Secularism's ugly face in Arab world

JDP has ruled Turkey better than any other party

Azmi Bishara

Modern Turkey has never experienced as extended a period of stability and economic growth as it has under the last government. This government was led by the Justice and Development Party (JDP), which just scored another major electoral triumph in the Turkish general elections. In its victory speeches, the Islamist party pledged to safeguard the constitution of Turkey's secular republic.
   
   Striking difference
   As I recall, in the trial over the murder of the Egyptian writer Farag Fouda, some mainstream members of the Muslim brotherhood testified on behalf of the accused that the killers had been rightfully motivated by religious zeal, because the secularism that Fouda advocated was heresy. What a striking difference! One Islamist party swears to uphold the state's secularist system while another rules that secularism is anathema and justifiable grounds for murder.
   The JDP is far from a leftist or liberal democratic party. But it has certainly governed Turkey better than any other Turkish party that I know of -- leftist, liberal, republican or otherwise. Even so, it did not have any easy ride. At one point it had to dissolve and change its name. More recently, it was the victim of a massive hate campaign waged by the left and right in concert in the name of secularism.
   
   Europe: awkward
   Many factors combined to propel this mainstream Islamist movement to embrace parliamentary life. For one, the military establishment certainly put a cap on its ambitions. Undoubtedly, too, Turkish cultural and national identity, the conflicting ramifications and repercussions of globalisation, and economic progress and development also played a part. Whatever these factors were, the party retained its equilibrium, adjusted to present limitations, and decided to play by the rules of the game.
   This placed Europe in an awkward spot. As it hemmed and hawed over granting membership to an industrially developed nation with a democratically elected government, a nation many times better than some of the Eastern European countries that were gaining admission, Europe was once again exposed for its widespread and deeply seated undercurrent of racism.
   
   Turkish Islamism
   The platitudes keep coming fast and furious to cover up the resounding moral collapse of European policy towards Turkey (in spite of a brave attempt to revive it in the post-colonialist era of the Kreisky and Brandt generation), a collapse that was merely a sideshow to the even more telling and more hastily swept under the carpet collapse of the German handling of the Jewish question and Palestine.
   Of course the issue has some bearing on the history of Islamism in Turkey. Unlike in the Arab world, Turkey never had that clear divide between radical political Islam versus mystical Sufism on the one hand and the conservative clergy on the other. In Turkey, things are more subtle: a vast social base of subscribers to a rational and tolerant form of Sufism and an invisible give-and-take between "the military" and "the Sufi lodge" that is constantly recalibrating itself.
   
   Lip service
   While in Turkey, a victorious Islamist party displays more moderation, rationality and pragmatism, and less demagoguery and populism than all its secularist rivals, the Arab world is experiencing a curious decline in the rhetorical lip service paid to democracy.
   I say "curious" because one sniffs hidden agendas and because there is a sudden increase in the talk of "secularism" and "the unity of secularist forces". Not that this should be all that surprising. Most of the ruling regimes are secularist and undemocratic, and most of the corruption they foster, and the nepotism they thrive on, is secular. At the same time, everyone knows that democracy could open the corridors of power to Islamist forces. Not that anyone would be so bold as to come out against democracy, even if they never supported it in their lives. The fashion, now, is to say you're a secularist instead.
   Secularism to some is a way of life; as opposed to a political philosophy that espouses the separation of religion and the state. More often than not, these self-acclaimed secularists are not secularist at all, but inveterate narcissists who do not like to be crossed. In effect, they have founded a new secular religion that is hostile to Islam in particular. And they are not put off by the George W Bush brand of fundamentalism and the bigotry of a broad segment of his grassroots base.
   Of course this brand of secularism has very little to do with the latest definition of secularism as privatising religious self-determination and separating it from the public sphere, and very much to do with taking a stance against political Islam. It is a position that expresses itself in the Arab world in the form of corrupt regimes that have hitched themselves to the skirts of Western powers and, occasionally, Israel.
   Secularist forces will never be able to offer a democratic alternative until they, themselves, become democrats and conceive of a reasonable way to run the country in a democratic and secular manner. But this challenge will remain beyond their reach unless they take into account the influence of Islamist parties and Islamist political forces.
   Democratic secularists must reach out to and speak with Islamists. There is a vast spectrum of them, and it is important to distinguish between those who share democratic values and those who condemn the democratic process. To toss all of them into a single basket on the grounds of a shared religious frame of reference is to be pointlessly rigid and closed-minded.
   The Arab nationalist trend may still attract the majority of the Arab public, and its Nasserist version may still appeal to the majority of Egyptians. However, it is not a sufficiently unified and organised movement to make its political clout felt. For this, it has only itself to blame. It should not cast the onus on organised Islamist forces to carry out tasks it should have performed itself long ago. For Arab nationalists to turn around now and exclude Islamists on the pretext that they are not "secularist", and therefore not ready to practise democracy, apart from being hypocritical, is unrealistic. What kind of democracy excludes that many people from across the various sectors of society and with such enormous potential to offer the nation?
   Of course, the Islamist mainstream must be expected to abide by both the spirit and principles of democracy. This does not only mean adhering to democratic practices, such as holding free and fair elections and handing over power peacefully when the polls tell it to. It also means respecting the human rights and civil liberties of all citizens during its period of rule, something for which Arab "secularist" governments have a dismally poor track record. Islamists will also be expected to accept and work for the national agenda and to honour and safeguard national sovereignty.
   Equally, if not more importantly, it must do this in collaboration with other political forces and, moreover, it must educate its own rank and file on how to engage in a constructive process of give-and-take.
   
   Left and US
   The radical left, in its time, made no such distinctions. To it, hypocrisy was worse than fascism and, anyway, it perceived little difference between social democracy and Nazism: both were essentially forms of the rule of the bourgeoisie. To me, Nazism and fascism are worse than hypocrisy. So is absolutist Islamism. However, the transformations through which mainstream Islamist movements are passing are not hypocrisy, but a historic imperative for the type of reforms needed to make the transition to a real and robust democracy. This fact must be acknowledged and handled appropriately.
   Those who do not recognise that the Muslim Brotherhood has undergone a sea of change since the days of Sayed Qotb, that Hamas today is not what it was a few years ago and that Hizbullah is not the same party that shot Shia leftists in the 1980s are, themselves, fundamentalists of a different stripe. They cling to their ideas or preconceptions without subjecting them to rational scrutiny or the light of reality, whether out of rigid closed-mindedness or simply because it is not in their interests to try to understand. Or perhaps it is because they, too, have changed? I, for one, find it difficult to understand a left that now finds itself collaborating with the US and Israel against Islamists. I find it even harder to understand a left that is now so remote from the poor and the culture of the underprivileged, and from the quest for social justice, and is so cosy with the prosperous classes that are so aloof from their own societies.

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War guilt and intellectuals

Gabriel Matthew Schivone

Question: In 1969, addressing a community of mostly students during a public forum at the steps of MIT, you said: "This particular community is a very relevant one to consider at a place like MIT because, of course, you're all free to enter this community-in fact, you're invited and encouraged to enter it. The community of technical intelligentsia, and weapons designers, and counterinsurgency experts, and pragmatic planners of an American empire is one that you have a great deal of inducement to become associated with. The inducements, in fact, are very real; their rewards in power, and affluence, and prestige and authority are quite significant." Let's start off talking about the significance of these inducements, on both a university and societal level. How crucial is it that students understand the function of this highly technocratic social order of the academic community?
   Chomsky: How important it is, to an individual, depends on what that individual's goals in life are. If the goals are to enrich yourself, gain privilege, do technically interesting work-in brief, if the goals are self-satisfaction-then these questions are of no particular relevance. If you care about the consequences of your actions, what's happening in the world, what the future will be like for your grandchildren and so on, then they're very crucial. So, it's a question of what choices people make.
   Q. What makes students a natural audience to speak to? And do you think it's worth 'speaking truth' to the professional scholars?
   N.C. I'm always uneasy about the concept of "speaking truth," as if we somehow know the truth and only have to enlighten others who have not risen to our elevated level. The search for truth is a cooperative, unending endeavor. We can, and should, engage in it to the extent we can and encourage others to do so as well, seeking to free ourselves from constraints imposed by coercive institutions, dogma, irrationality, excessive conformity and lack of initiative and imagination, and numerous other obstacles.
   As for possibilities, they are limited only by will and choice.
   Students are at a stage of their lives where these choices are most urgent and compelling, and when they also enjoy unusual, if not unique, freedom and opportunity to explore the choices available, to evaluate them, and to pursue them.
   Q. What is it about the privileges within university education and academic scholarship which correlate with a greater responsibility for catastrophic atrocities such as the Vietnam War or those in the Middle East in which the United States is now involved?
   N.C. There are really some moral truisms. One of them is that opportunity confers responsibility. If you have very limited opportunities, then you have limited responsibility for what you do. If you have substantial opportunity you have greater responsibility for what you do. I mean, that's kind of elementary, I don't know how it can be discussed.
   And the people who we call 'intellectuals' are just those who happen to have substantial opportunity. They have privilege, they have resources, they have training. In our society, they have a high degree of freedom-not a hundred per cent, but quite a lot-and that gives them a range of choices that they can pursue with a fair degree of freedom, and that hence simply confers responsibility for the predictable consequences of the choices they make.
   Q. From where may we trace the development of this strong coterie of technical experts in the schools, and elsewhere, sometimes referred to as a 'bought' or 'secular priesthood'?
   N.C. It really goes back to the latter-part of the nineteenth century, when there was substantial discussion-not just in the United States but in Europe, too-of what was then sometimes called 'a new class' of scientific intellectuals. In that period of time there was a level of knowledge and technical expertise accumulating that allowed a kind of managerial class of educated, trained people to have a greater share in decision-making and planning. It was thought that they were a new class displacing the aristocracy, the owners, political leaders and so on, and they could have a larger role-and of course they liked that idea.
   Out of this group developed an ideology of technocratic planning. In industry it was called 'scientific management'. It developed in intellectual life with a concept of what was called a 'responsible class' of technocratic, serious intellectuals who could solve the world's problems rationally, and would have to be protected from the 'vulgar masses' who might interfere with them. And, it goes right up until the present.
   Just how realistic this is, is another question, but for the class of technical intellectuals, it's a very attractive conception that, 'We are the rational, intelligent people, and management and decision-making should be in our hands.'
   Actually, as I've pointed out in some of the things I've written, it's very close to Bolshevism. And, in fact, if you put side-by-side, say, statements by people like Robert McNamara and V.I. Lenin, they're strikingly similar. In both cases there's a conception of a vanguard of rational planners who know the direction that society ought to go and can make efficient decisions, and have to be allowed to do so without interference from, what one of them, Walter Lippmann, called the 'meddlesome and ignorant outsiders' , namely, the population, who just get in the way.
   It's not an entirely new conception: it's just a new category of people. Two hundred years ago you didn't have an easily identifiable class of technical intellectuals, just generally educated people. But as scientific and technical progress increased there were people who felt they can appropriate it and become the proper managers of the society, in every domain. That, as I said, goes from scientific management in industry, to social and political control.
   There are periods in history, for example, during the Kennedy years, when these ideas really flourished. There were, as they called themselves, 'the best and the brightest.' The 'smart guys' who could run everything if only they were allowed to; who could do things scientifically without people getting in their way.
   It's a pretty constant strain, and understandable. And it underlies the fear and dislike of democracy that runs through elite culture always, and very dramatically right now. It often correlates closely with posturing about love of democracy. As any reader of Orwell would expect, these two things tend to correlate. The more you hate democracy, the more you talk about how wonderful it is and how much you're dedicated to it. It's one of the clearer expressions of the visceral fear and dislike of democracy, and of allowing, again, going back to Lippmann, the 'ignorant and meddlesome outsiders' to get in our way. They have to be distracted and marginalized somehow while we can take care of the serious questions.
   Now, that's the basic strain. And you find it all the time, but increasingly in the modern period when, at least, claims to expertise become somewhat more plausible. Whether they're authentic or not is, again, a different question. But, the claims to expertise are very striking. So, economists tell you, 'We know how to run the economy'; the political scientists tell you, 'We know how to run the world, and you keep out of it because you don't have special knowledge and training.'
   When you look at it, the claims tend to erode pretty quickly. It's not quantum physics; there is, at least, a pretense, and sometimes, some justification for the claims. But, what matters for human life is, typically, well within the reach of the concerned person who is willing to undertake some effort.
   Q. Given the self-proclaimed notion that this new class is entitled to decision-making, how close are they to actual policy, then?
   N.C. My feeling is that they're nowhere near as powerful as they think they are. So, when, say, John Kenneth Galbraith wrote about the technocratic elite which is taking over the running of society-or when McNamara wrote about it, or others-there's a lot of illusion there. Meaning, they can gain positions of authority and decision-making when they act in the interests of those who really own and run the society. You can have people that are just as competent, or more competent, and who have conceptions of social and economic order that run counter to, say, corporate power, and they're not going to be in the planning sectors.
   So, to get into those planning sectors you first of all have to conform to the interests of the real concentrations of power.
   And, again, there are a lot of illusions about this-in the media, too. Tom Wicker is a famous example, one of the 'left commentators' of the New York Times. He would get very angry when critics would tell him he's conforming to power interests and that he's keeping within the doctrinal framework of the media, which goes back to their corporate structure and so on. And he would answer, very angrily-and correctly-that nobody tells him what to say. He wrote anything he wanted-which is absolutely true. But, if he wasn't writing the things he did he wouldn't have a column in the New York Times.
   That's the kind of thing that is very hard to perceive.
   People do not want, or often are not able, to perceive that they are conforming to external authority. They feel themselves to be very free, and indeed they are, as long as they conform. But power lies elsewhere. That's as old as history in the modern period. It's often very explicit.
   Adam Smith, for example, discussing England, quite interestingly pointed out that the merchants and manufacturers, the economic forces of his day, are the 'principal architects of policy', and they make sure that their own interests are 'most peculiarly attended to', no matter how grievous the effect on others, including the people in England. And that's a good principle of statecraft, and social and economic planning, which runs pretty much to the present. When you get people with management and decision-making skills, they can enter into that system and they can make the actual decisions within a framework that's set within the real concentrations of power. And now it's not the merchants and manufacturers of Adam Smith's day, it's the multinational corporations, financial institutions, and so on.
   But, stray too far beyond their concerns and you won't be the decision-maker.
   It's not a mechanical phenomenon, but it's overwhelmingly true that the people who make it to decision-making positions (that is, what they think of as decision-making positions) are those who conform to the basic framework of the people who fundamentally own and run the society.
   That's why you have a certain choice of technocratic managers and not some other choice of people equally or better capable of carrying out policies but have different ideas.
   Q. What about degrees of responsibility and shared burdens of guilt on an individual level? What can we learn about how those in positions of power or authority often view themselves?
   N.C. You almost never find anyone, whether it's in a weapons plant, or planning agency, or in corporate management, or almost anywhere, who says, 'I'm really a bad guy, and I just want to do things that benefit myself and my friends.'
   Almost invariably you get noble rhetoric like: 'We're working for the benefit of the people.' The corporate executive who is slaving for the benefit of the workers and community; the friendly banker who just wants to help everybody start their business; the political leader who's trying to bring freedom and justice to the world-and they probably all believe it. I'm not suggesting that they're lying. There's an array of routine justifications for whatever you're doing. And it's easy to believe them. It's very hard to look into the mirror and say, 'Yeah, that guy looking at me is a vicious criminal.' It's much easier to say, 'That guy looking at me is really very benign, self-sacrificing, and he has to do these things because it's for the benefit of everyone.'
   Or you get respected moralists like Reinhold Niebuhr, who was once called 'the theologian of the establishment'. And the reason is because he presented a framework which, essentially, justified just about anything they wanted to do. His thesis is dressed up in long words and so on (it's what you do if you're an intellectual). But, what it came down to is that, 'Even if you try to do good, evil's going to come out of it; that's the paradox of grace'. And that's wonderful for war criminals. 'We try to do good but evil necessarily comes out of it.' And it's influential. So, I don't think that people in decision-making positions are lying when they describe themselves as benevolent. Or people working on more advanced nuclear weapons. Ask them what they're doing, they'll say: 'We're trying to preserve the peace of the world.' People who are devising military strategies that are massacring people, they'll say, 'Well, that's the cost you have to pay for freedom and justice', and so on.
   But, we don't take those sentiments seriously when we hear them from enemies, say, from Stalinist commissars. They'll give you the same answers. But, we don't take that seriously because they can know what they're doing if they choose to. If they choose not to, that's their choice. If they choose to believe self-satisfying propaganda, that's their choice. But, it doesn't change the moral responsibility. We understand that perfectly well with regard to others. It's very hard to apply the same reasoning to ourselves.
   In fact, maybe the most elementary of moral principles is that of universality, that is, If something's right for me, it's right for you; if it's wrong for you, it's wrong for me. Any moral code that is even worth looking at has that at its core somehow. But that principle is overwhelmingly disregarded all the time. If you want to run through examples we can easily do it. Take, say, George W. Bush, since he happens to be president. If you apply the standards that we applied to Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg, he'd be hanged. Is it an even conceivable possibility? It's not even discussable. Because, we don't apply to ourselves the principles we apply to others.
   There's a lot of talk about 'terror' and how awful it is. Whose terror? Our terror against them? I mean, is that considered reprehensible? No, it's considered highly moral; it's considered self-defense, and so on. Now, their terror against us, that's awful, and terrible, and so on.
   But, to try to rise to the level of becoming a minimal moral agent, and just enter in the domain of moral discourse is very difficult. Because, that means accepting the principle of universality. And you can experiment for yourself and see how often that's accepted, either in personal or political life. Very rarely.
   (To be continued)

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