Islam and Democracy: Fear of the Modern World (8 page)

In the face of this convergence, Arab intellectuals, mostly philosophers, are defending the opening to all humanistic thought, whether ancient or modern. The rationalist past and the luminaries of Western humanism have been reclaimed, Marx among them. Contemporary philosophers and ideologues like Muhammad
^c
Amara, Husayn Mruwa (who was killed a few years ago in Beirut), and Muhammad al-Jabiri (one of today’s most important thinkers) have become more well known in the Arab world than hit singers and often more popular than the heads of state who try to repress them. The Moroccan al-Jabiri is probably the philosopher most read by Arab youths, if I can judge by the remarks of students in conference debates and informal discussions. In
Nahnu wa al-tharwa
(We and Our Heritage) he contends that the Muslims did not just pass the Greek heritage on to the West, but rather enlarged and enriched it.
²²
His masterly
Taqwin al-
^c
aql al-
^c
arabi
(The Process of the Formation of Arab Thought), which takes up the question of the opposition between the obedience of the palace and the reason of the intellectuals, has reconciled millions of Arab young people to modernity and raised their democratic aspirations.
²³
Devouring his books, they find there an Islam in which openness and personal opinion are an integral part of our tradition. This aspect of openness in our culture is ignored by the West. The works of al-Jabiri and the others are not translated, and their authors are not interviewed by Western television networks. Is it because al-Jabiri resembles a French or German intellectual, focusing on the great eternal values like integrity and self-respect, that he doesn’t convey the facile exoticism the media look for to depict the frightening Islam that furthers racism and encourages rejection? It is certainly interesting to note that the leaders of fanatical movements are often invited to speak on television programs, while the whole progressive movement is ignored by the Western media, duplicating at the international level the media tactics of the local despots.

The Arab governments denounced reason
(
^c
aql)
as foreign after the departure of the colonial powers. In the last few decades, the combination that all despots dream of—making obedience to the imam correspond to obedience to God—became the program and the law of the Arab regimes that base themselves on the sacred. The Muslim world of the 1980s, governed by leaders who attack reason, sank into
al-inhitat
(decay). Our military, economic, political, and ethical decline was brought to consciousness for us by the Gulf War, which CNN displayed before the eyes of the world, revealing Muslims as partially educated but deprived of
ra
y.

In his amazing book
Al-milal wa al-nihal
(Revealed Religions and Fabricated Beliefs), written in the twelfth century, the Iranian Shahrastani crystallized the process by which reason was set aside.
Ta
^c
a
(obedience to God) was to become forever confused with
milal
(revealed religions); everything else was only forgery, fabricated belief. It would thus affirm the triumph of the
ahl al-hadith,
the supporters of a rigid interpretation of the
shari
^c
a,
which reduces Islamic civilization to revealed knowledge in the Arabic language only. The concept of reason and all speculation about personal opinion would ever after be dismissed as
nihal,
beliefs fabricated by sects. The word
nahala
means “to imitate,” “to counterfeit"—in a word, “to forge.”
rc
y
was then forever connected to criminal activities that destroyed the solidarity of the
umma.
It is that Islam, shorn of its rational pole, that we are now being compelled to recognize as
thurat islami
(Muslim heritage), in the same terms used by Shahrastani: believe
(i
^c
iqad)
and obey
(ta
^c
a),
or stick to one’s own opinion and thus act in an egotistical way. This question has always been posed, and the way of responding to it has not changed since the twelfth century. It is the one that is being loudly proclaimed by those who propose despotism as a way of life: individuals’ use of reason means weakening Islam and serving the enemy.

Shahrastani simplified things by saying that the world is divided in two: those who believe in one of the revealed religions, and those who rely on their individual inclination: “Those who believe something or say something only have two choices: either to adopt a belief, that is, to adhere to a preexisting idea and borrow it, or to fabricate one from one’s own arrogant personal opinion.” Since the time of
^c
Umar Ibn al-Khattab, all Muslim men and women conscious of their dignity have had to face the dilemma of whether to believe or to cultivate their own judgment. Shahrastani’s solution was simple: “A Muslim is he who believes and obeys. Religion is obedience. An obeying Muslim is religious. He who gives priority to his own opinion is a modernizing innovator and a creator.
²⁴

Al-milal wa al-nihal
contains all the terms of the debate on democracy which is shaking the Muslim world today and permeates the press of both the Left and the Right. The debate turns on six key words that constitute its two poles. On one end is the pole of allegiance to the leader, confounded with faithfulness to God; it inseparably links together three words:
din
(religion),
i
^c
iqad
(belief), and
tcfa
(obedience). At the other end are grouped together three words that are just as strategic and that all affirm individual responsibility:
rc
y
(personal opinion),
ihdath
(innovation, modernization), and
ibda
^c
(creation). The conflict lies in the fact that this second pole has for centuries been condemned as negative, subversive. Asserting oneself and believing in one’s personal opinion mean weakening the palace and the power of the community concentrated in the hands of the caliph, and thus playing the enemy’s game. This fear that the expression of individual opinion will weaken the group and play into the hands of adversaries is the emotional vein that all those who wish to block the democratic process in the Arab world try to exploit.

From the time of Shahrastani on, the definition of a Muslim, forged by political men faithful to the despotic regimes, relayed by
the fuqaha
(religious authorities), and serving the palaces, would condemn
rc
y, ihdath,
and
ibda
^c
as foreign and blasphemous. But this stripping our heritage of the rationalist tradition would not have succeeded if we had had access to the modern humanistic heritage that the Europeans forged during their bloody struggles against despotism, which opened the way to scientific development and political participation. With complete impunity, the Muslim leaders would battle the Muslim intellectuals who tried to explain and spread the philosophy of the Enlightenment. Like the Mu
^c
tazila of the past, those intellectuals were harassed, condemned, and denounced as blasphemers during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Bans on their writings and imprisonment followed, despite the declarations of independence—but with one difference. The Mu
^c
tazila were the traitors who imported Greek ideas; the modern intellectuals are called servants of the West. Twentieth-century humanism, celebrated elsewhere as the triumph of creativity and the flowering of the individual, is forbidden to us on the pretext that it is foreign. Obscurantism is proposed as the ideal of the future, and one to defend.

Arabs do not so much have a fear of democracy as suffer from a lack of access to the most important advances of recent centuries, especially tolerance as principle and practice. By this I mean the secular humanism that has allowed the flowering of civil society in the West. Humanistic ideas—freedom of thought, the sovereignty of the individual, the right to freedom of action, tolerance—were propagated in the West through secular schools. With a few rare exceptions (notably Turkey), the modern Muslim state has never called itself secular, and has never committed itself to teaching individual initiative. On the contrary, individualism always held a rather ambiguous place among the “reformers” of the nineteenth-century nationalist movement. This movement, focused on the struggle against colonization and therefore viscerally anti-Western, was obliged to root itself more deeply than ever in Islam. Facing the militaristic, imperialistic West, Muslim nationalists were forced to take shelter in their past and erect it as a rampart—cultural
hudud
to exorcise colonial violence. The Muslim past they reactivated did not anchor modern identity in the rationalist tradition. In fact, the nationalists were prisoners of a historical situation that inevitably made modernity a no-win choice. Either they might construct modernity by claiming the humanistic heritage of the Western colonizer at the risk of losing unity (for when we speak about the rationalist tradition, we are talking about
ra
y,
“individual opinion,” and
^c
aql,
“reason,” and therefore about the possibility of divergence of opinion); or they could carefully safeguard a sense of unity in the face of the colonizer by clinging to the past, favoring the tradition of
ta
^c
a
“obedience,” and foreclosing all Western innovation.

Alas, it was this second solution that the nationalist politicians more or less involuntarily chose. The essence of the two rationalist heritages, both the Muslim and the Western, was freedom of thought, freedom to differ. This was sacrificed to save unity. What the politicians and reformers of the 1920s and 1930s didn’t clearly see was that by shutting out reason, Muslims weakened themselves more than ever and became that crippled, powerless mass that the Gulf War spread before the world on television.

Once colonization had ended after World War II, the newly independent Muslim states did not renounce their vendetta against reason. They fought against the advances of Enlightenment philosophy and banned Western humanism as foreign and “imported,” calling the intellectuals who studied it enemy agents and traitors to the nationalist cause. At the same time, they committed themselves to the massive importation of weapons from the West. The Arab states allocate a higher percentage of their gross domestic product to military expenditures than do the Western countries. This makes them doubly dependent, since Westerners use the income from arms sales to finance research and development and boost their aeronautic and space industries. A survey conducted by the International Labor Organization reveals that in the West employment in the arms industries is concentrated in the aeronautic and aerospace sectors: 33 percent in Belgium, 25 percent in France, 47 percent in Sweden, 27 percent in Italy, 35 percent in Finland and Greece, and 40 percent in the United States.
¹
The supremacy of the West is not so much due to its military hardware as to the fact that its military bases are laboratories and its troops are brains, armies of researchers and engineers. The same survey shows that the arms industry provides an enormous number of jobs in other sectors, such as electronics and communications, which employ 20 percent of the manpower working in armaments in France, 23 percent in Sweden, 26 percent in Italy, and 30 percent in the United States.

The West creates its power through military research, which forces underdeveloped countries to become passive consumers. The weakness of the Arab nations stems from the fact that they buy weapons instead of choosing to do their own research. If it chose the latter course, an Arab state could pull off two miracles at one stroke: invest in an army of researchers and engineers, thus contributing to full employment, and free itself from military dependence on the West.

Middle Eastern states bought more than 40 percent of all arms sold throughout the world during the 1980s, wasting on hardware the wealth that could finance full employment:

Among the nine largest purchasers of arms in the world in 1983, four were Arab states: Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Libya, and Egypt.
³
What the officials of these states ignore is that the age of fetishism is over, and importing military hardware increases dependence. Power comes from the cultivation of the scientific spirit and participatory democracy. Despite its incredible investment in “King Khalid Military City,” as the Americans call it, a megaproject that cost $6 billion, the Saudi regime was incapable of defending itself when the Gulf War broke out, and recourse to American help became inevitable.
⁴
The Gulf War exposed the extent of the military dependence of not just Saudi Arabia but all the Arab states. Arms purchases have blocked the creation of Arab intellectual and scientific power and its corollary, the diffusion via public education of democratic culture.

The problem of unemployment in the Arab world is structurally tied to the massive importation of arms, which burns up enormous state resources without creating a scientific infrastructure. I emphasize the issue of arms purchases because, as a woman, I consider that one of the most urgent questions which should be brought before the masses is, Do we really need to arm ourselves in such a stupid and sterile fashion? Wouldn’t it be better to follow the example of Japan, which is highly developed precisely because it has not armed itself but has opted for power based on scientific research? The power of the modern West has been built by state propagation, through public schools, of that humanism that the Arab masses have never had the right to.

Secular humanism, as defined by the American sociologist James Davison Hunter, is one of the things taught by American public schools: “Public school curricula tend to reflect an emphasis on the individual as the measure of all things and on personal autonomy, feelings, personal needs, and subjectively derived values—all of which are independent of the transcendent standard implied in traditional theism.”
⁵
American secular humanism was developed not so much against religion as against state interference in religion and especially manipulation of it. The success of this approach is demonstrated in the fact that the United States is one of the most religious countries imaginable; not only do churches still exist, but they are growing!

In addition to Protestant Christianity, which is omnipresent and constitutes the dominant religious culture, there are the other religious denominations: “About 28 percent of the U.S. population is Catholic; Jews make up about 2.5 percent. Mormons now constitute 1.6 percent of the population . . . and are one of the fastest growing denominations in America. Much more significant is the expansion of pluralism beyond the traditions of the Judeo- Christian faith. There are about as many Muslims in America, for example, as there are Mormons, and more Muslims than Episcopalians. The numbers of Hindus and Buddhists have also grown prodigiously since the end of World War II.”
⁶
Preaching tolerance and freedom of thought, secular humanism is an attack not on God but on government officialdom and a ban on its use of government funds and institutions to propagate religion, any religion.

The majority of the colonized countries—that is, the non- Western countries—never experienced that phase of history so indispensable to the development of the scientific spirit, during which the state and its institutions became the means of transmitting the ideas of tolerance and respect for the individual. Above all else, colonial governments were brutal and culturally limited. The nationalist governments that supplanted them were just as brutal and just as hostile to the flowering of the scientific spirit and individual initiative. This produced a virtual cutoff of the Third World from the advances of humanism in the last centuries in both its aspects: the scientific aspect (promoting the use of government resources to invest in scientific research and encourage freedom to explore and invent), and the political aspect (establishing representative democracy, with citizens’ exercise of the right to vote and to participate in political decision making). The result was the rampant malaise, which some call
^c
azma
(crisis), that now besets the colonized nations. In the modern Arab states it sometimes takes the form of intolerant outbursts and rejections of the present and our leaders. At other times it is expressed in the desire of lower-class young people to emigrate, to leave the Arab world to go to Europe. At still other times it can be seen in the world-weary attitude of the intellectual toward his own country, which Hichem Djait expresses so well:

Djait speaks for the thousands if not millions who feel the same way. The tragedy is that Arabs, like the rest of the citizens of the Third World, have never had systematic access to the modern advarices rooted in “the legacy of the Enlightenment, an ideological revolution that led to the debunking of medieval and reformational cosmologies and the undermining of feudal forms of political authority and theistic forms of moral authority.”
⁸
But the break with the medieval state, which used the sacred to legitimize and mask arbitrary rule, never took place in the Arab world:

Today when we in the formerly colonized nations of the Arab world talk about democracy and the fear of democracy, we are speaking within a mental framework structured by lack, by truncations, by gaps. People experience modernity without understanding its foundations, its basic concepts. Freedom of thought is demonized and identified with Kharijite rebellion and disorder. The state uses the public schools to propagandize us. But the solution is not to supplant public schools with widespread privatization of education, as President Reagan proposed. The Arab world cannot count on help from the private sector, which doesn’t recognize workers’ rights and which, in the absence of any labor organizations or legislation mandating social insurance, systematically siphons off profits. The Arab private sector still does not contribute to the financing of social projects, and private education plays a small role in our culture. In the coming decades the state and its public schools will remain the only means of creating and propagating democratic culture and educating tolerant citizens.

The Moroccan philosopher
^c
Ali Umlil has devoted a whole book to the conceptual confusions that are the basis of “Arab reformism.”
¹⁰
In it he shows that the nationalist movements at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries tried to modernize Muslim culture without breaking with the past, which was burdened with despotism and manipulation of the sacred. These movements introduced institutions and concepts of Western representative democracy like “constitution,” “parliament,” and “universal suffrage,” while yet failing to educate the masses about the essential point: the sovereignty of the individual and freedom of opinion that are the philosophical basis of these institutions and concepts. The nationalists failed to think the problems through. Many were religious authorities forced to take part in the movement by military men and were inhibited by the barracks-room jingoism. We must not forget that the Arab world, like the rest of the Third World, saw the accession to power of the military in the 1950s and 1960s. The debate never became philosophical, as Umlil says: “The philosopher never counted; he was never invited to play the role of
da
^c
i,
propagandist for reformist ideas. That role went to the
fuqaha,
the religious authorities.”
¹¹