatened by the devilish dish, so were many French politicians, like the mayor of Couronnes (Essonne) and Saint Cloud (hauts-Seine), who issued laws to stop their Arab migrants from using satellite dishes in the Democratic French Republic. The 36 satellites enabling 150 TV channels to broadcast across Europe threatened the French mayors of cities with large Arab populations, when they realized that the latter turned their dishes in the direction to those channels beaming Arab- only programs.

The Western media do not seem to have the slightest clue about the information revolution that is transforming the balance of power in the Arab world by making youth autonomous as far as reality decoding and identity manufacturing and by reducing the elders who are still playing leading roles on the political stage to clownish propagandists. A significant example that revealed how ill informed the Western media are about information dynamics in the region is that Western pundits accused Al-Jazeera, the only television station the Taliban allowed in Kabul after the United States started bombing that city after September 11, of being Osama bin Laden supporters. “We have been accused before of being financed by the CIA and Mossad because we invited Americans and Israeli rulers to speak,” explained Sheikh Hamad Ibn Thamer al-Thani, the station director. “Now, we are suddenly the bin Laden platform. . . . Our only principle is the freedom of expression. . . . Everyone has the right to explain his opinion.”
²⁸
Western journalists did not know that Arab despots who have suffered damaging criticism from Al-Jazeera s
jadal-
based programs have accused the station of being a mercenary of extremist oil emirs. They ignored the fact that although oil emirs do finance dozens of both local and satellite TV channels, they did not manage to recruit Al-Jazeera s millions of viewers, of all classes and ages, in the Arab world. If Al-Jazeera did not respect its viewers and instead catered to a funding emir, it would have condemned itself to oblivion.
Jadal
is the secret of the success of the television stations that win large audiences among the huge Arab-speaking public.

Actually, Al-Jazeera played a key role in discrediting the Taliban weeks before the September 11 attacks. The Taliban’s Kabul may look much like ninth-century Baghdad, when unpopular caliphs such as the Abassid al Mu͑tadid tried to regain power by outlawing
jadal,
which was the most popular form of street entertainment. In 279 of the Hijra (A.D. 892), “public announcers warned that no one was allowed to stop in the street and speak to the public, and no
kadi
(judges) or
munajim
(astronomers)
were allowed to speak at the mosque. Printers were forbidden to sell books about
jadal [controversy]
and
falasifa [philosophy].”
²⁹

But there is a huge difference between the ninth-century Abbassid caliph and the Taliban, a difference that highlights the irreversible trend toward democratization in the Muslim world. The caliph did not have to face the risky situation Al-Jazeera inflicted on the Taliban when it invited them to convince Arab viewers, using the rules of
jadal,
that destroying the Bamian statutes was in keeping with Islamic tradition. When Egyptian religious authorities argued that Islam had invaded Egypt and never destroyed pharaonic sites because those artifacts were respected as significant in world history, the Taliban were discredited when their representatives showed how little they knew about either Islam or the pharaohs.

Satellite TV is definitely not good for extremists. When the Taliban seized Kabul in 1996 and Richard Keller, the president for Pakistan operations for the petroleum giant UNOCAL, claimed the new government would “be good for us,” he did not realize that millions of viewers made a link between Islamic extremism and the American oil industry.
³⁰
It also became clear to Arab viewers where the ignorant Taliban had obtained their funding for advertising themselves as Islam’s best spokespersons. What surprised people like Brahim and Karim was that Mr. Keller thought it good for America to rely on criminals like the Taliban to secure his “way for the oil and gas pipelines he hoped to build through Afghanistan at a cost of 8 billion dollars.”
³¹
How could it escape Mr. Keller that he was jeopardizing his wife’s and daughter’s security by associating his profit schemes, even for a short period (UNOCAL suspended its project four years later), with a group of extremists who did not share his own notions of civic virtue?
³²

Karim was right about the necessity to ensure that winners and losers share the same “Saladin” peace values. Evidently many Americans do share Saladin’s peace vision because many U.S.-based activists condemned UNOCAL for supporting the Taliban. However, the American courts reduced them to silence: “In September 1998 a group of Green activists asked California’s attorney general to dissolve UNOCAL for crimes against humanity and the environment and because of UNOCAL‘s relations with the Taliban,” reported Ahmed Rachid in his ominous book
Taliban,
which revealed that many American citizens disapproved of crossing the ethical line.
³³
Though this initiative failed, the UNOCA1 events revealed that terrorists can indeed be subdued if peace-nurturing citizens in both East and West know each other’s views. A tough job awaits both the Eastern and Western media: that of making sure that violence is criminalized everywhere.