Islam and Democracy: Fear of the Modern World (11 page)

When we speak about the conflict between Islam and democracy, we are in fact talking about an eminently legal conflict. If the basic reference for Islam is the Koran, for democracy it is effectively the United Nations Charter, which is above all a superlaw.

The majority of Muslim states have signed this covenant, and thus find themselves ruled by two contradictory laws. One law gives citizens freedom of thought, while the
shari
^c
a,
in its official interpretation based on
ta
^c
a
(obedience), condemns it. Most Muslims, who are familiar with the Koran from very early in life, have never had occasion to read the United Nations Charter or to become acquainted with its key concepts. For many people, the charter is like the Haguza monster of my childhood: you hear about it, but no one has ever yet seen it. It has come onto our shores mysteriously folded away in the attache cases of diplomats and, like a harem courtesan, has never succeeded in getting out. With age and confinement it has become, like Haguza, the more terrifying because of its invisibility.

But first I must introduce Haguza.

I was born in one of the last harems of Fez in the 1940s, just before the walls of that honorable institution began to crack under the force of modernity. I had what is called a happy childhood, living in a house that had an enormous traditional courtyard floored with black and white marble, making a gigantic design for endless games of hopscotch. Four stairways, one in each of the four corners, pushed their green faience way upward, like magic columns, to one of the highest terraces in the medina of Fez. Ten cousins of the same age, both boys and girls, were constantly running around, laughing and playing games. For sure, it was a catastrophe for the adults. Siesta time in the Mernissi household was impossible. Guests always begged leave to depart before lunch. Our mothers had to shout to make themselves heard—until the day an aunt came from Tétouan, a city in the north that was a center for Muslims chased out of Andalusia. She brought with her a terrifying legend that she probably inherited from her Spanish ancestors: the legend of Lalla Haguza.

Haguza comes once a year on a special holiday tor which people prepare a ritual dish of rather thick couscous with milk. Haguza hides behind the shadowy staircase and watches for the child who makes any noise, ripping that child open if its mother does not intercede in time and say the required prayers. Suddenly the great mansion becomes silent, and the childish population is divided (as are Arabs today on the question of democracy) into two camps: those who want to encounter Haguza, and those whose jaws are locked with fear. I was of course in the second group. I wouldn’t go near the stairs, even in daylight, except when holding on to my mother’s caftan. The daredevil group, on the contrary, led by my cousin Ahmad, was all for meeting her. Very early in the morning we had to be at our posts before the monstrous Haguza occupied the stairway; armed with slingshots, we would lay her low. Once she was brought down, we would negotiate the right of way.

The legend of Lalla Haguza enlivened a great part of our childhood. Then one day we stumbled into puberty and found that our adolescence coincided with the struggle for national independence. All of us, men and women, rushed headlong into the streets of the medina to chant
“Al-hurriyya jihadiuna hatta narha
“ ("We will fight for freedom until we get it"). Fear took flight, and everything was possible; the Arab world opened up like a flower giddy with its own perfume. The future had the color of the Moroccan sky, that unparalleled, extraordinary, and so persistent blue. Haguza became the code word for everything we didn’t know and that was frightening. Sometimes in the lively youth meetings of the Istiqlal (Independence) party, which drew hundreds of men and women from all corners of the medina, Ahmad would poke me in the ribs and say
“Haguza ma
^c
ana”
("Haguza is with us").

The United Nations Charter is a little like Haguza: neither seen nor known, and resembling everything bizarre. It will remain like Haguza, until the day it leaves the briefcases of our diplomats and enters the public schools and the suqs. Until that day this venerable charter, like a kidnaped virgin, will be jealously guarded by those who have signed it.

The United Nations Charter has the effect of law in the territory of the Muslim countries that are members of the United Nations and signatories of the charter. And what a body of law it is! It is impossible to imagine one more forceful, for it claims to be superior to all local laws, the ideal that will reform and transform them. It is the supreme model: a higher law than those of the states’ constitutions themselves. The preamble to the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights declares:

The charter was signed in San Francisco on June 26, 1945. Several Muslim states were among the original members of the United Nations: Iran, Turkey, Lebanon, Egypt, Syria, and Saudi Arabia.

The others hastily sent diplomats to add signatures on their behalf. Soon afterward the United Nations established conditions of admission for new members which obliged them to sign documents in which they recognized the charter as superior to their national constitutions. Since most Muslim states had just emerged from decades of colonial occupation, they were ready to do anything in order to sit side by side as partners with their ex-colonizers. They must have read the text of General Assembly Resolution 116 of November 21, 1947, which provides that

So it was that after World War II there appeared on Muslim territory regimes that were parliamentary democracies on paper and that introduced laws different from the Islamic rule of
ta
^c
a
which these states had chosen to identify themselves with and from which
ra
y
(personal opinion) and reason were banished, especially the explosive Article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which said in part:

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the General Assembly on December 10, 1948, as “a common standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations,” should have initiated a debate about freedom of thought and the relationship between religion and the state. The face of the Muslim world would have been changed if after 1948 Saudi Arabia, one of the original signatories of the United Nations Charter, had mobilized its huge education and propaganda establishment and its banking network to explain to the people that the secular state provided for in Article 18 is not so much one staffed by
mulhid
(atheistic) officials as one that prohibits its agents from squandering public funds to push their interpretation of religion.

The states that were signatories of the charter and the international conventions had a choice between two possible approaches: they could seize the opportunity of the adoption of these new universal laws to open up a full public debate on the nature of power and explain to the people the mechanisms of participatory democracy; or they could hide these laws away, sequestering them like clandestine courtesans who are an embarrassment when one wants to play the role of imam and demand
ta
^c
a.
It was the second option that was chosen. Hiding these laws, putting them behind a
hijab,
became the strategy and the objective. Mobilizing the media and millions of teachers to explain Article 18 would have meant explaining the philosophical basis of the secular state. It would have required banning the use of the government apparatus to publicize
ta
^c
a
blind obedience to the president of the republic.

If the Arab states had chosen the way of representative democracy, we would not have witnessed one of the miracles of the century—"reigns” of presidents of Arab republics as long as those of kings. The Arab world is probably one of the rare regions of the world where a presidency can last a lifetime. Habib Bourguiba of Tunisia, for example, agreed to step down only under pressure. As for Hafaz al-Assad of Syria, he has just announced his fourth term. The long reign of President Bourguiba, like the four terms of President Assad, is not subject to the routine procedures of representative democracy, which would reflect the whims of very changeable public opinion. The long tenure in office of Arab presidents can be explained in only two ways: it is the result of either supernatural forces (divine grace or magic) or much more mundane acts, like rigging the vote. President Bourguiba, whom we all admire for his past as a nationalist leader, would certainly have had a shorter presidency if he had not put government funds into publicity for himself as the
mujahid akhbar
(Great Warrior). If I mention President Bourguiba, it is because Tunisia is one of the rare Arab states that have declared themselves modern—by contrast with Morocco, where tradition is unequivocably embraced.

If we are to sharpen our understanding of the intimate link between authoritarianism and the state’s refusal to engage the masses in the great debate that modern life demands of us—that is, the question of the secular state—we have to understand how the system operates. The regime of President Bourguiba monopolized the mass media and the schools to tell citizens that they must modernize and renounce tradition while refusing to grant them the essence of modernity: freedom of thought and participation in decision making. The government lauded democracy while robbing the Tunisian citizens of the right to have a say in how their tax money was spent. The result was that Arab countries like Tunisia which call themselves liberal, or those like Algeria which call themselves socialist, created the most confusion among their peoples and thus brought on the fundamentalist opposition that now threatens them.

The fundamentalists’ argument is that if Islam is separated from the state, no one will any longer believe in Allah and the memory of the Prophet will dim. Since we are constantly bombarded via satellite by advertisements for all sorts of products, from soap to films, the state must defend Islam. Such reasoning is in fact an insult to Islam, with its suggestion that Islam can succeed only if it is imposed on people in a totalitarian manner, through courts that punish those who drink wine or refuse to fast during Ramadan. According to this argument, Islam has nothing to offer a modern citizen, who would quickly abandon it if state surveillance were lifted. We shall see in the following chapters that Islam has much to offer. As both Christianity and Judaism have done, Islam can not only survive but thrive in a secular state. Once dissociated from coercive power, it will witness a renewal of spirituality. Christianity and Judaism strongly rooted in people’s hearts are what I have seen in the United States, France, and Germany. In those countries the secular state has not killed religion; rather, it has put a brake on the state’s manipulation of religion. It took three centuries of effort by many European philosophers and several revolutions for this fundamental nuance to be developed, accepted, and made understandable to the masses.

The Muslim states, which since independence have controlled the networks of propaganda and mass education, have never put these networks in the service of that new idea of the secular state which Article 18 formulates so simply. By clearly affirming the right to freedom of belief, Article 18 directly challenges the right of a state to use violence against citizens and makes the principle of tolerance inviolable. However, the Muslim leaders who signed the United Nations Charter and the conventions that have accumulated over half a century are scarcely tolerant. They have not only increased measures to mask all conflict between the charter and their authoritarian interpretation of Islam; they have also used their national budgets to betray the charter and forbid as contrary to Islam the freedom of thought which it proclaims, and to preclude citizens from becoming familiar with its rules and regulations through regular democratic participation.