CHAPTER IV
ETHNICITY
AND ISLAMIC MODERNIZATION
MUSTAFA MALIK
The Strategy Group
I
begin this paper with the argument that many of today’s human conflicts stem
from a stampede among ethnic communities for the panoply of statehood. Secondly,
I argue that many Muslim communities are slowly moving toward modernization and
seculari-zation, which could further intensify ethnic conflicts and aggravate
political instability. Finally, I recommend the use of creative new political
models, including confederations and "state-plus-nation" approaches,
to accommodate ethnic and nationalist aspirations without upsetting the present
nation-state-based international order.
Let
me start on a personal note. In my application for permanent residency in the
United States, I had stated as follows: I was born in what is now India but grew
up mostly in what is now Bangladesh. However, I came to America from what is now
Pakis-tan with a Pakistan passport and on a diplomatic assignment from the
Pakistan government.
All
this was very confusing to Vernon Dutton, an examiner at the Immigration and
Naturalization Service office at Baltimore. "Which is your native country,
anyway?" Mr. Dutton asked. I said I didn’t know. He asked a colleague to
try to figure out my national origin, but to no avail. I asked Mr. Dutton why it
was so important to determine my national origin. "Man!" he yelled,
apparently exasperated by his inability trace my juridical roots, "we need
to know where to dump you if you create trouble here."
Years
later I ran into Mr. Dutton in a Baltimore convenience store. I told him that I
had become a U.S. citizen, and he congratulated me. Then I reminded him of the
difficulty he was having deciding where to deport me in case of a problem. He
laughed. "I am glad you have solved that problem by becoming an American
citizen," he said. "Now we will be happy to hang you here if you cause
any troubles."
It
took me a little more than three decades to become the citizen of four states --
India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and the United States. Each of these states
considers itself a nation. Last year I was reminded that I had a fifth
"nationality" which I had all but for-gotten.
I
belong to a joint family. My brother’s son bought a piece of land in
Bangladesh in my name and my brother’s. He later sent me a copy of the deed
registered at a Bangladesh government regis-tration office. That deed, written
in my native Bengali language, identifies me as "Mustafa Malik, son of so
and so, of such and such village, by nationality Muslim. . . ."
Deed
recording has been going on in the Asian subcontinent since long before the
French Revolution heralded the Age of Na-tionalism. For centuries, people of the
subcontinent have identified their "nationality" with their religious
community. Our Bangladesh scribe -- and I suppose his colleagues in parts of
Pakistan and India -- continues that practice even though politicians have
rechrist-ened our nationalities as Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi. Al-ternately,
people in some regions of the subcontinent identify their nationality with their
ethnicity: Kashmiri, Sikh, Naga, Mizo, Tamil, and so on.
South
Asian independence movements, like independence movements in much of the rest of
the Third World, were launched at a high-water mark of the Age of Nationalism.
It was a time when Woodrow Wilson’s call for the right of self-determination
of nation-alities was resonating in the hearts and minds of statesmen in our
subcontinent as in the rest of the colonized world. Their watchword is echoed in
a pungent simile of Ernest Gellner: "[E]very girl ought to have a husband,
preferably her own; and every high culture now wants a state, preferably its
own."1
The
stampede among Third World elites to gain statehood via nationhood was provoked
by the astonishing accomplishments of early nation-states and the goods they had
brought their citizens. Most early nation-states, though small in size, had
defeated ex-pansive empires -- Ottoman, Mughal, Chinese -- built empires of
their own and ushered in eras of unprecedented prosperity for their citizens. So
leaders of their exploited colonies aspired to have nation-states of their own
hoping to get a piece of the action.
These
statesmen included British Indian leaders Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru,
Mohammed Ali Jinnah and Liaqat Ali Khan -- all British-educated barristers. They
knew the British con-stitutional and legal systems inside out and used that
knowledge masterfully in their argumentation with the British colonial power to
gain the independence of the subcontinent. Yet it appears -- and here lies our
tragedy -- that they had not mastered so well the political history of Britain
or Europe. In their impatient drive to attain the pomp and power of
nation-states, they ignored the process through which early European
nation-states had evolved.
West
European nation-states were not based on their shared faiths or historical
experience, which is what our leaders mostly talked about. Those nation-states
have been products of moderni-zation -- industrialization, secularization and
division of labor. They brewed over centuries when growth of business and
industry brought people from different cultures together into melting pots. In
those melting pots, the demands of modernization imparted in them modern
education and skills, blended them into new forms of social organization based
on mobility and crosscultural communication. In this process was born national
cultures, which were different from the former ethnic and religious cultures of
the nationals.
These
industrial nations, nurtured by the Enlightenment, were powerful not because of
their racial superiority or religious virtues. They were powerful because of
their knowledge of the sciences and technology that gave them modern weapons and
ammunition and superior social organization, which translated into more
effective military and bureaucratic organizations.
South
Asian and most other Third World statesmen sought to short-circuit this long,
arduous process. They simply declared their peoples nations on the grounds of
their shared geographical ha-bitat, ethnicity or faith. Secondly, colonial
powers, in their efforts to retain political and economic stranglehold over the
Third World, created a host of other new states in a capricious fashion. Thus
the French, British and Italians split the Middle East and much of Africa into
states, often cutting across ethnic communities and herding disparate ethnic and
national collectivities into new states.
Many
of the human conflicts that concern us today stem from this miscreation of many
postcolonial states. India, for example, comprises hundreds of ethnic and dozens
of national collectivities who practice all the major and many minor faiths, and
who speak 16 major languages and about 1600 dialects. But Indian statesmen
declared this medley of heterogenous population groups a nation and assumed that
it could be governed smoothly with a con-stitutional arrangement they had seen
working at Westminster during their student years in Britain.
The
Muslim leadership of British India had their Muslim-majority Pakistan arguing
that Muslim elements in this medley constituted a nation. Pakistan, too, adopted
a political system, in fact a series of ephemeral systems, under which that
multi-ethnic state was ruled under a unitary central government mostly run by
military or military-backed dictators.
In
fact, neither India nor Pakistan has yet been a nation as a student of
nationalism would understand it. Both are agglomerations of ethnic groups,
tribes and nationalities. The straitjacket of a virtually unitary state into
which Indian leaders have herded the country’s myriad religious, linguistic
and tribal communities has been the source of perennial nationalist, ethnic and
religious con-vulsions. India’s colossal military juggernaut has, however,
suc-ceeded in suppressing the half-dozen secession movements that have stalked
the country from time to time while interfaith, inter-ethnic mayhem continues.
Pakistan’s
military failed to avert the secession of its former eastern province. Bengali
Muslims of what used to be East Pakis-tan and Punjabi Muslims of the western
region bickered for years over the official language, budget priorities, and
share of political power at the center. Finally, after a bloody civil war in
which Bengali Muslims joined hands with Indian Hindus to fight Pakistani Muslim
forces, East Pakistan emerged as indepen-dent Bangladesh. Now, in what remains
of Pakistan, a separatist movement festers among the Sindhi-speaking natives of
the Sindh province. Simultaneously the Urdu-speaking Mohajirs, or
immigrants from India, have en-gaged the Sindhis in a bloody struggle over
cultural, economic and political issues.
The
arbitrary division and subdivision of the subcontinent has spelled some of the
ghastliest human tragedies in human history. The Hindu-Muslim bloodletting over
the creation of Pakistan cost 800,000 lives and uprooted fourteen million
people. My family abandoned our Indian home and property and resettled in what
was then East Pakistan.
We
Muslims of the subcontinent have learned a twofold les-son from the
dismemberment of the old Pakistan, the only state ever created in the name of
Islam, and from the endemic ethnic strife ravaging what is left of it. It is
that Islam, which is an ennobling faith and dynamic social system, does not have
the glue for modern nationhood. Jinnah was one of the brightest statesmen the
Muslim world has ever had. But he was wrong when he said we Muslims of the
subcontinent are a nation.
Secondly,
and this follows from my first point, at crucial historical moments our ethnic
pulls can outweigh our Islamic soli-darity. I wanted to say this rather bluntly
because I believe that our failure to understand or admit this reality has, over
the centuries, driven us into many frustrating, and sometimes bloody, quagmires.
Pakistan
is not the only example of such frustration. On a visit to Baghdad after the
Gulf War, I noticed a big banner overhanging the city’s central square
dwarfing a life size portrait of Saddam Hussein under it. The banner flashed the
Qur’anic verse:
And
hold fast
All
together, by the Rope
Which
God (stretches out
For
you) and be not divided.2
Two days later I was driven
to the city of Kerbala. Hundreds of Shiite rebels had been slaughtered in
Kerbala by the troops of Saddam’s Sunni-dominated government. There I saw the
same Qur’anic verse displayed on another banner over a street. The ban-ner was
mocked by the ruins of dozens of nearby houses razed during the anti-Shiite
assault. It was mocked, too, by the headlines of several magazine articles I was
carrying on the Kurdish Muslim rebellion in northern Iraq. Saddam was not the
first Iraqi ruler to remind Iraqi Muslims of their common Islamic faith. Yet the
intensity of ethnic and sectarian strife has made Iraq perhaps the most
problematic state in the Middle East.
Many
other multi-ethnic Muslim states have been stalked by interethnic feuds.
Examples include the strife between Pashtuns and Tajiks in Afghanistan, Moors
and blacks in Mauritania, blacks and whites in Senegal, Tuaregs and blacks in
Mali, Arabs and Bar-bers in Algeria. We Muslims should strive to build strong,
pros-perous polities to preserve our dynamic religious principles and foster the
best of our cultural heritage. Our difficulty in doing so in multiethnic states
calls for rethinking the political structures of those polities. It is a
problem, I would argue, common to all multi-ethnic states run under unitary,
autocratic political systems.
Many
factors combine to create an ethnic collectivity, although each has a dominant
factor. It is monarchy that largely molded the French ethnic character. Kurdish,
Ukrainian and Slovak ethnicity has been cemented by language. In the United
States today, skin color is about the only ingredient that makes African
Americans an ethnic community, the overwhelming majority of which share the same
faith and language with the Protestant main-stream.
Religion
has played a dominant role in the creation of ethnic entities. Non-Muslim ethnic
and national collectivities cemented largely by religion include the Irish,
Israelis, Poles, Serbs, Croats, Sikhs, Christians in India’s Nagaland, Tamils
and Sinhalese in Sri Lanka, Maronites and Druze in Lebanon. Ancient examples
include Sumer, Assyria, Egypt, Persia, China, India.
Similarly,
religion has been the bedrock of most Muslim ethnic and national collectivities:
the Somalis, Mauritanians, Algerians, Egyptians, Turks, Chechens, Azerbaijanis,
Tadjiks, Pashtuns, Baluchis, Sindhis, Bangladeshis, Malayans, and Indonesians.
Yet the culture of each Muslim ethnic group, though steeped in Islamic ethos, is
different. For, as we have noted, apart from religion, culture has a host of
other ingredients which vary from place to place. They include language,
historical memories, customs, the arts, music, poetry, modes of earning a
living, environmental conditions, and so on. As ecology and social en-vironment
differs from region to region, so do human cultures, and Muslim cultures at
that. The Indonesian Islamic culture is different from that of Pakistan, which
is different from that of Somalia, which is different from that of Egypt, which
is different from that of Turkey, which is different from that of Morocco. Each
brand is zealously preserved and fostered by its members regardless of whether
they personally practice the faith part of that Islamic culture.
Jinnah,
who founded Pakistan to preserve an Islamic culture, seldom prayed. Today, the
most vicious struggle for Muslim identity is being fought by one of the most
secular Muslim collectivities, the Bosnians. Their secularism is portrayed in
another of Gellner’s telling epigrams:
Justice
Oliver Wendell Holmes once observed that to be a gentleman one does not need to
know Latin and Greek, but one must have forgotten them. Nowadays, to be a
Bosnian Muslim you need not believe that there is no God but God and that
Mohammed is his Prophet, but you do need to have lost that faith.3
The Muslim identity the
Bosnians are fighting for is an ethnic rather than purely religious identity,
even though religion played a pivotal role in shaping it. I cite these cases to
suggest that ethnicity, rather than religion, has been the principal factor in
most of today’s human conflicts.
From
time to time, religions have tried to supersede other elements of ethnic
cultures. They did so during the Inquisition in Europe, the Wahhabi movement in
Arabia and in the current Islamist revolutionary Iran. But almost invariably, as
Anthony Smith has noted, "after an enthusiastic phase" all religious
movements yield to broader ethnic pulls.4
Multiethnic collectivities held together by religious bonds often dissolve along
ethnic lines. Examples include the Holy Roman Empire, the early Islamic
Caliphate, the Ottoman Empire and, lately, the old Pakistan. In many cases,
though, ethnic and nationalist collectivities cemented with large doses of
religious glue remain intact but are secularized for example, Ireland, Turkey,
Israel and Poland.
It
appears that the current "enthusiastic phase" of Islamist revivalism
has peaked or is about to peak. We no longer hear the strident anti-American
tirade coming out of Iran. The ruling Islamic Refah (Walfare) government in
Turkey, despite its compaign rhe-toric, has kept its relationship with the U.S.,
Europe and Israel intact and reiterated its commitment to the pluralist
democratic political system of Turkey.
Forget
that Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s Shiite Islamist polity has always been an
Iranian phenomenon. His Shiite-Iranian revolution did not appeal very much even
to Shiite communities in neighboring Arab Iraq, Bahrain or Saudi Arabia, let
alone to the rest of the Muslim world.
In
fact, during the Iran-Iraq war the so-called theocratic Saudi government
supported the secular, Arab regime of Iraq against the theocratic Iranian one.
And Arab Shiites of Iraq, despite the re-pression of the Sunni Saddam regime,
bore the brunt of the fighting against Shiite Iranians. Iraqi Shiites paid
little heed to Iranian Shiite leader Khomeini’s calls for an uprising against
Saddam. Instead, a decade later they rose, unsuccessfully, against Saddam at the
call of Protestant George Bush!
Pakistanis
appear to have been done with Islam in the Zia al-Haq era. In the last
parliamentary elections, the freest ever held in Pakistan, all Islamist parties
together polled 2.5 percent of the votes cast, which have translated into three
seats in the National Assembly of 217 members. The Wahhabist Saudi Arabia, once
an epitome of early-Islamic piety and puritanism, has degenerated into a
hedonist, repressive and racially segregationist dynasty. Even the best known of
today’s Islamist movements, e.g. Algeria’s Islamic Salvation Front (FIS),
Lebanon’s Hizbollah (Party of God) or Hamas in the Israeli-occupied
Territories essentially are ethnic movements using Islamic symbols for political
causes.
During
a visit to Jerusalem, I had a brief conversation with a Palestinian
schoolteacher who identified himself as a supporter of Hamas, the inveterate
Palestinian Islamist group. Radwan Abu Salameh complained that the Arab and
Muslim world was doing little for the Palestinian cause. I reiterated my
sympathies for the Palestinian cause and at the end of our conversation asked
Abu Salameh casually what Palestinians thought about the Kashmir movement. I
heard Kashmiris complain, I said, that Arabs and other Muslims have abandoned
them. He said Palestinians, more than any other Arab groups, understand and
support the Kashmiri struggle, but added:
As
you can see, we are busy fighting the enemy occupying our own country. It is our
first duty. It’s an Islamic duty. You know, Allah has said he has created us
as nations and wants us to defend our homelands.
He
is right. What we call the Islamic umma, or community, has been a picturesque
quilt of a bewildering variety of ethnic and national patches. Sadly, the many
colors of this quilt seem to remain in a large blind spot of many in the
American academes and media. Islam, Islamism and terrorism are often used
interchangeably. The New York Times alarms Americans about "The
Islamic Wave," and quotes American officials as designating "militant
Islam as the new enemy, to be `contained’ much the way Communism was during
the cold war."5 The
New Republic blames the bombing of the World Trade Center on a "culture in
Brooklyn and Jersey City and Detroit off which the criminals feed and which gets
a grim thrill from them."6 A professor at the American University likens Islamic
movements to "Bolshevik, Fascist and Nazi movements of the past" which
should not be allowed to come to power even through the democratic process.7
This
kind of negative portrayal of Islam and Muslims has had its inevitable effect on
the American public mind. Early this year a project to build an Islamic school
in Montgomery County, Maryland, triggered a paranoid reaction among a group of
Americans. Among their fears, the school would "bring us close to
danger" from Muslim terrorism. One irate American, James Watkins of
Poolesville, Md., was worried that terrorists who would be studying at the
proposed Islamic school might "shoot at low-flying aircraft"
approaching the Dulles airport.8
The
notion of a monolithic Islam is shared, too, by many Muslims including
traditionalists and Islamists. They try to discount the God-given richness of
our diversity in race, language, customs, dress, food habits, social
organization, political experience and outlook. Many view any discussion of
Muslims cultural diversity as un-Islamic, if not anti-Islamic.
These
traditionalists and Islamists seem to forget that our ethnic diversity is part
of a providential design. God created Adam "from clay,"9
the Qur’an says, and sent him down to Earth because he wanted man to be his
"viceregent on earth." God did so even though angels pointed out to
him that man:
[W]ill
make
Mischief
therein and shed blood -- 10
The first thing that God
taught his viceregent on earth was not prayer.
And
He taught Adam the nature
Of
all things -- 11
It
is man’s knowledge of "the nature of all things" in this diverse
universe, and not his piety, that qualifies him to represent God on Earth and
makes him superior to angels. To make this point, God ordered the angels:
"Bow down to Adam!" and they bowed down.12
Thus
our Creator assigned us to inhabit and rule the deserts, the greeneries, the
prairies, the mountains and the snowfields. It is the requirement of his
assignment that makes us speak different languages, dress differently, eat
different foods and follow different social customs. Our Maker tells us that he
wants us this way:
And
[We] made you into
Nations
and tribes, that
Ye
may know each other
(Not
that ye may despise
(Each
other).13
It
is this providential arrangement that Abu Salameh was referring to when he said
that struggling for the Palestinian national cause is his "Islamic
duty." This providential design is reflected in the all-Levantine
Palestinian rallies held in Washington. It was reflected in a Kashmir symposium
that attracted only Pakistanis and Kashmiris; in the fact that the cause of the
Sudanese govern-ment is promoted here by a group of African American Muslims;
and in events arranged to honor the late African American Sunni Muslim Malcolm X
that are attended by more African American Christians than by Sunni immigrant
Muslims.
I
focus this discussion mainly on ethnicity rather than nationalism because the
distinction between the two, as Daniel Patrick Moynihan puts it, is a matter of
"degrees," the nation being "the highest form of the ethnic
group."14 An ethnic
community be-comes a nation, "when it mobilizes for political action and
becomes politically significant."15
Ethnic groups are thus more basic and durable collectivities than nations. They
are the cockroaches among human collectivities. They have been around since the
be-ginning of man’s social living and likely will remain if and when nations
and nationalism, which are only a few hundred years old, should become obsolete.
Conflicts
do occur among nations. It is nations and so-called nations which fought the
Gulf War, the Iran-Iraq war, the wars over Afghanistan and those between India
and Pakistan, the First and Second World Wars, and so on. Yet, as conflicts
among nations be-come costlier both in human and economic terms, they decrease.
"Nation states," to quote Moynihan again, "no longer seem
inclined to go to war with one another, but ethnic groups fight all the
time."16 Developed
nations, in particular, have refocused their competition "from war to
commerce."17
In
the developing world, though, more and more ethnic communities, many of them
Muslim, are claiming national status. One reason is that most of those
communities are undergoing a transition from agrarian to industrial culture.
Industrialism, as noted earlier, pulls man away from his primordial social and
cultural roots, and nationalism offers him an alternative refuge for collective
living. Besides, because anti-colonial movements generally were fought in the
garb of nationalism, nationalism remains "a progressive cause" for
many Third World communities.18 Most important, nationhood is viewed as a qualification for
statehood which pro-mises its members economic development, mobility, modern
edu-cation, and citizenship, a seemingly more prestigious individual identity
than membership of an ethnic group.
Even
though the concept of Islamic brotherhood is often viewed as antithetical to
territorial nationalism, Islam has fueled many an ethnic group’s drive for
nationhood. It has done so in Muslim communities surrounded by non-Muslims
(Malayans), do-minated by non-Muslim minorities (Algerians), haunted by me-mories
of conflict with non-Muslim majorities (Pakistanis, Bang-ladeshis), and so on.
In
the past two centuries, the colonial stranglehold largely suppressed political
aspirations of most Muslim, and many non-Muslim, ethnic communities. In recent
decades, most of these communities have had the freedom to strive to acquire
education, engage in business and industry and develop political institutions.
The ethnic communities that find their progress suppressed by others have waged
nationalist movements. Usually nationalist movements are most stimulated by a
feeling of exploitation and it gains momentum with modernization.19 As the
developing world po-pulation explodes and competition for resources gets stiffer
among new, modernizing generations, ethnic and nationalist unrest could increase
proportionately, too.20
Among
Muslim societies, one consequence of modernization is expected to be an
increasing trend toward secularization. In the stagnant agrarian life, man’s
allegiance to his traditional culture is total. In the melting pot of modern
life he develops a web of new affiliations -- to his employer and coworkers,
professional guild, recreational club. As a result, his identity is, to use Ali
Mazrui’s expression, "partialized." Eventually, these
"partially eroded group personalities coalesce to form a new national
entity."21
The new national culture replaces the culture of the clerics or ideologues. The
price that people pay for his transition from the agrarian-ethnic to
industrial-nationalist culture, Gellner points out, is that "they become
secularized."22
I
know I am stepping on a mine with this statement. I will be reminded that in
many societies including, especially Muslim societies, modernization has
accompanied religious revivalism instead of secularization. True, today’s
Islamist movements in several parts of the world, the Hindu revivalist movement
in India, Buddhist revivalism in Sri Lanka, Jewish fundamentalist movement in
Israel and Christian fundamentalist movement in the United States are all modern
phenomena. And a great deal has been written about the effects of modernization
on these movements.23
The
focus of this paper does not permit adequate treatment of the issue. I would
argue, though, that religious revivalism, like the just fading communism, is a
transient phase in man’s quest for more enduring political values and
structures. So far as Islam is concerned, it generally is attracting youth who
have been turned off by their corrupt politicians; by Western government
policies and elite attitudes perceived as insensitive to Muslims and Islam; by
social ills of today’s Western societies, and by the social and economic ills
of Muslim societies, defying Western political and economic recipes.
Eventually,
however, as the Islamist resurgence peaks, these bright, idealist youth will
realize that secular political models are most conducive for the dissemination
of Islam’s uplifting values and ideals. Humanity, wary of the frenzied, brutal
stampede for material goods, is hungering for such Islamic principles as
justice, welfare of the indigent, equality, brotherhood and social
responsibility. Our new generations of educated youth imbued with Islamic spirit
need a secular world environment to cultivate and foster these great ideals.
They cannot go around defending Muslim women’s head covering in France and
North America and also the suppression of religious minorities in Pakistan, Iran
or Sudan.
Secularization
of Muslim societies, not a clash of civilization, is, I believe, going to
highlight the next phase of human history. Even though Islam has been the latest
and, in some ways, the most progressive of the three Abrahamic faiths, we
Muslims have been behind the other two in modernization and secularization. The
main reason: We sat out the industrial revolution and the Enlightenment. Both
these phenomena, of course, took place in Christian Europe. But then Ashkenazi
Jews eventually caught up with them and modernized and secularized their society
with great success.
Anthony
Smith attributes the rapid modernization of Jewish society to Jewry’s
"traditional high regard for learning."24 The Jews’ zest for learning is admirable. They have proved
it in many branches of knowledge. Yet Smith’s argument does not explain why
Sepherdic Jews’ "regard for learning" has not generally been as high
as Ashkenazis’. Neither does he say why German Jews have done significantly
better in their pursuit of education and modernization than have, for example,
Polish Jews.
Two
factors seem to have helped Ashkenazi Jews modernize faster than their Asian and
African coreligionists. One, and Lewis has alluded to it, is their proximity to
the theaters of the Reformation and Enlightenment. The commercial policies of
Prussia, especially under Frederick William II, also helped Jewish enterprize
and edu-cation a great deal. The other factor is the sheer need for survival of
a persecuted minority, which means getting a good education, working hard at
your lab, store or music studio. (The drive for survival in adversity probably
explains, more than anything else, why the Palestinians of today are among the
best educated and most modern segments of Arab society.)
What
has become of Muslims? Muslim societies were phy-sically far removed from the
intellectual and industrial ferment of Enlightenment Europe. In the 18th century
when Western and Central Europe pulsated with that ferment, life in the partly
nomadic partly agrarian Muslim world flowed steadily along its old, tra-ditional
social and cultural grooves. Then, as European armies, merchants and preachers
swarmed to Muslim (and non-Muslim) lands of Asia and Africa, Muslim societies
reacted defensively, clutching fast on to their traditional religious and social
values and institutions. Muslim religious leaders blamed the colonization of
their countries and other adversities on Muslims’ deflection from traditional
Islam. A number of Islamic revivalist movements swept the Muslim world. They
further shielded their societies from the winds of secular education and
modernization, which they asso-ciated with the hated colonizers.
In
many Muslim societies, public aversion to Western edu-cation lingered past the
colonial age and has been one of the main causes of the backwardness of
subcontinent Muslims. In the 1950s my father, an Islamic scholar in what used to
be East Pakistan, was bitterly criticized by his friends for my going to a
secular school. Our county (pargana) had three Islamic schools, all
teeming with Muslim students, but no school for secular education above the
fourth grade.
I
had to leave home at age 11 to enroll in a dilapidated "middle English
school" in another county. Our one-room school, divided into three class
"rooms" by two movable straw partitions, had a total of fewer than 30
students attending grades three through six. The three-member faculty was headed
by a third-year college dropout, the highest educated person in two counties who
was suspected to be crazy because he seldom prayed. The two other teachers were
high school dropouts. Our principal was provided free room and board in lieu of
tutoring his host’s children and had a monthly pay of about $4, supplemented
by another $1.50 as government allow-ance. His two colleagues used to get about
half that amount each. Yet we and our school were the objects of scorn and
innuendoes at Islamic gatherings.
The
Hindus of the subcontinent were taking advantage of Western education that
British colonialists had introduced there. Hence they have been much ahead of us
in education and and modernization. The secular schools were patronized by the
colonial government, which had conquered most of India from Muslim rulers. Hence
resentment of the British and everything they stood for was stronger among
Muslims than among Hindus (until the onset of the independence movement, which
was led by Hindu elites). Until recent decades, Muslim backwardness in education
had been worldwide, but in the subcontinent Muslims’ campaign to shun secular
schools also was part of their broader non-coope-ration with the alien rulers.
It
has been just a few decades that most of the Muslim world has thrown off
colonial tutelage and set about modernization. In many cases, the process has
been rather slow. It will take us a while, as it did West Europeans, to undergo
the "intellectual, technological and social revolution" sparked by
modernization.25
Secularization of Muslim societies will not, in all probability, make them
copies of Euro-American democracies. For the immediate future, democracy in most
Muslim countries likely will have a strong Islamic tinge. I don’t expect to
see writings of Salman Rushdie or Taslima Nasreen in Pakistani or Egyptian
bookstores anytime soon regardless of the political systems these countries may
have. Neither can I see a Muslim parliament enacting laws in the near future to
allow women the same inheritance rights as men (Islam allows the son to inherit
two-thirds of his father’s property leaving one-third for the daughter).
No
two Western democracies are alike. Indian democracy is strikingly different from
all of them. Under the Indian version of secularism, many religious institutions
receive government patronage, and the government participates in the management
of some. The practice strikes at the core of the American principle of
secularism: church-state separation. Because of the preponderance of religious
values in Muslim cultures, democracies in Muslim countries will have a stronger
religious flavor than in most others. Yet as Muslim societies continue to
modernize and the current "enthusiastic period" of Islamic revivalism
levels off, their secular ethos will strengthen.
Modernization,
of which nationalism and secularism are co-rollaries, is never painless. It hits
different segments of a com-munity and different parts of a country at different
times. And of course some countries modernize more rapidly than others. Hence
the early phase of modernization usually accompanies interethnic and interstate
unrest. For as the tidal wave of modernization sweeps the world, it makes sure
that almost everyone, at some time or other, has cause to feel unjustly treated.26 As a result, the coming decades likely will witness
continued ethnic and nationalist feuds in the Muslim and Third worlds.
During
this period of economic and political scramble, many Muslim and Third world
societies may find it difficult to guarantee the full range of human rights that
David Little and many of the rest of us in the West are concerned about. Rights
to free speech and association, and equal enjoyment of those rights by all
citizens, are basic to the quality of life that we live in America and the West.
I personally do not want to live in a society that does not or cannot guarantee
them.
Many
less privileged societies are, however, more concerned with more basic
requisites of life: food, shelter, medicine, basic education. They place greater
priority on equity in the enjoyment of resources than on political and juridical
equality of citizenship, e.g. equal right to vote, equal protection of the law,
right to trial in a civilian court and right to counsel of one’s own choice
during the trial.
The
rights to freedom of thought, conscience and religion, freedom from
discrimination, etc., to which Little also has referred, are essentials of
secular, democratic societies. I believe that as the pace of modernization
accelerates in the Muslim and Third World societies, indigenous forces in those
societies will inevitably push for the realization of these rights.
Meanwhile,
societies that are ahead in the march toward freedom and liberty, owe it to
themselves and the rest of mankind to strive to promote those ennobling values
among others. Pushing these ideals will, I hope, help speed the process of their
realization. They should not, however, be daunted by the possibility that
rewards for their efforts may not be immediate, especially among the premodern
and modernizing societies that have never known freedom of thought, conscience,
religion, and the rest. I said that heightening ethnic and nationalist
aspirations and competition for finite resources can continue to spawn
interethnic, inter-national violence. Creative constitutional models and
statesmanship, how-ever, can avert such conflicts and facilitate relatively
peaceful coexistence and coalescence among different ethnic and nationa-list
communities.
Many
ethnonationalist conflicts center on collectivities’ aspirations for sovereign
statehood. The sovereignty of the territo-rial nation-state is assumed to be
sacrosanct. The Kashmiris, for example, are dying by the thousands for the
panoply of a sovereign state to preserve their ethnonational rights. The
Indians, on the other hand, have been committing hair-raising barbarity to
people they call their countrymen to make sure that Kashmir remains, as Indian
officials often assert, "an integral part" of the sovereign Indian
state. Thus most nationalist movements today mean dis-section of territory,
disruption of means of living, the domination of the religious and cultural
affairs of one community by another.
The
early nation-states followed the reverse course. The French nation, for example,
evolved over centuries in the frame-work of a state. The issues of economic and
cultural rights resolved themselves as local ethnic cultures transformed
gradually into the French national culture. And there was no question of
territorial division. Even though discrete cultural enclaves persisted in the
Gaelic highlands, in Languedoc and Brittany, peaceful trade and social
interaction across cultural contours barred them from unleashing the kind of
murderous passion that we witness today in the Balkans, Kashmir and Palestine.
In
Britain, civil society evolved over centuries while the three national
collectivities -- the English, Welsh and Scots -- retained their national
identities. As these nationalities together passed through the "triple
revolutions" of industrialization, bureaucratization and communication and
as the blood of their youth mixed in the battlefields of World War I, they
gradually emerged as a new nation-state. Most other West and North European
nation-states passed from statehood to nationhood this way.
The
problem with many East European and Third World collectivities is that they are
struggling to transform first into nation-hood in order to acquire statehood.
This often leads to such painful consequences as "ethnic cleansing,"
dissection of territories and communities, domination of one community by
another rather than their gradual assimilation or coalescence. So Kashmiris must
either have a sovereign state of their own or none of their national rights. The
Indians must either have Kashmir as an "integral part" of India or let
it secede. The concept of sacrosanctity of state sovereignty does not allow for
relationships in between.
This
dilemma could be resolved through alternative political arrangements that might
require modifying the concept of sover-eignty. "Confederalism" is one
option. Many feuds between se-cessionist national collectivities and
integrationist multinational states could be amenable to confederal solutions.
The nationalist movement would have its flag and most state powers but cede a
few subjects such as defense, foreign affairs and currency to the state it wants
to secede from. The recipe of "federal and confederal state," as
Anthony Smith points out, "would make it possible to de-link ethnic and
national aspirations from statehood and sover-eignty."27
We in the Indian subcontinent could have been spared much bloodshed and
suffering had our leaders accepted a con-federal arrangement that the
withdrawing British colonial power had proposed in 1946. Later the secession of
Bangladesh after a bloody civil war followed Islamabad’s refusal to accept a
con-federation between Bangladesh and Pakistan.
Another
approach, once propagated by Austrian Social Democrats Otto Bauer and Karl
Renner to preserve the unity of Austria-Hungary, could be the basis of a range
of other frame-works. Bauer and Renner proposed that national groups, whether
they are concentrated in one territory or scattered around the world, have their
cultural affairs handled by their national institutions leaving political and
security issues to be tackled by a "supra-national government."28
The
American Foreign Policy Association put out a study that offers a similar
formula for the accommodation of nationalist aspirations without bloody
convulsions.29 Under his
so-called "states-plus-nations" approach, Gidon Gottlieb suggests a
series of concepts that would help resolve nation-state conflicts outside of
territorial-sovereignty configuration.
Gottlieb
suggests that the international make room for nations that do not have the
panoply of full-fledged states. Secondly, in multinational states, he argues for
a redistribution of the attributes of state sovereignty among competing
nationalities. He also suggests that in special cases "national
rights" may be conferred on natives of a state who are citizens of another
country. The problems of irredentism and contested state boundaries can be
alleviated, according to Gottlieb, by drawing different boundaries for different
purposes, e.g. one for security, another for customs and immigration, a third
for cultural and vocational interaction.
There
can be other approaches. The basic point I wish to make is that the
postcolonial, post-Cold War world calls for a second look at the international
juridical and political systems based on the Hobbesian concept of nationhood and
sovereignty. Fixation with those concepts has been a major cause of festering
conflicts in many places.
In
fact, the Age of Nationalism appears to have peaked in the region of its birth.
The oldest nation-states today find the armor of the Leviathan an impediment to
their progress and are increasingly ceding attributes of national sovereignty to
the European Union. A less noticeable step has been taken by North American
states through the North American Free Trade Association. The states in the
Pacific envisage a similar free trade zone which will lower economic and
commercial fences. Obviously, the sovereign state, which was created by
modernizing nations, is becoming a burden for high-tech nations.
Let
not less developed ethnic and national collectivities spill blood for the armor
of sovereignty that they may need to throw away later. Today’s German, British
and French youth mock their grandparents who fought World War II. We can be
spared being ridiculed by our grandchildren if we heed the Qur’anic caveat:
And
[We] made you into
Nations
and tribes, that
Ye
may know each other
(Not
that ye may despise
(Each
other).
NOTES
1.
Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 1983), p. 51.
2. Qur’an,
III:103.
3. Nations
and Nationalism, p. 72.
4.
Anthony D. Smith, The Ethnic Origins of Nations (New York: Basil
Blackwell, Ltd., 1987), p. 32.
5.
Judith Miller, "The Islamic Wave," The New York Times Magazine,
May 31, 1992.
6.
Richard Cohen, "An Arab Headdress," The Washington Post, Aug.
27, 1993.
7.
Amos Perlmutter, "Wishful Thinking About Islamic Fundamentalism," The
Washington Post, Jan. 1, 1991.
8.
"Battle Lines in Poolesville Over Site for Saudi School," The
Washington Post, Jan. 22, 1995.
9. Qur’an.,
IV: 2.
10.
Ibid., II: 30.
11.
Ibid., II: 31.
12.
Ibid., II: 34.
13.
Ibid., XLIX:13
14.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Pandaemonium: Ethnicity in International Politics
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 4.
15.
Paul R. Brass, Language, Religion and Politics in Northern India (New
York: Cambridge University Press, 1974), p. 8.
16.
Pandaemonium, 5.
17.
William Pfaff, The Wrath of Nations (New York: Simon & Schuster,
1993), p. 31.
18.
Ibid., 33.
19.
Hah and Jeffrey Martin Chong-do, "Toward a Synthesis of Conflict and
Integration Theories of Nationalism," World Politics, Vol. XXVII,
No. 3 (April 1975), 372-75.
20.
Ethnic Origins of Nations, pp. 225-26.
21.
Ali A. Mazrui, "Pluralism and National Integration," in Leo Kuper and
M.G. Smith eds., Pluralism in Africa (Berkeley, Calif.: University of
California Press, 1969), pp. 334-35.
22.
Nations and Nationalism, p. 78.
23.
Dankwart Rustow, A World of Nations: Problems of Political Modernization
(Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1967), p. 3.
24.
Anthony D. Smith, "Nationalism and Religion: The Role of Religious Reform
in the Genesis of Arab and Jewish Nationalism." Archives de Sciences
Sociales des Religions, 35 (January-June 1973), 31.
25.
A World of Nations, p. 3.
26.
Nations and Nationalism, p. 112.
27.
Ethnic Origins of Nations, p. 225.
28.
Eli Kedourie, Nationalism and Politics (New York: Hutchinson & Co.,
1960), p. 116.