Islam and Democracy: Fear of the Modern World (24 page)

Equal sharing and the access of all to this knowledge is not a Utopian dream. It is written into the very nature of electronic technology, which is nothing but communication and circulation of information.
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‘By definition, both force and wealth,” says Alvin Toffler, “are the property of the strong and the rich. It is the truly revolutionary characteristic of knowledge that it can be grasped by the poor and weak as well. So it is the most democratic of the sources of power.”
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The West can revoke the challenge it poses to human history by operating according to its own archaisms, and the best way to do so would be to include others in its decision making. It could begin by tapping the talents of the thousands of Third World intellectuals and savants who live in the West, often as political exiles, who are rarely invited to participate in fashioning the Western approach to the subject of universality. They could become a bridge between the very powerful and baffling West and those other cultures with their complex wishes for both change and stability, their overtures and rejections, their hesitations and retreats.

The fate of women depends in large measure on such an adoption of responsibility on the part of the West, for, paradoxical as it may seem, it is these women, veiled and immobilized by tradition, who have been metamorphosed by modernity into Egerias of freedom. It is they who sing loudest of individualism, for they, more than anyone else, were suppressed by the law of the group. Condemned for so long to silence, their song rhymes “liberty” with “individuality,” introducing strange music into the city. They are fascinating and frightening; they arouse anger and they are defiant. The imams condemn them, but they stand firm. Without masks, frail and with faces uncovered, they are starting their forward march, without supervision for the first time, in a city where all holds fast except the boundaries.

The Arab world is about to take off.

This is not a prophecy. It is a woman’s intuition, and God, who knows everything, knows that women’s intuition is rarely wrong.

It is going to take off for the simple reason that everybody, with the fundamentalists in the lead, wants change. The fact that they propose to go forward by going backward doesn’t alter the fact that they ardently want change. There is a very strong wish in this corner of the world to go elsewhere, to migrate collectively to another present. Foreigners perhaps do not feel this, but every morning I wake up with the radio at my ear and think: anything can happen; perhaps everything will change between one minute and the next.

By plunging a knife into the sore spots—dependence, lack of democracy, powerlessness—the Gulf War shattered something deep within us. I have thought a lot about what that might be, and I have come to the conclusion that it smashed the multiple circles of cold fear that have pressed on us. What worse could happen to Arabs than what the war produced—the whole West with all its technology dropping bombs on us? It was the ultimate horror. When you have gone through an experience of horror—and all those who have experienced deep depression know it—you emerge free of fear. Not that you are rid of it, but you have conquered it. The Arab world, paralyzed by all the fears that this book explores, has finally with this war had the opportunity to live through them and emerge from the experience, a bit shaky perhaps, but with the firm conviction that making the perilous jump into the unknown is the least dangerous thing that could happen to us.

A sense of hurtling toward the unknown is already reflected in good-natured daily chitchat:
“Ma zal
^c
ayish?”
("Are you still alive?") replaced “Hi, how are you?” during the war. Everyone now knows that for an Arab, surviving means changing, exploring those dimensions of life that have been muzzled—
^c
aql
(reason), individual freedom,
ra
y
(judgment), and especially
khayal,
that power of imagination that will assure supremacy in the world of the future. But although Arabs are amazed in this post-Gulf War era at the possibilities opening up to them, women already began their resolute and perilous march toward the realm of freedom some decades ago. Why, I will be asked, did women form this audacious avant-garde? Because we had nothing to lose except our fears, our masks, and all the crippling effects of segregation and confinement.

Women are eager to plunge into adventure and the unknown. The symbol of that eagerness is the Palestinian Mother Courage whom we see every day on our television screens, standing firmly in the street, neither intimidated nor filled with hatred toward the Israeli soldiers whom she scolds as though they were teenagers who have trouble relinquishing adolescence to become adults.

Arab women are not afraid of modernity, because for them it is an unhoped-for opportunity to construct an alternative to the tradition that weighs so heavily on them. They long to find new worlds where freedom is possible. For centuries, confined and masked, they have been singing about freedom, but no one was listening. Muhammad al-Fasi, a Moroccan scholar, had the idea of collecting some of the songs that circulated in the harems of Fez during the 1930s. Many spoke of forbidden passions, of nocturnal rendezvous, of crazy escapades, and some ridiculed the effectiveness of locks and chains. Others celebrated the bird who played false when given the chance:

Women never let themselves be tamed. Men believed that a person could become accustomed to confinement. But women were waiting for the right moment, the moment of difference with dignity, of participation and dialogue, and that moment has arrived.

Women have already taken flight

Pale and grave, they are performing the pilgrimage that their grandmothers dreamed of for so long: to dance without a mask, with eyes riveted on a limitless horizon.

They are afraid, they stumble and feel weak—how do you move about when chains were your programmed destiny? But the call of the open sea is irresistible.

They fall down and get up again; they educate themselves and kick over the traces. How can you roam when a cage was to be your future?

At the beginning, both frightened and frightening, they petrified men. Then, as the years rolled by, the men, recovered from their consternation, began to listen to the women who were singing about roaming and were longing for the obliteration of boundaries. Such a strange song it was, seeming to mistake itself for that symphony of the universal that the foreign West was intoning like a hymn to the galaxies. Harems exist anymore only on postcards or in the palaces of a few emirs who have enough money to re-create a gimcrack version of those of Baghdad of the Golden Age. The rest of the men are beginning to feel almost at home in this apocalyptic renaissance where power is to be found in moving forward and not in the past. According to the Syrian poet Adonis, in the abyss that modernity represents, the Arab man must change and rethink himself in cosmic terms, including the possibility of being as nebulous as the wind:

Arab women do not always say what they are thinking, but these men who are striding into the abyss and are like the wind are more than ever the lovers of whom they have dreamed—nomads of modernity, traveling light, seeking no country, for moving forward is their tribe.

It is not true that our mothers were happy with our fathers, wrapped in their own certitudes. My uncle Hajj Muhammad would overturn the table and threaten to pronounce the formula of repudiation every time Aunt Kanza put a little too much salt or pepper in the couscous on Fridays. She wept on the day of his death, and she keeps his memory alive and nurses it, but did she love him? Can you love a man who is always right because the law binds the wife to marital obedience? Everyone knows that men who are uncertain of themselves, who are feeling their way, are the most attractive. Young Arabs know it, and love affairs are only the better for it. What is certain is that women have decided to listen no longer to
khutaba
(sermons) they have not had a hand in writing. They are ready for takeoff. They have always known that the future rests on the abolition of boundaries, that the individual is born to be respected, that difference is enriching. For them, the San Francisco charter is neither a novelty nor a breakthrough. It is just the formulation of a dream that losers have always cherished, like a talisman that protects them.

Meanwhile the imams, who have proclaimed for centuries that marital
ta
^c
a
(obedience) is a duty, are fuming. Obeying the husband means obeying God. The word
ta
^c
a
which appears in contemporary civil codes, reproduces in the harem blind obedience to the caliph. The imams are irate because if domestic
ta
^c
a
is challenged by weak women, how can men be expected to lower their eyes in deference to the leader? The modesty of the Arab woman is the linchpin of the whole political system. Entire chapters in the collections of Ha-dith (sayings and actions of the Prophet) dictate to us how to braid our hair, how to lower our eyes, and how to slip on modesty like a camisole. The sermons continue today. A new book on the dangers of mixing the sexes, published at great expense in Cairo, offers to the believer for 95 dirhams ($10) a seven-hundred-page tome, “Dress and Adornment: The Purifying Tradition,”
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whose author has collected all that the
fiqh
(religious knowledge) orders women to do regarding such crucial questions as how to wear the
sarwal,
the wide-legged pantaloon so common in the Muslim world, how to pluck the eyebrows and depilate the skin, and the rights and wrongs of wearing rouge, and finally includes a very important chapter on footwear. No, certainly not all men are ready for takeoff, for the journey toward uncertainties, toward plural modernities, toward cities without protection, because they get paid too much oil money for preserving the benefits of the
hijab
and the virtues of obedience.

The ancestral violence against those who refuse to obey is being mobilized this time not against the Mu
^c
tazila or the Sufis, long buried, but against those who have taken up their chant, women who want a city without ramparts, where children blossom in the abode of change and find their roots in the only traditions that are still valid, those of the odyssey of the stars.

As for the violence in the ancestral cities, it was women who were its most quiet victims and most silent scapegoats. The caliphs never respected them. From the moment any crisis began, it was women and wine that were condemned. For centuries women and wine were regarded as the source of all our troubles.

Banning mixing of the sexes and advocating the separation of men and women as the measure to alleviate all political crises is far from being a novelty in Muslim political history. It is a tradition, even a state tradition. Opposition forces claim past practice as the basis for treating women with contempt. A Muslim sovereign in a crisis, facing hunger riots or a popular revolt, immediately has recourse to the traditional measures of destroying the stores of wine and placing a ban on women leaving their homes, and especially on their using the same means of transportation as men, reducing them to a state of immobility in capitals like Cairo and Baghdad which are traversed by great rivers. Wine and women—here we have the Gordian knot of the crisis.
Tathir,
the ritual purification of the social body, requires the destruction of the first and the confinement of the second. The recent violence against women which we have seen in Algeria, like the burning of the house of a feminist activist in Annaba on November 15, 1989, is in the purest caliphal tradition.

Al-Hakim, the Fatimid caliph who ordered his mathematician to regulate the waters of the Nile, turned to other, more realizable, measures to calm the masses when the waters continued to fall and the failure of crops provoked enormous inflation.
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In year 405 of the Hejira he decided to act, ordering Egyptian women to be shut in: “In that year al-Hakim forbade women to leave their houses at all; he forbade them to go to the public baths and put an end to manufacture of shoes for women. Many opposed his orders and were killed.”
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Some decades later, in year 487, a similar scene took place in Baghdad. The caliph al-Muqtadi, the twenty-eighth ruler of the Abbasid dynasty, exiled women singers and women of ill fame from the city: “Their houses were sold and they themselves sent into exile; people were forbidden to go to the public baths without a
mi
zar
[loincloth]. . . . Sailors were also forbidden to transport men and women together.”
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When the anger of a prince against women abated but the populace was still tormented by economic insecurity, the measures against women were often made part of a “package” of prohibitions. These prohibitions, such as banning certain food and drinks, as futile as they were bothersome, introduced into the city the thing that frightens Muslims the most: the making violence banal. The link in historical memory between crisis, calamity, and
tathir
is very strong and has persisted throughout the centuries, right up to the present. Shaykh
^c
Abbas Madani, one of the leaders of the Algerian fundamentalist movement, is convinced that it is women and wine that are at the bottom of the economic and political troubles that are shaking his country: