Islam and Democracy: Fear of the Modern World (19 page)

The verse the false prophet asked to be quoted to him was none other than the one the headline writer put in the mouth of President Bush: “I am your Supreme God.” A Muslim caliph, however powerful he was, had to avoid the arrogance of Pharaoh and show his humility before God, who is the only one to hold supremacy. Thus al-Ma
mun could not pronounce the sentence demanded by the false prophet, who was then able to leave the palace alive.

One of the most powerful messages of the Koran is the complete break between the divine and the human, and the equality of all human beings of all races before God; whatever their status in life, only their faith can make a difference between them. Supremacy, greatness, strength, sheer power belong only to God; any person who claims them is wrong. One of the ideas that divide Sunnis and Shi
^c
ites is that the Sunnis do not believe in the infallibility of the imam, for infallibility belongs only to God: no human being, even an imam or caliph, can claim it. Making mistakes is the privilege of human beings and thus make it possible to criticize those in power. This basic equality between the strong and the weak, between governors and the governed, which is the essence of orthodox Islam, was surely one of the ideas that constituted a rupture with the
jahiliyya.
It introduced a new and revolutionary idea, unknown until then: the idea of
musawat,
“equality.”

In Mecca of the
jahiliyya
where trade connections provided the model of relationships, the safety of the gods was a chancy affair. Until the advent of Islam, blackmailing the gods (along the lines of “give me some livestock if you want me to remain faithful to you") kept monotheism from establishing and proving itself.
⁷

In this sense Islam is a long outcry against arrogant individualism. It was their boundless self-confidence that the Prophet demanded that the fiercely aristocratic Arabs give up by submitting their destiny to Allah. It was total, undivided submission that would permit the building of an egalitarian community. The annihilation of individuality before Allah, the Master of the Worlds, would allow construction of the other pillar of the Muslim order— equality. Along with peace,
salam,
it is the absolute equality of all, men and women, masters and slaves, Arabs and non-Arabs, which Islam guarantees, in exchange for the surrender of individualism. One of the most emblematic verses in this regard is verse 13 of sura 49, which the Prophet proclaimed in a speech in the Ka
^c
ba once the idols had been swept out, and which is regularly recited at the opening ceremonies of intra-Islamic conferences: “O mankind! We have created you male and female, and have made you nations and tribes that ye may know one another.”
⁸

This verse condenses and articulates two messages: that of the
umma
formed of equals, and of the
umma
whose solidarity crosses borders and encompasses cultures, giving Muslims the beautiful sense of belonging, of universal communion, which is so striking when one travels abroad. From Dakar to Malaysia, the faces of merchants, at first indifferent, light up when during lengthy bargaining sessions an Arabic word escapes me. Then they ask me where I come from, and when I answer Morocco, they say,
“Ah! al-maghrib al-aqsa
[the Far West].
La ilaha ilia Allah!
” Suddenly I am given every consideration; a chair is offered, a cold Coca-Cola is brought from the neighboring shop, and the price of the bracelets of carved horn or of the glass beads I had taken such a fancy to falls precipitately.

It is impossible to explain the incredibly rapid expansion of Islam just by the fighting spirit of the fervently religious Arabs. That would leave out a very important factor: the insistence of the Koran on the equality of all, of whatever race or social origin. This tenet made Islam a peaceful, unobtrusive traveler, circulating in all simplicity, without armies or swords, using established trading routes. Islam traversed Asia and Africa, where social ranks often had the rigidity of castes, and it followed the great trade routes even to Indonesia and China, where one of the most threatened religions was Buddhism:

In 1987 I disembarked in Karachi for the first time, half asleep at four o’clock in the morning. What was my surprise to hear the customs agent, who gallantly offered to show me the city once day had broken, recite in a pure Arabic, when I rejected his offer: “O mankind! We have created you male and female, and have made you nations and tribes that ye may know one another.” This same verse was quoted to me in mangled Arabic with a strong American accent by a jazz musician whom I went to hear in the Roxbury neighborhood of Boston. This was during the 1970s, when I was a student, and at that time many blacks were converting to Islam under the influence of Malcolm X. As a matter of fact, it was during my student days in America that I discovered how attractive Islam was for oppressed minorities, something that had never struck me at home in Morocco, where inequality and lack of solidarity are the normal state of affairs.

The popular sympathy Iraq enjoyed among Muslim countries during the Gulf War had nothing to do with the personality of Saddam Hussein, who was never the object of a cult of personality as Gamal
^c
Abd al-Nasir had been. Saddam Hussein’s war against Iran, in which thousands of Muslims were killed, left the masses in a state of confusion and disarray. The Arab masses are ripe for a leader; since President Nasir, who championed the idea of autonomy and sovereignty during the cold war before he began to imprison intellectuals, no one has succeeded in taking his place. The
Green Book
of President Qaddafi has been seriously read or commented on only by those who are guaranteed a job or an income if they do so. Other claimants to the role of leader of the Arab world have had the good sense not to be too persistent.

During the Gulf War it was not the personality of the leaders which carried weight in the decision to align on one side or the other. Rather, it was the
taghiya
schema that was operating, leading the masses to tilt to the side of Iraq. The emir of Kuwait and the king of Saudi Arabia, sitting on the oil wells that could change the power alignment if they were put at the service of the
umma,
both perfectly filled the role of the
taghiya,
for they were guided only by their individual self-interest. This is the way the Arab press and slogans depicted them: as pharaohs forgetful of the
rahma
that Muhammad’s Mecca promised the world. President Bush, by insisting on making the whole world participate in the war effort, forced the Kuwaitis and Saudis to expose for the first time the amount of money they were paying to various Western countries. Learning how much the emir of Kuwait had been paying for French weapons was the opening shot in an inter-Arab democratic debate as, thanks to CNN, the financial details of the princely budgets were revealed and the flood of petrodollars invested in arms was duly exposed. The people became conscious for the first time of the cost of an airplane or a tank, and every time one burned up on the screen the young shoemakers, their hands working the delicate leather, mentally calculated the amount of money going up in smoke and compared it with their miserable daily pay: “
^c
Aqabt, ya far
^c
un
“ ("Take that, Pharaoh!"). The medina was caught up by the full force of the sacred and by economic confusion that could only end in the condemnation of the tyrant.

Seen today as the culture most capable of channeling popular frustrations, Islam gives the faithful enormous expectations of social solidarity. The sacred, after long being utilized to pacify the masses and keep them quiet, is today taking its revenge on those who have manipulated it. It has become, as at the time of its birth, a force for the destabilization of privilege, whether regional or global. Harassed and hounded, the modern lay leftist movements coming out of socialism and Marxism have never been able to do the hard work that might have yielded up other schemas and other ideas. For many experiencing the collapse of democratic movements in the Muslim world, the cold war was the American struggle against the socialist Left. For them the CIA plot against Mossadeq was a representative example. The cold war derailed the cultural development of Muslim societies and, in Iran, allowed the imams to emerge as deformed mirrors of stifled aspirations: “What is happening today with the fundamentalists of all sorts not only does not renew the spirit of Islam, but is in fact a funeral cortege of petrified dreams that will disappear in the desert sands. Fundamentalism lowers intelligence to the level of emotional, visceral reflexes. And any drop in intelligence bears within it the germs of decay.”
¹⁰

Our mutilated modernity, void of the great democratic advances as well as cultural and scientific accomplishments, opens the way to the merchants of hope who are so familiar to us. Since we lack a vision anchored in the present and still less in the future, they are leading all of us toward the only area where phantasms can flourish—toward the past. They are unscrupulously manipulating its rich language, charged as it is with symbols and images saturated with emotion and bursting with hope, but connected to the subterranean vagaries of ancestral terrors. And well ensconced there we find the fear of women—a fear strongly linked to the disorder of the
jahiliyya,
which Arabs have never taken the pains to analyze coolly, as a first step toward moving beyond it. At the beginning Islam tried to break with the fears and superstitions of the heathen Arabs. But very quickly the example of the Prophet, who insisted on the necessity of change, disappeared from people’s consciousness. The caliphs slid back toward the
jahiliyya,
locking women up and excluding them from the mosques. Women fell into ignorance and sank into silence.
¹¹

How can I dare to maintain that Arabs are afraid of the past, Arabs whose leaders daily trumpet that the past was the perfect time, the crucible of their identity, and that no present or future is imaginable without it? Our pre-Islamic past is called the
jahiliyya,
the “time of ignorance,” and as a result is subjected to the
hijab
that also veils the feminine. But who knows better than the Arabs the haunting power of that which is veiled, of that which the
hijab
hides? The Arabs have dared to do two things no other great civilization has ever tried: to deny the past, a dark past, and to hide the feminine. And the past and the feminine are two poles for reflection on that source of all terrors: difference.

How can the new be distinguished from the old if the old is banned from sight, if the
jahiliyya
is a black hole, existential darkness?

And how, please tell me, can the masculine be distinguished if the feminine is banned from sight, if femaleness is a black hole, a silent gap, an absent face?

Can it be that the
jahiliyya,
that
hijab
of ignorance, is only an amulet against what is too difficult for us to accept, the raw, naked violence in the city that is linked in the inadequately buried past to a femaleness still more unbearable to contemplate—that of the goddesses who reigned in the Ka
^c
ba? For these Arab goddesses had nothing of the maternal about them. Their milieu was nothing but a pool of blood, and their sacred city a vast field of injustice and murder that neither the rituals nor the sacrifices succeeded in checking.

The
jahiliyya,
whose violence was miraculously suspended in time, has its revenge today by being reborn more monstrous than ever as Mecca is “defended” by American missiles—missiles sometimes fired by young women with angelic faces beneath their combat helmets. Are these young strangers, descended from the sky in war uniforms, parachuted into holy cities, aware that before them only goddesses handled arms and made blood demands in Arabia, where femaleness, like demons and dreams, has been driven into darkness?

These young American women have chosen military careers and perhaps see the Gulf War as an unhoped-for opportunity to liberate a country. But do they know that by treading Arab soil during this conflict they have awakened the giant shadows of those goddesses of death, pregnant with fifteen centuries of oblivion? Do the innocent blond heads peering out of the tops of tanks, whose function, death and sacrifice, is as archaic as that of divine weapons, know that they are unveiling a modernity that seems in danger of being mistaken for that spurned
jahiliyya?

Ah, young American women, who exercise your democracy by dealing in combat helmets and death, let me tell you about one of the mysteries of that Arabia that for you was just an assignment, but for me is a tradition and a destiny. Let me tell you what my ancestors have put behind the
hijab.

What is behind a
hijab,
the veil that means a barrier?

What is certain is that it does not veil “nothing.” If there is nothing, there is no need for a
hijab.

Normally only what is both powerful and dangerous is veiled. In our Arab civilization, the most famous
hijab
is that of certain caliphs. The
hijab al-khalifa
(caliph
s veil), an institution of political Islam, with its protocol and rituals, was the subject of numerous treatises, the most entertaining of which are those of al-Jahiz.
¹
The caliph was veiled because he represented a dangerous concentration of power—the power to kill. Can it be, then, that the notion of women in power is linked in our collective memory with violence and murder?

The answer must be sought in the zero time, the dark years of the
jahiliyya,
the years in which, despite the proliferation of gods, it was the goddesses who reigned over heaven and earth in Mecca. And these goddesses lived on blood. Goddesses of war and death, they reflected in their blood rituals and terrifying demands the miserable existence of the Arab people, decimated by their own violence. It was to put an end to this violence, to end the
safk al- dimc?
(bloodshed), that Allah sent his message to an Arab Prophet.

Sura 53, in verses 19 and 20, names three of the most important divinities in the Islamic heaven; then the subsequent verses utterly condemn them. They are al-
^c
Uzza, whose name means “power” in the military sense of the word; Manat, whose name comes from the same root as
maniyya
(death); and finally al-Lat, which is a contraction of
ilahat
(goddesses). Among the other gods mentioned in the Koran are Wadd, Suw
^c
a, Yaghuth, Ya
^c
uq, and Nasr (in sura 71, v. 23). But according to Arab and other sources, these gods were far from carrying as much weight as the female divinities.
²
First listen to the verses of sura 53 concerning these goddesses:

These goddesses are identified by name because, among all the gods that filled the Ka
^c
ba, they alone reigned uncontested in the two towns that were the cradle of Islam, Mecca and Medina.

According to Ibn Hisham in his
Sira
(biography of the Prophet), al-Lat was the goddess of the Banu Taqif and reigned over their city, Ta
if. Manat was worshiped by the Aws and the Khazraj, the two tribes who invited the Prophet to Medina in 622 who constituted the majority of the population: “Manat . . . was their goddess and the goddess of all those who practiced their religion in Yathrib [the ancient name of Medina]; her temple was on the coast.” Finally, according to Ibn Hisham, al-
^c
Uzza was the goddess of the Quraysh and so controlled their city, Mecca.
³
Ibn al-Kalbi gives us more details in his
Kitab al-asnam
(Book of Idols): “Manat was the most ancient; Arabs were named after her, children being given names like
^c
Abd Manat [slave of Manat] and Zayd Manat. Her idol stood on the coast, facing the sea, alongside the mountain called al-Mushallal, situated at Qudayd between Mecca and Medina. The Aws and the Khazraj and all those who visited those two cities or their environs worshiped her, presenting offerings and sacrifices.” The Aws and the Khazraj “carried out with the other Arabs all the ritual stages of the
hajj
[pilgrimage] except that they did not shave their heads.” They concluded their ritual at Manat’s shrine by shaving their heads there, at the feet of that idol, and it was “only then that they considered their
hajj
complete.”
⁴
One of Manat’s forms was a rock (
sakhra
); her name, stemming from far back in the ancient Semitic languages, in the beginning meant “count the days of your life.” Later it came to be identified with destiny, which “gives each person his role,” and ended with the meaning of
maniyya
, which is familiar to us toady as a word for death.
⁵

Manat shares with the other two goddesses, al-Lat and al-
^c
Uzza, the very revealing title of
taghiya.
⁶
This is a detail of some importance, for in the world of symbols everything is in the details. According to Arab sources, one of the sabers found in the temple of Manat had a new life under the banner of Islam. It was none other than the celebrated
dhu al-faqar,
the saber of
^c
Ali, the cousin and son-in-law of the Prophet, who would become the fourth caliph. After the destruction of the temple of Manat, “the Prophet offered
^c
Ali two sabers, and it is said that
dhu al-faqar
was one of them.”
⁷

Al-Lat, whose center was at Ta’if, Ibn al-Kalbi tells us, was more recent than Manat. “The Banu Taqif had built a construction around ... a square rock. Quraysh and all the Arabs accorded her an enormous importance. ... It was in her honor that the Arabs gave their children the name of Zayd al-Lat.”
⁸
The military dimension of al-Lat has been well vouched for by recent scientific expeditions and research:

Armed and helmeted, she was recognized by archeologists on the altar at Hebran and the lintels of Souweida: “It was a warrior goddess, armed with a lance, being honored among soldiers; on the altar, receiving an offering from a veteran, she also appeared in armor and wearing a crested helmet.” Although at the beginning al-Lat was the goddess of both war and fertility, only her military aspect remained prominent.
¹⁰

But it is the goddess al-
^c
Uzza who represents most strongly the warrior dimension of the divine, linking the reign of the feminine in the collective memory with the age of darkness, when the insatiable deities bathed in the blood of innumerable victims, who were not always animals. Some link the enigmatic
wa
d al-banat,
burial of newborn girls, which was still being practiced at the time of the Prophet, to the human sacrifices demanded by certain gods. Al-
^c
Uzza would have been among them. Her name comes from the words
Hzz
(power) and
quwwa
(physical force). She was worshiped in the form of a tree, and homage was paid to her in the Ka
^c
ba, where she was represented by an idol, as well as outside it in a parallel rival temple dedicated exclusively to her. According to others she was supposed to be Venus and was worshiped in the form of a star. Let us begin with something tangible—her manifestations on earth, which were physically destroyed at the time of the conquest of Mecca in 630—before we consider her astral dimension, which seems to have survived, especially in the south in Yemen.

In his
Sira,
Ibn Hisham tells us that the Quraysh, the Prophet’s tribe, whose influence radiated out from Mecca over the whole peninsula, worshiped al-
^c
Uzza at Nakhla, which was situated in a valley not far from Mecca on the route to Iraq. Some say she was represented by a tree, others say by three acacias. The fact that her temple contained a
ghabghab
(sacrificial altar) and an oracle, which was consulted by people from near and far, is evidence of her importance. She was “the most important idol of Quraysh; they made pilgrimages to her, presenting her with offerings to win her favor.”
¹¹
Her
ghabghab
was a
manhar
—literally, “place of slaughter": “It was a sacrificial altar placed beside a ditch or [dry] well into which ran the blood of the victims offered to the idol.”
¹²
According to the Byzantine historian Procope de Cesaree, the famous king of Hira al-Mundhir Ibn Ma
^c
al-Sama
(505-54) offered to al-
^c
Uzza four hundred human sacrifices, all Sassanid prisoners of war.
¹³