Over the past few decades, death and
devastation, dispossession and humiliation
have become the lot of ordinary Muslims
around the world. In Pakistan today Muslims
are massacred by Muslims on account of
differences in sect, gender and class. In
India they pay the price for being a
minority in the midst of a majority fired by
militant Hindu nationalism. In Afghanistan
an erratic jihad instigated years ago by the
United States in complicity with the Saudi
royal family and a Pakistani dictator has
reduced the Muslim country into killing
fields with no end in sight. In the Middle
East, the birth place of Islam, Muslim
masses remain helpless victims of Zionist
fury and a resurgent imperialism, fuelled in
part by the region's own oil wealth.
The horrors of the recent high-tech invasion
of Afghanistan and Iraq displayed on the TV
screens for the whole world to watch have
convincingly demonstrated the pitiable
disarray in the world of Islam. As there
seems to be no end to this tale of woes, one
feels compelled to look for credible
explanations of the tragic phenomenon.
Fatima Mernissi, a Moroccan scholar of
Islamic history, well versed in the language
and the message of the Quran offers one such
explanation in her book, Islam and
Democracy. It is very likely that her
analysis of the situation will be spurned by
the patriarchal establishments within the
world of Islam, as it comes from a woman who
also happens to be a professed feminist. But
it is her very feminist consciousness,
sparked by her experience of spending her
childhood in a Muslim harem (chadar aur
chardewari as they call it in Pakistan) and
her early education in a Quranic school,
which gives her a profound insight into the
plight of her co-religionists.
Mernissi traces the roots of Islam's decline
and the sorry state of Muslims to the
historically generated and strategically
fostered fears and phobias of the caliphs,
imams and their present day counterparts in
authority, including their fundamentalist
allies and opponents. One by one she
identifies the elements that were once the
seeds of life in Islam, but over the course
of time have come to be dreaded, demonized
and veiled as alien and subversive to the
faith.
A major casualty of this atavistic
repression is democracy itself and its
working principles. The Mu'tazila
intellectuals, philosophers, and sufis
fostered the democratic ideals of freedom,
equality, humanism and tolerance within
Islamic culture during the 9th and 10th
centuries AD under the early Abbasid rulers
of Baghdad. Reason and private initiative
triumphed during this period, making Islamic
civilization synonymous with the flowering
of philosophy, arts, mathematics, astronomy,
engineering and medicine.
But soon these caliphs too succumbed to the
despotism characteristics of their Umayyad
predecessors. Mu'tazila philosophers were
hunted down and condemned for polluting
Islam with foreign (Greek) ideas. Al-Hallaj,
the sufi who insisted that human beings can
be repositories of truth, was burned alive.
Freedom of thought and private initiative (ijtehad)
was replaced with the cult of blind
obedience (ta'a).
Islamic history reveals two traditions of
dealing with the problem of despotism. One
is the rational tradition based on the use
of reason (aql) to challenge absolute
authority, promoted by the Mu'tazila. Human
beings, they argued, are endowed with power
to think and form opinion (ra'y) based on
reasoning. Therefore, they should have the
right to choose their leaders without being
coerced to obey. This tradition was
violently suppressed and silenced by the
latter day caliphs who invoked shari'a,
stripped of its questioning dimension, to
demand obedience and conformity.
The second tradition of dissent is centred
around subversive rebellion, associated with
the kharjites who first appeared on the
scene of political Islam as the assassins of
Ali, the fourth successor (caliph) to the
Prophet of Islam. With the effective
suppression of the rational tradition of
political Islam only the kharjite rebel
tradition has survived and flourished.
Interaction between "the violence of the
caliph and the violence of the subversive"
became the pattern in Muslim history and
explains the modern reality". But seeking
justice through violence and murder is no
solution to the problem of despotism
"because it removes the essential element
from the scene, the masses and their will".
After decolonization of the 1940s through
1960s the Muslim nationalist leaders, faced
with the militaristic, imperialist West took
shelter in their past, erecting it as a
cultural rampart or boundaries (hudud) to
fence off all sorts of real and imagined
enemies. But the past they activated was not
the rational tradition; it was the cult of
obedience (ta'a), entrenched in the caliphal
Islam of the palace and the hangman.
Democracy was defined as a "Western malady"
and decked out in the chador of foreignness.
The "West by constantly talking about
democracy, brings before our eyes the
phantom ship of those who were decapitated
for refusing to obey," says Mernissi.
It is tragic that while Muslims are cut off
from the most important cultural advances of
recent times that have made the flowering of
civil society in the West possible, their
states continue to import Western arms in
massive quantities. The billions of dollars
raised through these sales are used by the
West in military research to boost its space
and electronic industries giving it control
over heavens through satellites, cruise
missiles and stealth bombers. The Muslim
East is by contrast weakened more than ever
and reduced to "that crippled, powerless
mass that Gulf wars spread before the world
on television". (The book under review was
written before the second and more
devastating Anglo-American invasion of
Iraq).
The Muslim regimes "frightened alike by
rationalism and by idea of democratic
participation" are neither able to protect
Islam nor Muslims," while the fundamentalism
of their allies and opponents "lowers
intelligence to the level of emotional,
visceral reflexes. And any drop in
intelligence bears within it the germs of
decay".
Linked to the widespread fear of democracy
among Muslim regimes and their Islamic
establishments is the fear of freedom of
thought. Why is it that there is hardly a
Muslim state where freedom of thought can be
taken for granted? Mernissi points out that
freedom of thought is associated with
pre-Islamic jahiliyya, the chaotic pagan
world before Islam.
Freedom of thought inevitably leads to
plurality of opinion conjuring up the vision
of plurality of gods worshipped by the
jahiliyya Arabs. Thinking involves creation
of different images of reality and the
images that the pre-Islamic Arabs created
were those of idols. Therefore, with
triumphant monotheism of Islam creation of
an image (sura) was slapped with a ban.
This was the beginning of distrust of
imagination, the locus of all creation,
innovation and improvization. Imagination (khayal)
is also the refuge of individuality, "a
person's little secret garden that escapes
all censorship, all compromise. It is a
place of freedom that the group cannot keep
a watch on," and what cannot be watched can
put the security of the group in danger.
"The fact is that for fifteen centuries the
imagination has been condemned to pursue its
course beyond the hudud, outside the walls.
This presents no danger if our great minds
are in Paris or London or the United
States." But whatever other purpose it may
serve, the banishing and stifling of
imagination, certainly does not serve the
need of the people to live in security and
peace in an electronic age. "It is
absolutely necessary that the ummah (Islamic
community) root its security somewhere else
than the ban on free thought," concludes
Mernissi.
All Muslim states that are members of the
United Nations have signed its charter which
gives their citizens freedom of thought, a
law that is supposed to supercede the laws
of the individual member states. However,
the regimes that seek legitimacy on cultural
and symbolic grounds rather than democratic
principles have resorted to introducing
shari'a laws which renounce freedom of
thought and demand obedience (ta'a).
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights
incorporated in the UN charter since the
founding of the world body says in part
(Article 18) that "Everyone shall have the
right to freedom of thought, conscience and
religion. This right shall include to have
or adopt a religion or belief of his choice,
either individually or in community with
others and in public or in private..."
This crucial article obviously calls for a
secular state. If the Muslim states had
signed the UN charter in good faith and
entered the modern age with grace, the least
they could have done was to "initiate a
debate about freedom of thought and the
relationship between religion and the state"
within their countries. They could have used
their government controlled media and
educational apparatuses to explain the UN
charter to their citizens and its relevance
to democracy. They could have addressed the
difference in freedom of thought in its
modern democratic context and freedom of
thought during the jahiliyya.
Instead the heads of the Muslim states chose
to hide the provisions of the charter they
had signed behind a hijab and squandered
their public revenues to promote the
ideology of obedience (ta'a). In order to
sit in the United Nation they chose to
present a modern face at the United Nations
in New York, only to return home to show the
"face of an Abbasid caliph to terrorize"
their people with shari'a.
Mernissi rejects the idea that Islam can
only succeed if it is imposed on the people
in a totalitarian manner through the courts,
as if Islam has nothing to offer to a modern
citizen who will quickly abandon it if state
surveillance is lifted. "Islam can not only
survive, but thrive in a secular state, as
has Christianity in secular United States,
France and Germany."
The fears and phobias of those who head the
Muslim states and their allies and opponents
among the fundamentalists fall into a
complex syndrome which explains the
mutilated modernity of the world of Islam,
devoid of the "democratic advances as well
as the cultural and scientific achievements"
of the last century. Mernissi's analysis of
this syndrome leads her to its core, the
fear of women. This fear is also strongly
linked to the jahiliyya, "which Arabs have
never taken pains to analyze coolly, as a
first step towards moving beyond it".
The most powerful of the 360 gods of Ka'aba
were female goddesses. These goddesses were
also the most violent as they demanded blood
sacrifices, and had nothing of the maternal
about them. "Despite many gods of the
pre-Islamic Arabs, it was the goddesses who
reigned over heaven and earth in Mecca,"
during the dark days of jahiliyya. They
symbolized strength and danger, just as the
jahiliyya stood for disorder. Therefore,
both must be veiled and made invisible, as
it is only the strong and dangerous that is
veiled. After the Ka'aba was cleansed of its
idols, women were not to walk the streets
again, had to be excluded from the mosques
and confined in the harem, the forbidden and
protected space.
The shrill calls for banning the mixing of
sexes heard from Algeria to Iran and
Pakistan today are nothing new in Islamic
political history. It is the caliphal
tradition of tathir, the ritual purification
of the social body. In year 405 of the
hijira when Egypt was faced with failure of
crops due to the falling waters of the Nile,
the Fatimid caliph, al-Hakim, ordered women
to be shut in their homes and forbade
manufacture of shoes for them. Those who
opposed his orders were killed. In year 487
faced with a similar crisis, al Mutaqi, the
Abbasid caliph of Baghdad, exiled women
singers and women of ill repute from the
city.
In due course this caliphal tradition was
formalized as a theory of crisis by some
Muslim historians. Mernissi notes that as
late as the middle of the twentieth century,
Ahmad Amin, an eminent historian contended
in his monumental work on Islamic history
that women have been the grave diggers of
dynasties; from the moment they became
visible in society the dynasty foundered.
The fundamentalists of today are just
reactivating this age-old caliphal tradition
in the name of shari'a.
To quote from a long lament of Shaykh Abbas
Madani, a leader of the Algerian
fundamentalist movement, "...mixing of sexes
in schools, Lycees, and universities has led
to the proliferation of bastards. Depravity
has spread, and we see that women no longer
cover themselves, but display their bodies
with makeup and are naked for all to see...
Where then is the dignity of the Algerian
man after his honour has been publicly
flouted?"
Is this not the same refrain that is blasted
into our ears in Pakistan from the mosque
loudspeakers every Friday?
The sacred city of Islam is supposed to be a
homogenized community, "carefully divided
into two hierarchical spaces, where only one
sex manages politics and monopolizes
decision making. The emergence of the woman
means the emergence of the stranger in the
city". And the stranger personifies danger.
Islam's sacred city must be protected from
anything that smacks of the disorder of the
jahiliyya.
But the boundaries, hudud, are crumbling
now. Women are infiltrating the forbidden
territory in large numbers and the imams are
alarmed and furious. Over the last few
decades women have drastically altered the
sex ratios in the universities, so much so
that in some Muslim countries such as Iran,
the proportion of women university teachers
is now higher than in some of the Western
countries. And that is why Imam Khomeini
ordered in 1980 to make hijab compulsory.
That is also why the conglomerate of
religious parties in Pakistan, the MMA, is
keen to legislate women back into hijab, and
segregate them into separate universities.
And that is also why the Jamaat-i-Islami of
Pakistan is taking the desperate step of
building its own sacred city of Islam to be
named Qartaba, where women will once again
be invisible and there will be no depravity
and nakedness (fahashi aur uriani, as they
call it in Pakistan). That seems to be the
Jamaat's solution to the problem of man
created weak because of shahwa (desire). But
what protection it will bring to the masses
of Muslim men, women and children around the
world from being bombed, massacred and
starved by their fellow Muslims and others
is another question.
"The hijab is manna from heaven for
politicians; it is not just a scrap of
cloth." Although it may have its other
contextual functions, for Mernissi "it is
division of labour. It sends women back to
the kitchen. Any Muslim state can reduce its
level of unemployment by half just by
appealing to the shari'a, in its meaning as
despotic caliphal tradition."
The Saudi monarchy is the natural epicentre
of all the fears and phobias that afflict
the despots who rule the world of Islam.
From its oil resources flow the billions of
dollars that have created the "petro-Wahabism,
whose pillar is the veiled woman". As the
core of Islamic fundamentalism, it is
promoted around the world to fight back
equality, freedom of thought, rationalism
and humanism, the working principles of
democracy, and thereby blocks all avenues
for the majority of Muslims to live peaceful
and productive lives in the modern age.
It is true that the story of tribulations of
the world of Islam remains incomplete if the
role of Western imperialism, specially the
arrogantly resurgent US imperialism, is not
taken into account. But there is no dearth
of incisive studies of this phenomenon that
are continually being produced by
progressive scholars both in the East and
the West.
The question is, can the Muslim East stand
any chance of defending itself from the
rapaciousness of Western imperialism by
taking shelter in its medieval past, by
hiding women behind the hijab and promoting
the cult of ta'a, by its phobia of
democratic pluralism, by its fear of freedom
of thought and by its vendetta against
reason?
Those women and men who are involved in the
struggle for democracy, social justice and
secular humanism in Muslim countries can
take heart that Fatima Mernissi has boldly
addressed these issues, even if she has a
tendency to romanticize the revolutionary
character of some of Islam's intrinsic
concepts, and the potential of the emergent
feminist movement to rescue Muslims from the
calamities that besiege them.
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