Islam and Democracy: Fear of the Modern World (5 page)

Then the old man pointed out the barge coming down the river in midstream, and they saw

And the Commander of the Faithful said to Ja
^c
afar, “By Allah, O Ja-
^c
afar, my reason is confounded and I am filled with amazement at this matter”
³
Nothing is more disturbing than to “see oneself’ without having previously repressed anything. How should we react when destiny brings us face to face with ourselves? One can go crazy over less than that. The most incomprehensible stranger is that
gharib
who lives within us, buried in the deepest levels of our private selves. Compared to that foreignness, the rest is easy to probe.

Democracy is like that sovereign boat that floats on the river of time, obliging us to face what we have been unable to contemplate up to now in our Muslim culture:
^c
aql
(reason) and
ra
y
(personal opinion or judgment).
⁴
Since the beginning Muslims have given their lives to pose and solve the question that has remained an enigma up until the present: to obey or to reason, to believe or to think? The assertion that the individual and his freedom are not the sole property of the West is at the heart of our tradition, but it has been submerged in incessant bloodbaths. The West with its insistence on democracy seems to us eminently
gharib,
foreign, because it is a mirror of what frightens us, the wound that fifteen centuries have not succeeded in binding: the fact that personal opinion always brings violence. Under the terror of the sword, political despotism has obliged Muslims to defer discussion about responsibility, freedom to think, and the impossibility of blind obedience. That was called the closing of the gates of
ijtihad,
“private initiative.”

The
gharb,
by constantly talking about democracy, brings before our eyes the phantom ship of those who were decapitated for refusing to obey. It also brings to the surface the struggle between the pen and the sword: that is, the struggle between, on the one hand, the intellectuals, the
qadis
(judges) thirsting for justice, the Sufis thirsting for freedom, and the poets who tried to express their individuality; and, on the other hand, the caliphs and their
shari
^c
a,
their very authoritarian reading of divine law.

The West compels Muslims to remember Imam Malik Ibn Anas, the founder of the Malikite school, which we adhere to in North Africa. He died in the year 179 of the Hejira as a result of torture ordered by the caliph: “The governor of Medina summoned him and tried to make him take back his words. When he refused, the governor ordered him stripped naked and whipped. His hand [which held the pen] was beaten so badly that his shoulder was dislocated.” Imam Malik still refused to take back his words. That was in year 147. It isn’t important to know what his words were: the essential thing is that they expressed his opinion, which was different from the caliph’s. Imam Malik never recovered from his beating; he lived on as a cripple, continuing to write and to struggle, until he finally died as a result of his injuries.
⁵

The West, which constantly talks about democracy via its satellites and media networks, is frightening to some because it awakens the memory of forgotten greats of the past who are never celebrated by today’s leaders. They were the defenders of that little thing, so fragile, so vulnerable, called
karama,
“dignity.” There was Hallaj, the Sufi who insisted that the human being is the depository of
haqq,
“truth,” and that each person reflects divine beauty and as a result is necessarily sovereign. Hallaj was burned alive in Baghdad in year 390 of the Hejira (the eleventh century A.D.) because he asked, for example, why the earth and its inhabitants were so estranged from the divine.

Since only closeness to or remoteness from the divine can legitimate the authority of the imam, he has no authority if everyone is as close to God as he is. Hallaj insisted on the privilege of the human being to be a creature of God and, as such, capable of self- guidance since he is endowed with reason and reflects the remarkable power and grandeur of the intellect. He thus challenged authority simply by declaring that he was
al-haqq,
truth incarnate. His
“ana al-haqq
“ ("I am truth") did not fall on deaf ears. Hallaj and his ideas were discussed in the streets and bazaars of Baghdad. The street gawkers were present on the day of his torture, which was of course public so that everyone would understand the caliph’s action. If human beings claim that they are worthy of their God and that they can very well understand the truth by themselves, then of what use are the caliph and the imam and all the violence they inflict? It was not easy for the caliph to decide to execute Hallaj, because what Hallaj said made sense to many people. “He received a thousand blows and didn’t utter a word. . . . The executioner cut off his hands and feet, cut off his head, which he kept aside, and then burned the body. When it was nothing but ashes, he threw it into the Tigris and planted the head on Baghdad’s bridge.”
⁶
As he was being tortured Hallaj chanted, “
Ana al-haqq.”

Who wants to remember? Who wants to disinter the bodies of the past and look back into that distant gloomy dawn when the cry for individuality and dignity was stifled in blood? How are we to flee from the wound within ourselves that we thought scarred over and long forgotten? If we had a true understanding of our past, we would feel less alienated by the West and its democracy. Does the
gharb
frighten the ruling despots, and the mini-despots who dream of replacing them, because it obliges them to plunge into that extraordinary quest for the Arab’s truncated individuality?

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights doesn’t frighten people because it declares that “the will of the people shall be the basis of the authority of government” and that “everyone has the right to take part in the government of his country.” It is frightening because it awakens the memory of the Kharijites, that rebel sect that emerged at the beginning of Islamic history which is linked in our memory to terrorism and anarchy.

Side by side with the Sufis, who philosophized about the need to reject the idea of blind submission, another movement arose whose members were devoted to assassinating the imams who displeased them. Throughout its history Islam has been marked by two trends: an intellectual trend that speculated on the philosophical foundations of the world and humanity, and another trend that turned political challenge violent by resort to force. The first tradition was that of the
falasifa,
the Hellenized philosophers, and of the Sufis, who drew from Persian and Indian culture; the second was the Kharijite tradition of political subversion.

The Kharijites (seceders) never dreamed of changing the relationship between the leader and the community; they simply thought that by rebelling against the imam and sometimes killing him they could change things. The
falasifa
and the Sufis proposed a profound reflection on the nature of humanity and the nature of the divine, thus bringing up the question of the place of reason and personal opinion, as did the Western philosophers of the Enlightenment. The two traditions raised the same issues that we are today told are imports from the West, issues that Islam has never resolved: that of
ta
^c
a
(obedience to the imam, the leader of the community) and that of individual freedom. Political Islam resolved these issues neither in theory (for debate was always stifled by the caliph) nor in practice, for the idea of representation was never effected, although the idea that the imam is chosen by the community is deeply rooted in Sunni Islam.

The
gharib
is still
^c
ajib.
The strange is always fascinating, and as in the tales of the
Arabian Nights,
one never knows what foot to stand on when faced with the unusual. Something that fascinates you, but that you don’t understand, can eventually destroy you. Western democracy, although it seems to carry within it the seeds of life, is too linked in our history with the seeds of death. But the death of whom? Of the authoritarian technocrats or the powerless intellectuals? Of the officials who are the watchdogs or the people who raise the challenge?

The imam, who leads the
umma
(community) along the right path—that almost mythical figure who has fascinated Western television audiences since the spectacular entry of the Ayatollah Khomeini onto the scene in the 1970s—is not a strong man in Muslim political theory. From the beginning of Islam he was meant to be a vulnerable, challengeable leader, which often earned him assassination. But the extreme vulnerability that was an important component of the imamate—the theory of the ideal leader and the relationship between leader and followers—has disappeared in modern Islam, which politicians shamelessly manipulate to hide their anachronistic personal desire to exercise a narrow authoritarianism.

Whether they are now established leaders or challengers who want to replace the established leaders and flaunt promises of spirituality, the politicians who have used Islam have succeeded by recognizing the impossibility of advocating straight-out authoritarianism. Who will vote for a leader who cries from the rooftops that he wants to suppress the individual’s right to make decisions? By promising on the contrary that if he becomes leader he will act like an imam, the modern politician mobilizes fifteen centuries of hopes. The ideal imam is just because he is attentive to the needs of the community and actively involved in people’s well-being. But according to the ideal, the imam is just only because he is vulnerable and challengeable. Today that vulnerability has disappeared from the scene through the combined effect of two phenomena: the separation of Muslim memory from the rationalist tradition of Islam, and the modern media. These two phenomena have given birth to a monstrosity: the all-powerful, unchallenged, unchallengeable media imam.

We can distinguish between two types of imam: the type created by the modern media, one who uses the media to create himself, versus the imam in the tradition of the Prophet, that is, the ideal imam described in the Koran and whose characteristics were later systematized in the political theory of the imamate and the caliphate, the visionary leader of the Muslim community. There is, of course, a great difference between these two imams. The media imam is strong, whereas the traditional imam is vulnerable. The media imam is the man we see on the screen explaining that he draws his power from God. The traditional imam did the same thing, but before the existence of television. This is an important distinction, because television cannot show complexities; it selects a detail, which then becomes enormous and takes over the whole screen. This technological effect is disastrous for our ideal imam. His vulnerability has disappeared in some way or other, if only because an imam and his opponent are never systematically interviewed on television. However, an imam always has an opponent. Neglecting this fact means shuffling the cards, and where politics is concerned, shuffling the cards necessarily gives the advantage to the one in power. This is what makes it essential to restore to our modern-day Caesars what they lack: their vulnerability. It must be restored if we are to understand the emotions at play today, with intolerance being absolutely pivotal.

The words “imam” and “caliph” both mean leader of the Muslim community. The difference is that the first is based on a spatial conception and the second on a temporal one. The imam is the person who is “in front of"; he occupies the leading place. The caliph is the successor to the Prophet, the one who takes his place as governor of the faithful. Often the word “imam” is used to designate the one who leads the prayers, whereas the caliph has other duties (executing justice, directing the army, etc.) in addition to leading the prayers. One may say that a caliph is always an imam (he leads the prayers), but an imam is not necessarily a caliph. He might simply be a small-time official who leads the prayers in the neighborhood mosque. In the beginning the two functions were linked; the caliph necessarily had to lead the prayers. But very quickly the functions were separated. The caliph assigned someone else to fulfill the duties of imam in his place. Nevertheless, when they refer to leadership in the political sense, “imam” and “caliph” are synonymous.
¹

Bernard Lewis rightly points out that the office of ayatollah is a nineteenth-century creation in Iran, and that the “reign of Khomeini” is a twentieth-century innovation.
²
An imam who comes to power through cassette tapes sent from exile in France is certainly not some musty survivor of medieval tradition. It is true that we don’t know much about the Islamic Middle Ages—though we can go so far as to state that imams did not have cassette tapes. We can also guess that our ignorance is far from being an accident; its cultivation is in fact a key political card which reflects a precise plan. For how can we evaluate which “Muslim identity” among those the politicians are selling is the authentic one if we don’t have a deep understanding of our history?

Not only are the fundamentalist states, which base their political legitimacy on the past, not committed to understanding Islamic history; they also censor the books that try to clarify it. In that part of the Muslim world which has fabulous resources as its disposal from oil sales, no plans exist for museums or archival collections or serious archeological excavations. What is most striking about “museums” in Islamic countries, whether in Lahore, Dakar, or Rabat, is the amount of dust on the meager number of works one finds, and the monastic silence surrounding the few custodians on duty. You almost feel a need to apologize for disturbing them, and the incredible number of bureaucratic steps required to make a photocopy or buy a reproduction makes you want to leave empty- handed and go home to fantasize quietly about the past.

Islam is probably the only monotheistic religion in which scholarly exploration is systematically discouraged, if not forbidden, since rational analysis would not serve the purposes of the despots. The Muslim history we possess is that ordered by the viziers to fulfill the needs of the caliphal palaces. Passing over in silence what the people think of the imam is a priority in that writing of history. One of the things which that history has tried to bury is fear of the imam—not just the fear he inspired, but also the fear he always carried deep within his thoughts, like a tyrannical lover.

Perhaps the world has never seen a power as fragile as that of the imam. He is owed obedience (
ta
^c
a)
only if he is just
(
^c
adil).
In the Koran the imam is sometimes a man and sometimes, as in sura 15, verse 19, a “high road plain to see” (
imam mubin).
A just imam must follow the road already laid out which leads the community to happiness on earth and in the Beyond. The importance of such a preestablished way of acting is that it gives the imam credibility in the eyes of Muslims, which is why
shari
^c
a
(divine law) also means “the road.” A politician who gives himself the name of imam in order to deal harshly with the members of the community and strip them of their rights certainly does not conform to the ideal of the
^c
adil
imam, the just ruler. Few imams have managed to lead the community to happiness, and many have died because of it, killed by dissatisfied followers. In Islam the words that relate to power and the relationship between ruler and ruled are spatial. This point will come up often because it forms the crux of the anxiety that the idea of instituting modern Western-style democracy arouses. Democracy recognizes no prescribed path to be followed, because such prescriptiveness would curtail individual freedom.

As must those of women, the acts of the imam must be within the
hudud,
Allah’s limits. If the imam violates the limits, say some sects, he is subject to being killed. This vulnerability is completely absent from the modern media image of the imam. Two needs are superimposed on that image. First there is the need of the Western journalist, who wants to inform his audience as quickly as possible and to give a simple, clear description of what is happening in our part of the world; and there is the need of the political leader who claims the title of imam, who wants to be filmed and interviewed, and who has a precise message to sell—the message of the
ta
^c
a
that Muslims owe him. If these two needs are not kept carefully distinct, we will not understand anything about that “despotic and fanatic Islam,” a media construct that is easily conveyed but that neglects many important historical and symbolic mechanisms. It is those mechanisms, which are so often neglected by the media, that I wish to introduce here to restore a more nuanced image of Islam, an image in which the small details count and help produce more precise contours.

Today Islam is presented as a bastion of fanatical despotism in which reason has no place. Passive Muslims thoughtlessly obey the imam. For at least two reasons, nothing is more false than this notion of the fanaticism of Muslims. First, the history of Islam’s leaders is a sorry tale of one political assassination after another, the killing of the imam by malcontents among the faithful. I call that trend the “tradition of rebel Islam,” a sort of spontaneous democracy, or “people power,” that reacted by killing the leader without putting much thought into how to bring about basic changes. Alongside the rebel tradition of revolt focused on the person of the leader was another form of dissidence, the “rationalist tradition.” This tradition proposed reintroducing reason
(
^c
aql)
and personal opinion (ray) into the political process.

This rationalist tradition has had its defenders and martyrs, the best known being the Mu
^c
tazila, who raised the question of
qadar
(predestination), that is, the question of whether individuals are responsible for their acts. This rationalist tradition considered
^c
aql
a precious endowment, and its defenders glow in our history against a seamy background of political intrigue. The Mu
^c
tazila were systematically combated by the holders of power, who condemned them as
falasifa
(philosophers) who were “polluting” Islam with the humanistic patrimony of ancient Greece.

From the first centuries of Islam the Mu
^c
tazila were castigated as being in the service of foreigners and the propagators of enemy ideas. As such they were repudiated as
mulhidun
(atheists) who were perverting the faith. This condemnation of the humanistic spirit, which began with the Mu
^c
tazila on the pretext that they were importing foreign ideas, has persisted throughout the centuries and continues still today. The difference is that the Greek influence was extended elsewhere, and now it is the whole West that is condemned as the source of borrowing and cultural importation. But the principle remains the same: for fifteen centuries Moslem politicians have censored intellectuals who wanted to synthesize the humanistic traditions by labeling as polluting the very thing that creates the dynamic of all civilization: its capacity to assimilate and use new ideas and accomplishments of the human spirit. Nevertheless, the fact that the rationalist, humanistic tradition was rejected by despotic politicians does not mean that it doesn’t exist. Having an arm amputated is not the same as being born with an arm missing. Studies of amputees show that the amputated member remains present in the person’s mind. The more our rational faculty is suppressed, the more obsessed we are by it. But first let us examine the rebel tradition.

It is difficult to imagine a weaker political leader than a Muslim imam. The ideal imam is modest, trembling with fear before his God and terrified before those he governs, for making an unjust decision will lead him directly to hell. An outraged believer is capable of anything. In theory, it is the Muslim’s duty to revolt against an imam who makes unjust decisions, and some sects quickly decreed that he should be assassinated. This rebel tradition is one of the most primitive that Islamic societies have known.

Beginning in the first decades after the death of the Prophet, the Kharijites raised the question of whether you must obey the imam if he does not protect your rights. Should you blindly obey, or can you trust your own judgment? The Kharijites answered by saying that you are not obliged to obey; you can “go out” (
kharaja)
from obedience. “To go out” is the title they gave themselves, one that has stuck to all dissident movements: “Any person who goes out
[kharaja]
from obedience to a just imam whom the community has chosen is called
khariji
/’ explains Shahrastani.
³
The motto of the Kharijites, “La
hikma ilia lillah
“ ("Power belongs only to God"), was used for the first time during the fourth caliphate, that of
^c
Ali, and led to his assassination by terrorists sent by the Kharijites in year 40 of the Hejira (661). This same slogan has condemned hundreds of imams and Muslim leaders, the last of whom was President Anwar Sadat of Egypt. Political dissidence is expressed in Islam as condemnation of the leader. It is this rebel tradition that links dissidence with terrorism.

The Kharijites, who intimidated Muslim populations for centuries, initiated the use of terrorism as an answer to arbitrary rule. Because they did not agree with the imam,
^c
Ali, they decided to assassinate him. In 40/660 a band of Kharijites meeting in Mecca decided on the victims and the killers. The one who was to kill
^c
Ali, Ibn Muljam, was directed to go to Kufa, where he would find his victim. The mosque was to be the site of the execution, since the caliph went there at dawn every day to lead the prayers. One member of the team charged with the assassination was a woman, Qatami: “On the night of Friday 13 Ramadan [January 20, 661] that woman withdrew for prayer under a sort of mosquito net within the walls of the great mosque. . . . She brought a piece of silk which she cut into strips and put around the men’s foreheads, while the men took their swords and went to sit facing the door through which
^c
Ali would enter the mosque, as he did every morning at the first call of the muezzin.” When the muezzin’s call to prayer rang out, everything happened as planned: “
^c
Ali came out of his house and called out in a loud voice, ‘Muslims, come to prayer, come to prayer!’ Ibn Muljam and his accomplices threw themselves on him. . . . Ibn Muljam struck him a sword blow on the top of his head.” Thus was violence established as the corollary of dissidence. One detail in the account of al-Mas
^c
udi summarizes the tragedy of political Islam: “It is reported that
^c
Ali had kept watch that whole night before the murder and that he kept repeating as he paced from the door to his bedroom, ‘God knows that I have never lied, nor been accused of lying.’ “
⁴
This heartrending cry, even if it comes from the imagination of al-Mas
^c
udi (who was known for his exaggerations), perfectly summarizes the weakness of the imam, which today is hidden from view.