Islamicist Utopia and Democracy
Lahouari ADDI
Lahouari Addi is professor of political
sociology at Oran University, Algeria. He holds a degree from Université
des Sciences Sociales de Grenoble and a doctorat d'état from Ecole des Hautes
Etudes en Sciences Sociales de Paris (France). He has written four books: De
L'Algérie pré-coloniale à l'Algérie coloniale (1985); Approche méthodologique
du pouvoir et de l'état dans les sociétés du Tiers-Monde (1990); L'impasse du
populisme (1991); and L'Algérie, l'économie et la question du politique, edited
by Bouchene Alger (1992). During
the year 1991-92, he was a visiting fellow in the Near Eastern Studies
Department, Princeton University.
The Annals of the American Academy of Political
And Social Science,
november 1992
Abstract::
This article addresses democratic construction in Islamic societies
throughout the Algerian experience. Its main conclusions can be summarized as
follows. First, in all Muslim societies, there exists an Islamicist Utopia that
stands as an obstacle not only to democracy but also to political modernity. Until
now, this Utopia has been contained only by repression that finally impedes the
democratization. Second, Islam presents itself as a public religion that
participates in the legitimization of political power. The democratic ideology,
however, is compatible with religion to the extent that it is lived as a
private concern. Finally, the Islamicist Utopia and the public aspect of Islam
aim at maintaining society's communal structures. They refuse to make the singularity
of the political arena independent and reject differentiation through politics
within a society that claims to be fraternal.
Sommaire
Texte intégral
In the
years following the independence of much of the Third World in the 1950s and
1960s, political sociology examined developing polities through the concepts of
nation building and state building. The object of this examination focused on
the emergence of a political center or central power that structured. Its
periphery in order to create a homogeneous nation and a developed economy. The
accent was placed on the autonomy of central power vis-à-vis the exterior world
and on its will and capacity to create a national society through the process
of modernization and industrial development.
The record
of the decades since independence, however, has shown that this approach
overestimated the capacity of the political center to develop a modern economy
and to begin the creation of a society, in the sense of Ferdinand Tönnies. Scholars
realized that the central power, itself belonging to the historical reality it
sought to transform, came to be governed by the dominant political logic. Setting
itself up as a self-contained end, it created an obstacle to its proclaimed
objectives. In the process, modernization called into question the dominant ideological
interests and social structures, and the central power followed its own
interests and entered into the collective image in order to ensure its own
survival.
The
concepts of modernization and of nation building—after Apter and
Abdelmalek—remained incomplete because they were developed separately from the
question of power, which is the basic question of political science and
therefore the essential element in political analysis. After noting that the
political center is privatized, that is, considered to be a private patrimony
and thus creating the notion of neopatrimonialism, political sociology leapt
over the problem by focusing on the concept of democracy building. In order to
understand what was going on, all that the analyst had to do was emerge from
the neopatrimonial logic, face the question of pluralism, and introduce the
laws of free competition and free enterprise. But the analyst forgot that
neopatrimonialism was the political effect of a historic situation where the
central power was privatized for ideopolitical reasons, making the central
power the object of public competition. Deprivatizing it will be possible only
if the ideopolitical factors lose their relevance and dominance.
The
example of Algeria shows that democratization was conceived as an operation to
justify the disengagement of the state from the economy. But democratization is
above all a political and ideological struggle; it implies the emergence of citizenship,
with liberty. Without a central power to protect public liberty and the
exercise of citizenship, there is no democracy. But in Algeria the team in
power, delegitimized by the economic and social failures for which it was
responsible, could not impose the authority of the state over the dominant
ideological interests and the logic of the collective image that refused
individual autonomy and its juridical political expression as a subject of law.
The citizen is a legal subject of law who obeys civil laws born out of reasoned
public debate. If the individual were to obey only other individuals, depend on
the whim of the prince, submit to laws handed down from time immemorial, there
would be no citizenship. The citizen is a free person vis-à-vis his or her
peers, living and dead. This liberty is no caprice destined to diminish the
citizen's human dignity, culture, religion, or history. Indeed, it permits the
development, expansion, and liberation of all the potentialities within the
human being.
In a society
confronted with the process of modernization, the emergence of citizenship
arouses suspicion among the religious. However, religious faith is true and
sincere only when it is lived in a free social milieu. If the exterior
appearances of faith were imposed by social constraint, there would be an
unimaginable number of hypocrites among/sincere believers. Religious awareness
will accept political citizenship only after historical experience shows that
citizenship does not diminish religion in the strict sense. Social constraint
does not come from religion, however; it is, rather, the effect of the public
character of religion, manifested as a social fact of the group and not as a
spirituality belonging to the private intimacy of the individual. Religion becomes
a political order to which one aspires, a political order whose coming is
resisted by immoral beings lacking respect for the word of God.
This
political order is not the coming of the kingdom of God on earth or the
preparation of believing souls for eternal life. Islam does not permit this
fundamentalism. The Islamicists are not fundamentalists, and, although they
proclaim the contrary, they do not confuse the spiritual and the temporal. Their
objective is to construct not a divine order but a human order that obeys the
prescriptions of the sacred test. This objective, if realized, will not ensure
the individual's place in paradise but will permit better life on earth. Access
to paradise is an individual and not a collective task.
This
spiritual predisposition is shared by all believers in the land of Islam; in
other words, Muslim societies are pregnant with a religious utopia from which
they would like to draw political order. It is an Islamicist Utopia, which
stands as an obstacle not only to democracy but also to political modernism in
general—at least in the latter's Western formulation. This utopia, latent in
all Muslim societies, is politically active in those countries where great
expectations have been disappointed, where the conditions of daily life are at
the limit of the tolerable, and where repression can go no further. These three
conditions applied in Algeria under the rule of Chadli Bendjedid.
But the
Islamicist Utopia is not an accident of circumstances; on the contrary, it
belongs to the long term of history. The Islamic world held itself apart from
the social debates that the Renaissance unleashed in Europe. Untouched by the
dynamic of social criticism, it remained faithful to apologetic historiography.
The Islamic renaissance, or Nahda, which took place in the second half of the
nineteenth century beginning with Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, marks the beginning
of the intellectual movement's attempt to integrate faith and reason. But,
confronted with the expansion of colonialism, the Nahda fell back upon
mythification of the past and apologetic discourse. Its last thinker, Rashid
Keda, had Hasan al Banna, founder of the Muslim Brotherhood movement in Egypt,
as a disciple. Thus colonization did not help matters, since modernism was
delegitimized by the very fact that it had brought with it colonial domination.
This explains why, with the exception of a few isolated Arab intellectuals,
whose positions were suspect, the paradigms of the Enlightenment had such
feeble echoes in Muslim societies. In the rare cultivated milieu of the
national liberation movements, the question was put off until after
independence, which was supposed to ignite the dynamic of modernism
automatically.
Nevertheless,
a few decades after independence, national disenchantment appeared. Modernity
had not been ignited at the desired speed or in the desired conditions. During
the first years of independence—the 1950s and the 1960s—popular Marxism, at
least in the universities, opposed the influence of Hobbes, Rousseau, Kant, de Tocqueville,
natural law, and political freedom. It delegitimized them, labeling them
"ideologies in service to the bourgeoisie, which produce alienation and
exploitation."The Islamicist Utopia became politically active, therefore,
in a social and political context marked by a double disappointment: hopes
invested in independence going unfulfilled and dissipation of the illusions of
"developmentalisrn."
In this
perspective, the system of education, in its legitimate task of teaching the
past, reactivates the epic combat of Islam. In reaction against the West, the
past is taught without any critical sense. Its specificity is emphasized to the
detriment of universality. Historic events in the origins of modernity are
minimized because they do not belong to the history of Islam. The discovery of
America—why, in fact, did the Muslims not take part in it?—the Christian
Reformation and the wars that followed it; the English, American, Russian, and
French revolutions; the recomposition of national borders in Europe in the
nineteenth century; the rise of Nazism in Germany—all these major events are
considered foreign to the Muslim historical experience and therefore relegated
to secondary importance. It is as if the Muslims did not consider themselves as
taking part in the universalizing historical process and as if they sought to
remake their history without drawing lessons from other people, especially
people who set in march the process of modernity and the process of domination
of which Muslims—along with other people— have been the victim. From the point
of view of Islamic sensitivity, there is no modern reading of the American
Revolution, the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, and Hitlerism. Obviously,
this is not a task for high school teachers. It belongs to the university,
which should produce historical works from which the public school system can
draw its lessons. In the absence of such research, the educational system
spreads myths that deform the perception of the contemporary historical
process, a deformation that results in a loss of the sense of reality. The
system of mass education spreads the myths that feed the Utopia, which is
itself repressed when it expresses itself politically.
Muslim
society is thus enclosed in a logic of ever-deepening repression. In this
context, any opening to pluralism and democratization is condemned to failure,
because the historical and ideological conditions for the privatization of
public power have not been reached, Democratization threatens to change
radically the verbal mode of legitimizing the neopatrimonial system. Historical
legitimacy risks being replaced by religious legitimacy, but both put central
authority above individuals and historical time; both refuse political
citizenship and attack the dignity of individuals, making them administrative
subjects who bow as the official vehicle passes by. Historical and religious
legitimacy are the modality by which the dead exercise their dictatorship on
the living. In the twentieth century there is only one legitimacy that conforms
to the dignity of the free individual, electoral legitimacy. But electoral
legitimacy is an inseparable part of democratic ideology, and the latter
requires religion to lose the public character that predisposes it to be a
basis of legitimacy and thus a political resource in the competition for power.
Without democratic ideology, the political party presenting itself as most
Muslim—or perceived as such—would be assured a crushing victory in democratic
elections, and this would inaugurate the end of the democratic process.
It is
necessary to show how political modernity is incompatible with the public
character of religion and how modernity is built on the depoliticization of
religion. But the notion of depoliticizing religion has a precise content, for
the idea that religion must be separated from politics proceeds from a
voluntarist, naive, and even religiously hostile vision. Clearly, every social
act and collective or public manifestation contains a political dimension. Islam,
like any other religion, contains a political dynamic that is impossible to
deny. In Christianity, the church does not permit a believer outside the
ecclesiastical hierarchy to speak to others in the name of religion. To the
contrary, in Islam, the political aspect is limited to no institution, thus
permitting any believer to claim religious authority and use it for temporal
purposes over other individuals. For reasons deriving from the structure of its
dogma, the political character of Islam is obvious. In addition, this character
is emphasized by the recent history of Muslim societies struggling against
colonial domination, during which Islam was mobilized as a political resource
and a factor of identity—so much as to become a constructive element in
national ideology and a constituent of nationality. Consequently, it is no
longer possible to call for the separation of religion and politics.
But
modernity does not require the separation of religion and politics or the
marginalization of religion as a precondition. Nobody has the right to prevent
the mosque from condemning corruption and arbitrariness or emphasizing the duty
to assist widows and orphans. It is even desirable for the mosque to have moral
authority in society, in order to appeal to the preservation of human
values—fraternity, solidarity, and justice—that accompany the divine message
and to denounce flagrant restrictions on human rights and social inequalities. But
for the mosque to incarnate this moral authority, it must remain outside of the
competition for power. That is, modernity and, more particularly, democratic
ideology are incompatible with religion's having a partisan character.
Indeed,
under modernity and democratic ideology, public debate about individual
autonomy, political citizenship, juridical equality, and political liberty
would be considered to be undermined were a party to claim divine authority in
making its argument. Democracy means free elections and alternance in power,
but it is also the public exercise of reason, as Habermas would say, on all
issues concerning the individual and his or her relations with the community. Political
parties that compete in elections try to convince their voters on the basis of
supposedly rational argumentation. Of course, these parties defend the
ideological interests of the group. But these interests, frequently not
perceived as such, are theoretically rationalized in order to be presented as
in the common interest of all members of society. Political debate, public in
its essence, has the purpose of making group interests and political programs
attractive from the point of view of a broad rationality. The voter is supposed
to choose, according to reason, the program most satisfactory to his or her own
interests and vision of things. Without open public debate, without reference
to the rationality of social choice, there can be no democracy.
If
religion as such intervenes in the debate, that is to say, if the protagonists
claim divine authority, there will no longer be debate or democracy. For
citizens, most of whom are believers, cannot opt against the religious
prescriptions for society. Once there is a religious party in the electoral
competition or a party presenting itself as such, there can be no free national
choice on the part of any voter who cannot imagine voting against the divine
message. Human nature being what it is, there might even be voters who would
vote for religious parties in order to assuage their conscience or to atone for
bad behavior in the past (or in the future).
It is not
the purpose of the electoral act to be transformed into a religious rite. It is
not Islam as a text that transforms the electoral act into a rite; it is the
culture of the believer, his or her capacity or incapacity to separate the
sacred from the profane. In a society where the level of political culture is
low, the theological content of the sacred text is altered. In such a case, the
finality of the profane act is transformed; the profane becomes sacralized and
the sacred profaned.
There is
no contradiction, of course, between textual Islam—the Quran and the sunna—and
modernism. The contradiction is with the way Islam is lived and practiced
today. But a religion's public character is not inevitable or inherent; it is a
product of history. Without succumbing to the illusion of hindsight, it can be
said that the public character of Islam results from the medieval
interpretation of the religion, an interpretation that remains active and
formally rejects the notion of political sovereignty—only God is sovereign. It
rejects, consequently, the logic of juridical positivism; it rejects political
freedom, the abyss of the civil state founded on the Hobbesian-Rousseauistic
notion of social contract; in short, as Charles Butterworth notes in his
article in this volume, it rejects the modern construction of political life.
The
Islamicist Utopia is not, however, merely a relic from the past. On the
contrary, it expresses, in a contradictory manner, a desire to join with
modernism, while at the same time assuring the survival of community values. The
Islamicist utopia seeks to construct a City where values of solidarity,
equality, and justice will dominate, with respect for the word of God. That is,
its goal is a City regulated not by politics— which showcase the ugliness of
humankind—but by morality. Political parties are not the expression of
preexisting divergences; in its view, they are the cause of these divergences. For
the militant of the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS), for example, the so-called
Berberist parties create the linguistic issues that serve as their stock in
trade. Banning those parties, therefore, would be enough to make the issues go
away. The same goes for all other parties that seek to divide the national
community.
Economic
battles and the ideological divergences that traverse Muslim societies would
not exist except for the fact that humans have turned aside from the work of
God. Let us come back to it, and we will once again become brothers, united by
the love of God. The interest of the individual as well as the cupidity of the
haves would stimulate the productivity of the workers, which would increase the
riches to be shared. The Islamicist Utopia is rooted in this ethical-religious
anthropological optimism and therefore refuses to establish social relations on
a juridicalpolitical basis that implies the Kantian categories of civil law,
rights and their subject, and individual will. To reorganize society on the
basis of the anthropological pessimism of Hobbes, Spinoza, Kant, or Carl
Schmitt would, for the Muslim consciousness, be a leap into the great unknown. The
Islamicist Utopia exists only because the categories of political modernism
have not been reworked in the mold of Arab-Islamic culture. But such a creation
of modernism by way of Arab-Islamic culture is theoretically possible, for
there is no reason—everything else kept the same—why democracy should be
inherently Western and absolutism inherently Muslim.
Thus the
Muslim world is now in the throes of a debate it missed in the wake of its
decadence. But now it is not the venerated thinkers who are forcing the debate.
It is being forced by the streets, violently, murderously. As in the past, the
thinkers of al-Azhar continue to ponder the immutable rules of grammar and the
placement of punctuation marks in the sacred texts, bypassing the fundamental
questions. In Algeria, it is the FIS—the street—that poses, unwittingly, the
essential questions about the reconstruction of political life in the context
of local culture. The Algerian democratic experience would have shown that as
long as the Islamicist Utopia remained popular, as long as it remained anchored
in the collective imagination, it would constitute an obstacle to the influx of
modern political categories without which democracy is impossible. This is why
the democratic experience in Algeria would have been decisive for the whole
Muslim world. Either it would have succeeded, and the Muslim world would have
profited; or it would have failed, and the Muslim world would have returned
either to the wasting of the oil patrimony in unproductive consumption or to
international beggary.
The
interruption of the electoral process—and probably of democracy building—in
Algeria at best restores the situation before October 1988, when the country
went out into the streets to protest government inefficiency. One may ask
whether the defense of immediate interests and the fear of eventual sanctions
against the ruling elite or the fear of political anarchy by themselves explain
this interruption. There may well be deeper reasons related to the very
perception of politics revealing fears of radical breaks with the past and
historic changes. This does not mean that the arrival of the FIS to power would
provoke a historic change in the FIS's view of itself as the single party of
all Algerians; rather, it is itself the refusal to change from the single-party
system of the National Liberation Front (FLN). But from the formal point of
view, by coming to power neither by riot nor by coup d'etat, the FIS would
inaugurate a new period of political history for the country, a period that
would have its own dynamic in the recomposition of political forces.
But the
incumbent leaders did not have the imagination and the courage to enter into
the movement of change. In this perspective, the banning of the FIS blocks
change; for the FIS, as an organized movement, serves as a magnet for the
ideology of the fraternal society. This magnet allows the protagonists to
define themselves in relation to each other. Banning the FIS means that the
ideology it bears will continue to dominate the entire political space and to
be present in all of the political groups. For the FIS, far from being a party,
is a sentiment, a prepolitical culture.
From this
point of view, all Algerians are members of the FIS to the extent that we all
swim in its prepolitical culture. The sense of historical perspective suggests
that this prepolitical culture will crystallize itself into a movement
expressing a Utopian sentiment, even if this movement takes power by democratic
rules. Then, upon confronting the contradictions of social life, it will be
repulsed to the point of losing any political meaning. It is through political
competition, public debate, freedom of expression, and the practice of
political citizenship that a large part of the electorate will come to realize
that the FIS is only a sentiment and not a management tool of modern political
life and social contradictions.
Electoral
competition forces the actors to situate themselves politically in the logic of
alternance, in a political space defined by ideological rivalries. Political
programs are not merely a trick to conquer and occupy central power. Any
attempt to recover the adversary becomes futile, because political adversaries
clash and publicly declare themselves to be irreconcilable. The bitterness of
their struggle does not affect civil peace, however, because the struggle is
regulated by democratic institutions and sanctioned by universal suffrage
within the framework of an alternance accepted by all. This political game
supposes above all that the society is permeated by irreducible political
cleavages and that these cleavages are interiorized by the actors. Such a
political game also presupposes that the historical subjects of political
modernity are in place and that they have a more or less clear awareness of
theoretical categories through which they perceive and practice politics. That
leading figures of the FLN easily join the FIS or that leaders of the FIS
easily participate in power only shows that the actors do not obey a
rationality of political modernity that presupposes the insurmountable
ideological and political contradictions compatible only in democratic
institutions and in alternance in state power.
The
refusal of political differentiation is founded on political fraternalism that
the interruption of the electoral process destroys. Because it does not conceive
of a national collectivity that is irreconcilably divided, fraternalism raises
the possibility of recovering the adversary of the moment, allying with him if
he is intransigent or sharing power if he is sufficiently strong. One must not
believe that political fraternalism is justified by a fear of recourse to
physical coercion. To the contrary, to the extent that fraternalism denies the
political character of social contradictions, it offers no institutional means
of resolution and therefore opens the possibility of bloody riots. In a
fraternal society, central power is not the subject of political competition;
it is the expression of a momentary relation of force. Maintaining oneself in
power or conquering it supposes the use of physical force and violence. Violence
is a banal means of political regulation in a fraternal society, as
differentiated from a democratic society where parties declare themselves
irreconcilable political adversaries without destroying civil peace and
citizens' lives, whatever their political opinions.
On the day
after the elections of 26 December 1991, Algeria was confronted with the choice
of opting either for the fraternal society that had prevailed to this point,
with its ideological handicaps and its political lethargy, or for a democratic
society, with its competition and implacable logic. It chose fraternal society
twice. The first time, it gave the majority to the FIS, which is an expression
par excellence of fraternal society; the second time, it stopped the electoral
process. Henceforth the great party of fraternal society will have to be
reconstructed on the remains of the FLN and the debris of the FIS. The result,
necessarily a single party, will have to reproduce the past and put central
authority above political competition. Obviously, this does not prevent
absolutism, corruption, or— even less—bloody repression of the riots that will
arise within the logic of fraternal society.
What to
do? There are two possible choices. The first one is to modernize the economy so
that the Islamicist utopia cannot be joined to the social discontent that gives
it its imprint. For Algeria, this choice will require a radical shuffling of
the team in power and financial resources to the tune of $50 billion, earmarked
for restructuring the economy. A different team in power—vested with a vision
of the future, developing the economy, and releasing a dynamic of
accumulation—would have enough authority to effect the necessary ruptures and
to transform the education system. The social base of the Islamicist Utopia
would leave it a minority opinion expressed by a few firebrands whose startling
actions would be human interest stories without any impact on the democratic
functioning of political society.
The second
choice would be to permit the democratic process to bring about its own
termination, by carrying the Islamicists to power. For a utopia, there is no
antidote like reality. Utopia is an attempt to replace the real with the
imaginary. As long as it is expressed by an opposition party, it can be
pertinent and efficacious. But once the party comes to power, it becomes
reduced to reflecting reality—the harsh reality of concrete causality and human
vice. History is the unhappy experiment. It has never followed the wise
counsels of the Platonic sage. Westerners did not construct modernism and
democracy with an ear to Hobbes, Rousseau, or Kant. Only after having suffered
the tragic excesses of absolute power and tyranny, only after being instructed
by Robespierre and Napoleon, did the consciousness of common interest prevail. The
thinkers were not convoked until afterward, to provide the ideological
justification for the new political order. That justification was traced back
to Greek antiquity and primitive Christianity. Why could it not be found in the
Islamic heritage as well?
It is
clear that preference for the first or the second of these choices depends on
the position of the chooser. If I, for example, were a Western politician, I
would do anything to prevent the Islamicists from acceding to power, because
that would provoke regional instability and threaten Western interests. For,
after all, in the Islamicist discourse, the Evil Empire is the now-Christian,
now atheist materialist West. If I were an army officer or a high bureaucrat,
implicated in the past mismanagement of the state, I would mount a coup d'etat
to prevent the Islamicists' accession. For, drunk with hatred for those whom
they consider to be the enemies of God, would they not wish to throw some heads
to the mob?
But I am
neither a Western politician nor an officer of the Algerian army. I am an
academic-Platonist, and the object of my reflection is the Islamicist utopia
and its rootedness in society. As long as this utopia remains active, Algeria
will twiddle its thumbs at the doorway of modernism. The Muslim consciousness
will not awaken to modernism until after the clash between the Islamicist
Utopia and the political realities of human anthropology occurs. At what price?
one might ask. To this I would be inclined to answer, "I am neither an
officer of the Algerian army nor a Western politician."