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Islam’s
lost golden age. Abd-ar-Rahman III, Caliph of Cordoba, and his court in Medina Azahara, by Dionisio Baixeras Verdaguer.
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The Arab world is a house with no roof. By Hisham Melhem. Al Arabiya News, January 2, 2016.
Melhem:
Generations after political emancipation from direct colonial rule and overt western influence, the quest for genuine political independence, democratization and cultural authenticity in many majority Arab states is still unfulfilled. The abject failures of decades of experimentation with controlled liberalization, Arab and local nationalisms, and Arab socialism in the 1950’s and 60’s and with Political Islam in its various forms since the 1967 defeat in the war with Israel, were shockingly confirmed by the Arab uprisings of recent years.
The end
of colonial rule was the beginning of the era of strong men, usually lower
ranking military officers (Nasser in Egypt, Qaddafi in Libya), and the rise of
repressive, chauvinistic nationalisms (especially the Baath in Syria and Iraq).
The Islamist movements, beginning with the oldest one, the Muslim Brotherhood
(established in Egypt in 1928) and the movements it spawned in subsequent
decades shared the same illiberal characteristics of the Arab Nationalists and
Socialists. In fact illiberal governance is the thread that connects that
amorphous universe we call the Arab world.
Illiberalism
The
Arab world is a house of many mansions. But it is very difficult for most of
its inhabitants to admit that they live in a house with no roof. The uprisings
have shown that the walls of all the mansions have deep cracks. It took
generations to bring the Arabs to this nadir, and it will take decades to fix
the walls and build a new roof, assuming that the house can be saved from total
collapse. In this house of many mansions, the mostly Sunni Islamists are, and
will likely to remain in the foreseeable future the dominant political force.
The
Islamists, who claim that they are the only authentic political force in the
Arab world, are of different stripes, but these differences are not profound.
They have shaped the course of all the Arab uprisings; they showed most
maturity through Ennahda Party in Tunisia, less so with the Muslim Brotherhood
in Egypt, (whose misrule did not warrant the bloody crackdown that befell
them). The Islamists fielded the militias that violently toppled Qaddafi in
Libya, and they constitute a huge spectrum of dizzying militant groups trying
to overthrow the Assad regime in Syria, when they are not fighting among
themselves. The Islamists are active above ground and underground throughout
the Arab world. The dominant Islamists in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Yemen are
Shiites or off-shoot of Shiism, sponsored by Iran. The combatants in these
majority Arab states are Islamists of all stripes. The illiberalism all of
these Islamists share may not be identical, but most don’t tolerate liberal
education, gender equality, full equal rights to minorities, and they usually
reduce democracy to majoritarian rule.
Elusive reform
Judging
by the constellation of Islamist movements and groups in the Middle East, and
given that they find themselves engaged in life and death struggles, and the
absence of institutional structures that allows scholars the freedom to debate
Islamic themes and reforms, it is difficult to see any time soon, the emergence
of a moderate political Islam reconciled with the imperatives of modernity and
liberalism that we associate with modern civil states. But this should not be
seen as a call to surrender. In the last few decades many Arab scholars and
Muslim reformers challenged the dogmas of both the political and religious authorities
pushing for reform and a different Muslim hermeneutics and some of them paid
the ultimate price, or ended up in exile or in prison.
Some
had hoped that Muslim communities in Europe and North America would provide the
intellectual vigor needed to spark serious critical self-examination in Muslim
societies or Muslim communities in the west; but the terror acts committed in
recent months and years by European born Muslims and the resulting backlash
doomed such hopes. Such attacks revealed that European Muslims still have a
long way to go to be fully integrated in European societies, assuming that they
want such integration. European states such as France and Belgium are not
helping their Muslim citizens feel fully at home when they enact illiberal laws
against public displays of religiosity such as banning the hijab in public
schools or try to appoint Imams at certain Mosques. On the other hand, even in
the most multicultural societies in Europe such as Britain and Denmark
integrating Muslim immigrants has become very problematic, with some Muslim
youths resorting to terrorism. More than a 100 Danish jihadists may have joined
ISIS in Syria, one of the highest rates per capita in Europe.
Eventually,
European Muslims would be compelled to develop a European Islam that tries to
respect the ethos of the countries the Muslim immigrants are adopting, and the
very core values of Islam. The diversity of Islam in history can be explained
by its phenomenal ability to adjust to the different cultural milieus it found
itself confronting. The way Islam developed in the Levant, Egypt and North
Africa, is different than the way it developed in Al-Andalus (Spain), or the
Balkans, or South Asia and China. Puritan Islamists refuse to acknowledge this
diversity and insist against history and facts that there is one uniform Islam.
Islamic civilization prospered and evolved not when it was onto its own, but
when it collaborated and learned and competed peacefully with other cultures
and religions.
Yes to life
The
Umayyad Dynasty in Damascus benefited tremendously from the Christian Arabs who
were steeped in Byzantine culture and learned a lot from the more advanced
Byzantine and Persian civilizations. In the eighth century, The Abbasid Caliph
Harun al-Rashid and his successor son al-Ma’mun established Baghdad’s
reputation as the capital of learning and scientific endeavor in the world. The
sprawling city, the largest outside China, was open and welcoming to diversity.
Caliph al-Rashid established his famed House of Wisdom – a medieval version of
a modern think tank- to translate the great works of Greek Philosophy and to
have Muslim scholars comment and build on it. In those golden days, classic
Arab poetry, including that unique Arab literary genre known as Khamriyat, (the glorification of wine
making and wine drinking, with bold references to the realms of religion
politics, and ethics) reached its zenith.
Other
great Muslim cities, from Cordoba to Istanbul achieved greatness only because
of their “liberal” environment and because they embraced intellectual diversity
and enjoyed and reveled in the material world. In all of these cities, the
Political realm and not the religious was the dominant one. The German
Philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche who had strong negative views of Judaism and
Christianity and contradictory views of Islam, nonetheless made a striking
comment about the “wonderful world of the Moorish culture of Spain,” and he
found it admirable that Islam “said Yes to life even with the rare and refined
luxuries of Moorish life.” From this perspective, there is no greatness in
asceticism, or in fake religious puritanism or in fear of the material world.
Yes to life.
Hard truths
After
each terrorism act in Europe last year, people asked where are the moderate
Muslims, or where the outrage in the Muslim world is, or why it is that many
Arabs don’t admit that ISIS has deep roots in Arab-Muslim traditions? Arabs and
Muslims, who live in denial, usually give the standard answers which dredge up
western colonialism and discrimination, or support for Israel and Arab
despotism, by way of putting things in “context.”
Historic
Western sins notwithstanding, Muslims should face some hard truths about most
of their polities and societies. According to the State Department’s Country
Reports on Terrorism 2013, of the ten countries with the most terrorist
attacks, seven were Muslim, and of the top ten groups that perpetrated
terrorist attacks, seven were Muslim. According to a study by the Pew Research
Center (2014), of the 24 most restrictive countries on the free exercise of
religion 19 are Muslim-majority. Some of the bloodiest terrorist groups in the
world wrap themselves with an Islamic garb, such as ISIS and Boko Haram. An arc
of upheavals and violence in majority Muslim states stretching from North
Africa, through Syria and Iraq, and all the way to Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Beyond the violence, the status of women, children and minorities is very
troubling. One cannot wish away these hard truths.
It is
true that there are no autonomous institutions in the Arab world where Muslim
reformers can develop and defend their views, but the fact remains that there
are Arab reformers in the Arab world and in the West. This is a battle the West
cannot and should not fight for Arabs and Muslims. The fight against ISIS and
other forms of religious repression and extremism requires sharp swords as well
as sharp and honest words. The challenge of the reformers is enormous and
dangerous. But first they have to say YES TO LIFE.
