Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to Allah

Friday, September 30, 2011The Libyan revolution, which put an end to Moammar Gadhafi’s 42-year-long tyranny after a chaotic civil war, has an interesting motto: “There is no god but Allah, and Gadhafi is his enemy!” This is quite ironic, though, because the now-dethroned Libyan colonel had also been referring to God to justify his dictatorial rule. A mantra of his regime bluntly read: “Allah, Moammar, Libya: that’s all we need!”

The image of Allah, in other words, seems to have shifted in the minds of many Libyans from a pillar of authoritarian rule to a beacon of liberty.

A similar transformation seems to be unfolding in Syria as well, which used to have its own version of the authoritarian Arab trinity: “Allah, Syria, Bashar – that’s all we need!” But the peaceful Syrian protestors who have been raising their voice against the dictatorship of Bashar al-Assad and co., despite all the killing and torture they face, are now using a different motto: “Allah, Syria, Freedom: that’s all we need!”

It is perfectly understandable that such religious themes within the Arab Spring are confusing, if not worrying, to Islamo-skeptic Westerners who assume that all political manifestations of Islam will lead to tyranny. However, the history of Muslim civilization shows that Islam has been understood in many different ways, and while it sometimes has been used to support tyrants, it more often than not challenged them.

In fact, one of the very early theological splits in Islam was precisely on this issue. The successive caliphs of the Umayyad Dynasty (661-750 AD) promoted a theory of divine predestination, which implied that the corrupt Umayyad rule was predestined, and thus willed by God. The opposing theologians, who defended humans’ freewill, argued that rulers were responsible to both God and the people.

After a few centuries of debate, the Sunni view on this matter settled on a middle position, which valued strong rulers, but also expected them to be just and lawful. In the Ottoman Empire, the ritualistic expression of this idea was a popular slogan that common people would say to the sultans after Friday prayers: “Don’t be arrogant my sultan, God is greater than thou!”

In the modern age, however, traditional Islamic law, whose functions included constraining arbitrary power, failed to update itself, and was gradually rendered ineffective via “modernization.” As Harvard law professor Noah Feldman demonstrates in his book, “The Fall and Rise of the Islamic State,” this process produced not the liberal democracy of the West, but various secular (and sometimes fiercely secularist) autocrats – such as Mustafa Kemal Atatürk in Turkey, Reza Shah in Iran, or Gamal Abdal Nasser in Egypt.

Islamism, the totalitarian ideology that aspires for an “Islamic state,” was more of a reaction to this modern crisis, rather than a direct continuation of the Islamic tradition. It was also based on an export of the worst ideas of the West. One of the founders of the Islamist ideology, Pakistani thinker Sayyid Abu al-A’la al-Mawdudi, had openly acknowledged that his “Islamic state” would “bear a kind of resemblance to the Fascist and Communist states.”

Here is the key question for today: If Mawdudi and his followers synthesized Islam with totalitarianism, can others synthesize it with liberal democracy?

The answer does not look as grim as some suspect. It’s not just the symbolic combination of “Allah” and “freedom” in the minds of the Arab masses, but the discussions among Muslim parties in Egypt and elsewhere are also raising hopes for a liberal future.

To be sure, the transformation of the Muslim mind from authoritarianism to liberalism would be a very challenging process. But was the political evolution of Christianity any easier? It certainly took a lot of effort to move from the Spanish Inquisition and the “divine right of kings” to the liberating motto of the U.S. founder Benjamin Franklin: “Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God.”

Islam is just no less capable of going the same distance.