An Abstract
All too frequently, students of democracy and democratization
view the politics they analyze exclusively through the prism of constitutions,
elections, and political actors. In the case of the Middle East, this involves worn out questions of
religious fundamentalism, neo-colonialism, entrenched autocracy, the politics
of oil and Israel, etc. While all of these are indeed relevant to understanding the
perseverance of authoritarian political structures, it is equally crucial to
understand the dynamics of culture, and the ways in which forms of cultural
expression are developing, and are channeled and managed. In
his recent
analysis
of the region, Hicham Ben Abdallah points out that, while legal and political
authorities certainly define the contours of what is permissible or not, it is
the shared system of collective beliefs which in turn shapes the law and
politics, and it is in the realm of culture that these shared beliefs are
produced and consumed. The wearing of veil, for example, is not mandated
by any legislation outside of Saudi Arabia and Iran, and yet it a growing
practice throughout the region, part of an increasingly powerful salafist ideological
norm that is at least as powerful as any law.
Contrary to the hastily-borrowed western-paradigm of an
inexorable development of secularism leading to an inevitable development of
democracy, Ben
Abdallah
demonstrates the proliferation of cultural practices in which result societies,
and individuals, learn to live in a complex mix of parallel and conflicting
ideological tendencies -- with the increasing Islamicization of everyday
ideology developing alongside the proliferation of de-facto secular forms of
cultural production, even as both negotiate for breathing room under the aegis
of an authoritarian state.
He finds any prospects for democratization complicated by parallel
tacit alliances. On the one hand, a modus vivendi between the state and
fundamentalists, in which the latter is permitted to Islamicize society, and is
sometimes allowed a carefully-delimited participation in state structures,
under the condition they restrain from attempting radically to reform the
state. On the other hand intellectuals and artists refrain from frontal
assaults on autocratic state structures, subtly limiting their militancy to
non-controversial causes, while seeking the state's protection from extremism;
their aim is to maintain some protected space of quasi-secular liberalism in
the present, which they hope portends the promise of democracy to come.
For its part, the state is learning how to manage and take
advantage of a segmented cultural scene by posing as the restraining force
against extreme enforcement of the salafist norm, and by channeling forms of
modernist cultural expression into established systems of institutional
and patronage rewards (for "high" culture) and into a commercialized
process of "festivalization" (for popular culture) that ends up as a
celebration of an abstract, de politicized "Arab" identity.
Ben Abdallah refers us to the deep history of Islam, which protected
and developed divergent cultural and intellectual influences as the patrimony
of mankind. He suggests a new paradigm of cultural and intellectual
discourse, inspired by this history while also understanding the necessity for
political democratization and cultural
modernism. We must, he argues, be unafraid to face the challenges in the
tension between the growing influence of a salafist norm and the widespread
embrace of new, implicitly secular, cultural practices throughout the Arab
world.
Version in English at Le Monde Diplomatique, "The Arab World's Cultural Challenge"
