Islam and Democracy: Fear of the Modern World (4 page)

Have things changed since then? Twelve centuries later is not our little paradise, which we create every day, in the image of the
madinat al-salam?
Who among us is able to imagine a city of peace without boundaries, without separations, without
hudud,
without walls, without
hijabsl
Who among us walks in security, without boundaries? Yet, the war proved that all Arab cities, including present-day Baghdad, can offer us many different fantasies, but not boundaries. Our cities have been stripped of boundaries. And how is one to exist without
hudud?
Where is one to find a sense of security on a planet where even the “defense of freedom,” as Mr. Bush calls it, can mobilize high-tech violence as lethal as it is mobile? Is it by chance that a house without security is called
^c
awra,
“naked,” like a woman without a
hijab
(sura 33, v. 13)?
⁴

Women who walk in the streets without the
hijab,
unveiled, are seen as out of bounds, beyond the norm. They are considered defenseless because they have left the boundaries of the harem, the forbidden and protected space, but also because they have ventured into areas that are not theirs. Another word used in the sermons of the imams to explain the dangers that mixing of the sexes presents to the Muslim city is
tabarruj,
borrowed, taken, like
^c
awra,
from military vocabulary. It comes from the word
burj,
“stronghold,” “so called because it is high and very visible,” says the dictionary. The charm of a woman who knows herself to be beautiful, makes herself beautiful, adorns herself, and goes out walking in the street without a
hijab
while rolling her hips is offensive
(tabarruj).
⁵
Walking about freely with face uncovered is exhibiting oneself to the eyes of the other, and men are defenseless against such temptation.

Muhsan,
“protected ones,” is the Arabic word for married people, who are protected from just this temptation since they guarantee each other sexual satisfaction.
Muhsan
is a legal concept; it comes into play in cases of adultery, where it can increase the penalty.
⁶
Married women and men are protected from the temptation of adultery. A
muhsana
is protected by the caresses and pleasure given her by her husband just as a city is protected by a
hisn
(citadel, fortress). She is protected not only physically, from the violence of other men who desire her, but above all from the temptations that might push her to transgress the
hudud,
Allah’s limits. The sexual
hudud
draw the line against unbridled desire just as ramparts defend the medina.

However, these
hudud
have another function that is just as strategic and that explains the outcry of the imams against mixing of the sexes. They protect the city against individualism, the source of all trouble. The
hudud
inscribe in the flesh the basic order that makes it possible to walk peacefully in a city organized around the preeminence of the group, where individualism and desire are carefully hidden behind the
hijab,
maintained behind boundaries. It is in this context that we must situate the fixation on the
hijab
if we are to understand why its disappearance causes so much anxiety. The
hijab
is a metaphor for the
hudud,
the boundaries that separate and create order and stand for all the others, especially those that delimit
dar al-islam,
the land of Islam, and protect it from the rest of the world.

Our fin-de-siècle era resembles the apocalypse. Boundaries and standards seem to be disappearing. Interior space is scarcely distinguishable from exterior. The generation of young people in their twenties, singles in no hurry, stroll around by the millions in the Arab capitals, especially the women, with all their charms exposed, fragile prey because they are without
hisn.
Transgression of the boundary is almost certain: “man was created weak,” says the Koran in verse 28 of sura 4.
⁷
That weakness, comment the imams, is
shahwa,
“desire,” which from the beginning was considered a major problem. How is this Muslim man, already disconcerted by so many unforeseen events, a visitor in the theater of the universe, which he looks at like a stranger, to be kept from “following] vain desires” (sura 4, v. 27)? Boundaries,
hudud, hisn, burj,
symbolic or stone-built casbahs—all are meant to discourage enemies. The Muslim man had to be alert, on the defensive, with one eye on the
hudud
that hemmed in the women, the other on the frontiers of the empire. What happens when the two boundaries give way, and both at the same time? The enemy is no longer just on earth; he occupies the heavens and the stars and rules over time. He seduces one’s wife, veiled or not, entering through the skylight of television. Bombs are only an incidental accessory for the new masters. Cruise missiles are for great occasions and the inevitable sacrifices. In normal times they nourish us with “software": advertising messages, teenage songs, everyday technical information, courses for earning diplomas, languages and codes to master. Our servitude is fluid, our humiliation anesthetizing.

It is true that Mecca is still the center of the world, even though it needs the American air force to protect it. But what can such a force protect against, against what deviation and confusion? What about the women in the city? What prayers should be said, to avert what violence? Who is afraid, and of whom, in a city without boundaries? What will become of the women in a city where the defense of the
hudud
is in the hands of foreigners?

How, and through what precise management of fears, will the military map be superimposed on the map of desire, and how will the two be maintained and reflect each other in order to weaken the Arab man, who is already so closely controlled by the electronic agenda? And who will pay the price for all these indistinct boundaries? Traditionally women were the designated victims of the rituals for reestablishing equilibrium. As soon as the city showed signs of disorder, the caliph ordered women to stay at home. Will it be we, the women living in the Muslim city, who will pay the price, we who bear the boundary against desire tattooed on our bodies? Will we be sacrificed for community security in the coming rituals to be performed by all those who are afraid to raise the real problem—the problem of individualism and responsibility, both sexual and political?

In the new post-Gulf War city, which will be anything but the
madinat al-salam,
what will happen to the women who cause fear because they have already gone beyond the boundaries and refused to accept them? How can one imagine a Baghdad in which security is possible despite the disappearance of the circle?

Gharb
the Arabic word for the West, is also the place of darkness and the incomprehensible, always frightening.
Gharb
is the territory of the strange, the foreign
(gharib
). Everything that we don’t understand is frightening. “Foreignness” in Arabic has a very strong spatial connotation, for
gharb
is the place where the sun sets and where darkness awaits. It is in the West that the night snaps up the sun and swallows it; then all terrors are possible. It is there that
gharaba
(strangeness) has taken up its abode.
¹

When my aunt Halima introduced into her Friday night stories a person called Gharib, the Stranger, my cousin
^c
Aziz tugged on my braids, I tugged on Mina’s; it suddenly became difficult to breathe; we stopped chewing the roasted chickpeas. Instinctively we knew that terrible things were going to happen in our elderly aunt’s peaceful living room. In the
gharb
everything is engulfed in darkness. One cannot see; one has to rely on the other senses to make out what is moving, what might be dangerous. The place of the setting sun is always a distant place, different from where we live. It is also the territory of night. In Arabic the crow is called
ghuraby
and it brings misfortune because its color heralds blindness.

The territory of the setting sun is also the territory of the faraway, of what is elsewhere. The Maghrib is the country of the setting sun. In the
Arabian Nights
the Maghribians were users of magic, of everything that Islam forbids and bans. The accepted name for Morocco is
al-maghrib al-aqsa,
the Far West. Within the Arab community, we Maghribians are perceived by the people of
al-mashriq
(the rising sun) as essentially shady; living close to the border of Christianity, we belong to the frontier territory. Is it because of our Berber heritage, because before the Arab conquest we spoke a different language and had different cults and rites? Is it because Tangier is only a few miles from Spain? Is it because before the discovery of America the Atlantic was considered the end of the world? But the difference does exist, and it will play a role as the Arab world is challenged to democratize itself and experience its many parts as riches to explore. When a Frenchman says “les Maghrebins,” he is simply saying “foreigners.”

Above all else, the strange, the foreign is spatial in concept. To protect against what is not understood, it is necessary to erect boundaries. The Gulf War taught the Arabs these two lessons at least: first, no border can any longer protect us from the
gharb;
and second, since we have a certain degree of vulnerability to start with, the terror that besets us becomes unbearable; facing what frightens us and understanding it is the only possible reflex. We are tired of being afraid. The medina and its inhabitants have finally decided to change the basic rules of the game: we must understand in order not to go under. is not up to the foreign West to understand us; it is up to us/to understand the West. We are well equipped for the job: millions of Arabs speak the languages of the West and are intimately familiar with its ideas, cultures, and dreams; millions of others live in its various countries and can mirror them back to us.

Until now the Arabs have been preoccupied with boundaries, with their uniqueness—what made them distinctive. Now they are simply trying to see what the other is. Why is the West so strong, and why are we so weak and vulnerable? Certainly democracy and respect for the individual and his rights have been recognized as the secret of the West’s strength. A demand for these ideals emerged in the slogans of the masses who marched in the streets of Algiers, Tunis, and Rabat to protest the war and the bombing of Baghdad. The Moroccans marching for peace on February 3, 1991, chanted:

When the masses shout their desire for democracy, fear enters the corridors of entrenched power. Those who have control over
qarar
(decision making) will naturally try to transfer the ancestral fear of the West onto the idea of democracy itself, that strange, fascinating daughter the West had a part in bringing into the world. Identifying democracy as a Western malady, decking it out in the chador of foreignness, is a strategic operation worth millions of petrodollars. This little book will have attained its objective if it succeeds in suggesting some of the techniques used in this operation, including manipulation of fears by pasting ancient anxieties onto modern ones. It is a complex undertaking because it builds on unpredictable emotional elements like hope, desire and the promise of pleasure, and fear of pain. Mosque and satellite, sin and Coca- Cola, spiritual retreat and bank accounts: here we have the most Oriental sophistication, where one can hope for anything except simple answers. You can choose any colors you want, except black and white.

But let us proceed without haste, with lots of patience, and taking time for all the detours, because maybe they will lead beyond where the main roads end. I don’t guarantee that the reader will be able to understand everything about the conflict between Islam and democracy; only the imams and presidents of the Muslim republics can give that kind of certainty. But by exploring the ambiguities, the analogies, and the paradoxes, as a woman I know that the ancestral locks and the fears that they are guarding can be unbolted.

Since the West spins fear the way a spider spins its web, it is enough to lure an idea into that web for it to take on the smell of fear and have the sound of forbidden things. Imagine for a moment a river on which two boats, the Orient and the Occident, are sailing toward each other, both with many people on board. The Orient looks at what is ahead of it, and suddenly it sees only its own reflection. The Occident at that precise moment is nothing but a mirror. The Orient is seized by terror, not because, the Occident is different, but because it reflects and exhibits the very part of the Orient that it is trying to hide from itself: individual responsibility. Democracy—that is, insistence on the sovereignty of the individual rather than of an arbitrary leader—is not as new as the imams proclaim. What it is is repressed. Democracy in this sense is not foreign to the Muslim East; it is an infected wound that the East has been carrying for centuries. Opposition forces have constantly rebelled and tried to kill the leader, and he has always tried to obliterate them. This dance of death between authority and individuality is for the Muslim repressed, for it is soaked in the blood and violence that no civilization lets float to the surface; it is awash in the inexhaustible rivers of blood that our teachers hid from us and that we hid from ourselves while rhapsodizing about the benefits of unity and solidarity within the
umma,
the Muslim community. The West is frightening because it obliges the Muslims to exhume the bodies of all the opponents, both religious and profane, intellectuals and obscure artisans, who were massacred by the caliphs, all those who were condemned, like the Sufis and the philosophers, because, the palace said, they talked about foreign i4eas from Greece, India, and ancient Persia.

The pouring of the masses onto the streets during the Gulf War, their calling for democracy, passed unnoticed in the Western media. Nevertheless, it was one of the essential events that will determine the future dynamics of the region. But the West and its cameras, focused behind another
hijab
and on other fears, sees in the Arab world only the dawn of obscurantist fanaticism. I was in the crowd that TV5, a European network, covered on February 3 in Rabat during the march for solidarity with Iraq. The French commentator presented it as a demonstration by xenophobic fundamentalists in which the French flag was burned. It is true that the French flag was burned and fundamentalists were among the demonstrators, but many other groups were present, including all the branches of the Moroccan Left and thousands of independents like me, of all persuasions, from university students and professors to shopkeepers.
^c
Ali, the shoe merchant from the Suq al-Sabat, was there. He is as independent as I am: “I don’t have confidence in anyone, bearded or shaved,” he often says.

Let us return to the river and the reflection and especially to that place of strangeness par excellence: ourselves. In one of the tales of the
Arabian Nights
the sovereign has the uncanny experience of meeting himself. Seeing his double on a river is for him complete disorientation, the most incomprehensible
(
^c
ajib)
thing that could happen. The sovereign was none other than Harun al-Rashid (170-93/786-809), the fifth caliph of the Abbasid dynasty, whose life of magnificence and ostentation fired the imagination of his contemporaries:

The disguised caliph and his attendants ordered the old man to take them for a ride on the river, offering him a handsome payment. But the old man refused, saying,