Democracy Matters Page 12

  Just as a new Jewish democratic identity can draw from the rich prophetic tradition of Judaism, so a new Islamic democratic identity can, and must, emerge from the rich prophetic tradition of Islam. Recent efforts to embark on democratic projects in Afghanistan and Iraq are salutary, but they must not be guided by imperial aims or informed by simplistic understandings of the Islamic tradition. Furthermore, any attempt to democratize Islamic states or to Socratize Islam must be conversant with their recent imperial past.

  The recent waves of Islamic revitalization movements—be they fundamentalist or not—are a quest for a new identity of subjugated Muslims in response to failed secular nationalist experiments. These nationalist experiments—Nasser in Egypt, the shah in Iran, Saddam in Iraq—were unable to create and sustain a workable identity for Islamic subjects in the aftermath of imperial subjugation. And their respective links with the Soviet and American empires during the cold war widened the gap between the thuggish rulers and their Muslim subjects. With the collapse of repressive secular nationalism at the top, the Islamic revival mobilized the masses and gained state power. This revival was guided by a particular kind of Islam—a clerical Islam rooted in the religious identity of people and responsive to the pervasive anxieties unleashed by the failure of secular nationalist ideology in the wake of a colonial past.

  In this sense, recent Islamic revitalization movements are not mindless revolts against modernity or blind expressions of hatred toward America. Their eager appropriations of modern technology (possibly including nuclear weapons) or selective infatuations with American culture (especially music) undercut such fashionable clichés. Rather, turbulent rumblings in the contemporary Islamic world—with a population of one billion people—are fueled by fears of cultural deracination and fanned by hopes for material security. The quest for an Islamic identity shuns the uprootedness and restlessness of the modern West and the licentiousness and avariciousness of the American empire. It is similar to any other modern fundamentalist response to certain aspects of modernity, be it Christian, Judaic, or tribalistic. Yet religious traditions are here to stay, and the question is how to support prophetic voices and forge democratic identities within them in our day.

  Identity in the highly developed world is often a subject of leisurely conversation and academic banter. In the poor developing world, identity is a matter of life and death. Identity has to do with who one is and how one moves from womb to tomb—the elemental desires for protection, recognition, and association in a cold and cruel world. Like the traditions of belief of most peoples of color in the Americas, religious traditions of oppressed peoples in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia posit the modern West itself as an idol to be suspicious of and distant from. Their major exposure to and encounter with the modern West was its imperial face—a boot on one’s neck. And although they might long for the conveniences and comforts of modern capitalist technologies, they are mindful of Western capitalism’s sterling rhetoric and oppressive practices and they abhor the pervasive materialistic individualism and destructive hedonism. This is not a childish rejection of modernity but rather a wise attempt to enter the modern world on one’s own terms.

  When modern imperial ideologies have dehumanized you and modern enterprises have exploited your labor, postcolonial situations become occasions to assert your sense of self and culture even when doing so appears backward to those who have been riding your back. Glib imitation of the West is suicide—even if recasting Islamic identity is painful, as profoundly and poignantly revealed in the great modern Islamic literature. The paradigmatic literary figures of Samba Diallo in Cheikh Hamidou Kane’s inimitable Ambiguous Adventure (1983), Mustafa Sa’eed in Tayeb Salih’s powerful Season of Migration to the North (1969), Ken Bugul in Mariétou M’Baye’s classic The Abandoned Baobab (1991), and Driss Ferdi in Driss Chraibi’s canonical The Simple Past (1983) all lay bare the inescapable need to confront their Islamic tradition.

  This noteworthy body of literature—much of it centered in the African Islamic world—deserves much more attention for those concerned about Islam, modernity, and democracy. In stark contrast to renowned literary figures like Salman Rushdie and V. S. Naipaul, these writers are sympathetic to the Islamic sources of their modern identity and to the modern sources of their Islamic identity. These works explore the profound alienation from both sources, and the necessity of building on both sources—all against the background of the West as imperial agent. As Kane writes in Ambiguous Adventure:

  The new school shares at the same time the characteristics of cannon and of magnet. From the cannon it draws its efficacy as an arm of combat. Better than the cannon, it makes the conquest permanent. The cannon compels the body, the school bewitches the soul. Where the cannon has made a pit of ashes and of death, in the sticky mold of which men would not have rebounded from the ruins, the new school establishes peace. The morning of rebirth will be a morning of benediction through the appeasing virtue of the new school.

  From the magnet, the school takes its radiating force. It is bound up with a new order, as a magnetic stone is bound up with a field. The upheaval of the life of man within this new order is similar to the overturn of certain physical laws in a magnetic field. Men are seen to be composing themselves, conquered, along the lines of invisible forces. Disorder is organized, rebellion is appeased, the mornings of resentment resound with songs of universal thanksgiving.

  This Islamic quest for a modern identity is situated between Good Friday and Easter, between a past of deep imperial wounds and a forward-looking resurrection. To erase the modern West is to ignore the dark predicament of the Islamic present. To wipe the traditions of Islam away would be to render themselves a blank carbon copy of a modern West that has no room or place for their complexity and humanity. Democracy matters must confront this Islamic identity crisis critically and sympathetically. In other words, there can be no democracy in the Islamic world without a recasting of Islamic identity. This new modern identity that fuses Islam and democracy has not even been glimpsed by most westerners. So it behooves us to proceed in a self-critical and open manner.

  The delicate dialogue between the modern West and the Islamic world should be neither a crude clash of civilizations nor an imposition of one upon the other. Rather it should be a Socratic process of examining a rich past of cultural cross-fertilization. Just as there is a long Judeo-Christian tradition, there is a long Judeo-Islamic tradition. The role of Islamic figures in the history of Judaic and Christian thought is immense. And the prophetic energies in Judaism and Christianity have been appropriated by many prophetic Islamic thinkers. These energies provide a hope for new democratic possibilities. This treacherous road has already been trod by towering Islamic intellectuals—like Fatima Mernissi, Mohamed Abid al-Jabri, Abdokarim Soroush, Mohamed Arkoun, Nawal El Saadawi, Anouar Majid, Tariq Ramadan, Khaled Abou El-Fadl, and, above all, Mahmoud Mohamed Taha—who all question, and examine, the modern West and Islamic traditions in order to forge a new democratic vision in the Muslim world. As Khaled Abou El-Fadl boldly proclaims in his article “Islam and the Challenge of Democracy” in the Boston Review (April–May 2003):

  A central conceptual problem is that modern democracy evolved over centuries within the distinctive context of post-Reformation, market-oriented Christian Europe. Does it make sense to look for points of contact in a remarkably different context? My answer begins from the premise that democracy and Islam are defined in the first instance by their underlying moral values and the attitudinal commitments of their adherents—not by the ways that those values and commitments have been applied. If we focus on those fundamental moral values, I believe, we will see that the tradition of Islamic political thought contains both interpretive and practical possibilities that can be developed into a democratic system. To be sure, these doctrinal potentialities may remain unrealized: without will power, inspired vision, and moral commitment there can be no democracy in Islam. But Muslims, for whom Islam is the authoritative frame of refere
nce, can come to the conviction that democracy is an ethical good, and that the pursuit of this good does not require abandoning Islam.

  The first step in discerning prophetic energies in Islam and forging an Islamic democratic identity is to put forward a persuasive genealogy of the subtle developments of Islamic legal thought (Usul al-fiqh and fiqh), theology (Kalam), mysticism (Tasawwuf), and philosophy (falsafa). This is an enormous task. This genealogy would lay bare the variety of interpretations and possibilities of thinking about Islam in relation to democratic practices. For example, those who stress Islamic law often espouse very different views than those who highlight Islamic mysticism. The dominant tendency in the Islamic revitalization movements today is to put a wholesale premium on Islamic law—Islam as Shari‘a. This emphasis already reduces the complexities and possibilities of Islam. This is especially so in regard to the crucial question of contemporary Islamic women, since patriarchy is an integral part of Islamic law.

  Yet there are both prelegalistic and postlegalistic forms of Islam that sidestep this patriarchal limit in Islam. It is the legalistic conception of Islam that often authorizes an antidemocratic rule of Muslim jurists. This version of Islam is dominant in the world today, but it does not exhaust the forms of Islam in the past, present, or future. Clerical Islam and legalistic Islam have a history, and their history resurfaces with power at specific moments. The present form of clerical Islam is an authoritarian effort to secure an Islamic identity and to run modern nation-states given the collapse of secular nationalism and the defeat of earlier European imperialisms in the Islamic world. Like rabbinical Judaism or Catholic Christianity, clerical Islam is in no way the essence of Islam—or its only form. Similarly, Islam, like all religions, has always incorporated non-Islamic and nonreligious sources that often appear to the believer to be purely Islamic. No modern religion can survive without learning from modern science, modern politics, and modern culture. Every modern religion accepts Newton’s law of gravity, Weber’s role of bureaucracies, and contemporary musical instruments in its rituals. All religions are polyvalent—subject to multiple interpretations under changing circumstances. Islam must be understood, by both non-Muslims and Muslims, as a fluid repertoire of ways of being a Muslim, not a dogmatic stipulation of rules that govern one’s life. Or, to put it another way, every dogmatic set of rules now espoused by the dominant clerics was once a challenge to an older dogmatic set of rules.

  The new dogma has simply become so routinized and ossified that it conceals its former contingency and insurgency. In this way, even to be a dogmatic traditionalist is to be part of a dynamic history and ever-changing tradition. This understanding of the fluidity of Islam is required in order for a democratic Islam to challenge the authority of Muslim clerics and Islamic jurists who attempt to naturalize and fossilize their prevailing edicts and decrees. The clerics and jurists themselves constitute forms of authority that result from earlier struggles over the role of clerics and who can be a jurist. The fundamental aim of authoritarian clerical Islam today is to procure an identity and secure a stable society over against the bombardments of the modern West, and the internal failures of past nationalist and imperial regimes.

  The key to Socratizing Islam is to understand precisely what kinds of authority present-day clerical Islam was a response to and to show that the new democratic Islamic responses to clerical Islam can promote Islamic aims in a more spiritually and politically effective manner. In short, modern clerical Islam was a response to the imperial European authorities that degraded Islamic religion, plundered Islamic resources, and cast the Islamic way of being and living as inferior to that of the modern West. The dominant secular response to imperial Europe was nationalism (be it Arab, Asian, or African nationalism)—itself an imitation of European nationalisms that revolted against empires inside Europe (like that in nineteenth-century Germany and the Italian nationalist revolt against Napoleon). This secular nationalism has failed in the Islamic world. And the grand example of Turkey—where secular nationalism, the religion of the elites, is imposed by an autonomous and repressive military on an Islamic populace—is what the Islamic world wants to avoid. (Ayatollah Khomeini’s clerical Islam overthrew the shah’s U.S.-backed nationalism in 1979 for the same reason.) Why? Because, like Israel, Turkey is a satellite country of the American empire generally willing to do imperial America’s dirty work in the Middle East, even as America looks the other way regarding Turkey’s vicious treatment of Islamic Kurds.

  Many Muslims see Turkey’s model as a form of U.S.-supported, anti-Islamic nationalism to be shunned and rejected. Turkey’s militaristic nationalism supported by the American empire represses Kurdish nationalism with a vengeance. This replay of European nationalist ideologies does not bode well for the Islamic world. The same dynamic holds in Pakistan, Indonesia, Morocco, and Egypt—all allies of imperial America. It is no accident that when these countries, like Israel, violate international law, imperial America looks the other way. The examples of Turkey’s seizure of two-fifths of Cyprus, Indonesia’s of East Timor, Morocco’s of Western Sahara, and Israel’s of Palestinian lands make the point. Such colonial conquests do not generate a mumbling word from imperial America in the United Nations or anywhere else. Only when the interests of the American empire are at stake—as in Saddam Hussein’s barbaric actions in Kuwait or Kim Jong Il’s vicious threats in Korea—does U.S. moral rhetoric about freedom surface. The repressive clerics in the autocratic Islamic states know this—and they are right. Yet even as this clerical Islam is attractive to many Islamic peoples in comparison to failed secular nationalism, this same clerical Islam is ruthlessly and horribly autocratic and is suffocating the democratic energies in the region.

  Therefore, the present task is to undermine the authority of the Muslim clerics on Islamic and democratic grounds. Western-style democracy has no future in the Islamic world. The damage has been done, the wounds are deep, and the die has been cast by the hypocritical European and nihilistic American imperial elites. There is simply no way to turn back the hands of time. The West had its chance and blew it. Yet the future of democracy in the Islamic world may be bright if democratic notions of voice and rights, community and liberties, rotation of elites and autonomous civic spaces are couched in Islamic terms and traditions. Western-style democracies—themselves in need of repair—are but one member of the family of democracy. Yet all democracies share certain common features, such as the voices of the demos; rotating elites; free expression of religion, culture, and politics; and uncoerced spaces for civic life. But we can encourage the Socratizing of Islam and the prophetizing of the Muslim populace even as we dismantle empire at home.

  There are three basic efforts to democratize the Islamic world by Muslims themselves. The first endeavor is to show that Islamic legalistic conceptions of justice (‘adl, or procedural justice, and ma‘ruf, or substantive justice) are compatible with democratic conceptions of justice. This is a fascinating and pioneering attempt to show that the Qur’an can be interpreted to support democracy. The complex relation of justice to revelation looms large. Does justice flow from divine revelation, or does justice exist apart from divine revelation? Furthermore, is justice an abstract ideal that puts forth rules that regulate a society (as the great political philosopher John Rawls would argue), or is justice one virtue among others to be balanced with them in the lived experience of Islamic peoples? What if these other virtues—like piety and temperance—downplay, contradict, or curtail democratic conceptions of justice? The pioneering work of Khaled Abou El-Fadl here in America best exemplifies this important tendency in contemporary Islam, in works such as The Place of Tolerance in Islam. His article in the Boston Review is a good place to begin:

  A case for democracy presented from within Islam must accept the idea of God’s sovereignty: it cannot substitute popular sovereignty for divine sovereignty, but must instead show how popular sovereignty—with its idea that citizens have rights and a correlative responsibility to pursue ju
stice with mercy—expresses God’s authority, properly understood. Similarly, it cannot reject the idea that God’s law is given prior to human action, but must show how democratic law-making respects that priority.

  The second effort does away with all appeals to Islamic law—it is an Islam without Shari‘a. As noted earlier, Islamic women often promote this endeavor in order to undercut the deeply patriarchal character and content of Islamic law. On this view, Islam is more an open-ended way of life and less a set of rules to obey. It harkens back to the early days before the rise of clerical Islam. It also allows a more free-flowing connection with democratic sensibilities, much like the practice of tolerance in the first Islamic state in 622, established by the Prophet Muhammad himself in his compact of Medina, which insisted on mutual respect and civility between Jews and Muslims. He enacted a constitutional rule that was based on a principled agreement between the Muhajirun (Muslim immigrants from Mecca), the Ansar (indigenous Muslims of Medina), and the Yahud (Jews). This federation authorized that the different communities were equal in rights and duties. In this way, the first Islamic state stands in stark contrast to the anti-Semitic practices of most of the autocratic Islamic states of our day.