Islam and Democracy: Fear of the Modern World (13 page)

The least confused Muslims are those whose heads of state have chosen to keep their traditional titles. In the absence of a proper education in civics, they don’t have to do somersaults to accommodate
ra
is
(head) as a translation of “president.” Those who live in a monarchy, as I do, have the least problem with official titles. The word
malik
(king) poses no difficulty because it is not new; it exists in the Koran and in the dictionaries of medieval Arabic. We have whole treatises dealing with
mulk
(earthly power), its nature, its rituals, and its requirements.
Ra
is al-jumhuriyya
(president of the republic), however, is not part of our heritage. It does not exist in the Koran or in the old dictionaries. In the dictionary
Lisan al-
^c
Arab
(Language of the Arabs) the two words
ra
is
and
jumhur
exist, but they are unconnected. When they are combined the result is a bizarre cocktail in which neither Frangois Mitterand nor George Bush would recognize himself, for what emerges has more to do with an Abbasid imam than anything else.

The word “republic” refers to a form of government in which power is not held by a single individual and in which the headship of state (the presidency) is not a hereditary post. This word does not exist in the Koran, although the words
hizb
(party) and
haqq
(right) are found there.

The
Lisan al-
^c
Arab
tells us that the word
al-jumhur,
which is the root of
jumhuriyya,
means “the majority of the people,” but also the most noble of them. Nevertheless, the key idea is of grouping and gathering together. The verb
jamhara
means “gathering together,” explains Ibn Manzur, the author of the dictionary. He gives several examples that affirm this gregarious and almost standardizing dimension of
jumhur,
pointing to a link in Arabic which relates to the horde, whereas the Latin
res publica
defines the nature of the leader’s power by implicitly emphasizing the border between the public and the private. One of the examples the dictionary gives to help us understand the meaning of the word is
“jumhuriyya
wine": “A wine that makes one very drunk"; it is called
jumhuriyya
because “most people consume it.” So we conclude that
jumhuriyya
describes a certain consensus, a unity within the collectivity; the word says nothing about the limits of the power exercised by the leader.

And how is the word “president” translated into Arabic? “To preside,” from the Latin
praesidere,
means “to occupy the place of authority (as in an assembly) ... to direct, control, or regulate proceedings as chief officer,” says
Webster
^}
s Third New International Dictionary.
However, in passing from English derived from Latin to Arabic, “president of the republic” becomes
ra
is al-jumhuriyya,
and in this transition from one semantic system to another the functions and position are so changed that the concept is scarcely recognizable. The head,
ra
is,
commands the rest of the body; I cannot lift my little finger if my brain doesn’t send the necessary signal. In moving from Latin to Arabic the idea of the assembly disappears; instead there is a dramatic focus on the highest point, the head. One passes from a spatial vision of presidency, which is exercised according to a horizontal schema (directing from the front of an assembly) to an Arabic bodily schema, which establishes a vertical relationship between leader and led, and in which what presides is the brain, while the others stupidly follow.

According to the
Lisan al-
^c
Arah, ra
is
is “the highest point of everything.” That is the most common meaning the word has in the Koran, where it occurs about eighteen times.
⁹
Rcfasa,
the dictionary tells us, means “to strike someone on the head.” Here we are far indeed from a relationship of peaceful exchange between leader and led. Ibn Manzur wants to make sure that we have understood clearly: “
Rcfasa
. . . means to give orders to people.” The
ra
is
is “master of the people.” On the off chance that we have not grasped the violence embedded in the relationship with the leader, he adds that “the original meaning of
irtc
^c
asa
is to take someone by the neck and make him lower his head to the ground.”

An Arab who says “president of the republic” thus doesn’t imagine an assembly in which a
ra
is
is seated facing those to whom he is supposed to listen in order to allow them to debate. When I, as an Arab woman, say
ra
is al-jumhuriyya,
I imagine a head on a body, and then I try to place myself as best I can in that bodily picture, which inevitably condemns me to powerlessness. I try to nestle down in the left toe or some obscure nook like that.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights certainly represents a traumatic break with medieval mental schemas. Its concepts, anchored in Enlightenment philosophy, could have emerged and changed perceptions in societies with a despotic tradition only if a systematic program of education and civic training had been undertaken. Such education would have been successful in transforming attitudes in depth if it had been carried out on two levels: with continual training and real participation, through the vote and representation, in democratic arrangements for decision making. Unless they are minutely remodeled, concepts of power and its use shaped in the Arabic language, which has been tightly controlled since the Abbasids so that it could not diverge from its caliphal past, swallow up all reference to the plurality that is the basis of democracy. It is in light of this lack in modern civic society, which is supposed to permit the Muslim masses access to modern humanism, that we must now return to the Koran, the basic text of Islam. In the chapters that follow we will learn why ambitious modern youths, aspiring to realize their talents and to live with dignity, are finding in the Koran concepts that express their insecurities. Written Islam, the
risala
(message), is a vast domain that resounds with a music that has the wings of hope. But to hear this murmur, we must stay away from the television mosques where the imams paid by oil money hold forth. Above all we must concentrate on ourselves, as our Sufi ancestors did long ago, in search of the Simorgh, that fabulous creature well buried in the only place able to contain it—deep within ourselves.