Islam and Democracy: Fear of the Modern World (20 page)

Were the Arabs still offering human sacrifices to their deities in the time of the Prophet? Were these human sacrifices particularly linked to the cult of the goddesses, so that the reign of the feminine would be linked in our memory of the pre-Islamic period with the idea of violence orchestrated from on high? If that is so, is it not connected to the enigma of the
hijab
that hides the feminine and crushes its will at the risk of denying its existence? Does the negotiation of a new relationship between the sexes inevitably require a reconciliation with the
jahiliyya
part of our past and its reintegration into our field of knowledge? So many banned questions have long remained without answer, but they constitute the challenges that Arabs must confront if they are to construct the only identity that endures: that in which our whole human heritage is taken into account. But meanwhile, let us at least try to put into perspective the few clues we have.

WAS
AL-WA
D
(BURIAL OF BABY GIRLS) HUMAN SACRIFICE?

Although some verses directly link
al-wa
d
to the demands of the deities, which would make it human sacrifice, many Muslim historians refuse to accept this thesis and advance other, less terrifying theories, such as that poverty or fear of dishonor caused parents to commit infanticide. Fathers sacrificed their daughters to spare them, in the first case, from dying of hunger; in the second, from falling into the hands of an enemy after a raid—the frequency of which, if this theory is correct, would suggest that such infanticide was a common practice. But the Koran explicitly recognizes in verse 138 of sura 6 that
al-wa
d
was inspired by the monstrous deities the people continued to associate with Allah, despite the clarity of his revelations: “Thus have their (so-called) partners (of Allah) made the killing of their children to seem fair unto many of the idolaters, that they may ruin them and make their faith obscure for them.”

Tabari, one historian with a declared aversion to any idea of considering human sacrifice possible in the period of the rise of Islam, was inclined to believe that the poverty of families was the motivation for
al-wa
d.
But when he undertook an explanation of verse 138, he was obliged to admit the unthinkable: that it was the idols who demanded the murder of little girls.
¹⁴
In verse 41 of the same sura the killing of children is condemned as the result of ignorance, of the baneful influence of the deities who continued to mislead people and kept them from listening to the word of God: “They are losers who besottedly have slain their children without knowledge. . . . They indeed have gone astray and are not guided.”

The idea of a deity who demanded the killing of children was inconceivable. To my mind, it is this phobia that explains the horror about the
jahiliyya
that up to the present day blocks scholarly research on that period. Before year 1 of the Hejira (A.D. 622), humanity had no history. There was nothing but darkness—only a zero. The fear that
the jahiliyya
inspires would explain all by itself why everything that recalls it stirs subterranean anxieties that we have never rid ourselves of.

The zero time is frightening in the same way that the future is— the future it so much resembles, with its violence that assails Arabs from all directions, from within and without, that swoops down from the sky in the form of bombs controlled by demonic enemy forces like the deities of the
jahiliyyay
each as mad as the other. Arabs never understood during the Gulf War, or even before, why the United States was so dead set against them. Why do the Palestinians, who are dying every day in the streets, chased and turned into fugitives, not mobilize the good will of the great powers of the world to stop that conflict? Whether the
jahiliyya
is behind us or before us is a question that recurs in the press. What have Arabs done to Allah which is so horrible that we are harrowed within and shamed, scorned, and bombarded without? The word
jahiliyya,
spread all over the media during the Gulf War, signified and condensed the problem that Islam came into the world to solve: the problem of violence.

In order to understand the connection between women and power which arouses so much hidden fear, we must establish the connection between these ancestral fears and the nonacceptance of the
jahiliyya.
The
jahiliyya
is the time that escapes our consciousness. The time that is not acknowledged is frightening because we risk finding there all our repressed images of violence.

We do know one thing: in the
wa
d
ritual it was the mother who buried the little girl alive, although the decision to do it fell to the father. According to Tabari,

In the lifetime of the Prophet, according to the Koran, only little girls were buried. We know, however, that one generation before that time the gods had demanded boys as well. The most famous case was that of the Prophet’s father, who barely escaped being sacrificed. According to some sources, the Prophet’s grandfather had vowed to the god Hobal that if he had ten living children in good health he would sacrifice the last to be born, who was Muhammad’s father,
^c
Abdallah Ibn
^c
Abd al-Muttalib. The Quraysh tribal leaders dissuaded
^c
Abdallah’s father from keeping his vow to sacrifice his tenth child, urging him instead to negotiate another solution with the god. Through the intermediary of the oracle, the god accepted the sacrifice of a hundred camels as ransom for
^c
Abdallah.
¹⁶

Some writers have questioned the credibility of this anecdote, saying that it is the product of the imagination of historians trying to make the very existence of the Prophet almost miraculous, since if his father had been sacrificed the Prophet would never have been born. Because Muhammad repudiated any association with miracles, these historians, checked in their desire to embellish his life with supernatural elements, did so underhandedly. Let’s admit that the proponents of this theory are right: that the story about
^c
Abdal- lah is a concoction of the historians. Their choice of a legend about sacrifice to the gods nevertheless remains significant. One doesn’t choose just any lie, and one doesn’t make up just any fantasy. Nothing is more programmed and coded than the sources from which we draw our lies and fantasies.

What is certain is that we know very little about the
jahiliyya,
which is so important in the construction of our identity. Exploring everything that has contributed to Islamic civilization, our whole past with all its historical and mythical component parts, with its “truths” and its “lies,” its “high points” and its “low points,” is necessary if we are to construct a dynamic, all- embracing identity. It is especially important to study what is hushed up, for it is there that we can recover the part of our unconscious heritage that kneads and molds our modern fears—fear, for example, of
al-wa
d
and the vengeful goddesses who demanded it. We must subject our past to study and analysis and mobilize our unemployed or self-exiled archeologists to teach us about the desires and whims of these deities, who didn’t simply exist on earth but also occupied the stars. Venus (Zahra), whom we are so fond of that many little girls are named after her—Venus, whose radiance is so alluring in our Mediterranean nights—is none other than al-
^c
Uzza. At least we should be warned!

If we go back to the religions of ancient Mesopotamia we find that the goddess al-
^c
Uzza was the Arabian counterpart of Venus, and both bore the name Kawkabta, which was of Syriac origin.
¹⁷
One of the most common words for star in Arabic today is
kawkah,
which is grammatically masculine; it is used several times in the Koran (e.g., sura 12; v. 4; sura 24, v. 35). Ibn Manzur, the author of the
Lisan al-Arab,
reveals to us that in his time (he was born in Cairo in 630/1232)
kawkah
was also called
kawkabatun;
“More than one [scholar] says that of all the stars, it is only
al-zahra
[Venus] that is called
kawkabatun
—that is, the feminine form is used while all the other stars take the masculine form,
kawkah.”