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	The challenge and the fear of becoming Enlightened by Pierre Tristam Stetson University   28 Nov. 2005   Since Sept. 11, we"ve been living under a "clash of civilizations" doctrine that can be summed up this way: Over there, dogma, orthodoxy, Islam; over here, democracy, pluralism, Constitution. Over there, dark continents, dark ages, terrorism; over here, enlightened West, enlightenment, freedom.   The doctrine has been used to justify two wars (so far) and a wholesale shift in the way the United States deploys its aims abroad and projects them at home. The doctrine draws its power from the language of freedom -- the language of enlightenment -- both in the way we"ve gone about defining ourselves as a culture and in the way we"ve gone about defending our right to fight the war on terror on our terms, but on other people"s turfs.   The doctrine is fatally flawed, and its consequences are lethal, both to American principles at home and to American interests abroad. There"s no connection between the language we"re using in defining ourselves and the reality being imposed at home and abroad. The language itself has become the mask of its very opposite. If you want absolutes, if you want black and white, if you want orthodoxy, look no further than the way American culture politically and legally has been evolving in the past several years.   That"s not to say that those orthodoxies don"t exist in the Muslim world. They do in spades. But the enlightenment ideal is not under attack from outside our culture. It is under attack from within it, in a context that increasingly fears pluralism, scorns dissent and erodes democracy. The very ideas of rational, critical thinking, of progress by way of challenging assumptions, is being replaced by a faith-based approach in policy-making and a fundamentalist approach in legal thinking (what some people call originalism) that is diametrically opposed to the ideals of enlightenment. If a battle for freedom is being waged, it is being waged on the wrong front.   ISLAM"S TOLERANCE   First, a look at Islam as a world supposedly so incapable of solving its crises that only western intervention can help. We should be honest. Islamdom doesn"t have a good reputation these days, and it brings a lot of the trouble on itself. But any religion in the wrong hands, beginning with Americans" own Christian creeds, can be violent, backward and evil. It so happens that few religions can lay claim to as much beauty of spirit, art, enlightenment and advancement of the human race as Islam did for the entirety of the Middle Ages, when nothing in Europe could hold a candle to Islamic civilization, when Islam was enlightenment before enlightenment was cool.   What was unique about Islam"s early and middle period was its great tolerance for people of other faiths, its love and wealth of learning, its antipathy for dogma, its realization of pluralism -- in the great Abassid caliphates of Baghdad from the 9th to the 12th centuries, in Spain during the same period, in India during the 16th and early part of the 17th centuries. It"s possible to see the Muslim Enlightenment literally as bookends, in time and geography, with Baghdad in the early period and the reign of Akbar the Great in the 16th and 17th centuries in India, who lived up to a famous verse in the Koran that speaks for all the potential pluralism in Islam: "There can be no compulsion in religion: Truth stands out clear from error" (which is actually a retelling of what Jesus said to his followers: "The truth will make you free.")   Akbar"s enlightened reign in India coincided with Europe"s bloodiest age of religious bigotry and warfare, when the Inquisition was murdering Jews in Spain and Catholics and Protestants were murdering each other everywhere else, when beheadings were the preferred method of Calvinists in sleepy Geneva for adulterous men, when Europe was to know nine wars of religion in three decades in a warm-up to the massacres and holocausts of the 17th century. The roads of religious intolerance are paved with the bones of that occasional oxymoron we know of as western civilization. And those same roads are conveniently forgotten by those who would point to a place like the Middle East and say things like, "Those people have been at each other"s throats for ever." Not quite true. Any notion that the Enlightenment was a western invention, or that barbarism is an eastern specialty, is a bit misguided.   But it is also true that everything is not relative. The Middle East today and much of the Islamic world is not a comfortable place to be. It is often not a defensible place. A United Nations report on Arab development noted that the 22 countries that form the Arab world translate about 330 books annually, one-fifth of the number that Greece alone translates. The cumulative total of translated books since 9th century Baghdad is about 100,000, almost the average that Spain translates in a single year. What that world needs is a dose of its own past enlightenment. So it"s a fair question: If Islam showed not only the potential but the reality of enlightenment over its history, why not now, and why shouldn"t the West be showing the way back to enlightenment?   Aside from the obvious fact that enlightenment doesn"t spring from the belly of a B-52, because what"s going on now in the Islamic world is exactly what should be going on: A reformation as momentous and violent as Europe"s reformation was 500 years ago. Islam is trying to reinvent itself. It is looking for a way out of its morass. The forces of reform and the reactionary forces of fundamentalism are literally at each other"s throats, the way Catholics and Protestants, and eventually religion and secularism, were at each other"s throats in Europe between the 16th and 18th centuries.   It"s not black and white. The camps aren"t neatly divided between progressives and reformers. Nor is the presumption true that the moderates are looking to adopt Western ways. The struggle is within Islam, for a solution for Islam, not to please the West, look like the West or get closer to the West. Who will win in Islam is anybody"s guess. Any way you look at it -- in Iran, Pakistan, Palestine, Iraq and Lebanon -- where you have elections, the moderates are losing big at the moment. But at the same time it"s also true, as the Iranian scholar of Islam Reza Aslan argues in a new book on Islam"s evolution, "the vast majority of the more than one billion Muslims in the world today readily accept the fundamental principles of democracy." It just isn"t American-style democracy they necessarily want or need.   So far as the West is concerned, this, as Aslan argues, is the most important lesson to learn: We are bystanders in this battle within Islam. We are not players. We are not wanted as players. We should not so arrogantly pretend to be players, or to think we have the right or the means to be players. How can we even think something like that with Sept. 11 behind us? Because the Sept. 11 attacks were not a declaration of war on the West, the way the lock and load warriors in the neo-con brigades like to see them.   The attacks were part of that "internal conflict between Muslims," and they made us, in Aslan"s words, "an unwary yet complicit casualty of a rivalry that is raging in Islam over who will write the next chapter in its story."   Let"s not play into the hands of the fanatics, or confuse the spectacular with the successful. The best we can do is what Islam did in its glory period of conquests: Show the light by example. Live up to our own enlightenment ideals.   What we are doing instead is the very opposite. Through such things as Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay, the secret prisons around the world called black sites, the bloody occupation of Iraq and the seemingly endless occupation of Afghanistan, we are only proving to the Islamic world that the secular West is diseased, that the Crusades, the Colonial period and the broken promises of the post-colonial 20th century were not a fluke but a pattern.   In Islam"s eyes, the West, the secular West especially, doesn"t save. It mucks up. As long as the United States insists on crusading for freedom in Islam"s lands, it will be retarding the more enlightened movements for reform there.   For all his good intentions, George W. Bush has been fundamentalist Islam"s best friend, and has probably set back the progress of Islamic Enlightenment for many, many years.   Osama bin Laden might as well pray facing the White House every day, because without this White House playing right into fundamentalist Islam"s recruiting drives, Osama might well have been nothing more than a bag of bones attached to a dialysis machine by now, and the tyrannical Arab world might well have been on its way to following in the steps of the Soviet Union"s disintegration at the end of the 1980s. Instead, we have a disintegration of our own to worry about.   DUAL TRANSFORMATIONS   The world of Islam is going through a great reformation. But in some ways, so is the United States. The world of Islam is divided between the forces of modernity and the reaction of fundamentalism. But so is the United States, and I don"t mean just because evangelicals are pulling a few political strings.   The Islamic world is trying to redefine its identity, with the Koran in the center of the battle. But so is the United States, with the Constitution, which has always been synonymous with American identity, at the heart of the battle -- and the Bible trying to make its way back in there. So what we have between East and West are two distinct struggles for identity. We delude ourselves into thinking either side can affect outcomes in the other. The irony is that while the president is warning us about this ragtag bunch of Islamic nut cases trying to "destroy our way of life," we"re being distracted from a very serious struggle happening right here that is changing our way of life.   The more we talk about doing battle for liberty in the world, the more we are losing it at home by not paying attention to what"s happening at home. The more we continue to ignore that the country is in the middle of its own identity crisis, the more the forces of reaction and fundamentalism can redefine the political climate their way, not even by stealth, but by using the language of enlightenment as a Trojan horse: Trust us. We are doing this for freedom"s sake. We are "the light of the world," and "whoever follows (us) will never walk in darkness." That"s a quote from the Gospel according to John of course, but it"s also a visual quote from Bush"s campaign ads in 2004, if you remember the famous "wolves" commercial that warns of "an increasingly dangerous world" and shows a bunch of wolves ready to attack - if you don"t vote for the Bush-Cheney ticket.   Seventy-two years ago Franklin Roosevelt told us the only thing we have to fear is fear itself. These days we"re told the only thing we have to fear is safety. The state of fear is our friend. Perpetual war is our condition in whose name anything goes. And all the while, freedom is being redefined as an instrument of state rather than an individual pursuit guaranteed by state protection.   That sounds strangely familiar. The fundamentalists and the reactionaries in the Islamic world, are looking to impose a regressive, power-centered society of control and submission. But what the reactionaries are doing in the United States isn"t that ideologically different. We are replacing the notion of an enlightened, progressive society with the notion of a defensive, reactionary society..   (The essay is adapted from "The Language of Enlightenment," a lecture presented as part of Stetson University"s Values Lecture Series. Published by the Daytona Beach News Journal).   Click on the link below to access the rest of this article. Visit the related web page
	Liberalism means more than just Elections by Ralf Dahrendorf Project Syndicate   27 Nov. 2005   There can be no liberal order without political democracy, but today we are frequently reminded that political democracy alone does not guarantee a liberal order. Free and fair elections may lead to the ascendancy of a president of Iran who wants to "wipe Israel off the map of the Middle East." Or to the recent election in Poland of a minority government that ruthlessly pursues its members" personal interests and breaks all promises of cooperation made before the polls.   In other words, elections are not enough if one wants to bring democracy to the world. Elections can lead to illiberal democracies and worse. They must be embedded in a much more complex institutional framework, which I would describe as the liberal order.   The first feature of the liberal order is that democracies must not tolerate those who set out to destroy democracy. Some countries, like Germany, have laws that make it possible to ban political parties whose programs are recognizably anti-democratic. In the past, the law has been used to curb parties of both the extreme left and the extreme right. This has clearly contributed to preventing any sign of a possible return to the totalitarian ways of the 20th century.   However, it is not always evident when people and parties stand for election what they are going to do if they win. This is where rules that impose term limits on officeholders, such as the 22nd Amendment of the Constitution of the United States, have their place. Many constitutions contain such a rule, and even President Vladimir Putin of Russia has stated that he will abide by it.   Let us hope that this will in fact be the case. Elsewhere, notably in many of the Soviet Union"s other successor states, and in Latin America, those in power have often simply changed the constitution - including rules on term limits - to their advantage. This is where a second pillar of a liberal order comes into play: the rule of law.   It cannot be said too often that democracy and the rule of law are not the same thing. There are lawless democracies and undemocratic "states of law." The constitution of liberty requires both, and the rule of law is the more difficult of the two to establish and maintain, for it requires not just a constitution but, almost more importantly, an independent judiciary that is sensitive to violations of constitutional and other legitimate rules.   For example, it is extremely important that Iraq held elections to a constituent assembly. This produced - albeit with a certain amount of external pressure notably on behalf of the Sunnis - a document that may provide the basis for the rule of law. But the task of finding, appointing and accepting independent judges remains. It will be particularly difficult in an environment in which Islamic religious law, administered not by judges but by clerics, is never far away. The rule of secular law is the most delicate prerequisite of a liberal order.   Even then, we know from history that it takes but one Enabling Law to unhinge the rule of law and replace it by an ideological tyranny, as happened when Hitler came to power in Germany.   This is where the third element of a liberal order comes into play: civil society. A plurality of civic associations and activities - regulated but not controlled by the state, and free to express its views and even to demonstrate diverse sentiments publicly - is the most powerful pillar of a liberal order. A vibrant civil society will mobilize when the rule of law is violated, and can check the illiberal inclinations of democratic majorities.   The near-universal availability of information makes it much easier than it had been in the past for voluntary non-governmental organizations, which form the backbone of civil society, to emerge. However, there is no ultimate guarantee against the abuse of power, especially if that power is democratically gained. The international community must therefore recognize that it is not enough to promote, organize or monitor elections in hitherto undemocratic countries.   The program of spreading the liberal order requires a much more sophisticated approach. Above all, it requires international agencies and groupings that remain alert to the risks of illiberal democracies.   (Ralf Dahrendorf, a former European commissioner from Germany, is a member of the British House of Lords, a former Rector of the London School of Economics).
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