ISLAM, CONFLICT AND DEMOCRACY There is a very familiar cautionary response that one finds oneself constantly makingwhen one engages in discussions about Islam these days. This is the response of saying “There are many Islams!” In fact this has become something of a mantra and, given the strenuous simplifications one finds in the media and on the lips and memos of politicians as well as in continuing forms of ‘orientalist’ academic writing, expressions of such caution are thoroughly warranted But on the other hand, it should not become a conversation-stopper. And it should not be inconsistently deployed. There is no doubt that there are many Islams. That should be a banality. But if that is so, then equally, in that case, there are many Americas, and there are many Wests, too. And that does not stop many of us from making remarks abstracting from this manyness and diversity of the West and of America to nevertheless make roughly true generalizations about the West -such as, that there is a corporate driven foreign policy prevalent in the West, especially in the US which has had very destructive effects in countries with Muslim populations, that the US government has consistently supported Islamic militants when it suited their geo-political and economic interests, that it has supported Israeli occupation and brutalization of the Palestinian land and peoples, and so on. These are all things that I and many others insist on saying, even as we acknowledge that there are many Wests, many Americas, with diverse interests and commitments, etc. But then, if one is consistent, one should also refused to be inhibited from making efforts to understand Islam which abstract away from its diversity, and look for generalizations that are roughly plausible and that advance discussion and understanding. In a sense there could be no social explanation if we were not so prepared to abstract enough from the diversities of a social phenomenon to set up the explananda. I say all this not to be dismissive of those who caution us against the crass and messianic media pundits on Islam. The media’s discussion of Islam is indeed brazenly ignorant and brash, for the most part. I say it only to allow enough discussion to get off the ground, such that any cautions about ignoring the diversity of Islam should take the form of improving our analyses piecemeal when it is ignoring some diversity on this or that matter, rather than to wield the caution as a general mantra that preempts earnest discussion of Islam in the fear that one is always falling into some caricature familiar from what we read in the press and various popular writings. One sensible way for me to avoid the pitfall of ignoring the diversity of Islam, is to perhaps start by discussing the position of many Muslims in one specific part of the world, a part where I come from, India, and see what lessons one may extrapolate from there. On the face of it, it should be surprising to come to any important lessons from the case of India for our present obsession with Islam since India is a special case of containing a minority Muslim population, whereas recent obsessions with Islam. and seventies. but rather as the site of a certain mentality. All or most of the country’s voices were thus active within the party itself.and consensus-building in order to carry out its commitment to using the state as an instrument for social change to promote diverse interests. it will be my claim that the fact of their minority status in India is actually quite revealing for the more general lessons that I do want to try and draw. both organizational and financial. the party at the centre in charge of government allowed relative autonomy. My extended point will be that these two aspects of the notion of minority are in an unusual and illuminating dialectical relation with one another among Muslim populations all over the world. Indian society developed a great deal of hard won civil society that was secular. sixties and seventies did not determine political mobilization to anything like the extraordinary degree that it does now. However. though not far from the surface of Indian politics in the fifties. The term 'minority' marked a subject of study only after statistics began to influence the governance of societies as well as influence the methodology of the social sciences. merely) the victorious and most popular party in the field. I want to view it not in its numerative function. and broadly nationalist. or the Muslim majority countries like Pakistan and Afghanistan due to their obvious geopolitical location in the cold war struggles against the USSR. But in my first use of the concept of minority. non-sectarian. Thus democracy. During the fifties. it became metonymically a stand-in for the entire political system of the country. Let me begin by pointing out that it is quite wrong to think that the current situation of the position of Muslims in India and in general the widespread religious communalization of Indian politics. sixties. even before September 11. In this system. for its own detailed purposes of governance. and this gave the national party the task of coalition. became not merely one party among other parties in the political field. and then later return to its obvious arithmetical implications for politics. have tended to be with the overwhelmingly Muslim majority countries of the oil-producing region of the Middle East. The Indian National Congress Party which in the struggle for independence had unified all sorts of different interests and points of view. the question of religious communities. after independence. to its provincial wings. All the same. thanks to the umbrella nature of the Congress party. Like many other countries after decolonization. thus allowing voice to dissident elements. and has in the last fifteen or twenty years. growing out of the freedom movement but settling in quickly at institutional and professional and commercial sites throughout the country after freedom was won. And it succeeded in doing so despite a very long period of British rule which constantly exploited the traditional religious divisions in society between Muslim and Hindu that were constructed during colonialism. did not succumb to its own potential for becoming a cynical electoral calculus where vote-banks are the primary targets of . reflects a chronic condition ever since Indian Independence. not even (again. caste. and to a measurable degree building institutional. it was India’s answer to its own most urgent question of how to combine the modern institutions of democracy and a centralized state with the deep traditions and religious. and these together cemented a structure of traditional social. economic. that we can forget that these strands were not as prominent as they are now in an earlier period after decolonization. kuttab-madrassa education to the shariah and the sultanate. how these infrastructures of civil society which to a considerable extent had subdued the political prominence of the traditional divisions and religious elements. there were various institutions surrounding the practice of Islam. we are focusing so much on the traditional religious and sectarian strands these days. built up over years not just since Independence but from decades earlier during the entire struggle for independence. commercial. the leadership in the Congress Party decided that elections would have to be . I won’t pause to do so now in detail. psychological and ideological links. and no doubt there is a different story to tell in each of these countries where that occurred. leaving them no motivation or initiative to use the state for purposes of reform and social change. ranging from such things as the guilds. a structure which was also greatly loosened by similar nationalist forces. because there too the grip of the traditional elements was considerably loosened by a burgeoning civil society at various levels in a way that is best describable in terms that ideologies of the left would call a growing ‘national bourgeoisie’. be seen to apply to other countries about which questions regarding Islam are now prominent. To the extent that this process was successful. How these transformations in these nations then went on to suffer a setback. still in other countries with Muslim populations like Iraq. dervish orders. First.competing political parties and determine all their political exercises even when in power after elections. and professional structures reflecting these different interests. Though there are no analogues to the agency of a single party which emerged from a freedom movement. rather. in her neurotic efforts at total centralized control over all regions. a similar point holds. but I will say (simplifying a bit) that in India there were two factors emerging during the government of Indira Gandhi. Indira Gandhi manage to dismantle the Congress party’s remarkable organizational structures in the regions and the grassroots. which if we abstract from detailed differences in context. In Egypt again. that are primarily responsible for the setbacks. And second. I am saying all this because it seems to me a point. and sectarian diversities spread across the country. democracy became an exercise in pluralism trying to accommodate different interests within the electoral domination of one party. when it became clear that the shallow populism of slogans such as “Remove Poverty” were not working with the populace in the face of policies that were manifestly intended to benefit the elite. can at an appropriate level of generality. were then undermined in the last twenty years or so is a story well worth telling. There too. for instance. all this return of traditionalism in the form of revivalist Hindu forces came in the name of a nationalism. the eventual result of this trend was to work against the Congress. since the effect was to so increase the dubious charm of the BJP (a Hindu Revivalist party) which could more openly and consistently play this majoritarian game that it has unsurprisingly begun to roundly defeat the Congress in national and regional elections. while at the same time claiming not at the level of ideas but at the material level a thoroughly modern version of nationalism. let me mention something very interesting that courses through the diversity.the pogrom against the Sikhs in Delhi after the assassination of Indira Gandhi. On the other. and normative element tied to the ulema and characterized by a deferential gaze that goes beyond the local toward the Arab lands from where the classical doctrine originated. without any serious critical response from the centre. that glorifies the communal solidarities within Hinduism that were supposed to have existed in an imagined earlier golden period. also lined up in the contemporary rage against Islam.won on a different basis. at the level of ritual.) It is against this background that one can diagnose the condition of the psychology of Muslims as a minority in India today. for instance-. and the destruction of the mosque in Ayodhya with the ensuing riots all over the country. there is the scriptural and transcendental. This has of course deteriorated much more since then. And –like in Iraq. and a broad range of other quotidian practice. (Interesting to note here that the US never raised a single critical note against the fact that somewhere between 1000 and 2000 Muslims were killed in ten days in Gujarat. On the one hand. hostility against minorities such as Muslims and Sikhs. So. It tapped and encouraged Hindu sentiment in public life and increasingly allowed. where the Congress --because the first factor I mentioned-. There is an enormous regional. until it was landed with two hideous moments of climax -.had in any case lost its grassroots power of organization. ceremony. and as we witnessed not long ago. Muslim religious life in India has always been characterized by two tendencies which have been preserved in a delicate balance due to the tension between them. sectarian as well as credal diversity in Islam in India but instead of cataloguing it. pogroms against Muslims can occur now with the full support and encouragement of a regional government. there is a great deal of pragmatic and syncretic ("sufistic") retention of local features that are quite continuous with many aspects of Hindu life and cultural practice. This is hardly surprising since the Islamic faith itself arrived in India via travels through Persia and Turkey and Central Asia . demanding the world take one seriously because one is now in possession of a nuclear bomb with newly formed alliances with the United States and Israel. not long after September 11th. first under Indira and then under her son Rajiv Gandhi and his successor Narsimah Rao. And as it happened. even promoted. the party decided that its future lay in the most debased path to success in a democracy: majoritarianism. not just in the rural and poorer sections of society. it is open to perception as a minority which is descended from the Muslim conquerors who ruled for centuries over a predominantly Hindu people. and thus a good target for 'historical' revenge. for all their avowed pluralism and secularism. but which chose to stay. There is to begin with the relative poverty of Muslims in India ever since the more landed and educated Muslims. but even in such highly metropolitan cultural productions of Hindusthani music or the Hindi cinema of Bombay. which I was describing as common to the setbacks suffered in Iraq and Egypt and other nations as well. For those who stayed. so it must now adapt in accord with the culture of the Hindu nation it opted for. Apart from the repugnance of the very idea of ‘historical revenge’. even something like the idea of historical justice and reparations only makes conceptual sense if the offended people are currently in a highly disadvantaged condition and it can be shown that that condition is causally explainable by the fact of their historical subjugation. those fears have largely been realized. fearing loss of estate and discrimination in career opportunities in India. Perhaps something like that can be said about American Blacks today and other such communities but that one should be even tempted to say Indian Hindus are disadvantaged today by Muslim rule that ended two hundred and fifty years ago is . still to some extent resisting the narrowing doctrinal visions of Muslim (as well as Brahmanical Hindu) religious orthodoxy. There was also another major loss. Second. the loss of their language Urdu (indeed the language of many Hindus in north India as well) which was given away as an exclusive gift to Pakistan because the Indian leaders. especially in the last fifteen years or so. The tense balance created by this double movement --of form and root-. which might quite properly be regarded as the last. left for Pakistan during the partition. were unable to withstand the nationalistic pique of Hindu ideologues in their own Congress party who put great pressure to drop Urdu altogether as a medium of instruction in the national and regional school curricula. so the ultimate and formal. It is precisely this balance which is increasingly made precarious by developments over the last two decades.acquiring local accretions from there. and though there is much integration of the two elements there is often rivalry between them. The Muslim 'minority' in India therefore has had the ideological potential to vex in at least two ways. it is open to the perception of being a residual population. First. one that had its choice of leaving for the newly created Muslim nation of Pakistan in 1947.has persisted in India through the centuries to this day. bookish elements had always to be recalled in self-conscious ways at all points in the midst of often livelier homegrown and alien elements. urban outposts of sufism. and they are phobic in the extreme of modernity. In fact the condition of disadvantage is overwhelmingly the other way round. This material as well as ideological situation I have been describing has made Indian Muslims deeply resentful and defensive in their mentality. the absolutist doctrinal side of the double movement is holding out promise of dignity and autonomy in the name of Islam. Just to give an example of reaction-formation. but the point I am most stressing is that they are reactionary in the sense of being a reaction to the feelings of helplessness and defeat. are the products of a free social imagination. and a place for boys from poverty-stricken families to live without cost while they train into strict scriptural doctrine. The well known fact is that most Muslims today are not descendants of a conquering people. In a situation where material life as well as self-respect is increasingly threatened by alarming majoritarian tendencies in the polity. Even putting this point aside. The attractions are utterly illusory of course --they are manifestly undemocratic. and in turn more defensiveness. and they offer free education in Urdu. and all of it predictably leads to more backlash from Hindu ideologues. and the seeming lack of viable alternatives to cope with these feelings. Moreover. and there is the fact of the idealism of both this class and the much smaller but admittedly more mobile educated middle class of Muslims who thought a secular India was a better option than a nation created on the basis of religion. they are deeply reactionary on issues of gender. there is the fact of the essentially and helplessly sedentary nature of the poor and labouring classes which made immigration over thousands of miles no serious option at all. and the loss of Urdu has been the rise of the phenomenon of the 'madrassa'. often financed by Saudi Arabian largesse. . These madaris are peppered all over the country but specially in north India. providing a recruitment ground for future careers in fundamentalist movements. This is just one example as I said. especially among the young. surfacing in more aggressive reactions among the Muslims. comparable at least to the Muslim rule in mediaeval Spain. one response to the combination of poverty. There is also the fact that a number of the Muslim rulers of India showed a remarkable amount of religious tolerance. but Hindu converts. with regard to the claim that they should have gone to Pakistan when it was created as a Muslim nation. lack of career opportunity. They are 'reactionary' in every sense of the term. and ideological perceptions. But these are mere. And this mentality is adversely affecting the double movement I mentioned of rooted quotidian syncretic diversity on the one hand and invocation of scriptural form and fundamentals on the other.laughable. there are plain historical facts which make nonsense of the idea of historical revenge or justice in this case. And so I finally come to a point of straightforward and familiar psychology. as we know. contemptible facts. even a homegrown and non-western path to modernity. by threatening to tilt the balance in favour of the latter over the former. Now let me move away from India to notice a curious thing. The only difference being that the reaction there is of course not to Hindus but to American and Israel and other such Western forces. in the way that Islam with its many shared assumptions. Of course. was. As some historians have pointed out. but were intellectually too remote to be palpably threatening to Christianity. And it is this fact which is being deliberately and wilfully ignored by recent writing in the West which instead of describing the relations between Islamic populations and the West along these lines. Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt and the British conquest of India. and violent in deed. . I mean this as a comparative remark only. but one of alienation. trading in diverse material products. and were felt to be so by the subject people. Even casual reflection on Muslims outside India suggests a paradoxical conclusion: and that is that it is precisely this minority mentality which is to be found among the Muslim populations all over the world. Conflict was of course still there on both sides. even where Muslims are an overwhelming majority. For centuries the relations between European Christendom and Islam. can only seem enviably robust and healthy. Let me explain by what I mean by saying that these terms of description are misleadingly neutral. dehumanization. despite local difference in religious doctrine. both cultures were feudal and pastoral. and. which was in large part the avowed ground of the antagonism. however. is doing so instead in misleadingly neutral terms of the ‘clash or conflict of civilizations’.. and engaged in a prolonged and fruitful mutual intellectual and artistic collaboration and influence ---all of which when viewed from the thoroughly revised circumstances of modernity. nevertheless displayed a respect for one another. quite properly describable as vilifying in word. gradually gave rise to an era defined by a quite different tone of relations. there were shared intellectual premises that governed these differences. What I want to insist on then is that the psychological attitudes even of many majority Muslim populations are the defensive attitudes of a minority mentality. That is a massive deception and self-deception. For those many hundred years prior to the consolidation of western colonial rule. So let me spell it out in one large historical comparison. In fact it is the shared element that was the real source of the hostility. It was the new tenor of colonial mastery that mastery required attitudes of condescension. such as Hinduism and Buddhism. it would appear that the crusades were fought against a form of heresy represented by Islamic civilization in Arabian lands rather than against some wholly alien presence there. breeding not so much a robust sense of conflict any more. The more ancient religions of the East. Perverse as it may sound. were not only more removed in space. I think that there is much health in clashes and conflict. but it was not the key to future relations. accompanied by a chronic and occasionally acute commitment to a war against modernity and its corporate and military symbols in the West and their presence in Muslim lands. taking only that which was necessary for its mercantile and industrial requirements. By transforming its own political economy while extracting surpluses but leaving structurally unchanged its conquered lands. it left well alone in these other lands. those within civilizations. not only material but also civilizational. rather than a conquest passing off in neutral terms as a clash. in one of the few truthful statements he made since September 11 said –just before he waged war against Afghanistan -. steadily destroying the pastoral societies in their own terrain. so I will use the term ‘absolutist’ instead. and is pervasively present today. and even. rather than between them. this material and moral and psychological situation has not changed in essentials since decolonization. alas.that most Muslims are not fundamentalists. and by it I will mean what I assume Bush meant. The clash or conflict between civilizations is not nearly as bad if it is a genuine clash. What feudal structures it destroyed to recreate new and vibrant economies in its own midst. So one lesson would be just this. Salman Rushdie. but their effect on the lands and economies of the colonial subjects was altogether different. (I don’t like the term ‘fundamentalist. This new moral psychology that accompanied colonial relations was of course undergirded by an altering of the material relations that had held for centuries. These are the most genuinely healthy sort of conflicts which exist. as we well know. and which are being pursued not only by Bush and his sinister coterie of advisers. like Christopher Hitchens and Michael Ignatieff. The growing mercantile and industrial forces of the most powerful Christian lands were. which would continue until today to be the underlying source of the ideological rhetoric of superior progress. George Bush. European colonialism thereby laid the foundation for an abiding material differential.and resentment. It is this neutral idiom of clash and conflict to describe a situation which is best described as a conquest that I am calling the misleadingly neutral descriptions which were imposed by Huntington. a cluster of commitments ranging from wanting to enforce Islamist regimes with strict sharia laws. Let me now suggest further that the health in conflict as compared to the malaise in conquest (passing off as conflict) is best understood by looking first and by looking dialectically at a quite other sort of conflict. The health of conflict by more or less equal foes had by these material agencies now also deteriorated to the alienating effects of condescension and defensive resentment among increasingly unequal ones. . As is well known and denied only by the mandarin classes in Western countries. but also implicitly by the more glamorous ideologues of liberal empire. viewed however not merely as military and economic forms of conquest so much as the presence of infidels. . Most ordinary Muslims are simply too busy with their occupations and preoccupations to be seduced by any absolutist fantasies about an Islamic revival worth fighting for. somehow capitulating to this longstanding history of being colonized and condescended. The point can be safely generalized. And the long history of colonial rule which I began with and its ongoing presence in new and revised forms today. and no one really disagrees that as a matter of ubiquitous empirical fact -whether in Mumbai or Cairo. The problem goes much deeper than this and as I was trying to say in my talk of the minority mentality even in majority Muslim populations it goes to the internal moral psychologies of Muslims in these countries. In fact in Pakistan. everyone acknowledges are not absolutists. but in the fact that in a situation of absolutely desperate subjugation of a colonized people. they have never gained more than six and half percent of the vote in national elections. As a result of the detailed subjugations visited by that history.most Muslims are not absolutists at all. accounts for this disparity between image and facts on the ground? Though it is perhaps true that this is to a considerable extent a result of misleading reportage and analysis by the Western media.) Bush is obviously right. Even the popularity of Hamas in the Palestinian territories does not lie in the fact of its Islamism. This fact certainly adds to the gap between image and reality. Afghanistan or Saudi Arabia. are often unwilling to come out and be openly critical of the absolutists in their midst. and it is obviously so. And it is a fact which itself needs diagnosis. even ordinary. in fact they share very little with the absolutist. What. it would be too simple to attribute it all to such distortion. has much to do with the diagnosis. whether in Iran or in Pakistan. Hard line Islamists are not likely to get anywhere in elections in any country where Islam has not been willfully suppressed. as in Algeria or perhaps Egypt. non-absolutist Muslims feel that to criticize their own people in any way is letting the side down. which we are trying to understand. as well as continuing feelings of helplessness in the face of American domination and Israeli occupation and expansion. If all this is right. as I said. with whom they share so little by way of ideology and ideal. This is evident in the fact that for the most part where there have been fair and open elections the 'fundamentalist' parties have failed to gain power. an obvious question arises as to why the general image of countries with predominantly Muslim populations give an impression of undergoing rampant Islamic revivalism. New Jersey or Bradford-. it more than anyone else has managed to keep services and basic lines of civil society active and functional. The first thing to be registered is the fact that the far larger population of ordinary Muslims who. Karachi or Tehran. but a further clash internal to the psychology of ordinary. There is no space here to elaborate in any detail. then. But the point is that there are two kinds of conflict. if the other conflict (the one in the hearts of ordinary non-absolutist Muslims) is overcome in one direction rather than another. But it is a form of convenient and self-serving obtuseness to think. and which have often supported the fundamentalists when it suited their political agendas. that addressing the issues that give rise to this defensive psychology is irrelevant or unnecessary. with empirical authority. of support of corrupt elites. Conflict between ordinary Muslims and the absolutists would be a sign of great health in societies with large Muslim populations (whether in Iran or Pakistan or India or indeed. that it is bound to have the effect of showing the absolutists within Muslim societies to be exactly what they are. do nothing to give ordinary Muslims the necessary confidence to take that critical attitude towards the absolutists ---nor does the transparently exploitative pursuit of Western corporate interests in these regions. but it could only have a good outcome. It is what will reveal the real health in these conflicts. of embargoes and sanctions. non-absolutist Muslims themselves.What this suggests is that there is a yet another conflict which is pertinent. since it is one point and rationale of democracies to calibrate representation with numbers. as I said even George Bush can assume. that most Muslims are not absolutists. At any rate it should be obvious except to those who are incapabable of the most elementary form of instrumental reasoning about means to ends. and. Most ordinary Muslims are torn between their dislike for fundamentalist visions of their religion and societies on the one hand. France and England). on the other. that the cruelty of wars. what it would take to overcome such a defensive cast of mind. called the numerative function of the idea of minority in a democracy. as we all know. So yes it is fine to wish that democracy should exist in various parts of the world where it does not. a shrill but unrepresentative minority. That is what I. a clash of attitudes and values. at the outset. And the point about the role of such conflict in public deliberation and internal change is essentially a dialectical point within the ideals of democracy. One is between the absolutist and the ordinary Muslim and no amount of democracy will reveal the health of this conflict unless . as many do in the US. The point of generality. if it were not for the fact that we can assume. it is an elementary consequence of such a conflict between these more numerous Muslims and the absolutists. None of this would be relevant. is this. their deep defensive feelings of resentment against forces which they perceive to be alien and hostile in one colonial form or another for a very long time. With this assumption in place. of occupations. This second layer of internal conflict within Islam. of bombings. They only encourage and increase the defensiveness. is a vital factor in understanding the scope for any kind of change in these regions of the world. not the one we have just registered between ordinary Muslims and fundamentalists. of expansionist settlements. that it is quite common to hear despairing and contemptuous descriptions of the American electorate. it is not a response that is compatible with a belief in democracy. and they are no obvious formal mechanisms by which democratic representation can be installed. that is to say of ‘ordinary Americans’ (the counterpart of the ‘ordinary Muslims’ I was talking about earlier). You simply cannot believe in democracy and say that the people are vile and stupid. where Muslims are a minority. That tedious Churchillian response can now be actually be seen to be the simple fallacy. Here. after all. say. most European countries. Communities are too dispersed. That is my point about the internal dialectical link between these two aspects of the notion of a ‘minority’ -. I have to confess to finding a rather disturbing tendency among even many progressive minded Americans who would quite readily agree with all that I have been saying so far. And it won’t do to trot out the Churchillian cliché that the only reason to believe in democracy. and so on. in that case. and it would not be better than other forms of polity. But this cannot possibly be a sensible response. Democratic and representative institutions should then be able to reveal that these absolutists are an unrepresentative group within the minority Muslim populations. They feel such disgust for the strong and open support shown for the war in this country as contrasted with. I must say just a word about an institutional sort of difficulty that exists in countries like India or for that matter Britain and France. if such moral strengths being denied .another conflict within the psychology of ordinary Muslims is resolved in a way that our slightly bumptious ideologues of liberal empire like Htichens have done everything possible to make it very difficult for them to do. as we have at the level of the region. belief in democracy would be pure and empty form. the province. But it is a curiously difficult and undertheorized problem about democracies that we have no institutional sites and means for developing representative institutions within communities. I want to move away from Islamic populations to look at this issue of conflict and democracy in the United States which has been responding to Islamic populations with war-like stances. If one had no confidence in the moral strengths of ordinary people. At any rate. Before I leave the subject of democracy and conflict altogether. Before I close this point about conflict and democracy vis a vis Muslim populations. is because it is the best of a bad lot of options we have regarding forms of polity. I have pointed to the obvious formal and arithmetical merit of democracy when we acknowledge the empirical fact that most Muslims are not absolutists. the city. One might as well believe in an aristocracy or enlightened monarchy.the numerative function of minorities in democracies cannot get its full play unless the defensive mentality of minority status is overcome. For.y. even so. This need for and failure to achieve intra-community democratization is a remarkably understudied and undertheorized phenomenon in political theory and political sociology. it always was. were then to be perceived in an aristocracy or in a monarch. we need essentially to think of conflict in these contexts in counterfactual terms. where there was a failure of conflict to surface because of ordinary Muslim reticence about criticism of the absolutist with whom they share so little. there was hardly any explicit conflict. Al-Jazeera’s impact on Saudi Arabia to some extent shows that in the US too. Take Saudi Arabia. and it may even sometimes be possible to describe things correctly by saying that there is latent conflict now. injecting conflict into Saudi Arabian society by the most basic service of providing information of just how much the country was run by a corrupt and selfserving state and its power elites. weak on information. This suggests the obvious point that ordinary Americans have all the moral strengths that ordinary people in Europe or any other place have. they would still need to overcome a great deal of indoctrination starting very early in life. the media in America is cravenly unwilling to provide the most basic information to ordinary people about their government’s actions. its weakness in comparison to other people. be pure procedural fetish. to stick with democracy would. And this impact is not restricted to Saudi Arabia. which would surface more if. Many factors no doubt were responsible for recent changes. One cannot exercise such moral strengths that one has. but one most salient and dramatic factor was without a doubt the extraordinary impact of Al-Jazeera on ordinary citizens. The implications of this for how to diagnose the situation in the US should now be obvious and familiar. among a disenchanted progressive community is disturbing partly because it is putting aside the relevance of the rest of their progressive analysis and agenda. These attitudes. counter-to-fact. if one is pervasively epistemically weak. in which even just three years ago. And no doubt the point goes deeper. So it would be useful to diagnose this situation here too in order to see why there is a failure of conflict to surface.to the electorate. is rather epistemic. full information was available. not to mention the actions and consequences of the governments elsewhere that it supports. and the consequences of those actions. not moral. But we can approach the obvious by looking at a case far away. Very much more obvious. just as we did with Muslim societies. Even if ordinary Americans were provided with information through the routine channels. . The diagnostic answers here are in a sense much more obvious than the more subtle ones having to do with a defensive (what I was calling a virtual minoritarian) moral psychology induced by colonial pasts and presents even in Muslim majorities. This should be inscribed as the First Law of Political Psychology. That is to say that there is much scope for conflict even in the US today. The implications of this form the subject of conflict and democracy are thus plain. By contrast with Al-Jazeera. not as individuals. requiring as I said a belief in the moral strengths of the electorate? There are many grounds. and this is the side that is being addressed when the first sort of question in polls is presented. They are a fraction. in response to the first sort of question. the answers go overwhelmingly in a humane and compassionate direction. But in fact. Just compare the number of books. Now of course one could say that the answer to the second sort of question is a sign that the answer to the first sort of question was insincere. on the very same issues. The point of pressing concern is how epistemic strength might be built up to make the conflict identified here resolve itself in the right direction? Here too the answers are obvious. not least some of the inconsistencies which show up in polls: It is quite commonly the case that when questions in polls are put in terms of values that individuals hold. Part of this tendency owes to an association of mass movements with extremism. elections. articles. then it is popular movements (nowadays strengthened with all the additional informational and communicative access to the internet and to electronic mail available to them. that are written on movements as compared to those on constitutions. I am afraid. It seems perfectly apt right here to invoke the notion of epistemic weakness rather than of moral depravity. but if formulated in terms of economic or foreign policy jargon. etc. which will have to be the main sites of public education and public deliberation. When people think (and indeed act) as individuals they simply are not typically vicious and ruthless. an association that goes very deep in a culture which for two hundred years has been taught to be spooked by the Jacobin aftermath of the French Revolution. and to the media that presents these structures to them in a light that conceals the conflicts that would otherwise surface with the value they have avowed as individuals.A question might be raised about what grounds there are for assuming this counterfactual except for a dogmatic and question-begging faith in democracy. Since it is widely acknowledged that the epistemic weakness is due to the fact that the widely available media (and even to a large extent the educational institutions) have subordinated themselves almost completely to the corporate and state structures. in post-constitutional . That is the latent and what I am calling the healthy form of conflict which allows one to retain one’s belief in democracy rather than strike attitudes that are incompatible with that belief. and all the other more formal apparatus and institutional aspects of democracy. so enhanced. many progressives are prone) is quite premature. But that sort of cynical interpretation (to which. PhD dissertations. There is a great and natural tendency in the intelligentsia of the US and perhaps also in Western Europe to think movements peripheral. But the second sort of question presents itself to them in a way that addresses their minds. which were simply unavailable to popular movements of three or four decades ago) ----it is popular movements. corporations. it goes in the opposite direction. but as they have been subordinated to institutional structures of state. Though I have views on the matter. the opposite is true. My commission has been to speak about Islam in public and private spaces. or anything else. which it would be evasive not to address. I have in this paper approached the distinction in somewhat implicit and abstract terms. Given these unavoidable failures to draw a clear and explicit distinction between the public and private. Populations that identify themselves with Islam could not possibly resolve the two . This is a simple but often unperceived fact. Only questioning whether the controversies surrounding them can be given a given a public versus private description. I have done so by saying that the apparent lack of open and healthy public conflict between a minority of what I have called ‘absolutists’ and a much larger class of what I have called ordinary Muslims. I am not prejudging what stand to take on family law or on turbans. After all if the law amounts to an inequity towards women in such things as divorce or alimony. Nor could it. you are bound to have to moderate. Here is. And I have argued that it is only if this latter conflict is resolved in a certain direction that the healthier conflict will emerge in public and within broadly democratic contexts may lead to interesting transformations that once held promise in decolonized societies such as India and Iraq and Egypt but which have been set back by developments in the last twenty years or more.societies of the West. Returning to the subject of Islam. I suspect. This is because it seems to me that secular liberalism has never –except in narrow juridical terms— made that distinction clearly or at any rate cleanly. Even a cursory look at the history of the civil rights movement makes that clear. (whether rightly or wrongly) secular liberalism is not going to allow that something as private as one’s religious dress code is going to be completely private since if public safety laws of traffic require that one wear a helmet rather than a turban. is to be diagnosed as issuing from a certain quite different and more private and inner conflict within the hearts of ordinary Muslims that itself owes to a certain defensive psychology usually associated with oppressed minorities. religious dress itself will no longer be viewed as a purely private phenomenon. hijab. When you have a mass movement. Now: one is constantly encountering a scepticism about the line I am taking in this paper from certain quarters. But I have not done so explicitly. a very widespread version of the scepticism. when you have to carry everyone with you. So also. one which I know is asserted with great eloquence by Christopher Hitchens. if anything. let me close by making two points now of a more broadly philosophical significance. Certainly the matter of personal or family law which has always been a vexed issue for Islam cannot count as defining a private rather than public space. then it runs afoul of a canonical element in public space as defined by secular liberalism’s commitments to gender justice. not deracines like me but religious people. but perhaps I am being terminologically rigid here. Identity is simply not a codified phenomenon in that way. it will be said. one is ceasing to be a Muslim altogether is an egregious misrepresentation of what it takes to be a Muslim. alimony etc. When these sympathetic diagnoses and explanations are given of Muslims by . it will be said. But I want to finish with a point of very abstract philosophy. even occasionally in the mainstream media. I have spent a long time in this essay diagnosing sympathetically the psychology of ordinary Muslims in different parts of the world. would be to give up on one’s Muslim identity. as we all know even from Muslim societies in many parts of the world today. such that if every item on the list is not checked off one loses one’s identity. A person’s identity is simply not given by a checklist. alas. and who have altogether shed these offending convictions and practices. perhaps the best thing we can say in gesturing towards that distinction. whom it would be a travesty to count as anything but Muslims. Coming back to the subject of public and private. The point is about the notion of identity and the notions of private and public are orthogonal to it. would require them to relinquish some aspects of their religion. I know any number of Muslims. This line of thought is based on a numbingly false picture of cultural identity. therefore. It is fluid and malleable and survives enormous amounts of revision and erosion.dialectcally linked conflicts I have described along the lines that I think are possible because to do so would be to give up on that identification with Islam. For ordinary Muslims to be more openly critical of the absolutists than they have.. to give up on Muslim identity. to cease to see oneself as a Muslim. divorce. and commitments to censorship and punishment of blasphemy… But to do so. though not often in the US. that fundamentalists would like to encourage. is to say that any plausible notion of religious and cultural identity allows that one’s identity as a Muslim can survive despite de facto discarding of this or that law and custom. Hitchens. Many others have done so. or even if one gives up a customary religious practice such as purdah. If that is a way of asserting the retention of a private identity despite public I don’t myself think that notions of ‘private’ and ‘public’ are transformations than so be it. should worry a bit that their views here are too perfectly of a piece with the absolutist’s. ideas about gender relations in institutions such as marriage. and it is a picture. To say that they don’t count as having Muslim identity is to assume a conception that only an absolutist would affirm. They would have to relinquish certain ideas about relations to non-Muslims. whether religious or otherwise. The idea that if one gives up a Shariah law about blasphemy or alimony. particularly helpful or illuminating descriptions of what I am saying about identity. By that I mean. as a third person would. it sounds very odd if Muslims themselves say. Why? Because it is a surrender of agency to say it in the first person mode of oneself. the objects of history and its causes. This is a point so fundamental that its significance amounts to nothing less than this. It would be the final triumph of imperialism if it has affected us so comprehensively that we understand ourselves so well as a product of the history it has visited upon us. which consists in the first person point of view. That is to say. but they nevertheless something off about saying it. Understanding oneself is done by stepping outside of oneself and looking at ourselves from the outside.destroyed our capacity for free. cannot exhaust our perspective on ourselves. etc. “We are the products of colonialism and that is why we are unable to be more self-critical of absolutist elements in our society. the point of view of the subject rather than the point of view by which we view ourselves as objects.writers in the West. the point of view of agency. But to take that perspective on ourselves. from the outside. though often necessary. thing. they are spoken in a third person voice. self-critical agency. that they take the form of saying “They must be understood as having a These very same remarks sound very odd in the first person voice. If it did it would destroy our freedom.” Thus the very same thing when spoken by another. And it is not as if it fails to be true when spoken by Muslims themselves in the first person voice. That is they sound psychology produced by past and present forms of colonialism etc. including by deracinated Muslims like me. is true.” But now notice a very odd very odd when they are said by Muslims themselves. that it has –in having this effect-. They are still true things to say. Akeel Bilgrami Johnsonian Professor of Philosophy Columbia University .