Muslims and Liberals

St. Louis Post – Dispatch
October 10, 1996

The Taliban, a pugnacious brand of Islamic revivalists, have taken over government in Afghanistan. As they entered government offices, their followers jeered at the body of former communist President Najibullah hanging from a post overlooking Kabul’s main square. Later they shut down girls’ schools, barred women from outdoor jobs and ordered men to grow beards. They think those actions are supported by the Islamic faith. In reality, they reflect a mixture of the tribal Afghan culture and social norms of early Islamic society.

The Taliban are a rough edge of the Afghan revolution, which, I hope, will mellow in the course of time. Most revolutions do. But we must remember that Afghan Muslims fought and defeated the communists not because of a yearning for Western capitalist democracy.

They spurn both systems as offshoots of liberalism, which is concerned mainly with man’s material needs and ignores his religious values. I bet they would also resist the American political model based on church-state separation.

If Islamic revivalists have rejected the corrupt, communist brand of liberalism in Afghanistan, they have bested liberalism’s Western variety in Turkey and Iran. In Turkey, the government of Islamic revivalist Prime Minister Necmettin Erbakan is trying to Islamize the country’s liberal, or secular, democratic system. In Iran, the 1979 revolution has transformed a secular monarchy into an Islamic theocracy.

Meanwhile, Islamic forces have emerged as the only viable opposition in Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Kuwait, Yemen, Palestine, Egypt, Algeria and Tunisia. Said K. Aburish, an Arab historian and journalist, told me during a recent meeting in London that he believes that Islamic forces will be coming to power in “much of the Arab world.”

Religious revivalism is not confined to Arab or Muslim societies. In Hindu India and Jewish Israel, religious parties have made unprecedented electoral gains over liberal establishments. The three religious parties represented in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s rightist government are pushing for the Judaization of Israeli laws. India’s Hindu revivalist Bharatiya Janata Party, which won the most seats at the last parliamentary elections, plans to establish a “Hindu state.” And since the mid-1970s a re-Christianization movement is simmering in Europe, spearheaded by such evangelical groups as the Communion and Liberation, Student Youth, Company of Deeds and People’s Movement. Earlier, Catholics brought down the Polish communist regime.

A more widespread religious and spiritual drive is sweeping North America. Mainline church deserters, agnostics, atheists and socialists are returning to God in droves through evangelical and fundamentalist Christian denominations, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, the Bahai faith and so on. A Newsweek poll taken two years ago found that 58 percent of Americans were yearning for spiritual growth, up from 33 percent in 1986 and 22 percent in 1978. Today the Christian Right is no longer an ignored political fringe. It is entrenched in the GOP presidential campaign.

I tend to agree with economist E.F. Schumacher, who says liberalism is a feature of a period of growth and the quest for order is a feature of decline. This explains, at least partly, the yearning for a religious and moral order in parts of the developed world.

Liberalism and structures of freedom were born in an age when Europeans had just discovered the unspoiled New World and set about colonizing and exploiting the resources of other continents. The need to tap those reso urces sparked momentous scientific inventions, technological innovation and an orgy of industrial production and consumption that has lasted a half-millennium.

That period of growth has peaked in many societies where a relentless industrial assault has reduced resources, producing diminishing return on labor. People are working harder for poorer wages. The growing hardships and uncertainties of life have triggered a stampede for the security of a religious or moral anchor.

Muslim and other developing societies have a different problem. Most of them have never left their religious moorings, which would loosen through modernization. A looming modernist threat to those moorings has now plunged the Afghan Taliban, Arab Muslim Brothers and others into their revivalist campaigns.

Some global demographic and social trends seem somewhat encouraging. The growth of world population is slowing down and is expected to stabilize in four decades. Environmental and other groups are guarding against the depletion of resources. And a communications revolution is helping to match resources with needs faster and farther than ever.

But how far could these global trends affect individual countries and communities would depend upon the dimension of this revolution. A thriving “global village” – a worldwide network of trade, commerce, investment and communications – would promote liberal values and institutions worldwide. A world driven by economic, military or cultural conflicts could, on the other hand, reinforce religious and ideological pulls.