Social Reform: Factor X: The Search for an Islamic Democracy

by SIR HAMILTON A. R. GIBB

1

THE “Eastern Question” of today differs profoundly from the “Eastern Question” of the nineteenth century. Then the Concert of Europe, jealous competitors, stood around the deathbed of the irremediably disintegrating Ottoman Empire, disputing its ultimate inheritance. Today the Western powers seek to promote the stability and cohesion of ton resurgent sovereign states, with a fringe of colonial or semicolonial fragments, and to find a basis for their integration. Yet repeated eruptions and revolutions show that “The Question” remains, and even grows in perplexity.

Since these manifestations are usually linked with foreign policy, political issues might seem to be the dominant factors. Political factors are real enough, especially the issues of foreign controls and the State of Israel; yet there is a growing perception that they alone cannot explain the region’s volcanic instability. The other factors, in prevailing Western opinion, are economic, and the most urgent question is seen as helping these ”underdeveloped ” countries to build new and efficient economic structures. Certainly the economic factors are crucial — and in Egypt, at least, frighteningly complex. But the internal causes of unrest can no more be cured by economic gadgets — even of such size as the High Dam on the Nile or a Jordan Valley Authority — than by a few clever political adjustments. Economic development may help if integrated with social development; but if it cuts across deep-seated social forces, it may even intensify the inner instability.

For the third element is the social factor. It is, not surprisingly, often overlooked. Political factors, if confusing, at least lie close to the surface; economic potentialities can be evaluated with fair accuracy. But the social factor has been the least studied, not only by outside observers, but by those most concerned within the region. Many of the weaknesses of the Middle Eastern states are arguably the result of their failure to recognize and meet adequately the problems of a prolonged social crisis.

A social organism is the resultant of a great variety of continually changing spiritual and material forces, producing strains which require adjustment to maintain a relatively stable equilibrium. If any maladjustment becomes too widespread and prolonged, the situation is felt to be intolerable and a violent demand arises for “reform.” The effectiveness of this demand depends on: 1) the kinds of organs for expressing social needs, the leadership for canalizing them, and the instruments available for promoting reforms; 2) the ability of the governing elements to diagnose the true causes of the maladjustment and so cure them that the society’s vital inner forces and external activities are again brought into harmony.

Every living society includes “devices” or organs whereby relative tensions can find adjustment; and the speed and ease with which they operate is a measure of its viability. In general, the older a society, the more its social institutions become fixed, and the means of adjustment restricted to minor reforms within a standardized framework. Yet these are usually adequate, precisely because the need for reforms in so experienced and equilibrated a society is correspondingly less. But when the need of a major adjustment shows the traditional instruments to be inadequate, new methods and organs must be created. The real vitality of a society can be measured by its success in providing them without excessively violent reactions or dislocation.

The organ evolved by Islamic society was the religious brotherhood. Considerations of space make it impossible to trace in detail here the origins and history of these brotherhoods. Suffice it to say that in face of the challenge of the Turko-Mongol invasions starting in the eleventh century, two existing currents — the spiritually reformist “methodism" of the cities, and the militant “frontier warfare" organizations — gradually coalesced and forced the invaders to respect established religious and economic institutions and co-operate with the settled agricultural and industrial communities. Ultimately the brotherhoods encompassed all social classes and reinforced the functional groupings by trade-guild and corporation.

After the establishment of the Ottoman Empire, they took on predominantly the role of mediators in a situation of recurrent military violence or usurpation or administrative tyranny. In Islamic thought, the state should be only the public exponent of Islamic ideology, ensuring the security and well-being of the Muslim peoples, and enforcing the Law of Islam but itself subject to that Law; and its authority derives wholly from the degree to which it is considered to do so. The religious leaders, though they created a Muslim community, had failed to control the centers of political power. This was the main socio-political tension within Islam. The political organizations, tainted by usurpation, violence, and corruption, were only passively accepted. The state always exists, but dynasties and governments are transient. Violation of a government’s man-made laws carried no moral reprobation or violation of conscience — rather indeed the contrary. Civil penalties inflicted by government officers carried no stigma. The citizen owed his loyalty primarily to Islam itself, and after Islam to his own social group or guild and its ethic.

Finally a reasonable modus vivendi was reached, with the religious brotherhoods mitigating inner tensions or conflicts of loyalties. Yet the limitation of their civic function to the removal of grievances and restoration of the status quo ante, reinforced the tendency, natural to every religious institution, to oppose “innovations" and resist all change.

The religious leadership was thus wholly unprepared and ill-equipped, and indeed contributed not a little to its own impotence, when in the nineteenth century this precarious balance was entirely destroyed. It was destroyed less by the direct intrusion of the West than by immensely complicated internal developments, which have been so insufficiently studied that it might almost be said that we know more about the internal history of the Muslim world in the ninth than in the nineteenth century. Only three things are reasonably certain: 1) the old corporative functional groups decayed or dissolved; 2) the old brotherhood organizations also decayed — these two results involving the loss of the personal link between the individual and the community and of social and religious integration; 3) the power of the state was disproportionately enlarged, by both the increased efficiency of its own instruments and the decay of the counterbalancing ones.

2

WHETHER the dissolution of the old community structure will ultimately prove beneficial depends on the principles and forms of social cohesion that will take its place. Rural co-operatives and industrial trade unions are still in their infancy, and fail to satisfy the deeper emotional and spiritual needs. The average individual belongs to his family and to Islam, but Islam no longer has any concrete social organization. This social void is intensely real and creates a spiritual dissatisfaction which craves a uniquely Muslim form of expression. Meanwhile social maladjustments and disequilibrium have grown so severe that the cry for relief and reform has become articulate and insistent.

Simultaneously with this disintegration there were growing up in all the Arab countries (save Arabia) new administrative and professional classes: lawyers, civil servants, doctors, journalists, teachers, entrepreneurs, and professional army officers. It would seem that, ignorant or careless of the old social structure, and fascinated by Western political theories, these elements overlooked the social issues altogether and concentrated on counteracting their countries’ inorganic political structures. They aimed at reorganizing political life on Western models, introducing Western legal codes and courts, and co-operated with the orthodox religious leaders to discredit the old Sufi brotherhoods as superstitious, while dreaming of reforming Islam itself in terms of Western thought.

Clearly this Westernized intelligentsia never thought in terms of a “Muslim State,” but unconsciously applied the Western division between church and state to the traditional Muslim separation of political and social functions. They would create organized constitutional governments and leave the religious institution as guarantor of social relationships in the new and enlightened society produced by the spread of education.

But the religious institution was no longer capable of carrying out this function. Only through the brotherhoods had orthodox Islam acquired a social integration. The religious leaders imagined that the “purification” of religion by the elimination of “superstition” would lead to an Islamic revival; but (leaving aside the question whether any religion can be truly effective in human society without an outer ring or protective covering of “superstition”) Islam’s abstract doctrines and personal duties, not backed by a social organization, lacked the force to guide social development. And the intelligentsia’s growing secularization and hostility to the “medievalism" of the ulema (religious teachers) nullified any purely religious sanctions.

The rift between political and social policy was strangely widened by the resounding campaign of the late-nineteenth-century reformer Jamal el-Din el-Afghani for a pan-Islamic program of spiritual unification of all Muslims under the Ottoman caliphate to oppose European political, economic, and cultural penetration. Jamal el-Din did align the Muslim masses behind movements to oppose the Most; but they paradoxically emerged, in the Middle East, at least, under the leadership, not of the caliphate, but of local nationalists already becoming hostile to the Ottoman government. And it was by this mass support that the nationalist movements finally succeeded in setting up their parliamentary governments.

3

THOUGH the nationalist leaders were primarily concerned with political emancipation, they had to let it be assumed, to hold the support of the masses, that it would be followed by positive measures to meet social discontents. They were thus committed to internal “reforms.”The vague identification of political and social ends was rendered easier by the obvious fact that the most extensive maladjustments were connected with the importation of Western systems, processes, and ideas. But underneath this superficial identification lay a real divergence of aims: between independence as an end in itself and independence as the means to the end of reknitting the threads of social cohesion supposedly severed by Western penetration and controls.

Even after political independence, the nationalist leaders failed to recognize this divergence. Maladjustments continued and even became more severe. For the main causes were not (as the masses naïvely thought) due to the presence of foreign governors and entrepreneurs, but to the pervasive effects of Western intellectual, legal, and economic systems, to new patterns of land tenure, to population growth and pressure on means of subsistence, and to the expansion of urban proletariats. While claiming to “choose out" the useful elements from Western civilization and reject those conflicting with national traditions, the nationalist leaders have made social discontents more acute by themselves continuing and expanding under nationalist auspices just those imported administrative and legal systems which had been responsible for dissolving the traditional community institutions.

Granted that the intricate nexus of material and psychological factors was difficult of comprehension, yet the nationalist leaders faced their problems like politicians everywhere. Either they remained immobile, putting up a stiff front of opposition to “disturbances,”or they attempted to placate by promises; and only recently, as the idea of the “welfare state" has percolated to the Middle East, have they started on social welfare legislation, modeled on the West and not very specifically related to the actual social situations, economic possibilities, or psychological dispositions. Or they have pinned their hopes on industrialization or other economic panaceas, again without much consideration of the social problems involved.

If this were all, the politicians could not be blamed overmuch. In a democratic system political leaders are expected to respond to popular will as expressed in institutions from parish councils and town meetings right up to the most comprehensive organizations. But it is precisely the great weakness of Arab countries that, since the breakdown of the old corporations, no social institutions have been evolved through which the public will can be canalized, interpreted, defined, and mobilized. Elective institutions at the lower levels practically do not exist. No functional associations link representatives from different areas. There is, in short, no functioning organ of social democracy at all.

The political leaders have demonstrated no awareness of this inorganic state of social institutions, have not aided them to develop, and indeed shown jealousy of any potential institution which might rival and eventually oppose the political parties. But their still greater disservice to the welfare of their peoples has lain in their party rivalries, open pursuit of private interests, scandals pinned upon one another in their wrangling, subservience to the wealthy and powerful, and toleration of bitter inequalities. By this behavior the parliamentary leaders have discredited themselves and the system, and disillusioned the masses. To these the new kind of state differed little from its predecessors. So-called “democracy" in practice was scarcely distinguishable from the old sultanates: corruption was as rife as ever in the administration, and violence was not less violence because clothed in incomprehensible legal forms. Like the old sultanates, the new governments were passively accepted in virtue of their power, but they had no real moral authority: in the people’s eyes they were merely associations of self-interested persons using power for their own advantage during their transient ministries.

Inevitably, as the nationalist leaders felt mass support slipping away, they made ever more violent efforts to regain it by continuing to harp on the continued presence of European forces or enterprises or controls, or on the hidden hand of Western diplomacy and on Western support of Zionism. When accused of neglecting social issues, they insisted that those were secondary and controversial, and must not disrupt the nation’s united determination to achieve its national aims. However genuinely the politicians desired national independence, they did not know what to do with it. Concentrating on its negative aspect as freedom from foreign interference, and without positive program, they could only try to fill the void of policy by propaganda.

4

IT MUST, of course, be frankly admitted that the policies adopted by Great Britain and France on the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire gave bitter offense to nationalist sentiment. And since the Second World War, the positive actions of these powers plus the United States have given further offense, especially through their support of Israel, while their open and concealed rivalries have intensified Arab suspicions and hostility toward the West. The grievances are real and deep-Sealed. But it is a fallacy to suppose that the Western countries could have escaped becoming the butt of nationalist propaganda. The weakness of the political leadership forced it to distract public resentment into anti-Western channels, and the Western powers, whatever their policies had been, were cast for the role of scapegoats.

The consequences of this emphasis on propaganda have been disastrous in at least two respects. First, propaganda is the most vicious of the habit-forming drugs. It engenders group delusions which so root themselves in the minds of the propagandists themselves that they finally inhibit rational judgment of real issues. Drifting helplessly on waves of mass emotion, they become an easy mark for exploitation even by their enemies, provided these enemies subtly minister to the delusions which the propagandists have implanted. And when the political leaders find it necessary or opportune to change course, their own propaganda recoils on them and they find themselves branded as turncoats and traitors.

Second, because its content was merely political, propaganda has inhibited positive thought on real internal problems. No stable state can arise or endure without a basic social philosophy, accepted by the mass of its citizens, more or less consciously pursued in public life and private associations, and guaranteed by its laws, whether it be the Respublica Christiana, or the ideology of the Islamic Community, or Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité, or “ Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.”Nationalism by itself is not such a philosophy; the “nation" is merely a political concept. In most Arab countries, indeed, it is not even a universally accepted concept, and has as yet acquired no inherent authority.

Thus the internal instability of the Arab World has been increased by the clash of different definitions of the content of the national concept. The Westernized professional classes define it in terms of Western political and social institutions, plus naïve faith in universal education, or at least primary literacy. The professional armies define it in terms of military strength. The small Socialist and Communist Parties define it in terms of their own doctrinaire ideologies. All of them may and do profess their desire to relieve social pressures, and many are sincere therein. But their programs are designed to serve their special interests and in power give way to those interests in the competition for shares of the limited national revenue.

One factor, however, is common to all of them. All regard the masses as so much plastic material to be molded, without will or vision of their own. But the masses do have their vision, in terms of their Arab heritage through thirteen centuries of Islam. Politically, their aspirations are not narrowly national, but pan-Arab. Socially, their disillusion with the failure of national governments to meet their social needs is slowly beginning to find expression in new forms corresponding to the old religious associations, such as the Muslim Brotherhood (el-Ikhwan el-Muslimin), which demand a program of social order based on the principles of Islam and which through local lodges restore the lost sense of “belonging.”

How such a program could be applied in the modern world is an open question. But these are only the first inchoate gropings toward a restatement of Muslim values in face of the invasion of Western values, and as such show an inherent vitality in Muslim society. Understandably the Westernized politicians and professionals view them with suspicion and disfavor, especially when they break into open political action. Yet since nationalism has hitherto manifestly failed to meet the social needs and aspirations of the Arab peoples, and even the new government in Egypt, though more positively affirming its good intentions, has not yet proved that it grasps the material or psychological dimensions of the social problem, these vital forces, even if repressed, will probably continue to find stronger and more coherent expressions and create new organs and institutions of their own.

To sum up, then. The Arab World is in the profound crisis of a dialectical process (outwardly concealed by a common hostility to the Western powers) which drags it in two different directions. On the one hand is the movement toward authoritarian regimes, whose principal aim is to build up the political and military power of the state and restore Arab unity by political alliances. On the other are tentative movements to rebuild the social organism on Islamic principles, and so recreate a moral reunion of the Arab peoples.

Although complementary in appearance, these movements stand on conflicting principles. The first gears social and economic development to Westerntype administration, military organization, and expansion of technical skills. Because these imported systems are artificial structures, imposed by the few, and not rooted in the national psychology, this program requires sustained propaganda and the use of state power to remold the life and thought of the nation to conform with the ideas and objectives of the ruling groups. The second stresses organic internal development, relating economic to social needs, not rejecting Western experience where consistent with these, but subordinating it to the directives derived from the Islamic traditions of the masses. But because there is no vitality left in the lingering remains of the old Islamic social organizations, its leaders must forge the appropriate new organizations and institutions to canalize their ideals — a task calling for a long period of germination, probably often in conflict with the state, and continuing adaptation to changing social needs and situations.

Both movements are thus partial and provisional experiments toward adjusting Arab political, economic, and social life to the play of world-wide forces. Probably neither can by itself fill the inner void, but through their opposition and interplay there may in time emerge the solution by which the restless social problems of the Arab World can be satisfied in a social order which meets their psychological needs within the framework of expanding international relationships. Only then will the Middle Eastern countries gain the stability which is to their own greatest interest and to the interest of the world at large.