Political Islam cannot but be fundamentalist, asserts Girilal Jain
The threat of a Muslim fundamentalist takeover in Algeria through the ballot box last December has put a damper on the enthusiasm of the West, euphoric after the victory over communism, for democracy.
Old habits die hard. So we shall continue to hear a lot of prattle about human rights, not only from self-appointed guardians such as Amnesty International and Asia Watch, or whatever other fancy labels they may sport, but also from the supposedly responsible US State Department. But it is a safe assumption that no western government or agency is likely to show much keenness for promoting democracy in any Muslim country.
This, in my assessment, applies is much to Pakistan as to Algeria. It is notable that the wholly illegal, illegitimate and, from the point of view of the West’s own interest, counter-productive effort to get rid of Saddam Hussein continues, there is no mention of democracy for Iraq in Washington and London.
There is, of course, no easy choice for the West in the conflict that pits Algerian fundamentalists against the Westernised elite hat has run the country since independence in 1962. But the choice has to be made and it has been made. The elites’ record of corruption and utter mismanagement notwithstanding, the West will support the army-backed regime unless the latter begins to collapse, which it well night.
The West has even begun to rediscover that there is a difference between the democratic process and democratic values and that the former can be used to destroy the latter, as Hitler did in the early thirties. Secretary of State James Baker has gone on record to say that the US would not apply a uniform yardstick of respect for human rights in dealing with other countries.
The difference between democratic process and values is doubtless a fact. Democracy is not merely an exercise in counting heads. Indeed, in Islamic fundamentalism, there is not much scope for even the empty electoral exercise. In the Algerian case, the more radical among the fundamentalists denounced participation in the electoral process “even as a necessary and cynical way to gain power, opting instead for violence and revolutionary overthrow”, as Professor Amos Perlmutter put it in a recent article in The Washington Post.
But just as participation in the electoral process does not convert Islamic fundamentalists into democrats, their disregard for western values and western-style democracy does not make them fascists either. The Algerian Prime Minister, Sid Ahmed Ghozali, stretches the point when he says that the Islamic Salvation Front leaders are “remote from Islam and rather close to fascism.” They belong to an altogether different order. Their values are non-western while fascism is as much a product of the West as democracy or communism.
Islam, as such, is not a monolith. Its scriptures admit of several interpretations, including the liberal one, even if on the strength of highly selective citations from the Koran and the Hadith. But such citations are meaningful only when Islam is not dominant in the political realm, either because Muslims are in a minority as in democratic India, or the state is run by an oligarchy or a dictatorship as it is in most Muslim countries. Political Islam cannot but be fundamentalist. This is the reality, however distasteful liberals, Muslim as well as non-Muslim, may find it.
No Muslim political figure can, for example, deny publicly that sovereignty resides in Allah and not in the people, that as such His word, as revealed in the Koran, is the supreme constitution for a Muslim country, and that the Shariat, based on the Hadith, overrides all man-made laws. And this is precisely what constitutes fundamentalism. It just cannot admit of separation of politics from religion, not to speak of secularisation of the mind in the deeper western sense of the term.
Of course, even fundamentalists are rather apologetic about punishments like the cutting off of hands that Shariat prescribes. Modern sensibilities rub on them as well to some extent. Hassan Turabi, the virtual ruler of Sudan, for instance, has said in a recent interview that though awarded, such punishments have not been carried out in his country. That, incidentally, is also what is said in Pakistan. But this is circumvention which cannot take care of the basic problem.
In this age of mass awakening and mass mobilisation, the appeal of fundamentalism can best be resisted if a credible enough enemy exists, or can be invented. Nasser, for example, needed to blow out of all proportion the threat and inequity of Israel to provide an underpinning to his ideology of Arab nationalism and to ward of the challenge posed by the Muslim Brotherhood.
Outside Iran, Islamic fundamentalism has, so far, been the ideology of opponents of existing regimes. And, in respect of Iran opinion in the West is divided. While some argue that power has not helped tame the Iranian fundamentalists and cite the Iranian help to Sudan, the new refuge and training centre for terrorists, and Iranian insistence on the ‘execution’ of Salman Rushdie as evidence, others contend that President Rafsanjani and his supporters have become pragmatic enough to realise that they need western cooperation in order to modernise their economy.
The more optimistic view has been presented in recent weeks by, among others, Grahm E Fuller, of the influential Rand Corporation, and by the well-known scholar and commentator, Willing Pfaff.
Fuller writes: “Indeed, it is time to demystify the phenomenon of Islamic fundamentalism and see it for what it is: a movement that is both historically inevitable and politically “tamable”. Despotic Middle Eastern regimes have oppressed and repressed Islamic politics for decades, especially when these movements have agitated against corruption, arbitrary rule and the old ruling elites. Like many political movements, Islam has often thrived on the martyrdom of political oppression. What should command attention are not the first election, but the second and the third elections”.
Similarly, Pfaff contends: “The Islamic Front says it is the Party of God. That is a heavy responsibility. If, after a year or two of fundamentalism, Algeria is still poor, an economic laggard, riddled with social injustices, still corrupt, the fundamentalists will have to explain why. The explanation will interest Moroccans, Tunisians, Egyptians and others in presently moderate Islamic countries challenged by fundamentalist movements. ”
Fuller does not even mention the risk France faces from fundamentalist takeover in Algeria through a wave of immigration of westernised men and women and the consequent aggravation of the white backlash already in evidence not only in France but in much of western Europe. He, indeed, suggests that, as in Jordan, women in Algeria would resist encroachments on their rights and force fundamentalists to temper their programme of re-Islamisation of society. But even he is not aware of the risk that the fundamentalists may never allow another election. He seeks solace in the proposition that “such a move could only tarnish the future electoral prospects of Islamic groups elsewhere in the region”. Pfaff makes the same point.
Whether they recognise it or not, implicit in their advocacy of western accommodation of Algerian fundamentalists is the proposition that elections are not to be held elsewhere in West Asia until they are either tamed or discredited in Algeria. Surely these are not the kind of arguments hard-headed Western leaders can find convincing.
Jim Hoagland, highly respected in Washington, including in the White House, sums up the US position more accurately when he writes: “By neither criticising nor approving the Algerian army’s action, Western countries cloak their real attitude – that democracy is fine up to a point – in necessary ambiguity. That is better than adopting the cheerful notion that western democracies are obliged to welcome and support whatever results an open election produce”.
But what if, like the Shah of Iran in 1979, the so-called High State Council in Algeria collapses? That, and not the setback to democracy, is the nightmare that must haunt policy makers in Paris, Washington, London and Berlin.
The Observer of Business & Politics, 25 February 1992