Islam and Democracy: Fear of the Modern World

Rating:
Summary: Can Islam and Democracy be Compatible?
Review: In her book, Islam and Democracy, Fatima Mernissi, a Moroccan author, draws back on her personal experiences, not only as a Moslem but also as a woman, to explain why democracy has not caught on in the Arab countries and what are the prospects for the future. Throughout the major part of her book, she demonstrates how the Islamic community is chained up by a set of fears that it would have to overcome to establish democracy.
The analysis is brilliant and gives religious, philosophical and historical reasons to the incapacity of the Islamic world to put in action a real democracy.
It is only in the last pages that Mernissi claims without much developing that "Our liberation will come through a rereading of our past and a reapropriation of all that has structured our civilization". She sheds however some light on two factors of optimism. The first can surprise an occidental: She thinks that the shock of the Gulf War was so great that the Muslims have emerged "free from fear". The second is carrying hope: She believes that the move of women toward self affirmation and freedom will transform the nature of the state and lead to democracy.

The first fear Mernissi points out is the traditional fear of the foreign West, "Garb", the place of darkness. Middle eastern political leaders have put in place the political institutions that apparently make the West strong, but have not educated the people to use them out of fear that their authority be challenged. These institutions soon turn corrupt and are viewed as decadent. Mernissi insists on the ancient "fear of the Imam" that has marked the history of Islam. The ruler still fears the opposition forces that have constantly rebelled and tried to kill the leader. She notes - and this is quite up to date - that with the assassination of Ali, the rebel tradition has linked dissidence with terrorism.
Thus "making obedience to the Imam correspond to obedience to God became the program and the law of Arab regimes" and still is.

On the contrary, the freedom of thought is identified with the Kharijite rebellion and disorder. To save unity the politicians of the twenties chose the tradition of obedience and not the democratic freedom of thought. Mernissi reminds us with nostalgia that another path, that of the sovereignty of the individual and freedom of opinion, were possible in the frame of Islam. The Mu'tazila philosophy brought up the place of reason and personal opinion. It was adopted by the first Abbasids during the "century of openness". Mernissi however passes very fast over the fact that this flowering Muslim thought, known as "falasifa" was an exception and that if "the concept of reason was connected to criminal activities which destroyed the solidarity of the Umma", it is because this idea was solidly founded in Islam. "The Muslim is he who believes and obeys". Mernissi tells us that modernizing without granting the freedom of thought as in Tunisia and Algeria has created confusion and brought fundamentalism opposition. She targets two fundalisms, the government fondalism, the official culture which serves as a barrier against democratic education which is feared, and opposition fundamentalism. Mernissi points out that the Arab countries that have signed the Charter of the United Nations as well as the Human Rights, had been accepting engagements without referring to their historical traditions. It is therefore not surprising if they have difficulties to hold these engagements inspired from another tradition than their own.
This fear of the freedom of thought comes from the origins of Islam and is linked to the fear of the past and of individualism. Mernissi tells us that certain features of democracy could be compared to those of the Jahiliyya, a period mostly suppressed and occulted as the example of what is incompatible with Islam, a period of arrogant individualism through the cult of the idols, crime and instability against which Mohammad fought. Traditional Islam is based on the sacrifice of the individual for the sake of the Umma's unity and solidarity. Personal opinions are considered close to a sin, where the individual forgets the interests for the community in a moment of passion.

Mernissi explains the fear of women by the interesting idea that women in power are linked in collective memory with the violence and murder of these old ages. At the time of the Jahiliyya, the goddesses of war and death were honored by bloody sacrifices. Monotheist order thus required that the female should be bared from the sphere of power which coincided with the sacred. Veiling women and separating them thus eradicates disorder. Body and sexuality were also seen as "the fortress of the condemnable sovereign individuality". Yet, says Mernissi, the Qur'an defends the equality of all the human beings and guarantees this equality in exchange for the surrender of individualism to God. Equality of all explains, according to Mernissi, the rapid expansion of Islam.

Finally, even if her book tends more toward pessimism on the near future of democracy, her ideas on the influence that women could have on the development of democracy in Islamic countries, even if they appear very optimistic, seem promising to me. She writes "Women demand renunciation of the ideal of the homogeneous city divided in two hierarchical spaces, where only one sex manages politics and decision making". She brings rightly to attention that "Women are the only ones who publicly assert their right to self affirmation as individuals" and that "their claim will transform the nature of the state".

Mernissi has also an interesting view on the consequences of the Gulf War, the "ultimate horror" for Muslims which put in light "the lack of democracy, the dependence and the powerlessness" of the Arab States who were unable to protect the Muslims. She thinks that the shock was so great that the Muslims have emerged "free of fear" accepting to make "a perilous jump into the unknown...as the least dangerous thing". It is to note that the book was published in 1992, and it is not certain that Mrs. Mernissi still maintains her opinion on this liberation of the fears. There too, she seems overly optimistic.

Mernissi concludes her book by telling the story of the Simorgh birds, to show that the future success of Arab societies depends upon its citizens' resourcefulness and independence from the state. It is still a long flight away, but it should be possible. One can share this hope as she assert that "The Arab world is about to take off for the reason that everybody, with the fundamentalists in the lead (even if they look towards the past) wants change".

Rating:
Summary: A Disorganized Rant
Review: The Moroccan scholar Fatima Mernissi is frequently upheld as the Muslim world's leading feminist thinker. Her book 'Beyond the Veil' has become standard college-reading for most people investigating the subject of women's rights in the Islamic tradition. This book, however, 'Islam and Democracy,' is a disorganized rant.

One suspects that many of these "chapters" were intended for individual essays, or perhaps were rushed into publication before they could take coherent shape as a book. Mernissi is all over the place. In the expanse of five or six pages she might make great sweeping claims about the Muslim sense of powerlessness, then claim that that powerlessness is not universal at all, but rather uniquely female, then blame Muslim despots for tyrannizing their people and preventing democracy, then blame the west for attacking and trying to overthrow Muslim despots (i.e., Saddam Hussein.) Then a few pages later she might drag out apocryphal stores of the assassination of medieval Caliphs, to demonstrate that Muslims leaders have never been strong enough!

Mernissi lavishes mythology upon fact, to the point where it is impossible to tell whether or not her use of examples is to be trusted. Despite the scientific-sounding nature of its title, 'Islam and Democracy' reads more like literary criticism: an argument about the meanings of fictions, which are then applied to the world and linked by some grand theory which - lo and behold - can be 'proven' by using more fiction as examples. It should not be surprising to find that excerpts from the Arabian Nights recur over and over again in her text.

Equally troubling is the fact that her main critique of Islam centers upon what she sees as its lack of respect for individual creativity and freedom - its adhesion to a slavish and unquestioning belief in scripture, yet she samples liberally from the Hadith - stories about the life of Muhammad and the early Muslims that even many Imams are skeptical of. In other words, she expects the reader to believe that her selection of scripture disproves other peoples' selections of scripture. And she can't even get them all straight: relating the story of an early Muslim martyr, she claims in one sentence that he bore his torture "and didn't utter a word" (20), and two sentences later, claims he was chanting the whole time.

In spite of all this, reading this book is still an education, of sorts. Much of this is due to the translation skills of Mary Jo Lakeland, who gives us a tour de force of Arabic etymology, and does great justice to the complex layers of meaning of this language, whose root words are so flexible and susceptible to subtle manipulation. If you would like to get a sense - albeit a dreadfully confused sense - of where one pole of Muslim critical theory stood in the 1990s, then this could be a useful text. If, however, you were hoping to learn something substantial about Islam and Democracy, you will be disappointed.

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Summary: Examines fundamentalist thinking in the Middle East
Review: Will democracy ever be possible in the volatile Arab world, and can human rights be respected under fundamentalist rules? Islamic scholar Mernissi examines fundamentalist thinking in the Middle East, considering how those on opposing sides use the same sacred texts and those who use them for violence, and providing keys to understanding Muslim and Western perceptions.