Read Islam and Democracy: Fear of the Modern World Online
Authors: Fatima Mernissi,Mary Jo Lakeland
Tags: #History, #Middle East, #General, #World, #Religion, #Religion; Politics & State
Westerners, along with the Japanese, are the only ones in the world with a mastery of the technology necessary for setting up such a system: clocks synchronized at the global level through an interconnected satellite network minutely superimposed on what we think of as “the sky.” According to Jacques Attali, “This extreme precision organizes a homogeneous time. . . . Therefore the planet lives on one single time.”
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The Gulf War—that is, the destruction of Baghdad by teleguided, televised bombs—was so tragic for us Arabs and Muslims, whatever side we were on, because it made us aware that we are slaves of this Coordinated Universal Time that we have decided to ignore in order to keep a bit of dignity, in order not to acknowledge that we don’t exist in our own time. We exist only in time defined by the West. We are exiles in Western time. The most horrible colonization is that which installs itself in your time, for there the wounds are to your dignity, and the resulting confusion borders on the pathological. “In two years the Japanese sold a million special timepieces destined for the Muslims. Marketed under the label
Kabir
(the greatest), they chime five times a day at the hour of prayer. A more expensive model recites a different Koranic verse at each hour.”
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Nothing better illustrates the tragic decline of the Arabs than this Kabir watch (bought only by those who can afford it, those who share the oil income) because it epitomizes our trouble with identity. This tiny silicon chip, on which a holy calendar, cyclical by definition, is inscribed, is a technological device that denies the sacred vision of the cosmos and declaims the triumph of the electronic age, where profit is the be-all and end-all—the age of scientific man, who no longer fears death and draws power from his very mortality, for he has buried his gods long ago and reduced the earth and the stars to numbers processed by satellite, to the amount of material to be classified and consumed.
We Arabs and Muslims are exiled from this age, reduced to mere consumers of gadgets. This is one reason why the Arab and Muslim masses and intellectuals poured into the streets in support of Iraq. It was not so much a wish to align themselves with Saddam Hussein as it was a condemnation of the buyers of Kabir watches and other gadgets, who waste the income from oil instead of using it to finance scientific development and to educate the young generation, now condemned to despair. And when you talk about Arab youth, you are talking about a demographic phenomenon without precedent in the world: “The annual mean rate of increase of the 0-24 age group is practically double that in the rest of the world.” In the year 2000, 61 percent of the Arab population will fall in this age group, compared with only 48 percent of the world population.
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This generation of Arab youth, contrary to what one might think, is plugged in via television to what takes place in the West, for the satellite project that was to establish “an emancipated and emancipating community television” for the Arab world came to nothing.
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Arabsat failed because the Arab governments didn’t want television that was emancipating; they thought that when they had signed the contracts and paid the bills, they would gain yet another propaganda instrument to extoll their greatness, like the national television broadcasting that already exists. The Kabir syndrome is certainly well entrenched in those who manipulate decision making and petrodollars. But those who take the Arab masses for imbeciles forget that a people with a historical memory are difficult to “regiment.” The artisans in the medina, literate or not, know about Harun al-Rashid’s gift to Charlemagne. The caliph, a great patron of scientific development, offered its marvels to his peers:
In 807 Charlemagne received from Baghdad, as a gift from Harun al-Rashid, a brass water clock with moving figures, described in the Annals of Eginhard as similar to the Hercules clock at Gaza. A seventeenth-century text describes it thus: “A machine that, set in motion by the force of water, marks the hours by the appropriate number of little brass balls that fall on a brass bell. At noon twelve little horsemen emerge from twelve windows that close after them.” This description, even though of a much later date, sounds credible, because the
Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices
by Badi al-Zamanibal Ressa al-Tazari, written in the ninth century, establishes that such water clocks were known at that time in the whole Arab world.
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This memory is what saves us from decline and fall, for it gives us historical data that constantly put the present in perspective; musing about Harun al-Rashid focuses our frustrations on the quality of our leadership. Not that that worthy Abbasid caliph was a fiery partisan of democracy; he was on the contrary the architect of a most successful despotism. But he used the decision-making power he took from the people to carry out great scientific and economic projects. Modern despotism takes decision-making power from the people in order to buy Kabir watches from the Japanese.
Although Arab leaders have abandoned the Muslim calendar, it is still followed by the most dispossessed as a symbol of self-definition and commemorization. The tourist who has visited Morocco has surely had the experience of going shopping in the medina on a Friday and finding all the shops closed. And yet the official day of rest, for both the public and the private sectors, is Sunday. The mass of society, the millions of people who have never had access to modernity, who have been informally relegated to jobs where neither the minimum wage nor social benefits are guaranteed, ignore the official calendar and stick to the sacred calendar. It might be said that one of the manifestations of the class struggle in Morocco is the choice of calendar. The poorest live according to the Muslim calendar, while the richest live by the calendar of the West. Sometimes the calendars clash. The wealthy directors of the Rabat and Sale textile factories can never meet the fall delivery dates of their German customers because the underpaid and uninsured Moroccan factory workers take time off to participate in various celebrations and religious festivals to observe the Prophet’s birthday, a holiday not marked on the German client’s calendar in his office in Berlin. The workers leave for what is supposed to be a week, but if the holiday spirit and feeling of community solidarity of the dancing and religious chants for the celebration of the patron saint of Meknes are very exalting, they may extend the vacation for a second week.
The struggle over the calendar is also an intergenerational struggle. Although some of the young opt for fundamentalism, growing beards and spending time in the mosques, many sing Hit Parade songs at the top of their lungs and dream more of
Kojak
and
Dallas
than of Harun al-Rashid. For these young people, their frustrations cultivated by television, the Muslim calendar is becoming a fuzzy reference point. Our tragedy is that our calendar more and more determines just religious rituals and holidays. In the majority of Arab countries, on the eve of the first day of the Muslim year, the first of Muharram, young people go to bed early, whereas on December 31 we have trouble getting to sleep before dawn. Auto horns and teenage songs blare away, accompanied by local or international radio stations broadcasting the latest American hits.
Our whole life—the production of goods and services, political and economic decision making, the circulation of people and ideas, the banks, the airports—runs on Coordinated Time, omitting the euphemistic “universal.” Since we are forced to live according to the Western calendar, our calendar now marks just the time of prayer, which still serves to anchor the life of the humble believer to the trajectory of the stars. Otherwise why do the five daily prayers bear the names of the positions of the sun in the sky? The prayers are a way of putting the believer in orbit, since he keeps constant watch on the sun to know the time of prayer: the first is called
al-fajr
(dawn); the second is
duha
(midday); the third,
c
asr,
marks the beginning of the sun’s descent; the fourth,
maghrib
, is at sundown; and finally the last,
c
asha
, announces the night.
We no longer live according to the rhythm of the sacred calendar, but we have not succeeded in creating the technological base that alone would guarantee access to the
kawn
(cosmos), the highest stake in the power game. Disconnected from our Muslim calendar, we are even more disconnected from the electronic calendar, that of Coordinated Time. This double disconnection gives our otherwise luminous days a twilight look. How often am I asked by young students, “
Ustada
[professor], what is going to happen to us? Why does our work have no value? Why is our life so absurd?” How, except to lower one’s eyes and break off the conversation, can one respond to those faces, so full of hope and innocence, reflecting a belief in the wisdom of their elders?
Renaming the moon
qamar
is certainly not the answer, as the fundamentalists sadly call for. Going back to year 1 of the Hejira is only important in that it lets us grasp the essential point: Islam’s beautiful gift to the Arabs, which was to teach them to lift their heads, in the most basic meaning of the expression. It taught us to walk through life with eyes fixed on the sun and the stars, that is, intimately connected to the cosmos and conscious of being a part of it. It is that galactic tradition of Islam that should be reactivated as the basic movement for our development, for it is in line with the planetary outlook that technology both permits and encourages. The difference between an Arab of the
jahiliyya
and a Muslim Arab, after year 1 of the calendar, is that the attention of the former was on the tribe that had two camels more than his tribe— camels he intended to steal—whereas the focus of the latter was on the stars. It was this cosmic focus that almost immediately gave meaning and power to life. The loss of the cosmic dimension is what has caused our confusion about our identity, creating trouble for us in living the present, which is nothing but absurdity and debacle, because our actions lead to nothing. The dance around the stars, the celebration of science and technology, is not universal. It is a tribal dance around the American flag.
The feeling of absurdity that pervades our lives today stems from the fact that modernity reminds us every minute that it is Western, and that since that night of July 20, 1969, when a tall blond man planted the flag of his nation on it, the moon is not universal. That tall blond man was named Neil Armstrong, and he was an American. We were happy to witness that triumph of the scientific spirit, that extraordinary breakthrough toward reaching the stars. But we were called back to reality by the astronaut’s flag, which did not celebrate the universal but rather was the flag of his tribe, as was astutely pointed out by the late mythologist Joseph Campbell: “And then, as though immediately at home there, two astronauts in their space suits were to be seen moving about in a dream- landscape, performing their assigned tasks, setting up the American flag.”
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Many Americans swelled with pride at this event, but those who thought about the responsibility of their country to establish universalism, in which everyone is welcome—those like Campbell, who as a student of myth analyzed the survival and dangerous metamorphoses of the archaic—were shocked by this primitive act.
Following the planting of the American flag, non-Western spectators were treated to a quotation from the Bible. The Apollo astronauts who came before Armstrong and were the first to orbit the moon carried one in their space suits and recited before the television camera from the first chapter of Genesis: “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. ...” “How sad, I thought,” concludes Campbell, “that we should have had nothing in our own poetry to match the sense of that prodigious occasion! Nothing to match, or even to suggest, the marvel and the magnitude of the universe into which we then were moving!”
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It is a given that the West, which flaunts before us the dream of one world, bears responsibility for the future of humanity. Its responsibility is heavy because it holds a quasi-monopoly on decision making in matters of science and technology. It alone decides if satellites will be used to educate Arabs or to drop bombs on them. It is understandable and even excusable that the Third World, off course and unable to participate in the celebration of science, seeks to find its way by drawing on myths and historical memory. But when the West, which is opening the way toward the galactic era, trots out tribal flags and Bibles to inaugurate man’s exploration of the moon, it does not help the excluded, among them Arab youth, feel they are partners in this universality.
It is obvious that the powerful, monolithic West that haunts our Arab imagination is more fiction than fact, especially in the decade of the nineties, since the fall of the Berlin Wall. Torn by ethnic and regional rivalries, it is disintegrating before our eyes. Nevertheless, for us Arabs this West, splintering into a myriad of conflicting interests, still has power over our daily lives. It crushes our potentialities and invades our lives with its imported products and televised movies that swamp the airwaves. Seen from the Arab side of the Mediterranean, the West (more exactly, Europe), however splintered and divided it may be, is a power that crushes us, besieges our markets, and controls our merest resources, initiatives, and potentialities. This was how we perceived our situation, and the Gulf War turned our perception into certitude. The pertinent question we have to ask, then, is, Does the West have the power to create a universal culture? Westerners might retort that forming a universal culture is everybody’s concern. I believe that forming a universal culture is the concern of those who hold the monopolies, especially the monopoly of knowledge, and that the responsibility of the West is extremely great. The West can surely produce a universal culture if it renounces its monopoly on scientific knowledge and the electronic agenda. The West can create a universal culture if it renounces its flags.