Solomon2
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"Humanistic ideas-freedom of thought, the sovereignty of the individual, the right to freedom of action, tolerance--were propagated in the West through secular schools. With a few rare exceptions (notably Turkey), the modern Muslim state has never called itself secular, and has never committed itself to teaching individual initiative. On the contrary, individualism always held a rather ambiguous place among the "reformers" of the nineteenth-century nationalist movement. This movement, focused on the struggle against colonization and therefore viscerally anti-Western, was obliged to root itself more deeply than ever in Islam. Facing the militaristic, imperialistic West, Muslim nationalists were forced to take shelter in their past and erect it as a rampart-cultural hudud to exorcise colonial violence. The Muslim past they reactivated did not anchor modern identity in the rationalist tradition. In fact, the nationalists were prisoners of a historical situation that inevitably made modernity a no-win choice. Either they might construct modernity by claiming the humanistic heritage of the Western colonizer at the risk of losing unity (for when we speak about the rationalist tradition, we are talking about ray, "individual opinion," and ʿaql, "reason," and therefore about the possibility of divergence of opinion); or they could carefully safeguard a sense of unity in the face of the colonizer by clinging to the past, favoring the tradition of ta'a, "obedience," and foreclosing all Western innovation.
"Alas, it was this second solution that the nationalist politicians more or less involuntarily chose. The essence of the two rationalist heritages, both the Muslim and the Western, was freedom of thought, freedom to differ. This was sacrificed to save unity. What the politicians and reformers of the 1920s and 1930s didn't clearly see was that by shutting out reason, Muslims weakened themselves more than ever...
"Once colonization had ended after World War II, the newly independent Muslim states did not renounce their vendetta against reason. They fought against the advances of Enlightenment philosophy and banned Western humanism as foreign and "imported," calling the intellectuals who studied it enemy agents and traitors to the nationalist cause. At the same time, they committed themselves to the massive importation of weapons from the West...
"American secular humanism was developed not so much against religion as against state interference in religion and especially manipulation of it...Preaching tolerance and freedom of thought, secular humanism is an attack not on God but on government officialdom and a ban on its use of government funds and institutions to propagate religion, any religion.
"The majority of the colonized countries - that is, the non-Wester countries - never experienced that phase of history so indispensable to the development of the scientific spirit, durich which the state and its institutions became the means of transmitting the ideas of tolerance and respect for the individual...
"As for the governments, there are some Muslim regimes that find their interests better protected iv they base their legitimacy on cultural and symbolic grounds other than on democratic principles. The sacred, the past, ancesotr worship seem to be the chosen grounds in most cases. This category groups together regimes as different as the kingdom of Saudi Arabia, the military regime of Zia al-Haq in Pakistan, and the Sudanese regime that terrorizes its people in the name of the shari'a...
"When I visit a Muslim country, whether Pakistan or Egypt or Algeria, what strikes me as a sociologist is first of all the strong feeling of bitterness in the people...
"...we run up against the limits of the traditional symbolic heritage, which doesn't make it possible...to conceive of a world where [the Muslim worker] would have the right to medical coverage and social security, or even less to participate in such a world. For that to happen -"
- Extracts from Islam and Democracy: Fear of the Modern World, Fatema Mernissi, Perseus Publishing, 1992.
"Alas, it was this second solution that the nationalist politicians more or less involuntarily chose. The essence of the two rationalist heritages, both the Muslim and the Western, was freedom of thought, freedom to differ. This was sacrificed to save unity. What the politicians and reformers of the 1920s and 1930s didn't clearly see was that by shutting out reason, Muslims weakened themselves more than ever...
"Once colonization had ended after World War II, the newly independent Muslim states did not renounce their vendetta against reason. They fought against the advances of Enlightenment philosophy and banned Western humanism as foreign and "imported," calling the intellectuals who studied it enemy agents and traitors to the nationalist cause. At the same time, they committed themselves to the massive importation of weapons from the West...
"American secular humanism was developed not so much against religion as against state interference in religion and especially manipulation of it...Preaching tolerance and freedom of thought, secular humanism is an attack not on God but on government officialdom and a ban on its use of government funds and institutions to propagate religion, any religion.
"The majority of the colonized countries - that is, the non-Wester countries - never experienced that phase of history so indispensable to the development of the scientific spirit, durich which the state and its institutions became the means of transmitting the ideas of tolerance and respect for the individual...
"As for the governments, there are some Muslim regimes that find their interests better protected iv they base their legitimacy on cultural and symbolic grounds other than on democratic principles. The sacred, the past, ancesotr worship seem to be the chosen grounds in most cases. This category groups together regimes as different as the kingdom of Saudi Arabia, the military regime of Zia al-Haq in Pakistan, and the Sudanese regime that terrorizes its people in the name of the shari'a...
"When I visit a Muslim country, whether Pakistan or Egypt or Algeria, what strikes me as a sociologist is first of all the strong feeling of bitterness in the people...
"...we run up against the limits of the traditional symbolic heritage, which doesn't make it possible...to conceive of a world where [the Muslim worker] would have the right to medical coverage and social security, or even less to participate in such a world. For that to happen -"
- Extracts from Islam and Democracy: Fear of the Modern World, Fatema Mernissi, Perseus Publishing, 1992.
