 |
| The
many faces of Islamic leadership (clockwise from top left) 1. Osama bin
Laden; 2. Saddam Hussein; 3. Rashid Rida, influential Islamist scholar;
4. Mohammad Khatami, former Iranian president; 5. Muhammed Abduh,
Egyptian religious scholar regarded as the founder of Islamic
modernism; 6. Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani; 7. Jamal al-Din
al-Afghani, who emphasised Islam as a civilisation more than a
religion; 8. King Hussein of Jordan; 9. Recep Tayyip Erdogan, prime
minister of Turkey; 10. King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia |
Uneasy Lies the Head
was the perhaps inevitable title of the autobiography of the late King
Hussein of Jordan, the West’s favourite benign Arab despot. He was the
improbable survivor of innumerable plots, coups and uprisings, of three
Arab-Israeli wars, two Gulf wars and a civil war with the Palestinians,
as well as around a dozen assassination attempts in the 46 years he
wore the heavy crown of his improbable desert kingdom.
The
Hashemite monarch, descended from the family of the Prophet Mohammed
and the Sharifs of Mecca, exuded total confidence in his legitimacy.
Yet, this most open of Arab autocrats, this elegant and charming
authoritarian, relied on the military and the Mukhabarat, his
ubiquitous secret police, to stay in power, no less than in any other
Arab state. To underline this truth is not necessarily to disparage
King Hussein’s often liberal instincts. What it reveals is that even a
leader willing to experiment with change, a regal populist who could
utter the word “democracy” with a more or less straight face, a monarch
who was once prepared to share (a bit of his) power with Islamists, was
in the end no different from his peers.
But a Hussein experiment
of 20 years ago is jostling its way back onto the political agendas of
the Arab world and wider Middle East: the attempt to marry Islam and
democracy. This is the single biggest challenge facing a region mired
in despotism and failure, where US and western collusion with local
strongmen has created an Arab Exception – leaving the Arabs marooned in
tyranny as waves of democracy broke over eastern Europe and Latin
America, sub-Saharan Africa and south-east Asia. There is no other part
of the world – not even China – where the west operates with such
little regard for the human and political rights of local citizens. The
west’s morbid fear of political Islam has served to deny Arabs
democracy in case they support Islamists, just as during the cold war
many Latin Americans, Asians and Africans had to endure
western-endorsed dictators lest they supported communists. Unless the
Arab countries and the broader Middle East can find a way out of this
pit of autocracy, their people – more than half of them under 25 – will
be condemned to bleak lives of despair, humiliation and rage. Western
support for autocracy and indulgence of corruption in this region, far
from securing stability, breeds extremism and, in extremis, failed
states. It will, of course, be primarily up to the citizens of these
countries to claw their way out of that pit. But the least they can
expect from the west is not to keep stamping on their fingers.
So
what was it King Hussein did? In 1989, the king risked an experiment in
“guided democracy”. The main beneficiaries were Islamists, grouped
mostly in the Jordanian chapter of the pan-Islamic Muslim Brotherhood
(al-Ikhwan al-Muslimeen). With 34 out of 80 assembly seats, the
Islamists were the largest, and the only ideologically cohesive, bloc.
In 1990-91, the king brought four Muslim Brothers into the cabinet. In
private conversation four years later, he even foresaw the day when
Jordan would have an Islamist prime minister, “and they and the people
will see what government is about and who can do it”. But, first, he
bound their leadership into a constitutional consensus. This set out
the rules of managed democracy. Crucially, it also established Islam as
but one fount of political legitimacy, alongside the parallel claims of
Jordanian patriotism, Arab nationalism, and universal values. This
Jordanian National Charter (al-Mithaq al-Watani al-Urduni) remains one
of the most suggestive political documents to have emerged in the
modern Arab world. It bucked the trend in the region.
The
minute the Brothers began to develop an agenda independently from the
Palace, however, King Hussein changed the rules, enacting new electoral
laws to guarantee majorities in parliament of Bedouin loyalists and
tribal grandees. As the peace Jordan signed with Israel in 1994 grew
ever more unpopular, moreover, so the king rolled back his democratic
reforms, limiting change to largely meaningless changes of government
(he ran through 56 prime ministers in 46 years).
This episode
nonetheless remains important, and transcends Jordan. King Hussein’s
volte face meant an opportunity was lost to develop new forms of
legitimacy – democratic legitimacy – by one of the few Arab leaders who
had any reserves of this precious commodity left. Yet in the following
two decades, there would be repeated attempts – from Khatami’s Iran to
post-Saddam Iraq, from Erdogan’s Turkey to King Abdullah’s Saudi Arabia
– either to synthesise Islam and democracy or tilt towards forms of
modernity the region’s religious heritage could sustain.
The
Islam and modernity debate, which accompanied the collapse of the
Ottoman empire after the first World War, has emerged again nearly a
century later. But there is an important difference. Few Muslims now
invest much hope in the democratic western powers (essentially the US,
Britain and France) that back the rulers who oppress them, even if,
against the odds, they still admire “western” values, science and
culture. There is no endemic or intrinsic conflict between Christians
and Muslims. Rather, the root of the problem is that a majority of
Muslims is convinced that the west – interested only in a stability
based on regional strongmen, the security of Israel and cheap oil – is
engaged in a war against Islam and is bent on denying them the freedoms
it claims for itself.
That is why it is so self-defeating to
collude in tyranny as ostensibly a lesser evil than political Islam.
The challenge now is to ensure that these Muslims are not driven into
the arms of the jihadis who are poised to enter the Muslim mainstream.
As poll after depressing poll shows, the moral credit of the west could
hardly be lower in the Muslim and Arab worlds. As western client-rulers
and local despots suppress all political challenge, leaving their
people only the mosque and the madrassa as space to rally and regroup,
Islamists are the beneficiaries. They build on doctrine common to all
Islam: the concern to build a just society and to preserve the unity of
the Umma, the worldwide community of believers. That is already a
seductive political combination even before any spark of religious
belief is added. Add to it the familiar list of timeless and actual
Muslim grievances, the sense of a religion under siege and the lament
for lost glory, and what emerges is a potent liberation theology.
Democracy,
in this unpromising context, could open a long period of illiberal
politics that may be inimical to stability. Yet the west’s only
realistic choice is to foster, or at least not actively obstruct, the
right of Arabs to decide their own future, in whatever form they wish.
That form will be heavily influenced by Islamism. Yet the west should
be able to see the similarities between Islamism (or Islamic
revivalism) and 19th-century nationalism in Europe. Both started as a
sort of forced march into the future and then they detoured in sinister
and destructive ways: fascism then and the jihadi cult of death now.
Any sane policy would be devoted to preventing the evolution of a
lethal form of radical Islam, in no small part by finding space for a
thoughtful Islamism to emerge.
That is no longer easy. The
freedom agenda proclaimed by George W. Bush has been discredited. Yet
the insight brought to the west so violently by al-Qaeda on September
11 2001 and subsequently – that tyranny breeds terrorism and
instability, infantilises politics and holds back development – is no
less valid. Not the least of the challenges facing Barack Obama is to
rescue that insight before it is too late.
It was never the
spontaneous choice of the Arabs and the Muslims to retreat into Islam,
even after colliding with a confident and expansionist Europe in the
late 18th century. The Islamic revival only acquired legs when
balance-of-power politics and subsequent western support for tyrants
thwarted nationalist and democratic attempts at modernisation.
Obviously,
once the European powers thrust into Arab and Muslim lands in the
course of the 19th and early 20th centuries – taking Algeria, Tunisia,
Egypt, Libya, Syria and Lebanon, and shrinking the Ottoman hinterland
before pointing a dagger at its heartland – the question of modernity,
much less democracy, must in many Muslim minds have been displaced by
the question of survival. There had been no shortage of “modernist”
Islamic thinkers, trying to tease out the lessons of western success
and clear the thickets of superstition from Muslim minds. But, while
looking forward, they also looked backwards to the dawn of Islam.
Jamal
al-Din al-Afghani (1838-97), probably, despite his name, a Persian who
studied philosophy in the Shia holy city of Najaf in Iraq, came to
represent a flowing together of Islamic reform and nationalist
assertion that would trickle into almost every political current in the
region. As the historian Albert Hourani has pointed out, he brought a
radical new emphasis on Islam as a civilisation rather than Islam as a
religion, yet “only by a return to Islam can the strength and
civilisation of Muslims be restored”. Islam needed to reclaim its
scientific roots, and harvest the new fruits that had flowered in
Europe from stems originally planted by the Muslims. With the unity of
the Umma, Islam could once more have a universal mission in the world,
because, as anyone who studied it could see, it was tolerant, rational
and in harmony with the principles uncovered by science through the
ages, not least by the great Muslim scientists who had not only adorned
their own civilisation but recovered the civilisation of the west.
Under
Afghani’s disciples, however, the emphasis on reform, and the nature of
universalism, gradually changed. Mohammed Abduh (1849-1905), an
Egyptian scholar who in 1899 became the Mufti of Egypt, was above all
concerned to show that the road to modernity could be discovered in the
roots of Islam. Ostensibly modern concepts could be evolved out of
traditional Islamic notions provided they were properly understood and
adapted. Thus, Muslims could identify the principle of maslaha –
whereby a judge could select from rival legal traditions to find the
best outcome for public welfare – as the slightly more modern idea of
the public good or interest. They would be able to recognise ijma –
something between the consensus of the scholars and the acceptance of
the community – as public opinion. Above all they could authentically
claim their own tradition of democracy in the practice of shura or
consultation.
Abduh’s attempt to spring Islam into the vanguard
of modernity was partly a job of reinterpreting and unifying Islamic
law and adapting it to modern problems, partly a job of revealing the
true meaning of old precepts and practices. It both cases it had to
involve ijtihad – the exercise of independent but scholarly judgment –
to confront the circumstances of modernity unforeseen at the dawn of
Islam.
Under Rashid Rida (1865-1935), a Syrian disciple of both
Afghani and Abduh, many of the themes are the same, but he insistently
argues that the technical skills of modernity arise out of the right
moral habits and intellectual principles. If the teaching of Islam is
properly understood, it will lead to success in this world and the
next. In Rida’s al-Manar (The Lighthouse) periodical, which had an
important influence on both Islamic revivalism and pan-Arab
nationalism, “true Islam involves two things, acceptance of the unity
of God and consultation [shura] in matters of state, and despotic
rulers have tried to make Muslims forget the second by encouraging them
to abandon the first”.
But Rida increasingly looked back
towards the Islam of the al-Salaf al-Salih – the pious forerunners of
the first generations. That focus quickly led to the perception that
decay had come about as a result of surrender to philosophy,
speculation and mysticism – rather than surrender to God, the precise
meaning of the word Islam. This meant all developments after the Salafi
period and the subsequent establishment of the four orthodox schools of
Sunni jurisprudence were deeply suspect. What started, therefore, as an
injunction to learn the secrets of western culture as the prelude to
relaunching Islam as a triumphantly universal civilisation subtly
mutated into a highly defensive Islamic revivalism led initially by
organisations such as the Muslim Brotherhood, determined to rid Islam
of the seeds of western decadence. These ideas would mutate further,
once detached from the sort of world that gave birth to them: an
inclusive and entire world dislocated by the upheaval of modernity and
the penetration of imperial power. Such Janus-like modernism easily
cleared a path for the Islamic revivalism of this century, especially
after nationalism was thwarted and the Arab world proceeded up one
blind alley after another, following what Osama bin Laden has derided
as “earthly flags”.
With the bin Ladenists, the notion of the
Umma has been corrupted into fascistic and supremacist ideas analogous
to the Volk or the Razza, with their primacy over individual human
rights and the universal rights of humanity, a muscular Islamism that
appeals to the young yet elicits a vicarious thrill among orderly
conservatives. As the American scholar of fascism, Robert Paxton, puts
it well, “war is indispensable for the maintenance of fascist muscle
tone”. Substitute “jihad” for war and “Islamist” for fascist and you
have an important element of the attraction of the modern holy warrior.
There
are grounds for hope. Islamism comes in many guises. Turkey, for
example, has shown that political Islam can evolve. The ruling Justice
and Development party of Recep Tayyip Erdogan was rebuilt from the
wreckage of two failed Islamist parties and broadened into a sort of
Muslim equivalent of Christian Democracy. It is widely admired in the
Arab and Muslim worlds, not as a model but because it works. Success
sells.
In Iran, by contrast, reformist attempts under Mohammad
Khatami (1997-2005) to create a freer society with a government
accountable to the people under the rule of law mesmerised the region
but eventually hit the buffers of theocracy. The silky and smiling
Iranian president was rebuffed in his search for détente by Bill
Clinton and rejected when he offered a “grand bargain” to George W.
Bush in 2003. The price of failure was the shrewdly extremist Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad.
Top Shia clerics in Iraq, however, such as Grand
Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, take their inspiration not from Iran’s
Islamic revolution of 1979 but from its constitutional revolution of
1906, aimed at establishing elected, representative government and the
rule of law. While jealous of their prerogatives, the Iraqi clergy
sought a new contract between ruler and ruled, not to become the new
rulers like Iran’s theocrats. The 2005 Iraqi constitution, like the
1989 Jordanian National Charter, establishes Islam as a “basic” source
of legislation, but states that no law can infringe the “principles of
democracy” or the “rights and basic freedoms” enumerated in the rest of
the constitution. This was no blueprint for secular liberalism. But
nor, in a country that elected Islamists to two thirds of parliamentary
seats, was it a warrant for theocracy.
In Saudi Arabia, the
region’s original theocracy, the ruling House of Saud’s hesitant steps
to lead the kingdom towards a modernity its Islamic heritage can absorb
means curbing the corrosive power of the Wahhabi religious
establishment. King Abdullah’s most feasible way forward is to enlist
Islamist progressives, the richest source of ideas for renewal. That is
a risk the al-Saud may not be willing or able to take. As one senior
prince, a moderniser who fears opening the door to Islamist reformers,
puts it with a certain melancholy: “We liberals sit around a bottle of
Scotch and complain to each other, and then, the next morning, do
nothing. Yet if we don’t get real progress, economically, socially and
politically, we are going to be in a terrible mess in five to 10 years.”
While
both the clerical establishment and al-Qaeda revile such “whisky
liberals”, they see as their real adversary the Islamist reformers who
advocate far-reaching change, many of whom have rediscovered the
thinking of Islamic revivalists of a century ago. The ideas of, for
example, Mohammed Abduh on maslaha (public interest), shura
(consultation) and above all of ijtihad, or independent reasoning to
marry Islamic belief with modern challenges, have resurfaced almost as
a newly minted currency. The idea of civil society was reborn, with
Muslim credentials the Wahhabi establishment justly fears. The turning
point was the 2003 petition, called “A vision for the present and
future of the homeland”, signed by leading Islamist reformers and
liberals – although the former were and are the real force. As this
pluralism implies, the document is founded on the principles of
confessional and political diversity in Saudi Arabia. But for the first
time, reformers both liberal and Islamist broke the taboo about
speaking out against Wahhabism, implying that its totalitarian ideology
was the deathly hand holding back the emergence of Saudi Arabia as a
successful modern state its citizens would easily support.
In
this respect, the 2003 Saudi “Vision” document is as suggestive of a
path forward as the 1989 Jordanian National Charter or the still
unrealised Iraqi constitution of 2005. They all draw on and revisit the
sources of renewal that are and will remain Islamic, and in important
ways, Islamist. The Islamist reformers nonetheless want free elections,
freedom of expression and association, an independent judiciary and a
fairer distribution of wealth – in short, a constitutional monarchy, if
not a bicycling monarchy.
The idiom, however strange to western
or liberal ears, is a large part of the story, because it gives those
who use it to articulate reform a recognisable immediacy, an
authenticity and a legitimacy that shields them from the usual charges
of foreign influence and intrusion. Sheikh Abdulaziz al-Qassim, a
former (defenestrated) Saudi judge and reformer, is a particularly
authoritative version of the genre. “Al-Qaeda and the clergy are
essentially doing the same thing in different ways – putting pressure
on the House of Saud for being less devout than it should be. This
paralyses reform,” he maintains. “The only way out of this is to dilute
the link with Wahhabi fanaticism. The only way forward is to win the
legitimacy of society itself – through political reform that does not
depend on the approval of the clergy. If you make society part of
reform you can overcome the clergy – it is the only way.”
David
Gardner is the FT’s chief leader writer. His book ‘Last Chance: The
Middle East in the Balance’ is published by I.B. Tauris next week
The
crusades have everything a historian could want: slaughter, conquest,
hubris, faith, folly, greed, heroes and villains. But histories of the
crusades have usually reflected the era in which they were written.
Iran
has every right to pursue nuclear power. It is a matter of national
sovereignty. We should never have signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty
in 1968 – it was based on an unfair bargain. I believe that now, and I
believed it more than 40 years ago, when the Shah of Iran, Mohammed
Reza Pahlavi, put me in charge of creating the country’s nuclear
programme. 
We
are all chasing happiness. We talk of it as if it were real, a place
the budget airlines will surely soon be flying to, or a new product –
iPhoria? – that will hit the shelves any day. We sniff at mere
contentment. Disgruntlement we see as aberration. And being down in the
dumps is a certifiable disease. 
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