Islam and Democracy: Fear of the Modern World (21 page)

Al-Mas
^c
udi, a tenth-century scholar who is criticized by many “serious” Arab historians for being too anecdotal and for a tendency to get lost in details, seems to have been fascinated by the star cults and collected an enormous amount of information about them. He tried to situate the cults geographically and to identify their cultural environment, and especially to establish how they came to Arabia from Greece and particularly India. Yemen emerged as an extraordinary antenna, attracting and tapping all the world’s knowledge. Al-Mas
^c
udi described his visit in 336/947 to a temple dedicated to Venus, the temple of Ghumdan in San
^c
a, which was destroyed by
^c
Uthman Ibn Affan (who later became the third caliph): “Today ... it is nothing but a mass of ruins that form a sizable mound. ...It is said that when the kings of Yemen climbed to the top of that mound during the night, illuminated by torches, people could see them from a distance of three days’ march.”
¹⁸
Al-Mas
^c
udi also places Venus among the Sabaeans in “the temples dedicated to intellectual matters and the stars,” where she is represented by a triangle within a square—a very common motif in Muslim art which is found in the geometric tile designs that decorate the walls of caliphal palaces and mosques from Lahore to Marrakech:

It is time for us to unearth those mysteries, for our glorious modernity will depend on the reappropriation of all that is at work in the deep layers of our unconscious. Already archeological studies of ancient cults in Yemen have uncovered considerable data about the sacred in that region and particularly about the cult of Venus.
²⁰

Worship of the stars in pre-Islamic Arabia is mentioned in the Koran itself, notably in sura 6. The one who practiced it was none other than our ancestor Abraham, who lived in Mesopotamia and was saved by Allah:

And so monotheism was established in Arabia for the first time, when the truth was revealed to Abraham, who renounced worship of the stars, particularly the sun and the moon. Later mankind forgot the truth that was revealed to Abraham, and Allah sent other prophets to remind the straying people: Isaac, Jacob, Noah, David, Solomon, Job, Joseph, Moses, and Aaron (sura 6, v. 85); Zachariah, John, Jesus, and Elias (v. 86); and Ishmael, Elisha, Jonah, and Lot (v. 87). Finally Allah honored the Arabs by revealing to Muhammad at the beginning of the seventh century an Arabic Koran (sura 41, v. 3), for the others had been revealed in other languages.

Although the other
ahl al-kitab
(Peoples of the Book), Jews and Christians, had practiced monotheism since the time of Abraham and renounced the worship of the stars, the Arabs had not taken the same step. Muhammad found them more fascinated than ever by the stars, and with no desire to forsake them. The Koran describes them as fervently committed to those cults. In verse 37 of sura 41, Allah commands: “Adore not the sun nor the moon; but adore Allah Who created them. ..."In his commentary on this verse, Tabari tells us that Allah brings those who have strayed back to the right path by teaching that the course of the stars is regular only because they obey the divine will. They are the proof of the uniqueness and supremacy of Allah: “The sun and the moon must not be worshiped for themselves,” he explains, “because they are incapable of self-guidance and of following their regular trajectory in the sky on their own. It is God himself who dictates their trajectory, and they are only signs of his power.” In order to make us really understand the meaning of the verse, Tabari says elsewhere: “If Allah wanted to, he would be able to hide their light from you and to plunge you into darkness, unable to find your way, incapable of seeing what is going on.”
²¹

The Koran mentions worship of the sun as it was practiced in Yemen, at the southern end of the Arabian peninsula—where a woman, the famous Queen of Sheba (whose Arabic name is Balqis), reigned; “I found her and her people worshipping the sun instead of Allah” (sura 27, v. 24). Moreover, a sanctuary of the Banu Tamim which was devoted to worship of the deity al-Shams was destroyed and its idol smashed.
²²
Even now the word
al-shams
(the sun) is feminine in our beautiful Arabic language. The Koran also speaks of the worship of another star,
al-shfra,
or Sirius (sura 53, v. 49). Commenting on this verse, Tabari says that
al-shi
^c
ra
is a star that some Arabs of the
jahiliyya
worshiped.
²³
Sirius, Jupiter, Mars, Venus—the celestial panoply displayed for our eyes every night—were also magisterial conquests by Islam, which was obliged to deploy its strategy not only on earth but also, especially, on the scale of the galaxies. The triumph of Islam ineluctably took place by pulling into its orbit everything that moves in the universe, with Venus in the lead.

Al-
^c
Uzza must be disinterred by our archeologists—al-
^c
Uzza, with her roots deeply buried in the earth, drenched in the blood of the
ghabghab.
We must recover that dark age if we wish to understand our archaic fears and to rationalize them. The pre-Islamic violence was so pervasive that many tribes no longer respected even the
haram
months, those in which it was forbidden to hunt and kill. Al-
^c
Uzza is forever linked in memory with disorder and killing in the city.
²⁴
Like the modern era, the age of darkness was characterized by a cycle of poverty, violence, and disorder. Islam broke the cycle and taught the Arabs to appropriate the stars and time and to fabricate for themselves a present. But in order to do so, al-
^c
Uzza first had to be destroyed—not only physically, but also wiped out of memory: the feminine should never again be seen where power is exercised. The time of feminine power was to be the dead time, the zero time.

Al-
^c
Uzza was shorn of her power, but unlike al-Lat, she was hardly defended at all by her ancient worshipers. The destruction of her temple, just after the conquest of Mecca in 8/630, was a spectacular event. Khalid Ibn al-Walid, one of the most valiant of the great men, led the attack. The monotheistic order required that the feminine should be barred from the sphere of power, which coincided with the sacred. Woman would be the equal of man in all domains in Islam, since she was also a believer and endowed with reason and will; but she was henceforward to be invisible in the political sphere. In the palace of the caliph she had her place—behind the
hijab,
in the harem—the “forbidden space.” Her space had to be separated from violence. Women must never have access to that which kills and introduces disorder: the power to govern the city, which was steeped in blood during the reign of al-
^c
Uzza, Manat, and al-Lat. Like the world, the caliphal palace was divided into two parts—a male space, where the sovereign manipulated power and used violence, and a female space, the harem, where women were distanced from everything that had any semblance of power.

Today the parliaments of the Arab states seem to take themselves for the caliphal palaces of yesteryear. There only men discuss and decide the fate of the world and its peoples while women wait at home, veiled and silent. The power of the feminine will henceforth be aligned with the
jahiliyya,
the zero time of Islam. The Arabs know very well that “zero” does not mean “nothing.” It was they who had the genius to rehabilitate this number (which they are supposed to have taken from the Indians, who were already using it), which allowed humanity to make the prodigious intellectual leap that started it on the road to modern mathematics. Women were veiled not only because their invisibility made it possible to forget difference and create the fiction that the
umma
was unified because it was homogeneous, but above all in order to make people forget what the Arabs of th
e jahiliyya
knew only too well: it is the body and its unconquerable sexuality that is the irreducible fortress of sovereign individuality. The Arabs of the
jahiliyya
could allow themselves to insult their gods, to be haughty and insolent, for they knew that they were irreparably mortal. They didn’t believe in the existence of another world and found the idea of resurrection (
al-ba
^c
th)
preached by the Prophet the sheerest fantasy.

Al-ba
^c
thy
resurrection after death, gives the Muslim immortality. It accomplishes two miracles with one stroke: it ties the life of the individual to the trajectory of the stars, and it effaces the uterus. A man born of the uterus of a woman is inevitably mortal. The Arabs of the
jahiliyya
did not recognize the law of paternity. To them it was a secondary consideration because they thought themselves mortal and couldn’t imagine how God would make them born again from a heap of bones:

Becoming immortal was something unimaginable for a pre- Islamic Arab, who distrusted everything and believed only what he could see: individuals are born of women, they die and become dust. Paternity has meaning only for a man who thinks himself immortal, who sees himself as part of a succession of generations, as integrated into a design that goes beyond the brief, fleeting individual experience. For the “ignorant” people of the
jahiliyya,
coming back to life after death was “mere magic” (sura 11, v. 7), and it was not easy for Islam to lead these rough bedouin to be on intimate terms with the stars and able to make use of them.
²⁵

The Arabs were to be resurrected in the Beyond; the Muslim would have the privilege of
ba
^c
th.
He would be reborn, whereas invisibility was the law for women, who are the bearers of finitude, with the mark of stupid, foolish death in their wombs.

The reform movements of the last two centuries have more or less all presented themselves as a renaissance (
inbi
^c
ath
). As the most recent example, the word
ba
^c
th
is that used by the founders of Saddam Hussein’s Ba
^c
th party to express their faith in the rebirth of the Arab world in the modern age. Like the other monotheistic religions, Islam completely changed the relationship of the behiever to time, enriching it and interweaving the behiever’s life with the movement of the stars.

Islam gave the faithful immortality in exchange for submission. The Arabs were to become immortal. A great Beyond opened to them the royal road to the conquest of time. They would no longer die; Paradise awaited them. Because the child born of the womb of the woman is mortal, however, the law of paternity was instituted to screen off the uterus and woman’s will within the sexual domain. Islam offered the Arabs two gifts, the idea of paternity and the Muslim calendar—gifts that are the two faces of the same thing, the privilege of eternity. The new code of immortality was to be inscribed on the body of woman. Henceforth the children born of the uterus of a woman would belong to their father, and he is certain of gaining Paradise if he submits to the divine will.

The Arabs, then, entered history by the main gate: the mastery of time through the submission of the world to an Arab calendar. In their dealings with the Arabs, the Persians and Romans were obliged to use the Arab calendar of the Hejira—a calendar whose year 1 erased the previous 622 years of the Christian calendar and thousands of years of the Jewish one. Masters of time and masters of women, the Muslims, with Koran in one hand and calendar in the other, set forth on the conquest of the world, succeeding with lightning speed for some centuries. Today they compute their debt and its amortization by the Christian calendar. As for women, under the compulsory chador, armed with university degrees and the contraceptive pill they challenge and threaten the city.

In the eleventh century the powerful Fatimid caliph al-Hakim ordered the astronomer, optician, and mathematician Ibn al-Haytham to use his science to regulate the waters of the Nile. In an attempt to solve his political problems, the caliph commanded the astronomer to find a means of halting the Nile’s disastrous fluctuations between flood and drought which brought on famine and inflation, resulting in riots and political instability. Ibn al-Haytham tackled the task but failed. His knowledge of mathematics proved inadequate to find a solution. Al-Hakim dismissed him from court, and Ibn al-Haytham finished out his days as a copyist. Nonetheless, his treatise on optics became a classic text and was used in the West in a Latin translation up to the time of Kepler.
¹

Today few Arab heads of state would dream of an ecological approach on this scale as a solution to the problems of unemployment and instability; their solution would more likely be to send an army into the streets or to imprison the rioters. Facing an ecological disaster, they would turn not to an Arab scientific team but rather to an American firm, just as the emir of Kuwait did to put the oil wells back in operation. It is not that there are not enough Arab brains to recruit; some thirty thousand university graduates in engineering from Muslim countries are now living in Europe and America, where many have become responsible for research and development in their professions.
²
/One finds 754 such specialists listed in the latest edition of
American Men and Women of Science,
among whom are 225 physicists and mathematicians. But why, unlike the eleventh-century caliph, does neither the emir of Kuwait nor any other Arab head of state think of calling on that army of scientific Muslims and “commanding” from them research aimed at solving the problem of political instability and economic neglect?

Al-Hakim tied sovereignty to the Muslim calendar, which anchors political decision making to the movements of the stars and the mastery of time. Today Muslims are exiles in time, and their exile is symbolized by the shrinking of the field of activities that are regulated by our calendar. Everything important is controlled by Western time, from airline schedules to the payment of the foreign debt. For al-Hakim, the Muslim sovereign, time and the paths of the stars were momentous questions. Under his rule, Cairo became a meeting place for the world’s great astronomers. As a Shi
^c
ite Muslim, he knew better than anyone the importance of light and the intimate relationship with the stars which gave meaning to a life. The Fatimids gave their princely fabrics the color of light; their robes and turbans were white and gold. For them, astronomy was both an avocation and a vehicle of political decision making. Just as modern-day Muslims do in primary school, al-Hakim as a child recited verses 32 and 33 of sura 14:

Al-Hakim was so fascinated by the cycle of the moon and the movement of the stars that he would spend whole nights observing them, forgetting to sleep, and finally forgetting the world. He ended up sinking into the madness that lies in wait for those who think too much about death. For what is our love of the stars if it is not fear of death? We depart, but they remain. This is the message of their mysterious, steady twinkling.
³
But that is another story. What I want to talk about here is the story of how Arabs have been dispossessed of time. What was so psychologically traumatic about the Gulf War was that it revealed that the heavens and the stars were in the service of the United States. What is Islam if it does not put at the service of Muslims the stars and time, which are given meaning and importance through our calendar?

The idea that Islam is the mastery of time and the anchoring of human life to the course of the stars is found throughout the Koran. Verse 6 of sura 10 says:

Being Muslim means being master of time and the stars, which Allah created to permit us to establish a
tarikh,
“calendar.” Isn’t it revealing that the word
tarikh
means both “calendar” and “history"? The
tarikh
is the calendar that allows us to situate ourselves in the present, to mark the dates for actions to be undertaken, but also wisely to align behind us the accumulation of the days and years gone by. A people without a
tarikh
have neither a present nor a history; they simply don’t exist. There are of course many Arabic words that denote time: for example,
zaman, dahr, waqt.
But the idea of
tarikh
entwines time with human endeavor; it is in time that action unfolds and events follow on one another.

With the idea of
tarikh
we come upon the most secret, least conscious dimension of Islam, although certainly a crucial one: the temporal dimension, which produces anxiety about death. We fear death because we want more time to laugh and love. If today religion is enjoying a resurgence, it is because all existing science has not dealt in any real way with the unbearable brevity of our days.
⁴
The Muslim calendar,
tarikh,
which begins with year 1 of the Hejira, resolves the fear of death with a single concept—
ba
^c
th
(resurrection). This concept “fatefully” ties together the movement of the stars, the flux of day and night, and woman, life’s starting point.

Is it possible that our idea of woman, who gives birth, thus beginning individual time, is in some way commingled in the deep obscurity of our unconscious with our apprehension of the end of life’s span, of that death that religion has precisely come to deny and erase? Can it be that the phobia about the mixing of the sexes, about women’s invasion of the streets and Muslim public places, has something to do with the needed reconsideration of our relationship to death—that is, to time? Can it be that the sexual crisis that is so well expressed by the obsession with the
hijab
is in fact a crisis about our perception of time? Can it be that woman, signifying birth and thus inevitably death, obliges Muslims to reconsider the present, the time they so scorn and neglect? The dream of immortality that the religion proposes pushes the fear of death from consciousness, but at the price of devaluing present time, the time marked by the rhythm of the stars in their courses and the regular appearance of the sun and moon, yesterday and today. We die a little at each sunset. In lands where sunset has a spectacular splendor, as on the Atlantic coast of Morocco, the anguish that overtakes us when the sun sinks into the sea is the realization that there is one day less between us and the end. Perhaps more than any other religion, Islam pays particular attention to the stars and the march of time.

Awareness of the stars and their light pervades the Koran, which reflects the brightness of the heavenly bodies in many verses. The blossoming of mathematics and astronomy was a natural consequence of this awareness. Understanding the cosmos and the movements of the stars means understanding the marvels created by Allah. There would be no persecuted Galileo in Islam, because Islam, unlike Christianity, did not force people to believe in a “fixed” heaven. In the Christian cosmos, Bertrand Russell tells us, “the orthodox theory was the Ptolemaic, according to which the earth is at rest in the centre of the universe, while the sun, moon, planets, and system of fixed stars revolve around it.”
⁵
This world view is very different from that of Islam: in the Koran the whole universe moves. This meant that the theorizing of mathematicians and astronomers could not threaten religious authority, as it did in the Catholic church, which—fearing that if the earth revolved around the sun, ecclesiastical authority would collapse—found itself obliged to suppress the savants.

Islam cannot be threatened by the discoveries of astronomy, such as the observation of new galaxies, because its vision is of a cosmos in movement. Threats to its authority do not come from outside, but from within human beings. It is imagination, and the irreducible sovereignty of the individual which engender disequilibrium and tension. A Galileo challenging the authority of Islam must be not a scientist but an essayist or novelist, a Salman Rushdie, and exploration of the psyche will surely be the arena of all future sedition.
⁷
It is certainly not the stars that pose a problem for Islam; in fact, it is their movement and their power that constitute, permeate, and inspire it. Shi
^c
ite Islam would be incomprehensible if one ignored the role played by light and the stars.
⁸

In the Islamic vision, the wealth of the earth and the heavens belongs to those who link earthly governance to the trajectory of the stars; everything else follows from that. Today our heads of state, who live without looking at the sky and have no passion for astronomy, the favorite pastime of the caliphs of old, are completely detached from any relationship to the stars and their movement. Intimate knowledge of the sky and the stars is the monopoly of the Christian West. Like idiots we continue to sing “
Ya layI ya qamar”
("O night, O moon"), the inevitable refrain of every love song, all the while ignoring the fact that both night and moon now belong to the masters of artificial satellites. The
tarikh
was one of the precious gifts that God gave to some miserable pre-Islamic Arabs who were being ignored and scorned in their time. We can see that scorn in the response of the king of Persia to a letter sent by the Prophet in year 6 of his own calendar:

If Islam and its Prophet make sense on the eve of the twenty-first century, it is because the
risala,
the message of the Koran, is nothing but a series of prescriptions about how to escape from the scorn of the international powers by appropriating time—that is, putting the faithful in orbit and attaching their lives to the dance of the stars. This poses the interesting questions of who the first to have the idea of the calendar was, and why the year 622 was chosen as its starting point.

Who was the first to have the idea of the calendar? The answers to that question vary. According to one, it was the Prophet who proposed establishing the
tarikh
soon after his arrival in Medina (thus, right after the Hejira). Another version of the origin of the calendar says that it was during the time of caliph
^c
Umar that its need was felt:

Because the Prophet had a cosmic dimension to his thinking which none of his Companions had, to me it seems more likely that it was he who instituted the calendar on his arrival in the new city. It should not be forgotten that he also changed the direction of the
qibla,
that is, of prayer, shortly after his arrival in Medina. The Muslims had been praying in the direction of Jerusalem for several months, but once the Jewish community of Medina became hostile, the Prophet received the order from God to change the direction of the
qibla
to Mecca. One anecdote concerning
^c
Umar gives an idea of what it was like to live in a society in the throes of a revolutionary turnabout of attitudes: