Debate: Islam and modern politics

The political consequences of terrorism are especially devastating for the Islamic
community – but also for non-Muslims. By Abu Bakr Rieger

There is little doubt that the mass murder of 11 September represents a turning--
point in recent political discourse. Since the fall of communism, only democratic
culture and its big brother capitalism have really remained to unfold across the
planet – from a Western point of view at least. Political rivalry on a world scale
has run out of rivals, political dialectics has no more adversaries. The democratic
culture, which by definition is without alternative, has now arrived in its own
totality. So it was that democracy’s triumph seemed assured at the opening of the
21st century, were it not for the emergence of new but very real opponents:
archaic hordes of terrorists, the masses of the poor, anti-globalists, and a
sprinkling of nationally operative despots.

And yet that supposed model of success, democracy and capitalism, is today the
subject of considerable suspicion, including in the West. While the Islamic world
plunges into casino capitalism, over here many are reflecting on the shadier
aspects of that system. Quite aside from the debt-traps of the IMF and WTO, a
new and fundamental question is being posed: what would happen if capitalism,
which economically encapsulates democracy, were to penetrate all of that
system’s political institutions so deeply that its own purported political form no
longer offered any kind of democratic correction to it? The problem, therefore, is
not democracy, the problem is radically intolerant capitalism. Already the great
majority of all conflicts are due not to a ‘Clash of Civilisations’ but to economic
disorder. What then if, in the not-so-distant future, global capitalism no longer
were to need democracy?

The German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk describes the pressure to change that
is clearly being exerted by global capital on the nationally bound democracies.
Sloterdijk believes that, within a ‘world interior of capital’, even freedom (which
from his point of view could only be rescued by an unrealistic union of asceticism
and democracy) is a matter up for debate. The space in which freedom can
operate, claims Sloterdijk, is shrinking, and we are living through nothing other
than a transition to post-liberal forms: “We have the choice between a party-
dictatorial mode, as in China, a state-dictatorial mode, as in the Soviet Union, an
electoral-dictatorial mode, as in the USA, and finally a media-dictatorial mode as
in Berlusconi’s Italy. Berlusconism is the European test-balloon of the emerging
Neo-authoritarian Age.”

Today, a profession of belief in democracy is conditional on an answer to the

question, “What kind of democracy?” But the prevailing superficial debate does
not wish to make time for that. We as Muslims, however, required as we are to
obediently embrace democratic values, are the very people to begin asking.
What are human rights worth without civil rights? What does global democracy
mean today? Is China a democracy? Or is China perhaps a kind of new capitalist
Ideal State with unfettered freedom for capital, and with a government that
undertakes the dirty work of monitoring the workers, as the Slovenian
philosopher Slavoj Zizek so powerfully expresses it. Zizek also identifies the
creeping erosion of the democratic form in that keen role-model, the West. He
examines the weight of real possibilities for political participation, comparing them
with the “Close-doors” button in a lift. Involvement is becoming abstract,
inconsequential; to the politically minded human being, participation appears
almost illusory.

Of course, Earth remains an unsettled place, and compared with large tracts of
our planet, life between Berlin and Baden-Baden is still fairly cosy. But this
cosiness may be deceptive. The Melilla refugee drama showed that the world’s
new divide does not lie between cultures, it separates the Rich and the Poor.
Materially speaking we Germans still live in a sheltered zone. The establishment
of Camps around the edges of our affluent society and the emergence of the
political figure of Homo Sacer, who has nothing left but his body, is the fault of
the modernism of our global principles of order. Our corporations are marauding
in Africa and they are not establishing a Nomos. It is in our relationship with the
South that the gaping chasm is revealed between the Christian claim of Europe
and its actual policies.

In the Islamic world, it is widely known that the political realm is cleft with deep
contradictions. In the Arabian lands, led by despots and little more than makeshift
dictatorships, the masses hope of democracy is that it will bring them civil rights
and a just distribution of prosperity. Zakat, which is an indicator of the just
distribution of prosperity from within Islam, has been degraded in the Islamic
world to a politically insignificant ritual. And yet the Muslim intellect remains
unsettled by the hypocritical question aimed at Islamic nations – whether they are
capable of democracy? – when everyone knows full well that barely a despot
would remain a day in power without the support of the West. Our wealth
depends to a considerable degree on the daily battle for a share of scarce
resources. What would happen if democratically elected governments in Riyadh
or Tripoli were to sell their oil to third parties?

The much-vaunted Enlightenment of which we are so proud here in the West

persists in avoiding the economic realm. We still ‘believe’ in endless growth, in
the reduction of debt mountains and in our natural right to acquire the world’s
resources. The magical multiplication of money belongs to the absurd aspects of
the capitalist religion. However, the limits of wealth have naturally not
disappeared, which is why good old geopolitics necessarily returns. We are no
longer fighting for Lebensraum, but for oil for our cars. For Western democracies
the problem now is how to democratically ‘legitimise’ their thirst for new
resources. What is interesting in all this is that the founding acts of democracy
deliberately overlook the people’s right to self-determination – the sole legitimate
subject of democracy, that is.

An analysis of terrorism today shows that as a phenomenon it not only enhances

the Global Security State, it also legitimises the necessity of a global empire.
John Gray considers terror/Al-Qaida to be an accompanying symptom of
globalisation and a very modern entity indeed. They are the dismal children of
modernisation; Muslims who never knew the context of mosque, market and
Zakat in their places of upbringing, and now members of revolutionary ‘Shock
Troops’ (one of Sayyid Qutb’s modernist terms). Their suicide appears to Zizek
more the action of someone in doubt, who simply has to know at last what he
basically does not know and spiritually could never experience: whether there is
another room behind the door. As a modernist ideology, says Zizek in his brilliant
analysis ‘Welcome to the Desert of the Real’, they want capitalism without
capitalism. An imaginary land of orthodoxy, without economic alternatives, but
with scarf-wearing women and a ban on alcohol. Meanwhile, even to the
terrorists, the Dollar is the most highly prized cultural asset of all.

The political consequences of terrorism are especially devastating for the Islamic
community – but also for non-Muslims. One has only to reflect on the obvious
weakening of the important anti-globalisation movement, which has invigorated
the political debate. As Muslims we do not just bemoan the superficial loss of
image; that longing for recognition which can be observed among today’s Muslim
functionaries is in fact a secular activity. But this does not preclude annoyance.
The limitless political term ‘Islamist’ is of course a gross simplification, and like
every other simplification it is one of the known preludes of a persecution which
must be genuinely feared – quite aside from the typical, inscrutable German
incapacity to respect orthodox religious life-practices. The political observer will
also have noticed that the term racism has been silently removed from the
debate. But more to the point is the regrettable fact that, beneath Terror’s clouds
of dust, even Islam itself is hardly recognisable. In the public arena, when advice
is sought about Islam, it is as if all that existed were hair-brained fundamentalism
or a banal esotericism. In either case, Islam loses its character as a credible
alternative way of life.

The denunciation of belief has now assumed shocking proportions. On the

Muslim side what is needed is a critique of Islamic modernism, but a critique
which leads into Islam, not out of Islam. The key points are clear: Islam is neither
an ideology nor a totalitarian life-form. Neither is it, as an organic life-pattern, a
system with totalitarian ambitions. Islamic thinking lives from the autonomy of its
own terminology. Even without the flowery language of tolerance, Islam
respected other ways of life in close proximity and for hundreds of years on end.