Islam and Democracy: Fear of the Modern World (27 page)

Will the West undermine the legitimacy of the regimes it has just saved from the storm? Will it support the demands of progressive forces and promote the creation of a civil society that would participate in decision making and demand an accounting of resources? Here lies the challenge posed by this scenario to the great Euro-American peoples, who sing of universalism and their love of democracy.

Or will the Western states only use their influence to maintain the status quo and prop up the legitimacy of the regimes that called on them for help? The priority of buttressing their legitimacy then calls for the regimes to play the fundamentalist card. Women will again be required to wear the
hijab,
while the progressive forces have to keep quiet and pray. Relying on
ta
^c
a
as the basis of politics will become the credo of a tele-petro-Islam transmitted by satellites. This credo will be all the knowledge that youth are entitled to as obscurantism is programmed by the electronic agenda as the modern heritage of Arab youth. The West will in great part be responsible for the avalanche of violence which will descend on all those who call for democracy, with women at the head of the list.

With globalization of the economy and globalization of responsibility, especially in the Mediterranean area, North and South are now tied to each other in fortune and misfortune. European youth are very conscious of this globalization, which looms ahead and frightens them, but which also opens extraordinary visions of solidarity, of
rahma,
of possibilities for something other than Crusades. Young people in France, Germany, and Italy are worried about what the media call the “Arab invasion.” But will the maintenance of the status quo to keep up the flow of oil and petrodollars, combined with new requirements for visas for Arab travelers, solve the problem? Will the West cling to the idea of universal worth while selfishly consuming Arab oil wealth and closing its borders to Arabs? Can one trumpet universality and erect frontiers at the same time? Isn’t building a Mediterranean economy based on a more equal management of oil which creates full employment and democracy everywhere the best way to stop Arab emigration to Europe? Can the West realize its ideal of one world where all can flourish together while continuing to base much of its economy on the military and space industry that it alone markets, and whose products inundate the world and especially the Arab region?

It is very laudable to want to destroy the “formidable military power” of Saddam Hussein. But this gesture is credible only if the West integrates it into a strategy of demilitarization not only of the region but of the whole planet. Destroying Saddam Hussein’s nuclear capacity while restocking the arsenals of other countries in the region and investing in Western military industries is certainly not the best way to create a peaceful future.

The Arab countries devote the highest percentage of gross domestic product in the world to arms. Saudi Arabia, for example, commits nearly one-quarter (21.8 percent) of its GDP for military expenses. Jordan and the Democratic Republic of Yemen spend 16 percent, Syria 17 percent. By contrast, France spends 4 percent of its GDP, the former West Germany 3.1 percent, Italy 3.2 percent, Sweden 1.7 percent, Spain 3 percent, Canada 3.2 percent, and Japan 1 percent on weapons.
³⁰

How can Arab women hop
to overcome opposition in their societies and go out in search of paid work if the economies of their countries are devoting a large part of their wealth to unproductive expenditures like the importation of weapons that don’t even serve any useful purpose, as the Gulf War amply demonstrated? If the West continues to sell arms to the Arab states, women’s chances to work out new relationships within their society will be destroyed because a society suffering from unemployment will not make any concessions to women.

One of the reasons for mounting unemployment in the Arab countries is the debt, a problem inextricably tied to military expenditures. The editors of the
Memento Defense-Desarmement 1989
contend that “the net sum of the debt before 1979 could have been 20 to 30 percent lower if the borrowing Third World countries had not bought arms. . . . Around half the arms contracts were directly or indirectly financed by borrowing, which is characteristic of the external debt of developing countries.”
³¹
Fundamentalism spread and flourished in the shadow of this famous debt. The editors clearly establish the link between military expenditures and the inflation of the debt by introducing the concept of what they call the “opportunity cost":

The military option is contrary to the interests of Arab citizens in general, and to those of women in particular. No leftist movement in the Arab world can offer a serious alternative if it doesn’t make the demilitarization of the region a priority. Arab women too must mobilize around the issue of demilitarization; otherwise any hope for an improvement in their lot is vain. The only way for the Arab nations is that of Japan, which allocates just 1 percent of its budget for defense, neither more nor less. Who will be the loser in this business? The weapons factories in the West, and some middlemen. That’s all. Who will be the winner? The whole world, headed by the citizens of the Western countries. For the West to focus on producing something other than weapons would be the best proof of its concern for implementing universal values.

While waiting, we can dream with Julia Kristeva about a future in which the
gharib,
“the strange” and “the stranger,” will no longer be frightening: can “the stranger,” who was “the enemy” in primitive societies, disappear in the modern world?
³³

I am an incurable optimist. There are now unprecedented opportunities for creating a better world. In Third World societies millions of people like me, who belong to groups that only recently were excluded from knowledge, have had access to that manna from heaven since the Second World War. We must not fall into the victim mentality and moan about what a miserable century this is. It is a fabulous century, at least for the countries of the Third World, which used to stagnate in material, political, and cultural deprivation. In countries like mine, many of our doctors and brilliant professors began life as shepherds, and they often recall this fact with a certain pride, especially to communicate to their students a sense of the wonder felt by all those in the Third World who have had access to an unhoped-for education. Let us have fewer weapons and more learning. Then we will have a world that I would love to travel around, a world in whose creation I would be proud to participate. I know there are untold millions of others who want such a world.

Farid al-din Attar, my favorite of the Sufis, dreamed nine centuries ago of a marvelous planet inhabited by fabulous birds that were much like us—who wanted to find themselves, who wanted to travel, but were afraid. Their desire for knowledge, however, was so strong that it transformed their lives. Attar sang of that Sufi Islam that is totally unknown to the Western media. It will probably be the only successful challenger to the electronic agenda, for it offers something the latter can never threaten nor replace: the spirituality that gives wings, opening you up to the other like a flower. A flower is not frightened by a
gharib.
A
gharib
might be a Simorgh! And each of us has a Simorgh within us.

It happened in Nishapur in Iran in the spring of A.D. 1175. A man dreamed of a world without fear, without boudnaries, where you could travel very far and find yourself in the company of strangers whom you knew as you knew yourself, strangers who were neither hostile nor aggressive. It was the land of the Simorgh.

In his long meditations in Nishapur, all by himself Attar imagined that land where strangeness only enriched what we are to the ultimate degree. He committed his dream to paper, a long poem that he called
Mantiq al-tayr
(The Conference of the Birds). It instantly became famous, but intolerance and violence knocked one night at Attar’s door. Genghis Khan’s Mongol soldiers murdered Attar in 1230. The poet died, but the dream lived on through the centuries and continues to haunt our imaginations.

Thousands of birds had heard of a fabulous being called the Simorgh, whom they longed to see and know. They decided to go together, by their thousands, to the place where they were told he could be found. For years and years they crossed rivers and oceans to find the Simorgh, that fabulous creature, radiant and dazzling. Many birds died along the way and never finished the journey. Fatigue and the rigors of the climate decimated most of the seekers. Only thirty succeeded in arriving at the gates of the fortress of the legendary Simorgh. But when they were finally received, a surprise awaited them which we will understand better if we know that in Persian
si
means thirty and
morgh
means birds:

When the thirty birds, dazzled and baffled, asked the Simorgh to explain this strange reality to them, he talked to them of a mirror that could reflect the whole planet, with all its differences and its individualities. They asked him to reveal the great secret, to explain the mystery of why “ ‘we’ is not distinguished here from ‘you’?”
²
The Simorgh explained to them what is still not understood eight centuries later by our leaders: that the community, indeed the whole world, can be a mirror of individualities, and that its strength will then only be greater:

Since that time, the Simorgh, banned in the Orient of the palaces, has haunted women’s tales and children’s dreams. Today the cry for pluralism no longer has to hide behind metaphysical allegories. We can bring a new world into being through all the scientific advances that allow us to communicate, to engage in unlimited dialogue, to create that global mirror in which all cultures can shine in their uniqueness. Nothing makes me more exuberant than the vision of this new world, and the fact that we must go forward toward it without any barriers no longer frightens me. How are we to learn to stride into the abyss and be like the wind? How are we to be defenseless like the forest? How can we have uncertainty as our country? It is surely the poets who will be our guides among these new galaxies.

1.
On the concept of the
hijab
and especially its visual, spatial, and ethical aspects see my
The Veil and the Male Elite: A Feminist Interpretation of Women’s Rights in Islam
(Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1991), pp. 93-97. The British edition is entitled
Women and Islam: An Historical and Theological Enquiry
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1991).

2.
The Suq al-Sabat is supplied with rejects from factories that make shoes for export. The narrowness of the street makes it an excellent place for communication. During times of important political events, all the radios and television sets are turned on, and buying and selling come to a stop when the news is being broadcast. Thanks to their friendship with the factory workers in Casablanca,
^c
Ali and his neighbors in the street can order custom-fit shoes for the shopper, with a choice of colors and features. Parallel to the mainstream shoe industry, the informal network between workers and small storeowners attracts a growing clientele, especially of fashion-conscious young people.

3.
In dates cited in this style the first date or dates are the years according to the Muslim calendar, the second the years according; to the Christian calendar.

4.
For the meaning of
^c
awra
see Tabari,
Tafsir
(Beirut: Dar al-Fikr, 1984), vol. 21, p. 136.

5.
See the proverbial
tabarruj
of the
jahiliyya
in sura 33, v. 33, and the commentary in Tabari,
Tafsir,
vol. 21, pp. 3ff. See also sura 24, v. 60 (and Tabari’s commentary in vol. 18, p. 165), where it is stated that a woman past menopause, who no longer has hopes of marriage or childbearing, may take off her veils.

6.
On the concept of
muhsanat
(protected women) see sura 4, v. 24-25, and Tabari,
Tafsir,
vol. 5, pp. Iff.

7.
All quotations from the Koran are from the English translation by Marma- duke Pickthall,
The Meaning of the Glorious Koran
(New York: Dorset, n.d.).