Islam and Democracy: Fear of the Modern World (9 page)

Very quickly many reformers tried to link the concept of a constitution to the
shari
^c
a
that is, to law of divine origin. The politicians, on the lookout for arguments to extend their authoritarianism, jumped at this opportunity to confuse the issue. Those who insisted on the distinction were condemned as infidels, blasphemers, allies of the colonizers, agents of the enemy.

Taha Husayn, one of our epoch’s great defenders of the rationalist tradition who died in 1972, was harassed during his lifetime and judged and condemned after his death “as a manipulator of heathen, Hellenic ideas ... a collaborator devoted to French thought and then in the service of American thought.”
¹²
Anwar al-Jundi undertook to conduct a “trial” (
muhakama
) of Taha Husayn in a book of nearly four hundred pages published in 1984, in which Taha Husayn is refuted and called a
kafir.
The author of some of the most luminous pages ever penned on the life of the Prophet (which I was introduced to in primary school)
¹³
, Taha Husayn is pictured on the cover of al-Jundi’s book in the dock. In the Arab world at the end of the twentieth century we are seeing this lack of tolerance because probably al-Jundi and his like never had a primary school education in which they were taught that in a civilized society one does not prosecute an author who thinks differently. Al-Jundi’s book is sold in bookstores that specialize in
al-thurat
(the heritage), and one can buy it for a few dirhams in Casablanca or Algiers. Apparently literature of this kind does not shock the officials of the Ministry of Information who are charged with censoring dangerous works. Intolerance is not dangerous. According to those in charge of information and culture in our era, it is books that challenge intolerance which are dangerous. The importation of a parliament and a constitution, without their essence being carefully explained, doesn’t allow the masses to reflect calmly about a concept that until now has been tainted with sin: the concept of freedom
(al-hurriyya).
In our time, freedom in the Arab world is synonymous with disorder.

Freedom of religion
(al-hurriyya al-diniyya)
is freedom of belief and opinion, “with one sole condition: do not leave Islam.” This is the way Rifa
^c
at al-Tahtawi, the most representative leader of the reform wing of the nationalist movement, defined one of the key concepts of the humanistic tradition, which is the basis of the parliamentary system.
¹⁴
Like the other reformers who helped design the modern Muslim state, he wanted a parliament and constitution with conditions attached to freedom of thought. Al-Tahtawi’s ideas on tolerance were (and are) taught in primary and secondary school. He is the exemplary modernizing figure whose works are pompously taught as avant-garde texts that open new horizons for Arab youths. We start out in life thinking that
hurriyyat al-rc
y
(freedom of opinion) has limits and is closely supervised; there are
hudud
that must not be passed. It is understandable that many of us who have received such an education are confused and have difficulty understanding this century and what respecting another’s opinion means.
¹⁵
The majority of the Arab people, who are still illiterate, are spared this kind of confusion; they never read al- Tahtawi in the original and never heard of the importance of
altasamuh
(tolerance).

Some Westerners are surprised to find that today university science departments and technological and scientific institutes are the breeding ground of fundamentalism; it is there that a large number of fundamentalists are recruited.
¹⁶
Actually, it is the most logical thing imaginable, considering the ambiguity that surrounds the idea of freedom. How can scientists be trained in societies that reject freedom of thought as contrary to Islamic identity? Then there is the absence of the scientific infrastructure that only fundamental research can develop. The Arab states prefer to import finished technological products, especially arms, rather than train a powerful corps of scientists, which would risk destabilizing their authority from within. We therefore have a massive importation of products and a massive dispatch of students from the well-to-do class to Western universities. Letting the rest vegetate in a state of semiscience is no problem, even with the growth of fundamentalism in science departments that lack laboratories and adequate means for doing research.
¹⁷

In this period of triumphant modernity, the Arab state (whether it is officially Islamic, like the monarchies, or socialist, like Syria and Algeria) has deprived us of our universal heritage of the last three centuries, and has disfigured the Muslim heritage through the teaching in its institutions. So let us return to the idea of fear of democracy and explore it a bit more.

“Fear” is a word that covers a gamut of different feelings: fear of slipping on the marble floor of an old
hammam
(bath) is not the same as dread of an approaching cyclone, and of course there is the very real fear of being arrested at dawn on a Friday and condemned at noon for a blasphemous text one wrote the night before.

This ambiguity which results from the extreme richness of the concept of fear, is also found in the word “democracy.” The term covers an impressive array of freedoms and privileges, of rights to exercise and taxes to pay, from the right to eat pork or drink wine or read censored works; to the right to fall in love, have a platonic friendship or embark on an affair, marry one’s partner or not, have children or not; to the right to demand a wage at least equal to the legal minimum wage, and appeal to a union if unjustly treated; to the right to elect a prime minister, and then to protest when the government-run television station gives him prime airtime at taxpayers’ expense.

Associating democracy with fear certainly multiplies the ambiguities and increases the uncertainties. This is especially true if we remember that in a certain country—let us say Kuwait—the fear experienced by the emir is not the same as that felt by his wife and daughters. The emir’s chauffeur—who is, let us say, a Palestinian—has different fears from his master’s and also from those of the palace servants, who are likely to be Pakistani, North African, or Filipino. Each one, depending on his circumstances at the moment, feels and names the fears that beset him. That strange but omnipresent democracy is rather like the
^c
afrit
of the
Arabian Nights:
it can metamorphose into a ravishing young girl before the eyes of an amorous adolescent, or take the form of a winged dragon to terrify an official in charge of censorship. We are not trying to classify these fears, only to understand them a bit better— to go beyond stereotypes and, if we can, dissipate confusions about them.

Arabs have been discussing democracy for a century and a half. It came to them, paradoxically, in the baggage of the French and English colonial armies, the armies that brought other strange things, like the telephone, electricity, and the automobile. We don’t have an Arabic word for democracy; we use the Greek word,
dimuqratiyya.
Two Arabs talking about democracy speak to each other in Greek, all the while remembering that the Greek heritage has been forbidden to them on the pretext that it is foreign. But we also have no words for telephone, electricity, and automobile. We call them by their foreign names, which we use and love, and there are no press reports of furious resistance to the automobile or electricity on Muslim soil. Although we always say
tumubil,
the word
siyara
exists, and the Arabic dictionaries have a list of other words to keep us from using those of “the enemy.” But the masses prefer
tumubil,
and I have never heard a mechanic in Rabat say
siyara.
The same is true of the word for telephone. There is an Arabic word,
hatif,
but workers, peasants, and young people call it only
tilifun.
The dictionaries have created equivalents for “television,” but everybody insists on buying a
tilivisiun.

Despite their foreignness, the objects these words signify are coveted and voraciously consumed. Nowhere in the Muslim world is anyone challenging the use of these marvelous, indispensable little objects. In fact, the opposition movements, whatever cause they espouse, use them widely to push their propaganda. There is no political debate about their being foreign, and no political party, especially not the serious fundamentalists, are calling on us to choose between religion and the telephone. But this is the case with the notion of democracy. In the debate that rages today the traditionalists hold that one cannot be a Muslim and embrace
dimuqratiyya
at the same time, for that is foreign to Islamic culture. The regimes that draw their legitimacy from Islam (Saudi Arabia, for example) brand their opponents who advance the cause of democracy unbelievers, infidels. The irony is that in other Arab countries it is the opposition that impugns democracy as the constitutional foundation of the republic. This is the argument, for example, between the Algerian and Tunisian heads of state and their fundamentalist opposition.

It is thus not simply the foreign origin of democracy that makes it the center of controversy and conflict on the Muslim political chessboard. Apparently, unlike the automobile and the telephone, democracy is not perceived by all Muslims as being in their interests. Or rather, what those who reject it see in it does not seem to agree with their interests.

That makes the pertinent question to be asked, How is this fascinating democracy perceived? What is that
^c
afrita
(feminine gender), as it is called by Aunt
^c
Aziza, who finishes listening to the eight-thirty news every night (televised in classical Arabic) by murmuring, “But why does no one explain this
dimuqratiyya?
Is it a country or an
^c
afrita
or an animal or an island?” Afterward she goes to make her ablutions before turning toward the Ka
^c
ba to say the evening prayer. Who perceives what democracy, and through what eyeglasses? Every Muslim, irrespective of sex, class, and income, can calculate immediately all the benefits they can draw from owning or at least using an automobile or a telephone. The faithful battle each other every day to have access to either of these objects. Although these products are manufactured mostly by multinational corporations that don’t care a fig about Muslims and their interests, this insensitivity doesn’t seem to disturb that same Muslim at all in his consumer enjoyment of these items.

It is not the same thing with democracy. Some groups of people think that it can promote their interests, especially those who know foreign languages, who have access to Western knowledge and culture (including such amenities as bank credit, social security, paid vacations, and so on). This is generally the case with bourgeois city dwellers, both men and women, who operate in the fields of finance and business. It is also the case with university professors, artists, and intellectuals, all of whom are involved in the creation and manipulation of knowledge, both traditional and modern. Others feel their interests to be terribly threatened by that
dimuqratiyya.
Considering the intensity of the opposition to democracy, which sometimes results in violence, they must believe that their very survival is in danger. This is apparently the situation of all those excluded from the good things mentioned above. Can it be that what they perceive of democracy is so distorted that its corollaries, personal and political initiative, seem threatening to them? Can it be that the most dispossessed in our societies cling to Islam because they fear being forgotten by their own people, who have found another identity and are involved in other networks, especially those very strong ones that create profit on an international scale?

But what is still more astonishing is that what goes for individuals goes for governments too. Some have more need of Islam, more need to find their identity in religion, than others. There are two kinds of governments: those that reject democracy as contrary to their identity, and those that embrace it. However, all of them use the automobile and the telephone and waste public funds on frivolous items that have no relation to the country’s vital needs, like the arms that make us goggle-eyed when we hear the price and the obsolescent surveillance networks they buy to keep an eye on us. But in the final analysis, these are just details. The essential point is that although all the Arab states are fond of electronic surveillance gadgets and sophisticated telecommunications systems, some of them nevertheless feel the need to base their political legitimacy on the past, while others feel no such need and embrace modernity. Why does Saudi Arabia, which moved heaven and earth during two U.S. administrations (those of President Carter and President Reagan) to buy the gem of American military electronics, the AWACS missile system, feel a stronger need to adhere to Islam than does Tunisia? What hides behind this outcry for religion that reverberates in the Arab world? What is its meaning to the person who expresses it—from the unemployed student of rural origin lost in the shantytowns of Cairo or Algiers, to the oil prince umbilically tied to the Pentagon? One thing is certain. The call for Islam in the 1990s expresses diverse needs that are not always archaic and are certainly not always of a spiritual nature.