The Gertrude Bell Jar

New Iraq Poll

From normblog: A new opinion poll showing apparently stronger support for secular democracy in general but weaker support for gender equality in particular than the poll I quoted earlier. Goes to show how much it matters which questions you’re asking, probably. And also, how much cultural attitudes towards women don’t map as completely to preferences about the role of religion in the state as you might think (see the link to the charts showing attitudes towards gender issues broken down by political preference on the page describing the new poll there). Secularists certainly rank lower than Islamic government supporters in opposing gender mixing in universities, for example, but 40-48% is still pretty high.

Correction!

Further to my earlier post on the Iraqi Constitution: Actually, Article 44 (“All individuals have the right to enjoy the rights stated in international human rights agreements and treaties endorsed by Iraq that don't run contrary to the principles and rules of this constitution”) was elimated in the final draft after all. For some reason I had thought that the only major change to the proposed Constitution was in the rule about how it could be amended, so I was working from my printout of the draft published in August in composing this entry. The full text of the draft that was actually voted on October 15th is here (What now appears as Article 44 is just the provision that was previously Article 45.) Looking over the updated draft, I don’t think anything else I highlighted has been changed.

Amnesty International’s statement deploring the change is here. (Actually, this is how the change came to my attention; I was looking something else up on their site). Their assessment is basically correct, I think. It wasn’t strongly worded enough in the original in my opinion, but obviously it was strong enough to be threatening to fundies; the deletion is a real loss.

Catching up on the Constitution

Normblog has a nice round-up of comments from Iraqi voters and bloggers, and a pretty spot-on analysis of the meaning of the vote on the Constitution (by Jeff Weintraub). Austin Bay has an interesting collection of reactions and analysis as well.

Longish Thoughts On the Iraqi Constitution

[I started this awhile ago and just got around to finishing it today. I haven't checked to see if we have a count yet from the voting yesterday. It would be pretty funny if it turned out I spilt this much verbiage on a non-Constitution, wouldn't it? Although as I understand it, the parts I'm writing about aren't really the main issues for those who oppose passage so might not change much in the event of a revision.]

Bearing the cautionary tale of the Iranian Constitutional Revolution of 1906 firmly in mind, (wherein A. Iranians created a secular constitutional monarchy; B. Conservative clerics managed to insert the implementation of Shari’a canon law anyway; C. The Shari’a provision was ignored in practice; D. Iranian women were screwed anyway, since members of parliament were still the same sexist bastards the day after the Revolution as they were the day before), here are my thoughts about what the draft Iraqi Constitution might mean for women. In other words, I am assuming for the purposes of this discussion that the draft Constitution both accurately reflects the collective intent of Iraqis and will actually be enforced more or less in good faith (as opposed to ignored by whatever group manages to seize power in the event, for example, that national security under rule of law deteriorates utterly or is never secured).

The full text of the proposed Constitution is here.

Article (1): The Republic of Iraq is an independent, sovereign nation, and the system of rule in it is a democratic, federal, representative (parliamentary) republic.

Article (2):

1st -- Islam is the official religion of the state and is a basic source of legislation:

(a) No law can be passed that contradicts the undisputed rules of Islam.

(b) No law can be passed that contradicts the principles of democracy.

(c) No law can be passed that contradicts the rights and basic freedoms outlined in this constitution.

2nd -- This constitution guarantees the Islamic identity of the majority of the Iraqi people and the full religious rights for all individuals and the freedom of creed and religious practices.

The Constitution follows the preferred form as outlined in the Rand document (outlining a method for acknowledging the cultural and legal historical influence of Islam while preventing theocracy in a democratizing Muslim state--written in reference to the Afghan constitution, see link in side bar), identifying Islam as "a" rather than "the" basic source of legislation.

So what does "undisputed rules of Islam" mean? Taken literally according to the meaning in English, it would seem to authorize review of legislation only on the most broadly agreed-upon principles of Islam. There are 4 major orthodox schools of jurisprudence in Sunni Islam, and 2 major and many other minor schools of Shia jurisprudence. Very few specific legal issues in shari’a law are "undiputed" between these various legal traditions. In earlier translations of the draft, the locution "essential verities of Islamic law" appeared instead of "undisputed rules." Does this reflect a change in the language in the original, or the vagaries of translation? "Essential verities" could be interpreted as closer to what role democratic reformers want Islam to play in the state, a sort of general legal and cultural background recognizing Islamic beliefs about justice and morality rather than the adoption of some literalist version of Islamic law based inflexibly on one school or the other. Both locutions, in other words, appear to be intended to limit the influence of specific historical legal iterations of shari’a and subject secular legisation to review only against the broadest principles enshrined in shari’a. However, without knowing anything at all about what the original Arabic actually is and might mean in Iraqi or Islamic legal history, I find it difficult to know for sure what the precise wording of Article 2 1a means. It may simply be a formulaic reference to Islamic canon law for example. I had hoped that someone with the appropriate linguistic and legal expertise would have elaborated on this in some public forum or other by now, but unfortunately I haven't come across any such so far.

I'm even more at sea with Article (2) 2nd: I have no idea what it means in practice to "guarantee the Islamic identity of the majority" while also guaranteeing free exercise of religion for non-Muslims. My best guess is that this is meant as a kind of reassurance or substitute for the habitual requirement in most Muslim states that the head of state be a Muslim, which is not stipulated in this constitution. The notion of Muslim headship as a basic requirement for the legitimacy of any person or body seeking to rule over Muslims dates from the earliest years of Islamic civilization (see my brief summary here). It is striking that it is omitted here, and this omission can I think be interpreted as a very positive move towards realizing the kind of nonsectarianism and tolerance for diversity that is spoken of so forcefully in the preamble. Perhaps guaranteeing the Islamic identity of the people is meant as a gesture towards swapping out the Islamic character of the people for that of ruler as the basis of legitimacy? This would be consonant with the articulation of the people (as opposed to God) as the source of authority in the state:

Article (5): The law is sovereign, the people are the source of authority and its legitimacy, which they exercise through direct, secret ballot and its constitutional institutions.

And now is as good a time as any to begin addressing the frequent claim that this Constitution authorizes an "Islamist state." The Islamist position is that God is the only source of legitimacy in a state or its law. Current and former Islamist states have therefore put clergy in charge of all three branches of the state, the judicial, legislative, and executive. (The Islamic Republic of Iran accomplished this end through the creation of the Revolutionary Council, a clerical body which of course has no equivalent in the proposed Iraqi Constitution, and which was given oversight and control of every function of government; I'm not sure that the Taleban ever bothered to commit the details of its rule to paper, but my impression is the structure of government, such as it was, was pretty much akin to rule by military junta). This Constitution includes clergy only in the judicial branch, and even there perhaps not to the exclusion of secular judges. Even if the worst happens, and the judiciary ends up populated exclusively with Sadr clones who willfully ignore all the international human rights norms written into this Constitution in favor of their extremist minority interpretation of Islam, they still would not be able to somehow create from the bench a free-ranging religious police, such as that which exists in Saudi Arabia and other Muslim states, to harass and terrify people in the streets and take up supposed wrongdoers for punishment, nor could they legislate new restrictions, such as not permitting women to leave their homes unaccompanied by a male guardian, as was the case in Afghanistan. A Sadrist judiciary may, in other words, very much want to create all kinds of new "crimes" and execute "apostate" women and religious minorities daily in the public square, but will be powerless to do so without a state apparatus set up to deliver victims to them. It is possible that Iraqis will one day fly in the face of all available public opinion polls about extremist Islam and vote for a legislature and executive that promises to play this bloody role, but in that case something will have gone very badly awry in the whole society. Talebanization cannot somehow arise from "loopholes" in this Constitution, there simply isn't one that would allow clergy under its own power to take over the whole government from the bench.

All of which is not to say that conservative Islamic judges alone can't do women significant harm if they choose; they certainly can. The conservative end of traditional Islam does not deserve to be tarred with the brush of the near-psychotic Taliban, but it disadvantages women plenty nonetheless. The unequal practices of polygamy, in which one man may marry up to four woman, and of divorce (in which a man may divorce his wife unilaterally through a simple oral formulation, whereas a woman must sue in court to divorce her husband, and only then on a few very narrowly defined bases) are comparatively rare but hang like the sword of Damocles over the heads of wives in traditional Muslim societies, and give men tremendous leverage in any marriage, the more so because Islamic law also automatically awards him sole custody of any children (once they reach a certain age, 7 and 9 respectively for boys and girls IIRC) following a divorce, and does not require alimony or any sort of post-divorce support for women of any kind, a significant economic threat in a part of world that does not have many jobs of any kind but particularly not for women, and in which a woman's family may refuse to take her in if her ex-husband is willing to allege that she was unfaithful to him or some such. From this position of power a husband may of course impose any number of restrictions on women in his household regardless of what any civil law says about where they may go and what they may do. There are other ways in which women are disadvantaged in Islamic law, such as a woman being entitled to inherit only a half-share of her parents' property as compared to her brothers, or counting as only half a witness in court, but the hard center of women's oppression in Muslim societies is family law. And some tribal customs regarding marriage, women, and family are even worse, which is why there was such a dispute about whether tribal courts would be formalized in this Constitution. I don't think that it does (reading it over now I'm not positive, see Article 43 2nd quoted below), but in any event, as I noted previously, the Constitution does promise to subject tribal customs to review for conformity with Constitutional principals regarding human rights.

And what are those principles that most affect women?

Article (14): Iraqis are equal before the law without discrimination because of sex, ethnicity, nationality, origin, colour, religion, sect, belief, opinion or social or economic status.

In a straightforward reading, this provision would seem to pre-empt the "half-a-witness" rule for women. It also would seem to be intended to identify women as fully included in all of the following rights as articulated, which include:

Article (15): Every individual has the right to life and security and freedom and cannot be deprived of these rights or have them restricted except in accordance to the law and based on a ruling by the appropriate judicial body. [My note: The inclusion of the words "male and female" should not be taken to mean that women are not included in any statements that do not include these words. The locution is very similar to that in the Koran, when Muhammad repetitively says: "O believers, men and women …" and then lists their duties and so forth. Muhammad adopted this formulation after a group of women asked him whether everything he addressed to believers was meant to apply to them, and Muhammad said that indeed it was, and used the "male and female" formulation thereafter for emphasis. It is included here probably for emphasis as well; and of course Article (14) explicitly underlines women's equal status under the law.]

Article (16): Equal opportunity is a right guaranteed to all Iraqis, and the state shall take the necessary steps to achieve this.

Article (17): 1st. Each person has the right to personal privacy as long as it does not violate the rights of others or general morality.

Article (20): Citizens, male and female, have the right to participate in public matters and enjoy political rights, including the right to vote and run as candidates.

Article (22): 1st. Work is a right for all Iraqis in a way that guarantees them a good life.

Article (29): 4th. Violence and abuse in the family, school and society shall be forbidden.

Article (30): 1st. The state guarantees social and health insurance, the basics for a free and honorable life for the individual and the family--especially children and women--and works to protect them from illiteracy, fear and poverty and provides them with housing and the means to rehabilitate and take care of them. This shall be regulated by law.

Article (34): 1st. Education is a main factor for the progress of society and it is a right guaranteed by the state. It is mandatory in the primary school and the state guarantees fighting illiteracy.
2nd. Free education is a right for Iraqis in all its stages.

Article (35): 3rd. Forced labour, slavery and the commerce in slaves is forbidden, as is the trading in women or children or the sex trade.

Article (43): 2nd. The state is keen to advance Iraqi tribes and clans and it cares about their affairs in accordance with religion, law and honourable human values in a way that contributes to a developing society and it forbids tribal customs that run contrary to human rights.

Article (44): All individuals have the right to enjoy the rights stated in international human rights agreements and treaties endorsed by Iraq that don't run contrary to the principles and rules of this constitution.

Article (45): Restricting or limiting any of the freedoms and liberties stated in this constitution may only happen by, or according to, law and as long as this restriction or limitation does not undermine the essence of the right or freedom.

As you can see, no position is taken in the Constitution on the crucial matter of family law, save the one provision which seems designed to explicitly invalidate the Islamic justification for wife-beating, (Article 29th, 4th, quoted above). And the guarantees about rights to education and work seem to address the assertions made by some that the inclusion of Islamic law in any capacity in the Constitution will prevent women from working without the permission of their husbands or girls going to school and so forth. We may derive some comfort from the references to international human rights treaties, since Iraq is a signatory to both the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and CEDAW, the latter especially since the rights of women within the family are articulated in some detail (though see my earlier caveat).

Many Muslims, including some clergy and Islamic law scholars, have sought and found amelioration for the unequal status of women in traditional Islam from within Islamic law and tradition (and indeed women's rights within marriage are better in some existing orthodox Islamic schools than others), and are working towards an understanding of Islam that will bring it into conformity with international human rights standards including those touching on the status of women. And some quite powerful clerics such as Sistani seem at least willing to bend Islamic practices to meet secular requirements, and to acknowledge the force of secular law and particularly international human rights standards in deliberating about how Muslims should live in "modernity."

The crucial question is, who will end up on the court? Because obviously an ultra-conservative like Sadr would be willing to overturn all human rights guarantees articulated in this Constitution and by reference to international rights treaties by finding them in violation of Article 2 a (despite the clear intention of Article 2 c, that the rights and freedoms outlined in the Constitution, should limit the authority of Islamic law) without batting an eye. (And apparently conservative clerics regard the rights for women implied in Article 44 threatening enough to their agenda to have attempted, unsuccessfully I am pleased to note, to have it excised). Even less radical clerics might jib at apparently privileging those treaties over Islamic law when it comes down to cases.

The constitution stipulates that members of the Iraqi version of the Supreme Court shall be experts in "Islamic law and law," but it leaves the matter of how they shall be chosen to enabling legislation. It would be a rare individual who could combine true expertise in both fields of law; will there be both secular and Islamic judges on this court? Will there be a certain number of seats allotted for each type, and which gets a majority? Or will each seat be filled separately so that you could possibly end up with a heavy clerical majority? Will judges be selected by the legislature, or the president, or what? Will there be a separate council appointed just for this purpose, which would leave the door open to a self-perpetuating aristocracy far removed from the society's beliefs about Islam (as is the case in Iran for example). And indeed any method of selection which does not somehow guarantee that the court will more or less reflect popular rather than extremist interpretations of Islam by allowing the electorate a pretty good amount of influence over selection will be vulnerable to producing an out-of-step court, possibly in a very conservative direction.

And in all truth while most ordinary Muslims do not believe that their religion does or should contradict human rights principles, the majority in the Arab world at least do not actually want full equality for women and so do not seem to interpret personal and family status in terms of human rights at all (see some pretty typical stats here), and to the extent that this Constitution creates a truly democratic body, this hesitation about women's rights will most likely be reflected in its institutions and law one way or another. Articles 17 and 43 2nd go a little way towards articulating an understanding of private, customary practices as public issues subject to process of law, but the existing cultural understanding of what is a public issue and what is a family issue may prevent them from being interpreted to women's advantage. It may be that many improvements in the status of women will have to be articulated explicitly in legislation rather than left for the courts to find in the Constitution.

Which leads us to the greatest weakness of the Constitution in my view (with respect to women at least): the provision which requires that any new piece of legislation be reviewed first by the judiciary before coming into force. This is in fact one of the methods that guarantees clerical domination via the Revolutionary Council of the legislature in Iran (the other is that body's ability to basically pick Parliamentary candidates) and could become a tremendous bar to all kinds of reform if it is allowed to be dominated by conservative clerics.

So in my view, the door is open both to oppression and to freedom for women in this Constitution; a little wider to the latter if it is taken at face value and in good faith by those who are tasked with enforcing it. But with so little information about how the courts will be constituted it is impossible to predict whether it will be interpreted so.

Hrm, I meant to talk about the relationship of honor killing to all of this too, but it's very complicated, and this is long enough already, and I'm tired … Soon, maybe.

Update: I came back to put in a missing link and correct some typos, so I might as well also point out since I forgot to mention it before that the provision guaranteeing 25% of Parliamentary seats to women is still in place in the proposed Constitution--there had been rumors that this would be eliminated.

Correction: Actually, Article 44 (“All individuals have the right to enjoy the rights stated in international human rights agreements and treaties endorsed by Iraq that don't run contrary to the principles and rules of this constitution”) was eliminated in the final draft after all. For some reason I had thought that the only major change to the proposed Constitution was in the rule about how it could be amended, so I was working from my printout of the draft published in August in composing this entry. The full text of the draft that was actually voted on October 15th is here (What now appears as Article 44 is just the provision that was previously Article 45.) Looking over the updated draft, I don’t think anything else I highlighted has been changed Amnesty International’s statement deploring the change is here. (Actually, this is how the change came to my attention; I was looking something else up on their site). Their assessment is basically correct, I think. It wasn’t strongly worded enough in the original in my opinion, but obviously it was strong enough to be threatening to fundies; the deletion is a real loss.

Happy Happy etc. cont.

I thought this was one of the more interesting comments of the day, from the Opinion Editor of the Daily Star in Beirut:

For most Lebanese, the killing of Hariri was very much perceived as an outrage against the normal order of things, because it targeted a rare Arab leader who left behind a constructive legacy and didn't pack a gun. Even recognizing the former prime minister's faults, one often-heard refrain somehow makes perfect sense, particularly against the backdrop of photographs of Hariri's burned body widely disseminated in the local press: "It was unnatural for such a man to die in such a sordid way." This suggested the extent to which the Lebanese today understand (as many should have, but not so long ago didn't) that autocracy is the triumph of the aberrant and the promotion of the inferior.

As the debate continues in the U.S. and elsewhere over Bush's merits and demerits, and over his dissembling, indeed lying, before dispatching forces to Iraq, the Lebanon example shows the advantages of selective interpretation. It matters little where Syria's Lebanese foes stand in disputations over Bush's record, nor did voters in Iraq much care either; both populations took what was relevant to them, accepted Bush's broad sound bites of democratization, and carried the idea on from there according to their parochial interests.

The whole article is worth a read.

Happy Happy, Joy Joy Joy

Wow, that was fast! M. and I were just talking last night about how we’ll know that the suddenly invigorated democratization trend in the Middle East is real and irreversible when the intelligentsia begin to argue that it was inevitable (as opposed to impossible, the conventional wisdom up to this point in time). And here, this very morning, is a NYT Times editorial laying the ground work already, by concluding: "The wonder is less that a new political restlessness is finally visible, but that it took so long to break through the ice."* The news article in the Chicago Tribune this morning deployed the alternate strategy of attributing all apparent progress primarily to the death of Arafat, with the Bush Doctrine trailing distantly as a secondary influence.

OH YEAH BABY! It’s all good.

It may all yet come to nothing, but this could turn out to be the point at which it was all over but the shouting, too. M. and I were also talking about how truly mysterious this sort of thing can be. We are both Cold War babies and grew up with the assumption that the Soviet Union would always exist, and that there would always be a Cold War, unless somebody screwed up and destroyed the planet and everything on it. And then you’re watching on tv about crowds gathering outside public buildings in Moscow, and Yeltsin addressing one of them over a bullhorn, and waiting for the tanks to roll in as they had in Prague. But they don’t come, and don’t come, and, at some undefinable moment, POOF, no more Soviet Union. I still don’t understand how that happened, exactly, how consensual reality just suddenly changed like that, in a way that utterly deprived the existing government of any power; how only consensual reality could have been holding all of that up in the first place, and why it had failed now and not in 1968. But a genuine anti-government protest in a country occupied by Syria that not only 1) occurs at all, 2) has thousands of participants, and 3) results in an actual change rather than a massacre should have been completely impossible, but somehow wasn’t. That may very well be the paradigm shift, right there.

Belgravia Dispatch has an email from a guy who was circulating and talking to the protesters in Beirut last Friday, btw. (And what looks like a nice round-up of responses to these developments in subsequent entries, but I haven’t read through it yet.)

*I kid, but the NYT editorial is actually pretty good, and summarizes all of the significant events thus far. I noticed that the Michael Jackson trial was the lead story on CNN.com all day yesterday, and a spectacular local murder trumped the story in the Trib this morning, so there’s a possibility that not everyone is really getting how astonishing the last few days have really been.

Update: Woot! M. found another one, employing a slightly different approach. All hail the paradigm shift!

Update 2: M. adds: Today's "Worldview" on NPR is must-listening for a cavalcade of people falling over themselves not to give more credit to the Bush administration or the Iraq election than absolutely necessary. (As the interviewer asked each subject whether American foreign policy was responsible for what was happening, I was reminded of Reverend Lovejoy's "...ooooh short answer yes with an if, long answer no with a but...") They very much wanted to make sure that everyone understood that this didn't mean that people in Lebanon/Egypt/the occupied territories liked Americans or George Bush. (Because otherwise, you know, the average NPR listener would naturally assume that we're beloved by all.) Highlights include the Lebanese newspaper editor whose comments amounted to "all right, maybe-- maybe-- things were sped up a little by events in Iraq and the presence of an American army across the border from Syria, but is it really important who might or might not be able to take credit?" and the Egyptian analyst (IIRC, an Egyptian professor at an American university) who was saying "well, elections will be good if people wind up voting on the issues, but if it all becomes a marketing campaign like elections here in the US then that's not really much of an improvement." Because, after all, there's no difference between an autocratic tyranny and a liberal democracy, right? And could you help me move these goalposts a little further that way? I smiled all the way to work-- if this is the level of quibbling from NPR's experts, then maybe we really are winning.

But perhaps I'm not being fair in my paraphrases-- memory and interpretation are tricky things. The show should be up on "Worldview's" site shortly. (It'll be the March 1 show) Judge for yourself.

Reality One Paging Reality Two, Please

I'm currently reading New Political Religions, or an Analysis of Modern Terrorism by Barry Cooper, a political philosopher by trade who is looking at a variety of 20th Century violent religio-political cults through the lens of a framework developed primarily by Eric Voegelin and Hannah Arendt to describe the totalitarian impulse. I think it would be of great interest to anyone who found Lee Harris' essay on fantasy ideology persuasive, because it provides a more precise and consistent conceptual framework for what the true believer is actually doing emotionally and intellectually. It also avoids the main weakness of Harris' argument, the assumption that the political goals of such actors are necessarily fantastic.

Put very crudely, Cooper theorizes movements like Islamism as an effect of a spiritual disorder he calls pneumopathology, a term he borrows from Voegelin. The essence of the disorder is a conscious act of "honest dishonesty," an adoption of a "second reality" independent of commonsense reality (although the second reality is often adopted in response to real grievances). Once the second reality is adopted, the imaginator finds the conflict between commonsense reality and the second reality unbearable; instead of containing this conflict within himself, the imaginator will seek to externalize the second reality, making the conflict the world's problem instead of his own. This sounds kind of airy and Freudian or whatever, but will make immediate sense to anyone who's ever had an "Hello, earth to Joshua/Heather/whoever" moment when talking to a member of, say, the Spartacist Youth League. (My vivid memory of the almost irresistible urge to snap my fingers in front of their eyes to awaken them from what seemed like a hypnotized daze is part of why, I think, I feel that I already kind of know people like al-Zarqawi, and why it makes such sense to me that Islamist terrorist tend to hail from the educated upper crust of their own societies, rather than being the superstitious medieval peasants that the idea of religious fanaticism suggests in the modern West.)

I'm not sure I completely understand the more theoretical part of Cooper's justification for regarding this as an essentially spiritual disorder, but what I do get is the way he explains that fully adopting a second reality involves the destruction of the imaginator's moral self, which was bound by the precepts and limitations of commonsense reality. The act of replacement of commonsense with second reality grants permission to actualize that second reality; methods of attempting to do so are understood as predictions rather statements of intention. For example, Stalin says that the Kulaks are a dying class. In commonsense reality, this means that he is about to have them all killed. But to Stalin this is merely a prediction about the future, which was already true when he made the initial statement. In the same vein, the Aum Shinrikyo cult turned the Buddhist concept of pao, which refers to a course of spiritual reflection undertaken near death, on its head by making it an active verb: they were pao-ing "enemies" of the cult, not murdering them. To cult members, their prediction that the time for the entire world to be paoed had come was being partially fulfilled by their act of planting nerve gas on Tokyo subways, whereas in commonsense reality, they had merely decided they wanted to kill everyone outside the cult, and proceeded to attempt to do so. In this way the essential connection between intention and action is lost, and is instead ascribed to the workings of a fictional reality; commonsense morality is abandoned absolutely.

What Harris' articulation of this phenomenon lacks is Cooper's recognition that sometimes commonsense reality is actually altered by imaginative religious and political movements. Aum Shinrikyo failed to murder the world, but Stalin did do a pretty good job on the Kulaks. Christopher Browning's Ordinary Men, about Nazi death squads populated by middle-aged non-ideological family men, presents a good account, I think, of how non-cult members will naturally adapt to a consensus reality created by cult members, if the cultists manage to accede to political power and impose it upon everyone. Among the examples of "second reality" movements cited by Cooper--Aum Shinrikyo, bolshevism, Nazism, the Witch Craze in Europe, Christian Identity, Heaven's Gate, Islamism, the revolutionary in general as a type, etc.--are of course many that succeeded in actually altering political reality for long periods of time; arguably in the cases of Nazism and bolshevism the alteration may have been permanent in the absence of powerful external enemies.

Cooper has avoided mentioning the American Revolution so far, but it is interesting to look at it through this framework. The central assertion of the Declaration of Independence amounted to standing the then-governing assumption about the relationship between divine and political authority on its head; the Divine Right of Kings was replaced by God's endowment instead of every man with inalienable political power. Note that we date the birth of the USA from this simple assertion of a new reality; the actual expulsion of the King's authority through the War of Independence and concretization of the new order in the Constitution followed much later. We have been living in this reality for so long that it is as if the previous one never existed; we are nearly incapable of conceptualizing the pre-Revolutionary mindset that accepted monarchy as the natural and divine order of things. The tendency of Westerners today to make movies about the history of Europe like King Arthur and Braveheart that project our current understanding of justice infinitely backwards is I think a consequence of that. In these types of movies, good men and true were always rebelling against authority in the name of "freedom," because that is what good people who have accessed the "real" nature of things always do (in a sense, they can't actually be good unless they are good within our reality). But of course this is revisionist nonsense.

The revolution that replaces existing reality with one that turns out to be actually better on a practical and moral level is a rare bird indeed, as 200 subsequent years of revolutions worldwide have clearly demonstrated. But how do you know your revolution isn't just such a good revolution that will be blessed by history? Apparently, you don't.

I'm skipping over Cooper's discussion of the tendency of religious "second-reality" movements in particular to assume an increasingly annihilatory character over time, because I'm just tucking into the part where he's going to talk about Islamism in particular (and, evidently, some specifics about the Abrahamic tradition in general, beginning with the implications of the Israelites' understanding of their covenant with God as history, which I imagine will connect up with the similar Islamic sense of history in some interesting ways.)

Update:
A reader objected that the idea of the divine right of kings was already pretty much dead by the time of the American Revolution.

C. replied: Predictably, it's even more complex than that. The Divine Right of Kings, formally speaking, is a rather late development of the theory of monarchy, going along with the appearance of absolutism and monarchies that were a great deal more powerful -- both in theory and in practice -- than the prior medieval types. Opposition to it crops up in odd places, like the Spanish political theorist (I'm blanking on the name) who published a justification of tyrannicide (and dedicated it to the newly crowned king, which I believe was Philip II's successor).

This should not denigrate the accomplishment of the Founders. The idea of consciously designing a system of government was intellectually "in the air" by this time, but I'm not sure that it was expected to be brought into the real world any more than the various utopias which had been proposed going back to the Renaissance. And it certainly does seem to be true that it's hard for Americans to grasp other political mentalities, now that ours is so firmly established.

One could also look for examples of a revolutionary "replacement of reality" in religious history: the rise of Christianity for sure; possibly the Protestant Reformation.

I replied: The idea of consciously designing a system of government was intellectually "in the air" by this time, but I'm not sure that it was expected to be brought into the real world any more than the various utopias which had been proposed going back to the Renaissance.

And indeed I did not mean to suggest that there was anything particularly sudden about the Declaration; obviously it was the outgrowth of a particular line of thought that had been developing for some time. I was noticing instead the fact that real-world actualization of it followed rather than preceded the assertion of its reality in the real world (We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. --That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, etc. etc.) in precisely the same fashion Cooper finds in the methodology of many other imaginitive political and religious movements.

C. added: ...though of course there are obvious differences between the American Revolution and the Rise of Christianity on the one hand, and Stalin and Aum Shinrikyo on the other, even apart from the level of success. For starters, that business about abandoning commonsense morality and confounding predictions of the future with statements of intent has no obvious parallels.

And: I'll have to look up Cooper: it's a promising line of analysis. I've never read anything by Voegelin, but the strand he pulls out of Arendt is certainly present in The Origins of Totalitarianism (the bit about Stalin and the "dying" kulaks is taken directly) and seems like it might well apply. Though she interpreted the totalitarian impulse as a response to specifically modern conditions, I'm not sure that's crucial to her argument.

(If the phrasing is too much in terms of "new realities" and "altering reality" I will have to wince a lot in the process of mental translation. Oh well.)

I replied: Though she interpreted the totalitarian impulse as a response to specifically modern conditions,

As it happens, it seems likely to me that Islamism is a response to modern conditions, most specifically the particularly totalitarian and repressive character of movements that managed to acquire and hold on to power in the Middle East. There are antecedents to the basic theology of Islamism going back to the very beginning of Islam--indeed it understands itself as reproducing the original project of Muhammad in the modern era. But as Cooper points out, the most logical and literalist methodology suggested by the Koran for reenacting the early years of Islamic history would be a new hijra, and in fact early versions of Islamist movements did center on withdrawing from society to perfect a "pure" Islam in a committed community, often literally in the desert. But it is impossible to have a wholly separate self-governing society within a totalitarian state, or in any version of a modern nation-state, really, and these communities were uniformly attacked and repressed wherever they arose. Time to cut straight from hijra to jihad!

Of course, there are many other ways of looking at this; objectively the hijra movement was short-lived and pretty spotty, and would have been viewed suspiciously by any type of formal government; the original hijra occurred within the context of warring tribes each controlling their own patch, so all Muhammad had to do was find a host tribe. But it does seem that the justification for jihad, now, rests heavily on the sense of constant and pervasive attack on Islamists by the state, which objectively is very much the case.

Democracy Update

Some interesting reports on the Iraqi National Council elections (to form an interim National Council until general elections projected for January 2005) from Zeyad (who incidentally is pretty sanguine about both Sistani and stability in the Hawza) and Ali.

Why was it important for the National Council elections not to fail? UN Envoy Lakhdar Brahimi had wanted to delay them until all groups (mostly Islamist groups and the Sadrists, although SCIRI is in), had agreed to participate instead of boycotting them, in order to enhance the perceived legitimacy of the interim National Council. And indeed it doesn't sound like anybody's happy with the number of Coalition-approved "list" members who made it onto the council. However it may have been better to have gone forward than not, if the outcome of Brahimi’s similar approach in Afghanistan is any guide. (Very long quote behind the cut since the Atlantic has suddenly gone entirely subscriber only, the chumpskies. I should point out that the author of this article, Laura Secor (writing probably in June), was arguing that Afghanistan had been an important learning experience for Brahimi and he would naturally be doing much better in Iraq):

Brahimi—whose official title is special adviser to the Secretary-General on the political situation in Iraq—is an odd match for the Bush Administration's Wilsonian project in Iraq. He does not see it as his business to engineer new democracies, or to impose outside visions on reluctant societies. On the contrary, he is a tough-minded realist who respects and understands power; his approach in similarly vexed situations has been to figure out which players are in charge on the ground and how to meet their minimum requirements. In Afghanistan, for instance, where he successfully negotiated a peace among competing armed factions after the U.S. invasion in 2001, Brahimi earned the enmity of human-rights advocates by allowing murderous warlords not merely to escape justice but to become officials of the new government. Assuring peace and stability, Brahimi explained, was a higher priority than realizing justice—and the surest way to restore peace quickly was to make the warlords stakeholders in the new government.

At the Afghan negotiations he chaired in Bonn, beginning in November of 2001, Brahimi worked out the following arrangement: an interim government would convene an emergency loya jirga seven months later, in order to select the government that would lead Afghanistan for two years after that. The loya jirga, organized by a commission of Afghans under UN supervision, has proved to be one of the most controversial undertakings of the seventy-year-old Brahimi's long career. Nader Nadery, an Afghan who worked as a human-rights activist during the Taliban era, served on the commission. He recalls that the Afghans drew up stringent guidelines excluding anyone who was known to be a human-rights violator from the loya jirga. "But Mr. Brahimi and the interim government were insisting that we invite the warlords," Nadery recalls. "He was pushing the commission to violate its own rules and procedures."

Whether the warlords were brought in on Brahimi's initiative or the Pentagon's is disputed. But Brahimi defended the idea in conversations at the time and in interviews afterward. He explained to the Afghans that if the warlords were not invited, they wouldn't accept the decisions of the loya jirga. He pointed out that the warlords, who had been armed and supported by the United States in the war against the Taliban, already controlled much of Afghanistan's territory; they could not be wished away. Four months later, in an interview conducted by the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School, Brahimi said that although civil leaders claimed to be more representative of the Afghan people than the warlords were, they had no particular basis for asserting this. "Yeah, they are nice people; they want the good of their country; but to say that they are representative—how?" he asked. "You can't compare whether the others are more representative or not."

In the event, the warlords not only attended the loya jirga but occupied front-row seats and left the proceedings in possession of important government ministries. It was a turning point for the new Afghanistan and, Brahimi's critics say, a tantalizing opportunity wasted. Although few experts believe the warlords could have been excluded from the political process, most of those with whom I spoke thought that Brahimi, the United States, and the United Nations actually strengthened the warlords at a moment when they could have been weakened. Vikram Parekh, a Kabul-based researcher for the nonprofit International Crisis Group, faults Brahimi for taking too little input from his own more experienced staff members, who might have told him that some of the warlords were "paper tigers," far from invincible. Nader Nadery recalls attending the pre-loya jirga election in Mazar-e-Sharif, where a handful of regional delegates were to be elected by secret ballot from among caucuses of about sixty local notables. One of the warlords, the notoriously brutal and much feared General Abdul Rashid Dostum, stood as a candidate. For the first time his lock on power was not assured. "When they were counting votes, I saw that his hands were shaking," Nadery told me. "He was very disturbed. He was concerned if he failed, if he lost, what will happen." He didn't lose—a fact Nadery attributes to the conspicuous presence of Dostum's thugs; but even more disappointing to his opponents was the legitimacy conferred on people like Dostum by an international community that saw them not as fading figures from Afghanistan's ugly past but as crucial interlocutors in determining its future. "General Dostum left the loya jirga tent a different person," Nadery claims. "A few days ago his hands were shaking. Now he left the tent the same person he was in 1992. He'd been honored by the international community and the government."

The trouble with Brahimi's approach was that stability and justice were never actually separable. Unsurprisingly, the warlords run their ministries as patronage rackets. Their political and economic entrenchment in power, along with their failure to disarm, has made it very hard for the central government to impose the rule of law more broadly on the country. Though overshadowed by the dramatic news of insurgency and prisoner abuse in Iraq, the situation in Afghanistan has been steadily deteriorating.

Indeed, toward the end of his tenure as head of the UN mission in Afghanistan, Brahimi seems to have realized that he could not guarantee long-term security there if key ministers in the Afghan government were criminals beyond the reach of the law. "As time wore on in his last year," one diplomatic source told me, "he realized that the continued role of the warlords would bring disaster to Afghanistan. He began to care much more about human rights. It was an evolution in his thinking. He began to realize that unless one had some kind of constitution and disarmament and rule of law, the process would not end up well." Shortly before he left Afghanistan, in January of this year, Brahimi delivered a rousing speech to this effect at the constitutional loya jirga.

I honestly don’t know what the ideal approach would be, but it’s clear that Shia groups are extremely suspicious of the UN approach, perhaps because of, rather than in spite of, the support it seems to enjoy with the Sunni Arab establishment.

Engagement or Coercion/Katerina Dalacoura

Engagement or Coercion: Weighing Western Human Rights Policies Towards Turkey, Iran and Egypt by Katerina Dalacoura.

(I've reviewed her previous book Islam, Liberalism and Human Rights here). This is a review of various policies adopted by the U.S., the European Union, various nations of Western Europe and Canada and an assortment of NGO's in an effort to promote human rights in the Middle East throughout the 1990's. Dalacoura meticulously documents every peaceful approach tried with respect to the nations mentioned in the title, the full suite of diplomatic tools ranging from verbal pressure to economic punishments, and the failure of each one (unless one counts cosmetic and short-lived changes as success, which she doesn't). So what does Dalacoura think of the Iraq War, you are dying to ask?

If the conclusion of this study, that Western human rights policies have had a limited and ambiguous impact in the Middle East, is correct, the implication, ironically, is that Iraq will democratize only if it is fully taken over and reconstructed by the occupying powers. But if the Iraqi people eventually come to assume responsibility for their affairs, as Japan and Germany did after the Second World War, then the flourishing of democracy and liberal institutions in Iraq is a possibility.

A similar argument was made by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in October 2002: "One of the lessons of more than a decade of democracy promotion around the world is that outsiders are usually marginal players. They become the central determinant of political change only if they are willing to intervene massively, impose a de facto protectorate, and stay for an indefinite, long term. No matter what happens in Iraq, such forceful intervention is unthinkable in most Middle East countries." It is indeed doubtful that the United States and the United Kingdom will be willing to commit the manpower and resources entailed by such an occupation of Iraq. A job left half-done and a quick exit, in the manner of Afghanistan after the US intervention of 2001-2, which left the Kabul government in partial control of the country, is a more likely scenario. This cannot but further discredit the West's commitment to human rights and democracy in the eyes of the people of the Middle East.

Of course that is a false characterization of the situation in Afghanistan. The US and its allies have not yet left Afghanistan; indeed that war isn't actually over yet, and there may be a bit more endgame to be played with respect to the warlords there once it is over. She may be right, she may be wrong; we'll all learn together soon enough I suppose.

More Details

I got an interesting news analysis in my mailbox today from IPO. I Googled around a bit for more information on Pachachi and found some comments to some blogs accusing him of being a Nazi sympathizer (a truism for secular pan-Arab nationalist leaders of Pachachi’s era, particularly in Iraq, which sided with anti-Britain Germany and the Axis during WWII; the Ba’ath Party, which took power in 1963 and whose government Pachachi served, was modelled ideologically on German National Socialism, though the Party itself is believed to have been initally bankrolled by the Soviet Union) and a supporter of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait (also true, I found). I thought this interview conducted by Amir Taheri during the Iraq War was interesting. He appears no longer to be an unreconstructed Arab nationalist, but he also appears to be campaigning pretty hard, no? It has not been difficult to know what the U.S. wanted to hear from possible Iraqi leaders then or now.

At the same time, though, he may be sincere. Some people really do become wiser as they get older, and Pachachi is in his 80’s. And the IPO’s contention that Iraq must have a Shia leader in the Presidency to prevent an explosion of Shia protest ignores the fact that a great deal of the violence in Sunni areas of Iraq is driven by insecurity about what a government that reflected a Shia majority might bring to the Sunni minority.

I don’t know what the ideal solution to the problem of having to pick one or the other for the Presidency would be. Maybe favor neither by appointing a Kurd? That would show them! And then what?