Mind Over Mullah

Islam and Democracy: Fear of the Modern World
By Fatima Mernissi, Translated by Mary Jo Lakeland, Perseus Publishing, 1992, 224 pp.

Review By Shanon Shah

There has been a sudden surge in debates across the world on whether or not Islam is compatible with democracy. Like it or not, there is no consensus yet on this issue. Indeed, the very concept of democracy is still hotly contested, with systems as varied as Turkey, the United States of America, Israel and South Africa each calling themselves democracies.

In Malaysia, we have an opposition fundamentalist Islamist party whose line of defense for its model of an Islamic state is that it would only pursue such a state through the democratic process. And what does this party mean exactly by the “democratic process?” Well, so far this party has only explained to Malaysians that its vision of an Islamic state would only be realized through the ballot box. If this sounds like a very superficial definition of “democracy,” it is only because this is primarily how “democracy” has been defined in the modern state of Malaysia. We are democratic because citizens get to vote during elections. To be fair, Malaysia has a fairly developed electoral system. Candidates from opposition parties do get elected to the federal Parliament, and to state assemblies. However, this has led to more than one observation that we are a well-oiled electocracy, but not really much of a democracy.

So where does an electocracy stop and a democracy begin? Is there a place where Islam stops and democracy begins? Or is it that Islam, by the virtue of it being complete and perfect, embodies democracy in all its inalienable principles? There must definitely be more to this debate, because all around the world, many people – Muslims and non-Muslims – have been losing their heads over this debate. Some literally, even.

All over the world, people seem to be afraid to ask questions about Islam’s relationship to democracy. It may appear strange, but both fundamentalist and modern reformist Muslims assert with equal conviction that Islam embodies democracy. However, it is also true that there are still many more people out there who are not convinced, or downright fearful, of such assertions. Islam and democracy? Islam, a religion revealed in the Arabian peninsula of the 6th Century A.D.? Democracy, a product of the modern “West”? Compatible with each other?

It should be no surprise that among the many people asking these questions are Muslims living in the Muslim world.

And so, when taking a second glance at the cover of Fatima Mernissi’s “Islam and Democracy”, one is struck by how accurate its subtitle really is: “Fear of the Modern World.”

Mernissi starts by introducing the spatial dimension of fear, specifically the fears of the Muslim world towards the Other, towards concepts and societies that are deemed “unIslamic.” Because the book was written in 1992, shortly after the end of the first Gulf War, Mernissi also plays around a bit with then newly-abandoned Cold War euphemisms. For one thing, she plays around at trying to translate the term “Iron Curtain” into Arabic. An accurate translation, she says, would be “al-hijab al-hadidi.” She says that this is an absolutely valid translation, since “the translation of the word ‘curtain’ in the sense of something that divides space to impede traffic, is precisely ‘hijab.’”

This is merely a tiny glimpse of the many ideas that Mernissi explores in this book, and the ways in which she approaches each idea. In order to understand the Muslim world’s aversion to “democracy,” Mernissi constantly re-examines many of the Muslim world’s accepted interpretations of its own concepts. And most of the time, she makes sense. Take her “Iron Curtain” approach. Many Muslims now view the “hijab” as pertaining solely to women’s dress. Mernissi goes further, making connections between a man’s obsession with moralizing on how a woman should dress, and an overall political superstructure that can only defend itself by sequestering half of its population from the public space. And she proposes that this logic has been severely undermined after the Gulf War. Because how could these borders, these methods of segregating society, possibly work when the borders themselves were suddenly trespassed and broken by Western armies, Western arms and Western technology?

And through this sort of analysis, Mernissi also examines how our use of language signifies both how we see ourselves, and how we see others. After all, it is primarily through language that most ideological battles are fought. And the Muslim world is no stranger to this fact. To realize this, one only needs to see the impact of Ayatollah Khomeini’s fiery sermons, circulated in Iran via audiocassettes while he was still in exile in France. It was a strange combination – his call for a return to an idealized “Islam” of the past, spread through thoroughly modern means.

The significance of this is not lost on Mernissi. With feeling and poetry, she calls the two sections of her book “A Mutilated Modernity” and “Sacred Concepts and Profane Anxieties.” Through richly woven arguments, she explores some of the most immediate fears of the Muslim world within these two sections.

Take one of her many elegant arguments about why the Muslim world seems to have so much phobia of the West. She again uses linguistic and spatial arguments to make her case. The Arabic word for West, she tells us, is “Gharb.” “Foreign” is “Gharib.” Thus, she says, “’Foreignness’ in Arabic has a very strong spatial connotation, for gharb is the place where the sun sets and where darkness awaits …it is there that gharaba (strangeness) has taken up its abode.”

Mernissi skillfully aligns all of her arguments behind her main contention, which is that:

“Identifying democracy as a Western malady, decking it out in the chador of foreignness, is a strategic operation worth millions of petrodollars. This little book will have attained its objective if it succeeds in suggesting some of the techniques used in this operation, including manipulation of fears by pasting ancient anxieties onto modern ones.”

Besides its fear of the foreign West, Mernissi also explores the Muslim world’s fears of Islamic religious authority (the imam), of democracy, of the United Nations Charter (all in the first part of the book), and of freedom of thought, of individualism, of our past and of our present (all in the second part of the book). At the end of the first part, she devotes a chapter to exploring the power and centrality of the Qur’an to debates about Islam and democracy. At the end of the second part, she explores the role that women will have to play in this whole situation.

Mernissi’s ideas are always challenging but well covered and sensible. To explain the terrifying ascent of terrorist imams, she makes the distinction between the “media imam” (a modern creation) and the “traditional imam” (a reality during the time of the Prophet). The “media imam” is a creation of modern technology. He, in turn, uses modern technology to magnify his presence and bulldoze his rhetoric over the many complex debates the community could potentially participate in. However, the “traditional imam” was vulnerable and utterly challengeable when he failed to secure the rights of each individual in society. Hence, according to Mernissi, the rise of political Islam. Because when a politician now promises that “if he becomes leader he will act like an imam, the modern politician mobilizes fifteen centuries of hopes.”

And here it is interesting because Mernissi has made it clear from the beginning that she is addressing the experience of the Arab-speaking Muslim world. She makes allowances for the fact that the contexts in non-Arab-speaking Muslim countries might be quite different from the contexts she describes.

From my own observations, however, the Malaysian experience really does not look quite that different from the experiences of the various Arab-speaking societies Mernissi talks about. We, too, have politicians blurring the lines between politics and religion to gain brownie points with Muslim voters. Granted, politicians who want to masquerade as imams here have a tougher time pursuing this image, because they also then have to contend with a sizable non-Muslim electorate. But to make a long story short, this has never stopped politicians here from trying to out-Islamize each other.

This could very well be due to the very pervasiveness of the Arabization of Islam in Malaysia. But it remains to be seen whether this is the sole determining factor. Another very important factor that should never be overlooked is how much the authorities have obstructed the circulation of opinions and accounts of Islam that contradict what is officially sanctioned. Malaysia is definitely not an Islamic fundamentalist state, but Malaysians can definitely empathize when Mernissi says that “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.” She may be talking specifically about Arab-speaking Muslim states, but she is really onto something here. Granted, it is something that many citizens of Muslim countries have already figured out in one way or another. But to have someone with Mernissi’s skills at analysis unpack this phenomenon is truly refreshing.

Because this book was written so shortly after the first Gulf War, Mernissi also spends some time dissecting the military industrial complex. Her analysis suggests that it is both the industrialized countries of the West and the Arab-Muslim countries that have a military industrial complex. However, the West spends most of its money subsidizing research and studies that go into advancing its military sector. And so, the West not only gets to stock more weapons in its arms inventory, it also develops the skills and knowledge to do this. And most of these skills and expertise have spillover effects. The West’s superiority in other areas of science and technology, from designing swanky household appliances to developing speedy computer network connections, is probably a result of its focus on research and development. The Arab countries, however, set aside huge amounts of money from massive petroleum revenues just to passively consume these products, without doing much to educate and train citizens. Thus, Arab countries do not develop their intellectual capital, and remain technologically inferior (both in military and non-military terms) to the West, because the West will always have the advantage of superior skills and knowledge over the Arab world.

But in no way does Mernissi ever recommend methods for Muslims to assert their military might. She says, “The military option is contrary to the interests of Arab citizens in general, and to those of women in particular. No leftist movement in the Arab world can offer a serious alternative if it doesn’t make the demilitarization of the region a priority.”

This analysis of the militarized Arab world is probably one of the few instances in which the experiences of the Arab-Muslim world differ from the experiences of Malaysia. Malaysia is not a military state. The government does spend quite a bit of money in proportion to our Gross Domestic Product on building up our military inventory, but not on the scale of some countries in the Middle East. Also, successive Malaysian governments have placed a high priority on education of citizens from the beginning. From the 1970s onwards, the Malaysian government, along with several government-associated private companies, has been sending Malaysian students to pursue their higher education overseas in a variety of technical and scientific fields. However, public discourse in Malaysia is still quite stifled, not because of the role that our military plays, but the role that our police force plays.

A Malaysian commentator once quipped that we certainly do not have to worry about being a military state, because we are a police state. While this observation is quite extreme, there is no denying that the police in Malaysia have a bigger role in affecting public society than the military. And because it is the police force that is dominant, the suppression of thought has quite a different dynamic here. Citizens here believe that they are qualified to speak up. We do not feel that we are really that inferior compared to the West. Even if we concede that we are inferior in some areas, many Malaysians believe we will “catch up” soon, in our own way. But Malaysians are still unable to fully participate in public discourse (an integral part of a functioning democracy), because of the many parliamentary laws that restrict public expression. These laws, of course, are upheld by our police force.

But many Muslim countries still view Malaysia as a model Islamic country. The level of technological development achieved by Malaysia is the envy of quite a few Muslim countries. They marvel at the Malaysian government’s effective strategies in encouraging the pursuit of knowledge among Malaysians. But it must be noted that the Malaysian government, though thoroughly supportive of the pursuit of knowledge, is not really supportive of the pursuit of imagination. The arts and letters do not occupy the front seat of any government initiatives to develop society. However, the pursuit of knowledge in scientific and technical fields is largely encouraged, from current favorites like information and communications technology, to fields that may not appear to be big revenue earners, like astronomy. And it is interesting that Mernissi sees this, too:

“Islam cannot be threatened by the discoveries of astronomy, such as the observation of new galaxies, because its vision is of a cosmos in movement. Threats to its authority do not come from outside, but from within human beings. It is imagination, and the irreducible sovereignty of the individual which engender disequilibrium and tension. A Galileo challenging the authority of Islam must be not a scientist but an essayist or novelist, a Salman Rushdie, and exploration of the psyche will surely be the arena of all future sedition.”

Mernissi, however, does not dismiss Muslims who fear democracy and freedom. She actually goes to great pains to make it clear that the situation the fundamentalists are in is also complicated, and stems from a need to be included.

“The clamor of the fundamentalist youth of today is, among other things, an appeal to that Islam of rahma, where the wealthy of the cities are sensitive to the anguish of the poor. Their outcry is the plaint of the unloved child of the family cut off from modern knowledge and its sciences that promise work and dignity. Reducing the outcry of the young to a declaration of war against the wealthy of the planet – that is, against the West – is to make a serious error in understanding their anguish.”

But this is also where the experiences of Malaysia seem to differ from the experiences of the Arab-Muslim world. In Malaysia, the government’s poverty eradication schemes – although heavily criticized – have been much more aggressively pursued, and have had arguably more success compared to other developing countries. We have, indeed, a sizable middle-class now in Malaysia. And a sizable section of this middle-class is Malay-Muslim. But fundamentalism is nevertheless a growing problem in Malaysia, especially among youth.

When the former Deputy Prime Minister, Anwar Ibrahim, was sacked, most of the people who rallied behind him were Islamists. Anwar himself had a prominent Islamist past before he was sacked. In the 1970s, the Minister of Education at that time suggested that Malaysians being sent to study abroad be taught how to use condoms to avoid unwanted pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases. One of the most vehement objections from the Islamists came from Anwar himself. But Anwar soon became the hero of the Malay Muslim middle class. So the role of poverty in promoting fundamentalism is still a blur in Malaysia. One only needs to speak to a cross-section of Malaysian Muslims to realize that it is not the rural poor who have fundamentalist ambitions – it is the professional, and sometimes even Western-educated, Malay Muslims who are most prominently seeking an Islamic state. Many of them are members of the political opposition. Incidentally, the Malaysian Islamist opposition seems to be intent on adopting the language of “progressive” Islam and democracy, without ever really telling anyone what it really thinks. One gets the feeling that this party, though opposed to the current administration, is not really opposed to the overall leadership structure in Malaysia. In other words, it is a battle of who wants to control the status quo. One feels, with good reason, that the Malaysian Islamists could be even more repressive if they came to power than the current government. One suspects that this is also the case in many Arab-Muslim countries.

Mernissi argues, however, that for every “opposition fundamentalist” movement, there is an equally repressive state-sponsored fundamentalism. But again, she urges a full and frank understanding of the history of Islam. Islamic societies have always seen tension between authoritarian rulers and disenchanted citizens. Each camp would use “Islam” to undermine the other. Mernissi argues for an awareness and critique of our past as Muslims to help us move forward. And here is how Mernissi views one possible solution to this situation: “Islam doesn’t reject anything; it manages all things. Its ideal schema is equilibrium.” Thus, whatever we discover, whatever we want to say, whatever we think as Muslims, we will always be within our rights because sensitive application of the principles of our faith will ensure the equilibrium of society.

In ending the book, Mernissi does not resort to cheap platitudes about “coming together” and returning to the “true” Islam. Her understanding of how society works has too much nuance for her to resort to such cop-outs. She does, however, point out that when those of us who are committed to democratic ideals work together, we must realize “that the community, indeed the whole world, can be a mirror of individualities, and that its strength will then only be greater.”

But more than ten years on, is Mernissi’s book still as valid today? She did not, for one thing, foresee the sheer force of will of the Usama bin Ladens of the world – people who are radically entrenched in the demonisation of the Other, and employ dangerous methods in pursuing their ambitions. She did not foresee the acceleration of the United States of America’s descent into imperialism, and its willingness to resort to equally deplorable measures in pursuing its global ambitions.

However, this is where we must realize why Mernissi confines most of her analysis to the Arab world – she cannot claim to represent the rest of the Muslim world. It is up to Muslims all over the world now to read more, to understand more, and to either expand on or refute these concepts she has presented. And given the fact that barely ten years after this book was published, the current President of the United States of America has already invaded not one but two Muslim countries within two years, it would seem pretty obvious that it is time for Muslims to start thinking very seriously again, and to not be afraid when we see that the very things we abhor about the Other, the foreign West, are reflected in the mirror right back at us. Because perhaps that is a very valuable way of seeing that the very things we celebrate about our lives are also reflected in the same mirror back to that not-so-Other, not-so-foreign West. Ultimately, it is not the mullahs or the West that we should be afraid of, but our own minds. Not because of what will happen to us if we free our minds, but because of what will happen if we don’t.