James Rupert, the Islamabad correspondent of New York Newsday, has recently been making the interesting argument that westerners who want to see the spread of democracy in the Muslim-peopled parts of the world should entertain the idea that, as he puts it, “in some cases only ‘Islamic government’ can be the solution.”
I am therefore pleased to publish here, as an exclusive publication of ‘Just World News’*, a short text in which he makes this case…. (drum-roll)
- Islams and democracy
by James Rupert
Islamabad, mid-August 2005
As Muslim peoples debate secular and “Islamic” forms of government, we in the West are given to shuddering at the idea of “Islamic republics” or a role in government for sharia law. And of course, there are plenty of human rights abuses under “Islamic” systems to make us shudder! But I think Westerners who yearn to see real democracy in the Muslim world must hear the idea (promoted recently by Brown University Prof. William Beeman and others) that Islamic government can be part of the solution instead of being seen as the problem.
Indeed, I’d suggest that in some cases only “Islamic government” can be the solution. I was reminded of the argument for this last week in the Dir Valley of Pakistan’s Pashtun belt, near the Afghan border. In Dir, Shad Begum, an energetic social worker in her 20s, is pushing the kind of revolution that I think most of us would want to see: education and basic health services for girls and women, and a voice in government for the female half of society.
Shad faces the Pashtuns’ iron culture of absolute male power and frequent enslavement of women (a repression dressed and legitimized to a largely illiterate population as “Islam”). In her insular, tradition-bound society, she has no conceivable tool but Islam with which to challenge this misrule. In her case, of course, it’s an Islam grounded in a much broader reading of the literature of her faith than that of those in power.
For those of us who are Western outsiders amid this battle of Islams, I think it’s very hard to understand how deeply any contribution we might want to make has been tainted by the baggage of still-not-so-long-ago Western colonization, Israel-Palestine, Iraq, Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, etc. In Dir, the most dangerous thing our friend Shad does is to quietly take grants from Western relief and development agencies.
In Friday sermons, Dir’s mullahs condemn the “obscenity and vulgarity” threatened by outsiders bent on change. And the men listen. Up the valley last month, a male relative shot social worker Zubaida Begum and her daughter to death after another worshipper taunted him (police reported) about failing to control her “un-Islamic” activities.
There’s a reason that the tribal khans and landlords of Dir dress their repression as religion, and it’s the reason that any reform must be dressed the same way. Put a little crudely, it’s the only thing that sells. Westerners might fondly yearn for Shad to campaign for a more comfortably familiar, secular order in this corner of the Muslim world. But in Dir, it’s hard to imagine her making any progress (or indeed surviving) by standing on a soapbox to recite Tom Paine.
Obviously, not all of the Islamic world is the Pashtun extreme, and the depth and details of the Islamic dress in which governments must come will vary. And just as obviously, we need to pay urgent attention when the “Islamic” features of Muslim-world governments are cover for repression. It’s something that Iraqis fear as they draft their constitution these days, and God knows it’s an issue here in Pakistan, too.
But Western people and polities that shudder at the phrase “Islamic government” must learn to lose that reflex. Most of us in the West surely wish to help Muslim liberals and democrats, whether Iran’s celebrated Nobel laureate, Shirin Ebadi, or the unknown Shad Begum of Dir. But we must understand that Islamic forms of democracy are the only kind these liberals can build. If we can’t swallow that, the best thing we can do for Ebadi or Shad is to shut up and go home.
* Rupert had articulated much of this same argument in a private communication earlier. But he and I lightly edited that text to arrive at the present one, and he happily gave permission for publishing it on JWN.
As I mention below, and I would argue that is applies to many third-world (i.e., middle-class-less) societies, the basic battle, albeit with cultural overtones at times (when they avail themselves), is the poor against the affluent or richer. In some real sense, and I saw this living in India, as well, not so long ago, is that radical Islam is one of the few ideologies in the post-Communism (with a capital “C”) world that ostensibly fights for the rights and interests of the poor. The fact of the matter is, as I have put it in other contexts before, the terrorists literally have nothing to live for, so they find something to die for. That, I think, is perhaps the best definition possible for who is a “revolutionary.” Whether we like it or not, radical Islam is the last best hope (for now) of the totally down and out and those who otherwise despise their oppression by the institutions of the day. Until the West (by which I mean institutions as well as voting populations) regains its apprehension of this fact, it will continue to mistake its way into advancing the cause of the Islamic extremists who ultimately want an Islamic republic of one sort or another.
I believe that truly progressive circumspection upon this reality can only lead to the conclusion that that ideology can only be changed by letting it play itself out. In Iran, we see it playing itself out, whereas Algeria has chosen to oppress it, and still is, and will continue to, in all likelihood, for a long time.
Students of Western history should realize that the West experienced exactly that on its own terms. Theocratic government existed for a long time in Europe, until its corruptions and imbalances resulted in social movements for change. I am not the first to say that this is the only way for this type of change to come about–it cannot, no matter how hard George W. Bush tries, be imposed at the end of a gun barrel.
This point really sticks in my craw, which is why I am writing still more. Many of us opposing the US invasion of Iraq, who would not be heard, argued well enough in advance, that we will not be able to control the situation. We will be lucky if a stable Islamic republic results from the US invasion. So far, the US’s own efforts in fact appear to be attempting to preclude that level of stability and civility. I say that, because the US’s obsession with democracy and human rights can, despite its good intentions, yet result in a lawlessness of a sort not seen in a generation (I am referring to southeast Asia in the 1970’s here). The analogy for the Iraq situation was, of course, the Soviet Union, and, before that, its prototype, Yugoslavia: to wit, the existing regime in each instance, including Iraq and Afghanistan, had destroyed any competing social or cultural institution. Thus, when the controlling institution, as in the regime, is (was) destroyed, there literally is little else to replace it. In Yugoslavia, it was local identities, in the Soviet Union, it was nationalities, and within them, what would in the US be called mafias, and in Iraq, there is only the Islamic hierarchy. (Afghanistan, it seems, is an unusual case, in that the tribal identities, while powerful, have included a yearning for a national identity.) If the combined, and I say not just Shi’i, Islamic hierarchy (and that, from my limited knowledge, appears to include the rather nonhierarchical Sunni leadership) is capable of controlling the ground in Iraq, the US would be lucky to have them do so at this point, given what worse eventualities are otherwise possible.
Charles – Do you live in the U.S.? We do not have “an obsession with democracy and human rights.” It would be nice if we did. We have an obsession with getting rich and flaunting it, or in most cases, voyeuristically admiring those who do.
Here’s a cautionary tale about the pitfalls of barging into alien societies–to do good, of course:
…a couple I met in Danang during the war. The husband was the Vietnamese director of Mobil Oil, the wife a professor of philosophy at the University of Danang. Although she was a staunch anti-Communist who loved going to New York and Paris, she provided the clearest reason I’d ever heard why the United States should not intervene in a society it does not understand. Praising Ngo Dinh Diem, the South Vietnamese president who had been assassinated in 1963 when our government withdrew its support from him, she discoursed on his skill as a statesman, how he’d have made peace with the North Vietnamese, and how splendid a patriot he was, the last piece of praise catching in her throat so that she doubled back on it to declare, “In fact, I think Ngo Dinh Diem was without doubt the second-greatest patriot in the entire history of my country.”
I bit on that one and gullibly asked who was the first greatest.
“Oh, Ho Chi Minh of course.”
At that moment it was clear that if this philosopher’s two seemingly irreconcilable assertions were true–according to the American left Diem was a puppet who was dropped when he proved both too corrupt and too independent, while Ho was George Washington and Abraham Lincoln combined; according to the right Ho was Stalinist and Diem was fine until he betrayed the cause–then the United States had no rational purpose sticking its nose, much less 2.15 million bodies, into what was taking place in Vietnam, regardless of whether the dispute was a revolution, civil war, insurgency against foreign invaders, anticolonialist struggle, reunification drive, or some of all of these…
The full ‘Letter from Vietnam’ by Oscar winning documentary maker Peter Davis can be read in the June 9, ’03 issue of ‘The Nation’:
http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20030609&s=davis
You couldn’t pick a tougher district in all of Pakistan to test this theory if you tried. Dir had Taliban-style Sharia before Afghanistan did.
In 1994 Sufi Mohammed, the warlord of Dir, fought the Pakistani Army in the “Sharia or Shahadat” campaign. His goal wasn’t to replace the government but to force it to implement Islamic Law. After 3 months and 300 deaths, the Pakistani government agreed to have its local representatives enforce Sufi Mohammed’s version of Sharia in the districts of Dir and Malakand.
Those same Western commentators who are never at a loss at making patronizing comments about other societies somehow skip any mention of the context and history in which unsavory forces gained ascendancy. The same Pashtun area of Pakistan which Western publics now “shudder” at, had until recently a very strong local progressive political tradition which was suppressed over a period of decades by British and Pakistani governments:
http://www.khyber.org/people/nwfp/khanghafarkhan.shtml
http://www.asianreflection.com/khanafghanistan.shtml
Whatever the shortcomings of above movement and it’s leaders, they believed in political contenstation and understood far better than outsiders how their society could be pulled out of stasis. The political vacuum left after the demise of popular parties was filled by those who would never have risen to prominence in even a halfway democratic setup that was sensitive to problems of ordinary people…
I would expand on Charles’ observations about the class angles of radicalization and terrorism. In the case of radical Islam the driving force is extreme inequality in income distribution. As a whole the Islamic world is not poor, but the combination of large pockets of extreme poverty (in Pakistan, in refugee camps, in Egypt, etc.) with the extreme affluence of the oil gulf countries is a deadly mix. The poor have nothing to lose and grow up in a pressure cooker of unemployment, ignorance, blame shifting propaganda, and semi-criminal religious preaching. The rich grow up with infinite idle time, unemployment due to the oil industry not being labor intensive, cultural backwardness and religious hatred.
Put the two together and you have the means, the ideology, and the masses to blow up the world as we are witnessing. If democracy is too much to ask for them, maybe a BIG middle class a la Japan can work instead?
David
David:
‘unemployment due to the oil industry not being labor intensive,”
If you could give us answers to these question pleas
1- Why there are 2 millions foreigners in Arabia Saudi mostly working in oil industry if the oil industry not being labor intensive?
2- There are one millions foreigners in Kuwait only if the oil industry not being labor intensive, where the population of Kuwaitis only less 400,000?
3- In the most African countries (not Muslim ones) they share all of extreme poverty, who responsible for this?
A New Strategic Approach to the Foreign Policy of the US
A New Strategic Approach to the Foreign Policy of the US
Salah,
The oil industry is not labor intensive. Just measure $/employee and you’ll find out. The Saudi guest workers are partially because the Saudis don’t want to do some chores. The government tried to get Saudis to work as taxi drivers by removing guest workers from that occupation.
The foreign workers in the oil industry are there because of their expertise. I guess that Saudi universities are nothing to write home about.
The other reason for the high number of foreign workers in Kuwait, for example, is that this paragon of Islamic hospitality does not integrate people as citizens. I have Indian friends whose parents worked in Kuwait for decades and were never granted citizenship. They hated every minute of it. Salah, if you come legally to the US you are a citizen in 5 years, and your kids are US citizens. Not in Kuwait, you are a foreigner forever. Ask the Palestinians that were expelled in 1991.
Poverty is not exclusive to Islam, but rich moslems funding Madrassas to indoctrinate poor moslems for martyrdom is vintage Islam. Imagine investing in literacy, self sufficiency, respect for women, and universal values. Why when you can focus on the Koran and brew in them the hate to be the cannon fodder of jihad.
David
It seems to me that Noah Feldman has been making this argument for quite a while now. It would be interesting to hear about in which ways, if any, James Rupert’s thinking differs from Prof. Feldman’s.
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