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Fatima Mernissi’s
Struggle with Islam and Democracy
Fatima Mernissi’s book
The Forgotten Queens of Islam is a historical study that analyzes women’s
place in the public sphere and their relationship with power. Her book
explores the ironies and oxymora of women and power through Islamic
history. Mernissi transcends the historical to discover the bits and pieces
of the situations surrounding political women in today’s Muslim societies.
Starting off through
the example of Benazir Bhutto, Mernissi argues that despite religious
leaders’ rejection of her access to power, Bhutto was neither the first
female with political power nor the only one to cause such a fuss. Mernissi
explores the lives of numerous women including influential jawari (female
slaves in harems) and malikas (queens) to discover that women held both
private and public power all though Islamic history.
Nonetheless, far from
optimistic on Muslim women’s struggle to assert their place in the public
sphere, Mernissi shows the unbalance caused by a female presence in the
public sphere. Starting through the issue of the Caliphate, Mernissi points
out that even when women can occupy a position of political power, they can
rarely claim spiritual power. Women are automatically disqualified from the
position of Caliph as the term denotes unquestionable masculinity.
The book further digs
into the irony of women’s place in power by unveiling the constant struggle
between different Muslim sects to determine the lawfulness of inheritance
of power through women, such as in the case of Fatima, Prophet Muhammad’s
daughter. Mernissi’s book explores the challenges that different
interpretations of political Islam pose for both Shi’ism and Sunnism.
Nevertheless, as in
Mernissi’s other books, it is possible to see how femininity and sexuality
become political when it comes to power and succession. Something that for
her plays such an important role that she claims that Arab women have been
in constant disadvantage in terms of the private-political sphere due to
the difference in sexual morals and ethics. Women, especially female
slaves, who were able to access power, were often sexually close to
politically active males.
Although power was more
easily available to women through the private sphere, women’s presence in
the mosque through the khutbah asserted women’s place in the public sphere.
Mernissi emphasizes the importance of the khutbah, and to some degree, she
measures a woman’s political success in terms of her ability to get the
khutbah said in her name.
Thus, Mernissi
emphasizes the success of the Yemeni queens Asma Al-Hurra and Arwa Al-Hurra
(titles that denote freedom) and the Fatimid princess Sitt Al-Mulk, whose
lives often challenge Shariah and Islamic interpretations of particular
sources. Mernissi comments on their success as rulers and their
capabilities. She highlights their spiritual and political importance only
to bring about the problems that female figures pose to Islamic exegesis
especially when it comes to women like the Queen of Sheba.
It is through the Queen
of Sheba and the stories of the other three women that Mernissi, once more,
emphasizes that even though femininity is a challenge to power (and vice
versa) women can hold political power; yet, the cannot hold spiritual one.
Mernissi introduces the
challenges that Shariah pose to women’s role in public life through the
discussions on women’s ability to be imams. Unlike some perceptions about
Mernissi, she heavily relies on traditional and contemporary Islamic
sources. Thus, she is able to show the disagreements among different
classical Islamic scholars on this topic.
Through this and other
examples, Mernissi points out that women are oppressed by religion rather
than by culture. She argues that it was Yemen’s cultural background that
allowed two very successful queens to rule, rather than Yemen’s attachment
to Ismaili Islam.
Further, she puts in
context the way in which political Islam has been used to undermine women’s
role. Mernissi resources to the example of Caliph Al-Hakim, who prohibited
everything that produced pleasure and even banned women from being seen
(something that even Hanbali considered extreme), and then to the case
of Mecca’s 17th century fatwa to
prohibit women from ruling, to argue that political Islam does not have
place for women unless it is through a male figure. Going back to Bhutto,
arguably her own claim to power through her father guaranteed her success.
Mernissi´s book is an
excellent historical source and a very well-developed argument on the
challenges faced by Muslim women in Muslim societies. Yet, although her
historical account of women’s place in the public sphere and transmission
of power provide us with an overview of the wrongdoings of political Islam
since the killing of Umar and Ali, Mernissi’s book is quite pessimistic on
the battle that Islamic feminism is fighting.
The first challenge
that Mernissi poses to the feminist struggle is the polarity between Islam
and democracy. She claims that since democracy requires individuality and
gender equality it has no place in Islam. Islam seems to grant women a
second-class citizen status while undermining monogamy. Mernissi believes
that democracy is the only way in which women can be better off
politically, socially and economically.
This is a challenging assumption as we see that democracy around the
world has not delivered its gender-equality promises yet. Even in the West
women have scarce access to power and even figures like Hillary Clinton may
have a claim to power through a male figure (i.e. her husband).
In addition, Mernissi,
who understands the veil as a symbol of confinement, argues that religion
rather than culture oppresses women. This not only undermines the efforts
of Islamic feminism, but also proves difficult as political Islam may not
be every Muslim’s definition of Islam. She continues to advance this
argument to claim that Islam lacks a concept of citizenship because it is
opposed to belief. Mernissi sees citizenship in the earthly realm, which is
incompatible with the idea of the caliphate, which is heavenly as well as
earthly. Women’s lack of access to the caliphate further shows that
democracy and Islam are incompatible.
Mernissi refers to the
Middle East and North Africa as proof of the failure of democracy, and if
this book was rewritten today she may reinforce this idea; however,
acknowledgement of the colonial experience is necessary when studying Islam
and it relationship to political power. Mernissi seems to think of
democracy in modern Western terms, which make me wonder, why do we think
that this is the ideal? And why should all of us import the same model?
Perhaps these questions
are beyond the scope of the book. Yet, Mernissi brings out important points
to consider when it comes to the inclusion of Muslim women in the democracy
and the advancement of their rights. This book proves useful to demonstrate
that women have been completely capable of ruling and even claiming
spiritual power. It is up to the Muslims who read it to acknowledge Muslim
women’s rightful place in the public sphere.
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POLITICK AND THE PROPHET
Where are the Arab-Muslim liberals?
by Martin Kramer
The New Republic
Can Islam and democracy
be reconciled? The vexed old question has enjoyed a revival since January
of last year, when Algeria's ruling party voided the results of that
country's first free parliamentary election. The election gave an
overwhelming mandate to the party of Islamic fundamentalism, whose most
outspoken leader affirmed that "it is Islam which has been the victor,
as always, not democracy. We did not go to the ballot boxes for
democracy."
There are some in the
West who have tried to sweep such fundamentalist disavowals of democracy
under the rug. They include not only apologists for Islam, but also
engineers in the democracy foundations, for whom no job is too big. The
masses vote for Islam, they admit, but really they want democracy; the
leaders talk revival, but really they mean reform. Yet the fundamentalists
continue to spin their indictments of dimuqratiyya as a foreign and
superfluous innovation. "One does not vote for God," declared the
same Algerian fundamentalist. "One obeys Him."
Unlike many of the
West's democracy doctors, Fatima Mernissi entertains no illusions about the
fundamentalists. Mernissi, a feminist who teaches sociology at the
Université Mohammed V in the Moroccan capital of Rabat, has seen them up close.
And they have seen more of her than they would like — "an educated
woman, unveiled, agitating in the street in the name of the Charter of the
United Nations and against the shari'a," the revealed law of Islam. At
times they have tried to smother her voice. Her earlier book, The Veil and
the Male Elite, was banned in Morocco after its publication in France. In
this newest statement from the front line of the cultural war, Mernissi has
ventured beyond women's rights into human rights. Yet now that a generational
surge of Islamic fundamentalism threatens to stuff the ballot boxes of the
Arab world, this courage is also quite useless as a realistic guide to what
should be done.
Mernissi's point of
departure is a dissenting interpretation of Islam's historical legacy. It
is currently fashionable to argue that an Islamic civil society, born with
the faith, survived and even thrived despite a rapid turnover of absolute
rulers; that, under the tumultuous surface of politics, Islamic society
maintained an inner harmony that lasted for a millennium, until the rude
intrusion of the West. Mernissi will have nothing to do with this anodyne
reading of history. She sees an Arab past marked by "incessant
bloodbaths," and a present haunted by "the phantom ship of those
who were decapitated for refusing to obey":
Opposition forces have constantly
rebelled and tried to kill the leader, and he has always tried to
obliterate them. This dance of death between authority and individuality is
for the Muslim repressed, for it is soaked in the blood and violence that
no civilization lets float to the surface. . . The West is frightening
because it obliges the Muslims to exhume the bodies of all the opponents,
both religious and profane, intellectuals and obscure artisans, who were
massacred by the caliphs.
Such an utterance would
incur general censure in many a university center for Islamic or Middle
Eastern studies. It is all that more courageous to pronounce such truths
from within a society where every schoolchild knows these caliphs as heroes
of a golden age, and where every history textbook fixes the blame for the
modern Arab malaise solely on foreign intruders. And there is personal risk
in drawing too close a parallel between past and present, as Mernissi does
when she avers that today's Arab politicians, in power and opposition,
"continue to succeed in gutting one of the most promising religions in
human history of its substance."
No eastern Arab land
would long suffer such a voice, whose allusions to the despotism of the
Damascus and Baghdad caliphates are too contemporary. These are countries
where the earliest disputes of Islam still simmer, especially over the
flame of the persistent dissent of Shiites. But North Africa, the far west
of the Arab world, and as much Berber as Arab, is sufficiently removed from
the early events that compromised Islam to see them with an altogether
clear eye. So it was in the time of Ibn Khaldun, and so it remains today.
Mernissi's voice is not a lone one; it echoes those of other North African
intellectuals, such as the Tunisian Moncef Marzouki, whose book of a decade
ago caused an uproar. "Our past has been a series of plots and
wars," he wrote. "We are almost completely ignorant about those
who were oppressed, crucified and murdered to keep the face of truth from
being revealed."
Historical Islam may
have been dominated by despots and rebels, but Mernissi believes there has
always been another Islam yearning to be free. This Islam had its origins
in the egalitarian message of the Prophet, but also, and far more
importantly, in the teachings of the ninth- and tenth-century rationalist
philosophers, known as the Mu'taliza. They placed reason on the same plane
as revelation and borrowed liberally from extra-Islamic sources, especially
Greek philosophy. Mernissi compares them to the Enlightenment philosophers
of the West, and makes them champions of humanism and individualism, whose
doctrines so menaced rulers that they severed them with the sword. The
stump has been "an infected wound that the East has been carrying for
centuries." But Mernissi, following her metaphor of mutilation to the
end, avers that "having an arm amputated is not the same as being born
with an arm missing." A sense of the severed limb persists. By this logic,
democracy is not foreign to Islam, and Muslims are wrong to fear that its
spread might compromise the integrity of Islam. On the contrary, it would
heal the injury inflicted by "despotic politicians" long ago.
The credibility of such
an argument is probably not for an unbeliever to weigh. Islam is what
Muslims make of it, and if Mernissi's polemic is to succeed, it must defeat
the opposing view of the fundamentalists. They argue that God revealed his
sacred law, the shari'a, obviating all need for human legislation or
legislators. The present secular rulers are tyrants not because they govern
absolutely, but because they govern without reference to Islamic law.
Implementation of this law is the primary duty of government; and if an
authoritarian state enforces the law, then its legitimacy is indisputable.
Indeed, just government should be authoritarian, because it rests upon the
unquestionable authority of the law. The wise ruler should consult the
leaders of society for their advice. But democracy, the perpetual
plebiscite, is the very essence of arbitrary government, since it turns on
popular whim. Participation in elections is admissible, perhaps, as a way
to acquire power for Islam. But once that power is established, any means
are permissible for its preservation.
Now to believe
Mernissi, the masses have already chosen democracy over shari'a. As
evidence, she offers (of all things) the massive demonstrations against the
Gulf war, in which she herself participated. This outpouring, described in
her book with an enthusiasm that evokes accounts of Eastern Europe's
revolutions, supposedly protested the absence of democracy and the waste of
resources — both epitomized by Saudi Arabia, at that time flooded by foreign
troops. The Western media portrayed these demonstrations as groundswells of
fundamentalist xenophobia, but Mernissi claims otherwise, invoking the
demonstration that she joined. "Fundamentalists were among the
demonstrators," she allows, "but many other groups were present,
including all the branches of the Moroccan Left and thousands of
independents like me, of all persuasions, from university students and
professors to shopkeepers."
But this evidence is
equivocal at best. A better argument could be made that those
demonstrations were neither about democracy nor Islam. If anything ran
through the chanting crowds that filled the streets, it was
anti-imperialism, a desire to see West's nose bloodied just once — and an
admiration for Saddam, who proved himself a man of honor by defying America
and keeping his promise to attack Israel. It is one of the paradoxes of
Mernissi's quixotic vision that she sees so clearly across centuries but
cannot make out the pattern of a crowd. The grim truth is that there have been
no massive demonstrations for democracy in the Arab world, whereas the
demand for an Islamic state has managed to fill boulevards, and not just
during the Gulf war. The problem is not that the pro-democracy liberals
fear coming out into the street. It is their fear that they would not fill
it.
For, despite the
efforts of Mernissi and others, the reading of democracy into Islam seems
forced for most Muslims. It too closely resembles the strained attempt of a
generation ago to read socialism into Islam. Those many dusty tomes on
Islamic socialism are an embarrassment today, and caused some Muslim
grumbling even when they were de rigueur. ("There is no God and Karl
Marx is his Prophet," ran a comic play on the Islamic profession of
faith.) As Muslims have watched ideology supersede ideology among the
unbelievers, they have stopped trying to reconcile Islam with the current
vogue. Instead, they have rallied around a literalist reading of Islam's
sources as an anchor against successive waves of Western thought. The
demagogues of contemporary Islam have worked this into a simple message of
salvation through Islamic law, with which Mernissi's intellectualized
juggling of the sources cannot possibly compete. Fundamentalism's leading
spokesman, the Sudan's Hasan al-Turabi, has put it bluntly: movements like
those in Iran and Algeria "are without elitism or obsession with
quality. They represent quantity and the people." The aim is power, by
packing the ballot boxes or the streets, and the fundamentalists have been
unbeatable at both.
If democracy is to have
any chance in the Arab world, its outnumbered friends, Mernissi among them,
will have to forge alliances of convenience. They have two choices. They
can negotiate with existing regimes, in the hope that the nudging of the
West might ultimately produce a gradual transformation, or they can march
with the fundamentalists and pray against all odds that they survive
militant Islam's excesses to emerge as equal partners. The starkness of
this choice has been brought home by the events in Algeria, where a civil
war may be brewing. The Arab world now stands poised on the brink of a
great contest between an increasingly pan-Islamic fundamentalism and a
region-wide alliance of threatened regimes. Wherever the gale strikes, the
brave friends of democracy will have to scatter for shelter under one roof
or the other.
And yet Mernissi, in a
disturbing show of naïvete that may afflict the liberals as a whole,
rejects all potential allies. The fundamentalists, who openly preach
against democracy and would consign women to servitude, are hardly
trustworthy partners. To her mind, however, neither are the regimes,
especially those that have been supported or bailed out by the West. All of
them have wasted the wealth of the Arabs on arms. One of them, Saudi
Arabia, is already fundamentalist, and is singled out by Mernissi as the
Arab regime "most contemptuous of human rights" — an odd
determination, which can only inspire admiration for Saddam's cover-up.
Other regimes, in a grab for legitimacy, are deemed likely to play the
fundamentalist card themselves, creating a "tele-petro-Islam"
bounced off satellites to the entire Arab world, demanding obedience and
preaching obscurantism. Mernissi still believes in the masses, but they
have been duped, kept in ignorance by relentless media manipulation.
And so in the end, she
envisions only one salvation: the West. In an act of supreme altruism,
Mernissi concludes, the West should "use its power to install
democracy in the Arab world." It must support the demands of
"progressive forces" against both regimes and fundamentalists,
and even "promote the creation of a civil society." For the Arab
world, like it or not, has become a virtual ward of the West:
The American president has taken on ethical
responsibility for the region, and along with him François Mitterrand and
Helmut Kohl and the citizens who elected them in the representative
democracies of the West. Whoever consumes Arab oil is responsible.
If the West does
nothing but back the status quo, argues Mernissi, it will "in great
part be responsible for the avalanche of violence which will descend on all
those who call for democracy, with women at the head of the list."
This amounts to an
appeal that the West take direct responsibility for rearranging the inner
politics of the region — to build an empire of democracy. The petition
deserves a hearing, for its liberal authors stand alone in the Arab world
in their belief in democracy and in the West's mission to defend freedom.
True, there are some in the West, mesmerized by the sheer numbers of
fundamentalists, who have begun to dream wistfully of a mass conversion of
Muslim zealots into admirers of democracy and the West. But this is
illusion. The fundamentalists, even as they flood the polling places, hold
democracy in utter contempt and imagine the West to be on the verge of
collapse, rotted away by unbelief and materialism. Liberals like Mernissi
are democracy's only true friends in Arab lands, and they are right to ask
whether "the West will be a pioneer in establishing those universal
values that it preaches and that we have come to love."
But the West has other
responsibilities too. It must assure the flow of oil out of the region. It
must block the flow of weapons of mass destruction into the region. It must
discourage aggression by ambitious states like Iraq and Iran. It must work
to reconcile Arabs and Israelis, lest they launch an unimaginably
destructive war upon one another. And the West must do all this at a time
when the peoples of the former Communist countries are also in dire need of
assistance if their own ventures in democracy are not to run aground.
For all these reasons,
the West has balanced its commitment to democracy with support of those
Arab regimes that endorse its other objectives. They include Egypt,
Tunisia, Morocco, Jordan, Kuwait and, yes, Saudi Arabia. The governments of
these countries have been encouraged to make gradual progress toward
political pluralism, within the limits imposed by the struggle against
fundamentalist violence. The progress has been slow, and there have been
disappointments. There will be more progress, more setbacks. But the
alternative to this gradualism is a maelstrom of intervention and
revolution, in a region armed to its teeth and seething with hatreds of
every imaginable kind.
If Arab liberals reject
gradualism and refuse to enter partnerships with reforming regimes, the
cause of democracy will be lost. They no doubt would prefer that liberal
democracy be established immediately, even through Western intervention, so
that they might inculcate its values through the apparatus of the state.
According to Mernissi, "The power of the modern West has been built by
state propagation, through public schools, of that humanism that the Arab
masses have never had the right to." In this view, an Arab state
governed by a liberal elite, controlling the media and education, could
transform society from above.
But the liberals'
possession of the state, if conferred by the West, would constitute a
short-lived triumph. The Mu'taliza, Mernissi's heroes, also enjoyed a
moment of power, when they gained the ear of a sympathetic caliph in the
ninth century. They promptly instituted an inquisition, to make their
rationalism prevail. But caliphs came and went, and soon the tables turned.
If democracy is to stand on its own shaky feet, it has to evolve through a
process of compromises — an abbreviated process, for time is short, but
still a process that is itself proto-democratic, involving the establishment
of balances between competing interests. Only such a process can generate
the rudimentary values of pluralism, which owe nothing to state propagation
and everything to the friction of politics.
Mernissi and the Arab
liberals, in short, cannot escape the need for politics. Still, who cannot
admire the pure flame of her own extraordinary humanism, and her refusal to
compromise principle? This is a rare book, written from within the Arab
world but without fear. It is dangerous to walk this path without minding
one's back, but it is also liberating.
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