Islam and Democracy: Fear of the Modern World (3 page)

When I finished writing
Islam and Democracy
right after the Gulf War in 1991, I talked about the huge humanist Islam potential (in the chapter “Fear of the Imam") and about the importance of the concept of controversy and
ra͑y
(opinion), but I could never have guessed that only five years later information technology would allow these concepts to thrive and gain millions of viewers, thanks to satellite TV. It is this humanist Islam that the West must discover in order to shed its fears and engage the East on Saladin’s trail of peace.

The Gulf War is over. The soldiers have long since returned to their bases. But for many people, and I am among them, this war is one of those things that have no end, like symbolic wounds and incurable illnesses. To be sure, life goes on. You are surprised to find yourself singing in the springtime, putting a flower in your hair, trying a new lipstick. Life continues, apparently as if nothing had happened—except that occasionally, in an unfamiliar country in the course of a morning reverie in a strange bed, something cracks, and feelings and ideas coming from elsewhere burst into consciousness. Then you realize that you have been tattooed somewhere with a nameless fear. A cut has been made, barely a scratch, but all the more indelible because it is buried in the dark zones of childhood terrors.

The first time this sort of thing happens you don’t talk about it, even to your closest friends. You try to forget it. You quietly sip your coffee with the cultivated sensibility of those whose lot in life is precarious, who develop a sort of apprehension about dreams, especially dreams that fade too quickly. You touch the strange bed to make sure it’s real; you go to the window and try to make the foreign city yours by studying the streets. Little by little, however, you notice that you travel less and less in order to avoid things foreign, and remembering your dreams becomes more and more difficult. You accept this state of things in the hope of finding peace and quiet, until the next incident, when even your own bed is transformed into foreign territory.

The most desperate outcry against the war was from women throughout the world, and especially from Arab women. A perhaps unnoticed detail, which nevertheless constitutes a historical breakthrough, is that during this conflict women, veiled or not, took the initiative in calling for peace—without waiting, as tradition demanded, for authorization from the political leaders, inevitably male. In Tunis, Rabat, and Algiers, women shouted out their fear louder than all the others; they were often the first to improvise sit-ins and marches, while the men could decide to do something only after drawn-out negotiations between various powers and minipowers. I participated in Rabat in dozens of meetings that spontaneously brought together intellectuals of all stripes to take a position against the war. When it was suggested that we go as a group to deliver a three- or four-paragraph communique to a foreign embassy or address a statement to a head of state, I was often astonished to see unfurled an unbelievable sequence of legal, diplomatic, and strategic ramifications of what seemed to me to be a rather simple gesture. Such ramifications would never have come to my mind, for as a woman the fact of being excluded from power gives me a wonderful freedom of thought—accompanied, alas, by an unbearable powerlessness.

Why did Arab women, usually silent and obedient, cry out their fear so strongly in that interminable night that was the war? Did they, whom the law officially designates as inferior, instinctively understand that that violence—presented as legitimate, and with the blessing of the highest authority defending human rights, the United Nations—would unleash within the Arab world other kinds of violence and legitimate the killing of others?

Did they shout because they felt, like sheep on the
^c
id al-kabir
(feast of the sacrifice), that that violence, directed by the priests of democracy and human rights, the Western heads of state and the high officials of the United Nations, augured an era of other rituals, rituals that would be more archaic and devastating than ever, that would hark back to other traditions, other ceremonies?

The lot of a woman in an Arab society that is at peace is precarious enough. But that lot is shaky indeed in an Arab society put to fire and sword by foreign forces.

How completely horrifying, then, are the prospects for a woman in an Arab society put to fire and sword in the name of international law and with the authorization of the Security Council of the United Nations! And what can be said when this is done by the very Western states that claim moral leadership of the world by forcing other nations to accept as universal the democratic model, which strips violence of all claim to legitimacy? Was this war inevitable? That is the question.

Why is the promise of democracy so threatening to hierarchies, why is it so destabilizing to Asian and African regimes, and why does it rally the holders of power around the appeal to the old traditions? Is it because the idea of democracy touches the very heart of what constitutes tradition in these societies: the possibility of draping violence in the cloak of the sacred? The West began to be considered credible for leadership of the nations it had traumatized through its own colonial terror when it promised to condemn all violence against humanity as illegitimate. The democratic model constituted a break with the sorry world of internal and interstate massacres and pogroms because it stood against violence and its legitimation.

Never had the Westerners, marked in the memory of the Third World by their past as brutal colonizers, succeeded in making themselves more credible as the bearers of good for other cultures than at the moment of the fall of the Berlin Wall. With the aid of the media, that event and the chain of falling despotisms which followed, especially the tragic and Ubuesque rout of Ceauçescu and above all the stillborn putsch in Moscow, stirred up a wind of long repressed hope in the Arab medinas. I remember the day when a fishmonger in the Rabat medina left me standing with my kilo of marlin in hand while he rushed to the neighboring shop, which had a television set, to hear the announcer report the capture of Nicolae and Elena Ceauçescu. When he returned after ten minutes and I expressed my displeasure to him at being abandoned, he gave me a reply that suggests what this moment meant to the masses: “I had the choice between serving you, which would have brought me forty dirhams [five dollars], and watching the apocalypse. Don’t you see that there is no comparison? Forty dirhams or the apocalypse? Who would choose forty dirhams? I am illiterate, Madame, but I can sense, just like you who are probably covered with diplomas, that history has come to a turning point.”

The fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the men, institutions, and symbols of the Eastern European despotisms were seen as having universal meaning, despite the fact that they were geographically and ethnically localized. It is true that only the Europeans, more exactly the Germans, were involved as actors. It was they whom we saw climb the wall, rejoice over the falling of that wall, break it into pieces, and wear those pieces as jewels, relics of demolished frontiers and of a ripped
hijab
(curtain, veil). If a child should play around at translating the expression “Iron Curtain” into Arabic, he would stumble on the word
hijab
and translate it as
al-hijab al-hadidi.
And he would be right, because the translation of the word “curtain” in the sense of something that divides space to impede traffic, is precisely
hijab.
¹
The shopkeepers in the North African medinas and the peasants in the Atlas Mountains had no trouble identifying with those young blonds of both sexes who were hugging, singing, and destroying the wall, drunk with freedom and the desire to put an end to authoritarianism. At the fall of the Berlin
hijab
a new word burst out in the medinas, a word as explosive as all the atomic bombs combined:
shaffafiyya
(transparency).

Excluded from power and leading a life as mutilated as the arbitrary politics that crushes them is inefficient, Arab youths of both sexes were suddenly interested in those people of the North who shouted in the streets for liberty and justice. The only idea they had of Germany was of a rich country where the strength of the deutsche mark caused the people to seek pleasure rather than brood over the fate of the poor. And suddenly here they saw them, animated by a feeling so familiar, so visceral, so fundamental, the yearning for justice and freedom that they thought to be solely the preoccupation of the excluded: “Allah! The Germans feel just like us. They love their poorer brothers and are freeing them,”
^c
Ali, a merchant in the Suq al-Sabat, the shoe market in the Rabat me- dina, kept exclaiming.
²
He bought a black-and-white television set for his shop three days after the fall of the wall: “Just in order to see the world,
Ustada
[professor], just to see.” The West that we believed to be anesthetized by its luxury and libertinism opened up to emotions forgotten since the humanizing wave of 1968. An unforeseen Europe flashed onto Arab television screens: “
Kafir
[infidel] and humanist. Allah is great,” murmured
^c
Ali, one eye on his shoes, the other on the screen.

In the days following the crumbling of Berlin’s
hijab,
just before the bombing of Baghdad, Europeans emerged for the Arab masses as promoters of the democratic credo, which would solve the problem of violence and reduce its use. And then the powerful wave of universal hope raised by the Europeans’ song to freedom and the promise to condemn violence was rudely and brutally dashed by this war. It was a war in which the nonplussed Arab masses witnessed in a few months, like some bad twist in a tale in the
Arabian Nights,
the putting to sleep of those humanistic European youths who had been singing of nonviolence. What they saw on their television screens was the appearance of another breed they had forgotten about: old generals with kepis and medals just like those of the colonial army, generals who enumerated with pride the tons of bombs they had dropped on Baghdad. Two weeks after the beginning of the bombing,
^c
Ali sold his black-and-white television set and gave the money to the Moroccan Red Crescent to buy medical supplies for Iraq: “I don’t understand anything,
Ustada.
This is a matter between the big shots. They just have to settle it between themselves. The shoe merchants of Baghdad are not in it. Why bomb the people? Can you imagine what would happen if they dropped a bomb on the Suq al-Sabat? A mere firecracker would send the whole medina up in flames! I am forty-six years old. The last time I saw a kepi on a French general I was ten years old. It was in 1955, on the eve of independence. But the Americans with their machines—it’s like in the movies! Except that—God help us—it is our brothers who are the target. I have nightmares. My wife forbids me to look at the TV.”

Violation is obscene. But violation, just after having flaunted before the eyes of the victim the hope of a new era in which violence would have no place, is more cruel than anything the human mind can describe. It is this ambivalence of the Europeans toward violence which has created confusion in people’s minds (I am speaking in ethnic terms, for the Gulf War has thrown discussion back to the most archaic level, that of two tribes who camp on the two shores of the Mediterranean). I have never felt my colleagues in the North so frozen in their Europeanness and I so frozen in my Arabism, each so archaic in our irreducible difference, as during my trip to Germany and France during the war to participate in discussions that were supposed to establish a dialogue, but that in fact established nothing but our pitiful inability to breach the boundary between us, to see the other in all his or her difference without letting that difference threaten and frighten. For as long as difference is frightening, boundaries will be the law.

I was born in a harem, and I instinctively understood very young that behind every boundary something terrifying is hiding. It is fear, or rather fears, that I want to speak about in this book. About all sorts of fears that burst forth from everywhere, from within and from without, from the East and from the West, and that multiply ad infinitum with strange mirroring effects. About individual fears, but most of all about collective fears. The former lead to suicide, which in the end is a personal matter, but the latter lead directly to
fitna
outbreaks of violence all the more murderous because they take place within the intimacy of the group.

In my group the boundaries are fixed in law. On this side of the Mediterranean they become
hudud.
The
hudud,
the sure and certain boundaries that enclose and protect when one feels fear, like those our ancestors built around the medinas, were shown by the Gulf War to be pointless, at least when under Arab control. How can an Arab woman, I ask, insist on raising with her own group her problem, which is the
hijab?
How can she demand the negotiation of new boundaries for the sexes if her group feels naked and vulnerable in a world where bombs in a fury of passion can single out Baghdad?

In the beginning, at the time of its founding in the second century of the Hejira (the eighth century
A.D.),
Baghdad was called
madinat al-salam,
City of Peace, recalling on earth the memory of Paradise, the
dar al-salam
(Abode of Peace) of the Koran (sura 6, v. 128; sura 10, v. 26). This was the name given to it by its founder, al-Mansur, the second Abbasid caliph (136-58/754-75),
³
the name he inscribed on his coins, weights, and the letters he wrote. To make the city safe and invulnerable to attack, his architects designed a circular plan. Did they know that before them the Sabaeans in southern Arabia built the temple to
siyasa
(politics) in the shape of a circle? The idea of boundaries, of
hudud,
was present in al-Mansur’s paradise, not only because his main preoccupation was defense, but also because his ideal of a well-organized Muslim community was based on the recognition of boundaries to separate and control differences. To guarantee maximum security, in 157/773 he ordered that the market be transferred outside the circle so that the ungrateful, seditious populace would stay far from the palace. That was his idea of paradise on earth.