Jihad vs. McWorld

by Benjamin Barber

  The hatreds of the region are as often learned as remembered, more frequently inspired by hate-mongering ethnic radio programs than inherited from ancient feuds. Actual identities are more commonly multicultural. “It is perfectly common for the elderly inhabitant of some central European city,” writes Hobsbawm, “to have had the identity documents of three successive states. A person of my age from Lemberg or Czernowitz has lived under four states, not counting wartime occupation; a man from Munkacs may well have lived under five.”25 Unfortunately, such tolerance-breeding genealogical uncertainties are today contrived away by terrorist rhetoric. Loosed of the imperial bonds that under the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires dissolved particularist identities, today’s subnationalist fragments seek a reduction to minimalist forms where local dialect, sectarian religion, and ethnic identity can merge and, courtesy of a constricting logic of ethnic self-determination, can forge a narrow nationality grounded—if not in history—in a carefully suckled hatred of “others.” A Serbo-Croat—speaking Bosnian who, however, has a great-great-grandfather who became a Muslim under the Ottomans, becomes a deserving subject of expulsion. A common religion and an efficient economic partnership are not enough to keep Czechs and Slovaks aroused by rekindled “historical” passions from annihilating all they share. After all, “if there is no suitable past, it can always be invented.”26 The stories of the regions outlined here all suggest reinvented pasts employed to make war on the present in a manner that can only haunt the future.

  Pessimists gave up on the region almost before it had emerged from communism. Janos Vorzsak, vice president of the Democratic Union of Hungarians in Romania, exclaimed back in 1990: “The majority of Romanians are not prepared for democracy. They have lived so long in an infernal darkness, that they are easily led. They have a primitive psychology.”27 But this is only true because leaders want it to be true, because the electronic and digital machinery of McWorld is put to work on behalf of Jihad, because memory is chained to resentment. Which means, as I shall suggest below, that it can be unchained. For if Jihad undermines the conditions for democracy, so democracy can undermine the conditions for Jihad. Or can it?

  14

  Essential Jihad: Islam and

  Fundamentalism

  NOWHERE IS THE tension between democracy and Jihad more evident than in the Islamic world, where the idea of Jihad has a home of birth but certainly not an exclusive patent. For, although it is clear that Islam is a complex religion that by no means is synonymous with Jihad, it is relatively inhospitable to democracy and that inhospitality in turn nurtures conditions favorable to parochialism, antimodernism, exclusiveness, and hostility to “others”—the characteristics that constitute what I have called Jihad.

  While Jihad is a term associated with the moral (and sometimes armed) struggle of believers against faithlessness and the faithless, I have used it here to speak to a generic form of fundamentalist opposition to modernity that can be found in most world religions. In their massive five-volume study of fundamentalisms, Martin E. Marty and R. Scott Appleby treat Sunni and Shiite Islam but pay equal attention to Protestantism and Catholicism in a variety of European, and North and South American forms, to Hinduism, to the Sikhs, to Theravada Buddhism, to Confucianist Revivalism, and to Zionism. Marty and Appleby take fundamentalist religions to be engaged in militancy, in a kind of permanent fighting: they are “militant, whether in the use of words and ideas or ballots or, in extreme cases, bullets.”1 They fight back, struggling reactively against the present in the name of the past; they fight for their religious conception of the world against secularism and relativism; they fight with weapons of every kind, sometimes borrowed from the enemy, carefully chosen to secure their identity; they fight against others who are agents of corruption; and they fight under God for a cause that, because it is holy, cannot be lost even when it is not yet won. The struggle that is Jihad is not then just a feature of Islam but a characteristic of all fundamentalisms. Nevertheless, Jihad is an Islamic term and is given its animating power by its association not just with fundamentalism in general but with Islamic fundamentalism in particular and with the armed struggles groups like Hamas and Islamic Jihad have engaged in. There are moderate and liberal strands in Islam, but they are less prominent at present than the militant strand.

  As a religion, Islam has universalist tendencies and while hardly ecumenical, it has displayed considerable tolerance for other religions, even when practiced by minorities dwelling in Muslim countries. Historically, it has shown a greater reluctance to proselytize than Christianity. It has had its empires, but nothing to rival the Crusades or the colonial empires of Britain and France. Yet Islam posits a world in which the Muslim religion and the Islamic state are cocreated and inseparable, and some observers argue it has less room for secularism than any other major world religion. Thus, while there are fundamentalist tendencies in every religion, in Islam, such tendencies have played a leading political role since the eighteenth century. This has created special problems for democracy and human rights in predominantly Muslim countries throughout the Middle East, North Africa, and Asia. Moreover, in such countries the struggle of Jihad against McWorld has been much more than a metaphor for tribalism or a worried antimodernism. It has been a literal war on the values, culture, and institutions that make up liberal society. Even Arab friends of the West feel constrained to raise doubts about Western values. In an advertisement intended to allay the worries of Americans about its Saudi Arabian ally, Ambassador Prince Bandar Ibn-Sultan nonetheless felt compelled to write: “Foreign imports are nice as shiny or high-tech ‘things.’ But intangible social and political institutions can be deadly.”2 An official of the Iranian Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance can afford to be less oblique. About satellite programs being beamed in to Teheran, he says: “These programs, prepared by international imperialism, are part of an extensive plot to wipe out our religious and sacred values.”3 With Dynasty, Donahue, Dinky Dog, and The Simpsons being beamed in courtesy of Star TV to compete with what Iranian skeptics call “the man on the balcony” (the late revolutionary leader Ayatollah Khomeini delivering interminable speeches), it is hardly surprising that the Iranian state believes “the satellite is exactly against the honorable Prophet” and is trying to ban the import, manufacture, and use of satellite dishes.4

  Jihad has been a metaphor for anti-Western antiuniversalist struggle throughout this book. The question here is whether it is more than just a metaphor in the Muslim culture that produced the term. An empirical survey of existing governments in Islamic nations certainly affirms a certain lack of affinity between Islam and democracy. In nearly all Muslim nations, democracy has never been tried or has been pushed aside after unsuccessful experiments. In Algeria, following elections that, because fundamentalists triumphed, were annulled, it is in deep peril; in Egypt, where democracy has not really been fully tried, minimal liberties are being eroded by a fearful government trying to track down fundamentalist enemies; in Kuwait, even after the war to “liberate” it from the Iraqi oppressors, democracy is invisible. Nations like Pakistan and Afghanistan and Sudan have become or seem likely to become even less democratic than they were as Islamic fundamentalists become more powerful, while American allies like Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and the oil emirates are hard-pressed to keep up the pretense of being democratic as they pursue their antifundamentalist struggle, even though it is in the name of democracy that they do battle.

  Indeed, fundamentalism may have a better record as an enemy of despots in the Middle East than have had the secular systems constructed to put down fundamentalism and to realize Western aspirations. Yet though fundamentalism has often stood against tyranny, it has never created democracy. The historical record is poor enough to have led some observers like John Waterbury to credit an “exceptionalist” thesis: that Islam creates an exceptional set of circum stances that disqualify Islamic countries from becoming democratic and fates them to an eternal struggle against the Enlightenment and i
ts liberal and democratic children.5 Hilal Khashan says simply, “All of the … democratic prerequisites are lacking in the Arab world. Arab democracy along Western terms is wishful thinking.”6

  Yet as one might expect, there are rival interpretations of Islam within the Islamic world, and no single monolithic argument goes unchallenged. Although Islam has no word for democracy and uses the Greek term (but then, as it happens, so do we) and though it often regards democratic political systems as unique to the West—what in Arabic is denominated as the strange, dark, fear-inspiring “Gharb” where the sun sets on the home of alien and aggressive peoples—it is not without its own Islamic Enlightenment sources. In at least one version of its history, Islam too is a story of the struggle between reason and belief, between consent and authoritarianism, between resistance to tyranny and tyrants. The Moroccan sociologist Fatima Mernissi insists that “throughout its history Islam has been marked by two trends: an intellectual trend that speculated on the philosophical foundations of the world and humanity, and another trend that turned political challenge violent by resort to force.” The first trend offered a meditation on reason akin to Western humanism; the second “simply thought that by rebelling against the imam and sometimes killing him they could change things.”7 Both traditions “raise the same issues that we are today told are imports from the West,” issues of resistance and accountability—that is to say, of democracy.

  There is thus a sense in which Islamic fundamentalists are genuine resisters against corrupt worldly political authority, much as the early Christians were. The zealots who assassinated Anwar Sadat in 1981 were members of a group called literally “Jihad” and when, their bloody deed done, they shouted, “I have killed Pharaoh, and I do not fear death,” they were speaking the language of martyrs of liberation.8 In Algeria, fundamentalists came to power by the ballot in 1991 and it was the secular party of national liberation under the tutelage of the army that shut down democratic institutions rather than turn them over to its adversaries, who had vanquished them in the polls. Observers thus continue to believe that Islam and democracy have a future together. At a 1992 conference held by the United States Institute on Peace, conferees spoke of a “new synthesis” in which the “clash of opinions on the relationship between Islam and democracy could yield a new synthesis view in which Islamic notions enhance and give new meaning to democratic concepts beyond their current western-dominated usages.”9

  How real is this promise? Is democracy in Islamic countries more a victim of colonial repression and postcolonial exploitation than of indigenous Islamic forces, as critics like Edward W. Said contend?10 Or is Islam an “exception” that rules out a free civil society and thus precludes real democracy? If democracy means Western democracy and modernization means Westernization, there would seem to be little hope for reconciliation since Islam regards Western secular culture and its attending values as corrupting to and morally incompatible with its own. But if democracy takes many forms, and is an ancient as well as a modern manifestation of the quest for self-governing communities, then perhaps it can be adapted to notions found in the Koran such as umma (community), shura (mutual consultation), and almaslaha (public interest). As other Islamic scholars have argued, understood this way, Islam may not be “antithetical to the telos of democratic values.”11 Islamic fundamentalists may insist that since Allah’s will is sovereign, the people’s will cannot be, but moderates point out that this still leaves ample room for the majority to exercise political authority as long as it does so within a framework that acknowledges the ultimate hegemony of divine power. Neither France nor Italy has a formal constitutional separation of church and state and both have constructed relatively viable democracies. Ultimate obedience to God can act as a brake on authoritarian and licentious worldly government, while affording a moderate people, constrained by faith, room to govern themselves democratically in the manner of Calvinist Geneva or Puritan Massachusetts before the Revolution.

  The trouble with this path to reconciliation is that fundamentalist Islam is not first of all opposed to democracy but to modernization, particularly as manifested in Westernization. Democracy has ancient antecedents and in its premodern and preliberal forms is not necessarily at odds either with fundamentalist Islam nor with fundamentalist Christianity. The City of God for Christians and Muslims alike is constituted by brother believers who are equal in their filial posture vis-à-vis God. But unlike democracy, which can be compatible with religion (Tocqueville actually thought it depended on religion), modernity is tantamount to secularism and is almost by definition corrupting to all religion, above all to that religion that assumes the “comprehensive and universal nature of the message of God as presented in the Qur’an.”12 This comprehensive and universal sovereignty of God creates thorny problems for Islam that Christianity circumvented by postulating a “two swords” doctrine in which God ruled in His domain and Man, through kingship, ruled in his own. Pope Gregory’s use of the New Testament accommodationist maxim, “Render unto God those things that are God’s and unto Caesar those that are Caesar’s,” represented a preconstitutional separation of church and state that has no analog in Islam, which prefers that men render everything unto Allah, ecclesiastic and worldly, spiritual and temporal alike. Such a monolithic arrangement may discomfit democrats, although it also discomfits kings (since neither have a domain exclusive of Allah’s in which to practice their sovereignty or their despotism; Allah does not tolerate rivals).

  Nevertheless, democracy has always found a way to accommodate religion, and Jihad’s war has been less with democracy than with McWorld. In the 1920s, Hasan al-Banna, founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, was railing against “the wave of atheism and lewdness” engulfing Egypt, a wave that “started the devastation of religion and morality on the pretext of individual and intellectual freedom.”13 Al-Banna could be reproaching Rupert Murdoch or Barry Diller when he assailed Westerners for importing “their half-naked women into these regions, together with their liquors, their theaters, their dance halls, their amusements, their stories, their newspapers, their novels, their whims, their silly games, and their vices.” He had taken the measure of McWorld long before McWorld had jelled sufficiently to take the measure of itself. Grasping the superior corrosiveness of knowledge over arms and of communications over armies, he warned in the 1920s that the culture of the West “was more dangerous than the political and military campaigns by far.” Where colonial empires failed, he seemed to prophesy, McWorld would succeed.

  Al-Banna’s indignation goes to the very heart of Jihad’s campaign against the modern, the secular, and the cosmopolitan. It captures the essence of fundamentalism as it has existed since the seventeenth century, growing up alongside the devil modernity to which it has played angel’s advocate for Puritans and Muslims, Buddhists and born-again Baptists alike. Compare al-Banna’s fiery rhetoric with the mad sermonizing of the British Puritan Prynne. In his nearly hysterical genealogy of theatrical vices called “Histriomastix,” Prynne condemns stage plays as “the very pompes of the Divell which we renounce in Baptisme … sinfull, heathenish, lewde, ungodly spectacles, and most pernicious Corruptions,” and then goes on to asperse as “wicked, unChristian pasttimes” a host of modern pursuits including “effeminate mixt dancing, Dicing, lascivious pictures, wanton Fashions, face-painting, health-drinking, long haire, love-lockes, Periwigs, womens curling, pouldering and cutting of their hair, Bone-Fires, New-yeares gifts, Maygames, amorous Pastoralls, lascivious effeminate Musicke, excessive laughter, luxurious disorderly Christmas keeping …” and a dozen other amusements that together compose a catalog of McWorld’s progenitors.14 Is there a single item here a fervent mullah could not also condemn? We can also hear al-Banna’s outrage in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s calculated rant against capital cities as coffins of true justice and morals, cities full of scheming, idle people without religion or principle.15 Rousseau’s complaints are the complaints of Provence peasants against effete Parisian courtiers and modernizing Pa
risian Jacobins; they are the bitter remonstrances of Alabama farmers against the cultural elites in Hollywood and New York and the out-of-touch “pols” playing special-interest games “inside the beltway.” For the revolt against modernity is a rebellion against cosmopolitanism and its urban culture and urbane entertainments. Not without good reason, the anticosmopolitan animus that drives all fundamentalist reaction has come to distrust Enlightenment: for economic growth brings burgeoning worldly needs and an obsession with gratification while the arts and sciences undermine simplicity and the natural faith of simple women and men. Enlightenment breeds secularism and secularism destroys not just formal religion but the morals on which it is based and thus the social fabric that holds communities together.

  Finally, al-Banna is not so far from Pat Robertson and Pat Buchanan and the Christian Right’s campaign for a return to nineteenth-century family values—family values understood as direct emanations of church going, school prayer, and a Protestant Christian America. As the Muslim Brotherhood saw in Christianity a crusading corruptor, Know-Nothing American Protestants back in the 1880s saw in Mediterranean Catholic immigrants a grave peril to the American Republic, just as nervous Californians today worry about illegal Latino immigrants as a burden not only on their pocketbooks but on the moral order of their unraveling communities. To Americans, Jihad is often taken to be a foreign phenomenon, a feature of Middle Eastern politics and the Holy War between Muslim diaspora and Zionist settlers mutually obsessed with holy turf. But we can today also speak of an American Jihad. Not the American Jihad promulgated by the media focused on the World Trade Center bombers or on Arab-American supporters of Hamas—the American Jihad about which Stephen Barboza wrote his recent book.16 The American Jihad that counts is rather the antiestablishmentarian fundamentalism of the Christian Right, the Jihad of profoundly antimodern fundamentalist Protestants who rebel against the culture of disbelief generated by the McWorld that is in their midst;17 the McWorld they unearth on their prime-time television programming and rebury on their talk-radio rants; and in the secular public square where despised “liberal” politicians undermine their belief systems with textbooks that preach evolution and schools that bar prayer.