[Dialogue] Empty-hearted secularism

[Harry Wainwright]

Empty-hearted secularism

False oppositions and machinations are rife in the Arab world, where
secularism has become a corrupted political fashion, writes Azmi Bishara 

  _____  

Modern Turkey has never experienced as extended a period of stability and
economic growth as it has under the last government. This government was led
by the Justice and Development Party, which just scored another major
electoral triumph in the Turkish general elections. In its victory speeches,
the Islamist party pledged to safeguard the constitution of Turkey's secular
republic. As I recall, in the trial over the murder of the Egyptian writer
Farag Fouda, some mainstream members of the Muslim Brotherhood testified on
the behalf of the accused that the killers had been rightfully motivated by
religious zeal, because the secularism that Fouda advocated was heresy. What
a striking difference! One Islamist party swears to uphold the state's
secularist system while another rules that secularism is anathema and
justifiable grounds for murder. Not that this kept mainstream Islamist
movements from jubilation, in turn, over the victory of a party whose
position on secularism they would roundly condemn if that party had declared
it openly in their own countries. 

The Justice and Development Party is far from a leftist or liberal
democratic party. But it has certainly governed Turkey better than any other
Turkish party that I know of, leftist, liberal, republican or otherwise.
Even so, it did not have any easy ride. At one point it had to dissolve and
change its name. More recently, it was the victim of a massive hate campaign
waged by the left and right in concert in the name of secularism.

Many factors combined to propel this mainstream Islamist movement to embrace
parliamentary life. For one, the military establishment certainly put a cap
on its ambitions. Undoubtedly, too, Turkish cultural and national identity,
the conflicting ramifications and repercussions of globalisation, and
economic progress and development also played a part. Whatever these factors
were, the party retained its equilibrium, adjusted to present limitations,
and decided to play by the rules of the game. 

This placed Europe in an awkward spot. As it hemmed and hawed over granting
membership to an industrially developed nation with a democratically elected
government, a nation many times better than some of the Eastern European
countries that were gaining admission, Europe was once again exposed for its
widespread and deeply seated undercurrent of racism. But the platitudes keep
coming fast and furious to cover up the resounding moral collapse of
European policy towards Turkey (in spite of a brave attempt to revive it in
the post- colonialist era of the Kreisky and Brandt generation), a collapse
that was merely a sideshow to the even more telling and more hastily swept
under the carpet collapse of the German handling of the Jewish question and
Palestine.

Of course, the issue has some bearing on the history of Islamism in Turkey.
Unlike in the Arab world, Turkey never had that clear divide between radical
political Islam versus mystical Sufism on the one hand and the conservative
clergy on the other. In Turkey, things are more subtle: a vast social base
of subscribers to a rational and tolerant form of Sufism and an invisible
give-and-take between "the military" and "the Sufi lodge" that is constantly
recalibrating itself. 

While in Turkey, a victorious Islamist party displays more moderation,
rationality and pragmatism, and less demagoguery and populism than all its
secularist rivals, the Arab world is experiencing a curious decline in the
rhetorical lip service paid to democracy. I say "curious" because one sniffs
hidden agendas and because there is a sudden increase in the talk of
"secularism" and "the unity of secularist forces". Not that this should be
all that surprising. Most of the ruling regimes are secularist and
undemocratic, and most of the corruption they foster, and the nepotism they
thrive on, is secular. At the same time, everyone knows that democracy could
open the corridors of power to Islamist forces. Not that anyone would be so
bold as to come out against democracy, even if they never supported it in
their lives. The fashion, now, is to say you're a secularist instead.

Of course, there are some very sincere liberal secularists out there who
have not been co-opted by the prevailing regimes and sucked into their
cycles of corruption. Many of these oppose suffrage for all, a position
that, as much as I take issue with it, I find I have to respect. I'm the
last to claim that "democracy is the solution", to borrow from the Muslim
Brotherhood chant "Islam is the solution." I don't subscribe to panaceas. 

This said, secularism to some is a way of life; as opposed to a political
philosophy that espouses the separation of religion and the state. More
often than not, these self-acclaimed secularists are not secularist at all,
but inveterate narcissists who do not like to be crossed. They worship
worldly values perhaps more than others revere spiritual ones, and they can
be more fundamentalist and verbally and physically aggressive in the defence
of these values than ultra nationalists and even ultra opportunists.
Criticism puffs up their vanity even more and goads them into peddling to
the consumerist middle and upper classes a rhetoric seething with a phobia
of religion and religious devotion. In effect, they have founded a new
secular religion that is hostile to Islam in particular. And they are not
put off by the George W Bush brand of fundamentalism and the bigotry of a
broad segment of his grassroots base.

Democracy was fashionable among some antidemocratic intellectuals at the
time the US moved to export democracy by gunboat. They joined the American
chorus in the chant that some regimes can only be changed from the outside,
even though some of these intellectuals were good friends with the regimes
in question and moved from one to the other when they had to. A life of
luxury sometimes depends on someone to support it, and the intellectual life
in our countries certainly can't feed itself as well as that mode of
"secular" existence. But what is sadder yet is that these panderers to
American rhetoric dropped democracy like a hot potato as soon as the
neo-cons (apart from Bush) realised that their advice was backfiring and
decided to revert to their former pragmatism that entailed taking their
allies for better or worse, laying off with the democratisation blackmail
and reconciling themselves to that bitter truth that political reform only
opened the floodgates to their enemies. So much is perfectly understandable.
What defies comprehension, however, is how fast our neo-liberals, here, took
up "secularism" in the course of this past year. "Secularism," now, has
become a multipurpose word. It can even be used to justify siding with Bush,
Olmert and the secular Arab regimes against what the legitimately elected
Hamas movement did, let alone to support the practices of corrupt security
agencies in defending the secular consumerist way of life in the face of the
backwardness of those who turned against it.

Of course this brand of secularism has very little to do with the latest
definition of secularism as privatising religious self-determination and
separating it from the public sphere, and very much to do with taking a
stance against political Islam. It is a position that expresses itself in
the Arab world in the form of corrupt regimes that have hitched themselves
to the skirts of Western powers and, occasionally, Israel. Here, secularism
is not a prerequisite for democracy, or a means to rationalise politics, but
a form of the worship of consumerism and the wares of certain classes.

Secularist forces, in their original sense or in the latest sense of
anti-Islamist forces, do not form a sufficient majority to establish a
democratic order. They are highly dependent upon dictatorships. In the best
of circumstances, they criticise dictatorship without presenting a
democratic alternative. But this is a form of camouflage. Secularist forces
will never be able to offer a democratic alternative until they, themselves,
become democrats and conceive of a reasonable way to run the country in a
democratic and secular manner. But this challenge will remain beyond their
reach unless they take into account the influence of Islamist parties and
Islamist political forces.

Democratic secularists must reach out to and speak with Islamists. There is
a vast spectrum of them, and it is important to distinguish between those
who share democratic values and those who condemn the democratic process. To
toss all of them into a single basket on the grounds of a shared religious
frame of reference is to be pointlessly rigid and closed-minded. Even if
secularists have some grounds for suspicion, to yield to this sentiment is
irrational and futile. The fact is, not only is there a rift in the greater
Islamist movement; its mainstream segment will constantly evolve the more it
is given the opportunity to involve itself in the affairs of society and
state, and the more it discovers, through practice, the diversity and
limitations of pluralistic interaction. In addition, the desire to attain
and keep power necessitates certain compromises with both self and others. 

But reaching out to Islamists does not mean flattering them to the extent of
abandoning important secularist principles. Nor should it stem from that
paternalistic self-righteous attitude that Arab nationalists, in particular,
seem to cling to without cause. Islamist movements have deep experience and
diversified expertise; they do not need tutors or custodians, but people
they can converse with and whom they can trust at times when it is necessary
to fight for a common cause. The Arab nationalist trend may still attract
the majority of the Arab public, and its Nasserist version may still appeal
to the majority of Egyptians. However, it is not a sufficiently unified and
organised movement to make its political clout felt. For this, it has only
itself to blame. It should not cast the onus on organised Islamist forces to
carry out tasks it should have performed itself long ago. For Arab
nationalists to turn around now and exclude Islamists on the pretext that
they are not "secularist", and therefore not ready to practice democracy,
apart from being hypocritical, is unrealistic. What kind of democracy
excludes that many people from across the various sectors of society and
with such enormous potential to offer the nation?

Of course, the Islamist mainstream must be expected to abide by both the
spirit and principles of democracy. This does not only mean adhering to
democratic practices, such as holding free and fair elections and handing
over power peacefully when the polls tell it to. It also means respecting
the human rights and civil liberties of all citizens during its period of
rule, something for which Arab "secularist" governments have a dismally poor
track record. Islamists will also be expected to accept and work for the
national agenda and to honour and safeguard national sovereignty. Equally,
if not more importantly, it must do this in collaboration with other
political forces and, moreover, it must educate its own rank and file on how
to engage in a constructive process of give-and-take. 

This brings me to some observations on the difference between internal
awareness raising and the discourse used to placate others. The very fact
that a movement perceives the need to modify its discourse to allay the
qualms of others is, in itself, a significant development, even if the
discourse has yet to be channelled for absorption within the movement.
Islamists that brand all other political movements and ideologies heretic do
not care at all about how others think of them. Of course, the radical left,
in its time, made no such distinctions. To it, hypocrisy was worse than
fascism and, anyway, it perceived little difference between social democracy
and Nazism: both were essentially forms of the rule of the bourgeoisie. To
me, Nazism and fascism are worse than hypocrisy. So is absolutist Islamism.
However, the transformations through which mainstream Islamist movements are
passing are not hypocrisy, but a historic imperative for the type of reforms
needed to make the transition to a real and robust democracy. This fact must
be acknowledged and handled appropriately.

Those who do not recognise that the Muslim Brotherhood has undergone a sea
of change since the days of Sayed Qotb, that Hamas today is not what it was
a few years ago and that Hizbullah is not the same party that shot Shia
leftists in the 1980s are, themselves, fundamentalists of a different
stripe. They cling to their ideas or preconceptions without subjecting them
to rational scrutiny or the light of reality, whether out of rigid
closed-mindedness or simply because it is not in their interests to try to
understand. Or perhaps it is because they, too, have changed? I, for one,
find it difficult to understand a left that now finds itself collaborating
with the US and Israel against Islamists. I find it even harder to
understand a left that is now so remote from the poor and the culture of the
underprivileged, and from the quest for social justice, and is so cosy with
the prosperous classes that are so aloof from their own societies.

C Copyright Al-Ahram Weekly. All rights reserved

Al-Ahram Weekly Online : Located at:
http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2007/856/op2.htm 

 

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