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, Berlin

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. Apart 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 were to no longer 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 peoples 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.

In liberalism, wanting to die for a political cause is unthinkable; hence in political theory and within the value-scheme, the terrorist or suicide bomber is a political figure of absolutely no worth whatsoever. He is not even an enemy, he has no values, and since inhuman, he is basically an animal. Cage, camp and leash are the reasonable civilising counter-measures. The outrageous acts themselves pursue an inescapable bio-political logic: the perpetrator utilises his body, but not his faith, against an opponent imagined to be overwhelmingly more powerful. He has nothing left other than this body, and in contravention to the Revelation he finally defiles that very existence which should have brought him to the Next World. All’s bad that ends bad.

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 that 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.

http://www.muslim-affairs.com