British liberals should learn from their Arab counterparts

[Originally posted at Left Foot Forward]

Catching up last week on yet another milestone in the sorry emaciation of free expression in Britain, documented in this case by Nick Cohen (who has after all written the book on this), I took to Twitter to quote his elegant synopsis of the problem with far too many of London’s self-styled radicals and insubordinates: “We only challenge religions that won’t hurt us, and governments that won’t arrest us.”

Within seconds, a prominent Lebanese atheist blogger, Gino Raidy, had replied, pointing out the curious and conspicuous fact that the same could not be said of the average disbelieving scribbler in the Arab world.

He’s exactly right. The truth is it seems to be more taboo to criticise Islamism in Britain these days than it is here in Beirut, where it’s taken for granted in liberal circles that theocracy is the enemy (and where, incidentally, the religious bigots are Christians as often as they are Muslims). The takfiris whose “legitimate grievances” right-thinking Britons are so anxious to locate and placate are treated with open contempt by liberal and leftist Arabs, and for very good reason.

It’s not just the proximity to the daily sectarian slaughter in Syria and Iraq, or the residue of the heady Arab nationalist days when the titanic Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser urged Saudi Arabians to revolt against their “reactionary” Wahhabi-Salafist rulers and openly ridiculed the Muslim Brotherhood.

It is, crucially, that Arabs – who naturally know their own language, culture, and history best – have the least difficulty seeing the Bin Ladenists for the crackpot criminals they are, and consequently have the least inclination to respect them.

Take the recent murder in Woolwich of Private Lee Rigby by two unapologetic Islamists. British jihadism’s savviest self-promoter, the former head of Hizb ut-Tahrir’s UK franchise and founder of the now-banned al-Muhajiroun, Omar Bakri, quickly made headlines by defending one of Rigby’s killers and claiming that, “To people around here [in the Middle East] he is a hero for what he has done.”

One pictures it all too easily: the furious throngs of bearded young men, burning Union Jacks, and bellowing for the infidels to be put to the sword. But there’s a reason Bakri didn’t repeat that claim when I interviewed him for a local publication: none of it happened. There were no demonstrations, no posters plastered on the walls, no festive sweets jubilantly doled out in city squares. Even the fringe militant Islamists, who successfully torched a KFC during the ‘Innocence of Muslims’ furore, made nothing of the occasion.

There was, quite simply, no evidence to suggest anyone in Lebanon felt anything but ordinary shock and disgust.

Yet the impressionable British mujahid-in-the-making two thousand miles away wouldn’t and couldn’t know that (and, incidentally, would have been little enlightened by the BBC’s invitation of Bakri’s protégé, Anjem Choudary, on to Newsnight to explain that the real victim in Woolwich was the killer, who had only acted in self-defense).

Maajid Nawaz, the former Hizb ut-Tahrir zealot turned liberal democracy activist, writes in his memoir, Radical, of how easily enthralled he and his fellow east Londoners in the 1990s were by the mere fact of Bakri’s being an actual Arab:

“Everyone wanted to see him and hear what he had to say […] Here was someone who did have a beard, who spoke Arabic, and who had the theological authority from having studied shari’ah (Islamic jurisprudence) at Damascus University.”

Western liberals have for decades permitted themselves to be fooled by these charlatans, even while secular Arabs have consistently and vocally opposed them (some, like the Egyptian Farag Foda and the Algerian Tahar Djaout, paying with their lives for doing so).

Recall that when Salman Rushdie was being vilified by John le Carré and Germaine Greer for the malicious “insult” his novel had been to a “great religion”, no fewer than one hundred Arab literary heavyweights, from Edward Said to Mahmoud Darwish to Adonis to Amin Maalouf, jointly published a book unambiguously rejecting the pro-censorship arguments (let alone the pro-murder ones) and explicitly identifying Rushdie’s cause as their own.

Indeed, in this, they were only following a Middle Eastern tradition identifiable since at least the irreverent poetry of Omar Khayyam, and much revitalized by the intellectual nahda (“awakening”) that flourished in the 19th century, of combating clerical and faith-based stupidity and asserting the superiority of reason and free inquiry. (My favourite example is the 1882 ‘Lewis Affair’, when university students in Beirut boycotted classes and even dropped out in protest at the firing by a Christian missionary administration of a Darwinist professor.)

The day can’t come soon enough that Britain’s liberals realize that, so far from extending a hand of “solidarity” to their Arab counterparts by making excuses for religious fundamentalists, they are on the contrary sharpening the daggers of those who are, and have ever been, their great adversaries.

Asking the impossible? Lebanon's march for secularism

[A condensed version of the below was posted on the UK National Secular Society website]

“Religion belongs to God, the country to everyone” – Butrus al-Bustani, Lebanese secularist, Arab nationalist and polymath (1819-83)

While in most respects the previous seventeen months have seen undreamt-of victories for civil liberties in the Middle East, there is one crucial measure by which things have not improved, and in fact threaten to worsen considerably: the separation of religion and politics. In the Gulf, petro-monarchs have set aside their traditional tribal and other distrusts in the spirit of Sunni unity and purity against the Shia heretics of Bahrain. Entire cities in Yemen have been taken over by Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). In Syria, what started as a nonviolent uprising now looks to be heading toward a civil war with ugly sectarian undertones. And in North Africa, Islamist parties have won by dizzying margins in every election from Cairo to Casablanca.

So it was with no small satisfaction that I surveyed the crowd at the Lebanese Laïque Pride Secular March Towards Citizenship in central Beirut on Sunday. For the third year in a row, the country’s secular community took to the streets to call for an end to the sectarian order and the implementation of a number of draft laws against things like censorship and domestic violence. To the bemusement and occasional encouragement of bystanders, some 1,500 students, professionals, activists and even the odd celebrity marched for three hours carrying banners like “Civil marriage not civil war” and variously chanting “What’s your sect? None of your business!”; “Revolution!”; and “The people want a secular state”.

As well they might, for Lebanon is a country where being born into the wrong religion means you can’t become president. Nor can you become prime minister, or speaker of the parliament, and so on down the cabinet, every seat of which is constitutionally reserved for a member of one faith or another. Civil service, military and security positions, too, are rationed along communal lines. Not even university faculty appointments are suffered to upset the sanctity of the sectarian calculus.

Similarly, citizenship is officially defined by faith, so that marital, inheritance and other such disputes are settled not by lawyers but theologians. What does that mean in practice? Well, for starters, that a Muslim man is fully within his rights to beat his wife, thanks to Sura 4:34 of the Qur’an, which, after laying down that “Men are in charge of women”, instructs husbands to “strike” wayward spouses. This jewel of 7th century Bedouin culture is the law of the land in 21st century Lebanon. In 2011, the Sunni Grand Mufti, Muhammad Qabbani, actually rejected a draft law against domestic violence on the grounds that “it harms the Muslim woman and denies her of the rights granted [to her]”. But the humiliation doesn’t end there: that same husband may also rape his wife, since the learned sheikhs decline to recognize the concept of marital rape in the first place. “There’s nothing called rape between a husband and wife”, as the al-Jamaa al-Islamiyah [Islamic Group] MP Imad Hout eloquently put it last December. “It’s called forcing someone violently to have intercourse.”

What else? Those born outside the eighteen recognized sects – such as the 4,000-odd Jehovah’s Witnesses – are effectively disowned by the state, unable to get married and denied various other basic entitlements. While atheism isn’t illegal – Article 9 of the constitution guaranteeing “absolute freedom of conscience” on the God question – every Lebanese is nevertheless branded from birth, on official identity documents*, by his father’s sect, so that an atheist born of a Christian is forbidden from marrying an atheist born of a Muslim. (Nearby Cyprus, as a result, does a lucrative trade in civil marriage tourism.)

To the outsider, this might all seem fairly straightforward to reform with some basic legislation. Alas, there are immense obstacles to this, many of them spawned and cultivated by the system itself. For one, the clergy has a financial interest in the status quo. To take just a small example, every Christian who marries is obliged to pay a fee, or ‘donation’, to their local parish. This tax (as it ought to be called), which can run into the thousands of dollars, is required irrespective of where the ceremony actually takes place. And it is, of course, distinct from the substantial extra raked in for the hiring of the premises and priest, or priests. Thus do the Lord’s terrestrial deputies succeed in turning even an occasion of love into yet another sordid extortion racket.

Moreover, and speaking of which, politicians have created a viciously destructive cycle in the phenomenon of patronage. Without exception, every major party invests its funds in the development of its ‘own’ religious community, whether it’s Hizbullah for the Shia (bankrolled by Iran); the Future Movement for the Sunnis (bankrolled by Saudi Arabia); the PSP for the Druze (bankrolled by the Jumblatt family wealth); or any of the Christian parties (bankrolled by various domestic and foreign donors). Nor is it limited to philanthropy – a tantalising array of string-pulling services are offered the loyal co-religionist, from legal assistance to healthcare to circumventing commercial red tape to simply getting a better number plate for the Merc. This of course sees to it that the state is kept weak – for what politician would choose to work for legitimacy so long as it can be bought instead? And what voter, without a viable state alternative, will opt for anyone who doesn’t put their interests first?

Kept permanently supine by these twin jackboots of religious and political authority, Lebanon’s secularists also face the task of winning over the country’s liberals, many of whom are unconvinced of the merits of scrapping the existing system altogether. Michael Young, the Lebanese-American columnist and author of The Ghosts of Martyrs Square: An Eyewitness Account of Lebanon’s Life Struggle, even partially defends the present arrangement, writing in the book that, “What makes Lebanon relatively free in an unfree Middle East is that the country’s sectarian system, its faults notwithstanding, has ensured that the society’s parts are stronger than the state; and where the state is weak, individuals are usually freer to function.”

I asked Young last week to elaborate on his position, which he did as follows [Disclosure: He is a regular contributor to my employer, NOW Lebanon]: “I would love to see, between now and tomorrow morning, a completely civil and secular order in Lebanon, but the reality is that we are not in London or New York. This is a society whose social and political development since around the 19th century has been based on confessional power sharing. So it’s unrealistic to say we will simply dump this sociological reality and go for a secular system. Change has to come gradually, from within, and you have to think in terms of wedges. Civil marriage, for example. From these we can eventually move on to secularising parliament, as stipulated by Ta’if [the revamped constitution that ended the civil war in 1989], in the context of a national dialogue on deconfessionalisation. But I’m not a big optimist that any of this will happen soon. Unfortunately, sectarianism has really entered the consciousness of many Lebanese, and it’s almost a default part of thinking in the country.”

Whether or not one agrees on the details, Young is surely right that secularism must be accepted socially before it can be sustained politically. The startling electoral successes of Islamists in countries as developed as Turkey, and now Tunisia, attest to that. What’s so disheartening in the case of Lebanon is that it didn’t by any means have to turn out this way. For at that very moment Young mentioned in the 19th century, when the Ottomans were beginning to institutionalise sectarianism by partitioning Mount Lebanon into two distinct Maronite and Druze qa’imaqamat, or administrative districts, something very different was taking place simultaneously. From Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq, the lexicographer, novelist, founder of Arab socialism (al-ishtirakiyya) and pioneering modernizer of the Arabic language; to Ibrahim al-Yaziji, the poet, scholar of grammar, music, medicine, art and astronomy, and creator of the first Arabic typewriter font; to Butrus al-Bustani, the polymath known as al-mu’allim (the master) with whose famous aphorism I began this article; the Lebanese were playing a central role in an extraordinary intellectual and cultural spring that was flourishing across the entire Levant.

It’s sometimes argued – usually by theocrats – that secularism is merely the latest guise of imperialism; yet another round in the White Man’s perennial quest to subdue the Orient. This is an argument that can only be made from the densest ignorance of Lebanese history, for, as the above men showed, there certainly need be nothing ‘Western’ about the values of the Enlightenment. My favourite example of the unprecedented spirit of resistance to piety and irrationality in the air at the time is the 1882 ‘Lewis Affair’, in which students at the Syrian Protestant College (as the American University of Beirut was then known) boycotted classes and even dropped out in protest at the firing of a professor for expressing Darwinist leanings. Orientalism, you say? Tell it to the dozens of freethinking young Arabs who were prepared to sacrifice their college degrees to defend reason and science from the ossified superstitions of American Christian fundamentalists.

Indeed, in many ways that was the whole point. Bustani and his peers were men of tremendously diverse interests and backgrounds – both Christians and Muslims among them – but they were united by two passions above all: secularism and Arab nationalism. Crucially, they understood the subversive potential of the former, and its indispensability for the latter, so that, so far from being an appeasement of their colonial masters, they saw secularism as their greatest hope of shaking them off. Simply put, for them, secularism and independence were one and the same struggle. Who can look at today’s Lebanon, beholden to the dictates of regional allegiances cultivated on purely sectarian grounds, and disagree?

To get an idea of how far we’ve declined since then, consider that the name given to the period by Arab historians is al-nahda, or ‘the awakening’. If that sounds familiar, it might be because it’s also the name of the new ruling party in Tunisia – a party that in just a few months has carried out what commentator Hussein Ibish has described as “severe attacks on religious dissidents”, including the jailing of bloggers and television producers for blasphemy. To crush your country’s irreligious community is one thing, but to do it in the name of secular emancipation takes a very special kind of contempt.

Yet nobody complains at this despicable insult to a noble chapter of Arab history. If the region’s secularists, therefore, are to indeed eradicate sectarianism from the consciousness of their peoples, there are surely worse ways to begin than by reclaiming the memory of their own intellectual – and yes, if you like, spiritual – forefathers, who appreciated so keenly so many years ago that secularism and liberation and dignity were not only mutually compatible, but in fact equivalent expressions of the same common goal.

* Correction: I initially had said that religion was included on passports. This is not true.